epublican
party and their supporters among the special interests "viewed
with, alarm" this frank attack upon their intrenched privileges. The
Progressives, however, welcomed with eagerness this robust leadership.
The breach in the Republican party was widening with steadily
accelerating speed.

In the fall of 1910 a new demand arose that Roosevelt should enter
actively into politics. Though it came from his own State, he resisted
it with energy and determination. Nevertheless the pressure from his
close political associates in New York finally became too much for him,
and he yielded. They wanted him to go as a delegate to the Republican
State Convention at Saratoga and to be a candidate for Temporary
Chairman of the Convention--the officer whose opening speech is
traditionally presumed to sound the keynote of the campaign. Roosevelt
went and, after a bitter fight with the reactionists in the party,
led by William Barnes of Albany, was elected Temporary Chairman over
Vice-President James S. Sherman. The keynote was sounded in no uncertain
tones, while Mr. Barnes and his associates fidgeted and suffered.

Then came a Homeric conflict, with a dramatic climax. The reactionary
gang did not know that it was beaten. Its members resisted stridently
an attempt to write a direct primary plank into the party platform. They
wished to rebuke Governor Hughes, who was as little to their liking
as Roosevelt himself, and they did not want the direct primary. After
speeches by young James Wadsworth, later United States Senator, Job
Hedges, and Barnes himself, in which they bewailed the impending demise
of representative government and the coming of mob rule, it was clear
that the primary plank was defeated. Then rose Roosevelt. In a speech
that lashed and flayed the forces of reaction and obscurantism, he
demanded that the party stand by the right of the people to rule.
Single-handed he drove a majority of the delegates into line. The plank
was adopted. Thenceforward the convention was his. It selected, as
candidate for Governor, Henry W. Stimson, who had been a Federal
attorney in New York under Roosevelt and Secretary of War in Taft's
Cabinet. When this victory had been won, Roosevelt threw himself
into the campaign with his usual abandon and toured the State, making
fighting speeches in scores of cities and towns. But in spite of
Roosevelt's best efforts, Stimson was defeated.

All this active participation in local political confl