Colonel Roosevelt (20 page)

THAT EVENING ROOSEVELT
sat in a rocking chair on the veranda of Sagamore Hill, watching the sun set over Long Island Sound. The day that had begun so loudly, with cannon booms and the most sustained shouts of adulation ever to assault his ears, was ending in quiet bird music. A storm during the afternoon had rinsed the air clean. From the belt of forest at the foot of his sloping lawn came the sleepy sound of wood thrushes chanting their vespers. Overhead in a weeping elm, an oriole alternately sang and scolded. Vireos and tanagers warbled. When dark came on, he heard the flight song of an ovenbird.

As a boy he had sat here when there was no house and no trees, only a grassy hilltop sloping down to Oyster Bay and Cold Sping Harbor.
He and his first wife had planned to build their summer place on it. Death parted them before the foundation stone was laid.
Being a young widower had not stopped Roosevelt from completing the full three-story, seven-bedroom structure before Edith arrived in the spring of 1887, already pregnant with Ted. Here, presumably, he would welcome his first grandchild. And here, probably, he would die.

“
One thing I want now is privacy,” he told a
New York Times
reporter. “I want to close up like a native oyster.” Only two public functions threatened: Ted’s wedding in a couple of days’ time, and a Harvard visit at the end of the month. Beyond them, all of July lay free. He could settle at his desk in the library, and pursue his new career as contributing editor of
The Outlook
. He had taken
a vow of political silence for two months.

During the next twenty-four hours he either heard or saw forty-two species of birds. This beat by one the total that Sir Edward Grey had been able to identify in the New Forest. From the point of view of melody, there was no contest at all. When he strolled around the house, or jogged down the hill to bathe, his ears rang with the calls of thrashers in the hedgerows and herons in the salt marsh, the hot-weather song of indigo buntings and thistle finches, the bubbling music of bobolinks, the mew and squeal of catbirds, the piercing cadence of the meadowlark, the high scream of red-tail hawks.

All of them were listed in the catalog,
Notes on Some of the
Birds of Oyster Bay, Long Island
. He had no need to consult that authoritative work, having written and published it himself, at age twenty.

OVER THE WEEKEND
, newspaper editorials generally agreed that Theodore Roosevelt stood at the peak of his renown. To the Pittsburgh
Leader
, the welcome extended him by New Yorkers had approached “deification.” The
New York Evening Post
described it as “sobering” in its implications, but praised him for not taking political advantage of the moment. “Never before in the history of America,” commented the Colorado Springs
Gazette
, “has a private citizen possessed the power which Mr. Roosevelt now holds.” The Philadelphia
North American
held that he could win a third term as President in 1912, even if he ran as a Democrat. Few sympathies were extended to the man he had chosen to succeed him. “Never mind, Mr. Taft,” the Chicago
Daily News
jeered. “When you are an ex-President you can be a celebrity yourself.”

In trekking so many thousands of miles, so far from home, Roosevelt seemed to have been away a long time. Taft’s presidency felt almost over, as though the coming elections were to mark its twilight, rather than its meridian. In fact, Taft had been in the White House less than a year and a half, and was not averse to a second term. He enjoyed his job’s lavish perks, if not the work that came with them. But he had learned to minimize that. By nature an administrator, he saw no reason to initiate policy. The Constitution, as he read it, provided him unlimited time off for golf, free first-class travel, and
the right to doze during meetings. He liked his $75,000 salary, and dreamed of being a justice of the Supreme Court after his prolonged sabbatical in the executive branch.

There was, besides, an all-powerful lobby determined to renominate him. While most of Manhattan had been brilliant with flags on the day of the Colonel’s great parade, Wall Street had remained defiantly drab. Bare poles projected from the House of Morgan, National City Bank, and the New York Stock Exchange. The austere men who ran these institutions
were convinced that Roosevelt was insane: a politician so deficient in financial sense as to need medical treatment. At all costs he must be kept safely rusticated at Oyster Bay.

Roosevelt remained so close-mouthed that not even Henry Cabot Lodge, an early guest at Sagamore Hill, was able to divine his thoughts. But he had to make a quick decision which was bound to be interpreted politically: what to do about the President’s offer of hospitality.
The letters Archie Butt had un-booted on the
Kaiserin Auguste Victoria
repeated the invitation three times. One was a copy of the long, querulous screed Roosevelt had already received in
Britain. The second, addressing him as “My dear Theodore,” had been written while he was at sea, and the third, from Helen Taft, expressed the hope that Edith, too, would come to stay in the White House.

