Theodore Roosevelt Abroad

by J. Lee Thompson

  By the time the White House Conservation Conference adjourned, the African trip was taking more definite shape. Roosevelt told Edward North Buxton, another of his British safari advisors, that he and Kermit expected to depart by early April, confessing that this was on account of his desire to “be away for a year or a year and a quarter immediately following the installation of my successor.” If he did not go, “all kinds of small disagreeable things” were sure to happen. Especially if his successor, as he hoped, was Taft, “whose policy and actions I should loudly be accused of trying to dictate if I stay at home.”31Buxton was chairman of the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire, dubbed by its critics the “penitent butchers.”32TR was an honorary member of the British society, few members of which ever gave up the pleasures of hunting completely, repented or apologized. Roosevelt planned to follow Buxton’s advice and make trips from the Uganda Railway through British East Africa of one or two months at a time. He wanted to make these long enough to be sure to get into “good game country and out of the ordinary tourist infested region.” TR told Buxton he did not want any butchery. To the contrary, he expected the “chief value of my trip to consist of the observations I was able to make upon the habits of the game, and to a lesser extent, of the birds, smaller animals and the like.”33

  In part to forestall charges by his enemies that the safari would be simply another “game-butchering” trip, Roosevelt’s original private junket scheme was transformed into a full-fledged scientific expedition, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He proposed the idea in June 1908 to Charles D. Walcott, the Secretary of the Smithsonian, which included the United States National Museum, as an opportunity to build a fine African collection of “unique value.” TR told Walcott that he was “not in the least a game butcher” and that his “real and main interest” in the expedition was as a “fauna naturalist.”34Walcott, fearing he might lose the chance to the rival American Museum of Natural History in New York, agreed to provide naturalist/taxidermists and to pay for the preparation and transport of the specimens.35In the end the Smithsonian hired three naturalists, one to preserve the big game shot by Roosevelt and Kermit, and two others to capture and catalog the smaller animals. An elated TR notified Selous that most of the safari’s specimens would now go to the National Museum. His house was rather small and he imagined it would be a while before Kermit had any house at all so they did not really care for many trophies “for our own private glorification.” Roosevelt was “greatly interested in natural history” and should like to make a largely scientific collecting trip, and to try and “add my mite to field observations of the habitats and life of big game.”36

  Despite charges to the contrary, no taxpayer dollars were spent on the expedition. Walcott created a special fund of $30,000 by private subscription so that, as the president suggested, congress would not need to be involved.37Roosevelt paid for his and Kermit’s expenses, while an impressive list of donors made up of wealthy friends, raised the rest.38Most generous in the end was Andrew Carnegie, the world’s richest man since 1901 when he sold his steel holdings to J. P. Morgan. Though the robber baron and the trustbuster had pointed differences over the years, TR came to respect Carnegie’s philanthropic work. He consulted Roosevelt about his big charities and TR felt that, whatever his motivation, the plutocrat was doing “tremendous work in the world.” Not so much by what he gave, but by the way he gave it. The conditions placed on the gifts, such as requiring the various cities to contribute their share, had, in Roosevelt’s opinion, “a splendid effect upon the communities which meet these conditions.”39

  World Peace was prominent among the many causes Carnegie supported and he enlisted TR, as a kindred spirit to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, to aid in this quest. Carnegie seemed to find no contradiction in turning to these two figures whose public personas often reflected the glorification of war and military virtues. One authority on the peace movement has commented that Carnegie coupled “an extraordinarily sanguine disposition” with “a simplicity of mind that blurred the contradictory implications of specific ideas and actions.”40 In 1903 he donated $1,500,000, a huge sum at that time, to build a “Temple of Peace” at The Hague to house the sessions of the permanent court of arbitration, the most lasting creation of the First Hague Conference called by the Russian Czar in 1899 to discuss disarmament. And over the rest of his life, as Carnegie followed his “Gospel of Wealth” to give away ninety per cent of his fortune, he proved a generous donor to peace organizations in the United States and abroad. After a White House dinner during which he and TR discussed the African expedition, Carnegie reported to his friend and fellow peace devotee in the British cabinet, John Morley, that he had told the president that the “big game he should hunt” was the German Emperor, France, Russia, and “especially you big fellows in London.” He went on that TR had “fixed upon a hunt how-ever first” and understandably wanted to get “out of harness for a while.”41

