Theodore Rex (126 page)

Between meals, there was much strenuous activity. Butt discovered during a midsummer deluge (as Ambassador Jusserand had discovered during a February snowstorm) that Roosevelt considered tennis to be a game for all seasons. The sodden ball was smashed to and fro. Swimming and water-fighting, too, were by their nature compatible with rain. When heat built up in the woods, the President was impelled to seize an ax and get in fuel for the winter. “I think Mr. Roosevelt cuts down trees merely for the pleasure of hearing them fall,” Butt wrote. “Just as he swims and plays tennis merely for the pleasure of straining his muscles and shouting. Yet when he reads he has such powers of concentration that he hears no noise around him and is unable to say whether people have been in the room or not.”

The President’s strenuosity extended even to ghost stories. “
I want ghosts who do things. I don’t care for the Henry James kind of ghosts. I want real sepulchral ghosts, the kind that knock you over and eat fire … none of your weak, shallow apparitions.”

Much of Roosevelt’s library time that weekend was devoted to books and maps about Africa. He talked about it continually. “
You know how you feel when you have all but finished one job and are eager to get at another. Well, that is how I feel. I sometimes feel that I am no longer President, I am so anxious to get on this trip.” He hoped that by the time he came down the Nile, to meet up with Edith in Cairo, he would be “sufficiently forgotten” to return home “without being a target for the newspapers.”

Winthrop asked what quarry he feared the most in East Africa. The answer came promptly: “You can kill the lion by shooting him in any part of the body, but his alertness and agility make him the most dangerous to me.”

Roosevelt moved on to discuss the King of Abyssinia, Albert Beveridge’s affectations, Shakespeare’s “compressed thought,” and the Book of Common Prayer, with interspersed witticisms that had his listeners roaring with laughter. “His humour is so elusive, his wit so dashing and his thoughts so incisive that I find he is the hardest man to quote that I have ever heard talk,” Butt wrote. “In conversation he is a perfect flying squirrel, and before you have
grasped one pungent thought he goes off on another limb whistling for you to follow.”

Despite the President’s tendency to dominate every gathering, Butt gradually became aware of “a sort of feminine luminiferous ether” at Sagamore Hill “pervading everything and everybody.” Edith Roosevelt’s cool discipline held the big crowded house together, as it had the White House. She made no effort to cajole or criticize her children or guests, manipulating them simply by her own quiet example. Over breakfast on Sunday morning, she announced that she and the President were going to church, but expected no one to accompany them unless “conscience” so dictated. Captain Butt, who could take religion or leave it, could also take a hint.

Knowing them both to be Protestant, he ventured an anti-Catholic remark during the automobile ride to Christ Episcopal Church. Roosevelt gave him a quizzical look.

“
Archie, when I discuss the Catholic Church, I am reminded that it is the only church which has ever turned an Eastern race into a Christian people. Is that not so?”

Forty small boys saluted as the President led the way into the little church on Shore Road. Captain Butt joined him and Mrs. Winthrop in the front family pew, while Edith, Ethel, and Kermit sat behind. Butt was intrigued to see that Roosevelt, a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, bowed his head in prayer, “just as all good Episcopalians do,” before the service started. He needed no prayer book, singing all the plainsong chants and the “Te Deum” by heart. He sang every hymn too, changing sometimes to a lower octave, somewhat surprising for a man whose speaking voice broke so often into falsetto. His only concession to the faith of his fathers, so far as Butt could see, was a refusal to bow his head during the Creed and again at the Gloria. “I came to the conclusion before the service was over that the President was at heart an Episcopalian, whatever his earlier training might have been.”

Asked afterward what his favorite hymns were, Roosevelt listed “How Firm a Foundation,” followed by “Holy, Holy, Holy,” “Jerusalem the Golden,” and “The Son of God Goes Forth to War.”

He indulged in no sports that afternoon, explaining to Butt that although Sabbath observance meant little to him personally, it meant a lot to many Americans, and he felt an obligation, as President, to respect such common beliefs.

Butt’s last day at Sagamore Hill, Tuesday, 28 July, was the eve of William Howard Taft’s long-awaited acceptance speech in Cincinnati. Roosevelt again revealed that he was worried about his candidate.
He sensed a general “lack of enthusiasm” for the Republican ticket, in contrast to Bryan’s gathering strength. The Commoner still impressed him.

“
And he is not a charlatan, either: he is a splendid politician and a wonderful leader. He has met with nothing but defeat so far, and yet he is stronger
today than ever and will be the hardest man to beat, whatever the papers may say to the contrary.”

President and aide sat that night on the porch in a flood of moonlight, talking about many things. Roosevelt confessed another fear, which he had entertained for the past year and a half: that of war with Japan. He did not think it would come soon, but he was sure it would one day.

“
No one dreads war as I do, Archie.… The little I have seen of it, and I have seen only a little, leaves a horrible picture in my mind.”

The surest way to postpone it, he said, was to prepare for it as much as possible, and show evidence of a steely willingness to fight. That was why he had authorized the Great White Fleet to proceed across the Pacific, stopping en route at Yokohama.

