Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [300]
No less a bandmaster than Lieutenant Commander John Philip Sousa, USN, conducting a two-hundred-piece ensemble, welcomed the Roosevelts to Kansas City with a performance of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The lovely town rippled with flags and ghastly portraits of the Colonel. Ten thousand citizens cheered his way to the newspaper office, a magnificent Italianate brick pile by Jarvis Hunt. Although Roosevelt was not required to contribute any articles before October, he wrote a couple before lunch. They observed only the third of the Star’s famous style rules (“Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English”), and they were penned on manuscript paper, front and back, to the distress of the production department. His copy editor was tolerant, but the rules were applied to good effect on the prose of the paper’s next recruit, the cub reporter Ernest Hemingway.
“IT WAS THERAPEUTIC FOR THEM BOTH TO GET AWAY.”
Theodore and Edith Roosevelt, 1917. (photo credit i26.1)
The Roosevelts moved on to Chicago, where on 26 September the Colonel gave a speech for the National Security League, assailing Senator La Follette and other pacifists as “old women of both sexes.” He noticed soldiers among his segregated audience and said he would give anything to go to war with them. “I greet you as comrades, you with the white faces and you with the black faces.” In a separate address at Camp Grant, he sarcastically complimented the troops in training on having one rifle for every three men, saying that he had seen camps on Long Island where recruits were still drilling with broomsticks. A spokesman for the War Department promised that there would be guns aplenty when America’s new army was ready to go overseas.
Edith became concerned about her husband’s psychological and physical condition as she accompanied him to several more speaking engagements in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. “He is in good spirits with his head up,” she wrote Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, “but at times the horrid futility of beating the air comes upon him in a great wave.” On occasion he publicly allowed his gloom to show, and said that he felt “blackballed” by the Wilson administration. He was graying faster now, his mustache almost white, his belly and buttocks massive. Energy still animated his speeches, but it came in sporadic bursts, as from a fading battery.
Other women besides Edith—the novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, Ida Tarbell, and Josephine Stricker, his new secretary—noticed how quickly the Colonel had deteriorated. He was prone to irrational rages. Back in New York at the beginning of October, he showed such fatigue in an appearance at Madison Square Garden that Edith sentenced him to two weeks at Jack Cooper’s Health Farm, outside Stamford, Connecticut.
He reported there on the tenth, and found himself the camp’s only patient. Arrangements had been made to keep his treatment private. “The household enthralls me,” he wrote Eleanor. “The men are professional athletes, touching the underworld on one side, and gilded youth and frayed gilded age on the other.” Jack Cooper was “an old-time skin-glove fighter [and] intimate friend of noted criminals and millionaires.” His partner was another retired pugilist, whose only reading seemed to be YMCA Weekly. An Irish domestic and a dismayingly fat Hungarian cook made up the rest of the establishment.
Cooper examined Roosevelt and told him that he was hypertense and thirty-five pounds overweight. “What’s the matter,