ON THE DAY AFTER Roosevelt’s election, Wilbur and Orville Wright took their flying machine on a series of long, celebratory hops over Ohio. Farther west, other aviators vied for the St. Louis World’s Fair Grand Prize for Aeronautic Achievement. With less than a month to go before the exposition formally closed, the award—one hundred thousand dollars—seemed impossible of attainment, a chimera not unlike the nightly glow of one hundred thousand fairground lights trying to hold back the encroachment of the prairie.
Since the Brazilian birdman Alberto Santos-Dumont had arrived in St. Louis in June, only to have his long silk gasbag slashed while in storage, American “aero-planes,” airships, ornithopters, gliders, balloons, and kites had been lifting off in wobbly attempts to make three flights over a fifteen-mile, L-shaped course. Metallic lighter-than-air cylinders, pterodactyl-like contraptions flapping bamboo wings, aluminum-and-silk sky-cycles, and huge cigars and saucers and tetrahedrons defied gravity with varying success—most triumphantly the California Arrow, a dirigible that floated for thirty-seven minutes over the exhibition’s fluttering flags. If unable to perform the requisite L, it described many graceful Os, wheeling careless of the wind, and releasing, at two thousand feet, a pigeon that tired of flight long before it did.
Nobody won the Grand Prize, but various ascents advanced the frontiers of science. Three men in a balloon soared almost two miles high and sent down wireless messages in the first American demonstration of air-to-ground telegraphy. Two airship distance records were broken. And throughout the final weeks of the Fair, as the President of the United States prepared to visit, an effervescence of meteorological balloons rose until they burst, dropping little basketfuls of data under cones of silk.
HENRY ADAMS, who loved expositions as much as he hated politics, had visited St. Louis at the earliest opportunity. Stooped and sedentary at sixty-six, he was inspired less by the Fair’s awkward attempts at levitation than by its horizontal dynamic, the almost contemptuous way a small Midwestern city had turned its back on the Mississippi and scattered palaces across the plain, gilding them with dollars and bathing them with light, daring the distant world to come and save it from insolvency.
Adams saw such thin crowds, and such a consequent emptiness of exhibits and promenades, that he doubted the city fathers would recoup a third of their twenty or thirty million. Yet they seemed “quite drunk” with expectations of profit, as Roosevelt had been earlier in the year, at the height of his unpopularity with Congress. The Fair was schwärmerisch—visionary—and above all paradoxical in its crass commercialism and unstudied beauty. “One asked oneself whether this extravagance reflected the past or imaged the future; whether it was a creation of the old America or the promise of the new one.”
Both coming and going, Adams (who had not been that far west in a decade) was struck by the raw power pulsating from landscapes once agricultural, now industrial—steam engines and smokestacks dirtying the air and surrounding each town with a no-man’s-land of “discards.” Ever since confronting an enormous, silently whirring dynamo at the last World’s Fair—in Paris, four years before—he had been trying to formulate a dynamic theory of history that would index man’s progress (or regress) to the curve of power production. But the curve was now becoming so steep, and the progress (or, again, regress) so fast that Adams saw nothing ahead but an acceleration that threatened the law of inertia.
He had tried to show, in his just-completed study of medievalism, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, that the “conservative Christian” civilization of the preceding nineteen hundred years had been dominated by one centripetal, feminine, fertile image, the Virgin. She had erected all of Europe’s great cathedrals, humanized its laws, and inspired its family and social values. One did not have to be a Catholic, or for that matter a European, to look to her for comfort. But now the centrifugal, masculine, destructive Dynamo threatened the Virgin—and, more personally, Henry Adams’s whole worldview.
The settled life, the vis inertiae he had enjoyed since boyhood, whose blue blood and classical education gave him a sense of stability at rest, and of steady direction when advancing himself, must soon, apparently, change to a perpetual motion that was not so much forward as omnidirectional, and favored the less weighted members of society: the young, the rudely opportunistic, above all the nimble Jews. In which case, he and his beloved John Hay were bound to be thrown off while Roosevelt, the very personification of dynamism (and with something of a “Jew look,” come to think of it, in a strong light), spun St. Louis, and Washington, and the world, into a maelstrom beyond Adams’s power to control.
“The devil is whirling me round, in the shape of a grinning fiend with tusks and eye-glasses … faster and faster, and I can’t get off.”
ROOSEVELT GOT TO the World’s Fair just in time, on 26 November, as the commissioners were preparing to douse its lights. He came at the behest of Henry Adams—or rather, at the behest of Edith, whom Adams had urged to see the white palaces before they reverted to prairie.
“We really had great fun, although we only spent one day at the Fair,” Roosevelt reported to Kermit. Unconsciously using Adams’s own language, he described his visit as “a perfect whirl.” He stomped through the display halls so fast that even Alice had to run to catch up. His hurry was less a matter of urgency than camouflage: unbeknownst to reporters, he was nursing several boxing and riding injuries, including a burst blood vessel that had spread a bruise “big as two dinner plates” across the inside of his thigh.
He was impressed by the beauty of the illuminations, but only one exhibit spoke to him personally. It was his own Maltese Cross ranch cabin from 1884, reverently presented by the State of North Dakota.
