The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [235]
Actually Roosevelt ceased to pester the little general through the campaign of 1892, possibly because he knew Mrs. Harrison was dying of tuberculosis. In July he wrote a long, flattering article, “The Foreign Policy of President Harrison,” for publication in the 11 August issue of The Independent. Although the policy in question was largely that of Secretary of State James G. Blaine, Roosevelt’s conclusion, “No other Administration since the Civil War has made so excellent a record in its management of our foreign relations,” could not but have gratified his melancholy chief.115
Roosevelt enjoyed a renewed burst of literary activity that summer, publishing at least four other major articles on subjects ranging from anglomania to political assessments. He also forced himself to read all of Chaucer, whose lustier lyrics had hitherto made him gag. Even now, he found such tales as the Summoner’s “altogether needlessly filthy,” but he confessed to enjoying the others.116 He exercised strenuously to work off the effects of a sedentary winter, galloping through the woods around Washington with Lodge, playing tennis at the British Legation, and whacking polo balls around the green fields of Long Island. “I tell you, a corpulent middle-aged literary man finds a stiff polo match rather good exercise!”117
At the beginning of August, Roosevelt left to go West as usual, but official engagements in South Dakota permitted him only a week or two in the Badlands. He was not sorry to leave Elkhorn, for game was scarce and the empty cabin depressed him.118 Hell-Roaring Bill Jones agreed to drive him south to Deadwood, with Sylvane Ferris as a companion. This trip gave Roosevelt the opportunity to luxuriate in cowboy conversation, of which he had been starved in recent years.119
On 25 August, the wagon rolled into Deadwood, and Roosevelt soon discovered that, in spite of his sunburn and rough garb, he was regarded as a visiting celebrity. This was due more, perhaps, to his fame as the captor of Redhead Finnegan than to any relationship with the current Administration. A deputation of citizens waited upon him at his hotel and announced that a mass meeting had been scheduled in his honor that evening. At the appointed hour a band escorted him willy-nilly to the Deadwood Opera House, where he was obliged to open President Harrison’s local reelection campaign. There was no point in protesting that as Civil Service Commissioner he was not supposed to take sides in a political contest. Local comprehension of his title was typified by the sheriff of the Black Hills, who remarked genially, “Well, anything civil goes with me.”120
HE SPENT THE NEXT MONTH on a “tedious but important” tour of the neighboring Indian reservations. The dusty hopelessness of those sprawling communities seems to have wrought a profound change in his attitude to the American Indian. During his years as a rancher, Roosevelt had acquired plenty of anti-Indian prejudice, strangely at odds with his enlightened attitude to blacks. But his research into the great Indian military heroes for The Winning of the West had done much to moderate this. Now, touring Pine Ridge and Crow Creek on behalf of the Great White Father, he looked on the red man not as an adversary but as a ward of the state, whom it was his duty to protect. Pity, not unmixed with honte du vainqueur, flared into anger when he discovered that even here, in decaying federal agencies and flyblown schools, the spoils system was an accepted part of government. Clerks and teachers testified they were routinely assessed for amounts up to $200 per head by the South Dakota Republican Central Committee, on pain of losing their jobs.121 Any time now the collectors would be around to seek “contributions” for President Harrison. Roosevelt promptly called a press conference in Sioux City and blasted the “infamy of meanness that would rob women and Indians of their meager wages.”122 He demanded the prosecution of several high Republican officials, and announced that Indians in the