Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [358]
36 the gospel he preached Owen Wister, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship (New York, 1930), 230; Marks, Velvet on Iron, chap. 3, “The Moral Quotient.”
37 Public works, for example Garstin and TR “exhaustively” discussed irrigation and Aswán on the last leg of the journey to Wadi Halfa. (Chicago Tribune, 19 Mar. 1910.) TR’s remark about the strategic value of Kitchener’s railroad is quoted in the same article.
38 There, on 21 March O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 55–56. It is not clear how this warning was transmitted to TR. The Egyptian nationalists may have heard of a remark he had made about Boutros Pasha’s assassin, at a dinner in Khartoum attended by hundreds of tarbooshed servants: “I would sentence him to be taken out and shot.” Abbott, Impressions of TR, 155.
39 “Theodore, what” Cleveland Dodge in Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 223.
40 One thing he had TR, Letters, 7.359; The New York Times, 23 Mar. 1910. If TR had not quite “summoned” Pinchot, he had certainly written, in response to the latter’s cri de coeur of 31 Jan. 1909, “I do wish I could see you. Is there any chance of you meeting me in Europe?” TR, Letters, 7.51.
41 Roosevelt remained mute TR, Letters, 7.63–64.
42 Remembering the squalor Ibid., 7.63, 351–52. See Karl K. Barbir, “Alfred Thayer Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, the Middle East, and the Twentieth Century,” The Journal of Middle Eastern and North African Intellectual and Cultural Studies, 2.1 (Spring 2004). This useful article is marred by the inclusion of an alleged boast by TR that is so uncharacteristic in language and attitude that it cannot be credited without corroboration.
43 Roosevelt detected Lodge, Selections, 2.364. “I must say,” TR wrote Whitelaw Reid on 24 Mar., “I should greatly like to handle Egypt and India for a few months. At the end of that time I doubtless would be impeached by the House of Commons but I should have things moving in fine order first.” TR, Letters, 7.63.
44 But he saw TR, Letters, 7.351. In Power, Faith, and Fantasy, 258ff., Michael B. Oren makes clear the ambivalent attitude of most Americans toward Britain’s occupancy of Egypt in the last decades of the 19th century. TR’s contrasting sharp certainty in 1910 is seen as the consequence of his might-makes-right Middle Eastern policies as President. His Cairo speech, however, should also be related to his lifelong horror of terrorism, reawakened by his stay in General Gordon’s palace, and his tour of Omdurman in company with Slatin Pasha. See also TR’s 31 May 1910 Guildhall address, 72–74.
45 The real danger TR, Letters, 7.351.
46 Sir Eldon Gorst Ibid., 7.353.
47 Islamic fundamentalists Sheik Ali Youssuf in North American Review, June 1910; Abbott, Impressions of TR, 186–87.
48 Small and struggling Cairo University’s enrollment in 1910 was only 123 students, down disastrously from 403 in 1909. Egyptian State Information Service, winter 1998.
49 He tried not The word contempt was TR’s own. TR, Letters, 7.65.
50 Swinging into Theodore Roosevelt, African and European Addresses, Lawrence F. Abbott, ed. (New York, 1910), 26.
51 The tarboosh-wearers Sheik Ali Youssuf in North American Review, June 1910; O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 69. Abbott, a white Christian American in TR’s thrall, contradicts Youssuf’s account of derision among the Muslims.
52 All good men Abbott, Impressions of TR, 156–57.
53 Next day, comments The Times and The Washington Post, 30 Mar. 1910. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy (318) calls this “the first major anti-American demonstration ever in the Middle East.” Among the many outraged telegrams protesting TR’s speech was one reading (in French): “We see with sorrow that you have no accurate idea of the capacity of the Egyptians whom you have wounded in their feelings and their pride.” (Unsigned fragment, 29 Mar. 1910 [TRP].) Also preserved in TRP is a letter, 30 Mar. 1910, from the sirdar of the Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate: “You have assisted us more than you can possibly imagine, and I am proportionally grateful.” For a presentist critique of TR