Colonel Roosevelt (132 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
68
He need not worry
The New York Times
, 22 July 1909; F. Warrington Dawson diary, 23 July 9, Dawson Papers, Duke University.
69
The letters, dictated
Lodge,
Selections
, 2.330–35; John C. O’Laughlin to TR, 30 July 1909 (OL); Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 37.
70
“Remember that I never”
Henry Cabot Lodge,
Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918
(New York, 1925), 2.344–45. In this same letter, TR writes in response to a forwarded article reviewing his presidency, “It almost frightened me to realize how completely the past was past as far as I was concerned.”
71
He admits
Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 58, 63. According to TR, his safari received no periodicals except for occasional ancient issues of the
Owego Gazette
addressed to Dr. Loring.
72
one startling remark
TR,
Letters
, 7.21 (italics added). See also Allan Nevins,
Henry White: Thirty Years of American Diplomacy
(New York, 1930), 297–99. Dawson may be excused for inattention if this was the day, cited by him afterward, when TR kept him “taking dictation … from 9 in the morning until 2:20 at night, our only pause being meals.” (Randall,
Joseph Conrad and Warrington Dawson
, 25.) However, Dawson, in his memoir, exaggerates the extent of his secretarial services to TR. He does not appear to have seen the Colonel again before a family emergency called him home in the early fall of 1909.
73
He is nearer death
TR,
Works
, 5.245. The packthread simile is TR’s.
74
There are no bullets
Lodge,
Selections
, 2.333; TR,
Works
, 5.414, 244–45. In 1919, Cuninghame was still marveling at TR’s “complete coolness” in a situation of extreme danger (they were surrounded by a rampaging herd of cows and young bulls), not to mention his eccentric behavior afterward. “I never saw a man so boyishly jubilant, waving his hat and dancing about.… Half an hour later, when we were back in camp … he sat down in a chair and began to read Balzac.” R. J. Cuninghame interview,
The New York Times
, 8 Jan. 1919.
75
Hunters’ etiquette
TR,
Works
, 5.246.
76
Soon they were all splashed
Ibid., 5.247.
77
Blood, nakedness
Perhaps the most powerful indictment of TR the hunter was penned in 1907 by Rev. William J. Long, whom TR had himself pilloried as a “nature faker” in love with sentimental theories of animal behavior. Replying to the President’s attacks, Long wrote in an open letter, “Who is he to write, ‘I don’t believe that some of these nature-writers know the heart of wild things’? As to that,
I find after carefully reading two of his big books, that every time Mr. Roosevelt gets near the heart of a wild thing he invariably puts a bullet through it.” Mark Sullivan,
Our Times
(New York, 1930), 3.155.
78
“Life is hard and cruel”
TR,
Works
, 5.196. As with ugliness, so with beauty. Warrington Dawson noticed that TR admired even the most peaceful sunset as “action,” a conflict of colors as night vanquished day. Big-game hunting had sharpened the Colonel’s aesthetic awareness, given him “a faculty beyond ordinary faculties, a state of mind distinctly creative and in many ways similar to … the artistic.” Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 68.
79
he has already read
TR to ERD, 24 June 1909 (ERDP); TR,
Works
, 14.465, 5.158. TR knew Khayyam’s
Rubaiyat
in several versions, and complained that the Edward Fitzgerald edition was more realization than translation. He constantly quoted Lewis Carroll, remarking on safari, for example, that he felt “the way Alice did in Looking-Glass country, when the elephants ‘did bother so.’ ” TR,
Works
, 5.295.
