Colonel Roosevelt (53 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
William Howard Taft was responding to a reporter’s suggestion that he should emulate some of Roosevelt’s headline-grabbing tricks in order to energize his campaign for reelection.
After his desperate attempts to win sympathy in the spring, only to be humiliated in the Massachusetts, Maryland, and Ohio primaries, he was resolved not to hustle for votes again. The electorate would have to judge him by his record—in token of which, he launched now into a defense of his tariff policy, detailed enough to turn two and a half newspaper columns gray. “Under the Dingley law the average percent of the imports that came in free was 44.3 percent in value of the total importations; the average percent in value of the imports which have come in free under the Payne law is 51.2 percent of the total importations.…”
Taft knew that he bored people, and did not much care. Archie Butt had been dismayed at the President’s lack of concern for the feelings of others. He kept people waiting for as many hours as suited him, even while he napped, and never apologized. At dinner, he would help himself to two-thirds of a beef tenderloin, before allowing his guests to share the remainder. He made no effort to shorten his speeches, aware that audiences could not walk out on a President. When his faults were pointed out to him, he listened placidly, registering nothing.
At the moment he was in a particularly obstinate mood, vetoing bill after bill as Congress sweltered to the end of its long session. The breezy golf links of Beverly beckoned. Taft was happy to let the Republican National Committee handle his campaign, under the chairmanship of his former secretary, Charles D. Hilles. As for himself, “
I have no part to play but that of a conservative, and that I am going to play.”
WHAT WITH TED
, Eleanor, and “Baby Gracie” in residence for the summer, plus Archie, Quentin, and various other Roosevelts coming and going (mostly coming, it seemed to Eleanor), Sagamore Hill was once again the noisy, teeming epicenter it had been in the first decade of the century. The only relatively quiet hours, undisturbed by phone bells and shouted dialogues up and down the bare, clattering stairs, were between one and six in the morning. The Colonel played daily host to reporters and politicos, frequently introducing group to group and then escaping on horseback before his absence was detected.
At other times he took refuge in the woods, felling dead trees amid a miasma of mosquitoes, or crammed his family into rowboats and headed for “picnic spots” chosen, apparently, only for their remoteness. Eleanor, to whom the notion of
al fresco
dining conjured up pleasant associations of chicken salad and lettuce sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, was disconcerted by her first experience of one of these forays:
By the time everybody was settled there was nowhere for me but a small space between the basket of clams and the demijohn of water in the flat-bottomed boat manned by Ted and his cousin George.
Under the blazing sun we rowed and rowed. There was no breeze. The Sound was as calm as glass.… Two hours later we landed on a beach precisely like the one we had started from except that it was farther from home. The boats were drawn up on the sand, and we settled ourselves at the water’s edge, unable to go near the trees because of poison ivy. The provisions were spread out and a kettle filled to make tea. The thought of hot tea was depressing enough, but it was worse to see the roaring fire built over the clams. When they were judged ready Colonel Roosevelt selected one, opened it, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, and handed it to me. It was large, with a long black neck. I managed to get it all in my mouth, burning myself quite badly. Although gritty with sand, it was delicious at first, but that soon wore off and it became a piece of old rubber hose.… Finally I slipped it under a log, but not deftly enough to escape Colonel Roosevelt’s eye.
“You aren’t as persistent as Archie,” he observed. “The first time he was old enough to eat a clam on a picnic he chewed for a time, then ate three sandwiches, some cookies, and an orange. Later he asked what he should do with the poor little dead clam. It was still in his mouth!”
Because of headwinds, it took twice as long for the party to row home.
After a few weeks of Rooseveltian hospitality, Eleanor found that she had lost twenty-six pounds.
One night after dinner the Colonel sat on the piazza with Ted, Archie, Nicholas, and George. Rocking in his chair, he said he was “dumbfounded” by the fervor he had aroused at the Progressive convention.
George remarked that whereas he had once been a radical among conservatives, he must now be the reverse. Roosevelt accepted the suggestion enthusiastically. “
Yes, yes! That’s it! I have to hold them in check all the time. I’ve got to restrain them.”
A more agitated rocker on the porch that August was Alice, talking politics, as Edith complained to Ethel, “like molasses blobbing out of a bottle.” She and Nick were spending the summer apart, their marriage on the verge of
collapse. It was 1910 all over again, except that Nick’s divided loyalties were even more strained, now that his father-in-law was directly challenging the President. Nick’s whole instinct was to remain in the mainstream of the Republican Party. But the moment was near when he was going to have to define himself publicly in campaigning for reelection. Edith was unsympathetic. “
I wish to goodness that Nick would come out flat footed and work for Taft, or do something! It is hard on everyone!”
