Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  As an honorary member of the Gang, which operated out of the White House attic, the President was capable of considerable mischief himself. But when Q’s guerrilla activities threatened national security, he did not hesitate to exercise his authority as Commander-in-Chief. One such occasion was the Battle of the Guidon, waged on the South Lawn between two divisions of the Gang, respectively led by Q and Taffy.

  The property office of the War Department having condemned a moth-eaten silk artillery pennant, Company Q decided to fight Company T for possession of it. Whichever side held the colors for three minutes (Q, like his father, was an obsessive clock-watcher) would win the privilege of dictating Gang activities for the rest of the afternoon. Taffy (like his father a capable deployer of military matériel) staked the guidon about five feet from the nozzle of a hose, the strategic significance of which Q did not at first appreciate.

  During the ensuing battle, Taffy, by far the largest combatant, maintained his grasp of the flagstaff and ordered an aide, Edward “Slats” Stead, to spin a concealed tap. Q and his force of three men were blasted head over heels in the resultant gush of water. Enraged, Q issued a counterorder (“Keep it up! Keep it up! I’m going to sinister this, immejitly!”) and disappeared. Suddenly, the gush lost its force. As the spray cleared, Q was revealed in possession of a fire ax, with which he had sliced the hose into several sections. His triumph was forestalled by a stentorian shout from the West Wing, and the President came charging through the Rose Garden, coattails flying.

  TR (panting heavily) Too late! Too late, by George! Quentin!—I mean Georgie Washington—come here with your i-n-c-r-i-m-i-n-a-t-i-n-g hatchet! In the heat of battle, many acts, which would not be c-o-u-n-t-e-n-a-n-c-e-d at other times, may be excusable—or at least, subject to sym-pa-thet-ic in-ter-pre-ta-tion; of course you understand that, boys?

  Q Sure. You mean that’s the reason why I did it? I did it, because something had to be done, immejit-ly—

  TR That’s e-x-a-c-t-l-y it! The point is always to do something quickly, because if you don’t, the other fellow will.

  Charles Evans Hughes, whose candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination had never recovered from Roosevelt’s surprise attack in January, could vouch for this advice, along with Senator Foraker, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and President Marroquín of Colombia. But the President was not finished with his son:

  TR You may be wrong—you were here—but you have, at least, i-n-i-t-i-a-t-e-d action. When the action is wrong, you must admit it, and correct it by some further action—

  Q (looking at the severed hose) I don’t see how this can be corrected.

  TR Only by an entirely new garden-hose. It was Government property, still is, but also, is no longer. You cannot imagine the difficulties involved, and the things required to be done, in order to replace it. It will even cost money, part of that which I am earning—or was earning, when interrupted by a despatch regarding the progress of this war, and left hurriedly for the field—

  Q Well, of course you’re right; but we’ve learned our lesson, you know—

  TR We? Don’t you mean yourself? And what have you learned?

  Q Not to cut up garden-hoses.

  TR And not to use fire-axes on anything but a fire—

  Q (with a touch of wistfulness) We’re not so likely to have a fire.

  TR Not with all this water around! You escape, Quentin, only because of the extenuating circumstances arising out of the heat of battle.

  With that, he turned on his heel and marched back to the Executive Office.

  To adults, as well as Gang members, Q was a freakish duplication of his father, right down to the juvenile asthma and queer, prudish chivalry. (When classmates giggled at a girl’s up-folded dress, he yanked it down, trembling with anger.) He had the same physical courage, clarity of perception, and ability to concentrate totally on any task at hand. Yet, more than any of the other Roosevelt children except Alice—who in any case had a different mother—he had a large personality of his own. Henry Adams found him fascinating, as had Mark Hanna.

  Q was imaginative enough to withdraw, periodically, into daydreams that seemed to elevate him in an almost physical sense. He loved heights, and the eagle’s-eye perception that height endows. The famous MacMillan Commission models of Washington thrilled him. “Look down on the White House, as if you were a god! How small it looks.… You could drop a pebble on it and crush it, together with the p-i-g-m-y President and the State-War-Navy Department, too, by mistake!”

