Colonel Roosevelt (54 page)

Ray Stannard Baker caught an early glimpse of him at a depot in Hartford, Connecticut, addressing a large crowd in the rain. “
He looked, as usual, as hard as a maple knot—and seemed to be enjoying himself.” But Baker, now one of Wilson’s keenest supporters, thought the Colonel was beginning to show signs of demagoguery, with bizarre proposals to emulate the authoritarian agricultural policies of Germany and Denmark, and to use American schoolhouses as political forums. “He is a dangerous man who makes the people feel intensely without making them think clearly.”

Even in miserable weather, Roosevelt radiated conviviality—so much so that rumors again circulated that he was on the bottle. He had been drunk at Osawatomie, befuddled at the Ohio constitutional convention, and soused at Armageddon.
A citizen of Butte, Montana, assured one of the reporters on his train that the Colonel had been seen knocking back fourteen highballs in fifteen minutes.

The reporter did not file this story, but Roosevelt heard about it and asked his campaign team to watch out for a clear case of published libel.

Although there were a few stretches of Democratic territory that received him coldly, most of the crowds greeting him were large. Official welcomers climbed aboard at every minor depot, sure that he was as thrilled as they were to see the band, bemedaled veterans, and babes in arms on the platform. Their salutations became so predictable that scribes in the press car developed
a convenient code for wire dispatch, “GXLC.”
^*

Some outdoor audiences spread so far in all directions that Roosevelt had to project his remarks at them section by section. “
Friends,” he yelled to a mob of twenty-five thousand at the Minnesota State Fair, “this is the only time I ever wished I could face two ways at once—or even five ways at once, but I’d have to be built like a starfish to do it.”

Words failed him in Spokane on 9 September, when he found himself the only man in an auditorium full of women. Washington was one of the most advanced of the suffrage states. He could not hide the fact that for most of his
life, feminism had passed him by. “
My fellow citizens,” he began awkwardly, “this is the first meeting of this kind I have ever addressed.”

A strange muffled noise stopped him. It was the sound of
gloved hands clapping. Unsure of how to proceed, he tried, then abandoned, the preachy tone that served him well with male audiences. He praised the Progressive Party for adopting a full suffrage plank, and spoke of his new friendship with Jane Addams. Thanks largely to her, he had become a convert to the cause. “It’s because I’m a natural democrat. I don’t like to associate with people unless they have the same rights I have.”

By now Roosevelt was talking naturally, and his listeners were sympathetic. “I was converted from a passive suffragist to an active suffragist,” he said, “by seeing women who had been doing social reform work.” In addition to Miss Addams, he cited as new friends Maud Nathan, the child labor activist, and Frances Kellor, an advocate for the immigrant poor and founder of the National League for the Protection of Colored Women. He rejected Democratic and Republican warnings that extension of the suffrage would lead to the breakup of the American home. On the contrary, “I believe it will tend toward … an increase in the sense of copartnership between the man and the woman, and make each think more of the rights of the other than of his or her own rights.… People say to me, ‘Men are different from women.’ Yes, but I have never met any differences so great as the differences between some men and other men.”

TWO NIGHTS LATER
, John F. Schrank sat writing poetry in his two-dollar-a-week apartment in downtown Manhattan. It was the anniversary of the assassination of William McKinley.

As he wrote, he felt the ghost of the dead president lay a hand on his shoulder. It did not stop his pen.

ROOSEVELT’S SUCCESS WITH
local audiences was achieved at the expense of the kind of newsy, national headlines his campaign organization had been hoping for. He kept repeating his trust-control, tariff, and labor policies, and when he contrasted them with those of Woodrow Wilson,
his oratory became impersonal, as if he was reluctant to launch a direct attack on the governor. By the second week in September, he had fallen into a rhythm of replying to whatever points Wilson chose to raise, without coming up with new or challenging ones of his own. There was a brief tossing of Bull Moose antlers at San Francisco on the fourteenth, when he effectively portrayed Wilson as a doctrinal academic, and Taft as a political corpse, but then his speeches became bland again. Word got back to Party headquarters in New York that the Colonel had gone “stale.” The campaign was losing ground. Wilson—in the midst of his own Western tour—was moving ahead in most states.
Only California seemed certain to vote Progressive.

