Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Baker offered to send a full guard of honor to Oyster Bay. Archie politely declined to be obligated to the bureaucrat who had prevented Roosevelt from serving his country. “It was my father’s wish that he would be buried among the people of Oyster Bay, and that the funeral service would be conducted entirely by those friends among whom he had lived so long and happily.”

  In a further effort to keep the exercises private, Archie let it be known that there were only 350 pew seats available, with standing room for perhaps 150 extra invited guests. He agreed to accommodate forty-five members of Congress, as representatives of the people, but said he could not invite any members of the Wilson administration other than Marshall, two naval aides, and Assistant Secretary of State William Phillips, deputizing for the absent Robert Lansing.

  The discipline Archie had acquired as a soldier enabled him to handle the anguished telegrams that inundated Sagamore Hill, as bales of afternoon newspapers blackened with the headline ROOSEVELT DEAD thumped onto sidewalks across the country. Even so, he had difficulty controlling himself when some children from the Cove School delivered an arrangement of pink and white carnations that they had personally chosen and bought.

  Alice Longworth and Ethel Derby called from Washington and South Carolina to say they were hurrying north to help Edith—although “Mother, the adamantine,” as Roosevelt used to call her, was more likely to comfort them in their mutual desolation. She also had to handle the anguish of her husband’s humbler mourners, from James Amos (inconsolable in the library, sobbing “Gone … gone” into cupped brown hands) to Charlie Lee the coachman and thrifty pilgrims walking from the railroad depot. “You did not expect to visit us for this reason,” she said to George Syran, a New York porter who had sent coffee every morning to the Colonel’s hospital room. “He’s gone now, so you must take good care of me.”

  In a letter recounting his visit, the porter wrote: “She had a crying smile on her, I’m sorry I haven’t the power to describe that devine face.… Her heart was torn out of her roots.”

  A perpetual drone in the sky over Cove Neck puzzled residents on neighboring parts of the North Shore. It came from military airplanes, ordered by the army aviation directorate to patrol the house where Quentin Roosevelt’s father lay dead. Pilots dropped wreaths of laurel on the lawn, buzzing so low that the wind from their propellers shook the bare trees around. The aerial watch continued through Monday night and all the next day, with alternate flights of five planes operating out of Mineola. For most of the time they kept high and circled far, but their noise became steadily more oppressive, like the throb of an organ pedal beneath a fugue that needed to resolve. Only in the predawn hours of Wednesday, as snow began to fall, did silence return to Sagamore Hill.

  “THE WIND FROM THEIR PROPELLERS SHOOK THE BARE TREES.”

  The Air Corps maintains a vigil over Sagamore Hill after TR’s death. (photo credit e.1)

  THE SNOW TAPERED OFF around noon, when Edith and Archie, wearing his captain’s dress uniform and French war medal, received relatives and close friends at home for a valedictory service in the North Room. The Colonel’s silver-handled oak coffin was set up in front of the fireplace. Before its lid was screwed down, Ethel went through for a last glimpse of her father. “He looked as if he were asleep—and weary,” she recorded. “But not stern.”

  She had become used to the grimness that had settled increasingly upon him during the last ten months. The coffin rested on one of his lion skins, and was covered with the Stars and Stripes, with a pair of Rough Rider flags crossed at the foot. Edith had requested no floral decorations, but raised no objection to a wreath of soft yellow mimosa blossoms, contributed at great expense by some veterans of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. Yellow was the regimental color, and Roosevelt had grown to love the scent of mimosa in Brazil.

  At 12:30, six undertakers wearing black skullcaps transferred the coffin to a motor hearse waiting under the porte cochère. Edith did not venture outside. In the austere tradition of Puritan widows, she retired to her bedroom alone while the rest of the house party climbed into automobiles and followed the hearse down the hill. There was no military escort. A squad of mounted policemen had ridden all the way from New York to march ahead of their former commissioner. But Archie, citing Roosevelt’s disdain for pompe funèbre, had asked them to wait at the church.

  The cortege made slow going, carving tracks in the snowy shore road. As it approached Oyster Bay village, the cloud cover broke. A shaft of sunshine irradiated Christ Church and several thousand bystanders cordoned off by the police. Shortly before one o’clock, the hearse reached the church door.

  Already a silence unrelated to the weather prevailed in most cities and large towns in the northeastern, central, and western states. Not just New York’s federal buildings, but schools, courts, firehouses, exchanges, and movie palaces closed in a show of reverence for the dead Colonel. Streetcars and subway trains ground to a halt. Factory wheels stopped spinning. The downtown financial district, so long a target of his righteous wrath, was deserted. Bell ringers in Trinity Church, St. Paul’s, and City Hall waited for 2 P.M., the presumed hour of internment of the only president born in Manhattan.

  The hush was even more profound inside his parish church. Melted snow could be heard dripping from the roof. Roosevelt had requested no music of any kind. Five hundred congregants watched the coffin come down the nave, through lozenges of stained-glass light. It was still carried by the six men in skullcaps. There were no official pallbearers. Archie followed with the family party, prominently including Flora Whitney. He noticed a distraught William Howard Taft sitting in a rear pew, settled his companions up front, then made Taft come and join them.

  Thomas Marshall sat in aloof eminence, the official bearer of a floral arrangement from the President of the United States. (It consisted of the same economical carnations that had appealed to the students of Cove School.) Charles Evans Hughes showed up, impassive behind his whiskers. Warren Harding and General Wood looked prepresidential, now that they no longer had to worry about a front-runner for next year’s Republican nomination. Henry Cabot Lodge, the senior senator present, was flanked by Hiram Johnson and Philander Chase Knox. The House was represented by the outgoing Speaker, Champ Clark, and his aged predecessor, “Uncle Joe” Cannon. Governor Al Smith of New York attended as an unwelcome envoy from Tammany Hall, and Elihu Root and Joe Murray as Roosevelt’s oldest political patrons. A democratic variety of attendees crowded the other rows, most so strange to one another that only the Colonel could have embraced them all in his vast bear hug of acquaintance.

  The service was almost cruelly short and spartan. Roosevelt’s favorite hymn, “How Firm a Foundation, Ye Saints of the Lord,” was recited, rather than sung, by the Reverend George F. Talmage:

  When through fiery trials Thy pathway shall lie,

  My grace, all sufficient, shall be Thy supply.

  At no time until the benediction did Father Talmage mention the name of the deceased. When he did, it evoked tears. “Theodore,” he said, “the Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious to thee.”

  A single pull of the church’s bell alerted Edith, across the bay, that her husband was beginning his final journey. Outside, the mounted police waited in formation. They were no longer to be dissuaded from forming an honor guard. Spectators sobbed as the cortege, now lengthened enormously with other automobiles, wound back toward the bend of Cove Neck.

  There was no room in the tiny parking lot of Youngs Cemetery for any vehicle except the hearse. Roosevelt’s grave awaited him at the top of a steep knoll. He had always enjoyed the birdsong in that fir-forested corner, and had long ago decided he wanted to be buried there. Typically, his chosen site involved a long hard climb. Slippery snow made it even harder for the six undertakers. They bent forward at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees as they labored under their burden. Father Talmage led the way in his surplice. He had as much difficulty in a
voiding a soaked front hemline as Alice, Ethel, and Flora. Big men like Taft and Wood puffed in the rear. Only a party of fifty children from Cove School trotted up the path with ease.

  The graveside view made the ascent worthwhile. There was a cutting breeze, bringing with it stray whiffs of wood smoke, but the sun was now fully out, and the bay glistened half white and half bright blue. Small spirals of mist rose from the frozen reeds. Already the snow between the surrounding trees was dotted with the spoor of rabbits and squirrels.

  “THEY BENT FORWARD … AS THEY LABORED UNDER THEIR BURDEN.”

  TR’s coffin is carried to his grave overlooking Oyster Bay, 8 January 1919. (photo credit e.2)

  A laurel lining and berm of flowers camouflaged the fresh hole in the ground. Standing over it, a police bugler blew taps. Then the flag was unfolded from the coffin, revealing a rectangle of silver that read:

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  OCTOBER 27, 1858–JANUARY 6, 1919

  As the engraved words sank out of sight, Father Talmage read the litany of committal. Lieutenant Otto Raphael, Roosevelt’s favorite Jewish policeman, muttered his own burial prayer in Hebrew. A flight of white geese wheeled and settled in the cove.

  One of the last mourners to remain behind, while the rest of the company straggled downhill, was Taft. He stood by the grave for a long time, crying.

  IN SUBSEQUENT DAYS and weeks, commentators and orators made up for the lack of a eulogy at the Colonel’s funeral. He had died so suddenly, and the glory of America’s late but decisive role in ending the world war had so plainly been earned at his urging, that he was at once invested with a godlike glow. The acolytes who had venerated him for so long—the Lawrence Abbotts, the Gifford Pinchots, the Julian Streets—resorted to levels of hyperbole not heard since the assassination of Lincoln. Given the poignancy of his sufferings over the last year, a considerable minority of Roosevelt-haters elected to keep their opinions private for the time being. Even H. L. Mencken reserved fire. “The man was a liar, a braggart, a bully, and a fraud,” he wrote a friend. “But let us not speak evil of the dead.”

  Among the superlatives granted Roosevelt by those who belonged to neither extreme camp, simple words came nearest to sincerity. “He was the most encouraging person that ever breathed,” Edna Ferber declared, on behalf of all the writers and artists he had befriended. “The strongest character in the world has died,” Will H. Hays said to a reporter. “I have never known another person so vital,” wrote William Allen White, “nor another man so dear.”

  Woodrow Wilson’s sentiments, conveyed in his proclamation of national mourning and a cable to Edith Roosevelt, were pro forma. This was to be expected from a head of state engaged in complex negotiations abroad. But two of his closest aides, Edward M. House and William G. McAdoo, verged on indiscretion in proclaiming Theodore Roosevelt one of the greatest of presidents. Newspapers that had savaged Roosevelt consistently throughout his career ran eloquent editorials. The New York Sun predicted that he would endure as a colossus in American history. “There are personalities so vivid, there is vitality so intense, so magnetically alert, as Motley said of Henry of Navarre, that ‘at the very mention of the name, the figure seems to leap from the mists of the past, instinct with ruddy, vigorous life.’ ” The New York Evening Post agreed:

  Something like a superman in the political sphere has passed away. He saw the nation steadily and he saw it whole. Where other politicians dealt with individuals, Mr. Roosevelt reached out for vast groups.… He boldly thrust out his hand and captured the hearts and the suffrages of a whole race, an entire church, a block of states. Never have we had a politician who, with such an appearance of effortless ease, drew after him great masses and moulded them to his will.

  From flag-bedecked platforms and pulpits in London (where for the first time in history a memorial service displaced evensong at Westminster Abbey), Paris, Rome, and throughout the Allied zone of occupancy in Germany, foreign speakers vied with American ones in celebrating the man who was commonly seen as instrumental in awakening his country to its social and strategic responsibilities. He was hailed as a liberator by Cubans and Serbs. Representatives of a nation only three months old announced that “Theodore Roosevelt was always a great friend of the Czechoslovaks.” In Tokyo, he was remembered as the peacemaker of the Russo-Japanese War and “perhaps the only great American who understood us.” Long biographies and appreciations were published in the major European newspapers. Jules Jusserand, who of all diplomats knew the Colonel best, had to be discreet in praising him at President Wilson’s elbow in Paris, but in private he was panegyrical. “I met in him a man of such extraordinary power that to find a second at the same time on this globe would have been an impossibility; a man whom to associate with was a liberal education, and who could be in every way likened to radium, for warmth, force and light emanated from him and no spending of it could ever diminish his store.”

