The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Yet the fact about this most pugnacious of Presidents is that his two terms in office have been almost completely tranquil. (If he had not inherited an insurrection in the Philippines from William McKinley, he could absolve himself of any military deaths.) He is currently being hailed around the world as a flawless diplomat, and the man who has done more to advance the cause of peace than any other. If all Eastern Asia—and for that matter most of Western Europe—is not embroiled in conflict, it is largely due to peace settlements delicately mediated by Theodore Roosevelt. At the same time he has managed, without so much as firing one American pistol, to elevate his country to the giddy heights of world power.20

  He never tires of reminding people that his famous aphorism “Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick” proceeds according to civilized priorities. Persuasion should come before force. In any case it is the availability of raw power, not the use of it, that makes for effective diplomacy. Last summer’s rebellion in Cuba, which left the island leaderless, provided Roosevelt with a textbook example. Acting as usual with lightning swiftness, he invoked an almost forgotten security agreement and proclaimed a U.S.-backed provisional government within twenty-four hours of the collapse of the old. While Secretary of War William H. Taft worked “to restore order and peace and public confidence,” American warships steamed thoughtfully up and down the Cuban coastline. The rebels disbanded, Taft returned to Washington, and the big white ships followed. Cuba is now assured of regaining her independence, and the Big Stick has been laid down unbloodied.21

  Roosevelt hopes the episode will put to an end, once and for all, rumors that he is still at heart an expansionist. “I have about as much desire to annex more islands,” he declares, “as a boa-constrictor has to swallow a porcupine wrong end to.”22

  TWO OR THREE political clouds, perhaps, mar the perfect blue of Theodore Roosevelt’s New Year. Japan is not convinced that his efforts to end discrimination against her citizens in California are sincere, and there are veiled threats of war; “but,” as yesterday’s Washington Star noted confidently, “President Roosevelt thinks he can settle them.” The stock market, despite the booming economy, seems paralyzed. Wall Street billionaires are predicting that Roosevelt-style railroad rate regulation will sooner or later bring about financial catastrophe. And there is an ominous paucity of blacks on line today—only fourteen, by one count—indicating that race resentment is growing against his dishonorable discharge of three companies of colored soldiers for an unproved riot in Brownsville, Texas.23

  As yet, these clouds do not loom very large. Roosevelt is free to enjoy the sensation of near-total control over “the mightiest republic on which the sun ever shone,”—his own phrase, much repeated.24 Youngest and most vigorous man ever to enter the White House, he exults in what today’s New York Tribune calls “an opulent efficiency of mind and body.” He loves power, loves publicity for the added power it brings, and so far at least seems to have disproved the Actonian theory of corruption. Curiously, the more power Roosevelt acquires, the calmer and sweeter he becomes, and the more willing to step down in two years’ time, although a third term is his for the asking. Until then he intends to exercise to the full his constitutional rights to cleave continents, place struggling poets on the federal payroll, and treat with crowned heads on terms of complete equality. Henry Adams calls him “the best herder of Emperors since Napoleon.”25 Expert opinion rates his influence over Congress as greater than that of Kaiser Wilhelm II over the Reichstag.26 He commands a twenty-four-seat majority in the Senate, a hundred-seat majority in the House, and the frank adoration of the American public. A cornucopia of gifts pours daily into the White House mail-room: hams shaped to match the Rooseveltian profile, crates of live coons, Indian skin paintings, snakes from a traveling sideshow, chairs, badges, vases, and enough Big Sticks to dam the Potomac. One million “Teddy” bears are on sale in New York department stores. Countless small boys, including a frail youngster named Gene Tunney, are doing chest exercises in the hope of emulating their hero’s physique. David Robinson, a bootblack from Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, has just arrived in Washington, bearing letters of recommendation from judges and members of Congress, and begs the privilege of shining the President’s shoes for nothing.27

  Nor is Roosevelt-worship confined to the United States. In England, King Edward VII and ex-Prime Minister Balfour consider him to be “the greatest moral force of the age.”28 Serious British journals rank him on the same level as Washington and Lincoln. Even the august London Times, in a review of his latest “very remarkable” message to Congress, admits “It is hard not to covet such a force in public life as our American cousins have got in Mr. ROOSEVELT.”29

  All over the world Jews revere him for his efforts to halt the persecution of their co-religionists in Russia and Rumania, and for making Oscar Solomon Straus Secretary of Commerce and Labor, the first Jewish Cabinet officer in American history.30 France’s Ambassador to the United States, Jules Jusserand, says publicly that “President Roosevelt is the greatest man in the Western Hemisphere—head and shoulders above everyone else.”31

  And from Christiania, Norway, comes the ultimate accolade: an announcement that Theodore Roosevelt, world peacemaker, has become the first American to win the Nobel Prize.32

  TWELVE-THIRTY HAS COME and gone, but the White House gates are still firmly shut. He must have shaken at least a thousand hands already.… Fob watches flash in the sun as students of Washington protocol calculate how long it will take him to work his way down through the social strata. Twenty minutes are generally enough for all the ambassadors, ministers, secretaries, and chargés d’affaires, assuming that each flatters the President for no longer than thirty seconds; ten minutes for the Supreme Court Justices and other members of the judiciary; a quarter of an hour for Senators, Representatives, and Delegates in Congress (he’ll probably spend a minute or two talking to old Chaplain Edward Everett Hale, who hasn’t missed a reception in sixty-two years); a good half-hour, knowing Roosevelt’s priorities, for officers of the Navy and Army; then five minutes apiece for the Smithsonian Institution, the Civil Service, and the Attorney General’s office … which means the Grand Army of the Republic should be going through about now. Last in the order of official precedence will be veterans of the Spanish-American War, including the inevitable Rough Riders, some of whom are very rough indeed. One of today’s newspapers complains about the President’s habit of inviting “thugs and assassins of Idaho and Montana to be his guests in the White House.”33 But Roosevelt has never been able to turn away the friends of his youth. After assuming the Presidency he sent out word that “the cowboy bunch can come in whenever they want to.” When a doorkeeper mistakenly refused admission to one leathery customer, the President was indignant. “The next time they don’t let you in, Sylvane, you just shoot through the windows.”34

  Twelve fifty-five. A stir at the head of the line. Bonnets are adjusted, with much bobbing of artificial fruit; ties are straightened, vests brushed free of popcorn. The gates swing open, and two bowler-hatted policemen lead the way down the White House drive. As the crowd approaches the portico, nine-year-old Quentin Roosevelt waves an affable greeting from his upstairs window. The officers eye him sternly: Young “Q” has a habit of dropping projectiles on men in uniform, including one gigantic, cop-flattening snowball that narrowly missed his father.35

  The music grows louder as the public steps into the brilliantly lit vestibule. Sixty scarlet-coated bandsmen, hedged around with holly and poinsettia, maintain a brisk, incessant rhythm: Roosevelt knows that this makes his callers unconsciously move faster. Ushers jerk white-gloved thumbs in the direction of the Red Room. “Step lively now!”36

  Shuffling obediently through shining pillars, past stone urns banked with Christmas-flowering plants, the crowd has a chance to admire Mrs. Roosevelt’s interior restorations, begun in 1902 and only recently completed.37 (One of her husband’s first acts, as President, had been to ask Congress to purge the Executiv
e Mansion of Victorian bric-a-brac and restore it to its original “stately simplicity.”) These changes come as a shock to older people in line who remember the cozy, shabby, half-house, half–office building of yesteryear, with its dropsical sofas and brass spittoons. Now all is spaciousness and austerity. Regal red furnishings accentuate the gleaming coldness of stone halls and stairways. Roman bronze torches glow with newfangled electric light. The traditional floral displays, which used to make nineteenth-century receptions look like horticultural exhibitions, have been drastically reduced. Rare palms tower in wall niches; vases of violets and American Beauty roses perfume the air.38

