Colonel Roosevelt (37 page)

“
Theodore Roosevelt is a presidential impossibility,” declared Felix Agnus, publisher of the
Baltimore American
. “The sooner this fact is recognized and the more firmly it is stated, the sooner will the Republican Party get its true bearings, and the drivel of hysteria that invokes his name as a saviour of the Party and the country will be checked.”

HENRY ADAMS, WALKING
at dusk one night in downtown Washington, was accosted by what he at first took to be a hippopotamus. “
It was the President himself wandering about with Archy [
sic
] Butt, and I joined them as far as the White House Porch. He … gave me a shock. He looks bigger and more tumble-to-pieces than ever, and his manner has become more slovenly than his figure; but what struck me most was the deterioration of his mind and expression.… He showed mental enfeeblement all over, and I wanted to offer him a bet that he wouldn’t get through his term.”

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a bitter Senator La Follette was blaming Roosevelt for retarding the progress of his campaign. “
What can you do?” Gifford Pinchot taunted him. “You must know that he has this thing in his hands and can do whatever he likes.”

La Follette’s real problem—and Roosevelt’s too, if he ran—was that
Taft had executive control of the Party machinery. His fat hand lay heavy on levers only he could wield, sending thrills of power along the patronage grid Mark Hanna had assembled, state by state, in the 1890s. The grid terminated in
about a thousand convention delegates or delegates-to-be, many already pledged to him. This advantage was furthered by the tradition that a sitting president was entitled to renomination unless he declined to serve again. It made Taft an almost unbeatable opponent through June, even if his lack of popularity made him a gift to the Democrats thereafter.

Roosevelt, in contrast, was hampered by another tradition, that of no president ever running for a third term. He had endorsed it himself, in his famous declaration after the election of 1904:
The wise custom which limits the President to two terms regards the substance and not the form. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination
.

It was a “custom” in the sense that the Constitution did not mandate it.
He now began to claim that its wisdom lay in denying an extension to any president who (as he laboriously put it), “is in office and has been in office for eight years.” There was nothing to prevent such a man from returning to power after taking some time off to hunt lions, or for that matter, hippopotami.

He defended his cagey public stance in a letter to Frank A. Munsey, the wealthy owner of
Munsey’s Magazine
and an ardent progressive. “
In making any statement it is not only necessary to consider what the man actually means and actually says … but also to consider what the statement will be held to mean by the great mass of people who are obliged to get their information more or less at second hand, and largely through instrumentalities like most of the New York dailies, such as the
American
, the
World
, the
Evening Post
and the
Times
, that is, through people who make their livelihood by the practice of slanderous mendacity for hire, and whose one purpose, as far as I am concerned, is to invent falsehood and to distort truth.”

Roosevelt’s conviction that such organs were mendacious was not paranoid. Few seemed disposed to favor him if he ran.
The only major papers he could count on were the
New York Press
and Baltimore
News
, both owned by Munsey, E. A. Van Valkenburg’s Philadelphia
North American
, Medill McCormick’s
Chicago Tribune
, and W. R. Nelson’s
Kansas City Star
. William Allen White’s
Emporia Gazette
was passionately supportive but small-town in its influence, compared to the “yellow” Pulitzer and Hearst tabloids, with their millions of readers and Democratic bias.

Again citing Lincoln, Roosevelt quoted the Emancipator’s policy of lying low whenever journalists were on the prowl:
What they want is a squabble and a fuss, and that they can have when we explain; and they cannot have it if we don’t
. He felt that this “homely common sense” applied to his current situation. He had been accused of overweening ambition often enough in the past to know that if he gave any hint of wanting to be drafted, it would be seen by most editors as fatal insolence.

ON 16 JANUARY
, a “Roosevelt National Committee” was independently established in Chicago. It set up offices in the Congress Hotel. What
Current Literature
called a “
Roosevelt obsession” at once spread to all parts of the country where GOP primaries were being planned. Speculation mounted in the press that the Colonel would announce his intentions in Ohio in late February.

“
I fear things are going to become very bitter before long,” Taft told Major Butt. “But, Archie, I am going to defeat him in the convention.”

The President had no doubt that a progressive revolution was being plotted at Oyster Bay. He had heard from Henry Stimson that the Colonel was “
as hard as nails” in his anger at having been named in the steel suit.

Taft seemed less affected by the prospect of a split in the Republican Party than by the lingering effect of that anger. “
It is hard, very hard, Archie, to see a devoted friendship going to pieces like a rope of sand.”

