The Wright Choice

To say that, in those early days of spring, that Theodore Roosevelt was the busiest man alive was quite an understatement. This would almost seem obvious given the circumstances that thrust him into the White House. He was having to find his own footing, run all of the more mundane details of a government, a war, and even a personal home to some degree. Foreign dignitaries and diplomats were calling on him left and right. Most of them used the pretense of expressing their remorse and sympathy for the fallen Elihu Root but, in reality, most of them were trying to size up Roosevelt. This was very different from the days when John Adams moved into the house. At that time, nobody considered the Presidency very important. It was even different from the time when Abraham Lincoln took possession. Strangely enough, even Elihu Root’s administration did not find that much different from either of the two President Lincolns. Now, not only was there a new man in the house but, the job had changed and, ironically enough, the house right along with it. Suddenly, it was all important.

This led to the very first problem of Roosevelt’s administration. It was the reason for his first executive order and it seems rather odd for an executive with the literal weight of the world on his shoulders. Roosevelt could not get any sleep and the primary reason was that his new home was more a military command center than anything else. Wires were crossed over each other on the floors and new holes were in the wall to accommodate the wires. Every room in the house was now occupied by it’s own private army and not only was there nowhere you could go where bells, clicking, and a hushed rumble of collective voices could not be heard, but also, there was literally no room for Roosevelt’s family that was still on the way.

Since no Vice President had yet to be confirmed, his old residence at the Naval Observatory was still vacant. That was why Roosevelt spent his first few months, as president, commuting to work. He also ordered renovations on the White House. Most of them would be finished before Roosevelt left office and, indeed, the bulk of them before the end of his first term. It was the beginning of the modern building we know today and, the establishment of one of it’s most visible traditions, the Oval Office. This was the center piece of what was ironically named “The West Wing” which was also what Roosevelt’s ad hoc cavalry command had been called in New Mexico.

For the time being, Roosevelt was stuck with what he had and this is why his first Cabinet meetings were not even held at the White House. Root had the same problem but, he spent a good deal of time working out of his railroad car. Roosevelt did not have such a thing, yet, so he chose a local hotel meeting room to sit down with Root’s old cabinet. It was really the first big problem he would face in establishing his administration. None of these men really held any loyalty to him which is not that surprising since a good number had little loyalty for Root either. Roosevelt could not arbitrarily dispose of them since Cabinet level positions had to be approved by Congress. Apparently, according to his journals, Roosevelt had not even decided what to do about this situation until the gas attacks in Tennessee. The triggering mechanism being that not only was Roosevelt unaware that the attack was to take place but, he also had no idea that these gas weapons even existed.

John Hay, who had used the gas weapons to deflect one president, now found himself on the spot with another. He did make a reasonable argument that there had simply been no time to tell Roosevelt, which was mostly true. He also stated that as Vice President, Roosevelt did not have a need to know and the weapons were of a very secretive nature. This was also true, to a point, because while the President of the US had to find out about his secret weapon in the newspapers, Confederate Intelligence had known something was up right from the start.

Maybe that was why Roosevelt did not accept either excuse. He did not say that was the case but, instead, he then made a point that Hay had obviously not thought of. The cabinet was so horrified by what Roosevelt said that it was apparent that none of them had thought of it. The new President told them in his usual energetic way, “the greatest threat we now face are these accursed flying trains. What happens when their ordinance stops exploding and begins to go woosh instead? I ask you that!”

One has to speculate here. Were these men afraid of Confederate gas shells falling on US cities, or, were they terrified at the prospect of Roosevelt ordering such attacks on Confederate population centers? If such an attack ever occurred, no matter which side was responsible, there would be no peace in North America for centuries. Roosevelt had a reputation as a loose cannon, the US now had an infant air fleet that was growing weekly, and they certainly had a surplus of chemical artillery shells. It had to be rumbling in the back of every mind in the room when you consider that this was before people knew who the real Roosevelt was.

