Theodore Rex (100 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
What particularly characterized the movement, McClure reported, was the evangelical fervor of its practitioners. As yet, they lacked a leader, even a liturgy. But their fervor, patent wherever the publisher traveled in the United States, “almost correspond[ed] to the passion that one finds in a country when it is on the eve of a righteous war.”
Now here, in the President’s hand, were page proofs of a new article by Baker, “Railroad Rebates.” It was scheduled for publication in
McClure’s
in December, coincident with the opening of the Fifty-ninth Congress. Second of a five-part series, it assailed the “secret, underhand” dealings and “piggish” greed of “the oil-barons, beef-monopolists, the steel-trust millionaires, the sugar magnates, the banana kings and their like.” Baker, who was apparently paid by the word, decried rebates as “wrong, wrong morally, wrong economically, wrong legally.”
This was carrying fervor too far, but Roosevelt saw no harm in encouraging political rhetoric more extreme than any he would use on Congress himself.
Let Baker, Steffens, et al. do what advance guards had always done in battle: draw enemy fire from both sides while Caesar advanced down the middle. He responded to the page proofs, therefore, with the utmost delicacy:
I haven’t a criticism to suggest about the article. You have given me two or three thoughts for my own message. It seems to me that one of the lessons you teach is that these railroad men are not to be treated as exceptional villains but merely as ordinary Americans, who under given conditions are by the mere force of events forced into doing much of which we complain. I want so far as I can to free the movement for their control from all rancor and hatred.
Just how “far” he would, in fact, go to keep the public temper sweet remained to be seen. For the moment, he was still exulting in the afterglow of
Portsmouth.
On 30 September, Oyster Bay collected at the depot to cheer him back to Washington. The little sheet of water beyond the rails lolled in its bowl, careless of the cannon fire (and submarine plunges) that had shaken it so thrillingly during the summer. Roosevelt’s fellow villagers, however, seemed determined not to forget the glory he had visited upon them eight weeks before. A large shield, starred and striped, hung over the station entrance, framed to right and left by the flags of Russia and Japan, and surmounted by a banner image of a white dove with olive leaves in its beak.
The President approached this portal between two cordons of young women in white dresses. To general surprise—since he was famous for self-control—he had tears in his eyes when he turned to say good-bye.
RAY STANNARD BAKER’S
proofs were not the only ones Roosevelt had to check that fall.
Two articles of his own, “Wolf-Coursing” and “A Colorado Bear Hunt,” were due out in consecutive issues of
Scribner’s Magazine
, followed by a collection of wildlife pieces in book form at the end of October. Somewhat redundantly entitled
Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter
, this volume was the fourth in a series begun with
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
(1885) and continued with
Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail
(1888) and
The Wilderness Hunter
(1893).
It supplemented an already bewildering variety of different editions of
The Works of Theodore Roosevelt
, which had begun to come out in 1900 and bulked as large as fifteen-volume sets of history, natural history, biography, criticism, memoir, and political philosophy.
His sudden return to authorship after four years of self-imposed silence, coupled with his current celebrity as peacemaker, prompted the first serious attempt by a foreign intellectual—for that matter,
any
intellectual—to make political and literary sense of the President of the United States. Léon Bazalgette, France’s ranking authority on Whitman and Thoreau, published a
livre broché
entitled simply
Théodore Roosevelt
. Although it was based only on close study of the Roosevelt canon, its thirty-five pages packed more perceptions into the President’s character than any current full-length biography of him.
Bazalgette admitted that, as a nonpolitical person, he preferred Roosevelt’s nature writings to the histories and social commentaries. They were more beguiling and more self-revealing. A paradoxical sweetness and love of life, in no way mitigating the author’s blood lust, emanated from such books as
The Wilderness Hunter
(whose title, in French, hauntingly became
Le Chasseur des solitudes)
. Despite many dogged pages, and a deliberate avoidance of fine prose, these works charmed “with their simplicity and acute sense of realism.” They were imbued with a poignant nostalgia for the free western way of life, which had passed away even as Roosevelt had participated in it. The plainness of his style enabled him to achieve special effects
“more intense than those of professional writers.” (Bazalgette seemed to be unaware that the President had once earned a living with his pen.)
Perhaps the most remarkable of these effects derived from his uncanny ear for sounds, which, combined with scientifically precise observation, often enabled him to achieve “a communion with all that breathes in Nature.”
