1912

Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs -The Election that Changed the Country

James Chace

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781439188262
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Beginning with former president Theodore Roosevelt's return in 1910 from his African safari, Chace brilliantly unfolds a dazzling political circus that featured four extraordinary candidates. When Roosevelt failed to defeat his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, for the Republican nomination, he ran as a radical reformer on the Bull Moose ticket. Meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson, the ex-president of Princeton, astonished everyone by seizing the Democratic nomination from the bosses who had made him New Jersey's governor. Most revealing of the reformist spirit sweeping the land was the charismatic socialist Eugene Debs, who polled an unprecedented one million votes.Wilson's "accidental" election had lasting impact on America and the world. The broken friendship between Taft and TR inflicted wounds on the Republican Party that have never healed, and the party passed into the hands of a conservative ascendancy that reached its fullness under Reagan and George W. Bush. Wilson's victory imbued the Democratic Party with a progressive idealism later incarnated in FDR, Truman, and LBJ.1912 changed America.

PART ONE

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America’s Destiny

ONE

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“Back from Elba”

AN ASTOUNDING AND dreadfully poignant letter from his successor, William Howard Taft, awaited Theodore Roosevelt a few days before he was to board an ocean liner for his return to America. It was June 10, 1910, and for more than a year Roosevelt had deliberately absented himself from the political scene at home to hunt wild beasts in Africa with his nineteen-year-old son, Kermit. After the safari, TR was joined by his wife, Edith, and their daughter Ethel. The family then toured Europe where thousands hailed the former president of the United States, whose drive, ebullience, and sweeping intellect made him the most sought-after statesman in the world.

Roosevelt read with growing sadness the letter Taft had written in his own hand on May 26, a casting up of the accounts of the Taft administration, and, behind his words, a barely concealed plea for sympathy and forgiveness. “It is now a year and three months since I assumed office and I have had a hard time,” Taft wrote:

I do not know that I have had harder luck than other presidents but I do know that thus far I have succeeded far less than have others. I have been conscientiously trying to carry out your policies, but my method for doing so has not worked smoothly. . . . My year and two [sic] months have been heavier for me to bear because of Mrs. Taft’s condition. A nervous collapse, with apparent symptoms of paralysis . . . made it necessary for me to be as careful as possible to prevent another attack. Mrs. Taft is not an easy patient and an attempt to control her only increased the nervous strain.¹

In London, a troubled Roosevelt dictated a hasty reply. He admitted that he was “much concerned about some of the things I see and am told; but what I have felt it best to do was to say absolutely nothing—and indeed to keep my mind as open as I kept my mouth shut.”²

The day after he composed that letter Roosevelt disappeared from London to go walking through the valley of Itchen to hear English songbirds with the British foreign minister, Sir Edward Grey; during this outing a far more alarming description of the ex-president’s views emerges. As Grey recalled, “He spoke of Taft and of their work together with very live affection; he had wished Taft to succeed him, had supported him, made way for him. How could he now break with Taft and attack him? Roosevelt spoke of this prospect in a way that left no doubt of sincerity and poignancy of feeling. On the other hand, how could he sit still and see all his own work being undone and the policies in which he believed being ruined? Roosevelt had come to no decision then, but there was evidence of strong internal combustion of spirit. Such spirits as his, however, are not consumed in this process; the result is energy, decision, and action.”³

DEPARTING A YEAR EARLIER with Kermit for an eleven-month safari to British East Africa (now the Republic of Kenya), along with a team of Smithsonian naturalists and taxidermists, Roosevelt wrote to the journalist William Allen White that he had planned the trip “so that I can get where no one can accuse me of running, nor do Taft the injustice of accusing him of permitting me to run, the job.” Already, in the time that had elapsed between the election in November and the inauguration in March, Taft knew that, as he wrote to Roosevelt at the end of February 1909, “People have attempted to represent that you and I were in some way at odds during the last three months, whereas you and I know that there has not been the slightest difference between us.” He signed his note, “With love and affection, my dear Theodore.”⁴

Roosevelt answered his letter promptly: “Your letter is so nice—nice isn’t anything like a strong enough word, but at the moment to use words as strong as I feel would look sloppy.”⁵ Although Taft was right in declaring that the two friends were not at odds, he could not know of TR’s doubts, which Roosevelt had confided to the journalist Mark Sullivan the day before his departure from the White House on March 3, 1909. Roosevelt and Sullivan had walked to the door and were looking out to the lowering sky over Lafayette Park. “How do you really think Taft will make out?” Sullivan asked. “He’s all right,” the president replied. “He means well and he’ll do his best. But he’s weak.”⁶