We do not know if Roosevelt meant to shock these men in such a way but, it certainly helped his cause. These men suddenly went silent and, that was probably for the best considering that, right then and there, Theodore decided the best way to handle his cabinet was to simply ignore it. That is not to say that the President was going to try and do everything alone, he just now planned on doing things differently. The term that would later stick to this kind of circumstance is called a “kitchen cabinet” and while that term would only be born years after Theodore’s death, it was most certainly the kind of team he assembled.

For all of Roosevelt’s life he had surrounded himself with people who were not only experts in their chosen fields but, many were quite gifted. Roosevelt’s real talent was spotting people like this and fostering their support and loyalty. He had used this skill to assemble a Cavalry regiment and it worked out splendidly. Now he was going to turn it on the war as a whole. Roosevelt had just spent several years in the army and his list of personal acquaintances, that were both experts at war and owed him favors, were both long and diverse. This list was from the very top of the command structure, like General Shafter, all the way down to privates in the field. He would call on many of these men in the months to come.

Some of these ‘consultants’ would be more notable than others but, right then, in March of 1901, there was no other expert that seemed to be more important to Theodore than Samuel Langley. Roosevelt had spent his restless hours reading and trying to acclimate himself to his new job. He had turned both his office and bedroom into makeshift file rooms where, in between courting ambassadors, he was catching up on all of the information that Root had the luxury of years to digest. Somewhere in his reading he had determined that his old acquaintance, now out in Kansas, held the best chance in stopping the Zeppelins. The sudden appearance of chemical weapons now seemed to make this matter even more urgent.

Oddly enough, it was not Langley who would become most instrumental in this equation. It was a trio of siblings from Dayton, Ohio that Roosevelt had never heard of and of whom Langley had little use. Wilbur and Orville Wright were two brothers who had been, for many years, as divided as the former American nation. They were born into a family of deeply held Christian beliefs that were both passionate and as equally divided. They were a very typical example of their times and the issues that confronted the average American.

Wilbur had chosen a path of deeply held pacifism while Orville was very much a hawk when it came to the Confederate States of America. It must be noted that both of these beliefs stemmed from the exact same issues and, oddly enough, it was not because they viewed the Confederacy any differently, they just disagreed on how to approach it. Wilbur’s attitude seemed to center around the idea that if you could only reach the hearts of their lost brethren then, unification would certainly result. This attitude was most definitely the one fostered by his deeply religious father. Orville, on the other hand, held the more popular view that the only way to deal with the south was to stomp it flat. Of course, these two seemingly opposite views never appeared to interfere with the brothers working together. They even ran a small newspaper at one time and their opinion articles were quite often similar on at least one point, they both firmly opposed slavery.

Of course, the final abolition of slavery, in the US, in the late 1880’s, may have been either a cause of celebration for the Wright’s, or, it was the last thing the two brothers agreed on and only managed to start a family wide civil war. We’re not really sure on this point. We are relatively certain that Orville and Wilbur’s one and only sister, Kitty, played referee for many years. When their mother died, despite Kitty’s young age, she took over the role of leading female of the Wright Family and some family friends noted that she kept her two older brothers from almost killing each other on many occasions.

Kitty was more than just a behind the scenes player. She had an advanced education, her own career as a teacher, and she still managed to run the family even with her father’s declining health. This is important to us because it now appears as if it were not for Kitty, the Wrights venture in the bicycle business would have fallen apart and probably right from the start. Wilbur was always the managerial sort, the natural leader, and Orville was more of the ideas man. Kitty kept them together because, as she noted in her own journal, they needed each other. The only thing that Kitty could not seem to do was make them have ambition. Individually they both seemed too but, once put together, their weaknesses began compounding on each other and as she noted, it was always “a terrible mess.”

Bicycle shops of that time are not what we think of them today. Had it been more modern times then Orville and Wilbur would have had themselves a used car lot. In many ways they were what we would call shade tree mechanics. They were also running this business to fund a project that was completely unrelated to bicycles, even if many of the shop parts would wind up in their attempts to build a vehicle capable of independent, heavier than air, flight. Just before the war began, their single biggest problem was the lack of resources and time. When the war started, this problem was trumped by almost constant bickering between the brothers. It was a situation, noted by their sister, that threatened everything they had done.

