Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (29 page)

The fifteen-month 1909–1910 odyssey, however, marks a shining example of TR still living and preaching the righteous, strenuous life to friend and foe alike and represents a high point of his postpresidential career. Though today soiled by its bloodiness, the African safari greatly increased scientific understanding of little known and even previously unknown fauna and flora, some recorded in
LifeHistories of African Game Animals
(1914), the scholarly work TR co-authored with Edmund Heller. Henry Fairfield Osborn described the volumes as “replete from cover to cover with accurate, original information—in fact a real contribution.”
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Researchers continue actively to consult the thousands of specimens brought back from Africa, whose value has increased over the last few decades in which animals are no longer shot. The practice of taking family groups, rather than simply record trophies, has provided an invaluable variety of specimens for study a century on and as benchmarks for modern DNA research.

Roosevelt’s
African Game Trails: An Account of the Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist
, which has sold more than a million copies in numerous editions, is still considered one of the finest and most valuable safari records ever published.
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In his review of the book, Sir Harry Johnston applauded the gain to science from the expedition. In this TR was “quite as anxious” to obtain the white-billed stork, the pygmy mouse, the green-backed day flying bat, the elephant shrew, as he was the white rhino or Abyssinian buffalo or giant eland. No notable bird or animal “died in vain.” Their remains would enrich the great natural history museums of America and be of “ever-growing interest to millions of men, women and children who will thus be able to realize the marvels of the African fauna.”
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The announcement in 1913 of a dedicated hall at the National Museum to display the mounted African specimens led also to renewed condemnation of the safari. William Hornaday, of the New York Zoological Garden, eloquently defended the expedition and Roosevelt from the critics, of which there continues to be no shortage down to today. He first praised TR, and the safari’s benefactors, for building at their own expense a collection of which the nation could be proud but that Congress, historically, had been unwilling to fund. Turning to those who questioned the ethics of the safari, Hornaday declared that “Ethically the world has decreed that whenever it does not spell extermination it is right to kill enough of the mammals, birds, reptiles and fishes of the world to stock the world’s museums with a satisfactory supply.” Otherwise, species would be exterminated without any permanent evidence of their existence being left behind. Death was the “ultimate portion of every living creature, and the collectors for museums are no more cruel or wasteful of life than are the forces of nature herself.” Those who thought the killing of animals wrong would no doubt condemn the Roosevelt expedition. But to do so was to condemn “the museum idea so far as it relates to zoological forms.” Some killing was necessary and, in his opinion, if it was wrong to kill wild animals for museums, it was also wrong to kill domestic animals, poultry, and fish for the table.

Hornaday wished that the public could see, as he had, the entire lot of specimens and “trophies” that TR had taken for himself. He had the right to retain a great many, but the number he kept were so few and “so trifling in value that they made, when placed on exhibition, a showing that was pitifully meager.” Literally, everything fine was given over to the National Museum in Washington except the two white rhinoceros heads that went to New York, one to his own institution and the other to the American Museum of Natural History. He regarded it as “particularly fine” that Roosevelt did not keep even one white rhino head for his own collection. In the end, Hornaday believed, when the splendid groups were finally mounted and put on exhibition in the new space, then the ethics of the Roosevelt collecting expedition to Africa would be “as firmly fixed as the foundations of the Rocky Mountains.”
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Sadly, all save one of the specimens that were displayed for decades in beautifully painted dioramas in what became the National Museum of Natural History in Washington have been dismantled. The only significant specimen shot by Roosevelt in Africa still on display is a single white rhino.

The European leg of TR’s journey had much less tangible and lasting results. Nevertheless, until Woodrow Wilson’s triumphant postwar visit in 1919 no American would touch the imagination of Europe to a greater degree. Across the Continent the Colonel raised the “consciousness that every country” needed a “Roosevelt of its own.”
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Lord Curzon, his host at Oxford, wrote TR soon after he departed that “the echoes of your great tour still survive & here we all think that the English was not the least successful part of it.” He could not recall “any man who has left a similar impression.”
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Roosevelt in return liked and respected almost all the aristocrats and royals he met. They struck him as “serious persons, devoted to their people and anxious to justify their own positions by the way they did their duty.” On the other hand, he did not find “the average among them very high as regards intellect and force.” Further, he could not imagine a “more appallingly dreary life for a man of ambition and power.”
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Almost all of these European notables, who assumed their distinguished guest would again be president, would either be swept away by the cataclysm of World War I or find their powers and prestige greatly reduced in its aftermath.

