Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  La Follette, in contrast, behaved like a candidate not for office, but for a psychological breakdown. He was weak from a recent attack of ptomaine poisoning, starved of sleep, and possessed by the notion that Roosevelt wanted to destroy him. Before standing up, he swigged a glassful of whiskey. He began to speak at 10 P.M. and was still at it long after midnight, at times rereading whole chunks of his text without noticing, at others rambling so incoherently that Baker left the room in an agony of embarrassment. Wilson’s long face expressed alarm. Of all subjects, La Follette chose to rant at the “subservience of the press to special interests,” not to mention “a subtle new peril, the centralization of advertising, that will in time seek to gag you.” Magazine magnates boggled as his language grew personal, then, when it degenerated into yells of abuse, went to collect their hats and coats. The senator continued to rave, in a virtually empty hall, before slumping forward onto his script.

  “That was a pitiable tragedy,” Roosevelt mused, after reading about it in the newspapers. He wrote a letter of sympathy when he heard an extenuating detail: La Follette had been distraught over the imminence of a life-threatening operation on his daughter. Nevertheless, most progressives agreed with Pinchot that the senator had forfeited their support.

  The pressure on Roosevelt to run now became overwhelming. “Politics are hateful,” a worried Edith Roosevelt wrote Kermit. “Father thinks he must enter the fight since La Follette’s collapse.” Unable to bear the sight of any more politicians in broad-brimmed black hats besieging Sagamore Hill, she decamped, first to New York, then to Panama and Costa Rica with Ethel. She did not want to be around to hear Theodore make his announcement.

  MARY LA FOLLETTE survived, and as she recovered, so did her father. He brushed aside the advice of his aides to withdraw as a candidate, saying he would consider doing so only if they could get the Colonel to issue a declaration of insurgent principles dictated by himself. For a week, representatives of the two camps tried to broker such an agreement. But Roosevelt declined to make any statement whatever until 21 February, when he was due to address a convention drafting a new constitution for Ohio. His words there, moreover, would represent his own philosophy and nobody else’s.

  Meanwhile, in what was seen as an ominous portent, Roosevelt supporters bolted the Florida Republican convention when it elected a delegate slate loyal to the President. Feeling themselves to be in the majority against Taft’s operatives, they chose their own delegation, and vowed to send it to Chicago in June, in an official contest for seating rights.

  On the ninth, about seventy members of the Roosevelt National Committee, representing twenty-four states, met in Chicago and authorized the dispatch of the governors’ petition. It was treated as a private communication that he could publish if he liked. But the governors made clear their feelings in a statement given to the press, even as Frank Knox, petition in hand, hurried to catch the fastest possible train east:

  A principle is of no avail without a man. A cause is lost without a leader. In Theodore Roosevelt we believe the principle has the man and the cause the leader. It is our opinion that this is the sentiment of the majority of the people of the United States.

  Taft, seriously disturbed, told a Lincoln’s Birthday gathering of Republicans in New York that there were certain “extremists” in the Party who wished to give ordinary Americans—“people necessarily indifferently informed”—a participatory role in handling great public issues best left to Congress and the courts. “Such extremists are not progressives—they are political emotionalists or neurotics,” the President declared, in what was taken as a reference to Roosevelt.

  Actually, he meant La Follette, who was still under neurological care. But Taft’s dread of progressivism as an anarchic force, destabilizing the polity he revered—a nation governed by laws not men, answerable only to judges—was obvious, as was his likely rhetorical course if the Colonel dared to challenge him.

  Roosevelt remained silent, working on his Ohio speech and urging a distraught Nicholas Longworth to remain loyal to the President. He himself could not. “If I were any longer doubtful, I would telegraph you to come and talk to me, but it would not be any use now Nick. I have got to come out.”

  He admitted that his chances of beating the White House organization were no better than one in three. Already, political appointees suspected of favoring him were being dismissed around the country. For that reason, he needed to mount the most formidable and well-financed campaign possible at such a late date. Fortunately, there was no shortage of progressive idealists eager to volunteer their services, either because of the magic of his name, or because they believed he would further the cause. Recruitment was proceeding so well in thirty-one states that his organization looked to be virtually complete by the time he announced his candidacy.

  Elihu Root made a last-minute effort to dissuade him from accepting the draft of the governors. “It seems to me that those who ask you to make a declaration are asking you … to incur the considerable probability of being defeated for the nomination, or, if successful in that, of being defeated in the election, and that the consequences to your future, to your power of leadership in the interests of the causes which you have at heart, and to your position in history, would be so injurious that … no number of friends have any right to ask such a sacrifice.”

  Root wrote pessimistically, knowing that nothing was less likely to deter his old friend than warnings of personal risk. “The time has come,” Roosevelt replied, “when I must speak.”

  He was beyond caution now, beyond the moralizing over duty and ideals that had obsessed him much of the past year. Day by day, he felt battle lust rising. And typically, when he rose in Columbus to address the Ohio constitutional convention, he said nothing about the governors’ petition and espoused the most radical issue in progressive politics.

