Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [221]
What would Roosevelt make of Adams’s Roosevelt, the godlike perpetrator of “pure act”? Insofar as he was pure act, he might be amused but not particularly interested. The President was not a speculative, nor a spiritual man. He was in too much of a hurry to make the world over, today or preferably yesterday, to care what Adams (or for that matter Hay) might think of him. They were both of them sixty-six; he twenty years younger. “With him wielding unmeasured power with immeasurable energy in the White House,” Adams wrote, “the relation of age to youth—of teacher to pupil—was altogether out of place; and no other was possible.”
Unless, of course, one continued one’s own education by watching the sometimes disorientating spectacle of youth in flight from the past. Roosevelt’s Energetik, his dirigible ability to change course at a moment’s notice, his tendency to write exuberant Os in the air, made Adams doubt his own trail across “the darkening prairie of education.” To a historian born in 1838, “always and everywhere the Complex had been true and the Contradiction certain.” Here was Roosevelt trumpeting either- or banalities, lecturing intellectuals as though they were children, and yet repeatedly prevailing in the most intricate political situations. Might the President’s simplicity be that of an idiot savant who instinctively understood how Complexity worked, even to the point of using Contradiction to generate extra energy? If so, he was certainly not simplistic. He was, on the contrary, formidable: twentieth-century in his eager embrace of Chaos, eighteenth-century in his utter self-certainty. To Roosevelt, as to Kant, “Truth was the essence of the ‘I.’ ”
ANOTHER HENRY WHO had long observed Roosevelt with bemusement visited the White House that January and was taken aback by its new splendor and protocol. Henry James attended the annual Diplomatic Reception, not inappropriately, as America’s most distinguished expatriate writer. Like Adams before him, he was swept upstairs afterward for “supper” in a sea of velvet-and-gold lace uniforms and found himself sitting one dowager away from Roosevelt.
“The President is distinctly tending—or trying—to make a ‘court,’ ” he wrote later. Yet he could not help being flattered at his placement above so many representatives of empires. Elsewhere, at a point hardly less privileged, next to Mrs. Roosevelt, sat the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Democracy still reigned at the heart of the Republic; art mattered here as much as politics.
“Theodore Rex,” James allowed, “is at any rate a really extraordinary creature for native intensity, veracity, and bonhomie—he plays his part with the best will in the world and I recognize his amusing likability.”
THE IMAGINATION MUST be given not wings but weights. Francis Bacon’s dogged dictum, which Adams had so long thought salutary, seemed negated by this new century with its young men impatient of gravity and its young powers—America, Japan, Germany—pushing back the borders of old empires. The only constant now was change. Here was Roosevelt, whose main responsibilities were to keep the United States safe and solvent, collaring Capital and Labor in either hand and splicing oceans more than one thousand miles south of Key West. Here was Arthur Balfour, at last report the Prime Minister of Great Britain, embracing a New Theory of Matter, and informing the world that all of human history, “down to say, five years ago,” was nothing but an illusion. Here was Kaiser “Willy” suddenly facing west, and leaving “Nicky,” his poor little crétin cousin, to face Red revolution at home and Yellow Peril in the Far East.
Adams belonged to the minority of Washington intellectuals