Even though it meant that he was away from his wife, whom he both adored and depended on for her sage political judgments, Roosevelt reacted with characteristically boyish excitement as he embraced the African adventure. And, indeed, it went off remarkably well. Neither TR nor Kermit, who had taken time off from Harvard, suffered from any debilitating illness, and his father was justifiably proud of Kermit’s courage. Writing to his oldest boy, Ted, he described Kermit as “a perfectly cool and daring fellow. Indeed he is a little too reckless and keeps my heart in my throat: he is not a good shot, not even as good as I am, and Heaven knows I am poor enough; but he is a bold rider, always cool and fearless, and eager to work all day long. He ran down and killed a Giraffe alone . . . and the day before yesterday he stopped a charging Leopard within six yards of him, after it had mauled one of our porters.” Roosevelt may have been, as he put it to his sister, “dreadfully homesick for Edie,” but he also admitted that he was “absolutely contented,” and as he rode along in a special seat built for him over the cowcatcher of the engine, he hardly knew “a thing which is going on in the other world.”⁷

He had brought along his “pigskin library” of eighty books, which meant that he read at least two a week, and many of them several times.⁸ Roosevelt later wrote in his own book, African Game Trails, that he found in Africa much the same thrill he had first experienced when he was much younger and sought solace in the Badlands of the Dakotas from the pain he was feeling after the sudden death of his first wife, Alice Lee. In Africa, he found

the joy of wandering through lonely lands; the joy of hunting the mighty and terrible lords of the wilderness. . . . But there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm. . . . swamps where the slime oozes and bubbles and festers in the steaming heat; lakes like seas; skies that burn above deserts . . . mighty rivers rushing out of the heart of the continent through the sadness of endless marshes; forests of gorgeous beauty, where death broods in the dark and silent depths.⁹

The “other world” rudely intruded on his African idyll on January 17, 1910, when a native runner brought a cable from the Press Agency with the news that Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, an ardent conservationist, had been dismissed by President Taft. Roosevelt who was hunting the rare white rhino in the Congo, about two degrees north of the equator, was shocked by what had befallen Pinchot, one of his closest collaborators; but, as he wrote later that day to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, “Of course I said nothing. I most earnestly hope it is not true.”¹⁰

The African postman—“who runs stark naked with the mail”—later picked up another letter, this one from Roosevelt to Pinchot. “Dear Gifford,” TR wrote. “We have just heard by special runner that you have been removed. I cannot believe it. I do not know any man in public life who has rendered quite the service you have rendered.”¹¹ Roosevelt would not receive for another month Gifford’s charges that Taft had all but abandoned TR’s environmental policies. In an anguished letter Gifford began by declaring, “We have fallen back down the hill you led us up.”¹²

Although Pinchot bore the rather lowly title of chief forester, serving under Secretary of the Interior James R. Garfield, he had become vital to Roosevelt’s campaign to save the wilderness from rapacious loggers. Moreover, Pinchot had achieved a true friendship with Roosevelt. Like TR, Pinchot was rich and well connected, as well as having a strong social conscience.

Pinchot believed in “scientific management” of the North American forest, and, along with Roosevelt, saw himself as anointed to save and wisely use America’s resources. In 1891 Congress had passed a law permitting the president to put certain federally owned properties into “forest reserves.” Other presidents had already transferred some fifty million acres of timberland into the reserve system. Roosevelt expanded the practice. To help accomplish this, he chose Gifford Pinchot as a man who combined, as Roosevelt saw it, “entire disinterestedness and sanity” with “great energy and knowledge.” Guided by Pinchot, TR placed another 150 million acres as forest reserves.¹³

Taft retained Pinchot after dropping Interior Secretary James R. Garfield and replacing him with Richard Ballinger, a one-time reform mayor of Seattle who now apparently favored exploitation of natural resources. Thus, a struggle between Pinchot and Ballinger was all but inevitable, and Taft concluded that he had to fire Pinchot.

According to Cabot Lodge, who also wrote Roosevelt about the matter, Pinchot had brought the ouster on himself by allowing his disagreements with Ballinger to escalate into virtual insubordination. Lodge, hearing that Pinchot was planning to go abroad to meet TR, warned the ex-president not to be “put in the apparent attitude of upholding Pinchot against the administration.” As Lodge put it, “There is a constantly growing thought of you and your return to the Presidency.” Above all, “I want you to be entirely aloof from these things, at least until we can meet and discuss the situation.”

Upon receiving Lodge’s letter when he met a steamer on the Upper White Nile, Roosevelt wrote the senator to assure him that he would “say nothing about politics until I have been home long enough to know the situation.” TR would be willing to meet Pinchot if he came abroad, but, he wrote Lodge, they “must renominate” Taft for the presidency in 1912.¹⁴

Arriving on March 14, 1910, in Khartoum in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, TR went directly to the railroad station to join Edith Roosevelt and their eighteen-year-old daughter, Ethel. Together with Kermit, the family made their way by train and steamer down the Nile to Cairo, and thence to Alexandria, where they boarded the steamer Prinz Heinrich for Naples. In Rome as in Naples, Roosevelt was greeted with great enthusiasm at state dinners and meetings with mayors and monarchs. Far from being dazzled by royalty, Roosevelt was both amused and distressed by them, writing of their “appallingly dreary life” and speculating that meeting him was “a relief to the tedium, the dull, narrow routine of their lives.”

