Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Since Hadley (secretly racked with tuberculosis, and running a 103°F fever) had joined Borah in declining to bolt, the Colonel authorized Henry J. Allen of Kansas to read this message aloud. But to general frustration, there were four further hours of roll calls to endure before Root announced that the convention was ready to hear any statement the Roosevelt forces wished to make. Allen rose at 2:54 P.M. He said that all he needed was “ten minutes of quiet attention.”

  What he got was forty-four minutes of such bedlam that for much of the time he could not be heard. But the pertinent phrases of Roosevelt’s message sounded clear, and were telegraphed simultaneously to ten thousand newspapers across the country: The convention [is] in no proper sense any longer a Republican convention representing the real Republican Party. Therefore, I hope the men elected as Roosevelt delegates will now decline to vote on any matter before the convention.

  From then until shortly before six, when 343 of Allen’s fellow progressives boycotted the adoption of the platform, mutual hatreds seethed. At last Root ordered each state that had a presidential candidate to present its nomination, in alphabetical order. Iowa, home of Albert B. Cummins, was called first. There was no response, signaling that the governor would join the progressive bolt. An even more deathly silence followed the call for New York. The progressive delegate who would have risen to name Theodore Roosevelt remained in his seat. At four minutes past the hour, Warren Harding of Ohio spoke for President Taft, and delivered an attack on the Colonel that had clearly cost him many hours with a dictionary:

  Sirs, I have heard men arrogate to themselves the title of “progressive Republicans.” … Progression is not proclamation or palaver. It is not pretense nor play on prejudice. It is not of personal pronouns, nor perennial pronouncement. It is not the perturbation of a people passion-wrought, nor a promise proposed. Progression is—

  Harding ran out of plosives at this point, to the relief of the megaphone men, and went on to other alliterations. But in conclusion, he reverted to his favorite consonant, accusing Roosevelt of “pap rather than patriotism,” and elevating Taft to the “party pantheon.” His speech touched off a wild demonstration. Yet there was something fatalistic about the chants and portrait-waving. Everyone knew that the RNC had decided to field a losing candidate in November, rather than gamble on one who would radicalize its traditional platform.

  After a last-minute attempt to swing the convention for Robert M. La Follette had been laughed down, Root asked the states to vote. The only disturbance to a droning succession of calls came when Massachusetts was polled, and two loyal Rooseveltians declined to vote, leaving the delegation evenly split. Root at once recognized their alternates, who happened to be Taft men, and a howl of rage arose, such as had never been heard in a convention before.

  At 9:28 P.M., William Howard Taft was renominated with 561 votes. One hundred and seven of Roosevelt’s supporters carried out their primary instructions and voted for the Colonel. They stayed in their seats while 344 others declared themselves “present and not voting.” Then, as Root wound up the Fifteenth National Republican Convention, the bolters rose and went out into the night. They headed, not for their hotel rooms, but for Orchestra Hall, where the galleries were already full and telephone and telegraph linemen were installing wires to broadcast the birth of a new party.

  WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE was so intent upon reporting Taft’s nomination that he did not even notice where his colleagues from Kansas were going. Three hours later, having written and filed his story, he entered the Congress Hotel restaurant and found it filling up with late diners. One of them jovially accosted him.

  “Why weren’t you over to Orchestra Hall?”

  White said he had been busy.

  “Well, you missed the big show.”

  “What show?”

  “Oh, we have organized the Progressive Party. Roosevelt made a ripsnorting speech, and the crowd tore the roof off and we are on our way!”

  White struggled with conflicting emotions. Chagrin at being scooped was not the worst of them. He felt as he had in Boston earlier in the year, when the Colonel had talked to him and Judge Grant of il gran rifiuto, and they had tried to dissuade him from running. Willing as White was to join the bolt, he secretly feared that the neonate cause might smother in Roosevelt’s too-lusty embrace. Better for progressivism to fight and survive as a broad-based movement for social reform, drawing strength from both parties, than for it to be identified with one man’s obsessed mission.

