The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (149 page)

But the true dictators of the convention were not McKinley’s friends. Senator Platt, nursing a broken rib, was so confident about the preliminary arrangements he had made in behalf of Roosevelt’s nomination that he beat a wheezy retreat on Tuesday night. He left the task of actually creating the nomination in the hands of his old friend, Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania—in Platt’s judgment, “the ablest politician this country ever produced.”
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Quay was happy to undertake the work, not out of any especial love for Roosevelt so much as a deep desire to hurt Mark Hanna. Quay was an ex–United States Senator, and wanted to regain office, but Hanna had blocked his efforts.
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To strike the Chairman down
in front of the National Convention would therefore be sweet revenge; and Platt, by turning Roosevelt over to him, had supplied Quay with an ideal missile.

Few delegates, least of all Roosevelt, took any notice of Quay on Wednesday morning, as he sat short, squat, silent, and Indian-eyed
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in his light suit at an inconspicuous place in the Pennsylvania delegation. He waited until Roosevelt had escorted Henry Cabot Lodge to the podium as elected chairman of the convention—a moment of great pride to both men—before rising to offer an amendment to the rules. Amid puzzled silence, Quay read a resolution to equalize, and where necessary reduce, the size of delegations at the convention, at a ratio of 1 to every 1,000 votes cast in their home states.
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Just what this had to do with nominating Roosevelt for Vice-President none of Platt’s aides could tell. But for the first time since the convention opened, there was real noise in the hall.
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The majority of the delegates from East and West roared approval, while those from the South howled with fear. They realized that Quay’s amendment would cut their ranks in half. Republican voting was traditionally light in Dixie. And since most of Chairman Hanna’s supporters hailed from the South, “equalization” would in effect neutralize his power over the convention. Quay’s true motive dawned on the politically astute: he was not remotely interested in delegate representation; he wanted something from Hanna. Sure enough, the Pennsylvanian suggested that a vote on the amendment be postponed overnight so that “the delegates would have ample time to become familiar with it.”
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Shortly afterward Hanna was seen crossing over and resignedly asking Quay what his price was. “If you will nominate Roosevelt,” said Quay, “I will withdraw the resolution. If you won’t, I shall insist upon its coming to a vote, and you know what will happen there.”

Hanna did. The resolution would pass on the grounds of simple fairness. He would lose his Southern delegates, and lose control of the convention; there would be no guarantee then even of President McKinley’s renomination.

That night Hanna, grimacing at the taste of wormwood, announced that in view of “strong and earnest sentiment … from all parts of the country,” he would support the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt for Vice-President.

“The best we can do,” he told his supporters, “is pray fervently for the continued health of the President.”
⁷⁴

Roosevelt, meanwhile, sat alone in his hotel room. He had already bowed to the inevitable, and would accept the nomination for what it was worth. Having finished one of the
Histories
of Josephus over the weekend, he was now reading Thucydides.
⁷⁵

S
HORTLY AFTER TEN O’CLOCK
the following morning the icy tones of Cabot Lodge announced that the business before the convention would be the nomination of candidates for President of the United States.

Senator Foraker spoke for an eloquent quarter of an hour on the glories of the McKinley Administration, and was awarded with an ovation that reminded one observer, Murat Halstead, of “the halcyon days of the Plumed Knight.” Then eighteen thousand voices joined in the singing of “The Union Forever”—an “incomparably moving” sound even to the dignified correspondent of
Harper’s Weekly
. “When one hears that sound one must either sing or cry.”
⁷⁶

Almost before the delegates resumed their seats, Governor Roosevelt had leaped up beside Lodge to second the nomination. He stared briefly into the eyes of his best friend, while applause rolled around them. Sixteen years before, as young delegates to the convention in Chicago, they had felt the pain of defeat together, and heard predictions of their political ruin; now they were two of the most powerful men in the country, and the party was shouting homage to them. It was a sweet moment—but Lodge’s face was distorted with “almost agonized anxiety,”
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and Roosevelt turned quickly to address the audience.

“Mr. Chairman and my fellow delegates, my beloved Republicans and Americans …” An accomplished orator now, he moved confidently through his prepared text, speaking at a torrential speed unusual even for him, his body trembling with the force of his gestures. A man in the audience was reminded of “a graduate in a school of acting”;
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a woman sighed that “he would make a first-class lover … from the stage point of view.” Here was no soft, hesitant wooer, she felt, “but one who would come at once to the
question, and, if the lady repulsed him, bear her away despite herself, as some of his ancestors must have done in the pliocene age.…”
⁷⁹

While Rose Coghlan dreamed, so did Theodore Roosevelt.

He gazed through his tossing lenses at the thousands of banners, the streamers, the bright balloons, the tricolored bunches of pampas grass, the hanging Stars and Stripes. The whole auditorium looked, said a nearby reporter, like a kaleidoscope.
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M
C
K
INLEY AND
R
OOSEVELT
were nominated by votes of 926 and 925 respectively—the Governor casting the convention’s only vote against himself.
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After that final gesture to his lost independence, he proclaimed himself a loyal member of the team, and offered his services to Hanna for the duration of the campaign.

The Chairman told him that it would be, as far as McKinley was concerned, a repetition of the campaign of 1896. While the Democratic nominee—William Jennings Bryan, again—stumped the country on behalf of the disadvantaged classes, the President would remain at home in Canton, Ohio, and hold his customary front-porch receptions to visiting deputations. Roosevelt would have to do most of the traveling, and most of the speechmaking; fortunately he was good at both.

The candidate was cheerfully agreeable. “I am as strong as a bull moose,” he assured Hanna, “and you can use me to the limit, taking heed of but one thing and that is my throat.” He did not wish to
seem to be neglecting his duties as Governor of New York, but fortunately “July, August, September, and October are months in which there is next to no work.”
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All through that quarter of a year, accordingly, Roosevelt crossed and recrossed the country, with such numbing frequency, and such an incessant outpouring of his familiar political philosophy, as to blur the sensibilities of all but a cataloger. Suffice to say that he traveled farther and spoke more than any candidate, presidential or vice-presidential, in nineteenth-century history, with the exception of Bryan himself, four years before. But Bryan in 1900 could not match Roosevelt. By 3 November the Governor had made a total of 673 speeches in 567 towns in 24 states; he had traveled 21,209 miles and spoken an average of 20,000 words a day to 3 million people.
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The following timetable of one undated campaign day survives from the diary of an aide:

Inevitably, there were moments of ugliness, as when a mob of hired “muckers” assaulted him near Cripple Creek, Colorado, with rocks big enough to crush the iron guards on the caboose. A flying wedge of Rough Riders rescued the candidate from serious harm. William Jennings Bryan haughtily disbelieved reports of the incident, but said it was an outrage “if true.”
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The Rough Riders, of course, were not above staging a little playful violence themselves, as when a member of the Campaign Special shot a Populist editor for presuming to criticize “mah Colonel.” The editor survived,
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but stories like this revived Roosevelt’s forgotten “cowboy” image in the East, much to the delight of cartoonists and humorists. On 13 October, Finley Peter Dunne’s barroom philosopher “Mr. Dooley”
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summarized the campaign thus:

Mr. Dooley went on to parody a local account of one of Roosevelt’s bipartisan meetings out West.