Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (11 page)

Back on safari Roosevelt wrote to his friend Spring Rice, “Here I am, way out in the desert with nobody but the hunter Cuninghame—a trump—and the funny grasshopper-like blacks.” Sometimes, he went on, “I have shot well, sometimes badly; and I am now an old man, and wholly unable to make exertions which once I should not have regarded as exertions at all.” But still on the whole he felt he had done pretty well, and from the scientific standpoint the trip would be of value as no such collection of complete skins of big game had ever been sent out of Africa by any one expedition. TR looked forward to seeing Spring Rice in England and talking to him about what he had seen in “your African colonies.” He greatly liked and admired “your officials, and your settlers seem to me in all essentials just like our westerners.” It was in fact difficult for him to remember that he was “not a fellow countrymen of theirs”; and they certainly acted as if they thought he was “an especial friend and champion who sympathized and believed in them.” TR concluded by telling Spring Rice that he was “dreadfully homesick for Mrs. Roosevelt. Catch me ever leaving her for a year again, if I can help it.”
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While he lived out his dream of Africa Edith, equally homesick for Theodore, had struck out on an expedition of her own to Europe.

While Theodore stalked British East Africa with Kermit, Edith took three of the children, Ethel, Archie, and Quentin, on an expedition of their own to Europe. They sailed on the S. S.
Crete
and she brought along $10,000 to finance a five months “endless sightseeing tour,” for the children’s education.
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The voyagers arrived on July 12, 1909 at Genoa where Edith’s maiden sister, Emily Carow, awaited them. By nightfall they were all ensconced seventy miles away at Emily’s tiny house, Villa Magna Quies (Villa of Great Quiet), outside Porto Maurizio. Though small, the villa in the Ligurian Hills featured breathtaking views of olive groves and the Mediterranean. For a few restful weeks the children rode bicycles and took daily French, Italian, and Latin lessons at the nearby Franciscan monastery. Edith ignored the journalists who snapped their pictures while they strolled on the pebbly beach or the donkey trails, protected by a Secret Service Agent. At the end of July, Ethel and Archie embarked for a tour of Provence with the U.S. ambassador to Italy, Lloyd Griscom, and his wife. On Edith’s forty-eighth birthday, August 6, she and Quentin explored the
Palais Des Papes
and saw a play at the amphitheatre at Orange before traveling to Lyons to be reunited with Ethel and Archie. Edith confided to her aunt Lizzie that she was beginning to feel “a little more confident in my powers of looking out for myself.”
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A week later the family was back together in a Paris apartment in the Rue Gabriel. Over the next month they carried out an intensive campaign of museums, palaces, and cathedrals from their Paris base. Their friend Henry Adams, who summered there and had written an important book on French cathedrals, joined them for sightseeing. He complained of playing “dancing bear to Mrs. Roosevelt,” but in fact the curmudgeonly Adams admired her and enjoyed his time with the children. He was particularly fond of Quentin and on Ethel’s eighteenth birthday gave her a party at the ornate
Le Petit Palais
on the Left Bank, built for the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition. Her father was happy to hear (some weeks later) that the party had been such a success and that Ethel’s mother had become a real “pretty miss dimples” when she thought of his struggles with “my one chicken” Kermit. TR reported to Ethel that the “one chicken” was off on “his own hook now” with a “haggard deputy hen” in the shape of Tarlton, but he was much less anxious than he had been about the risks. His chief concern at present was that Kermit, because he was so keen and active, did not understand that TR had to take the first chance at the game, “because a large part of the value to the museum vanishes if I do not shoot it myself.” Kermit could not bear to think the trip would ever end while TR looked forward to the last of March and being reunited at Khartoum with his wife and daughter.
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On September 11, to return to their schoolwork, Archie and Quentin took ship home accompanied by an adult chaperone, Ward Theron. That day Edith confided to Spring Rice that “for the last six months my life has been made up of partings which seemed more or less inevitable.” She reported that Warrington Dawson had come to Paris from Africa with “many tales of the hunters.” There was nothing left to them now but “white rhino and a few rare species with unheard of names.” She did rather dread the long trip through the less healthy climate of Uganda, but knew that precautions would be taken. Dawson had reported that TR was in perfect health and that Kermit was “absolutely tireless.” Of the whole safari of 200 there was no one who could keep up with him. She asked Spring Rice if he remembered “what a frail little midget” Kermit was as a boy, “with a great iron brace on his leg.” Edith told Spring Rice to write to her and not to mind saying things about sleeping sickness as she knew “all about it” and did not need to “pretend to you that I think Africa is a Paradise, in any case it is less dangerous to life than the White House!”
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The departure of the boys left Edith and Ethel free to visit Switzerland, Milan, Verona, Venice, Padua, and Turin before returning to Porto Maurizio on 8 October. Later in the month they added Florence, Siena, and Rome to their itinerary. At the last, in the early hours of November 6, Edith was awakened by news of “a terrible rumor” circulating that Theodore had been killed in Africa. Only at five that afternoon did a cable finally arrive from TR’s friends in Nairobi confirming that the report was false. An immensely relieved Edith nevertheless told their friend Spring Rice that the fright, “took something out of me which can’t come back until I see him.”
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When he learned of his wife’s distress over the false report, Roosevelt moved up his arrival in Khartoum by two weeks, to mid-March. On November 12, 1909, Edith and Ethel sailed for New York.

The same day, from their camp on the ‘Nzoi River, near Mount Elgon in British East Africa, TR poured out his heart to Edith in one of the few love letters she attached enough importance to not to later destroy in an attempt to protect their privacy. “Oh sweetest of all sweet girls,” he wrote, “last night I dreamed that I was with you, and that our separation was but a dream; and when I awoke it was almost too hard to bear. Well, one must pay for everything. You have made a real happiness in my life; and so it is natural and right that I should constantly [be] more and more lonely without you.” He went on, “Darling, I love you so. In a little over four months I shall see you, now.”

Of his present situation, Roosevelt explained that the ‘Nzoi, a rapid muddy river with crocodiles and hippos in it, was one of the streams that made up the headwaters of the Nile. Its banks were fringed with strange trees, and the surrounding country was covered with grass so high as to make it hopeless to look for lions. But they had killed many antelope of kinds new to them, and whose names would mean little to her—bohor, sing sing, oribi, lelwel, kob. It seemed to be a healthy country for men but half their horses had died and they might have to go on to the railway by foot. He worried whether his
Scribner’s
articles had been well received but hoped at least “you have liked them” and confessed that it had been “a very real resource to have them to do.” He reassured her that he never would have taken the safari as “merely a pleasure trip, a mere hunting trip.” He signed the letter “Your Own Lover.”
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Over the previous months, TR had been busy himself. At Nairobi on August 3, 1909, before an audience of two hundred settlers and officials, he gave the first of many public preachments to follow over the next ten months on a variety of topics, ranging from his view of Britain’s imperial mission to world peace, taking to the wider world the “bully pulpit” he had made famous at home. The Colonel told his Nairobi audience that he had come on a pleasure trip and any ex-president or ex-statesman who desired “an antidote for the pleasures or troubles of the past,” would do well to “have recourse to lion shooting” for then they would live “in the immediate present.” Without detracting from the lion, hunting buffalo in a papyrus swamp was also “unrivalled for distracting the attention of the mind from the past.” In addition to being “the most attractive playground in the world,” Roosevelt believed the country had a great agricultural and industrial future. From the first time he stood on the Kapiti Plains, conditions in British East Africa struck him as similar to those he knew in the American West years earlier and, though times were hard at present, he believed that eventually the same wealth that came West during the last quarter century would come to the protectorate.

Men of means and business should be encouraged, but in TR’s view for the colony to prosper most newcomers must settle on the land, and be of the right type, farmers, and ranchers from “tough fighting stock” like those who had gone to the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains thirty years before. Such settlement was now possible because of the Uganda Railroad. The construction of this he compared to the Panama Canal and railways in the American West, both built for future needs and not in terms of whether they would pay or not. He had not the “slightest sympathy” with those at home in the Liberal government who expected an immediate return. Not many people outside of Africa realized that this was one of the few regions in the world fit for new white settlement and that the protectorate was in fact “a real white man’s country.” He had been told that white children could not prosper, but had seen them “as sturdy as anyone could wish to see” and as “healthy as any in America or the British Isles.”

