Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [119]
Much of the respect accorded Hadley came from a general awareness that he was the Colonel’s potential running mate. Taft had wanted him too, until he became one of the governors asking Roosevelt to run. (In a sure sign that the President despaired of reelection, he had chosen to retain Vice President Sherman, who was moribund with heart disease.) “I do not know if a majority of this convention agrees with me upon the proposition that Theodore Roosevelt ought to be our candidate for President of the United States,” Hadley said to a round of applause. “But there can be no difference on the proposition in the mind of any intelligent man that his voice today is the greatest voice in the western world.”
A series of more provocative, fist-waving speakers took up the seating debate. The noise level of the convention began to rise. Senator Lodge’s son-in-law, Congressman Augustus Peabody Gardner of Massachusetts, was so exasperated by the threat of a progressive, Henry J. Allen, to unload “two hundred pounds” of documents disqualifying the Washington State delegation that he stood on a chair repeatedly bellowing, “Are you going to abide by the decision of this convention?”
“I will support the nominee on one condition,” Allen replied. Pandemonium broke out, and for some minutes he could not continue. He waited for quiet. “Upon the one condition that his nomination is not accomplished by fraud and thievery.”
Instantly every Roosevelt delegate in the hall, with the exception of a few from Illinois, was leaping and cheering. William Flinn emerged as a major loudmouth, hurling insults at Elihu Root. He punctuated them with jets of tobacco juice. The chairman listened with indifference, showing disapproval only when anyone tried to interrupt a reasonable argument. Root’s voice was not strong, and his orders had to be amplified by aides sprinting down the aisles with megaphones. But he projected such an air of chilly rectitude, in his morning coat and gray trousers, that usually it was enough for him to step to the front of the rostrum to restore order.
His fairness extended to stopping the clock between speeches, so that prolonged ovations could expend themselves. The hours dragged on. In mid-afternoon Hadley and Watson had an emergency conference and agreed, with mutual alarm, that the proceedings were on track to a deadlock. Unless the question of the seventy-two contested delegates was resolved, it could split the GOP—no matter whose name was placed in nomination. Watson, gray-faced, took the podium and declared, “The convention is not in a fit condition, neither is it in a fit temper … to judge intelligently upon any one of these contests.” He said that Governor Hadley was willing, on behalf of the Roosevelt forces, to allow all seating claims to be decided by the credentials committee.
That body was not yet appointed, but for the moment, Hadley was seen as the savior of the Party. Delegation by delegation, an ovation for him built up until observers in the press box stared at the sight of William Flinn and William Barnes, Jr., cheering in tandem. The demonstration was that rare phenomenon in a national convention, a spontaneous expression of emotion, and it went through several mood changes. For the first twenty minutes it was bipartisan, with the potential of whipping up into a draft of the governor as a compromise nominee. But then rhythmic cries of “Teddy, Teddy—we want Teddy!” developed in the uproar, like the drumbeat of a coming fanfare. Attention began to divert from Hadley on the floor to a pretty woman standing in a high gallery. She wore a white dress, with a bunch of pinks at her waist. Whatever mysterious force focused fourteen thousand pairs of eyes on her, she was thespian enough to revel in it. She blew kisses at the crowd, then, leaning over the balustrade, unrolled