Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  66 “receiver of stolen goods” This phrase, commonly attributed to TR, was first hurled at Root by William Flinn, in the aftermath of the chairmanship vote. Proceedings of the 15th RNC, 88.

  67 unconvicted felons The epithet was TR’s. He was still applying it to Root in 1916. Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 204, 209.

  68 He knew what venality See TR’s subsequent essay, “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” in TR, Works, 19.318ff. For an analysis of the rage that gripped TR in Chicago, by a friend who was worried by it, see White, Autobiography, 464. “Ambition, I am satisfied, was not the governing passion.”

  69 “I never saw” Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 305. Stoddard was active in the campaign and conferred frequently with TR and the Executive Committee.

  70 “Theodore, remember” Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 381.

  71 The last of his visitors [Clinton W. Gilbert], The Mirrors of Washington: With Fourteen Cartoons by Cesare (New York, 1922), 250. See also Claudius O. Johnson, Borah of Idaho (New York, 1936), 137–40. Borah at this time was under pressure from William Barnes, Jr., to run for vice president with Charles Evans Hughes, should the latter emerge as a compromise candidate. Ibid., 139.

  72 Their cheers and oratory Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 305. Possibly TR heard William Flinn bellowing from a tabletop: “I am going to follow Theodore Roosevelt, the greatest leader of men of this day, and we are going to carry Pennsylvania for him.” The New York Times, 20 June 1912.

  73 “My fortune” Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 306. See also Amos Pinchot, History of the Progressive Party, 1912–1916 (New York, 1958), 164–65. Some authorities, notably Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 43–44, believe that this incident took place the following evening, Thursday 20 June. The sequence of events, however, suggests Wednesday evening—or more precisely, the small hours of Thursday morning.

  74 “You see” [Gilbert], The Mirrors of Washington, 250. According to another insider account, the final straw that broke TR’s back was the news that the GOP Credentials Committee had voted to severely reduce the time its protesting members needed to present their cases. George Henry Payne, The Birth of the New Party, or, Progressive Democracy (New York, 1912), 25–26.

  75 When he arrived The committee bolt, reportedly ordered by TR, occurred at 11:45 p.m. The New York Times, 20 June 1912.

  76 “As far as I” Pringle, Taft, 808–9.

  77 After he left The New York Times, 20 June 1912; Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 34–35.

  78 a period of uneasy calm Bryan, A Tale of Two Conventions, 61.

  79 After that he was The New York Times, 21 June 1912; Longworth, Crowded Hours, 200.

  80 It is no pleasant Bryan, A Tale of Two Conventions, 64–65.

  81 This could not have been achieved The “crisis” moment that Bryan had anticipated occurred when two Californian delegates for Taft were seated in defiance of that state’s primary rules by a vote of 542 to 529. “Had this vote gone the other way, there would unquestionably have been a general break for Roosevelt.” Lewis, TR, 359, 363–64.

  82 “If you don’t look out” The New York Times, 22 June 1912.

  83 During the umpteenth Ibid., 22 June 1912.

  84 The atmosphere on Saturday Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 41–43. Instead of “Amen” at the end of the opening prayer, one delegate called out, “Toot toot.” During the course of the day, as Root tried to move things along, a delegate from Mississippi arose in mock complaint. “Mr. Chairman, I make the point of order that the steam roller is exceeding the speed limit.” Lowell (Mass.) Sun, 22 June 1912.

  85 The Roosevelt family Lowell (Mass.) Sun, The New York Times, 22 June 1912; Longworth, Crowded Hours, 202.

  86 She joined in Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 42; The New York Times, 22 June 1912. “They are all white hot,” ERD wrote that day to her friend Dorothy Straight. 22 June 1912 (ERDP).

  87 racked with tuberculosis White, Autobiography, 470.

  88 But the pertinent The full text of TR’s message is in TR, Letters, 7.562–63.

  89 Sirs, I have heard Proceedings of the 15th RNC, 378–79.

  90 a howl of rage Lewis, TR, 361. It was this act, more than any other by Root, that caused TR to break from him, saying that the Massachusetts delegation had been “publicly raped,” and contemptuously comparing the senator to Autolycus, Shakespeare’s “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.” Nicholas Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, 13.

