Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [43]
Roosevelt nudged his thesis into modern times by arguing, in words he would certainly not have risked at the University of Berlin, that anthropological science now clearly perceived “how artificial most great nationalities are.” At least, in the racial sense: “There is an element of unconscious and rather pathetic humor in the simplicity of half a century ago which spoke of the Aryan and the Teuton with reverential admiration, as if the words denoted, not merely something definite, but something ethnologically sacred.” Nationality was not myth, but a matter of common speech and purpose, of values shared between peoples whose origins might be various.
He acknowledged “that these great artificial societies acquire such unity that in each one all the parts feel a subtle sympathy, and move or cease to move, go forward or go back, all together, in response to some stir or throbbing, very powerful, and yet not to be discerned by our senses.” But whatever romance attached to nationalism had little to do with race.
Roosevelt was using the last word carefully, distinguishing it from ethnic, which he made clear had only cultural connotations for him, as ethnos had for the Ancient Greeks. Turning to a subject much more sensitive to his audience, he ventured some of the reasons why empires went into decline. One was when the sovereign authority devolved too much power to its provinces. In that case, “the centrifugal forces overcome the centripetal,” and the whole flew to pieces. He cited also greed, love of luxury, declining birth-rates, and loss of the “fighting edge.”
These drumskins, which he had been pounding for a quarter of a century, awoke the politician in him. The Romanes Lecture of 1910 degenerated into a stump speech, so prolonged it made his Sorbonne and Berlin orations seem epigrammatic in comparison. Toward the end—Roosevelt had been speaking for well over an hour—he did make one notable claim, that he considered himself “a very radical democrat,” opposed to any long-term domination of one group over another. But it was drowned out by the thunder of his exhortations.
“It would appear that the biological analogies in history are three,” a weary Oxonian remarked afterward. “Longitude, Latitude, Platitude.”
AFTER A FAREWELL dinner at Dorchester House, attended by the heads of the government, judiciary, and Anglican Church, Roosevelt left London for Southampton early on Thursday, 9 June. His ship was not due to sail until the following day, but he had an unusual assignation in Hampshire, en route to the port.
For years he had dreamed of roaming the English countryside “at the time of the singing of the birds.” Bird-listening was his primary delight as an ornithologist—almost his only delight in childhood, when he had been so myopic he had difficulty tracing the source of any song. Now, with his left eye blinded, he again wanted to hear, if not see, some of the British species he had studied as a boy.
Sir Edward Grey was happy to act as his guide through some melodious plot of beechen green. The foreign secretary was a passionate outdoorsman, extremely knowledgeable