Theodore Roosevelt Abroad Read online

  Marshal Bullock had been chosen to make a speech for the company and to present a bronze mountain lion to the president. He, however, was unable to say a word and instead began to tear away at the floral centerpiece on the table in front of him that hid the statue. Once it was uncovered, still speechless, he simply gestured at the lion. At this point Henry Stimson, the U.S. district attorney for the Southern District of New York and future secretary of state, rose and told the president that Bullock’s inability to express his feelings was shared by all, that “no one loving a father could express that love he felt” and that the president, had “glorified each one by his friendship to that point when each man had been reborn in matters of principle, in character, and in mind.” Pinchot then arranged for a Forest Service photographer to take a group portrait on the White House lawn.3

  The lion was a particularly appropriate gift for Roosevelt, who departed three weeks later for an African safari, meant to be a final great adventure before he became too old for such things. In this endeavor one of the prime objectives was to stalk the much larger and dangerous African cousins of the American cougar. When asked by Beekman Winthrop, the assistant secretary of the treasury and a descendant of the first governor of Massachusetts, what he thought was the most dangerous animal he would face, Roosevelt did not hesitate to name the African lion. Other big game hunters feared the elephant and tiger, and the hippo, but from what TR had heard the lion was far more dangerous because it was the quickest and showed the most “alertness and agility.” 4It was a perfect totem animal for Roosevelt and amongst themselves TR’s four sons called him the Old Lion.

  Planning for the post-presidential odyssey began more than a year before Roosevelt departed on March 23, 1909. He had first envisioned a trip to Alaska, with its store of large carnivores. But at a late 1907 White House dinner Carl Akeley, a hunter-naturalist for the Field Museum in Chicago who had just returned from Africa, tipped the scales with a riveting tale of a cave on Juja Farm in British East Africa (later Kenya) from which sixteen lions emerged. TR had long been fascinated by the Dark Continent and had amassed an impressive library of African lore. After hearing Akeley, he turned to Illinois Congressman James Mann, seated next to him, and remarked that he wished he had those lions to turn loose on Congress. “B-but Mr. President,” said Mann after some hesitation, “aren’t you afraid they might make mistakes?” “Not if they stayed long enough,” he replied, with a characteristic snap of his teeth and to general laughter round the table. “Alaska,” he added, “would have to wait.”5The safari represented a test of Roosevelt and his nineteen-year-old son Kermit against the most dangerous big game that nature, “red in tooth and claw” (and horn on this occasion), could offer. As a gift to his wife Edith for her indulgence of his big game adventure, the couple planned to follow the safari with a briefer tour of Europe, Africa’s civilized antithesis. Originally this part of the trip was to be a quiet second honeymoon of sorts.

  Edith Kermit Roosevelt was in many ways a perfect complement to Theodore. Much more clear-eyed and wary in her outlook, Edith’s composed nature moderated his exuberance, in domestic and political matters. She was a combination of advisor and loving companion.6 Growing up in the same wealthy circle, “Teedie” and “Edie” had been childhood sweethearts; her best friend was his sister Corinne. But while away at Harvard he became enchanted by, and married, the beautiful Alice Lee, who took Edith’s place, temporarily at least, in his heart. Alice’s tragic death soon after the birth of their first child, which came within twelve hours of the passing of his beloved mother, led TR never to mention his first wife’s name again. Not even to their daughter Alice who, while he recovered from the double blow in the Dakotas Badlands, was put into the care of Theodore’s older sister Anna—called “Bamie” by family and friends.

  Within two years, TR had rekindled his romance with Edith and they married in 1886 at St George’s, Hanover Square, London. At the private ceremony Theodore wore fashionable orange gloves suggested by his best man, Cecil Spring Rice, a bright young British diplomat attached to the Washington embassy that he had met on the boat to Europe. Thereafter a life-long friend, “Springy,” as he was called, is perhaps most famous for his only half-jesting comment about TR to The Times of London foreign correspondent Valentine Chirol, “You must always remember that the President is about six.”7 When they returned from their honeymoon in Europe, Edith insisted that her husband’s daughter Alice live with them and over the following years they also had five children of their own: Theodore Jr., Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and the youngest Quentin, a miniature TR who led the adventures of the “White House Gang” often joined by the children of Washington’s leading citizens. Being older, “Princess” Alice, as she was dubbed by a press fascinated with the doings of the energetic First Family, developed her own highly independent spirit and idiosyncrasies, including smoking cigarettes on the roof of the White House and forming a “Race Suicide” club to lampoon what she considered one of her father’s more ludicrous hobby horses. TR famously told his writer friend Owen Wister that he could run the country or control Alice but could not possibly do both. Her sister Ethel, more central to this story, was in many ways the flamboyant and glamorous Alice’s opposite. Reliable, responsible, and solid, she wanted none of the limelight Alice sought out.

  Of all the children Kermit was most like his father in prizing outdoor challenges, and in the dedication of his book detailing their expedition, African Game Trails, Roosevelt dubbed him “My SidePartner in Our ‘Great Adventure.’ ” Kermit recalled that his father had notified him in 1908 that, after he left the presidency, he planned to make a trip to Africa and “that if I wished to do so I could accompany him.” There was no need to ask whether he wanted to go. At school Kermit’s compositions “invariably took the form of some imaginary journey” across the Dark Continent. But his father made it his practice to speak to the children as if they were his contemporaries and never ordered or told them to follow a certain line. There would be a discussion and then they were left to draw their own conclusions. Roosevelt told Kermit that he was allowing himself a holiday at fifty, after a very busy life, and that if his son came along the holiday would be coming at the beginning of his career, so afterwards, he would have to be prepared to work “doubly hard to justify both him and myself for having taken it.”8

  To prepare, Roosevelt devoured as many books about African game and hunting as he could find, raiding among others the library of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, of which he was a trustee. These volumes included J. H. Patterson’s chilling best-seller The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, Abel Chapman’s On Safari: Big Game Hunting in British East Africa with Studies in Bird Life, Richard Lydekker’s Game Animals of Africa, Major P. G. H. Powell-Cotton’s In Unknown Africa, and Boyd Alexander’s From the Niger to the Nile, to name the most prominent. In addition to reading about Africa, Roosevelt also got first hand information by interrogating as many experienced naturalists, hunters, and explorers as he could lure to the White House or the “family sanctuary,” their home Sagamore Hill at Oyster Bay, Long Island, where they summered.9At one such luncheon meeting at Sagamore Hill, TR astounded the learned naturalists on hand with his detailed knowledge of African mammals: which seemed equal to any man in the room.10In March 1908, he began to direct serious enquiries to the hunters and explorers for practical advice about an African trip.

  First among these was perhaps the most famous big game hunter of them all, Frederick Courteney Selous, a British-born African hunterexplorer who had published numerous books detailing his exploits.11 Some have seen Selous a s the model for Henr y R ider Hagga rd ’s cha racter Allan Quartermain, the hero of King Solomon’s Mines, and many other adventure stories. Roosevelt himself had more than a little in common with his friend Rider Haggard’s hero. A recent biographer has commented that TR was “the living antidote to the dawning twentieth century’s problems: small like Allan Quartermain; energetic, virile, an attractive and boisterous personal
ity; an explorer of wildernesses; a hunter, both of grizzlies in the American west and of lions in Africa; a fighter (when needed) both of men and the powers of darkness in high places; and, not least, a prolific writer.”12

  After Selous visited the White House in 1905, TR’s praise of the hunter’s vivid and detailed stories inspired him to produce African Nature Notes and Reminiscences, which he dedicated to Roosevelt, who in turn added a Foreword. In this he described Selous as “the last of the mighty hunters whose experiences lay in the greatest hunting ground which this world has seen since civilized man has appeared therein.” However, Selous was “much more than a mere big-game hunter.” He was “by instinct a keen field naturalist, an observer with a power of seeing and remembering what he has seen.” And finally, he was a writer who possessed “to a very marked and unusual degree the power vividly and accurately to put on paper his observations.” Such a combination of qualities was “rare indeed.” The inevitable disappearance of biggame, TR went on, “before the onrush of the greedy, energetic, forceful men, usually both unscrupulous and short-sighted, who make up the vanguard of civilization” should make all the more prized Selous’s “life-histories of the great, splendid, terrible beasts whose lives add an immense majesty to the far off wilds.”13

  On March 20, 1908, Roosevelt wrote to Selous, “A year hence I shall stop being President, and while I can not be certain of what I shall do, it may be that I can afford to devote a year to a trip to Africa.” His aim was to “visit the Pleistocene and the world ‘as it lay in the sunshine unworn of the plow;’ to see the great beasts whose like our forefathers saw when they lived in caves and smote one another with stone-headed axes.” Noting the limitations caused by his age, weight and sedentary lifestyle of the past seven years, TR asked Selous for his recommendations about hunting grounds, outfitting a safari, what sort of guns and clothing would be required, and myriad other questions.14 For the next year, Selous aided Roosevelt in planning every aspect of the trip, from logistics to location, weapons, equipment, and provisions. The president reported to Kermit, still at Groton, that he had begun his correspondence about the African trip although it was not yet possible to say for sure whether it would be possible. Selous had suggested they go by Mombasa in British East Africa because the Uganda-Nile regions were not healthy and they could get acclimated in a more salubrious climate. Moreover, they could almost immediately have “some hunting to the good,” even if the Nile portion of the trip was not a success.15

  A s did Selous, Roosevelt considered himself a “Hunter-Naturalist.”16 Indeed, had the biological curriculum at Harvard been more fieldoriented, TR’s greatest achievements might well have come in the scientific rather than the political arena. Roosevelt and other gentlemen enthusiasts such as himself saw no contradiction whatsoever in passionately pursuing both hunting and conservation. To them the two went hand in hand. In 1887, he and George Bird Grinnell, the editor of Forest and Stream, took the first steps towards establishing the Boone and Crockett Club of sportsmen who were also big game hunters. Roosevelt was the first president of the organization, which became a powerful force for the preservation of the nation’s natural resources and forests—in particular the nation’s remaining wild places and large game animals such as the buffalo, elk, and moose against the predations of commercial hunters.17TR continued a close association with the Boone and Crockett Club, even after the Spanish-American War and William McKinley’s assassination changed his career path forever and afforded him the opportunity to use, first the governorship of New York, and then the presidency and the federal government, to spread conservationist ideas from his powerful bully pulpit.

