Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [137]
He had not begun to see Wilson as a threat until they both emerged as avatars of progressivism in 1911. Now they were seriously opposed to each other. For the first time in more than a quarter-century, Roosevelt assessed someone who had the power to beat him.
Wilson is a good man who has in no way shown that he possesses any special fitness for the Presidency. Until he was fifty years old, as college professor and college president he advocated with skill, intelligence and good breeding the outworn doctrines which were responsible for four fifths of the political troubles of the United States.… Then he ran as Governor of New Jersey, and during the last eighteen months discovered that he could get nowhere advocating the doctrines he had advocated, and instantly turned an absolute somersault so far as least half these doctrines was concerned. He still clings to the other half, and he has shown not the slightest understanding of the really great problems of our present industrial situation.… He is an able man, and I have no doubt could speedily acquaint himself with these problems, and would not show Taft’s muddleheaded inability to try to understand them when left by himself. But he is not a nationalist, he has no real and deep-seated conviction of the things that I regard as most vital, and he is in the position where he can only win … by the help of the worst bosses in this country, and by perpetuating their control of their several states in return for their aid.
He is not a nationalist. In Rooseveltian parlance, that meant Wilson, the former girls’ school teacher who had sat out the Spanish-American War and signed last year’s peace manifesto in The Christian Herald, was not likely to be a strong commander in chief.
“I KNOW IT, BUT I can’t do it. I couldn’t if I would and I wouldn’t if I could.”
William Howard Taft was responding to a reporter’s suggestion that he should emulate some of Roosevelt’s headline-grabbing tricks in order to energize his campaign for reelection. After his desperate attempts to win sympathy in the spring, only to be humiliated in the Massachusetts, Maryland, and Ohio primaries, he was resolved not to hustle for votes again. The electorate would have to judge him by his record—in token of which, he launched now into a defense of his tariff policy, detailed enough to turn two and a half newspaper columns gray. “Under the Dingley law the average percent of the imports that came in free was 44.3 percent in value of the total importations; the average percent in value of the imports which have come in free under the Payne law is 51.2 percent of the total importations.…”
Taft knew that he bored people, and did not much care. Archie Butt had been dismayed at the President’s lack of concern for the feelings of others. He kept people waiting for as many hours as suited him, even while he napped, and never apologized. At dinner, he would help himself to two-thirds of a beef tenderloin, before allowing his guests to share the remainder. He made no effort to shorten his speeches, aware that audiences could not walk out on a President. When his faults were pointed out to him, he listened placidly, registering nothing.
At the moment he was in a particularly obstinate mood, vetoing bill after bill as Congress sweltered to the end of its long session. The breezy golf links of Beverly beckoned. Taft was happy to let the Republican National Committee handle his campaign, under the chairmanship of his former secretary, Charles D. Hilles. As for himself, “I have no part to play but that of a conservative, and that I am going to play.”
WHAT WITH TED, Eleanor, and “Baby Gracie” in residence for the summer, plus Archie, Quentin, and various other Roosevelts coming and going (mostly coming, it seemed to Eleanor), Sagamore Hill was once again the noisy, teeming epicenter it had been in the first decade of the century. The only relatively quiet hours, undisturbed