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Theodore Roosevelt and Arthur Balfour: Friendship Without Familiarity

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The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson

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Abstract

Few world leaders in the early twentieth century had more in common than British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and American President Theodore Roosevelt. Born into wealthy and politically connected families, both men naturally exuded the charm and sophistication of Victorian aristocrats. Equally well educated, Balfour followed emerging intellectual debates in psychology and philosophy, while Roosevelt closely read the natural sciences and humanities. They shared a passion for sports—tennis specifically—and a mutual fascination in the new technologies of their age. As politicians they rose to high office somewhat accidentally and without an electoral mandate: Roosevelt became president when an assassin shot and killed William McKinley in 1901, and Balfour succeeded his retiring uncle Lord Salisbury as party leader and prime minister in 1902, although he led the Commons and stood in for Salisbury on numerous occasions before taking the top job.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914 (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 107.

  2. 2.

    Robert Pilpel, Churchill in America 1895–1961: An Affectionate Portrait (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 37–8. Roosevelt made similar disparaging remarks about Churchill to his eldest son and British friend George Otto Trevelyan years later. Theodore Roosevelt [hereafter TR] to Henry Cabot Lodge, 12 September 1906, in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt [hereafter Letters], ed. Elting E. Morison, et al. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1952), 5–6: 407–8, 1034, 1329.

  3. 3.

    Kathleen Dalton, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Contradictory Legacies: From Imperialist Nationalism to Advocacy of a Progressive Welfare State,” in A Companion to Theodore Roosevelt (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 487.

  4. 4.

    Alfred Griswold, Far Eastern Policy of the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 106; Perkins, 107; TR to Robert Harry Munro Ferguson, 22 January 1898, John and Isabella Greenway Papers, Arizona Historical Society (http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org).

  5. 5.

    TR to George Otto Trevelyan, 9 September 1906, in Letters (1952): 5, 399–400.

  6. 6.

    Jean Jules Jusserand, What Me Befell: The Reminiscences of J. J. Jusserand (London: Constable and Co., 1933), 269.

  7. 7.

    TR to John St. Loe Strachey, 12 February 1906, in Letters (1952): 5, 151.

  8. 8.

    Arthur J. Balfour [hereafter AJB] to Henry White, 12 December 1900, AJB Papers, British Library (49742).

  9. 9.

    For a broad overview of the ways in which the British, subjects of the British Empire, and American thinkers projected ideas of race and civilization at the turn of the twentieth century, see Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895–1904 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981); Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (March 2002): 1315–53; Edward Kohn, This Kindred People: Canadian-American Relations and the Anglo-Saxon Idea, 1895–1903 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004).

  10. 10.

    For scholarship on Roosevelt’s idea of race and ideology of civilization, see Frank Ninkovich, “Theodore Roosevelt: Civilization as Ideology,” Diplomatic History 10, no. 2 (July 1986): 221–45; Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1980); Michael Patrick Cullinane, “Imperial ‘Character’: How Race and Civilization Shaped Theodore Roosevelt’s Imperialism,” in America’s Transatlantic Turn: Theodore Roosevelt and the “Discovery” of Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2012).

  11. 11.

    TR, “Social Evolution,” The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Memorial Edition, Vol. 24 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 110.

  12. 12.

    TR, “Character and Success,” in Strenuous Life (New York: The Century Company, 1902), 114.

  13. 13.

    Cullinane, “Imperial ‘Character,’” 35–7.

  14. 14.

    TR, The Winning of the West: Part I (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900), 17.

  15. 15.

    Historians Thomas Dyer and Sarah Watts credit Balfour, to a certain extent, as the inspiration of Roosevelt’s racialized worldview, but Roosevelt’s idea of racial hierarchies and American imperialism developed long before he read Balfour’s book Decadence. Since his education at Harvard, Roosevelt had been developing his ideas of race, and arguably even before then. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, 13; Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 58.

  16. 16.

    AJB, The Foundations of Belief (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), 30.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 31.

  18. 18.

    AJB, “A Fragment on Progress: Rectorial Address at the University of Glasgow, 26 November 1891,” in The Man and His Work (London: Grant Richards, 1903), 282–3.

  19. 19.

    R. J. Q. Adams, Balfour: The Last Grandee (London: Thistle Publishing, 2013), 158.

  20. 20.

    AJB, The Foundations of Belief, 30–1.

  21. 21.

    E. T. Raymond, Mr. Balfour: A Biography (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1920), 41.

  22. 22.

    “Mr. Balfour on Foreign Affairs,” London Times, 16 January 1896.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.;’

  24. 24.

    TR, Winning of the West: Part I, 134.

  25. 25.

    TR to Henry White, 30 March 1896 in Letters (1951): 1, 523.

  26. 26.

    AJB to Henry White, 12 December 1900, AJB Papers, British Library (49742).

  27. 27.

    Richard Olney to Thomas Bayard, 20 July 1895, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States [hereafter FRUS] (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), 545–62.

  28. 28.

    TR to Herbert de Haga Haig, 6 January 1896 (https://www.raabcollection.com).

  29. 29.

    Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America (London: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), 124.

  30. 30.

    Lord Salisbury to Julian Pauncefote, 26 November 1895, in FRUS (1896), 566.

  31. 31.

    “Mr. Balfour on Foreign Affairs,” London Times, 16 January 1896.

  32. 32.

    AJB to Morton Frewden, Scottish National Archives GD 433/2/13. For a further treatment on John Hay’s Anglophilia, and the role of other statesmen beyond Roosevelt in the rapprochement, see William Shirey, “The Big Stick Split in Two: Roosevelt vs. Hay on the Anglo-American Relationship,” Penn History Review 24, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 102–28.

