Theodore Roosevelt (13 page)

Root moaned to a friend: “I care more for one button on Theodore Roosevelt's waistcoat than for Taft's whole body.”

The progressives who now abandoned the Republican Party in Chicago formed their own independent party, to be called the Bull Moose, and promptly nominated Roosevelt who responded with his famous cry, “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord!”

Nobody had been more appalled by TR's challenge of Taft than Lodge, who had written to his old and dearest friend: “I have had my share of mishaps in politics, but I never thought that any situation could arise which could have made me as miserably unhappy as I have been during the past week.” But Lodge maintained his loyalty to the party despite all, and Roosevelt, uncharacteristically, forgave him. Perhaps it was because it was the deepest friendship of Roosevelt's life, and perhaps because Lodge never said or did anything that his friend could take as personally disloyal. But with Root it was different. TR would not even speak to Root for four years, and he described him as the kind of lawyer who was paid by mighty corporations to permit them to do what the law forbids and yet avoid the penalty that might otherwise attend technical violations of the law. But, of course, Roosevelt was convinced that Root had used his chairmanship to rig a false nomination and deserved jail!

TR embarked on a vigorous campaign that was characterized by statements showing his continuing swing to the left. Antitrust suits were no longer enough; his stand was what he had said a year earlier: “The effort at prohibiting all combinations has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare.” But an attempt on his life interrupted his western tour and sent him home to Sagamore to await the election.

A would-be assassin fired a bullet into his chest as he was approaching the podium to make a speech in Milwaukee. The missile was deflected from a fatal effect by the contents of his breast pocket. “As I did not cough blood,” he explained later, “I was pretty sure the wound was not a fatal one.” Continuing his progress to the platform he told his horror-stricken audience: “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.… The bullet is in me now, so I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.” He insisted on finishing his address before the doctors rushed him to the hospital. It was the most dramatic performance of a lifetime of dramatic performances. He may even have enjoyed it.

He wanted to continue the campaign, but Edith arrived at the hospital and took him firmly home to convalesce. There was no gainsaying her when she was convinced something was necessary for his health. The aides were amused at how docilely their fiery chief took his orders from her, and the public sympathy aroused by the event was probably worth more votes than any campaign would have brought in.

Nothing, however, could save a party fatally split in two. Woodrow Wilson won with more than six million votes; Roosevelt polled four and Taft only three and a half. TR had handed the nation over to the Democrats and become the greatest mugwump in Republican history. It is interesting to note that James Bryce, the British historian who showed in his great work,
The American Commonwealth,
that he understood our political system to the core and who was a close friend of TR, said that what Roosevelt had really resented in the mugwumps who had bolted the party in 1884 was that they had impeached his own righteousness and classed him with the politicians. One wonders if he ever had doubts about the bolters of 1912. But doubting, of course, was not his habit. At least not overt doubting.

What he may have done to his party may still affect it to this day. Has the Republican Party ever really recovered the liberal wing which abandoned it to follow TR in 1912?

*   *   *

As Africa had provided the needed distraction for TR after leaving the White House in 1909, so did South America offer an alternative challenge after the fiasco of the Bull Moose campaign. There was a large river in Brazil, appropriately called the River Doubt, which headed north toward the equatorial rain forest and was supposed to join the Amazon in some uncharted dense jungle area. It was this that TR and his son Kermit proposed to explore in the company of some scientists on an expedition sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and the government of Brazil.

It was by no means an easy undertaking, particularly for a man who, if only fifty-five, had a number of physical things wrong with him, including a game leg from an injury in a street crash back in 1902. The party encountered poisonous snakes, ravenous termites, carnivorous ants, bloodsucking vampire bats, and piranhas. Fortunately the latter were good to eat. Because of the rapids they often had to proceed slowly along the banks of the river, through the steaming jungle, and this of course entailed exhausting portage of canoes and supplies.

To make matters worse, the trip took much longer than planned; supplies ran short, and illness plagued the travelers. One of their bearers was drowned; another was murdered by a man who ran amok and disappeared into the jungle. TR became seriously ill when he damaged his bad leg; he lay feverishly in his dugout reciting over and over: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.” He pleaded with the others to leave him to die and save themselves as best they could, but obviously none of the party would consent to this, and ultimately they were rescued by running into a group of rubber tappers. As TR described his ordeal for the readers of
Scribner's Magazine:

It is not ideal for a sick man to spend the hottest hours of the day stretched on the boxes in the bottom of a small open dugout, under the well nigh intolerable heat of the torrid sun of the mid-tropics, varied by blinding, drenching downpours of rain.

Shortly after his return he was faced with the outbreak of what would become World War I. It was to provide him with the final five-year battle of his own life: his passionate opposition to everything that Woodrow Wilson did, wrote, and said, before, during, and after the direct military involvement of the United States in the conflict.

Sixteen

If the election returns of 1912 proved anything it was that the old guard still ruled the Republican Party. The progressives who had bolted to support Roosevelt faded away, and even TR, after refusing their reoffered nomination four years later, not only because they had lost their following but because he found them too wildly radical, rejoined his old party. It was once again a united conservative body, as would be affirmed by its presidents from 1921 to 1933, and it preferred to lose the election in 1912 to winning it with TR. But it was still clear that had Roosevelt won the Republican nomination in that year, he would have defeated Wilson.

What, then, were the issues between the Democrats and the Bull Moosers, between a progressive Roosevelt and a progressive Wilson? Very few. As William Allen White put it: “Between the New Nationalism and the New Freedom was that fantastic imaginary gulf that has always existed between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.” Their very similarity may have caused their leaders to invent issues and to misrepresent each other.

