Colonel Roosevelt (125 page)

The graveside view made the ascent worthwhile. There was a cutting breeze, bringing with it stray whiffs of wood smoke, but the sun was now fully out, and the bay glistened half white and half bright blue. Small spirals of mist rose from the frozen reeds. Already the snow between the surrounding trees was dotted with the spoor of rabbits and squirrels.

“T
HEY BENT FORWARD … AS THEY LABORED UNDER THEIR BURDEN
.”
TR’s coffin is carried to his grave overlooking Oyster Bay, 8 January 1919
.
(photo credit e.2)

A laurel lining and berm of flowers camouflaged the fresh hole in the ground. Standing over it, a police bugler blew taps. Then the flag was unfolded from the coffin, revealing a rectangle of silver that read:

THEODORE ROOSEVELT
OCTOBER 27, 1858–JANUARY 6, 1919

As the engraved words sank out of sight, Father Talmage read the litany of committal.
Lieutenant Otto Raphael, Roosevelt’s favorite Jewish policeman, muttered his own burial prayer in Hebrew. A flight of white geese wheeled and settled in the cove.

One of the last mourners to remain behind, while the rest of the company straggled downhill, was Taft. He stood by the grave for a long time, crying.

IN SUBSEQUENT DAYS
and weeks, commentators and orators made up for the lack of a eulogy at the Colonel’s funeral. He had died so suddenly, and the glory of America’s late but decisive role in ending the world war had so plainly been earned at his urging, that he was at once invested with a godlike glow. The acolytes who had venerated him for so long—the Lawrence Abbotts, the Gifford Pinchots, the Julian Streets—resorted to levels of hyperbole not heard since the assassination of Lincoln. Given the poignancy of his sufferings over the last year, a considerable minority of Roosevelt-haters elected to keep their opinions private for the time being. Even H. L. Mencken reserved fire. “
The man was a liar, a braggart, a bully, and a fraud,” he wrote a friend. “But let us not speak evil of the dead.”

Among the superlatives granted Roosevelt by those who belonged to neither extreme camp, simple words came nearest to sincerity. “He was the most encouraging person that ever breathed,” Edna Ferber declared, on behalf of all the writers and artists he had befriended. “The strongest character in the world has died,” Will H. Hays said to a reporter. “I have never known another person so vital,” wrote William Allen White, “nor another man so dear.”

Woodrow Wilson’s sentiments, conveyed in his proclamation of national mourning and a cable to Edith Roosevelt, were
pro forma
. This was to be expected from a head of state engaged in complex negotiations abroad. But two of his closest aides, Edward M. House and William G. McAdoo, verged on indiscretion in proclaiming Theodore Roosevelt one of the greatest of presidents. Newspapers that had savaged Roosevelt consistently throughout his career ran eloquent editorials. The New York
Sun
predicted that he would endure as a colossus in American history. “There are personalities so vivid, there is vitality so intense, so magnetically alert, as Motley said of Henry of Navarre, that ‘at the very mention of the name, the figure seems to leap from the mists of the past, instinct with ruddy, vigorous life.’ ” The
New York Evening Post
agreed:

From flag-bedecked platforms and pulpits in London (where for the first time in history a memorial service displaced evensong at Westminster Abbey),
Paris, Rome, and throughout the Allied zone of occupancy in Germany, foreign speakers vied with American ones in celebrating the man who was commonly seen as instrumental in awakening his country to its social and strategic responsibilities.
He was hailed as a liberator by Cubans and Serbs. Representatives of a nation only three months old announced that “Theodore Roosevelt was always a great friend of the Czechoslovaks.” In Tokyo, he was remembered as the peacemaker of the Russo-Japanese War and “perhaps the only great American who understood us.” Long biographies and appreciations were published in the major European newspapers. Jules Jusserand, who of all diplomats knew the Colonel best, had to be discreet in praising him at President Wilson’s elbow in Paris, but in private he was panegyrical. “I met in him a man of such extraordinary power that to find a second at the same time on this globe would have been an impossibility; a man whom to associate with was a liberal education, and who could be in every way likened to radium, for warmth, force and light emanated from him and no spending of it could ever diminish his store.”

