They come up to the house after dark, and are fond of sitting in the elk-antlers over the gable. When the moon is up, by changing one’s position, the little owl appears in sharp outline against the bright disk, seated on his many-tined perch.
To the west, beyond Hell Gate, he could see the nimbus of New York City, and, northeast across the Sound, the twinkling lights of Connecticut. At regular intervals, Fall River Line steamers en route to Massachusetts drew chains of gold across the water.
No matter how beautiful the night, the President could never relax entirely, knowing that William “Big Bill” Craig, his bodyguard, lurked in some nearby bush, while other large men prowled the lawns and driveway. Secret Service protection had become a full-time nuisance since McKinley’s assassination. Roosevelt disliked it, but the agents were inexorable. They checked their watches when he went upstairs, stared at his window while he slept, and hung yawning around the kitchen at breakfast time. They webbed the estate with trip wires, and treated all visitors as potential anarchists, even a party of dowagers from the Oyster Bay Needlework Guild. On afternoons off, they wandered around town looking for “cranks,” their knobby pockets and patent-leather shoes infallibly identifying them as plainclothesmen.
Roosevelt gave up protesting that he could adequately defend himself. (The sight of a gun butt protruding from the presidential trouser-seat caused some consternation in Christ Episcopal Church.) Instead, he used his familiarity with the landscape to shake off his escort as often as possible. One day he managed to escape Big Bill Craig for two hours by galloping Bleistein into the woods. Another of his tricks was to lead unwary officers to Cooper’s Bluff, the almost vertical, 150-foot sand cliff at the end of Cove Neck. Talking casually, Roosevelt would arrive at the brink, then drop out of sight like a plummet. The Secret Service men would instinctively follow, and, losing their footing, somersault to the bottom in a choking avalanche. Meanwhile, the President, striding off unscathed, could enjoy a few moments of peace.
Yet had it not been for the cordon that Craig threw about Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt would have enjoyed no peace at all. Every train from “York,” as Oyster Bay natives called the metropolis, brought delegations of politicians, office-seekers, and sycophants bent on disturbing his leisure. “I never seed the like of it,” said Si Josslyn, veteran clam digger of Cove Neck, “and it ain’t no wonder the President has to stan’ most of ’em off.” Only pilgrims on urgent public business, with a pass signed by Cortelyou, were permitted up the private road.
Cabinet officers and Congressmen found that strange rules of protocol applied in the President’s house:
SMALL BOY (reproachfully) Cousin Theodore, it’s after four.
ROOSEVELT By Jove, so it is! Why didn’t you call me sooner? One of you boys get my rifle. (Apologetically) I must ask you to excuse me.… I never keep boys waiting.
Rough Riders, accustomed to instant access to their Colonel, found Sagamore Hill harder to take than the heights of San Juan. They joined the crowds of other rejectees in town, gazing in frustration at the big house and windmill across the bay.
Most disappointed of all were members of the press, who could not reconcile Roosevelt’s availability in the White House with his refusal to receive them at home. Starved of news, they mooched unhappily in the village, waylaying every returning visitor for bits of information. About once a week, the President would trot down East Main Street, followed by a procession of children (at least ten Roosevelt cousins lived on Cove Neck, in addition to his own brood). Little Archie, clad in a Rough Rider suit, always brought up the rear. Reporters would run alongside in the dust, bawling questions to which the President was benignly deaf.
One day, he reined in his horse and teased them with a mock bulletin. “I want you to know all the facts, so I shall give them to you at first hand. Teddy [Jr.] is now fishing for tadpoles, but really expects to land a whale. Archie shot three elephants this morning. Ethel at this moment is setting fire to the rear of the house; Kermit and the calico pony are having a wrestling match in the garret, and Quentin, four years old, is pulling down the windmill.”
Unamused, the reporters began to concoct their own fantasies of life at Sagamore Hill. Roosevelt took no notice until suggestive accounts of a picnic à deux with Edith appeared in several newspapers. The headlines were arch: “PRESIDENT AND MRS. ROOSEVELT STROLL IN ARCADY—Executive Realizes the Poet’s Dream—‘A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine and Thou, Singing in the Wilderness.’ ” Worse still were patently sexual references to himself as “a gallant gentleman in knickerbockers,” bent on “pleasuring” his “lady,” and making “little sallies into the heart of nature.”
