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By Root 2900 0

and body.” He loves power, loves publicity for the added power it brings, and so far at least seems to have disproved the Actonian theory of corruption. Curiously, the more power Roosevelt acquires, the calmer and sweeter he becomes, and the more willing to step down in two years’ time, although a third term is his for the asking. Until then he intends to exercise to the full his constitutional rights to cleave continents, place struggling poets on the federal payroll, and treat with crowned heads on terms of complete equality. Henry Adams calls him “the best herder of Emperors since Napoleon.”25 Expert opinion rates his influence over Congress as greater than that of Kaiser Wilhelm II over the Reichstag.26 He commands a twenty-four-seat majority in the Senate, a hundred-seat majority in the House, and the frank adoration of the American public. A cornucopia of gifts pours daily into the White House mail-room: hams shaped to match the Rooseveltian profile, crates of live coons, Indian skin paintings, snakes from a traveling sideshow, chairs, badges, vases, and enough Big Sticks to dam the Potomac. One million “Teddy” bears are on sale in New York department stores. Countless small boys, including a frail youngster named Gene Tunney, are doing chest exercises in the hope of emulating their hero’s physique. David Robinson, a bootblack from Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, has just arrived in Washington, bearing letters of recommendation from judges and members of Congress, and begs the privilege of shining the President’s shoes for nothing.27

Nor is Roosevelt-worship confined to the United States. In England, King Edward VII and ex-Prime Minister Balfour consider him to be “the greatest moral force of the age.”28 Serious British journals rank him on the same level as Washington and Lincoln. Even the august London Times, in a review of his latest “very remarkable” message to Congress, admits “It is hard not to covet such a force in public life as our American cousins have got in Mr. ROOSEVELT.”29

All over the world Jews revere him for his efforts to halt the persecution of their co-religionists in Russia and Rumania, and for making Oscar Solomon Straus Secretary of Commerce and Labor, the first Jewish Cabinet officer in American history.30 France’s Ambassador to the United States, Jules Jusserand, says publicly that “President Roosevelt is the greatest man in the Western Hemisphere—head and shoulders above everyone else.”31

And from Christiania, Norway, comes the ultimate accolade: an announcement that Theodore Roosevelt, world peacemaker, has become the first American to win the Nobel Prize.32

TWELVE-THIRTY HAS COME and gone, but the White House gates are still firmly shut. He must have shaken at least a thousand hands already.… Fob watches flash in the sun as students of Washington protocol calculate how long it will take him to work his way down through the social strata. Twenty minutes are generally enough for all the ambassadors, ministers, secretaries, and chargés d’affaires, assuming that each flatters the President for no longer than thirty seconds; ten minutes for the Supreme Court Justices and other members of the judiciary; a quarter of an hour for Senators, Representatives, and Delegates in Congress (he’ll probably spend a minute or two talking to old Chaplain Edward Everett Hale, who hasn’t missed a reception in sixty-two years); a good half-hour, knowing Roosevelt’s priorities, for officers of the Navy and Army; then five minutes apiece for the Smithsonian Institution, the Civil Service, and the Attorney General’s office … which means the Grand Army of the Republic should be going through about now. Last in the order of official precedence will be veterans of the Spanish-American War, including the inevitable Rough Riders, some of whom are very rough indeed. One of today’s newspapers complains about the President’s habit of inviting “thugs and assassins of Idaho and Montana to be his guests in the White House.”33 But Roosevelt has never been able to turn away the friends of his youth. After assuming the