King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

by Adam Hochschild

  The veteran British Baptist missionaries John and Alice Harris, who followed Morel to America, addressed more than two hundred public meetings in forty-nine cities. At one meeting in Chicago an old woman who had been born a slave tried to donate her life savings to the cause of Congo reform; the reformers would accept only one dollar. Speaking tours by other activists followed. John Harris enthusiastically reported to Morel from Washington, "Telegrams, petitions, private letters are rolling in here by the thousands.... The President ... with a little more pressure will take some action."

  Secretary of State Elihu Root, who found himself on the receiving end of all the pressure, recalled later in some exasperation, "The very people who are most ardent against entangling alliances insist most fanatically upon our doing one hundred things a year on humanitarian grounds.... The Protestant Church and many good women were wild to have us stop the atrocities in the Congo.... People kept piling down on the [State] Department demanding action." Petition-signers included the governor of Massachusetts and every member of the Commonwealth's senate, a group of Yale professors and officials, university presidents, divinity school deans, bishops, and newspaper editors. A Congo resolution was passed by the convention of the National Women's Christian Temperance Union.

  Although Morel had vocal individual supporters throughout Europe, only in the United States did the cause of Congo reform become the full-scale crusade it was in England. Horrified to see the movement against him spreading to a new continent, Leopold leaped into action. When Morel spoke in Boston in 1904, no fewer than six of the king's spokesmen showed up to demand equal time. When the influential Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts arrived in Paris for a visit the following year, the king immediately sent an emissary to invite him to dinner in Brussels. "He named six different days, so there was no escape," Lodge wrote to President Roosevelt. Lodge was impressed by Leopold; he described him as "a shrewd, active able man of business—a cross between [railroad barons] Jim Hill & Harriman, between the great organizer & promoter & the speculator. He knows everybody & about everybody."

  Using his knowledge "about everybody," Leopold targeted an even more powerful senator, Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. Aldrich, a multimillionaire, a card-playing partner of J. Pierpont Morgan, the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was the ultimate Washington power broker. "I'm just a president," Roosevelt once told the journalist Lincoln Steffens, "and he has seen lots of presidents."

  Leopold courted Aldrich and other influential Americans by promising them a share of the loot. He gave major Congo concession rights to Aldrich, the Guggenheim interests, Bernard Baruch, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the financier Thomas Ryan, a close friend and former legal client of Secretary of State Root. A letter of advice to the king from one of his American agents made clear the strategy Leopold was following: "Open up a strip of territory clear across the Congo State from east to west for benefit of American capital. Take the present concessionaires by the throat if necessary, and compel them to share their privileges with the Americans. In this manner, you will create an American vested interest in the Congo which will render the yelping of the English agitators and the Belgian Socialists futile." Leopold also gave more than three thousand Congo artifacts to the American Museum of Natural History, knowing that J. P Morgan was on its board.

  With Senator Aldrich, Leopold's largesse worked. The State Department was under constant pressure from the reformers to appoint an American consul general to the Congo who could follow up Roger Casement's investigation with one of his own. To get the reformers off his back, Secretary of State Root nominated the consul general they had suggested, but when Aldrich let it be known he would block that choice in the Senate, Root withdrew the nomination.

  His eye on key American ethnic voting blocs, Leopold also played the role of the victimized Catholic. His representatives in Rome successfully convinced the Vatican that this Catholic king was being set upon by unscrupulous Protestant missionaries. A stream of messages in Latin* flowed from the Holy See across the Atlantic to the designated Catholic point-man for Leopold in the United States, James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore—who, as it happened, was another card-playing companion of Senator Aldrich. Cardinal Gibbons believed that the Congo reform crusade was the work of "only a handful of discontented men ... depending largely upon the untrustworthy hearsay evidence of natives." He spoke out loudly for Leopold, who awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown.

