Robert La Follette was delighted to support Woodrow Wilson. Still consumed with anger toward Roosevelt for projecting his personal ambition for a third term onto “a strong and rapidly growing” Progressive movement within the Republican Party, La Follette insisted that he would devote his days to “exposing the Roosevelt fraud.” Calling the Colonel’s primary battle “the most extravagant in American history,” La Follette vowed to travel through the West, convincing farmers and laborers alike that “men notoriously identified with the Steel Trust and the Harvester Trust” were among Roosevelt’s chief financial backers. Wilson gratefully acknowledged La Follette’s support, lauding the Wisconsin senator as a courageous leader—“taunted, laughed at, called back, going steadfastly on.”
“If Wilson had been nominated first,” Roosevelt privately conceded, he might never have initiated the movement for a third party. “But it was quite out of the question,” he told a friend, “after having led my men into the fight, that I should then abandon them.” Now, supporters would conclude that he “was flinching from the contest,” that he “was not game enough to stand punishment and face the possibility of disaster.” Moreover, Roosevelt contended, while Wilson might be an “excellent man,” supporting him “would mean restoring to power the Democratic bosses in Congress and in the several States, and I don’t think that we can excuse ourselves for such action.”
The die was cast. On July 7, Roosevelt’s campaign manager Senator Dixon released “a call to the people of the United States,” designating August 5 for a convention in Chicago of the newly formed National Progressive Party in Chicago. Each state was asked to send a bloc of delegates equal to the total of its senators and representatives, selected by whatever method the state leaders desired. The call urged all those in all sections of the country who believed in “a national progressive movement” to rally together “to secure the better and more equitable diffusion of prosperity,” and to “strike at the roots of privilege” in both industry and politics.
Sixty-three prominent Republicans in forty states signed the declaration, but to Roosevelt’s chagrin, many of his once most fervent supporters held back. Those who were running for office faced a difficult choice: forsake their hero or join an untested party with little time to develop the machinery to get out the vote. In the end, Montana senator Joseph Dixon was the only senator or governor up for reelection who took the leap of joining the Progressive Party. Senators Cummins, Hadley, Borah, and Nelson declared their opposition to Taft but declined to desert the Republican Party, promising instead to reform it from within. These defections both saddened and irritated Roosevelt, who believed the national cause should hold precedence. “I feel that Cummins naturally belongs to us,” he lamented to one friend, while confessing to another, “I greatly regret that Hadley was so foolish as not to come with us.”
Carefully observing Roosevelt’s efforts to establish his “Bull Moose” party—the name the newspapers gave to the new organization—Taft felt the Colonel’s campaign was “sagging.” With a trace of sympathy, he remarked to Nellie that the Colonel was “up against now what I have always had to contend against, to wit, the selfishness of local candidates, and he is feeling the effects I suppose of a tendency to regularity that a third party always has to fight.” Nonetheless, Taft predicted, Roosevelt was “such a persistent talker” that he would compel “the courage of his followers.” Though he believed Roosevelt “utterly unscrupulous” at times, Taft marveled at his “method of stating things, and his power of attracting public attention.”
Despite the historic dominance of the two-party system, the Colonel remained confident that once “the object and purposes of his campaign” were made clear, many voters would “be won over,” in particular, those “holding back for a nicer definition of his aims.” During the final two weeks in July, Roosevelt canceled public appearances and refused visitors, closeting himself “hour after hour” in his private study at Sagamore Hill to prepare both the planks of the new party’s platform and the keynote address he would deliver on August 5, the first day of the convention. Fully aware that “a great measure of his party’s success” would depend upon “the strength and solidity” of its principles and platform, he promised that his speech would represent “the greatest effort of [his] life.”
When he finished the first draft of the platform, Roosevelt took a single day off, amusing reporters with his characteristically frenetic style of relaxation: “Got up with the sun; worked in the library until breakfast; took Mrs. Roosevelt for a long walk toward Cold Spring Harbor; rowed about twelve miles; went horseback riding after luncheon and played six sets of tennis on his return.” The next morning, he was back at his desk, reinvigorated, to complete his projected 15,000-word keynote speech on schedule.
IN THE WAKE OF THE contentious Republican National Convention, President Taft wisely decided that “simplicity” should be “the distinguishing feature” of his notification ceremony, scheduled for August 1. There would be none of the fireworks, open-air concerts, booming cannons, parades, or decorated streets that had made Cincinnati so festive four years earlier. Marked by “unusual informality,” the ceremony would be held in the White House, with only four hundred persons in attendance—primarily cabinet officials, members of Congress, and prominent Republican figures. During the last week in July, Taft worked “an average of sixteen hours a day” on his acceptance speech, designed as a defense of the Republican Party, the Constitution, judicial independence, private property, and civil liberty. “Roosevelt proposes to give out a radical platform that will startle some people,” he told his Aunt Delia, recognizing exactly where he stood in the current political landscape. “Wilson says that his letter of acceptance is going to be radical, so between the two I have no part to play but that of a conservative, and that I am going to play.”
The notification ceremony took place at noon in the East Room. The seats had been positioned in a semicircle around a raised platform. Stationed in the adjoining hallway, the Marine Band played patriotic airs. Warm applause greeted Nellie as she walked in and took her seat on the dais. Shortly thereafter, President Taft, accompanied by members of the Notification Committee, entered “amid loud shouts and handclapping.” Following tradition, the chair of the Notification Committee, Elihu Root, delivered the official news of Taft’s nomination.
In his brief remarks, Root referred to the turmoil surrounding the contested delegates. Speaking with force and authority, Root assured the president that as the convention’s presiding officer, he had followed “long-established and unquestioned rules of law governing the party” at every step along the way. “Your title to the nomination is as clear and unimpeachable as the title of any candidate of any party since political conventions began.” Root’s testimonial provided tremendous comfort to Taft, who worried that Roosevelt’s continued “harping” on the seating of delegates had persuaded people that his campaign had “committed great frauds,” and that he had, in effect, stolen the nomination.
Taft accepted the nomination on behalf of a Republican Party “through which substantially all the progress and development in our country’s history in the last fifty years has been finally effected.” Our party, he declared, stands for “the right of property” and “the right of liberty,” for institutions that have “stood the test of time,” and for an economic system that rewards “energy, courage, enterprise, attention to duty, hard work, thrift, and providence” rather than “laziness, lack of attention, lack of industry, the yielding to appetite and passion.” While he hoisted the conservative banner, Taft also spoke with genuine pride of the progressive legislation passed in recent years—the railroad legislation, the postal banking system, workers’ compensation, an eight-hour day for all government contracts, and, most recently, the Children’s Bureau, the first federal agency dedicated to the social welfare of children. Even as the Republican Party protected the traditions of the past, he argued, it must remain sensitive to the shifting views of the role of govern
ment. “Time was,” he explained, “when the least government was thought the best, and the policy which left all to the individual, unmolested and unaided by the government, was deemed the wisest.” As industry consolidation and wealth disparity grew apace, however, it was “clearly recognized” that the government had a responsibility “to further equality of opportunity in respect of the weaker classes in their dealings with the stronger and more powerful.” In sum, Taft did not intend to take the country backward, but rather to protect it against the demagogic proposals of his adversaries.
Asked to comment on Taft’s speech, Roosevelt initially told reporters he preferred to answer the president in his own upcoming address at the Progressive Party Convention. “On second thought,” he proved “unable to restrain himself,” derogating Taft’s words as “fatuous, inadequate, conservative,” and ignorant of all “the live issues.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Armageddon
A Nov. 16, 1912, Harper’s Weekly cartoon distilled the election’s outcome: In the original caption, Taft, as the GOP elephant, says to his opponent, Bull Moose Roosevelt: “Well, you’ve helped rip me apart and ‘downed’ yourself! Now I hope you’re satisfied!”
AS MEMBERS OF THE PROGRESSIVE Party began filling Chicago’s hotels in preparation for the August 5, 1912, opening of the “Bull Moose Convention,” journalists remarked that “no man could go through the lobbies” without confronting a gathering of people that “looked less like the average Republican or Democratic Convention than anything you ever saw.” There was “not a saloon-keeper in the crowd”; the delegates were younger and more earnest than the usual convention goers. Petticoats were everywhere. Hundreds of social workers, suffragettes, and advocates for working girls’ rights had enlisted in the new party. “Instead of forcing your way through a crowd of tobacco-stained political veterans,” the New York Times observed, “you raise your hat politely and say, ‘Pardon me, Madam.’ ”
A sense of “great adventure” was in the air, William Allen White observed in the Boston Daily Globe, despite the certainty of “a convention seemingly without contest or climax, a convention apparently devoid of chance or speculation.” No one questioned who the nominee would be or how it would come about. There would be “no dead places” in the convention hall, “no blocks of delegates seated with arms folded, with faces set and sullen while other delegates behaved like dancing dervishes.” There was little dissent on any major issue; almost everyone believed in the Social Gospel. They had come to Chicago as crusaders, “satisfied that they were in the right.”
Roosevelt had already contrived his response to the only issue that threatened this near-perfect accord. Though the new party embraced a number of Negro delegates from the North (“more, in fact,” he noted, “than ever before figured in a National convention”), there would not be a single Negro delegate from the South. The Colonel had given southern progressives permission to send solely white delegations. Hoping to break into the “Solid South,” he had persuaded himself that true justice would only come to Negro residents of old Confederate states by enlisting the efforts of “high-minded white men.” Roosevelt’s policy “was riddled with contradictions and paradoxes,” as the historian John Gable succinctly observes. “He wanted to establish the New Nationalism on a nationwide basis by using a sectionalist approach; he sought to bring an end to racism by a racist strategy.” When word of Roosevelt’s “lily-white” delegations leaked, discord surfaced among party members attending the convention. But once Roosevelt made it clear that he absolutely would “not budge,” the issue quickly faded from discussion. It was evident to all that Roosevelt himself was “the whole show,” the rhyme and reason for the new party.
