Theodore Rex (88 page)

When Cortelyou again said nothing, Roosevelt lost patience. “
I have never seen him so troubled,” his wife wrote.
The question was no longer one of whether he should enter the campaign, but when. With Election Day looming on Tuesday, 8 November, he decided that the Saturday morning prior would be the best moment to hit Parker, and “hit him hard.” That way, the judge would suffer a repeated onslaught of headlines throughout the weekend, and would be unable to publish much of a reply before Monday—too late, probably, to regain the initiative.

Parker was tempted into a final indiscretion on Thursday, 3 November, when he accused the Republican National Committee of “blackmail” and
threats to leak secret data from the Bureau of Corporations.
This was going too far, as he himself seemed to realize the following day, when he hedged on the source of his information in a lame speech in Brooklyn.

Shortly before twelve o’clock that night, the President released his statement.
Old-time journalists had to look back to the 1880s for a political utterance that packed more force. It was long—over a thousand words—but passionate enough to compel thorough reading. He began by rephrasing Parker’s charges and innuendos, making them sound at once more extreme, yet easier to refute. His prose in answer was shotgunned with characteristic repetitions and alliterations that lodged in anyone’s memory the points he wanted to make.

Roosevelt asked all voters to check his record as the prosecutor of
Northern Securities
and the mediator of the coal strike, and then ponder Parker’s cozy relations with the “great corporate interests” that had financed the
Democratic
campaign. With a sarcastic pun, he compared the judge’s “trusted” advisers to his own roster of Root, Knox, Crane, Moody, Garfield, and Cortelyou—all of whom must be corrupt, if one was.

“
The statements made by Mr. Parker,” he again declared, “are unqualifiedly and atrociously false.”

“
VICTORY. TRIUMPH.
My Father is elected,” Alice wrote in her diary for 8 November 1904. “Received Parker’s congratulatory telegram at 9. Carried New York State by over 200,000. Higgins elected Governor. An unprecedented landslide. It is all colossal.”

Her last adjective was no girlish exaggeration. Although the full dimension of the President’s majority would take days to tabulate, he had been returned to power by thirty-three of the forty-five states, even managing to detach Missouri from the historically solid “South.” He seemed certain to amass at least as large a popular vote as McKinley’s in 1900, and to outscore every one of his twenty-five predecessors in the electoral college.

Purged by his last-minute blast at Parker, astounded at the extent of his sweep, and reverential to the memory of George Washington, he dictated a quick statement to reporters at 10:30
P.M.
in the White House vestibule, while Alice Roosevelt stood by, not quite believing her ears.

“
On the fourth of March next I shall have served three and a half years, and this three and a half years constitutes my first term. The wise custom which limits the President to two terms regards the substance and not the form. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.”

ON THE DAY AFTER
Roosevelt’s election, Wilbur and Orville Wright took their flying machine on a series of long, celebratory hops over Ohio. Farther west, other aviators vied for the St. Louis World’s Fair Grand Prize for Aeronautic Achievement. With less than a month to go before the exposition formally closed, the award—one hundred thousand dollars—seemed impossible of attainment, a chimera not unlike the nightly glow of one hundred thousand fairground lights trying to hold back the encroachment of the prairie.

Since the Brazilian birdman Alberto Santos-Dumont had arrived in St. Louis in June, only to have his long silk gasbag slashed while in storage, American “aero-planes,” airships, ornithopters, gliders, balloons, and kites had been lifting off in wobbly attempts to make three flights over a fifteen-mile, L-shaped course. Metallic lighter-than-air cylinders, pterodactyl-like contraptions flapping bamboo wings, aluminum-and-silk sky-cycles, and huge cigars and saucers and tetrahedrons defied gravity with varying success—most triumphantly the
California Arrow
, a dirigible that floated for thirty-seven minutes over the exhibition’s fluttering flags. If unable to perform the requisite L, it described many graceful Os, wheeling careless of the wind, and releasing, at two thousand feet, a pigeon that tired of flight long before it did.

Nobody won the Grand Prize, but various ascents advanced the frontiers of science. Three men in a balloon soared almost two miles high and sent down wireless messages in the first American demonstration of air-to-ground telegraphy. Two airship distance records were broken. And throughout the final weeks of the Fair, as the President of the United States prepared to visit, an effervescence of meteorological balloons rose until they burst, dropping little basketfuls of data under cones of silk.

HENRY ADAMS
, who loved expositions as much as he hated politics, had visited St. Louis at the earliest opportunity. Stooped and sedentary at sixty-six, he was inspired less by the Fair’s awkward attempts at levitation than by its horizontal dynamic, the almost contemptuous way a small Midwestern city had turned its back on the Mississippi and scattered palaces across the plain,
gilding them with dollars and bathing them with light, daring the distant world to come and save it from insolvency.

Adams saw such thin crowds, and such a consequent emptiness of exhibits and promenades, that he doubted the city fathers would recoup a third of their twenty or thirty million. Yet they seemed “
quite drunk” with expectations of profit, as Roosevelt had been earlier in the year, at the height of his unpopularity with Congress. The Fair was
schwärmerisch
—visionary—and above all paradoxical in its crass commercialism and unstudied beauty. “
One asked oneself whether this extravagance reflected the past or imaged the future; whether it was a creation of the old America or the promise of the new one.”

Both coming and going, Adams (who had not been that far west in a decade) was struck by the raw power pulsating from landscapes once agricultural, now industrial—steam engines and smokestacks dirtying the air and surrounding each town with a no-man’s-land of “discards.” Ever since confronting an enormous, silently whirring dynamo at the last World’s Fair—in Paris, four years before—he had been trying to formulate a dynamic theory of history that would index man’s progress (or regress) to the curve of power production. But the curve was now becoming so steep, and the progress (or, again, regress) so fast that Adams saw nothing ahead but an acceleration that threatened the law of inertia.

He had tried to show, in his just-completed study of medievalism,
Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres
, that the “conservative Christian” civilization of the preceding nineteen hundred years had been dominated by one centripetal, feminine, fertile image, the Virgin. She had erected all of Europe’s great cathedrals, humanized its laws, and inspired its family and social values. One did not have to be a Catholic, or for that matter a European, to look to her for comfort. But now the centrifugal, masculine, destructive Dynamo threatened the Virgin—and, more personally, Henry Adams’s whole worldview.

The settled life, the
vis inertiae
he had enjoyed since boyhood, whose blue blood and classical education gave him a sense of stability at rest, and of steady direction when advancing himself, must soon, apparently, change to a perpetual motion that was not so much forward as omnidirectional, and favored the less weighted members of society: the young, the rudely opportunistic, above all the nimble Jews. In which case, he and his beloved John Hay were bound to be thrown off while Roosevelt,
the very personification of dynamism (and with something of a “Jew look,” come to think of it, in a strong light), spun St. Louis, and Washington, and the world, into a maelstrom beyond Adams’s power to control.

“
The devil is whirling me round, in the shape of a grinning fiend with tusks and eye-glasses … faster and faster, and I can’t get off.”

ROOSEVELT GOT TO
the World’s Fair just in time, on 26 November, as the commissioners were preparing to douse its lights.
He came at the behest of Henry Adams—or rather, at the behest of Edith, whom Adams had urged to see the white palaces before they reverted to prairie.

“
We really had great fun, although we only spent one day at the Fair,” Roosevelt reported to Kermit. Unconsciously using Adams’s own language, he described his visit as “a perfect whirl.”
He stomped through the display halls so fast that even Alice had to run to catch up. His hurry was less a matter of urgency than camouflage: unbeknownst to reporters, he was nursing several boxing and riding injuries, including a burst blood vessel that had spread a bruise “big as two dinner plates” across the inside of his thigh.

He was impressed by the beauty of the illuminations, but only one exhibit spoke to him personally. It was his own Maltese Cross ranch cabin from 1884, reverently presented by the State of North Dakota.

The presidential train did not depart St. Louis until after midnight on 28 November. Edith, exhausted, retired to her stateroom, but Roosevelt still had some energy to work off. He called for a stenographer and dictated a thousand-word letter-review of James Ford Rhodes’s five-volume
History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850
. Inevitably if naïvely, the great theme of North versus South made him think of his own recent Appomattox at the polls, and he segued into a jovial reflection that Democratic cartoonists had played into his hands by representing him as the eternal Rough Rider, “carrying a big stick and threatening foreign nations.” This had only made a “kind of
ad captandum
appeal on my behalf,” especially to younger voters.

A couple of midnights later, as November gave way to December, the president of the World’s Fair turned a rheostat at the base of the Louisiana Purchase Monument, and the illuminations began to fade as one hundred thousand spectators applauded. They had some reason to cheer.
Nearly nineteen million visitors from around the world had helped replenish the city’s coffers, if not those of the exposition itself. Clearly “the spirit of St. Louis”—a new expression, already popular—was more potent than the pessimistic whinings of Henry Adams.