Over and above its documentary appeal, the book exuded a kind of savage romance new to American readers. Roosevelt’s authenticity of voice made the Western novels of Zane Grey and Owen Wister seem pallid: “So, with the lion-skin swinging behind two porters, a moribund puff-adder in my saddle pocket, and three rhinos threatening us in the darkness, we marched campward through the African night.”
Reviewers acknowledged the occasional overripeness of his prose style, but excused it in view of the curiosity and courage with which he had traversed lands hitherto seen as hostile to foreign exploration and settlement. The Nation noted that what he wrote was of secondary importance to what he had done to place the African section of the Smithsonian Museum “in the front rank of zoological collections.”
Roosevelt felt he had not done enough. As soon as he had extricated himself from his current political embroilment, he intended to collaborate with Edmund Heller on a volume of life histories of African game animals that would last in libraries long after the New Nationalism had become old.
ROOSEVELT AND TAFT were so clearly on divergent roads by mid-September (the former calling for authority to be centered in the executive, the latter for its enshrinement in the judiciary) that Party intermediaries felt it was crucial for them to meet again, in a show of Republican unity. Lloyd Griscom arranged a lunch rendezvous at Henry White’s summer house in New Haven, Connecticut, on 19 September. Roosevelt crossed Long Island Sound by motorboat. It was a stormy voyage, into which the press did not fail to read portents, but he received a pleasant reception from Taft and a small group of friends and aides.
Covers were laid for six. By prearrangement, the President and the Colonel were left alone at the end of the meal, and the dining room door was locked. “I suppose it is the New York situation you want to discuss,” Taft said. He allowed that he was willing, after all, to support Roosevelt’s bid for the chairmanship of the Saratoga convention, now only one week away. But the White House would not oppose any gubernatorial candidate or policy initiative that might result if he lost. Roosevelt, for his part, was unwilling to beg any further favor. When after a considerable time they emerged, it was evident that their polite estrangement continued. They parted with strained joviality, and contrary impressions as to why they met and what they each had said.
To Roosevelt’s annoyance, Charles D. Norton, the President’s devious young secretary, authorized a wire report stating that the Colonel had come to New Haven hat in hand. Taft, genuinely concerned about Barnes manipulating the convention, had agreed to support Roosevelt’s candidacy over that of his own vice president, James S. Sherman.
Roosevelt indignantly denied Norton’s wire, annoying Taft in turn. The President complained to Archie Butt that Roosevelt had been “offish” during their meeting, while lecturing him on the need to keep the GOP intact. “If you were to remove Roosevelt’s skull now, you would find written on his brain ‘1912.’ ”
Yet the owner of the skull in question recoiled from the prospect of a petty political battle in Saratoga. “Twenty years ago I should not have minded it in the least,” Roosevelt wrote Henry Cabot Lodge. “It would have been entirely suitable for my age and standing. But it is not the kind of fight into which an ex-President should be required to go.”
NOW HERE HE WAS, in his thirtieth year as a practicing Republican, positioning himself, as he had in 1880, against the lowliest type of machine politicians. He climbed aboard a train full of convention delegates heading up the Hudson Valley, and confessed to a sense of déjà vu. “It reminds me of the old days when I was first elected to the Assembly.” He introduced Lawrence Abbott to a red-faced old ward heeler from the Twenty-first District of Manhattan. “I want you to know my friend, Joe Murray. He started me in politics. Take him into the smoking room and get him to tell you the story.”
Saratoga’s pink, High Victorian town hall overbore the modest resort as much as the State Capitol dominated Albany. Its chandelier-hung auditorium and thirty-foot stage looked more appropriate for plays than politics, and indeed functioned as a theater for much of the year. On the opening day of the convention, 27 September, the thespian in Roosevelt rose to the challenge of impressing a thousand fellow Republicans that he, not Sherman, was best qualified to chair the proceedings.
