CHAPTER FOURTEEN
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May 31, Chicago—Fast and thick the delegates to the convention are flocking into this city. . . a canvass of the members of the convention here shows Blaine to be in the lead. . . .
IN THE GILDED, MIRRORED COMFORT of the Palmer House barbershop, where, as every visitor to Chicago learned soon enough, the floor was inlaid with silver dollars, they sat waiting for a morning shave, smoking their first cigars of the day, or, if not that, spitting tobacco juice with amazing accuracy, some among the Californians—those newly arrived by the “Blaine Train”—looking, as one man said, as if they had walked in from the Pacific Coast. They talked of Blaine’s strength in the West, of the send-off they had had at San Francisco, of stops the day before, Memorial Day, at places like Marshalltown, Iowa, where several thousand people were waiting at the depot to cheer them on. They studied the plan of the convention floor published in the morning Tribune or read aloud a quote from Tom Platt that “for every kicker who does bolt, Blaine will get two Irish votes in exchange.” Such observations as “It’s Blaine’s turn now” and “Arthur can’t carry New York” were also exchanged as the long line of barbers went about their business. Then shaved, combed, made fragrant with a splash of bay rum, their bright red-and-white BLAINE badges in place, they went out to join the fun.
In the marble lobby of the hotel there were still more of them, talking, reaching for outstretched hands, huddled in threes and fours. At the Grand Pacific Hotel, four blocks away, they were even more numerous. At Blaine headquarters upstairs Titus Sheard of New York was already claiming 341 Blaine votes on the first ballot, a mere 70 shy of what was needed to nominate, and by midday in the bar and the main dining room, they were clinking green glasses in toasts to the next President of the United States, James Gillespie Blaine.
Reporters were struck by their exuberance, their confidence, and the contrast with the Arthur people, who were so plainly downcast and uninspired. “Whenever you meet a Blaine man,” complained the correspondent for The New York Times, “he seizes you and pours into your ear the same old story. ’Everybody wants him. The great West cries for him. The Middle States yearn for him.’” “All were filled with enthusiasm,” noted another reporter, “and the most enthusiastic were filled with whiskey.” Some ambitious orators like to climb up on the lobby furniture in order to make known their theories for the salvation of the country.
They were the rank and file of the party, as they were fond of saying, from city and country alike, as Tom Platt stressed. Theodore, in a letter to Bamie, would describe them as mainly “good, ordinary men, who do not do very much thinking, who are pretty honest themselves, but who are callous to any but very flagrant wrongdoing in others, unless it is brought home to them most forcibly, who ’don’t think Blaine any worse than the rest of them’. . .”
It was their feelings for Blaine that made them such a force to reckon with. Blaine’s only power was the devotion he inspired through force of personality (demagoguery, Theodore and his friends called it). Blaine controlled no patronage, no machine, held no keys to the Customhouse or the Treasury. His home state of Maine had no political importance nationally. And though in recent years he had served quite ably as Garfield’s Secretary of State, and could be thus fairly described as a “statesman,” he did not even hold public office any longer. Blaine was adored for being Blaine—for his very real human warmth and love of people, his brains and loyalty, and “that gorgeous surplus of personal grace called magnetism.” He remained, since the Ingersoll speech at Cincinnati eight years before, the “Plumed Knight” of the party, the Republican’s Republican whose mere presence on a platform could work magic wherever Republican fortunes were in trouble. At the last national convention, also held in Chicago, his forces had carried their fight through thirty-six ballots before Garfield was named. It had been Blaine who handed his friend Garfield the nomination at the last and it had been Conkling who kept the nomination from Blaine; and now with Conkling out of the picture, Blaine’s people were bound to let nothing stand in the way.
The famous visage—the long, pale face with its luminous dark eyes and silvery beard—was to be seen everywhere about the hotels and in store windows, but the idol himself, like President Arthur, remained in Washington. Ironically, with the prize closer to his reach than at any time before, Blaine no longer craved it as he once had.
Also, in April, only weeks before the convention, the old burden of the Mulligan letters had been resurrected in brilliant, vicious fashion by a famous full-color cartoon that the opposition was busily passing out in Chicago, just in case there was anyone left who had not seen it. It had appeared in Puck. Blaine was displayed as “The Tattooed Man,” stripped to his undershorts before a tribunal of his Republican peers. The tattoos were all his old sins—”Mulligan Letters,” “Little Rock RR Bonds,” “N Pacific Bonds,” “Corruption”—and his famed personal magnetism was revealed to be nothing more than a cheap “magnetic pad” worn about the neck.
Nor was the old “saving element” of the party any less adamant in its opposition to Blaine than in times past. Virtually everyone from the Fifth Avenue Conference who was still active in politics was lined up against him—Schurz, Curtis, Godkin, Lodge—and some, like Schurz, talked openly of bolting the party if Blaine was the nominee. They saw him as morally obtuse and the most “venal” of apologists for the spoils system. He had been too close all his career to “the wealthy criminal class,” and to Jay Gould in particular. About the only thing they would not do to stop him was support Chester Arthur. Theodore, writing to Lodge shortly before leaving for Chicago, described the choice as between the Blaine devil and the Arthur deep sea, though of the two, Blaine was “the most dangerous man.”
The puzzling thing about Arthur was that he had turned out to be quite a respectable President. Since Garfield’s murder in 1881, he had been a surprise to almost everybody. His record was a good one. He had conducted himself with great dignity, denied old cronies special license. (“He isn’t ‘Chet’ Arthur any more,” Johnny O’Brien observed wistfully, “he’s the President.”) He had supported the Pendleton Act, the national indebtedness had been cut, the cost of domestic postage reduced. At his urging a decrepit wooden navy was being phased out, new steel cruisers built. The country was prospering. Times were so good that when General Grant’s Wall Street firm of Grant and Ward failed that spring, it “created only a temporary disturbance” in the overall business picture.
With his height and elegant tailoring, Arthur also looked more like a President than any of his Republican predecessors. He had insisted that the somewhat dowdy old Executive Mansion be brought up to standards (according to the taste of the day), and that official hospitality be raised from the depths of the Hayes years. Modern plumbing was installed in the White House, and the first elevator. Louis Tiffany of New York had done over the Red, Blue, and East rooms, and the showpiece of the new look was a jeweled Tiffany glass screen, fifty feet in length, that now divided the main corridor from the public north vestibule. At Arthur’s invitation, Madame Christine Nilsson and other opera singers performed at state dinners, where, customarily, there were flowers in abundance, as well as small bouquets of roses at every lady’s place, boutonnieres for the men, and gilt-edged place cards embossed with the national coat of arms in gold. There could be as many as fourteen courses with seven or eight wines, each with its proper glass. It was said that Arthur had brought more tact and culture to the White House than anyone in memory, and if such influential figures as Schurz and Curtis thought little better of him than in days gone by, Mark Twain and Henry Ward Beecher thoroughly approved. “I can hardly imagine how he could have done better,” Beecher was quoted as saying. More important for the moment, he was liked by businessmen and could count on strong support from those on the federal payroll and from black politicians and party workers from the South. Of the 820 accredited delegates converging on Chicago, something over 100 were government employees.
