Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  46 “We have made” TR, Letters, 7.585–86.

  47 He noted that Ibid., 7.587–89. According to TR, 7 out of every 8 black delegates at the Republican convention voted for WHT. Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 63.

  48 The machinery does not TR, Letters, 7.590.

  Biographical Note: Even allowing for “the pastness of the past,” and the fact that TR never shared the virulent racism of, e.g., Owen Wister, Henry Adams, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, it is difficult not to see him now as anything other than paternalistic in his attitude to blacks. His genuine admiration, approaching reverence, for Dr. Washington was shared by many liberal white Republicans in the early years of the 20th century. However, the very uniqueness they ascribed to the author of Up from Slavery emphasized their consensus that Negroes generally languished at the opposite end of the scale of achievement. The best that can be said for TR’s paternalism is that it was good-natured and devoid of fear. His descriptions of his black safari employees in African Game Trails are affectionate, but almost always dismissive, e.g.: “Most of them were like children, with a grasshopper inability for continuity of thought and realization for the future.” (TR, Works, 4.120.) For a detailed analysis of the reasoning behind his letter to Joel Harris, see Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 167ff. For the agonized subsequent discussions of race policy in the provisional National Progressive Committee, ending in the decision to endorse TR’s attitude, see “Proceedings of the Provisional National Progressive Committee, 3–5 August 1912,” bound ts. (TRC).

  TR had no patience with blanket or “scientific” theories of race, describing Houston Stewart Chamberlain, xenophobic author of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), as “an able man whose mind is not quite sound,” and remarking of Joseph de Gobineau’s famous Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1855) that “to approach it for serious information would be much as if an albatross should apply to a dodo for a lesson in flight.” (TR, Works, 14.201, 464–65.) Racial extremism on the liberal side also irritated him, especially in regard to foreign policy: “I have some worthy friends in Boston appeal to me to give self-government to a number of individuals who regard themselves as overdressed when they wear breech-clouts.” (TR, Works, 15.548.)

  The only extended study of TR’s racial attitudes is Thomas G. Dyer’s Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge, La., 1980). It is flawed by presentism, and a failure to examine TR’s long and close relationship with Booker T. Washington—a subject worthy of a book in itself. For a more balanced analysis relevant to the politico-racial situation in 1912, see Gable, The Bull Moose Years, chap. 3, “Lily White Progressivism.” See also McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, chap. 6., and David W. Southern, The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900–1917 (Wheeling, W.V., 2005). Two contemporary essays on race by TR are self-revelatory: “The Negro in America,” and “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” in TR, Works, 14.185–202 and 412–18.

  49 Many of the Progressive Except where otherwise indicated, the following account is based on “First National Convention of the Progressive Party,” typed minutes (TRC), and daily reports in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and Atlanta Constitution, 5–8 Aug. 1912.

  50 Barbed wire no longer White, Autobiography, 483.

  51 The semi-religious glow The New York Times, 23 June 1912; Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 410. For TR’s appointment of Straus to his cabinet (“I want to show Russia and some other countries what we think of Jews in this country”), see Straus, Under Four Administrations, chap. 9.

  52 The record size Many states sent double or triple the number of their allotted delegates, dividing votes between them.

  53 They were scrubbed Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 40–41; White, Autobiography, 483–84.

  54 White was struck White, Autobiography, 483. A photograph reproduced in The New York Times, 7 Aug. 1912, dramatically shows how many women attended the convention. Woman suffrage was still considered a states’ rights issue in the early months of 1912. Only six states (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, California, and Washington) allowed women to vote. For TR’s belated, but unqualified conversion to the cause, see TR, Letters, 7.595–96.

  55 too fond of battleships TR, Letters, 7.594. TR, in turn, regretfully wrote of Miss Addams, “She is a disciple of Tolstoy.” Ibid., 7.833.

  56 She had agreed The Washington Post, 6 Aug. 1912; Chicago Tribune, 6 Aug. 1912. Jane Addams (1860–1935) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. She first became famous in the 1890s as the founder of Hull House, a pioneer social settlement in Chicago, and later as a writer and lecturer on social problems. For TR’s courtship of Miss Addams, and her subsequent role in the formation of the Progressive Party, see Katherine Joslin, Jane Addams (Urbana, Ill., 2004), 133ff.

  57 an opening prayer The devout quality of the convention was established by this prayer, which occupies seven full pages of the typed “Proceedings.”

  58 The former senator Atlanta Constitution and Boston Globe, 6 Aug. 1912; Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 408–9. O. K. Davis amusingly reports that TR had to be dissuaded from delivering his acceptance speech from the balcony of the Congress Hotel. Davis, Released for Publication, 320–26.

  59 in the days of McKinley This phrase forms the title of one of the great presidential biographies, by Margaret Leech (New York, 1959).

  60 His ego In his unpublished “Autobiography of an American Boy,” Beveridge wrote, “This miracle of the invisible powers in my behalf has strengthened the sureness of achievement which is so vital a part of me” (BEV). For a contemporary sketch (1910), see Dreier, Heroes of Insurgency, 103–22.

  61 “We stand for” “Pass Prosperity Around”: Speech of Albert J. Beveridge (Progressive Party pamphlet [AC]). Nervous at first, Beveridge seemed to be in competition with Warren Harding for alliterative mastery: “Parties exist for the people, not the people for the parties. Yet for years the politicians have made the people do the work of the parties instead of the parties doing the work for the people.” Speech scholars contemplating a monograph on the extraordinary fondness of politicians for the letter p should note TR’s own attraction to it. See Morris, The Rise of TR, 224–25.

  62 “It was not a convention” The New York Times, 6 Aug. 1912.

  63 Enthusiasm became ecstasy Except where otherwise indicated, this account of the second day of the Progressive convention is based on The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Atlanta Constitution, 7 Aug., and The Washington Post, 8 Aug. 1912. The survey of attendees derives mainly from Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 34–59. Black delegates attended on the second day of the convention not only from the Northern states TR had mentioned in his letter to Joel Harris, but also from Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. By the peculiar political standards of the time, these Southern states were considered to be “border” territory, with their electoral votes not yet wholly lost either to the Republican or Progressive parties. Lewis L. Gould to author, 2 Dec. 2008, AC.

  64 Two black Northern These same delegates had conspicuously boycotted the previous day’s proceedings, in a show of sympathy for their excluded Southern brothers. Atlanta Constitution, 6 Aug. 1912.

  65 Roosevelt led the singing Atlanta Constitution, 7 Aug. 1912.

  66 “I have been” The New York Times, 7 Aug. 1912.

  67 Senator Root’s mocking prophecy Quoted in Adams, Letters, 6.515.

  68 His smile betrayed A reporter sitting just below TR in the press box noted, “It was evident that the fanaticism had got past him, and that he himself had no realization of the intense Christian feeling in that crowd all over the hall.” (The New York Times, 7 Aug. 1912.) Richard Harding Davis wrote of the demonstration, “There was in it something inspired, spiritual, almost uncanny. It caught one by the throat.” Davis, “The Men at Armageddon,” Collier’s, 24 Aug. 1912.

  69 It said something Morris, The Rise of TR, 54–56; Hermann Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (Boston, 19
21), 473; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.509. For TR’s relationships with all these men, see Morris, The Rise of TR, passim.

  70 not even Alice Cordery, Alice, 229.

  71 The explosion somehow Atlanta Constitution, 7 Aug. 1912.

  72 Roosevelt’s address TR to KR, 12 Aug. 1912 (TRC); TR, Works, 19.376, 386. TR’s entire speech is reprinted in Works, 19.358–411.

