Colonel Roosevelt (25 page)

ROOSEVELT’S “NEW NATIONALISM”
speech made front-page headlines all over the country. Newspapers printed the text in full. Progressive editors reacted with understandable warmth, forgiving the Colonel for his reluctance—still—to condemn the administration outright. “The dominant note of the whole address was its humanity,” remarked the
Fort Wayne Sentinel
, “its demand for the square deal, and its placing of the rights of man above the rights of property.” Conservative organs of both major parties condemned him as a “neo-Populist,” a “peripatetic revolutionist,” and “a virtual traitor to American institutions.” Criticism was particularly shrill in New York, center of the American financial industry. “The character of his addresses in the West during the last few days,” remarked
The New York Times
, “has startled all thoughtful men and impressed them with the frightful danger which lies in his
political ascendancy.” The
New York Commercial
described New Nationalism as “more and worse than rank socialism—it is communism at the limit.” The
Tribune
noted that Roosevelt had traveled to Osawatomie by way of the state lunatic asylum.

Perhaps the most trenchant commentary was that of the
New York Evening Post
, focusing on what he had not said:

Even taken at its face value, the
Post
went on, “his speech yesterday outstrips not only the most extreme utterance that he himself ever made previously, but that of any of the most radical men of our time.”

Roosevelt himself granted that he had probably gone too far at Osawatomie—at least, voiced his “deepest convictions” on the subject of radical reform too soon. “I had no business to take the position in the fashion that I did,” he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge. “A public man is to be condemned if he fails to make his point clear … and it is a blunder of some gravity to do it.” He would have difficulty, now, in pretending that he was a regular Republican.
Progressive
had been the final word he threw at his Kansas audience, before jumping down off that kitchen table to roars of applause.

He tried to sound as conciliatory as possible toward the administration in stump speeches on the way back east, arguing that Republicans had to remain unified in the face of the threat they faced in November. But the damage was done. In future, nothing he said about Party policy could be interpreted as constructive. As Taft scoffed privately, the program Roosevelt had advanced at Osawatomie “could never be gotten through without a revolution or revisions to the Constitution.”

James Bryce, currently British ambassador to Washington and a lifelong observer of the American scene, was reminded of Disraeli’s remark “that
when a majority in the House of Commons is too large and the opposition too weak, part of the majority becomes detached and begins to fill the function of an opposition.” Republicans had simply been too strong too long, in all three branches of government. Since the Democrats had failed to mount an effective challenge to them, in seven successive election seasons, the GOP’s own “progressive and so-called radical section” had begun, almost without realizing it, to think and campaign like another party. Chief among the apostates was Theodore Roosevelt. Their transformation was his transformation. Except that, having changed so much as President, he had continued to
change during more than a year of removal from domestic politics. The “enlarged personality” immediately obvious to four intimates on his first day home, the new capability of “greater good or greater evil,” was now an inescapable challenge to the leadership of both major parties.

“
A break between the President and the Colonel might not be altogether regrettable,”
Harper’s Weekly
remarked. “Like the removal of Mr. Pinchot last winter, it might clear the atmosphere, lessen the need for pretence and hypocrisy, and greatly simplify the task of the average Republican in making up his mind where he stands.”

In no way did Roosevelt seem more radically threatening than in his moralistic attitude toward justice. If constructionists could believe their ears and eyes, he proposed to subject the Constitution itself to moral review. “
When I see you,” Henry Cabot Lodge wrote on 5 September, “I shall want to have a full talk in regard to this matter of court decisions, about which I admit I am very conservative.… The courts are charged with the duty of saying what the law is, not what it ought to be, and I think that to encourage resistance to the decisions of the courts tends to lead to a disregard of the law.”

Roosevelt answered that his attack on the Supreme Court’s pro-corporate bias had been prompted by none other than Justice William Henry Moody, whom he had met with the day after seeing Taft in June. Not only that, he had “most carefully” consulted with another constitutional expert, Professor Arthur D. Hill of Harvard. Moody believed “that the courts … sometimes erred in deciding against the national government,” and Hill had even compared the Court to “an irresponsible House of Lords.”

Since both consultants hailed from Massachusetts, the center of Lodge’s universe, no further dissent was heard in Nahant. But the damage to Roosevelt’s reputation as a regular Republican was a perceived fact when he got back home, hoarse and depressed, on 11 September.

