Roosevelt

by Brett Harper

  The expedition was intended to collect specimens for the Smithsonian Institution’s natural history museum, and all told Roosevelt brought back 11,400 specimens, ranging from elephants to insects to plants. Between them, he and Kermit shot seventeen lions, three leopards, seven cheetahs, nine hyenas, eleven elephants, ten buffalo, eleven black rhinoceros, nine white rhinos, along with 469 antelopes and other large herbivores, which didn’t count as big game and were usually eaten by the expedition. By the standards of the day, this wasn’t a large number for a year’s hunting; some hunters boasted of killing more than 1,000 elephants.

  Roosevelt surely heard about Taft’s great tragedy in the early days of his presidency; his wife Nellie suffered a stroke that left her temporarily paralyzed on the right side and her speech permanently impaired. Nellie would endure months of convalescence and years of only partly successful speech therapy and would never again function fully as first lady. Taft, distracted by her illness and lonely in the White House as she retreated to their summer home in Massachusetts, lost both presence and effectiveness.

  With this distraction, the new president took on a fight that Roosevelt had chronically avoided: tariff reform. Though the issue had the potential to split the Republican Party, it could no longer be delayed. The effect of the tariff on prices, particularly for Western farmers, miners, and consumers, was too damaging. Taft had insisted the party call for a special session of Congress to revise the tariff, and in the spring of 1909, he summoned the lawmakers.

  Taft faced strong GOP opposition in both houses, and reporters predicted he could win only if an outburst of public opinion such as those that had pushed through railroad rate reform and the Pure Food and Drug Act carried the legislation through. The tariff hawks in Congress were headed by two formidable opponents for Taft: Senator Nelson Aldrich, a familiar nemesis, and House Speaker Joe Cannon, regarded as the canniest politician in the country.

  Both Aldrich and Cannon proceeded to manipulate the president. Cannon sent emissaries to assure Taft that he favored tariff reform and would pass a bill that, while “not perfect,” would be “the best revenue law ever written.” Both men advised Taft to keep his distance from the bill until it reached the final conference committee stage of passage, at which point he could help shape its final form by threatening to veto an unsatisfactory measure.

  Through months of hearings and debate in both houses, Aldrich spent hours reassuring Taft that the bill he wanted would come to a vote. He promised Taft his concerns would carry great weight in the conference committee, and said as soon as the tariff was out of the way, he would push to pass the rest of Taft’s program, including laws on conservation, the trusts, interstate commerce, and a postal savings system.

  The net effect of the maneuvering was a whittling away of the reformers’ goals. Taft, abandoning his hands-off stance, finally encouraged progressive Republicans to fight. When the conference committee work commenced, as Aldrich and Cannon endeavored to reduce the cuts that remained, the bill’s objective got lost in the details. Taft, speaking out for tariff cuts in general and specifically cuts on oil, coal, and hides, later issued an ultimatum threatening to veto a bill that did not cut duties on gloves and hosiery and end the tariff on raw materials. When the conferees agreed to that demand, the president happily signed the bill into law. Progressives remained dissatisfied, but the president maintained it was a considerable improvement and the best bill possible.

  Then the president undermined his cause and cemented his image as a weak chief executive by giving a long speech touting the bill and the virtues of compromise and ending with a ringing dose of hyperbole: “I am bound to say that I think the Payne tariff bill is the best bill that the Republican Party ever passed.” In the ensuing fireball of criticism, a New York Times comment stood out: “Theodore Roosevelt’s good fortune has not deserted him. . . . If he still cherishes an ambition to return to the White House, the path has been opened to him by President Taft.”

  There’s no record that the clipping reached Roosevelt in his trek through British East Africa, the Belgian Congo, and the Nile valley, or that he took any interest in the tariff battle. But he was involved in the next storm to swirl around his successor, and it was this that opened the rift that was to permanently divide the two allies.

