Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [115]
On 19 December, Germany and Britain formally invited Roosevelt to arbitrate their claims against Venezuela. He said he would think about it, and left town with his children to spend a day or two in the pinewoods of northern Virginia. Cortelyou announced that the President had been under great strain “both mentally and physically … in the Venezuela crisis.”
This was the nearest Roosevelt got to a public acknowledgment that there had indeed been a “crisis” involving himself. “I suppose,” he wrote privately, “we shall never make public the fact of the vital step.”
Overflowing with goodwill, he went out of his way to praise things Teutonic at a meeting with trade representatives of the Kaiser. For twenty minutes he spoke, in vigorous if ungrammatical German, of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Theodor Körner. “He astounded us,” one of the group said afterward. “He is as well posted on German affairs as on American.… His familiarity with the masterpieces of German literature would amaze even the most exact scholar in the Fatherland.”
ROOSEVELT RESERVED HIS decision on whether to act as arbitrator through the holidays. John Hay felt sure that he would, in the end, resist this chance for easy glory, and refer the case to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Feeling a surge of tenderness, he put his rusty poetic talents to work and composed a Christmas Eve ode to the President of the United States.
Be yours—we pray—the dauntless heart of youth,
The Eye to see the humor of the game—
The scorn of lies, the large Batavian mirth;
And—past the happy, fruitful years of fame,
Of sport and work and battle for the truth
A home not all unlike your home on earth.
Snow fell as the Secretary wrote. His poem joined the other presents piling around the White House Christmas tree.
“SNOW FELL AS THE SECRETARY WROTE.”
Theodore Roosevelt’s White House in winter (photo credit 13.1)
CHAPTER 14
A Condition, Not a Theory
We insist that though his happy fellow-citizen may pass us
our vittles, he shall not fork out our stamps.
“THE EQUILIBRIUM OF the world is moving westwards,” a member of the Institut de France told Jean Jules Jusserand early in 1903.
Jusserand, packing his ambassadorial uniform for Washington, did not disagree. An intellectual himself (he was a specialist in medieval culture, and had published several works of literary and social history), he accepted, and mourned, the decline of French power. Yet it coincided excitingly with the rise of his own diplomatic fortunes. At forty-seven, he found himself entrusted with a mission of major importance: to protect France’s entente cordiale with her sister republic from increased competition by foreign monarchies. Tunis and Copenhagen had been nothing next to this. Clearly he had been selected less for experience than for brains and youthfulness—qualities now much in demand on Massachusetts Avenue. In Berlin, fifty-year-old Baron Speck von Sternburg was also packing for transfer. Britain’s forty-five-year-old Sir Michael Herbert had been at his post for three months. All three ambassadors had American wives.
Equally clearly, Jusserand saw that his life as half-scholar, half-envoy was over. Washington had little time for historiographical musings. As his friend at the Institut put it, “You will no longer decipher manuscripts, but men.” Jusserand could write in Latin and read fourteenth-century English with perfect fluency. But could he construe Theodore Roosevelt? The task had been too much for his predecessor, Jules Cambon, who seemed to doubt the President’s sanity.
Speculation about Roosevelt was intense at the Quai d’Orsay. French foreign-policy experts believed him to be the strongest international personality since Bismarck. Yet they could not reconcile the impérialiste who talked about “the proper policing of the world” with the statesman who had just