The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [2]
13: The Long Arm of the Law
14: The Next Mayor of New York
Interlude: Winter of the Blue Snow, 1886–1887
PART TWO: 1887–1901
15: The Literary Feller
16: The Silver-Plated Reform Commissioner
17: The Dear Old Beloved Brother
18: The Universe Spinner
19: The Biggest Man in New York
20: The Snake in the Grass
21: The Glorious Retreat
22: The Hot Weather Secretary
23: The Lieutenant Colonel
24: The Rough Rider
25: The Wolf Rising in the Heart
26: The Most Famous Man in America
27: The Boy Governor
28: The Man of Destiny
Epilogue: September 1901
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes
Illustrations
About the Author
PROLOGUE: NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1907
AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK PRECISELY the sound of trumpets echoes within the White House, and floats, through open windows, out into the sunny morning. A shiver of excitement strikes the line of people waiting four abreast outside Theodore Roosevelt’s front gate, and runs in serpentine reflex along Pennsylvania Avenue as far as Seventeenth Street, before whipping south and dissipating itself over half a mile away. The shiver is accompanied by a murmur: “The President’s on his way downstairs.”1
There is some shifting of feet, but no eager pushing forward. The crowd knows that Roosevelt has hundreds of bejeweled and manicured hands to shake privately before he grasps the coarser flesh of the general public. Judging by last year’s reception, the gate will not be unlocked until one o’clock, and even then it will take a good two hours for everybody to pass through. Roosevelt may be the fastest handshaker in history (he averages fifty grips a minute), but he is also the most conscientious, insisting that all citizens who are sober, washed, and free of bodily advertising be permitted to wish the President of the United States a Happy New Year.2
On a day as perfect as this, nobody minds standing in line—with the possible exception of those unfortunates in the blue shadow of the State, War, and Navy Building. Already the temperature is a springlike 55 degrees. It is “Roosevelt weather,” to use a popular phrase.3 Ladies carry bunches of sweet-smelling hyacinths. Gentlemen refresh their thirst at dray-wagons parked against the sidewalk. A reporter, strolling up and down the line, notices that the weather has brought out an unusual number of children, some of whom seem determined to enter the White House on roller skates.4
“All citizens who are sober, washed, and free of bodily advertising.”
Theodore Roosevelt receives the American people on New Year’s Day. (Illustration prl.1)
More music seeps into the still air. This time it is “The Star-Spangled Banner,” played with dignified restraint by the Marine Band. (The President has had occasion to complain, in previous years, of too loud a welcome as he arrives in the vestibule.) After only one strophe, the anthem fades into silence, and another murmur runs down the line: “He’s taking his position in the Blue Room.” Now a German march. “He’s begun to receive the ambassadors.”5
FOR THE LAST half hour they have been rolling up in their glossy carriages—viscounts, barons, and knights bearing the greetings of emperors and kings to a plain man in a frock coat. A sizable crowd has gathered outside the East Gate to watch them alight under the porte cochère. Their Excellencies teeter down, almost crippled by the weight of full court dress. Plumed helmets wobble precariously, while silver nose-straps tweak at their mustaches. Great bars of medals tangle with their swaying epaulets, gold braid stiffens their trousers, and swords of honor slap against their thigh-length patent-leather boots. Officers of the White House detail, themselves as brilliant as butterflies, hurry across the sunny gravel to assist. Screened through the tall pickets of the White House fence, all this awkward pageantry dissolves into an impressionistic shimmer, and the crowd watches fascinated until the last diplomat has hobbled inside.6
Thousands of other onlookers throng Sixteenth Street and Connecticut Avenue to watch the cavalcade of Washington society