Theodore Rex (85 page)

Neither party had anything specific to say about trust control, labor policy, or tariff reform. Both candidates agreed that the Panama Canal would be of vast benefit to mankind. Parker said nothing about lynchings—still occurring at a rate of one every four days—and Roosevelt, having courageously raised the subject in 1903, was content to let it rest.

Major press endorsements were not expected until the fall. Yet
the most eagerly awaited came with devastating suddenness on 11 August, fewer than twenty-four hours after Parker’s speech. For as long as anyone could remember, the New York
Sun
had visited its wrath on any politician, Republican or Democrat, who presumed to interfere with the free workings of capital—as Roosevelt had done during the coal strike. But the paper’s editors compared his record with Parker’s rhetoric, and announced their decision in five weary words:

    THEODORE! with all thy faults—

WITHIN DAYS OF
the arrival of Admiral Jewell’s squadron at Smyrna, Minister Leishman advised that Abd al-Hamid had promised, in an informal memorandum, that there was to be “no discrimination between American schools and those of other nationalities” anywhere in his Sultanate. Clearly, Turkey’s willingness to negotiate was related to the weight of armor on her doorstep.

Leishman would have preferred something more binding than a note scribbled by a secretary, but
Roosevelt hastened to proclaim victory without violence. He ordered Leishman to accept the Sultan’s word without question, adding,
INFORM ADMIRAL THAT FLEET CAN NOW LEAVE
.

Thanks to Hay’s restraint, Roosevelt the candidate was able to bask in praise of his statesmanship. He wished that the election could be held “next Tuesday.” Even critical commentators were reduced to grudging admiration. The Brooklyn
Eagle
suggested that he had aimed his naval guns “at the Democratic enemy, not the Sultan,” pointing out that Jewell could have been sent east immediately after the Perdicaris affair. But Roosevelt had obviously delayed his grand gesture to coincide with Judge Parker’s notification ceremony. “The power to seize the psychological moment is the essence of genius
in politics, and if anybody doubts that Theodore Roosevelt is a genius he should reverse himself on this further evidence.”

THE PRESIDENT WAS
now free to resume his summer vacation. But he did so aware that a much more serious crisis was burgeoning in the Far East.

For almost a month now, Japanese naval and ground forces had been consolidating themselves around Port Arthur, redoubt of the Liaotung Peninsula and strategic key to both Korea and Manchuria. The Russian-held fortress still stood, but without naval protection, leaving Japan in complete command of the sea approaches. On 20 August, General Maresuke Nogi began a “final” assault on Port Arthur. Wave after wave of seemingly berserk little infantrymen broke bloodily on the fortress walls for two nights and days. But the walls held, and the waves receded, carrying a flotsam of fifteen thousand dead and wounded. Nogi’s army settled down to what looked like a long winter of siege.

Farther inland, three other Japanese columns converged on Liao-yang, where Russia’s main army lay entrenched. On 23 August, there began nine days of what
Review of Reviews
called “perhaps the most desperate fighting of modern times.” Three hundred thousand soldiers tried to kill one another on roads and fields and hills. The Russians, who fought bravely but unimaginatively, fell back mile by mile, battered by Japanese frontal pressure and harassed by surprise attacks on their rear communications. They summoned ten thousand reserves to stay their retreat, in vain. Even behind breastworks, they lost more men than the enemy did. For forty-eight hours the air was so loud with artillery blasts, at sixty shots a minute, that men wondered if they would ever hear again.

“
The Russians think only with half a mind,” Roosevelt wrote Hay, as birds sang in the quiet woods of Sagamore Hill. “I think the Japanese will whip them handsomely.”

SENATOR BEVERIDGE TOOK
a similar view of the President’s own political battle. “
Unless I am in a chloroformed state and merely dreaming, you are going to have the greatest victory since the Civil War.”

The “speaking phase” of the campaign got under way as August turned to September. Orators from all parties spread out across the land with prepared texts and throat lozenges. The loudest voice, at first, was that of the Socialist presidential candidate, Eugene Debs. (“The capitalists made no mistake in nominating Mr. Roosevelt. They know him well.… He [has] nothing in common with the working class.”)

A quieter voice eventually proved to have more effect than any other. From the moment of his selection as Roosevelt’s running mate, the fifty-two-year-old
Charles W. Fairbanks had been caricatured as a “stuffed club” and “Wall Street puppet.” He was mocked for his spindly height, his triple-strand baldness, his prim manners and paper-dry personality. The New York
Sun
compared him unfavorably to a table of logarithms, while the
Evening Post
opined that he had been nominated for national-security reasons. “The maddest anarchist would never think of killing Roosevelt to make Fairbanks President.”

The puppet comparison worked best.
At six foot four, Fairbanks moved and spoke as if he had no life of his own. His voice seemed to emanate from some inner Edison cylinder, and his gestures were correct but mechanical, as if jerked by hidden wires. At exhortatory moments, his fist would clench, always in the same upheld position. Whenever he delivered a warning, a lank forefinger would shoot up, and he would rock back on his heels. From time to time, both hands would snap open like fans, and remain open until he shook them shut.

This awkwardness was oddly compelling on the hustings. But what made Fairbanks so effective was what had made him a millionaire at forty, a quiet power in the Senate, and a presidential possibility for 1908: he simply could not be stopped. The voice droned on relentlessly, the arms kept pumping, and the long legs kept striding, wherever Nathan B. Scott sent him, from White River Junction, Vermont, to Spokane, Washington. Hundreds were amused; thousands bored; hundreds of thousands convinced. If Roosevelt demonstrated the power of personality in American politics, Charles Fairbanks showed the benefit of persistence.

The first tests of their combined appeal came on 6 and 13 September, when voters in Vermont and Maine went to the polls to elect governors. August Belmont, who seemed to be managing Parker’s campaign over the head of the Democratic National Committee, did not conceal his anxiety.
Both states were Republican strongholds, but if the GOP margin was significantly reduced in either, Democrats could take heart for November. In Vermont, however, the Democratic candidate was defeated by a margin greater than even Cortelyou hoped for, and another Republican surge was registered in Maine.

“
Unless we throw it away, we have the victory,” a satisfied President declared.

Nothing was heard from the gray house at Esopus but Parker’s usual booming silence. The judge—now retired from the Court of Appeals—remained as inscrutable as if he were still wearing silk. Joseph Pulitzer, the strident owner of the New York
World
, began to have second thoughts about him. “
The people need a judicial Chief Magistrate, but not too judicial a candidate.”

THE PRESIDENT CHOSE
this moment to issue his long-awaited acceptance letter, a twelve-thousand-word enlargement upon his acceptance speech, covering every aspect of Republican policy.
At least twelve close advisers—including Root, Cortelyou, Spooner, and a cross-section of lawyers and journalists—had added their own contributions, but the letter’s clarity and comprehensiveness were pure Roosevelt, as were its ideological blows at Parker. Coinciding as it did with the GOP triumph in Maine, it had the dizzying effect of a follow-up punch.

Its basic theme was the self-contradiction of the St. Louis platform, which failed to reconcile Cleveland’s urban conservatism with Bryan’s agrarian radicalism. “
Our opponents …” Roosevelt wrote, “seem at a loss, both as to what it is that they really believe, and as to how firmly they shall assert their belief in anything.” After eight years of screaming for free silver, they now called for gold—but only because Judge Parker told them to. They solemnly endorsed the civil-service law, “the repeal of which they demanded in 1900 and 1896.” As for the issue of Philippine independence, “they have occupied three entirely different positions within fifty days.”

He proclaimed his own consistency, emphasizing that if elected he would proceed “on exactly the same lines” in national defense, insular administration, tariff policy, and management-labor relations. Without even a pass at modesty, he listed his eighteen proudest executive achievements, including the coal-strike settlement, arbitration of the Venezuela crisis, establishment of the Department of Commerce and Labor, dispatch of the Kishinev petition, and “decisive actions” in Panama, Tangier, and Smyrna. “
There is not a policy, foreign or domestic, which we are now carrying out, which it would not be disastrous to reverse or abandon.”

Sonorously he concluded: “
We have striven both for civic righteousness and for national greatness; and we have faith to believe that our hands will be upheld by all who feel love of country and trust in the uplifting of mankind.”

The President’s letter was greeted rapturously by Republicans and ruefully by Democrats. Even
Harper’s Weekly
, usually his bitter critic, praised it as “a masterful and extraordinarily able document.” John Hay wrote to say that Judge Parker must regret ever quitting the state bench.