We’re a gr-reat people. We ar-re that. An’ th’ best
iv it is, we know we ar-re.
LATE ON THE AFTERNOON of 1 April 1903, a stranger in a slouch hat got off a train waterstopping at Altoona, Pennsylvania, and crunched up the wrong side of the track. Six gleaming private cars screened him from the crowd on the platform. Tilting his head back as he approached the locomotive, he called in a harsh, yodeling voice, “Will you take a passenger in there?”
The fireman stared down stupidly, so the stranger appealed to higher authority. “Mr. Engineer, I’d like to ride with you a few miles.” This time there was no mistaking the command in his voice. A second or two later, Theodore Roosevelt was in the cab, receiving sooty handshakes. He seated himself where he could pretend to be driving, and gazed eagerly ahead at the Alleghenies. The whistle blew, the throttle dipped, and the Pacific Coast Special clanked into motion, while the crowd waved and cried “Godspeed!” at its curtained caboose.
Free at last of Washington and the special session of the Senate (which had taken fifteen days to give him the treaty ratifications he demanded), Roosevelt was embarking on his much-delayed tour of the West. While in postponement, it had grown to the most ambitious presidential itinerary yet undertaken. During the next eight weeks, he was scheduled to travel fourteen thousand miles through twenty-five states, visiting nearly 150 towns and cities and giving an estimated two hundred speeches. Five major addresses, forming a review of his legislative and administrative achievements to date, lay snug in his traveling desk, along with something more formal to say at the dedication ceremonies of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. All the other speeches, unwritten, he would leave to inspirations of time and place. Twenty years of public speaking had taught him that provincial audiences would listen to anything as long as it was seasoned with local references.
The challenge awaiting him beyond the Alleghenies was enough to daunt a fit man, and Roosevelt was far from fit. His long struggle with Congress over race, regulation, and reciprocity, the emotional drain of Edith’s latest miscarriage, and the stress of entertaining fifteen thousand guests in the White House since last November had brought about a return of his childhood bronchial wheezings. He was further weakened by recent influenza and laryngitis. He longed for the dry healthfulness of the West, which had restored him so often in the past. As soon as he had delivered his five policy addresses, he planned a short vacation in Yellowstone National Park.
Reveling already in feelings of liberation, Roosevelt breathed coal smoke and mountain air for forty-nine miles. At Seward, he thanked the engineer for a “bully” trip, descended, and marched back down the length of his train. First, a baggage car; then theAtlantic, a club car heavy with wood and leather, plus a fully equipped barbershop; then the Gilsey diner, stocked with champagne and cigars; then the Senegal, a big Pullman carrying reporters, photographers, telegraphers, and Secret Service men; then theTexas, a compartmental sleeper for White House staff, and any guests Roosevelt might ask to ride along.
Last came the President’s own Elysian, seventy feet of solid mahogany, velvet plush, and sinkingly deep furniture. It had two sleeping chambers with brass bedsteads, two tiled bathrooms, a private kitchen run by the Pennsylvania Railroad’s star chef, a dining room, a stateroom with picture windows, and an airy rear platform for whistle-stop speeches. Whatever austerities Roosevelt looked forward to at Yellowstone, he would not lack for creature comforts now or afterward.
AT 8:50 THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, he stood in black tie and silk lapels on the stage of the Chicago Auditorium, waiting for a long roar of welcome to subside. “Mr. Chairman—Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen—” But the roar went on. President McKinley had never been cheered like this. Five thousand people overcrowded the hall. Even when they calmed, another horde outside the doors continued to shout, creating a bizarre echo effect as Roosevelt began to speak. His text, an affirmation of the Monroe Doctrine with special reference to Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia, featured his favorite “West African proverb,” except now the source was obscured, to make it more memorable and quotable:
There is a homely old adage which runs, Speak softly and carry a big stick: you will go far. If the American nation will speak softly, and yet build, and keep at a pitch of the highest training, a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.
This generated such loud applause as to suggest that the audience took his “adage” as aggressive, rather than cautionary. Actually, Roosevelt was trying to say that soft-spoken (even secret) diplomacy should be the priority of a civilization, as long as hardness—of moral resolve, of military might—lay back of it. Otherwise, inevitably, soft speech would sound like scared speech.
He reiterated his distaste for national “boasting and blustering.” In liberating Cuba and defusing the Venezuela crisis, the United States had proved herself to be idealistic rather than imperialistic, independent yet global-minded. Treaties negotiated by his Administration guaranteed that Americans alone would build and defend the Panama Canal; bills initiated by him had provided the necessary money and warships. But true, hemispheric security in a rearming world would require a much larger fleet than that currently envisaged by Congress. “If we have such a Navy—if we keep on building it up—we may rest assured … that no foreign power will ever quarrel with us about the Monroe Doctrine.”
THE PRESIDENT INVITED some of his old Chicago cronies to join him for supper at his hotel. Herman Kohlsaat and the financier Charles G. Dawes arrived first, and were at once irradiated in Rooseveltian warmth. But as the reception proceeded and more and more “friends” crowded the room, they found themselves edged toward the crockery and spoons. Roosevelt continued to beam indiscriminately upon all comers, a searchlight picking out vessels of any size. Later, Dawes the diarist wrote:
His hearty greetings are simply the natural results of his own good spirits and splendid vitality.… He has no “blind side.” … He seeks to wield power—not to avoid wielding it. He apparently loves everybody and nobody—both at once—everything and everybody being subordinated to his desire to keep the approbation of the public—not simply for the sake of that approbation but for the sake of that right-doing as well, which brings it.
The Chicago Tribune’s front-page headline the next morning ran: SPEAK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG STICK, SAYS ROOSEVELT. Within hours, baseball bats and rough-hewn clubs waved over the heads of onlookers along the presidential trail.
In Milwaukee’s Plankinton House, Roosevelt reviewed his trust policy at a dinner for local merchants and manufacturers. Heavy with sausages and schnapps, they tried to guess where he stood on the conservative/radical issues now dividing Wisconsin Republicans. His balanced phrases gave them no help. “We are not in the least against wealth … nor yet for the demagogic agitator … on the contrary … on the other hand … the alternative is …”
The grinning equivocations went on and on, wreathing through cigar smoke and sweet wine fumes, while smilax, asparagus vines, and American Beauty roses intertwined above his head, and a thousand lightbulbs drowsily heated the room. Champagne was served. Now the President was beating time to a German Trinklied, and joining in chorus after chorus:
Er lebe hoch! Er lebe hoch!
Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!
Further roars of “Hoch!” followed him as his train pulled out of the station. “Good song, that!” he shouted, and waved till darkness swallowed him up.
TARIFF POLICY IN ST. PAUL. Labor policy in Sioux Falls. Philippines policy in Fargo.… Roosevelt arrived at Bismarck, North Dakota, toward sunset on 7 April, and saw, opening out beyond the Missouri, the windswept landscape of his youth. Great balls of thistle spooled across the prairie. He gazed around him, visibly relaxing. “Good to breathe this free Western air again.”
He ate a barbecued-ox sandwich and drank a mug of cider, then returned to his train. Two of his old Badlands buddies, Sylvane and Joe Ferris, were waiting on the other side of the water, at Mandan. They climbed aboard the Elysian, their faces solemn with excitement.
For the next two hours, Roosevelt entertained them as the flat grassland swayed in his windows. He effortlessly recalled places and scenes, even the names of horses and dogs they had forgotten. At Dickinson, he manifested himself as a sort of deus ex machinato people who remembered him as a reedy young ranchman, running along the tops of cattle cars and jabbing at steers with a pole.
When the train drew near the Badlands, darkness already had descended. The President went onto his rear platform and watched coulees etch themselves into the grassland, black out of silver, like a giant printer’s block. Medora lay in the deepest cut of all, a clutch of houses by the sand-choked Little Missouri. Here, twenty years before, he had come to shoot his first buffalo, and found himself “at heart as much a Westerner as an Easterner.” But this time he did not have to drag his duffel bag alone across the sage. And the entire population of the Badlands, as far as he could see, had gathered to welcome him.
Joe Ferris was upset that Roosevelt would not take his old pony, Manitou, for a gallop through the buttes; security forbade it. The President stayed in Medora no longer than it took to say a few words, shake every hand, and endure some fond, erroneous reminiscences. Then he was on his way again, leaving the disappointed populace to cheer itself up with a dance. Why had he looked so stern, why had he not stayed the night?
Perhaps he sought to protect some dreamy nostalgia from present scrutiny. The free range of twenty years before was gone. He did not have to dwell on its eroded green and barbed-wire entanglements. Nor need he ever return.
Night shrouded the Château de Morès, home of his long-dead ranching rival; shrouded the ruins of his log house in the Elkhorn bottom; shrouded Nolan’s Hotel in Wibaux, Montana, where he had once knocked out the drunken bully who had called him “Four Eyes.” The train sped across Montana, hauling him away from what he still thought of as “Dakota.” No North and South then!
It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West.… It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lovely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman. It was a land of scattered ranches, of herds of long-horned cattle, and reckless riders who unmoved looked in the eyes of life or of death. In that land we lived a free and hardy life, with horse and with rifle. We worked under the scorching midsummer sun, when the wide plains shimmered and wavered in the heat; and we knew the freezing misery of riding night guard round the cattle in the late fall round-up. In the soft springtime the stars were glorious in our eyes each night before we fell asleep; and in the winter we rode through blinding blizzards, when the driven snow-dust burnt our faces.… We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst; and we saw men die violent deaths as they worked among the horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another; but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.
Shortly after noon on 8 April, Roosevelt found himself in Gardiner, Montana, at the entrance to Yellowstone Canyon. The park was not yet open for the season. Ten-foot drifts of snow glared in the Rockies. He looked forward to spending two therapeutic weeks here, before continuing with his tour.
When he emerged from his car, he was already wearing full riding gear and a Western hat. He was followed by a short, white-bearded, instantly recognizable figure: the wildlife writer John Burroughs, revered by millions of Americans for his sentimental essays on nature. Affable, placid, and malleable, “Oom John” had been invited along as a walking advertisement that the President would kill no animals in Yellowstone.
They were greeted by the park superintendent, Major John Pitcher, a small escort of cavalrymen, and some mule carts loaded with camping equipment. Roosevelt swung joyfully up onto a waiting gray stallion, while Burroughs, who had not ridden a horse in forty years, was helped into one of the carts.
“By the way, Mr. President,” Pitcher said as they rode through the gates, “an old friend of yours named Bill Jones has been very anxious to see you, but I am sorry to say that he has got so drunk that we had to take him out into the sage brush.”
Hell-Roaring Bill Jones! He of the happy triggers, the alkali thirst, and the transcendental cussing!
“I will try to have him meet you before we leave the park,” Pitcher promised. A guide led the way down the canyon, and Roosevelt passed out of sight. Reporters, forbidden to follow, were left hanging round the sidelined train, wondering what stories they could file for the next fifteen days.
A FEW HOURS AFTER the President disappeared, flash news reached Gardiner. Four judges of the United States Eighth Circuit Court in St. Louis had just upheld Roosevelt’s suit against the Northern Securities Company. The opinion came as a shock to most Americans, after more than a year of languid legal proceedings. It showed how the new Expedition Act had strengthened antitrust law. The court had ruled unanimously, in an astonishingly narrow interpretation of the Sherman Act, that mere power of a combination to restrain trade was earnest of intent, whether or not the power was exercised by its holding company.
