ROOSEVELT TRANQUILLY RECEIVED the British writer H. G. Wells at the White House on 6 May. They lunched and strolled the grounds together. Wells, who was on assignment for the London Tribune, noted that the President had none of the usual stiffness of politicians afraid of being quoted. He talked in the manner of Arthur Balfour, another intellectual who had risen to supreme eminence. But unlike that unhappy statesman, recently deposed, Roosevelt had the “power of overriding doubts in a sort of mystical exaltation.” He seemed more representative than patrician:
He is the seeking mind of America displayed.… His range of reading is amazing; he seems to be echoing with all the thought of his time, he has receptivity to the point of genius. And he does not merely receive, he digests and reconstructs; he thinks.… He assimilates contemporary thought, delocalizes it and reverberates it. He is America for the first time vocal to itself.
“A COMPLEX MINGLING OF WILL
AND CRITICAL PERPLEXITY.”
Theodore Roosevelt in mid-sentence. (photo credit 26.1)
Having read extensively in Roosevelt’s earlier writings, Wells had expected “Teddy” the Rough Rider, all slouch hat and swordsmanship. Instead, he found himself dealing with a friendly, gray-clad statesman, whose voice was more confidential than strenuous, and whose clenched fist waved almost absentmindedly. The President’s screwed-up, bespectacled face conveyed “a complex mingling of will and critical perplexity.” There again, Roosevelt was representative. “Never did a President so reflect the quality of his time.”
IF BY “QUALITY of his time” Wells was alluding to the progressive impulse behind Roosevelt’s current regulatory proposals, its force burgeoned in the days immediately following. Tillman railed against the President for treachery and manipulation of muckrakers, but his language was oddly muted, as if he had to acknowledge that the Hepburn Bill deserved bipartisan support.
On 18 May, the Senate approved the bill with only three dissenting votes—two by gentlemen from Alabama, and one from the lone Republican who still hoarsely declaimed the right of railroads to regulate themselves: Joseph B. Foraker of Ohio. Even though the original Roosevelt-Dolliver measure’s simplicity was now complicated by the Allison Amendment, its sheer accumulation of legislative weight, from a motion few supported to a majority measure only extreme conservatives opposed, was evidence that the President had started something very big.
Railroad rate regulation was not yet a reality, since the bill now had to be reported to a joint committee of the House and Senate. This did not stop early words of praise from flowing Roosevelt’s way. The most moving were uttered by the man most disposed to choke on them. “But for the work of Theodore Roosevelt in bringing this matter to the attention of the country, we would not have had any bill at all,” Benjamin R. Tillman said. “Whatever success may come from it will largely be due to him.”
AS THE WEATHER WARMED, so did the attitude of both Houses toward other items of progressive legislation. Joseph Cannon grudgingly relaxed his opposition to the Pure Food Bill. Senator Beveridge introduced a separate meat-inspection bill based on the President’s secret investigation of Packingtown practices—a probe that not only vindicated everything Upton Sinclair had written in The Jungle, but supplied extra details so disgusting that Roosevelt could not bring himself to release them. He did not scruple, however, to let congressional leaders know what was in the report. Apprehensive that some details might leak, the Senate voted unanimously to make Beveridge’s bill an amendment to the Agricultural Appropriations Bill. That gave food-industry advocates in the House the task of explaining why meat shipped across state lines should not be inspected and dated by federal agents.
James W. Wadsworth, Chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, rose to the challenge with such determination that Roosevelt sent Congress the results of his probe on 8 June, warning, “My investigations are not yet through.” Wadsworth did not seem fazed even by an account of a hog carcass falling from its hook and sliding halfway into a packinghouse men’s room, whence it was retrieved and sent on to its destination, unwashed.
Again, Roosevelt saw a need for compromise. The Congressman was a stockbreeder and as fanatically opposed to regulation of his industry as Foraker was on behalf of the railroads. Beveridge was ordered to sacrifice can-dating (which Wadsworth believed would hinder sales) in exchange for the more important principle of mandatory inspection. Again, a majority in favor materialized, and the principle moved toward passage.
