Theodore Roosevelt Abroad Page 4
The many perils they would face in Africa led several people to suggest it would be better if Kermit did not go, but TR knew that it would “absolutely break Kermit’s heart” if he left him behind.57 Among those who had sent warnings, including a pamphlet on the dangers to the young of “sleeping sickness,” was Cecil Spring Rice, who in 1908 was attached to the British Embassy in Stockholm. TR replied to his old friend that he “laughed until he cried” over the pamphlet and the explanation in his letter that it was “perfectly possible that I would not die of that, because, in the event of my not being previously eaten by a lion or crocodile, or killed by an infuriated elephant or buffalo, malarial fever or a tribe of enraged savages might take me off before the sleeping sickness got me!” He was bound to say, however, that the letter gave his wife “a keen and melancholy enjoyment, and she will now have the feeling that she is justified in a Roman-matron-like attitude of heroically bidding me go to my death when I sail in a well-equipped steamer for an entirely comfortable and mild little hunting trip.”58
However her husband might jest, Theodore’s constant talk of the trip, reading maps and jungle literature, took a toll on Edith. It was bad enough that her soul mate soon would be disappearing into the wilds of Africa for almost a year, but he was taking along Kermit, her favorite, as company. Archie Butt and others noticed, “some beautiful understanding” between the reed-thin young man and his mother. He always stood near her with his arm around her waist and he never came into a room that he did not go up and kiss her.59 The prospect of a long separation and the dangers of a safari appeared “pretty hard on Mrs. R,” however, she told Captain Butt that “even wild-animal hunting in Africa” had its compensations when she thought of her anxiety when her husband was “appearing in public, a target for every crank who comes to these shores.”60 Edith was made somewhat less “anxious” when her husband arranged for Major Edgar Mearns, of the Army Medical Corps, who had seen much tropical service, to go along as one of the Smithsonian naturalists.61
Dr. Mearns suggested they take along a “movie picture machine” offered cost free by Thomas Edison in return for the advertising rights, but Roosevelt vetoed the idea. He told Mearns it would only hamper them and would not be useful enough to make up for the “very undesirable” advertising of the expedition that would result.62 Though he doubted the value of the Edison machine, TR believed that making a photographic record of the expedition was of central importance and in fact might be its most lasting and valuable legacy. By 1908 photographic safaris were not unknown and another of TR’s British advisors, Sir Harry Johnston, told the press that, if he had his say, he would “present a telephoto camera instead of a rifle to the president and entreat him to take shots at long range with that. Everywhere we witness the destruction of animals and birds indigenous to their native soils, and I am for preserving them rather than destroying them. Africa is no exception and the big game there is slowly being exterminated.”63 The naturalists all brought cameras, but Kermit acted as the expedition’s official photographer. TR advised his son to take a plain Kodak in addition to the cumbersome and elaborate “Chapman apparatus” with which he had been practicing. He thought a good plan was to take a great number of pictures and “hope that one in ten will turn out well.” Then of those, “we will be able to pick enough that we want.”64 In the end Kermit used a Graphlex Naturalist’s camera for most of his thousands of photographs that chronicled the journey.
Roosevelt had planned to oversee the expedition himself and protested that he did not want to feel as if he were on a “kind of Cook’s tour party,” but he finally listened to reason and took Selous’s advice to hire the firm of Newland and Tarlton in Nairobi to manage the safari.65 This freed TR to concentrate on the game. One of the partners, Leslie Tarlton, joined them as a hunter and sometimes companion to Kermit, while Theodore’s official guide was R. J. Cuninghame, an old African hand whom Carl Akeley had hired two years before to teach him to hunt elephants. By August the final details of the trip had been decided. TR reported to a close friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, that they would leave New York on March 23rd, going by Naples to Mombasa in British East Africa. By December 1909 he expected to reach the headwaters of the Nile and would leave Cairo near the end of March 1910. Almost all the trophies would go to the National Museum which, he went on, was a “great relief to Edith” who felt she would “have to move out of the house if I began to fill it a full of queer antelopes, stuffed elephants and the like.”66 TR hoped to run the safari as economically as possible and pared what he considered luxuries including pâté de fois gras, canned prawns and French plums, white tablecloths and fancy china crockery. He also slashed the liquor supply from a gross of whisky to three flasks—for medicinal purposes.67 Despite incessant rumors of his drinking bouts, TR was in fact practically a teetotaler.
