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CHAPTER TWENTY TWO 

Of Theodore Roosevelt And his Time Volume 2

 THE "STEAM ROLLER" CONVENTION OF 1912: 

the contests in the primaries for the election of delegates to the National Republican Convention became extremely animated after Roosevelt's consent to be a candidate was made known. With characteristic frankness and courage he stood by his principles without flinching. On March 20, 1912, he made a speech in Carnegie Hall, New York, when he declared "I stand by my Columbus speech," and reiterated the views he had expressed in it, taking occasion to reply at some length to the criticisms which President Taft had made of his remarks on the question of the recall of judicial decisions. In this speech he quoted an approval of his recall plan which had been given by William Draper Lewis, Dean of the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania, and in which the Dean had said:
"I don't mind saying, however, that I think it unfortunate that it should have been proposed by Colonel Roosevelt. He is a man of such marked characteristics, and his place in the political world is such that he arouses intense enthusiasm on the one hand, and intense animosity on the other. Because of this, the great idea which he has propounded is bound to be beclouded, and its adoption to be delayed. It is a pity that anything so important should be confounded with any man's personality."
Commenting upon this, Roosevelt said:
"As regards the Dean's last paragraph, I can only say that I wish somebody else whose suggestions would arouse less antagonism had proposed it; but nobody else did propose it, and so I had to. I am not leading this fight as a matter of aesthetic pleasure.   I am leading because somebody must lead, or else the fight would not be made at all.''
In closing his speech he said:
"Friends, our task as Americans is to strive for social and industrial justice, achieved through the genuine rule of the people. This is our end, our purpose. The methods for achieving the end are merely expedients, to be finally accepted or rejected, according as actual experience shows that they work well or ill. But in our hearts we must have this lofty purpose, and we must strive for it in all earnestness and sincerity, or our work will come to nothing. In order to succeed we need leaders of inspired idealism, leaders to whom are granted great visions, who dream greatly and strive to make their dreams come true; who can kindle the people with the fire from their own burning souls. The leader for the time being, whoever he may be, is but an instrument, to be used until broken and then to be cast aside; and if he is worth his salt, he will care no more when he is broken than a soldier cares when he is sent where his life is forfeit in order that the victory may be won. In the long fight for righteousness the watchword for all of us is, Spend and be spent. It is of little matter whether any one man fails or succeeds; but the cause shall not fail, for it is the cause of mankind. We, here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men. If on this new continent we merely build another country of great but unjustly divided material prosperity, we shall have done nothing; and we shall do as little if we merely set the greed of envy against the greed of arrogance, and thereby destroy the material well-being of all of us."
In the election of delegates to the Republican National Convention of 1912 a new element entered. In thirteen States,—California, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Wisconsin—preferential primary laws had been enacted and were to go into effect for the first time. Under these laws the rank and file of the party had the right to express their preference for Presidential nominees when they voted for delegates to the convention. In all, these States chose 382 delegates, and the result in their primaries justified the claim that Roosevelt was the choice of a large majority of the voters of the Republican party, for of the 382 delegates chosen 278 were instructed specifically to vote for him as the nominee for President and 68 for Taft, 28 of whom were from Georgia, a hopelessly Democratic State. There were 36 for Senator La Follette of Wisconsin. Early in the primary contests eight delegates-at-large in Massachusetts, avowedly Roosevelt men, had been chosen but under a confusing provision of the law a preference for Taft had been adopted by a small majority, about 3,000. Colonel Roosevelt at once announced that he should demand that this preference be obeyed by the eight delegates, though they had been chosen as Roosevelt supporters, giving as his reason that he intended to have the honest expression of the rank and file obeyed. The primaries in the 36 Congressional districts of the State had resulted in the election of 18 delegates for Roosevelt and 18 for Taft. Later, on the eve of the primaries in the Ohio districts, Mr. Taft announced that the result in them would settle the contest between him and Roosevelt, Ohio being Taft's home State. They resulted in the election of Roosevelt delegates in all the districts, 34 in number, by a majority of 47,000 votes, but neither Mr. Taft nor his managers accepted the verdict as final. On the contrary, they were able through their control of the party machinery to elect four Taft men as delegates-at-large when the State Convention met a short time later, thereby refusing to accept the 47,000 majority among the Republican votes of the State as indicating the will of the party. Their course was precisely opposite to that which Roosevelt had followed in the Massachusetts case.
