Colonel Roosevelt (59 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
By court order, Schrank was remanded to the custody of a “lunacy commission” of five psychiatrists. They concluded that he was a case of “
dementia praecox
, paranoid type,” and unanimously recommended
incarceration for life in the Wisconsin state asylum in Oshkosh. A guard escorting him there by train noticed him staring out the window at passing fields, and asked if he liked to hunt.
“
Only Bull Moose,” Schrank said.
MUCH AS ROOSEVELT
wanted to become a full-time “literary feller,” as he had proclaimed himself in his thirties, his still-evangelical followers begged him to stay on as their leader. With four years to expand, refinance, and consolidate, the Progressive National Committee was intent on “renominating” him for president in 1916—so much so that it had already scheduled a Party conference in Chicago to sanction that plan.
George Perkins, seeking publicity, presided at a preliminary dinner of “Highbrow Political Contributors” in New York. The Colonel was guest of honor. Frank Munsey attended, along with the short-story writer Edna Ferber, the journalist Will Irwin, and Hamlin Garland, the kind of all-round man of letters Roosevelt most enjoyed. Garland’s short stories and essays were highly regarded, and he had also written
an excellent life of President Grant.
If Perkins was hoping for an evening of Progressive dialectic, he was disappointed. Garland was more interested in encouraging Roosevelt (looking fully recovered and cheerful) to push ahead with his autobiography. He said he knew how difficult it was for a public man to find the right intimate tone, and passed on a recommendation from William Dean Howells, the sage of American letters: the Colonel should reminisce aloud to a stenographer.
Roosevelt was in receipt of similar advice from Lawrence Abbott of
The Outlook
, but he let Garland think the notion intrigued him. “
I’ll begin it immediately, dictating the way Howells suggested.”
“Don’t give us too much of the political, the official,” Garland said. “Write it the way you talk to your friends.”
“That’s not so easy as it sounds, especially when you consider the distractions I suffer.” Roosevelt’s voice rose to the ironic squeak he sometimes used when mocking himself. “Being out of politics is not precisely retirement for me.”
ABBOTT’S IDEA, SHREWDER
than Howells’s, was to engage the Colonel in conversations at Sagamore Hill, with Frank Harper sitting in. They should be as informal as possible. When Roosevelt dictated, he orated. But relaxing in front of his own fire and surrounded by his own books and mementoes, he was a natural raconteur. He could go on for hours, with effortless sequitur and wit, often laughing himself into paroxysms. Abbott worried, however, that he might be inhibited by the sight of his secretary scratching away on a pad.
Fortunately Harper was so short as to be unobtrusive in any room with large furniture. Before their first, experimental session, Abbott instructed the young man to record everything verbatim, no matter how disjointed the sequence. They they joined Roosevelt in his study.
The Colonel began to talk about his childhood with freshness and freedom. From time to time, he remembered Harper’s presence and stiffened. But as the afternoon wore on, he relaxed and Abbott went home triumphant, with a mass of material to snip and paste. After a couple of days Roosevelt had a typed draft copy for approval. He edited and punctuated it with his usual conscientiousness. The result was “Boyhood and Youth,” the first chapter of what promised to be the most entertaining American memoir since Benjamin Franklin’s.
On October 27, 1858, I was born at No. 28 East Twentieth Street, New York City, in the house in which we lived during the time that my two sisters and my brother and I were small children. It was furnished in the canonical taste of the New York which George William Curtis described in the
Potiphar Papers
. The black haircloth furniture in the dining room scratched the bare legs of the children when they sat on it. The middle room was a library, with tables, chairs, and bookcases of gloomy respectability. It was without windows, and so was available only at night. The front room, the parlor, seemed to us children to be a room of much splendor, but was open for general use only on Sunday evening or on rare occasions when there were parties.… The ornaments of that parlor I remember now, including the gas chandelier decorated with a great variety of cut-glass prisms. These prisms struck me as possessing peculiar magnificence. One of them fell off one day, and I hastily grabbed it and stowed it away, passing several days of furtive delight in the treasure, a delight always alloyed with fear that I would be found out and convicted of grand larceny.
ROOSEVELT’S REDISCOVERY
of his narrative voice was interrupted on 8 December by distant, discordant Bull Moose calls. They emanated from the Progressive conference in Chicago, where his presence was urgently requested.
Gifford and Amos Pinchot had never been able to reconcile themselves to the power George Perkins wielded as chairman of the Party’s Executive Committee.
