Chapter Forty-Seven

Bull Moose

In the month after King Edward’s funeral, Colonel Roosevelt returned home to New York, on June 18, 1910, to a tumultuous welcome. Crowds had been gathering since dawn of that summer day, and by 7:30 they were lining the parade route from Battery Park north five miles along Broadway and Fifth Avenue as far uptown as Fifty-Ninth Street. Amid the horns and whistles of small craft and the boom of cannon from Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, the Colonel, who had been out of the country for fourteen months, disembarked in the harbor and, coming ashore in midmorning, took part with his family in a grand celebration. Dignitaries in fourteen open carriages rolled slowly uptown, preceded and followed by mounted police, marching bands, Rough Riders on horseback, and Spanish-American War veterans afoot, Roosevelt as honoree showered with confetti and ticker tape and engulfed in the cheers of nearly a million fellow citizens.

For the Colonel, it was the capstone of more than a year of glory. As African big-game hunter he had bagged among much else nine lions, thirteen rhinos, seven giraffes, eight elephants, twenty zebras, and six fearsome water buffaloes, and had sent back to the Smithsonian 3,000 skins and 13,000 specimens to augment the holdings of that scientific repository. Once arrived in Europe, in early April 1910, the hunter had metamorphosed into world statesman, a former president of the United States honored wherever he went: in Rome, Vienna, Budapest, Paris (where he delivered a rapturously received address at the Sorbonne, “The Man in the Arena,” among his most characteristic and frequently cited), on to Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Christiania in Norway (now Oslo, where, as recipient of the Nobel Prize, he spoke appropriately of attaining world peace), to Stockholm, to Berlin (where Kaiser Wilhelm, whom he was meeting for the first time, honored the distinguished American by having him review units of the German army), and finally to England (where Mr. Roosevelt not only represented the United States at King Edward VII’s funeral but also delivered the prestigious Romanes Lecture at Oxford and was awarded honorary degrees both there and at Cambridge University).

Now he was home, to the cheers and good wishes of huge numbers of his countrymen—merely a private citizen, however, author of the recent bestselling African Game Trails and under contract to furnish the journal Outlook with regular commentary on matters of his own choosing.

As for political affairs, the Colonel had vowed to write nothing on that subject for at least these first couple of months back at Sagamore Hill. Let President Taft discharge his duties without any second-guessing from his still enormously popular predecessor. Yet it was hard to keep quiet. To Roosevelt’s way of thinking, Taft’s presidency had been a disaster. The Colonel would hold his peace for now, but it pained him to see how an old friend elevated to the White House was betraying causes that the two had fought for when Roosevelt was president and Taft his able governor of the Philippines and secretary of war. For example, this current chief executive had let himself be persuaded to fire from his cabinet Gifford Pinchot, onetime head of the forestry service with whom Roosevelt had worked closely ever since his days as governor of New York: the most valuable man in his own administration, the Colonel had come to believe, and the author of Roosevelt’s conservation program that had awakened Americans to the need to preserve their unique natural heritage. In Pinchot’s place, the new president was supporting a complacent functionary much more to the liking of greedy timber and mining interests out West. By doing so, as well as through various other presidential decisions, Taft appeared meekly to be delivering Republican leadership back into the hands of the Old Guard, the party of Lincoln thus wrenched from the plain people whom Roosevelt had championed, in order—as in the bygone Gilded Age—to make it once more the servant of the wealthy few.

“Taft, who is such an admirable fellow, has shown himself,” according to his mentor, who had got the man the presidency in the first place, “such an utterly commonplace leader; good-natured; feebly well-meaning; but with plenty of small motive, and totally unable to grasp or put into execution any great policy.” The Cincinnati judge raised to the top job in the land appeared to be supporting whatever in the law protected property. Which was all well and good: Roosevelt believed in the sanctity of property, too; but he also believed in those parts of the Constitution that speak of providing for and promoting the general welfare. His idol Lincoln had put the matter succinctly: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” To be sure, that was but one side of the argument—the side, however, that capitalists should be heeding. The working man for his part should keep in mind the other side: “Capital has its rights”—again quoting Lincoln—“which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.” For property is the fruit of labor, and “a positive good in the world.” But, as Roosevelt insisted in a speech he delivered at Osawatomie, Kansas, in late August 1910, scarcely two months after his return from Europe, those who own property should expect no governmental favors merely for being rich.

