Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  An electricity never given off before by an art event in New York was palpable around the huge building. Double-parked automobiles crowded the streets to north, east, and south. Porters tried to control the jostle of ticket holders, and hollered through megaphones at cabs blocking the entrance. Of the two side exits, the most animated—mainly by people laughing and improvising “Cubist” jokes—was that adjoining Gallery I, notorious for its concentration of works by Matisse and other Parisian enfants terribles.

  Roosevelt was in no hurry to bypass the American rooms, which outnumbered those of France, Britain, Ireland, and Germany almost three to one. The first area he entered, a luminous, tented space full of sculptures and decorative pieces, at once seized his attention. He was predisposed to like the lacquered oak screens of Robert Chanler, not just because the artist was the brother of one of his former Rough Riders, but because the exquisite designs that covered them fulfilled his long-held dream of a new aesthetic arising out of the paradox of American identity. Here was the work of a man like himself, a wealthy Knickerbocker who had lived in the West and served as a sheriff, yet who was at home in European salons. Chanler, too, loved nature, finding zoomorphic beauty even in the rule of tooth and claw. His Asiatic-looking black wolves, their tails flowing like serpents, bit soundlessly into the writhing bodies of white stags. Attenuated giraffes, splotched as delicately as orchids, grazed the tops of impossibly tall trees. Moonlight irradiated the needles of porcupines slinking through a forest of blue and silver. Perhaps most thrilling, to a tired man of letters planning to take his youngest sons to Arizona in July, was a representation of the Hopi Snake Dance in the “sky city” of Walpi. By transfiguring primitive movement into an ethereal choreography, Chanler was doing the reverse of what the Ballets Russes had done in Paris—where his panels were apparently admired.

  Moving on through five more galleries of contemporary American art, Roosevelt saw nothing by Saint-Gaudens, Frederick MacMonnies, William Merritt Chase, and other favorites of his presidency. He did not miss them. They had had too long a reign, with their effete laurel wreaths and Grecian profiles. It was clear that the show’s organizers, headed by the symbolist painter Arthur B. Davies, intended to eradicate the beaux arts style from the national memory. Even Sargent was shunned, in favor of young American artists of powerful, if not yet radical originality: George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, and dozens of women willing to portray their sex without prettification. Roosevelt was taken with Ethel Myers’s plastilene group, “Fifth Avenue Gossips,” whose perambulatory togetherness reminded him of the fifteenth idyll of Theocritus. He liked the social realism of John Sloan’s “Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair” and George Luks’s camera-quick sketches of animal activity at the Bronx Zoo. Leon Kroll’s “Terminal Yards” impressed him, although it represented the kind of desecration of the Hudson Palisades that he and George Perkins had worked to curtail. From a vertiginous, snowcapped height, the artist’s eagle eye looked down on railroad sidings and heaps of slag. Drifting vapor softened the ugliness and made it mysteriously poetic.

  What pleased Roosevelt about the work of these “Ashcan” painters, and indeed the entire American showing as he wandered on, was the lack of “simpering, self-satisfied conventionality.” All his life he had deplored the deference his countrymen tended to extend toward the art and aristocracy of the Old World. Sloan was a social realist as unsentimental as Daumier, but bigger of heart. Walt Kuhn’s joyful “Morning” had the explosive energy of a Van Gogh landscape, minus the neurosis. Hartley’s foreflattened “Still Life No. 1” was the work of a stateside Cézanne, its Indian rug and tapestries projecting a geometry unseen in Provence.

  Davies modestly exhibited only three oil paintings. He eschewed realism in favor of a dreamlike classicism that was at once as serene yet more mysterious than the masterworks of Puvis de Chavannes. Roosevelt, like virtually every American critic or connoisseur, revered Puvis, but Davies’s “Moral Law—A Line of Mountains” was perhaps the most cosmopolitan picture in the show, with its unmistakably Western chain of peaks shimmering across a prairielike emptiness, and pale vague nudes that could have been doodled by Puvis, or traced from the walls of the Roman catacombs, floating in the foreground. Roosevelt took pleasure in it even if the title was bafflingly cryptic.

