Colonel Roosevelt (29 page)

“
I don’t see what I could have done to make things different,” Taft said to Archie Butt. “It distresses me very deeply, more deeply than anyone can know, to think of him sitting there at Oyster Bay alone and feeling himself deserted.”

The President wiped away a sentimental tear. “I hope the old boy has enough philosophy left to take him through this period.… If he could only fight! That is what he delights in, and that is what is denied him now.”

ROOSEVELT’S OSAWATOMIE SPEECH
, along with three supplementary essays on morality in politics, was
now published in book form as
The New Nationalism
.
Many progressives read it skeptically, in view of his steady refusal to break with the President. “He thinks that compromise is the only thing,”
William Allen White complained to Mark Sullivan. Gifford and Amos Pinchot kept reproaching the Colonel for calling Taft an “upright” man at Saratoga. Roosevelt, irritated, wrote the brothers off as “ultraextremists” who came “dangerously near the mark of lunacy.”

He knew that they were plotting with Congressional insurgents to form a third party if Taft was renominated. Sure enough, their names, along with White’s, appeared on the stationery of a new group calling itself the National Progressive Republican League. Most of the other men listed—Beveridge, Bristow, Clapp, Cummins, Garfield, Madison, Murdock, and Senator Miles Poindexter of Washington—still professed to be Roosevelt supporters. But one name in particular, that of Robert M. La Follette, made him suspect that the League was a presidential campaign committee in disguise. Now that
he
had dropped out of contention, “Battling Bob” looked to be the white hope of Republican progressivism.

La Follette begged Roosevelt to join the League. The Colonel was reluctant to compromise himself. He still talked of holding the GOP together. Dividing it was unlikely to stop the Democrats from completing their sweep of the government in 1912. Four years out of power should convince conservative Republicans that the age of protectionism was over, and that of progressivism—
his
enlightened kind, not La Follette’s bristling zealotry—an evolutionary fact. Conceivably, 1916 might see him restored to Party leadership. Not that he would admit to any desire to be President again. “There is nothing I want less.”

He saw little of his New Nationalism in the Progressive League’s manifesto: no proposal to regulate corporations, no plea for conservation, nothing on the deteriorating relations of capital and labor.
La Follette wanted to see direct voting in primaries and senatorial elections, direct participation in sending and instructing delegates to national conventions, laws to restrict corrupt practices, and, in a mantra beloved of populists, “the initiative, the referendum, and the recall.”

This last triple demand, for voter involvement in the passage and repeal of laws, was evidence to Roosevelt of
the insurgents’ tendency to overreach. Reforms to benefit democracy in some states, such as the judicial-recall clause proposed for the new constitution of Arizona, would not necessarily do so in all. The vituperation he had brought down on his own head, for suggesting that the Supreme Court needed to adapt itself to new industrial conditions, had shown how negatively progressivism was perceived in some quarters. But in declining to be associated with the League, he did not want to sound like yesterday’s radical turned timid. “
I think,” he wrote La Follette, “that we wish to be careful not to seem to be dictating to good people who may not be quite as far advanced as we are.” He noted that the senator’s own constituents in ultraprogressive Wisconsin had not yet accepted the initiative or the referendum.

Roosevelt promised to make clear in
The Outlook
that he was in “substantial agreement” with most of the things the new group stood for. “But I hardly think that it would be of service from the public standpoint for me to go into such a league at present.”

ON 21 JANUARY
, the same day that the National Progressive Republican League was organized in Washington, Taft sent a major new proposal to Congress. It was for tariff reciprocity with Canada, and sought to double the number of free imports from that country, mostly agricultural, while protecting the wide range of American exports, mostly manufactured, that flowed north.
Roosevelt praised it as “admirable from every standpoint” in a personal letter to the President. “Whether Canada will accept such reciprocity, I do not know,” he added, “but it is greatly to your credit to make the effort.”

Experience had taught him that economic considerations mattered less, in foreign negotiation, than those of national pride. The Dominion might well jib at a trade agreement that could transfer all its important bank credits to New York and Chicago—making it what Taft, with typical clumsiness, called “
a virtual adjunct of the United States.” But Roosevelt saw hope in the fact that Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Canadian prime minister, favored reciprocity.

