Theodore Roosevelt (12 page)

The Roosevelts' stay in London was marred by the death of Edward VII, and TR was asked to represent President Taft at the obsequies. He was also able to comfort and reassure Queen Alexandra, who had appealed to him in her intense grief to delay what seemed to her the too hasty inhumation of her husband's corpse.

He wrote Lodge:

I drive through dense throngs of people cheering and calling, exactly as if I were President and visiting cities at home where there was great enthusiasm for me. As I say, I have been much puzzled by it. It is largely because, and perhaps exclusively because, I am a former President of the American Republic which stands to the average European as a queer attractive dream, being sometimes regarded as a golden Utopia partially realized, and sometimes as a field for wild adventure of a by no means necessarily moral type—in fact a kind of mixture of Bacon's Utopia and Raleigh's Spanish Main.

Roosevelt's return to America onboard the
Kaiserin Augusta Victoria
was another triumph. The banks and docks of New York Harbor were lined with shouting crowds to welcome the great vessel from whose bridge the beaming ex-president cheerfully waved. Six battleships and hundreds of small craft were assembled to greet him, and a twenty-one-gun salute boomed from Fort Wadsworth.

Yet he was not quite the same man who had departed the country a year before. Archie Butt, the devoted naval aide who was later to lose his life on the
Titanic,
noticed this.

He was just the same in manner, in appearance, in expression, yet there was something different. We, all of us who had been closely associated with him in the past, felt it.… To me he had ceased to be an American, but had become a world citizen. His horizon seemed to be greater, his mental scope more encompassing.… He is bigger, broader, capable of greater good or greater evil, I don't know which, than when he left.

Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, had struck a note of truth years before, when he had warned TR that he would find it harder to be an ex-president than a president.

Fifteen

It was inevitable that the new president should expect to be better served by his own appointees than by his predecessor's, and understandable that he should not feel he had to consult with his predecessor as to their selection, yet Roosevelt was indignant at what he considered the arbitrary replacement of worthy men. Nor did he at all approve of the fact that six out of nine of Taft's cabinet secretaries were lawyers who had represented large corporations and might be expected to prefer a financial climate agreeable to their former clients. Taft's abrupt removal of Henry White as ambassador to France because (and this was believed by both Lodge and Root) he had failed, decades previously, when White was first secretary at the London embassy, to procure tickets to a House of Commons debate for the honeymooning Tafts, must have disgusted TR who regarded White not only as a close friend but as America's ablest diplomat.

Both Taft and his wife were capable of occasional smallnesses, but it seems more likely that Helen Taft was the one who bore a grudge against White. She certainly bore one against Roosevelt, and what could be more natural? There had always been more than a hint of condescension in TR's attitude toward his chosen successor, whom he once described as “a kindly and well-meaning man with no instinct for leadership,” a note of “Now I've done the bulk of the job and shown you the way, carry on!” She wanted her husband, of whom she was naturally proud and possessive, to stand on his own feet and have his own niche in history, and she found the long shadow of his predecessor oppressive.

But the real personal blow to Roosevelt was in Taft's discharge of Pinchot, the ex-president's particular protégé and friend, as chief of the Division of Forestry. This came about after Pinchot had challenged the sale by Richard Ballinger, secretary of the interior, of certain lands in the public domain to a Guggenheim family syndicate. Taft had upheld the action of his cabinet officer, and Pinchot had thereupon written an open letter to Senator J. A. Dolliver of Iowa defending his position. Elihu Root, now a senator from New York, sat with a committee that upheld the president, and he advised Taft, who had served with him in TR's cabinet and was a close Republican ally, that “there is only one thing for you to do now, and you must do it at once,” which was to discharge Pinchot for insubordination. And Taft did so.

It was, of course, inevitable that liberals and TR himself should see this as the revenge of lumber interests against the man who had deprived them of so much of their prey. Root himself admitted that the affair was “pregnant of immense evil,” both to the administration and to the Republican Party. Had he known how much, even as strict a man as himself might have been inclined to overlook even so glaring an example of political insubordination.

Roosevelt was waxing cooler and cooler about his successor. He made supporting speeches for Republican candidates for Congress in the 1910 midterm elections, but he voiced his deepening doubts in a letter to Root:

The sordid business of most of the so-called Regulars, who now regard themselves as especially the Taft men, and the wild, irresponsible folly of the ultra-Insurgents, make a situation which is very unpleasant. From a variety of causes, the men who are both sane and progressive, the men who make up the strength of the party, have been left so at sea during these months in which Taft has put himself in commission of Aldrich, Cannon, Ballinger and Wickersham, that they have themselves tended to become either sordid on the one hand or wild on the other. I do not see how as a decent citizen I could have avoided taking the stand I have taken this year, and striving to unite the party and to help the Republicans to retain the control of Congress and of the State of New York, while at the same time endeavoring to see that this control within the party was in the hands of sensible and honorable men who were progressives and not of a Bourbon reactionary type.

Root was in the difficult position of trying to keep peace between Taft and Roosevelt and save the party from a split. TR still had faith and trust in Root. In a letter to Andrew Carnegie about world peace he said of Root:

You know how I trust him; he was the man of my cabinet, the man on whom I relied, to whom I owed most, the greatest Secretary of State we have ever had, as great a cabinet officer as we ever had, save Alexander Hamilton alone. He is as sane and cool-headed as he is high-minded; he neither lets facts blind him to ideals, nor ideals to facts; he is the wisest and safest of advisers and staunchly loyal alike to friends and causes—and all I say I mean, and it is said with the full remembrance that on certain points he and I would hardly agree.

I quote this in full for its contrast to TR's attitude three years later when he turned on his old friend.

There was certainly no question, at any rate, that TR had come to view Taft as the betrayer of all his progressive ideals, his so-called Square Deal, and this despite the fact that the Taft administration had achieved an eight-hour day for government employees, expanded the civil service, supported a constitutional amendment in favor of the income tax, and brought more antitrust suits, under Attorney General George W. Wickersham, including the one that broke up the Standard Oil Company, than in all of TR's two terms. Yet a considerable part of the public agreed with the former president. Taft was widely seen as less zealous than his predecessor in his opposition to business monopoly, and his support of the protective tariff in the interest of Wall Street strongly intensified this feeling. The Payne-Aldrich Tariff Bill, sponsored by Congressman Sereno W. Payne and Rhode Island senator Nelson W. Aldrich, staunch supporters of big business, was publicly endorsed by the president as “the best tariff law the Republicans ever made and therefore the best the country ever had.” What this statement cost Taft in public esteem was gained in his higher reputation with the right-wing Republican Party machine and with Joseph G. Cannon, “Uncle Joe,” Speaker of the House, who had served in Congress for half a century.

The progressives in the Republican Party, now frankly labeling themselves that, began to rally around Roosevelt, hoping to nominate him instead of Taft at the 1912 convention in Chicago. But, as TR still hesitated to declare himself, they turned to Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, an accredited liberal, whose “Wisconsin Idea” of reform encompassed control of party bosses and expansion of business regulating agencies. But La Follette suffered a brief but politically fatal mental collapse in February of that year, and the governors of seven states appealed to the still wavering Roosevelt.

His wavering was not caused by any false modesty. He was troubled, of course, by his 1905 declaration that he would never accept another nomination, but this should have been discounted as meaning his decision not to run for a third
consecutive
term, on the plausible theory that a president still in office at the end of his second term had, in a now solidly established government bureaucracy, an unfair advantage over any opponent. But TR's real trouble lay in going against the man whom he had all but named as his successor, dividing the party and, perhaps greatest of all, flying in the face of the heartfelt advice of his closest personal and political friends, Root and Lodge.

