Colonel Roosevelt (8 page)

Slatin certainly knew, having fought for British control of the Sudan no fewer than thirty-eight times, endured eleven years of Arab imprisonment, and been forced to watch the presentation of Gordon’s head to Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad.

Roosevelt stood on the crest of Jebel Surgham, from which Winston Churchill had looked down on wave after wave of black-clad Arabs, firing bullets into the air and waving banners imprinted with verses from the Koran. Now he saw only empty sand, and the shabby sprawl of Omdurman Fort, and the Mahdi’s tomb rising like a ruined beehive.
His soul revolted against all he had read about “the blight of the Mahdist tyranny, with its accompaniments of unspeakable horror.” Those sons of the Prophet had tortured and killed two-thirds of their own number—mostly blacks in the southern Sudan—in a fanatic interpretation of
jihad
.
If that was what today’s Egyptian Nationalists looked for, as they smuggled in bombs through Alexandria and called for the murder of every foreign official in the condominium, then it was plainly the duty of the British government to stand for humanity against barbarism.

Omdurman fascinated Roosevelt so much that he was loath to leave. By the time the camelcade got back to the riverbank it was already dark, and a quarter moon had risen. Khartoum’s stately buildings glowed white across the Nile.

CAL O’LAUGHLIN AND ABBOTT
were generous in sharing all the domestic news the Colonel had missed, or failed to register, in nearly a year. The contents of his mail sack amplified every story they had to tell, from betrayal of the Roosevelt legacy on the part of Taft administration officials to what looked like significant stirrings of strength in the Democratic Party, long dormant as a national political force.

One long, anguished letter, from his protégé Gifford Pinchot, was especially disturbing. It confirmed a rumor Roosevelt had heard some weeks before (courtesy of the naked messenger from Gondokoro) and refused to believe. Taft had dismissed Pinchot as chief forester of the United States.

It was understandable that the President might find such a passionate reformer difficult to deal with. But of all men, Pinchot was the one most identified with Roosevelt’s conservation record, and by extension, with all the progressive reforms they had worked on together after 1905—reforms that Taft was supposed to have perpetuated.

“
We have fallen back down the hill you have led us up,” Pinchot wrote, “and there is a general belief that the special interests are once more in substantial control of both Congress and the Administration.” He portrayed a well-meaning but weak president, co-opted by “reactionaries” careless of natural resources. Wetlands and woodlands Roosevelt had withdrawn from commercial exploitation had been given back to profiteers. The National Conservation Commission was muzzled. Pinchot’s longed-for World Conservation Conference had never happened. His main villain was his boss, Interior Secretary Richard A. Ballinger, whom he had publicly accused of trading away protected waterpower sites in Alaska, and allowing
illegal coal claims in a forest that had been Theodore Roosevelt’s final presidential gift to the American people.
Taft, consequently, had had no choice in dismissing Pinchot from office.

Other letters made clear that “the Ballinger-Pinchot Controversy” had become a flashpoint of American political anger, as recriminatory on both sides as the Coal Strike of 1902. Except now, the sides were not free-market adversaries, but the left and right of a Grand Old Party that Roosevelt thought he had left unified.

Taft had endorsed an equally divisive overhaul of the nation’s revenue system, already infamous as “the Payne-Aldrich tariff.” Touted as a downward revise of protectionist duties on products ranging from apricots to wool, and debated in the Senate with extraordinary acrimony, it had somehow become law, to the continuing enrichment of America’s corporate elite.

“
Honored Sir: Please get back to the job in Washington, 1912,
for the sake of the poor,
” one plaintive note read.

Captain Archibald Willingham Butt, the gossipy military aide who now served Taft as he had once served Roosevelt, reported that the President had been cast down by a stroke suffered by Mrs. Taft, the previous spring. “
I flatter myself that I have done something in the way of keeping him from lapsing into a semi-comatose state by riding with him and playing golf.…”

Roosevelt paid no attention to several appeals for him to run for mayor of New York, or senator in the New York state legislature—stopgap positions, obviously, from which he would be expected to launch another run for the presidency in 1912. “
My political career is ended,” he told Lawrence Abbott. “No man in American public life has ever reached the crest of the wave as I appear to have done without the wave’s breaking and engulfing him.”

THE LATE EVENING
of 17 March found the Colonel, his party, and press pool clattering north by train toward Wadi Halfa. He was not sorry to leave Khartoum, where an excess of formal engagements, climaxing in a thousand-plate dinner, had tried his patience after nearly a year in the wilderness.

At least,
one delicate encounter, with a group of “native” army officers whom Slatin suspected of anti-British sentiments, had gone well. Roosevelt had reminded them of their sworn duty to the Crown, without saying anything controversial about Arab nationalism, and they had been polite enough to cheer him.

