Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Butt was so angry he had to go outside and stare at the sea to calm down. “It makes me ill,” he wrote his sister-in-law that night, “to see the President lessen his own character by lending himself and his great office to these petty devices to humiliate his predecessor.”

  A news flash from Oyster Bay next day reported that the Colonel had told friends that he might have to oppose Taft in 1912 to preserve his progressive legacy. He neither confirmed nor denied that rumor, contenting himself with an announcement that he would go to Saratoga as a delegate from Nassau County, and would run against Sherman for the chairmanship. Barnes warned that there would be dead bodies in his way. “So they want a fight, do they?” Roosevelt responded. “By George, they shall have it.” With that, he left New York on his western tour.

  “BARNES WARNED THAT THERE WOULD BE DEAD BODIES IN HIS WAY.”

  William Barnes, Jr. (photo credit i5.1)

  ROOSEVELT WAS GLOOMY about embarking on a “Teddysee,” closely watched by the press, which might well leave the Party more fragmented than it was already. He had lost his former zest for whistle-stop speeches and—though he would not admit it—much of his love for crowds. He worried that his throat, sandpapered by dusty drought conditions on Long Island, would not stand the strain of nearly three weeks of shouting at people. “Ugh! I do dread … having to plunge into this cauldron of politics.”

  The truth was, he was not well. Earlier in the month, he had visited the anthracite country of Pennsylvania, and been struck by a recurrence of the same ailment that had immobilized him during the Coal Strike of 1902: an inflammation of the left shinbone, complicated by an attack of Cuban fever. He was also regaining the weight he had lost in Africa. He vowed that after this tour, and a lecture trip he was committed to the following spring, he would never again go on the road for any length of time.

  Without much hope that anyone would believe him, Roosevelt insisted that he was traveling as an independent commentator, in behalf of The Outlook. This did not deter representatives of other magazines and newspapers from attaching a special car to his train. “It is incredible that there should remain a single American citizen,” declared the New York Sun, “who does not see that Theodore Roosevelt has undertaken a campaign for the presidential nomination in 1912.”

  Rolling north on 23 August through Albany (stronghold of William Barnes, Jr.) and Utica (hometown of Vice President Sherman), he tried at first not to talk about politics at all. His provincial audiences reacted with dismay, and he realized that they wanted him to behave like a candidate for the presidency.

  “I don’t care that for it,” he said, snapping his fingers, to O. K. Davis of The New York Times. “I’ve had all the work and all the fun and all the glory of it.”

  Davis waited for the inevitable follow-on. “Of course, if there were a big job to be done which the people wanted me to handle, that would be a different thing.”

  Proceeding via Buffalo into Ohio, Roosevelt began to address current issues—conservation, corporation control, labor and welfare reform—but carefully pitched his rhetoric so as not to offend conservative opinion. He praised the administration in the blandest possible language, refraining from any direct endorsement of Taft. As Ohio gave way to Indiana and the plains states, where insurgent candidates were registering dramatic gains in primary elections and conventions, he began to sound more progressive. But he said little that the President might not have said, to please the same audiences. He wanted to give maximum impact to what he called his “credo” at Osawatomie.

  FOR A FEW RECREATIONAL HOURS, in Wyoming on the twenty-eighth, he was Roosevelt the Rough Rider again, happily participating in the Frontier Days celebration outside Cheyenne. The constant thunder of hooves, the band music, and the fluttering of myriad Stars and Stripes triggered a longing within him that went deeper than politics, deeper than patriotism, to some dark core of desire unsatisfied since his “crowded hour” in Cuba. Riding across the prairie with Robert D. Carey, a local rancher, he said that it was the ambition of his life “to go to war at the head of a brigade of cavalry.”

  With no war immediately at hand, Carey thought little of this strange remark. He had no inkling, and Roosevelt’s subconscious may not have acknowledged, any connection between their current trot and the charge of the Twenty-first Lancers at Omdurman. Yet it had been there, some five months before, that Roosevelt had committed to come to Cheyenne.

  ADDRESSING BOTH HOUSES of the Colorado legislature in Denver the next day, Roosevelt gave Eastern conservatives the first hint of radical oratory to come. He accused the Supreme Court of favoring big corporations and creating a judicial no-man’s-land around them, into which neither state nor federal government could trespass. A notorious case in point, he said, was Lochner v. New York. By striking down as unconstitutional a state law against excessive workplace hours, the Court had shown itself to be “against popular rights.”

  The word popular sounded, to conservative ears, like populist, and the idea that the Court was capable of hostile acts in defense of liberty of contract showed how far Roosevelt had come from his Social-Darwinist youth. President Taft, who venerated appellate justice as something superior to vox populi, thought his remark smacked of anarchy. But Roosevelt was only warming up.

  At 2:15 P.M. on the thirty-first, he climbed onto a kitchen table in a grove outside Osawatomie, Kansas, where John Brown had fought the Missouri raiders in 1856. A crowd of thirty thousand Kansans waited to hear him declaim his “credo.” The prairie sun was strong, but there had been a cloudburst earlier in the day, and many stood ankle deep in mud.

  Addressing himself repeatedly toward the Civil War veterans who sat in a special place on the battleground, Roosevelt roared over the calls of food vendors, “There have been two great crises in our country’s history: first, when it was formed, and then, again, when it was perpetuated.” The name of John Brown, he declared, would “be forever associated” with the second of these national crises. Having said that, he avoided any further tribute to the bloody old fanatic.

  It was a looming third crisis he wished to discuss—one utterly modern, yet still subject to the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln. The Emancipator had advocated harnessing a universal dynamic, whose power derived from the struggle between those who produced, and those who profited. Roosevelt quoted Lincoln’s famous maxim, Labor is the superior of capital, and joked, “If that remark was original with me, I should be even more strongly denounced as a communist agitator than I shall be anyhow.”

  Nevertheless, he was willing to go further in insisting that property rights must henceforth be secondary to those of the common welfare. A maturing civilization should work to destroy unmerited social status. “The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been … to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.”

  America’s corporate elite, Roosevelt said, was fortifying itself with the compliance of political bosses. He revived one of his favorite catchphrases: “I stand for the square deal.” Granting that even monopolistic corporations were entitled to justice, he denied them any right to influence it, or to assume that they could buy votes in Congress.

  The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.

  Gifford Pinchot sat listening with collaborative satisfaction. He, James Garfield, and William Allen White, the progressive editor of the Emporia Gazette, had drafted significant sections of the Colonel’s speech.

  Roosevelt explained that th
ere could be no check to the growth of special interests so long as channels of collusion flowed back and forth between secretive boardrooms and secretive halls of government. To that end, the people must insist on “complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs,”* and a law prohibiting “the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes.”

  There should be federal regulation, and physical valuation, of the stock flotations of all industrial combinations doing an interstate business: not only railroads and steamship lines, but those dealing in meat, oil, coal, and other necessities. Executives and “especially” the board members of such corporations should be held responsible for breaches of antitrust law. Roosevelt cited one of the proudest creations of his own administration, the Federal Bureau of Corporations, and said that it and the Interstate Commerce Commission should be handed greater powers. He further advocated “the great central task” of conservation of natural resources, second only to national security on his agenda; graduated income and inheritance taxes on big fortunes; a judiciary accountable to changing social and economic conditions; comprehensive workmen’s compensation acts; national laws to regulate the labor of children and women; higher safety and sanitary standards in the workplace; and public scrutiny of all political campaign spending, both before and after elections.

  Throughout his address, the food vendors had loudly continued to advertise peanuts, popcorn, hot dogs, and pink lemonade, and a merry-go-round whistled not far away. But Kansans stood rapt as the Colonel, acknowledging that there could be such a thing as too much federal power, called for a compensatory spirit of democratic redress, as strong in the extremities of the country as at its center.

  Three times, he defined this spirit as “New Nationalism.” One of its principal features would be a judiciary that favored individual over property rights. “I rank dividends below human character,” Roosevelt shouted, and swung into his peroration:

  If our political institutions were perfect, they would absolutely prevent the political domination of money in any part of our affairs. We need to make our political representatives more quickly and sensitively responsive to the people whose servants they are.… It is particularly important that all moneys received or expended for campaign purposes should be publicly accounted for, not only after election, but before election as well.…

  No matter how honest and decent we are in our private lives, if we do not have the right kind of law and the right kind of administration of the law, we cannot go forward as a nation. That is imperative; but it must be an addition to, and not a substitution for, the qualities that make us good citizens.… The prime problem of our nation is to get the right type of good citizenship, and, to get it, we must have progress, and our public men must be genuinely progressive.

  ROOSEVELT’S “NEW NATIONALISM” speech made front-page headlines all over the country. Newspapers printed the text in full. Progressive editors reacted with understandable warmth, forgiving the Colonel for his reluctance—still—to condemn the administration outright. “The dominant note of the whole address was its humanity,” remarked the Fort Wayne Sentinel, “its demand for the square deal, and its placing of the rights of man above the rights of property.” Conservative organs of both major parties condemned him as a “neo-Populist,” a “peripatetic revolutionist,” and “a virtual traitor to American institutions.” Criticism was particularly shrill in New York, center of the American financial industry. “The character of his addresses in the West during the last few days,” remarked The New York Times, “has startled all thoughtful men and impressed them with the frightful danger which lies in his political ascendancy.” The New York Commercial described New Nationalism as “more and worse than rank socialism—it is communism at the limit.” The Tribune noted that Roosevelt had traveled to Osawatomie by way of the state lunatic asylum.

  Perhaps the most trenchant commentary was that of the New York Evening Post, focusing on what he had not said:

  He never once mentioned the party to which he is supposed to belong … nor referred in the remotest way to the President.… What are we to make of this? Are we to infer that Mr. Roosevelt proposes to found and head a new party, made up of elements from both the old ones? Is this speech to be taken as a bold bid for the Presidency in 1912?

