Colonel Roosevelt (2 page)

EITHER THESE FLORA
and fauna are reluctantly giving way to him, as an armed intruder from the future, or he is, in a sense, regressing into them,
finding again the Dark Continent he embraced as a child, in a copy of David Livingstone’s
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa
. Before he could read that book, let alone manage its weight, he had dragged it around his father’s Manhattan townhouse, begging adults to “tell” him the pictures: elephants spiked with assegais; surging, snap-jawed hippos; a lion mauling a white man.

From then on, the rule of tooth and claw in nature seemed as supreme as his own success at becoming “one of the governing class.”

At puberty he had set out to prove that it was possible for the frailest of small boys, nearly dead at three from asthma and nervous diarrhea, to punish bone and muscle till both grew strong. If an overstrained heart fluttered in protest, it must be ignored.

“
Doctor,” he had said on leaving college, “I’m going to do all the things you tell me not to do. If I’ve got to live the sort of life you have described, I don’t care how short it is.” Privately, he allowed for sixty years.

At first, paradoxically, he had had to struggle free of privilege. His eminence, at twenty-two, as the head of one of New York City’s “Four Hundred” best families disqualified him for politics, in the opinion of the rough professionals who dominated the state Republican party.
Hustling for votes was not the business of a young gentleman with a
magna cum laude
Harvard degree.

So he had fought—if not with tooth and claw, then with whatever weapons, blunt or subtle, cleared his path—north to Albany as assemblyman from the “Silk Stocking” district, west to Dakota Territory as ranchman and deputy sheriff, south to Washington as civil service commissioner, back to New York City as police commissioner, south again to Washington as assistant secretary of the navy. In the process he won wide admiration for political skills so great as to render him unstoppable in his quest for power. If he was
not alone in plotting the Spanish-American War, he did more than anyone else in the McKinley administration to bring it about. Then, as colonel of his own volunteer regiment, “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders,” and
generalissimo
of its faithful press corps, he transformed himself into a military hero. Fresh out of uniform at forty, he became governor of New York, and at forty-two, vice president under the reelected William McKinley. In September 1901, an assassin’s bullet made him President of the United States.

Not surprisingly, given his physical and rhetorical combativeness, many Americans greeted his accession to the presidency in 1901 with dread. Those of nonconfrontational temper shuddered at his “despotic” reorganization of the army, and demands for a navy big enough to dominate the Western Hemisphere. Their fears seemed realized when he used warships to safeguard the Panamanian Revolution of 1903, securing for the United States the right to build an isthmian canal—and, not incidentally, the ability to move its battle fleet quickly from ocean to ocean. At the same time, they had been amazed at his promptness in granting independence to Cuba in 1902, his willingness to accept less than total victory in exchange for a cease-fire in the Philippines insurrection, and his discreet mediation of the Russo-Japanese peace settlement in 1905—not to mention intervention in the Morocco crisis of 1906, which for a while seemed likely to plunge Europe into war.

His Nobel Peace Prize, the first won by an American, was in recognition of these last two achievements. Had the prize committee been aware of how successfully—and secretly—he had worked to contain the
Weltpolitik
of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the most dangerous autocrat on the international scene, it might have made its award sooner.

Nevertheless, he has never been quite able to resolve whether action is not preferable to negotiation, and might the superior of right. Even the most scholarly of his books,
The Naval War of 1812
and the four-volume
Winning of the West
, are muscular in their bellicose expansionism. Read in sequence, his biographies of Thomas Hart Benton, Gouverneur Morris, and Oliver Cromwell amount to a serial portrait of himself as a prophet of Manifest Destiny, a cultured revolutionary, an autocrat reconciling inimical forces. For bloodlust—strangely combined with tenderness toward the creatures he shoots—few memoirs match his Western trilogy,
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail
, and
The Wilderness Hunter
.

Sexual lust is a subject he deems unfit for print. He is as delicate about the most intimate of acts as a Dutch Reformed dominie.
That does not stop him from condemning birth control as “race suicide”—using the word
race
, now, in the loose sense of
nationality
. An advanced society must reproduce more and more, to swell its economic power and keep its “fighting edge.” He rejoices in having sired six children and betrays an obvious, if unconscious, desire to castrate men “who think that life ought to consist of a perpetual
shrinking from effort, danger and pain.”
Such are the intellectual elitists “whose cult is nonvirility,” and other “mollycoddles” unwilling to play a masterful role in making the world.
Masterful
remains one of his favorite adjectives. This British railroad, for example: this “embodiment of the eager, masterful, materialistic civilization of today,” pushing through the Pleistocene!

