"Great-Heart": The Life Story of Theodore RooseveltHenderson, Daniel
General
"Great-Heart": The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt
Henderson, Daniel
Presidents -- United States -- Biography; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
Roosevelt made a typically strenuous fight for the control of
delegates to the national Republican Convention, and when he was
defeated he and his supporters created the Progressive party, by which
at Chicago, he was nominated for the Presidency. In response to those
who criticised him for seeking a third term when he had previously
announced that he would not accept another nomination, he explained
that he had meant three consecutive terms.
It was while he was conducting a whirlwind campaign for election that
he was shot by a crank. The shooting occurred in Milwaukee. Roosevelt
was entering the automobile that was to drive him to the meeting place
when the fanatic fired at him. The bullet lodged in his shoulder.
With characteristic dauntlessness, Roosevelt insisted on going on the
platform, where he told the waiting multitude that he had been shot,
and then went on to deliver a rousing speech that lasted over an hour.
When Woodrow Wilson heard of the assault upon Roosevelt, he
chivalrously offered to discontinue his own campaign, but the Colonel
refused this concession. After a few days spent in recuperation he
resumed his speaking tour with undiminished vigor. In the Presidential
election which followed he received eighty-eight electoral votes. He
had divided the Republican party in all states. In twenty-eight of the
states he received a majority over Taft. Through this division in the
Republican ranks, Woodrow Wilson became President.
WORLD PEACE
While Roosevelt and Wilson were for the most part in opposition to
each other, some have wrongly said, with regard to the proposal for
a league of nations, that Roosevelt was backward and reactionary in
his attitude. This is directly confuted by the prophetic speech he
delivered at Christiania, Norway, May 5, 1910, while on his world tour.
His utterance there shows that fundamentally President Wilson and he
were thinking alike on this subject:
“Something should be done as soon as possible to check the growth of
armaments, especially naval armaments, by international agreement.
No one power could or should act by itself; for it is eminently
undesirable, from the standpoint of peace and righteousness, that a
power which really does believe in peace should place itself at the
mercy of some rival which may at bottom have no such belief and no
intention of acting on it.
“But, granted sincerity of purpose, the great powers of the world
should find no insurmountable difficulty in reaching an agreement which
would put an end to the present costly and growing extravagances of
expenditures on naval armaments. An agreement merely to limit the size
of ships would have been very useful a few years ago, and would still
be of use; but the agreement should go much further.
“Finally, it would be a master stroke if those great powers honestly
bent on peace would form a league of peace, not only to keep peace
among themselves, but to prevent by force if necessary, its being
broken by others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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