Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [110]
Roosevelt covered eighteen thousand miles across the state, addressing about ninety rallies. Unlike the President, who traveled even farther and spoke more, he was able to leaven his insults with wit. “Mr. Taft,” he said at Marion, “never discovered that I was dangerous to the people until I discovered he was useless to the people.”
It did Taft little good to seethe in private at “the hypocrisy, the insincerity, the selfishness, the monumental egotism, and almost the insanity of megalomania that possess Theodore Roosevelt.” He had powerful issues to level against his opponent—among them the third-term question, the reliance on anti-administration bosses, and the acceptance of enormous sums of money from trust lords, as long as they styled themselves as “progressives.” (One name that agitated the President’s mustache more than any other was that of George W. Perkins, of U.S. Steel and the International Harvester Company.) Taft could not understand why his detailed, droning exposures of such liabilities failed to excite more anger against his opponent.
He went home to Cincinnati to vote on the twenty-first, only to hear that one of his own supporters had asked Roosevelt to consider the idea of backing a compromise candidate—possibly Charles Evans Hughes. The Colonel’s reply was characteristic: “I will name the compromise candidate, he will be me.”
THE OHIO PRIMARY was so complete a victory for Roosevelt that it took several days for Taft’s full loss to be computed. Cincinnati remained loyal to him, but that was largely because his challenger had bypassed the city, not wanting to make things awkward for Nick Longworth. Overall, Taft won only eight delegates out of forty-two. He comforted himself with the probability that the state convention would award him another eight delegates-at-large, while his campaign managers insisted that he had a national lead over Roosevelt of 555 to 377. But the fact remained that the President had lost his own state by a margin of almost forty-eight thousand votes.
Roosevelt’s astonishing subsequent triumphs in the New Jersey and South Dakota primaries further eroded support for Taft. A new word was coined: “TRnadoes.” The Democratic governor of New Jersey expressed concern for the fate of the nation. “Your judgment of Roosevelt is mine own,” Woodrow Wilson wrote a friend. “God save us of another four years of him now, with his present insane distemper of egotism!”
When the nomination campaign ended on 4 June, the Colonel had amassed more popular votes than either of his opponents combined—at 1,214,969 for himself, 865,835 for Taft, and 327,357 for La Follette. Demonstrably, he was the runaway favorite of rank-and-file Republicans in the thirteen states that had granted them a direct voice. Outside of Maryland, all his victories had been landslides. He had beaten Taft two to one in California and Illinois, and three to one in South Dakota and Nebraska. Several other states controlled by the Party machine were embarrassed by upstart Roosevelt delegations vowing to fight for seats at the national convention. This made the actual, pre-ballot strengths of the three candidates difficult to assess. All that could be said with certainty was that, before the Chicago Coliseum opened its doors on 18 June, the RNC would have to decide the eligibility of every contesting delegate.
And of those decisions there could be no recall.
*In 1912, the word propaganda had not yet acquired its modern, truth-bending connotation. It meant, simply, “publishable information.”
*Understand!
CHAPTER 10
Armageddon
Are we no greater than the noise we make
Along one blind atomic pilgrimage
Whereon by crass chance billeted we go
Because