The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (76 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
Be happy, Mr. Roosevelt, be happy while you may. You are young—yours is the time of roses—the time of illusions … You have heard of Pitt, of Alexander Hamilton, of Randolph Churchill, and of other men who were young and yet who, so to speak, got there just the same. Bright visions float before your eyes of what the Party can and may do for you. We wish you a gradual and gentle awakening … You are not the timber of which Presidents are made.
T
HE SPRING OF 1887
settled down on Oyster Bay. Bloodroot and mayflower whitened the slopes around Cove Neck; on
Sagamore Hill, the saplings were feathery green against the sky, noticeably taller than last year. Two woolly horses began to plow the fields behind the house.
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Inside, Theodore and Edith unhooked shutters, pulled dust-sheets off beds and sofas, and distributed the latest batch of hunting-trophies from Dakota (already the walls were forested with antlers, and snarling bear-jaws caught the unwary foot). They crammed some very big pieces of oak furniture into the very small dining room, and Edith, insisting that at least one corner of the house should be allowed to look feminine, arranged some rather more delicate furniture in the west parlor.
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Theodore’s own retreat, which none could visit without his permission,
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was a pleasantly cluttered room on the top floor, full of guns and sporting books and photographs of his ranches. There was a desk rammed against a blind wall, so that when he sat down to work he would not be distracted by the sight of Long Island Sound brimming blue in the window. Here, sometime early in June, he dipped a steel pen into an inkwell and began to write his fourth book. By the time the nib needed recharging he was already 135 years back in the past, in the New York City of his forebears—
a thriving little trading town, whose people in summer suffered much from the mosquitoes that came back with the cows when they were driven home at nightfall for milking; while from the locusts and water-beeches that lined the pleasant, quiet streets, the tree-frogs sang so shrilly through the long, hot evenings that a man in speaking could hardly make himself heard.
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G
OUVERNEUR MORRIS
,
WHICH
Roosevelt worked on steadily throughout the summer of 1887, was a companion biography to his
Thomas Hart Benton
in the American Statesmen series. The critical success of the earlier book had prompted Houghton Mifflin to commission another study of a neglected historical figure. Only one life of Morris had hitherto been published—a ponderous tome now half a century out of date. It was time, the editors felt, for their
breezy young author to blow the dust off Morris’s letters and diaries, and subject the great New Yorker to a fresh scrutiny.
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With his powdered wig and peg-leg, his coruscating wit and picaresque adventures, Morris (1752–1816) was a biographer’s dream. There was about him, Roosevelt remarked, “that ‘touch of the purple’ which is always so strongly attractive.”
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Well-born, well-bred, charming, literate, and widely traveled, he had been a strong believer in centralized government, an aggressive moralist, and a passionate patriot. All these characteristics were shared, to varying degrees, by Roosevelt himself. Yet, as with Benton, there were enough antipathetic elements to keep the portrait objective.
Unfortunately a major obstacle loomed early in Roosevelt’s research. “The Morrises won’t let me see the old gentleman’s papers at any price,” he complained to Cabot Lodge. “I am in rather a quandary.”
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Being in no position to pay back his advance, he resolved to make what he could of public documents. Fortunately these were copious,
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and the complete manuscript was ready for the printer by 4 September.
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A
S HISTORY
, the first five chapters of
Gouverneur Morris
are adequate but unrewarding; as biography they are tedious. Roosevelt’s lack of family material forces him to weave the thread of Morris’s early life (1752–86) into a general tapestry of the Revolutionary period. The resultant cloth is drab, for he seems determined, as in
The Naval War of 1812
, to avoid any hint of romantic color. Only a couple of pages devoted to Morris as the founder of the national coinage are worth reading for their lucid treatment of a complex subject.
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Matters become more interesting in chapter 6, “The Formation of the National Constitution.” Now the author has access to official transcripts, and can ponder the actual speeches of Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, and the two Morrises (Gouverneur and Robert). “Rarely in the world’s history,” he concludes, “has there been a deliberative body which contained so many remarkable men.”
