Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [102]
At the Congress Hotel in Chicago, Truman H. Newberry, Roosevelt’s former navy secretary, assumed the vital role of treasurer of the National Committee. A millionaire local merchant, Alexander H. Revell, served as overall chairman, commuting to executive meetings in New York. In Washington, Frank Munsey gave space in his own press building—and a $50,000 startup budget—to the Roosevelt propaganda bureau.* Its manager was Cal O’Laughlin, who had come a long way in politics since waylaying the Colonel on the Nile. The bureau operated under the ideological control of Gifford and Amos Pinchot, James Garfield, and Medill McCormick—all of them thankful to be free of their obligations to La Follette. Another former journalist who joined the campaign was O. K. Davis of The New York Times. He attached himself to Senator Dixon as a pen for hire.
Branch offices opened in thirty other states, from New Hampshire west to California, and North Dakota south to Louisiana. Only the most reactionary corners of the old Confederacy, and the flintiest extremes of Republican New England, were deemed beyond the reach of new ideas. Wisconsin was ceded to La Follette, who could count on being nominated there, if nowhere else. Roosevelt’s eight original gubernatorial backers chaired their respective state committees.
The case that Dixon (dark, smooth-shaven, intense, and tireless) decided to present to rank-and-file Republicans was that three years of Taft’s leadership had reduced the Party to near impotence. The President had managed to turn a GOP majority of sixty in the House of Representatives into a minority of seventy, and a two-to-one overbalance of power in the Senate into virtual equipoise. His blindly supportive National Committee had lost control of a dozen states in the North and West. He was perceived as well-intentioned but weak; his obsessive traveling looked more like running away than reaching out. Whatever his support among the editors of loyal Republican periodicals, Dixon pointed out, reporters and cartoonists everywhere mocked him as long-winded, lazy, and obese. To Woodrow Wilson or whatever other falcon the Democrats might uncap this summer, Taft was easy meat.
Roosevelt, in contrast, was leading Taft by more than 66 percent in regional popularity polls across the country. According to the same surveys, he had more potential votes than all the other presidential contenders combined. But the goodwill of ordinary Americans counted for little at this stage of the political process. Only six states offered direct, preferential primaries: California, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wisconsin. In the remaining forty-two, delegates were selected, rather than elected, by the state parties in caucuses or conventions. And since these proceedings were controlled by bosses, or manipulated by sit-pat officeholders in favor of the status quo, they were democratic shams.
“You understand, my dear fellow,” Roosevelt wrote Newberry, “that probably Taft will be nominated. This is not a thing we can say in public, because of course such a statement discourages men; but I am in this fight purely for a principle, win or lose.”
Unfortunately, that principle was now perceived to be the recall of judicial decisions, rather than the broad “Charter of Democracy” he had tried to present at Columbus. Senator Dixon’s long-term strategy was to recommunicate, through the Washington propaganda bureau, the progressive content of the rest of that speech. It would serve as a campaign platform, and—if the Colonel would only shut up about judges—recall would have faded as an issue by June.
In the short term, Dixon wanted to persuade as many caucus-convention states as possible to adopt the popular selection of delegates, while there was