T.R.
Theodore Roosevelt or “T.R.” as his staff called him, wasn’t the kind of Republican we think of today. He was a “Progressive” Republican, interested in conservation (he established five national parks) and in reducing the power of the massive business monopolies.
He was serving as Governor of New York when President McKinley asked him to run for Vice President in 1900. McKinley needed to replace his first Vice President who died of heart failure in 1899. Roosevelt’s nomination also gave New York’s more conservative Republican Party the opportunity to get rid of him. T.R. gave the McKinley campaign the “spark” of youth (he was forty-one) and energy from his Rough Rider background. It helped win the state and nation in a tough election campaign against Populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan.
The hope of Republican Party leaders was that Roosevelt would disappear in the background like most Vice Presidents. But when anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley in September of 1901, everything changed. The President died a week later, and the Party was stuck with Roosevelt. As Ohioan and National Republican Boss Mark Hanna said: “Now look, that damned cowboy is President of the United States”.
Roosevelt served the remaining three and a half years of McKinley’s term, then earned his own overwhelming re-election in 1904. In 1908 he felt bound by Washington’s precedent of two terms and chose not to run. He threw his support to the Secretary of War, Cincinnati’s William Howard Taft, who defeated Democrat Bryan once again. T.R. soon left on a world tour that included a massive safari of Africa, and didn’t return to the United States for over a year. As Taft’s term progressed, he began to “stray” towards more traditional conservative Republicanism and Roosevelt tried to reorganize the Party to favor more Progressive ideas.
A Progressive Republican
In 1912 he ran against Taft for the Republican nomination. In spite of Roosevelt’s popularity, Taft had the regular Party support and won the convention vote. T.R. then ran as a third party candidate for the Progressive Party, dubbed the “Bull Moose” Party in Roosevelt’s honor. It was during that campaign that Teddy Roosevelt was shot.
On October 14, 1912, Roosevelt was scheduled to give a speech in Milwaukee. As he left his hotel for the engagement, a saloonkeeper named John Schrank fired a bullet into T.R. It passed through the fifty pages of his address and a steel reinforced eyeglass case before entering the former President’s chest. The assembled crowd grabbed the shooter. Only Roosevelt’s personal intervention prevented a lynching.
Roosevelt knew he was shot. His staff wanted to transport him immediately to a hospital. But Roosevelt coughed and realized that there wasn’t blood. He assumed correctly that the bullet had not penetrated his lung, so demanded to continue with the speech.
He stood at the podium as his staff waited for him to collapse. Teddy delivered a new opening line, displaying the tattered speech and blood soaked shirt:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”
He then proceeded to deliver the full ninety-minute speech, glaring at his over-attentive assistants. Afterwards he went to the hospital where they used the newly acquired X-Ray machine to find the bullet lodged in his chest muscle. It remained there for the rest of his life.
Risking Life
Saturday afternoon President Trump emulated Roosevelt, trying to show that COVID cannot kill a Trump. The problem is, that while Roosevelt was risking his own life on the platform in Milwaukee, President Trump continues to risk the lives of his supporters. More than 2,000 were invited, but only a few hundred, some paid to be there, gathered on the White House lawn to listen to a campaign speech delivered from the Truman Balcony. The one thing the President did prove is that he could maintain his coherence in a twenty-minute campaign oration. That improved on his rant and profanity laced two-hour radio interview with Rush Limbaugh the day before.
But he still gathered a crowd in defiance of COVID protocols, just as he did at the “super-spreader” Supreme Court Justice nomination. And he also risked his own recovery, trying to prove that he is “a winner” over COVID. Even those who don’t support the President still hope he recovers. But he’s less than a week from leaving the hospital, and likely is still infectious.
October Surprise
But Donald Trump is desperate to get back on the campaign trail. And he’s also desperate to keep the spotlight on his candidacy, and not on the drip-drip-drip of news from his tax returns emerging from the New York Times. The “October Surprises” he was counting on seem to be waning. Attorney General Bill Barr says he can’t deliver a “Biden Indictment” from the Durham investigation. And the Johnson Senate Committee investigation of Ukraine and Biden was unable to turn Russian disinformation into any actual charges or evidence in an eighty page report.
Secretary of State Pompeo is now promising Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 lost emails before Election Day. That might have been an effective “surprise”: if Donald Trump was still running against Clinton. Since he isn’t – so what? But in all likelihood Pompeo is spoofing Trump along until after November 3rd. That way he doesn’t have to endure the criticism that Barr is taking from the President.
Teddy Roosevelt “doubled down” on his image by delivering the Milwaukee speech. It was exactly what the public expected him to do. And while it was courageous, and reckless, and probably foolish, it made for great spectacle. Donald Trump hopes to find that same spectacle in his “courageous” recovery from the COVID “plague”. His visual of choice: standing on the Truman Balcony overlooking his “admiring masses”. It has “Mussolini” overtones. But to his base, he looks courageous and perhaps reckless. The problem, of course, is to everyone else he not only looks foolish; he looks desperate. And that’s not a “good” image for re-election.
Roosevelt lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Taft came in third. Twenty-three days left until we learn of Trump’s fate.
