Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [49]
During the next twenty-four hours he either heard or saw forty-two species of birds. This beat by one the total that Sir Edward Grey had been able to identify in the New Forest. From the point of view of melody, there was no contest at all. When he strolled around the house, or jogged down the hill to bathe, his ears rang with the calls of thrashers in the hedgerows and herons in the salt marsh, the hot-weather song of indigo buntings and thistle finches, the bubbling music of bobolinks, the mew and squeal of catbirds, the piercing cadence of the meadowlark, the high scream of red-tail hawks.
All of them were listed in the catalog, Notes on Some of the Birds of Oyster Bay, Long Island. He had no need to consult that authoritative work, having written and published it himself, at age twenty.
OVER THE WEEKEND, newspaper editorials generally agreed that Theodore Roosevelt stood at the peak of his renown. To the Pittsburgh Leader, the welcome extended him by New Yorkers had approached “deification.” The New York Evening Post described it as “sobering” in its implications, but praised him for not taking political advantage of the moment. “Never before in the history of America,” commented the Colorado Springs Gazette, “has a private citizen possessed the power which Mr. Roosevelt now holds.” The Philadelphia North American held that he could win a third term as President in 1912, even if he ran as a Democrat. Few sympathies were extended to the man he had chosen to succeed him. “Never mind, Mr. Taft,” the Chicago Daily News jeered. “When you are an ex-President you can be a celebrity yourself.”
In trekking so many thousands of miles, so far from home, Roosevelt seemed to have been away a long time. Taft’s presidency felt almost over, as though the coming elections were to mark its twilight, rather than its meridian. In fact, Taft had been in the White House less than a year and a half, and was not averse to a second term. He enjoyed his job’s lavish perks, if not the work that came with them. But he had learned to minimize that. By nature an administrator, he saw no reason to initiate policy. The Constitution, as he read it, provided him unlimited time off for golf, free first-class travel, and the right to doze during meetings. He liked his $75,000 salary, and dreamed of being a justice of the Supreme Court after his prolonged sabbatical in the executive branch.
There was, besides, an all-powerful lobby determined to renominate him. While most of Manhattan had been brilliant with flags on the day of the Colonel’s great parade, Wall Street had remained defiantly drab. Bare poles projected from the House of Morgan, National City Bank, and the New York Stock Exchange. The austere men who ran these institutions were convinced that Roosevelt was insane: a politician so deficient in financial sense as to need medical treatment. At all costs he must be kept safely rusticated at Oyster Bay.
Roosevelt remained so close-mouthed that not even Henry Cabot Lodge, an early guest at Sagamore Hill, was able to divine his thoughts. But he had to make a quick decision which was bound to be interpreted politically: what to do about the President’s offer of hospitality. The letters Archie Butt had un-booted on the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria repeated the invitation three times. One was a copy of the long, querulous screed Roosevelt had already received in Britain. The second, addressing him as “My dear Theodore,” had been written while he was at sea, and the third, from Helen Taft, expressed the hope that Edith, too, would come to stay in the White House.
“I do not know that I have had harder luck than most presidents,” Taft’s cri de coeur read, “but I do know that thus far I have succeeded far less than have others. I have been conscientiously trying to carry out your policies but my method of doing so has not worked smoothly.” Page