Taft even complained about being unable to lose weight.
Roosevelt had long been aware that the President lacked confidence. Uxorious and inordinately susceptible to guidance from his brothers Henry and Charles, Taft was always looking for approval. But this whining note was unbecoming for a chief executive. It did not augur well for the program of progressive reform he was supposed to have consolidated and extended. Taft took credit for “a real downward revision” of tariff rates, laws to improve labor safety and bolster postal savings, and a conservation bill giving the Department of the Interior increased powers of land withdrawal. But he wrote more convincingly about rising prices, opposition in Congress, and a hostile press. He thought there was a real possibility that the GOP would lose its House majority in the fall, and the White House in 1912.
In that case, Taft stated, Senators La Follette of Wisconsin, Cummins and Dolliver of Iowa, Bristow of Kansas, Clapp of Minnesota, Beveridge of Indiana, and Borah of Idaho—Midwestern insurgents to a man—would be responsible. “[They] have done all in their power to defeat us.” Whether by “us” the President meant himself and his administration, or himself and Roosevelt as a continuum, was unclear.
He mentioned in passing that it had been his idea to send the South Carolina to New York “and give you a salute from her batteries.”
Roosevelt sensed that he was being coerced. He replied on 20 June with a letter that began and ended affectionately, but contained one paragraph of startling coldness:
Now, my dear Mr. President, your invitation to the White House touches me greatly, and also what Mrs. Taft wrote Mrs. Roosevelt. But I don’t think it well for an ex-President to go to the White House, or indeed to go to Washington, except when he cannot help it. Sometime I shall have to go to Washington to look over some of the skins and skulls of the animals we collected in Africa, but I thought it would be wisest to do it when all of political Washington had left.
Having thus relegated Taft to a level of less consequence than zoological specimens, Roosevelt went with his family to attend the wedding of Ted and Eleanor in New York.*
TWO DAYS LATER, emerging from the office of Charles Scribner’s Sons, on Fifth Avenue, he was mobbed by a crowd so overexcited that mounted policemen had to ride in and free him. “They wanted to carry me on their shoulders,” he told his sister Corinne. Gone was the frank adoration that had touched him during his parade. “It represented a certain hysterical quality that boded ill for my future. That type of crowd, feeling that kind of way, means that in a very short time they will be throwing rotten eggs at me.”
A dinner in his honor that night at Sherry’s, the most exclusive restaurant in the city, also failed to inspire him. The evening’s proceedings (printed on rag paper with illustrations hand-colored by Maxfield Parrish, bound in soft calfskin, and stamped with the Roosevelt crest) seemed to warrant a major statement. But his only reference to his future was cryptic, and disappointing to many guests. “I am like Peary at the North Pole,” he said, comparing himself to America’s other celebrity of the moment. “There is no way for me to travel but south.”
As soon as he returned home, political pilgrims began to make the three-mile trek from Oyster Bay station to Sagamore Hill. To President Taft’s alarm, they were all of the progressive persuasion. Gifford Pinchot arrived with James R. Garfield, a fellow conservationist who had served Roosevelt as secretary of the interior. Joseph Medill McCormick, the idealistic owner of the Chicago Tribune, came with Francis J. Heney, a Californian prosecutor famous for attacking corporate fraud. Booker T. Washington, Roosevelt’s former conduit to black Americans, wished to renew old ties. So did Senator Robert M. La Follette, although in this case the ties had never been strong. “Battling Bob” almost comically personified insurgency. His pompadour and soaring brow comprised fully half of his head, and a good deal of his height. “I am very much pleased with my visit to Colonel Roosevelt,” he announced.
Most of the pilgrims expressed similar pleasure. They were vague as to what, exactly, Roosevelt had said to them. Outsiders could only infer he was not praising William Howard Taft.
“He says he will keep silent for at least two months,” the President remarked, sulking over the morning newspapers. “I don’t care if he keeps silent forever.”
The most far-seeing commentary on Roosevelt in retreat came, ironically, from a blind Democrat, Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma.
Colonel Roosevelt is now in the most difficult and delicate positioning of his career. Has he the power to stand this greatest draft on his talent or his tact?… If he is to continue to progress, he must leave behind those whom he has created in his own image. If he does not now progress, he will be left behind by that great popular procession of which he delighted to imagine himself both the leader and the creator.
I trust that the progressives will have just cause to rejoice at his return and that the stand-patters will be compelled to bewail it as a catastrophe. I hope that enlightened, rational reform will find in Roosevelt the ablest reformer, otherwise there may be more of fiction than fact in this back-from-Elba talk, for, as I remember, the return from Elba was followed by the campaign of the Hundred Days, and the campaign of the Hundred Days was followed by Waterloo and a night without a dawn.
IN HIS REPETITIONS of the words progress and progressive, as well as Roosevelt and reform, Senator Gore showed much political acuity. If he had identified the Colonel’s followers more narrowly as Republican insurgents, he would have excluded forward-thinkers in his own party who found progressivism a realistic alternative to William Jennings Bryan’s sentimental “democracy of the heart.” Gore was, in effect, challenging Roosevelt to reform the Republican Party along “enlightened” lines. If its Old Guard leaders “stood pat” behind President Taft, then the “great popular procession” of progressivism might change avenues, and march behind a Democratic drummer.
