Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  “I am alone,” Roosevelt told his old hunting companion, Dr. Alexander Lambert, back at Sagamore Hill that weekend. “You can’t imagine how lonely it is for a man to be rejected by his own kind.” He said that he and Hallowell were made to feel “like a pair of Airedale terriers that had walked in on a convention of tom cats.”

  In a cultural essay published some weeks before in The Outlook, he had noted that whenever a medieval man fought against prevailing orthodoxy, the tendency of society was to outlaw him. Now, after a lifetime of Party regularity, he found himself both free and shunned, loved and despised. It took some getting used to, and a considerable amount of evasion when friends as worried as William Allen White asked if he was prepared, in the likelihood of defeat, to found a new party. “We made the too obvious pretense in those days of our party loyalty,” White wrote afterward, “whistling in unison through the tall timber of darkening events to support our courage.”

  As March loomed, Taft’s organization accelerated the pace of delegate selections in states that it controlled. This portended an agonizing choice for Roosevelt Republicans, bluntly expressed by Senator Jonathan Bourne of Oregon, at a strategy session in Washington: “Gentlemen, the first thing we have got to decide is a matter of fundamental policy. If we lose, will we bolt?”

  The company sat stunned. Bourne had been a founding member of the Progressive Republican League, set up more than a year before to advance the fortunes of Robert La Follette. As such, he was a courageous, even a rash man, willing to back the most radical challenger to Old Guard rule. But the question of “bolting” had never occurred to the League, which meant only to advance the cause of progressivism within the Party.

  Bourne persisted with his motion. “I move that we agree, here and now, and not be too secretive about our agreement, that if we lose, we bolt.”

  There was silence while the politicians around the table considered their prospects. Those in Congress knew that apostasy would likely excommunicate them forever. And could progressivism, born of the Party, survive long without it? If Taft was nominated and then defeated as badly as everybody expected, it would be difficult even for GOP stalwarts to stay in office through the election of 1916. What real chance was there, at this late date, of Roosevelt recruiting enough delegates to commandeer the national convention in June?

  William Allen White was in attendance. He was a bona fide progressive, but also, proudly, a member of the Republican National Committee, and hated the idea of splitting the Party. He sensed fear building in some quarters of the room. Senator Joseph Dixon of Montana had Bourne’s kind of recklessness, and so did their former colleague, Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, unseated by a Democrat in 1910. But Senators William E. Borah of Idaho, Moses E. Clapp of Minnesota, and Joseph L. Bristow of Kansas had won their seats as insurgents and enjoyed the balance of power they maintained in the upper chamber. White doubted they would willingly give that up. Representative Victor Murdock was for Roosevelt whatever happened, but understood the risks. “This rebellion,” he had said earlier, “has a long, long way to go before it wins.”

  With Bourne’s motion on the table, a debate ensued that sounded, to White, more loud than sincere. At the end, loyalty overcame expediency. A non-voting consensus was reached that the answer to the question was “yes.”

  REGULAR REPUBLICANS WHO had always considered the Colonel to be one of their number reacted to his candidacy with varying degrees of perplexity. The most common theory was that he had lost touch with reality. Senator Root thought that he was motivated by vainglory. “He aims at a leadership far in the future, as a sort of Moses and Messiah for a vast progressive tide of rising humanity.”

  Henry Cabot Lodge wrote Roosevelt, “I never thought that any situation could arise which would have made me so miserably unhappy as I have been during the past week.” He blamed himself for not realizing how long they had been at political odds. Now that Roosevelt had embraced judicial recall as a campaign theme, Lodge felt he could remain silent no longer. He had given a statement to the press. “It is at least honest although it gives no expression to the pain and unhappiness which lie behind it.”

  I am opposed to the constitutional changes advocated by Colonel Roosevelt in his recent speech at Columbus. I have very strong convictions on those questions.… Colonel Roosevelt and I for thirty years, and wholly apart from politics, have been close and most intimate friends. I must continue to oppose the policies which he urged at Columbus, but I cannot personally oppose him who has been my lifelong friend, and for this reason I can take no part whatever in the campaign for the political nomination.