“If this decision is upheld by the Supreme Court,” James J. Hill was quoted as saying, “no less than eighty-five percent of the railroad systems of the United States will be up in the air.”
William Loeb asked a soldier to hurry word of the court’s ruling along the President’s trail. No reply came back from the silent mountains.
THE NORTHERN SECURITIES opinion was Roosevelt’s fourth political victory in fewer than four weeks. He had also succeeded in winning reciprocity for Cuba, digging rights in Panama, and an equitable arbitration award for last winter’s striking miners. (Their wages had, as expected, been raised 10 percent by the Anthracite Coal Commission.) All these decisions, except the Commission’s, were subject to review: the Cuban treaty by the House of Representatives, the Panama Canal Treaty by the Colombian Senate, and the Circuit Court ruling by the Supreme Court. But America’s perennial flux and reflux of power from the executive branch to the legislative and back again seemed to have turned in his favor.
That did not mean it was anywhere near a full resurgence. His unpopularity on Capitol Hill and Wall Street—as a Chief Executive prone to rash impulses, self-advertisement, and fiscal irresponsibility—was extreme. Remarkably, though, the nation at large (outside the white South) regarded him quite differently, as political observers were everywhere conceding, not without bemusement. One of the most articulate attempts to explain this dichotomy of opinion was that of Henry Herzberg, a New Yorker writing for the Charleston News. He ascribed the paradox to Roosevelt’s own “psychology of inconsistency,” illogically reflecting both an aristocratic will and a democratic desire to please. Hence, the President was both coordinated and conflicted, inimitable yet representative of a wide range of new, hard-to-define trends:
Such a bosom of necessity must surge with overleaping ambition. There are passions ever impelling some righteous action and promptings which ever restrain these moral impulses.
Mr. Roosevelt is bold and fearless yet timid and wary; he is ambitious and striving, but circumspect and cautious. He is imperious in mind, but thoughtful and considerate in action. Whether or not these temperamental traits of Mr. Roosevelt give us a picture of the typical President of the future is doubtful, but certain it is that the nervous energy, the irrepressible ambition, the fascinating elements which predominate in Mr. Roosevelt’s nature represent the American character now in the making.
ROOSEVELT WAS NO stranger to Yellowstone, having first visited it in 1886. As founder of the Boone & Crockett Club, he had worked to save it from vandalism and exploitation, and he took pride in having been a motive force behind the National Park Protective Act of 1894. Only last year he had won an appropriation that made the Yellowstone bison wards of the federal government. Now he could enjoy the benefits of his work in solitude.
Or near solitude. John Burroughs caught cold the first day, and remained behind at Mammoth Hot Springs; but Major Pitcher stuck tight. Roosevelt bided his time. He passed several sociable nights with the superintendent, eating sardines and hardtack round the campfire, and helping wash up in the icy river. Each day, he rode deeper into the park, while snow dust boiled in the peaks and mountain sheep stared down at him, half veiled by their own breath. He feasted his eyes, long starved for the sight of game, on pronghorns and buffalo and black-tailed deer. A giant herd of elk enthralled him for four hours. His ear caught the counterpoint between a solitaire singing at the top of a canyon, and a water-ouzel perched a thousand feet below.
On 12 April, he suddenly said that, as it was Sunday, he wished to “take a walk alone.” Pitcher felt unable to deny a President’s desire for private devotion, so Roosevelt marched happily off and for six hours worshiped God in his own fashion.
There were rumors, later on, of rifle shots echoing in the park, and Roosevelt was definitely seen with a cartridge bruise on his cheek. But Pitcher announced that the President had merely indulged in “a little target shooting” back at camp and been wounded by an ejected shell.
Burroughs, who had rejoined the party, confirmed this. Roosevelt was sincere in his vow not to kill local wildlife, even such permissible prey as coyotes and cougar. He still lusted, or thought that he lusted, after big game, but nowadays it was the pursuit, rather than the quarry, that interested him. A new protective sensibility was notable in his account of these days in Yellowstone:
Every man who appreciates the majesty and beauty of the wilderness and of wild life, should strike hands with the far-sighted men who wish to preserve our material resources, in the effort to keep our forests and our game-beasts, game-birds, and game-fish—indeed, all the living creatures of prairie and woodland and seashore—from wanton destruction. Above all, we should recognize that the effort toward this end is essentially a democratic movement. It is entirely within our power as a nation to preserve large tracts of wilderness, which are valueless for agricultural purposes and unfit for settlement, as playgrounds for rich and poor alike.… But this end can only be achieved by wise laws and by a resolute enforcement of the laws.
Roosevelt expressed contempt for “the kind of game butcher … who leaves deer and ducks and prairie chickens to rot,” worse still market hunters and rich dilettantes who hunted by proxy.
Only once did he weaken, when a four-inch meadow mouse hopped across his path. He slew it in the interest of science, and sent the skin and skull, with tabulations, to the United States Biological Survey.
BACK IN GARDINER, bored members of the White House press detail fished, scavenged for elk antlers, and got drunk with mountain men. Their thirdhand reports of Roosevelt’s activities began to sound slightly testy. When word came that the President had watched Old Faithful erupting and its mist turning to hail as it fell, the New York World man called it “his only rival in intermittent but continuous spouting.”
Finally, on 24 April, a cloud of dust in the foothills signaled the President’s return. The train was shunted out of its siding, and Hell-Roaring Bill Jones brought in from the sagebrush, stark sober for the first time in years, for a quick reunion. Before leaving, Roosevelt dedicated a new arched gateway to the park, calling Yellowstone a “veritable wonderland,” and noted that Europeans seemed more interested in visiting it than were most Americans. He spoke feelingly about forest reserves, buffalo breeding, and Yellowstone’s “essential democracy.” Then, with a flash of teeth (his face dark tan with snow burn, his nose peeling), he swung aboard the Elysian and was gone. The train moved northeast, then southeast, descending to levels of hotter, thicker air.
On the flatland, it accelerated to maximum speed, crossing the Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska state lines in a single day. The succession of prairie hamlets blurred into a dreary pattern to travelers on board. Always a long, low depot, red-painted and sand-coated, with wide, rakish eaves; always a concentration of buggies and carts, iron filings magnetized on the papersheet plain; Roosevelt running out onto his platform and waving, sometimes with his table napkin. (“Those children wanted to see the President of the United States, and I could not disappoint them.”) Then the cheers suddenly stifled, as if a door had been slammed, and in dwindling retrospect, the sight of families turning their backs against whorls of white dust.
At whistle-stops, always the local dignitaries, with their furrowed eyes and crooked medals and drooping trousers, silver cornets playing “Hail to the Chief,” whiskery veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, a bobbing sea of bowlers and bonnets, and invariably, boys on telegraph poles screeching, “How are you, Teddy?”
Just as invariably, the President would rehearse his litany of McGuffey Reader virtues (“If I might give a word of advice to Omaha …”) until reporters no longer bothered to transcribe them. Only Roosevelt found new stimulation eight or ten times a day, thundering every platitude with the pleased air of having just discovered it. He was quite unapologetic: “Platitudes and iteration are necessary in order to hammer the truths and principles I advocate into people’s heads.”
Indistinguishable as the whistle-stops soon became, even to him, each was supreme drama to a little audience that had been looking forward to it for weeks. Some buggy travelers had come one hundred miles to perch on the platform and peer endlessly at the horizon, waiting for a smudge of smoke to signal that “Teddy” was imminent. Then a speck growing in the smoke, a crescendo of wind and wheels, a great locomotive advancing—too fast, surely, to stop? Despair as it indeed keeps moving. Relief when it halts, after all, under the water tank one hundred yards down the track. A general stampede toward the Elysian, where Roosevelt stands grinning in frock coat and vest. He leans over the rail, pumping hands and tousling cowlicks. “Dee-lighted!” Rearing back, he begins to orate, punctuating every sentence with palm-smacks and dental percussion, while his listeners stand mesmerized. The engine bell rings; the train jerks forward. Another grin, and a farewell wave. The Cheshire-cat flash of those teeth floats in the sky long after the train is a speck again.
“WHEREVER HE WENT, INFANTS WERE BRANDISHED AT HIM.”
The President on his cross-country tour, 1903
THE “ESSENTIAL DEMOCRACY” of Yellowstone—its lesson that government can both serve and conserve, and that future generations had as much right to natural resources as contemporaries—remained on Roosevelt’s mind as he journeyed through America’s heartland. No longer was he the patrician politician addressing high affairs of state in Eastern cities. He was, at least for the moment, a man of the earth, a cuddler of babies. Wherever he went, infants were brandished at him, wiggling representatives of the next generation. His robust views on childbearing (“Three cheers for Mr. and Mrs. Bower and their really satisfactory American family of twelve children!”) were bolstered by spaces so wide and soil so deeply fertile. With the irrigation schemes he had signed into law, these plains might one day support a hundred million people.
In Iowa’s fecund fields, glistening with spring rain, women in faded Mother Hubbard gowns crowded around his car, their arms bursting with progeny. A platoon of boys and girls hoisted a banner over their heads: NO “RACE SUICIDE” HERE, TEDDY! It was another of Roosevelt’s catchphrases, broadly biological rather than ethnic in its implications. Bachelors declining to marry, urban women repressing their natural reproductive function, denied America the seed she needed to grow and be great. Ripeness was all. “I congratulate you upon your crops,” he said, smiling around at clustered families, “but the best crop is the crop of children.”
Some of his new democracy, and all of his charm, was evident in the west Kansas cow town of Sharon Springs, where on 3 May he attended divine service:
There were two very nice little girls standing in the aisle beside me. I invited them in and we all three sang out of the same hymn book. They were in their Sunday best and their brown sunburned little arms and faces had been scrubbed till they almost shone. It was a very kindly, homely country congregation … all of them looking well-to-do and prosperous in a way hardly warranted as it seemed to me by the eaten-off, wired-fence-enclosed, shortgrass ranges of the dry plains roundabout. When church was over I shook hands with the three preachers and all the congregation, whose buggies, ranch wagons, and dispirited-looking saddle ponies were tied to everything available in the village. I got a ride myself in the afternoon, and on returning found that all the population that had not left had gathered solemnly around the train. Among the rest there was a little girl who asked me if I would like a baby badger which she said her brother Josiah had just caught. I said I would, and an hour or two later the badger turned up from the little girl’s father’s ranch some three miles out of town. The little girl had several other little girls with her, all in clean starched Sunday clothes and ribbon-tied pigtails. One of them was the sheriff’s daughter, and I saw her nudging the sheriff, trying to get him to make some request, which he refused. So I asked what it was and found that the seven little girls were exceedingly anxious to see the inside of my car, and accordingly I took them all in. The interior arrangements struck them as being literally palatial—magnificent.… I liked the little girls so much that I regretted having nothing to give them but flowers; and they reciprocated my liking with warm western enthusiasm, for they hung about the car until it grew dark, either waving their hands to me or kissing their hands to me whenever I appeared at the window.
The baby badger, which reminded Roosevelt of “a small mattress, with a leg at each corner,” was christened Josiah, and given well-ventilated accommodations on the Elysian’s front platform. From this vantage point he was able to survey an unrolling landscape as the train proceeded to Denver and then bent south along the line of the Rockies.
NEW MEXICO TERRITORY opened up ahead, and Roosevelt began to encounter a wilder species of western fauna: Rough Rider veterans. Importunate, noisy, and side-armed, they demanded preferential access to their Colonel, even in small desert towns at 3:00 in the morning.
|
1ST VOICE |
Why don’t the son of a gun come out? (Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!) |
|
2ND VOICE |
Three cheers for President Roosevelt! (Bang! Bang! Bang!) |
At Santa Fe, he was corralled by his former Mexican-American sergeant into serving as godfather at the baptism of Theodore Roosevelt Armijo in an old adobe church. Candle in hand, looking at the back of the father’s swarthy neck, he reflected that “his ancestors and mine had doubtless fought in the Netherlands in the days of Alva and Parma, just about the time this mission was built and before a Dutch or English colonist had set foot on American soil.”
In the plaza afterward, Roosevelt spoke seriously on his new theme, the conservation of natural resources. “This is a great grazing state. Because of the importance of the grazing industry I wish to bespeak your support for the preservation in proper shape of the forest reserves of the state.” He was conscious of opposition in his audience, many of whom were sheep farmers. As such, they must be aware that their flocks destroyed forest growth: he tried to make them understand that forest pasturage, restricted and supplemented by irrigation schemes, could be self-renewing. They stood quietly in the hot square, cowboys in pale sombreros, muscular Mexican women in lace tea gowns, bandy-legged soldiers in khaki, priests in black-and-red cloaks, plump, prosperous-looking shepherds, and stockmen frowning at his words.
A similar audience awaited Roosevelt on the edge of the Grand Canyon. The stupendous chasm, which he had not seen before, powerfully affected him. “I don’t exactly know what words to use in describing it. It is beautiful and terrible and unearthly.” He was relieved to hear that the Santa Fe Railroad had rejected a plan to build a hotel at Rowe’s Point. “Leave it as it is,” he implored the crowd. “You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it—keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you.”
Those last words were to become a recurrent theme in Roosevelt’s speeches as he crossed the Sierras and descended the Pacific slope. All the landscape was new to him now. He exulted in California’s lush, feminine fertility. Here, literally blossoming around him, was desert made flowerland by irrigation: houses embowered with roses and grapevines, deep orchards, acres of golden poppies, wildflowers speckling the sage in pointillistic patterns. Here, he told himself, “a new type” of American child was growing up, indigenous as the flowers, half familiar yet exotic. New York seemed impossibly far away; Europe a historical memory. “I felt as if I was seeing Provence in the making—that is, Provence changed by, and in its turn changing, a northern race.”
Fifteen hundred children and millions of flowers greeted him at Redlands on 7 May. The roadway under his carriage was so thick with rose petals that he rolled along soundlessly and fragrantly. When he arrived in front of the Casaloma Hotel, the children serenaded him; they pelted him with blossoms as he stood up to speak. Again he talked of irrigation, of conservation, and of procreation. There were yet more children, and roses, at San Bernardino and Riverside and Pasadena (their upthrust arms, holding bouquets, seemed to undulate in the breeze of his rhetoric). Roosevelt became slightly incoherent, as if drunk on the scented air: “this plain tilled by the hand of man as you have never tilled it until it blossomed like the rose … blossomed as I never dreamed in my life that the rose could blossom …”
But the horticultural climax to his visit was yet to come. He reached Los Angeles on 8 May, in time for the final parade of the Fiesta de Flores. Looking dazed, he sat on the reviewing stand as marshals rode by, perched on saddle blankets apparently woven from carnations and roses. They were followed by a barren float piled with sand and bones: the desert as cadaver, unlamented. Then came a tableau of efflorescent California: waterworks spraying mist over seedlings and grain; harsh sunflowers yielding to lilies and pansies; citrus and olive groves jiggling with fruit. The floats, drawn by ropes and chains of flowers, became ever more extravagant: a thirty-foot mobile garden, courtesy of the Los Angeles Parks Department; an eight-foot pyramid of white carnations, symbolizing the purity of organized labor; a submarine of scarlet geraniums; and a flower globe of the Earth, with the United States picked out in yellow daisies, between oceans of undulating fern. Amid all the color and luxuriance, nubile girls in white waved prettily, to the President’s obvious pleasure.
For four hours, the child California bloomed like a rose before him.
THE SIGHT OF AN enormous redwood towering above Santa Cruz three days later was expected also to enchant the President. But he frowned at its petticoat of calling cards and advertising posters. “Those cards pinned up on that tree give an air of the ridiculous to this majestic grove,” he said angrily. He began to lecture bystanders. “Do keep these trees, keep all the wonderful scenery of this wonderful state unmarred by vandalism or the folly of man.” Refusing an official escort, he went to cool off in a nearby grove. When he came back, the cards had been taken down.
“There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty,” Roosevelt declared the next day. He was speaking at Stanford University, whose architecture and setting, half Pacific, half Mediterranean, enhanced his impression of California as the loveliest of states.
In a major conservation address, he urged the students to respect their natural heritage. “I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates.” This was not to say that most of the North American forest could not be “used” scientifically and efficiently, if government exerted its just powers. Properly protected, woodlands and grasslands would function forever as spongelike sources of water for irrigation, making immense tracts of arable land available to homesteaders under the national reclamation program. “Water speculation”—rentals charged by the private owners of dams and streams in semidesert areas—would dwindle as public reservoirs swelled. Monopoly, whether of wood or water, would be confounded, and land laws refined to their original democratic purpose.
“We have a right to expect that the best trained, the best educated men on the Pacific Slope, the Rocky Mountains and great plains states will take the lead in the preservation and right use of the forests,” Roosevelt roared. He did not add that he had quietly expanded the federal woodland by one third in his first year as President. Such a boast would only antagonize western reactionaries.
CONCERN MOUNTED, MEANWHILE, behind boardroom doors on Wall Street that Theodore Roosevelt was “an extremely dangerous man.” For all his lip service at Milwaukee and St. Paul to laissez-faire ways, he seemed to stand, in the eyes of Henry W. Taft, for “a pretty pronounced type of socialism.” He had shown prejudice against railroad owners, beef packers, and coal-mine operators; he had won a referral of Knox’s Northern Securities suit to the Supreme Court, and stirred up hell in the South; now he was protecting foliage and threatening to strengthen the public-land laws. His professed truce with the trusts was likely to last as long as it took him to win the Presidency in his own right. Once he got the executive bit between those grinning, biting teeth, there would be no holding him.
A group of financiers, asked whom they would prefer to see as the Republican nominee in 1904, replied almost unanimously, “Somebody like Hanna.”
MORE THAN 2,500 MILES, and a greater distance between prejudice and perception, prevented Roosevelt’s capitalist critics from seeing him address a conservative audience of “citizens of the Golden State” at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on 12 May. Had they done so, they might have been reassured as to his fiscal soundness. Standing in white tie over a table spread with cloth of gold, beneath hanging golden garlands two feet thick, he accepted a gold loving cup and reverently invoked the need for “a gold basis” for the nation’s currency. His subsequent call for a more elastic money supply could have been written by Senator Aldrich, and indeed possibly was.
The next morning, at Mechanics Pavilion, Roosevelt changed guises, reverting to the exultant imperialism of his prepresidential days. He looked toward the Orient and saw nothing but an American ocean, veined with American cables and crisscrossed by American freighters, the largest in the world:
Before I came to the Pacific Slope I was an expansionist [applause], and after having been here I fail to understand how any man, convinced of his country’s greatness … can be anything but an expansionist [applause]. In the century that is opening the commerce and the command of the Pacific will be factors of incalculable moment in the world’s history.
He reviewed the rise and fall of seagoing civilizations from the Phoenicians and Carthaginians to the more recent navies and the merchant marines of northern conquerors. California—America’s new Greece—must now rise to the commercial and cultural challenges of “the greatest of all the seas.” The United States as a whole must follow its westward destiny until West and East merged. This meant a new global strategy:
In the South Seas the great commonwealth of Australia has sprung into being. Japan, shaking off the lethargy of centuries, has taken her rank among civilized, modern powers. European nations have seated themselves along the eastern coast of Asia, while China by her misfortunes has given us an object-lesson in the utter folly of attempting to exist as a nation at all, if both rich and defenseless.
The audience understood Roosevelt’s last reference very well. He was bringing his historical survey right up-to-date. Current newspapers agitatedly reported a crisis situation in the Chinese province of Manchuria. Tsar Nicholas II, whose forces had occupied that industrialized region for five years, had failed to honor a promised withdrawal timetable. Now Russian officials were conspiring to keep Manchurian ports closed to foreign trade—a clear breach of Secretary Hay’s Open Door policy in the Far East—while profiting themselves from mining and shipping concessions. And much to Japanese alarm, the Trans-Siberian Railway, with its seemingly limitless capability to bring in military reinforcements, was nearing completion.
In other disturbing Russian news, dispatches reported a mass killing of Jews in the Bessarabian city of Kishinev. Casualty figures “worse than the censor will permit to publish” were leaking out. The American Hebrew’s estimate was one hundred and twenty killed and five hundred injured in anti-Semitic riots; the Tsar himself was rumored to have ordered the slaughter.
For the first time, popular unease was palpable about the ever-burgeoning empire in the East. It loomed beyond the haze of the Pacific horizon, menacing primarily Japan. American hearts warmed to that warlike little power, if only because it stood as a bulwark for the Philippines.
Roosevelt was constrained, as President, from criticizing the domestic policies of another sovereign state. But he made clear that he would not tolerate Russian aggression in the Pacific. “The inevitable march of events gave us the control of the Philippine Islands at a time so opportune that it may without irreverence be called providential,” he said. “Unless we show ourselves weak, unless we show ourselves degenerate sons of the sires from whose loins we sprang, we must go on with the work we have undertaken—” Applause interrupted him. “We infinitely desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war.”
After making his standard calls for muscular morality at home and a big navy abroad, he concluded on a note of exaltation rare even for him:
Our place as a nation is and must be with the nations that have left indelibly their impress on the centuries.… Those that did not expand passed away and left not so much as a memory behind them. The Roman expanded, the Roman passed away, but the Roman has left the print of his law, of his language, of his masterful ability in administration, deep in the world’s history, deeply imprinted in the character of the races that came after him. I ask that this people rise level to the greatness of its opportunities.
TWO EVENINGS LATER, Roosevelt lay high in Yosemite, on a bed of fragrant pine needles, looking up at the sky. On all sides soared the cinnamon-colored shafts of sequoia trees. He had the feeling that he was “lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hands of man.” Birdsong filled the arches as the sky darkened. He identified the treble tessitura of hermit thrushes, and thought it “an appropriate choir for such a place of worship.”
“A PLACE OF WORSHIP.”
Roosevelt at Glacier Point, Yosemite, May 1903
His companion was John Muir, the glaciologist, naturalist, and founder of the Sierra Club. Since early youth, Muir had roamed Yosemite, carrying little more than “some bread and tea in an old sock,” returning to civilization as infrequently as possible. At sixty-five, he knew more about the park, and loved it more passionately, than any other American. Roosevelt had booked his exclusive services well in advance: “I want to drop politics absolutely for four days, and just be out in the open with you.”
