Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [410]
109 At seven the Colonel EKR to KR, 6 Nov. 1912 (KRP); Cordery, Alice, 234.
110 The phone call TR actually knew as early as 7:30 P.M. that a landslide for WW impended, but the Democratic National Committee did not claim victory until 10:30. WW acknowledged his triumph at 10:45. Atlanta Constitution and The New York Times, 6 Nov. 1912.
111 THE AMERICAN PEOPLE The New York Times, 6 Nov. 1912.
112 “Like all other” New York Evening Post, 6 Nov. 1912.
CHAPTER 13: A POSSIBLE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 16.
2 “Well, we have” TR to KR, 5 Nov. 1912, ts. (TRC).
3 In his still-fragile Ibid. After the last line, TR characteristically added, “I am absolutely happy and contented.” See also his posterity letter sent on the same date to Arthur Lee, in TR, Letters, 7.634–35.
4 “You know him” EKR to KR, 6 Nov. 1912 (KRP).
5 Gradually, Roosevelt realized In further analysis, TR ran second in 23 states, seven of them in the South, where his “lily-white” Party policy proved effective in weakening WHT’s machine support. He swept Pennsylvania with a 50,000-vote margin over WW, plus California with 11 out of 13 electoral votes, and Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Washington besides. He was only 1,000 votes behind WHT in Vermont, and 3,000 behind WW in Maine. The governor’s winning margins in North Dakota and Montana were not much greater, at 4,000 and 6,000. New York City rejected its native son by a plurality of 122,777 votes, but TR racked up convincing wins in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He performed strongly in the Midwest and West, and secured a majority of the nation’s normal GOP vote by a margin of more than half a million. (Gould, Bull Moose, 176–77; Literary Digest, 16 Nov. 1912; Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 131–32.) Gould points out that TR did not technically defeat WHT in either California or South Dakota, since the President was not on the ballot in those states.
6 stomped and burned The New York Times, 10 Nov. 1912.
7 Even if he A progressive Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota received almost four times as many votes as the Progressive Party candidate. TR himself did best in states where the GOP vote was traditionally high. Potts, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party”; Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 132.
8 He would now John Milton Cooper, in Naylor et al., TR, 505, expresses a contrary view, suggesting that WW would have been nominated as the only possible foil to TR, and during the campaign would have attracted away from him much of WHT’s conservative/corporate support.
9 There remained James E. Amos, Theodore Roosevelt: Hero to His Valet (New York, 1927), 147–48. “To me and to some of the others who were near him it always seemed that after the shooting things began to break against him. Up to that moment his life had been a rising scale of successes. People talked about his star and his destiny. Things broke for him. After that they broke the other way.”
10 poor Nick Representative Longworth was defeated by only 97 votes—which ARL guiltily blamed on herself, for attending a Progressive rally in Columbus earlier in the year. He took solace in alcohol, breaking down completely on 13 Nov., to her “infinite sorrow and pity.” Cordery, Alice, 235–36.
11 Roosevelt admitted TR to KR, 24 May 1913, ts. (TRC); Willard Straight to Henry P. Fletcher, 3 Oct. 1912 (STR). Apparently TR did not know that The Outlook had taken out a $25,000 accident insurance policy on him, and made a claim after he was incapacitated in Milwaukee. The insurance company argued that only TR could have claimed, and tried to have the policy voided. TR then mystifyingly announced that TR would not file any