Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [139]
Taft broke his vow of presidential silence long enough to issue a reproof to voters who registered as Republicans but supported “the candidate of another party.” Every curve of his massive body, now approaching its lifetime peak weight of 340 pounds, expressed disillusionment with the office Roosevelt had cajoled him into. By universal consent, his liberation was at hand. But the prospect of handing power back to his patron was not to be borne.
“As the campaign goes on and the unscrupulousness of Roosevelt develops,” the President wrote his wife, “it is hard to realize that we are talking about the same man whom we knew in the presidency.” The peacemaker of Portsmouth had mutated into the half-crazed leader of a religious cult. “I have not any feeling of enmity against him,” Taft told her, “or any feeling of hatred. I look upon him as an historical character of a most peculiar type in whom are embodied elements of real greatness, together with certain traits that have now shown themselves in unfitting him for any trust or confidence by the people.”
As he penned these words, Debs, in Terre Haute, Indiana, was warning working-class Americans that there was little to choose between the three major candidates. All of them stood for “private ownership of the sources of wealth and the means of life.” The only real choice, therefore, was between Democracy—the real, socialistic kind, with wealth and opportunity equalized by law—and Plutocracy, otherwise known as the status quo.
Debs was sensible enough to know that his alternative was not likely to be chosen in November, if ever in the United States as presently constituted. But he was not far wrong in suggesting that Roosevelt, Wilson, and Taft were three panels of a triptych, linked and painted with the same capitalistic brush. They differed from one another only in ideological color and fineness of detail.
On the left, the Colonel and his Party offered by far the most advanced program of reform, with enough administrative and legislative proposals to keep the federal government busy for two decades. The Chicago platform was essentially a rewording, in legalistic language, of Roosevelt’s “Confession of Faith,” amplified with many slighter, but still significant initiatives, such as vows to revise the currency, register lobbyists, fight illiteracy, and adjust roadways to the coming of the motor age. There were so many other proposals regarding health care, flood control, parcel post, patent law, and foreign commerce that Wilson joked it would take “a Sabbath day’s drive” just to plow through the whole Progressive agenda.
His own, centrist platform combined the kind of small-p progressivism he had pioneered as governor of New Jersey with the traditional emphasis Democrats put on states’ rights. If Wilson sounded, at times, like a populist, it was because he felt he had to gratify the old “Commoner,” William Jennings Bryan, who had helped bring about his nomination. He undertook to control malfeasant corporations with as much force as Roosevelt, but said he would do so by strengthening the antitrust law, not by regulation. He was for a revenue-only tariff instead of the protective one that his rivals preferred. Woman suffrage was an issue only slightly less abhorrent, to his Southern supporters, than Negro enfranchisement, so Wilson was content to let Mrs. J. Borden Harriman and other Northern feminists fight that fight for him. Otherwise, he showed as much social concern as Roosevelt, except that he sympathized more with credit-stressed farmers than