Colonel Roosevelt (51 page)

Vigorously, his fine eyes glowing, Beveridge also inveighed against child labor, neglect of the elderly, and sex discrimination. The Party, he said, demanded that women be paid as much as men. What was more, “Votes for women are theirs as a matter of natural right alone.” At this, the convention exploded. Delegates of both sexes clambered onto their chairs and shouted approval. Jane Addams controled her emotions, but her face was triumphant. Even men were seen wiping away tears everyone sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

“
It was not a convention at all,” a
New York Times
reporter wrote that night. “It was an assemblage of religious enthusiasts.”

ENTHUSIASM BECAME ECSTASY
the following day, when Theodore Roosevelt materialized beneath the yellow airfoil. No presidential candidate had ever before attended a national convention. For fifty-eight minutes he stood grinning as the Coliseum shook with noise.

At least ten thousand people flooded the floor in a red tide of bandannas. Hats encircled with rings rose on the ends of canes.
Two black Northern delegates climbed onstage, and Roosevelt gratefully reached out for them. They huddled with him as he talked and gesticulated, his words inaudible a few feet away. Then one pounded him on the shoulder, and for a moment the trio stood hand in hand, to roars of applause and imitation moose calls.

Jane Addams mounted in her turn. As she posed beside the Colonel, the band struck up “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
Roosevelt led the singing, both arms held high.

The hymn was not quite to Miss Addams’s taste. But its tune was impossible to resist, and not all the words embarrassed her:

“
I have been fighting for progressive principles for thirty years,” she said as she descended from the platform into a sea of well-wishers. “This is the biggest day in my life.”

The celebration went on and on. Eventually Roosevelt was left alone onstage, bowing to the crowd.
Senator Root’s mocking prophecy appeared to have been fulfilled:
He aims at a leadership far in the future, as a sort of Moses and Messiah for a vast progressive tide of a rising humanity
.
His smile betrayed a hint of alarm, as if he was bewildered by the religiosity that surged around him. Vitality he had, and passion too, for earthly attainments and even abstract ethical aims, but he could not abandon himself to this communal rapture. The crowd was unlike any other he had seen before, chaotic in its variety.

Here, waving bandannas, were former Democrats like Judge Benjamin B. Lindsey of Colorado, a power in the juvenile court movement, Raymond Robins, a wealthy labor activist, Don Dickinson, postmaster general under
President Cleveland, and Bourke Cockran, the legendary orator of Tammany Hall. Senators Dixon, Poindexter, Clapp, Bristow, and Norris represented the Republican insurgency of recent years. James Garfield, the brothers Pinchot, and other “moonbeamers” were in transports at finding their long-planned third party an actuality. The sculptor Gutzon Borglum and the novelist Winston Churchill were prominent in the Connecticut and New Hampshire delegations. Ambitious young intellectuals included the lawyer Felix Frankfurter, the essayist Walter Lippmann, Judge Learned Hand of New York, and Harold L. Ickes, a Chicago municipal reformer. Academics not normally inclined to prance and sway with party bosses brandished the same signs as Boss Walter F. Brown of Ohio and “Tiny Tim” Woodruff of Brooklyn (dazzling in white flannel, as if to advertise his conversion from Republican orthodoxy). Suffragists, political scientists, social theorists, lapsed priests, and exponents of Adlerian ethical culture looked forward to hearing Roosevelt address their respective causes.

It said something for his range of acquaintance that he knew hundreds of these people by name. Many of them, in turn, knew him from his past lives. Professor Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard remembered him as a reed-thin freshman, punching the air in a student demonstration for “Hayes and Honest Ways.” Joe Murray and Isaac Hunt had witnessed his baptism in the New York Republican Party—and now his apostasy from it. Sylvane and Joe Ferris, Bill Merrifield, and George Myers, his former ranch partners and Badlands buddies, were in attendance as excited delegates half inclined to shoot out the lights. Present too was the ubiquitous Seth Bullock, who thought Armageddon was a town in Oklahoma. The veteran civil service reformers William Dudley Foulke and Lucius B. Swift could testify that Roosevelt had been their idealistic ally as far back as 1889. W. Franklin Knox led a contingent of graying Rough Riders, all prepared to follow their Colonel up another dangerous hill.

