Theodore Rex (42 page)

Roosevelt’s hopes for nomination in 1904 were thus extended to probable election as President in his own right, by a margin of nearly 170 electoral votes. No doubt he would never capture Dixie, but the rest of the country offered a dazzling perspective. The only flecks in this kaleidoscope were those of Republican insurgents in the Midwest—Governor LaFollette of Wisconsin looming particularly large. One of these days, that particular crystal would have to be shaken into the pattern, no matter how jarring its color.

A SIGNBOARD READING SMEDES
dripped with the damp of a Mississippi autumn afternoon.
On one side of the rails was a depot; on the other, a plantation store. Cotton fields sprawled dully, their extent incalculable behind curtains of mist. About twenty Negroes waited on bales, swinging their legs
and staring down the track toward Vicksburg. The President had tried to keep the location of his hunting trip secret, but bush telegraph advised that he would look for bear hereabouts, on the banks of the Little Sunflower River.

Among the bale-sitters, at least, Roosevelt was guaranteed a welcome. Ever since his dinner for Booker T. Washington, Southern blacks had called him “our President” and compared him to Lincoln. They did not care that he had only just announced his first appointment of a Negro to high federal office—Dr. William D. Crum, Collector-designate of Customs in Charleston, South Carolina. It was good enough that
he elsewhere favored moderate white Democrats over the “Lily White” extremists of his own party. Had not Dr. Washington himself declared Roosevelt’s opposition to any further “
drawing of the color line” in Southern politics?

Within the depot, two plantation owners were also waiting.
George H. Helm and Hugh L. Foote were not ashamed to show support for the President in a state where so many of his own race despised him. Roosevelt could hardly have chosen a worse time to visit the Yazoo delta. The idea of Dr. Crum (wealthy, cultured, conscientious, but … 
black)
seated in a position of power overlooking Fort Sumter was incendiary enough to revive the passions of a year ago—not to mention the passions of 1861. James K. Vardaman, a prominent Mississippi Democrat, had openly advertised for “16 coons to sleep with Roosevelt.” Given such propaganda, the President’s hosts were worried about a possible assassination attempt. Hence the secrecy surrounding his hunt, and the remoteness of his camp, fifteen miles east of Smedes, in a privately owned forest choked with bud vine and briar. Only one access trail had been hacked. Armed guards were on patrol, ready to stop with buckshot any unauthorized stranger.

Shortly before four o’clock, a locomotive and private car steamed out of the mist and clanked to a halt. Roosevelt emerged in leather leggings, a blue flannel shirt, and a rough corduroy jacket. Around his waist was a cartridge belt, flashing with steel-jacketed and soft-nose bullets. An ivory-handled hunting knife rode on his hip, and he gripped his favorite .40-.90 Winchester. The gun was custom-made, with a crescent cheek-piece that somehow helped alleviate Roosevelt’s 8-D myopia. Its walnut butt was scarred with Colorado cougar bites.

He stepped down with a crunch of hobnail boots onto Mississippi soil, followed by George Cortelyou and the rest of his hunting party. Helm and Foote, assuming he wanted to shed his presidential identity, addressed him politely as “Colonel.” He shook hands, then heaved himself onto a waiting horse. His companions mounted, too, and they rode off together into the fog.

THE NEXT FIVE DAYS
made for the worst hunt of Roosevelt’s life: “simply exasperating … I never got a shot.” Bears were not rare around the Little
Sunflower, just rare wherever he went. His veteran catcher, Holt Collier (lifetime tally, 1,600 specimens), tried to lure game within range of the presidential rifle, yet hunter and prey invariably moved in different directions.

The other men in the party did not dare to bag anything themselves. Roosevelt insisted on first blood. “
I am going on this hunt to kill a bear, not to see anyone else kill it.”
Embarrassingly, he had given representatives of the three press agencies permission to visit camp once a day. The resultant nonstories caused national hilarity. He was obliged to let his companions shoot a bear and a deer, if only to soothe their Southern pride.

Paradoxically, one misadventure worked to his political advantage, and spawned the most enduring of all Rooseveltian myths. Early on the morning of 14 November, Holt Collier’s hounds scented bear and began to yelp. Roosevelt and Foote galloped after the pack, but thickening brush cut them off. Collier tactfully suggested that they stake out a nearby clearing, while he rounded up the critter and drove it past them—“same as anybody would drive a cow.”

The yelping of the hounds receded into silence. Roosevelt and Foote sat for hours, sweating as the sun climbed and cooked the humidity of the forest. Noon came, and with it boredom and hunger. Eventually they concluded that Collier’s bear had gone astray, so they might as well ride back to camp for lunch.

No sooner had they left than a lean black bear burst through the brush with the pack at its heels. Hot and exhausted, it lunged into a pond, and the dogs splashed after it. The bear reared and struck out, crushing one hound’s spine. Collier threw a lariat over the shaggy neck and pulled tight. Then he waded in and cracked the bear’s skull with the butt of his gun—carefully, because he wanted it to stay alive.

Back at the camp, the hunters heard excited horn calls. A messenger from Collier galloped up. “They done got a bear out yonder about ten miles and ‘Ho’ wants the Colonel to come out and kill him.”

