The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [238]
Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees
Sweet freedom’s song!
Theodore Roosevelt did not arrive in Chicago for another ten days3—his own modest contribution to the World’s Fair was a Boone & Crockett Club cabin, dedicated 15 May4—but he had little need of music and artillery to swell his love of country. Indeed, this stupendous exposition, whose combination of classical architecture and modern technology so bewildered Henry Adams that he felt the universe was tottering,5 was to Roosevelt an entirely natural and logical product of American civilization. He was conventionally moved by its grandeur (“the most beautiful architectural exhibit the world has ever seen”),6 but the Fair by no means matched the splendor of his own dreams for America. These palaces, after all, were carved out of plaster, and would survive, at most, for a couple of seasons; his Columbia would burgeon for centuries.
To Adams, sitting with spinning head on the steps of the Administration Building, the World’s Fair asked for the first time “whether the American people knew where they were driving.” He suspected they did not, “but that they might still be driving or drifting unconsciously to some point in thought, as their solar system was said to be drifting towards some point in space; and that, possibly, if relations enough could be observed, this point might be fixed. Chicago was the first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start there.”7
Roosevelt felt no need to ask, or answer, such questions. He had long known exactly where the United States was drifting, just as he had throughout life known where he was driving. He came to the White City, gazed cheerfully upon it, then hurried off to Indianapolis on Civil Service Commission business.8 There was no need to stop and ponder the dynamos, the “new powers” which so mystified Henry Adams, for he felt their energy whirring within himself. Theodore Roosevelt, as the British M.P. John Morley later observed, “was” America9—the America that grew to maturity after the Civil War, marshaled its resources at Chicago, and exploded into world power at the turn of the century.
Grover Cleveland’s adjectives on Opening Day—splendid, magnificent, grand, vast—were no different from those Roosevelt himself had lavished on America in all his books. The symbolism of the flags, and of the little Spanish admiral dwarfed by a three-hundred-pound American President, was pleasing to him, but not revelatory. Nine years before, in his Fourth of July oration to the cowboys of Dickinson, he had hoped “to see the day when not a foot of American soil will be held by any European power,” and instinct told him that that day was fast approaching. When it came, it would bring out what some consider the best, what others consider the worst in him. This overriding impulse has been given many names: Jingoism, Nationalism, Imperialism, Chauvinism, even Fascism and Racism. Roosevelt preferred to use the simple and to him beautiful word Americanism.
THE WINNING OF THE WEST, which occupied Roosevelt, on and off, for nearly nine years, was the first comprehensive statement of his Americanism, and, by extension (since he “was” America), of himself. All his previous books had been, in a sense, sketches for this one, just as his subsequent books were postscripts to it, of diminishing historical and psychological interest. One by one, themes he had touched on in the past came up for synthesis and review: the importance of naval preparedness, and effect of ethnic derivations on fighting blood (The Naval War of 1812); the identity of native Americans with their own flora and fauna (Hunting Trips of a Ranchman); the doctrine of Manifest Destiny (Thomas Hart Benton); the need for law and order in a savage environment (Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail); the significance of the United States Constitution (Gouverneur Morris); the problems of free government (Essays in Practical Politics); and the social dynamics