Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [136]
Ray Stannard Baker, noting the paternalistic trend in Roosevelt’s philosophy, was no longer prepared to concede that he was a “true liberal,” much less a political genius. “At this very moment of his triumph in Chicago, I believe TR to be on his way downward. He has even now passed the zenith of his power—unless it be the power for evil.”
And at the lowest level of American political opinion, John F. Schrank, thirty-six years old and unemployed, read in two New York newspapers that the Colonel was determined to overthrow the Constitution. Brooding over them, he was reminded of a nightmare he had had eleven years before, in which the ghost of the assassinated William McKinley pointed at Roosevelt and said, “This is my murderer, avenge my death.”
“OF COURSE I DO not for a moment believe that we shall win,” Roosevelt wrote Kermit after returning to Oyster Bay. “The chances are overwhelmingly in favor of Wilson, with Taft and myself nearly even, and I hope with me a little ahead.…”
He may have been reading a Washington Post article on election odds currently being offered along Wall Street. Wilson was the 2-to-1 favorite of financiers, the class that felt most threatened by the Bull Moose platform. The odds of Roosevelt beating Taft were no better than 5 to 4 and 10 to 7. Politically, the nation was so piebald, with race prejudice darkening the South, and fields of progressivism, protectionism, socialism, and anarchism splotching the rest of the map, that not even a candidate of his enormous appeal could hope to be elected on mere popularity.
Nicholas and George Roosevelt visited Sagamore Hill that August and found their cousin uninhibited by the prospect of a doomed campaign. On the contrary, he was in uproarious form. He said he did not intend to hit the speaking trail in earnest until September, and in the meantime wanted to get as much frenetic exercise as possible. His apotheosis in Chicago seemed to have rejuvenated him. The hotter the weather, the greater his oversupply of energy. “You’ve got to play a set of tennis! You’ve got to play a set of tennis!” he chanted, beating Nicholas over the head with his racquet. The young man joined him in doubles against Archie and Ethel, and whenever Roosevelt hit a winning shot, he hopped across the court on one foot, singing and chortling.
Something of his élan vital seemed to communicate itself to Woodrow Wilson, summering more sedately on the New Jersey shore. “He is a real, vivid person,” the governor wrote in a rare moment of self-criticism. “I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.”
Roosevelt did not know it, but he had been the focus of Wilson’s direct gaze earlier in the year. A coincidence in their respective primary campaigns had scheduled them both to address rallies in Princeton. Wilson had been able to sit in the Nassau Inn and watch Roosevelt speaking outside. He had not been impressed by the Colonel’s rhetoric, with its constant, shuttlecock rebound between the extremes of any issue.
Although Wilson knew that he could never match Roosevelt’s energy and charm, he underestimated his own force as a campaigner. At fifty-five, he was formidably mature, intellectually imposing, by no means inhuman, and about as vague as a racehorse in sight of the pole. A few early, disastrous failures on the primary circuit had taught him how to moderate his cerebral style without descending to the crowd-pleasing platitudes that Roosevelt used almost as a form of punctuation. Wilson developed a gift of expressing complexities in the simplest language, driven home with just the right colloquialism. When he improvised a joke, it was usually a good one. Roosevelt, so funny in social life and in confidential correspondence, was overcome by moral seriousness on the stump.