Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (6 page)

The success of the May 1908 White House Conference had led TR to call a North American Conservation Conference which two weeks before he left office brought Canadian and Mexican representatives to the White House. The delegates agreed on a declaration of conservation principles and, caught up in the spirit of the event, urged that, “all nations should be invited to join together in conference on the subject of world resources, and their inventory, conservation and wise utilization.”
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A delighted Roosevelt instructed his secretary of state to send invitations to forty-five nations to attend such a global conference at a date to be determined in the future. TR envisioned the conclave being held at Carnegie’s Peace Palace at The Hague, but without his guidance and energy the proposed conference was stillborn and it would be more than half a century before such an event truly took place.

Another of Roosevelt’s passions was building American sea power, often in the face of stiff congressional opposition, to safeguard U.S. interests in a hostile world. He was therefore very gratified before he left office to be on hand to greet the return of the Great White Fleet from its triumphant fourteen month, 42,227 mile, circumnavigation of the globe.
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This armada of sixteen white-painted ships, practically the entire Atlantic battleship fleet, remains the largest ever to complete such a voyage. Setting forth at the end of 1907, the first objective had been to reach the U.S. west coast. With the Panama Canal still almost seven years from completion, it took the ships considerable time to sail down the Atlantic coasts of North and South America, past the Straits of Magellan and into the Pacific, all along the way making good will calls before large and appreciative crowds. When the fleet arrived at San Francisco, 1 million lined the Golden Gate. Across the Pacific at Australia, half a million greeted the flotilla at Sydney, and hundreds of thousands elsewhere, including Japan. The ships had departed amidst much criticism and some fear of war with the Japanese, whose considerable national pride had been deeply insulted by discrimination against their countrymen in California. As it fell out, however, the cruise proved entirely peaceful and demonstrated to a doubting world the capabilities of the Atlantic-based American Navy.

The multitude of yachts and steamers also waiting in the rain at Hampton Roads on George Washington’s birthday, February 22, sailed by whistling and shrieking until Roosevelt appeared on the deck of the 273-foot presidential yacht
Mayflower
, a refitted twelve-gun dispatch boat, and lifted his hat. When he caught sight of the Great White Fleet’s “forest of masts and fighting tops” in the distance TR exclaimed: “Here they are. That is the answer to my critics. Another chapter is complete, and I could not ask a finer concluding scene to my administration.” “Until some American fleet returns victorious from a great sea battle,” Roosevelt exalted in a toast to the commander, Admiral Sperry, never would “there be another such homecoming.”
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Unfortunately the ships, soon painted gray for better camouflage, were rendered obsolete even before they sailed by the all-big-gun, turbine powered,
Dreadnought
-class battleship unveiled by England in 1906 and soon accepted by all the great powers, including the United States, as the new standard.