History through the ages records an ongoing conflict, he said on that same occasion, “between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess.” At present the conflict takes the form of a “struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.” What the current strife is about, then, according to Roosevelt (energized, as ever, by strife), is the effort “to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.” At Osawatomie, outdoors, standing on a kitchen table, the speaker made clear to his large audience, many of them veterans of an earlier great conflict, that he sought no more than “what you fought for in the Civil War. I ask that civil life be carried on according to the spirit in which the army was carried on. You never get perfect justice, but the effort in handling the army was to bring to the front the men who could do the job. Nobody grudged promotion to Grant, or Sherman, or Thomas, or Sheridan, because they earned it. The only complaint was when a man got promotion which he did not earn.”

Give everybody a chance: our great republic was founded on that principle. No aristocracy, no established church, no entrenched privilege. For the first time a nation of continental extent was exhibiting “the triumph of a real democracy,” one based on merit, by means of “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.” That ideal, of no privileged favorites and opportunity for all, must be lived up to. Yet President Taft’s policies were too often indulging special interests—the well connected, the powerful few—at the expense of Lincoln’s plain people and the Constitution’s general welfare.

If anyone else could have restored the Great Emancipator’s party to its original purposes, Roosevelt would have given such a one his full support. But nobody adequate to the task came forward. Only Colonel Roosevelt (he convinced himself, encouraged by many of his fellow citizens) was sufficiently selfless, large of motive, full of vigor, and ready to reenter the political fray in the service of the nation by taking up the cudgels against his former dear friend Will Taft. As for his earlier, two-term pledge, the Colonel now explained that he had meant all along two successive terms, one after the other, uninterrupted. This late—and him years out of the White House—the pledge about not running again no longer applied. Thus, in February 1912, Theodore Roosevelt told the press that he was stripped to the buff, and his hat was in the ring. The image evokes a makeshift boxing ring roped off in some village square, a roaming pugilist on hand to fight whoever in town is willing to stand up to him for a bit of prize money. Anybody so inclined tosses his hat in the ring, takes off his shirt, climbs between the ropes—and may the better man win. So our Teddy would be coming to fisticuffs with Big Bill Taft. The contest promised tension and rollicking excitement; yet Roosevelt’s determining to seek the presidency in 1912 came near to breaking his old friend’s heart.

Even so, in the end Taft resolved to fight back. Shortly before, twelve states had introduced the novelty of primaries as a way to let voters have a say in choosing nominees. Roosevelt entered all the primaries, campaigning flat out and ending by winning nine of the twelve, including the one in Taft’s own state of Ohio. Accordingly, when delegates met in Chicago that summer to pick the Republican candidate, the Roosevelt faction had amassed impressive support among the populace at large. But the convention machinery remained in the hands of the Old Guard, who managed to disqualify most of Roosevelt’s delegates in favor of the regulars, pledged to Taft. Charging theft, TR’s supporters stormed out, held their own convention, and nominated their man for president at the head of a new, third party—the National Progressives—which chose as its emblem a bull moose, its candidate in the course of the fight proclaiming himself as fit as a bull moose to lead.

A three-ring circus, then: elephant, bull moose, and donkey. The Bull Moose platform was designed to curb the power of big business in national affairs. Thus, one plank demanded that lobbyists be registered, another that campaign contributions be limited and amounts disclosed. Further, the platform called for constitutional amendments providing for a national income tax and for the election of senators directly by the people (rather than by state legislators, as the Constitution stipulated). And an inheritance tax would be set up to frustrate any burgeoning aristocracy’s passing of its wealth down through the generations. This same platform went on to advocate a national health service, the vote for women, a minimum wage for women in the workforce, an eight-hour workday, compensation for work-related injuries, limits on the use of injunctions to break up strikes, relief for farmers, and insurance for the disabled, the elderly, and the unemployed.

In effect, the Progressive platform of 1912 provided specifics to flesh out Lincoln’s earlier praise of labor in general. Business of course denounced the document as communistic, the moneyed classes loath to support any such radical program. Most of their funds flowed the other way, into the Taft campaign. Democrats, meanwhile, sensing the nation’s current progressive mood, had nominated as their candidate the former president of Princeton University, now reform governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, who ended by campaigning as an alternative for liberals and—with Roosevelt poised to split the Republican vote—a leader who could win.

When the ballots were counted that November of 1912, Roosevelt had brought about the only instance in American history where a third-party candidate outpolled the nominee of one of the two major parties at the national level. Taft the Republican received 23 percent of the popular vote; Roosevelt the Progressive won 27 percent. But the Democrat Wilson captured 42 percent—and the election—with a crushing majority in the electoral college, of 435 for Wilson, 88 for Roosevelt, and a measly 8 for the incumbent, Mr. Taft.

“Well, we have gone down in a smashing defeat,” Roosevelt remarked of his loss. “Whether it is a Waterloo or a Bull Run, time only can tell.” As matters turned out, it was a Waterloo. Denied the power he so ardently craved—not for its own sake (he insisted) but for what he could do with it for the nation’s benefit and the world’s—Theodore Roosevelt, just turned fifty-four, found himself at loose ends. By the next presidential campaign his Progressives had dwindled into irrelevancy; and TR was back in the Republican fold supporting New York’s governor Charles Evans Hughes, a presidential candidate he felt no affection for, against the incumbent President Wilson, a politician he despised. But by that later summer and fall, of 1916, Roosevelt was a changed man, prematurely aged, in a world that had altered drastically as well.

After losing his 1912 presidential bid, the Colonel had gone to South America—he and his wife Edith—to visit a continent they had never seen, to fulfill lucrative speaking engagements, and to be with son Kermit, approaching his mid-twenties that fall of 1913 and building railroads in Brazil. Kermit had accompanied his father on the African safari four years earlier, a young man apparently unacquainted with fear and thus, perhaps, the Colonel’s favorite son. They planned an adventure now—Roosevelt’s last chance to be a boy, he said—so after seeing Mrs. Roosevelt off in Valparaiso on her return home, he and Kermit (following a spell of jaguar-hunting in Uruguay) joined twenty others on an exploring expedition deep in the Brazilian rainforest. There was a river in there whose source was known but its course uncharted—the River of Doubt it was called, Rio da Dúvida—and the expedition meant to follow that river down, gathering specimens along the way, and discover where it came out. On February 27, 1914, the party got under way in seven heavy, awkward dugout canoes: a former president and his son, a physician, an ornithologist, a professional explorer, his assistant, and sixteen Brazilian porters and paddlers, all ill-equipped, as it happened, for the ordeal that lay before them.

Roosevelt very nearly died. It was a horrible journey, two months of heat and relentless rain, of rapids innumerable, of portages around those rapids one after another, each track through the jungle taking eight or ten hours to hack clear, log rollers made and laid down to drag the one-ton dugouts overland, supplies borne the distance around falls and the impassably swollen rapids to be reloaded for the brief stretches where the river leveled out before raging impassably again. Natives lurked in the woods, and the rains poured down. Fire ants, sandflies, bees, wasps in great numbers, ticks, incessant gnats, poisonous snakes, mosquitoes, piranhas, malaria—and the unforeseen mishaps: a dugout dislodged and carried irretrievably downriver, causing a perilous delay while a new one was gouged out as supplies ran low. It was on the occasion of trying to retrieve another dugout wedged in boulders that Roosevelt at work in the swirling current banged his knee and opened a wound from a carriage accident years before. The abscess grew inflamed. The sufferer lapsed into delirium, helpless, his life in jeopardy. All of their lives were jeopardized as the journey lengthened, their ill-chosen food about exhausted, any hunting for game impossible in the thick growth on shore, and the question pressing: would they get out at all? At last, at long last, they did come upon a rubber-porter’s solitary hut at the water’s edge and realized they had drifted, just barely in time, to safety. After two months and nearly a thousand miserable miles of exploration the exhausted team emerged at the Madeira, a tributary of the Amazon—earth’s greatest river—the raging stream just traversed having proved to be as long as the Rhine.

When he got back to the States, Roosevelt weighed fifty-five pounds less than when he set out, limping, severely weakened; and thereafter he never fully recovered from what the adventure had put him through.

The diminished former president landed in New York on May 19, 1914. A month later, on June 28, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his consort Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead in the Serbian city of Sarajevo. Outraged, the Austrian government issued a July ultimatum that set impossible demands on Serbia as retribution. In addressing those demands, the Serbs came up short. Austria, followed by its ally Germany, broke off relations and mobilized its armed forces. Russia came to the defense of fellow Slavs. France, in alliance with Russia, felt obliged to honor its treaty; and England, allied with France, entered the conflict as well.

Thus, in August 1914, the First World War—the so-called Great War—began. Above all else, Roosevelt wanted to get into it. He loathed what he saw as President Wilson’s dithering early on. Germany violated Belgium’s neutrality to strike at France, and Wilson did nothing about it. How different the response would have been had Roosevelt been president! Then in May 1915, a German U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania off the Irish coast. One hundred twenty-eight Americans drowned; and again, the professor-president did nothing beyond dispatching protests to the German government. Words, words. “There’s such a thing,” President Wilson said, “as a man being too proud to fight”; and for that craven sentiment, as for the coward who uttered it, Roosevelt felt only contempt. In months ahead, he reached in private for the most egregious epithets to describe this current leader: a “wretched creature,” a “white rabbit,” “yellow all through,” “the lily-livered skunk in the White House.”

Wilson ran for a second term in the fall of 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” If earlier, back from his African safari and his triumphal tour of Europe six years before, in 1910, Roosevelt had been willing to wait—leave Taft alone and wait until now, till 1916, to declare his candidacy—this time he would almost surely have won. Even Governor Hughes of New York, that gray iceberg of a nominee, came within a shadow’s breadth of defeating Wilson. Out of nearly 18 million votes cast, the incumbent was reelected by a majority of just over 600,000—a mere whisper—277 electoral votes to Hughes’s 254. One or two states going the other way would have been enough to let even the starchy Charles Evans Hughes prevail.

Roosevelt all this while, in the pages of the Outlook, the Metropolitan, and the Kansas City Star, went on writing blisteringly of the academic returned to the White House. Some of it was envy, recalling his own time as chief executive and not a shot fired except for that skirmishing in the Philippines—persuaded, too, that only the crisis of war makes for the greatest presidencies, above all for Lincoln’s. Yet this current commander in chief, given a just war to fight, would do nothing. And when at last Wilson, even the timorous Wilson, was pushed so far by Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare as to enter the European conflict, he denied Colonel Roosevelt—who went personally to him and pleaded his case—the privilege of organizing a division of volunteers and leading it into early combat on the western front. That had been the Colonel’s burning desire; but he apparently was judged too old, too enfeebled, and the times were passing him by. President Wilson graciously thanked the petitioner for his offer, yet nothing came of it. Roosevelt must leave America’s fighting to younger men.

Young Kermit, unwilling to wait for his country to enter the conflict, had already joined the British army to do battle against the Turk in Mesopotamia. His three brothers got into the fight as soon as they could, to their father’s infinite gratification. In March 1918 Archie Roosevelt suffered severe wounds in combat and was hospitalized in France. Ted was wounded in July; and in that same summer month, five days earlier, flying in the skies over Belleau Wood, Quentin Roosevelt had dived into aerial combat with German pilots and was shot down. Hope flickered, then went out, as word arrived at Sagamore Hill that the Colonel’s aviator son, his youngest, had not survived.

Roosevelt never recovered from Quentin’s death, although he bore it stoically. To Kermit soon after, he wrote, “No man could have died in finer or more gallant fashion; and our pride equals our sorrow.” And he phrased an oblique tribute: “Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are part of the same Great Adventure.” Yet privately, alone, the father felt the loss of poor Quinikens to his core, and to the very last.

Even then, however, even toward the end, despite the conflict’s appalling human cost, the foul trenches, the mud, the mustard gas that son Ted had breathed in, despite the utter futility and waste in a new, horrendous type of war on a world scale that was mere butchery, Theodore Roosevelt clung to talk of sacrifice, gallantry, and glory, and to battle as something grand, noble, and sublime. That February of 1918 he had gone into the hospital with a persistence of jungle fever, an ear abscess, and the Amazon rainforest leg-wound still troublesome, needing tissue to be cut away. The patient was back home at Sagamore Hill in March, but returned to the hospital on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, and was there until Christmas. Yet despite such late grave illnesses and his grievous loss, these closing days of a supremely busy life held consolations: Roosevelt’s deep love for Edith, for his new grandchildren, for his children and their spouses. “I don’t believe in all the United States,” he said, “there is any father who has quite the same right that I have to be proud of his four sons.” And there was talk of his running for president again, in 1920, to retrieve the Republican Party from the Old Guard’s iron grip and restore it to the service of Lincoln’s kind of people.

Figure 47.1. TR with Edith Derby, his daughter Ethel’s second child, born in 1917. This is among the last pictures taken of the Colonel.

Courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

But that didn’t come to pass. At Sagamore Hill, at age sixty, on the evening of January 15, 1919, Theodore Roosevelt bade an affectionate goodnight to Edith and went to bed feeling a bit odd, short of breath. Before dawn he was dead—found lying as though “just asleep, only he could not hear”—dead of what was revealed to be malignant endocarditis and an embolism in the coronary arteries. His simple burial service occurred two days later in Christ Episcopal Church at Oyster Bay, where ex-President Taft, now a professor of law at Yale University, was among the mourners. Later, at the snowy gravesite in nearby Youngs Cemetery, Mr. Taft was observed standing alone, head bowed in grief, lingering longer than all the others with his thoughts and his tears.