Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  This did not signify that Roosevelt would have inherited much of Taft’s support, had he won the GOP nomination and campaigned as a small-p progressive. He had always been anathema to the sort of Republicans who, on election night in Darien, Connecticut, had stomped and burned a portrait of him. But he might have forestalled Wilson’s own nomination, so reluctantly assented to by Democrats after forty-three ballots in Baltimore. Even if he had not, he would have had an established party organization behind him, and a platform that addressed itself to the changing national mood. His phenomenal personal popularity would have surged to new heights, along with his international renown. He would now probably be President-elect of the United States, and John Schrank not in the dock for trying to kill him.

  There remained the moral question that his black butler—no student of Aristotle—was asking: whether by bolting the party that had once made him president, had he not committed the fatal insolence? Was he now irreversibly headed toward a pathetic, if not tragic end? Nothing in Roosevelt’s strenuous soul could entertain such an idea. He had cheated death. He had books to write, trees to chop, sons to bring up, a daughter to marry off, and another daughter to save from divorce (poor Nick had been defeated, and was taking it out on Alice). Always, too, there was Edith.

  ROOSEVELT ADMITTED TO feeling “a little melancholy” over the prospect of having to continue as head of the Progressive Party, when his real need was to start earning money again. His recent hospital and doctor bills, totaling between two and three thousand dollars, had cut into savings already depleted by marathon travels over the last two and a half years—not to mention the cost of entertaining hundreds of political pilgrims to Sagamore Hill. He had begun what was bound to be an expensive libel action against George Newett. And he suspected that Ethel was about to get engaged to her faithful doctor, Dick Derby. That would mean a large wedding in the spring. It could not compare in splendor to the White House nuptials of “Princess Alice” in 1906. But given the rise in prices under the Taft administration, it might run up a similar bill.

  One way of making a great deal of money was to go on the lecture circuit. Demands for him to speak had become innumerable after his performance in the Milwaukee Auditorium. A novel feature of many of these invitations was the suggestion that he accompany his presentation with “moving pictures” of himself in Africa, Europe, and on the campaign trail. If there was not enough of such footage, more could easily be faked, using an impersonator and studio props.

  Roosevelt was willing to address such institutions as the National Geographic Society and American Historical Association, with or without fee. He declined, however, to make an exhibition of himself on less prestigious platforms. “I could probably make a good deal of money by so doing,” he wrote Kermit. “But I shrink to a degree greater than I can express from commercializing what I did as President or the reputation I have gained in public service.”

  He felt the same way about journalism. “I get from The Outlook a salary probably not more than one-eighth of what I could get by writing for the Sunday Hearst papers or the Sunday World; and nineteen men out of twenty would not see any difference; but there seems to me to be a very great difference.” He had his dignity to consider, and in that regard, unselfconsciously compared himself to Lincoln, Milton, and Darwin. “With none of these would it be pardonable to consider the possible monetary return, whether for the presidency, for Paradise Lost or for The Origin of Species.”

  There remained his perennial source of gentlemanly income: the publication of books. African Game Trails had been enormously profitable in its first-serial form, and a bestseller for a while, but thereafter only a modest success. The polite notes Charles Scribner attached to Roosevelt’s half-yearly royalty checks did not quite mask editorial disappointment. Sales so far, in luxury and library editions, totaled fewer than forty thousand copies.

  Looking back over his statements, Roosevelt could see that his other Scribner titles had lost momentum after his humiliation in the Congressional elections of 1910. Royalties earned by Oliver Cromwell, The Rough Riders, and Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter had fallen from $28,620 in February 1911 to $1,531 in February 1912. Oddly enough, his reemergence as the Bull Moose candidate had not arrested this slide; his latest check, for sales of all four books though 22 August, was a mere $895.

  It was clear that something important had to come out of his pen during the winter, if he was going to reestablish himself as a man of letters. But what, and who would publish it? Most of the top houses in New York listed titles by him. G. P. Putnam’s Sons had The Naval War of 1812, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, The Wilderness Hunter, The Winning of the West, American Ideals, and Theodore Roosevelt: Works, a fifteen-volume set issued somewhat prematurely in 1900. The Century Company had Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, Hero Tales from American History, The Strenuous Life, and Stories of the Great West. Houghton Mifflin had Gouverneur Morris and Thomas Hart Benton; Longmans, Green & Co., New York: A Sketch; and the Outlook Company, The New Nationalism. Bibliographically, it was an impressive list, especially when the Scribners quartet was added to it, along with overseas editions and translations. Commercially, he had to accept that all of his books except The Rough Riders were languishing in backlist.

  Late in November he let it be known that he was thinking of publishing some autobiographical chapters in The Outlook. He was not sure that he would enjoy this “experiment” in self-revelation, but very sure that he wanted to be well paid if it developed into a book. Charles Scribner was upset not to be offered first serial rights, since Scribner’s Magazine had such a wide circulation and had done so well with African Game Trails. But Roosevelt felt obliged to give them to The Outlook, which had suffered many canceled subscriptions after supporting his bolt from the Republican Party. Scribner, undeterred, scented another bestseller. It would be the first presidential autobiography since those of the two Adamses—not that they had been of much value. Ulysses S. Grant’s famous memoir had ended with the Civil War. Roosevelt was not only a gifted writer, but his life story was as thrilling as any novel. Scribner wrote to William B. Howland, treasurer of The Outlook, in a state of high excitement. “This is the first time that I have ever put in a blind bid for the publication of a book.” He asked if the Colonel would accept an advance of $12,000 and a royalty rate of 20 percent.

