Colonel Roosevelt (31 page)

Roosevelt, luxuriating in the warmth of his reception at Berkeley, and the even warmer hospitality of Ted’s house in San Francisco, seemed not to care about
the fuss his “boast” had caused.
He had other priorities now. Eleanor was pregnant with his first grandchild. After a final few farewell speeches en route home—one, in Wisconsin, to praise Senator La Follette—he should be back at Sagamore Hill in time to see the budding of the fruit trees.
Qui plantavit curabit
.

OLD FRIENDS WERE
not persuaded that this was the Colonel’s last political tour. “Quiescence for him is an impossibility,” James Bryce observed in early April, comparing Roosevelt to Gladstone for out-of-office fame. “He is a sort of comet … but much denser in substance; and not so much attracted by as attracting the members of the system which he approaches.” At every whistle-stop, women stood holding up their children for him to touch. “It seems,” Edith wrote Cecil Spring Rice, “as if in proportion with the hatred of Wall Street, is the love which is lavished upon him in the West.”

Taft continued to woo him, in the hope that their rapprochement would strengthen the GOP through difficult days ahead. The Sixty-first Congress had just come to an end, and with it the Party’s majority rule. Opposition from both progressives and Republican stalwarts had stalled Taft’s pet project, reciprocity with Canada. He had called an immediate session of the new Congress to reconsider the measure. That meant dealing from now on with hostile Democrats, and the President, seeking to counter their hostility, needed allies.

He sought to please Roosevelt with a pair of cabinet appointments almost
pandering in their progressiveness: Walter L. Fisher as secretary of the interior, and Henry L. Stimson as secretary of war. The former, replacing Richard Ballinger, was a Pinchot-friendly conservationist, and the latter could be counted on to deploy the Colonel in any military emergency.
But Roosevelt felt that Taft was “absolutely lost” as a leader. Ballinger’s resignation was symbolic in more ways than one. It cast a moral afterglow on the accusations of Gifford Pinchot, and reestablished conservation as an ideological issue of prime importance.

Rhetorically, what was more, Taft and the Democrats deserved one another. Champ Clark, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, had just managed to insult Canadians by suggesting that reciprocity was merely a step toward the day when the Stars and Stripes would fly “
up to the North Pole.” Roosevelt, cooling on the issue, declined to associate himself with such jingoism.

ON CAPITOL HILL
, Representative Henry T. Rainey, Democrat of Illinois, demanded “an investigation of the means by which President Roosevelt ‘took’ the Isthmus of Panama from the United States of Colombia.”
The New York Times
, usually quick to criticize the Colonel, remarked with some sympathy that the move persecuted a man who was at present “down and out.” Ambitious Democrats thinking ahead to 1912 seemed to be hoping for “some kind of scandal that will wipe the name of Theodore Roosevelt clear off the map of political possibilities in this country.” The Panama Canal was “about the most popular asset of recent history, and it will be very difficult to convince the public that Mr. Roosevelt was not a great public benefactor in ‘taking’ the canal zone.”

“
NOT A WORD, GENTLEMEN,”
a suntanned Roosevelt told reporters when he got back to New York on 16 April. “Not a word to say.”

This did not stop him from saying plenty about the political situation in private to such intimates as James Garfield and Gifford Pinchot—the latter reunited with him in mutual contempt for Taft. All three agreed that the President could be renominated only “by default” in 1912, absent a major progressive challenger. La Follette did not appear to be developing any real strength in the East.
If anyone was, it was the Democratic Party’s rising star, Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey.

Roosevelt did not wait for Stimson to move into the War Department before making his first public break with Taft. His weapon of choice was
a signed editorial in
The Outlook
. He wished to discuss national honor, and what he saw as the President’s willingness to compromise it.

Since agreeing to head up the American Society for Judicial Settlement of International Disputes, Taft had fixated on the concept of
a series of arbitration treaties that would subject all signatory nations to the authority of a world court, when situations arose to threaten the security of any of them. Roosevelt voiced no particular objection to Taft’s prototype treaty with Great Britain, feeling that it merely cemented an Anglo-American alliance already in place. But he noted that France and Germany—whose intense mutual hostility he had so recently felt at first hand—were also on the State Department’s wish list, not to mention Japan, and a number of other warlike or meddlesome powers.

