He may do more by seeing what he sees
Than others eager for iniquities;
He may, by seeing all things for the best,
Incite futurity to do the rest.
THE CONTRARY FORCES2 ALIGNING themselves for and against the campaign of Theodore Roosevelt to unseat his successor were on display in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 28 February 1912. He attended a meeting of the Harvard board of overseers and was ostracized by his fellow members. They stood with their backs to him until he was joined by a sympathetic friend, Colonel Norwood P. Hallowell. Yet on emerging into the Yard, he was greeted by a crowd so boisterously affectionate that ten patrolmen were needed to get him into his car. It was clear his only hope of being nominated was to appeal to the people over the opposition of conservative Republicans.
“I am alone,”3 Roosevelt told his old hunting companion, Dr. Alexander Lambert, back at Sagamore Hill that weekend. “You can’t imagine how lonely it is for a man to be rejected by his own kind.” He said that he and Hallowell were made to feel “like a pair of Airedale terriers that had walked in on a convention of tom cats.”
In a cultural essay4 published some weeks before in The Outlook, he had noted that whenever a medieval man fought against prevailing orthodoxy, the tendency of society was to outlaw him. Now, after a lifetime of Party regularity, he found himself both free and shunned, loved and despised. It took some getting used to, and a considerable amount of evasion when friends as worried as William Allen White asked if he was prepared, in the likelihood of defeat, to found a new party. “We made5 the too obvious pretense in those days of our party loyalty,” White wrote afterward, “whistling in unison through the tall timber of darkening events to support our courage.”
As March loomed, Taft’s organization accelerated the pace of delegate selections in states that it controlled. This portended an agonizing choice for Roosevelt Republicans, bluntly expressed by Senator Jonathan Bourne of Oregon, at a strategy session in Washington: “Gentlemen, the first6 thing we have got to decide is a matter of fundamental policy. If we lose, will we bolt?”
The company sat stunned. Bourne had been7 a founding member of the Progressive Republican League, set up more than a year before to advance the fortunes of Robert La Follette. As such, he was a courageous, even a rash man, willing to back the most radical challenger to Old Guard rule. But the question of “bolting” had never occurred to the League, which meant only to advance the cause of progressivism within the Party.
Bourne persisted with his motion. “I move that8 we agree, here and now, and not be too secretive about our agreement, that if we lose, we bolt.”
There was silence while the politicians around the table considered their prospects. Those in Congress knew that apostasy would likely excommunicate them forever. And could progressivism, born of the Party, survive long without it? If Taft was nominated and then defeated as badly as everybody expected, it would be difficult even for GOP stalwarts to stay in office through the election of 1916. What real chance was there, at this late date, of Roosevelt recruiting enough delegates to commandeer the national convention in June?
William Allen White was in attendance. He was a bona fide progressive, but also, proudly, a member of the Republican National Committee, and hated the idea of splitting the Party. He sensed fear building in some quarters of the room. Senator Joseph Dixon of Montana had Bourne’s kind of recklessness, and so did their former colleague, Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, unseated by a Democrat in 1910. But Senators William E. Borah of Idaho, Moses E. Clapp of Minnesota, and Joseph L. Bristow of Kansas had won their seats as insurgents and enjoyed the balance of power they maintained in the upper chamber. White doubted they would willingly give that up. Representative Victor Murdock was for Roosevelt whatever happened, but understood the risks. “This rebellion,”9 he had said earlier, “has a long, long way to go before it wins.”
With Bourne’s motion on the table, a debate ensued that sounded, to White, more loud than sincere. At the end, loyalty overcame expediency. A non-voting consensus was reached that the answer to the question was “yes.”
REGULAR REPUBLICANS WHO had always considered the Colonel to be one of their number reacted to his candidacy with varying degrees of perplexity. The most common theory was that he had lost touch with reality. Senator Root thought that he was motivated by vainglory. “He aims10 at a leadership far in the future, as a sort of Moses and Messiah for a vast progressive tide of rising humanity.”