  Leopold had a full squadron of lobbyists in the United States. Professor Alfred Nerincx, of George Washington University, helped put out a new English-language magazine on the Congo, gave speeches, and saw to it that favorable articles appeared in highbrow magazines. Frederick Starr, an oddball University of Chicago anthropologist who was a big believer in the inferiority of "primitive" peoples, received one of Leopold's innumerable medals and a full-year, all-expenses-paid tour of the Congo. In return he produced a series of fifteen enthusiastic articles in the Chicago Daily Tribune under the heading "Truth about the Congo Free State," later reprinted as a book.* Henry Wellington Wack, an attorney for a patent-medicine firm, published a thick book that soon appeared in thousands of American libraries. Instructions from Brussels were that Wack was "to act as if he were not in the State's employ, but merely an impartial publicist."

  Another American agent, however, proved less reliable. In setting up his U.S. lobbying effort, the king had made a rare and disastrous misstep.

  ***

  For any well-heeled Californian who found himself on trial in 1904, a likely defense lawyer might have been Colonel Henry I. Kowalsky of San Francisco. Kowalsky was a classic American type: the flamboyant trial lawyer who himself skirts the edge of the law and whose showman's dazzle attracts a roster of famous friends and acquaintances. A bon vivant, raconteur, and big spender who ran up legendary hotel bills, the gregarious Kowalsky's larger-than-life persona and courtroom skills won him a broad range of clients. Some were boxers and underworld figures; some were previously unknown relatives or common-law wives, whom he had a great knack for finding when there was a will that could be contested. Like many a colonel of his day, Kowalsky had never been in the army, although he let Europeans believe he had been.

  It was not just Kowalsky's personality that was larger than life. A renowned amateur chef, he consumed a vast amount of his own and others' cooking. "Compared with him," a reporter later observed when the portly William Howard Taft was in the White House, "President Taft is a top worker in a team of acrobats." Kowalsky's enormous neck cascaded over his collar; his voice had a husky wheeze; and when a San Francisco newspaper asked local luminaries for their favorite recipes one Christmas, Kowalsky slyly submitted one for roast jowls.

  He also suffered from narcolepsy, the disease that causes uncontrollable short spells of sleep. "There is scarcely a man familiar with the life of San Francisco who has not seen Kowalsky fall asleep on the street, sitting in the lobby of a hotel, trying a case in court or occupying a box at a theater," observed a reporter. He may, in fact, have had more control over this problem than he admitted; a journalist covering one trial noticed that "he awakes just in time to interpose the most pertinent legal objections to questions.

  "And it is these sudden awakenings," the story went on, "that have occasioned such havoc among the furniture of Judge Graham's court. When a man of some 300 pounds—to put it conservatively—awakes with a start, it is apt to jar the strongest chair made.... A few times more and there is an ominous creak, and then a crack and a smash. 'There goes another,' murmurs Bailiff McGenity as the colonel abandons his ruined chair and draws up a firm one." At the end of this particular trial, Kowalsky grandly presented the court with a special chair he had ordered built—of solid oak, held together by iron bolts, its legs reinforced with iron bracing.

  When Kowalsky was on the other side of a bitter legal battle with the famous gunfighter Wyatt Earp, the short-fused Earp threatened to shoot Kowalsky
on sight. The two men ran into each other in a San Francisco saloon. Earp forced Kowalsky into a back room, pulled out a revolver, and told the lawyer to get ready to meet his maker. Kowalsky's jowly face dropped onto his chest and he dozed off. Earp stormed from the room, saying, "What can you do with a man who goes to sleep just when you're going to kill him!"

  Kowalsky had an unerring eye for the pathway to a lucrative client, and he spotted one when Prince Albert, heir apparent to the Belgian throne, came to California. Albert was traveling incognito, but Kowalsky recognized and befriended him, and was rewarded in 1904 with an invitation to Belgium. There, he was received on board the royal yacht at Ostend and introduced to Leopold.

  Looking at Kowalsky, the king saw an American who was active in the Republican Party, then in power, and a man who portrayed himself as a lobbyist extraordinaire, able to thwart the troublesome do-gooders intent on causing trouble for His Majesty. With Morel starting to stir up the American public, there seemed no time to waste. The king hired Kowalsky, gave him detailed instructions, and provided enough money for a luxurious office on Wall Street. As Kowalsky prepared to move to New York, his friends in San Francisco—judges, businessmen, an admiral, and some rival lawyers who may have been happy to see him leave town— gave him a farewell banquet that doubtless added a few more pounds to his already awesome frame. "I shall not closely follow the text of the toast which has been assigned me," said the mayor of San Francisco. "Like our guest, it is too large a subject." Another speaker commented that it was fortunate Leopold had not sent Kowalsky directly to the Congo, where "the cannibals of Africa would have taken pleasure in so choice a morsel."