  The tribute most awaited in Washington was that of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. He addressed a joint memorial session of Congress on 9 February in the presence of two thousand rapt listeners, including Taft, members of the Supreme Court, and officers of the cabinet, armed services, and diplomatic corps. His survey of the life and accomplishments of his oldest friend lasted almost two hours. With characteristic erudition, he began with an Arab lament, A tower is fallen, a star is set! Alas! Alas!, and ended with a quotation from John Bunyan, describing the passage of Mr. Valiant-for-Truth across the river of death: “So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.” By then Lodge was so overcome he half-fell back into his seat, and silence filled the House chamber.

  THE EULOGIES AND POEMS and memorial proceedings had hardly been printed and bound before the worshipful biographies began to appear. William Draper Lewis’s The Life of Theodore Roosevelt and William Roscoe Thayer’s Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography were substantial studies, reflecting some personal acquaintance with the great man, but their incense content was only a few degrees less fragrant than that of Lawrence Abbott’s Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt, Niel MacIntyre’s Great-heart, and William Hard’s Theodore Roosevelt: A Tribute.

  Expectations were high that the authorized biography by Joseph Bucklin Bishop would be a scholarly and unbiased corrective. But Bishop was not yet ready to publish. Then in November 1919 Stuart Sherman, who had savaged Roosevelt in The Nation two years before, published a review of the hagiographies. Entitled “Roosevelt and the National Psychology,” it amounted to the first effective attack on the Colonel’s posthumous reputation.

  “Mr. Roosevelt’s great and fascinating personality,” he began, “is part of the national wealth, and should, so far as possible, be preserved undiminished.” But those who insisted in canonizing a man so lustily, imperfectly, and on occasion tragically human offered posterity nothing more than “a whitewashed plaster bust.” Noting that the Colonel was always clear-eyed about himself, Sherman quoted his negative response in 1918 to a friend who told him he would be President again: “No, not I.… I made too many enemies, and the people are tired of my candidacy.” Roosevelt had understood then what his worshippers refused to allow—that both he and the American people had changed since his glory days at the turn of the century. And in changing, it was the people, not he, who had moved ahead.

  Sherman looked back at the life of Theodore Roosevelt and found it to be a three-act drama, ultimately tragic because the protagonist had been brought down by his own gifts. First there was the young reformer, alone among the money-grubbing or inheritance-squandering materialists who dominated American society in the eighties and nineties, preaching and personifying his famous gospel of the Strenuous Life. “Under the influence of this masterful force, the unimaginative plutocratic psychology was steadily metamorphosed into the psychology of efficient, militant, imperialistic nationalism.” So long as the United States had no army to speak of, and no empire to fatten on, the energies Roosevelt had inspired had pushed toward a more perfect Un
ion. But then, with amazing swiftness, both he and the nation had been elevated to supreme power.

  As president, Roosevelt had been even more strenuous, establishing an ideal in the popular mind of a federal government as virile, incorruptible, and morally driven as himself. Panama should have been a warning to his supporters that the reformer at home was an imperialist abroad, but then and now, the American people had little understanding of foreign affairs.

  It was not until Roosevelt visited Germany in 1910 that the imperial strain had begun to overmaster him. His address to the University of Berlin had shown the degenerative process at work, even as he spoke. Sherman quoted a “beautiful” passage from that speech, It is only by working along the lines laid down by philanthropists, by lovers of mankind, that we can be more sure of lifting our civilization to a higher and more permanent plane of well-being, and asked if any reader, nine years later, heard in them the authentic note of the Colonel’s voice. He then quoted the sentences immediately following: But woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it. And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses his fighting edge. Time and again thereafter, and compulsively during the war years, Roosevelt had indulged this rhetorical tic: always, first, the salute to men of benign instinct, then the harsh warning that if they did not fight and breed, they were doomed. In doing so, the former straight talker had become “the greatest concocter of ‘weasel’ paragraphs on record.” His misfortune was that when Americans found out that he was less interested in fighting for social justice than fighting for fighting’s sake, they had shown themselves unwilling to be either patronized or cajoled.