A Zombie's History of the United States (18 page)

He also introduced the word “zombie” to the American vernacular.

The Sickly Scholar

The zombi is no more evil than the brown bear.

—Theodore Roosevelt, The Natural History of Zombis, 1881

Theodore Roosevelt was born October 27, 1858, in what is today the Gramercy section of New York City, the second child of a wealthy family of Dutch origin. Young Teedie, as he was affectionately known (the nickname Teddy would later be bestowed by his first wife, Alice), was outwardly the polar opposite of the robust and athletic Roosevelt we think of today. Sickly and suffering from a variety of ailments, he was so severely asthmatic that he needed to be propped up in bed while he slept. These maladies, of course, did little to curb young Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for the life.

Unable to partake in much childhood play, Roosevelt became an avid reader and, not unlike Meriwether Lewis, developed an early fascination and love for the natural world, in particular zoology. At age nine, a lifelong interest in what he would later term
zombology
took form when Roosevelt saw the decapitated head of a de-animated zombie at a local market. After getting his father to purchase the head, Roosevelt and two of his cousins created what they called the Roosevelt Museum of UnNatural History. Teaching himself taxidermy from books, Roosevelt stocked his makeshift museum with as many zombie parts as he could acquire. Here, working from the family home, young Roosevelt dreamed of one day hunting and de-animating a fully mobile zombie himself.

By age sixteen, Roosevelt had willed his once weak body up to the same level of fitness as his mind, becoming an adroit athlete. In 1876, he matriculated at Harvard College where he became active in boxing and rowing. He joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, was a member of Harvard’s private society, the Porcellian Club, and would eventually graduate
magna cum laude
. But Roosevelt would later recall that in the middle of his classes, his mind would inevitably “wander from my lessons to that of zombis.” While still in school, he undertook a methodical study of the undead, and began work on the book that would launch his public career.

The Natural History of Zombis
was published in 1881, just one year after Roosevelt’s graduation from Harvard. The word “zombi,” as Roosevelt spelled it, he found in a book about Caribbean cultures. Though America’s flesh-eaters were far more real than those supposedly resurrected by witchcraft in voodoo folklore, Roosevelt felt that superstition and ignorance had kept zombies from ever receiving a proper name for far too long, noting in his introduction:

We may call the manatee “the sea cow,” but yet it remains a manatee. Walking dead, undead, or naught, the brutes should have themselves a name like any other creature.

Since none preceding myself saw fit to affix one, it would seem I have the due pleasure.

Combing through existing literature on the undead, Roosevelt found that there had been no truly systematic study of the creatures. Unlike previous American, British, and Spanish books, which ignored quantifiable facts to push a religious agenda, Roosevelt’s carefully researched book concerned itself simply with history and observed science, complete with drawings depicting individual zombies, charts depicting living populations, and analyses of the differences between Colonial and Native American interaction with the undead. Roosevelt’s somewhat revolutionary approach was examining the history of zombies as one would examine that of the buffalo or any other animal species. The very title was a shift in attitude, as he called it the
natural
history of the zombie instead of
unnatural
.

They are the most ferocious creature in the world. Even the most formidable beast, the lion or the crocodile, usually attack things smaller than themselves. And male lions will always run from another male of greater stature. But the zombis habitually attack humans much larger than themselves. A small child who became a zombi will zestfully attack even the largest of men. They will rend and devour alive any man they can get their hands on, never growing exhausted and never relenting. Their teeth are still the dull teeth of man, and the jaw muscles possess no great power. It is the rabid, furious snaps that drive the teeth through flesh and bone, and zombis may lose their teeth like any creature. I never witnessed an exhibition of such impotent, savage fury as when I first saw a cage full of zombis. They uttered an extraordinary guttural sound. As they thrashed about they bit with vicious eagerness at whatever presented itself. One of them bit one of its fellows accidentally; another snapped at a piece of wood, and left the teeth-marks deep therein. As man does not eat zombi, by all accounts that makes zombis the top predators of the land, and it is necessary to be exceedingly cautious around them. If they succeeded taking down a man, the blood brings up every member of the ravenous throng which is anywhere near.

Among today’s zombie historians and zombologists,
The Natural History of Zombis
is considered the first modern work in zombism. The book was immediately praised by literary critics for scholarship and style, the Smithsonian adopted it for study, and the Department of War ordered a copy given to every regiment during the Second Cleanse. Roosevelt’s feeling that zombies were drawn by blood was ahead of its time and would not be scientifically proven until decades later. In a 1987 interview, the University of Minneapolis’s Tom Ringdal wrote, “Roosevelt’s study of the zomboid influenced all subsequent scholarship in the field. More than a classic, it remains, after more than one hundred years, a standard study of zombies.”

Zombie Ranch

It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West of Owen Wister’s stories, and Frederic Remington’s drawings, the soldier and the cowpuncher and the savage zombi. The land of the West has gone now, “gone, gone with the lost Atlantis,” gone to the isle of ghosts and strange dead memories.

—Theodore Roosevelt, writing in 1912

The Natural History of Zombis
established Roosevelt as a serious historian and authority on zombies. This rise in esteem helped him become the youngest person ever elected to the New York State Assembly. Sadly, tragedy was also dogging the future president. Theodore Sr., who beyond being Roosevelt’s father, was also his idol, had died in 1878. Then on February 14, 1884, his mother died of typhoid fever, and mere hours later his beloved wife, Alice, died of acute kidney failure in the same house. These events, combined with the disappointment of the recent Republican National Convention, inspired Roosevelt to an early retirement from public life. He would relocate to the ranch he had purchased in the Dakota Territory Badlands.

