The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [500]
Adding to Roosevelt’s discomfort with president-elect Taft was that Taft dismissed James R. Garfield as secretary of the interior in January 1909. Roosevelt kept his composure. But in his eyes Taft now had two strikes against him. “No one knows exactly why Taft chose to drop Garfield,” historian M. Nelson McGreary writes in Gifford Pinchot, “but many of the various explanations boil down to a general feeling on the part of Taft that Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior was a bit overzealous in his support of conservation and was inclined to stretch the exact letter of the law on occasion in order to protect what Garfield felt was the public interest.” 4 Moreover, Roosevelt worried that Taft would be too frightened to initiate antitrust suits.
Some of Roosevelt’s friends, sensing an impending rift between the outgoing and incoming presidents, scrambled to find a meaningful position for Roosevelt; the possibilities included becoming a U.S. congressman and becoming president of Harvard University. Civic organizations also sought ways to memorialize him in plaques, bas-reliefs, and newsletters. Only half-jokingly, Senator Philander Knox declared that Roosevelt “should be made a Bishop.” And magazines offered Roosevelt substantial sums of money to write for them. He declined the offers from major magazines, on the principle of not selling out the presidency, but he did sign on with Outlook, a minor but important periodical for which he would write approximately a dozen long articles a year (like those that now appear on op-ed pages), for $12,000.5
Roosevelt’s big money came from an arrangement with Scribner’s Magazine to write a series of articles that would eventually become the book African Game Trails. Determined that his specimen collecting not be written up as a “game butchering trip,” and wanting to frame his adventure as Wildlife Conservation, Roosevelt had Andrew Carnegie donate $75,000 for the presumably scientific expedition. With reporters, in fact, Roosevelt incessantly stressed that he was working for the Smithsonian Institution; only a few duplicate trophies would be kept for his wall at Sagamore Hill. And with due diligence Roosevelt started reading everything on such African explorer-hunters as Gordon Cummins and Cornwallis Harris.6 Instead of mocking the thirty-four-year-old Winston Churchill as he had done in the fall, Roosevelt now carefully read Churchill’s My African Journey (1908) and was impressed that the author had bagged a white rhinoceros.7 Roosevelt also wanted to hunt a rhinoceros, because America couldn’t let the indefatigable Britons have the edge in natural history anymore.
To get into physical shape for Africa, Roosevelt would ride horseback every day to the point of exhaustion. “The last fifteen miles were done in pitch darkness and with a blizzard of sleet blowing in our faces,” the president wrote his son Kermit. “But we got thru safely, altho we are a little stiff and tired nobody is laid up.”8 And he raced his favorite horse over fifty miles a day that January, as if preparing to charge up San Juan Hill. He would need to make the American scientific societies and explorers’ clubs proud when he was abroad. Friends from the Cosmos Club were concerned that by trying to get into trim, Roosevelt would suffer a heart attack or stroke. Jokes circulated on Capitol Hill that “crazy Teddy” was going to die from the strenuous life, now that he was a fat ex-president loaded down with guns. Some people scoffed that with his White House tenure winding down, he was little more than a rusted bolt, hard to shake loose.
With no congressional legislation pending, Roosevelt, as interregnum presidents are likely to be, was written off as a lame duck that winter.