Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [150]
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, BY A GREAT PLURALITY, HAVE CONFERRED UPON YOU THE HIGHEST HONOR IN THEIR GIFT.
I CONGRATULATE YOU THEREON.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Just before midnight the Colonel received reporters in his study. He was still in black tie. A log fire burned softly behind him.
“Like all other good citizens,” he said, “I accept the result with good humor and contentment.”
* “Great Excitement! Local Committee!”
CHAPTER 13
A Possible Autobiography
And if he still remembers here
Poor fights he may have won or lost,—
If he be ridden with the fear
Of what some other fight may cost …
He may by contemplation learn
A little more than what he knew,
And even see great oaks return
To acorns out of which they grew.
BEFORE ROOSEVELT WENT to bed after hearing the election result, he dictated a letter to Kermit. It belied his sanguine words to the press. “Well, we have gone down in a smashing defeat; whether it is a Waterloo or a Bull Run, only time will tell.”
He did not have to wait for a full count of the vote to see that Wilson had scored the greatest electoral victory yet accorded a presidential candidate. Forty states had gone to the governor, and only six to himself. Taft had to be content with Utah and Vermont. Debs secured none. The electoral college tally was just as disproportionate, with 435 votes for Wilson, 88 for Roosevelt, and 8 for Taft. In Congressional races, the Democratic Party was triumphant, winning control of the Senate and substantially increasing its majority in the House of Representatives.
In his still-fragile state, Roosevelt yielded to rage against Root, La Follette, and all the others who had hampered his campaign from the start. Their efforts, he told Kermit, had been backed by “95% of the press” and “the great mass of ordinary commonplace men of dull imagination who simply vote under the party symbol and whom it is almost as difficult to stir by any appeal to the higher emotions and intelligence as it would be to stir so many cattle.” He railed at the “astounding virulence and hatred” of those who accused him of everything from habitual drunkenness to mendacity. Even after he had been struck down in Milwaukee, “the opposition to me was literally a mania.… I now wish to take as little part as possible in political affairs and efface myself as much as possible.”
Like a female ranger living near Old Faithful, Edith Roosevelt understood her husband’s regular need to erupt. “You know him well enough,” she warned Kermit in a covering note, “to realize that he will paint the situation in his letter to you in the blackest colors.”
Gradually, Roosevelt realized that his loss was not as devastating as it at first seemed. He had scored 4,126,020 popular votes over Taft’s 3,483,922. Wilson’s winning total was only 6,286,124: William Jennings Bryan had done better than him in losing four years before. Debs, by contrast, had doubled the Socialist vote of 1908 to nearly a million. This last was a remarkable achievement, but Roosevelt’s was historic. He had recruited a new party, schooled it in his Confession of Faith, and brought it to second place in a well-fought election. In just over ninety days, he had humbled a sitting president and decisively beaten a party that had dominated national politics for forty years. When the Progressive vote share, at just under 27.5 percent, was added to the GOP’s 23.2 percent, the Democratic total of 41.9 percent looked a lot less impressive. Technically, Wilson was a minority president.
This did not signify that Roosevelt would have inherited much of Taft’s support, had he won the GOP nomination and campaigned as a small-p progressive. He had always been anathema to the sort of Republicans who, on election night in Darien, Connecticut, had stomped and burned a portrait of him. But he might have forestalled Wilson’s own nomination, so reluctantly assented to by Democrats after forty-three ballots in Baltimore. Even if he had not, he would have had an established party organization behind him, and a platform that addressed itself