Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [82]
Even The New York Times felt that he had acquitted himself. Congressman Stanley, the paper remarked, had failed to expose the former president as a stooge, while showing a “partisan” and “ignorant” attitude toward U.S. Steel. “It is indeed fortunate that Mr. Roosevelt dealt with the panic instead of Mr. Stanley.”
ON 6 AUGUST, the day the editorial appeared, Edith Roosevelt turned fifty. To her adoring husband, who presented her with a thermos pitcher and four volumes of Punch, she was still the indoor and outdoor companion of childhood—so “very young looking and pretty in her riding habit” as she trotted beside him on horseback, through the woods to Cold Spring Harbor or along the bayside road. Today the weather was too hot for horses, so he took her for an afternoon row to Lloyd Neck.
Constant in their love for each other and their six children—Edith had always treated Alice as her own daughter—they were preparing themselves now for the emotional elevation of grandparenthood. News came from San Francisco on the seventeenth that Eleanor had had a baby girl, Grace. Roosevelt wrote her and Ted: “ ‘The birth pangs make all men the debtors of all women.’ ” He was paraphrasing Jules Michelet’s Priests, Women and Families, a humanistic tract that exactly expressed his view of sex, faith, and nature. Eleanor was invested with the same glow of fulfilled femininity that he saw shimmering around Edith, and regretfully did not see around Alice. For the first time in his life, he signed himself Grandfather.
ONE EFFECT OF THE new arrival upon Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was to embolden him to show signs of political independence. Grimly determined, a squat knot of muscle and sinew, Ted confided to Eleanor that his ambition was to earn a lot of money quickly, then use his fortune to go into public life. In order to learn the dry basics of business—not something Harvard had prepared him for—he had taken a dreary job as the West Coast representative of a Connecticut carpet company. But in the day-to-day slog of salesmanship—“I do love work!”—he was proving to be a dynamo. He had also involved himself in Californian progressive politics. He let his father know that if Taft and Woodrow Wilson were nominated in 1912, he might vote for the governor.
“Do remember,” Roosevelt wrote back, “that to say anything in public, or to take any public stand against Taft, especially by supporting his Democratic opponent, would cause me very great embarrassment, and … create the impression that I, while nominally supporting Taft, am underhandedly doing all I can do against him.”
His caution seemed unreasonable, because he was expressing more and more disapproval of the President’s policies in the pages of The Outlook. And he was not alone among Republican commentators in doing so. The widespread admiration Taft had won by calling for reciprocity with Canada was dissipated. Endless wrangling over rates had dragged the special session of Congress into midsummer. A compromise act had been passed and sent to Ottawa: Sir Wilfrid Laurier had gambled his whole government on the issue, and dissolved Parliament so that all Canadians could vote on it. This was not necessarily good news. Republicans remained deeply divided over tariff reform, with conservatives alienated from conservatives, and progressives from progressives. Taft was blamed for the passions aroused.
About the only politician to profit from the battle on Capitol Hill was Robert La Follette. He seized on reciprocity, which he eloquently opposed, to announce that he would challenge the President for the nomination in 1912. No Shakespearean upstart, all arms and arrogance, could have thrown down his gauntlet in front of a less popular king. Republicans clustered uneasily behind the one or the other. With Roosevelt offstage, they lacked any leader strong enough to hold them all together.
La Follette imagined that he had the Colonel’s support, after Roosevelt