He did it by exuding such jovial, uninhibited charisma that all eyes were drawn to him when the list of candidates was announced. William Barnes, Jr.—pale, long-fingered, weary-looking—made the mistake of asking the smallest politician present, Abe Gruber of New York, to make a speech opposing Roosevelt’s nomination. Gruber tried to make up in stridency what he lacked in height. But he came up short in both respects, and succeeded only in evoking hilarity. When he tried to portray the returned hunter as a trigger-happy revolutionary (“Looking for other fields of shooting practice, this man is now shooting at the courts”), Roosevelt rocked in his seat with laughter, slapping the thigh of a fellow delegate.
The subsequent vote, however, was a solemn affair. No previous state convention had ever been required to choose between a former president and sitting vice president. It decided in Roosevelt’s favor, 567 to 445. Sherman had to escort him onstage and listen to his keynote address.
As a forum for oratory, Saratoga Town Hall did not compare with the Sorbonne or Oxford University. Roosevelt’s audience that hot afternoon was unlikely to be receptive to any biological analogies in history, nor, for that matter, to much New Nationalism. He soothed it with an opening list of laws creditable to Republicans in Congress, “and to our able, upright, and distinguished President, William Howard Taft.”
Except for his conspicuous avoidance of any other reference to the administration, this sounded like the endorsement Taft had been craving all summer. The word upright had a sycophantic ring to progressives still chafing over the Ballinger-Pinchot affair. But Roosevelt wanted to strike a moral note early. “We are against the degrading alliance which adds strength to the already powerful corrupt boss and to the already powerful corrupt head of big business,” he shouted.
He was trying to galvanize the convention into a wholesale revolt against Barnes. In fact (as Democratic observers were pleasedly aware), no boss could worsen, no reform ticket could improve the GOP’s appalling fortunes in New York. Not to mention other parts of the country: Taft and his tariff were simply too unpopular, and the Party too divided to inspire voter confidence. Already Maine, that most rock-ribbed of Republican states, had just elected a Democratic governor and legislature, and, for the first time in half a century, returned two Democrats to the House of Representatives.
For the moment in Saratoga, Roosevelt gave the Party an illusion of unity. He paced the stage with such jut-jawed force that O. K. Davis, in the press box, was reminded of a caveman on the prowl. The audience sat stunned as words flew out of him in spasms, punctuated by loud palm punches: “The rule of the boss is the negation of democracy.”
At least one delegate was able, by virtue of long friendship, to distinguish the performer from the performance. “Theodore,” said Elihu Root, putting a hand on his shoulder, “you are still the same great, overgrown boy as ever.”
By far the most distinguished man to have served him, as political patron, legal adviser, secretary of war, and secretary of state, Root now represented New York in the U.S. Senate. He might even have done so in the White House, if the “overgrown boy” had not regretfully decided, in 1908, to choose a successor with fewer ties to Wall Street. It was ironic that Taft had turned out to be a much more divisive figure. For all Root’s conservatism, he was capable, at sixty-five, of liberal attitudes—toward strategic autonomy for Latin America, for example, or the ideal of a permanent international court of justice at The Hague. Almost alone among orthodox Republicans, he declined to be fazed by New Nationalism. “If it means having the federal government do the things which it can do better than the states and which are within the limits of its present constitutional power, I am for it. If it means more than that, I am against it.”
Root opposed, by reflex, any challenge to legal authority. He had been instrumental in persuading Taft to fire Gifford Pinchot for insubordination. He did not admire the President, but accepted him as someone sanctioned by the people, by the Party, and by Theodore Roosevelt. Behind that gibe at Saratoga flashed an admonition, as from father to son: Behave yourself.
THE CONVENTION’S MOST important business on its second day was to name a successor to Governor Hughes, now about to take his seat on the Supreme Court. Roosevelt had his candidate: Henry Lewis Stimson, the unimpeachably correct U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Barnes put forward a tame congressman, William S. Bennet. Stimson was chosen, 684 votes to 242. Roosevelt then forced the adoption of a progressive platform that pledged to introduce the direct primary. By now, his control of the convention was so absolute that he even got delegates to stop smoking. “It shows an utter lack of consideration for the rest of those present,” he scolded, as they meekly crushed out their cigars.
