Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [346]
4 Less disconcerting TR, Works, 5.15–18.
5 “this great fragment” Ibid., 5.5, xxvi.
6 finding again the Dark Continent See Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (rev. ed., New York, 2001), 15.
7 “Doctor,” he had said Ibid., 129.
8 Hustling for votes This distaste for electoral politics, owing much to the corruption of the Gilded Age, was a comparatively recent phenomenon in TR’s immediate family. Several of his ancestors in revolutionary and federal times had been public men. See Carlton Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858–1886 (New York, 1958), 3–6.
Biographical Note: Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt, whose surname probably derived from a farm, Rosevelt (“Rose Field” on the island of Tholen in Zeeland, Holland), is established as the first American Roosevelt in Timothy Field Beard and Henry B. Hoff, “The Roosevelt Family,” The New York Genealogical and Biological Record, 118.4 (Oct. 1987), 1–2.
9 Not surprisingly Morris, Theodore Rex, 98–99, 180–81; Carl Cavanaugh Hodge, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Transoceanic Naval Arms Race, 1897–1909,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, 30.1–2 (Winter–Spring, 2009); Peter Larsen, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Moroccan Crisis, 1904–1906” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1984), 307–8. For a compact study of TR’s personal style in foreign affairs, see Frederick W. Marks III, Velvet on Iron: The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt (Lincoln, Neb., 1979).
10 His Nobel In the opinion of a modern expert on foreign policy, TR “approached the global balance of power with a sophistication matched by no other American president.” Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York, 1994), 41.
11 That does not stop him Theodore Roosevelt, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, Elting E. Morison, John Blum, et al., eds., 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1951–1954), 1.324. Henceforth TR, Letters.
12 Such are the intellectual TR quoted in memorandum, “Curtis at the Conference,” 20 Aug. 1887 (HKB). TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, 15 Feb. 1887; TR, Letters, 1.509; TR, Works, 5.4. For a typical statement of TR’s philosophy of activism, see TR, “Latitude and Longitude Among Reformers,” Works, 15.379.
13 Having spent much See David H. Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt and His English Correspondents: A Special Relationship of Friends,” Transactions of the America Philosophical Society, n.s., 63, pt. 2 (1973). Great Britain and Germany had agreed in 1890 to partition inland East Africa, while allowing the sultanate of Zanzibar to continue in control of the coastal strip. Relations between the two protectorates were testy. Britain scored a strategic coup in 1903, when its 584-mile Mombasa–Kisumu railroad opened for business, with the intent of connecting British East Africa to Lake Victoria and the Nile. But the venture was hugely expensive, and looked unlikely ever to pay for itself unless enough white farmers could be coaxed to develop the countryside it traversed. Hence the eagerness of British imperialists to assist TR’s safari, in the hope he would encourage settlement of the Protectorate in his book—seen as a certain international bestseller.
14 “I am the only” TR en route to Africa, ca. 28 Mar. 1909, quoted in E. Alexander Powell, Yonder Lies Adventure (New York, 1932), 319.
15 Fifty-six eminent TR, Works, 5.24–25. The list of gun donors included the Duke and Duchess of Bedford; the Earls of Lonsdale and Warwick; Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India; Sir Edward Grey, British foreign minister; Sir George Otto Trevelyan, historian; and Col. J. H. Patterson, author of The Man-Eaters of Tsavo.
16 Germany’s current arms buildup Just before TR arrived in Mombasa, Austria-Hungary announced that it, too, would be laying down three new dreadnoughts. (The Leader of British East Africa, 10 Apr. 1909.) For a compact account of the British-German “Navy Scare of 1909,” see chap. 33 of Robert Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and