Lot 362
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
(1858 - 1919) Twenty-sixth President of the United States who started the Panama Canal, settled the Russo-Japanese War, broke up Standard Oil and encouraged conservation. Very fine content T.Ms., 18pp. 4to., [n.p. poss Chicago, n.d., c. April-May 1912] a draft speech with numerous penciled corrections and emendations in Roosevelt's hand accusing the Republican Party of being beholden to party bosses as opposed to the party rank and file during the heated three-way election of 1912. Roosevelt specifically accuses the Chairman of the New York County Republican Committee, Samuel S. Koenig, and the State Chairman, William Barnes, of wholesale election fraud, manipulating ballots and rigging the primary in the favor of the incumbent, William H. Taft. Roosevelt writes in very small part: "…the fundamental issue in this fight is an issue of honesty, decency, fair play. Have the people the right to rule? Have the masses of the4 Republican Party, the rank and file, the plain people in whom Abraham Lincoln trusted, the right to express their will as to who the nominee for President will be? Or are they to be bullied and defrauded out of that right and is the nomination be entrusted to the representatives of political and financial privilege…the representatives of the power of pillage, the men who, with the backing of big crooked business, working through the lowest kind of political machinery and count on the silence or support of every newspaper that is owned or controlled by…the great financial powers that work in the darkness… We have just held a primary in New York City. The Chairman of the Republican Organization in New York County, Mr. Koenig, who in this fight is a lieutenant of Mr. Barnes, has conducted the campaign for President Taft… Mr. Koenig had been given the right to name all the inspectors at the primary election in the County of New York and had already used that right to throw out over a hundred of the inspectors simply because it was known that they were supporting the Roosevelt ticket… (I may add that even before I left yesterday afternoon, two or three men had come round to me protesting that they were not being given an opportunity to vote when they went to the polls, that they could not find any Roosevelt tickets, that there were no Roosevelt waters, that they were maltreated and that no protection was given to them when they appealed to the police; and I had to call up the Commissioner of Police over the telephone and ask him to issue orders that the police should protect the voters in [sic, and] their right to poll.) Judge Duell telegraphs me that in the seventh assembly district, where William Halpin is leader, every one of the eight elections inspectors was removed and anti-Roosevelt men substituted. In ten election districts of the twenty-sixth assembly district, the ballots did not arrive until eight o'clock in the evening. The polling places had then been filled up with the Koenig-Taft men, who occupied the remaining time in voting, and gave the Roosevelt men no chance to vote until the polls closed, at nine! In three election districts of the twenty-fifth assembly district, the ballots did not arrive until four minutes of nine, and here again the Taft-Koenig men had taken possession of the polling places, and they kept the Roosevelt men out until it was too late to vote. In the thirteenth and fourteenth election districts of the thirtieth assembly district, when the ballot boxes were opened our watchers saw several bundles of ballots with from two ro [sic] five ballots folded in each voted as one, so that in each election district twenty ballots were voted over the number of men recorded as voting. All of these ballots were marked in the Taft column in spite of the protest of our watchers. In the twenty-third assembly district the names of the Roosevelt delegates were not printed on the ballots at all. In the twenty-seventh assembly district the entire Roosevelt ticket was left off the ballot. There was a similar omission in the fifteenth assembly district. On Staten Island, where Mr[.] Cahauney M. Depew was running for delegate on the Taft ticket, there were six election districts where ballots did not arrive at all, nine election districts where they arrived at eight o'clock, and seventeen where they arrived after six o'clock. In the thirty-fifth assembly district, the Roosevelt ticket was misprinted so that the delegates appeared to be running for the national committee instead of the national convention. … In short, the election machinery was used as unscrupulously a in the days of Tweed, names of Roosevelt delegates were left of the ballots, ballots were misprinted, were folded in such a ways as to confuse voters, and in numerous instances were not delivered to polling places until four or five hours after the polls had opened… What was done in New York is substantially what was done in Indiana and in Colorado… and by their fraudulent action which can only be called brutal in the utter defiance of decency, nearly two hundred delegates were thrown out, and the will of the people reversed. … In all these places our opponents have shown that they wish to win by any means, no matter how foul, and that they will not abide by the decision of the people. We ask nothing excepting that the people themselves be permitted to say what they want. There never has been a clearer line-up in the history of this country, that the present line-up. Now men of Illinois, it is for you to see that your Legislature really represents you , and gives you a genuine direct primary where you can express your preferences for President… Their character of the campaign which the chief supporters of Mr[.] Taft are now waging is such as to make it absolutely impossible that they are striving to create a situation where the Republican Party can win at the polls. On the contrary, the methods they are resorting to are such as to make it evident that they are deliberately trying to throw away all chance of victory at the polls provided only they can themselves retain control of the machinery within the party… " Ironically, the election of 1912 saw the first extensive use of the primary election as a method of selecting delegates for party conventions, a key reform of Roosevelt's Progressive movement as a means to wrest control of the party from political bosses. This row between Taft and Roosevelt continued into the convention where on June 22, Roosevelt bid his followers to leave the convention and spark his third-party Progressive (or "Bull Moose") campaign for President. A superb speech bound in leather with elegant guilt lettering, very light toning, else very fine condition.
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