Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [126]
Her radiance, remarked on by other visitors as well as Van Valkenburg, may indeed have been a matter of idealism. But there was also the thought that Theodore’s retirement from politics, so distressingly interrupted, must surely become permanent after November.
The Roosevelt children reacted to the coming campaign with varying degrees of excitement and fear. Alice was torn, even more than in 1910, between loyalty to her father and dread that her husband would be swept out of Congress on Taft’s coattails. She did not think she could stand any more of “Cincinnasty” than she already had to endure.
To the puzzlement of many of her own relatives, Alice adored everything about Nicholas Longworth except his willingness to serve the President. His baldness, his boozing, his lust for other women—she had taken them on when she married him, and found them perversely attractive. She had even come to like the kind of echt German chamber music he played with some of his friends (usually on first violin: behind the Midwestern swagger, a gifted musician lurked). “Darling Nick, I love him so much.” But for all her floaty, expensive clothes and party chat, Alice was as political as a ward heeler. Progressivism meant little to her as a cause. It was simply a platform that her father had chosen to run on, and in any race, she was for him “first, last and always.”
Representative Longworth’s position was an agonizing one. He had come to share many of Roosevelt’s beliefs. But his political ties to Taft were so old, and so intertwined with those of friendship between their respective clans, that bolting the Ohio Republican party was simply not an option for him. Alice—pale and coughing, existing mainly on fruit and eggs and Vichy water—suffered along with him, finding it difficult to contain her fury against the bile his mother and sister showed toward the Colonel. If Nick lost his seat in Congress, she saw little in his future but more alcohol, and more women.
Ted was an ardent progressive who had learned much by working to elect Hiram Johnson as governor of California. In Chicago he had been ubiquitous at planning sessions for the new party. Recently hired as a bond salesman for the New York banking house of Bertron, Griscom & Co., he was staying at Sagamore Hill until he and Eleanor could find a house in the city. This gave him an inside position to observe the workings of a presidential campaign. But he soon found out that the name of Theodore Roosevelt did not help him sell many bonds on Wall Street.
Kermit had no interest in politics. His new Harvard degree and Porcellian circle of acquaintance promised him a charmed entry into the world Ted prized—clubs, banks, lunches, squash courts, smokers, balls. But Africa had left an ache in his heart for the Land of Beyond. His parents had made it clear to him, as to all their children, that they could not afford to support adult dependents. So if he wanted the career of a gentleman adventurer, he was either going to have to do it on salary, or find himself a rich wife. Kermit had already made overtures in both directions, securing a job with the Brazil Railway Company, and courting Belle Willard, daughter of the owner of a chain of Southern hotels. The girl’s financial expectations were rosy, but to distress at Oyster Bay, her parents were Democrats. So far, fortunately, Belle had not given Kermit much encouragement. He was due to sail for South America in a matter of weeks, and would see if she pined for him.
Ethel would, at any rate. For the last couple of years, brother and sister had been inseparable, swapping their favorite poems, united in their disapproval of Ted’s “fast” way of life. A sedate and colorless moth in contrast to butterfly Alice, Ethel was being wooed by a thirtyish surgeon, Richard Derby. His job—not an easy one at the moment—was to convince her that