Taft had studied law at Yale University and served as a federal judge. As “far back as I can remember,” he said, “I believe my ambitions were of a judicial cast.” More than anything he wanted to be chief justice of the Supreme Court. Even a few days before he was nominated to be the Republican presidential candidate, Taft said if he was offered the job of chief justice he would take it. But it wasn’t only Theodore who wanted him in the White House. The secretary’s wife, Helen, wanted to be First Lady more than her husband wanted to be president. But like many people, Helen was convinced the president would change his mind about a third term at the last minute.
TR was very physically active, even as president.
Theodore himself related to an editor friend, “There has never been a moment when I could not have had the Republican nomination with practical unanimity by simply raising one finger.” He was too radical for some conservatives and too conservative for some progressives, but he was as beloved as ever by the American people. That was acknowledged even by his political enemies such as Democratic senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina, who said Theodore was “the most popular president the country has ever had.”
At the Republican convention in June delegates paraded and chanted, “Four more years” and “We want Teddy,” for more than three-quarters of an hour. But Senator Lodge, the convention’s chairman, told the delegates, “His refusal of a renomination, dictated by the loftiest motives and by a noble loyalty to American traditions, is final and irrevocable.” So Theodore’s supporters gave up and supported Taft.
“Always excepting Washington and Lincoln,” TR wrote to a British historian, “I believe that Taft as President will rank with any other man who has ever been in the White House.” Of his own seven and a half years as president, Theodore said, “I have enjoyed every moment of this so-called arduous and exacting task.” But he didn’t change his mind about a third term, because “if there is any value whatever in my career, as far as my countrymen are concerned, it consists in their belief that I have been both an efficient public man, and at the same time, a disinterested public servant.”
One of President Roosevelt’s last official acts in 1909 was to join thousands of other people on George Washington’s birthday, February 22, to watch the Great White Fleet return to Hampton Roads. The president attended despite having learned the day before that his nephew, Stewart, Corinne’s youngest son and a Harvard sophomore, had died after plunging from his sixth-floor dormitory window. “I am heartbroken at the dreadful news,” he explained to Archie. “No president can let any private matter interfere with a great public duty.”
When the last of the ships cruised by the presidential yacht, the president told his military aid, “Another chapter is complete and I could not ask a finer concluding scene for my administrations.” No other individual had done as much as Theodore to create this mighty navy. When he became president, the U.S. Navy was the world’s fifth strongest. Now it was second to only Great Britain.
After Theodore left the White House, he remained one of the most popular people on the planet and, much to his old friend Taft’s distress, increasingly critical of the new president.
10
THREE WEEKS AFTER Taft’s inauguration in 1909, Theodore left the country for fourteen months to go on safari with Kermit in the east African country of Kenya. On his return trip, the former president passed through Europe, where he was greeted by large crowds and by heads of state. But no place gave him a bigger greeting than his hometown.
When the ocean liner carrying Theodore cruised into New York Harbor on June 16, 1910, it was met by hundreds of small craft, tugs, fireboats, and six navy battleships. They filled the air with the sounds of bells, whistles, and sirens and, from Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, cannons boomed a twenty-one-gun salute. Tens of thousands of people, one of the biggest public gatherings in New York City’s history at the time, filled the streets along the harbor, straining to see the familiar figure. When they saw Theodore on deck, said one observer, “such a shout went up from the shore as to waken the stones.” Leading a parade up Broadway, the city’s mayor and the former president rode in a black carriage followed by thirteen more black carriages of dignitaries, a band of Rough Riders on horseback, and a hundred-piece band.
For several weeks politicians visited Sagamore Hill to tell Theodore their concerns. Many complained that President Taft had aligned himself with the Old Guard Republicans. The colonel, as Theodore preferred to be called, had already heard some of the complaints. He had been deep in the jungle of Kenya when a barefoot messenger delivered a telegram informing him that President Taft had fired Gifford Pinchot from the National Forest Service. We “have just heard by special runner that you have been removed. I cannot believe it,” TR wrote to his friend. “I do not know any man in public life who has rendered quite the service you have rendered.”
Pinchot met Theodore in Italy that spring and gave him a list of complaints, which essentially said that the Taft administration wasn’t following Theodore’s policies, especially on conservation. The president had appointed a new secretary of the interior, Richard Achilles Ballinger, who seemed determinedly anticonservation. Pinchot had been fired for encouraging the press to write critical articles about Ballinger, who had been accused of working to give J. P. Morgan access to valuable government coal deposits.
These complaints were more serious than the irritating slights that had occurred after Taft’s inauguration. First Helen Taft replaced several of the Roosevelts’ favorite White House servants. Then, after implying that he planned to keep the members of Theodore’s cabinet, President Taft replaced them all, mostly with conservative lawyers who had represented big business. Then the new president sent Theodore a thank-you letter saying he owed his successful election to both Theodore and Taft’s older brother Charley, who had provided much of his campaign money. Theodore felt there was only one man responsible for Taft being president, and it wasn’t Charley.
At times Theodore sounded like he was ready to live a quiet life as a contributing editor to The Outlook, a public-affairs magazine that paid him $1,000 a month. Although he was only fifty-one, he complained of feeling old. “Unfortunately my infernal body is bothered more or less with rheumatism,” he said, “and I doubt if I shall be much good for long walks again.” But the colonel wasn’t about to retire from public life.
In August 1910, on a special train hired by The Outlook, Theodore began a sixteen-state speaking tour of the Midwest. While the former president insisted he was representing himself and no one else, his speeches probably had at least two purposes. He wanted to stir up enthusiasm for Republican candidates in the congressional elections that fall. And he wanted to promote his progressive ideas.
Theodore called these ideas the “New Nationalism,” and he gave a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, that spelled out exactly what the term meant. It “puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage,” he explained. It means that the “citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.” This required a strong federal government to ensure social justice. He wanted laws that regulated the labor of women and children, limited the use of corporate funds for political purposes, and created income and inheritance taxes. The president should be the “steward of public welfare,” Theodore said, while personal property was “subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use.” The “essence of the struggle is to destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.” People in the Midwest cheered Theodore’s ideas while people in the East denounced them as radical and communistic.
Former President Roosevelt on his speaking tour, 1910.
In the 1910 midterm elections the Republicans lost the House, which they had held since McKinley had been first elected president fourteen years before. And the party’s Senate majority was red
uced from twenty-nine to ten. Theodore blamed Taft for the midterm losses. “I am really sorry for Taft,” he wrote one of his political friends. “I’m sure he means well, but he means well feebly, and he does not know how. He is utterly unfit for leadership, and this is a time when we need leadership.”
The Colonel tried not to let politics interfere too much with his life at Sagamore Hill. “I have reveled in being home,” TR wrote to a friend in Kenya, “and if fortune favors me I shall never again leave Mrs. Roosevelt and my own belongings.” He was especially happy to learn that Ted and his wife, who had been married in June 1910 in Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, were already expecting their first child. “Home, wife, children, they are what really count in life,” he wrote his son, who had moved to San Francisco after his wedding. “I have heartily enjoyed many things; the Presidency, my success as a soldier, a writer, a big game hunter and explorer; but all of them put together are not for one moment to be weighed in the balance when compared with the joy I have known with your mother and all of you. As merely a secondary thing, this house and the life here yield me constant pleasure. Really, the prospect of grandchildren was all that was lacking to make perfect mother’s happiness and mine.”
By the middle of 1911 Theodore’s criticism of President Taft sharpened. He is “is a flubdub with a streak of the second-rate and the common in him, and he has not the slightest idea of what is necessary if this country is to make social and industrial progress.”
Taft especially angered Theodore by advocating the use of arbitration to settle disputes between nations. In speeches, the president said the problems that had caused the Spanish-American War in 1898 and earlier foreign wars could have been settled peacefully if the two sides had sat down and talked. “I don’t think,” Taft explained, “that it indicates a man lacks personal courage if he does not want to fight, but prefers to submit questions of national honor to a board of arbitration.”
Taft’s ideas were “maudlin folly,” Theodore snorted, because there were issues that could never be negotiated with Japan or Germany—the two nations he felt were the biggest threats to the United States.
“The truth is,” Taft said of the ex-president’s remarks, “he believes in war and wishes to be a Napoleon and die on the battlefield. It is curious how unfitted he is for courteous debate. I don’t wonder he prefers the battle-ax.”
Taft was also harder on the trusts than Theodore had been, and that caused problems as well. While the former president had been selective about which trusts to file suit against, Taft applied the letter of the law to all trusts. Theodore was especially irritated when Taft’s attorney general filed suit against J. P. Morgan, charging that his acquisition of the Tennessee coal and iron company, which the ex-president had approved in 1907, had created an illegal trust.
By the beginning of 1912 Theodore had made up his mind. “Taft is utterly hopeless,” he told a friend. “I think he would be beaten if nominated, but in any event it would be a misfortune to have him in the presidential chair for another term, for he has shown himself an entirely unfit president.”
Others agreed, and they knew exactly who they wanted to replace Taft. “Roosevelt for president” clubs sprang up across the country. The wealthy Wall Street businessman George W. Perkins offered to fund his campaign. Senator Robert La Follette, one of the country’s prominent progressives, was already planning to challenge Taft for the Republican nomination, but several of his backers hinted that if Theodore ran they would switch allegiances. “I think well of La Follette,” TR wrote Ted, explaining why he wouldn’t support the senator for president. “With most of his policies I am in entire accord. He is, however, an extremist, and has the touch of fanaticism which makes a man at times heedless of means in attaining his ends.”
After he decided to challenge Taft and La Follette for the Republican presidential nomination, Theodore explained that his previous misgivings about third terms applied only to consecutive terms. “Real danger would come from a man who had been in office eight years and may be thought to have solidified his power by patronage, contracts and the like, using that power to perpetuate itself.”
