Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [208]
During their prepresidential careers (Wilson was almost two years older), they had both written histories and biographies that showed they understood the American dynamic—its geographical push westward, and the centripetal forces that had worked against secession and defederalized the Constitution. But their respective attempts at a magnum opus—Roosevelt’s four-volume The Winning of the West, and Wilson’s five-volume A History of the American People—had nothing in common except the palpable ache of each author to be making history rather than writing it. Wilson had no gift for narrative, and absolutely no feel for the physical things Roosevelt reveled in: hunting, warfare, exploration, danger. He named no plants and heard no birds. Surprisingly, for a professor, he had been less willing than Roosevelt to scour archives and even attics for original documents. His forte was abstract, analytical thought, especially on governmental and legal issues. Questions of process and synthesis, the objective calculation of power balances (or imbalances, as in Congressional Government, his 1885 exposé of committee rule on Capitol Hill), and the logical resolution of conflicting ideas were the sort of cerebral challenges that delighted him. Roosevelt could no more have written Wilson’s Division and Reunion, about the polemics of the Civil War, than the President could have published The Rough Riders.
Had Wilson not been so formidably sure of himself, with his calm gray gaze and air of aloof command, he might well have been intimidated by the recovering invalid opposite him. Aside from the facts that Roosevelt had served two successful terms as president, and would now be serving a third, if the Republican Party had not been so hostile to progressive reform, there was the prodigality of his worldly experience to take into account. At least a cat’s quota of lives, and easy adaptation to environments as irreconcilable as Nahant, Nairobi, and the piranha pools of Brazil were embodied in the cheerful sunburned man who sat drinking the President’s lemonade.
When Roosevelt rose to go, Wilson escorted him to the north door of the White House and waved goodbye as he limped back to his automobile. A crowd of several hundred spectators had collected around it. “Hurrah for Teddy!” a young man yelled. “Hurrah for our next President!”
Roosevelt, grinning, took off his panama hat and bopped the youth’s head with it.
Afterward, Joseph Tumulty asked Wilson what he thought of the Colonel.
“He is a great big boy,” Wilson said. “There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling. You can’t resist the man. I can easily understand why his followers are so fond of him.”
IT WAS STILL HOT at 8:30 P.M., when Roosevelt arrived at the District of Columbia Convention Hall. The huge room was built over a street-level market, so a miasma of rotting vegetables saluted the nostrils of the four thousand people waiting to hear his lecture. Almost the entire membership of the National Geographic Society was present, in a show of solidarity against transatlantic critics who were alleging that the Colonel had explored very little, and discovered nothing new, in Brazil. An editorial in the Daily Graphic had compared him to Baron Münchhausen as a fantasist of improbable adventures.
He came perspiring up the stairway, and was formally escorted into the hall by a group of geographers walking backward and applauding. The ovation was thunderous, especially when he took the stage and flashed his white-tile grin. Veteran observers of the capital scene could not recall any former president since Ulysses S. Grant being more loudly cheered. Those more future-minded looked ahead to the possibility of Roosevelt challenging Wilson in 1916.
“ ‘HURRAH FOR OUR NEXT PRESIDENT!’ ”
A thinner Roosevelt revisits Washington, 19 May 1914.