Theodore Roosevelt

B

Break with Taft

Roosevelt returned to the United States to receive a stirring and exceptional welcome. Political observers watched his movements closely for light on his attitude toward the Republican administration. The Republicans had received a severe rebuff by voters in the congressional elections. Taft had antagonized those who wanted a lower tariff by signing the Payne-Aldrich Bill, which raised taxes on many items, and compounded the injury by calling it “the best tariff bill that the Republican Party ever passed.” Taft also supported the speaker of the House of Representatives, Joseph Cannon, who was the target of discontented progressives in the House. Taft told his side of the controversy to Roosevelt but received neither support nor repudiation.

Roosevelt was much impressed by Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life (1909), a book that denounced the individualism of Thomas Jefferson and called for unity behind a national program of improvement and control. This among other influences was the basis for what became Roosevelt’s New Nationalism program. He undertook a Western tour that drew many Republicans to his side. At Osawatomie, Kansas, on August 31, 1910, he put “the national need before sectional or personal advantage.” He took a radical stand on the Supreme Court of the United States, accusing it of having restricted necessary social action. He also demanded stronger executive action.

Roosevelt continued to establish a progressive plan of action, helped by Republicans who called for his candidacy in 1912 and who rejected the progressive La Follette. Roosevelt decided to run for the presidency in 1912 when Taft’s attorney general filed a law suit to dissolve the U.S. Steel Corporation. The suit noted U.S. Steel’s acquisition of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company as one reason for the suit. The charge enraged Roosevelt, who regarded it as a personal insult because he had approved the purchase as part of J. P. Morgan’s strategy for ending the Panic of 1907. Roosevelt broke openly with Taft. On February 21, 1912, he announced,”My hat is in the ring.”

C

Election of 1912

Roosevelt hoped that his tactics would cause delegates to the Republican National Convention to flock to his banner and permit him to overthrow the alliance supporting Taft’s renomination. Roosevelt’s showing in the Republican direct primaries before the Chicago convention encouraged this hope; unfortunately most delegates were not chosen in direct primary elections. Taft’s managers were thus able to keep control of the convention. Roosevelt charged fraud with long-practiced forthrightness and led his followers out of the convention. His supporters reconvened in Chicago on August 5 and nominated Roosevelt as their so-called Bull Moose, or Progressive, candidate in the election (see Progressive Party).

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The split in the Republican Party was inevitable in view of the basic split between conservatives and progressives. Moreover, it practically ensured the election of the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. Nevertheless, Roosevelt conducted a whirlwind campaign. The Kansas journalist William Allen White, analyzing the New Nationalism program, as distinguished from Wilson’s New Freedom program, concluded that the difference was between “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

On October 14, 1912, Americans were shocked by an attempt to assassinate Roosevelt while he was visiting Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The bullet fired at him just missed entering his right lung, but Roosevelt delivered his scheduled speech before entering the hospital.

In the electoral college, Wilson won by a landslide, with 435 votes. Roosevelt was still a popular hero. His 4,126,020 votes topped Taft’s 3,483,922. Both totals added up to substantially more than Wilson’s 6,286,124 votes, which constituted only 42 percent of the popular vote. Some Progressive Party members hoped Roosevelt had begun a crusade that he might fulfill in later elections. Roosevelt had promised as much in the course of the campaign. However, although Roosevelt continued to support the Progressive Party, he turned to other concerns.

D

Amazon Adventure

Roosevelt received a proposal to explore the River of Doubt (now the Roosevelt River) in Brazil. “I had to go,” he later said. “It was my last chance to be a boy.” Roosevelt was received with acclaim in Brazil and also in Argentina and Chile, where he delivered lectures. In December 1913, with a number of scientists and explorers, Roosevelt pushed into the wilderness. Although he thought of the trip chiefly in terms of its naturalist aspects and collected specimens for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, he also enjoyed the hunting and other adventures. The expedition’s trials and successes were recorded in one of Roosevelt’s most popular books, Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914), written in the course of travel. Although Roosevelt regained the weight and the appearance of vigor that had characterized him, he was a sick man whose jungle ordeal contributed to his premature death.

E

Prophet of Preparedness

Roosevelt had developed an uncompromising antipathy to President Wilson’s temperament and political approach, which he called “ridiculous and insincere.” He particularly despised Wilson’s “pacifism,” which to him was the product of fear and ineptitude, rather than of strength and the ability to control events. Roosevelt believed that Wilson’s incapacity, as he interpreted it, compounded crises at home, as well as abroad. Thus a major strike against the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, bringing troops into bloody conflict with mine workers, seemed to him to require a kind of government action Wilson could not comprehend.

Wilson’s response to the overthrow of the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1911 and the subsequent struggles of revolutionary generals did not impress Roosevelt favorably. Wilson’s policy infuriated him. He scorned it as “grape juice diplomacy,” a reference to Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, a firm pacifist who drank no alcohol.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Roosevelt hesitated to take a stand against either the Allies or the Central Powers. He had many close friends on both sides, and each urged him to understand their causes. However, his dilemma did not make him more sympathetic to Wilson’s predicament as president. Wilson’s appeals for Americans to be neutral “in fact as well as in name” impressed Roosevelt as feeble.

Wilson’s later assertion that “there is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight” offended every principle that had governed Roosevelt’s life. As early as 1890 he called for naval preparedness. In 1897 he had proclaimed preparedness for war as the best guarantor of peace, and it became the principal tenet of his political philosophy.

Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality won Belgium Roosevelt’s sympathy, although he restrained expression of it at that time. On May 7, 1915, a German submarine torpedoed without warning the British steamship Lusitania off the southern coast of Ireland. The ship sank in less than 20 minutes with the loss of 1198 people, including 128 Americans. Thereafter Roosevelt felt less restraint and without specifying an enemy, he distinguished between those who advocated action and those who temporized. He denounced “hyphenated Americans,” theoretically both German Americans and those overly sympathetic to the United Kingdom. However, as the United States identified more with the Allied cause and Roosevelt’s own sympathies shifted, the phrase became criticism of those opposed to the British.

Roosevelt’s insistence on preparedness made him impatient with the very word “peace.” His slogan became, “Fear God and take your own part.”

F

Election of 1916

Early in 1916 Wilson began to take a position in favor of national defense, he did so in roundabout ways that irritated Roosevelt. Wilson, in praising what he termed American “passion for peace,” probably better reflected the mood of a nation divided by minority sympathies. Nevertheless, Roosevelt was convinced that the American public was tired of Wilson and would not reelect him. He therefore supported Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican candidate for president in 1916. The famous Democratic Party slogan, “He kept us out of the war,” which contributed to Wilson’s victory, was evidence that Roosevelt was part of a minority.

In a letter, Roosevelt himself admitted that the country’s need of him “has probably passed.” He continued, summing up what seemed to him his achievements: “My great usefulness as President came in connection with the Anthracite Coal Strike (Pennsylvania), the voyage of the battle fleet around the world, the taking of Panama, the handling of Germany in the Venezuelan business, England in the Alaska boundary matter, the irrigation business in the West, and finally, I think, the toning up of the government service generally.”