“His Back to the Wall,” a June 3, 1912, New York World cartoon, dramatizes the tumultuous battle between Taft and Roosevelt for the Republican presidential nomination.
TO OBSERVERS ACROSS THE NATION and even overseas, it was clear an unprecedented challenge to President Taft was well under way. “A month ago practically every impartial observer believed that Mr. Roosevelt had no chance,” The Times of London noted as the primary season drew to an end. “Now, however, it is admitted on all hands that he has a chance.” As Republicans completed preparations to meet in Chicago in mid-June to choose their nominee for president, William Jennings Bryan predicted that the Republican National Convention of 1912 would be “the most exciting ever held in the history of the country.” Not only were the main contenders “once bosom friends” who had become “bitter enemies,” but the country had “never before” witnessed a fight for the nomination between a president and an ex-president.
“Each side makes confident assertions,” one correspondent for the New York Tribune remarked, “but each side secretly is scared stiff.” Roosevelt steadfastly maintained that the people had already spoken. The vast majority of primary voters had chosen him, furnishing a significant percentage of the 540 delegates he needed to secure the nomination; the convention, he confidently asserted, would “not dare to oppose the will of the majority,” because to do so “would mean ruin to the Republican Party.” The president, however, had far greater support in states where party organizations retained control of the selection process. Taft believed he had accumulated enough delegates in non-primary states to win at Chicago. In truth, neither campaign arrived in the Windy City with enough votes to take the nomination on the first ballot. “No man in this city, nor any man in this hemisphere,” the Tribune reporter figured, “knows absolutely who will be nominated for President.”
Before the convention could begin its proceedings, the Republican National Committee had to settle disputes over 254 seats. These contested seats represented more than half the votes necessary for victory and the turbulent nomination fight had generated scores of rival delegations. Meeting in Chicago twelve days before the convention, the committee was charged with determining the legitimacy of the competing claims. Lawyers from both sides were prepared with detailed affidavits, but there, the New York Sun noted, resemblance to a civilized courtroom setting would likely end. Emotions were running high, the paper declared, and “the lawyers and witnesses and contestants are liable to break out into fisticuffs and thump each other around the committee room.” There were “some contests, of course, Roosevelt ought to win,” Taft acknowledged, but he believed the vast majority of the disputes brought by the Colonel’s campaign had been intended merely to generate publicity. Most important, the National Committee comprised loyal Taft supporters whom Roosevelt would not be able to “frighten or bulldoze.”
To Roosevelt’s detriment, the first contests to be decided were from the South, where Taft had legitimately secured most of the delegates before his opponent even entered the race. The Roosevelt campaign had never expected to win these contests; indeed, they had been instituted simply to keep Taft’s delegate count from appearing insurmountable before the northern primaries commenced. When these early cases came before the committee, even Roosevelt’s men voted to seat the Taft delegates, conceding that in most instances “the contestants had failed to make out a case.”
In Oyster Bay, Roosevelt followed the hearings with dismay, anxious that decisions in Taft’s favor would begin to sound all too “familiar.” In one Alabama district where Roosevelt had a reasonable case for seating two of his delegates, the committee nonetheless assigned the two places to Taft, confirming his fears. Roosevelt issued a fierce denouncement of the decision, charging that men had “been sent to the penitentiary for less reprehensible election frauds than the theft of that delegation.” The Colonel’s bombastic statement succeeded in riveting public attention on the actions of the National Committee. While the public outcry stiffened the spine of his supporters, it simultaneously hardened the attitudes of the Taft committeemen. On subsequent rulings in critical contests in Washington, Indiana, Texas, and California, the committee divided along straight partisan lines, with thirty-nine members consistently voting for Taft’s delegates, fourteen for Roosevelt’s.
Even impartial observers agreed that in the cases of Washington and Indiana, the committee’s decisions complied with “neither justice nor logic.” In Washington, the first primaries ever held in Spokane, Tacoma, and Seattle favored Roosevelt by two-to-one and sometimes ten-to-one margins. Overwhelming support in these populous areas should have secured him a majority of the state’s fourteen delegates; but when evidence of fraud and “irregularities” in the city primaries surfaced at the hearings, the National Committee decided it had no choice but to stand by the proceedings of the state party organization, which had selected Taft. In Indiana, the committee “reversed itself,” declining to examine a series of questionable district primaries in which Taft had emerged the clear victor. Though Roosevelt’s team demonstrated that repeat voting had occurred and that some Indianapolis ballots had not been counted, the committee claimed that it was too late to relitigate the election results.
The National Committee’s decision to award the majority of the Texas delegates to Taft represented what many considered the most glaring violation of “fair play.” Texas was the sole southern state where the leader of the state party, Cecil Andrew Lyon, was a Roosevelt man. Lyon had accompanied the Colonel on his hunting trip in 1905 and remained a personal friend. At the state convention, Lyon engineered a solid victory for Roosevelt. The committee acknowledged that the Roosevelt delegation had been legally chosen according to party rules but claimed that the rival Taft delegation, selected at a rump convention, had greater popular support. Seating the Taft delegation, the committee argued, was an important step toward eliminating “boss rule” in the state of Texas. California was one of the last contests the committee considered. The hearing should have been simple: the California legislature had passed a primary law calling for delegates to be elected at large. Roosevelt, who had won the state by a margin of 77,000 votes, argued he was entitled to all twenty-six of the state’s delegates. Taft had carried one district—the 4th congressional district of San Francisco. The committee gave the two San Francisco seats to Taft.