  “My dear fellow,” Roosevelt consoled him, “you could not do anything that would make me lose my warm personal affection for you. For a couple of years I have felt that you and I were heading opposite ways as regards internal politics.”

  President Taft told Archie Butt that Roosevelt was delusional if he thought he could control the forces of anarchy he had unleashed. “He will either be a hopeless failure if elected or else destroy his own reputation by becoming a socialist, being swept there by the force of circumstances just as the leaders of the French Revolution were swept on and on.”

  Butt listened to the President ramble, as he had listened for three years, and decided to take a vacation. Divided in his loyalty to both candidates, he had no stomach to see them heading into a contest that had all “the irresistible force of a Greek drama.” With Taft’s permission, he booked himself a passage to Europe.

  “If the old ship goes down,” he wrote his sister, “you will find my affairs in shipshape condition.”

  THE ENERGY OF the progressive movement, now that Roosevelt had committed to it, was explosive. By early March, the three main hubs of his campaign organization were staffed, financed, and running. The Executive Committee, chaired by Senator Dixon, operated out of New York, from a rapidly expanding “skyscraper suite” on the twenty-fourth floor of the Metropolitan Life tower. When Roosevelt visited, he could look down on the decaying town house, three blocks south, where he had been born. Generally he stayed away, preferring to hold court in his office at The Outlook, one block east. He told reporters he was content to leave the direction of the campaign to Dixon and Frank Knox, as vice chairman. The rest of the executive team consisted of hardened professional politicians—none harder than former congressman William L. Ward of New York, a manufacturer of nuts, bolts, and rivets, and William “Big Bill” Flinn of Pittsburgh, a power player set on dismantling Pennsylvania’s reactionary Republican machine.

  At the Congress Hotel in Chicago, Truman H. Newberry, Roosevelt’s former navy secretary, assumed the vital role of treasurer of the National Committee. A millionaire local merchant, Alexander H. Revell, served as overall chairman, commuting to executive meetings in New York. In Washington, Frank Munsey gave space in his own press building—and a $50,000 startup budget—to the Roosevelt propaganda bureau.* Its manager was Cal O’Laughlin, who had come a long way in politics since waylaying the Colonel on the Nile. The bureau operated under the ideological control of Gifford and Amos Pinchot, James Garfield, and Medill McCormick—all of them thankful to be free of their obligations to La Follette. Another former journalist who joined the campaign was O. K. Davis of The New York Times. He attached himself to Senator Dixon as a pen for hire.

  Branch offices opened in thirty other states, from New Hampshire west to California, and North Dakota south to Louisiana. Only the most reactionary corners of the old Confederacy, and the flintiest extremes of Republican New England, were deemed beyond the reach of new ideas. Wisconsin was ceded to La Follette, who could count on being nominated there, if nowhere else. Roosevelt’s eight original gubernatorial backers chaired their respective state committees.

  The case that Dixon (dark, smooth-shaven, intense, and tireless) decided to present to rank-and-file Republicans was that three years of Taft’s leadership had reduced the Party to near impotence. The President had managed to turn a GOP majority of sixty in the Hou
se of Representatives into a minority of seventy, and a two-to-one overbalance of power in the Senate into virtual equipoise. His blindly supportive National Committee had lost control of a dozen states in the North and West. He was perceived as well-intentioned but weak; his obsessive traveling looked more like running away than reaching out. Whatever his support among the editors of loyal Republican periodicals, Dixon pointed out, reporters and cartoonists everywhere mocked him as long-winded, lazy, and obese. To Woodrow Wilson or whatever other falcon the Democrats might uncap this summer, Taft was easy meat.

  Roosevelt, in contrast, was leading Taft by more than 66 percent in regional popularity polls across the country. According to the same surveys, he had more potential votes than all the other presidential contenders combined. But the goodwill of ordinary Americans counted for little at this stage of the political process. Only six states offered direct, preferential primaries: California, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wisconsin. In the remaining forty-two, delegates were selected, rather than elected, by the state parties in caucuses or conventions. And since these proceedings were controlled by bosses, or manipulated by sit-pat officeholders in favor of the status quo, they were democratic shams.

