Theodore Roosevelt Abroad

by J. Lee Thompson

  The layer of snow-like ash left by the widespread grass fires made tracking the game much easier. On a second foray after the squaremouthed rhino, they took along the small mammal expert Loring who had before this not seen elephant or rhino alive. This would soon be remedied as within a few hours of leaving camp they came upon a herd of elephant, which they skirted around, not wishing them to charge. A few hours later they came upon the spoor of two rhino they soon caught up with and Kermit captured with his camera before Roosevelt shot one, while the other dashed away to safety. Unlike the ordinary rhino, they found the square-mouth did not charge as often when attacked. They also had the habit of sitting on their haunches like a dog, the only kind of heavy game they saw do so.

  Loring stayed behind to oversee the skinning, while TR and Kermit went on to follow a native who had come in with a report of another rhino nearby. This turned out to be, Roosevelt recorded, “a huge bull, with a fair horn; much the biggest bull we had seen; and with head up and action high, the sun glinting on his slate hide and bringing out his enormous bulk, he was indeed a fine sight.” The color of the animal was exactly that of the ordinary rhino, but he was taller and heavier, being six feet high. The “stout” horn was over two feet long. Later, after first taking a series of photographs of her, Kermit shot a cow with a thirty-one inch horn, the longest they had collected, to complete the two pair needed for the museums.15

  After this hunt, while Loring and Mearns stayed behind capturing in photographs, and in the flesh, the abundant bird and other life, TR, Kermit, Heller, Cuninghame and Grogan set off inland for a week’s safari traveling as lightly as possible with only two tents. The grass was mostly burned, but they camped by a beautiful pond covered with white and lilac water lilies, with large acacias nearby to provide shade. They saw nine rhino, none of which carried notable horns, before Roosevelt shot one with a horn a little shorter than Kermit’s cow for the National Collection of Heads and Horns. At the “zenith” of his trip, the Colonel reported the six white rhinos to his sister Anna, telling her that it was the animal he most wanted and their “tale of big game is now full.” They were in the heart of wild Africa where there were not even any natives nearby. TR supposed that they were bound to come down with “some fever or other soon,” but so far Kermit had been in robust health and he had not for years passed nine months in such good physical condition as he had the last nine in Africa.16

  Breaking camp at the Lado, the party sailed down the Nile to Nimule where the boats were left behind for a ten-day march cross country through a “barren and thirsty land” to Gondokoro. After this tramp, TR reported to Lodge on February 5 that he and Kermit remained well, but “this was not a mere health resort” as all the other members of the party had been down with fever or dysentery. One gun bearer, one skinner, and four porters had died, two had been mauled by lions and, in a village along the way, eight had died of sleeping sickness during their stay.17 Loring, adopting the style of epitaph they had seen on numerous headstones in Africa, left a rhyme in one of the native graves:

  Here lies the remains of skinner Dick

  Who died from the bite of the spirillum tick

  He trapped from Mt Kenia to the Athi plains

  And here in Uganda we leave his remains.18

  Among the many letters awaiting TR at Gondokoro was Gifford Pinchot’s explanation of the Ballinger affair and his firing. Though couched in careful language on account of Roosevelt’s close friendship with the president, it amounted to a bill of indictment against Taft. Pinchot explained that he had not written before as he wanted TR to be “free for a time from the echoes of trouble.” But now, in Pinchot’s view, it was clear that, “We have fallen back down the hill you led us up” and there was a general belief that the special interests were “once more substantially in control of both Congress and the Administration.” He did not go so far as to attribute the present situation to “deliberate bad faith on the part of Mr. Taft,” but to a “most surprising” weakness and indecision, and to his desire to “act as a judge, dealing with issues only when they are brought to him,” not as, what the president really was, at least in the view of TR and Pinchot, “the advocate and active guardian of the general welfare.” Further, the reactionaries believed that Taft followed the advice of the last man who talked to him and had consequently “built a fence round him with their own men.”

  Pinchot then proceeded to list sixteen reasons he had come to these conclusions. To begin with, after his election, Taft had surrounded himself by Trust attorneys and other reactionary advisors in the Cabinet and Congress “who were necessarily in opposition to the Roosevelt policies” and from which he had never broken away. Consequently, in the tariff debate Taft had failed to support the insurgent Republicans in Congress, including many progressives who were “honestly trying to fulfill the party pledges and reduce the tariff” and now the president defended “a tariff bill made by the special interests, following the passage of which the cost of living rose beyond all precedent.” On the conservation front, Taft had allowed the work of the National Conservation Commission to be stopped, which “seriously retarded the practical progress” of the movement. Through decisions by the attorney general, Taft had abandoned the principles TR had established of federal regulation and control, in the public interest, of waterpower on navigable streams. By the appointment of Ballinger, the president had “brought about the most dangerous attack yet made upon the Conservation policies—an attack now happily checked.”