Henry Cabot Lodge wrote Roosevelt, “I never thought11 that any situation could arise which would have made me so miserably unhappy as I have been during the past week.” He blamed himself for not realizing how long they had been at political odds. Now that Roosevelt had embraced judicial recall as a campaign theme, Lodge felt he could remain silent no longer. He had given a statement to the press. “It is at least honest although it gives no expression to the pain and unhappiness which lie behind it.”
I am opposed12 to the constitutional changes advocated by Colonel Roosevelt in his recent speech at Columbus. I have very strong convictions on those questions.… Colonel Roosevelt and I for thirty years, and wholly apart from politics, have been close and most intimate friends. I must continue to oppose the policies which he urged at Columbus, but I cannot personally oppose him who has been my lifelong friend, and for this reason I can take no part whatever in the campaign for the political nomination.
“My dear fellow,”13 Roosevelt consoled him, “you could not do anything that would make me lose my warm personal affection for you. For a couple of years I have felt that you and I were heading opposite ways as regards internal politics.”
President Taft told Archie Butt that Roosevelt was delusional if he thought he could control the forces of anarchy he had unleashed. “He will either14 be a hopeless failure if elected or else destroy his own reputation by becoming a socialist, being swept there by the force of circumstances just as the leaders of the French Revolution were swept on and on.”
Butt listened15 to the President ramble, as he had listened for three years, and decided to take a vacation. Divided in his loyalty to both candidates, he had no stomach to see them heading into a contest that had all “the irresistible force of a Greek drama.” With Taft’s permission, he booked himself a passage to Europe.
“If the old16 ship goes down,” he wrote his sister, “you will find my affairs in shipshape condition.”
THE ENERGY OF the progressive movement, now that Roosevelt had committed to it, was explosive. By early March17, the three main hubs of his campaign organization were staffed, financed, and running. The Executive Committee, chaired by Senator Dixon, operated out of New York, from a rapidly expanding “skyscraper suite” on the twenty-fourth floor of the Metropolitan Life tower. When Roosevelt visited, he could look down on the decaying town house, three blocks south, where he had been born. Generally he stayed away, preferring to hold court in his office at The Outlook, one block east. He told reporters he was content to leave the direction of the campaign to Dixon and Frank Knox, as vice chairman. The rest of the executive team consisted of hardened professional politicians—none harder than former congressman William L. Ward of New York, a manufacturer of nuts, bolts, and rivets, and William “Big Bill” Flinn of Pittsburgh, a power player set on dismantling Pennsylvania’s reactionary Republican machine.
At the Congress Hotel in Chicago, Truman H. Newberry, Roosevelt’s former navy secretary, assumed the vital role of treasurer of the National Committee. A millionaire local merchant, Alexander H. Revell, served as overall chairman, commuting to executive meetings in New York. In Washington, Frank Munsey gave space in his own press building—and a $50,000 startup budget18—to the Roosevelt propaganda bureau.* Its manager was Cal O’Laughlin, who had come a long way in politics since waylaying the Colonel on the Nile. The bureau operated under the ideological control of Gifford and Amos Pinchot, James Garfield, and Medill McCormick—all of them thankful to be free of their obligations to La Follette. Another former journalist who joined the campaign was O. K. Davis of The New York Times. He attached himself to Senator Dixon as a pen for hire.
Branch offices opened in thirty other states, from New Hampshire west to California, and North Dakota south to Louisiana. Only the most reactionary corners of the old Confederacy, and the flintiest extremes of Republican New England, were deemed beyond the reach of new ideas. Wisconsin was ceded to La Follette, who could count on being nominated there, if nowhere else. Roosevelt’s eight original gubernatorial backers chaired their respective state committees.
The case that Dixon (dark, smooth-shaven, intense, and tireless) decided to present to rank-and-file Republicans was that three years of Taft’s leadership had reduced the Party to near impotence. The President had managed to turn a GOP majority of sixty in the House of Representatives into a minority of seventy, and a two-to-one overbalance of power in the Senate into virtual equipoise. His blindly supportive National Committee had lost control of a dozen states in the North and West. He was perceived as well-intentioned but weak; his obsessive traveling looked more like running away than reaching out. Whatever his support among the editors of loyal Republican periodicals, Dixon pointed out, reporters and cartoonists everywhere mocked him as long-winded, lazy, and obese. To Woodrow Wilson or whatever other falcon the Democrats might uncap this summer, Taft was easy meat.
Roosevelt, in contrast19, was leading Taft by more than 66 percent in regional popularity polls across the country. According to the same surveys, he had more potential votes than all the other presidential contenders combined. But the goodwill of ordinary Americans counted for little at this stage of the political process. Only six states offered direct, preferential primaries: California, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wisconsin. In the remaining forty-two, delegates were selected, rather than elected, by the state parties in caucuses or conventions. And since these proceedings were controlled by bosses, or manipulated by sit-pat officeholders in favor of the status quo, they were democratic shams.
“You understand20, my dear fellow,” Roosevelt wrote Newberry, “that probably Taft will be nominated. This is not a thing we can say in public, because of course such a statement discourages men; but I am in this fight purely for a principle, win or lose.”
Unfortunately, that principle was now perceived to be the recall of judicial decisions, rather than the broad “Charter of Democracy” he had tried to present at Columbus. Senator Dixon’s long-term strategy was to recommunicate, through the Washington propaganda bureau, the progressive content of the rest of that speech. It would serve as a campaign platform, and—if the Colonel would only shut up about judges—recall would have faded as an issue by June.
In the short term, Dixon wanted to persuade as many caucus-convention states as possible to adopt the popular selection of delegates, while there was still time for legislative action. Seven of them—Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota—were seen as amenable to primaries, thanks to parallel lobbying by the progressive arm of the Democratic Party. If they fell in line, Roosevelt could count on perhaps ten large delegations pledged to him. The number of delegates admitted to the national convention was 1,078, meaning that a consensus of 540 votes would clinch the nomination. His mass appeal might yet achieve that miracle. And there was always the chance (though no gentleman would think of mentioning it) that the President, at 330 pounds plus, might take one golf swing too many.
NEITHER TAFT NOR ROOSEVELT undertook to campaign personally at first. Tradition required major candidates to remain aloof from delegate-hunting. The Colonel contented himself with press relations. One day he allowed21 two of the investigative journalists he had slammed as “muckrakers” during his presidency to buy him lunch at the Colony Club in New York. Ida Tarbell, who had made herself famous by exposing the monopolistic practices of the Standard Oil Company, was by no means his fan. She had not forgiven him for his epithet, which had stuck to her ever since. Ray Stannard Baker knew Roosevelt well enough to doubt that he was as pure in his progressivism as Senator La Follette—or for that matter Governor Wilson, with whom Baker was now ideologically infatuated.
Both writers, however, were captivated by the Colonel’s charm. His political image was so swashbuckling and his quoted rhetoric so pugnacious that skeptics were always surprised to find how gentle he was in private. “Again he impressed me with his wonderful social command,” Baker wrote afterward. There were two other women present, along with William Allen White, and Roosevelt showed himself to be “keenly sensitive to everyone in the party,” bringing out all personalities. It was not possible to be shy in front of him. He disarmed by being frank about himself, not hiding the fact that he had been snubbed by the Harvard overseers, and admitting that some people considered him crazy.
Baker thought that he looked “wonderfully well,” sitting relaxed in a soft dark suit and bright tie. The light through the club’s big windows shone on his straw-brown hair and showed it to be thinning slightly at the crown. There was little gray in it, in contrast to streaks of white in his mustache. In his sharp voice, he talked about his career, saying that as a young man he had felt most comfortable with fellow members of the Knickerbocker aristocracy. Later he had come to admire self-made men like Mark Hanna, who made fortunes in industry and parlayed it into political power, until their amorality repelled him and he had realized that “the real democratic spirit lay deeper,” in the bosoms of the plain people he had bunked with out West, and fought with in Cuba.
Baker sensed that Roosevelt’s conscious adoption of their values had, over the years, become visceral. “This is his strong point—that he voices rather than creates the sentiment which he expresses. He is not a pioneer, but a reporter.” As such, he did not seem to care if he won or not, as long as “the great fundamental principles” of progressivism prevailed.