It is unfortunate that, however much he might have disagreed with Andrew Carnegie’s schemes, TR was unable to further the cause of peace before 1914, as he had done to garner the Nobel Prize in 1906. His belated Nobel Address shows that, at least in 1910, he stood for many of the aims Woodrow Wilson would list in his Fourteen Points program for peace eight years later, including arms control and a League of Nations. The failure to form an international police force, which Roosevelt called for a century ago to enforce peace, has proven the Achilles heel, first of the League of Nations, and then of the United Nations today, to the world’s detriment.

In London at the end, Roosevelt’s private conversations and Guildhall address in support of the aims of Britain’s African colonists and governors, and to urge a stiffer policy in Egypt, gave at least a brief fillip to Britain’s imperialists. In the long run, however, the dream of a “White Man’s Country” in British East Africa, which Roosevelt supported, proved as illusory as the overall imperial idea. Whatever its shortcomings, however, TR’s post-presidential odyssey represents a luminous example of a man at the height of his powers enjoying his life immensely, and still attempting to shape the world in his own image.

For three decades after her husband’s death, Edith Roosevelt defended his record and name. She traveled widely, and in 1932 campaigned vigorously for Herbert Hoover against Theodore’s fifth cousin Franklin’s first bid for the presidency. She died in 1948 at Sagamore Hill, aged eighty-seven. Five years earlier, Edith’s favorite child Kermit, who had accompanied his father down the Amazon as he had done to Africa, succumbed to the Roosevelt family’s predilection to alcoholism and depression. He committed suicide while serving in the army in Alaska during World War II. His mother was told he suffered a heart attack.

TR’s obedient and upright daughter Ethel married a surgeon friend of Kermit’s, Richard Derby, in 1913. They had two children, Richard and Edith. The last in particular became a favorite of grandfather Theodore in visits to Sagamore Hill. On her father’s death, Ethel commented “The whole country mourns him and I mourn for the country. There’s no one now to say what we want said.”
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She went on to lead a successful fight to make Sagamore Hill an historic site, opened to the public in 1953. Ethel died in December 1977, outlived only by her brother Archie, and by “Princess” Alice, who kept her place as a feared and revered leader of Washington society for decades. Dubbed “the other Washington monument,” she called herself “Washington’s only perambulatory monument.”
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Alice died in February 1980, only days after her ninety-sixth birthday.

After the failure of TR’s peace mission to Germany, Andrew Carnegie did not give up his crusade, or the hope that the German Emperor might yet be brought to his side in the struggle. At home Carnegie put his faith in President Taft and with his blessing at the end of 1910 the plutocrat’s efforts took a new course when he used $10,000,000 in United States Steel bonds to fund the Carnegie Endowment for Peace still at work today.
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Elihu Root became the endowment’s first president and held the position for the next fifteen formative years. In 1912, for his labors in the vineyards of international arbitration, Root joined Roosevelt as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. That same year their friendship ended when Root supported Taft’s nomination over TR.

The next year Carnegie led a delegation to Germany for the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wilhelm’s reign. When they met the boisterous Kaiser, wagging his index finger, exclaimed, “Remember Carnegie! Twenty-five years!—and twenty-five years of peace! If I am Emperor for another twenty-five years not a shot shall be fired in Europe!”
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The following year, German troops invaded Belgium, which Carnegie had passed through in 1913, noting its beauty, and that it could never be attacked, because Germany, France, and England guaranteed its neutrality. When the last entered World War I, ostensibly on account of her pledge to Belgium, Carnegie’s friend John Morley was one of the two men in the British Cabinet who resigned rather than support the decision. The foremost proponent of intervention in the Cabinet was Sir Edward Grey, who lived up to Roosevelt’s hopes for him in this matter at least.

