Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [124]
At 9:28 P.M., William Howard Taft was renominated with 561 votes. One hundred and seven of Roosevelt’s supporters carried out their primary instructions and voted for the Colonel. They stayed in their seats while 344 others declared themselves “present and not voting.” Then, as Root wound up the Fifteenth National Republican Convention, the bolters rose and went out into the night. They headed, not for their hotel rooms, but for Orchestra Hall, where the galleries were already full and telephone and telegraph linemen were installing wires to broadcast the birth of a new party.
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE was so intent upon reporting Taft’s nomination that he did not even notice where his colleagues from Kansas were going. Three hours later, having written and filed his story, he entered the Congress Hotel restaurant and found it filling up with late diners. One of them jovially accosted him.
“Why weren’t you over to Orchestra Hall?”
White said he had been busy.
“Well, you missed the big show.”
“What show?”
“Oh, we have organized the Progressive Party. Roosevelt made a ripsnorting speech, and the crowd tore the roof off and we are on our way!”
White struggled with conflicting emotions. Chagrin at being scooped was not the worst of them. He felt as he had in Boston earlier in the year, when the Colonel had talked to him and Judge Grant of il gran rifiuto, and they had tried to dissuade him from running. Willing as White was to join the bolt, he secretly feared that the neonate cause might smother in Roosevelt’s too-lusty embrace. Better for progressivism to fight and survive as a broad-based movement for social reform, drawing strength from both parties, than for it to be identified with one man’s obsessed mission.
The fight promised to be a long one—only getting under way, he thought, this year, with little chance of premature success. White admired Roosevelt so much that he could not bear to think of his hero being humiliated in November, as a certain consequence of splitting the Republican vote, just when the Democrats (already congregating for their convention in Baltimore) were so strong.
Here was the splitter himself, coming into the restaurant and asking in a teasing falsetto where White had been. Somebody who knew him less well would have seen only the exuberance of a man who had just worked up a crowd and been bathed in acclamation. White, however, noticed something more disturbing. Roosevelt was bent on revenge. “He was not downcast; indeed he was triumphant, full of jokes and quips as though the teakettle of his heart were humming and rattling the lid of his merry countenance. But rage was bubbling inside him.”
Elsewhere in the hotel, supporters of the President were disinclined to celebrate their victory. And from the far side of the divide that had opened up between the Colonel and the victims of his wrath came the sad voice of Elihu Root: “I care more for one button on Theodore Roosevelt’s waistcoat than for Taft’s whole body.”
CHAPTER 11
Onward, Christian Soldiers
And what is this that comes and goes,
Fades and swells and overflows,
Like music underneath and overhead?
What is it in me now that rings and roars
Like fever-laden wine?
“MY PUBLIC CAREER WILL end next election day,” Roosevelt said to a visitor on the morning after Woodrow Wilson was nominated as the Democratic candidate for President.
It was 3 July 1912. For about a week he had been able to hope against hope that his decision to run as a progressive independent might return him to the White House. Although Wilson’s brand of progressivism was not radical, it had so agitated the Baltimore convention as to make the proceedings in Chicago look sedate. No fewer than forty-three ballots had been required to persuade Bourbon reactionaries that the governor was the best man to win a four-way