Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [57]
Alice Roosevelt—debutante of the season, and glowing prettier by the day as the richest bucks in town vied for her favor—attracted even more attention than the royal visitor. Gorgeous in white lace and “Alice blue” velvet, she smashed champagne over a new, American-built yacht, which the Prince had come to pick up for his brother. Heinrich, enchanted, returned home and recommended that Fraulein Alice be invited to visit the Kaiser’s court. But Roosevelt decided she should go to London instead, as his representative at King Edward VII’s coronation.
“ROOSEVELT … TOLD THE DISAPPOINTED GIRL
SHE WOULD HAVE TO STAY HOME.”
Father and daughter at the launching of the Kaiser’s yacht, 25 February 1902 (photo credit 5.1)
He regretted the impulse when a British newspaper counseled that Alice be treated as “the oldest daughter of an Emperor.” A Washington scandal sheet began to make arch references to “the Crown Prin—beg pardon—daughter of the President.” Roosevelt was annoyed by these intimations of antirepublicanism, and told the disappointed girl she would have to stay home.
In the meantime, he basked in popular praise. Previous Presidents had sued the trusts with various success, but none had done so voluntarily, and with such virile force. He had acted, on grounds few lawyers considered valid, at the height of the greatest merger movement in history.
For these reasons, his old friend Owen Wister placed the Northern Securities suit “at the top of all Roosevelt’s great and courageous strokes in the domain of domestic statesmanship.” Whether fated for good or ill, it had excited public optimism at the very moment that public pessimism saw no end to the tyranny of wealth. “I think that to make up his mind to take this first step, to declare this war, on the captains of industry, was a stroke of genius; and I more than think—I know—that it marked the turn of a rising tide.”
CHAPTER 6
Two Pilots Aboard, and Rocks Ahead
It looks to me as if this counthry was
goin’ to th’ divil.
“CHAOS! EVERYWHERE!” Henry Watterson exulted on 13 March 1902. The veteran Democratic pundit was visiting Washington to scout out future opportunities for his party. “For the first time these thirty years,” he reported, “it is the Republicans who are at sea.”
Rival hands were tugging at the wheel of the ship of state. One pair belonged to President Roosevelt, who was responsible for last month’s violent tack to port; the other to Senator Hanna, who wanted to resume the course set by President McKinley. “Both compass and rudder are still intact,” wrote Watterson, enjoying his metaphor. “But there are two pilots aboard, and rocks ahead.”
On the very day these remarks were published in The Washington Post, the Washington Times printed a front-page, foot-high photograph of Hanna, captioned THE MAN OF THE HOUR. Since the caption was very large, and the copyright date 1901 very small, readers were persuaded that the Senator was his old self again. Massive, placid, benign, he loomed from the page, dwarfing the masthead. Gone—or at least refined by studio lighting—was his former porcine flabbiness. Here was Statesmanship, glowing on the fine brow and in the magnificent eyes; here was Solidity and Sound Money.
Hanna’s presidential stock had been rising on Wall Street since the Northern Securities suit. Bankers and industrialists took his candidacy in 1904 for granted. So did Old Guard politicians in Washington. They estimated that he already had enough delegates to be nominated on the first ballot. His mail was thick with appeals for him to declare, and not all were typed on corporate stationery. “While we admire the presidint Theodore Roosevelt,” one correspondent scrawled, “there are such things as being to strenuous, what we wan is a man of the people.”
Hanna dismissed the campaign talk as “amusing,” but did not discourage it. His backers, led by Senator Nathan B. Scott and other probusiness members of the Republican National Committee, were serious. Laugh as he might—“that smile would grease a wagon,” a henchman said—he had to be impressed when