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Here, twenty-five years before, he had nursed the first great sorrow of his life; twenty-four years before, wheezed asthmatic over Rhetoric and Comparative Anatomy; twenty-three years before, suffered agonies over a girl from Chestnut Hill. As long as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me.…
watched with fascination as he tore off his coat and vest and slammed a large pistol on the dresser. Eliot asked if it was his habit to carry firearms. “Yes, when I am going into public places.”
When John D. Long introduced him with a joke about his inability to sit still in any position of power, Roosevelt shook from head to foot with laughter.
He dropped back to his seat, drenched with sweat, and got a standing ovation. Hay marveled at his power to transform a skeptical audience. Even Dr. Eliot was moved. “He has genius, force, originality.”
Roosevelt spent many moonlit evenings on the piazza in his rocking chair, with Edith beside him, listening to this “night-singing in the air.” Despite his mature preoccupation with politics, he was still susceptible to poetic impressions.
One day, he reined in his horse and teased them with a mock bulletin. “I want you to know all the facts, so I shall give them to you at first hand. Teddy [Jr.] is now fishing for tadpoles, but really expects to land a whale. Archie shot three elephants this morning. Ethel at this moment is setting fire to the rear of the house; Kermit and the calico pony are having a wrestling match in the garret, and Quentin, four years old, is pulling down the windmill.”
Dana withdrew his correspondent, and the press corps learned to respect the veil that the President drew across his family activities. Both he and Edith held to the Victorian concept of childhood as a state of grace that cameras, and coarse questions, could only profane. For the younger Roosevelts, the long summer days certainly seemed appareled in celestial light. “It is avowedly the ambition of the President,” a visitor wrote, “to make Sagamore Hill ever remain in the eyes of his children, the one spot on earth which is different from every other.”
From early morning, when he drummed them downstairs for a prebreak-fast game of “bear,” until late evening, when he romped them up to bed, their days were spent largely in his company. His burly arms tickled them, swung them shrieking into the sea, steadied their gun barrels, and rowed them around the bay.
Cortelyou was usually on his way by noon, and Roosevelt, looking like a
large plump urchin in negligee shirt, linen knickers, and canvas shoes, would play a set of tennis before lunch. With the sun glowing on his awnings, and the table piled with the products of his farm—roast chickens, asparagus, potatoes, corn, fresh rye bread and butter, gooseberries, grapes, peaches swimming in cream—he was tempted to forget that summer must end,
Heedless on the piazza overlooking the bay, her father used the long afternoons to catch up with his reading. His “beach book” for the season was Nicolay and Hay’s Abraham Lincoln: A History, in ten volumes. Unfazed, he read it straight through, along with his usual supply of dime novels and periodicals.
he would soon have to choose a nominee for the Supreme Court.
In his world there was neither absolute good nor absolute evil—only shifting standards of positive and negative behavior, determined by the majority and subject to constant change. Morality was not defined by God; it was the code a given generation of men wanted to live by. Truth was “what I can’t help believing.” Yesterday’s absolutes must give way to “the felt necessities of the time.”
HOLMES RETURNED TO Boston unsure of his fate, but a letter appointing him to the Supreme Court arrived within days.
So far, the strike had been oddly peaceful. Then at the end of July, just as he was about to announce Judge Holmes’s appointment, violence erupted in the anthracite country.
Speak softly and carry a big stick was a West African proverb Roosevelt had tried out once, as Vice President, and memorized as a personal mantra. Perhaps the current situation would enable him to test its effectiveness, starting with the soft speech. “If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; but neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power.”
The reaction in Berlin was immediate. On 17 December, the Reichstag voted secretly to accept arbitration, in such haste that other encouragements, from Hay in Washington and Metternich in London, were redundant on receipt. SO THE DEADLINE passed in peace.
massive release of tension was felt on both sides of the Atlantic.
Roosevelt’s triumph was von Hollebe...
