Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [249]
This was carrying fervor too far, but Roosevelt saw no harm in encouraging political rhetoric more extreme than any he would use on Congress himself. Let Baker, Steffens, et al. do what advance guards had always done in battle: draw enemy fire from both sides while Caesar advanced down the middle. He responded to the page proofs, therefore, with the utmost delicacy:
I haven’t a criticism to suggest about the article. You have given me two or three thoughts for my own message. It seems to me that one of the lessons you teach is that these railroad men are not to be treated as exceptional villains but merely as ordinary Americans, who under given conditions are by the mere force of events forced into doing much of which we complain. I want so far as I can to free the movement for their control from all rancor and hatred.
Just how “far” he would, in fact, go to keep the public temper sweet remained to be seen. For the moment, he was still exulting in the afterglow of Portsmouth. On 30 September, Oyster Bay collected at the depot to cheer him back to Washington. The little sheet of water beyond the rails lolled in its bowl, careless of the cannon fire (and submarine plunges) that had shaken it so thrillingly during the summer. Roosevelt’s fellow villagers, however, seemed determined not to forget the glory he had visited upon them eight weeks before. A large shield, starred and striped, hung over the station entrance, framed to right and left by the flags of Russia and Japan, and surmounted by a banner image of a white dove with olive leaves in its beak.
The President approached this portal between two cordons of young women in white dresses. To general surprise—since he was famous for self-control—he had tears in his eyes when he turned to say good-bye.
RAY STANNARD BAKER’S proofs were not the only ones Roosevelt had to check that fall. Two articles of his own, “Wolf-Coursing” and “A Colorado Bear Hunt,” were due out in consecutive issues of Scribner’s Magazine, followed by a collection of wildlife pieces in book form at the end of October. Somewhat redundantly entitled Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, this volume was the fourth in a series begun with Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885) and continued with Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888) and The Wilderness Hunter (1893). It supplemented an already bewildering variety of different editions of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, which had begun to come out in 1900 and bulked as large as fifteen-volume sets of history, natural history, biography, criticism, memoir, and political philosophy.
His sudden return to authorship after four years of self-imposed silence, coupled with his current celebrity as peacemaker, prompted the first serious attempt by a foreign intellectual—for that matter, any intellectual—to make political and literary sense of the President of the United States. Léon Bazalgette, France’s ranking authority on Whitman and Thoreau, published a livre broché entitled simply Théodore Roosevelt. Although it was based only on close study of the Roosevelt canon, its thirty-five pages packed more perceptions into the President’s character than any current full-length biography of him.
Bazalgette admitted that, as a nonpolitical person, he preferred Roosevelt’s nature writings to the histories and social commentaries. They were more beguiling and more self-revealing. A paradoxical sweetness and love of life, in no way mitigating the author’s blood lust, emanated from such books as The Wilderness Hunter (whose title, in French, hauntingly became Le Chasseur des solitudes). Despite many dogged pages, and a deliberate avoidance of fine prose, these works charmed “with their simplicity and acute sense of realism.” They were imbued with a poignant nostalgia for the free western way of life, which