Major Butt noticed, as Adams had, that the President was deteriorating mentally and physically. He stayed up later and later at night, and during the day kept nodding off—so often on public occasions that Butt had to keep elbowing him in the ribs and coughing loudly in his ear.

La Follette, too, began to ail under the stress induced by Roosevelt’s silence. He saw that his most influential backers, James Garfield, Medill McCormick, and Gifford and Amos Pinchot, were daily less loyal to him. It was obvious that the slightest positive signal from Oyster Bay would make them beg to be released from their pledges. The senator announced through a spokesman that “nothing but death” would keep him from pursuing the nomination, right through to the convention.

He had hoped to shine at a showdown between himself, Taft, Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson in early February, at the annual dinner of the Periodical Publishers Association in Philadelphia. All four were invited to appear, but the President and the Colonel, not wanting to look like co-equals, sent regrets. La Follette summoned up what strength he had left to write and rehearse the most important speech of his career. A spellbinding political orator, less preachy and ambiguous than Roosevelt, he felt confident of his power to win over the shapers of public opinion. Progressives who had already heard Wilson on the stump were less sanguine.

WITHIN TWO DAYS
of the opening of his national headquarters in Chicago, the pressure on Roosevelt to declare had increased to such a point that he decided to yield—but only to a petition that made clear his reluctance to run. He
asked the four Republican governors who were most energetically championing him (Chase Osborn of Michigan, Robert P. Bass of New Hampshire, William E. Glasscock of West Virginia, and Walter R. Stubbs of Kansas) to send him a written appeal for his candidacy. If they would argue that they were acting on behalf of the “plain people” who had elected them, he would feel “in honor bound” to say yes.

Frank Knox was appointed his roving emissary between the governors. Big and bluff, Knox was amply equipped to handle the various egos involved. He took it upon himself to solicit more gubernatorial signatures, and added those of Herbert S. Hadley of Missouri, Chester H. Aldrich of Nebraska, and Joseph M. Carey of Wyoming. With subsequent endorsements from Hiram Johnson of California and Robert S. Vessey of South Dakota, the appeal group represented a wide swath of country—considering that the South was Democratic territory, and the major industrial states were controlled by Taft-beholden bosses.

All this coordination took time, since some of the governors were more progressive than others, and regretted having to betray La Follette’s candidacy. Roosevelt complicated matters by toying with each executive separately, as if he wanted to delay the very petition he had invited.

Meanwhile, delegate-selection proceedings were under way in several states that had not yet adopted the primary system. On 23 January, Oklahoma’s Fourth District Republican convention grotesquely dramatized the factionalism of a party splitting three ways.

The local committee chairman, Edward Perry, was a Roosevelt man who hoped to create a progressive stampede for the Colonel. A letter from Gifford Pinchot reminded him that, as yet, La Follette was Taft’s only official challenger. Perry read the letter to the convention, but made plain that he still favored Roosevelt. This infuriated the rank and file supporting Taft.
Pandemonium ensued, with Perry roaring “Slap Roosevelt in the face if you dare!” over contrary shrieks and howls. A posse of fake Rough Riders invaded the hall. For fifteen minutes they tried to storm the stage, but found it harder to take than the Heights of San Juan. Cigar-smoking Taft forces repelled them. One cavalryman got through on a miniature pony: the young son of Jack “Catch-’em-Alive” Abernathy, a friend of Roosevelt’s famous for seizing wolves by the tongue. The boy shrilled “I want Teddy!” to the crowd, touching off further furor. But then the organization men suppressed him, and the convention endorsed Taft over La Follette by a vote of 118 to 32. Perry, locally known as “Dynamite Ed,” showed his displeasure by going outside and detonating five hundred pounds of high explosives.

His district may have returned a slate of delegates loyal to the President, but he wanted the world to know that progressivism was a force to be reckoned with.

ROOSEVELT MAINTAINED FOR
the rest of the month that he was not a candidate. “
Do not for one moment think that I shall be President next year,” he cautioned Joseph Bucklin Bishop, one of his most obsequious acolytes. “I write you, confidentially, that my own reading of the situation is that while there are a great many people in this country who are devoted to me, they do not form more than a substantial minority of the ten or fifteen millions of voters.… Unless I am greatly mistaken, the people have made up their mind that they wish some new instrument, that they do not wish me; and if I know myself, I am sincere when I tell you that this does not cause one least little particle of regret to me.”