Home Life in the White House [excerpt]

Uncrowned the brow,
Where truth and courage meet,
The citizen alone confronts the land.
    .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .
A man whose dreamful, valiant mind conceives
High purpose, consecrated to his race.
                                   —Margaret Ridgely Partridge.

THE deed of the cowardly assassin had done its work. William McKinley was dead; the young Vice-President had made the hazardous trip from the heart of the Adirondack Mountains, had taken the solemn oath in Buffalo, had followed the body of his chief to the final resting-place, and had returned to Washington. From Washington he telegraphed to my husband and myself, with the thought which he always showed, and told us that as Mrs. Roosevelt was attending to last important matters at Sagamore, she could not be with him the day he moved into the White House, and that he was very anxious that not only my sister, Mrs. Cowles, and her husband, but that we also should dine with him the first night that he slept in the old mansion. So we went on to Washington, and were with him at that first meal in the house for which he had such romantic attachment because it had sheltered the hero of his boyhood and manhood, Abraham Lincoln. As we sat around the table he turned and said: “Do you realize that this is the birthday of our father, September 22? I have realized it as I signed various papers all day long, and I feel that it is a [206][207] good omen that I begin my duties in this house on this day. I feel as if my father’s hand were on my shoulder, and as if there were a special blessing over the life I am to lead here.” Almost as he finished this sentence, the coffee was passed to us, and at that time it was the habit at the White House to pass with the coffee a little boutonnière to each gentleman. As the flowers were passed to the President, the one given to him was a yellow saffronia rose. His face flushed, and he turned again and said: “Is it not strange! This is the rose we all connect with my father.” My sister and I responded eagerly that many a time in the past we had seen our father pruning the rose-bush of saffronia roses with special care. He always picked one for his buttonhole from that bush, and whenever we gave him a rose, we gave him one of those. Again my brother said, with a very serious look on his face, “I think there is a blessing connected with this,” and surely it did seem as if there were a blessing connected with those years of Theodore Roosevelt in the White House; those merry happy years of family life, those ardent, loving years of public service, those splendid, peaceful years of international amity—a blessing there surely was over that house.
     Nothing could have been harder to the temperament of Theodore Roosevelt than to have come “through the cemetery,” as Peter Dunne said in his prophetic article, to the high position of President of the United States. What he had achieved in the past was absolutely through his own merits. To him to come to any position through “dead men’s shoes” was peculiarly distasteful; but during the early years of his occupancy of the White House, feeling it his duty so to do, he strove in every possible way to fulfil [sic] the policies of his predecessor, retaining his appointees and working with conscientious loyalty as much as possible along the lines laid down by President McKinley.