Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (3 page)

After Selous visited the White House in 1905, TR’s praise of the hunter’s vivid and detailed stories inspired him to produce
African Nature Notes and Reminiscences
, which he dedicated to Roosevelt, who in turn added a Foreword. In this he described Selous as “the last of the mighty hunters whose experiences lay in the greatest hunting ground which this world has seen since civilized man has appeared therein.” However, Selous was “much more than a mere big-game hunter.” He was “by instinct a keen field naturalist, an observer with a power of seeing and remembering what he has seen.” And finally, he was a writer who possessed “to a very marked and unusual degree the power vividly and accurately to put on paper his observations.” Such a combination of qualities was “rare indeed.” The inevitable disappearance of biggame, TR went on, “before the onrush of the greedy, energetic, forceful men, usually both unscrupulous and short-sighted, who make up the vanguard of civilization” should make all the more prized Selous’s “life-histories of the great, splendid, terrible beasts whose lives add an immense majesty to the far off wilds.”
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On March 20, 1908, Roosevelt wrote to Selous, “A year hence I shall stop being President, and while I can not be certain of what I shall do, it may be that I can afford to devote a year to a trip to Africa.” His aim was to “visit the Pleistocene and the world ‘as it lay in the sunshine unworn of the plow;’ to see the great beasts whose like our forefathers saw when they lived in caves and smote one another with stone-headed axes.” Noting the limitations caused by his age, weight and sedentary lifestyle of the past seven years, TR asked Selous for his recommendations about hunting grounds, outfitting a safari, what sort of guns and clothing would be required, and myriad other questions.
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For the next year, Selous aided Roosevelt in planning every aspect of the trip, from logistics to location, weapons, equipment, and provisions. The president reported to Kermit, still at Groton, that he had begun his correspondence about the African trip although it was not yet possible to say for sure whether it would be possible. Selous had suggested they go by Mombasa in British East Africa because the Uganda-Nile regions were not healthy and they could get acclimated in a more salubrious climate. Moreover, they could almost immediately have “some hunting to the good,” even if the Nile portion of the trip was not a success.
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A s did Selous, Roosevelt considered himself a “Hunter-Naturalist.”
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Indeed, had the biological curriculum at Harvard been more fieldoriented, TR’s greatest achievements might well have come in the scientific rather than the political arena. Roosevelt and other gentlemen enthusiasts such as himself saw no contradiction whatsoever in passionately pursuing both hunting and conservation. To them the two went hand in hand. In 1887, he and George Bird Grinnell, the editor of
Forest and Stream
, took the first steps towards establishing the Boone and Crockett Club of sportsmen who were also big game hunters. Roosevelt was the first president of the organization, which became a powerful force for the preservation of the nation’s natural resources and forests—in particular the nation’s remaining wild places and large game animals such as the buffalo, elk, and moose against the predations of commercial hunters.
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TR continued a close association with the Boone and Crockett Club, even after the Spanish-American War and William McKinley’s assassination changed his career path forever and afforded him the opportunity to use, first the governorship of New York, and then the presidency and the federal government, to spread conservationist ideas from his powerful bully pulpit.

Strange as it may appear a century on, when hunting is considered murder or worse to much of the environmental community, Roosevelt was equally comfortable with non-hunting preservationists and they with him. Such friends included several of the founders of the modern American conservation movement, notably John Burroughs and John Muir.
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While president he camped in Yosemite with Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, and in Yellowstone with Burroughs, with whom he shared a passion for birds, first developed as a boy when the future president catalogued and stuffed specimens for his own private home museum.
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He also shared with Burroughs an abhorrence of “nature fakers,” writers who tried to pass off tall tales of animals as factual accounts. While president he joined Burroughs in a scathing attack on the work of one such writer in particular, Reverend William J. Long, who would in return lead the criticism of the African expedition as simply another “game butchering” adventure by Roosevelt.
