The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [286]
With his belly full of antelope meat, and the oily perfume of sage in his nostrils, he rejoiced in rediscovering his other self, that almost-forgotten Doppelgänger who haunted the plains while Commissioner Roosevelt patrolled the streets of Manhattan. For the thousandth time he pondered the dynamic interdependence of East and West. No force of nature surely, not even the anarchistic Bryan, with his talk of grass growing in the streets of cities,31 could sunder those two poles, nor for that matter bring them any closer together. American energy lay in their mutual repulsion and mutual attraction. The money men of the East would vote for McKinley, of course. Bryan had already seen he could make no headway there; it was here in the West that the battle between Gold and Silver, Capitalism and Populism, Industry and Agriculture must be fought out.
From talking to his cowboys, and to friends he met in the depot in St. Paul, and to the staff of party headquarters in Chicago, Roosevelt returned to New York on 10 September convinced that “the drift is our way.”32 He serenely articulated his thoughts to an Evening Post reporter: “The battle is going to be decided in our favor because the hundreds and thousands of farmers, workingmen, and merchants all through the West have been making up their minds that the battle should be waged on moral issues … It is in the West that as a nation we shall ultimately work out our highest destiny.”33
BUT HIS SURGE OF CONFIDENCE did not last long. By mid-September the “battle” initiative was clearly with the Democrats. A campaign map of the United States showed the frightening smallness of McKinley’s constituency (New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio) as opposed to the vast spread of states loyal to Bryan (the whole South plus Texas, and all of the mountain states). The Democratic candidate seemed to be everywhere, his big body tireless and his melodious voice unfailing. Republican planners, attempting to plot his every whistle-stop, stippled the Midwest with as many as twenty-four new dots a day; in some areas the concentration was so dense as to shade the paper gray.34 Now the dots were beginning to creep ominously across the Mississippi, into the traditionally Republican plains states, every one of which had been reclassified as doubtful.35
Roosevelt, like Hanna, began to feel pangs of real dread. He was “appalled” at Bryan’s ability “to inflame with bitter rancor towards the well-off those … who, whether through misfortune or through misconduct, have failed in life.”36 Remarks like this suggest that Roosevelt, for all his public attacks upon “the predatory rich,” for all his night-walks through the Lower East Side, was congenitally unable to understand the poor. People who lacked wealth, even through “misfortune,” had “failed in life.”37
Their votes, however, mattered, so he threw himself ardently into the campaign. Taking advantage of some space in Review of Reviews, which he was supposed to fill with an article on the Vice-Presidency, Roosevelt assailed the Populists (Bryan’s third-party backers on the extreme Left) to witty effect:
Refinement and comfort they are apt to consider quite as objectionable as immorality. That a man should change his clothes in the evening, that he should dine at any other hour than noon, impress these good people as being symptoms of depravity instead of merely trivial. A taste for learning and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause them the deepest suspicion … Senator Tillman’s brother has been frequently elected to Congress upon the issue that he wore neither an overcoat nor an undershirt.38
This, and a fiery New York speech criticizing the Democratic platform’s bias in favor of unrestricted job action (