After two terms, Odell was not popular enough to run again. But having painstakingly made himself party boss, he wanted to remain so. Much to the disgust of Democrats, he had forced the state Republican Committee to elect him its chairman. This brazen mixing of executive politics and electioneering was sure to be a campaign issue, particularly if Odell tried to choose his own successor. Roosevelt dreaded the prospect of having to carry a heavy puppet, should the presidential race become close. New York State represented the nation’s largest block of electoral votes.
It was vital, therefore, to find a gubernatorial candidate who would be perceived as a Roosevelt Republican. Odell did not object, as long as he was consulted. He agreed with the President that one New Yorker, above all others, had the integrity and stature to sweep the state. Unfortunately, Elihu Root was adamant about remaining in private life. “I must ask my friends to accept as final the refusal of the nomination.” To make things doubly plain, he stayed away from Sagamore Hill.
The press noted Root’s absence from the notification ceremony, as did other national strategists. At their behest, Roosevelt wrote his old friend and proffered the most glittering of grails:
The Republicans of this country are turning their eyes towards you as being the man who, by present appearances, would, if elected Governor of New York, become the foremost Republican in the land, and the natural leader of the party.… You would become the man likely to be nominated by the Republicans for the Presidency in 1908.
Root politely declined. He told Henry Cabot Lodge that after serving at the national level he had developed a “perfect loathing and disgust” for the “sordid details of state politics.” He suspected that Governor Odell’s inheritance might be corrupt. Five years of overwork under two Presidents had left him drained. He was almost sixty. Even if the grail were offered him, he would be sixty-three before he could hold it. More to the point, he simply did not want it.
ON THE DAY AFTER the notification ceremony, Roosevelt returned to the capital he had so recently quit. With what John Hay described as “cheery cruelty,” he insisted that his Cabinet officers break their vacations and join him. Questions of labor and monetary policy had to be discussed before he could issue his acceptance letter, and another potential Mediterranean crisis, this time in Turkey, required group attention. Mrs. Roosevelt’s added presence indicated that he was in no hurry to go home.
Washington sweltered and stagnated. Dust settled on doorsteps in the northwest sector, etching the panels of barred doors. For block after block, blinds filled every window, giving the city an empty, eyeless look. John Hay took afternoon drives in vain search of breezes. Eastward along Pennsylvania Avenue, the air boiled silently over the sidewalks. Capitol Hill floated like a mirage about to slide over the horizon. It was too hot for birds to sing. The trees around the White House rang with beetles.
Inside, the big stone mansion was cool and fragrant with cut flowers. Roosevelt worked mornings only, debating what to do about a meat workers’ strike in Chicago, and about a treaty-breaking refusal by Turkey to grant American missionaries the same privileges enjoyed by those from European nations. The first question was easy to answer in an election year: he would do nothing. But the second begged comparisons with Perdicaris’s kidnapping, in that it involved a desperate envoy, a languid Sultan, and conveniently available units of the United States Navy. Roosevelt decided on 5 August to dispatch Admiral Jewell’s three fast cruisers to the Levant in a further demonstration of “goodwill.”
Freed for a few weeks from the demands of fatherhood, and reveling in the luxury of being alone with his “sweetest of all sweet girls,” he wrote to his sister Bamie:
Edith and I are having a really lovely time in Washington. The house is delightful. We breakfast on the portico, and then stroll in the garden; and at night we walk through the garden or on the terraces. Tomorrow we intend to cut church, and to ride out to Burnt Mills to spend the day, walking through the gorge.… The next three months will be wearing at times. I have no idea what the outcome will be, and I know that, as I shall hear little but what is favorable, it will be impossible for me to tell. However, come what may, I have achieved certain substantial results, have made an honorable name to leave the children, and will have completed by March 4th next pretty nearly seven years of work (dating from the time I became lieutenant colonel of my regiment) which has been of absorbing interest and of real importance. So, while if defeated, I shall feel disappointed, yet I shall also feel that I have had far more happiness and success than fall to any but a very few men; and this aside from the infinitely more important fact that I have had the happiest home life of any man whom I have ever known.
