Colonel Roosevelt (23 page)

The trouble was that they were, and both of them knew it.

“
Archie, I am very greatly distressed,” Taft told Captain Butt on 6 July. “I do not see how I am going to get out of having a fight with President Roosevelt.”

He was still inclined to use the last two words when preoccupied or flustered. A rumor was going around that Roosevelt wanted to prevent Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger from running for the the U.S. Senate. True or not, the rumor reminded people that the Colonel had always been close to Ballinger’s enemy, Gifford Pinchot.

“I confess it wounds me very deeply,” Taft said. “I hardly think the prophet of the Square Deal is playing it exactly square with me now.” His wife was taunting him with the possibility that Roosevelt might beat him for renomination in 1912.

Butt asked if he believed Roosevelt really wanted to challenge him.

“I do not know. I have thought sometimes that he did, and then I don’t see how he can. In his mind, however, it may be the only logical way of reaching a third term. Then, too, his tour of Europe, his reception there, and the fact that every crowned head seemed to take it for granted that he would be elected …”

The President spent the rest of the morning soothing his soul with golf.

Later that same day at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt put both hands on the shoulders of two old friends, the civil-service reformers Lucius Burrie Swift and William Dudley Foulke, and said, “
I could cry over Taft.” He escorted them upstairs to a private room, complaining that the President had been a good lieutenant, but was unfit for higher command. Then, closing the door, he said, “I will talk to you with perfect frankness. I would not consider another nomination unless it was practically universally demanded.”

It was a classic Rooseveltian recruitment ploy: the physical embrace, the melodramatic confidentiality, the denial of personal ambition. Swift and Foulke left convinced that he was already running. A trio of Kansas insurgents, Senator Joseph L. Bristow, Congressmen Victor Murdock, and Edmond H. Madison, got the same impression.

“
Are you aware,” Bristow asked the others as they walked back to Oyster Bay, “that we have been participants in a historic occasion where a former President definitely broke with the man he had made his successor?”

Madison expressed awe, but Murdock was skeptical. A former newspaperman, he noted the vehemence of Roosevelt’s private denunciations of Taft and the coyness with which he declined to be quoted.

Actually
Roosevelt was struggling, as throughout his life, between the desire for power and the ethics of responsibility. It was a struggle he had never been able wholly to resolve: indeed, its contrary tensions held him together. He wanted to destroy Taft because Taft had failed. He wanted Taft to succeed because Taft was an extension of himself. He knew he was no longer President, yet he was seen as presidential—the emperors of the Old World had made
that
clear, not to mention Taft in conversation. Although not running, he was running. Even as he maintained his vow of silence, he was shouting from the hustings.

“
THE GREATEST SERVICE
I can render to Taft,” Roosevelt wrote Lodge, “the service which beyond all others will tend to secure his renomination … is to try and help the Republican Party to win at the polls this Fall, and that I am trying to do.”

That meant resisting, on the one hand, pressure from GOP leaders to come out with a “flaming endorsement” of the President, and on the other, appeals from insurgents to proclaim himself in opposition. Either course, he felt, would cost him friends, and split the Party. The fault line ran right through his own family. Alice shared his reformist philosophy, while Nicholas Longworth was a regular, albeit moderate, Republican.

Roosevelt felt sorry for them both. If any single person symbolized the urgency of holding the Party together, it was Nick: son-in-law to the most eminent progressive in America, yet a former law student of William Howard Taft, hailing from the same district in Cincinnati, even representing Taft in Congress.

In response to a letter from Nick, saying it was essential that the President keep control of his own home state, Roosevelt wrote to say he agreed. “
Of course you must stand straight by Taft.… He is your constituent.” He urged the same spirit of cooperation on Gifford Pinchot. “I do hope you won’t take any position which would make it impossible, or even merely exceedingly difficult, for you to support him if necessary.” The President had started off badly, he felt, through having no real qualities of leadership.
“He is evidently a man who takes color from his surroundings. He was an excellent man under me, and close to me. For eighteen months after his election he was a rather pitiful failure, because he had no real strong man on whom to lean, and yielded to the advice of his wife, his brother Charley, the different corporation lawyers who have his ear, and various similar men.” With a midterm review coming his way, however, Taft must surely start considering the interests of the people. “He may and probably will turn out to be a perfectly respectable President, whose achievements will be disheartening compared with what we had expected, but who nevertheless will have done well enough for us to justify us
in renominating him—for you must remember that not to renominate him would be a very serious thing, only to be justified by really strong reasons.”

The Colonel was putting the case as favorably for Taft as he could. “Otherwise I could see very ugly times ahead for me, as I should certainly not be nominated unless everybody believed that the ship was sinking and thought it a good thing to have me aboard her when she went down.”

ROOSEVELT PONDERED WHAT
to say about the state of the nation when his two-month vow of silence was up. His every word would be listened to as if megaphoned. Plainly, he would have to make a major address, or Americans would ask why he was willing to orate to Europeans, but not them.
A poll conducted by
World’s Work
magazine showed that more than three out of every four of its readers wanted him back in the White House. Progressive Democrats were likely to defect to him in large numbers. “I have just returned from a trip across Wisconsin and Minnesota,” one respondent wrote, “and in talking with men on the train [about] Roosevelt and the presidency, the answer in
every
instance was that he could not help being President again.”

He was in receipt of almost two thousand speaking invitations. Most were from committees or candidates desperate for help in endangered GOP constituencies. It did him little good to protest that the prospect of a return to the hustings filled him with “unalloyed horror.” So he yielded to pressure from the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee to make a sixteen-state campaign trip, beginning in late August. The foray would take him west of Ohio into the heartland of insurgency. His itinerary would advertise his progressivism, no matter what dutiful words he uttered in behalf of the Party leadership.

To his annoyance, he heard that the Committee was raising money with the specific purpose of destroying every insurgent running for election or reelection in the fall—Senator Beveridge of Indiana, for one. Even Taft had contributed funds. The more Roosevelt thought about it, the more he convinced himself that his big speech on tour—most likely at Osawatomie, Kansas—must be a restatement of his Special Message of 1908, updated and expanded to embrace the aspirations of the anticorporate middle class.

“
My proper task,” he wrote an insurgent editor, “is clearly to announce myself on the vital questions of the day … and take a position that cannot be misunderstood.”

For the rest of July, he chopped wood and swam, rowed, and camped with Archie and Quentin, when his huge volume of mail allowed him. He passed what were to him the most precious minutes of any day reading with Edith—either back and forth aloud, or sitting silently together with their books, as they had when they were children. Once or twice a week he was driven into Manhattan to attend meetings at the
Outlook
offices, traveling in a new automobile,
a Haynes-Apperson Model 19. He quickly learned to drive himself, and became, in Edith’s word, “addicted” to it.

At either end of his commute, the political pilgrims kept coming: more and more insurgents, Old Guard “mossbacks,” fund-raisers, former appointees, emissaries of the New York Republican Party. All wanted something, if only the pleasure of having a former president listen to their “advice,” on the presumption that he wanted it.

Those begging him to make personal appearances were particularly bothersome. Roosevelt had long ago discovered that the more provincial the supplicants, the less able they were to understand that their particular need was not unique: that he was not yearning to travel two thousand miles on bad trains to support the reelection campaign of a county sheriff, or to address the congregation of a new chapel in a landscape with no trees. His refusal, however elaborately apologetic, was received more often in puzzlement than anger. Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, and practically every monarch or minister of consequence in Europe—not to mention the maquettes in Rodin’s studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions.

ON A VISIT
to the summer White House, Lloyd Griscom encountered at first hand the President’s desire to evade any contretemps not occurring on the golf course or poker table. Taft indicated that he might not support Roosevelt for chairman of the New York State convention in September. His explanation was simple: a gratified Boss Barnes would deliver a pro-Taft delegation to the national convention in 1912.

Then Barnes announced on 16 August that the machine had endorsed Vice President James Schoolcraft Sherman as its candidate for chairman of the convention. The Colonel was aghast at the news. Sherman was an archconservative who, he felt, could not have been nominated without Taft’s approval.
But he kept to his vow of silence, which had a few more days to run.

Taft could not refrain from chortling.
“Have you seen the newspapers this afternoon?” he asked Archie Butt. “They have defeated Theodore.”

Butt was so angry he had to go outside and stare at the sea to calm down. “
It makes me ill,” he wrote his sister-in-law that night, “to see the President lessen his own character by lending himself and his great office to these petty devices to humiliate his predecessor.”

A news flash from Oyster Bay next day reported that the Colonel had told friends that he might have to oppose Taft in 1912 to preserve his progressive legacy. He neither confirmed nor denied that rumor, contenting himself with
an announcement that he would go to Saratoga as a delegate from Nassau County, and would run against Sherman for the chairmanship. Barnes warned that there would be dead bodies in his way. “
So they want a fight, do they?” Roosevelt responded. “By George, they shall have it.” With that, he left New York on his western tour.