Colonel Roosevelt (36 page)

For himself as a natural historian and social reformer, he most admired and identified with the great English prophet of natural selection. Wallace had followed a curious trajectory since his days of co-discovery with Darwin, becoming more mystical (and politically progressive) as his scientific expertise grew.

Meanwhile, Henry Bernard had gone further than Wallace in opening up what Roosevelt considered to be “a new biological and even sociological field of capital importance”—the theory that the principle of group development in human beings was as instinctive, and organic, as that in biological evolution. Bernard was willing to entertain the role of the soul in science. But he fell
“into the great mistake of denying freedom of the will, merely because he with his finite material intelligence cannot understand it.” This incomprehension led him to call illogically for the remoralization of society, and for judicial reforms that would catch up with modern psychical perceptions. Roosevelt did not boast that he had recently called for the same things himself, but he remarked that a perfect community was unattainable “if there are no such things as freedom of the will and accountability.”

Not to mention love, an emotion scientists hesitated to analyze. It bonded the basic human cluster, the family, better than economic or environmental forces. Saint Augustine had correctly proclaimed that “the truths of love are as valid as the truths of reason.” Another essential was plain old common sense—too common for most philosophers, but not for Bergson, who regarded it as different from, and superior to, reason. In his new masterwork, the French philosopher had, in Roosevelt’s words, shown that “Reason can deal effectively only with certain categories [of knowledge]. True wisdom must necessarily refuse to allow reason to assume a sway outside its limitations; and where experience plainly proves that the intellect has reasoned wrongly, then it is the part of wisdom to accept the teachings of experience, and bid reason to be humble—just as under like conditions it would bid theology be humble.”

Roosevelt felt that Dwight and other cautionaries against purely materialistic thought were performing “a real service” in warning that dogmas, no matter how provable they seemed in the laboratory or the marketplace, were often as not swept away by the currents of historical change. Today’s “law” might be tomorrow’s superstition. But if there was to be any steady scientific or social advance, theists and materialists alike must give way to “bolder, more self-reliant spirits … men whose unfettered freedom of soul and intellect yields complete fealty only to the great cause of truth, and will not be hindered by any outside control in the search to attain it.”

The word
progress
sounded repeatedly in his essay as he continued to equate faith and reason as coefficients, not opposites, in improving the human lot. “In the world of politics,” he wrote, “it is easy to appeal to the unreasoning reactionary, and no less easy to appeal to the unreasoning advocate of change, but difficult to get people to show for the cause of sanity and progress combined the zeal so easily aroused against sanity by one set of extremists and against progress by another set of extremists.”

For a moment Roosevelt seemed tempted to veer into one of his habitual either-or mantras, but remembering that the theme he had set himself was truth-seeking in a spirit of reverence, he resumed his assault on “the narrowness of a shut-in materialism.” While praising materialistic scholars for “the whole enormous incredible advance in knowledge of the physical universe and
of man’s physical place in that universe,” he ascribed superior wisdom to James, Boutroux, and Bergson because they understood “that outside the purely physical lies the psychic, and that the realm of religion stands outside even of the purely psychic.”

He argued that those who professed faith while allowing reason to persuade them that evolution was a material fact were not having philosophy both ways. They were, on the contrary, “in a position of impregnable strength,” rightly holding that religion itself was evolutionary: it too had to adapt as it progressed. Roosevelt came near to articulating his own spiritual aspirations in summarizing theirs: “To them Christianity, the greatest of the religious creations which humanity has seen, rests upon what Christ himself teaches: for, as M. Boutroux phrases it, the performance of duty is faith in action, faith in its highest expression, for duty gives no other reason, and need give no other reason, for its existence than ‘its own incorruptible disinterestedness.’ ”

In conclusion, he wrote:

THE YEAR ENDED WITH
the Colonel insisting “I am not and will not be a candidate.” He declared over and over that his nomination would be a “calamity” both for him and the Republican Party. But privately he equivocated, for reasons implicit in his confessional article. All the books he had discussed concerned
progress
from one state of held beliefs to another—whether from paganism to Christianity, or clerical orthodoxy to free-market capitalism, or from rationalism to theism in science. All accepted, or tried in vain to deny, that belief itself was as transformative a force as materialism, and a necessary chastener of it. After a lifetime of rejecting spiritual speculation, in favor of praise of the body electric and the physics of military power,
Theodore Roosevelt had conceded the vitality of faith—not necessarily Bible-thumping, but at least the compulsive “ethical obligation” that distinguished the unselfish citizen from the mere hoarder of gold.

His best interest would have been to announce that under no circumstances
would he run, or accept a draft, for the presidency. But that prospect was beyond his present policy of noncommital. He did, however, entrust a strange message to his elder daughter, who he knew was a friend of Major Butt in the White House.

“
Alice, when you get the opportunity, tell Archie from me to get out of his present job. And not to wait for the convention, but do it soon.”

