Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [140]
“—for me to do what I can to get him a square deal,” said the President.
The phrase sank in, and the crowd relaxed.
“Nobody made a motion to attack me,” Roosevelt wrote John Hay afterward.
My address was felt to be honor enough for one hotel, and the dinner was given in the other. When the dinner was announced the mayor led me in—or to speak more accurately, tucked me under one arm and lifted me partially off the ground, so that I felt as if I looked like one of those limp dolls with dangling legs carried around by small children, like Mary Jane in “The Golliwogs,” for instance. As soon as we got in the banquet hall and sat at the head of the table the mayor hammered lustily with the handle of his knife and announced, “Waiter, bring on the feed!” Then in a spirit of pure kindliness he added, “Waiter, pull up the curtains and let the people see the President eat!”—but to this I objected. The dinner was soon in full swing.… Of the hundred men who were my hosts I suppose at least half had killed their man in private war, or had striven to encompass the assassination of an enemy. They had fought one another with reckless ferocity. They had been allies and enemies in every kind of business scheme, and companions in brutal revelry. As they drank great goblets of wine the sweat glistened on their hard, strong, crafty faces. They looked as if they had come out of the pictures in Aubrey Beardsley’s Yellow Book.
Roosevelt left prudently early. He stood on the rear platform of the Elysian as his train pulled out of town, and the citizens of Butte howled and fired shots into the air. They would doubtless continue to celebrate all night.
After recanvassing Idaho, the train headed south to Salt Lake City, then east, recrossing the plains of Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois. May turned to June. Day after day, freak rainstorms beat down. On either side of the tracks, the vast Midwest lay flat and flooded, halved by Roosevelt’s trajectory. Here, in the heartland of the country, was his political center of gravity. Ahead of him in the baggage car sat his silver scales, effortlessly maintaining their balance. The Negroes of Butte had chosen well. Nothing appealed to him more than the concept of equilibrium. Justice separating good and evil, power—“my hand on the lever”—regulating the conflicting interests of blacks and whites, Buffs and Blues, tycoons and tradesmen, the born and the unborn. The phrase he had coined en route, a square deal, was potent. He tried it again on 4 June, standing in the drizzle by Lincoln’s tomb. Cheers and applause resounded in the wet air.
He created one further magnificent image at Springfield Armory, as the sun lowered on the last day of his tour. Rhetorically, it was too strange, too poetic, to register on his audience; he seemed hardly to notice it himself, and never used it again. But after eight weeks of travel and 262 speeches, he could think of no more slogans, no positive platitudes. Blinking with exhaustion, he found only a compressed, negative metaphor for himself and the social forces he sought to mediate.
“Envy and arrogance,” said Roosevelt, “are the two opposite sides of the same black crystal.”
WHATEVER PRIVATE PERPLEXITY this suggested (did he see the Presidency, for all his efforts to fire it up, as something cold and dark at heart, merely reflecting outside passions?) was negated by male buffoonery that evening, as the train sped across Indiana. Roosevelt was sitting in his parlor with the Hoosier State’s quarrelsome senators,