THE BULL MOOSE
I haven’t much patience with these men who are wiser than all the other fellows put together, and whose views are unchangeable . . . If he can’t fight it out in party ranks and yield if he is beaten, then he had better go out and join the enemy or, better still, form an organization of his own.
—Uncle Joe1
COLUMBUS, OHIO, FEBRUARY 21, 1912
“Poor La Follette!” Roosevelt wrote to Governor Walter Stubbs of Kansas. “As you say, that was a pitiable tragedy.” He didn’t waste much time on sympathy, though. One sentence later, he was assessing the political opportunity that La Follette’s implosion had produced. “[T]he tremendous public sentiment which is unquestionably against Taft must be crystallized into delegates if anything has to come from it,” he continued.2
Though he had not publicly declared his candidacy, Roosevelt immediately began peeling off La Follette’s supporters. The Republican governors of Nebraska and California, previously pledged to La Follette, switched to Roosevelt. So did the editors of the Kansas City Star, Philadelphia North American, and Pittsburgh Leader. The staff of La Follette’s Chicago headquarters defected en masse. A number of leading progressives hesitated, still unsure of the former president’s dedication to the cause, so Roosevelt sent a letter to the editor of the Leader promising, “You can say to the progressives that I will not desert the cause, and they will find me fighting side by side with them to the finish.”3
Still more was required for Roosevelt to establish his progressive bona fides. Ever since the 1910 election, he had studiously avoided controversy, but as he prepared to launch a new presidential campaign, he charged into the thick of it. There was no more seesaw to his rhetoric. The words he used and the positions that he advocated sounded very much like those of a certain senator from Wisconsin. First he endorsed woman’s suffrage in an Outlook editorial, a sharp turnabout from his insistence one year earlier that “[w]omen do not really need the suffrage.” But that was just a warm-up for his next bombshell.4
La Follette’s most controversial campaign issue was judicial recall. Since reactionary federal judges had frequently nullified progressive legislation, La Follette championed recall laws that would allow citizens to vote them out of office. The Standpatters abhorred the idea. “Judicial recall!” Taft snorted. “The words are so inconsistent that I hate to utter them. Are we going to make our constitution a liquid thing, so that a majority can . . . override with popular passion and prejudice every principle of this government, the greatest God ever made?”5
At first, Roosevelt kept to the comfortable middle. He objected to the decisions of certain conservative judges, including some that he had appointed, but worried that popular recall went too far. “The more I see of it, read of it, and think of it, the less I care for it,” he wrote in 1911. “So far I have simply refrained from committing myself in favor of it, but it may be I will have to be outright against it.” As late as February 5, 1912, he assured a concerned conservative, “I do not myself believe in the recall of the judiciary as the best or indeed as a normal remedy.” But his ideas were evolving rapidly these days. Two weeks later, he said something quite different in a speech in Columbus, Ohio. “When a Judge decides a Constitutional question,” he declared, “when he decides what the people as a whole can or can not do, the people should have the right to recall that decision if they think it wrong.”6
The words thundered across the political landscape. “[T]he Colonel’s speech makes Senator La Follette look like a reactionary,” gasped the New York Times, for even La Follette had not proposed recall of judicial decisions. Progressives were euphoric. When Roosevelt announced, “My hat is in the ring,” on his way home from Columbus, wavering La Follette supporters like Albert Beveridge, Moses Clapp, and George Norris jumped into his campaign with both feet. By the beginning of March, he was the undisputed progressive candidate for the Republican nomination.7
What he did not expect was the backlash. Conservatives launched a fusillade of obloquy—“fanatical,” “deplorable,” “radical,” “despicable,” “monstrous,” “dangerous in the extreme,” “the end of our government,” and “the death knell of our prosperity.” Judges, journalists, and Republican politicians united in mutual contempt for the man who had been their president.8
Roosevelt was used to criticism, but he did not anticipate the reaction from his old allies. In public, his dear friend Henry Cabot Lodge said only, “[T]he Colonel and I have long since agreed to disagree on a number of points.” Senator Lodge had always been more conservative than Roosevelt, but they were both practical men. In the past, they had never permitted minor political differences to interfere with their friendship. That was no longer possible. By 1912, the gap between progressives and conservatives yawned wide. When Roosevelt made that speech in Columbus, Ohio, he threw himself once and for all onto the progressive side of the gorge, alienating those who had once supported him. Lodge now stood far across the chasm with so many other old friends and colleagues, such as Roosevelt’s former attorney general Philander Knox, his former secretary of state Elihu Root; and, of course, his former secretary of war William Howard Taft. These three senators and the President were now the leaders of the conservative faction of the Republican Party. When Roosevelt became the leader of the progressive faction, he became their enemy.9
Truth be told, La Follette preferred to be on his own. Free of intrigues and tepid praise from lukewarm supporters, he was once again the lonely long-shot radical, and he relished the role. Belle noticed that “he seems to gather strength and power” from the adversity. “He feels better always when things are straightened out and the decks seem cleared for action,” she added, “no matter how big a fight he has on his hands.”10
North Dakota held the first primary that year. Defying critics who declared his campaign defunct, La Follette put on his “fighting clothes” and plunged into the race. “He is tense, vigorous and full of fighting ire,” remarked a Minneapolis Tribune correspondent. “Picture this ‘little giant’ with the bushy head of hair, tramping up and down the platform, face, hands and figure in nervous action as he drives home his points . . . There is an indominitable [sic] something in this little fighting man that evokes admiration whether willing or unwilling.”11
Pinchot was there too, campaigning for Roosevelt. He praised La Follette but compared him to a disabled steam engine. “[A]nother human engine, Roosevelt, must take the progressive train to the terminal,” he said.
La Follette rejoined, “[M]y fire box is all right, my drive wheels strong, and my sand box isn’t empty.”12
North Dakotans emphatically agreed. On March 20, nearly 29,000 voters braved a blizzard to nominate La Follette, compared with 19,000 for Roosevelt and a mere 1,500 for Taft. “That’s better even than I expected,” La Follette crowed. “My friends in that State can’t be fooled by mere talk, and North Dakota can’t be shaken from its progressive trend.”13
“La Follette is a wonder,” admitted a rueful Roosevelt supporter. “What other man on earth could collapse as he did, not only physically but politically, and ‘come back’ so soon as he has done?”14
But it could not last. Roosevelt was too popular, and if many admired La Follette’s pluck, few believed he could win. He had far fewer financial resources than Roosevelt, who had enlisted George W. Perkins of J. P. Morgan & Co. and newspaper tycoon Frank Munsey to raise money. Meanwhile, the pro-Roosevelt governors worked hard to deliver their states to the Colonel, creating fierce headwinds in progressive states. La Follette raced across the country making speeches from New Jersey to California, but Roosevelt, equally vigorous, raced right along with him and rolled up victory after victory.
La Follette’s loss in progressive Oregon, where Roosevelt did not campaign, was particularly devastating. The Colonel was rolling through the backwoods of Arkansas when he heard the news. He was lounging on the rear platform of his train, basking in the southern sun. His throat ached from speaking, but his victory over that “half zealot and half self-seeking demagogue” tasted like honey. A journalist from the New York Sun joined him. He wanted a comment for the paper. Roosevelt declined to discuss the election but declared that he was “feeling like a bull moose.”
