Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  “A photographer,” said Commander Cowles.

  “Something should be done with that fellow,” Roosevelt muttered savagely. For a moment, in his nervousness, he forgot he was President, and gestured Hay and Gage into his carriage ahead of him. They demurred. He climbed in, taking the rear right seat. The Secretaries followed, with Commander Cowles. A little colonel jumped up on the box, yellow plumes waving. Ahead, to the sound of trumpets, the hearse began its journey to the White House. Roosevelt’s carriage rolled off a few seconds later. Thousands of spectators watched it disappear into the warm Washington night.

  The epigraphs at the head of every chapter are by “Mr. Dooley,” Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite social commentator.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Shadow of the Crown

  I see that Tiddy, Prisidint Tiddy—here’s his health—is th’ youngest prisidint we’ve iver had, an’ some iv th’ pa-apers ar-re wondherin’ whether he’s old enough f’r th’ raysponsibilities iv’ th’ office.

  ON THE MORNING after McKinley’s interment, Friday, 20 September 1901, a stocky figure in a frock coat sprang up the front steps of the White House. A policeman, recognizing the new President of the United States, jerked to attention, but Roosevelt, trailed by Commander Cowles, was already on his way into the vestibule. Nodding at a pair of attachés, he hurried into the elevator and rose to the second floor. His rapid footsteps sought out the executive office over the East Room. Within seconds of arrival he was leaning back in McKinley’s chair, dictating letters to William Loeb. He looked as if he had sat there for years. It was, a veteran observer marveled, “quite the strangest introduction of a Chief Magistrate … in our national history.”

  As the President worked, squads of cleaners, painters, and varnishers hastened to refurbish the private apartments down the hall. He sent word that he and Mrs. Roosevelt would occupy the sunny river-view suite on the south corner. Not for them the northern exposure favored by their predecessors, with its cold white light and panorama of countless chimney pots.

  A pall of death and invalidism hung over the fusty building. Roosevelt decided to remain at his brother-in-law’s house until after the weekend. It was as if he wanted the White House to ventilate itself of the sad fragrance of the nineteenth century. Edith and the children would breeze in soon enough, bringing what he called “the Oyster Bay atmosphere.”

  At eleven o’clock he held his first Cabinet meeting. There was a moment of strangeness when he took his place at the head of McKinley’s table. Ghostly responsibility sat on his shoulders. “A very heavy weight,” James Wilson mused, “for anyone so young as he is.”

  “A STOCKY FIGURE IN A FROCK COAT.”

  Theodore Roosevelt walks to work, 20 September 1901 (photo credit 1.1)

  But the President was not looking for sympathy. “I need your advice and counsel,” he said. He also needed their resignations, but for legal reasons only. Every man must accept reappointment. “I cannot accept a declination.”

  This assertion of authority went unchallenged. Relaxing, Roosevelt asked for briefings on every department of the Administration. His officers complied in order of seniority. He interrupted them often with questions, and they were astonished by the rapidity with which he embraced and sorted information. His curiosity and apparent lack of guile charmed them.

  The President’s hunger for intelligence did not diminish as the day wore on. He demanded naval-construction statistics and tariff-reciprocity guidelines and a timetable for the independence of Cuba, and got two visiting Senators to tell him more than they wanted to about the inner workings of Congress. In the late afternoon, he summoned the heads of Washington’s three press agencies.

  “This being my first day in the White House as President of the United States,” Roosevelt said ingratiatingly, “I desired to have a little talk with you gentlemen who are responsible for the collection and dissemination of the news.”

  A certain code of “relations,” he went on, should be established immediately. He glanced at the Associated Press and Sun service representatives. “Mr. Boynton and Mr. Barry, whom I have known for many years and who have always possessed my confidence, shall continue to have it.” They must understand that this privilege depended on their “discretion as to publication.” Unfortunately, he could not promise equal access to Mr. Keen of the United Press, “whom I have just met for the first time.”

  Boynton and Barry jumped to their colleague’s defense. Roosevelt was persuaded to trust him, but warned again that he would bar any White House correspondent who betrayed him or misquoted him. In serious cases, he might even bar an entire newspaper. Barry said that was surely going too far. Roosevelt’s only reply was a mysterious smile. “All right, gentlemen, now we understand each other.”

  MUCH LATER THAT EVENING, after a small dinner with friends in the Cowles house on N Street, the President allowed himself a moment or two of querulousness. “My great difficulty, my serious problem, will meet me when I leave the White House. Supposing I have a second term …”

  Commander Cowles, replete with roast beef, sank deep into leather cushions and folded his hands over his paunch. He paid no attention to the cataract of talk pouring from the walnut chair opposite. For years he had benignly suffered his brother-in-law’s fireside oratory; he was as deaf to Rooseveltian self-praise as he was to these occasional moments of self-doubt. How like Theodore to worry about moving out of the White House before moving in! The Commander’s eyes drooped. His breathing grew rhythmic; he began to snore.

  “I shall be young, in my early fifties,” Roosevelt was saying. “On the shelf! Retired! Out of it!”

  Two other guests, William Allen White and Nicholas Murray Butler, listened sympathetically. Prodigies themselves—White, at thirty-three, had a national reputation for political journalism, and Butler, at thirty-nine, was about to become president of Columbia University—they were both aware that they had reached the top of their fields, and could stay there for another forty years. Roosevelt was sure of only three and a half. Of course, the power given him dwarfed theirs, and he might win an extension of it in 1904. But that would make its final loss only harder to bear.

  So Butler and White allowed the President to continue lamenting his imminent retirement. They interrupted only when he grew maudlin—“I don’t want to be the old cannon loose on the deck in the storm!”

  Undisturbed by the clamor of younger voices, Commander Cowles slept on.

  QUIET SETTLED OVER Washington that weekend, as the government resumed its interrupted vacation. With Congress not due back in town until December, there was little to detain anyone who could afford to leave. Lafayette Square was deserted. Office-seekers—those perennial mosquitoes whining around the body politic—were mercifully few, thanks to mass appointments by Hanna and McKinley earlier in the year. Roosevelt waved away unsatisfied applicants, saying that he was in mourning; but he knew that they would return in ever-increasing numbers. Nothing could stop the natural attrition of federal jobs by resignations, retirements, and deaths.

  Nervous tension still afflicted him at unguarded moments. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” he roared at a boy who tried to photograph him leaving church. Later, on a twilight stroll with Lincoln Steffens, his fantasy about being attacked recurred. He demonstrated just what he would do with his fists, feet, and teeth if another Czolgosz came out of the shadows. “What I sensed,” Steffens recalled, “was the passionate thrill the President was finding in the assassination of the assassin.”

  By Monday morning, Roosevelt had calmed down enough to perform his duties with dignity and dispatch. “Here is the task,” he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge. “I have got to do it to the best of my ability; and that is all there is about it. I believe,” he added, with the naïveté that had always endeared him to his friend, “you will approve of what I have done and the way I have handled myself so far.”

  The presidential suite was now ready for occupancy. Reluctant to spend his first night there alone, he s
ent a telegram to his younger sister, Corinne, inviting her and her husband, Douglas Robinson, to be his guests. They came down by express train from New Jersey, and Commander and Mrs. Cowles joined them for dinner en famille. Roosevelt was in a nostalgic mood. His thoughts kept reverting to Theodore Senior. “What would I not give if only he could have lived to see me here in the White House!”

  Later, when decorations from the table were distributed as boutonnieres, the President received a saffronia rose. His face flushed. “Is it not strange! This is the rose we all connect with my father.” For a moment “Teedie,” “Bamie,” and “Pussie” were children again, clustering around the broad bright man who had always worn a yellow flower in his buttonhole. “I think,” said Roosevelt, “there is a blessing connected with this.”

  TWO EVENINGS LATER, a carriage drew up outside the White House. The moon had not yet risen. Not until a boy and a girl tumbled into the light of the portico did reporters in Lafayette Square realize that Edith Roosevelt had arrived. True to her reticent fashion, she came under cloak of darkness. There was a moment of hesitation before she emerged, a comely figure draped in black. Her exquisite profile, usually cast modestly downward, tilted as she followed Kermit and Ethel up the steps. She brought no other children. Little Archie and Quentin were coming with their nurse, Ted had gone straight to Groton, and Alice, the eldest and most independent, would find her own way to the capital.

  Kermit and Ethel vanished into the vestibule, and reappeared clinging to their father. Careless of watching eyes, he threw his arms around Edith, then escorted her inside for supper.

  Over the next few days of official mourning, Washington correspondents were starved of substantive news, and covered Kermit and Ethel as if they were visiting royalty. The latter’s negotiations with ground staff on the subject of white rabbits was treated by The Washington Post as a diplomatic dispatch. “It is understood that the high contracting parties are about to reach an agreement, the only point of difference being that of the assignment of territory to the rabbits.… A protocol is likely to be signed tomorrow.”

  Official Washington smiled as more children and more animals joined the Roosevelt menagerie. The White House police were particularly disarmed, allowing Archie and Quentin to march in their morning parades, and looking the other way as Kermit carved huge slices out of the lawn on his bicycle.

  Alice, naughtily hiding out in Connecticut, kept everybody guessing. At seventeen, she already had her father’s instinct for delayed entrances.

  DISTRACTED AS THE reporters were with family gossip, they missed the secret visit of a black man to Roosevelt’s office late on the night of Sunday, 29 September. It was unlike Booker T. Washington to be so furtive. He was a world-famous figure, revered even by white Southerners, and had visited William McKinley in broad daylight. But fame had made him cautious. Privately, he admitted to “grave misgivings” about Roosevelt’s telegram from Buffalo. The President must not expect him to be an automatic ally in any strategy to dismantle the Southern patronage system wrought by McKinley and Hanna.

  Washington’s resistance did not last long. He was impressed by how frankly Roosevelt stated that he did not intend to appoint “a large number of colored people” to federal office in Dixie. That would only worsen racial tensions there, currently exemplified by a lynch rate of about one hundred hangings per year. Better to name just a few exemplary blacks, concentrating instead—with Washington’s approval—on “the very highest type of native Southern white man … regardless of political influences.” He, Theodore Roosevelt, was the first President to mingle Union and Confederate blood. As such, he wanted “to see the South back in full communion” with the North.

  Washington listened, darkly impressed. Here was a candidate desperate for delegates in 1904, yet willing to gamble on a patronage policy of quality rather than quantity—indeed, if Roosevelt was to be believed, to appoint members of the opposite party when necessary. For forty years, Republican executives, aided by Grover Cleveland, had imposed Northern reform on the South, with the result that white Democrats there were almost totally alienated from the federal civil service. Divided as they might be into “Gold” and Bryanite factions, they were united in their fear of the fecund Negro. Only the most rigid segregation, they believed, could save them from all becoming mulattoes.

  State by state, Southern legislatures were disfranchising Negroes. By the next presidential election, not one black man in a thousand would be eligible to vote. Washington understood that it made little sense for Roosevelt to elevate many Negroes in areas where they were unwelcome at the ballot box. Every new black postmaster licking stamps, every tax assessor asking uppity questions, would fan the flames of Southern race hatred. And the “flames” were not metaphorical. Just the other day in Winchester, Tennessee, a maddened crowd of whites had burned a black man at the stake and sold slices of his roasted liver.

  Washington, whose political agenda was as unsentimental as Roosevelt’s (if considerably more veiled), agreed to help create a new Southern majority of moderate white appointees, plus a minority of blacks. The President, in gratitude, promised an identical patronage policy in the North.

