Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [116]
“It is our duty to the people of this country to insist that no action of the convention which is based on the votes of these fraudulently seated delegates binds the Republican party or imposes any obligation upon any Republican.”
The last five words, full of implication of a bolt, earned Roosevelt his first standing ovation of the evening. Encouraged, he launched into an analysis of the Committee’s recent rulings that was so dense with numbers and labyrinthine in its arguments of conspiracy as to annoy anyone immune to his charisma. But there were few such unbelievers present. Almost in spite of himself, he moved from the particular to the philosophical. Conservatives, he said, “are taught to believe that change means destruction. They are wrong.… Life means change; where there is no change, death comes.”
By now the applause was thunderous. “I am never surprised at anything Theodore may say,” Edith remarked to Cal O’Laughlin, her face lit up with pride.
Again and again he declared that American society wished to transform itself. “The trumpets sound the advance, and their appeal cannot be drowned by repeating the war-cries of bygone battles, the victory shouts of vanquished hosts. Here in this city—”
He seemed about to identify Chicago as the civitas Dei. By now he had been orating for well over an hour, and Bryan looked ready to nod off. But a magnificent peroration was coming:
Assuredly the fight will go on whether we win or lose.… What happens to me is not of the slightest consequence; I am to be used, as in a doubtful battle any man is used, to his hurt or not, so long as he is useful, and then cast aside or left to die. I wish you to feel this. I mean it; and I shall need no sympathy when you are through with me, for this fight is far too great to permit us to concern ourselves about any one man’s welfare.… The victory shall be ours, and it shall be won as we have already won so many victories, by clean and honest fighting for the loftiest of causes. We fight in honorable fashion for the good of mankind; fearless for the future; unheeding of our individual fates; with unflinching hearts and undimmed eyes; we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.
Never before had Roosevelt used such evangelical language, or dared to present himself as a holy warrior. And never before had he heard such cheering. Intentionally or not, he invested progressivism with a divine aura. Secular Republicans were repelled by the fanaticism of his followers, and wondered which “Lord” the Colonel really had in mind to command his mythical army. A flyer circulated around Chicago, arousing much hilarity:
At Three o’Clock
Thursday Afternoon
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Will Walk
on the
Waters of
Lake Michigan
BARBED WIRE PROTRUDED from the bunting around the rostrum of the Republican National Convention when it opened in the Coliseum on Tuesday, 18 June. Nothing could have more graphically signaled the Party leadership’s desire to fortify itself against a hostile takeover. The surrounding platform, edged in red-white-and-blue, stood shoulder-high and was inaccessible from the floor. Anyone hoisting himself up onto it would get his hands and chest slashed by the wire. A stairway just wide enough to admit one man led up from the National Committee room below, and was guarded at top and bottom by security agents. Behind yawned a dry moat, twelve feet deep. A line of Chicago policemen was deployed facing the front row of seats, and others stood in a tight circle around the delegate enclosure. One of them told a reporter, “I am for Teddy and I don’t care who knows it.”
By the time the building opened its doors at 10:30 A.M., Henry James’s description of Roosevelt as “the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise” was fully borne out. The bands that had greeted the Colonel’s arrival in town were amplified five times over by those of marching clubs escorting the various delegations. Other kinds of din, beginning