Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [115]
“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.
If the methods adopted by the National Committee are approved by the convention which is about to assemble, a great crime will have been committed. The triumph of such proceedings at the moment would mean the wreck of the Republican Party; and if such proceedings became habitual, it would mean the wreck of popular government. The actions of the Taft leaders … are monstrous, and they should be indignantly condemned by the moral sentiment of the whole country.
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