Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [184]
While Roosevelt talked to the consul from Shanghai, two brothers on a windswept beach in North Carolina shook hands. Then one of them lay down beside some covered ribs in front of a propeller motor. It sparked to life. Tremulous and spindly, a matchbox of spars and muslin accelerated along a rail, and stepped into the air. Its wings rippled on an invisible swell, like wet leaves on water. The swell surged to ten feet, then fifteen feet, before gently subsiding. Ecstatic, the flying machine kicked off and soared, again and again and again.
CHAPTER 20
Intrigue and Striving and Change
Whin he does anny talkin’—which he sometimes does—he
talks at th’ man in front iv him. Ye don’t hear him hollerin’ at
posterity. Posterity don’t begin to vote till after th’ polls close.
HENRY ADAMS ATTENDED Roosevelt’s annual Diplomatic Reception on 7 January 1904, and was disturbed by signs of a developing autocracy—to say nothing of a nervous system that seemed to be beyond self-discipline. The President accosted him with a war whoop and ordered him upstairs for supper:
I was stuffed into place at the imperial table, opposite Joe Chamberlain’s daughter.… Root sat at the end of the table between us.… We were straws in Niagara. Never have I had an hour of worse social malaise. We were overwhelmed in a torrent of oratory, and at last I heard only the repetition of I-I-I—attached to indiscretions greater than one another until only the British female seemed to survive. How Root stands this sort of thing I do not know, for it is mortifying beyond even drunkenness. The worst of it is that it is mere cerebral excitement, of normal, or at least habitual, nature. It has not the excuse of champagne, the wild talk about everything—Panama, Russia, Germany, England, and whatever else suggested itself—belonged not to the bar-room but the asylum.… When I was let out and got to bed, I was a broken man.
Another veteran of quieter times visited Washington that month and found that it was no longer the genteel city he remembered. “I am glad to leave,” Charles G. Dawes wrote in his diary, after seeing both Mark Hanna and the President. “The air is full of intrigue and striving and change.”
ON THE AFTERNOON of 27 January, Roosevelt sent a White House carriage and a company of cavalry to Sixth Street Station. Crowds collected along Pennsylvania Avenue. Such trappings usually heralded a visiting head of state, although none had been announced. When the procession clattered and jingled back downtown, the carriage rode much lower on its springs. Inside sat an enormously corpulent man of forty-six, his jowls tanned and his mustache bleached by years of Pacific sun. He smiled with enchanting sweetness, waving a cushioned palm, his pale blue eyes squeezed between chuckling rolls of fat. He was the retiring Governor of the Philippines, and now the successor to Elihu Root as Secretary of War: William Howard (“Big Bill”) Taft.
Merely to look at him was to be warmed and impressed. Taft had none of Root’s austerity or Roosevelt’s restless energy. He lounged comfortably at any angle, and spoke calmly in all circumstances. At 330 pounds, he was periodically drowsy from too much food. Yet he was not lazy; once he got under way, he had the ponderous momentum of an elephant. His gestures were slow, but full of power. He bore with no complaint huge loads of work, and produced commensurately. Whether he dictated a document or wrote it by hand, the words flowed in their hundreds and thousands, bland but never specious, unsparkling yet clear. His was not the vocabulary of a calculating politician. Taft wrote, thought, and acted like a judge.
The Supreme Court was his admitted dream. “As far back as I can remember, I believe my ambitions were of a judicial cast,” he told a reporter, after checking into the Arlington Hotel. He did not mention that Roosevelt had twice offered him a seat on the Bench, and that he had declined only out of a sense of “duty” in the Philippines. Still less would the elephant allow that Mrs. Taft (perched small and determined