On 8 June, the President signed into law “An Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities,” the first of an accelerating series of measures deriving from his Fifth Message. It empowered him to proclaim national monuments and historic and prehistoric sites on federal ground, without resort to Congress. Then came twin measures establishing the liability of federal agencies and common carriers for negligence-caused job accidents. A pleasedly firm presidential signature, inscribed with an eagle quill, granted Oklahoma statehood. The last two days of the month, and of the session, brought protection for Niagara Falls from hydroelectric despoilment, immunity for witnesses in antitrust cases, stricter standards for alien naturalization, a lock system for the Panama Canal, and the three major laws Roosevelt most wanted: the Railroad Rate Regulation Act on the twenty-ninth, and the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts on the thirtieth.
That afternoon, the temperature in Washington rose to one hundred degrees. Government buildings seemed to explode with released tension as limp-collared legislators and administrators emerged from every doorway and headed out of town. Roosevelt, looking relatively cool in a white suit, was in as much a hurry as any. But he had to wait until the House dispatched a final bill to him at 9:30 P.M., via the fastest automobile in town. By then he had had more than his fill of the Fifty-ninth Congress, and could be sure that most of its members—Senator Foraker in particular—hoped his vacation would be long.
Still, it had been an historic session, he felt, one that had greatly extended the authority of centralized government. Over railroads alone, that reach now embraced passenger rates, pipeline fees, freight bills, storage and refrigeration contracts, and a plethora of other surchargeable services, from switch and spur facilities to dockyard terminals. Already, Packingtown was scrubbing down, food inspectors sharpening their pencils, and pigs being kept out of privies. The Man with the Muckrake was chastised, and the rule of Burke—movingly cited by Ray Stannard Baker—affirmed as a guiding principle of progressivism: “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere.”
CHAPTER 27
Blood Through Marble
I’m not so much troubled about th’ naygur whin he lives among his opprissors as I am whin he falls into th’ hands iv his liberators.
EDITH KERMIT ROOSEVELT was waiting in the yellow-wheeled family wagon when her husband’s train steamed into Oyster Bay station on 1 July 1906. She positioned herself, as always, slightly aloof, letting a width of cinder road intervene between the carriage door and the door of the depot, where the usual crowd of villagers was jostling.
The President emerged, caught sight of Kermit first, and kissed him. Then he began to shake hands while Edith sat with Quentin beside her, wrapped in her private role as wife and mother.
She was not quite forty-five and not quite slender, a calm, contented woman who had gotten what she wanted by simply waiting for it—as she waited now for the only man she had ever loved. The fact that she was not the only person in his romantic history had long since ceased to hurt her, as far as anyone knew, but with Edith, “far” was not much. The averted gaze, the set mouth, the careful expressionlessness she gave to the world outside her world revealed little and invited nothing. To children other than her own, she appeared as “a remote goddess … as calm and imperturbable as a Buddha.” Born into the same wealthy haut-bourgeois circles as Theodore, and having become, at age four, his intimate friend, she had acquired a sense of privilege that never left her, even though her alcoholic fat
her’s money had dissipated with such quickness that she remembered a childhood more shabby than genteel.
There had never been any question in her mind, as she grew up, that “Teedie” would marry her. When he chose someone prettier and richer, Edith had simply counted the days until fate would return him to her. She would have counted fifty years, if necessary. In the event, five were enough. Edith had reacted to Theodore’s aberrant liaison much as she had to her father’s drinking, by simply editing it out of her book of life. The name of Alice Hathaway Lee was not to be mentioned, even in the index; no illustrations of that sweet, blank face were necessary; a quick cut from 1880 to 1885 would speed the narrative nicely. There had remained the awkward subplot of a stepdaughter, but at last, thanks to Nick Longworth, it was part of another tale.
“A REMOTE GODDESS … CALM AND IMPERTURBABLE AS A BUDDHA.”
The President’s favorite photograph of Edith Kermit Roosevelt (photo credit 27.1)
Episcopalian, erudite, conservative, intensely private, and—when her serenity was threatened—a formidable adversary, Edith struck most strangers as snobbish. The impression was in part correct (Archie and Quentin had to research the antecedents of all their would-be friends) but caused mostly by her New England reserve. She did not consider herself superior, so much as separate from hoi polloi. In receiving lines, she let the President do the glad-handing, while she stood clutching a nosegay, smiling only slightly, her sapphire eyes cool. What they saw, they saw without mercy. Mediocrity bored her, as did class resentment. “If they had our brains,” she was wont to say of servants, “they’d have our place.”
Yet within a silken web of family, social, and political connections, almost all spun about her by Theodore, Edith was frank, warm, unassuming, and loyal. Henry Adams found her “sympathetic” and greatly preferred her company to that of the President. “She has bad taste, and that too is a comfort.” To Ray Stannard Baker, she was “a singularly attractive woman, of rare refinement and charm of manner.” Jules Jusserand informed his government that she was “certainly adorned with most precious and charming qualities”—adding, by way of explanation, that she was of French descent.
Edith was well-read enough to hold her own in conversation with Adams and Henry Cabot Lodge. “She is not only cultured, but scholarly,” Roosevelt boasted. Her intellectual interests were more sophisticated than his, inclining toward belles-lettres and aphoristic essays, and she loved the theater, to which he reacted as if caged. Whereas his idea of a sublime musical experience was “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” played by the full Marine band, hers was a recital in the East Room by Ernestine Schumann-Heink. Edith did not equate such occasions with fashion; her taste in clothes was at best severe, and she cared little for intermission gossip. Yet she enjoyed entertaining, whether brilliantly at diplomatic dinners in Washington, or messily at mosquito-infested picnics with her children, the largest and worst of whom, she joked, was Theodore.
His attitude toward her—beyond the fact, clear to all, that they personified every syllable of the marriage vow—was one of doglike adoration. He looked to her for porch company, for approving pats and hugs, and sometimes, guiltily, for discipline when he had done something wrong. She could bring him up short, during one of his indiscreet monologues, by giving off a special quietness that he could sense within seconds. “Why, Ee-die, I was only going to say …”
Her attitude toward him was complementary, yin to his yang. Theodore represented “the fire of life” (an image from Walter Savage Landor that she often cited), and she warmed both hands at him. Deeply domestic, she accepted his compulsive need for public attention, knowing that he could stay home only so long before the urge to hunt or fight or orate would take him away again. She had enough quiet humor to suffer his idiosyncrasies—the yodels of falsetto laughter, the mad rock-climbs, woodsmen and their wives invited to stay over in the White House—even though he often outraged her sense of propriety.
“You only have to live with me,” she periodically reminded him, “while I have to live with you.”
HE DID NOT LOOK well this July day, with his limp and obvious need for rest after seven months of legislative wrangling. Edith had thought him “jaded” a month before, and others had noticed even earlier signs of exhaustion. Whenever he was tired, his internal pressure tended to spew, geyserlike. There had been an outburst, to Sir Mortimer Durand’s face, about the “damned little Jew” of a British journalist who had accused him of paying court to the Kaiser. William E. Chandler had also been scalded, after politely asking if the White House had shown “good faith” in negotiating with both parties during the rate-bill fight. And Norman Hapgood, a journalist guilty of suggesting that Roosevelt sometimes denied his own press leaks, was currently in receipt of a presidential letter that came close to a demand for armed satisfaction.
Nervous fatigue could be allayed in the soothing environs of Sagamore Hill. But Roosevelt had more chronic physical problems to face up to—or more accurately, to play down. He admitted to Kermit and Ethel that his steadily dimming left eye was causing him “a little difficulty,” and that his ankle sprain was complicated by rheumatism. His weight hovered obstinately around two hundred pounds, no matter how much he exercised.
“He is certainly the most enduring man I have ever known,” Gifford Pinchot reported to Irving Fisher, a concerned fitness expert, “and it seems to me equally certain that his endurance can have little to do with his diet.” The President consumed whatever was put before him, with a partiality for meat over vegetables: “I should say that he ate nearly twice as much as the average man.”
