When the Republican convention met in 1912 I was again a delegate.
In my fifty-six years of national conventions I never had such an intensely disagreeable experience. I felt it my duty to support President Taft for renomination. I thought he had earned it by his excellent administration. I had many ties with him, beginning with our associations as graduates of Yale, and held for him a most cordial regard. I was swayed by my old and unabated love for Roosevelt. In that compromise and harmony were impossible.
I saw that, with the control of the organization and of the convention on the side of Mr. Taft, and with the wild support for Roosevelt of the delegates from the States which could be relied upon to give Republican majorities, the nomination of either would be sure defeat.
I was again a delegate to the Republican convention of 1916.
The party was united. Progressives and conservatives were acting together, and the convention was in the happiest of moods. It was generally understood that Justice Hughes would be nominated if he could be induced to resign from the Supreme Court and accept.
The presiding officer of the convention was Senator Warren G. Harding.
He made a very acceptable keynote speech. His fine appearance, his fairness, justice, and good temper as presiding officer captured the convention. There was a universal sentiment that if Hughes declined the party could do no better than to nominate Senator Harding. It was this impression among the delegates, many of whom were also members of the convention of 1920, which led to the selection as the convention's candidate for president of Warren G. Harding.
My good mother was a Presbyterian and a good Calvinist. She believed and impressed upon me the certainty of special Providence.
It is hard for a Republican to think that the election of Woodrow Wilson was a special Providence, but if our candidate, Mr. Hughes, had been elected he would have had a hostile Democratic majority in Congress.
When the United States went into the war, as it must have done, the president would have been handicapped by this pacifist Congress.
The draft would have been refused, without which our army of four millions could not have been raised. The autocratic measures necessary for the conduct of the war would have been denied.
With the conflict between the executive and Congress, our position would have been impossible and indefensible.
I had a personal experience in the convention. Chairman Harding sent one of the secretaries to me with a message that there was an interval of about an hour when the convention would have nothing to do. It was during such a period the crank had his opportunity and the situation was dangerous, and he wished me to come to the platform and fill as much of that hour as possible. I refused on the ground that I was wholly unprepared, and it would be madness to attempt to speak to fourteen thousand people in the hall and a hundred million outside.
