Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [62]
Perhaps the most trenchant commentary was that of the New York Evening Post, focusing on what he had not said:
He never once mentioned the party to which he is supposed to belong … nor referred in the remotest way to the President.… What are we to make of this? Are we to infer that Mr. Roosevelt proposes to found and head a new party, made up of elements from both the old ones? Is this speech to be taken as a bold bid for the Presidency in 1912?
Even taken at its face value, the Post went on, “his speech yesterday outstrips not only the most extreme utterance that he himself ever made previously, but that of any of the most radical men of our time.”
Roosevelt himself granted that he had probably gone too far at Osawatomie—at least, voiced his “deepest convictions” on the subject of radical reform too soon. “I had no business to take the position in the fashion that I did,” he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge. “A public man is to be condemned if he fails to make his point clear … and it is a blunder of some gravity to do it.” He would have difficulty, now, in pretending that he was a regular Republican. Progressive had been the final word he threw at his Kansas audience, before jumping down off that kitchen table to roars of applause.
He tried to sound as conciliatory as possible toward the administration in stump speeches on the way back east, arguing that Republicans had to remain unified in the face of the threat they faced in November. But the damage was done. In future, nothing he said about Party policy could be interpreted as constructive. As Taft scoffed privately, the program Roosevelt had advanced at Osawatomie “could never be gotten through without a revolution or revisions to the Constitution.”
James Bryce, currently British ambassador to Washington and a lifelong observer of the American scene, was reminded of Disraeli’s remark “that when a majority in the House of Commons is too large and the opposition too weak, part of the majority becomes detached and begins to fill the function of an opposition.” Republicans had simply been too strong too long, in all three branches of government. Since the Democrats had failed to mount an effective challenge to them, in seven successive election seasons, the GOP’s own “progressive and so-called radical section” had begun, almost without realizing it, to think and campaign like another party. Chief among the apostates was Theodore Roosevelt. Their transformation was his transformation. Except that, having changed so much as President, he had continued to change during more than a year of removal from domestic politics. The “enlarged personality” immediately obvious to four intimates on his first day home, the new capability of “greater good or greater evil,” was now an inescapable challenge to the leadership of both major parties.
“A break between the President and the Colonel might not be altogether regrettable,” Harper’s Weekly remarked. “Like the removal of Mr. Pinchot last winter, it might clear the atmosphere, lessen the need for pretence and hypocrisy, and greatly simplify the task of the average Republican in making up his mind where he stands.”
In no way did Roosevelt seem more radically threatening than in his moralistic attitude toward justice. If constructionists could believe their ears and eyes, he proposed to subject the Constitution itself to moral review. “When I see you,” Henry Cabot Lodge wrote on 5 September,