Colonel Roosevelt (46 page)

This was a focusing of Roosevelt’s assertion that “sixty to eighty” names on the draft roll were fraudulent.
The latest
New York Times
estimate of Taft’s majority over him (contradicting O’Laughlin’s projection) was one hundred, at 466 to 566. If that was correct, the substitution of 72 progressive alternates would put him only two votes short of a first-ballot win, with plenty of time to round up a bunch of waverers.

Hadley stood no real chance of persuading the convention to set aside the National Committee’s roll in favor of his own. But he had cleverly cast doubt on the former before the convention had begun to develop its own will. He was also exploiting the fact, apparent to all who had mustered at Armageddon, that Roosevelt could win in November, whereas Taft could only lose. The forecast was based on the Colonel’s nearly one and a quarter million primary votes, and made more exciting by his palpable proximity to the Coliseum. Four-fifths of the spectators in the gallery, and (Hadley hoped) most people on the floor, were infused with a sense of a giant, available, reconciling personality.

“We contend,” Hadley said to loud cheers, “that this convention should not proceed with the transaction of any business until it either disproves the charges of fraud and dishonesty that have been made against this roll of delegates, or until it sustains those charges, and purges the roll.”

Watson again complained about improper procedure. He dropped the name of Elihu Root, in a clear hint as to whom Taft expected to succeed Rosewater on the podium. Hisses, sandpaper scrapes, and cries of “liar!” “thief!” “swindler!” rose over a roar of conservative approbation. At 1:30
P
.
M
., Root and McGovern were announced as candidates for permanent chairman.

Tension at once mounted in the room. More than any newspaper tabulation, the vote on these nominations promised to show the President’s exact strength. The first speaker for Root, Job E. Hedges of New York, scored devastatingly by quoting Roosevelt’s own panegyric of some years before—“
Elihu Root is the ablest man I have known in our governmental service … the ablest man who has appeared in the public life of any country in my time.” Progressives tried to mute the guffaws this aroused by shouting “Roosevelt! Roosevelt!” Hedges fended them off with mock weariness. “You need not hesitate to cheer Roosevelt in my presence. I cheered him for seven years, and I am just trying to take a day off, that is all.”

The debate that followed was vituperative, degenerating to personal abuse between rival orators. Almost forgotten, as they bellowed face-to-face and policemen raced down the aisles, breaking up fistfights, was the fact that there were more than two sides in contention. McGovern hailed from Wisconsin, Robert La Follette’s home state. In backing the governor for chairman, Roosevelt had counted on the senator to approve—and, in due course, release the Wisconsin and North Dakota delegations from their pledges.

A shock comparable to a sudden shower of ice therefore descended when, at the hottest point of the afternoon, a spokesman for La Follette announced that McGovern “did not represent the interests” of Wisconsin’s favorite son. Evidently La Follette was still furious at Roosevelt for entering the presidential race. After this, there was little any McGovern supporter could say except, weakly, that progressives would go home guilty if they voted for Senator Root.

“
Cousin Theodore could be wrecked,” a dispirited Nicholas Roosevelt wrote in his notes of the session.

At 3:21
P
.
M
. the temporary roll was called and voting proceeded, state by state and delegate by delegate, with crushing slowness. The only note of novelty in an otherwise dutiful recitation of partisan sentiments occurred when California took the floor, and
for the first time in American history the clear voice of a woman registered a vote at a national convention.

Along with 23 of her progressive colleagues, Florence Collins Porter favored McGovern.

So, about three hours later, did 13 Wisconsin delegates irked by La Follette’s petulance. But the final count—558 votes for Root and 501 for McGovern—indicated that Roosevelt was still 49 votes short of the majority he needed in his quest for the nomination.

Meanwhile, the ablest public man he had ever known, in a previous life, mounted the rostrum and appealed for Party unity, to
rows of emptying benches.

WHEN ROOT GAVELED
the delegates to order at 11:15 the next morning, Wednesday, 19 June, the Coliseum was so crammed that the Chicago Fire Department
had to bar entry to further would-be spectators. “The unfinished business before the convention,” the chairman announced, “is the motion of the gentleman of Missouri.” He said that Governor Hadley and Mr. Watson had agreed that debate on the subject of substitute delegates would be limited to three hours, divided equally.

Hadley, elegant in a double-breasted, knee-length coat that he somehow carried off casually, spoke first, expanding on his remarks of the day before. He used language as strong as Roosevelt’s to describe the “naked theft” of convention seats by Taft delegates, but his manner was unprovocative and his response to every objection patiently polite. The odor of partisanship, lingering over the hall from the day before, cleared, and the convention grew calm. Even Barnes listened attentively as Hadley presented a declaration, signed by the progressive minority of the National Committee, that the validity of plausible claims for seats among the delegations of eleven states “should be determined by the uncontested delegates of this convention.”

Much of the respect accorded Hadley came from a general awareness that he was the Colonel’s potential running mate. Taft had wanted him too, until he became one of the governors asking Roosevelt to run. (In a sure sign that the President despaired of reelection, he had chosen to retain Vice President Sherman, who was moribund with heart disease.) “I do not know if a majority of this convention agrees with me upon the proposition that Theodore Roosevelt ought to be our candidate for President of the United States,” Hadley said to a round of applause. “But there can be no difference on the proposition in the mind of any intelligent man that his voice today is the greatest voice in the western world.”

A series of more provocative, fist-waving speakers took up the seating debate. The noise level of the convention began to rise. Senator Lodge’s son-in-law, Congressman Augustus Peabody Gardner of Massachusetts, was so exasperated by the threat of a progressive, Henry J. Allen, to unload “two hundred pounds” of documents disqualifying the Washington State delegation that he stood on a chair repeatedly bellowing, “
Are you going to abide by the decision of this convention?”