As it came to an end, Roosevelt reflected on his presidency in a letter to one of the British champions of Dreadnought construction, Arthur Lee. His old friend of Cuban days had entered parliament and become such a staunch supporter of the United States in the Commons that he was derided as the “Member for America.” TR told Lee that he was finishing his presidency “with just the same stiff fighting” that had marked it since he took office but was nevertheless having a thoroughly good time. He had achieved a large proportion of what he set out to do and felt he had “measurably realized my ideals.” TR supposed he should be melancholy on leaving and “taking his hands off the levers of the great machine,” but the African trip represented the “realization of a golden dream” and he looked forward to it with such delight that, he told Lee, it was “quite impossible for me to regret even the Presidency.” Regarding Taft, Roosevelt declared that he could not express the “measureless content” that came over him to think that the work in which he so much believed would be carried on by his successor.
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Whatever he put in letters, TR must have had at least some doubts about Taft. Shortly before he left office, he confided to his faithful Secret Service bodyguard of seven years, Jimmy Malone, that he hoped he was “not mistaken; that my policies will be made into law; but I may have to come back in four years and enter the fight.”
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Roosevelt invited Taft and his wife Nellie to spend the night before the inauguration at the White House to “save all the bother of moving in on Inauguration Day itself.” He also did not plan, as was the custom, to drive back to the White House after the ceremony. This had always struck TR as “a peculiarly senseless performance on the part of the man who had been President and was no longer.”
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Though he made his general wishes very clear, Roosevelt took care not, unless asked, to give Taft specific instructions on policy, save in one area. On his last day as president, at the behest of an almost frantic Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, who feared that Congress would allow the Japanese to do to a divided U.S. fleet what they had to Russia’s, TR wrote to Taft: “One closing legacy. Under no circumstances divide the Battle Fleet between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans prior to the opening of the Panama Canal.”
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Taft took the presidential oath on March 4, 1909, at a ceremony moved indoors on account of blizzard conditions. But even before he took office there were rumblings of discontent among TR’s friends in Washington about the developing state of affairs. Archie Butt, who stayed on as Taft’s military aide, was concerned with new president’s “amiability and doctrine of expediency.” To him the incoming regime looked a bit like the old days of McKinley and he noted that the Ohio school of politics bred “a peculiar genius” and corruption always flourished under it. The government seemed already to be drifting into the control of Roosevelt’s enemies. The old crowd, typified by rich Senators such as Aldrich, Wetmore and Depew, were already “licking their chops and looking forward to seven fat years after seven lean years just about to close.”
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The central problem Taft faced, in Captain Butt’s estimation, was that for those seven previous years he had been “living on the steam” of Roosevelt, who had furnished the “high pressure” behind Taft’s accomplishments. With TR out of the country, the president would have find his own fuel and “like a child, will have to learn to walk alone.” He thought Taft up to the task, but also that it would be “a readjustment all the same.”
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The former president, who had decided to style himself in private life simply “Colonel” Roosevelt for his rank in the Spanish-American War, returned to Sagamore Hill for three weeks of rest and final preparations for the African expedition. Many thousands of farewell letters poured in. Among them was a note from the naturalist John Muir, who was taking their mutual friend John Burroughs on a tour of the West. He told Roosevelt that they had had a delightful time at the Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon and he looked forward to taking Burroughs through Yosemite, “recalling our glorious campaign of 1903.” To Muir, somehow the whole country seemed “lonesome to me since you left Washington & are so soon to sail for Africa. Heaven bless you dear friend & bring you safely back home.”
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Burroughs assured TR that he was “bound to bag big game wherever you hunt” and hoped that he would be “as successful in the wilds of Africa as you have been in the wilds of American politics & make ‘em all dance to the same lively tune.”
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While her husband and Kermit saw to vaccinations, had their teeth “overhauled” for the trip, and practiced on the rif le range, Edith busied herself with preparations as well, packing nine extra pairs of spectacles, medicines and other essential items. Quentin and Archie were due home for Easter vacation, which gave her some solace. “If it were not for the children,” Edith confessed, she would not have the “nervous strength to live through these endless months of separation from Father.”
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Having no wish to face the throng of well-wishers at the Hoboken pier of their ship, the S. S.
Hamburg
, Edith said her private farewells to the voyagers from the piazza of Sagamore Hill on the morning of 23 March 1909. She tried mightily to be perfectly calm and self-possessed, but Kermit felt her heart was almost broken.
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In private life, Mrs. Roosevelt told Butt she wanted her husband “to be the simplest American alive.” The funniest thing to her was that, while he also wished to live a simple life and promised to do so, the trouble was that he had really forgotten how. She tried to think of his year in Africa and her own planned trip to her sister’s house in Italy as having “the effect the forty years wandering had on the Jews.” At the end of that time they would enter their home at Oyster Bay “as gladly and as meekly as ever the children of Israel entered the Promised Land.”
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It was an enchanting dream, but alas not to be.

It was wise of TR’s staid and reserved wife to say her farewells at Sagamore Hill, for the scene at the Hoboken pier on the morning of March 23, 1909 was frantic. Roosevelt, however, was in his element. He dove into the rowdy crowd of three thousand and spent two hours shaking five hundred or so hands. Well-wishers knocked off his trademark black felt slouch hat and grasped at the gilt buttons of the Colonel’s overcoat for souvenirs, while he called for the Rough Riders present to show themselves. He then navigated through the throng towards as many as he could make out. To add to the raucous atmosphere, a brass band of Italian immigrants alternated enthusiastic versions of the “Star Spangled Banner” and the Italian national anthem, in repayment for the aid Roosevelt had sent to Messina for the earthquake victims he would soon see in person. President Taft had Archie Butt hand deliver a farewell letter, a photograph, and a gift (that his aide had chosen for its usefulness), a small gold-mounted ruler that would be drawn out to a foot, or a third, or two-thirds, with a pencil at one end. On it was engraved, “Theodore Roosevelt from William Howard Taft, GoodBye—Good Luck.”
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This was TR’s own favorite expression on seeing anyone off. He promised Butt that he would read the letter as soon as they got under way.

At eleven Roosevelt’s ship, the S.S.
Hamburg
, festooned with bunting and signal flags, sounded its final whistle and the tugs nudged it on its way down the Hudson, accompanied by a noisy flotilla of a hundred other vessels crammed to the gills with friends and sightseers. The owners of the German Hamburg-Amerika liner had offered TR free passage but he insisted on paying at least a nominal fare. The line was chosen in part because it offered lower rates than its British Cunard and White Star competitors, but it was also the only one that would carry ammunition, stowed in several of the venture’s two hundred six by four foot luggage cases below decks.

As they departed Roosevelt, against all regulations, perched on the ship’s bridge, waving his hat in farewell, his glasses glinting in the sunshine. Passing through the narrows, the
Hamburg
received a twenty-one-gun salute from Fort Hamilton. TR occupied Cabin 1, the former “Emperor William Suite,” four rooms on the starboard side of the promenade deck the steamship line redecorated in red and green damask for the new occupant, with pictures of Lincoln and Washington on the walls in place of the Kaiser. Coincidentally, four years before, the
Hamburg
had taken Wilhelm to Tangier, where his landing began the Moroccan crisis that TR had taken a hand in settling.

Once at sea, Roosevelt had time to read the president’s letter. After the salutation, “My Dear Theodore,” Taft confessed, “if I followed my impulse I should say “My Dear Mr. President,” as he could not overcome the habit. Further, when he was so addressed, he turned “to see whether or not you are at my elbow.” He wished his friend “as great pleasure and as much usefulness as possible in the trip you are about to undertake.”

Turning to politics, Taft told TR that there had already been many questions he would have liked to consult him on, but he had “forborne to interrupt your well-earned quiet.” The Old Guard Republican congressional chiefs, Senator Nelson Aldrich and Speaker Joseph “Uncle Joe” Cannon, he reported, had promised to “stand by the party platform and follow my lead.” Roosevelt had been able to hold his own against the powerful Cannon and Aldrich, who feared him and his popularity. Unfortunately, they did not hold the more amiable, and pliable, Taft in the same regard.

The platform had called for a “revision” of the tariff, which had been taken up by a special session of congress. At least in the eyes of the progressive wing, the Republican Party was pledged to lower tariff rates in the general interest. Taft warned Roosevelt that when he returned he would no doubt “find me very much under suspicion by our friends in the West” enraged by the hides and other raw materials put on the free list for the benefit of Eastern manufacturers at the expense of farmers and cattlemen. The previous December, many of these progressives had joined with Democrats in a failed attempt to limit “Uncle Joe’s” power as speaker. Taft did not support them, explaining to Roosevelt that he was “not disposed to countenance an insurrection of thirty men against 180 outside the caucus.” Since he did not have TR’s prestige or popular support, Taft did not want to make a “capital error” at the beginning of his administration by alienating the good will of Cannon and those whose votes he would need to get legislation passed—a course Roosevelt himself had advised Taft to follow.

Also lacking the former president’s “facility for educating the public” through the press, Taft feared a large part of the populous would feel as though he had “fallen away from your ideals”; but told TR, “you know me better.” He assured his friend that he did “nothing in my work in the Executive Office without considering what you would do under similar circumstances.” Taft could never forget that the power that he now exercised was a “voluntary transfer from you to me” and that he was under obligation “to see to it that your judgment in selecting me as you r succe ssor . . . sha l l be v ind ic ated.”
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TR, who had made no serious attempt as president either to revise the tariff, or limit the powers of Cannon, replied to this plaintive cry that day with a brief cable: “Am deeply touched by your gift and even more by your letter. Greatly appreciate it. Everything will surely turn out right, old man.”
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