Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  The Governor, who had been staring out the window, hoping to be recognized by a passing umbrella, turned an astonished gaze on Blaise. The spectacles were allowed to drop from his nose onto his chest—where they swung on their chain like a pendulum. The eyes, Blaise could see at last, were blue. “You! A city dude?” There was a burst of high laughter; then: “You’re on,” said the Governor.

  The two men then arranged themselves on the back seat so that each could rest an elbow on the middle cushion as they interlocked forearms. Blaise was perfectly confident; he was stronger, he knew, as he began to force down the older man’s arm. But Roosevelt was heavier; finally, faced with defeat, he simply cheated. Aware that he was about to be beaten, he surreptitiously slid his feet under the folding seat opposite and, with this leverage, abruptly forced Blaise’s arm down. “There!” shouted the Governor, delighted.

  “You had your feet under the seat.”

  “I did not …”

  “Look!” Blaise pointed; the feet were quickly withdrawn.

  “An accident. They slipped.” For an instant Roosevelt looked furious, like a small child caught out. Then he roared. “Bully for you, my boy! Come on in. You’re no city dude. Whatever you are. A Sanford. Which Sanford?”

  The family game was swiftly played through. The Colonel, a perfect snob like so many tribunes of the people, was quite at home with a Sanford; but somewhat intimidated by a Delacroix. As they got out of the carriage in front of 422 Madison Avenue, the brownstone house of the Governor’s youngest sister, Mrs. Douglas Robinson (Blaise took meticulous notes), Roosevelt said, “Do you box?”

  “Yes,” said Blaise, who did.

  “We’ll go put on the gloves in the basement, once breakfast’s settled.”

  Mrs. Robinson, addressed as Conie by her brother, was a dark, bright-eyed woman, who led them into a small parlor, dominated by the head of a buffalo shot by the Governor when he was a cowboy in the West. The resemblance, Blaise noted, was eerie between victim-beast and victor-man. “I used to be a taxidermist myself,” said Roosevelt. “Birds, mostly. But I really wanted to be an ornithologist, a naturalist. Why Hearst?”

  “Well, why not, sir?” Blaise sat in a William Morris rocking chair while Roosevelt worked off his breakfast by walking vigorously, if pointlessly, about the room. From the back parlor, a telephone rang from time to time and a low masculine voice would answer it. Apparently, the state of New York was being strenuously governed even as they spoke.

  “He is against reform, of course. He is a Democrat, not that I am strict in such matters. But I think Boss Croker is, perhaps, unsavory, even by Tammany standards.”

  “That’s true, sir. But he did stand by when you were running for governor, and you won by eighteen thousand votes because he wouldn’t really go all out for Judge Van Wyck.”

  Roosevelt chose not to hear this. “Last week, Mr. Hearst was at the Tammany Hall dinner, in Grand Central Palace, presided over by our friend Croker, home from Ireland, or away from home, in Ireland. I would not want to be so closely allied with such a man.”

  “I think, sir, the Chief was there to listen to Mr. Bryan.”

  “I can’t think why a newspaper publisher, who went to Harvard, should want to involve himself in politics when he has, as far as I can tell, no politics at all.”

  Although Blaise had been more amused than bemused by the Chief’s sudden obsession with politics and the holding of high office, he could not tell Roosevelt that much of the Chief’s interest had been created not, as many thought, by the career of his father, Senator George Hearst, but by that of the thick small restless shrill-voiced man who was marching about the room like a toy soldier that someone had wound up but forgot to point in any particular direction. Blaise had now given up on conducting an interview with the Governor. Those whom Roosevelt regarded as social equals, and Blaise was one, were not treated as a part of the solemn consistory of reforming angels at work with bucket and shovel in the stables of the republic; rather, they were treated as a fellow boy by a boy who despite—or because of—small stature and bad eyesight, was a born bully and, perhaps, leader, too, if anyone could be persuaded to follow him. Certainly, whatever crossed his plainly quick mind, he felt obliged to express.