The only prejudice he displayed during two hours of conversation was a refusal to accept that La Follette was as idealistic as himself. Baker had to conclude, “He is nearer the true liberal in spirit than any man now in public life … a great man—a genius in his way.”
MEANWHILE, ROOSEVELT’S AGENTS fought for every delegate who could be cajoled, bullied, or bribed. It was an embarrassment to him that men like Ward and Flinn22, bosses themselves, were employing methods contemptuous of his pronouncement at Saratoga in 1910, “The rule of the boss is the negation of democracy.” Every Pennsylvanian ward heeler looking for a new job in a new machine, every Southern Negro who yielded to the charms of Ormsby McHarg23, Dixon’s none-too-scrupulous representative in Dixie, shrugged at what the Colonel had to say about righteousness.
The problem was that, no matter how honest most of his campaign executives were in command of their various field operations, they had to rely on professional politicians at the state and lower levels—when such men could be found. Often as not, “Republicans for Roosevelt” were passionate amateurs who had never worked in a campaign before, and who needed to be trained and supervised. In Massachusetts, he was served by a committee of seven Harvard men24, all from families dating back to the seventeenth century, all young, and all except one possessed by the notion that progressivism was a form of noblesse oblige. But with Senator W. Murray Crane controlling the Bay State GOP organization (for as long as Lodge recused himself), the Harvard men were as rowers without a cox: all muscle, but no coordination.
It followed that25 Roosevelt had to tolerate, or choose not to know about, signatures forged on nominating petitions in New York, horses traded with conservative mercenaries in Indiana, and baseball bats wielded to discipline delegates in Missouri. He contented himself with occasional letters of admonition or restraint.
His first convention victory over Taft in Oklahoma on 14 March was at least a start, albeit coerced by a progressive enthusiast26 standing behind the chairman with a loaded revolver. The result, achieved at the cost of one death and three casualties, was ten delegates-at-large and six district delegates. Frank Knox thought that some of the minority pledged to Taft might be unseated by appealing to the Republican National Committee in June.
All at once, the Colonel’s campaign seemed to be gaining momentum. A series of separate headlines in The New York Times on 18 March proclaimed:
NORTH CAROLINA FOR ROOSEVELT
N.D. MAY BE ROOSEVELT’S
ROOSEVELT MAY CARRY OREGON
OHIO DRIFTING ROOSEVELT’S WAY
TEXAS ALL FOR ROOSEVELT
AGAINST ROOSEVELT IN WISCONSIN
The last news was not bad news, since La Follette was Wisconsin’s favorite son. What was most significant was the trend in Ohio—Taft’s home state. If Roosevelt could pull off a miracle there, the blow to the President’s prestige would be severe. However, that primary was not due to be held for another two months, giving the White House plenty of time to continue its steady banking of pledges.
In the meantime, the speculative nature of the Times’s headlines was quickly exposed. On 19 March27, North Dakota, the plains state Roosevelt most identified with as a former ranchman (“Here the romance of my life began”), gave him only 23,669 votes to La Follette’s 34,123. Taft scored a humiliating 1,876, but that was a small consolation to Senator Dixon, given the fact that La Follette was supposed to have committed political suicide only six weeks before. Roosevelt urged the chairman to inflect the story as an “emphatically anti-administration” win for progressivism. He argued that even a La Follette delegation would count, in the end, as his own. But the claim sounded wishful.
He was, in fact, lagging in his race for the nomination. Infighting among his regional supporters was chronic, defectors from the La Follette organization were being shunned rather than welcomed, and would-be delegates were running against one another, rather than together for him. Nor had there been much evidence of “Teddy’s” alleged mass popularity. As James Bryce scoffed in a report to Sir Edward Grey, “The prairies28 did not burst into flame as soon as his consent to become a candidate was known.”
