Empire (50 page)

“And saw?”

“And saw, for an instant, the gun.”

“How grisly!” Roosevelt was plainly delighted by this macabre detail.

In front of the N Street house of Anna Roosevelt Cowles, two policemen stood guard. From a second-story window a huge American flag drooped at half-mast. “Why
don’t
they take down these flags?” Roosevelt was querulous; and, Hay suspected, somehow discomfited by the tribute to his predecessor.

In the downstairs parlor, Roosevelt greeted his wife, Edith; sister, Anna, whom he called Bamie; and son, Ted. The ladies wore mourning; they were in excellent spirits. The ladies made much of Hay, who was pleased to be treated like a piece of rare porcelain from an earlier time. He was helped into an armchair, and encouraged to smoke a cigar, which he refused. Meanwhile, the new president was prancing about the room, asking everyone questions to which he alone had the answers. During this display, the admirable Edith maintained her stately calm. Hay had always preferred her to the noisy—no other word—Theodore.

Edith Kermit Carow was descended from Huguenots who had intermarried
with the family of Jonathan Edwards. She had known Theodore all her life. The Carow family had lived in New York’s Union Square next door to the house of Theodore’s grandfather. Edith had been a bookish girl, no great recommendation in their world, but a link to the high-strung asthmatic Theodore, who was not only bookish but, to compensate for physical weakness, doggedly athletic as well.

Hay had always thought that Theodore took too much for granted his perfect wife. Certainly, he had taken her so much for granted that, perhaps to her surprise—who would ever know, as she was all tact and reserve?—Theodore, on his twenty-second birthday, had married a beautiful girl named Alice Lee, and Edith Carow had, serenely it was reported, been a guest at the wedding. In due course, Alice Lee gave birth to a daughter, Alice; not long after, Alice Lee died within a day of Theodore’s mother. The two sudden deaths drove Theodore out of politics—he had been a member of New York’s State Assembly; out of New York City, too. He bought a ranch in the Badlands of the Dakotas; lost money on cattle; and wrote with marvellously contagious self-love of his own bravery. Four Eyes, as the bespectacled Theodore was known to the Western toughs, was very much a hero in his own eyes, while giving much pleasure to his friends the Hearts, if not in the way that he might have liked. After all, he was a mere dude compared to Clarence King.

As Hay listened to this most unlikely of American presidents, he was reminded of the chilling prescience of Henry Adams’s letter from Stockholm, which had arrived on the day that the President was shot. “Teddy’s luck” was the letter’s theme; fate’s too, as it proved. Theodore was, Adams had proclaimed, “pure act,” like God: endless energy without design.

Finally, Roosevelt had returned from the West, poorer than when he had left but better-known to magazine readers. After losing an election for mayor of New York in the autumn of 1886, he and Edith Kermit Carow were married, most fashionably, at St. George’s in Hanover Square, London; the groomsman was Cecil Spring-Rice, the Hearts’ favorite British diplomat. Then the Roosevelts returned to the ugly comfortable house that he had built on Sagamore Hill at Oyster Bay, Long Island. Here he wrote the six-volume history
Winning the West;
filled the house with children; and plotted, with Henry Cabot Lodge, a political career that had been interrupted not only by personal tragedies but by a mistrust of the Republican Party’s leader James G. Blaine; fortunately, this dislike had not led to apostasy of the sort that
had caused the truly virtuous to bolt the party and raise high the banner of Independence and Mugwumpery. Roosevelt and Lodge were too practical for this sort of idealistic gesture. They stayed with Blaine, who lost to Cleveland in 1884.

While Theodore was turning out biographies of Thomas Hart Benton and Gouverneur Morris and essays in celebration of Americanism of the sort that had given Henry James such exquisite pain, he was also busy president-making. One president thus made was Benjamin Harrison; and Theodore’s political carpentry was rewarded with a place on the Civil Service Commission.

