Colonel Roosevelt (38 page)

By 2 February, however, the governors were on the verge of approving the language of their group petition, and Roosevelt confirmed to Hiram Johnson that he would run. He did not want to announce until the petition had been formally delivered to him. No word of his intent leaked through to members of the Periodical Publishers Association, meeting that night in Philadelphia. But before the evening was over, they had another news story, of major proportions.

Woodrow Wilson preceded Senator La Follette to the podium and delivered a short, urbane, perfectly pitched address. Ray Stannard Baker, co-author of La Follette’s campaign autobiography, was present and felt excitement building in the audience. Wilson, he scribbled in his notebook, was somebody endowed with “unlimited reserves of power.”

La Follette, in contrast, behaved like a candidate not for office, but for a psychological breakdown. He was weak from a recent attack of ptomaine poisoning, starved of sleep, and possessed by the notion that Roosevelt wanted to destroy him. Before standing up, he swigged a glassful of whiskey. He began to speak at 10
P
.
M
. and was still at it long after midnight, at times rereading whole chunks of his text without noticing, at others rambling so incoherently that Baker left the room in an agony of embarrassment. Wilson’s long face expressed alarm. Of all subjects, La Follette chose to rant at the “subservience of the press to special interests,” not to mention “a subtle new peril, the centralization of advertising, that will in time seek to gag you.” Magazine magnates boggled as his language grew personal, then, when it degenerated into yells of abuse, went to collect their hats and coats. The senator continued to rave, in a virtually empty hall, before slumping forward onto his script.

“
That was a pitiable tragedy,” Roosevelt mused, after reading about it in the newspapers. He wrote a letter of sympathy when he heard an extenuating detail: La Follette had been distraught over the imminence of a life-threatening operation on his daughter. Nevertheless, most progressives agreed with Pinchot that the senator had forfeited their support.

The pressure on Roosevelt to run now became overwhelming. “
Politics are hateful,” a worried Edith Roosevelt wrote Kermit. “Father thinks he must enter the fight since La Follette’s collapse.” Unable to bear the sight of any more politicians in broad-brimmed black hats besieging Sagamore Hill, she decamped, first to New York, then to Panama and Costa Rica with Ethel. She did not want to be around to hear Theodore make his announcement.

MARY LA FOLLETTE
survived, and as she recovered, so did her father.
He brushed aside the advice of his aides to withdraw as a candidate, saying he would consider doing so only if they could get the Colonel to issue a declaration of insurgent principles dictated by himself. For a week, representatives of the two camps tried to broker such an agreement. But Roosevelt declined to make any statement whatever until 21 February, when he was due to address a convention drafting a new constitution for Ohio. His words there, moreover, would represent his own philosophy and nobody else’s.

Meanwhile, in what was seen as an ominous portent,
Roosevelt supporters bolted the Florida Republican convention when it elected a delegate slate loyal to the President. Feeling themselves to be in the majority against Taft’s operatives, they chose their own delegation, and vowed to send it to Chicago in June, in an official contest for seating rights.

On the ninth, about seventy members of the Roosevelt National Committee, representing twenty-four states, met in Chicago and authorized the dispatch of the governors’ petition. It was treated as a private communication that he could publish if he liked. But the governors made clear their feelings in a statement given to the press, even as Frank Knox, petition in hand, hurried to catch the fastest possible train east:

Taft, seriously disturbed, told a Lincoln’s Birthday gathering of Republicans in New York that there were certain “extremists” in the Party who wished to give ordinary Americans—“people necessarily indifferently informed”—a participatory role in handling great public issues best left to Congress and the courts. “Such extremists are not progressives—they are political emotionalists or neurotics,” the President declared, in what was taken as a reference to Roosevelt.

Actually, he meant La Follette, who was still under neurological care. But Taft’s dread of progressivism as an anarchic force, destabilizing the polity he
revered—a nation governed by laws not men, answerable only to judges—was obvious, as was his likely rhetorical course if the Colonel dared to challenge him.

Roosevelt remained silent, working on his Ohio speech and urging a distraught Nicholas Longworth to remain loyal to the President. He himself could not. “
If I were any longer doubtful, I would telegraph you to come and talk to me, but it would not be any use now Nick. I have got to come out.”

