Colonel Roosevelt (103 page)

“T
HE ONLY ROCK ON
R
OOSEVELT’S COAST
.”
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge
.
(photo credit i23.1)

The bipartisan conference adjourned without result and on the following day, Friday, the Republican convention took its first ballot. Hughes led with 253½ votes; five other candidates, including Lodge, scored ahead of Roosevelt, who got only 65. A second ballot increased his total to 81, but Hughes’s mushroomed to 328½.

By nine o’clock that evening it was clear that the justice was going to be nominated—without enthusiasm—unless the Progressive convention could suggest another candidate acceptable to both parties. A second conference began just before midnight, with constant calls going back to Sagamore Hill. Roosevelt, aghast at the prospect of a campaign pitting Charles the Baptist
against the Byzantine Logothete, got on the line and asked Nicholas Murray Butler if he had any chance to win on a future ballot. Butler said no. The Republican leadership would prefer to choose between Elihu Root, Philander Chase Knox, and Senator Fairbanks. Roosevelt said none were congenial to his Progressive supporters. Instead of himself, he suggested Leonard Wood or Henry Cabot Lodge.

At the mention of the last name, Butler showed some interest. When the two parties reassembled on Saturday morning, 10 June, a telegram from the Colonel urged both of them to support Lodge as a man of “the broadest national spirit.” Perkins’s communication of this news to the Progressives provoked anguished cries of “No.” The protests swelled and transformed into such passion for Roosevelt that at 12:37
P.M.
, Perkins was unable to delay his nomination. That was three minutes too late to influence Republicans voting a few blocks away in Convention Hall. They had already decided on Hughes.

It remained only for Roosevelt to make his final break with the Progressive rank and file. He did so with
another telegram declining their nomination “at this time.” Its brusque tone was no more shocking than his demand that his “conditional refusal” be referred to George Perkins’s National Committee to accept as absolute. “If they are not satisfied they can … confer with me and then determine on whatever action we may severally deem appropriate to meet the needs of the country.”

Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the
New York Evening Post
, watched as the import of these words sank in on the delegates. Roosevelt was not only rejecting them (in the very hall where he had once vowed to battle for the Lord) but, with the silky-smooth collusion of George Perkins, making it impossible for them to nominate anybody else who might damage the Republican Party’s choice. “
Around me,” Villard reported, “men of the frontier type could not keep back their tears at this self-revelation of their idol’s selfishness, the smashing of their illusions about their peerless leader.”

ROOSEVELT’S BRUSQUENESS
masked considerable hurt. Against all his instincts, he had allowed himself to believe that the miracle might happen, that the Republican nomination he had always wanted (in preference to that of 1912) was coming to him just as Americans realized that he, of all the men in the world, was probably the best equipped to arrest the general breakdown of civilization.
If I have anything at all resembling genius, it is the gift for leadership
. But leadership once again, and probably forever now, was denied him. The future of America was in the hands of two aloof and cagey deliberators. Wilson and Hughes were men who waited for events to happen and then reacted. They lacked his ability to see events coming and act accordingly, faster than anyone else on the political scene. Since Belgium, he had known in his
bones that the United States must go to war, as he had known the same after the
Maine
blew up in ’98. Now he could only wait until whichever nominee faced up to telling the American people this disagreeable fact.

“
Theodore,” Corinne Robinson said, bursting in on him as he sat brooding in his library, “the people wanted you.” She had attended both conventions in Chicago.

He smiled at her. “If they had wanted me
hard
enough, they could have had me.”

With other family and friends he affected his usual good humor, and joked that the country obviously “wasn’t in a heroic mood.” Wheezing with a sudden attack of dry pleurisy (which he blamed on the bullet in his chest), he admitted, in an off-the-record interview with John J. Leary, that he was deeply disappointed. To the newspaperman’s surprise, he quoted the prophet Micah—
What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God
—taking apparent comfort in the kind of biblical text William Jennings Bryan was always spouting.

His secretary interrupted to ask if he wanted to comment on a news flash that the President had called out the National Guard to help secure the Mexican border.

“No,” Roosevelt said. Then, with a click of teeth: “Let Hughes talk—it’s his fight.”

