Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [134]
In Iowa’s fecund fields, glistening with spring rain, women in faded Mother Hubbard gowns crowded around his car, their arms bursting with progeny. A platoon of boys and girls hoisted a banner over their heads: NO “RACE SUICIDE” HERE, TEDDY! It was another of Roosevelt’s catchphrases, broadly biological rather than ethnic in its implications. Bachelors declining to marry, urban women repressing their natural reproductive function, denied America the seed she needed to grow and be great. Ripeness was all. “I congratulate you upon your crops,” he said, smiling around at clustered families, “but the best crop is the crop of children.”
Some of his new democracy, and all of his charm, was evident in the west Kansas cow town of Sharon Springs, where on 3 May he attended divine service:
There were two very nice little girls standing in the aisle beside me. I invited them in and we all three sang out of the same hymn book. They were in their Sunday best and their brown sunburned little arms and faces had been scrubbed till they almost shone. It was a very kindly, homely country congregation … all of them looking well-to-do and prosperous in a way hardly warranted as it seemed to me by the eaten-off, wired-fence-enclosed, shortgrass ranges of the dry plains roundabout. When church was over I shook hands with the three preachers and all the congregation, whose buggies, ranch wagons, and dispirited-looking saddle ponies were tied to everything available in the village. I got a ride myself in the afternoon, and on returning found that all the population that had not left had gathered solemnly around the train. Among the rest there was a little girl who asked me if I would like a baby badger which she said her brother Josiah had just caught. I said I would, and an hour or two later the badger turned up from the little girl’s father’s ranch some three miles out of town. The little girl had several other little girls with her, all in clean starched Sunday clothes and ribbon-tied pigtails. One of them was the sheriff’s daughter, and I saw her nudging the sheriff, trying to get him to make some request, which he refused. So I asked what it was and found that the seven little girls were exceedingly anxious to see the inside of my car, and accordingly I took them all in. The interior arrangements struck them as being literally palatial—magnificent.… I liked the little girls so much that I regretted having nothing to give them but flowers; and they reciprocated my liking with warm western enthusiasm, for they hung about the car until it grew dark, either waving their hands to me or kissing their hands to me whenever I appeared at the window.
The baby badger, which reminded Roosevelt of “a small mattress, with a leg at each corner,” was christened Josiah, and given well-ventilated accommodations on the Elysian’s front platform. From this vantage point he was able to survey an unrolling landscape as the train proceeded to Denver and then bent south along the line of the Rockies.
NEW MEXICO TERRITORY opened up ahead, and Roosevelt began to encounter a wilder species of western fauna: Rough Rider veterans. Importunate, noisy, and side-armed, they demanded preferential access to their Colonel, even in small desert towns at 3:00 in the morning.
1ST VOICE Why don’t the son of a gun come out? (Bang!