Colonel Roosevelt (62 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
As James Bryce, the outgoing British ambassador in Washington, noted, Roosevelt “wouldn’t always look at a thing.”
HOWEVER, IN HIS SUBSEQUENT
review, modestly entitled “A Layman’s Views of an Art Exhibition,” he declined to be as outraged as most professional critics.
His tone in confessing his inability to appreciate much of what he had seen was at first almost wistful, as if to acknowledge that the new century had begun to bewilder him. But if the law of evolution was applicable to artists, those fittest to survive were not the ones who mutated most startlingly. “It is true, as the champions of the extremists say, that there can be no life without change, and that to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life. It is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and retrogression instead of development.”
He thought that there was life, and much “real good” in the work of the two emergent American modernist schools, “fantastic though the developments of these new movements are.” Personally, he preferred the nationalistic realism of the Ashcan artists to the violent expressionism of a Marsden Hartley. If the former group was popularist, it was at least all-American, and relatable to Progressivism, as were the new sociological novels of Theodore Dreiser, the “saleswoman” stories of Edna Ferber, and Israel Zangwill’s immigrant drama
The Melting Pot
, which Roosevelt had himself endorsed as an advertisement for Western-style democracy.
What disturbed him was the Armory Show’s message that the Old World was, ironically, far ahead of the New in developing a cultural response to the terrifying implications of modern science. His own written attempt at such a response, “The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit,” could be taken as naïve, if the future—even the present!—really was as inhuman as Lehmbruck and Duchamp and Brancusi saw it. Unable to conceive of a head as a metal egg, Roosevelt abandoned reverence for humor:
In this recent exhibition the lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists.… The Cubists are entitled to the serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored puzzle-pictures of the Sunday newspapers. Of course there is no reason for choosing the cube as a symbol, except that it is probably less fitted than any other mathematical expression for any but the most formal decorative art. There is no reason why people should not call themselves Cubists, or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, or Knights of the Isosceles Triangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so desire; as expressing anything serious and permanent, one term is as fatuous as another. Take the picture which for some reason is called “A Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” There is in my bathroom a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now, if for some inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of, say, “A Well-Dressed Man Going Up a Ladder,” the name would fit the facts just about as well.… From the standpoint
of terminology each name would have whatever merit inheres in a rather cheap striving after effect; and from the standpoint of decorative value, of sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of the picture.
ROOSEVELT’S SUDDEN INTEREST
in modern art, on a day when he could have stayed home and read accounts of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, caused much editorial hilarity.
A cartoon by Kemble in the
Baltimore Evening Sun
showed the new President contemplating a portrait of his toothy predecessor in the Oval Office and musing, “I wonder if that’s a futurist? It can’t be a cubist.” The New York
World
argued that
the “Square Deal” of 1903 had been a proto-Cubist conceit, doing to the Constitution what Braque and Picasso would do to color and form ten years later. As for Progressivism, there was little to distinguish it from the dizziness of Duchamp. “The ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’ is the perfect pictorial representation of a Roosevelt platform.”
C. E. Wood, staff cartoonist for
The Independent
,
drew a caricature of the Colonel explaining a Cubist construction to a fellow viewer at the Armory Show. “You don’t understand this new style of painting? It’s as clear as day.”
The canvas’s blocky shapes spelled out “1916.”
IT TURNED OUT
that Sargent’s portrait of Theodore Roosevelt was indeed the sole wall decoration to greet Wilson when he reported for work in the Oval Office on 5 March 1913. Not only that, the new desk chair ordered for him had not yet been delivered, so he found himself sitting in Roosevelt’s old one, rather battered after seven and a half years of strenuous occupancy.
During the early days of his campaign, Wilson had reacted touchily when reporters suggested he should try to emulate the Colonel’s dynamic speaking style. “
Don’t you suppose I know my own handicaps?… I’d do it if I could.” But when formal oratory was called for, Wilson was capable of eloquence without affectation, as his inaugural address showed:
The great government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people. There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been, “Let every man look out for himself; let every generation look out for itself,” while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves.…
We have now come to the sober second thought. The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every purpose of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried in our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration.
Washington’s diplomatic corps noted that the new President had said nothing about the world outside the United States.
Roosevelt was determined not to criticize him publicly, as a matter of personal propriety as well as respect for the decision of the electorate. But his hackles were raised early by Wilson’s choice of William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state. Not only was Bryan a hayseed of the purest fiber, sure to alienate the aristocrats along Embassy Row, he also quaintly believed that all foreign provocations could be talked or prayed away. That boded ill for another crisis over Mexico, where an anti-American despot named Victoriano Huerta had seized power and, apparently, condoned
an armed attack on a U.S. border patrol in Arizona, the same day Wilson was inaugurated.
Republican and Progressive congressmen wishing to urge a forceful response from the new administration
found themselves barred by a White House access rule that reversed more than a century of democratic tradition. Wilson’s plump young secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, announced that in future, all callers upon the President must bear invitations. This haughty policy was perhaps to be expected from a political scholar whose writings made clear that he believed in an isolated, powerful executive. Wilson felt that legislators over the years had spent too much time visiting the White House with unasked-for advice, and too little on Capitol Hill, consenting.
ON FRIDAY, 4 APRIL
, there was a gathering of Rooseveltians—both Republican and Progressive—at Christ Church, Oyster Bay, to watch the Colonel give away his younger daughter in marriage to Dr. Richard Derby. Although the gathering was large, cramming the flower-filled nave beyond capacity, it was select. Conspicuous absentees included William Howard Taft (now a professor of law at Yale), and Elihu Root. George von Lengerke Meyer, who had served in Taft’s cabinet as well as Roosevelt’s, had needed encouragement to attend. So had Senator Lodge. They were not sure they had been forgiven for failing to stand at Armageddon. Roosevelt scoffed at their embarrassment. “
I feel very strongly against Root,” he told Winthrop Chanler, “because Root took part in as downright a bit of theft as ever was perpetrated by any Tammany ballot box stuffer.… But with Cabot and George it was wholly different. They had the absolute right to do each exactly as he did, and I never expected either of them to follow me.”
Both were, in any case, Harvard men, as were Chanler, Owen Wister, and many of the other top-hatted figures attending the ceremony—not least the bridegroom. “Dusky Dick,” as Alice Longworth teasingly called him (he was dark, and prone to black moods), happened also to be wealthy, with an easy expectation of twelve to fourteen thousand dollars a year over and above his professional income.
This had been a further reason to approve him as an addition to the family. Roosevelt was so much a product of the Porcellian and Knickerbocker clubs that he never seemed to notice how exclusive his preferred field of acquaintance really was.
“F
UTURE GENERATIONS WERE MANIFESTING THEMSELVES
.”
The Colonel gives his younger daughter away in marriage, 4 April 1913
.
(photo credit i13.2)
He seemed near to tears as he escorted Ethel to the altar, in contrast to his unsmiling demeanor at Alice’s wedding in the White House. That had been a state function; this was private. It was, nevertheless, momentous as a rite of passage not only for the young woman at his side, glowing in ivory satin and emeralds, but for himself as a public person. Never again, probably, would he attract
such a concourse, as Wister called it, of familiars. The power that he
had exuded for so long was diminishing by the day while Woodrow Wilson—not to mention Cubism!—remade the world in ways not to his liking.