Once again, Chicago went mad with Theodore Roosevelt’s arrival. The streets were blocked, all work came to a halt, and the sidewalks were filled with thousands of people. Standing in the rear of an open automobile as he made his way to the same hotel suite where he had stayed during the Republican Convention, Roosevelt was buoyant: “My friends,” he proclaimed, “it is a great pleasure for me to be in Chicago again, and this time at the birth of a new party and not at the death of an old party.” Reaching the Congress Hotel, he settled in to work on his all-important speech. He had deliberately scheduled his address before the platform was voted on, informing delegates that he would accept their nomination only if the party’s agenda corresponded to the views he intended to outline in his “Confession of Faith.”
When Roosevelt stepped onto the stage of the Coliseum, he received perhaps one of “the greatest personal demonstrations that has ever been given a man in public life.” Seasoned reporters were long accustomed to staged political rallies. Over the years, they had witnessed “hundreds of men marching about with signs and banners, and shouting themselves hoarse”; but this display of genuine emotion was unprecedented. The men and women gathering in Chicago had left past affiliations behind, having decided to “cast their lots together” under the banner of a fledgling movement. They signaled their collective identity with a unique “battle flag”—a red bandanna, chosen to represent “the plain people,” the heart of the country. Every man wore the party’s emblem around his neck; every woman had one around her wrist. One delegate had even fastened a red bandanna around the neck of a stuffed bull moose, strategically placed at the front of the auditorium.
Roosevelt “stood smiling in the center of the storm,” waving his bandanna at friends in various delegations. Twenty thousand voices spontaneously rose in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the assembled crusaders finding courage and unity in the stirring words and soaring melody. During the nearly hour-long demonstration, Roosevelt’s managers invited a procession of people onto the platform to shake hands with the Colonel. When Jane Addams was led to the stage, the delegates “sprang to their feet and yelled,” offering a moving tribute to the settlement house worker who had committed her life to helping the poor and the underprivileged. “I have been fighting for progressive principles for thirty years,” she said. “This is the first time there has been a chance to make them effective. This is the biggest day of my life.”
When it seemed that the ecstatic tumult would never end, Roosevelt looked toward his wife, seated in a box near the stage. While Edith had dreaded her husband’s entry into the race, she knew that once he had committed himself to the fight, he had to carry it through. Noting her “jovial smile and bright eye,” Roosevelt beamed. He took off his hat and hailed her, inspiring the delegates to follow suit. Then, en masse, they gave homage to the former first lady, doffing their hats and cheering with abandon. “Mrs. Roosevelt shrank into her chair,” Richard Harding Davis reported. “Her confusion, her pleasure, her distress, were as pretty as was the compliment the men strove to pay her. Before their onslaught of good will and admiration she blushed and looked like a young girl.” The cheering continued unabated until she rose from her seat and bowed to the crowd. “That curtsy she made,” exclaimed a correspondent who had covered the Roosevelt family since their days in Albany, “was the most prominent part I ever saw Mrs. Roosevelt take in public life!”
At last, the crowd composed itself enough for Roosevelt to speak. “At present,” he began, “both the old parties are controlled by professional politicians in the interests of the privileged classes.” Together, they would forge a new Progressive Party, based on “the right of the people to rule.” Though the delegates cheered the familiar litany of progressive proposals to establish popular sovereignty through presidential primaries, direct election of senators, and the publication of campaign contributions, they reserved their most sustained applause for the Colonel’s pledge to secure women the right to the vote. “In most cases where men applaud the mention of woman suffrage, they do it with a grin,” one reporter remarked, but at this convention, “old men and young men alike got up on their chairs, yelled like wild Indians and waved anything available and portable.”
Each new reform that Roosevelt projected, the New York Times note
d, even the most radical, “fell on willing ears”—the call for “a living wage,” the prohibition of child labor, federal regulation of interstate corporations, a graduated inheritance tax, an eight-hour workday for women, new standards for workmen’s compensation, and, finally, a system of social insurance designed to protect citizens against “the hazards of sickness . . . involuntary unemployment, and old age” to which employers and employees would both contribute. “Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one in which we are engaged,” Roosevelt proclaimed. “Whatever fate may at the moment overtake any of us, the movement itself will not stop.” He closed his two-hour address with the same stirring lines he had uttered seven weeks earlier in Chicago: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”
The following day, the platform—“a purely Rooseveltian document,” embracing everything the Colonel wanted—was approved. Nominations followed for the presidency. Jane Addams was among those who seconded Roosevelt’s nomination, marking “the first time a woman ever had made a seconding speech in a national convention of a big party.” After Roosevelt’s unanimous election, the delegates chose California governor Hiram Johnson as the vice-presidential nominee. When the two men entered the hall, “wave upon wave of emotion swept over the audience.” And when Roosevelt, equally moved, began to speak, “his voice trembled and he seemed to forget all the little tricks” he commonly deployed when trying to reach an audience. He simply thanked the delegates from the bottom of his heart, saying, “I have been President and I measure my words when I say I hold it by far the greatest honor and the greatest opportunity that has ever come to me to be called by you to the leadership for the time being of this great movement.”