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altar draped with the German and American flags. The only light in the windowless space came from candles. He asked a Polish priest to say on his behalf “how earnestly he wished the adventure into the new land would be a turning-point in their lives; wished that they might find there all their dreams had painted for them; and how earnestly he, as a citizen of the great republic, welcomed them to it.” Many in the congregation began to weep as these words were translated. He stayed to hear them sing a litany and receive the priest’s benediction. As he made his way out, a girl seized his hand and kissed it. Others followed by the dozen, catching at the skirts of his coat and pressing it to their lips. He proceeded to another gathering on the third-class deck, where, speaking partly in German, he extended the same good wishes.

Later in the day, musing, Roosevelt said to one of the journalists on board that he would like to see steerage done away with, so that all American immigrants “might, from the beginning of the voyage, feel that they were entering into a new life of self-respect, with privacy and cleanliness.”

CHAPTER 4

A Native Oyster

The palms of Mammon have disowned

The gift of our complacency;

The bells of ages have intoned

Again their rhythmic irony;

And from the shadow, suddenly,

’Mid echoes of decrepit rage,

The seer of our necessity

Confronts a Tyrian heritage.

JOSEPH YOUNGWITZ, of 610 East Sixth Street, Manhattan, was among the smallest and least elegant of the one million New Yorkers ready to welcome Theodore Roosevelt home on 18 June 1910. His savings as a messenger boy were insufficient to gain him admission to the reception area in Battery Park. But he had $2.75 to spend on a bunch of flowers, and vowed, somehow, to get them into his hero’s hand.

That task looked progressively more difficult as police formed a double cordon up Broadway and Fifth Avenue, holding back a crowd that began collecting at dawn and soon filled both sidewalks all the way north to Fifty-ninth Street. It was a warm, humid morning. Straw boaters undulated twenty deep, like water lilies amid a bobbing of froglike bowlers. Female hats were fewer, but women were in the majority on the jerry-built scaffolds, some three stories high, offering ROOSEVELT PARADE SEAT RENTALS.

At 7:30 A.M. the first of twenty-one cannon shots flashed and boomed from Fort Wadsworth, and the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria loomed out of the haze at the head of New York bay. She was escorted by a battleship, five destroyers, and a flotilla of smaller vessels. At once a small launch bearing representatives of the federal government put out from the presidential yacht Dolphin, determined to beat four cutters loaded with Mayor Gaynor’s official welcoming committee, Roosevelt family and friends, local politicians, and gentlemen of the press. They raced one another to where the great liner was mooring in quarantine.

WHEN ROOSEVELT, SITTING IN his stateroom, heard the cannonade, his wife noticed a curious mix of pain and pleasure on his face. “He was smiling, but looking forward”—to what, Edith did not say.

Possibly he was struggling with feelings beyond the comprehension of anyone who had not been, for seven and a half years, President of the United States. The twenty-one guns, the great gray battleship with its men standing at quarters, the launch coming alongside to a shrill of whistles; the arrival on board of his former secretary of the navy, his former secretary of agriculture, and most familiar of all, in a gold-laced uniform, his former military aide, Archie Butt—it was difficult to think of them as anything but paraphernalia of an administration still in power.

Of course they were not: the two cabinet officers, George von Lengerke Meyer and James Wilson, simply symbolized continuity between old times and new, and Captain Butt was extracting, from the leg of his boot, some letters from President and Mrs. Taft. Yet Roosevelt could not help falling at once into the habit of treating them authoritatively—just as Archie was heard to say, when