Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [217]
There was no reply. Loeb made a follow-up call to New York and got through only to Bliss, who said with distinct irritation, “No contribution has been received from the Standard Oil Company and none will be received.”
Roosevelt had to accept this denial. But restraint became more and more difficult as Parker began to repeat the “Ten Questions,” and suggest that Cortelyou’s rapid rise from presidential aide to Secretary to party chief had been engineered with the precise intent of dunning captains of industry. No man in the country, the judge implied, enjoyed such equal access to privileged information in his former fiefdom, the Bureau of Corporations. Hence his success in “demanding” support from tycoons too scared to resist him. “Although this may be satisfactory to the conscience of Republican leaders,” Parker said, without actually naming the President, “it must, I firmly believe, be condemned as a shameless exhibition of a willingness to make compromise with decency.”
When Cortelyou again said nothing, Roosevelt lost patience. “I have never seen him so troubled,” his wife wrote. The question was no longer one of whether he should enter the campaign, but when. With Election Day looming on Tuesday, 8 November, he decided that the Saturday morning prior would be the best moment to hit Parker, and “hit him hard.” That way, the judge would suffer a repeated onslaught of headlines throughout the weekend, and would be unable to publish much of a reply before Monday—too late, probably, to regain the initiative.
Parker was tempted into a final indiscretion on Thursday, 3 November, when he accused the Republican National Committee of “blackmail” and threats to leak secret data from the Bureau of Corporations. This was going too far, as he himself seemed to realize the following day, when he hedged on the source of his information in a lame speech in Brooklyn.
Shortly before twelve o’clock that night, the President released his statement. Old-time journalists had to look back to the 1880s for a political utterance that packed more force. It was long—over a thousand words—but passionate enough to compel thorough reading. He began by rephrasing Parker’s charges and innuendos, making them sound at once more extreme, yet easier to refute. His prose in answer was shotgunned with characteristic repetitions and alliterations that lodged in anyone’s memory the points he wanted to make.
Mr. Parker’s accusations against me and Mr. Cortelyou are monstrous. If true, they would brand both of us forever with infamy, and inasmuch as they are false, heavy must be the condemnation of the man making them.…
The assertion that Mr. Cortelyou had any knowledge gained while in any official position whereby he was enabled to secure and did secure any contributions from any corporation is a falsehood. The assertion that there has been any blackmail, direct or indirect, by Mr. Cortelyou or by me is a falsehood. The assertion that there has been made in my behalf and by my authority by Mr. Cortelyou or by anyone else any pledge or promise … in recognition of any contribution from any source, is a wicked falsehood.
That Mr. Parker should desire to avoid the discussion of principles I can well understand, for it is but the bare truth to say that he has not attacked us on any matter of principle or upon any action of the government save after first misstating that principle or that action.
Roosevelt asked all voters to check his record as the prosecutor of Northern Securities and the mediator of the coal strike, and then ponder Parker’s cozy relations with the “great corporate interests” that had financed the Democratic campaign. With a sarcastic pun, he compared the judge’s “trusted” advisers to his own roster of Root, Knox, Crane, Moody, Garfield, and Cortelyou—all of whom must be corrupt, if one was.
“The statements made by Mr. Parker,” he again declared, “are unqualifiedly and atrociously false.”
“VICTORY. TRIUMPH. My Father is elected,” Alice wrote in her diary for 8 November 1904. “Received Parker’s congratulatory telegram at 9. Carried