Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  He had not begun to see Wilson as a threat until they both emerged as avatars of progressivism in 1911. Now they were seriously opposed to each other. For the first time in more than a quarter-century, Roosevelt assessed someone who had the power to beat him.

  Wilson is a good man who has in no way shown that he possesses any special fitness for the Presidency. Until he was fifty years old, as college professor and college president he advocated with skill, intelligence and good breeding the outworn doctrines which were responsible for four fifths of the political troubles of the United States.… Then he ran as Governor of New Jersey, and during the last eighteen months discovered that he could get nowhere advocating the doctrines he had advocated, and instantly turned an absolute somersault so far as least half these doctrines was concerned. He still clings to the other half, and he has shown not the slightest understanding of the really great problems of our present industrial situation.… He is an able man, and I have no doubt could speedily acquaint himself with these problems, and would not show Taft’s muddleheaded inability to try to understand them when left by himself. But he is not a nationalist, he has no real and deep-seated conviction of the things that I regard as most vital, and he is in the position where he can only win … by the help of the worst bosses in this country, and by perpetuating their control of their several states in return for their aid.

  He is not a nationalist. In Rooseveltian parlance, that meant Wilson, the former girls’ school teacher who had sat out the Spanish-American War and signed last year’s peace manifesto in The Christian Herald, was not likely to be a strong commander in chief.

  “I KNOW IT, BUT I can’t do it. I couldn’t if I would and I wouldn’t if I could.”

  William Howard Taft was responding to a reporter’s suggestion that he should emulate some of Roosevelt’s headline-grabbing tricks in order to energize his campaign for reelection. After his desperate attempts to win sympathy in the spring, only to be humiliated in the Massachusetts, Maryland, and Ohio primaries, he was resolved not to hustle for votes again. The electorate would have to judge him by his record—in token of which, he launched now into a defense of his tariff policy, detailed enough to turn two and a half newspaper columns gray. “Under the Dingley law the average percent of the imports that came in free was 44.3 percent in value of the total importations; the average percent in value of the imports which have come in free under the Payne law is 51.2 percent of the total importations.…”

  Taft knew that he bored people, and did not much care. Archie Butt had been dismayed at the President’s lack of concern for the feelings of others. He kept people waiting for as many hours as suited him, even while he napped, and never apologized. At dinner, he would help himself to two-thirds of a beef tenderloin, before allowing his guests to share the remainder. He made no effort to shorten his speeches, aware that audiences could not walk out on a President. When his faults were pointed out to him, he listened placidly, registering nothing.

  At the moment he was in a particularly obstinate mood, vetoing bill after bill as Congress sweltered to the end of its long session. The breezy golf links of Beverly beckoned. Taft was happy to let the Republican National Committee handle his campaign, under the chairmanship of his former secretary, Charles D. Hilles. As for himself, “I have no part to play but that of a conservative, and that I am going to play.”

  WHAT WITH TED, Eleanor, and “Baby Gracie” in residence for the summer, plus Archie, Quentin, and various other Roosevelts coming and going (mostly coming, it seemed to Eleanor), Sagamore Hill was once again the noisy, teeming epicenter it had been in the first decade of the century. The only relatively quiet hours, undisturbed by phone bells and shouted dialogues up and down the bare, clattering stairs, were between one and six in the morning. The Colonel played daily host to reporters and politicos, frequently introducing group to group and then escaping on horseback before his absence was detected. At other times he took refuge in the woods, felling dead trees amid a miasma of mosquitoes, or crammed his family into rowboats and headed for “picnic spots” chosen, apparently, only for their remoteness. Eleanor, to whom the notion of al fresco dining conjured up pleasant associations of chicken salad and lettuce sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, was disconcerted by her first experience of one of these forays:

  By the time everybody was settled there was nowhere for me but a small space between the basket of clams and the demijohn of water in the flat-bottomed boat manned by Ted and his cousin George.

