Theodore Rex (107 page)

That afternoon, the temperature in Washington rose to one hundred degrees. Government buildings seemed to explode with released tension as limp-collared legislators and administrators emerged from every doorway and headed out of town. Roosevelt, looking relatively cool in a white suit, was in as much a hurry as any. But he had to wait until the House dispatched a final bill to him at 9:30
P.M.
, via the fastest automobile in town. By then he had had more than his fill of the Fifty-ninth Congress, and could be sure that most of its members—Senator Foraker in particular—hoped his vacation would be long.

Still, it had been an historic session, he felt, one that had greatly extended the authority of centralized government. Over railroads alone, that reach now embraced passenger rates, pipeline fees, freight bills, storage and refrigeration contracts, and a plethora of other surchargeable services, from switch and spur facilities to dockyard terminals. Already, Packingtown was scrubbing down, food inspectors sharpening their pencils, and pigs being kept out of privies. The Man with the Muckrake was chastised, and the rule of Burke—movingly cited by Ray Stannard Baker—affirmed as a guiding principle of progressivism: “
Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere.”

EDITH KERMIT ROOSEVELT
was waiting in the yellow-wheeled family wagon when her husband’s train steamed into Oyster Bay station on 1 July 1906. She positioned herself, as always, slightly aloof, letting a width of cinder road intervene between the carriage door and the door of the depot, where the usual crowd of villagers was jostling.

The President emerged, caught sight of Kermit first, and kissed him. Then he began to shake hands while Edith sat with Quentin beside her, wrapped in her private role as wife and mother.

She was not quite forty-five and not quite slender, a calm, contented woman who had gotten what she wanted by simply waiting for it—as she waited now for the only man she had ever loved. The fact that she was not the only person in his romantic history had long since ceased to hurt her, as far as anyone knew, but with Edith, “far” was not much. The averted gaze, the set mouth, the careful expressionlessness she gave to the world outside her world revealed little and invited nothing.
To children other than her own, she appeared as “a remote goddess … as calm and imperturbable as a Buddha.” Born into the same wealthy
haut-bourgeois
circles as Theodore, and having become, at age four, his intimate friend, she had acquired a sense of privilege that never left her, even though her alcoholic father’s money had dissipated with such quickness that she remembered a childhood more shabby than genteel.

There had never been any question in her mind, as she grew up, that “Teedie” would marry her. When he chose someone prettier and richer, Edith had simply counted the days until fate would return him to her. She would have counted fifty years, if necessary. In the event, five were enough. Edith had reacted to Theodore’s aberrant liaison much as she had to her father’s
drinking, by simply editing it out of her book of life. The name of Alice Hathaway Lee was not to be mentioned, even in the index; no illustrations of that sweet, blank face were necessary; a quick cut from 1880 to 1885 would speed the narrative nicely. There had remained the awkward subplot of a stepdaughter, but at last, thanks to Nick Longworth, it was part of another tale.

“A REMOTE GODDESS … CALM AND IMPERTURBABLE AS A BUDDHA.”
The President’s favorite photograph of Edith Kermit Roosevelt
(photo credit 27.1)

Episcopalian, erudite, conservative, intensely private, and—when her serenity was threatened—a formidable adversary, Edith struck most strangers as snobbish. The impression was in part correct (Archie and Quentin had to research the antecedents of all their would-be friends) but caused mostly by her
New England reserve. She did not consider herself superior, so much as separate from
hoi polloi
. In receiving lines, she let the President do the glad-handing, while she stood clutching a nosegay, smiling only slightly, her sapphire eyes cool. What they saw, they saw without mercy. Mediocrity bored her, as did class resentment. “
If they had our brains,” she was wont to say of servants, “they’d have our place.”

Yet within a silken web of family, social, and political connections, almost all spun about her by Theodore, Edith was frank, warm, unassuming, and loyal. Henry Adams found her “sympathetic” and greatly preferred her company to that of the President. “She has bad taste, and that too is a comfort.” To Ray Stannard Baker, she was “a singularly attractive woman, of rare refinement and charm of manner.” Jules Jusserand informed his government that she was “certainly adorned with most precious and charming qualities”—adding, by way of explanation, that she was of French descent.

Edith was well-read enough to hold her own in conversation with Adams and Henry Cabot Lodge. “She is not only cultured, but scholarly,” Roosevelt boasted. Her intellectual interests were more sophisticated than his, inclining toward
belles-lettres
and aphoristic essays, and she loved the theater, to which he reacted as if caged.
Whereas his idea of a sublime musical experience was “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” played by the full Marine band, hers was a recital in the East Room by Ernestine Schumann-Heink. Edith did not equate such occasions with fashion; her taste in clothes was at best severe, and she cared little for intermission gossip. Yet she enjoyed entertaining, whether brilliantly at diplomatic dinners in Washington, or messily at mosquito-infested picnics with her children, the
largest and worst of whom, she joked, was Theodore.

