Colonel Roosevelt (9 page)

Public works, for example. His dinner guest this evening was Sir William Garstin, the builder of the Aswān Dam. And what had the defeat of the Sudanese caliphate been, if not a triumphant demonstration of the superiority of British railway engineering?

TRANSFERRING OVERNIGHT
at Wadi Halfa to the Nile steamer
Ibis
, the Roosevelts cruised downriver to Shellal, where they were welcomed to Egypt by condominium officials. They toured the tomb of Rameses II and Sir William’s great waterworks at Aswān before proceeding to Luxor.
There, on 21 March, a colder greeting awaited them, in the form of a Nationalist warning that if the Colonel condemned the assassination of Boutros Pasha during his Cairo address, he would suffer the same fate. Roosevelt at once began work on a speech in direct defiance of this threat.

Three days later at Giza, Cleveland H. Dodge, a wealthy friend of Taft’s, was amused to see the Colonel, arms folded, contemplating the Sphinx.

“
Theodore, what are you thinking about?” Roosevelt seemed startled by the question.

One thing he had in common with the Sphinx at the moment was inscrutability—at least on the subject of American politics.
The New York Times
was reporting that he had “summoned” Gifford Pinchot to meet with him somewhere in Europe, for a briefing on the Taft administration’s anti-progressive
policies. Apparently the former chief forester was already halfway across the Atlantic.

Roosevelt remained mute on Pinchot, but swung into action on other matters as soon as he had settled into Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. He dictated a telegram to the American minister in Rome: “It would be a real pleasure for me to be presented to the Holy Father, for whom I entertain a high respect both personally and as the head of a great Church … [but I] must decline to make any stipulations or to submit to any conditions which in any way limit my freedom of conduct.”

Next, he embarked on a series of local excursions, in order to weigh up Egypt’s current security situation.
Remembering the squalor he had seen in Cairo as a boy, he marveled at the “material and moral” improvements brought about by twenty-eight years of British rule. Yet he was dismayed at the quality of the current army regime, some of whose officers reminded him of the worst caricatures in Kipling. Arrogant in their Englishness, obsessed with tennis and polo, they seemed unmindful of what the assassination of Boutros Ghali portended. Egyptian Nationalists had made plain that the former prime minister had been murdered for being a proponent of condominium, and for supporting long-term extension of Great Britain’s Suez Canal rights.

Roosevelt detected an uncertainty of purpose behind the hauteur of British officials in Cairo. He knew that Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government at home was plagued by anti-imperialists who felt that Egypt should be returned to self-government.
But he saw no local elite, Coptic or Muslim, capable of holding the country’s teeming multitudes together—or even apart, since various sects seemed intent on slaughtering one another. Native Christians had democratic ideals, but were hugely outnumbered. Nationalist leaders, with their red fezzes and European clothes, struck him as “quite hopeless as material on which to build,” given only “to loud talk in the cafés and prone to emotional street parades.”

The real danger to condominium, in Roosevelt’s opinion, throbbed among “the mass of practically unchanged bigoted Muslims to whom the movement meant driving out the foreigner, plundering and slaying the local Christian, and a return to all the violence and corruption which festered under the old-style Muslim rule, whether Asiatic or African.” This threatened the world balance of power, for Germany, with its East African protectorate, clearly coveted British control of the Nile.

Sir Eldon Gorst, the new British consul general in Cairo, entreated him to stay off the subject of political assassination in his forthcoming speech at Cairo University. Roosevelt reacted as he had to the Pope’s attempt to strong-arm him. He said that if he could not address “the one really vital question
which was filling the minds of everyone,” he would rather not speak at all. Gorst backed down.

Islamic fundamentalists resented the establishment of the university, only two years earlier, as a school for their accommodationist brethren. So on 26 March, Roosevelt made a goodwill visit to Al-Azhar Mosque, the world’s oldest religious academy. He found nine thousand students, all male, squatting on classroom floors and chanting in Arabic. To the amazement of the library staff, he asked to see a scroll of the fourteenth-century
Travels of Ibn Battuta
, and proceeded, with the aid of a translator, to locate and recite passages he had read in French, many years before. This so pleased his hosts that he left the mosque with a copy of the Koran under his arm. It was the first ever presented by Al-Azhar to an infidel.

Interest on all sides was therefore intense two days later, when Roosevelt rose to address the general assembly of Cairo University.
Small and struggling, with only apathetic support from local authorities, the institution typified, for him, Great Britain’s loss of imperial will.
He tried not to show his contempt for the khaki-clad soldiers around him on the platform, so querulous about native feelings, and the Nationalist Muslims whose tarbooshes dotted his audience.

