“ROOSEVELT’S RECANTATION REGARDED AS HIS POLITICAL DEATH WARRANT,” announced the World, while the Evening Post insisted the whole thing was a hoax and sent off a wire to Medora, in the Bad Lands, calling for a denial. The Times decided to say nothing of the reported statement, so certain were the editors that it was false.
“Theodore, beware of ambition!” observed the Daily Globe in Boston. The Evening Transcript speculated that the story was the work of “some bungling Western reporter” (a remark some readers of the Transcript probably considered redundant). “If Mr. Roosevelt’s remarks are reported aright,” declared the author of a letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser, “they are among the most startling effects of modern practical politics.”
The so-called repudiation from Medora was dated June 12, an enigmatic telegram saying, “To my knowledge had no interview for publication; never said anything like you report. May have said I opposed Blaine for public reasons not personal to myself.”
So cheered were the editors of the Boston Transcript by this news that they put out an extra edition.
On June 16 came another telegram, but again there was no telling where he stood on Blaine, whether he was bolting the party or not.
“Just saw my alleged St. Paul interview for the first time. It is wholly fictitious. I never was interviewed on this subject, and never said anything even approximately resembling what was reported.”
To the editors of the World it was all becoming wonderfully ludicrous.
The gallant young man rushed away from the Chicago convention full of heat and bitterness. Now that he has expanded his lungs with the rarefied air incident to the high altitudes of the earth and cooled his intellectual brow in the streams which flow down from regions of virgin snow he might confer a favor on mankind by simply saying explicitly whether he is for or against Blaine.
In Boston, meantime, the revolt had begun in no uncertain terms. A meeting of the Massachusetts Reform Club had been called at the Parker House the very next day after the nominations in Chicago. Blaine was denounced, and a committee was organized to work for his defeat in November. Charles W. Eliot and Theodore’s old classmate Josiah Quincy were principals in the movement. Most of those Theodore had known on the Harvard faculty were bolting the party (with the exception of Shaler, who was already a Democrat). Both James Russell Lowell and Richard H. Dana, his father’s two friends from the ’76 convention, were bolting.
In New York the Times ran columns of letters from Republicans who were joining the exodus. Schurz, Godkin, and the editors of the Times had already renounced Blaine, and so, too, by now had Curtis, who, in spite of what he said at Chicago and for all that the party had meant to him, was unable to go along with such a nominee. On June 14 Harper’s Weekly came out against Blaine. On July 5, in an editorial, Curtis put the magazine squarely behind Grover Cleveland, and when at Chicago the next week, the Democrats made Cleveland their candidate, the effect among influential Republicans exceeded anyone’s expectations. The staunchly Republican New York Times announced its support for Cleveland. Henry Ward Beecher was leaving the party. So was Mayor Seth Low of Brooklyn. So was Theodore’s senior partner in the publishing business, George Haven Putnam, who called the Republican nominations “a farce and an absurdity, not to say an anachronism.” Even J. Pierpont Morgan was bolting. And along with Curtis, Schurz, Godkin, Lowell, Dana—all those with whom the elder Theodore had worked with such verve and conviction in ’76—there was even added the name of Benjamin H. Bristow.
Henry Cabot Lodge, who continued to say, as he had at Chicago, that he would stand by the nominee, was being denounced by old friends and admirers as little better than a traitor. He was no longer invited to dinner. Some in Boston who had known him all their lives were refusing even to speak to him. “Mr. Lodge maintains that he has changed his mind,” remarked one man. “I call it not a change of mind but a change of soul.” Schurz, in a kindly letter of advice, urged Lodge to come to his senses.
You are a young man. You have the great advantage of affluent circumstances. You have the promise of an honorable and useful career before you. . . . The course you are now in danger of following . . . will unite you more and more in fellowship with . . . the ordinary party politicians. The more you try to satisfy them the less you will satisfy yourself.
“Whatever the result of the election, the parties will remain,” Lodge answered Schurz with cold logic. “By staying in the party I can be of use. By going out I destroy all the influence for power and good I may possess. . . . If I am to be banned because I vote according to what I believe . . . I will fight against such treatment with all my strength.”
Lodge said later that he and Theodore had made a pact before Chicago to stand by the nominee even if it was Blaine, which is precisely what Theodore had told the Chicago Tribune he would do, the first morning at the Grand Pacific. It was also what he had told the Boston Transcript he would do within an hour after Blaine was nominated. But the last week in June, Lodge received a letter from the Bad Lands dated the seventeenth. “I am absolutely ignorant of what has been said or done since the convention,” wrote Theodore, “as I have been away from all newspapers for ten days. I hope soon to be back when I will see you and decide with you as to what we can do.”
A day or so later a second letter reached Lodge. He was heading east in another week, Theodore wrote, “as I wish to see you at once. You are pursuing precisely the proper course; do not answer any assaults unless it is imperatively necessary; keep on good terms with the machine, and put in every ounce to win.” He was writing under certain difficulties, Theodore said, being in a cattleman’s hut and having just spent thirteen hours in the saddle. In a postscript he repeated again that he had not seen a newspaper since leaving Chicago.
