Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [66]
THE CONVENTION’S MOST important business on its second day was to name a successor to Governor Hughes, now about to take his seat on the Supreme Court. Roosevelt had his candidate: Henry Lewis Stimson, the unimpeachably correct U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Barnes put forward a tame congressman, William S. Bennet. Stimson was chosen, 684 votes to 242. Roosevelt then forced the adoption of a progressive platform that pledged to introduce the direct primary. By now, his control of the convention was so absolute that he even got delegates to stop smoking. “It shows an utter lack of consideration for the rest of those present,” he scolded, as they meekly crushed out their cigars.
Less than three months after his reluctant reentry into politics, he had become the architect of the Party’s fall campaign. But by so personalizing a local struggle widely seen as hopeless (Stimson was an unpromising candidate, with all the charm of a bluefish), the Colonel was once again risking his reputation.
“I do not think we can win,” Roosevelt told O. K. Davis after the convention adjourned. “However, the fight was worth the making. We have beaten the reactionary machine, and the progressives are in charge of the party organization.”
Democrats assembling in Rochester for their own convention acknowledged this by nominating John A. Dix, a wealthy, boss-beholden industrialist, to oppose Stimson. They made clear that their long-term purpose was to defeat Roosevelt so badly that he would never again run for president. “We have got a bitter fight ahead of us—a fight against a marvelous man,” one orator declared. “Let us take it out of him!”
HOME AT SAGAMORE HILL, Roosevelt consented to an off-the-record interview with Ray Stannard Baker, one of the progressive journalists he had accused of “muckraking” back in 1906. Now he merely teased the younger man for being “a reasonable exponent of the extreme left of the Party,” and said, “Ask me anything you like.”
He sat relaxed in his library, still perspiring from an early morning ride, and talked exultantly about his victory at Saratoga. Sooner or later, Republican reactionaries were going to have to adjust to changing times. “Root is all right, but he needs me to direct him. Taft is the same sort of man. He needs direction.”
Baker had gotten used, over the years, to Roosevelt’s amazing self-confidence, but this imperious note, not unmixed with contempt for former allies, was something new.
“Are you a candidate for the presidency in 1912?”
“I will answer your question as plainly as you have asked it.” Roosevelt leaned forward, as he always did for emphasis.
“I don’t know.”
THE GROWING SUSPICION that the Colonel was running for a third term caused his old enemies on Wall Street to look with disfavor on the Saratoga ticket. Their newspaper of choice, the New York Sun, kept printing an editorial leitmotif, “The time to beat Roosevelt in 1912 is on November 8, 1910.” Even stalwart Republicans solicited funds for Dix and other Democratic candidates. They knew they were embarrassing President Taft, but their corporate consciences were clear: the vital thing was to keep government weak, and business strong.
Roosevelt spent the next forty days trying to save the GOP inside and outside his own state. He traveled wherever he felt needed—south through Georgia and Mississippi to Hot Springs, Arkansas; west to St. Louis and back through Illinois and Indiana (where Albert J. Beveridge’s Senate seat was under siege); northeast in aid of the similarly threatened Henry Cabot Lodge; up, down, and around New York State, making twelve to fifteen speeches a day, hoping to convince voters that reform and Republicanism were not incompatible. “He is trying to be both radical and conservative,” Baker observed. “It will not work.”
Occasionally Roosevelt’s passion for social reform got the better of him. On 22 October he attacked Simeon E. Baldwin, the retired chief justice of Connecticut, for ruling in Hoxie v. the New Haven Railroad (1909)