Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [169]
Roosevelt no longer believed that civilization improved by expanding. On the contrary, it coarsened as it spread, and encroached on refined enclaves. He found his own sanctuary on Cove Neck in Oyster Bay invaded by a new species, the “moving-picture man of vast wealth.” Somehow this mogul, J. Stuart Blackton, had managed to buy the estate next door, and gotten permission to extend a huge dock out into Cold Spring Harbor. Judging from the size of the stable he was building on a field that had once belonged to Sagamore Hill, he would soon follow up with a mansion that would rob the woods beyond of many trees.
The Colonel was not alone among the clan of fiftyish, self-styled Anglo-Saxon “gentlemen,” raised on both sides of the Atlantic, who felt a sense of social claustrophobia. For such men (restless Winty Chanler was an example, and Rider Haggard and Frederick Selous and Lord Delamere), there was little left to explore north of the equator except the El Dorados of economic, political, and scientific progress. Those parts of the Southern Hemisphere that were not ice or ocean still offered, here and there, opportunities for geographical exploration to persons no longer young. Roosevelt confided a few details of his Brazilian dream to Arthur Lee, admitting, “It is rather an ambitious trip for a stout, elderly, retired politician.”
If he could persuade Dr. Lambert that he was fit, and get official backing from the American Museum of Natural History, he would probably not be back home until the late spring of 1914. “I shall be glad to be out of the country for one reason, and that is the Progressive Party,” he told Lee. “The temptation is for the Progressives always to lie down on me, and in the unlikely event of the party continuing to exist, it has got to learn to walk alone.”
Another reason to leave home for six or seven months would be to spare himself from having to watch the Democrats pervert his political and social legacy. Here was President Wilson determined to remove all Negroes from the federal bureaucracy, and collaborating with Oscar Underwood, the House majority leader, on a tariff bill as pro-corporate as anything approved by Taft. The pious doctrines of pacificism and prohibition had become fashionable in Washington—nowhere more so than at the State Department, where William Jennings Bryan had declared that nothing stronger than grape juice should be served at diplomatic receptions. The secretary also announced that he would continue to accept fees for delivering his famous chautauqua oration, “The Prince of Peace.” Roosevelt, disgusted, took advantage of a visit of some British pacifists to Sagamore Hill to preach a sermon of his own on the text, “Thou Shalt Not Slop Over.”
He was sufficiently alarmed at worsening relations with Mexico, and with Japan over the perennial problem of “yellow-peril” discrimination in California, to warn Franklin Roosevelt in the Navy Department that war with either country was not implausible. “In that case we shall be in an unpardonable position if we permit ourselves to be caught with our fleet separated.”
There was little more he could say to influence administration policy without sounding meddlesome. In the fall, he intended to write a single, statesmanlike appraisal of the current political situation, and publish it in the neutral pages of Century Magazine. Then he would sail south and out of the public eye. He was more