Colonel Roosevelt (45 page)

It was as if Chicago sought to emulate the welcome that New York had given Roosevelt on his return from Africa. The noise reminded one reporter of
a boiler factory, with all the station bands following, and trumpets sounding ragtime riffs ahead. By the time he arrived at the huge Congress Hotel, the crowd was so dense as to be dangerous. But another protective wedge was waiting for him. Five large guards handy with their fists got him inside with minimal violence, preceded by yet another band. It played “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here” until displaced by a large number of screaming suffragists. Roosevelt had no sooner found sanctuary in the hotel’s presidential suite than the crowd, resurgent up the stairs and jamming the corridor outside his door, drove him to climb through a window onto a stone balustrade overlooking Michigan Avenue. His grin reassured the thousands below that he was not about to jump.

Far to his left and right, a flotsam of faces swirled. The smoky, coppery sky seemed to press down on the city, concentrating its heat and noise. Waving his hat for quiet, he yelled in his high voice, “
Chicago is a mighty poor place in which to try and steal anything.”

“And they better not try to steal anything from you!” somebody shouted.

“From us, you mean,” Roosevelt replied.

This caused a roar of delight. He pointed at a banner declaring that the California delegation was solid for him, in defiance of exclusions by the Committee. “California’s twenty-six votes are mine. They are mine, and they will be counted for me.”

“Hurrah for Teddy!” came another shout.

He leaned over the parapet, still holding his hat in the air. “The people have spoken, and the politicians must learn to answer or understand. They will be made to understand that they are the servants of the rank and file of the plain citizens of the republic.”

For several minutes, the cheering made it impossible for him to continue. Red-faced and sweating, he listed a few of the derelictions of the Committee. “
It is a fight against theft,” he said again, “and the thieves will not win!”

With that, he climbed back inside.
The crowd in the street dispersed, but a lone band kept playing as evening came on. Hotel guests unassociated with the Republican Party enjoyed little rest that night. In the Gold and Florentine banquet rooms, tabletop orators respectively barked the merits of Taft and Roosevelt to whoever would listen. “We are in danger of monarchy,” Boss Barnes bawled. “The country must be saved!” Groups of delegates roamed the corridors in long frock coats and black beaver hats, singing and shouting.

THE FERVOR OF
the Colonel’s supporters—much more truculent, in scattered brawls and curses, than Taft’s or La Follette’s—reached its peak at 8:15
P.M
. on Monday in the Chicago Auditorium. The immense, five-thousand-seat hall was packed to the doors, and could have been filled four times over with
the multitude outside. Two hundred and fifty policemen struggled to keep Congress Street clear.

Roosevelt got only a short burst of applause when he strode onstage, after being introduced by Senator Borah. The audience was so eager to hear what he had to say that it fell silent almost immediately. Indeed, once he began talking, attempts by barkers to generate ovations were thwarted by hisses and
cries of “Shame.” Addressing his listeners as “fellow Americans” rather than “fellow Republicans,” Roosevelt said that the fundamental issue at hand was moral. It transcended petty politics, and even the personal fates of a president and former president.

Before describing the “naked robbery” that had deprived him of “sixty to eighty” first-ballot votes, Roosevelt appealed to Senators La Follette and Cummins to release the forty-six delegates they controlled. His primary successes proved, he said, that he was the Party’s overwhelming popular favorite, and the only candidate strong enough to bring about social reform. “If I had not made the progressive fight … there would have been no substantial opposition to the forces of reaction and political crookedness.”

The last few words set him off on an overlong tirade against the Taft administration, its corporate beneficiaries, and political bosses. Reporters who had followed him over the past two years could scribble the catchphrases in advance:
treason … conspiracy … the led captains of mercenary politics … the great crooked financiers … privilege in its most sordid and dangerous form … corrupt alliance between crooked business and crooked politics … an oligarchy of the representatives of privilege
.
William Jennings Bryan (attending in his new guise as a syndicated columnist) looked bored. Roosevelt was imputing guilt by association to the RNC, which became the focus of his wrath for ignoring the message of the primaries.

“It is our duty to the people of this country to insist that no action of the convention which is based on the votes of these fraudulently seated delegates binds the Republican party or imposes any obligation upon any Republican.”

The last five words, full of implication of a bolt, earned Roosevelt his first standing ovation of the evening. Encouraged, he launched into an analysis of the Committee’s recent rulings that was so dense with numbers and labyrinthine
in its arguments of conspiracy as to annoy anyone immune to his charisma. But there were few such unbelievers present. Almost in spite of himself, he moved from the particular to the philosophical. Conservatives, he said, “are taught to believe that change means destruction. They are wrong.… Life means change; where there is no change, death comes.”