The rhetoric from both campaigns grew more vitriolic with each passing day. Taft’s campaign manager, William McKinley, claimed that the Roosevelt forces were taking “desperate measures” to forestall the inevitability of Taft’s nomination on the first ballot. It was “common knowledge,” McKinley asserted, that several Negro delegates from the South had been “brazenly approached” by Roosevelt men “with offers of money” to switch their allegiance to the Colonel. “I dare them to name any of our men involved in bribery,” Senator Joseph Dixon retorted. “McKinley is like a cuttlefish,” he added, “that muddies the water that its own hideousness may not be seen.”
Of the 254 seats, the National Committee finally awarded 235 to Taft and only 19 to Roosevelt. While most analysts agree that Taft rightfully won the great majority of the southern contests, which yielded over 150 delegates, the 100 remaining seats are subject to debate. Roosevelt likely deserved to win somewhere between thirty and fifty. Even with fifty additional delegates, however, he would have been short of a majority. Still, with the help of La Follette’s delegates, Taft’s nomination on the first ballot might be prevented—and then, anything was possible.
As the committee hearings wound to a close, Roosevelt’s campaign managers decided that they must do something “to crystallize the public spirit, to force public indignation, or arouse enough public sentiment to compel the nomination of Roosevelt.” The temporary roll of delegates established by the National Committee still had to be sanctioned by the convention’s Committee on Credentials and voted upon by the delegates as a whole. Aware that time was running out, Senator Dixon prevailed upon Roosevelt to take the unprecedented step of coming to Chicago in person.
Roosevelt needed little encouragement. On June 14, he and Edith drove together to his Outlook office in New York. Reporters noted that “he seemed in a gay mood,” sporting “a new sombrero, with a five-inch brim.” The old hat he had worn when he gave his controversial Columbus speech, he quipped, “had been kicked around the ring enough to warrant a new one.” The Colonel sequestered himself in his office for several hours before appearing in the lobby with a prepared statement: “A small knot of professional politicians,” he charged, were trying “to steal” the right of the people “to make their own nomination.” The rank and file of Republican voters, having clearly expressed their will in the primaries, were “not in the mood to see their victory stolen from them.”
On the day Roosevelt boarded the Lake Shore Limited bound for Chicago, the president issued a brief statement from the White House. “All the information I get is that I will be nominated on the first ballot with votes to spare,” Taft announced. He had remained silent during the proceedings of the National Committee, leaving Washington correspondents to chronicle his social life: a trip with Nellie to present diplomas to Annapolis cadets; a sail on the Mayflower to Hampton Roads; a dinner for Guatemala’s minister of foreign affairs; an evening party on Capitol Hill; and a golf game at Chevy Chase.
While Taft remained tight-lipped, his campaign spokesmen made headlines, depicting Roosevelt’s journey to Chicago as “an undeniable admission of defeat.” Recalling the Colonel’s assertion that he would not go unless it proved “absolutely necessary,” William McKinley claimed that the trip represented “the last hope of a lost cause.” New York boss William Barnes issued an acid personal attack: “Mr. Roosevelt’s departure for Chicago was inevitable. Undignified as it is, and impotent as it will prove to be, its chief interest lies in the disclosure of the mania for power over which Mr. Roosevelt has no control.”
The people of Chicago greeted the arrival of Theodore Roosevelt quite differently; word that Roosevelt was en route drove the city “plum crazy” with excitement. Ordinary business was suspended as tens of thousands made plans to celebrate Roosevelt’s arrival. In the Loop district, one reporter observed, “there wasn’t an office boy on the job.” It seemed that “everyone had lost a grandmother and had failed to show up for work.” Scuffles erupted in hotel lobbies as Roosevelt delegates routinely cried out “thief” at men sporting Taft badges. Armed with megaphones, Roosevelt supporters belted out songs for “Teddy,” only to be met with “jeers and hoots” by equal numbers of Taft men. A bartender at one of the leading hotels offered a special “campaign drink” garnished with a lemon peel cut to resemble a Rough Rider hat. The circumference of the cocktail glass symbolized the political ring into which the Colonel had metaphorically flung his hat. Patrons who kept the lemon peel in the glass as they consumed the gin and vermouth concoction were Roosevelt men; those who discarded it supported Taft.
Hours before Roosevelt’s train arrived at La Salle Station, three bands and an immense crowd, waving “Teddy” flags and wearing Roosevelt buttons, had gathered at the railway yards. “The sight of the Colonel, teeth agleam, romantic headgear, burly arms waving greetings, was catalytic,” reported Mark Sullivan. “A mob, shouting, laughing, cheering, shoving, engulfed the police and took Roosevelt to its bosom.” Thousands of screaming men and women lined the streets as the former president rode in an open car to the Congress Hotel. So frenzied was the crowd in the lobby that it took a team of five men using “football tactics” to propel Roosevelt to the elevator.
No sooner had the Colonel reached the quiet of his room than he clambered from a window onto a balcony over Michigan Avenue, anxious to satisfy the expectations of the waiting crowd. “His appearance was the signal for a roar,” the New York Times reported. Smiling broadly and waving his hat, he initiated the wild acclaim of the people for several minutes before leaning over the stone railing to speak. “Chicago is a mighty poor place in which to try and steal anything,” he roared. “Give it to ’em, Colonel,” the crowd thundered in return. “Knock ’em out.” In answer to their entreaties, he went directly after the president. “The receiver of stolen goods is no better than the thief,” he fiercely pronounced. “The people will win. We have won in every State where the people could express themselves 3 to 1 and sometimes 8 to 1. This is a naked fight against corrupt politicians and thieves and the thieves will not win.”