The President was disappointed to find that Muir had no ear for bird music. He was Wordsworthian rather than Keatsian, revering only “rocks and stones and trees.” Garrulous, erudite, and wall-eyed, he talked a pure form of preservation that Roosevelt was not used to hearing. Muir had no patience with the utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number” policy of Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, the President’s very good friend. Conservation favored business at the expense of nature, and property rather than beauty. “The ‘greatest number’ is too often found to be number one.”
Whatever resonance such views found in the President’s own developing awareness of the “democracy” of national parks, he would have preferred to hear less of Muir and more of the hermit thrushes. Eventually he fell asleep, in the piney air. Another bird chorale saluted him at dawn.
For the next forty-eight hours, the boy in Roosevelt, never quite suppressed, reveled in his wild surroundings. “This is bully!” he yelled, when Muir burned a dead tree for him and the sparks hurtled skyward. After another night out, he awoke at Glacier Point, and was intrigued to find himself buried under four inches of snow. “This is bullier!”
On 17 May he came down from the peaks in dusty khakis, his eyes sparkling. “I never felt better in my life!” Muir, too, was elated, having confessedly fallen in love with the President’s “interesting, hearty and manly” personality. The substance of their camping conversations remained tacit, suggesting some philosophical difference on the subject of Gifford Pinchot. Muir won at least an immediate presidential order to extend the California forest through the Mount Shasta region, and a promise that Yosemite’s over-commercialized valley would be ceded back to the national park system. Roosevelt’s next conservation statement, on 19 May, was obstinately utilitarian, yet an eloquent plea later that day echoed the preservationist sentiments he had expressed at the Grand Canyon. Speaking in Sacramento, he begged Californians to preserve their “marvelous natural resources” unimpaired. “We are not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last through the ages.”
ON THE MORNING of 23 May, Roosevelt sailed across Puget Sound toward Seattle, the apogee of his great swing across the nation. “Well, thank heaven,” he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge, “tomorrow I turn my face toward the East.” He suddenly, with a returning traveler’s sense of anticlimax, felt as spent as the fireworks fizzling in the sun over Alki Point. “I am so jaded and nerve-weary and bored that it almost seems as if I could not go through the remainder of the speech-making.”
Seattle neither knew nor cared about the President’s tiredness. From the moment he stepped ashore, inexorable hands nudged him from platform to platform, and fifty thousand worshipers drained him with their adoration. It was late at night before he fell into bed at the Hotel Washington, only to be shaken awake by William Loeb. He had forgotten to address a banquet group downstairs: he must get up, don full evening dress, step out on the balcony, apologize, and “say a few words.” When he retired for the second time, Roosevelt had to struggle with a problem new to him: insomnia.
Fortunately for his rest, a telegram dispatched that afternoon from Cleveland did not reach him until the next morning:
THE ISSUE WHICH HAS BEEN FORCED ON ME IN THE MATTER OF OUR STATE CONVENTION THIS YEAR ENDORSING YOU FOR THE REPUBLICAN NOMINATION NEXT YEAR HAS COME IN A WAY WHICH MAKES IT NECESSARY FOR ME TO OPPOSE SUCH A RESOLUTION. WHEN YOU KNOW ALL THE FACTS I AM SURE YOU WILL APPROVE MY COURSE.
M. A. HANNA
Roosevelt, fatigue forgotten, pondered this telegram excitedly as his train wound east to Walla Walla. He felt in the mood for “a knockdown and dragout fight with Hanna and the whole Wall Street crowd.” Fate had placed a big political stick in his hands.
Fate—or Joseph B. Foraker. Ohio’s wily, irascible senior Senator had for years been plotting to wrest control of the state Republican Party from Hanna. That organization was about to have its annual convention, and Foraker had issued a surprise demand that the state party endorse Theodore Roosevelt for President, one year early. This put Hanna in the impossible position of having to deny the resolution without seeming to be against the President’s nomination. Alternatively, if he confirmed it, he would seem to be engineering an endorsement for himself. Either way, he stood to lose presidential favor, while Foraker would gain power and prestige—and a possible chance at the GOP nomination in 1908.
Roosevelt saw an irresistible chance to play one Senator off the other. Hanna was clearly appealing for help. He was not in good health. If Wall Street was not so determined to have “somebody like Hanna” in the White House, he would surely have disclaimed any presidential ambition whatsoever. Roosevelt dictated a curtly formal reply, and released it to the press at Walla Walla:
YOUR TELEGRAM RECEIVED. I HAVE NOT ASKED ANY MAN FOR HIS SUPPORT. I HAVE HAD NOTHING WHATEVER TO DO WITH RAISING THE ISSUE. INASMUCH AS IT HAS BEEN RAISED OF COURSE THOSE WHO FAVOR MY ADMINISTRATION AND MY NOMINATION WILL FAVOR ENDORSING BOTH AND THOSE WHO DO NOT WILL OPPOSE.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Hanna had no choice but to wire back that “in view of the sentiment expressed” he would not after all oppose the resolution.
Thus the President added a fifteenth endorsement to the list of states already committed to him, forced neutrality upon Hanna, gratified Foraker, and banished his own “nerve-weariness.” Benisonlike, the lilacs and locusts of Walla Walla enveloped him in their fragrance. “This whole incident,” he wrote to Lodge, “has entirely revived me.”