  LITTLE MORE THAN two weeks before, he had assured Henry Stimson, “I do not myself believe in the recall of the judiciary.” The secretary of war was still trying to live down their doomed double effort to launch a reform coup d’état in New York in the fall of 1910, and had been rendered nervous by Roosevelt’s Outlook article recommending the annulment of judicial decisions that favored property rights over human rights. No proposal could be more certain to enrage the President, who regarded even questions of national honor as “justiciable.” Was this to be a theme of his coming campaign? Would he also suggest the recall of judges, state and federal? And if so, were justices of the Supreme Court next on his Robespierrean agenda?

  Roosevelt set a defiant tone at the outset by declaring, “I believe … that human rights are supreme over all other rights; that wealth should be the servant, not the master of the people.” Yet for the next half hour his speech, cast in the form of an ideological lecture, was not provocative. It covered the whole range of issues with which a modern state had to deal as it adjusted itself to an age in which individualism was secondary to collectivism. Only a revitalized democracy could prevent industrial and political combinations from making property rights the basis of all law.

  “Shape your constitutional action,” he advised the delegates, “so that the people will be able through their legislative bodies, or … by direct popular vote, to provide workmen’s compensation acts, to regulate the hours of labor for children and for women, to provide for their safety while at work, and to prevent overwork or work under unhygienic or unsafe conditions.”

  No reasonable Republican could object to granting such benefits, although there was a hint of Jacksonian threat in the phrase by direct popular vote. It implied more participation in policymaking than William Howard Taft (to name one Ohioan) felt ordinary Americans deserved. Roosevelt proceeded to recite the basic progressive creed, pledging himself to direct primaries, direct senatorial elections, and—when legislators quailed or failed—the initiative and referendum. As to the recall of short-term elective officers, he favored it, but only when public disillusionment was extreme.

  “There
remains the question of the recall of judges,” Roosevelt said.

  I do not believe in adopting the recall save as a last resort.… But either the recall will have to be adopted or else it will have to be made much easier than it now is to get rid, not merely of a bad judge, but of a judge who, however virtuous, has grown so out of touch with social needs and facts that he is unfit longer to render good service on the bench. It is nonsense to say that impeachment meets the difficulty.…

  When a judge decides a constitutional question, when he decides what the people as a whole can and cannot do, the people should have the right to recall that decision if they think that it is wrong. We should hold the judiciary in all respect, but it is both absurd and degrading to make a fetish of a judge or of any one else.

  At no point did he mention the President as the nation’s ranking such fetishist. However, Roosevelt’s contempt for legalistic justice, as opposed to executive action in favor of human rights, was plain. He cited a workmen’s compensation suit against the Southern Buffalo Railroad, recently rejected by the New York State Court of Appeals. The judge in that case, like Judge Baldwin in Hoxie v. the New Haven Railroad, had declared the federal statute unconstitutional in terms of common law. “I know of no popular vote by any state of the union,” Roosevelt said, “more flagrant in its defiance of right and justice, more short-sighted in its inability to face the changed needs of our civilization.”

  THE REACTION TO “Roosevelt’s Recall Speech” was angrier and more widespread than that following his New Nationalism address eighteen months before. The American Bar Association came out solidly against it. He was assailed from quarters as far away as Great Britain for the “sheer madness,” “demagogy,” “absolutism,” and “despicable nature” of his prejudice against judges. It was to be expected that the New York World should accuse him of inciting “mob rule,” and that the Wall Street Journal should wisecrack: “Those most enthusiastic over the recall of judicial decisions are prevented by prison rules from working for the Colonel.” But even such progressives as Congressman Victor Murdock and Senator William E. Borah felt that Roosevelt had gone too far. “One statement frequently heard today,” The New York Times reported on 22 February, “is that the Colonel’s speech makes Senator La Follette look like a reactionary.” The Texas Progressive Republican League voted to support William Howard Taft.

  Academics reverent of anything canonical in law or political doctrine were especially vituperative. Andrew Dickson White, the former president of Cornell, called the notion of popular amendment of state constitutions “the most monstrous proposal ever presented to the American people, or any other people.” James Day, chancellor of Syracuse University, declared, “Emma Goldman could not make a more violent attack on our institutions.” Even clerics weighed in. The aged Episcopal bishop of Albany, who had known Roosevelt since his days as governor, called him “erratic, unsafe, and unfair.”

  Doubts about Roosevelt’s sanity recirculated. Justice W. O. Howard of the New York Supreme Court described him as “a madman” with “the instinct of a beast.” The editor of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology theorized that the Colonel would “go down in history as one of the most illustrious psychological examples of the distortion of conscious mental processes through the force of subconscious wishes.” A Chicago lawyer offered $5,000 to any medical or charitable institution that could arrange to have Roosevelt certified. Henry Adams warned Brooks Adams, “His mind has gone to pieces.… He is, as Taft justly said, a neurotic, and his neurosis may end like La Follette’s, in a nervous collapse or acute mania.”

  An appalled Henry Cabot Lodge could only say to reporters, “The Colonel and I have long since agreed to disagree on a number of points.”

