Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [17]
They dismounted by the dry watercourse where four hundred cavalrymen, trailed by vultures, had collided with Arab troops in a charge as suicidal as that of Pickett at Gettysburg. It had occurred only two months after Roosevelt’s own charge up the Heights of San Juan in 1898. “All men who have any power of joy in battle,” he had written then, “know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart.”
Slatin certainly knew, having fought for British control of the Sudan no fewer than thirty-eight times, endured eleven years of Arab imprisonment, and been forced to watch the presentation of Gordon’s head to Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad.
Roosevelt stood on the crest of Jebel Surgham, from which Winston Churchill had looked down on wave after wave of black-clad Arabs, firing bullets into the air and waving banners imprinted with verses from the Koran. Now he saw only empty sand, and the shabby sprawl of Omdurman Fort, and the Mahdi’s tomb rising like a ruined beehive. His soul revolted against all he had read about “the blight of the Mahdist tyranny, with its accompaniments of unspeakable horror.” Those sons of the Prophet had tortured and killed two-thirds of their own number—mostly blacks in the southern Sudan—in a fanatic interpretation of jihad. If that was what today’s Egyptian Nationalists looked for, as they smuggled in bombs through Alexandria and called for the murder of every foreign official in the condominium, then it was plainly the duty of the British government to stand for humanity against barbarism.
Omdurman fascinated Roosevelt so much that he was loath to leave. By the time the camelcade got back to the riverbank it was already dark, and a quarter moon had risen. Khartoum’s stately buildings glowed white across the Nile.
CAL O’LAUGHLIN AND ABBOTT were generous in sharing all the domestic news the Colonel had missed, or failed to register, in nearly a year. The contents of his mail sack amplified every story they had to tell, from betrayal of the Roosevelt legacy on the part of Taft administration officials to what looked like significant stirrings of strength in the Democratic Party, long dormant as a national political force.
One long, anguished letter, from his protégé Gifford Pinchot, was especially disturbing. It confirmed a rumor Roosevelt had heard some weeks before (courtesy of the naked messenger from Gondokoro) and refused to believe. Taft had dismissed Pinchot as chief forester of the United States.
It was understandable that the President might find such a passionate reformer difficult to deal with. But of all men, Pinchot was the one most identified with Roosevelt’s conservation record, and by extension, with all the progressive reforms they had worked on together after 1905—reforms that Taft was supposed to have perpetuated.
“We have fallen back down the hill you have led us up,” Pinchot wrote, “and there is a general belief that the special interests are once more in substantial control of both Congress and the Administration.” He portrayed a well-meaning but weak president, co-opted by “reactionaries” careless of natural resources. Wetlands and woodlands Roosevelt had withdrawn from commercial exploitation had been given back to profiteers. The National Conservation Commission was muzzled. Pinchot’s longed-for World Conservation Conference had never happened. His main villain was his boss, Interior Secretary Richard A. Ballinger, whom he had publicly accused of trading away protected waterpower sites in Alaska, and allowing illegal coal claims in a forest that had been Theodore Roosevelt’s final presidential gift to the American people. Taft, consequently, had had no choice in dismissing Pinchot from office.
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