Colonel Roosevelt (60 page)

More excitingly to Kermit, Roosevelt mentioned that the Historical and Geographical Society of Brazil had invited him to deliver a series of lectures in Rio and São Paulo during the spring and early summer of 1913. That would be too soon for him, with his three books to finish; but both father and son felt that some sort of seed had been sown.

AT SYMPHONY HALL
in Boston on Saturday, 27 December, Roosevelt had the novel experience of speaking to a capacity audience for nearly two hours without mentioning Progressivism. His listeners included not only the American Historical Association, but five other professional societies holding conventions in the city that weekend—sociologists, statisticians, economists, labor lawyers, and political scientists. He could not have asked for a forum
more to his purpose, which was to offend as deeply as possible the data-drunk bores who, in his opinion, were leaching all the color and romance out of scholarship. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, American historians, modeling themselves on the German academics who wrote for one another, rather than for the general public, had forsaken the linear narrative of Prescott and Parkman and Lecky for prose that sat on the page like bagged sand.

Ironically, Roosevelt was guilty of writing this kind of history himself. His first book,
The Naval War of 1812
, had been so dense with logistics that it read like a manual in places. He had boasted at the time that the first two chapters were “so dry they would have made a dictionary seem light reading by comparison.” But having proved that he could match modern historians fact for fact, he had gone on to write
The Winning of the West
in the light of his own experience of the frontier, and with all the creativity he could legitimately apply to the study of sources.
And the great Parkman had praised him.

He was less concerned, now, with the passing of the amateur historian—somebody he was not sorry to see go—but with the prejudice growing in academe against any prose that did not
sound
scientific.
None of the members of the American Historical Association, he suspected, believed any more that history was a branch of literature. If their attitude held, historical writing was doomed as a civilizing influence. It would degenerate into the kind of sterile jargon that only professors fed on.
He proceeded to say just that, undeterred by stony stares and occasional titters among his audience.

Imagination, Roosevelt argued, did not have to be invention. In nonfiction writing, it should be no more than the ability to see and feel intensely what was there to be seen and felt. “No amount of self-communion and of pondering the soul of mankind, no gorgeousness of literary imagery, can take the place of cool, serious, widely extended study.” Repeatedly he declared that color—authentic color—was not an embellishment of truth: it
was
truth. Modern scientists were dazzled by their discoveries, but apologetic, not to say
perverse, in failing to communicate the beauty of revelation. Modern historians should beware of going the same way.

“Do not misunderstand me,” he said. “In the field of historical research an immense amount can be done by men who have no literary power whatever.” As the discipline developed to keep pace with technology, so must a new type of “investigator”—as opposed to narrative historian—arise and be accepted as indispensable. Roosevelt compared the relationship of the two types to that of the stonemason and the architect. Just as religious faith had had to square itself with Darwin, so must history adjust to the immense proliferation of proven fact. “So far from ignoring science, the great historian of the future can do nothing unless he is steeped in science.… He must accept what we now know to be man’s place in nature.” As Romance died, he must illumine the usual as well as the unusual.… “If he possesses the highest imaginative and literary quality, he will be able to interest us in the gray tints of the general landscape no less than in the flame hues of the jutting peaks.”

Except to deaf ears, Roosevelt had so far presented a plausible case. But what his friend Owen Wister called “
the preacher militant” in him caused him to add that history should teach morality. It could not record the best and worst of human behavior without comment. Even as he said this, he backed down, and granted that many historical moralists, such as Thomas Carlyle, had made fools of themselves when they diverged from the abstract and started laying down principles of conduct. He fell into his old habit of equivocation, and indulged a long purple passage in praise of purple passages. This spoiled the effect of a fine admonition to the historian of the future:

Alice Hooper of Boston, sitting in for Frederick Jackson Turner of “Frontier Thesis” fame, did not know whether to be approving or critical of the Colonel’s performance. “
He is so self-impressed and so thoroughly sure,” she wrote Turner afterward, “…  and is so anxious to make a ten strike every time he opens his mouth that it detracts from the profoundness of his learning.… His personality thunders too loud! But in spite of that—what an amount of things he carries about in his head doesn’t he—and admiration for his capacity must be acknowledged when all is said and done.”

Whatever others present thought of Roosevelt the historiographer, they basked in his celebrity at a post-lecture reception in the Copley Plaza Hotel. So many of them crammed in to meet him that the grand ballroom had to be
opened up. He spent the night in the house of his friend William Sturgis Bigelow, a Buddhist scholar, and enjoyed himself at breakfast next morning with a couple of Harvard historians receptive to his views.

“
T.R. came and went,” Bigelow reported to Henry Cabot Lodge in Washington. “He was apparently never better. You never said a truer thing that he has no spilt milk in his life. He was just as much interested in the next thing as if the last one had never existed.”

“ ‘U
NLESS HE WRITES VIVIDLY HE CANNOT WRITE TRUTHFULLY
.’ ”
The manuscript of Roosevelt’s autobiography, 1913
.
(photo credit i13.1)

ONE CONSEQUENCE OF
Roosevelt’s recent escape from death was an end to his estrangement from Lodge. Since the latter’s declaration of neutrality in the presidential contest, they had had little politically to do with each other. But the personal bond between them remained strong, and Lodge had reaffirmed it in an emotional telegram immediately after the shooting.
With some awkwardness, they began to correspond again on the subject of Roosevelt’s lecture, and on the coincidental fact that they were both engaged in writing their autobiographies.

A much frostier estrangement showed no signs of thaw on 4 January 1913, when the Colonel and President Taft were seated opposite each other at the funeral of Whitelaw Reid in New York. Appropriately bitter weather buffeted the Cathedral of St. John the Divine throughout the service, which was attended by many of the eminent Republicans who had once thought of themselves as a team: Lodge, Elihu Root, Robert Bacon, Philander Knox, Henry White, J. P. Morgan, Joseph H. Choate, Andrew Carnegie, Frank Munsey, and others. By no attempt at a smile, or even a nod of the head, did Taft acknowledge his predecessor’s presence across the chancel. After the benediction, he rose quickly and marched down the stone aisle, his aides clattering after him. Eleanor, sitting with her father-in-law, asked if it was protocol for a president to walk out ahead of the coffin.

“
No, dear, no,” Roosevelt said. “It is not customary, but in this case Mr. Taft probably thought there should be precedence even between corpses!”

His wisecrack may have been overheard by the President’s brother Henry, who was sitting close by.
In a bizarre speech that night, at a GOP fund-raiser in the Waldorf-Astoria, Taft described himself as “deceased,” and the dinner in his honor “a wake.” He blamed Roosevelt (who was not present) for eliminating him, saying that a million Republicans had voted Democratic in order to avert the Progressive threat.

Then came a virtual wail for sympathy. “What was the political disease of which I died? I am hopeful that when historians conduct their post-mortems it may be found that my demise was due to circumstances over which I had no great control, and to a political cataclysm, which I could hardly have anticipated or avoided.”

FOR THE REST OF
the winter, Roosevelt was absorbed in literary work. He continued to grind out what
The Outlook
obediently advertised as “Chapters of a Possible Autobiography,” as well as editorials and book reviews, and wrote his African life histories at such a rate that he had to urge Edmund Heller to keep up. In addition, he prepared “History as Literature” for publication
in the April 1913 issue of
American Historical Review
and collected ten other pieces to appear with it in the essay volume he had promised Scribners. They included his three European university lectures, a paper on the ancient Irish sagas, “Dante in the Bowery,” and “The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit,” his analysis of the conflict between faith and reason.

Edith worried about the pace at which he drove himself, and the struggle he seemed to be having with his memoir. “
It is very difficult to strike just the happy medium between being too reticent and not reticent enough!” he wrote her sister. “I find it difficult both as regards my life when I was a child and my political experiences.” His solution in the former case was simply to omit whatever was not pleasant, and in the latter to adopt what Abbott regretfully called his “argumentative” style.