Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (18 page)

Roosevelt himself sent off the last installment of his own book. He wrote the “Foreword” at Khartoum, beginning the work (and continuing his rehabilitation in Shakespeare) with a quotation from
Henry IV, Part II
: “I speak of Africa and golden joys.” He went on with no mean nature prose of his own

The hunter who wanders through these lands sees sights which ever afterward remain fixed in his mind. He sees the monstrous riverhorse snorting and plunging beside the boat, the giraffe looking over the tree-tops at the nearing horsemen, the ostrich fleeing at a speed that none may rival, the snarling leopard and coiled python with their lethal beauty, the zebras barking in the moonlight, as the laden caravan passes on its night march through a thirsty land. In afteryears there shall come to him memories of the lion’s charge, of the gray bulk of the elephant, close at hand in the somber woodland; of the buffalo, his sullen eyes lowering from under his helmet of horn; of the rhinoceros, truculent and stupid, standing in the bright sunlight on the empty plain.

These things can be told. But there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm. There is delight in the hardy life of the open, in long rides rifle in hand, in the thrill of the fight with dangerous game. Apart from this, yet mingled with it, is the strong attraction of the silent places, of the large tropic moons, and the splendor of the new stars; where the wanderer sees the awful glory of sunrise and sunset in the wide waste spaces of the earth, unworn of man, and changed only by the slow changes of the ages through time everlasting.
¹¹

With his writing duties completed, Roosevelt was free to join his family in a busy schedule of sightseeing. In their three days at Khartoum they took a camel trip into the forbidding desert, visited the battlefield of Omdurman just across the Nile, where Lord Kitchener famously had defeated the Khalifa (the Mahdi’s successor) in 1898, watched native dancers and reviewed an impressive parade of Sudanese troops. They were also extended a rare invitation to the Egyptian and Sudanese Officer’s Club. Slatin saw this as an opportunity to enlist Roosevelt’s aid with the officers whose continuing loyalty he and all the other officials questioned in light of a new menace, the growing power of the anti-British Nationalist party in Egypt, which had reclaimed the Sudan after Kitchener’s victory. Three weeks before at Cairo, Boutros Ghali Pasha, the Coptic Christian Egyptian prime minister (whose namesake grandson would one day be secretary-general of the United Nations), had been assassinated by a Muslim Egyptian nationalist who saw Ghali as a tool of the British. This act not only stirred fears of unrest in Egypt, but also in the Sudan, where Wingate had been forced to stamp out a minor rebellion the previous year.

The youthful assassin of Boutros, though immediately captured, had not yet been tried and Roosevelt was asked at a dinner at the Governor’s Palace what action he would have taken had he been the British Agent. To TR the matter was a simple one. He would immediately have brought the murderer before a drum-head-court-martial. As there was no question about the facts, which the Nationalists did not deny, he would have been sentenced to death and taken out and shot. Then, if the Home Government cabled, “in one of their moments of vacillation to wait a little while, I would cable in reply: ‘Can’t wait, the assassin has been tried and shot.’ ” The government could recall or impeach him if it wished, “but
that
assassin would have received his just deserts.” After this remark, Lawrence Abbott recalled that one of the British officers, Colonel Asser, told him, “By Heaven! I wish that man were my boss!”
¹²

Some Egyptian officers of the Sudanese army had greeted the news of the murder of Boutros Ghali with cheers and there was no little fear of disloyalty, understandable since the original British occupation of Egypt in 1882 had come in reaction to an officers’ revolt at Alexandria which posed an unacceptable threat to the Suez Canal, Britain’s lifeline to India and the Far East. Slatin asked Roosevelt to address the officers at Khartoum which, he believed, would do “a very real good.” The Colonel readily agreed and told Slatin that the fact that he, an Austrian, was the British representative only underscored the fundamental truth that English rule in the Sudan was “really the rule of civilization, and that every believer in justice and progress all over the world should uphold it.” Consequently, at the Egyptian Officers Club on March 17, Roosevelt urged the men to stay out of politics and tried his best to “use such language and arguments as would add to the self-respect of my hearers” while at the same time speaking with “unmistakable plainness as to their duty of absolute loyalty,” and the “ruin which would come to both Egypt and the Sudan unless the power and prestige of English rule were kept undiminished.”
¹³

