Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [293]
Roosevelt had tried to be more moderate, and restrain his natural force—and indeed succeeded in doing so much of the time. But men such as Foraker brought out the primitive in him. It was a quality lesser men recognized and admired—witness the macabre artifact coming his way (according to The New York Times) from deepest Texas: a silver-mounted, jewel-studded big stick, carved by the citizens of Brownsville in his honor.
More rational admirers, including Henry Cabot Lodge and James Garfield, thought they detected signs of exhaustion in the President. On an excursion to Cambridge, he had spoken so mechanically, as if spinning some internal Edison cylinder, as to scotch a nascent campaign by William James to make him president of Harvard in 1909. “Althou’ he praised scientific research,” the philosopher complained, “there wasn’t otherwise a single note of innovation or distinction in anything he said.” Few knew that at the very end of winter, the Roosevelts had nearly lost their son Archie to diphtheria. The boy’s nine-day struggle for life, including at least one heart failure, took its emotional toll.
Spring came late to the White House grounds, less benignly than Roosevelt had ever seen it, with frigid air coming down from Canada to wither the magnolia blossoms. Every tree bore its dead brown load, and other buds stayed dormant. When Roosevelt ventured his first tennis game of the season, with Pinchot, Garfield, and Jusserand, a snow squall struck. They grimly played four sets. The following day, cold rain fell.
Normally, in short-session years, April and May were pleasant months for the President and his Cabinet, with no congressional liaison to worry about and plenty of time to talk policy. But this change of season brought an unwelcome flowering of bad political news. The Immigration Act seemed to be having no effect on the flow of Japanese coolies into California. Consequently, the Yellow Peril was again being proclaimed in San Francisco. In Ohio, Joseph B. Foraker announced his opposition to Taft’s undeclared presidential candidacy. This was tantamount to launching his own campaign for nomination by the state GOP. Disturbingly, he began to court Ohio’s black voters, who were enough upset about Brownsville to back him.
In early May, a compromise was advanced by George B. Cox, Cincinnati’s former political boss, who offered to unite the party behind Taft for President and Foraker for another term as Senator. Foraker accepted this arrangement, knowing it left him quite free to run for President. Taft rejected it on the ground that he would be seen as a deal maker. The unhappy result for him was to make Foraker a stronger candidate than ever, while fueling rumors that Taft lacked political ambition.
It also revived talk about Roosevelt’s own presumed secret agenda. “At the moment,” he wrote Kermit on 15 May, “I am having a slightly irritating time with well-meaning but foolish friends who want me to run for a third term.” He did not mention his elder daughter, who preferred the phrase second elective term. Going along with their plans would make him the virtual overlord of the next Congress, and, probably, the longest-serving President in history (yet by no means the oldest: if he served through to March 1913, he would still be only fifty-four).
Nor did he mention to anybody, unless to Edith Roosevelt in utter privacy, that nine tenths of him wanted to run again. And that nine tenths was reason, not emotion. He could not account for the moral particle that stopped him, except to describe it vaguely as a “still, small voice.”
Having thus made, or remade, one of the fateful decisions of his life, Roosevelt left Washington with Edith and Archie for a few days at Pine Knot. The weather, though still crisp, was clear, and he took his field glasses to do some bird-watching.
HE SAW THEM ON 18 May, for the first time in twenty-five years—another reminder that tempus