  73 He dismissed TR, Works, 19.358. TR’s complaint about press bias was to become a leitmotif of his campaign from now on. In mid-August a researcher armed with a foot rule measured the coverage he and the Progressive agenda had in fact received, since the start of the month, in The New York Times and Sun. The total just for ten days was 2,148½ column inches, or something over 200,000 words, most of it front-page reportage under banner headlines. WHT or even WW would have been glad of half as much. The New York Times editorial, 18 Aug. 1912.

  74 The dead weight TR, Works, 19.372.

  75 new or revived federal agencies The genesis of the future Federal Trade and Securities Exchange Commissions, as well as the Social Security and Occupational Safety and Health administrations, may be traced back to these 1912 proposals by TR. He did not, however, suggest that the federal government should itself provide medical insurance. That was the responsibility of employers, and, on occasion, state governments.

  76 “I say in closing” TR, Works, 19.411.

  77 voices singing his name The Washington Post, 8 Aug. 1912.

  78 “Colonel,” Robins said Raymond Robins interview, n.d. (TRB).

  79 In another room Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 98–99.

  80 “Each one of those” Raymond Robins interview, n.d. (TRB). One of these planks, written by Amos Pinchot, tied the high cost of living to business, a view that TR rejected as “utter folly.” (Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” [diss.], 245.) The others were for prohibition, a single tax, and constitutional amendment by referendum.

  81 “Each one of those” Raymond Robins interview, n.d. (TRB).

  82 a compromise platform A sheaf of Perkins’s draft paragraphs, preserved in the Pforzheimer Collection subsection of TRC, shows that he and TR initially conceived of their platform as a Republican document, in the hope of victory at the GOP convention in June. Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 98–106, is an exhaustive account of the platform deliberations. See also Davis, Released for Publication, 328–36.

  83 “much the most important” TR, Letters, 8.1068. For the last-minute, behind-the-scenes story of how this document was assembled, only to have a confused Dean Lewis misrepresent it to the convention (nearly costing TR the support of George Perkins), see Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 98–106 and Davis, Released for Publication, 328–36.

  Historical Note: The Progressive Party platform for 1912 amounted to a redrafting, for practical campaign purposes, of TR’s 1910 New Nationalism program. Not until the Democratic platform of 1964 did any major party demand so many and such specific reforms. These were, in partial summary: direct primaries to nominate state, national, and presidential candidates, plus direct elections to the U.S. Senate; federal jurisdiction over national problems formerly treated as state problems; a universal minimum wage, and broader laws to protect, insure, and compensate abused or injured industrial workers; an eight-hour day work limit for women and juvenile employees, plus welfare benefits; facilitated organization of labor unions, and limitation of injunctions in labor disputes; farm relief; a more elastic currency; a downwardly revised, but still protective tariff; at least four nonpartisan regulatory commissions, with power over corporate pricing and all interstate business; further application of the initiative, referendum, and recall (but severely limited in application to judicial decisions); accelerated conservation and protection of natural resources, including a vast flood control program for the Mississippi River and its tributaries; development of Alaskan coal fields; woman suffrage; a national health service; federal income and graduated inheritance taxes; a two-battleships-per-year rearmament schedule; national highways; and a parcel post system.

  84 “There is no” The New York Times, 8 Aug. 1912.

  85 When Judge Lindsey Ogden (Utah) Examiner, 8 Aug. 1912.

  86 singing the Doxology Mansfield (Ohio) News, 8 Aug. 1912.

  CHAPTER 12: THERE WAS NO OTHER PLACE ON HIS BODY

  1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 31

  2 “In form, two thousand” Proceedings of the 15th RNC, 436.

  3 The more measured The New York Times, 7 Aug. 1912.

  4 Ray Stannard Baker Baker, notebook M, 17–20 (RSB).

  5 And at the lowest Robert Donovan, The Assassins (New York, 1955), 135, 137.

  6 “Of course I do not” TR to KR, 13 July 1912 (TRC). See also Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 155.

  7 Wilson was the 2-to-1 The Washington Post, 7 Aug. 1912.

  8 he hopped across the court The last words of this sentence are taken from Nicholas Roosevelt’s diary of 10 Aug. 1912. See Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 98–99.

