American Experiment (215 page)

The progressive leadership spoke for a new breed of mugwumps, entrenched in some states and districts, especially in the West, but emerging mainly from the nation’s growing professional and business elements both East and West. Most of them born and bred Republicans, they had often kept their distance from country populists, silverites, and labor groups, but many still passionately embraced the old causes of political purity and mugwump reform. By 1909, this was the party of the Square Deal, headed by Roosevelt and his reform leaders in Washington and the states.

The stiffest challenge to Taft’s middle way was posed by the progressives’ attack on Cannonism and Aldrichism. In the House, Joe Cannon, after six years in the speakership, had established an autocratic leadership that rivaled Czar Reed’s of old. A bantam rooster of a man, as coarse in manner as he was reactionary in doctrine, Cannon controlled the committee system through his power to hand out choice committee memberships. Taft disliked both Cannon and Cannonism, and might have heeded the rumblings of George Norris and other progressives who planned to strip the Speaker of his appointing powers. But the President crumbled when Cannon and Senator Nelson Aldrich warned him to his face that a defeat for Cannon would jeopardize the President’s program, especially tariff revision.

Rather, they offered him a deal: if the President stood by Cannon, the Speaker would help carry out the Republican platform. Taft agreed, to the consternation of the insurgents; soon he was out on the hustings, embracing Aldrich politically and Cannon literally. Then he had to stand by helplessly as the Speaker stripped rebel congressmen of choice committee assignments and continued to promote his own brand of Republicanism.

Later Roosevelt would attack Taft for his “bungling leadership,” which Roosevelt blamed for splitting the party. Taft was indeed inept in dealing with other politicians, especially progressive leaders. But he was no fool. He simply lacked the personal qualities necessary to carry out his strategy of “party unity.” To maintain links with both wings, to play one group against the other, to avoid alienating either side for good, called for
rocklike self-confidence, unflagging energy, a firm direction, and a willingness to exploit and even expand presidential power. These strengths were not Taft’s. He lacked the steady willpower and purpose that enables strong leaders, with all their twists and turns, to move toward their goals; rather, as Secretary of Commerce and Labor Charles Nagel remarked, Taft had only the stubbornness of the uncertain man.

He was indolent, too; his personal political voltage was not high and steady enough to energize the circuits of power leading out of the White House. Doubtless, part of the problem was his sheer corpulence, though by a mighty effort he had reduced his weight from 326 to 250 pounds. He believed that the Constitution restricted presidential power, and this inhibited him from “interfering” in the bill-making process during the early crucial stages on the Hill. He was too high-minded to use some of Roosevelt’s blustering, bullying methods; and he lacked what Mowry called Roosevelt’s catlike political touch.

The more Taft succumbed to the Old Guard embrace, the more he was caught in the network of obligations and pressures surrounding the congressional party. He became more psychologically dependent on the Old Guard too. “When you and Senator Aldrich are both absent from the Senate,” the President wrote to the extreme right-wing Senator Hale of Maine in June 1910, “I yearn for the presence of an old parliamentary hand.” To Aldrich he wrote: “I long for your presence.” He was on such good terms with the Old Guard leadership that when Chauncey Depew in a jocular mood put his hand on the President’s huge stomach and asked, “What are you going to name it when it comes?” Taft shot back, “Well, if it is a boy, I’ll call it William; if it’s a girl, I’ll call it Theodora; but if it turns out to be just wind, I’ll call it Chauncey!”

Taft’s marriage of convenience with the Old Guard helped bring him some major legislative victories during his first two years in the White House. Congress passed a controversial tariff act which Taft absurdly termed the best bill ever passed by the Republican party; the Mann-Elkins Act placing telephone and telegraph companies under the Interstate Commerce Commission; a postal savings bank law; and the Mann Act prohibiting interstate transportation of women for immoral purposes. But the more Taft compromised with the regulars to pass his bills, the more he frayed the frail cords still connecting him with the progressives.

Theodore Roosevelt returned home in June 1910. He was fifty-one, restless, and jobless. He was apprehensive about Taft and the political situation, about himself and his ability to resist the siren call of ambition
and power. His reception in New York—a welcome by the battleship
South Carolina,
a twenty-one gun salute followed by bugle calls, a reunion with his kinsfolk, including his young niece Eleanor and her husband Franklin, and a monster parade up Broadway headed by Rough Riders—boosted his self-esteem without slaking his ambition. And as he settled back into Oyster Bay life and met with old political cronies, his moral indignation began to accelerate.

Even while in Africa, runners had brought him news of Taft’s dalliance with the Old Guard. Roosevelt’s United States Forester, Gifford Pinchot, had intercepted the former President in Paris with a long bill of complaints from outraged progressives. In particular, Pinchot had filled his ears about the most sensational political issue that had boiled up during Roosevelt’s absence—Taft’s sacking of Pinchot after the forester publicly attacked Taft’s Interior Secretary, Richard A. Ballinger, for harming conservation in order to aid corporate interests. Republican regulars, including Roosevelt’s old and close friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, urged on him that any man who publicly attacked his superior was asking to be fired, but to Roosevelt it was a moral issue.

For a time, Roosevelt, despite his rising feeling, tried to follow a moderate and middle way. He could not forget his longtime friendship with good old Will, and he preferred not to antagonize the rank-and-file Republican regulars; yet progressive leaders were pressing him to move against the Old Guard. He tried to be a “regular with a conscience,” staying in touch with regulars like Lodge and with Taft, whom he placed in that category, while pouring out his progressive views in speeches and correspondence. But his heart was no longer in moderation or centrism. He had never had a more unpleasant summer, he told Root.

Roosevelt could no more keep to his middle course than Taft had been able to a year earlier. His indignation soared as Taft moved into closer embrace with the Old Guard. He now dismissed his successor as a man who had been a good first lieutenant but was not fit to be captain. Taft’s shift toward the right had left a leadership vacuum and progressives were now turning to Roosevelt to supply it. A “Roosevelt party” indeed stretched across the country, founded in the moralistic mugwump tradition, rooted in the nation’s social and political fabric, and fully equipped with its own ideology and platform, zealous troops, and an unemployed hero.

From the grass roots of this Roosevelt party came seductive words of praise and even more seductive calls of moral duty. In January 1911: “On the trains and in the hotels, you are the main subject under discussion”—people now “awaken to a realization of what you were trying to do for the people.” “Don’t attempt to thwart the spontaneous movement for you.”
“I trust and admire you more every year”—this from editor William Allen White. “Will you lead in the formation of a new party [that will] break the solid South?” By 1912, the appeals—and invitations to speak—had risen from a trickle to a torrent. Even a former President “is not big
enough”
to decline a nomination which comes to him “unsought.” He should brush aside the “third term phantom—you were only elected once and you did not serve two full terms.” “It is God’s will that you be our next President.”

All that was needed now was the spark to bring this movement to life. That spark was struck from Roosevelt’s smoldering ambition. Into his letters during 1911 crept a note that betrayed his appetite for leadership and power even as he tried to contain it. “I very emphatically feel that to me personally to be nominated in 1912 would be a calamity,” he wrote in a typical letter of 1911. But then came the giveaway sentence: “Moreover I am absolutely certain that it would be criminal folly under any circumstances to nominate me unless it could be made clear as day that the nomination came not through intrigue or political work, not in the least to gratify any kind of wish or ambition on my part, but simply and solely because the bulk of the people wanted a given job done, and for their own sakes, and not for mine, wanted me to do that job.” Elihu Root astutely compared his old chief to a “thirsty sinner.”

While Roosevelt invited the call that was sure to come, opposition was looming on the left. By 1910, Robert La Follette had become the acknowledged leader of western progressives in the Senate. La Follette met the Alger image in politics: born in a two-room cabin in Wisconsin pioneer country, he had worked his way through the University of Wisconsin, served as a horseback district attorney, and was making his way through the power system of the House of Representatives as a run-of-the-mill congressman when he rebelled against the reactionary Republican establishment in Congress and back home and struck out on his own progressive course. As perhaps the most effective governor of his time, he had forced through an opposition legislature measures for an industrial commission to protect the health and safety of labor in his state, a railroad commission that slashed rates, a direct primary, and ample money and recognition for the university.