He traced the stories to the Oyster Bay correspondent of the New York Sun, and complained to the paper’s editor, Paul Dana:
It seems to me they are not proper stories to be told about a President or the members of his family.… I very much wish you would send instead of your present man at Oyster Bay someone who will tell the facts as they are, and will not try to make up for the fact that nothing is happening here by having recourse to invention. The plain truth of course is that I am living here with my wife and children just exactly as you are at your home; and there is no more material for a story in one case than in the other!
Dana withdrew his correspondent, and the press corps learned to respect the veil that the President drew across his family activities. Both he and Edith held to the Victorian concept of childhood as a state of grace that cameras, and coarse questions, could only profane.
For the younger Roosevelts, the long summer days certainly seemed appareled in celestial light. “It is avowedly the ambition of the President,” a visitor wrote, “to make Sagamore Hill ever remain in the eyes of his children, the one spot on earth which is different from every other.” The estate, with its forty acres of lawns, gardens, wheat fields, and woodland, its stable, barn, windmill, and well, its molehilly tennis court and turtle pond full of nice green scum, was about as near to Paradise as any child could wish. Best of all, perhaps, was its long stretch of private beach, beyond the heron pools in Cold Spring Harbor. There were two red bathing houses there, some battered boats, and miles of quiet water.
These haunts, Elysian as they were, needed the transforming touch of a Zeus to make them divine. Roosevelt did not disappoint. He gave off a godlike aura of radiance and vitality, and the children luxuriated in it, like bees in sun.
From early morning, when he drummed them downstairs for a prebreak-fast game of “bear,” until late evening, when he romped them up to bed, their days were spent largely in his company. His burly arms tickled them, swung them shrieking into the sea, steadied their gun barrels, and rowed them around the bay. He was slightly dangerous in his fun. His bulk half-smothered them—girls as well as boys—in wrestling contests. His playful cuffs rang in their ears, his myopia made him a lethal diver. At night in the woods, he enthralled them with harsh, yodeling ghost stories, climaxed with a flash of teeth, a roar, and a pounce, deliciously scary. Later, recovering round the campfire, they would revel in his infamous clams, fried in beef fat and garnished with equal parts pepper and sand.
“CHILDHOOD AS A STATE OF GRACE.”
Quentin Roosevelt in the daisy field at Sagamore Hill (photo credit 8.1)
Only when he climbed wearily into his sleeping bag did their adoration turn to protectiveness, and for as long as possible they would stay awake, guarding the President of the United States as he slept.
NO MATTER WHERE Roosevelt spent the night, his presence was required in the library of Sagamore Hill every weekday at 8:30 A.M. Secretary Cortelyou, oily and purposeful as an otter, would come up the drive with a leather bag full of mail, and for the next few hours “typing machines” would click, and a Morse transmitter rattle, as he and the President dispatched affairs of state. Since the government was in recess, their business was neither copious nor demanding. Cortelyou was usually on his way by noon, and Roosevelt, looking like a large plump urchin in negligee shirt, line
n knickers, and canvas shoes, would play a set of tennis before lunch.
With the sun glowing on his awnings, and the table piled with the products of his farm—roast chickens, asparagus, potatoes, corn, fresh rye bread and butter, gooseberries, grapes, peaches swimming in cream—he was tempted to forget that summer must end, that the fecund ripeness of the nation’s economy would be susceptible, sooner or later, to cold winds. A new magazine, ironically entitled World’s Work, reported that more Americans were on vacation, and spending more money, than ever before. After a century of struggle, of wars and assassination and depression and empire-building, the United States felt entitled to bask at last in peace and prosperity. A musical paean to mindlessness lilted round the country. Holidaymakers sang the song on yachts in Bar Harbor, on the roller coasters of Coney Island, on horseback in Colorado, and on streetcars in San Francisco. They bellowed it in chorus from vaudeville boats in the Hudson, and heard it echoing back at them from the Palisades:
In the good old Summertime,
In the good old Summertime!
