Theodore Roosevelt Killed by Egyptian Nationalists, 1910

"After spending a few days in visiting Omdurman and other scenes connected with the British conquest of the Mahdists, less than a dozen years before, the Roosevelts went down the river to Cairo, where the ex-President addressed the Egyptian students. These were the backbone of the so-called Nationalist Party, which aimed at driving out the British and had killed the Prime Minister a month before. They warned Roosevelt that if he dared to touch on this subject he, too, would be assassinated. But such threats did not move him then or ever. Roosevelt reproved them point-blank for killing Boutros Pasha, and told them that a party which sought freedom must show its capacity for living by law and order, before it could expect to deserve freedom." William R. Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography (1919) http://www.bartleby.com/170/20.html

"Clueless, Roosevelt [in his Cairo University speech] squandered any good will which his attempts at Arabic might have gained him. The students were furious. They demonstrated outside his hotel. Even conservative Egyptian politicians wondered 'if Roosevelt was aware that the British had obstructed the founding of the very university at which he spoke.'...Probably the worst sign of Roosevelt's ineptitude in this situation was his private comment to the journalist Walter Moore, published in the English-language Egyptian Gazette on 9 April 1910: 'That speech of mine at Cairo was a crackery jack. You should have seen the Fuzzy Wuzzies' faces as I told them off. They expected candy, but I gave them the big stick. And they squirmed, Sir; they squirmed.'" Karl K.Barbir, "Alfred Thayer Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, the Middle East, and the Twentieth Century," Journal of Middle Eastern and North African Intellectual and Cultural Studies, volume 2, issue 1. (Edmund Morris in Colonel Roosevelt says that this "alleged boast by TR...is so uncharacteristic in language and attitude that it cannot be credited without corroboration." https://books.google.com/books?id=_mabsSXXhKEC&pg=PA596)

There is a discussion of these events in Michael B. Oren's Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. TR warned that if Britain were to leave Egypt, women would be denied the most basic rights and many more Christians would be murdered. He regarded the leaders of the Nationalist movement, both Muslim and Christian, as noisy, emotional, decadent "Levantine" types in European business suits, hopeless as nation-builders, and explained to the British historian George Otto Trevelyan that it was not those leaders he feared but their followers, "the mass of...bigoted Moslems," committed to "driving out the foreigner, plundering and slaying the local Christian, and return[ing] to all the violence and corruption which festered under the old-style Moslem rule." As Oren remarks, TR was probably unaware that many of the "noisy nationalists leaders" he condemned had been educated at the Syrian Protestant College established by American missionaries in Beirut, and that some of the senior Egyptian officers had studied at schools established in Egypt by American Civil War veterans (he goes into that last point in a chapter entitled "Rebs and Yanks on the Nile." [1]) "The yearning for freedom they expressed was, partially at least, forged by the United States." p. 318 (Americans did get to hear the Egyptian side--Sheikh Ali Yousuff, an Egyptian editor, wrote an article for the North American Review of June 1910 entitled "Egypt's Reply to Colonel Roosevelt," available at https://books.google.com/books?id=zrsxAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA729 Oren briefly summarizes it as assailing Roosevelt "for impugning Egypt's readiness for self-government while praising the power that prevented Egypt from proving itself" and warning that "when Egypt is insulted every Mohammedan on the face of this world feels the insult." Sheikh Yousuff did recognize America's contribution to the struggle for Middle Eastern liberty, though, and said that despite Roosevelt, "We believe that Americans are still...the friends of freedom. The friends of nations that are governed against their will.")

Anyway, hundreds of the nationalists subsequently gathered outside TR's hotel in Cairo for what Oren describes as "the first major anti-American demonstration ever in the Middle East," shouting "Down with Roosevelt" and "Down with the Occupation." Suppose the Egyptian nationalists had followed through on their threats and did indeed kill TR as one of them had recently killed Boutros Pasha (Boutros Ghali, a Copt and the grandfather of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who would be Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1992 to 1996--see Karl K. Barbir's article quoted above and also Samir Raafat's article at https://web.archive.org/…//www.egy.com/people/96-09-18.shtml on why the senior Boutros Ghali was so hated by Egyptian nationalists, who considered him a stooge of the British). I don't know the details of TR's security in Cairo in March 1910 but let's just assume it wasn't foolproof.

Consider first the consequences for British politics. The January 1910 general elections had just been held, and no party had a majority. The Liberals, who won two more seats in the House of Commons than the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists, formed a minority government with the support of the Irish Nationalists, but a second election had to be held in December 1910, with almost identical results. http://en.wikipedia.org/…/United_Kingdom_general_election%2… In this ATL, I assume that the Conservatives are going to argue that the Liberals had mishandled the situation in Egypt, and that the assassination of TR was dramatic proof of it. What effect (if any) will this have on the subsequent election?