Biographical Note:
At the end of his safari TR wrote an essay about his compulsion to read in the wilderness. He cited, from memory, a classical canon including the Bible and Apocrypha, Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey
, the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristotle, Theocritus, Euripides, Polybius, Arrian, and Dante’s
Divine Comedy
(all in translation). In German, he read the
Nibelungenlied
, plus the poetry of Schiller, Koerner, and Heine. In French, he read the essays of Montaigne, Voltaire’s
Siècle de Louis XIV
, Saint-Simon’s
Mémoires
, Barbey d’Aurevilly’s
Le chevalier des Touches
, the elder Dumas’s
Les louves de Machecoul
and
Tartarin de Tarascon
, Flaubert’s
Salammbô
, and Arthur de Gobineau’s
Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines
. It is unclear whether he read Manzoni’s
I Promessi Sposi
in Italian, although as President, he did manage Michaelis’s
L’Origine degli Indo-Europei
. (TR,
Letters
, 4.795.) He listed the poems of Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Kipling, Browning, Longfellow, Emerson, Poe, and George Cabot Lodge. He did not detail his academic reading, apart from Alexander Sutherland’s
The Origin and the Growth of the Moral Instinct
, “because as yet scientific books rarely have literary value.” He confessed to an enjoyment of popular fiction, ranging from Harris’s
Tales of Uncle Remus
to Owen Wister’s
The Virginian
and Emily Eden’s
The Semi-Attached Couple
, but also cited the Finnish historical novels of Zacharias Topelius, Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
, and Gogol’s
Taras Bulba
, reread “because I wished to get the Cossack view of what was described by Sienkiewicz from the Polish side.” See TR, “The Pigskin Library,”
Works
, 14.463–74. See also the much longer reading list, compiled for Nicholas Murray Butler in 1903. (TR,
Letters
, 3.641–44.) For an extensive survey of TR the reader, see chap. 2, “The World of Thought,” in Edward Wagenknecht,
The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt
(New York, 1958, Guilford, Conn., 2008).
80
His ear for sounds
TR,
Works
, 5.37, 387, 353, 96, 121. TR was amused to hear some Kenyan settlers referring to tree hyraxes as “Teddy bears.” Ibid., 352.
81
One sound falls
TR to ERD, 24 June 1919; TR to ABR, 21 Jan. 1910, privately held.
82
He is proud
TR to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 21 June 1909 (TRC); TR,
Letters
, 7.30. See also TR’s admiring portrait of KR on safari in TR,
Works
, 4.120–21.
83
Possibly the image
See Putnam,
TR
, 157ff, or Morris,
The Rise of TR
, 75–77.
84
He has grown used
TR’s desire to escape public attention while on safari was periodically frustrated by social invitations, which he felt he had to accept, from
government authorities in Nairobi and from prominent settlers in the “White Highlands.” On 3 Aug., for example, he was guest of honor at a banquet in Nairobi’s Railway Institute, attended by the Protectorate’s elite, in various stages of inebriation. He was presented with a rhinoceros foot, and sat through a flattering address printed on silk and read by the public recorder. An extract from his speech in response, “Education in Africa,” is quoted on page 22. (
The Leader of British East Africa
, 7 Aug. 1909.) As a result of his stays on local ranches, he formed lasting friendships with such colonial notables as Governor Sir Percy Girouard, Lord Delamere, Lord Cranworth, Sir Alfred Pease, and Sir William Northrup McMillan—into whose family his granddaughter Grace would one day marry.
85
He has to laugh
TR,
Works
, 5.161–62.
86
Snug in his tent
Ibid., 5.262.
87
He has to drive
Ibid.
88
It is plain to him
Ibid., 5.37;
The Leader of British East Africa
, 7 Aug. 1909. The only blanket order J. Alden Loring could recall TR issuing on safari was a ban on the whipping of porters, although it was a punishment sanctioned by the British East Africa administration. Wood,
Roosevelt As We Knew Him
, 216.
89
the Song of Solomon
TR to Lawrence F. Abbott, 21 Oct. 1909 (ABB). TR, who had not read the Bible through before he went to Africa, boggled at some of its racier parts. “I must say that it contains matter that I should not care to have my children read until they had reached the years of discretion.” To J. Alden Loring, quoted in Wood,
Roosevelt As We Knew Him
, 220.
90
Oh, sweetest of all
For more of the text of this letter, see Sylvia Morris,
Edith Kermit Roosevelt
, 351–52. It was one of the very few
billets-doux
from TR that EKR, after his death, did not destroy. Had their daughter Ethel not saved a handful, one of the great loves in American history would be undocumented.
91
Moving on to Londiani
KR diary, 30 Nov. 1909 (KRP);
The Leader of British East Africa
, 7 Aug. 1909; TR,
Letters
, 7.39–40.
92
From now on
TR,
Works
, 5.357.
93
He is generous
Lawrence F. Abbott wrote, after a few months of handling TR’s finances, “He had less interest in money, as mere money, than almost any man that I have ever known.”