  Hearst now ceased to interest the Colonel. Instead, he was distracted by a model of a battleship, not, Blaise was reasonably certain, a treasured possession of Mrs. Robinson’s. “I was given this when I was assistant secretary of the Navy. Build more, I said. Have you read Admiral Mahan on sea-power? Published nine years ago. An eye-opener. I reviewed it in the Atlantic Monthly. We are fast friends. Without sea-power, no British empire. Without sea-power, no American empire, though we don’t use the word ‘empire’ because the tender-minded can’t bear it. Like Andrew Carnegie, that old scoundrel, who says that if we don’t give freedom to our little brown brothers in the Philippines, we will be cursed. By what? His money? He told Mr. Hay that if an American soldier fires—as they’ve had to do—on the Filipinos, we will lose our republic at home. Incredible! Thanks to Mr. Carnegie and his friends our government was obliged to fire on a great many American workers at the time of the Haymarket riots, and the old fraud was dee-light-ed. Hypocrite. But Mahan’s not. He’s a patriot. The torpedo boats. I have him to thank for the theory. The Navy has me to thank for arming us, in time …”

  “… and you to thank for Admiral Dewey.” Blaise took advantage of a pause during which Roosevelt clicked his teeth together three times, like a dog; the sound was as disconcerting as the expression of the face was alarming. “Well, I did get him the job in the Pacific. Took a bit of doing. Had to get a senator to sponsor him first. Imagine! What a country! If we hadn’t found us a senator to sponsor him, another officer would have got the job, and we’d not be in Manila. Good man, Dewey. Good officer. They’ll try to run him for president, of course. I hope he’s wise. And stays out.”

  “Mr. Hearst thinks the Admiral would be better than Bryan …”

  “Dear boy, you’d be better than Bryan. Didn’t my sister Anna visit your father a few years ago?”

  “Did she go to Allenswood?” Suddenly Blaise remembered a charming, excessively plain, large-toothed woman, very much at home in France.

  “No. But she studied with Mlle. Souvestre when she still had her school in France. Before she moved to England …”

  “My sister Caroline was there, too. In England …”

  Roosevelt talked through him. “… did wonders for Bamie’s French and general knowledge but I’m not so sure of morals. She’s now a freethinker, like Mlle. Souvestre …”

  “Who’s an atheist, actually.”

  Roosevelt ground his teeth in a lively imitation of rage. “So much the worse for my sister. And yours …” Like so many politicians who never ceased to talk, he heard what others said even through the comforting cascade of his own words. “At least mine learned perfect French. What about yours?”

  “She already spoke perfect French. She was obliged to learn perfect English, which she did.”

  “We’re sending my niece to her this year. We have hopes …” But the Governor looked grim.

  “That would be the daughter of Mr. Elliott Roosevelt, sir?”

  “Yes. My brother is well known to your readers.” The Governor threw himself into an armchair; and glowered at Blaise, as if he were Hearst, the devil. Four years earlier, Elliott Roosevelt had died, under an assumed name, in 102nd Street, where he had been living with his mistress and a valet. Although he had been a heavy drinker for years, Blaise’s father had always said that if any Roosevelt could be said to have true charm, it was Elliott, who had spent quite a lot of time in Paris, much of it at the Chateau Suresnes, a place of refuge—or containment—for wealthy alcoholics. Some years earlier, the Governor had publicly declared his brother insane, to the delight of the press. The Chief, in particular, found it almost impossible to let the Roosevelt family skeleton rest peacefully in its closet; he also never let pass an opportunity to remind New Yorkers
that in order to avoid taxes, Theodore Roosevelt used to give as his place of residence not New York State but the District of Columbia. Because of this confusion over residence he had come close to losing the nomination for governor; but then the brilliant Elihu Root, a lawyer without peer, as the Journal would say, had talked the nominating convention around. All in all, Blaise was pleased that he himself had no political ambitions. Between private life and public, there was, for him, no contest. What, he sometimes wondered, would they do with the Chief’s private life when he decided to enter the arena?

  Roosevelt wondered the same. “He’ll find all the newspaper fellows will be treating him the way he’s treated everybody else.” Roosevelt removed his spectacles; and stared near-sightedly at the buffalo, which stared into eternity, a place just above the door to the hall. “I suppose he’ll support Bryan again. That would make things easy for us. McKinley’s a shoo-in.”

  “What about you, sir?”

