Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [107]
I chose myself to be
leader it is MY
right to do so. Down with
the courts, the bosses
and every confounded thing that opposes
ME. I AM IT
do you get me?
I will have as many terms
in office as I
desire. Sabe!*
T.R.
TAFT SUPPORTERS BECAME seriously alarmed when Roosevelt went on to take Nebraska and Oregon. They did what they could to discredit him. Rumors that “Teddy” was a toper—what else could explain his exuberant animation and rapid-fire speech?—spread to such an extent that he had to issue an order that no alcohol be served on his campaign train. Lyman Abbott issued a wry statement that the Colonel indeed imbibed excessively, being addicted to milk.
Roosevelt did not know whether to be amused or irritated. “Since I have been back from Africa, I have drunk an occasional glass of madeira or white wine, and at big dinners an occasional glass of champagne. That is literally all.” But when hints of alcoholism began to appear in print, he looked for an open libel that would enable him to sue “for the heaviest kind of damages.”
On 23 April, Taft won New Hampshire, an Old Guard fiefdom that Roosevelt had written off. One week later, the Massachusetts primary loomed. Legislators there had bowed to popular pressure and agreed to a direct vote. Roosevelt had so far won every preferential contest he entered, but the power of the Massachusetts Republican leadership made him doubt his luck this time. “I think Taft will carry the state, because ours is only a fight of minute-men under sergeants and corporals, and all the generals are against us.”
Taft was nervous enough to travel to Boston on the twenty-fifth and say out loud what he thought about his opponent. No president had ever campaigned for his own renomination. “I am in this fight to perform a great public duty,” he told a reporter, “—the duty of keeping Theodore Roosevelt out of the White House.” At every stop en route, he played for sympathy, saying that he had never wanted to take his predecessor on. “This wrenches my soul.” But he felt entitled to defend himself against the false charges of a political turncoat—“one whom in the past I have greatly admired and loved, and whose present change of attitude is the source of the saddest disappointment.”
That night in the Boston Arena, Taft was greeted by a capacity audience so welcoming as to disprove the notion that he was loved only by the Old Guard. His opening words promised a speech of unusual frankness: “The ordinary rules of propriety that restrict a President in his public addresses must be laid aside, and the cold, naked truth must be stated in such a way that it shall serve as a warning to the people of the United States.”
Taft proceeded to attack Roosevelt in lawyerly fashion, reading for more than an hour from a typescript. As he did so, the enthusiasm around him cooled to respectful silence. Unlike La Follette, he did not lose his place or ramble. There were no Rooseveltian riffs, no high-pitched jokes, no fist-smacks, only the steady strong voice of an aggrieved man. His performance was boring, yet persuasive in its relentless accumulation of detail.
He itemized eleven specific charges the Colonel had laid against him, and in denying or correcting them, kept asking how a man could allege such things and yet pretend to stand for a square deal in politics. Disingenuously, he defended his use of White House patronage by saying that 70 percent of federal officeholders were still Roosevelt appointees. This was a false argument, because no customs clerk or farm inspector dared to risk the wrath of a sitting president. Moreover, Taft was either lying or in a state of ignorance when he insisted that “not a single” person had lost his job for political reasons. Dismissals of progressives had been going on since February.
In the manner of counsel holding up exhibits for adjudication, the President read some friendly letters that had passed between him and the Colonel during their rapprochement in the winter of 1910–1911. He cited the addresses and dates of each letter, and even the superscriptions