At first he was tactfully equivocal. “Those responsible for the management of this University should set before themselves a very high ideal,” he said. “Not merely should it stand for the uplifting of all Mohammedan peoples and of all Christians and peoples of other religions who live in Mohammedan lands, but it should also carry its teaching and practice to such perfection as in the end to make it a factor in instructing the Occident.”

Swinging into the preaching mode that came naturally to him, he counseled the university professors headed for study in Great Britain to embrace, rather than resist, the best findings of Western Enlightenment. He emphasized that a full education “is attained only by a process, not by an act,” and compared it to the political gradualism inevitable in any backward nation’s attempt to modernize itself. “The training of a nation to fit itself successfully to fulfill the duties of self-government is a matter, not of a decade or two, but of generations.” He quoted an Arab proverb: “
Allah ma el saberin, izza sabaru
, God is with the patient, if they know how to wait.”

The tarboosh-wearers found this so patronizing that they broke into derisive laughter. But the soldiers applauded, and Roosevelt ploughed on toward the reference Sir Eldon was bracing for:

Englishmen used to pomposities, and Levantines to elaborate circumlocutions, were aghast at Roosevelt’s readiness to call a spade a spade. What Lawrence Abbott described as an “electrical” thrill ran around the hall. But there were loud cheers when Roosevelt ended with a call for mutual respect between Islam and Christianity.

Next day, comments on the speech in native newspapers expressed widespread resentment of Roosevelt as a stooge for the British. He was accused of not really caring whether Arabs were oppressed or not. “How,” asked the
Shaab
, “could a man who so denies liberty and individual rights have been chosen president of a free people?” Hundreds of furious students marched on Shepheard’s Hotel and shouted, “Give us a constitution!” at his terrace windows. The Colonel was engaged elsewhere, but got back to the hotel in time to see the demonstration breaking up.

When he embarked with his family from Alexandria the following afternoon, the dockside jostled with both Copts and Muslims. He was pursued across the water with roars of “Long live Roosevelt!” and “Down with Roosevelt!”

ON 2 APRIL
the Colonel arrived in Naples, and found that his celebrity in Africa was nothing compared to that awaiting him in Europe. Municipal, ecclesiastical, and military uniforms glowed and glittered. Evidently he was to be treated everywhere
as if he were still a head of state. He fobbed off several dozen reporters with advance copies of his Sorbonne, Berlin, and Oxford speeches, to hold until delivery, and that night sought refuge at the opera. But his entry precipitated a ten-minute ovation.
He saw less of Giordani’s
Andrea Chénier
than of constant visitors to his box, begging to be introduced.

Moving on to Rome the following day, Roosevelt managed to clear from his calendar any appointments with Catholic clerics. Cardinal Merry del Val, the Vatican secretary of state, would not back down on the see-no-Methodists condition of a papal audience, while Reverend Ezra Tipple, an American preacher given to calling Pius X “the whore of Babylon,” publicly boasted that the Colonel would at least see
him
. The comic-strip aspects of this squaring off of two clerics with bibulous names delighted Roosevelt, and gave him the chance to outmaneuver both. He acknowledged the Pope’s right to decline audiences “for any reason that seems good to him,” while claiming the same right for himself. And he canceled an embassy reception that Methodists would have attended, on the grounds of Tipple’s discourtesy toward the Holy Father.

His own tolerance—religious, social, and political—embraced, with humor
and an easy response to all cultural challenges, the schedule of engagements that now crowded upon him.
He rejoiced in the fact that both the mayor of Rome and the Prime Minister of Italy were Jews—“in the Eternal City, in the realm of the Popes, the home of the Ghetto …!”—and treated King Victor Emmanuel III as a fellow scholar, equally well informed on the Savoyard preference of Roman over Lombard law. Flattered, the king held a dinner for him in the Palazzo del Quirinale that had all the trappings of a state function.
Roosevelt was unfazed at having to sit between Queen Helene, a Montenegrin, and her niece, the Princess Royal of Serbia. Conversing in rough but rapid French, he revealed his command of Balkan history and a lively interest in Slav literature, citing in particular some translations of Romanian folk songs by Carmen Sylva. They were enchanted, and teased him about having a daughter nicknamed “Princess Alice.”

BEFORE THE ROOSEVELTS PROCEEDED
with their European tour, they snatched a brief family vacation at Porto Maurizio, on the Italian Riviera.
Edith’s unmarried younger sister, Emily Carow, lived there. She called her home Villa Magna Quies—“house of great quiet”—but its peace was disturbed on 11 April by the arrival of Gifford Pinchot.