Free Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

was chilled by their demand that he deliver it within the next six months, while his name “still had a value.” Apparently, they had no more concern for literary quality than for him—in the past, one of their most valuable authors.
    “As you know I am not a rich man,” Roosevelt wrote to Judge John C.Rose, a friend in Baltimore, “and if possible I want to continue earning some money until all my boys get started in life. Eight years hence Quentin will have graduated if things go as they should go.” He himself would then be sixty, and able to retire. He had the income from a $60,000 trust fund, which was notenough to support four children, let alone run a large country property. Edith had some money of her own, but he did not like to touch that, in case he predeceased her. They must live off his pen, and the modest investments his cousin Emlen managed for him.

    “ ‘A YOUNG GIRL ENTITLED TO THINK PRIMARILY OF HER AMUSEMENTS .’ ”
Ethel Roosevelt, ca. 1911
. (photo credit i7.1)
    He used a favorite metaphor in dismissing the prospect of his ever returning to public service. “The kaleidoscope changes continually and the same grouping of figures is not ever repeated.”

    NOT ONLY HE HAD been shaken out of the pattern, but so had almost all of the Old Guard senators he had dealt with as president. Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root alone remained, in uneasy alliance with Winthrop Murray Crane of Massachusetts and Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania. Root wanted to return to private life at the expiration of his current term. Now that Republican progressives were no longer “insurgent,” but established as an independent voting block, Congress was in effect divided into three parties, with the Democratic majority exuberant over its split opposition, and determined to keep it so through next year’s GOP convention.
    Roosevelt confessed that there were moments when “I very earnestly desire to champion a cause,” but he was not unhappy to be out of politics. The feeling was tinged with something like triumph on 5 August, when he appeared in New York before the House committee investigating his role in the stock crisis of 1907. Neither then nor now had he understood much about the acquisition by U.S. Steel of the Tennessee Coal & Iron Company, and less still about the secret ways banking houses connived with one another. But he testified with such righteous vigor (“You must apply to some one else if you want an expert on Wall Street”), that Congressman Augustus Stanley, in the chair, became incoherent in trying to show that he had gone along with a monopolistic coup, vastly to the profit of the the world’s biggest trust. Roosevelt insisted that his only thought at the time had been to prevent the bankruptcy of Moore & Schley, a giant brokerage firm whose collapse might have triggered a worldwide depression. “The word
panic
means fear, unreasoning fear,” he said. “To stop a panic it is necessary to restore confidence.”
    Even
The New York Times
felt that he had acquitted himself. Congressman Stanley, the paper remarked, had failed to expose the former president as a stooge, while showing a “partisan” and “ignorant” attitude toward U.S. Steel. “It is indeed fortunate that Mr. Roosevelt dealt with the panic instead of Mr. Stanley.”

    ON 6 AUGUST , the day the editorial appeared, Edith Roosevelt turned fifty. To her adoring husband, who presented her with a thermos pitcher and four volumesof
Punch
, she was still the indoor and outdoor companion of childhood—so “very young looking and pretty in her riding habit” as she trotted beside him on horseback, through the woods to Cold Spring Harbor or along the bayside road. Today the weather was too hot for horses, so he took her for an afternoon row to Lloyd Neck.
    Constant in their love for each other and their six children—Edith had always treated Alice as her own daughter—they were preparing themselves now for the emotional elevation of