Before Roosevelt went to dinner that night, a newspaperman asked whether he was prepared “to stand up to the rigors of what lay ahead.” His answer provided the enduring symbol of his campaign. “I’m feeling like a bull moose,” he replied, invoking the antlered king of the northern woods whose supposed instinct “to gore his antagonist” reflected Roosevelt’s combative mood. “He is essentially a fighter,” Elihu Root said of his old friend, “and when he gets into a fight he is completely dominated by the desire to destroy his adversary.” The bull moose icon captured the imagination of the American people. Images of the massive creature suddenly appeared on posters and placards all across the country, while button manufacturers desperately tried to keep up with demand. The Teddy bear had been supplanted by a far more imposing and belligerent mascot.
The following Monday, June 17, Roosevelt “put in one of the busiest days of his life—a very frenzy of activity, which amazed and startled even his close associates.” He met with streams of supporters, interviewed Taft delegates who might be persuaded to change their minds, conferred with the seven governors, and talked with reporters, all the while continuing to draft the address he would deliver that evening to a mass audience. It was evident, a Chicago Daily Tribune reporter marveled, that the Colonel had not lost any of his “magnetism.” And he had retained the gift for making every caller feel that he was “at that moment the exact person of all the world’s population he loved and most desired to see.”
More than 20,000 people clamored for tickets to hear Roosevelt’s final speech of the nominating campaign. His managers had reserved the Auditorium, advertised as “the largest theater in the United States west of the Alleghenies,” though, in actuality, it seated only 4,200. At 6 p.m., police shut down all the surrounding streets, allowing only ticket holders to enter the cordoned area. Hundreds of eager bystanders without tickets deployed all manner of “ingenious” schemes to gain entrance: women claimed their husbands and children were already inside; men insisted they were members of the glee club or the platform committee. All were steadfastly denied by the police. Every seat was filled long before Roosevelt arrived. An organist played patriotic tunes while the audience sang along. “A great roar” greeted the Colonel’s entrance, and the “avalanche of applause” continued for nearly five minutes. At last, Roosevelt stretched out his arms and began delivering what critics considered not only “the most moving speech of his career” but “one of the most dramatic speeches ever made.”
He had decided to run, Roosevelt explained, only when “convinced that Mr. Taft had definitely and completely abandoned the cause of the people and had surrendered himself wholly to the biddings of the professional political bosses and of the great privileged interests standing behind them.” He entreated those still backing Senator La Follette to join with him, for he had honestly earned “the overwhelming majority” of the votes of the Republican progressive vote, and he alone could win the fight against Taft. He then set forth two maxims: first, those delegates “fraudulently put on the temporary roll by the dishonest action of the majority of the national committee” must be barred from voting; second, if they were allowed to participate, then progressives would not be bound by the actions of the convention.
Buoyed by the thunderous approval of the crowd, Roosevelt rolled toward his final call to arms. “A period of change is upon us,” he proclaimed, warning that “our opponents, the men of reaction, ask us to stand still. But we could not stand still if we would; we must either go forward or go backward. . . . It would be far better to fail honorably for the cause we champion than it would be to win by foul methods the foul victory for which our opponents hope. But the victory shall be ours, and it shall be won as we have already won so many victories, by clean and honest fighting for the loftiest of causes. We fight in honorable fashion for the good of mankind; fearless of the future; unheeding of our individual fates; with unflinching hearts and undimmed eyes; we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”
The hall erupted in tumultuous, sustained applause. “There is no question,” William Allen White observed, “that the psychology of the situation, the enthusiasm of the crowds, the lonesomeness at Taft headquarters and the energy of the Roosevelt workers all point to Roosevelt’s nomination.” Still, White reflected, “it is delegates rather than psychology that make nominations.”
BY THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE Republican National Convention on June 18, the atmosphere was so tense that “extraordinary preparations” were made “to preserve the peace.” More than 1,000 policemen were deployed to the Coliseum, a massive stone structure “two squares in length and one in width,” capable of seating more than 12,000 people. “Passions have been unloosed, anger has been unbridled,” The Washington Post reported. “It is almost incredible to hear at a national convention the question seriously discussed if there will be firearms used and whether blood will be shed, but one can hear this at every step in the frightful jam and welter in the hotel lobbies.”
In the comfort of the White House that morning, Taft was detached both physically and emotionally from the turmoil in Chicago. “Whatever happens,” he wrote to Horace, “I shall be glad to have the strain over.” With each passing month, the gulf between Taft and Roosevelt had grown. Taft had long considered himself a moderate progressive, aligned almost perfectly with the sentiments and policies of his old friend. In the throes of the brutal campaign, however, he had withdrawn increasingly from more progressive ideas. “If I am nominated, I shall have to take my stand as the representative of the conservative, sober, second thought of the people of the United States,” he told one friend. “I may go down to defeat if a bolt is started by Roosevelt,” the president acknowledged to another, “but I will retain the regular organization of the party as a nucleus about which the conservative people who are in favor of maintaining constitutional government can gather.”
Before convening his cabinet at ten that morning, Taft spoke by long-distance telephone to his campaign team. McKinley and Charles Hilles were hopeful that they had the votes from the temporary list of delegates to win the crucial election of the convention’s presiding officer, known as the temporary chair. Taft’s candidate was New York senator Elihu Root, perhaps the shrewdest decision of his entire campaign. William Allen White described the sixty-seven-year-old Root as the “most learned, even erudite, distinguished, and impeccable conservative,” a “calm, serene, and sure” leader, capable of dominating any gathering. Indeed, Roosevelt himself had once described his former secretary of state as “the ablest man that has appeared in the public life of any country in any position in my time.” Such praise came before Elihu Root had backed William Taft through the bitter primary season. Now, Roosevelt announced his blistering opposition to Root’s candidacy for the chairmanship, declaring: “Mr. Root stands as the representative of reaction. He is put forward by the bosses and the representatives of special privilege. He has ranged himself against the men who stand for progressive principles.” Roosevelt’s vituperative charges, Root’s biographer observes, “were cruel thrusts at an old friend and Root felt them.”