  The fight promised to be a long one—only getting under way, he thought, this year, with little chance of premature success. White admired Roosevelt so much that he could not bear to think of his hero being humiliated in November, as a certain consequence of splitting the Republican vote, just when the Democrats (already congregating for their convention in Baltimore) were so strong.

  Here was the splitter himself, coming into the restaurant and asking in a teasing falsetto where White had been. Somebody who knew him less well would have seen only the exuberance of a man who had just worked up a crowd and been bathed in acclamation. White, however, noticed something more disturbing. Roosevelt was bent on revenge. “He was not downcast; indeed he was triumphant, full of jokes and quips as though the teakettle of his heart were humming and rattling the lid of his merry countenance. But rage was bubbling inside him.”

  Elsewhere in the hotel, supporters of the President were disinclined to celebrate their victory. And from the far side of the divide that had opened up between the Colonel and the victims of his wrath came the sad voice of Elihu Root: “I care more for one button on Theodore Roosevelt’s waistcoat than for Taft’s whole body.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Onward, Christian Soldiers

  And what is this that comes and goes,

  Fades and swells and overflows,

  Like music underneath and overhead?

  What is it in me now that rings and roars

  Like fever-laden wine?

  “MY PUBLIC CAREER WILL end next election day,” Roosevelt said to a visitor on the morning after Woodrow Wilson was nominated as the Democratic candidate for President.

  It was 3 July 1912. For about a week he had been able to hope against hope that his decision to run as a progressive independent might return him to the White House. Although Wilson’s brand of progressivism was not radical, it had so agitated the Baltimore convention as to make the proceedings in Chicago look sedate. No fewer than forty-three ballots had been required to persuade Bourbon reactionaries that the governor was the best man to win a four-way race against Taft, Roosevelt, and the Socialist Eugene V. Debs.

  Roosevelt understood that, having encouraged progressives to leave the GOP, he ran the risk of many of them choosing Wilson over himself. The man looked like a winner: already there was a group that called itself the “Wilson Progressive Republican League.” A large majority of the country’s editors and commentators praised this new celebrity who had proved so effective a gubernatorial reformer. Wilson appealed to what Roosevelt called the “rural tory” element, opposing, for example, recall of judicial decisions, while tacitly catering to the anti-Negro prejudice that was a powerful, if unstated, aspect of progressivism. The white, corn-fed Midwestern farmers, small businessmen, professionals, and middle-class moralists who largely composed the movement’s membership did not subscribe to the lynch mentality of Dixie Democrats. But neither did they think blacks were good for much more than field labor. Word had gotten out that the Colonel favored the idea of a Negro delegate to second his nomination when the new party established itself. Veteran politicians recalled him attending his first GOP convention in 1884, and pushing for the election of a black chairman. One could not imagine Wilson, born in Virginia and bred in the South, carrying democracy quite that far.

  Another factor against Roosevelt’s chances of success was the lack of nerve among GOP progressives in retreat from Armageddon. Four of the seven governors who had petitioned him to run in February now declined t
o support him. Chase Osborn of Michigan had come out as a Republican for Wilson, railing against “malcontents” seeking to destroy the two-party system. Herbert Hadley wrote that as the head of the Republican party in Missouri, he would have to be “thoroughly convinced that it had ceased to be a useful agency of good government before I abandoned it and joined in the formation of a new party.” He argued that the local machinery was “in the hands of progressives” anyway. As for veterans of the Progressive Republican League, Jonathan Bourne had answered his own question (“If we lose, will we bolt?”) in the negative, while Robert La Follette, who could have followed Roosevelt out and then challenged him for the leadership of the apostates, elected to stay put and support Wilson. Eight other former insurgents, including Senator Cummins, sent regrets, saying they did not want to lose all power in their states.

