Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [129]
Last came the President’s own Elysian, seventy feet of solid mahogany, velvet plush, and sinkingly deep furniture. It had two sleeping chambers with brass bedsteads, two tiled bathrooms, a private kitchen run by the Pennsylvania Railroad’s star chef, a dining room, a stateroom with picture windows, and an airy rear platform for whistle-stop speeches. Whatever austerities Roosevelt looked forward to at Yellowstone, he would not lack for creature comforts now or afterward.
AT 8:50 THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, he stood in black tie and silk lapels on the stage of the Chicago Auditorium, waiting for a long roar of welcome to subside. “Mr. Chairman—Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen—” But the roar went on. President McKinley had never been cheered like this. Five thousand people overcrowded the hall. Even when they calmed, another horde outside the doors continued to shout, creating a bizarre echo effect as Roosevelt began to speak. His text, an affirmation of the Monroe Doctrine with special reference to Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia, featured his favorite “West African proverb,” except now the source was obscured, to make it more memorable and quotable:
There is a homely old adage which runs, Speak softly and carry a big stick: you will go far. If the American nation will speak softly, and yet build, and keep at a pitch of the highest training, a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.
This generated such loud applause as to suggest that the audience took his “adage” as aggressive, rather than cautionary. Actually, Roosevelt was trying to say that soft-spoken (even secret) diplomacy should be the priority of a civilization, as long as hardness—of moral resolve, of military might—lay back of it. Otherwise, inevitably, soft speech would sound like scared speech.
He reiterated his distaste for national “boasting and blustering.” In liberating Cuba and defusing the Venezuela crisis, the United States had proved herself to be idealistic rather than imperialistic, independent yet global-minded. Treaties negotiated by his Administration guaranteed that Americans alone would build and defend the Panama Canal; bills initiated by him had provided the necessary money and warships. But true, hemispheric security in a rearming world would require a much larger fleet than that currently envisaged by Congress. “If we have such a Navy—if we keep on building it up—we may rest assured … that no foreign power will ever quarrel with us about the Monroe Doctrine.”
THE PRESIDENT INVITED some of his old Chicago cronies to join him for supper at his hotel. Herman Kohlsaat and the financier Charles G. Dawes arrived first, and were at once irradiated in Rooseveltian warmth. But as the reception proceeded and more and more “friends” crowded the room, they found themselves edged toward the crockery and spoons. Roosevelt continued to beam indiscriminately upon all comers, a searchlight picking out vessels of any size. Later, Dawes the diarist wrote:
His hearty greetings are simply the natural results of his own good spirits and splendid vitality.… He has no “blind side.” … He seeks to wield power—not to avoid wielding it. He apparently loves everybody and nobody—both at once—everything and everybody being subordinated to his desire to keep the approbation of the public—not simply for the sake of that approbation but for the sake of that right-doing as well, which brings it.
The Chicago Tribune’s front-page headline the next morning ran: SPEAK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG STICK, SAYS ROOSEVELT. Within hours, baseball bats and rough-hewn clubs waved over the heads of onlookers along the presidential trail.
In Milwaukee’s Plankinton House, Roosevelt reviewed his trust policy at a dinner for local merchants and manufacturers. Heavy with sausages and schnapps, they tried to guess where he stood on the conservative/radical issues now dividing Wisconsin Republicans. His balanced phrases gave them no help. “We are not in the least against wealth … nor yet for the demagogic agitator … on