Roosevelt’s subsequent biographers never discovered the origin of this quote. The words, however, would go down in history.15
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, APRIL 25, 1912
President Taft had no hope of winning direct primaries. He was wildly unpopular in the progressive states that had adopted them, and even conservative supporters were annoyed by his trust busting. But many states still lacked direct primaries, and Taft’s backers helped dissuade other legislatures from adopting them before the convention. In the south and northeast, his staff invoked the power of patronage to ensure that anyone holding federal office was committed to reelecting the President, and he quickly racked up delegates.16
Taft found the whole business unbearably depressing. He became irritable and seldom smiled. His weight ballooned to 332 pounds. His attitude was fatalistic. “I have to set my teeth and go through with it as best I can,” he vowed. “But after it is all over I shall be glad to retire and let another take the burden . . . It seems to me that intelligent men have lost their heads and are leaning toward fool, radical views in a way I never thought possible. Perhaps we’ll have to get worse before we get better. The day of the demagogue, the liar and the silly is on.”17
The worst part was Theodore Roosevelt. His old friend had become almost unrecognizable—“violent,” “desperate,” and “temperamentally irresponsible.” Despite their strained relations, Taft was determined to avoid a public quarrel. He avoided mentioning Roosevelt in speeches and exhorted his supporters to do the same. But the Colonel had not shown him the same courtesy and was viciously attacking him all along the campaign trail. “It is very hard to take all the slaps Roosevelt is handing me at this time, Archie,” Taft complained to Butt. “I don’t know what he is driving at except to make my way more difficult.” He added poignantly, “[I]t is hard, very hard, Archie, to see a devoted friendship going to pieces like a rope of sand.”18
At the end of March, Taft won his first direct primary—in Roosevelt’s home state of New York—but there were reports of fraud at the hands of New York City bosses. An embittered Roosevelt publicly accused the Taft campaign of stealing the election. Taft was indignant. The “hypocrisy of such attacks” particularly galled him. Roosevelt had employed the same tactics and associated with the same machine bosses when he was president. “It is only when they support me that bosses are wicked,” he fumed.19
In April, he went to Massachusetts to campaign in the primary. Speaking to packed halls and from the back of the train, he declared, “This wrenches my soul . . . I am here to reply to an old and dear friend of mine, Theodore Roosevelt, who has made many charges against me. I deny those charges. I deny all of them. I do not want to fight Theodore Roosevelt, but then sometimes a man in a corner fights. I am going to fight.”
He launched his counterattack before a crowd of 9,000 in the Boston Arena. He accused Roosevelt of misrepresenting his record and exaggerating the voting flaws. Presenting old letters as evidence, he argued that his predecessor had exploited the same patronage powers and relied on the same political bosses that he now accused Taft of misusing. He revealed that it had been Roosevelt who encouraged him to work with Cannon and Aldrich in the first place. “In all Mr. Roosevelt’s history he never failed to use as instruments for his purpose those whom he found in power,” he continued. “I have merely followed his example . . . ” In not so many words, he accused his old friend and mentor of shameless hypocrisy.
After it was over, he returned to his train and slumped into a lounge chair with his head in his hands. A reporter came in to speak to him. “Roosevelt was my closest friend,” he said, his voice breaking. Then he began to weep.20
For once, the loyal Archie Butt was not there to comfort him. At Taft’s insistence, he had taken a vacation in Europe. He was supposed to return a week before the Boston trip, but he never arrived. On April 15, his ship struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland. He perished with 1,500 fellow passengers aboard the RMS Titanic.21
“It is hard to believe that he is gone,” Taft lamented, “I expect to see him walk in at any moment.”
He sorely missed Butt’s soothing presence in the weeks to come, for the quarrel with the Colonel became an all-out war. He called Roosevelt a “dangerous egotist,” a “demagogue,” and a “flatterer of the people.” Roosevelt called him a “puzzlewit” and a “fathead” with the intellect of a guinea pig. The epithets escalated—“honeyfugler,” “hypocrite,” “apostate,” “Jacobin,” “brawler.” By the time the convention finally arrived, they loathed each other.22
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 9, 1912
Like Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson was a man who rode the wave of popular sentiment, but he was more deliberate about it—all head, no hips. While Roosevelt did not even notice that his political ideas had evolved, Wilson was fully conscious of what he was doing. “My idea of a progressive man is one who keeps up with the world,” he told his audience. “A stand-pat is one who stands still, with eyes shut and ears stuffed with cotton, and refuses to concede that the world is moving on.” Wilson was a progressive man; he kept up with the world.23
His conversion had been even sharper than Roosevelt’s. Two years earlier, he had been a steadfast Bourbon Democrat, hand-picked by the bosses to rescue the party from the clutches of William Jennings Bryan. Now he hoped to position himself as Bryan’s heir. The trick was to bury his past.
Ever since his gubernatorial victory, Wilson had assiduously courted Bryan in hopes of winning his endorsement for the presidential nomination. He invited him to dinner in Princeton and praised him effusively in speeches. When Bryan returned the praise, it seemed as if the effort was paying off. But then Wilson hit a snag. In January 1912, the New York Sun published a letter that he’d written a few years earlier. Commenting on a speech that excoriated Bryan, Wilson wrote, “I have read it with relish and entire agreement. Would that we could do something at once dignified and effective to knock Mr. Bryan into a cocked hat!”24
There was no way to justify the letter or explain it away, and Wilson didn’t try. They were both scheduled to speak at a fund-raising dinner the next day. To his relief, Bryan greeted him with a warm handshake. When it was Wilson’s turn to speak, he acknowledged that he’d had differences with Bryan in the past but now praised him for having had “the steadfast vision all along of what it was that was the matter.” Turning to the man that he had once threatened to knock into a cocked hat, he said, “Let us apologize to each other that we ever suspected or antagonized one another; let us join hands once more . . . which will show us at the last to have been indeed the friends of our country and the friends of mankind.”
Bryan rose and put his hand on Wilson’s shoulder. “That was splendid, splendid!” he murmured.
The next day, friendly newspapers cheered the reconciliation. Even the New York Sun, which had instigated the rift, had to admit that the evening “fairly dripped harmony.” The magnanimity of Wilson and Bryan contrasted sharply with the personal enmities that divided the Republican leaders, La Follette and Roosevelt, Roosevelt and Taft.25
Wilson was pleased. “The great Jackson Day banquet came off—and was a great triumph for me,” he wrote to Mary Allen Hulbert Peck, an intimate friend,26 “and the effect of it all (for it was a national affair) seems to have been to strengthen the probabilities of my nomination many-fold.”27
Wilson’s past was not quite finished with him, however. In February, one of his opponents publicized excerpts from an American history book he’d written in 1902. The book denigrated nearly every constituency in his new progressive coalition, including labor organizers, western populists, and immigrants—“men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland.” There was no single leader to conciliate this time, so Wilson issued a series of tortured excuses and exculpations to representatives of the groups he had offended, alternately praising the “the great people of Italy” and expressing his “admiration of the Polish character.” It wasn’t enough. At last, a Polish-American group suggested that he insert erratum slips into unsold copies of the book and rewrite the offensive passages in the next edition. Wilson, after some hesitation, agreed to literally rewrite his past.28
Despite these efforts, his campaign was foundering. He had counted on his Virginian roots to help him win the south, but conservative voters in Virginia and Georgia delivered their delegates to Representative Oscar Underwood of Alabama. Governor Judson Harmon of Ohio, another conservative, won his populous home state. Meanwhile, Champ Clark of Missouri, who had succeeded Cannon as the Speaker of the House, dominated the western primaries.