In an equally canny move, the Roosevelt team chose Wisconsin governor Francis McGovern as their candidate for the chairmanship. A few weeks earlier, Roosevelt had asked Dixon to “think over whether it would not be (a good play) wise to have McGovern of Wisconsin Permanent Chairman.” Not only was Wisconsin’s popular governor “a fine fellow,” but “our choice of him would emphasize, as nothing else would, the fact that we wish all Progressives to stand together.” Three days later, Roosevelt approached McGovern directly: “I assume that you will make the nominating speech for La Follette. And this would leave all the La Follette men at entire liberty to stand by him.” If McGovern then ran for chair with the backing of the Roosevelt team, the progressives would present “a united front.” When McGovern agreed, Roosevelt was delighted,hoping that “state pride” would lead La Follette’s twenty-six delegates to support the selection of McGovern for chair.
At noon, Republican national chair Victor Rosewater called the convention to order. Rosewater had been designated to take charge of the proceedings until the election of the chair. But before Rosewater had the chance to call for nominations for the position, Roosevelt’s floor leader, Missouri’s Herbert Hadley, rose and motioned that seventy-two of the most fiercely contested Taft delegates, fraudulently included in the temporary roll by the National Committee, should be replaced by “honestly elected” Roosevelt delegates.
The method by which the Roosevelt team arrived at the figure of seventy-two remains a matter of conjecture. Three years later, a disaffected former intimate of the Colonel informed Taft that Hadley had approached Roosevelt, suggesting a determined fight on twenty-four or twenty-eight seats that had clearly been stolen from them in states such as Texas, Washington, California, and Indiana. Roosevelt, “with characteristic emphasis and energy,” immediately tripled that figure, knowing how many votes he needed to control the convention.
Hadley’s motion to bar participation of the seventy-two contested delegates brought great cheers from Roosevelt supporters. After silence was restored, Indiana’s James Watson, a Taft spokesman, insisted that Hadley’s motion “was not in order, on the ground that the convention itself had no chairman as yet,” and therefore could not take up any business. Rosewater allowed forty minutes of debate on the motion before rendering the critical ruling that Hadley’s motion was, indeed, out of order, and straightaway opened nominations for the chairmanship. As expected, Root’s nomination was greeted with cheers from Taft’s supporters while McGovern drew equal enthusiasm from the Roosevelt side. A wave of surprise swept the hall, however, when La Follette’s manager, Walter Houser, stood and forcibly insisted that McGovern’s candidacy was “not with La Follette’s consent.” La Follette, he continued, would strike no deal whatsoever with Roosevelt. Houser’s words propelled La Follette boosters to their feet, waving a large banner bearing the words: “We’ll heed not Taffy’s smile / Nor Teddy’s toothsome grin / For it’s La Follette once, La Follette twice / And La Follette till we win!” It seemed, the New York Tribune observed, that La Follette preferred “to see Senator Root elected rather than to see Colonel Roosevelt win the initial contest of the convention.” Roosevelt’s failure to reconcile with La Follette would prove costly.
So raucous was the atmosphere in the hall that nearly three hours passed before the voting was completed. When Rosewater announced that Root had defeated McGovern by a narrow margin of 558 to 501, pandemonium erupted. Pennsylvania’s William Flinn marched up onto the platform, jabbed a finger at Root, and screamed out: “Receiver of stolen goods!” This brazen accusation prompted a series of fistfights that would have escalated into wholesale rioting without police intervention. Root approached the speaker’s table to deliver his keynote address, apparently unperturbed by “the sweating wrathful faces in the pit.” Marveling at the senator’s comportment, William White reflected that “hundreds of [Root’s] outraged fellow Republicans, men who had once been his friends, were glaring at him with eyes distraught with hate.” Still, White observed, “Root’s hands did not tremble, his face did not flicker.”
That afternoon, in lieu of an anxious White House vigil for convention bulletins, Taft and Nellie had motored to the ballpark to attend a Nationals baseball game. When the president entered the stadium, the exuberant crowd of more than 20,000 “loudly cheered him for five minutes, the men throwing their hats into the air and the women waving their handkerchiefs.” In a brief speech, Taft congratulated the team on their astonishing record—winning sixteen games in a row—before settling into his box to enjoy the action. So absorbed did he become in the game, which the Nationals won, that he never called for any updated bulletins. Returning to the White House, he discovered, to his great satisfaction, that Elihu Root had defeated Francis McGovern.
Roosevelt, meanwhile, had monitored every twist and turn of the proceedings by wire and telephone. All afternoon, hundreds of supporters had gathered in the Florentine Room of the Congress Hotel, where news from the convention floor was relayed by telephone to a man with a megaphone. “It was his duty,” one journalist for the New York Times recorded, “to shout out the various incidents of the Colonel’s triumphant progress” to those packing the room and the noisy throng assembled in the hallways and the lobby below. “There were frequent cheers from the crowd,” the Times reporter wrote, “but as it progressed and the tide began to fall, threatening to leave the Colonel stranded on the political sands, the megaphone man lost his enthusiasm and his voice.” When word spread that Roosevelt “had lost his preliminary skirmish,” the crowd “fell silent.”
The Colonel “remained in seclusion” for a short time while he and Dixon debated their next move. Later that night, he called a meeting of his delegates. Infusing them with his own energy and defiance, he “urged them to stand by him” as he resumed the fight to purge the tainted delegate roll once the convention came to order the following morning.
