Let the People Rule by Geoffrey Cowan

Author:Geoffrey Cowan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Chapter Thirteen

For anyone who understood politics, power, and the parliamentary realities of nominating conventions, the outcome should have been clear by the time the 1912 Republican Convention opened on Tuesday morning, June 18. Sam Blythe had provided Saturday Evening Post readers with an excellent briefing six weeks earlier. “Taft will win,” he wrote, “because the men who control the convention, control the machinery, are for him.” They were for him “solely to perpetuate themselves in the control of the machinery. They expect Taft to be beaten in November but they want to retain the organization for future use.” Blythe then explained their strategy:

The temporary roll of the convention will be for Taft, unless the old-line politicians lose their cunning. With any sort of intelligent political work Taft should have a clear majority of the temporary roll. Then the situation becomes easy. The delegates of the temporary roll call will select a credentials committee, to which will be referred such contests as have been held to be meritorious by the national committee. Then the question resolves itself into a situation where a lot of delegates vote whether they themselves shall remain on the roll and become the permanent delegates to the convention, or shall vote to unseat themselves.

Roosevelt’s core campaign staff agreed with Blythe’s assessment. They knew that they were now fighting for public opinion. One way or another, it seemed preordained that they would create a new party, or walk out of the convention and claim to be the true representatives of the Republican Party. Thanks to the primaries, they had a strong case to make: After all, TR had won the popular vote against Taft overwhelmingly. It seemed clear that he would have won hundreds of additional delegates if the public had been allowed to participate in the selection process everywhere. What’s more, he had a clear majority of the delegates from states outside of what were often derided as the “rotten boroughs” of the old Confederacy, delegates chosen from areas where no Republican candidate could ever win an election. Outside of the delegates from those eleven states, Taft had about 300 delegates in his corner, whereas TR had at least 450.

In the view of his millions of supporters, Roosevelt was the legitimate nominee. If the people really were allowed to rule, TR would be the Republican Party choice. But his campaign team needed to use the convention to make their case as effectively as possible, to make sure that the general public would agree.

Once the temporary roll had been chosen, and the chance of finding enough defecting delegates evaporated, the only real issue was how and when to leave the convention. “It being perfectly clear to all of us at Chicago that the National Committee had determined to steal the convention,” O. K. Davis recalled in his memoir, “it was a matter of supreme importance to make the record so plain that the theft would be entirely obvious all over the country.” As the senior press advisor for the campaign, Davis had a front-row view of the deliberations.

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