Actually, the movement was not great in any statistical sense. To be progressive in 1910 was to belong to America’s middle class—only a fifth of the general populace—and want to make bourgeois values the law of the land. To be insurgent was to belong to a much smaller, politically active minority, determined to write those values into Republican ideology. Roosevelt had been wary of the latter presumption since the fall of 1902, when La Follette and Albert B. Cummins, both Midwestern governors, emerged as pioneer insurgents. He happened to agree with some of their demands, such as regulation of railroad rates, but they had struck him as too parochial, uninterested in the other worlds that lay beyond their respective horizons of water and corn. He had done nothing to encourage the spread of further insurgencies through the central states during his first term, and little to welcome La Follette to Washington as a senator in 1906. Yet he had been pleased when reformers of both major parties praised his own “progressive” swing that same year. By 1908, the GOP insurgents had more or less ceded their cause to him.
Now it appeared that during his time out of the country, insurgent and progressive had become synonymous on orthodox Republican lips. Henry Cabot Lodge could barely force either obscenity through his reactionary whiskers. Roosevelt, describing himself as a “radical” at Oxford, meant, in the European sense, to convey that he was “a real—not a mock—democrat,” protective of the petite bourgeoisie like Clemenceau, liberal like Lloyd George. To Americans, the word unfortunately connotated grass roots.
Like many well-born men with a social conscience, Roosevelt liked to think that he empathized with the poor. He was democratic, in a detached, affable way. However, his rare exposures to squalor had been either voyeuristic, as when he encouraged Jacob Riis to show him “how the other half lived,” or vicarious, as when he recoiled from the “hideous human swine” in the works of Émile Zola.
Gifford Pinchot had the same kind of aristocratic fastidiousness. But most progressives looked down from a less exalted height. They felt threatened by the lower ranks of society. These were, in descending order, organized labor, represented by the AFL
(trades-oriented, exclusionary, anti-immigrant), then the immense subpopulation of unskilled workers who toiled in factories and stockyards and mines, followed by poor whites, and at the dreg level, imported coolies, reservation Indians, and disenfranchised blacks.
Except for the two years he had lived with cowboys in North Dakota, and being the employer of a dozen or so servants, Roosevelt had never had to suffer any prolonged intimacy with the working class. From infancy, he had enjoyed the perquisites of money and social position. The money, through his own mismanagement, had often run short, and he was by no means wealthy even now, but he had always taken exclusivity for granted. The brownstone birthplace in Manhattan, the childhood tours of Europe, the open doors of Harvard and the Porcellian, the riverside ranch and hilltop estate, the gubernatorial mansion and the White House; Mrs. Astor’s balls, Brahmin clambakes, diplomatic banquets, and most recently, royal receptions; custom clothes, first-class sleepers, private boxes, pro bono lawyers, investment managers, club privileges, a driver and a valet—he had them all. Every night except Sunday he dressed in black tie for dinner, and when he rocked on the piazza, gazing out over his estate, he saw no other roofs, heard no street noise, breathed only the freshest air.
Ensconced, he lacked some of the neuroses of progressives—economic envy and race hatred especially. His radicalism was a matter of energy rather than urgency. It wanted to spread out and embrace social (not socialistic) reformers, labor leaders who spoke decent English, churchgoing farmers, businessmen with a sense of community responsibility, and even the occasional polite, self-made Negro, such as Booker T. Washington. He had no attraction toward the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers in their parvenu palaces. A strong sense of fairness saved him from complacency. If he was less motivated by compassion than anger at what he saw as the arrogance of capital, he chafed, nonetheless, to regulate it.
DURING ROOSEVELT’S ABSENCE OVERSEAS, a book by the political philosopher Herbert Croly had become the bible of the new social movement. Entitled The Promise of American Life, it was Hamiltonian in its insistence on the need for a strong central government, yet Jacksonian in calling for a war on unearned privilege—and it named Theodore Roosevelt as the only leader on the American scene capable of encompassing both aims. “An individuality such as his,” Croly wrote, “wrought with so much consistent purpose out of much variety of experience, brings with it an intellectual economy of its own and a sincere and useful sort of intellectual enlightenment.”
A close reading of The Promise showed that many of its ideas derived from Roosevelt’s Special Message of January 1908. More than any other utterance in his career, that bombshell had convinced Wall Street and the Old Guard that “Theodore the Sudden” was a dangerous man. The issues he raised then—automatic compensation for job-related accidents, federal scrutiny of boardroom operations, value-based regulation of railroad rates, redress against punitive injunctions, strengthened antitrust laws—were the issues his followers wanted him to fight for now. The violent language he had used—“predatory wealth,” “purchased politician[s],” “combinations which are both noxious and legal”—had become commonplaces of progressive rhetoric. When insurgents called for a “moral regeneration of the business world,” and insisted that their “campaign against privilege” was “fundamentally an ethical movement,” they were shouting through a megaphone Roosevelt had left behind.