  Here the Roosevelts live in a style which, to their critics, seems “almost more than royal dignity.”39 Formality unknown since the days of George Washington governs the conduct of the First Family. Even the President’s sisters have to make appointments to see him. During the official diplomatic season, beginning today, the White House will be the scene of banquets and receptions of an almost European splendor. (The President spends his entire $50,000 salary on entertaining.)40 Roosevelt’s practice, on such occasions, of making dramatic entrances at the stroke of the appointed hour, offering his arm to the lady who will sit at his right, looks like imperial pomp to some. “The President,” says Henry James, “is distinctly tending—or trying—to make a court.”41

  Roosevelt himself scoffs cheerfully at such gibes. “They even say I want to be a prince myself! Not I! I’ve seen too many of them!”42 He is merely performing, with meticulous correctness, the duties of a head of state. Within the confines of protocol he remains the most democratic of men. He refuses to use obsequious forms of address when writing to foreign rulers, preferring the informal second person, as a gentleman among gentlemen. Nor is he impressed when they address him as “Your Excellency” in return. “They might just as well call me His Transparency for all I care.”43

  Yet some citizens are bent on killing this “first of American Caesars.” Last year a man walked into the President’s office with a needle-sharp blade up his sleeve. Ever since then, White House security has been tight.44 Uniformed aides confiscate bundles, inspect hats, draw pocketed hands into open view. All along the corridor, Secret Service men stand like statues. Only their eyes flicker: by the time a caller reaches the Blue Room, he has been scrutinized from head to foot at least three times. Roosevelt does not want to leave office a day too soon.

  “I enjoy being President,” he says simply.45

  NO CHIEF EXECUTIVE has ever had so much fun. One of Roosevelt’s favorite expressions is “dee-lighted”—he uses it so often, and with such grinning emphasis, that nobody doubts his sincerity. He indeed delights in every aspect of his job: in plowing through mountains of state documents, memorizing whole chunks and leaving his desk bare of even a card by lunchtime; in matching wits with the historians, zoologists, inventors, linguists, explorers, sociologists, actors, and statesmen who daily crowd his table; in bombarding Congress with book-length messages (his latest, a report on his trip to Panama, uses the novel technique of illustrated presentation); in setting aside millions of acres of unspoiled land at the stroke of a pen; in appointing struggling literati to jobs in the U.S. Treasury, on the tacit understanding they are to stay away from the office; in being, as one of his children humorously put it, “the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.”46

  He takes an almost mechanistic delight in the smooth workings of political power. “It is fine to feel one’s hand guiding great machinery.”47 Ex-President Grover Cleveland, himself a man of legendary ability, calls Theodore Roosevelt “the most perfectly equipped and most effective politician thus far seen in the Presidency.”48 Coming from a Democrat and longtime Roosevelt-watcher, this praise shows admiration of one virtuoso for another.

  With his clicking efficiency and inhuman energy, the President seems not unlike a piece of engineering himself. Many observers are reminded of a high-speed locomotive. “I never knew a man with such a head of steam on,” says William Sturgis Bigelow. “He never stops running, even while he stokes and fires,” another acquaintance marvels, adding that Roosevelt presents “a dazzling, even appalling, spectacle of a human engine driven at full speed—the signals all properly set beforehand (and if they aren’t, never mind!).” Henry James describes the engine as “destined to be overstrained perhaps, but not as yet, truly, betraying the least creak … it functions astonishingly, and is quite exciting to see.”49

  At the moment, Roosevelt can only be heard, since the first wave of handshakers, filing through the Red Room into the Blue, obscures him from view. He is in particularly good humor today, laughing heartily and often, in a high, hoarse voice that floats over the sound of the band.50 It is an irresistible laugh: an eruption of mirth, rising gradually to falsetto chuckles, that convulses everybody around him. “You don’t smile with Mr. Roosevelt,” writes one reporter, “you shout with laughter with him, and then you shout again while he tries to cork up more laugh, and sputters, ‘Come, gentlemen, let us be serious. This is most unbecoming.’ ”51

