The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [366]
Perhaps the most fitting symbol of the inaugural parade wasn’t on the official itinerary. A few Washingtonians, it turned out, had gathered tree limbs and branches from nearby woods in Maryland. Setting up souvenir stands along the Pennsylvania Avenue parade route, these “big sticks” went for ten cents apiece, complete with an inaugural verification card. They sold briskly, revelers waving them in the air to express solidarity with Roosevelt, as they listened to the clip-clopping of the horses’ hooves marching down the grand boulevard.75 Meanwhile, for three and a half hours Roosevelt stood on the reviewing stand, doffing his top hat to the thousands who paraded past him. As the New York Times reported, “Old timers agree that in point of picturesqueness, variety, and general interest no inaugural procession in many years” equaled Roosevelt’s parade of 1905.76
People poured into Washington, D.C., from far and wide to be part of history on that cold March day. More than 35,000 Americans took part in the procession. Most were wearing topcoats and scarves. Not since Andrew Jackson muddied the White House furniture with his “corn liquor” crowd had there been as much fun at an inaugural. People came from the lake regions of the Midwest, and the high plains of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Old-style Rocky Mountain guides from west of Denver suddenly experienced East Coast civilization for the first time. Coal miners from West Virginia arrived by railroad from mountain hollows not even on maps. There were the Scotch-Irish from Kentucky and fishermen from the Georgia Sea Islands. Self-proclaimed cornhuskers ventured into the alien town from the grouse-hunting lands of Illinois and Iowa which the president had first tramped in 1880. Members of the Boone and Crockett Club, proud of their founder, sat together shouting “Roos-e-velt!” “Roos-e-velt!” like children at P. T. Barnum’s circus. As one reporter observed, the entire navy base from Norfolk had come to see the author of Naval War of 1812 in his moment of triumph. A Pennsylvania cavalry regiment played “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” causing Roosevelt to applaud wildly; it was considered a risqué number. A comical note was struck whenever Roosevelt tried to shout out to a parader and the wind blew his glasses-cord into his mouth.
Cultural diversity was a predominant theme in Roosevelt’s unusual parade. Eager-faced African-American students from Virginia and Pennsylvania were asked to participate in the parade; so too were Puerto Ricans and Filipinos, who wore earmuffs to combat the cold. Socialites, carrying canes, arrived by the trainful from Beacon Hill, the Upper East Side, the “gold coast” of Long Island, and Philadelphia’s East Falls. It almost seemed as if representatives from every bump, knoll, and stretch of America were present to cheer Roosevelt. The entire event was like the kind of murals Thomas Hart Benton would later paint: no region, epoch, or local type was left out. This was Roosevelt’s own Buffalo Bill production, an amazing explosion of Americana choreographed in a way that matched the Saint Louis world’s fair.
This time Roosevelt took his oath of office by pledging on a Bible, the same one he had kissed on January 2, 1899, when he was sworn in as New York’s governor.77 Of all the guests Roosevelt received, it was Robert B. Roosevelt, standing on the same platform, who most strongly plucked the president’s heartstrings.* Surely he remembered coughing his way through his Manhattan childhood, with his father trying to open the Museum of Natural History and Uncle Rob lobbying to create New York’s fish hatcheries. Until 1905 President Roosevelt had always seen his Uncle Rob as a political liability and was disinclined to be photographed with him—stories about his uncle’s flirtations and romances with women served only to hurt his own claim to high personal morality. But Uncle Rob had led the way in the conservation movement—he was, after all, the “Father of Fishes