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to the chagrin of his colleagues. In his message to Congress (December 7) President Roosevelt congratulated the country on the satisfactory settlement which had "removed from the field of discussion and possible danger a question liable to become more acutely accentuated with each passing year."

In spite of his oft-professed indifference to the effects of his public acts upon his political fortunes, Roosevelt was extremely anxious for the indorsement of the American people by a reelection in 1904. For three and a half years he had been president by accident. He wanted to be president in his own right. Yet a policy as strenuous as his had necessarily made him many political enemies. The "bosses" resented his independence. Wall Street was nervously apprehensive as to how far his crusade would go to bring the great corporations to the heel of the law. Capitalists complained of his "meddlesomeness" in descending from the calm heights of constitutional propriety to mix in a quarrel between them and their "men." The American Federation of Labor passed a resolution of censure against him (September, 1903) because he had reinstated in the Government Printing Office an assistant foreman, W. A. Miller, who had been removed by his chief simply because he had been expelled from a labor union. And from all quarters the President was receiving protests against "the rape of Panama." Even Mr. Cleveland, who had been heart and soul with him in the anthracite crisis, wrote during the campaign of 1904 of the need to "rid the country of Rooseveltism and its entire brood' of dangers and humiliations."1

It was understood that the "interests" intended to substitute Mark Hanna for Roosevelt in the convention of 1904, and the President did not hesitate to call upon Hanna to show his hand. Several state conventions had declared for Roosevelt in 1902; and just before the Ohio convention met (June 3, 1903), Senator Foraker, who was not on the best of terms with his junior colleague, asserted that the convention would indorse Roosevelt. Hanna thereupon announced his determination to oppose such

1 Robert McElroy, "Grover Cleveland, the Man and the Statesman," Vol. II, p. 344.

an indorsement, on the ground that it was the business of the national convention, which was to meet a year later, to select its candidate freely.' He telegraphed his intention of opposing the resolution to Roosevelt, who was on a speaking tour in the Far West. Roosevelt replied from Seattle, May 25: "Your telegram received. I have not asked any man for his support. I have had nothing whatever to do with raising this issue. Inasmuch as it has been raised, of course, those who favor my administration and my nomination will favor indorsing both, and those who do not will oppose." The motive of this rather curt message Roosevelt explained in a letter to Lodge a few days later: "I decided that the time had come to stop shilly-shallying and let Hanna know definitely that I did not intend to assume the position, at least passively, of a suppliant to whom he might give the nomination as a boon." He "rather expected Hanna to make a fight." But the Ohio senator, now in his sixty-sixth year and far from a well man, had really no wish to contest the nomination. He immediately replied to Roosevelt's telegram: "I shall not oppose the indorsement of your administration and candidacy by our state convention. I have given the substance of this to the Associated Press." Hanna's death on February 15, 1904, shattered any plans that his supporters may have entertained of forcing the nomination upon him at the eleventh hour. The way was open clear for Roosevelt, who was nominated by acclamation at the convention at Chicago, June 21-23. Governor Charles W. Fairbanks of Indiana was named for the vice presidency.

The Democrats were in a quandary. Bryan had been twice defeated, but he had not abated a jot of his convictions on free silver (though the party as a whole regarded the issue as dead), and many of the leading Democrats in the East and South, who had supported him in 1896 and 1900, were thoroughly sick of "Bryanism." There was a decided movement toward Grover Cleveland, who had been living in retirement at Princeton for seven years, and whose solid merits were beginning to be more

1 Compare this sudden solicitude for the untrammeled independence of the convention with Hanna's pre-convention campaign for McKinley in 1896 (pp. 277-278).

appreciated by his fellow countrymen. The ovation which he received at the opening of the Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exposition at St. Louis on April 30, 1904, was a testimony to his strength. Roosevelt wrote to Lodge from Seattle, on the very day that he received Hanna's first telegram: "Most of the people out here believe that Cleveland will be nominated on the Democratic ticket and that he will be a very formidable man to beat. . . . Pierpont Morgan and other Wall Street men have been announcing publicly within the past fortnight that they should support Mr. Cleveland against me with all their power." And Bryan at the same time published in his Commoner a long editorial denouncing Cleveland as "the office boy in a Wall Street institution, the logical candidate in case the Democratic party returns to its wallow in the mire." But in spite of appeals from his old friends like Olney and Dickinson, and even of his old enemy Tammany Hall, to enter the campaign, Cleveland relieved the anxiety of both Roosevelt and Bryan by a positive refusal to allow his name to be used. He was ready to give his loyal support to any conservative Democrat, though his own choice was Judge Gray of Delaware. The Democrats, however, had no possible conservative candidate besides himself who had any chance of beating Roosevelt. Moreover, the leading radical candidate for the nomination, the man on whose shoulders the mantle of Bryan seemed about to fall, was William R. Hearst of New York, the millionaire owner of a chain of sensational newspapers. Hearst had been elected to Congress in 1902, but he was rarely in his seat at the Capitol, preferring to spend his time and money scheming for delegates to the national convention. He had a reputation as a demagogue rather than as a statesman. To escape from Bryan to Hearst was like jumping from the frying-pan into the fire.

An early trial of strength between the radicals and the conservatives in the convention was made when Bryan was defeated in his attempt to seat a contesting Hearst delegation from Illinois. The "peerless leader" was not able to force the silver plank on the convention as he had done four years earlier at Kansas City. The platform remained silent on the currency

issue, while arraigning the whole policy, foreign and domestic, of the Republican administration as "spasmodic, erratic, sensational, spectacular, and arbitrary." The man to whom the Democrats turned in their plight was Judge Alton B. Parker of the New York Court of Appeals. He received 658 votes on the first ballot, to 200 for Hearst, and 139 distributed among eleven other names. Parker's chief qualifications for the nomination were rather negative. It was said that he was nominated chiefly with the purpose of heading off Hearst. As a conservative Eastern Democrat he had not bolted the ticket when it was led by Bryan; and as a New Yorker he might carry Roosevelt's state, on which the hopes of Democratic success depended, and from which the Democrats had chosen all their presidential candidates save one (Hancock of Pennsylvania, in 1880) from the close of the Civil War to the advent of Bryan.

Immediately after the nomination Judge Parker threw a bombshell into the convention in the shape of a telegram to Governor Sheehan of the New York delegation, stating that he regarded the gold standard "as firmly and irrevocably established" and should act accordingly if elected. He requested that in case his views on this subject proved unsatisfactory to the majority of the convention, his name be withdrawn and another candidate chosen. After a heated discussion, in which the Bryanites demanded a revision of the platform and the nomination of a new candidate, the conservatives won again by securing a vote of 794 to 191 for the approval of the following reply to Judge Parker's telegram: "The platform adopted by this convention is silent on the question of a monetary standard, because it is not regarded by us as a possible issue in this campaign. . Therefore there is nothing in the views expressed by you in the telegram just received which would preclude a man entertaining them from accepting a nomination on the said platform." Judge Parker's telegram was praised as an act of courage by his supporters like Cleveland; but the Republicans declared that he sent it in a "blue funk" because several influential New York papers attacked the platform for rejecting a gold plank, while Bryan asserted that if the candidate had had the courage to

announce his views before his nomination, the convention would never have chosen him. Bryan repeated his charge made in April, in a speech against the "reorganizers," that Judge Parker was "utterly unfit" to lead the Democratic party.

It is practically certain, as Champ Clark, the permanent chairman of the St. Louis convention, remarked many years later, that "Colonel Roosevelt would have been elected, no matter what the Democratic platform was or who was the Democratic candidate, for the tide was running strong in his favor." At any rate, Judge Parker proved to be a veritable man of straw against his popular fellow New Yorker. His sterling qualities as a judge and a gentleman were a poor offset to his lack of political qualifications. He was almost unknown beyond the limits of his own state. He had no political record, no gifts of oratorical appeal to the voters, no program of leadership on the subjects of the trusts, finance, labor, and foreign policy, in which the public was interested. A Republican campaign orator remarked that the Democratic ticket was composed of "an enigma from New York and a ruin from West Virginia"-the latter epithet referring to Henry G. Davis, the octogenarian nominee for the vice presidency. The strange spectacle was presented of a conservative successor to Bryan pitted against a radical successor to McKinley. For Roosevelt in his attack on privilege, had, to paraphrase the witty remark of an English statesman, "caught the Democrats in bathing and stolen their clothes." The only exciting incident in the campaign came toward its close, when Judge Parker accused the Republican manager, George B. Cortelyou, of using the information about the business of the big corporations which he had gained as Secretary of Commerce in Roosevelt's cabinet (1903-1904) for the purpose of extracting from them large campaign contributions. Three days before the election the President issued a public denial of Parker's "slanderous accusations," declaring them to be "unqualifiedly and atrociously false." As the Democratic candidate had neither the facts at hand to substantiate his serious charges nor the time, had he had the facts, to make them 1" My Quarter Century of American Politics" (1920), p. 151.

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