In New York, where the summer heat was only a degree or two less intense, George B. Cortelyou moved into a modern suite of offices at 1 Madison Avenue. Old Guard visitors used to the noisy disorder of earlier campaign headquarters felt that they had stumbled into the premises of a small, efficient corporation. “The brass band has departed,” James Clarkson remarked, with a touch of sadness. Polite young men sat at neat desks and spent a great deal of time on the telephone. There was not a spittoon to be seen.
The chairman himself occupied a big room on the fourth floor, overlooking Madison Square. Somehow, the sunbeams angling in left him cool. He wore a stiff white vest at all times, and his handshake was dry. He slapped no backs and never went into a huddle, as Hanna used to do; the contrast with his burly, lapel-gripping predecessor was total. Cortelyou diffused a quieter authority, no less potent. Success became him: he had lost the drawn, intense look of his thirties. A female reporter admired his geometric grooming, the tie precisely pinned, the dark, silver-streaked hair brilliantined back.
Also unlike Hanna, Cortelyou left the responsibility of soliciting contributions to professional money men. Cornelius Bliss was given responsibility for eastern fund-raising; Charles Dawes collected west of the Mississippi. The chairman made it clear that Roosevelt must be elected “upon an absolutely clean and business basis.” To that end, he abolished the old “bureaus”—ethnic, industrial, religious, and social—that used to serve as two-way conduits between the Republican National Committee and special-interest groups. The only bureau he kept was that of speakers, awarding it to his enemy, Nathan B. Scott.
The Senator softened, as did other members of the Old Guard, who realized that they had misjudged Cortelyou. The contacts he had built up in eighteen months as Secretary of Commerce and Labor were not inconsiderable; even the great J. P. Morgan was said to admire him. “Cortelyou is a splendid executive—resourceful and tactful and masterful,” Dawes wrote in his diary. “Am delighted with the way he takes hold of things.”
Roosevelt tried once to issue a set of moral instructions, but when he tried a second time, Cortelyou courteously lost his temper. “If I did not know you as well as I do I should resent you sending me such a communication,” the chairman wrote. “Whatever may be my shortcomings—and they are many—I think I have a fair degree of moral fiber.… I am conducting this campaign for your reelection on as high a plane as you have conducted the affairs of your great office.”
ROOSEVELT HAD LONG wanted to “smash” the Ottoman Empire as a passé power, opulent and corrupt. While not exactly violating the terms of her most-favored-nation agreement with the United States, Turkey had for more than a year been so discriminatory toward American missionaries and school-teachers, and so obstructive in dealing with American diplomats throughout the Ottoman Empire, that the treaty might as well have been written in water.
John G. Leishman, the United States Minister in Constantinople, reported that the Sublime Porte, as Sultan Abd al-Hamid’s government was called, had closed on him once too often. He demanded a military response. On 8 August, Hay, who was an adroit politician behind his courtly whiskers, suggested to Roosevelt that Leishman should knock on the Porte just once more, just as Admiral Jewell’s squadron arrived at Smyrna. If the Sultan then reacted as obligingly as His Chereefian Majesty had in T
angier, and granted all the Minister’s claims, Roosevelt would be congratulated on a brilliant diplomatic victory, without having landed a single Marine. If, however, the Sultan pleaded one of his usual excuses—fatigue, indisposition, a prior engagement in the harem—Leishman should come away in one of the ships, and the matter be referred to Congress. Roosevelt would then look like a responsible Commander-in-Chief, while all danger of bloodshed would be postponed until after the election.
The President agreed, and Hay sent new instructions to Leishman.
AS HEADLINES ON the Turkish crisis grew larger, and European diplomats hurried back to Washington from vacation, Democratic National Committee officials competed for attention by notifying Alton B. Parker of his nomination for the Presidency.
Their high hopes were dampened in more ways than one on Wednesday, 10 August, the day set for the ceremony. Once more, fog shrouded Esopus, and rain fell in sheets on Parker’s steep lawn, bleeding mud into the river.
At midday, a small steamer brought the committeemen north from New York City. They disembarked at the pier and looked askance at the slippery path up to the house. An authoritative escort aligned them two abreast and shouted “Forward march.” Almost immediately, their formation broke up as they floundered and lost traction. One toiler, bent almost double, was heard to say that the hero of San Juan himself “couldn’t climb this hill.” August Belmont’s shoes raced on a patch of slime, and he tumbled backward. Fortunately, someone caught him, or the party’s richest benefactor would have ended up in the Hudson.
Parker waited on the porch until they came up, drenched and puffing, to shake his hand. He led the way to an open dais in the garden. About two thousand friends and townspeople sat patiently under low umbrellas. Congressman Champ Clark of Missouri made the notification address, and handed over a moist copy of the St. Louis platform. Camera bulbs popped in the drizzle. Then the judge, bareheaded, made his first political address in nearly two decades.
His declamation came as a surprise to the sodden crowd. He spoke confidently, incisively, like his rival, with little risings of the voice and sideways jabs of the arm. Yet somehow the Rooseveltian air of command was missing. At one point he broke from his text to urge an exposed group of listeners to take shelter under the trees: “You can hear just as well, and you won’t get wet.” Nobody moved.
The speech itself was uninspiring. Like Roosevelt, Parker summarized his party’s campaign philosophy, but apologetically, as if he was embarrassed by the limp envelope in his pocket. He attacked the President’s refusal to name a date for Philippine independence, without suggesting a date himself. He seemed unable to utter the words Morocco and Turkey when he harrumphed, “I protest against the feeling, now far too prevalent, that by reason of the commanding position we have assumed in the world we must take part in the disputes and broils of foreign countries.”
Parker received his longest burst of applause when he announced that if elected he would serve only one term. Fate conspired to spoil even his final accolade. Just as cold hands began to clap, a photographer yelled for quiet. Down came umbrellas and hats, and everybody posed motionless in the sifting rain.
AFTERWARD, LOYAL COMMENTATORS hailed Parker’s speech as a workmanlike synthesis of all that the Democratic Party stood for. Only the most fervent found anything to admire in his literary style and stage presence. Adjectives such as impersonal, sober, labored, and heavy recurred in editorial columns from Boston to San Francisco. If politics was supposed to be interesting, then Theodore Roosevelt was elected already.
An educated electorate would presumably, however, concentrate on the issues that divided the two candidates. Their acceptance speeches, plus the party platforms and convention proceedings, could now be published in “campaign textbooks” for editors and other speakers to expound on.
Cortelyou’s textbook presented the Republican Party as the guardian of prosperity, the guarantor of high tariffs, the resolver of labor disputes, and the original upholder of the gold standard. It boasted of the emancipation of Cuba, the Philippines Armistice, the Panama Canal Act, and the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty. It reminded Northeasterners that the President had settled the coal strike, and Southwesterners that he was making the desert blossom. Without actually using the word Negro, it said that any states guilty of “special discrimination” in suffrage should be penalized by reduced representation in Congress.
The Democratic textbook, much thinner, noted that Republican “prosperity” benefited Wall Street more than Main Street, while protectionism made American goods cheaper abroad than at home. It accused Roosevelt of disrespect for the Constitution—and promised that President Parker would “set his face sternly against Executive usurpation of legislative and judicial functions.” His Administration would not be “spasmodic, erratic, sensational, spectacular, and arbitrary.” Abroad, Democrats were for Philippine independence, and against jingoism, imperialism, and “the display of great military armaments.” At home, they deplored what they saw as Roosevelt’s attempts “to kindle anew the embers of racial and sectional strife.”
Neither party had anything specific to say about trust control, labor policy, or tariff reform. Both candidates agreed that the Panama Canal would be of vast benefit to mankind. Parker said nothing about lynchings—still occurring at a rate of one every four days—and Roosevelt, having courageously raised the subject in 1903, was content to let it rest.
Major press endorsements were not expected until the fall. Yet the most eagerly awaited came with devastating suddenness on 11 August, fewer than twenty-four hours after Parker’s speech. For as long as anyone could remember, the New York Sun had visited its wrath on any politician, Republican or Democrat, who presumed to interfere with the free workings of capital—as Roosevelt had done during the coal strike. But the paper’s editors compared his record with Parker’s rhetoric, and announced their decision in five weary words:
THEODORE! with all thy faults—
WITHIN DAYS OF the arrival of Admiral Jewell’s squadron at Smyrna, Minister Leishman advised that Abd al-Hamid had promised, in an informal memorandum, that there was to be “no discrimination between American schools and those of other nationalities” anywhere in his Sultanate. Clearly, Turkey’s willingness to negotiate was related to the weight of armor on her doorstep.
Leishman would have preferred something more binding than a note scribbled by a secretary, but Roosevelt hastened to proclaim victory without violence. He ordered Leishman to accept the Sultan’s word without question, adding, INFORM ADMIRAL THAT FLEET CAN NOW LEAVE.
Thanks to Hay’s restraint, Roosevelt the candidate was able to bask in praise of his statesmanship. He wished that the election could be held “next Tuesday.” Even critical commentators were reduced to grudging admiration. The Brooklyn Eagle suggested that he had aimed his naval guns “at the Democratic enemy, not the Sultan,” pointing out that Jewell could have been sent east immediately after the Perdicaris affair. But Roosevelt had obviously delayed his grand gesture to coincide with Judge Parker’s notification ceremony. “The power to seize the psychological moment is the essence of genius in politics, and if anybody doubts that Theodore Roosevelt is a genius he should reverse himself on this further evidence.”
THE PRESIDENT WAS now free to resume his summer vacation. But he did so aware that a much more serious crisis was burgeoning in the Far East.
For almost a month now, Japanese naval and ground forces had been consolidating themselves around Port Arthur, redoubt of the Liaotung Peninsula and strategic key to both Korea and Manchuria. The Russian-held fortress still stood, but without naval protection, leaving Japan in complete command of the sea approaches. On 20 August, General Maresuke Nogi began a “final” assault on Port Arthur. Wave after wave of seemingly berserk little infantrymen broke bloodily on the fortress walls for two nights and days. But the walls held, and the waves receded, carrying a flotsam of fifteen thousand dead and wounded. Nogi’s army settled down to what looked like a long winter
of siege.
Farther inland, three other Japanese columns converged on Liao-yang, where Russia’s main army lay entrenched. On 23 August, there began nine days of what Review of Reviews called “perhaps the most desperate fighting of modern times.” Three hundred thousand soldiers tried to kill one another on roads and fields and hills. The Russians, who fought bravely but unimaginatively, fell back mile by mile, battered by Japanese frontal pressure and harassed by surprise attacks on their rear communications. They summoned ten thousand reserves to stay their retreat, in vain. Even behind breastworks, they lost more men than the enemy did. For forty-eight hours the air was so loud with artillery blasts, at sixty shots a minute, that men wondered if they would ever hear again.
“The Russians think only with half a mind,” Roosevelt wrote Hay, as birds sang in the quiet woods of Sagamore Hill. “I think the Japanese will whip them handsomely.”
SENATOR BEVERIDGE TOOK a similar view of the President’s own political battle. “Unless I am in a chloroformed state and merely dreaming, you are going to have the greatest victory since the Civil War.”
The “speaking phase” of the campaign got under way as August turned to September. Orators from all parties spread out across the land with prepared texts and throat lozenges. The loudest voice, at first, was that of the Socialist presidential candidate, Eugene Debs. (“The capitalists made no mistake in nominating Mr. Roosevelt. They know him well.… He [has] nothing in common with the working class.”)
A quieter voice eventually proved to have more effect than any other. From the moment of his selection as Roosevelt’s running mate, the fifty-two-year-old Charles W. Fairbanks had been caricatured as a “stuffed club” and “Wall Street puppet.” He was mocked for his spindly height, his triple-strand baldness, his prim manners and paper-dry personality. The New York Sun compared him unfavorably to a table of logarithms, while the Evening Post opined that he had been nominated for national-security reasons. “The maddest anarchist would never think of killing Roosevelt to make Fairbanks President.”
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