The day of his speech, Roosevelt’s party boarded a special train for Wadi Halfa, where the government steamer
Ibis
waited to begin the next segment of the voyage down the Nile. By coincidence the steamer carried the same name as the luxurious lateen-sailed houseboat, complete with servants and crew, on which a thirteen-year-old Theodore and his parents had sailed the Nile for two months thirty-eight years before. When he first saw Alexandria on November 28, 1872, he recorded: “How I gazed on it! It was Egypt, the land of my dreams; Egypt the most ancient of all countries; a land that was old when Rome was bright, was old when Babylon was in its glory, was old when Troy was taken! It was a sight to awaken a thousand thoughts and it did.” On that trip, young Theodore was able to add Egyptian bird specimens to the “Museum” he had started in the family’s Manhattan brownstone. He later wrote that his “first real collecting as a student of natural history” started in Egypt and at least three of the birds remain in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
¹⁴

In 1910, on the week-long journey to Cairo, the party paused at major and minor sites, the first being Abu Simbel, with its four colossal figures of Ramses the Great. Ethel read descriptions from their Baedeker’s guide and her father was indignant to find initials carved in the rock of the ancient chambers. If he had his way the vandals would be treated as similar miscreants in Yellowstone Park, who when apprehended were forced to “return and remove every trace of their despicable work.”
¹⁵
TR had apparently forgotten his own youthful sacrilege in 1872, when he shot birds from a column of the Ramesseum at Thebes. The
Ibis
stopped at the island ruins of Philae, formerly the garden-like “Pearl of the Nile,” but sadly under water half the year since the 1902 completion the Aswan dam, a modern wonder they visited as well. At Aswan for the first time, crowds of American and English tourists gathered to see the former president.

From Luxor, the chief tourist center of Upper Egypt, they took an excursion to the nearby massive ruin at Karnak in a moonlight tour led by a British Egyptologist. Roosevelt also visited the American Presbyterian mission school for girls. There he praised the education of native women, who along with men, he asserted, must be elevated to a new status based on respect for the individual.
¹⁶
In the long run, the Colonel told the students, “a fig tree is judged by the fact that it produces figs and not thistles.” Rehearsing a theme he would raise many times in the following months, he asserted that book knowledge was not all. Education must be practical as well. “You women must learn to cook and keep house, but at the same time you must have the literary knowledge and trained mind to enable you to take your proper place as counselor of the families.” To O’Laughlin, however, Luxor was most notable as the place Roosevelt received a warning that if he mentioned the assassination of Boutros in a planned speech at the new Cairo University he might suffer the same fate. This threat only ensured that the address, which the Colonel dictated at Luxor, included a pointed condemnation of the murder.
¹⁷

Arriving at Cairo on March 24, the party was greeted by the American Consul-General Lewis Iddings and TR’s old friend and “tennis cabinet” member Oscar Straus. Now the U.S. ambassador at Constantinople, Straus briefed his former chief both on conditions in Turkey and politics at home, where “much ground had been lost.” The Colonel paid a call at the Abdin Palace on the Khedive Abbas, the titular ruler of Egypt, and in return he received Abbas at the American Agency, the first of many such reciprocal visits he continued across Europe. At the same time Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Iddings called on the Khediva, described as a “beautiful woman of about thirty years, with sad eyes and a pathetic manner,” who, if local gossip was true, “was about to be replaced by an Austrian woman who has first place in the affections of the Khedive.”
¹⁸

The Roosevelts stayed at Shepeard’s Hotel, the home away from home of visiting Englishmen, and a powerful symbol of British rule which would be burned down forty-two years later during another nationalist uprising—one which would finally force out the British. The first night the family saw the Sphinx and pyramids in the moonlight. The next day they visited Saqqara, burial site of the rulers of ancient Memphis, the capital of Egypt’s old Kingdom, twelve miles south of Cairo. Abbot recounted Roosevelt’s reaction to a temple carving which showed a witness in a law court being horribly tortured before a judge to gain a confession. TR commented that he wished “that those pessimists who believe that civilization is not making steady progress” could see it. Here was a king “portraying as one of the virtues of his reign a state of vicious cruelty which would not have been tolerated by Tammany Hall in its worst days of corruption.” The “water cure,” he was sorry to say, had sometimes been practiced by Americans in the Philippines, “but it was practiced secretly, and no man who employed it would have been willing to have the fact inscribed upon his tombstone.”
¹⁹

