Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [98]
When a judge decides a constitutional question, when he decides what the people as a whole can and cannot do, the people should have the right to recall that decision if they think that it is wrong. We should hold the judiciary in all respect, but it is both absurd and degrading to make a fetish of a judge or of any one else.
At no point did he mention the President as the nation’s ranking such fetishist. However, Roosevelt’s contempt for legalistic justice, as opposed to executive action in favor of human rights, was plain. He cited a workmen’s compensation suit against the Southern Buffalo Railroad, recently rejected by the New York State Court of Appeals. The judge in that case, like Judge Baldwin in Hoxie v. the New Haven Railroad, had declared the federal statute unconstitutional in terms of common law. “I know of no popular vote by any state of the union,” Roosevelt said, “more flagrant in its defiance of right and justice, more short-sighted in its inability to face the changed needs of our civilization.”
THE REACTION TO “Roosevelt’s Recall Speech” was angrier and more widespread than that following his New Nationalism address eighteen months before. The American Bar Association came out solidly against it. He was assailed from quarters as far away as Great Britain for the “sheer madness,” “demagogy,” “absolutism,” and “despicable nature” of his prejudice against judges. It was to be expected that the New York World should accuse him of inciting “mob rule,” and that the Wall Street Journal should wisecrack: “Those most enthusiastic over the recall of judicial decisions are prevented by prison rules from working for the Colonel.” But even such progressives as Congressman Victor Murdock and Senator William E. Borah felt that Roosevelt had gone too far. “One statement frequently heard today,” The New York Times reported on 22 February, “is that the Colonel’s speech makes Senator La Follette look like a reactionary.” The Texas Progressive Republican League voted to support William Howard Taft.
Academics reverent of anything canonical in law or political doctrine were especially vituperative. Andrew Dickson White, the former president of Cornell, called the notion of popular amendment of state constitutions “the most monstrous proposal ever presented to the American people, or any other people.” James Day, chancellor of Syracuse University, declared, “Emma Goldman could not make a more violent attack on our institutions.” Even clerics weighed in. The aged Episcopal bishop of Albany, who had known Roosevelt since his days as governor, called him “erratic, unsafe, and unfair.”
Doubts about Roosevelt’s sanity recirculated. Justice W. O. Howard of the New York Supreme Court described him as “a madman” with “the instinct of a beast.” The editor of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology theorized that the Colonel would “go down in history as one of the most illustrious psychological examples of the distortion of conscious mental processes through the force of subconscious wishes.” A Chicago lawyer offered $5,000 to any medical or charitable institution that could arrange to have Roosevelt certified. Henry Adams warned Brooks Adams, “His mind has gone to pieces.… He is, as Taft justly said, a neurotic, and his neurosis may end like La Follette’s, in a nervous collapse or acute mania.”
An appalled Henry Cabot Lodge could only say to reporters, “The Colonel and I have long since agreed to disagree on a number of points.”
ALMOST UNHEARD IN the general uproar over Roosevelt’s speech was a casual remark he had made en route to Columbus: “My hat is in the ring. The fight is on and I am stripped to the buff.” It took several days for the seventeen monosyllables to work their way into the folk consciousness. But when they did, realization spread that he had, at last, confirmed his candidacy—in yet another of the popular images he coined so effortlessly. By 25 February, when he arrived