Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [393]
65 “In this fight” The New York Times, 2 May 1912; TR, Letters, 7.539–40.
66 By early May The New York Times, 4 May 1912.
67 Over the next week The Michigan state convention in April managed to elect two delegations simultaneously from the same platform, after reaching such a pitch of violence that Governor Osborn was compelled to deploy the state militia against Taft goons supplied by the sugar beet industry. Louise Overacker, The Presidential Primary (New York, 1926, 1974), 205.
68 “If I am defeated” Pringle, Taft, 757.
69 “I am a man” The New York Times, 5 May 1912. In another speech, WHT compared himself to “a man of straw.”
70 Their vocabulary The Washington Post, 15 May 1912.
71 “honeyfugler” A now extinct word, meaning one who seduces or cheats by sweet talk.
72 their Pullmans parked The New York Times, 15 May 1912.
73 “the hypocrisy, the insincerity” Pringle, Taft, 787.
74 a compromise candidate The first politician to suggest Hughes was William Barnes, Jr., citing the “grave” condition of the Republican Party. Barnes bitterly blamed progressivism for the plague of preferential primaries spreading across the nation. “This so-called reform has done more to confuse and corrupt legislators than anything in politics for fifty years.” The New York Times, 17 May 1912.
75 “I will name” The New York Times, 21 May 1912. The satirical magazine Life remarked, “The popular demand for Colonel Roosevelt is steadily increasing, but however great the demand may become, it can never be as great as the supply.” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.491.
76 “TRnadoes” Alice Hooper to Frederick Jackson Turner in Turner, Dear Lady, 123. For a documentary account of how hard TR worked (and was worked) on the campaign trail, see William H. Richardson, Theodore Roosevelt: One Day of His Life (Jersey City, 1921). The day in question was 23 May 1912.
77 “Your judgment” Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 24.446.
78 more popular votes The precise size of this vote is difficult to calculate, because authorities are divided on how many, and which, states contributed to it. Mowry, e.g., cites “thirteen,” without naming them, and gives the candidate totals as TR, 1,157,397; WHT, 761,716; and La Follette, 351,043. Bishop lists 13 states, including Georgia but not New York. Lewis L. Gould lists 12 states, excluding both Georgia and New York. His resultant figures are TR, 1,164,765; WHT, 768,202; and La Follette 327,357. (Mowry, TR, 236; Bishop, TR, 2.322; Lewis M. Gould, ed., Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics [Lawrence, Kan., 2008], appendix B.) In a letter to the author (1 Aug. 2008), Gould disqualifies New York as a primary state in 1912 because of heavy-handed manipulation of the vote by Boss Barnes, and because delegates were elected locally rather than apportioned on the basis of a statewide vote, which mysteriously was never recorded. But these criteria might also disqualify, say, Boss Flinn’s Pennsylvania or Boss Walter F. Brown’s Ohio, or Washington State, whose mix of local primaries and district mini-conventions became a vexed issue at the national convention. New York’s election, which netted WHT 83 delegates to TR’s 7, was widely referred to as a “primary” at the time, despite the lack of a statewide total. See Overacker, The Presidential Primary, 13, 135. On 4 June 1912, The New York Times did at least compute the popular vote in New York County at 33,492 for WHT and 16,933 for TR, or a 2-for-1 majority for the President. If the total GOP state vote in 1912 was about the same as it was in 1916, i.e., 147,038, and if WHT and TR divided it much as they did the New York County vote, we may estimate their respective primary vote shares at 97,633 and 49,404. These figures, added to Gould’s for the other twelve primary states, project the grand totals given here. Whichever set is preferred, TR’s