Colonel Roosevelt (43 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And of those decisions there could be no recall.

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

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

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

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

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

“ ‘S
EVEN-EIGHTHS LAWYER AND ONE-EIGHTH MAN
.’ ”
Senator Elihu Root
.
(photo credit i10.1)

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

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

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

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

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