Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [58]
He was in receipt of almost two thousand speaking invitations. Most were from committees or candidates desperate for help in endangered GOP constituencies. It did him little good to protest that the prospect of a return to the hustings filled him with “unalloyed horror.” So he yielded to pressure from the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee to make a sixteen-state campaign trip, beginning in late August. The foray would take him west of Ohio into the heartland of insurgency. His itinerary would advertise his progressivism, no matter what dutiful words he uttered in behalf of the Party leadership.
To his annoyance, he heard that the Committee was raising money with the specific purpose of destroying every insurgent running for election or reelection in the fall—Senator Beveridge of Indiana, for one. Even Taft had contributed funds. The more Roosevelt thought about it, the more he convinced himself that his big speech on tour—most likely at Osawatomie, Kansas—must be a restatement of his Special Message of 1908, updated and expanded to embrace the aspirations of the anticorporate middle class.
“My proper task,” he wrote an insurgent editor, “is clearly to announce myself on the vital questions of the day … and take a position that cannot be misunderstood.”
For the rest of July, he chopped wood and swam, rowed, and camped with Archie and Quentin, when his huge volume of mail allowed him. He passed what were to him the most precious minutes of any day reading with Edith—either back and forth aloud, or sitting silently together with their books, as they had when they were children. Once or twice a week he was driven into Manhattan to attend meetings at the Outlook offices, traveling in a new automobile, a Haynes-Apperson Model 19. He quickly learned to drive himself, and became, in Edith’s word, “addicted” to it.
At either end of his commute, the political pilgrims kept coming: more and more insurgents, Old Guard “mossbacks,” fund-raisers, former appointees, emissaries of the New York Republican Party. All wanted something, if only the pleasure of having a former president listen to their “advice,” on the presumption that he wanted it.
Those begging him to make personal appearances were particularly bothersome. Roosevelt had long ago discovered that the more provincial the supplicants, the less able they were to understand that their particular need was not unique: that he was not yearning to travel two thousand miles on bad trains to support the reelection campaign of a county sheriff, or to address the congregation of a new chapel in a landscape with no trees. His refusal, however elaborately apologetic, was received more often in puzzlement than anger. Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, and practically every monarch or minister of consequence in Europe—not to mention the maquettes in Rodin’s studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions.
ON A VISIT to the summer White House, Lloyd Griscom encountered at first hand the President’s desire to evade any contretemps not occurring on the golf course or poker table. Taft indicated that he might not support Roosevelt for chairman of the New York State convention in September. His explanation was simple: a gratified Boss Barnes would deliver a pro-Taft delegation to the national convention in 1912.
Then Barnes announced on 16 August that the machine had endorsed Vice President James Schoolcraft Sherman as its candidate for chairman of the convention. The Colonel