Colonel Roosevelt (41 page)

It followed that Roosevelt had to tolerate, or choose not to know about, signatures forged on nominating petitions in New York, horses traded with conservative mercenaries in Indiana, and baseball bats wielded to discipline delegates in Missouri. He contented himself with occasional letters of admonition or restraint.

His first convention victory over Taft in Oklahoma on 14 March was at least a start, albeit coerced by
a progressive enthusiast standing behind the chairman with a loaded revolver. The result, achieved at the cost of one death and three casualties, was ten delegates-at-large and six district delegates. Frank Knox thought that some of the minority pledged to Taft might be unseated by appealing to the Republican National Committee in June.

All at once, the Colonel’s campaign seemed to be gaining momentum. A series of separate headlines in
The New York Times
on 18 March proclaimed:

The last news was not bad news, since La Follette was Wisconsin’s favorite son. What was most significant was the trend in Ohio—Taft’s home state. If Roosevelt could pull off a miracle there, the blow to the President’s prestige would be severe. However, that primary was not due to be held for another two months, giving the White House plenty of time to continue its steady banking of pledges.

In the meantime, the speculative nature of the
Times
’s headlines was quickly exposed.
On 19 March, North Dakota, the plains state Roosevelt most identified with as a former ranchman (“Here the romance of my life began”), gave him only 23,669 votes to La Follette’s 34,123. Taft scored a humiliating 1,876, but that was a small consolation to Senator Dixon, given the fact that La Follette was supposed to have committed political suicide only six weeks before. Roosevelt urged the chairman to inflect the story as an “emphatically anti-administration” win for progressivism. He argued that even a La Follette delegation would count, in the end, as his own. But the claim sounded wishful.

He was, in fact, lagging in his race for the nomination. Infighting among his regional supporters was chronic, defectors from the La Follette organization were being shunned rather than welcomed, and would-be delegates were running against one another, rather than together for
him
. Nor had there been much evidence of “Teddy’s” alleged mass popularity. As James Bryce scoffed in a report to Sir Edward Grey, “
The prairies did not burst into flame as soon as his consent to become a candidate was known.”

Roosevelt began to show signs of panic, snapping at a suggestion by the publisher Hermann Kohlsaat that he withdraw in Taft’s favor, and admitting, “
I tend to get pessimistic at times.”
A childhood friend, Frances “Fanny” Parsons, came to stay with him and noticed that he had lost the bubbling high spirits that had enchanted her forty years before. She tried to keep up with him on one of his frenzied marches down Cove Neck. “On that long, rapid, for me almost breathless walk through the leafless woods, I realized that he was starting out on a strange untraveled road, the end of which he could not see.”

ONE THING THE COLONEL
had not lost was his power over audiences.

Carnegie Hall was crammed to the door when he rose to speak there on the night after the North Dakota primary. It was his first public appearance in almost a month. Arcs of women in evening dress glittered in the first and second tiers (Edith and Ethel looking down from box 61), standees crammed even the upper levels, and the stage behind him groaned with representatives of the New York Civic Forum. Outside in the street, five thousand disappointed attendees milled around, hoping he would address them later.

Noticing William Barnes, Jr., and a henchman, Timothy L. Woodruff, in the orchestra section, Roosevelt began by remarking that if Lincoln’s formula of government by the people was to be abandoned for minority rule, he knew who its chief exponents would be in New York State. “
It will be Brother Barnes and Brother Woodruff.”

Barnes glared at him from the parquet, but the audience rose in a standing ovation when Roosevelt continued, “I prefer to govern myself, to do my own part, rather than have the government of a particular class.” For the rest of the evening he was in complete control. He rephrased, but at the same time reaffirmed, all the points he had made at Columbus, emphasizing that he was advocating the recall only of judicial decisions that took elite advantage of the Constitution. “
The courts should not be allowed to reverse the political philosophy of the people.” He named Taft as the nation’s top reactionary in favor of oligarchy rule.

Roosevelt’s sharp voice scratched every sentence into the receptivity of his listeners, and his habit of throwing
sheet after sheet of manuscript to the floor seemed to mime points raised and dealt with. His peroration brought even Barnes to his feet in applause:

Afterward in one of the political clubs, Barnes was defensive. “
Roosevelt, confound him, has a kind of magnetism that you cannot resist when you are in his presence!”

BARNES RECOVERED
from the magnetism in time to hand the Colonel another defeat in the New York primary on 26 March.
Republicans amenable to Party discipline voted two to one for Taft. Those of more independent temper appeared to have stayed home.