AS DELEGATES AND SPECTATORS GATHERED for the second day of the convention, June 19, “electricity filled the air.” The Coliseum was “a powder mine.” With the chairman in place and the convention open for business, Hadley once again moved to replace the seventy-two contested Taft delegates with Roosevelt men. Chairman Root allowed three hours of debate on the motion. Watson, speaking for the Taft campaign, persuasively countered Hadley’s motion, insisting that the full convention had “no knowledge” and was “in no temper to pass upon these contests.” Evaluating the merits of the National Committee’s controversial decisions belonged finally to the Committee on Credentials, which would be officially appointed later that day. After conferring with Hadley, Watson announced that a compromise had been reached and that Hadley would“consent to refer the resolution to the Committee on Credentials.” The news thrilled Republicans on both sides of the bitter divide. A Pennsylvania delegate dashed to the stage, shouting, “Hadley, the next president of the United States,” triggering a boisterous Hadley demonstration. Delegations marched about the hall exulting in the sudden possibility of a compromise candidate who might unite the party.
Just as suddenly, the spell was broken. An attractive young woman in a white dress, with a “radiant and infectious smile,” stood up in the gallery blowing kisses and waving a large Roosevelt poster. The band began playing; shouts of “Teddy, Teddy, Teddy” rose from every corner in the hall. The woman made her way to the floor, escorted through the aisles “with the Roosevelt State delegations and placards falling in line.” For forty-two minutes, the crowd followed her lead. Regardless of whether, as some speculated, this lady had been cued to begin blowing kisses and rallying support for the Colonel, the emotional Roosevelt demonstration ended the prospect of bringing Hadley to the stage as a compromise candidate.
When Root finally restored order, Hadley stood up, returning the convention’s focus to the delegate confirmation process for the contested seats. While both he and Root agreed that “no man can be permitted to vote upon the question of his own right to a seat in the convention,” Hadley stridently argued that the entire group of contested delegates should be barred from determining the composition of the vital Credentials Committee. Root, however, adhering to congressional parliamentary procedure, maintained that “the rule does not disqualify any delegate whose name is on the roll from voting upon the contest of any other man’s right, or participating in the ordinary business of the convention so long as he holds his seat.” This pivotal ruling, which allowed all the contested delegates to participate in the makeup of the Credentials Committee, essentially delivered control of the convention to Taft.
The committee members began their deliberations that night. Outnumbered thirty-one to twenty-one, the Roosevelt men soon realized that the Taft contingency had no intention of relitigating the National Committee’s seating decisions. It was evident that most, if not all, of the contested delegates from the temporary roll would retain their seats, thereby providing Taft a clear majority. At midnight, a message arrived from the Colonel himself. “We are requested to go at once to the Florentine room of the Congress hotel,” California’s Francis Heney shouted, dismissively observing, “We can’t get a square deal here.” Back at the hotel, rebellious delegates and regular party members debated whether to bolt. While talk of a new party had been in the air since the convention opened, they now faced the difficult reality of engineering a split and financing a new creation. Suddenly the “prospect of leaving party lines, even to support Colonel Roosevelt,” did not seem “half as attractive” as from “some miles further away.” If the prospective members were “to be anything other than ridiculous figures in their state campaigns,” this new party would require “time and money and effort,” with money the paramount resource.
Amos Pinchot would long recall “the moment when the third party was born.” At two o’clock in the morning, Roosevelt’s inner circle gathered in his bedroom suite. “A dozen were seated around the table, the rest in armchairs or leaning against the wall,” Pinchot wrote. “Roosevelt was walking rapidly up and down in silence.” All eyes were on Frank Munsey and George Perkins, who whispered together in the corner. Without the financial support of these two wealthy men, there was little hope that a new party could be organized in time for the fall election. “Suddenly, the whispered talk ceased,” Pinchot recollected, as both Munsey and Perkins “moved over to Roosevelt, meeting him in the middle of the room. Each placed a hand on one of his shoulders, and one, or both of them, said, ‘Colonel, we will see you through.’ ” Munsey, the more effusive of the two magnates, added: “My fortune, my magazines and my newspapers are with you.”
Returning to the conference room, Roosevelt read a short announcement to his delegates and supporters. If the convention refused to purge the tainted roll, the Colonel had resolved to “lead a fight for his principles in defiance of any action of the regular Republican convention.” He expressed his thanks “to those who had come thus far in his fight, but who might not care to continue with him further.” He would release these men, parting from them “on terms of friendship and undiminished gratitude.” Those who chose to stay, he invited to participate in the birth of a new party. “Grizzled veterans wiped tears from their eyes,” observed a reporter for the Washington Times, “making no effort to conceal their emotions.”
AS WORD SPREAD THAT ROOSEVELT might come in person to deliver a statement that next day, the convention hall was “jammed to its fullest capacity.” Minutes after Root gaveled the convention to order, Taft’s floor leader called for a recess, explaining that the report of the Credentials Committee was not ready. A later four o’clock session lasted only a minute because the committee was still not ready. After this second delay, the convention was adjourned until the following day. Leaving the hall, delegates and spectators “gathered in knots,” trying to piece together what was happening. Word circulated that men on both sides had revived the search for a compromise candidate—perhaps Cummins or Hughes or Hadley. It was rumored but later denied that Taft had agreed “to withdraw his candidacy providing Colonel Roosevelt would do the same.” Details of the dramatic midnight session in Roosevelt’s suite gradually began to surface—foremost Roosevelt’s pledge to continue fighting if the Credentials Committee refused to seat his “honestly elected” delegates.