By now the applause was thunderous. “
I am never surprised at anything Theodore may say,” Edith remarked to Cal O’Laughlin, her face lit up with pride.

Again and again he declared that American society wished to transform itself. “The trumpets sound the advance, and their appeal cannot be drowned by repeating the war-cries of bygone battles, the victory shouts of vanquished hosts. Here in this city—”

He seemed about to identify Chicago as the
civitas Dei
. By now he had been orating for well over an hour, and Bryan looked ready to nod off. But a magnificent peroration was coming:

Never before had Roosevelt used such evangelical language, or dared to present himself as a holy warrior. And never before had he heard such cheering. Intentionally or not, he invested progressivism with a divine aura. Secular Republicans were repelled by
the fanaticism of his followers, and wondered which “Lord” the Colonel really had in mind to command his mythical army. A flyer circulated around Chicago, arousing much hilarity:

BARBED WIRE PROTRUDED
from the bunting around the rostrum of the Republican National Convention when it opened in the Coliseum on Tuesday, 18 June. Nothing could have more graphically signaled the Party leadership’s desire to fortify itself against a hostile takeover. The surrounding platform, edged in red-white-and-blue, stood shoulder-high and was inaccessible from the floor. Anyone hoisting himself up onto it would get his hands and chest slashed by the wire. A stairway just wide enough to admit one man led up from the National Committee room below, and was guarded at top and bottom by security agents. Behind yawned a dry moat, twelve feet deep. A line of Chicago policemen was deployed facing the front row of seats, and others stood in a tight circle around the delegate enclosure. One of them told a reporter, “
I am for Teddy and I don’t care who knows it.”

By the time the building opened its doors at 10:30
A
.
M
., Henry James’s description of Roosevelt as “
the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise” was fully borne out.
The bands that had greeted the Colonel’s arrival in town were amplified five times over by those of marching clubs escorting the various delegations. Other kinds of din, beginning with the first nervous knock of
Victor Rosewater’s gavel at two minutes past noon, were clearly on the agenda, and set to build in a continuous crescendo through the nomination on Friday. One of the strangest, accompanied by whistles and screams of “Toot, toot!” was the spine-stiffening hiss of sheets of sandpaper scraped together. It was meant to express the conviction among Roosevelt Republicans that an organization “steamroller” was under way, intent on flattening their spirit of revolt.

But first came a bang of flashbulbs, as the delegates sat still for a group photograph. (Conspicuously missing, anywhere in the room, was the usual overhanging portrait of the President of the United States.) The brief glare illuminated 1,078 faces, only a few managing smiles. “It’s the last time the convention will look pleasant,” Rosewater said.

Contrary to rumors, Roosevelt had not asked permission to attend. Edith and all his children represented him in a special box in the gallery. He remained at the Congress Hotel, looking, in Nicholas’s words, “fresh as an apple and rosy and happy as a child,” and monitoring the proceedings by means of a telephone line rigged through to his floor manager, Governor Herbert S. Hadley of Missouri.

Hadley, a calm, fine-featured man of forty, cut an imposing figure on the floor. Although he had been one of the signers of the petition requesting Roosevelt to run, he was no radical, and enjoyed the distinction of having been eyed as a running mate by both major candidates. He engineered the day’s first surprise by taking the rostrum as soon as the official convention call had
been read. “
Mr. Chairman,” he said to Rosewater, “I rise to a question of information.”

William Barnes, Jr., jumped up in shock from his seat with the New York delegation. Simultaneously, the President’s personal representative, former congressman James E. Watson of Indiana, rushed to the edge of the stage. Neither was able to stop Hadley from asking, in an easy sonorous voice, if the Committee had drawn up its temporary roll of the convention. If not, he had an alternative roll to offer. He was sure that the Committee’s draft included the names of certain delegates unacceptable to Roosevelt Republicans, and he moved that they be replaced by the names on his own list, which he felt the rank and file might prefer.

Rosewater overruled Barnes and Watson, who were protesting that the convention was not yet organized, and said that in the spirit of fairness, the governor would be allowed twenty minutes to argue his point.
Hadley said that a substantial minority of the National Committee believed that the recent hearings had been manipulated. As a result, seventy-two usurpers were now sitting before him, “without any honest title to their seats.”