Theodore Roosevelt (11 page)

Thirteen

This chapter will be devoted to quotations from TR's correspondence during his two terms as president. I hope to illustrate the diversity of his interests even while he was concentrating his principal energies on a job that affected not only the nation but the planet itself.

We start with his private injunction to a naval officer who, although promoted, had a drinking problem:

But for your own sake and for the sake of the service which is so dear to us both I wish greatly that you would write me pledging your word as an officer and a gentleman that you would never again under any circumstances permit yourself to get under the influence of liquor.

When he discovered that the tax on the New York City residence of his cabinet officer Elihu Root had been suddenly and steeply raised, he responded with his usual anger and suspicion, writing Mayor Seth Low as follows:

What the tax commissioners mean or can mean I do not know, but it seems literally impossible that they could have proceeded from any other than a sinister motive in this attack upon, and outrageous discrimination against, a singularly upright, self-sacrificing and disinterested public servant.

TR, although born and bred in the heart of what was then considered the best and most exclusive New York society, had little use for its showy and party-loving side, as exemplified by Newport and Mrs. Astor and the list of four hundred eligible family names compiled by her majordomo, Ward McAllister. That TR's daughter, Alice, who loved him but loved to defy him, cultivated this world no doubt caused this snort of disgust:

Personally the life of the Four Hundred in its typical form strikes me as being as flat as stale champagne. I would rather hold my own in any congenial political society—even in Tammany—than in a circle where Harry Lehr is deemed a prominent and rather fascinating person.

It could have been only through Alice that TR would so much as have heard the name of Harry Lehr, the epicene court jester of first Mrs. Astor and then Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. And it may have been the raised—and dropped—question of Alice's presentation at the Court of St. James that elicited this comment:

I have grown to have a constantly increasing horror of the Americans who go abroad desiring to be presented at court or to meet sovereigns. In very young persons it is excusable folly; in older people it is mere snobbishness.

And here is his sharp summary judgment of the kind of socialite who tended, if he was willing to work at all, to go into the diplomatic service. He is referring to Lawrence Townsend, his minister to Belgium.

He possesses all the superficial requirements of the minister, and none that are of the slightest consequence when there is any real work to be done. He is a gentleman. He speaks foreign languages. He knows the minutiae of diplomacy, and he has a beautiful wife who, as a matter of fact, got him his present position and expects to keep him in it. All kinds of social and some political pressure is exercised on his behalf. But he is in the office not because he can do good to the service but because the office does good to him, and he has no claim whatever on retention—which is equally true of four-fifths of our European ambassadors and ministers.

TR had made his good friend Bellamy Storer ambassador to Austria, and the latter's ultimate recall had not been because of his incapacity in the job but his incapacity to control his wife, an ardent Catholic who used her position to promote appointments in ecclesiastical politics. She was born a Longworth and was the aunt of TR's son-in-law, Nicholas. Here is TR's last stern warning, addressed directly to her:

If you cannot make up your mind absolutely to alter your conduct in this regard, while your husband is in the diplomatic service, to refrain absolutely from taking any further part in the matter of ecclesiastical politics at the Vatican and to refuse to write or speak to anyone (whether laymen or ecclesiastics—at home or abroad) as you have been writing and speaking in the Cardinal's hat matter, then Bellamy cannot with propriety continue to remain Ambassador of the United States.

Another example of a reprimand, although far less severe, is this one to the writer Upton Sinclair. His novel
The Jungle,
about the horrible conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry, had aroused both the nation and its president, but his violent language even for a good cause sometimes overstated the truth.

I must add that you do not seem to feel bound to avoid making and repeating utterly reckless statements which you have failed to back up by proof. But my own duty is entirely different. I am bound to see that nothing but the truth appears, that this truth does in its entirety appear, and that it appears in such shape that practical results for good will follow.

His interest in wildlife did not flag, and he was never too busy to concern himself with the welfare of the bears in Yellowstone:

There are lots of tin cans in the garbage heaps which the bears muss over, and it has now become fairly common for a bear to get his paw so caught in a tin can that he cannot get if off, and of course great pain and injury follow.

Less concern about pain caused to animals is shown in this description of a wolf hunt on a presidential vacation in Colorado in 1905:

I was in at the death of eleven wolves.… I never took part in a row which ended in the death of a wolf without getting through the run in time to see the death.… One run was nine miles long, and I was the only man in at the finish except the professional wolf hunter Abernathy, who is really a wonderful fellow, catching the wolves alive by thrusting his gloved hands down between their jaws so they cannot bite.

Nor was he averse to contemplating the relationship of such carnivores to men, and to himself:

Yet wide and deep though the gulf is between even the lowest man and an anthropoid ape, or some carnivore as intelligent as a dog, there are in both the latter animals and in a good many higher animals intellectual traits and (if I may use the word loosely) moral traits which represent embryonic or rudimentary forms of such intellectual and moral traits of our own and perhaps prefigure them.

The fierceness of man was in TR's opinion the raw material out of which a soldier had to be carved, and he charged the prating of antiwar idealists with producing “a habit of mind under the effect of which the military or warlike virtues tend to atrophy.” When he organized his Rough Riders he called on all the virtues of the frontier:

I was immensely struck by the superiority of the man who had been bred in the open, or was accustomed to the open, who knew how to take cover and to handle horse and rifle, over the ordinary clerk or mechanic or similar individual from the great industrial centers.

Despite his Southern blood and his pride in the naval accomplishments of his maternal uncles, TR remained adamant in his strong condemnation of the folly and belligerence of the Southerners who in his opinion had plunged the nation into civil strife. He wrote to a friend who maintained that there were two sides to every quarrel:

Perhaps I should bar one sentence—that in which you say that in no quarrel is the right all on one side and the wrong all on the other. As regards the actual act of secession, the actual opening of the Civil War, I think the right was exclusively with the Union people and the wrong exclusively with the secessionists; and indeed I do not know of another struggle in history in which the sharp division between right and wrong can be made in quite so clear-cut a manner.