La Follette had created his personal organ,
La Follette’s Weekly,
in January 1909; he created his personal organization two years later when he convened a meeting of progressives in his Washington home. The cream of the progressive leadership was present: Norris of Nebraska, Senator Jonathan Bourne of Oregon, Governor Chase S. Osborn of Michigan, bathtub tycoon Charles R. Crane of Chicago, and reformer Frederic C. Howe of New York. These men and Senators Joseph L. Bristow of Kansas and
Moses E. Clapp of Minnesota, and such redoubtables as Congressman Irvine L. Lenroot of Wisconsin and Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania, were elected to the leadership of a new organization, the National Progressive Republican League. The aim of the League was announced as the promotion of democratic government and progressive legislation, but politicos and press suspected that it was a vehicle to promote La Follette for President.

Certainly Roosevelt so suspected. He had long been personally friendly with the Wisconsin senator, but had kept a political distance from him. Now he could hardly ignore “Battling Bob,” who was the very image of progressive militancy with his eloquent speeches, quick and savage thrusts in debate, and shock of bristling hair crowning photogenic features and a sturdy frame. Roosevelt moved warily, not wanting to alienate rank-and-file progressive leaders in the West. Some of these leaders had supported La Follette on the premise that Roosevelt was unavailable; as the former President inched toward availability, La Follette suffered serious defections.

In vain the La Follette forces sought to stem the Roosevelt tide. Warning the former President that Taft delegates would carry Nebraska because of division in progressive ranks, Norris asked Roosevelt to support La Follette delegates—or at least not oppose them. If later La Follette failed of nomination, the Wisconsin’s delegates would shift toward Roosevelt. Would Roosevelt announce categorically his noncandidacy? Roosevelt would not.

The denouement came unexpectedly in early February 1912, when La Follette, himself ill and exhausted, and with his daughter facing a serious operation, gave a speech in Philadelphia to a dinner audience of publishers and politicians that included such luminaries as Alexander Graham Bell, Lincoln Steffens, and Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey. As the six hundred banqueters watched first indignant, then astonished, and finally embarrassed, La Follette, after vitriolically attacking the press, the bankers, and the interests, lost control of himself and simply ranted for over two hours. After the press caricatured La Follette as having had a mental breakdown, a number of progressive leaders found the episode a good reason—or excuse—for shifting to their true love, their “colonel.”

And by now their true love was ready. For Roosevelt, the decision to run had not been as easy as the press suspected. Certainly he wanted to beat Taft and the Old Guard. But he did not wish to do so at the risk of sending La Follette or even Bryan to the White House. And he could not forget the prospect of 1916. If he supported Taft and in the end the President lost, as Roosevelt expected he would, TR would stand well with the
regulars, and, backed by his progressive followers, he could take over the GOP after some incompetent Democrat served one term. If Taft won in 1912, Roosevelt could still succeed him after the President’s second term.

Oddly, it was Taft who forced the issue, as much as Roosevelt. During 1911, he mobilized the congressional Old Guard and the rank-and-file regulars with promises, patronage, and portents. With its usual lack of skill, the Taft White House took a number of steps bound to infuriate the thin-skinned Roosevelt. A few days before Roosevelt announced, Taft wrote his brother that the former President was “surrounded by so many sycophants and neurotics who feed his vanity and influence his judgment that his usual good political sense is at fault in respect of the election.” Such provocations from Taft were not slow to reach the ears of his predecessor.

Rising differences over issues, bolstered by each man’s followers and sharpened by ambition and self-esteem, lay at the center of the escalating conflict between the two old comrades. Of all Roosevelt’s heresies, the one that Taft found most incomprehensible and unforgivable was his proposal for the people’s power to recall judicial decisions. For Taft, judicial power and independence were almost sacrosanct. He had vetoed the admission of Arizona because of a provision in its constitution authorizing the recall of judges. (The astute Arizonans removed the offending clause, gained admission to statehood in February 1912, and later restored the provision.) Roosevelt’s call, in a Columbus speech, for recall of state—but not federal—judicial decisions roused Taft to hyperbole. Such extremists, he said, were “political emotionalists or neurotics” who would cause “bubbling anarchy.” Since calling his enemies lunatics or neurotics had long been one of Roosevelt’s own specialties, he could not help being infuriated by the charge.