Colonel Roosevelt (49 page)

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.

How, though, could he claim to be the leader of a new national party unless it had a full ticket in every state? Lack of local and federal candidates
would fatally weaken it in regions where Taft or Wilson were strong. And his own campaign would look like a search for glory, rather than leadership of a popular upsurge.

In weighing this and other tactical problems before the convention, Roosevelt turned less to the Pinchot brothers than to a man identified with everything they despised: big-business,
laissez-faire
, monopolistic capital. George Walbridge Perkins—fifty years old, flush with the proceeds of a fabulous career at the House of Morgan—was a convert to the cause of progressivism.
He had surpassed Frank Munsey as
the Party’s biggest bankroller. To old-money liberals like the Pinchot brothers, there was something suspect about a
nouveau riche
altruist declaring that he had the welfare of the people at heart. “
Roosevelt has the right idea,” the historian Frederick Jackson Turner commented, “but if he keeps Mr. Perkins as his chef, he is likely to have to take his omelet with Mr. Morgan’s spoon instead of the people’s spoon.”

“A
NEW POLITICAL ANIMAL, ALL TEETH AND ANTLERS
.”
Roosevelt emerges as a third-party candidate for the presidency, summer 1912
.
(photo credit i11.1)

Conversely, it was difficult for small-town Midwesterners such as William Allen White to believe that Perkins—so sleek, so at ease entertaining on
his palatial estate overlooking the Hudson River—had started out as an office boy in Chicago.
He had come by his millions through adroit corporate climbing, up through the executive ranks of insurance and banking companies to the top echelon of some of the world’s greatest conglomerates, including U. S. Steel. For well over a decade this rise had coincided, not always harmoniously, with that of Theodore Roosevelt.

If anything had converted Perkins, fully and finally, to the progressive cause, it was the Colonel’s famous blast against the Taft administration for finding fault with the merger of U.S. Steel and Tennessee Coal & Iron. He believed, with Roosevelt, that there should be an entente between socially responsible entrepreneurs and a powerful, yet non-prosecutorial, government.

Exquisitely undertailored, in custom clothes that favored shades of gray and white, Perkins was a slender man with a trim, soft mustache and a soft voice. He smiled often, and was in constant motion even at rest: toe-tapping, thumb-flicking, black eyes snapping. The pudgy little White envied the drape of his mohair suits, while Gifford Pinchot despaired of ever being able to make Roosevelt laugh the way Perkins did. Behind their jealousy, however, lay an honest concern. They wondered if his real cause was not Roosevelt, but regulatory policy. If he ever became Secretary of Commerce, champagne would surely foam in a thousand corporate boardrooms.

Deep down, Roosevelt preferred the society of sophisticates (Perkins was “George,”
White always a surname), as long as they embraced the values of the middle class. Perkins shared his own cheerful nature and freakish ability to be both fast and thorough in dispatching great quantities of work. There was no question as to who should become the chief executive officer of the Progressive Party.

Pinchot, White, and Hiram Johnson, respectively burgeoning as leaders of eastern, central, and West Coast delegations to the convention, worried less about this than about Perkins’s influence on the drafting of the Party platform. He was heard to say that competition in the marketplace was a waste of energy.
To White, that sounded like a trust lord talking. It would be a cruel irony if Roosevelt allowed the platform’s antitrust plank to be edited by this silky-smooth, check-writing ambassador from Wall Street.

ONE OF THE REASONS
the Colonel liked Perkins was that they could talk about things other than policy, unlike the “moonbeamers,” as Frank Munsey called ideologues of the far left, obsessed with social and economic theory. Roosevelt himself was so bored by some of the doctrinaires who droned around him through the first week of August that he would excuse himself and sneak off somewhere with a novel, until retrieved and reprimanded by his wife.

He had plenty of patience, however, for crucial discussions, choosing eventually to run on “a straight-out progressive ticket” in most states of the union.
Excepted only were those in the hopelessly reactionary South, Wisconsin as the pocket principality of Senator La Follette, and six Republican states (Maine, West Virginia, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, and California), progressive enough to have voted for him already. Elsewhere, he felt the third-party ticket would give him a chance to cut into Wilson’s support.