  Unlike Carnegie, Roosevelt was not a wealthy man. His own father, also called Theodore, had used up much of his fortune in philanthropic pursuits, including the founding of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Consequently, the future president inherited only $125,000, still not an inconsiderable sum at the time. But he had little interest or skill in financial affairs and one fourth of his already dwindling capital was lost when his Dakotas cattle herd froze in a blizzard. Since their marriage Theodore and Edith had been forced to economize to make ends meet. In 1908, both to fill the family coffers and to pay his and Kermit’s way in Africa and Europe, TR accepted $50,000 from Scribner’s Magazine for a series of twelve articles detailing the safari, to be published in book form for an additional twenty per cent royalty. He turned down an offer of twice as much from Collier’s, which he did not consider as “dignified and appropriate” a venue for his writing. To forestall competition, the three naturalists who joined the expedition had to agree that they would not write or speak of the safari until Roosevelt’s articles and book were published.

  To make a living on his return from Africa, TR arranged to join another journal with sympathetic views, The Outlook, as a contributing editor for $12,000 a year. This turned out to be a wise investment for the journal, the circulation of which boomed after the ex-president’s association became known. He could have made four times as much at other magazines and eight times more in business. Money aside, Roosevelt told a British friend, John St Loe Strachey, editor of the similarly liberal London Spectator, that it was the character of the men at The Outlook that made it “the best instrument with which I can work.” The agreement was simply that whatever he had to say he would say in its columns. After the presidency, TR told Strachey, the work open to him “best worth doing” was “fighting for political, social, and industrial reform,” just as he had done over his twenty-eight years in politics. Roosevelt felt like he could still for some years “command a certain amount of attention from the American public,” and before his influence totally vanished he wanted to use it “so far as possible to help onward certain movements for the betterment of our people.” He strongly disagreed with Strachey’s assertion that ex-presidents should be given pensions and some continuing official role. To TR, it would be “personally an unpleasant thing to be pensioned and given some honorary position.” He emphatically did not desire to “clutch at the fringe of departing greatness.” In his view there was “something rather attractive, something in the way of living up to a proper democratic ideal,” in having a president go out of office as he planned, and become “absolutely and without reservation a private man, and do only honorable work he finds to do.” His first work would be to go to Africa for the National Museum. At fifty, after having led a very sedentary life for ten years, he felt it was his “last chance for something in the nature of a great adventure.”42

  To ensure the success of his adventure, Roosevelt was not reluctant to use his presidential connections and prestige to open doors
in Africa. Since most of the trip would be in British territory he had Whitelaw Reid, the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St James in London, contact British officials for the necessary permissions and licenses. The Colonial Secretary, Lord Crewe, arranged for preserves to be opened in British East Africa and Uganda, as did the Sudan’s governor-general, Sir Reginald Wingate. Wingate also put a small government steamer at Roosevelt’s disposal to navigate the tributaries of the Nile.

  For the previous decade and more, Roosevelt had been an admirer of the British Empire and a proponent of cooperation and friendship between the two great English-speaking peoples, later dubbed the “Special Relationship.”43 Over that time, for strategic and other reasons that suited both nations, A nglo-A merican relations became more cordial, particularly from the brief Spanish-American War.44 British support for the United States in the “Splendid Little War” reversed Roosevelt’s previous opinion. He told one of his many British friends, Arthur Lee (later Lord Lee of Fareham), that the attitude of England “worked a complete revolution in my feelings and the attitude on the continent at that time opened my eyes to the other side of the question.” Soon after the war, TR wrote to Lee, who had seen action with him in Cuba as British Military Attaché and was made an honorary Rough Rider, “I feel very strongly that the English-speaking peoples are now closer together than for a century and a quarter, and that every effort should be made to keep them together; for their interests are really fundamentally the same, and they are far more closely akin, not merely in blood, but in feeling and in principles, than either is akin to any other people in the world.” “Our two peoples,” Roosevelt told Lee, were “the only two really free great peoples.”45 After TR became president this new sentiment was further nourished by the reality that both the United States and Britain were isolated in the international community by their policies in the Philippines and South Africa where each was engaged until 1902 in similarly bloody guerilla wars against enemies who refused to lay down their arms and obey the rules of “civilized” warfare.