He admitted that his chances of beating the White House organization were no better than one in three. Already, political appointees suspected of favoring him were being dismissed around the country. For that reason, he needed to mount the most formidable and well-financed campaign possible at such a late date. Fortunately, there was no shortage of progressive idealists eager to volunteer their services, either because of the magic of his name, or because they believed he would further the cause. Recruitment was proceeding so well in thirty-one states that his organization looked to be virtually complete by the time he announced his candidacy.

Elihu Root made a last-minute effort to dissuade him from accepting the draft of the governors. “
It seems to me that those who ask you to make a declaration are asking you … to incur the considerable probability of being defeated for the nomination, or, if successful in that, of being defeated in the election, and that the consequences to your future, to your power of leadership in the interests of the causes which you have at heart, and to your position in history, would be so injurious that … no number of friends have any right to ask such a sacrifice.”

Root wrote pessimistically, knowing that nothing was less likely to deter his old friend than warnings of personal risk. “
The time has come,” Roosevelt replied, “when I must speak.”

He was beyond caution now, beyond the moralizing over duty and ideals that had obsessed him much of the past year. Day by day, he felt battle lust rising. And typically, when he rose in Columbus to address the Ohio constitutional convention, he said nothing about the governors’ petition and espoused the most radical issue in progressive politics.

LITTLE MORE THAN
two weeks before, he had assured Henry Stimson, “I do not myself believe in the recall of the judiciary.” The secretary of war was still trying to live down their doomed double effort to launch a reform
coup d’état
in New York in the fall of 1910, and had been rendered nervous by Roosevelt’s
Outlook
article recommending the annulment of judicial decisions that favored property rights over human rights. No proposal could be more certain to enrage the President, who regarded even questions of national honor as “justiciable.” Was this to be a theme of his coming campaign? Would he also
suggest the recall of judges, state and federal? And if so, were justices of the Supreme Court next on his Robespierrean agenda?

Roosevelt set a defiant tone at the outset by declaring, “I believe … that human rights are supreme over all other rights; that wealth should be the servant, not the master of the people.” Yet for the next half hour his speech, cast in the form of an ideological lecture, was not provocative. It covered the whole range of issues with which a modern state had to deal as it adjusted itself to an age in which individualism was secondary to collectivism. Only a revitalized democracy could prevent industrial and political combinations from making property rights the basis of all law.

“
Shape your constitutional action,” he advised the delegates, “so that the people will be able through their legislative bodies, or … by direct popular vote, to provide workmen’s compensation acts, to regulate the hours of labor for children and for women, to provide for their safety while at work, and to prevent overwork or work under unhygienic or unsafe conditions.”

No reasonable Republican could object to granting such benefits, although there was a hint of Jacksonian threat in the phrase
by direct popular vote
. It implied more participation in policymaking than William Howard Taft (to name one Ohioan) felt ordinary Americans deserved. Roosevelt proceeded to recite the basic progressive creed, pledging himself to direct primaries, direct senatorial elections, and—when legislators quailed or failed—the initiative and referendum. As to the recall of short-term elective officers, he favored it, but only when public disillusionment was extreme.

“There remains the question of the recall of judges,” Roosevelt said.

At no point did he mention the President as the nation’s ranking such fetishist. However, Roosevelt’s contempt for legalistic justice, as opposed to executive action in favor of human rights, was plain. He cited a workmen’s compensation suit against the Southern Buffalo Railroad, recently rejected by the
New York State Court of Appeals. The judge in that case, like Judge Baldwin in
Hoxie v. the New Haven Railroad
, had declared the federal statute unconstitutional in terms of common law. “
I know of no popular vote by any state of the union,” Roosevelt said, “more flagrant in its defiance of right and justice, more short-sighted in its inability to face the changed needs of our civilization.”

THE REACTION TO
“Roosevelt’s Recall Speech” was angrier and more widespread than that following his New Nationalism address eighteen months before. The American Bar Association came out solidly against it. He was assailed from quarters as far away as Great Britain for the “sheer madness,” “demagogy,” “absolutism,” and “despicable nature” of his prejudice against judges.
It was to be expected that the New York
World
should accuse him of inciting “mob rule,” and that the
Wall Street Journal
should wisecrack: “Those most enthusiastic over the recall of judicial decisions are prevented by prison rules from working for the Colonel.” But even such progressives as Congressman Victor Murdock and Senator William E. Borah felt that Roosevelt had gone too far. “One statement frequently heard today,”
The New York Times
reported on 22 February, “is that the Colonel’s speech makes Senator La Follette look like a reactionary.” The Texas Progressive Republican League voted to support William Howard Taft.