Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  “MR. PRESIDENT, I HAVE THE HONOR TO PRESENT …”

  Mark Hanna and members of the Republican National Committee, 11 December 1903 (photo credit 19.1)

  Roosevelt was overjoyed. This boded well for a favorable decision in the spring. In other good news, Nicaragua became the first Latin American nation to recognize Panama. All the world’s major powers had already done so except Britain and Japan, and their announcements were due at any moment.

  Further presents crammed his presidential stocking. The Senate voted for Cuban reciprocity, 57 to 8. G. P. Putnam’s Sons confirmed a thirty-thousand-dollar contract for the publication of a new edition of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt in fourteen volumes. Another thirty thousand dollars was deposited to his account in New York as the bequest of a deceased uncle. Although the most cash the President generally saw was what Edith put in his pocket, he understood that in his forty-sixth year, he was beginning to be rich.

  Better than money, his greatest dream in life seemed more and more realizable. According to the New York Herald, twenty-three states had already pledged him 496 votes at next June’s Republican National Convention—eleven more than he needed to be nominated. And ten months remained for him to persuade the American people that he was no longer “His Accidency,” but a substantial statesman deserving their vote of confidence.

  THE SEVENTEENTH OF December 1903 was a workday much like any other for Roosevelt. He faced, at carefully timed intervals through the morning, a newspaper owner from upstate New York, a counsel to the Hague tribunal, a consul from Shanghai, an aspirant postmaster from Missouri, an old hayseed from Oklahoma, the secretary of the Postal Progress League, the Attorney General of the United States, two doctors, three reverends, six senators, fifteen railway inspectors, and uncounted congressmen. At one o’clock, he was to conduct his usual barbershop levée. Root, Lodge, and Cortelyou were scheduled to join him for lunch, along with Winthrop Murray Crane. There would be precious little time for exercise in the afternoon, since he had bills to sign and letters to dictate, and appointments every hour until six o’clock. Then he must play bear with Archie and Quentin, spend some time with Edith, and dress for the Cabinet dinner. And the Odells and Mellens would be staying the night.

  While Roosevelt talked to the consul from Shanghai, two brothers on a windswept beach in North Carolina shook hands. Then one of them lay down beside some covered ribs in front of a propeller motor. It sparked to life. Tremulous and spindly, a matchbox of spars and muslin accelerated along a rail, and stepped into the air. Its wings rippled on an invisible swell, like wet leaves on water. The swell surged to ten feet, then fifteen feet, before gently subsiding. Ecstatic, the flying machine kicked off and soared, again and again and again.

  CHAPTER 20

  Intrigue and Striving and Change

  Whin he does anny talkin’—which he sometimes does—he

  talks at th’ man in front iv him. Ye don’t hear him hollerin’ at

  posterity. Posterity don’t begin to vote till after th’ polls close.

  HENRY ADAMS ATTENDED Roosevelt’s annual Diplomatic Reception on 7 January 1904, and was disturbed by signs of a developing autocracy—to say nothing of a nervous system that seemed to be beyond self-discipline. The President accosted him with a war whoop and ordered him upstairs for supper:

  I was stuffed into place at the imperial table, opposite Joe Chamberlain’s daughter.… Root sat at the end of the table between us.… We were straws in Niagara. Never have I had an hour of worse social malaise. We were overwhelmed in a torrent of oratory, and at last I heard only the repetition of I-I-I—attached to indiscretions greater than one another until only the British female seemed to survive. How Root stands this sort of thing I do not know, for it is mortifying beyond even drunkenness. The worst of it is that it is mere cerebral excitement, of normal, or at least habitual, nature. It has not the excuse of champagne, the wild talk about everything—Panama, Russia, Germany, England, and whatever else suggested itself—belonged not to the bar-room but the asylum.… When I was let out and got to bed, I was a broken man.

  Another veteran of quieter times visited Washington that month and found that it was no longer the genteel city he remembered. “I am glad to leave,” Charles G. Dawes wrote in his diary, after seeing both Mark Hanna and the President. “The air is full of intrigue and striving and change.”

