Theodore Rex (131 page)

Shortly after three o’clock, the railway north was cleared, and Roosevelt passed with his wife and son through a crowd that had swelled to several thousand. The vast station hall reverberated with roars as he waved, flashed his teeth and pince-nez, and disappeared down the platform. At 3:26 on the station register, Theodore Roosevelt officially departed Washington, D.C.

THE STORM HAD
abated, but with wires down and only hand signals operating for the next thirty miles, the train took more than two hours to get to Baltimore. By then darkness had fallen, and Roosevelt
did not show himself, as if to emphasize to a small, wistful crowd that he was no longer public property.

Seven years and a hundred and sixty-nine days before, on another lowering
evening, he had come south along this same track, eager to begin work as President of the United States. For all his show of grief for McKinley, and natural nervous tension, he had been happy then, as he was happy now; happy at the large things he had managed to achieve—a canal, a coal-strike settlement, a peace treaty, a national conservation conference—contented with myriad smaller triumphs, proud of his appointees, passionate about his country, in love with his wife and children; many-friended, much-honored, lusty in his physical and intellectual appetites,
constantly bubbling with mirth; happy, above all, at having kept his promise not to hold on too long to power. Brownsville had been proof to many, and perhaps even a warning to himself, of the truth of Lord
Acton’s famous dictum.

Already, in his fifty-first year, epitaphs of him were beginning to appear, distressingly written in the past historic, from H. G. Wells’s claim that he seemed “
a very symbol of the creative will in man” to Henry Adams’s “
Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the quality that medieval theology assigned to God—he was pure act.”

In time, no doubt, the inevitable memorial committee would form, and solemn scholars would comb his works for quotations suitable to chisel in stone. Statute books and official histories would celebrate his administrative achievements: the Monroe Doctrine reaffirmed, the Old World banished from the New World, the great Canal being cut; peace established in the Far East; the Open Door swinging freely in Manchuria and Morocco; Cuba liberated (and returned to self-government just in time for his departure); the Philippines pacified; the Navy hugely strengthened, known literally around the world; the Army, shorn of its old deadwood generals, feeling the green sap of younger replacements; capital and labor balanced off, the lynch rate declining, the gospel of cleaner politics now canon, and enough progressive principles established, or made part of the national debate, to keep legislative reformers busy for at least ten years.

But for millions of contemporary Americans, he was already memorialized in the eighteen national monuments and five national parks he had created by executive order, or cajoled out of Congress. The “inventory,” as Gifford Pinchot would say, included protected pinnacles, a crater lake, a rain forest and a petrified forest, a wind cave and a jewel cave, cliff dwellings, a cinder cone and skyscraper of hardened magma, sequoia stands, glacier meadows, and the grandest of all canyons.

Less solidly but equally enduringly, he left behind a folk consensus that he had been the most powerfully positive American leader since Abraham Lincoln. He had spent much of his two terms crossing and recrossing the country, east and west, south and north, reminding anyone who would listen to him that he embodied all America’s variety and the whole of its
unity; that what he had made of his own life was possible to all, even to boys born as sickly as himself.
Uncounted men, women, and children who had crowded around the presidential caboose to stare and listen to him now carried, forever etched in memory, the image of his receding grin and wave.

(photo credit epl.2)

PORTIONS OF THE
manuscript of
Theodore Rex
were written at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., and in the research library of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site, New York City. The author expresses his great debt to these two institutions. He also thanks the following people for helping him in ways more than ordinary: Daniel J. Boorstin; David Burnham; Michael Cahill; William Chanler; Karen Chapel; Catherine Cook; Wallace Finley Dailey; Amanda Deaver; George Didden III; Maurice F. X. Donohue; Philip Dunne; G. Thomas Edwards; Allen Fitz-Gerald; Jeff Flannery; Stephen Fox; Rob Friedman; David Gerstner; Ann Godoff; Julie Grau; Sharon Harris, translator; Paul T. Heffron; Stephen B. Hess; Mia Kazanjian; Dave Kelly; Michael P. Lacey; Alton A. Lindsay; Robert Loomis; Henry Luce III; Margaret Fox Mandel; Thomas Mann; Albro Martin; Alison Martin; John M. Mason; Robert K. Massie; Lyle McGeoch; Bruce K. MacLaury; Charles Moose; Sylvia Jukes Morris; Angela Orcken; John Gray Peatman; Christina Rae; P. James Roosevelt; W. S. Sims; Brad Smith; Kathy Smith; Mary E. Smith; Michael D. Sternfeld; Joanna Sturm; Robert N. Walton; and John D. Weaver.

John Allen Gable is especially thanked for a scholarly review of the manuscript, and the services of Rebecca Kramer and Timothy Mennel are remembered with profound gratitude.

Unless otherwise noted, collections are held in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.