Colonel Roosevelt (58 page)

BEFORE ROOSEVELT WENT
to bed after hearing the election result, he dictated a letter to Kermit. It belied his sanguine words to the press. “
Well, we have gone down in a smashing defeat; whether it is a Waterloo or a Bull Run, only time will tell.”

He did not have to wait for a full count of the vote to see that Wilson had scored the greatest electoral victory yet accorded a presidential candidate. Forty states had gone to the governor, and only six to himself. Taft had to be content with Utah and Vermont. Debs secured none. The electoral college tally was just as disproportionate, with 435 votes for Wilson, 88 for Roosevelt, and 8 for Taft. In Congressional races, the Democratic Party was triumphant, winning control of the Senate and substantially increasing its majority in the House of Representatives.

In his still-fragile state, Roosevelt yielded to rage against Root, La Follette, and all the others who had hampered his campaign from the start. Their efforts, he told Kermit, had been backed by “95% of the press” and “the great mass of ordinary commonplace men of dull imagination who simply vote under the party symbol and whom it is almost as difficult to stir by any appeal
to the higher emotions and intelligence as it would be to stir so many cattle.” He railed at the “astounding virulence and hatred” of those who accused him of everything from habitual drunkenness to mendacity. Even after he had been struck down in Milwaukee, “the opposition to me was literally a mania.… I now wish to take as little part as possible in political affairs and efface myself as much as possible.”

Like a female ranger living near Old Faithful, Edith Roosevelt understood her husband’s regular need to erupt. “
You know him well enough,” she warned Kermit in a covering note, “to realize that he will paint the situation in his letter to you in the blackest colors.”

Gradually, Roosevelt realized that his loss was not as devastating as it at first seemed. He had scored 4,126,020 popular votes over Taft’s 3,483,922. Wilson’s winning total was only 6,286,124: William Jennings Bryan had done better than him in
losing
four years before. Debs, by contrast, had doubled the Socialist vote of 1908 to nearly a million. This last was a remarkable achievement, but Roosevelt’s was historic. He had recruited a new party, schooled it in his Confession of Faith, and brought it to second place in a well-fought election. In just over ninety days, he had humbled a sitting president and decisively beaten a party that had dominated national politics for forty years. When the Progressive vote share, at just under 27.5 percent, was added to the GOP’s 23.2 percent, the Democratic total of 41.9 percent looked a lot less impressive. Technically, Wilson was a minority president.

This did not signify that Roosevelt would have inherited much of Taft’s support, had he won the GOP nomination and campaigned as a small-
p
progressive. He had always been anathema to the sort of Republicans who, on election night in Darien, Connecticut, had
stomped and burned a portrait of him. But he might have forestalled Wilson’s own nomination, so reluctantly assented to by Democrats after forty-three ballots in Baltimore.
Even if he had not, he would have had an established party organization behind him, and a platform that addressed itself to the changing national mood. His phenomenal personal popularity would have surged to new heights, along with his international renown.
He would now probably be President-elect of the United States, and John Schrank not in the dock for trying to kill him.

There remained the moral question that his black butler—no student of Aristotle—was asking: whether by bolting the party that had once made him president, had he not committed the fatal insolence? Was he now irreversibly headed toward a pathetic, if not tragic end? Nothing in Roosevelt’s strenuous soul could entertain such an idea. He had cheated death. He had books to write, trees to chop, sons to bring up, a daughter to marry off, and another daughter to save from divorce (
poor Nick had been defeated, and was taking it out on Alice). Always, too, there was Edith.

ROOSEVELT ADMITTED TO
feeling “a little melancholy” over the prospect of having to continue as head of the Progressive Party, when his real need was to start earning money again. His recent hospital and doctor bills, totaling between two and three thousand dollars, had cut into savings already depleted by marathon travels over the last two and a half years—not to mention the cost of entertaining hundreds of political pilgrims to Sagamore Hill. He had begun what was bound to be an expensive libel action against George Newett.
And he suspected that Ethel was about to get engaged to her faithful doctor, Dick Derby. That would mean a large wedding in the spring. It could not compare in splendor to the White House nuptials of “Princess Alice” in 1906. But given the rise in prices under the Taft administration, it might run up a similar bill.

One way of making a great deal of money was to go on the lecture circuit. Demands for him to speak had become innumerable after his performance in the Milwaukee Auditorium. A novel feature of many of these invitations was the suggestion that he accompany his presentation with “moving pictures” of himself in Africa, Europe, and on the campaign trail. If there was not enough of such footage, more could easily be faked, using an impersonator and studio props.

Roosevelt was willing to address such institutions as the National Geographic Society and American Historical Association, with or without fee. He declined, however, to make an exhibition of himself on less prestigious platforms. “I could probably make a good deal of money by so doing,” he wrote Kermit. “But I shrink to a degree greater than I can express from commercializing what I did as President or the reputation I have gained in public service.”

