Theodore Rex (86 page)

“
WELL, MY PART
is pretty nearly ended,” Roosevelt had to acknowledge, as the Republican National Committee took full charge of his campaign in mid-September. After three years of bossing George Cortelyou, he faced eight weeks of being bossed in return—a novel sensation for any President.

Cortelyou’s first priority was fund-raising, now that Wall Streeters were returning to New York from their country places. So for a while the chairman ceded initiatives to the treasurer. Silver-whiskered, avuncular, discreet, Cornelius
Bliss went calling on old friends downtown. In office after paneled office, he was welcomed as a money man among money men, someone who knew the dollar’s political worth as well as its purchasing power. Speaking the language of money, he had little difficulty in getting financiers to admit th
at Roosevelt had not harmed the workings of
laissez-faire
. The
Northern Securities
suit looked, in retrospect, like a necessary check on illegal combination—“salutary from every point of view,” as
The Wall Street Journal
conceded.

Most of Bliss’s visits ended with the scratch of a pen writing many zeros on a slip of paper, or with the even more satisfying sound of banknotes being counted out. Few donors demanded favors in return.
When one did, asking to be appointed Ambassador to Belgium, Cortelyou returned his check. Bliss was not quite so fastidious, provided understandings were kept vague.

“
Now, Mr. Bliss, we want to make this contribution,” said John D. Archbold of the Standard Oil Company, handing over $100,000. “But”—he chose his words carefully—“we do not want to do it without its being known and thoroughly approved of by the powers that be.”

Bliss smiled. “
You need have no apprehension about it whatever,” he said.

AT 10:00 A.M. ON 22 SEPTEMBER
, Judge Parker drove unrecognized through the streets of lower Manhattan. He entered the Hoffman House by a side door and was at once closeted with Democratic campaign planners. As they urgently and gloomily conferred, a bedlam of steam whistles signaled the passage down the East River of an important vessel. It was the USS
Sylph
, the smaller of Roosevelt’s two official yachts, cruising white and silver between crowds lining either bank. The President strolled on deck accompanied by a bulldog pup and waving a black slouch hat. He was on his way back to Washington.

The bedlam continued as the
Sylph
rounded Battery Point. Admiral Barker, back from the Mediterranean on the
Kearsarge
, saluted the Commander-in-Chief with twenty-one thunderous guns. (Meanwhile, Parker was trying to have a working lunch with the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.) Roosevelt, enjoying himself, ordered the
Sylph
to proceed up the West Side. The steam whistles followed him north as far as Grant’s Tomb, before he doubled back and crossed to the railroad dock at Jersey City. Cheers of two thousand welcomers rolled across the Hudson. Finally, at 1:27
P.M.
, his six-car special got under way, carrying the presidential party, Mr. and Mrs. William Loeb, Jr., six Secret Service men, a governess, the entire summer White House complement of secretaries, stenographers, clerks, and messengers, plus a stallion, a bay mare, a calico pony, Josiah the badger, the bulldog pup, and other pets.

Parker’s next interlocutor was Representative William Cowherd, who informed him that the Democratic congressional campaign was critically short of funds. He would of course need a majority in the House if he expected to prevail as President.

The judge spent another day and night in Manhattan, and by the time he left town on 24 September he was so depressed he would not talk to reporters even about the weather. As soon as he got back to Esopus, he ordered his horse, and rode off alone. For the rest of the afternoon he cantered aimlessly through the countryside.

WHEN ROOSEVELT GOT
back to Washington, the little flags on his wall map of the Russo-Japanese War needed repositioning. There now had to be a cluster so close as almost to hide Port Arthur, where the Russian garrison was still under siege. Nearly two hundred miles inland, the Battle of Liao-yang was inconclusively over, with more than forty thousand dead. General Kuropatkin’s army was in retreat on the plains south of Mukden. Marshal Oyama’s forces were extended along the mountain slopes opposite.

This new pattern of flags pleased the President more than it did John Hay, who saw nothing but blood and snow for the rest of the winter, and, trampled underfoot, his cherished Open Door policy for China. “
War grows more frightful to me as I grow older,” he confessed.
Roosevelt, younger and less sentimental, saw the possibility of a favorable balance of power developing in the East. He was prepared to let the Island Empire colonize Korea—but not Manchuria.

“
I would like to see the war ending with Russia and Japan locked in a clinch, counterweighing one another, and both kept weak by the effort,” he told Jules Jusserand. This would safeguard the security of Hawaii and the Philippines. He noticed signs of Japanese exhaustion, as evinced by General Nogi’s failure to take Port Arthur: “
Look how long they’ve been predicting its surrender!”

Jusserand, whose own government was allied with the Tsar’s, reported “un
notable changement”
in Roosevelt’s views to the Quai d’Orsay.

ACCORDING TO ALL THE
laws of political navigation, the Democratic campaign vessel, split along ideological lines and commanded by a man who would not steer, should by now have sunk. Amazingly, however, she began to ride higher in the last week of September, and on the first day of October gave off a blast of live steam.

Joseph Pulitzer complained, in an open letter spread across two pages of the New York
World
, “You have not kept the faith, Mr. President, in your promise of publicity as to the affairs of the corporations.… Why?” Roosevelt’s
much-vaunted Bureau of Corporations had been in existence for eighteen months, but Americans still knew nothing of how trust lords such as E. H. Harriman and J. P. Morgan operated. Both men, Pulitzer reported, were giving huge sums to the Republicans. (He did not mention that August Belmont and James J. Hill were doing the same for the Democrats.) “When they give something to Mr. Cortelyou for your campaign … they regard your acceptance of their tribute as an implied promise of protection.” Pulitzer proceeded to ask ten bold-face questions.

1. How much has the beef trust contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?
   
2. How much has the paper trust contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?
   
3. How much has the coal trust contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?
   
4. How much has the sugar trust contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?
   
5. How much has the oil trust contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?
   
6. How much has the tobacco trust contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?
   
7. How much has the steel trust contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?
   
8. How much have the national banks contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?
   
9. How much has the insurance trust contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?
   
10. How much have the six great railroads contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?
    

The aggregate answer—which Cortelyou declined to give—was: less than half of what Hanna and McKinley had collected from such sources in 1900. Corporate contributions were actually tapering off, since the President seemed such a cinch for election.

Cortelyou’s friends knew him to be a man of almost ludicrous probity. He had spent the last fourteen years paying off debts of honor at maximum interest, despite the forgiveness of his creditors. But these were private matters. Pulitzer’s “Ten Questions” (shrewdly aimed at him, rather than at the well-respected Bliss) amounted to ten very public slurs on Cortelyou’s reputation.
Soon Democratic campaign speakers were shouting his name over and over again, along with
How much? How much? How much?
, until the chorus resounded throughout New York State. Judge Parker alone maintained an austere silence.

All Cortelyou said in response was that the next Administration was going to be “unhampered by a single promise of any kind.” Roosevelt chafed with frustration. He was beginning to have doubts about his choice for chairman.
The fighter in him longed to push Cortelyou aside and lead “the most savage counterattack possible.” Bliss wrote urging him to have faith. “
Mr. Cortelyou is proving to be all we anticipated, and more: his grasp of the details of the business in hand is remarkable.”

Roosevelt was not soothed. One needed to be more than a detail man to see that winning the White House was not enough: it had to be won in such
a way th
at state houses were won, too—at least those vital to one’s future executive effectiveness. Cortelyou did not seem to “grasp” the necessity of a Republican victory in New York’s gubernatorial contest.

After Elihu Root’s refusal to run, the state GOP had compromised by nominating Lieutenant Governor Frank W. Higgins. Unfortunately, Higgins was a listless candidate whose first reaction to being dubbed “Odell’s stooge” had been to stop campaigning and sulk.
The Democratic National Committee, sensing weakness, had begun to lavish money on its own local ticket. If Cortelyou—or someone more forceful—did not immediately kick some fight into Higgins, the second Roosevelt Administration might have to deal with a broken Odell machine and a Tammany Hall governor.

An even worse scenario, not inconceivable in the event of a foreign emergency or major scandal, was that Roosevelt’s current popularity could decline nationwide, to the point that defeat in New York might cost him his Presidency. “
Pray get out and put yourself into the canvass at the earliest possible moment,” Roosevelt wrote Higgins. “You and I are in the same boat. We shall sink or swim together.”

Higgins continued to sulk. By the second week of October, gloom over his candidacy was so great that contributions to both the presidential and gubernatorial campaigns dwindled further. “
The drift here seems to be against us,” William Dudley Foulke wrote Roosevelt.

At 1 Madison Avenue, the telephone rang for Cortelyou. He was out. Staff rushed in search of Bliss: it was the President calling. But the treasurer was out, too. Senator Scott came on the line.

Scott explained that Bliss and Cortelyou had budgeted a quarter of a million dollars for the gubernatorial campaign. Now, just when Odell needed to bolster Higgins’s sagging ratings, the campaign was in default. The President exploded.