Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [151]
There remained the moral question that his black butler—no student of Aristotle—was asking: whether by bolting the party that had once made him president, had he not committed the fatal insolence? Was he now irreversibly headed toward a pathetic, if not tragic end? Nothing in Roosevelt’s strenuous soul could entertain such an idea. He had cheated death. He had books to write, trees to chop, sons to bring up, a daughter to marry off, and another daughter to save from divorce (poor Nick had been defeated, and was taking it out on Alice). Always, too, there was Edith.
ROOSEVELT ADMITTED TO feeling “a little melancholy” over the prospect of having to continue as head of the Progressive Party, when his real need was to start earning money again. His recent hospital and doctor bills, totaling between two and three thousand dollars, had cut into savings already depleted by marathon travels over the last two and a half years—not to mention the cost of entertaining hundreds of political pilgrims to Sagamore Hill. He had begun what was bound to be an expensive libel action against George Newett. And he suspected that Ethel was about to get engaged to her faithful doctor, Dick Derby. That would mean a large wedding in the spring. It could not compare in splendor to the White House nuptials of “Princess Alice” in 1906. But given the rise in prices under the Taft administration, it might run up a similar bill.
One way of making a great deal of money was to go on the lecture circuit. Demands for him to speak had become innumerable after his performance in the Milwaukee Auditorium. A novel feature of many of these invitations was the suggestion that he accompany his presentation with “moving pictures” of himself in Africa, Europe, and on the campaign trail. If there was not enough of such footage, more could easily be faked, using an impersonator and studio props.
Roosevelt was willing to address such institutions as the National Geographic Society and American Historical Association, with or without fee. He declined, however, to make an exhibition of himself on less prestigious platforms. “I could probably make a good deal of money by so doing,” he wrote Kermit. “But I shrink to a degree greater than I can express from commercializing what I did as President or the reputation I have gained in public service.”
He felt the same way about journalism. “I get from The Outlook a salary probably not more than one-eighth of what I could get by writing for the Sunday Hearst papers or the Sunday World; and nineteen men out of twenty would not see any difference; but there seems to me to be a very great difference.” He had his dignity to consider, and in that regard, unselfconsciously compared himself to Lincoln, Milton, and Darwin. “With none of these would it be pardonable to consider the possible monetary return, whether for the presidency, for Paradise Lost or for The Origin of Species.”
There remained his perennial source of gentlemanly income: the publication of books. African Game Trails had been enormously profitable in its first-serial form, and a bestseller for a while, but thereafter only a modest success. The polite notes Charles Scribner attached to Roosevelt’s half-yearly royalty checks did not quite mask editorial disappointment. Sales so far, in luxury and library editions, totaled fewer than forty thousand copies.
Looking back over his statements, Roosevelt could see that his other Scribner titles had lost momentum after his humiliation in the Congressional elections of 1910. Royalties earned by Oliver Cromwell, The Rough Riders, and Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter had fallen from $28,620 in February 1911 to $1,531 in February 1912. Oddly enough, his reemergence as the Bull Moose candidate had not arrested this slide; his latest check, for sales of all four books