Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [92]
“It now looks as if Roosevelt, not Taft, would get (or rather, take) the Republican nomination,” Woodrow Wilson wrote a friend. “That would make a campaign worth while.”
To Edith’s dismay, Sagamore Hill once again became a political mecca. The pilgrims Roosevelt had attracted after his return from Africa in 1910 were nothing to the hajj that converged on him now. In cabs and carriages and automobiles, they took advantage of the metaled road he had rashly built up the slope of Sagamore Hill. Freezing rain did not keep them away. He got even less peace in his office at The Outlook, which began to look like a campaign headquarters, minus the posters and spittoons.
Once more the sad, worshipful eyes of Gifford Pinchot and James Garfield burned into him, beseeching him to free them from their commitment to La Follette. They argued that only he was capable of preventing the Party split that would surely occur if Taft was nominated in June. Midwesterners loyal to “Battling Bob” lobbied Roosevelt to proclaim himself a non-candidate, loud and clear. Progressive governors, National Committeemen, publishers, and businessmen tried to make him do just the opposite. George W. Perkins, the star executive of J. P. Morgan & Co., offered him financing.
Old friends he had not seen in nearly two years paid court, drawn by a fascinated desire to observe Theodore redux. They included Henry White and William Allen White, about as socially different as two namesakes could be, united in their admiration for him; Cal O’Laughlin, now head of the Washington bureau of the Chicago Tribune; Jules Jusserand, trying to avoid detection by the press; and even Archie Butt, on an espionage mission approved by Taft.
Roosevelt was inscrutable to all. After leaving him, Jusserand asked Butt what he made of the Colonel’s attitude.
“He is not a candidate, but if he can defeat the President for renomination he will do it.”
“Exactly my opinion.”
Taft received Butt’s report pettishly. “If he is not a candidate, why is he sending for governors and delegations all the time?”
Roosevelt was not soliciting support so much as advice from professional politicians, in genuine agony of mind as to what he should do. Mail flowed in by the sackful, every correspondent wanting or urging something. “I would much prefer to wait until 1916,” he told a neighbor, Regis H. Post.
That indicated he had not altogether lost his desire for power. To Representative George W. Norris of Nebraska, he wrote, “I am not a candidate and shall not be a candidate, but hitherto to all requests as to whether I would accept if nominated I have answered in the words of Abraham Lincoln that nobody had a right to ask me to cross that bridge until I came to it.”
Nothing less than a draft, representing popular rather than partisan feeling, would square Roosevelt’s sense of honor with his sense of duty, and make him commit himself to a campaign that was bound to be one of the most brutal in Republican history. Outside of a few electoral areas, in the Deep South and Brahmin precincts of New England, the American people loved him to a degree that Taft and La Follette had to envy. He was attractive even to the progressive Democrats currently being courted by Woodrow Wilson. The promise he seemed to personify of social justice, and a White House made lively once again, was what made his political enemies desperate to keep him away from the hustings.
The radical wing of progressivism represented by La Follette noted the Colonel’s recent rightward swing and doubted that he would swing left again, once renominated by a majority of the Party. Old Guard Republicans got exactly the reverse impression. They looked at