by Brett Harper
Taft, for his part, seemed resigned to losing the race. He was hurt by Roosevelt’s insults and saddened by the loss of their friendship; he had seriously considered dropping out of the campaign in Roosevelt’s favor, but concluded that he owed it to the presidency and the people who had voted for him to stand fast. Winning the nomination had been important to him, but with that done, he told Nellie, “I seem to think that we have won what there was to fight about, and that what follows is less important.” By early October, The New York Times said, it was “becoming more and more plain that the fight was between Wilson and Roosevelt. Taft was steadily fading into the background.”
Then, in Milwaukee, as Roosevelt was leaving his hotel to make another speech, a man in the front of the crowd raised a large pistol and shot him, at nearly point-blank range. Roosevelt’s secretary, a former football player, quickly disarmed the man and began choking him. Roosevelt, struggling to stand, called out, “Bring him here. Don’t hurt him.” The bullet had struck the right side of his chest but had been slowed by his metal spectacle case and the fifty pages of his speech, folded double to fit in his breast pocket. Disregarding his doctor, he demanded to be taken to the auditorium, where one of his bodyguards told the crowd that the colonel had been shot. Someone yelled “Fake,” and Roosevelt showed the crowd his bloody shirt and the hole in the manuscript. “Friends,” he said, “I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot – but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” He insisted on giving the entire speech and spoke for ninety minutes before finally going to the hospital. The would-be assassin, John Schrank, a former saloonkeeper, told police he had a dream in which the dead William McKinley had told him Roosevelt was his murderer. In any case, Schrank said, “Any man looking for a third term ought to be shot.”
The bullet had broken a rib and stopped there, and doctors in Chicago decided against operating to remove it. Roosevelt wasn’t allowed to resume campaigning until just before the election, when a crowd packing Madison Square Garden in New York gave him a forty-two-minute ovation.
He knew it was his last appearance on the political stage, and he gave it his best effort, attacking neither of his opponents but repeating his credo: “We propose to lift the burdens from the lowly and the weary, from the poor and oppressed. We propose to stand for the sacred rights of childhood and womanhood. Nay, more, we propose to see that manhood is not crushed out of the men who toil, by excessive hours of labor, by underpayment, by injustice and oppression. . . . Surely, there never was a fight better worth making than this.” He concluded, “Win or lose, I am glad beyond measure that I am one of the many who in this fight have stood ready to spend and be spent.”
The election result, with the Republican vote split, was foreordained: Wilson won, earning 6.3 million votes and carrying forty of the forty-eight states. Roosevelt, with 4.1 million votes, took six states, and Taft’s 3.5 million votes carried only Vermont and Utah. Taft was philosophical, saying he felt no resentment, but Roosevelt was shaken by the magnitude of his loss and the damage it had done to his Progressive cause.
He took refuge in physical activity, public speaking, and writing; immediately after his defeat, he began work on his autobiography and finished it in ten months. Then he went to South America with Kermit for the last great adventure of his life and the one that nearly killed him: exploring the River of Doubt.
Near the end of his last term in the White House, Roosevelt’s old friend, Father John Zahm, had repeatedly invited the president to join him on a South American river voyage. Zahm, a Roman Catholic priest who taught physics at Notre Dame, published a book defending Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution and had an enormous love of the outdoors. Rather than go to South America, Roosevelt chose his African safari, but Zahm kept asking, and after the Bull Moose failure, he decided that the expedition would be a fine holiday with “just the right amount of adventure.”
Zahm planned a cruise down a well-known river, but when Roosevelt got to Brazil and a government official mentioned the unexplored Rio Duvida, or River of Doubt, the colonel leaped at the idea. The river was a minor tributary of the Amazon; explorers thought they knew where its headwaters joined the well-explored Rio Aripuana, but for several hundred miles between those points, it ran through trackless jungle filled with wild animals, unknown insects, and hostile natives. Officials of the American Museum of Natural History, which was sponsoring the trip for the specimens Roosevelt would bring back, were horrified. But when they pressed him to revert to the original plan, he would have no part of it, writing: “If it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite prepared to do so.”
It soon became clear that Father Zahm wasn’t capable of leading or even participating in such an expedition, so the Brazilian government provided a qualified guide, Colonel Candido Rondon, who had spent years exploring and installing telegraph wires in the Amazon basin. But after two months of travel, first by steamboat and then on mules, before even reaching the headwaters of the River of Doubt, it became apparent that some of the men chosen by Father Zahm were not prepared for the river voyage. The boats they brought had to be abandoned on the overland trek, so the explorers were expected to buy dugout canoes from the local Indians; and the provisions Zahm bought were heavy on gourmet delicacies but lacking in dried foods and salted meat. Rondon split the crew, sending half the men to make their way overland to the junction of the river with the Aripuana while he and Roosevelt led the rest down the unknown stream. The two leaders were accompanied by Kermit Roosevelt as well as Rondon’s assistant, team physician Dr. Cajazeira, naturalist George Cherrie, and sixteen camaradas, Brazilians hired as paddlers and trailblazers.
Progress was slow. The river had many rapids and sometimes hurtled through sheer rock gorges only six feet wide. The dugouts had only a few inches of freeboard to separate the men from the river’s caimans, anacondas, and razor-toothed piranhas. Game along the banks was elusive and thoroughly camouflaged, almost impossible to see and shoot in the heavy jungle; with their inadequate supplies, the team was in a race to reach the mouth of the river before they starved.
They soon became aware that the natives along the river were watching them. Rondon ordered his men to do nothing that could be perceived as hostile, and he often left presents along trails in the jungle. Later, it was learned that the Cinta Larga (Long Belt) tribesmen were debating whether to kill the intruders, which they could easily have done. The tribe made decisions by consensus, and it could well be that the explorers had passed through Cinta Larga territory before the natives could finalize their decision.
At first, Roosevelt and his party attempted to negotiate rapids by guiding the clumsy canoes through the chutes guided by ropes rather than paddling. But two of the dugouts were soon smashed, and several days were lost carving a replacement. Then Kermit, trying to navigate another section of whitewater with two camaradas in his canoe, was swept over a thirty-foot waterfall. One of his companions died; the body was never found.
The next disaster came when Roosevelt, trying to prevent another canoe from being smashed, gashed his thigh on a rock. The doctor treated it, but infection set in overnight, along with a bout of malarial fever. For several days, the colonel drifted in and out of consciousness, obsessively reciting Coleridge: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree . . . .” In a lucid moment, Roosevelt tried to persuade Rondon and Kermit that he was hampering their survival, and they should leave him behind to die. They refused.
A new crisis came when one of the cameradas was caught stealing food and fatally shot his accuser. When two other men reported the murder, Roosevelt jumped from his bed, grabbed a rifle and set out on the trail with the others. When they found nothing but the body and the gun the murderer had used, they stopped the chase and left the punishment to the jungle. The next day, when the man called to Rondon from the bank of the river, Rondon ignored him.
Roosevelt had
refused to let Dr. Cajazeira perform surgery on his leg, but it soon became apparent he couldn’t live more than a day or two without it. With the former president fully conscious and without anesthetic, the doctor cut away the dead flesh to clean the wound. According to witnesses, Roosevelt didn’t wince during the operation, and afterward his symptoms began to ease.
Their food was almost gone when they saw the first traces of civilization on the river bank. Rubber tappers had been moving deeper into the jungle to meet America’s new need for automobile tires, and the explorers saw their slashes on rubber trees. A day or two later, they came across shacks where the tappers were living. After they had convinced the men they weren’t hostile Indians, the tappers were hospitable, sharing their food and eventually trading lightweight canoes for the explorers’ heavy dugouts. Gliding downstream several days later, the party saw the Brazilian and American flags of the other half of the expedition, waiting for them where the River of Doubt met the Rio Aripuana. They had traveled 950 miles.
Roosevelt had lost nearly sixty pounds. He spent weeks recuperating, but he steamed home to cheering crowds in New York and Oyster Bay. The River of Doubt was renamed Roosevelt River, but skeptics doubted the expedition had traveled its length. Indignant, Roosevelt arranged to give lectures at the National Geographic Society in Washington late in May and at the Royal Geographical Society in London in mid-June. Though he could barely speak above a whisper, he silenced the critics. American explorer George Miller verified Roosevelt’s account with a second trip down the river in 1927 – thirteen years later.
The colonel never fully recovered. He remained feisty and a public fascination; in retirement, he was receiving some 50,000 letters a year, and he could go nowhere without attracting a crowd. Roosevelt warmly reconciled with Taft, but remained critical of Woodrow Wilson, especially Wilson’s determination to remain neutral in World War I. Getting America into the war became his last great political cause, but he made no serious effort to run against Wilson in 1916; the Progressive Party was in ruins, and Republicans were still smarting from his defection in 1912. But Roosevelt campaigned for the GOP nominee, Charles Evans Hughes and chafed when Wilson was narrowly re-elected.
When America joined the war in 1917, the colonel announced that he would raise a division of volunteer troops and take them to France to fight the Germans himself. But he was aging, in poor health, and inexperienced in trench warfare; Wilson and his generals rejected the colonel’s offer. But he sent all four of his sons to the war, spoke at war bond rallies, and worked to refurbish himself with the Republican Party, campaigning for some of its candidates in the 1918 midterm elections. In the run-up to 1920 presidential election, there was serious talk that Roosevelt would receive the GOP nomination.
It wasn’t to be. When his youngest son, Quentin, was shot down behind enemy lines in the summer of 1918, the loss affected Roosevelt deeply. It was the first death in battle he hadn’t been able to dismiss as a noble sacrifice, the inevitable price of victory, and a risk any man should be ready to take. Quentin had been a high-spirited, mischievous, lovable boy, ingenious and unaffected, and a popular, almost recklessly brave pilot – a man from his father’s mold. It may be that it took his death to bring home to Roosevelt how much he loved him. In any case, he never got over it. He was only sixty-three, but he had become an old man.
On Christmas day 1918, Roosevelt came home to Sagamore Hill, still in pain after six weeks in a hospital with inflammatory rheumatism. By January 5, he seemed better, dictating some letters and proofreading an editorial he had written for Metropolitan magazine vigorously demanding the vote for women: “It is an absurdity to longer higgle about the matter.” With Edith, he watched the sunset light up the bay. He complained of feeling peculiar, as if his heart were about to stop, but the family doctor found nothing wrong. That night he died in his sleep.
“Death had to take him sleeping,” said Wilson’s vice president, Thomas Marshall. “If Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.”
With the oak casket on their shoulders, six pallbearers struggled through melting snow as some 500 mourners followed to the gravesite Roosevelt had selected near the top of a hill in the small cemetery just across a cove in Oyster Bay from Sagamore Hill. As his family stood above the grave with the rest of the crowd below, a simple burial service was read. Children from the local school stood among the mourners; one small boy in a brown suit climbed a small locust tree nearly overhanging the grave and sat there motionless throughout the ceremony.
Church bells rang in New York City and across the country, and flags would fly at half-mast for a month. Half of official Washington, it seemed, was in the cemetery, headed by Vice President Marshall; so was former President Taft, openly weeping. Captain Archie Roosevelt, pale and thin from his war wounds, had been an usher at the simple funeral service in the local Episcopal Church, but his brothers Theodore, Jr., and Kermit were still with their troops in Germany. After the private family service at Sagamore Hill, Edith Roosevelt stayed there, alone in her grief. Her daughter Ethel and Alice Longworth wept in the bright sunshine.
There had been no eulogy for Roosevelt; had there been, said The New York Times, it would surely have triggered an outburst of grief. In any case, no words would have fit his outsized figure. For all his flaws, Theodore Roosevelt lit up the landscape wherever he went. He was unique, a man to rule his time: There was never another like him, and there will never be again.
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© Brett Harper
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