ROOSEVELT ARRIVED AT BUTTE, Montana, on 27 May to find that mining city divided, like the Ohio GOP, into two warring political factions. Neither bore much relation to national party lines, and both were eager to welcome him. He saw at once that the crowd “was filled with whooping enthusiasm and every kind of whiskey,” and that a riot might ensue if either camp felt slighted. Modeling his conduct on that of Mr. Pickwick at Eatanswill, he presented an equable face to both Buffs and Blues, addressing the former in the afternoon and the latter in the evening. He solved the problem of apportioning dinner tickets by asking Butte’s enormous top-hatted mayor to issue exactly one hundred seats on a fifty-fifty basis. Satisfied, the factions respectively presented him with a silvered copper vase and a silver loving cup. Roosevelt was touched by a third gift, a pair of silver scales from Butte’s black minority. “This,” he said, lifting it delicately aloft, “comes in the shape I appreciate—the scales of justice held even.”
He waited until the applause died. “I fought beside the colored troops at Santiago, and I hold that if a man is good enough to be put up and shot at then he is good enough—” Again he paused, while the crowd held its breath, wondering whether he was going to risk violence with a racially charged remark. Scattered Negroes, some Swedes, two Austrian families, a Chinese, and an Australian jostled with polyglot miners, Rough Riders, and dangerous-looking “rednecks” from the Coeur d’Alene. Roosevelt’s old friend Seth Bullock of Deadwood, South Dakota, stood guard with a long .44.
“—for me to do what I can to get him a square deal,” said the President.
The phrase sank in, and the crowd relaxed.
“Nobody made a motion to attack me,” Roosevelt wrote John Hay afterward.
My address was felt to be honor enough for one hotel, and the dinner was given in the other. When the dinner was announced the mayor led me in—or to speak more accurately, tucked me under one arm and lifted me partially off the ground, so that I felt as if I looked like one of those limp dolls with dangling legs carried around by small children, like Mary Jane in “The Golliwogs,” for instance. As soon as we got in the banquet hall and sat at the head of the table the mayor hammered lustily with the handle of his knife and announced, “Waiter, bring on the feed!” Then in a spirit of pure kindliness he added, “Waiter, pull up the curtains and let the people see the President eat!”—but to this I objected. The dinner was soon in full swing.… Of the hundred men who were my hosts I suppose at least half had killed their man in private war, or had striven to encompass the assassination of an enemy. They had fought one another with reckless ferocity. They had been allies and enemies in every kind of business scheme, and companions in brutal revelry. As they drank great goblets of wine the sweat glistened on their hard, strong, crafty faces. They looked as if they had come out of the pictures in Aubrey Beardsley’s Yellow Book.
Roosevelt left prudently early. He stood on the rear platform of the Elysian as his train pulled out of town, and the citizens of Butte howled and fired shots into the air. They would doubtless continue to celebrate all night.
After recanvassing Idaho, the train headed south to Salt Lake City, then east, recrossing the plains of Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois. May turned to June. Day after day, freak rainstorms beat down. On either side of the tracks, the vast Midwest lay flat and flooded, halved by Roosevelt’s trajectory. Here, in the heartland of the country, was his political center of gravity. Ahead of him in the baggage car sat his silver scales, effortlessly maintaining their balance. The Negroes of Butte had chosen well. Nothing appealed to him more than the concept of equilibrium. Justice separating good and evil, power—“my hand on the lever”—regulating the conflicting interests of blacks and whites, Buffs and Blues, tycoons and tradesmen, the born and the unborn. The phrase he had coined en route, a square deal, was potent. He tried it again on 4 June, standing in the drizzle by Lincoln’s tomb. Cheers and applause resounded in the wet air.
He created one further magnificent image at Springfield Armory, as the sun lowered on the last day of his tour. Rhetorically, it was too strange, too poetic, to register on his audience; he seemed hardly to notice it himself, and never used it again. But after eight weeks of travel and 262 speeches, he could think of no more slogans, no positive platitudes. Blinking with exhaustion, he found only a compressed, negative metaphor for himself and the social forces he sought to mediate.
“Envy and arrogance,” said Roosevelt, “are the two opposite sides of the same black crystal.”
WHATEVER PRIVATE PERPLEXITY this suggested (did he see the Presidency, for all his efforts to fire it up, as something cold and dark at heart, merely reflecting outside passions?) was negated by male buffoonery that evening, as the train sped across Indiana. Roosevelt was sitting in his parlor with the Hoosier State’s quarrelsome senators, Charles W. Fairbanks and Albert J. Beveridge, when two reporters marched in, waggishly attired in top hats and frock coats. “Mr. President, we desire to present you the keys of our great and beautiful car. The freedom of the Gilsey is yours, sir.”
Roosevelt recalled that he had promised to accept the hospitality of the press on the final night of his tour. “My fellow Americans,” he cried, his voice choked with fake sobs, “I am deeply affected by this spontaneous welcome, this unparalleled and unprecedented greeting.” He allowed himself to be escorted forward. Fairbanks and Beveridge joined the general exodus of White House staff to the Gilsey.
As Roosevelt passed through the Senegal, two grinning black porters snapped to attention, saluting him with brooms. Hideous caricatures of “Teddy” lined the walls. A small group of cordoned-off reporters, pretending to be a welcoming crowd, cheered and clicked Kodaks. Roosevelt shook with laughter. “Well, this is bully!” He proceeded under an arch of spread trousers to his table in the Gilsey, where the menu sent him into further convulsions. It advertised “Haunch of Snow-fed Cinnabar Mountain Lion” and “Purée of Yosemite Mule,” and was footnoted: “Guests who find their wine too warm will notice an improvement after placing their glasses between any two Senators from the same state who happen to be present.”
The subsequent dinner was private, but leaks indicated that the President “talked a string and ate like a farmhand.”
He was in bed by midnight. Ohio rumbled by unseen in the small hours. Ahead, Pennsylvania’s hills waited for dawn. Barreling through blackness, the train twisted now left, now right.