Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [399]
91 They headed The New York Times, 22 June 1912.
92 “Why weren’t you” White, Autobiography, 473. The original ts. of TR’s speech to the bolting delegates is preserved in TRC. For a photograph of him presiding at the Orchestra Hall meeting, see Lorant, Life and Times of TR, 569.
93 He felt as he had White, Autobiography, 452, 473.
94 The fight promised Ibid., 474.
95 “He was not downcast” Ibid., 474–75.
96 “I care more” Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root, 2 vols. (New York, 1938), 2.202. In 1919, still brooding, Root told Finley Peter Dunne that “it was on his [TR’s] advice that I declared myself for Taft before he himself determined to throw his hat into the ring.” Dunne, “Remembrances” (DUN).
CHAPTER 11: ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS
1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 324.
2 “My public career” TR quoted in E. A. Van Valkenburg, “Roosevelt the Man,” Philadelphia North American, 9 Jan. 1919. TR indicated on 10 July that he would have withdrawn from the race had WW been nominated before Taft. TR, Letters, 7.575.
3 For about a week “Pop is praying for the nomination of Champ Clark,” KR told Franklin Roosevelt before the Democratic convention. A TR lieutenant, Francis J. Heney, was dispatched to Baltimore to negotiate a progressive defection in the event of a win by the conservative Clark. TR’s mail during this period contained proposals that WW, or even William Jennings Bryan, be tapped to run with him on a third-party ticket. According to O. K. Davis, Bryan strongly hinted to TR and other GOP progressives in Chicago that he would lead a bolt of his own supporters from the Democratic Party if Clark was nominated in Baltimore. The two splinter movements would then unite under TR in a new, potentially irresistible Progressive Party. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton, N.J., 1947), 422; Davis, Released for Publication, 316–17.
4 the Socialist Eugene V. Debs Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, compensates for the neglect historians and biographers have shown to Debs’s candidacy in 1912. Although Debs, in his third presidential race, scored well over 900,000 votes (a record for the American Socialist Party), his 6 percent share of the national total hardly compared with those of the three major candidates.
5 anti-Negro prejudice See McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, chap. 6.
6 Word had gotten out TR, Letters, 7.561; Morris, The Rise of TR, 254–55. WW had little discernible race hatred, but felt that Southern blacks, having no educational or social qualifications for suffrage, compounded the evil of Reconstruction. In the fifth volume of his History of the American People (1900–1903), he imputed the rise of the “great” Ku Klux Klan to “the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes,” and described its nocturnal vigilantism with obvious relish (58–60). See also his article, “The Reconstruction of the Southern States,” The Atlantic Monthly, 87 (1901). As president of Princeton, WW opposed the admission of black students, and was not above joking about “coons.” (Morris, Theodore Rex, 207.) For a sober analysis of the racial aspects of WW’s campaign, see Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House, 501–5.
7 Four of the seven governors The New York Times, 8 July 1912; TR, Letters, 7.569. Osborn eventually changed his mind about WW, and—too late—campaigned for TR. See Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 24–25.
8 as the head Hadley to TR, 5 July 1912 (TRP). Hadley eventually supported WHT, not to Osborn’s surprise. “Hadley is a politician.” Osborn to TR, 5 July 1912 (TRP).
9 As for veterans Mowry, TR, 256–57; Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House, 468; E. Daniel Potts, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party, 1912–1916: A Re-Interpretation,” Pacific Circle: Proceedings of the Second Biennial Conference of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association (St. Lucia, Queensland, 1968), 186.
10 the nascent Progressive Party When the Party