Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Even The New York Times felt that he had acquitted himself. Congressman Stanley, the paper remarked, had failed to expose the former president as a stooge, while showing a “partisan” and “ignorant” attitude toward U.S. Steel. “It is indeed fortunate that Mr. Roosevelt dealt with the panic instead of Mr. Stanley.”

  ON 6 AUGUST, the day the editorial appeared, Edith Roosevelt turned fifty. To her adoring husband, who presented her with a thermos pitcher and four volumes of Punch, she was still the indoor and outdoor companion of childhood—so “very young looking and pretty in her riding habit” as she trotted beside him on horseback, through the woods to Cold Spring Harbor or along the bayside road. Today the weather was too hot for horses, so he took her for an afternoon row to Lloyd Neck.

  Constant in their love for each other and their six children—Edith had always treated Alice as her own daughter—they were preparing themselves now for the emotional elevation of grandparenthood. News came from San Francisco on the seventeenth that Eleanor had had a baby girl, Grace. Roosevelt wrote her and Ted: “ ‘The birth pangs make all men the debtors of all women.’ ” He was paraphrasing Jules Michelet’s Priests, Women and Families, a humanistic tract that exactly expressed his view of sex, faith, and nature. Eleanor was invested with the same glow of fulfilled femininity that he saw shimmering around Edith, and regretfully did not see around Alice. For the first time in his life, he signed himself Grandfather.

  ONE EFFECT OF THE new arrival upon Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was to embolden him to show signs of political independence. Grimly determined, a squat knot of muscle and sinew, Ted confided to Eleanor that his ambition was to earn a lot of money quickly, then use his fortune to go into public life. In order to learn the dry basics of business—not something Harvard had prepared him for—he had taken a dreary job as the West Coast representative of a Connecticut carpet company. But in the day-to-day slog of salesmanship—“I do love work!”—he was proving to be a dynamo. He had also involved himself in Californian progressive politics. He let his father know that if Taft and Woodrow Wilson were nominated in 1912, he might vote for the governor.

  “Do remember,” Roosevelt wrote back, “that to say anything in public, or to take any public stand against Taft, especially by supporting his Democratic opponent, would cause me very great embarrassment, and … create the impression that I, while nominally supporting Taft, am underhandedly doing all I can do against him.”

  His caution seemed unreasonable, because he was expressing more and more disapproval of the President’s policies in the pages of The Outlook. And he was not alone among Republican commentators in doing so. The widespread admiration Taft had won by calling for reciprocity with Canada was dissipated. Endless wrangling over rates had dragged the special session of Congress into midsummer. A compromise act had been passed and sent to Ottawa: Sir Wilfrid Laurier had gambled his whole government on the issue, and dissolved Parliament so that all Canadians could vote on it. This was not necessarily good news. Republicans remained deeply divided over tariff reform, with conservatives alienated from conservatives, and progressives from progressives. Taft was blamed for the passions aroused.

  About the only politician to profit from the battle on Capitol Hill was Robert La Follette. He seized on reciprocity, which he eloquently opposed, to announce that he would challenge the President for the nomination in 1912. No Shakespearean upstart, all arms and arrogance, could have thrown down his gauntlet in front of a less popular king. Republicans clustered uneasily behind the one or the other. With Roosevelt offstage, they lacked any leader strong enough to hold them all together.

  La Follette imagined that he had the Colonel’s support, after Roosevelt praised his radical record in The Outlook. A warm exchange of letters followed. But when La Follette sent an emissary to Sagamore Hill asking for a specific endorsement, he was turned down.

  Roosevelt saw no chance of La Follette being nominated. “My present intention,” he wrote Ted, “is to make a couple of speeches for Taft, but not to go actively into the campaign.” He thought that Woodrow Wilson was the strongest Democratic candidate. Taft, in contrast, was “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.”

  As for foreign policy, he gave the President little credit. Arbitration treaties with Britain and France were fated to shred like leaves in any gale-force storm. Right now, a second “Morocco crisis” loomed between Germany, France, and Great Britain, as dangerous as the one that had nearly precipitated war six years before. France had recently expanded its military presence in Morocco, only to see a German gunboat, the Panther, appear at once in the Atlantic port of Agadir. This incursion into waters not normally considered part of Germany’s sphere of influence had, in turn, brought about massing of the Royal Navy in the English Channel. The British government was bound to make such a move, by virtue of its entente cordiale with France. But neutral observers were startled at the vigor with which David Lloyd George was insisting that “Britain should at all hazards maintain her place and her prestige amongst the great powers of the world.” Yesterday’s peace advocate and anti-imperialist had evidently come to share the dread of Sir Edward Grey that German naval expansionism in North Africa menaced the Suez Canal, and with it, access to India.

  Britain’s unwillingness to see that France, not Germany, was the prime aggressor in the affair demonstrated, for Roosevelt, the fatuity of any faith in “judicial” peacekeeping. Great powers were not interested in behaving justly, when they could misbehave to their own advantage and get away with it. They wanted to dominate one another, either singly or in combination, at the first opportunity. Germany’s response to Lloyd George’s bluster had been to withdraw the Panther and replace it with the Berlin, a battleship three times larger.

