Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [394]
CHAPTER 10: ARMAGEDDON
1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 66.
2 a baby parade The New York Times, 30 May 1912.
3 Next morning Heaton, The Story of a Page, 343.
4 A further similarity TR was about 20 percent behind WHT in delegates in the first week of June, and Wilson about 37 percent behind Clark.
5 his own claimants Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 67. The Atlanta Constitution, 18 June 1912, cited affidavits by three Taft members of the Georgia delegation stating that they had been offered cash bribes of up to $400 apiece to switch their votes to TR. McHarg does not appear to have been directly involved.
6 Still, he had Bishop, TR, 2.322–23; The New York Times, 9 June 1912.
7 chairman of the convention Technically in 1912, temporary chairman. See above, 612.
8 “Elihu,” Roosevelt TR quoted by Finley Peter Dunne in The American Magazine, 24 Sept. 1912.
9 On 3 June TR, Letters, 7.555.
10 EXCEPTION OF A VERY FEW Barnes was alluding to New York’s imbalance of 7 delegates for TR and 83 for Taft. The phrase temporary chairman in this telegram has been shortened to chairman, for reasons explained above (612).
11 “Root,” he complained Mowry, TR, 242; TR, Letters, 7.548–49, 555.
12 Unfortunately, most Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 66. Owen Wister describes delegates to the Republican convention in 1912 as coins pre-stamped with image and value. Notwithstanding their marks, the coins did not achieve currency until they had passed through a machine carefully calibrated by the National Committee. “A coin might be full weight, but if it were stamped with Roosevelt’s image, it might be rejected in favor of a short weight coin bearing Taft’s image.” Wister, Roosevelt, 310.
13 not a professional Rosewater (1871–1940), editor of the Omaha Bee, is generally portrayed as a conservative, but he had been comfortable with some of the reforms of TR’s second administration. In June 1912, Rosewater was acting chairman of the RNC, substituting for Harry S. New. He left a record of his convention experiences in a memoir, Back Stage in 1912: The Inside Story of the Split Republican Convention (Philadelphia, 1932).
14 The rest of the Committee Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 66–67. At the beginning of June, TR’s forces in Chicago launched an attempt to stack the committee by having at least five newly elected members take seats at the hearings at once, rather than waiting for the convention to authorize them. Among these were William Allen White of Kansas and R. D. Howell of Nebraska, who had displaced Rosewater as a delegate and now hoped to displace him as acting chairman. (The New York Times, 3 June 1912.) But since current members of the committee were entitled to keep serving until 18 June, the Roosevelt putsch never went anywhere.
15 “theft, cold-blooded” The New York Times, 8 June 1912.
16 For a while Davis, Released for Publication, 292; Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 86.
17 “If circumstances demand” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.497. The version of this quote given in Pringle, Taft, 796, comes with acquired dental effects.
18 proceeded to throw out For accounts of the hearings disputing TR’s accusations of delegate-stealing, see Rosewater, Back Stage in 1912, 80–120, and Pringle, Taft, 799ff.
19 Perhaps thirty Lewis Gould states that TR, on the basis of a modern impartial analysis, deserved “another twelve or fourteen” delegates from Texas, plus “probably … another twenty or so” from other states. With his 19 awardees, that would have given him an extra complement of 53, still far short of the number he needed to clinch the nomination. Earlier authorities, notably John Allen Gable in 1965, George E. Mowry in 1946, and Senator Borah, Governor Hadley, and Gilbert E. Roe (a La Follette supporter) back in 1912, differ in their assessments of TR’s chances of winning the nomination, but all agree that he was entitled to about 50 more delegates. See Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 67, and Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” [diss.], 39.
20 An impartial observer This sentence