Topic 16 
ON ELECTION EVE, 1916

THE day before election in 1916, I saw Colonel Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill.  I raised the question as to what would follow if Judge Hughes should by any chance be elected.

"I shall be out of it," said he.  "I shall ask for nothing from him and will recommend nobody.  He will not ask my advice.  So I will just be an elderly literary gentleman of quiet tastes and an interesting group of grandchildren.

"Make no mistake about Hughes.  The men who gave him the nomination will regret the day they did it.  Some of them have reason to regret it now.  He feels that he owes them nothing, that he owes the party nothing.  He will have trouble with the organization, but he will make a fair President.

"You see Mr.  Hughes is grateful to nobody but Almighty God, and I am not so sure he is over grateful to Him.  He truly believes he was chosen by God to be President, when as a matter of fact he was merely picked by the 'Old Guard' to beat Roosevelt."

"Suppose Mr.  Wilson wins, what then?"

"He will muddle along just as he has been, writing notes that are brave, but doing nothing to back them up until Germany decides it wants us in this war and kicks us into it.  Against that contingency he will do nothing and war will find us as unprepared as we were two years ago.

" I shall continue as I have been doing to advocate preparedness and to try to arouse the people to the need of universal military service.  I shall not make the headway I should because of Mr.  Wilson's attitude.  I have no delusions on that score.  But I shall continue, for whatever we do succeed in doing is that much gained.

"But whether it be Mr.  Hughes or Mr.  Wilson that is elected, the result will be that we will be in this war sooner or later unless Mr.  Hughes is much more fortunate than I fear he will be.

"If he is elected and is big enough, if he is strong enough to make an out-and-out declaration of pure Americanism — if he is big enough to serve notice that he will make Germany toe the mark, when and if he becomes President, he may keep us out.

"But Wilson, never! He will have secured his re-election and be in a position to do big things.  But he won't do them.  He'll simply write notes until something so audacious is done that he will wake up to the fact that Germany has been making war upon us while he has been writing."

True to his promise, Colonel Roosevelt issued on election night a declaration that he was in private life and would neither ask anything of Mr.  Hughes, who then appeared to have been elected, or to recommend any one for office.  Later when it appeared that California was in doubt and that Mr.  Wilson might be reelected, he expressed no surprise.

" I was not at all certain in my own mind that the confidence of the New York papers or of theNational Headquarters was fully justified when I gave out that statement," he said.  "But it is just as well I did so.  It certainly left the record straight."