Colonel Roosevelt (28 page)

ROOSEVELT’S MOOD WAS
not as melancholy as Sullivan imagined. For a few weeks, he alternated between bravado (“The fight for progressive government
has merely begun”) and relief that a repugnant campaign was over (“I have never had a more unpleasant summer”).

One piece of good news was that Simeon Baldwin might not, after all, sue him for libel.
The governor-elect felt there was little political capital to be gained by dragging a still beloved former president into court, and suggested arbitrating their differences. Roosevelt declined to arbitrate and insisted, once again, on the primacy of national law over states’ rights. Baldwin replied that in view of the Colonel’s obvious sincerity, he would not proceed against him.

Gradually Roosevelt began to feel more cheerful about his disastrous decision to reenter politics. He gave thanks that there would be no more talk of him challenging the President for renomination. “It looks to me as if, ultimately, the best thing that could happen to us now would be to do what we can with Taft, face probable defeat in 1912, and then endeavor to reorganize under really capable and sanely progressive leadership.”

He thought that he had behaved responsibly at Saratoga, fighting against machine politics with the approval of the administration.
And he was pleased that, although his too-big personality seemed to have hurt some progressive candidates, his promulgation of the New Nationalism had helped others to win big in the West and Midwest. The swing vote that Republican insurgents now wielded in the Senate was encouraging. If Democrats had been shameless in cottoning on to the progressive cause, at least their imitation was a sincere form of flattery. One of them, Woodrow Wilson, the former president of Princeton University, had been elected governor of New Jersey on a campaign platform of corporate control, railroad taxation, humane labor policies, and primary reform that the Colonel himself could have written.

AS THE END
of the year approached, Roosevelt and Taft began—half-shyly, half-warily—to reconcile. They had mutual bruises to nurse, as well as memories of an era when they had been on happier terms, forever roaring with laughter.

On 19 November, the Colonel put in a surprise appearance at the White House. He pretended not to know that Taft was away on a Caribbean cruise, and said only that he had time to kill before engagements at the Smithsonian and National Geographic Society. Munching corn bread from the kitchen and trailed by an excited group of former servants and clerks, he marched over to the West Wing to look at the new Oval Office that Taft had built over his former tennis court.

Without a trace of self-consciousness, he sat behind the President’s desk and said how “natural” it felt to be there. He praised everything he saw, and remembered the names of all around him, including scullery maids. Then he was off, leaving behind a calling card for Mrs. Taft. Ike Hoover, the White
House usher, wept when describing the event to Archie Butt. “It is the only happy day we have had in two years, and not one of us would exchange it for a hundred-dollar bill.”

When Taft returned to reclaim his chair, he wrote Roosevelt to say he was sorry to have missed him, and insisted that he stay at the White House next time he came to the capital. “
I think you are a trump to ask me,” Roosevelt replied, but was vague about future visits. A political instinct sharper than the President’s warned him to keep his distance.
That did not stop him lobbying Taft to appoint Edward Douglass White, a Southern Democrat and a Catholic, as Chief Justice of the United States, instead of Charles Evans Hughes, who had shown no gratitude for services rendered earlier in the year.
Taft was happy to oblige, and in return asked the Colonel to review a draft of his annual message to Congress. “There is nothing for me to say,” Roosevelt replied, “save in the way of agreement and commendation.”

Notwithstanding their politesse on paper, a residue of personal disapproval remained. Taft used the phrase
deeply wounded
so often, in complaining about Roosevelt’s post-Africa attitude, as to sound almost masochistic. It was clear to aides that the President was mentally and physically ailing. Over the summer his weight had ballooned to 330 pounds, and he kept falling asleep during the day. A doctor advised that his heart was under serious strain. He lived for play rather than duty, procrastinating endlessly—“I would give anything in the world if I had the ability to clear away work as Roosevelt did.” Tabulatory games obsessed him: when his golf score was low, or his bridge and poker winnings high, he was unconscious of time passing, and the resentment of companions wanting to go home.

Roosevelt was more healthy in mind and body, although he had trouble shaking his travel fatigue. He claimed to be reconciled to life on the sidelines, and wrote Eleanor, now settled with Ted in San Francisco:

SAGAMORE HILL WAS A BLEAK PLACE
in January 1911, with no windbreak except leafless, lower woods to cut gusts sweeping up from the ice sheet of Oyster Bay. On still afternoons, Roosevelt could hear the
ha’-ha’-wee, ha’-ha’-wee
of long-tailed ducks lying under the lee of the shore. It was a harsh, not unmusical clangor that had enchanted him as a boy, and prompted
his first attempt at autobiographical writing.
But to older ears, the calls spoke of
temps perdu
. Here was yesterday’s “Teedie” in his fifty-third year, trying to adjust to the fact that the American people had gotten tired of him.

So it seemed, judging from the quietness of his driveway. Cabs from the station no longer disgorged groups of politicians. The few who came offered little in the way of cheer. Lloyd Griscom visited once.
Henry Stimson, a close neighbor, stopped by occasionally, but could not help bringing with him, like wisps of fog, cold reminders of defeat. Roosevelt’s Harvard classmate, Congressman Charles G. Washburn—defeated too—came one day to commiserate.

“
You are now enduring the supreme test,” Washburn said. He looked around the house.
It had the used, not to say abused look of a home that had seen many children grow up and go their various ways, while also functioning for a quarter of a century as the country headquarters of a public man. Never elegant—it was too darkly paneled, too cluttered, with horns protruding from the walls and flattened animals snarling underfoot—it had gone through its comfortable and luxurious phases and begun to be shabby. Between faded oriental rugs, the hall floorboards were pitted from the pounding of hobnail
boots. Foundation cracks ran around the frieze of the hall mantel. Years of creosote deposits had darkened the cannonballs that lay like testicles at the base of two penile, brass-sleeved shell cartridges serving as andirons in the hearth. The great North Room, built for presidential receptions, now functioned mainly as a gallery for the display of mementos (Wilhelm II’s indiscreetly captioned photographs prominent among them). Roosevelt’s library, with its excess of ill-matched chairs, dangling pelts, and shelfloads of battered books, was cozier, warmed by a large fire. A stuffed badger lurked in one corner, and a hollowed-out elephant’s foot near the desk served as a wastepaper basket. Edith’s parlor was the only feminine room in the house, light-filled and vaguely French. Through her muslin-draped windows could be seen a poignant symbol of power
passé:
a stretch of veranda with the balustrade removed. On countless occasions, the President of the United States had stood on that ledge and shouted at crowds stretching down the hillside. Today it projected only over snow.

“A
GALLERY FOR THE DISPLAY OF MEMENTOS
.”
The North Room of Sagamore Hill, ca. 1911
.
(photo credit i6.1)

Washburn pursued his point. “You have retired from a position of great power and are now a private citizen. Can you endure the change?”

“Well, I have never been happier than in the past months since the election.”

It was Roosevelt’s stock reply, but Washburn accepted it. He knew his old friend to be a genuine democrat, indifferent to splendor. The huge sums Theodore had spent on redecorating the White House and entertaining Washington’s
crème de la crème
had signified nothing more than respect for the dignity of the state. At home, he and Edith were unpretentious, even bourgeois in the plainest old-money style.
Their breeding showed itself in manners. Washburn noticed how courteous the Colonel was to servants, and how he talked with equal animation about his gardener and the King of Italy.

More snow was falling when the congressman left. Roosevelt insisted on coming outside hatless to say goodbye.

Later, Washburn wrote in his diary: “
I adhere to my original estimate of him, contrary to that held by almost anyone else—A child of nature, doing what he feels impelled to from day to day: more resources, simpler tastes, and more enthusiasm than any man I ever knew. He will be an interesting figure as long as he lives.”

BECAUSE ROOSEVELT WAS
, in the image of Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia University, “polygonal,” visitors saw only certain facets of his personality at any given time. People less three-dimensional looked for the facet that best reflected their own views, and judged him accordingly. Washburn’s impression was accurate only so far as the “child of nature” was willing to play along. Lloyd Griscom needed to believe that the Colonel was “
a changed man,” lonely and listless, no longer a threat to Party unity. This information found its way to the White House.