Hissing Cousins

by Marc Peyser

  The political implications—a former president challenging a sitting president from his own party—were obviously huge. For the extended Roosevelt family, the personal consequences were downright monumental. As a man effectively straddling two bobbing ships, Nick was in the most tenuous position. One foot was firmly planted with Taft, his patron, his constituent, his party’s standard-bearer, and his close friend. (In 1911, Taft had one White House lunch guest on his birthday—Nick.) At the same time, he desperately wanted to stay loyal to his father-in-law, whom he liked and respected. In the days before his father-in-law announced his candidacy, Nick was vowing to give up his seat rather than be forced to publicly take sides. “Nick feels it is a tragedy,” Alice wrote in her diary.66 “I have never been so sorry for anyone.”67 He could take some consolation in that neither of the presidents tried to strong-arm him. Taft told Nick the choice was his. Theodore, ever the political realist, told Nick to back Taft, knowing that the GOP would ditch a congressman who dumped the party’s own president. If Roosevelt did defeat Taft, his father-in-law vowed to protect him. “He had a dear letter from F. [Father] today saying he was coming out and then with words to the effect that he would soak it to ‘any Roosevelt creature’ who dared to worry us in Cincinnati,” Alice wrote in her diary.68

  For Alice, the role of political wife had suddenly taken a hairpin turn. Campaigning at Nick’s side had fed her vanity and her sense of self-worth. Now she stood next to him powerless to help and a major cause of his pain. Still, she decided to back her father completely. Partly, that was out of loyalty; she had never wanted him to pass the baton to Taft in the first place. Part of that was selfish, too. While she enjoyed being married to a congressman on the rise, he was still only a congressman. Too much of her identity was tied to being the daughter of the president to not want to reclaim that.

  Her choice might have been clear, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t agonizing. She knew that if Nick went along with her, he would put his career at serious risk. “I’ve begun to have a desperate feeling again. That lost feeling of being absolutely alone. Darling Nick. I love him so much,” she wrote in her diary. “If I can only keep him cheerful, sober and moderately contented.”69 She shuttled back and forth between the two most important men in her life, listening and advising them on potential solutions. You could measure her anxiety by the number of ways in which she stopped behaving like Princess Alice of old. First, she now often woke up before noon—before 9:00 a.m., even—because breakfast was the best time to consult with her father. Second, she lost her always-healthy appetite. “Food choked me and I existed principally on fruit and eggs and Vichy,” she said. “I had a chronic cold and cough, indigestion, colitis, anemia and low blood pressure—and quite marked schizophrenia.”70 And third, she occasionally cried, even in front of other people. “Had a talk with Nick and been a fool and wept,” she wrote.71 “That poor fat man [a.k.a. President Taft] has come courting for him. Why must he [Nick] sacrifice us for that lump of flesh?”72

  The irony was that while she was miserable in her inability to rescue Nick, in a way Alice had become more important to him than ever. She had presented detailed plans on how to navigate the Taft-Roosevelt predicament, just as she did for her father. She became a sounding board for their ideas as well as for their speeches. Rather than serving as a mere ribbon cutter and all-purpose curio, she had graduated to trusted adviser to both men. Alice had stepped into the inner circle. She would stay there—with politicians from various backgrounds, and not just her relatives—for decades.

  If that transition went largely undetected at the time (even by Alice), it was because the election of 1912 grew stranger and noisier by the day. Once he entered the race, Theodore took charge of it like—well, he said it himself when he arrived in Chicago on June 15 for the Republican convention: “I’m feeling like a bull moose!”73 He had won 235 of the 254 contested delegates in the primaries, leaving Taft with only 19. But the sitting president controlled the convention and with it the delegates. Taft’s henchmen proceeded to invalidate one Roosevelt backer after the next, as if they were tin cans lined up in a shooting gallery. Taft also pocketed the majority of heretofore uncommitted delegates. When it was over, Taft claimed 561 votes to 107 for Roosevelt, with the Wisconsin senator Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette getting 41. Three hundred and forty-four disgruntled Roosevelt supporters refused to back anyone. They had been steamrolled, they shouted in the convention hall, loudly rubbing pieces of sandpaper together to simulate the sound of a steam engine. Before the votes were even counted, Roosevelt and his followers had decamped to Orchestra Hall down the street and convened a “rump” convention to form a third party. They called themselves the Progressive Party. Most of the time, though, they were known as Bull Moosers.

