Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [42]
JOHN HAY’S AVUNCULAR fondness for Theodore Roosevelt had became almost grandfatherly as he watched him struggle toward statesmanship. The President, he wrote a friend, was “a young fellow of infinite dash and originality.”
Although Hay was sometimes embarrassed by Roosevelt’s gaucheries, he forgave them as folies de jeunesse. Youth, as the President kept saying, was “a curable disease.” How boyish of Theodore not to notice, that final freezing Friday before Congress assembled, that the Cabinet Room fire was unlit, and that some of his older officers were still in their overcoats! And how charmingly unpretentious—when he at last did notice—to light the logs himself, and coax them to flame!
CHAPTER 4
A Message from the President
On th’ wan hand I wud stamp them undher fut; on th’ other hand, not so fast.
SHORTLY BEFORE NOON on Tuesday, 3 December 1901, a committee of senators and representatives called upon the President. They announced that the Fifty-seventh Congress was in session, and “ready to receive any communication” he might want to make. The delegation bowed out, and returned to Capitol Hill by official carriage. After a polite interval, one of Roosevelt’s own monogrammed vehicles followed. It drew up outside the House of Representatives, and a White House secretary jumped out with an enormous manila envelope.
Octavius L. Pruden had carried thirty presidential messages up the Capitol steps, but this was the heaviest yet. It consisted of two duplicate eighty-page volumes—one for the House, one for the Senate. Each was silk-lined, leather-bound, gold-stamped, and sealed with the presidential wafer. A Secret Service man, marching beside Pruden, kept guard over the precious cargo.
Actually, the content of Roosevelt’s Message was the worst-kept secret since the Declaration of Independence. For at least six weeks, White House guests had been treated to stentorian readings of the author’s favorite passages. Newspaper presses across the country held every word in cold type, and in Britain and Europe the Message was already being published and commented on.
Even so, Congress was tense with anticipation when Pruden appeared at the door of the House and announced, “A message from the President of the United States.” Speaker David B. Henderson took delivery of the first volume and broke its seal. He was surprised to see printed text, instead of the traditional formal copperplate. A reading clerk took it from him, and flicked through to the end. “Yes, sir, it is signed.” Henderson shrugged. The clerk in-toned Roosevelt’s opening sentence: “The Congress assembles this year in the shadow of a great calamity.”
There was an immediate reaction. Presidential messages were supposed to begin blandly, with hackneyed phrases about the United States being at peace with mankind. But as the clerk continued to read, it was clear that Roosevelt was all business.
William McKinley, he said, was the victim of a chillingly modern breed of assassin. Lincoln and Garfield had been martyrs for the kind of government they stood for; today’s political killer wanted to destroy government itself. Roosevelt began to eulogize his predecessor, but rage against Czolgosz diverted him into a magnificent six-minute tirade against anarchism, and those who abused the First Amendment by inciting it. The reading clerk could not help but perform histrionically: “The wind is sowed by the men who preach such doctrines, and they cannot escape their responsibility for the whirlwind that is reaped.… If ever anarchy is triumphant, its triumph will last for but one red moment, to be succeeded for ages by the gloomy night of despotism.”
The House sat rapt as Roosevelt demanded federal jurisdiction over attacks on the presidential line of succession, and a ban on all politically violent immigrants. “They and those like them should be kept out of this country; and if found here they should be promptly