  91 They headed The New York Times, 22 June 1912.

  92 “Why weren’t you” White, Autobiography, 473. The original ts. of TR’s speech to the bolting delegates is preserved in TRC. For a photograph of him presiding at the Orchestra Hall meeting, see Lorant, Life and Times of TR, 569.

  93 He felt as he had White, Autobiography, 452, 473.

  94 The fight promised Ibid., 474.

  95 “He was not downcast” Ibid., 474–75.

  96 “I care more” Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root, 2 vols. (New York, 1938), 2.202. In 1919, still brooding, Root told Finley Peter Dunne that “it was on his [TR’s] advice that I declared myself for Taft before he himself determined to throw his hat into the ring.” Dunne, “Remembrances” (DUN).

  CHAPTER 11: ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

  1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 324.

  2 “My public career” TR quoted in E. A. Van Valkenburg, “Roosevelt the Man,” Philadelphia North American, 9 Jan. 1919. TR indicated on 10 July that he would have withdrawn from the race had WW been nominated before Taft. TR, Letters, 7.575.

  3 For about a week “Pop is praying for the nomination of Champ Clark,” KR told Franklin Roosevelt before the Democratic convention. A TR lieutenant, Francis J. Heney, was dispatched to Baltimore to negotiate a progressive defection in the event of a win by the conservative Clark. TR’s mail during this period contained proposals that WW, or even William Jennings Bryan, be tapped to run with him on a third-party ticket. According to O. K. Davis, Bryan strongly hinted to TR and other GOP progressives in Chicago that he would lead a bolt of his own supporters from the Democratic Party if Clark was nominated in Baltimore. The two splinter movements would then unite under TR in a new, potentially irresistible Progressive Party. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton, N.J., 1947), 422; Davis, Released for Publication, 316–17.

  4 the Socialist Eugene V. Debs Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, compensates for the neglect historians and biographers have shown to Debs’s candidacy in 1912. Although Debs, in his third presidential race, scored well over 900,000 votes (a record for the American Socialist Party), his 6 percent share of the national total hardly compared with those of the three major candidates.

  5 anti-Negro prejudice See McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, chap. 6.

  6 Word had gotten out TR, Letters, 7.561; Morris, The Rise of TR, 254–55. WW had little discernible race hatred, but felt that Southern blacks, having no educational or social qualifications for suffrage, compounded the evil of Reconstruction. In the fifth volume of his History of the American People (1900–1903), he imputed the rise of the “great” Ku Klux Klan to “the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes,” and described its nocturnal vigilantism with obvious relish (58–60). See also his article, “The Reconstruction of the Southern States,” The Atlantic Monthly, 87 (1901). As president of Princeton, WW opposed the admission of black students, and was not above joking about “coons.” (Morris, Theodore Rex, 207.) For a sober analysis of the racial aspects of WW’s campaign, see Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House, 501–5.

  7 Four of the seven governors The New York Times, 8 July 1912; TR, Letters, 7.569. Osborn eventually changed his mind about WW, and—too late—campaigned for TR. See Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 24–25.

  8 as the head Hadley to TR, 5 July 1912 (TRP). Hadley eventually supported WHT, not to Osborn’s surprise. “Hadley is a politician.” Osborn to TR, 5 July 1912 (TRP).

  9 As for veterans Mowry
, TR, 256–57; Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House, 468; E. Daniel Potts, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party, 1912–1916: A Re-Interpretation,” Pacific Circle: Proceedings of the Second Biennial Conference of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association (St. Lucia, Queensland, 1968), 186.

  10 the nascent Progressive Party When the Party celebrated its first birthday in 1913, it chose to on 2 July, the anniversary of WW’s nomination. According to Henry Stoddard, TR had to fight to prevent it being called the Progressive Republican Party. “He insisted that [would be] a hopeless name down South; with a party having some other title, he would gain thousands of votes there.” Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 406.

