Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [153]
A cooperative, often jocular witness, he insisted that he was neither insane nor a Socialist. He bequeathed the bullet in Roosevelt’s chest to the New-York Historical Society, although some would have thought it belonged to the Colonel by right of conveyance. At times, Schrank claimed he was penniless; at others, that he had inherited Manhattan real estate from his father, a Bavarian immigrant. He had cash enough to have bought a gun and pursued the Colonel for two weeks through the Deep South and on across the Midwest—intending but failing to shoot him in at least five cities before Milwaukee. Always his phobia had been that Roosevelt, if elected, would plunge the country into a civil war.
By court order, Schrank was remanded to the custody of a “lunacy commission” of five psychiatrists. They concluded that he was a case of “dementia praecox, paranoid type,” and unanimously recommended incarceration for life in the Wisconsin state asylum in Oshkosh. A guard escorting him there by train noticed him staring out the window at passing fields, and asked if he liked to hunt.
“Only Bull Moose,” Schrank said.
MUCH AS ROOSEVELT wanted to become a full-time “literary feller,” as he had proclaimed himself in his thirties, his still-evangelical followers begged him to stay on as their leader. With four years to expand, refinance, and consolidate, the Progressive National Committee was intent on “renominating” him for president in 1916—so much so that it had already scheduled a Party conference in Chicago to sanction that plan.
George Perkins, seeking publicity, presided at a preliminary dinner of “Highbrow Political Contributors” in New York. The Colonel was guest of honor. Frank Munsey attended, along with the short-story writer Edna Ferber, the journalist Will Irwin, and Hamlin Garland, the kind of all-round man of letters Roosevelt most enjoyed. Garland’s short stories and essays were highly regarded, and he had also written an excellent life of President Grant.
If Perkins was hoping for an evening of Progressive dialectic, he was disappointed. Garland was more interested in encouraging Roosevelt (looking fully recovered and cheerful) to push ahead with his autobiography. He said he knew how difficult it was for a public man to find the right intimate tone, and passed on a recommendation from William Dean Howells, the sage of American letters: the Colonel should reminisce aloud to a stenographer.
Roosevelt was in receipt of similar advice from Lawrence Abbott of The Outlook, but he let Garland think the notion intrigued him. “I’ll begin it immediately, dictating the way Howells suggested.”
“Don’t give us too much of the political, the official,” Garland said. “Write it the way you talk to your friends.”
“That’s not so easy as it sounds, especially when you consider the distractions I suffer.” Roosevelt’s voice rose to the ironic squeak he sometimes used when mocking himself. “Being out of politics is not precisely retirement for me.”
ABBOTT’S IDEA, SHREWDER than Howells’s, was to engage the Colonel in conversations at Sagamore Hill, with Frank Harper sitting in. They should be as informal as possible. When Roosevelt dictated, he orated. But relaxing in front of his own fire and surrounded by his own books and mementoes, he was a natural raconteur. He could go on for hours, with effortless sequitur and wit, often laughing himself into paroxysms. Abbott worried, however, that he might be inhibited by the sight of his secretary scratching away on a pad.
Fortunately Harper was so short as to be unobtrusive in any room with large furniture. Before their first, experimental session, Abbott instructed the young man to record everything verbatim, no matter how disjointed the sequence. They they joined Roosevelt in his study.
The Colonel began to talk about his childhood with freshness and freedom. From time to time, he remembered Harper’s presence and stiffened. But as the afternoon wore on, he relaxed and Abbott went home triumphant, with a mass of material to snip and paste. After a couple of days Roosevelt had a typed