Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [141]
Roosevelt recalled that he had promised to accept the hospitality of the press on the final night of his tour. “My fellow Americans,” he cried, his voice choked with fake sobs, “I am deeply affected by this spontaneous welcome, this unparalleled and unprecedented greeting.” He allowed himself to be escorted forward. Fairbanks and Beveridge joined the general exodus of White House staff to the Gilsey.
As Roosevelt passed through the Senegal, two grinning black porters snapped to attention, saluting him with brooms. Hideous caricatures of “Teddy” lined the walls. A small group of cordoned-off reporters, pretending to be a welcoming crowd, cheered and clicked Kodaks. Roosevelt shook with laughter. “Well, this is bully!” He proceeded under an arch of spread trousers to his table in the Gilsey, where the menu sent him into further convulsions. It advertised “Haunch of Snow-fed Cinnabar Mountain Lion” and “Purée of Yosemite Mule,” and was footnoted: “Guests who find their wine too warm will notice an improvement after placing their glasses between any two Senators from the same state who happen to be present.”
The subsequent dinner was private, but leaks indicated that the President “talked a string and ate like a farmhand.”
He was in bed by midnight. Ohio rumbled by unseen in the small hours. Ahead, Pennsylvania’s hills waited for dawn. Barreling through blackness, the train twisted now left, now right.
CHAPTER 16
White Man Black and Black Man White
Th’ black has manny fine qualities. He is joyous,
light-hearted, an’ easily lynched.
SENATOR BEVERIDGE AND others getting off Roosevelt’s train in Washington on 5 June 1903 were amazed to see a multitude jamming Pennsylvania Avenue all the way downtown from Sixth Street Station. Normally the capital paid little attention to executive comings and goings, but this looked like an almost royal welcome. Apparently, the President’s forceful oratory on tour, his widely reported disappearances into the wilderness, and his haughty suppression of Mark Hanna—in Walla Walla, of all places!—had caught the public’s imagination, and strengthened him as the likely ruler of America for six more years. Roosevelt now enjoyed the endorsement of sixteen state Republican organizations, and seventeen more were expected to follow suit. “He will be nominated by acclamation,” Beveridge predicted, “and elected by the greatest popular majority ever given a President.”
For the moment, Roosevelt was interested in the acclamation of only an intimate minority. He addressed a few words to the crowd in Lafayette Square, then rasped, “I thank you again, my friends, but now I am going in to my own folks.”
Edith had been busy with landscapers during his absence. The White House grounds, winter-bare when he saw them last, and littered with construction rubble, were elegantly lush. The north lawn was a sheet of velvet, its beds bejeweled with pansies. Blossoms dense as ermine lay on the shrubbery. Fountains rose above the new terraces to east and west, separated by plantings of boxwoods and Dutch bays.
Although the President could not see it yet, there was a surprise tennis court waiting for him just south of his office window. Perhaps Edith had read about his prodigious eating over the last eight weeks (ox steaks on rye in North Dakota; dozens of fried grayling at Yellowstone; lamb and white bread spread with cream in Nebraska; pluvier au cresson and petits fours at St. Louis; a two-hour chuckwagon breakfast on the Colorado prairie; T-bones and broilers at Yosemite; and always, between stops, presidential command of the Elysian’s kitchen). He was aware of having gained seventeen pounds en route to the Pacific. There would be inevitable comparisons with “stout Cortez,” and Elihu Root was bound to ask archly for a copy of his remarks on expansionism.
“THERE