Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [88]
Unauthorized Roosevelt “clubs” began to sprout in Idaho, Montana, Michigan, and Ohio. On 11 December, the Republican National Committee held its annual meeting in Washington, D.C. It split at once into progressive and conservative factions. Taft members were in control of the proceedings, but their loyalty to the President (sulky and ailing in the White House, too gouty to venture outside) was more out of reflex than conviction. Nobody could see where funds for next year’s campaign were going to come from. Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock, an ornithological friend of the Colonel, made no secret of his disillusionment with the administration. The atmosphere was funereal, even doom-laden, as both sides agreed to summon their delegates to Chicago at noon on 18 June 1912.
A group of three progressive state chairmen, led by W. Franklin Knox of Michigan, telephoned Roosevelt in New York to ask if they could come to see him. He said he would prefer to be left alone. But the group was persistent, and descended on him at Sagamore Hill.
KNOX Colonel, I never knew you to show the white feather, and you should not do so now.
TR (angrily) What do you mean by that?
KNOX Why, you are basing your refusal on the possibly bad effect another term might have on your reputation. I contend that you ought to look at this thing from the Party’s interests and not your own. The Party has honored you, and it now turns to you to do a service for it. It is in distress and it needs you.
TR By George, that would be a good argument if I were the only man available, but I am not. I agree that Taft cannot be elected, but if the Party can win, I am not the only Republican with whom it can win. I am not ungrateful for the honor I have had, but I think I have repaid in service. When I left the White House every state we had any right to expect was in the Republican column. It is not my job to put them back again.
There was no arguing with him, and the group left frustrated.
IN A MONTH FULL of adulation and importuning, opposite in all political respects to his dark December of 1910, Roosevelt chose to publish an extraordinary essay—what was, for him, almost a religious confession. Entitled “The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit,” it appeared in The Outlook just as his private will not to run was wavering. Nothing he had written in that piously inclined periodical compared with it in philosophical, if not theological weight, and never had he come so close to confessing his own faith. It was ignored by the political commentators who had read so much into his previous editorial on the trusts. Yet to an intellectual minority able to follow him in his self-avowed “search” toward a universal understanding beyond that of any contemporary public figure—Arthur Balfour alone excepted—it was an infinitely more important statement, indicating that whatever Theodore Roosevelt did with the rest of his life would have to have moral purpose.
The essay was a review of twelve recent scientific, religious, historical, and philosophical books, including Carlos Reyles’s La morte du cygne, Thomas Dwight’s Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist, Alfred Russel Wallace’s The World of Life, Henry M. Bernard’s Some Neglected Factors in Evolution, Émile Boutroux’s Science et religion dans la philosophie contemporaine, William De Witt Hyde’s From Epicurus to Christ, and Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution and Time and Free Will. Concentrating