Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  La Follette begged Roosevelt to join the League. The Colonel was reluctant to compromise himself. He still talked of holding the GOP together. Dividing it was unlikely to stop the Democrats from completing their sweep of the government in 1912. Four years out of power should convince conservative Republicans that the age of protectionism was over, and that of progressivism—his enlightened kind, not La Follette’s bristling zealotry—an evolutionary fact. Conceivably, 1916 might see him restored to Party leadership. Not that he would admit to any desire to be President again. “There is nothing I want less.”

  He saw little of his New Nationalism in the Progressive League’s manifesto: no proposal to regulate corporations, no plea for conservation, nothing on the deteriorating relations of capital and labor. La Follette wanted to see direct voting in primaries and senatorial elections, direct participation in sending and instructing delegates to national conventions, laws to restrict corrupt practices, and, in a mantra beloved of populists, “the initiative, the referendum, and the recall.”

  This last triple demand, for voter involvement in the passage and repeal of laws, was evidence to Roosevelt of the insurgents’ tendency to overreach. Reforms to benefit democracy in some states, such as the judicial-recall clause proposed for the new constitution of Arizona, would not necessarily do so in all. The vituperation he had brought down on his own head, for suggesting that the Supreme Court needed to adapt itself to new industrial conditions, had shown how negatively progressivism was perceived in some quarters. But in declining to be associated with the League, he did not want to sound like yesterday’s radical turned timid. “I think,” he wrote La Follette, “that we wish to be careful not to seem to be dictating to good people who may not be quite as far advanced as we are.” He noted that the senator’s own constituents in ultraprogressive Wisconsin had not yet accepted the initiative or the referendum.

  Roosevelt promised to make clear in The Outlook that he was in “substantial agreement” with most of the things the new group stood for. “But I hardly think that it would be of service from the public standpoint for me to go into such a league at present.”

  ON 21 JANUARY, the same day that the National Progressive Republican League was organized in Washington, Taft sent a major new proposal to Congress. It was for tariff reciprocity with Canada, and sought to double the number of free imports from that country, mostly agricultural, while protecting the wide range of American exports, mostly manufactured, that flowed north. Roosevelt praised it as “admirable from every standpoint” in a personal letter to the President. “Whether Canada will accept such reciprocity, I do not know,” he added, “but it is greatly to your credit to make the effort.”

  Experience had taught him that economic considerations mattered less, in foreign negotiation, than those of national pride. The Dominion might well jib at a trade agreement that could transfer all its important bank credits to New York and Chicago—making it what Taft, with typical clumsiness, called “a virtual adjunct of the United States.” But Roosevelt saw hope in the fact that Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Canadian prime minister, favored reciprocity.

  Favoring it himself, he was aware that he was once again in conflict with Henry Cabot Lodge. His old friend, just reelected to the Senate by a tiny majority of the Massachusetts legislature, had found it difficult to be polite about New Nationalism last fall. Poor Cabot was fighting a lonely battle against the initiative in behalf of Bay State fishermen.

  Any protectionist west of the clambake fringe could see that Taft’s proposal stood to benefit American corporate interests. Roosevelt might have been expected to oppose it for that reason, out of loyalty to the small businessmen and farmers who had always voted for him. Instead, he seemed to be siding with the administration—pandering to it, even, when he said he wanted “to see radicalism prosper under conservative leadership.”

  The words made no sense. However, as a born operator, it was characteristic of him to salute the only brilliant tactic of Taft’s presidency so far: sponsorship of a pro-business bill that progressives would have difficulty opposing, because it granted their demand for a reduction in tariff excess. The odds were good that before the Sixty-first Congress passed out of existence in March, Taft would have a treaty to offer to Canada.

