Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  A couple of midnights later, as November gave way to December, the president of the World’s Fair turned a rheostat at the base of the Louisiana Purchase Monument, and the illuminations began to fade as one hundred thousand spectators applauded. They had some reason to cheer. Nearly nineteen million visitors from around the world had helped replenish the city’s coffers, if not those of the exposition itself. Clearly “the spirit of St. Louis”—a new expression, already popular—was more potent than the pessimistic whinings of Henry Adams.

  As if in earnest of that spirit, the little meteorological balloons continued to rise for the rest of the year, shining and swelling and bursting.

  MARGUERITE CASSINI HAD just dressed in satin and chinchilla for a ball on 2 January 1905 when she came across her father in the vestibule of the Russian Embassy. His hands held a batch of telegrams, and were shaking. “Go back upstairs and take off those clothes!” he growled at her. “You’re going nowhere tonight. Port Arthur has been surrendered!”

  The Ambassador’s choler concealed, perhaps, his embarrassment at having first heard about the surrender a few hours earlier, during the White House New Year’s reception. John Hay had discreetly murmured the news before Theodore Roosevelt trumpeted it to other diplomats. Only a lifetime’s training in court politesse had enabled Cassini to move on, and greet Minister Takahira as if nothing had happened.

  While Europe reacted in shock—Roosevelt’s ten-month certainty that Japan would win the war had been shared by only the French—rumors ran along Embassy Row that the United States would press for a peace settlement. Hay denied them all. Rheumatic, perpetually coughing, seizing every chance to stay in bed, the Secretary had lost his appetite for hard work. More and more since the election, Roosevelt was taking the controls, and accelerating the pace, of foreign policy.

  Hay had been Secretary of State for six years now. Working with characteristic quietness and dedication—qualities that had endeared him in youth to Lincoln—he had built a series of agreements and alignments that peacefully buttressed the United States against the rivalries of Europe, Central Asia, and the Far East. The current Anglo-American rapprochement was largely his, as was the Open Door in China, and the reaffirmed Alaskan boundary, and the Paris and Panama Canal Treaties. He brought a high moral tone to the often mendacious business of diplomacy, without compromising any of his country’s commercial interests. All that remained for him to complete his life’s work (for he knew himself to be dying) was to negotiate a peace in Manchuria that would keep the Open Door ajar and save Russia from revolution.

  However, Count Cassini seemed confident that the Tsar’s endless military reserves would humble Japan sooner or later. Those twenty-four thousand troops lost at Port Arthur were as replaceable as grapes in the Trubetskoy vineyard. The Russian Baltic Fleet was on its way around the world to wreak revenge on Admiral Togo. But Cassini may have been merely posturing; before the war, he had seemed to favor a peaceful Russian foreign policy, especially vis-à-vis China. As Hay reminded Roosevelt, “dealing with people to whom mendacity is a science is no easy thing.”

  All he knew in January 1905 was that if the belligerents did not soon agree to a cease-fire, his heart would give out in the attempt to negotiate one. Along with all his Cabinet colleagues, Hay had handed in his resignation. But this was a formality, returning to Roosevelt the power of appointment—or reappointment. The Secretary could only hope against hope that he would not be needed in the new Administration.

  Politely disapproving, he stood by as two junior members of the secret du roi arrived from overseas for White House consultations. One was the President’s Harvard classmate Baron Kentaro Kaneko, and the other his former best man, Cecil Spring Rice, still attached to the British Embassy in St. Petersburg.

  MEANWHILE, HENRY ADAMS tried again and again to plot the power curve of 1901 through 1904, and relate it to force fields other than Roosevelt’s personality. He wanted to include his Dynamic Theory of History in an intellectual memoir he had begun to write, provisionally entitled “The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity.” Adams figured that he would need about two years to finish the book, which he would then publish privately, in a limited edition, for members of his immediate circle. John Hay would be the first to see it—if Hay lived long enough—and of course the President must get a copy, too.

  What would Roosevelt make of Adams’s Roosevelt, the godlike perpetrator of “pure act”? Insofar as he was pure act, he might be amused but not particularly interested. The President was not a speculative, nor a spiritual man. He was in too much of a hurry to make the world over, today or preferably yesterday, to care what Adams (or for that matter Hay) might think of him. They were both of them sixty-six; he twenty years younger. “With him wielding unmeasured power with immeasurable energy in the White House,” Adams wrote, “the relation of age to youth—of teacher to pupil—was altogether out of place; and no other was possible.”

  Unless, of course, one continued one’s own education by watching the sometimes disorientating spectacle of youth in flight from the past. Roosevelt’s Energetik, his dirigible ability to change course at a moment’s notice, his tendency to write exuberant Os in the air, made Adams doubt his own trail across “the darkening prairie of education.” To a historian born in 1838, “always and everywhere the Complex had been true and the Contradiction certain.” Here was Roosevelt trumpeting either- or banalities, lecturing intellectuals as though they were children, and yet repeatedly prevailing in the most intricate political situations. Might the President’s simplicity be that of an idiot savant who instinctively understood how Complexity worked, even to the point of using Contradiction to generate extra energy? If so, he was certainly not simplistic. He was, on the contrary, formidable: twentieth-century in his eager embrace of Chaos, eighteenth-century in his utter self-certainty. To Roosevelt, as to Kant, “Truth was the essence of the ‘I.’ ”

  ANOTHER HENRY WHO had long observed Roosevelt with bemusement visited the White House that January and was taken aback by its new splendor and protocol. Henry James attended the annual Diplomatic Reception, not inappropriately, as America’s most distinguished expatriate writer. Like Adams before him, he was swept upstairs afterward for “supper” in a sea of velvet-and-gold lace uniforms and found himself sitting one dowager away from Roosevelt.

  “The President is distinctly tending—or trying—to make a ‘court,’ ” he wrote later. Yet he could not help being flattered at his placement above so many representatives of empires. Elsewhere, at a point hardly less privileged, next to Mrs. Roosevelt, sat the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Democracy still reigned at the heart of the Republic; art mattered here as much as politics.

  “Theodore Rex,” James allowed, “is at any rate a really extraordinary creature for native intensity, veracity, and bonhomie—he plays his part with the best will in the world and I recognize his amusing likability.”

  THE IMAGINATION MUST be given not wings but weights. Francis Bacon’s dogged dictum, which Adams had so long thought salutary, seemed negated by this new century with its young men impatient of gravity and its young powers—America, Japan, Germany—pushing back the borders of old empires. The only constant now was change. Here was Roosevelt, whose main responsibilities were to keep the United States safe and solvent, collaring Capital and Labor in either hand and splicing oceans more than one thousand miles south of Key West. Here was Arthur Balfour, at last report the Prime Minister of Great Britain, embracing a New Theory of Matter, and informing the world that all of human history, “down to say, five years ago,” was nothing but an illusion. Here was Kaiser “Willy” suddenly facing west, and leaving “Nicky,” his poor little crétin cousin, to face Red revolution at home and Yellow Peril in the Far East.

  Adams belonged to the minority of Washington intellectuals that dreaded a Japanese victory. Russia was, he acknowledged, a moribund empire, but at least its crown and its army held the peasants at bay, not to mention the ne
w Mongols crowding Port Arthur. If the Tsar was deposed, “I foresee something like a huge Balkan extending from Warsaw to Vladivostok; an anarchy tempered with murders.” Nearer home, France—Russia’s ally—could become vulnerable to German imperialism. Hay’s attitude was frustratingly ambivalent: while aware of the ruin Russia’s defeat would visit upon his Open Door policy, he nevertheless worked for Theodore Roosevelt, and the President’s proclamation of neutrality compelled him to be discreet.

  What tormented Adams was the possibility that Roosevelt’s electoral triumph—which the world had gasped at—might persuade one or the other power to ask the President to mediate a peace settlement. Surely the Virgin, if she still had any say in world affairs, would allow Hay that final honor.

  BOTH KANEKO AND Spring Rice made social calls on the ailing Secretary of State. They were politely vague about their conversations with the President, Kaneko saying only that Roosevelt kept insisting that Japan should not be “exorbitant” in her demands for a price to end the war. The Baron was in no hurry to return home, and hinted at the possibility of “important news” from his government in the spring.

  Hay looked out his window and saw nothing but the frozen gray of early February. “The weather remains gloomy,” he wrote in his diary, “et moi aussi.”

  Heart pain kept him awake at night, and when he slept he was often plagued by nightmares. Once he dreamed he was going to be hanged. Mrs. Hay conspired with Adams to ship him to Bad Nauheim, Germany, for a cure, but he would not hear of leaving town until after the President’s Inauguration. That was more than a month away. Congress was still in session, and he had to calm the agitation of Takahira and Cassini, both of whom visited on him what they could not properly communicate to Roosevelt.

  Cassini waved aside Japan’s recent victories as “éphémères.” The American people should know that Russia had four hundred thousand soldiers in Manchuria, not to mention Admiral Zinovi Rozhdestvenski’s “fine fleet,” still desperately steaming toward the war theater. “Russia is neither defeated nor ruined.”

  The President also showed signs of rising agitation. Those who knew him understood that he was merely working up steam for the Inauguration. Henry James thought the Rooseveltian machine was “destined to be overstrained” one day. He had to admit that, at present, “it functions astonishingly, and is quite exciting to see.”

  With that, James left town. So did many Democrats wanting to put as much distance as possible between themselves and “Theodore the First” on the day of his coronation. “Roosevelt has the world in a sling right now,” Henry Watterson wrote from a cruise ship in the Mediterranean. “But, wait a little.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Many Budding Things

  Onaisy lies th’ head that wears a crown.

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT TOOK his second oath of office in sharp, cold sunshine on 4 March 1905. Exactly four years before, he had stood on this same Capitol platform, watching President McKinley being sworn in by this same little Chief Justice. Then, heavy rain and a dogged phalanx of mostly incumbent Old Guard Republicans had reinforced his sense of having been forced into political immobility. Now, a blustering wind tore at his hair and speech cards as he stepped forward to address the crowd. It tossed the dozens of flags rising to either side of him, so violently that some wrapped around their staffs in tight spirals of red, white, and blue. Other flags, suspended between the marble columns behind him, whipped and cracked. The caps of several Annapolis and West Point cadets went spinning through the air. Women clutched at their hats (none more determinedly than Alice Roosevelt, who wore a flimsy white-and-black satin wheel, undulant with ostrich plumes), while men jammed their toppers down. The whole scene, from the ten-acre crush of spectators in the plaza to hundreds more onlookers perched dangerously on every one of the Capitol’s upper protuberances (not to mention boys clambering in trees, and a whirl of pigeons around the dome), was one of constant movement, as if Roosevelt’s energy had animated the entire body politic.

  “THE WHOLE SCENE … WAS ONE OF CONSTANT MOVEMENT.”

  Roosevelt’s Inauguration, 4 March 1905 (photo credit 23.1)

  “My fellow citizens, no people on earth … with gratitude to the Giver of Good … under a free government … things of the body and the things of the soul … justice … power …” The wind snatched at his shouted phrases, now muffling them, now hurling them at one group of listeners, while others heard not a word.

  Roosevelt read with difficulty, his silk pince-nez ribbon slapping the side of his face. Nobody, with the exception of his wife and Dr. Rixey, knew that he was losing sight in his left eye—the legacy of a recent boxing blow. He was obliged to keep a tight grasp on his cards with both hands. Close observers noticed a strange, heavy gold ring on his left third finger. It contained a strand of Abraham Lincoln’s hair. John Hay had given it to him with a request that he wear it when he was sworn in: “You are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln.”

  Hay could not have made a gesture more certain to move Roosevelt, whose worship of the Emancipator was admixed with pride that Theodore Senior had once been an habitué of Lincoln’s White House—indeed, had met the young John Hay there. The effect of the gift was to imbue the President, at least temporarily, with a Lincolnesque devotion to the Constitution as “a document which put human rights above property rights.”