Roosevelt began to show signs of panic, snapping at a suggestion by the publisher Hermann Kohlsaat that he withdraw in Taft’s favor, and admitting, “I tend to get29 pessimistic at times.” A childhood friend30, Frances “Fanny” Parsons, came to stay with him and noticed that he had lost the bubbling high spirits that had enchanted her forty years before. She tried to keep up with him on one of his frenzied marches down Cove Neck. “On that long, rapid, for me almost breathless walk through the leafless woods, I realized that he was starting out on a strange untraveled road, the end of which he could not see.”
ONE THING THE COLONEL had not lost was his power over audiences.
Carnegie Hall was crammed31 to the door when he rose to speak there on the night after the North Dakota primary. It was his first public appearance in almost a month. Arcs of women in evening dress glittered in the first and second tiers (Edith and Ethel looking down from box 61), standees crammed even the upper levels, and the stage behind him groaned with representatives of the New York Civic Forum. Outside in the street, five thousand disappointed attendees milled around, hoping he would address them later.
Noticing William Barnes, Jr., and a henchman, Timothy L. Woodruff, in the orchestra section, Roosevelt began by remarking that if Lincoln’s formula of government by the people was to be abandoned for minority rule, he knew who its chief exponents would be in New York State. “It will be32 Brother Barnes and Brother Woodruff.”
Barnes glared at him from the parquet, but the audience rose in a standing ovation when Roosevelt continued, “I prefer to govern myself, to do my own part, rather than have the government of a particular class.” For the rest of the evening he was in complete control. He rephrased, but at the same time reaffirmed, all the points he had made at Columbus, emphasizing that he was advocating the recall only of judicial decisions that took elite advantage of the Constitution. “The courts should33 not be allowed to reverse the political philosophy of the people.” He named Taft as the nation’s top reactionary in favor of oligarchy rule.
Roosevelt’s voice scratched every sentence into the receptivity of his listeners, and his habit of throwing sheet after sheet34 of manuscript to the floor seemed to mime points raised and dealt with. His peroration brought even Barnes to his feet in applause:
The leader for35 the time being, whoever he may be, is but an instrument, to be used until broken and then to be cast aside; and if he is worth his salt he will care no more when he is broken than a soldier cares when he is sent where his life is forfeit in order that the victory may be won. In the long fight for righteousness the watchword for all of us is “Spend and be spent.”
We, here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men.
Afterward in one of the political clubs, Barnes was defensive. “Roosevelt, confound him36, has a kind of magnetism that you cannot resist when you are in his presence!”
BARNES RECOVERED from the magnetism in time to hand the Colonel another defeat in the New York primary on 26 March. Republicans amenable37 to Party discipline voted two to one for Taft. Those of more independent temper appeared to have stayed home.
It turned out that38 hundreds of Roosevelt supporters had gone to the polls in New York County, only to be frustrated by mysterious equipment failures and closings. Others had been handed preposterously long ballots folded like concertinas, with up to three feet of blank space separating the Roosevelt ticket from its emblem. People tore off what they thought was waste paper, then found themselves unable to vote for the Colonel. The sole delegate he won in the city of his birth was an unopposed candidate in Brooklyn. Statewide, he netted seven delegates to Taft’s eighty-three. Every winner of a state committee seat or district leadership was a machine man. And when, later that same evening, the Indiana and Colorado GOP conventions elected their delegates-at-large, all were instructed for Taft.
The net results39 were so damaging that it availed Dixon little to complain that the New York vote was “a joke.” Taft now had a roster of 265 pledged delegates, with 539 needed to win. Roosevelt had 27.
He received the news40 of his triple defeat while traveling west aboard the Chicago Limited. Already he had concluded that his only chance of avoiding catastrophe was to forget about ex-presidential dignity and campaign in person, as strenuously and widely as possible.
“They are stealing41 the primary elections from us,” he said. “All I ask is a square deal.… I cannot and will not stand by while the opinion of the people is being suppressed and their will thwarted.”
If the eight thousand people who awaited him in the Chicago Auditorium that evening were voyeurs expecting a valedictory, what they got was a battle cry. Roosevelt roared42 against “fraud” in New York, “brutal and indecent” exclusion of his delegates in Indiana, and “outrageous” machine tactics in Denver. He called upon Illinois voters to insist on a direct primary, so they could register their personal preferences. Without saying so, he made it clear that if the RNC continued to thwart the will of progressives, he would bolt the Party and fight under a new banner.
He was back43 in New York at the end of the month, after a five-day swing through Indiana, Missouri, Minnesota, and Michigan. Almost immediately he was off again, on an itinerary reminiscent of his marathon tours as president. At the top44 of his fraying voice, he preached progressive Republicanism at municipal receptions, church socials, chautauquas, spring festivals, and rallies huge and small. He zigzagged south through West Virginia and Kentucky, then eastward via Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania to New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Another flying visit home, and he was off across the Midwestern states to Iowa and Nebraska and Kansas, then down into Oklahoma, Arkansas, and North Carolina. From dawn until long after dusk, sometimes in pajamas from the back of his caboose, he harangued the citizens of Albia, Amboy, Ashland, Auburn, Aurora, Ayer, Beatrice, Blairsville, Clinton, Coatesville, Crete, Danville, Dixon, Hinton, Latrobe, Mattoon, Minonk, Mount Sterling, Nashua, Olive Hill, Osceola, Ottumwa, Ozark, Pawnee City, Peru, Point Pleasant, Polo, Ronceverte, Salisbury, Shelbyville, St. Albans, Tecumseh, Tuscola, Urbana, Wymore, and a hundred other places, until the names blurred into Anytown and the faces became the single face of Everyman.
On 9 April, just as he was preparing to deliver a major address45 on judicial reform in Philadelphia, he was rewarded with the first really good news of his campaign. Republicans in Illinois had coaxed a direct primary out of the legislature, awarding him a two-to-one-plus victory over Taft. Fifty-six of the state’s fifty-eight delegates were his, and a popular majority of 139,436. The dispatch hit with especial force in Washington, where most political gossips had already renominated the President.
“No one can explain46 it,” Henry Adams marveled, “and I think no one expected it.”
Six days later, Roosevelt scored an even bigger win in Pennsylvania. It coincided with the first wire report of a catastrophe beyond belief in the North Atlantic. “The Titanic is wrecked,”47 Adams wrote aghast. “So is Taft; so is the Republican Party.”
The President, nearly frantic48 as the extent of the tragedy became known, spent most of that evening in the White House telegraph office. He wanted to learn the fate of one passenger in particular: his indispensable aide, Major Archibald Willingham Butt.
Roosevelt claimed to be as bereaved as Taft when survivor testimony confirmed that Butt had helped women and children escape before going down with the ship. “Major Butt was49 the highest type of officer and gentleman,” he said while campaigning in Lindsborg, Kansas. “I and my family all loved him sincerely.”
His syntax did not escape the attention of E. W. Kemble, the great cartoonist working for Harper’s Weekly and, by extension, for the Democratic Party. As Roosevelt continued to rack up primary wins, trumpeting each victory as a personal triumph, Kemble began a savage series of caricatures portraying him as a self-obsessed spoiler. Grinning toothily, “The odosus the Great”50 crowned himself with laurels; he toted a tar-bucket of abuse and splattered it, black and dripping, across the Constitution, Supreme Court, and White House. He emboldened every capital I in a screed reading:
I am the will51 of the
people I am the leader
I chose myself to be
leader it is MY
right to do so. Down with
the courts, the bosses
and every confounded thing that opposes
ME. I AM IT
do you get me?
I will have as many terms
in office as I
desire. Sabe!*
T.R.
TAFT SUPPORTERS BECAME seriously alarmed when Roosevelt went on to take Nebraska and Oregon. They did what they could52 to discredit him. Rumors that “Teddy” was a toper—what else could explain his exuberant animation and rapid-fire speech?—spread to such an extent that he had to issue an order that no alcohol be served on his campaign train. Lyman Abbott issued a wry statement that the Colonel indeed imbibed excessively, being addicted to milk.
Roosevelt did not know whether to be amused or irritated. “Since I have been53 back from Africa, I have drunk an occasional glass of madeira or white wine, and at big dinners an occasional glass of champagne. That is literally all.” But when hints of alcoholism began to appear in print, he looked for an open libel that would enable him to sue “for the heaviest kind of damages.”
