Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [252]
The allusion was to Edwin Arlington Robinson, the reclusive and poverty-stricken northeastern balladeer, whose collection The Children of the Night had come his way earlier in the year. Kermit Roosevelt had studied some of the poems at Groton and been transfixed by their chilly beauty. The President had read them too, at his son’s urging, and agreed that Robinson had “the real spirit of poetry in him.”
Kermit had found out that Robinson was living in New York City, drinking heavily, and so desperate for money he was working ten hours a day as a time-checker in the Manhattan subway system. Clearly, such an existence was not conducive to the production of more verse. The President, in strict secrecy waiving all civil-service rules, had offered Robinson jobs in the immigration service or the New York Customs House, which latter the poet accepted. A tacit condition of employment was that, in exchange for his desk and two thousand dollars a year, he should work “with a view to helping American letters,” rather than the receipts of the United States Treasury.
In further generosity, Roosevelt had written a review of The Children of the Night, comparing Robinson’s prosody to “the coloring of Turner,” and published it in Outlook during the Portsmouth peace conference. Léon Bazalgette might have had this enlightened kind of patronage in mind when he approvingly quoted a Roosevelt dictum, “A poet can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.”
THE PRESIDENT STAYED in Washington just eighteen days, intently plotting railroad-legislation strategy, before embarking on a nine-day tour of the South. His ostensible purpose was to generate favorable publicity for the GOP, in advance of the November elections. But he also wanted to try out some of the centralized-government rhetoric of his upcoming Message in an area of the country that cherished the notion of states’ rights. If his ideas won favor there, it would be much more difficult for Congressional conservatives to challenge them in December.
Tensions were high when he arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, on 19 October to make an announced address on railroad rate legislation. Lieutenant Governor Francis D. Winston did not appreciate being frisked by agents before being allowed to shake the President’s hand, and the “peanuts ’n pickle” lunch laid on at the state fairground came close to a denial of hospitality. Hunger, or anger, made Roosevelt orate with persuasive effect. (“The new highway, the railway, is in the hands of private owners, whereas the old highway … was in the hands of the state.”) He was rewarded with considerable applause.
The following day he made a pilgrimage, poignant to him, to Bulloch Hall, the white-columned mansion in Roswell, Georgia, where his mother had grown up and married his father. The floors were no longer polished by corn shucks tied to the feet of a mulatto slave boy, as they had been then, and only the Union flag flew in the little park down the avenue. But he knew the place so vividly in his imagination, from listening to his mother and aunt talk about it, that he felt he was revisiting it.
“It is my very good fortune,” Roosevelt told the villagers of Roswell, “to have the right to claim that my blood is half southern and half northern.”
The farther south he went, the more heartening it was for him to see that white Southerners seemed disposed to forgive him for his “Negrophilist” behavior in 1902 and 1903. Some of his welcomes were almost royal in their triumphalism. He avoided the question of black disfranchisement in his speeches, and made only one unscripted reference to lynching, when Governor Jeff Davis of Arkansas suggested to his face that the “only good Negro is a dead Negro.” This Roosevelt could not tolerate. “Above all other men, Governor, you and I [as] exponents and representatives of the law, owe it to our people, owe it to the cause of civilization and