Gore Vidal - Empire

Roosevelt wondered the same. “He’ll find all the newspaper fellows will be treating him the way he’s treated everybody else.” Roosevelt removed his spectacles; and stared near-sightedly at the buffalo, which stared into eternity, a place just above the door to the hall. “I suppose he’ll support Bryan again. That would make things easy for us. McKinley’s a shoo-in.”

“What about you, sir?”

“I am a good party man. McKinley’s the head of the party. I’ve been offered the editorship of Harper’s Weekly . You can write that. You can also say I’m tempted to take it next year, when my term’s up.” An aide entered from the hall; and gave the Governor what Blaise could see was a newspaper slip. He wondered from which paper; probably the Sun . As the aide left, Roosevelt was on his feet again, marching up and down, with no precise end in view other than the pleasure that vigorous motion of any kind appeared to give him. “The President has unleashed General MacArthur on the rebels. I’ve proposed unconditional surrender on our terms, not that the humble governor of New York has anything to say in such great matters.”

“But they listen to you, sir.” Blaise was beginning to work out a theme if not a story. “You are for expansion-everywhere?”

“Everywhere that we are needed. It is to take the manly part, after all. Besides, every expansion of civilization-and we are that, preeminently in the world, our religion, our law, our customs, our modernity, our democracy. Wherever our civilization is allowed to take hold means a victory for law and order and righteousness. Look at those poor benighted islands without us. Bloodshed, confusion, rapine… Aguinaldo is nothing but a Tagal bandit.”

“Some people regard him as a liberator,” Blaise began, aware that the Governor could thunder platitudes by the hour.

But there was no braking him now. Roosevelt was now marching rapidly in a circle at the center of the room. He had been seized by a speech. As he spoke, he used all the tricks that he would have used had Blaise been ten thousand people at Madison Square Garden. Arms rose and fell; the head was thrown back as if it were an exclamation mark; right fist struck left hand to mark the end of one perfected argument, and the beginning of the next. “The degeneracy of the Malay race is a fact. We start with that. We can do them only good. They can do themselves only harm. When the likes of Carnegie tell us that they are fighting for independence, I say any argument you make for the Filipino you could make for the Apache. Every word that can be said for Aguinaldo could be said for Sitting Bull. The Indians could not be civilized any more than the Filipinos can. They stand in the path of civilization. Now you may invoke the name of Jefferson…” Roosevelt glowered down at Blaise, who had no intention of invoking anyone’s name. Blaise stared straight ahead at the round stomach whose gold watch-chain quivered sympathetically with its owner’s mood, now militant, imperial. “Well, let me tell you that when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he did not include the Indians among those possessing our rights…”

“… or Negroes either,” said Blaise brightly.

Roosevelt frowned. “Slavery was something else, and solved in due course in the fiery crucible of civil war.”

Blaise wondered what the inside of a politician’s mind looked like. Were their drawers marked “Slavery,” “Free Trade,” “Indians”? Or did the familiar arguments hang on hooks, like newspaper galleys? Although Roosevelt was a respectable historian, who wrote and even read books, he could never say anything that one had not already heard said a thousand times. Perhaps that was the politician’s art: to bring to the obvious the appearance of novelty and passion. In any case, the Governor was enchanted by his own rhetoric. “Jefferson bought Louisiana, and never once consulted the Indian tribes that he had acquired in the process.”

“Or the Delacroix family, and some ten thousand other French and Spanish inhabitants of New Orleans. We still hate Jefferson, you know.”

“But, in due course, you were incorporated as free citizens of the republic. I speak now only of savages. When Mr. Seward acquired Alaska, did we ask for the consent of the Eskimos? We did not. When the Indian tribes went into rebellion in Florida, did Andrew Johnson offer them a citizenship for which they were not prepared? No, he offered them simple justice. Which is what we shall mete out to our little brown brothers in the Philippines. Justice and civilization will be theirs if they but seize the opportunity. We shall keep the islands!” Roosevelt suddenly began to click his teeth rapidly, alarmingly; he was like a machine, thought Blaise, wondering how on earth he could describe, in mere words, so odd a creature. Again the image of a wound-up toy soldier. “And we shall establish therein a stable and orderly government so that one more fair spot,” fist struck hand a powerful blow, “of the world’s surface shall have been snatched,” two stubby hands seized the innocent warm air of the parlor, saving it from winter cold, “from the forces of darkness!” There was a bit of froth at the edge of the governor’s full lower lip. He brushed it away with the back of the hand which still held the one fair spot snatched from darkness.

“Are you absolutely sure that Mlle. Souvestre is an atheist?” The Governor suddenly settled into a chair. He had put away the Philippines in their drawer; and locked it.

“So I’ve been told. I don’t really know her.” Blaise was neutral. “She’s been very active for Captain Dreyfus.” This was not such a non sequitur, since freethinkers tended to be Dreyfusards. In any case, the Governor was not listening.

“Bamie-my sister, that is-says that one can just ignore her on religious matters. It’s worth the chance, I think, for my niece, Eleanor.” The Governor then lectured Blaise for an hour. He wanted stronger proconsuls in Cuba and the Philippines. He would discuss the matter with the President. He thought that the sooner Secretary of War Alger-the man responsible for feeding the troops tinned, tainted meat-left the Cabinet the better. Blaise managed to ask a question or two about the Governor’s relations with Senator Platt. They were, apparently, “bully,” even though everyone knew that the two men could not bear each other, and that Platt had only taken Roosevelt because, after the scandals of the previous Republican governor, the party would have lost the state. At the same time, Roosevelt, the zealous reformer, needed the Republican machine in order to be elected governor. It was also no secret that he would like to join his friend Lodge in the Senate; it was also no secret that Platt was not about to surrender his own seat to accommodate a governor who was currently insisting that any corporation with a public franchise must pay tax. Specifically, this struck at William Whitney, a Democrat millionaire, who owned numerous streetcar lines as well as, some said, the golden key to Tammany Hall. Whitney had served in Cleveland’s cabinet; had fathered Blaise’s classmate Payne.

As the Governor declaimed, he would shift his voice from effete questioner to stern Jehovah-like answerer; he played a dozen different parts, all badly but engagingly. Blaise wondered, idly, as he so often did in this still strange city, whether or not such a man would have a mistress, or go to brothels (there were more in the Tenderloin District than in all of Paris), or would he confine himself, with iron resolve, to the indulgences of his second wife?

The thought of Payne Whitney had made Blaise think of sex. Once, innocently, at Yale, Blaise had asked the high-spirited Payne if there was a decent brothel in New Haven. The boy had gone red in the face; and Blaise had realized that his twenty-year-old classmate was a virgin. Further highly covert investigations convinced Blaise not only that most of the young men of his class were virgins but that this unnatural state explained their, to him, inexplicable long and dull talk of the girls that they knew socially, combined with heavy drinking of a sort that he associated, in Paris, with workmen of the lowest class. As a result, he never let on that since his sixteenth year he had been involved in an affair with a friend of his father’s, Anne de Bieville, twenty years his senior and happily married to a bank manager; her oldest son, two years Blaise’s senior, had taught him how to shoot at Saint-Cloud; for a time, he was Blaise’s best friend. As it was tacitly assumed that Blaise was the mother’s lover, the subject was never mentioned between the boys. Consequently, prim New Haven had come as something of a shock.