Colonel Roosevelt
Page 1
ALSO BY EDMUND MORRIS
—
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
Theodore Rex
Beethoven: The Universal Composer
Copyright © 2010 by Edmund Morris
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Morris, Edmund.
Colonel Roosevelt / Edmund Morris.
p. cm.
Continues: Theodore Rex.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60415-0
1. Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858–1919. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government—1909–1913. 4. United States—Politics and government—1913–1921.
I. Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. II. Title.
E757.M8825 2010 973.911092—dc22 2010005890
[B]
www.atrandom.com
Frontispiece photograph: Theodore Roosevelt by George Moffett, 1914
v3.1
To
Robert Loomis
IT HAS BEEN OBSERVED IN ALL AGES, that the advantages of nature or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank, or the extent of their capacity, have placed upon the summits of human life, have not often given any just occasion to envy in those who look to them from a lower station; whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages; or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those, whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention, have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, not more frequent, or more severe.
—Samuel Johnson, THE LIVES OF THE POETS (1781)
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
PROLOGUE The Roosevelt Africa Expedition, 1909–1910
PART ONE 1910–1913
CHAPTER 1 Loss of Imperial Will
CHAPTER 2 The Most Famous Man in the World
CHAPTER 3 Honorabilem Theodorum
CHAPTER 4 A Native Oyster
CHAPTER 5 The New Nationalism
CHAPTER 6 Not a Word, Gentlemen
CHAPTER 7 Showing the White Feather
CHAPTER 8 Hat in the Ring
CHAPTER 9 The Tall Timber of Darkening Events
CHAPTER 10 Armageddon
CHAPTER 11 Onward, Christian Soldiers
CHAPTER 12 There Was No Other Place on His Body
CHAPTER 13 A Possible Autobiography
CHAPTER 14 A Vanished Elder World
INTERLUDE Germany, October–December, 1913
PART TWO 1914–1919
CHAPTER 15 Expediçào Cíentífica Roosevelt-Rondon
CHAPTER 16 Alph, the Sacred River
CHAPTER 17 A Wrong Turn Off Appel Quay
CHAPTER 18 The Great Accident
CHAPTER 19 A Hurricane of Steel
CHAPTER 20 Two Melancholy Men
CHAPTER 21 Barnes v. Roosevelt
CHAPTER 22 Waging Peace
CHAPTER 23 The Man Against the Sky
CHAPTER 24 Shadows of Lofty Words
CHAPTER 25 Dust in a Windy Street
CHAPTER 26 The House on the Hill
CHAPTER 27 The Dead Are Whirling with the Dead
CHAPTER 28 Sixty
EPILOGUE In Memoriam T.R.
Acknowledgments
Archives
Select Bibliography
Notes
Illustration Credits
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For compatibility with quotations, and stylistic empathy with the period 1909–1919, most place-names and usages remain unmodernized in this book. Hence, British East Africa for what is now Kenya, Christiania for Oslo, Near East for the Middle East, Mesopotamia for Iraq. Turkey is synonymous with the Ottoman Empire, and England with the United Kingdom.
Racial, personal, and sexual attitudes of the time have not been moderated. Hence, in the African prologue, such words as savage, boy, and native (the last regarded as respectful now, but tending toward disparagement then). And in the chapters proper, crippled, Miss or Mrs. Married or unmarried, women were hardly ever referred to by surname only. The word race, when quoted, usually connotes a national rather than ethnic identity. Although some “hyphenated” minorities achieved recognition during World War I, the phrase African-American did not challenge Negro as a universal term. The world was divided into the Occident and the Orient, and each hemisphere had its Indians. God was masculine; countries, ships, and cyclonic disturbances feminine. United States and politics were still sometimes employed as plural nouns.
A few archaic capitalizations, such as Government and Nation, have been dropped. Other spellings that have changed only slightly since 1919 are updated without comment: Czar becomes Tsar, Servia, Serbia, and Moslem, Muslim. Punctuation marks are altered for clarity only in transcripts of oral remarks.
PROLOGUE
The Roosevelt Africa Expedition, 1909–1910
SITTING ABOVE THE COWCATCHER, on an observation bench rigged for him by British East Africa Railway officials, he feels the thrust of the locomotive pushing him upland from Mombasa, over the edge of the parched Taru plateau. He has the delightful illusion of being transported into the Pleistocene Age.
His own continent recedes to time out of mind. Is it only seven weeks since he was President of the United States? His pocket diary indicates the date is 22 April 1909—not that the calendar matters much in this land of perpetual summer, with equal days and nights. Nor will many of its natives be able to read, let alone recognize the name THEODORE ROOSEVELT, prominently stenciled on a gun case riding behind him in the freight car. They are more likely to be impressed by what the case contains: a “Royal” grade .500/.450 double-barrel Holland & Holland Nitro Express, the most magnificent rifle ever made. (It contrasts with a portable library of about six dozen pocket-size books, ranging from the Apocrypha to the Pensées of Pascal, all bound in pigskin and shelved in a custom-made aluminum valise.)