As a matter of fact, so far as the primaries indicated the wishes of a majority of the Republican voters, they showed undeniably that Roosevelt was the favorite candidate. The total number of delegates in the National Convention was 1,078, and 540 were necessary for a nomination. The great majority of the delegates had been chosen in the old style of primary and their exact attitude toward candidates was, in many instances, not known. At the time the convention met, on June 18, 1912, the leaders of both Roosevelt and Taft forces claimed a majority. In a canvass of the delegates, published by the New York Tribune, a strong Taft advocate, a few days earlier, the number of delegates who had expressed their preference for Roosevelt was placed at 469% and those similarly committed to Taft at 454%. This was frank admission that Roosevelt, on the face of the primary and convention results, had a clear majority of the convention. In describing the proceedings both in the convention and in the National Committee anterior to the meeting of the convention, I shall quote from an account which was submitted to Roosevelt after the election in 1912 and received his approval. I am, therefore, giving his own version of the proceedings which, in his judgment, deprived him of a nomination which was rightfully his.
The seats of more than 200 delegates were contested, and in accordance with established procedure in the party all contests were referred to the National Republican Committee for investigation and report to the convention.
The committee assembled at Chicago ten days in advance of the meeting of the convention. Several of its most influential members had been defeated in the election of delegates and were not to be members of the convention. These were known to be bitterly opposed to Mr. Roosevelt, and it was quite generally asserted in the press that they would use their power to prevent his nomination by so deciding the contests as to secure a majority of the convention against him. It was claimed, also, that in accordance with precedent, the committee had authority to make up the temporary roll of the convention, and thus secure control of its organization.
The composition of the committee was peculiar. It had been the practise for many years for each State delegation to nominate and for the national convention, at the close of its work, to ratify the choice of members of its National Committee to serve for the ensuing four years. In this way each National Committee, through its control over contests, had it in its power to make up the roll of the next succeeding convention, although many or even a majority of its members might not be delegates in that body. In 1912 fifteen members of the committee had failed in their efforts to be chosen delegates; many of them had been thus repudiated by their own party by very large majorities. The total membership of the committee was 53. Of this number 10 were from the Southern States, not one of which would give the nominee of the convention an electoral vote, and four others were from territorial possessions—District of Columbia, Alaska, Hawaii, Philippines, and Porto Rico— which took no part in presidential elections. These three sets of members, 29 in all, actually represented nobody in the convention, yet they were its controlling and dominating force. The members of the committee who had been most signally repudiated by their own people were the leaders in all acts of the committee, and with them stood unswervingly on all questions the Southern and territorial members.
The first act of the committee was to elect Victor Rose-water, of Nebraska, who had failed to be elected a delegate, chairman, he, as vice-chairman of the committee, having been acting chairman because of the death of the occupant of that position. The moving spirits in the committee were Senator Penrose, of Pennsylvania, and Senator Crane, of Massachusetts, both defeated as delegates, and both, like Mr. Rosewater, not eligible for reelection as members of the National Committee. The unconcealed prominence of these repudiated leaders in the business of making up the temporary roll of the convention, and thereby securing control of it, very naturally aroused earnest protest, and impaired confidence in the strict impartiality of the committee's decisions.
But party precedent authorized it, and protest and appeal were vain. The leaders of the committee had the courage of their kind. They went about their task openly and with slight regard for either the rights or the merits of their opponents. They adopted a set of rules, the chief of which was that there should be no roll-call save on the request of twenty members, refusing to cut it down to ten, though under the Constitution of the United States one-fifth of members present is a sufficient number for a roll-call in the Senate or House of Representatives. Having a solid and unshakable majority of thirty-seven in the committee, the leaders knew that twenty members could not be collected in opposition, and that embarrassing roll-calls could thus be avoided. Although President Taft sent a personal request that the hearings of the committee on contests be thrown open to members of the press, the committee voted to hold them behind closed doors, admitting only representatives of the three or four press associations.
