Theodore Rex (57 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
My address was felt to be honor enough for one hotel, and the dinner was given in the other. When the dinner was announced the mayor led me in—or to speak more accurately, tucked me under one arm and lifted me partially off the ground, so that I felt as if I looked like one of those limp dolls with dangling legs carried around by small children, like Mary Jane in “The Golliwogs,” for instance. As soon as we
got in the banquet hall and sat at the head of the table the mayor hammered lustily with the handle of his knife and announced, “Waiter, bring on the feed!” Then in a spirit of pure kindliness he added, “Waiter, pull up the curtains and let the people see the President eat!”—but to this I objected. The dinner was soon in full swing.… Of the hundred men who were my hosts I suppose at least half had killed their man in private war, or had striven to encompass the assassination of an enemy. They had fought one another with reckless ferocity. They had been allies and enemies in every kind of business scheme, and companions in brutal revelry. As they drank great goblets of wine the sweat glistened on their hard, strong, crafty faces. They looked as if they had come out of the pictures in Aubrey Beardsley’s Yellow Book.
Roosevelt left prudently early. He stood on the rear platform of the
Elysian
as his train pulled out of town, and the citizens of Butte howled and fired shots into the air. They would doubtless continue to celebrate all night.
After recanvassing Idaho, the train headed south to Salt Lake City, then east, recrossing the plains of Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois. May turned to June. Day after day, freak rainstorms beat down. On either side of the tracks, the vast Midwest lay flat and flooded, halved by Roosevelt’s trajectory. Here, in the heartland of the country, was his political center of gravity. Ahead of him in the baggage car sat his silver scales, effortlessly maintaining their balance. The Negroes of Butte had chosen well. Nothing appealed to him more than
the concept of equilibrium.
Justice separating good and evil, power—“my hand on the lever”—regulating the conflicting interests of blacks and whites, Buffs and Blues, tycoons and tradesmen, the born and the unborn. The phrase he had coined en route,
a square deal
, was potent. He tried it again on 4 June, standing in the drizzle by Lincoln’s tomb. Cheers and applause resounded in the wet air.
He created one further magnificent image at Springfield Armory, as the sun lowered on the last day of his tour. Rhetorically, it was too strange, too poetic, to register on his audience; he seemed hardly to notice it himself, and never used it again. But after eight weeks of travel and 262 speeches, he could think of no more slogans, no positive platitudes. Blinking with exhaustion, he found only a compressed, negative metaphor for himself and the social forces he sought to mediate.
“
Envy and arrogance,” said Roosevelt, “are the two opposite sides of the same black crystal.”
WHATEVER PRIVATE PERPLEXITY
this suggested (did he see the Presidency, for all his efforts to fire it up, as something cold and dark at heart, merely reflecting outside passions?) was negated by male buffoonery that evening, as
the train sped across Indiana.
Roosevelt was sitting in his parlor with the Hoosier State’s quarrelsome senators, Charles W. Fairbanks and Albert J. Beveridge, when two reporters marched in, waggishly attired in top hats and frock coats. “Mr. President, we desire to present you the keys of our great and beautiful car. The freedom of the
Gilsey
is yours, sir.”
Roosevelt recalled that he had promised to accept the hospitality of the press on the final night of his tour. “My fellow Americans,” he cried, his voice choked with fake sobs, “I am deeply affected by this spontaneous welcome, this unparalleled and unprecedented greeting.” He allowed himself to be escorted forward. Fairbanks and Beveridge joined the general exodus of White House staff to the
Gilsey
.
As Roosevelt passed through the
Senegal
, two grinning black porters snapped to attention, saluting him with brooms. Hideous caricatures of “Teddy” lined the walls. A small group of cordoned-off reporters, pretending to be a welcoming crowd, cheered and clicked Kodaks. Roosevelt shook with laughter. “Well, this is bully!” He proceeded under an arch of spread trousers to his table in the
Gilsey
, where the menu sent him into further convulsions. It advertised “Haunch of Snow-fed Cinnabar Mountain Lion” and “Purée of Yosemite Mule,” and was footnoted: “
Guests who find their wine too warm will notice an improvement after placing their glasses between any two Senators from the same state who happen to be present.”
The subsequent dinner was private, but leaks indicated that the President “talked a string and ate like a farmhand.”
He was in bed by midnight. Ohio rumbled by unseen in the small hours. Ahead, Pennsylvania’s hills waited for dawn. Barreling through blackness, the train twisted now left, now right.
White Man Black and Black Man White
Th’ black has manny fine qualities. He is joyous,
light-hearted, an’ easily lynched
.
