Authors: Edmund Morris
63
Enthusiasm became ecstasy
Except where otherwise indicated, this account of the second day of the Progressive convention is based on
The New York Times, Chicago Tribune
, and
Atlanta Constitution
, 7 Aug., and
The Washington Post
, 8 Aug. 1912. The survey of attendees derives mainly from Gable,
The Bull Moose Years
, 34–59. Black delegates attended on the second day of the convention not only from the Northern states TR had mentioned in his letter to Joel Harris, but also from Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. By the peculiar political standards of the time, these Southern states were considered to be “border” territory, with their electoral votes not yet wholly lost either to the Republican or Progressive parties. Lewis L. Gould to author, 2 Dec. 2008, AC.
64
Two black Northern
These same delegates had conspicuously boycotted the previous day’s proceedings, in a show of sympathy for their excluded Southern brothers.
Atlanta Constitution
, 6 Aug. 1912.
65
Roosevelt led the singing
Atlanta Constitution
, 7 Aug. 1912.
66
“I have been”
The New York Times
, 7 Aug. 1912.
67
Senator Root’s mocking prophecy
Quoted in Adams,
Letters
, 6.515.
68
His smile betrayed
A reporter sitting just below TR in the press box noted, “It was evident that the fanaticism had got past him, and that he himself had no realization of the intense Christian feeling in that crowd all over the hall.”
(The New York Times
, 7 Aug. 1912.) Richard Harding Davis wrote of the demonstration, “There was in it something inspired, spiritual, almost uncanny. It caught one by the throat.” Davis, “The Men at Armageddon,”
Collier’s
, 24 Aug. 1912.
69
It said something
Morris,
The Rise of TR
, 54–56; Hermann Hagedorn,
Roosevelt in the Bad Lands
(Boston, 1921), 473; Sullivan,
Our Times
, 4.509. For TR’s relationships with all these men, see Morris,
The Rise of TR, passim
.
70
not even Alice
Cordery,
Alice
, 229.
71
The explosion somehow
Atlanta Constitution
, 7 Aug. 1912.
72
Roosevelt’s address
TR to KR, 12 Aug. 1912 (TRC); TR,
Works
, 19.376, 386. TR’s entire speech is reprinted in
Works
, 19.358–411.
73
He dismissed
TR,
Works
, 19.358. TR’s complaint about press bias was to become a leitmotif of his campaign from now on. In mid-August a researcher armed with a foot rule measured the coverage he and the Progressive agenda had in fact received, since the start of the month, in
The New York Times
and
Sun
. The total just for ten days was 2,148½ column inches, or something over 200,000 words, most of it front-page reportage under banner headlines. WHT or even WW would have been glad of half as much.
The New York Times
editorial, 18 Aug. 1912.
74
The dead weight
TR,
Works
, 19.372.
75
new or revived federal agencies
The genesis of the future Federal Trade and Securities Exchange Commissions, as well as the Social Security and Occupational Safety and Health administrations, may be traced back to these 1912 proposals by TR. He did not, however, suggest that the federal government should itself provide medical insurance. That was the responsibility of employers, and, on occasion, state governments.
76
“I say in closing”
TR,
Works
, 19.411.
77
voices singing his name
The Washington Post
, 8 Aug. 1912.
78
“Colonel,” Robins said
Raymond Robins interview, n.d. (TRB).
79
In another room
Gable,
The Bull Moose Years
, 98–99.
80
“Each one of those”
Raymond Robins interview, n.d. (TRB). One of these planks, written by Amos Pinchot, tied the high cost of living to business, a view that TR rejected as “utter folly.” (Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” [diss.], 245.) The others were for prohibition, a single tax, and constitutional amendment by referendum.
81
“Each one of those”
Raymond Robins interview, n.d. (TRB).
82
a compromise platform
A sheaf of Perkins’s draft paragraphs, preserved in the Pforzheimer Collection subsection of TRC, shows that he and TR initially conceived of their platform as a Republican document, in the hope of victory at the GOP convention in June. Gable,
The Bull Moose Years
, 98–106, is an exhaustive account of the platform deliberations. See also Davis,
Released for Publication
, 328–36.
83
“much the most important”
TR,
Letters
, 8.1068. For the last-minute, behind-the-scenes story of how this document was assembled, only to have a confused Dean Lewis misrepresent it to the convention (nearly costing TR the support of George Perkins), see Gable,
The Bull Moose Years
, 98–106 and Davis,
Released for Publication
, 328–36.
Historical Note:
The Progressive Party platform for 1912 amounted to a redrafting, for practical campaign purposes, of TR’s 1910 New Nationalism program.
Not until the Democratic platform of 1964 did any major party demand so many and such specific reforms. These were, in partial summary: direct primaries to nominate state, national, and presidential candidates, plus direct elections to the U.S. Senate; federal jurisdiction over national problems formerly treated as state problems; a universal minimum wage, and broader laws to protect, insure, and compensate abused or injured industrial workers; an eight-hour day work limit for women and juvenile employees, plus welfare benefits; facilitated organization of labor unions, and limitation of injunctions in labor disputes; farm relief; a more elastic currency; a downwardly revised, but still protective tariff; at least four nonpartisan regulatory commissions, with power over corporate pricing and all interstate business; further application of the initiative, referendum, and recall (but severely limited in application to judicial decisions); accelerated conservation and protection of natural resources, including a vast flood control program for the Mississippi River and its tributaries; development of Alaskan coal fields; woman suffrage; a national health service; federal income and graduated inheritance taxes; a two-battleships-per-year rearmament schedule; national highways; and a parcel post system.
84
“There is no”
The New York Times
, 8 Aug. 1912.