He gazes through eager pince-nez at the prehistoric landscape opening ahead. Waves of bleached grass billow in all directions. Baobab trees, pale gray and oddly elephantine, writhe amid anthills the color of dried blood. Black men and women, naked as the stick figures in cave paintings, stare expressionlessly as he bears down upon them. He will have to get used to that opaque scrutiny wherever he treks in Africa. It is a look that neither absorbs nor reflects, the stone face of savagery.
Less disconcerting, but just as foreign, are the birds that flap and flash around the locomotive’s progress: tiny, iridescent sunbirds, green bee-eaters, yellow weavers and rollers, a black-and-white hornbill rising so late from the track he could catch it in his hands. Much as he loves all feathered things, the zoologist in him is distracted by horizon-filling herds of wildebeest, kongoni, waterbuck, impala, and other antelope. Errant zebras have to be tooted off the rails. Long-tailed monkeys curlicue from tree to tree. A dozen giraffes canter alongside in convoy, their tinkertoy awkwardness transformed into undulant motion.
Polish his lenses as he may, he cannot see the Tsavo reserve, “this great fragment of the long-buried past of our race,” through twentieth-century eyes. The word race, with its possessive
pronoun, comes easily to him, connoting not color but culture. Even when culture is at its most primitive, as here, something in him thrills at the prospect of soon being where there is no culture at all.
EITHER THESE FLORA and fauna are reluctantly giving way to him, as an armed intruder from the future, or he is, in a sense, regressing into them, finding again the Dark Continent he embraced as a child, in a copy of David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. Before he could read that book, let alone manage its weight, he had dragged it around his father’s Manhattan townhouse, begging adults to “tell” him the pictures: elephants spiked with assegais; surging, snap-jawed hippos; a lion mauling a white man.
From then on, the rule of tooth and claw in nature seemed as supreme as his own success at becoming “one of the governing class.”
At puberty he had set out to prove that it was possible for the frailest of small boys, nearly dead at three from asthma and nervous diarrhea, to punish bone and muscle till both grew strong. If an overstrained heart fluttered in protest, it must be ignored.
“Doctor,” he had said on leaving college, “I’m going to do all the things you tell me not to do. If I’ve got to live the sort of life you have described, I don’t care how short it is.” Privately, he allowed for sixty years.
At first, paradoxically, he had had to struggle free of privilege. His eminence, at twenty-two, as the head of one of New York City’s “Four Hundred” best families disqualified him for politics, in the opinion of the rough professionals who dominated the state Republican party. Hustling for votes was not the business of a young gentleman with a magna cum laude Harvard degree.
So he had fought—if not with tooth and claw, then with whatever weapons, blunt or subtle, cleared his path—north to Albany as assemblyman from the “Silk Stocking” district, west to Dakota Territory as ranchman and deputy sheriff, south to Washington as civil service commissioner, back to New York City as police commissioner, south again to Washington as assistant secretary of the navy. In the process he won wide admiration for political skills so great as to render him unstoppable in his quest for power. If he was not alone in plotting the Spanish-American War, he did more than anyone else in the McKinley administration to bring it about. Then, as colonel of his own volunteer regiment, “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders,” and generalissimo of its faithful press corps, he transformed himself into a military hero. Fresh out of uniform at forty, he became governor of New York, and at forty-two, vice president under the reelected William McKinley. In September 1901, an assassin’s bullet made him President of the United States.
Not surprisingly, given his physical and rhetorical combativeness, many Americans greeted his accession to the presidency in 1901 with dread. Those of nonconfrontational temper shuddered at his “despotic” reorganization of the army, and demands for a navy big enough to dominate the Western Hemisphere. Their fears seemed realized when he used warships to safeguard the Panamanian Revolution of 1903, securing for the United States the right to build an isthmian canal—and, not incidentally, the ability to move its battle fleet quickly from ocean to ocean. At the same time, they had been amazed at his promptness in granting independence to Cuba in 1902, his willingness to accept less than total victory in exchange for a cease-fire in the Philippines insurrection, and his discreet mediation of the Russo-Japanese peace settlement in 1905—not to mention intervention in the Morocco crisis of 1906, which for a while seemed likely to plunge Europe into war.
His Nobel Peace Prize, the first won by an American, was in recognition of these last two achievements. Had the prize committee been aware of how successfully—and secretly—he had worked to contain the Weltpolitik of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the most dangerous autocrat on the international scene, it might have made its award sooner.