  THE COLONEL’S JOB AS contributing editor of a serious, not to say sedate, weekly journal enabled him to stay in touch with current affairs and write about them. He commuted into Manhattan on Tuesdays and Fridays, usually by automobile. When the roads were icy he took the train, hanging on a strap like any other citizen, but suffering because fellow travelers would not leave him alone. In The Outlook’s headquarters at 287 Fourth Avenue he could at least control whom he wanted to see. Ray Stannard Baker, watching him hold court there one morning, was struck by the executive charade:

  He is a sort of president-regent—“one vested with vicarious authority.” In some ways he possesses more power than the president, for he is essentially the real leader of the people. And yet he really has no power at all.… Somehow I felt, as I sat there today, that his work had passed its apex: that he could not return to his former power. There was a lack, somewhere, of his old grip on things. The movement has gone beyond him!

  Roosevelt was not deceived as to his polarizing effect on public opinion. Passions aroused by last November’s election still ran high in New York City. He joked to O. K. Davis that he could not leave the building without provoking someone. “If I go down by the side elevator, that is evidence of furtiveness. If I go down in front, that is proof of ostentation.”

  He worked hard for his $12,000 salary, always delivering copy on time, and soliciting articles from other progressive writers. “There is no fake in Roosevelt’s reference,” a fellow editor remarked. “His memory is prodigious. He can meet any man—any specialist on his own ground.” Lyman and Lawrence Abbott, the father-son duo in charge of The Outlook, valued him as a precious resource. They knew that glossier periodicals had offered him four, if not five times as much money as they could afford. He told them he found their moralistic brand of progressivism congenial. However spent a political force (and they were not sure that he was), Theodore Roosevelt had made The Outlook one of the most influential organs in the country.

  In January alone, he reviewed a book on the subject of foreign disaster relief, wrote three articles for a new series entitled “Nationalism and Progress,” and published the texts of his exchange with Governor Baldwin. These contributions were meant to show that he had lost none of his radical fervor, and to prevent La Follette from co-opting one of progressivism’s prime issues: that of employers’ liability.

  ROOSEVELT WAS PLEASED to hear in February that African Game Trails, which had been named 1910’s “Book of the Year” by the New York Herald, had sold 36,127 copies in all editions. Charles Scribner sent him a royalty check for $28,620, and wrote that the book was still moving off the shelves.

  “It is a great sight to see a lion coming on with his mane all bristling, and his teeth showing, with one of those grunting roars,” the Colonel told an audience of enraptured children on Washington’s Birthday. “A great sight.” Showing a fair number of teeth himself, he regaled his audience with stories, alternately frightening and funny, about his year in Africa. The children were in stitches at his descriptions of man-eater attacks on Indian employees of the Uganda Railway. “A lion came up and tried to get inside the station [at Voi] and the Hindoo inside sent an agitated telegram running, ‘Lion fighting station. Help urgently necessary.’ ”

  The more the great safari receded into memory, the more he accepted that he was living in a state of anticlimax. Whether this would prove a permanent condition, he could not tell, but he clearly had no future in active politics as long as Taft maintained a semblance of control over the Republican Party, and progressives continued to be disappointed in him. He could at least look forward to the doubtful satisfaction of becoming an elder statesman.

  AROUND THIS TIME Roosevelt became disapprovingly aware
of a new, legalistic peace-advocacy group. It styled itself “The American Society for Judicial Settlement of International Disputes,” and its honorary president was none other than William Howard Taft.

  The word judicial in the society’s title reflected the influence of Elihu Root, who, as secretary of state in 1908, had been frustrated by the failure of the Second Hague Peace Conference to establish a strong world tribunal. Taft would have been happy to do without strength, in the sense of punitive power, altogether: his preference was for a peace movement that put its faith in arbitration. Optimistic and sentimental, he believed that all human beings were the same at heart. “If we do not have arbitration,” he told the society in his inaugural address, “we shall have war.”

