Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [71]
He dropped back to his seat, drenched with sweat, and got a standing ovation. Hay marveled at his power to transform a skeptical audience. Even Dr. Eliot was moved. “He has genius, force, originality.” Old Edward Everett Hale, who had attended more Commencements than any man present, babbled that the President had made “a speech to be remembered … for centuries.”
Roosevelt had to attend four more functions, and make three more speeches, before he could retire to his private car. Pale with exhaustion, he vomited and went straight to bed. He was asleep before the train left Boston.
WASHINGTON WAS SHUTTERING up for the summer when he got back. Edith and the children had left for Oyster Bay. Even the White House was barred to him, on account of extensive restoration and refurbishment by the architect Charles McKim. Carpenters were busy salvaging historic bits of floorboard, and plaster dust floated out of every window. It would not be habitable again until the fall.
He took up temporary residence a few doors away, at 22 Jackson Place, and signed a last-minute stack of bills, none of them his. Legislation, Roosevelt realized, was not his forte. Public leadership was. Invitations were flooding in for him to address audiences in New England in August, in the Midwest in September, in the far West whenever he cared to come. He accepted them indiscriminately, even a grotesque summons from Los Angeles, singed across the shoulders of a calfskin.
“THE CAPITAL DROWSED INTO ITS ANNUAL DOLDRUMS.”
Theodore Roosevelt’s White House in summer (photo credit 7.2)
Congress adjourned on the first day of July. The capital drowsed into its annual doldrums. Hardly a hoofbeat disturbed the shimmering pavements, and cicadas hummed in Lafayette Square. Roosevelt, dressed in white from head to foot, had one final, purgative duty to perform: a proclamation of amnesty in the Philippines. It had to be written around the fact that the Moros of Mindanao were not yet subjugated. They were fanatic Muslims, and could be conveniently differentiated from other Filipinos. Elsewhere, Pax Americana ruled throughout the archipelago. In a lame attempt to equate civil government with independence, Roosevelt postdated the declaration “July Fourth, 1902.”
Only then did he feel free to join his family on the shores of Long Island Sound.
CHAPTER 8
The Good Old Summertime
Th’ capital iv th’ nation has raymoved to Eyester Bay,
a city on th’ north shore iv Long Island,
with a popylation iv three million clams.
SUMMER RAIN WAS FALLING as the Oyster Bay special chugged out of Long Island City on 5 July 1902. New York’s fringes progressively crumbled from wet factories to brickyards to sodden fields of flowers and vegetables. These in turn gave way to patches of marsh hazy with insects. Presently, the land grew solid enough to support acre after acre of greenhouses, a farm or two, and some new towns still edged with mud. Then white steeples began to prick the horizon—pikestaffs protecting the privileged greens of Nassau County—and the train swung northeast toward the Sound.
Roosevelt had been riding this way for nearly thirty years, first as a teenager lugging rifles, birdshot, and the smelly paraphernalia of taxidermy, now as a President badly in need of a vacation. Familiar station signs flashed by in the drizzle: Roslyn Harbor, Sea Cliff, Glen Cove. The names had a marine ring, yet no hint of sea showed beyond wet roofs and foliage. The train curved eastward again, slowing almost to buggy speed as it descended Locust Valley. Forest closed in, broken only by an occasional duck pond or timber cut, then the valley broadened, and light sliced through thinning trees. The rails leveled out, and suddenly the train was rolling along a little harbor stiff with yachts.
Were it not for the mild, salt-laden air, Oyster Bay might be mistaken for a lake. Green slopes surrounded it at all points