Up to this point, TR had been preaching to the choir and his comments roundly applauded, but he warned his audience that he was now going to speak “at the risk of not receiving so much sympathy.” In ma k ing this a “white man’s countr y,” Roosevelt asked them to remember that “not only the laws of righteousness but your own real and ultimate self-interest demand that the black man be treated with justice, that he be safeguarded in his rights and helped upward, not pressed downward.” However, he had no patience with “sentimentalists,” who he believed did more damage than did brutality. In his view, the native tribes were “hopelessly incompetent to better themselves or to utilize this country to advantage, without white leadership and direction.” Neither did he have any patience for those at home who “prate of selfgovernment” for people who have “not governed themselves and never could.” The white population must “occupy a position of unquestioned mastery and leadership,” but with a “deep sense of all the responsibility which it entails.” This was why Roosevelt believed in helping the missionary, of whatever creed, who labored “sincerely, disinterestedly, and with practical good sense in his fieldwork.” He judged men by their conduct, not by creed or origin.

In the difficult task of building this new nation, TR told his audience, “you are entitled to the heartiest support and encouragement” from the “men who stay at home.” Responding to those who had asked for his aid on this front, he went on that he meant to “speak frankly” when he reached London. The Colonel concluded with an exhortation to “stand by each other” and to remember that “time spent in back biting” was wasted, and to “work heartily together” so that they would soon “turn this region into a real and prosperous white man’s country.” As the rest of the speech, this peroration was greeted with prolonged and loud applause.
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Roosevelt really liked the men he met in British East Africa and he found all the officials to be “most kind.” He commented to Lodge that the day was past when an American was regarded as a poor relation and “if we remain self-reliant and powerful it will never return.” TR was interested to see how extensive American influence was and in how many directions it was felt. For example among the novels in the houses no English ones were more common than those of the American authors Edward Noyes Westcott and Winston Churchill, adding, “I mean of course our Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill the gentleman.” Their hunter Tarlton, an Australian, was fond of books and among his favorites were Longfellow, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain, and he felt towards the United States “just about as he feels towards England—if anything more warmly.”
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He told Lodge that half the people he met looked as though they had walked out of the pages of Kipling, but they greatly resented his saying so as they looked upon Kipling “much as Californians look upon Bret Harte.”
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Two days after the Colonel’s Nairobi speech, the congressional insurgents who had waved TR’s progressive banner in the tariff fight finally lost their battle as Taft signed into law the Payne-Aldrich Tariff. The measure in fact changed things little overall, but it was seen as an upward revision and this perception ruled the day, to the detriment of Taft’s political future. Archie Butt, however, reported to his old chief on the tariff, in his opinion the only important matter that had come up since Roosevelt left, that he would be pleased to learn that Taft had “whipped the old-timers” such as Aldrich and Cannon. Though not pleased with the bill, the president had got “certain fundamentals incorporated in it” which he felt made the measure “one he could sign.” Butt also reported that he had been playing golf, a game he had never liked, with Taft and was beginning to suspect it had “charms of which I have been ignorant.” In their old White House days he had “corns on my right hand from tennis.” Now his right hand was as “delicate as that of a girl,” while there were corns on his left hand, “the change of hands showing the change of administrations.”
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Roosevelt departed Nairobi August 8 for a month’s elephant hunting at Mount Kenya and beyond. Decades of ivory hunting had driven the herds to more and more remote areas and led the British to extend protections from extermination. No cows were allowed to be shot except by special license for museums and no bulls with ivory weighing less than thirty pounds. In Roosevelt’s opinion, too much praise could not be given the “government and the individuals who had brought about this happy result” as it would be “a veritable and most tragic calamity if the lordly elephant, the giant among existing four-footed creatures, should be permitted to vanish from the face of the earth.”
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Wherever he had gone, no other animal, not even the lion, was so widely spoken of and respected as the great pachyderm. “Not only to hunters,” TR wrote, “but to naturalists, and to all people who possess any curiosity about wild creatures and the wild life of nature” the elephant was the “most interesting of all.” This was because of the unrivalled combination of its “huge bulk, its singular form, the value of its ivory, its great intelligence—in which it is only matched, if at all, by the highest apes, and possibly by one or two of the highest carnivora—and its varied habits.” In line of descent and physical formation the elephant stood by itself, “wholly apart from all the other great land beasts, and differing from them even more widely than they differ from each other.”
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