It was after the committee had refused to reduce the number of names required for a roll-call from twenty to ten that the brand of "Steam Roller" was applied to the committee's course. It was applied subsequently to the course of the convention, and adopted into general use both by the press in reporting its proceedings and by delegates on the floor.
Although the doors were closed to reporters generally, an occasional bit of illuminating information escaped from the committee room. One such was published in the Chicago Tribime on June 8, 1912, a few days after the committee began its work, as follows:
"While the ninth Alabama contest was under consideration, Senator W. Murray Crane suggested to several members of the committee that it would be wise tactics to seat the Roosevelt delegates.
" 'Big Steve'  Stephenson,  of  Colorado, who holds  a proxy from former Senator Nathan B. Scott, of West Virginia, is reported to have replied:
" 'We can't afford to let them have it. We might be able to spare two votes now, but we must look ahead to the time when we will have to give them something. We can't do it now.''
When the ninth district contest was settled by a vote of 38 to 15 in favor of the Taft forces, National Committee-man Mulvane, an ardent Taft man of Kansas, said to a man friendly to Colonel Roosevelt:
"Now you fellows have got an inkling of what you are going to get. Are you going to waste our time going over all these contests?"
'' What do you fellows intend to do!" Mulvane was asked. "You know you surely can't elect Taft?"
To which Mulvane is said to have responded:
"We can't elect Taft, but we are going to hold on to
this organization, and when we get back four years from
now we will have it and not those d Blank	• insurgents."
At the conclusion of the committee's work, it was announced officially that 92 contests had been investigated and decided; there had been no roll-calls in 74 decisions; roll-calls in 16; unanimous vote in 4, and 2 contests had been abandoned. The net result was that 233 of the contested delegates were given to Taft and 6 to Roosevelt. The daily records of the proceedings of the committee were published in the newspapers of the country under such headlines as the "Steam Roller Continues Its Work." "The Steam Roller Goes on Crushing Out Roosevelt Hopes." "The Steam Roller Gives Forty-Two More Votes to Taft— None to Roosevelt."
When the convention came together it was predicted almost or quite universally by the newspaper correspondents in attendance that Taft's nomination had been assured by the action of the National Committee, since the "Steam Roller" would pursue its course as inflexibly in the convention as it had in the committee. This prediction was fulfilled literally. At the first session formal protest was made by the Roosevelt leaders against allowing seventy-four delegates, whose seats had been contested and whose names had been placed on the temporary roll of the convention, to vote in the election of temporary chairman, since by so doing each would be voting upon his own right to a seat.
In making the protest Governor Hadley of Missouri placed very clearly before the convention the real issue involved, which was simply whether the convention itself or the National Committee was to nominate the candidate for the presidency. He said:
"Were this question simply one of principle I would have no doubt what the decision would be; because upon a question of principle, if it is within the power of the thirty-seven men to say who shall constitute the majority of a convention, then we have ceased to recognize the principle of representative government in this country in the conduct of the Republican party. We have but one form of government in this country, and that is government by political parties, and if the decisions of parties in convention can be finally controlled by those who make up the temporary roll, then we have established within a political organization a political oligarchy with power to make candidates and to defeat candidates; with power to pass laws and to veto laws."
This protest was in complete accord with the one that Colonel Roosevelt, as recorded in Chapter 5, Volume 1 of this history, made in the Republican Convention of 1884, the first such convention he ever attended.
His protest in 1884, like that of Governor Hadley in 1912, was aimed at the assumption that a National Committee, under the control of men who were not delegates in the convention, should dictate the convention's action in utter disregard of the principles of representative government.
