In this Feb. 1912 cartoon, Roosevelt’s hat dwarfs all the others tossed in the “Presidential Ring.”
THE COLONEL IS MUSSING UP the whole Progressive situation with his ‘To be or not to be,’ ” fretted Lincoln Steffens in January 1912. “He won’t make a statement. He talks to us privately, but not convincingly; at least not to all of us,” he wrote to a friend, resolving that in all probability, Roosevelt “simply isn’t clear himself. He’s undecided; wabbles and, of course, the Taft side makes the most of it. La Follette is bully. He is for the cause, not himself, and wants to act, at once, and in the best interest of ultimate results.” In truth, Roosevelt was far closer to a decision than Steffens realized. Continuing to insist that he would neither “seek the nomination” nor take a single step to secure it, Roosevelt softened his tone and told supporters that if “a genuine popular demand” for his nomination indicated conviction that he was “the man to do the job,”he would “of course” accept.
“Events have been moving fast,” Roosevelt told Michigan governor Chase Osborn in mid-January, noting that “it is impossible for me much longer to remain silent.” Osborn was among more than half a dozen governors who were strongly urging him to run. In response, Roosevelt told Osborn he had come up with a plan: If the governors who had privately encouraged him would sign a joint public letter declaring their desire for him to run, he would answer their demand with an announcement of his candidacy. Roosevelt delegated the task of drafting the letter to Frank Knox, chairman of Michigan’s state central committee; after the Colonel added several lines emphasizing that the governors were acting “not for his sake, but for the sake of the country,” Knox was dispatched to secure the signatures.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s friends began working surreptitiously to undermine La Follette’s campaign. A convention of Ohio progressives, expected to endorse La Follette, decided on a last-minute substitute resolution that pronounced the Wisconsin senator “the living embodiment of progressive principles,” but declined to express a preference “for a single candidate.” La Follette was furious at his campaign manager for agreeing to the compromise.
On the night of January 22, La Follette spoke at Carnegie Hall before an overflow audience; crowds lining the streets had waited hours for the doors to open. “Carnegie Hall never held a bigger nor a more enthusiastic audience,” the New York Times reported. Seated on the platform were more than two hundred Insurgents’ Club members, including Gifford and Amos Pinchot, Ray Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and Francis Heney. The passionate orator “got on good terms with the audience at once and never lost it,” the New York World observed. Afterward, a group of La Follette’s friends gathered at the Plaza Hotel for dinner. The celebratory mood quickly dissipated when the conversation turned to Theodore Roosevelt. Earlier that day, the Pinchot brothers had gone to see the former president and were now convinced that the Colonel would run. They worried that if La Follette remained in the race, the two men would divide the progressive vote. William Allen White had already switched his allegiance to Roosevelt, arguing in the Emporia Gazette that only the former president could save the Republicans from massive defeat. “Roosevelt or bust!” he proclaimed. Perhaps the time had come, La Follette’s friends suggested, for him to withdraw.
The senator could no longer suppress his rage that Roosevelt had been using him as “a stalking horse” all along, testing President Taft’s political strength. “When Roosevelt left the White House,” La Follette charged, “he had 1916 firmly in his mind.” Yet the wild reception as the Colonel toured the country had “fired his blood. There were the old-time crowds, the music, the cheers. He began to think of 1912 for himself. It was four years better than 1916.” Regardless of Roosevelt’s ambitions, La Follette insisted, he would continue his own campaign.
A week later, during a “painful” conference at the senator’s Washington home, the Pinchots redoubled their efforts to persuade La Follette to end his candidacy. The Pinchot brothers were among his most fervent supporters before Roosevelt’s name surfaced, and La Follette viewed their entreaties as a bitter betrayal. He told them he would persevere, even if he had to “fight alone,” even if he carried only Wisconsin. “When I gave my ultimatum, refusing to abandon the field,” La Follette later said, “Gifford Pinchot left my house and never crossed the threshold again.” The next morning, La Follette ordered his manager to release a statement: “Senator La Follette never has been and is not now a quitter,” the communiqué read, concluding, “He will be there until the gavel falls in the convention announcing the nominee.”
For La Follette, trouble soon piled on trouble. Although mentally and physically exhausted, he was scheduled to speak on February 2 in Philadelphia at the annual banquet of the Periodical Publishers’ Association. There, he would join an impressive roster of speakers, including New Jersey’s new governor Woodrow Wilson, California governor Hiram Johnson, and Philadelphia mayor Rudolph Blankenburg. But five days before the event, doctors diagnosed his thirteen-year-old daughter with tuberculosis in three glands near her jugular vein. An operation to cut off the affected tissue was scheduled for the morning after the banquet. La Follette considered withdrawing from the engagement but feared his failure to show would signal an intention to withdraw from the race.
La Follette arrived late, set to give the banquet’s closing speech. Wilson had earlier delivered the evening’s best speech, humorous, charming, and short. Before taking the stage at ten o’clock that night, La Follette “took a great gobletful of whiskey and swallowed it neat, as a stimulant.” He had prepared a provocative message for the magazine publishers—a warning that the same “money power” that had gained domination over the newspaper industry in recent decades was now threatening to corrupt independent periodicals through “the centralization of advertising.” After their staunch efforts to illuminate corruption, he trusted they would “not be found wanting” before this “final test.” They alone promised “to hold aloft the lamp of truth, lighting the way for the preservation of representative government.”
Had La Follette focused his speech solely on this challenge to magazine journalists, he might have found an appreciative audience; instead, he began with a long historical lecture on how corporate interests had seized control of the newspapers, reducing journalists to hirelings “who no longer express honest judgments and sincere conviction,” writing only “what they are told to write.” La Follette encountered a response significantly less sympathetic than he might have hoped. In the enervating days preceding the banquet, he had neglected to inquire about the composition of the audience of eight hundred people. This particular annual dinner had been specifically calculated “to bring together the newspaper and magazine publishers.” For the first time, newspapermen made up a significant portion of the guests.
La Follette immediately alienated his listeners by announcing that he would read his speech and give it out for publication, since he was “frankly sick of being eternally misquoted.” His voice grew “acid and raucous” as he berated the newspapermen as instruments of the “predatory interests.” Dumbfounded at first, the audience quickly grew angry. Scores of newspapermen simply rose and left. La Follette “shook his fist at them,” roaring: “There go some of the fellows I’m hitting. They don’t want to hear about themselves.” When another guest leaned over to whisper a comment to his neighbor, the senator pointed “his dagger-like forefinger” at the man, accusing him of accepting bribes from the trust, and hollered: “You’ve got to listen to me and hear the facts for once!” Attempting to return to his text after each of these fiery outbursts, La Follette repeatedly lost his place, rereading long passages he had already read. During the first two hours, he repeated one section seven times.