  “You understand, my dear fellow,” Roosevelt wrote Newberry, “that probably Taft will be nominated. This is not a thing we can say in public, because of course such a statement discourages men; but I am in this fight purely for a principle, win or lose.”

  Unfortunately, that principle was now perceived to be the recall of judicial decisions, rather than the broad “Charter of Democracy” he had tried to present at Columbus. Senator Dixon’s long-term strategy was to recommunicate, through the Washington propaganda bureau, the progressive content of the rest of that speech. It would serve as a campaign platform, and—if the Colonel would only shut up about judges—recall would have faded as an issue by June.

  In the short term, Dixon wanted to persuade as many caucus-convention states as possible to adopt the popular selection of delegates, while there was still time for legislative action. Seven of them—Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota—were seen as amenable to primaries, thanks to parallel lobbying by the progressive arm of the Democratic Party. If they fell in line, Roosevelt could count on perhaps ten large delegations pledged to him. The number of delegates admitted to the national convention was 1,078, meaning that a consensus of 540 votes would clinch the nomination. His mass appeal might yet achieve that miracle. And there was always the chance (though no gentleman would think of mentioning it) that the President, at 330 pounds plus, might take one golf swing too many.

  NEITHER TAFT NOR ROOSEVELT undertook to campaign personally at first. Tradition required major candidates to remain aloof from delegate-hunting. The Colonel contented himself with press relations. One day he allowed two of the investigative journalists he had slammed as “muckrakers” during his presidency to buy him lunch at the Colony Club in New York. Ida Tarbell, who had made herself famous by exposing the monopolistic practices of the Standard Oil Company, was by no means his fan. She had not forgiven him for his epithet, which had stuck to her ever since. Ray Stannard Baker knew Roosevelt well enough to doubt that he was as pure in his progressivism as Senator La Follette—or for that matter Governor Wilson, with whom Baker was now ideologically infatuated.

  Both writers, however, were captivated by the Colonel’s charm. His political image was so swashbuckling and his quoted rhetoric so pugnacious that skeptics were always surprised to find how gentle he was in private. “Again he impressed me with his wonderful social command,” Baker wrote afterward. There were two other women present, along with William Allen White, and Roosevelt showed himself to be “keenly sensitive to everyone in the party,” bringing out all personalities. It was not possible to be shy in front of him. He disarmed by being frank about himself, not hiding the fact that he had been snubbed by the Harvard overseers, and admitting that some people considered him crazy.

  Baker thought that he looked “wonderfully well,” sitting relaxed in a soft dark suit and bright tie. The light through the club’s big windows shone on his straw-brown hair and showed it to be thinning slightly at the crown. There was little gray in it, in contrast to streaks of white in his mustache. In his sharp voice, he talked about his career, saying that as a young man he had felt most comfortable with fellow members of the Knickerbocker aristocracy. Later he had come to admire self-made men like Mark Hanna, who made fortunes in industry and parlayed it into political power, until their amorality repelled him and he had realized that “the real democratic spirit lay deeper,” in the bosoms of the plain people he had bunked with out West, and fought with in Cuba.

  Baker sensed that Roosevelt’s conscious adoption of their values had, over the years, become visceral. “This is his strong point—that he voices rather than creates the sentiment which he expresses. He is not a pioneer, but a reporter.” As such, he did not seem to care if he won or not, as long as “the great fundamental principles” of progressivism prevailed.

  The only prejudice he displayed during two hours of conversation was a refusal to accept that La Follette was as idealistic as himself. Baker had to conclude, “He is nearer the true liberal in spirit than any man now in public life … a great man—a genius in his way.”

