Yesterday

Both Castor and I have a great admiration for T. R. B., the very able Washington correspondent of the New Republic, and so it is a little disappointing to hear him say that Franklin Roosevelt has none of Theodore's magnificent quixotry, none of his passion for fighting brilliantly in the name of a lost cause. The lost causes of Theodore Roosevelt have never seemed quite like the lost causes of anyone else. In the very early Albany era, his politics was mere moral indignation, but he vented it so resoundingly as to rid New York of a few petty pillagers of the till and to sweep himself into the governor's chair. During the war days, when he was one moment writing articles and the next going off to sulk because Mr. Root would not let him lead a picturesque cavalry squadron to suicide in France, his politics was mere moral indignity. But whenever he abandoned a cause, he washed his hands of it quietly, and never failed to preserve the waters of its ablution, for which sometimes, as in the case of Progressivism, he found later employment. At least two worthy crusades were so distorted by his leadership as to be useless for long to come. Trust busting he converted into a mammoth and gaudy college yell, and then left it, imprisoned in the toils of a witless and unenforceable law, to the kind of animate death in which it survives. The third party became in his hands a symbol of perfidy to the politicians, and a testimony to the populace that only by the two party system could the gods be appeased, and water and honey made to flow in the land. But he kept face through it all, kept face by being unique among discredited statesmen in that he appeared really to believe what he was saying, even though he had been saying something very different ten years ago, or last month, or yesterday. He must have believed in himself, and in his dicta however incipient, for not even the chanciest wag would have dared to tell the seething followers of Arabia in Cairo that British rule in Egypt was a divine thing, and that to oppose it was heresy, but only a man who believed this and was ready to be garroted for saying it. His was that great personal magnetism that can come only from sincerity, but he was temperamentally so fitted for rule among mobs, and he reflected so unconsciously and accurately the tempper of the multitude, that he was never faced with the disagreeable necessity of leading a lost cause. What the causes became after his enthusiasm had engauded and debauched them is another matter.

This problem of lost causes finds a curious modern parallel in the refusal of Norman Thomas to support the fusion ticket in New York City. There is an interesting correspondence on just this point in the Nation, between Mr. Thomas and Oswald Garrison Villard, who believes that so fine an opportunity for deposing the sorry shame yelept O'Brien ought not be overlooked. Thus he is not so fastidious as Mr. Thomas, who looks upon Boss Koenig as the undeniably unpleasant thug he is, chides Mr. La Guardia for camping among the enemy, even in the high mok-a-mok temp, and hints that Mr. Villard is relaxing too easily from his position of stern and examining rectitude. Possibly Mr. Villard is right, and Mr. Blanshard is right, in withdrawing support from the Socialist party as a "permanently defeated organization," and in preferring a temporary compromise to the awful alternative of seeing O'Brien untoppled, and his dispensation retained, but there is in Mr. Thomas' position far more dignity, far more of that contemptuous idealism which ennobles Rousseau than of that mild practicality which makes Saint Simon, in the long perspective, seem more than a little ridiculous.