  Under the blazing sun we rowed and rowed. There was no breeze. The Sound was as calm as glass.… Two hours later we landed on a beach precisely like the one we had started from except that it was farther from home. The boats were drawn up on the sand, and we settled ourselves at the water’s edge, unable to go near the trees because of poison ivy. The provisions were spread out and a kettle filled to make tea. The thought of hot tea was depressing enough, but it was worse to see the roaring fire built over the clams. When they were judged ready Colonel Roosevelt selected one, opened it, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, and handed it to me. It was large, with a long black neck. I managed to get it all in my mouth, burning myself quite badly. Although gritty with sand, it was delicious at first, but that soon wore off and it became a piece of old rubber hose.… Finally I slipped it under a log, but not deftly enough to escape Colonel Roosevelt’s eye.

  “You aren’t as persistent as Archie,” he observed. “The first time he was old enough to eat a clam on a picnic he chewed for a time, then ate three sandwiches, some cookies, and an orange. Later he asked what he should do with the poor little dead clam. It was still in his mouth!”

  Because of headwinds, it took twice as long for the party to row home. After a few weeks of Rooseveltian hospitality, Eleanor found that she had lost twenty-six pounds.

  One night after dinner the Colonel sat on the piazza with Ted, Archie, Nicholas, and George. Rocking in his chair, he said he was “dumbfounded” by the fervor he had aroused at the Progressive convention.

  George remarked that whereas he had once been a radical among conservatives, he must now be the reverse. Roosevelt accepted the suggestion enthusiastically. “Yes, yes! That’s it! I have to hold them in check all the time. I’ve got to restrain them.”

  A more agitated rocker on the porch that August was Alice, talking politics, as Edith complained to Ethel, “like molasses blobbing out of a bottle.” She and Nick were spending the summer apart, their marriage on the verge of collapse. It was 1910 all over again, except that Nick’s divided loyalties were even more strained, now that his father-in-law was directly challenging the President. Nick’s whole instinct was to remain in the mainstream of the Republican Party. But the moment was near when he was going to have to define himself publicly in campaigning for reelection. Edith was unsympathetic. “I wish to goodness that Nick would come out flat footed and work for Taft, or do something! It is hard on everyone!”

  Contrary to her private, bookish nature, Edith had become politicized by the two Chicago conventions. Madame Defarge, sternly knitting her husband’s doom in June, had been unable to resist the sight of thousands of Progressives turning toward her box, on the day of his “Confession of Faith,” and roaring for her to stand up and show herself. She knew as well as Theodore did that he was headed for defeat, but she was happy that he was happy in his new guise as a social reformer.

  BY THE END OF the month, all three candidates—or four, if Eugene V. Debs was to be counted as a presidential possibility—had launched their campaigns. Wilson chose to do so at an agricultural fair in New Jersey. His belly full of fried chicken, he surveyed his audience of two thousand farmers (their children frolicking nearby on merry-go-rounds and roller coasters) and dispensed with his prepared speech on the tariff. He told them that the White House was their property. “What I modestly suggest is that you proceed to break into your own house.… The tenants who have been living there a long time have been making you pay the rent, instead of paying rent to you.”


  Taft broke his vow of presidential silence long enough to issue a reproof to voters who registered as Republicans but supported “the candidate of another party.” Every curve of his massive body, now approaching its lifetime peak weight of 340 pounds, expressed disillusionment with the office Roosevelt had cajoled him into. By universal consent, his liberation was at hand. But the prospect of handing power back to his patron was not to be borne.

  “As the campaign goes on and the unscrupulousness of Roosevelt develops,” the President wrote his wife, “it is hard to realize that we are talking about the same man whom we knew in the presidency.” The peacemaker of Portsmouth had mutated into the half-crazed leader of a religious cult. “I have not any feeling of enmity against him,” Taft told her, “or any feeling of hatred. I look upon him as an historical character of a most peculiar type in whom are embodied elements of real greatness, together with certain traits that have now shown themselves in unfitting him for any trust or confidence by the people.”

