Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [163]
We have now come to the sober second thought. The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every purpose of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried in our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration.
Washington’s diplomatic corps noted that the new President had said nothing about the world outside the United States.
Roosevelt was determined not to criticize him publicly, as a matter of personal propriety as well as respect for the decision of the electorate. But his hackles were raised early by Wilson’s choice of William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state. Not only was Bryan a hayseed of the purest fiber, sure to alienate the aristocrats along Embassy Row, he also quaintly believed that all foreign provocations could be talked or prayed away. That boded ill for another crisis over Mexico, where an anti-American despot named Victoriano Huerta had seized power and, apparently, condoned an armed attack on a U.S. border patrol in Arizona, the same day Wilson was inaugurated.
Republican and Progressive congressmen wishing to urge a forceful response from the new administration found themselves barred by a White House access rule that reversed more than a century of democratic tradition. Wilson’s plump young secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, announced that in future, all callers upon the President must bear invitations. This haughty policy was perhaps to be expected from a political scholar whose writings made clear that he believed in an isolated, powerful executive. Wilson felt that legislators over the years had spent too much time visiting the White House with unasked-for advice, and too little on Capitol Hill, consenting.
ON FRIDAY, 4 APRIL, there was a gathering of Rooseveltians—both Republican and Progressive—at Christ Church, Oyster Bay, to watch the Colonel give away his younger daughter in marriage to Dr. Richard Derby. Although the gathering was large, cramming the flower-filled nave beyond capacity, it was select. Conspicuous absentees included William Howard Taft (now a professor of law at Yale), and Elihu Root. George von Lengerke Meyer, who had served in Taft’s cabinet as well as Roosevelt’s, had needed encouragement to attend. So had Senator Lodge. They were not sure they had been forgiven for failing to stand at Armageddon. Roosevelt scoffed at their embarrassment. “I feel very strongly against Root,” he told Winthrop Chanler, “because Root took part in as downright a bit of theft as ever was perpetrated by any Tammany ballot box stuffer.… But with Cabot and George it was wholly different. They had the absolute right to do each exactly as he did, and I never expected either of them to follow me.”
Both were, in any case, Harvard men, as were Chanler, Owen Wister, and many of the other top-hatted figures attending the ceremony—not least the bridegroom. “Dusky Dick,” as Alice Longworth teasingly called him (he was dark, and prone to black moods), happened also to be wealthy, with an easy expectation of twelve to fourteen thousand dollars a year over and above his professional income. This had been a further reason to approve him as an addition to the family. Roosevelt was so much a product of the Porcellian and Knickerbocker clubs that he never seemed to notice how exclusive his preferred field of acquaintance really was.
“FUTURE GENERATIONS WERE MANIFESTING THEMSELVES.”
The Colonel gives his younger daughter away in marriage, 4 April 1913. (photo credit i13.2)
He seemed near to tears as he escorted Ethel to the altar, in contrast to his unsmiling demeanor at Alice’s wedding in the White House. That had been a state function; this was private. It was, nevertheless, momentous as a rite of passage not only for the young woman at his side, glowing in