Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [72]
“A GALLERY FOR THE DISPLAY OF MEMENTOS.”
The North Room of Sagamore Hill, ca. 1911. (photo credit i6.1)
Washburn pursued his point. “You have retired from a position of great power and are now a private citizen. Can you endure the change?”
“Well, I have never been happier than in the past months since the election.”
It was Roosevelt’s stock reply, but Washburn accepted it. He knew his old friend to be a genuine democrat, indifferent to splendor. The huge sums Theodore had spent on redecorating the White House and entertaining Washington’s crème de la crème had signified nothing more than respect for the dignity of the state. At home, he and Edith were unpretentious, even bourgeois in the plainest old-money style. Their breeding showed itself in manners. Washburn noticed how courteous the Colonel was to servants, and how he talked with equal animation about his gardener and the King of Italy.
More snow was falling when the congressman left. Roosevelt insisted on coming outside hatless to say goodbye.
Later, Washburn wrote in his diary: “I adhere to my original estimate of him, contrary to that held by almost anyone else—A child of nature, doing what he feels impelled to from day to day: more resources, simpler tastes, and more enthusiasm than any man I ever knew. He will be an interesting figure as long as he lives.”
BECAUSE ROOSEVELT WAS, in the image of Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia University, “polygonal,” visitors saw only certain facets of his personality at any given time. People less three-dimensional looked for the facet that best reflected their own views, and judged him accordingly. Washburn’s impression was accurate only so far as the “child of nature” was willing to play along. Lloyd Griscom needed to believe that the Colonel was “a changed man,” lonely and listless, no longer a threat to Party unity. This information found its way to the White House.
“I don’t see what I could have done to make things different,” Taft said to Archie Butt. “It distresses me very deeply, more deeply than anyone can know, to think of him sitting there at Oyster Bay alone and feeling himself deserted.”
The President wiped away a sentimental tear. “I hope the old boy has enough philosophy left to take him through this period.… If he could only fight! That is what he delights in, and that is what is denied him now.”
ROOSEVELT’S OSAWATOMIE SPEECH, along with three supplementary essays on morality in politics, was now published in book form as The New Nationalism. Many progressives read it skeptically, in view of his steady refusal to break with the President. “He thinks that compromise is the only thing,” William Allen White complained to Mark Sullivan. Gifford and Amos Pinchot kept reproaching the Colonel for calling Taft an “upright” man at Saratoga. Roosevelt, irritated, wrote the brothers off as “ultraextremists” who came “dangerously near the mark of lunacy.”
He knew that they were plotting with Congressional insurgents to form a third party if Taft was renominated. Sure enough, their names, along with White’s, appeared on the stationery of a new group calling itself the National Progressive Republican League. Most of the other men listed—Beveridge, Bristow, Clapp, Cummins, Garfield, Madison, Murdock, and Senator Miles Poindexter of Washington—still professed to be Roosevelt supporters. But one name in particular, that of Robert M. La Follette, made him suspect that the League was a presidential campaign committee in disguise. Now that he had dropped out of contention, “Battling Bob” looked to be the white hope of Republican progressivism.
La Follette begged Roosevelt to join the League. The Colonel was reluctant to compromise himself. He still talked of holding the GOP together. Dividing it was unlikely to stop the Democrats from completing their sweep of the government in 1912. Four years out of power should convince conservative Republicans that the age of protectionism was over, and that of progressivism—his enlightened kind, not La Follette’s bristling zealotry—an evolutionary fact. Conceivably,