Contrary to her private, bookish nature, Edith had become politicized by the two Chicago conventions. Madame Defarge, sternly knitting her husband’s doom in June, had been unable to resist the sight of thousands of Progressives turning toward her box, on the day of his “Confession of Faith,” and roaring for her to stand up and show herself. She knew as well as Theodore did that he was headed for defeat, but she was happy that
he
was happy in his new guise as a social reformer.
BY THE END OF
the month, all three candidates—or four, if Eugene V. Debs was to be counted as a presidential possibility—had launched their campaigns.
Wilson chose to do so at an agricultural fair in New Jersey. His belly full of fried chicken, he surveyed his audience of two thousand farmers (their children frolicking nearby on merry-go-rounds and roller coasters) and dispensed with his prepared speech on the tariff. He told them that the White House was their property. “What I modestly suggest is that you proceed to break into your own house.… The tenants who have been living there a long time have been making you pay the rent, instead of paying rent to you.”
Taft broke his vow of presidential silence long enough to issue a reproof to voters who registered as Republicans but supported “the candidate of another party.” Every curve of his massive body, now approaching its lifetime peak weight of
340 pounds, expressed disillusionment with the office Roosevelt had cajoled him into. By universal consent, his liberation was at hand. But the prospect of handing power back to his patron was not to be borne.
“
As the campaign goes on and the unscrupulousness of Roosevelt develops,” the President wrote his wife, “it is hard to realize that we are talking about the same man whom we knew in the presidency.” The peacemaker of Portsmouth had mutated into the half-crazed leader of a religious cult. “I have not any feeling of enmity against him,” Taft told her, “or any feeling of hatred. I look upon him as an historical character of a most peculiar type in whom are embodied elements of real greatness, together with certain traits that have now shown themselves in unfitting him for any trust or confidence by the people.”
As he penned these words, Debs, in Terre Haute, Indiana, was warning working-class Americans that there was little to choose between the three
major candidates.
All of them stood for “private ownership of the sources of wealth and the means of life.” The only real choice, therefore, was between Democracy—the real, socialistic kind, with wealth and opportunity equalized by law—and Plutocracy, otherwise known as the
status quo
.
Debs was sensible enough to know that his alternative was not likely to be chosen in November, if ever in the United States as presently constituted. But he was not far wrong in suggesting that Roosevelt, Wilson, and Taft were three panels of a triptych, linked and painted with the same capitalistic brush. They differed from one another only in ideological color and fineness of detail.
On the left, the Colonel and his Party offered by far the most advanced program of reform, with enough administrative and legislative proposals to keep the federal government busy for two decades. The Chicago platform was essentially a rewording, in legalistic language, of Roosevelt’s “Confession of Faith,” amplified with many slighter, but still significant initiatives, such as vows to revise the currency, register lobbyists, fight illiteracy, and adjust roadways to the coming of the motor age. There were so many other proposals regarding health care, flood control, parcel post, patent law, and foreign commerce that Wilson joked it would take “a Sabbath day’s drive” just to plow through the whole Progressive agenda.
His own, centrist platform combined the kind of small-
p
progressivism he had pioneered as governor of New Jersey with the traditional emphasis Democrats put on states’ rights. If Wilson sounded, at times, like a populist, it was because he felt he had to gratify the old “Commoner,” William Jennings Bryan, who had helped bring about his nomination. He undertook to control malfeasant corporations with as much force as Roosevelt, but said he would do so by strengthening the antitrust law, not by regulation. He was for a revenue-only tariff instead of the protective one that his rivals preferred.
Woman suffrage was an issue only slightly less abhorrent, to his Southern supporters, than Negro enfranchisement, so Wilson was content to let Mrs. J. Borden Harriman and other Northern feminists fight that fight for him. Otherwise, he showed as much social concern as Roosevelt, except that he sympathized more with credit-stressed farmers than with workers exploited in large cities.
Taft, on the Republican right, took what had become the obligatory stance among all candidates of opposition to special privilege and monopoly. He could justifiably boast of Attorney General Wickersham’s strong record as a trust-buster. Like Wilson, he called for more prosecutorial powers, and like the Progressive moonbeamers restrained by George Perkins, clearer definitions of acts that might be criminalized as monopolistic. This was as far as the GOP platform enabled Taft to go in appealing to popular reform sentiment. The rest of the document amounted to a virtual reprint of its predecessors in 1908 and 1904, but purged of progressive values.
AT THE BEGINNING
of September, Roosevelt set out from New York with a herd of
small silver bull mooses in his luggage, to give away to children.
He intended to barnstorm for a month, from New England to the far Northwest, continuing via California, the Rockies, and the breadbasket states deep into Dixie. By the time he got home via the mid-Atlantic seaboard, he would have covered nine thousand miles, and become the first presidential campaigner ever to encircle the country.