  Besides being receptive to humor, the President produces plenty of it himself. As a raconteur, especially when telling stories of his days among the cowboys, he is inimitable, making his audiences laugh until they cry and ache. “You couldn’t pick a hallful,” declares the cartoonist Homer Davenport, “that could sit with faces straight through his story of the blue roan cow.”52 Physically, too, he is funny—never more so than when indulging his passion for eccentric exercise. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge has been heard yelling irritably at a portly object swaying in the sky, “Theodore! if you knew how ridiculous you look on top of that tree, you would come down at once.”53 On winter evenings in Rock Creek Park, strollers may observe the President of the United States wading pale and naked into the ice-clogged stream, followed by shivering members of his Cabinet.54 Thumping noises in the White House library indicate that Roosevelt is being thrown around the room by a Japanese wrestler; a particularly seismic crash, which makes the entire mansion tremble, signifies that Secretary Taft has been forced to join in the fun.55

  Mark Twain is not alone in thinking the President insane. Tales of Roosevelt’s unpredictable behavior are legion, although there is usually an explanation. Once, for instance, he hailed a hansom cab on Pennsylvania Avenue, seized the horse, and mimed a knife attack upon it. On another occasion he startled the occupants of a trolley-car by making hideous faces at them from the Presidential carriage. It transpires that in the former case he was demonstrating to a companion the correct way to stab a wolf; in the latter he was merely returning the grimaces of some small boys, one of whom was the ubiquitous Quentin.56

  Roosevelt can never resist children. Even now, he is holding up the line as he rumples the hair of a small boy with skates and a red sweater. “You must always remember,” says his English friend Cecil Spring Rice, “that the President is about six.”57 Mrs. Roosevelt has let it be known that she considers him one of her own brood, to be disciplined accordingly. Between meetings he loves to sneak upstairs to the attic, headquarters of Quentin’s “White House Gang,” and thunder up and down in pursuit of squealing boys. These romps leave him so disheveled he has to change his shirt before returning to his duties.58

  A very elegant old lady moves through the door of the Blue Room and curtsies before the President. He responds with a deep bow whose grace impresses observers.59 Americans tend to forget that Roosevelt comes from the first circle of the New York aristocracy; the manners of Gramercy Park, Harvard, and the great houses of Europe flow naturally out of him. During the Portsmouth Peace Conference in 1905, he handled Russian counts and Japanese barons with such delicacy that neither side was able to claim preference. “The man who had been represented to us as impetuous to the point of rudeness,” wrote one participant, “displayed a gentleness, a kindness, and a tactfulness that only a truly great man can command.”60

  Roosevelt’s courtesy is not extended only to the well-born. The President of the United
States leaps automatically from his chair when any woman enters the room, even if she is the governess of his children. Introduced to a party of people who ignore their own chauffeur, he protests: “I have not met this gentleman.” He has never been able to get used to the fact that White House stewards serve him ahead of the ladies at his table, but accepts it as necessary protocol.61

  For all his off-duty clowning, Roosevelt believes in the dignity of the Presidency. As head of state, he considers himself the equal, and on occasion the superior, of the scepter-bearers of Europe. “No person living,” he curtly informed the German Ambassador, “precedes the President of the United States in the White House.” He is quick to freeze anybody who presumes to be too familiar. Although he is resigned to being popularly known as “Teddy,” it is a mistake to call him that to his face. He regards it as an “outrageous impertinence.”62

  CORDS OF OLD GOLD velvet channel the crowd into single file at the entrance to the Blue Room. Since the President stands just inside the door, on the right, there is little time to admire the oval chamber, with its silk-hung walls and banks of white roses; nor the beauty of the women invited “behind the line”—a signal mark of Presidential favor—and who now form a rustling backdrop of chiffon and lace and satin, their pearls aglow in the light of three sunny windows.63 Roosevelt is shaking hands at top speed, so the observer has only two or three seconds to size him up.

  A FEW SECONDS, surprisingly, are enough. Theodore Roosevelt is a man of such overwhelming physical impact that he stamps himself immediately on the consciousness. “Do you know the two most wonderful things I have seen in your country?” says the English statesman John Morley. “Niagara Falls and the President of the United States, both great wonders of nature!”64 Their common quality, which photographs and paintings fail to capture, is a perpetual flow of torrential energy, a sense of motion even in stillness.65 Both are physically thrilling to be near.