Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [51]
Most of the pilgrims expressed similar pleasure. They were vague as to what, exactly, Roosevelt had said to them. Outsiders could only infer he was not praising William Howard Taft.
“He says he will keep silent for at least two months,” the President remarked, sulking over the morning newspapers. “I don’t care if he keeps silent forever.”
The most far-seeing commentary on Roosevelt in retreat came, ironically, from a blind Democrat, Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma.
Colonel Roosevelt is now in the most difficult and delicate positioning of his career. Has he the power to stand this greatest draft on his talent or his tact?… If he is to continue to progress, he must leave behind those whom he has created in his own image. If he does not now progress, he will be left behind by that great popular procession of which he delighted to imagine himself both the leader and the creator.
I trust that the progressives will have just cause to rejoice at his return and that the stand-patters will be compelled to bewail it as a catastrophe. I hope that enlightened, rational reform will find in Roosevelt the ablest reformer, otherwise there may be more of fiction than fact in this back-from-Elba talk, for, as I remember, the return from Elba was followed by the campaign of the Hundred Days, and the campaign of the Hundred Days was followed by Waterloo and a night without a dawn.
IN HIS REPETITIONS of the words progress and progressive, as well as Roosevelt and reform, Senator Gore showed much political acuity. If he had identified the Colonel’s followers more narrowly as Republican insurgents, he would have excluded forward-thinkers in his own party who found progressivism a realistic alternative to William Jennings Bryan’s sentimental “democracy of the heart.” Gore was, in effect, challenging Roosevelt to reform the Republican Party along “enlightened” lines. If its Old Guard leaders “stood pat” behind President Taft, then the “great popular procession” of progressivism might change avenues, and march behind a Democratic drummer.
Actually, the movement was not great in any statistical sense. To be progressive in 1910 was to belong to America’s middle class—only a fifth of the general populace—and want to make bourgeois values the law of the land. To be insurgent was to belong to a much smaller, politically active minority, determined to write those values into Republican ideology. Roosevelt had been wary of the latter presumption since the fall of 1902, when La Follette and Albert B. Cummins, both Midwestern governors, emerged as pioneer insurgents. He happened to agree with some of their demands, such as regulation of railroad rates, but they had struck him as too parochial, uninterested in the other worlds that lay beyond their respective horizons of water and corn. He had done nothing to encourage the spread of further insurgencies through the central states during his first term, and little to welcome La Follette to Washington as a senator in 1906. Yet he had been pleased when reformers of both major parties praised his own “progressive” swing that same year. By 1908, the GOP insurgents had more or less ceded their cause to him.
Now it appeared that during his time out of the country, insurgent and progressive had become synonymous on orthodox Republican lips. Henry Cabot Lodge could barely force either obscenity through his reactionary whiskers. Roosevelt, describing himself as a “radical” at Oxford, meant, in the European sense, to convey that he was “a real—not a mock—democrat,” protective of the petite bourgeoisie like Clemenceau, liberal like Lloyd George. To Americans, the word unfortunately connotated