As midnight approached, La Follette’s secretary, seated directly behind him, desperately tried to get him to stop. Increasing numbers left the room, and those who remained began to applaud with contempt, in hopes of bringing the interminable harangue to an end. “You can’t drown me out!” he defiantly shouted, threatening with renewed belligerence, “If you don’t shut up and listen I’ll talk all night!” By the end of the ordeal, the New York Times reporter sardonically noted, he “was denouncing the empty chairs” and “calling the abandoned cups and cigar stubs minions of the trust.” At twelve-thirty he collapsed in his chair, “with closed eyes and his chin sunk on his chest.”
This humiliating episode was heartbreaking to Baker. He had expected La Follette to deliver “the greatest speech of his career—the speech with which he hoped to win the East.” Instead, the gifted orator had utterly lost control of himself and his emotions. “To those of us who were there and who were La Follette’s friends,” Baker grimly recalled, “it was a tragedy beyond tears.”
Rumors circulated that La Follette had suffered a nervous breakdown and headed for a sanitarium. Dispirited and exhausted, he was nevertheless not only able to attend his daughter’s operation the following morning but also, after “a short rest,” return to the Senate. The damage to his campaign, however, proved irreparable. As he later acknowledged, his supposedly “shattered health” provided a pretext for hundreds of his supporters who wanted to “switch to Roosevelt” but would have felt guilty doing so. In a dramatic statement that captured headlines, Gifford Pinchot announced that he was abandoning La Follette, whose “ill health” compromised the progressive cause. “I shall,” he declared, “hereafter advocate the nomination of Colonel Roosevelt, whose duty I believe it is to take up the leadership of the progressive movement.”
As La Follette and his wife, Belle, endured the gloomy days that followed, a gracious letter from Sam McClure provided a singular bright spot. “I want to let you know how much I sympathize with you and the Senator,” McClure assured Belle, adding that he had “listened with eager interest to all that he said.” Indeed, McClure’s had recently published a seven-part series, the “last great series” Sam McClure would publish, exploring the increasing “concentration of capital in the hands of a few men” on Wall Street—the very “money power” theme at the center of La Follette’s botched address.
The senator’s speech, McClure told Mrs. La Follette, had simply started too late and lasted too long, preventing the crowd from giving it the “justice” it deserved. “Your letter,” Belle replied, “was very helpful to me, and to Mr. La Follette.” At its core, the speech had a powerful message, but her husband had been unable to deliver it due to his overwrought emotions. “I think in his state of over strain and exhaustion,” she explained, “the hostility he felt in his audience must have caused him to lose all self possession. Of course, he realizes what it means and suffers accordingly . . . I shall always remember your kindness and think of you as a friend.”
“POOR SENATOR LA FOLLETTE,” ROOSEVELT wrote to his publicity chief, newspaperman John Callan O’Laughlin, after the debacle, attempting to justify his own late entrance into the race. “It is perfectly silly of him to feel hurt at me, and I wish you could bring out the fact that I have done absolutely nothing, that if ever there was a perfectly spontaneous and genuinely popular movement, this has been one . . . each and every one of [the governors] wrote to me out of a clear sky, saying that he was for me. Between ourselves, in more than one case I did not even know the Governor’s name until he wrote me.” Roosevelt’s protest was somewhat disingenuous. While the movement for his candidacy may have begun spontaneously, the Colonel was orchestrating every detail of how and when to respond publicly to the round-robin letter he himself had initiated. Having received an invitation to speak before the Ohio Constitutional Convention in Columbus two months earlier, he decided to use the occasion to present his platform before giving a formal answer to the governors’ request.
By delaying his entry into the race, Roosevelt had similarly destabilized Taft’s position. “The trouble with the Colonel” had long overshadowed the White House “like a big, black cloud.” Throughout the early winter, Taft continued to hope that Roosevelt would ultimately decide against running. Otto Bannard, a friend to both men, believed that “the whole plan” was to effect Taft’s voluntary withdrawal, that if Roosevelt had to face the “handicap” of taking the nomination from a sitting president, he would not run. Indeed, Taft had not been happy in the presidency and seriously dreaded the prospect of open conflict with his old friend. Moreover, if he deferred to Roosevelt, he might have another shot at the Supreme Court. But the dignity of the presidency—and his duty to the people who elected him—ultimately prevented such a move. “I hate to be at odds with Theodore Roosevelt, who made me President,” he told Horace, to which he made an important addendum: “of course, he made me President and not deputy, and I have to be President; and I do not recognize any obligation growing out of my previous relations to step aside and let him become a candidate for a third term when he specifically declined a third term.”
The period of uncertainty weighed with particular gravity on Archie Butt. “My devotion to the Colonel is as strong as it was the day he left,” he told Clara, but “I would not ask to be relieved from the President now if my whole life was at stake.” Day in and day out, Butt had been a constant companion to the president. Taft “is so honest, so big, and tries to be so just,” Butt said of his boss, “that it is hard for the people to get a proper perspective of him.” The affection, even love between the two men was mutual. “A President sees but very few people continuously in a confidential way,” Taft explained, “and his Aide has to be with him all the time.” For three years, Archie Butt had shared moments of sadness, anxiety, and joy. “I very much doubt whether I have ever known a man,” Taft declared, with such an empathetic gift “to put himself in the place of another, and suffer and enjoy with that other, as Archie Butt.”
A few weeks after the mysterious warning from Alice Roosevelt that he should leave the White House soon, Archie received an open invitation from Edith Roosevelt to join the family at Oyster Bay. He wrote back to propose a visit the last Sunday in January, when he would be in New York with the president. “Delighted,” Edith responded by telegram. “Will expect you to lunch.” Despite the tensions of the upcoming election, Archie did not conceal such correspondence from Taft, telling the president he would like to accept the invitation. “Go by all means,” Taft replied. “It will cheer them, and I know will make you happy.”
The visit, Archie recorded with delight, was “like a leaf out of an old book.” Logs were “glowing” in every fireplace; dogs were running “all over the house,” and the Colonel and Mrs. Roosevelt “were just the same dear people.” Archie sat with Edith by the fire for some time before the Colonel arrived. “We settled down to an old-time gossip,” Butt recalled, “Mrs. Roosevelt asking a hundred questions and I tripping up myself in my haste” to tell the latest stories of her Washington friends. Hearing their laughter, Roosevelt charged into the room, urging them to repeat their entertaining conversation. At lunch, Butt angled for some indication of Roosevelt’s plans, but the Colonel never “mentioned the president” nor “even asked about him,” leaping instead “from subject to subject with the agility of a flying squirrel.”
“It is all a mystery to me,” Archie told Taft later that night, “but the fact that he would not send a message to you by me was significant.” No longer hopeful that Roosevelt would not run, Taft grew “more bitter every hour” about his former friend. “The clash which must follow between these two men is tragic,” Archie lamented. “It is moving now from day to day with the irresistible force of the Greek drama, and I see no way for anything save divine Providence to interpose to save the reputation of either should they hurl themselves at each other.”
WHEN ROOSEVELT ARRIVED IN COLUMBUS, Ohio, on February 21, 1912, to deliver the speech heralded as his platform should he run for president, an enormous crowd of “cheering spectators” provided “a boisterous reception.” Sustained applause greeted his entrance to the rotunda and continued as he took his seat. His face, the president of the constitutional convention declared by way of introduction, was “more familiar than the face of the man in the moon.”
