Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [112]
The issue of the chairmanship was forced by William Barnes, Jr., Taft’s principal tactician on the Republican National Committee. On 3 June, he telegraphed all delegates elected to the convention, except those pledged to the Colonel:
I AM WIRING YOU IN BEHALF OF THE NEW YORK DELEGATION, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF A VERY FEW, TO ASK YOUR SUPPORT FOR SENATOR ROOT FOR CHAIRMAN. WE BELIEVE THIS CONTEST IS THE MOST SERIOUS ONE WHICH HAS AFFLICTED THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AND THAT THE ATTEMPT TO NOMINATE MR. ROOSEVELT CAN LEAD ONLY TO DISASTER.… WILL YOU PLEASE WIRE ME, NEW YORK CITY COLLECT, WHETHER WE CAN RELY ON YOUR SUPPORT FOR SENATOR ROOT FOR CHAIRMAN?
Thus goaded, Roosevelt announced that he would instruct his delegates to vote for Governor Francis E. McGovern of Wisconsin, a progressive sympathetic to both himself and Senator La Follette. “Root,” he complained, “is simply the representative of Barnes in this matter.”
He relied on his organization in Chicago to seat as many as possible of his contesting delegates—potentially almost a quarter of the convention. Fifty more would make his bid for the nomination serious, and he hoped for 80 or 90. Assuming a minimum of 278 uncontested delegates from his primary victories, and another minimum of 133 non-primary pledges, his solid first-ballot strength was 411, with 540 needed to win. He therefore had to press another 129. There were 166 uninstructed delegates. Perhaps he could persuade enough of them to combine with his accreditees for a winning edge, however narrow.
Unfortunately, most of the uninstructed seemed to favor Taft. And so did a majority of the Republican National Committee.
ROOSEVELT COULD ONLY hope the Committee would be fair, rather than blacken the GOP’s already tarnished political image with a show of discrimination. Many of the delegates pledged to Taft were obviously fraudulent. To seat a decent number of progressive challengers would make for good public relations, and confound the RNC’s pro-Roosevelt minority. That group was dominated by William Flinn, Francis J. Heney, and Senator Borah of Idaho, an austere, brooding maverick who had once voted for Bryan. All were formidable men, determined to shame their opposing trio of senior reactionaries: Barnes, Boise Penrose, and W. Murray Crane.
Barnes, of course, was already the Colonel’s open enemy. “Big Grizzly” Penrose was Taft’s chief supporter on Capitol Hill, infamous for reactionary machine politics. He would be seeking revenge on Roosevelt and Flinn for recently unseating him as boss of the Pennsylvania GOP. Crane was a Yankee paper manufacturer, as stiff and traditional as his own business cards. As for the Committee chairman, Victor Rosewater of Nebraska, the best that could be said of him was that he was not a professional politician. Moderate, frail, and with luck, malleable, Rosewater might be receptive to arguments that progressivism was a social force that the Republican Party had to accommodate, or else cede to the candidacy of Woodrow Wilson. He was a key figure, since he would serve ex officio as temporary chairman of the convention until giving way to either Root or McGovern.
The rest of the Committee, apart from ten or so members friendly to Roosevelt and La Follette, consisted of about thirty-five Party regulars who served at the President’s pleasure.
ROOSEVELT CHAFED AT Sagamore Hill as the hearings proceeded alphabetically, state by state. On the first day, all twenty-four of his delegates from Alabama and Arkansas were barred from the convention, and on the second, his entire slate from Georgia. In electoral terms, those states counted for nothing. Still, the Committee’s bias against him seemed clear. Senator Dixon complained to reporters of “theft, cold-blooded, premeditated and deliberate.”
For a while, Roosevelt tried to maintain control of his representatives by long-distance telephone. But he hated the instrument and suspected it was being tapped. A private telegraph in the attic, a relic of his time as president, was even less satisfactory.