Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  The flood became an embarrassment for Roosevelt. Did all these men imagine they were buying him? “Corporate cunning has developed faster than the laws of nation and state,” he remarked to the reporter Lindsay Denison. “Sooner or later, unless there is a readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement.” Born to wealth, with an inherited sense that it must be repaid with public service, he found himself increasingly repelled by those who went after money for money’s sake, or used it to buy power. Unless wealth was chastened by culture or regulated by government, it was at worst predatory, at best boring. He did not care how little time he spent in future with E. H. Harriman. “It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own businesses.”

  DEMOCRATIC CAMPAIGN OFFICIALS could not hide their disappointment in Alton B. Parker. Although James J. Hill and George F. Baer had been generous supporters of his candidacy, their primary desire was obviously to stop Roosevelt rather than support Parker. His refusal to do or say anything partisan was irritating reporters and alienating voters. As one workingman complained, “The Jedge hain’t quite riz to the occasion.”

  On 22 October, in New York, the veteran strategist Daniel S. Lamont tried to shock Parker’s complacency. “Well, you are going to be licked, old fellow, but brace up and make the best fight you can, and when it is over, come down here and practice law.”

  Like most presidential candidates, Parker could not believe bad news. “How do you know I am going to be defeated?”

  “Why, they have underwritten it, just as they would underwrite building a railroad to San Francisco.”

  The judge returned stunned to Esopus. He decided that if he could not win, he could at least speak out against the “menace” of corporate campaign funds.

  As luck would have it, he was visited the next afternoon by a delegation of supporters. He managed to startle them with some semispecific allegations of “debasing and corrupt” payments to the GOP by “individuals of corporations … who would control the results of election contests.” His remarks made modest headlines on 24 October.

  John Hay, whose memories went back to the hellfire days of American political oratory, was not impressed by Parker’s tepid outrage. “We are at the fag end of the most absurd political campaign of our time,” he wrote Henry Adams, “and it looks like Roosevelt to the gamblers and the Jews.”

  ALICE LIKED TO TEASE her father about his habit of writing “posterity letters” whenever anything occurred that might affect his historical reputation. It was a habit that went back to the earliest days of his political career, when he would write solemn screeds to Bamie and portentously sign them “Theodore Roosevelt,” as if she were unaware of his surname.

  Some instinct warned him, on the eve of his birthday, that the Democrats might return to the theme of corporate contributions in the closing days of the campaign. The instinct was triggered when a reporter from New York mentioned seeing a check made out to the Republican National Committee by an executive of Standard Oil—still the most hated trust in popular mythology. Another reporter confirmed this, and said the check had been written after Cornelius Bliss intimated that a failure to be generous would be to the “disadvantage” of the Rockefeller interests.

  Roosevelt’s reaction was to dictate not only a posterity letter, but a posterity telegram and posterity memorandum as well. The letter went to Cortelyou:

  I have just been informed that the Standard Oil people have contributed one hundred thousand dollars to our campaign fund. This may be entirely untrue. But if true I must ask you to direct that the money be returned to them forthwith.… It is entirely legitimate to accept contributions, no matter how large they are, from individuals and corporations on the terms on which I happen to know that you have accepted them: that is, with the explicit understanding that they were given and received with no thought of any more obligation … than is implied by the statement that every man shall receive a square deal, no more and no less, and this I shall guarantee him in any event to the best of my ability.

  He did not explain why a check from John D. Archbold should be any less acceptable than one from E. H. Harriman, except to say that “in view of my past relations with the Standard Oil Company,” the transaction might be construed “as putting us under an improper obligation.”

  By telegram, he demanded that Cortelyou confirm the refund, and by memo, he explained at length how he had heard about the check. Then, forsaking pomposity for his normal boyish good cheer, he celebrated his birthday.

  Elihu Root, who over the years had developed an almost paternal tenderness for him, sent a note to the White House: “I congratulate you on attaining the respectable age of 46. You have made a very good start in life and your friends have great hopes for you when you grow up.”

  IN THE LAST DAYS of October, Parker unexpectedly yielded to the pleas of the Democratic National Committee and undertook a speaking tour. He confined himself to a few pivotal counties in New York and New Jersey, but adopted an aggressive tone that kept him in the national headlines. His theme—“The trusts are furnishing the money with which they hope to control the election”—focused on the hapless Cortelyou, who was once again portrayed in yellow newspapers as a Wall Street toady.

  Roosevelt was at first sympathetic, then nervous when the chairman failed to respond adequately to his letter about Standard Oil. He telegraphed again: “Has my request been complied with? I desire that there be no delay.”

  There was no reply. Loeb made a follow-up call to New York and got through only to Bliss, who said with distinct irritation, “No contribution has been received from the Standard Oil Company and none will be received.”

