Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  In other disturbing Russian news, dispatches reported a mass killing of Jews in the Bessarabian city of Kishinev. Casualty figures “worse than the censor will permit to publish” were leaking out. The American Hebrew’s estimate was one hundred and twenty killed and five hundred injured in anti-Semitic riots; the Tsar himself was rumored to have ordered the slaughter.

  For the first time, popular unease was palpable about the ever-burgeoning empire in the East. It loomed beyond the haze of the Pacific horizon, menacing primarily Japan. American hearts warmed to that warlike little power, if only because it stood as a bulwark for the Philippines.

  Roosevelt was constrained, as President, from criticizing the domestic policies of another sovereign state. But he made clear that he would not tolerate Russian aggression in the Pacific. “The inevitable march of events gave us the control of the Philippine Islands at a time so opportune that it may without irreverence be called providential,” he said. “Unless we show ourselves weak, unless we show ourselves degenerate sons of the sires from whose loins we sprang, we must go on with the work we have undertaken—” Applause interrupted him. “We infinitely desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war.”

  After making his standard calls for muscular morality at home and a big navy abroad, he concluded on a note of exaltation rare even for him:

  Our place as a nation is and must be with the nations that have left indelibly their impress on the centuries.… Those that did not expand passed away and left not so much as a memory behind them. The Roman expanded, the Roman passed away, but the Roman has left the print of his law, of his language, of his masterful ability in administration, deep in the world’s history, deeply imprinted in the character of the races that came after him. I ask that this people rise level to the greatness of its opportunities.

  TWO EVENINGS LATER, Roosevelt lay high in Yosemite, on a bed of fragrant pine needles, looking up at the sky. On all sides soared the cinnamon-colored shafts of sequoia trees. He had the feeling that he was “lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hands of man.” Birdsong filled the arches as the sky darkened. He identified the treble tessitura of hermit thrushes, and thought it “an appropriate choir for such a place of worship.”

  “A PLACE OF WORSHIP.”

  Roosevelt at Glacier Point, Yosemite, May 1903 (photo credit 15.2)

  His companion was John Muir, the glaciologist, naturalist, and founder of the Sierra Club. Since early youth, Muir had roamed Yosemite, carrying little more than “some bread and tea in an old sock,” returning to civilization as infrequently as possible. At sixty-five, he knew more about the park, and loved it more passionately, than any other American. Roosevelt had booked his exclusive services well in advance: “I want to drop politics absolutely for four days, and just be out in the open with you.”

  The President was disappointed to find that Muir had no ear for bird music. He was Wordsworthian rather than Keatsian, revering only “rocks and stones and trees.” Garrulous, erudite, and wall-eyed, he talked a pure form of preservation that Roosevelt was not used to hearing. Muir had no patience with the utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number” policy of Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, the President’s very good friend. Conservation favored business at the expense of nature, and property rather than beauty. “The ‘greatest number’ is too often found to be number one.”

  Whatever resonance such views found in the President’s own developing awareness of the “democracy” of national parks, he would have preferred to hear less of Muir and more of the hermit thrushes. Eventually he fell asleep, in the piney air. Another bird chorale saluted him at dawn.

  For the next forty-eight hours, the boy in Roosevelt, never quite suppressed, reveled in his wild surroundings. “This is bully!” he yelled, when Muir burned a dead tree for him and the sparks hurtled skyward. After another night out, he awoke at Glacier Point, and was intrigued to find himself buried under four inches of snow. “This is bullier!”

  On 17 May he came down from the peaks in dusty khakis, his eyes sparkling. “I never felt better in my life!” Muir, too, was elated, having confessedly fallen in love with the President’s “interesting, hearty and manly” personality. The substance of their camping conversations remained tacit, suggesting some philosophical difference on the subject of Gifford Pinchot. Muir won at least an immediate presidential order to extend the California forest through the Mount Shasta region, and a promise that Yosemite’s over-commercialized valley would be ceded back to the national park system. Roosevelt’s next conservation statement, on 19 May, was obstinately utilitarian, yet an eloquent plea later that day echoed the preservationist sentiments he had expressed at the Grand Canyon. Speaking in Sacramento, he begged Californians to preserve their “marvelous natural resources” unimpaired. “We are not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last through the ages.”

  ON THE MORNING of 23 May, Roosevelt sailed across Puget Sound toward Seattle, the apogee of his great swing across the nation. “Well, thank heaven,” he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge, “tomorrow I turn my face toward the East.” He suddenly, with a returning traveler’s sense of anticlimax, felt as spent as the fireworks fizzling in the sun over Alki Point. “I am so jaded and nerve-weary and bored that it almost seems as if I could not go through the remainder of the speech-making.”

