Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (2 page)

The major “political question” on practically everyone’s mind that June was the attitude Roosevelt would take toward his chosen successor, William Howard Taft. Theodore had gone abroad in part so that his friend Will could chart his own presidential course without the appearance of interference. Everyone assumed, and Taft declared, that he would continue TR’s policies. In this they all, Roosevelt first, were wrong. The African trip was a tonic for him, but leaving Taft to his own devices in the wilds of Washington proved a huge error with devastating political results including an acrimonious split between the two that fatally divided the party and led directly to the election of Woodrow Wilson and eight years of Democratic rule.

At the heart of the problems between the two old friends, one who felt betrayed and one who felt abandoned, was the course Taft pursued in conservation policy culminating in the firing of TR’s man Gifford Pinchot from his post as Chief Forester of the United States. Not long after Roosevelt’s return, Pinchot confided to him, “you and I agree about Taft. We both realize his weakness, his disloyalty to you, and his incapacity to understand or to lead the people.” He went on “you are progressive—Taft is not, and never had been or will be except under orders.” The country was as progressive as TR and, in Pinchot’s estimation, “wholly irrespective of whether you are to be President again or not, it wants you to lead it where in any event it is bound to go.” Renominating Taft would give the special interests control of the Republican party and “check the forward movement” which was the “central result of your work.” Taft had deceived them all once. That

So what follows is a tale of daring adventure, of international celebrity and, sadly, of friendship lost and political legacy transformed. But there is also a more private story of true love and family devotion— the love of Theodore and Edith Roosevelt, and the deep bonds of affection TR held for his children, particularly his son Kermit who came along on the safari. All these remarkable and fascinating aspects are revealed in the following account of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1909–1910 journey—a story almost as multi-faceted as TR’s own personality. And one never before as fully told.

On March 1, 1909, three days before he passed along the presidency, and with it the safekeeping of his progressive policies, to his friend Will Taft, Theodore Roosevelt held a first and last luncheon at the White House for his loose “tennis cabinet” of friends and advisors. At this affair the core of Washington insiders who had actually done battle with TR on the dirt White House court were intermixed with honorary members—western wolf-hunters, “two-gun” men, and others who came to the capital for the occasion. So that the various elements would get to know one another the thirty-one men were seated irrespective of precedence and rank. The press had made a good deal of fun of this group of presidential “playmates” but had never known just how extensive it was or how important a role it held in the administrations. Roosevelt meant the gathering to be his only official recognition of their contributions.

Those present were, among the Washington tennis players, James Rudolph Garfield, son of the twentieth president, secretary of the interior and considered the leader of the group; Gifford Pinchot, the patrician Chief Forester of the United States; Jean Jules Jusserand, the dapper ambassador of France; and TR’s close advisor Elihu Root, until recently secretary of state. The honorary members from the West and elsewhere included Luther “Yellowstone” Kelly, who Roosevelt had first met on the Little Missouri River and was now an Indian Agent in Arizona, the wolf-hunter “Catch ‘Em Alive Jack” Abernathy, and the Dakotas Marshal Seth Bullock of Deadwood fame, who TR had known since the 1880s “cowboy” years. The president’s military aide, Captain Archie Butt, himself a member of the company, was frankly amazed by the contrasting crew of wolf catchers, fox hunters, and one or two men who had been arrested some time in the past for holding up trains.
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Near the end of the luncheon, when TR rose and called the meeting to order, the clatter of knives and forks promptly stopped. The President surveyed the men in the room and then delivered what amounted to a funeral oration for his administration, while praising each man in turn. He paid particularly glowing tributes to Garfield and Jusserand. The first, who was soon to be replaced at the interior department in the new administration, Roosevelt called “one of the most useful Cabinet members who ever sat at the Cabinet table.” The president noted that Garfield, who was not a wealthy man, symbolized those who would leave government with him. He had answered TR’s call seven years before to join the administration as a civil service commissioner. When the Bureau of Corporations was created in 1903 to combat big business combinations, Roosevelt had entrusted Garfield to head it, and then three years later he had taken over the Interior Department and, with Gifford Pinchot, led the fight for conservation. All of this was done at great personal sacrifice to Garfield’s promising legal career. Turning to the diminutive, bearded Jusserand, his ally in heading off the threatening Moroccan crisis between France and Germany four years before, TR declared that there had never been such a relationship between an ambassador and a president, “they were friends and playmates—and the help, the courage which the ambassador had imparted to him at times could not be estimated.”
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Uncharacteristically, the loquacious little Frenchman, the acknowledged “vice-president” of the group, was unable to find the words to reply.

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.
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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.”
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It 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.”
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The 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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At 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.
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In 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.
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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 personality; 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.”
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