Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [14]
Behind Roosevelt now (he could reopen his blinds, as the train gathered speed), Buffalo receded into a cyclorama of modern industrial development. Louis Sullivan’s “skyscraper,” the Prudential Building, bespoke a modern, defiantly native school of architecture. Scores of dockside cranes dipped and reared like hungry pterodactyls. Horseless carriages trailed plumes of dust and engine smoke in and out of town. Hydroelectric-plant towers loomed against the mists of Niagara, sending invisible thrills of power through the industrial suburbs. Wherever the sun shone, it glinted on countless telephone and telegraph wires, weaving block to block in warps and woofs of copper.
Trees soon barred Buffalo from sight, but the wires pursued the train effortlessly, rising and falling from pole to pole. Already news of Roosevelt’s departure had flashed along them, flickering into every corner of the land. Wires like these, connecting with other wires in Albany and yet more wires in the Adirondacks, had summoned him from the peak of Mount Marcy. In about twelve hours, they would broadcast the details of his arrival in Washington.
EMPTY LAKESIDE LAND BEGAN to roll by. Roosevelt relaxed with the morning newspapers. Almost every editor in the country, it seemed, approved of his promise to continue “unbroken” the policies of President McKinley. The New York Herald featured an on-the-spot sketch of him taking the oath, hand held high, saying that he deserved “golden praise.” The Albany Journal and The Washington Post contributed their share of fine ounces. The New York Sun, banner journal of business conservatism, hailed his “responsible” desire to keep the Cabinet intact. “Nothing so sobers a man as the possession of great power.”
The funeral train slowed to ten miles an hour as it approached Aurora, first village on the line. Farmworkers crowded the embankment, doffing their hats to the passing catafalque. Schoolchildren knelt in the cinders, holding up streams of black bunting. Thinly, through the hiss of steam and rumble of wheels, came the sound of their voices singing:
Nearer my God to Thee,
Nearer to Thee …
The train did not stop. Accelerating again, it moved out of the flat country into a narrow valley splotched with red maple trees. Roosevelt returned to his newspapers.
The foreign papers indicated that British opinion was in his favor. Even The Times, which had been critical of him during his bellicose Navy Department days, said that he had “great gifts” as a leader, and hoped that his “impulsiveness” was a thing of the past. The Daily Chronicle welcomed him as a benign, if formidable, new force in world affairs. “He believes in a big America. He is an expansionist and an imperialist, … [but] we are safe in thinking that this youngest of Presidents will prove one of the greatest.”
Continental comment was reported to be cooler. Misgivings about Roosevelt’s peculiar brand of Pan-Americanism had been expressed in both Paris and St. Petersburg. In Berlin, the Kreuz-Zeitung feared that the new President might be “anti-German.” But the Neueste Nachrichten recalled that as a teenager he had lived and studied with a Dresden family. Surely this meant that he would have more sympathy than his predecessors for the Teutonic point of view.
On one thing most nations were agreed: under Theodore Roosevelt, American sea power was sure to burgeon rapidly. The man who had prepared Admiral Dewey for Manila Bay was unlikely to let the United States Navy remain fifth in the world.