Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [210]
Thanks to Hay’s restraint, Roosevelt the candidate was able to bask in praise of his statesmanship. He wished that the election could be held “next Tuesday.” Even critical commentators were reduced to grudging admiration. The Brooklyn Eagle suggested that he had aimed his naval guns “at the Democratic enemy, not the Sultan,” pointing out that Jewell could have been sent east immediately after the Perdicaris affair. But Roosevelt had obviously delayed his grand gesture to coincide with Judge Parker’s notification ceremony. “The power to seize the psychological moment is the essence of genius in politics, and if anybody doubts that Theodore Roosevelt is a genius he should reverse himself on this further evidence.”
THE PRESIDENT WAS now free to resume his summer vacation. But he did so aware that a much more serious crisis was burgeoning in the Far East.
For almost a month now, Japanese naval and ground forces had been consolidating themselves around Port Arthur, redoubt of the Liaotung Peninsula and strategic key to both Korea and Manchuria. The Russian-held fortress still stood, but without naval protection, leaving Japan in complete command of the sea approaches. On 20 August, General Maresuke Nogi began a “final” assault on Port Arthur. Wave after wave of seemingly berserk little infantrymen broke bloodily on the fortress walls for two nights and days. But the walls held, and the waves receded, carrying a flotsam of fifteen thousand dead and wounded. Nogi’s army settled down to what looked like a long winter of siege.
Farther inland, three other Japanese columns converged on Liao-yang, where Russia’s main army lay entrenched. On 23 August, there began nine days of what Review of Reviews called “perhaps the most desperate fighting of modern times.” Three hundred thousand soldiers tried to kill one another on roads and fields and hills. The Russians, who fought bravely but unimaginatively, fell back mile by mile, battered by Japanese frontal pressure and harassed by surprise attacks on their rear communications. They summoned ten thousand reserves to stay their retreat, in vain. Even behind breastworks, they lost more men than the enemy did. For forty-eight hours the air was so loud with artillery blasts, at sixty shots a minute, that men wondered if they would ever hear again.
“The Russians think only with half a mind,” Roosevelt wrote Hay, as birds sang in the quiet woods of Sagamore Hill. “I think the Japanese will whip them handsomely.”
SENATOR BEVERIDGE TOOK a similar view of the President’s own political battle. “Unless I am in a chloroformed state and merely dreaming, you are going to have the greatest victory since the Civil War.”
The “speaking phase” of the campaign got under way as August turned to September. Orators from all parties spread out across the land with prepared texts and throat lozenges. The loudest voice, at first, was that of the Socialist presidential candidate, Eugene Debs. (“The capitalists made no mistake in nominating Mr. Roosevelt. They know him well.… He [has] nothing in common with the working class.”)
A quieter voice eventually proved to have more effect than any other. From the moment of his selection as Roosevelt’s running mate, the fifty-two-year-old Charles W. Fairbanks had been caricatured as a “stuffed club” and “Wall Street puppet.” He was mocked for his spindly height, his triple-strand baldness, his prim manners and paper-dry personality. The New York Sun compared him unfavorably to a table of logarithms, while the Evening Post opined that he had been nominated for national-security reasons. “The maddest anarchist would never think of killing Roosevelt to make Fairbanks President.”
The puppet comparison worked best. At six foot four, Fairbanks moved and spoke as if he had no life of his own. His voice seemed to emanate from some inner Edison cylinder, and his gestures were correct but mechanical, as if jerked by hidden wires. At exhortatory moments, his fist would clench, always in the same upheld position. Whenever he delivered a warning,