Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [108]
Professor Norton voiced the elegy of the Anti-Imperialists. “I reach one conclusion,” he wrote to a friend in the month of Aguinaldo’s capture, “that I have been too much of an idealist about America, had set my hopes too high, had formed too fair an image of what she might become. Never had a nation such an opportunity; she was the hope of the world. Never again will any nation have her chance to raise the standard of civilization.”
Six months later came Czolgosz’s shot and McKinley’s place was taken by Roosevelt, “that damned cowboy,” as Mark Hanna said when he heard the news. The remark was not astute. It was an architect of the new age who now became its President at forty-three.
Reed wrote him a letter of good wishes but the exchange was formal and the gulf remained. Living in New York, Reed formed a congenial companionship with Mark Twain, whose wit and turn of mind and sardonic outlook matched his own. They were guests together on board the yacht of the multi-trust capitalist Henry H. Rogers for a long cruise of which the epic legend survives that Reed won twenty-three poker hands in succession. He visited Washington now and then, once arguing a case before the Supreme Court and entertaining the justices by his rather remarkable style of delivery. He did not revisit the floor of the House but would hold court and see old friends in the office of the Ways and Means Committee. On doctor’s orders he succeeded in losing forty pounds but his health was worrisome. In the summer of 1902 he was the central figure at Bowdoin’s centennial celebration, where he enjoyed “a rare good time” such as, he said, “we may have again but cannot sanely look for.” In December he was back in Washington and while in the Committee Room at the Capitol, was suddenly taken ill. He proved to be in the terminal stage of a chronic nephritis. Five days later, on December 6, 1902, he died, aged sixty-two. Joe Cannon, his successor as Speaker, said of him, “His was the strongest intellect crossed on the best courage of any man in public life that I have ever known.” With those two qualities and his “self-made laws,” Reed had stood his ground on the swampy soil of politics, uncompromising to the end, a lonely specimen of an uncommon kind, the Independent Man.
* This has also been ascribed to Roosevelt. It is not certain to whom the credit belongs.
4
“Give Me Combat!”
FRANCE : 1894–99
4
“Give Me Combat!”
“THE PERMANENT glamour of France” was a phrase used by an Englishman of the nineties, Sir Almeric Fitzroy, secretary to the Duke of Devonshire. He felt that every child of Western civilization owed a debt to the country from which “came the impulse that dissolved the old world in agony and gave life and passion to the present.” For two years, from the summer of 1897 to the summer of 1899, the agony of that old dissolution returned. Rent by a moral passion that reopened past wounds, broke apart society and consumed thought, energy and honor, France plunged into one of the great commotions of history.
During those “two interminable years” of struggle to secure the retrial of a single individual unjustly convicted, “life was as if suspended,” wrote Léon Blum, a future premier, then in his twenties. It was as if, in those “years of tumult, of veritable civil war … everything converged upon a single question and in the most intimate feelings and personal relationships everything was interrupted, turned upside down, reclassified.… The Dreyfus Affair was a human crisis, less extended and less prolonged in time but no less violent than the French Revolution.”
It “would have divided the angels themselves,” wrote the Comte de Vogüé, on the opposite side from Blum. “Above the base motives and animal passions, the finest souls in France flung themselves at each other with an equal nobility of sentiments exasperated by their fearful conflict.”
The protagonists felt a grandeur in the storm that battered them. Decadence was exorcised in the violence of their feelings and they felt conscious again of “high principles and inexhaustible energies.