Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [87]
Roosevelt insisted that in arguing for less prosecution and more regulation, he was not advocating socialism. He merely wanted a government that was democratic, and an economy that was moral. Under federal regulation, competition would flourish without becoming “an all-sufficient factor” that justified the exploitation of workers. Plutocrats in future should be held to account on “all questions connected with the treatment of their employees, including the wages, the hours of labor, and the like.” Once again he paid La Follette a compliment by noting that Wisconsin had already pioneered such a policy. There was not a hint, elsewhere in his text, of any personal animus against President Taft, or any desire to return to power.
FOR ALL THE article’s reticence, it was regarded as an “editorial explosion” by the Boston Globe, and was the talk of financial and political circles for days. Steel shares on the New York Stock Exchange registered a confident surge. Roosevelt was widely seen as having regained his conservative senses, and in an ironic reversal of image, earned praise for opposing the administration’s “war on business interests.” Henry Clews, the oracle of the finance industry, was outspoken in his approval. The Washington Post said that he had mutated into “an able and highly influential advocate of constructive business policies.” Joseph Pulitzer’s anticorporate New York World did not know whether to be suspicious or admiring. In an article headed HAS THEODORE ROOSEVELT NOW BECOME MR. MORGAN’S CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT?, it commented:
He presents Wall Street’s resentment against Mr. Taft more forcefully and coherently than Wall Street itself has been able to do.… He provides the mask of radicalism which any movement to prevent Mr. Taft’s renomination requires in order to be successful.
Mr. Roosevelt is palpably a candidate, and his extraordinary political genius has set for itself the task of bringing about a coalition of the anti-Taft progressives in the West and the anti-Taft plutocrats of Wall Street.
As so often before, Roosevelt found himself misunderstood by partisan critics for seeing things in the round. “Most men seem to live in a space of two dimensions,” he complained to Charles D. Villard, a California progressive. He had no desire to challenge Taft, and even less interest in speaking for investment bankers—about the only living species that bored him. All he asked in their behalf was a square deal. Never before had he openly advocated federal price-fixing, yet conservatives chose to think that he liked the idea of guaranteed profits. And manifestly, in his dismissal of “rural toryism,” he had once again dashed the hopes of progressives that he might lead them.
Or so he thought. James Garfield’s Republican club in Ohio annoyed him exceedingly by endorsing him for President in 1912. At once the Philadelphia North American, whose editor, E. A. Van Valkenburg, often served as a spokesman for the Colonel, printed “an authoritative statement” of his nonavailability. On 27 November, Gifford Pinchot assured a dinner of the Insurgents’ Club that “Bob” La Follette would be the nominee of the Republican Party in 1912.
Asked if he was acting on orders from Sagamore Hill, he said no. “Since Mr. Roosevelt eliminated himself, Senator La Follette is his logical successor.”
LA FOLLETTE WAS not flattered by this grudging endorsement. “I’m nobody’s cloak. I’ll fight to the finish!” Money from both the wealthy