O. K. Davis, the Party’s overtaxed publicity director, set to work on a briefing book that would rearm Roosevelt with anti-Wilson material. In the meantime he hoped that his other star speakers, most notably Hiram Johnson and Albert Beveridge, would arouse audiences more than the Colonel seemed to be doing.

It was left to Charles Willis Thompson of
The New York Times
to point out that Roosevelt, stale or not, had already addressed a million people. The muted reaction to many of his speeches moreover, did not denote apathy so much as “
a quiet, steady, intent earnestness that does not often characterize a crowd at a political meeting.”

On the date that Thompson wrote this, Sunday, 22 September, Roosevelt spent a few relaxed hours at the Emporia, Kansas, home of William Allen White. Late that afternoon White drove him down to the station in a two-seat surrey, rolling through a sea of tall grass. Several hundred well-scrubbed souls waited on the platform. It was clear they hoped for a sermon before the candidate left town. Roosevelt managed a few bromides about righteousness. Amazingly, even these words were taken as a benediction. “
There was no applause,” recalled a Progressive bystander. “Tears stood in some men’s eyes. When the train pulled out for the East, that crowd stood and waved as long as there was a speck in sight.”

IN AN EFFORT
to reach voters living remote from his itinerary, but within range of a phonograph, Roosevelt cut
five 78 rpm shellac discs that featured short extracts from his campaign speeches. They were distributed and sold by the Victor Talking Machine Company, along with others recorded by Wilson
and Taft. His sharp singsong voice sawed through needle hiss, articulating every syllable with rounded vowels and rolled
r
s (“Ow-er aim is to prro-mote prros-perr-i-ty”) and decisive downward swoops at the end of each sentence.

Personally, he was tired of his own rhetoric and press images (always distressing) of himself on the stump—two years tireder than he had been during the campaign of 1910. “
I am hoarse and dirty and filled with a bored loathing of myself whenever I get up to speak,” he wrote Kermit. “I often think with real longing of the hot, moonlit nights on our giant eland hunt, or in the white rhino camp, with the faithful gun-boys talking or listening to the strumming of the funny little native harp.…”

MISSOURI. OKLAHOMA.
ARKANSAS. TENNESSEE
. Grinding across the dank flats of Louisiana, he braced himself for a swing through Mississippi and Alabama to Georgia, where he would try to make the most of his Bulloch ancestry. He was in Democratic territory now, and as a Republican renegade, could not hope to see many friendly black faces. Even Booker T. Washington had decided to come out for Taft.

“
Theodore Roosevelt has spent some time in Africa,” the
African Methodist Episcopal Church Review
noted, “but he has never spent one second inside of a black skin.” If he had, he might understand the impact of his letter to Julian Harris on people long treated as a separate species—indeed, as a subspecies. His “monstrous, unpatriotic, unjust and politically immoral” attempt to “array the Northern Negro against the Southern Negro” was reminiscent of the bad old days of Reconstruction.

These
touchés
might have been more damaging had they not appeared in a periodical whose title seemed designed to keep readership to a minimum. Everything Roosevelt saw of Southern Progressives flocking to his banner convinced him that his “lily-white” policy was working. “
It is impossible,”
Charles Thompson reported from Atlanta on 28 September, “to give any idea of the hold that the idea of ‘a new white man’s party’ has taken on in the South.” Segregationists who believed that the Negro should nevertheless be treated as a human being felt liberated from the hate policies of the Democratic Party, while old-time Populists had turned into “religious zealots, and they look on him as an apostle.”

Encouraged, the Colonel went out of his way to antagonize some Democratic hecklers when he spoke that night in the Atlanta Auditorium.
He practically called Woodrow Wilson a liar for misquoting a remark he had made about the “inevitable” rise of monopolistic corporations. “He has no right … to attribute to me words which I have never used.”