Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (15 page)

The square-mouthed rhinoceros differed from the ordinary African prehensile-lipped variety (the upper lip of which looked like the hook of a turtle’s beak), in several other ways. It was less solitary and on the average larger, with a very prominent hump over the withers, and a still larger fleshy hump on the neck. Its “huge, mis-shapen head,” in TR’s opinion, differed as much from the ordinary rhino as the head of a moose differed from an elk. It fed exclusively on grass, unlike the more common variety. The square-mouth, once plentiful in South Africa, had been almost exterminated there and also had become rare in British East Africa. Consequently, Roosevelt ventured into the Belgian Congo where the animal was still found in some numbers. Nevertheless, he admitted that it would “be well” if all killing were prohibited “until careful inquiry” had been made as to its remaining numbers and exact distribution.
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After, of course, he took his specimens.

Late on the first day out tramping through the dry grassland they came upon a group of rhino and were able to take several. From an ant-hill, TR spied the first lying asleep on its side, “looking like an enormous pig.” When the full-grown cow heard something and rose up on its forelegs in sitting position, he opened fire with the Holland & Holland, killing it with one shot. At this four other rhinos rose and bolted right and left. As he watched them Roosevelt was struck by how much they resembled the paintings he knew from Sir William Cornwallis Harris’s famous 1840 portfolio of South African game. On this occasion Kermit killed a bull, while his father added a calf for the Smithsonian family group. TR noted that the common rhino was a dark slate gray, while these animals were rather lighter in color, but he put this down to “a mere individual peculiarity” for the experts claimed they were the same.
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Leaving Heller and the skinners to do their jobs, TR returned to the main camp which he had to defend from two fires that swept towards them across the tinder-like, tall thin grass. He, Kermit, Mearns, Loring, and the porters cut a lane around their tents and started a back-fire which burnt out fifty yards from their camp and ended the danger. Shortly afterward, TR recorded, it was a “fine sight to see” when one of the fires against which they were guarding came over a low hill crest into view beyond the line of their back-fire, as “the long line of leaping, wavering flames advance toward one another.” The fires burned in their neighborhood for several days and at night it was “splendid to see the line of flames, leaping fifty feet into the air as they worked across the serried masses of tall papyrus” across the bay.
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While TR bagged his first white rhino in the Belgian Congo, at home Senator Dolliver read aloud in the Senate a flagrantly insubordinate letter by Gifford Pinchot on the conservation controversy that forced Taft’s hand. The president dismissed him on January 7, 1910, asserting that Pinchot’s conduct had “destroyed your usefulness as a helpful subordinate.”
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Later that month a Joint Committee of both Houses began to look into the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy, and affairs generally in the Interior Department. From Sagamore Hill, Edith reported to Kermit that the investigation had begun and she was not happy with it for it put Taft, for whom she felt sorry, in “such a difficult position.” In her opinion, his good qualities had become disadvantages. If he would have “roared” at them a bit, as would have Kermit’s father, things might not have come to such a pass. Now, as it threatened to engulf her husband once again, she hated the political outlook more and more.
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The news of Pinchot’s firing reached TR by special runner ten days after the event. From the Lado he wrote to his friend that it seemed to him “absolutely impossible that there could be any truth in this statement” and that he did not know any man who had “rendered quite the service you have rendered.” He asked Pinchot to write him “just what the real situation is” as he had been able only “very imperfectly” to follow things in Africa.
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Such a letter had already been sent, a week before Pinchot’s dismissal. TR did not receive this, however, until he reached Gondokoro in the Sudan the next month.