The ranch was located north of the boomtown of Medora, North Dakota, on the banks of the Little Missouri. Roosevelt had spotted the property two years prior while on a zombie hunt. He named the ranch Zombi Tooth and began to rebuild his life and reshape himself as a rugged frontiersman. He learned to ride a horse western-style, to rope cattle, to hunt buffalo and antelope and zombies. He began writing about frontier life, publishing both
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
and
On the Hunting Trail of the Zombi
. He became a deputy sheriff and single-handedly captured three outlaws who stole his riverboat. While working with a posse to hunt down a group of horse thieves, Roosevelt met famous Deadwood sheriff, Seth Bullock. Bullock himself was an avid fan of zombie hunting and the two were to remain friends for life.

Here Roosevelt was finally able to indulge the fantasies he had held as a sickly, upper-class East Coast child. Here he could be a zombie-hunting wild man. You can feel his excitement as he describes an episode to his friend John Bowman back in New York:

We were hunting zombi, which they call out here, “walkers.” Yesterday we were in the saddle for ten hours. The dogs ran one zombi down and killed it among the rocks after a vigorous scuffle. This morning, soon after starting out, we struck the cold trail of a zombi. The hounds puzzled about for nearly two hours, going up and down the great gorges, until we sometimes absolutely lost even the sound of the baying. Then they struck the fresh trail, where the zombi had killed a prospector over night. In half an hour a clamorous yelling told us they had overtaken the quarry; for we had been riding up the slopes and along the crests, wherever it was possible for the horses to get footing. Soon we saw the “walker” tussling with the dogs. Here I could have shot him, but waited for Stewart to get a photo; and the zombi jumped out at us. A great fight broke out between the zombi and the dogs. For fear he might kill one I ran in and stabbed him at the soft base at the rear of the skull, thrusting the knife you loaned me right into the brain. I have always wished to kill a zombi as I did this one, with dogs and the knife.

During this time, Roosevelt began thinking about conservation. He was not the only American worried about the disappearance of the buffalo or deforestation, but he may have been the only one worried about the loss of zombies (Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” was still many years away). The Second Cleanse was just beginning its sweep of the westerner lands, but already the change was noticeable to hunters like Roosevelt.

The winter of 1886-87 was uncharacteristically severe. The extreme cold claimed the entirety of Roosevelt’s cattle herd, which was a major financial loss. Roosevelt took this as a sign. Reinvigorated by his time at Zombi Tooth, he decided to return to the East Coast and resume his career in public service. He wed again, this time to his childhood sweetheart, Edith Kermit Carow. He campaigned for Benjamin Harrison in the 1888 presidential election, and when Harrison won, Roosevelt was appointed to the United States Civil Service Commission. In 1895, he became president of the board of New York City Police Commissioners, where he would modernize the police force and establish the first Police Academy.

THE ZOMBIE BATTERY

Nikola Tesla, the revolutionary inventor and mad prince of electrical engineering, played a pivotal role in Buffalo winning the right to hold the Pan-American Exposition. The competition was between Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Buffalo had the larger population (350,000, then the eighth-largest city in America), but Niagara had its water-powered electrical plant. Tesla had recently invented a way to successfully transmit electricity over great distances, which meant that an exposition in Buffalo could be lit using power generated twenty-five miles away at Niagara Falls. Buffalo won the bid.

Tesla was no stranger to zombies. In 1884, when the Serbian Tesla immigrated to the United States, he worked for Thomas Edison where he experimented with using zombies as batteries. The human body generates electricity. Tesla theorized that what keeps a zombie animated so long after human death was simply a heightened amount of electricity. He proposed harnessing this power. He even devised a device that could potentially be used to de-animate zombies cleanly by absorbing their excess electricity.

Unfortunately, none of these inventions were to see the light of day. Edison found the ideas unseemly, but because of Edison’s clever and ruthless business model, he owned the patents to all the work Tesla did for the company. Enraged, Tesla quit.

In 1897, the newly elected President William McKinley appointed Roosevelt assistant secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt resigned the very next year with the onset of the Spanish-American War (April 25-August 12, 1898) to establish the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment. Made up of an eclectic group of volunteers, from Western cowboy cohorts to his Ivy League friends, the group was dubbed Zombi Doom by Roosevelt. The press called them the Rough Riders, and that name stuck, as few of Roosevelt’s men shared his reverence for the walking dead.

Ascending the Throne

Among his multitude of achievements and records held, it could be added that Teddy was the first man to become President by killing the previous President.

—Stephen B. Bucklyn, from the introduction to an unpublished Roosevelt biography, 1927

Upon leaving the army, Roosevelt was elected governor of New York in 1898. Within two short years Roosevelt had become such a powerful force in the Republican Party that Republican boss Thomas Collier Platt forced him onto McKinley’s reelection bill as vice president, against McKinley’s wishes. McKinley won his bid in a landslide. On September 6, 1901, President McKinley gave a speech at the Pan-American Exposition World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York. Afterward McKinley stayed to greet the public. Among his many well-wishers was Leon Frank Czolgosz, a steel worker and anarchist who did not wish the president well. Revealing a pistol he had concealed under a handkerchief, Czolgosz fired two rounds into the president—one hitting McKinley’s shoulder, the other hitting McKinley’s gut—before being subdued by the crowd.

Following the assassination attempt, McKinley was rushed to the exposition’s emergency hospital where the bullet in his shoulder was quickly removed. The second bullet had pierced several internal organs and buried itself in the muscles near the president’s spine. Fearing that searching for the bullet might cause more harm, the surgeons decided to leave the bullet where it was for the time being while McKinley recuperated at Exposition Medical Director Roswell Park’s Buffalo home. Initially, McKinley was making a recovery, but within several days he took a turn for the worse. On September 14, he slipped into shock.