  33. 33.

    TR to Hermann Speck von Sternberg, 12 July 1901, in Letters (1951): 3, 116.

  34. 34.

    AJB to Andrew Carnegie, 18 December 1902, AJB Papers, British Library (49742).

  35. 35.

    Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), 144–5. See also William N. Tilchin, Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire: A Study in Presidential Statecraft (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

  36. 36.

    It is worth noting that the Venezuela blockade included German and Italian warships alongside British ones. The rise of Germany as a world power coincided with the rise of the United States, and British statesmen feared the Kaiser considerably more than they feared the United States. Anglo-American rapprochement was a means of ensuring Germany did not gain a foothold in the Western Hemisphere, a cause that suited both Roosevelt and Balfour. Nancy Mitchell, “The Height of the German Challenge: The Venezuela Blockade, 1902–1903,” Diplomatic History 20, no. 2 (April 1996): 185–210.

  37. 37.

    “Mr. Balfour in Liverpool,” London Times, 14 February 1903.

  38. 38.

    J.A.S. Grenville, “Great Britain and the Isthmian Canal, 1898–1901,” American Historical Review 61, no. 1 (October 1955): 48.

  39. 39.

    AJB to Holls, 31 December 1901, AJB Papers, British Library (49854).

  40. 40.

    Henry Cabot Lodge to TR, 29 June 1905, TR Papers, Reel 55, Library of Congress.

  41. 41.

    Marquess of Landsdowne to AJB, 8 August 1903, AJB Papers, British Library (49728); Allan Nevins, Henry White: Thirty Years of American Diplomacy (New York and London Harper & Bros., 1930), 200.

  42. 42.

    Henry Cabot Lodge to TR, 20 August 1903, Reel 36, TR Papers, Library of Congress.

  43. 43.

    Jason Tomes, Balfour and Foreign Policy: The International Thought of a Conservative Statesman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 183.

  44. 44.

    AJB to Landsdowne, 11 February 1904, AJB Papers, British Library (49728).

  45. 45.

    The Open Door policy was encouraged, if not conceived, by British diplomats, intellectuals, and agents. See Michael Patrick Cullinane and Alex Goodall, The Open Door Era: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 18–9.

  46. 46.

    AJB, Fiscal Reform (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), 267.

  47. 47.

    Raymond Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and the International Rivalries (Waltham, MA: Ginn-Blaisdell, 1970), 95–103; C. Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1889–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 122.

  48. 48.

    John M. Thompson, “Constraint and Opportunity: Theodore Roosevelt, Transatlantic Relations and Domestic Politics,” in America’s Transatlantic Turn: Theodore Roosevelt and the ‘Discovery’ of Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 59.

  49. 49.

    Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 2010), 357–9.

  50. 50.

    Richard D. White, Roosevelt the Reformer: Theodore Roosevelt as Civil Service Commissioner, 1889–1895 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 72–3.

  51. 51.

    Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power, 132–3; William N. Tilchin, “Anglo-American Partnership: The Foundation of Theodore Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy,” in A Companion to Theodore Roosevelt (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 319.

  52. 52.

    AJB to Henry Cabot Lodge, 11 April 1905, Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, Reel 22, Massachusetts Historical Society.

  53. 53.

    Choate had previously lived at the Viceroy of India Lord Curzon’s house, but the two fell out over the arrangements. Balfour, aware of this, nevertheless rented to Choate. See Curzon to Henry White, 27 April 1899, Henry White Papers, Box 16, Folder Mar–May 1899, Library of Congress.

  54. 54.

    Angelique Chrisafis “Portrait of Balfour Stays in Britain,” Guardian, 23 July 2002.

  55. 55.

    Adams, Balfour, 143.

  56. 56.

    Nevins, Henry White, 80.

  57. 57.

    John Hay to Henry White, 7 September 1900 and 13 September 1903, Box 16 and 17, Henry White Papers, Library of Congress.

  58. 58.

    Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power, 114; Nevins, Henry White, 196–200.

  59. 59.

    TR to Henry White, 26 September 1903, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress (http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org).

  60. 60.

    TR to David Gray, 5 October 1911, Letters: 7, 405–6.

  61. 61.

    Alan Clark (ed.), A Good Innings: The Private Papers of Viscount Lee of Fareham (London: John Murray, 1974), 108–9.

  62. 62.

    TR to Cecil Spring-Rice, 16 April 1917 in Letters (1954): 8, 1175; Michael Patrick Cullinane, “Theodore Roosevelt in the Eyes of the Allies,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15, no. 1 (January 2016): 80–101.

  63. 63.

    Ian Malcolm, Lord Balfour, A Memory (London: Macmillan and Co., 1930), 53–4.

  64. 64.

    Ibid.

  65. 65.

    Winston Churchill, Great Contemporaries (1937; ISI Books, 2012), 245.

  66. 66.

    AJB to Joseph Choate, 12 June 1905, Joseph Hodges Choate Papers, Box 11, Folder: Balfour, Library of Congress.

  67. 67.

    TR to Arthur Lee, 6 June 1905, Letters: 4, 1207.

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  1. Department of Humanities, University of Roehampton, London, UK

    Michael Patrick Cullinane

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  1. Department of Humanities, University of Roehampton, London, UK

    Michael Patrick Cullinane

  2. School of History, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Martin Farr

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Cullinane, M.P. (2022). Theodore Roosevelt and Arthur Balfour: Friendship Without Familiarity. In: Cullinane, M.P., Farr, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_4

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