Colonel Roosevelt (101 page)

That night he slept with his companions in the humid hut of a black coconut farmer. His clothes from the cave were still wet the next morning when he rode back to Port of Spain.

From there, on 9 March, he cabled a long statement to New York, for immediate release to all newspapers:

He did not say what the “facts” were that Americans had to face. Nor did he directly mention the war. But he did refer to “tremendous national and international problems” confronting Woodrow Wilson’s “unmanly” administration, and cited Washington and Lincoln as two presidents who had not sought to escape action “behind clouds of fine words.” He went on at tremendous length, trying the patience of Trinidad’s wartime censor, who was required to check every word transmitted out of the island. Late that evening the cable went off. On 10 March,
The New York Times
published it under the headline
ROOSEVELT’S HAT AGAIN IN THE RING
.

WHEN HE RETURNED
home a fortnight later, he found two booms for the Republican presidential nomination under way. One—perhaps more of a discreet, offstage rumble than a boom—was in behalf of Justice Charles Evans Hughes, and represented the wishes of Party stalwarts who had supported Taft for reelection in 1912. Few of them were enthusiastic about their choice, but Hughes had the supreme virtue of being so colorless and closemouthed as to be virtually attack-proof.
A joke went around that “no one wanted Hughes, but everyone was for him.”

The other boom was for the author of
Fear God and Take Your Own Part
. Roosevelt’s book had become
a surprise bestseller. Two biographical sketches of him were out, both frankly adoring: Julian Street’s
The Most Interesting American
, and a memoir by Charles G. Washburn,
Theodore Roosevelt: The Logic of His Career
. Quite apart from his literary celebrity, he appeared to have inspired scores of Progressive and Republican campaign planners with a desire for “something of the heroric.”

They thought he was talking about political heroism. He meant the soldierly kind. Whatever desire for power still burned in Roosevelt related solely to the war—manifesting itself in fantasies of how
he
, last spring, would have handed the German ambassador his passports and made him sail home on the
Lusitania
. He did not see his boom lasting through the convention. Recriminations over the great bolt of 1912 were still too fierce to admit any real possibility that he could reunite both wings of the GOP. Nor was he deceived by the sales of his book into thinking that a majority of Americans believed in preparedness—much less overseas military action. As Robert Bacon wrote to a friend in France, “
In America there are fifty thousand people who understand the necessity of the United States entering the war immediately on your side. But there are a hundred million Americans who have not even thought of it. Our task is to see that the figures are reversed.”

Roosevelt had seen Hughes’s candidacy coming for a long time. Typically, the justice would neither confirm nor deny a desire to be nominated. But he had much to recommend him. Hughes was progressive without being Progressive, a man of icy brilliance, enrobed now with all the majesty of a seat on the Supreme Court. The only virtue he lacked, in abundance, was charm. But Grover Cleveland had managed to do without it and serve two distinguished terms in the White House, to say nothing of George Washington.

What, though, would a President Hughes do about such recent provocations as Britain’s rejection of Secretary Lansing’s proposal to classify armed merchantmen as warships? And
Pancho Villa’s cross-border raid on Columbus, New Mexico, killing eight civilians and seven U.S. troopers? And Germany’s torpedoing of the Channel ferry
Sussex
, with four Americans aboard? Roosevelt had no evidence to go on, but suspected that the justice would prove to be “
another Wilson with whiskers.”

JOVIAL AND RED-BROWN
from the Caribbean sun, Roosevelt returned to Sagamore Hill and found a book of poems in the
mass of mail awaiting his attention. It was entitled
The Man Against the Sky
, and had been sent to him by Edwin Arlington Robinson, strangest of all the literary figures he had patronized. Robinson had done little over the past twenty-seven years but write austere, elliptical poetry and try to keep from starving. When inspiration failed, he would try without success to drink himself to death. There was too much blood in his sunsets and aching regret in his love lyrics for most magazine editors to read, let alone print anything by him. What books he had managed to publish were either self-financed or commercial failures. In 1905, Roosevelt had had to exercise the power of the presidency to persuade Scribners to reissue
The Children of the Night
, simultaneously awarding Robinson a no-show government job. As the poet, forever grateful, wrote Kermit: “
I don’t know where I would be without your astonishing father. He fished me out of hell by the hair of the head, and so enabled me to get my last book together and in all probability to get it published.”

That had been
The Town Down the River
, which came out in 1910 and
ended in an enigmatic ode entitled “The Revealer—Roosevelt.” Except for some haunting verses here and there, it showed an attrition of his gifts, indicating that Robinson would have been better off left in hell. He seemed to write best when he was nearest to suicide.

The Roosevelts had seen him only once or twice since then: a mousy, half-deaf little man who had come to Sagamore Hill in 1913 and remained almost mute—not that any of the Colonel’s guests ever had much opportunity to speak. Now Robinson repaid their hospitality with a book of such original power as to justify the belief, among a few cognoscenti, that he was the finest poet in America.
He confessed in an accompanying note that he had recently emerged from one of his depressive slumps.

“
Your letter deeply touches me,” Roosevelt wrote on 27 March. “There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us.… It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts.”

He was referring to a terrifying poem in the book, describing Robinson’s
Döppelganger
-like experience of having witnessed his own death in a house full of demonic shadows. Roosevelt responded more to the poet’s feeling of rebirth—
After that, from everywhere, / Singing life will find him
—than to whatever agonies Robinson may have suffered before a door mysteriously opened and let him out.

He did not elaborate on his own periods of melancholy, or say if he had ever felt overmastered by them.
Robinson had long ago, with sly word play in “The Revealer,” implied that Roosevelt was too happily constituted to suffer real despair.
Theodoros
in Greek connoted a man gifted by the gods with equal quantities of positivity and personal courage—someone who was, in a later simile, sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion. Had he not killed his share of lions in Africa, and come home purged and purified, to shout out his message that a life of total engagement was the only one worth living? Then and now, Robinson perceived him to be much more than “biceps and sunshine.”

The title poem in
The Man Against the Sky
was not, as some might think, another portrait of Roosevelt. It did celebrate his anti-materialistic philosophy. Robinson’s extraordinary imagery, at once elusive and allusive, was pitched to fly right past the Colonel’s ears. But the central metaphor of a giant figure reaching the top of a black hill, gazing with inscrutable emotion at a world on fire beyond, then descending by slow stages out of sight (whether to Elysian fields or some unseen doom), was there for any Roosevelt-watcher to ponder.

ON THE LAST DAY
of March, Roosevelt made his first overt move toward a return to the GOP by lunching with Elihu Root. Four years had passed since their estrangement at the last Republican National Convention—years in
which Root had felt no annoyance at Roosevelt calling him a “thief,” only regret that someone he loved could be so unable to accept that his rulings as chairman might have been fair.

They met in New York, at Robert Bacon’s town house on Park Avenue. Henry Cabot Lodge and Leonard Wood attended. All five men found themselves linked by their dislike of the President. To Roosevelt’s sardonic amusement, Root and Lodge also had bitter things to say about Taft. But it was no time to upbraid them for supporting an un-reelectable President. The prime purpose of the lunch was to let the press and Progressive Party know that Athos and D’Artagnan had reconciled. Wood wrote with satisfaction in his diary, “Roosevelt and Root seemed to be glad to be together again, really so.”

The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
treated the lunch as front-page news, on a par with dispatches describing “the greatest of conflicts” ongoing at Verdun. Political commentators were agreed that Roosevelt was making himself available as a candidate for nomination by both the Progressive and Republican parties. Supporters of the President felt qualms. Wilson did not look strong.
Pancho Villa’s raid had been a severe embarrassment to him, and a four-thousand-man punitive American expedition, headed by Brigadier General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, had so far failed to raise much more than a cloud of alkali dust. Lindley Garrison had resigned as secretary of war, in protest against the President’s feeling that an enlarged, all-white National Guard was preferable to a segregated Continental Army. The first anniversary of the sinking of the
Lusitania
loomed in six weeks’ time, and Germany had still not yet acknowledged her “strict accountability” for that outrage.

A mild irony of the lunch at Bacon’s house was that, despite its appearance of solidarity, every guest felt ambivalent about the Roosevelt boom. Root and Wood aspired to the presidency themselves, and Lodge was secretly for Hughes. Roosevelt himself wished he was not still the last hope of die-hard Progressives. Having re-embraced the party of William Howard Taft and Boies Penrose (not to mention William Barnes, Jr.), he felt he could not in good faith allow his Bull Moose followers to nominate him again. That would signal a belief that the Progressive movement was still viable, whereas he had long ago told Kermit that it had “vanished
into the
Ewigkeit.
”
^*

But his boom would not stop. George von Lengerke Meyer created a Roosevelt Republican Committee, and funds flowed in. To the fury of the brothers Pinchot, George Perkins discreetly aided this organization. A Theodore Roosevelt Non-Partisan League worked hand in hand with a Women’s Roosevelt League. Catholic bishops and Detroit auto executives pondered convention strategy. The old cry, “We want Teddy!” was heard in Maine and
Minnesota. Advertisements ran in newspapers and magazines. “Campaign” headquarters opened in New York, Boston, and Chicago, even though the Colonel insisted he would not contest a single primary. “What I am really trying to do,” he wrote Hiram Johnson (another presidential hopeful), “is … get the Republicans and Progressives together for someone whom we can elect and whom it will be worth while electing.” Although his head told him that person was Justice Hughes, his heart could not help beginning to throb with seasonal ambition. By 5 April he was ready to take seriously the teasing threat of a delegate-elect to the Republican convention, “
You know, Colonel, I may make up my mind that we will have to nominate you.”