Less than three months after his reluctant reentry into politics, he had become the architect of the Party’s fall campaign. But by so personalizing a local struggle widely seen as hopeless (Stimson was an unpromising candidate, with all the charm of a bluefish), the Colonel was once again risking his reputation.
“I do not think we can win,” Roosevelt told O. K. Davis after the convention adjourned. “However, the fight was worth the making. We have beaten the reactionary machine, and the progressives are in charge of the party organization.”
Democrats assembling in Rochester for their own convention acknowledged this by nominating John A. Dix, a wealthy, boss-beholden industrialist, to oppose Stimson. They made clear that their long-term purpose was to defeat Roosevelt so badly that he would never again run for president. “We have got a bitter fight ahead of us—a fight against a marvelous man,” one orator declared. “Let us take it out of him!”
HOME AT SAGAMORE HILL, Roosevelt consented to an off-the-record interview with Ray Stannard Baker, one of the progressive journalists he had accused of “muckraking” back in 1906. Now he merely teased the younger man for being “a reasonable exponent of the extreme left of the Party,” and said, “Ask me anything you like.”
He sat relaxed in his library, still perspiring from an early morning ride, and talked exultantly about his victory at Saratoga. Sooner or later, Republican reactionaries were going to have to adjust to changing times. “Root is all right, but he needs me to direct him. Taft is the same sort of man. He needs direction.”
Baker had gotten used, over the years, to Roosevelt’s amazing self-confidence, but this imperious note, not unmixed with contempt for former allies, was something new.
“Are you a candidate for the presidency in 1912?”
“I will answer your question as plainly as you have asked it.” Roosevelt leaned forward, as he always did for emphasis.
“I don’t know.”
THE GROWING SUSPICION that the Colonel was running for a third term caused his old enemies on Wall Street to look with disfavor on the Saratoga ticket. Their newspaper of choice, the New York Sun, kept printing an editorial leitmotif, “The time to beat Roosevelt in 1912 is on November 8, 1910.” Even stalwart Republicans solicited funds for Dix and other Democratic candidates. They knew they were embarrassing President Taft, but their corporate consciences were clear: the vital thing was to keep government weak, and business strong.
Roosevelt spent the next forty days trying to save the GOP inside and outside his own state. He traveled wherever he felt needed—south through Georgia and Mississippi to Hot Springs, Arkansas; west to St. Louis and back through Illinois and Indiana (where Albert J. Beveridge’s Senate seat was under siege); northeast in aid of the similarly threatened Henry Cabot Lodge; up, down, and around New York State, making twelve to fifteen speeches a day, hoping to convince voters that reform and Republicanism were not incompatible. “He is trying to be both radical and conservative,” Baker observed. “It will not work.”
Occasionally Roosevelt’s passion for social reform got the better of him. On 22 October he attacked Simeon E. Baldwin, the retired chief justice of Connecticut, for ruling in Hoxie v. the New Haven Railroad (1909) that a brakeman was not entitled to compensation for the loss of a leg in a collision of two trains. Judge Baldwin had held that the Federal Employers’ Liability Act of 1906 denied liberty of labor contract within states. Because such liberty was, in the judge’s view, a form of property protected by the Constitution, Congress had no power to override the personnel policies of a private railroad.
The liability law was one of the most progressive achievements of Roosevelt’s presidency. He had seen it strengthened just before he went out of office, and was furious to find that a provincial judge had thrown it out of court. Railroad lobbyists were now seizing on the Hoxie decision as an argument in favor of deregulation, and sending copies of it to conservative candidates across the country. Baldwin himself was running for governor of Connecticut on the Democratic ticket, and suggesting that the New Nationalism was an authoritarian plan for the dismantling of states’ rights. Back of it, he warned, lay the desire of a dangerous man to radicalize the Supreme Court. “So far as I am aware, ex-President Roosevelt has had no special training for undertaking such a task.”
