Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [63]
Roosevelt answered that his attack on the Supreme Court’s pro-corporate bias had been prompted by none other than Justice William Henry Moody, whom he had met with the day after seeing Taft in June. Not only that, he had “most carefully” consulted with another constitutional expert, Professor Arthur D. Hill of Harvard. Moody believed “that the courts … sometimes erred in deciding against the national government,” and Hill had even compared the Court to “an irresponsible House of Lords.”
Since both consultants hailed from Massachusetts, the center of Lodge’s universe, no further dissent was heard in Nahant. But the damage to Roosevelt’s reputation as a regular Republican was a perceived fact when he got back home, hoarse and depressed, on 11 September.
To Edith, the debilitating effect campaign travel now seemed to have on him was worrying. “He comes home in the saddest frame of mind that can be imagined,” she wrote Jules Jusserand, “and requires much cheering from his family.” On the trail, Roosevelt was as conscientious and energetic as he had always been, stopping his train up to thirty times a day whenever he saw a crowd, large or small, waiting for a glimpse of “Teddy.” He shouted or rasped or squeaked with all his old fervor, repeating the bromides that delighted them, glowing with charm, humor, and goodwill, leaving behind an image that never faded. (“His tour through the West has been one continuous ovation,” Taft marveled, with a touch of envy.) But Edith could see that her husband had changed in some fundamental way. He had lost his compulsion for electoral favor. No matter how passionately he believed in the New Nationalism, the statesman in him cringed at the prospect of having to go back to selling it.
THERE WAS ONE pleasant development, however, to cheer Roosevelt on his return: the popular and critical success of his safari book, just released by Scribners. African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist was selling strongly. Thanks to first serial and foreign rights, it promised to be the most profitable title he had ever published. Five hundred signed copies of the two-volume first edition, boxed and printed on Dutch handmade paper, had been followed by a one-volume trade issue, hardly less luxurious in three-quarter pigskin with uncut pages, and a subscription edition for the mass market. Lavishly illustrated, African Game Trails was irresistible to readers who could stomach the meticulous descriptions of bullets drilling hearts and brains. Even those who could not (Cecil Spring Rice found it sickening, “rather like the diary of a butcher”) had to concede that Roosevelt was scientific in his scrutiny of every aspect of the African wilderness, and often movingly lyrical. The density of recorded details, whether ornithological, paleontological, botanical, or anthropological, was almost overwhelming. Most came not from notes, but from the author’s movie-camera memory, which in advance of any system yet available in nickelodeons, registered both sight and sound.
Over and above its documentary appeal, the book exuded a kind of savage romance new to American readers. Roosevelt’s authenticity of voice made the Western novels of Zane Grey and Owen Wister seem pallid: “So, with the lion-skin swinging behind two porters, a moribund puff-adder in my saddle pocket, and three rhinos threatening us in the darkness, we marched campward through the African night.”
Reviewers acknowledged the occasional overripeness of his prose style, but excused it in view of the curiosity and courage with which he had traversed lands hitherto seen as hostile to foreign exploration and settlement. The Nation noted that what he wrote was of secondary importance to what