The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (52 page)

W
HEN
H
ENRY
C
ABOT
L
ODGE
and Theodore Roosevelt arrived in Chicago on Saturday, 31 May, they were already close friends. Earlier that month, the thirty-four-year-old Bostonian had written the twenty-five-year-old Knickerbocker, congratulating him on his election as delegate-at-large from New York, and proposing a joint visit to Washington to interview Senator Edmunds before the convention started. On the very day that Roosevelt received this letter, he had been writing a similar one to Lodge, congratulating him, in turn, on
his
election as delegate-at-large from Massachusetts. He accepted Lodge’s invitation “with pleasure,” and asked him to stay over at 6 West Fifty-seventh Street en route. “We are breaking up house, so you will have to excuse very barren accommodations.”
⁴⁵

Thus with an exchange of mutual flattery, an evening of echoing conversation in the Roosevelt mansion,
⁴⁶
and a pilgrimage to the city of their destiny, Lodge and Roosevelt laid the foundation of one of the great friendships in American political history.

At first sight the two men seemed an unlikely pair. Next to the wiry, bouncing, voluble Roosevelt, Lodge was tall, haughty, quiet, and dry. His beard was sharp, his coat tightly buttoned, his handshake quickly withdrawn. His eyes, forever screwed up and blinking, surveyed the world with aristocratic disdain. A heavy mustache clamped his mouth aggressively shut. On the rare occasions when the thin lips parted, they emitted a series of metallic noises which, according to Lodge’s whim, might be a quotation from Prosper Mérimée, or a joke comprehensible only to those of the bluest blood and most impeccable tailoring, or a personal insult so stinging as to paralyze all powers of repartee. Only in conditions of extreme privacy would Henry Cabot Lodge unbend an inch or so, and allow the privileged few to call him “Pinky.”
⁴⁷

Among his own kind, Lodge was said to be a man of considerable wit and charm;
⁴⁸
but the large mass of humanity, including most of the political establishment, found him repellently cold. By
no amount of persuasion could he be made to see any other man’s view if it differed from his own. Those who ventured to disagree with him were crushed with sarcasm, or worse still, ignored. Although he had served only two terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, as opposed to Roosevelt’s three in Albany, “Lahde-dah Lodge” was already on his way to becoming one of America’s most disliked politicians.
⁴⁹
Yet nobody could deny that he was a man of extraordinary caliber. His promises, once made, were never broken. His treatment of both friends and enemies was unshakably fair. As for his attitude to government, it was as high-minded as a philosopher’s.

This latter characteristic, of course, attracted Roosevelt instantly. But the younger man was also drawn to Lodge’s mind, which was more erudite than his own. Lodge had not been deprived, by childhood invalidism, of a full classical education. After graduating from Harvard he had become an editor, with Henry Adams, of the
North American Review
, and had collaborated with that august intellectual in a book on the history of Anglo-Saxon law.
⁵⁰
More recently, he had published biographies of George Cabot (1877), Alexander Hamilton (1882), and Daniel Webster (1883), as well as
A Short History of the American Colonies
(1881). Lodge was now, in 1884, an overseer of Harvard College, chairman of the Massachusetts Republican party, and a candidate for Congress.
⁵¹

No wonder Roosevelt admired this “Scholar in Politics.” Lodge, in turn, admired Roosevelt’s raw force and superior political instinct. The two had, besides, many things in common: aristocratic manners, wealth, a love of elegant clothes, membership in the Porcellian, early marriages to beautiful women (the Cabot blood shared by both Lodge and Alice Lee was another bond, albeit unspoken), massive egos, and a ruthless ambition.
⁵²
Theirs was a relationship in which occasional clashes of personality merely emphasized identical taste and breeding, as one or two dissonant notes enrich the larger harmonies of a major chord.

N
O SOONER HAD
R
OOSEVELT
checked into the Grand Pacific Hotel, New York’s headquarters, than newspapermen began to cluster
around him. With his “chipper straw hat,” “natty cane,” and “new, French calf, low-cut shoes” he was “more specifically an object of curiosity than any other stranger in Chicago.”
⁵³
Lodge, too, attracted attention with his “crisp, short hair … full beard, and an appearance of half-shut eyes.”
⁵⁴

But it was politics, not appearances, that made reporters cluster around them. Word had spread that they might prove pivotal figures at the convention, beginning Tuesday. Under the patronage of old George William Curtis, the snowy-whiskered Civil Service Reformer and editor of
Harper’s Weekly
, Roosevelt and Lodge were leaders of the Independent forces. (They had spent most of the month rounding up Edmunds delegates by mail.)
⁵⁵
Although their power was too slight to affect the nomination of one clear favorite, they could possibly play two favorites off against each other, and then push the nomination of Senator Edmunds as a compromise. In other words, Roosevelt hoped to repeat his successful Utica performance. The numbers at Chicago were much larger, and the list of candidates longer (at least nine, as of midnight Saturday),
⁵⁶
but he had at least one trend in his favor: President Arthur and James G. Blaine were running neck and neck, with about three hundred delegates apiece. Edmunds lay third with ninety; all the other dark horses were far behind.

Making the most of their news value, Roosevelt and Lodge announced loudly and repeatedly that they would stay with their candidate until the end. Yet both added
sotto voce
, to at least one reporter, that if either Arthur or Blaine were nominated they, as loyal Republicans, would of course support him.
⁵⁷
It was a considerable admission, for their ideological rejection of both candidates, especially the “decidedly mottled” Blaine, was total. Editors buried the remarks beneath thousands of words of more frivolous preconvention copy.
⁵⁸

I
N 1927
N
ICHOLAS
M
URRAY
B
UTLER
, president of Columbia University and an old friend of Theodore Roosevelt, remembered the Republican National Convention of 1884 as “the ablest body of men that ever came together in America since the original Constitutional
Convention.”
⁵⁹
At the time, it was considered just the opposite—“a disgrace to decency, and a blot upon the reputation of our country,” to quote Andrew D. White.
⁶⁰
Roosevelt himself was unimpressed by most of his fellow conventioneers. Six days of politicking with them were enough to convince him that, often as not,
vox populi
was “the voice of the devil, or what is still worse, the voice of a fool.”
⁶¹
All the same, he certainly met most of the emerging leaders whose talents Butler so admired, and registered their faces in his photographic memory.
⁶²

Vastly outnumbering these men of the future were the “Old Guard”—veteran party members who had voted for Frémont and shed their blood for Lincoln and Grant; men who had prospered mightily under the “spoils system” for almost a quarter of a century of Republican power. They held the party and its orthodox ideology so holy that some of them cast their delegate badges in gold.
⁶³
Those from the West, and from Pennsylvania, arrived full of whiskey and love for James G. Blaine; those from the South, and from Wall Street, formed glee clubs to sing the praises of President Arthur. Both groups brought bags of “boodle” to purchase the votes of uncommitted delegates. They looked askance at the Edmunds men, who not only refused to be bought, but sanctimoniously shut up shop on Sunday morning. Independents were promptly accused of having more ice than blood in their blue Northeastern veins, and it became standard procedure, whenever anybody like Henry Cabot Lodge walked by, for members of the Old Guard to turn up their coat collars and shiver ostentatiously.
⁶⁴

The “schoolboy” Roosevelt, with his “inexhaustible supply of insufferable dudism and conceit,”
⁶⁵
aroused their particular scorn, even though they could not help being impressed by his mental powers. One old delegate remarked, after meeting him, that “all the brains intended for others of the Roosevelt family had evidently fallen into the cranium of young Theodore.”
⁶⁶

To see the Chicago Convention as far as possible through Roosevelt’s eyes, it is necessary to remember how desperately he had been driving himself through the last three months, how full of private grief he was, and how he longed during this final crescendo of political bedlam for the silence and solace of the Badlands. The events of the next week may best be visualized through a red blur of
fatigue, which thickened as day followed night with barely a pause for sleep.

M
IDNIGHT
, M
ONDAY,
2
JUNE
.
Every room, stairway, and corridor in the Grand Pacific Hotel is crammed with garrulous, perspiring delegates. It takes one reporter a quarter of an hour to fight his way up from the lobby to Arthur headquarters, on the third floor. “All the corrupt element in the Republican party,” he notes en route, “seems to be concentrated here working in behalf of Blaine.”
⁶⁷
Brass bands thump in the streets outside, the President’s glee clubs roar discordantly, and tabletop orators shout themselves hoarse; but the most omnipresent sound is the soft rustle of “boodle.” Thomas Collier Platt of New York, Blaine’s unofficial treasurer, is rumored to be paying the highest price for votes. Arthur men are running out of money in the effort to compete with him, and impatiently await the arrival of a $50,000 parcel from New York City.
⁶⁸
Meanwhile they bolster their bribes with promises of federal jobs. Some wily colored delegates, trading on the white man’s traditional inability to distinguish one black face from another, sell themselves over and over to both major candidates, stocking up on free cheese and whiskey, and steadily escalating their prices. The going rate for a black Arkansas vote is already $1,000.