The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [150]
Innuendo of this sort, from a man as genuinely puritanical as Roosevelt, might have been acceptable had it not been flavored with hypocrisy. Cleveland’s sexual peccadillo signified little, in national opinion. The Governor had made no attempt to hide the details, and the scandal had begun to die down.86 On the other hand, Blaine’s sins, as a Speaker who had used the powers of office to promote his own portfolio, could not be easily forgotten. There was no question as to which candidate was the morally inferior. Roosevelt’s statement that he was a Republican, and therefore bound to support Blaine, was understandable. Yet it could have been made in a letter from Dakota, rather than repeated ad nauseam all over the East, on platforms festooned with portraits of a man he despised.87
In later years, Roosevelt’s support of the Plumed Knight proved to be something of an embarrassment to his admirers, including that most ardent of them, himself. Nobody has ever satisfactorily reconciled Roosevelt’s passionate antagonism to Blaine in May and June with his equally passionate partisanship in October and November, although it has been argued that in bowing to the will of the party he was simply acting as a complete political professional.88 His many statements of support and non-support, his promises of action and threats of inaction, were bewilderingly self-contradictory. No adulterer could more adroitly combine illicit lovemaking with matrimonial obligations than Roosevelt in his relations with both wings of the party in 1884. While seducing the Independents, he promised to remain faithful to the Stalwarts; after abandoning the former, he assured them it was not out of love for the latter.
In his defense it must be said that he never sounded insincere. He genuinely believed that an Edmunds might represent the “good” in politics, but that only a Blaine, as President, could effectively bring that “good” about. Still it is hard to avoid the conclusion of one disgusted classmate: “The great good, of course, was Teddy.”89
ON 20 OCTOBER Roosevelt was annoyed to read a report, by one Horace White, of his off-the-record, post-convention remarks in a Chicago hotel five months before. White, it turned out, was the journalist to whom he had blustered, late on the night of Blaine’s nomination, that “any proper Democratic nomination will have our hearty support.” In an obvious attempt to expose Roosevelt as a turncoat, White chose to report the interview now, when the ex-Assemblyman was back in the public eye; to make the blow more personal, he did so in the correspondence columns of The New York Times. Roosevelt could do little but protest in a letter of reply that “I was savagely indignant at our defeat … and so expressed myself in private conversation.” He had “positively refused” to say anything for publication, “nor did I use the words that Mr. White attributes to me.”90 But the damage to his reputation had been done.
He consoled himself, in Boston, with the society of such intellectuals as William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. These men came to a dinner at Lodge’s in honor of Roosevelt’s twenty-sixth birthday, and he glowed in the radiance of their conversation. “I do not know when I have enjoyed a dinner so much.”91
As the campaign entered its final week, Blaine seemed poised for inevitable victory. His extraordinary personal magnetism had never been stronger. Audiences everywhere serenaded him with adoring choruses of “We’ll Follow Where the White Plume Waves.” The stolid Cleveland, meanwhile, droned on about the tariff and Civil Service Reform, trying to ignore catcalls of “Ma! Ma! Where’s My Pa? Gone to the White House, Ha Ha Ha!”92
Then, in New York on 29 October, a garrulous Presbyterian