The judge was clearly spoiling for a fight, and Roosevelt was quick to oblige. As he explained to Elihu Root, “When I’m mad at a man I want to climb right up his chest.” Speaking extempore in Concord, Massachusetts, to a supportive crowd, he accused Baldwin of holding that the Constitution gave industrial employees the right to sign contracts that later prevented them suing for loss of life and limb.
Baldwin, incensed at newspaper reports of the speech, denied that personal feelings had influenced his Hoxie decision. In an open letter addressed to Roosevelt, he insisted that he had ruled according to legal precedent—specifically, the “fellow-servant” defense hallowed by common law—and pointed out that his own campaign in Connecticut touted workmen’s compensation. “I trust that your remarks at Concord were misinterpreted; if not, you certainly were misinformed. If you did, in fact, make the charge against me, or one substantially of that character, I write to request that you would retract it.”
In a return open letter of his own, Roosevelt stood by the substance of what he had said. “I feel that it is in the highest degree retrogressive (or, if you prefer the term, Bourbon and reactionary), to take the view that the fellow-servant rule … rests … ‘upon consideration of right and justice.’ ”
The exchange was an obvious first skirmish in an ideological battle whose repercussions would probably extend far beyond the current campaign. At stake was the classical, or “mechanical” jurisprudence of Baldwin and his constructionist counterparts on the Supreme Court versus the “sociological” jurisprudence of William H. Moody and other progressive legal thinkers. The common law itself needed to be redefined, either as the unchanging thing it had seemed to be through most of the nineteenth century, or as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (another Roosevelt appointee), had famously proposed, as a codification of “the felt necessities of the time.”
Nobody “felt” the changing demands of American society more viscerally than Theodore Roosevelt in the fall of 1910. Herbert Croly intellectualized them; Moody and Holmes gave them constitutional sanction; La Follette and Pinchot formulated them as dogma; writers as various as Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and William Allen White gave them literary expression. But Roosevelt was unique in the force of his conviction that these “necessities” must be translated from desire into political reform—unique, too, in his ability to persuade voters of the possibility of such reform. He “felt” so strongly that he was prepared to temporize, pleading for Republican unity, as progressivism burgeoned into the fundamental issue of the next presidential election. “One thing always to remember in politics,” he told White, “is that it takes a long time to overcome inertia, and that, when it has been overcome, it takes an equall
y long time to stop momentum.”
Judge Baldwin, by contrast, amounted almost to a caricature of the old paternalist neurosis, on the wane everywhere except on Wall Street and in Brahmin Boston. He believed not only in states’ rights over federal power, but in trusts as always trustworthy, and the rich as “stewards for the public good,” not to mention flogging, castration, and other methods of social control. As such, he was clearly a candidate, not only for governor of Connecticut, but for one of the most devastating weapons in Roosevelt’s arsenal: a no-holds-barred, public “posterity letter.”
Nothing in their previous correspondence could have prepared Baldwin for the missive he received on 2 November: two thousand words long, specific, and packed with argument. Readers of the newspaper transcript had no need to consult African Game Trails for further evidence that the Colonel, in full hunting cry, was a formidable adversary.
He brushed aside Baldwin’s legalistic self-defense (“My criticism of you as a reactionary was based, not upon what you may have said as a law writer, but upon what you did as a judge”) and said that Section Five of the Federal Employers’ Liability Act voided any contract that enabled a common carrier to exempt itself from liability for accidents due to negligence. In indemnifying the New Haven Railroad against any claim from employees mutilated on the job, Baldwin had flouted that structure and in effect decided that “the right to get killed” was a property right sanctioned by the Constitution. “Congress aimed at giving the railroad employee a substance. You construed the act as giving him a shadow by solemnly declaring that to give him substance is to take away his property in the shadow.”
Colonel Roosevelt Page 15
