Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [48]
TO THE CHAGRIN of three thousand ticket holders in the park, Mayor Gaynor’s welcoming speech and Roosevelt’s reply were so brief that the parade got under way at 11:30, almost an hour earlier than scheduled. Reporters were left to guess what, if anything, the Colonel had meant when he said, “I am ready and eager to do my part … in helping solve problems which must be solved.”
During his ensuing five-mile drive uptown, standing most of the way in the mayor’s open carriage, he was deluged in ticker tape and confetti, and subjected to ceaseless roars of “Teddy! Teddy!” A man with a megaphone bellowed, “Our next President!” to a crescendo of applause. The parade was almost as long as the marine file had been, with a vanguard of mounted police and bandsmen followed by Rough Riders prancing on sorrel horses. “I certainly love my boys,” Roosevelt yelled at them. Thirteen carriages of dignitaries trailed his own. Then came another band, a marching mass of Spanish War veterans, two more bands, and finally more mounted police, guarding against incursions from the rear. The heat by now was tremendous, and he glistened with sweat as he waved his topper at the never-thinning crowd.
Archie Butt and William Loeb, collector of the Port of New York, rode in the carriage just behind him. Loeb had been Roosevelt’s private secretary in the White House, and agreed with Butt that there was “something different” about their former boss. So, for that matter, did Lodge and Nick Longworth. Butt was best able to express their collective thoughts:
[We] figured it out to be simply an enlarged personality. To me he had ceased to be an American, but had become a world citizen.… He is bigger, broader, capable of greater good or greater evil, I don’t know which, than when he left; and he is in splendid health and has a long time to live.
Just above Franklin Street, a small boy broke out from the curb, screaming, “Hey, Teddy! I want to shake hands with you!” The Colonel reached down and they managed a quick clasp, then police hustled the boy away.
“ ‘HEY, TEDDY! I WANT TO SHAKE HANDS WITH YOU!’ ”
Joseph Youngwitz presents a bouquet to his hero, 18 June 1910. (photo credit i4.2)
The parade thumped on up Broadway and Fifth Avenue. About an hour later, as it approached its end at Grand Army Plaza, the same urchin—who evidently knew how to ride subways—reappeared, this time waving flowers. Roosevelt took the cluster and called out, as police again swooped, “I think I have seen you before.”
Joseph Youngwitz confirmed to a reporter that this was true. He had shaken hands with his hero on a presidential visit to New York “about five years ago.”
THAT EVENING ROOSEVELT sat in a rocking chair on the veranda of Sagamore Hill, watching the sun set over Long Island Sound. The day that had begun so loudly, with cannon booms and the most sustained shouts of adulation ever to assault his ears, was ending in quiet bird music. A storm during the afternoon had rinsed the air clean. From the belt of forest at the foot of his sloping lawn came the sleepy sound of wood thrushes chanting their vespers. Overhead in a weeping elm, an oriole alternately sang and scolded. Vireos and tanagers warbled. When dark came on, he heard the flight song of an ovenbird.
As a boy he had sat here when there was no house and no trees, only a grassy hilltop sloping down to Oyster Bay and Cold Sping Harbor. He and his first wife had planned to build their summer place on it. Death parted them before the foundation stone was laid. Being a young widower had not stopped Roosevelt from completing the full three-story, seven-bedroom structure before Edith arrived in the spring of 1887, already pregnant with Ted. Here, presumably, he would welcome his first grandchild. And here, probably, he would die.
“One thing I want now is privacy,” he told a New York Times reporter. “I want to close up like a native oyster.” Only two public functions threatened: Ted’s wedding in a couple of days’ time, and a Harvard visit at the end of