  The last two words were an indication of Quentin Roosevelt’s essentially kindly nature. Like his father, he had an aggressive urge to hurl bolts from above. Unlike his father, he thought about the consequences.

  TO THE RATHER less aggressive Kermit Roosevelt, the President wrote, “I have two first-rate maps of the part of Africa we are to go to.”

  For some time he had been thinking of taking Kermit, who had just graduated from Groton, on a hunting trip after William Howard Taft (or William Jennings Bryan?) succeeded to the Presidency. He knew himself well enough to know that he would want to reassume control of the government (if necessary, at the head of a company of cavalry), within weeks of either man’s inauguration. The stability of the country, and of his own blood pressure, might best be preserved if he withdrew to an environment as remote as possible from Washington. Newfoundland and Alaska had been presented as possibilities; but during the last few months, after a dinner with the African explorer Carl Akeley, Roosevelt had become obsessed with the idea of conducting a marathon nine-month safari through British East Africa and the uplands of the Nile.

  He tried hard to pretend to Edith, when she came back from her cruise, that the trip was merely a pipe dream that could easily blow away. But to Kermit, he gave a more concrete impression:

  I think I shall get a double-barrelled 450 cordite, but shall expect to use almost all the time my Springfield and my 45-70 Winchester. I shall want you to have a first-class rifle, perhaps one of the powerful new model 40 or 45 caliber Winchesters. Then it may be that it would be a good thing to have a 12-bore shotgun that could be used with solid ball.… It is no child’s play going after lion, elephant, rhino and buffalo.

  AS HE WROTE, the Republican herd of delegates, now overwhelmingly pledged to Taft, began to converge like slow wildebeests on Chicago. ROOSEVELT STAMPEDE STOPPED ran a gratifying headline in the Washington Evening Star. The body copy, however, allowed that anything could still happen when they met head-to-head.

  “I know that the President does not want the nomination and will not accept it,” Congressman Charles B. Landis of Indiana was quoted as saying. “Of course, if the convention should nominate him and then adjourn, he would have to take it.”

  The ironic secret—which would have provoked the herd to a horizon-filling rout, if carried on any breeze—was that Taft did not want the nomination either. As always, when strong people around him felt strongly (Roosevelt, Mrs. Taft, Charles P. Taft, even young Taffy), he went along. His heart alone protested. A few days before the convention, he said to Senator Cullom, “If your friend Chief Justice Fuller should retire, and the President should send me a commission as Chief Justice, I would take it now.”

  The hour was too late for such fantasies. At latest count, Taft had 563 delegates, Knox 68, and Hughes 54. One estimate of Taft’s strength went even higher, to more than six hundred delegates. There was no question as to whose popularity, whose policies, whose rhetoric, whose patronage, and whose mastery of press relations had pumped up this formidable total. Reluctant or not, Taft could hardly avoid being seen as the inevitable successor of an irresistible party leader. The giant airship that Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was readying for flight at Friedrichshafen, Germany, was no more shaped, stressed, powered, and dirigible.

  Helen Taft’s embarrassment about her husband’s debt to the President was correspondingly acute. She wished he could be a candidate in his own right, and resented everything Roosevelt had done to help him, while dreading tha
t her husband might yet suffer the indignity of having that support withdrawn.

  On Tuesday, 16 June, the Convention opened at the Chicago Coliseum, where Theodore Roosevelt had been so triumphantly nominated four years before. Taft remained in Washington, headquartered in his office at the War Department, while the President worked in the West Wing, just a few dozen yards away. Both offices kept in constant telegraphic touch with floor managers in Chicago, and with each other by telephone and messenger.

  At first, these communications were frequent, as a dispute about the use of injunctions in strike situations threatened the integrity of the party platform. But after Roosevelt and Taft agreed on a compromise plank, not at all to the satisfaction of the American Federation of Labor, the two power centers spoke less and less. Almost imperceptibly, a sense of separation began to develop between them.

