by Worm Miller
Among today’s zombie historians and zombologists, The Natural History of Zombis is considered the first modern work in zombism. The book was immediately praised by literary critics for scholarship and style, the Smithsonian adopted it for study, and the Department of War ordered a copy given to every regiment during the Second Cleanse. Roosevelt’s feeling that zombies were drawn by blood was ahead of its time and would not be scientifically proven until decades later. In a 1987 interview, the University of Minneapolis’s Tom Ringdal wrote, “Roosevelt’s study of the zomboid influenced all subsequent scholarship in the field. More than a classic, it remains, after more than one hundred years, a standard study of zombies.”
Zombie Ranch
It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West of Owen Wister’s stories, and Frederic Remington’s drawings, the soldier and the cowpuncher and the savage zombi. The land of the West has gone now, “gone, gone with the lost Atlantis,” gone to the isle of ghosts and strange dead memories.
—Theodore Roosevelt, writing in 1912
The Natural History of Zombis established Roosevelt as a serious historian and authority on zombies. This rise in esteem helped him become the youngest person ever elected to the New York State Assembly. Sadly, tragedy was also dogging the future president. Theodore Sr., who beyond being Roosevelt’s father, was also his idol, had died in 1878. Then on February 14, 1884, his mother died of typhoid fever, and mere hours later his beloved wife, Alice, died of acute kidney failure in the same house. These events, combined with the disappointment of the recent Republican National Convention, inspired Roosevelt to an early retirement from public life. He would relocate to the ranch he had purchased in the Dakota Territory Badlands.
The ranch was located north of the boomtown of Medora, North Dakota, on the banks of the Little Missouri. Roosevelt had spotted the property two years prior while on a zombie hunt. He named the ranch Zombi Tooth and began to rebuild his life and reshape himself as a rugged frontiersman. He learned to ride a horse western-style, to rope cattle, to hunt buffalo and antelope and zombies. He began writing about frontier life, publishing both Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and On the Hunting Trail of the Zombi. He became a deputy sheriff and single-handedly captured three outlaws who stole his riverboat. While working with a posse to hunt down a group of horse thieves, Roosevelt met famous Deadwood sheriff, Seth Bullock. Bullock himself was an avid fan of zombie hunting and the two were to remain friends for life.
Here Roosevelt was finally able to indulge the fantasies he had held as a sickly, upper-class East Coast child. Here he could be a zombie-hunting wild man. You can feel his excitement as he describes an episode to his friend John Bowman back in New York:
We were hunting zombi, which they call out here, “walkers.” Yesterday we were in the saddle for ten hours. The dogs ran one zombi down and killed it among the rocks after a vigorous scuffle. This morning, soon after starting out, we struck the cold trail of a zombi. The hounds puzzled about for nearly two hours, going up and down the great gorges, until we sometimes absolutely lost even the sound of the baying. Then they struck the fresh trail, where the zombi had killed a prospector over night. In half an hour a clamorous yelling told us they had overtaken the quarry; for we had been riding up the slopes and along the crests, wherever it was possible for the horses to get footing. Soon we saw the “walker” tussling with the dogs. Here I could have shot him, but waited for Stewart to get a photo; and the zombi jumped out at us. A great fight broke out between the zombi and the dogs. For fear he might kill one I ran in and stabbed him at the soft base at the rear of the skull, thrusting the knife you loaned me right into the brain. I have always wished to kill a zombi as I did this one, with dogs and the knife.
During this time, Roosevelt began thinking about conservation. He was not the only American worried about the disappearance of the buffalo or deforestation, but he may have been the only one worried about the loss of zombies (Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” was still many years away). The Second Cleanse was just beginning its sweep of the westerner lands, but already the change was noticeable to hunters like Roosevelt.
The winter of 1886-87 was uncharacteristically severe. The extreme cold claimed the entirety of Roosevelt’s cattle herd, which was a major financial loss. Roosevelt took this as a sign. Reinvigorated by his time at Zombi Tooth, he decided to return to the East Coast and resume his career in public service. He wed again, this time to his childhood sweetheart, Edith Kermit Carow. He campaigned for Benjamin Harrison in the 1888 presidential election, and when Harrison won, Roosevelt was appointed to the United States Civil Service Commission. In 1895, he became president of the board of New York City Police Commissioners, where he would modernize the police force and establish the first Police Academy.
THE ZOMBIE BATTERY
Nikola Tesla, the revolutionary inventor and mad prince of electrical engineering, played a pivotal role in Buffalo winning the right to hold the Pan-American Exposition. The competition was between Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Buffalo had the larger population (350,000, then the eighth-largest city in America), but Niagara had its water-powered electrical plant. Tesla had recently invented a way to successfully transmit electricity over great distances, which meant that an exposition in Buffalo could be lit using power generated twenty-five miles away at Niagara Falls. Buffalo won the bid.
Tesla was no stranger to zombies. In 1884, when the Serbian Tesla immigrated to the United States, he worked for Thomas Edison where he experimented with using zombies as batteries. The human body generates electricity. Tesla theorized that what keeps a zombie animated so long after human death was simply a heightened amount of electricity. He proposed harnessing this power. He even devised a device that could potentially be used to de-animate zombies cleanly by absorbing their excess electricity.
Unfortunately, none of these inventions were to see the light of day. Edison found the ideas unseemly, but because of Edison’s clever and ruthless business model, he owned the patents to all the work Tesla did for the company. Enraged, Tesla quit.
In 1897, the newly elected President William McKinley appointed Roosevelt assistant secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt resigned the very next year with the onset of the Spanish-American War (April 25-August 12, 1898) to establish the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment. Made up of an eclectic group of volunteers, from Western cowboy cohorts to his Ivy League friends, the group was dubbed Zombi Doom by Roosevelt. The press called them the Rough Riders, and that name stuck, as few of Roosevelt’s men shared his reverence for the walking dead.
Ascending the Throne
Among his multitude of achievements and records held, it could be added that Teddy was the first man to become President by killing the previous President.
—Stephen B. Bucklyn, from the introduction to an unpublished Roosevelt biography, 1927
Upon leaving the army, Roosevelt was elected governor of New York in 1898. Within two short years Roosevelt had become such a powerful force in the Republican Party that Republican boss Thomas Collier Platt forced him onto McKinley’s reelection bill as vice president, against McKinley’s wishes. McKinley won his bid in a landslide. On September 6, 1901, President McKinley gave a speech at the Pan-American Exposition World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York. Afterward McKinley stayed to greet the public. Among his many well-wishers was Leon Frank Czolgosz, a steel worker and anarchist who did not wish the president well. Revealing a pistol he had concealed under a handkerchief, Czolgosz fired two rounds into the president—one hitting McKinley’s shoulder, the other hitting McKinley’s gut—before being subdued by the crowd.
Following the assassination attempt, McKinley was rushed to the exposition’s emergency hospital where the bullet in his shoulder was quickly removed. The second bullet had pierced several internal organs and buried itself in the muscles near the president’s spine. Fearing that searching for the bullet might cause more harm, the surgeons decided to leave the bullet where it was for the time being w
hile McKinley recuperated at Exposition Medical Director Roswell Park’s Buffalo home. Initially, McKinley was making a recovery, but within several days he took a turn for the worse. On September 14, he slipped into shock.
Despite the White House’s best efforts to suppress the truth about President McKinley’s final moments, this New York Times cartoon depicting Roosevelt fighting what looks like a zombinated McKinley, published October 8, 1903, indicates that it may not have been a well-kept secret.
McKinley’s political harem was in a panic. The president dying so soon after reelection was bad enough, but his replacement…Teddy. For all the admirers he had, Roosevelt had just as many detractors, especially within the government. Many feared what the antitrust, anticorruption man-of-the-people cowboy might do once in office. In this panic, Benjamin Pomeroy, one of McKinley’s aids, proposed zombinating the president before he succumbed to his wounds. McKinley’s men wagered that they could claim the president was simply bed-ridden, too sick to ever greet the public, but well enough to govern and sign documents. In the pre-television, pre-radio era it was not entirely unthinkable, and there was a zombie nearby (it had been on display at the exposition). It is doubtful Pomeroy’s charade could have worked for long, but McKinley’s men were foiled before they ever had a chance to test it out. Foiled by…Teddy.
Roosevelt had quickly boarded a train for Buffalo after learning that McKinley had taken a turn for the worse. When he arrived in the city, Pomeroy informed him that McKinley was now fine, but unavailable to take visitors. When Roosevelt was denied entry again the following day, he grew irate. Roosevelt described the ensuing events in a letter to his older sister, Anna:As my blood was up enough to box the twit on the ears, a loud noise came from the room where the President—I was told—was resting. Sounded to me like a fight, yet Pomeroy acted the cool part telling me to return later. I heard an unmistakable scream at which point I gave the chap a square smack in the teeth and entered the room to find several esteemed men of our government trying to subdue the President with ropes and a net like he were an angry black bear… A zombi! Their fast one failed, it was evident that the President must be put down like a rapid dog. A man went to retrieve a rifle but I stopped him. It came quick upon me, a comprehension that destiny had knocked and nudged me to this crossroads. Does the alpha lion give up his position in the pride because his term ends? Lions elect by combat. So did America on that day!
The other men assuredly thought Roosevelt was crazy when he asked to be left alone with zombie McKinley, so that they “might make a battle of it,” and it is a testament to how little they wanted Roosevelt to succeed McKinley that they granted him the wish, likely praying Roosevelt would need to be put down himself soon.
The President came at me, teeth bared like a jungle cat. The zombi always aims towards the throat and head, so I treated the President not unlike a boxer—though one who aims with his face, not his glove. It was a bully brawl! Old and doughy as the President was as a man, now zombi he was quite formidable. Thankfully he stood an inch or two low my height, allowing me to eventually get him locked by the neck with my arm! …wielding him around the room, avoiding those fingernails again and again I struggled to find something I might remove the President’s head with. As the room was wholly without any weapons I was forced to make due with a paper guillotine in the corner.
Roosevelt emerged from the room with McKinley’s head, which he continued to hold while being sworn in an hour later. Roosevelt wanted to keep McKinley’s body to mount and stuff it, but McKinley’s family denied the request. Roosevelt agreed to keep the zombination matter under wraps, at least from the press. The official story was that McKinley had peacefully slipped from this earth.
Save the Zombies
The zombi is as much a part of America’s natural wild as the buffalo.
—Theodore Roosevelt, from a speech to Congress, 1907
Roosevelt was one of our most productive presidents. Energetic and beaming with personal magnetism, Roosevelt culled a dedicated following of political allies and a broad base of public support. Abroad he showed the world the might of the American Navy with the Great White Fleet and built the Panama Canal, opening a new door for global trade. At home he broke trusts, improved conditions for laborers, and established regulations for the railroad and the food and drug industries—though the issue closest to Roosevelt’s heart was that of American conservation.
THE TEDDY ZOMBIE
In May 1902, President Roosevelt was partaking in an organized zombie hunt in Missouri. Roosevelt’s attendants cornered, hobbled, and restrained a zombie to tree and then called Roosevelt to the site and suggested that he should shoot it. Roosevelt refused to do so, deeming this unsportsmanlike. After reading a Washington Post piece reporting on the event, Morris Michtom, a Brooklyn candy shop owner and amateur toy maker, was inspired to create a new toy. He made a little stuffed zombie and put it in his shop window with a sign that read “Teddy’s Zomby,” after sending one of the stuffed zombies to Roosevelt and receiving permission to use the president’s name. The toy was a flop. No children wanted to cuddle a zombie it would seem.
Fortunately for Michtom, later that same year a very similar incident occurred in Mississippi involving the president and a black bear. This time Michtom had much better luck with the “Teddy bear.” The few remaining original Teddy’s Zombys have sold for upward of $750,000 among collectors.
The first conservation president, Roosevelt set aside more federal land for national parks than all of his predecessors combined (a whopping 230 million acres). He established the United States Forest Service, championed the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, created five national parks, signed the 1906 Antiquities Act, under which he proclaimed eighteen new U.S. National Monuments, and established the Shoshone National Forest, the nation’s first. But all of Roosevelt’s formidable powers and enthusiasm were no match for the American people’s fear and disgust of zombies.
By the time Roosevelt had taken office, zombies were all but extinct. Newer generations growing up in big cities never knew what it was like to find a zombie shambling in their apartment hallway. Outside of Indian reservations, one was lucky to ever spot a zombie roaming in the wild, let alone actually be attacked by one.
In 1907, Roosevelt tried to rally support for the creation of a national zombie preserve. At the time, the entire eastern portion of Oklahoma was an unorganized territory, which Roosevelt thought would be perfect. Roosevelt got absolutely no support on Capital Hill, and representatives from the areas bordering the proposed reserve were up in arms. Roosevelt made a second bid that same year to turn the unorganized territory of Alaska into a preserve, but it would have been incredibly costly to round up and transport undead to the area, when compared with simply de-animating them. Not to mention the Canadians, who had invested a lot in keeping the zombie menace below their southern border, were not thrilled with the idea of hordes of zombies suddenly being dumped near their harder-to-defend northern woods.
United States and Territories, 1907
In a final attempt to rally support, Roosevelt said before Congress:Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their paranoia and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all zombis, sometimes seek to champion them by saying “the people want no zombis.” And that may be so, but what of the unborn people. The “greatest good for the greatest number” applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of the zombis and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.
His dreams were not to be realized, and the zombie population would continue to decline. It was partly due to frustration over this failure that Roosevelt decided
not to run for reelection.
Demise
The old lion is dead.
—Archie Roosevelt, telegram to his siblings, 1919
Roosevelt came out of political retirement to found the Progressive Party (fondly called the Bull Moose Party) to oppose his previous protégé, Howard Taft, and Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson, in the 1912 election. It was during this campaign that Roosevelt famously delivered a speech after being shot by an assassin. Though resoundingly defeating Taft, Roosevelt ultimately lost to Wilson. To shake off the dust of the political world, Roosevelt embarked on a South American adventure with his son Kermit and Brazilian explorer Cândido Rondon. Roosevelt was convinced that there must be zombies native to South America, hidden away within the rain forest, despite reports to the contrary.