The person whose support meant most to Roosevelt may have been the quietest spectator in the hall. Edith sat as before in the family box. Only now she had none of their children with her—
not even Alice, whom Nick had begged to stay away. Incredibly, for a woman who flinched at public exposure, Edith stood up when the crowd yelled for her, and smiled and waved at her husband. He responded with his bandanna.

They were singing the “Battle Hymn” again. After the last salvo of “Hallelujahs,” the tumult finally subsided. Delegates returned to their seats. Roosevelt could not begin speaking until the formal convention photograph had
been taken. Everybody froze as a corona of flashbulbs popped.
The explosion somehow ignited one of the dangling white cotton bags (which apparently functioned as air purifiers) and, to screams from below, a tongue of flame leaped out. Before panic could spread, a fireman crawled catlike up the nearest beam and smothered the blazing bag with his bare hands.

ROOSEVELT’S ADDRESS, ENTITLED
“A Confession of Faith,” lasted for two hours. “And they wished more!” he wrote Kermit afterward. Applause stopped him 145 times, most loudly when he espoused the cause of woman suffrage, and berated the “twilight zone” between federal and state judiciaries. For all the cheers it aroused, the speech was a dry statement of policy, resembling one of the giant Messages he used to inflict on Congress every December during his presidency. It amounted to a survey of the entire Progressive program, more detailed and less self-referential than the blueprint he had issued at Osawatomie in 1910. Throughout, Roosevelt used the pronoun
we
rather than
I
.

He dismissed the Republican and Democratic parties as “husks,” saying they were “boss-ridden and privilege-controlled.” In the new one, only the people would rule against yesterday’s alliance of Wall Street lawyers and Old Guard congressmen, aided and abetted by conservative newspaper publishers. That meant a nationwide presidential primary system, popular election of senators, votes for women, full disclosure of campaign funding, and laws to prevent fraud and trickery at the polls. The triple power of the initiative, referendum, and recall would be made available to various states, on the understanding that it should be exercised with extreme caution, in situations where representative government was threatened. Caution was not elsewhere going to be a feature of the Progressive Party’s attitude toward protecting what Roosevelt, in one of his few passages of eloquence, called “the crushable elements” at the base of American society.

He declared, as he had so often done as president, “There can be no greater issue than that of conservation in this country.” He promised a sheaf of new
federal statutes to set minimum wage and workplace standards, compensate for job-related injuries, strengthen his own pure-food law of 1906, and institute a system of “social insurance” with medical coverage for the poor. He endorsed an income-tax amendment to the Constitution. If he was returned to the White House,
new or revived federal agencies would include a department of public health, plus commissions to inquire into the rising cost of living, improve rural conditions, and regulate interstate industrial corporations. He warned that the last-named commission would have “complete power” to investigate, monitor, publicize, and if necessary prosecute irresponsible trusts.

“ ‘A
ND THEY WISHED MORE
!’ ”
Roosevelt’s two-hour address to the Progressive National Convention, 6 August 1912
.
(photo credit i11.2)

Once or twice, quailing at the bulk of his twenty-thousand-word typescript, he suggested that sections of it should be omitted “as read.” The crowd was insatiable: “Go on, go on.” He tried to skip the tariff, his least favorite subject, and was reprimanded. Even so, he tore out and crumpled some later pages. It was plain that he had written them for press release, rather than to be declaimed.

At last came the line all wanted to hear, from his oration at the Chicago Auditorium. “
I say in closing what in that speech I said in closing: We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

The response was tumultuous. If Progressivism was, as more and more critics were suggesting, a religion, it needed its mantras, and could not hear them enough. Roosevelt ducked out of the hall at 3:30
P
.
M
., pursued by the sound of ten thousand
voices singing his name, to the tune of “Maryland, My Maryland.”

WHEN RAYMOND ROBINS
^*
saw him again, in his hotel parlor late that night, he was resting his tired head against the mantelpiece.