Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [284]
Few listening could doubt that a political war was being declared. It would probably last as long as the President continued to bluster and the Senate continued to probe—strife between executive and legislative, impetuosity and due process. Fortunately, Christmas was coming, and New Year’s Day with its traditional courtesies, so there was time for both sides to weigh the costs of battle.
“WHEN YOU TURNED those niggers out of the army at Brownsville,” Owen Wister asked Roosevelt, “why didn’t you order a court of enquiry for the commissioned officers?”
The two old friends were out walking together, along the shore of the Potomac.
“Because I listened to the War Department, and I shouldn’t,” Roosevelt replied. He paused. “Of course, I can’t know all about everything.”
Defensively, he launched into a long disquisition on the fickleness of financial advisers. Wister heard him out.
“And so, the best you can do is to stop, look, and listen—and then jump.”
“Yes. And then jump. And hope I’ve jumped right.”
CHAPTER 28
The Clouds That Are Gathering
We’ve been staggerin’ undher such a load iv mateeryal wealth that if we can’t dump some iv it I don’t know what’ll happen to us. We ar-re so rich that if we were anny richer we’d be broke.
THE NEW YEAR of 1907 found Theodore Roosevelt at the peak of his Presidency. With Cuba peaceful and the Senate irresolute, for the moment, on Brownsville, he could luxuriate in his Nobel Prize and congratulate himself on the fact that if he so much as winked, a popular majority would form to re-elect him in 1908. He was still only forty-eight years old. America was unprecedentedly prosperous. The national product had become so “gross” that railroads were hard put to supply enough cars, and banks enough cash, to move it. As a result, prices were rising—but so were wages.
All this good economic news redounded to the credit of the man in the White House. Attendees at his annual New Year’s reception observed only one note of grimness in the smiles and handshakes he exchanged with more than eight thousand visitors. It occurred when he greeted Senator Foraker.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Roosevelt had an hourlong legislative conference with Speaker Cannon and Congressman Longworth. He did not indicate to the press, if indeed he even realized, that exactly one quarter of a century had passed since he first attended such a conference in Albany, as the freshman assemblyman from the Silk Stocking district.
Then, as ever since, his obsession had been to find and hold the center of power. In 1882, he had watched a small group of Tammany mavericks parlay eight votes out of 128 into an operating advantage that had effectively immobilized the state government for more than three weeks. Roosevelt had never forgotten his early lesson in the application of physics to political process. A mass of opinion on one side was quantifiably irrelevant, if balanced by an equal and contrary mass on the other. The same went for any number of masses, large or small, as long as they balanced circularly. Only the slightest pressure, applied by whoever stayed in medias res, was necessary to tilt the opposites to and fro, or for that matter hold them still. That was power: operating freedom, not force.
He saw that his legislative balancing act now was going to be especially delicate through 4 March, when the Fifty-ninth Congress would end. With a much more Democratic Congress due in December, he was going to be losing many old allies (most seriously, Senator Spooner) and gaining, if not enemies, at best an equal number of newcomers more likely to cultivate his heir apparent than himself. Those Republicans re-elected would by the same token not have to worry, anymore, about contradicting an enormously popular President. Even the representatives among them now knew that they would see out his second term.
To maintain his centricity, therefore, he was going to have to be less confrontational and more accommodating as his power slowly waned. When decisive action