The mayhem in Chicago attracted unprecedented attention in the press. Correspondents covered every reversal, every sensational, rancorous moment, with relish. Reporters from dozens of national and regional publications were busy “politicking, filing correspondence, intriguing, pretending they were making a president.” Sam McClure, who had come to the convention on his own, “stood on the edges” of the clusters of journalists, feeling “like a cipher.” He had been “shorn” as editor of his once celebrated magazine a month earlier when his accumulated debt had finally forced him to lease and then sell McClure’s. The buyer had originally promised to retain McClure as editor, but the final deal left S.S., in his own words, “unhorsed.” He had come to Chicago in search of work. At the convention hall and in the lobbies of the hotels, the fifty-five-year-old McClure met up with scores of old friends. For the first time in his life, observing the hurly-burly of the convention, Sam McClure found himself on the periphery of the action.
At noon on Friday, June 21, after two straight nights with little sleep, the Credentials Committee was finally ready to issue state-by-state reports on the contested seats. Proceeding alphabetically with Alabama, the committee chairman announced that the majority had voted to sustain the original decision of the National Committee and seat the two Taft delegates. A minority report introduced by the Roosevelt members was immediately voted down by a safe Taft majority. “A storm of hisses and booing” broke out, but Root swiftly restored order, calling on Arizona and then Arkansas. As one state after another voted to seat the Taft delegates, a voice from the gallery rose from the din: “Roll the steamroller some more!” As each new case was decided in favor of Taft’s delegates, “a thousand toots and imitation whistles of the steamroller engine pierced the air.” Bedlam followed as the galleries “caught the spirit,” rhythmically shouting “Toot Toot” and “Choo Choo.” The police removed a man who interrupted the proceedings by repeatedly crying: “All aboard.” As he was escorted out, he grinned and waved, provoking “a great uproar.” The convention was adjourned until the following day when, amid “a chorus of shrieks, whistles, groans and catcalls,” the remainder of the states followed suit, granting Taft all seventy-two contested delegates.
With Taft’s nomination on the first ballot virtually guaranteed, Henry Allen, a Roosevelt delegate from Kansas, asked to read a statement from the Colonel. “The Convention has now declined to purge the roll of the fraudulent delegates,” Roosevelt’s announcement began. “This action makes the convention in no proper sense any longer a Republican convention, representing the real Republican Party, therefore I hope that the men elected as Roosevelt delegates will now decline to vote on any matter before the Convention. . . . Any man nominated by the Convention as now constituted would be merely the beneficiary of this successful fraud.” Roosevelt’s inflammatory words provoked near riot on the convention floor. Taft delegates physically attacked Roosevelt delegates; brawls erupted throughout the galleries. Although police stopped dozens of scuffles, they were unable “to keep track of them all.”
It was nearly 7:30 p.m. on Saturday night before the roll call for the nomination began. At 9:28 p.m., William Howard Taft was officially proclaimed the victor, with 561 votes. Three hundred forty-four Roosevelt delegates had followed the Colonel’s request, designating themselves“present but not voting.” An additional 107 delegates insisted on following the command of their primaries, casting their votes for Roosevelt. Of the remaining votes, La Follette received 41, Senator Cummins 17, and Justice Hughes 2.
THE WHITE HOUSE WAS SO quiet on the night the convention concluded, one reporter remarked, that “no one would have suspected that under the same roof was the man who had been named as candidate of the ruling party.” During the balloting, Taft had been with Nellie and their children in the living quarters. Young Charlie Taft was once again in charge of carrying the up-to-date bulletins from the telegraph office. Reporters noted that the fourteen-year-old was “all grin” when word came that his father had secured a majority vote for the nomination. But unlike the “electric” excitement that had filled the room four years earlier, when Nellie had sparkled with happiness and Taft had “laughed with the joy of a boy,” both the president and first lady clearly understood that the divisive convention had rendered Republican chances for election in November almost impossible. “No Republican convention ever adjourned,” observed the New York Tribune, “leaving so many sores and with so little prospect that the wounds would be healed.”
“I am not afraid of defeat in November,” Taft repeatedly said in the days that followed his nomination. He believed he had already achieved the victory he wanted by preventing Roosevelt from taking over the Republican Party and moving it in an incomprehensibly radical direction that threatened to upset the constitutional separation of powers and destroy “the absolute independence of the judiciary.” In the course of the campaign, he had come to regard Roosevelt as “a real menace to our institutions.” The central issue “at stake,” he declared in his first public statement after his nomination, “was whether the Republican party” would remain “the chief conservator” of the country’s constitutional guarantees. His victory, he proudly noted, had “preserved the party organization as a nucleus for conservative action.”
THE ROOSEVELT DELEGATES HAD BEGUN their exodus from the Coliseum even before the finalization of Taft’s nomination. A “mass meeting” had been called at Orchestra Hall a short distance away to begin the process of forming a new national party. Great applause greeted Edith and the Roosevelt children as they took their seats in a box near the platform. News that conservative Vice President James Sherman had been renominated added to the “delight” of the Roosevelt men, who had worried that Taft might try to bolster the Republican ticket by selecting a progressive for the second spot. As they waited for the various state delegations to arrive from the convention, the audience joined in a spirited rendition of “America.” When the California delegation paraded into the hall bearing its distinctive Golden Bear banner, the crowd erupted with “wild enthusiasm.” A new round of cheers began a few minutes later when the Ohio delegation entered the room. “Here comes Texas,” screamed a man in the audience as the Lone Star delegation marched in, followed in short order by Oklahoma. Similar waves of cheering met each of the delegations as they entered the room, creating a jubilant atmosphere.
