Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  Roosevelt was too restless and too reform-minded to heed such a motto. On the other hand (to use his favorite phrase), he despised the theorists who advocated radical change. Not for him Eugene Debs’s vision of a society purged of aggression, with all citizens pooling their assets in a state of torpid bonhomie. He tended toward a biological view of the common man as a brute—albeit capable, with encouragement, of self-refinement. Years of sweaty acquaintance with cowboys, policemen, and soldiers had convinced him that their instincts were benign, that greater social efficiency was as much their desire as his. All they needed was enlightened leadership.

  In a fundamental disagreement with Social Darwinist thinkers, Roosevelt condemned “that baleful law of natural selection which tells against the survival of some of the most desirable classes.” His own field studies, both scientific and political, had shown him how populous species, whose competition was ferocious, advanced more slowly than those whose selection was determined by reasonable numbers and controlled by certain laws of behavior. As with guinea pigs, so with Slavs; as with lions, so with Anglo-Saxons.

  The United States, with seventy-seven million citizens, was still uncrowded and healthily competitive. But its social balance would be threatened if poverty spread in proportion to immigration. (Hundreds of Japanese coolies and thousands of dirt-poor Chinese peasants were arriving every month, boxed in barrels, buried under potatoes, sandwiched between bales of hay.) The worst thing he could do now was “let well enough alone.” Somehow he must grant a little leisure, and a little extra money, to the multitudes currently working only to survive. This would enable them to develop those noneconomic virtues—intelligence, unselfishness, courage, decency—which he loosely defined as “character.” Character determined the worth of the individual, and “what is true of the individual is also true of the nation.”

  At the same time, he must persuade Union League Republicans that perpetual, mild reform was true conservatism, in that it protected existing institutions from atrophy, and relieved the buildup of radical pressure. All his life he had preached this doctrine. He would preach it louder now that he had universal attention. He might not have power—yet—to convert his Cabinet, much less the Senate. But youth and time were on his side, and the presidency promised to be “a bully pulpit.”

  AS IF TO REASSURE Roosevelt that the America of his dreams could be a reality, the exquisite town of Lock Haven rocked into view. Tall houses glowed white and apricot in the mid-afternoon light. Willows trailed their fronds in the glassy river, quiet lanes divided schools and steeples and shops. Here was Social Order, in the harmonious interdependence of rich and poor. Here was Fecundity, symbolized by the women on every stoop, lifting their babies to bless the new President. Here was Industry, in the form of an immaculate paper mill. And here—palpably, all about—was Morality. The fine white paper from that mill went under contract to Roosevelt’s good friend Edward W. Bok, publisher of Ladies’ Home Journal. Both men believed that the bourgeois domestic environment—efficient, loving, aesthetic, mother-controlled—was the nucleus of a perfect society (although Roosevelt wished the Journal would emphasize women’s suffrage less, and regular childbearing more).

  Girls softly pelted the train with flowers as it steamed through Lock Haven Depot. More girls with more flowers were waiting down the line, at Williamsport. The locomotive stopped there briefly to take on water, and an invitation scrawled in childish capitals was delivered to Roosevelt’s car. Unable to resist it, he stepped outside and bowed. A little boy yelled “Hooray!” then burst into tears as an older girl smacked him for irreverence. The train jerked forward again, crossed the Susquehanna, and entered a broad landscape of harvest crops, orchards, and stone farmhouses.

  Thickening crowds at every level crossing announced the approach to Harrisburg. Urchins perched like starlings on telephone poles. Soon even haystacks bore teetering human loads. At twenty minutes to five, city buildings closed in. A crescendo of ten thousand voices singing “Nearer My God to Thee” floated out of Union Station. Church bells, steam whistles, and several discordant bands joined in the din.