  Roosevelt scoffed at such naïveté. He had stood in the way of too many charging lions to believe for one minute that aggression was not a fact of nature. He detected no common peaceableness among human beings, let alone between nations vying for power. Men were either weak or they were strong. Only the strong could enforce “righteousness”—a word that the dictionary was vague about, but which to him had concrete meaning.

  A case in point presented itself early in March, when revolutionary unrest in Mexico threatened the authoritarian government of Porfirio Díaz. Forces headed by Francisco Madero, Pascual Orozco, and Pancho Villa prepared to attack Ciudad Juárez. Taft, worrying about the security of American interests, stationed twenty thousand troops on the border. He assured Díaz that this mobilization was for exercise purposes only, and was “not intended as an act hostile to the friendly Mexican government.”

  Roosevelt smelled civil war, and a consequent need for el Coloseo del Norte to restore order. The vague urge that had stirred him at the Cheyenne rodeo returned and clarified itself. “I most earnestly hope,” he wrote the President, “that we will not have to intervene.… But if by any remote chance … there should be a serious war, a war in which Mexico was backed by Japan or some other big powers, then I would wish immediately to apply for permission to raise a division of cavalry, such as the regiment I commanded in Cuba.” He was certain that, given a free hand, he could whip up “as formidable a body of horse riflemen … as has ever been seen.”

  “OPTIMISTIC AND SENTIMENTAL, HE BELIEVED THAT ALL HUMAN BEINGS WERE THE SAME.”

  William Howard Taft as President of the United States. (photo credit i6.2)

  Anyone less passionate, pressing such a dream upon Taft, would have heard the President’s slow rumble of amusement, his great sedentary body (unimaginable in military uniform!) quivering like blancmange. But Roosevelt was already mentally recruiting ten or twelve thousand rough riders. “My brigade commanders would be Howze and Boughton of the regular army, and Cecil Lyon of Texas. My nine colonels would include …” As he drummed out name after name, his dream shifted from the prospect that beguiled to a retrospect that filled him with bloodthirsty pride. “I ask, Sir, that [you] remember that in the war with Spain our regiment was raised, armed, equipped, mounted, dismounted, drilled, kept two weeks on transports, and put through two vigorous fights in which it lost almost a quarter of the men engaged, and over one third of the officers, a loss greater than that suffered by any but two of the twenty-four regular regiments in that same army corps; and all this within sixty days.”

  Coincidentally, Roosevelt happened at that moment to be heading to El Paso, just across the river from Ciudad Juárez. It was as if fate was speeding him toward the epicenter of the Mexican revolution, via the very country where he hoped to find most of his recruits.

  But for the moment, his mission was peaceful. He was on the southwestern leg of a fifteen-state lecture tour. Edith was traveling with him. She wanted to see two of their sons—Archie in Mesa, Arizona, where he was registered at a health-building school, and Ted, establishing himself as a businessman in San Francisco. Cool and equable, Edith saw no prospect of her husband being ordered back into the saddle for any war.

  Neither did Taft. The President politely acknowledged Roosevelt’s eligibility for a command, but informed him that the administration would make no move into Mexico without the consent of Congress.

  ROOSEVELT ROLLED ON through deserts and mountains stippled with spring flowers. It was, he assured Taft, “the last speaking tour I shall ever make.” The campaign of 1910 had enabled him to visit much of the Midwest, Deep South, and Atlantic seaboard—exactly half the forty-six states. Now he wanted to chant a swansong across the borderland and up the Pacific Coast into the Northwest. He spoke and gripped flesh with all his old energy, but as Ray Stannard Baker had noted, he seemed to have lost his political touch. Taft was convulsed to hear that the Colonel’s response, to a Texan complaining that Mexican insurrectos had carried off his son, had been an absentminded “Fine, fine, splendid!”

  In further evidence that he was no longer front-page news, he found himself, for the first time since 1898, without a press car hitched to his train. Only local correspondents reported his appearances, and few of their stories were syndicated nationwide. Even such a story as his dedication, in Arizona on 18 March, of Roosevelt Dam—the monumental apotheosis of his reclamation policy as President—rated no higher than page sixteen of The New York Times.