That evening Roosevelt dined with the modern rulers of Egypt, Sir Eldon Gorst, the British agent and consul-general, and Sir Reginald Wingate, who in addition to being governor-general of the Sudan, was also Sirdar (commander) of the Anglo-Egyptian army which enforced British policy on the ground. Wingate and Roosevelt agreed in the “methods of action” needed to maintain British rule and the Sirdar thanked him for “all you have done to help forward our task in the Sudan.”
²⁰
The more conciliatory Gorst, who spoke Arabic and had decades of experience in Egypt, had the bad fortune in 1907 to follow a legend in Lord Cromer, who for the previous quarter century had run Egypt, called the “Veiled Protectorate” because it had not been officially annexed by Britain, with an iron hand.
²¹
Theoretically, the British hierarchy only advised Egypt’s ruler, the Khedive, and his government, staffed in the main by a non-Egyptian Turco-Circassian elite, headed by a prime minister. The Khedive in turn made a substantial yearly payment to the Sublime Porte for the privilege of ruling Egypt according to a firman (license) granted by the Ottoman Sultan at the beginning of his reign.

It was a curious system, in which, Cromer had commented in his 1908 book
Modern Egypt
, “one alien race, the English, have had to control and guide a second alien race, the Turks, by whom they are disliked, in the government of a third race, the Egyptians.”
²²
Roosevelt told Wingate that reading Cromer’s “really great book” gave him a “fresh realization of Lincoln’s saying, ‘There is a great deal of human nature in mankind.’ ” Cromer’s descriptions of the trouble caused in Egypt by “well-meaning but fatuous philanthropists at home” reminded TR of his own experiences with the same type concerning the Philippines. They filled Faneuil Hall in Boston with audiences “equally prepared to demand that the Filipinos be given the fullest democratic selfgovernment, and to denounce us if any disorder follows even the most cautious and tentative move in the very direction they advocate.”
²³

Gorst and Wingate frankly discussed the current state of affairs with Roosevelt, including the nationalist agitation for self-government, which had only been emboldened by Gorst’s conciliation. The nationalists were also incensed by recent increases in the numbers of British officials in government service and demanded more jobs for Egyptians. Roosevelt reported to his friend Henry White that Wingate was “a fine fellow” and he had no doubt Gorst was also a good man, but he was “evidently afraid of acting,” unless he was sure that he would be “backed up at home.”
²⁴
Other British officials in the post-Cromer regime also seemed to be “drifting, and uneasy and uncertain of their ground.” They too complained to Roosevelt of the “mischief wrought by certain ignorant Members of Parliament” who had come to Egypt “under the belief they were championing the cause of human righteousness.” This had ironically only inspired in the Egyptians “a touch of that most dangerous of all feelings, contempt” towards the English. Cairo was also the only place in Africa where TR was disappointed with some of the British army officers he met, who seemed to be absorbed, not in the task at hand, but in polo and tennis matches, and had “no serious appreciation of the situation or of their own duties.”
²⁵

Outside the British hierarchy, TR also spoke with several deputations of local dignitaries and journalists. He noted the “curious” state of things in which the country had prospered greatly, both materially and morally, since his visit thirty-eight years before. However, in his view the “very prosperity had made the Jeshuren wax fat and kick.” The noisy nationalist leaders were “merely Levantine Moslems in red fezes” and “quite hopeless as material on which to build.” He did not consider them dangerous foes, but noted that, profoundly affected by the reforms gained by the Young Turks in Constantinople, they were given to “loud talk in the cafés and to emotional street parades.”
²⁶
Before he left the United States, TR had commented to Spring Rice on the Young Turk movement, which had forced a parliament and a constitution on the Ottoman Sultan, that he was “intensely interested in the Liberal movement in the Moslem world.” He admitted that it was of course very complicated but he hoped that in Turkey the “parliamentary talkers and the army fighters” would be able to stay together and act “not only in harmony but with moderation.” One of the things he feared was that they would be “misled by false analogies.” In his estimation, the fact that reform was necessary in Turkey, did not mean that it was “now to the advantage of Egypt to have a parliament” or for that matter a constitution as the nationalists demanded.
²⁷