Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  The Times acknowledged, however, that a large number of delegates were neither pledged nor instructed, but just “leaning” toward one candidate or the other. Its editorial tilt was clear. There was no mention of the Colonel’s strong prospects in California and Minnesota, nor of his popularity in Ohio—birthplace of so many presidents (Taft included), and the most delegate-rich state of all. A primary was due to be held there on the twenty-fifth. Even if Taft won elsewhere as the Times projected, failure to hold his native soil would almost certainly end his hopes of reelection.

  Over the next week, Roosevelt captured Maryland, Kansas, and Minnesota. Arkansas held two state conventions, one instructing its slate for him and the other for Taft. So another brace of rival delegations was added to the swelling number that intended to contest seats at the national convention. Roosevelt’s campaign team, ecstatic, calculated the President’s strength at only 175 bona fide delegates. This was a gross underestimate. But when, on 14 May, Roosevelt went on to sweep California, Taft put aside affairs of state for a final desperate stand in Ohio. “If I am defeated,” he wrote his brother Horace, “I hope that somebody, sometime, will recognize the agony of spirit that I have undergone.”

  TAFT’S TENDENCY TO whine was accompanied by a genius for political gaffes. His latest was, “I am a man of peace, and I don’t want to fight. But when I do fight, I want to hit hard. Even a rat in a corner will fight.”

  The unfortunate metaphor stuck as his train raced from corner to corner of Ohio, and Roosevelt’s followed suit. Both candidates smelled blood. Their vocabulary of personal invective got terser and uglier. Taft called the Colonel a “dangerous egotist” and “bolter.” Roosevelt replied with “puzzlewit,” “reactionary,” and “fathead,” and convulsed a crowd in Cleveland by comparing the President’s brain unfavorably with that of a guinea pig. La Follette, vying for attention, weighed in with imprecations of his own, until it was difficult for Republican voters to figure out which “demagogue,” “hypocrite,” and “Jacobin” was calling the other a “brawler,” “apostate,” and “honeyfugler.” Democrats rejoiced in a report that one night Roosevelt and Taft had, after a fashion, slept together, with their Pullmans parked side by side in the Steubenville depot.

  Roosevelt covered eighteen thousand miles across the state, addressing about ninety rallies. Unlike the President, who traveled even farther and spoke more, he was able to leaven his insults with wit. “Mr. Taft,” he said at Marion, “never discovered that I was dangerous to the people until I discovered he was useless to the people.”

  It did Taft little good to seethe in private at “the hypocrisy, the insincerity, the selfishness, the monumental egotism, and almost the insanity of megalomania that possess Theodore Roosevelt.” He had powerful issues to level against his opponent—among them the third-term question, the reliance on anti-administration bosses, and the acceptance of enormous sums of money from trust lords, as long as they styled themselves as “progressives.” (One name that agitated the President’s mustache more than any other was that of George W. Perkins, of U.S. Steel and the International Harvester Company.) Taft could not understand why his detailed, droning exposures of such liabilities failed to excite more anger against his opponent.

  He went home to Cincinnati to vote on the twenty-first, only to hear that one of his own supporters had asked Roosevelt to consider the idea of backing a compromise candidate—possibly Charles Evans Hughes. The Colonel’s reply was characteristic: “I will name the compromise candidate, he will be me.”

  THE OHIO PRIMARY was so complete a victory for Roosevelt that it took several days for Taft’s full loss to be computed. Cincinnati remained loyal to him, but that was largely because his challenger had bypassed the city, not wanting to make things awkward for Nick Longworth. Overall, Taft won only eight delegates out of forty-two. He comforted himself with the probability that the state convention would award him another eight delegates-at-large, while his campaign managers insisted that he had a national lead over Roosevelt of 555 to 377. But the fact remained that the President had lost his own state by a margin of almost forty-eight thousand votes.

  Roosevelt’s astonishing subsequent triumphs in the New Jersey and South Dakota primaries further eroded support for Taft. A new word was coined: “TRnadoes.” The Democratic governor of New Jersey expressed concern for the fate of the nation. “Your judgment of Roosevelt is mine own,” Woodrow Wilson wrote a friend. “God save us of another four years of him now, with his present insane distemper of egotism!”