  11 Had Wilson not TR, Letters, 7.598; Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 20–21.

  12 “She was quite radiant” E. A. Van Valkenburg, “Roosevelt the Man.” Albert J. Beveridge wrote many years later that TR in 1912 was possessed of “a kind of exaltation,” equally composed of fervor, unselfishness, and “an august dignity.” TR, Works, 8.xxi.

  Biographical Note: In Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 252–53, the banker Otto Kahn gave this account of a conversation with TR in the winter of 1916:

  Q. What did induce you to make the run on the Progressive ticket?

  A. (head shoving forward) If a man does a thing which he discerns clearly to be against his interest, if he accepts the burden, strain and bitterness of a fight, at the end of which he sees discomfiture, defeat and lasting disability, if he leads a forlorn hope … how would you diagnose his motives?

  Q. It seems to me the answer is—

  A. (interrupting) The answer is that his motives disregard his personal interests, that he is actuated by a compelling sense of what his duty, his conscience and his station require him to do.

  Potts, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party,” dissents from the received view that TR left the GOP in order to revenge himself on corporate conservatives and WHT in particular. He argues that TR’s moral conscience always dictated his decisions in moments of crisis. When the Party was threatened with a similar split in 1884, for example, the young TR cited three moral reasons to stay with it: the cause (resentment against the nomination of James G. Blaine) was not overwhelming, the time was not right, and the effect of his leaving would not be demonstrably “proper.” See Putnam, TR, chap. 25; Lewis, TR, 368–70; and TR, “How I Became a Progressive,” TR, Works, 19.435–40.

  13 “weaving the inevitable” White, Autobiography, 468. On the eve of the convention, EKR told John C. O’Laughlin that “she did not want her husband nominated, [and] looked forward with dread to returning to the White House.” O’Laughlin, “Diary of the National Republican Convention,” 16 June 1912 (OL).

  14 other visitors as well e.g., Elizabeth Cameron in Adams, Letters, 6.550.

  15 The Roosevelt children According to the manager of the Progressive Party, TR held a family conference after WW’s nomination and warned that the consequences of his proceeding with a third-party campaign would be dire. “Some of the finest minds in the country, some of the men I most admire and love are going to stop coming here.” David Hinshaw, interviewed by Hermann Hagedorn, n.d. (TRB).

  16 To the puzzlement Morris, Theodore Rex, 400; Longworth, Crowded Hours, 228–29; Cordery, Alice, 221–22. Longworth’s talent was recognized by no less an authority than the conductor Leopold Stokowski, who said that music was his “natural element.” His fellow quartet players were all professionals. He was also an excellent pianist and dabbled in composition. Later in life he became president of the Washington Chamber Music Society.

  17 “first, last and always” This slogan was repeatedly chanted at the Chicago convention by supporters of TR.

  18 Representative Longworth’s position Longworth, Crowded Hours, 192–94; Cordery, Alice, 223–28. In old age Alice told Michael Teague that she had briefly considered divorcing Nicholas Longworth in 1912, but was dissuaded by TR and EKR. Teague, Mrs. L, 158.

  19 Ted was an ardent Longworth, Crowded Hours, 197; Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 58–59.

  20 the Land of Beyond Robert W. Service’s imagery had a powerful effect on thousands of young romantically inclined Americans in the early 20th century. Kermit Roosevelt, The Happy Hunting Grounds (New York, 1920) makes plain its author’s lifelong wanderlust.

  21 He was due to sail KR left for Brazil on 27 July 1912.

  22 a thirtyish surgeon She had met him in Berlin in May 1909. KR to ERD, 19 May 1913 (ERDP).

  23 “How is my sweet” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 829. In a conversation with her piano teacher, ERD said of her shyness, “I wonder if it could be Papa I get it from? Can it be that he seems so terribly the opposite of shy because at heart he really is so?” Emma Knorr in Washington Herald, 27 July 1931.