Nevertheless, he has never been quite able to resolve whether action is not preferable to negotiation, and might the superior of right. Even the most scholarly of his books, The Naval War of 1812 and the four-volume Winning of the West, are muscular in their bellicose expansionism. Read in sequence, his biographies of Thomas Hart Benton, Gouverneur Morris, and Oliver Cromwell amount to a serial portrait of himself as a prophet of Manifest Destiny, a cultured revolutionary, an autocrat reconciling inimical forces. For bloodlust—strangely combined with tenderness toward the creatures he shoots—few memoirs match his Western trilogy, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, and The Wilderness Hunter.
Sexual lust is a subject he deems unfit for print. He is as delicate about the most intimate of acts as a Dutch Reformed dominie. That does not stop him from condemning birth control as “race suicide”—using the word race, now, in the loose sense of nationality. An advanced society must reproduce more and more, to swell its economic power and keep its “fighting edge.” He rejoices in having sired six children and betrays an obvious, if unconscious, desire to castrate men “who think that life ought to consist of a perpetual shrinking from effort, danger and pain.” Such are the intellectual elitists “whose cult is nonvirility,” and other “mollycoddles” unwilling to play a masterful role in making the world. Masterful remains one of his favorite adjectives. This British railroad, for example: this “embodiment of the eager, masterful, materialistic civilization of today,” pushing through the Pleistocene!
THE ICE CAP OF KILIMANJARO floats like a bubble, the blue of its lower slopes dissolving into the blue of heat haze. Somewhere in that southern swim, parallel with the line of the railway, runs the uneasy border between British and German East Africa. He has no plans to cross it. Having spent much of his presidency perfecting Anglo-American relations, and much of his life visiting and corresponding with well-placed English friends, he is almost an honorary British citizen. “I am the only American in public life whom the Europeans really understand,” he says. “I am a gentleman and follow the code of a gentleman.”
Right now he is the guest of His Majesty’s Colonial Office, as an honored collector of specimens for the National Museum in Washington, D.C. King Edward VII has sent him an official telegram of welcome to the Protectorate. Fifty-six eminent English peers, parliamentarians, naturalists, and men of letters are the donors of his Holland & Holland rifle. Given a high state of alarm in Parliament over Germany’s current arms buildup (the Reichstag has announced the construction of three new dreadnought battleships), it would be undiplomatic of him to quit one empire for another, even if a record rhinoceros beckons.
Packed among his safari gear is the typescript of a speech he has been asked to make at Berlin University next spring. In it, he praises the Wilhelmine Reich for its “lusty youth”—a compliment he feels unable to bestow on France or Britain, in similar addresses written for delivery at the Sorbonne and Oxford. He has taken pains to make all three speeches sound as academic as possible, not wanting to exacerbate the rivalries of Europe’s main powers. Like it or not, he will still be listened to as an American foreign policy spokesman.
So much for his fantasy of fading from popular memory in Darkest Africa. His safari has generated worldwide interest. British East African authorities have extended him special privileges: this train, for instance, comes courtesy of the acting governor. For as long as he roams the Protectorate, he must pay reciprocal respects to every district commissioner who flies a Union Jack over a hut of mud and wattle.
The East African phase of the expedition will end sometime in early December. If personal funds permit, he will then lead a smaller safari through Uganda to the headwaters of the Nile. In the new year, he will cruise down the great river to Egypt, stopping at leisure to hunt northern big game, not reconnecting with civilization until his wife meets him at Khartoum. That should be about eleven months from now. He wants to show her Aswan and Luxor and Karnak, where as a boy he first felt himself regressing in time. (She has somehow always figured in his recall: at twelve, the mere sight of a photograph of little Edith Kermit Carow was enough to stir up in him “homesickness and longings for the past which will come
again never, alack never.”) From Alexandria, they plan to sail to Italy and revisit the scenes of their honeymoon. After that, his northern speech engagements beckon. He does not expect to return to the United States until the early summer of 1910.
Roosevelt’s safari route through British East Africa, 1909–1910. (photo credit p.1)
“JAMBO BWANA KING YA AMERIK!”
The shout comes from more than three hundred porters, gunbearers, horse boys, tent men, and askari guards. They stand in two lines outside the little station of Kapiti Plains, five and a half thousand feet above sea level. Pitched behind them are sixty-four tents, and the half-distributed paraphernalia of the largest safari yet mounted in equatorial Africa. Were it not sponsored by the Smithsonian Museum and financed in large part by Andrew Carnegie, it could almost be a British military foray, with its crates of guns, ammunition, and rocket flares, its show of blue blouses and puttees, its sun helmets shading a few authoritative white faces. But four tons of salt, scalpel kits, powdered borax, and enough cotton batting to unspool back to Mombasa betray the safari’s field purpose. And instead of the Union Jack, a large Stars and Stripes floats over the field-green headquarters of the “King of America.”