Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [209]
Parker received his longest burst of applause when he announced that if elected he would serve only one term. Fate conspired to spoil even his final accolade. Just as cold hands began to clap, a photographer yelled for quiet. Down came umbrellas and hats, and everybody posed motionless in the sifting rain.
AFTERWARD, LOYAL COMMENTATORS hailed Parker’s speech as a workmanlike synthesis of all that the Democratic Party stood for. Only the most fervent found anything to admire in his literary style and stage presence. Adjectives such as impersonal, sober, labored, and heavy recurred in editorial columns from Boston to San Francisco. If politics was supposed to be interesting, then Theodore Roosevelt was elected already.
An educated electorate would presumably, however, concentrate on the issues that divided the two candidates. Their acceptance speeches, plus the party platforms and convention proceedings, could now be published in “campaign textbooks” for editors and other speakers to expound on.
Cortelyou’s textbook presented the Republican Party as the guardian of prosperity, the guarantor of high tariffs, the resolver of labor disputes, and the original upholder of the gold standard. It boasted of the emancipation of Cuba, the Philippines Armistice, the Panama Canal Act, and the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty. It reminded Northeasterners that the President had settled the coal strike, and Southwesterners that he was making the desert blossom. Without actually using the word Negro, it said that any states guilty of “special discrimination” in suffrage should be penalized by reduced representation in Congress.
The Democratic textbook, much thinner, noted that Republican “prosperity” benefited Wall Street more than Main Street, while protectionism made American goods cheaper abroad than at home. It accused Roosevelt of disrespect for the Constitution—and promised that President Parker would “set his face sternly against Executive usurpation of legislative and judicial functions.” His Administration would not be “spasmodic, erratic, sensational, spectacular, and arbitrary.” Abroad, Democrats were for Philippine independence, and against jingoism, imperialism, and “the display of great military armaments.” At home, they deplored what they saw as Roosevelt’s attempts “to kindle anew the embers of racial and sectional strife.”
Neither party had anything specific to say about trust control, labor policy, or tariff reform. Both candidates agreed that the Panama Canal would be of vast benefit to mankind. Parker said nothing about lynchings—still occurring at a rate of one every four days—and Roosevelt, having courageously raised the subject in 1903, was content to let it rest.
Major press endorsements were not expected until the fall. Yet the most eagerly awaited came with devastating suddenness on 11 August, fewer than twenty-four hours after Parker’s speech. For as long as anyone could remember, the New York Sun had visited its wrath on any politician, Republican or Democrat, who presumed to interfere with the free workings of capital—as Roosevelt had done during the coal strike. But the paper’s editors compared his record with Parker’s rhetoric, and announced their decision in five weary words:
THEODORE! with all thy faults—
WITHIN DAYS OF the arrival of Admiral Jewell’s squadron at Smyrna, Minister Leishman advised that Abd al-Hamid had promised, in an informal memorandum, that there was to be “no discrimination between American schools and those of other nationalities” anywhere in his Sultanate. Clearly, Turkey’s willingness to negotiate was related to the weight of armor on her doorstep.
Leishman would have preferred something more binding than a note scribbled by a secretary, but Roosevelt hastened to proclaim victory without violence. He ordered Leishman to accept the Sultan’s word without question, adding, INFORM