  Roosevelt had to accept this denial. But restraint became more and more difficult as Parker began to repeat the “Ten Questions,” and suggest that Cortelyou’s rapid rise from presidential aide to Secretary to party chief had been engineered with the precise intent of dunning captains of industry. No man in the country, the judge implied, enjoyed such equal access to privileged information in his former fiefdom, the Bureau of Corporations. Hence his success in “demanding” support from tycoons too scared to resist him. “Although this may be satisfactory to the conscience of Republican leaders,” Parker said, without actually naming the President, “it must, I firmly believe, be condemned as a shameless exhibition of a willingness to make compromise with decency.”

  When Cortelyou again said nothing, Roosevelt lost patience. “I have never seen him so troubled,” his wife wrote. The question was no longer one of whether he should enter the campaign, but when. With Election Day looming on Tuesday, 8 November, he decided that the Saturday morning prior would be the best moment to hit Parker, and “hit him hard.” That way, the judge would suffer a repeated onslaught of headlines throughout the weekend, and would be unable to publish much of a reply before Monday—too late, probably, to regain the initiative.

  Parker was tempted into a final indiscretion on Thursday, 3 November, when he accused the Republican National Committee of “blackmail” and threats to leak secret data from the Bureau of Corporations. This was going too far, as he himself seemed to realize the following day, when he hedged on the source of his information in a lame speech in Brooklyn.

  Shortly before twelve o’clock that night, the President released his statement. Old-time journalists had to look back to the 1880s for a political utterance that packed more force. It was long—over a thousand words—but passionate enough to compel thorough reading. He began by rephrasing Parker’s charges and innuendos, making them sound at once more extreme, yet easier to refute. His prose in answer was shotgunned with characteristic repetitions and alliterations that lodged in anyone’s memory the points he wanted to make.

  Mr. Parker’s accusations against me and Mr. Cortelyou are monstrous. If true, they would brand both of us forever with infamy, and inasmuch as they are false, heavy must
be the condemnation of the man making them.…

  The assertion that Mr. Cortelyou had any knowledge gained while in any official position whereby he was enabled to secure and did secure any contributions from any corporation is a falsehood. The assertion that there has been any blackmail, direct or indirect, by Mr. Cortelyou or by me is a falsehood. The assertion that there has been made in my behalf and by my authority by Mr. Cortelyou or by anyone else any pledge or promise … in recognition of any contribution from any source, is a wicked falsehood.

  That Mr. Parker should desire to avoid the discussion of principles I can well understand, for it is but the bare truth to say that he has not attacked us on any matter of principle or upon any action of the government save after first misstating that principle or that action.

  Roosevelt asked all voters to check his record as the prosecutor of Northern Securities and the mediator of the coal strike, and then ponder Parker’s cozy relations with the “great corporate interests” that had financed the Democratic campaign. With a sarcastic pun, he compared the judge’s “trusted” advisers to his own roster of Root, Knox, Crane, Moody, Garfield, and Cortelyou—all of whom must be corrupt, if one was.

  “The statements made by Mr. Parker,” he again declared, “are unqualifiedly and atrociously false.”

  “VICTORY. TRIUMPH. My Father is elected,” Alice wrote in her diary for 8 November 1904. “Received Parker’s congratulatory telegram at 9. Carried New York State by over 200,000. Higgins elected Governor. An unprecedented landslide. It is all colossal.”

  Her last adjective was no girlish exaggeration. Although the full dimension of the President’s majority would take days to tabulate, he had been returned to power by thirty-three of the forty-five states, even managing to detach Missouri from the historically solid “South.” He seemed certain to amass at least as large a popular vote as McKinley’s in 1900, and to outscore every one of his twenty-five predecessors in the electoral college.

  Purged by his last-minute blast at Parker, astounded at the extent of his sweep, and reverential to the memory of George Washington, he dictated a quick statement to reporters at 10:30 P.M. in the White House vestibule, while Alice Roosevelt stood by, not quite believing her ears.

  “On the fourth of March next I shall have served three and a half years, and this three and a half years constitutes my first term. The wise custom which limits the President to two terms regards the substance and not the form. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.”

  Interlude

  ON THE DAY AFTER Roosevelt’s election, Wilbur and Orville Wright took their flying machine on a series of long, celebratory hops over Ohio. Farther west, other aviators vied for the St. Louis World’s Fair Grand Prize for Aeronautic Achievement. With less than a month to go before the exposition formally closed, the award—one hundred thousand dollars—seemed impossible of attainment, a chimera not unlike the nightly glow of one hundred thousand fairground lights trying to hold back the encroachment of the prairie.

  Since the Brazilian birdman Alberto Santos-Dumont had arrived in St. Louis in June, only to have his long silk gasbag slashed while in storage, American “aero-planes,” airships, ornithopters, gliders, balloons, and kites had been lifting off in wobbly attempts to make three flights over a fifteen-mile, L-shaped course. Metallic lighter-than-air cylinders, pterodactyl-like contraptions flapping bamboo wings, aluminum-and-silk sky-cycles, and huge cigars and saucers and tetrahedrons defied gravity with varying success—most triumphantly the California Arrow, a dirigible that floated for thirty-seven minutes over the exhibition’s fluttering flags. If unable to perform the requisite L, it described many graceful Os, wheeling careless of the wind, and releasing, at two thousand feet, a pigeon that tired of flight long before it did.

  Nobody won the Grand Prize, but various ascents advanced the frontiers of science. Three men in a balloon soared almost two miles high and sent down wireless messages in the first American demonstration of air-to-ground telegraphy. Two airship distance records were broken. And throughout the final weeks of the Fair, as the President of the United States prepared to visit, an effervescence of meteorological balloons rose until they burst, dropping little basketfuls of data under cones of silk.

  HENRY ADAMS, who loved expositions as much as he hated politics, had visited St. Louis at the earliest opportunity. Stooped and sedentary at sixty-six, he was inspired less by the Fair’s awkward attempts at levitation than by its horizontal dynamic, the almost contemptuous way a small Midwestern city had turned its back on the Mississippi and scattered palaces across the plain, gilding them with dollars and bathing them with light, daring the distant world to come and save it from insolvency.

  Adams saw such thin crowds, and such a consequent emptiness of exhibits and promenades, that he doubted the city fathers would recoup a third of their twenty or thirty million. Yet they seemed “quite drunk” with expectations of profit, as Roosevelt had been earlier in the year, at the height of his unpopularity with Congress. The Fair was schwärmerisch—visionary—and above all paradoxical in its crass commercialism and unstudied beauty. “One asked oneself whether this extravagance reflected the past or imaged the future; whether it was a creation of the old America or the promise of the new one.”

  Both coming and going, Adams (who had not been that far west in a decade) was struck by the raw power pulsating from landscapes once agricultural, now industrial—steam engines and smokestacks dirtying the air and surrounding each town with a no-man’s-land of “discards.” Ever since confronting an enormous, silently whirring dynamo at the last World’s Fair—in Paris, four years before—he had been trying to formulate a dynamic theory of history that would index man’s progress (or regress) to the curve of power production. But the curve was now becoming so steep, and the progress (or, again, regress) so fast that Adams saw nothing ahead but an acceleration that threatened the law of inertia.

  He had tried to show, in his just-completed study of medievalism, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, that the “conservative Christian” civilization of the preceding nineteen hundred years had been dominated by one centripetal, feminine, fertile image, the Virgin. She had erected all of Europe’s great cathedrals, humanized its laws, and inspired its family and social values. One did not have to be a Catholic, or for that matter a European, to look to her for comfort. But now the centrifugal, masculine, destructive Dynamo threatened the Virgin—and, more personally, Henry Adams’s whole worldview.

  The settled life, the vis inertiae he had enjoyed since boyhood, whose blue blood and classical education gave him a sense of stability at rest, and of steady direction when advancing himself, must soon, apparently, change to a perpetual motion that was not so much forward as omnidirectional, and favored the less weighted members of society: the young, the rudely opportunistic, above all the nimble Jews. In which case, he and his beloved John Hay were bound to be thrown off while Roosevelt, the very personification of dynamism (and with something of a “Jew look,” come to think of it, in a strong light), spun St. Louis, and Washington, and the world, into a maelstrom beyond Adams’s power to control.

  “The devil is whirling me round, in the shape of a grinning fiend with tusks and eye-glasses … faster and faster, and I can’t get off.”

  ROOSEVELT GOT TO the World’s Fair just in time, on 26 November, as the commissioners were preparing to douse its lights. He came at the behest of Henry Adams—or rather, at the behest of Edith, whom Adams had urged to see the white palaces before they reverted to prairie.

  “We really had great fun, although we only spent one day at the Fair,” Roosevelt reported to Kermit. Unconsciously using Adams’s own language, he described his visit as “a perfect whirl.” He stomped through the display halls so fast that even Alice had to run to catch up. His hurry was less a matter of urgency than camouflage: unbeknownst to reporters, he was nursing several boxing and riding injuries, including a burst blood vessel that had spread a bruise “big as tw
o dinner plates” across the inside of his thigh.

  He was impressed by the beauty of the illuminations, but only one exhibit spoke to him personally. It was his own Maltese Cross ranch cabin from 1884, reverently presented by the State of North Dakota.

  The presidential train did not depart St. Louis until after midnight on 28 November. Edith, exhausted, retired to her stateroom, but Roosevelt still had some energy to work off. He called for a stenographer and dictated a thousand-word letter-review of James Ford Rhodes’s five-volume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850. Inevitably if naïvely, the great theme of North versus South made him think of his own recent Appomattox at the polls, and he segued into a jovial reflection that Democratic cartoonists had played into his hands by representing him as the eternal Rough Rider, “carrying a big stick and threatening foreign nations.” This had only made a “kind of ad captandum appeal on my behalf,” especially to younger voters.