The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [7]
“I enjoy being President,” he says simply.45
NO CHIEF EXECUTIVE has ever had so much fun. One of Roosevelt’s favorite expressions is “dee-lighted”—he uses it so often, and with such grinning emphasis, that nobody doubts his sincerity. He indeed delights in every aspect of his job: in plowing through mountains of state documents, memorizing whole chunks and leaving his desk bare of even a card by lunchtime; in matching wits with the historians, zoologists, inventors, linguists, explorers, sociologists, actors, and statesmen who daily crowd his table; in bombarding Congress with book-length messages (his latest, a report on his trip to Panama, uses the novel technique of illustrated presentation); in setting aside millions of acres of unspoiled land at the stroke of a pen; in appointing struggling literati to jobs in the U.S. Treasury, on the tacit understanding they are to stay away from the office; in being, as one of his children humorously put it, “the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.”46
He takes an almost mechanistic delight in the smooth workings of political power. “It is fine to feel one’s hand guiding great machinery.”47 Ex-President Grover Cleveland, himself a man of legendary ability, calls Theodore Roosevelt “the most perfectly equipped and most effective politician thus far seen in the Presidency.”48 Coming from a Democrat and longtime Roosevelt-watcher, this praise shows admiration of one virtuoso for another.
With his clicking efficiency and inhuman energy, the President seems not unlike a piece of engineering himself. Many observers are reminded of a high-speed locomotive. “I never knew a man with such a head of steam on,” says William Sturgis Bigelow. “He never stops running, even while he stokes and fires,” another acquaintance marvels, adding that Roosevelt presents “a dazzling, even appalling, spectacle of a human engine driven at full speed—the signals all properly set beforehand (and if they aren’t, never mind!).” Henry James describes the engine as “destined to be overstrained perhaps, but not as yet, truly, betraying the least creak … it functions astonishingly, and is quite exciting to see.”49
At the moment, Roosevelt can only be heard, since the first wave of handshakers, filing through the Red Room into the Blue, obscures him from view. He is in particularly good humor today, laughing heartily and often, in a high, hoarse voice that floats over the sound of the band.50 It is an irresistible laugh: an eruption of mirth, rising gradually to falsetto chuckles, that convulses everybody around him. “You don’t smile with Mr. Roosevelt,” writes one reporter, “you shout with laughter with him, and then you shout again while he tries to cork up more laugh, and sputters, ‘Come, gentlemen, let us be serious. This is most unbecoming.’ ”51
Besides being receptive to humor, the President produces plenty of it himself. As a raconteur, especially when telling stories of his days among the cowboys, he is inimitable, making his audiences laugh until they cry and ache. “You couldn’t pick a hallful,” declares the cartoonist Homer Davenport, “that could sit with faces straight through his story of the blue roan cow.”52 Physically, too, he is funny—never more so than when indulging his passion for eccentric exercise. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge has been heard yelling irritably at a portly object swaying in the sky, “Theodore! if you knew how ridiculous you look on top of that tree, you would come down at once.”53 On winter evenings in Rock Creek Park, strollers may observe the President of the United States wading pale and naked into the ice-clogged stream, followed by shivering members of his Cabinet.54 Thumping noises in the White House library indicate that Roosevelt is being thrown around the room by a Japanese wrestler; a particularly seismic crash, which makes the entire mansion tremble, signifies that Secretary Taft has been forced to join in the fun.55
Mark Twain is not alone in thinking the President insane. Tales of Roosevelt’s unpredictable behavior are legion, although