Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [100]
For five hours, with White, they tried in vain to change his resolve to run. At eleven-thirty the party broke up. Thayer, who was not staying over, went out into the night, feeling saddened and apprehensive. Just before the Colonel went up to bed, Grant made the mistake of mentioning his cool treatment of Taft.
Roosevelt stopped at the foot of the stairway. “It was through me and my friends that he became President.”
It was a tense moment. Both of them were aware that his announcement was even now thumping through printing presses across the country.
They continued on up the stairs. Roosevelt stretched out his arms and said, “I feel as fine as silk.”
CHAPTER 9
The Tall Timber of Darkening Events
He may do more by seeing what he sees
Than others eager for iniquities;
He may, by seeing all things for the best,
Incite futurity to do the rest.
THE CONTRARY FORCES ALIGNING themselves for and against the campaign of Theodore Roosevelt to unseat his successor were on display in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 28 February 1912. He attended a meeting of the Harvard board of overseers and was ostracized by his fellow members. They stood with their backs to him until he was joined by a sympathetic friend, Colonel Norwood P. Hallowell. Yet on emerging into the Yard, he was greeted by a crowd so boisterously affectionate that ten patrolmen were needed to get him into his car. It was clear his only hope of being nominated was to appeal to the people over the opposition of conservative Republicans.
“I am alone,” Roosevelt told his old hunting companion, Dr. Alexander Lambert, back at Sagamore Hill that weekend. “You can’t imagine how lonely it is for a man to be rejected by his own kind.” He said that he and Hallowell were made to feel “like a pair of Airedale terriers that had walked in on a convention of tom cats.”
In a cultural essay published some weeks before in The Outlook, he had noted that whenever a medieval man fought against prevailing orthodoxy, the tendency of society was to outlaw him. Now, after a lifetime of Party regularity, he found himself both free and shunned, loved and despised. It took some getting used to, and a considerable amount of evasion when friends as worried as William Allen White asked if he was prepared, in the likelihood of defeat, to found a new party. “We made the too obvious pretense in those days of our party loyalty,” White wrote afterward, “whistling in unison through the tall timber of darkening events to support our courage.”
As March loomed, Taft’s organization accelerated the pace of delegate selections in states that it controlled. This portended an agonizing choice for Roosevelt Republicans, bluntly expressed by Senator Jonathan Bourne of Oregon, at a strategy session in Washington: “Gentlemen, the first thing we have got to decide is a matter of fundamental policy. If we lose, will we bolt?”
The company sat stunned. Bourne had been a founding member of the Progressive Republican League, set up more than a year before to advance the fortunes of Robert La Follette. As such, he was a courageous, even a rash man, willing to back the most radical challenger to Old Guard rule. But the question of “bolting” had never occurred to the League, which meant only to advance the cause of progressivism within the Party.
Bourne persisted with his motion. “I move that we agree, here and now, and not be too secretive about our agreement, that if we lose, we bolt.”
There was silence while the politicians around the table considered their prospects. Those in Congress knew that apostasy would likely excommunicate them forever. And could progressivism, born of the Party, survive long without it? If Taft was nominated and then defeated as badly as everybody expected, it would be difficult even for GOP stalwarts to stay in office through the election of 1916. What real chance was there, at this late date, of Roosevelt recruiting enough delegates to commandeer the national convention in June?
William Allen White was in attendance. He was a bona fide progressive, but also,