Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [97]
Elihu Root made a last-minute effort to dissuade him from accepting the draft of the governors. “It seems to me that those who ask you to make a declaration are asking you … to incur the considerable probability of being defeated for the nomination, or, if successful in that, of being defeated in the election, and that the consequences to your future, to your power of leadership in the interests of the causes which you have at heart, and to your position in history, would be so injurious that … no number of friends have any right to ask such a sacrifice.”
Root wrote pessimistically, knowing that nothing was less likely to deter his old friend than warnings of personal risk. “The time has come,” Roosevelt replied, “when I must speak.”
He was beyond caution now, beyond the moralizing over duty and ideals that had obsessed him much of the past year. Day by day, he felt battle lust rising. And typically, when he rose in Columbus to address the Ohio constitutional convention, he said nothing about the governors’ petition and espoused the most radical issue in progressive politics.
LITTLE MORE THAN two weeks before, he had assured Henry Stimson, “I do not myself believe in the recall of the judiciary.” The secretary of war was still trying to live down their doomed double effort to launch a reform coup d’état in New York in the fall of 1910, and had been rendered nervous by Roosevelt’s Outlook article recommending the annulment of judicial decisions that favored property rights over human rights. No proposal could be more certain to enrage the President, who regarded even questions of national honor as “justiciable.” Was this to be a theme of his coming campaign? Would he also suggest the recall of judges, state and federal? And if so, were justices of the Supreme Court next on his Robespierrean agenda?
Roosevelt set a defiant tone at the outset by declaring, “I believe … that human rights are supreme over all other rights; that wealth should be the servant, not the master of the people.” Yet for the next half hour his speech, cast in the form of an ideological lecture, was not provocative. It covered the whole range of issues with which a modern state had to deal as it adjusted itself to an age in which individualism was secondary to collectivism. Only a revitalized democracy could prevent industrial and political combinations from making property rights the basis of all law.
“Shape your constitutional action,” he advised the delegates, “so that the people will be able through their legislative bodies, or … by direct popular vote, to provide workmen’s compensation acts, to regulate the hours of labor for children and for women, to provide for their safety while at work, and to prevent overwork or work under unhygienic or unsafe conditions.”
No reasonable Republican could object to granting such benefits, although there was a hint of Jacksonian threat in the phrase by direct popular vote. It implied more participation in policymaking than William Howard Taft (to name one Ohioan) felt ordinary Americans deserved. Roosevelt proceeded to recite the basic progressive creed, pledging himself to direct primaries, direct senatorial elections, and—when legislators quailed or failed—the initiative and referendum. As to the recall of short-term elective officers, he favored it, but only when public disillusionment was extreme.
“There remains the question of the recall of judges,” Roosevelt said.
I do not believe in adopting the recall save as a last resort.… But either the recall will have to be adopted or else it will have to be made much easier than it now is to get rid, not merely of a bad judge, but of a judge who, however virtuous, has grown so out of touch with