Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [127]
Archie had little patience with holiness, but he loved the sound of the word war. Through dogged self-improvement he had managed to conquer his learning disabilities and beat back ill health, much as his father had done in the summer of ’76. “His frail-looking body,” Roosevelt noted approvingly, “has a certain tough whipcord-like quality to it.” Terse and touchy, Archie would have liked nothing better than to enlist with firearms in the “battle for the Lord”—perhaps at the side of his hero, U.S. Marshal Seth Bullock. But a remedial term at Phillips Academy in Andover awaited him in the fall, and he must cram his slow brain for that.
Quentin was still boy enough to enjoy the political activity at Sagamore Hill (daily delegations, a constant racket of typewriters and telegraphers, reporters camping out on the lawn) without any curiosity about what, exactly, was going on. In an affectionate pen portrait written that summer, his father described him as “tranquil, efficient, moon-faced and entirely merry … busy about affairs which mostly have to do with machinery.”
ROOSEVELT SEEMED A relieved man after the catharsis of Chicago. He had lingered there long enough to transmute what was left of rage into momentum, declaring, “I’m feeling like a bull moose.” Cartoonists seized upon the image with joy, and a new political animal, all teeth and antlers, pranced onto the pages of a thousand newspapers, shouldering aside the elephant and the donkey. Gifford and Amos Pinchot and other serious souls might insist that they were at work on the constitution of the Progressive Party, but to popular perception it was already the “Bull Moose Party,” and “Teddy” a rambunctious critter.
For as long as he stayed home, however, recuperating after his strenuous spring, Roosevelt’s behavior was tame. He made a few mild complaints about the “miserable showing” of his lost supporters. Yet Governor Osborn wrote to apologize and explain, he was forgiving, and hinted that he might have supported Wilson himself, were it not for the reactionary bosses behind the Democratic Party’s promises of social reform. Senator Dixon, reappointed as his campaign manager, could only hope that the velvet on the Bull Moose’s antlers would soon wear off.
“I suppose that as we grow older, we naturally lose the natural feeling of young men to take an interest in politics just for the sake of the strife,” Roosevelt wrote the British novelist H. Rider Haggard. That did not make him any less keen to fight for distributive justice. His challenge over the next four months, he felt, was to convince a majority of the American people that he was not personally ambitious. “The great bulk of my wealthy and educated friends regard me as a dangerous crank.… But all this is of little permanent consequence. It is a fight that must be made, and it is worth making; and the event lies on the knees of the gods.”
ON 7 JULY, DIXON issued a formal call for delegates of the new party to convene in Chicago in the first week of August. The publication of this letter forced Roosevelt to confront an almost insoluble political dilemma. After being nominated by the convention (a foregone conclusion), he would be expected to campaign across the country on the Progressive Party ticket. Yet what was the sense of running on such a ticket in states where a majority of “Roosevelt Republicans” were sworn to support him? He would in effect be asking these loyalists to follow him out of the GOP, and give up their local power and affiliations.
How, though, could he claim to be the leader of a new national party unless it had a full ticket in every