Theodore Rex (56 page)

For the first time, popular unease was palpable about the ever-burgeoning empire in the East. It loomed beyond the haze of the Pacific horizon, menacing primarily Japan. American hearts warmed to that warlike little power, if only because it stood as a bulwark for the Philippines.

Roosevelt was constrained, as President, from criticizing the domestic policies of another sovereign state. But he made clear that he would not tolerate Russian aggression in the Pacific. “
The inevitable march of events gave us the control of the Philippine Islands at a time so opportune that it may without irreverence be called providential,” he said. “Unless we show ourselves weak, unless we show ourselves degenerate sons of the sires from whose loins we sprang, we must go on with the work we have undertaken—” Applause interrupted him. “We infinitely desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war.”

After making his standard calls for muscular morality at home and a big navy abroad, he concluded on a note of exaltation rare even for him:

TWO EVENINGS LATER
, Roosevelt lay high in Yosemite, on a bed of fragrant pine needles, looking up at the sky. On all sides soared the cinnamon-colored shafts of sequoia trees. He had the feeling that he was “lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hands of man.”
Birdsong filled the arches as the sky darkened. He identified the treble
tessitura
of hermit thrushes, and thought it “an appropriate choir for such a place of worship.”

“A PLACE OF WORSHIP.”
Roosevelt at Glacier Point, Yosemite, May 1903
(photo credit 15.2)

His companion was John Muir, the glaciologist, naturalist, and founder of the Sierra Club. Since early youth, Muir had roamed Yosemite, carrying little more than “some bread and tea in an old sock,” returning to civilization as infrequently as possible. At sixty-five, he knew more about the park, and loved it more passionately, than any other American. Roosevelt had booked his exclusive services well in advance: “I want to drop politics absolutely for four days, and just be out in the open with you.”

The President was disappointed to find that Muir had no ear for bird music. He was Wordsworthian rather than Keatsian, revering only “rocks
and st
ones and trees.” Garrulous, erudite, and wall-eyed, he talked a pure form of preservation that Roosevelt was not used to hearing. Muir had no patience with the utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number” policy of Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, the President’s very good friend. Conservation favored business at the expense of nature, and property rather than beauty. “
The ‘greatest number’ is too often found to be number one.”

Whatever resonance such views found in the President’s own developing awareness of the “democracy” of national parks, he would have preferred to hear less of Muir and more of the hermit thrushes. Eventually he fell asleep, in the piney air. Another bird chorale saluted him at dawn.

For the next forty-eight hours, the boy in Roosevelt, never quite suppressed, reveled in his wild surroundings. “This is bully!” he yelled, when Muir burned a dead tree for him and the sparks hurtled skyward. After another night out, he awoke at Glacier Point, and was intrigued to find himself buried under four inches of snow. “This is bullier!”

On 17 May he came down from the peaks in dusty khakis, his eyes sparkling. “I never felt better in my life!” Muir, too, was elated, having confessedly fallen in love with the President’s “interesting, hearty and manly” personality. The substance of their camping conversations remained tacit, suggesting
some philosophical difference on the subject of Gifford Pinchot. Muir won at least an immediate presidential order to extend the California forest through the Mount Shasta region, and a promise that Yosemite’s over-commercialized valley would be ceded back to the national park system.
Roosevelt’s next conservation statement, on 19 May, was obstinately utilitarian, yet an eloquent plea later that day echoed the preservationist sentiments he had expressed at the Grand Canyon. Speaking in Sacramento, he begged Californians to preserve their “marvelous natural resources” unimpaired. “We are not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last through the ages.”

ON THE MORNING
of 23 May, Roosevelt sailed across Puget Sound toward Seattle, the apogee of his great swing across the nation. “
Well, thank heaven,” he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge, “tomorrow I turn my face toward the East.” He suddenly, with a returning traveler’s sense of anticlimax, felt as spent as the fireworks fizzling in the sun over Alki Point. “I am so jaded and nerve-weary and bored that it almost seems as if I
could not
go through the remainder of the speech-making.”