  On a more personal level, Pinchot reported that Taft had allowed attacks on TR in Congress to continue “unchecked when a word from the incoming President would have ended them.” Then, in a series of speeches, Taft had endorsed Roosevelt’s bitterest enemies in the Congress, including Senator Aldrich and Speaker Cannon, while he “tried to read out of the Republican [P]arty,” senators Nelson, Beveridge, Cummins, and others “whose fight was made for equality of opportunity and a square deal.” And finally, Taft had repeatedly put party solidarity above the public welfare while allying himself with the special interests and allowing “the great mass of the people to lose confidence in the President.” Pinchot claimed not to have lost all hope that Taft might yet change course and vowed to support him “up to the point where my loyalty to the people of this country requires me to break with the administration.” He assured Roosevelt that “the hold of your policies on the plain people” was as strong as ever and that because of Taft’s actions many of TR’s former enemies were now his friends. The issue at stake had become “immeasurably larger than politics or any man’s political fortunes.” It was a “straight fight for human rights.” At least that was how it looked to him “on the last day of 1909.”19 And this is how it would look to Roosevelt two years later when he challenged his friend Taft for the Republican nomination.

  At the time, however, TR replied to Pinchot that he had received his letter at Gondokoro and along with it the definite news that the chief forester had been removed. He assured Pinchot that his replacement by an able man, the forestry expert Henry Graves, in no way or to the least degree lightened the blow, for besides being the chief of the forestry department, Pinchot had also been the leader of “all the forces which were struggling for conservation, which were fighting for the general interest as against special privilege.” He did not wish to be ungracious towards his successor, but he could not as an honest man cease to battle for the principles for which Pinchot, Garfield and other of their close associates stood. Roosevelt went on that he would of course say nothing at present but asked if there was any chance to see Pinchot in Europe. If not he asked to see him on the steamer to America as he wanted to talk to him before he “even in the smallest degree commit myself.”20 Three days after TR wrote this letter, on the first anniversary of Taft’s inauguration, the Indiana newspaperman and reformer Lucius B. Swift sent “My Dear Roosevelt” a one sentence message which summarized the view of many: “Taft is a damn, pig-headed blunderer.”21

  All of Roosevel
t’s correspondents, however, did not condemn Taft. Two of his closest friends in fact, Lodge and Root, defended the president in their letters. Lodge, who also had been a supporter of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, noted that no president could possibly have tolerated such a letter as their mutual friend sent to Dolliver. He thought Pinchot had been unwise as his first duty should have been to “the great service he has built up” and he ought not to have allowed himself or his subordinates to become involved with the muck-raking magazines that attacked Ballinger.22 Root, whom Taft had consulted before he dismissed Pinchot, had become one of the president’s closest advisors. Root revealed to TR that, for his sins, he had been placed on the committee investigating the Ballinger-Pinchot affair, which he considered a “very disagreeable row” between the two men. Taking Taft’s line, Root asserted that there had been lots of gross distortions aimed at Ballinger and that “indiscreet friends” were making matters worse. In his view the scandal was hurting the administration and, he feared, Pinchot and the cause of conservation as well. Although he admitted Taft had not “yet altogether arrived,” Root asserted that he was nevertheless “making a good President” and would eventually win his way ‘into the public confidence.” He compared the change in presidential styles from TR to Taft as between an automobile and a cab. Like the latter, Taft was “big and good natured and easy going and let things drift considerably.”23

  Back in Africa, there was still hunting to be done. While the sick members of the party recovered at Gondokoro, TR and Kermit struck off across the Nile again into Belgian territory for eight days spent in pursuit of the giant eland, not only one of largest and handsomest, but also the least known of African antelopes. The Belgian commandant of the Lado supplied seven askari to accompany the party, which had sixty Ugandan porters in train. The weather was very hot and the terrain a “waste of barren desolation.” They saw elephant, giraffe, and buffalo along the way before, after three days, Roosevelt at last got a chance for a giant eland, a big bull with horns twisted almost like a koodoo’s and a finely modeled head and legs. After a long stalk, at the end of which he had to crawl on all fours across the baked ground, TR shot his bull at one hundred yards with his Springfield. In the following days Kermit shot a bull and a cow. Eight days hunting yielded only these three of the elusive prey.

  Their last major big game animals bagged, the hunters returned to Gondokoro, where they found waiting the steamer Dal, which Sir Reginald Wingate, the Sudan’s governor-general, had arranged to take them on the two week voyage down the Nile to Khartoum and civilization. Along the way, at Lake No and near the Nile, and on short side trips down its tributaries—the Bahr el Ghazal and Bahr el Zeraf, the final few specimens collected included white-eared kobs and saddle-marked lechwes, commonly called Mrs. Gray’s water-buck. When the numbers were totted up at the end of the safari, more than 11,000 specimens, large and small, had been captured and preserved. Many of the almost 5,000 mammals, 4,000 birds, 500 fish, 2,000 reptiles, and many invertebrates, remain in the Smithsonian and other museums and are still used regularly today for research and study.24 The naturalists discovered new genera, species, and sub-species. To many of these, including shrews, rodents, monkeys, deer, antelope, gazelle, birds, and even a conch shell, they gave the name roosevelti. Outside big game, the expedition had been the first systematic and comprehensive investigation undertaken of the flora and fauna of the areas visited. From this the Smithsonian garnered the most complete collection of East African species in the world.