There was no question in his mind that all the North African lands west of Suez were better off as imperial protectorates. He admired what the French had done in Algeria, and hoped they would do the same for Morocco. Likewise, he thought that the British should continue to govern Egypt—if only to protect it from the Turks and that self-proclaimed “friend of three hundred million Muslims,” Kaiser Wilhelm II. His own country was constitutionally unfit for empire, yet he approved of its missionary work in the Nile Valley and in Lebanon.
He had not hesitated, as President, to send gunboats into the Mediterranean whenever American interests seemed threatened, and he had followed up with the Great White Fleet in 1908, signaling that the United States would henceforth be a strategic presence in the Near East.

On the morning of the eighteenth, desert sands disclosed themselves, undulating unbroken to the horizon. Phantom lakes shimmered, running like mercury with the progress of the train. This Nubian landscape was the last depopulated country Roosevelt would see. For several months, he was told, a series of imperial or royal capitals had been bidding for the privilege of entertaining him. So many invitations were already on hand that Lawrence Abbott warned he would need another secretary, if not two, when he got to Europe. “Darkest” Africa had polished his public image to a dazzle of celebrity.

The appearances he had long promised to make at the universities of the Sorbonne, Berlin, and Oxford were now but stops on
an ever-expanding grand tour of Europe. In Rome, both the Pope and the King of Italy insisted on receiving him. So did the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, who expected him to visit both Vienna and Budapest. Next in line were the President of France, the Queen of Holland, and the monarchs of Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, where the Nobel Prize committee wished him to make an address on world peace. Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to show him the German army, and King Edward VII the British. Not only
têtes couronnées
, but aristocrats, intellectuals, industrialists, press lords, and politicians of every persuasion clamored for a few moments of the Colonel’s time.
Even the Calvinist Academy of Geneva was threatening hospitality.

Roosevelt’s reaction was a half-humorous, half-resigned willingness to do what diplomacy required—as long as his schedule permitted, and he was treated as a private American citizen. He prepared himself for the coming ordeal in typical fashion. Around sunset, Abbott became concerned by his absence from the family car.

ROOSEVELT WAS NOT
new to the scholarship of William Edward Lecky (1838–1903). In his youth, he had found the great historian too Old World, too Olympian. Now he was mesmerized by an intellect that encompassed, and gave universal dimensions to, the odyssey he had embarked on. Lecky showed how Europe had passed, age by age, from heathenism through paganism, early Christianity, Islamic infiltration, totalitarian Catholicism, Reformation, and Renaissance—arriving finally at an Enlightenment based on scientific discovery, materialistic philosophy, and the secularization of government. Roosevelt’s present passage out of the Pleistocene into lands still medieval-Muslim in atmosphere duplicated this vast arc of human progress.

Right now, he had to deal diplomatically with
two clerical provocations that suggested that rationalism still had a way to go before the twentieth century could consider itself emancipated from the intolerances that Lecky chronicled. The head of an American missionary school in Asyūt wrote to say that if he did not come to visit, Presbyterians everywhere would be “very seriously” offended. The Vatican advised that Pope Pius X would grant him an audience on the fifth of April, providing that he did not embarrass His Holiness by associating with any Methodists in Rome.

Roosevelt was prepared to stop by the mission. But he could not permit Vatican officials to tell him whom he might see or not see, as a private traveler en route through the Eternal City. To him, no faith was superior to another, and none to the dignity of individual will. “
Moi-même, je suis libre-penseur,” he confided to a French diplomat.
^*

He had done his Sunday school bit as a teenager, teaching children the
rudiments of Christianity, more out of duty than conviction. Throughout adulthood he had been a regular worshipper, gradually switching from the Dutch Reformed Church of his forefathers to Edith’s Episcopalian Church—though without her piety. He had no capacity for devotion, unless his love of nature qualified as that.
He scoffed at theories that could not be proved, sentimentalities that put a false face on reality, and extremes of religious belief, whether morbid or mystical.
As President, he had tried to remove the phrase “In God We Trust” from the national coinage. When consoling bereaved people, he would awkwardly invoke “unseen and unknown powers.” Aside from a few clichés of Protestant rhetoric,
the gospel he preached had always been political and pragmatic. He was inspired less by the Passion of Christ than by the Golden Rule—that appeal to reason amounting, in his mind, to a worldly rather than heavenly law.

Much as Roosevelt admired the contributions of medieval Islam to the development of European civilization, he had no patience with the interfaith squabble now going on in Egypt between Muslims and Coptic Christians. Their inability to tolerate each other proved the necessity of condominium with the British, who at least had advanced far enough into the modern age to know there were more important things than dogma.