Colonel Roosevelt (21 page)

IN HIS REPETITIONS
of the words
progress
and
progressive
, as well as
Roosevelt
and
reform
, Senator Gore showed much political acuity. If he had identified the Colonel’s followers more narrowly as Republican
insurgents
, he would have excluded forward-thinkers in his own party who found progressivism a realistic alternative to William Jennings Bryan’s sentimental “
democracy of the heart.” Gore was, in effect, challenging Roosevelt to reform the Republican Party along “enlightened” lines. If its Old Guard leaders “stood pat” behind President Taft, then the “great popular procession” of progressivism might change avenues, and march behind a Democratic drummer.

Actually, the movement was not great in any statistical sense. To be
progressive
in 1910 was to belong to America’s middle class—only
a fifth of the general populace—and want to make bourgeois values the law of the land. To be
insurgent
was to belong to a much smaller, politically active minority, determined to write those values into Republican ideology.
Roosevelt had been wary of the latter presumption since the fall of 1902, when La Follette and Albert B. Cummins, both Midwestern governors, emerged as pioneer insurgents. He happened to agree with some of their demands, such as regulation of railroad rates, but they had struck him as too parochial, uninterested in the other worlds that lay beyond their respective horizons of water and
corn. He had done nothing to encourage the spread of further insurgencies through the central states during his first term, and little to welcome La Follette to Washington as a senator in 1906. Yet he had been pleased when reformers of both major parties praised his own “progressive” swing that same year. By 1908, the GOP insurgents had more or less ceded their cause to him.

Now it appeared that during his time out of the country,
insurgent
and
progressive
had become synonymous on orthodox Republican lips. Henry Cabot Lodge could barely force either obscenity through his reactionary whiskers. Roosevelt, describing himself as a “radical” at Oxford, meant, in the European sense, to convey that he was “a real—not a mock—democrat,” protective of the
petite bourgeoisie
like Clemenceau, liberal like Lloyd George. To Americans, the word unfortunately connotated grass roots.

Like many well-born men with a social conscience, Roosevelt liked to think that he empathized with the poor. He was democratic, in a detached, affable way. However, his rare exposures to squalor had been either voyeuristic, as when he encouraged Jacob Riis to show him “how the other half lived,” or vicarious, as when he recoiled from the “
hideous human swine” in the works of Émile Zola.

Gifford Pinchot had the same kind of aristocratic fastidiousness. But most progressives looked down from a less exalted height. They felt threatened by the lower ranks of society. These were, in descending order, organized labor, represented by the AFL (trades-oriented, exclusionary, anti-immigrant), then the immense subpopulation of unskilled workers who toiled in factories and stockyards and mines, followed by poor whites, and at the dreg level, imported coolies, reservation Indians, and disenfranchised blacks.

Except for the two years he had lived with cowboys in North Dakota, and being the employer of a dozen or so servants, Roosevelt had never had to suffer any prolonged intimacy with the working class.
From infancy, he had enjoyed the perquisites of money and social position. The money, through his own mismanagement, had often run short, and he was by no means wealthy even now, but he had always taken exclusivity for granted. The brownstone birthplace in Manhattan, the childhood tours of Europe, the open doors of Harvard and the Porcellian, the riverside ranch and hilltop estate, the gubernatorial mansion and the White House; Mrs. Astor’s balls, Brahmin clambakes, diplomatic banquets, and most recently, royal receptions; custom clothes, first-class sleepers, private boxes, pro bono lawyers, investment managers, club privileges, a driver and a valet—he had them all. Every night except Sunday he dressed in black tie for dinner, and when he rocked on the piazza, gazing out over his estate, he saw no other roofs, heard no street noise, breathed only the freshest air.

Ensconced, he lacked some of the neuroses of progressives—economic envy and race hatred especially.
His radicalism was a matter of energy rather
than urgency. It wanted to spread out and embrace social (not socialistic) reformers, labor leaders who spoke decent English, churchgoing farmers, businessmen with a sense of community responsibility, and even the occasional polite, self-made Negro, such as
Booker T. Washington. He had no attraction toward the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers in their parvenu palaces. A strong sense of fairness saved him from complacency.
If he was less motivated by compassion than anger at what he saw as the arrogance of capital, he chafed, nonetheless, to regulate it.

DURING ROOSEVELT’S ABSENCE OVERSEAS
, a book by the political philosopher Herbert Croly had become the bible of the new social movement. Entitled
The Promise of American Life
, it was Hamiltonian in its insistence on the need for a strong central government, yet Jacksonian in calling for a war on unearned privilege—and it named Theodore Roosevelt as the only leader on the American scene capable of encompassing both aims. “
An individuality such as his,” Croly wrote, “wrought with so much consistent purpose out of much variety of experience, brings with it an intellectual economy of its own and a sincere and useful sort of intellectual enlightenment.”

A close reading of
The Promise
showed that many of its ideas derived from
Roosevelt’s Special Message of January 1908. More than any other utterance in his career, that bombshell had convinced Wall Street and the Old Guard that “Theodore the Sudden” was a dangerous man.
The issues he raised then—automatic compensation for job-related accidents, federal scrutiny of boardroom operations, value-based regulation of railroad rates, redress against punitive injunctions, strengthened antitrust laws—were the issues his followers wanted him to fight for now. The violent language he had used—“predatory wealth,” “purchased politician[s],” “combinations which are both noxious and legal”—had become commonplaces of progressive rhetoric. When insurgents called for a “moral regeneration of the business world,” and insisted that their “campaign against privilege” was “fundamentally an ethical movement,” they were shouting through a megaphone Roosevelt had left behind.

His own voice from those times echoed back to him:

Sooner than he had predicted, and embarrassingly coincident with his return to America, the movement had begun to achieve critical mass,
converging at state and local levels. “
Is this not the logical time,” the
Kansas City Star
asked in a front-page editorial, “to look forward to a new party which shall include progressive Democrats and Republicans—a party dedicated to the square deal and led by Theodore Roosevelt?”

The fact that a respected GOP organ could propose such a thing, along with “Roosevelt Clubs” springing up like wheat elsewhere in the plains states, explained why Taft’s Republican Congressional Campaign Committee was determined to suppress all insurgents running for state and federal offices in the fall of 1910. Roosevelt took no responsibility for the clubs. “
I might be able to
guide
this movement,” he told Senator Lodge, “but I should be wholly unable to
stop
it, even if I were to try.”

ON 29 JUNE
, Theodore Roosevelt, A.B.
magna cum laude
, Harvard, ’80, returned to Cambridge for the thirtieth anniversary of his class. He found himself walking in the commencement procession next to Governor Charles Evans Hughes of New York. For once, the bearded inellectual, whom he privately mocked as “Charles the Baptist,” did not irritate him. They became so absorbed in conversation that they delayed general entry into Sanders Theatre.

Hughes wanted help. A mildly progressive Republican, he had served three and a half years in Albany at great personal cost, frustrated at every political turn by the state party machine. He was about to be relieved with a seat on the Supreme Court, courtesy of an admiring President Taft. Before resigning, he was determined to take the power of nomination to state offices away from party officials, and transfer it to the rank and file, voting in direct primaries. A bill to this effect had been blocked by standpatters throughout the regular session of the legislature. So he had convened a special session to pass it, in defiance of William Barnes, Jr., boss of the state GOP.

Hughes saw Roosevelt as the only New Yorker powerful enough to exert more influence than Barnes, and asked him if he would get behind the bill.
Cannily, he emphasized that the lawmakers supporting it were all Roosevelt Republicans.

Many times, over the years, Roosevelt had compared the workings of politics to those of a kaleidoscope. Brilliant, harmonious patterns, sometimes carefully shaken into shape, sometimes forming of their own accord, could at the slightest touch fall into jagged disarray, with clashing colors and shafts of impenetrable black. Hughes’s appeal had just such an effect on his current outlook. On this pleasant June day, under the elms of Harvard Yard, he was
confronted with a situation of bewildering intricacy, sharp with factional danger.

He did not like Hughes, but then, neither did anybody at close range. It was impossible to warm to a man who exuded such cold correctness, and grinned with horse-toothed insincerity. However, there was no denying the governor’s intellectual brilliance (he was at home in Japanese, and in infinitesimal calculus), nor the acclaim he had won as an incorruptible advocate of the common good. Not to help him would be to signal approval of Barnes’s bossism.
Even Taft supported the New York primary bill.

“H
E WAS ABOUT TO BE RELIEVED WITH A SEAT ON THE
S
UPREME
C
OURT
.”
Charles Evans Hughes as governor of New York State
.
(photo credit i4.3)

By supporting it too, Roosevelt saw an opportunity to show that he was as willing to work with the President, as a Party regular, as with Hughes or any other moderate progressive. Surely the three of them, with their combined prestige, could swing the bill’s passage. Hughes would go out of office in glory, and establish himself on the Supreme Court, no doubt, as a progressive interpreter of the Constitution. Taft would be seen as hospitable to reasonable reform, and the Old Guard would have to accept that progressivism was now a
permanent part of the Republican agenda. Best of all, Theodore Roosevelt would go down in history as a statesman who had made one final, selfless gesture of conciliation before retiring from Party politics.