To Edith, the debilitating effect campaign travel now seemed to have on him was worrying. “He comes home in the saddest frame of mind that can be imagined,” she wrote Jules Jusserand, “and requires much cheering from his family.” On the trail, Roosevelt was as conscientious and energetic as he had always been, stopping his train up to thirty times a day whenever he saw a crowd, large or small, waiting for a glimpse of “Teddy.” He shouted or rasped or squeaked with all his old fervor, repeating the bromides that delighted them, glowing with charm, humor, and goodwill, leaving behind an image that never faded. (“His tour through the West has been one continuous ovation,” Taft marveled, with a touch of envy.) But Edith could see that her husband had changed in some fundamental way. He had lost his compulsion for electoral favor. No matter how passionately he believed in the New Nationalism, the statesman in him cringed at the prospect of having to go back to selling it.

THERE WAS ONE
pleasant development, however, to cheer Roosevelt on his return: the popular and critical success of his safari book, just released by Scribners.
African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist
was selling strongly. Thanks to first serial and foreign rights, it promised to be the most profitable title he had ever published. Five hundred signed copies of the two-volume first edition, boxed and printed on Dutch handmade paper, had been followed by a one-volume trade issue, hardly less luxurious in three-quarter pigskin with uncut pages, and a subscription edition for the mass market. Lavishly illustrated,
African Game Trails
was irresistible to readers who could stomach the meticulous descriptions of bullets drilling hearts and brains. Even those who could not (Cecil Spring Rice found it sickening, “
rather like the diary of a butcher”) had to concede that Roosevelt was scientific in his scrutiny of every aspect of the African wilderness, and often movingly lyrical. The density of recorded details, whether ornithological, paleontological, botanical, or anthropological, was almost overwhelming. Most came not from notes, but from
the author’s movie-camera memory, which in advance of any system yet available in nickelodeons, registered both sight and sound.

Over and above its documentary appeal, the book exuded a kind of savage romance new to American readers. Roosevelt’s authenticity of voice made the Western novels of Zane Grey and Owen Wister seem pallid: “
So, with the lion-skin swinging behind two porters, a moribund puff-adder in my saddle pocket, and three rhinos threatening us in the darkness, we marched campward through the African night.”

Reviewers acknowledged the occasional overripeness of his prose style, but excused it in view of the curiosity and courage with which he had traversed lands hitherto seen as hostile to foreign exploration and settlement.
The Nation
noted that what he wrote was of secondary importance to what he had done to place the African section of the Smithsonian Museum “in the front rank of zoological collections.”

Roosevelt felt he had not done enough. As soon as he had extricated himself from his current political embroilment,
he intended to collaborate with Edmund Heller on a volume of life histories of African game animals that would last in libraries long after the New Nationalism had become old.

ROOSEVELT AND TAFT
were so clearly on divergent roads by mid-September (the former calling for authority to be centered in the executive, the latter for its enshrinement in the judiciary) that Party intermediaries felt it was crucial for them to meet again, in a show of Republican unity.
Lloyd Griscom
arranged a lunch rendezvous at Henry White’s summer house in New Haven, Connecticut, on 19 September. Roosevelt crossed Long Island Sound by motorboat. It was a stormy voyage, into which the press did not fail to read portents, but he received a pleasant reception from Taft and a small group of friends and aides.

Covers were laid for six. By prearrangement, the President and the Colonel were left alone at the end of the meal, and the dining room door was locked. “I suppose it is the New York situation you want to discuss,” Taft said. He allowed that he was willing, after all, to support Roosevelt’s bid for the chairmanship of the Saratoga convention, now only one week away. But the White House would not oppose any gubernatorial candidate or policy initiative that might result if he lost. Roosevelt, for his part, was unwilling to beg any further favor. When after a considerable time they emerged, it was evident that their polite estrangement continued. They parted with strained joviality, and contrary impressions as to why they met and what they each had said.

To Roosevelt’s annoyance, Charles D. Norton, the President’s devious young secretary, authorized a wire report stating that the Colonel had come to New Haven hat in hand. Taft, genuinely concerned about Barnes manipulating the convention, had agreed to support Roosevelt’s candidacy over that of his own vice president, James S. Sherman.

Roosevelt indignantly denied Norton’s wire, annoying Taft in turn. The President complained to Archie Butt that Roosevelt had been “offish” during their meeting, while lecturing him on the need to keep the GOP intact. “
If you were to remove Roosevelt’s skull now, you would find written on his brain ‘1912.’ ”

Yet the owner of the skull in question recoiled from the prospect of a petty political battle in Saratoga. “
Twenty years ago I should not have minded it in the least,” Roosevelt wrote Henry Cabot Lodge. “It would have been entirely suitable for my age and standing. But it is not the kind of fight into which an ex-President should be required to go.”