When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House - Softcover

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Patricia O’Toole is the author of five books, including The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made, When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House, and The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A former professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and a fellow of the Society of American Historians, she lives in Camden, Maine.

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Chapter Four: Into the Thick of Things

To travel with Theodore Roosevelt was to travel in a carnival led by a conjurer and trailed by an idolatrous throng. People were drawn by his energy and joy, qualities he possessed in quantities rarely found in persons over the age of eight. They wished for his courage, and if they did not always admire his pugnacity, they forgave it, for what was pugnacity but courage overspilling its banks? A conjurer beguiles by seeming guileless, and over the next three months Roosevelt would present himself as a former statesman on a grand tour, peregrinating from palace to palace, orating, collecting honors. Although few in Washington were deceived, the conjurer kept up the illusion, hoping, perhaps, to beguile himself.

TR and Kermit had planned to dress up for their reunion with Edith and Ethel in Khartoum on March 14, but a mix-up with luggage forced TR into a stained shirt of gray flannel and a khaki suit impervious to beautification after a year in the bush. Junior Bwana, the dandy, hid his dishevelment under a duster.

To Edith they looked splendid. Theodore had shed "that look of worry and care," she thought, and Kermit, although still "of the hatpin type," had gained muscle. He had also sprouted a wispy mustache.

Would she like him to shave it off? he asked.

She said it was lovely.

In a hail of kisses from Theodore, Edith announced that their son Ted, twenty-two, was engaged. When Ethel told her father that Ted's fiancée, Eleanor Butler Alexander, would remind him of Edith, TR wrote her a welcoming letter and sent his congratulations to Ted.*

Pledged to silence on American politics, Roosevelt uncaged his political energies on behalf of British imperialism. The petty warlords who long tyrannized Egypt and Sudan had been subdued by the English, but the natives were calling for independence, and an extremist in their number had just assassinated Egypt's prime minister for supporting new censorship rules imposed by the British. After only a day with his official hosts in Khartoum, the Colonel agreed to lecture the native officers on their duty to uphold British law. The Sudanese immediately protested, and the Colonel immediately returned their fire. Britain's successes in the region resembled his own struggle to build the Panama Canal, he said. Victory had come from standing fast in a barrage. In blood and pounds sterling, the price of pacifying the region had been immense, and Britain should resist the pressure to set a date for independence: "you are really ruling the country now and ruling it for its good, using Egyptians and Sudanese as your instrumentalities. You must indeed have a genius for government when you can so well manage a strange people like these."

The speeches in Sudan pleased his English friends, angered the natives, and signaled his return to the political stage. By lecturing other governments, the conjurer pulled off the neat trick of keeping himself in the news while honoring his promise not to comment on American affairs. On March 20 he announced that the speech he planned to make when he landed in New York in June would neither praise nor criticize the administration of William Howard Taft. There was no need for TR to announce the speech, much less to characterize it, and the promise of neutrality was a veiled insult: withholding support from his chosen successor was tantamount to attacking him. Roosevelt was drawing a line between Taft and himself, drawing it publicly, and drawing it less than a week after emerging from his safari.

The Colonel's utterances in Khartoum preceded him to Cairo, where they were received as an affront to the aspirations of the Egyptian people. Anxious British officials put Roosevelt in a cocoon of bodyguards and asked him not to mention the assassination when he spoke at Cairo University. He refused. Everyone was thinking about the slaying, and if he did not speak of it, he would be branded a coward, he said. This Theodore Roosevelt, an English newspaper declared, had "a propensity to put himself into the thick of things."

The speech proved to be little more than a compendium of bland preachments on goodness until the end, when he condemned the assassination and declared that preparation for successful self-government was the work "not of a decade or two but of generations." He shot his point home with an Arab proverb: "God is with the patient, if they know how to wait."

For two days students shouting "Down with autocracy!" marched in the streets near Shepheard's Hotel, where the Roosevelts were lodged. The protesters resented his assumption that everyone who favored independence approved of the assassination, and they were appalled by his suggestion that Egypt, progenitor of Western civilization, was unprepared to govern itself. Colonel Roosevelt, said one of his Egyptian critics, knew no more about the region than a tourist and had been "deceived by bad company, such as is always the curse of great men."

The second most interesting American at Shepheard's Hotel was Oscar Straus, ambassador to Turkey. The first Jew to hold a cabinet post, Straus had been appointed by Roosevelt to serve as secretary of commerce and labor. He had come to Cairo to talk politics and to show Roosevelt a sober, unsettling editorial in the North American Review. The voters of the United States had been hoodwinked, the Review said. They had "accepted Mr. Taft at Mr. Roosevelt's word" and expected him to stay the progressive course, but Mr. Taft's first year showed that Mr. Roosevelt's word had been broken, his judgment misplaced.

To progressives, it seemed that the new president had tacked hard to the political right. He had fired Gifford Pinchot, replaced Henry White, and gutted the cabinet after telling Roosevelt that he hoped Straus and several others would stay on. Taft had asked Roosevelt to let the cabinet members know of his wishes, and when Roosevelt asked why he did not tell them himself, Taft said he wanted them to know of his wishes but thought it best not to make promises.

That was Roosevelt's version of events, recounted several years after the fact. Taft left two versions, and in the one that found its way to biographers and historians -- a letter written just before the inauguration to William Rockhill Nelson, publisher of the Kansas City Star -- Taft said he had decided to fill his cabinet with lawyers. Roosevelt's administration had created a public demand for reform on several fronts, and Taft proposed to meet it by amending the relevant statutes. "The people who are fitted to do this, without injury to the business interests of the country, are those lawyers who understand corporate wealth, the present combination, its evils, and the methods by which they can be properly restrained," he told Nelson. Most of the new cabinet secretaries were honorable men, but they were also laissez-faire men, men from the grand duchies of American capitalism. Although Taft sensed that his choices would be sharply criticized, he believed he could accomplish more with the help of "conservative men who know what they are talking about" than with progressives clamoring for greater reform. "With more radical men I should split the party and do nothing," he said.

A year later, aware that Roosevelt felt betrayed by the cabinet purge, Taft angrily defended himself in a private talk with two reporters. He was the one who had been betrayed, he said. "Mr. Roosevelt told me that he would make absolutely no suggestion to me, but I told him that I did not want to be deprived of the privilege of consulting him. Notwithstanding his declaration of neutrality, Mr. Roosevelt did take great interest in the selections, and, although, perhaps, he made no out-and-out request of me, I didn't have to be hit with a club ten times a day to understand the workings of his mind."

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