  ON THE AFTERNOON of 27 January, Roosevelt sent a White House carriage and a company of cavalry to Sixth Street Station. Crowds collected along Pennsylvania Avenue. Such trappings usually heralded a visiting head of state, although none had been announced. When the procession clattered and jingled back downtown, the carriage rode much lower on its springs. Inside sat an enormously corpulent man of forty-six, his jowls tanned and his mustache bleached by years of Pacific sun. He smiled with enchanting sweetness, waving a cushioned palm, his pale blue eyes squeezed between chuckling rolls of fat. He was the retiring Governor of the Philippines, and now the successor to Elihu Root as Secretary of War: William Howard (“Big Bill”) Taft.

  Merely to look at him was to be warmed and impressed. Taft had none of Root’s austerity or Roosevelt’s restless energy. He lounged comfortably at any angle, and spoke calmly in all circumstances. At 330 pounds, he was periodically drowsy from too much food. Yet he was not lazy; once he got under way, he had the ponderous momentum of an elephant. His gestures were slow, but full of power. He bore with no complaint huge loads of work, and produced commensurately. Whether he dictated a document or wrote it by hand, the words flowed in their hundreds and thousands, bland but never specious, unsparkling yet clear. His was not the vocabulary of a calculating politician. Taft wrote, thought, and acted like a judge.

  The Supreme Court was his admitted dream. “As far back as I can remember, I believe my ambitions were of a judicial cast,” he told a reporter, after checking into the Arlington Hotel. He did not mention that Roosevelt had twice offered him a seat on the Bench, and that he had declined only out of a sense of “duty” in the Philippines. Still less would the elephant allow that Mrs. Taft (perched small and determined in his howdah) was nudging him in another direction.

  The reporter, Kate Carew of the New York World, asked, “Which would you rather be, Chief Justice of the United States, or President of the United States?”

  Taft quaked with self-protective laughter. “Oh, ho, ho! Of course I couldn’t answer that question.” He flushed with merriment, while she thought, He must have been a very pink and white baby.

  “Who do you suppose,” Miss Carew pursued, when the heavings subsided, “will be the Republican candidate for President this year?”

  “PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT!” Taft boomed, puffing out his cheeks.

  “And who in 1908?”

  “Oh,” he said, smiling, “that is too far ahead.”

  “But I had read somewhere that perhaps you would be.”

  Taft began to talk about golf.

  TWO DAYS LATER, the outgoing Secretary of War attended his last Cabinet meeting. He appeared to be struggling with his composure as Roosevelt thanked him for staying on until Taft could relieve him. Root had a public reputation of being “the coldest proposition that ever came down the pike.” But friends knew the warmth of his bottled-up emotions and the precision of his wit, which Owen Wister nicely described as “humor in ambush.” The crack about the President’s culpability for “rape” was already part of Administration lore, as was the cable Root had sent to Manila, after hearing that Taft had taken a twenty-five-mile ride: HOW IS THE HORSE?

  Roosevelt rambled on affectionately until Root stood up, unable to bear more. He crossed to Taft’s left, symbolically shedding power. “Mr. President,” he said. His eyes filled, and he stopped.

  It was the little parlor in Buffalo all over again. Then, however, Root had been taking charge of a young and nervous beneficiary. Now he was quitting a leader who could do without him. “I thank you for what you have been good enough to say, Mr. President. This, of course,
has been the great chapter in my life.…” He could not go on. “You know, sir, what I would say.”

  The following evening, Root attended a Gridiron Club dinner in his honor at the Arlington. Roosevelt was there, along with the full Cabinet; even Senator Hanna limped downstairs. A performance group threw satiric barbs. Taft (giggling and guffawing, prodigiously duplicated in mirrors around the room) was warned that he might catch cold in Root’s chilly aura. If so, he must stand close when Mark Hanna finally swore allegiance to Theodore Roosevelt. The President’s glow of joy would thaw him.

