Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [274]
“No,” Roosevelt said. Then, with a click of teeth: “Let Hughes talk—it’s his fight.”
There were spasms of anger in subsequent days, along with coughing fits so violent he pulled some tendons. Pride in Kermit, who had come north from Argentina with Belle to present Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., age five months, for inspection, and in Ted, Archie, and Quentin, re-registered at Plattsburg, prompted him to rage at the offspring of some of his friends. “If they were mine I’d want to choke them—pretty boys who know all the latest tango steps and the small talk, and the latest things in socks and ties—tame cats, mollycoddles.”
At such times, only Edith Roosevelt could hush him. “Now, Theodore. That is just one of those remarks that make it so difficult sometimes for your friends to defend you.”
“Why, Edie!”
* “I see that Madame Guy is crying. So is Madame Roosevelt, and I feel tears coming myself. This is impressive.”
* “I too have a German bullet in my back [sic]. The assassin who shot me was a German.”
* “You offer us a rare, almost unique, example of a political person who is not a politician, of a man of action who is at the same time a man of thought; of a public speaker who does not speak unless he has something to say; of a writer who knows how to fight and a warrior who knows how to write. And all this with a frank gaiety, a lack of pomposity that seduces the humblest and impresses the most powerful. There is in you something of our Cyrano de Bergerac, who risked his life for an idea; who fought without fear of danger for his belief, but between battles set aside his armor and his sword to read Lucretius and expound Plato.”
* Eternity.
CHAPTER 24
Shadows of Lofty Words
Far journeys and hard wandering
Await him in whose crude surmise
Peace, like a mask, hides everything
That is and has been from his eyes.
AS A BOY, ROOSEVELT USED TO PLAY a running game with his siblings and friends, called “stagecoach.” It involved bursts of motion, interrupted by imaginary collisions that caused all passengers aboard to fly off in various directions.
In recent years, he had suffered similar feelings of acceleration and ejection, often enough to wonder if the game had not been a forecast of his future. He lay now amid the dust of yet another political crash, feeling no particular desire to get back on the road. Reading The Man Against the Sky had revived his interest in poets and poetry. “A poet,” he liked to say, “can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.” He devoured Spoon River Anthology and invited Edgar Lee Masters to visit him at Sagamore Hill. Hearing that the nature bards Bliss Carman and Madison Cawein were in financial straits, he quietly raised funds for them.
His taste in verse was unpredictable. One of Robert Frost’s bitterest poems, “A Servant to Servants,” with its central image of a caged, naked psychotic, spoke to him more than the popular lyrics in North of Boston. He astonished the poet by reciting some lines from it at a meeting of the Poetry Society of America. What may have appealed to him was the dogged voice of the first-person narrator, a caretaker resigned to unending, thankless responsibilities: By good rights I ought not to have so much / Put on me, but there seems no other way.
In that spirit, Roosevelt heard himself promising once again to take part in an election campaign, although this time he so disliked the ticket (vitiated by Senator Fairbanks in the number two spot) that he resented being asked. It was bad enough having to endorse Charles Evans Hughes, who had never shown any gratitude for his help in 1910, and who had developed a severe attack of amnesia when asked to testify for the defense in Barnes v. Roosevelt.
However, the prospect of four more years of Woodrow Wilson was so unthinkable that Roosevelt felt he should do whatever was necessary to put Hughes in the White House. On 26 June 1916, he announced his support for Hughes, and dined with