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argument, which was that the spread of Greco-Roman culture across half the globe presaged the “world movement” now known as Western civilization. He listed the main features of European history since the invention of printing, in such primer-like fashion that scholars in the audience—many of whom had spent their careers studying the complexities of each—listened with expressions ranging from surprise to bemusement. Those who could understand English did not know whether they were being patronized, or merely disregarded by this species of genus Americanus egotisticus. Roosevelt certainly seemed to care little for the Kaiser’s racial phobias:

Here and there, instances occur where … an alien people is profoundly and radically changed by the mere impact of Western civilization. The most extraordinary instance of this, of course, is Japan; for Japan’s growth and change during the last half-century has been in many ways the most striking phenomenon of all history. Intensely proud … intensely loyal to certain of her past traditions, she has yet with a single effort wrenched herself free from all hampering ancient ties, and with a bound has taken her place among the leading civilized nations of mankind.

So much for the Yellow Peril. Roosevelt went on to suggest that the best aspirations of all modern cultures were connected, as never before, by a web of global communications. “The bonds are sometimes those of hatred rather than love, but they are bonds nevertheless.”

As at the Sorbonne, he spoke too long, and equivocated too often. So the most cautionary part of his address, a reminder that the world’s new inter-connectedness could just as easily bring about its destruction, lulled more than it alarmed:

Forces for good and forces for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a thousand-fold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over the whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid, the mainspring coils and spreads at a rate constantly quickening, the whole world movement is of constantly accelerating velocity.…

The machinery is so highly geared, the tension and strain are so great, the effort and the output have alike so increased, that there is cause to dread the ruin that would come from any great accident, from any breakdown, and also the ruin that may come from the mere wearing out of the machine itself.

But it was a warm afternoon, and the auditorium was stuffy. Here and there, grayheaded professors slept.

ROOSEVELT’S BERLIN UNIVERSITY ADDRESS was even less of a success than his speech in Christiania. Local newspapers gave it scant attention. Nevertheless, he enjoyed substantive interviews over the next two days with many eminent Berliners, from Bethmann-Hollweg and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz to the aeronaut Count Zeppelin and the wildlife photographer C. G. Schillings. The German he had learned as a teenager in Dresden came back to him, and he had no difficulty making himself understood.

Back at the embassy, he was tickled to receive a set of photographs of himself and the Kaiser conversing at Döberitz. Each print was annotated on the back by Wilhelm, with heavy Prussian humor:

The Colonel of the Rough Riders lecturing the Chief of the German Army

A piece of good advice: “Carnegie is an old Peace bore”

The German and Anglo Saxon Races combined will keep the world in order!

Just before he left for London, an emissary came to ask if he would mind returning the pictures. Clearly, someone in the imperial suite dreaded that they might be published. But Roosevelt could already see them framed in glass, front and back, on display at his home in Oyster Bay.

“Oh, no,” he said. “His Majesty the Kaiser gave the photographs to me and I propose to retain them.”

* “When one speaks French, one handles the clearest and most precise instrument that exists.”

* “You unite morality with politics, and right with might.”

CHAPTER 3

Honorabilem Theodorum

The man Flammonde, from God knows where,

With firm address and foreign air,

With news of nations in his talk

And something