“We Progressives believe,” Roosevelt began, “that human rights are supreme over all other rights; that wealth should be the servant, not the master, of the people.” All those who sought reform were engaged in an epic battle “on behalf of the common welfare,” a fight to ensure that the people’s wishes, rather than the special interests, propelled governmental decisions. “Unless representative government does absolutely represent the people it is not representative government at all,” he proclaimed. An advocate of “pure democracy,” he fully embraced the campaign to put additional “weapons in the hands of the people,” including direct primaries, the initiative, and the referendum.
To the dismay of the Pinchot brothers, Roosevelt then proceeded to deploy his characteristic “balanced statements”: progressives must treat capital with the same justice as labor; they must “encourage legitimate and honest business,” even as they attacked “injustice and unfairness and tyranny in the business world,” and above all, he maintained, they must understand that “methods for the proper distribution of prosperity” were worthless “unless the prosperity is there to distribute.” He renewed his call for federal laws to regulate child labor and women’s working conditions, establish an income tax, and secure workmen’s compensation—all measures that many moderate Republicans could support.
Near the end of his speech, however, Roosevelt introduced a radical proposal that demolished any prospect of securing support from a broad party base. “When a judge decides a constitutional question, when he decides what the people as a whole can or cannot do, the people should have the right to recall that decision if they think it wrong,” he insisted. Time and again, he had witnessed “lamentable” judicial decisions by state courts, which had declared laws designed to secure better conditions for laborers unconstitutional. It was “foolish to talk of the sanctity of a judge-made law,” he pointed out, when such cases were often the product of a divided bench, with “half of the judges” fervently condemning the outcome. “If there must be a decision by a close majority,” Roosevelt suggested, “then let the people step in and let it be their majority that decides.”
The “damaging effect” of Roosevelt’s recall speech was soon evident. The proposition that “a plebiscite or popular referendum” could overturn “the highest appellate tribunals in the states,” the New York Sun argued, had “revolutionary” consequences for the framework of America’s government—creating nothing less than a “Court of the Crowd, with supreme jurisdiction.” Acknowledging that Roosevelt had not included Supreme Court decisions in his proposal, the editorial predicted that such a policy would eventually compromise the highest court in the land as well. Why require the long, cumbersome procedure to secure a constitutional amendment? While the Sun’s opposition was predictable, many papers followed a similar line of reasoning. The Colonel’s proposed judicial recall, declared the St. Louis Republic, revealed “Mr. Roosevelt’s incapacity to grasp a legal proposition.” The World characterized the speech as Roosevelt’s attempt to “out demagogue all other demagogues.” With this address, the New York Times predicted, the former president had effectively removed himself from his party, rendering his nomination impossible.
Beyond this outcry in the press, Roosevelt’s inflammatory speech estranged him from several of his closest allies. “Theodore has gone off upon a perfectly wild program,” Elihu Root told a friend, admitting that he had “been feeling very sad about [Roosevelt’s] new departure.” His fellow cabinet member Oscar Straus shared Root’s consternation. Roosevelt had shown him a draft of the speech a week before, and Straus was appalled by the judicial recall proposition. His attempt to discuss the issue with Roosevelt, however, had been summarily rebuffed. “That was so unlike the Roosevelt I knew,” Straus added, “that I was quite disappointed and somewhat taken aback.”
While Straus kept his objections private, Henry Cabot Lodge felt compelled to declare his disapproval publicly. “I am opposed to the constitutional changes advocated by Colonel Roosevelt,” he told the New York Times. Though the two men had been “close and most intimate friends” for three decades, he could not remain silent when “the sanctity of the judiciary” was under attack. “I have had my share of mishaps in politics but I never thought that any situation could arise which would have made me so miserably unhappy as I have been during the past week,” Lodge wrote to Roosevelt, following his public statement. “I knew of course that you and I differed on some of these points but I had not realized that the difference was so wide.” Roosevelt replied the next day: “My dear fellow, you could not do anything that would make me lose my warm personal affection for you.”
The swirling controversy only reinforced Edith Roosevelt’s chagrin over her husband’s decision to engage in what would undoubtedly prove a ferocious fight with Taft for the nomination. The previous six months had not been easy for her. In September 1911, riding “at a gallop” with Theodore, she had been thrown on the hard macadam road when her favorite horse suddenly “swerved and wheeled.” The concussion and dislocation of three vertebrae that resulted required three weeks of bed rest. “She is very much shattered,” Roosevelt confided to a friend a month later. Her convalescence had just begun when Theodore seriously started to entertain the idea of running. “Politics are hateful,” Edith despaired in a letter to Kermit. “Father thinks he must enter the fight definitely . . . and there is no possible result which could give me aught but keen regret.” Three days after the Columbus speech, Edith and her daughter Ethel sailed to South America. “At the worst of it I was forced to be away,” she wrote a friend, admitting that “in all my life I was never more unhappy.”
Few were more vexed by Roosevelt’s determination to run than his son-in-law, Congressman Nicholas Longworth, whose family had known the Tafts for decades. In her memoir Alice recorded “the quandary” her husband faced: “On the one hand his friendship with Mr. Taft and the fact that he came from Mr. Taft’s own district; on the other his affection for and his admiration of Father, made his position almost intolerable. I have never been so sorry for any one.” Roosevelt sympathized with Nick’s uncomfortable position. “Of course you must be for Taft,” he told Nick on the eve of his announcement. Still, his son-in-law found the situation painful, particularly as Alice grew “single-minded in enthusiasm” for her father’s campaign, evincing more emotion and interest in politics than ever before. This newfound political passion stirred domestic strife: at dinner parties with members of Nick’s family, Alice fought back whenever they criticized her father. “I got furious,” she confided in her diary after one unpleasant exchange. “Poor Nick angry—Says I must ‘shut up.’ ”
If family and friends were foiled by Roosevelt’s decision, the Colonel himself embraced the looming battle with gusto. “It is not the critic who counts,” he had famously preached upon his return from his African safari, “not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause.”
Indeed, his exuberance for battle manifested itself three days before his planned announcement, when he answered a question about his intentions with a spontaneous declaration: “My hat is in the ring.” The tradition of “shying the hat” went back to a time when men either fought in a ring “with bare knuckles” or flung a hat at a rooster that would only fight when goaded. The former president’s reference to fisticuffs and cockfighting, the New York Evening World commented, undoubtedly heralded “some brutality in the contest.”
On Sunday evening, February 25, Roosevelt’s New York office released the governors’ request that “in the interests of the people as a whole,” the Colonel should respond affirmatively to the “unsolicited and unsought” demand that he enter the race. “I deeply appreciate your letter,” Roosevelt publicly replied, affirming, “I will accept the nomination for President if it is tendered to me, and I will adhere to this decision until the convention has expressed its preference.”
