Some senators detected a note of self-identification in this appeal, and guffawed as it was read aloud. Meanwhile, sugar-heavy freighters wallowed in the island’s ports, symbols of prosperity held in check.
ANOTHER CAUSE DEAR to Roosevelt’s heart—reclamation of the arid West—was preoccupying the House that same day. He did not want to have a second Special Message laughed at, so he wrote a passionate letter to the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee:
My dear Mr. Cannon: I do not believe that I have ever before written to an individual legislator in favor of an individual bill, but I break through my rule to ask you as earnestly as I can not to oppose the [National Reclamation Bill]. Believe me this is something of which I have made a careful study, and great and real though my deference is for your knowledge of legislation, and for your attitude in stopping expense, yet I feel from my acquaintance with the Far West that it would be a genuine and rankling injustice for the Republican party to kill this measure. I believe in it with all my heart from any standpoint.… Surely it is but simple justice for us to give the arid regions a measure of relief, the financial burden of which will be but trifling.… I cannot too strongly express my feeling upon this matter.
Faithfully yours,
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Representative Joseph (“Not One Cent for Scenery”) Cannon was Congress’s leading anticonservationist. In Illinois, where he hailed from, well-watered corn thrust tall out of the nation’s richest soil. But the President spoke for a harsher, more remote West, where recent settlers struggled to fertilize the desert. He had tasted enough alkali dust as a young rancher in the Badlands to understand the desperation of stockmen unable to breed, farmers unable to reap or sow.
For a quarter of a century, environmental pioneers had urged the construction of vast irrigation systems to collect and distribute Western floodwaters. John Wesley Powell and WJ McGee noted that the arid lands thus reclaimed—one third of the total area of the United States—could be sold to farmers and ranchers, and the profits recycled for further reclamation. But Congress had responded with unenforceable public land laws, allowing a “water monopoly” to grow up in the West. This combination levied extortionate rates where supply was meager, and dried out established communities in order to irrigate speculative tracts elsewhere.
Roosevelt expressed “keen personal pride” in the reclamation measure. It seemed to him properly to combine federal responsibility with private enterprise, in that water rights would be sold, deposit-free and interest-free, to small farmers, who would eventually repay the government out of the profits from their irrigated property. Although it was offered in the appropriate name of Francis G. Newlands (D., Nevada), the President felt that it had grown out of the irrigation proposals of his First Annual Message, and he protested vehemently when Newlands claimed authorship.
Cannon ignored Roosevelt’s letter, but a majority of the House, responding to strong White House pressure, voted in favor of the bill. The Senate followed suit. On 17 June 1902, Roosevelt delightedly signed the National Reclamation Act into law. It funded a six-hundred-man civil-engineering force within the National Geological Survey, and conjured up, like some glittering grail of future prosperity, a vision of dams and aqueducts bejeweling the country’s unwatered tracts. “They must be built for permanence and safety,” the President urged, “for they are to last and spread prosperity for centuries.”
Reclamationists spoke almost drunkenly of supporting a new population of one hundred million, and creating such opportunities for American producers as to make the current economy seem like penury. Mark Hanna praised the act as Theodore Roosevelt’s first major legislative achievement, and said that its importance would grow with the years. “People have not paid much attention to this business.… It’s a damn big thing.”
DURING THE NEXT two days, the Senator, grumbling “he was two thirds crazy, he was so tired,” launched a final blitz for Panama votes. Bunau-Varilla conducted a simultaneous propaganda campaign, sending every Senator a Nicaraguan postage stamp showing the live cone of Momotombo. “An official witness,” he typed beneath, “of the volcanic activity of the Isthmus of Nicaragua.” Cromwell lobbied in his own secretive fashion. One by one, the ten votes Hanna needed slipped from the Nicaragua checklist. When it was clear that Panama would prevail, the slippage became an avalanche. The final tally, on 19 June, was 67 to 6 in favor of a Panama canal.