Arthur had made little effort to get the nomination and professed he did not want it. His representatives on the scene were badly organized, poorly financed. When a New Yorker showed up with a suitcase full of cash amounting to $100,000, all for the Arthur cause, Arthur, by cable from Washington, ordered that the money be returned. But Arthur’s forces also included such able men as Elihu Root, such thorough professionals as Johnny O’Brien, who had no doubt that he wanted another term.
Besides Arthur and Blaine, there were a half-dozen different dark horses and favorite sons whose strength, if combined, could conceivably stop Blaine. There were John Sherman of Ohio and John A. Logan of Illinois, both United States senators, dainty little Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, and Robert Todd Lincoln. There was talk of Senator Sherman’s more famous brother, William Tecumseh Sherman, and of George William Curtis. But the only one with any substantial support, other than the two front-runners, was the candidate the reformers had settled on, the man upon whom Theodore was banking his fortunes, Senator George Franklin Edmunds of Vermont. Edmunds was the Bristow of this seasons crusade. He was bearded, scowling, capable, incorruptible, eligible, contentious, colorless, devoid of humor, and the very one, it had been decided, to rescue the party and restore it to the high ideals of the founders. (That Blaine, too, had been among the founders was a point left unsaid.) Theodore, so far as is known, had never met Edmunds, nor does he appear to have been aware that it was Edmunds, back at the time of his fathers nomination for the Customhouse, who made a special trip to the White House to urge Hayes to compromise with Conkling and choose another, more acceptable man.
The drumbeat for Edmunds had begun as far back as January, when Harper’s Weekly described him as “in full sympathy with the intelligent progressive spirit,” an “inflexible Republican of spotless personal character,” and it had been Curtis who led the campaign thereafter, joined by George Jones of The New York Times, Godkin of The Nation, President Eliot of Harvard, Andrew D. White, who was president of Cornell, and Henry Cabot Lodge. Of the bare handful of actual politicians who announced for Edmunds the two most frequently mentioned were John D. Long of Massachusetts, who was a congressman and former governor, and Theodore, who in that spring of furious, headlong work and sleepless nights had done all he could to further the Edmunds cause, and with notable results. At the state convention at Utica in April, working at fever pitch, he had neatly outmaneuvered the Blaine and Arthur forces and seen that the four who were elected as delegates-at-large to the national convention were all Edmunds men, he himself and Andrew D. White receiving the most votes. Henry Cabot Lodge, also newly elected as a delegate-at-large from Massachusetts, had written to suggest that they combine forces at Chicago, and that in the meantime they make a run down to Washington to see what Edmunds support could be found. The Washington trip proved nothing, except that Theodore and Lodge got to know each other. Lodge stopped over in New York, spending a weekend at 6 West 57th Street amid packing boxes and bare floors. “We are breaking up house,” Theodore had warned, “so you will have to excuse very barren accommodations.”
When Theodore departed for Chicago on the Pennsylvania Limited the evening of May 30, he traveled in a private car with the same two who had led his father’s one political crusade in 1876, Schurz and Curtis. (Again as in 1876, Schurz was going to the convention as an observer.) And when Theodore and Curtis were seen checking in at the Grand Pacific Hotel the next morning, amid the swarming Blaine crowd, they were at once the subjects of much talk and speculation. Curtis, with his white bangs and sallow, priestly look, was a face everyone knew. Theodore, according to the New York Evening Post, was “more specifically an object of curiosity than any other stranger in Chicago.” He was the boy wonder of Albany, New York’s “Cyclone Assemblyman,” the youngest delegate at the convention. Curtis and his cartoonist, Thomas Nast, had been giving Theodore handsome attention in Harper’s Weekly that spring. In one Nast cartoon he had been shown holding a whole sheaf of reform bills as Governor Grover Cleveland signed them into law.
They were there to work for Edmunds, Theodore told reporters. He was carrying a bamboo cane and wearing a “clipper” straw hat, the brim of which, on the underside, was bright blue. He talked extremely fast. He had “a mouth full of regular white teeth like a young lady,” it was noted, and his gold-rimmed spectacles kept sliding down his nose. He was asked by a man from the Chicago Tribune what he might do should Blaine be the nominee. Would he bolt the party? “I will not speak for the others, but for myself I say freely that under no circumstances will I cast a vote for either Blaine or Arthur in this convention. But I am a Republican, and should one or the other of them be nominated, then I will support him.”
Curtis, who was standing at his side, let the remark pass, but by saying what he had to the Tribune, Theodore had guaranteed that in a matter of hours it would be available in print for every delegate in town.
Later in the day, when Theodore, Curtis, and Schurz walked into the main dining room and stood waiting for a table, they looked, said one man, “as if the fate of the nation was in their keeping. Perhaps it is.”
Lodge, who arrived from Boston that same day, seems to have known from the start that there was no way to stop Blaine. And indeed to any experienced observer it looked as though the convention was already decided, three days before it officially opened. By nightfall New York reporters were cabling their home offices that the Blaine boom had “burst all bounds.”
Bits of good news . . . came thick and fast to cheer the partisans of Blaine and keep their enthusiasm at the boiling point. . . . To sum it all up, the drift today has been decidedly toward Blaine. He was never so near the nomination. . . .
Thousands more poured into the city the following day, Sunday, June 1, and it was emphatically “ANOTHER BLAINE DAY.” As a Boston correspondent observed, few people went to church. In New York the Times gave notice that if Blaine was nominated, theTimeswould abandon the Republican Party.
Monday, the papers were saying Arthur was clearly beaten and the word from the Arthur people was that if the nominee could not be their man, then it must be Blaine, which was about the same as saying Blaine was nominated. If noise and cheap enthusiasm were to be the deciding factors, said The New York Times indignantly, then Blaine was a certain victor. A sure sign, supposedly, was the swing to Blaine by the Ohio congressman William McKinley. No one talked of issues or programs, only of winning in November.
The first news of consequence came Monday night, and it was then that Theodore and Lodge went to work. Theodore, almost alone of the delegates, it would seem, was sure Blaine could be beaten.
