Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [65]
The subsequent vote, however, was a solemn affair. No previous state convention had ever been required to choose between a former president and sitting vice president. It decided in Roosevelt’s favor, 567 to 445. Sherman had to escort him onstage and listen to his keynote address.
As a forum for oratory, Saratoga Town Hall did not compare with the Sorbonne or Oxford University. Roosevelt’s audience that hot afternoon was unlikely to be receptive to any biological analogies in history, nor, for that matter, to much New Nationalism. He soothed it with an opening list of laws creditable to Republicans in Congress, “and to our able, upright, and distinguished President, William Howard Taft.”
Except for his conspicuous avoidance of any other reference to the administration, this sounded like the endorsement Taft had been craving all summer. The word upright had a sycophantic ring to progressives still chafing over the Ballinger-Pinchot affair. But Roosevelt wanted to strike a moral note early. “We are against the degrading alliance which adds strength to the already powerful corrupt boss and to the already powerful corrupt head of big business,” he shouted.
He was trying to galvanize the convention into a wholesale revolt against Barnes. In fact (as Democratic observers were pleasedly aware), no boss could worsen, no reform ticket could improve the GOP’s appalling fortunes in New York. Not to mention other parts of the country: Taft and his tariff were simply too unpopular, and the Party too divided to inspire voter confidence. Already Maine, that most rock-ribbed of Republican states, had just elected a Democratic governor and legislature, and, for the first time in half a century, returned two Democrats to the House of Representatives.
For the moment in Saratoga, Roosevelt gave the Party an illusion of unity. He paced the stage with such jut-jawed force that O. K. Davis, in the press box, was reminded of a caveman on the prowl. The audience sat stunned as words flew out of him in spasms, punctuated by loud palm punches: “The rule of the boss is the negation of democracy.”
At least one delegate was able, by virtue of long friendship, to distinguish the performer from the performance. “Theodore,” said Elihu Root, putting a hand on his shoulder, “you are still the same great, overgrown boy as ever.”
By far the most distinguished man to have served him, as political patron, legal adviser, secretary of war, and secretary of state, Root now represented New York in the U.S. Senate. He might even have done so in the White House, if the “overgrown boy” had not regretfully decided, in 1908, to choose a successor with fewer ties to Wall Street. It was ironic that Taft had turned out to be a much more divisive figure. For all Root’s conservatism, he was capable, at sixty-five, of liberal attitudes—toward strategic autonomy for Latin America, for example, or the ideal of a permanent international court of justice at The Hague. Almost alone among orthodox Republicans, he declined to be fazed by New Nationalism. “If it means having the federal government do the things which it can do better than the states and which are within the limits of its present constitutional power, I am for it. If it means more than that, I am against it.”
Root opposed, by reflex, any challenge to legal authority. He had been instrumental in persuading Taft to fire Gifford Pinchot for insubordination. He did not admire the President, but accepted him as someone sanctioned by the people, by the Party, and by Theodore Roosevelt. Behind that gibe at Saratoga flashed an