In favor of running, however, was his increasing conviction that his mission in life had not been fulfilled, that such things as he had been able to accomplish might even be annulled by a conservative successor. This feeling, bordering perhaps on a touch of megalomania, might have been encouraged by the tremendous acclaim that he had received from both royalty and mobs on his European visit in 1910. Furthermore, and greatly to the distress of some of his intimates, he had veered sharply to the left and was actually endorsing the highly controversial issue of Initiative, Referendum, and Recall, by which the voters of a state would be empowered to reverse judicial decisions of which they disapproved.

William Roscoe Thayer wrote an interesting account of an evening with TR and Judge Robert Grant in Boston, where the three old friends met to discuss the issue of TR's candidacy. Thayer protested that the Referendum and Recall would mean the end of representative government and its substitution by the whim of the populace of the moment. But TR retorted that we had no representative government, exclaiming: “I can name forty-six senators who secured their seats and hold them by the favor of a Wall Street magnate and his associates in all parts of the country. Do you call that popular representative government?”

Thayer and Grant were so appalled by the new radicalism of their friend that they ended by urging him not to run. But he was now ready to declare his candidacy and told them: “I wish to draw into one dominant stream all the intelligent and patriotic elements in order to prepare against the social upheaval which will otherwise overwhelm us!”

It seems to me that this marks the point where the change in TR noted by Archie Butt on the ex-president's return from his triumphant tour of Europe showed that it was not for the better but, as Butt had dared to speculate, for evil. From here on TR is inclined to reveal himself as vindictive and wholly intolerant of any opposition. One had to be either with him or a deadly foe. He had, of course, always had this tendency, but now it was less and less relieved by compassion or even by his old sense of humor.

Early in 1912 Taft at last declared open war on his predecessor by labeling as political emotionalists or neurotics all those who advocated the recall of judicial decisions, and TR responded with a cry that was original with him: “My hat is in the ring!”

Root felt as strongly as Taft about the issue of recall, which he regarded as the end of constitutional government, and he poured his heart out to Robert Bacon, Morgan partner and later secretary of state:

Theodore has gone off on a perfectly wild program, most of which he does not really believe in, although of course at this moment he thinks he does. He has a tremendous following of Populists and Socialists in both parties and all the advantage of the dissatisfaction and dislike for the rich and successful, and he is stimulating that element with all his extraordinary skill. His course has had the effect of throwing Taft into high relief in the public mind as the representative of conservative constitutionalism. I don't think Roosevelt will succeed in getting the nomination. He will, however, succeed in so damaging Taft that he can't be elected. If Roosevelt should be nominated he could not possibly be elected. Of course, Lodge, George Meyer, Stimson and myself, who cannot possibly go with Roosevelt in his departure, have been feeling very gloomy over the situation.… Altogether I shall be glad to get up to the farm at Clinton under the protection of a force of accomplished liars who will say that I am not at home. In the meantime, however, I wish to fall upon your neck and weep. I wish to walk up and down in your congenial and unrestraining presence and curse and swear and say things which I would not have repeated for the world.

But Root was not to escape to his beloved farm to avoid the painful test of the Republican convention in Chicago. He was to be its chairman.

Arguments about who cheated whom out of what in that convention continue to this day. It presents a sorry picture of democracy in action. The bickerings are endless over Root's rulings as chairman as to whether challenged delegates should be allowed to vote on issues prior to the decision as to their qualification, and whether delegates who were present but refused to vote could be represented by their alternates, but Philip Jessup, in his excellent life of Root, concludes: “Under ordinary circumstances, a mere quarrel about a parliamentary ruling would have amounted to little; in this convention, due to the personality of Roosevelt, all of these incidents were cumulative and were seized upon to sustain the charges of fraud and theft and to justify the Bull Moose bolt.”

Root always maintained that he had acted scrupulously and fairly on every issue, and it can certainly be argued that TR would not have won even if granted his disputed votes, but the whole matter is so cloaked in lies and subterfuge that it is not possible to make a valid assessment. At any rate, Taft was nominated, and Roosevelt, convinced that he had been cheated out of victory, felt morally released to head a third party.