He felt the same way about journalism. “
I get from
The Outlook
a salary probably not more than one-eighth of what I could get by writing for the Sunday Hearst papers or the Sunday
World;
and nineteen men out of twenty would not see any difference; but there seems to me to be a very great difference.” He had his dignity to consider, and in that regard, unselfconsciously compared himself to Lincoln, Milton, and Darwin. “With none of these would it be pardonable to consider the possible monetary return, whether for the presidency, for
Paradise Lost
or for
The Origin of Species.
”

There remained his perennial source of gentlemanly income: the publication of books.
African Game Trails
had been enormously profitable in its first-serial form, and a bestseller for a while, but thereafter only a modest success. The polite notes Charles Scribner attached to Roosevelt’s half-yearly royalty checks did not quite mask editorial disappointment. Sales so far, in luxury and library editions, totaled fewer than forty thousand copies.

Looking back over his statements, Roosevelt could see that his other Scribner titles had lost momentum after his humiliation in the Congressional elections of 1910. Royalties earned by
Oliver Cromwell, The Rough Riders
, and
Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter
had fallen from $28,620 in February 1911 to $1,531 in February 1912. Oddly enough, his reemergence as the Bull Moose candidate had not arrested this slide; his latest check, for sales of all four books though 22 August, was a mere $895.

It was clear that something important had to come out of his pen during the winter, if he was going to reestablish himself as a man of letters. But what, and who would publish it? Most of the top houses in New York listed titles by him. G. P. Putnam’s Sons had
The Naval War of 1812, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, The Wilderness Hunter, The Winning of the West, American Ideals
, and
Theodore Roosevelt: Works
, a fifteen-volume set issued somewhat prematurely in 1900.
The Century Company had
Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, Hero Tales from American History, The Strenuous Life
, and
Stories of the Great West
. Houghton Mifflin had
Gouverneur Morris
and
Thomas Hart Benton;
Longmans, Green & Co.,
New York: A Sketch;
and the Outlook Company,
The New Nationalism
. Bibliographically, it was an impressive list, especially when the Scribners quartet was added to it, along with overseas editions and translations. Commercially, he had to accept that all of his books except
The Rough Riders
were languishing in backlist.

Late in November he let it be known that he was thinking of publishing some autobiographical chapters in
The Outlook
.
He was not sure that he would enjoy this “experiment” in self-revelation, but very sure that he wanted to be well paid if it developed into a book. Charles Scribner was upset not to be offered first serial rights, since
Scribner’s Magazine
had such a wide circulation and had done so well with
African Game Trails
. But Roosevelt felt obliged to give them to
The Outlook
, which had suffered many canceled subscriptions after supporting his bolt from the Republican Party. Scribner, undeterred, scented another bestseller. It would be the first presidential autobiography since those of the two Adamses—
not that
they
had been of much value. Ulysses S. Grant’s famous memoir had ended with the Civil War. Roosevelt was not only a gifted writer, but his life story was as thrilling as any novel. Scribner wrote to William B. Howland, treasurer of
The Outlook
, in a state of high excitement. “
This is the first time that I have ever put in a blind bid for the publication of a book.” He asked if the Colonel would accept an advance of $12,000 and a royalty rate of 20 percent.

It was a generous offer, matching the record rate Scribner had paid for
African Game Trails
. He was pained when Howland replied on 3 December that Roosevelt had yielded to “
another proposition [that] is distinctly better from more than one point of view.”

The proposition had come from the Macmillan Company, and was better indeed, paying Roosevelt an advance of $20,000 and a royalty rate of 50 percent. In return for these amazing terms, he was required to finish his manuscript by the summer of 1913, for publication that fall. Which meant printing the first chapters in
The Outlook
early in the new year, so that the whole book could be serialized before it appeared in hardcover.

Nobody in the industry doubted that Roosevelt could, and would, deliver on time: his
reputation for promptness was legendary. But before starting work on what he insisted on calling his “possible autobiography,” he had some scholarly writing to do. The American Historical Association had elected him as its president, and invited him to address its year-end convention. He thought he would speak on the subject of “History as Literature,” and publish his lecture as the title piece in a volume of miscellaneous essays and reviews.

His third book project for the winter was unlikely to be profitable, but would satisfy the mammologist in him. It was to be the collaborative scientific study he had long planned to write with Edmund Heller, entitled
Life-Histories of African Game Animals
. Charles Scribner was awarded full publication rights for $4,000, a not exactly glittering consolation prize.

JOHN F. SCHRANK
, meanwhile, was tried in Milwaukee on a charge of assault with intent to murder. He pleaded guilty, but with qualifications: “I intended to kill Theodore Roosevelt, the third termer. I did not want to kill the candidate of the Progressive Party.”

A cooperative, often jocular witness,
he insisted that he was neither insane nor a Socialist.
He bequeathed the bullet in Roosevelt’s chest to the New-York Historical Society, although some would have thought it belonged to the Colonel by right of conveyance. At times, Schrank claimed he was penniless; at others, that he had inherited Manhattan real estate from his father, a Bavarian immigrant. He had cash enough to have bought a gun and pursued the Colonel for two weeks through the Deep South and on across the Midwest—intending but failing to shoot him in at least five cities before Milwaukee. Always his phobia had been that Roosevelt, if elected, would plunge the country into a civil war.