Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [99]
“I WILL ACCEPT the nomination for President if it is tendered to me, and I will adhere to this decision until the convention has expressed its preference.”
As Roosevelt’s letter to the governors went out on the evening wires, he relaxed in the Boston home of Robert Grant, a liberal and literary judge he had known for many years. Grant thought that the Colonel had made a self-destructive mistake, and carefully observed his looks and behavior for the record. “I never saw him in better physical shape. He is fairly stout, but his color is good.… He halts in his sentences occasionally; but from a layman’s point of view there was nothing to suggest mental impairment, unless the combination of egotism, faith in his own doctrines, fondness for power and present hostility to Taft … can be termed symptomatic.… He was a most delightful guest.”
For all the pleasure Judge Grant took in the Colonel’s company—and that of William Allen White and the biographer William Roscoe Thayer as fellow dinner guests—he was not disposed to congratulate him on running for the presidency again. “Has not every one of your friends advised you against it?”
Roosevelt admitted that was true. For a long time, he said, he had been “very uncertain” about what to do. But the urgency of the progressives who looked to him for leadership had finally convinced him that he had to rescue the reform program so disastrously mismanaged by President Taft. To have ignored their appeals, to have waited until 1916 to run again, would have been “cowardice,” he said—“a case of il gran refiuto.”
Dante’s phrase clearly appealed to him, and he repeated it, evoking the refusal of a thirteenth-century hermit to accept elevation to the Papacy.
“But you will agree that Taft has made a good president this year?” Grant spoke out of a sense of fairness, rather than loyalty to the administration.
Roosevelt said he thought that all Taft had done was to reduce the Republican Party to a torpor reminiscent of that of “the Bell and Everett Whigs just before the Civil War.” He plunged into a discussion of patronage with White, and Grant noticed that he saw betrayal in every reasonable move Taft had made to consolidate himself as president.
“But will any of the Party leaders support you?” the judge asked.
“No. None of them; not even Lodge, I think.” He said he believed his only hope of winning was to “reach the popular vote through direct primaries,” in states democratic enough to hold them.
“But the situation is complex, I suppose? You would like to be President.”
“You are right, it is complex. I like power; but I care nothing to be President as President. I am interested in these ideas of mine and I want to carry them through, and feel that I am the one to carry them through.” He cited, by way of example, his belief that the will of the people was being “thwarted” by reactionary courts.
Grant was a bona fide member of the Harvard Republican establishment, but unlike most of his associates, saw no constitutional threat in the Colonel’s Columbus speech. Thayer did, saying that anyone advising the recall of judicial decisions wished to subject American institutions to “the whims of the populace at the moment.” Roosevelt, keeping his temper, pointed out that he had excluded the Supreme Court from his proposal. Nor was he advocating the removal of judges themselves. He was concerned only with judicial decisions at the state level, in cases where humanitarian legislation was struck down on fake constitutional grounds.
Thayer and Grant were impressed with his self-assurance. But Theodore in private was different from Theodore on the stump. They saw that his moral fervor, the way he had of charging argument with more passion than it needed, would prevent persons of colder blood from understanding that he was actually