ONE OF THE FOLK SAYINGS
that Roosevelt liked to share with audiences was “
They say that nothing is as independent as a hog on ice. If he doesn’t want to stand up, he can lie down.”

As 1912 dawned, he found himself faced with the hog’s dilemma. He could run and slip, and this time there would be no recovery. Or he could maintain a low profile, and feel the chill of inactivity slowly spreading through his bones.

Were it not such a momentous year, politically speaking, he might keep himself warm with literary production: perhaps write his “big work,” or continue pouring out editorials for
The Outlook
on any subject that interested him. (He was proud of his latest essay, on medieval scholarship, and sent a copy to Edith Wharton.) The life of a dignified elder statesman, such as Arthur Balfour had embarked on in Britain, was what Edith Roosevelt wanted for her husband. She felt that biweekly trips into town, with a busy schedule of meetings and lunches, would be worldly action enough for him. On other days, he could satisfy his intellectual hunger at home with books, and there was always the estate to take care of excess energy.

“
You can put it out of your mind, Theodore,” she said. “You will never be President of the United States again.”

The problem was putting it out of the minds of other people.
His response to the U.S. Steel suit had created the general impression, which no number of denials could dispel, that he was running. A convention of the Ohio Progressive Republican League declined to endorse Robert La Follette, and spawned the first of many state “booms” for the Colonel. Governor Chase Osborn of Michigan urged both Taft and La Follette to withdraw in Roosevelt’s favor.
Some sober-minded industrialists and stockbrokers were tempted to agree, suggesting that it might be better to have the Square Dealer renominated, in his new, responsible regulatory mode, than risk the prosecutorial zeal of his rivals.

“It now looks as if Roosevelt, not Taft, would get (or rather, take) the Republican nomination,” Woodrow Wilson wrote a friend. “
That
would make a campaign worth while.”

To Edith’s dismay, Sagamore Hill once again became a political mecca. The pilgrims Roosevelt had attracted after his return from Africa in 1910 were nothing to
the
hajj
that converged on him now.
In cabs and carriages and automobiles, they took advantage of the metaled road he had rashly built up the slope of Sagamore Hill. Freezing rain did not keep them away. He got even less peace in his office at
The Outlook
, which began to look like a campaign headquarters, minus the posters and spittoons.

Once more the sad, worshipful eyes of Gifford Pinchot and James Garfield burned into him, beseeching him to free them from their commitment to La Follette. They argued that only he was capable of preventing the Party split that would surely occur if Taft was nominated in June.
Midwesterners loyal to “Battling Bob” lobbied Roosevelt to proclaim himself a non-candidate, loud and clear. Progressive governors, National Committeemen, publishers, and businessmen tried to make him do just the opposite. George W. Perkins, the star executive of J. P. Morgan & Co., offered him financing.

Old friends he had not seen in nearly two years paid court, drawn by a fascinated desire to observe Theodore
redux
. They included Henry White and William Allen White, about as socially different as two namesakes could be, united in their admiration for him; Cal O’Laughlin, now head of the Washington bureau of the
Chicago Tribune;
Jules Jusserand, trying to avoid detection by the press; and even Archie Butt, on an espionage mission approved by Taft.

Roosevelt was inscrutable to all. After leaving him, Jusserand asked Butt what he made of the Colonel’s attitude.

“
He is not a candidate, but if he can defeat the President for renomination he will do it.”

“Exactly my opinion.”

Taft received Butt’s report pettishly. “If he is not a candidate, why is he sending for governors and delegations all the time?”

Roosevelt was not soliciting support so much as advice from professional politicians, in genuine agony of mind as to what he should do. Mail flowed in by the sackful, every correspondent wanting or urging something. “
I would much prefer to wait until 1916,” he told a neighbor, Regis H. Post.

That indicated he had not altogether lost his desire for power. To Representative George W. Norris of Nebraska, he wrote, “
I am not a candidate and shall not be a candidate, but hitherto to all requests as to whether I would accept
if nominated I have answered in the words of Abraham Lincoln that nobody had a right to ask me to cross that bridge until I came to it.”

Nothing less than a draft, representing popular rather than partisan feeling, would square Roosevelt’s sense of honor with his sense of duty, and make him commit himself to a campaign that was bound to be one of the most brutal in Republican history. Outside of a few electoral areas, in the Deep South and Brahmin precincts of New England, the American people loved him to a degree that Taft and La Follette had to envy.
He was attractive even to the progressive Democrats currently being courted by Woodrow Wilson. The promise he seemed to personify of social justice, and a White House made lively once again, was what made his political enemies desperate to keep him away from the hustings.

The radical wing of progressivism represented by La Follette noted the Colonel’s recent rightward swing and doubted that he would swing left again, once renominated by a majority of the Party. Old Guard Republicans got exactly the reverse impression. They looked at
his latest article in
The Outlook
and saw, with a group shudder, that he had begun to advocate the recall of judicial decisions. What socialist mayhem would he visit upon the courts, if by some perversion of democracy he returned to the White House?