Theodore Rex (36 page)

Speaking lucidly and calmly, the President reminded his audience that some trusts might react to tariff penalties by laying off “very many tens of thousands of workmen.” Other trusts would escape discipline because their
products were tariff-free. “The Standard Oil Company offers a case in point—and the corporations which control the anthracite coal.”

By choosing two particularly unpopular trusts to illustrate the inequities of the Iowa Idea, Roosevelt managed to sound both reform-minded and conservative. He mentioned his own “present legislative and constitutional limitations,” and ended with a vague promise that in spite of them, he would deal “exact and even-handed justice … to all men, without regard to persons.”

At last the audience could applaud freely. He listened with an air of abstraction to the roars that followed him into the street. “It’s rather peculiar,” he remarked, “that everywhere they call for ‘Roosevelt’ or ‘Teddy,’ but never say ‘Theodore.’ ”

A REPORTER COVERING
Roosevelt’s arrival at Detroit on Sunday, 21 September, was impressed with the change in him since his last visit, two years before. No longer was he a young, ruddy-faced Governor, grinning and squinting and pumping hands. He appeared to have aged considerably; his features were sterner. The close-cropped auburn hair glinted with gray, and there was “an indefinable something about his appearance, call it dignity, call it responsibility—that showed he felt the weight resting on his shoulders.”

Actually, the main weight Roosevelt felt was on his left leg. He complained of pain, and was unresponsive to press-pool questions about the coal strike. As soon as he reached the Hotel Cadillac, he went to bed.

Early the next morning, the inevitable crowd of gogglers gathered on the sidewalk outside. “Just keep your eye on that little window,” a porter said helpfully. “That’s his bathroom, and when you see a light in there you’ll know that the President is in his tub.” The light remained off, to general mystification. Roosevelt’s major appearance of the day was at a convention of Spanish-American War veterans. Normally he delighted in such events, but he arrived late and delivered a perfunctory address, grimacing and sweating heavily. During the subsequent parade, he had to stand for four hours. At the end, he looked drained.

Speculation that something was wrong with his health began early on Tuesday, at an outdoor event in Logansport, Indiana. Despite steady rain, he launched into the big speech he had been expected to deliver that afternoon at Indianapolis. He declined applause as he extolled the glories of private enterprise. Beneficiaries of the new prosperity must look to themselves, he said, rather than to government, for the advancement of their welfare. Stressing the word
individual
again and again, he prayed that great issues of the future would be decided by Americans thinking “as Americans first, and party men second.”

The tariff, for example—Roosevelt deftly brought it in—should be
judged not as a political issue, but “as a business proposition” working in the people’s common interest. That interest would only be harmed by “violent and radical changes.” Perhaps some subtle regulatory device could be installed to correct the flaws in tariff policy, “without destroying the whole structure.”

Standing awkwardly off balance, Roosevelt allowed that his personal preference would be for a board of distinguished and pragmatic tariff commissioners. The concept was Senator Spooner’s, although he did not say so.

WITH FURTHER ROARS
ringing in his ears, he stepped off the platform and saw, sloping away from him at an angle of forty-five degrees, a grassy path slick with rain. He hesitated, then allowed Captain Lung to take his elbow as he descended, slowly and with set face.

From Logansport station, secret telegrams flashed ahead to Indianapolis. Roosevelt reached the state capital on schedule, but begged “fifteen or twenty minutes grace” before attending a reception in his honor at the Columbia Club. He closeted himself with four surgeons in an anteroom, then emerged expressionless for lunch. There were no presidential remarks over coffee; just a grim smile, a wave, and a hurried exit. Bystanders were surprised to see Roosevelt’s carriage speed off toward St. Vincent’s Hospital, Secret Service men galloping after.

Rumors proliferated. “
The President has burst a blood vessel!”

“He’s sick!”

“He’s been shot!”

At St. Vincent’s, the four surgeons were waiting. Before following them into the operating theater, Roosevelt had an intimation of mortality. He called for Elihu Root, who was on tour with him, and asked George Cortelyou to witness their conversation. “
Elihu … if anything happens, I want you to be Secretary of State.”

