Theodore Rex (116 page)

Simultaneously, a reshuffled Roosevelt Cabinet took office. No names made headlines, since the President had announced his appointments and reappointments before the last election. For the sake of continuity in congressional relations, he had kept most officers in their old jobs until now. One new face was that of Oscar S. Straus as Secretary of Commerce and Labor—
the first Jew in Cabinet history. (Washington dinner-table opinion was divided as to whether Roosevelt had chosen Straus as a signal of goodwill
toward the business community, or of contempt toward Russia, where the plague of pogroms had become endemic.)

A stranger choice, for the gossips, was that of Ambassador George von L. Meyer to succeed George B. Cortelyou as Postmaster General. Why should so suave and successful a diplomat, who hobnobbed with the Kaiser and the King of Italy, forsake the gilded halls of St. Petersburg for the Post Office’s bleary corridors? Cortelyou, who seemed to be promoted every time the President put on weight, was now Secretary of the Treasury. Charles J. Bonaparte continued as Attorney General, his former job at the Navy Department being taken over by Victor H. Metcalf, while James R. Garfield became Secretary of the Interior.

Cortelyou had been at the Treasury only ten days when he was tested even more severely than Leslie Shaw had been during the “rich man’s panic” of 1903. Prices on the New York Stock Exchange, rendered unstable by a worldwide overexpansion of credit, plummeted without warning on 14 March. The Dow Jones Industrial Average declined by one quarter. Several big businesses went bankrupt. Doubts that the President’s former note-taker could handle such an emergency were swiftly dispelled when Cortelyou deposited twelve million dollars’ worth of Treasury gold in New York banks to replenish the money drain. This Morgan-like gesture saved Morgan himself from having to do something similar. It also pre-empted an emergency plan by E. H. Harriman and four other financiers to make twenty-five million available at the first hint of a crash. The speed and certainty with which Cortelyou acted helped to arrest the stock slide and turn it into a slow, but manageable decline. He won instant respect on Wall Street, and no more jokes were made about his stenographic past.

Roosevelt scoffed that the quasi-panic had been “
a demonstration arranged by Mr. Harriman to impress the Administration.” Few financiers were prepared to believe that the Southern Pacific tycoon would make so expensive a gesture of protest against government regulation. A mild recession did seem to be in the making, though, and Jacob H. Schiff wrote to the President, begging him to do something statesmanlike before things got worse.

Schiff—silver-bearded and courtly, with the accent of
his native Germany still heavy on his tongue—was one of Roosevelt’s few Democratic supporters, and, as such, not inclined to mince words. “
We are confronted by a situation not only serious, but which, unless promptly taken in hand and prudently treated, is certain to bring great suffering upon the country,” he wrote. It was not so much a money crisis as a loss of confidence, brought about belatedly by last year’s regulatory reforms. Investors were afraid to risk funds in railroad stocks, out of fear that the Sixtieth Congress might be even more amenable to reform than the Fifty-ninth. With no Congress at all sitting for the next eight months, that fear was bound to intensify. Railroad securities would fail to sell, and railway improvement and construction programs
would be canceled by nervous executives, causing both devaluation and deterioration. Schiff suggested that Roosevelt “bring together a committee representative of the railroad interests and the Interstate Commerce Commission,” along the lines of his successful coal-strike conference of five years before. Its job would be to discuss whatever future regulatory legislation the President had in mind, so that an endorsed program could be presented to Congress. “This will speedily restore confidence and dispel the clouds that are gathering over us in so threatening a manner.”

Roosevelt wrote back to say that J. Pierpont Morgan had recently tried to get some railroad executives, including Harriman, to visit the White House, but none had shown. He was therefore disinclined to call a conference. “Sooner or later they will realize that in their opposition to me for the last few years they have been utterly mistaken … that nothing better for them could be devised than the laws I have striven for and am striving to have enacted.”

Harriman would only say, enigmatically, to reporters, “
This has been an unusual winter, both as to politics and as to weather.”

SO HAD IT BEEN
for the President. The perfect conditions, meteorological and political, that had brightened his New Year’s Day (excepting always the dark cloud of Brownsville) had become unsettled almost at once. Now Jake Schiff was talking of more and bigger clouds, and a financial storm to come. A phrase in Schiff’s latest letter was disquieting:
“
your stern and uncompromising attitude in important questions.”

Roosevelt had tried to be more moderate, and restrain his natural force—and indeed succeeded in doing so much of the time. But men such as Foraker brought out the primitive in him. It was a quality lesser men recognized and admired—witness
the macabre artifact coming his way (according to
The New York Times)
from deepest Texas: a silver-mounted, jewel-studded big stick, carved by the citizens of Brownsville in his honor.