  Governor William Stone of Pennsylvania was waiting on the platform with an honor guard, but Roosevelt stayed aloof behind drawn blinds. Harrisburg was notoriously the most corrupt seat of state government in the nation. It was also a bedrock of orthodox Republicanism. This posed delicate problems of executive strategy. If he wished to preserve his honest reputation, he could not identify too closely with machine politicians here—yet to govern effectively he had to cooperate with the machine’s Washington representatives. Only three weeks ago he had mused, “Were I President, I should certainly endeavor to do what the two Pennsylvania Senators wished in matters of patronage—so as I honorably could.”

  A messenger ran along the train with a telegram for Herman Kohlsaat. It was a favorable reply, from Secretary Gage, to Roosevelt’s plea for loyalty. Kohlsaat jumped out and bought the evening papers. Riffling through them, he found the headlines he was looking for. Wall Street had reacted optimistically to the news that Gage and Hay might stay. Opening prices had soared one to six points higher than Friday’s closing, and steadiness had prevailed throughout the market. A spokesman for the financial community called these signs “clear and reassuring.”

  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!”

  The tolling of church bells faded as the train moved on, but the singing did not. Thousands of black-clad mourners crammed around Cumberland Valley Bridge took up the threnody of McKinley’s dying hymn. By now the lugubrious tune palled on passengers who had listened to it ever since leaving Buffalo. For days to come, awake or asleep, they would hear voices crooning “Near-urr, my God to Thee, near-urr to Thee!” Their nerves, tightened by seventy-two hours of suspense, tragedy, excitement, and fatigue, began to fray in the waning daylight. Women burst into tears. Men grew morose, or in the case of Senator Hanna, profane. “That damn cowboy wants me to take supper with him alone, damn him!”

  Ahead, in the press car, a group of reporters sat talking about death. They noticed a country funeral procession crawling darkly up the slope of a hill. It receded into the distance behind McKinley’s bier. “What shadows we are,” someone quoted softly, “and what shadows we pursue.”

  THE SUN WAS SETTING, and its rays gilded the misty transpirations of peach orchards and tobacco fields. An old farmer, hearing the onrush of the train, climbed off his harrow and stood to attention, his red shirt incandescent in the horizontal light. Children ran to cluster around him. Their spindly shadows, leaping east, briefly stroked the wheels of Roosevelt’s car.

  To eyes that had so recently gazed upon oil derricks and steel bridges and Harrisburg’s jumbled housing, the little group looked quaintly anachronistic, a vignette of the past century. Though such families still accounted for 60 percent of the American population, their numbers were dwindling as Combination crept across the countryside, leveling hedgerows and quintupling the size of farms. (These very fields were already in fief to the tobacco trust.) Departments of agriculture in state after state boasted the effects of the new “scientific management.” Kansas wheat production had increased to such an extent that some farmers there were calling themselves “manufacturers.” Review of Reviews reported enormous sales of sophisticated agricultural machinery across the nation. An “ultra-new combined header and thresher” was being tested in California. Eight horses were needed to haul it; it advanced across a field of standing grain, miraculously leaving nothing behind but a row of stuffed sacks.

  Technological progress for big farmers, however, did not mean that life was any better for small. In the Midwest, nearly three fourths of rural families lived below subsistence level. In the South (looming ever closer as Roosevelt rode), country people sought town jobs through the winter, just to survive on fatback and hoecake.

  Roosevelt could see little relief for th
e rural unemployed in the immediate future. A place like York, Pennsylvania (flashing by redly at a quarter to six), was the typical country town grown too big. There were more than a thousand such cities across the nation. For its new poor, York offered only more poverty. A laborer might trade his hoe for a hammer, for a few extra dollars a week, but the increment was meaningless, given urban costs. His children would still run barefoot through November, and in midwinter their breath would be ice on their bedsheets. Even more wretched than these migrants were the immigrants from unsalubrious parts of Europe further crowding American cities. Since January, nearly half a million had poured in. With their greasy kerchiefs and swollen cheekbones, they seemed content to live in any slum and do any work, for pig’s wages. Not surprisingly, the native-born Americans they supplanted felt rage and ethnic contempt. Roosevelt’s journalist friend William Allen White spoke for many in his syndicated diatribes against “Hunkies and Italians, the very scum of European civilization.”