  He pressed the obligatory button, and three cascades spilled out into the Salt River Valley. The reservoir was still only half full, but it had already submerged the dam’s construction town (also named after him) and collected enough water to irrigate the Phoenix area through two years of drought. Nothing he had accomplished, he said, matched this project for grandeur—except the Panama Canal.

  “MONUMENTAL APOTHEOSIS OF HIS RECLAMATION POLICY.”

  Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Arizona. (photo credit i6.3)

  PRIDE IN THE LATTER achievement overcame him five days later at the University of California at Berkeley. The canal was much on local minds, for San Francisco had just been chosen as host city for a grand “Panama-Pacific” international exposition, once the western and eastern oceans were joined. That consummation no longer seemed remote: after a record one and a half million tons dug in February, the immense earthwork was more than two-thirds complete.

  Speaking in the university’s Greek amphitheater, Roosevelt said, “The Panama Canal I naturally take an interest in, because I started it.”

  He had come to Berkeley to deliver a series of lectures on morality in politics, but today was Charter Day, and the sunshine was sweet. His audience was enormous, spreading out onto the surrounding slopes, pointillistic in places with academic silk.

  “If I had acted strictly according to precedent,” he continued, “I should have turned the whole matter over to Congress; in which case, Congress would be ably debating it at this moment, and the canal would be fifty years in the future.”

  Roosevelt was referring to the controversy, early in his presidency, over whether to cut an isthmian waterway across Nicaragua or Panama. He began to talk about another controversy, concerning his role in the Panamanian Revolution of 1903. Why he raised this vexed subject, half-forgotten over the years, was a mystery. He could have been rambling, were he not reading from his own script.

  The revolution, he joked, had “fortunately” occurred when Congress was in recess, enabling him to act with executive freedom. “Accordingly I took a trip to the Isthmus, started the canal, and then left Congress—not to debate the canal, but to debate me. But while the debate goes on, the canal does too; and they are welcome to debate me as long as they wish, provided that we can go on with the canal.”

  What his script said was not what all note-takers in the amphitheater recorded. A staff stenographer entered the words I took a trip to the Isthmus into the official text of Roosevelt’s remarks, for publication in the next issue of the University of California Chronicle. Scattered reporters, however, alternately heard, or thought they heard, I took the Isthmus, I took Panama, I took the Canal Zone. The last phrase was what The New York Times chose to quote under the headline ROOSEVELT BOASTS OF CANAL, along with a free transcription
of the boast itself. Accurate or not, the transcription became canon:

  If I had followed traditional, conservative methods I would have submitted a dignified state paper of probably two hundred pages to Congress, and the debates on it would be going on yet. But I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate, and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.

  Actually, lawmakers had long ceased to question Roosevelt’s opportunism in 1903. What “debate” there was these days concerned the canal’s strategic and commercial potential. Naval and military authorities wanted to fortify it, while American shippers lobbied for preferential tolls, or none, since its construction costs were borne by the United States. But now the syntagma I took (what, exactly, had he taken—a trip, a zone, a country, a historic opportunity?) echoed south of the border, and revived Colombia’s anger at having been cheated of its expectations in 1903.

  Philander Chase Knox, his not very supportive attorney general at the time, was now Taft’s secretary of state, and remained unconvinced that Roosevelt had been fair in denying Colombia any compensation for the loss of its precious province. Knox agreed with Senator Root that the United States was pledged from the start to be “passive” in any domestic revolution in Colombia, albeit “active” in maintaining transit across the Isthmus. He also agreed, to an extent, with the Colonel’s current language, but not for reasons Roosevelt would consider supportive: “The fact is we practically took Panama. We did not take it from Colombia, we took it from the Panaman[ian]s, and this is the only sense in which that statement is true.”