Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [143]
Willard Straight, a family friend of the Roosevelts, came to visit and found Sagamore Hill a gloomy place. He got the impression that Theodore and Edith were worried about money, with two boys still boarding in expensive schools and each looking forward to four years at Harvard. Roosevelt was also harassed by yet another Senate probe—this time into charges that he had accepted improper campaign contributions in 1904. The committee’s evidence, focusing on an alleged $25,000 payment from Standard Oil in exchange for immunity from antitrust prosecution, made no sense, because he had sued the company anyway. But he now had to sacrifice a day of rest and go to Washington to testify.
After he got back, a conference of Progressive leaders took place at Sagamore Hill. Senator Dixon presided, with George Perkins exuding new authority as chairman of the Party’s Executive Committee. Hiram Johnson was there, a small man with a loud voice, and Oscar Straus, who was running for governor of New York, along with Frank Munsey and Walter F. Brown, the Ohio boss.
It was essentially a godspeed session, to cheer the Colonel up and discuss strategy and tactics for the final four weeks of the campaign. Wilson had come up with a catchy slogan, promising Americans a “New Freedom” to restore the balance of government and individualism that had served them so well before the age of combination. It would be a policy subject, however, to the restraints of modern antitrust law. In that respect it amounted to a Jeffersonian rewrite of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism—what Wilson, in another telling phrase, called “government by experts.”
The electorate had to be persuaded that the Progressive Party was not paternalistic, nor was it a one-man band. Johnson had a twenty-two-state speaking tour planned, while Straus took care of the Empire State, and Brown worked to humiliate Taft at home. In Indiana, Albert Beveridge was also running for governor, pouring out a flood of eloquent addresses that were widely reprinted. The Party had dozens of other gubernatorial aspirants campaigning as far south as Florida and Texas, plus state, Congressional, and local candidates in all regions of the country. A loose-strung but vital network of bosses, reformers, publishers, and legislators supported this drive for recognition. In some states, including most of New England, the network sagged hopelessly, due to lack of leadership or funds. But on the whole, Dixon’s National Committee had distinguished itself—appointing, at the outset, four women as members-at-large. That Progressivism had in fact spread so far, staffed so many offices, and publicized so comprehensive an ideology since August was something of a political miracle. Whatever the movement’s immediate prospects, it looked to be firmly established in 1916. Roosevelt had to hide the fact that he dreaded being asked to lead it again.
“CHILDREN, DON’T CROWD so close to the car, it might back up, and (falsetto) we can’t afford to lose any little Bull Mooses, you know.”
The Colonel was back in his private Pullman, the Mayflower, traveling west. Young Philip Roosevelt attended as his personal aide, plus Dr. Scurry Terrell, a throat specialist, Cecil Lyon, leader of the Texan Progressives, and Henry F. Cochems, chairman of the Party speaker’s bureau. O. K. Davis and two stenographers, Elbert E. Martin and John W. McGrath, made up the rest of the entourage. An adjoining car carried gentlemen of the press.
Roosevelt seemed a new man after his brief stay at home, quickly absorbing an eighty-thousand-word dossier on Wilson. Lawrence Abbott, reporting for The Outlook, compared him