  MEANWHILE, ROOSEVELT’S AGENTS fought for every delegate who could be cajoled, bullied, or bribed. It was an embarrassment to him that men like Ward and Flinn, bosses themselves, were employing methods contemptuous of his pronouncement at Saratoga in 1910, “The rule of the boss is the negation of democracy.” Every Pennsylvanian ward heeler looking for a new job in a new machine, every Southern Negro who yielded to the charms of Ormsby McHarg, Dixon’s none-too-scrupulous representative in Dixie, shrugged at what the Colonel had to say about righteousness.

  The problem was that, no matter how honest most of his campaign executives were in command of their various field operations, they had to rely on professional politicians at the state and lower levels—when such men could be found. Often as not, “Republicans for Roosevelt” were passionate amateurs who had never worked in a campaign before, and who needed to be trained and supervised. In Massachusetts, he was served by a committee of seven Harvard men, all from families dating back to the seventeenth century, all young, and all except one possessed by the notion that progressivism was a form of noblesse oblige. But with Senator W. Murray Crane controlling the Bay State GOP organization (for as long as Lodge recused himself), the Harvard men were as rowers without a cox: all muscle, but no coordination.

  It followed that Roosevelt had to tolerate, or choose not to know about, signatures forged on nominating petitions in New York, horses traded with conservative mercenaries in Indiana, and baseball bats wielded to discipline delegates in Missouri. He contented himself with occasional letters of admonition or restraint.

  His first convention victory over Taft in Oklahoma on 14 March was at least a start, albeit coerced by a progressive enthusiast standing behind the chairman with a loaded revolver. The result, achieved at the cost of one death and three casualties, was ten delegates-at-large and six district delegates. Frank Knox thought that some of the minority pledged to Taft might be unseated by appealing to the Republican National Committee in June.

  All at once, the Colonel’s campaign seemed to be gaining momentum. A series of separate headlines in The New York Times on 18 March proclaimed:

  NORTH CAROLINA FOR ROOSEVELT

  N.D. MAY BE ROOSEVELT’S

  ROOSEVELT MAY CARRY OREGON

  OHIO DRIFTING ROOSEVELT’S WAY

  TEXAS ALL FOR ROOSEVELT

  AGAINST ROOSEVELT IN WISCONSIN

  The last news was not bad news, since La Follette was Wisconsin’s favorite son. What was most significant was the trend in Ohio—Taft’s home state. If Roosevelt could pull off a miracle there, the blow to the President’s prestige would be severe. However, that primary was not due to be held for another two mon
ths, giving the White House plenty of time to continue its steady banking of pledges.

  In the meantime, the speculative nature of the Times’s headlines was quickly exposed. On 19 March, North Dakota, the plains state Roosevelt most identified with as a former ranchman (“Here the romance of my life began”), gave him only 23,669 votes to La Follette’s 34,123. Taft scored a humiliating 1,876, but that was a small consolation to Senator Dixon, given the fact that La Follette was supposed to have committed political suicide only six weeks before. Roosevelt urged the chairman to inflect the story as an “emphatically anti-administration” win for progressivism. He argued that even a La Follette delegation would count, in the end, as his own. But the claim sounded wishful.

  He was, in fact, lagging in his race for the nomination. Infighting among his regional supporters was chronic, defectors from the La Follette organization were being shunned rather than welcomed, and would-be delegates were running against one another, rather than together for him. Nor had there been much evidence of “Teddy’s” alleged mass popularity. As James Bryce scoffed in a report to Sir Edward Grey, “The prairies did not burst into flame as soon as his consent to become a candidate was known.”

  Roosevelt began to show signs of panic, snapping at a suggestion by the publisher Hermann Kohlsaat that he withdraw in Taft’s favor, and admitting, “I tend to get pessimistic at times.” A childhood friend, Frances “Fanny” Parsons, came to stay with him and noticed that he had lost the bubbling high spirits that had enchanted her forty years before. She tried to keep up with him on one of his frenzied marches down Cove Neck. “On that long, rapid, for me almost breathless walk through the leafless woods, I realized that he was starting out on a strange untraveled road, the end of which he could not see.”