  It was a generous offer, matching the record rate Scribner had paid for African Game Trails. He was pained when Howland replied on 3 December that Roosevelt had yielded to “another proposition [that] is distinctly better from more than one point of view.”

  The proposition had come from the Macmillan Company, and was better indeed, paying Roosevelt an advance of $20,000 and a royalty rate of 50 percent. In return for these amazing terms, he was required to finish his manuscript by the summer of 1913, for publication that fall. Which meant printing the first chapters in The Outlook early in the new year, so that the whole book could be serialized before it appeared in hardcover.

  Nobody in the industry doubted that Roosevelt could, and would, deliver on time: his reputation for promptness was legendary. But before starting work on what he insisted on calling his “possible autobiography,” he had some scholarly writing to do. The American Historical Association had elected him as its president, and invited him to address its year-end convention. He thought he would speak on the subject of “History as Literature,” and publish his lecture as the title piece in a volume of miscellaneous essays and reviews.

  His third book project for the winter was unlikely to be profitable, but would satisfy the mammologist in him. It was to be the collaborative scientific study he had long planned to write with Edmund Heller, entitled Life-Histories of African Game Animals. Charles Scribner was awarded full publication rights for $4,000, a not exactly glittering consolation prize.

  JOHN F. SCHRANK, meanwhile, was tried in Milwaukee on a charge of assault with intent to murder. He pleaded guilty, but with qualifications: “I intended to kill Theodore Roose
velt, the third termer. I did not want to kill the candidate of the Progressive Party.”

  A cooperative, often jocular witness, he insisted that he was neither insane nor a Socialist. He bequeathed the bullet in Roosevelt’s chest to the New-York Historical Society, although some would have thought it belonged to the Colonel by right of conveyance. At times, Schrank claimed he was penniless; at others, that he had inherited Manhattan real estate from his father, a Bavarian immigrant. He had cash enough to have bought a gun and pursued the Colonel for two weeks through the Deep South and on across the Midwest—intending but failing to shoot him in at least five cities before Milwaukee. Always his phobia had been that Roosevelt, if elected, would plunge the country into a civil war.

  By court order, Schrank was remanded to the custody of a “lunacy commission” of five psychiatrists. They concluded that he was a case of “dementia praecox, paranoid type,” and unanimously recommended incarceration for life in the Wisconsin state asylum in Oshkosh. A guard escorting him there by train noticed him staring out the window at passing fields, and asked if he liked to hunt.

  “Only Bull Moose,” Schrank said.

  MUCH AS ROOSEVELT wanted to become a full-time “literary feller,” as he had proclaimed himself in his thirties, his still-evangelical followers begged him to stay on as their leader. With four years to expand, refinance, and consolidate, the Progressive National Committee was intent on “renominating” him for president in 1916—so much so that it had already scheduled a Party conference in Chicago to sanction that plan.

  George Perkins, seeking publicity, presided at a preliminary dinner of “Highbrow Political Contributors” in New York. The Colonel was guest of honor. Frank Munsey attended, along with the short-story writer Edna Ferber, the journalist Will Irwin, and Hamlin Garland, the kind of all-round man of letters Roosevelt most enjoyed. Garland’s short stories and essays were highly regarded, and he had also written an excellent life of President Grant.

  If Perkins was hoping for an evening of Progressive dialectic, he was disappointed. Garland was more interested in encouraging Roosevelt (looking fully recovered and cheerful) to push ahead with his autobiography. He said he knew how difficult it was for a public man to find the right intimate tone, and passed on a recommendation from William Dean Howells, the sage of American letters: the Colonel should reminisce aloud to a stenographer.

  Roosevelt was in receipt of similar advice from Lawrence Abbott of The Outlook, but he let Garland think the notion intrigued him. “I’ll begin it immediately, dictating the way Howells suggested.”

  “Don’t give us too much of the political, the official,” Garland said. “Write it the way you talk to your friends.”

  “That’s not so easy as it sounds, especially when you consider the distractions I suffer.” Roosevelt’s voice rose to the ironic squeak he sometimes used when mocking himself. “Being out of politics is not precisely retirement for me.”

  ABBOTT’S IDEA, SHREWDER than Howells’s, was to engage the Colonel in conversations at Sagamore Hill, with Frank Harper sitting in. They should be as informal as possible. When Roosevelt dictated, he orated. But relaxing in front of his own fire and surrounded by his own books and mementoes, he was a natural raconteur. He could go on for hours, with effortless sequitur and wit, often laughing himself into paroxysms. Abbott worried, however, that he might be inhibited by the sight of his secretary scratching away on a pad.

