Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [94]
Again citing Lincoln, Roosevelt quoted the Emancipator’s policy of lying low whenever journalists were on the prowl: What they want is a squabble and a fuss, and that they can have when we explain; and they cannot have it if we don’t. He felt that this “homely common sense” applied to his current situation. He had been accused of overweening ambition often enough in the past to know that if he gave any hint of wanting to be drafted, it would be seen by most editors as fatal insolence.
ON 16 JANUARY, a “Roosevelt National Committee” was independently established in Chicago. It set up offices in the Congress Hotel. What Current Literature called a “Roosevelt obsession” at once spread to all parts of the country where GOP primaries were being planned. Speculation mounted in the press that the Colonel would announce his intentions in Ohio in late February.
“I fear things are going to become very bitter before long,” Taft told Major Butt. “But, Archie, I am going to defeat him in the convention.”
The President had no doubt that a progressive revolution was being plotted at Oyster Bay. He had heard from Henry Stimson that the Colonel was “as hard as nails” in his anger at having been named in the steel suit.
Taft seemed less affected by the prospect of a split in the Republican Party than by the lingering effect of that anger. “It is hard, very hard, Archie, to see a devoted friendship going to pieces like a rope of sand.”
Major Butt noticed, as Adams had, that the President was deteriorating mentally and physically. He stayed up later and later at night, and during the day kept nodding off—so often on public occasions that Butt had to keep elbowing him in the ribs and coughing loudly in his ear.
La Follette, too, began to ail under the stress induced by Roosevelt’s silence. He saw that his most influential backers, James Garfield, Medill McCormick, and Gifford and Amos Pinchot, were daily less loyal to him. It was obvious that the slightest positive signal from Oyster Bay would make them beg to be released from their pledges. The senator announced through a spokesman that “nothing but death” would keep him from pursuing the nomination, right through to the convention.
He had hoped to shine at a showdown between himself, Taft, Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson in early February, at the annual dinner of the Periodical Publishers Association in Philadelphia. All four were invited to appear, but the President and the Colonel, not wanting to look like co-equals, sent regrets. La Follette summoned up what strength he had left to write and rehearse the most important speech of his career. A spellbinding political orator, less preachy and ambiguous than Roosevelt, he felt confident of his power to win over the shapers of public opinion. Progressives who had already heard Wilson on the stump were less sanguine.
WITHIN TWO DAYS of the opening of his national headquarters in Chicago, the pressure on Roosevelt to declare had increased to such a point that he decided to yield—but only to a petition that made clear his reluctance to run. He asked the four Republican governors who were most energetically championing him (Chase Osborn of Michigan, Robert P. Bass of New Hampshire, William E. Glasscock of West Virginia, and Walter R. Stubbs of Kansas) to send him a written appeal for his candidacy. If they would argue that they were acting on behalf of the “plain people” who had elected them, he would feel “in honor bound” to say yes.
Frank Knox was appointed his roving emissary between the governors. Big and bluff, Knox was amply equipped to handle the various egos involved. He took it upon himself to solicit more gubernatorial signatures, and added those of Herbert S. Hadley of Missouri, Chester H. Aldrich of Nebraska, and Joseph M. Carey of Wyoming. With subsequent endorsements from Hiram Johnson of California and Robert S. Vessey of South Dakota, the appeal group represented a wide swath of country—considering that the South was Democratic territory, and the major industrial states were controlled