Prologue: Peace Envoy, Spring 1910

Abstract

On May 4, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt and his wife Edith, daughter Ethel, and son Kermit arrived at Christiana (the future Oslo) and were greeted by Norway’s King Haakon VII and Queen Maud. Once again, as they had almost everywhere in their tour across Europe, they stayed at the royal palace. The Colonel, as TR styled himself after the presidency, reported to his close friend Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge his continuing puzzlement about the “extraordinary” receptions he received in Norway and elsewhere. Royals had vied with one another to entertain them, and the popular displays were even more remarkable. In his opinion this was largely because to them he represented the American Republic, which stood to the average European as a “queer, attractive dream”—to some a “golden utopia partially realized” and to others a “field for wild adventure of a by no means necessarily moral type—in fact a kind of mixture of Bacon’s Utopia and Raleigh’s Spanish Main.“ In addition, the former president appealed personally to their imaginations as a “leader whom they suppose to represent democracy, liberty, honesty and justice.” It was all very interesting and amusing, but it was also fatiguing and irksome. As much as he dreaded getting back into the “confusion” of American politics, after 13 months abroad he longed “inexpressibly to be back at Sagamore Hill, in my own house, with my own books, and among my own friends.”¹