Colonel Roosevelt (42 page)

TAFT SUPPORTERS BECAME
seriously alarmed when Roosevelt went on to take Nebraska and Oregon.
They did what they could to discredit him. Rumors that “Teddy” was a toper—what else could explain his exuberant animation and rapid-fire speech?—spread to such an extent that he had to issue an order that no alcohol be served on his campaign train. Lyman Abbott issued a wry statement that the Colonel indeed imbibed excessively, being addicted to milk.

Roosevelt did not know whether to be amused or irritated. “
Since I have been back from Africa, I have drunk an occasional glass of madeira or white wine, and at big dinners an occasional glass of champagne. That is literally all.” But when hints of alcoholism began to appear in print, he looked for an open libel that would enable him to sue “for the heaviest kind of damages.”

On 23 April, Taft won New Hampshire, an Old Guard fiefdom that Roosevelt had written off. One week later, the Massachusetts primary loomed. Legislators there had bowed to popular pressure and agreed to a direct vote. Roosevelt had so far won every preferential contest he entered, but the power of the Massachusetts Republican leadership made him doubt his luck this time. “
I think Taft will carry the state, because ours is only a fight of minute-men under sergeants and corporals, and all the generals are against us.”

Taft was nervous enough to travel to Boston on the twenty-fifth and say out loud what he thought about his opponent. No president had ever campaigned for his own renomination. “
I am in this fight to perform a great public duty,” he told a reporter, “—the duty of keeping Theodore Roosevelt out of the White House.” At every stop en route, he played for sympathy, saying that he had never wanted to take his predecessor on. “This wrenches my soul.” But he felt entitled to defend himself against the false charges of a political turncoat—“one whom in the past I have greatly admired and loved, and whose present change of attitude is the source of the saddest disappointment.”

That night in the Boston Arena, Taft was greeted by a capacity audience so
welcoming as to disprove the notion that he was loved only by the Old Guard. His opening words promised a speech of unusual frankness: “The ordinary rules of propriety that restrict a President in his public addresses must be laid aside, and the cold, naked truth must be stated in such a way that it shall serve as a warning to the people of the United States.”

Taft proceeded to attack Roosevelt in lawyerly fashion, reading for more than an hour from a typescript. As he did so, the enthusiasm around him cooled to respectful silence. Unlike La Follette, he did not lose his place or ramble. There were no Rooseveltian riffs, no high-pitched jokes, no fist-smacks, only the steady strong voice of an aggrieved man. His performance was boring, yet persuasive in its relentless accumulation of detail.

He itemized eleven specific charges the Colonel had laid against him, and in denying or correcting them, kept asking how a man could allege such things and yet pretend to stand for a square deal in politics. Disingenuously, he defended his use of White House patronage by saying that 70 percent of federal officeholders were still Roosevelt appointees. This was a false argument, because no customs clerk or farm inspector dared to risk the wrath of a sitting president.
Moreover, Taft was either lying or in a state of ignorance when he insisted that “not a single” person had lost his job for political reasons. Dismissals of progressives had been going on since February.

In the manner of counsel holding up exhibits for adjudication, the President read some friendly letters that had passed between him and the Colonel during their rapprochement in the winter of 1910–1911. He cited the addresses and dates of each letter, and even the superscriptions “Personal” and “Confidential.” He claimed to be Roosevelt’s faithful follower, and reviewed his own, professedly liberal executive and legislative record at such length as to cramp the hand of any shorthand scribe. The crowd in the Arena became listless, but livened up as Taft, trembling and sweating, swung to a powerful conclusion:

After returning to his train, Taft put his head in his hands and cried.

THE COLONEL WAS
in Worcester, Massachusetts, the next day, and responded in tones of outrage. It was “the grossest and most astounding hypocrisy,” he said, for the President to claim that he had always been a faithful Rooseveltian. The words sent
a momentary shiver through his audience, unused to such
lèse-majesté
. Then cheers and catcalls broke out. “He has not merely in thought, word, and deed been disloyal to our past friendship, but has been disloyal to every canon of ordinary decency and fair dealing.… Such conduct represents the very crookedest type of a crooked deal.”