  His enjoyment did not diminish when he found himself among the works of European moderns loosely cataloged as “post-impressionist.” He was blind to a piece of pure abstraction by Wassily Kandinsky, but responded happily to the dreamy fantasies of Odilon Redon and the virtuoso draftsmanship of Augustus John, as well as to Whistler, Monet, Cézanne, and other acknowledged revolutionaries.

  Then came the slap in the face that was Matisse. More vituperation had been directed at this painter, in reviews of the show so far, than at any other “Cubist”—a term that actually did not apply to him, but nevertheless was used as an epithet. Roosevelt gazed at his “Joaquina” and found its cartoony angularity simply absurd. Beyond loomed a kneeling nude by Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Although obviously mammalian, it was not especially human; the “lyric grace” that had made it the sensation of a recent exhibition in Cologne reminded him more of a praying mantis.

  A phrase he had recently tried out on Henry Cabot Lodge, in a letter complaining about political extremists, came to mind: lunatic fringe. It seemed even more applicable to the French radicals who now proceeded to insult his intelligence, as if he and not they were insane: Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, Maillol. He boggled at Marcel Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier, a shuttery flutter of cinematic movement propelled by the kind of arcs that American comic artists drew to telegraph punches, or baseball swings. If this was Cubism, or Futurism, or Near-Impressionism, or whatever jargon-term the theorists of modern art wanted to apply to it, he believed he had seen it before, in a Navajo rug.

  At least Duchamp had had the decency not to flaunt sexual organs. Roosevelt noted no e on the end of Nu in the painting’s title (helpfully lettered onto the canvas), and decided in the face of general opinion to translate it as “A Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” Nakedness seemed to be a motif of the show’s remaining galleries, so much so that he elected to ignore a walking nude by Robert Henri that verged on the anatomical, and a frankly lesbian study by Jules Pascin that had three girls preparing to have sex on a bed, limbs intertwined, lips caressing a proffered nipple.

  As James Bryce, the outgoing British ambassador in Washington, noted, Roosevelt “wouldn’t always look at a thing.”

  HOWEVER, IN HIS SUBSEQUENT review, modestly entitled “A Layman’s Views of an Art Exhibition,” he declined to be as outraged as most professional critics. His tone in confessing his inability to appreciate much of what he had seen was at first almost wistful, as if to acknowledge that the new century had begun to bewilder him. But if the law of evolution was applicable to artists, those fittest to survive were not the ones who mutated most startlingly. “It is true, as the champions of the extremists say, that there can be no life without change, and that to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life. It is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and retrogression instead of development.”

  He thought that there was life, and much “real good” in the work of the two emergent American modernist schools, “fantastic though the developments of these new movements are.” Personally, he preferred the nationalistic realism of the Ashcan artists to the violent expressionism of a Marsden Hartley. If the former group was popularist, it was at least all-American, and relatable to Progressivism, as were the new sociological novels of Theodore Dreiser, the “saleswoman” stories of Edna Ferber, and Israel Zangwill’s immigrant drama The Melting Pot, which Roosevelt had himself endorsed as an advertisement for Western-style democracy.

  What disturbed him was the Armory Show’s message that the Old World was, ironically, far ahead of the New in developing a cultural response to the terrifying implications of modern science. His own written attempt at such a res
ponse, “The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit,” could be taken as naïve, if the future—even the present!—really was as inhuman as Lehmbruck and Duchamp and Brancusi saw it. Unable to conceive of a head as a metal egg, Roosevelt abandoned reverence for humor:

  In this recent exhibition the lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists.… The Cubists are entitled to the serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored puzzle-pictures of the Sunday newspapers. Of course there is no reason for choosing the cube as a symbol, except that it is probably less fitted than any other mathematical expression for any but the most formal decorative art. There is no reason why people should not call themselves Cubists, or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, or Knights of the Isosceles Triangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so desire; as expressing anything serious and permanent, one term is as fatuous as another. Take the picture which for some reason is called “A Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” There is in my bathroom a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now, if for some inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of, say, “A Well-Dressed Man Going Up a Ladder,” the name would fit the facts just about as well.… From the standpoint of terminology each name would have whatever merit inheres in a rather cheap striving after effect; and from the standpoint of decorative value, of sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of the picture.

  ROOSEVELT’S SUDDEN INTEREST in modern art, on a day when he could have stayed home and read accounts of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, caused much editorial hilarity. A cartoon by Kemble in the Baltimore Evening Sun showed the new President contemplating a portrait of his toothy predecessor in the Oval Office and musing, “I wonder if that’s a futurist? It can’t be a cubist.” The New York World argued that the “Square Deal” of 1903 had been a proto-Cubist conceit, doing to the Constitution what Braque and Picasso would do to color and form ten years later. As for Progressivism, there was little to distinguish it from the dizziness of Duchamp. “The ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’ is the perfect pictorial representation of a Roosevelt platform.”

  C. E. Wood, staff cartoonist for The Independent, drew a caricature of the Colonel explaining a Cubist construction to a fellow viewer at the Armory Show. “You don’t understand this new style of painting? It’s as clear as day.”

  The canvas’s blocky shapes spelled out “1916.”

  IT TURNED OUT that Sargent’s portrait of Theodore Roosevelt was indeed the sole wall decoration to greet Wilson when he reported for work in the Oval Office on 5 March 1913. Not only that, the new desk chair ordered for him had not yet been delivered, so he found himself sitting in Roosevelt’s old one, rather battered after seven and a half years of strenuous occupancy.

  During the early days of his campaign, Wilson had reacted touchily when reporters suggested he should try to emulate the Colonel’s dynamic speaking style. “Don’t you suppose I know my own handicaps?… I’d do it if I could.” But when formal oratory was called for, Wilson was capable of eloquence without affectation, as his inaugural address showed:

  The great government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people. There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been, “Let every man look out for himself; let every generation look out for itself,” while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves.…

  We have now come to the sober second thought. The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every purpose of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried in our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration.

  Washington’s diplomatic corps noted that the new President had said nothing about the world outside the United States.

  Roosevelt was determined not to criticize him publicly, as a matter of personal propriety as well as respect for the decision of the electorate. But his hackles were raised early by Wilson’s choice of William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state. Not only was Bryan a hayseed of the purest fiber, sure to alienate the aristocrats along Embassy Row, he also quaintly believed that all foreign provocations could be talked or prayed away. That boded ill for another crisis over Mexico, where an anti-American despot named Victoriano Huerta had seized power and, apparently, condoned an armed attack on a U.S. border patrol in Arizona, the same day Wilson was inaugurated.

  Republican and Progressive congressmen wishing to urge a forceful response from the new administration found themselves barred by a White House access rule that reversed more than a century of democratic tradition. Wilson’s plump young secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, announced that in future, all callers upon the President must bear invitations. This haughty policy was perhaps to be expected from a political scholar whose writings made clear that he believed in an isolated, powerful executive. Wilson felt that legislators over the years had spent too much time visiting the White House with unasked-for advice, and too little on Capitol Hill, consenting.

  ON FRIDAY, 4 APRIL, there was a gathering of Rooseveltians—both Republican and Progressive—at Christ Church, Oyster Bay, to watch the Colonel give away his younger daughter in marriage to Dr. Richard Derby. Although the gathering was large, cramming the flower-filled nave beyond capacity, it was select. Conspicuous absentees included William Howard Taft (now a professor of law at Yale), and Elihu Root. George von Lengerke Meyer, who had served in Taft’s cabinet as well as Roosevelt’s, had needed encouragement to attend. So had Senator Lodge. They were not sure they had been forgiven for failing to stand at Armageddon. Roosevelt scoffed at their embarrassment. “I feel very strongly against Root,” he told Winthrop Chanler, “because Root took part in as downright a bit of theft as ever was perpetrated by any Tammany ballot box stuffer.… But with Cabot and George it was wholly different. They had the absolute right to do each exactly as he did, and I never expected either of them to follow me.”