On 23 April, Taft won New Hampshire, an Old Guard fiefdom that Roosevelt had written off. One week later, the Massachusetts primary loomed. Legislators there had bowed to popular pressure and agreed to a direct vote. Roosevelt had so far won every preferential contest he entered, but the power of the Massachusetts Republican leadership made him doubt his luck this time. “I think Taft54 will carry the state, because ours is only a fight of minute-men under sergeants and corporals, and all the generals are against us.”
Taft was nervous enough to travel to Boston on the twenty-fifth and say out loud what he thought about his opponent. No president had ever campaigned for his own renomination. “I am in55 this fight to perform a great public duty,” he told a reporter, “—the duty of keeping Theodore Roosevelt out of the White House.” At every stop en route, he played for sympathy, saying that he had never wanted to take his predecessor on. “This wrenches my soul.” But he felt entitled to defend himself against the false charges of a political turncoat—“one whom in the past I have greatly admired and loved, and whose present change of attitude is the source of the saddest disappointment.”
That night in the Boston Arena, Taft was greeted by a capacity audience so welcoming as to disprove the notion that he was loved only by the Old Guard. His opening words promised a speech of unusual frankness: “The ordinary rules of propriety that restrict a President in his public addresses must be laid aside, and the cold, naked truth must be stated in such a way that it shall serve as a warning to the people of the United States.”
Taft proceeded to attack Roosevelt in lawyerly fashion, reading for more than an hour from a typescript. As he did so, the enthusiasm around him cooled to respectful silence. Unlike La Follette, he did not lose his place or ramble. There were no Rooseveltian riffs, no high-pitched jokes, no fist-smacks, only the steady strong voice of an aggrieved man. His performance was boring, yet persuasive in its relentless accumulation of detail.
He itemized eleven specific charges the Colonel had laid against him, and in denying or correcting them, kept asking how a man could allege such things and yet pretend to stand for a square deal in politics. Disingenuously, he defended his use of White House patronage by saying that 70 percent of federal officeholders were still Roosevelt appointees. This was a false argument, because no customs clerk or farm inspector dared to risk the wrath of a sitting president. Moreover, Taft was56 either lying or in a state of ignorance when he insisted that “not a single” person had lost his job for political reasons. Dismissals of progressives had been going on since February.
In the manner of counsel holding up exhibits for adjudication, the President read some friendly letters that had passed between him and the Colonel during their rapprochement in the winter of 1910–1911. He cited the addresses and dates of each letter, and even the superscriptions “Personal” and “Confidential.” He claimed to be Roosevelt’s faithful follower, and reviewed his own, professedly liberal executive and legislative record at such length as to cramp the hand of any shorthand scribe. The crowd in the Arena became listless, but livened up as Taft, trembling and sweating, swung to a powerful conclusion:
Mr. Roosevelt ought not57 to be nominated at Chicago because in such a nomination the Republican Party will violate our most useful and necessary government tradition—that no one shall be permitted to hold a third presidential term.… (Loud applause)
Mr. Roosevelt would accept a nomination for a third term on what ground? Not because he wishes it for himself. He has disclaimed any such desire. He is convinced that the American people think that he is the only one to do the job (as he terms it), and for this he is prepared to sacrifice his personal comfort. (Laughter) He does not define exactly what the “job” is which he is to do, but we may infer from his Columbus platform it is to bring about a change of the social institutions of the country by legislation and other means.… I need hardly say that such an ambitious plan could not be carried out in one short four years.[sic] … There is not the slightest reason why, if he secures a third term, and the limitation of the Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson tradition is broken down, he should not have as many terms as his natural life will permit. If he is necessary now to the government, why not later?
One who so lightly regards constitutional principles, and especially the independence of the judiciary, one who is naturally so impatient of legal restraints, and of due legal procedure, and who has so misunderstood what liberty regulated by law is, could not be safely entrusted with successive [sic] presidential terms. I say this sorrowfully, but I say it with the full conviction of truth. (prolonged applause)
After returning58 to his train, Taft put his head in his hands and cried.