That same night, before news of his decision had become public, Roosevelt attended a Porcellian Club Dinner and a meeting of the Harvard Overseers, after which he went to the home of his old college friend, Judge Robert Grant. At Roosevelt’s request, Grant had invited another college friend, the historian William Roscoe Thayer, and William Allen White to dinner. While Roosevelt showed “no signs” of agitation about the upcoming struggle, his friends expressed misgivings about his decision to run and the backlash from the Columbus speech. White continued to believe that public sentiment stood “overwhelmingly” with Roosevelt but doubted whether the political system was “flexible enough to register that sentiment.” If presidential primaries existed across the nation, he was confident Roosevelt would win, but the convention system had myriad ways of thwarting public desire. Grant believed Roosevelt was making “an unnecessary and possibly fatal blunder” by challenging a sitting president instead of waiting for an open field four years later. And Thayer begged him, “for the sake of his own future, not to engage in a factional strife which might end his usefulness to the country.”
The Colonel blithely deflected their arguments with animation and good humor. Never losing his composure when Thayer as a historian defended the judiciary and argued that Roosevelt’s platform would “destroy representative government” in favor of “the whims of the populace,” Roosevelt countered that he could identify nearly four dozen senators who obtained their offices through the influence of Wall Street. “Do you call that popular, representative government?” he queried in response. And when Grant wondered if he would have the backing of party leaders, Roosevelt acknowledged that he had “none of them; not even Lodge.” Instead, he counted on a cadre of young leaders, like Governor Robert Bass of New Hampshire.
As the lively conversation broke up around midnight, Grant made one final attempt to dissuade Roosevelt from running, emphasizing that people would think him disloyal to the president. About to retire to the guest room upstairs, Roosevelt angrily declared: “What do I owe to Taft? It was through me and my friends that he became President. I had him in the hollow of my hand and he would have dropped out.” To illustrate his point, he withdrew his pocketknife from his pocket, balanced it in the palm of his hand, then let it clatter to the floor.
THE PRESIDENT, THE FIRST LADY, and a few guests, including Archie Butt, were at dinner in the White House when a messenger brought Roosevelt’s letter declaring his candidacy. Reading it aloud to those at the table, Taft remarked that it was more definite than he had expected. Assuming it would be laden “with conditions and explanations,” he was surprised to find a clear “rallying cry to the Progressives.” Nellie turned to her husband. “I told you so four years ago, and you would not believe me,” she chided. Her husband gave a good-natured laugh. “I know you did, my dear, and I think you are perfectly happy now. You would have preferred the Colonel to have come out against me than to have been wrong yourself.”
Archie was less able to make light of the revelation, tossing in his bed that night unable to sleep. A week earlier, with the president’s blessing, he had made plans for a short European vacation with his good friend, the painter and sculptor Frank Millet. Archie had driven himself “like a steam engine” through the continuous round of dinners and receptions marking the winter social season, and now felt “tired all the time.” They were planning to sail on the Berlin. “If the old ship goes down,” he wrote his sister-in-law, Clara, “you will find my affairs in shipshape condition.”
As he lay in his bed that night, Archie had second thoughts about the trip. “It seems to me that the President will need every intime near at hand now. If we are ever to be of any real comfort to him, this is the time,” he reflected. “I can see he hates to see me go, and I feel like a quitter in going.” That morning, he canceled his sailing orders and told the president of his intention to remain in Washington. “He would not hear of it,” Archie told his Aunt Kitty, “and insisted on my going on the ground this was the only time I could get away.”
On Saturday, March 2, Archie Butt sailed for Europe. He hated “to leave the Big White Chief,” he told Clara, but he’d be back in six weeks, returning to the White House in plenty of time to support the president during “the fight of his life for the nomination.”
“BY A STRANGE COINCIDENCE,” The Washington Post reported, both Taft and Roosevelt opened their national headquarters on the same day. The Taft men commandeered twelve luxurious rooms in the Raleigh Hotel, while two blocks away, the Roosevelt headquarters occupied the tenth floor of the Munsey Building. To head his campaign, the Colonel chose Montana senator Joseph M. Dixon, an energetic young man with “a very pleasant and winning personality, easy manners, and attractive address.” Taft selected Illinois congressman William Brown McKinley, chairman of the Republican National Committee. No relation to the assassinated president, McKinley had made a fortune in traction corporations before entering Congress in 1905. For both campaigns, major financial backers helped furnish “the sinews of war.” Roosevelt would enjoy the support of two multimillionaires—Frank Munsey, the publisher of newspapers and magazines, and George Perkins, who had departed the house of Morgan “to devote himself to public affairs.” Taft could rely on traditional Republican Party stalwarts, including the financiers Otto Bannard and Chauncey Depew. And once again, Charley Taft contributed handsomely to his brother’s campaign.
As the battle for the nomination began, Taft was immensely relieved that the Colonel’s radical Columbus speech provided the opportunity to distinguish his own position “without indulging in any personal attack.” Though he agreed with many of the Colonel’s proposals on capital and labor, he had felt that the initiative and the referendum were problematic and was “unalterably opposed” to “the recall of judicial decisions.” In a letter to Charley, he noted that Roosevelt had “stirred up a veritable hornet’s nest of disapproval.” The issues were now “sharply defined,” clearing “the political atmosphere wonderfully.” Meeting with Roosevelt’s friend Henry White in early March, Taft vowed that his campaign would remain a battle of ideas. Indeed, he hoped that “when all this turmoil of politics had passed,” he and Roosevelt “would get together again and be as of old.”
Speaking in New York, Boston, and Toledo in the late winter and early spring, Taft deployed a series of metaphors to illuminate the inherent dangers in subjecting judicial decisions to “the momentary passions of a people.” In one late winter speech, he warned that judicial recall would topple “the pillars of the temple.” In subsequent addresses that spring, the president warned that such action threatened to smash “the ark of the covenant” and that it laid “the axe at the foot of the tree of well ordered freedom.” Defending his beloved judiciary, Taft found his voice. At the State House in Boston, he enjoyed the most “genuine ovation” of his speaking career. “One cannot adequately describe,” he told Charley, “the manner in which my speech was received without using extravagant expressions.”
“Taft has behaved with dignity and amiable forbearance since the announcement,” Roosevelt’s friend Judge Grant told the historian James Ford Rhodes at the end of March, noting that he had “become almost an idol, even in circles where a few months ago he was reviled.” If Taft triumphed, Grant continued, it would be “on the crest of the wave of revolt from and denunciation of Roosevelt.” In recent weeks, suspicion that Roosevelt had not granted the president “quite the square deal seems to have taken hold of the public mind,” and “the abuse” of the Colonel in the New York and Massachusetts newspapers had been “overwhelming and bitter.”
When the election year opened, only one eastern state—New Jersey—and five western states—Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oregon, North Dakota, and California—made use of the direct primary. Everywhere else, delegates would be selected at district and state conventions, where local machines and the power of federal patronage gave the president a decided advantage.