  Kowalsky replied to the toasts, "When I leave you, it is only because I have heard the clarion call of duty in the interest of humanity and civilization." The clarion call included an annual retainer of 100,000 francs, about $500,000 in today's money. In his new role, Kowalsky was received by President Roosevelt, to whom he gave a photograph of Leopold in a silver frame, an album of photos of the Congo, and a memorandum asking him not to be deceived by jealous missionaries and Liverpool merchants.

  Someone taken by surprise by all this was Baron Ludovic Moncheur, the Belgian minister to the United States, who had just penned a rapturous article, "Conditions in the Congo Free State," for the influential North American Review and who thought he was leading Leopold's American propaganda effort. He was horrified by the sudden appearance of Kowalsky, who had the unmistakable look of a shyster. On the very day of Kowalsky's farewell banquet in San Francisco, Moncheur learned with dismay, the lawyer had had a fistfight in court with a creditor. Moncheur and his aides sent off a frantic stream of messages to Brussels.

  At the Royal Palace, no underling dared openly oppose a new favorite of the king's, but Moncheur did at last receive a coded telegram from a top executive for Congo affairs: "I have your information on Kowalsky. Do you think the situation is such that we should cancel his mission?—which would be difficult for us, however. Wouldn't it be better to try to give him another mission in Africa or China?"

  "It would be worse than useless to send him to the Congo," one of Moncheur's aides replied, "unless one could hope that he wouldn't come back." Moncheur followed this up with a prescient warning about Kowalsky: "If he took me to be the cause of his disgrace, he could make scenes that would produce a scandal in the press."

  Cautiously, Congo state officials asked Kowalsky to come to Brussels, where they requested that he undertake an urgent mission to Nigeria. Kowalsky was interested enough to buy himself a sun helmet and an elephant gun, but he then turned down the assignment, probably having guessed that he was being put out of circulation. Because he knew too much, Leopold's worried Congo aides did not dare fire him, so they sent him back to the United States with more lobbying instructions, which barely disguised their mounting anxiety: "Colonel Kowalsky's mission is to enlighten senators and congressmen as to the justice of our cause, and to ward off the passing of unfavorable resolutions by them." However: "He will be careful not to call at the White House except in case of absolute necessity.... He will make no public speeches except after taking the Belgian Minister's advice."

  Kowalsky was now out of the loop, and a year after Leopold had hired him, the king let his contract expire. In vain, the lawyer bombarded Leopold with letters (all beginning "My dear Majesty...") touting his work for the Congo cause, denouncing his rivals among Leopold's other American lobbyists (he called one "a characterless, unworthy, and unprincipled ingrate" with a "rascally hand"), and making extravagant claims for himself. "It was a mighty task, and I worked night and day.... I have travelled thousands of miles in this cause." He tried to flatter the king into putting him back on the payroll: "I confess having conceived an affection for your Majesty such as I felt for my much beloved and lamented father." To Kowalsky's annual retainer, Leopold added a hefty 125,000 francs on condition that he leave quietly, all the while soothing him with hints that at some future date the king might need his services again.

  At last, however, the spurned Kowalsky did what Moncheur and his colleagues at the Belgian embassy had been dreading. On December 10, 1906, readers of William Randolph Hearst's New York American picked up their newspapers to find a front-page exposé on the workings of the American Congo lobby. KING LEOPOLD'S AMAZING ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE OUR CONGRESS EXPOSED.... FULL TEXT OF THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN KING LEOPOLD OF BELGIUM AND HIS PAID AGENTS IN WASHINGTON. Although Kowalsky indignantly maintained that someone had robbed his office, he had, it appears, sold Hearst his complete Congo correspondence.

  Every day for a week, Hearst played the story for all it was worth, splashing tens of thousands of words and dozens of photographs across the pages of the American and the many other newspapers he owned. There could not have been a worse catastrophe for Leopold, for, in order to highlight its scoop, the American dramatized the king's villainy by reprinting Morel's severed-hands photos and trumpeting all the Congo reformers' atrocity charges: INFAMOUS CRUELTIES. ... TORTURE OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN.... U.S. AMAZED AT CRIMES OF CONGO.

  The documents revealed that, in addition to Kowalsky's salary and keep-quiet payment, Leopold had promised Kowalsky an additional 100,000 francs in the king's Congo state bonds "if the American Government does not make any declaration harmful to the Congo State, and if Congress passes no unfavourable resolutions before the end of the next session." A letter from Kowalsky to the king boasted of a $1000 bribe he had paid to an unnamed prominent journalist, who was, he claimed, "the President's personal friend," from whose services "we got hundreds of thousands in advertising our cause." Kowalsky also boasted that he had quashed an exposé in Munsey's Magazine by going to "the editor, my personal friend, who destroyed the article and published one very complimentary to Your Majesty's interest instead."

  The most enticing revelation of all was that Kowalsky had used Leopold's money to bribe Thomas G. Garrett, a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to help derail Congo protest resolutions. Garrett, Kowalsky extravagantly told the king, had "stood at the door of the committee room and held back the demanding, howling missionaries, ministers, and religious cranks, as well as some agents of the Liverpool outfit. All this time I was at my post, and only when Congress closed did I breathe safely." On the American's front page appeared a photograph of a handwritten letter on U.S. Senate stationery from Garrett to Kowalsky, asking for part of the promised payment.

  Garrett was promptly fired. Hours after the story broke, Senator Lodge of Massachusetts, where the American Congo Reform Association had its headquarters, introduced a resolution calling for an international investigation of the Congo scandal. Skillful lobbying by Moncheur and backroom maneuvering by Senator Aldrich got the resolution watered down before it was passed, but the entire episode dramatically changed the climate in Washington. Secretary of State Root reversed the government's previous hands-off policy and decided to cooperate with the British in putting pressure on Leopold to end his rule over the territory. The Kowalsky rev
elations—swiftly and jubilantly reprinted by Morel, both in England and in a pamphlet in French for Belgium—created a major setback for Leopold. The tide was turning against the king.

  ***

  Around the time that he hired Kowalsky, Leopold had begun maneuvers on a completely different front. Remembering how effectively his sham Commission for the Protection of the Natives had silenced his critics in the 1890s, he decided it was time for another commission. This one would go to the Congo, investigate the situation, and clear his name.

  To his new Commission of Inquiry, he appointed three judges: one Belgian, one Swiss, and one Italian. The commission, however, was not as neutral as it appeared. The Italian, Baron Giacomo Nisco, worked not in Italy, but in the Congo state as chief judge. It was he, in fact, who in the notorious Caudron case [see [>]] had reduced the prisoner's sentence on grounds that a certain amount of "force" and "terror" was unavoidable. Furthermore, none of the three judges knew any African language or even enough English to talk directly to the highly critical British and American missionaries. The commission was told to hold hearings, hear witnesses, and issue a report. On the long voyage to the Congo, the king surely hoped, the old Africa hand Baron Nisco would enlighten his two fellow judges about the natives' need for firm discipline.

  The commission spent several months taking 370 depositions. It held its sessions everywhere, from the verandas of rubber-collecting posts to the deck of its steamboat, the Archiduchesse Stéphanie, named after one of the daughters Leopold was not speaking to. There was much ceremony: scarlet judicial robes and black ones, interpreters, scribes, guards with rifles and fixed bayonets. A parade of witnesses offered horrifying testimony. One of the most impressive was Chief Lontulu of Bolima, who had been flogged with the chicotte, held hostage, and sent to work in chains. When his turn came to testify, Lontulu laid 110 twigs on the commission's table, each representing one of his people killed in the quest for rubber. He divided the twigs into four piles: tribal nobles, men, women, children. Twig by twig, he named the dead.