His own voice from those times echoed back to him:
The opponents of the measures we champion single out now one, and now another measure for especial attack, and speak as if the movement in which we are engaged was purely economic. It has a large economic side, but it is fundamentally an ethical movement. It is not a movement to be completed in one year, or two or three years; it is a movement which must be persevered in until the spirit which lies behind it sinks deep into the heart and the conscience of the whole people.
Sooner than he had predicted, and embarrassingly coincident with his return to America, the movement had begun to achieve critical mass, converging at state and local levels. “Is this not the logical time,” the Kansas City Star asked in a front-page editorial, “to look forward to a new party which shall include progressive Democrats and Republicans—a party dedicated to the square deal and led by Theodore Roosevelt?”
The fact that a respected GOP organ could propose such a thing, along with “Roosevelt Clubs” springing up like wheat elsewhere in the plains states, explained why Taft’s Republican Congressional Campaign Committee was determined to suppress all insurgents running for state and federal offices in the fall of 1910. Roosevelt took no responsibility for the clubs. “I might be able to guide this movement,” he told Senator Lodge, “but I should be wholly unable to stop it, even if I were to try.”
ON 29 JUNE, Theodore Roosevelt, A.B. magna cum laude, Harvard, ’80, returned to Cambridge for the thirtieth anniversary of his class. He found himself walking in the commencement procession next to Governor Charles Evans Hughes of New York. For once, the bearded inellectual, whom he privately mocked as “Charles the Baptist,” did not irritate him. They became so absorbed in conversation that they delayed general entry into Sanders Theatre.
Hughes wanted help. A mildly progressive Republican, he had served three and a half years in Albany at great personal cost, frustrated at every political turn by the state party machine. He was about to be relieved with a seat on the Supreme Court, courtesy of an admiring President Taft. Before resigning, he was determined to take the power of nomination to state offices away from party officials, and transfer it to the rank and file, voting in direct primaries. A bill to this effect had been blocked by standpatters throughout the regular session of the legislature. So he had convened a special session to pass it, in defiance of William Barnes, Jr., boss of the state GOP.
Hughes saw Roosevelt as the only New Yorker powerful enough to exert more influence than Barnes, and asked him if he would get behind the bill. Cannily, he emphasized that the lawmakers supporting it were all Roosevelt Republicans.
Many times, over the years, Roosevelt had compared the workings of politics to those of a kaleidoscope. Brilliant, harmonious patterns, sometimes carefully shaken into shape, sometimes forming of their own accord, could at the slightest touch fall into jagged disarray, with clashing colors and shafts of impenetrable black. Hughes’s appeal had just such an effect on his current outlook. On this pleasant June day, under the elms of Harvard Yard, he was confronted with a situation of bewildering intricacy, sharp with factional danger.
He did not like Hughes, but then, neither did anybody at close range. It was impossible to warm to a man who exuded such cold correctness, and grinned with horse-toothed insincerity. However, there was no denying the governor’s intellectual brilliance (he was at home in Japanese, and in infinitesimal calculus), nor the acclaim he had won as an incorruptible advocate of the common good. Not to help him would be to signal approval of Barnes’s bossism. Even Taft supported the New York primary bill.
“HE WAS ABOUT TO BE RELIEVED WITH A SEAT ON THE SUPREME COURT.”
Charles Evans Hughes as governor of New York State. (photo credit i4.3)
By supporting it too, Roosevelt saw an opportunity to show that he was as willing to work with the President, as a Party regular, as with Hughes or any other moderate progressive. Surely the three of them, with their combined prestige, could swing the bill’s passage. Hughes would go out of office in glory, and establish himself on the Supreme Court, no doubt, as a progressive interpreter of the Constitution. Taft would be seen as hospitable to reasonable reform, and the Old Guard would have to accept that progressivism was now a permanent part of the Republican agenda. Best of all, Theodore Roosevelt would go down in history as a statesman who had made one final, selfless gesture of conciliation before retiring from Party politics.
“Our governor,” he announced at a luncheon for Hughes following the commencement ceremony in Sanders, “has a very persuasive way with him. I had intended to keep absolutely clear from an
y kind of public or political question after coming home, and I could carry my resolution out all right until I met the governor this morning, and he then explained to me that I had come back to live in New York now; that I had to help him out, and after a very brief conversation I put up my hands and agreed to help him.”
AFTER COFFEE, ROOSEVELT seemed to want to retract his pledge. William N. Chadbourne, a Hughes lieutenant from New York County, said that party members who had gotten into politics because of him would be deeply disillusioned if “the old group” reasserted machine control in Albany.
The Colonel hesitated. “What shall I do?”
“You’d better send a telegram to Lloyd Griscom.”
Griscom was chairman of the New York County Committee. Roosevelt sat down and scribbled the brief message that was to reinvolve him in politics. “I believe the people demand it,” he wrote of the direct primary bill. “I most earnestly hope that it will be enacted into law.”
EXHILARATED AS ALWAYS by the prospect of a fight, he went on to stay with Henry Cabot and Nanny Cabot Lodge at their summer home in Nahant, Massachusetts. Old mutual friends, the Winthrop Chanlers, were there too. Margaret Chanler wrote:
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