By a margin of 44 to 34, the Senate also approved the Spooner Amendment. Theodore Roosevelt, nine months President of the United States, was handed power to join the world’s largest oceans. Forty million dollars—the largest sum in real-estate history, dwarfing the Louisiana Purchase—was placed at his disposal, plus $130 million in construction funds. Exultant, he forecast that the Panama Canal would be “the great bit of work of my administration, and from the material and constructive standpoint one of the greatest bits of work that the twentieth century will see.”
ROOSEVELT’S EUPHORIA WAS short-lived, because two days later a delegation of Republican leaders informed him that his Special Message on Cuba had failed. Hearteningly, though, Senators Aldrich, Platt, Hanna, Spooner, and Foraker had all backed him up. But the party’s endemic inability to agree on tariff reciprocity had defeated even them. He had to take what comfort he could in widespread admiration for his goodwill toward Cuba and his “spectacular courage.” Even the New York Evening Post, not usually complimentary, had called him “a brave man and a real President.”
Somewhat cheered, Roosevelt left town on 24 June to accept an honorary degree from Harvard. Early next morning, the sun-tipped spires and elms of his alma mater appeared across the Charles. After a reunion breakfast in Back Bay with members of the Class of 1880, he crossed Harvard Bridge in a plush carriage. He relaxed comfortably against its cushions in his white waistcoat, a Porcellian Club button at his breast, squinting at the bright water. Then the familiar elms of Cambridge dappled his silk hat, and bugle calls and cheers heralded his approach to Harvard Yard. Here, twenty-five years before, he had nursed the first great sorrow of his life; twenty-four years before, wheezed asthmatic over Rhetoric and Comparative Anatomy; twenty-three years before, suffered agonies over a girl from Chestnut Hill. As long as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me.…
Grief; disease; desire. And now, even more privately, Edith’s failure to carry her latest baby to term. Only the most masculine activism could dispel these feminine frailties. Roosevelt burst from his carriage like a bear. At the welcoming ceremony in Massachusetts Hall, he stood erect and talkative, his big chest nudging the presidential robes of Charles William Eliot.
Outside in the Yard, the Class of 1902 was yelling for “Teddy.” Stimulated by the sound of cheers and press of flesh, Roosevelt began to radiate his famous electricity. He joined the Commencement procession. Deputy marshals Owen Wister and Woodbury Kane, ’82, followed him.
WISTER When we were in college, you didn’t used to like him much. How do you feel now?
KANE If he and I were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, and he ordered me to jump over, I’d do it without asking why.
ROOSEVELT (calling) What are you fellows dangling behind for? Come alongside!
WISTER (hurrying to catch up) Unconditional surrender?
KANE Absolutely, old man.
The President’s behavior after receiving his honorary LL.D. was so archetypal as to imprint itself on the eyes and ears of many observers. Dr. Eliot escorted him to a guest suite to change, and watched with fascination as he tore off his coat and vest and slammed a large pistol on the dresser. Eliot asked if it was his habit to carry firearms. “Yes, when I am going into public places.”
At the Alumni Banquet, Roosevelt spied Senator Hoar and plumped down beside him like an impulsive boy. He whispered a confession, saying it was his “dearest wish” to do what the Senator wanted in the Philippines.
Dr. Eliot began to speak, interrupting them. At the first mention of the wo
rd millions, so dear to university presidents, Roosevelt’s attention wandered. Finance meant no more to him than the music of Chopin. He suppressed a yawn, and swiveled in his seat, staring at pictures on the walls. When John D. Long introduced him with a joke about his inability to sit still in any position of power, Roosevelt shook from head to foot with laughter. Moments later, he was leaning over the high table at an angle of thirty degrees, his teeth still bared, but no longer in mirth.
John Hay, seated nearby, knew what was coming. Harvard, to Theodore, was a temple defiled by mugwumps, who congregated here to exchange the dull coins of anti-imperialism. Sure enough, Roosevelt launched into a stentorian defense of his island administrations, and of the public servants who sacrificed their careers to help “weaker friends … along the stony and difficult path of self-government.” Clapping his hands for emphasis, he bit three names out of the air: “Elihu Root … Will Taft … General Wood!” Root could be earning fabulous fees as a corporate lawyer in New York, Taft could be a Justice of the Supreme Court, and Wood, in a more mythologically inclined culture, would be celebrated as “a hero mixed up with a sun god” for the miracles he had performed in Cuba.