  9 “He is a real” Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 25.26. For TR’s embrace of (and self-identification with) Bergson’s currently popular theory of élan vital, see TR, Works, 14.435 and passim.

  10 He had not been impressed William Starr Myers, ed., Woodrow Wilson: Some Princeton Memories (Princeton, N.J., 1946), 42–43.

  11 Wilson is a good man TR, Letters, 7.592.

  12 “I know it” The New York Times, 13 Aug. 1912.

  13 After his desperate Pringle, Taft, 818; The New York Times, 13 Aug. 1912. For WHT’s decision not to campaign actively, see Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 126ff.

  14 Taft knew that Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 694 and passim; Pringle, Taft, 82. “Ike” Hoover, the veteran White House usher, considered WHT to be, after Calvin Coolidge, the most self-centered of the nine presidents he had known. TR rated third. Hoover, Forty-Two Years, 232.

  15 “I have no” WHT quoted in Pringle, Taft, 823.

  16 What with Ted Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 60–61.

  17 By the time everybody Ibid., 62.

  18 After a few weeks Ibid., 61.

  19 One night after dinner Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 99.

  20 “Yes, yes!” Ibid.

  21 A more agitated EKR to ERD, n.d., ca. Aug. 1912 (ERDP); Cordery, Alice, 231–32.

  22 “I wish to goodness” EKR to ERD, n.d., ca. Aug. 1912 (ERDP).

  23 By the end of the month For Debs’s double challenge to TR and WW in the summer of 1912, see Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, chap. 5. TR made two brief campaign trips into New England during the second half of Aug., attracting large, enthusiastic crowds. In Providence, R.I., on the 16th he spoke on tariff and currency reform, and made what appears to have been the first use of a phrase that reentered the American political vocabulary 70 years later: “The Republican proposal is only to give prosperity to [wealthy industrialists] and then to let it trickle down.” The New York Times, 17 Aug. 1912.

  24 Wilson chose Dunkirk (N.Y.) Evening Observer and The New York Times, 16 Aug. 1912.

  25 340 pounds WHT admitted to this weight at the end of his presidential term. New York Times, 12 Dec. 1913.

  26 “As the campaign” WHT on 26 Aug. 1912, quoted in Pringle, Taft, 815.

  27 All of them stood The New York Times, 27 Aug. 1912.

  28 Woman suffrage was an issue The cover illustration of the pro-Wilson Harper’s Weekly, 17 Aug. 1912, showed TR shouting “Woman Suffrage Forever” through a megaphone, with a billboard proclaiming, “Great Vaudeville Act—The Call of the Wild.”

  29 small silver bull mooses Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 184. TR had previously (28–31 Aug.) undertaken a short campaign swing through New England. See Gould, Bull Moose, 41–51, for an important address in Vermont on the social-industrial aspects of Progressive policy.

  30 He intended to barnstorm TR’s itinerary is detailed day by day in the trip journal of George E. Roosevelt (TRC). The Colonel traveled with George and four other aides in a private car hitched to various public trains. Another private car, ch
artered by the press, was in turn hitched to his.

  31 “He looked, as usual” Baker, notebook M, 34–35 (RSB). TR’s speech is in Gould, Bull Moose, 51–56.

  32 A citizen of TR, Letters, 7.570–71; The New York Times, 13 July, 1 Aug. 1912; Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 273ff.; Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 190.

  33 a convenient code Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 141.

  34 “Friends,” he yelled Ibid., 175.

  35 “My fellow citizens” The New York Times, 10 Sept. 1912.

  36 gloved hands clapping Ibid.

  37 Two nights later Donovan, The Assassins, 136. According to the self-styled “written proclamation” of John Schrank, quoted in the New York Press, 15 Sept. 1912, the time of this vision was 1:30 A.M. on the 12th. For his earlier vision of McKinley and TR at the same hour on 15 Sept. 1901, see Morris, Theodore Rex, 17.