Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [332]
IN SUBSEQUENT DAYS and weeks, commentators and orators made up for the lack of a eulogy at the Colonel’s funeral. He had died so suddenly, and the glory of America’s late but decisive role in ending the world war had so plainly been earned at his urging, that he was at once invested with a godlike glow. The acolytes who had venerated him for so long—the Lawrence Abbotts, the Gifford Pinchots, the Julian Streets—resorted to levels of hyperbole not heard since the assassination of Lincoln. Given the poignancy of his sufferings over the last year, a considerable minority of Roosevelt-haters elected to keep their opinions private for the time being. Even H. L. Mencken reserved fire. “The man was a liar, a braggart, a bully, and a fraud,” he wrote a friend. “But let us not speak evil of the dead.”
Among the superlatives granted Roosevelt by those who belonged to neither extreme camp, simple words came nearest to sincerity. “He was the most encouraging person that ever breathed,” Edna Ferber declared, on behalf of all the writers and artists he had befriended. “The strongest character in the world has died,” Will H. Hays said to a reporter. “I have never known another person so vital,” wrote William Allen White, “nor another man so dear.”
Woodrow Wilson’s sentiments, conveyed in his proclamation of national mourning and a cable to Edith Roosevelt, were pro forma. This was to be expected from a head of state engaged in complex negotiations abroad. But two of his closest aides, Edward M. House and William G. McAdoo, verged on indiscretion in proclaiming Theodore Roosevelt one of the greatest of presidents. Newspapers that had savaged Roosevelt consistently throughout his career ran eloquent editorials. The New York Sun predicted that he would endure as a colossus in American history. “There are personalities so vivid, there is vitality so intense, so magnetically alert, as Motley said of Henry of Navarre, that ‘at the very mention of the name, the figure seems to leap from the mists of the past, instinct with ruddy, vigorous life.’ ” The New York Evening Post agreed:
Something like a superman in the political sphere has passed away. He saw the nation steadily and he saw it whole. Where other politicians dealt with individuals, Mr. Roosevelt reached out for vast groups.… He boldly thrust out his hand and captured the hearts and the suffrages of a whole race, an entire church, a block of states. Never have we had a politician who, with such an appearance of effortless ease, drew after him great masses and moulded them to his will.
From flag-bedecked platforms and pulpits in London (where for the first time in history a memorial service displaced evensong at Westminster Abbey), Paris, Rome, and throughout the Allied zone of occupancy in Germany, foreign speakers vied with American ones in celebrating the man who was commonly seen as instrumental in awakening his country to its social and strategic responsibilities. He was hailed as a liberator by Cubans and Serbs. Representatives of a nation only three months old announced that “Theodore Roosevelt was always a great friend of the Czechoslovaks.” In Tokyo, he was remembered as the peacemaker of the Russo-Japanese War and “perhaps the only great American who understood us.” Long biographies and appreciations were published in the major European newspapers. Jules Jusserand, who of all diplomats knew the Colonel best, had to be discreet in praising him at President Wilson’s elbow in Paris, but in private he was panegyrical. “I met in him a man of such extraordinary power that to find a second at the same time on this globe would have been an impossibility; a man whom to associate with was a liberal education, and who could be in every way likened to radium, for warmth, force and light emanated from him and no spending of it could ever diminish his store.”
The tribute most awaited in Washington was that of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. He addressed a joint memorial session