  In short, the nascent Progressive Party (it was not yet formally organized, and must stage its own convention as soon as possible) was already fighting for life. Money it had, and plenty of political passion left over from “the big show” in Chicago, but its frailties were obvious. Chief among these was a lack of ideological unity—not only between intellectuals of the Herbert Croly stamp and petty bosses like William Flinn, but between city men and hayseeds, suffragists and social workers, temperance advocates and the Irish, muckraking journalists and self-made millionaires. Had Wilson not been nominated, Roosevelt might conceivably have managed to compress all this dissent into one hot mass of energy. Now he saw that he had no choice but to lead a quixotic campaign on his own principles.

  He left his Sagamore Hill guest, E. A. Van Valkenburg, alone for a moment, and went to fetch Edith. When they returned, he asked her to say what she thought.

  “She was quite radiant with trust and affection,” Van Valkenburg reported, “as she expressed her faith that the path through honor to defeat was the one to take.”

  IN CHICAGO, EDITH had given off such waves of foreboding, as she sat quietly knitting amid the tumult around her, that she reminded William Allen White of Madame Defarge—“weaving the inevitable destiny ahead of us out of the yard and skein where it had been wound by the hand of some terrible fate.” Since then, evidently, she had reconciled herself to the idea of Roosevelt’s crusade—a word that was often on the lips of his family and followers these days. Protestant for the most part, and not a few of them puritanical in their ardor (Edith herself was a descendant of Jonathan Edwards, the New England divine), they saw themselves as a persecuted minority, bound to grow stronger as their numbers diminished.

  Her radiance, remarked on by other visitors as well as Van Valkenburg, may indeed have been a matter of idealism. But there was also the thought that Theodore’s retirement from politics, so distressingly interrupted, must surely become permanent after November.

  The Roosevelt children reacted to the coming campaign with varying degrees of excitement and fear. Alice was torn, even more than in 1910, between loyalty to her father and dread that her husband would be swept out of Congress on Taft’s coattails. She did not think she could stand any more of “Cincinnasty” than she already had to endure.

  To the puzzlement of many of her own relatives, Alice adored everything about Nicholas Longworth except his willingness to serve the President. His baldness, his boozing, his lust for other women—she had taken them on when she married him, and found them perversely attractive. She had even come to like the kind of echt German chamber music he played with some of his friends (usually on first violin: behind the Midwestern swagger, a gifted musician lurked). “Darling Nick, I love him so much.” But for all her floaty, expensive clothes and party chat, Alice was as political as a ward heeler. Progressivism meant little to her as a cause. It was simply a platform that her father had chosen to run on, and in any race, she was for him “first, last and always.”

  Representative Longworth’s position was an agonizing one. He had come to share many of Roosevelt’s beliefs. But his political ties to Taft were so old, and so intertwined with those of friendship between their respective clans, that bolting the Ohio Republican party was simply not an option for him. Alice—pale and coughing, existing mainly on fruit and eggs and Vichy water—suffered along with him, finding it difficult to contain her fury against the bile his mother and sister showed toward the Colonel. If Nick lost his seat in Congress, she saw little in his future but more alcohol, and more women.

  Ted was an ardent progressive who had learned much by working to elect Hiram Johnson as governor of California. In Chicago he had been ubiquitous at planning sessions for the new party. Recently hired as a bond salesman for the New York banking house of Bertron, Griscom & Co., he was staying at Sagamore Hill until he and Eleanor could find a house in the city. This gave him an inside position to observe the workings of a presidential campaign. But he soon found out that the name of Theodore Roosevelt did not help him sell many bonds on Wall Street.

  Kermit had no interest in politics. His new Harvard degree and Porcellian circle of acquaintance promised him a charmed entry into the world Ted prized—clubs, banks, lunches, squash courts, smokers, balls. But Africa had left an ache in his heart for the Land of Beyond. His parents had made it clear to him, as to all their children, that they could not afford to support adult dependents. So if he wanted the career of a gentleman adventurer, he was either going to have to do it on salary, or find himself a rich wife. Kermit had already made overtures in both directions, securing a job with the Brazil Railway Company, and courting Belle Willard, daughter of the owner of a chain of Southern hotels. The girl’s financial expectations were rosy, but to distress at Oyster Bay, her parents were Democrats. So far, fortunately, Belle had not given Kermit much encouragement. He was due to sail for South America in a matter of weeks, and would see if she pined for him.

