Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [371]
45 His radicalism In June 1910, TR was offered the presidency of the National Trades and Workers Association at the enormous salary of $100,000. He turned the job down.
46 Booker T. Washington Ten years after their famous dinner, TR concluded that Washington was “the highest type of all-round man I have ever met.” Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers (Urbana, Ill., 1972–1989), 1.439.
47 If he was less motivated “Roosevelt,” WW sagely remarked, “never works the heart out of himself.” Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, N.J., 1966–1990), 56.
48 During Roosevelt’s absence Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York, 1909). TR had ordered a copy of the English edition to be held for him in London. (TR, Letters, 7.76.) Gary Murphy, “Mr. Roosevelt Is Guilty: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for Constitutionalism, 1910–1912,” Journal of American Studies, 36.3 (Dec. 2002) notes, “There is scarcely a theme or a recommendation of the New Nationalism which Roosevelt had not already enunciated before Croly’s work.”
49 “An individuality such” Croly, The Promise of American Life, 174. An odd feature of this book, published nine months after TR’s departure from the White House, was that it consistently spoke of him as if he were still in power. On 4 Oct. 1910, Ray Stannard Baker noticed the book lying on TR’s desk at Sagamore Hill, “with passages heavily scored and pages on the fly-leaf with references.” Notebook K, 153 (RSB).
50 Roosevelt’s Special Message Morris, Theodore Rex, 506–8. Mowry, TR, 34, dates the “rebirth” of progressive reform (after its earlier trial run as populism) to 1902, the annus mirabilis of TR’s first term. Except for Robert M. La Follette, then in his own first term as governor of Wisconsin, “Roosevelt stood virtually alone as a nationally known progressive Republican.”
51 The issues he raised then The complete text of TR’s Special Message of 31 Jan. 1908 is reprinted in TR, Letters, 6.1572–91.
52 The opponents TR, Letters, 6.1587.
53 converging at state and local levels The phrase is taken from John Allen Gable, The Bull Moose Years: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party (Port Washington, N.Y., 1978), 9.
Historical Note: The summer of 1910 also marked the convergence, within the Republican Party, of insurgency and progressivism, hitherto two separate movements. As Kenneth W. Hechler differentiates them, insurgency was agrarian in its values, and nonetheless narrow for being fought out primarily in Washington’s corridors of power. Progressivism’s typical battleground had been the state capitol or city hall, where “social reformers, champions of the rights of labor, and scions of the business world advocat[ed] a greater sense of responsibility to the public.” (Hechler, Insurgency, 24.) Although the two movements became one for campaign purposes through 1912 and beyond, their Jeffersonian-versus-Hamiltonian differences prevented them from achieving true unity.
54 “Is this not” Literary Digest, 25 June 1910, quoted in Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 9. This was a commentary on a widely publicized prediction, by the chairman of the Roosevelt Club of St. Paul, Minn., that TR, Gifford Pinchot, and James Garfield were destined to lead a new party with a progressive agenda.
55 The fact that Hechler, Insurgency, 217; Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 300–301. For a full account of this purge, and WHT’s role in it, see Mowry, TR, chap. 4.
56 “I might be able” TR, Letters, 7.74.
57 On 29 June Sullivan, Our Times, 4.447. Sullivan was an eyewitness to this encounter.
58 Cannily, he emphasized Davis, Released for Publication, 192.
59 Many times See, e.g., Morris, The Rise of TR, 756.
60 He did not like The satirist Finley Peter Dunne stated flatly, “Nobody liked Hughes—nobody at all.” Philip Dunne, ed., Mr. Dooley Remembers: The Informal Memoirs of Finley Peter Dunne (Boston, 1963), 142.
61 Even Taft supported Pringle, Taft,