Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [47]
Edith was the first to spot another Archie, sixteen years old, blond and bone-thin, on the foremost boat, Manhattan. He stood with his younger brother, Quentin, and other family members, among whom could be discerned the natty figure of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Edith’s New England reserve cracked, and she looked as though she wanted to jump overboard. “Think—for the first time in nearly two years I have them all within reach!”
Bidding farewell to his fellow passengers, Roosevelt escorted her down a gangway to the Manhattan at 8:20. He wore a silk topper and black frock coat. Edith presented a trim, if matronly figure in dark blue and white. Kermit, panama-topped, followed with Alice in a plaid dress and Ethel, looking almost pretty in mushroom linen, clutching her little black dog. For the next hour they were mobbed by Roosevelts of all ages and relationships, while Nicholas Longworth (impeccably dressed as always, to compensate for his bald shortness) and Henry Cabot Lodge staged a miniature conference of the House and the Senate.
Roosevelt embraced his sisters “Bamie” and Corinne, the former now deaf as well as bent by arthritis, the latter ravaged by the suicide of her youngest son at Harvard. Ted presented his petite fiancée, Eleanor Butler Alexander. The latter had won quick family approval, since she shared four Mayflower ancestors with Edith, and was the only child of wealthy parents.
While the Colonel continued to kiss and hug and pump hands, his distant Democratic cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, stood apart. Tall and slender, he sported a straw boater, and kept close to his own Eleanor,* an aggressively shy young woman whose chin receded as far as his own protruded. Franklin was said to have political ambitions.
Another cannonade began as Roosevelt transferred alone to the reception steamer Androscoggin. It was to ferry him ashore, after a short foray by the official flotilla up the Hudson. He crowed with delight when he saw that the battleship leading the way was the South Carolina. Twin-turreted fore and aft, still so new that her paint seemed polished, she was the first American dreadnought, a proud symbol of his efforts to build a world-class navy.
“THE NATTY FIGURE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT, JR.”
Roosevelt’s eldest son at the time of his engagement to Eleanor Butler Alexander. (photo credit i4.1)
Roosevelt could not resist climbing out onto the Androscoggin’s bridge and standing there for a while, feeling himself the center of a vast marine movement churning north. Ahead to port and starboard, the warships (grimly gray now, not white as they had been in his day) guarded him. Behind came the cutters, flanked by a growing armada of private vessels and sightseeing boats. Well-wishers clustered on both New York and New Jersey piers. The air shrilled with steam whistles.
At Fourteenth Street the flotilla swiveled south. On the way back downriver, the Colonel shook the hands of the eminent New Yorkers who had arranged and paid for his homecoming. Most of them were greeted with his famous memory flashes. “My deadly rivals!” he joked at the sight of the editors of Munsey’s and Everybody’s magazines. And, “Hello, here’s my original discoverer!” to Joseph Murray, who had put him forward as a candidate for the New York State Assembly in 1881. Even when the recognition was obviously faked, his grin and vigorous squeeze exuded friendliness.
He was, in short, already politicking, bent upon charming as many people as he could see—even the black cook making him breakfast. Yet in the midst of his effusions, Roosevelt the writer could not resist secluding himself with the latest issue of The Outlook, to see how a story he had dispatched from Europe looked in print.
When, at last, he stepped onto the soil of his native city, a huge shout went up from the crowd waiting in Battery Park and ran echoing up Broadway. It built into such a roar that for the first time in his life he was brought to public tears. He had to turn toward