  Strange as it may appear a century on, when hunting is considered murder or worse to much of the environmental community, Roosevelt was equally comfortable with non-hunting preservationists and they with him. Such friends included several of the founders of the modern American conservation movement, notably John Burroughs and John Muir.18 While president he camped in Yosemite with Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, and in Yellowstone with Burroughs, with whom he shared a passion for birds, first developed as a boy when the future president catalogued and stuffed specimens for his own private home museum.19He also shared with Burroughs an abhorrence of “nature fakers,” writers who tried to pass off tall tales of animals as factual accounts. While president he joined Burroughs in a scathing attack on the work of one such writer in particular, Reverend William J. Long, who would in return lead the criticism of the African expedition as simply another “game butchering” adventure by Roosevelt.20

  In 1908 TR reported to the elderly, bewhiskered Burroughs, whom he affectionately called Oom (Dutch for uncle) John, the birds he and Edith spotted through their field glasses in the White House garden. Some of these he was not familiar with and wished Burroughs had been on hand to identify. Burroughs did join his friend that May at “Pine Knot,” the rustic presidential retreat in the Virginia countryside, where they “tramped and pottered about the fields and gazed with absorbed interest at all kinds of little insignificant birds.”21 About TR’s ambitions to shoot lion and elephant in Africa, Burroughs commented, “I am sure you will bag at least one lion but I had rather the elephants would escape.” He looked forward “with great expectations” for the natural history notes Roosevelt would bring back. Burroughs was more interested in birds than big game and wanted to know more about their songs than he had been able to learn from any of the African hunting books. If there were swallows, he wanted to know where they nested. He wondered if the grouse drummed, or called as in America. All of these things, TR promised to investigate.22

  The same month Burroughs visited “Pine Knot,” Roosevelt opened the White House Conservation Conference with an impassioned address titled “Conservation as a National Duty.” The first such national gathering ever held in any country, the White House Conference has been described as both the “great showpiece” of TR’s last year as president and “one of the great landmarks in conservation history.”23Those invited included all the state and territorial governors, the Supreme Court justices, congressmen, international visitors, and leading authorities on the natural resources of the nation. Out of this meeting came, among other things, the unanimous approval by the governors of a declaration in support of conservation, the birth of thirty-six state conservation commissions and the creation of a National Conservation Commission which inventoried the nation’s resources over the next year.

  At the time Roosevelt called the gathering “unique of its kind” and told Kermit that in it “we have taken a long first step in awakening the American people to the need of the conservation of their natural resources,” and the need to exercise the qualities which really distinguished the “civilized men from the savage, foresight, forethought.” With congress set to adjourn, this meant he had been able to “end my very active work as President in a way worthwhile.” It was the end of his “active work,” he explained, because after the nomination for the next presidency attention must “properly be concentrated” upon the nominee rather than the man who is finishing his last eight months.24 The man Roosevelt made sure his Republican party chose the next month was the Secretary of War, William Howard Taft. TR confided to another friend and “intellectual playmate,” the British historian and statesman Sir George Otto Trevelyan, that he had to fight “tooth and nail” to head off a stampede for his own renomination. He could not be sure of Taft’s election, but he believed “the chances” favored it. Roosevelt went on that, “always excepting Washington and Lincoln,” he thought Taft would “rank with any other man who has ever been in the White House.”25

  The man TR meant to leave behind to lead the conservation crusade in the hoped-for Taft administration was Gifford Pinchot, the chief forester of the United States.26 For the previous seven years, first as head of the Division of Forestry in the Agriculture Department, and then Chief of the new Forest Service after 1905, the handsome, wealthy and stylish Pinchot had led a righteous (some would say selfr
ighteous) crusade as Roosevelt’s “lightening rod” and point man on what would later be called environmental issues.27 Among the first “scientific foresters,” Pinchot was forced to travel to France for his training since no such programs existed in the United States. He returned convinced that “forestry is the art of using a forest without destroying it.”28Pinchot credited TR (and himself) with formulating and laying before the American people and the world a utilitarian “Conservation idea—the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time, the development and use of the earth and all its resources for the enduring good of men—both on a national and international scale.”29

  The president did not know anyone he would sooner choose to send to a danger point than Pinchot and just before he left the White House, he wrote to the chief forester, “I owe you a peculiar debt of obligation for a very large part of the achievement of this administration.”30 In conservation these included the establishment of the first Federal Wildlife Refuge, and the growth of the system to fifty bird sanctuaries before TR left office; the creation of a new system of National Monuments such as the Grand Canyon, totaling eighteen by 1909; the addition of 150 million acres of timberland to the Forest Reserves, called National Forests after 1907; the withdrawal of waterpower sites to safeguard the growing demand for electricity; doubling the number of national parks; and the creation of the Federal Reclamation Service dedicated to irrigation and reforestation.