  Roosevelt and Hanna, separated by white linen and bowls of roses, laughed with the rest. But the latter looked far from happy. He ate and drank nothing, and there were dark smudges under his eyes.

  “How is your health, Senator?” somebody asked.

  “Not good.”

  HANNA DID NOT leave his bed the next morning, Sunday, nor on Monday, the first of February. The jingling cavalrymen rode down the avenue again, below his windows, escorting Elihu Root to the station. Taft was sworn in. An order went out for an extra large Cabinet chair to be built for the new Secretary.

  Day followed upon icy day. It had been the whitest winter in decades; Washington lay locked under a glaze of hard snow. Children skated on the streets. Alice Roosevelt and her friend Marguerite Cassini went bobsledding together and competed for the attentions of Congressman Nicholas Longworth, rich, youngish, and sexily balding.

  Something about Alice’s laugh, when she asked if “Nick” had ever proposed, made Marguerite say, “Yes, he has.” The two girls began to see less of each other.

  Roosevelt took a new course of jujitsu, lunched with Buffalo Bill, and sent a long tirade against the demoralization of scientific historiography to his latest intellectual “playmate,” Sir George Otto Trevelyan. He heard with relief that Mrs. Cox, the black postmaster of Indianola, Mississippi, had decided not to seek another term. In her place, he quietly appointed a white man.

  The newspapers reported that Elihu Root had made a powerful speech to an audience of New York Republicans, warning them that Theodore Roosevelt was “not safe”:

  He is not safe for the men who wish to prosecute selfish schemes for the public’s detriment. He is not safe for the men who wish the Government conducted with greater reference to campaign contributions than to the public good. [Applause] He is not safe for the men who wish to drag the President of the United States into a corner and make whispered arrangements.… I say that he has been, during these years since President McKinley’s death, the greatest conservative force for the protection of property and our institutions in the city of Washington.

  When Root used the adjective conservative, conservatives listened. Private word came that Wall Street opposition was at last diminishing. “It has become almost flat for me to express to you my realization of all you have done for me,” the President wrote Root.

  Late on the evening of 4 February, George Cortelyou came in with a shock bulletin. Senator Hanna had been diagnosed with typhoid fever. Roosevelt was at the Arlington Hotel well before nine the next morning. Doctors barred entry to the sickroom, but he stayed ten minutes with Mrs. Hanna. The afternoon papers noted his pilgrimage, as did Hanna, who scrawled a trembly note:

  My dear Mr. President:

  You touched a tender spot old man when you call personaly [sic] to inquire after this a.m. I may be worse before I can be better But all the same such “drops” of kindness are good for a fellow

  Sincerely Yours

  M.A. Hanna

  Friday PM

  The Senator lay comatose for several days, then surprised Mrs. Hanna by reaching for her hand. “Old lady,” he said, “you and I are on the home stretch.”

  HALF A WORLD AWAY, the Far East exploded into war. For months, State Department officials had known that Japan would not long tolerate Russia’s expansionism in Manchuria and her designs on Korea. However, even John Hay was surprised by the ferocity and speed of the first attack, on 8 February. Dispatches confirmed that Admiral Heihachiro Togo had virtually annihilated the Russian Oriental fleet in a single swoop on Port Arthur. On the ninth, reports of further naval attacks followed like claps of thunder. In under twelve hours, Russia’s two biggest battleships were sunk, another seriously damaged, and four cruisers disabled or destroyed. Japan was now the superior power in the Yellow Sea. Minister Kogoro Takahira could hardly conceal his elation as he delivered the Mikado’s proclamation of war to Hay. On 11 February, Roosevelt announced that the United States would remain neutral.

  Count Cassini, the Russian Ambassador, was not consoled by Hay’s expressions of sympathy. He knew that the President personally favored Japan. Marguerite and Alice became even more estranged.

  UNCONSCIOUS, MARK HANNA drifted toward death. He had never paid much attention to the world at large. Panama was merely a crossroads of American commerce, the oceans but highways for American ships. The cosmopolitan curiosity of a Theodore Roosevelt (currently reading a study of Indo-European ethnicity, in Italian) was beyond him. All he had learned in life was that industry created wealth, and wealth subsidized good government. He had not done badly in either field; he had made seven million dollars, and a President of the United States.

