Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [75]
“CHILDHOOD AS A STATE OF GRACE.”
Quentin Roosevelt in the daisy field at Sagamore Hill (photo credit 8.1)
Only when he climbed wearily into his sleeping bag did their adoration turn to protectiveness, and for as long as possible they would stay awake, guarding the President of the United States as he slept.
NO MATTER WHERE Roosevelt spent the night, his presence was required in the library of Sagamore Hill every weekday at 8:30 A.M. Secretary Cortelyou, oily and purposeful as an otter, would come up the drive with a leather bag full of mail, and for the next few hours “typing machines” would click, and a Morse transmitter rattle, as he and the President dispatched affairs of state. Since the government was in recess, their business was neither copious nor demanding. Cortelyou was usually on his way by noon, and Roosevelt, looking like a large plump urchin in negligee shirt, linen knickers, and canvas shoes, would play a set of tennis before lunch.
With the sun glowing on his awnings, and the table piled with the products of his farm—roast chickens, asparagus, potatoes, corn, fresh rye bread and butter, gooseberries, grapes, peaches swimming in cream—he was tempted to forget that summer must end, that the fecund ripeness of the nation’s economy would be susceptible, sooner or later, to cold winds. A new magazine, ironically entitled World’s Work, reported that more Americans were on vacation, and spending more money, than ever before. After a century of struggle, of wars and assassination and depression and empire-building, the United States felt entitled to bask at last in peace and prosperity. A musical paean to mindlessness lilted round the country. Holidaymakers sang the song on yachts in Bar Harbor, on the roller coasters of Coney Island, on horseback in Colorado, and on streetcars in San Francisco. They bellowed it in chorus from vaudeville boats in the Hudson, and heard it echoing back at them from the Palisades:
In the good old Summertime,
In the good old Summertime!
The sun affects some people
In a manner quite divine …
THE ONLY MEMBER of Roosevelt’s family who expressed discontent that summer was eighteen-year-old Alice—brittle, boy-crazy, and by her own admission “bored to extinction” at Oyster Bay. She yearned for the elegant youths of Newport and Saratoga and for her adored maternal grandparents in Boston, and in particular she lusted after money. Her own considerable private income was not enough. “I want more,” she scribbled in her diary, “I want everything.… I care for nothing but to amuse myself in a charmingly expensive way.” She prowled round the dark house, a caged blond cheetah among its skins and stuffed trophies.
Heedless on the piazza overlooking the bay, her father used the long afternoons to catch up with his reading. His “beach book” for the season was Nicolay and Hay’s Abraham Lincoln: A History, in ten volumes. Unfazed, he read it straight through, along with his usual supply of dime novels and periodicals.
Since Roosevelt was a devotee of Review of Reviews, edited by his good friend Albert Shaw, he probably noticed the extraordinary face reproduced in halftone on page 37 of the July issue. Pale eyes absolutely lacking in self-doubt, an unfurrowed brow, haughty nostrils, a long cruel mouth over a tremendous jaw—features both intellectual and tough, adamantine in their cold, smooth pallor: it was the beaky professor who had visited with him in Buffalo the day after his inauguration.
Woodrow Wilson, the magazine reported, was about to become president of Princeton University. “Every great step that he has taken has been one of conscious choice, leading to a definite, logical end.” Still only forty-five, Dr. Wilson had farther yet to go. Already “one of the political parties” wanted to send him to the New Jersey State Senate, “and recently a Western newspaper has pointed him out as the right kind of man to be a candidate for President of the United States.”
ON 14 JULY, Elihu Root delivered to Sagamore Hill the first politically charged document of