California governor Hiram Johnson opened the formal proceedings of the new Progressive Party. “We came here,” he declared, “to carry out the mandate of the people to nominate Theodore Roosevelt. By a fraud he has been robbed of that which was his. We, the delegates free and untrammeled, have come here to nominate him tonight.” After a nominating resolution was unanimously passed, a notification committee composed of representatives from twenty-two states escorted Roosevelt into the hall. “The people leaped to their feet with a shout and for five minutes there was pandemonium,” the New York Tribune reported. Another demonstration ensued when Roosevelt mounted the stage to declare his acceptance. He charged supporters to go home, “find out the sentiment of the people,” and then reconvene a few weeks later at “a mass convention” to nominate “a progressive candidate on a progressive platform” that would truly represent people in all sections of the country. “If you wish me to make the fight I will make it,” he promised, “even if only one State should support me. The only condition I impose, is that you shall be free when you come together to substitute any other man in my place if you deem it better for the movement and in such case I will give him my heartiest support.”
The enthusiasm that had sustained the Roosevelt Progressives all week reached a peak that evening at Orchestra Hall. That a split party had little prospect for victory in November seemed irrelevant to the exuberant crowd, though not to former Republican senator Chauncey Depew, who offered a widely quoted comment as the 1912 Republican National Convention came to a close. “The only question now,” he said, “is which corpse gets the most flowers.”
DURING THE LAST WEEK OF June, as Democrats gathered in Baltimore to choose their nominee for president, reporters asked Roosevelt for his thoughts on the leading contenders—Speaker Champ Clark and New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson. “I’m in the fight for an independent Republican party,” Roosevelt defiantly declared, “and whatever the Democrats do will make no difference with me.” Bluster aside, Roosevelt knew he had a much greater chance of victory if the Democrats chose the more conservative Clark over Wilson, who had emerged as a Progressive champion. “Pop’s been praying for Clark,” Kermit Roosevelt disclosed, revealing a Roosevelt far from indifferent to the outcome.
Like the Republicans, the Democrats quickly evidenced party discord in their own battle to appoint the temporary chair. Clark, with the backing of Tammany Hall, won that “first skirmish,” but progressives refused to accept his nominee, overturning the result when the time came to choose a permanent chair. “Everybody’s doing it. Doesn’t it remind you of Chicago?” Roosevelt gleefully asked reporters. When the balloting began for the nomination, Clark took an early lead, reaching a majority vote on the tenth ballot. Democratic Party rules required a two-thirds vote for victory, however; by the fourteenth ballot, the momentum had shifted to Wilson. Sixteen ballots later, Wilson held a slight majority, but it was not until the forty-sixth ballot, eight turbulent days after the Democratic National Convention opened, that the New Jersey governor finally secured the nomination. The suspenseful events in Baltimore had transfixed the nation’s attention. All week long, William White reported, “the country was standing around the billboards of newspapers in great crowds,” waiting for the latest news from that city.
Throughout the dramatic ordeal, Wilson appeared impassive. “You must sometimes have wondered why I did not show more emotions as the news came in from the convention,” he told reporters when word of his victory finally arrived, “and I have been afraid that you might get the impression that I was so self-confident and sure of the result that I took the steady increase in the vote for me complacently and as a matter of course. The fact is that the emotion has been too deep to come to the surface.”
Wilson’s nomination immediately affected Roosevelt’s campaign prospects. Chase Osborn, one of the seven governors who had originally urged the Colonel to run, announced that he intended to support New Jersey’s Democratic governor. With a progressive in the field, he explained, there was “no necessity for a new political party.” The president of Minnesota’s Progressive League agreed with Osborn, declaring that his organization would back Wilson. To illustrate that Wilson’s appeal crossed party lines, his campaign cited more than 2,000 letters from Republicans pledging support. “Warmest congratulations from a Roosevelt Progressive Republican, who will vote for Wilson,” one Californian had written. “I most gladly leave my old party—the party of my father—and join your cause,” declared a lawyer from West Virginia.
Robert La Follette was delighted to support Woodrow Wilson. Still consumed with anger toward Roosevelt for projecting his personal ambition for a third term onto “a strong and rapidly growing” Progressive movement within the Republican Party, La Follette insisted that he would devote his days to “exposing the Roosevelt fraud.” Calling the Colonel’s primary battle “the most extravagant in American history,” La Follette vowed to travel through the West, convincing farmers and laborers alike that “men notoriously identified with the Steel Trust and the Harvester Trust” were among Roosevelt’s chief financial backers. Wilson gratefully acknowledged La Follette’s support, lauding the Wisconsin senator as a courageous leader—“taunted, laughed at, called back, going steadfastly on.”
“If Wilson had been nominated first,” Roosevelt privately conceded, he might never have initiated the movement for a third party. “But it was quite out of the question,” he told a friend, “after having led my men into the fight, that I should then abandon them.” Now, supporters would conclude that he “was flinching from the contest,” that he “was not game enough to stand punishment and face the possibility of disaster.” Moreover, Roosevelt contended, while Wilson might be an “excellent man,” supporting him “would mean restoring to power the Democratic bosses in Congress and in the several States, and I don’t think that we can excuse ourselves for such action.”
The die was cast. On July 7, Roosevelt’s campaign manager Senator Dixon released “a call to the people of the United States,” designating August 5 for a convention in Chicago of the newly formed National Progressive Party in Chicago. Each state was asked to send a bloc of delegates equal to the total of its senators and representatives, selected by whatever method the state leaders desired. The call urged all those in all sections of the country who believed in “a national progressive movement” to rally together “to secure the better and more equitable diffusion of prosperity,” and to “strike at the roots of privilege” in both industry and politics.