  The problem had its roots in the waning days of Roosevelt’s administration, when Roosevelt warned the nation of a looming threat taking shape in the hydroelectric power industry, where General Electric and Westinghouse were leading a plot to monopolize water rights in the Western states. “I esteem it my duty,” the then president said, “to use every endeavor to prevent this growing monopoly, the most threatening which has ever appeared, from being fastened upon the people of this nation.”

  With his close friend and forestry chief Gifford Pinchot and Interior Secretary James Garfield, Roosevelt devised a way to eliminate the threat. Bypassing the need for Congressional authority, Garfield used executive orders to protect more than 1.5 million acres on sixteen rivers across the West. Since there wasn’t time to make detailed surveys, the wholesale taking didn’t pretend to safeguard actual sites for power plants. Roosevelt said he had acted in the activist tradition of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, in the belief that a president should act to protect the people by any means necessary “unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.”

  Taft, with his judicial temperament, considered the move unconstitutional. While he sympathized with Roosevelt’s conservation goals and liked both Garfield and Pinchot, he saw them as fanatics justifying dubious means by citing glorious ends. So, in building his Cabinet, he replaced Garfield with Richard Ballinger, a lawyer and former judge who promptly restored most of Garfield’s land withdrawals. Ballinger said he would order proper surveys of the disputed acreage and then ask Congress for legislation to protect the actual sites of prospective power plants.

  Conservationists argued the sites would be taken over by monopolists before the surveys were finished. Pinchot, whose Forestry Service technically reported to the Agriculture Department, began a crusade against Ballinger that lasted for more than a year and included two murky scandals involving selling land to large corporations, charges and countercharges of illegal lobbying for the coal industry and others, and a full-blown Congressional investigation. Taft backed Ballinger, who was vindicated, but the president was losing the public-relations battle; the long scandal left the impression that the administration had something to hide and that Ballinger was working for the robber barons. Knowing he would risk his friendship with Roosevelt if he fired Pinchot, Taft hesitated for months. But with the scandal consuming his administration and the forestry chief openly insubordinate, Taft dismissed him.

  When a runner brought the news to the Congo, Roosevelt was outraged. “I cannot believe it,” he wrote Pinchot, and though he didn’t criticize Taft, he invited Pinchot to meet him in Europe to discuss the situation. When they met on the Italian Riviera after Roosevelt left Africa in April 1910, Pinchot brought letters from his fellow progressive Republicans, all lamenting Taft’s record in office, his failure to recognize the machinations of Aldrich and Cannon, and his squandering of the opportunity Roosevelt had left him to make progress on the issues they cared about.

  When Roosevelt returned to America in June, he wasn’t ready to denounce his successor and protégé. He believed there still was a chance for Taft to redeem himself. Roosevelt wrote Henry Cabot Lodge: “Everybody believes him to be honest, and most believe him to be doing the best he knows how.” Indeed, Taft was regaining political ground; after the tariff battle, Congress had acted on nearly all his legislative priorities, including increased control of rail rates, a new Bureau of Mines, and a postal savings system. Taft’s strategy of compromise had succeeded, but the insurgent Republicans remained distant; none attended Taft’s final bill-signing ceremony.

  Roosevelt’s homecoming added new speculation to the political landscape. He was more popular than when he left
for Africa, Ray Baker wrote, “the most interesting, amusing, thrilling figure in America.” Roosevelt told the press he would remain silent for two months, and even then, he wouldn’t make any political speeches. Within a week, though, he signed up to promote New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes’ push for a direct presidential primary election to replace nomination by party conventions.

  Despite repeated overtures from the White House, Roosevelt was developing ill will toward Taft. During Nellie Taft’s illness, Alice Roosevelt and Nick Longworth felt they had been slighted; they had received several dinner invitations, but in Edith’s absence, Alice said she should have been asked to greet the guests at the head of the receiving line. Edith Roosevelt also complained that her eighteen-year-old daughter Ethel hadn’t been sufficiently singled out at a White House garden party. And Roosevelt complained that Taft, in a post-election letter thanking Roosevelt for all he had done to help his career, had equated Roosevelt with Taft’s brother Charley, who had unstintingly donated money whenever Taft needed it. The perceived slight rankled Roosevelt.