These observations were only reinforced by his travels to other capitals on the continent. Kaiser Wilhelm II flattered him by inviting him to review German troops for five hours. Later, the kaiser sent him a photograph of the two of them on horseback talking earnestly. On this, the kaiser wrote: “The Colonel of the Rough Riders instructing the German Emperor in field tactics.” On another, he scribbled: “When we shake hands we shake the world.”¹⁵

WHILE ROOSEVELT was making his stately journey from Egypt to Italy, a tall, lean gentleman with thinning hair and a dark, drooping mustache had boarded the liner President Grant for Europe. This was Gifford Pinchot, heading for Porto Maurizio on the Italian Riviera to see his old friend and protector, Theodore Roosevelt.¹⁶

The Roosevelts, wearied by the round of dinners and receptions they were attending, were hoping to relax at a villa rented by Edith’s spinster sister, Emily Carow, in the ancient town of Porto Maurizio on the Ligurian Sea. They arrived on April 10 to encounter once again ecstatic cries of “Viva Roosevelt” from what seemed the entire population of the town of six thousand. After a ceremony during which the mayor made Roosevelt an honorary citizen, they repaired to the villa for the night. That same evening, Gifford Pinchot checked into the Riviera Palace Hotel, and the next morning Roosevelt emerged from his villa at nine o’clock to greet Pinchot with a joyful shout of “Hello, Gifford.”

They talked for two hours, which Pinchot recorded in his diary as “one of the best & most satisfactory talks with T.R. I ever had.”¹⁷ Not only did Pinchot defend his position in criticizing Taft’s new secretary of the interior, but he also brought with him letters from some of TR’s closest collaborators, such as Republican Senators Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana and Jonathan P. Dolliver of Iowa, and journalist William Allen White. They provided a rich bill of particulars against the administration and, most especially, criticized the president for cooperating too closely with the reactionary and imperious Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, so powerful that he was called the “manager of the United States,” and the acknowledged boss of the Senate.

The Republican arch-conservatives had always been wary of TR’s commitment to political and economic reform: they detested Roosevelt’s effort to regulate the great business and financial trusts, his disposition to reduce tariffs, and his environmental policy of protecting and conserving the wilderness.

By signing the Payne-Aldrich tariff bill, Taft seemed to have broken the promises made in the Republican platform of 1908, when the party had pledged tariff revision, which was understood to mean a reduction in the high levels established a decade earlier. Aldrich had worked closely with the equally conservative, whiskey-drinking, poker-playing speaker of the house, “Uncle” Joe Cannon, ostensibly to support the lower tariff that Taft wanted. Although Aldrich, along with Cannon and Sereno Payne, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, did produce a bill that reduced the rates on a number of items, most of the changes went upward. In humorist Finley Peter Dunne’s newspaper column, his imaginary Irish saloon keeper-philosopher Mr. Dooley observed: “Th’ Republican party has been thrue to its promises. Look at th’ free list if ye don’t believe it. Practically ivrything nicessary to existence comes in free. Here it is. Curling stones, teeth, sea moss, newspapers, nux vomica, Palu, canary bird seed.”¹⁸ Although Taft was deeply wounded by Aldrich’s betrayal, he refused to interfere with the legislative process, as TR had often done, and became therefore even more dependent on Aldrich and Cannon. As Senator Dolliver put it, Taft is a “ponderous and amiable man completely surrounded by men who know exactly what they want.”

The meeting between Pinchot and Roosevelt was a turning point in Roosevelt’s attitude toward Taft. In the letter TR composed to Lodge immediately after his encounter with Pinchot, responding to the senator’s urging that Roosevelt save the party from defeat in the upcoming congressional elections by supporting the Taft administration, Roosevelt replied with some outrage that since the administration had “completely twisted round the policies I advocated and acted upon,” supporting Taft was out of the question.¹⁹

The reform legislation that had been passed during his presidency justified in Roosevelt’s eyes his growing disenchantment with his successor. Had he not begun some forty suits against trusts? Not that he wanted to break them up so much as regulate them; he was not against big business, he was against wickedness. Only too often he had seen that the very rich, those “malefactors of great wealth,” were often the very wicked. As he had written to the investment banker Jacob Schiff in 1907, “I wish to do everything in my power to aid every honest businessman, and the dishonest businessman I wish to punish simply as I wo...