Theodore Rex (9 page)

AT FOUR MINUTES
past eleven, the funeral train drew into Port Allegany, Pennsylvania, and stopped for a while to allow platform mourners to look at the dead President’s bier. Souvenir collectors laid nickels and pennies and flowers on the rails. When the wheels started to roll again, there was a
crunching of coins, and the perfume of pressed roses filled the air. In future years, misshapen metal discs and bits of dried petal would remind the citizens of Port Allegany of McKinley’s last earthly journey.

THE STEEP CLIMB
up Keating Ridge began. At times the locomotive seemed about to stall. Shortly before noon, it dragged its payload over the crest and with loud puffs of relief entered a winding valley. Hills crowded in on both sides. Then one cut gave way to the shaft of a coal mine, and for a few seconds Roosevelt and his fellow passengers could exchange stares with four hundred filthy coal miners.

Boys, youths, and old men (were they really old, or just toothless?) stood bareheaded, leaning on picks and shovels. Their small, smudged eyes (only the creases showing white), squat bodies, and tape-wrapped shins proclaimed them to be Slavs. It was impossible to tell from their swarthy expressions whether the sight of a presidential cortege moved them or not. Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor’s historic threat of violence against capital.

Roosevelt knew that nowhere in America was the threat more real than in the Pennsylvania coalfields—the bituminous region he had just entered, and the anthracite region to east and south. Valley after valley, as the train snaked through, disclosed communities as squalid as any these people could have fled in Europe. Thousands of sooty shacks on stilts, with pigs tied below; gutters buzzing with garbage; mules clopping to the mineheads, hock-deep in fine gray dust. Beneath that dust, men were scrabbling in wet, gassy gloom, earning a dollar and change for every ton of coal they hacked. If 1901 turned out to be a good year, they might get five hundred dollars apiece—about what Roosevelt had already earned as President of the United States. In cash, they would realize perhaps a third of that—their wage packets were subject to compulsory deductions for rent, fuel, medical bills, and food supplied at inflated prices by the company store. As a group, they aged and ailed faster than any other workers in American industry.

These boys began their careers at eight or nine, picking splinters of slate out of the coal breakers until their hands were scarred for life. These men worked coal ten hours a day, six days a week. They ate coal dust in their bread and drank it in their milk; they breathed it and coughed it. At forty or forty-five, most were so ravaged by black-lung disease that they had to return to the breakers to pick slate with their grandchildren, contracting fresh black scars until they died.

Roosevelt understood enough about social repression to sense that today’s contempt for the unskilled worker was tomorrow’s likely revolution.
Trade-union membership had more than doubled in the last five years. Sullen miners personally fueled most of the nation’s industrial machine. In his opinion,
“the labor question” was the greatest problem confronting twentieth-century America, “the most far-reaching in its stupendous importance.” He had been saying so since the United Mine Workers (UMW) first struck the Pennsylvania anthracite mines in 1900. How worried Hanna had been that bloodshed might prevent McKinley’s re-election! The Senator had wheedled both sides to an interim contract. Today’s New York
Sun
noted that this
modus vivendi
was to expire in six months. Passion was building in the pits: if the UMW was not soon recognized as a bargaining agent by the mine operators, the next coal strike could be violent enough to obliterate memories of the Haymarket Riot.

Roosevelt had been violently inclined himself in Haymarket days. He had fantasized leading a band of riflemen against the rioters, and shooting them into submission. But middle age, and the democratizing effect of war, had moderated his attitude toward organized labor.

PILLARS OF HEMLOCK
and pine rose on either side of the train, suffusing it in cool gloom. Here and there a shaft of light fell vertically (for the sun stood at noon), disclosing naves and transepts carpeted with needles, cloisters where deer and pheasants sought sanctuary from the hunting season.

Roosevelt was more prone to revere such natural architecture than any Gothic cathedral. Trees were objects of deep spiritual significance to him, especially when they were full of birdsong. He had stocked the bare slopes of Sagamore Hill with elms and chestnuts and oaks and dogwoods, faithful to his family motto,
Qui plantavit curabit
. The jungles of Cuba had made a soldier of him; the forests of Wyoming had brought him solace after the death of his first wife; the piney air of Maine had cut and soothed the asthma in his teenage lungs. Further back still, in boyhood, were memories of summer nights in the woods, and the sound of a beloved, bass voice reading
Last of the Mohicans
under fire-reddened branches.