“I will support the nominee on one condition,” Allen replied. Pandemonium broke out, and for some minutes he could not continue. He waited for quiet. “Upon the one condition that his nomination is not accomplished by fraud and thievery.”

Instantly every Roosevelt delegate in the hall, with the exception of a few from Illinois, was leaping and cheering. William Flinn emerged as a major loudmouth, hurling insults at Elihu Root. He punctuated them with jets of tobacco juice. The chairman listened with indifference, showing disapproval only when anyone tried to interrupt a reasonable argument. Root’s voice was not strong, and his orders had to be amplified by aides sprinting down the
aisles with megaphones. But he projected such an air of chilly rectitude, in his morning coat and gray trousers, that usually it was enough for him to step to the front of the rostrum to restore order.

His fairness extended to stopping the clock between speeches, so that prolonged ovations could expend themselves. The hours dragged on. In mid-afternoon Hadley and Watson had an emergency conference and agreed, with mutual alarm, that the proceedings were on track to a deadlock. Unless the question of the seventy-two contested delegates was resolved, it could split the GOP—no matter whose name was placed in nomination. Watson, gray-faced, took the podium and declared, “The convention is not in a fit condition, neither is it in a fit temper … to judge intelligently upon any one of these contests.” He said that Governor Hadley was willing, on behalf of the Roosevelt forces, to allow all seating claims to be decided by the credentials committee.

That body was not yet appointed, but for the moment, Hadley was seen as the savior of the Party. Delegation by delegation, an ovation for him built up until observers in the press box stared at the sight of William Flinn and William Barnes, Jr., cheering in tandem.
The demonstration was that rare phenomenon in a national convention, a spontaneous expression of emotion, and it went through several mood changes. For the first twenty minutes it was bipartisan, with the potential of whipping up into a draft of the governor as a compromise nominee. But then rhythmic cries of “Teddy, Teddy—we want Teddy!” developed in the uproar, like the drumbeat of a coming fanfare. Attention began to divert from Hadley on the floor to a pretty woman standing in a high gallery. She wore a white dress, with a bunch of pinks at her waist. Whatever mysterious force focused fourteen thousand pairs of eyes on her, she was thespian enough to revel in it. She blew kisses at the crowd, then, leaning over the balustrade, unrolled a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt. The noise became deafening. Unfazed, she began to yell, and proved to have the lungs of a Valkyrie. “
Boys—give three cheers for Teddy!
”

A golden bear materialized beneath her, in the shape of the mascot of the California delegation. She reached out and cuddled it as it rose on the top of a proffered totem, whereupon the poles of other Roosevelt delegations joined in and jiggled up and down in phallic rivalry. The woman in white vanished for a minute. When she reappeared on the floor, it seemed improbable that the Coliseum could contain more sound. She marched up the main aisle, flushed with excitement, followed by stampeding delegates in an unconscious parody of Delacroix’s
Liberty Leading the People
. As William Jennings Bryan watched from the press box, perhaps remembering a far-off day when he had stimulated almost as great a riot, she was hoisted giggling onto a shelf of shoulders and carried to the rostrum. Elihu Root tolerantly let her take control of the proceedings.

She did so without the aid of the gavel or megaphones, merely waving a
long-gloved arm to increase or decrease the applause inundating her. When she again brandished Roosevelt’s portrait—looking rather tattered now—the cries of “We want Teddy!” broke out with renewed force. It took fifty minutes for the tumult to die down and for the woman to be coaxed, as gently as possible, back into her box.

Hadley rejoined Root and Watson onstage. His luster of an hour before had been much diminished. As Roosevelt’s floor leader, he had to regret that he had agreed to let the credentials committee decide the matter of the contested delegates. If his alternative list could have been resubmitted to the whole convention, at this moment of maximum affection for the Colonel, it would almost certainly have been approved, with Roosevelt cleared for nomination, and
he
generally accepted as the likely next vice president of the United States.

Under the circumstances, the best Hadley could do was persuade Governor Charles S. Deneen of Illinois to move that none of the seventy-two men whose seats were being contested should be allowed to participate in the election of members of the still-unconstituted committee. Nor should they be allowed to approve or disapprove the committee’s report, when it was issued. The morality of this was to prevent any possibly fraudulent delegate from voting on the rightness of his own case, or the cases of his seventy-one contested colleagues.

Watson countered by moving to lay Deneen’s amendment on the table.

By no flicker of expression did Root, gavel in hand, reveal that he recognized that the determining moment of the convention had arrived. He ordered a roll call on Watson’s motion. “
That question is not debatable.”

Hadley tried to debate it anyway. “I wish to ask if the individuals whose titles to seats are here challenged are to vote upon this motion.”

“The chair will rule upon that question at the conclusion of the roll call.”

As the roll slowly proceeded, the heat of the demonstration went out of the room, and instinctual loyalties reasserted themselves. There were minor variations on yesterday’s vote—Wisconsin announced itself as “solid this time” against Taft—but at the end of the call, the President’s strength had increased by nine votes, to 567 over Roosevelt’s 507, with four abstentions.

It was small comfort to Hadley and Flinn that their candidate was now only thirty votes short of being nominated, since Taft could afford to lose plenty and still defeat the Colonel. And here was Root moving in for the kill. “
No man can be permitted to vote on the question of his own right to a seat in the convention,” he said. “But the rule does not disqualify any delegate whose name is upon the roll from voting on the contest of any other man’s right, or from participating in the ordinary business of the convention so long as he holds his seat.”