Theodore Rex (127 page)

Bryan’s brazen vocal cords were worked to the limit as he crisscrossed the country, meeting large and rapturous audiences wherever he went, and saying little to tax either his or their own mental abilities. But as James Bryce sympathetically observed, “
That a man who talks so much should be able to think at all is amazing.”

ROOSEVELT RETURNED TO
Washington on 23 September and plunged into the only kind of campaign work he could do, barring a request (which never came) to tour on behalf of Taft. He fired off a series of press statements and public letters attacking every candidate in the Democratic ranks who seemed vulnerable to charges of corruption, or any other sins on the calendar of human frailty. His biggest triumph was in causing the resignation of the treasurer of the Democratic campaign, Charles N. Haskell—also on account of links to Standard Oil, which by now was equated in the public mind with Attila’s
Kingdom of the Huns. That the links had been first announced, again, by Hearst in no way spoiled Roosevelt’s satisfaction in having deeply embarrassed Bryan. “How the President does enjoy a fight when there is need of one,” James Garfield wrote in his diary.

Taft came to Washington only once, on 18 October. He was fresh from a tour of the Baptist South, and feeling somewhat bruised by the hostility of evangelicals toward his Unitarian faith. Roosevelt sympathetically went to church with him. “I did this,” he wrote Kermit, “hoping that it would attract the attention of sincere but rather ignorant Protestants who support me, and would make them tend to support Taft also.” It was the first time President and candidate had met since July. Roosevelt was pleased to find Taft, as ever, “just a dear,” and confident of victory in a majority of states. Dixie, after all, had never been GOP territory.

The nearest thing to a campaign debate that month was that over the use of injunctions in labor disputes. Unions claimed that corporations had too much power, under existing law, to force strikers back to work, by unduly influencing judges. Samuel Gompers of the AFL castigated the Republican Party for reneging on instructions from Roosevelt himself, earlier in the year, to adopt an anti-injunction plank. But the issue appealed only to a hard core of union voters, and the President neutralized it by publishing one of his typical public letters, accusing Gompers of impugning the integrity of the courts. On 26 October, Roosevelt released another epistle, four thousand words long, summarizing Taft’s fair-minded labor policies as a judge in the 1890s and as the Cabinet officer responsible for the well-being of workers in the Panama Canal Zone. He proudly identified himself as an honorary locomotive fireman, and announced that no less a personage than “the secretary-treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Steamshovel and Dredge men” was going to vote Republican.

THE FOLLOWING DAY
, Theodore Roosevelt turned fifty. He celebrated with a solitary ride, jumping all the hurdles in Rock Creek Park. “That is, Roswell jumped them,” he wrote Jules Jusserand. “I just sat on his back and admired the scenery.”

By now, it was apparent that Taft was going to win, in a victory proportionate to his size if not his stature. Ohio black leaders announced for him, the Republican labor vote remained loyal, and Bryan’s search for a last-minute, election-breaking issue failed. The President did not deny himself credit for having turned Taft into an effective campaigner. “
I told him he must treat the political audience as one coming, not to see an etching, but a poster,” he said to Jusserand and Archie Butt. “He must, therefore, have streaks of blue, yellow, and red to catch the eye, and eliminate all fine lines and soft colors.”

Changing the subject, Roosevelt began excitedly to discuss a lecture he had been invited to give at Oxford University after he emerged from Africa. It was to be entitled “Biological Analogies in History,” and would discuss the continuance and disappearance of species as illustrative of the limitations of Social Darwinism. He was already deep into paleontological and sociological research. To save time, he was dictating the lecture while Joseph De Camp painted his portrait. He wanted both it and another paper, commissioned by the Sorbonne, to be well in hand before he devoted himself entirely to safari preparations.

Jusserand, who had come to the Executive Office for tea, had to keep listening until almost eight o’clock. Captain Butt was finally permitted to escort him out.

“Was there ever such a man before?” the Ambassador asked.

ON 3 NOVEMBER 1908
, Edith Roosevelt was dismayed to hear that Pine Knot had fallen to William Jennings Bryan.

The fake telegram was sent by her husband, radiant over the election of William Howard Taft as twenty-seventh President of the United States. He regarded the vote as a vindication of his own record, and a guarantee of four more years of Rooseveltism. “We have beaten them to a frazzle!” The next morning, he arrived in the Executive Office in high good humor. James Garfield and Captain Butt were waiting to see him. “You army officers and politicians who still have futures before you may continue the struggle,” he said, taking his secretary by the hand, “but Mr. Loeb and I will sing the
Nunc Dimittis.”

Taft’s Electoral College majority was overwhelming, at 321 votes over Bryan’s 162. He also helped maintain the Republican control of both houses of Congress. His popular plurality was less so—1,269,606 votes over Bryan, a decisive total, but only half as impressive as Roosevelt’s landslide in 1904. Missouri reverted to the Democratic Party. Other Republican losses were in Colorado, Nebraska, and Nevada, along with the new state of Oklahoma. Indiana, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and Ohio chose Democratic governors. Charles Evans Hughes retained New York by the merest of whiskers.

Bryan was gracious, even self-mocking after his third failed run for the White House. He said he identified with
the legendary Texan drunk who tried to get into a bar, and was escorted out. Trying again, he was hustled out; trying yet again, he was thrown out. “I guess,” said the drunk, brushing dust from his clothes, “they don’t want me in there.”

ANY HOPES ROOSEVELT
might have had that Taft would return to Washington to plot an ideologically continuous transition were disappointed when the President-elect headed straight back to Hot Springs to play golf. In his first public statement after arriving there, he announced, “
I really did some great work at sleeping last night.”

Meanwhile, Roosevelt was composing an early valedictory for himself, addressed to George Otto Trevelyan:

He was not short of job opportunities. A large corporation offered him its presidency, at a salary of one hundred thousand dollars. The newspaperman Carr V. Van Anda offered him the editorship of a new metropolitan daily, to be formed out of a merger of the New York
Sun
and New York
Press
. The New York
World
suggested that he run for the Senate. Henry Adams thought he should emulate John Quincy Adams and become a Congressman. Philander Knox suggested he be made a bishop, to gratify his need to preach. A New York publisher made “a dazzling offer” for an exclusive on his postpresidential writings. G. P. Putnam’s tried to persuade him to complete his historical saga,
The Winning of the West. Scribner’s
offered him $25,000 for the story of his African adventure,
McClure’s
, $72,000, and
Collier’s
, $100,000. Lecture invitations came in sackfuls.

As before with the Nobel Prize, Roosevelt let his conscience, rather than greed, guide him.
He had long ago been approached by the father-and-son
team of Lyman and Lawrence Abbott to join their magazine,
Outlook
, as a contributing editor writing on current affairs. Lyman, an ordained clergyman with a strong social conscience, had been particularly persuasive. Although
Outlook
was not a wealthy periodical, its middle-class, mildly progressive profile appealed to Roosevelt. He gratefully remembered its support during the crises and controversies of his presidency—support that, by such a definition, had been continuous for seven years. Many magazines less loyal to him now wished to be generous, in exchange for what he could do for their circulation figures. For that reason if for no other, Roosevelt decided to accept
Outlook
’s offer. And in another gesture of loyalty, he signed a first-serial-and-book-rights deal with Charles P. Scribner’s Sons for fifty thousand dollars plus 20 percent royalties. In both cases, he could easily have doubled or tripled the money elsewhere. But, as he said to his editor at Scribner’s, Robert Bridges, “You have got the same standards of propriety that I have.”