Episode 75 - Cowboys, Theodore Roosevelt & Americans in the Anglo-Boer War

This week I'm focusing on America and Americans who fought in the war. What made Americans travel half way around the world to fight for both the Boers and the English? The initial answer is obvious - given the Boer’s attempts at forging independence from the British Empire, something the Americans had done one hundred and 30 years before. “I have been absorbed in interest in the Boer War,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt to his friend Cecil Spring Rice in 1899. “The Boers are belated Cromwellians, with many fine traits. They deeply and earnestly believe in their cause, and they attract the sympathy which always goes to the small nation. … But it would be for the advantage of mankind to have English spoken south of the Zambesi just as in New York; and as I told one of my fellow Knickerbockers the other day, as we let the Uhlanders of old in here, I do not see why the same rule is not good enough in the Transvaal.” He was not alone. Most Americans took a keen interest in this remote conflict, many espoused the same belief in what they earnestly believed was the British civilising influence in Southern Africa. Two years later later, though the former Senator and now president Roosevelt wrote: “I am not an Anglomaniac any more than I am an Anglophobe … but I am keenly alive to the friendly countenance England gave us in 1898. … I have been uncomfortable about the Boer War, and notably in reference to certain details of the way it was brought on; but I have far too lively a knowledge of our national shortcomings to wish to say anything publicly that would hamper or excite feeling against a friendly nation for which I have a hearty admiration and respect.” That contradiction was played out across the USA. Leading newspapers sent their correspondents to the front; the war was debated in Congress and discussed in Cabinet meetings; private organisations sprang up to help one side or the other; a surprising number of Americans actually made their way to South Africa and joined the fight; and toy stores stocked up on two new games, one called “Boer and Briton” and the other “The War in South Africa”. In addition, the United States sold the British tens of thousands of tons of preserved meat, hay, and oats as well as horses, mules and oxen. Boers and their friends in America tried to prevent such sales, and the Chicago branch of the American Transvaal League and the Boer Legislative Committee of Philadelphia lodged formal protests with Washington. Although publishing legend and businessman William Randolph Hearst thought Britain should win—because as he put it “civilization and progress demand it”—most American publishers and their newspapers were pro-Boer. For Example, the man who gave us the Pulitzer prize, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World sided with the Boers and favoured American mediation. It even worked up a petition to the President urging this which was signed by 19 bishops and archbishops, 104 out of 442 members of Congress, 89 college presidents, 13 mayors of important cities, and many distinguished judges, editors, and businessmen.