Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [356]
5 the blood of General Gordon TR to EKR, quoted in Earle Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, Private Citizen (New York, 1932), 106.
6 Khartoum’s North Station AP report, Chicago Tribune, 15 Mar. 1910.
7 That evening, Roosevelt Ibid.; Walter Wellman, “The Homecoming of Roosevelt,” in American Review of Reviews, 41.5 (10 May 1910).
8 He was not unwilling O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 41–42.
9 However, another contender Abbott, Impressions of TR, 214–16. TR’s contract with The Outlook had been negotiated while he was still President. According to Abbott, he had “half a dozen editorial articles … ready for publication” within five days of quitting the White House. The first, an attack on socialism, ran in the magazine on 20 Mar. 1909. Another, on Tolstoy (15 May 1909), criticized the novelist for “foolish and fantastic” pacifism, not to mention “a dark streak … of moral perversion.” (TR, Works, 14.417.) It was reprinted in Russia, and came to the attention of its subject. “An article on me by Roosevelt,” Tolstoy noted on 20 May 1909. “The article is silly, but I was pleased. It aroused my vanity.” (R. F. Christian, trans., Tolstoy’s Diaries [London, 1985], 2.614.) For more of TR’s views on Tolstoy, see Abbott, Impressions of TR, 188–91.
10 Edith Kermit Roosevelt See Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 9–10.
11 In the event Chicago Tribune, 16 Mar. 1910.
12 They dismounted Chicago Tribune, 16 Mar. 1910; AP dispatch, 15 Mar., in ibid.; Morris, The Rise of TR, 685. Winston Churchill’s classic account of the Battle of Omdurman in his The River War: An Historical Account of the Recon-quest of the Soudan, 2 vols. (London, 1899).
13 Slatin certainly In a transcendent moment of tit for tat, years later, Slatin permitted the Mahdi’s skull to be handed over to Kitchener, who had to be persuaded not to use it as a drinking cup. Gordon Bank-Shepherd, Between Two Flags: The Life of Baron Sir Rudolf von Slatin Pasha, GCVO, KCMG, CB (New York, 1973); Chicago Tribune, 16 Mar. 1910.
14 His soul revolted TR, Works, 5.438; TR, Letters, 8.946. To TR’s sardonic amusement, the Marquis de Mores, his youthful rival from Badlands days and a supporter of Arab independence, had been killed in 1896, while attempting to enlist in the Mahdi’s service. A band of Tuaregs had not been “able to appreciate the fine frenzy of his altruism.” Ibid.
15 If that was what The importation of large quantities of terrorist arms into Egypt, beginning in Dec. 1909, was publicized by S. Verdad in The New Age, 5 May 1910.
16 Omdurman fascinated Chicago Tribune, 17 Mar. 1910.
17 One long, anguished letter Pinchot to TR, 31 Dec. 1909 (TRP); TR, Letters, 7.45–46; TR to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 21 Jan. 1910 (ARC).
18 “We have fallen” Pinchot to TR, 31 Dec. 1909 (TRP). See also William H. Harbaugh, The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (rev. ed., New York, 1975), 361–62, 78. Having already successfully hosted national and North American conservation conferences in May 1908 and Feb. 1909, TR suggested on the eve of his departure from office “that all nations should be invited to join together in conference on the subject of world resources … their inventory, conservation and wise utilization.” His idea was that the forty-five participant powers in the Hague Peace Conference should form the nucleus of a world conservation movement. In the event, he sent out invitations to fifty-eight nations, calling upon them to meet in the fall of 1909. Taft withdrew the invitations, and the world conference was aborted. Michael J. Lacey, “The Mysteries of Earth-Making Dissolve: A Study of Washington’s Intellectual Community and the Origins of American Environmentalism in the Late Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1979), 401–3.
19 illegal coal claims Alaska’s Chugach National Forest had been expanded by TR on his last day in office. According to Pinchot, J. P. Morgan and the Guggenheim mining syndicate