Colonel Roosevelt
Authors: Edmund Morris
A
LSO BY
E
DMUND
M
ORRIS
—
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
Theodore Rex
Beethoven: The Universal Composer
Copyright © 2010 by Edmund Morris
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Morris, Edmund.
Colonel Roosevelt / Edmund Morris.
p. cm.
Continues: Theodore Rex.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60415-0
1. Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858–1919. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government—1909–1913. 4. United States—Politics and government—1913–1921.
I. Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. II. Title.
E757.M8825 2010 973.911092—dc22 2010005890
[B]
Frontispiece photograph: Theodore Roosevelt by George Moffett, 1914
v3.1
To
Robert Loomis
IT HAS BEEN OBSERVED IN ALL AGES
, that the advantages of nature or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank, or the extent of their capacity, have placed upon the summits of human life, have not often given any just occasion to envy in those who look to them from a lower station; whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages; or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those, whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention, have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, not more frequent, or more severe.
—
Samuel Johnson
,
THE LIVES OF THE POETS (1781)
For compatibility with quotations, and stylistic empathy with the period 1909–1919, most place-names and usages remain unmodernized in this book. Hence,
British East Africa
for what is now Kenya,
Christiania
for Oslo,
Near East
for the Middle East,
Mesopotamia
for Iraq.
Turkey
is synonymous with the Ottoman Empire, and
England
with the United Kingdom.
Racial, personal, and sexual attitudes of the time have not been moderated. Hence, in the African prologue, such words as
savage, boy
, and
native
(the last regarded as respectful now, but tending toward disparagement then). And in the chapters proper,
crippled, Miss
or
Mrs
. Married or unmarried, women were hardly ever referred to by surname only. The word
race
, when quoted, usually connotes a national rather than ethnic identity. Although some “hyphenated” minorities achieved recognition during World War I, the phrase
African-American
did not challenge
Negro
as a universal term. The world was divided into the
Occident
and the
Orient
, and each hemisphere had its
Indians
. God was masculine; countries, ships, and cyclonic disturbances feminine.
United States
and
politics
were still sometimes employed as plural nouns.
A few archaic capitalizations, such as
Government
and
Nation
, have been dropped. Other spellings that have changed only slightly since 1919 are updated without comment:
Czar
becomes Tsar,
Servia
, Serbia, and
Moslem
, Muslim. Punctuation marks are altered for clarity only in transcripts of oral remarks.
The Roosevelt Africa Expedition, 1909–1910
SITTING ABOVE THE COWCATCHER
, on an observation bench rigged for him by British East Africa Railway officials, he feels the thrust of the locomotive pushing him upland from Mombasa, over the edge of the parched Taru plateau. He has the delightful illusion of being transported into the Pleistocene Age.
His own continent recedes to time out of mind. Is it only seven weeks since he was President of the United States? His pocket diary indicates the date is 22 April 1909—not that the calendar matters much in this land of perpetual summer, with equal days and nights. Nor will many of its natives be able to read, let alone recognize the name
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
, prominently stenciled on a gun case riding behind him in the freight car. They are more likely to be impressed by what the case contains:
a “Royal” grade .500/.450 double-barrel Holland & Holland Nitro Express, the most magnificent rifle ever made. (
It contrasts with a portable library of about six dozen pocket-size books, ranging from the Apocrypha to the
Pensées
of Pascal, all bound in pigskin and shelved in a custom-made aluminum valise.)
He gazes through eager pince-nez at the prehistoric landscape opening ahead. Waves of bleached grass billow in all directions. Baobab trees, pale gray and oddly elephantine, writhe amid anthills the color of dried blood. Black men and women, naked as the stick figures in cave paintings, stare expressionlessly as he bears down upon them. He will have to get used to that opaque scrutiny wherever he treks in Africa. It is a look that neither absorbs nor reflects, the stone face of savagery.
Less disconcerting, but just as foreign, are the birds that flap and flash around the locomotive’s progress: tiny, iridescent sunbirds, green bee-eaters, yellow weavers and rollers, a black-and-white hornbill rising so late from the track he could catch it in his hands. Much as he loves all feathered things, the
zoologist in him is distracted by horizon-filling herds of wildebeest, kongoni, waterbuck, impala, and other antelope. Errant zebras have to be tooted off the rails. Long-tailed monkeys curlicue from tree to tree. A dozen giraffes canter alongside in convoy, their tinkertoy awkwardness transformed into undulant motion.
Polish his lenses as he may, he cannot see the Tsavo reserve, “
this great fragment of the long-buried past of our race,” through twentieth-century eyes. The word
race
, with its possessive pronoun, comes easily to him, connoting not color but culture. Even when culture is at its most primitive, as here, something in him thrills at the prospect of soon being where there is no culture at all.
