Part 47

Neither of us was quite sincere. Both were unconsciously pleased to hear the familiar strains. At an open-air fiesta in Barcelona some American friends who made their home there put the bandmaster up to breaking forth with the dear old melody as I came down the aisle, and I was mightily pleased. Again at a concert in Lucerne, the band, playing a potpourri of Swiss songs, interpolated Kentucky’s national anthem and the group of us stood up and sang the chorus.

I do not wonder that men march joyously to battle and death to drum and fife squeaking and rattling The Girl I Left Behind Me. It may be a long way to Tipperary, but it is longer to the end of the tether that binds the heart of man to the cradle songs of his nativity. With the cradle songs of America the name of Stephen Collins Foster “is immortal bound,” and I would no more dishonor his memory than that of Robert Burns or the author of The Star-Spangled Banner.

Chapter the Twenty-Second

Theodore Roosevelt—His Problematic Character—He Offers Me an Appointment—His Bonhomie and Chivalry—Proud of His Rebel Kin

It is not an easy nor yet a wholly congenial task to write—truthfully, intelligently and frankly to write—about Theodore Roosevelt. He belonged to the category of problematical characters. A born aristocrat, he at no time took the trouble to pose as a special friend of the people; a born leader, he led with a rough unsparing hand. He was the soul of controversy. To one who knew him from his childhood as I did, always loving him and rarely agreeing with him, it was plain to see how his most obvious faults commended him to the multitude and made for a popularity that never quite deserted him.

As poorly as I rate the reign of majorities I prefer it to the one-man power, either elective or dynastic. The scheme of a third term in the presidency for General Grant seemed to me a conspiracy though with many of its leaders I was on terms of affectionate intimacy. I fought and helped to kill in 1896 the unborn scheme to give Mr. Cleveland a third term. Inevitably as the movement for the retention of Theodore Roosevelt beyond the time already fixed began to show itself in 1907, my pen was primed against it and I wrote variously and voluminously.

There appeared in one of the periodicals for January, 1908, a sketch of mine which but for a statement issued concurrently from the White House would have attracted more attention than it did. In this I related how at Washington just before the War of Sections I had a musical pal—the niece of a Southern senator—who had studied in Paris, been a protégée of the Empress Eugénie and become an out-and-out imperialist. Louis Napoleon was her ideal statesman. She not only hated the North but accepted as gospel truth all the misleading theories of the South: that cotton was king; that slavery was a divine institution; that in any enterprise one Southern man was a match for six Northern men.

On these points we had many contentions. When the break came she went South with her family. The last I saw of her was crossing Long Bridge in a lumbering family carriage waving a tiny Confederate flag.

Forty-five years intervened. I had heard of her from time to time wandering aimlessly over Europe, but had not met her until the preceding winter in a famous Southern homestead. There she led me into a rose garden, and seated beneath its clustered greeneries she said with an air of triumph, “Now you see, my dear old friend, that I was right and you were wrong all the time.”

Startled, and altogether forgetful, I asked in what way.

“Why,” she answered, “at last the South is coming to its own.”

Still out of rapport with her thought I said something about the obliteration of sectionalism and the arrival of political freedom and general prosperity. She would none of this.

“I mean,” she abruptly interposed, “that the son of Martha Bullock has come to his own and he will rescue us from the mudsills of the North.”

She spoke as if our former discussions had been but yesterday. Then I gave her the right of way, interjecting a query now and then to give emphasis to her theme, while she unfolded the plan which seemed to her so simple and easy; God’s own will; the national destiny, first a third term, and then life tenure à la Louis Napoleone for Theodore Roosevelt, the son of Martha Bullock, the nephew of our great admiral, who was to redress all the wrongs of the South and bring the Yankees to their just deserts at last.

“If,” I ended my sketch, “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, why not out of the brain of this crazed old woman of the South?”

Early in the following April I came from my winter home in Florida to the national capital, and the next day was called by the President to the White House.

“The first thing I want to ask,” said he, “is whether that old woman was a real person or a figment of your imagination?”

“She was a figment of my imagination,” I answered, “but you put her out of business with a single punch. Why didn’t you hold back your statement a bit? If you had done so there was room for lots of sport ahead.”

He was in no mood for joking. “Henry Watterson,” he said, “I want to talk to you seriously about this third-term business. I will not deny that I have thought of the thing—thought of it a great deal.” Then he proceeded to relate from his point of view the state of the country and the immediate situation. He spoke without reserve of his relations to the nearest associated public men, of what were and what were not his personal and party obligations, his attitude toward the political questions of the moment, and ended by saying, “What do you make of all this?”

“Mr. President,” I replied, “you know that I am your friend, and as your friend I tell you that if you go out of here the fourth of next March placing your friend Taft in your place you will make a good third to Washington and Lincoln; but if you allow these wild fellows willy-nilly to induce you, in spite of your declaration, to accept the nomination, substantially for a third term, all issues will be merged in that issue, and in my judgment you will not carry a state in the Union.”

As if much impressed and with a show of feeling he said: “It may be so. At any rate I will not do it. If the convention nominates me I will promptly send my declination. If it nominates me and adjourns I will call it together again and it will have to name somebody else.”

As an illustration of the implacability which pursued him I may mention that among many leading Republicans to whom I related the incident most of them discredited his sincerity, one of them—a man of national importance—expressing the opinion that all along he was artfully playing for the nomination. This I do not believe. Perhaps he was never quite fixed in his mind. The presidency is a wondrous lure. Once out of the White House—what else and what——?

Upon his return from one of his several foreign journeys a party of some hundred or more of his immediate personal friends gave him a private dinner at a famous uptown restaurant. I was placed next him at table. It goes without saying that we had all sorts of a good time—he Cæsar and I Brutus—the prevailing joke the entente between the two.

“I think,” he began his very happy speech, “that I am the bravest man that ever lived, for here I have been sitting three hours by the side of Brutus—have repeatedly seen him clutch his knife—without the blink of an eye or the turn of a feature.”

To which in response when my turn came I said: “You gentlemen seem to be surprised that there should be so perfect an understanding between our guest and myself. But there is nothing new or strange in that. It goes back, indeed, to his cradle and has never been disturbed throughout the intervening years of political discussion—sometimes acrimonious. At the top of the acclivity of his amazing career—in the very plenitude of his eminence and power—let me tell you that he offered me one of the most honorable and distinguished appointments within his gift.”

“Tell them about that, Marse Henry,” said he.

“With your permission, Mr. President, I will,” I said, and continued: “The centenary of the West Point Military Academy was approaching. I was at dinner with my family at a hotel in Washington when General Corbin joined us. ‘Will you,’ he abruptly interjected, ‘accept the chairmanship of the board of visitors to the academy this coming June?’

“‘What do you want of me?’ I asked.