He was bursting with the things he wanted to tell us. He always liked to talk from a rocking chair; so one was brought out on the piazza, and the Lodge family, including the three children … and Winnie and I sat around him while he rocked vigorously and told one story after another, holding us enchanted, making us laugh until we cried and ached.… Some of his best stories were about King Edward’s funeral, or “wake” as he irreverently called it.…
I do not think the rest of us spoke a hundred words.… It was a manifestation of that mysterious thing, nth-powered vitality, communicating itself to the listeners.
Lodge was doubtful about Roosevelt’s New York venture, but pleased to hear that he was cooperating with the President on something.
Taft happened to be vacationing nearby on the North Shore. That made it impossible to put off their reunion any longer. So the following afternoon, with Lodge for company, Roosevelt donned a panama hat and motored up the coast to the “summer White House” in Beverly. It was a large rented cottage overlooking the surf at Burgess Point. Taft liked it more for the proximity of the Myopia golf links than for its ozone.
“I know this man better than you do,” a secret service agent, James Sloan, said to Archie Butt as they stood looking out for the Colonel’s automobile. “He will come to see the President today and bite his leg off tomorrow.”
Sloan despised Taft. He claimed he had once heard Roosevelt say, “Jimmy, I may have to come back in four years to carry out my policies.” Butt was ambivalent. He had become fond of his boss, finding him to be essentially good-natured and high-minded. When convinced of the rightness of a course of action, Taft pushed all obstacles out of his way, like an elephant rolling logs. However, again like an elephant, he had a tendency to listen to whichever trainer whispered in his ear.
He came out of the house now, as Roosevelt arrived. “Ah, Theodore, it is good to see you.”
“How are you, Mr. President? This is simply bully.”
“See here now, drop the ‘Mr. President.’ ”
“Not at all. You must be Mr. President and I am Theodore. It must be that way.”
They affected male exuberance, with shoulder punches reminiscent of their old friendship. But the strain between them was palpable. Taft led the way to a group of wicker chairs on the breezy side of the porch. Roosevelt said that he “needed rather than wanted” a Scotch and soda. Nobody else drank. Lodge and Butt puffed cigars.
To get a dialogue going, Taft raised the subject of Hughes’s primary bill. He confirmed that he would do all he could to help its passage. Roosevelt said that as a citizen of New York, he supported it too. This lame exchange went nowhere, and a telephone message from Lloyd Griscom gave them no encouragement. The chairman advised that every member of his committee looked on the fight as “hopeless.”
Taft and Roosevelt were clearly cast down. The President blustered that he would continue to issue appeals for votes.
“I wish they had both remained out of it,” Lodge muttered to Butt.
The arrival on the porch of Mrs. Taft, still half mute from her stroke, put a further damp on the proceedings. Roosevelt was sensitive enough not to force her into conversation. He rambled politely until she relaxed.
“Now, Mr. President,” Taft said, “tell me about cabbages and kings.”
Roosevelt was willing to oblige, but protested being called by his old title.
“The force of habit is very strong in me,” Taft said, with the simplicity that was a large part of his charm. “I can never think of you save as ‘Mr. President.’ ”
“TAFT LED THE WAY TO A GROUP OF WICKER CHAIRS ON THE BREEZY SIDE OF THE PORCH.”
The summer White House in Beverly, Massachusetts. (photo credit i4.4)
For an hour, Roosevelt told royal stories, and was funny enough about M. Pichon and “the poor little Persian” to get everyone laughing.
When he got up to go, Lodge informed him that there were about two hundred newsmen and photographers waiting outside the gates. Roosevelt asked Taft for permission to say that their visit had been personal, and delightful. “Which is true as far as I am concerned.”
“And more than true as far as I am concerned,” Taft answered. “This has taken me back to some of those dear old afternoons when I was Will and you were Mr. President.”
They parted with tacit acknowledgment that whatever remained of their friendship, “dearness” was no longer an option.
BEFORE LEAVING BOSTON for New York, Roosevelt paid a visit to Corey Hospital in Brookline, where Justice William Henry Moody lay bent and emaciated with rheumatoid arthritis. Only fifty-six, Moody was the last, and to some minds the most distinguished of his three appointments to the Supreme Court. Yet after four short terms, the justice had been felled by a streptococcal storm that left him unable to walk and deeply depressed.
It was a poignant reunion for both, and Roosevelt was mute about it afterward. He had looked to Moody to serve for many years as his representative on the bench, whenever cases arose that tested the constitutionality of his presidential policies. Back when nobody quite knew what progressive meant, Moody had been his most forward-looking cabinet officer, first as secretary of the navy, then as a resolutely antitrust attorney general—along with Root and Taft, one of the administration’s famous “Three Musketeers.”
Now that happy trio was disbanded. Aramis was bedridden for life, Athos intellectually stifled in the Senate, and Porthos no longer the jovial giant. Bereft of their company, whither D’Artagnan?
* Niece of Theodore Roosevelt.
* From now on, unqualified references to “Eleanor” should be understood to refer to Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., not her later more famous namesake.
CHAPTER 5
The New Nationalism
He’ll break out some day like a keg of ale
With too much independent frenzy in it.
ROOSEVELT RETURNED HOME on the evening of 1 July to news that despite his advocacy, Hughes’s direct-primary bill had been defeated by a combination of machine Republicans and Tammany Hall Democrats.
This was exactly the kind of political “trust” he had battled as a young assemblyman in Albany. But then, legislative disappointments were to be expected. Nearly three decades later, a former president and toast of foreign monarchs could ill afford such a rebuff. Senator Gore had to be laughing. Roosevelt’s ancient scourge, the New York Sun, printed a one-line wisecrack: “And the ‘Hundred Days’ lasted just thirteen.”
The question now was whether he should nurse the bruise William Barnes, Jr., had inflicted on him, and wait for sympathetic critics to point out that he had merely tried to help out his governor and his President. Or, seek revenge on Barnes for humbling all three of them?
Lloyd Griscom came to see him in a funk. At all costs, the triumphant boss must be stopped from bulldozing the New York Republican convention at Saratoga Springs in September. If Barnes prevailed, his machine would write the platform, nominate whom it pleased to local, state, and federal offices, and advertise to the world that the Old Guard was back in control of Party affairs. The result was bound to be a Democratic sweep in November. Griscom suggested that Roosevelt run, with White House support, for chairman of the convention. Barnes doubtless had a conservative candidate in mind, so the contest would pit the forces of moderation against those of reaction, and maybe compensate for the primary-bill debacle.
Roosevelt listened without committing himself. He was not fooled that Griscom—a Taft man—wanted to do anything other than serve the administration. But here was a chance to influence the nomination of a decent man for governor, and push for a moderately progressive state delegation to the national convention in 1912. At the very least, cooperation with Griscom would signal that Roosevelt and Taft were not drifting apart.
The trouble was that they were, and both of them knew it.
“Archie, I am very greatly distressed,” Taft told Captain Butt on 6 July. “I do not see how I am going to get out of having a fight with
President Roosevelt.”
He was still inclined to use the last two words when preoccupied or flustered. A rumor was going around that Roosevelt wanted to prevent Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger from running for the the U.S. Senate. True or not, the rumor reminded people that the Colonel had always been close to Ballinger’s enemy, Gifford Pinchot.
“I confess it wounds me very deeply,” Taft said. “I hardly think the prophet of the Square Deal is playing it exactly square with me now.” His wife was taunting him with the possibility that Roosevelt might beat him for renomination in 1912.
Butt asked if he believed Roosevelt really wanted to challenge him.
“I do not know. I have thought sometimes that he did, and then I don’t see how he can. In his mind, however, it may be the only logical way of reaching a third term. Then, too, his tour of Europe, his reception there, and the fact that every crowned head seemed to take it for granted that he would be elected …”
The President spent the rest of the morning soothing his soul with golf.
Later that same day at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt put both hands on the shoulders of two old friends, the civil-service reformers Lucius Burrie Swift and William Dudley Foulke, and said, “I could cry over Taft.” He escorted them upstairs to a private room, complaining that the President had been a good lieutenant, but was unfit for higher command. Then, closing the door, he said, “I will talk to you with perfect frankness. I would not consider another nomination unless it was practically universally demanded.”
It was a classic Rooseveltian recruitment ploy: the physical embrace, the melodramatic confidentiality, the denial of personal ambition. Swift and Foulke left convinced that he was already running. A trio of Kansas insurgents, Senator Joseph L. Bristow, Congressmen Victor Murdock, and Edmond H. Madison, got the same impression.
“Are you aware,” Bristow asked the others as they walked back to Oyster Bay, “that we have been participants in a historic occasion where a former President definitely broke with the man he had made his successor?”
Madison expressed awe, but Murdock was skeptical. A former newspaperman, he noted the vehemence of Roosevelt’s private denunciations of Taft and the coyness with which he declined to be quoted.
Actually Roosevelt was struggling, as throughout his life, between the desire for power and the ethics of responsibility. It was a struggle he had never been able wholly to resolve: indeed, its contrary tensions held him together. He wanted to destroy Taft because Taft had failed. He wanted Taft to succeed because Taft was an extension of himself. He knew he was no longer President, yet he was seen as presidential—the emperors of the Old World had made that clear, not to mention Taft in conversation. Although not running, he was running. Even as he maintained his vow of silence, he was shouting from the hustings.
“THE GREATEST SERVICE I can render to Taft,” Roosevelt wrote Lodge, “the service which beyond all others will tend to secure his renomination … is to try and help the Republican Party to win at the polls this Fall, and that I am trying to do.”
That meant resisting, on the one hand, pressure from GOP leaders to come out with a “flaming endorsement” of the President, and on the other, appeals from insurgents to proclaim himself in opposition. Either course, he felt, would cost him friends, and split the Party. The fault line ran right through his own family. Alice shared his reformist philosophy, while Nicholas Longworth was a regular, albeit moderate, Republican.
Roosevelt felt sorry for them both. If any single person symbolized the urgency of holding the Party together, it was Nick: son-in-law to the most eminent progressive in America, yet a former law student of William Howard Taft, hailing from the same district in Cincinnati, even representing Taft in Congress.
In response to a letter from Nick, saying it was essential that the President keep control of his own home state, Roosevelt wrote to say he agreed. “Of course you must stand straight by Taft.… He is your constituent.” He urged the same spirit of cooperation on Gifford Pinchot. “I do hope you won’t take any position which would make it impossible, or even merely exceedingly difficult, for you to support him if necessary.” The President had started off badly, he felt, through having no real qualities of leadership. “He is evidently a man who takes color from his surroundings. He was an excellent man under me, and close to me. For eighteen months after his election he was a rather pitiful failure, because he had no real strong man on whom to lean, and yielded to the advice of his wife, his brother Charley, the different corporation lawyers who have his ear, and various similar men.” With a midterm review coming his way, however, Taft must surely start considering the interests of the people. “He may and probably will turn out to be a perfectly respectable President, whose achievements will be disheartening compared with what we had expected, but who nevertheless will have done well enough for us to justify us in renominating him—for you must remember that not to renominate him would be a very serious thing, only to be justified by really strong reasons.”
The Colonel was putting the case as favorably for Taft as he could. “Otherwise I could see very ugly times ahead for me, as I should certainly not be nominated unless everybody believed that the ship was sinking and thought it a good thing to have me aboard her when she went down.”
ROOSEVELT PONDERED WHAT to say about the state of the nation when his two-month vow of silence was up. His every word would be listened to as if megaphoned. Plainly, he would have to make a major address, or Americans would ask why he was willing to orate to Europeans, but not them. A poll conducted by World’s Work magazine showed that more than three out of every four of its readers wanted him back in the White House. Progressive Democrats were likely to defect to him in large numbers. “I have just returned from a trip across Wisconsin and Minnesota,” one respondent wrote, “and in talking with men on the train [about] Roosevelt and the presidency, the answer in every instance was that he could not help being President again.”
He was in receipt of almost two thousand speaking invitations. Most were from committees or candidates desperate for help in endangered GOP constituencies. It did him little good to protest that the prospect of a return to the hustings filled him with “unalloyed horror.” So he yielded to pressure from the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee to make a sixteen-state campaign trip, beginning in late August. The foray would take him west of Ohio into the heartland of insurgency. His itinerary would advertise his progressivism, no matter what dutiful words he uttered in behalf of the Party leadership.
To his annoyance, he heard that the Committee was raising money with the specific purpose of destroying every insurgent running for election or reelection in the fall—Senator Beveridge of Indiana, for one. Even Taft had contributed funds. The more Roosevelt thought about it, the more he convinced himself that his big speech on tour—most likely at Osawatomie, Kansas—must be a restatement of his Special Message of 1908, updated and expanded to embrace the aspirations of the anticorporate middle class.
“My proper task,” he wrote an insurgent editor, “is clearly to announce myself on the vital questions of the day … and take a position that cannot be misunderstood.”
For the rest of July, he chopped wood and swam, rowed, and camped with Archie and Quentin, when his huge volume of mail allowed him. He passed what were to him the most precious minutes of any day reading with Edith—either back and forth aloud, or sitting silently together with their books, as they had when they were children. Once or twice a week he was driven into Manhattan to attend meetings at the Outlook offices, traveling in a new automobile, a Haynes-Apperson Model 19. He quickly learned to drive himself, and became, in Edith’s word, “addicted” to it.
At either end of his commute, the political pilgrims kept coming: more and more insurgents, Old Guard “mossbacks,” fund-raisers, former appointees, emissaries of the New York Republican Party. All wanted something, if only the pleasure of having a former president listen to their “advice,” on the presumption that he wanted it.
Those begging him to make personal appearances were particularly bothersome. Roosevelt had long ago discovered that the more provincial the supplicants, the less able they were to understand that their particular need was not unique: that he was not yearning to travel two thousand miles on bad trains to support the reelection campaign of a county sheriff, or to address the congregation of a new chapel in a landscape with no trees. His refusal, however elaborately apologetic, was received more often in puzzlement than anger. Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, and practically every monarch or minister of consequence in Europe—not to mention the maquettes in Rodin’s studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions.
ON A VISIT to the summer White House, Lloyd Griscom encountered at first hand the President’s desire to evade any contretemps not occurring on the golf course or poker table. Taft indicated that he might not support Roosevelt for chairman of the New York State convention in September. His explanation was simple: a gratified Boss Barnes would deliver a pro-Taft delegation to the national convention in 1912.
Then Barnes announced on 16 August that the machine had endorsed Vice President James Schoolcraft Sherman as its candidate for chairman of the convention. The Colonel was aghast at the news. Sherman was an archconservative who, he felt, could not have been nominated without Taft’s approval. But he kept to his vow of silence, which had a few more days to run.
Taft could not refrain from chortling. “Have you seen the newspapers this afternoon?” he asked Archie Butt. “They have defeated Theodore.”
Colonel Roosevelt Page 13
