Colonel Roosevelt
Page 5
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.
I searched the train for him and finally discovered him in one of the white enameled lavatories with its door half open.… He was busily engaged in reading, while he braced himself in the angle of the two walls against the swaying motion of the train, oblivious to time and surroundings. The book in which he was absorbed was Lecky’s History of Rationalism in Europe. He had chosen this peculiar reading room both because the white enamel reflected a brilliant light and he was pretty sure of uninterrupted quiet.
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.
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:
All good men, all the men of every nation whose respect is worth having, have been inexpressibly shocked by the recent assassination of Boutros Pasha. It was an even greater calamity for Egypt than it was a wrong to the individual himself. The type of man who turns out an assassin … stands on a pinnacle of evil infamy; and those who apologize for or condone his act, those who by word or deed, directly or indirectly, encourage such an act in advance, or defend it afterward, occupy the same bad eminence.
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!”
* “I myself am a free thinker.”
CHAPTER 2
The Most Famous Man in the World
As long as Fame’s imperious music rings
Will poets mock it with crowned words august;
And haggard men will clamber to be kings
As long as Glory weighs itself in dust.
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.”