Roosevelt said that the President had set the tone of their rivalry early on, calling him a “neurotic” and “demagogue,” and then, pathetically, pretending that it hurt to do so. “No man resorts to epithets like these if it really gives him pain,” Roosevelt scoffed. No gentleman, moreover, would read out another’s private correspondence without permission.

Responding to Taft’s charge that he had no right to a third term in the White House, he emphasized that he was not an incumbent seeking to perpetuate himself with patronage. He was a private citizen with the rights of any other. He went on for an hour and twenty minutes, using the personal pronoun 181 times, not admitting a single mistake or error of judgment. At the end, he managed to convey a kind of contemptuous sympathy for the President as a good-natured misfit dominated by stronger men: “He means well, but he means well feebly.”

Later he spoke at the Boston Arena, as Taft had twenty-four hours before. A boxing match had been held there in the interim, and the ropes were still in place. This enabled Roosevelt to make a stooping, straightening, fist-pumping entrance that touched off a seven-minute roar of applause. He had become, literally, the Man in the Arena.

“
Now you have me,” he shouted, after yet another statement of his recall philosophy. “Am I preaching anarchy?”

The answer was a roof-raising, “
NO!
”

As Elihu Root remarked to a friend, “
He is essentially a fighter and when he gets into a fight he is completely dominated by the desire to destroy his adversary.”

THE EXTRAORDINARY VEHEMENCE
with which Taft and Roosevelt defended themselves in Massachusetts indicated that the nomination battle had entered its critical stage. Taft was not as far ahead as his late-April total of 432 delegates seemed to imply. All had been pledged or instructed in states where the Party still controlled its own representation. Consequently they were less reflective of the
vox populi
than Roosevelt’s 208 delegates, elected for the most part in direct primaries. Massachusetts, a conservative state about to mount its own primary for the first time, offered Taft his best chance yet to demonstrate that ordinary voters were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

VOTE OF BAY STATE MAY BE DECISIVE
,
The New York Times
proclaimed before the election, suggesting that it might end the brief Roosevelt boom. Taft was reportedly hoping to sweep all thirty-six delegates. If so, he was disappointed. The vote, on 30 April, was indecisive. He won a small statewide majority of 3,622, but that allowed him no more delegates than Roosevelt, at eighteen each. The draw was broken by eight delegates-at-large, who pledged themselves to the Colonel.

Roosevelt, overjoyed but noting Taft’s larger vote, was quick to take moral advantage of it. “
In this fight,” he announced, “I am standing for certain great principles.… Foremost of these is the right of the people to rule.” He said he would order his delegates-at-large to switch their allegiance to the President.

By early May, with only four weeks of active campaigning left and 540 delegates needed to win the nomination,
The New York Times
estimated Taft’s complement at 468, Roosevelt’s at 232, and La Follette’s at 36. Senator Cummins of Iowa had a favorite-son slate of 10. The newspaper forecast that Taft would soon capture Nevada and Arkansas, followed by the primary states of Maryland and New Jersey. These, plus a swath of far-western states—Washington, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming—should yield him over a hundred more delegates, and eliminate his challengers well before June.

The
Times
acknowledged, however, that a large number of delegates were neither pledged nor instructed, but just “leaning” toward one candidate or the other. Its editorial tilt was clear. There was no mention of the Colonel’s strong prospects in California and Minnesota, nor of his popularity in Ohio—birthplace of so many presidents (Taft included), and the most delegate-rich state of all. A primary was due to be held there on the twenty-fifth. Even if
Taft won elsewhere as the
Times
projected, failure to hold his native soil would almost certainly end his hopes of reelection.

Over the next week, Roosevelt captured Maryland, Kansas, and Minnesota. Arkansas held two state conventions, one instructing its slate for him and the other for Taft. So another brace of rival delegations was added to the swelling number that intended to contest seats at the national convention. Roosevelt’s campaign team, ecstatic, calculated the President’s strength at only 175 bona fide delegates. This was a gross underestimate. But when, on 14 May, Roosevelt went on to sweep California, Taft put aside affairs of state for a final desperate stand in Ohio. “
If I am defeated,” he wrote his brother Horace, “I hope that somebody, sometime, will recognize the agony of spirit that I have undergone.”