Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [260]
ALICE ROOSEVELT HAD no such socioeconomic prejudice. Newspaper articles heralding her imminent wedding to Congressman Nicholas Longworth degenerated into endless catalogs of gold and silver gifts, every one of which, gorgeous or garish, she accepted with glee. White House aides complained that Miss Roosevelt would accept “anything but a red-hot stove,” and that the accumulating pile of treasure, requiring a special room and twenty-four-hour security, was “entirely too much to be given to one person.”
“Trinkets,” Alice said, when asked if she was still short of anything. “Preferably diamond trinkets.”
King Edward VII’s gift fit that category, being a gold snuffbox with a diamond-encrusted lid. The Kaiser sent a diamond bracelet. Cuba invested part of her reciprocity income on a spectacular pearl necklace. Ambassador Jusserand delivered, on behalf of his government, a magnificent Gobelin tapestry, and the Dowager Empress of China sent enough brocaded silk to keep Alice in dinner gowns for decades. A cornucopia of crystal, china, and jewelry poured in from congressmen and other aspirants for presidential favor.
The President gave away his daughter in the East Room at noon on 17 February, before a capacity congregation of family members and the Washington establishment—many women wearing brilliant accents of “Alice Blue.” Outside, the White House grounds jostled with the most frenzied press activity the capital had ever seen. Roosevelt seemed oddly subdued in his white waistcoat, and answered the Bishop of Washington’s question “Who giveth this woman?” in an inaudible voice. Posing with Alice afterward for a photograph of notable stiffness, he stood leaning away from her slightly, his face devoid of expression. She held herself erect, almost as tall as Nick, in white satin trimmed with old lace, a frozen Niagara of white and silver brocade cascading from her waist and down the carpeted dais.
Did Roosevelt’s masked look, and his apparent scruple not to touch Alice with his shoulder, convey an awareness that the lace covering her shoulder and sweeping in a graceful crescent across her breasts had been worn, long ago, by another Alice? And did Edith Roosevelt, who also remembered that lace with pain, have it in mind when she kissed her stepdaughter good-bye and said, not entirely jokingly, “I want you to know that I’m glad to see you leave. You have never been anything else but trouble”?
The bride, heading off to Cuba on honeymoon, was missed at least by her Mexican yellow-head parrot. For days after her departure, the White House resounded with despairing calls of “Alice—Alice—Alice.”
ROOSEVELT READ THE Depew/Platt profile in The Cosmopolitan and began to wonder if the literature of exposure was not becoming a destructive force. He approved of public attacks on corruption and fraud, but not this kind of “hysteria and sensationalism.” The double tendency of subjective journalism, he felt, was toward “suppression of truth” and “assertion or implication of the false.”
What bothered him particularly about the current series was that its publisher, William Randolph Hearst, was a member of Congress. Here was an elected representative of the people using the fourth estate to malign and manipulate his colleagues, probably with intent to destabilize. “I need hardly tell you what I feel about Hearst,” the President wrote to the Attorney General of New York State, “and about the papers and magazines he controls and their influence for evil upon the social life of this country.”
The pity was that honest exposure writing, even the fact-filled fiction of Sinclair, could still be an influence for the good—witness Senator Aldrich