Hay, listening, sensed a thought in many old heads: He is so young, and will be with us for many a day to come. The President’s forehead wriggled, his pince-nez flashed, and his harsh voice skipped from baritone to squeak, as pent-up loyalties poured out. With a final lunge across the linen, he roared, “I can show my appreciation in no way save the wholly insufficient one of standing up for them and their works, and that I do!”
He dropped back to his seat, drenched with sweat, and got a standing ovation. Hay marveled at his power to transform a skeptical audience. Even Dr. Eliot was moved. “He has genius, force, originality.” Old Edward Everett Hale, who had attended more Commencements than any man present, babbled that the President had made “a speech to be remembered … for centuries.”
Roosevelt had to attend four more functions, and make three more speeches, before he could retire to his private car. Pale with exhaustion, he vomited and went straight to bed. He was asleep before the train left Boston.
WASHINGTON WAS SHUTTERING up for the summer when he got back. Edith and the children had left for Oyster Bay. Even the White House was barred to him, on account of extensive restoration and refurbishment by the architect Charles McKim. Carpenters were busy salvaging historic bits of floorboard, and plaster dust floated out of every window. It would not be habitable again until the fall.
He took up temporary residence a few doors away, at 22 Jackson Place, and signed a last-minute stack of bills, none of them his. Legislation, Roosevelt realized, was not his forte. Public leadership was. Invitations were flooding in for him to address audiences in New England in August, in the Midwest in September, in the far West whenever he cared to come. He accepted them indiscriminately, even a grotesque summons from Los Angeles, singed across the shoulders of a calfskin.
“THE CAPITAL DROWSED INTO ITS ANNUAL DOLDRUMS.”
Theodore Roosevelt’s White House in summer (photo credit 7.2)
Congress adjourned on the first day of July. The capital drowsed into its annual doldrums. Hardly a hoofbeat disturbed the shimmering pavements, and cicadas hummed in Lafayette Square. Roosevelt, dressed in white from head to foot, had one final, purgative duty to perform: a proclamation of amnesty in the Philippines. It had to be written around the fact that the Moros of Mindanao were not yet subjugated. They were fanatic Muslims, and could be conveniently differentiated from other Filipinos. Elsewhere, Pax Americana ruled throughout the archipelago. In a lame attempt to equate civil government with independence, Roosevelt postdated the declaration “July Fourth, 1902.”
Only then did he feel free to join his family on the shores of Long Island Sound.
CHAPTER 8
The Good Old Summertime
Th’ capital iv th’ nation has raymoved to Eyester Bay,
a city on th’ north shore iv Long Island,
with a popylation iv three million clams.
SUMMER RAIN WAS FALLING as the Oyster Bay special chugged out of Long Island City on 5 July 1902. New York’s fringes progressively crumbled from wet factories to brickyards to sodden fields of flowers and vegetables. These in turn gave way to patches of marsh hazy with insects. Presently, the land grew solid enough to support acre after acre of greenhouses, a farm or two, and some new towns still edged with mud. Then white steeples began to prick the horizon—pikestaffs protecting the privileged greens of Nassau County—and the train swung northeast toward the Sound.
Roosevelt had been riding this way for nearly thirty years, first as a teenager lugging rifles, birdshot, and the smelly paraphernalia of taxidermy, now as a President badly in need of a vacation. Familiar station signs flashed by in the drizzle: Roslyn Harbor, Sea Cliff, Glen Cove. The names had a marine ring, yet no hint of sea showed beyond wet roofs and foliage. The train curved eastward again, slowing almost to buggy speed as it descended Locust Valley. Forest closed in, broken only by an occasional duck pond or timber cut, then the valley broadened, and light sliced through thinning trees. The rails leveled out, and suddenly the train was rolling along a little harbor stiff with yachts.