Sixty-three prominent Republicans in forty states signed the declaration, but to Roosevelt’s chagrin, many of his once most fervent supporters held back. Those who were running for office faced a difficult choice: forsake their hero or join an untested party with little time to develop the machinery to get out the vote. In the end, Montana senator Joseph Dixon was the only senator or governor up for reelection who took the leap of joining the Progressive Party. Senators Cummins, Hadley, Borah, and Nelson declared their opposition to Taft but declined to desert the Republican Party, promising instead to reform it from within. These defections both saddened and irritated Roosevelt, who believed the national cause should hold precedence. “I feel that Cummins naturally belongs to us,” he lamented to one friend, while confessing to another, “I greatly regret that Hadley was so foolish as not to come with us.”
Carefully observing Roosevelt’s efforts to establish his “Bull Moose” party—the name the newspapers gave to the new organization—Taft felt the Colonel’s campaign was “sagging.” With a trace of sympathy, he remarked to Nellie that the Colonel was “up against now what I have always had to contend against, to wit, the selfishness of local candidates, and he is feeling the effects I suppose of a tendency to regularity that a third party always has to fight.” Nonetheless, Taft predicted, Roosevelt was “such a persistent talker” that he would compel “the courage of his followers.” Though he believed Roosevelt “utterly unscrupulous” at times, Taft marveled at his “method of stating things, and his power of attracting public attention.”
Despite the historic dominance of the two-party system, the Colonel remained confident that once “the object and purposes of his campaign” were made clear, many voters would “be won over,” in particular, those “holding back for a nicer definition of his aims.” During the final two weeks in July, Roosevelt canceled public appearances and refused visitors, closeting himself “hour after hour” in his private study at Sagamore Hill to prepare both the planks of the new party’s platform and the keynote address he would deliver on August 5, the first day of the convention. Fully aware that “a great measure of his party’s success” would depend upon “the strength and solidity” of its principles and platform, he promised that his speech would represent “the greatest effort of [his] life.”
When he finished the first draft of the platform, Roosevelt took a single day off, amusing reporters with his characteristically frenetic style of relaxation: “Got up with the sun; worked in the library until breakfast; took Mrs. Roosevelt for a long walk toward Cold Spring Harbor; rowed about twelve miles; went horseback riding after luncheon and played six sets of tennis on his return.” The next morning, he was back at his desk, reinvigorated, to complete his projected 15,000-word keynote speech on schedule.
IN THE WAKE OF THE contentious Republican National Convention, President Taft wisely decided that “simplicity” should be “the distinguishing feature” of his notification ceremony, scheduled for August 1. There would be none of the fireworks, open-air concerts, booming cannons, parades, or decorated streets that had made Cincinnati so festive four years earlier. Marked by “unusual informality,” the ceremony would be held in the White House, with only four hundred persons in attendance—primarily cabinet officials, members of Congress, and prominent Republican figures. During the last week in July, Taft worked “an average of sixteen hours a day” on his acceptance speech, designed as a defense of the Republican Party, the Constitution, judicial independence, private property, and civil liberty. “Roosevelt proposes to give out a radical platform that will startle some people,” he told his Aunt Delia, recognizing exactly where he stood in the current political landscape. “Wilson says that his letter of acceptance is going to be radical, so between the two I have no part to play but that of a conservative, and that I am going to play.”
The notification ceremony took place at noon in the East Room. The seats had been positioned in a semicircle around a raised platform. Stationed in the adjoining hallway, the Marine Band played patriotic airs. Warm applause greeted Nellie as she walked in and took her seat on the dais. Shortly thereafter, President Taft, accompanied by members of the Notification Committee, entered “amid loud shouts and handclapping.” Following tradition, the chair of the Notification Committee, Elihu Root, delivered the official news of Taft’s nomination.
In his brief remarks, Root referred to the turmoil surrounding the contested delegates. Speaking with force and authority, Root assured the president that as the convention’s presiding officer, he had followed “long-established and unquestioned rules of law governing the party” at every step along the way. “Your title to the nomination is as clear and unimpeachable as the title of any candidate of any party since political conventions began.” Root’s testimonial provided tremendous comfort to Taft, who worried that Roosevelt’s continued “harping” on the seating of delegates had persuaded people that his campaign had “committed great frauds,” and that he had, in effect, stolen the nomination.
Taft accepted the nomination on behalf of a Republican Party “through which substantially all the progress and development in our country’s history in the last fifty years has been finally effected.” Our party, he declared, stands for “the right of property” and “the right of liberty,” for institutions that have “stood the test of time,” and for an economic system that rewards “energy, courage, enterprise, attention to duty, hard work, thrift, and providence” rather than “laziness, lack of attention, lack of industry, the yielding to appetite and passion.” While he hoisted the conservative banner, Taft also spoke with genuine pride of the progressive legislation passed in recent years—the railroad legislation, the postal banking system, workers’ compensation, an eight-hour day for all government contracts, and, most recently, the Children’s Bureau, the first federal agency dedicated to the social welfare of children. Even as the Republican Party protected the traditions of the past, he argued, it must remain sensitive to the shifting views of the role of government. “Time was,” he explained, “when the least government was thought the best, and the policy which left all to the individual, unmolested and unaided by the government, was deemed the wisest.” As industry consolidation and wealth disparity grew apace, however, it was “clearly recognized” that the government had a responsibility “to further equality of opportunity in respect of the weaker classes in their dealings with the stronger and more powerful.” In sum, Taft did not intend to take the country backward, but rather to protect it against the demagogic proposals of his adversaries.
Asked to comment on Taft’s speech, Roosevelt initially told reporters he preferred to answer the president in his own upcoming address at the Progressive Party Convention. “On second thought,” he proved “unable to restrain himself,” derogating Taft’s words as “fatuous, inadequate, conservative,” and ignorant of all “the live issues.”