  ALMOST UNHEARD IN the general uproar over Roosevelt’s speech was a casual remark he had made en route to Columbus: “My hat is in the ring. The fight is on and I am stripped to the buff.” It took several days for the seventeen monosyllables to work their way into the folk consciousness. But when they did, realization spread that he had, at last, confirmed his candidacy—in yet another of the popular images he coined so effortlessly. By 25 February, when he arrived in Boston to issue his formal acceptance of the petition of the governors, The Hat in the Ring had already joined The Man in the Arena, The Strenuous Life, The Big Stick, The Square Deal, The Black Crystal, and Malefactors of Great Wealth in the American political lexicon.

  “I WILL ACCEPT the nomination for President if it is tendered to me, and I will adhere to this decision until the convention has expressed its preference.”

  As Roosevelt’s letter to the governors went out on the evening wires, he relaxed in the Boston home of Robert Grant, a liberal and literary judge he had known for many years. Grant thought that the Colonel had made a self-destructive mistake, and carefully observed his looks and behavior for the record. “I never saw him in better physical shape. He is fairly stout, but his color is good.… He halts in his sentences occasionally; but from a layman’s point of view there was nothing to suggest mental impairment, unless the combination of egotism, faith in his own doctrines, fondness for power and present hostility to Taft … can be termed symptomatic.… He was a most delightful guest.”

  For all the pleasure Judge Grant took in the Colonel’s company—and that of William Allen White and the biographer William Roscoe Thayer as fellow dinner guests—he was not disposed to congratulate him on running for the presidency again. “Has not every one of your friends advised you against it?”

  Roosevelt admitted that was true. For a long time, he said, he had been “very uncertain” about what to do. But the urgency of the progressives who looked to him for leadership had finally convinced him that he had to rescue the reform program so disastrously mismanaged by President Taft. To have ignored their appeals, to have waited until 1916 to run again, would have been “cowardice,” he said—“a case of il gran refiuto.”

  Dante’s phrase clearly appealed to him, and he repeated it, evoking the refusal of a thirteenth-century hermit to accept elevation to the Papacy.

  “But you will agree that Taft has made a good president this year?” Grant spoke out of a sense of fairness, rather than loyalty to the administration.

  Roosevelt said he thought that all Taft had done was to reduce the Republican Party to a torpor reminiscent of that of “the Bell and Everett Whigs just before the Civil War.” He plunged into a discussion of patronage with White, and Grant noticed that he saw betrayal in every reasonable move Taft had made to consolidate himself as president.

  “But will any of the Party leaders support you?” the judge asked.

  “No. None of them; not even Lodge, I think.” He said he believed his only hope of winning was to “reach the popular vote through direct primaries,” in states democratic enough to hold them.

  “But the situation is complex, I suppose? You would like to be President.”

  “You are right, it is complex. I like power; but I care nothing to be President as President. I am interested in these ideas of mine and I want to carry them through, and feel that I am the one to carry them through.” He cited, by way of example, his belief that the will of the people was being “thwarted” by reactionary courts.

  Grant was a bona fide member of the Harvard Republican establishment, but unlike most of his associates, saw no constitutional threat in the Colonel’s Columbus speech. Thayer did, saying that anyone advising the recall of judicial decisions wished to subject American institutions to “the whims of the populace at the moment.” Roosevelt, keeping his temper, pointed out that he had excluded the Supreme Court from his proposal. Nor was he advocating the removal of judges themselves. He was concerned only with judicial decisions at the state level, in cases where humanitarian legislation was struck down on fake constitutional grounds.

  Thayer and Grant were impressed with his self-assurance. But Theodore in private was different from Theodore on the stump. They saw that his moral fervor, the way he had of charging argument with more pa
ssion than it needed, would prevent persons of colder blood from understanding that he was actually a thoughtful man.

  For five hours, with White, they tried in vain to change his resolve to run. At eleven-thirty the party broke up. Thayer, who was not staying over, went out into the night, feeling saddened and apprehensive. Just before the Colonel went up to bed, Grant made the mistake of mentioning his cool treatment of Taft.

  Roosevelt stopped at the foot of the stairway. “It was through me and my friends that he became President.”

  It was a tense moment. Both of them were aware that his announcement was even now thumping through printing presses across the country.

  They continued on up the stairs. Roosevelt stretched out his arms and said, “I feel as fine as silk.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The Tall Timber of Darkening Events

  He may do more by seeing what he sees

  Than others eager for iniquities;

  He may, by seeing all things for the best,

  Incite futurity to do the rest.

  THE CONTRARY FORCES ALIGNING themselves for and against the campaign of Theodore Roosevelt to unseat his successor were on display in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 28 February 1912. He attended a meeting of the Harvard board of overseers and was ostracized by his fellow members. They stood with their backs to him until he was joined by a sympathetic friend, Colonel Norwood P. Hallowell. Yet on emerging into the Yard, he was greeted by a crowd so boisterously affectionate that ten patrolmen were needed to get him into his car. It was clear his only hope of being nominated was to appeal to the people over the opposition of conservative Republicans.