  The proceedings in the Coliseum were routine through Wednesday afternoon, when Henry Cabot Lodge, speaking as permanent chairman, described Theodore Roosevelt as “the best abused and most popular man in the United States today.” This remark touched off a forty-nine-minute demonstration, nineteen minutes longer than the historic bedlam that had followed William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896. Twelve thousand throats, including that of an ecstatic Alice Longworth, joined in roars of “Four more years! Four more years!” The enormous hall, notorious for its muffled acoustics, seemed unable to hold any more noise. Lodge’s black gavel rose and fell as if it were the only soundless thing. Toy bears bobbed and bowed to further shouts: “We want Teddy! We want Teddy!”

  As soon as his voice became audible, Lodge moved to forestall what looked like an incipient stampede. “That man is no friend to Theodore Roosevelt, and does not cherish his name and fame, who now from any motive, seeks to urge him as a candidate for the great office which he has finally declined.” Lodge could not help sounding oracular. But his reproof calmed the convention for the rest of the session.

  Joseph Bucklin Bishop, the professional journalist, sycophant, and anti-Semite whom Roosevelt had appointed Secretary of the Panama Canal Commission, happened to be in Washington the following morning. He visited the Executive Office around eleven o’clock and found the President in the midst of yet another attempt to control fanatic third-termers in Chicago. Roosevelt never minded being observed at work, so Bishop stayed to watch and record as telegrams flashed back and forth.

  The action in Chicago seemed to be off the floor, while speakers began to drone the nominations of Taft and his six rivals: Knox, Fairbanks, Foraker, Cannon, LaFollette, and Hughes. Private messages urged Roosevelt to issue another disclaimer, lest he be added to the list. He saw no reason for a man of honor to repeat himself, but was worried enough to ask for advice. Bishop persuaded him that the precautionary letter he had already issued was explicit enough.

  At 1:30, the President took lunch on the South Portico with Edith, Ethel, and Quentin. Bishop and another guest joined them. The grounds were already lush with premature summer, after the loveliest spring Roosevelt could recall in Washington. Only the linden trees remained in scented bloom. Nine hundred contentious Republicans determining who might sit here in a year’s time could have been a million miles away, except for further telegrams of appeal, and further, increasingly annoyed presidential refusals.

  Bishop remained at the White House until around 4:00, then crossed over to the War Department to see his boss. Taft sat calmly with Mrs. Taft—not so calm—while Taffy kept scuttling in from an anteroom with slips from Chicago. Each arrived promptly enough to describe the progress of the speeches almost cheer by cheer. When at last Taft’s name was announced, the telegrams tabulated the loudness and length of the ensuing ovation.

  “I only want it to last more than forty-nine minutes,” Helen Taft said.

  She was denied her wish. The demonstration was over in less than half an hour. Oratory resumed for other candidates. Then, during a tribute to LaFollette, the President of the United States was mentioned. Taffy came in with a wire saying that the convention had “exploded.” Senator Lodge was trying, and failing, to restore order; a huge American flag with Roosevelt’s face on it had been unfurled on the platform. Mrs. Taft turned white, and sat in silence. Taft tapped the arm of his chair, whistling softly. Further wires reported that the flag was being circulated round the floor, amid even greater uproar. But Lodge, determined to restore order, was proceeding with the roll call of states. After about twenty-two minutes, the hubbub abated, Georgia’s declaration was heard, and the convention calmed. By 5:22 P.M., the delegates had registered their choice. Taft was nominated for President of the United States by a vote of 702 to 68 for Knox, 67 for Hughes, 58 for Cannon, 40 for Fairbanks, 25 for LaFollette, and a paltry 16 for Foraker. By motion of Senator Penrose, the nomination was made unanimous, and the color returned to Helen Taft’s high cheekbones.

  AFTERWARD, WHEN CONGRESSMAN James S. Sherman of New York had been announced for Vice President, there were the usual sotto voce recriminations among those cheated of glory. Charles Evans Hughes huffed, through his wealth of beard, that he had gotten a 2:00 A.M. telegram from a White House intermediary, asking him in the names of both Roosevelt and Taft to accept the vice-presidential nomination, along with a substantial cash bonus. He had of course refused. LaFollette complained about the President’s secret manipulation of the entire proceedings: “No administration in the history of this government ever gave a more flagrant example of political control of delegates than was brazenly flaunted in the face of the public at the Convention of 1908.”

  LaFollette was especially disturbed by Taft’s choice of “Sunny Jim” Sherman, a big, bluff conservative widely seen as a stooge for Speaker Cannon. All observers were agreed, however, that the Republican ticket, at five hundred pounds and counting, was the heaviest package ever offered to American voters.

  “THERE IS A LITTLE hole in my stomach,” Q remarked to his father on the day after the convention, “when I think of leaving the White House.”

  Roosevelt maintained a cheerful attitude over Taft’s huge win, but when writing to intimates, such as Nannie Lodge, he could not avoid imparting a similar wistfulness. “Four more years” had been so urgently, so almost compellingly, offered him, not once but day after day—years in which he could without doubt accomplish the most far-reaching reforms since Reconstruction. Declining that opportunity had, as always with him, been a matter of moral compulsion:

  It was absolutely necessary that any stampede for me should be prevented, and that I should not be nominated.… If I had accepted, my power for useful service would have forever been lessened, because nothing could have prevented the wide diffusion of the impression that I had not really meant what I had said, that my actions did not really square with the highest and finest code of ethics—and if there is any value whatever in my career, as far as my countrymen are concerned, it consists in their belief that I have been both an efficient public man, and at the same time, a disinterested public servant.

  Ray Stannard Baker stopped by to see the President that evening, and found him in a rare reflective mood: “Well, I’m through now. I’ve done my work.”

  They talked until midnight. Baker suggested that the American people might not be through with him, and might be clamoring for his return to the White House in four years’ time.

  “No, revolutions don’t go backwards,” Roosevelt said. He seemed tired, and his voice had a note of sad finality. “New issues are coming up. I see them. People are going to discuss economic issues more and more: the tariff, currency, banks. They are hard questions, and I am not deeply interested in them: my problems are moral problems, and my teaching has been plain morality.”

  He stayed in Washington only long enough to accept Taft’s resignation as Secretary of War, along with his profuse thanks and vows of obligation. They agreed that Luke Wright, a former Ambassador to Japan and coauthor of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, should be given charge of the War Department. As to other members of the Cabin
et, Taft said, in the flood of his gratitude, that he saw no reason why they should not continue to serve if he was elected President.

  The President, delighted, relayed this information to all concerned. “He and I view public questions exactly alike,” he wrote George Otto Trevelyan. “In fact, I think it is very rare that two public men have ever been so much at one in all the essentials of their public beliefs.”

  On 20 June, he left town for Oyster Bay. Taft headed in the opposite direction to work on his acceptance speech in Hot Springs, Virginia.

  FOUR DAYS LATER, Grover Cleveland died. On 10 July, delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, nominated William Jennings Bryan for President. While doing so, they proved that their lungs were more leathery than those of Roosevelt’s puny claque in Chicago, as they cheered the Commoner for an hour and twenty-eight minutes.

  Edith was not impressed. She had met Bryan at the Governors’ Conference and decided that American voters had been right in rejecting him for the presidency twice already. “A trifle too fat and oily for the fastidious,” she wrote her sister-in-law.

  Oily or not, Bryan was by no means unattractive to voters. He was an orator of legendary eloquence, unlike Taft, whose platform manner was awkward and gaffe-prone. (The Grand Army of the Republic had not appreciated his reminder, on Memorial Day, that General Grant had had a drinking problem.) Bryan, a genuine man of the people, was able to empathize with his audiences “one on one,” whereas Taft the judge manqué always sounded as if he was handing down majority opinions.