  Both were, in any case, Harvard men, as were Chanler, Owen Wister, and many of the other top-hatted figures attending the ceremony—not least the bridegroom. “Dusky Dick,” as Alice Longworth teasingly called him (he was dark, and prone to black moods), happened also to be wealthy, with an easy expectation of twelve to fourteen thousand dollars a year over and above his professional income. This had been a further reason to approve him as an addition to the family. Roosevelt was so much a product of the Porcellian and Knickerbocker clubs that he never seemed to notice how exclusive his preferred field of acquaintance really was.

  “FUTURE GENERATIONS WERE MANIFESTING THEMSELVES.”

  The Colonel gives his younger daughter away in marriage, 4 April 1913. (photo credit i13.2)

  He seemed near to tears as he escorted Ethel to the altar, in contrast to his unsmiling demeanor at Alice’s wedding in the White House. That had been a state function; this was private. It was, nevertheless, momentous as a rite of passage not only for the young woman at his side, glowing in ivory satin and emeralds, but for himself as a public person. Never again, probably, would he attract such a concourse, as Wister called it, of familiars. The power that he had exuded for so long was diminishing by the day while Woodrow Wilson—not to mention Cubism!—remade the world in ways not to his liking.

  Had Roosevelt not decided to make his autobiography as impersonal as possible, he could have brought it to an end with an account of this ceremony, casting the congregation as a sort of dramatis personae of his life and times. Here was old Joseph Choate, to whom he had turned, after the death of Theodore Senior, for career advice; his classmate Bob Bacon, still the handsomest man in the world, but grizzled now and replaced as American ambassador to France; tiny, guttural Jake Riis, who had opened h
is eyes to “how the other half lives”; his orthographical mentor, Brander Matthews, one of the few academics he could stand; Bill Loeb, who had handed him John Hay’s telegram in 1901, confirming his accession to the presidency; sleek George Cortelyou, manager of his huge electoral win in 1904; Gifford Pinchot, the architect of his conservation policies; Henry White, who had ridden with him and the Kaiser on Döbertiz Field; Lyman and Lawrence Abbott, his employers at The Outlook, wondering how long they could afford to showcase his political opinions; George Perkins, who intended to keep bankrolling the Progressive Party, and Frank Munsey, who did not. And here by virtue of blood was the sole Democrat present, thirty-one-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt, recently confirmed as assistant secretary of the navy.

  Dick and Ethel were married over the loud objections of little Gracie, Ted and Eleanor’s daughter. Future generations were manifesting themselves.

  WITH SPRING UNDER WAY and the Derbys off to Europe on honeymoon, Roosevelt reapplied himself to the literary task he was beginning to find unbearable. “I am working with heated unintelligence at my ‘biography,’ ” he wrote Ethel. “I fairly loathe it, now.”

  His boredom showed as he dictated two long, dry chapters about his commissionerships in Washington and New York in the 1890s. It was difficult to interest any modern reader in the civil service and municipal problems of a quarter-century before. He tried to make them sound less dated, and fell into a presentist mode, as if he were still campaigning against Taft and Wilson. A chapter on his service with the Rough Riders in Cuba, heavily appendicized with documents testifying to his heroism at San Juan, ended with an argument for military and naval preparedness in 1913. Hindsight made him more pro-labor and better informed about the abuse of women than he had been as president. The Progressive Party platform kept intruding, like King Charles’s head. He seemed to realize that his book was becoming polemical, but could not help himself. Nor could he turn, as he had in happier days, to Elihu Root for corrective sarcasm.