The presidential train did not depart St. Louis until after midnight on 28 November. Edith, exhausted, retired to her stateroom, but Roosevelt still had some energy to work off. He called for a stenographer and dictated a thousand-word letter-review of James Ford Rhodes’s five-volume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850. Inevitably if naïvely, the great theme of North versus South made him think of his own recent Appomattox at the polls, and he segued into a jovial reflection that Democratic cartoonists had played into his hands by representing him as the eternal Rough Rider, “carrying a big stick and threatening foreign nations.” This had only made a “kind of ad captandum appeal on my behalf,” especially to younger voters.
A couple of midnights later, as November gave way to December, the president of the World’s Fair turned a rheostat at the base of the Louisiana Purchase Monument, and the illuminations began to fade as one hundred thousand spectators applauded. They had some reason to cheer. Nearly nineteen million visitors from around the world had helped replenish the city’s coffers, if not those of the exposition itself. Clearly “the spirit of St. Louis”—a new expression, already popular—was more potent than the pessimistic whinings of Henry Adams.
As if in earnest of that spirit, the little meteorological balloons continued to rise for the rest of the year, shining and swelling and bursting.
MARGUERITE CASSINI HAD just dressed in satin and chinchilla for a ball on 2 January 1905 when she came across her father in the vestibule of the Russian Embassy. His hands held a batch of telegrams, and were shaking. “Go back upstairs and take off those clothes!” he growled at her. “You’re going nowhere tonight. Port Arthur has been surrendered!”
The Ambassador’s choler concealed, perhaps, his embarrassment at having first heard about the surrender a few hours earlier, during the White House New Year’s reception. John Hay had discreetly murmured the news before Theodore Roosevelt trumpeted it to other diplomats. Only a lifetime’s training in court politesse had enabled Cassini to move on, and greet Minister Takahira as if nothing had happened.
While Europe reacted in shock—Roosevelt’s ten-month certainty that Japan would win the war had been shared by only the French—rumors ran along Embassy Row that the United States would press for a peace settlement. Hay denied them all. Rheumatic, perpetually coughing, seizing every chance to stay in bed, the Secretary had lost his appetite for hard work. More and more since the election, Roosevelt was taking the controls, and accelerating the pace, of foreign policy.
Hay had been Secretary of State for six years now. Working with characteristic quietness and dedication—qualities that had endeared him in youth to Lincoln—he had built a series of agreements and alignments that peacefully buttressed the United States against the rivalries of Europe, Central Asia, and the Far East. The current Anglo-American rapprochement was largely his, as was the Open Door in China, and the reaffirmed Alaskan boundary, and the Paris and Panama Canal Treaties. He brought a high moral tone to the often mendacious business of diplomacy, without compromising any of his country’s commercial interests. All that remained for him to complete his life’s work (for he knew himself to be dying) was to negotiate a peace in Manchuria that would keep the Open Door ajar and save Russia from revolution.
However, Count Cassini seemed confident that the Tsar’s endless military reserves would humble Japan sooner or later. Those twenty-four thousand troops lost at Port Arthur were as replaceable as grapes in the Trubetskoy vineyard. The Russian Baltic Fleet was on its way around the world to wreak revenge on Admiral Togo. But Cassini may have been merely posturing; before the war, he had seemed to favor a peaceful Russian foreign policy, especially vis-à-vis China. As Hay reminded Roosevelt, “dealing with people to whom mendacity is a science is no easy thing.”
All he knew in January 1905 was that if the belligerents did not soon agree to a cease-fire, his heart would give out in the attempt to negotiate one. Along with all his Cabinet colleagues, Hay had handed in his resignation. But this was a formality, returning to Roosevelt the power of appointment—or reappointment. The Secretary could only hope against hope that he would not be needed in the new Administration.
Politely disapproving, he stood by as two junior members of the secret du roi arrived from overseas for White House consultations. One was the President’s Harvard classmate Baron Kentaro Kaneko, and the other his former best man, Cecil Spring Rice, still attached to the British Embassy in St. Petersburg.
MEANWHILE, HENRY ADAMS tried again and again to plot the power curve of 1901 through 1904, and relate it to force fields other than Roosevelt’s personality. He wanted to include his Dynamic Theory of History in an intellectual memoir he had begun to write, provisionally entitled “The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity.” Adams figured that he would need about two years to finish the book, which he would then publish privately, in a limited edition, for members of his immediate circle. John Hay would be the first to see it—if Hay lived long enough—and of course the President must get a copy, too.
What would Roosevelt make of Adams’s Roosevelt, the godlike perpetrator of “pure act”? Insofar as he was pure act, he might be amused but not particularly interested. The President was not a speculative, nor a spiritual man. He was in too much of a hurry to make the world over, today or preferably yesterday, to care what Adams (or for that matter Hay) might think of him. They were both of them sixty-six; he twenty years younger. “With him wielding unmeasured power with immeasurable energy in the White House,” Adams wrote, “the relation of age to youth—of teacher to pupil—was altogether out of place; and no other was possible.”
