Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [329]
If so, he could be said in more ways than one to have died of a broken heart.
THE NEWS OF THE COLONEL’S death came too late for the morning papers that Monday, but it spread around the world with extraordinary swiftness by telephone, telegraph, and cable.
A common reaction among the millions of Americans who had imagined him to be indestructible, and headed again for the presidency, was a sense of shock so violent they took refuge in metaphor. For Henry A. Beers, “a wind had fallen, a light had gone out, a military band had stopped playing.” For John Burroughs, a pall seemed to cover the sky. For William Dudley Foulke, as well as the editors of the New York Evening Post, there had been an eclipse of the sun. For General Fred C. Ainsworth, a storm center was swept away. For Hamlin Garland, a mountain had slid from the horizon. For Kermit Roosevelt, who heard the news with Ted at the U.S. Army headquarters in Coblenz, the earth had lost one of its dimensions.
“You will know how the bottom has dropped out for me,” he wrote his mother.
Archibald Roosevelt announced that a funeral of stark simplicity would take place in two days’ time at Christ Episcopal Church in Oyster Bay. The burial would follow in Youngs Memorial Cemetery, nearby on a hillside overlooking the cove. President Wilson issued a proclamation from Paris, appointing Vice President Thomas R. Marshall to represent him at both ceremonies, and directing government offices to fly their flags at half-mast for a month. Both houses of Congress adjourned, as did the Supreme Court, closing without any proceedings for the first time in its history. Secretaries Newton D. Baker and Josephus Daniels ordered army, marine, and naval posts around the world to fire salutes to the former commander in chief at sunrise on the day of his obsequies, Wednesday, 8 January, and to continue firing at half-hourly intervals until sunset.
Baker offered to send a full guard of honor to Oyster Bay. Archie politely declined to be obligated to the bureaucrat who had prevented Roosevelt from serving his country. “It was my father’s wish that he would be buried among the people of Oyster Bay, and that the funeral service would be conducted entirely by those friends among whom he had lived so long and happily.”
In a further effort to keep the exercises private, Archie let it be known that there were only 350 pew seats available, with standing room for perhaps 150 extra invited guests. He agreed to accommodate forty-five members of Congress, as representatives of the people, but said he could not invite any members of the Wilson administration other than Marshall, two naval aides, and Assistant Secretary of State William Phillips, deputizing for the absent Robert Lansing.
The discipline Archie had acquired as a soldier enabled him to handle the anguished telegrams that inundated Sagamore Hill, as bales of afternoon newspapers blackened with the headline ROOSEVELT DEAD thumped onto sidewalks across the country. Even so, he had difficulty controlling himself when some children from the Cove School delivered an arrangement of pink and white carnations that they had personally chosen and bought.
Alice Longworth and Ethel Derby called from Washington and South Carolina to say they were hurrying north to help Edith—although “Mother, the adamantine,” as Roosevelt used to call her, was more likely to comfort them in their mutual desolation. She also had to handle the anguish of her husband’s humbler