Nor did Wilson have much hope for the no-primary states. The Democratic bosses had little love for the man they regarded as a double-crossing radical. Three weeks before the convention in Baltimore, Wilson wrote Mary Peck, “Just between you and me, I have not the least idea of being nominated . . . the outcome is in the hands of the professional, case-hardened politicians who serve only their own interests and who know that I will not serve them . . . ” Feigning indifference, he added, “I am well and in the best of spirits. I have no deep stakes involved in this game.”29
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, JUNE 15, 1912
In June, the Republicans returned once more to the Chicago Coliseum to choose their presidential nominee. The circumstances were entirely different from Roosevelt’s nomination eight years earlier. In 1904, the party was united and confident of victory. The Standpatters reigned supreme, and the party bosses were firmly in control of every state save Wisconsin. There were no questions about the platform or the nominee. Everything had already been decided.
In 1912, the party was bitterly divided and stumbling toward defeat. Nothing was determined, and the battle lines were sharp. On one side, Roosevelt stood for popular elections, big government, and a host of progressive reforms. On the other, Taft represented machine politics, corporate power, and the narrow government that the country had always known.
The race was tight going into the convention. Roosevelt had won more than three-fourths of the delegates in primary states, but Taft dominated the rest. Some papers estimated a slight lead for Roosevelt, others for Taft. Their guesswork was complicated by numerous contested delegates. Like Wisconsin in 1904, rival factions in many states had held their own conventions and sent competing delegations to Chicago. There were 254 disputed seats, almost a quarter of the total delegate count. The Republican National Committee would have to settle the disputes before the convention just as it had settled the Wisconsin delegate fight eight years earlier.
Unfortunately for Roosevelt, Taft men controlled the committee. Ignoring the hisses and occasional fistfights, they proceeded to “steamroll” the hearings, awarding delegate after delegate to Taft. From Oyster Bay, Roosevelt howled that his opponents were “deliberately conspiring to steal the victory from the people.” That was somewhat overstated, for a large number of his delegate challenges had been spurious. Nonetheless, the committee members certainly erred on Taft’s side, and the lopsided results gave credence to the allegations: 235 disputed seats went to Taft, only 19 to Roosevelt.30
FOUR DAYS LATER, COLONEL ROOSEVELT BOUNDED out of a passenger car in Chicago. He was not supposed to be there, brazenly campaigning for his own nomination, but righteous fury had buried his deference to political decorum. Emerging from the station, he looked out over a sea of screaming supporters in straw hats all along the avenue. “Thank you! Thank you!” he shouted. He took off his new hat, a big buckskin sombrero with a five-inch brim, and waved it vigorously. When he came down the stairs, the surging crowd smashed through the police lines and eagerly stretched out their arms. He grasped every hand within reach, grinning and clicking his teeth with pleasure as he squeezed past.
A brass band led his car down Michigan Avenue to the tune of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” He waved his big hat at the onlookers choking the sidewalks. The Congress Plaza Hotel was also jammed with people. The band tried to lead him into the lobby, but the bass drummer got knocked over, and the other musicians were scattered. His escorts had to shove their way through a swarm of delegates and a phalanx of suffragists who wanted to petition him. “Stand back, stand back, stop crowding!” he shouted.
When he finally reached his suite, he went to the window and waved his hat once more at the mob outside. Thrusting his jaw forward, he yelled, “Chicago is a mighty poor place in which to try and steal anything!”
The crowd roared back, “Hurrah for Teddy! Soak them! Go to it Teddy!”
“The people have spoken,” he continued, “and the politicians, dead or alive, will be made to understand that they are the servants and not the masters . . . ”
“Give it to them, Teddy! That’s the way to talk!”
Leaning out over the edge of the parapet, he bellowed, “It is a fight against theft, the thieves will not win!”31
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, JUNE 17, 1912
The day before the convention, Roosevelt addressed an audience of 5,000 at the Chicago Auditorium; 10,000 more waited outside in roped off streets. It was not a campaign speech in the traditional sense, not like any campaign speech that he had ever given. He did not discuss his policies or political vision. The speech resembled a cross between a prosecutor’s opening statement and a Christian jeremiad. Roosevelt spent most of the time detailing the crimes of the men who had “stolen” the people’s votes from him, but he veered regularly into righteous lamentation.
“Tonight we come together to protest against a crime which strikes straight at the heart of every principle of political decency and honesty,” he proclaimed, “a crime which represents treason to the people, and the usurpation of the sovereignty of the people by irresponsible political bosses, inspired by the sinister influences of moneyed privilege.”
And so it continued for 9,000 words until he reached the religious finale: “We fight in honorable fashion for the good of mankind; fearless of the future; unheeding of our individual fates; with unflinching hearts and undimmed eyes; we stand at Armageddon.”32
This was a new Roosevelt. He had always preached to his audiences, but his lectures usually resembled the scoldings of a stern schoolmaster. On that warm Chicago evening, he took the form of an evangelical preacher thundering about the devil. The old Roosevelt—the one who had regarded party machines as defective institutions that should be gradually reformed—would have called the new Roosevelt a demagogue, an agitator, and a wild-eyed fanatic.
But it wasn’t just Roosevelt who had changed. This was a new America. The Standpatters hung back in the old America, scrabbling desperately to staunch the flow of progress. La Follette raced ahead, breaking down dams and cutting new channels. Roosevelt rode the crest of the wave. The people had no more patience for the old ways, so neither did he. The people demanded a leader who would change the world, so he became one. His mind and his hips, united at last, charged into the future.
There was only one problem. His party was not with him.
While the Colonel was leading his crusade in Chicago, La Follette remained in Washington, observing the proprieties that Roosevelt had defied. The morning before the convention, he received a phone call from his delegates. Roosevelt’s people had asked for their assistance in electing a progressive convention chairman. To defeat the conservative favorite, they needed Wisconsin’s 13 votes. To sweeten the deal, they dangled a tempting candidate, Francis McGovern, governor of Wisconsin.33
La Follette was familiar with Roosevelt’s interest in the matter. The Colonel wanted a favorable chairman who would assist him in challenging Taft’s disputed delegates on the convention floor. Many of La Follette’s allies, including McGovern himself, had urged him to accept the olive branch, put aside his differences, and unite with Roosevelt against the conservatives.
But that was not his nature. For nearly two decades, he had doggedly rejected any compromise of his principles regardless of the consequences. He was not about to abandon that policy for the sake of a man who embodied its antithesis—the proud pragmatist and eager compromiser who had repeatedly betrayed and undermined him. He refused to sully his progressive principles by making any deals with Taft or Roosevelt. One of the delegates on the call warned him that this decision would likely split the Wisconsin delegation. “Let the split come then,” he answered. As always, he would hold his course to the bitter end.34
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, JUNE 18, 1912
On the surface, the Chicago Coliseum looked much as it had in 1904 and 1908. The usual profusion of red, white, and blue swathed every wall, railing, and post. But hidden beneath the bunting that girded the grandstand, barbed wire waited for anyone who dared to rush the stage. The basement held a temporary police headquarters and an emergency hospital. Two hundred bluecoats manned the aisles while a reserve force waited downstairs, and another hundred plainclothes cops lurked in the stands.35
The delegates who started filing in at 10 a.m. were subdued at first. As the hall filled up, they began to let loose. “Rah, rah, rah, who are we?” sang the New Jerseyans, “We are the delegates from New Jers-ee. Are we in it? Just you wait. Till we give Teddy 28 straight!” The other states countered with their own cheers. Soon, defiant shouts of “Teddy!” and “Taft!” punctuated the air. Roosevelt’s supporters cried “Toot! Toot!” to mock the national committee’s steamroller.
