Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [191]
Your unlimited power for work, dauntless energy of purpose, pureness of motives moving towards the highest ideals, this all crowned by an iron will, form qualities which elicit the highest admiration from everybody over here. They are the characteristics of a “man,” and as such most sympathetic to me. The 20th century is sadly in want of men of your stamp at the head of great nations.… Thank Heaven, the Anglo-Saxon Germanic Race is still able to produce such a specimen. You must accept it as a fact that your figure has moved to the foreground of the world, and that men’s minds are intensely occupied by you.
“AS ALWAYS WHEN THE PRESIDENT WAS HAPPY
HIS HAPPINESS TOUCHED THOSE AROUND HIM.” Theodore and Edith Roosevelt receiving at a White House garden party (photo credit 20.1)
The Kaiser could yet turn nasty if Roosevelt did not make good his own Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and place Santo Domingo under American receivership. Juan Franco Sanchez, the Dominican Minister of Foreign Affairs, was in Washington practically begging for annexation. Roosevelt saw political problems if he agreed. Any new protectorate, coinciding with his acquisition of the Canal Zone, was likely to reactivate the pesky Anti-Imperialist League, and give the Democrats a major campaign issue. Cuba was libre and the Philippines, thanks to Taft, pretty well pacified; his own youthful appetite for empire was gone.
He searched for a simile strong enough to express his distaste for another insular possession: “I have about the same desire to annex it as a gorged boa constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong end to.”
TWO MONTHS AFTER Mark Hanna’s death, the question of who should be the new chairman of the Republican National Committee had not been resolved. Elihu Root, prospering hugely as a Wall Street attorney, declined to serve. Three other candidates pleaded ill health: Henry Clay Payne of Wisconsin, Winthrop Murray Crane of Massachusetts, and the septuagenarian Cornelius N. Bliss of New York. The last, a veteran of McKinley’s first Cabinet, had such excellent corporate connections, not to mention “stainless honor and purity,” that Roosevelt urged him to reconsider. Bliss said he would think about it.
In the meantime, the President felt free to set his own Republican agenda, in a series of indiscretions calculated to heave fresh sod on Hanna’s grave. He preached conservation to the National Wholesale Lumber Dealers’ Association, and political morality to Republican professionals. He meddled in the gubernatorial politics of New York and Missouri, ordered a draft platform for the convention, considered and approved a mysterious proposal to translate American campaign literature into Bohemian, and grossly flattered the first national assembly of American periodical publishers: “It is always a pleasure for a man in public life to meet the real governing classes.”
Hearing that some desperate Democrats were trying to persuade Grover Cleveland to run against him, he circulated among newspaper editors (“for your private use”) a note from the former President that appeared to support his labor policies during the coal strike. Cleveland fumed with rage: “I am amazed at Roosevelt.… There are some people in this country that need lessons in decency and good manners.”
“Theodore thinks of nothing, talks of nothing, and lives for nothing but his political interests,” Henry Adams noted. “If you remark to him that God is Great, he asks naïvely how that will affect his election.”
Old Guard Republicans worried about the undignified spectacle of a President campaigning for his own office. He was supposed to put himself in the hands of party professionals. McKinley had successfully sat out two campaigns at home in Canton, Ohio; here was “Teddy” virtually setting up pre-convention headquarters in the White House.
The most that conservatives could do, until the party organized itself at the national convention in June, was beg Roosevelt not to go public with