Taft’s campaign had already established control of most southern state conventions before Roosevelt formally entered the race. Fearful that the region’s running totals would make Taft’s lead appear impregnable before delegates from the rest of the country were selected, an enterprising Roosevelt supporter organized groups of men to contest the results of conventions throughout the South. Even if it was later determined that legitimate Taft majorities existed, the newspapers would be forced to list the results as contested rather than straight Taft victories. When rumors reached Roosevelt that bribes were being employed, he wrote his overenthusiastic organizer that while he was “absolutely sure that there was not a particle of truth” to the accusations, he nonetheless wanted “assurance” that no “improper” tactics were being used “to influence any man.”
At state conventions in the North and West, brutal altercations broke out, swiftly dispelling Taft’s hope for a high-minded campaign based on the issues. In Michigan, Taft’s forces secured a victory after what one newspaper described as “the worst riots that ever occurred in a political gathering in the state.” More than 1,800 men arrived at the Bay City Armory to claim 1,400 seats. The Taft men, the New York Times reported, were admitted first and filled the hall “despite the frantic efforts of the Roosevelt men to gain entrance through side doors, windows, and the basement.” With the aid of the state militia, delegates without proper credentials were “seized bodily” and thrown to the back of the crowd. Eventually, four hundred Roosevelt supporters were admitted, and “then the fireworks began.” When the chairman of the Taft delegation attempted to open the meeting, the Colonel’s men “set up a roar,” making it impossible for him to continue. One Roosevelt advocate rushed the platform only to be flung backward, landing atop the newspapermen’s table. More than a hundred men joined the fight before police “charged on the combatants and restored order with their clubs.” The Roosevelt faction promptly selected their own delegates before leaving the hall, “yelling and jeering at their foes.” The Taft faction then moved forward with the regular order of business.
Violence erupted at conventions in many other states as well, including Missouri and Oklahoma. In the third Missouri district, the Taft contingent, positioned at the only open door with “clubs and baseball bats,” prevented Roosevelt supporters from entering. Pandemonium broke out in Oklahoma City when a Roosevelt man wearing a Rough Rider outfit entered the hall on a horse and “rode down the aisle to the rostrum.” Before an hour had passed, a series of “dynamite explosions” shook the convention hall. A few weeks later, at a district convention in Guthrie, Oklahoma, a Roosevelt supporter held a loaded gun to the head of the chairman of Taft’s delegation. He wanted to be fully prepared, he declared, in case “any chicanery” occurred. Before the “all-night session” came to a close, one delegate had “dropped dead” from an apparent apoplexy.
EVEN BEFORE OFFICIALLY THROWING HIS hat in the ring, Roosevelt realized that his only chance for the nomination lay in expanding the direct primary beyond the half-dozen states that had adopted the system. In his letter to the governors, he had voiced his “hope that so far as possible the people may be given the chance, through direct primaries, to express their preference as to who shall be the nominee.” Initially led by La Follette and his band of insurgents, the movement for direct primaries had been slow to catch on. Two years earlier, Roosevelt had unsuccessfully tried to persuade the New York state legislature to change its nominating system. As a presidential candidate, however, he transformed the “sluggishly moving cause” into “a torrential crusade.”
“Get the Direct Primary for Your State,” proclaimed a Roosevelt supporter in Collier’s Weekly, alerting constituents that “the Presidential primary means that you can go to the polls (if you are a Republican) and say whether you want Taft or Roosevelt. If you don’t do the choosing the bosses will.” Roosevelt operatives pressured legislatures in one state after another to change their rules. “Don’t let the politicians tell you it is too late,” the progressive journalist Mark Sullivan proclaimed. “The Presidential primary can be got for every State if the people demand it.”
The call for a popular voice in party nominations was a delicate issue for the Taft campaign. While the president’s strength lay in the old convention system, the political climate made public opposition to direct primaries awkward. Nor did Taft oppose the concept in principle; he told Horace that he had “no objection at all” to Republican primaries, so long as the law provided safeguards to prevent Democrats from voting. Meanwhile, his managers did everything possible to prevent states from adopting primaries. “Legislatures are being dragooned, officeholders are being set at work,” the Washington Times reported, “and big business is using its influence at every point.” Challenged to explain why Taft’s campaign organizers were leading the fight, William McKinley flatly stated: “I do not favor changes in the rules of the game while the game is in progress. To propose the recall of conventions in the midst of the campaign is contrary to the dictates of fair play.” It appeared the campaign would progress smoothly, Taft assured Horace, if he could “only keep my people from talking too much.”
Roosevelt sounded the central theme of his own campaign in a speech at Carnegie Hall on March 20. Every seat was occupied; the speaker’s platform was jammed with chairs; women in evening gowns crowded the upper boxes. Five thousand people had to be turned away. Roosevelt“waved his hand energetically” to stop the “wild cheers” that greeted him as he entered, but the demonstration only escalated when someone in the back began the singsong refrain: “What’s the matter with Roosevelt?” To which the crowd chanted: “He’s all right!” At last, the audience reluctantly quieted and Roosevelt began to speak.
“The great fundamental issue now before the Republican party and before our people can be stated briefly,” he thundered, posing the rhetorical question: “Are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves? I believe they are. My opponents do not.” Declaring that he stood by the sentiments in his Columbus speech, Roosevelt adroitly folded his proposal for the recall of judicial decisions into the larger issue of popular rule. Any attack on his proposal, he maintained, was in effect “a criticism of all popular government,” grounded in “the belief that the people are fundamentally unworthy.”
For the first time, the New York Times reported, Roosevelt proceeded to pour “ridicule” on the president, deriding his misguided interpretation of the principles of American government. Unlike Abraham Lincoln, who believed in “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” Roosevelt charged that Taft ostensibly held that “our government is and should be a government of all the people by a representative part of the people,” the very definition of “oligarchy.” Where progressives trusted that the entire voting republic would rule correctly most of the time, Taft rested his hope in the courts—“a special class of persons wiser than the people.” In recent years, Roosevelt pointed out, these very courts had proved “the most serious obstacles” to social justice—repeatedly striking down legislation designed to better the working conditions of ordinary citizens. “Our task as Americans is to strive for social and industrial justice, achieved through the genuine rule of the people,” he urged. “We, here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world.” The destiny of “our great experiment” would mean nothing, he warned, “if on this new continent we merely build another country of great but unjustly divided material prosperity,” rather than a genuine democracy based on “the rule of all the people.”
As spring commenced, vigorous efforts by the Roosevelt campaign to spread the direct primary system had succeeded in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maryland, Ohio, South Dakota, Illinois, and New York, bringing the number of participating states to thirteen. The New York struggle resulted in multiple litigations regarding the format of the ballot and the placement of the delegates’ names, but the primary was finally set for March 26. In Illinois, the Chicago Tribune led a successful campaign to force the reluctant governor to call a special legislative session to pass the bill. With primaries scheduled nearly every week between mid-March and early June, the first presidential campaign conducted under this new system generated widespread interest and high emotions.
