Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [131]
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
The record size of the convention (two thousand delegates and alternates, representing every state in the Union except South Carolina) astounded political reporters aware of the difficulty of organizing a new party in less time than corn took to grow. A sense of mass belonging thrilled the delegates themselves, many of whom had suffered, back home, the obloquy of heresy. Squads seating themselves under the banners of New Hampshire and Maine were encouraged by the sight of others in Western sombreros, or the white starched suits of Mississippi and Florida. All could be excused the delusion that Progressivism (at last styled with a capital P) was strong everywhere in the country, unified behind the most formidable campaigner in American history. Their common accessory was a red bandanna, tied around the neck in Rough Rider style—“common” indeed to observers who associated red with the rise of the proletariat.
Yet there was nothing lumpen about these Progressives, no representation of the poor-white element seen at Democratic conventions. They were scrubbed and prosperous-looking, well dressed and well behaved, churchgoing, charitable, bourgeois to a fault. Even the cigar-chomping Boss Flinn of Pennsylvania took care to spit sideways, so as not to stain his immaculate clothes. William Allen White surveyed the crowd and saw the sort of people he wrote for in the Emporia Gazette. He figured that there was not a delegate on the floor making less than two thousand dollars a year, or more than ten thousand—with a few conspicuous exceptions, such as George Perkins, “spick-and-span, oiled and curled like an Assyrian bull.”
White was struck by how many women he saw in the delegate rows, looking as businesslike as possible in their frilly shirtwaisters: female doctors, lawyers, teachers, and community activists. Not a few were in their early twenties—“rich young girls who had gone in for settlement work.” All seemed to take it for granted that the Progressive platform would recognize universal woman suffrage.
The social pioneer Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s Hull House project and arguably the most famous woman in America, entered to reverential applause, a Bull Moose badge on her breast. She took her place in the front row of the VIP enclave, to the joy of officials who had feared she might stay away. Roosevelt’s decision not to seat Southern black delegates had disturbed her, and she had pleaded in vain with the provisional Party Committee to modify it. She was also a pacifist, and thought that the Colonel was too fond of battleships. Only the overriding importance he attached to social reform persuaded Miss Addams to support him rather than Wilson. She had agreed with some reluctance to second his nomination.
The convention came to order at 1:40 P.M., with an opening prayer remarkable for the loudness of its “Amens.” Then Albert J. Beveridge mounted the rostrum, a short, handsome figure dwarfed by a yellow soundboard that hung above him like an airfoil.
The former senator had to get things going with a keynote address that would compensate for the absence of the one man everybody wanted to see. Roosevelt had in fact wanted to make a brief, inspirational appearance after the first fall of the gavel. But Beveridge, a narcissist of the purest bloom, had demanded the afternoon’s headlines to himself. He was then prepared to act unflamboyantly as chairman of the convention.
Roosevelt could not argue against the wisdom of giving a better speaker than himself a chance to articulate the basic tenets of Progressivism—in a voice more silvery, with gestures less punchy. Back in the days of McKinley, Beveridge had won fame as a boyish, golden-haired prophet of America’s imperialistic destiny. Now he was older, darker, and less jingoistic, but still full of frustrated ambition. He had agonized for a long time about leaving the Republican Party, aware that he might never again represent