Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [96]
“That was a pitiable tragedy,” Roosevelt mused, after reading about it in the newspapers. He wrote a letter of sympathy when he heard an extenuating detail: La Follette had been distraught over the imminence of a life-threatening operation on his daughter. Nevertheless, most progressives agreed with Pinchot that the senator had forfeited their support.
The pressure on Roosevelt to run now became overwhelming. “Politics are hateful,” a worried Edith Roosevelt wrote Kermit. “Father thinks he must enter the fight since La Follette’s collapse.” Unable to bear the sight of any more politicians in broad-brimmed black hats besieging Sagamore Hill, she decamped, first to New York, then to Panama and Costa Rica with Ethel. She did not want to be around to hear Theodore make his announcement.
MARY LA FOLLETTE survived, and as she recovered, so did her father. He brushed aside the advice of his aides to withdraw as a candidate, saying he would consider doing so only if they could get the Colonel to issue a declaration of insurgent principles dictated by himself. For a week, representatives of the two camps tried to broker such an agreement. But Roosevelt declined to make any statement whatever until 21 February, when he was due to address a convention drafting a new constitution for Ohio. His words there, moreover, would represent his own philosophy and nobody else’s.
Meanwhile, in what was seen as an ominous portent, Roosevelt supporters bolted the Florida Republican convention when it elected a delegate slate loyal to the President. Feeling themselves to be in the majority against Taft’s operatives, they chose their own delegation, and vowed to send it to Chicago in June, in an official contest for seating rights.
On the ninth, about seventy members of the Roosevelt National Committee, representing twenty-four states, met in Chicago and authorized the dispatch of the governors’ petition. It was treated as a private communication that he could publish if he liked. But the governors made clear their feelings in a statement given to the press, even as Frank Knox, petition in hand, hurried to catch the fastest possible train east:
A principle is of no avail without a man. A cause is lost without a leader. In Theodore Roosevelt we believe the principle has the man and the cause the leader. It is our opinion that this is the sentiment of the majority of the people of the United States.
Taft, seriously disturbed, told a Lincoln’s Birthday gathering of Republicans in New York that there were certain “extremists” in the Party who wished to give ordinary Americans—“people necessarily indifferently informed”—a participatory role in handling great public issues best left to Congress and the courts. “Such extremists are not progressives—they are political emotionalists or neurotics,” the President declared, in what was taken as a reference to Roosevelt.
Actually, he meant La Follette, who was still under neurological care. But Taft’s dread of progressivism as an anarchic force, destabilizing the polity he revered—a nation governed by laws not men, answerable only to judges—was obvious, as was his likely rhetorical course if the Colonel dared to challenge him.
Roosevelt remained silent, working on his Ohio speech and urging a distraught Nicholas Longworth to remain loyal to the President. He himself could not. “If I were any longer doubtful, I would telegraph you to come and talk to me, but it would not be any use now Nick. I have got to come out.”
He admitted that his chances of beating the White House organization were no better than one in three. Already, political appointees suspected of favoring him were being dismissed around the country. For that reason, he needed to mount the most formidable and well-financed campaign