There were spasms of anger in subsequent days, along with coughing fits so violent he pulled some tendons. Pride in Kermit, who had come north from Argentina with Belle to present Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., age five months, for inspection, and in Ted, Archie, and Quentin, re-registered at Plattsburg, prompted him to rage at the offspring of some of his friends. “
If they were mine I’d want to choke them—pretty boys who know all the latest tango steps and the small talk, and the latest things in socks and ties—tame cats, mollycoddles.”

At such times, only Edith Roosevelt could hush him. “
Now, Theodore. That is just one of those remarks that make it so difficult sometimes for your friends to defend you.”

“Why,
Edie
!”

AS A BOY
,
ROOSEVELT USED TO PLAY
a running game with his siblings and friends, called “stagecoach.” It involved bursts of motion, interrupted by imaginary collisions that caused all passengers aboard to fly off in various directions.

In recent years, he had suffered similar feelings of acceleration and ejection, often enough to wonder if the game had not been a forecast of his future. He lay now amid the dust of yet another political crash, feeling no particular desire to get back on the road. Reading
The Man Against the Sky
had revived his interest in poets and poetry. “A poet,” he liked to say, “can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.” He devoured
Spoon River Anthology
and invited Edgar Lee Masters to visit him at Sagamore Hill. Hearing that the nature bards Bliss Carman and Madison Cawein were in financial straits, he quietly raised funds for them.

His taste in verse was unpredictable. One of Robert Frost’s bitterest poems, “A Servant to Servants,” with its central image of a caged, naked psychotic, spoke to him more than the popular lyrics in
North of Boston
. He astonished the poet by reciting some lines from it at a meeting of the Poetry Society of America. What may have appealed to him was the dogged voice of the first-person narrator, a caretaker resigned to unending, thankless responsibilities:
By good rights I ought not to have so much / Put on me, but there seems no other way
.

In that spirit, Roosevelt heard himself promising once again to take part in an election campaign, although this time he so disliked the ticket (vitiated by
Senator Fairbanks in the number two spot) that he resented being asked. It was bad enough having to endorse Charles Evans Hughes, who had never shown any gratitude for his help in 1910, and who had developed
a severe attack of amnesia when asked to testify for the defense in
Barnes v. Roosevelt
.

However, the prospect of four more years of Woodrow Wilson was so unthinkable that Roosevelt felt he should do whatever was necessary to put Hughes in the White House.
On 26 June 1916, he announced his support for Hughes, and dined with the candidate a couple of days later. He agreed to kick off the Republican campaign with a major address in Lewiston, Maine, at the end of August, and to follow up with four or five shorter speeches at spaced intervals, on the understanding that Hughes would back him up on preparedness and a strong policy toward Mexico. More than that Roosevelt declined to do, on the unarguable ground that his forceful personality would make the candidate seem weak. Privately, he referred to Hughes as “the Bearded Lady.”

Strength would appear to be required in Mexico, since General Carranza, the
de facto
ruler of that country, was objecting to Pershing’s pursuit of Pancho Villa, and as a sign of displeasure, had just killed fourteen American soldiers. He had also taken twenty-three prisoners. Clearly Pershing was going to need massive reinforcements. Roosevelt donned the imaginary uniform of a major general and cast about for recruiters. “
I don’t believe this administration can be kicked into war, for Wilson seems about as much a milksop as Bryan,” he wrote Seth Bullock. “But there is, of course, the chance that he may be forced to fight. If so, are you too old to raise a squadron of cavalry in South Dakota?”

He was concerned that Kermit, who was in New York pending reassignment to another foreign branch of National City Bank, was the only one of his sons who had not had the benefit of military training at Plattsburg in 1915. General Wood was running a similar camp this summer, and the other boys were already registered for it.
Kermit could try to catch up with them by joining the “TBM” program in July.

Roosevelt underestimated the President’s willingness to go to war in Mexico. “
The break seems to have come,” Wilson privately concluded. But before he and his new secretary of war, Newton D. Baker, could agree on a plan of action, Carranza released the prisoners and offered to negotiate terms that would permit Pershing to continue operations.

COINCIDENTALLY, AN ENGLISH
infantryman going into battle on the Somme on the first day of July used Wilson’s phrase,
the break
, to describe his feeling, as twenty-one thousand men fell dead around him, that what was left
of the pre-war world and its values had finally split and fallen apart. Memory was not erased so much as made irrelevant, in the face of Maxim-gun fire that drilled efficiently through line after line of uniforms. Even at Verdun (where French and German soldiers were now reduced to hand-to-hand combat in caves) there had never been such butchery as this.