Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  CHAPTER 15

  The Black Crystal

  We’re a gr-reat people. We ar-re that. An’ th’ best

  iv it is, we know we ar-re.

  LATE ON THE AFTERNOON of 1 April 1903, a stranger in a slouch hat got off a train waterstopping at Altoona, Pennsylvania, and crunched up the wrong side of the track. Six gleaming private cars screened him from the crowd on the platform. Tilting his head back as he approached the locomotive, he called in a harsh, yodeling voice, “Will you take a passenger in there?”

  The fireman stared down stupidly, so the stranger appealed to higher authority. “Mr. Engineer, I’d like to ride with you a few miles.” This time there was no mistaking the command in his voice. A second or two later, Theodore Roosevelt was in the cab, receiving sooty handshakes. He seated himself where he could pretend to be driving, and gazed eagerly ahead at the Alleghenies. The whistle blew, the throttle dipped, and the Pacific Coast Special clanked into motion, while the crowd waved and cried “Godspeed!” at its curtained caboose.

  Free at last of Washington and the special session of the Senate (which had taken fifteen days to give him the treaty ratifications he demanded), Roosevelt was embarking on his much-delayed tour of the West. While in postponement, it had grown to the most ambitious presidential itinerary yet undertaken. During the next eight weeks, he was scheduled to travel fourteen thousand miles through twenty-five states, visiting nearly 150 towns and cities and giving an estimated two hundred speeches. Five major addresses, forming a review of his legislative and administrative achievements to date, lay snug in his traveling desk, along with something more formal to say at the dedication ceremonies of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. All the other speeches, unwritten, he would leave to inspirations of time and place. Twenty years of public speaking had taught him that provincial audiences would listen to anything as long as it was seasoned with local references.

  The challenge awaiting him beyond the Alleghenies was enough to daunt a fit man, and Roosevelt was far from fit. His long struggle with Congress over race, regulation, and reciprocity, the emotional drain of Edith’s latest miscarriage, and the stress of entertaining fifteen thousand guests in the White House since last November had brought about a return of his childhood bronchial wheezings. He was further weakened by recent influenza and laryngitis. He longed for the dry healthfulness of the West, which had restored him so often in the past. As soon as he had delivered his five policy addresses, he planned a short vacation in Yellowstone National Park.

  Reveling already in feelings of liberation, Roosevelt breathed coal smoke and mountain air for forty-nine miles. At Seward, he thanked the engineer for a “bully” trip, descended, and marched back down the length of his train. First, a baggage car; then the Atlantic, a club car heavy with wood and leather, plus a fully equipped barbershop; then the Gilsey diner, stocked with champagne and cigars; then the Senegal, a big Pullman carrying reporters, photographers, telegraphers, and Secret Service men; then the Texas, a compartmental sleeper for White House staff, and any guests Roosevelt might ask to ride along.

  Last came the President’s own Elysian, seventy feet of solid mahogany, velvet plush, and sinkingly deep furniture. It had two sleeping chambers with brass bedsteads, two tiled bathrooms, a private kitchen run by the Pennsylvania Railroad’s star chef, a dining room, a stateroom with picture windows, and an airy rear platform for whistle-stop speeches. Whatever austerities Roosevelt looked forward to at Yellowstone, he would not lack for creature comforts now or afterward.

  AT 8:50 THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, he stood in black tie and silk lapels on the stage of the Chicago Auditorium, waiting for a long roar of welcome to subside. “Mr. Chairman—Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen—” But the roar went on. President McKinley had never been cheered like this. Five thousand people overcrowded the hall. Even when they calmed, another horde outside the doors continued to shout, creating a bizarre echo effect as Roosevelt began to speak. His text, an affirmation of the Monroe Doctrine with special reference to Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia, featured his favorite “West African proverb,” except now the source was obscured, to make it more memorable and quotable:

  There is a homely old adage which runs, Speak softly and carry a big stick: you will go far. If the American nation will speak softly, and yet build, and keep at a pitch of the highest training, a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.