More rational admirers, including Henry Cabot Lodge and James Garfield, thought they detected signs of exhaustion in the President. On an excursion to Cambridge, he had spoken so mechanically, as if spinning some internal Edison cylinder, as to scotch a nascent campaign by William James to make him president of Harvard in 1909. “Althou’ he praised scientific research,” the philosopher complained, “there wasn’t otherwise a single note of innovation or distinction in anything he said.” Few knew that at the very end of winter, the Roosevelts had nearly lost their son Archie to diphtheria. The boy’s nine-day struggle for life, including at least one heart failure, took its emotional toll.

Spring came late to the White House grounds, less benignly than Roosevelt had ever seen it, with frigid air coming down from Canada to wither the magnolia blossoms. Every tree bore its dead brown load, and other buds
stayed dormant. When Roosevelt ventured his first tennis game of the season, with Pinchot, Garfield, and Jusserand, a snow squall struck. They grimly played four sets. The following day, cold rain fell.

Normally, in short-session years, April and May were pleasant months for the President and his Cabinet, with no congressional liaison to worry about and plenty of time to talk policy. But this change of season brought an unwelcome flowering of bad political news. The Immigration Act seemed to be having no effect on the flow of Japanese coolies into California. Consequently, the Yellow Peril was again being proclaimed in San Francisco. In Ohio, Joseph B. Foraker announced his opposition to Taft’s undeclared presidential candidacy. This was tantamount to launching his own campaign for nomination by the state GOP. Disturbingly, he began to court Ohio’s black voters, who were enough upset about Brownsville to back him.

In early May, a compromise was advanced by George B. Cox, Cincinnati’s former political boss, who offered to unite the party behind Taft for President and Foraker for another term as Senator. Foraker accepted this arrangement, knowing it left him quite free to run for President. Taft rejected it on the ground that he would be seen as a deal maker. The unhappy result for him was to make Foraker a stronger candidate than ever, while fueling rumors that Taft lacked political ambition.

It also revived talk about Roosevelt’s own presumed secret agenda. “At the moment,” he wrote Kermit on 15 May, “I am having a slightly irritating time with well-meaning but foolish friends who want me to run for a third term.” He did not mention his elder daughter, who preferred the phrase
second elective term
. Going along with their plans would make him the virtual overlord of the next Congress, and, probably, the longest-serving President in history (yet by no means the oldest: if he served through to March 1913, he would still be only fifty-four).

Nor did he mention to anybody, unless to Edith Roosevelt in utter privacy, that
nine tenths of him wanted to run again. And that nine tenths was reason, not emotion. He could not account for the moral particle that stopped him, except to describe it vaguely as a “still, small voice.”

Having thus made, or remade, one of the fateful decisions of his life, Roosevelt left Washington with Edith and Archie for a few days at Pine Knot. The weather, though still crisp, was clear, and he took his field glasses to do some bird-watching.

HE SAW THEM ON
18 May, for the first time in twenty-five years—another reminder that
tempus fugit
. There were about a dozen, unmistakable with their pointed tails and brown-red breasts, flying in characteristically tight formation to and fro before alighting on a tall, dead pine. He compared them to some mourning doves in the field beyond; and there was no question of the
difference between the two species. All his ornithological training told him that he was looking at
the passenger pigeon
“Ectopistes migratoria—
described on page 25 of the 5
^th
volume of Audubon,” a bird generally accepted to be on the edge of extinction.

He had collected and cataloged a specimen as a boy, noting even then that it was becoming rare on Long Island. Once it had been the most abundant feathered thing in the world, so prolific that a single flock, in 1832, had been assessed at more than two and a quarter billion birds. Old frontiersmen remembered passenger pigeons literally blotting out the sun. In 1856, the Ohio legislature had declared, “The passenger pigeon needs no protection.”

Thus encouraged, hunters had succeeded in obliterating it to such an extent that, by the end of the nineteenth century, shootings became almost as rare as sightings. W. B. Mershon’s valedictory
The Passenger Pigeon
, in press even as Roosevelt watched his flock circling and settling, recorded
the last bird killed in Wisconsin in 1900.

Twice more that afternoon, the passenger pigeons swooped over Pine Knot. Their large size and rapid, circular movements seemed confirmatory, but they did not perch again, and vanished as quickly as they had come. Roosevelt stayed at the cabin for three more days, walking and riding with Edith through the woods from noon to sunset, and
saw no evidence that he had not been dreaming.

OYSTER BAY
. Oyster Bay. Oyster Bay. Oyster Bay. Oyster Bay. Oyster Bay. Oyster Bay …

The agreeable monotony of Roosevelt’s schedule for late June 1907 was interrupted on the twenty-seventh by a captain from the General Board of the Navy and a colonel from the Army War College. They accompanied Victor H. Metcalf, the Secretary of the Navy, and Postmaster General George von L. Meyer, who had definitely not come to discuss rural free delivery. Meyer’s presence, indeed, helped explain his real role in the Cabinet, which was to advise the President on questions of extreme diplomatic delicacy.