SENATOR BEVERIDGE AND
others getting off Roosevelt’s train in Washington on 5 June 1903 were amazed to see a multitude jamming Pennsylvania Avenue all the way downtown from Sixth Street Station. Normally the capital paid little attention to executive comings and goings, but this looked like an almost royal welcome. Apparently, the President’s forceful oratory on tour, his widely reported disappearances into the wilderness, and his haughty suppression of Mark Hanna—in Walla Walla, of all places!—had caught the public’s imagination, and strengthened him as the likely ruler of America for six more years.
Roosevelt now enjoyed the endorsement of sixteen state Republican organizations, and seventeen more were expected to follow suit. “He will be nominated by acclamation,” Beveridge predicted, “and elected by the greatest popular majority ever given a President.”
For the moment, Roosevelt was interested in the acclamation of only an intimate minority. He addressed a few words to the crowd in Lafayette Square, then rasped, “
I thank you again, my friends, but now I am going in to my own folks.”
Edith had been busy with landscapers during his absence. The White House grounds, winter-bare when he saw them last, and littered with construction rubble, were elegantly lush. The north lawn was a sheet of velvet, its beds bejeweled with pansies. Blossoms dense as ermine lay on the shrubbery. Fountains rose above the new terraces to east and west, separated by plantings of boxwoods and Dutch bays.
Although the President could not see it yet, there was a surprise tennis court waiting for him just south of his office window.
Perhaps Edith had read about his prodigious eating over the last eight weeks (ox steaks on rye in North Dakota; dozens of fried grayling at Yellowstone; lamb and white bread
spread with cream in Nebraska;
pluvier au cresson
and
petits fours
at St. Louis; a two-hour chuckwagon breakfast on the Colorado prairie; T-bones and broilers at Yosemite; and always, between stops, presidential command of the
Elysian’s
kitchen). He was aware of having gained seventeen pounds en route to the Pacific.
There would be inevitable comparisons with “stout Cortez,” and Elihu Root was bound to ask archly for a copy of his remarks on expansionism.
“THERE WAS A SURPRISE TENNIS COURT WAITING FOR HIM JUST
SOUTH OF HIS OFFICE WINDOW.”
View of the renovated White House, ca. 1903
(photo credit 16.1)
A younger, slimmer, oil-painted Roosevelt greeted him in the vestibule. Edith had hung Fedor Encke’s portrait there, rather than the more recent rendering by John Singer Sargent, knowing that her husband loved to see himself in Rough Rider uniform. “I cannot say that I think it looks particularly like me,” he commented, but admitted that it was the image he wanted his children to have of him.
Roosevelt’s vanity was oddly leavened with modesty.
He never failed to take the bait when Root drawled, “Mr. President, I would like so much to have you give us an account of the fight at San Juan Hill,” yet he deferred to all Civil War veterans. He lectured some of the finest minds in America on their own specialties, while protesting his own intellectual ordinariness: “I am but the average man.” Living in a White House more formal than any in history, he nevertheless entertained cowboys and backwoodsmen there, on equal terms with Cabinet officers and diplomats.
Although political analysts were beginning to use the word
genius
to describe his political sleight of hand, he scoffed at such hyperbole. Genius was what drove Frank Jarvis in the hundred meters, or John Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “power to do what no one else has the power to do.” His own power, idiosyncratic as it seemed, was the same given to all Presidents. Democratically won, it could be democratically lost, as soon as he failed to please.
Yet his wife, watching him swig Apollinaris from his Golden State loving cup “as if he were a King of Thule,” noticed a new, almost placid confidence in his attitude toward affairs of state. Less intimate observers, such as former Senator David B. Hill, feared the development of “demagogical and dangerous tendencies.” There was little anyone could do to restrain Roosevelt for the next half year, until the new Congress was sworn in. Three current issues offered him much opportunity for executive rashness: Jewish demands to protest the Kishinev pogrom; allegations of spoilsmanship, forgery, bribery, and fraud in the Post Office Department; and reports that resistance to the Panama Canal Treaty had developed in Colombia.
To all of these challenges the King of Thule felt equal.
He would receive the Jews and make the Post Office’s own internal investigation (relating, fortunately, to matters predating his presidency) an essay on open government. But the third matter required urgent attention.
ONE OF HIS FIRST
acts on returning to his desk was to ask the State Department for a copy of the 1902 Canal Bill, which spelled out his powers in the event of nonratification.
John Hay cautioned him that
there was no immediate crisis. The Colombian Congress had not yet assembled to debate the treaty. And President José Manuel Marroquín was constitutionally authorized to override any negative vote.