85
When Judge Lindsey
Ogden (Utah)
Examiner
, 8 Aug. 1912.
86
singing the Doxology
Mansfield (Ohio)
News
, 8 Aug. 1912.
1
Epigraph
Robinson,
Collected Poems
, 31
2
“In form, two thousand”
Proceedings of the 15th RNC
, 436.
3
The more measured
The New York Times
, 7 Aug. 1912.
4
Ray Stannard Baker
Baker, notebook M, 17–20 (RSB).
5
And at the lowest
Robert Donovan,
The Assassins
(New York, 1955), 135, 137.
6
“Of course I do not”
TR to KR, 13 July 1912 (TRC). See also Gould,
Four Hats in the Ring
, 155.
7
Wilson was the 2-to-1
The Washington Post
, 7 Aug. 1912.
8
he hopped across the court
The last words of this sentence are taken from Nicholas Roosevelt’s diary of 10 Aug. 1912. See Nicholas Roosevelt,
TR
, 98–99.
9
“He is a real”
Link,
Papers of Woodrow Wilson
, 25.26. For TR’s embrace of (and self-identification with) Bergson’s currently popular theory of
élan vital
, see TR,
Works
, 14.435 and
passim
.
10
He had not been impressed
William Starr Myers, ed.,
Woodrow Wilson: Some Princeton Memories
(Princeton, N.J., 1946), 42–43.
11
Wilson is a good man
TR,
Letters
, 7.592.
12
“I know it”
The New York Times
, 13 Aug. 1912.
13
After his desperate
Pringle,
Taft
, 818;
The New York Times
, 13 Aug. 1912. For WHT’s decision not to campaign actively, see Gould,
Four Hats in the Ring
, 126ff.
14
Taft knew that
Butt,
Taft and Roosevelt
, 694 and
passim;
Pringle,
Taft
, 82. “Ike” Hoover, the veteran White House usher, considered WHT to be, after Calvin Coolidge, the most self-centered of the nine presidents he had known. TR rated third. Hoover,
Forty-Two Years
, 232.
15
“I have no”
WHT quoted in Pringle,
Taft
, 823.
16
What with Ted
Eleanor B. Roosevelt,
Day Before Yesterday
, 60–61.
17
By the time everybody
Ibid., 62.
18
After a few weeks
Ibid., 61.
19
One night after dinner
Nicholas Roosevelt,
TR
, 99.
20
“Yes, yes!”
Ibid.
21
A more agitated
EKR to ERD, n.d., ca. Aug. 1912 (ERDP); Cordery,
Alice
, 231–32.
22
“I wish to goodness”
EKR to ERD, n.d., ca. Aug. 1912 (ERDP).
23
By the end of the month
For Debs’s double challenge to TR and WW in the summer of 1912, see Gould,
Four Hats in the Ring
, chap. 5. TR made two brief campaign trips into New England during the second half of Aug., attracting large, enthusiastic crowds. In Providence, R.I., on the 16th he spoke on tariff and currency reform, and made what appears to have been the first use of a phrase that reentered the American political vocabulary 70 years later: “The Republican proposal is only to give prosperity to [wealthy industrialists] and then to let it trickle down.”
The New York Times
, 17 Aug. 1912.
24
Wilson chose
Dunkirk (N.Y.)
Evening Observer
and
The New York Times
, 16 Aug. 1912.
25
340 pounds
WHT admitted to this weight at the end of his presidential term.
New York Times
, 12 Dec. 1913.
26
“As the campaign”
WHT on 26 Aug. 1912, quoted in Pringle,
Taft
, 815.
27
All of them stood
The New York Times
, 27 Aug. 1912.
28
Woman suffrage was an issue
The cover illustration of the pro-Wilson
Harper’s Weekly
, 17 Aug. 1912, showed TR shouting “Woman Suffrage Forever” through a megaphone, with a billboard proclaiming, “Great Vaudeville Act—The Call of the Wild.”
29
small silver bull mooses
Thompson,
Presidents I’ve Known
, 184. TR had previously (28–31 Aug.) undertaken a short campaign swing through New England. See Gould,
Bull Moose
, 41–51, for an important address in Vermont on the social-industrial aspects of Progressive policy.
30
He intended to barnstorm
TR’s itinerary is detailed day by day in the trip journal of George E. Roosevelt (TRC). The Colonel traveled with George and four other aides in a private car hitched to various public trains. Another private car, chartered by the press, was in turn hitched to his.
31
“He looked, as usual”
Baker, notebook M, 34–35 (RSB). TR’s speech is in Gould,
Bull Moose
, 51–56.
32
A citizen of
TR,
Letters
, 7.570–71;
The New York Times
, 13 July, 1 Aug. 1912; Wood,
Roosevelt As We Knew Him
, 273ff.; Thompson,
Presidents I’ve Known
, 190.
33
a convenient code
Thompson,
Presidents I’ve Known
, 141.
34
“Friends,” he yelled
Ibid., 175.
35
“My fellow citizens”
The New York Times
, 10 Sept. 1912.
36
gloved hands clapping
Ibid.
37
Two nights later
Donovan,
The Assassins
, 136. According to the self-styled “written proclamation” of John Schrank, quoted in the
New York Press
, 15 Sept. 1912, the time of this vision was 1:30
A.M
. on the 12th. For his earlier vision of McKinley and TR at the same hour on 15 Sept. 1901, see Morris,
Theodore Rex
, 17.
38
his oratory became impersonal
Exhorted by a Progressive official to “come out stronger” against WW, TR said, “No, that would be entirely wrong. Give Wilson a chance to make good. Don’t handicap him before he has had an opportunity to do anything.” David S. Hinshaw interviewed by J. F. French, 1922 (TRB).