Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [111]
Will have it so?
TO DEMOCRATS PREPARING for their own convention in the spring of 1912, there was a pleasing symbolism in the rainstorm that drowned out a baby parade in New Jersey, on the last day of the Republican primary campaign in that state. A plump competitor dressed as “President Taft” had his silk hat and frock coat ruined, while “Baby Roosevelt,” riding on another float, cried so loudly he had to be rescued and comforted.
Après le déluge, qui? Next morning, the New York World had an endorsement to offer all adult voters tired of childish squabbles in the GOP: FOR PRESIDENT—WOODROW WILSON.
Ideologically, there was less difference between Wilson and Roosevelt than between any of the Republican candidates. The governor’s success in bestowing a raft of progressive reforms upon New Jersey had helped Roosevelt to his big win there. But it also bolstered Wilson’s own campaign for the Democratic nomination. A further similarity was that he and Roosevelt were both running a strong second to holders of high office in their own parties. And they were both hopeful of sweeping their respective conventions, if they could shake “organization” control of the proceedings.
Champ Clark, Speaker of the House of Representatives, was the man ahead of Wilson: a garrulous, vaguely progressive, cornpone Westerner. With Democrats not scheduled to meet in Baltimore until after the Republican convention in Chicago, Wilson might yet benefit from Clark’s propensity for political gaffes—as Roosevelt had already done from Taft’s.
In the interim, the governor did not have to worry about getting his delegates seated. Roosevelt did. Most of his convention support, over and above the delegates he had won in primaries, lay in the claims of 254 “shadow” delegates to be recognized as the true representatives of their states, on grounds ranging from miscarried conventions to outright fraud. Only seven of them were Taft men. As Roosevelt well knew, a fair number of his own claimants were wishful, especially those purchased with snake oil and other charms by his Southern salesman, Ormsby McHarg. Still, he had considerable strength on paper. The New York Tribune, a pro-administration paper, put him ahead of Taft, at 469½ potential delegates to 454. Taft’s vaunted total of 583, or 43 more than necessary for a first-ballot win, presupposed winning virtually all the seating contests. The New York Times allotted the Colonel only 355 delegates, 85 short of the number he needed, and reported that Taft hoped to unseat a further twenty.
“ ‘SEVEN-EIGHTHS LAWYER AND ONE-EIGHTH MAN.’ ”
Senator Elihu Root. (photo credit i10.1)
But all these calculations were little more than chalk on a blackboard due to be dusted, rewritten, and dusted again when the Republican National Committee began its convention eligibility hearings early in June. Only two figures could not be erased: 1,078, the legal number of seats available to delegates, and 540, the number needed to nominate.
EVEN BEFORE THE RNC arrived in Chicago, it had decided to recommend Elihu Root, the Party’s most rational conservative, as chairman of the convention. Roosevelt found himself in the painful position of having to oppose this choice, which boded well for Taft and ill for himself and La Follette. If Senator Root was acceptable to a majority of the delegates, he would influence the proceedings more than any other Party official. And the nature of that influence could be predicted.
“Elihu,” Roosevelt used to joke, “is seven-eighths lawyer and one-eighth man.” That had been in happier days, when Root served only his purpose. Now the legal construct had a new brief: to defend orthodox Republicanism at a convention under radical siege, and ensure the renomination of William Howard Taft.
Old friendship could not survive such a clash of interests. Roosevelt had to accept that Root, along with Henry Cabot Lodge and many other former political allies, must henceforth be a stranger to him. Or rather, he had become strange to them. They could not understand why