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He had misjudged a President, misled an Emperor, and nearly started a war.
On 19 December, Germany and Britain formally invited Roosevelt to arbitrate their claims against Venezuela.
This was the nearest Roosevelt got to a public acknowledgment that there had indeed been a “crisis” involving himself. “I suppose,” he wrote privately, “we shall never make public the fact of the vital step.”
Overflowing with goodwill, he went out of his way to praise things Teutonic at a meeting with trade representatives of the Kaiser. For twenty minutes he spoke, in vigorous if ungrammatical German, of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Theodor Körner. “He astounded us,” one of the group said afterward. “He is as well posted on German affairs as on American.… His familiarity with the masterpieces of German literature would amaze even the most exact scholar in the Fatherland.” ROOSEVELT RESERVED HIS decision on whether to act as arbitrator through the holidays. John Hay felt sure that he would, in
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“THE EQUILIBRIUM OF the world is moving westwards,” a member of the Institut de France told Jean Jules Jusserand early in 1903.
French foreign-policy experts believed him to be the strongest international personality since Bismarck. Yet they could not reconcile the impérialiste who talked about “the proper policing of the world” with the statesman who had just modestly declined to arbitrate the Venezuela matter.
protocol to be submitted to The Hague. The last foreign battleships were steaming out of the Western Hemisphere.
THE NEXT MORNING’S newspapers proclaimed the double achievement: BLOCKADE ORDERED RAISED and THE PRESIDENT’S ANTITRUST PROGRAM COMPLETED.
Nevertheless, Roosevelt had brought about the first strengthening of federal regulatory authority in more than a decade, and unlike any Chief Executive before him, identified himself with antitrust policy. In the words of the Washington Evening Star, “The President of the United States is the original ‘trust-buster,’
“Do let me entreat you to say nothing that can be taken hold of by those anxious to foment trouble between ourselves and any foreign power, or who delight in giving the impression that as a nation we are walking about with a chip on our shoulder. We are too big a people to be able to be careless in what we say.”
So he acted while he still had time.
He had hardly finished dictating when complaints about his “precipitous and unnecessary action” resounded in the upper chamber. Evidently he had acted just in time. He responded by threatening to call back the House of Representatives as well, if funds were not voted in support of his naval buildup.
A House-Senate conference hastily recommended that the President be given enough funds to build not four but five big new battleships.
a stranger in a slouch hat got off a train waterstopping at Altoona, Pennsylvania, and crunched up the wrong side of the track. Six gleaming private cars screened him from the crowd on the platform. Tilting his head back as he approached the locomotive, he called in a harsh, yodeling voice, “Will you take a passenger in there?” The fireman stared down stupidly, so the stranger appealed to higher authority. “Mr. Engineer, I’d like to ride with you a few miles.” This time there was no mistaking the command in his voice. A second or two later, Theodore Roosevelt was in the cab, receiving sooty
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Free at last of Washington and the special session of the Senate (which had taken fifteen days to give him the treaty ratifications he demanded), Roosevelt was embarking on his much-delayed tour of the West.
Twenty years of public speaking had taught him that provincial audiences would listen to anything as long as it was seasoned with local references.
There is a homely old adage which runs, Speak softly and carry a big stick: you will go far. If the American nation will speak softly, and yet build, and keep at a pitch of the highest training, a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far. This generated such loud applause as to suggest that the audience took his “adage” as aggressive, rather than cautionary. Actually, Roosevelt was trying to say that soft-spoken (even secret) diplomacy should be the priority of a civilization, as long as hardness—of moral resolve, of military might—lay back of it. Otherwise, inevitably, soft
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Treaties negotiated by his Administration guaranteed that Americans alone would build and defend the Panama Canal; bills initiated by him had provided the necessary money and warships. But true, hemispheric security in a rearming world would require a much larger fleet than that currently envisaged by Congress. “If we have such a Navy—if we keep on building it up—we may rest assured … that
