Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [267]
Roosevelt remained silent while he went birding in the Trinidadian interior with an entomologist and mycologist, two of the inexhaustible list of friends he seemed able to call on wherever he traveled. They spent an afternoon in a cave stranger than anything dreamed by Hieronymus Bosch. It concealed itself high in the mountains, behind a gush of clear water. Scrabbling through into pitch darkness, Roosevelt heard all around him a weird flapping and fluttering, combined with metallic clacks, growls, pipes, and wails. As torches lit up the gloom, he saw slabs and ledges slathered two feet deep with guano. Obese, naked guacharo chicks sat in this nitrous clay, peering blindly out of cup-shaped hollows, while overhead their parent birds sat guard like nighthawks. Bats furred the ceiling. Roosevelt was amazed to see slender fungi growing out of the guano, although there was no light to feed them.
That night he slept with his companions in the humid hut of a black coconut farmer. His clothes from the cave were still wet the next morning when he rode back to Port of Spain.
From there, on 9 March, he cabled a long statement to New York, for immediate release to all newspapers:
I MUST REQUEST AND I NOW DO REQUEST AND INSIST THAT MY NAME BE NOT BROUGHT INTO THE MASSACHUSETTS PRIMARIES AND I EMPHATICALLY DECLINE TO BE A CANDIDATE IN THE PRIMARIES OF THAT OR ANY OTHER STATE.…
I DO NOT WISH THE NOMINATION. I AM NOT IN THE LEAST INTERESTED IN THE POLITICAL FORTUNES EITHER OF MYSELF OR ANY OTHER MAN. I AM INTERESTED IN AWAKENING MY FELLOW COUNTRYMEN TO THE NEED OF FACING UNPLEASANT FACTS.…
I WILL NOT ENTER ANY FIGHT FOR THE NOMINATION.… INDEED, I WILL GO FURTHER AND SAY IT WOULD BE A MISTAKE TO NOMINATE ME UNLESS THE COUNTRY HAD IN ITS MOOD SOMETHING OF THE HEROIC.
He did not say what the “facts” were that Americans had to face. Nor did he directly mention the war. But he did refer to “tremendous national and international problems” confronting Woodrow Wilson’s “unmanly” administration, and cited Washington and Lincoln as two presidents who had not sought to escape action “behind clouds of fine words.” He went on at tremendous length, trying the patience of Trinidad’s wartime censor, who was required to check every word transmitted out of the island. Late that evening the cable went off. On 10 March, The New York Times published it under the headline ROOSEVELT’S HAT AGAIN IN THE RING.
WHEN HE RETURNED home a fortnight later, he found two booms for the Republican presidential nomination under way. One—perhaps more of a discreet, offstage rumble than a boom—was in behalf of Justice Charles Evans Hughes, and represented the wishes of Party stalwarts who had supported Taft for reelection in 1912. Few of them were enthusiastic about their choice, but Hughes had the supreme virtue of being so colorless and closemouthed as to be virtually attack-proof. A joke went around that “no one wanted Hughes, but everyone was for him.”
The other boom was for the author of Fear God and Take Your Own Part. Roosevelt’s book had become a surprise bestseller. Two biographical sketches of him were out, both frankly adoring: Julian Street’s The Most Interesting American, and a memoir by Charles G. Washburn, Theodore Roosevelt: The Logic of His Career. Quite apart from his literary celebrity, he appeared to have inspired scores of Progressive and Republican campaign planners with a desire for “something of the heroric.”
They thought he was talking about political heroism. He meant the soldierly kind. Whatever desire for power still burned in Roosevelt related solely to the war—manifesting itself in fantasies of how he, last spring, would have handed the German ambassador his passports and made him sail home on the Lusitania. He did not see his boom lasting through the convention. Recriminations over the great bolt of 1912 were still too fierce to admit any