Roosevelt was aware that he had espoused the spirit of arbitration himself as President, in the moderation of labor disputes and such international questions as the proper plotting of borders. When calling for “a League of Peace” in his address to the Nobel Prize Committee, however, he had stressed that such an authority should be armed. Nor had he ever countenanced the idea of the United States abrogating the right to police its own interests.

Taft proposed to do just that, telling the peace society, “
Personally, I don’t see any more reason why matters of national honor should not be referred to a court.” The President believed that its judges, like himself, would be gentlemen who “understood” what honor meant.

This kind of fantasy was enough to provoke, in private,
Roosevelt’s hottest language. He restrained himself in print, addressing only the British treaty and declaring, “
The United States ought never specifically to bind itself to arbitrate questions respecting its honor, independence, and integrity.” But the fact that he had never before criticized Taft publicly made his demurral sound like a shout.

Its echoes were still reverberating on 6 June, when he found himself seated next to the President at
a jubilee in Baltimore honoring James Cardinal Gibbons. Fellow celebrants looked for signs of rancor between them, but they managed the encounter well, laughing or pretending to laugh at private jokes. Between chuckles, Roosevelt advised Taft that he would soon testify before a Congressional committee investigating charges of White House collusion with U.S. Steel during the fiscal crisis of October–November, 1907. It was not to be confused with the committee looking into his alleged rape of Panama, but both probes were obviously part of the new majority’s effort to impugn the Republican Party in advance of the next election.
Taft advised him to stand on his dignity and refuse to appear. Roosevelt was determined to defend himself. They kept on grinning at each other, so much so that the Associated Press reported that the Colonel had promised to support Taft for renomination in 1912.

Roosevelt denied the report as soon as it was published. A few days later, he sent the Tafts a silver wedding-anniversary gift. The President thanked him for it on 18 June, and from then on their estrangement was total.

SO—NARROWLY AT FIRST
, then yawningly as the ideological landscape split—a double division began to run, not only between Taft and Roosevelt, but between dreamers of peace and
Realpolitiker
who believed that in time of war, treaties were not worth the parchment they were written on. In 1911, the average American voter could not remember Gettysburg, let alone feel what Henry Adams, relocated to Paris, described as “
this huge big storm cloud gathering in Central Europe.” Adams prophesied that the cloud would one day burst over Austria and the Balkans, then move southeast to the Levant, sweeping away the Ottoman Empire. Roosevelt had explored much of that territory himself, both as a boy and ex-President. He was not sure that Western Europe would
escape the cataclysm. The heads of state and other eminences he had met, in nation after nation from Italy to Norway, had betrayed, in their various, defensive ways, a general consciousness that some breakdown of civilization was on its way. Whether it happened soon, as Balfour and Spring Rice kept predicting, or held off for a decade, as Adams hoped, it was unlikely to be deflected by arbiters droning on at The Hague.

Roosevelt believed that the United States (if Taft could be stopped from signing away its strategic independence), would succeed Great Britain as the enforcer of world peace—“never mind against which country or group of countries our efforts may have to be directed.” It would do so, if necessary, with an armed hand. “We ourselves,” he told a German visitor to
The Outlook
, “are becoming more and more the balance of power of the whole globe.”

Like many men of martial instinct, the Colonel claimed to be peaceable. But it was plain to everybody that he loved war and thought of it as a catharsis. War purged the fat and ill humors of a sedentary society whose values had been corrupted by getting and spending. Waged for a righteous cause,
it reawakened moral fervor, intensified love and loyalty, concentrated the mind on fundamental truths, strengthened the body both personal and political. It was, in short, good for man, good for man’s country, and often as not, good for the vanquished too. In celebrating its terrible beauty, Roosevelt often came near the sentimentality he despised among pacifists—so much so that some of his most affectionate
friends felt their gorges rise when he romanticized death in battle.

He used the strongest language to emasculate men who hated militarism, or recoiled like women from the chance to prove themselves in armed action: “aunties” and “sublimated sweetbreads,” shrilly piping for peace. (The tendency of his own voice to break into the treble register was an embarrassment in that regard.) He noted with scorn that such “mollycoddles” as Governor Baldwin of Connecticut and Boss Barnes of New York supported the Judicial Settlement Society. Andrew Carnegie had established a multimillion-dollar
Endowment for International Peace, and was lobbying the President to recognize it. “I feel,” Roosevelt wrote a fellow veteran of the Cuban war, “somewhat as if we were all threatened with death by drowning in an ocean of weak tea with too much milk and sugar.”