  This effusion might have bypassed most ears, but Washington caught its significance. No other President had ever appointed a black official above the Mason-Dixon Line. None had considered the feelings of franchised blacks in such states as New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Surely this was proof of Roosevelt’s enlightenment.

  AFTER LEAVING THE White House, Booker T. Washington headed south via Virginia, where he had been born a slave forty-five years before. One of the first things he could remember was the sight of his uncle being strapped to a tree and screaming under the lash of a cowhide whip, “Pray, master, pray, master!” The half-coherent cry still rang in his ears, convincing him of the white man’s urgent need to be regarded as superior, and the black man’s equally urgent need to accommodate that fantasy, on pain of extinction.

  Washington’s pale gray eyes and tawny complexion further sharpened his consciousness of white lust, white guilt, and white hatred. As his mother had endured the embraces of some nameless white man—or men—so must he endure the contempt of rednecks, and the paternalism of rich Yankees. Present passivity was future power.

  For sixteen years he had been urging his fellow Negroes to accept disfranchisement as inevitable, to concentrate instead on educational and vocational self-improvement. Blacks and whites alike, with the exception of extremists at either end of the color spectrum, accepted this as the only practical solution to “the color problem.” Washington’s famous simile, “We can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress,” implied both economic integration and social segregation. But he insisted that the vote would not long be withheld from a race acquiring skills, learning, and property.

  Washington’s philosophy of accommodation struck many black intellectuals as craven, yet his career showed how it could be turned to advantage. Where once little Booker had crawled on packed dirt, and endured slave shirts that stung his skin, big Booker now summered in wealthy New England resorts, and ruled a multimillion-dollar educational empire. The Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute of Alabama, the black teacher-training college he had founded in 1881, was a huge and thriving enterprise, financed by eager philanthropists. Through the “Tuskegee Machine”—his secret fraternity of academics, businessmen, preachers, politicians, and journalists—he controlled most of the nation’s Negro newspapers and political platforms. Washington was the most powerful black man in America, and to Theodore Roosevelt (who tended to equate power with creativity) “a genius such as does not arise in a generation.”

  Exactly what his full ambition was nobody knew. Courteous yet inscrutable, he operated on many levels. Roosevelt, gazing at him with blind patrician eyes, saw only a chunky yellow man of quiet speech and deferential manner. Washington, gazing back, saw himself reflected quite otherwise in the President’s spectacle
s: a double image of anger and power, wholly, bitterly black.

  NO SOONER HAD he returned to Alabama than the patronage agreement he had with Roosevelt was put to the test. A federal district court judge died in Montgomery, not far from Tuskegee. Washington swung into immediate action. The vacancy could best be filled, he wrote the President, by Thomas G. Jones, a former governor of the state. “He stood up in the Constitutional Convention and elsewhere for a fair election law, opposed lynching, and he has been outspoken for the education of both races. He is head and shoulders above any of the other persons who I think will apply for the position.” Jones also happened to be a Democrat.

  Roosevelt received the last piece of information with modified rapture. He would have preferred a Republican judge to begin with, if only to lull Senator Hanna into a false sense of security. This important appointment would be seen as a prototype of his future patronage policy. Hanna was bound to suggest someone from the “Lily White” wing of the GOP. A dilemma then loomed. If Roosevelt accepted Hanna’s recommendation, he would look like a puppet in his first major presidential act, and perpetuate the Southern status quo. If he appointed Governor Jones—a racial moderate who had fought under Lee—he would gratify Negroes, while persuading Southern Democrats that their long exile from political privilege was over.

  Morally, his course was clear. Yet the politician in him hesitated. Washington sent an aide, Emmett J. Scott, to the White House to press the appointment. Scott reported that the President was cordial, yet cagey:

  [He] wanted to know if Gov. Jones supported Bryan.… I told him No. He wanted to know how I knew. I told him of the letter wherein he (Governor Jones) stated to you that … he had not supported Bryan, etc. etc. Well, he said he wanted to hear from you direct.