Colonel Roosevelt (35 page)

Roosevelt insisted that in arguing for less prosecution and more regulation, he was not advocating socialism. He merely wanted a government that was democratic, and an economy that was moral. Under federal regulation, competition would flourish without becoming “an all-sufficient factor” that justified the exploitation of workers. Plutocrats in future should be held to account on “all questions connected with the treatment of their employees, including the wages, the hours of labor, and the like.” Once again he paid La Follette a compliment by noting that Wisconsin had already pioneered such a policy. There was not a hint, elsewhere in his text, of any personal animus against President Taft, or any desire to return to power.

FOR ALL THE
article’s reticence,
it was regarded as an “editorial explosion” by the
Boston Globe
, and was the talk of financial and political circles for days. Steel shares on the New York Stock Exchange registered a confident surge. Roosevelt was widely seen as having regained his conservative senses, and in an ironic reversal of image, earned praise for opposing the administration’s “war on business interests.” Henry Clews, the oracle of the finance industry, was outspoken in his approval.
The Washington Post
said that he had mutated into “an able and highly influential advocate of constructive business
policies.” Joseph Pulitzer’s anticorporate New York
World
did not know whether to be suspicious or admiring. In an article headed
HAS THEODORE ROOSEVELT NOW BECOME MR. MORGAN’S CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT?
, it commented:

As so often before, Roosevelt found himself misunderstood by partisan critics for seeing things in the round. “Most men seem to live in a space of two dimensions,” he complained to Charles D. Villard, a California progressive. He had no desire to challenge Taft, and even less interest in speaking for investment bankers—about the only living species that bored him. All he asked in their behalf was a square deal. Never before had he openly advocated federal price-fixing, yet conservatives chose to think that he liked the idea of guaranteed profits. And manifestly, in his dismissal of “rural toryism,” he had once again dashed the hopes of progressives that he might lead them.

Or so he thought. James Garfield’s Republican club in Ohio annoyed him exceedingly by endorsing him for President in 1912. At once the Philadelphia
North American
, whose editor, E. A. Van Valkenburg, often served as a spokesman for the Colonel, printed “an authoritative statement” of his nonavailability. On 27 November, Gifford Pinchot assured a dinner of the Insurgents’ Club that “Bob” La Follette would be the nominee of the Republican Party in 1912.

Asked if he was acting on orders from Sagamore Hill, he said no. “
Since Mr. Roosevelt eliminated himself, Senator La Follette is his logical successor.”

LA FOLLETTE WAS
not flattered by this grudging endorsement. “I’m nobody’s cloak. I’ll fight to the finish!” Money from both the wealthy Pinchot brothers mollified him, but as precinct and district bosses plotted the GOP state conventions that would begin to choose delegates early in the new year, the Senator’s principal weakness—a lack of support east of the Mississippi—became apparent. The
Wall Street Journal
remarked that if Taft faltered at the national convention, his support was unlikely to devolve to La Follette. A compromise candidate was sure to emerge: “someone who has personal qualifications,
the voice, the power greatly to stimulate enthusiasm, the impressive presence.… That man’s name need not be spoken to the convention, for every delegate has it in his heart.”

Unauthorized Roosevelt “clubs” began to sprout in Idaho, Montana, Michigan, and Ohio.
On 11 December, the Republican National Committee held its annual meeting in Washington, D.C. It split at once into progressive and conservative factions. Taft members were in control of the proceedings, but their loyalty to the President (sulky and ailing in the White House, too gouty to venture outside) was more out of reflex than conviction. Nobody could see where funds for next year’s campaign were going to come from. Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock, an ornithological friend of the Colonel, made no secret of his disillusionment with the administration. The atmosphere was funereal, even doom-laden, as both sides agreed to summon their delegates to Chicago at noon on 18 June 1912.

A group of three progressive state chairmen, led by W. Franklin Knox of Michigan, telephoned Roosevelt in New York to ask if they could come to see him. He said he would prefer to be left alone. But the group was persistent, and descended on him at Sagamore Hill.

There was no arguing with him, and the group left frustrated.