  When the nomination campaign ended on 4 June, the Colonel had amassed more popular votes than either of his opponents combined—at 1,214,969 for himself, 865,835 for Taft, and 327,357 for La Follette. Demonstrably, he was the runaway favorite of rank-and-file Republicans in the thirteen states that had granted them a direct voice. Outside of Maryland, all his victories had been landslides. He had beaten Taft two to one in California and Illinois, and three to one in South Dakota and Nebraska. Several other states controlled by the Party machine were embarrassed by upstart Roosevelt delegations vowing to fight for seats at the national convention. This made the actual, pre-ballot strengths of the three candidates difficult to assess. All that could be said with certainty was that, before the Chicago Coliseum opened its doors on 18 June, the RNC would have to decide the eligibility of every contesting delegate.

  And of those decisions there could be no recall.

  *In 1912, the word propaganda had not yet acquired its modern, truth-bending connotation. It meant, simply, “publishable information.”

  *Understand!

  CHAPTER 10

  Armageddon

  Are we no greater than the noise we make

  Along one blind atomic pilgrimage

  Whereon by crass chance billeted we go

  Because our brains and blood and cartilage

  Will have it so?

  TO DEMOCRATS PREPARING for their own convention in the spring of 1912, there was a pleasing symbolism in the rainstorm that drowned out a baby parade in New Jersey, on the last day of the Republican primary campaign in that state. A plump competitor dressed as “President Taft” had his silk hat and frock coat ruined, while “Baby Roosevelt,” riding on another float, cried so loudly he had to be rescued and comforted.

  Après le déluge, qui? Next morning, the New York World had an endorsement to offer all adult voters tired of childish squabbles in the GOP: FOR PRESIDENT—WOODROW WILSON.

  Ideologically, there was less difference between Wilson and Roosevelt than between any of the Republican candidates. The governor’s success in bestowing a raft of progressive reforms upon New Jersey had helped Roosevelt to his big win there. But it also bolstered Wilson’s own campaign for the Democratic nomination. A further similarity was that he and Roosevelt were both running a strong second to holders of high office in their own parties. And they were both hopeful of sweeping their respective conventions, if they could shake “organization” control of the proceedings.

  Champ Clark, Speaker of the House of Representatives, was the man ahead of Wilson: a garrulous, vaguely progressive, cornpone Westerner. With Democrats not scheduled to meet in Baltimore until after the Republican convention in Chicago, Wilson might yet benefit from Clark’s propensity for political gaffes—as Roosevelt had already done from Taft’s.

  In the interim, the governor did not have to worry about getting his delegates seated. Roosevelt did. Most of his convention support, over and above the delegates he had won in primaries, lay in the claims of 254 “shadow” delegates to be recognized as the true representatives of their states, on grounds ranging from miscarried conventions to outright fraud. Only seven of them were Taft men. As Roosevelt well knew, a fair number of his own claimants were wishful, especially those purchased with snake oil and other charms by his Southern salesman, Ormsby McHarg. Still, he had considerable strength on paper. The New York Tribune, a pro-administration paper, put him ahead of Taft, at 469½ potential delegates to 454. Taft’s vaunted
total of 583, or 43 more than necessary for a first-ballot win, presupposed winning virtually all the seating contests. The New York Times allotted the Colonel only 355 delegates, 85 short of the number he needed, and reported that Taft hoped to unseat a further twenty.

  “ ‘SEVEN-EIGHTHS LAWYER AND ONE-EIGHTH MAN.’ ”

  Senator Elihu Root. (photo credit i10.1)

  But all these calculations were little more than chalk on a blackboard due to be dusted, rewritten, and dusted again when the Republican National Committee began its convention eligibility hearings early in June. Only two figures could not be erased: 1,078, the legal number of seats available to delegates, and 540, the number needed to nominate.

  EVEN BEFORE THE RNC arrived in Chicago, it had decided to recommend Elihu Root, the Party’s most rational conservative, as chairman of the convention. Roosevelt found himself in the painful position of having to oppose this choice, which boded well for Taft and ill for himself and La Follette. If Senator Root was acceptable to a majority of the delegates, he would influence the proceedings more than any other Party official. And the nature of that influence could be predicted.