  As he penned these words, Debs, in Terre Haute, Indiana, was warning working-class Americans that there was little to choose between the three major candidates. All of them stood for “private ownership of the sources of wealth and the means of life.” The only real choice, therefore, was between Democracy—the real, socialistic kind, with wealth and opportunity equalized by law—and Plutocracy, otherwise known as the status quo.

  Debs was sensible enough to know that his alternative was not likely to be chosen in November, if ever in the United States as presently constituted. But he was not far wrong in suggesting that Roosevelt, Wilson, and Taft were three panels of a triptych, linked and painted with the same capitalistic brush. They differed from one another only in ideological color and fineness of detail.

  On the left, the Colonel and his Party offered by far the most advanced program of reform, with enough administrative and legislative proposals to keep the federal government busy for two decades. The Chicago platform was essentially a rewording, in legalistic language, of Roosevelt’s “Confession of Faith,” amplified with many slighter, but still significant initiatives, such as vows to revise the currency, register lobbyists, fight illiteracy, and adjust roadways to the coming of the motor age. There were so many other proposals regarding health care, flood control, parcel post, patent law, and foreign commerce that Wilson joked it would take “a Sabbath day’s drive” just to plow through the whole Progressive agenda.

  His own, centrist platform combined the kind of small-p progressivism he had pioneered as governor of New Jersey with the traditional emphasis Democrats put on states’ rights. If Wilson sounded, at times, like a populist, it was because he felt he had to gratify the old “Commoner,” William Jennings Bryan, who had helped bring about his nomination. He undertook to control malfeasant corporations with as much force as Roosevelt, but said he would do so by strengthening the antitrust law, not by regulation. He was for a revenue-only tariff instead of the protective one that his rivals preferred. Woman suffrage was an issue only slightly less abhorrent, to his Southern supporters, than Negro enfranchisement, so Wilson was content to let Mrs. J. Borden Harriman and other Northern feminists fight that fight for him. Otherwise, he showed as much social concern as Roosevelt, except that he sympathized more with credit-stressed farmers than with workers exploited in large cities.

  Taft, on the Republican right, took what had become the obligatory stance among all candidates of opposition to special privilege and monopoly. He could justifiably boast of Attorney General Wickersham’s strong record as a trust-buster. Like Wilson, he called for more prosecutorial powers, and like the Progressive moonbeamers restrained by George Perkins, clearer definitions of acts that might be criminalized as monopolistic. This was as far as the GOP platform enabled Taft to go in appealing to popular reform sentiment. The rest of the document amounted to a virtual reprint of its predecessors in 1908 and 1904, but purged of progressive values.

  AT THE BEGINNING of September, Roosevelt set out from New York with a herd of small silver bull mooses in his luggage, to give away to children. He intended to barnstorm for a month, from New England to the far Northwest, continuing via California, the Rockies, and the breadbasket states deep into Dixie. By the time he got home via the mid-Atlantic seaboard, he would have covered nine thousand miles, and become the first presidential campaigner ever to encircle the country.

  Ray Stannard Baker caught an early glimpse of him at a depot in Hartford, Connecticut, addressing a large crowd in the rain. “He looked, as usual, as hard as a maple knot—and seemed to be enjoying himself.” But Baker, now one of Wilson’s keenest supporters, thought the Colonel was beginning to show signs of demagoguery, with bizarre proposals to emulate the authoritarian agricultural policies of Germany and Denmark, and to use American schoolhouses as political forums. “He is a dangerous man who makes the people feel intensely without making them think clearly.”

  Even in miserable weather, Roosevelt radiated conviviality—so much so that rumors again circulated that he was on the bottle. He had been drunk at Osawatomie, befuddled at the Ohio constitutional convention, and soused at Armageddon. A citizen of Butte, Montana, assured one of the reporters on his train that the Colonel had been seen knocking back fourteen highballs in fifteen minutes.