Then of course there are the effects on US politics. The absence of a Taft-TR split does not IMO mean that Taft will be re-elected in 1912. His mistakes and misfortunes in office--the Ballinger-Pinchot affair, the Payne-Aldrich Tariff and Taft's praise of it, the revolt against "Cannonism", etc.--had given him an exaggerated reputation as a reactionary and made people compare him unfavorably to TR, which obscures not only Taft's real accomplishments but, for example, what one historian has called "Roosevelt's role in dodging the tariff question during his presidency and the troubled legacy he left for Taft." https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/19924 In any event, the Republicans lost the election of 1910, long before the Progressive Party was formed, and indeed before the Taft-TR relationship reached the stage of an open split. Nor will the absence of TR mean that Taft will be spared Republican primary opposition: there is always La Follette. Taft will of course defeat La Follette for the nomination (it was hard to prevent the renomination of an incumbent Republican president, especially given his control via patronage of Southern delegates, and La Follette in any event was not as popular as TR) but the latter's followers will be embittered and many of them will not vote for Taft in the general election. It is often suggested that the Republicans had a "natural" majority in 1912, and that they lost only because their vote was split between Taft and TR, but this assumes that OTL Bull Moose voters would have overwhelmingly supported Taft in a two-way race with a Democratic candidate, something which I don't think can be assumed.

It is possible, however, that the lack of TR will make some difference in the choice of the Democratic candidate. One of the arguments used by Bryan and others in 1912 was that the Democrats must nominate a progressive or else they would lose progressive votes to the TR third party movement. If TR is not around (and if La Follette does not form a third party), the Democrats may think that they can afford to nominate a relatively conservative candidate, since he will still be seen as more progressive than Taft and therefore progressives will have nowhere else to go (except for a relatively few who might vote for Debs). The problem with this analysis, though, is that most Democrats in 1912 probably wanted a progressive candidate out of conviction and not just because they thought no other kind would win (though Parker's landslide defeat in 1904 was a cautionary lesson). So I still do not see Underwood or Harmon (even though neither of them was really as conservative as portrayed by their opponents) winning the nomination. It is, however, possible that Champ Clark would do better than in OTL; despite Clark's progressive record, Bryan had argued that his support by Tammany made his reformism suspect and could handicap him in the general election. (This was somewhat ironic, because Bryan had happily accepted Tammany support in 1908, though after the election his supporters became convinced that Tammany had "knifed" him. And of course in 1900 Bryan had come to New York and in a celebrated speech had cried out "Great is Tammany, and [boss Richard] Croker is its prophet!") I don't know how many Democratic delegates actually accepted this argument, but in any event it would have been even weaker had TR not been around, and to that extent Clark's chances would have been slightly stronger.

Even assuming that as in OTL Wilson wins the Democratic nomination, and that he goes on to defeat Taft in a one-on-one race, TR's death will still matter to American political history, for two reasons. First of all, while the Democrats will still probably retain control of the House and win control of the Senate in 1912, their margin of control in the 63rd (1913-15) Congress will not be nearly as great as in OTL if there is no Republican-Progressive split (or even if there is such a split but the split is between Republicans and *La Follette* Progressives, who are unlikely to get nearly as many votes as TR Progressives got in OTL). This could make some difference to some of the legislation passed by that Congress (the Underwood Tariff, the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Act, etc.); I'm not saying that they won't pass, but they might not take exactly their OTL form: it might be necessary to make greater concessions to conservatives. Second, without TR, it may be harder for Wilson to win re-election in 1916; Roosevelt's belligerence undoubtedly dissuaded a great many peace-minded voters (especially German-Americans) from voting for Hughes. Arthur Link wrote in *Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era*: "Indeed, Roosevelt was a virtual millstone around Hughes' neck, for the hapless candidate was drawn into approving Roosevelt's declarations, which enabled the Democrats to charge that Hughes also harbored warlike designs. Bemstorff was not far wrong when he wrote the Foreign Office, 'If Hughes is defeated he has Roosevelt to thank for it.'" https://archive.org/stream/woodrowwilsonand007665mbp…

And of course there are the effects in Egypt itself. Very likely there will be a more severe British crackdown on Egyptian nationalism--leading to even greater resentment.

One other thing to consider: Maybe (as I said, I don't know the details) TR was too well guarded in Egypt to be killed there. But what if an Egyptian student were subsequently to kill TR in England a couple of months later? (In this connection, it is relevant that the man who killed Boutros Ghali Pasha was "a young pharmacologist graduate freshly returned from the UK." https://web.archive.org/…//www.egy.com/people/96-09-18.shtml Many of the effects would be similar to TR being killed in Egypt, but here the political fallout in the UK would be much worse, for the failure of security had happened in Great Britain itself, not in distant Egypt. The Liberal Government will be in deep political trouble, and above all Home Secretary Winston Churchill...

(BTW, Roosevelt's Cairo University speech can be found at https://books.google.com/books?id=dEQGAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA15 As a model of equal justice to Christian and Muslim, he gives the US administration in the Philippines...)

[1] "A total of forty-eight Civil War officers, both blue and gray, worked, explored, and occasionally, fought for Egypt. They built an army, erected schools, and blazed new trails into Africa...Indeed, the army they helped create became the leading force for the liberation and modernization of Egypt and remained so for well over a century." pp. 208-9
 
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