  “Elihu,” Roosevelt used to joke, “is seven-eighths lawyer and one-eighth man.” That had been in happier days, when Root served only his purpose. Now the legal construct had a new brief: to defend orthodox Republicanism at a convention under radical siege, and ensure the renomination of William Howard Taft.

  Old friendship could not survive such a clash of interests. Roosevelt had to accept that Root, along with Henry Cabot Lodge and many other former political allies, must henceforth be a stranger to him. Or rather, he had become strange to them. They could not understand why he had rejected their advice not to run.

  The issue of the chairmanship was forced by William Barnes, Jr., Taft’s principal tactician on the Republican National Committee. On 3 June, he telegraphed all delegates elected to the convention, except those pledged to the Colonel:

  I AM WIRING YOU IN BEHALF OF THE NEW YORK DELEGATION, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF A VERY FEW, TO ASK YOUR SUPPORT FOR SENATOR ROOT FOR CHAIRMAN. WE BELIEVE THIS CONTEST IS THE MOST SERIOUS ONE WHICH HAS AFFLICTED THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AND THAT THE ATTEMPT TO NOMINATE MR. ROOSEVELT CAN LEAD ONLY TO DISASTER.… WILL YOU PLEASE WIRE ME, NEW YORK CITY COLLECT, WHETHER WE CAN RELY ON YOUR SUPPORT FOR SENATOR ROOT FOR CHAIRMAN?

  Thus goaded, Roosevelt announced that he would instruct his delegates to vote for Governor Francis E. McGovern of Wisconsin, a progressive sympathetic to both himself and Senator La Follette. “Root,” he complained, “is simply the representative of Barnes in this matter.”

  He relied on his organization in Chicago to seat as many as possible of his contesting delegates—potentially almost a quarter of the convention. Fifty more would make his bid for the nomination serious, and he hoped for 80 or 90. Assuming a minimum of 278 uncontested delegates from his primary victories, and another minimum of 133 non-primary pledges, his solid first-ballot strength was 411, with 540 needed to win. He therefore had to press another 129. There were 166 uninstructed delegates. Perhaps he could persuade enough of them to combine with his accreditees for a winning edge, however narrow.

  Unfortunately, most of the uninstructed seemed to favor Taft. And so did a majority of the Republican National Committee.

  ROOSEVELT COULD ONLY hope the Committee would be fair, rather than blacken the GOP’s already tarnished political image with a show of discrimination. Many of the delegates pledged to Taft were obviously fraudulent. To seat a decent number of progressive challengers would make for good public relations, and confound the RNC’s pro-Roosevelt minority. That group was dominated by William Flinn, Francis J. Heney, and Senator Borah of Idaho, an austere, brooding maverick who had once voted for Bryan. All were formidable men, determined to shame their opposing trio of senior reactionaries: Barnes, Boise Penrose, and W. Murray Crane.

  Barnes, of course, was already the Colonel’s open enemy. “Big Grizzly” Penrose was Taft’s chief supporter on Capitol Hill, infamous for reactionary machine politics. He would be seeking revenge on Roosevelt and Flinn for recently unseating him as boss of the Pennsylvania GOP. Crane was a Yankee paper manufacturer, as stiff and traditional as his own business cards. As for the Committee chairman, Victor Rosewater of Nebraska, the best that could be said of him was that he was not a professional politician. Moderate, frail, and with luck, malleable, Rosewater might be receptive to arguments that progressivism was a social force that the Republican Party had to accommodate, or else cede to the candidacy of Woodrow Wilson. He was a key figure, since he would serve ex officio as temporary chairman of the convention until giving way to either Root or McGovern.

  The rest of the Committee, apart from ten or so members friendly to Roosevelt and La Follette, consisted of about thirty-five Party regulars who served at the President’s pleasure.

  ROOSEVELT CHAFED AT Sagamore Hill as the hearings proceeded alphabetically, state by state. On the first day, all twenty-four of his delegates from Alabama and Arkansas were barred from the convention, and on the second, his entire slate from Georgia. In electoral terms, those states counted for nothing. Still, the Committee’s bias against him seemed clear. Senator Dixon complained to reporters of “theft, cold-blooded, premeditated and deliberate.”