It turned out that hundreds of Roosevelt supporters had gone to the polls in New York County, only to be frustrated by mysterious equipment failures
and closings. Others had been handed preposterously long ballots folded like concertinas, with up to three feet of blank space separating the Roosevelt ticket from its emblem. People tore off what they thought was waste paper, then found themselves unable to vote for the Colonel. The sole delegate he won in the city of his birth was an unopposed candidate in Brooklyn. Statewide, he netted seven delegates to Taft’s eighty-three. Every winner of a state committee seat or district leadership was a machine man. And when, later that same evening, the Indiana and Colorado GOP conventions elected their delegates-at-large, all were instructed for Taft.

The net results were so damaging that it availed Dixon little to complain that the New York vote was “a joke.” Taft now had a roster of 265 pledged delegates, with 539 needed to win. Roosevelt had 27.

He received the news of his triple defeat while traveling west aboard the Chicago Limited. Already he had concluded that his only chance of avoiding catastrophe was to forget about ex-presidential dignity and campaign in person, as strenuously and widely as possible.

“
They are stealing the primary elections from us,” he said. “All I ask is a square deal.… I cannot and will not stand by while the opinion of the people is being suppressed and their will thwarted.”

If the eight thousand people who awaited him in the Chicago Auditorium that evening were voyeurs expecting a valedictory, what they got was a battle cry.
Roosevelt roared against “fraud” in New York, “brutal and indecent” exclusion of his delegates in Indiana, and “outrageous” machine tactics in Denver. He called upon Illinois voters to insist on a direct primary, so they could register their personal preferences. Without saying so, he made it clear that if the RNC continued to thwart the will of progressives, he would bolt the Party and fight under a new banner.

He was back in New York at the end of the month, after a five-day swing through Indiana, Missouri, Minnesota, and Michigan. Almost immediately he was off again, on an itinerary reminiscent of his marathon tours as president.
At the top of his fraying voice, he preached progressive Republicanism at municipal receptions, church socials, chautauquas, spring festivals, and rallies huge and small. He zigzagged south through West Virginia and Kentucky, then eastward via Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania to New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Another flying visit home, and he was off across the Midwestern states to Iowa and Nebraska and Kansas, then down into Oklahoma, Arkansas, and North Carolina. From dawn until long after dusk, sometimes in pajamas from the back of his caboose, he harangued the citizens of Albia, Amboy, Ashland, Auburn, Aurora, Ayer, Beatrice, Blairsville, Clinton, Coatesville, Crete, Danville, Dixon, Hinton, Latrobe, Mattoon, Minonk, Mount Sterling, Nashua, Olive Hill, Osceola,
Ottumwa, Ozark, Pawnee City, Peru, Point Pleasant, Polo, Ronceverte, Salisbury, Shelbyville, St. Albans, Tecumseh, Tuscola, Urbana, Wymore, and a hundred other places, until the names blurred into Anytown and the faces became the single face of Everyman.

On 9 April, just as he was preparing to deliver
a major address on judicial reform in Philadelphia, he was rewarded with the first really good news of his campaign. Republicans in Illinois had coaxed a direct primary out of the legislature, awarding him a two-to-one-plus victory over Taft. Fifty-six of the state’s fifty-eight delegates were his, and a popular majority of 139,436. The dispatch hit with especial force in Washington, where most political gossips had already renominated the President.

“
No one can explain it,” Henry Adams marveled, “and I think no one expected it.”

Six days later, Roosevelt scored an even bigger win in Pennsylvania. It coincided with the first wire report of a catastrophe beyond belief in the North Atlantic. “
The
Titanic
is wrecked,” Adams wrote aghast. “So is Taft; so is the Republican Party.”

The President, nearly frantic as the extent of the tragedy became known, spent most of that evening in the White House telegraph office. He wanted to learn the fate of one passenger in particular: his indispensable aide, Major Archibald Willingham Butt.

Roosevelt claimed to be as bereaved as Taft when survivor testimony confirmed that Butt had helped women and children escape before going down with the ship. “
Major Butt was the highest type of officer and gentleman,” he said while campaigning in Lindsborg, Kansas. “I and my family all loved him sincerely.”

His syntax did not escape the attention of E. W. Kemble, the great cartoonist working for
Harper’s Weekly
and, by extension, for the Democratic Party. As Roosevelt continued to rack up primary wins, trumpeting each victory as a personal triumph, Kemble began a savage series of caricatures portraying him as a self-obsessed spoiler. Grinning toothily, “
Theodosus the Great” crowned himself with laurels; he toted a tar-bucket of abuse and splattered it, black and dripping, across the Constitution, Supreme Court, and White House. He emboldened every capital
I
in a screed reading: