Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  It was Natalie Curtis, embarrassed to have been discovered in the act of cleaning herself up for his arrival. Roosevelt did not know that his announcement, some weeks back, that he would attend the Hopi Snake Dance festival had become a news sensation throughout the Southwest. Walpi was thronged with white visitors, and accommodations in the town were so scarce that Miss Curtis had been forced to camp out in a peach orchard. The cup of gasoline—vaporizing even as she explained her presence—was intended to cut the grease on her skirt.

  “SHE CALLED OUT TO HIM, ‘HAIL TO THE CHIEF!’ ”

  Natalie Curtis in Indian dress. (photo credit i14.1)

  She could not help thinking, as she looked the Colonel over, that he could have used some of it as well. His khaki riding clothes were stained, and his face under a big Stetson was burned as red as the bandanna around his throat. But he was still the overwhelming presence she recalled from White House days, with a combination of drive and curiosity that had him quizzing her about the Hopi even before they moved on into town.

  He told her he was writing some articles about his travels in Arizona, and wanted them to be full of information. “I am going to South America shortly, and I can stay here only a few days, so the sooner we talk the better.”

  Natalie was only too willing to help. He was unaware that she had come to Walpi deliberately to waylay him and plead her continuing cause, against “the tide of Anglo-Saxon iconoclasm” that was sweeping away what was left of pre-Columbian culture. Nobody in government had ever been able to answer her question, “How much longer will the American people go to Europe for inspiration and destroy the art that is at their own door?”

  Roosevelt had asked much the same thing himself, in his review of the Armory Show. Much as he had admired the quasi-American art of Robert Chanler (including representations of the Arizona desert and the Snake Dance), there was something effete about it, in comparison with the vibrant reality that now confronted him.

  “Tell me what I ought to see,” he said to Natalie. “I always like to find students who have made a life study of certain subjects.… And I am glad to put forward ideas, for somehow people do listen to me. I have at least the faculty of making myself heard!”

  They made a date to meet for an information session the following morning, before Chu’tiva, the Snake-Antelope ceremonials, got under way. Roosevelt then gave himself over to the local officials who were to be his hosts over the next two days. He was flattered to hear that as “a former great chief,” he would receive privileges rarely accorded to white men. After lunch he climbed down a ladder festooned with eagle feathers into the kiva, an antechamber of the underworld where the snake priests were preparing themselves for Thursday’s dance.

  THE SENSE OF THE strangeness that had possessed him ever since his stay in Kayenta mounted as he stepped off the ladder and found himself in a spacious skylit room, one end of which—the end nearest his ankles—undulated with rattlesnakes. Cigar-puffing priests kept them at bay by stroking them with feather wands. He was intrigued by the sinuous movements of both man and reptile. They seemed to share a temporary accord in which, however, the threat of sudden violence lurked. He was made to sit on the floor with his back to the snakes, about eight feet away, and did not feel at all comfortable. A pot nearby imprisoned—he hoped—some dangerous-looking ribbon snakes. There were about forty rattlers along the line of the wall, some writhing in a tangle, the others free to move at will. One wriggled toward him, and he had to ask for it to be stroked away.

  Meanwhile, near-naked acolytes, their coppery bodies daubed with splotches of white paint, were stitching and beading dance costumes. Their moccasins respectfully avoided a sandpainting of a coyote, framed with rainbow lines and pinned at each corner with black thunder-sticks. A priest who spoke some English informed Roosevelt that the east wall beyond it was an altar of sorts, that the prayers offered before it were for “male and female rain,” and that the snakes were being courted as “brothers of men,” who through their soft bellies would telegraph to the underworld gods that the Hopi craved water.

  He had seen tribal ritual before—in Africa, on Döberitz Field, in the Chicago Coliseum, at Mrs. Astor’s Fifth Avenue balls when he was fresh out of Harvard. But nothing as mystic as this, nothing as symbolic of “an almost inconceivably remote and savage past.”

  ON WEDNESDAY MORNING he closeted himself with Natalie Curtis in a schoolhouse. If he expected a lecture on Hopi mythology, he was disappointed. She was more intent on criticizing the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ latest folly, the substitution of European-style houses, with rain-shedding, hot tin roofs, for the flat, cool, adobe-walled architecture that spread so naturally around him. She talked about the inability of most white men to understand either the beauty or the fitness of Indian aesthetics. She complained about Congress’s failure ever to have made “a systematic study” of the whole Indian problem, ethnological, environmental, and educational. Until some great foundation like the Carnegie or the Rockefeller should finance such a study, she said, efforts to improve the lot of the tribes would be like the rain-shedding roofs—“misfits in spirit as in fact.”

  Roosevelt listened and memorized with a receptivity not far short of Natalie’s own as a song transcriber. But he was too old, and too much of a white man himself, to admire pagan values as much as she. He went no further in his commitment to her cause than to agree that there should be “an interchange of ideas between the two races.”

  At dawn the following day, she went to the Colonel’s quarters with a bottle of hot coffee. She had promised to take him to the crest of the ridge, so that he could see the Hopi runners coming across the plain as heralds of the great Snake Dance. But his bedroom was empty. He had already heard the call of the crier and climbed the highest butte above town in pitch darkness. By the time she found him, the “yellow line” of Pueblo cosmology was widening in the east, silhouetting Roosevelt’s bulk against the sky. When the runners appeared below, they seemed aware of his importance, and leaped up the side of the escarpment as if they had not already run five miles. Painted children accompanied the winner’s final, easy-breathing rush.

  Roosevelt applauded, privately wishing that he could enter such a splendid athlete in the next Olympic marathon.

  All thoughts of common humanity faded, however, when he returned to the kiva for the Washing of the Snakes. Nicholas, Archie, and Quentin were permitted to climb down the ladder with him. The ensuing drama moved beyond strangeness into the realm of dream.

  About twenty Hopi took part in it, naked except for breechclouts. The number of snakes on the floor around them had increased to about a hundred, with many of the more venomous breeds now at large. Again feather wands stroked errant ones away, as the oldest priest puffed smoke and sprinkled cornmeal over a huge tureen filled with water. In deep silence, he mumbled a prayer, and the other Indians punctuated it with what sounded to Roosevelt like “a kind of selah or amen.” The chant grew louder and the copper bodies began to sway, but there was little hint of any rising passion. Acolytes reached casually into the tangle of snakes and passed them, coiling and waving, to the priests around the bowl.

  When each priest had a couple of fistfuls, the chant rose to a scream, the snakes were dunked in the water, and then hurled halfway across the room so violently that several thunder-sticks were knocked flat. Roosevelt boggled at their willingness to be abused. The phrase he had used in endorsing Natalie Curtis’s book came to him. He was being granted a glimpse into “an elder world.”

  At five o’clock the climactic Snake Dance began in the village. Antelope priests and snake priests, their faces daubed, chanted and stomped in a rhythm intended to reverberate to the center of the earth. Plumed headdresses tossed and leather kirtles flapped as they circled the rock Archie had climbed. At its foot, little girls dusted the newly washed snakes with corn meal. Then the dancers broke into couples, one of each scooping up a snake and putting it in his mouth. A particularly daring priest clamped his jaws around two
narrow sidewinders. The flat triangular heads were left to float free and strike at will. Roosevelt saw no bites to the face, although he judged by a definite nervousness in the dancers that such an accident was possible. Both men and snakes seemed to be moving in tandem, caught up in the universality of the dance.

  At last all the snakes … were thrown at the foot of the natural stone pillar, and immediately, with a yell, the dancers leaped in, seized each of them, several snakes, and rushed away, east, west, north, and south, dashing over the edge of the cliff and jumping like goats down the precipitous trails. At the foot of the cliff, or on the plain, they dropped the snakes, and then returned to purify themselves by drinking and washing from pails of dark sacred water—medicine water—brought by the women.

  Roosevelt left Walpi with the boys by automobile later that evening, but not before he had set down in longhand a three-thousand-word account of the day’s experiences. “If I don’t write the article now I never will,” he told Natalie Curtis, “because my life is too full.”

  He explained that in two days’ time he would be taking the California Limited from Gallup, New Mexico, en route home. Then he must write four lectures for delivery in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. The governments of the latter countries were demanding that he address their learned societies as well as the one in Buenos Aires. Inevitably, his forthcoming itinerary had had to be extended.

  “I can never afford to be in arrears,” Roosevelt said.

  Natalie complimented him on his orderliness and dynamic drive.

  “I like the strenuous life, you know,” he said, smiling, “and I am going to South America now because I very much want to make that exploring trip.” He figured he had about six more years of real energy left. “I am nearly fifty-five.… I suppose that after sixty it won’t be well for me to tax my resistance in the same way.”

  THE COLONEL RETURNED to Oyster Bay on 26 August to find Edith back from Europe. He was overjoyed when she agreed to accompany him on the official part of his tour, linking São Paulo and Rio to Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Santiago. She declined to contemplate a return crossing of the Andes by ox wagon. If he was determined to see Patagonia, from whatever altitude, he could do it without her. Her plan was to sail home from Valparaiso, Chile, at the end of November, and await the birth of Ethel’s baby, due early the following March. By then, she hoped, her husband’s jungle adventure would be over, and they could face old age in peace. One of her favorite quotations, recalled from the story of Troilus, was, “Life is short—let us spend it together.”

  This appeared also to be the sentiment of the veterans of Armageddon, querulous about Roosevelt’s long-term loyalty. “I am having my usual difficulties with the Progressive Party, whose members drive me nearly mad,” he told Quentin. “I have to remember, in order to keep myself fairly good tempered, that even though the wild asses of the desert are mainly in our ranks, our opponents have a fairly exclusive monopoly of the swine.”

  He did what he could to console Party members for deserting them at the start of the new political season. On 27 September he attended the New York Progressive convention in Rochester, roundly attacked William Barnes Jr., and the state GOP, and forced the nomination of Learned Hand for chief judge of the court of appeals. He published his long-delayed commentary on the national political situation in the October issue of The Century, but the writing was tired: it was little more than an update of his campaign platform of the year before.

  Finally he allowed 2,350 wildly applauding Progressives to give him a farewell dinner in the roof garden of the New York Theater on 3 October. He promised that before he went into the Brazilian jungle, he would impress their ideology upon the intellectual and political elite of South America. “Next spring I shall return to devote myself with whatever strength I have to working with you for the success of the Progressive Party and of the great principles for which the Progressive Party stands.”

  VARIOUS OTHER SERPENTS had to be stroked before Roosevelt felt free to board the SS Vandyck, southbound on 4 October. Lyman and Lawrence Abbott were distressed to be losing their star columnist, so he sold The Outlook the rights to his four South American lectures, and a like number of travel articles, for $5,000. He assuaged Charles Scribner’s chagrin over his defection to Macmillan by signing a $15,000 contract for a book about his coming expedition. As with African Game Trails, it would be prepublished serially in Scribner’s Magazine, then put out in hardback with a 20 percent royalty. Roosevelt kept quiet about the speaking fees he would earn in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, but Edith privately informed Ethel that they would total “about $10,000.” Even after deducting all his travel and equipment costs, he expected to clear $20,000 over the next six months.

  Quentin and Archie bade their parents goodbye with adolescent equanimity, and went their separate ways to school and college. Alice was more clinging. Still childless, she had been emotionally fragile since the announcement of Ethel’s pregnancy, and had to be persuaded not to sue her depressed, philandering husband for divorce. The only salvation for the Longworths, as Edith saw it, was for Nick to win back his cherished seat in Congress.

  In his last literary task before leaving, the Colonel composed an introduction to the book version of his memoirs. “Naturally,” he wrote, “there are chapters of my autobiography which cannot now be written.”

  Then for the second time in his life, he dropped below the equator.

  Interlude

  Germany, October–December, 1913

  NEWLY COMPLETED AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS of construction, at a cost of six million marks, the pyramidal structure outside Leipzig was the largest war memorial in the world, comprising three hundred thousand tons of concrete and stone. Twelve colossal sentinels balanced their granite shields in a ring around the crown of the monument, as if to repel would-be invaders from any point in the compass.

  Inevitably, they dwarfed Wilhelm II, more than 250 feet below. He bobbed in Prussian uniform down the steps from the dedication platform, his shrunken left arm clutching his sword. A crowd of sixty thousand cheered while a choir accompanied by six brass bands broke into “Nun danket alle Gott.” The date was 19 October 1913, the centenary of the birth of the modern German state. Here, Napoleon Bonaparte had been defeated at the Battle of Leipzig, or Volkerschlacht, as the Kaiser preferred to call it—“the People’s Battle,” greatest of all European clashes of arms.

  Today’s ceremony also marked the twenty-fifth year of Wilhelmine rule. The significance of the occasion to all German-speakers was signaled by the attendance of a special guest, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. Lumpen, colorless, and stiff, the heir to the Dual Monarchy was everything that the Kaiser was not. Their helmets bespoke their characters—Wilhelm’s a froth of white plumes, respondent to the slightest breeze, the archduke’s a stolid cylinder. The two men were, however, close friends, vacationing frequently in each other’s hunting lodges, and discussing questions of offense and defense against the Slav. It was a question which of them was the more obsessive on that subject.

  Their shared neurosis was nothing compared to that of Franz Ferdinand’s protégé, marching a few steps behind them: General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorff, the Austro-Hungarian chief of staff. Conrad’s anti-Slavism focused on Serbia, the most restive of the Balkan states crowding the Austrian border. That landlocked nation had already triggered two wars, each nominally against Turkey but strategically threatening its northern neighbor. Its aim was a southern Slav federation, a Yugoslavia strong enough to resist pan-Germanism.

  Now, even as Leipzig celebrated the superiority of all things Teutonic, the archduke and general had disturbing news for Wilhelm. A third Balkan war was imminent. Serbia had sent troops into Albania in an attempt to gain access to the Adriatic Sea. The Austrian government was alarmed at this development, which compromised its whole wall of security against two hostile empires—the Ottoman in the south, the Russian in the east. As a result, Vienna had sent a peremptory note to Belgrade: if Serbia
did not withdraw from Albania by 26 October, it would be obliterated.

  By the time this ultimatum was headlined in tomorrow’s European papers (sharing space, no doubt, with the dedication of the Volkerschlacht monument), six days would be left. That was hardly enough time for Serbia to comply, let alone hope that nations dreading a more general war might intervene. As every half-educated burgher living west of the steppes knew, Russia was Serbia’s most reflexive ally, and would not tolerate any further Austrian aggrandizement in the Balkans. The annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 had been provocation enough.

  Wilhelm had not welcomed that particular move. But recently he had shown signs of conversion to the Austrian way of thinking. His particular phobia was against the Eastern Slavs: the Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, and even Poles who for fourteen centuries had menaced Prussia across its erasable slate of a border—the plattland that any tourist could see from the monument’s observation deck, fading into the enormous distance. A thousand years before, Leipzig had been a Slav settlement. Those sentinels bespoke the granite determination of Teutons that it would never be so again.

  “Ich gehe mit Euch,” the Kaiser said privately to Conrad. “I am with you. The other powers are not ready; they will attempt nothing against it. In a couple of days you would be at Belgrade.”

  Franz Ferdinand jealously observed the intimacy developing between Wilhelm and his general, and returned to Vienna that evening in something of a huff.

  LEFT ALONE TO STAND against the gray Saxon sky in the days following, after the tents and platforms and bunting had been cleared away, the Leipzig memorial became an iconic shape, inspiring to Germans, Austrians, and Reichslanders, ludicrously overwrought to citizens of other countries. French comments had been especially scathing. It was not only the largest such pile since the days of Ancient Egypt, it was something new in its völkisch, ethnic quality, appealing less to memory of a particular battle than to the aspirations of a people who felt that their time for dominance had come.