Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [53]
His own voice from those times echoed back to him:
The opponents of the measures we champion single out now one, and now another measure for especial attack, and speak as if the movement in which we are engaged was purely economic. It has a large economic side, but it is fundamentally an ethical movement. It is not a movement to be completed in one year, or two or three years; it is a movement which must be persevered in until the spirit which lies behind it sinks deep into the heart and the conscience of the whole people.
Sooner than he had predicted, and embarrassingly coincident with his return to America, the movement had begun to achieve critical mass, converging at state and local levels. “Is this not the logical time,” the Kansas City Star asked in a front-page editorial, “to look forward to a new party which shall include progressive Democrats and Republicans—a party dedicated to the square deal and led by Theodore Roosevelt?”
The fact that a respected GOP organ could propose such a thing, along with “Roosevelt Clubs” springing up like wheat elsewhere in the plains states, explained why Taft’s Republican Congressional Campaign Committee was determined to suppress all insurgents running for state and federal offices in the fall of 1910. Roosevelt took no responsibility for the clubs. “I might be able to guide this movement,” he told Senator Lodge, “but I should be wholly unable to stop it, even if I were to try.”
ON 29 JUNE, Theodore Roosevelt, A.B. magna cum laude, Harvard, ’80, returned to Cambridge for the thirtieth anniversary of his class. He found himself walking in the commencement procession next to Governor Charles Evans Hughes of New York. For once, the bearded inellectual, whom he privately mocked as “Charles the Baptist,” did not irritate him. They became so absorbed in conversation that they delayed general entry into Sanders Theatre.
Hughes wanted help. A mildly progressive Republican, he had served three and a half years in Albany at great personal cost, frustrated at every political turn by the state party machine. He was about to be relieved with a seat on the Supreme Court, courtesy of an admiring President Taft. Before resigning, he was determined to take the power of nomination to state offices away from party officials, and transfer it to the rank and file, voting in direct primaries. A bill to this effect had been blocked by standpatters throughout the regular session of the legislature. So he had convened a special session to pass it, in defiance of William Barnes, Jr., boss of the state GOP.
Hughes saw Roosevelt as the only New Yorker powerful enough to exert more influence than Barnes, and asked him if he would get behind the bill. Cannily, he emphasized that the lawmakers supporting it were all Roosevelt Republicans.
Many times, over the years, Roosevelt had compared the workings of politics to those of a kaleidoscope. Brilliant, harmonious patterns, sometimes carefully shaken into shape, sometimes forming of their own accord, could at the slightest touch fall into jagged disarray, with clashing colors and shafts of impenetrable black. Hughes’s appeal had just such an effect on his current outlook. On this pleasant June day, under the elms of Harvard Yard, he was confronted with a situation of bewildering intricacy, sharp with factional danger.
He did not like Hughes, but then, neither did anybody at close range. It was impossible to warm to a man who exuded such cold correctness, and grinned with horse-toothed insincerity. However, there was no denying the governor’s intellectual brilliance (he was at home in Japanese, and in infinitesimal calculus), nor the acclaim he had won as an incorruptible advocate of the common good. Not to help him would be to signal approval of Barnes’s bossism. Even Taft supported the New York primary bill.
“HE WAS ABOUT