Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [117]
But first came a bang of flashbulbs, as the delegates sat still for a group photograph. (Conspicuously missing, anywhere in the room, was the usual overhanging portrait of the President of the United States.) The brief glare illuminated 1,078 faces, only a few managing smiles. “It’s the last time the convention will look pleasant,” Rosewater said.
Contrary to rumors, Roosevelt had not asked permission to attend. Edith and all his children represented him in a special box in the gallery. He remained at the Congress Hotel, looking, in Nicholas’s words, “fresh as an apple and rosy and happy as a child,” and monitoring the proceedings by means of a telephone line rigged through to his floor manager, Governor Herbert S. Hadley of Missouri.
Hadley, a calm, fine-featured man of forty, cut an imposing figure on the floor. Although he had been one of the signers of the petition requesting Roosevelt to run, he was no radical, and enjoyed the distinction of having been eyed as a running mate by both major candidates. He engineered the day’s first surprise by taking the rostrum as soon as the official convention call had been read. “Mr. Chairman,” he said to Rosewater, “I rise to a question of information.”
William Barnes, Jr., jumped up in shock from his seat with the New York delegation. Simultaneously, the President’s personal representative, former congressman James E. Watson of Indiana, rushed to the edge of the stage. Neither was able to stop Hadley from asking, in an easy sonorous voice, if the Committee had drawn up its temporary roll of the convention. If not, he had an alternative roll to offer. He was sure that the Committee’s draft included the names of certain delegates unacceptable to Roosevelt Republicans, and he moved that they be replaced by the names on his own list, which he felt the rank and file might prefer.
Rosewater overruled Barnes and Watson, who were protesting that the convention was not yet organized, and said that in the spirit of fairness, the governor would be allowed twenty minutes to argue his point. Hadley said that a substantial minority of the National Committee believed that the recent hearings had been manipulated. As a result, seventy-two usurpers were now sitting before him, “without any honest title to their seats.”
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