  Roosevelt had refused Taft’s invitations to visit the White House, pretending that it would be somehow improper. The two presidents met instead in June at Woodbury Point, Taft’s summer White House in Beverly, Massachusetts, in a strained hour-long visit with Lodge and their wives; Roosevelt declined any tete-a-tete with Taft, filling the time with anecdotes about his dealings with the crowned heads of Europe. When reporters asked when he planned to visit again, he said coolly, “I don’t know that I shall.”

  Roosevelt made the direct primary his personal cause, only to be defeated by conservatives in the New York Senate. Smarting, he undertook a three-week speaking tour through sixteen states. He was consulting with William Allen White and Gifford Pinchot, among others, and giving ever-more-radical speeches, culminating in one titled “The New Nationalism,” in which he promoted presidential power as the central pillar of democracy and called on the judiciary to hold property interests second to human welfare. He demanded a panoply of liberal laws, from the direct primary and corporate taxes to stronger child-labor laws and a ban on corporate political contributions.

  The speech horrified Taft and put Roosevelt at the head of the progressive Republican insurgency. Nonetheless, Roosevelt was trying to hold the party together; in the midterm elections that fall, he campaigned for both progressives and conservatives, backing both direct primaries and the traditional GOP tariff. But the effort proved a fiasco. Both his causes and his candidates were almost all beaten, and the Democratic landslide was laid at Roosevelt’s feet. If he had kept his promise to avoid politics, said the Literary Digest, “defeat would have come to his party,” but there would have been “a great cry for him as the only compeller of victory” in the 1912 presidential race. Despondent, Roosevelt began to think his career was over. “The American people feel a little tired of me,” he wrote. When a journalist rose to end an interview at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt stopped him: “Don’t go. The time will come when only a few friends like you will come out to see me here.”

  He didn’t “care a rap” about his unpopularity, Roosevelt maintained; it was “bound to come.” If he were ever to come back into public favor, he would make the most of it, but if not, he could make his peace. But as he began a six-week tour of the Southwest, arranged long before the midterm disaster, he fretted over how he would be received. It revived his spirits when huge crowds turned out as glad as ever to see him.

  Robert LaFollette, now a Wisconsin senator and a leader of the GOP insurgents, had organized a Progressive Federation of Publicists and Editors, and he invited Roosevelt, who had accepted the title of contributing editor at Outlook magazine, to join. Roosevelt, who considered LaFollette a bit of a radical, responded that he supported the league’s objectives and would endorse it, but he wouldn’t become a member. After the midterm elections, he was “very anxious not to seem to take part prominently in any political movement.” Nevertheless, he was keeping his options open. When the Associated Press reported that he had endorsed Taft for the 1912 race, Roosevelt first said, “I have made no such statement to the Associated Press or any paper. That is all I have to say.” But in the next few days, increasingly irked, he called the report “an unqualified falsehood” and then “outrageous,” keeping the story alive.

  Then the colonel, as Roosevelt had been called since his return from Africa, widened the breach by denouncing a favorite Taft project, a proposed treaty committing the United States, Great Britain, and France to binding arbitration to settle any disputes that might come between them. With all his old belligerence, Roosevelt wrote that “no self-respecting nation” would give up its right to make war for national honor; it would be like watching a man slap your wife and going to a referee to adjudicate the insult. There are far worse things than war, he argued: “No man is fit to live unless he is ready to quit life for adequate cause.” After that broadside, the Senate would consent to the treaty only after it was watered down to insignificance, and it was never ratified.

