Chapter the Twenty-Second
Theodore Roosevelt--His Problematic Character--He Offers Me an Appointment--His Bonhomie and Chivalry--Proud of His Rebel Kin
I
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."