  Roosevelt was not immune to such sentiments himself—his youthful views on the inferiority of various ethnic stocks had been republished with rather embarrassing frequency—yet he believed in America’s ability to integrate all comers. One of his favorite stories was that of Otto Raphael, the young Russian Jew he had plucked from the Lower East Side of Manhattan and made a policeman. Roosevelt was the first President ever to be born in a large city; he welcomed the clash of alien cultures, as long as it did not degenerate into mass collision. As such, he saw no paradox in being an opponent of the xenophobic American Protective Association, and strong supporter of the Immigration Restriction League. But he felt that America’s first responsibility was to its literate, native-born, working poor.

  Several thousand such citizens stood watching his train pass through the industrial outskirts of York—half a mile of humanity silhouetted against the sunset, dinner pails in hand. Then they were gone. Night closed in. For the next half hour Roosevelt sat with his elbow on the window ledge, staring through his own reflection at the speeding darkness.

  THE CONSISTENT FEATURES of the political landscape, as he saw it, were fault lines running deeply and dangerously through divergent blocks of power. Potential chasms lurked between Isolationism and Expansionism, Government and the Trusts, Labor and Capital, Conservation and Development, Wealth and Commonwealth, Nativism and the Golden Door. And since the last election, the fault lines had widened. As William Jennings Bryan kept saying, “The extremes of society are being driven further and further apart.”

  Roosevelt thought he knew what was causing the underlying drift: a crumbling of Government, the national bedrock. Some quick executive reinforcements (such as he always made when taking a new job) would slow the drift until the next election. Then, assuming he was the Republican Party’s chosen candidate, he might campaign for more fundamental change. How, in the meantime, to care for those millions of Americans out there in the twilight? How to articulate their vague feelings that despite general peace and prosperity, something deep down was wrong with the United States? Here was his challenge as President: to put into speech, and political action, what they felt in their hearts, but could not express. His appeal must be to neither reactionary nor radical, but to Everyman—the farmer in the red shirt.

  Signs were not wanting in September 1901 that Everyman was impatient, inclining toward revolution. From several Western states came demands for direct voter participation in primary elections, direct election of senators, and a referendum system to permit citizens to pass legislation without the consent of their legislators. In Madison, Wisconsin, a Republican insurgent who called himself “Bob” had won the governorship on an antitrust ticket, and was crying hoarsely for regulation of interstate railroad rates. In Cleveland, Ohio, a fat radical nicknamed “Tom” had captured City Hall, and was bellowing threats against its private utility companies.

  Far-flung and lonely as these voices might sound to a trainload of Old Guard politicians en route to Washington, one passenger, at least, was acute enough to pay attention. He sensed that they might some day swell into a chorus, the first great political outcry of the twentieth century. He must soon respond to it, or the farmer in the red shirt would vote for somebody else in 1904, and Theodore Roosevelt would go down in history as a President unworthy of power, forcibly retired at forty-six.

  ROOSEVELT’S REVERIE WAS disturbed by Senator Hanna arriving for supper. While the two men ate and talked, the funeral train crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. Black faces began to flash by, lit by the glare of watch fires. Up North, earlier in the day, there had been few such faces—maybe one in fifty. Here in Maryland the ratio was one in five; across the South as a whole, one in three.

  Census statistics such as these meant various things to marketers, sociologists, and geographers. To Roosevelt and Hanna they reduced down to one vital political fact: whoever commanded the loyalty of Southern blacks commanded the Republican presidential nomination.