Roosevelt the modern statesman clearly owed much to his youthful cultivation of, and acceptance by, frontiersmen of the hardest and most violent sort. A man who could earn the respect of such “desperadoes,” and write about them with such unsentimental empathy, was unlikely to be fazed by eruptions of the primitive in the behavior of senators, or, for that matter, of plenipotentiaries. His youth in the Badlands had been an education in essentials:
He was able to observe there, in its absolute nakedness, the perpetual phenomenon of existence on this planet: human life consisting of the rhythm and friction of two parallel dynamics, inextricably interlaced, twin instincts eternally directing its course, the struggle for existence and the acceptance of existence. Both of them are positive forces, fertilizing and appropriate, the complete and final fusion of which will probably coincide with the ruin of humanity and the reign of silence around the world.
Out of his lessons in man and nature, Roosevelt had evolved a Darwinian philosophy that was harsh, yet wholly altruistic. No one reading his volumes of political and social essays,
Administration—Civil Service, American Ideals
, and
The Strenuous Life (La Vie intense)
, could have doubted what sort of President he would be. An anarchist had ironically elevated to power “
the supreme political personality of our time, of all contemporary statesmen the one surest of his mission, and most capable of achieving it.”
What these didactic works lacked in charm, they made up for in exhortatory effect. Old World sensibilities might recoil, at first, from the extraordinary aggression of Roosevelt’s attacks on “
that most dangerous of all classes, the wealthy criminal class,” as well as on all who put private gain, or cloistered security, or machine loyalty before their larger social obligations.
The tone is resolute, affirmative, maybe even brutal. He is pitiless toward hypocrites and rogues, whom he always identifies by name. Rare, in a man of his station, is the audacity, vehemence, and hasty decisiveness with which he exposes and denounces the corruption of the political world around him.… To live, for him, has no meaning other than to drive oneself, to act with all one’s strength. An existence without stress, without struggle, without growth has always struck him as
mindless. Those who remain on the sidelines he sees as cowards, and consequently his personal enemies.
“OF ALL CONTEMPORARY STATESMEN, THE ONE SUREST OF HIS MISSION.”
Roosevelt in his Sagamore Hill study, September 1905
(photo credit 25.2)
There was, nevertheless, “a contagious force” to Roosevelt’s moral energy, which no foreign sophisticate could resist. “One feels braced by the presence of a reformer, in the full sense of the word.… He shakes our delicacies, repeats to us the healthy, grand lesson that no refinement can compensate for rugged virtues.”
Braced thus, one was pleasantly shocked when Theodore Roosevelt stopped preaching and started affirming. At such times, Bazalgette wrote,
Roosevelt was possessed of an almost evangelical urgency, campaigning for political and social reform with the “ineradicable conviction” of a John Knox or a Martin Luther:
Such is the magnetism of his utterance, so forceful is his advocacy, that he persuades us to understand him and love him, even though we—I speak of such [Europeans] as myself—flinch and protest, and refuse to suit our instincts to his.
When, for example, the excess which is part of his nature moves him to the point of “spread-eaglism,” formidably increasing the vibration of patriotic and warlike strings, I am not with him, and turn instead to his noble dream that “justice will rule, not only between man and man, but also between nation and nation.” It is the dream, more than any others I might cite, he has done the most to bring about.
In political prose as in political speech, the President’s most characteristic weapon was the rhythmically beating fist. Every beat punched home an idea or part of an idea, and he never stopped punching.
He has only one limiting and devouring ambition, which is to move and convince. He has too much to say not to dispense altogether with artifices of style, too much faith and force to need anything else. He is a workman who puts the best of his energy into driving rivets. He hammers out understandings.
THE LEGISLATIVE CONSENSUS
that Roosevelt wanted to forge during the winter of 1905–1906 was going to require more than huge amounts of energy. He would also have to exercise his gift for delicate negotiation—
an attribute Bazalgette did not know about, since it was incommunicable in writing and by its nature discreet. The same landslide that had swept him back into power had elected a Congress with big Republican majorities, so whatever reforms he intended would have to be accomplished within the bounds of party orthodoxy. And prosperity was booming in both farms and factories. With a largely contented populace and a paralyzed political opposition (Parker had been
the worst-beaten candidate in the history of the popular vote), he must whip up a moral fervor for his program, rather than the usual economic and social arguments that got difficult bills through.
Having found, during the last session of the Fifty-eighth Congress, that tariff revision was too divisive an issue to wreck his presidency on, he was happy to trade it for legislation addressing the fact that most American business was now conducted across state lines—a phenomenon the framers of the Constitution could not possibly have foreseen. That meant that “the government
must in increasing degree supervise and regulate the workings of the railways engaged in interstate commerce.” The Sherman Act was no longer enough, nor the Anti-Rebate Law. The Bureau of Corporations could only monitor business malfeasance, not control it. What was needed was a larger, stronger Interstate Commerce Commission.
