Colonel Roosevelt (32 page)

TAFT REMARKED THAT
on occasion Theodore Roosevelt was possessed of “the spirit of the old berserkers.” If so, the Colonel’s savage beast was as often soothed by the bird music he heard at Oyster Bay, spring after warming spring:

QUENTIN ROOSEVELT BROUGHT
a diminished rush and noise of boyhood back to Sagamore Hill that summer. At nearly thirteen, he had little innocence left, and seemed to have exchanged his genius for mayhem for serious study.
He had flabbergasted his parents—and made the front page of
The New York Times
—by winning a scholarship at Groton.

Always precocious, he read adult books to widen an already impressive vocabulary. Since attending an air show with his mother at Reims, France, in 1909, he had loved anything that turned over, vibrated, clattered, or flew. “You don’t know how pretty it was to see all the aeroplanes sailing at a time … the prettiest thing I ever saw.” Big of brow and burly bodied, forever baring his teeth in fits of laughter, he was no longer a miniature version of his father, but stood half an inch taller.

Archie, Quentin’s former knockabout buddy, was now a loping, long-limbed youth of seventeen, not unlike an Apache with his hawk features and Arizona tan. The slowest of the six Roosevelt siblings, he could spare little time for tennis matches with “Q,” having to study for his Harvard entrance exams. Whether accepted or not—he was characteristically pessimistic about his chances—Archie had another year at the Evans School in Mesa to face. One of the family’s secrets was that he had been expelled from Groton in 1910 for insubordination.

For Theodore and Edith, there was a temporary feel to the lingering presence of Kermit and Ethel under their roof. It was likely to be Kermit’s last summer at home. After graduation next year, he would be looking for a career in business. And judging from the “motor” excursions he and his sister kept taking to visit with Hitchcocks and Bacons and Rumseys and Whitneys—the Meadowbrook set—it might be the last summer Ethel remained “
a young girl entitled to think primarily of her amusements,” as Roosevelt, trying to sound like a tolerant father, put it. She was about to turn twenty, and must address herself to the serious business of choosing a husband.

There were no nurses and governesses upstairs anymore. Edith had pensioned off the last of the old family servants during Theodore’s absence in Africa.
The Roosevelt retinue was now reduced to five white women—a cook, a waitress, and three housemaids—and five black men, including a butler and a “chauffeur” for the Haynes-Apperson. The hay and corn fields were farmed by freelance laborers, among whom could often be seen the former President of the United States, husky and sweating in white blouse and knickerbockers.

“
I am really thinking more about natural history than about politics,” he wrote to Arthur Lee on 27 June, boasting that he had finished “a masterly article on ‘Revealing and Concealing Coloration in Birds and Mammals.’ ” He was being arch, but his assessment was justified when the monograph saw print. It filled 112 pages of the
Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History
, and summed up forty years of field observation.
Roosevelt followed it with a quirky essay in
The Outlook
entitled “Dante and the Bowery,” arguing that literary stylists had grown too precious in eschewing contemporary imagery. There was as much epic grandeur and poignant example to be found in modern life, he suggested, as there was in Greek myth, or for that matter, thirteenth-century cosmology. He used his regular column to editorialize on intercollegiate athletics, labor unions, conservation, and class. He wrote reviews of Arthur E. Weigall’s
Treasury of Ancient Egypt
and Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
, and, showing signs of intellectual restlessness, ordered a translation of
De Contemptu Mundi
. Erasmus’s ambivalent attitude to monastic retreat—was it an austere giving up, or a voluptuous letting go?—spoke to his current half-happiness, half-regret at being rusticated.

Somehow, he could not bring himself to start on the “big work” he had contemplated when he left politics. Both the Century Association and Scribners were offering him large sums for a life of Lincoln. But he was chilled by their demand that he deliver it within the next six months, while his name “still had a value.” Apparently, they had no more concern for literary quality than for him—in the past, one of their most valuable authors.

“
As you know I am not a rich man,” Roosevelt wrote to Judge John C.
Rose, a friend in Baltimore, “and if possible I want to continue earning some money until all my boys get started in life. Eight years hence Quentin will have graduated if things go as they should go.” He himself would then be sixty, and able to retire. He had the income from a $60,000 trust fund, which was not
enough to support four children, let alone run a large country property. Edith had some money of her own, but he did not like to touch that, in case he predeceased her. They must live off his pen, and the modest investments his cousin Emlen managed for him.

“ ‘A
YOUNG GIRL ENTITLED TO THINK PRIMARILY OF HER AMUSEMENTS
.’ ”
Ethel Roosevelt, ca. 1911
.
(photo credit i7.1)

He used a favorite metaphor in dismissing the prospect of his ever returning to public service. “
The kaleidoscope changes continually and the same grouping of figures is not ever repeated.”

NOT ONLY HE HAD
been shaken out of the pattern, but so had almost all of the Old Guard senators he had dealt with as president. Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root alone remained, in uneasy alliance with Winthrop Murray Crane of Massachusetts and Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania. Root wanted to return to private life at the expiration of his current term. Now that Republican progressives were no longer “insurgent,” but established as an independent voting block, Congress was in effect divided into three parties, with the Democratic majority exuberant over its split opposition, and determined to keep it so through next year’s GOP convention.

Roosevelt confessed that there were moments when “
I very earnestly desire to champion a cause,” but he was not unhappy to be out of politics. The feeling was tinged with something like triumph on 5 August, when he appeared in New York before the House committee investigating his role in the stock crisis of 1907. Neither then nor now had he understood much about the acquisition by U.S. Steel of the Tennessee Coal & Iron Company, and less still about the secret ways banking houses connived with one another. But he testified with such righteous vigor (“You must apply to some one else if you want an expert on Wall Street”), that Congressman Augustus Stanley, in the chair, became incoherent in trying to show that he had gone along with a monopolistic coup, vastly to the profit of the the world’s biggest trust. Roosevelt insisted that his only thought at the time had been to pr
event the bankruptcy of Moore & Schley, a giant brokerage firm whose collapse might have triggered a worldwide depression. “
The word
panic
means fear, unreasoning fear,” he said. “To stop a panic it is necessary to restore confidence.”

Even
The New York Times
felt that he had acquitted himself. Congressman Stanley, the paper remarked, had failed to expose the former president as a stooge, while showing a “partisan” and “ignorant” attitude toward U.S. Steel. “It is indeed fortunate that Mr. Roosevelt dealt with the panic instead of Mr. Stanley.”

ON 6 AUGUST
, the day the editorial appeared, Edith Roosevelt turned fifty. To her adoring husband, who presented her with a thermos pitcher and four volumes
of
Punch
, she was still the indoor and outdoor companion of childhood—so “
very young looking and pretty in her riding habit” as she trotted beside him on horseback, through the woods to Cold Spring Harbor or along the bayside road. Today the weather was too hot for horses, so he took her for an afternoon row to Lloyd Neck.