Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [159]
ON TUESDAY, 4 MARCH, the present and the future simultaneously intruded themselves on literary recall. Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as President of the United States, calling upon “all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men” to come to his side. “God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!”
Doubting, somehow, that Wilson wanted his advice, the Colonel went that morning to the huge new “Futurists Exhibition” at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory in midtown Manhattan. Since its opening two weeks before, the show, officially entitled “International Exhibition of Modern Art” and displaying well over a thousand paintings and sculptures, had drawn record crowds, setting off reactionaries against sophisticates, critic against critic, and the avant-garde against the merely curious, in a bedlam of aesthetic debate. It seemed worthy of an Outlook review.
Roosevelt had never written art criticism before. His references to painting, mostly in letters, were conventional and uninvolved, although Arthur Lee had managed to thrill him with the gift of some Valhallan landscapes by Pinckney Marcius-Simons, a New Yorker transplanted to Bayreuth. As for sculpture, Alice had once been convulsed by her father’s admiration for a “particularly fine Diana,” despite three-dimensional evidence that the figure was Apollo.
Monocular vision was part of his problem, but he also had a tin ear for music, and no sense of interior design beyond the hunter’s desire to surround himself with disjecta membra. “Art,” Roosevelt admitted, “is about the only subject of which I feel some uncertainty.” That had not stopped him, as President, from being strongly supportive of the creative classes. His executive dining room had vied with Henry Adams’s breakfast parlor as a meeting place for writers, artists, and intellectuals. He had put the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the novelist James B. Connolly, and the cartoonist Thomas Nash on the federal payroll, on the understanding that they would do as little governmental work as possible. He had sponsored a classical restoration of the White House by the architects McKim, Mead & White, teamed up with the planners of the City Beautiful movement against the yahoos of Capitol Hill, posed for John Singer Sargent, and chosen Augustus Saint-Gaudens to design the most elegant coins in modern circulation. “I’d like to be remembered in that way—a patron of art,” he told Hamlin Garland.
Nevertheless, something earthy in him mistrusted what was most fine in the fine arts. He had trouble reading Jane Austen, and thought Henry James effeminate. He disliked poetry that dwelt on intuitions or sensation, preferring border ballads and Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf to Keats and Baudelaire. Yet his own writings demonstrated a lyrical receptivity to the sights and sounds of the natural world, plus a willingness to be surprised. He rejected nothing new until he understood it well enough to form an opinion of it—usually on moral or utilitarian grounds. Even then, he was amenable to changing his mind, if an expert could improve his perception. Unlike most of the sixty thousand traditionally minded viewers who had preceded him to the Armory, he came without prejudice. He felt that the organizers of the show were doing a public service in displaying “art forces which of late have been at work in Europe, forces which cannot be ignored.”
An electricity