Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [93]
“Theodore Roosevelt is a presidential impossibility,” declared Felix Agnus, publisher of the Baltimore American. “The sooner this fact is recognized and the more firmly it is stated, the sooner will the Republican Party get its true bearings, and the drivel of hysteria that invokes his name as a saviour of the Party and the country will be checked.”
HENRY ADAMS, WALKING at dusk one night in downtown Washington, was accosted by what he at first took to be a hippopotamus. “It was the President himself wandering about with Archy [sic] Butt, and I joined them as far as the White House Porch. He … gave me a shock. He looks bigger and more tumble-to-pieces than ever, and his manner has become more slovenly than his figure; but what struck me most was the deterioration of his mind and expression.… He showed mental enfeeblement all over, and I wanted to offer him a bet that he wouldn’t get through his term.”
At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a bitter Senator La Follette was blaming Roosevelt for retarding the progress of his campaign. “What can you do?” Gifford Pinchot taunted him. “You must know that he has this thing in his hands and can do whatever he likes.”
La Follette’s real problem—and Roosevelt’s too, if he ran—was that Taft had executive control of the Party machinery. His fat hand lay heavy on levers only he could wield, sending thrills of power along the patronage grid Mark Hanna had assembled, state by state, in the 1890s. The grid terminated in about a thousand convention delegates or delegates-to-be, many already pledged to him. This advantage was furthered by the tradition that a sitting president was entitled to renomination unless he declined to serve again. It made Taft an almost unbeatable opponent through June, even if his lack of popularity made him a gift to the Democrats thereafter.
Roosevelt, in contrast, was hampered by another tradition, that of no president ever running for a third term. He had endorsed it himself, in his famous declaration after the election of 1904: The wise custom which limits the President to two terms regards the substance and not the form. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.
It was a “custom” in the sense that the Constitution did not mandate it. He now began to claim that its wisdom lay in denying an extension to any president who (as he laboriously put it), “is in office and has been in office for eight years.” There was nothing to prevent such a man from returning to power after taking some time off to hunt lions, or for that matter, hippopotami.
He defended his cagey public stance in a letter to Frank A. Munsey, the wealthy owner of Munsey’s Magazine and an ardent progressive. “In making any statement it is not only necessary to consider what the man actually means and actually says … but also to consider what the statement will be held to mean by the great mass of people who are obliged to get their information more or less at second hand, and largely through instrumentalities like most of the New York dailies, such as the American, the World, the Evening Post and the Times, that is, through people who make their livelihood by the practice of slanderous mendacity for hire, and whose one purpose, as far as I am concerned, is to invent falsehood and to distort truth.”
Roosevelt’s conviction that such organs were mendacious was not paranoid. Few seemed disposed to favor him if he ran. The only major papers he could count on were the New York Press and Baltimore News, both owned by Munsey, E. A. Van Valkenburg’s Philadelphia North American, Medill McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, and W. R. Nelson’s Kansas City Star. William Allen White’s Emporia Gazette was passionately supportive but small-town in its influence, compared to the “yellow” Pulitzer and Hearst tabloids, with their