Ever since the election, they had plagued Roosevelt with a proposal that the executive headquarters should be translocated from New York—Perkins’s orbit—to Washington, home of the more malleable Senator Dixon. The Colonel saw a threat to his reputation. The Party was bound to self-destruct if it lost its big-city backers. Perkins would resign rather than be sidelined by the Pinchots, and Frank Munsey was wistful to rejoin the GOP. Roosevelt did not want to look like a leader unable to hold on to his best men.
Showing as much good grace as possible, he left for Chicago on a special train, and found fifteen hundred loyal Progressives waiting for him next day in
the ballroom of the LaSalle Hotel. The National Committee was sufficiently
convinced by his support of Perkins to vote 32 to 12 in favor of keeping the executive headquarters in New York. As a sop to the Pinchots, a branch office was established in Washington, and antitrust language reinserted in the Party platform.
Roosevelt’s “renomination” two days later was more of a headline-getter than a formal nod toward 1916. He cast most of his speech of thanks in the present tense, telling the delegates that their current priority must be to fight for distributive justice at the state and federal level. He obstinately defended his philosophy of judicial recall: “
The doctrine of the divine right of judges to rule the people is every bit as ignoble as the doctrine of the divine right of kings.”
With that he handed the platform over to Jane Addams, and the proceedings degenerated into a dry chautauqua on questions of organization, recruitment, and finance. Charts were drawn, titles devised, plans mooted, budgets projected, lists compiled from other lists, and committees split into subcommittees. Not until the morning of 12 December was Roosevelt free to head for home and his study, with its constant fire and Frank Harper tapping away on the typewriter downstairs.
BY CHRISTMAS HE
had “History As Literature” finished, as well as several essays, the first few of his African game mammal studies, and another chapter of his autobiography. He decided to discontinue interview sessions with Lawrence Abbott and write or dictate the rest of that book. To Abbott and other editors at
The Outlook
, this was a fatal decision. The Colonel could not be expected to draw himself out, lacking the stimulus of a curious—and commercially-minded—interlocutor. He was aware of their distress, but relieved to be in control of his own story. “
I have had to refuse to write a whole raft of interesting and sensational things that they would have liked me to put in,” he told Kermit. The result was that he became self-conscious about any revelations at all, and admitted that it gave him “a great deal of worry.”
Much of his inhibition derived from that traditional mute on the autobiographical trumpet, the over-protective wife. Still headachy and frail after her near-fatal riding accident of fourteen months before, Edith did not see why hundreds of thousands of readers should be privy to the sort of personal things kept for family letters, or better still, not put on paper at all: matters of health and bereavement and money and sex. It was out of the question that he should write about
her
, let alone the dead young woman whose face and name she had so assiduously erased from his Harvard photograph album. (But
a lock of honey-colored hair survived, in a secret envelope inscribed in his own hand.)
The company of Archie and Quentin over the Christmas holidays, along with Ethel, Ted, Eleanor, and little Gracie, cheered both parents up. Stuffed stockings and dense snow insulating the house added the right Dickensian touches. Edith began to look “distinctly better,” Roosevelt wrote her sister. He thanked Emily for sending him two volumes of Italian short stories. “I shall read them both of course; probably the Fogazzaro first.”
He was intrigued to see how fast Quentin was developing in body and mind, and described him to Kermit as a “huge, wise philosopher.” Actually the boy was intelligent rather than intellectual. His instincts were tactile. Roosevelt, dictating, talked about the machinery of government; Quentin talked simply of machinery. He played the piano with ease, understanding it to be an intricate system of levers. He wrote well too, although flights of imagination seemed to engage him less than the delightful task of setting them as slugs of type, slathering them with greasy ink, and hearing them crank out during all-night sessions in the school print shop.
Ted, settled now in a Manhattan town house, with his pipe, his books, his wife and daughter, and a well-paying job, was bourgeois enough to bore a bank president—which he in fact repeatedly did, in his capacity as a bond salesman on Wall Street. Archie was what Archie would always be: faithful, dogged, inflexible.
Kermit claimed to be content in his subequatorial solitude. He was overworked and underpaid, but too proud to ask for help. Single or spliced, Edith’s beloved “one with the white head and the black heart” had the mark of a loner. “I’m afraid Mother thinks I’m hopeless,” he wrote Ethel, “what they call down here a
vagabondo
, which means a peculiarly useless sort of tramp.” His father tried to make him feel he was still an integral member of the family. “
As president of the American Historical Association, I am to deliver an address which I hope you will like.… I shall send it to you when it is delivered.”
