Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [207]
Freed for a few weeks from the demands of fatherhood, and reveling in the luxury of being alone with his “sweetest of all sweet girls,” he wrote to his sister Bamie:
Edith and I are having a really lovely time in Washington. The house is delightful. We breakfast on the portico, and then stroll in the garden; and at night we walk through the garden or on the terraces. Tomorrow we intend to cut church, and to ride out to Burnt Mills to spend the day, walking through the gorge.… The next three months will be wearing at times. I have no idea what the outcome will be, and I know that, as I shall hear little but what is favorable, it will be impossible for me to tell. However, come what may, I have achieved certain substantial results, have made an honorable name to leave the children, and will have completed by March 4th next pretty nearly seven years of work (dating from the time I became lieutenant colonel of my regiment) which has been of absorbing interest and of real importance. So, while if defeated, I shall feel disappointed, yet I shall also feel that I have had far more happiness and success than fall to any but a very few men; and this aside from the infinitely more important fact that I have had the happiest home life of any man whom I have ever known.
In New York, where the summer heat was only a degree or two less intense, George B. Cortelyou moved into a modern suite of offices at 1 Madison Avenue. Old Guard visitors used to the noisy disorder of earlier campaign headquarters felt that they had stumbled into the premises of a small, efficient corporation. “The brass band has departed,” James Clarkson remarked, with a touch of sadness. Polite young men sat at neat desks and spent a great deal of time on the telephone. There was not a spittoon to be seen.
The chairman himself occupied a big room on the fourth floor, overlooking Madison Square. Somehow, the sunbeams angling in left him cool. He wore a stiff white vest at all times, and his handshake was dry. He slapped no backs and never went into a huddle, as Hanna used to do; the contrast with his burly, lapel-gripping predecessor was total. Cortelyou diffused a quieter authority, no less potent. Success became him: he had lost the drawn, intense look of his thirties. A female reporter admired his geometric grooming, the tie precisely pinned, the dark, silver-streaked hair brilliantined back.
Also unlike Hanna, Cortelyou left the responsibility of soliciting contributions to professional money men. Cornelius Bliss was given responsibility for eastern fund-raising; Charles Dawes collected west of the Mississippi. The chairman made it clear that Roosevelt must be elected “upon an absolutely clean and business basis.” To that end, he abolished the old “bureaus”—ethnic, industrial, religious, and social—that used to serve as two-way conduits between the Republican National Committee and special-interest groups. The only bureau he kept was that of speakers, awarding it to his enemy, Nathan B. Scott.
The Senator softened, as did other members of the Old Guard, who realized that they had misjudged Cortelyou. The contacts he had built up in eighteen months as Secretary of Commerce and Labor were not inconsiderable; even the great J. P. Morgan was said to admire him. “Cortelyou is a splendid executive—resourceful and tactful and masterful,” Dawes wrote in his diary. “Am delighted with the way he takes hold of things.”
Roosevelt tried once to issue a set of moral instructions, but when he tried a second time, Cortelyou courteously lost his temper. “If I did not know you as well