IN A MONTH FULL
of adulation and importuning, opposite in all political respects to his dark December of 1910, Roosevelt chose to publish an extraordinary essay—what was, for him, almost a religious confession. Entitled
“The
Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit,” it appeared in
The Outlook
just as his private will not to run was wavering. Nothing he had written in that piously inclined periodical compared with it in philosophical, if not theological weight, and never had he come so close to confessing his own faith. It was ignored by the political commentators who had read so much into his previous editorial on the trusts. Yet to an intellectual minority able to follow him in his self-avowed “search” toward a universal understanding beyond that of any contemporary public figure—
Arthur Balfour alone excepted—it was an infinitely more important statement, indicating that whatever Theodore Roosevelt did with the rest of his life would have to have moral purpose.

The essay was a review of twelve recent scientific, religious, historical, and philosophical books, including Carlos Reyles’s
La morte du cygne
, Thomas Dwight’s
Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist
, Alfred Russel Wallace’s
The World of Life
, Henry M. Bernard’s
Some Neglected Factors in Evolution
, Émile Boutroux’s
Science et religion dans la philosophie contemporaine
, William De Witt Hyde’s
From Epicurus to Christ
, and Henri Bergson’s
Creative Evolution
and
Time and Free Will
. Concentrating mainly on the pessimistic materialism of Reyles, the Christian apologetics of Dwight, and the radiant, octogenarian wisdom of Wallace, Roosevelt synthesized multiple points of view into his own argument for wider recognition of “the psychical accompaniment of physical force”—by which he meant the spiritual qualities inherent in all materialistic pursuits, from science to business and politics.

Reyles’s dying swan was a metaphor for Latin civilization in Europe, which the author, a wealthy Uruguayan and disciple of Nietzsche, believed to be doomed unless France, Italy, and Spain shook themselves free of political and clerical absolutism and turned to the acquisition of money and arms. As long as those countries remained at peace, they should cultivate an “ideology of force” to avoid being left behind by Northern powers, particularly Germany and the United States.

Roosevelt was revolted by the book, and not just because parts of it echoed his frequent celebrations of strenuosity. He found in it a “hard dogmatic materialism” indistinguishable from that of his new boosters on Wall Street. Modern worship of the golden calf (Reyles actually used the phrase
métaphysique de l’Or
) struck him as more pernicious than any medieval superstition. He rejected the pro-Americanism of a writer who could not distinguish between the democratic tradition of Washington and Lincoln and the anti-constitutionalism of tycoons.

Rigid materialistic standards in science, rejecting the imaginative or metaphysical eurekas that had always aided advances in knowledge, were equally retrogressive, in Roosevelt’s opinion. They worked against discovery. But he was uneasy with the Catholic values that Dwight, a venerable figure at Harvard, sought to apply to “infidel science.” Logically extended, they could
“plunge us back into the cringing and timid ignorance of the Dark Ages.” He quoted Henry Osborn Taylor’s characterization of medieval man: “
Subject to bursts of unrestraint, he yet showed no intelligent desire for liberty.”

Dwight was effective, however, in reminding the young czars of evolutionary theory of what Roger Bacon had proclaimed in the thirteenth century: “
The first essential for advancement in knowledge is for men to be willing to say, ‘We do not know.
’ ” There could be no advancement, Roosevelt wrote, in a scientific dogma that saw only itself, and liked what it saw:

He took up the ancient antithesis of
fides versus ratio
and argued that an embrace of both faith and reason was necessary for a person of “conscience” to search for truth, as something wholly practical, yet (since truth-seeking was a form of prayer) divine. An egregious preacher of “intolerant arrogance and fanatical dogmatism” was Dwight’s didactic opposite, the German anatomist Ernst Haeckel. Not only were Haeckel’s assumptions “unscientific” in their absolute refusal to accept mystery as part of knowledge, they were as ideological as the ecclesiastical tenets they sought to refute. Roosevelt noted that Boutroux, Bergson, and William James felt the same way about Haeckel as he did. It said something for the materialism of contemporary Germany that the man was still admired there.