Were it not for the mild, salt-laden air, Oyster Bay might be mistaken for a lake. Green slopes surrounded it at all points of the compass, keeping out both the swell of the sea and the turbulence of the outside world. (New York was not thirty miles away, but could have been three hundred.) At the flattest part of the shoreline, a few sandy roads converged on a post office, an inn, six churches, and ten or twelve squat commercial buildings. Members of the President’s official party looked around anxiously for sources of entertainment. They saw only a library and an empty, dripping bandstand. “There are many one-horse towns on Long Island,” a reporter noted, “but it is doubtful if there is another as uninteresting as Oyster Bay.”
The little community turned out in force to welcome its returning squire. Steam whistles shrilled the President’s arrival, and thunder and lightning added extra dramatic effects. A new depot, not quite finished, sheltered Roosevelt as he descended from the train. Kermit, Ethel, and Archie, representing the family, flung themselves upon him, while his Secret Service escort made a wedge through the crowd. Grinning at the shouted familiarities of old-timers—here he was unavoidably “Teddy”—he climbed into an open surrey. Kermit joined the coachman, while the two younger children snuggled close to their father. He threw a protective oilcloth over them. Then, with a final wave at the crowd, he took what cover he could under his rapidly collapsing Panama hat.
The surrey splashed east along Audrey Avenue, past the Oyster Bay Bank building, of which the first-floor office suite—two melancholy brown-painted rooms—had been reserved through September by George Cortelyou. Roosevelt had no desire to visit these headquarters. He intended to put as much distance as possible between himself and White House staff. His destination lay three miles farther on, beyond Christ Episcopal Church and Youngs Cemetery, around the bend of Oyster Bay Cove. As the village fell away, Shore Road became an avenue of moss-hung locust trees winding past the resorts of the rich—white-pillared “cottages” of twenty or forty rooms, lawns sloping to sea level, beached rowboats bearing old names that spoke of power, breeding, and interbreeding: Tiffany, Beekman, Gracie, Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt.
Turning north, the surrey left the mainland and followed the line of Cove Neck as it jutted, rising, into the bay. Reeds waved to the left of the road, and saltwater slapped close to the horse’s hooves, while on the other side the landscape became more rural, and fields and woods spaced out the mansions of Roosevelt’s immediate neighbors. Ahead rose the crown of the peninsula. Its highest house was invisible for trees—trees he had planted himself, in early manhood. Qui plantavit curabit.
A private driveway led steeply up the slope, and Sagamore Hill disclosed itself at last, glowing dull red through the rain. Red brick below, red wood above; brown and yellow awnings over
the west piazza; streaming shingles the color of old mustard. Roosevelt’s eyes, rejoicing in the house’s ugliness, noticed only one unfamiliar note: a telephone pole trailing wires back the way he had come. Evidently Cortelyou was determined to keep him in touch with affairs of state.
RAIN GAVE WAY to sun in the days that followed. The hilltop breezes sweetened as catalpa and locust bloomed below, and the birds of Roosevelt’s youth saluted his acute ear with remembered calls. Exulting in their clamor, he began to compose his first piece of presidential nature-writing:
Among Long Island singers the wood-thrushes are the sweetest; they nest right around our house, and also in the most open woods of oak, hickory, and chestnut, where their serene, leisurely songs ring through the leafy arches all day long.… Chickadees wander everywhere; the wood-pewees, red-eyed vireos, and black-and-white creepers keep to the tall timber, where the wary, thievish jays chatter, and the great-crested flycatchers flit and scream. In the early spring, when the woods are still bare, when the hen-hawks cry as they soar high in the upper air, and the flickers call and drum on the dead trees, the strong, plaintive note of the meadow-lark is one of the most noticeable and most attractive sounds. On the other hand, the cooing of the mourning-doves is most noticeable in the still, hot summer days.
Ovenbirds fluted too, in the heat, but more frequently after dark, when the whippoorwills were calling. Roosevelt spent many moonlit evenings on the piazza in his rocking chair, with Edith beside him, listening to this “night-singing in the air.” Despite his mature preoccupation with politics, he was still susceptible to poetic impressions. Musing on the behavior of screech owls, he produced one extraordinary, if ungrammatical, image:
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