Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [103]
NEITHER TAFT NOR ROOSEVELT undertook to campaign personally at first. Tradition required major candidates to remain aloof from delegate-hunting. The Colonel contented himself with press relations. One day he allowed two of the investigative journalists he had slammed as “muckrakers” during his presidency to buy him lunch at the Colony Club in New York. Ida Tarbell, who had made herself famous by exposing the monopolistic practices of the Standard Oil Company, was by no means his fan. She had not forgiven him for his epithet, which had stuck to her ever since. Ray Stannard Baker knew Roosevelt well enough to doubt that he was as pure in his progressivism as Senator La Follette—or for that matter Governor Wilson, with whom Baker was now ideologically infatuated.
Both writers, however, were captivated by the Colonel’s charm. His political image was so swashbuckling and his quoted rhetoric so pugnacious that skeptics were always surprised to find how gentle he was in private. “Again he impressed me with his wonderful social command,” Baker wrote afterward. There were two other women present, along with William Allen White, and Roosevelt showed himself to be “keenly sensitive to everyone in the party,” bringing out all personalities. It was not possible to be shy in front of him. He disarmed by being frank about himself, not hiding the fact that he had been snubbed by the Harvard overseers, and admitting that some people considered him crazy.
Baker thought that he looked “wonderfully well,” sitting relaxed in a soft dark suit and bright tie. The light through the club’s big windows shone on his straw-brown hair and showed it to be thinning slightly at the crown. There was little gray in it, in contrast to streaks of white in his mustache. In his sharp voice, he talked about his career, saying that as a young man he had felt most comfortable with fellow members of the Knickerbocker aristocracy. Later he had come to admire self-made men like Mark Hanna, who made fortunes in industry and parlayed it into political power, until their amorality repelled him and he had realized that “the real democratic spirit lay deeper,” in the bosoms of the plain people he had bunked with out West, and fought with in Cuba.
Baker sensed that Roosevelt’s conscious adoption of their values had, over the years, become visceral. “This is his strong point—that he voices rather than creates the sentiment which he expresses. He is not a pioneer, but a reporter.” As such, he did not seem to care if he won or not, as long as “the great fundamental principles” of progressivism prevailed.
The only prejudice he displayed during two hours of conversation was a refusal to accept that La Follette was as idealistic as himself. Baker had to conclude, “He is nearer the true liberal in spirit than any man now in public life … a great man—a genius in his way.”
MEANWHILE, ROOSEVELT’S AGENTS fought for every delegate who could be cajoled, bullied, or bribed. It was an embarrassment to him that men like Ward and Flinn, bosses themselves, were employing methods contemptuous of his pronouncement at Saratoga in 1910, “The rule of the boss is the negation of democracy.” Every Pennsylvanian ward heeler looking for a new job in a new machine, every Southern Negro who yielded to the charms of Ormsby McHarg, Dixon’s none-too-scrupulous representative in Dixie, shrugged at what the Colonel had to say