Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [125]
Roosevelt understood that, having encouraged progressives to leave the GOP, he ran the risk of many of them choosing Wilson over himself. The man looked like a winner: already there was a group that called itself the “Wilson Progressive Republican League.” A large majority of the country’s editors and commentators praised this new celebrity who had proved so effective a gubernatorial reformer. Wilson appealed to what Roosevelt called the “rural tory” element, opposing, for example, recall of judicial decisions, while tacitly catering to the anti-Negro prejudice that was a powerful, if unstated, aspect of progressivism. The white, corn-fed Midwestern farmers, small businessmen, professionals, and middle-class moralists who largely composed the movement’s membership did not subscribe to the lynch mentality of Dixie Democrats. But neither did they think blacks were good for much more than field labor. Word had gotten out that the Colonel favored the idea of a Negro delegate to second his nomination when the new party established itself. Veteran politicians recalled him attending his first GOP convention in 1884, and pushing for the election of a black chairman. One could not imagine Wilson, born in Virginia and bred in the South, carrying democracy quite that far.
Another factor against Roosevelt’s chances of success was the lack of nerve among GOP progressives in retreat from Armageddon. Four of the seven governors who had petitioned him to run in February now declined to support him. Chase Osborn of Michigan had come out as a Republican for Wilson, railing against “malcontents” seeking to destroy the two-party system. Herbert Hadley wrote that as the head of the Republican party in Missouri, he would have to be “thoroughly convinced that it had ceased to be a useful agency of good government before I abandoned it and joined in the formation of a new party.” He argued that the local machinery was “in the hands of progressives” anyway. As for veterans of the Progressive Republican League, Jonathan Bourne had answered his own question (“If we lose, will we bolt?”) in the negative, while Robert La Follette, who could have followed Roosevelt out and then challenged him for the leadership of the apostates, elected to stay put and support Wilson. Eight other former insurgents, including Senator Cummins, sent regrets, saying they did not want to lose all power in their states.
In short, the nascent Progressive Party (it was not yet formally organized, and must stage its own convention as soon as possible) was already fighting for life. Money it had, and plenty of political passion left over from “the big show” in Chicago, but its frailties were obvious. Chief among these was a lack of ideological unity—not only between intellectuals of the Herbert Croly stamp and petty bosses like William Flinn, but between city men and hayseeds, suffragists and social workers, temperance advocates and the Irish, muckraking journalists and self-made millionaires. Had Wilson not been nominated, Roosevelt might conceivably have managed to compress all this dissent into one hot mass of energy. Now he saw that he had no choice but to lead a quixotic campaign on his own principles.
He left his Sagamore Hill guest, E. A. Van Valkenburg, alone for a moment, and went to fetch Edith. When they returned, he asked her to say what she thought.
“She was quite radiant with trust and affection,” Van Valkenburg reported, “as she expressed her faith that the path through honor to defeat was the one to take.”
IN CHICAGO, EDITH had given off such waves of foreboding, as she sat quietly knitting amid the tumult around her, that she reminded William Allen White of Madame Defarge—“weaving the inevitable destiny ahead of us out of the yard and skein where it had been wound by the hand of some terrible fate.” Since then, evidently, she had reconciled herself to the idea of Roosevelt’s crusade—a word that was often on the lips of his family and followers these days. Protestant for the most part, and