“
I do not know that I have had harder luck than most presidents,” Taft’s
cri de coeur
read, “but I do know that thus far I have succeeded far less than have others. I have been conscientiously trying to carry out your policies but my method of doing so has not worked smoothly.” Page after page, the self-pity went on. “My year and two months [
sic
] have been heavier for me to bear because of Mrs. Taft’s condition.… I am glad to say she has not seemed to be bothered by the storm of abuse to which I have been subjected.… The Garfield-Pinchot Ballinger controversy has given me a great deal of pain and suffering.”

Taft even complained about being unable to lose weight.

Roosevelt had long been aware that the President lacked confidence. Uxorious and inordinately susceptible to guidance from his brothers Henry and Charles, Taft was always looking for approval. But this whining note was unbecoming for a chief executive. It did not augur well for the program of progressive reform he was supposed to have consolidated and extended.
Taft took credit for “a real downward revision” of tariff rates, laws to improve labor safety and bolster postal savings, and a conservation bill giving the Department of the Interior increased powers of land withdrawal. But he wrote more convincingly about rising prices, opposition in Congress, and a hostile press. He thought there was a real possibility that the GOP would lose its House majority in the fall, and the White House in 1912.

In that case, Taft stated, Senators La Follette of Wisconsin, Cummins and Dolliver of Iowa, Bristow of Kansas, Clapp of Minnesota, Beveridge of Indiana, and Borah of Idaho—Midwestern insurgents to a man—would be responsible. “
[They] have done all in their power to defeat us.” Whether by “us” the President meant himself and his administration, or himself and Roosevelt as a continuum, was unclear.

He mentioned in passing that it had been his idea to send the
South Carolina
to New York “and give you a salute from her batteries.”

Roosevelt sensed that he was being coerced. He replied on 20 June with a letter that began and ended affectionately, but contained one paragraph of startling coldness:

Having thus relegated Taft to a level of less consequence than zoological specimens, Roosevelt went with his family to attend the wedding of Ted and Eleanor in New York.
^*

TWO DAYS LATER
, emerging from the office of Charles Scribner’s Sons, on Fifth Avenue, he was mobbed by a crowd so overexcited that mounted policemen had to ride in and free him. “They wanted to carry me on their shoulders,” he told his sister Corinne. Gone was the frank adoration that had touched him during his parade. “It represented a certain hysterical quality that boded ill for my future.
That type
of crowd, feeling
that
kind of way, means that in a very short time they will be throwing rotten eggs at me.”

A dinner in his honor that night at Sherry’s, the most exclusive restaurant in the city, also failed to inspire him. The evening’s proceedings (printed on rag paper with illustrations hand-colored by Maxfield Parrish, bound in soft calfskin, and stamped with the Roosevelt crest) seemed to warrant a major statement. But his only reference to his future was cryptic, and disappointing to many guests. “
I am like Peary at the North Pole,” he said, comparing himself to America’s other celebrity of the moment. “There is no way for me to travel but south.”

As soon as he returned home, political pilgrims began to make the three-mile trek from Oyster Bay station to Sagamore Hill. To President Taft’s alarm, they were all of the progressive persuasion. Gifford Pinchot arrived with James R. Garfield, a fellow conservationist who had served Roosevelt as secretary of the interior. Joseph Medill McCormick, the idealistic owner of the
Chicago Tribune
, came with Francis J. Heney, a Californian prosecutor famous for attacking corporate fraud. Booker T. Washington, Roosevelt’s former conduit to black Americans, wished to renew old ties. So did Senator Robert M. La Follette, although in this case the ties had never been strong. “Battling Bob” almost comically personified insurgency. His pompadour and soaring brow comprised fully half of his head, and a good deal of his height. “
I am very much pleased with my visit to Colonel Roosevelt,” he announced.

Most of the pilgrims expressed similar pleasure. They were vague as to what, exactly, Roosevelt had said to them. Outsiders could only infer he was not praising William Howard Taft.

“
He says he will keep silent for at least two months,” the President remarked, sulking over the morning newspapers. “I don’t care if he keeps silent forever.”

The most far-seeing commentary on Roosevelt in retreat came, ironically, from a blind Democrat, Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma.