Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (5 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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!”
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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 these, that he felt “likely to bring on war between the United States and the governments referred to,” he advised TR to omit.
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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.
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In the end, accepting the Berlin address also meant accepting Wilhelm’s invitation to “meet somewhere and get personally acquainted.”
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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.
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The 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.”
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In 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.