  Fortunately Harper was so short as to be unobtrusive in any room with large furniture. Before their first, experimental session, Abbott instructed the young man to record everything verbatim, no matter how disjointed the sequence. They they joined Roosevelt in his study.

  The Colonel began to talk about his childhood with freshness and freedom. From time to time, he remembered Harper’s presence and stiffened. But as the afternoon wore on, he relaxed and Abbott went home triumphant, with a mass of material to snip and paste. After a couple of days Roosevelt had a typed draft copy for approval. He edited and punctuated it with his usual conscientiousness. The result was “Boyhood and Youth,” the first chapter of what promised to be the most entertaining American memoir since Benjamin Franklin’s.

  On October 27, 1858, I was born at No. 28 East Twentieth Street, New York City, in the house in which we lived during the time that my two sisters and my brother and I were small children. It was furnished in the canonical taste of the New York which George William Curtis described in the Potiphar Papers. The black haircloth furniture in the dining room scratched the bare legs of the children when they sat on it. The middle room was a library, with tables, chairs, and bookcases of gloomy respectability. It was without windows, and so was available only at night. The front room, the parlor, seemed to us children to be a room of much splendor, but was open for general use only on Sunday evening or on rare occasions when there were parties.… The ornaments of that parlor I remember now, including the gas chandelier decorated with a great variety of cut-glass prisms. These prisms struck me as possessing peculiar magnificence. One of them fell off one day, and I hastily grabbed it and stowed it away, passing several days of furtive delight in the treasure, a delight always alloyed with fear that I would be found out and convicted of grand larceny.

  ROOSEVELT’S REDISCOVERY of his narrative voice was interrupted on 8 December by distant, discordant Bull Moose calls. They emanated from the Progressive conference in Chicago, where his presence was urgently requested.

  Gifford and Amos Pinchot had never been able to reconcile themselves to the power George Perkins wielded as chairman of the Party’s Executive Committee. Ever since the election, they had plagued Roosevelt with a proposal that the executive headquarters should be translocated from New York—Perkins’s orbit—to Washington, home of the more malleable Senator Dixon. The Colonel saw a threat to his reputation. The Party was bound to self-destruct if it lost its big-city backers. Perkins would resign rather than be sidelined by the Pinchots, and Frank Munsey was wistful to rejoin the GOP. Roosevelt did not want to look like a leader unable to hold on to his best men.

  Showing as much good grace as possible, he left for Chicago on a special train, and found fifteen hundred loyal Progressives waiting for him next day in the ballroom of the LaSalle Hotel. The National Committee was sufficiently convinced by his support of Perkins to vote 32 to 12 in favor of keeping the executive headquarters in New York. As a sop to the Pinchots, a branch office was established in Washington, and antitrust language reinserted in the Party platform.

  Roosevelt’s “renomination” two days later was more of a headline-getter than a formal nod toward 1916. He cast most of his speech of thanks in the present tense, telling the delegates that their current priority must be to fight for distributive justice at the state and federal level. He obstinately defended his philosophy of judicial recall: “The doctrine of the divine right of judges to rule the people is every bit as ignoble as the doctrine of the divine right of kings.”

  With that he handed the platform over to Jane Addams, and the proceedings degenerated into a dry chautauqua on questions of organization, recruitment, and finance. Charts were drawn, titles devised, plans mooted, budgets projected, lists compiled from other lists, and committees split into subcommittees. Not until the morning of 12 December was Roosevelt free to head for home and his study, with its constant fire and Frank Harper tapping away on the typewriter downstairs.

  BY CHRISTMAS HE had “History As Literature” finished, as well as several essays, the first few of his African game mammal studies, and another chapter of his autobiography. He decided to discontinue interview sessions with Lawrence Abbott and write or dictate the rest of that book. To Abbott and other editors at The Outlook, this was a fatal decision. The Colonel could not be expected to draw himself out, lacking the stimulus of a curious—and commercially-minded—interlocutor. He was aware of their distress, but relieved to be in control of his own story. “I have had to refuse to write a whole raft of interesting and sensational things that they would ha
ve liked me to put in,” he told Kermit. The result was that he became self-conscious about any revelations at all, and admitted that it gave him “a great deal of worry.”

  Much of his inhibition derived from that traditional mute on the autobiographical trumpet, the over-protective wife. Still headachy and frail after her near-fatal riding accident of fourteen months before, Edith did not see why hundreds of thousands of readers should be privy to the sort of personal things kept for family letters, or better still, not put on paper at all: matters of health and bereavement and money and sex. It was out of the question that he should write about her, let alone the dead young woman whose face and name she had so assiduously erased from his Harvard photograph album. (But a lock of honey-colored hair survived, in a secret envelope inscribed in his own hand.)

  The company of Archie and Quentin over the Christmas holidays, along with Ethel, Ted, Eleanor, and little Gracie, cheered both parents up. Stuffed stockings and dense snow insulating the house added the right Dickensian touches. Edith began to look “distinctly better,” Roosevelt wrote her sister. He thanked Emily for sending him two volumes of Italian short stories. “I shall read them both of course; probably the Fogazzaro first.”