This opinion he held in spite of his disapproval of Northern abolitionists and their violent agitation against slavery:

In social and economic, as in political reforms, the violent revolutionary extremist is the worst friend of liberty, just as the arrogant and intense reactionary is the worst friend of order. It was Lincoln, and not Wendell Phillips and the fanatical abolitionists, who was the effective champion of union and freedom.

In his reading of the Victorian novelists TR was always guarded in his appreciation of Dickens:

There are innumerable characters that he has created which symbolize vices, virtues, follies and the like, almost as well as the characters in Bunyan; and therefore I think the wise thing to do is simply to skip the bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth and get the benefit out of the rest. Of course, one fundamental difference between Thackeray and Dickens is that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens was not.

And he always found time for Greek tragedy:

I have never been able to see that there was the slightest warrant for resenting the death of Agamemnon on the part of his son and daughter, inasmuch as the worthy gentleman had previously slain another daughter, to whose loss the brother and sister never even allude; not to mention that he had obtained possession of the daughter, in order to slay her, by treachery, and that he had brought Cassandra home with him as his mistress.

We catch a glimpse of TR's ability to synchronize his knowledge of history with the names and official positions of his guests at a White House entertainment:

At the state dinner Prince Louis of Battenberg [a British admiral] sat between me and Bonaparte [Charles Joseph, TR's secretary of the navy], and I could not help smiling to myself that here was this British admiral seated beside this American Secretary of the Navy, being a grandnephew of Napoleon and the grandson of Jerome, King of Westphalia; while the British admiral was the grandson of a Hessian general who was the subject of King Jerome and served under Napoleon, and then, by no means creditably, deserted him in the middle of the Battle of Leipzig.

It is perhaps time for a more domestic note. Young Quentin and three of his pals on a frolicsome afternoon put spitballs on some of the White House portraits.

I did not discover it until after dinner, and then pulled Quentin out of bed and had him take them all off the portraits, and this morning required him to bring in the three other culprits before me. I explained to them that they had acted like boors, that it would have been a disgrace to have behaved so in any gentleman's house, but that it was a double disgrace in the house of the Nation.… They were four very sheepish small boys when I got through with them!

I would like to end these quotations to show how charming TR could be when the occasion called for it. The acting American governor of Cuba, prior to its independence, had sent Mrs. Roosevelt the Christmas present of a pitcher and basin. Perhaps because of the impropriety of such a gift from a governor to his chief, it had to be returned, but Edith had liked it, and her husband wished to keep it for her. He wrote the governor:

But the fact is, my dear Governor, that the pitcher and basin are so very beautiful that I simply cannot bear not to give them to her myself, and, after all, altho I shall have to make you permit me to pay for them … the major part of the gift, that is, the trouble in finding it, and the taste in choosing it, cannot but be yours, and so you have simply put us
both
under an obligation.

Fourteen

The retired president, accompanied by his son Kermit, headed for Africa to make a ten months' safari that had long been one of his dreams. The most dangerous animal he had so far hunted was the grizzly bear, and he yearned to try his luck and skill with the lion, the elephant, the rhino, and the cape buffalo. Conscious of his reputation as one who put a bullet through the heart of every wild thing he encountered, and anxious to ameliorate it with one as a conservationist, he dedicated his safari to the cause of science and emphasized to the press that the animals shot would be stuffed and added to the collection of the Natural History Museum in Washington. He persuaded Andrew Carnegie to finance the expedition, which the latter did on a munificent scale with a staff of 260 bearers, cooks, and tent men to accompany Roosevelt and the scientists he had invited to join him. TR also, on his own behalf, contracted for fifty thousand dollars with a magazine to send articles about the trip as it progressed.

He was more tickled than his wife, who of course would be left behind, by some of the newspaper accounts of the forthcoming trip: “I was immensely amused the other day to see an article in the
Philadelphia Ledger
in which the writer stated that as I had had a very picturesque career, and as it was probably now at an end, it would really be a fitting, and on the whole, a happy conclusion if I came to my death in some striking way on the African trip!”

And J. P. Morgan is supposed to have raised his glass at dinner to the toast: “America expects that every lion will do his duty.”

The expedition traversed Kenya and ended in Khartoum. It was estimated that TR and his son shot some three hundred animals, and that TR was personally responsible for nine lions, eight elephants, twenty zebras, seven giraffes, and six buffaloes. Some of the accounts he sent home were sufficiently thrilling:

Right in front of me, thirty yards off, there appeared from behind the bushes which had first screened him from my eyes, the tawny galloping form of a big mane-less lion. Crack!—the Winchester spoke; and as the soft-nosed bullet ploughed forward through his flank the lion swerved so that I missed him with the second shot; but my third bullet went through the spine and forward into his chest. Down he came sixty yards off, his hind quarters dragging, his head up, his ears back, but his jaws open and lips drawn up in a prodigious snarl, as he endeavored to turn and face us.

Edith met the travelers in Khartoum, and she and her husband now embarked on a six-week tour of European capitals where they were greeted by enthusiastic crowds and royalty. There was a slight hitch in Rome where Pius X made the granting of an interview conditional on the Roosevelts' not visiting the American Methodist Mission, which TR refused, but King Victor Emmanuel of Italy received him, and another near hitch in Berlin when TR declined to stay in the royal palace unless Edith too was invited. The Kaiser, however, relaxed his rule; both Roosevelts were included, and TR was asked to join his host at a mock army battle staged for the American ex-president's amusement and perhaps edification.