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Deep in the Brazilian rain forest, he recognized the approach of death when he saw it, and it now hung unmistakably over Theodore Roosevelt.
Throughout his life, Roosevelt had turned to intense physical exertion as a means of overcoming setbacks and sorrow, and he had come to the Amazon in search of that same hard absolution.
With only a handful of men, he had set out on a self-imposed journey to explore the River of Doubt, a churning, ink-black tributary of the Amazon that winds nearly a thousand miles through the dense Brazilian rain forest.
From his earliest childhood, that energetic credo had served as his compass and salvation, propelling him to the forefront of public life, and lifting him above a succession of personal tragedies and disappointments.
Each time he faced personal tragedy or weakness, he found his strength not in the sympathy of others, but in the harsh ordeal of unfamiliar new challenges and lonely adventure.
“No civilized man, no white man, had ever gone down or up this river, or seen the country through which we were passing,” he wrote. “The lofty and matted forest rose like a green wall on either hand. The trees were stately and beautiful, the looped and twisted vines hung from them like great ropes.”
Even Colonel Cândido Rondon, the expedition’s Brazilian co-commander, who had explored more of the Amazon than any other man alive, had no idea where the uncharted river would take them.
“The scene is vivid before me,” Kermit would later recall. “The black rushing river with the great trees towering high above along the bank; the sodden earth under foot; for a few moments the stars would be shining, and then the sky would cloud over and the rain would fall in torrents, shutting out the sky and trees and river.”
As the fever-wracked former president drifted in and out of consciousness, he slipped into a trancelike delirium, reciting over and over again the opening lines to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree. In Xanadu …”
Roosevelt’s decision to abandon the Republican Party and run as a Progressive had been bitterly criticized, not just because he was muddying the political waters but because he still had a large and almost fanatically loyal following.
Roosevelt was proving to be dangerous competition for the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, to say nothing of President William Howard Taft, the lackluster Republican incumbent whom Roosevelt had hand-picked to be his successor in the White House four years earlier.
“How it swayed and swung! how it throbbed with life and elation! how imbued it was with an earnest party ambition, and yet, with a deep and genuine religious fervor. Had I lived my whole life only for those fifteen minutes during which I marched toward the Garden already full to overflowing with my brother’s adoring followers, I should have been content to do so.” Caught up in the moment, fifty-one-year-old Corinne finally made it into the arena by climbing a fire escape.
The last time Roosevelt had given a speech—just two weeks earlier, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—he had been shot in the chest by a thirty-six-year-old New York bartender named John Schrank, a Bavarian immigrant who feared that Roosevelt’s run for a third term was an effort to establish a monarchy in the United States.
That night, whether out of an earnest desire to deliver his message or merely an egotist’s love of drama, Roosevelt had insisted on delivering his speech to a terrified and transfixed audience. His coat unbuttoned to reveal a bloodstained shirt, and his speech held high so that all could see the two sinister-looking holes made by the assailant’s bullet, Roosevelt had shouted, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose!”
Then, in a voice that filled the auditorium, Theodore Roosevelt launched into the last great campaign speech of his political career: “Friends, perhaps once in a generation, perhaps not so often, there comes a chance for the people of a country to play their part wisely and fearlessly in some great battle of the age-long warfare for human rights.”
He did not attack his opponents—the coolly academic Wilson or the genial Taft. Instead, he talked in broad terms about character, moral strength, compassion, and responsibility. “We do not set greed against greed or hatred against hatred,” he thundered. “Our creed is one that bids us to be just to all, to feel sympathy for all, and to strive for an understanding of the needs of all. Our purpose is to smite down wrong.”
“I know the American people,” he had said prophetically in 1910, upon returning to a hero’s welcome after an epic journey to Africa. “They have a way of erecting a triumphal arch, and after the Conquering Hero has passed beneath it he may expect to receive a shower of bricks on his back at any moment.”
ON ELECTION day, November 5, 1912, Roosevelt’s grim expectations about his candidacy were realized in full. Woodrow Wilson took the White House in a landslide victory, winning 2.2 million more votes than Roosevelt out of the fifteen million cast.
The Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs, pulled in over nine hundred thousand votes, more than twice the number he had received during his presidential run four years earlier.
Roosevelt had at first vied for the Republican nomination, and when party bosses ensured Taft’s victory, he had struck back by ensuring their defeat in the general election. As a third-party candidate, Roosevelt could not count on winning, but he could certainly spoil.
The Republican Party’s Old Guard, once a bastion of Roosevelt’s friends and backers, held him responsible for the debacle that had put a Democrat in the White House for the first time in sixteen years.
William Roscoe Thayer, Roosevelt’s friend and one of his earliest biographers, wrote in 1919. “If he could not rule he would ruin. The old allegation that he must be crazy was of course revived.”
From childhood, he had been not only accepted but admired and undoubtedly envied as a Roosevelt, the older son of a wealthy and respected man. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he had been a member of the exclusive and unapologetically elitist Porcellian Club.
“You cannot imagine how glad I am to see you!” Roosevelt confessed to Lambert. “I have been unspeakably lonely. You don’t know how lonely it is for a man to be rejected by his own kind.”
When confronted with sadness or setbacks that were beyond his power to overcome, Roosevelt instinctively sought out still greater tests, losing himself in punishing physical hardship and danger—experiences that came to shape his personality and inform his most impressive achievements.
Through what Corinne described as “regular, monotonous motion”—swinging from horizontal bars, struggling with heavy, awkward barbells—Teedie, as his family called him, slowly broadened his chest, strengthened his arms, and transformed himself into a young man whose body was as strong and sure as his mind.
Finally, Theodore Sr. sat his son down and told him that he had the power to change his fate, but he would have to work hard to do it. “Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body,” he said, “and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.”
Throughout his adult life, Roosevelt would relish physical exertion, and he would use it not just as a way to keep his body fit and his mind sharp but as his most effective weapon against depression and despair.
During his sophomore year at Harvard, his father—”the best man I ever knew”—died from stomach cancer at the age of forty-six. Blindsided, Roosevelt reeled from the greatest loss of his young life. “If I had very much time to think,” he wrote in his diary, “I believe I should go crazy.”
“Look out for Theodore,” a doctor traveling with Roosevelt advised Sewall. “He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll even say he’s tired.”
At 3:00 a.m. on February 14, Valentine’s Day, Martha Roosevelt, still a vibrant, dark-haired Southern belle at forty-six, died of typhoid fever. Eleven hours later, her daughter-in-law, Alice Lee Roosevelt, who had given birth to Theodore’s first child just two days before, succumbed to Bright’s disease, a kidney disorder. That night, in his diary, Roosevelt marked the date with a large black “X” and a single anguished entry: “The light has gone out of my life.”
He left his infant daughter with his sister Anna and boarded a train for the Dakota Badlands, where he hoped to find the kind of hard existence that might keep his body and mind too busy to ache for Alice.
“Black care,” he explained, in a rare unguarded comment on the subject, “rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.”
“Of course a man has to take advantage of his opportunities, but the opportunities have to come,” he told an audience in Cambridge, England, in the spring of 1910. “If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not the great occasion, you don’t get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name now.”
two days before leaving office, Roosevelt had admonished his friend Paul Martin, “My dear fellow, for Heaven’s sake don’t talk about my having a future. My future is in the past.”
Edith was a private person, and her quiet life at Sagamore Hill was precious to her. But she knew that it was not enough for Theodore. He would not rest until he found some physically punishing adventure that would take him far from home and, Edith feared, place him in grave danger.
BEYOND THE money, the recognition, and the opportunity to advise a fledgling democracy, Roosevelt also had a very personal reason for wanting to take this trip: It would give him a chance to see his twenty-three-year-old son, Kermit, who had been living and working in South America for more than a year. Kermit was a quiet middle child, the third of Roosevelt’s six children. He was smart, disciplined, and a skilled athlete, and he had inherited his father’s passion for far-flung places and physically challenging adventures.
“The only question that gives me concern in connection with it is whether letting you take it will tend to unsettle you for your work afterwards. I should want you to make up your mind fully and deliberately that you would treat it just as you would a college course; enjoy it to the full; count it as so much to the good, and then when it was over turn in and buckle down to hard work; for without the hard work you certainly can not make a success of life.”
If the idea of traveling to a South American city was unusual for most Americans in 1913, venturing into the dense jungles of the Amazon was simply out of the question. With the exception of a few large and widely spaced rivers, each more than eight hundred miles long, there was a blank, unexplored spot on the map of South America the size of Germany, and within it lay the vast, tangled expanse of the Amazon rain forest.
Any promise that the railroad held, however, was eclipsed by the horrors of building it. In The Sea and the Jungle, his classic 1912 book on the Amazon, British author H. M. Tomlinson described meeting some of the men who worked on the railroad.
Nicknamed “Mad Maria” by the engineers who designed it, the railroad took five years to finish, and by the time it was ready in 1912, the South American rubber trade had gone bust, and the estimated six thousand men who had died of disease and starvation trying to build it had lost their lives for nothing.
There were few places on earth that were of greater interest to the former president than the Amazon—not just because it promised adventure but because it was a naturalist’s Shangri-La.
By the time he was in the White House, Roosevelt was not merely the most powerful elected official in the country, but one of its most knowledgeable and experienced naturalists.
When Roosevelt was only fourteen years old, he began contributing specimens to New York’s American Museum of Natural History, the museum that his father had helped found in 1869.
Although Roosevelt chose politics over science, he never lost his passion for natural history, and his ascent to high office afforded him ever-expanding opportunities to follow his obsession.
Although he did not contemplate anything too difficult or dangerous, the sheer scale of the continent’s natural wonders promised a rich and absorbing adventure, crowned by the chance to have a firsthand look—however casual—at the wonders of the Amazon.
In looking to the museum for advice, Roosevelt was turning to the epicenter of American natural science. The museum, encompassing four city blocks between Seventy-seventh and Eighty-first Streets, had grown during Roosevelt’s lifetime to become not only one of the world’s leading natural-history museums, but also a renowned sponsor of expeditions to all corners of the earth, from the North Pole to the Gobi Desert to the lush jungle of the Congo.
Osborn, who would earn a place in history for naming the Tyrannosaurus Rex, did not have the specialized regional knowledge necessary to help the former president with his plan, but he pledged the full support of the museum staff, and offered the assistance of Frank Chapman, head of the museum’s ornithology department, whom Roosevelt knew and respected from his own detailed study of birds.
A slight, balding man with heavily lidded blue eyes and cup-handle ears, Father Zahm was a strange pastiche of seemingly incongruent interests and passions, which had placed him at the crossroads of religion, science, and politics.
In 1896, while still at Notre Dame, Zahm had even taken the extraordinary step of publishing a book defending evolution. The book, titled Evolution and Dogma, bravely argued that evolution “explains countless facts and phenomena which are explicable on no other theory,” and that, rather than being religion’s enemy, was its ally.
