Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [272]
If it was the mind and wish of Americans to reelect Woodrow Wilson in November, he was doubtless hinting at the long-term goal of his presidency.
ON THE NIGHT of Thursday, 8 June, ten leaders of the Progressive and Republican parties, convening in Chicago, met to explore the possibility of uniting behind a fusion candidate. Roosevelt was neither present nor near at hand: his non-candidacy required him to be at home in Sagamore Hill, pretending not to be interested in incoming long-distance telephone calls.
It was soon obvious that George Perkins’s delegation was willing to trade away almost every plank of the old Bull Moose platform, on condition that Theodore Roosevelt was nominated by the GOP. Members of the Republican delegation, including Winthrop Murray Crane and Nicholas Murray Butler, the antiwar president of Columbia University, made it equally clear that they would as soon vote for Senator Charles W. Fairbanks of Indiana, the most un-charismatic politician in America.
Sir Cecil Spring Rice, observing both conventions on behalf of Sir Edward Grey, was struck by the ambivalence of the Republican delegates who had traveled with him from Washington. “All were united in asseverating that they hated Teddy like hell and wanted to get back at him,” he wrote his wife, “but [felt] that he was the only man who could save the country.”
From what, the ambassador did not say. Possibly from international contempt: the United States was a pariah at the moment, with Mexico resentful of Pershing’s mission, Britain and France furious at a suggestion by Wilson that no parties to the world war were free of responsibility for its outbreak, and Germany seething at the haughty tone of his last note. The European situation was desperate. Ten thousand shells a day were falling on Verdun, and still troops were horded in from east and west to die, with no resolution in sight after three and a half months: Stellungskrieg, standing war, motionless mortality. General Falkenhayn’s announced intention was to bleed France white. The Battle of Jutland had been not so much a victory for Britain as a strategic retreat by the German navy. Russia was resurgent against Austria on the southwestern front. The British minister of war, Lord Kitchener—he whom Roosevelt had once taunted with a reference to Shakespeare’s “vasty deep”—had gone down at sea with all his aides, victims of a German-laid mine. Meanwhile, petty politicians in Chicago were still squabbling over Roosevelt’s bolt in 1912.
“They believed,” Spring Rice said of his travel companions, “that if he turned up at Chicago [today] he would carry the whole place with him. On the other hand Cabot thought if he only kept away he might have a dog’s chance, but that if he came he would spoil everything.”
Long ago, Henry Adams had observed that the only rock on Roosevelt’s coast was the senator from Massachusetts. “We all look for inevitable shipwreck there.” None of their friends had ever been able to understand the mutual attraction of two such contrary souls. Lodge was overtly for Roosevelt, covertly for Hughes, but in the suspicion of many delegates, not averse to being nominated himself.
“THE ONLY ROCK ON ROOSEVELT’S COAST.”
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. (photo credit i23.1)
The bipartisan conference adjourned without result and on the following day, Friday, the Republican convention took its first ballot. Hughes led with 253½ votes; five other candidates, including Lodge, scored ahead of Roosevelt, who got only 65. A second ballot increased his total to 81, but Hughes’s mushroomed to 328½.
By nine o’clock that evening it was clear that the justice was going to be nominated—without enthusiasm—unless the Progressive convention could suggest another candidate acceptable to both parties. A second conference began just before midnight, with constant calls going