Colonel Roosevelt (19 page)

JOSEPH YOUNGWITZ
, of 610 East Sixth Street, Manhattan, was among the smallest and least elegant of the one million New Yorkers ready to welcome Theodore Roosevelt home on 18 June 1910. His savings as a messenger boy were insufficient to gain him admission to the reception area in Battery Park. But he had $2.75 to spend on a bunch of flowers, and vowed, somehow, to get them into his hero’s hand.

That task looked progressively more difficult as police formed a double cordon up Broadway and Fifth Avenue, holding back a crowd that began collecting at dawn and soon filled both sidewalks all the way north to Fifty-ninth Street. It was a warm, humid morning.
Straw boaters undulated twenty deep, like water lilies amid a bobbing of froglike bowlers. Female hats were fewer, but women were in the majority on the jerry-built scaffolds, some three stories high, offering
ROOSEVELT PARADE SEAT RENTALS
.

At 7:30
A
.
M
. the first of twenty-one cannon shots flashed and boomed from Fort Wadsworth, and the
Kaiserin Auguste Victoria
loomed out of the haze at the head of New York bay. She was escorted by a battleship, five destroyers, and a flotilla of smaller vessels. At once a small launch bearing representatives of the federal government put out from the presidential yacht
Dolphin
, determined to beat four cutters loaded with Mayor Gaynor’s official welcoming committee, Roosevelt family and friends, local politicians, and gentlemen of the press. They raced one another to where the great liner was mooring in quarantine.

WHEN ROOSEVELT, SITTING IN
his stateroom, heard the cannonade, his wife noticed a curious mix of pain and pleasure on his face. “
He was smiling, but looking forward”—to what, Edith did not say.

Possibly he was struggling with feelings beyond the comprehension of anyone who had not been, for seven and a half years, President of the United States. The twenty-one guns, the great gray battleship with its men standing at quarters, the launch coming alongside to a shrill of whistles; the arrival on board of his former secretary of the navy, his former secretary of agriculture, and most familiar of all, in a gold-laced uniform, his former military aide, Archie Butt—it was difficult to think of them as anything but paraphernalia of an administration still in power.

Of course they were not: the two cabinet officers, George von Lengerke Meyer and James Wilson, simply symbolized continuity between old times and new, and Captain Butt was extracting, from the leg of his boot, some letters from President and Mrs. Taft. Yet Roosevelt could not help falling at once into the habit of treating them authoritatively—just as Archie was heard to say, when they all went on deck to see the cutters approach, “
Will you kindly let the President pass?”

Edith was the first to spot another Archie, sixteen years old, blond and bone-thin, on the foremost boat,
Manhattan
. He stood with his younger brother, Quentin, and other family members, among whom could be discerned the natty figure of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Edith’s New England reserve cracked, and she looked as though she wanted to jump overboard. “
Think—for the first time in nearly two years I have them all within reach!”

Bidding farewell to his fellow passengers, Roosevelt escorted her down a gangway to the
Manhattan
at 8:20. He wore a silk topper and black frock coat. Edith presented a trim, if matronly figure in dark blue and white. Kermit, panama-topped, followed with Alice in a plaid dress and Ethel, looking almost pretty in mushroom linen, clutching her little black dog. For the next hour they were mobbed by Roosevelts of all ages and relationships, while Nicholas Longworth (impeccably dressed as always, to compensate for his bald shortness) and Henry Cabot Lodge staged a miniature conference of the House and the Senate.

Roosevelt embraced his sisters “Bamie” and Corinne, the former now deaf as well as bent by arthritis, the latter ravaged by the suicide of her youngest son at Harvard.
Ted presented his petite fiancée, Eleanor Butler Alexander. The latter had won quick family approval, since she shared four
Mayflower
ancestors with Edith, and was the only child of wealthy parents.

While the Colonel continued to kiss and hug and pump hands, his distant
Democratic cousin,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, stood apart. Tall and slender, he sported a straw boater, and kept close to his own Eleanor,
^*
an aggressively shy young woman whose chin receded as far as his own protruded. Franklin was said to have political ambitions.

Another cannonade began as Roosevelt transferred alone to the reception steamer
Androscoggin
. It was to ferry him ashore, after a short foray by the official flotilla up the Hudson. He crowed with delight when he saw that the battleship leading the way was the
South Carolina
. Twin-turreted fore and aft, still so new that her paint seemed polished, she was the first American dreadnought, a proud symbol of his efforts to build a world-class navy.

“T
HE NATTY FIGURE OF
T
HEODORE
R
OOSEVELT
, J
R
.”
Roosevelt’s eldest son at the time of his engagement to Eleanor Butler Alexander
.
(photo credit i4.1)

Roosevelt could not resist climbing out onto the
Androscoggin
’s bridge and standing there for a while, feeling himself the center of a vast marine movement churning north. Ahead to port and starboard, the warships (grimly gray now, not white as they had been in his day) guarded him. Behind came the cutters, flanked by a growing armada of private vessels and sightseeing boats. Well-wishers clustered on both New York and New Jersey piers. The air shrilled with steam whistles.

At Fourteenth Street the flotilla swiveled south. On the way back downriver, the Colonel shook the hands of the eminent New Yorkers who had arranged and paid for his homecoming. Most of them were greeted with his famous memory flashes. “My deadly rivals!” he joked at the sight of the editors of
Munsey’s
and
Everybody’s
magazines. And, “Hello, here’s
my original discoverer!” to Joseph Murray, who had put him forward as a candidate for the New York State Assembly in 1881. Even when the recognition was obviously faked, his grin and vigorous squeeze exuded friendliness.

He was, in short, already politicking, bent upon charming as many people as he could see—even the black cook making him breakfast. Yet in the midst of his effusions, Roosevelt the writer could not resist secluding himself with the
latest issue of
The Outlook
, to see how a story he had dispatched from Europe looked in print.

When, at last, he stepped onto the soil of his native city, a huge shout went up from the crowd waiting in Battery Park and ran echoing up Broadway. It built into such a roar that for the first time in his life he was brought to public tears.
He had to turn toward the pilothouse and polish his spectacles before proceeding.

TO THE CHAGRIN
of three thousand ticket holders in the park, Mayor Gaynor’s welcoming speech and Roosevelt’s reply were so brief that the parade got under way at 11:30, almost an hour earlier than scheduled. Reporters were left to guess what, if anything, the Colonel had meant when he said, “
I am ready and eager to do my part … in helping solve problems which must be solved.”

During his ensuing five-mile drive uptown, standing most of the way in the mayor’s open carriage, he was deluged in ticker tape and confetti, and subjected to ceaseless roars of “Teddy! Teddy!” A man with a megaphone bellowed, “Our next President!” to a crescendo of applause. The parade was almost as long as the marine file had been, with a vanguard of mounted police and bandsmen followed by Rough Riders prancing on sorrel horses. “I
certainly love my boys,” Roosevelt yelled at them. Thirteen carriages of dignitaries trailed his own. Then came another band, a marching mass of Spanish War veterans, two more bands, and finally more mounted police, guarding against incursions from the rear. The heat by now was tremendous, and he glistened with sweat as he waved his topper at the never-thinning crowd.

Archie Butt and William Loeb, collector of the Port of New York, rode in the carriage just behind him. Loeb had been Roosevelt’s private secretary in the White House, and agreed with Butt that there was “something different” about their former boss. So, for that matter, did Lodge and Nick Longworth. Butt was best able to express their collective thoughts:

Just above Franklin Street, a small boy broke out from the curb, screaming, “Hey, Teddy! I want to shake hands with you!” The Colonel reached down and they managed a quick clasp, then police hustled the boy away.

“ ‘H
EY
, T
EDDY
! I
WANT TO SHAKE HANDS WITH YOU
!’ ”
Joseph Youngwitz presents a bouquet to his hero, 18 June 1910
.
(photo credit i4.2)

The parade thumped on up Broadway and Fifth Avenue. About an hour later, as it approached its end at Grand Army Plaza, the same urchin—who evidently knew how to ride subways—reappeared, this time waving flowers. Roosevelt took the cluster and called out, as police again swooped, “I think I have seen you before.”

Joseph Youngwitz confirmed to a reporter that this was true. He had shaken hands with his hero on a presidential visit to New York
“about five years ago.”