3
Without question, the Chicago convention was one of the crucial events of Theodore’s life, a dividing line with numerous consequences. He had carried the fight against Blaine with all that was in him, and if he had lost, if, as he told Bamie, it had been “an overwhelming rout,” no one could fault him for not trying, and the impression he had made in this first appearance on the national political stage was phenomenal. He was still all of twenty-five years old; it had been his first national convention. Yet from the first day he had proved himself a force to reckon with, by friend or foe, and the attraction he had for newspaper attention was the kind every politician dreams of. He was a natural politician. He had a born genius for the limelight, for all the gestures and theatrics of politics. In his undersized, overdressed way he had presence. Unquestionably, he had nerve.
He understood the part reporters play and knew exactly how to play to them. He was wonderful copy, easy—a pleasure—to write about, however one felt toward him. Also, for many who wrote about him, there was the underlying excitement of discovery: here was somebody with a future. In his best “notices” he was portrayed as “fearless,” “courageous,” “manly,” “tireless,” “plucky and unyielding,” as “the most interesting” man on hand, the “young chief,” as “an earnest direct speaker, who will be listened to whenever he speaks.” The Chicago Tribune, a Blaine paper, had called him “brilliant” and lauded his gallantry, placing him alongside Curtis as a standard of moral rectitude and character. He had been “young Casabianca Roosevelt [who] ’stood on the burning deck whence all but him fled’...” The Chicago Times called him very simply “the most remarkable young politician of the day,” and then made the point that he had had to get where he had in politics despite his background. “The advantage of being a self-made man was denied him. An unkind fortune hampered him with an old and wealthy family.”
Those who had fought for Edmunds with him—Lodge, Andrew D. White, John D. Long—had been enormously impressed. Andrew D. White, the Cornell president, would remember the rest of his life this “first revelation of that immense pluck and vigor . . . nothing daunted him.”
Possibly the most fervent of all admirers through the week at Chicago had been George W
illiam Curtis, who at lunch one day at the Grand Pacific is said to have pushed back from the table, placed his napkin beside his plate, waited a few seconds, then responded as follows to a reporters question about “young Roosevelt.”
You’ll know more, sir, later; a deal more. . . . He has integrity, courage, fair scholarship, a love for public life, a comfortable amount of money, honorable descent, the good word of the honest. He will not truckle nor cringe, he seems to court opposition to the point of being somewhat pugnacious. His political life will probably be a turbulent one, but he will be a figure, not a figurehead . . . or, if not, it will be because he gives up politics altogether.
As important as anything, as time would show, was the bond formed with Lodge. Chicago marked the beginning of the first lasting male friendship Theodore had ever made outside the family; and like another friendship also formed at that same convention—between McKinley and Mark Hanna—the political consequences were to be far-reaching.
In some respects Lodge was an improbable choice. Eight years Theodore’s senior, he struck most people as unbearably superior and fastidious, cold, calculating, a man who appeared to find any but his own patrician kind extremely distasteful. But Lodge was also fiercely loyal to his friends. He had tremendous energy, wide-ranging interests, a keen mind. He was a scholar, wellborn, wealthy. He loved history and literature, long walks, horses, and Harvard University. He was a fellow member of the Porcellian. By 1884 he had already published five books and yet was ambitious for a political career, despite his obvious handicaps. (He was called “Lah-de-dah Lodge,” among other things, and the sound of his voice was once compared to the tearing of a bed sheet.) Furthermore, he liked Theodore and let Theodore know it. They were fellow spirits in many respects and the difference in age made Lodge something of the big brother Theodore had never had. “I can’t help writing you,” he would tell Lodge some years later in a letter from New York, “for I literally have no one here to whom to unburden myself; I make acquaintances very easily, but there are only one or two people in the world, outside my own family, whom I deem friends or for whom I really care.”
And beyond all that Lodge was a fighter. “I have never been able to work so well with anybody before,” Theodore would tell him.
So . . . he had been in the roughest political fight of his experience and though beaten badly he had fought in a way no one would forget or that he need ever be ashamed of. He had commanded attention. He had found a friend, given a speech before the largest crowd he had ever seen, heard one speech he thought brilliant, heard another by a blind man whose voice “rang like a trumpet” and swept the convention. He had seen the voice of the people in action and had been both awed and a little appalled. But he had also perceived that Arthur failed because, as he wrote Bamie, Arthur had “absolutely no strength with the people.” Probably, he had drawn from the experience the lesson that in politics “strength with the people” is what ultimately counts. He was glad to have been present, he also told her; it had been a “historic scene.”
Interestingly, neither he nor any of those who wrote about him at such length ever mentioned the tragedy of February or the burden of grief he carried.
But the overriding importance of the Chicago convention for Theodore was that it marked the point at which he chose—had to choose—whether to cross the line and become a party man, a professional politician. He made no formal announcement of his support for Blaine until he had seen Lodge that July, but from all he had already said it is clear he knew what he would do even before leaving Chicago; he only needed, as he later said, time to cool down and think things over. Like Lodge, he was opening himself to heavy abuse from friends and from those admiring members of the press whose favor counted so much to him. Like Lodge, he could be accused of gross ambition, of moral backsliding, of betraying his own high-minded kind. And such condemnation could be extremely painful. Still, as he had said in a letter to Bamie soon after leaving Chicago, Blaine had been the “free choice of the great majority” of Republicans. It had been a fair fight, and while he found Blaine repellent, there was something about stalking off, quitting the game because he lost, that was even more repellent, quite apart from whatever personal ambition he harbored. He had no sentimental attachment to majority rule. “It may be,” he told Bamie, “that ’the voice of the people is the voice of God’ in fifty-one cases out of a hundred; but in the remaining forty-nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, or, what is still worse, the voice of a fool.” But voice of God, devil, fool, whatever it was, he must abide by it, both out of some fundamental sense of fair play and out of plain determination to have a stake in political power. If he bolted, he knew, he would be finished, out of politics except in some chance or peripheral fashion. He would be an outsider, devoid of that “inside influence” he knew to be essential if he was ever to accomplish anything. He had arrived at the point where he must decide whether he was to be a “mornin’ glory” or the real thing.
A writer of the day, Joseph Bucklin Bishop, who kept close watch on Theodore’s career and became a later-day confidant, said that with the nomination of Blaine, Theodore confronted “what in many respects was the most serious crisis of his career. . . . He insisted upon deciding the question himself, and in his own way and time.”
Similarly, a kinsman, the author Nicholas Roosevelt (son of Cousin West), was to write years later, “After watching American party politics closely for more than half a century. I am of the opinion that if TR had run out on the party in 1884, his political career would have been finished then and there.”
Yet apart from the more obvious difficulties of the decision, there was the break it meant for Theodore with so much that his father had stood for. He was severing himself from his father’s approach to public service, deserting his father’s old friends, all the people his father had so admired. It was now, far more than when he entered the legislature, that he was taking the step his father would almost certainly have disapproved. Had Blaine or Conkling been nominated at Cincinnati in ’76, there is little doubt what his father would have done.
Two years before, in February 1882, Theodore had written what, in the context of his decision on Blaine, is a very important letter. It was addressed to an old friend and admirer of his father s, the noted philanthropist and reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell.
I honestly mean to act up here [in the Assembly] on all questions as nearly as possible as I think Father would have done, if he had lived. I thoroughly believe in the Republican Party when it acts up to its principles—but if I can prevent it I never shall let party zeal obscure my sense of right and decency. What my success as a politician may be I do not care an atom: but I do wish to be able to end my work here with an entirely light heart and clear conscience.
The most striking and appropriate example of what would most likely have happened to him, had he bolted, is the case of Seth Low. Low refused to support Blaine, maintaining he was not a Republican mayor but the mayor of all the people in Brooklyn. As a consequence he never again received the wholehearted backing of the Republican organization, and his political career never came to much.
Theodore spent three days in New York with Bamie and his child, then several days at Chestnut Hill with the Lees before going to Lodge’s summer home at Nahant on Boston’s North Shore. The two of them spent a warm Friday evening sitting on a porch looking at the sea and talking until quite late. The following day, Saturday, July 19. Theodore made his statement to the Boston Herald.
I intend to vote the Republican presidential ticket. While at Chicago I told Mr. Lodge that such was my intention; but before announcing it, I wished to have time to think the whole matter over. A man cannot act both without and within the party; he can do either, but he cannot possibly do both. . . . I went in with my eyes wide open to do what I could within the party; I did my best and got beaten; and I propose to stand by the result. . . .
I am by inheritance and by education a Republican; whatever good I have been able t
o accomplish in public life has been accomplished through the Republican Party; I have acted with it in the past, and wish to act with it in the future . . . I am going back in a day or two to my western ranches, as I do not expect to take part in the campaign this fall.
People like William Roscoe Thayer felt “dumbfounded.” “We thought of him as a lost leader,” Thayer remembered. Owen Wister was convinced Theodore had come under the maleficent influence of Lodge, “his evil genius.” At the State Street offices of Lee, Higginson and Company, where he was working as a clerk in the vaults, Wister overheard Henry Lee remark to George C. Lee, “As for Cabot Lodge, nobody’s surprised at him; but you can tell that young whippersnapper in New York from me that his independence was the only thing in him we cared for, and if he has gone back on that, we don’t care to hear anything more about him.”
In New York he was denounced as “a crank and a nuisance.”
Young men like Mr. Roosevelt owe all their force in politics not to party fidelity [wrote the Evening Post], but to popular confidence in their absolute integrity. . . . In fact, the function of such men is to stand firm against bursts of party folly or baseness, until the popular conscience has time to act. . . . There is no ranch or other hiding place in the world in which a man can wait for Blaine and the Mulligan letters to “blow over,” for they will never blow over until justice is done.
Alone of those who had bolted, George William Curtis admitted privately that Theodore, in staying with the party, had “played the game fairly.”
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