Theodore Roosevelt [128]
from the muggy heat and the tropical sunshine.
On April 15th, forty-eight days after they began their voyage on the River of Doubt, they saw a peasant, a rubber-gatherer, the first human being they had met. Thenceforward they journeyed without incident. The River of Doubt flowed into the larger river Madeira where they found a steamer which took them to Manaos on the Amazon. A regular line of steamers connects Manaos with New York, where Roosevelt and Kermit and Cherrie, one of the naturalists, landed on May 19, 1914. During the homeward voyage Roosevelt slowly recovered his strength, but he had never again the iron physique with which he had embarked the year before. His friends had urged him not to go, warning him that a man of fifty four was already too old to waste his reserve force on unnecessary enterprises. But his love of adventure, his passion for testing his endurance and pluck by facing the grimmest dangers, and his wish to keep out of American political turmoil for a time, prevailed against wiser counsel. The Brazilian Wilderness stole away ten years of his life.
I do not know whether later, when he found himself checked by recurrent illness, he regretted having chosen to encounter that ordeal in Brazil. He was a man who wasted no time over regrets. The past for him was done. The material out of which he wove his life was the present or the future. Days gone were as water that has flowed under the mill. Acting always from what he regarded as the best motives of the present, he faced with equal heart whatever result they brought. So when he found on his return home that some geographers and South American explorers laughed at his story of the River of Doubt, he laughed, too, at their incredulity, and presently the Brazilian Government, having established the truth of his exploration and named the river after him, Rio Teodoro, his laughter prevailed. He took real satisfaction in having placed on the map of Central Brazil a river six hundred miles long.
New York made no festival for him on this second homecoming. The city and the country welcomed him, but not effusively. The American people, how ever, felt a void without Roosevelt. Whether they always agreed with him or not, they found him perpetually interesting, and during the ten or eleven weeks when he went into the Brazilian silence and they did not know whether he was alive or dead, they learned how much his presence and his ready speech had meant to them. And so they rejoiced to know that he was safe and at home again at Sagamore Hill.
Roosevelt insisted, imprudently, on accompanying his son Kermit to Madrid, where he was to marry the daughter of the American Minister. He made the trip to Spain and back, as quickly as possible, and then he turned to politics. That year, Congress men and several Governors were to be elected, and Roosevelt allowed himself to be drawn into the campaign. As I have said, he was like the consummate actor who, in spite of his protestations, can never bid farewell to the stage. And now a peculiar obligation moved him. He must help the friends who had followed him eagerly into the conflict of 1912, and, in helping them, he must save the Progressive principles and drive them home with still greater cogency. He delivered a remarkable address at Pittsburgh; he toured New York State in an automobile; he spoke to multitudes in Pennsylvania from the back platform of a special train; he visited Louisiana and several other States. But the November elections disappointed him. The Progressive Party, if not dead, had ceased to be a real power in politics; but Progressivism, as an influence and an ideal, was surviving under other forms.
Probably the chief cause for this wane was the putting into operation, by President Wilson and the triumphant Democrats, of many of the Progressive suggestions which the Democratic Platform had also contained. The psychological effect of success in politics is always important and this accounted for the cooling of the zeal of a certain number of enthusiasts who had vociferously supported Roosevelt
On April 15th, forty-eight days after they began their voyage on the River of Doubt, they saw a peasant, a rubber-gatherer, the first human being they had met. Thenceforward they journeyed without incident. The River of Doubt flowed into the larger river Madeira where they found a steamer which took them to Manaos on the Amazon. A regular line of steamers connects Manaos with New York, where Roosevelt and Kermit and Cherrie, one of the naturalists, landed on May 19, 1914. During the homeward voyage Roosevelt slowly recovered his strength, but he had never again the iron physique with which he had embarked the year before. His friends had urged him not to go, warning him that a man of fifty four was already too old to waste his reserve force on unnecessary enterprises. But his love of adventure, his passion for testing his endurance and pluck by facing the grimmest dangers, and his wish to keep out of American political turmoil for a time, prevailed against wiser counsel. The Brazilian Wilderness stole away ten years of his life.
I do not know whether later, when he found himself checked by recurrent illness, he regretted having chosen to encounter that ordeal in Brazil. He was a man who wasted no time over regrets. The past for him was done. The material out of which he wove his life was the present or the future. Days gone were as water that has flowed under the mill. Acting always from what he regarded as the best motives of the present, he faced with equal heart whatever result they brought. So when he found on his return home that some geographers and South American explorers laughed at his story of the River of Doubt, he laughed, too, at their incredulity, and presently the Brazilian Government, having established the truth of his exploration and named the river after him, Rio Teodoro, his laughter prevailed. He took real satisfaction in having placed on the map of Central Brazil a river six hundred miles long.
New York made no festival for him on this second homecoming. The city and the country welcomed him, but not effusively. The American people, how ever, felt a void without Roosevelt. Whether they always agreed with him or not, they found him perpetually interesting, and during the ten or eleven weeks when he went into the Brazilian silence and they did not know whether he was alive or dead, they learned how much his presence and his ready speech had meant to them. And so they rejoiced to know that he was safe and at home again at Sagamore Hill.
Roosevelt insisted, imprudently, on accompanying his son Kermit to Madrid, where he was to marry the daughter of the American Minister. He made the trip to Spain and back, as quickly as possible, and then he turned to politics. That year, Congress men and several Governors were to be elected, and Roosevelt allowed himself to be drawn into the campaign. As I have said, he was like the consummate actor who, in spite of his protestations, can never bid farewell to the stage. And now a peculiar obligation moved him. He must help the friends who had followed him eagerly into the conflict of 1912, and, in helping them, he must save the Progressive principles and drive them home with still greater cogency. He delivered a remarkable address at Pittsburgh; he toured New York State in an automobile; he spoke to multitudes in Pennsylvania from the back platform of a special train; he visited Louisiana and several other States. But the November elections disappointed him. The Progressive Party, if not dead, had ceased to be a real power in politics; but Progressivism, as an influence and an ideal, was surviving under other forms.
Probably the chief cause for this wane was the putting into operation, by President Wilson and the triumphant Democrats, of many of the Progressive suggestions which the Democratic Platform had also contained. The psychological effect of success in politics is always important and this accounted for the cooling of the zeal of a certain number of enthusiasts who had vociferously supported Roosevelt