Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [325]
The Abbotts proudly announced on 7 November that “on or after the 5th of March, 1909, Theodore Roosevelt will be associated with the Outlook’s editorial staff as a special Contributing Editor.” Only four days after the election, the President was having to get used to the nude look of his name shorn of any honorific.
Far from being disconcerted, he told Edith that that was how he wanted it styled on his new business cards. She thought Mr. would be more dignified. He thought not, and Archie Butt agreed with him.
“I might have known the true Georgians would stand together,” she said, laughing. “Why should he not have ‘Mr. Theodore Roosevelt,’ as any other gentleman would have on his card?”
“Because he is not like any other gentleman,” Butt said.
MID-NOVEMBER BROUGHT the first snow of the season. It fell, melted a little, then froze slick enough to prevent rides in Rock Creek Park. Roosevelt continued to play singles and doubles with members of the Tennis Cabinet, or, when they were not available, with the ever-willing Archie Butt. He enjoyed the velocity of the ball off the glassy lawn, the sharp air in his lungs, and the exchange of French Revolutionary shouts with his favorite partner, Jules Jusserand. (“Honneur au courage malheureux!” “À la lanterne!”) But as the month progressed, he became oddly silent on court, and played with less verve. Butt surmised that he was bracing himself for the return to town of the Sixtieth Congress, and its almost certain hostility to any further attempts at reform.
If so, his pessimism was justified. His last Annual Message, issued on 8 December, was so imperious a call for enhanced executive authority that it amounted to a condemnation of the doctrine of checks and balances. “Concentrated power is palpable, visible, responsible, easily reached, quickly held to account. Power scattered through many administrators, many legislators, many men who work behind and through legislators and administrators, is impalpable, is unseen, is irresponsible, cannot be reached, can not be held to account.”
His legislative requests were, for the most part, those of previous years, either strengthened or doggedly renewed: for control (“complete,” now) of railroad operations, extended employer’s liability and workmen’s-compensation laws, an eight-hour day in all government departments, forest protection, and inland-waterway improvements.
The only really new note in Roosevelt’s Eighth Message sounded so extreme, not to say eccentric, that it was criticized more as an attack on the courts than as what it really was: a deep and brilliant perception that justice is not a matter of eternal verities, but of constant, case-by-case adaptation to the human prejudices of judges. “Every time they interpret contract, property, vested rights, due process of law, liberty, they necessarily enact into law parts of a system of social philosophy; and as such interpretation is fundamental, they give direction to all lawmaking.”
This suggestion that the judicial branch of government was actually a branchlet of the legislative was almost as revolutionary as Roosevelt’s claim that concentration of power was democratic. Although he wrote in language considerably more thoughtful than that of his Special Message of the previous January, the mere implications of his words were enough to convince conservatives like Joseph Cannon that the best way to treat the President, as his legislative time ran out, was to ignore him.
Unless, of course, he was being deliberately and flagrantly provocative, as when he suggested, in another paragraph, that congressmen who had voted to limit the activities of the Secret Service “did not themselves wish to be investigated.”
PRESIDENT-ELECT TAFT arrived in town just in time to coincide with the release of the Message and thus present an alternative image—tranquil and uncomplicated—to Roosevelt’s perpetual Sturm und Drang. He was in reality depressed and wishing that he was headed for the Supreme Court, rather than