  For a while, Roosevelt tried to maintain control of his representatives by long-distance telephone. But he hated the instrument and suspected it was being tapped. A private telegraph in the attic, a relic of his time as president, was even less satisfactory. He preferred the clicking of his own teeth in face-to-face confrontations, the feel of lapels gripped in his hand.

  Behind his frustration lay the embarrassing fact—harped on in many newspapers—that about a hundred of the delegates he needed to seat were no more legitimate than the machine men on Taft’s list. The kind of progressives-for-hire rounded up by Ormsby McHarg would have sold themselves quite as willingly to the Socialist candidate for the presidency, had Eugene V. Debs reached them first. Roosevelt remained convinced, however, that bona fide claimants were being discriminated against. Asked by a reporter whether he intended to barnstorm the convention, he said, “If circumstances demand, of course I’ll go!”

  That was as good as a threat to the Republican National Committee, which proceeded to throw out all but 19 of his delegates, and seat 235 of Taft’s.

  TWO FACTS WERE clear in the aftermath of the Committee’s action: first, that Roosevelt no longer had a credible chance of being nominated, and second (what he was prevented by blind rage from seeing) that most of the contests had been decided fairly. Perhaps thirty to thirty-five had not. But there would have been as much bias in favor of himself, had Taft been the challenging candidate, and he the Party leader. An impartial observer might conclude that neither man had enough honestly elected delegates to nominate him.

  All the same, Roosevelt had reason to accuse the Committee of being out of touch with current Republican sentiment. Penrose, Crane, Rosewater, and a dozen other members were themselves ineligible to serve as delegates, having been defeated in their home primaries. Ten further members hailed from Southern states in the grip of the Democratic Party, and four from “territorial possessions” (including the District of Columbia) that could not vote in November. These eunuchs, comprising more than two-thirds of the Committee, had power before the convention to defeat a candidate who was overwhelmingly the people’s choice.

  “The Taft leaders speak as if they were regular Republicans,” Roosevelt said in an icy public statement. “I do not concede that theft is a test of party regularity.” He had never deluded himself that he could be elected in the fall, even if nominated in the spring. But the pugilist in him, so bruisingly evident on the stage of the Boston Arena, was now aroused beyond control. It was the phenomenon Root had seen coming: When he gets into a fight he is completely dominated by the desire to destroy his adversary. There was nothing for him now but to go to Chicago and beat the convention into submission—or else bolt through the ro
pes and precipitate a riot.

  Specifically, Roosevelt intended to use his huge primary vote to persuade the Party as a whole not to ratify the exclusion of his delegates, and to accept that progressivism was a natural, desirable evolution of Republican doctrine. Root, whose gavel would probably determine the issue, sent out word that any attempt by the Colonel to rewrite convention rules would lead to “confusion and comparative anarchy.”

  EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD Nicholas Roosevelt, one of the Oyster Bay cousins who had grown up as virtually a member of the Colonel’s own brood, visited Sagamore Hill on Friday, 14 June. He found Roosevelt unusually silent over breakfast, and “Cousin Edith” exuding frosty disapproval of whatever was brewing in the house beside coffee. Later, without saying why, she insisted on accompanying her husband into town.

  “Well, Nick,” Roosevelt called out, as their automobile started down the driveway, “I guess we’ll meet at a lot of Philippics soon.”

  This was a clear hint to the young man to pack his bags for Chicago—and maybe other cities as well. Nicholas was ardently interested in politics. Confirmation came by telephone at noon that Colonel and Mrs. Roosevelt were booked on the Lake Shore Limited, departing New York at 5:30 P.M. When Nicholas arrived at Grand Central, he found Kermit and two other cousins, George Roosevelt and Theodore Douglas Robinson, also ready to go. Word had also gone out to Ted and Eleanor (tired, now, of San Francisco, and keen to reestablish themselves in New York). They would travel to Chicago separately. So would Alice, to whom conventions were catnip. The New York party was amplified by Regis H. Post—rich, progressive, retired, a willing workhorse—two or three Outlook staffers, and Frank Harper, the Colonel’s tiny English secretary. And like bees attracted to the sudden popping of a lily, newsmen swarmed to ride along.