   The convention of 1884, not being under Steam Roller control, heeded Mr. Roosevelt's protest and elected Mr. Lynch by a vote of 431 in his favor to 382 for General Clayton. In 1912, however, the appeal of Governor Hadley was made to a very different body of delegates. By that time precisely such a "political oligarchy" as he described had been established within the party, firmly intrenched behind precedent, and this the Steam Roller operators proceeded to demonstrate. The rejected delegate who was in the chair by virtue of being chairman of the National Committee, had been coached in advance for the emergency and was, so to speak, "loaded" to meet it. He ruled against the protest, taking from his pocket a carefully prepared document in which it was claimed that his decision was in accordance with party precedent of more than half a century.
Mr. Finley Peter Dunne ("Mr. Dooley"), who was present in the convention, wrote and published this account of the incident in the American Magazine of September 1912:
''After Mr. Victor Rosewater had been instructed in his duties as acting chairman of the National Committee by the delectable three—William Barnes, Jr., Murray Crane, and Boies Penrose—and had rehearsed his decision on the right of the National Committee to seat the Taft delegates (which was prepared for him) until he was almost letter perfect, and was about to retire to his sleepless couch, the Senator from Pennsylvania genially said to him: 'Victor, as soon as you've made that decision jump off the platform, for some one is going to take a shot at you, sure.' The effect of this kindly counsel upon young Mr. Rosewater was not soothing. Yet he made the decision. There is no doubt about that. It is in the official record, written down by the official reporters the night before. But no one heard him make it. The actual, physical disposition of the decision is unknown. The impression of those who sat in front of the chairman and watched the play of his throat muscles was that he swallowed it,"
After this ruling there was no doubt as to the dominating power of the National Committee over the convention. The Steam Roller went smoothly, relentlessly, and even proudly forward, crushing out all opposition. The committee's choice for temporary chairman, Senator Elihu Root, was placed in nomination and, by the votes of the 74 contested delegates whose names had been placed on the roll by the committee, was elected. The result of the ballot showed how vital their votes were, for the figures were 558 for Mr. Root and 501 for his chief opponent, with 19 scattering and not voting.
To have taken chances with less than 74 votes would have been reckless, for the Steam Roller would have been thrown off the track, thus making the convention itself the nominating power.
When Mr. Root had taken the chair and had delivered his address, the Roosevelt leaders renewed their protest against allowing the 74 contested delegates to vote in the selection of committees of the convention, including the committee on credentials. Mr. Root overruled the protest, sustaining his decision on the ground of party precedent and parliamentary practise. In giving his decision, he said:
"No man can be permitted to vote upon the question of his own right to a seat in the convention, but the rule does not disqualify any delegate whose name is upon the roll from voting upon the contest of any other man's right or from participating in the ordinary business of the convention so long as he holds his seat. Otherwise, any minority could secure control of a deliberative body by grouping a sufficient number of their opponents in one motion, and by thus disqualifying them turn the minority into a majority without any decision upon the merits of the motion. . . . To hold that a member whose seat is contested may take no part in the proceedings of this body would lead to the conclusion that if every seat were contested, as it surely would be if such a rule were adopted, there could be no convention at all, as nobody would be entitled to participate.''
Thus the National Committee's control of the convention was claimed to be in accordance with precedent. The claim could have been made with equal justice for the reverse course. Either claim would have been purely technical. The true test was, Did Mr. Root and his fellows in good faith seek to find out and give effect to the honestly expressed wish of the rank and file of the Republican party? The answer must be that they did not, for that answer was returned at the polls by the members of the rank and file themselves in the subsequent election.
After the decision was announced Roosevelt, who was in Chicago, instructed his delegates to take no further part in the deliberations of the convention. An offer had been brought to him to turn over a sufficient number of Southern delegates to secure either his own nomination or that of any one he would designate. To this Roosevelt answered—and this statement is made upon unimpeachable authority—that he was not interested in the fortunes of himself or any other one man, but in certain great fundamental principles which affected the right of honest self-government ; that if the roll was purged he would accept the nomination of any man made by the convention, but if the roll was not purged he would neither accept a nomination of himself nor support that of any other man.
With Mr. Root's decision in support of its course, the Steam Roller proceeded merrily on its way. With the aid of the votes of the 74 contested delegates, it secured the appointment of a committee on credentials which could be depended upon to ratify all the findings of the National Committee on contested seats, which it proceeded to do, reporting in favor of seating the 74 as permanent members. When the vote on acceptance of this report was put before the convention for adoption, the temporary chairman held sternly to his decision that no one of the 74 whose seat was contested could vote on his own case, but as his 73 companions in dispute could be relied on to vote for him, the deprivation was easily borne. All "regular," all "in accordance with precedent" in conventions since they were first established! The operators of the Steam Roller themselves had created the precedent in accordance with which they were operating it, and knowing their business thoroughly, they had made no mistakes. Again it may be said, they could have cited equally good precedent for an opposite course.
With the 74 contested delegates firmly in their seats, the remaining work of the convention went on with only slight and occasional friction. Nothing jarred the progress of the Steam Roller. Occasionally a delegate, not entirely reconciled to its crushing progress, made the point of order that it was "exceeding the speed limit," but so general had recognition of its control of the proceedings become that the chairman was able to look upon such protest as an uncommonly good joke, and join in the general laugh.
Only once was the beaten path of "regularity" departed from, and the responsible person in the case was Mr. Root, who had been elected permanent as well as temporary chairman. During the roll-call for the nomination of candidates for the presidency, the vote of Massachusetts was being polled. An account of what occurred was published by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, of Harvard University, who was a member of the delegation, and from this the following quotation is made:
"The first delegate-at-large replied to his name: 'Present and not voting.' Whereupon the Honorable Elihu Root, president of the convention, called the Taft alternate. Forthwith Frederick Fosdick, chairman of 'the Roosevelt Eighteen,' stepped out into the aisle, raising his hand to command attention, and said: 'Massachusetts is a law-abiding State, and will not stand for such a steal.' Thereupon, the honored president of the convention advanced to the edge of the platform and said: 'If the delegates from Massachusetts will not do their duty, we will call upon those who will do it.' To which Mr. Fosdick manfully replied: ' No convention can make me vote for any man.' A second Roosevelt delegate answered, 'Present and not voting, ' and a second alternate was called who voted for Taft. This, in brief, is the reason why the Massachusetts delegation, which was divided 18 to 18, shows on the record 20 votes 'Taft' and 16 'present and not voting.'
"If this transfer of two votes was fair play, good parliamentary law, and the traditional practice of a Republican convention, its basis can be found in the printed records of the successive Republican conventions since 1856. They have been examined by the writer from beginning to end as the basis of this article. There is not one single rule, vote, or decision in any one of the fourteen sets of proceedings which is a precedent for the decision of Mr. Root. On the contrary, the ruling was contrary to every precedent which bears on the case."
"Why Mr. Root thought it so necessary to get these two additional votes for Taft has never been revealed. His act, Professor Hart shows, had no precedent in its support, and as such mars the perfect record of "regularity" for the convention's conduct. The fact that no protest was made to it shows that the convention managers insisted on strict regularity and obedience to precedent only when such conduct was necessary for the accomplishment of their purpose. They thus confessed that it was in their power to violate law and precedent whenever they chose to do so, or whenever their chairman elected to lead them in a new departure. The two votes were not absolutely necessary to secure Taft's nomination, for when the roll-call was ended the record stood: Taft, 561; Roosevelt, 107; La Follette, 41; Cummins, 17; Hughes, 2; present and not voting, 349. Taft thus received 21 votes more than were necessary for a nomination, and the two snatched, as it were, from Massachusetts by Mr. Root were superfluous. The Roosevelt delegates, under Roosevelt's personal direction, had withdrawn from active participation in the proceedings of the convention, and only about a fourth of them joined in the balloting.
The Steam Roller had gone over them, but subsequent events were to show that it had by no means crushed them. One of the last acts of the convention was the election of a new National Committee to serve for four years, thus placing the controlling power of the convention of 1916 in the hands of a like body to that which had dominated the convention of 1912.