The primary season opened on March 12 in North Dakota, where Robert La Follette still “had his fighting clothes on,” determined to prove that he was the sole progressive in the race. Roosevelt, he charged, was merely a “switch engine” that ran on “one track, and then on another.” Aware that La Follette was generating widespread enthusiasm, Roosevelt’s managers published a last-minute appeal in newspapers across the state: “Today’s primary crucial. On the returns,” the statement advised, “will depend whether Col. Theodore Roosevelt is to be further considered as a factor in the fight for the nomination.”
In Washington, Alice Roosevelt Longworth waited anxiously. After placing repeated telephone calls to her father’s campaign manager, she finally received the “very bad news” that La Follette had beaten Roosevelt by a margin of 58 percent to 39 percent. Though Taft garnered but a miserable 3 percent of the vote, Roosevelt had predicted that if he did not win, “the East will construe it not as a defeat for Taft but as a defeat for me.” The Washington Post confirmed Roosevelt’s assessment: “The small vote count for President Taft means very little, as he was not fighting for recognition of the primaries as were Roosevelt and La Follette.” Moreover, Taft could not anticipate much support in a state on the Canadian border, where many farmers still resented his advocacy for reciprocity. “In a nutshell,” the Post concluded, the outcome in North Dakota “is decidedly embarrassing to Roosevelt, encouraging to La Follette and the subject of mixed amusement and satisfaction to Taft.”
A week later, Roosevelt suffered a far more significant loss when Taft crushed him by a margin of eight to one in New York’s “first trial of the new primary law,” securing eighty-three out of ninety district delegates. “They are stealing the primary election from us,” Roosevelt protested. It was evident that “an entire breakdown of the election machinery” in New York had occurred. Litigation by both the Taft and Roosevelt campaigns had delayed getting the ballots to the printer. In some districts, they arrived only after the polling had closed; in others, the long ballots had been so badly folded that the bottom section bearing the delegates’ names became detached. Despite these technical difficulties, the press reported “the indisputable fact” that Taft had scored a decisive victory over Roosevelt.
The day after the New York primary, Roosevelt boarded a train to begin a weeklong swing through the West in anticipation of the Illinois primary. Having studied the returns from New York, he reached Chicago “in a fighting mood.” Discarding his prepared speeches, he “raised the cry of fraud,” claiming that the Taft men in New York “had cheated the people out of their will by the grossest corruption” since “the days of Tweed.” Had he simply been unable to gain support for his political philosophy, the Colonel maintained, he “should be sorry” but would not complain. “If the politicians subvert the will of the people,” however, he would “have a great deal to say.” Buoyed by immense crowds yelling “Teddy, Teddy, hooray for Teddy,” Roosevelt escalated his rhetoric against bosses, machines, and William Howard Taft. “Our fight,” he claimed, “is the biggest fight the Republican Party has been in since the Civil War.” Before a packed Decatur crowd, he linked Taft directly to Republican William Lorimer, who would soon be expelled from the Senate for bribing members of the Illinois state legislature to obtain his Senate seat. Generating wild applause, he proclaimed: “As an American citizen, it is a shock to me to see the name of Lincoln desecrated by its use as a mask for Mr. Lorimer.”
“Easter came on April seventh that year,” Alice Roosevelt recalled, “but all that I could think of was the Illinois primary, two days off.” A loss in Illinois after his humiliating New York defeat would cripple the Roosevelt movement. But before midnight on April 9, it became clear that Roosevelt had won a sweeping victory, “carrying every district in the State but one, and electing fifty-six of the fifty-eight delegates.” His campaign secretary, Oscar King Davis, later designated April 9 as “the day on which the Roosevelt ‘band wagon’ got its real start, and from then on there was a rush to get aboard it.” Well aware that he had benefited from widespread anti-Lorimer sentiment, Roosevelt claimed the stunning victory as “a stinging rebuke to the alliance between crooked business and crooked politics.” As he headed toward Pennsylvania, where voters would go to the polls in four days, he wore his broadest smile. “We slugged them over the ropes,” he told supporters. The outcome was almost “too good to believe,” Alice Roosevelt recorded in her diary. “How wonderfully happy I am.”
A somber mood enveloped the Taft camp. Taft confided to Howard Hollister that the Illinois defeat had “given his campaign a heavy jolt.” More frustrating than the loss itself, Taft told his friend, was the unjust way that the Lorimer issue had been used to debase him. Roosevelt knew that Taft had never supported Lorimer; indeed, he and the Colonel had exchanged letters, working together to determine how they might persuade a reluctant Senate to expel one of its own. Despite the blow suffered in Illinois, Taft assured Hollister, the campaign could easily “recover by a good result in Pennsylvania.”
On Saturday, April 13, the people of Pennsylvania crushed Taft’s hope “for turning the avalanche of sentiment” that Roosevelt had unleashed. “It was long after midnight,” the Washington Times reported, “before the weary managers quit bringing their discouraging telegrams and Mr. Taft sought a few hours rest.” By Sunday morning, it was clear that Roosevelt had achieved another staggering triumph, gaining sixty-eight of seventy-six delegates. After hearing the final tally, Taft wrote a long letter to his brother Horace. “One of the burdens that a man leading a cause has to carry is the disappointment that his friends and sympathizers feel at every recurring disaster,” he began. With every unfavorable report in the papers, that load grew heavier. “I felt more sorrow at Nellie’s disappointment and yours, and that of all who have become absorbed in the fight on my behalf than I did myself,” he explained. Nevertheless, he assured his brother, he had no plans to withdraw. Nor did he intend to “make any personal attacks on Roosevelt.” If Roosevelt persisted in his “lies and unblushing misrepresentations,” however, he could not prevent his campaign managers “from pointing out his mendacity.”
“I wish I could help,” Horace replied. “I can’t manage to think of much else. I don’t see how you stand it. I don’t mind a licking. I can get used to anything. But the continued uncertainty is hard to bear.” No matter the eventual outcome, Horace told his brother, William Taft would never lose the affection and respect of “the thinking men,” the men who understood the fight being waged for the Constitution. Hoping to cheer his brother, Horace recounted a conversation with Taft’s eldest son, Robert, who had “never loved him so much” and expressed certainty “that his place in history is sure if he never does another lick.”
“The stampede is on,” the Pittsburgh Press proclaimed. “Those who have been led to believe that Roosevelt has been fighting a lost cause will have to change their minds. Theodore Roosevelt is stronger today than he has been at any time since his hat was cast into the ring.” Optimism reigned too at Roosevelt’s headquarters in Washington. “Of course, Pennsylvania settles it,” Chicago Tribune correspondent Cal O’Laughlin wrote to Roosevelt on April 14. “I am absolutely convinced that you will be nominated hands down at Chicago,” noting with satisfaction that “the gloom around the White House to-day was so thick, it could be cut with a knife.”
KEEPING ABREAST OF THE INCREASINGLY bitter nomination struggle from abroad, Major Butt decided to cut his vacation a little short, “anxious to be home,” where he could offer comfort and companionship to his beleaguered Chief. On April 10, 1912, he boarded the White Star Line’s palatial new ocean liner, RMS Titanic, for her maiden crossing of the North Atlantic.
