The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [200]
Roosevelt was silent in July and August, but came back resoundingly in September with “A Reply to Some Recent Criticism of America” in Murray’s Magazine. The piece was a brilliant and erudite attack upon Matthew Arnold and Lord Wolseley (“that flatulent conqueror of half-armed savages”) and became the talk of Washington and London. In October, Putnam’s put out his Essays in Practical Politics, being a reissue, in book form, of two long polemics on legislative and municipal corruption, “Phases of State Legislation” (1884) and “Machine Politics in New York City” (1886). Finally, in December, his six Century articles were revised and republished as Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, in a deluxe gift edition, illustrated by Frederic Remington. It was greeted with enthusiastic reviews.114
ROOSEVELT’S NONLITERARY ACTIVITIES through 1888 can be briefly summarized. The family man played host to Cecil Spring Rice and “delicious Cabotty,” piggybacked little Alice downstairs to breakfast every day, and noted approvingly that young Ted “plays more vigorously than any one I ever saw.” He worried sporadically about his brother Elliott, whose health was beginning to deteriorate from too much hard drinking and hard riding with the “fast” Meadowbrook set.115
The end of August found Roosevelt the hunter in Idaho’s Kootenai country. He spent most of September in the mountains, sleeping above the snow-line without a jacket and feasting lustily on bear-meat. Returning East via Medora, Roosevelt the rancher was able to make some respectable sales of his remaining cattle. But Roosevelt the author was still so hard pressed for money that he rashly accepted an invitation to write a history of New York City for a British publisher. He begged for “a little lee-way … to finish up some matters which I must get through first.”116
This referred to The Winning of the West. Its text was beginning to drag alarmingly: with six months to go on his contract, he had written only half of Volume One. Vowing to “fall to … with redoubled energy,” he returned to Sagamore Hill on 5 October117—but Roosevelt the politician would not let him sit down at his desk.
The presidential campaign was well under way, and with Cleveland crippled by the tariff controversy, there seemed to be a real chance of a Republican victory. Duty required that he make at least a token appearance for Benjamin Harrison. Actually Roosevelt was more than willing, for he considered the little general an excellent candidate.118 Despite a total lack of charisma, Harrison was a magnificent orator, capable of enthralling thousands—as long as he did not shake any hands afterward. It was said that every voter who touched his icy flesh walked away a Democrat.119 Party strategy, therefore, called for maximum public exposure, minimum personal contact, and support appearances by fiery young Republicans like Roosevelt, who could be guaranteed to thaw anybody Harrison had frozen.
On 7 October, after only one day at home, Roosevelt answered the call. Jumping back onto the Chicago Limited, he set off on a speaking tour of Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota. The sight of crowds and bunting worked its usual magic on him, and he canvassed with great zest. His performance was good enough to establish him, within a week, as one of the campaign’s most effective speakers. “I can’t help thinking,” he wrote Lodge, “that this time we have our foes on the hip.”120
On 27 October, Theodore Roosevelt turned thirty. Nine days later he heard that his party had won not only the Presidency but the Senate and House of Representatives as well. “I am as happy as a king,” he told Cecil Spring Rice, “—to use a Republican simile.”121
AT LAST, as winter settled down on Sagamore Hill, a measure of tranquillity returned to Roosevelt’s life. The sight of snow tumbling past his study window, and the sound of logs crackling in the grate, combined to produce that sense of calm seclusion a writer most prizes—when the pen seems to move across the paper almost of its own accord, and the words flow steadily