Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [211]
This awkwardness was oddly compelling on the hustings. But what made Fairbanks so effective was what had made him a millionaire at forty, a quiet power in the Senate, and a presidential possibility for 1908: he simply could not be stopped. The voice droned on relentlessly, the arms kept pumping, and the long legs kept striding, wherever Nathan B. Scott sent him, from White River Junction, Vermont, to Spokane, Washington. Hundreds were amused; thousands bored; hundreds of thousands convinced. If Roosevelt demonstrated the power of personality in American politics, Charles Fairbanks showed the benefit of persistence.
The first tests of their combined appeal came on 6 and 13 September, when voters in Vermont and Maine went to the polls to elect governors. August Belmont, who seemed to be managing Parker’s campaign over the head of the Democratic National Committee, did not conceal his anxiety. Both states were Republican strongholds, but if the GOP margin was significantly reduced in either, Democrats could take heart for November. In Vermont, however, the Democratic candidate was defeated by a margin greater than even Cortelyou hoped for, and another Republican surge was registered in Maine.
“Unless we throw it away, we have the victory,” a satisfied President declared.
Nothing was heard from the gray house at Esopus but Parker’s usual booming silence. The judge—now retired from the Court of Appeals—remained as inscrutable as if he were still wearing silk. Joseph Pulitzer, the strident owner of the New York World, began to have second thoughts about him. “The people need a judicial Chief Magistrate, but not too judicial a candidate.”
THE PRESIDENT CHOSE this moment to issue his long-awaited acceptance letter, a twelve-thousand-word enlargement upon his acceptance speech, covering every aspect of Republican policy. At least twelve close advisers—including Root, Cortelyou, Spooner, and a cross-section of lawyers and journalists—had added their own contributions, but the letter’s clarity and comprehensiveness were pure Roosevelt, as were its ideological blows at Parker. Coinciding as it did with the GOP triumph in Maine, it had the dizzying effect of a follow-up punch.
Its basic theme was the self-contradiction of the St. Louis platform, which failed to reconcile Cleveland’s urban conservatism with Bryan’s agrarian radicalism. “Our opponents …” Roosevelt wrote, “seem at a loss, both as to what it is that they really believe, and as to how firmly they shall assert their belief in anything.” After eight years of screaming for free silver, they now called for gold—but only because Judge Parker told them to. They solemnly endorsed the civil-service law, “the repeal of which they demanded in 1900 and 1896.” As for the issue of Philippine independence, “they have occupied three entirely different positions within fifty days.”
He proclaimed his own consistency, emphasizing that if elected he would proceed “on exactly the same lines” in national defense, insular administration, tariff policy, and management-labor relations. Without even a pass at modesty, he listed his eighteen proudest executive achievements, including the coal-strike settlement, arbitration of the Venezuela crisis, establishment of the Department of Commerce and Labor, dispatch of the Kishinev petition, and “decisive actions” in Panama, Tangier, and Smyrna. “There is not a policy, foreign or domestic, which we are now carrying out, which it would not be disastrous to reverse or abandon.”
Sonorously he concluded: “We have striven both for civic righteousness and for national greatness; and we have faith to believe that our hands will be upheld by all who feel love of country and trust in the uplifting of mankind.”
The President’s letter was greeted rapturously by Republicans and ruefully by Democrats. Even Harper’s Weekly, usually his bitter critic, praised it as “a masterful and extraordinarily