  Roosevelt and Kermit personally accounted for 512 big game trophies, of which they kept only a dozen for themselves.25 TR’s bag included nine lions, eight elephants, thirteen rhinos, six buffaloes and fifty-three other species, 296 animals in all collected over nearly as many days. Game was so numerous that, had they been willing, they could have killed ten, or a hundred, times as many. In all the hunting, only two wounded animals that Roosevelt knew of were left unaccounted for in the field. Of all the letters he received applauding the expedition, the one the Colonel perhaps most cherished came from Selous, who congratulated TR on the “marvelous, unbroken success of your African journey.” More than “anything else he had got,” Selous envied him the giant eland trophy.26 TR’s and Kermit’s achievements in Africa had placed them amongst the greatest big game sportsmen in the world. However, Roosevelt had had enough. The safari was meant to be the adventure of a lifetime and he had done a lifetime of shooting in ten months. He told his sister Corinne, “I do not care if I do not fire off my rifle again.” He was also overjoyed at the prospect of seeing Edith and confessed he would “never go away from her again if I can help it.”27

  On March 10 the Dal reached Kodok, where the British had faced down a French imperial incursion a decade before in the so-called Fashoda Incident. Just before this they met the steamer of Sir William Garstin, a British engineer who had built the Aswan dam and for two decades had overseen the massive irrigation projects that ensured Egypt’s prosperity. Garstin and the Colonel were able to talk for some time of Sudanese and Egyptian affairs. Roosevelt greatly admired the constructive work of Garstin, as well as that of Sir Reginald Wingate, both of whom he saw as fellow imperialists toiling in the vineyard without much support, particularly from the elected leaders at home. While still president he had written to Wingate that his own colonial experiences made him appreciate the governor-general’s complaint that he was not getting the money that he needed for development in the Sudan. There was much TR would have liked to do in the Philippines that was impossible because Congress denied him the necessary funds. Roosevelt had years before read Wingate’s 1891 book Mahdism and the Egyptian Sudan and, in addition to the hunting, he had written Wingate that he looked forward “with eager interest” to see what his people were doing in his domain, as in all the British possessions.28

  On his journey down the great river, at village after village that had been “touched by the blight of the Mahdist tyranny,” Roosevelt was struck by the lack of men of middle age, and by the children, all of whom were under twelve and known as “Government children” because under the previous regime most of them had been killed or died of starvation.29 In his opinion, during the twelve years of British rule since the Khalifa’s defeat at Omdurman, no place else in the world had shown “such astonishing progress from the most hideous misery to well-being and prosperity.” By putting an end to the “wolf-pack” rule of the Mahdi, and his successor the Khalifa, the British had ended a “tyranny which for cruelty, blood-thirstiness, unintelligence, and wanton destructiveness surpassed anything which a civilized people can even imagine.” Under such rule millions had died in an atmosphere of religious intolerance, slavery and murder.30

  What he saw along the Nile in the Sudan made a strong imprint on TR, who came to equate the bloody jihadist regime of the Mahdi with Muslim rule in general. When he reached Khartoum, the Colonel told the American missionaries there that he felt they owed “a peculiar duty” to the Government under which they lived “in the direction of doing your full worth to make the present conditions perpetual.” It was “incumbent on every decent citizen of the Sudan to uphold the present order of things; to see that there is no relapse; to see that the reign of peace and justice continues.”31 This meant continued British rule.

  Lodge had warned TR that at Khartoum at least eight or ten newspapermen, some very hostile to Taft, would attempt to “rouse your indignation against him by what they say.” Lodge thought it of the “first importance” that Roosevelt should stay “entirely aloof” and say “absolutely nothing” about American politics before he got home, where they could talk and TR could judge the facts himself. Edith had written to Lodge about those who wanted Theodore to stay away another year. With this Lodge disagreed, and he told his friend to “carry out your plans just as you intended” and come home in the summer.32 The Colonel would heed Lodge’s advice as best he could, but the journalists would not wait until Khartoum for their interviews. They hired boats and came up the Nile to intercept
him on the way down.

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  Figure 1 TR, seated, with his mountain lion statue and “Tennis Cabinet.” Notables include Captain Archie Butt at far left; Gifford Pinchot, fifth from left; French Ambassador Jules Jusserand, thirteenth from left; Elihu Root, behind TR’s left shoulder; James Garfield to Root’s left; Seth Bullock next to Garfield; John Callan O’Laughlin, fourth from right. Jack Abernathy is in a light colored suit. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

  Figure 2 TR and his chosen successor William Howard Taft at the 1909 Inaugural. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

  Figure 3 The Roosevelt family, Christmas 1908. From left, Ethel, Kermit, Quentin, Edith, Ted, TR, Archie, Alice, and her husband Nicholas Longworth. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.