  This generated such loud applause as to suggest that the audience took his “adage” as aggressive, rather than cautionary. Actually, Roosevelt was trying to say that soft-spoken (even secret) diplomacy should be the priority of a civilization, as long as hardness—of moral resolve, of military might—lay back of it. Otherwise, inevitably, soft speech would sound like scared speech.

  He reiterated his distaste for national “boasting and blustering.” In liberating Cuba and defusing the Venezuela crisis, the United States had proved herself to be idealistic rather than imperialistic, independent yet global-minded. Treaties negotiated by his Administration guaranteed that Americans alone would build and defend the Panama Canal; bills initiated by him had provided the necessary money and warships. But true, hemispheric security in a rearming world would require a much larger fleet than that currently envisaged by Congress. “If we have such a Navy—if we keep on building it up—we may rest assured … that no foreign power will ever quarrel with us about the Monroe Doctrine.”

  THE PRESIDENT INVITED some of his old Chicago cronies to join him for supper at his hotel. Herman Kohlsaat and the financier Charles G. Dawes arrived first, and were at once irradiated in Rooseveltian warmth. But as the reception proceeded and more and more “friends” crowded the room, they found themselves edged toward the crockery and spoons. Roosevelt continued to beam indiscriminately upon all comers, a searchlight picking out vessels of any size. Later, Dawes the diarist wrote:

  His hearty greetings are simply the natural results of his own good spirits and splendid vitality.… He has no “blind side.” … He seeks to wield power—not to avoid wielding it. He apparently loves everybody and nobody—both at once—everything and everybody being subordinated to his desire to keep the approbation of the public—not simply for the sake of that approbation but for the sake of that right-doing as well, which brings it.

  The Chicago Tribune’s front-page headline the next morning ran: SPEAK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG STICK, SAYS ROOSEVELT. Within hours, baseball bats and rough-hewn clubs waved over the heads of onlookers along the presidential trail.

  In Milwaukee’s Plankinton House, Roosevelt reviewed his trust policy at a dinner for local merchants and manufacturers. Heavy with sausages and schnapps, they tried to guess where he stood on the conservative/radical issues now dividing Wisconsin Republicans. His balanced phrases gave them no help. “We are not in the least against wealth … nor yet for the demagogic agitator … on the contrary … on the other hand … the alternative is …”

  The grinning equivocations went on and on, wreathing through cigar smoke and sweet wine fumes, while smilax, asparagus vines, and American Beauty roses intertwined above his head, and a thousand lightbulbs drowsily heated the room. Champagne was served. Now the President was beating time to a German Trinklied, and joining in chorus after chorus:

  Er lebe hoch! Er lebe hoch!

  Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!

  Further roars of “Hoch!” followed him as his train pulled out of the station. “Good song, that!” he shouted, and waved till darkness swallowed him up.

  TARIFF POLICY IN ST. PAUL. Labor policy in Sioux Falls. Philippines policy in Fargo.… Roosevelt arrived at Bismarck, North Dakota, toward sunset on 7 April, and saw, opening out beyond the Missouri, the windswept landscape of his youth. Great balls of thistle spooled across the prairie. He gazed around him, visibly relaxing. “Good to breathe this free Western air again.”

  He ate a barbecued-ox sandwich and drank a mug of cider, then returned to his train. Two of his old Badlands buddies, Sylvane and Joe Ferris, were waiting on t
he other side of the water, at Mandan. They climbed aboard the Elysian, their faces solemn with excitement.

  For the next two hours, Roosevelt entertained them as the flat grassland swayed in his windows. He effortlessly recalled places and scenes, even the names of horses and dogs they had forgotten. At Dickinson, he manifested himself as a sort of deus ex machina to people who remembered him as a reedy young ranchman, running along the tops of cattle cars and jabbing at steers with a pole.

  When the train drew near the Badlands, darkness already had descended. The President went onto his rear platform and watched coulees etch themselves into the grassland, black out of silver, like a giant printer’s block. Medora lay in the deepest cut of all, a clutch of houses by the sand-choked Little Missouri. Here, twenty years before, he had come to shoot his first buffalo, and found himself “at heart as much a Westerner as an Easterner.” But this time he did not have to drag his duffel bag alone across the sage. And the entire population of the Badlands, as far as he could see, had gathered to welcome him.

