Colonel Roosevelt (104 page)

CARRANZA’S PEACE GESTURE
did not slow
Roosevelt’s drive to raise a volunteer division. When the War Department heard about it, Secretary Baker was more amused than angry. On 6 July, having received an encouraging flood of applications, the Colonel formally requested authority to proceed with recruitment.
His letter to Baker was less boastful and more detailed than the one he had sent President Taft at the time of the first Mexican troubles, and he dropped none of the distinguished names, military and civilian, he had already settled on for command posts. The influence of his younger son was detectable in a proposal to create “one motor-cycle regiment with machine guns … an engineering regiment, [and] an aviation squadron.”

Baker referred his letter to the adjutant general of the army, who replied, much as Taft had done, that “
in the event of war with Mexico,” the administration would consider his offer.

Roosevelt, fretful and still coughing with dry pleurisy, had said nothing about wanting to fight anywhere else in the world. But his current reading included the military
memoirs of Baron Grivel in French. He also wrote an article for
Collier’s Weekly
entitled “
Lafayettes of the Air: Young Americans Who Are Flying for France.”

ON 4 AUGUST
, Miss Flora Whitney, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the owner of
Metropolitan
magazine, came out in Newport. In local parlance, she was the “first bud” of the debutante season. Five hundred guests danced fox-trots in the blue-and-gold ballroom of the Whitney mansion on Bellevue Avenue, and Flora, slender as a calla lily in a white dress with silver trim, twirled in the arms of her dinner partner, Mr. Quentin Roosevelt of Oyster Bay. They danced all night, then took a sunrise dip in the sea.

Quentin was on a pass from Plattsburg, and in no hurry to return.
He admitted, even to his father, that he did not enjoy himself there. Ted loved it. So did Archie, who had just graduated from Harvard. Kermit was at least no gloomier there than anywhere else. Quentin found camp life a bore. He was not lazy, nor did he lack courage. But parade-ground drill bothered his back, agonizingly sometimes.
His ironic sense of humor, unshared by any of his siblings except Alice, made it difficult for him to take military life seriously.

He was the same age as Flora—or would be in the fall—and he shared her eager appetite for fun. There was plenty of that available at Newport, and on the other Whitney estates in upstate New York, South Carolina, and Old Westbury, Long Island. Slick-haired,
fast-driving boys like himself zoomed in on these places, their autos crammed with girls daringly dressed in the latest modes from Paris—none more daring than
Flora, who was
arty
, if not a teensy bit affected, in her love of “modern” jewelry and fabrics that only she could mix and carry off. She smoked straw-tipped Benson & Hedges cigarettes, which she kept in a red-beaded case. Her spiffy Scripps-Booth torpedo roadster had wire wheels and a silver radiator shell. Since her mother was the famous sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a hint of
la bohème
was to be
expected of her. Flora dreamed of being a designer one day. Her small chiseled face was more unusual than pretty, with long-lashed hazel eyes and gull’s-wing brows that made her look fiercer than she was.

“F
LORA DREAMED OF BEING A DESIGNER ONE DAY
.”
Flora Payne Whitney
.
(photo credit i24.1)

Quentin had been friendly with her for almost a year. Before going up to Harvard, he had gotten into the habit of driving out to Westbury and enjoying the society of people more entertaining than the dour Brahmins forever visiting his parents. He was not the only Roosevelt attracted to Flora.
Archie had briefly paid court, and although he was a handsome youth, blond and skinny as a whippet, she had made clear her preference for his younger brother. So far, Quentin had no stronger feelings for her than affection and a mutual interest in poetry. This was just as well, from the point of view of Flora’s parents: he was just the sort of name-but-no-money college boy they wanted to protect her from. Now that she was “introduced to society,” there would be many scions of the Four Hundred seeking to add a Whitney to their portfolios.

Nevertheless, Quentin’s claims on her—should he choose to exercise them—could not be discounted. He was the son of a former President of the United States. He had his father’s charm, but none of the obsessive need to cajole and convert that was making the Colonel so difficult to take these days. Growing up in the White House had given Quentin a sense of self-worth that had little in it of vanity. He did not need to work at impressing people, being used to their deference. At Harvard he had fitted right in with the best sort. “
You get a speaking acquaintance with a lot of others,” he reported to Kermit, “but you don’t know them any more than the little Yids I sit next to in class.”

