Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [101]
With Bourne’s motion on the table, a debate ensued that sounded, to White, more loud than sincere. At the end, loyalty overcame expediency. A non-voting consensus was reached that the answer to the question was “yes.”
REGULAR REPUBLICANS WHO had always considered the Colonel to be one of their number reacted to his candidacy with varying degrees of perplexity. The most common theory was that he had lost touch with reality. Senator Root thought that he was motivated by vainglory. “He aims at a leadership far in the future, as a sort of Moses and Messiah for a vast progressive tide of rising humanity.”
Henry Cabot Lodge wrote Roosevelt, “I never thought that any situation could arise which would have made me so miserably unhappy as I have been during the past week.” He blamed himself for not realizing how long they had been at political odds. Now that Roosevelt had embraced judicial recall as a campaign theme, Lodge felt he could remain silent no longer. He had given a statement to the press. “It is at least honest although it gives no expression to the pain and unhappiness which lie behind it.”
I am opposed to the constitutional changes advocated by Colonel Roosevelt in his recent speech at Columbus. I have very strong convictions on those questions.… Colonel Roosevelt and I for thirty years, and wholly apart from politics, have been close and most intimate friends. I must continue to oppose the policies which he urged at Columbus, but I cannot personally oppose him who has been my lifelong friend, and for this reason I can take no part whatever in the campaign for the political nomination.
“My dear fellow,” Roosevelt consoled him, “you could not do anything that would make me lose my warm personal affection for you. For a couple of years I have felt that you and I were heading opposite ways as regards internal politics.”
President Taft told Archie Butt that Roosevelt was delusional if he thought he could control the forces of anarchy he had unleashed. “He will either be a hopeless failure if elected or else destroy his own reputation by becoming a socialist, being swept there by the force of circumstances just as the leaders of the French Revolution were swept on and on.”
Butt listened to the President ramble, as he had listened for three years, and decided to take a vacation. Divided in his loyalty to both candidates, he had no stomach to see them heading into a contest that had all “the irresistible force of a Greek drama.” With Taft’s permission, he booked himself a passage to Europe.
“If the old ship goes down,” he wrote his sister, “you will find my affairs in shipshape condition.”
THE ENERGY OF the progressive movement, now that Roosevelt had committed to it, was explosive. By early March, the three main hubs of his campaign organization were staffed, financed, and running. The Executive Committee, chaired by Senator Dixon, operated out of New York, from a rapidly expanding “skyscraper suite” on the twenty-fourth floor of the Metropolitan Life tower. When Roosevelt visited, he could look down on the decaying town house, three blocks south, where he had been born. Generally he stayed away, preferring to hold court in his office at The Outlook, one block east. He told reporters he was content to leave the direction of the campaign to Dixon and Frank Knox, as vice chairman.