  Joe Ferris was upset that Roosevelt would not take his old pony, Manitou, for a gallop through the buttes; security forbade it. The President stayed in Medora no longer than it took to say a few words, shake every hand, and endure some fond, erroneous reminiscences. Then he was on his way again, leaving the disappointed populace to cheer itself up with a dance. Why had he looked so stern, why had he not stayed the night?

  Perhaps he sought to protect some dreamy nostalgia from present scrutiny. The free range of twenty years before was gone. He did not have to dwell on its eroded green and barbed-wire entanglements. Nor need he ever return.

  Night shrouded the Château de Morès, home of his long-dead ranching rival; shrouded the ruins of his log house in the Elkhorn bottom; shrouded Nolan’s Hotel in Wibaux, Montana, where he had once knocked out the drunken bully who had called him “Four Eyes.” The train sped across Montana, hauling him away from what he still thought of as “Dakota.” No North and South then!

  It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West.… It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lovely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman. It was a land of scattered ranches, of herds of long-horned cattle, and reckless riders who unmoved looked in the eyes of life or of death. In that land we lived a free and hardy life, with horse and with rifle. We worked under the scorching midsummer sun, when the wide plains shimmered and wavered in the heat; and we knew the freezing misery of riding night guard round the cattle in the late fall round-up. In the soft springtime the stars were glorious in our eyes each night before we fell asleep; and in the winter we rode through blinding blizzards, when the driven snow-dust burnt our faces.… We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst; and we saw men die violent deaths as they worked among the horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another; but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.

  Shortly after noon on 8 April, Roosevelt found himself in Gardiner, Montana, at the entrance to Yellowstone Canyon. The park was not yet open for the season. Ten-foot drifts of snow glared in the Rockies. He looked forward to spending two therapeutic weeks here, before continuing with his tour.

  When he emerged from his car, he was already wearing full riding gear and a Western hat. He was followed by a short, white-bearded, instantly recognizable figure: the wildlife writer John Burroughs, revered by millions of Americans for his sentimental essays on nature. Affable, placid, and malleable, “Oom John” had been invited along as a walking advertisement that the President would kill no animals in Yellowstone.

  They were greeted by the park superintendent, Major John Pitcher, a small escort of cavalrymen, and some mule carts loaded with camping equipment. Roosevelt swung joyfully up onto a waiting gray stallion, while Burroughs, who had not ridden a horse in forty years, was helped into one of the carts.

  “By the way, Mr. President,” Pitcher said as they rode through the gates, “an old friend of yours named Bill Jones has been very anxious to see you, but I am sorry to say that he has got so drunk that we had to take him out into the sage brush.”

  Hell-Roaring Bill Jones! He of the happy triggers, the alkali thirst, and the transcendental cussing!

  “I will try to have him meet you before we leave the park,” Pitcher promised. A guide led the way down the canyon, and Roosevelt passed out of sight. Reporters, forbidden to follow, were left hanging round the sidelined train, wondering what stories they could file for the next fifteen days.

  A FEW HOURS AFTER the President disappeared, flash news reached Gardiner. Four judges of the United States Eighth Circuit Court in St. Louis had just upheld Roosevelt’s suit against the Northern Securities Company. The opinion came as a shock to most Americans, after more than a year of languid legal proceedings. It showed how the new Expedition Act had strengthened antitrust law. The court had ruled unanimously, in an astonishingly narrow interpretation of the Sherman Act, that mere power of a combination to restrain trade was earnest of intent, whether or not the power was exercised by its holding company.

  “If this decision is upheld by the Supreme Court,” James J. Hill was quoted as saying, “no less than eighty-five percent of the railroad systems of the United States will be up in the air.”

  William Loeb asked a soldier to hurry word of the court’s ruling along the President’s trail. No reply came back from the silent mountains.

