after he made the decision said: "His tail-feathers were all down. The fight had gone out of him and he had changed his former tune to that of: 'I cannot disappoint my Western friends if they insist. . . . I cannot seem to be bigger than the party.' " 1 VII Roosevelt was named for Vice-President. Hanna took over from Platt the tail of the obstreperous bear. The New York Tribune printed a cartoon showing Platt as a railroad workman throwing the switch which turned the Roosevelt flyer off the governorship track and onto the vice-presidential siding. The New York Journal printed a cartoon entitled "Rounded Up," in which Platt, riding triumphantly on his cow-pony, had thrown his lariat, entitled "Vice-Presidency," so as to catch Roosevelt's foot and throw him. After the deed was securely completed by the actual election of Roosevelt, some one asked Senator Platt if he were going to attend the inaugural exercises at Washington. Platt replied: "Yes, I am going down to see Theodore Roosevelt take the veil." 2 And but for a remote chance, the insane whim of the poor creature who murdered McKinley, Roosevelt would have been safely veiled into political sterility. Roosevelt himself felt so. On November 22, 1900, twenty days after he was elected Vice-President, he wrote to a friend, Edward S. Martin: "I do not expect to go any further in politics." Believing his political career ended, he took steps to utilize the energy for which the vice-presidency provided no outlet, by studying law, to equip himself for a new career. 1 Ascribed to Nicholas Murray Butler by Herman Kohlsaat. 2 H. H. Kohlsaat, "McKinley to Harding." THREE POLITICAL LEADERS IN that 1900 campaign Roosevelt came into direct conflict with Bryan, Roosevelt as the Republican candidate for Vice-President campaigning1 against Bryan as the Democratic candidate for President. This was the only occasion when Roosevelt and Bryan faced each other at the polls. But for twelve years, from 1900 until 1912, these two were the dominant leaders in their respective parties. (Bryan had been dominant since four years before, in 1896.) They, with Woodrow Wilson, were in a class apart, and above, in the political history of this quarter-century. For twelve years after 1900 Roosevelt and Bryan competed side by side. Then Woodrow Wilson arose and for the following eight years eclipsed both. No other political figures of the time approached these in the stature of their relations to their parties and to the public. In the six presidential elections from 1896 to 1916, always one of these and sometimes two were among the candidates. In 1896, Bryan ran for President; in 1900, Bryan ran for President and Roosevelt for VicePresident; in 1904, Roosevelt for President; in 1908, Bryan for President; in 1912, Roosevelt and Wilson ran; in 1916, Wilson again. When any one of them was not the candidate himself, he usually had a controlling hand in the selection of whoever else was, and in determining the issues. Bryan nominated himself three times, and in 1912 determined the nomination of Wilson. (Bryan's career is 1 Roosevelt travelled and spoke for eight weeks, covering 21,000 miles in twentyfour States; McKinley repeated his 1896 "front-porch" campaign. unique in that he is the only man who was given his party's nomination for the presidency three times, in spite of repeated failure to win an election; Grover Cleveland was given the Democratic nomination three times, but he contributed to his party the asset of two successes.) Roosevelt nominated himself in 1904, nominated Taft in 1908, and again in 1912 nominated himself as the candidate of a third party that cast more votes than the Republicans. Wilson, having received the nomination in 1912, renominated himself in 1916, and in 1920 only prevented the nomination from being made in accordance with his wishes by preserving the most austere silence, and sternly ordering his secretary not to attempt to influence the convention "by so much as the lifting of a finger." To illustrate the position Roosevelt had, it can be said fairly that the personal relations between him and one man, Taft, first friendly and then hostile, determined the presidency three times and gave a definite bent to history. Roosevelt, Wilson, and Bryan during the greater part of this quarter-century supplied America with its political leadership. In them the people personified their convictions, visualized their aspirations. Then within a single year all three passed off the scene in one way or another, and left America with a lack of accepted leaders, which accounted for much that happened thereafter.1 In January, 1919, Roosevelt died. In September, 1919, Wilson became incapacitated. And the same year may be 1 This passing of outstanding leaders, so striking in the field of politics, also took place in other fields of public thought. In the opening years of this quartercentury there had been such leaders as Joseph Pulitzer, E. L. Godkin, and Henry Watterson in journalism; Cardinal Gibbons, Lyman Abbott, and T. Dewitt Talmadge among clergymen; Charles W. Eliot, then in his prime, and Andrew D. White in education. By 1920 and after, there were none who could be called equivalents of these. The passing of so many accepted spokesmen in the various fields of public thought, the rather sudden poverty of leadership after great riches, was one of the striking phenomena of the times. William Jennings Bryan in 1900, the year of his second cam- From a photograph by United News Pictures. Bryan at the Democratic National Convention in 1924, prematurely old at sixty-four. named, without stretching the facts too much for the sake of emphasizing a coincidence, as the time when Bryan came to be generally recognized as, so to speak, shopworn as having been too long on the shelf, and offered to the public too many times, unsuccessfully. When, in 1925, Bryan died, and in the same year La Follette,' an American era unusually rich in leadership, in forceful personalities, was ended completely. Roosevelt, Bryan, and Wilson were in a class apart. Their leadership had one important basis in common. They represented, each within his party, a common political mood, a mood that arose in America during the nineties and continued, with some changes of objective, into the present century, until displaced by the coming of the Great War in 1914; a mood in which the common man regarded himself as oppressed, as in danger of becoming stratified economically; a mood of revolt against organized wealth, of resentment against the union of "big business" and the boss system in politics. But aside from being children and prophets of that common mood, Roosevelt, Bryan, and Wilson were quite unlike. They were unlike to some extent in the reforms they advocated to meet the common discontent, and even more so in their political methods. In intellect, in temperament, in practically every attribute that enters into personality they were utterly unlike. Decidedly it is desirable to make clear that the grouping of these three here is restricted to their 1 Bryan in his three campaigns received respectively 47, 46, and 43 per cent of the popular vote; in the 1896 election, less than 50,000 added votes, if distributed among the States just right, would have given Bryan victory. Roosevelt received 57 per cent of the popular vote in 1904; in 1912 as the candidate of a third party he received 27 per cent. If he had permitted himself to be a candidate in 1908 he would have received an overwhelming majority. If he had lived until 1920 it is practically certain he would have been the Republican candidate, and would have received probably a larger popular vote than the 60 per cent that went to Harding. Wilson received 41 per cent of the popular vote in 1912 and 49 per cent in 1916. La Follette, as a third-party candidate in 1924, received 16 per cent of the popular vote. |