Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [73]
He saw little of his New Nationalism in the Progressive League’s manifesto: no proposal to regulate corporations, no plea for conservation, nothing on the deteriorating relations of capital and labor. La Follette wanted to see direct voting in primaries and senatorial elections, direct participation in sending and instructing delegates to national conventions, laws to restrict corrupt practices, and, in a mantra beloved of populists, “the initiative, the referendum, and the recall.”
This last triple demand, for voter involvement in the passage and repeal of laws, was evidence to Roosevelt of the insurgents’ tendency to overreach. Reforms to benefit democracy in some states, such as the judicial-recall clause proposed for the new constitution of Arizona, would not necessarily do so in all. The vituperation he had brought down on his own head, for suggesting that the Supreme Court needed to adapt itself to new industrial conditions, had shown how negatively progressivism was perceived in some quarters. But in declining to be associated with the League, he did not want to sound like yesterday’s radical turned timid. “I think,” he wrote La Follette, “that we wish to be careful not to seem to be dictating to good people who may not be quite as far advanced as we are.” He noted that the senator’s own constituents in ultraprogressive Wisconsin had not yet accepted the initiative or the referendum.
Roosevelt promised to make clear in The Outlook that he was in “substantial agreement” with most of the things the new group stood for. “But I hardly think that it would be of service from the public standpoint for me to go into such a league at present.”
ON 21 JANUARY, the same day that the National Progressive Republican League was organized in Washington, Taft sent a major new proposal to Congress. It was for tariff reciprocity with Canada, and sought to double the number of free imports from that country, mostly agricultural, while protecting the wide range of American exports, mostly manufactured, that flowed north. Roosevelt praised it as “admirable from every standpoint” in a personal letter to the President. “Whether Canada will accept such reciprocity, I do not know,” he added, “but it is greatly to your credit to make the effort.”
Experience had taught him that economic considerations mattered less, in foreign negotiation, than those of national pride. The Dominion might well jib at a trade agreement that could transfer all its important bank credits to New York and Chicago—making it what Taft, with typical clumsiness, called “a virtual adjunct of the United States.” But Roosevelt saw hope in the fact that Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Canadian prime minister, favored reciprocity.
Favoring it himself, he was aware that he was once again in conflict with Henry Cabot Lodge. His old friend, just reelected to the Senate by a tiny majority of the Massachusetts legislature, had found it difficult to be polite about New Nationalism last fall. Poor Cabot was fighting a lonely battle against the initiative in behalf of Bay State fishermen.
Any protectionist west of the clambake fringe could see that Taft’s proposal stood to benefit American corporate interests. Roosevelt might have been expected to oppose it for that reason, out of loyalty to the small businessmen and farmers who had always voted for him. Instead, he seemed to be siding with the administration—pandering to it, even, when he said he wanted “to see radicalism prosper under conservative leadership.”
The words made no sense. However, as a born operator, it was characteristic of him to salute the only brilliant tactic of Taft’s presidency so far: sponsorship of a pro-business bill that progressives would have difficulty opposing, because it granted their demand for a reduction in tariff excess. The odds were good that before the Sixty-first Congress passed out of existence in March, Taft would have a treaty to offer to Canada.