  The South was Hanna’s chief source of political strength. No matter that he himself represented Ohio. No matter either that the Republican Party in Dixie was so weak that in some state legislatures it had no seats at all. What did matter was that the South was disproportionately rich in delegates to national conventions. Hanna’s expert cultivation of these delegates, and his control of party funds as Chairman of the Republican National Committee, had guaranteed the two nominations of William McKinley. In his other role as Senator in charge of White House patronage, he had been a rewarding boss, showering offices and stipends upon the faithful. As long as the South continued to send delegations of these blacks north every four years, Mark Hanna would remain party kingmaker. For a moment—just one moment, two days ago—Hanna had seemed vulnerable. But Roosevelt’s vow of fidelity to McKinley’s policies reconfirmed his power. The new President must continue to consult him on matters of Southern patronage, as the old had done. And consultation, given Hanna’s mastery of the system, implied consent, rather than advice.

  Such a partnership might be good for a party weakened by assassination, but it was hardly desirable for Roosevelt as a presidential candidate in 1904. Grotesquely, the next Republican nominee could be Hanna himself. “Uncle Mark” did not look like a vote-getter at sixty-three, with his arthritic limp and huge, melancholy eyes. Yet he was loved and respected by both business and labor. Even Roosevelt found Hanna’s “burly, coarse-fibered honesty” attractive.

  To consolidate his Presidency, therefore, he must quietly build up a Southern organization of his own. He had in fact already sent an urgent summons to the nation’s most influential black leader, Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee, Alabama, asking him to come north for patronage consultations.

  “Theodore,” said Hanna, perhaps reading his mind, “do not think anything about a second term.”

  AT TWENTY PAST SEVEN, the train pulled into Baltimore. Flowers, handkerchiefs, gloves, and Bible pages cushioned the sound of its slowing wheels. The catafalque was gently detached from the rear of Mrs. McKinley’s car and shunted forward for the last stage of the journey. As soon as it was coupled, the train began to move again, serenaded by a choir of two thousand Negroes. They sang the inevitable dirge, but the tenderness of their voices was such that both words and melody regained full poignance. At least one passenger felt that it was the sweetest music he had ever heard.

  An hour later, the lights of Washington came into view. Loeb helped Roosevelt into a dark Prince Albert coat, and gave him the black kid gloves and silk hat he had worn in Buffalo. Crape was tied around the Presidential sleeve.

  There was neither clanging of bells nor singing when the locomotive nosed under the shed of Sixth Street Station at 8:38. Silence filled the cavernous space. Even the crowd outside stood hushed, listening for the final groan of brakes. All personnel on the platform were military or naval, with the exception of two elderly gentlemen in top hats: John Hay and Lyman Gage. Their black clothes made a somber contrast with the glitter of braid and swords all around them. Beside them paced the
portly figure of Commander William Sheffield Cowles, Roosevelt’s brother-in-law, and host, until such time as Mrs. McKinley vacated the White House.

  As usual in moments of high drama, Roosevelt delayed appearing. For nearly a quarter of an hour, the Cabinet waited in a semicircle around his car, and anticipation mounted on the platform and in the street. At last, a few minutes before nine, he came down the steps, jaw set sternly. The military guard presented arms. Roosevelt shook hands with Hay and Gage, and whispered the urgent word stay in the former’s ear. He made it clear this was an order: Hay “could not decline, nor even consider.” Then he marched on, his Cabinet following in double file. Five Secret Service men appeared from nowhere and clustered about him. Ignoring the crowd at the station entrance, he took command with the natural ease of a colonel of cavalry. “Divide off, divide off!” He waved a black-gloved hand at the Cabinet officers. They formed two facing ranks. Roosevelt joined Hay on the right-hand side. There was a pause, and onlookers barricaded behind the gates were able to contrast his features with those of Senator Hanna. Roosevelt’s face was lined with fatigue, but looked harsh and strong. Hanna’s was pitiful, full of despair.

  Soldiers and sailors approached with the coffin on their shoulders. The crowd uncovered, and “Taps” broke the silence. Then, just as the coffin was sliding into the hearse, there was a flash from a window across the street, accompanied by a revolver-like crack. Roosevelt flinched. “What was that?”