Pinchot asked La Follette to step aside and let Theodore alone challenge Taft, but the senator refused. Many of his backers quickly jumped ship and climbed on board with Theodore. But the Colonel also needed support from moderate Republicans, and his policies were too radical for many of them.
One of Theodore’s most controversial ideas had to do with judicial decisions. He was specifically concerned with popular laws passed by state legislatures, such as the attempts to regulate railroad rates back in the 1890s, which were struck down by the courts. If the courts issued an unpopular ruling, Theodore said citizens should be able to vote to reverse the ruling. Many moderates and conservatives denounced his idea as mob rule.
Theodore’s candidacy against an incumbent Republican president upset Senator Lodge, his old friend of more than a quarter of a century. They had both agreed a long time ago that party loyalty was important. Now Lodge had to choose between being loyal to the Republican Party or to Theodore. “I have had my share of mishaps in politics,” the senator wrote in a letter, “but I never thought that any situation could arise which would have made me so miserably unhappy.” Lodge said he couldn’t support Theodore, but he wouldn’t oppose him either.
The Colonel’s family rallied around him, though. He was amused when Alice, who always liked to thumb her nose at conventional behavior, came to visit. “I think she just had to see me because of course all respectable society is now apoplectic with rage over me,” he told Kermit. Although Alice’s husband Nick was running for reelection in Ohio and supported Taft, Alice backed her father’s campaign “with mind heart and soul.” Alice said her stepmother was “stony and unsympathetic” about Theodore’s return to politics, but Edith eventually came around and said she was proud of her husband for “making an uphill fight for what he believes in.” The “campaign is all that means anything to us now,” said Theodore’s youngest daughter, Ethel. She and several cousins worked as volunteers in her father’s New York campaign headquarters.
The three-way race for the nomination inspired lots of insults and name calling. In their editorials, newspapers said Theodore had the “daring of a mad-man” and “the instincts of a beast”; and he was “the most cunning and adroit demagogue that modern civilization has produced since Napoleon III.” They believed his campaign was an “invitation to anarchy.”
Taft said his former friend was “a dangerous egotist” and a “flatterer of the people. I hate a flatterer. I like a man to tell the truth.” The president added, “Such extremists are not progressives—they are political emotionalists or neurotics.”
“Mr. Taft only discovered that I was dangerous to the people after I discovered that he was useless to the people,” Theodore responded. He labeled Taft a “fathead” and a “puzzlewit,” which means stupid.
The ex-president was clearly the public’s favorite. Party primaries were a new idea at the time, initiated by progressives so that ordinary people, rather than party insiders, could choose political candidates. States were slow to adopt the primary system, so there were only thirteen primaries in 1912. Theodore won them all—even the primary in Taft’s home state of Ohio.
But Old Guard Republicans were still in control of the party, and they awarded Taft a clear majority of the delegates to the June national convention in Chicago. Theodore’s supporters disputed the eligibility of nearly half of those delegates. But the party leaders decided the matter by awarding most of the disputed delegates to Taft.
When Theodore heard about the decision, he rushed to Chicago to rally his supporters. In a speech he told them, we “fight in honorable fashion for the good of mankind; fearless of the future; unheeding of our individual fate; with unflinching hearts and undimmed eyes; we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” He felt as fit as a “bull moose,” he added. “We who are in this fight are not feeble
, and we intend to carry the fight to the end.”
The convention was wild. There were fist fights, noisy demonstrations, and cursing as the convention’s chairman, Theodore’s former secretary of war Elihu Root, asked each state for a voice vote. Knowing that he had lost the nomination before the vote was finished, Theodore led his 344 delegates out of the convention shouting, “Thou shall not steal.”
Over the next several weeks Theodore and his followers decided to abandon the Republicans and formed the new Progressive Party. They returned to Chicago in August for their first convention. Circulars proclaimed: “At Three o’Clock Thursday Afternoon, Theodore Roosevelt Will Walk on the Waters of Lake Michigan.” The ex-president didn’t walk on water, but he did give another rousing speech. “The time is ripe, and overripe,” he told the cheering crowd, “for a genuine Progressive movement, nation-wide and justice-loving, sprung from and responsible to the people themselves.”
The presidential race was essentially between Theodore and the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. Taft did a little campaigning, but his heart wasn’t in it. “There are so many people in the country who don’t like me,” he said at one point. Another time, after a speech attacking the ex-president, Taft told a reporter that “Roosevelt was my closest friend,” and began to cry.
“My feeling is the Democrats will probably win if they nominate a progressive,” Theodore had predicted privately. Their candidate was a progressive. Wilson had been a lawyer and professor of political science, president of Princeton University, and governor of New Jersey. The Democrat differed from Theodore in that he believed more strongly in state rights and was less concerned about labor laws and woman’s suffrage. And he thought all trusts should be busted.
Michael L. Cooper Page 9