There was, however, a philosophic difference between Wilson's and Roosevelt's attitudes toward the trusts, and one that may have epitomized the basic difference between the characters of the two men.

Roosevelt tended to favor the giant corporations. He admired their force and orderly organization; he saw them as essential to the growth of a great industrial nation, as vital components of the new century of material progress. And as a devoted advocate of military preparedness, he must have also foreseen them as the indispensable producers of warships and armaments. What he objected to—and objected to forcibly—was not their size but their too frequent wickedness.
That
had to be policed by a national government stronger than the corporations themselves. The prospect of the clashing conflict and the victory of the stars and stripes was agreeable to the hero of San Juan Hill.

Wilson, the reflective scholar, the former president of Princeton, saw the business picture through a different lens. To him the mammoth size of the trusts was an evil in itself, a factor that stifled competition and shut the small guy out of the market. He wanted every man, so to speak, to have his chance; he wanted to open the business arena to new enterprises that might initially lack the capital held by the established ones. If Roosevelt believed in laissez-faire, subject to government regulation of what he deemed antisocial behavior—exploitation of labor and unfair business practices—Wilson believed in protecting the individual from being shut out of business by corporate monopoly. For, unlike his predecessor in office, he insisted that size did lead to monopoly and that monopoly did stifle competition.

As John Milton Cooper Jr. saw it, Roosevelt was the warrior who believed in a strong chief of state to inspire the nation as a heroic leader, and Wilson preferred the image of the leader who listened to the people to pick up his cue. Cooper put it this way:

Roosevelt's misfortune lay in not having a war in which he could act upon his beliefs. His worst time began later, after the outbreak of World War I, which he viewed as a perfect historical occasion for his kind of heroic leadership. He knew he required a great national crisis, like Lincoln's with the Civil War, to practice his politics to the fullest. Only in such a situation could he have succeeded in rousing people and parties to self-sacrificing service and heroic action.

Wilson moved forward in his social program in his second term, despite his very narrow victory in 1916 over Charles Evan Hughes, until, to our eyes, he seemed to be anticipating the welfare state of the 1930s. It had to be galling to TR to see his own Square Deal outdone by tariff reform, workmen's compensation for those under government contract, an eight-hour day for railway workers, exclusion of the products of child labor from interstate commerce, and a big boost in income and inheritance taxes. Indeed, it began to look as if the federal government would take a principal role in aiding the disadvantaged, with all the danger, as Roosevelt saw it, of creating a society spoiled and feminized by a kind of permanent dole.

TR took querulous objection in the 1916 campaign, when he stumped for Hughes, to Wilson's statement that “you cannot worship God on an empty stomach, and you cannot be a patriot when you are starving.” It was outrageous of Wilson, he strongly affirmed, to espouse a creed that failed to engender among Americans “something at least of that nobility of soul which makes men not only serve their country when they are starving, but when death has set its doom upon their faces.”

The outbreak of war in Europe in the summer of 1914 found Wilson determined to maintain neutrality. He went further than many in his definition of what a true neutrality involved. “The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days which are to try men's souls.” He called upon Americans to be impartial “in thought as well as in action” in order “to do what is necessary and disinterested and truly serviceable to the peace of the world.”

Wilson was far from accusing Germany of being solely responsible for the conflict, and he saw the hope of the world not in an allied victory but in a deadlock between the foes. All during the war, up to the date of America's intervention, he initiated peace offers, mostly through his unofficial ambassador, Colonel House, in the vain hope of following a ceasefire with a conference that would contain neither a gloating and punishing victor nor a crushed opponent thirsting for revenge.

Roosevelt was not at first opposed to neutrality. He was deeply shocked by Germany's brutal invasion of Belgium and he admired Britain's pluck in so promptly implementing her treaty obligations and coming to the aid of her ally. When the Kaiser sent a delegate to call upon him in New York and to convey a cheerful and flattering greeting, TR dryly reminded his caller of the close ties he had made on his European tour with King Albert of the Kaiser's violated small neighbor. But he had always harbored a certain admiration of the militant Germans, and although he considered Britain and France as two of the principal upholders of civilization on the globe, he had his own doubts about their imperial policies. Besides, the Russian despot was on the side of the allies, and this somewhat muddied their ethical superiority.

But as he read the tear-jerking accounts of the suffering Belgians and contemplated the speed of advance of the terrifyingly organized Prussian units, he came to see Wilson's concept of neutrality as “so strict as to forbid our even whispering protest against wrongdoing, lest such whispers might cause disturbance of our ease and well-being.” And he became vociferously anxious for his country to take a more heroic stand. He was soon telling friends that “Germany is absolutely wrong.”

Only a few months after the start of the war in July Roosevelt was claiming that if he had been president, he would have come to the aid of Belgium. “I should have acted on the thirtieth or thirty-first of July, as head of a signatory power of the Hague treaties, calling attention to the guaranty of Belgium's neutrality and saying that I accepted the treaties as imposing a serious obligation which I expected not only the United States but all other neutral nations to join in enforcing.” He added later that such action “might very possibly have resulted in putting a stop to the war or in localizing or narrowly circumscribing its area.”

Of course, this was grossly untrue, for we have seen what his real attitude had been in the summer months of 1914. Had he reached the point where he could actually delude himself that he was telling the truth? One cannot but speculate that what TR really minded about Wilson was that he occupied center stage in a world drama that seemed to have been written for just such an actor as his predecessor. It was he, TR, who should have been the hero of the script now called for; it was a role for the Rough Rider, for the man who had built the great canal, who had engineered peace in the Far East, who had confronted the criminals in the streets of New York and faced the charging elephant and lion in Kenya! And what did we have instead? A dry scholar, a university don, a man who had never heard a shot fired in anger!