  In July 1908, TR instructed Whitelaw Reid that he wanted permission to shoot in British territory only where people were sometimes allowed, not closed areas such as Yellowstone Park in the United States. It would also, he told Reid, “be a matter of pride with me to kill the minimum number absolutely needed.” Roosevelt had already assured Sir Frederick Jackson, the acting governor of British East Africa and the prototype for another of Rider Haggard’s heroes, Captain Good, that he did not want to be any trouble to the local officials and meant to travel quietly just as would Selous or Buxton. This would be difficult with the small army of 250 or so men finally assembled for the expedition. After Africa, TR told Reid, he meant to go to Europe for a few weeks, without meeting heads of state. He wanted to spend a few weeks in the hill towns of Northern Italy and country districts of France before spending ten days or so in England with friends.46

  Based on reports Buxton and others had sent on conditions in Africa, TR carefully listed the game he hoped to bag. The desired animals of British East Africa were, in order of priority: lion, elephant, rhino, buffalo, giraffe, hippo, eland, sable, oryx, koodoo, wildebeest, hartebeest, warthog, zebra, waterbuck, Grant’s gazelle, reedbuck, and topi. Roosevelt feared he would not get a lion or elephant, but told Buxton he would “try hard,” and ought to get all the others except the rare sable and koodoo. If he was able to go to Larga in Uganda, Roosevelt wanted to make “a hard try for white rhino.” He would accept “the certainty of fever and a good deal more for a chance.”47 As it happened, Roosevelt had to cross into Belgian territory for his opportunity in part because he wished to avoid the bad publicity Winston Churchill had stirred up the previous year when he took a rare white rhino in a British preserve.

  Churchill had carried out his hunt while Parliamentary undersecretary for the colonies, officially on a tour of East Africa to inspect the Uganda Railway, which had opened the country to settlement. TR had been thrilled by Churchill’s Strand Magazine account of his hunt, which was one reason he wanted a white rhino so badly. The two men first met in Albany in December 1900 when Vice President Elect Roosevelt was still governor of New York. The new Member of Parliament was on a speaking tour in support of the British cause in the Boer War, out of which he had become a hero with a daring escape from a Boer prison. Roosevelt may well have heard, possibly through his friend Selous, who was a Pro-Boer, the rumor that Churchill had broken his word to his captors that he would not take flight. For whatever reason, though interested by his talk of India, from their first meeting TR disliked the young man. This was perhaps simply on account of Churchill’s self-important and arrogant nature, of which Roosevelt had further reports in Africa. Alice later noted that her father considered Churchill bad-mannered and she and many others have thought the antipathy simply a case of like repelling like. TR dispatched a courteous thank you note nevertheless for the copy Churchill forwarded of his book, My African Journey.48

  Roosevelt accepted an invitation to begin his hunt in British East Africa on the ranch of Sir Albert Pease, a wealthy settler and former Member of Parliament who split his time between Africa and London. He reminded Pease that he was “absolutely out of condition” and, he was sorry to say, had “not only grown fat, but also a little gouty” to which he hoped safari work would be an antidote. But he would have to begin “with great moderation.” TR weighed twice the 124 pounds he had measured as a Harvard freshman. His waist also had almost doubled to forty-seven inches and his neck measured nineteen. He was also made “rather nervous” by his prospective host’s assurance that he and Kermit would have the opportunity to shoot Hartebeest while riding out to his ranch. Roosevelt replied that “we shall both be utterly out of practice and we shall certainly miss our first shots.” Nonetheless, he confided to Pease that he really found it difficult to “devote full attention to my Presidential work at present, because I am looking forward so eagerly to my African trip!”49

  While he eagerly anticipated the safari, Roosevelt dreaded the prospect of being followed into Africa by tourists, or worse still, a “horde of reporters.” He had learned as president the difficulty of hunting with reporters who scared the game or got in the line of fire. To be sure he would be free of newspapermen, for at least the first leg of his journey, TR banned from his party all the journalists clamoring to accompany him. Further, before going he issued a statement that during the safari he would not open his mouth for print and therefore anything published would be “without authority and foundation.”50 To forestall the American press monster his presidency had done much to feed, Roosevelt appealed to, among others, Melville Stone, General Manager of the Associated Press. He told Stone that it would be a “wanton outrage” for the press association to send reporters to cover him once he was a private citizen. Further, it would be “inexpressibly distasteful” and of “no possible benefit to any human being, to have any newspaper try to report or exploit the trip.”51

  Roosevelt did not think English newspapermen would follow him as they were “rather decent in such matters.” American reporters were another matter and TR meant to have the authorities intervene until he could “elude them in the wilds.” If he could “get ahead of them once,” they would never catch up. On the off chance they did, he told Archie Butt he might see on his expense account for the Smithsonian something like: “One hundred dollars for buying the means to rid myself of one World reporter; three hundred dollars expended in dispatching a reporter of the American; five hundred dollars for furnishing wine to cannibal chiefs with which to wash down a reporter of the New York Evening Post.”52

  Jokes of cannibals aside, the real dangers of the looming safari reminded Roosevelt of his own mortality. Many people urged him not to go to Africa as he might be killed by a wild beast or die of sleeping sickness or in a thousand other ways, but in his opinion it did not do to try to live too long. TR told Butt that he was ready to go at any time and that fear of death would not deter him from doing what he wished. He did not k
now what the future had in store, but was “ready to rest my case here,” or, he added with a characteristic laugh and flash of his teeth by way of emphasis, “after I have had a little fling in Africa.”53 For luck, TR’s pal John Sullivan, the former Heavyweight Boxing Champion, gave him a gold-mounted rabbit’s foot, which Roosevelt put on his watch chain and took to Africa.54 His own amateur boxing activities while president had cost him the sight of one eye, a considerable drawback for shooting big game.

  Even with only one useful eye (which required powerful spectacles to remedy his nearsightedness), Roosevelt simply could not exist without reading and among the essentials packed carefully away for the journey were a number of non-hunting books. At night and on any moment of rest, at home or on whatever trail he followed, TR always kept a volume handy. Those he took to Africa were dubbed the “pigskin library” for the weather-proof binding put on the fourdozen trimmed down volumes. The portable collection was designed to fit into a single aluminum crate weighing fifty-five to sixty pounds, the standard load for one native bearer. His sister Corinne presented TR with the custom fitted case, with waterproof canvas cover, and the bindings, as a parting gift. “I want you to think of me,” she told him, “when you are reading in some little mosquito cage in far off Africa.”55

  Among the books chosen were many classics such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, the Chanson de Roland, Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Nibelungenlied, and the works of Shakespeare. TR told Butt that, though he did not like Shakespeare’s “dramatic poetry,” he could “get all of him in three pocket volumes” and there was a lot of “compressed thought” in the bard—as the “soldier takes the emergency ration, not for the quality, but for the largest amount of sustenance in the smallest space.” Historical tomes such as his friend and naval mentor Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, Macauley’s History of England and Carlyle’s Frederick the Great were balanced by the poetry of Keats, Longfellow, Tennyson, Poe and Emerson. The collection also included the fiction of Twain, Bret Harte, Dickens and Scott. The original pigskin library did not include a Bible, and Roosevelt saw that Kermit brought his. He also presumed that his mother would “conceal the book of Common Prayer somewhere among his underclothes.”56