He was intrigued to see how fast Quentin was developing in body and mind, and described him to Kermit as a “huge, wise philosopher.” Actually the boy was intelligent rather than intellectual. His instincts were tactile. Roosevelt, dictating, talked about the machinery of government; Quentin talked simply of machinery. He played the piano with ease, understanding it to be an intricate system of levers. He wrote well too, although flights of imagination seemed to engage him less than the delightful task of setting them as slugs of type, slathering them with greasy ink, and hearing them crank out during all-night sessions in the school print shop.
Ted, settled now in a Manhattan town house, with his pipe, his books, his wife and daughter, and a well-paying job, was bourgeois enough to bore a bank president—which he in fact repeatedly did, in his capacity as a bond salesman on Wall Street. Archie was what Archie would always be: faithful, dogged, inflexible.
Kermit claimed to be content in his subequatorial solitude. He was overworked and underpaid, but too proud to ask for help. Single or spliced, Edith’s beloved “one with the white head and the black heart” had the mark of a loner. “I’m afraid Mother thinks I’m hopeless,” he wrote Ethel, “what they call down here a vagabondo, which means a peculiarly useless sort of tramp.” His father tried to make him feel he was still an integral member of the family. “As president of the American Historical Association, I am to deliver an address which I hope you will like.… I shall send it to you when it is delivered.”
More excitingly to Kermit, Roosevelt mentioned that the Historical and Geographical Society of Brazil had invited him to deliver a series of lectures in Rio and São Paulo during the spring and early summer of 1913. That would be too soon for him, with his three books to finish; but both father and son felt that some sort of seed had been sown.
AT SYMPHONY HALL in Boston on Saturday, 27 December, Roosevelt had the novel experience of speaking to a capacity audience for nearly two hours without mentioning Progressivism. His listeners included not only the American Historical Association, but five other professional societies holding conventions in the city that weekend—sociologists, statisticians, economists, labor lawyers, and political scientists. He could not have asked for a forum more to his purpose, which was to offend as deeply as possible the data-drunk bores who, in his opinion, were leaching all the color and romance out of scholarship. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, American historians, modeling themselves on the German academics who wrote for one another, rather than for the general public, had forsaken the linear narrative of Prescott and Parkman and Lecky for prose that sat on the page like bagged sand.
Ironically, Roosevelt was guilty of writing this kind of history himself. His first book, The Naval War of 1812, had been so dense with logistics that it read like a manual in places. He had boasted at the time that the first two chapters were “so dry they would have made a dictionary seem light reading by comparison.” But having proved that he could match modern historians fact for fact, he had gone on to write The Winning of the West in the light of his own experience of the frontier, and with all the creativity he could legitimately apply to the study of sources. And the great Parkman had praised him.
He was less concerned, now, with the passing of the amateur historian—somebody he was not sorry to see go—but with the prejudice growing in academe against any prose that did not sound scientific. None of the members of the American Historical Association, he suspected, believed any more that history was a branch of literature. If their attitude held, historical writing was doomed as a civilizing influence. It would degenerate into the kind of sterile jargon that only professors fed on. He proceeded to say just that, undeterred by stony stares and occasional titters among his audience.
Literature may be defined as that which has permanent interest because of both its substance and its form, aside from the mere technical value that inheres in a special treatise for specialists. For a great work of literature there is the same demand now that there has always been; and in any great work of literature the first element is imaginative power. The imaginative power demanded for a great historian is different from that demanded for a great poet; but it is no less marked. Such imaginative power is in no sense incompatible with minute accuracy. On the contrary, very accurate, very real and vivid, presentation of the past can come only from one in whom the imaginative gift is strong.
Imagination, Roosevelt argued, did not have to be invention. In nonfiction writing, it should be no more than the ability to see and feel intensely what was there to be seen and felt. “No amount of self-communion and of pondering the soul of mankind, no gorgeousness of literary imagery, can take the place of cool, serious, widely extended study.” Repeatedly he declared that color—authentic color—was not an embellishment of truth: it was truth. Modern scientists were dazzled by their discoveries, but apologetic, not to say perverse, in failing to communicate the beauty of revelation. Modern historians should beware of going the same way.
“Do not misunderstand me,” he said. “In the field of historical research an immense amount can be done by men who have no literary power whatever.” As the discipline developed to keep pace with technology, so must a new type of “investigator”—as opposed to narrative historian—arise and be accepted as indispensable. Roosevelt compared the relationship of the two types to that of the stonemason and the architect. Just as religious faith had had to square itself with Darwin, so must history adjust to the immense proliferation of proven fact. “So far from ignoring science, the great historian of the future can do nothing unless he is steeped in science.… He must accept what we now know to be man’s place in nature.” As Romance died, he must illumine the usual as well as the unusual.… “If he possesses the highest imaginative and literary quality, he will be able to interest us in the gray tints of the general landscape no less than in the flame hues of the jutting peaks.”