Both President and Theodore had been eager for him to be undersecretary of state, but the secretary, James G. Blaine himself, had the usual politician’s long memory, and Theodore was forced to content himself with Civil Service reform, an Augean stable where not even Hercules would have dreamed of putting hand to shovel. Although Theodore was no Hercules, he was, by nature, busy. In 1889, at the age of thirty, he made himself the commission’s head. He railed against the spoils system, and the press enjoyed him. When Republican President Harrison was replaced by Democratic President Cleveland, Roosevelt was kept on. During the six years he served on the commission, he entered the lives of the Hearts. In 1895, a reform mayor of New York City appointed Roosevelt president of the board of police commissioners. Roosevelt proved to be a fierce unrelenting prosecutor of vice; and the press revelled in his escapades. Since the law that forbade saloons to dispense their poisons on the Sabbath was often flouted, Roosevelt closed down the saloons, which meant that the saloon-keepers need no longer pay protection to Mr. Croker of Tammany Hall. But Mr. Croker was more resourceful than Roosevelt; he got a judge to rule that as it was not against the law to serve alcohol with a meal, a single pretzel ingested while drinking a bottle of whiskey made lawful the unlawful.

Roosevelt was also introduced to a world from which he had always been sheltered, the poor. He took for his guide a Danish-born journalist named Jacob Riis, who had written a polemical book called
How the Other Half Lives
. Roosevelt was shown not only the extent of poverty in the great city but the complacence of the ruling class, which included his own family.

Hay had never been much impressed by Theodore’s occasional impassioned denunciations of the “malefactors of great wealth”; after all, as Henry Adams liked to say, they were all of them consenting parties to the status quo. Though the Police Commissioner got himself a
reputation for the disciplining of dishonest policemen, when the journalist Stephen Crane—previously admired by Roosevelt—testified in court against two policemen who had falsely arrested a woman for soliciting, Roosevelt had sprung to the defense of the policemen, and denounced Crane, an eye-witness to the arrest. Since Crane was much admired by the Hearts, Roosevelt had been taken to task. But he stood by his men, like a good commander in a war.

In March, 1897, the thirty-eight-year-old Roosevelt met, as it were, his luck. The new president, McKinley, appointed him assistant secretary of the Navy, ordinarily a humble post, but with a weak and amiable secretary, Roosevelt, in thrall to the imperial visions of Captain Mahan and Brooks Adams, was now in a position to build up the fleet without which there could be no future wars, no glory, no empire. The next four years were to wreathe with laurel the stout little man who now stood, if not like a colossus athwart the world, like some tightly wound-up child’s toy, dominating all the other toys in power’s playroom, shrill voice constantly raised. “Germany, John. There’s the coming problem. Coming? No, it’s here. The Kaiser’s on the move everywhere. He’s built a fleet to counter us—or the British, one or the other, but not—
not
both together—yet. Also, if he makes the bid, he will have to look to his rear, for there is savage Russia, huge and glacial, waiting for the world to fall like a ripe fruit into its paws.” Theodore smote together his own paws. Hay tried to imagine the world smashed in those pudgy hands. “Russia is the giant of the future,” Theodore proclaimed.

Hay felt obliged to intervene. “I don’t know about the future—but at the moment the only kind of giant that Russia is is a giant dwarf.”

Theodore laughed; and clicked his teeth. Bamie was now pouring coffee, with Edith’s assistance. Neither paid much attention to Theodore; but their absent-mindedness was benign. “I’ll use that, John, with your permission.”

“Don’t you dare.
I
can say such things in private. But you can’t, ever. We have enough trouble here with Cassini, with Russia. You may
think
such things,” Hay conceded, “but the president must always avoid wit …”

“And truth?”

“Truth above all, the statesman must avoid. Elevated sentiment and cloudy tautologies must now be your style …”

“Oh, you depress me! I had hoped to make a brilliant State of the Union address. Full of epigrams, and giant dwarfs. Well, all right. No dwarfs.”

“We must extend the hand of friendship,” Hay intoned, “through every open door that we can find.”

Roosevelt laughed; or, rather, barked; and started to march about the room. “The thing to remember about the Germans is this. They simply haven’t got the territory to support their population. They’ve got France and England to the west—and us back of them. They’ve got your giant dwarf to the east, and back of it China. There’s really no place, anywhere, for a German empire …”

“Africa,” Hay broke in.

“Africa, yes. But Africa
what
? A lot of territory, and no Germans willing to go there. In the last ten years, one million Germans—the best and the pluckiest of them all—moved out of Germany. And who got them? We did—or most of them. No wonder the Kaiser’s eager to set up his own empire in China. But he’ll have to deal with us if he moves into Asia …”

“Suppose he moves into Europe?” Hay’s back pains had returned; and Bamie Cowles’s coffee had created turbulence in a digestive system more than usually fragile.

