Colonel Roosevelt (52 page)

“
Colonel,” Robins said, “they have just voted down four planks.”

In another room, a subcommittee of the Resolutions Committee, chaired by William Draper Lewis, dean of the University of Pennsylvania law department, was trying to nail down the Party’s campaign platform. Lewis had been agonizing over this all-important “contract with the people” since July. A group of moonbeamers, led by Gifford and Amos Pinchot, was determined to substitute some radical planks for the more pragmatic ones favored by Perkins, Beveridge, and the Colonel himself. Their efforts had apparently succeeded.

“
Each one of those planks will go back,” Roosevelt angrily told Robins, “or I am not a candidate.”

The result, in the small hours of Wednesday morning, was
a compromise platform that mentioned neither prohibition nor race, but awarded the Colonel his battleships and retained the regulatory plank as written by himself and Perkins—more accurately, handwritten on various slips of paper, some of them dating as far back as May. It formalized in prose all the other promises Beveridge and Roosevelt had made verbally, committing the Progressive Party to a vast program of social, economic, and environmental reform. For once, Roosevelt was entitled to a superlative when he called it “
much the most important public document promulgated in this country since the death of Abraham Lincoln.”

A day of steady drizzle dawned. Delegates found the visitor galleries of the Coliseum largely deserted when they filed in under the giant moose head, shaking their umbrellas. Hours of report-reading by various committee chairs, as well as presentation and adoption of the platform, had to be endured before the nominating speeches could begin. Since there was only one candidate, those were unlikely to be news. Only then would the convention be informed whom the Colonel had chosen as his running mate. Most bets were on Benjamin B. Lindsey of Colorado.

In the late afternoon, William A. Prendergast, comptroller of New York City, presented Roosevelt’s name to automatic cheers. His remarks cost him
no effort, as he had written them over two months before to deliver at the Republican convention. “
There is no other man in American life,” he said, “who, in public office or out of it, has by his devotion to its interests, made so complete and genereous a contribution to the cup of its achievements.”

When Judge Lindsey rose to give the first seconding speech, realization spread that the diminutive Democrat was not going to be on the ticket. Jane Addams followed him to the rostrum. “I second the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt because his is one of the few men in our public life who has been responsive to the social appeal, and who has caught the significance of the modern movement,” she said, in the first address ever made by a woman to a national convention.

Finally, at seven o’clock, Beveridge announced that the Colonel had chosen Governor Hiram Johnson of California to run with him.

The two men came out together (Johnson notably shorter and stockier) to a roar of acclaim that formalized their nomination. Roosevelt seemed genuinely moved. The religiosity in the hall surged to the point of delirium, but yesterday’s alarm was gone from his face. He stood arm-in-arm with Johnson as fifes and drums, a trombone quartet, and a full band led the crowd of ten thousand in
singing the Doxology—its meter syncopated by the popping of a minute gun in the organ loft:

THE PROGRESSIVE NATIONAL CONVENTION
did not strike everyone as a transcendental event. “
In form, two thousand delegates, more or less, gathered in the Coliseum,” Senator George Sutherland of Utah told Vice President James S. Sherman. “In reality, Mr. Roosevelt met in convention at Chicago, made a confession of faith, gave his hand to the colored brother from the north and his foot to the colored brother from the south, adopted a platform, nominated himself and brother Johnson, and adjourned with the ease of a thoroughly trained thimblerigger plying his vocation among the rural visitors to the Midway plaisance.”

The more measured view of
The New York Times
was that Roosevelt’s statement of Progressive policy had been “the best, the ablest, the most persuasive of all his public utterances.” That did not alter the chilling fact that what the Colonel wanted was “a vast system of state socialism.” If returned to power, he would regulate business with a rod of iron, fixing prices and redistributing profits. He would make Washington the nation’s welfare center, and emulate Lloyd George in the profligate bestowal of old-age pensions and industrial insurance. Worse still, he would subject “the whole organic law” of the United States, including its constitutional checks and balances, “to an endless series of judgments of the people, expressed at the polls.” Armageddon had no real place in his mythology. “He stood at Chicago and preached socialism and revolution, contempt for law, and doctrines that lead to destruction.”