The sacrifices Britain and her colonies made in the Great War only increased TR’s admiration for the British Empire. Among the million British casualties was Sir Frederick Selous, who enlisted at age sixtyfour and was killed in action in 1917, fighting the German foe in East Africa, and gaining the heroic death the old Rough Rider felt cheated of by Woodrow Wilson. Before the end of the war Theodore and Edith’s friend Sir Cecil Spring Rice also died, but in less gallant circumstances. In poor health for several years, he was forced out as ambassador to the United States in late 1917 and passed away a few months later. Another close English friend, Arthur Lee, like Theodore unable to serve in arms, accepted various government posts during the war and was First Lord of the Admiralty by the end of the Lloyd George coalition government that won it. Of TR and the Welshman, Lee commented that “in drive and sense of humour they were almost equally matched and . . . they both possessed that higher genius for leadership which enabled men to serve under their banner and to follow them ‘over the top’ with a sense of exhilaration and without counting the cost.”
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An avid and talented collector of art, Lee co-founded the Courtauld Institute in London and died in 1947.

Though dispirited by the ghastly world cataclysm of 1914–1918, Andrew Carnegie continued to call for a League of Peace. He died in August 1919, while Woodrow Wilson was in the midst of his losing postwar battle to have the United States join his brainchild League of Nations. TR’s old friend Henry Cabot Lodge was instrumental in the Senate defeat of the Versailles Treaty, and with it American membership in Wilson’s League. Lodge and Roosevelt also fell out in 1912 over the Bull Moose rebellion, and he certainly would not have understood or forgiven Lodge’s support of the belated 1920s payment of $25,000,000 to Colombia by the United States for TR’s “theft” of the Panama Canal.

Roosevelt, however, was able to come to a rapprochement with another old friend, Will Taft, who in his heart of hearts had never really wanted or enjoyed the presidency, and soon got over the humiliation of coming in third in the 1912 election behind Wilson and TR. Despite the fears of Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the Taft administration left behind a quite respectable record in conservation, about which Taft and Ballinger had differed with their predecessors more in style and speed, than in the final goal. After spending a quiet eight years as a professor of Law at his beloved Yale, Taft was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court by the next Republican president, Warren G. Harding, giving the former president the position he had always wanted most of all. He proved a sound choice for the conservative times and happily stayed on the court until his death in 1930.

Pinchot, whose battle with Richard Ballinger was so instrumental in pulling Roosevelt back into the political fray against Taft in 1910, carried on the struggle for his brand of conservation policy for the rest of his long life. He also embarked on a political career, winning the first of two terms as governor of Pennsylvania in 1922. His memoir
Breaking New Ground
constituted a defense of his and TR’s conservation policies. Roosevelt’s death in 1919, he feared, might result in “such control by the reactionaries” as to put “the policies they had fought for “back many years.” In Pinchot’s estimation, TR’s life had been one lived “at its warmest, and fullest and truest, at its utmost in vigor, at its sanest in purpose, and its clearest of clearest—life tremendous in volume, unbounded in scope, yet controlled and guided with a disciplined power that made him, as few men have even been, the captain of his soul.”
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Another man who had served both Roosevelt and Taft, their military aide Archie Butt, tragically went down with the
Titanic
in 1912.

Among the royals Roosevelt came to know in 1910, the little King Victor Emmanuel III, who so impressed him, defied parliamentary majorities in 1915 to bring Italy into World War I on the side of the Allies. Less wisely seven years later, to avoid civil war, he offered Benito Mussolini the premiership, opening the door for the Fascist regime. In 1936 Mussolini added the title Emperor of Abyssinia to his titles and Victor Emmanuel supported Il Duce until his fall. In June 1944, on the occupation of Rome by the Allies, the King retired from public life. Two years later he abdicated and was followed, for a month, by his son Umberto II, who himself abdicated when a national referendum voted for a republic.