Seattle neither knew nor cared about the President’s tiredness. From the moment he stepped ashore, inexorable hands nudged him from platform to platform, and fifty thousand worshipers drained him with their adoration. It was late at night before he fell into bed at the Hotel Washington, only to be shaken awake by William Loeb. He had forgotten to address a banquet group downstairs: he must get up, don full evening dress, step out on the balcony,
apologize, and “say a few words.” When he retired for the second time, Roosevelt had to struggle with a problem new to him: insomnia.

Fortunately for his rest, a telegram dispatched that afternoon from Cleveland did not reach him until the next morning:

Roosevelt, fatigue forgotten, pondered this telegram excitedly as his train wound east to Walla Walla. He felt in the mood for “
a knockdown and dragout fight with Hanna and the whole Wall Street crowd.” Fate had placed a big political stick in his hands.

Fate—or Joseph B. Foraker. Ohio’s wily, irascible senior Senator had for years been plotting to wrest control of the state Republican Party from Hanna. That organization was about to have its annual convention, and Foraker had issued a surprise demand that the state party endorse Theodore Roosevelt for President, one year early. This put Hanna in the impossible position of having to deny the resolution without seeming to be against the President’s nomination. Alternatively, if he confirmed it, he would seem to be engineering an endorsement for himself. Either way, he stood to lose presidential favor, while Foraker would gain power and prestige—and a possible chance at the GOP nomination in 1908.

Roosevelt saw an irresistible chance to play one Senator off the other. Hanna was clearly appealing for help. He was not in good health. If Wall Street was not so determined to have “somebody like Hanna” in the White House, he would surely have disclaimed any presidential ambition whatsoever. Roosevelt dictated a curtly formal reply, and released it to the press at Walla Walla:

Hanna had no choice but to wire back that “in view of the sentiment expressed” he would not after all oppose the resolution.

Thus the President added a fifteenth endorsement to the list of states already committed to him, forced neutrality upon Hanna, gratified Foraker, and banished his own “nerve-weariness.” Benisonlike, the lilacs and locusts of Walla Walla enveloped him in their fragrance. “This whole incident,” he wrote to Lodge, “has entirely revived me.”

ROOSEVELT ARRIVED AT BUTTE
, Montana, on 27 May to find that mining city divided, like the Ohio GOP, into two warring political factions. Neither bore much relation to national party lines, and both were eager to welcome him. He saw at once that the crowd “was filled with whooping enthusiasm and every kind of whiskey,” and that a riot might ensue if either camp felt slighted. Modeling his conduct on that of Mr. Pickwick at Eatanswill, he presented an equable face to both Buffs and Blues, addressing the former in the afternoon and the latter in the evening. He solved the problem of apportioning dinner tickets by asking Butte’s enormous top-hatted mayor to issue exactly one hundred seats on a fifty-fifty basis. Satisfied, the factions respectively presented him with a silvered copper vase and a silver loving cup. Roosevelt was touched by a third gift, a pair of silver scales from Butte’s black minority. “This,” he said, lifting it delicately aloft, “comes in the shape I appreciate—the scales of justice held even.”

He waited until the applause died. “I fought beside the colored troops at Santiago, and I hold that if a man is good enough to be put up and shot at then he is good enough—” Again he paused, while the crowd held its breath, wondering whether he was going to risk violence with a racially charged remark. Scattered Negroes, some Swedes, two Austrian families, a Chinese, and an Australian jostled with polyglot miners, Rough Riders, and dangerous-looking “rednecks” from the Coeur d’Alene. Roosevelt’s old friend Seth Bullock of Deadwood, South Dakota, stood guard with a long .44.

“—for me to do what I can to get him
a square deal,” said the President.

The phrase sank in, and the crowd relaxed.

“Nobody made a motion to attack me,” Roosevelt wrote John Hay afterward.