I am sorry the trees have been cut down
. Little Teedie Roosevelt had been nine when he wrote that, after some minor act of vandalism in Georgia. As an adult, what was he to make of the wasteland he now began to see in Pennsylvania? The Allegheny forest receded on both sides, leaving only stumps. Soon there was nothing but a fringe of trees on the highest ridges, beyond reach of any saw. Stumps, stumps, and more stumps perforated the landscape, like arrows snapped off in death agony. Most were blackened. Local lumberjacks wanted white pines only—less profitable trees could be burned like weeds. There were no saplings to be seen. With billions more trees beyond the horizon, replanting was a waste of time.

Descent via Emporium Junction and Driftwood revealed even worse devastation. Roosevelt had foreseen just such sterility when Governor of New York: “Unrestrained greed means the ruin of the great woods and the drying
up of the sources of the rivers.” These hillsides, which for centuries had absorbed foliage-filtered rainfall, were now bare, gullied by direct precipitation. The courses running off them were choked with mud and dead fish.

A town sign flashed by:
RENOVO.
Edith had vacationed here as a child. The name—Latin for
I renew
—sounded mocking in these dying uplands of the Susquehanna. About the only renewal Roosevelt could see was a station repair yard, where flatcars were being overhauled to carry away more and more trees. He understood (as most Americans did not) the tendency of transport and industrial combinations to consume the environments they served. United States railroads owned more timberland than all the nation’s homesteaders.

To him,
conservation
—a term just becoming politically fashionable—meant “not only the preservation of natural resources, but the prevention of the monopoly of natural resources, so they should inhere in the people as a whole.”

IT WAS NEARLY
time for lunch. Roosevelt ordered places laid for himself and the Secretary of War, and went to pay his respects to Mrs. McKinley. Ravaged, almost comatose with grief, she did not detain him long. By 1:30, he was back in his car and the congenial company of Elihu Root.

He felt at home with conservatives. Whether or not the term applied to himself, he owed his political advancement to men of Root’s type: wealthy Republicans who belonged to the Union League Club, read the
North American Review
, and were coldly polite to butlers.
More conservative rhetoric followed after lunch, as the other Cabinet officers on the train came in one by one to see him. With the exception of Attorney General Philander Chase Knox, a polished little man of forty-eight, they were venerable figures. There was his old boss, Secretary of the Navy John Davis Long, portly and lumbering at sixty-three. Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson was sixty-six, Secretary of the Interior Ethan Allen Hitchcock sixty-five, Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith fifty-nine. Elihu Root was fifty-six. The two absent Secretaries, John Hay and Lyman Gage, were sixty-two and sixty-five respectively.

McKinley had chosen carefully: a more orthodox phalanx of Republicans would be difficult to assemble. To a man, these conservatives believed in the sanctity of property and the patrician responsibilities of wealth and power.

Their eyes were honest, but hard (Knox again the exception, with his veiled, astigmatic stare).
They were accustomed to luxury travel on complimentary railroad passes, and a myriad of other corporate privileges.
They were prepared, in return, to give trust lords such as J. P. Morgan their favorable support in disputes between capital and labor, or local and interstate commerce. They tacitly acknowledged that Wall Street, rather than the White House, had executive control of the economy, with the legislative cooperation
of Congress and the judicial backing of the Supreme Court. This conservative alliance, forged after the Civil War, was intended to last well into the new century, if not forever. Senator Hanna was determined to protect it: “Let well enough alone!”

Roosevelt was too restless and too reform-minded to heed such a motto. On the other hand (to use his favorite phrase), he despised the theorists who advocated radical change. Not for him Eugene Debs’s vision of a society purged of aggression, with all citizens pooling their assets in a state of torpid
bonhomie
.
He tended toward a biological view of the common man as a brute—albeit capable, with encouragement, of self-refinement.
Years of sweaty acquaintance with cowboys, policemen, and soldiers had convinced him that their instincts were benign, that greater social efficiency was as much their desire as his. All they needed was enlightened leadership.

In a fundamental disagreement with Social Darwinist thinkers, Roosevelt condemned “that baleful law of natural selection which tells against the survival of some of the most desirable classes.” His own field studies, both scientific and political, had shown him how populous species, whose competition was ferocious, advanced more slowly than those whose selection was determined by reasonable numbers and controlled by certain laws of behavior. As with guinea pigs, so with Slavs; as with lions, so with Anglo-Saxons.