Colonel Roosevelt (124 page)

THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S DEATH CERTIFICATE
, signed by Dr. Faller, declared that he had succumbed at 4:15
A.M
. on Monday, 6 January 1919, to an embolism of the lung, with multiple arthritis as a contributory factor. In a simultaneous press statement, Faller and
two consulting physicians hedged slightly, saying that the blood clot might have gone to the brain.
They revealed for the first time that their patient had been struck by a near-fatal pulmonary embolism some three weeks earlier. Neither of these detachments, they felt, necessarily related to the inflammatory rheumatism that had troubled him for some twenty years. They did not seem to know that in early childhood Roosevelt had shown many symptoms of rheumatic heart disease—an affliction notoriously capable of recurring in later life, often in winter weather. It was left to
other observers to note that he had never entirely recovered from his prostration in the Brazilian jungle, or from the bullet John Schrank had fired into his chest. Not to be discounted, either, was the fact that he had recently suffered a devastating bereavement. In a more sophisticated era of professional diagnosis, a review of his medical history would indicate that “
the cause of death was myocardial infarction, secondary to chronic atherosclerosis with possible acute coronary occlusion.”

If so, he could be said in more ways than one to have died of
a broken heart.

THE NEWS OF THE COLONEL’S
death came too late for the morning papers that Monday, but
it spread around the world with extraordinary swiftness by telephone, telegraph, and cable.

A common reaction among the millions of Americans who had imagined him to be indestructible, and
headed again for the presidency, was a sense of shock so violent they
took refuge in metaphor. For Henry A. Beers, “a wind had fallen, a light had gone out, a military band had stopped playing.” For John Burroughs, a pall seemed to cover the sky. For William Dudley Foulke, as well as the editors of the
New York Evening Post
, there had been an eclipse of
the sun. For General Fred C. Ainsworth, a storm center was swept away. For Hamlin Garland, a mountain had slid from the horizon. For Kermit Roosevelt, who heard the news with Ted at the U.S. Army headquarters in Coblenz, the earth had lost one of its dimensions.

“You will know how the bottom has dropped out for me,” he wrote his mother.

Archibald Roosevelt announced that a funeral of stark simplicity would take place in two days’ time at Christ Episcopal Church in Oyster Bay. The burial would follow in Youngs Memorial Cemetery, nearby on a hillside overlooking the cove. President Wilson issued a proclamation from Paris, appointing Vice President Thomas R. Marshall to represent him at both ceremonies, and directing government offices to fly their flags at half-mast for a month. Both houses of Congress adjourned, as did the Supreme Court, closing without any proceedings for the first time in its history. Secretaries Newton D. Baker and Josephus Daniels ordered army, marine, and naval posts around the world to fire salutes to the former commander in chief at sunrise on the day of his obsequies, Wednesday, 8 January, and to continue firing at half-hourly intervals until sunset.

Baker offered to send a full guard of honor to Oyster Bay. Archie politely declined to be obligated to the bureaucrat who had prevented Roosevelt from serving his country. “
It was my father’s wish that he would be buried among the people of Oyster Bay, and that the funeral service would be conducted entirely by those friends among whom he had lived so long and happily.”

In a further effort to keep the exercises private, Archie let it be known that there were only 350 pew seats available, with standing room for perhaps 150 extra invited guests. He agreed to accommodate forty-five members of Congress, as representatives of the people, but said he could not invite any members of the Wilson administration other than Marshall, two naval aides, and Assistant Secretary of State William Phillips, deputizing for the absent Robert Lansing.

The discipline Archie had acquired as a soldier enabled him to handle the anguished telegrams that inundated Sagamore Hill, as bales of afternoon newspapers blackened with the headline
ROOSEVELT DEAD
thumped onto sidewalks across the country.
Even so, he had difficulty controlling himself when some children from the Cove School delivered an arrangement of pink and white carnations that they had personally chosen and bought.

Alice Longworth and Ethel Derby called from Washington and South Carolina to say they were hurrying north to help Edith—although “
Mother, the adamantine,” as Roosevelt used to call her, was more likely to comfort them in their mutual desolation. She also had to handle the anguish of her husband’s humbler mourners, from James Amos (inconsolable in the library, sobbing
“
Gone … gone” into cupped brown hands) to Charlie Lee the coachman and thrifty pilgrims walking from the railroad depot. “
You did not expect to visit us for this reason,” she said to George Syran, a New York porter who had sent coffee every morning to the Colonel’s hospital room. “He’s gone now, so you must take good care of me.”

In a letter recounting his visit, the porter wrote: “
She had a crying smile on her, I’m sorry I haven’t the power to describe that devine face.… Her heart was torn out of her roots.”

A perpetual drone in the sky over Cove Neck puzzled residents on neighboring parts of the North Shore. It came from military airplanes, ordered by the army aviation directorate to patrol the house where Quentin Roosevelt’s father lay dead. Pilots dropped wreaths of laurel on the lawn, buzzing so low that the wind from their propellers shook the bare trees around.
The aerial watch continued through Monday night and all the next day, with alternate flights of five planes operating out of Mineola. For most of the time they kept high and circled far, but their noise became steadily more oppressive, like the throb of an organ pedal beneath a fugue that needed to resolve. Only in the predawn hours of Wednesday, as snow began to fall, did silence return to Sagamore Hill.