THE COLONEL WAS in Worcester, Massachusetts, the next day, and responded in tones of outrage. It was “the grossest and most astounding hypocrisy,” he said, for the President to claim that he had always been a faithful Rooseveltian. The words sent a momentary shiver59 through his audience, unused to such lèse-majesté. Then cheers and catcalls broke out. “He has not merely in thought, word, and deed been disloyal to our past friendship, but has been disloyal to every canon of ordinary decency and fair dealing.… Such conduct represents the very crookedest type of a crooked deal.”
Roosevelt said that60 the President had set the tone of their rivalry early on, calling him a “neurotic” and “demagogue,” and then, pathetically, pretending that it hurt to do so. “No man resorts to epithets like these if it really gives him pain,” Roosevelt scoffed. No gentleman, moreover, would read out another’s private correspondence without permission.
Responding to Taft’s charge that he had no right to a third term in the White House, he emphasized that he was not an incumbent seeking to perpetuate himself with patronage. He was a private citizen with the rights of any other. He went on for an hour and twenty minutes, using the personal pronoun 181 times, not admitting a single mistake or error of judgment. At the end, he managed to convey a kind of contemptuous sympathy for the President as a good-natured misfit dominated by stronger men: “He means well, but he means well feebly.”
Later he spoke61 at the Boston Arena, as Taft had twenty-four hours before. A boxing match had been held there in the interim, and the ropes were still in place. This enabled Roosevelt to make a stooping, straightening, fist-pumping entrance that touched off a seven-minute roar of applause. He had become, literally, the Man in the Arena.
“Now you have me,”62 he shouted, after yet another statement of his recall philosophy. “Am I preaching anarchy?”
The answer was a roof-raising, “NO!”
As Elihu Root remarked to a friend, “He is essentially63 a fighter and when he gets into a fight he is completely dominated by the desire to destroy his adversary.”
THE EXTRAORDINARY VEHEMENCE with which Taft and Roosevelt defended themselves in Massachusetts indicated that the nomination battle had entered its critical stage. Taft was not as far ahead as his late-April total of 432 delegates seemed to imply. All had been pledged or instructed in states where the Party still controlled its own representation. Consequently they were less reflective of the vox populi than Roosevelt’s 208 delegates, elected for the most part in direct primaries. Massachusetts, a conservative state about to mount its own primary for the first time, offered Taft his best chance yet to demonstrate that ordinary voters were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.
VOTE OF BAY STATE64 MAY BE DECISIVE, The New York Times proclaimed before the election, suggesting that it might end the brief Roosevelt boom. Taft was reportedly hoping to sweep all thirty-six delegates. If so, he was disappointed. The vote, on 30 April, was indecisive. He won a small statewide majority of 3,622, but that allowed him no more delegates than Roosevelt, at eighteen each. The draw was broken by eight delegates-at-large, who pledged themselves to the Colonel.
Roosevelt, overjoyed but noting Taft’s larger vote, was quick to take moral advantage of it. “In this fight,”65 he announced, “I am standing for certain great principles.… Foremost of these is the right of the people to rule.” He said he would order his delegates-at-large to switch their allegiance to the President.
By early May66, with only four weeks of active campaigning left and 540 delegates needed to win the nomination, The New York Times estimated Taft’s complement at 468, Roosevelt’s at 232, and La Follette’s at 36. Senator Cummins of Iowa had a favorite-son slate of 10. The newspaper forecast that Taft would soon capture Nevada and Arkansas, followed by the primary states of Maryland and New Jersey. These, plus a swath of far-western states—Washington, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming—should yield him over a hundred more delegates, and eliminate his challengers well before June.
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 week67, 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,”68 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 man69 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 vocabulary70 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.”71 Democrats rejoiced in a report that one night Roosevelt and Taft had, after a fashion, slept together, with their Pullmans parked72 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 insincerity73, 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 candidate74—possibly Charles Evans Hughes. The Colonel’s reply was characteristic: “I will name75 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.”76 The Democratic governor of New Jersey expressed concern for the fate of the nation. “Your judgment77 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 votes78 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!