Colonel Roosevelt (24 page)

“B
ARNES WARNED THAT THERE WOULD BE DEAD BODIES IN HIS WAY
.”
William Barnes, Jr
.
(photo credit i5.1)

ROOSEVELT WAS GLOOMY
about embarking on a “
Teddysee,” closely watched by the press, which might well leave the Party more fragmented than it was already. He had lost his former zest for whistle-stop speeches and—though he would not admit it—much of his love for crowds. He worried that his throat, sandpapered by dusty drought conditions on Long Island, would not stand the strain of nearly three weeks of shouting at people. “
Ugh! I do dread … having to plunge into this cauldron of politics.”

The truth was, he was not well. Earlier in the month, he had visited the anthracite country of Pennsylvania, and been struck by a recurrence of the same ailment that had immobilized him during the Coal Strike of 1902: an inflammation
of the left shinbone, complicated by an attack of Cuban fever. He was also regaining the weight he had lost in Africa. He vowed that after this tour, and a lecture trip he was committed to the following spring, he would never again go on the road for any length of time.

Without much hope that anyone would believe him, Roosevelt insisted that he was traveling as an independent commentator, in behalf of
The Outlook
. This did not deter representatives of other magazines and newspapers from attaching a special car to his train. “
It is incredible that there should remain a single American citizen,” declared the New York
Sun
, “who does not see that Theodore Roosevelt has undertaken a campaign for the presidential nomination in 1912.”

Rolling north on 23 August through Albany (stronghold of William Barnes, Jr.) and Utica (hometown of Vice President Sherman), he tried at first not to talk about politics at all. His provincial audiences reacted with dismay, and he realized that they wanted him to behave like a candidate for the presidency.

“
I don’t care
that
for it,” he said, snapping his fingers, to O. K. Davis of
The New York Times
. “I’ve had all the work and all the fun and all the glory of it.”

Davis waited for the inevitable follow-on. “Of course, if there were a big job to be done which the people wanted me to handle, that would be a different thing.”

Proceeding via Buffalo into Ohio, Roosevelt began to address current issues—conservation, corporation control, labor and welfare reform—but carefully pitched his rhetoric so as not to offend conservative opinion. He praised the administration in the blandest possible language, refraining from any direct endorsement of Taft. As Ohio gave way to Indiana and the plains states, where
insurgent candidates were registering dramatic gains in primary elections and conventions, he began to sound more progressive. But he said little that the President might not have said, to please the same audiences. He wanted to give maximum impact to what he called
his “credo” at Osawatomie.

FOR A FEW RECREATIONAL HOURS
, in Wyoming on the twenty-eighth, he was Roosevelt the Rough Rider again, happily participating in the Frontier Days celebration outside Cheyenne. The constant thunder of hooves, the band music, and the fluttering of myriad Stars and Stripes triggered a longing within him that went deeper than politics, deeper than patriotism, to some dark core of desire unsatisfied since his “crowded hour” in Cuba.
Riding across the prairie with Robert D. Carey, a local rancher, he said that it was the ambition of his life “to go to war at the head of a brigade of cavalry.”

With no war immediately at hand, Carey thought little of this strange remark. He had no inkling, and Roosevelt’s subconscious may not have acknowledged, any connection between their current trot and the charge of the Twenty-first Lancers at Omdurman.
Yet it had been there, some five months before, that Roosevelt had committed to come to Cheyenne.

ADDRESSING BOTH HOUSES
of the Colorado legislature in Denver the next day, Roosevelt gave Eastern conservatives the first hint of radical oratory to come. He accused the Supreme Court of favoring big corporations and creating a judicial no-man’s-land around them, into which neither state nor federal government could trespass. A notorious case in point, he said, was
Lochner v. New York
. By striking down as unconstitutional a state law against excessive workplace hours, the Court had shown itself to be “
against popular rights.”

The word
popular
sounded, to conservative ears, like
populist
, and the idea that the Court was capable of hostile acts in defense of liberty of contract showed how far Roosevelt had come from his Social-Darwinist youth. President Taft, who venerated appellate justice as something superior to
vox populi
, thought his remark smacked of anarchy. But Roosevelt was only warming up.

At 2:15
P
.
M
. on the thirty-first, he climbed onto a kitchen table in a grove outside Osawatomie, Kansas, where John Brown had fought the Missouri raiders in 1856. A crowd of thirty thousand Kansans waited to hear him declaim his “credo.” The prairie sun was strong, but there had been a cloudburst earlier in the day, and many stood ankle deep in mud.

Addressing himself repeatedly toward the Civil War veterans who sat in a special place on the battleground, Roosevelt roared over the calls of food vendors, “There have been two great crises in our country’s history: first, when it was formed, and then, again, when it was perpetuated.” The name of John Brown, he declared, would “be forever associated” with the second of these national crises. Having said that, he avoided any further tribute to the bloody old fanatic.

It was a looming third crisis he wished to discuss—one utterly modern, yet still subject to the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln. The Emancipator had advocated harnessing a universal dynamic, whose power derived from the struggle between those who produced, and those who profited. Roosevelt quoted Lincoln’s famous maxim,
Labor is the superior of capital
, and joked, “If that remark was original with me, I should be even more strongly denounced as a communist agitator than I shall be anyhow.”

Nevertheless, he was willing to go further in insisting that property rights must henceforth be secondary to those of the common welfare. A maturing
civilization should work to destroy unmerited social status. “
The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been … to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.”

America’s corporate elite, Roosevelt said, was fortifying itself with the compliance of political bosses. He revived one of his favorite catchphrases: “I stand for the square deal.” Granting that even monopolistic corporations were entitled to justice, he denied them any right to influence it, or to assume that they could buy votes in Congress.

Gifford Pinchot sat listening with collaborative satisfaction. He, James Garfield, and William Allen White, the progressive editor of the
Emporia Gazette
, had drafted significant sections of the Colonel’s speech.

Roosevelt explained that there could be no check to the growth of special interests so long as channels of collusion flowed back and forth between secretive boardrooms and secretive halls of government. To that end, the people must insist on “complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs,”
^*
and a law prohibiting “the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes.”

There should be federal regulation, and physical valuation, of the stock flotations of all industrial combinations doing an interstate business: not only railroads and steamship lines, but those dealing in meat, oil, coal, and other necessities. Executives and “especially” the board members of such corporations should be held responsible for breaches of antitrust law. Roosevelt cited one of the proudest creations of his own administration, the Federal Bureau of Corporations, and said that it and the Interstate Commerce Commission should be handed greater powers. He further advocated “the great central task” of conservation of natural resources, second only to national security on his agenda; graduated income and inheritance taxes on big fortunes; a judiciary accountable to changing social and economic conditions; comprehensive workmen’s compensation acts; national laws to regulate the labor of
children and women; higher safety and sanitary standards in the workplace; and public scrutiny of all political campaign spending, both before and after elections.

Throughout his address, the food vendors had loudly continued to advertise peanuts, popcorn, hot dogs, and pink lemonade, and a merry-go-round whistled not far away. But Kansans stood rapt as the Colonel, acknowledging that there could be such a thing as too much federal power, called for a compensatory spirit of democratic redress, as strong in the extremities of the country as at its center.

Three times, he defined this spirit as “New Nationalism.” One of its principal features would be a judiciary that favored individual over property rights. “I rank dividends below human character,” Roosevelt shouted, and swung into his peroration: