Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [205]
Both candidates were expected to sit out the planning phase of the campaign in their respective retreats—although Roosevelt had scheduled a midsummer visit to Washington, to confer with party tacticians. In the meantime, clams were spouting in Cold Spring Harbor, and the corn was green on Sagamore Hill; distant picnic spots beckoned, and the waters of the bay cried out for the splash of oars.
Even from the austere heights of Esopus, New York, the Hudson showed more than a hint of blue.
ON 27 JULY, fifty-four solemn Republicans creaked up Sagamore Hill in a dusty procession of buggies. Despite the heat, they all wore neckties and stiff collars, and their trousers were ironed to knife-edges—even, incredibly, those of Speaker Cannon. One and all were solemn, for they were enacting the party’s most hallowed ritual: a formal notification of nomination to its presidential candidate.
“FIFTY-FOUR SOLEMN REPUBLICANS.”
Roosevelt being notified of his nomination, 27 July 1904 (photo credit 22.1)
Roosevelt awaited them on the broad porch, surrounded by his wife and a clutch of children. He wore a frock coat and white waistcoat. The visitors respectfully banged the dust from their hats before mounting the steps to shake his hand. William Loeb brought out a low stool for Cannon to stand on. The Speaker teetered awkwardly, and drew a typed speech from his pocket. “It’s seven minutes long,” he apologized.
As he read a condensed version of the Chicago platform, the sea breeze brought up scents of hay. Flags snapped on the house’s high roof. Roosevelt swayed with pleasure, patting one of his nephews on the head. He kept glancing toward Edith, aloof in filmy white lace. “That’s perfectly true,” he interrupted at one point, “perfectly true.”
When the President’s turn came, Alice Roosevelt, unnoticed till now, eased through the crowd and stood slightly behind him, where he could not see her. Her eyes never left his face. He spoke for twelve minutes, and used the word power a lot. She laughed with delight at every burst of applause. Later, as the younger Roosevelts served croquettes, ice cream, and lemonade on the lawn, she moved gracefully about, beguiling man after man with her twenty-year-old body and gray-blue, almost phosphorescent eyes. Something flickered at her wrist. A bright green snake twined round her fingers and wriggled up the front of her dress.
Roosevelt paid no attention. He was more interested in checking whom Governor Odell was talking to, on a secluded bench in the garden. Alice was not the only one of his children to wear reptiles next to the skin. She was, however, the only one who resented him—though loving him with equal violence. Her attitude toward herself was equally confused. “I feel that I want something, I don’t know what.” At times, in her padlocked diary, she fantasized symbols of escape: a roadster, a rich husband, a world tour, a London season. Roosevelt’s “political” reasons for refusing to indulge her drove her to such paroxysms of rage that her handwriting degenerated into a near-maniacal scribble. At other times, like this, she luxuriated in his aura of power, much as the snake enjoyed the warmth of her own bodice.
“When I come down to bed rock facts,” Alice told herself, “I am more interested in my father’s political career than anything in the world. Of course I want him re-elected … but there again, I am afraid it is because it would keep me in my present position.”
ROOSEVELT’S THOUGHTFUL OBSERVANCE of Governor Odell (parchment-pale, rumpled, and glowering) in the garden betrayed his worry that the dour politico might prove a liability in the election. Since both presidential candidates happened to be New Yorkers, the Empire State’s vote was