Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [95]
All this coordination took time, since some of the governors were more progressive than others, and regretted having to betray La Follette’s candidacy. Roosevelt complicated matters by toying with each executive separately, as if he wanted to delay the very petition he had invited.
Meanwhile, delegate-selection proceedings were under way in several states that had not yet adopted the primary system. On 23 January, Oklahoma’s Fourth District Republican convention grotesquely dramatized the factionalism of a party splitting three ways.
The local committee chairman, Edward Perry, was a Roosevelt man who hoped to create a progressive stampede for the Colonel. A letter from Gifford Pinchot reminded him that, as yet, La Follette was Taft’s only official challenger. Perry read the letter to the convention, but made plain that he still favored Roosevelt. This infuriated the rank and file supporting Taft. Pandemonium ensued, with Perry roaring “Slap Roosevelt in the face if you dare!” over contrary shrieks and howls. A posse of fake Rough Riders invaded the hall. For fifteen minutes they tried to storm the stage, but found it harder to take than the Heights of San Juan. Cigar-smoking Taft forces repelled them. One cavalryman got through on a miniature pony: the young son of Jack “Catch-’em-Alive” Abernathy, a friend of Roosevelt’s famous for seizing wolves by the tongue. The boy shrilled “I want Teddy!” to the crowd, touching off further furor. But then the organization men suppressed him, and the convention endorsed Taft over La Follette by a vote of 118 to 32. Perry, locally known as “Dynamite Ed,” showed his displeasure by going outside and detonating five hundred pounds of high explosives.
His district may have returned a slate of delegates loyal to the President, but he wanted the world to know that progressivism was a force to be reckoned with.
ROOSEVELT MAINTAINED FOR the rest of the month that he was not a candidate. “Do not for one moment think that I shall be President next year,” he cautioned Joseph Bucklin Bishop, one of his most obsequious acolytes. “I write you, confidentially, that my own reading of the situation is that while there are a great many people in this country who are devoted to me, they do not form more than a substantial minority of the ten or fifteen millions of voters.… Unless I am greatly mistaken, the people have made up their mind that they wish some new instrument, that they do not wish me; and if I know myself, I am sincere when I tell you that this does not cause one least little particle of regret to me.”
By 2 February, however, the governors were on the verge of approving the language of their group petition, and Roosevelt confirmed to Hiram Johnson that he would run. He did not want to announce until the petition had been formally delivered to him. No word of his intent leaked through to members of the Periodical Publishers Association, meeting that night in Philadelphia. But before the evening was over, they had another news story, of major proportions.
Woodrow Wilson preceded Senator La Follette to the podium and delivered a short, urbane, perfectly pitched address. Ray Stannard Baker, co-author of La Follette’s campaign autobiography, was present and felt excitement building in the audience. Wilson, he scribbled in his notebook, was somebody endowed with “unlimited reserves of power.”
La Follette, in contrast, behaved like a candidate not for office, but for a psychological breakdown. He was weak from a recent attack of ptomaine poisoning, starved of sleep, and possessed by the notion that Roosevelt wanted to destroy him. Before standing up, he swigged a glassful of whiskey. He began to speak at 10 P.M. and was still at it long after midnight, at times rereading whole chunks of his text without noticing, at others rambling so incoherently that Baker left the room in an agony of embarrassment. Wilson’s long face expressed alarm. Of all subjects, La Follette chose to rant at the “subservience of the press to special interests,” not to mention “a subtle new