The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [220]
Once again Washington began to drowse in summer heat. Edith and the children returned to Sagamore Hill; Cecil Spring Rice fled for the cool shores of Massachusetts; Henry Adams prepared to depart for the South Seas. Congress remained in session, with Speaker Reed presiding over the House in flannels and canvas shoes, a yellow scarf around his enormous waist.150 Roosevelt went to Oyster Bay as often as he could, but pressure of work (for the Commission was still backlogged) continually drew him back. He managed to finish his “very commonplace little book” on New York by the beginning of August, and spent the next three weeks feverishly trying to clear his desk. Another Western trip was in the offing, this time to Yellowstone, which he wished to inspect on behalf of the Boone & Crockett Club, but administrative difficulties nearly made him cancel it. “Oh, Heaven, if the President had a little backbone, and if the Senators did not have flannel legs!”151
The first of September found Roosevelt in a large family party, including his wife and two sisters, heading West to Medora and the Rockies. Impressed as he was by the splendors of Yellowstone, he reserved his most admiring adjectives for Edith. The sight of that demure, book-loving lady cantering across the prairie on a wiry horse seemed to have shocked him into a renewed awareness of her charms. “She looks just as well and young and pretty as she did four years ago when I married her … she is as healthy as possible, and so young-looking and slender to be the mother of those two sturdy little scamps, Ted and Kermit.”152
WASHINGTON WAS STILL deserted when he got back there in early October. Benjamin Harrison was at home, however, so Roosevelt paid a friendly call. Harrison, who had gotten into the habit of drumming his fingers nervously during their interviews, gave him a frigid reception. Evidently the White House wanted to have nothing further to do with Civil Service Reform. “Damn the President! He is a cold-blooded, narrow-minded, prejudiced, obstinate, timid old psalm-singing Indianapolis politician.”153
The November Congressional elections were disastrous for the Republican party, due mainly to an unpopular tariff measure which William McKinley had pushed into law at the end of the last session. With prices on manufactured goods rising daily, voters threw the culprit out of office—severely damaging his presidential prospects—and filled the House with the largest Democratic majority in history.154 Roosevelt, who had never liked the McKinley bill, began to mutter dire predictions about Cleveland recapturing the White House in 1892. But with his family reinstalled in town, and Henry Cabot Lodge by great luck returned to Congress, he found it impossible to be gloomy. Indeed, Roosevelt was conspicuously the most cheerful Republican in Washington that winter. “He continues to wear the nattiest and most stylish grey trousers, and the most boyish hat he can buy,” reported a local correspondent, “and he whistles jovially as he legs it down to the rooms of the Civil Service Commission.”155
Christmas was spent at 1820 Jefferson Place, and Roosevelt rejoiced in the event as much as any of his children:
Such nice stockings, with such an entrancing way of revealing in their bulging outline the promise of what was inside! They burrowed into them with their eager, chubby little hands, and hailed each new treasure with shouts of delight. Then after breakfast we all walked into the room where the big toys, so many of them! were, on the tables; and I suppose Alice and Ted came as near to realizing the feelings of those who enter