The day TR got the news of Pinchot’s dismissal, January 17, he reported to Lodge from the Lado Enclave, “Here we are, camped on the banks of the White Nile, about two degrees north of the equator” in the “heart of the African wilderness.” The previous night a hippo almost came into camp, lions were roaring and elephants were trumpeting within a mile. The day before he had shot two white rhinos which, he reported, were “not as white as they are painted.” Ever since they had reached Lake Albert Nyanza the heat had been intense. In the evenings they had to use mosquito headnets and gauntlets and they slept under netting, “usually with nothing on, on account of the heat.” Kermit remained “hard as nails” and both of them were in excellent health. They were now past the spirillum tick and sleeping sickness districts. He told Lodge that he earnestly hoped the news of Pinchot was not true. TR concluded that he was not sure when his friend would get the letter, as the postman was “a wild savage who runs stark naked with the mail.”
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The layer of snow-like ash left by the widespread grass fires made tracking the game much easier. On a second foray after the squaremouthed rhino, they took along the small mammal expert Loring who had before this not seen elephant or rhino alive. This would soon be remedied as within a few hours of leaving camp they came upon a herd of elephant, which they skirted around, not wishing them to charge. A few hours later they came upon the spoor of two rhino they soon caught up with and Kermit captured with his camera before Roosevelt shot one, while the other dashed away to safety. Unlike the ordinary rhino, they found the square-mouth did not charge as often when attacked. They also had the habit of sitting on their haunches like a dog, the only kind of heavy game they saw do so.

Loring stayed behind to oversee the skinning, while TR and Kermit went on to follow a native who had come in with a report of another rhino nearby. This turned out to be, Roosevelt recorded, “a huge bull, with a fair horn; much the biggest bull we had seen; and with head up and action high, the sun glinting on his slate hide and bringing out his enormous bulk, he was indeed a fine sight.” The color of the animal was exactly that of the ordinary rhino, but he was taller and heavier, being six feet high. The “stout” horn was over two feet long. Later, after first taking a series of photographs of her, Kermit shot a cow with a thirty-one inch horn, the longest they had collected, to complete the two pair needed for the museums.
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After this hunt, while Loring and Mearns stayed behind capturing in photographs, and in the flesh, the abundant bird and other life, TR, Kermit, Heller, Cuninghame and Grogan set off inland for a week’s safari traveling as lightly as possible with only two tents. The grass was mostly burned, but they camped by a beautiful pond covered with white and lilac water lilies, with large acacias nearby to provide shade. They saw nine rhino, none of which carried notable horns, before Roosevelt shot one with a horn a little shorter than Kermit’s cow for the National Collection of Heads and Horns. At the “zenith” of his trip, the Colonel reported the six white rhinos to his sister Anna, telling her that it was the animal he most wanted and their “tale of big game is now full.” They were in the heart of wild Africa where there were not even any natives nearby. TR supposed that they were bound to come down with “some fever or other soon,” but so far Kermit had been in robust health and he had not for years passed nine months in such good physical condition as he had the last nine in Africa.
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Breaking camp at the Lado, the party sailed down the Nile to Nimule where the boats were left behind for a ten-day march cross country through a “barren and thirsty land” to Gondokoro. After this tramp, TR reported to Lodge on February 5 that he and Kermit remained well, but “this was not a mere health resort” as all the other members of the party had been down with fever or dysentery. One gun bearer, one skinner, and four porters had died, two had been mauled by lions and, in a village along the way, eight had died of sleeping sickness during their stay.
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Loring, adopting the style of epitaph they had seen on numerous headstones in Africa, left a rhyme in one of the native graves:

Here lies the remains of skinner Dick
Who died from the bite of the spirillum tick
He trapped from Mt Kenia to the Athi plains
And here in Uganda we leave his remains.
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Among the many letters awaiting TR at Gondokoro was Gifford Pinchot’s explanation of the Ballinger affair and his firing. Though couched in careful language on account of Roosevelt’s close friendship with the president, it amounted to a bill of indictment against Taft. Pinchot explained that he had not written before as he wanted TR to be “free for a time from the echoes of trouble.” But now, in Pinchot’s view, it was clear that, “We have fallen back down the hill you led us up” and there was a general belief that the special interests were “once more substantially in control of both Congress and the Administration.” He did not go so far as to attribute the present situation to “deliberate bad faith on the part of Mr. Taft,” but to a “most surprising” weakness and indecision, and to his desire to “act as a judge, dealing with issues only when they are brought to him,” not as, what the president really was, at least in the view of TR and Pinchot, “the advocate and active guardian of the general welfare.” Further, the reactionaries believed that Taft followed the advice of the last man who talked to him and had consequently “built a fence round him with their own men.”

