Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [114]
For twenty-two hours the Limited puffed west. A hot damp inversion enveloped it the following morning as it crossed from Ohio into the industrial flats of Indiana. Roosevelt laid aside his current reading—Herodotus—and labored on the text of a speech that he planned to deliver in the Chicago Auditorium on Monday night, the eve of the convention. He declined to provide reporters with an advance copy, but told Nicholas it would be “the great effort of his life.”
In mid-afternoon, the train stopped at South Bend, and the ubiquitous Cal O’Laughlin climbed aboard. He had an optimistic projection to deliver. According to campaign headquarters, some of Taft’s uncontested delegates were wavering. They had been recruited under pressure, and resented it. If they defected, the President would find himself four votes short of a majority on Tuesday.
This was a number easier for Taft to reduce than for Roosevelt to expand, but it caused the Colonel to bubble over with joy. He began to talk about winning rather than bolting—an act that should be considered “only in the very last extremities.”
At 4 P.M. he stepped down onto the platform of Chicago’s LaSalle Street station. He wore a new, tan campaign hat that said, louder than words, that the Rough Rider was back in the saddle. Its brim, fully five inches wide, failed to obscure the brilliancy of his teeth. A howling crowd broke through barriers erected by the police and surged so voraciously that Nicholas, George, and two other youths had to form a wedge around him and batter their way toward the station exit. Meanwhile, a band thumped out his old marching song, “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Outside in Van Buren Street, the crowd was even larger and louder. Two other bands blared in Ivesian discord. A line of flag-decked automobiles stood waiting. Roosevelt hauled himself into the first, accompanied by Senator Dixon. The motorcade got under way with difficulty. As Nicholas recorded in his diary:
People packed the windows and lined the roofs and the elevated tracks and were so thick in the streets we could hardly move in the procession.… Everyone was howling with delight, and cries of “Teddy!” filled the air. At the cross streets, as far as we could see to either side, or back or forward, people were wedged in like pins. Everyone cheered. Everyone screamed. Everyone was hurled along in the irresistible force of the delighted mob. Ahead rode Cousin Theodore, bowing to right and to left.… Even now the thought of it makes shivers run up and down my back.
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