The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (144 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
He found William Allen White was already working for his nomination in Kansas. What the two men said on this subject, during a brief midjourney meeting, is unknown, but White was at least persuaded to avoid setting Roosevelt up as McKinley’s rival in 1900.
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“There is no man in American today whose personality is rooted deeper in the hearts of the people than Theodore Roosevelt,” the little editor wrote, as soon as his friend’s train was over the horizon. “He is more than a presidential possibility in 1904, he is a presidential probability … He is the coming American of the twentieth century.”
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Eastern newspapers mockingly reprinted this and other Roosevelt-for-President editorials, and suggested that McKinley had better look to his skirts at next year’s convention.
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A
FTER THIRTY-SIX
raucous hours at Las Vegas, Roosevelt hurried back to New York on 29 June and announced that he was
definitely not a presidential candidate. He urged all Americans to vote for the renomination of William McKinley.
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With that he adjourned to Oyster Bay, only to be greeted by a garrulous speaker eulogizing him as “the man in whose hands we hope the destinies of our country will be placed.” At this his gubernatorial dignity began to collapse. He struggled like a small boy to keep his face straight, but grins broke through, and as the crowd burst into applause, he laughed till he shook.
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“N
OW AS TO WHAT YOU
say about the Vice-Presidency,” Roosevelt wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge on 1 July.
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Lodge’s first words on this interesting subject are unfortunately lost. But it is clear from their surviving correspondence that he considered a vice-presidential nomination in 1900 to be the best assurance of a presidential nomination in 1904.
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McKinley’s last running mate, Garret A. Hobart, was a nice old boy, but in failing health. Rumor had it he would not seek a second term. The President might prefer to select another nice old boy, like John D. Long; on the other hand, the National Convention might prefer Roosevelt, in which case McKinley would undoubtedly bow to its wishes. As Joe Cannon of Illinois once remarked, “McKinley has his ear so close to the ground it’s always full of grasshoppers.”
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“Curiously enough,” Roosevelt went on in his letter to Lodge, “Edith is against your view and I am inclined to be for it.”
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There were at least two alternative avenues of approach to the White House. One was to continue his admirable career as Governor of New York, and run for reelection in 1900; unfortunately that would only carry him through the year 1902. By 1904 the people who were shouting for him now might well have forgotten about him: “I have never known a hurrah endure for five years.”
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Another choice would be to succeed Russell A. Alger as Secretary of War; it was an open secret that McKinley wanted to get rid of that embarrassing executive. Roosevelt earnestly wanted the Secretaryship (“How I would like to have a hand in remodeling our army!”),
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but McKinley had seen enough of his behavior in the Navy Department to look for somebody less forceful.
All in all, therefore, the Vice-Presidency was his best chance of
keeping in the national spotlight until 1904. At least it was “an honorable position.” But, Roosevelt wrote sadly, “I confess I should like a position with more work in it.” There could hardly be an executive position with less.
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Tiredness, intensified by his week of railroading, returned as he finished his letter to Lodge. Word went out that the Governor intended a month’s rest. Reporters, photographers, and glory-seekers were asked to stay away from Sagamore Hill.
“I don’t mean to do one
single
thing during that month,” said Roosevelt to his sister Corinne, “except write a life of Oliver Cromwell.”
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R
OOSEVELT’S THIRTEENTH BOOK
and third biography, which one friend of the family described as a “fine imaginative study of Cromwell’s qualifications for the Governorship of New York,” was completed by 2 August.
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Even allowing for the fact that it was dictated, and that the author spent another month or so revising the manuscript, its speed of composition must be considered something of a record. What was more, Roosevelt did not have the month entirely to himself, as he had planned; McKinley summoned him to the White House for a consultation on the Philippines on 8 July, and he spent three days later in the month at Manhattan Beach trying to restore good relations with Senator Platt.
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Yet somehow he found time to produce sixty-three thousand words of English history, remarkable for clarity and grasp of detail if not for style.
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According to his stenographer, William Loeb, the Governor would appear in his study every morning with a pad of notes and a reference book or two, and proceed to talk “with hardly a pause,” pouring out dates and place-names as copiously as any college professor. The British military attaché Colonel Arthur Lee, who was Roosevelt’s houseguest at this time, remembered him calling in another stenographer and dictating gubernatorial correspondence in between paragraphs of
Cromwell
, while a barber tried simultaneously to shave him. Yet there was no lack of continuity as the author’s mind switched to and fro. Robert Bridges came out on 12 August to look at the draft typescript, and remembered one chapter “that could
have been printed as it stood, with mere mechanical proof-reading corrections.”
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Roosevelt, who shared the ability to double-dictate with Napoleon, did not think his intellect was in any way remarkable. “I have only a second-rate brain,” he said emphatically to Owen Wister, “but I think I have a capacity for action.” When Wister repeated this remark to Lord Bryce many years later, the great scholar was unimpressed. “He didn’t do justice to himself there, you know. He had a brain that could always go straight to the pith of any matter. That is a mental power of the first rank.”
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O
LIVER
C
ROMWELL
,
HOWEVER
, has dated even less well than
Thomas Hart Benton
and
Gouverneur Morris
. Unlike those earlier books, it contained no original research. Nor was it short of competitors in the field; even in 1899 it could not compare with the standard lives of the Protector. Reviews were few and apathetic, and the book quickly faded from memory. Yet as a clear, rapid analysis of one leader of men by another, it still has its merits. As with the two previous biographies,
Cromwell
is most interesting when it draws parallels between author and subject. Roosevelt’s own analysis of it remains the best and most succinct:
I have tried to tell the narrative in its bearings upon the later movements for political and religious freedom in England in 1688 and in America in 1776 and 1860. Have endeavoured to show how the movement had two sides; one mediaeval and one modern, and how it failed, just so far as the former was dominant, but yet laid the foundations for all subsequent movements. I have tried to show Cromwell, not only as one of the great generals of all time, but as a great statesman who on the whole did a marvellous work, and who, where he failed, failed because he lacked the power of self-repression possessed by Washington and Lincoln … The more I have studied Cromwell, the more I have grown to admire him, and yet the more I have felt that his making himself a dictator was unnecessary and destroyed the possibility
of making the effects of that particular revolution permanent.
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N
OT SURPRISINGLY
, Roosevelt’s flying visit to the capital prompted instant speculation that McKinley, gratified by his recent announcement of support, intended to name him Secretary of War after all.
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The secretaryship was indeed discussed at the White House that night—at such length as to lend credence to the rumors—but Roosevelt, showing remarkable self-control, assumed that if the President wanted his advice on War Department management of the Philippine situation, “he should regard me as wholly disinterested.” He therefore announced as soon as he stepped into McKinley’s office “that I was not a candidate for the position of Secretary of War and could not leave the Governorship of New York now.”
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This protestation seems to have increased McKinley’s respect for Roosevelt as a man, if not as an ambitious politician. On 31 July, Secretary Alger stepped down, and the President named Elihu Root to succeed him. Then Vice-President Hobart, though ailing, let it be known that he would like to remain in office indefinitely, so another of Roosevelt’s avenues for advancement closed off.
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The Governor, setting off for a fall tour of state county fairs, decided to let the kaleidoscope shift for itself for a while.
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In the New Year, once the legislative season was fairly under way, he would gaze through the prisms again and see if any new perspectives had opened up. For the first time in his adult life he felt no desire to hurry. He was, after all, nearly forty-one, with a growing family (Alice was almost as tall as he was now), a decent income, and a job that he loved. “I do not believe,” he told Lodge, “that any other man has ever had as good a time as Governor of New York.”
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Here, within certain geographical and political limits, was the supreme power he had always craved, and the events of last April had shown how well that power became him. Senator Platt, fortunately, had recovered from the Ford Franchise Tax Bill, and was disposed to be “cordial.”
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This augured well for their working
partnership through the next session. Roosevelt would live out the nineteenth century in Albany—1900 was not, as so many of his constituents seemed to think, the first year of the twentieth—and try to persuade Platt that he was worth renominating for a second term. “I should be quite willing to barter the certainty of it for all the possibilities of the future.”
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