Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [164]
Had Roosevelt not decided to make his autobiography as impersonal as possible, he could have brought it to an end with an account of this ceremony, casting the congregation as a sort of dramatis personae of his life and times. Here was old Joseph Choate, to whom he had turned, after the death of Theodore Senior, for career advice; his classmate Bob Bacon, still the handsomest man in the world, but grizzled now and replaced as American ambassador to France; tiny, guttural Jake Riis, who had opened his eyes to “how the other half lives”; his orthographical mentor, Brander Matthews, one of the few academics he could stand; Bill Loeb, who had handed him John Hay’s telegram in 1901, confirming his accession to the presidency; sleek George Cortelyou, manager of his huge electoral win in 1904; Gifford Pinchot, the architect of his conservation policies; Henry White, who had ridden with him and the Kaiser on Döbertiz Field; Lyman and Lawrence Abbott, his employers at The Outlook, wondering how long they could afford to showcase his political opinions; George Perkins, who intended to keep bankrolling the Progressive Party, and Frank Munsey, who did not. And here by virtue of blood was the sole Democrat present, thirty-one-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt, recently confirmed as assistant secretary of the navy.
Dick and Ethel were married over the loud objections of little Gracie, Ted and Eleanor’s daughter. Future generations were manifesting themselves.
WITH SPRING UNDER WAY and the Derbys off to Europe on honeymoon, Roosevelt reapplied himself to the literary task he was beginning to find unbearable. “I am working with heated unintelligence at my ‘biography,’ ” he wrote Ethel. “I fairly loathe it, now.”
His boredom showed as he dictated two long, dry chapters about his commissionerships in Washington and New York in the 1890s. It was difficult to interest any modern reader in the civil service and municipal problems of a quarter-century before. He tried to make them sound less dated, and fell into a presentist mode, as if he were still campaigning against Taft and Wilson. A chapter on his service with the Rough Riders in Cuba, heavily appendicized with documents testifying to his heroism at San Juan, ended with an argument for military and naval preparedness in 1913. Hindsight made him more pro-labor and better informed about the abuse of women than he had been as president. The Progressive Party platform kept intruding, like King Charles’s head. He seemed to realize that his book was becoming polemical, but could not help himself. Nor could he turn, as he had in happier days, to Elihu Root for corrective sarcasm.
Lawrence Abbott tried but failed to persuade him to write more “picturesquely.” It was not for lack of literary labor. Roosevelt revised some pages of typescript with such care that all four margins were crammed with interlineations. He eliminated anything that might be read as overtly boastful, assembling a sober and comprehensive account of his service as governor of New York State with the help of George Perkins, and asking Gifford Pinchot to draft a chapter entitled “The Natural Resources of the Nation.” The titles of five other chapters spoke for themselves: “The Presidency: Making an Old Party Progressive,” “The Big Stick and the Square Deal,” “Social and Industrial Justice,” “The Monroe Doctrine and the Panama Canal,” and finally “The Peace of Righteousness.”
Desperate to compile the most official record, he neglected his own advice to historians and wrote hundreds of colorless paragraphs unlikely to swell The Outlook’s subscription list. Only once, in an inserted chapter about his love of books and the outdoors, did he recapture the charmingly natural style of earlier installments. By the third week