  Unremarked in Roosevelt’s letter of thanks to Hay (which had expressed “love” for the first time in his male, non-family correspondence) was the fact that some sort of valediction was implied: if not from President to President, then at least from the man who had served them both, in youth and age, and was now palpably ceding his last responsibility as Secretary of State. Roosevelt had declined Hay’s pro forma resignation, but clearly any settlement of the Russo-Japanese War was going to have to be put into younger, stronger hands—hands calmed, one hoped, by this precious token of statesmanship.

  “Much has been given us,” the President bellowed, leaning forward into the wind, “and much will rightfully be expected of us.”

  THE LENGTH OF HIS Inaugural Address was in reverse proportion to the size of those expectations. He spoke for no more than six minutes, employed few rhetorical flourishes, and said nothing of substance. Thousands of spectators cheered with some bewilderment, not understanding that the President, with a new Senate convening in special session and foreign ministries looking to him to mediate the Russo-Japanese War, was deliberately presenting as bland a public face as possible.

  Afterward, Roosevelt joked to Henry Cabot Lodge, “Did you see Bacon turn pale when he heard me swear to uphold the Constitution?” Senator Augustus Bacon of Georgia, a strict constructionist, overheard this remark, as intended. “On the contrary, Mr. President, I never felt so relieved in my life.”

  Count Cassini led the diplomatic corps offstage, his chest virtually armor-plated with gold and silver orders. A commensurate glittering defensiveness had begun to characterize St. Petersburg’s attitude toward any peace overture that might be construed as further meddling by the United States in Russian affairs. So impregnable was this breastwork that John Hay could not answer when Minister Takahira asked if Cassini believed external peace might help Russia achieve internal peace, or vice versa.

  At two o’clock, the President entertained two hundred guests at lunch in the White House, while thirty-five thousand Rough Riders, Negro Republicans, Harvard alumni, anthracite miners, Indians (Chief Geronimo prominent in war paint and feathers), cowboys, Grand Army veterans, ward heelers, Filipino scouts, Oyster Bay neighbors, and bandsmen massed at the eastern end of Pennsylvania Avenue. High above the banners and placards being readied for display (WE HONOR THE MAN WHO SETTLED OUR STRIKE) floated an enormous and not very threatening Big Stick.

  During the ensuing parade, which lasted three and a half hours, Roosevelt scorned his glass-enclosed reviewing stand and stood alone in the constant wind, waving his tall hat, bowing, clapping, and laughing. Whatever tomorrow’s new
spapers might say about him being still the youngest of Presidents, he was now the same age Theodore Senior had been when he had died—a sobering thought to his sisters, if not to himself. Four more years of strenuous responsibility loomed. Nor was he as constantly healthy as he pretended to be. The “Cuban fever” he shared with so many of these Rough Riders (trotting by with rebel yells) had to be kept down with drugs; his joints were stiffening, no matter how much he exercised; and his blood pressure, always abnormally high, was being worsened by hardening arteries.

  “The President will of course outlive me,” Hay wrote in his diary, “but he will not live to be old.”

  ON 10 MARCH, Roosevelt decided it was time “to let the Japanese Government understand that we should be glad to be of use” in any effort to arrive at a negotiated settlement. He cautioned Hay that this stated willingness must not sound too much like an “offer.” If he was to be a peacemaker, he could not let the Tsar think he had solicited the job. Hay obediently bypassed Takahira and gave Lloyd C. Griscom, the young United States Minister to Japan, carte blanche to leak the President’s availability.

  The leak coincided with the Japanese capture of Mukden, after weeks of savage fighting. Even Count Cassini had to admit to feelings of despair. He came to see Hay, who was preparing to leave for Europe, and spoke at such length about Russia’s “tremendous sacrifices and misfortunes” in wartime that the Secretary, losing patience, asked, “When will come the time of your diplomats?”

  Cassini sank into even deeper gloom. “We are condemned to fight. We cannot honestly stop.”

  Hay left Washington on 17 March and journeyed north to New York. So, by a separate train, did Roosevelt. The Secretary went to stay overnight in his daughter’s suite at the Lorraine Hotel. He had no sooner settled in than a crescendo of hooves in the street below signaled the approach of the presidential cavalcade. Hay got to a window in time to see his employer sweep by, en route to Delmonico’s restaurant.