As it turned out, the champion of the prohibition movement in the United States, William Jennings Bryan, also happened to be Taft’s Democratic opponent in the 1908 election campaign. TR was unsure if he could transfer his undoubted popularity to Taft, and conventional wisdom held that a financial panic during an administration, such as happened in 1907, meant the defeat of the party in power in the following election. Nevertheless, before leaving for Africa and Europe it was imperative to Roosevelt that his chosen successor be elected to carry on his policies. He wrote to Buxton on 25 September that he had gotten into the campaign “as hard as I know how” and for the next six weeks he supposed “even Africa will a little bit submerged in interest compared to the desirability of electing Taft.”68
The president’s close friend was a political novice, unused to the rough and tumble of campaigning. An Ohio native, Taft had studied at Yale and been a lawyer and judge in Cincinnati before becoming Solicitor-General of the United States in 1890. Ten years later Taft was made president of the Philippine Commission and in 1901 the first Civil governor of the islands. In 1904 he became secretary of war, and since then had in addition done yeoman service as TR’s agent overseeing the construction of the Panama Canal, while also acting in 1906 as provisional governor of Cuba. Roosevelt might have done better to keep Taft close in Washington for the education in politics his chosen successor badly needed, but never got. Among these skills, making speeches was never a Taft strong point, while his opponent in 1908 was one of the most famous orators in American history.
On the stump, Taft had been citing decision after decision that he had rendered. This TR told him simply to stop, for “the moment you begin to cite decisions people at once think it is impossible to understand and they cease trying to comprehend and promptly begin to nod.” Instead, he coached Taft to view his audience as one “coming, not to see an etching, but a poster.” He must, therefore, “have streaks of blue, yellow and red to catch the eye, and eliminate all fine lines and soft colors.” Taft at first, Roosevelt recalled, thought him a “barbarian and a mountebank,” but he was pleased to say by the end of the campaign that his chosen successor was “at last catching the attention of the crowd” and, he thought, holding it.69
While he gave Taft as much aid as he thought wise, TR crafted several speeches of his own for delivery in Europe. The first of these sprung from his inability to resist the intellectual prestige in an invitation from the chancellor of Oxford, George Nathaniel Curzon, Baron Curzon of Kedleston, to give the Romanes Lecture at the university in June 1910. The lecture also afforded an official reason to visit England. A delighted TR replied to Curzon, “surely no man was ever asked to do a pleasant thing in such a pleasant way as you have asked me!”70 Roosevelt practiced the speech, which he wrote while having his portrait painted by Joseph De Camp, on Ambassador Jusserand and Archie Butt. He also sent a copy of the lecture, titled “Biological Analogies in History,” to his friend Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Osborn recalled that it was “full of analogies between the extinct animal kingdom and the kingdoms and principalities in the human world.” Several of thes
e, that he felt “likely to bring on war between the United States and the governments referred to,” he advised TR to omit.71
When news of the Romanes Lecture got out, a torrent of invitations followed. So as not to hurt French sensibilities, and his friend Jusserand, Roosevelt agreed to give a Paris address at the Sorbonne. Then, after the Kaiser sent an invitation, the University of Berlin was added to the progress. He first turned down an invitation from the Nobel Committee to make a belated address in Norway for the Peace Prize he had been awarded for mediating the Russo-Japanese War. However, TR finally heeded the urgings of Carnegie and others and decided to accept.