THE ICE CAP OF
KILIMANJARO
floats like a bubble, the blue of its lower slopes dissolving into the blue of heat haze. Somewhere in that southern swim, parallel with the line of the railway, runs the uneasy border between British and German East Africa. He has no plans to cross it.
Having spent much of his presidency perfecting Anglo-American relations, and much of his life visiting and corresponding with well-placed English friends, he is almost an honorary British citizen. “
I am the only American in public life whom the Europeans really understand,” he says. “I am a gentleman and follow the code of a gentleman.”

Right now he is the guest of His Majesty’s Colonial Office, as an honored collector of specimens for the National Museum in Washington, D.C. King Edward VII has sent him an official telegram of welcome to the Protectorate.
Fifty-six eminent English peers, parliamentarians, naturalists, and men of letters are the donors of his Holland & Holland rifle. Given a high state of alarm in Parliament over
Germany’s current arms buildup (the Reichstag has announced the construction of three new dreadnought battleships), it would be undiplomatic of him to quit one empire for another, even if a record rhinoceros beckons.

Packed among his safari gear is the typescript of a speech he has been asked to make at Berlin University next spring. In it, he praises the Wilhelmine Reich for its “lusty youth”—a compliment he feels unable to bestow on France or Britain, in similar addresses written for delivery at the Sorbonne and Oxford. He has taken pains to make all three speeches sound as academic as possible, not wanting to exacerbate the rivalries of Europe’s main powers. Like it or not, he will still be listened to as an American foreign policy spokesman.

So much for his fantasy of fading from popular memory in Darkest Africa.
His safari has generated worldwide interest. British East African authorities have extended him special privileges: this train, for instance, comes courtesy of the acting governor. For as long as he roams the Protectorate, he must pay reciprocal respects to every district commissioner who flies a Union Jack over a hut of mud and wattle.

The East African phase of the expedition will end sometime in early December. If personal funds permit, he will then lead a smaller safari through Uganda to the headwaters of the Nile. In the new year, he will cruise down the
great river to Egypt, stopping at leisure to hunt northern big game, not reconnecting with civilization until his wife meets him at Khartoum. That should be about eleven months from now.
He wants to show her Aswan and Luxor and Karnak, where as a boy he first felt himself regressing in time. (She has somehow always figured in his recall: at twelve, the mere sight of a photograph of little Edith Kermit Carow was enough to stir up in him “homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never, alack never.”) From Alexandria, they plan to sail to Italy and revisit the scenes of their honeymoon. After that, his northern speech engagements beckon. He does not expect to return to the United States until the early summer of 1910.

Roosevelt’s safari route through British East Africa, 1909–1910
.
(photo credit p.1)

“
JAMBO BWANA KING YA AMERIK
!
”

The shout comes from more than three hundred porters, gunbearers, horse boys, tent men, and
askari
guards. They stand in two lines outside the little station of Kapiti Plains, five and a half thousand feet above sea level. Pitched behind them are sixty-four tents, and the half-distributed paraphernalia of
the largest safari yet mounted in equatorial Africa. Were it not sponsored by the Smithsonian Museum and financed in large part by Andrew Carnegie, it could almost be a British military foray, with its crates of guns, ammunition, and rocket flares, its show of blue blouses and puttees, its sun helmets shading a few authoritative white faces. But four tons of salt, scalpel kits, powdered borax, and enough cotton batting to unspool back to Mombasa betray the safari’s field purpose. And instead of the Union Jack, a large Stars and Stripes floats over the field-green headquarters of the “King of America.”

His original plan, conceived while fending off Republican attempts to nominate him for
a third term in 1908, was for a private hunting trip in the environs of
Mount Kenya. “
If I am where they can’t get at me, and where I cannot hear what is going on, I cannot be supposed to wish to interfere with the methods of my successor.” But as his preparatory reading extended from J. H. Patterson’s
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo
to Lord Cromer’s
Modern Egypt
, and anti-hunting advocates protested his bloody intentions, he let scientific and political considerations reshape a more public-minded itinerary. The Smithsonian Museum is avid for male and female specimens of all the big-game species he can shoot, plus a complete series of smaller East African mammals. He is also expected to collect flora. The Colonial Office wants him to advertise its new railway, and attract settlers along the line to Victoria Nyanza. The British foreign secretary hopes he will cast a sympathetic American eye on Anglo-Egyptian problems in Khartoum and Cairo.

He has, besides, his own image to worry about. Having made almost a religion of conservation in the White House, and laid the groundwork for a world conference on the subject, he can ill afford to be seen again, as he was in youth, as an indiscriminate killer of big game. In fact, he has always hunted for constructive reasons: as a boy, to fill the glass cases of his “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History,” and teach himself the minutest details of anatomy and coloration; in youth, to fight his way out of invalidism, choosing always to make the chase as difficult as possible; and in early middle age, to promulgate, as founder-president of the Boone & Crockett Club, the paradox that hunters are practical conservationists, needing to preserve what they pursue—not only birds and animals and fish, but the wilderness too.