At noon, the temporary presiding officer rapped his gavel. The first order of business was the election of a convention chairman. One of Taft’s supporters nominated Senator Elihu Root of New York. It was an inspired choice. Root was a distinguished statesman, brilliant, poised, and widely respected. He had been a member of Roosevelt’s inner circle. The Colonel could hardly object to someone he had once called “the ablest man I have known in our government service.”36
Then a Wisconsin delegate asked for the floor. “I present the name of the brilliant, the able, the impartial and the fearless governor of my commonwealth, Hon. Francis E. McGovern, of Wisconsin,” he called out. The Roosevelt delegates erupted in cheers and enthusiastically seconded the nomination.
Their celebration did not last long. A few minutes later, La Follette’s campaign manager repudiated McGovern’s nomination. “Men have spoken from this platform today,” he said, “claiming to represent the interests of Senator La Follette. I am here to say to you that they have neither the authority, nor do they represent him in this direction . . . he refuses now to be forced into such an alliance.” The nomination stood, but Wisconsin did not stand behind it.
After the speeches, a chaotic roll call proceeded. Whenever the disputed delegates voted for Root, the Roosevelt men protested angrily. “You are a pack of thieves!” shouted William Flinn of Pennsylvania. But they couldn’t stop the tide. When Wisconsin’s turn came, the delegation split; loyal La Follette delegates voted for other candidates. It would not have made a difference in any case. Root won, 558 to 501.
When Senator Root mounted the podium to give his speech, someone shouted, “Receiver of stolen goods!” He ignored the barb and began speaking. Hundreds of Roosevelt supporters walked out. By the time he finished, entire sections of seats were empty.37
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, JUNE 19, 1912
The next day, the Coliseum was full again, and the delegates were even rowdier. Shouts, cheers, hisses, fistfights, and endless toot-toots roiled the hall. Elihu Root stood serenely at the podium, silver haired and impeccably dressed, sweeping his eyes across the storm that thundered around him. He let the police handle the fights; his gavel did the rest. William Allen White recalled, “Root seemed to us like a diabolical sphinx. He pushed the program of the convention through steadily, and as swiftly as possible . . . When he clicked the gavel on the marble block that topped the speaker’s table, order ensued almost hypnotically.”
It was time for the convention to approve the national committee’s decisions on the disputed delegates. Roosevelt’s supporters planned to challenge 72 of those decisions. It was their last chance. If they failed to unseat those delegates, Taft would win the nomination easily. But there was a catch. In order to overturn the committee’s decisions, they needed a majority. Because of the disputed delegates, they didn’t have one; the “thieves” would judge their own cases.
On the convention floor, Governor Herbert Hadley of Missouri argued that the 72 disputed delegates should be prohibited from voting on any credentials decisions. The Taft people were prepared for this. They moved that Hadley’s motion be referred to the Committee on Credentials, which they controlled. The roll was called. It proceeded along the same lines as the previous day. The disputed Taft delegates naturally voted for referral.
When Wisconsin’s turn came, the room went quiet with anticipation. Governor McGovern stepped nimbly into the aisle. “Wisconsin is solid this time,” he announced proudly. “It votes 26 votes No.” Pandemonium broke out anew. Roosevelt supporters leaped onto their chairs and cheered.
But even with Wisconsin, it was not enough. Their only hope was to discount the votes of the 72 delegates on the referral motion. In desperation, Hadley appealed for a ruling from the chairman. This was the pivotal moment.
Amid the uproar, Elihu Root’s soft voice did not carry more than ten feet. “No man can be permitted to vote upon the question of his own right to a seat in the Convention,” he said slowly, “but the rule does not disqualify any delegate whose name is upon the roll from voting upon the contest of any other.”
The Taft supporters roared with delight. Roosevelt’s people got up to leave. For all intents and purposes, the convention was over: Roosevelt could not win.38
THAT NIGHT, A CROWD OF HIGH-LEVEL SUPPORTERS gathered in Roosevelt’s hotel suite. Few had any illusions about winning the nomination. The question was what to do next. Governor Hiram Johnson of California urged his colleagues to bolt the convention and found a new party. Governor Walter Stubbs of Kansas counseled patience. Senator William Borah of Idaho argued vehemently against abandoning the party.
Roosevelt circulated among the fray, deliberating. He had spent his career in the Republican Party, alternately battling and negotiating with the old guard while he gradually prodded his colleagues toward reform. He’d never had any patience for “bolters” like La Follette at the 1904 convention. But it was different this time, or at least seemed different to him now. In a fair election, he knew that he would have won easily. He believed that the party had committed fraud at the highest level to thwart the will of the people. This was not about a man named Theodore Roosevelt. It was about justice and democracy. It was about the men all around him—good men, loyal Republicans—who believed in his cause enough to abandon their own party and embark on an uncertain future.
After midnight, Senator Borah was still trying dissuade him from bolting when a representative from the Credentials Committee burst into the room. He announced that Roosevelt’s supporters had walked out of the committee meeting en masse. They had assembled in a ballroom downstairs with the other delegates.39
“You see,” Roosevelt said to Borah, “I can’t desert my friends now.”
He left the suite, hat in hand, and descended to the ballroom. Squeezing his way through the crowd, he climbed up on a table and stood over them, his head framed by Renaissance-style murals that adorned the arched ceiling. “So far as I am concerned, I am through,” he announced. “If you are voted down I hope that you, the real and lawful majority of the convention, will organize as such, and you will do it if you have the courage and loyalty of your conviction.” When he finished, Governor Johnson took his place and described the progressive Republicans’ plans to found a new political party.
Roosevelt left the delegates to their organizing and returned to his suite. Many of his supporters were still there, but it was late, and the crowd was thinning. Soon there were only three left: journalist Henry Stoddard and Roosevelt’s financial backers, George Perkins and Frank Munsey. They sat on the bed until dawn discussing their plans while Roosevelt leaned wearily against the headboard. Perkins and Munsey promised to fund the new party. “My fortune, my magazines and my newspapers are with you,” Munsey pledged. It was decided. They would abandon the Republican Party to its fate. A new progressive party would hold its own convention and nominate its own candidate for president.40
TAFT RECEIVED THE NEWS WITH EQUANIMITY. “If I win the nomination and Roosevelt bolts, it means a long, hard fight with probable defeat,” he predicted. “But I can stand defeat if we retain the regular Republican Party as a nucleus for future conservative action.”41
Many Taft supporters in Chicago were less sanguine. Desperate to preserve Republican unity, they reached out to Roosevelt, offering to change their votes to some other candidate who would be acceptable to him. But Roosevelt’s compromising days were behind him. Channeling La Follette, he stood on principle and refused to negotiate until the disputed delegates were disqualified. “No! No! No! I won’t hear it! I won’t have it!” he retorted to one of the negotiators. “[T]his is a crooked convention, I won’t touch it with a forty-rod pole.”42
And so, the fate of the Republican Party was sealed. Three days later, it nominated William H. Taft for president on the first ballot. The Wisconsin delegation remained at the convention and proudly voted for Robert M. La Follette; 107 Roosevelt delegates registered their votes for the Colonel. Others answered, “present but not voting.” The rest left behind empty seats, silent testimony that the progressives were leaving the party. Henceforth, the Republican Party, whose members had founded the progressive movement, would be known as the conservative party of the United States.
