Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [154]
On October 27, 1858, I was born at No. 28 East Twentieth Street, New York City, in the house in which we lived during the time that my two sisters and my brother and I were small children. It was furnished in the canonical taste of the New York which George William Curtis described in the Potiphar Papers. The black haircloth furniture in the dining room scratched the bare legs of the children when they sat on it. The middle room was a library, with tables, chairs, and bookcases of gloomy respectability. It was without windows, and so was available only at night. The front room, the parlor, seemed to us children to be a room of much splendor, but was open for general use only on Sunday evening or on rare occasions when there were parties.… The ornaments of that parlor I remember now, including the gas chandelier decorated with a great variety of cut-glass prisms. These prisms struck me as possessing peculiar magnificence. One of them fell off one day, and I hastily grabbed it and stowed it away, passing several days of furtive delight in the treasure, a delight always alloyed with fear that I would be found out and convicted of grand larceny.
ROOSEVELT’S REDISCOVERY of his narrative voice was interrupted on 8 December by distant, discordant Bull Moose calls. They emanated from the Progressive conference in Chicago, where his presence was urgently requested.
Gifford and Amos Pinchot had never been able to reconcile themselves to the power George Perkins wielded as chairman of the Party’s Executive Committee. Ever since the election, they had plagued Roosevelt with a proposal that the executive headquarters should be translocated from New York—Perkins’s orbit—to Washington, home of the more malleable Senator Dixon. The Colonel saw a threat to his reputation. The Party was bound to self-destruct if it lost its big-city backers. Perkins would resign rather than be sidelined by the Pinchots, and Frank Munsey was wistful to rejoin the GOP. Roosevelt did not want to look like a leader unable to hold on to his best men.
Showing as much good grace as possible, he left for Chicago on a special train, and found fifteen hundred loyal Progressives waiting for him next day in the ballroom of the LaSalle Hotel. The National Committee was sufficiently convinced by his support of Perkins to vote 32 to 12 in favor of keeping the executive headquarters in New York. As a sop to the Pinchots, a branch office was established in Washington, and antitrust language reinserted in the Party platform.
Roosevelt’s “renomination” two days later was more of a headline-getter than a formal nod toward 1916. He cast most of his speech of thanks in the present tense, telling the delegates that their current priority must be to fight for distributive justice at the state and federal level. He obstinately defended his philosophy of judicial recall: “The doctrine of the divine right of judges to rule the people is every bit as ignoble as the doctrine of the divine right of kings.”
With that he handed the platform over to Jane Addams, and the proceedings degenerated into a dry chautauqua on questions of organization, recruitment, and finance. Charts were drawn, titles devised, plans mooted, budgets projected, lists compiled from other lists, and committees split into subcommittees. Not until the morning of 12 December was Roosevelt free to head for home and his study, with its constant fire and Frank Harper tapping away on the typewriter downstairs.
BY CHRISTMAS HE had “History As Literature” finished, as well as several essays, the first few of his African game mammal studies, and another chapter of his autobiography. He decided to discontinue interview sessions with Lawrence Abbott and write or dictate the rest of that book. To Abbott and other editors at The Outlook, this was a fatal decision. The Colonel could not be expected