Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [52]
Like many well-born men with a social conscience, Roosevelt liked to think that he empathized with the poor. He was democratic, in a detached, affable way. However, his rare exposures to squalor had been either voyeuristic, as when he encouraged Jacob Riis to show him “how the other half lived,” or vicarious, as when he recoiled from the “hideous human swine” in the works of Émile Zola.
Gifford Pinchot had the same kind of aristocratic fastidiousness. But most progressives looked down from a less exalted height. They felt threatened by the lower ranks of society. These were, in descending order, organized labor, represented by the AFL (trades-oriented, exclusionary, anti-immigrant), then the immense subpopulation of unskilled workers who toiled in factories and stockyards and mines, followed by poor whites, and at the dreg level, imported coolies, reservation Indians, and disenfranchised blacks.
Except for the two years he had lived with cowboys in North Dakota, and being the employer of a dozen or so servants, Roosevelt had never had to suffer any prolonged intimacy with the working class. From infancy, he had enjoyed the perquisites of money and social position. The money, through his own mismanagement, had often run short, and he was by no means wealthy even now, but he had always taken exclusivity for granted. The brownstone birthplace in Manhattan, the childhood tours of Europe, the open doors of Harvard and the Porcellian, the riverside ranch and hilltop estate, the gubernatorial mansion and the White House; Mrs. Astor’s balls, Brahmin clambakes, diplomatic banquets, and most recently, royal receptions; custom clothes, first-class sleepers, private boxes, pro bono lawyers, investment managers, club privileges, a driver and a valet—he had them all. Every night except Sunday he dressed in black tie for dinner, and when he rocked on the piazza, gazing out over his estate, he saw no other roofs, heard no street noise, breathed only the freshest air.
Ensconced, he lacked some of the neuroses of progressives—economic envy and race hatred especially. His radicalism was a matter of energy rather than urgency. It wanted to spread out and embrace social (not socialistic) reformers, labor leaders who spoke decent English, churchgoing farmers, businessmen with a sense of community responsibility, and even the occasional polite, self-made Negro, such as Booker T. Washington. He had no attraction toward the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers in their parvenu palaces. A strong sense of fairness saved him from complacency. If he was less motivated by compassion than anger at what he saw as the arrogance of capital, he chafed, nonetheless, to regulate it.
DURING ROOSEVELT’S ABSENCE OVERSEAS, a book by the political philosopher Herbert Croly had become the bible of the new social movement. Entitled The Promise of American Life, it was Hamiltonian in its insistence on the need for a strong central government, yet Jacksonian in calling for a war on unearned privilege—and it named Theodore Roosevelt as the only leader on the American scene capable of encompassing both aims. “An individuality such as his,” Croly wrote, “wrought with so much consistent purpose out of much variety of experience, brings with it an intellectual economy of its own and a sincere and useful sort of intellectual enlightenment.”
A close reading of The Promise showed that many of its ideas derived from Roosevelt’s Special Message of January 1908. More than any other utterance in his career, that bombshell had convinced Wall Street and the Old Guard that “Theodore the Sudden” was a dangerous man. The issues he raised then—automatic compensation for job-related accidents, federal scrutiny of boardroom operations, value-based regulation of railroad rates, redress against punitive injunctions, strengthened antitrust laws—were the issues his followers wanted him to fight for now. The violent language he had used—“predatory wealth,” “purchased politician[s],” “combinations which are both noxious and legal”—had become commonplaces of progressive rhetoric.