  Alice promptly elected herself president of the Bull Moose Booster Club. “Mr. Roosevelt will be elected because the people believe in fair play,” she announced to a group of reporters. “And he’ll win too; don’t forget that for a minute. He’s full of life, and just now he thinks he’s been unjustly treated and will fight with every ounce of strength that is in him.”74 She said this as she and Nick were boarding the train from Chicago back to Washington, and the reporters couldn’t help but notice that Nick “wore a dejected look.”75 When they asked him if he would be supporting his father-in-law, he barked, “I have nothing to say.” And he wanted to make damn sure to keep it that way. No one had seen Nick in Chicago the prior day, including Alice.76 He had been avoiding everyone, in no small part because the Taft-Roosevelt rift was tearing his own marriage apart. Alice, fed up with their fighting and Nick’s growing problems with drinking, had just asked him for a divorce. Her family quickly intervened. “They exercised considerable pressure to get me to reconsider,” she said. “The whole thing would have caused too much of a hullabaloo apparently. In those days people just didn’t go around divorcing one another. Not done, they said. Emphatically.”77

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  They were apparently able to patch things up in time to travel together to the following whistle-stop—the Democratic National Convention, which began the next day in Baltimore. It might have been enemy territory, but the Longworths found at least one pair of friendly faces: Franklin and Eleanor. “Alice & Nick sat near us in Baltimore & she told me that Uncle Ted’s meeting in Chicago was wonderful,” Eleanor wrote to her friend Isabella Greenway.*5 “Alice looks much better & she asked much about you & Bob.”78 Franklin had hoped to use the convention both to support Wilson and, in the event that he won the nomination, to secure a job in the new administration. The problem was that he garnered more notice for being “the Democratic Roosevelt,” as a pro-Wilson newspaperman named Josephus Daniels referred to him, than he did on his own merits. Franklin wasn’t a delegate or an alternate. He wasn’t even allowed on the convention floor. “Much attention is being given to the expected arrival to-morrow of the Roosevelts,” reported the New York Times. “Someone started a story to the effect that ‘Roosevelt had arrived.’ This was true, but the Roosevelt referred to was not the former President, but State Senator James Roosevelt of New York, a cousin of the Oyster Bay man.”79 They didn’t even get his first name right.

  Like their husbands, the cousins inhabited vastly different rungs on the political pecking order. Alice was now both a superstar and an insider, notable as much for what she thought as what she wore. Eleanor was barely a face in the crowd. She later professed to having enjoyed her first convention, but she didn’t stay all that long. It was hot and smoky and loud in Baltimore. She didn’t always understand what was going on. “Finally, I decided my husband would hardly miss my company, as I rarely laid eyes on him, and the children should go to Campobello, so I went home,” she wrote.80 It was hard to blame her. It took the Democrats forty-six ballots and one impassioned speech from William Jennings Bryan to nominate Wilson. He was the worst possible opponent from Roosevelt’s vantage, given that they were both progressives who supported an eight-hour workday, a federal i
ncome tax, and national health and unemployment insurance.*6 “My hopes were far from robust,” said Alice, though the budding political operative in her couldn’t help but be excited by the intra-party warfare. “It was comforting to see that there was no more sweet harmony in the Democratic ranks than in those of the erstwhile Republican Party.”81

  Eleanor, off in Campobello with the children, got the word from Franklin in a telegraph: “Wilson nominated this afternoon. All my plans vague. Splendid triumph.”82 Receiving the news long-distance was something of a blessing and perhaps part of the plan in skipping out of Baltimore early. It meant that Eleanor didn’t have to react to Franklin’s enthusiasm in kind. The truth was, she hadn’t really wanted Wilson to get the nomination. After all, the Democratic candidate would be running against not just Taft but the Progressive Party nominee. “I wish Franklin could be fighting now for Uncle Ted, for I feel he is in the Party of the Future,” she wrote to Isabella.83

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  The future was nearly over before it began. On October 14, Theodore Roosevelt was stumping in Milwaukee, where he drew yet another large and adoring crowd. A sizable group had collected in the lobby of the Gilpatrick Hotel just to wait for him to finish dinner before making that evening’s speech. When Theodore finally emerged at about 8:00 p.m., the throng followed him into the street and toward the car that would take him to the Milwaukee Auditorium, three blocks away.84 Just as Roosevelt stepped on the floorboard of his car and turned to wave, a stocky barkeep from New York named John Schrank pushed through the throng, aimed his shiny revolver at the former president, and shot him once in the chest from about six feet away.85 At first, Theodore didn’t realize he had been hit. When the crowd toppled Schrank and started yelling, “Lynch him!” Roosevelt announced that he was unhurt and begged, “Don’t hurt the poor creature. I want to see him.”86 Later, Schrank told police that he feared Roosevelt’s dictatorial ambitions. “Any man looking for a third term ought to be shot,” he said.87

  It wasn’t until Roosevelt was driven away in the car that an aide noticed the hole in Roosevelt’s shirt. Theodore found some blood there, but there wasn’t any when he coughed into his hand, so he assumed that the bullet hadn’t traveled to his lungs. In fact, it had been slowed by two objects in Roosevelt’s left jacket pocket: his steel eyeglass case and his folded fifty-page speech, which he proceeded to deliver over the next hour as if nothing had happened. “It takes more than that,” he told the hushed crowd, “to stop a Bull Moose.” But over the course of the speech, as blood slowly soaked his shirt, his voice grew fainter and his face paler. His insistence on pushing through to the end only cemented his indomitable reputation. When Roosevelt finally did finish, he was rushed to a Milwaukee hospital. The reports were conflicting and confusing. Edith got word from a cousin while sitting in a Broadway theater. Alice, in Cincinnati, tried to follow the news by phone. Franklin, who was in the midst of recovering from typhoid, resorted to calling the NewYork Times office to get the latest updates.88 The next day Theodore was transferred to a hospital in Chicago, where doctors decided that the wound wasn’t life threatening and opted to leave the bullet in his chest.

  The Roosevelts endured another kind of near-death experience in the election season. Nick and Theodore told Alice that she must not stump for the Progressive Party or attend any high-profile events, such as the official Progressive Party convention in early August back in Chicago. The men reasoned that any divided Longworth-family loyalty would confuse and maybe anger the staunch Taft supporters in Nick’s district. Just as Nick didn’t publicly back either Taft or Roosevelt, Alice needed to keep a low profile. “It was torture,” she said, “not to be doing something.”89

  Of course, telling Alice Roosevelt not to do something was just like waving a red flag in front of a bull moose. Try as she might, she couldn’t help herself from going to hear California’s governor, Hiram Johnson, her father’s running mate, when he came to speak in Cincinnati on September 20. “It was simply splendid,” she told Johnson backstage after the speech. “I am so glad to meet you.”90 (This was said, somewhat obtusely, right in front of Nick, who went to the speech with her rather than give voters reason to believe the election was impacting his marriage.) Alice went alone when her father spoke in Chicago the following month and again when he stormed New York’s Madison Square Garden on October 30, his first appearance after the shooting. After all, she’d helped to edit her father’s speech, and it proved to be the high point of the entire campaign. “It was one of those resounding, enthusiastic crowds, the streets jammed for blocks around the hall, three-quarters of an hour of ear-splitting racket when Father came to the platform,” she said.91

  Unfortunately, the election itself proved far less exciting than the campaigns. Alice was correct: Roosevelt essentially split the vote twice, fighting for Republican voters with Taft and progressive voters with Wilson. In the end, Wilson took forty states and 435 electoral votes. Roosevelt won six states and 88 electoral votes. Taft only won two states (Utah and Vermont) and 8 electoral votes, still the worst showing ever by an incumbent president. Despite the loss, Roosevelt only solidified his standing as America’s most intrepid and beloved warrior. He became not only the most successful third-party candidate (and still is); he was only the second, after Andrew Jackson, to campaign with a bullet in his chest.

