Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [141]
TWO NIGHTS LATER, John F. Schrank sat writing poetry in his two-dollar-a-week apartment in downtown Manhattan. It was the anniversary of the assassination of William McKinley.
When night draws near
And you hear a knock
And a voice should whisper
Your time is up.…
As he wrote, he felt the ghost of the dead president lay a hand on his shoulder. It did not stop his pen.
Refuse to answer
As long as you can
Then face it and be a man.
ROOSEVELT’S SUCCESS WITH local audiences was achieved at the expense of the kind of newsy, national headlines his campaign organization had been hoping for. He kept repeating his trust-control, tariff, and labor policies, and when he contrasted them with those of Woodrow Wilson, his oratory became impersonal, as if he was reluctant to launch a direct attack on the governor. By the second week in September, he had fallen into a rhythm of replying to whatever points Wilson chose to raise, without coming up with new or challenging ones of his own. There was a brief tossing of Bull Moose antlers at San Francisco on the fourteenth, when he effectively portrayed Wilson as a doctrinal academic, and Taft as a political corpse, but then his speeches became bland again. Word got back to Party headquarters in New York that the Colonel had gone “stale.” The campaign was losing ground. Wilson—in the midst of his own Western tour—was moving ahead in most states. Only California seemed certain to vote Progressive.
O. K. Davis, the Party’s overtaxed publicity director, set to work on a briefing book that would rearm Roosevelt with anti-Wilson material. In the meantime he hoped that his other star speakers, most notably Hiram Johnson and Albert Beveridge, would arouse audiences more than the Colonel seemed to be doing.
It was left to Charles Willis Thompson of The New York Times to point out that Roosevelt, stale or not, had already addressed a million people. The muted reaction to many of his speeches moreover, did not denote apathy so much as “a quiet, steady, intent earnestness that does not often characterize a crowd at a political meeting.”
On the date that Thompson wrote this, Sunday, 22 September, Roosevelt spent a few relaxed hours at the Emporia, Kansas, home of William Allen White. Late that afternoon White drove him down to the station in a two-seat surrey, rolling through a sea of tall grass. Several hundred well-scrubbed souls waited on the platform. It was clear they hoped for a sermon before the candidate left town. Roosevelt managed a few bromides about righteousness. Amazingly, even these words were taken as a benediction. “There was no applause,” recalled a Progressive bystander. “Tears stood in some men’s eyes. When the train pulled out for the East, that crowd stood and waved as long as there was a speck in sight.”
IN AN EFFORT to reach voters living remote from his itinerary, but within range of a phonograph, Roosevelt cut five 78 rpm shellac discs that featured short extracts from his campaign speeches. They were distributed and sold by the Victor Talking Machine Company, along with others recorded by Wilson and Taft. His sharp singsong voice sawed through needle hiss, articulating every syllable with rounded vowels and rolled rs (“Ow-er aim is to prro-mote prros-perr-i-ty”) and decisive downward swoops at the end of each sentence.
Personally, he was