  The reporter did not file this story, but Roosevelt heard about it and asked his campaign team to watch out for a clear case of published libel.

  Although there were a few stretches of Democratic territory that received him coldly, most of the crowds greeting him were large. Official welcomers climbed aboard at every minor depot, sure that he was as thrilled as they were to see the band, bemedaled veterans, and babes in arms on the platform. Their salutations became so predictable that scribes in the press car developed a convenient code for wire dispatch, “GXLC.”*

  Some outdoor audiences spread so far in all directions that Roosevelt had to project his remarks at them section by section. “Friends,” he yelled to a mob of twenty-five thousand at the Minnesota State Fair, “this is the only time I ever wished I could face two ways at once—or even five ways at once, but I’d have to be built like a starfish to do it.”

  Words failed him in Spokane on 9 September, when he found himself the only man in an auditorium full of women. Washington was one of the most advanced of the suffrage states. He could not hide the fact that for most of his life, feminism had passed him by. “My fellow citizens,” he began awkwardly, “this is the first meeting of this kind I have ever addressed.”

  A strange muffled noise stopped him. It was the sound of gloved hands clapping. Unsure of how to proceed, he tried, then abandoned, the preachy tone that served him well with male audiences. He praised the Progressive Party for adopting a full suffrage plank, and spoke of his new friendship with Jane Addams. Thanks largely to her, he had become a convert to the cause. “It’s because I’m a natural democrat. I don’t like to associate with people unless they have the same rights I have.”

  By now Roosevelt was talking naturally, and his listeners were sympathetic. “I was converted from a passive suffragist to an active suffragist,” he said, “by seeing women who had been doing social reform work.” In addition to Miss Addams, he cited as new friends Maud Nathan, the child labor activist, and Frances Kellor, an advocate for the immigrant poor and founder of the National League for the Protection of Colored Women. He rejected Democratic and Republican warnings that extension of the suffrage would lead to the breakup of the American home. On the contrary, “I believe it will tend toward … an increase in the sense of copartnership between the man and the woman, and make each think more of the rights of the other than of his or her own rights.… People say to me, ‘Men are different from women.’ Yes, but I have never met any differences so great as the differences between some men and other men.”

  TWO NIGHTS LATER, John F. Schrank sat writing poetry in his two-dollar-a-week apartment in downtown Manhattan. It was the anniversary of the assassination of William McKinley.

>   When night draws near

  And you hear a knock

  And a voice should whisper

  Your time is up.…

  As he wrote, he felt the ghost of the dead president lay a hand on his shoulder. It did not stop his pen.

  Refuse to answer

  As long as you can

  Then face it and be a man.

  ROOSEVELT’S SUCCESS WITH local audiences was achieved at the expense of the kind of newsy, national headlines his campaign organization had been hoping for. He kept repeating his trust-control, tariff, and labor policies, and when he contrasted them with those of Woodrow Wilson, his oratory became impersonal, as if he was reluctant to launch a direct attack on the governor. By the second week in September, he had fallen into a rhythm of replying to whatever points Wilson chose to raise, without coming up with new or challenging ones of his own. There was a brief tossing of Bull Moose antlers at San Francisco on the fourteenth, when he effectively portrayed Wilson as a doctrinal academic, and Taft as a political corpse, but then his speeches became bland again. Word got back to Party headquarters in New York that the Colonel had gone “stale.” The campaign was losing ground. Wilson—in the midst of his own Western tour—was moving ahead in most states. Only California seemed certain to vote Progressive.

  O. K. Davis, the Party’s overtaxed publicity director, set to work on a briefing book that would rearm Roosevelt with anti-Wilson material. In the meantime he hoped that his other star speakers, most notably Hiram Johnson and Albert Beveridge, would arouse audiences more than the Colonel seemed to be doing.