Impressions of TR
, 210.
94
totaling almost
$40,000 In contemporary (2010) dollars, this sacrifice amounted to $711,000 (Measuring Worth). As President, TR earned $50,000 ($888,000) a year. He felt that his prize money, totaling almost $37,000 ($696,000) in 1906, had been earned while he was a public servant, and therefore was not his personal property. He directed that it be used to endow a foundation dealing with what he then considered to be the largest problem of the age—labor/capital strife. See Morris,
Theodore Rex
, 473, 723. For the later history of this bequest, see 539.
95
He is therefore relieved
TR,
Letters
, 7.13–15, 24–25, 36–37. For an extended account of Carnegie’s infatuation with TR as a potential “Great Peace Maker,” see Joseph F. Wall,
Andrew Carnegie
(Pittsburgh, Pa., 1970, 1989), 924–35.
96
“The very large edition”
Robert Bridges to TR, 21 Oct. 1909, 10 Feb. 1910 (SCR). In this letter, Bridges tried to interest TR in a follow-up travel series focusing on the American Southwest. “We should of course be willing to pay a very large sum for it.” When TR showed no enthusiasm, Bridges offered a staggering $5,000 per article. TR declined, but, as will be seen, eventually did write some Southwestern pieces for
Scribner’s Magazine
.
97
In Nairobi’s little bookstore
TR,
Letters
, 7.44; Randall,
Joseph Conrad and Warrington Dawson
, 28; TR,
Works
, 5.357, 14.463–64.
98
It is elephant country
TR,
Works
, 5.373–75, 423.
99
He is in superb health
The sentence in
African Game Trails
, “An elderly man with
a varied past which includes rheumatism does not vault lightly into the saddle, as his sons, for instance, can” is an example of TR’s self-mocking humor. In a letter to Henry Cabot Lodge dated 5 Feb. 1910, he reports that while he and Kermit remained healthy, all the other members of his party “have been down with fever of dysentery; one gun bearer has died of fever, four porters of dysentery and two have been mauled by beasts.” During their visit to one Ugandan village, “eight natives died of sleeping sickness.” TR,
Letters
, 7.47.
100
His stride is tireless
E. M. Newman in Wood,
Roosevelt As We Knew Him
, 223; TR,
Works
, 5.417. According to Newman, TR’s pace when marching “compelled the average man to maintain a dog trot to keep up with him.”
101
He looks better
TR boasted on 21 Jan. 1910, “I have not for years passed nine months of such good health.” (TR to Anna Roosevelt Cowles [ARC].) See also TR,
Works
, 5.298, 375–76; John C. O’Laughlin in the
Chicago Tribune
, 13 Mar. 1910.
102
Yet on the seventh day
TR,
Letters
, 7.348–49.
103
a three-week halt
TR states in a letter to Henry Cabot Lodge that he is encamped “about two degrees north of the equator.” His actual position was nearer three degrees north, in the vicinity of the spot now known as Rhino Camp.
Biographical Note:
Bartle Bull notes that TR’s bag of nine white rhinos, including four cows and a calf, exceeded his licensed quota by three. The species was then, as now, one of the most endangered in Africa. His excessive kill offended even the sensibilities of the time. “Do those nine white rhino ever cause ex-President Roosevelt a pang of conscience?” Lord Cranworth wrote in a 1912 memoir. “… I venture to hope so.” (Bull,
Safari
, 179–80.) TR admits in
African Game Trails
that the white rhino was already virtually extinct in Africa outside of the Lado Enclave. It was, however, the only major game animal he had not yet collected for his sponsors. “We deemed it really important to get good groups for the National Museum in Washington and the American Museum in New York, and a head for National Collection of Heads and Horns [in] the Bronx Zoological Park.” Kermit killed at least one charging cow in self-defense. “He was sorry … but I was not, for it was a very fine specimen, with the front horn thirty-one inches long.” (TR,
Works
, 5.389, 399, 408.) The kills, plus five found skulls, enabled Edmund Heller to write a definitive Smithsonian study, “The White Rhinoceros.” See TR,
Letters
, 7.46. For the role unwittingly played by Winston Churchill in this hunt, see below, 604–605.