The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (4 page)

With his clicking efficiency and inhuman energy, the President seems not unlike a piece of engineering himself. Many observers are reminded of a high-speed locomotive. “I never knew a man with such a head of steam on,” says William Sturgis Bigelow. “He never stops running, even while he stokes and fires,” another acquaintance marvels, adding that Roosevelt presents “a dazzling, even appalling, spectacle of a human engine driven at full speed—the signals all properly set beforehand (and if they aren’t, never mind!).” Henry James describes the engine as “destined to be overstrained perhaps, but not as yet, truly, betraying the least creak … it functions astonishingly, and is quite exciting to see.”
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At the moment, Roosevelt can only be heard, since the first wave of handshakers, filing through the Red Room into the Blue, obscures him from view. He is in particularly good humor today, laughing heartily and often, in a high, hoarse voice that floats over the sound of the band.
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It is an irresistible laugh: an eruption of mirth, rising gradually to falsetto chuckles, that convulses everybody around him. “You don’t smile with Mr. Roosevelt,” writes one reporter, “you shout with laughter with him, and then you shout again while he tries to cork up more laugh, and sputters, ‘Come, gentlemen, let us be serious. This is most unbecoming.’ ”
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Besides being receptive to humor, the President produces plenty of it himself. As a raconteur, especially when telling stories of his days among the cowboys, he is inimitable, making his audiences laugh until they cry and ache. “You couldn’t pick a hallful,” declares the cartoonist Homer Davenport, “that could sit with faces straight through his story of the blue roan cow.”
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Physically, too, he is funny—never more so than when indulging his passion for eccentric exercise. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge has been heard yelling irritably at a portly object swaying in the sky, “Theodore! if you knew how ridiculous you look on top of that tree, you would come down at once.”
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On winter evenings in Rock Creek Park, strollers may observe the President of the United States wading pale and naked into the ice-clogged stream, followed by shivering members of his Cabinet.
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Thumping noises in the White House library indicate that Roosevelt is being thrown around the room by a Japanese wrestler; a particularly seismic crash, which makes the entire mansion tremble, signifies that Secretary Taft has been forced to join in the fun.
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Mark Twain is not alone in thinking the President insane. Tales of Roosevelt’s unpredictable behavior are legion, although there is usually an explanation. Once, for instance, he hailed a hansom cab on Pennsylvania Avenue, seized the horse, and mimed a knife attack upon it. On another occasion he startled the occupants of a trolley-car by making hideous faces at them from the Presidential carriage. It transpires that in the former case he was demonstrating to a companion the correct way to stab a wolf; in the latter he was merely returning the grimaces of some small boys, one of whom was the ubiquitous Quentin.
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Roosevelt can never resist children. Even now, he is holding up the line as he rumples the hair of a small boy with skates and a red sweater. “You must always remember,” says his English friend Cecil Spring Rice, “that the President is about six.”
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Mrs. Roosevelt has let it be known that she considers him one of her own brood, to be disciplined accordingly. Between meetings he loves to sneak upstairs to the attic, headquarters of Quentin’s “White House Gang,” and thunder up and down in pursuit of squealing boys. These romps leave him so disheveled he has to change his shirt before returning to his duties.
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A very elegant old lady moves through the door of the Blue Room and curtsies before the President. He responds with a deep bow whose grace impresses observers.
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Americans tend to forget that Roosevelt comes from the first circle of the New York aristocracy; the manners of Gramercy Park, Harvard, and the great houses of Europe flow naturally out of him. During the Portsmouth Peace Conference in 1905, he handled Russian counts and Japanese barons with such delicacy that neither side was able to claim preference. “The man who had been represented to us as impetuous to the point of rudeness,” wrote one participant, “displayed a gentleness, a kindness, and a tactfulness that only a truly great man can command.”
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Roosevelt’s courtesy is not extended only to the well-born. The President of the United States leaps automatically from his chair when any woman enters the room, even if she is the governess of his children. Introduced to a party of people who ignore their own chauffeur, he protests: “I have not met this gentleman.” He has never been able to get used to the fact that White House stewards serve him ahead of the ladies at his table, but accepts it as necessary protocol.
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For all his off-duty clowning, Roosevelt believes in the dignity of the Presidency. As head of state, he considers himself the equal, and on occasion the superior, of the scepter-bearers of Europe. “No person living,” he curtly informed the German Ambassador, “precedes the President of the United States in the White House.” He is quick to freeze anybody who presumes to be too familiar. Although he is resigned to being popularly known as “Teddy,” it is a mistake to call him that to his face. He regards it as an “outrageous impertinence.”
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C
ORDS OF OLD GOLD
velvet channel the crowd into single file at the entrance to the Blue Room. Since the President stands just inside the door, on the right, there is little time to admire the oval chamber, with its silk-hung walls and banks of white roses; nor the beauty of the women invited “behind the line”—a signal mark of Presidential favor—and who now form a rustling backdrop of chiffon and lace and satin, their pearls aglow in the light of three sunny windows.
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Roosevelt is shaking hands at top speed, so the observer has only two or three seconds to size him up.

A
FEW SECONDS
, surprisingly, are enough. Theodore Roosevelt is a man of such overwhelming physical impact that he stamps himself immediately on the consciousness. “Do you know the two most wonderful things I have seen in your country?” says the English statesman John Morley. “Niagara Falls and the President of the United States, both great wonders of nature!”
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Their common quality, which photographs and paintings fail to capture, is a perpetual flow of torrential energy, a sense of motion even in stillness.
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Both are physically thrilling to be near.

Although Theodore Roosevelt stands three inches short of six feet, he seems palpably massive.
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Two hundred pounds of muscle—those who think it fat have not yet been bruised by contact with it—thicken his small-boned frame. (The only indications of the latter are tapered hands and absurdly small shoes.) A walrus-like belt of muscle strains against his stiff collar. Muscles push through the sleeves of his gray frock coat and the thighs of his striped trousers. Most muscular of all, however, is the famous chest, which small boys, on less formal occasions, are invited to pummel. Members of the White House Gang admit to “queer sensations” at the sight of this great barrel bearing down upon them, and half expect it to burst out of the Presidential shirt. Roosevelt has spent many thousands of hours punishing a variety of steel springs and gymnastic equipment, yet his is not the decorative brawn of a mere bodybuilder. Professional boxers testify that the President is a born fighter who repays their more ferocious blows with interest. “Theodore Roosevelt,” says his heavyweight sparring partner, “is a strong, tough man; hard to hurt and harder to stop.”
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The nerves that link all this mass of muscle are abnormally active. Roosevelt is not a twitcher—in moments of repose he is almost cataleptically still—but when talking his entire body mimes the rapidity of his thoughts. The right hand shoots out, bunches into a fist, and smacks into the left palm; the heels click together, the neck bulls forward, then, in a spasm of amusement, his face contorts, his head tosses back, spectacle-ribbons flying, and he shakes from head to foot with laughter. A moment later, he is listening with passionate concentration, crouching forward and massaging the speaker’s shoulder as if to wring more information out of him. Should he hear something not to his liking, he recoils as if stung, and the blood rushes to his face.
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Were it not for his high brow, and the distracting brilliance of his smile, Roosevelt would unquestionably be an ugly man. His head is too big and square (one learned commentator calls it brachycephalous),
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his ears too small, his jowls too heavy. The stiff brown hair is parted high and clipped unflatteringly short. Rimless pince-nez squeeze the thick nose, etching a tiny, perpetual frown between his eyebrows. The eyes themselves are large, wide-spaced, and very pale blue. Although Roosevelt’s gaze is steady, the constant movement of his head keeps slicing the pince-nez across it, in a series of twinkling eclipses that make his true expression very hard to gauge. Only those who know him well are quick enough to catch the subtler messages Roosevelt sends forth. William Allen White occasionally sees “the shadow of some inner femininity deeply suppressed.”
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Owen Wister has detected (and Adolfo Muller-Ury painted) a sort of blurry wistfulness, a mixture of “perplexity and pain … the sign of frequent conflict between what he knew, and his wish not to know it, his determination to grasp his optimism tight, lest it escape him.”
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His ample mustache does not entirely conceal a large, pouting underlip, on the rare occasions when that lip is still. Mostly, however, the mustache gyrates about Roosevelt’s most celebrated feature—his dazzling teeth. Virtually every published description of the President, including those of provincial reporters who can catch only a quick glimpse of him through the window of a campaign train, celebrates his dental display. Cartoonists across the land have sketched them into American folk-consciousness, so much so that envelopes ornamented only with teeth and spectacles are routinely delivered to the White House.
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At first sight the famous incisors are, perhaps, disappointing, being neither so big nor so prominent as the cartoonists would make out. But to watch Roosevelt talking is to be hypnotized by them. White and even, they chop every word into neat syllables, sending them forth perfectly formed but separate, in a jerky
staccatissimo
that has no relation to the normal rhythms of speech. The President’s diction is indeed so syncopated, and accompanied by such surprise thrusts of the head, that there are rumors of a youthful impediment, successfully conquered.
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His very voice seems to rasp out of the tips of his teeth. “I always think of a man biting tenpenny nails when I think of Roosevelt making a speech,” says an old colleague.
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Others are reminded of engines and light artillery. Sibilants hiss out like escaping steam; plosives drive the lips apart with an audible
pfft.
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Hearing him close up, one can understand his constant use of
“dee-lighted.”
Phonetically, the word is made for him, with its grinning vowels and snapped-off consonants. So, too, is that other staple of the Rooseveltian vocabulary, “I.” He pronounces it
“Aieeeee,”
allowing the final e’s to rise to a self-satisfied pitch which never fails to irritate Henry Adams.
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The force of Roosevelt’s utterance has the effect of burying his remarks, like shrapnel, in the memory of the listener. Years after meeting him, an Ohio farmer will lovingly recall every inflection of some such banality as “Are you German? Congratulations—I’m German too!” (His ability to find common strains of ancestry with voters has earned him the nickname of “Old Fifty-seven Varieties.”)
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Children are struck by the tenderness with which he enunciates his wife’s name—“Edith.”
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H. G. Wells preserves, as if filmed and recorded, an interview with the President in the White House garden last summer. “I can see him now, and hear his unmusical voice saying, ‘the effort’s worth it, the effort’s worth it,’ and see the … how can I describe it? The friendly peering snarl of his face, like a man with sun in his eyes.”
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