“Spring-Rice thinks he might, one day. I like Germans. I like the Kaiser, in a way. I mean, if I were in his situation, I’d try for something, too.”

“Well, we did not like them in ’98, when they tried to get England to join them to help Spain against us.”

“No. No. No. But you can see how tempting it must have been for the Kaiser. He wanted the Philippines. Who didn’t? Anyway, the British were with us.” Roosevelt suddenly frowned.

“Canada claims,” Hay began.

“Not now! Not now, dear John. The subject bores me.”

“Bores you? Think of me, hour after hour, day after day, in close communion with Our Lady of the Snows …”

“Boring Lady, in my experience.”

“Now, Thee.” Edith’s warning voice was a bit lower than her normal voice; but no less effective.

“But, Edie. I was just commiserating with John …”

“I suppose,” said young Ted, “that I will be able to endure Groton another term.”

“Is this a cry for attention?” asked the father, balefully clicking his teeth.

“No, no. It was just an observation …”

“Where is Alice?” asked the President, turning to his wife.

“Farmington, isn’t she?” Edith turned to her sister-in-law.

“In my house, yes. Or she was. She’s very social, you know.”

“I don’t know where she gets that from.” Theodore appealed to Hay. “We are not—never have been—fashionable.”

“Perhaps this is an advance, a new hazard for an old fortune—”

“No fortune either!” sighed Edith. “I don’t know how we’ll live now. This black dress,” she slowly turned so that her husband could appreciate her sacrifice, “cost me one hundred and thirty-five dollars at Hollander’s this morning. That’s ready-made, of course, and then I had to buy a truly hideous hat with black crepe veil.”

“One can only hope that there will be numerous similar funerals for you to attend,” said Hay, “of elderly diplomats, of course, and senators of any age.”

Theodore was staring at himself in a round mirror; he seemed as fascinated by himself as others were. Then he confided, “I have to go to Canton after the services here.” Then he spun around, and sat in a chair, and was suddenly still. It was as if the toy had finally run down. He even sat like a doll, thought Hay; legs outstretched, arms loose at his side.

“Shall I go?” asked Hay.

“No. No. We can never travel together again, you and I. If something should happen to me, you’re the only president we’ve got.”

“Poor country,” said Hay, getting to his feet. “Poor me.”

“Stop sounding old.” The doll, rewound, was on its feet. “I’ll meet with the Cabinet Friday, after Canton; the usual time.”

“We shall be ready for you. As for Alice, if she does decide to visit Washington, Helen says that she can stay with us.”

“Alice worships your girls,” said Edith, without noticeable pleasure. “They dress so beautifully, she keeps reminding me.”

“Alice doesn’t like having poor parents,” said the President, as he led Hay to the door.

“Give her to us. There’s plenty of room.”

“We might. Pray for me, John.”

“I have done that, Theodore. And will, again.”

B
LAISE
found the Chief in, of all places, his office at the
Journal
. As a rule, he preferred to work at home when he was in New York, which was seldom these days. In Hearst’s capacity
as presiding genius of the Democratic clubs, he travelled the nation, rallying the faithful, preparing for his own election four years hence. He had been in Chicago when McKinley was shot.

Brisbane was seated on a sofa while the Chief sat feet on his desk, and eyes on the window, through which nothing could be seen except falling, melting snow. Neither man greeted Blaise; he was a member of the family. But when Blaise asked, “How bad is it?” Hearst answered, “Bad and getting worse.” Hearst gave him a copy of the
World
. Ambrose Bierce’s quatrain was printed in bold type. Hearst’s deliberate incitement to murder was the theme of the accompanying story. As Blaise read, he could hear the steady drumming of Hearst’s fingers on his desk, always a sign of nervousness in that generally phlegmatic man. “They’re trying to make out that the murderer had a copy of the
Journal
in his pocket at Buffalo. He didn’t, of course.”

“They will invent anything,” said Brisbane sadly. The two founding fathers of invented news were not pleased to find themselves being reinvented by others no less scrupulous. The irony was not lost on Blaise.

“The
Chicago American
’s got close to three hundred thousand circulation.” Hearst’s mind worked rather like a newspaper’s front page, a number of disparate items crowded together, some in larger type than others. “I’m going to add the word ‘American’ to the
Journal
here. Particularly now. Croker’s leaving Tammany Hall. Murphy’s taking his place. The saloon-keeper, who was also dock commissioner. The one we caught owning stock in that ice company.”