Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [212]
“WELL, MY PART is pretty nearly ended,” Roosevelt had to acknowledge, as the Republican National Committee took full charge of his campaign in mid-September. After three years of bossing George Cortelyou, he faced eight weeks of being bossed in return—a novel sensation for any President.
Cortelyou’s first priority was fund-raising, now that Wall Streeters were returning to New York from their country places. So for a while the chairman ceded initiatives to the treasurer. Silver-whiskered, avuncular, discreet, Cornelius Bliss went calling on old friends downtown. In office after paneled office, he was welcomed as a money man among money men, someone who knew the dollar’s political worth as well as its purchasing power. Speaking the language of money, he had little difficulty in getting financiers to admit that Roosevelt had not harmed the workings of laissez-faire. The Northern Securities suit looked, in retrospect, like a necessary check on illegal combination—“salutary from every point of view,” as The Wall Street Journal conceded.
Most of Bliss’s visits ended with the scratch of a pen writing many zeros on a slip of paper, or with the even more satisfying sound of banknotes being counted out. Few donors demanded favors in return. When one did, asking to be appointed Ambassador to Belgium, Cortelyou returned his check. Bliss was not quite so fastidious, provided understandings were kept vague.
“Now, Mr. Bliss, we want to make this contribution,” said John D. Archbold of the Standard Oil Company, handing over $100,000. “But”—he chose his words carefully—“we do not want to do it without its being known and thoroughly approved of by the powers that be.”
Bliss smiled. “You need have no apprehension about it whatever,” he said.
AT 10:00 A.M. ON 22 SEPTEMBER, Judge Parker drove unrecognized through the streets of lower Manhattan. He entered the Hoffman House by a side door and was at once closeted with Democratic campaign planners. As they urgently and gloomily conferred, a bedlam of steam whistles signaled the passage down the East River of an important vessel. It was the USS Sylph, the smaller of Roosevelt’s two official yachts, cruising white and silver between crowds lining either bank. The President strolled on deck accompanied by a bulldog pup and waving a black slouch hat. He was on his way back to Washington.
The bedlam continued as the Sylph rounded Battery Point. Admiral Barker, back from the Mediterranean on the Kearsarge, saluted the Commander-in-Chief with twenty-one thunderous guns. (Meanwhile, Parker was trying to have a working lunch with the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.) Roosevelt, enjoying himself, ordered the Sylph to proceed up the West Side. The steam whistles followed him north as far as Grant’s Tomb, before he doubled back and crossed to the railroad dock at Jersey City. Cheers of two thousand welcomers rolled across the Hudson. Finally, at 1:27 P.M., his six-car special got under way, carrying the presidential party, Mr. and Mrs. William Loeb, Jr., six Secret Service men, a governess, the entire summer White House complement of secretaries, stenographers, clerks, and messengers, plus a stallion, a bay mare, a calico pony, Josiah the badger, the bulldog pup, and other pets.
Parker’s next interlocutor was Representative William Cowherd, who informed him that the Democratic congressional campaign was critically short of funds. He would of course need a majority in the House if he expected to prevail as President.
The judge spent another day and night in Manhattan, and by the time he left town on 24 September he was so depressed he would not talk to reporters even about the weather. As soon as he got back to Esopus, he ordered his horse, and rode off alone. For the rest of the afternoon he cantered aimlessly through the countryside.
WHEN ROOSEVELT GOT back to Washington, the little flags on his wall map of the Russo-Japanese War needed repositioning. There now had to be a cluster