  Roosevelt’s appraisals of Taft ranged from patronizing to scathing. “I am really sorry for Taft,” he said at one point. “I am sure he means well, but he means well feebly, and he does not know how! He is utterly unfit for leadership, and this is a time when we need leadership.” As Roosevelt saw it, Taft insulted him when he filed an antitrust suit against the U.S. Steel trust. The suit’s centerpiece was the merger with Tennessee Coal and Iron, the last-ditch deal that Roosevelt had approved to quell the Panic of 1907, and headlines screamed accordingly that “Roosevelt Was Deceived.” As The Philadelphia Record put it, “Mr. Taft has kicked him on the shins and hauled him into the witness box for cross-examination.” Furious, Roosevelt charged Taft with hypocrisy, claiming he had backed the merger at the time. He attacked Taft’s antitrust policy as a misguided assault on corporate size alone.

  The colonel was inching ever closer to challenging Taft for the nomination. LaFollette had already announced his candidacy, and Roosevelt thought the radical senator couldn’t and shouldn’t win. Meanwhile, his supporters were encouraging him to declare. In January 1912, he told seven governors who had urged him to run that if they would frame the request in a formal letter, he would grant it. Most of LaFollette’s backers defected to Roosevelt.

  Since the conservative bosses still controlled the majority of the convention delegates, Roosevelt knew his only hope of being nominated would be to expand the number of direct primaries, which numbered only six as the year began. He pushed for the cause and managed to add seven states to the roster. But he lost crucial primaries in North Dakota and New York before picking up eight of the next eleven primary states, including California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Taft’s own state of Ohio. The campaign grew increasingly bitter and personal, with Taft accusing Roosevelt of egotism and the colonel calling the president a “puzzlewit” and a “fathead.” The spectacle, chided The New York Times, “should bring a blush of shame to the cheek of every American. . . . We are no longer a people, but a mob.”

  The primaries gave Roosevelt considerable momentum heading into the Chicago convention in June, but once there, the conservative bosses stayed in charge. Of 254 disputed delegate seats, they awarded 235 to Taft. Roosevelt made a dramatic and unprecedented trip to the convention, announcing that “I’m as fit as a bull moose.” Denouncing his opponents as thieves and frauds, he made what some considered the best speech of his career, with its ringing peroration: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!” But for all the drama, the occasional brawls on the convention floor, and the frantic maneuvering of his backers, he was unable wrest enough delegates from Taft. Despite Roosevelt’s call for his delegates to boycott the vote, Taft was nominated on the first ballot.

  Even before the loss, Roosevelt’s supporters left the convention for a nearby hall to organize a new national party. They called it the National Progressive Party, but it would be known as the Bull Moose Party, and there was never any doub
t as to who would be its candidate.

  There was equally little doubt that the odds were against both factions of the newly split GOP that November, particularly when Democrats nominated liberal New Jersey governor, Woodrow Wilson. “The only question now,” said New York Republican Senator Chauncey Depew, “is which corpse gets the most flowers.” Nonetheless, Roosevelt whipped his new party together, worked to develop its platform, and campaigned in its cause. His speaking tour covered forty states, with three or four speeches and countless whistle-stop talks every day in addition to dinners, lunches, and campaign meetings. As always, his energy and charisma drew immense, adoring crowds.

  Characteristically, as the campaign heated up, the colonel grew increasingly combative. His ideology also grew sharper and more autocratic; he dismayed many of his associates with a proposal that any law derived from a judge’s interpretation should be subject to popular recall. It was “foolish to talk of the sanctity of a judge-made law,” he said, especially when such judgments were often split: “If there must be a decision by a close majority, then let the people step in and let it be their majority that decides.” Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root, among many others, were appalled at this trampling of the Constitution, but Roosevelt held his position. “The Constitution was made for the people, not the people for the Constitution,” he said.

  Wilson, who had hoped to make a dignified campaign of a few reasoned speeches, was forced into two extended trips of his own. His quiet eloquence was no match for Roosevelt’s fist-thumping oratory but was thoroughly suited to convey complex ideas and beliefs. He answered one of Roosevelt’s jabs with a deft quip of his own: “Suppose you choose a leader of the third party as president. Don’t you think he will be pretty lonely? Not that he’ll mind, because I believe he finds himself rather good company.”