The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [151]
IN A LETTER OF CONDOLENCE to Henry Cabot Lodge, whose bid for Congress had received a humiliating rejection in the polls, Roosevelt raged against “the cursed pharisaical fools and knaves who have betrayed us.”94 Evidently he ascribed the Republican defeat to Independent defectors, although every other political commentator in the country blamed it on the Presbyterian minister. The fact that he and Lodge had helped muster the Independents at Chicago, only to fall in behind the regular Republicans later, did not seem to indicate any betrayal on their part.
But three days after this letter to Lodge, he wrote a mea culpa which shows that all his essential decency and common sense had returned, if not yet his optimism.
Of course it may be true that we have had our day; it is far more likely that this is true in my case than yours … Blaine’s nomination meant to me pretty sure political death if I supported him; that I realized entirely, and went in with my eyes open. I have won again and again; finally chance placed me where I was sure to lose whatever I did; and I will balance the last against the first … I shall certainly not complain. I have not believed and do not believe that I shall ever be likely to come back into political life; we fought a good winning fight when our friends the Independents were backing us; and we have both of us, when circumstances turned them against us, fought the losing fight grimly out to the end. What we have been cannot be taken away from us; what we are is due to the folly of others; and to no fault of ours.95
In larger retrospect it may be seen that Roosevelt had done exactly the right thing, obeying the dictates of a political instinct so profound as to be almost infallible. He did not realize his luck, as he miserably returned to Dakota, but a Republican victory might have destroyed his chances of ever becoming President. The grateful Blaine would have offered him a government post, along with all the machine men who supervised the campaign; Roosevelt would thereafter have been associated with the corrupt Old Guard of the nineteenth century, rather than the enlightened Progressives of the twentieth. His decision not to “bolt” after Chicago was equally fortunate. Cleveland would not likely have rewarded him, and later Republican conventions would remember him as a man of doubtful loyalty.
All in all, a Republican defeat was the best thing that could have happened to Roosevelt in 1884. The fact that three alliterative words brought about that defeat only reinforces the conclusion that fate, as usual, was on his side. Not that he could be persuaded to see it that way. “The Statesman (?) of the past,” he wrote Lodge from Maltese Cross, “has been merged, alas I fear for good, in the cowboy of the present.”96
ON 16 NOVEMBER, a spell of “white weather” settled down over the Badlands, as Roosevelt left his southern ranch and headed north to Elkhorn. His progress was slow that morning, for he had a beef herd to deliver to Medora. It was almost two o’clock before he concluded his business in town and rode on alone, with thirty-three miles to go.97
The wind in his face was achingly cold, especially on exposed plateaus when it combed grains of snow out of the grass and hurled them at him; the sensation was not unlike being whipped with sandpaper. His lungs