Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [162]
What disturbed him was the Armory Show’s message that the Old World was, ironically, far ahead of the New in developing a cultural response to the terrifying implications of modern science. His own written attempt at such a response, “The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit,” could be taken as naïve, if the future—even the present!—really was as inhuman as Lehmbruck and Duchamp and Brancusi saw it. Unable to conceive of a head as a metal egg, Roosevelt abandoned reverence for humor:
In this recent exhibition the lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists.… The Cubists are entitled to the serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored puzzle-pictures of the Sunday newspapers. Of course there is no reason for choosing the cube as a symbol, except that it is probably less fitted than any other mathematical expression for any but the most formal decorative art. There is no reason why people should not call themselves Cubists, or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, or Knights of the Isosceles Triangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so desire; as expressing anything serious and permanent, one term is as fatuous as another. Take the picture which for some reason is called “A Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” There is in my bathroom a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now, if for some inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of, say, “A Well-Dressed Man Going Up a Ladder,” the name would fit the facts just about as well.… From the standpoint of terminology each name would have whatever merit inheres in a rather cheap striving after effect; and from the standpoint of decorative value, of sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of the picture.
ROOSEVELT’S SUDDEN INTEREST in modern art, on a day when he could have stayed home and read accounts of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, caused much editorial hilarity. A cartoon by Kemble in the Baltimore Evening Sun showed the new President contemplating a portrait of his toothy predecessor in the Oval Office and musing, “I wonder if that’s a futurist? It can’t be a cubist.” The New York World argued that the “Square Deal” of 1903 had been a proto-Cubist conceit, doing to the Constitution what Braque and Picasso would do to color and form ten years later. As for Progressivism, there was little to distinguish it from the dizziness of Duchamp. “The ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’ is the perfect pictorial representation of a Roosevelt platform.”
C. E. Wood, staff cartoonist for The Independent, drew a caricature of the Colonel explaining a Cubist construction to a fellow viewer at the Armory Show. “You don’t understand this new style of painting? It’s as clear as day.”
The canvas’s blocky shapes spelled out “1916.”
IT TURNED OUT that Sargent’s portrait of Theodore Roosevelt was indeed the sole wall decoration to greet Wilson when he reported for work in the Oval Office on 5 March 1913. Not only that, the new desk chair ordered for him had not yet been delivered, so he found himself sitting in Roosevelt’s old one, rather battered after seven and a half years of strenuous occupancy.
During the early days of his campaign, Wilson had reacted touchily when reporters suggested he should try to emulate the Colonel’s dynamic speaking style. “Don’t you suppose I know my own handicaps?… I’d do it if I could.” But when formal oratory was called for, Wilson was capable of eloquence without affectation, as his inaugural address showed:
The great government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people. There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought