Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [168]
AFTER IT WAS ALL OVER, and a nickel and a penny had been received by his lawyers, he pushed his way through a jostling crowd of congratulators. He was in a hurry to catch the 5:30 train and return home for what was left of the Memorial Day weekend. Charles Thompson of The New York Times managed to get close and ask, “Are you and Newett going to meet?”
Roosevelt looked back with an expression half surprised, half sardonic.
“Not if the advances are to come from me,” he said.
ROOSEVELT V. NEWETT WAS a front-page news story across the United States, and received wide coverage even in Britain. Comment on the Colonel’s Pyrrhic victory was generally supportive. The New York Times remarked that all Americans should be pleased to have seen libel rebuffed with honest truth. Satirists and cartoonists sharpened their pens. Hotels in Philadelphia reported a run on “Roosevelt punch.” The Fort Wayne News joked that the Colonel’s major achievement had been to disillusion those millions of Americans who thought he did not drink at all.
“I am very glad I put the suit through,” Roosevelt wrote Kermit, “but of course it was an unpleasant expense.” Six cents would not significantly reduce his legal fees, let alone pay the travel costs of his dozens of witnesses. “The last eight months I have had three heavy expenses, the attempted assassination, Ethel’s wedding, and this libel suit.” His big book advance from the Macmillan Company was not due until the fall. “I shall have to make one or two speeches and write one or two articles before I start for Arizona with Archie and Quentin.”
It occurred to him that Kermit was in far worse straits than himself. The young man had at last resigned from his underpaid railroad job, and was about to start work for a firm of bridge builders in the southern part of Brazil. But his new employers sounded shifty with money. Roosevelt fretted about Kermit not eating properly, in order to save enough milreis to marry Belle Willard. “Did you get the check for $200 which I sent you a couple of months ago? I’ll send you another next month, and you will of course let me know if you are short of funds.”
Kermit indeed had received the check, and proudly torn it up. He attached much more value to a hint that his father let drop in another letter: “Sometime I must get down to see you.”
Roosevelt had in fact decided to accept an invitation from the government of Argentina to lecture in Buenos Aires sometime in November. That meant a sea journey down the South American coastline, with an opportunity to stop off and see Kermit en route. He was sure of being officially welcomed in Brazil: Hermes da Fonseca, the president of that country, wanted to take him on a hunting trip.
Secretly, Roosevelt was planning something much more ambitious. The idea of a collecting expedition linking Brazil’s two great waterways, the Rio Paraguay and the Amazon, had begun to grow on him. He had long been curious about the interior of the subcontinent, working its paleontology into his theory of biological analogies in history. Now, with his political career ended (once again!), his autobiography written, and his reputation wiped free of stain, he thought he might embark on one more great adventure before he got too old. Undoubtedly it would be dangerous for a man of his age, but as he wrote in a tribute to the British explorer Robert Scott in The Outlook, “Great risks and hazards are warranted by the end sought to be achieved.” People afraid to venture outside the pale of safety possessed “limited imaginative power.”
For a variety of reasons, not all of them conscious, he wanted to feel again as free as he had in Africa, and in those ecstatic days of youth when he could ride across the prairie and never see another human being. The spread of civilization across the earth’s waste spaces, which he had celebrated in The Winning of the West, was accelerating at such a rate that little remained of mystery in nature. Since he left the presidency, both the north and south poles had