Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [387]
16 “It was the President” Adams, Letters, 6.490.
17 “What can you do?” La Follette, Autobiography, 547.
18 Taft had executive control Mowry, TR, 226–27. In anticipation of a run by TR, WHT had pressured state Republican committees to hold their conventions as early as possible, before his campaign took hold. Ibid., 209.
19 He now began TR, Letters, 7.451.
20 “In making any” Ibid., 7.481.
21 The only major papers Mowry, TR, 225.
22 Again citing Lincoln TR, Letters, 7.483–84.
23 On 16 January Mowry, TR, 205.
24 “Roosevelt obsession” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.472.
25 “I fear things” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 814.
26 “as hard as nails” Hermann Hagedorn, “Some Notes on Colonel Roosevelt from Henry L. Stimson,” 12 Dec. 1923 (TRB). Corinne Roosevelt Robinson told Archie Butt that her brother “could never forgive” Taft’s insult. The breach between him and the President was “irrevocable.” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 811–13.
27 “It is hard” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 804.
28 Major Butt noticed Ibid., 839.
29 La Follette, too Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 30–31; La Follette, Autobiography, 541–45, 586ff.; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.473; Margulies, “La Follette”; The New York Times, 4 Jan. 1912.
30 He had hoped to The New York Times, 6 Jan. 1912. La Follette was an obsessive, but not self-obsessed candidate for the presidency. His primary interest was to advance the cause of progressivism, and his initial reaction to the Roosevelt presidential boom at the end of 1911 had been to offer to withdraw in TR’s favor. But the latter’s indecision made him soldier on. See Harbaugh, TR, 392–94.
31 Within two days Mowry, TR, 210; TR, Letters, 7.485. Since TR had been so inscrutable on the question of his possible candidacy through Dec. 1911 and the first half of Jan. 1912, and since the governor’s letter was subject to several submissions, withdrawals, and revisions through 10 Feb. 1912, historians have long debated as to when, exactly, he decided to run against Taft and La Follette. The most exhaustive analysis of the available evidence is that of John Allen Gable, who concludes that TR “made up his mind sometime between the Norris letter of Jan. 2 and Jan. 16.” By 18 Jan., TR’s availability was a matter of record. Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 31–32, 66–69. See also La Follette, Robert M. La Follette, 1.385–86.
32 All this coordination Margulies, “La Follette”; TR, Letters, 7.487–93.
33 Pandemonium ensued The New York Times, 24 Jan. 1912. The convention also endorsed James Harris for the Republican National Committee.
34 “Do not for one” TR, Letters, 7.493. TR’s continuing reluctance to run in Feb. 1912 was proclaimed not only by himself in countless letters, but by friends and intimates who could sense both his doubts and his almost deterministic acceptance of fate. Albert Bushnell Hart remembers being invited to Sagamore Hill on 26 Jan. to listen, with others, to TR reading a proposed statement of candidacy. They felt it was too self-explanatory, and TR withdrew it, as if he was glad to postpone the moment of reckoning. Hart notes that by delaying almost another month before making a very different announcement, TR lost delegates in Colorado and elsewhere whose numbers might have clinched his nomination in June. (Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 254–56.) As late as mid-February, when TR was working on his Columbus speech in Manhattan, a young progressive named John A. Kingsbury took an evening stroll with him. “I remember that I was very genuinely impressed that night that the Colonel meant what he said when he told me that he would much prefer to retire to his home in Oyster Bay to lead the life of a private citizen … but that he could see the drift of events and he felt certain that he was going to be drafted.” (Kingsbury to Hermann Hagedorn, 31 Oct. 1921 [TRB].) See also Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 79–82.
35 By 2 February The petition was drafted by John C. O’Laughlin of the Chicago Tribune, operating, as he often did, on both sides of the media/governmental divide.
36 Woodrow