  Roosevelt raged in a letter to Henry Cabot Lodge against the inability of the President “and all the male shrieking sisterhood of Carnegies” to see that in any serious international dispute, might made for right. “If war is to be averted, it will be only because Germany thinks that France has a first-class army and will fight hard, and that England is ready and able to render her some prompt assistance. The German war plans contemplate, as I happen to know personally, as possible courses of action, flank marches through both Belgium and Switzerland.”

  LIKE A PAIR OF sopranos deliberately setting out to irritate someone who disliked opera, Taft and Governor Wilson chose this moment to sing a duet in praise of pacifism. They did so in the September issue of The Christian Herald. “I yield to no one in my love of peace, in my hatred of war, and in my earnest desire to avoid war,” the President wrote. “If I have my way and am able to secure the assent of other powers, I shall submit to the Senate arbitration treaties broader in their terms than any that body has heretofore ratified.”

  Wilson’s statement revealed a prose stylist adept at making graceful generalities, while avoiding any personal commitment: “I consider the present agitation for international arbitration and world peace a deep-seated and permanent thing, representing the fixed and universal desire of the human heart.”

  Roosevelt published his own views on the subject in an editorial, “The Peace of Righteousness,” in The Outlook on 9 September. Its tone was forceful yet restrained, as was often the case with him after he had blown off steam in private correspondence. “I sincerely believe in the principle of arbitration,” he wrote, “… but I believe that the effort to apply it where it is not practicable cannot do good and may do serious harm. Confused thinking and a willingness to substitute words for thought, even though inspired by an entirely amiable sentimentality, do not tend toward sound action.”

  As an example of proxy words, he cited justiciable, which Secretary Knox had applied to the kind of disputes best suited to arbitration by The Hague: “It can be defined in any way that either party chooses.” Was the Monroe Doctrine justiciable, along with the administration of the
Panama Canal, U.S.-Cuba relations, West Coast immigration policies, and even Canadian reciprocity? If so, were they to be arbitrated by judges sitting in The Hague? A president willing to let foreigners decide questions affecting America’s national security “was not fit to hold the exalted position to which he had been elected,” Roosevelt declared.

  Taft laughed the editorial off. “The fact of the matter is, Archie, the Colonel is not in favor of peace.”

  ROOSEVELT SAT ONE AFTERNOON on the piazza at Sagamore, drinking tea with the veteran journalist Henry L. Stoddard.

  “This is the only spot on earth for me,” he said. “I’m never satisfied away from here.”

  They talked about the old days of the Harrison administration. Roosevelt remembered wanting to live in the White House every time he walked past it.

  Stoddard suggested there might be a call for him to live there again.

  “No—I’ve had the title of President once—having it twice means nothing except peril to whatever reputation I achieved the first time.”

  He was silent a moment, then said, “Do you know the only title that appeals to me now?”

  “I suppose it is ‘Colonel.’ ”

  Roosevelt admitted that he liked being called that. “But if I were asked what title I would prefer, it would not be President or Colonel; it would be Major General in the U.S. Army in active service.”

  ON 15 SEPTEMBER, the President set off on a thirteen-thousand-mile cross-country tour, which he hoped would drum up popular support for his arbitration treaties and force the Senate to ratify them without change. In response to Roosevelt’s editorial, he remarked, “I don’t think that it indicates that 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 had faith in his ability to persuade people by speaking at stupefying length (the transcripts of his presidential addresses already totaled twenty volumes). He also relied on travel as a means of escape from the bad political news that kept seeping into the Oval Office, like cold air through cracked windows. But the gust that came down from Ottawa on the first day of fall was enough to chill him in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Canadians had voted against reciprocal tariffs, and elected a new government skeptical of the goodwill of the United States.

  Roosevelt was relieved of the need to pay any further lip service to Taft’s foreign policy. He had supported reciprocity, he wrote Arthur Lee, only because he favored closer relations with the British Empire. England was much in his thoughts, what with her quarrel with Germany over Morocco and Lloyd George’s success—at last—in wresting parliamentary power from the House of Lords.

  Contrite at not having finished an account of his European grand tour, long promised to Sir George Otto Trevelyan, he took up the manuscript and resumed it with enormous enjoyment. I found I was expected to walk in with the queen on my arm and my hat in the other hand—a piece of etiquette which reminded me of nothing with which I was previously acquainted except a Jewish wedding on the East Side of New York.…

  By the last day of September his letter was approaching the length of a small book, at more than thirty thousand words. That afternoon, he went riding with Edith. They were galloping along the bay road when her horse swerved and threw her headfirst onto the pavement. She was knocked unconscious for thirty-six hours, and remained semicomatose for ten days, waking to terrible pain. Throughout her life, she had been prone to neuralgia, retiring to her room for days at a time. This trauma went beyond any in her experience, permanently wiping out her sense of taste and smell.