  “I am a good party man. McKinley’s the head of the party. I’ve been offered the editorship of Harper’s Weekly. You can write that. You can also say I’m tempted to take it next year, when my term’s up.” An aide entered from the hall; and gave the Governor what Blaise could see was a newspaper slip. He wondered from which paper; probably the Sun. As the aide left, Roosevelt was on his feet again, marching up and down, with no precise end in view other than the pleasure that vigorous motion of any kind appeared to give him. “The President has unleashed General MacArthur on the rebels. I’ve proposed unconditional surrender on our terms, not that the humble governor of New York has anything to say in such great matters.”

  “But they listen to you, sir.” Blaise was beginning to work out a theme if not a story. “You are for expansion—everywhere?”

  “Everywhere that we are needed. It is to take the manly part, after all. Besides, every expansion of civilization—and we are that, preeminently in the world, our religion, our law, our customs, our modernity, our democracy. Wherever our civilization is allowed to take hold means a victory for law and order and righteousness. Look at those poor benighted islands without us. Bloodshed, confusion, rapine … Aguinaldo is nothing but a Tagal bandit.”

  “Some people regard him as a liberator,” Blaise began, aware that the Governor could thunder platitudes by the hour.

  But there was no braking him now. Roosevelt was now marching rapidly in a circle at the center of the room. He had been seized by a speech. As he spoke, he used all the tricks that he would have used and had Blaise been ten thousand people at Madison Square Garden. Arms rose and fell; the head was thrown back as if it were an exclamation mark; right fist struck left hand to mark the end of one perfected argument, and the beginning of the next. “The degeneracy of the Malay race is a fact. We start with that. We can do them only good. They can do themselves only harm. When the likes of Carnegie tell us that they are fighting for independence, I say any argument you make for the Filipino you could make for the Apache. Every word that can be said for Aguinaldo could be said for Sitting Bull. The Indians could not be civilized any more than the Filipinos can. They stand in the path of civilization. Now you may invoke the name of Jefferson …” Roosevelt glowered down at Blaise, who had no intention of invoking anyone’s name. Blaise stared straight ahead at the round stomach whose gold watch-chain quivered sympathetically with its owner’s mood, now militant, imperial. “Well, let me tell you that when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he did not include the Indians among those possessing our rights …”

  “… or Negroes either,” said Blaise brightly.

  Roosevelt frowned. “Slavery was something else, and solved in due course in the fiery crucible of civil war.”

  Blaise wondered what the inside of a politician’s mind looked like. Were their drawers marked “Slavery,” “Free Trade,” “Indians”? Or did the familiar arguments hang on hooks, like newspaper galleys? Although Roosevelt was a respectable historian, who wrote and even read books, he could never say anything that one had not already heard said a thousand times. Perhaps that was the politician’s art: to bring to the obvious the appearance of novelty and passion. In any case, the Governor was enchanted by his own rhetoric. “Jefferson bought Louisiana, and never once consulted the Indian tribes that he had acquired in the process.”

  “Or the Delacroix family, and some ten thousand other French and Spanish inhabitants of New Orleans. We still hate Jefferson, you know.”

  “But, in due course, you were incorporated as free citizens of the republic. I speak now only of savages. When Mr. Seward acquired Alaska, did we ask for the consent of the Eskimos? We did not. When the Indian tribes went into rebellion in Florida, did Andrew Johnson offer them a citizenship for which they were not prepared? No, he offered them simple justice. Which is what we shall mete out to our little brown brothers in the Philippines. Justice and civilization will be theirs if they but seize the opportunity. We shall keep the islands!” Roosevelt suddenly began to click his teeth rapidly, alarmingly; he was like a machine, thought Blaise, wondering how on earth he could describe, in mere words, so odd a creature. Again the image of a wound-up toy soldier. “And we shall establish therein a stable and orderly government so that one more fair spot,” fist struck hand a powerful blow, “of the world’s surface shall have been snatched,” two stubby hands seized the innocent warm air of the parlor, saving it from winter cold, “from the forces of darkness!” There was a bit of froth at the edge of the governor’s full lower lip. He brushed it away with the back of the hand which still held the one fair spot snatched from darkness.