“T
HE WIND FROM THEIR PROPELLERS SHOOK THE BARE TREES
.”
The Air Corps maintains a vigil over Sagamore Hill after TR’s death
.
(photo credit e.1)

THE SNOW TAPERED OFF
around noon, when Edith and Archie, wearing his captain’s dress uniform and French war medal, received relatives and close friends at home for a valedictory service in the North Room. The Colonel’s silver-handled oak coffin was set up in front of the fireplace. Before its lid was screwed down, Ethel went through for a last glimpse of her father. “
He looked as if he were asleep—and weary,” she recorded. “But not stern.”

She had become used to the grimness that had settled increasingly upon him during the last ten months. The coffin rested on one of his lion skins, and was covered with the Stars and Stripes, with a pair of Rough Rider flags crossed at the foot. Edith had requested no floral decorations, but raised no objection to a wreath of soft yellow mimosa blossoms, contributed at great expense by some veterans of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. Yellow was the regimental color, and Roosevelt had grown to love the scent of mimosa in Brazil.

At 12:30, six undertakers wearing black skullcaps transferred the coffin to a motor hearse waiting under the
porte cochère
. Edith did not venture outside. In the austere tradition of Puritan widows, she retired to her bedroom alone while the rest of the house party climbed into automobiles and followed the hearse down the hill. There was no military escort. A squad of mounted policemen had ridden all the way from New York to march ahead of their former commissioner. But Archie, citing
Roosevelt’s disdain for
pompe funèbre
, had asked them to wait at the church.

The cortege made slow going, carving tracks in the snowy shore road. As it approached Oyster Bay village, the cloud cover broke. A shaft of sunshine irradiated Christ Church and several thousand bystanders cordoned off by the police. Shortly before one o’clock, the hearse reached the church door.

Already a silence unrelated to the weather prevailed in most cities and large towns in the northeastern, central, and western states. Not just New York’s federal buildings, but schools, courts, firehouses, exchanges, and movie palaces closed in a show of reverence for the dead Colonel. Streetcars and subway trains ground to a halt. Factory wheels stopped spinning. The downtown financial district, so long a target of his righteous wrath, was deserted. Bell ringers in Trinity Church, St. Paul’s, and City Hall waited for 2
P.M.
, the presumed hour of internment of the only president born in Manhattan.

The hush was even more profound inside his parish church. Melted snow could be heard dripping from the roof. Roosevelt had requested no music of any kind. Five hundred congregants watched the coffin come down the nave, through lozenges of stained-glass light. It was still carried by the six men in skullcaps. There were no official pallbearers. Archie followed with the family party, prominently including Flora Whitney.
He noticed a distraught William
Howard Taft sitting in a rear pew, settled his companions up front, then made Taft come and join them.

Thomas Marshall sat in aloof eminence, the official bearer of a floral arrangement from the President of the United States. (It consisted of the same economical carnations that had appealed to the students of Cove School.) Charles Evans Hughes showed up, impassive behind his whiskers. Warren Harding and General Wood looked prepresidential, now that they no longer had to worry about a front-runner for next year’s Republican nomination. Henry Cabot Lodge, the senior senator present, was flanked by Hiram Johnson and Philander Chase Knox. The House was represented by the outgoing Speaker, Champ Clark, and his aged predecessor, “Uncle Joe” Cannon. Governor Al Smith of New York attended as an unwelcome envoy from Tammany Hall, and Elihu Root and Joe Murray as Roosevelt’s oldest political patrons. A democratic variety of attendees crowded the other rows, most so strange to one another that only the Colonel could have embraced them all in his vast bear hug of acquaintance.

The service was almost cruelly short and spartan. Roosevelt’s favorite hymn, “How Firm a Foundation, Ye Saints of the Lord,” was recited, rather than sung, by the Reverend George F. Talmage:

At no time until the benediction did Father Talmage mention the name of the deceased. When he did, it evoked tears. “
Theodore,” he said, “the Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious to thee.”

A single pull of the church’s bell alerted Edith, across the bay, that her husband was beginning his final journey. Outside, the mounted police waited in formation. They were no longer to be dissuaded from forming an honor guard. Spectators sobbed as the cortege, now lengthened enormously with other automobiles, wound back toward the bend of Cove Neck.

There was no room in the tiny parking lot of Youngs Cemetery for any vehicle except the hearse. Roosevelt’s grave awaited him at the top of a steep knoll. He had always enjoyed the birdsong in that fir-forested corner, and had long ago decided he wanted to be buried there. Typically, his chosen site involved a long hard climb. Slippery snow made it even harder for the six undertakers. They bent forward at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees as they labored under their burden. Father Talmage led the way in his surplice. He had as much difficulty in avoiding a soaked front hemline as Alice, Ethel, and Flora. Big men like Taft and Wood puffed in the rear. Only a party of fifty children from Cove School trotted up the path with ease.