The National Committee, dominated by Blaine people, had announced that the name to be placed in nomination for the honor of temporary chairman, the name to be put before the convention first thing in the morning, was that of Powell Clayton, a former Arkansas governor and Grand Army general who had lost an arm in the war and whose personal reputation was very low. Clayton, who had come to Chicago uncommitted, had offered his fourteen Arkansas votes to the Arthur people in trade for a Cabinet seat.“Not for forty nominations,” Arthur responded by wire, and so Clayton went immediately to see the Blaine people. He and Tom Platt, it was known, had been closeted most of that afternoon. (His Conkling past behind him, his “bit of scandal” in the Albany hotel fading from memory, Platt had “thrown in” with Blaine and as head of the New York Blaine delegates was realistically viewed as one of the two or three most important men at the convention.)
Naming Clayton had been a silly move by the Blaine people, the crudest kind of arrogance, and insulting to a large number of delegates. Even the most case-hardened veterans of political compromise were visibly stunned. Chauncey Depew is said to have received the news with his mouth hanging open, speechless for perhaps the first time in his career.
Theodore saw it at once as a chance to force a fight and test Blaine’s strength at the outset. Lodge came rushing to him with much the same idea and so the two “pulled together and went in for all we were worth,” as Theodore said. They were up most of the night, working the hotel corridors, seeing everyone they could. To challenge a decision of the National Committee at the start of a convention was unheard of. “Many of our men were very timid,” Theodore reported to Bamie, and chief among the “weak-kneed ones” was George William Curtis.
Just finding somebody willing to stand as a candidate against Clayton proved difficult and apparently it was Theodore’s personal appeal that made the difference. The volunteer was former Congressman John R. Lynch, a black delegate from Mississippi, who was pledged to Arthur.
When, at ten the next morning, the different delegations began forming up in the hotel lobbies for the march to the convention hall, Theodore had had perhaps two hours’ sleep. The day, June 3, 1884, marked his debut in national politics, his first chance on the national stage.
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Probably he had his mind on business only as the march began—out of the hotel into the glare of the morning. But the day was spectacular, clear and surprisingly cool for June, and Chicago itself on such a day, and at that particular moment in history, could be a tonic. Four years earlier, when stopping there with Ellie, he had called “Chicagoe,” as he spelled it, a “marvelous city.” Chicago was the new America, the real thing, full of “go-aheadism,” as everyone heard from its outspoken citizenry. It exuded “a sense of big things to be done.” If Chicago had faults, it was because Chicago was “young yet”; Chicago was the “Phoenix City of America,” risen out of its own ashes, as the saying went. One could take heart in Chicago, from new life, energy, enterprise, even grandeur, springing forth from tragedy.
The parade to the Exposition Hall was under way by eleven, the crowds falling back and making way for the delegates to pass. They marched two by two in the glaring sunshine, everybody adorned with his proper badge. Their party, for all its failings, its scandals and fallen idols, was still the party of Lincoln, the party that saved the Union, freed the slaves, restored the national credit. Even to so sensitive a moralist as George William Curtis it remained “the party of the best instincts, of the highest desires of the American people.” Many men were Republicans as they were church elders or lodge brothers. It was as if one belonged to an order. Their loyalties, their faith and pride in party, were often deeper, more vital to their self-respect and sense of worth than they could express. Delegates to Republican national conventions, as Mark Sullivan noted, sometimes had their official badges cast in gold and passed them along in their wills as precious relics. When a man like Tom Platt talked about the depth of James G. Blaine’s loyalty to the party, he did so knowing full well the emotional content in those words—”loyalty” and “party.” He felt it himself, even Tom Platt. They all did, or nearly all. “What I liked about him [Blaine] then, as always,” Platt remembered, “was his bold and persistent contention that the citizen who best loved his party and was loyal to it, was loyal to and best loved his country.”
The line of march was east, toward the lake, along Adams Street to where it joined wide, wood-paved Michigan Avenue. The Exposition Hall, pale green with much glass and a red roof, stood straight ahead on the other side of the avenue, and from all its turrets, domes, and gable ends, a hundred or more flags and banners were flying in the breeze, flying and floating exactly as flags are supposed to, against a clear blue sky. The hall had been built expressly to show that Chicago could rise from the disaster of the Great Fire. It stood at the edge of a broad park and beyond the park was the lake, at the moment nearly violet in color and flat as a tabletop. Above the main portico hung a single, tremendous sign: NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONVENTION.
The crowd converging from all directions, stopping traffic, backing up at six or seven different entrances, was estimated at ten thousand. The scalpers’ price for tickets was $50.
The parading delegates entered through the main door, then moved along a passage beneath the back gallery which opened all at once on to several acres of faces turned in their direction. The Iowans came in first, followed by Rhode Island. Congressman McKinley—short, solid, close-shaven—walked at the head of the Ohio delegation.
The Pennsylvanians wore brilliant blue neckties and cream-colored plug hats and matching cream-colored silk handkerchiefs in their coat pockets, a spray of lily of the valley on the lapel. The New Yorkers, seventy-two in all, largest of the delegations, had white badges with gold fringe and as they started down the aisle the band struck up “When First I Put This Uniform On.” A Chicago reporter thought them “fine-looking fellows” and observed that nearly all were wearing the latest low-cut shoes. “The leader was Mr. George William Curtis with his handsome white whiskers. . . . He had on his arm Theodore Roosevelt who bowed right and left to delegates and newspapermen.” Theodore was wearing his straw hat. Immediately behind walked Andrew D. White and bringing up the rear was Tom Platt.
They had the priority position, four rows front and center. Curtis sat on the aisle, beside the New York pennon. As the others were getting settled, Theodore was seen to vault lightly over several chairs to sit directly in front of Curtis, after which Andrew D. White negotiated a seat beside Theodore. Platt, meantime, sat at the far end of the row from Curtis and appeared to have nothing more on his mind than the slow, rhythmic stroking of his beard.
The setting looked like nothing else so much as a tremendous, dressed-up railroad terminal. An enormous vaulted ceiling was carried overhead by iron girders, these springing upward from long clerestory windows through which great shafts of sunshine slanted onto portions of the crowd like theatrical spotlights. The ironwork was painted red; the ceiling, pale blue; and red-white-and-blue bunting, state flags, and shields of every color banked the galleries.
The stage was at the west end of the hall and back from the stage was a still higher platform reserved for a thousand or more who qualified as “distinguished persons.” Directly above this point, suspended at an angle of about sixty degrees, was a colossal sounding board, hung from the ceiling, a duplicate of which could also be seen at the other end of the hall. The combined surface of these two devices was twenty-five thousand square feet, about half the area of a football field, and their combined acoustical effect was quite amazing. A speaker on stage, talking in a normal voice, could be heard anywhere in the hall and the hall sat about twelve thousand people.
The stage itself was a big semicircle with a long, curving prow now all but buried in still more bunting. A speaker’s stand was flanked with battle flags. There were potted palms and several large bouquets of flowers and two large portraits of Washington and Lincoln.
Members of the press, of whom there were no less than eight hundred in attendance, were arranged behind a line of tables on a raised platform immediately in front of the stage. Then across the entire main floor, from the press section to midpoint in the hall, were the cane-seated oak chairs for the delegates, row after row, divided into three equal sections. The pennons marking each reserved section were of blue silk lettered in gold, one for each of the thirty-eight states, eight territories, and the District of Columbia. The boundary line between the delegates and all other ticketholders was a white picket fence running across the center of the hall, from which point the floor sloped steadily uphill to the bleachers at the very back. At the center of the bleachers, directly below the second sounding board, was a thirty-piece band under the direction of “Professor” Johnny Hand. The overhead galleries, running the length of the hall on two sides, were perhaps fifty feet above the main floor.
The opening gavel of the Eighth Republican National Convention fell at 12:28. A slender young clergyman with yellow hair stepped to the rostrum and with hands behind his back thanked God for Plymouth Rock, Yorktown, Appomattox, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Republican Party, then prayed for—in vain, as it happened—”dignity of temper” in the forthcoming campaign. The chairman of the National Committee, a senator from Minnesota named Sabin, spoke of Chicago as sacred ground (Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield had all been nominated in Chicago), after which he put Powell Clayton’s name before the convention.
Immediately, Lodge was on his feet calling to substitute Lynch of Mississippi. Lodge, tidy, prim, full-bearded, and close-buttoned, spoke without passion, as though he wished merely to express a polite difference of opinion. He offered the name of Lynch, he said, with no view of attempting to make a test vote, but simply to strengthen the party. His manner was described as “supercilious.”
Others demanded to be heard. The Blaine people claimed that any challenge to the National Committee would subject the party to needless divisiveness. The opposition insisted that the convention had the right to do as it pleased. Meantime, if we are to believe one of those observing the scene from the press section, the “rather dudish-looking” Roosevelt and the “properly English” Lodge “applauded with the tips of their fingers, held immediately in front of their noses.”
Then it was Theodore’s turn. “Up from the midst of the Empire State Delegation rose a slight, almost boyish figure,” wrote the admiring correspondent for The New York Times. “Everybody knew the man, for there is not a State headquarters which he had not visited in his canvass for Edmunds, and scarce an individual delegate with whom he had not conversed in a straightforward, manly way, carrying conviction even when he could not convert.” He had handed someone his hat and climbed onto his chair. It was said he looked like a college boy.
“It was the first time I had ever had the chance of speaking to ten thousand people assembled together,” he would tell Bamie.
He had one hand on his hip. A reporter described how his “slight frame shook with the effort to make himself heard.”
“Mr. Chairman . . . I hold it to be derogatory to our honor, to our capacity for self-government, to say that we must accept the nomination of a presiding officer by another body; and that our hands are tied . . .” He asked that the vote on the temporary chairman be taken by an individual poll of the delegates. “Let each man stand accountable . . . let each man stand up here and cast his vote, and then go home and abide by what he has done.”
It is now, Mr. Chairman, less than a quarter of a century since, in this city, the great Republican Party for the first time organized for victory and nominated Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, who broke the fetters of the slave and rent them asunder forever. It is a fitting thing for us to choose to preside over this convention one of that race whose right to sit within these walls is due to the blood and treasure so lavishly spent by the founders of the Republican Party. And it is but a further vindication of the principles for which the Republican Party so long struggled. I trust that the Honorable Mr. Lynch will be elected temporary chairman of this convention.
Then, as quickly, he was back in his seat again, the “warmest applause” ringing in his ears, and once five or six others had spoken, the roll was called. Lynch won—Blaine had lost—by a margin of forty votes.
So for the moment, for one exhilarating, fleeting afternoon, it looked as if Blaine might be stopped after all. Certainly, he could not be nominated on the first ballot. In New York the Evening Post hailed the all-night efforts of Roosevelt and Lodge as a brilliant flanking movement. The New York Times singled Theodore out as not only the most conspicuous of the Edmunds men, but the most effective. But what the vote had actually done was to show that the balance of power was held by the reform contingent, the Edmunds people: the “Plumed Knight” could be stopped, but only if they were to give up on Edmunds and agree to Arthur, or resolve a way to unite the Edmunds and Arthur forces behind some acceptable alternative, such as John Sherman. It was clearly a case of Blaine against the field and the field could win only by uniting, which seemed just about hopeless, given the known preference of the Arthur people for Blaine as their second choice.
That night at the Grand Pacific, as a glee club hired by the Arthur forces paraded about the lobby singing the praises of the President, Theodore went back to work.
Wednesday, June 4, was taken up with routine business. The weather was cloudy and warm. “Young Roosevelt alone was buoyant. . .” The one bit of excitement was a resolution put forth by the Blaine people—an old Conkling resolution from the previous convention—calling for every delegate to pledge in advance his support of the nominee, irrespective of who it might be. It was aimed directly at George William Curtis and Curtis was instantly on his feet. The color was drained from his face, his hands clenched. Curtis had a magnificent voice—a famous voice—and he spoke now with what was described as “electric” intensity: “A Republican I came into this convention. By the grace of God, a Republican and a free man I will go out of this convention.” The resolution was withdrawn.
Thursday, June 5, petitions for women’s suffrage were read and referred to committee, there to die; the party platform, replete with praise for a high tariff and the gold standard, was read aloud in its entirety by William McKinley. Again the weather was correspondingly gray and dull, and again Theodore was extremely active, “quick, watchful, rather enjoying his brief lease on public life.” An Ohio delegate, Joseph Foraker, would later relate that he had found one conference with the indefatigable New Yorker “so trying upon the strength and the mental operations” that he was barely able to make it back to the convention hall that evening for the nominating speeches.
Sixteen nominating speeches were delivered, beginning at 7:35 and lasting more than five hours. Every seat was taken, every foot of standing room. The night was hot and close and thousands of little fans were moving in the mellow gaslight. Outside, thousands of people crowded about the building, waiting for whatever news was shouted down from those inside who were seated in the last rows of the galleries, up along the line of clerestory windows.
Senator Shelby Cullom of Illinois nominated his colleague Logan; the principal speaker for Arthur was an elderly unknown from Troy, New York, named Martin Townsend, who was obviously unprepared; John Sherman was nominated by Foraker of Ohio; and the two speeches for Edmunds were delivered by John D. Long, a noted speaker, and George William Curtis. Theodore thought the speech by Long the finest he had ever heard. It struck the old theme of the Hayes inaugural: country before party. “We are here as Republicans, and yet. . . not in the interest of the Republican Party alone. Even in this tumultuous excitement, we feel that. . . we are here in the interests of the people and all the people . . . of the country and the whole country.” And then Long said, “Gentlemen, I nominate the Honorable—aye! the Honorable—George F. Edmunds of Vermont.”
But the overwhelming, unforgettable event of the night was the nominating speech for Blaine and what it did to the audience. No one could remember having witnessed anything comparable. It was one of the most memorable events in the whole history of national political conventions. To some it was appalling. Andrew D. White called it a scene “absolutely unworthy of a convention of any party, a disgrace to decency.” Godkin, from what he was told, would dismiss it as “a mass meeting of maniacs.” Theodore, in a moment of calm reflection afterward, would concede to Bamie that it had been “most impressive.”
The speaker was a blind man, Judge William H. West from Bellefontaine, Ohio, a tall, gaunt, white-bearded figure in an ancient blue cloak that reached nearly to the floor, who was led to the stage and up the steps by a small boy. He “stood looking with his sightless eyes towards the vast throng,” wrote Theodore, “. . . his voice rang like a trumpet. . .”
He had been in Chicago in 1860, said the speaker. He had been there when they nominated Abraham Lincoln.
Four and twenty years of the grandest history in recorded times have distinguished the ascendancy of the Republican Party. The skies have lowered and reverses have threatened, but our flag is still there, waving above the mansion of the Presidency. . . . Six times, in six campaigns, has that symbol of union, freedom, humanity, and progress, been borne in triumph . . .
The cadence was Biblical and he looked as if he might have been present at the Creation.
Gentlemen, the Republican Party demands of this convention a nominee whose inspiration and glorious prestige shall carry the Presidency.... Gentlemen, three millions of Republicans believe that the man to accomplish this is the Ajax Telamon of our party, who made and whose life is a conspicuous part of its glorious history. Through all the conflicts of its progress, from the baptism of blood on the plains of Kansas to the fall of the immortal Garfield, whenever humanity needed succor or freedom needed protection or a country a champion, wherever blows fell thickest and fastest, there, in the forefront of the battle, was seen to wave the white plume of James G. Blaine, our Henry of Navarre. . . . Nominate him, and the campfires and beacon lights will illuminate the continent from the Golden Gate to Cleopatra’s Needle. Nominate him, and the millions who are now waiting will rally to swell the column of victory that is sweeping on. In the name of the majority of the delegates from the Republican States and their glorious constituencies who must fight this battle, I nominate . . .
But he never completed his sentence. It was as if the huge auditorium had been rocked by an explosion. The noise was horrendous. Delegates were cheering, screaming, stamping their feet, shouting at the tops of their lungs. They climbed onto chairs, leaped and danced about in the aisles, grabbed one another in great bear hugs and went spinning around in circles. There were hats spinning on the tops of canes held overhead, hats flying into the air. Bonnets, coats, canes, umbrellas, thousands of white handkerchiefs, were waving frantically. People were singing, weeping. Flags and banners were being stripped from the walls. The noise went on and on. It was “pandemonium universal and all-pervading,” a scene “never equaled and utterly indescribable.” And just when everyone’s energy seemed to have been spent, somebody came down the aisle and onto the stage carrying a huge American flag on a long staff at the top of which rode a helmet of pink and white roses surmounted by a waving snow-white plume, “the helmet of Navarre.”
“. . . James G. Blaine of Maine,” Judge West was able to exclaim at last, a half hour later, and then “another great roar went up like the noise of many waters, sweeping in great waves of sound around the hall, and the crowd without. . . answered in a muffled roar, which echoed within.”
Here and there on the floor, chiefly among the Massachusetts and New York delegations, could be seen small islands of silent men who sat with their arms folded and who, from the looks on their faces, might have been at a funeral.
Nothing said in the other speeches mattered greatly. Everything after the West speech was anticlimactic and by the time it was decided to adjourn, the hour then being past midnight, there was little doubt as to what would happen the next morning.
Yet once again Theodore and Lodge worked through the night. As a last-ditch effort they tried to unite the Arthur and Edmunds forces behind John Sherman, working behind closed doors with an Ohio delegate, a political nobody who was also attending his first convention and learning a great deal, Mark Hanna. Another idea was to stampede the convention for Robert Lincoln.
“It is a life or death struggle for the Republican Party in Chicago,” wrote the editor of The New York Times as the paper was put to bed that night in New York. “. . . [Blaine’s] nomination means a disastrous defeat for the Republican Party, and from that defeat the party would never recover except under other leaders and perhaps another name. The party has assuredly fallen upon evil days.” The Times had decided at this late hour to support Robert Lincoln.
“It quickly degenerates into ‘anything to beat Blaine,’” said a Chicago reporter who was on the scene.
It is eager, bitter, and peculiar. Dudes and roughs, civil service reformers and office-holding bosses, shorthairs and college presidents—many men of various kinds of ambition or selfishness join in midnight conferences. . . . Logan refuses all combination. The Lincoln boom collapses. . . . To throw Arthur to Edmunds is impossible. To transfer Edmunds to Arthur is merely to send Logan and Sherman to Blaine. Logan will not have Edmunds; the Edmunds men do not want Logan. Arthur also prefers Blaine to Sherman . . .
The balloting began the morning of the fourth day, Friday, June 6, the hall as packed as the previous night. “It was a tumultuous crowd, but a very good-natured one [noted a Chicago reporter]. . . . Tally sheets are ready, pencils are out, the delegates who are still toiling with the weak and weakening the stubborn, hurry to their places, while the gavel keeps up its heavy staccato.”
Blaine did not win on the first ballot, nor the second, nor the third, but he kept gaining, while Arthur held steady and Edmunds kept slipping, so that by the end of the third ballot Blaine needed only thirty-six votes for the nomination. The opposition could only fight for time. Foraker moved to recess, and when a delegate from Pennsylvania challenged him, Theodore was up shouting that the motion was not debatable or amendable. Blaine people pushed their way across the stage to the chairman, surrounding him. Theodore and the Pennsylvania delegate stood on their chairs shouting at each other, but the noise of the crowd was so great it was impossible to hear what they were saying. Theodore, thrashing his arms in the air, “vociferated and gesticulated in a dramatic manner amid the cheers and jeers of the vast audience . . .” No one was seated any longer, most people were standing on their chairs. Theodore was trying to get on stage to ask a question, and getting nowhere until he thrust aside “several officious persons who were attempting forcibly to exclude him.” But then William McKinley, the conventions great conciliatory figure, emerged from the crowd on stage, raised a small, pale hand, and “lo! as if Canute had found the sea obedient, the Blaine men drop into their seats, wipe their brows and puff out their short breath. . . . The storm is over.”
“The gentlemen representing the different states here have a right to the voice of this convention upon this subject,” said McKinley in a resolute voice, “and, as a friend of James G. Blaine, I insist that all his friends shall unite in having the roll of states called ...”
A vote was taken on the move to adjourn and the Blaine forces voted it down.
So it was on the fourth ballot that Blaine carried the day, Logan released his Illinois delegation, 34 votes, to Blaine. Minutes later Ohio made it final.
The final vote for Blaine was 541; for Arthur, 207. Edmunds ended with only 41. In one of the galleries Carl Schurz took out his watch and remarked to a neighbor, “This is the hour and minute which will go down in history as marking the death of the Republican Party.”
The crowd was euphoric, as the night before, “crazy with rapture . . . sheer ecstasy.” The band was playing and somewhere in the distance a cannon boomed. There was a motion to make the nomination unanimous and William McKinley came pushing down the aisle to where Theodore and Curtis sat. He urged one or the other to go to the platform and speak for Blaine, but neither would budge. When Curtis shook his head, wrote one of the many reporters who were watching the whole interchange, it was not in anger but in sorrow. A reporter took hold of Theodore by the arm as he started toward the exit. He had nothing to say, Theodore insisted. His face was crimson, his “eyes flashed with indignation behind his gold-rimmed spectacles as he contemplated his first real defeat.”
“I decline to say anything ...”
“But you will certainly support Blaine, will you not?”
“That question I decline to answer. It is a subject that I do not care to talk about.”
“Will you not enter the campaign in the interests of the Republican Party?”
“I am going cattle ranching in Dakota for the remainder of the summer and part of the fall. What I shall do after that I cannot tell you.”
He brushed off another reporter by telling him to wait a week. To the man from the Times he said that by tradition he was expected to support the nominee, but refused to say more.
“A grave would be garrulous compared to me tonight,” he told still another man, this one from the Boston Transcript, but then suddenly he said that picking Blaine was the greatest possible blunder—and that he would support him.
Lodge and Curtis were being besieged with the same questions. “Don’t hit a fellow because he’s down,” Lodge responded. “I think on the whole I may join the machine and keep in politics. This country is in such a hurry it can’t stop for reform.”
Curtis, in Theodore’s presence, said he had been a Republican too long to break from the party now.
The convention ended that evening with the naming of John A. Logan as Blaine’s running mate. Logan, a profane, contentious figure, had been an excellent commander in the Union Army and in politics a “thick-or-thin” Grant supporter. He was on the ticket to please the old Conkling crowd and to bring in the soldier vote. It was Logan who, in 1868, had conceived the idea of Memorial Day. Blaine, like Cleveland, had hired a substitute during the war.
At the White House Chester A. Arthur sent off a cable pledging his “earnest and cordial support.” Two weeks later, he would confide to a friend that he was indeed suffering from an advanced case of Bright’s disease and did not have long to live.
Jubilant crowds surged through the streets of Chicago most of the night, tying up traffic for blocks around the main hotels. Bonfires burned at several street corners; one, in front of the Vickers Theater, gave off such heat that passing horses were injured. Rockets flashed from housetops; “people—young and old—formed impromptu processions and marched . . . howling like madmen: ’Blaine, Blaine, hurrah for Blaine!’”
Bulletins reported similar demonstrations for Blaine in Pittsburgh, Dayton, Princeton. In San Francisco all business was suspended. The city had “gone wild.”
It was also that night, about midnight, according to one of the editors of the Evening Post, Horace White, that Theodore came into the Independent committee room at the Grand Pacific, where White was busy composing a dispatch to the New York office, predicting a revolt among the Independent Republicans. Theodore sat down, according to White’s account, and White read aloud what he had written, asking at the end if he had made it strong enough. No, he had not, said Theodore, his fury and fatigue having caught up with him. “If I were writing it, I would say, ’any proper Democratic nomination will have our hearty support.’” He thought the best Democrat would be Cleveland.
By midmorning the following day, Saturday, June 7, however, Theodore had packed and checked out. “ROOSEVELT TAKES TO THE WOODS,” scoffed a headline in the World. Roosevelt and Curtis, alone of all the delegates, had pouted and sulked like whipped schoolboys, said a Midwestern paper.
But then two days later came a report from St. Paul, Minnesota, quoting Theodore as saying, “I shall bolt the nomination of the convention by no means. I have no personal objections to Blaine . . . I believe Blaine will be elected. . . . I have been called a reformer but I am a Republican . . .” He had been interviewed by a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press during a stop en route to the Bad Lands. The story was picked up all over the East—the New York Tribune carried it on the front page—and so suddenly whether he was in or out of the party, with Blaine or against him, was cause for an uproar.
“ROOSEVELT’S RECANTATION REGARDED AS HIS POLITICAL DEATH WARRANT,” announced the World, while the Evening Post insisted the whole thing was a hoax and sent off a wire to Medora, in the Bad Lands, calling for a denial. The Times decided to say nothing of the reported statement, so certain were the editors that it was false.
“Theodore, beware of ambition!” observed the Daily Globe in Boston. The Evening Transcript speculated that the story was the work of “some bungling Western reporter” (a remark some readers of the Transcript probably considered redundant). “If Mr. Roosevelt’s remarks are reported aright,” declared the author of a letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser, “they are among the most startling effects of modern practical politics.”
The so-called repudiation from Medora was dated June 12, an enigmatic telegram saying, “To my knowledge had no interview for publication; never said anything like you report. May have said I opposed Blaine for public reasons not personal to myself.”
So cheered were the editors of the Boston Transcript by this news that they put out an extra edition.
On June 16 came another telegram, but again there was no telling where he stood on Blaine, whether he was bolting the party or not.
“Just saw my alleged St. Paul interview for the first time. It is wholly fictitious. I never was interviewed on this subject, and never said anything even approximately resembling what was reported.”
To the editors of the World it was all becoming wonderfully ludicrous.
The gallant young man rushed away from the Chicago convention full of heat and bitterness. Now that he has expanded his lungs with the rarefied air incident to the high altitudes of the earth and cooled his intellectual brow in the streams which flow down from regions of virgin snow he might confer a favor on mankind by simply saying explicitly whether he is for or against Blaine.
In Boston, meantime, the revolt had begun in no uncertain terms. A meeting of the Massachusetts Reform Club had been called at the Parker House the very next day after the nominations in Chicago. Blaine was denounced, and a committee was organized to work for his defeat in November. Charles W. Eliot and Theodore’s old classmate Josiah Quincy were principals in the movement. Most of those Theodore had known on the Harvard faculty were bolting the party (with the exception of Shaler, who was already a Democrat). Both James Russell Lowell and Richard H. Dana, his father’s two friends from the ’76 convention, were bolting.
In New York the Times ran columns of letters from Republicans who were joining the exodus. Schurz, Godkin, and the editors of the Times had already renounced Blaine, and so, too, by now had Curtis, who, in spite of what he said at Chicago and for all that the party had meant to him, was unable to go along with such a nominee. On June 14 Harper’s Weekly came out against Blaine. On July 5, in an editorial, Curtis put the magazine squarely behind Grover Cleveland, and when at Chicago the next week, the Democrats made Cleveland their candidate, the effect among influential Republicans exceeded anyone’s expectations. The staunchly Republican New York Times announced its support for Cleveland. Henry Ward Beecher was leaving the party. So was Mayor Seth Low of Brooklyn. So was Theodore’s senior partner in the publishing business, George Haven Putnam, who called the Republican nominations “a farce and an absurdity, not to say an anachronism.” Even J. Pierpont Morgan was bolting. And along with Curtis, Schurz, Godkin, Lowell, Dana—all those with whom the elder Theodore had worked with such verve and conviction in ’76—there was even added the name of Benjamin H. Bristow.
Henry Cabot Lodge, who continued to say, as he had at Chicago, that he would stand by the nominee, was being denounced by old friends and admirers as little better than a traitor. He was no longer invited to dinner. Some in Boston who had known him all their lives were refusing even to speak to him. “Mr. Lodge maintains that he has changed his mind,” remarked one man. “I call it not a change of mind but a change of soul.” Schurz, in a kindly letter of advice, urged Lodge to come to his senses.
You are a young man. You have the great advantage of affluent circumstances. You have the promise of an honorable and useful career before you. . . . The course you are now in danger of following . . . will unite you more and more in fellowship with . . . the ordinary party politicians. The more you try to satisfy them the less you will satisfy yourself.
“Whatever the result of the election, the parties will remain,” Lodge answered Schurz with cold logic. “By staying in the party I can be of use. By going out I destroy all the influence for power and good I may possess. . . . If I am to be banned because I vote according to what I believe . . . I will fight against such treatment with all my strength.”
Lodge said later that he and Theodore had made a pact before Chicago to stand by the nominee even if it was Blaine, which is precisely what Theodore had told the Chicago Tribune he would do, the first morning at the Grand Pacific. It was also what he had told the Boston Transcript he would do within an hour after Blaine was nominated. But the last week in June, Lodge received a letter from the Bad Lands dated the seventeenth. “I am absolutely ignorant of what has been said or done since the convention,” wrote Theodore, “as I have been away from all newspapers for ten days. I hope soon to be back when I will see you and decide with you as to what we can do.”
A day or so later a second letter reached Lodge. He was heading east in another week, Theodore wrote, “as I wish to see you at once. You are pursuing precisely the proper course; do not answer any assaults unless it is imperatively necessary; keep on good terms with the machine, and put in every ounce to win.” He was writing under certain difficulties, Theodore said, being in a cattleman’s hut and having just spent thirteen hours in the saddle. In a postscript he repeated again that he had not seen a newspaper since leaving Chicago.
3
Without question, the Chicago convention was one of the crucial events of Theodore’s life, a dividing line with numerous consequences. He had carried the fight against Blaine with all that was in him, and if he had lost, if, as he told Bamie, it had been “an overwhelming rout,” no one could fault him for not trying, and the impression he had made in this first appearance on the national political stage was phenomenal. He was still all of twenty-five years old; it had been his first national convention. Yet from the first day he had proved himself a force to reckon with, by friend or foe, and the attraction he had for newspaper attention was the kind every politician dreams of. He was a natural politician. He had a born genius for the limelight, for all the gestures and theatrics of politics. In his undersized, overdressed way he had presence. Unquestionably, he had nerve.
He understood the part reporters play and knew exactly how to play to them. He was wonderful copy, easy—a pleasure—to write about, however one felt toward him. Also, for many who wrote about him, there was the underlying excitement of discovery: here was somebody with a future. In his best “notices” he was portrayed as “fearless,” “courageous,” “manly,” “tireless,” “plucky and unyielding,” as “the most interesting” man on hand, the “young chief,” as “an earnest direct speaker, who will be listened to whenever he speaks.” The Chicago Tribune, a Blaine paper, had called him “brilliant” and lauded his gallantry, placing him alongside Curtis as a standard of moral rectitude and character. He had been “young Casabianca Roosevelt [who] ’stood on the burning deck whence all but him fled’...” The Chicago Times called him very simply “the most remarkable young politician of the day,” and then made the point that he had had to get where he had in politics despite his background. “The advantage of being a self-made man was denied him. An unkind fortune hampered him with an old and wealthy family.”
Those who had fought for Edmunds with him—Lodge, Andrew D. White, John D. Long—had been enormously impressed. Andrew D. White, the Cornell president, would remember the rest of his life this “first revelation of that immense pluck and vigor . . . nothing daunted him.”
Possibly the most fervent of all admirers through the week at Chicago had been George William Curtis, who at lunch one day at the Grand Pacific is said to have pushed back from the table, placed his napkin beside his plate, waited a few seconds, then responded as follows to a reporters question about “young Roosevelt.”
You’ll know more, sir, later; a deal more. . . . He has integrity, courage, fair scholarship, a love for public life, a comfortable amount of money, honorable descent, the good word of the honest. He will not truckle nor cringe, he seems to court opposition to the point of being somewhat pugnacious. His political life will probably be a turbulent one, but he will be a figure, not a figurehead . . . or, if not, it will be because he gives up politics altogether.
As important as anything, as time would show, was the bond formed with Lodge. Chicago marked the beginning of the first lasting male friendship Theodore had ever made outside the family; and like another friendship also formed at that same convention—between McKinley and Mark Hanna—the political consequences were to be far-reaching.
In some respects Lodge was an improbable choice. Eight years Theodore’s senior, he struck most people as unbearably superior and fastidious, cold, calculating, a man who appeared to find any but his own patrician kind extremely distasteful. But Lodge was also fiercely loyal to his friends. He had tremendous energy, wide-ranging interests, a keen mind. He was a scholar, wellborn, wealthy. He loved history and literature, long walks, horses, and Harvard University. He was a fellow member of the Porcellian. By 1884 he had already published five books and yet was ambitious for a political career, despite his obvious handicaps. (He was called “Lah-de-dah Lodge,” among other things, and the sound of his voice was once compared to the tearing of a bed sheet.) Furthermore, he liked Theodore and let Theodore know it. They were fellow spirits in many respects and the difference in age made Lodge something of the big brother Theodore had never had. “I can’t help writing you,” he would tell Lodge some years later in a letter from New York, “for I literally have no one here to whom to unburden myself; I make acquaintances very easily, but there are only one or two people in the world, outside my own family, whom I deem friends or for whom I really care.”