  “Are you absolutely sure that Mlle. Souvestre is an atheist?” The Governor suddenly settled into a chair. He had put away the Philippines in their drawer; and locked it.

  “So I’ve been told. I don’t really know her.” Blaise was neutral. “She’s been very active for Captain Dreyfus.” This was not such a non sequitur, since freethinkers tended to be Dreyfusards. In any case, the Governor was not listening.

  “Bamie—my sister, that is—says that one can just ignore her on religious matters. It’s worth the chance, I think, for my niece, Eleanor.” The Governor then lectured Blaise for an hour. He wanted stronger proconsuls in Cuba and the Philippines. He would discuss the matter with the President. He thought that the sooner Secretary of War Alger—the man responsible for feeding the troops tinned, tainted meat—left the Cabinet the better. Blaise managed to ask a question or two about the Governor’s relations with Senator Platt. They were, apparently, “bully,” even though everyone knew that the two men could not bear each other, and that Platt had only taken Roosevelt because, after the scandals of the previous Republican governor, the party would have lost the state. At the same time, Roosevelt, the zealous reformer, needed the Republican machine in order to be elected governor. It was also no secret that he would like to join his friend Lodge in the Senate; it was also no secret that Platt was not about to surrender his own seat to accommodate a governor who was currently insisting that any corporation with a public franchise must pay tax. Specifically, this struck at William Whitney, a Democrat millionaire, who owned numerous streetcar lines as well as, some said, the golden key to Tammany Hall. Whitney had served in Cleveland’s cabinet; had fathered Blaise’s classmate Payne.

  As the Governor declaimed, he would shift his voice from effete questioner to stern Jehovah-like answerer; he played a dozen different parts, all badly but engagingly. Blaise wondered, idly, as he so often did in this still strange city, whether or not such a man would have a mistress, or go to brothels (there were more in the Tenderloin District than in all of Paris), or would he confine himself, with iron resolve, to the indulgences of his second wife?

  The thought of Payne Whitney had made Blaise think of sex. Once, innocently, at Yale, Blaise had asked the high-spirited Payne if there was a decent brothel in New Haven. The boy had gone red in the face; and Blaise had realized that his twenty-year-old classmate was a virgin. Further highly covert investigations convinced B
laise not only that most of the young men of his class were virgins but that this unnatural state explained their, to him, inexplicable long and dull talk of the girls that they knew socially, combined with heavy drinking of a sort that he associated, in Paris, with workmen of the lowest class. As a result, he never let on that since his sixteenth year he had been involved in an affair with a friend of his father’s, Anne de Bieville, twenty years his senior and happily married to a bank manager; her oldest son, two years Blaise’s senior, had taught him how to shoot at Saint-Cloud; for a time, he was Blaise’s best friend. As it was tacitly assumed that Blaise was the mother’s lover, the subject was never mentioned between the boys. Consequently, prim New Haven had come as something of a shock.

  “Perhaps Anglo-Saxons develop later than we do,” said Anne, amused at the sight of so much virginity on the playing fields of Yale; actually, not the playing fields but at a dance for the senior class. Blaise had introduced violet-eyed Anne as his aunt; and she had caused a sensation. “Well, physically, they are all there,” said Blaise; many seniors wore thick moustaches, heavy sideburns. “But something happens—or doesn’t happen—to their brains over here.”

  “Their livers, too, I should suspect. They drink too much.”

  Theodore Roosevelt was again on the march around the room. Blaise tried to imagine him in a love nest in 102nd Street; and failed. Yet the brother, Elliott, had had a mistress with him when he died—a Mrs. Evans, whom the Roosevelt family had paid off because there was a Mr. Evans, who had threatened to shoot the Roosevelt lawyer if her income was not increased. Elliott had also loved a Mrs. Sherman, who lived in Paris but was not received in the Sanford world.

  Blaise decided that Governor Roosevelt was not the sort to enjoy women as he did, say, food. On the other hand, to Blaise’s youthful cynic’s eye, Roosevelt seemed very much the sort of person who would, after much heart-searching and hand-wringing, seduce the wife of his best friend, and then hold his best friend entirely responsible for the tragedy. That seemed to be the Anglo-Saxon style. A secretary brought news of a telephone call from Albany. Thus, the interview was concluded.