  Seattle neither knew nor cared about the President’s tiredness. From the moment he stepped ashore, inexorable hands nudged him from platform to platform, and fifty thousand worshipers drained him with their adoration. It was late at night before he fell into bed at the Hotel Washington, only to be shaken awake by William Loeb. He had forgotten to address a banquet group downstairs: he must get up, don full evening dress, step out on the balcony, apologize, and “say a few words.” When he retired for the second time, Roosevelt had to struggle with a problem new to him: insomnia.

  Fortunately for his rest, a telegram dispatched that afternoon from Cleveland did not reach him until the next morning:

  THE ISSUE WHICH HAS BEEN FORCED ON ME IN THE MATTER OF OUR STATE CONVENTION THIS YEAR ENDORSING YOU FOR THE REPUBLICAN NOMINATION NEXT YEAR HAS COME IN A WAY WHICH MAKES IT NECESSARY FOR ME TO OPPOSE SUCH A RESOLUTION. WHEN YOU KNOW ALL THE FACTS I AM SURE YOU WILL APPROVE MY COURSE.

  M. A. HANNA

  Roosevelt, fatigue forgotten, pondered this telegram excitedly as his train wound east to Walla Walla. He felt in the mood for “a knockdown and dragout fight with Hanna and the whole Wall Street crowd.” Fate had placed a big political stick in his hands.

  Fate—or Joseph B. Foraker. Ohio’s wily, irascible senior Senator had for years been plotting to wrest control of the state Republican Party from Hanna. That organization was about to have its annual convention, and Foraker had issued a surprise demand that the state party endorse Theodore Roosevelt for President, one year early. This put Hanna in the impossible position of having to deny the resolution without seeming to be against the President’s nomination. Alternatively, if he confirmed it, he would seem to be engineering an endorsement for himself. Either way, he stood to lose presidential favor, while Foraker would gain power and prestige—and a possible chance at the GOP nomination in 1908.

  Roosevelt saw an irresistible chance to play one Senator off the other. Hanna was clearly appealing for help. He was not in good health. If Wall Street was not so determined to have “somebody like Hanna” in the White House, he would surely have disclaimed any presidential ambition whatsoever. Roosevelt dictated a curtly formal reply, and released it to the press at Walla Walla:

  YOUR TELEGRAM RECEIVED. I HAVE NOT ASKED ANY MAN FOR HIS SUPPORT. I HAVE HAD NOTHING WHATEVER TO DO WITH RAISING THE ISSUE. INASMUCH AS IT HAS BEEN RAISED OF COURSE THOSE WHO FAVOR MY ADMINISTRATION AND MY NOMINATION WILL FAVOR ENDORSING BOTH AND THOSE WHO DO NOT WILL OPPOSE.

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  Hanna had no choice but to wire back that “in view of the sentiment
expressed” he would not after all oppose the resolution.

  Thus the President added a fifteenth endorsement to the list of states already committed to him, forced neutrality upon Hanna, gratified Foraker, and banished his own “nerve-weariness.” Benisonlike, the lilacs and locusts of Walla Walla enveloped him in their fragrance. “This whole incident,” he wrote to Lodge, “has entirely revived me.”

  ROOSEVELT ARRIVED AT BUTTE, Montana, on 27 May to find that mining city divided, like the Ohio GOP, into two warring political factions. Neither bore much relation to national party lines, and both were eager to welcome him. He saw at once that the crowd “was filled with whooping enthusiasm and every kind of whiskey,” and that a riot might ensue if either camp felt slighted. Modeling his conduct on that of Mr. Pickwick at Eatanswill, he presented an equable face to both Buffs and Blues, addressing the former in the afternoon and the latter in the evening. He solved the problem of apportioning dinner tickets by asking Butte’s enormous top-hatted mayor to issue exactly one hundred seats on a fifty-fifty basis. Satisfied, the factions respectively presented him with a silvered copper vase and a silver loving cup. Roosevelt was touched by a third gift, a pair of silver scales from Butte’s black minority. “This,” he said, lifting it delicately aloft, “comes in the shape I appreciate—the scales of justice held even.”

  He waited until the applause died. “I fought beside the colored troops at Santiago, and I hold that if a man is good enough to be put up and shot at then he is good enough—” Again he paused, while the crowd held its breath, wondering whether he was going to risk violence with a racially charged remark. Scattered Negroes, some Swedes, two Austrian families, a Chinese, and an Australian jostled with polyglot miners, Rough Riders, and dangerous-looking “rednecks” from the Coeur d’Alene. Roosevelt’s old friend Seth Bullock of Deadwood, South Dakota, stood guard with a long .44.

  “—for me to do what I can to get him a square deal,” said the President.

  The phrase sank in, and the crowd relaxed.

  “Nobody made a motion to attack me,” Roosevelt wrote John Hay afterward.

  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.

  CHAPTER 16

  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.”