Fisher, who had been studying the nutritional theories of Russell H. Chittenden, replied, “It is clear to me that the President is running his machine too hard.… In another decade or two … I would almost risk my reputation as a prophet in predicting that he will find friction in the machine, which will probably increase to almost the stopping point.”
Edith sweetly served cakes, ice cream, and lemonade on the Fourth of July. The Oyster Bay Pilot thereafter noticed an unprecedented number of presidential rowing excursions. Roosevelt was also seen haying with his farmworkers, sweating hugely in white clothes and forking loads so large he had to center himself underneath before lifting them.
“J’ESSAIE DE FAIRE circuler le sang à travers le marbre,” Auguste Rodin declared in August 1906, after getting permission to sculpt the President on a forthcoming visit to America. “I try to make the blood circulate through the marble.”
Theodore Roosevelt was sanguine in every sense of the word, physiological and psychological. He was ruddy and excitable, flush-faced, susceptible to cuts and grazes. (“Theodore,” Edith remarked, after he collided with the Sagamore Hill windmill, “I wish you’d do your bleeding in the bathroom.”) The medieval humor sanguis expressed his character exactly: courageous, optimistic, affectionate, ardent. His apparent fatigue in the summer of 1906 was the result of overstimulation rather than overwork. For more than a year now, he had prevailed too easily against too many opponents, and found himself more than equal to the largest tasks. As a result, he had begun to receive regular boosts of journalistic hyperbole, intoxicating enough to contravene the Pure Food and Drug Act. “It is now universally recognized by experienced politicians of all parties,” The Washington Post reported, “… that he has more political acumen in one lobe of his brain than the whole militant tribe of American politicians have in their combined intelligence; that his political perception, so acute as to amount almost to divination, is superior to that of any American statesman of the present or immediate past era.”
With so much success in his system, and nothing—for the moment—to restrain him, Roosevelt was fast approaching a level of executive hypertension. His reaction, then, was more or less predictable on 16 August, when he received a telegram from the mayor and citizens of Brownsville, Texas, a depressed, dust-baked outpost on the Rio Grande:
At a few minutes before midnight on Monday, the 13th, a body o
f United States soldiers of Twenty-fifth United States infantry (colored), numbering between 20–30 men, emerged from the garrison inclosure, carrying their rifles and abundant supply of ammunition, also begun [sic] firing in town and directly into dwellings, offices, stores, and at police and citizens. During firing, one citizen, Frank Natus, was killed in his yard, and the lieutenant of police, who rode toward the firing, had his horse killed under him and was shot through the right arm, which has since been amputated at the elbow. After firing about 200 shots, the soldiers retired to their quarters. We find that threats have been made by them that they will repeat this outrage. We do not believe their officers can restrain them.… Our condition, Mr. President, is this: our women and children are terrorized and our men are practically under constant alarm and watchfulness. No community can stand this strain for more than a few days. We look to you for relief; we ask you to have the troops at once removed from Fort Brown and replaced by white soldiers.
Roosevelt ordered a full report on the incident from the War Department. Supplementary details were already appearing in the press. The black battalion—three companies minus a fourth on separate assignment—had arrived in Brownsville fewer than three weeks before, and racial tensions had been rising ever since. Soldiers had been denied access to local bars, shoved off sidewalks, beaten, and warned that their brains might be blown out. On the eve of the riot, the usual “large” Negro had tried to force himself on the usual “respectable” white woman. She could not describe his face, but had total recall of his khaki trousers.
As a result of warnings from downtown, Major Charles W. Penrose, the battalion’s white commander, had placed all his men under curfew the following night. Yet about fifteen of them had allegedly found a key to the barracks and gone on their murderous rampage downtown—even though a call to arms, begun while the bullets were still flying, found all soldiers present or accounted for. The culprits must have sprinted back as soon as they heard the bugle and snuck into line in time to holler “Present” when the roster was read.
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