SEA GIRT, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 25, 1912
Wilson waited out the Democratic convention at the governor’s summer cottage on the Jersey shore. The fifteen-room colonial-style mansion was a replica of George Washington’s Revolutionary War headquarters, constructed for the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. After the exhibition, the state reassembled it next to a National Guard rifle range in Sea Girt. The pop-pop-pop of distant gunfire drifted in on the wind now and then. The reporters, photographers, and “moving-picture” men made much more racket, snapping photos, and begging for comments every time Wilson left the house. He teased them with small talk and funny anecdotes but refused to discuss politics.43
Despite the public show of disinterest, Wilson followed the convention closely. His campaign manager called him regularly from Baltimore, and his staff relayed news bulletins from a makeshift telegraph office under a tent on the lawn. The convention was rancorous even by Democratic standards. Bryan had launched an all-out war on Tammany Hall, the bastion of New York’s Democratic machine. He proposed to disqualify every delegate who was “under obligation to J. Pierpont Morgan . . . or any other member of the privilege-hunting and favor-seeking class,” which meant all of New York City’s delegates. The Tammany bosses fought back furiously, and it seemed as if the Democrats might split like the Republicans before Bryan finally relented.44
The quarreling delayed the nominations until midnight of the third day. The usual demonstrations of Democratic fervor accompanied them, slightly tempered by exhaustion. Underwood received 30 minutes of cheers; Clark got 65. Wilson’s supporters, not to be outdone, lasted 75 minutes. The nominations were still coming in at dawn. Finally, at 7 a.m., the Democrats voted: Speaker Champ Clark of Missouri, 440½; New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, 324; Ohio Governor Judson Harmon, 148; Alabama Congressman Oscar Underwood, 117½; the rest, 56. Clark had a big lead, but he needed a two-thirds majority to win the nomination.45
The delegates recessed to get some much-needed sleep. When they returned in the afternoon, they voted again with little change. And again. And again. And again. The weaker candidates dropped out, and a few delegates trickled into the Wilson camp but not enough to make a difference.
BACK AT SEA GIRT, WILSON BEHAVED AS IF nothing unusual were happening except for the swarm of reporters and photographers camping on his lawn. He played with his daughters, joked with his wife, took long walks, and refused to discuss politics. After the eighth ballot, he broke his silence to predict, “This is to be a ten-inning game, and I fear several more than that.”
Before midnight, he called for a glass of buttermilk, declaring that things were too interesting for him to sleep, but no further information came in, and he retired to bed. Looking out his bedroom window, he spotted one of his campaign advisers leaving for home. “Tumulty, is there any news from Baltimore?” he called.
“Nothing new, governor,” Tumulty replied.
But Wilson could see from his long face that something had happened.46
SEA GIRT, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 29, 1912
In the morning, Wilson received a phone call from his campaign manager in Baltimore, William McCombs. The bombshell had landed just after midnight. On the tenth ballot, Tammany Hall withdrew its support from Governor Harmon and sent 81 delegates into the Clark camp. Clark now had a majority of the delegates—556 to Wilson’s 350½. Though Clark remained shy of the two-thirds threshold, the attainment of a majority was normally the signal for a stampede to the frontrunner. McCombs told Wilson that the situation was hopeless and advised him to send a telegram authorizing his delegates to vote for other candidates.
Wilson hung up the phone and put on a cheerful expression. “Well dear,” he said to his wife, “Do you realize that now we can see our beloved Rydal again?” referring to their favorite vacation spot in England’s Lake District. He asked for a pen and paper to draft the telegram for his delegates. But before he’d had a chance to send it, he received a call from another high-level adviser in Baltimore who vehemently disagreed with McCombs. “Your nomination is inevitable,” he promised, “your delegates will stick, if it takes all summer.” Wilson put aside the telegram. Sure enough, his delegates stuck; the anticipated stampede never materialized.47
In the afternoon, another bomb exploded. For the first thirteen ballots, William Jennings Bryan had observed the wishes of Nebraska’s primary voters and cast his vote for Clark. But after New York switched to Clark, his disgust for Tammany Hall’s bosses overcame his fealty to the voters. Declaring that he would not vote for Clark “as long as New York’s vote is recorded for him,” he voted for Wilson. Pandemonium broke loose in the hall. Bryan and a few Nebraska delegates who joined him added only five votes to Wilson’s count, but the Great Commoner’s vote meant far more than its direct contribution to the total. The tide began to turn.48
At 5 p.m., news reached Sea Girt that delegates were “breaking for Wilson all along the line.” A swarm of reporters rushed over to the house to alert the governor.
“Is that so?” he replied. “Marvels will never cease.”
The ballots kept coming. By the end of the night, Wilson trailed Clark by only 56 votes.
“I find that if I continue to gain strength at the exact ratio,” Wilson teased the reporters, “I will land the nomination just after the 175th ballot is cast.”49
SEA GIRT, NEW JERSEY, JULY 2, 1912
It only took 46 ballots. On the seventh day of the marathon convention, Wilson received a phone call from Baltimore. The connection was bad, and he couldn’t make out who it was. The caller said something about Underwood withdrawing and a motion to unanimously nominate Wilson, then hung up.
Wilson quietly put down the phone and walked upstairs to see his wife. “Well, dear,” he said, “I guess we won’t go to Mount Rydal this summer after all.”50
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, AUGUST 5, 1912
The Chicago Coliseum was red, white, and blue again. Except for the stuffed moose head standing guard on one wall and the oil painting of Theodore Roosevelt watching from the other, a careless visitor might not have noticed that the scenery had changed. But a glance at the people who streamed into the hall on August 5 revealed that this was no ordinary party convention. Career politicians and party henchmen were scarce. Instead, the delegates included lawyers, journalists, teachers, farmers, laborers, and other middle-class professionals—a well-mannered, clean-cut crowd “like a convention of Sunday School Superintendents,” quipped the New York Times.
At the Republican convention, purple and gold sashes had cordoned off a special section for the millionaires’ wives. Young women in shirtwaists now occupied these seats, and the trim was no different from any other row. Many of the delegates on the floor were women, including Jane Addams, the eminent philosopher, social activist, and proponent of women’s suffrage, who was treated with reverence second only to Theodore Roosevelt.
The conduct of the delegates was even more striking than the demographics. Instead of jingoistic rhymes, the delegates sang hymns, parading through the hall to the tune of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The religious overtones recalled the spiritual atmosphere that Roosevelt had evoked in his Armageddon speech. “It was not a convention at all,” the Times concluded. “It was an assemblage of religious enthusiasts.”51
Albert Beveridge, who was running for governor of Indiana, chaired the convention. Even in the Senate, his speeches had been sentimental. At the Chicago Coliseum, he inaugurated the National Progressive Party with an operatic homily that moved many of the delegates to tears. “We stand for a nobler America,” he began. “We battle for the actual rights of men.” He catalogued the failures of the Democratic and Republican parties—bosses, tariffs, corporate interests, child labor, and hyper-partisanship. To heal the country’s ills, he heralded the formation of a new party “from the grass roots.” He concluded his speech with a line from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—“Oh, be swift our souls to answer Him! Be jubilant our feet! Our God is marching on!” That was supposed to be the cue for the band to play the song, but it started up with “Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys” by mistake. The delegates knew better, and they shook the hall as they sang, “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah! His Truth is Marching On.”52
Other than Beveridge and other speakers that day, few referred to the new party by its official name. In the press, in mouths of politicians and voters alike, it was simply the Bull Moose Party. The nickname belied one element of Beveridge’s speech. The Progressive Party was not exactly the spontaneous grassroots organization that he made it out to be. It owed its existence to the charisma, vitality, and ambition of one man.
Theodore Roosevelt did not regard the Bull Moose Party as his personal fief. To the contrary, he saw himself as its instrument. But as La Follette had feared, the man who thought he was the bride at every wedding could not avoid dominating his own political party. When prohibitionists and other “radical” elements tried to substitute several planks in the platform, Roosevelt threatened, “Each one of those planks will go back, or I am not a candidate.” When Jane Addams, among others, protested the exclusion of black delegates from southern delegations, he insisted that southern blacks were not enlightened enough to lead the progressive movement. “I earnestly believe that by appealing to the best white men in the South,” he rationalized, “we shall create a situation by which the colored men of the South will ultimately get justice . . . ” Consequently, the few black delegates at the convention came only from northern states.53
Given Roosevelt’s dominance of the party, it seemed almost natural that he should break a century of tradition by speaking at his own convention. The National Progressive Party was his church, and he was its messiah. He titled his speech, appropriately, “My Confession of Faith.” Despite the title, it was mostly a dry recitation of his proposed policies: corporate regulation, minimum wages, workman’s compensation, child labor laws, tariff reductions, women’s suffrage, conservation, currency reform, direct primaries, judicial recall, and ballot initiatives. The litany lasted two hours with delegates cheering all the way through. At the finale, Roosevelt returned to the heroic biblical imagery that had served him so well. “Our cause is based on the eternal principles of righteousness,” he proclaimed, “and even though we who now lead may for the time fail, in the end the cause itself shall triumph.”
La Follette could not have put it better. Roosevelt had come a long way from the man who once told Lincoln Steffens that he believed in fighting one evil at a time, that he trusted those “who take the next step; not those who theorize about the 200th step.” Shorn of his former power, alienated from his old allies, facing long odds and an uncertain future, he dared to look above the horizon. “Now to you men, who, in your turn, have come together to spend and be spent in the endless crusade against wrong,” he continued, “to you who gird yourselves for this great new fight in the neverending warfare for the good of humankind, I say in closing . . . We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”
He left his crusaders cheering and waving red bandannas. “Thy gleaming sword shall never rust, Roosevelt O Roosevelt,” they sang as he strode from the stage. “In thee we hail a leader just . . . to crush the powers of greed and lust, Roosevelt, O Roosevelt.”54
BUFFALO, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 2, 1912
Wilson wasn’t worried about Taft. The President didn’t stand a chance. Roosevelt was the competition. In a popularity contest, the Colonel would win easily. “He appeals to their imagination; I do not,” Wilson admitted to Mary Peck, “He is a real, vivid person, whom they have seen and shouted themselves hoarse over and voted for, millions strong; I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.” To beat the beloved Colonel, he would have to emphasize policy over personality. But it was not obvious how to differentiate his policies from Roosevelt’s. “When I sit down and compare my views with those of a Progressive Republican, I can’t see what the difference is,” he confessed.55
Three days later, Louis Brandeis brought him the answer. Brandeis had campaigned for La Follette during the primaries, but he was not keen on the new Bull Moose Party or its benefactor, George Perkins. As an expert in antitrust law, he found the party’s trust regulation plank, which Perkins had helped draft, particularly suspect. Roosevelt and Perkins believed that effective federal oversight could reform the “bad” trusts. Brandeis thought their plan was futile and dangerous. The closer the government was to the trusts, the more likely the trusts were to corrupt it, raising the specter of a tyrannical government-industrial partnership that would oppress workers and small businesses alike. Outlining the antitrust legislation that he and La Follette had prepared after the Supreme Court’s Standard Oil decision, he argued that Congress shoud outlaw all monopolies, regardless of whether government officials deemed them “good” or “bad,” because monopolies were inherently anti-competitive.
Wilson’s understanding of trust policy was limited, but Brandeis’s ideas resonated with his skepticism of Roosevelt’s paternalistic approach to government. During their three-hour lunch meeting, they agreed on the broad outline of an alternative antitrust policy, which Brandeis would help him to formulate in detail. In juxtaposition to Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism,” he would call it the “New Freedom”.56
A few days later, he introduced the idea to the public in a Labor Day speech for 10,000 workers in Buffalo. “My kind of leading will not be telling other people what they have got to do,” he told the workers. “What I fear is a government of experts . . . What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of by a small number of gentlemen who are the only men who understand the job?”
He continued, “As to the monopolies, which Mr. Roosevelt proposes to legalize and to welcome, I know that they are so many cars of juggernaut, and I do not look forward with pleasure to the time when the juggernauts are licensed and driven by commissioners of the United States.”
A century later, modern conservatives would erroneously castigate Wilson as a paternalistic “statist.” In fact, he pioneered an alternative strain of progressivism, suspicious of big government and big business alike. He did not believe that a nation’s government should manage the business of its corporations or the lives of its citizens. Rather, he appealed to a Jeffersonian ideal of individualism. He differed from the Standpatters in that he believed government must actively protect the freedom of the individual. He differed from the Bull Moosers in that he believed the government should go no further than that. “Ours is a programme of liberty,” he concluded, “theirs is a programme of regulation.”57
The New Freedom theme enabled Wilson to differentiate his policies in a way that appealed to the individualistic westerners at the core of the progressive movement. It also exposed the flaw in the Colonel’s magnetism. Roosevelt had always been a moralizer. In his new role as progressive evangelist, he was insufferably sanctimonious. He not only preached paternalism, he embodied it.
WARWICK, RHODE ISLAND, SEPTEMBER 10, 1912
Nelson Aldrich paid little attention to politics these days. The press had circulated rumors that he would return to the Senate in 1913, but he denied them. He was enjoying his retirement. His new mansion was magnificent—a great stone palace reigning majestically over a kingdom of manicured lawns and rocky shores. Stonemasons and carpenters from France and Italy had labored for two years to build the 70-room structure according to Aldrich’s exacting standards. Intricate murals graced the lofty ceilings. Flemish masterpieces adorned the walls. Streaked marble and ornate woodcarving framed the fireplaces. It was the house of a king.58
But Aldrich wasn’t a king, not anymore. He still held out hope that the progressive hysteria would fade, but no one else did. Though he’d succeeded in persuading the bankers to embrace his National Reserve Association, his allies in the Senate kept postponing the bill. They knew it could not pass. In the House, Democratic leaders did not even discuss it. They were busy preparing another investigation that would soon drag old Pierpont Morgan before its tribunal. Even the Republican Party avoided mentioning the Aldrich Plan in its convention platform.
On September 10, the American Bankers’ Association, which had twice endorsed the plan, declined to extend its support. The bankers’ opinions of the plan had not changed, but the political world had. They recognized that no proposal with Aldrich’s name on it would pass Congress in the foreseeable future. New leaders were destined for Washington, and the practical bankers prepared themselves to work with them. The Aldrich Plan was dead.59
It would not be forgotten, however. Its memory would live on in the establishment of the Federal Reserve.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 12, 1912
John F. Schrank did not receive many visitors at his dingy tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Unemployed and reclusive, he stayed in his room writing poetry. But the man—or whatever it was—who tapped his shoulder at 1:30 in the morning was no ordinary visitor. “Let not a murderer take the presidential chair,” it whispered. “Avenge my death.”
Schrank had seen that face before, in a dream eleven years earlier on the day the man died. He recognized him from the pictures that filled the newspapers—President William McKinley. In the original dream, McKinley rose from his coffin dressed like a monk. “This is my murderer,” he had said, “avenge my death.” He pointed a cold finger at another man Schrank knew from the papers: Vice President Theodore Roosevelt.
Inspired by the second ghostly visit, Schrank scribbled a poem into his notebook:
But when night draws near
And you hear a knock
And a voice should whisper your
Time is up; Refuse to answer
As long as you can
Then face it and be a man.
A week later, Schrank borrowed $350, bought a .38 caliber Colt revolver, and boarded a southbound steamship.60
BEVERLY, MASSACHUSETTS, SEPTEMBER 29, 1912
President Taft had no illusions about his chances. “Sometimes I think I might as well give up so far as being a candidate is concerned,” he sighed. “There are so many people in the country who don’t like me.” He consoled himself that he had at least stopped Roosevelt from taking over the Republican Party and, hopefully, the presidency. His disgust with the Colonel had grown so toxic that he preferred Wilson. “As the campaign goes on and the unscrupulousness of Roosevelt develops,” he wrote to Nellie, “it is hard to realize that we are talking about the same man whom we knew in the presidency . . . it is impossible to conceive of him as the fakir, the juggler, the green goods man, the gold-brick man that he has come to be.”
While the other candidates gave speeches and gobbled up headlines, Taft relaxed on the Massachusetts coast and focused on his golf game. When a campaign adviser complained to him about all the golf pictures in the press, Taft shrugged him off. “I seem to have heard that before,” he wrote. “It always makes me impatient, as if I were running a P. T. Barnum show, with two or three shows across the street, and as if I ought to have as much advertising as the rest.”61
At the end of September, he ventured as far as the veranda of his cottage to address the Republican clubs of Essex County, Massachusetts. “A third party has split off from the Republican Party,” he declared, “not for any one principle, or indeed on any principle at all, but merely to gratify personal ambition and vengeance . . . This new party is not united on any cohesive principles, and is only kept together by the remarkable personality of its leader. Were he to die the party would go to pieces . . . ” He dismissed the Bull Moose platform as a “crazy-quilt” of “preposterous,” “impracticable,” and “Socialistic” doctrines, then eloquently articulated the Republican credo: “A National Government cannot create good times. It cannot make the rain to fall, the sun to shine, or the crops to grow, but it can, by pursuing a meddlesome policy . . . halt enterprise, paralyze investment, and throw out of employment hundreds of thousands of working men.”62
Then he returned to his golf and waited out the inevitable.
MADISON, WISCONSIN, OCTOBER 12, 1912
Bob La Follette shared Taft’s enmity of the Colonel but for a different reason. While Taft thought Roosevelt had gone crazy, La Follette believed he hadn’t changed in the slightest. After the Bull Moose convention, he authored a scathing editorial in his magazine. “It is characteristic of Roosevelt,” he wrote, “that while he seizes upon issues that make good propaganda and gives them publicity, he has not the patience nor stability nor depth of conviction to prevent his sacrificing essential principles and permanent results to personal considerations and temporary advantage.” Privately, he was even harsher. “[E]verything should be done to prevent true progressive republicans from joining the Roosevelt party,” he wrote to a friend. “His success means disaster to the progressive cause and to the country.”63
La Follette had always maintained a principled policy of avoiding personal attacks. Even in his roll-call campaigns, he had named names only during the recitation of the roll. But when it came to Roosevelt, his resentment and fear of losing control of the progressive movement got the better of him. Defeating the Bull Moose became his crusade, and he pursued it on every front. La Follette’s Weekly printed article after article lambasting Roosevelt and his party, including one by Brandeis that assailed the antitrust policies of the “Roosevelt-Perkins-Steel-Trust-Party.” In the Senate, La Follette launched one investigation into Roosevelt’s 1904 campaign, to which the trusts had contributed heavily, and another into the Bull Moose Party’s financing in 1912. In Wisconsin, he campaigned against the Colonel. Though he did not endorse any candidate, his speeches clearly favored Wilson.64
La Follette’s most trenchant attacks arrived in the final installments of his autobiography. First, he criticized Roosevelt’s progressive record, describing his failure to enact substantive legislation during his presidency and his refusal to support La Follette’s Wisconsin delegation in the 1904 credentials fight—a charge that was particularly damning in light of Roosevelt’s complaints about delegate theft. Then he moved on to the 1912 campaign. He expounded his theory that Roosevelt had used him as a stalking horse, deliberately manipulating his supporters to set him up for a fall. Nor did he spare his erstwhile advocates—Pinchot, Cummins, Johnson, and other progressives who deserted him when Roosevelt joined the field.
La Follette’s anti-Roosevelt vendetta was effective, but it cost him his reputation. The vindictiveness of the accusations belied his claims to be above personal feuds, and the unsubstantiated allegations made him look paranoid. By naming the people he considered traitors to the cause, he further alienated his old allies and splintered the progressive faction of the Republican Party. He would always be recognized as a pioneer of the progressive movement, but he forever sacrificed his place as its leader.
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN, OCTOBER 14, 1912
Roosevelt raced across the country at even more breathtaking pace than during his primary campaign six months earlier. In September, he traveled a 9,000-mile circuit around the nation. At every stop, thousands of ecstatic supporters greeted him with cheers and hymns, crowding close enough to touch his feet. Roosevelt seldom indulged them with soaring oratory, however. On the stump, he exchanged religious-themed rhetoric for more conventional campaign speeches that focused on his policies and, more often, his opponents.65
He wasted little time on Taft. “I never discuss dead issues,” he shrugged. In North Dakota, he took a shot at La Follette. “Look out for the man who is going about attacking the Progressive party,” he warned. “Any man claiming to be a Progressive that does not heartily support the Progressive party is merely a tool.” For the most part, he concentrated his fire on Woodrow Wilson. He had trouble drawing a bead on him though. First he dismissed him as a stooge of the bosses, then a fusty academic wedded to outmoded doctrines, then a naïve rookie.66
By contrast, Wilson was proving a disciplined campaigner who always hit his mark. In speech after speech, he charged that Roosevelt was too paternalistic and too close to the trusts. Pro-Wilson papers assisted with the first charge, caricaturing Roosevelt as Caesar and Napoleon, and La Follette’s Senate investigations underscored the second. Even Eugene Debs, the perennial Socialist candidate, laid into the Colonel for belatedly embracing a cause “that four years ago he denounced as anarchistic” In less reputable papers, slanderous and unfounded rumors of alcoholism dogged him.
Roosevelt fell onto the defensive, spending much of the time rebutting the charges against him. He had trouble articulating why a large federal government—an unattractive idea in the abstract—was necessary for progressive reform and why people should put their trust in “government by experts,” as Wilson put it. In Atlanta, he all but called Wilson a liar, which did not play well in the Democratic South where Wilson had grown up. When the crowd heckled him, Roosevelt jumped onto the speaker’s table and yelled, “I’ll get up here so that you’ll all have a chance to see me,” momentarily silencing the stunned hecklers.67
One man had traveled all the way from New York to see the Colonel in Atlanta, but he did not get the opportunity. After missing Roosevelt’s speech, John Schrank left town by train, hoping to catch his quarry in another city.68
BY THE TIME ROOSEVELT RETURNED TO OYSTER BAY, his voice had given out, and he was thoroughly exhausted. “I am hoarse and dirty and filled with a bored loathing of myself whenever I get up to speak,” he wrote to his son Kermit on the way home. But he wasn’t finished. A week later, his campaign manager sent him west to hit a few cities that he’d missed on the first lap. That was how he ended up in Milwaukee on October 14.
At his speech that evening, he intended to refute La Follette’s charges that he had rebuffed the Wisconsin Half-Breeds at the 1904 convention. He planned to read a letter proving that he had endorsed their cause—after the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided in La Follette’s favor. Naturally, he would not read from the letters he’d written before the convention.69
He left his hotel at 8 p.m. A throng of people had gathered around the automobile that was to take him to the auditorium. His escorts cleared a path, and he climbed into the rear seat. The crowd edged closer. A short, plump man pushed his way to the front. The Colonel stood up in the car and tipped his hat to the crowd.
Bang. Roosevelt’s knees bent and he clutched the car door. His stenographer, a six-foot tall former football player, hurtled through the air and landed on John Schrank’s shoulder. Schrank went down. The stenographer seized the revolver and wrapped his arm around the man’s neck. The enraged crowd was shouting, “Lynch him! Kill him!”
Roosevelt straightened up and raised his hand. “Don’t hurt him,” he said. “Bring him here. I want to see him.” He reached down and took Shrank’s head in both hands. “What did you do it for?” he asked. “Oh, what’s the use? Turn him over to the police.”
He gave another reassuring tip of the hat to the crowd, and his car roared off. As they rode, one of Roosevelt’s secretaries examined his overcoat. “Why, Colonel, you have a hole in your overcoat,” he exclaimed. “He has shot you.”
“I know it,” Roosevelt replied, and opened up his coat. His shirt was drenched with blood.
The other men insisted on taking him to the hospital, but Roosevelt refused. He felt the way he did when he charged up San Juan Hill so many years ago—that if he were hit he must keep straight on as long as he could. “I know I am good now,” he said. “I don’t know how long I may be. This may be my last talk in this cause to our people, and while I am good I am going to drive to the hall and deliver my speech.”
When they reached the auditorium, he finally consented to let a doctor examine the bloody hole that gaped below his right nipple, but he still refused to go to the hospital. After covering the wound with a handkerchief, he buttoned up his coat. “Now, gentlemen, let’s go in,” he said and strode onto the stage.
When the introductory speaker described the assassination attempt, not everyone believed him. “Fake!” someone shouted.
Roosevelt stepped forward and opened his coat, revealing the red stain. Gasps rippled through the crowd. He grinned and boasted, “It takes more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose.” But when he took his speech out from his right breast pocket, he flinched. There was a bullet hole straight through it. Fifty pages of thick paper folded in half plus one steel spectacles case had saved his life. He held up the perforated pages to the crowd.
“The bullet is in me now,” he told them, “so that I can not make a very long speech, but I will try my best.” He swore that he did not “care a rap” about what happened to him. “I am ahead of the game, anyway. No man has had a happier life than I have led.” His only concern was for the progressive cause. “I never in my life had any movement in which I was able to serve with such wholehearted devotion as in this.”
“And now, friends,” he continued, “I want to take advantage of this incident and say a word of a solemn warning . . . it is a very natural thing that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers . . . they cannot month in and month out and year in and year out make the kind of untruthful, of bitter assaults that they have made and not expect that brutal violent natures . . . will be unaffected by it.”
As he spoke, his friends kept trying to persuade him to stop talking, but Roosevelt waved them off. He turned to his prepared speech and doggedly worked his way through in spite of the bullet-sized gaps in the text. When he mentioned La Follette’s name, the crowd cheered so much that he could not make himself heard, but he persevered and said his piece.70
After an hour and twenty minutes, Roosevelt finally concluded the address and agreed to go to the hospital.
“Oh, gosh! Shot again!” he said to the press photographers as he climbed into the ambulance.
The X-rays located the bullet next to one of his ribs, which had cracked on impact. The surgeons decided not to remove it. They inoculated Roosevelt for tetanus, monitored him for infection, and ordered him to rest. One of the doctors assured him, “Mr. President, you were elected last night. It was the turning of the tide in your favor.”
The next day, telegrams arrived from all over the world. The king of England, the kaiser of Germany, and the emperor of Japan expressed their concern. Closer to home, the President of the United States was particularly agitated. “I am greatly shocked to hear of the outrageous and deplorable assault made upon you,” Taft wired, “and I earnestly hope and pray that your recovery may be speedy and without suffering.”
Governor Wilson sent his “warmest sympathy” and offered to suspend his campaign. “Bully,” Roosevelt said when he read the telegram. “Wilson is of the right American blood, notwithstanding the fact that he and I are opposed in a political sense.”
Senator La Follette expressed “profound regret that your life should have been in peril” and wished him a speedy recovery. “Let me see that again,” Roosevelt said. He immediately dictated a thank you reply, as he had for Taft and Wilson. A few days later, La Follette’s Weekly praised Roosevelt for “the spirit with which he met the ordeal.”71
These expressions of goodwill did not end the feuds or change the course of history. Roosevelt, Taft, and La Follette still despised one another. Roosevelt and Wilson were still hostile. But for a moment, at least, the malice of the bitter campaign gave way to a breath of humanity. A madman’s bullet had finally compelled these resentful men to unbutton their overcoats and reveal the better angels of their natures.
A chastened nation drifted quietly through the final weeks of the campaign. When Roosevelt rose from his sick bed and spoke to a rapturous crowd of 17,000 at Madison Square Garden—with many thousands more waiting outside—most Americans could not help but cheer with them.72
The outpouring of affection did not save his candidacy, however. His new party was too disorganized, his political base too fractured, his opponent too strong. Roosevelt won 6 states, 88 electoral delegates, and 27 percent of the popular vote—the best third-party showing in American history. It was not nearly enough. Wilson soared above him with 42 percent of the popular vote and a landslide 435 electoral votes. Roosevelt took some consolation in beating his successor to a frazzle—Taft won only Utah and New Hampshire, a mere eight electoral votes, the worst defeat of any presidential incumbent.
The Progressive Party fared worse than its presidential nominee. Albert Beveridge lost his race for governor of Indiana, as did every other Bull Moose gubernatorial candidate except Hiram Johnson of California. In Congress, the new party won only ten House races and not a single Senate race. “Well, we have gone down in a smashing defeat,” Roosevelt admitted to Kermit, “whether it is a Waterloo or a Bull Run, only time will tell.” In public, he blustered, “The Progressive Party has come to stay . . . So far from being over, the battle has just begun.” In private, he raged against those he blamed for his defeat—Elihu Root, William Taft, and “that vindictive and unscrupulous faker” Bob La Follette.73
The Standpatters could not take much pleasure in the Bull Moose losses, for their own thrashing was even worse. The once unsinkable Republican battleship, which had ruled the seas for 16 years, lay torn and broken on the shoals. The new Democratic dreadnought glided up and blasted it to shreds. When the smoke cleared, the Democrats led the Senate 51 to 44 and the House 290 to 164.
In addition to becoming a minority party, the Republican congressional leaders had been decimated. At the head of the pack, Uncle Joe lost the seat he had held for a record 38 years. “Let me tell you something,” he told a reporter, chewing his cigar and staring at the ceiling. “The Republican party is still a great, big patriotic party. It is not dead, and it never will die . . . The Progressive movement and its effect on the old party will not be everlasting.”74
Bob La Follette disagreed. “The country is progressive,” he told his magazine readers. “The rank and file of the Republican party are progressive.” Now that the false prophets and bumbling patsies were out of the way, he was sure that his rising movement would overwhelm the remaining Standpatters. “Freed from the leadership of both Roosevelt and Taft,” he predicted, “progressive leadership in the Republican party will now assert itself and the next National Republican Convention will be overwhelmingly progressive.”75
Amid the bluster and recriminations that followed the election, few Republican and Progressive leaders appreciated the enormity of what had just happened. After eight years of political strife, the wall of obstruction that had blocked progress for half a century lay in ruins. The Standpatters were overthrown, the Bourbons and bosses were marginalized, and the progressives were ascendant. On the long trail of history, it mattered little whether the President was a Democratic progressive, Republican progressive, or Bull Moose progressive. He was progressive. The majority of the Senate was progressive. The majority of the House was progressive. Under President Woodrow Wilson, the government was about to embark on the greatest political revolution since the Civil War, which would set America’s course for the next hundred years.
“A great cause has triumphed,” Wilson declared the night of his election. “Every Democrat, every true progressive, of whatever alliance, must now lend his full force and enthusiasm to the fulfillment of the people’s hope—the establishment of the people’s right—so that justice and progress may go hand in hand.”76