The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [215]
Adams, for his part, found Roosevelt repulsively fascinating.114 The young commissioner’s vitality was indecent, his finances ridiculous, and he was about as subtle, culturally speaking, as a bull moose; yet there was no denying his originality, and his extraordinary ability to translate thought into deed—with such blinding rapidity, sometimes, that the two seemed to fuse. Roosevelt had “that singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the quality that medieval theology assigned to God—he was pure act.”115 He came flying up the steps of 1603 H Street at such a rate that one could sense, as one shrank into one’s armchair, the power that drove him. This young man was equally at home on Adams’s Oriental hearthrug, the spit-streaked stairway of the Senate, or the sod floor of a cowboy cabin. His self-assurance, as he paced up and down blustering about the “white-livered weaklings” who ran the government, was both amusing and frightening. Adams was to spend the next eleven years waiting for the inevitable moment when Roosevelt moved into the house of his ancestors, marvelling at the momentum, “silent and awful like the Chicago express … of Teddy’s luck.”116
The other regular visitors to No. 1603 included Cecil Spring Rice, Clarence King, an eccentric, globe-trotting geologist whose conversation was as coruscating as the specimens clinking in his pockets, and John La Farge—tall, sickly, saturnine, a genius in the difficult art of stained glass, and in the even more difficult art of writing about it. Equally brilliant, though taciturn and absent-minded, was the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. He was then at work on his masterpiece, the memorial to Mrs. Henry Adams in Rock Creek Cemetery.117 Senator James Donald Cameron, beetle-browed and gruff, stopped by often, unaware that he was welcome mainly on account of his young wife, Elizabeth, the most beautiful woman in Washington. (Adams was secretly in love with her; so, to a lesser extent, were Hay and Spring Rice; the three men vied with one another in writing sonnets to her charms.) “Nannie” Cabot Lodge was almost as beautiful as Mrs. Cameron, with her sculptured profile and violet eyes. Famous for her tact, she spent much of her time placating those whom her supercilious husband had offended. Many other rich and talented people crowded Adams’s salon for good food, good champagne, and good talk—the best, perhaps, that has ever been heard in Washington.118
During the season of 1890, Roosevelt’s position in this “pleasant gang,” as John Hay liked to call it, was distinctly that of junior member. He received more in the way of ideas and entertainment than he could possibly bestow. It may be wondered why he was so immediately popular. Perhaps the clue lies in a remark made by one who did not quite make it into the Adams circle: “There was a vital radiance about the man—a glowing, unfeigned cordiality towards those he liked that was irresistible.” Men of essentially cold blood, like Reed and Adams and Lodge, grew dependent upon his warmth, as lizards crave the sun.119
Roosevelt’s ascent into the stratosphere of Washington society was not accompanied by any easing of his difficulties as Civil Service Commissioner. If anything, they were worse now Congress was in session, for spoilsmen formed a majority in both Houses.120 President