The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [236]
Hundreds of veterans of the Rough Riders followed Roosevelt through the Rocky Mountain states, acting as both bodyguards and essential eyewitnesses of his valor in Cuba. Buffalo Bill had signed up sixteen of the veterans to reenact the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cody’s Wild West extravaganza.29 When one populist editor mocked Roosevelt in Cripple Creek, Colorado, a well-armed Rough Rider shot the critic with a revolver; Roosevelt wouldn’t denounce this act, perpetrated in defense of his besmirched character. The fact that the Democrats had nominated the pro-silver ticket of William Jennings Bryan and Adlai E. Stevenson (the grandfather of the Democratic presidential nominee of 1952 and 1956) egged on Roosevelt’s quarrelsome nature. These were repugnant types, he believed, afraid of Darwinism, the strenuous life, fierce expansionism, vehement nationalism, modern science, and old-fashioned hard work. His opinion of Bryan, in fact, was very low—and the Scopes trial was still twenty years in the future.
The most memorable moment of the American West tour occurred when Roosevelt visited Medora. Suddenly there was a proud luster to his gait. The Badlands lay before him, the essence of eternity found in the fossils of ancient fish and odd-shaped buttes. He wanted nothing more than to disappear over the horizon with a fine horse, saddle, and bridle. “The romance of my life,” Roosevelt said, “began here.”30 That simple phrase was soon adopted by North Dakotans as something akin to the state motto. Having traveled more than 1,000 miles by rail, delivered more than 1,000 speeches, and met 3 million folks, he found the absolute stillness of the badlands mighty impressive. His day in Medora was his only moment of sustained reflection that fall. “Tis Teddy alone that’s runnin’,” Mr. Dooley reported, “an’ he ain’t a-runnin, he’s gallopin’.”31
President William McKinley and Governor Theodore Roosevelt ran together as a ticket in the 1900 presidential election. Because they never were together, this photo was purposely doctored to give the appearance of a policy pow-wow.
McKinley and T.R. (Courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Association)
For the first time in his storied Democratic career, Robert B. Roosevelt broke from his party to vote for his nephew. Blood was thicker than politics. Spending time at Lotus Lake oyster farming, continuing to perfect fish hatching techniques and breed eels, R.B.R. had retired his bicycle in favor of an automobile (the first Roosevelt to do so). Indeed, he was now fancying himself as a race car driver. Although he also maintained a stable of the best horses in Long Island. Old Charlie Hallock, founder of Field and Forest, fresh from his success in obtaining birds’ rights, wrote to R.B.R., curious about how he planned on voting in the 1900 election, as a Democrat with a nephew on the Republican ticket. “I’m glad…that you are still fishing and shooting,” R.B.R. wrote back. “I have been a Democrat the last year [but] the wild extravagances of Bryan and his populist associates forced me to McKinley. I can go there easier now for Bryan is just as crazy about 16 to 1 as ever. Besides Theodore is half a Democrat and will keep the administration right. The tail will wag the dog.” 32
On November 6, 1900, McKinley and Roosevelt won in an electoral landslide. Boss Platt was perhaps the happiest man in America, having foisted Roosevelt on Washington, D.C., and gotten him out of New