Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [269]
He did not elaborate on his own periods of melancholy, or say if he had ever felt overmastered by them. Robinson had long ago, with sly word play in “The Revealer,” implied that Roosevelt was too happily constituted to suffer real despair. Theodoros in Greek connoted a man gifted by the gods with equal quantities of positivity and personal courage—someone who was, in a later simile, sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion. Had he not killed his share of lions in Africa, and come home purged and purified, to shout out his message that a life of total engagement was the only one worth living? Then and now, Robinson perceived him to be much more than “biceps and sunshine.”
The title poem in The Man Against the Sky was not, as some might think, another portrait of Roosevelt. It did celebrate his anti-materialistic philosophy. Robinson’s extraordinary imagery, at once elusive and allusive, was pitched to fly right past the Colonel’s ears. But the central metaphor of a giant figure reaching the top of a black hill, gazing with inscrutable emotion at a world on fire beyond, then descending by slow stages out of sight (whether to Elysian fields or some unseen doom), was there for any Roosevelt-watcher to ponder.
ON THE LAST DAY of March, Roosevelt made his first overt move toward a return to the GOP by lunching with Elihu Root. Four years had passed since their estrangement at the last Republican National Convention—years in which Root had felt no annoyance at Roosevelt calling him a “thief,” only regret that someone he loved could be so unable to accept that his rulings as chairman might have been fair.
They met in New York, at Robert Bacon’s town house on Park Avenue. Henry Cabot Lodge and Leonard Wood attended. All five men found themselves linked by their dislike of the President. To Roosevelt’s sardonic amusement, Root and Lodge also had bitter things to say about Taft. But it was no time to upbraid them for supporting an un-reelectable President. The prime purpose of the lunch was to let the press and Progressive Party know that Athos and D’Artagnan had reconciled. Wood wrote with satisfaction in his diary, “Roosevelt and Root seemed to be glad to be together again, really so.”
The New York Times and The Washington Post treated the lunch as front-page news, on a par with dispatches describing “the greatest of conflicts” ongoing at Verdun. Political commentators were agreed that Roosevelt was making himself available as a candidate for nomination by both the Progressive and Republican parties. Supporters of the President felt qualms. Wilson did not look strong. Pancho Villa’s raid had been a severe embarrassment to him, and a four-thousand-man punitive American expedition, headed by Brigadier General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, had so far failed to raise much more than a cloud of alkali dust. Lindley Garrison had resigned as secretary of war, in protest against the President’s feeling that an enlarged, all-white National Guard was preferable to a segregated Continental Army. The first anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania loomed in six weeks’ time, and Germany had still not yet acknowledged her “strict accountability” for that outrage.
A mild irony of the lunch at Bacon’s house was that, despite its appearance of solidarity, every guest felt ambivalent about the Roosevelt boom. Root and Wood aspired to the presidency themselves, and Lodge was secretly for Hughes. Roosevelt himself wished he was not still the last hope of die-hard Progressives. Having re-embraced the party of William Howard Taft and Boies Penrose (not to mention William Barnes, Jr.), he felt he could not in good faith allow his Bull Moose followers to nominate him again. That would signal a belief that the Progressive movement was still viable, whereas he had long ago told Kermit that it had “vanished into the Ewigkeit.”*
But his boom would not stop. George von Lengerke Meyer created a Roosevelt Republican Committee, and funds flowed in. To the fury of the brothers Pinchot,