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In 1908 TR reported to the elderly, bewhiskered Burroughs, whom he affectionately called Oom (Dutch for uncle) John, the birds he and Edith spotted through their field glasses in the White House garden. Some of these he was not familiar with and wished Burroughs had been on hand to identify. Burroughs did join his friend that May at “Pine Knot,” the rustic presidential retreat in the Virginia countryside, where they “tramped and pottered about the fields and gazed with absorbed interest at all kinds of little insignificant birds.”
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About TR’s ambitions to shoot lion and elephant in Africa, Burroughs commented, “I am sure you will bag at least one lion but I had rather the elephants would escape.” He looked forward “with great expectations” for the natural history notes Roosevelt would bring back. Burroughs was more interested in birds than big game and wanted to know more about their songs than he had been able to learn from any of the African hunting books. If there were swallows, he wanted to know where they nested. He wondered if the grouse drummed, or called as in America. All of these things, TR promised to investigate.
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The same month Burroughs visited “Pine Knot,” Roosevelt opened the White House Conservation Conference with an impassioned address titled “Conservation as a National Duty.” The first such national gathering ever held in any country, the White House Conference has been described as both the “great showpiece” of TR’s last year as president and “one of the great landmarks in conservation history.”
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Those invited included all the state and territorial governors, the Supreme Court justices, congressmen, international visitors, and leading authorities on the natural resources of the nation. Out of this meeting came, among other things, the unanimous approval by the governors of a declaration in support of conservation, the birth of thirty-six state conservation commissions and the creation of a National Conservation Commission which inventoried the nation’s resources over the next year.

At the time Roosevelt called the gathering “unique of its kind” and told Kermit that in it “we have taken a long first step in awakening the American people to the need of the conservation of their natural resources,” and the need to exercise the qualities which really distinguished the “civilized men from the savage, foresight, forethought.” With congress set to adjourn, this meant he had been able to “end my very active work as President in a way worthwhile.” It was the end of his “active work,” he explained, because after the nomination for the next presidency attention must “properly be concentrated” upon the nominee rather than the man who is finishing his last eight months.
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The man Roosevelt made sure his Republican party chose the next month was the Secretary of War, William Howard Taft. TR confided to another friend and “intellectual playmate,” the British historian and statesman Sir George Otto Trevelyan, that he had to fight “tooth and nail” to head off a stampede for his own renomination. He could not be sure of Taft’s election, but he believed “the chances” favored it. Roosevelt went on that, “always excepting Washington and Lincoln,” he thought Taft would “rank with any other man who has ever been in the White House.”
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The man TR meant to leave behind to lead the conservation crusade in the hoped-for Taft administration was Gifford Pinchot, the chief forester of the United States.
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For the previous seven years, first as head of the Division of Forestry in the Agriculture Department, and then Chief of the new Forest Service after 1905, the handsome, wealthy and stylish Pinchot had led a righteous (some would say selfrighteous) crusade as Roosevelt’s “lightening rod” and point man on what would later be called environmental issues.
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Among the first “scientific foresters,” Pinchot was forced to travel to France for his training since no such programs existed in the United States. He returned convinced that “forestry is the art of using a forest without destroying it.”
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Pinchot credited TR (and himself) with formulating and laying before the American people and the world a utilitarian “Conservation idea—the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time, the development and use of the earth and all its resources for the enduring good of men—both on a national and international scale.”
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The president did not know anyone he would sooner choose to send to a danger point than Pinchot and just before he left the White House, he wrote to the chief forester, “I owe you a peculiar debt of obligation for a very large part of the achievement of this administration.”
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In conservation these included the establishment of the first Federal Wildlife Refuge, and the growth of the system to fifty bird sanctuaries before TR left office; the creation of a new system of National Monuments such as the Grand Canyon, totaling eighteen by 1909; the addition of 150 million acres of timberland to the Forest Reserves, called National Forests after 1907; the withdrawal of waterpower sites to safeguard the growing demand for electricity; doubling the number of national parks; and the creation of the Federal Reclamation Service dedicated to irrigation and reforestation.

By the time the White House Conservation Conference adjourned, the African trip was taking more definite shape. Roosevelt told Edward North Buxton, another of his British safari advisors, that he and Kermit expected to depart by early April, confessing that this was on account of his desire to “be away for a year or a year and a quarter immediately following the installation of my successor.” If he did not go, “all kinds of small disagreeable things” were sure to happen. Especially if his successor, as he hoped, was Taft, “whose policy and actions I should loudly be accused of trying to dictate if I stay at home.”
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Buxton was chairman of the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire, dubbed by its critics the “penitent butchers.”
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TR was an honorary member of the British society, few members of which ever gave up the pleasures of hunting completely, repented or apologized. Roosevelt planned to follow Buxton’s advice and make trips from the Uganda Railway through British East Africa of one or two months at a time. He wanted to make these long enough to be sure to get into “good game country and out of the ordinary tourist infested region.” TR told Buxton he did not want any butchery. To the contrary, he expected the “chief value of my trip to consist of the observations I was able to make upon the habits of the game, and to a lesser extent, of the birds, smaller animals and the like.”
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In part to forestall charges by his enemies that the safari would be simply another “game-butchering” trip, Roosevelt’s original private junket scheme was transformed into a full-fledged scientific expedition, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He proposed the idea in June 1908 to Charles D. Walcott, the Secretary of the Smithsonian, which included the United States National Museum, as an opportunity to build a fine African collection of “unique value.” TR told Walcott that he was “not in the least a game butcher” and that his “real and main interest” in the expedition was as a “fauna naturalist.”
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Walcott, fearing he might lose the chance to the rival American Museum of Natural History in New York, agreed to provide naturalist/taxidermists and to pay for the preparation and transport of the specimens.
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In the end the Smithsonian hired three naturalists, one to preserve the big game shot by Roosevelt and Kermit, and two others to capture and catalog the smaller animals. An elated TR notified Selous that most of the safari’s specimens would now go to the National Museum. His house was rather small and he imagined it would be a while before Kermit had any house at all so they did not really care for many trophies “for our own private glorification.” Roosevelt was “greatly interested in natural history” and should like to make a largely scientific collecting trip, and to try and “add my mite to field observations of the habitats and life of big game.”
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Despite charges to the contrary, no taxpayer dollars were spent on the expedition. Walcott created a special fund of $30,000 by private subscription so that, as the president suggested, congress would not need to be involved.
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Roosevelt paid for his and Kermit’s expenses, while an impressive list of donors made up of wealthy friends, raised the rest.
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Most generous in the end was Andrew Carnegie, the world’s richest man since 1901 when he sold his steel holdings to J. P. Morgan. Though the robber baron and the trustbuster had pointed differences over the years, TR came to respect Carnegie’s philanthropic work. He consulted Roosevelt about his big charities and TR felt that, whatever his motivation, the plutocrat was doing “tremendous work in the world.” Not so much by what he gave, but by the way he gave it. The conditions placed on the gifts, such as requiring the various cities to contribute their share, had, in Roosevelt’s opinion, “a splendid effect upon the communities which meet these conditions.”
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World Peace was prominent among the many causes Carnegie supported and he enlisted TR, as a kindred spirit to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, to aid in this quest. Carnegie seemed to find no contradiction in turning to these two figures whose public personas often reflected the glorification of war and military virtues. One authority on the peace movement has commented that Carnegie coupled “an extraordinarily sanguine disposition” with “a simplicity of mind that blurred the contradictory implications of specific ideas and actions.”
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In 1903 he donated $1,500,000, a huge sum at that time, to build a “Temple of Peace” at The Hague to house the sessions of the permanent court of arbitration, the most lasting creation of the First Hague Conference called by the Russian Czar in 1899 to discuss disarmament. And over the rest of his life, as Carnegie followed his “Gospel of Wealth” to give away ninety per cent of his fortune, he proved a generous donor to peace organizations in the United States and abroad. After a White House dinner during which he and TR discussed the African expedition, Carnegie reported to his friend and fellow peace devotee in the British cabinet, John Morley, that he had told the president that the “big game he should hunt” was the German Emperor, France, Russia, and “especially you big fellows in London.” He went on that TR had “fixed upon a hunt how-ever first” and understandably wanted to get “out of harness for a while.”
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