Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [104]
The problem was that, no matter how honest most of his campaign executives were in command of their various field operations, they had to rely on professional politicians at the state and lower levels—when such men could be found. Often as not, “Republicans for Roosevelt” were passionate amateurs who had never worked in a campaign before, and who needed to be trained and supervised. In Massachusetts, he was served by a committee of seven Harvard men, all from families dating back to the seventeenth century, all young, and all except one possessed by the notion that progressivism was a form of noblesse oblige. But with Senator W. Murray Crane controlling the Bay State GOP organization (for as long as Lodge recused himself), the Harvard men were as rowers without a cox: all muscle, but no coordination.
It followed that Roosevelt had to tolerate, or choose not to know about, signatures forged on nominating petitions in New York, horses traded with conservative mercenaries in Indiana, and baseball bats wielded to discipline delegates in Missouri. He contented himself with occasional letters of admonition or restraint.
His first convention victory over Taft in Oklahoma on 14 March was at least a start, albeit coerced by a progressive enthusiast standing behind the chairman with a loaded revolver. The result, achieved at the cost of one death and three casualties, was ten delegates-at-large and six district delegates. Frank Knox thought that some of the minority pledged to Taft might be unseated by appealing to the Republican National Committee in June.
All at once, the Colonel’s campaign seemed to be gaining momentum. A series of separate headlines in The New York Times on 18 March proclaimed:
NORTH CAROLINA FOR ROOSEVELT
N.D. MAY BE ROOSEVELT’S
ROOSEVELT MAY CARRY OREGON
OHIO DRIFTING ROOSEVELT’S WAY
TEXAS ALL FOR ROOSEVELT
AGAINST ROOSEVELT IN WISCONSIN
The last news was not bad news, since La Follette was Wisconsin’s favorite son. What was most significant was the trend in Ohio—Taft’s home state. If Roosevelt could pull off a miracle there, the blow to the President’s prestige would be severe. However, that primary was not due to be held for another two months, giving the White House plenty of time to continue its steady banking of pledges.
In the meantime, the speculative nature of the Times’s headlines was quickly exposed. On 19 March, North Dakota, the plains state Roosevelt most identified with as a former ranchman (“Here the romance of my life began”), gave him only 23,669 votes to La Follette’s 34,123. Taft scored a humiliating 1,876, but that was a small consolation to Senator Dixon, given the fact that La Follette was supposed to have committed political suicide only six weeks before. Roosevelt urged the chairman to inflect the story as an “emphatically anti-administration” win for progressivism. He argued that even a La Follette delegation would count, in the end, as his own. But the claim sounded wishful.
He was, in fact, lagging in his race for the nomination. Infighting among his regional supporters was chronic, defectors from the La Follette organization were being shunned rather than welcomed, and would-be delegates were running against one another, rather than together for him. Nor had there been much evidence of “Teddy’s” alleged mass popularity. As James Bryce scoffed in a report to Sir Edward Grey, “The prairies did not burst into flame as soon as his consent to become a candidate was known.”
Roosevelt began to show signs of panic, snapping at a suggestion by the publisher Hermann Kohlsaat that he withdraw in Taft’s favor, and admitting, “I tend to get pessimistic at times.” A childhood friend, Frances “Fanny” Parsons, came to stay with him and noticed that he had lost the bubbling high spirits that had enchanted her forty years before. She tried to keep up with him on one of his frenzied marches down Cove Neck. “On that long, rapid, for me almost breathless walk through the leafless woods, I realized that he was starting out on a strange untraveled road, the end of which