Theodore Rex (10 page)

The United States, with seventy-seven million citizens, was still uncrowded and healthily competitive. But its social balance would be threatened if poverty spread in proportion to immigration. (Hundreds of Japanese coolies and thousands of dirt-poor Chinese peasants were arriving every month, boxed in barrels, buried under potatoes, sandwiched between bales of hay.) The worst thing he could do now was “let well enough alone.”
Somehow he must grant a little leisure, and a little extra money, to the multitudes currently working only to survive. This would enable them to develop those noneconomic virtues—intelligence, unselfishness, courage, decency—which he loosely defined as “character.” Character determined the worth of the individual, and “what is true of the individual is also true of the nation.”

At the same time, he must persuade Union League Republicans that perpetual, mild reform was true conservatism, in that it protected existing institutions from atrophy, and relieved the buildup of radical pressure. All his life he had preached this doctrine. He would preach it louder now that he had universal attention. He might not have power—yet—to convert his Cabinet, much less the Senate. But youth and time were on his side, and the presidency promised to be “
a bully pulpit.”

AS IF TO REASSURE
Roosevelt that the America of his dreams could be a reality, the exquisite town of Lock Haven rocked into view. Tall houses glowed
white and apricot in the mid-afternoon light. Willows trailed their fronds in the glassy river, quiet lanes divided schools and steeples and shops. Here was Social Order, in the harmonious interdependence of rich and poor. Here was Fecundity, symbolized by the women on every stoop, lifting their babies to bless the new President. Here was Industry, in the form of an immaculate paper mill. And here—palpably, all about—was Morality.
The fine white paper from that mill went under contract to Roosevelt’s good friend Edward W. Bok, publisher of
Ladies’ Home Journal
. Both men believed that the bourgeois domestic environment—efficient, loving, aesthetic, mother-controlled—was the nucleus of a perfect society (although Roosevelt wished the
Journal
would emphasize women’s suffrage less, and regular childbearing more).

Girls softly pelted the train with flowers as it steamed through Lock Haven Depot. More girls with more flowers were waiting down the line, at Williamsport. The locomotive stopped there briefly to take on water, and an invitation scrawled in childish capitals was delivered to Roosevelt’s car. Unable to resist it, he stepped outside and bowed. A little boy yelled “Hooray!” then burst into tears as an older girl smacked him for irreverence. The train jerked forward again, crossed the Susquehanna, and entered a broad landscape of harvest crops, orchards, and stone farmhouses.

Thickening crowds at every level crossing announced the approach to Harrisburg. Urchins perched like starlings on telephone poles. Soon even haystacks bore teetering human loads. At twenty minutes to five, city buildings closed in. A crescendo of ten thousand voices singing “Nearer My God to Thee” floated out of Union Station. Church bells, steam whistles, and several discordant bands joined in the din.

Governor William Stone of Pennsylvania was waiting on the platform with an honor guard, but Roosevelt stayed aloof behind drawn blinds. Harrisburg was notoriously the most corrupt seat of state government in the nation. It was also a bedrock of orthodox Republicanism. This posed delicate problems of executive strategy. If he wished to preserve his honest reputation, he could not identify too closely with machine politicians here—yet to govern effectively he had to cooperate with the machine’s Washington representatives. Only three weeks ago he had mused, “Were I President, I should certainly endeavor to do what the two Pennsylvania Senators wished in matters of patronage—so as I honorably could.”

A messenger ran along the train with a telegram for Herman Kohlsaat. It was a favorable reply, from Secretary Gage, to Roosevelt’s plea for loyalty. Kohlsaat jumped out and bought the evening papers. Riffling through them, he found the headlines he was looking for. Wall Street had reacted optimistically to the news that Gage and Hay might stay. Opening prices had soared one to six points higher than Friday’s closing, and steadiness had prevailed throughout the market. A spokesman for the financial community called these signs “clear and reassuring.”

Roosevelt was relieved to hear the good news. “I don’t care a damn about stocks and bonds, but I don’t want to see them go down the first day I am President!”

The tolling of church bells faded as the train moved on, but the singing did not. Thousands of black-clad mourners crammed around Cumberland Valley Bridge took up the threnody of McKinley’s dying hymn. By now the lugubrious tune palled on passengers who had listened to it ever since leaving Buffalo. For days to come, awake or asleep, they would hear voices crooning
“Near-urr, my God to Thee, near-urr to Thee!”
Their nerves, tightened by seventy-two hours of suspense, tragedy, excitement, and fatigue, began to fray in the waning daylight. Women burst into tears. Men grew morose, or in the case of Senator Hanna, profane. “That damn cowboy wants me to take supper with him alone, damn him!”

Ahead, in the press car, a group of reporters sat talking about death. They noticed a country funeral procession crawling darkly up the slope of a hill. It receded into the distance behind McKinley’s bier.
“What shadows we are,”
someone quoted softly, “
and what shadows we pursue.”