Except to deaf ears, Roosevelt had so far presented a plausible case. But what his friend Owen Wister called “the preacher militant” in him caused him to add that history should teach morality. It could not record the best and worst of human behavior without comment. Even as he said this, he backed down, and granted that many historical moralists, such as Thomas Carlyle, had made fools of themselves when they diverged from the abstract and started laying down principles of conduct. He fell into his old habit of equivocation, and indulged a long purple passage in praise of purple passages. This spoiled the effect of a fine admonition to the historian of the future:
He must ever remember that while the worst offense of which he can be guilty is to write vividly and inaccurately, yet that unless he writes vividly he cannot write truthfully; for no amount of dull, painstaking detail will sum up the whole truth unless the genius is there to paint the whole truth.
Alice Hooper of Boston, sitting in for Frederick Jackson Turner of “Frontier Thesis” fame, did not know whether to be approving or critical of the Colonel’s performance. “He is so self-impressed and so thoroughly sure,” she wrote Turner afterward, “… and is so anxious to make a ten strike every time he opens his mouth that it detracts from the profoundness of his learning.… His personality thunders too loud! But in spite of that—what an amount of things he carries about in his head doesn’t he—and admiration for his capacity must be acknowledged when all is said and done.”
Whatever others present thought of Roosevelt the historiographer, they basked in his celebrity at a post-lecture reception in the Copley Plaza Hotel. So many of them crammed in to meet him that the grand ballroom had to be opened up. He spent the night in the house of his friend William Sturgis Bigelow, a Buddhist scholar, and enjoyed himself at breakfast next morning with a couple of Harvard historians receptive to his views.
“T.R. came and went,” Bigelow reported to Henry Cabot Lodge in Washington. “He was apparently never better. You never said a truer thing that he has no spilt milk in his life. He was just as much interested in the next thing as if the last one had never exis
ted.”
“ ‘UNLESS HE WRITES VIVIDLY HE CANNOT WRITE TRUTHFULLY.’ ”
The manuscript of Roosevelt’s autobiography, 1913. (photo credit i13.1)
ONE CONSEQUENCE OF Roosevelt’s recent escape from death was an end to his estrangement from Lodge. Since the latter’s declaration of neutrality in the presidential contest, they had had little politically to do with each other. But the personal bond between them remained strong, and Lodge had reaffirmed it in an emotional telegram immediately after the shooting. With some awkwardness, they began to correspond again on the subject of Roosevelt’s lecture, and on the coincidental fact that they were both engaged in writing their autobiographies.
A much frostier estrangement showed no signs of thaw on 4 January 1913, when the Colonel and President Taft were seated opposite each other at the funeral of Whitelaw Reid in New York. Appropriately bitter weather buffeted the Cathedral of St. John the Divine throughout the service, which was attended by many of the eminent Republicans who had once thought of themselves as a team: Lodge, Elihu Root, Robert Bacon, Philander Knox, Henry White, J. P. Morgan, Joseph H. Choate, Andrew Carnegie, Frank Munsey, and others. By no attempt at a smile, or even a nod of the head, did Taft acknowledge his predecessor’s presence across the chancel. After the benediction, he rose quickly and marched down the stone aisle, his aides clattering after him. Eleanor, sitting with her father-in-law, asked if it was protocol for a president to walk out ahead of the coffin.
“No, dear, no,” Roosevelt said. “It is not customary, but in this case Mr. Taft probably thought there should be precedence even between corpses!”
His wisecrack may have been overheard by the President’s brother Henry, who was sitting close by. In a bizarre speech that night, at a GOP fund-raiser in the Waldorf-Astoria, Taft described himself as “deceased,” and the dinner in his honor “a wake.” He blamed Roosevelt (who was not present) for eliminating him, saying that a million Republicans had voted Democratic in order to avert the Progressive threat.
Then came a virtual wail for sympathy. “What was the political disease of which I died? I am hopeful that when historians conduct their post-mortems it may be found that my demise was due to circumstances over which I had no great control, and to a political cataclysm, which I could hardly have anticipated or avoided.”
FOR THE REST OF the winter, Roosevelt was absorbed in literary work. He continued to grind out what The Outlook obediently advertised as “Chapters of a Possible Autobiography,” as well as editorials and book reviews, and wrote his African life histories at such a rate that he had to urge Edmund Heller to keep up. In addition, he prepared “History as Literature” for publication in the April 1913 issue of American Historical Review and collected ten other pieces to appear with it in the essay volume he had promised Scribners. They included his three European university lectures, a paper on the ancient Irish sagas, “Dante in the Bowery,” and “The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit,” his analysis of the conflict between faith and reason.
Edith worried about the pace at which he drove himself, and the struggle he seemed to be having with his memoir. “It is very difficult to strike just the happy medium between being too reticent and not reticent enough!” he wrote her sister. “I find it difficult both as regards my life when I was a child and my political experiences.” His solution in the former case was simply to omit whatever was not pleasant, and in the latter to adopt what Abbott regretfully called his “argumentative” style.
He was shy about mentioning any members of his family except the Roosevelts and Bullochs who had preceded him, expressing awe of his father (“the only man of whom I was ever really afraid”), and tolerant affection for his “entirely unreconstructed” Georgian mother, with her stories of antebellum life on Roswell Plantation and “queer goings-on in the Negro quarters.” As far as any reader could tell, the woman who bore his first child had never existed. The mother of his later children was referred to only in passing as “Mrs. Roosevelt,” and the children themselves were neither numbered nor named. He wrote tersely about his juvenile battles with asthma, then dismissed the subject of health altogether. Adult traumas, whether physical or psychological, went unrecorded. Autobiographically speaking, he had not squandered half his patrimony in the Badlands. He had not run for mayor of New York, let alone finished last in a three-way race. His younger brother, Elliott, had not impregnated a servant girl, the family had not paid her off, and Elliott had not died a hopeless alcoholic. Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt had been obstructed, rather than outwitted, by a Machiavellian colleague. Somebody else could take credit for comparing President McKinley’s backbone to a chocolate éclair. And the Colonel of the Rough Riders had not lobbied for a Medal of Honor on the ground of personal heroism.
A few of these lacunae were self-serving, but most were self-aware, to be expected in the reminiscences of a former president. He knew that every word that he wrote on personal matters would be pored over. (Hundreds of newspapers, including The New York Times, were quoting each chapter as soon as it appeared in The Outlook.) His moral instinct, moreover, prevented him from recording material that did not trumpet his beliefs. Owen Wister saw clearly in characterizing him as “an optimist who saw things as they ought to be, wrestling with a realist who knew things as they were.”
The optimist forged ahead with his text, cutting down on anecdotes and applying political experience to future ideals. Yet it was the realist, persuaded to reminisce by fellow editors at the magazine, who here and there set down stretches of beguiling autobiography, faithful to his own precept that vividness was a necessary part of historical truth. He wrote an elegiac chapter, “In Cowboy Land,” about his years as a rancher and deputy sheriff in North Dakota:
That land of the West has gone now, “gone, gone with lost Atlantis,” gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories. It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman.… 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 the 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.
ON TUESDAY, 4 MARCH, the present and the future simultaneously intruded themselves on literary recall. Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as President of the United States, calling upon “all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men” to come to his side. “God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!”
Doubting, somehow, that Wilson wanted his advice, the Colonel went that morning to the huge new “Futurists Exhibition” at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory in midtown Manhattan. Since its opening two weeks before, the show, officially entitled “International Exhibition of Modern Art” and displaying well over a thousand paintings and sculptures, had drawn record crowds, setting off reactionaries against sophisticates, critic against critic, and the avant-garde against the merely curious, in a bedlam of aesthetic debate. It seemed worthy of an Outlook review.
Roosevelt had never written art criticism before. His references to painting, mostly in letters, were conventional and uninvolved, although Arthur Lee had managed to thrill him with the gift of some Valhallan landscapes by Pinckney Marcius-Simons, a New Yorker transplanted to Bayreuth. As for sculpture, Alice had once been convulsed by her father’s admiration for a “particularly fine Diana,” despite three-dimensional evidence that the figure was Apollo.
Monocular vision was part of his problem, but he also had a tin ear for music, and no sense of interior design beyond the hunter’s desire to surround himself with disjecta membra. “Art,” Roosevelt admitted, “is about the only subject of which I feel some uncertainty.” That had not stopped him, as President, from being strongly suppor
tive of the creative classes. His executive dining room had vied with Henry Adams’s breakfast parlor as a meeting place for writers, artists, and intellectuals. He had put the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the novelist James B. Connolly, and the cartoonist Thomas Nash on the federal payroll, on the understanding that they would do as little governmental work as possible. He had sponsored a classical restoration of the White House by the architects McKim, Mead & White, teamed up with the planners of the City Beautiful movement against the yahoos of Capitol Hill, posed for John Singer Sargent, and chosen Augustus Saint-Gaudens to design the most elegant coins in modern circulation. “I’d like to be remembered in that way—a patron of art,” he told Hamlin Garland.
Nevertheless, something earthy in him mistrusted what was most fine in the fine arts. He had trouble reading Jane Austen, and thought Henry James effeminate. He disliked poetry that dwelt on intuitions or sensation, preferring border ballads and Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf to Keats and Baudelaire. Yet his own writings demonstrated a lyrical receptivity to the sights and sounds of the natural world, plus a willingness to be surprised. He rejected nothing new until he understood it well enough to form an opinion of it—usually on moral or utilitarian grounds. Even then, he was amenable to changing his mind, if an expert could improve his perception. Unlike most of the sixty thousand traditionally minded viewers who had preceded him to the Armory, he came without prejudice. He felt that the organizers of the show were doing a public service in displaying “art forces which of late have been at work in Europe, forces which cannot be ignored.”
Colonel Roosevelt Page 35
