"Great-Heart": The Life Story of Theodore RooseveltHenderson, Daniel
General
"Great-Heart": The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt
Henderson, Daniel
Presidents -- United States -- Biography; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
The minister picked up his Bible. There he found the answer: “For the
zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.”
IN THE AFRICAN JUNGLE
How Roosevelt should employ his energy when he left the Presidency had
been a problem he had thought about for many months before his second
term closed.
Roosevelt was surrounded then by his famous “Tennis Cabinet.” This was
an elastic term, for the cabinet included not only such old Western
friends as Ben Daniels, Seth Bullock, Luther Kelly--who was formerly an
army scout against the Sioux--and Abernathy, the wolf hunter, but also
men like Leonard Wood, James Garfield, Secretary of the Interior, and
Robert Bacon, afterward Secretary of State.
One of the chief of the many athletic diversions of the “Tennis
Cabinet” was swimming in the Potomac. Roosevelt in his autobiography
tells how one day, when the French Ambassador, Jusserand, was along,
the members of the party, including the Ambassador, took off their
clothes preliminary to swimming in the river.
Just as they were entering the water someone cried:
“Mr. Ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, you haven’t taken off your gloves!”
The Ambassador promptly replied:
“I think I will leave them on, we might meet ladies!”
Often big game hunters from abroad were entertained by Roosevelt and
the “Tennis Cabinet,” and when the Colonel mentioned to this group his
ambition to bring his hunting experiences to a grand climax in the
wilds of Africa he received the enthusiastic encouragement that one
would expect to come from these hunters and sportsmen.
On March 23, 1909, with his son Kermit, he sailed from New York to
Naples, thence, by way of Suez, to British East Africa, for a hunting
trip in its jungles.
The Smithsonian Institute had commissioned him to collect specimens,
and the faunal and floral trophies he brought back from this almost
unknown country show that he fulfilled this part of his mission with
brilliant success.
Roosevelt was on his way to one of the wildest parts of the earth, yet
he did not entirely cut himself off from the influences of culture.
Always there were books to ease his mind when the strenuous hunt was
over or when the journey into the jungle grew monotonous. With him he
took his famous “Pigskin library,” bound in pigskin that they might
be handled by powder-stained or oil-stained hands. This strangely
assorted list, which showed the wide range of Roosevelt’s reading,
included the following-named authors and works:
“The Federalist,” Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great”, the “Song of
Roland,” the “Nibelungenlied,” the Bible and Apocrypha, Homer, Dante,
Spenser and Milton, Shelley, Emerson, Longfellow, Tennyson, Keats, Poe,
Bret Harte, Bacon, Lowell, Euripides, Froissart, Macaulay, Shakespeare,
Marlowe, Dickens, Thackeray, Cooper and Scott. “Huckleberry Finn”
and “Tom Sawyer” were included for humor, and later were added such
books as “Alice in Wonderland,” “Tartarin,” “Don Quixote” and works of
Darwin, Goethe and Huxley.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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