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Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography
Chapter XXIII. The Brazilian Ordeal
by Thayer, William Roscoe
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"They will be throwing rotten apples at me soon," Theodore had
said to his sister, on the day when New York went frantic in
placing him among the gods. His treatment, after he championed
Progressivism, showed him to be clairvoyant. Not only did his
political opponents belabor him--that was quite natural--but his
friends, having failed to persuade him not to take the fatal
leap, let him see plainly that, while he still had their
affection, they had lost their respect for his judgment. He
himself bore the defeat of 1912 with the same valiant
cheerfulness with which he took every disappointment and
thwarting. But he was not stolid, much less indifferent. " It is
all very well to talk with the Crusading spirit," he said after
the election, "and of the duty to spend and be spent; and I feel
it absolutely as regards myself; but I hate to see my Crusading
lieutenants suffer for the cause." He was thinking of the eager
young men, including some of his kinsmen, who had gone into the
campaign because they believed in him.
His close friends did not follow him, but they still loved him.
And it was a sign of his open-mindedness that he would listen to
their opinions and even consult them, although he knew that they
entirely rejected his Progressivism. General Luke E. Wright, who
remained a devoted friend but did not become a Progressive, used
to explain what the others called the Colonel's aberration, as
being really a very subtle piece of wisdom. Experienced ranchmen,
he would say, when their herds stampede in a sudden alarm, spur
their horses through the rushing cattle, fire their revolvers
into the air, and gradually, by making the herds suppose that men
and beasts are all together in their wild dash, work their way to
the front. Then they cleverly make the leaders swing round, and
after a long stampede the herd comes panting back to the place it
started from. This, General Wright said, is what Roosevelt was
doing with the multitudes of Radicals who seemed to be headed for
perdition.
Just as he had absented himself in Africa for a year, after
retiring from the Presidency, so Roosevelt decided to make one
more trip for hunting and exploration. As he could not go to the
North Pole, he said, because that would be poaching on Peary's
field, he selected South America. He had long wished to visit the
Southern Continent, and invitations to speak at Rio Janeiro and
at Buenos Aires gave him an excuse for setting out. As before, he
started with the distinct purpose of collecting animal and
botanical specimens; this time for the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, which provided two trained naturalists to
accompany him. His son Kermit, toughened by the previous
adventure, went also.
Having paid his visits and seen the civilized parts of Brazil,
Uruguay, and Argentina, he ascended the Paraguay River and then
struck across the plateau which divides its watershed from that
of the tributaries of the Amazon; for he proposed to make his way
through an unexplored region in Central Brazil and reach the
outposts of civilization on the Great River. Dr. Osborn had
dissuaded him from going through a tract where the climate was
known to be most pernicious. The Brazilian Government had
informed him that, by the route he had chosen, he would meet a
large river--the Rio da Duvido, the River of Doubt--by which he
could descend to the Amazon. Roosevelt's account of this
exploration, given in his "The Brazilian Wilderness," belongs
among the masterpieces of explorers' records.
There were some twenty persons, including a dozen or fifteen
native rowers and pack-bearers, in his party. They had canoes and
dugouts, supplies of food for about forty days, and a carefully
chosen outfit. With high hopes they put their craft into the
water and moved downstream. But on the fourth day they found
rapids ahead, and from that time on they were constantly obliged
to land and carry their dugouts and stores round a cataract. The
peril of being swept over the falls was always imminent, and as
the trail which constituted their portages had to be cut through
the matted forest, their labors were increased. In the first
eleven days, they progressed only sixty miles. No one knew the
distance they would have to traverse nor how long the river would
be broken by falls and cataracts before it came down into the
plain of the Amazon. Some of their canoes were smashed on the
rocks; two of the natives were drowned. They watched their
provisions shrink. Contrary to their expectations, the forest had
almost no animals. If they could shoot a monkey or a monster
lizard, they rejoiced at having a little fresh meat. Tropical
insects--of which the pium seems to have been the worst--bit them
day and night and caused inflammation and even infection.
Man-eating fish lived in the river, making it dangerous for the
men when they tried to cool their inflamed bodies by a swim. Most
of the party had malaria, and could be kept going only by large
doses of quinine. Roosevelt, while in the water, wounded his leg
on a rock, inflammation set in, and prevented him from walking,
so that he had to be carried across the portages. The physical
strength of the party, sapped by sickness and fatigue, was
visibly waning. Still the cataracts continued to impede their
progress and to add terribly to their toil. The supply of food
had shrunk so much that the rations were restricted and amounted
to little more than enough to keep the men able to go forward
slowly. Then fever attacked Roosevelt, and they had to wait for a
few days because he was too weak to be moved. He besought them to
leave him and hurry along to safety, because every day they
delayed consumed their diminishing store of food, and they might
all die of starvation. They refused to leave him, however, and he
secretly determined to shoot himself unless a change for the
better in his condition came soon. It came; they moved forward.
At last, they left the rapids behind them and could drift and
paddle on the unobstructed river. Roosevelt lay in the bottom of
a dugout, shaded by a bit of canvas put up over his head, and too
weak from sickness, he told me, even to splash water on his face,
for he was almost fainting 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, Congressmen
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 in 1912. The falling-off in the
vote measured further the potency of Roosevelt's personal
magnetism; thousands voted for him who would not vote for other
candidates professing his principles. Finally, other issues--the
imbroglio with Mexico, for instance--were looming up, and
exciting a different interest among the American people. Before
we discuss the greatest issue of all, in which Theodore
Roosevelt's career as a patriot culminated, we must recall two or
three events which absorbed him at the time and furnished
evidence of vital import to those who would appraise his
character fairly.
During the campaign of 1912, his enemies resorted to all sorts of
slanders, calumnies, lies, ignoble always, and often indecent, to
blacken him. On October 12th, the Iron Ore, a trade paper edited
by George A. Newett at Ishpeming, Michigan, pubished this
accusation: "Roosevelt lies and curses in a most disgusting way;
he gets drunk too, and that not infrequently, and all of his
intimates know about it." When he was President, Roosevelt had
appointed Newett as postmaster, but Newett stayed by the
Republican Party, and did not scruple to serve it, as he
supposed, in this way. The charge of drunkenness spread so far
and, as usual, so many persons said that where there is much
smoke there must be some fire, that Roosevelt determined to crush
that lie once for all. He would not have it stand unchallenged,
to shame his children after he was dead, or to furnish food for
the maggots which feed on the reputations of great men. So he
brought suit against Newett. His counsel, James H. Pound,
assembled nearly two-score witnesses, who had known Roosevelt
since he left College, men who had visited him, had hunted with
him, had served with him in the Spanish War, had been his Cabinet
Ministers, journalists who had followed him on his campaigning
tours, detectives, and his personal body-servant; General Leonard
Wood, and Jacob Riis, and Dr. Alexander Lambert, who had been his
family physician for a quarter of a century. This cloud of
witnesses all testified unanimously that they had never seen him
drink anything stronger than wine, except as a medicine; that he
took very little wine, and that they had never seen him drunk.
They also declared that he was not a curser or blasphemer.
After listening to this mass of evidence for a week, Newett
begged to withdraw his charge and to apologize, and he confessed
that he had nothing but hearsay on which to base his slanders.
Then Roosevelt addressed the court and asked it not to impose
damages upon the defendant, as he had not prosecuted the libeler
with the intention of getting satisfaction in money. He wrote one
of his sisters from Marquette, where the trial was held: "I
deemed it best not to demand money damages; the man is a country
editor, and while I thoroly* depise him, I do not care to seem to
persecute him." (May 31, 1913.)
[ I copy "thoroly," as he wrote it, as a reminder that Roosevelt
practiced the spelling reform which he advocated.]
Roosevelt had to undergo one other trial, this time as defendant.
The managers of the Republican Party-and the Interests behind
them, not content with blocking his way to the nomination in
1912, wished utterly to destroy him as a political factor; for
they still dreaded that, as a Progressive, he might have a
triumphant resurrection and recapture the confidence of the
American people. To accomplish their purpose they wished to
discredit him as a reform politician, and as a leader in civic
and social welfare.
Roosevelt himself gave the occasion for their on slaught upon
him. In supporting Harvey D. Hinman, the Progressive candidate
for the Governor of New York in 1914, he declared that William
Barnes, Jr., who managed the Republican Machine politics in that
State, had a bi-partisan alliance with the Democratic Machine in
the interest of crooked politics and crooked business. Mr.
Barnes, in whose ears the word "Boss" sounded obnoxious as
applied to himself, brought suit for libel, and it came to trial
at Syracuse on April 19, 1915. Mr. Barnes's counsel, Mr. Ivins,
peered into every item of Mr. Roosevelt's political career with a
microscope. Mr. Barnes had, of course, all the facts, all the
traditions that his long experience at Albany could give him. And
as he dated back to Boss Platt's time, he must have heard, at
first hand from the Senator, his relations with Roosevelt as
Governor. But the most searching examination by Mr. Barnes
brought him no evidence, and cross-examination, pursued for many
days, brought him no more. When it became Roosevelt's turn to
reply, he showed how the Albany Evening Journal, Mr. Barnes's
organ, had profited by illegal political advertising. He proved
the existence of the bi-partisan alliance with the Democratic
Machine, and showed its effects on legislation and elections.
After deliberating two days, the jury brought in a verdict in
favor of Roosevelt.
The trial, which had lasted two months, and cost Roosevelt
$52,000 (so expensive is it for an honest man to defend his
honesty against hostile politicians!) decided two things: first,
that Mr. Barnes was a Boss, and had used crooked methods; and
next, that Theodore Roosevelt, under the most intense scrutiny
which his enemies could employ, was freed from any suspicion of
dishonest political methods or acts. As William M. Ivins,
attorney for Mr. Barnes, left the New York Constitutional
Convention to try the case at Syracuse, he said with un concealed
and alluring self-satisfaction to Mr. Root: "I am going to nail
Roosevelt's hide to the barn door." Mr. Root replied: "Be sure it
is Roosevelt's and not some other hide that is nailed there."
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