Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [128]
In weighing this and other tactical problems before the convention, Roosevelt turned less to the Pinchot brothers than to a man identified with everything they despised: big-business, laissez-faire, monopolistic capital. George Walbridge Perkins—fifty years old, flush with the proceeds of a fabulous career at the House of Morgan—was a convert to the cause of progressivism. He had surpassed Frank Munsey as the Party’s biggest bankroller. To old-money liberals like the Pinchot brothers, there was something suspect about a nouveau riche altruist declaring that he had the welfare of the people at heart. “Roosevelt has the right idea,” the historian Frederick Jackson Turner commented, “but if he keeps Mr. Perkins as his chef, he is likely to have to take his omelet with Mr. Morgan’s spoon instead of the people’s spoon.”
“A NEW POLITICAL ANIMAL, ALL TEETH AND ANTLERS.”
Roosevelt emerges as a third-party candidate for the presidency, summer 1912. (photo credit i11.1)
Conversely, it was difficult for small-town Midwesterners such as William Allen White to believe that Perkins—so sleek, so at ease entertaining on his palatial estate overlooking the Hudson River—had started out as an office boy in Chicago. He had come by his millions through adroit corporate climbing, up through the executive ranks of insurance and banking companies to the top echelon of some of the world’s greatest conglomerates, including U. S. Steel. For well over a decade this rise had coincided, not always harmoniously, with that of Theodore Roosevelt.
If anything had converted Perkins, fully and finally, to the progressive cause, it was the Colonel’s famous blast against the Taft administration for finding fault with the merger of U.S. Steel and Tennessee Coal & Iron. He believed, with Roosevelt, that there should be an entente between socially responsible entrepreneurs and a powerful, yet non-prosecutorial, government.
Exquisitely undertailored, in custom clothes that favored shades of gray and white, Perkins was a slender man with a trim, soft mustache and a soft voice. He smiled often, and was in constant motion even at rest: toe-tapping, thumb-flicking, black eyes snapping. The pudgy little White envied the drape of his mohair suits, while Gifford Pinchot despaired of ever being able to make Roosevelt laugh the way Perkins did. Behind their jealousy, however, lay an honest concern. They wondered if his real cause was not Roosevelt, but regulatory policy. If he ever became Secretary of Commerce, champagne would surely foam in a thousand corporate boardrooms.
Deep down, Roosevelt preferred the society of sophisticates (Perkins was “George,” White always a surname), as long as they embraced the values of the middle class. Perkins shared his own cheerful nature and freakish ability to be both fast and thorough in dispatching great quantities of work. There was no question as to who should become the chief executive officer of the Progressive Party.
Pinchot, White, and Hiram Johnson, respectively burgeoning as leaders of eastern, central, and West Coast delegations to the convention, worried less about this than about Perkins’s influence on the drafting of the Party platform. He was heard to say that competition in the marketplace was a waste of energy. To White, that sounded like a trust lord talking. It would be a cruel irony if Roosevelt allowed the platform’s antitrust plank to be edited by this silky-smooth, check-writing ambassador from Wall Street.
ONE OF THE REASONS the Colonel liked Perkins was that they could talk about things other than policy, unlike the “moonbeamers,” as Frank Munsey called ideologues of the far left, obsessed with social and economic theory. Roosevelt himself was so bored by some of the doctrinaires who droned around him through the first week of August that he would excuse himself and sneak off somewhere