The sun affects some people
In a manner quite divine …
THE ONLY MEMBER of Roosevelt’s family who expressed discontent that summer was eighteen-year-old Alice—brittle, boy-crazy, and by her own admission “bored to extinction” at Oyster Bay. She yearned for the elegant youths of Newport and Saratoga and for her adored maternal grandparents in Boston, and in particular she lusted after money. Her own considerable private income was not enough. “I want more,” she scribbled in her diary, “I want everything.… I care for nothing but to amuse myself in a charmingly expensive way.” She prowled round the dark house, a caged blond cheetah among its skins and stuffed trophies.
Heedless on the piazza overlooking the bay, her father used the long afternoons to catch up with his reading. His “beach book” for the season was Nicolay and Hay’s Abraham Lincoln: A History, in ten volumes. Unfazed, he read it straight through, along with his usual supply of dime novels and periodicals.
Since Roosevelt was a devotee of Review of Reviews, edited by his good friend Albert Shaw, he probably noticed the extraordinary face reproduced in halftone on page 37 of the July issue. Pale eyes absolutely lacking in self-doubt, an unfurrowed brow, haughty nostrils, a long cruel mouth over a tremendous jaw—features both intellectual and tough, adamantine in their cold, smooth pallor: it was the beaky professor who had visited with him in Buffalo the day after his inauguration.
Woodrow Wilson, the magazine reported, was about to become president of Princeton University. “Every great step that he has taken has been one of conscious choice, leading to a definite, logical end.” Still only forty-five, Dr. Wilson had farther yet to go. Already “one of the political parties” wanted to send him to the New Jersey State Senate, “and recently a Western newspaper has pointed him out as the right kind of man to be a candidate for President of the United States.”
ON 14 JULY, Elihu Root delivered to Sagamore Hill the first politically charged document of the season. It was a transcript of General “Kill and Burn” Jake Smith’s court-martial in Manila. The general’s fellow officers had predictably found him guilty only of excessive zeal, and they “admonished” him to mend his ways.
For a moment Roosevelt was tempted to accept the verdict, in the spirit of his recent amnesty declaration. Military authority no longer applied in the Philippines; ugly memories of the pacification campaign should be encouraged to fade. Part of him sympathized with General Smith. As a former commanding officer himself, Roosevelt had no illusions about the nature of guerrilla warfare. “I thoroughly believe in severe measures when necessary, and am not in the least sensitive about killing any number of men when there is adequate reason.”
Smith, however, had condoned the killing of women and children—“shooting niggers,” to use the general’s own phrase. Roosevelt could not tolerate such genocidal rhetoric, nor could he discount the brutalizing effect it must have had on junior officers. The court-martial, he decided, had been a miscarriage of justice. He ordered Smith’s prompt dismissal from the Army.
After dinner, Roosevelt and Root sat up late in their tuxedos working on another Philippines problem: how to buy and secularize Vatican holdings in the archipelago, to the gratification of natives, without alienating American Catholics. Both of them got deep satisfaction out of such chesslike exercises in policy. At 2:00 A.M., they closed the last folder and went out onto the lawn overlooking Oyster Bay. Root puffed a cigar. He had been touched by the President’s cry of comradeship at Harvard. Roosevelt, in turn, felt convinced that of all the men in his Cabinet, Root alone had the qualities to succeed him as President.
Friends again, they stood surrounded by the tranquillity of wealth, protected by the trappings of power. Below them, Root’s naval transport lay black on the moonlit water. Farther off floated another recent arrival, slender, white, and glistening: Roosevelt’s own official vessel, USS Mayflower. Personally, he did not much care for yachts. But this 273-foot refitted dispatch boat, with its twelve guns and white-and-gold reception rooms (not to mention its wine cellar, silk paneling, and a solid marble bath), was clearly more suited to his dignity than the Sylph or tubby little Dolphin. He looked forward to a tour of inspection in the morning.
ABOUT FIVE HOURS LATER, sailors were swabbing the Mayflower’s decks, and its officers were dressing below, when a rowboat began to splash across the bay. Pulling the oars was a stocky man in a sleeveless swimsuit. The sailors paid no attention until there was a creaking of the gangway ladder, and the President appeared beaming in their midst.
“Bully! Bully!” Roosevelt exclaimed, as he rushed around admiring fixtures and fittings. By the time the officers came on deck in their hastily buttoned tunics, he was already rowing back to Sagamore Hill for breakfast.
“ROOT ALONE HAD THE QUALITIES TO SUCCEED HIM AS PRESIDENT.”
Elihu Root as Secretary of War (photo credit 8.2)
ROOSEVELT’S DECISION TO dismiss General Smith won universal praise. Democrats congratulated him for acknowledging that there had been both cruelty and injustice in the Philippines campaign. Republicans felt that he had upheld the national honor.
Even the Anti-Imperialist League conceded that the President had out-maneuvered them at every turn. His seemingly haphazard actions since General Miles’s opening shots in February now looked more like a careful battle plan. First, a broadside against the general’s character and reputation; next, a series of aggressive moves that were actually retreats—his acceptance of the Gardener Report, his demand for an investigation, his self-distancing from Root.… Each of these feints had coincided with, and neutralized, some strike by the League, Congress, or the press. Then his double dispatch of envoys—Lodge to the Senate with a promise of justice in Manila, Root to Cuba with a grant of independence. Finally, the coup de grâce: Roosevelt had himself invaded Harvard Yard and captured the mugwumps in their own stronghold. Magnanimous in victory, he had offered amnesty to the Filipinos, and buried the hatchet in one of his own generals.
Anti-imperialism, Charles Francis Adams wrote Carl Schurz, was a lost cause, thanks to Theodore Roosevelt. “I think he has been very adroit. He has conciliated almost every one.”
ALMOST UNNOTICED IN the bluster of the President’s Harvard speech had been a hint that he would soon have to choose a nominee for the Supreme Court. Justice Horace Gray’s resignation letter was now on file. Roosevelt had already offered the seat to William Howard Taft, knowing that the Governor longed, above all things, for a judicial appointment. But Taft had regretfully declined, citing unfulfilled business in the Philippines.
With Justice Gray gone, the Court seemed to stand evenly divided on the status of the Philippines as “unincorporated” American territory. A similar balance of opinion seemed likely to confront the Northern Securities suit, currently grinding its way through circuit-court review. Roosevelt therefore had to be sure that whoever he chose to replace Gray shared the Administration’s colonial and antitr
ust philosophy.
He dreamily informed Henry Cabot Lodge, who thought that an ideal candidate was available in Massachusetts, that the next Justice should be a patrician person with enlightened instincts at home and conservative views abroad, somebody who would unite “aloofness of mind” with “broad humanity of feeling.” Not only that, this person should have a respectful sense of what the Administration wanted of him:
Now … in the ordinary and low sense which we attach to the words “partisan” and “politician,” a judge of the Supreme Court should be neither. But in the higher sense, in the proper sense, he is not in my judgment fitted for the position unless he is a party man, a constructive statesman, constantly keeping in mind his adherence to the principles and policies under which this nation has been built up and in accordance with which it must go on; and keeping in mind also his relations with his fellow statesmen who in other branches of the government are striving in cooperation with him to advance the ends of government.
Having thus briskly disposed of the doctrine of an independent judiciary, Roosevelt left Lodge to send his candidate down, and went for a cruise on the Mayflower.
FOG DELAYED THE President’s return on 24 July. His press detail was marooned with him off Sea Girt, New Jersey, so a tremendously tall stranger was able to arrive at the Oyster Bay station that afternoon, unannounced and unrecognized.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, was not well-known outside legal circles, but his distinction was obvious to anyone, even in mist. Unabashed by his height, he walked with lean, military grace. A ten-inch mustache, whitening (he was sixty-one), swept like a bow wave on either side of his haughty profile. His gaze, clear gray and cool, projected the most original intelligence in American jurisprudence. 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.”
Theodore Rex Page 17