The heart of the matter was Wilbur’s opposition to the war. This pacifism spilled over on their project because both brothers realized that what they were doing had military applications. In much of the popular literature, and something that historians even believed up till most recently, it was thought that letters from both the war department and Octave Chanute had set off a tinder box at the Wright home. This has now been shown to be false because we now know that neither brother ever saw the letters. As it turns out, Kitty had kept the correspondence from her brothers because a divide over the war was already brewing in their household. She did more than just hide the letters though. Kitty apparently realized the importance of them and she actually answered both, signing them with Wilbur’s name.

Kitty would also write another fateful letter, this one addressed to a family friend who lived in Kentucky. The man she sent it to was a published writer and someone that both of her brothers respected. He came to see the family in the hopes that his presence would help sooth the tensions. Paul Dunbar did exactly that but, not in the way that anyone had intended. As noted before, he died in Wilbur’s arms on the J Roebling Bridge, hit by a bullet, in a cross fire between Confederate raiders and Ohio guardsmen. This event would change Wilbur’s life forever and when he returned from Kentucky, where he took the body of his friend, his attitudes on the war had changed dramatically.

Wilbur never told anybody as such, never said that he was wrong and, in fact, he never really spoke much at all about what had happened that morning on the bridge. All that is known, for certain, is that he stopped fighting with his brother and they both began serious work on their flying machine. At this point, their story could have very well ended if it had not been for Kitty. While the Wright Brothers were not well known figures, even in the race to build the first airplane, they were not completely unknown. Both men had traveled to any number of fairs that were promoting this unproven technology and in these travels they had both met pioneers in the field, including Chanute and Langley.

While the Wright’s might have appeared to the giants in the field as little more than what today we would call, ‘fan boys,’ they did make an impression. Unfortunately for them, the impression on Langley was unfavorable and he particularly found Wilbur’s personality quite abrasive, as he would later comment. Chanute was a different story. He actually found some of the Wright’s ideas intriguing but, apparently, not enough to ask them for any help until he found himself trapped in France and working on their aircraft project, where he had repeatedly hit one dead end after another. The Boulanger Government had grown more desperate by the day and General Revenge was not the kind of man that Chanute wished to anger. He was looking for any help he could get.

Oddly enough, the letters that Chanute had sent to the Wrights were not really a serious plea for help. That correspondence was Chanute simply tapping every source of ideas that he knew about. His real call for help went to Langley since the Franco/American rail engineer was aware that his old acquaintance was working on a similar project for the US Government. Both men were hampered by security concerns but, they helped each other as much as possible. It was not until Theodore Roosevelt ascended to the White House that there was any talk at all of official cooperation between the projects.

It was not until the gas attacks in Tennessee and West Virginia that the entire project was bumped up to a priority status and the new President of the US declared, “the time for talking (about airplanes) is over. We either do or we sink!” That was why Theodore, against the advice of his friends and advisors alike, took his first presidential trip. It would be the first of many and it concerned the building of an airplane. Oddly enough, he would not be heading to Wichita where the project was centered. In this case, Theodore went to Dayton, Ohio and the bicycle shop of the Wright Brothers.

How Theodore had heard of them was in his flurry of communications with both Chanute and Langley and is a long story all by itself. While neither of the engineers suggested that Roosevelt bring the Wrights in to the project, what the President did notice was that their names kept appearing many times when almost no one else’s did. Reading these telegrams, it seems as if Chanute first mentioned them in connection with something that Langley thought ludicrous. Roosevelt began to systematically pin down Langley on the matter and, finally, the head of the Smithsonian had to admit that this wind tunnel idea, might show promise. Langley was not used to anyone outside of the engineering field being so precise, or even interested, in the kinds of details that Roosevelt was demanding.

That was how the President of the United States paid an unannounced call on a pair of bicycle mechanics in Dayton Ohio. The purposes of his trip were never reported to the public and, for that matter, there were no official government notes made either. The entire affair was so vague that even the film industry, of later years, never picked up on it. We have no idea what was said. All we do know is that when Theodore left Dayton, the Wright Brothers were no longer repairing bicycles and many local people began to note that an army major was staying around the shop and acting as if he owned the place. Eventually, Samuel Langley would be making calls there as well. The results would be dramatic.