  Ethel would, at any rate. For the last couple of years, brother and sister had been inseparable, swapping their favorite poems, united in their disapproval of Ted’s “fast” way of life. A sedate and colorless moth in contrast to butterfly Alice, Ethel was being wooed by a thirtyish surgeon, Richard Derby. His job—not an easy one at the moment—was to convince her that life away from her father was worth living. Roosevelt was touched by her devotion, and aware of the desperate shyness that made her cling to him. “How is my sweet little apostle?” he would tease, enfolding her in bear hugs. Ethel was a devout churchgoer who had been overwhelmed, in Chicago, by the fervor of his followers. “Oh Dorothy,” she told a friend about the post-bolt meeting, “every person in that hall felt as if it were the Holy War—and they crusaders.”

  Archie had little patience with holiness, but he loved the sound of the word war. Through dogged self-improvement he had managed to conquer his learning disabilities and beat back ill health, much as his father had done in the summer of ’76. “His frail-looking body,” Roosevelt noted approvingly, “has a certain tough whipcord-like quality to it.” Terse and touchy, Archie would have liked nothing better than to enlist with firearms in the “battle for the Lord”—perhaps at the side of his hero, U.S. Marshal Seth Bullock. But a remedial term at Phillips Academy in Andover awaited him in the fall, and he must cram his slow brain for that.

  Quentin was still boy enough to enjoy the political activity at Sagamore Hill (daily delegations, a constant racket of typewriters and telegraphers, reporters camping out on the lawn) without any curiosity about what, exactly, was going on. In an affectionate pen portrait written that summer, his father described him as “tranquil, efficient, moon-faced and entirely merry … busy about affairs which mostly have to do with machinery.”

  ROOSEVELT SEEMED A relieved man after the catharsis of Chicago. He had lingered there long enough to transmute what was left of rage into momentum, declaring, “I’m feeling like a bull moose.” Cartoonists seized upon the image with joy, and a new political animal, all teeth and antlers, pranced onto the pages of a thousand newspapers, shouldering aside the elephant and the donkey. Gifford and Amos Pinchot and other serious souls might insist that
they were at work on the constitution of the Progressive Party, but to popular perception it was already the “Bull Moose Party,” and “Teddy” a rambunctious critter.

  For as long as he stayed home, however, recuperating after his strenuous spring, Roosevelt’s behavior was tame. He made a few mild complaints about the “miserable showing” of his lost supporters. Yet Governor Osborn wrote to apologize and explain, he was forgiving, and hinted that he might have supported Wilson himself, were it not for the reactionary bosses behind the Democratic Party’s promises of social reform. Senator Dixon, reappointed as his campaign manager, could only hope that the velvet on the Bull Moose’s antlers would soon wear off.

  “I suppose that as we grow older, we naturally lose the natural feeling of young men to take an interest in politics just for the sake of the strife,” Roosevelt wrote the British novelist H. Rider Haggard. That did not make him any less keen to fight for distributive justice. His challenge over the next four months, he felt, was to convince a majority of the American people that he was not personally ambitious. “The great bulk of my wealthy and educated friends regard me as a dangerous crank.… But all this is of little permanent consequence. It is a fight that must be made, and it is worth making; and the event lies on the knees of the gods.”

  ON 7 JULY, DIXON issued a formal call for delegates of the new party to convene in Chicago in the first week of August. The publication of this letter forced Roosevelt to confront an almost insoluble political dilemma. After being nominated by the convention (a foregone conclusion), he would be expected to campaign across the country on the Progressive Party ticket. Yet what was the sense of running on such a ticket in states where a majority of “Roosevelt Republicans” were sworn to support him? He would in effect be asking these loyalists to follow him out of the GOP, and give up their local power and affiliations.