Unless, of course, one continued one’s own education by watching the sometimes disorientating spectacle of youth in flight from the past. Roosevelt’s Energetik, his dirigible ability to change course at a moment’s notice, his tendency to write exuberant Os in the air, made Adams doubt his own trail across “the darkening prairie of education.” To a historian born in 1838, “always and everywhere the Complex had been true and the Contradiction certain.” Here was Roosevelt trumpeting either- or banalities, lecturing intellectuals as though they were children, and yet repeatedly prevailing in the most intricate political situations. Might the President’s simplicity be that of an idiot savant who instinctively understood how Complexity worked, even to the point of using Contradiction to generate extra energy? If so, he was certainly not simplistic. He was, on the contrary, formidable: twentieth-century in his eager embrace of Chaos, eighteenth-century in his utter self-certainty. To Roosevelt, as to Kant, “Truth was the essence of the ‘I.’ ”
ANOTHER HENRY WHO had long observed Roosevelt with bemusement visited the White House that January and was taken aback by its new splendor and protocol. Henry James attended the annual Diplomatic Reception, not inappropriately, as America’s most distinguished expatriate writer. Like Adams before him, he was swept upstairs afterward for “supper” in a sea of velvet-and-gold lace uniforms and found himself sitting one dowager away from Roosevelt.
“The President is distinctly tending—or trying—to make a ‘court,’ ” he wrote later. Yet he could not help being flattered at his placement above so many representatives of empires. Elsewhere, at a point hardly less privileged, next to Mrs. Roosevelt, sat the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Democracy still reigned at the heart of the Republic; art mattered here as much as politics.
“Theodore Rex,” James allowed, “is at any rate a really extraordinary creature for native intensity, veracity, and bonhomie—he plays his part with the best will in the world and I recognize his amusing likability.”
THE IMAGINATION MUST be given not wings but weights. Francis Bacon’s dogged dictum, which Adams had so long thought salutary, seemed negated by this new century with its young men impatient of gravity and its young powers—America, Japan, Germany—pushing back the borders of old empires. The only constant now was change. Here was Roosevelt, whose main responsibilities were to keep the United States safe and solvent, collaring Capital and Labor in either hand and splicing oceans more than one thousand miles south of Key West. Here was Arthur Balfour, at last report the Prime Minister of Great Britain, embracing a New Theory of Matter, and informing the world that all of human history, “down to say, five years ago,” was nothing but an illusion. Here was Kaiser “Willy” suddenly facing west, and leaving “Nicky,” his poor little crétin cousin, to face Red revolution at home and Yellow Peril in the Far East.
Adams belonged to the minority of Washington intellectuals that dreaded a Japanese victory. Russia was, he acknowledged, a moribund empire, but at least its crown and its army held the peasants at bay, not to mention the new Mongols crowding Port Arthur. If the Tsar was deposed, “I foresee something like a huge Balkan extending from Warsaw to Vladivostok; an anarchy tempered with murders.” Nearer home, France—Russia’s ally—could become vulnerable to German imperialism. Hay’s attitude was frustratingly ambivalent: while aware of the ruin Russia’s defeat would visit upon his Open Door policy, he nevertheless worked for Theodore Roosevelt, and the President’s proclamation of neutrality compelled him to be discreet.
What tormented Adams was the possibility that Roosevelt’s electoral triumph—which the world had gasped at—might persuade one or the other power to ask the President to mediate a peace settlement. Surely the Virgin, if she still had any say in world affairs, would allow Hay that final honor.
BOTH KANEKO AND Spring Rice made social calls on the ailing Secretary of State. They were politely vague about their conversations with the President, Kaneko saying only that Roosevelt kept insisting that Japan should not be “exorbitant” in her demands for a price to end the war. The Baron was in no hurry to return home, and hinted at the possibility of “important news” from his government in the spring.
Hay looked out his window and saw nothing but the frozen gray of early February. “The weather remains gloomy,” he wrote in his diary, “et moi aussi.”
Heart pain kept him awake at night, and when he slept he was often plagued by nightmares. Once he dreamed he was going to be hanged. Mrs. Hay conspired with Adams to ship him to Bad Nauheim, Germany, for a cure, but he would not hear of leaving town until after the President’s Inauguration. That was more than a month away. Congress was still in session, and he had to calm the agitation of Takahira and Cassini, both of whom visited on him what they could not properly communicate to Roosevelt.
Cassini waved aside Japan’s recent victories as “éphémères.” The American people should know that Russia had four hundred thousand soldiers in Manchuria, not to mention Admiral Zinovi Rozhdestvenski’s “fine fleet,” still desperately steaming toward the war theater. “Russia is neither defeated nor ruined.”
The President also showed signs of rising agitation. Those who knew him understood that he was merely working up steam for the Inauguration. Henry James thought the Rooseveltian machine was “destined to be overstrained” one day. He had to admit that, at present, “it functions astonishingly, and is quite exciting to see.”
With that, James left town. So did many Democrats wanting to put as much distance as possible between themselves and “Theodore the First” on the day of his coronation. “Roosevelt has the world in a sling right now,” Henry Watterson wrote from a cruise ship in the Mediterranean. “But, wait a little.”