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Morris is presented as the Constitution’s most brilliant intellect, as well as its dominant conservative force. Yet the narrative clearly
shows why he was doomed never to rise to the first rank of statesmen:
His keen, masterful mind, his far-sightedness, and the force and subtlety of his reasoning were all marred by his incurable cynicism and deep-rooted distrust of all mankind. He throughout appears as
advocatus diaboli;
he puts the lowest interpretation upon every act, and frankly avows his disbelief in all generous and unselfish motives … Morris championed a strong national government, wherein he was right; but he also championed a system of class representation, leaning toward aristocracy, wherein he was wrong.
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Nevertheless Morris is commended for his “thoroughgoing nationalism,” and for his prophecy of an emergent America whose glories would make the grandest empire of Europe seem “but a bauble” in comparison. Roosevelt also praises his early espousal of the doctrine of emancipation. There are flashes of dry humor, as in the following explanation of Morris’s acquisitiveness: “He considered the preservation of property as being the distinguishing object of civilization, as liberty was sufficiently guaranteed even by savagery.”
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The book comes brilliantly to life in its penultimate section, describing Morris’s ten years in London and Paris, 1789–98, and his not-so-neutral participation in the major events of the French Revolution. Roosevelt was doubtless inspired by his own recent stays in those same cities, and his prose sparkles with true Gallic
éclat
. Chapters 7 through 11 are the best stretch of pure biography he ever wrote. Morris’s courtly flirtations with Mmes. de Staël, de Flahant, and the Duchesse d’Orléans; his plot to smuggle Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette out of Paris after the fall of the Bastille; the bloody riots of 10 August 1792, when he was the only foreign diplomat left in Paris, and gave sanctuary to veterans of the War of American Independence—all these episodes read like Dumas. Only the occasional jarring reference to municipal corruption in New York City, and sideswipes at the “helpless” Jefferson and that “filthy little atheist” Thomas Paine remind us of the true identity of the writer.
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The biography ends with two brief chapters tracing Morris’s decline into cantankerous old age. There are hints of certain “treasonous” tendencies during these “discreditable and unworthy” last years (Morris had been part of a Federalist group contemplating secession from the Union in 1812). Yet, in a final-page summary of the whole life, Roosevelt is willing to bestow his highest praise upon Gouverneur Morris. “He was essentially a strong man, and he was American through and through.”
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R
EVIEWS WERE NEGATIVE
when
Morris
came out the following spring. The
Book Buyer
felt that there had been insufficient character analysis, and complained of some “rather dry” stretches of prose.
The New York Times
commented, “Mr. Roosevelt has no style as style is understood,” but allowed that “his meaning is never to be mistaken.” The
Dial
, while praising him for “an exceedingly interesting narrative, artistic in its selection, forcible in its pungent expression,” called his scholarship “rather more brilliant than sound,” and said that his irreverent treatment of the American Revolution, not to mention certain “slurs” upon eminent men of the past, were “beneath the gravity of historical writing.”
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It was generally agreed that
Gouverneur Morris
was clever, patchy, and superficial—a verdict which posterity can only endorse.
R
OOSEVELT’S “STRAITENED FINANCES”
made the summer of 1887 an uneventful one.
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He was kept from being too restless by the intensity of his work on
Morris
(the 92,000-word manuscript was researched and written in little over three months). Sometimes he took a day off to row his pregnant wife to a secluded spot in the marshes, where they would picnic and read to each other.
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For other recreation, he chopped wood, played tennis (winning the local doubles championship and promptly splurging his share of the “cup” on a new Winchester), taught himself the rudiments of polo, and now and then allowed his hunting-horse to “hop sedately over a small fence.” There were many wild romps on the piazza with
Baby Lee, who was now an enchantingly pretty little girl of three. His letters are full of fond anecdotes about “the blue-eyed offspring” and “yellow-haired darling.”
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