  Hanna’s horizon contracted. He knew nothing of the vigilants in the lobby below, the constantly shrilling telephone booth, the letter from Roosevelt: “May you soon be with us again, old fellow, as strong in body and as vigorous in your leadership as ever.”

  Inert on the pillow, he looked as formidable as ever, porcine features firm, skin tanned from oxygen treatment. But in the small hours of Monday the fifteenth his heart began to fail. Doctors worked all morning to stimulate life. They blew ether up his nose, poured champagne and whiskey and nitroglycerine down his throat, and pumped brandy into his abdomen in eight-ounce shots. Washington’s political activity slowed to a halt. Congressmen quit their desks and joined the crowd in the Arlington lobby. At 3:00 P.M., when Roosevelt walked over again from the White House, Hanna’s pulse rate was scarcely perceptible. It fluttered for three and a half more hours, then stopped.

  Governors, generals, Cabinet officers, and senators pressed sobbing out of the lobby into the freezing night. Even Nelson Aldrich cried, his face contorted with sorrow.

  ON 23 FEBRUARY, after nine weeks of debate, the Panama Canal Treaty came up for ratification. By now, most of the world agreed with John Hay that Roosevelt had followed a “perfectly regular course” in recognizing Panama. The little republic had just constituted herself into a tripartite democracy, and elected Manuel Amador as its first President. Encouraged by these developments, and by a positive legal argument by Elihu Root published in that morning’s newspapers, the Senate voted in favor of the treaty, 66 to 14.

  Roosevelt and his successors were given power “in perpetuity” over the Canal Zone, ten miles wide, dividing Panama into two provinces and extending three miles out to sea each way. The power, though not technically absolute, was what “the United States would possess and exercise if it were the sovereign of the territory … to the entire exclusion of the exercise by the Republic of Panama of any such sovereign rights, power or authority.”

  It was dread of such provisions that had caused old Amador to totter in Bunau-Varilla’s arms. The original Hay-Herrán Treaty had called for a ninety-nine-year renewable lease and a much narrower Canal Zone. But Bunau-Varilla had been so anxious to achieve ratification that Panamanians already felt he had mortgaged their future. Instead of becoming a hero of the people he had helped liberate, he incurred their lasting resentment.

  Bunau-Varilla triumphantly resigned as Panamanian Minister, stating that he would accept no salary for his services. It was enough that the Great Idea could now be realized, “for the honor of Panama and for the glory of France and of the United States.”

  Few Americans imagined, as Secretary Shaw prepared to disburse ten million dollars as down payment on the Zone (J. P. Morgan & Co., agents), that Amador could be anything but pleased
.

  AN ENORMOUS MAP in the White House enabled Roosevelt to keep pace with the Russo-Japanese War. He pinned it with little flags to show the movement of forces (“Japan is playing our game”), browsed weekly bulletins from the Office of Naval Intelligence, and wondered if he might not have to mediate a peace settlement one day. At present, the belligerents simply wanted to destroy each other. Japan, flush with naval success, was ready for a land battle. Russia would soon strike back. The world waited.

  Cecil Spring Rice, now Secretary of the British Embassy in St. Petersburg, wrote to say that Russia was obsessed with expanding eastward as well as westward. “There has been nothing like it since Tamurlane. The whole of Asia and half Europe!” He foresaw problems with Muslims one day, but who could ultimately resist a Bear so big, so blindly driven?

  Roosevelt, replying, looked instead to a victorious Japan as the “great new force” in the Far East. Should Korea and China proceed to develop themselves along Japanese lines, “there will result a real shifting of the center of equilibrium as far as the white races are concerned.” He was philosophical about this. “If new nations come to power … the attitude of we who speak English should be one of ready recognition of the rights of the newcomers, of desire to avoid giving them just offense, and at the same time of preparedness in body and in mind to hold our own if our interests are menaced.”