On Monday morning, April 15, the press reported that the Titanic, carrying more than 2,300 passengers and crew, had struck a giant iceberg. The first reports erroneously suggested that the great ship had been “held afloat by her water-tight compartments” and was “slowly crawling” toward Halifax. Relieved to hear that “all onboard had been saved,” Taft went to see the comedy Nobody’s Widow at Poli’s Theatre that evening. Learning at around 11 p.m. that the ship had actually gone down in the early morning hours, “he looked,” one reporter observed, “like a man that had been stunned by a heavy blow.” He rushed back to his office, where he closeted himself in the telegraph room to read the latest bulletins. Shortly before midnight, he dispatched a telegram to the White Star offices in New York: “Have you any information concerning Major Butt? If you communicate at once I will greatly appreciate.” The response offered little reason for optimism. There was “no definite information” available. Before returning to the mansion, Taft instructed the telegraph operator to bring him the most recent news regardless of how late it arrived.
The days that followed would drive Taft down into a profound state of grief. By early Tuesday morning, White Star officials had compiled a list of over seven hundred survivors, mainly women and children, who had been loaded into lifeboats and taken aboard the nearby Carpathia. At noon, the Washington Times reported, the president’s telegraph operator received a message from the White Star office, expressing their profound “regret that Major Butt’s name” was not to be found on any list of survivors. “Even with the list of the rescued made public,” the press reported, “Washington found it hard to realize that the President’s military aide, the tall, stalwart, light-hearted man who won such popularity, who knew pretty nearly everybody in the Capital, and was loved by all of them is really dead.” The White House canceled all social activities as “news of the disaster swallowed up all such temporary minor considerations as politics and official business.”
Both the president and the first lady were “greatly depressed,” The Washington Post reported; “in fact, the entire White House staff was plunged into sorrow.” With tears in his eyes, Taft told callers he considered Archie a member of his family and felt “his loss as if he had been a younger brother.” To his friend Mabel Boardman, Taft confessed that it was impossible to believe he would never see Archie again. “I miss him every minute,” he wrote; “every house, and every tree, and every person suggests him. Every walk I take somehow is lacking his presence, and every door that opens seems to be his coming.”
As survivors began talking about their ordeal, Taft absorbed stories about Archie’s last hours. Marian Thayer, a Philadelphia Main Liner whose husband had perished on the ship, sent a heartfelt letter to the president. “In my own grief I think often of yours,” she told him, “and feel I must write to tell you how I spent the last Sunday evening with Major Butt.” She had dined with Archie at a small dinner party in honor of the Titanic’s captain, Edward J. Smith, and could not forget “how devoted he was to you and what a lovely noble man he was!” Archie had told Mrs. Thayer about the scores of letters he had written to his mother and his sister-in-law over the recent years and shared his hope that if published posthumously, this correspondence might leave “his mark and memorial of truth to the world.” He admitted that he was “very nervous” about returning home, Marian confided to Taft, knowing that the nomination battle between “you and someone else he loved but I do not” was in full swing. “Oh, how he loved you” she added, “and how frightfully you will miss his care—such a true, devoted, close more-than-friend.”
According to reports, Archie had been in the smoking room enjoying a game of cards at 11:40 p.m. when the Titanic hit the iceberg. “A slight rocking of the ship” followed, but the passengers remained unaware of danger until forty minutes later, when a steward announced: “The captain says that all passengers will dress themselves warmly, bring life preservers and go up to the top deck.” Over the next two hours, as water continued to flood the vessel, women and children were lowered into lifeboats. Mrs. Henry Harris, wife of the celebrated theatrical producer who died on board, recalled that Archie Butt had been “the real leader” during the rescue operation. A male passenger who survived by jumping at the last moment told reporters: “My last view of Major Butt—one that will live forever in my memory—was of that brave soldier coolly aiding the officers of the boat in directing the dis-embarkation of the women from the doomed ship.” Even before the limited survivor list and the testimony of witnesses reached him, William Taft was grimly certain of his companion’s fate: “After I heard that part of the ship’s company had gone down, I gave up hope for the rescue of Major Butt, unless by accident. I knew that he would certainly remain on the ship’s deck until every duty had been performed and every sacrifice made.”
Theodore Roosevelt was on a whirlwind speaking tour through the West when the tragic news of the disaster reached him. From Lindsberg, Kansas, he “paid tribute” to his former aide. “Major Butt was the highest type of officer and gentleman. He met his end as an officer and gentleman should, giving up his own life that others might be saved. I and my family all loved him sincerely.” For Alice Roosevelt, who was especially close to Archie, the loss was particularly painful. “I can’t believe it,” she repeatedly recorded in her diary. “I can’t believe it.”
Taft immediately prepared for the journey to Augusta, Georgia, where he would speak at the memorial service in his devoted aide’s hometown. Shops were closed, flags flew at half-mast, and thousands gathered around the Grand Opera House hoping to hear the president speak.“Everybody knew Archie as Archie,” Taft began. “I cannot go into a box at a theater; I cannot turn around in my room; I can’t go anywhere without expecting to see his smiling face or to hear his cheerful voice in greeting. The life of the President is rather isolated, and those appointed to live with him come much closer to him than anyone else.” Before reaching the end of his prepared remarks, he broke down and could not finish.
HEAVYHEARTED, TAFT ENDEAVORED TO RETURN to “a rush of activities” in preparation for the April 30 Massachusetts primary, which the press had deemed “the Gettysburg of the Republican presidential test.” If the president could not win the Bay State, “the very heart of the section where he is supposed to be the strongest,” commentators noted, “the curtain will ring down on his candidacy.” Fully aware of the stakes, Taft decided to buck the tradition that kept sitting presidents from campaigning on their own behalf, announcing that he would deliver his message “in person” to the people of Massachusetts.
For weeks, Taft’s campaign advisers had argued that it was “absolutely essential” for him to “open fire” on the former president. Taft had refused, believing it undignified “to get down into the ring of crimination and recrimination.” The walloping he suffered in Illinois and Pennsylvania, however, persuaded him that the time had come to answer Roosevelt’s charges. His campaign announced that Taft would “explode a bomb” that would level Roosevelt’s false accusations. When he finished drafting his speeches, Taft circulated them to his cabinet at an “all night” session. Apparently, one Washington correspondent reported, “the President’s idea of severity was not as strong as that of some of his advisers.” Informed of the proposed attack, Roosevelt laughed. “Frightful,” he mockingly replied.
The president’s train reached Springfield, Massachusetts, in the early afternoon of April 25. Speaking in a half-dozen small towns en route to Boston, where he would deliver his principal address that evening, Taft revealed acute discomfort at the need to defend himself “against the accusations of an old friend,” whom he “greatly admired and loved,” a man who had helped make him president. “This wrenches my soul,” he admitted. If the fight were purely personal, he would have remained silent, but it was his duty to represent “the cause of constitutionalism,” and he could not allow Roosevelt’s false charges to go unanswered. When he arrived at South Station, he learned that an immense crowd had already filled the new Boston Arena, with thousands more packed into Symphony Hall. Anticipation that he would deliver a fighting speech had revitalized his supporters.