And beyond all that Lodge was a fighter. “I have never been able to work so well with anybody before,” Theodore would tell him.
So . . . he had been in the roughest political fight of his experience and though beaten badly he had fought in a way no one would forget or that he need ever be ashamed of. He had commanded attention. He had found a friend, given a speech before the largest crowd he had ever seen, heard one speech he thought brilliant, heard another by a blind man whose voice “rang like a trumpet” and swept the convention. He had seen the voice of the people in action and had been both awed and a little appalled. But he had also perceived that Arthur failed because, as he wrote Bamie, Arthur had “absolutely no strength with the people.” Probably, he had drawn from the experience the lesson that in politics “strength with the people” is what ultimately counts. He was glad to have been present, he also told her; it had been a “historic scene.”
Interestingly, neither he nor any of those who wrote about him at such length ever mentioned the tragedy of February or the burden of grief he carried.
But the overriding importance of the Chicago convention for Theodore was that it marked the point at which he chose—had to choose—whether to cross the line and become a party man, a professional politician. He made no formal announcement of his support for Blaine until he had seen Lodge that July, but from all he had already said it is clear he knew what he would do even before leaving Chicago; he only needed, as he later said, time to cool down and think things over. Like Lodge, he was opening himself to heavy abuse from friends and from those admiring members of the press whose favor counted so much to him. Like Lodge, he could be accused of gross ambition, of moral backsliding, of betraying his own high-minded kind. And such condemnation could be extremely painful. Still, as he had said in a letter to Bamie soon after leaving Chicago, Blaine had been the “free choice of the great majority” of Republicans. It had been a fair fight, and while he found Blaine repellent, there was something about stalking off, quitting the game because he lost, that was even more repellent, quite apart from whatever personal ambition he harbored. He had no sentimental attachment to majority rule. “It may be,” he told Bamie, “that ’the voice of the people is the voice of God’ in fifty-one cases out of a hundred; but in the remaining forty-nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, or, what is still worse, the voice of a fool.” But voice of God, devil, fool, whatever it was, he must abide by it, both out of some fundamental sense of fair play and out of plain determination to have a stake in political power. If he bolted, he knew, he would be finished, out of politics except in some chance or peripheral fashion. He would be an outsider, devoid of that “inside influence” he knew to be essential if he was ever to accomplish anything. He had arrived at the point where he must decide whether he was to be a “mornin’ glory” or the real thing.
A writer of the day, Joseph Bucklin Bishop, who kept close watch on Theodore’s career and became a later-day confidant, said that with the nomination of Blaine, Theodore confronted “what in many respects was the most serious crisis of his career. . . . He insisted upon deciding the question himself, and in his own way and time.”
Similarly, a kinsman, the author Nicholas Roosevelt (son of Cousin West), was to write years later, “After watching American party politics closely for more than half a century. I am of the opinion that if TR had run out on the party in 1884, his political career would have been finished then and there.”
Yet apart from the more obvious difficulties of the decision, there was the break it meant for Theodore with so much that his father had stood for. He was severing himself from his father’s approach to public service, deserting his father’s old friends, all the people his father had so admired. It was now, far more than when he entered the legislature, that he was taking the step his father would almost certainly have disapproved. Had Blaine or Conkling been nominated at Cincinnati in ’76, there is little doubt what his father would have done.
Two years before, in February 1882, Theodore had written what, in the context of his decision on Blaine, is a very important letter. It was addressed to an old friend and admirer of his father s, the noted philanthropist and reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell.
I honestly mean to act up here [in the Assembly] on all questions as nearly as possible as I think Father would have done, if he had lived. I thoroughly believe in the Republican Party when it acts up to its principles—but if I can prevent it I never shall let party zeal obscure my sense of right and decency. What my success as a politician may be I do not care an atom: but I do wish to be able to end my work here with an entirely light heart and clear conscience.
The most striking and appropriate example of what would most likely have happened to him, had he bolted, is the case of Seth Low. Low refused to support Blaine, maintaining he was not a Republican mayor but the mayor of all the people in Brooklyn. As a consequence he never again received the wholehearted backing of the Republican organization, and his political career never came to much.
Theodore spent three days in New York with Bamie and his child, then several days at Chestnut Hill with the Lees before going to Lodge’s summer home at Nahant on Boston’s North Shore. The two of them spent a warm Friday evening sitting on a porch looking at the sea and talking until quite late. The following day, Saturday, July 19. Theodore made his statement to the Boston Herald.
I intend to vote the Republican presidential ticket. While at Chicago I told Mr. Lodge that such was my intention; but before announcing it, I wished to have time to think the whole matter over. A man cannot act both without and within the party; he can do either, but he cannot possibly do both. . . . I went in with my eyes wide open to do what I could within the party; I did my best and got beaten; and I propose to stand by the result. . . .
I am by inheritance and by education a Republican; whatever good I have been able to accomplish in public life has been accomplished through the Republican Party; I have acted with it in the past, and wish to act with it in the future . . . I am going back in a day or two to my western ranches, as I do not expect to take part in the campaign this fall.
People like William Roscoe Thayer felt “dumbfounded.” “We thought of him as a lost leader,” Thayer remembered. Owen Wister was convinced Theodore had come under the maleficent influence of Lodge, “his evil genius.” At the State Street offices of Lee, Higginson and Company, where he was working as a clerk in the vaults, Wister overheard Henry Lee remark to George C. Lee, “As for Cabot Lodge, nobody’s surprised at him; but you can tell that young whippersnapper in New York from me that his independence was the only thing in him we cared for, and if he has gone back on that, we don’t care to hear anything more about him.”
In New York he was denounced as “a crank and a nuisance.”
Young men like Mr. Roosevelt owe all their force in politics not to party fidelity [wrote the Evening Post], but to popular confidence in their absolute integrity. . . . In fact, the function of such men is to stand firm against bursts of party folly or baseness, until the popular conscience has time to act. . . . There is no ranch or other hiding place in the world in which a man can wait for Blaine and the Mulligan letters to “blow over,” for they will never blow over until justice is done.
Alone of those who had bolted, George William Curtis admitted privately that Theodore, in staying with the party, had “played the game fairly.”
Theodore seemed immensely relieved, once the step had been taken. “Most of my friends seem surprised to find that I have not developed hoofs and horns,” he wrote Lodge jauntily from New York before leaving again for the West. Next, he was writing from his ranch. “You would be amused to see me, in my broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horsehide chaparajos or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs.” He had changed his mind about the fall campaign, he said. Lodge could count on his help.