The tribute most awaited in Washington was that of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. He addressed a joint memorial session of Congress on 9 February in the presence of two thousand rapt listeners, including Taft, members of the Supreme Court, and officers of the cabinet, armed services, and diplomatic corps.
His survey of the life and accomplishments of his oldest friend lasted almost two hours. With characteristic erudition, he began with an Arab lament,
A tower is fallen, a star is set! Alas! Alas!
, and ended with a quotation from John Bunyan, describing the passage of Mr. Valiant-for-Truth across the river of death: “So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.” By then Lodge was so overcome he half-fell back into his seat, and silence filled the House chamber.

THE EULOGIES AND POEMS
and memorial proceedings had hardly been printed and bound before the worshipful biographies began to appear. William Draper Lewis’s
The Life of Theodore Roosevelt
and William Roscoe Thayer’s
Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography
were substantial studies, reflecting some personal acquaintance with the great man, but their incense content was only a few degrees less fragrant than that of Lawrence Abbott’s
Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt
, Niel MacIntyre’s
Great-heart
, and William Hard’s
Theodore Roosevelt: A Tribute
.

Expectations were high that the authorized biography by Joseph Bucklin Bishop would be a scholarly and unbiased corrective. But Bishop was not yet ready to publish. Then in November 1919 Stuart Sherman, who had savaged Roosevelt in
The Nation
two years before, published a review of the hagiographies. Entitled “Roosevelt and the National Psychology,” it
amounted to the first effective attack on the Colonel’s posthumous reputation.

“
Mr. Roosevelt’s great and fascinating personality,” he began, “is part of the national wealth, and should, so far as possible, be preserved undiminished.” But those who insisted in canonizing a man so lustily, imperfectly, and on occasion tragically human offered posterity nothing more than “a whitewashed plaster bust.” Noting that the Colonel was always clear-eyed about himself, Sherman quoted his negative response in 1918 to a friend who told him he would be President again: “No, not I.… I made too many enemies, and the people are tired of my candidacy.” Roosevelt had understood then what his worshippers refused to allow—that both he and the American people had changed since his glory days at the turn of the century. And in changing, it was the people, not he, who had moved ahead.

Sherman looked back at the life of Theodore Roosevelt and found it to be a three-act drama, ultimately tragic because the protagonist had been brought down by his own gifts. First there was the young reformer, alone among the money-grubbing or inheritance-squandering materialists who dominated American society in the eighties and nineties, preaching and personifying his famous gospel of the Strenuous Life. “Under the influence of this masterful force, the unimaginative plutocratic psychology was steadily metamorphosed into the psychology of efficient, militant, imperialistic nationalism.” So long as the United States had no army to speak of, and no empire to fatten on, the energies Roosevelt had inspired had pushed toward a more perfect Union. But then, with amazing swiftness, both he and the nation had been elevated to supreme power.

As president, Roosevelt had been even more strenuous, establishing an ideal in the popular mind of a federal government as virile, incorruptible, and morally driven as himself. Panama should have been a warning to his supporters that the reformer at home was an imperialist abroad, but then and now, the American people had little understanding of foreign affairs.

It was not until Roosevelt visited Germany in 1910 that the imperial strain had begun to overmaster him. His address to the University of Berlin had shown the degenerative process at work, even as he spoke. Sherman quoted a “beautiful” passage from that speech,
It is only by working along the lines laid down by philanthropists, by lovers of mankind, that we can be more sure of lifting our civilization to a higher and more permanent plane of well-being
, and asked if any reader, nine years later, heard in them the authentic note of the Colonel’s voice. He then quoted the sentences immediately following:
But woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it. And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses his fighting edge
. Time and again thereafter, and compulsively during the war years, Roosevelt had indulged this rhetorical tic: always,
first, the salute to men of benign instinct, then the harsh warning that if they did not fight and breed, they were doomed. In doing so, the former straight talker had become “the greatest concocter of ‘weasel’ paragraphs on record.” His misfortune was that when Americans found out that he was less interested in fighting for social justice than fighting for fighting’s sake, they had shown themselves unwilling to be either patronized or cajoled.

Summarizing, Sherman felt that Roosevelt had been more of an autocrat than a democrat, a warrior, not a peacemaker, a man of action who scoffed at philosophical scruples. His end had been tragic, Yet there was something undeniably epic about him: