CHAPTER 8
Hat in the Ring

Nothing will help that man.
You see the fates have given him so much,
He must have all or perish.

ONE OF THE FOLK SAYINGS that Roosevelt liked to share with audiences was “They say that² nothing is as independent as a hog on ice. If he doesn’t want to stand up, he can lie down.”

As 1912 dawned, he found himself faced with the hog’s dilemma. He could run and slip, and this time there would be no recovery. Or he could maintain a low profile, and feel the chill of inactivity slowly spreading through his bones.

Were it not such a momentous year, politically speaking, he might keep himself warm with literary production: perhaps write his “big work,” or continue pouring out editorials for The Outlook on any subject that interested him. (He was proud of his latest essay, on medieval scholarship, and sent a copy to Edith Wharton.) The life of a dignified elder statesman, such as Arthur Balfour had embarked on in Britain, was what Edith Roosevelt wanted for her husband. She felt that biweekly trips into town, with a busy schedule of meetings and lunches, would be worldly action enough for him. On other days, he could satisfy his intellectual hunger at home with books, and there was always the estate to take care of excess energy.

“You can put it³ out of your mind, Theodore,” she said. “You will never be President of the United States again.”

The problem was putting it out of the minds of other people. His response to⁴ the U.S. Steel suit had created the general impression, which no number of denials could dispel, that he was running. A convention of the Ohio Progressive Republican League declined to endorse Robert La Follette, and spawned the first of many state “booms” for the Colonel. Governor Chase Osborn of Michigan urged both Taft and La Follette to withdraw in Roosevelt’s favor. Some sober-minded industrialists and stockbrokers were tempted to agree, suggesting that it might be better to have the Square Dealer renominated, in his new, responsible regulatory mode, than risk the prosecutorial zeal of his rivals.

“It now looks⁵ as if Roosevelt, not Taft, would get (or rather, take) the Republican nomination,” Woodrow Wilson wrote a friend. “That would make a campaign worth while.”

To Edith’s dismay, Sagamore Hill once again became a political mecca. The pilgrims Roosevelt had attracted after his return from Africa in 1910 were nothing to the hajj that converged⁶ on him now. In cabs and carriages⁷ and automobiles, they took advantage of the metaled road he had rashly built up the slope of Sagamore Hill. Freezing rain did not keep them away. He got even less peace in his office at The Outlook, which began to look like a campaign headquarters, minus the posters and spittoons.

Once more the sad, worshipful eyes of Gifford Pinchot and James Garfield burned into him, beseeching him to free them from their commitment to La Follette. They argued that only he was capable of preventing the Party split that would surely occur if Taft was nominated in June. Midwesterners loyal⁸ to “Battling Bob” lobbied Roosevelt to proclaim himself a non-candidate, loud and clear. Progressive governors, National Committeemen, publishers, and businessmen tried to make him do just the opposite. George W. Perkins, the star executive of J. P. Morgan & Co., offered him financing.

Old friends he had not seen in nearly two years paid court, drawn by a fascinated desire to observe Theodore redux. They included Henry White and William Allen White, about as socially different as two namesakes could be, united in their admiration for him; Cal O’Laughlin, now head of the Washington bureau of the Chicago Tribune; Jules Jusserand, trying to avoid detection by the press; and even Archie Butt, on an espionage mission approved by Taft.

Roosevelt was inscrutable to all. After leaving him, Jusserand asked Butt what he made of the Colonel’s attitude.

“He is not⁹ a candidate, but if he can defeat the President for renomination he will do it.”

“Exactly my opinion.”

Taft received Butt’s report pettishly. “If he is not a candidate, why is he sending for governors and delegations all the time?”

Roosevelt was not soliciting support so much as advice from professional politicians, in genuine agony of mind as to what he should do. Mail flowed in by the sackful, every correspondent wanting or urging something. “I would much¹⁰ prefer to wait until 1916,” he told a neighbor, Regis H. Post.

That indicated he had not altogether lost his desire for power. To Representative George W. Norris of Nebraska, he wrote, “I am not¹¹ a candidate and shall not be a candidate, but hitherto to all requests as to whether I would accept if nominated I have answered in the words of Abraham Lincoln that nobody had a right to ask me to cross that bridge until I came to it.”

Nothing less¹² than a draft, representing popular rather than partisan feeling, would square Roosevelt’s sense of honor with his sense of duty, and make him commit himself to a campaign that was bound to be one of the most brutal in Republican history. Outside of a few electoral areas, in the Deep South and Brahmin precincts of New England, the American people loved him to a degree that Taft and La Follette had to envy. He was attractive¹³ even to the progressive Democrats currently being courted by Woodrow Wilson. The promise he seemed to personify of social justice, and a White House made lively once again, was what made his political enemies desperate to keep him away from the hustings.

The radical wing of progressivism represented by La Follette noted the Colonel’s recent rightward swing and doubted that he would swing left again, once renominated by a majority of the Party. Old Guard Republicans got exactly the reverse impression. They looked at his latest article¹⁴ in The Outlook and saw, with a group shudder, that he had begun to advocate the recall of judicial decisions. What socialist mayhem would he visit upon the courts, if by some perversion of democracy he returned to the White House?

“Theodore Roosevelt is¹⁵ a presidential impossibility,” declared Felix Agnus, publisher of the Baltimore American. “The sooner this fact is recognized and the more firmly it is stated, the sooner will the Republican Party get its true bearings, and the drivel of hysteria that invokes his name as a saviour of the Party and the country will be checked.”

HENRY ADAMS, WALKING at dusk one night in downtown Washington, was accosted by what he at first took to be a hippopotamus. “It was the President¹⁶ himself wandering about with Archy [sic] Butt, and I joined them as far as the White House Porch. He … gave me a shock. He looks bigger and more tumble-to-pieces than ever, and his manner has become more slovenly than his figure; but what struck me most was the deterioration of his mind and expression.… He showed mental enfeeblement all over, and I wanted to offer him a bet that he wouldn’t get through his term.”

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a bitter Senator La Follette was blaming Roosevelt for retarding the progress of his campaign. “What can you do?”¹⁷ Gifford Pinchot taunted him. “You must know that he has this thing in his hands and can do whatever he likes.”

La Follette’s real problem—and Roosevelt’s too, if he ran—was that Taft had executive control¹⁸ of the Party machinery. His fat hand lay heavy on levers only he could wield, sending thrills of power along the patronage grid Mark Hanna had assembled, state by state, in the 1890s. The grid terminated in about a thousand convention delegates or delegates-to-be, many already pledged to him. This advantage was furthered by the tradition that a sitting president was entitled to renomination unless he declined to serve again. It made Taft an almost unbeatable opponent through June, even if his lack of popularity made him a gift to the Democrats thereafter.

Roosevelt, in contrast, was hampered by another tradition, that of no president ever running for a third term. He had endorsed it himself, in his famous declaration after the election of 1904: The wise custom which limits the President to two terms regards the substance and not the form. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.

It was a “custom” in the sense that the Constitution did not mandate it. He now began¹⁹ to claim that its wisdom lay in denying an extension to any president who (as he laboriously put it), “is in office and has been in office for eight years.” There was nothing to prevent such a man from returning to power after taking some time off to hunt lions, or for that matter, hippopotami.

He defended his cagey public stance in a letter to Frank A. Munsey, the wealthy owner of Munsey’s Magazine and an ardent progressive. “In making any²⁰ statement it is not only necessary to consider what the man actually means and actually says … but also to consider what the statement will be held to mean by the great mass of people who are obliged to get their information more or less at second hand, and largely through instrumentalities like most of the New York dailies, such as the American, the World, theEvening Post and the Times, that is, through people who make their livelihood by the practice of slanderous mendacity for hire, and whose one purpose, as far as I am concerned, is to invent falsehood and to distort truth.”

Roosevelt’s conviction that such organs were mendacious was not paranoid. Few seemed disposed to favor him if he ran. The only major papers²¹ he could count on were the New York Press and Baltimore News, both owned by Munsey, E. A. Van Valkenburg’s Philadelphia North American, Medill McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, and W. R. Nelson’s Kansas City Star. William Allen White’s Emporia Gazette was passionately supportive but small-town in its influence, compared to the “yellow” Pulitzer and Hearst tabloids, with their millions of readers and Democratic bias.

Again citing Lincoln²², Roosevelt quoted the Emancipator’s policy of lying low whenever journalists were on the prowl: What they want is a squabble and a fuss, and that they can have when we explain; and they cannot have it if we don’t. He felt that this “homely common sense” applied to his current situation. He had been accused of overweening ambition often enough in the past to know that if he gave any hint of wanting to be drafted, it would be seen by most editors as fatal insolence.

ON 16 JANUARY²³, a “Roosevelt National Committee” was independently established in Chicago. It set up offices in the Congress Hotel. What Current Literature called a “Roosevelt obsession”²⁴ at once spread to all parts of the country where GOP primaries were being planned. Speculation mounted in the press that the Colonel would announce his intentions in Ohio in late February.

“I fear things²⁵ are going to become very bitter before long,” Taft told Major Butt. “But, Archie, I am going to defeat him in the convention.”

The President had no doubt that a progressive revolution was being plotted at Oyster Bay. He had heard from Henry Stimson that the Colonel was “as hard as nails”²⁶ in his anger at having been named in the steel suit.

Taft seemed less affected by the prospect of a split in the Republican Party than by the lingering effect of that anger. “It is hard²⁷, very hard, Archie, to see a devoted friendship going to pieces like a rope of sand.”

Major Butt noticed²⁸, as Adams had, that the President was deteriorating mentally and physically. He stayed up later and later at night, and during the day kept nodding off—so often on public occasions that Butt had to keep elbowing him in the ribs and coughing loudly in his ear.

La Follette, too²⁹, began to ail under the stress induced by Roosevelt’s silence. He saw that his most influential backers, James Garfield, Medill McCormick, and Gifford and Amos Pinchot, were daily less loyal to him. It was obvious that the slightest positive signal from Oyster Bay would make them beg to be released from their pledges. The senator announced through a spokesman that “nothing but death” would keep him from pursuing the nomination, right through to the convention.

He had hoped to³⁰ shine at a showdown between himself, Taft, Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson in early February, at the annual dinner of the Periodical Publishers Association in Philadelphia. All four were invited to appear, but the President and the Colonel, not wanting to look like co-equals, sent regrets. La Follette summoned up what strength he had left to write and rehearse the most important speech of his career. A spellbinding political orator, less preachy and ambiguous than Roosevelt, he felt confident of his power to win over the shapers of public opinion. Progressives who had already heard Wilson on the stump were less sanguine.

WITHIN TWO DAYS³¹ of the opening of his national headquarters in Chicago, the pressure on Roosevelt to declare had increased to such a point that he decided to yield—but only to a petition that made clear his reluctance to run. He asked the four Republican governors who were most energetically championing him (Chase Osborn of Michigan, Robert P. Bass of New Hampshire, William E. Glasscock of West Virginia, and Walter R. Stubbs of Kansas) to send him a written appeal for his candidacy. If they would argue that they were acting on behalf of the “plain people” who had elected them, he would feel “in honor bound” to say yes.

Frank Knox was appointed his roving emissary between the governors. Big and bluff, Knox was amply equipped to handle the various egos involved. He took it upon himself to solicit more gubernatorial signatures, and added those of Herbert S. Hadley of Missouri, Chester H. Aldrich of Nebraska, and Joseph M. Carey of Wyoming. With subsequent endorsements from Hiram Johnson of California and Robert S. Vessey of South Dakota, the appeal group represented a wide swath of country—considering that the South was Democratic territory, and the major industrial states were controlled by Taft-beholden bosses.

All this coordination³² took time, since some of the governors were more progressive than others, and regretted having to betray La Follette’s candidacy. Roosevelt complicated matters by toying with each executive separately, as if he wanted to delay the very petition he had invited.

Meanwhile, delegate-selection proceedings were under way in several states that had not yet adopted the primary system. On 23 January, Oklahoma’s Fourth District Republican convention grotesquely dramatized the factionalism of a party splitting three ways.

The local committee chairman, Edward Perry, was a Roosevelt man who hoped to create a progressive stampede for the Colonel. A letter from Gifford Pinchot reminded him that, as yet, La Follette was Taft’s only official challenger. Perry read the letter to the convention, but made plain that he still favored Roosevelt. This infuriated the rank and file supporting Taft. Pandemonium ensued³³, with Perry roaring “Slap Roosevelt in the face if you dare!” over contrary shrieks and howls. A posse of fake Rough Riders invaded the hall. For fifteen minutes they tried to storm the stage, but found it harder to take than the Heights of San Juan. Cigar-smoking Taft forces repelled them. One cavalryman got through on a miniature pony: the young son of Jack “Catch-’em-Alive” Abernathy, a friend of Roosevelt’s famous for seizing wolves by the tongue. The boy shrilled “I want Teddy!” to the crowd, touching off further furor. But then the organization men suppressed him, and the convention endorsed Taft over La Follette by a vote of 118 to 32. Perry, locally known as “Dynamite Ed,” showed his displeasure by going outside and detonating five hundred pounds of high explosives.

His district may have returned a slate of delegates loyal to the President, but he wanted the world to know that progressivism was a force to be reckoned with.

ROOSEVELT MAINTAINED FOR the rest of the month that he was not a candidate. “Do not for one³⁴ moment think that I shall be President next year,” he cautioned Joseph Bucklin Bishop, one of his most obsequious acolytes. “I write you, confidentially, that my own reading of the situation is that while there are a great many people in this country who are devoted to me, they do not form more than a substantial minority of the ten or fifteen millions of voters.… Unless I am greatly mistaken, the people have made up their mind that they wish some new instrument, that they do not wish me; and if I know myself, I am sincere when I tell you that this does not cause one least little particle of regret to me.”

By 2 February³⁵, however, the governors were on the verge of approving the language of their group petition, and Roosevelt confirmed to Hiram Johnson that he would run. He did not want to announce until the petition had been formally delivered to him. No word of his intent leaked through to members of the Periodical Publishers Association, meeting that night in Philadelphia. But before the evening was over, they had another news story, of major proportions.

Woodrow Wilson preceded³⁶ Senator La Follette to the podium and delivered a short, urbane, perfectly pitched address. Ray Stannard Baker, co-author of La Follette’s campaign autobiography, was present and felt excitement building in the audience. Wilson, he scribbled in his notebook, was somebody endowed with “unlimited reserves of power.”

La Follette, in contrast³⁷, behaved like a candidate not for office, but for a psychological breakdown. He was weak from a recent attack of ptomaine poisoning, starved of sleep, and possessed by the notion that Roosevelt wanted to destroy him. Before standing up, he swigged a glassful of whiskey. He began to speak at 10 P.M. and was still at it long after midnight, at times rereading whole chunks of his text without noticing, at others rambling so incoherently that Baker left the room in an agony of embarrassment. Wilson’s long face expressed alarm. Of all subjects, La Follette chose to rant at the “subservience of the press to special interests,” not to mention “a subtle new peril, the centralization of advertising, that will in time seek to gag you.” Magazine magnates boggled as his language grew personal, then, when it degenerated into yells of abuse, went to collect their hats and coats. The senator continued to rave, in a virtually empty hall, before slumping forward onto his script.

“That was³⁸ a pitiable tragedy,” Roosevelt mused, after reading about it in the newspapers. He wrote a letter of sympathy when he heard an extenuating detail: La Follette had been distraught over the imminence of a life-threatening operation on his daughter. Nevertheless, most progressives agreed with Pinchot that the senator had forfeited their support.

The pressure on Roosevelt to run now became overwhelming. “Politics are hateful,”³⁹ a worried Edith Roosevelt wrote Kermit. “Father thinks he must enter the fight since La Follette’s collapse.” Unable to bear the sight of any more politicians in broad-brimmed black hats besieging Sagamore Hill, she decamped, first to New York, then to Panama and Costa Rica with Ethel. She did not want to be around to hear Theodore make his announcement.

MARY LA FOLLETTE survived, and as she recovered, so did her father. He brushed aside⁴⁰ the advice of his aides to withdraw as a candidate, saying he would consider doing so only if they could get the Colonel to issue a declaration of insurgent principles dictated by himself. For a week, representatives of the two camps tried to broker such an agreement. But Roosevelt declined to make any statement whatever until 21 February, when he was due to address a convention drafting a new constitution for Ohio. His words there, moreover, would represent his own philosophy and nobody else’s.

Meanwhile, in what was seen as an ominous portent, Roosevelt supporters bolted⁴¹ the Florida Republican convention when it elected a delegate slate loyal to the President. Feeling themselves to be in the majority against Taft’s operatives, they chose their own delegation, and vowed to send it to Chicago in June, in an official contest for seating rights.

On the ninth⁴², about seventy members of the Roosevelt National Committee, representing twenty-four states, met in Chicago and authorized the dispatch of the governors’ petition. It was treated as a private communication that he could publish if he liked. But the governors made clear their feelings in a statement given to the press, even as Frank Knox, petition in hand, hurried to catch the fastest possible train east:

A principle is⁴³ of no avail without a man. A cause is lost without a leader. In Theodore Roosevelt we believe the principle has the man and the cause the leader. It is our opinion that this is the sentiment of the majority of the people of the United States.

Taft, seriously disturbed⁴⁴, told a Lincoln’s Birthday gathering of Republicans in New York that there were certain “extremists” in the Party who wished to give ordinary Americans—“people necessarily indifferently informed”—a participatory role in handling great public issues best left to Congress and the courts. “Such extremists are not progressives—they are political emotionalists or neurotics,” the President declared, in what was taken as a reference to Roosevelt.

Actually, he meant⁴⁵ La Follette, who was still under neurological care. But Taft’s dread of progressivism as an anarchic force, destabilizing the polity he revered—a nation governed by laws not men, answerable only to judges—was obvious, as was his likely rhetorical course if the Colonel dared to challenge him.

Roosevelt remained silent, working on his Ohio speech and urging a distraught Nicholas Longworth to remain loyal to the President. He himself could not. “If I were any⁴⁶ longer doubtful, I would telegraph you to come and talk to me, but it would not be any use now Nick. I have got to come out.”

He admitted⁴⁷ that his chances of beating the White House organization were no better than one in three. Already, political appointees suspected of favoring him were being dismissed around the country. For that reason, he needed to mount the most formidable and well-financed campaign possible at such a late date. Fortunately, there was no shortage of progressive idealists eager to volunteer their services, either because of the magic of his name, or because they believed he would further the cause. Recruitment was proceeding so well in thirty-one states that his organization looked to be virtually complete by the time he announced his candidacy.

Elihu Root made a last-minute effort to dissuade him from accepting the draft of the governors. “It seems to me⁴⁸ that those who ask you to make a declaration are asking you … to incur the considerable probability of being defeated for the nomination, or, if successful in that, of being defeated in the election, and that the consequences to your future, to your power of leadership in the interests of the causes which you have at heart, and to your position in history, would be so injurious that … no number of friends have any right to ask such a sacrifice.”

Root wrote pessimistically, knowing that nothing was less likely to deter his old friend than warnings of personal risk. “The time has come,”⁴⁹ Roosevelt replied, “when I must speak.”

He was beyond caution now, beyond the moralizing over duty and ideals that had obsessed him much of the past year. Day by day, he felt battle lust rising. And typically, when he rose in Columbus to address the Ohio constitutional convention, he said nothing about the governors’ petition and espoused the most radical issue in progressive politics.

LITTLE MORE THAN two⁵⁰ weeks before, he had assured Henry Stimson, “I do not myself believe in the recall of the judiciary.” The secretary of war was still trying to live down their doomed double effort to launch a reform coup d’état in New York in the fall of 1910, and had been rendered nervous by Roosevelt’s Outlook article recommending the annulment of judicial decisions that favored property rights over human rights. No proposal could be more certain to enrage the President, who regarded even questions of national honor as “justiciable.” Was this to be a theme of his coming campaign? Would he also suggest the recall of judges, state and federal? And if so, were justices of the Supreme Court next on his Robespierrean agenda?

Roosevelt set⁵¹ a defiant tone at the outset by declaring, “I believe … that human rights are supreme over all other rights; that wealth should be the servant, not the master of the people.” Yet for the next half hour his speech, cast in the form of an ideological lecture, was not provocative. It covered the whole range of issues with which a modern state had to deal as it adjusted itself to an age in which individualism was secondary to collectivism. Only a revitalized democracy could prevent industrial and political combinations from making property rights the basis of all law.

“Shape your constitutional⁵² action,” he advised the delegates, “so that the people will be able through their legislative bodies, or … by direct popular vote, to provide workmen’s compensation acts, to regulate the hours of labor for children and for women, to provide for their safety while at work, and to prevent overwork or work under unhygienic or unsafe conditions.”

No reasonable Republican could object to granting such benefits, although there was a hint of Jacksonian threat in the phrase by direct popular vote. It implied more participation in policymaking than William Howard Taft (to name one Ohioan) felt ordinary Americans deserved. Roosevelt proceeded to recite the basic progressive creed, pledging himself to direct primaries, direct senatorial elections, and—when legislators quailed or failed—the initiative and referendum. As to the recall of short-term elective officers, he favored it, but only when public disillusionment was extreme.

“There remains the question of the recall of judges,” Roosevelt said.

I do not believe in adopting the recall save as a last resort.… But either the recall will have to be adopted or else it will have to be made much easier than it now is to get rid, not merely of a bad judge, but of a judge who, however virtuous, has grown so out of touch with social needs and facts that he is unfit longer to render good service on the bench. It is nonsense to say that impeachment meets the difficulty.…

When a judge decides a constitutional question, when he decides what the people as a whole can and cannot do, the people should have the right to recall that decision if they think that it is wrong. We should hold the judiciary in all respect, but it is both absurd and degrading to make a fetish of a judge or of any one else.

At no point did he mention the President as the nation’s ranking such fetishist. However, Roosevelt’s contempt for legalistic justice, as opposed to executive action in favor of human rights, was plain. He cited a workmen’s compensation suit against the Southern Buffalo Railroad, recently rejected by the New York State Court of Appeals. The judge in that case, like Judge Baldwin in Hoxie v. the New Haven Railroad, had declared the federal statute unconstitutional in terms of common law. “I know of no⁵³ popular vote by any state of the union,” Roosevelt said, “more flagrant in its defiance of right and justice, more short-sighted in its inability to face the changed needs of our civilization.”

THE REACTION TO⁵⁴ “Roosevelt’s Recall Speech” was angrier and more widespread than that following his New Nationalism address eighteen months before. The American Bar Association came out solidly against it. He was assailed from quarters as far away as Great Britain for the “sheer madness,” “demagogy,” “absolutism,” and “despicable nature” of his prejudice against judges. It was to be⁵⁵ expected that the New York World should accuse him of inciting “mob rule,” and that the Wall Street Journal should wisecrack: “Those most enthusiastic over the recall of judicial decisions are prevented by prison rules from working for the Colonel.” But even such progressives as Congressman Victor Murdock and Senator William E. Borah felt that Roosevelt had gone too far. “One statement frequently heard today,” The New York Times reported on 22 February, “is that the Colonel’s speech makes Senator La Follette look like a reactionary.” The Texas Progressive Republican League voted to support William Howard Taft.

Academics reverent of anything canonical in law or political doctrine were especially vituperative. Andrew Dickson White, the former president of Cornell, called the notion of popular amendment of state constitutions “the most monstrous proposal ever presented to the American people, or any other people.” James Day, chancellor of Syracuse University, declared, “Emma Goldman could not make a more violent attack on our institutions.” Even clerics weighed in. The aged Episcopal bishop of Albany, who had known Roosevelt since his days as governor, called him “erratic, unsafe, and unfair.”

Doubts about⁵⁶ Roosevelt’s sanity recirculated. Justice W. O. Howard of the New York Supreme Court described him as “a madman” with “the instinct of a beast.” The editor of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology theorized that the Colonel would “go down in history as one of the most illustrious psychological examples of the distortion of conscious mental processes through the force of subconscious wishes.” A Chicago lawyer offered $5,000 to any medical or charitable institution that could arrange to have Roosevelt certified. Henry Adams warned Brooks Adams, “His mind has gone to pieces.… He is, as Taft justly said, a neurotic, and his neurosis may end like La Follette’s, in a nervous collapse or acute mania.”

An appalled Henry⁵⁷ Cabot Lodge could only say to reporters, “The Colonel and I have long since agreed to disagree on a number of points.”