All this swept away TR’s original intention not to go near a European capital. He had declared that he would sooner give up the trip than let it be made into a “peripatetic show”; however, as he told his friend Henry White, the U.S. ambassador in Paris, though he would like to avoid seeing any sovereigns, he realized this might make him look “churlish.” He wanted to travel as a private citizen and was no “hanger-on to shreds of departing greatness.” Therefore, he wanted any introductions to be as informal as possible and, so that he could actually speak with the rulers, under no circumstance did he want any formal dinners or other entertainments. Roosevelt supposed that when he reached England, he would be “informally presented” to Edward VII, who had sent his best wishes for the safari across his possessions, but he feared this would hurt the feelings of the German Kaiser, with whom he had also had a pleasant correspondence and in whom he found much to admire.72 In the end, accepting the Berlin address also meant accepting Wilhelm’s invitation to “meet somewhere and get personally acquainted.”73
Making allowances for Edward and Wilhelm opened the royal floodgates. TR’s larger than life personality and reputation led other kings, great and small, to vie with each other to honor him. European royals, as far as they gave their attention to anything or anyone outside their own inbred society, looked upon him as an interesting curiosity, a prince who had succeeded an assassinated ruler and then been elected temporary king is his own right in 1904. Roosevelt had also made a warrior’s name for himself as Colonel of the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, living out a martial fantasy from which twentieth-century monarchs were excluded. More recently he had, in light of the bloody Philippine experience, curbed his expansionist imperialism and turned peacemaker.74The same year he won the Nobel Prize, TR also helped to foster an agreement at the Algeciras Conference in Spain called to settle the differences between Germany and France over the Moroccan crisis, which had threatened the peace of Europe and the world.
Any looming threat to Roosevelt’s domestic policies also appeared to be settled when, as he expected, Taft won the 1908 election. An elated TR sent a telegram to his friend in Cincinnati: “I need hardly say how heartily I congratulate you, and the country even more.” He told Taft that the returns made it evident that he was “the only man who we could have nominated that could have been elected.” He had won a “great personal victory, as well as great victory for the party, and all those who love you, who admire and believe in you, and are proud of your great and fine qualities must feel a thrill of exultation over the way in which the American people have shown their insight and character, their adherence to high principle.”75In his thank you note for TR’s letter of congratulations, Taft seemed to give equal credit to “you and my brother Charlie” for his election—a statement Roosevelt would not forget and a first, and at the time small, fissure between the two men.76
Another early rift developed over Taft’s cabinet, chiefly on account of the dismissal of the activist and TR loyalist James Garfield from the Interior Department. Of course Roosevelt made it clear that the new president had the perfect right to nominate whomever he chose, even if it meant dismissing many worthy men. Taft nevertheless felt uncomfortable about the president’s obvious disapproval. From the Canal Zone, on his last inspection tour as vice president, he confided to Roosevelt that he was “very much torn up in my feelings in respect to the cabinet and leaving out so many men for whom I have the highest respect.” But the president-elect believed he was “doing right in making selections with a view to a somewhat different state of reforms” which TR had started and he must carry on. He knew he would be attacked for having more lawyers than he ought to have, among them the new Secretary of the Interior, Richard Achilles Ballinger. There was also the problem that many of the men he wanted had big business ties. Nevertheless, Taft explained to Roosevelt that he “wanted to get the best” and could not do so “without securing those who have had corporate employment.”77
The famously rotund Taft had not been physically up to the strenuous activity required for membership in the “tennis cabinet” and played golf instead. During his term in office, TR’s beloved dirt court was covered over by an addition to the White House, an act symbolic of the deterioration in relations between the two old friends. Taft did ride regularly which, Roosevelt quipped, was both “dangerous to him and cruel to the horse.” He advised Archie Butt, who was one of the select few chosen to stay on in the new regime, that life in the White House would be strenuous enough for Taft and that he should not take much exercise, which did him no good at any rate. If TR were the president-elect, he would “content myself with the record I was able to make in the next four years or the next eight and then be content to die.”78 While making his own record, Taft was also pledged to guard with his political life Roosevelt’s progressive achievements, of which conservation was most prominent.
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.”79 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.80This 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.”81 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.82 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.”83