Favoring it himself, he was aware that he was once again in conflict with Henry Cabot Lodge. His old friend, just reelected to the Senate by a tiny majority of the Massachusetts legislature, had found it difficult to be polite about New Nationalism last fall. Poor Cabot was fighting a lonely battle against the initiative in behalf of Bay State fishermen.

Any protectionist west of the clambake fringe could see that Taft’s proposal stood to benefit American corporate interests. Roosevelt might have been expected to oppose it for that reason, out of loyalty to the small businessmen and farmers who had always voted for him. Instead, he seemed to be siding with the administration—pandering to it, even, when he said he wanted “
to see radicalism prosper under conservative leadership.”

The words made no sense. However, as a born operator, it was characteristic of him to salute the only brilliant tactic of Taft’s presidency so far: sponsorship of a pro-business bill that progressives would have difficulty opposing, because it granted their demand for a reduction in tariff excess. The odds were good that before the Sixty-first Congress passed out of existence in March, Taft would have a treaty to offer to Canada.

THE COLONEL’S JOB AS
contributing editor of a serious, not to say sedate, weekly journal enabled him to stay in touch with current affairs and write about them. He commuted into Manhattan on Tuesdays and Fridays, usually
by automobile. When the roads were icy he took the train, hanging on a strap like any other citizen, but suffering because fellow travelers would not leave him alone. In
The Outlook
’s headquarters at 287 Fourth Avenue he could at least control whom he wanted to see. Ray Stannard Baker, watching him hold court there one morning, was struck by the executive charade:

Roosevelt was not deceived as to his polarizing effect on public opinion. Passions aroused by last November’s election still ran high in New York City. He joked to O. K. Davis that he could not leave the building without provoking someone. “
If I go down by the side elevator, that is evidence of furtiveness. If I go down in front, that is proof of ostentation.”

He worked hard for his $12,000 salary, always delivering copy on time, and soliciting articles from
other progressive writers. “
There is no fake in Roosevelt’s reference,” a fellow editor remarked. “His memory is prodigious. He can meet any man—any specialist on his own ground.” Lyman and Lawrence Abbott, the father-son duo in charge of
The Outlook
, valued him as a precious resource.
They knew that glossier periodicals had offered him four, if not five times as much money as they could afford. He told them he found their moralistic brand of progressivism congenial. However spent a political force (and they were not sure that he was), Theodore Roosevelt had made
The Outlook
one of the most influential organs in the country.

In January alone, he reviewed a book on the subject of foreign disaster relief, wrote three articles for a new series entitled “Nationalism and Progress,” and published the texts of his exchange with Governor Baldwin. These contributions were meant to show that he had lost none of his radical fervor, and to prevent La Follette from co-opting one of progressivism’s prime issues: that of employers’ liability.

ROOSEVELT WAS PLEASED
to hear in February that
African Game Trails
, which had been named 1910’s “Book of the Year” by the
New York Herald
, had sold 36,127 copies in all editions. Charles Scribner sent him a royalty check for $28,620, and wrote that the book was still moving off the shelves.

“
It is a great sight to see a lion coming on with his mane all bristling, and
his teeth showing, with one of those grunting roars,” the Colonel told an audience of enraptured children on Washington’s Birthday. “A great sight.” Showing a fair number of teeth himself, he regaled his audience with stories, alternately frightening and funny, about his year in Africa. The children were in stitches at his descriptions of man-eater attacks on Indian employees of the Uganda Railway. “A lion came up and tried to get inside the station [at Voi] and the Hindoo inside sent an agitated telegram running, ‘Lion fighting station. Help urgently necessary.’ ”

The more the great safari receded into memory, the more he accepted that he was living in a state of anticlimax. Whether this would prove a permanent condition, he could not tell, but he clearly had no future in active politics as long as Taft maintained a semblance of control over the Republican Party, and progressives continued to be disappointed in him. He could at least look forward to the doubtful satisfaction of becoming an elder statesman.