Pinchot then proceeded to list sixteen reasons he had come to these conclusions. To begin with, after his election, Taft had surrounded himself by Trust attorneys and other reactionary advisors in the Cabinet and Congress “who were necessarily in opposition to the Roosevelt policies” and from which he had never broken away. Consequently, in the tariff debate Taft had failed to support the insurgent Republicans in Congress, including many progressives who were “honestly trying to fulfill the party pledges and reduce the tariff” and now the president defended “a tariff bill made by the special interests, following the passage of which the cost of living rose beyond all precedent.” On the conservation front, Taft had allowed the work of the National Conservation Commission to be stopped, which “seriously retarded the practical progress” of the movement. Through decisions by the attorney general, Taft had abandoned the principles TR had established of federal regulation and control, in the public interest, of waterpower on navigable streams. By the appointment of Ballinger, the president had “brought about the most dangerous attack yet made upon the Conservation policies—an attack now happily checked.”

On a more personal level, Pinchot reported that Taft had allowed attacks on TR in Congress to continue “unchecked when a word from the incoming President would have ended them.” Then, in a series of speeches, Taft had endorsed Roosevelt’s bitterest enemies in the Congress, including Senator Aldrich and Speaker Cannon, while he “tried to read out of the Republican [P]arty,” senators Nelson, Beveridge, Cummins, and others “whose fight was made for equality of opportunity and a square deal.” And finally, Taft had repeatedly put party solidarity above the public welfare while allying himself with the special interests and allowing “the great mass of the people to lose confidence in the President.” Pinchot claimed not to have lost all hope that Taft might yet change course and vowed to support him “up to the point where my loyalty to the people of this country requires me to break with the administration.” He assured Roosevelt that “the hold of your policies on the plain people” was as strong as ever and that because of Taft’s actions many of TR’s former enemies were now his friends. The issue at stake had become “immeasurably larger than politics or any man’s political fortunes.” It was a “straight fight for human rights.” At least that was how it looked to him “on the last day of 1909.”
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And this is how it would look to Roosevelt two years later when he challenged his friend Taft for the Republican nomination.

At the time, however, TR replied to Pinchot that he had received his letter at Gondokoro and along with it the definite news that the chief forester had been removed. He assured Pinchot that his replacement by an able man, the forestry expert Henry Graves, in no way or to the least degree lightened the blow, for besides being the chief of the forestry department, Pinchot had also been the leader of “all the forces which were struggling for conservation, which were fighting for the general interest as against special privilege.” He did not wish to be ungracious towards his successor, but he could not as an honest man cease to battle for the principles for which Pinchot, Garfield and other of their close associates stood. Roosevelt went on that he would of course say nothing at present but asked if there was any chance to see Pinchot in Europe. If not he asked to see him on the steamer to America as he wanted to talk to him before he “even in the smallest degree commit myself.”
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Three days after TR wrote this letter, on the first anniversary of Taft’s inauguration, the Indiana newspaperman and reformer Lucius B. Swift sent “My Dear Roosevelt” a one sentence message which summarized the view of many: “Taft is a damn, pig-headed blunderer.”
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All of Roosevelt’s correspondents, however, did not condemn Taft. Two of his closest friends in fact, Lodge and Root, defended the president in their letters. Lodge, who also had been a supporter of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, noted that no president could possibly have tolerated such a letter as their mutual friend sent to Dolliver. He thought Pinchot had been unwise as his first duty should have been to “the great service he has built up” and he ought not to have allowed himself or his subordinates to become involved with the muck-raking magazines that attacked Ballinger.
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Root, whom Taft had consulted before he dismissed Pinchot, had become one of the president’s closest advisors. Root revealed to TR that, for his sins, he had been placed on the committee investigating the Ballinger-Pinchot affair, which he considered a “very disagreeable row” between the two men. Taking Taft’s line, Root asserted that there had been lots of gross distortions aimed at Ballinger and that “indiscreet friends” were making matters worse. In his view the scandal was hurting the administration and, he feared, Pinchot and the cause of conservation as well. Although he admitted Taft had not “yet altogether arrived,” Root asserted that he was nevertheless “making a good President” and would eventually win his way ‘into the public confidence.” He compared the change in presidential styles from TR to Taft as between an automobile and a cab. Like the latter, Taft was “big and good natured and easy going and let things drift considerably.”
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