  THE NORTHERN SECURITIES opinion was Roosevelt’s fourth political victory in fewer than four weeks. He had also succeeded in winning reciprocity for Cuba, digging rights in Panama, and an equitable arbitration award for last winter’s striking miners. (Their wages had, as expected, been raised 10 percent by the Anthracite Coal Commission.) All these decisions, except the Commission’s, were subject to review: the Cuban treaty by the House of Representatives, the Panama Canal Treaty by the Colombian Senate, and the Circuit Court ruling by the Supreme Court. But America’s perennial flux and reflux of power from the executive branch to the legislative and back again seemed to have turned in his favor.

  That did not mean it was anywhere near a full resurgence. His unpopularity on Capitol Hill and Wall Street—as a Chief Executive prone to rash impulses, self-advertisement, and fiscal irresponsibility—was extreme. Remarkably, though, the nation at large (outside the white South) regarded him quite differently, as political observers were everywhere conceding, not without bemusement. One of the most articulate attempts to explain this dichotomy of opinion was that of Henry Herzberg, a New Yorker writing for the Charleston News. He ascribed the paradox to Roosevelt’s own “psychology of inconsistency,” illogically reflecting both an aristocratic will and a democratic desire to please. Hence, the President was both coordinated and conflicted, inimitable yet representative of a wide range of new, hard-to-define trends:

  Such a bosom of necessity must surge with overleaping ambition. There are passions ever impelling some righteous action and promptings which ever restrain these moral impulses.

  Mr. Roosevelt is bold and fearless yet timid and wary; he is ambitious and striving, but circumspect and cautious. He is imperious in mind, but thoughtful and considerate in action. Whether or not these temperamental traits of Mr. Roosevelt give us a picture of the typical President of the future is doubtful, but certain it is that the nervous energy, the irrepressible ambition, the fascinating elements which predominate in Mr. Roosevelt’s nature represent the American character now in the making.

  ROOSEVELT WAS NO stranger to Yellowstone, having first visited it in 1886. As founder of the Boone & Crockett Club, he had worked to save it from vandalism and exploitation, and he took pride in having been a motive force behind the National Park Protective Act of 1894. Only last year he had won an appropriation that made the Yellowstone bison wards of the federal government. Now he could enjoy the benefits of his work in solitude.

  Or near solitude. John Burroughs caught cold the first day, and remained behind at Mammoth Hot
Springs; but Major Pitcher stuck tight. Roosevelt bided his time. He passed several sociable nights with the superintendent, eating sardines and hardtack round the campfire, and helping wash up in the icy river. Each day, he rode deeper into the park, while snow dust boiled in the peaks and mountain sheep stared down at him, half veiled by their own breath. He feasted his eyes, long starved for the sight of game, on pronghorns and buffalo and black-tailed deer. A giant herd of elk enthralled him for four hours. His ear caught the counterpoint between a solitaire singing at the top of a canyon, and a water-ouzel perched a thousand feet below.

  On 12 April, he suddenly said that, as it was Sunday, he wished to “take a walk alone.” Pitcher felt unable to deny a President’s desire for private devotion, so Roosevelt marched happily off and for six hours worshiped God in his own fashion.

  There were rumors, later on, of rifle shots echoing in the park, and Roosevelt was definitely seen with a cartridge bruise on his cheek. But Pitcher announced that the President had merely indulged in “a little target shooting” back at camp and been wounded by an ejected shell.

  Burroughs, who had rejoined the party, confirmed this. Roosevelt was sincere in his vow not to kill local wildlife, even such permissible prey as coyotes and cougar. He still lusted, or thought that he lusted, after big game, but nowadays it was the pursuit, rather than the quarry, that interested him. A new protective sensibility was notable in his account of these days in Yellowstone:

  Every man who appreciates the majesty and beauty of the wilderness and of wild life, should strike hands with the far-sighted men who wish to preserve our material resources, in the effort to keep our forests and our game-beasts, game-birds, and game-fish—indeed, all the living creatures of prairie and woodland and seashore—from wanton destruction. Above all, we should recognize that the effort toward this end is essentially a democratic movement. It is entirely within our power as a nation to preserve large tracts of wilderness, which are valueless for agricultural purposes and unfit for settlement, as playgrounds for rich and poor alike.… But this end can only be achieved by wise laws and by a resolute enforcement of the laws.