“Mr. Roosevelt,” Taft began, claims to believe “that every man is entitled to a square deal. I propose to examine the charges he makes against me, and to ask you whether in making them he is giving me a square deal.” With emotion in his voice, “throwing aside official reserve,” Taft proceeded to tell “the cold, naked truth about Theodore Roosevelt,” presenting hard evidence to counter each of his rival’s major accusations. He began by producing a transcript to prove that he had never stated, as Roosevelt repeatedly claimed, that “our Government is and should be a government of all the people by a representative part of the people.” In fact, he had pointed out that major segments of the population remained voiceless, while “the people” included only adult males, since women were not allowed to vote. Nor had he ever been a supporter of the disgraced Senator Lorimer, as Roosevelt well knew. To prove his point, Taft read out the letter to the Colonel in which he had suggested a joint strategy for removing Lorimer from the Senate. Yet another letter revealed Roosevelt’s dishonorable opportunism: while the reciprocity agreement was being hammered out with Canada, Roosevelt had written to tell Taft that it was “admirable from every standpoint.” Yet facing the opposition of angry farmers, the Colonel had hastily revised his position. Taft pushed relentlessly onward, refuting each of eleven accusations Roosevelt had made against him in the course of the campaign.
Nearly two hours had passed before Taft reached his peroration, which included “a solemn warning to the American people” regarding “the danger of a third presidential term.” Mr. Roosevelt, he stated, “is convinced that the American people think that he is the only one to do the job.” Though Roosevelt had never articulated “exactly” what that job entailed, the ambitious plans outlined in his Columbus platform could not possibly be completed in four years. “We are left to infer, therefore, that ‘the job’ which Mr. Roosevelt is to perform is one that may take a long time, perhaps the rest of his natural life. 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.” Taft concluded with an ominous question, implying the full danger of granting Roosevelt an unprecedented third term: “If he is necessary now to the Government, why not later?”
The audience, which had “loudly cheered” Taft throughout the entire speech as “each item was submitted to the square deal balance and found wanting,” received his final words “with a storm of endorsement.” As his advisers had urged, William Taft had finally struck back. “He had cause for exhilaration,” his biographer remarked, but “weariness and depression were the only sensations he felt.” Informed that evening that several hundred bodies, recovered from the icy waters near the site where the Titanic went down, were being taken to Halifax, Taft had dispatched an Army official to the city wharf “to scrutinize” every victim, “in the hope of recovering” the body of Archie Butt. After his speech at the Arena, Taft stopped at Symphony Hall to meet the overflow crowd. It was after midnight by the time he returned to his private car. Spent, he “slumped over,” and despite the presence of a journalist, “began to weep.”
In sharp contrast, Theodore Roosevelt was in great spirits as he prepared his own Boston speech, scheduled for delivery at Mechanics Hall the very next night. “If they are anxious for a fight they can have it,” he blasted, as he flung aside his earlier draft to respond to Taft’s allegations. Incited by his belligerent tone, “the crowd was keyed up” from the start. They stamped in unison, shouting: “Hit him between the eyes! Soak him! Put him over the ropes!” The Colonel did not disappoint, delivering what the New York Times called a “merciless denunciation” of his former friend, “flaying the President in one scathing sentence after another.” With each thrust Roosevelt delivered, the audience “howled with delight,” spurring him onward. Roosevelt dismissed Taft’s square deal comment out of hand. “Taft has not only been disloyal to our past friendship, but he has been disloyal to every canon of decency and fair play,” he countered. “He only discovered I was dangerous to the people when I discovered he was useless to the people.” Insisting that a gentleman’s unpardonable sin is to publish a letter marked “confidential,” the Colonel claimed that the president was guilty of “the crookedest kind of deal.” Categorically, he stated, “I care nothing for Taft’s personal attitude toward me.”
“This is our first presidential campaign under the preference primary plan,” the New York Times editorialized two days later. “We hope it may be our last. The spectacle presented by the fierce fight for the nomination is one that must be amazing to foreigners, it is one that should bring a blush of shame to the cheek of every American.” The old system, the Times continued, under which candidates were “content to await the action of the convention” and appeal to the people in a formal acceptance speech, “was a rational, a seemly procedure.” Under this new system, “we are no longer a people, but a mob.”
On April 30, the Massachusetts voters granted Taft a narrow victory, but six days later, Roosevelt captured Maryland, and the following week California. Then came the battle for Ohio, which brought both men to the Buckeye State for ten days of hard campaigning. Traveling thousands of miles by train from one corner of the state to the other, Taft and Roosevelt sometimes found themselves playing “rival matinees in the same towns.” With each passing day, the tone of the campaign degenerated further. Roosevelt called the president a “puzzlewit” and a “fathead,” while Taft railed against his rival’s egotism. “You’d suppose there was not anybody in the country to do this job he talks about but himself,” the president ridiculed. “It’s I, I, I, all the time with him.” Robert La Follette, having traveled to Ohio after a surprisingly good showing in California, joined in the bitter attacks, focusing most of his ire on Roosevelt. While some people found “the spectacle of a President and ex-President hurling personal abuse at each other” unseemly, “the attacks of one on the other won the loudest applause everywhere.”
“It is about as painful for me as it possibly could be,” Taft confessed as the contest in Ohio drew near. “At least, if it is settled against me, it will be finally settled,” he told his Aunt Delia. “I have had a long and, I hope, an honorable career, and one in which good fortune has been with me at many crises. If now, fortune is to desert me for a time or permanently, it is my business to stand it, and I hope I have the courage to do so.” Roosevelt, by contrast, found pleasure in every aspect of the campaign. He reveled in the sight of the enormous crowds that greeted him at every stop; he enjoyed going after his rival, bantering with the press, talking with local officials. “He is having a perfectly corking time,” one reporter noted, “and has said so a dozen times.”
On May 21, a jubilant Roosevelt carried the state of Ohio by a margin of 55 percent to 39 percent of the popular vote. Beating Taft in his own state had “settled the contest,” he predicted. “It will be hopeless to try to beat us” at the convention. A week later, Roosevelt carried both New Jersey and South Dakota, bringing the primary season to an end. In nine of the thirteen states where direct primaries had been held, Roosevelt had won overwhelming victories. Taft had carried only New York and Massachusetts. La Follette had secured North Dakota and Wisconsin. The total popular vote for Roosevelt stood at 1,214,969, while Taft secured 865,835 votes and La Follette 327,357.
“I have had so many jolts,” the despondent Taft told Horace—bespeaking a battering far beyond the political arena, to intimate his sorrow over the ugly estrangement from Theodore Roosevelt and a profound grief for his lost companion Archie Butt—“that I am not worrying over it.”