Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [253]
ROOSEVELT WAS SO pleased with his Southern trip that he invited the historian James Ford Rhodes to the White House to hear about it. Rhodes arrived on 16 November and found Root and Taft among his fellow guests. The President recounted his put-down of Governor Davis with the meticulousness of an actor analyzing a coup de théâtre. He said he had controlled his displeasure at first, and proceeded with his own speech until he felt the crowd was “in sympathy” with him. Then he had marched up to Davis, looked him in the eye, and issued his reprimand, gesticulating in such a way that both Governor and audience thought he was going to throw a punch. The cheering had been “enthusiastic and genuine.”
It was clear to Rhodes that the President’s brave stand had been made not out of compassion, but out of concern for due process. Roosevelt, encouraged by Root and Taft, proceeded to give robust evidence that he and Davis were not far apart on phylogenetic matters. The Fifteenth Amendment had been “very unjust and bad policy.” Lincoln’s dream of a graduated extension of suffrage, as more and more black men qualified for it, was all very well, but the Yazoo Delta offered proof that a people could regress. Negroes, Roosevelt said, were “two hundred thousand years behind.”
Rhodes suggested “a million,” and the President agreed. He cheerfully went on to castigate the Irish, who struck him as a good argument for Anglophilia. Not that there were many other justifications. The English were by nature undemocratic, and were not even good at governing themselves anymore: Prime Minister Balfour and his Cabinet were “a set of split carrot-heads” who might “answer perfectly well for a pink tea.” He did not believe in sending American boys to Oxford, and would “dislike exceedingly” to have one of his daughters marry a foreigner. (At least Alice, just back from her marathon junket to the Far East, would spare him that pain: she and Nick were now unofficially engaged.) English girls, on the other hand …
Léon Bazalgette could only dream of listening to Roosevelt talk, as Rhodes was now. But the Frenchman understood that these floods of apparent aggression, half fierce, half humorous, were more indicative of energy than of serious thought. They were part of l’outrance qui est dans sa nature, the excess that was part of Roosevelt’s nature. The weir had constantly to spill, to keep the deep water behind clear and calm.
A SURPRISE RESULT of the elections that month was that machine candidates of either party were punished in what Outlook called “the Rout of the Bosses.” Even Henry Cabot Lodge, who was not machine-made but seemed to personify orthodox Republicanism in Massachusetts, nearly lost his senatorial seat. New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana favored “Reform” or “New Idea” tickets over ones labeled “Stalwart” or “Old Guard.” Evidently, there was a schism developing in the GOP, and the force driving it apart was the same fervor S. S. McClure had tried to describe earlier in the summer. Only now it was less vague, more political, easier to define—as Ray Stannard Baker did, in the first article of his railroad series:
We are at this moment facing a new conflict in this country, the importance of which we are only just beginning to perceive. It lies between two great parties, one a progressive party seeking to give the government more power in business affairs, the other a conservative party striving to retain all the power possible in private hands. One looks toward socialism, the other obstinately defends individualism. It is industrialism forcing itself into politics. And the crux of the new conflict in this case, recognized by both sides, is the Railroad Rate.
Baker might have used a less distracting word than party, with its inevitable overtones of registration and organization. But progressive, an adjective hitherto only generally indicative of forward