  24 “Oh Dorothy” ERD to Dorothy Straight, ca. 22 June 1912 (ERDP).

  25 Archie had little patience ABR to QR, 12–27 Sept. 1917 (ABRP); TR to Cecil Spring Rice, 10 Aug. 1912 (CSR). Archie Roosevelt’s personal characteristics of truculent terseness, intense focus (from a slightly obtuse angle) on one matter at a time, and unconcern about offending people, are consistent with a modern diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome.

  26 “tranquil, efficient” TR to ERD, 21 Aug. 1912 (ERDP).

  27 “I’m feeling like” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.506. There is some uncertainty as to when TR said this, but it was definitely part of the American political vernacular by the weekend of 22–23 June, when WHT received a telegram congratulating him on “having lassoed the bull moose.” (The New York Times, 24 June 1912.) Before the end of the month the moose had traveled as far as Germany, where it was the subject of a mocking editorial in the Berliner Tagblatt (29 June 1912). TR described himself as feeling “as rugged as a bull moose” as early as 30 Sept. 1894, in a letter to Henry Cabot Lodge. TR, Letters, 1.399.

  28 Governor Osborn wrote Chase Osborn to TR, 1 July 1912 (TRP); TR, Letters, 7.569.

  29 “I suppose that” TR, Letters, 7.567–68.

  30 On 7 July The New York Times, 8 July 1912. For a detailed account of the pre-convention work of organizing the Progressive Party, see Gable, The Bull Moose Years, chap. 2.

  31 the Party’s biggest bankroller Mowry, TR, 222. By the end of the 1912 campaign, however, Frank Munsey’s contributions slightly exceeded Perkins’s.

  32 “Roosevelt has the right” Frederick Jackson Turner in Turner, Dear Lady, 124.

  33 his palatial estate overlooking the Hudson Now Wave Hill, a public park in New York City. Coincidentally, but no doubt pleasingly to both men, TR had summered there as a boy.

  34 He had come John A. Garraty, Right-Hand Man: The Life of George W. Perkins (New York, 1960), passim. See also William J. Boies, “George W. Perkins,” World’s Work, Dec. 1901; White, Autobiography, 459–561, 519. In 1912, Perkins told Henry L. Stoddard that he had “all the money a man should possess” and intended to devote the rest of his life to “public affairs.” Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 423.

  35 Exquisitely undertailored The phrase is William Allen White’s. See White, Autobiography, 459–561, 519. Since at least the turn of the century, when they had worked together to create the Palisades Intersate Park, Roosevelt had held Perkins to be “one of the most delightful men I have ever met.” TR, Letters, 3.53.

  36 White always a surname At least until 1917, when he became “W.A.”

  37 To White, that sounded White, Autobiography, 459.

  38 One of the reasons Mowry, TR, 225; Hagedorn, The Roosevelt Family, 310; TR, Letters, 7.567. “I’d much rather discuss ornithology than politics,” TR told a Columbia University professor in between platform discussions. (Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 263.) For a detailed account of these discussions, see Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 133–40.

  39 Excepted only were Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 129; TR, Letters, 7.564.

  40 “I regard” TR, Letters, 7.577.

  41 all hailed from Southern states Specifically, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mi
ssissippi.

  42 his racial views See Morris, Theodore Rex, chaps. 2 and 27.

  43 Taft’s deliberate score Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 511.

  44 “inhuman cruelty and barbarity” See Morris, Theodore Rex, 49–50, 110–11, 246, 258–62.

  45 Yet stray observations TR, Letters, 5.226; M. A. DeWolfe Howe, James Ford Rhodes: American Historian (New York, 1929), 119–20; Bull, Safari, 179. Rhodes’s account of a conversation on race with TR (16 Nov. 1905) should be considered in the light of his own opinion that the Negroes of the Yazoo delta were a million years behind their fellow whites. According to Grogan, TR remarked that, fantasies of button-pushing aside, “integration [was] the only answer” to the color problem in the United States.