Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [404]
69 It said something Morris, The Rise of TR, 54–56; Hermann Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (Boston, 1921), 473; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.509. For TR’s relationships with all these men, see Morris, The Rise of TR, passim.
70 not even Alice Cordery, Alice, 229.
71 The explosion somehow Atlanta Constitution, 7 Aug. 1912.
72 Roosevelt’s address TR to KR, 12 Aug. 1912 (TRC); TR, Works, 19.376, 386. TR’s entire speech is reprinted in Works, 19.358–411.
73 He dismissed TR, Works, 19.358. TR’s complaint about press bias was to become a leitmotif of his campaign from now on. In mid-August a researcher armed with a foot rule measured the coverage he and the Progressive agenda had in fact received, since the start of the month, in The New York Times and Sun. The total just for ten days was 2,148½ column inches, or something over 200,000 words, most of it front-page reportage under banner headlines. WHT or even WW would have been glad of half as much. The New York Times editorial, 18 Aug. 1912.
74 The dead weight TR, Works, 19.372.
75 new or revived federal agencies The genesis of the future Federal Trade and Securities Exchange Commissions, as well as the Social Security and Occupational Safety and Health administrations, may be traced back to these 1912 proposals by TR. He did not, however, suggest that the federal government should itself provide medical insurance. That was the responsibility of employers, and, on occasion, state governments.
76 “I say in closing” TR, Works, 19.411.
77 voices singing his name The Washington Post, 8 Aug. 1912.
78 “Colonel,” Robins said Raymond Robins interview, n.d. (TRB).
79 In another room Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 98–99.
80 “Each one of those” Raymond Robins interview, n.d. (TRB). One of these planks, written by Amos Pinchot, tied the high cost of living to business, a view that TR rejected as “utter folly.” (Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” [diss.], 245.) The others were for prohibition, a single tax, and constitutional amendment by referendum.
81 “Each one of those” Raymond Robins interview, n.d. (TRB).
82 a compromise platform A sheaf of Perkins’s draft paragraphs, preserved in the Pforzheimer Collection subsection of TRC, shows that he and TR initially conceived of their platform as a Republican document, in the hope of victory at the GOP convention in June. Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 98–106, is an exhaustive account of the platform deliberations. See also Davis, Released for Publication, 328–36.
83 “much the most important” TR, Letters, 8.1068. For the last-minute, behind-the-scenes story of how this document was assembled, only to have a confused Dean Lewis misrepresent it to the convention (nearly costing TR the support of George Perkins), see Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 98–106 and Davis, Released for Publication, 328–36.
Historical Note: The Progressive Party platform for 1912 amounted to a redrafting, for practical campaign purposes, of TR’s 1910 New Nationalism program. Not until the Democratic platform of 1964 did any major party demand so many and such specific reforms. These were, in partial summary: direct primaries to nominate state, national, and presidential candidates, plus direct elections to the U.S. Senate; federal jurisdiction over national problems formerly treated as state problems; a universal minimum wage, and broader laws to protect, insure, and compensate abused or injured industrial workers; an eight-hour day work limit for women and juvenile employees, plus welfare benefits; facilitated organization of labor unions, and limitation of injunctions in labor disputes; farm relief; a more elastic currency; a downwardly revised, but still protective tariff; at least four nonpartisan regulatory commissions, with power over corporate pricing and all interstate