Ray Stannard Baker, noting the paternalistic trend in Roosevelt’s philosophy, was no longer prepared to concede that he was a “true liberal,” much less a political genius. “At this very moment of his triumph in Chicago, I believe TR to be on his way downward. He has even now passed the zenith of his power—unless it be the power for evil.”

And at the lowest level of American political opinion, John F. Schrank, thirty-six years old and unemployed, read in two New York newspapers that the Colonel was determined to overthrow the Constitution. Brooding over them, he was reminded of a nightmare he had had eleven years before, in which the ghost of the assassinated William McKinley pointed at Roosevelt and said, “This is my murderer, avenge my death.”

“
OF COURSE I DO
not for a moment believe that we shall win,” Roosevelt wrote Kermit after returning to Oyster Bay. “The chances are overwhelmingly in favor of Wilson, with Taft and myself nearly even, and I hope with me a little ahead.…”

He may have been reading a
Washington Post
article on election odds currently being offered along Wall Street.
Wilson was the 2-to-1 favorite of financiers, the class that felt most threatened by the Bull Moose platform. The odds of Roosevelt beating Taft were no better than 5 to 4 and 10 to 7. Politically, the nation was so piebald, with race prejudice darkening the South, and fields of progressivism, protectionism, socialism, and anarchism splotching the rest of the map, that not even a candidate of his enormous appeal could hope to be elected on mere popularity.

Nicholas and George Roosevelt visited Sagamore Hill that August and found their cousin uninhibited by the prospect of a doomed campaign. On the contrary, he was in uproarious form. He said he did not intend to hit the speaking trail in earnest until September, and in the meantime wanted to get as much frenetic exercise as possible. His apotheosis in Chicago seemed to have rejuvenated him. The hotter the weather, the greater his oversupply of energy. “You’ve got to play a set of tennis! You’ve got to play a set of tennis!” he chanted, beating Nicholas over the head with his racquet. The young man joined him in doubles against Archie and Ethel, and whenever Roosevelt hit a winning shot,
he hopped across the court on one foot, singing and chortling.

Something of his
élan vital
seemed to communicate itself to Woodrow Wilson, summering more sedately on the New Jersey shore. “
He is a real, vivid person,” the governor wrote in a rare moment of self-criticism. “I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.”

Roosevelt did not know it, but he had been the focus of Wilson’s direct
gaze earlier in the year. A coincidence in their respective primary campaigns had scheduled them both to address rallies in Princeton. Wilson had been able to sit in the Nassau Inn and watch Roosevelt speaking outside.
He had not been impressed by the Colonel’s rhetoric, with its constant, shuttlecock rebound between the extremes of any issue.

Although Wilson knew that he could never match Roosevelt’s energy and charm, he underestimated his own force as a campaigner. At fifty-five, he was formidably mature, intellectually imposing, by no means inhuman, and about as vague as a racehorse in sight of the pole. A few early, disastrous failures on the primary circuit had taught him how to moderate his cerebral style without descending to the crowd-pleasing platitudes that Roosevelt used almost as a form of punctuation. Wilson developed a gift of expressing complexities in the simplest language, driven home with just the right colloquialism. When he improvised a joke, it was usually a good one. Roosevelt, so funny in social life and in confidential correspondence, was overcome by moral seriousness on the stump. The face he presented to press cameras was severe. What laughs he got with improvised asides were often the result of his squeaky voice and facial grimaces.

He had not begun to see Wilson as a threat until they both emerged as avatars of progressivism in 1911. Now they were seriously opposed to each other. For the first time in more than a quarter-century, Roosevelt assessed someone who had the power to beat him.

He is not a nationalist
. In Rooseveltian parlance, that meant Wilson, the former girls’ school teacher who had sat out the Spanish-American War and signed last year’s peace manifesto in
The Christian Herald
, was not likely to be a strong commander in chief.

“
I KNOW IT, BUT
I can’t do it. I couldn’t if I would and I wouldn’t if I could.”