Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

politician he had never much cared for—struggled in Roosevelt’s breast with more violent emotions regarding the assassin, Leon Czolgosz. In his opinion, those bullets at Buffalo had been fired, not merely at a man, but at the very heart of the American Republic. They were an assault upon representative government and civilized order. Unable to contain his rage, he leaned forward and blurted an excoriation of Czolgosz into the rain. “If it had been I who had been shot, he wouldn’t have got away so easily.… I’d have guzzled him first.”

He had been a published author at eighteen, a husband at twenty-two, an acclaimed historian and New York State Assemblyman at twenty-three, a father and a widower at twenty-five, a ranchman at twenty-six, a candidate for Mayor of New York at twenty-seven, a husband again at twenty-eight, a Civil Service Commissioner of the United States at thirty. By then he was producing book after book, and child after child, and cultivating every scientist, politician, artist, and intellectual of repute in Washington. His career had gathered further speed: Police Commissioner of New York City at thirty-six, Assistant Secretary of the Navy at thirty-eight, Colonel of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, the “Rough Riders,” at thirty-nine.

Last winter, in Colorado, he had leaped off his horse into a pack of hounds, kicked them aside, and knifed a cougar to death. What a great fight that had been!

No Vice President succeeding to the presidency through death had yet won another term in his own right.

A random survey of his achievements might show him mastering German, French, and the contrasted dialects of Harvard and Dakota Territory; assembling fossil skeletons with paleontological skill; fighting for an amateur boxing championship; transcribing birdsong into a private system of phonetics; chasing boat thieves with a star on his breast and Tolstoy in his pocket; founding a finance club, a stockmen’s association, and a hunting-conservation society; reading some twenty thousand books and writing fifteen of his own; climbing the Matterhorn; promulgating a flying machine; and becoming a world authority on North American game mammals.

He struggled to reconcile his love of strong language with the need for dignified expression. It had always been thus with him: conflict between belligerence and civilized restraint, between animal brutality and human decency, between pessimism and optimism, or, as his perceptive friend Owen Wister put it, “between what he knew, and his wish not to know it.”

McKinley had marched with them at Antietam, when “Teedie” Roosevelt had been but a child in a zouave suit. A gulf, not merely of years but of ideology, separated him from these heroes of the past. They had fought to preserve the Union; he had fought to create a world power. The old soldiers had cheered when the young soldiers liberated Cuba, but they fell silent when similar “freedoms” were imposed on Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. They had watched with worried eyes as the Stars and Stripes rose over Hawaii, Wake Island, and half of Samoa, and Secretary Hay began negotiations to purchase the Danish West Indies. Was their beloved republic, they asked, taking on the trappings of an imperial power?

Presidents Cleveland, Harrison, and McKinley paid little attention to the phenomenon of Combination. To them, it seemed a natural economic trend. If industries produced vital supplies, if railroads functioned as semipublic utilities, why restrict their profitable development?

Roosevelt had been violently inclined himself in Haymarket days. He had fantasized leading a band of riflemen against the rioters, and shooting them into submission. But middle age, and the democratizing effect of war, had moderated his attitude toward organized labor.

Roosevelt was relieved to hear the good news. “I don’t care a damn about stocks and bonds, but I don’t want to see them go down the first day I am President!”

“Theodore is never sober,” Henry Adams observed, “only he is drunk with himself and not with rum.”

“Roosevelt,” declared Grover Cleveland, “is the most perfectly equipped and the most effective politician thus far seen in the Presidency.”

Previous Presidents had sued the trusts with various success, but none had done so voluntarily, and with such virile force. He had acted, on grounds few lawyers considered valid, at the height of the greatest merger movement in history.

Taft had succeeded so well in the Philippines, as diplomat and executive, that his conversion to imperialism passed almost unnoticed. Only recipients of his classified dispatches understood how deeply he despised the people he governed. Filipinos, Taft wrote, were “the greatest liars it has ever been my fortune to meet.” The educated minority were “ambitious as Satan and quite as unscrupulous.” The rest—some six and a half million peasants and jungle tribesmen—were inferior to “the most ignorant negro,” and “utterly unfit” for self-government. “They need the training of fifty or a hundred years before they shall even realize what Anglo-Saxon liberty is.”

THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S TOTAL lack of inhibition—some said, of decorum—was much discussed at Washington dinner tables in the spring of 1902. Whether exercising, working, or pricking the bubbles of solemnity around him, he seemed unconcerned by his growing reputation as “the strangest creature the White House ever held.”

Roosevelt was currently studying jujitsu.

Hikers in Rock Creek Park learned to take cover when he galloped by, revolver in hand; he had a habit of “popping” shortsightedly at twigs and stumps with live ammunition.

Petitioners visiting the Executive Office learned to keep talking, because the President usually had an open book on his desk, and was quite capable of snatching it up when the conversation flagged.

It was Holmes who, in 1881, had shockingly suggested that most statutes were obsolete by the time they got between leather covers. “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.… At any given time [it] pretty nearly corresponds … with what is then understood to be convenient.”

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.”

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.”

Only Roosevelt found new stimulation eight or ten times a day, thundering every platitude with the pleased air of having just discovered it. He was quite unapologetic: “Platitudes and iteration are necessary in order to hammer the truths and principles I advocate into people’s heads.”

CONCERN MOUNTED, MEANWHILE, behind boardroom doors on Wall Street that Theodore Roosevelt was “an extremely dangerous man.” For all his lip service at Milwaukee and St. Paul to laissez-faire ways, he seemed to stand, in the eyes of Henry W. Taft, for “a pretty pronounced type of socialism.” He had shown prejudice against railroad owners, beef packers, and coal-mine operators; he had won a referral of Knox’s Northern Securities suit to the Supreme Court, and stirred up hell in the South; now he was protecting foliage and threatening to strengthen the public-land laws. His professed truce with the trusts was likely to last as long as it took him to win the Presidency in his own right. Once he got the executive bit between those grinning, biting teeth, there would be no holding him.

Behind his jocularity on Southern race relations, the President was giving serious thought to an “utterance” on lynching. He admitted that long-term justice for the Negro concerned him more than any other issue.

Born to wealth, with an inherited sense that it must be repaid with public service, he found himself increasingly repelled by those who went after money for money’s sake, or used it to buy power.

“Theodore Rex,” James allowed, “is at any rate a really extraordinary creature for native intensity, veracity, and bonhomie—he plays his part with the best will in the world and I recognize his amusing likability.”

Roosevelt read with difficulty, his silk pince-nez ribbon slapping the side of his face. Nobody, with the exception of his wife and Dr. Rixey, knew that he was losing sight in his left eye—the legacy of a recent boxing blow.

Nor was he as constantly healthy as he pretended to be. The “Cuban fever” he shared with so many of these Rough Riders (trotting by with rebel yells) had to be kept down with drugs; his joints were stiffening, no matter how much he exercised; and his blood pressure, always abnormally high, was being worsened by hardening arteries.

WHAT NONE OF THE diplomats appreciated, as they obeyed their instructions, was Theodore Roosevelt’s lifelong obsession with balance. He loved the poised spin of the big globe in his office, the rhythm of neither-nor sentences, the give-and-take of boxing, the ebb and flow of political power play.

“What I cannot understand about the Russian,” Roosevelt complained, “is the way he will lie when he knows perfectly well that you know he is lying.”

The peace the President had made possible at Portsmouth was the result of just such an inexplicable ability to impose his singular charge upon plural power. By sheer force of moral purpose, by clarity of perception, by mastery of detail and benign manipulation of men, he had become, as Henry Adams admiringly wrote him, “the best herder of Emperors since Napoleon.”

“Mr. Roosevelt is one of the most likable men that I am acquainted with,” Mark Twain remarked a few days later, dictating his autobiography. The President was “the most popular human being that has ever existed in the United States,” by virtue of his “joyous ebullitions of excited sincerity.” Twain was nevertheless moved to express the misgivings of not a few thoughtful observers who wondered if a Roosevelt unrestrained might not become a Roosevelt moving too fast for his own good. “He flies from one thing to another with incredible dispatch.… each act of his, and each opinion expressed, is likely to abolish or controvert some previous act or expressed opinion.”

Baker discovered, as Steffens had before him, that the only time to interrupt Roosevelt à toilette was when the razor made further loquacity perilous. He waited until the presidential chin was being scraped before venturing that the railroad bill was “the most important” Roosevelt could ever claim credit for. “Yes, but not the most important administrative action. That was Panama.”

“You may not agree with me, Mr. President, but I believe that we cannot stop short of governmental ownership of the railroads.” Roosevelt became vehement. He said that he knew, better than anyone else, how “inefficient and undependable” federal employees were. It would be “a disaster” to have them in charge of free enterprises.

“Here is the thing you must bear in mind,” Roosevelt said, clearly irritated. “I do not represent public opinion: I represent the public. There is a wide difference between the two, between the real interests of the public, and the public’s opinion of these interests. I must represent not the excited opinion of the West, but the real interests of the whole people.”

Upton Sinclair, a bony, driven twenty-seven-year-old, proclaimed himself as dedicated to the equalization of wealth. Yet in the past year, he had managed to sell the same novel to four different publishers—an achievement any capitalist might envy. His book was entitled The Jungle. It detailed unsanitary practices in Chicago’s meatpacking houses with a relish verging on the pathological.

“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.”

Roosevelt had to consider was that of his own successor. Mrs. Taft did not know it, but his personal preference always had been for Elihu Root. “I would walk on my hands and knees from the White House to the Capitol to see Root made President. But I know it cannot be done. He couldn’t be elected.” The Secretary of State was considered by many who knew him to be a great man—something never said of Taft. Intellectually formidable, tireless, brave, unbeatable in any negotiation, Root was hampered by his identity as a corporate lawyer. However honorable, that was simply the wrong thing to be at a time when Roosevelt himself had declared war on laissez-faire.

Taft was warm dough to Root’s cold iron. He presented no hard edge to the public, or indeed to the President, who imagined that the dough could be permanently imprinted “T.R.”

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON was not surprised by the swiftness and unanimity of black reaction. For the last five years, he sadly noted, Theodore Roosevelt had been the idol of America’s ten million Negroes. Now, within days—“I might almost say hours”—the President had become a pariah.

ALL IN ALL, this was not a propitious moment for Theodore Roosevelt to be officially informed that he had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, for his work in ending the Russo-Japanese War.

On 14 January, Roosevelt moved to quell a fierce Senate debate over whether he had exceeded his authority in dismissing the Brownsville soldiers. He sent Congress another special message on the subject, much less aggressive than his first. Although he still insisted that he had acted correctly, he allowed for the first time that he was prepared to readmit any dischargee who “shows to my satisfaction that he is clear of guilt, or of shielding the guilty.” This was not of much comfort to those who believed that the burden of proof should lie on the other side, but it persuaded a majority of the Senate that the President had not broken any law.

“It seems to me time for the country to take account of its natural resources,” the President wrote, “and to enquire how long they are likely to last.”

Roosevelt wrote Kermit to say that blame for the economic downturn would inevitably center on himself and his regulatory policies. He might have to spend the rest of his presidency answering to the two classes of people always most vociferous in hard times: the bewildered and the guilty. However, “I am absolutely certain that what I have done is right and ultimately will be of benefit to the country.”

“THE REACTION AGAINST ROOSEVELT, socially, is violent,” Henry Adams wrote to a friend as the last tremblings of the great panic subsided. “And, like all Presidents, he will probably find himself, in his last year, a severely dethroned king.”

LaFollette was especially disturbed by Taft’s choice of “Sunny Jim” Sherman, a big, bluff conservative widely seen as a stooge for Speaker Cannon. All observers were agreed, however, that the Republican ticket, at five hundred pounds and counting, was the heaviest package ever offered to American voters.

Roosevelt admitted to some worries on the last score. “If the people knew Taft there would be no doubt of his election. They know what he has done, but they don’t know the man. If they knew him they would know that he can be relied on to carry out the policies which I stand for. He is committed to them just the same as I am and has been made the mouthpiece for them as frequently as I.”

Taft, however, was not a fighter, either open or covert. Lacking aggression, all he wanted was to be loved.

official histories would celebrate his administrative achievements: the Monroe Doctrine reaffirmed, the Old World banished from the New World, the great Canal being cut; peace established in the Far East; the Open Door swinging freely in Manchuria and Morocco; Cuba liberated (and returned to self-government just in time for his departure); the Philippines pacified; the Navy hugely strengthened, known literally around the world; the Army, shorn of its old deadwood generals, feeling the green sap of younger replacements; capital and labor balanced off, the lynch rate declining, the gospel of cleaner politics now canon, and enough progressive principles established, or made part of the national debate, to keep legislative reformers busy for at least ten years.