Colonel Roosevelt
Page 30
Jane Addams mounted in her turn. As she posed beside the Colonel, the band struck up “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Roosevelt led the singing, both arms held high.
Like a mighty army moves the church of God,
Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod.…
The hymn was not quite to Miss Addams’s taste. But its tune was impossible to resist, and not all the words embarrassed her:
We are not divided, all one body we—
One in hope and doctrine, one in charity.
“I have been fighting for progressive principles for thirty years,” she said as she descended from the platform into a sea of well-wishers. “This is the biggest day in my life.”
The celebration went on and on. Eventually Roosevelt was left alone onstage, bowing to the crowd. Senator Root’s mocking prophecy appeared to have been fulfilled: He aims at a leadership far in the future, as a sort of Moses and Messiah for a vast progressive tide of a rising humanity. His smile betrayed a hint of alarm, as if he was bewildered by the religiosity that surged around him. Vitality he had, and passion too, for earthly attainments and even abstract ethical aims, but he could not abandon himself to this communal rapture. The crowd was unlike any other he had seen before, chaotic in its variety.
Here, waving bandannas, were former Democrats like Judge Benjamin B. Lindsey of Colorado, a power in the juvenile court movement, Raymond Robins, a wealthy labor activist, Don Dickinson, postmaster general under President Cleveland, and Bourke Cockran, the legendary orator of Tammany Hall. Senators Dixon, Poindexter, Clapp, Bristow, and Norris represented the Republican insurgency of recent years. James Garfield, the brothers Pinchot, and other “moonbeamers” were in transports at finding their long-planned third party an actuality. The sculptor Gutzon Borglum and the novelist Winston Churchill were prominent in the Connecticut and New Hampshire delegations. Ambitious young intellectuals included the lawyer Felix Frankfurter, the essayist Walter Lippmann, Judge Learned Hand of New York, and Harold L. Ickes, a Chicago municipal reformer. Academics not normally inclined to prance and sway with party bosses brandished the same signs as Boss Walter F. Brown of Ohio and “Tiny Tim” Woodruff of Brooklyn (dazzling in white flannel, as if to advertise his conversion from Republican orthodoxy). Suffragists, political scientists, social theorists, lapsed priests, and exponents of Adlerian ethical culture looked forward to hearing Roosevelt address their respective causes.
It said something for his range of acquaintance that he knew hundreds of these people by name. Many of them, in turn, knew him from his past lives. Professor Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard remembered him as a reed-thin freshman, punching the air in a student demonstration for “Hayes and Honest Ways.” Joe Murray and Isaac Hunt had witnessed his baptism in the New York Republican Party—and now his apostasy from it. Sylvane and Joe Ferris, Bill Merrifield, and George Myers, his former ranch partners and Badlands buddies, were in attendance as excited delegates half inclined to shoot out the lights. Present too was the ubiquitous Seth Bullock, who thought Armageddon was a town in Oklahoma. The veteran civil service reformers William Dudley Foulke and Lucius B. Swift could testify that Roosevelt had been their idealistic ally as far back as 1889. W. Franklin Knox led a contingent of graying Rough Riders, all prepared to follow their Colonel up another dangerous hill.
Crowns and thrones may perish, kingdoms rise and wane.…
The person whose support meant most to Roosevelt may have been the quietest spectator in the hall. Edith sat as before in the family box. Only now she had none of their children with her—not even Alice, whom Nick had begged to stay away. Incredibly, for a woman who flinched at public exposure, Edith stood up when the crowd yelled for her, and smiled and waved at her husband. He responded with his bandanna.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.…
They were singing the “Battle Hymn” again. After the last salvo of “Hallelujahs,” the tumult finally subsided. Delegates returned to their seats. Roosevelt could not begin speaking until the formal convention photograph had been taken. Everybody froze as a corona of flashbulbs popped. The explosion somehow ignited one of the dangling white cotton bags (which apparently functioned as air purifiers) and, to screams from below, a tongue of flame leaped out. Before panic could spread, a fireman crawled catlike up the nearest beam and smothered the blazing bag with his bare hands.
ROOSEVELT’S ADDRESS, ENTITLED “A Confession of Faith,” lasted for two hours. “And they wished more!” he wrote Kermit afterward. Applause stopped him 145 times, most loudly when he espoused the cause of woman suffrage, and berated the “twilight zone” between federal and state judiciaries. For all the cheers it aroused, the speech was a dry statement of policy, resembling one of the giant Messages he used to inflict on Congress every December during his presidency. It amounted to a survey of the entire Progressive program, more detailed and less self-referential than the blueprint he had issued at Osawatomie in 1910. Throughout, Roosevelt used the pronoun we rather than I.
