Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [101]
CHAPTER 12
Not a Cloud on the Horizon
In this palace he lives like a king.
“THE PRESIDENT RETURNS to Secretary Hay the two little German brochures on the trust question,” said Roosevelt, dictating. “The President has troubles of his own, and positively declines to read these articles in the original. If the enthusiastic consul who sent them will translate them (by preference into verse), the President may or may not look at them.”
He was in high good humor as his forty-fourth birthday approached. The late October air was fragrant with political fruit. With arbitration of the coal strike under way, Democratic Congressional candidates were unable to campaign on the theme of labor unrest. Nor could they attack the Republican Party in other vulnerable areas. Harper’s Weekly noted how deftly the President had neutralized such issues as trust control, Philippine independence, Cuban reciprocity, and tariff reform. If the GOP was rescued from a rout in November, it had Theodore Roosevelt to thank. “The power of one man thus to cover his party with the mantle of his own strength is unprecedented in the history of American politics.”
Tributes, in the form of endorsements from state Republican conventions, were already piling up, each gaily wrapped with the ribbon “1904.” Political veterans could not remember a time when delegates across the country had pledged themselves to a sitting President so soon. At latest count, Roosevelt had 394 votes from fifteen states. Ninety-eight more votes would give him half of the projected maximum of 984, and he had nineteen months to expand that half into a majority. Wall Street, of course, still wanted Senator Hanna in the White House. Yet J. P. Morgan had shown that it was possible to do business with the President and not burst a blood vessel. Even E. H. Harriman now proclaimed himself a Roosevelt man, and had “come to the front handsomely” with campaign contributions.
Roosevelt’s long-term prospects, indeed, were so favorable that he had lost interest in the current campaign. “I feel like throwing up my hands and going to the circus.” Secretly, he plotted a postelection hunting trip to Mississippi, and allowed himself several bad puns on the words Baer and bear.
It was not blood he craved, so much as exercise. His left leg had now healed, but he was lame from the wheelchair, and his girth was increasing. He felt he might turn fat to muscle with a few days’ violent activity. The alternative method of losing weight did not seem to occur to him: he continued to eat heartily three times a day. A guest at lunch noticed that waiters “were always moving toward the President.”
He had, besides, a sound domestic reason to quit town as soon as possible. The newly restored White House was ready for occupancy—or would be, as soon as it stopped reeking of fresh paint and varnish. Edith was busy choosing fabric and furnishings for some twenty large rooms. Such delicate details were beneath his robust attention. To hunt swatches of chintz was a woman’s job; to kill Ursus horribilis, a man’s.
ON 4 NOVEMBER, Roosevelt was chagrined to see Oyster Bay fall to the Democrats. Only the traditional Republican vote of northern New York saved his native state from a takeover. Governor Benjamin B. Odell, Jr., won re-election by fewer than ten thousand votes. Nationwide, the Democratic Party gained twenty-six new Congressmen.
Even so, analysis of the results showed that the GOP had performed better than normal for a ruling party in off-year elections. It still had a House majority of thirty seats, ample for legislative purposes, and its margin of dominance in the Senate was unchanged. Some seriously eroded fields of support south of the Mason-Dixon Line could be written off as Democratic territory anyway. Everywhere else, except Nevada, the aggregate of votes cast indicated statewide Republican pluralities.
Roosevelt’s hopes for nomination in 1904 were thus extended