Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [255]
Remarkably, Wilson displayed no animus against the old idealist, and wrote him a farewell letter full of respect. The White House let it be known that when the two men took their leave of each other, they had both said, “God bless you.”
Next morning, Bryan stated that for the first time in months he had been able to sleep through the night.
“GOOD MORNING, LITTLE Miss Anarchist, I understand you are cutting my copy.”
Somehow, Roosevelt had found out that Sonya Levien, his junior colleague at Metropolitan magazine, was of radical Russian background. It bothered him no more than the short work she made of some of his essays. The Colonel remained, as ever, a delight for editors to work with. No matter how sick he might be (since Brazil, his fever attacks had multiplied), or how distracted by other responsibilities, his copy was always ready when due, revised down to the last semicolon. The same went for galleys, which he checked the moment he received them. If passages he had labored over fell victim to Miss Levien’s scissors, his good humor never failed. “I always regard with stoical calm the mutilation of my bantlings.”
Although he now regretted his AP statement in support of the President, and was once again violently abusing the administration, Miss Levien was struck by the contrasting mildness of his personality. “There was an air of suppressed amiability about him which made one realize what fun his children must have had with him.” He was unable to resist any boy or girl of romping age: their company made him revert to childhood himself. One morning when the anteroom to the Colonel’s office was crowded, as usual, with politicians, newspapermen, foreigners, and favor-seekers, Miss Levien was alarmed to hear roars and shrieks emanating from his sanctum. She went to investigate and found Roosevelt “on his knees playing bear with the adorable, red-headed freckle-nosed son of Mr. Dunne.”
For all the Colonel’s charm, she found him unsentimental about her personal experience of growing up among the working poor. When she said that the sordid privations and deadly monotony of those days had made her a socialist, he scoffed that “radicals laid too much stress upon the drudgery of the day laborer’s work.” So much for his own claim to be a radical, a few years back. Much of the work of artists, directors, and writers, he told Miss Levien, was drudgery of the most monotonous kind. But he saw nothing sordid in it, only enjoyment and satisfaction if the end product—a painting, a play, a T-girder—benefited civilization. Of course, “There are people who enjoy nothing, who have not the capacity for fun and contentment—no matter in what status of life they happen to be.”
She saw that Roosevelt could not understand the difference between the kind of boredom he complained of on the campaign trail, and the spiritual despair of miners and factory workers who saw nothing ahead of them but brute labor and an unpaid old age. His response to her attempts to enlighten him on that score was invariable: that the life of the working poor could be improved by social legislation, but that ultimately every man’s success or failure depended upon “character.”
What he meant by character was as vague as his concept of righteousness. But there was no doubt in Miss Levien’s heart that Roosevelt—child of privilege as he was—embodied both