Theodore Rex (6 page)

ROOSEVELT AWOKE REFRESHED
early the next morning. “I feel bully!” He went out onto the porch for some air, unaware that he was being minutely observed through the fence. His tanned skin stretched over his jutting jaw. His teeth gleamed through thick, half-parted lips. His neck, too squat for a standing collar, merged with weight-lifter shoulders, sloping two full inches to the tip of his biceps, and his chest pushed apart the lapels of his frock coat. He tugged at his watch chain with short, nervous fingers, shifting his small, square-toed shoes. Here, palpably, was a man of expansive force. When he breathed, the porch seemed to breathe with him.

Breakfast, laced as usual by vast infusions of caffeine, served only to stoke
Roosevelt’s energy. A sheaf of congratulatory telegrams further stimulated him: one read simply,
VIVE LE ROI.
He managed to look solemn on the way to Milburn House, but his mind was seething with politics. During the memorial service, he caught sight of Herman H. Kohlsaat, publisher of the Chicago
Times-Herald
, and whispered urgently, “
I want to see you.”

Kohlsaat followed him back to the Wilcox Mansion. He was shown into the library, and found Roosevelt exchanging compliments with a beaky, fortyish professor from Princeton. “Woodrow, you know Kohlsaat, don’t you? Mr. Kohlsaat, let me introduce you to Woodrow Wilson.” The professor bowed out. Roosevelt got straight to the point.

“
I am going to make two changes in my Cabinet that I know will please you,” he said. Kohlsaat began to preen. He was a journalist of large influence, and even larger vanity. But what he heard next did not please him at all. “I am going to let John Hay go, and appoint Elihu Root Secretary of State,” Roosevelt said. “I am also going to ask Lyman Gage for his resignation.”

Actually, Roosevelt had no intention of firing either Hay or Gage. On the contrary, he was worried by continued reports that they would resign as soon as he got to Washington. The presence in Buffalo of Kohlsaat, who knew both men well, came as a godsend. Roosevelt had long since perfected the art of manipulating newspapermen. Kohlsaat rose to his herring like a trained seal.

Compounding the flattery, he invited Kohlsaat to accompany him to Washington the next day. “The only other friend I have on the train is Elihu Root.” Then, casually: “Gage does not like me. I want you to wire him to meet you at your hotel on our arrival and tell him he must stay for a while, at least, and I want you to see the Associated Press man and ask him to send a dispatch that when we reach Washington tomorrow night I am going to ask Hay and Gage to remain in the Cabinet.”

Kohlsaat bustled off feeling he had managed to sway the rods of power. Had he understood the subtleties of Rooseveltian press relations, he might
have seen that he had been tricked into making a personal appeal to Gage. The AP dispatch would also forestall any possible resignation statement by Hay. Neither man could then quit without appearing disloyal to Roosevelt, and to the unfinished agenda of William McKinley.

Roosevelt’s move was well-timed. Even now, in Washington, the Secretary of State was composing a letter that read like a valedictory.

16 SEPTEMBER DAWNED
so bright that Buffalo’s heavy black drapery looked inconsequential, even tawdry, against the overwhelming blueness of lake and sky. A stiff breeze snapped thousands of half-mast flags. At shortly after 8:15, Roosevelt, escorted by a small troop of mounted policemen, rolled down Delaware Avenue on his way to Exchange Street Station. Presently, windblown fragments of music heralded the approach of McKinley’s cortege from City Hall. Roosevelt ordered his procession to follow at a respectful distance. He stood watching at the station entrance as soldiers unloaded the coffin and carried it inside. “Nearer My God to Thee” sounded inevitably from the band. Mrs. McKinley was escorted onto the platform, a frail figure almost
hidden by black-clad rel
atives. Then Roosevelt stepped forward. He seemed surprised at the sight of a huge, mute crowd. Unthinkingly, he waved his hat. Before boarding the train, he groped for Herman Kohlsaat in the press party and hissed again in his ear.
“Did you send that telegram to Gage?”

THE FUNERAL TRAIN
, courtesy of the Pennsylvania Railroad, consisted of two black-draped locomotives—one, with a particularly sad whistle, to steam ahead as pilot for the other—plus a baggage car, a saloon car, and five sumptuous Pullmans.
Reporters were assigned to the first of these, Senator Hanna and other dignitaries to the second, Roosevelt and his Cabinet to the third. The fourth carried George Cortelyou and members of the McKinley family. Officially speaking, Cortelyou was now Roosevelt’s personal secretary, but as long as Mrs. McKinley depended on him, he was pleased to defer to Loeb. The fifth and final car, a glass observation parlor, acted as a catafalque: McKinley’s coffin rode inside on a bed of flowers.

At 8:57, the train began to move. Church bells tolled across the city. Thousands of onlookers crowded every platform, stairway, bollard, and bridge. From sheds and warehouses along the track, grimy workmen emerged to squint and stare. The avid scrutiny of all these eyes was too much for Roosevelt. He ordered his blinds drawn—but not so soon as to miss the sight of workmen hurrying back to their jobs after the train had passed them by. For a while he sat alone, waiting for the liberating sense of acceleration into open country.

What he had just observed—evidence of America’s passion for work, its impatient refusal to loiter a moment longer than necessary—was pleasing, if not surprising. For several years, both he and the world had been aware that the United States was the most energetic of nations. She had long been the most richly endowed.
This first year of the new century found her worth twenty-five billion dollars more than her nearest rival, Great Britain, with a gross national product more than twice that of Germany and Russia. The United States was already so rich in goods and services that she was more self-sustaining than any industrial power in history.

Indeed, it could consume only a fraction of what it produced. The rest went overseas at prices other exporters found hard to match. As Andrew Carnegie said, “The nation that makes the cheapest steel has other nations at its feet.” More than half the world’s cotton, corn, copper, and oil flowed from the American cornucopia, and at least one third of all steel, iron, silver, and gold.

Even if the United States were not so blessed with raw materials, the excellence of her manufactured products guaranteed her dominance of world markets. Current advertisements in British magazines gave the impression that the typical Englishman woke to the ring of an Ingersoll alarm, shaved
with a Gillette razor, combed his hair with Vaseline tonic, buttoned his Arrow shirt, hurried downstairs for Quaker Oats, California figs, and Maxwell House coffee, commuted in a Westinghouse tram (body by Fisher), rose to his office in an Otis elevator, and worked all day with his Waterman pen under the efficient glare of Edison lightbulbs. “It only remains,” one Fleet Street wag suggested, “for [us] to take American coal to Newcastle.” Behind the joke lay real concern: the United States was already supplying beer to Germany, pottery to Bohemia, and oranges to Valencia.

As a result of this billowing surge in productivity, Wall Street was awash with foreign capital. Carnegie calculated that America could afford to buy the entire United Kingdom, and settle Britain’s national debt in the bargain. For the first time in history, transatlantic money currents were thrusting more powerfully westward than east. Even the Bank of England had begun to borrow money on Wall Street. New York City seemed destined to replace London as the world’s financial center.

It was hard to believe that the United States had struggled out of a depression only five years before. Prosperity was everywhere for Roosevelt to see—if not through drawn blinds at the moment, then memorably on his recent trip to Minnesota. The weather-stained barns of poorer days, the drab farmhouses and blistered grain elevators, were pristine with new paint. He had seen corrugated dirt giving way to asphalt, rotten boardwalks smoothing to stone, shards of shacks pushed aside by new redbrick houses. Not so long ago, Midwestern towns had glowed dully at night, if they glowed at all. Now they were constellations of electricity, bright enough to wake the sleeping traveler. Equally bright, by day, were silver threads of irrigation in the green fields, and new, steel-roofed sheds and schoolhouses.

Behind Roosevelt now (he could reopen his blinds, as the train gathered speed), Buffalo receded into a cyclorama of modern industrial development. Louis Sullivan’s “skyscraper,” the Prudential Building, bespoke a modern, defiantly native school of architecture. Scores of dockside cranes dipped and reared like hungry pterodactyls. Horseless carriages trailed plumes of dust and engine smoke in and out of town. Hydroelectric-plant towers loomed against the mists of Niagara, sending invisible thrills of power through the industrial suburbs. Wherever the sun shone, it glinted on countless telephone and telegraph wires, weaving block to block in warps and woofs of copper.

Trees soon barred Buffalo from sight, but the wires pursued the train effortlessly, rising and falling from pole to pole. Already news of Roosevelt’s departure had flashed along them, flickering into every corner of the land. Wires like these, connecting with other wires in Albany and yet more wires in the Adirondacks, had summoned him from the peak of Mount Marcy. In about twelve hours, they would broadcast the details of his arrival in Washington.

EMPTY LAKESIDE LAND BEGAN
to roll by. Roosevelt relaxed with the morning newspapers. Almost every editor in the country, it seemed, approved of his promise to continue “unbroken” the policies of President McKinley. The New York
Herald
featured an on-the-spot sketch of him taking the oath, hand held high, saying that he deserved “golden praise.”
The Albany Journal
and
The Washington Post
contributed their share of fine ounces. The New York
Sun
, banner journal of business conservatism, hailed his “responsible” desire to keep the Cabinet intact. “Nothing so sobers a man as the possession of great power.”