Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [386]
67 The year ended TR, Letters, 7.450. “If I should run and be defeated,” TR told one of the “fool friends” urging him to commit himself, “I should be covered with obloquy.” He had had enough of that the winter before. Regis H. Post, “How Roosevelt Made the Government Efficient,” World’s Work, Apr. 1921.
68 Theodore Roosevelt had See, e.g., TR, Letters, 7.451–52.
69 His best interest Some biographers, e.g. Mowry, TR, 192ff., attempt to show that TR had become ambitious for the presidency in the fall of 1911, and that the steel suit was a jump-start to his campaign to defeat Taft. Their arguments, due to a common inability to conceive of TR as anything other than a politician, do not hold up in the light of his countless, and laboriously emphatic, denials of any such ambition. See the representative selection of apologia in TR, Letters, 7.446–69.
70 “Alice, when you” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 776. Butt had been promoted to major. According to ibid., 811–12, several other TR associates in the administration received similar storm warnings.
CHAPTER 8: HAT IN THE RING
1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 21.
2 “They say that” TR speech in Manhattan, 7 Nov. 1910, transcript in TRB.
3 “You can put it” Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 371. Meanwhile Helen Taft was telling her own husband with equal accuracy, “I think you will be renominated, but I don’t see any chance for the election.” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 68.
4 His response to TR, Letters, 7.466; Margulies, “La Follette”; Mowry, TR, 203.
5 “It now looks” Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 23.596.
6 the hajj that converged Mark Sullivan uses the simile of “strewn iron filings mobilizing to the pull of a revitalized magnet.” (Our Times, 4.469–71.) See also Mowry, TR, 199–202; TR, Letters, 7.470–493, 8.1474.
7 In cabs and carriages TR, Letters, 7.315.
8 Midwesterners loyal La Follette, Autobiography, 581–82; Pringle, TR, 554; Mowry, TR, 200–202.
9 “He is not” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 834–35. “What struck me as significant,” Butt wrote the next day, “was the fact that never once [in a visit lasting from three to four hours] did the Colonel mention the President.” Ibid., 833.
10 “I would much” Post, “How Roosevelt.”
11 “I am not” TR, Letters, 7.470–71. Norris was a La Follette supporter.
12 Nothing less Ibid., 7.474. Andrew C. Pavord, “The Gamble for Power,” argues that TR, in Jan. 1912, was not looking for personal glory. Profoundly idealistic, he felt that the radical reform program he had tried to launch in his second term had been thwarted by Congress, then under the control of Speaker Joseph Cannon and Senator Nelson Aldrich, and thereafter by the Taft administration. He now saw an opportunity to transform the desire of some progressives that he reenter politics into a “mass demand of the people” for completion of his presidential legacy. Through the rest of this month and into February, “Roosevelt was presented with a huge amount of evidence that such a demand truly existed.”
13 He was attractive Harbaugh, TR, 385–86.
14 his latest article TR, “Judges and Progress,” The Outlook, 6 Jan. 1912. James Bryce reported to his government that this article “has thrilled with horror minds of a conservative bent, and especially the higher ranks of the legal profession.” (Bourne, British Documents, pt. 1, ser. C, 15.66.) Elihu Root, an eloquent representative of both groups, argued before the New York State Bar Association on 19 Jan. that the philosophy of popular recall “abandons absolutely the conception of a justice which is above majorities.… It denies the vital truth taught by religion and realized by the hard experience of mankind, and which has inspired … every declaration for human freedom since Magna Charta [sic]—the truth that human nature needs to distrust its own impulses and passions, and to establish for its own control the restraining and guiding influence of declared principles of action.” The New York Times, 20 Jan. 1912.
15 “Theodore Roosevelt