THE SUN WAS SETTING
, and its rays gilded the misty transpirations of peach orchards and tobacco fields. An old farmer, hearing the onrush of the train, climbed off his harrow and stood to attention, his red shirt incandescent in the horizontal light. Children ran to cluster around him. Their spindly shadows, leaping east, briefly stroked the wheels of Roosevelt’s car.

To eyes that had so recently gazed upon oil derricks and steel bridges and Harrisburg’s jumbled housing, the little group looked quaintly anachronistic, a vignette of the past century.
Though such families still accounted for 60 percent of the American population, their numbers were dwindling as Combination crept across the countryside, leveling hedgerows and quintupling the size of farms. (These very fields were already in fief to the tobacco trust.) Departments of agriculture in state after state boasted the effects of the new “scientific management.” Kansas wheat production had increased to such an extent that some farmers there were calling themselves “manufacturers.”
Review of Reviews
reported enormous sales of sophisticated agricultural machinery across the nation. An “ultra-new combined header and thresher” was being tested in California. Eight horses were needed to haul it; it advanced across a field of standing grain, miraculously leaving nothing behind but a row of stuffed sacks.

Technological progress for big farmers, however, did not mean that life was any better for small. In the Midwest, nearly three fourths of rural families lived below subsistence level. In the South (looming ever closer as Roosevelt rode), country people sought town jobs through the winter, just to survive on fatback and hoecake.

Roosevelt could see little relief for the rural unemployed in the immediate future. A place like York, Pennsylvania (flashing by redly at a quarter to six), was the typical country town grown too big. There were more than a thousand such cities across the nation. For its new poor, York offered only more poverty. A laborer might trade his hoe for a hammer, for a few extra dollars a week, but the increment was meaningless, given urban costs. His children would still run barefoot through November, and in midwinter their breath would be ice on their bedsheets. Even more wretched than these migrants were the immigrants from unsalubrious parts of Europe further crowding American cities. Since January, nearly half a million had poured in. With their greasy kerchiefs and swollen cheekbones, they seemed content to live in any slum and do any work, for pig’s wages.
Not surprisingly, the native-born Americans they supplanted felt rage and ethnic contempt. Roosevelt’s journalist friend William Allen White spoke for many in his syndicated diatribes against “Hunkies and Italians, the very scum of European civilization.”

Roosevelt was not immune to such sentiments himself—his youthful views on the inferiority of various ethnic stocks had been republished with rather embarrassing frequency—yet he believed in America’s ability to integrate all comers.
One of his favorite stories was that of Otto Raphael, the young Russian Jew he had plucked from the Lower East Side of Manhattan and made a policeman. Roosevelt was the first President ever to be born in a large city; he welcomed the clash of alien cultures, as long as it did not degenerate into mass collision. As such, he saw no paradox in being an opponent of the xenophobic American Protective Association, and strong supporter of the Immigration Restriction League. But he felt that America’s first responsibility was to its literate, native-born, working poor.

Several thousand such citizens stood watching his train pass through the industrial outskirts of York—half a mile of humanity silhouetted against the sunset, dinner pails in hand. Then they were gone. Night closed in. For the next half hour Roosevelt sat with his elbow on the window ledge, staring through his own reflection at the speeding darkness.

THE CONSISTENT FEATURES
of the political landscape, as he saw it, were fault lines running deeply and dangerously through divergent blocks of power. Potential chasms lurked between Isolationism and Expansionism, Government and the Trusts, Labor and Capital, Conservation and Development, Wealth and Commonwealth, Nativism and the Golden Door. And since the last election, the fault lines had widened. As William Jennings Bryan kept saying, “
The extremes of society are being driven further and further apart.”

Roosevelt thought he knew what was causing the underlying drift: a crumbling of Government, the national bedrock. Some quick executive reinforcements (such as he always made when taking a new job) would slow the
drift until the next election. Then, assuming he was the Republican Party’s chosen candidate, he might campaign for more fundamental change. How, in the meantime, to care for those millions of Americans out there in the twilight? How to articulate their vague feelings that despite general peace and prosperity, something deep down was wrong with the United States? Here was his challenge as President: to put into speech, and political action, what they felt in their hearts, but could not express. His appeal must be to neither reactionary nor radical, but to Everyman—the farmer in the red shirt.

Signs were not wanting in September 1901 that Everyman was impatient, inclining toward revolution. From several Western states came demands for direct voter participation in primary elections, direct election of senators, and a referendum system to permit citizens to pass legislation without the consent of their legislators. In Madison, Wisconsin, a Republican insurgent who called himself “
Bob” had won the governorship on an antitrust ticket, and was crying hoarsely for regulation of interstate railroad rates. In Cleveland, Ohio, a fat radical nicknamed “Tom” had captured City Hall, and was bellowing threats against its private utility companies.