Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [24]
Roosevelt was relieved to hear the good news. “I don’t care a damn about stocks and bonds, but I don’t want to see them go down the first day I am President!”
The tolling of church bells faded as the train moved on, but the singing did not. Thousands of black-clad mourners crammed around Cumberland Valley Bridge took up the threnody of McKinley’s dying hymn. By now the lugubrious tune palled on passengers who had listened to it ever since leaving Buffalo. For days to come, awake or asleep, they would hear voices crooning “Near-urr, my God to Thee, near-urr to Thee!” Their nerves, tightened by seventy-two hours of suspense, tragedy, excitement, and fatigue, began to fray in the waning daylight. Women burst into tears. Men grew morose, or in the case of Senator Hanna, profane. “That damn cowboy wants me to take supper with him alone, damn him!”
Ahead, in the press car, a group of reporters sat talking about death. They noticed a country funeral procession crawling darkly up the slope of a hill. It receded into the distance behind McKinley’s bier. “What shadows we are,” someone quoted softly, “and what shadows we pursue.”
THE SUN WAS SETTING, and its rays gilded the misty transpirations of peach orchards and tobacco fields. An old farmer, hearing the onrush of the train, climbed off his harrow and stood to attention, his red shirt incandescent in the horizontal light. Children ran to cluster around him. Their spindly shadows, leaping east, briefly stroked the wheels of Roosevelt’s car.
To eyes that had so recently gazed upon oil derricks and steel bridges and Harrisburg’s jumbled housing, the little group looked quaintly anachronistic, a vignette of the past century. Though such families still accounted for 60 percent of the American population, their numbers were dwindling as Combination crept across the countryside, leveling hedgerows and quintupling the size of farms. (These very fields were already in fief to the tobacco trust.) Departments of agriculture in state after state boasted the effects of the new “scientific management.” Kansas wheat production had increased to such an extent that some farmers there were calling themselves “manufacturers.” Review of Reviews reported enormous sales of sophisticated agricultural machinery across the nation. An “ultra-new combined header and thresher” was being tested in California. Eight horses were needed to haul it; it advanced across a field of standing grain, miraculously leaving nothing behind but a row of stuffed sacks.
Technological progress for big farmers, however, did not mean that life was any better for small. In the Midwest, nearly three fourths of rural families lived below subsistence level. In the South (looming ever closer as Roosevelt rode), country people sought town jobs through the winter, just to survive on fatback and hoecake.
Roosevelt could see little relief for the rural unemployed in the immediate future. A place like York, Pennsylvania (flashing by redly at a quarter to six), was the typical country town grown too big. There were more than a thousand such cities across the nation. For its new poor, York offered only more poverty. A laborer might trade his hoe for a hammer, for a few extra dollars a week, but the increment was meaningless, given urban costs. His children would still run barefoot through November, and in midwinter their breath would be ice on their bedsheets. Even more wretched than these migrants were the immigrants from unsalubrious parts of Europe further crowding American cities. Since January,