The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [305]
ABOUT THIS TIME Roosevelt added yet another influential voice to his expansionist propaganda machine.88 William Allen White was not yet thirty, but he was proprietor and editor of a powerful Midwestern newspaper, the Emporia Gazette, and had won a national following in 1896 with a diatribe against the Populists, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Printed first as an editorial in his own paper, then reprinted and distributed in millions of copies by Mark Hanna, the piece had been the single most effective broadsheet of McKinley’s campaign.89 Roosevelt had read the famous editorial with interest. Here was the natural Republican antidote to William Jennings Bryan, and a much better metaphorist to boot. If he could take White in hand and teach him the gospel of expansionism, he would enlarge his own sphere of influence by thousands of readers and thousands of square miles. Roosevelt did not care who propounded Rooseveltian views, even if they won glory by doing so: what mattered was that the message got through. When he heard that White was in Washington on a patronage mission, he asked for him to be sent down to the Navy Department.90
Blond, red-faced, and pudgy, White looked the typical corn-fed “hick” journalist, yet his intelligence was acute, and his language rich and rolling as the Midwest itself. Their meeting was casual—little more than a handshake and an agreement to have lunch next day—but Roosevelt was so radiant with newfound power that White was unable to sit down for excitement afterward. “I was afire with the splendor of the personality that I had met.”91
The little Kansan was still “stepping on air” the following afternoon, when Roosevelt escorted him to the Metropolitan Club and signaled for the menu.92 Both men were compulsive eaters and compulsive talkers, and for the next hour they awarded each other equal time, greed alternating with rhetoric. In old age White fondly recalled “double mutton chops … seas of speculation … excursions of delight, into books and men and manners, poetry and philosophy.”93
Roosevelt spoke with shocking frankness about the leaders of the government, expressing “scorn” for McKinley and “disgust” for the “deep and damnable alliance between business and politics” that Mark Hanna was constructing. White, whose worship of the Gold Dollar amounted to religion, flinched at this blasphemy, yet within another hour he was converted:
I have never known such a man as he, and never shall again. He overcame me … he poured into my heart such visions, such ideals, such hopes, such a new attitude toward life and patriotism and the meaning of things, as I never dreamed men had … So strong was this young Roosevelt—hard-muscled, hard-voiced even when the voice cracked in falsetto, with hard, wriggling jaw muscles, and snapping teeth, even when he cackled in raucous glee, so completely did the personality of this man overcome me that I made no protest and accepted his dictum as my creed.94
Later they strolled for a while under the elms of F Street, and when they parted “I was his man.” Years later White tried to analyze the elements of Roosevelt’s conquering ability. It was not social superiority, he decided, nor political eminence, nor erudition; it was something vaguer and more spiritual, “the undefinable equation of his identity, body, mind, emotion, the soul of him … It was youth and the new order calling youth away from the old order. It was the inexorable coming of change into life, the passing of the old into the new.”95
WHEN ACTING SECRETARY Roosevelt boarded the battleship Iowa on Tuesday, 7 September, the Virginia Capes had long since slipped below the horizon.96 Apart from a forlorn speck of color floating some twenty-five-hundred yards off—the target for today’s gunnery exercises—the world consisted of little but blue sky and glassy water, in which seven white ships of the North Atlantic Squadron sat with the solidity of buildings. Biggest and most sophisticated by far was the eleven-thousand-ton Iowa, a masterpiece of naval engineering, and the equal of any German