Free Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris Page A

grandparenthood.News came from San Francisco on the seventeenth that Eleanor had had a baby girl, Grace. Roosevelt wrote her and Ted: “ ‘The birth pangs make all men the debtors of all women.’ ” He was paraphrasing Jules Michelet’s
Priests, Women and Families
, a humanistic tract that exactly expressed his view of sex, faith, and nature. Eleanor was invested with the same glow of fulfilled femininity that he saw shimmering around Edith, and regretfully did not see around Alice. For the first time in his life, he signed himself
Grandfather
.

    ONE EFFECT OF THE new arrival upon Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was to embolden him to show signs of political independence.Grimly determined, a squat knot of muscle and sinew, Ted confided to Eleanor that his ambition was to earn a lot of money quickly, then use his fortune to go into public life. In order to learn the dry basics of business—not something Harvard had prepared him for—he had taken a dreary job as the West Coast representative of a Connecticut carpet company. But in the day-to-day slog of salesmanship—“I do
love
work!”—he was proving to be a dynamo. He had also involved himself in Californian progressive politics. He let his father know that if Taft and Woodrow Wilson were nominated in 1912, he might vote for the governor.
    “Do remember,” Roosevelt wrote back, “that to say anything in public, or to take any public stand against Taft, especially by supporting his Democratic opponent, would cause me very great embarrassment, and … create the impression that I, while nominally supporting Taft, am underhandedly doing all I can do against him.”
    His caution seemed unreasonable, becausehe was expressing more and more disapproval of the President’s policies in the pages of
The Outlook
. And he was not alone among Republican commentators in doing so. The widespread admiration Taft had won by calling for reciprocity with Canada was dissipated. Endless wrangling over rates had dragged the special session of Congress into midsummer. A compromise act had been passed and sent to Ottawa: Sir Wilfrid Laurier hadgambled his whole government on the issue, and dissolved Parliament so that all Canadians could vote on it. This was not necessarily good news. Republicans remained deeply divided over tariff reform,with conservatives alienated from conservatives, and progressives from progressives. Taft was blamed for the passions aroused.
    About the only politician to profit from the battle on Capitol Hill was Robert La Follette. He seized on reciprocity, which he eloquently opposed, to announce that he would challenge the President for the nomination in 1912. No Shakespearean upstart, all arms and arrogance, could have thrown down his gauntlet in front of a less popular king. Republicans clustered uneasily behind the one or the other. With Roosevelt offstage, they lacked any leader strong enough to hold them all together.
    La Follette imagined that he had the Colonel’s support, after Roosevelt praised his radical record in
The Outlook
. A warm exchange of letters followed. But when La Follette sent an emissary to Sagamore Hill asking for a specific endorsement, he was turned down.
    Roosevelt saw no chance of La Follette being nominated. “My present intention,” he wrote Ted, “is to make a couple of speeches for Taft, but not to go actively into the campaign.” He thought that Woodrow Wilson was the strongest Democratic candidate. Taft, in contrast, was “a flubdub with a streak of the second-rate and the common in him, and he has not the slightest idea of what is necessary if this country is to make social and industrial progress.”
    As for foreign policy, he gave the President little credit. Arbitration treaties with Britain and France were fated to shred like leaves in any gale-force storm. Right now,a second “Morocco crisis” loomed between Germany, France, and Great Britain, as dangerous as the one that had nearly precipitated war six years