Colonel Roosevelt (146 page)

48
The President, nearly frantic
The New York Times
, 16 Apr. 1912.

49
“Major Butt was”
Ibid., 20 Apr. 1912. According to local survivors, Butt had handled the catastrophe as if on army duty, controlling crowd hysteria and helping women and children aboard lifeboats. Marie Young, who had taught music to Archie and Quentin Roosevelt in the White House, was reportedly the last woman to catch a glimpse of him, waving to her from an upper deck as her boat pulled away. (Ibid.) Walter Lord, in
A Night to Remember
(1955), doubts the legend of Butt’s heroism on the ground that the accounts of it by Ms. Young and another Washington woman sound over-embellished. As quoted in the
Times
, they certainly sound so. But the two women nevertheless corroborated each other, and the behavior they describe is consistent with the punctilio and physical forcefulness self-evident in Butt’s three volumes of correspondence. A memorial fountain to him and his traveling companion, the Washington artist Frank Millett, survives on the Ellipse south of the White House.

50
“Theodosus the Great”
Alice Hooper to Frederick Jackson Turner in Turner,
Dear Lady
, 123.

51
I am the will
See Lorant,
Life and Times of TR
, 560–61 and 571.

52
They did what they could
TR,
Letters
, 7.542–43;
The New York Times
, 21 May 1912.

53
“Since I have been”
TR,
Letters
, 7.507–8.

54
“I think Taft”
Ibid., 7.537.

55
“I am in”
Thompson,
Presidents I’ve Known
, 220. The following account is based on reports in the
Boston Globe
and
The New York Times
, 26 Apr. 1912. All quotations are taken from the former source.

56
Moreover, Taft was
Mowry,
TR
, 226–27.

57
Mr. Roosevelt ought not
Boston Globe
, 26 Apr. 1912.

58
After returning
Pringle,
Taft
, 781–82.
The New York Times
, annoyed that Taft should stoop to the level of a personal attack, called his Boston appearance “one of the most deplorable occasions in the history of our politics.” Sullivan,
Our Times
, 4.482.

59
a momentary shiver
The image of the shiver comes from the
Boston Globe
’s report
of this meeting (27 Apr. 1912), as do the words of TR’s speech quoted here. See also Sullivan,
Our Times
, 4.482–85.

60
Roosevelt said that
TR’s criticism was well founded. One of WHT’s self-quotations was to the effect that reciprocity would make Canada “only an adjunct of the United States.” These words caused an explosion of outrage both in Canada and Britain, where on 4 May the
Pall Mall Gazette
remarked that the President’s “blazing indiscretion” might cause embarrassed Americans “to turn to Roosevelt after all for political sobriety.”

61
Later he spoke
The New York Times
, 28 Apr. 1912.

62
“Now you have me”
Ibid.

63
“He is essentially”
Harbaugh,
TR
, 402.

64
“
VOTE OF BAY STATE
”
The New York Times
, 27, 30 Apr., 2 May 1912. In TR’s own wry summing-up of the vote, “Apparently there were about eighty thousand people who preferred Taft, about eighty thousand who preferred me, and from three to five thousand who, in an involved way, thought they would vote for both Taft and me.” TR,
Letters
, 7.539–40.

65
“In this fight”
The New York Times
, 2 May 1912; TR,
Letters
, 7.539–40.

66
By early May
The New York Times
, 4 May 1912.

67
Over the next week
The Michigan state convention in April managed to elect two delegations simultaneously from the same platform, after reaching such a pitch of violence that Governor Osborn was compelled to deploy the state militia against Taft goons supplied by the sugar beet industry. Louise Overacker,
The Presidential Primary
(New York, 1926, 1974), 205.

68
“If I am defeated”
Pringle,
Taft
, 757.

69
“I am a man”
The New York Times
, 5 May 1912. In another speech, WHT compared himself to “a man of straw.”

70
Their vocabulary
The Washington Post
, 15 May 1912.

71
“honeyfugler”
A now extinct word, meaning one who seduces or cheats by sweet talk.

72
their Pullmans parked
The New York Times
, 15 May 1912.

73
“the hypocrisy, the insincerity”
Pringle,
Taft
, 787.

74
a compromise candidate
The first politician to suggest Hughes was William Barnes, Jr., citing the “grave” condition of the Republican Party. Barnes bitterly blamed progressivism for the plague of preferential primaries spreading across the nation. “This so-called reform has done more to confuse and corrupt legislators than anything in politics for fifty years.”
The New York Times
, 17 May 1912.

75
“I will name”
The New York Times
, 21 May 1912. The satirical magazine
Life
remarked, “The popular demand for Colonel Roosevelt is steadily increasing, but however great the demand may become, it can never be as great as the supply.” Sullivan,
Our Times
, 4.491.

76
“TRnadoes”
Alice Hooper to Frederick Jackson Turner in Turner,
Dear Lady
, 123. For a documentary account of how hard TR worked (and was worked) on the campaign trail, see William H. Richardson,
Theodore Roosevelt: One Day of His Life
(Jersey City, 1921). The day in question was 23 May 1912.

77
“Your judgment”
Link,
Papers of Woodrow Wilson
, 24.446.

78
more popular votes
The precise size of this vote is difficult to calculate, because authorities are divided on how many, and which, states contributed to it. Mowry, e.g., cites “thirteen,” without naming them, and gives the candidate totals as TR, 1,157,397; WHT, 761,716; and La Follette, 351,043. Bishop lists 13 states, including Georgia but not New York. Lewis L. Gould lists 12 states, excluding both Georgia and New York. His resultant figures are TR, 1,164,765; WHT, 768,202; and La Follette 327,357. (Mowry,
TR
, 236; Bishop,
TR
, 2.322; Lewis M. Gould,
ed.,
Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics
[Lawrence, Kan., 2008], appendix B.) In a letter to the author (1 Aug. 2008), Gould disqualifies New York as a primary state in 1912 because of heavy-handed manipulation of the vote by Boss Barnes, and because delegates were elected locally rather than apportioned on the basis of a statewide vote, which mysteriously was never recorded. But these criteria might also disqualify, say, Boss Flinn’s Pennsylvania or Boss Walter F. Brown’s Ohio, or Washington State, whose mix of local primaries and district mini-conventions became a vexed issue at the national convention. New York’s election, which netted WHT 83 delegates to TR’s 7, was widely referred to as a “primary” at the time, despite the lack of a statewide total. See Overacker,
The Presidential Primary
, 13, 135. On 4 June 1912,
The New York Times
did at least compute the popular vote in New York County at 33,492 for WHT and 16,933 for TR, or a 2-for-1 majority for the President. If the total GOP state vote in 1912 was about the same as it was in 1916, i.e., 147,038, and if WHT and TR divided it much as they did the New York County vote, we may estimate their respective primary vote shares at 97,633 and 49,404. These figures, added to Gould’s for the other twelve primary states, project the grand totals given here. Whichever set is preferred, TR’s absolute popular majority among GOP voters is clear. See below, 638–39.

1
Epigraph
Robinson,
Collected Poems
, 66.

2
a baby parade
The New York Times
, 30 May 1912.

3
Next morning
Heaton,
The Story of a Page
, 343.

4
A further similarity
TR was about 20 percent behind WHT in delegates in the first week of June, and Wilson about 37 percent behind Clark.

5
his own claimants
Gould,
Four Hats in the Ring
, 67. The
Atlanta Constitution
, 18 June 1912, cited affidavits by three Taft members of the Georgia delegation stating that they had been offered cash bribes of up to $400 apiece to switch their votes to TR. McHarg does not appear to have been directly involved.

6
Still, he had
Bishop,
TR
, 2.322–23;
The New York Times
, 9 June 1912.

7
chairman of the convention
Technically in 1912,
temporary chairman
. See above, 612.

8
“Elihu,” Roosevelt
TR quoted by Finley Peter Dunne in
The American Magazine
, 24 Sept. 1912.

9
On 3 June
TR,
Letters
, 7.555.

10
EXCEPTION OF A VERY FEW
Barnes was alluding to New York’s imbalance of 7 delegates for TR and 83 for Taft. The phrase
temporary chairman
in this telegram has been shortened to
chairman
, for reasons explained above (612).

11
“Root,” he complained
Mowry,
TR
, 242; TR,
Letters
, 7.548–49, 555.

12
Unfortunately, most
Gould,
Four Hats in the Ring
, 66. Owen Wister describes delegates to the Republican convention in 1912 as coins pre-stamped with image and value. Notwithstanding their marks, the coins did not achieve currency until they had passed through a machine carefully calibrated by the National Committee. “A coin might be full weight, but if it were stamped with Roosevelt’s image, it might be rejected in favor of a short weight coin bearing Taft’s image.” Wister,
Roosevelt
, 310.

13
not a professional
Rosewater (1871–1940), editor of the
Omaha Bee
, is generally portrayed as a conservative, but he had been comfortable with some of the reforms of TR’s second administration. In June 1912, Rosewater was acting chairman of the RNC, substituting for Harry S. New. He left a record of his convention experiences
in a memoir,
Back Stage in 1912: The Inside Story of the Split Republican Convention
(Philadelphia, 1932).

14
The rest of the Committee
Gould,
Four Hats in the Ring
, 66–67. At the beginning of June, TR’s forces in Chicago launched an attempt to stack the committee by having at least five newly elected members take seats at the hearings at once, rather than waiting for the convention to authorize them. Among these were William Allen White of Kansas and R. D. Howell of Nebraska, who had displaced Rosewater as a delegate and now hoped to displace him as acting chairman.
(The New York Times
, 3 June 1912.) But since current members of the committee were entitled to keep serving until 18 June, the Roosevelt
putsch
never went anywhere.

15
“theft, cold-blooded”
The New York Times
, 8 June 1912.

16
For a while
Davis,
Released for Publication
, 292; Nicholas Roosevelt,
TR
, 86.

17
“If circumstances demand”
Sullivan,
Our Times
, 4.497. The version of this quote given in Pringle,
Taft
, 796, comes with acquired dental effects.

18
proceeded to throw out
For accounts of the hearings disputing TR’s accusations of delegate-stealing, see Rosewater,
Back Stage in 1912
, 80–120, and Pringle,
Taft
, 799ff.

19
Perhaps thirty
Lewis Gould states that TR, on the basis of a modern impartial analysis, deserved “another twelve or fourteen” delegates from Texas, plus “probably … another twenty or so” from other states. With his 19 awardees, that would have given him an extra complement of 53, still far short of the number he needed to clinch the nomination. Earlier authorities, notably John Allen Gable in 1965, George E. Mowry in 1946, and Senator Borah, Governor Hadley, and Gilbert E. Roe (a La Follette supporter) back in 1912, differ in their assessments of TR’s chances of winning the nomination, but all agree that he was entitled to about 50 more delegates. See Gould,
Four Hats in the Ring
, 67, and Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” [diss.], 39.

20
An impartial observer
This sentence quotes De Witt,
The Progressive Movement
, 82. See also Mowry,
TR
, 239–40; Gould,
Four Hats in the Ring
, 67. The former notes that TR, arranging the nomination of WHT in 1908, used many of the strong-arm tactics he accused the White House of using in 1912.

21
All the same, Roosevelt
The clearest analysis of the bias of the Republican National Committee in 1912 remains that in Bishop,
TR
, 2.324–26.