TAFT’S SPEECH SEEMED
to bear out Roosevelt’s belief that he intended “no backward step” from the policies of the current Administration. He pledged himself “to clinch what has already been accomplished at the White House,” and said that his chief work would be “to complete and perfect the machinery by which the President’s policies may be maintained.”

With that, he returned to Hot Springs to complete and perfect the machinery of his golf game, which to the consternation of Republican strategists interested him much more than politics.

Now began what the veteran Philadelphia
Press
reporter Henry L. Stoddard called “a silent boycott of T.R.” Roosevelt did not notice it at first, since he bombarded Taft with letters of advice almost daily, and received courteous, if not very forthcoming, replies. Only slowly, as August progressed, did he realize that no Cabinet officers were being summoned to Hot Springs. If Taft had meant what he said about wanting to work with them in future, he was not showing much present interest in their counsel. Neither was he sending for any of the President’s state or national lieutenants.

Roosevelt could only assume that Taft wished, quite understandably, to counteract the “residuary legatee” factor. Plump, lovable Will must know what he was doing. If not, the rather less lovable Mrs. Taft certainly did.

THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
of 1908 began in earnest after Labor Day. But earnestness did not translate into energy. Ideologically, the two main candidates were hampered by the fact that there was little difference between their respective platforms. The Republican Party was for the protective tariff, but not averse to reforming it; the Democratic Party wanted revision, but shrank from the idea of free trade. Both camps vowed a limited war on monopoly, called for more railroad regulation, and demanded fairer treatment for labor. Theodore Roosevelt may have been excluded physically from the
campaign, but its very blandness was
testimony to his
de ipse
domination of American politics: he could have written either platform himself.

He fretted, longing to get involved, as he had during his own campaign four years before. “
For reasons which I am absolutely unable to fathom,” he wrote Elihu Root, “Taft does not arouse the enthusiasm which his record and personality warranted us in believing he ought to arouse.” A note of irritation, as of a patron taken too much for granted, colored his continuing advice to the candidate. He stopped just short of giving direct orders:

Without being so tactless as to refer to the widely published image of Taft, in midswing, trying to circumnavigate his own circumference, he warned him to stay away from candid press cameras: “
I never let friends advertise my tennis, and never let a photograph of me in tennis costume appear.”

He tried to coach Taft in the art of personality projection. “
Let the audience see you smile
always
, because I feel that your nature shines out so transparently when you smile—you big, generous, high-minded fellow.” But back of the smile, there should be the aggression of a fighter for the right. “Hit at them; challenge Bryan on his record.”

As September progressed, with little noticeable change in traditional party loyalties, Roosevelt calmed down. Every vote for the
status quo ante
was a vote for continued GOP dominance of all three branches of government.

Only one discord, an unresolvable one, affected Republican harmony. It was that of Brownsville. The Senate Committee on Military Affairs may have upheld the President’s action, and Foraker may have been eliminated as a candidate, but the anger of black voters in such key states as Ohio and New York was potentially threatening to Taft. They did not have to give their support to Bryan to cripple his candidacy; if they were merely solid in refusing to vote at all, he could lose and lose.

Roosevelt got, if not consolation for the major mistake of his presidency, a certain grim satisfaction out of seeing Foraker totally humiliated on 17 September.
William Randolph Hearst, stumping for the Independents Party, revealed the existence of letters between Foraker and Standard Oil’s John D.
Archbold, going back over a period of years, that amounted to black-and-white proof of a senatorial purchase. Sums as large as fifty thousand dollars were itemized as “fees” and “payments” for vague legal services and “understandings” that clearly involved legislation.

Foraker, devastated, admitted the authenticity of the letters, but claimed that they related to law work only, which he had performed during intersessional times, and before such outside work was frowned upon by the Senate. At least one check—the largest—had been not a payment, but a loan from Standard Oil, to help a colleague buy a newspaper. Hearst had neglected to mention that Foraker had paid Archbold back within a month.

These qualifications, however, had little effect on public outrage. Foraker himself neglected to explain how $150,000 in corporate contributions toward the redecoration of his Washington mansion in no way related to his defense of corporations on Capitol Hill. He was, overnight, a dead man politically, and Roosevelt urged Taft to make the most of his demise. “I would have it understood in detail what is the exact fact, namely, that Mr. Foraker’s separation from you and from me has been due not in the least to a difference of opinion on the Negro question, which was merely a pretense.… Make a fight openly on the ground that you stood in the Republican party and before the people for the triumph over the forces which were typified by the purchase of a United States Senator to do the will of the Standard Oil Company.”

Taft, however, was not a fighter, either open or covert. Lacking aggression, all he wanted was to be loved. For the most part, this need served him well on the hustings. Audiences forgave his lackluster speaking style and warmed to his portly, always cheerful demeanor. When pressing flesh, he discharged none of Roosevelt’s galvanizing energy, but instead imparted an unthreatening, gentle glow. He was everybody’s favorite fat uncle from childhood, dispensing coins and lollipops.