Roosevelt rode back at full speed. He was both disappointed and upset, on reaching the pond, to find a stunned, bloody, mud-caked runt tied to a tree. At 235 pounds, the bear was not much bigger than he. He refused to shoot. “
Put it out of its misery,” he said. Somebody dispatched it with a knife.

The hunt continued for another three days, but the curse of that tortured bear kept Roosevelt’s bullets cold. He did not know, as he crashed vainly through the mists, that the outside world was already applauding his “sportsmanlike” refusal to kill for killing’s sake. Clifford Berryman, the
Washington Post
cartoonist, was inspired to make a visual pun linking the incident with the President’s race policy. He sketched a very black bear being roped about the neck by a very white catcher, and Roosevelt turning away in disgust, with sloped rifle. The cartoon appeared on the front page of the
Post
on 16 November, captioned
DRAWING THE LINE IN MISSISSIPPI
.

Whether or not readers got Berryman’s pun, they rejoiced in his imagery, and demanded more “bear cartoons” after Roosevelt returned to Washington. Berryman obliged—again and again, as he realized he had hit upon a symbol the public adored. With repetition, his original lean bear became smaller, rounder, and cuter. He drew it as “a poor measly little cub with most of its fur rubbed off, and big ears like prickly pears,” and it became the leitmotif of every cartoon he drew of Theodore Roosevelt.

That winter, by one of the mysterious coincidences that yoke inventions, stuffed, plush bear cubs with button eyes and movable joints began to issue from Margarete Stieff’s toy factory in Giengen, Germany.
Three thousand were ordered by F.A.O. Schwarz of New York City, while in Brooklyn a storekeeper named Morris Michtom began producing something similar at $1.50 each. The competing bears soon fused, along with Berryman’s cub, into a single cuddly entity that attached to itself the nickname of the President of the United States. For decades, perhaps centuries to come, uncounted millions of children across the world would hug their Teddy Bears, even as the identities of Stieff, Michtom, Berryman, and Roosevelt himself rubbed away like lost plush.

EDITH ROOSEVELT RECEIVED
her husband in a White House immeasurably different from the dark, dank mansion they had inherited from the McKinleys.
Gone were the executive offices crowding the second floor, and the malignant outgrowth of greenhouses on the west facade. Gone were the sagging floorboards that needed to be shimmed up during receptions, the barroom glass screens and scuffed wooden stairs, the curly wallpaper and wainscots jaundiced with fifty years of tobacco spit. Gone, too, were the mustard carpets, the dropsical radiators, the sad-smelling laundry, the vertical wooden pipes that made flatulent noises in wet weather. Best of all, gone was the china hen, hatching a nestful of china eggs, that had bid a glazed welcome to every visitor to the vestibule since the time of President Hayes.

For this improvement alone, the Roosevelts were entitled to the thanks of a grateful nation. But McKim, Mead & White had done more than strip; they had extensively rebuilt, while remaining faithful to Roosevelt’s injunction that the White House should be “restored to what it was planned to be by Washington.” Outwardly it was the same, except for fresh paint and the addition of two sweeping pillared pavilions. Even these were not altogether new, for the eastern pavilion rose on the site of one demolished thirty years before, while the western, designed by Benjamin Latrobe and Thomas Jefferson, was simply exposed after decades of being hidden behind greenhouse glass.

The pavilions flanked a spacious basement that had been transformed into reception rooms capable of handling thousands of visitors at a time. In
place of pipes and boilers—now sunk out of sight and earshot—there were parlors for ladies and gentlemen entering from the new porte cochere on East Executive Avenue. A separate, oval luxury lounge was provided for diplomats arriving through the south door. The vaulted corridor linking these suites with the central stairway made an art gallery. Edith Roosevelt had graced its white walls with portraits of First Ladies. Now Dolley Madison, “Lemonade Lucy” Hayes, and Edith herself, sumptuously portrayed in white chiffon by Théobald Chartran, could observe the flow of guests strolling up to the ground floor.

“
The first impression one gets,” an architectural critic wrote of the main vestibule, “is that its size has been greatly increased.” Cleared of all clutter, refinished in buff and pure white, soaring above marble slabs that shone like mirrors, the hall seemed to breathe light and air. A delicate screen of wrought iron barred any further ascent of the stairs, while six stately columns invitingly revealed the crimson-carpeted corridor. There was a dramatic feeling of entrance, of access to power.

Thanks to solid reconstruction, it was now possible to walk the length of the corridor without creakings or precautionary detours. A further burst of light heralded the East Room. This great parlor was so changed that only people remembering the days of President Monroe could view it without shock. Charles McKim had scraped, chipped, and burned away eighty-four years’ accretion of fust and filigree, leaving nothing but the original walls. New waxed parquet reflected three coruscating chandeliers. Bronze standards glowed in every corner, and marble wainscots and consoles augmented the general radiance. Twelve classical bas-reliefs replaced the dark portraits that used to hang over the doors like guillotine blades. Window drapes and banquette seats were of yellow silk. The room’s only baroque decoration was a magnificently carved and gilded grand piano, courtesy of Steinway and Sons.