Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [216]
“The future lies with Russia,” he told an aide. “She grows and grows, and lies on us like a nightmare.”
WHILE WASHINGTON WAITED to see what Vienna would do, Americans went back to the business and pleasure of being American. Rep. James F. Byrnes of South Carolina presented President Wilson and Secretary Tumulty with a pair of white duck summer suits. In San Francisco, the city chamber of commerce heralded the imminent opening of the Panama Canal as “the dawn of a new era of unequaled prosperity.” Members of the Buttersville, Michigan, Scandinavian Methodist Church burned their paid-off mortgage and sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” in alternate verses of English and Norwegian. Missouri reported that its registration of automobiles had topped thirty-eight thousand. Ty Cobb, champion slugger of the Detroit American League, was seen dining conspiratorially with the president of the Federal League. A Philadelphia market listed its latest prices for dressed poultry: “Fowls, western fancy, 18 @ 19 cents; fowls, western unattractive, 10 @ 13 cents.” State hospitals in New York experimented with “lawn movies,” a new therapy enhanced by Victrola music. Evelyn Nesbit Thaw announced that she would star in a full-length feature entitled The Life of Evelyn Nesbit Thaw. The Pacific Coast Federation for Sex Hygiene sponsored a presentation on “Sex as a Factor in High School and University Life.” West Virginia went dry. Wild strawberries studded the fields around Tryonville, Pa., and Kansas wheat fields ripened northward, in a slow wave of gold.
CHAPTER 18
The Great Accident
What unrecorded overthrow
Of all the world has ever known,
Or ever been, has made itself
So plain to you, and you alone?
WHEN THE IMPERATOR RETURNED to New York on 15 July 1914, its register of first-class passengers included Mrs. Nicholas Longworth as well as Mr. and Mrs. Kermit Roosevelt. Alice had stocked up in Paris with all the latest hats and dresses, and was looking forward to wearing something spectacular when her parents welcomed the newlyweds at Sagamore Hill that evening.
It was the first time in four years that the Roosevelts could all be together, and it might be the last for as long again. Alice could stay only one night. Nick (waiting at quayside for the ship to dock) urgently needed her in Cincinnati, where he was campaigning to recapture his Congressional seat. Kermit and Belle were booked to sail on to Brazil in just twelve days. Ethel and Dick Derby would remain on Long Island for a while after that, with little Richard, their son of fourteen weeks. So would Ted and Eleanor with Grace, now almost three, and Theodore Roosevelt III, just one month old. Archie, down from Harvard, was available to drive everyone around in the family’s brand-new Buick. Quentin (fully grown now, a big boy not far off seventeen) was getting ready for his first independent adventure, a pack-horse expedition in Arizona.
Alice’s early departure spared her one of the democratic exercises Roosevelt insisted on in his capacity as a man of the people: an open reception for the residents of Oyster Bay. He thought they should be allowed to meet Belle. That young lady was no more drawn to the hoi polloi than her elder sister-in-law. But she had learned public manners in the courts of Europe, and acquitted herself gracefully as the villagers sipped tea and looked her over.
Though Belle was, as her name and accent implied, Southern-born, her plentiful teeth qualified her as an authentic Roosevelt. The sight of her laughing with Archie, Quentin, and the Colonel was enough to overexpose the fastest camera film. Kermit found it hard to smile. Otherwise, he was beginning to resemble his father. The slender graduate who had gone south in 1912 was a bulkier personage, with a broadening face and body and passé mustache. Ted and Archie, like most young men of their generation, were slick of hair and clean-shaven.
A DELEGATION OF New York Progressives tried to crash the reception, but were told that the Colonel