  Even taken at its face value, the Post went on, “his speech yesterday outstrips not only the most extreme utterance that he himself ever made previously, but that of any of the most radical men of our time.”

  Roosevelt himself granted that he had probably gone too far at Osawatomie—at least, voiced his “deepest convictions” on the subject of radical reform too soon. “I had no business to take the position in the fashion that I did,” he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge. “A public man is to be condemned if he fails to make his point clear … and it is a blunder of some gravity to do it.” He would have difficulty, now, in pretending that he was a regular Republican. Progressive had been the final word he threw at his Kansas audience, before jumping down off that kitchen table to roars of applause.

  He tried to sound as conciliatory as possible toward the administration in stump speeches on the way back east, arguing that Republicans had to remain unified in the face of the threat they faced in November. But the damage was done. In future, nothing he said about Party policy could be interpreted as constructive. As Taft scoffed privately, the program Roosevelt had advanced at Osawatomie “could never be gotten through without a revolution or revisions to the Constitution.”

  James Bryce, currently British ambassador to Washington and a lifelong observer of the American scene, was reminded of Disraeli’s remark “that when a majority in the House of Commons is too large and the opposition too weak, part of the majority becomes detached and begins to fill the function of an opposition.” Republicans had simply been too strong too long, in all three branches of government. Since the Democrats had failed to mount an effective challenge to them, in seven successive election seasons, the GOP’s own “progressive and so-called radical section” had begun, almost without realizing it, to think and campaign like another party. Chief among the apostates was Theodore Roosevelt. Their transformation was his transformation. Except that, having changed so much as President, he had continued to change during more than a year of removal from domestic politics. The “enlarged personality” immediately obvious to four intimates on his first day home, the new capability of “greater good or greater evil,” was now an inescapable challenge to the leadership of both major parties.

  “A break between the President and the Colonel might not be altogether regrettable,” Harper’s Weekly remarked. “Like the removal of Mr. Pinchot last winter, it might clear the atmosphere, lessen the need for pretence and hypocrisy, and greatly simplify the task of the average Republican in making up his mind where he stands.”

  In no way did Roosevelt seem more radically threatening than in his moralistic attitude toward justice. If constructionists could believe their ears and eyes, he proposed to subject the Constitution itself to moral review. “When I see you,” Henry Cabot Lodge wrote on 5 September, “I shall want to have a full talk in regard to this matter of court decisions, about which I admit I am very conservative.… The courts are charged with the duty of saying what the law is, not what it ought to be, and I think that to encourage resistance to the decisions of the courts tends to lead to a disregard of the law.”

  Roosevelt answered that his attack on the Supreme Court’s pro-corporate bias had been prompted by none other than Justice William Henry Moody, whom he had met with the day after seeing Taft in June. Not only that, he had “most carefully” consulted with another constitutional expert, Professor Arthur D. Hill of Harvard. Moody believed “that the courts … sometimes erred in deciding against the national government,” and Hill had even compared the Court to “an irresponsible House of Lords.”

  Since both consultants hailed from Massachusetts, the center of Lodge’s universe, no further dissent was heard in Nahant. But the damage to Roo
sevelt’s reputation as a regular Republican was a perceived fact when he got back home, hoarse and depressed, on 11 September.

  To Edith, the debilitating effect campaign travel now seemed to have on him was worrying. “He comes home in the saddest frame of mind that can be imagined,” she wrote Jules Jusserand, “and requires much cheering from his family.” On the trail, Roosevelt was as conscientious and energetic as he had always been, stopping his train up to thirty times a day whenever he saw a crowd, large or small, waiting for a glimpse of “Teddy.” He shouted or rasped or squeaked with all his old fervor, repeating the bromides that delighted them, glowing with charm, humor, and goodwill, leaving behind an image that never faded. (“His tour through the West has been one continuous ovation,” Taft marveled, with a touch of envy.) But Edith could see that her husband had changed in some fundamental way. He had lost his compulsion for electoral favor. No matter how passionately he believed in the New Nationalism, the statesman in him cringed at the prospect of having to go back to selling it.

  THERE WAS ONE pleasant development, however, to cheer Roosevelt on his return: the popular and critical success of his safari book, just released by Scribners. African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist was selling strongly. Thanks to first serial and foreign rights, it promised to be the most profitable title he had ever published. Five hundred signed copies of the two-volume first edition, boxed and printed on Dutch handmade paper, had been followed by a one-volume trade issue, hardly less luxurious in three-quarter pigskin with uncut pages, and a subscription edition for the mass market. Lavishly illustrated, African Game Trails was irresistible to readers who could stomach the meticulous descriptions of bullets drilling hearts and brains. Even those who could not (Cecil Spring Rice found it sickening, “rather like the diary of a butcher”) had to concede that Roosevelt was scientific in his scrutiny of every aspect of the African wilderness, and often movingly lyrical. The density of recorded details, whether ornithological, paleontological, botanical, or anthropological, was almost overwhelming. Most came not from notes, but from the author’s movie-camera memory, which in advance of any system yet available in nickelodeons, registered both sight and sound.