It took a moment for the meaning of these words to sink in. He was appointing his line of succession. “If John Hay should be President,” Roosevelt went on, “he would have nervous prostration within six weeks.” In that case, the Constitution might require a third new Chief Executive before Christmas. Only one man, in Roosevelt’s judgment, could rise to such an emergency.

Root paced up and down, unable to speak. Finally he managed, “I guess you don’t need to disturb yourself in the least about anything of that kind.”

The President moved on without comment. Entering the operating theater, he tried to joke with the surgeons. “Gentlemen, you are formal! I see you have your gloves on.” He took off his trousers and left shoe, revealing a tumor halfway down his shin. It bulged nearly two inches. He lay down on the table and refused anesthetic. “Guess I can stand the pain.”

Dr. George H. Oliver’s scalpel pricked and sliced, disclosing a circumscribed accumulation of serum under the shin’s periosteum. Syringes punctured the sac and sucked the serum out, drop by drop. Roosevelt muttered to himself occasionally, and when the suction went deep, asked for a glass of water. Three aspirations were needed before the wound was pronounced clean.

At five o’clock, Cortelyou issued a bulletin stating that the President had had a successful operation, and was resting comfortably with his leg in a sling. “It is absolutely imperative, however, that he should remain quiet.” Two and a half hours later, a heavily sedated Roosevelt was carried out of the hospital, lying stiff on a stretcher, his face white under the streetlamps. Spectators removed their hats. At eight o’clock, the presidential train left for Washington.

Successive bulletins through the night assured the nation that Roosevelt was in no danger of blood poisoning. (The four surgeons were not so sure.) News of the cancellation of his western trip came as a relief to protectionists. “If it had been completed,” said one member of the Indiana Old Guard, “I do not think there would have been anything left of the Republican party. That Logansport speech today was the limit.”

PAINTERS AND PLASTERERS
were putting the finishing touches to a restored White House when Roosevelt arrived back in Washington on 24 September 1902. But the gleaming halls and new Executive Wing were still bare of furnishings, so he was carried back to his temporary quarters at 22 Jackson Place. An anxious Edith was waiting to nurse him. “I feel a great deal better than I look,” he told reporters before she closed the door.

She established him in a second-floor parlor overlooking Lafayette Square. The room was large and sunny and full of well-wishers’ flowers. Treetops waved beneath its windows. It was an ideal place to recuperate, but the President, rolling around in a wheelchair, with his leg trussed stiffly in front of him, soon complained of inactivity.

He regretted that he had not been able to discuss tariff policy in the Midwest as fully as he wished. Still, his two big speeches had done much to quash the Iowa Idea. Governor Cummins was disavowing any threat to Republican unity, and other tariff reformers were following suit.

That did not stop Roosevelt from worrying if he had, indeed, gone too far with conservatives in his Logansport address. “I only hope Uncle Mark doesn’t mind it.” His fears seemed realized on 27 September, when Hanna rose at the Ohio State Convention and scoffed at the notion of a tariff commission. Amid cheers of “Hanna in 1904,” the Senator continued: “A year ago I gave you a piece of advice, ‘Let well enough alone.’ … Today I say, ‘stand pat.’ ”

Stand pat
. That was it: Old Guard Republicanism in two words. Roosevelt’s dilemma, as he plotted his uncertain future, was how to convince reformers that he was their best hope, while standing pat enough to please conservatives.

Right now, he could not stand at all. Ominously, his left leg had begun to throb again.

ON SUNDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER
, the Surgeon General of the Navy, Dr. Presley M. Rixey, decided that a second operation was necessary.
The President’s temperature was rising, and there was a new swelling, large and shiny as a monocle, on his shin. This time—since Rixey intended to cut to the bone—Roosevelt allowed himself to be semi-anesthetized with whiskey. Cocaine was rubbed around the swelling. Then Rixey, assisted by an orthopedist, made a two-inch incision over the tibia and reopened the periosteum. Serous fluid welled out. It was allowed to drain, revealing a length of white, roughened bone. A few dark spots, the size of knitting-needle points, were visible. Rixey scraped the bone smooth, and left the incision unstitched, so that further fluid could flow out naturally, in the process of healing. Overnight, Roosevelt’s temperature subsided. A bulletin listing his condition as “satisfactory” was posted Monday morning, together with orders that he must remain chair-bound for at least another fortnight.