Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [366]
Their first recorded meeting took place in Dec. 1900. Churchill, just elected to Parliament at age 26, was then on a speaking tour of America, and TR, at 41, was governor of New York and vice president–elect. He had read the younger man’s memoirs of military service in India and the Sudan, and regretted that he could not attend his Manhattan lecture. “I am really sorry as I am a great admirer of Mr. Churchill’s books, and should very much like to have a chance to meet him socially.” (TR, Letters, 2.1454.) The chance materialized later in the month, when Churchill dined with the Roosevelts in Albany and “incensed his hosts by slumping in his chair, puffing on a cigar, and refusing to get up when women came into the room.” (Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 539; for another abrasive encounter, see Robinson, My Brother TR, 189.) TR thought Churchill was interesting, but “not an attractive fellow.” (TR, Letters, 3.116–17.) His disapproval deepened in 1904, when Churchill, in what looked to TR like opportunism, bolted Britain’s foundering Conservative Party and joined the new Liberal government. In 1906, TR read Churchill’s biography of Lord Randolph Churchill, found it “vulgar,” and concluded that the author had inherited “levity, lack of sobriety, lack of permanent principle, and inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety.” (Lodge, Selections, 2.231–32.) Exactly the same accusations would one day be leveled against TR himself. In 1908, when TR was planning his safari, he read a first-serial account by Churchill of killing a white rhinoceros in the Lado Enclave, and was overcome by competitive bloodlust. “I should consider my entire African trip a success if I could get to that country and find the game as Mr. Churchill describes it.… The white rhino is the animal I care most to get—even more than the elephant.” (TR, Letters, 6.1383.) Churchill subsequently sent him a presentation copy of My African Journey, which TR acknowledged with ill grace: “I do not like Winston Churchill but I suppose ought to write him.” (TR, Letters, 6.1465, 1467.) As recorded above (592), he went on to kill nine white rhinos to Churchill’s one.
Churchill’s booziness and lack of consideration for other people were bound to irritate TR, who set great store by probity and good manners. Subconsciously, however, he may have been more disturbed by the many parallels between them. In 1898, for example, both men almost simultaneously participated in historic cavalry charges. Of the two engagements, that at Omdurman was much more bloody, and of their respective published accounts, Churchill’s was incomparably superior. It might be added that Churchill was capable of empathy with, even admiration for, his enemies, whereas TR always demonized them.
34 The foreign secretary approved Grey, Twenty-five Years, 2.92. EKR and ARL worried about TR overplaying his role as an outsider. “Don’t try and talk through your nose and say ‘Amurika,’ ” they begged—in vain. Teague, Mrs. L, 137.
35 By then, Roosevelt Lee, A Good Innings, 1.416; TR quoted in Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time: Shown in His Own Letters (New York, 1920), 2.260. Seth Bullock, asked why TR had no patience for kings, said he thought the Colonel “preferred aces.” Kenneth C. Kellar, Seth Bullock: Frontier Marshal (Aberdeen, S.D., 1972), 165.
36 On 26 May The New York Times, 27 May 1910; Lorant, Life and Times of TR, 532–33; TR, Letters, 7.407. For TR’s improvised speech at the Cambridge Union, see TR, African and European Addresses, 143ff. It was a humorous response to a poem about his penchant for preaching, published in The Gownsman in advance of his arrival: Oh! We’re ready for you, Teddy, our sins are all reviewed, / We’ve put away our novels and our statues in the nude. / We’ve read your precious homilies, and hope to hear some more / At the coming visitation of the moral Theodore.
37 Coincidentally,