He dismissed the Republican and Democratic parties as “husks,” saying they were “boss-ridden and privilege-controlled.” In the new one, only the people would rule against yesterday’s alliance of Wall Street lawyers and Old Guard congressmen, aided and abetted by conservative newspaper publishers. That meant a nationwide presidential primary system, popular election of senators, votes for women, full disclosure of campaign funding, and laws to prevent fraud and trickery at the polls. The triple power of the initiative, referendum, and recall would be made available to various states, on the understanding that it should be exercised with extreme caution, in situations where representative government was threatened. Caution was not elsewhere going to be a feature of the Progressive Party’s attitude toward protecting what Roosevelt, in one of his few passages of eloquence, called “the crushable elements” at the base of American society.
The dead weight of orphanage and depleted craftsmanship, of crippled workers and workers suffering from trade diseases, of casual labor, of insecure old age, and of household depletion due to industrial conditions are, like our depleted soils, our gashed mountainsides and flooded river bottoms, so many strains upon the national structure, draining the reserve strength of all industries and showing beyond all peradventure the public element and public concern in industrial health.
He declared, as he had so often done as president, “There can be no greater issue than that of conservation in this country.” He promised a sheaf of new federal statutes to set minimum wage and workplace standards, compensate for job-related injuries, strengthen his own pure-food law of 1906, and institute a system of “social insurance” with medical coverage for the poor. He endorsed an income-tax amendment to the Constitution. If he was returned to the White House, new or revived federal agencies would include a department of public health, plus commissions to inquire into the rising cost of living, improve rural conditions, and regulate interstate industrial corporations. He warned that the last-named commission would have “complete power” to investigate, monitor, publicize, and if necessary prosecute irresponsible trusts.
“ ‘AND THEY WISHED MORE!’ ”
Roosevelt’s two-hour address to the Progressive National Convention, 6 August 1912. (photo credit i11.2)
Once or twice, quailing at the bulk of his twenty-thousand-word typescript, he suggested that sections of it should be omitted “as read.” The crowd was insatiable: “Go on, go on.” He tried to skip the tariff, his least favorite subject, and was reprimanded. Even so, he tore out and crumpled some later pages. It was plain that he had written them for press release, rather than to be declaimed.
At last came the line all wanted to hear, from his oration at the Chicago Auditorium. “I say in closing what in that speech I said in closing: We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”
The response was tumultuous. If Progressivism was, as more and more critics were suggesting, a religion, it needed its mantras, and could not hear them
enough. Roosevelt ducked out of the hall at 3:30 P.M., pursued by the sound of ten thousand voices singing his name, to the tune of “Maryland, My Maryland.”
WHEN RAYMOND ROBINS* saw him again, in his hotel parlor late that night, he was resting his tired head against the mantelpiece.
“Colonel,” Robins said, “they have just voted down four planks.”
In another room, a subcommittee of the Resolutions Committee, chaired by William Draper Lewis, dean of the University of Pennsylvania law department, was trying to nail down the Party’s campaign platform. Lewis had been agonizing over this all-important “contract with the people” since July. A group of moonbeamers, led by Gifford and Amos Pinchot, was determined to substitute some radical planks for the more pragmatic ones favored by Perkins, Beveridge, and the Colonel himself. Their efforts had apparently succeeded.
“Each one of those planks will go back,” Roosevelt angrily told Robins, “or I am not a candidate.”
The result, in the small hours of Wednesday morning, was a compromise platform that mentioned neither prohibition nor race, but awarded the Colonel his battleships and retained the regulatory plank as written by himself and Perkins—more accurately, handwritten on various slips of paper, some of them dating as far back as May. It formalized in prose all the other promises Beveridge and Roosevelt had made verbally, committing the Progressive Party to a vast program of social, economic, and environmental reform. For once, Roosevelt was entitled to a superlative when he called it “much the most important public document promulgated in this country since the death of Abraham Lincoln.”
A day of steady drizzle dawned. Delegates found the visitor galleries of the Coliseum largely deserted when they filed in under the giant moose head, shaking their umbrellas. Hours of report-reading by various committee chairs, as well as presentation and adoption of the platform, had to be endured before the nominating speeches could begin. Since there was only one candidate, those were unlikely to be news. Only then would the convention be informed whom the Colonel had chosen as his running mate. Most bets were on Benjamin B. Lindsey of Colorado.
In the late afternoon, William A. Prendergast, comptroller of New York City, presented Roosevelt’s name to automatic cheers. His remarks cost him no effort, as he had written them over two months before to deliver at the Republican convention. “There is no other man in American life,” he said, “who, in public office or out of it, has by his devotion to its interests, made so complete and genereous a contribution to the cup of its achievements.”
When Judge Lindsey rose to give the first seconding speech, realization spread that the diminutive Democrat was not going to be on the ticket. Jane Addams followed him to the rostrum. “I second the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt because his is one of the few men in our public life who has been responsive to the social appeal, and who has caught the significance of the modern movement,” she said, in the first address ever made by a woman to a national convention.
Finally, at seven o’clock, Beveridge announced that the Colonel had chosen Governor Hiram Johnson of California to run with him.
The two men came out together (Johnson notably shorter and stockier) to a roar of acclaim that formalized their nomination. Roosevelt seemed genuinely moved. The religiosity in the hall surged to the point of delirium, but yesterday’s alarm was gone from his face. He stood arm-in-arm with Johnson as fifes and drums, a trombone quartet, and a full band led the crowd of ten thousand in singing the Doxology—its meter syncopated by the popping of a minute gun in the organ loft:
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host,
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
* Convention delegate, chairman of the Illinois Progressive Central Committee.
CHAPTER 12
There Was No Other Place on His Body
O no, not now! He’ll not be going now:
There’ll be time yet for God knows what explosions
Before he goes.
THE PROGRESSIVE NATIONAL CONVENTION did not strike everyone as a transcendental event. “In form, two thousand delegates, more or less, gathered in the Coliseum,” Senator George Sutherland of Utah told Vice President James S. Sherman. “In reality, Mr. Roosevelt met in convention at Chicago, made a confession of faith, gave his hand to the colored brother from the north and his foot to the colored brother from the south, adopted a platform, nominated himself and brother Johnson, and adjourned with the ease of a thoroughly trained thimblerigger plying his vocation among the rural visitors to the Midway plaisance.”
The more measured view of The New York Times was that Roosevelt’s statement of Progressive policy had been “the best, the ablest, the most persuasive of all his public utterances.” That did not alter the chilling fact that what the Colonel wanted was “a vast system of state socialism.” If returned to power, he would regulate business with a rod of iron, fixing prices and redistributing profits. He would make Washington the nation’s welfare center, and emulate Lloyd George in the profligate bestowal of old-age pensions and industrial insurance. Worse still, he would subject “the whole organic law” of the United States, including its constitutional checks and balances, “to an endless series of judgments of the people, expressed at the polls.” Armageddon had no real place in his mythology. “He stood at Chicago and preached socialism and revolution, contempt for law, and doctrines that lead to destruction.”
Ray Stannard Baker, noting the paternalistic trend in Roosevelt’s philosophy, was no longer prepared to concede that he was a “true liberal,” much less a political genius. “At this very moment of his triumph in Chicago, I believe TR to be on his way downward. He has even now passed the zenith of his power—unless it be the power for evil.”
And at the lowest level of American political opinion, John F. Schrank, thirty-six years old and unemployed, read in two New York newspapers that the Colonel was determined to overthrow the Constitution. Brooding over them, he was reminded of a nightmare he had had eleven years before, in which the ghost of the assassinated William McKinley pointed at Roosevelt and said, “This is my murderer, avenge my death.”
“OF COURSE I DO not for a moment believe that we shall win,” Roosevelt wrote Kermit after returning to Oyster Bay. “The chances are overwhelmingly in favor of Wilson, with Taft and myself nearly even, and I hope with me a little ahead.…”
He may have been reading a Washington Post article on election odds currently being offered along Wall Street. Wilson was the 2-to-1 favorite of financiers, the class that felt most threatened by the Bull Moose platform. The odds of Roosevelt beating Taft were no better than 5 to 4 and 10 to 7. Politically, the nation was so piebald, with race prejudice darkening the South, and fields of progressivism, protectionism, socialism, and anarchism splotching the rest of the map, that not even a candidate of his enormous appeal could hope to be elected on mere popularity.
Nicholas and George Roosevelt visited Sagamore Hill that August and found their cousin uninhibited by the prospect of a doomed campaign. On the contrary, he was in uproarious form. He said he did not intend to hit the speaking trail in earnest until September, and in the meantime wanted to get as much frenetic exercise as possible. His apotheosis in Chicago seemed to have rejuvenated him. The hotter the weather, the greater his oversupply of energy. “You’ve got to play a set of tennis! You’ve got to play a set of tennis!” he chanted, beating Nicholas over the head with his racquet. The young man joined him in doubles against Archie and Ethel, and whenever Roosevelt hit a winning shot, he hopped across the court on one foot, singing and chortling.
Something of his élan vital seemed to communicate itself to Woodrow Wilson, summering more sedately on the New Jersey shore. “He is a real, vivid person,” the governor wrote in a rare moment of self-criticism. “I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.”
Although Wilson knew that he could never match Roosevelt’s energy and charm, he underestimated his own force as a campaigner. At fifty-five, he was formidably mature, intellectually imposing, by no means inhuman, and about as vague as a racehorse in sight of the pole. A few early, disastrous failures on the primary circuit had taught him how to moderate his cerebral style without descending to the crowd-pleasing platitudes that Roosevelt used almost as a form of punctuation. Wilson developed a gift of expressing complexities in the simplest language, driven home with just the right colloquialism. When he improvised a joke, it was usually a good one. Roosevelt, so funny in social life and in confidential correspondence, was overcome by moral seriousness on the stump. The face he presented to press cameras was severe. What laughs he got with improvised asides were often the result of his squeaky voice and facial grimaces.