Flora could have found someone better looking to squire her on the night she “came out.” With his lofty forehead, Rooseveltian teeth, and furrowed brows, Quentin was not likely to improve with age. But he was tall and powerfully built and to her, adorable.

ROOSEVELT’S ARTICLE ABOUT
American volunteer pilots in France (“
We are all of us indebted to these young men of generous soul … proudly willing to die for their convictions”) reflected a growing popular awareness that war was no longer constrained by gravity. One “aeroplane” dispatched across no-man’s-land with a camera could survey more battleground in half an hour than a reconnaissance patrol in a month. For days before the German attack on Verdun, the French had been alerted to its imminence by a steady droning east of the Meuse.

Secretary Baker was pleased to confirm in mid-August that Congress had voted $13 million toward the reorganization and equipping of an army air arm. Aspiring fliers thrilled to the size of this appropriation, building as it did
on passage of an ambitious National Defense Act. Now patriotic young men unattracted to ground or naval warfare could, if they wanted in any future emergency, serve their country in the skies.
Quelle gloire!

Quentin dutifully completed his course at Plattsburg, then spent as many late-summer days as he could with Flora. He had to cram for his next semester at Harvard, having determined to pass through university in three years and then add two more at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He told Kermit he would like to be a mechanical engineer.

ON 31 AUGUST, ROOSEVELT
inaugurated the Republican fall campaign as promised, with a major policy statement in Lewiston, Maine. Absentmindedly, he referred to it as “my
Lusitania
speech.” The verbal slip was telling. Instead of musing how he could best help Hughes as a candidate, he was still brooding over an act of war that had found Woodrow Wilson wanting fifteen months before. His speech—an unfavorable comparison of the President to Pontius Pilate—was roaringly received, and reached millions of newspaper readers in transcript. It buttressed his new image as an elder statesman of the GOP, but disturbed many undecided voters who felt that he was too pugnacious a campaigner for Hughes’s good. “
Roosevelt would be a really great man,” the naturalist John Burroughs wrote in his journal, “if he could be shorn of that lock of his hair in which that strong dash of the bully resides.”

Two days later, the President effortlessly reclaimed national attention by appearing on the porch of “Shadow Lawn,” his summer cottage at Long Branch, New Jersey, and thanking a delegation of Democratic officials for renominating him to another term. Slim and laughing, natty in white slacks and a dark blazer, he looked almost young, the happiness of his remarriage radiating from him. It was difficult for reporters who had covered the Colonel in recent months to believe that Wilson, soon to be sixty, was the older man.

There was much for him to be happy about. He had just negotiated an end to a threatened railroad strike that would have paralyzed the country and damaged his candidacy. In doing so he had openly sided with labor against capital, and persuaded Congress to reduce the daily hours worked by rail union members from ten to six, with no loss of pay. The public rejoiced, and Roosevelt fumed. He wanted to boast about the time
he
had settled the great anthracite strike of 1902,
without
partiality, but thought it would hurt Hughes if he carped against a piece of progressive legislation.

The United States was prospering, with exporters reaping huge profits from war-related sales. Americans dismissed the President’s unpopularity abroad, seeing him as a patient but firm negotiator who—as his propagandists were forever trumpeting—“kept us out of war.” It even redounded to Wilson’s
advantage that he no longer showed any partiality toward Great Britain. That country’s cruel crackdown on Irish unrest, and its continuing harassment of Europe-bound merchant ships, had created widespread voter anger.

Canadian air signaled the end of summer. Yachts returned to their docks. Maids stripped the linen covers from parlor furniture. Department stores stocked up with black velvet caps and the new zebra boa. Charlie Chaplin’s new movie
The Count
opened on Broadway.
Quentin Roosevelt returned to college, beset by memories of Flora in an orange bathing suit, and realized that he had fallen in love with her.