ALMOST UNHEARD IN the general uproar over Roosevelt’s speech was a casual remark he had made en route to Columbus: “My hat⁵⁸ is in the ring. The fight is on and I am stripped to the buff.” It took several days for the seventeen monosyllables to work their way into the folk consciousness. But when they did, realization spread that he had, at last, confirmed his candidacy—in yet another of the popular images he coined so effortlessly. By 25 February, when he arrived in Boston to issue his formal acceptance of the petition of the governors, The Hat in the Ring had already joined The Man in the Arena, The Strenuous Life, The Big Stick, The Square Deal, The Black Crystal, and Malefactors of Great Wealth in the American political lexicon.

“I WILL ACCEPT⁵⁹ the nomination for President if it is tendered to me, and I will adhere to this decision until the convention has expressed its preference.”

As Roosevelt’s letter to the governors went out on the evening wires, he relaxed in the Boston home of Robert Grant, a liberal and literary judge he had known for many years. Grant thought⁶⁰ that the Colonel had made a self-destructive mistake, and carefully observed his looks and behavior for the record. “I never saw him in better physical shape. He is fairly stout, but his color is good.… He halts in his sentences occasionally; but from a layman’s point of view there was nothing to suggest mental impairment, unless the combination of egotism, faith in his own doctrines, fondness for power and present hostility to Taft … can be termed symptomatic.… He was a most delightful guest.”

For all the pleasure Judge Grant took in the Colonel’s company—and that of William Allen White and the biographer William Roscoe Thayer⁶¹ as fellow dinner guests—he was not disposed to congratulate him on running for the presidency again. “Has not every one of your friends advised you against it?”

Roosevelt admitted that was true. For a long time, he said, he had been “very uncertain” about what to do. But the urgency of the progressives who looked to him for leadership had finally convinced him that he had to rescue the reform program so disastrously mismanaged by President Taft. To have ignored their appeals, to have waited until 1916 to run again, would have been “cowardice,” he said—“a case of il gran refiuto.”

Dante’s phrase⁶² clearly appealed to him, and he repeated it, evoking the refusal of a thirteenth-century hermit to accept elevation to the Papacy.

“But you will agree that Taft has made a good president this year?” Grant spoke out of a sense of fairness, rather than loyalty to the administration.

Roosevelt said he thought that all Taft had done was to reduce the Republican Party to a torpor reminiscent of that of “the Bell and Everett Whigs just before the Civil War.” He plunged into a discussion of patronage with White, and Grant noticed that he saw betrayal in every reasonable move Taft had made to consolidate himself as president.

“But will any of the Party leaders support you?” the judge asked.

“No. None of them; not even Lodge, I think.” He said he believed his only hope of winning was to “reach the popular vote through direct primaries,” in states democratic enough to hold them.

“But the situation is complex, I suppose? You would like to be President.”

“You are right, it is complex. I like power; but I care nothing to be President as President. I am interested in these ideas of mine and I want to carry them through, and feel that I am the one to carry them through.” He cited, by way of example, his belief that the will of the people was being “thwarted” by reactionary courts.

Grant was a bona fide member of the Harvard Republican establishment, but unlike most of his associates, saw no constitutional threat in the Colonel’s Columbus speech. Thayer did, saying that anyone advising the recall of judicial decisions wished to subject American institutions to “the whims of the populace at the moment.” Roosevelt, keeping his temper, pointed out that he had excluded the Supreme Court from his proposal. Nor was he advocating the removal of judges themselves. He was concerned only with judicial decisions at the state level, in cases where humanitarian legislation was struck down on fake constitutional grounds.

Thayer and Grant were impressed with his self-assurance. But Theodore in private was different from Theodore on the stump. They saw that his moral fervor, the way he had of charging argument with more passion than it needed, would prevent persons of colder blood from understanding that he was actually a thoughtful man.

For five hours, with White, they tried in vain to change his resolve to run. At eleven-thirty the party broke up. Thayer, who was not staying over, went out into the night, feeling saddened⁶³ and apprehensive. Just before the Colonel went up to bed, Grant made the mistake of mentioning his cool treatment of Taft.

Roosevelt stopped at the foot of the stairway. “It was through me and my friends that he became President.”

It was a tense moment. Both of them were aware that his announcement was even now thumping through printing presses across the country.

They continued on up the stairs. Roosevelt stretched out his arms and said, “I feel as fine as silk.”