Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [277]
Secretary Baker was pleased to confirm in mid-August that Congress had voted $13 million toward the reorganization and equipping of an army air arm. Aspiring fliers thrilled to the size of this appropriation, building as it did on passage of an ambitious National Defense Act. Now patriotic young men unattracted to ground or naval warfare could, if they wanted in any future emergency, serve their country in the skies. Quelle gloire!
Quentin dutifully completed his course at Plattsburg, then spent as many late-summer days as he could with Flora. He had to cram for his next semester at Harvard, having determined to pass through university in three years and then add two more at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He told Kermit he would like to be a mechanical engineer.
ON 31 AUGUST, ROOSEVELT inaugurated the Republican fall campaign as promised, with a major policy statement in Lewiston, Maine. Absentmindedly, he referred to it as “my Lusitania speech.” The verbal slip was telling. Instead of musing how he could best help Hughes as a candidate, he was still brooding over an act of war that had found Woodrow Wilson wanting fifteen months before. His speech—an unfavorable comparison of the President to Pontius Pilate—was roaringly received, and reached millions of newspaper readers in transcript. It buttressed his new image as an elder statesman of the GOP, but disturbed many undecided voters who felt that he was too pugnacious a campaigner for Hughes’s good. “Roosevelt would be a really great man,” the naturalist John Burroughs wrote in his journal, “if he could be shorn of that lock of his hair in which that strong dash of the bully resides.”
Two days later, the President effortlessly reclaimed national attention by appearing on the porch of “Shadow Lawn,” his summer cottage at Long Branch, New Jersey, and thanking a delegation of Democratic officials for renominating him to another term. Slim and laughing, natty in white slacks and a dark blazer, he looked almost young, the happiness of his remarriage radiating from him. It was difficult for reporters who had covered the Colonel in recent months to believe that Wilson, soon to be sixty, was the older man.
There was much for him to be happy about. He had just negotiated an end to a threatened railroad strike that would have paralyzed the country and damaged his candidacy. In doing so he had openly sided with labor against capital, and persuaded Congress to reduce the daily hours worked by rail union members from ten to six, with no loss of pay. The public rejoiced, and Roosevelt fumed. He wanted to boast about the time he had settled the great anthracite strike of 1902, without partiality, but thought it would hurt Hughes if he carped against a piece of progressive legislation.
The United States was prospering, with exporters reaping huge profits from war-related sales. Americans dismissed the President’s unpopularity abroad, seeing him as a patient but firm negotiator who—as his propagandists were forever trumpeting—“kept us out of war.” It even redounded to Wilson’s advantage that he no longer showed any partiality toward Great Britain. That country’s cruel crackdown on Irish unrest, and its continuing harassment of Europe-bound merchant ships, had created widespread voter anger.
Canadian air signaled the end of summer. Yachts returned to their docks. Maids stripped the linen covers from parlor furniture. Department stores stocked up with black velvet caps and the new zebra boa. Charlie Chaplin’s new movie The Count opened on Broadway. Quentin Roosevelt returned to college, beset by memories of Flora in an orange bathing suit, and realized that he had fallen in love with her.
THE CAMPAIGNS OF THE two parties cranked up. Roosevelt fretted over Hughes’s dryasdust speaking style, and in a letter to the candidate, repeated the advice he had given Henry Stimson in 1910: “What the average voter wants is not an etching, but a poster, a statement so broad and clear and