  The family doctor found no concussion, and she slowly recovered. But the accident, following so soon after her fiftieth birthday and the advent of baby Grace, served as a notice to Roosevelt that they had both reached the years of physical decline. His mustache was going from gray to white, and chronic rheumatism assured him that he would never again stride out as freely as he had in Africa. He comforted her with a copy of Edith Wharton’s new novel Ethan Frome—not that she found much to enjoy in the climactic crash scene—and in his only speaking engagement of the season, called passionately for a social policy more considerate toward the frailties of women and children. “I am not talking to you tonight about abstract things,” he told a packed audience at Carnegie Hall, “but about flesh and blood and the ills of flesh and blood.”

  Worried as he was about his wife, he was only distractedly aware that the Agadir crisis had eased, with Germany being “compensated” for French supremacy in Morocco with a large slice of the Middle Congo and several billion tsetse flies. It sounded like the kind of arbitral accord that the President favored. Meanwhile Taft, still traveling, was trying to publicize himself as a trust-buster. He launched an attack on monopolistic combinations in Boise, Idaho, and warned that his attorney general, George W. Wickersham, would prosecute violations of the Sherman Act, “whether we be damned or not.” Coming from a self-proclaimed conservative, this language sounded like a parody of Roosevelt’s own radical rhetoric, or at best, an attempt to win back Westerners lost to reciprocity. The first national convention of Republican progressives responded on 16 October by endorsing Robert La Follette for the presidency in 1912.

  Eleven days later, on Theodore Roosevelt’s fifty-third birthday, Taft handed him an unwelcome present.

  THE HEADLINES THAT MORNING on the front page of the New York Tribune could not have been more enraging:

  GOVERNMENT SUES TO DISSOLVE STEEL TRUST AS ILLEGAL COMBINATION IN RESTRAINT OF TRADE

  Mentions 36 Companies as Defendants and Names J. P. Morgan, J. D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie

  SAYS ROOSEVELT WAS DECEIVED

  RECITES PURCHASE OF TENNESSEE COAL AND IRON COMPANY AND DECLARES THAT E. H. GARY AND H. C. FRICK MISLED THE PRESIDENT AS TO THEIR REAL PURPOSE AT TIME OF PANIC

  Other newspapers treated the story similarly, with the words deceived and misled recurring like drumbeats. Roosevelt was stunned into temporary wordlessness. It was as if everything he had told the Stanley Committee, and subsequently published, word for word, in The Outlook, was disbelieved by the Justice Department. With friends like Taft and Wickersham, he did not need enemies in Congress.

  For two and a half years, he had tried to keep quiet about Taft. In the process he had disappointed and even lost many of his progressive colleagues, who were now, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, supporting La Follette. He debated what to do about his credibility and the fragmentation of the GOP, cracking like a salt lick under the President’s elephantine missteps. Labor despised Taft; the insurgents always had; free-traders and protectionists alike blamed him for the reciprocity debacle; Democrats could not wait for 1912. Even the Republican Old Guard deplored this prosecution, which could be justified only on the most legalistic grounds.

  As James Bryce noted, U.S. Steel was not technically a monopoly: it often lost out on large orders to smaller competitors. Wickersham had therefore focused on the Tennessee Coal & Iron deal as monopolistic in intent, enabled by Theodore Roosevelt. His petition granted that the former president had acted honestly in 1907. But to readers of newspaper headlines four years later, Roosevelt’s innocence looked like naïveté—if not complicity in what the financial expert John Moody called “the best bargain [any] concern or individual ever made in the purchase of a piece of property.”

  Taft professed not to have known that his attorney general was going to name the Colonel. But the plan’s political intent was plain. Wickersham wanted voters to know that he and the President had launched almost as many antitrust prosecutions in two years as “Teddy the trust-buster” had in seven and a half. The fact that they were both pro-business did not betray their mutual commitment to the letter of the law.

  “I know you will agree with me that the only wise course for me to pursue is that of absolute silence,” Roosevelt wrote the president of the Reform Club, in reply to a sympathetic letter. By that he meant only oral speech: he would have plenty to say in print. If he spoke out too for
cefully to reporters, he would start hearing from Roosevelt Republicans again, and find himself pitted against both Taft and La Follette in 1912.

  He told two progressive friends, William Allen White and Governor Hiram Johnson of California, that an emergency could conceivably arise which would require him to make the “sacrifice” of a presidential run. Otherwise, it was best that he remained a private citizen. “I very sincerely believe that if I should be nominated, you would find that it was a grave misfortune not only for me but for the progressive cause.… I ask with all the strength that is in my power … to do everything possible to prevent not merely my nomination, but any movement looking toward my nomination.”

  JOHNSON, BEING A POLITICIAN, took note of the condition and ignored the disclaimer. It was useless for Roosevelt to try to persuade such men that he meant what he said: that his fears were for progressivism rather than for himself. But if he was one day to be nominated against his will, he had to do something about his present low esteem on Wall Street. At Carnegie Hall he had spoken, he thought, “with guarded moderation” about court rulings that favored property rights over the public interest, “but every single New York newspaper was bitterly against me, and for the most part suppressed my speech, merely playing it up in the headlines as an attack on the judiciary.”

  He therefore worked with extreme care on an article responding to the steel suit. How he expressed himself did not really matter. What he was saying, in so many words, was that he no longer supported William Howard Taft as President of the United States.