  Nick’s career, however, went on life support. He lost his seat by a mere ninety-seven votes. It seemed likely that Alice’s full-throated support for her father boomeranged and whacked her husband in the back. There was a real possibility that he was finished politically, and for the rest of her life Alice blamed herself for his defeat. It’s fair to say that Nick blamed her, too, even before the votes had been counted. “Nick and I had a tremendous row after lunch—he accuses me of not being for him, not ‘standing by’ him and I am so hurt and angry,” Alice wrote in her diary two days before the election. “We are surely drifting decidedly apart. It is so sad.”92 When the congressional session ended that March, they drifted back together—back to Cincinnati, where Nick plotted his return to office and Alice attempted to live under the same roof again with her mother-in-law. That might have been a sentence worse than death.

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  Despite his candidate’s crushing victory over Taft and Uncle Ted, Franklin’s future was somewhat less clear than Nick’s. He was reelected to the New York State Senate, thanks to Louis Howe’s skill as a political magician. But FDR had hoped for something in the Wilson administration. For the upcoming 1913 term, Franklin and Eleanor rented a few rooms in an Albany hotel and left the children with Mama. He took his seat in the senate, but his real job was working his connections in Washington. In the middle of January, a telegram summoned him to New Jersey to meet with Wilson, but nothing concrete came of it. Then, three days before Wilson’s March 4 inauguration, Franklin and Eleanor booked into Washington’s Willard hotel, long the prime deal-making spot in town. Sure enough, FDR happened across William Gibbs McAdoo, the incoming Treasury secretary, and he offered Franklin his choice of two jobs: assistant Treasury secretary or collector of customs at the Port of New York. Franklin smiled, expressed his gratitude—and took neither. On the morning of the inauguration, he encountered Josephus Daniels, the North Carolina newspaper editor who had labeled him “the Democratic Roosevelt” at the Democratic convention in Baltimore. Wilson had recently asked Daniels to be secretary of the navy, and Franklin duly congratulated him. “How would you like to come to Washington as assistant secretary?” Daniels replied. Uncle Ted’s old job? Franklin was delighted. “How would I like it?” said Franklin, breaking into his incandescent smile. “I’d like it bully well!” Right on schedule, Franklin had climbed up another rung of Uncle Ted’s ladder to the White House.

  * * *

  *1 Maternal grandfather of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  *2 Having lost baby Franklin in 1909, the Roosevelts would also name this child Franklin junior, when he was born on August 17, 1914.

  *3
The Twenty-Second Amendment, limiting presidents to two terms, wasn’t ratified until 1951, after a different Roosevelt won four elections to the White House.

  *4 The ex-president preferred to be called Colonel Roosevelt, a reminder of his glory days as a Rough Rider.

  *5 Isabella Selmes Ferguson Greenway’s (1886–1953) life was intertwined with the Roosevelts from the moment of her birth. Her father was the co-owner with Theodore Roosevelt of a ranch in North Dakota, where she spent the first part of her childhood. As a schoolgirl in New York City, Isabella met Eleanor and they formed a lifelong friendship. She served as a bridesmaid at Eleanor’s wedding, and would eventually marry two of TR’s Rough Riders: Robert Ferguson in 1905 (with whom she was godparent to Eleanor’s daughter Anna) and, after his death in 1922, Colonel John Greenway. She seconded FDR’s nomination at the 1932 Democratic convention, and served two terms in the House of Representatives as Arizona’s first female member of Congress before retiring in 1936.

  *6 Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 Progressive Party platform called for many policies that would later be introduced during FDR’s presidency.