His attitude toward her—beyond the fact, clear to all, that they personified every syllable of the marriage vow—was one of doglike adoration. He looked to her for porch company, for approving pats and hugs, and sometimes, guiltily, for discipline when he had done something wrong. She could bring him up short, during one of his indiscreet monologues, by giving off a special quietness that he could sense within seconds. “Why, Ee-die, I was only going to say …”

Her attitude toward him was complementary, yin to his yang. Theodore represented “the fire of life” (an image from Walter Savage Landor that she often cited), and she warmed both hands at him. Deeply domestic, she accepted his compulsive need for public attention, knowing that he could stay home only so long before the urge to hunt or fight or orate would take him away again. She had enough quiet humor to suffer his idiosyncrasies—the yodels of falsetto laughter, the mad rock-climbs, woodsmen and their wives invited to stay over in the White House—even though he often outraged her sense of propriety.

“You only have to live with me,” she periodically reminded him, “while I have to live with
you
.”

HE DID NOT LOOK
well this July day, with his limp and obvious need for rest after seven months of legislative wrangling. Edith had thought him “jaded” a month before, and others had noticed even earlier signs of exhaustion. Whenever
he was tired, his internal pressure tended to spew, geyserlike. There had been an outburst, to Sir Mortimer Durand’s face, about the “
damned little Jew” of a British journalist who had accused him of paying court to the Kaiser.
William E. Chandler had also been scalded, after politely asking if the White House had shown “good faith” in negotiating with both parties during the rate-bill fight.
And Norman Hapgood, a journalist guilty of suggesting that Roosevelt sometimes denied his own press leaks, was currently in receipt of a presidential letter that came close to a demand for armed satisfaction.

Nervous fatigue could be allayed in the soothing environs of Sagamore Hill.
But Roosevelt had more chronic physical problems to face up to—or more accurately, to play down. He admitted to Kermit and Ethel that his steadily dimming left eye was causing him “a little difficulty,” and that his ankle sprain was complicated by rheumatism. His weight hovered obstinately around two hundred pounds, no matter how much he exercised.

“He is certainly the most enduring man I have ever known,” Gifford Pinchot reported to Irving Fisher, a concerned fitness expert, “and it seems to me equally certain that his endurance can have little to do with his diet.” The President consumed whatever was put before him, with a partiality for meat over vegetables: “I should say that he ate nearly twice as much as the average man.”

Fisher, who had been studying the nutritional theories of Russell H. Chittenden, replied, “
It is clear to me that the President is running his machine too hard.… In another decade or two … I would almost risk my reputation as a prophet in predicting that he will find friction in the machine, which will probably increase to almost the stopping point.”

Edith sweetly served cakes, ice cream, and lemonade on the Fourth of July. The Oyster Bay
Pilot
thereafter noticed an unprecedented number of presidential rowing excursions. Roosevelt was also seen haying with his farmworkers, sweating hugely in white clothes and forking loads so large he had to center himself underneath before lifting them.

“
J’ESSAIE DE FAIRE
circuler le sang à travers le marbre,”
Auguste Rodin declared in August 1906, after getting permission to sculpt the President on a forthcoming visit to America. “I try to make the blood circulate through the marble.”

Theodore Roosevelt was sanguine in every sense of the word, physiological and psychological. He was ruddy and excitable, flush-faced, susceptible to cuts and grazes. (“Theodore,” Edith remarked, after he collided with the Sagamore Hill windmill, “I wish you’d do your bleeding in the bathroom.”) The medieval humor
sanguis
expressed his character exactly: courageous, optimistic,
affectionate, ardent. His apparent fatigue in the summer of 1906 was the result of overstimulation rather than overwork. For more than a year now, he had prevailed too easily against too many opponents, and found himself more than equal to the largest tasks. As a result, he had begun to receive regular boosts of journalistic hyperbole, intoxicating enough to contravene the Pure Food and Drug Act. “
It is now universally recognized by experienced politicians of all parties,”
The Washington Post
reported, “…     that he has more political acumen in one lobe of his brain than the whole militant tribe of American politicians have in their combined intelligence; that his political perception, so acute as to amount almost to divination, is superior to that of any American statesman of the present or immediate past era.”