Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [132]
He spoke for an hour and a half, beginning with a rhythmic affirmation of the Progressive creed: “We stand for a nobler America.… We stand for social brotherhood as against savage individualism. We stand for an intelligent cooperation instead of a reckless competition.… Ours is a battle for the actual rights of man.” The Party, he said, had been gestating for years, as ordinary Americans of all political persuasions grew to resent special-interest rule, “the invisible government behind our visible government.” He called for the reforms that Roosevelt had itemized at Osawatomie and elsewhere—direct primaries, direct election of senators, the initiative, referendum, and recall—arguing that popular rule would alleviate bossism, social insecurity, worker abuse, and the oligarchical concentration of wealth. America was blessed in being prosperous and thinly peopled, but cursed in making a cult of selfishness. “The Progressive motto is, ‘Pass prosperity around.’ ”
Vigorously, his fine eyes glowing, Beveridge also inveighed against child labor, neglect of the elderly, and sex discrimination. The Party, he said, demanded that women be paid as much as men. What was more, “Votes for women are theirs as a matter of natural right alone.” At this, the convention exploded. Delegates of both sexes clambered onto their chairs and shouted approval. Jane Addams controled her emotions, but her face was triumphant. Even men were seen wiping away tears everyone sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
“It was not a convention at all,” a New York Times reporter wrote that night. “It was an assemblage of religious enthusiasts.”
ENTHUSIASM BECAME ECSTASY the following day, when Theodore Roosevelt materialized beneath the yellow airfoil. No presidential candidate had ever before attended a national convention. For fifty-eight minutes he stood grinning as the Coliseum shook with noise.
At least ten thousand people flooded the floor in a red tide of bandannas. Hats encircled with rings rose on the ends of canes. Two black Northern delegates climbed onstage, and Roosevelt gratefully reached out for them. They huddled with him as he talked and gesticulated, his words inaudible a few feet away. Then one pounded him on the shoulder, and for a moment the trio stood hand in hand, to roars of applause and imitation moose calls.
Jane Addams mounted in her turn. As she posed beside the Colonel, the band struck up “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Roosevelt led the singing, both arms held high.
Like a mighty army moves the church of God,
Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod.…
The hymn was not quite to Miss Addams’s taste. But its tune was impossible to resist, and not all the words embarrassed her:
We are not divided, all one body we—
One in hope and doctrine, one in charity.
“I have been fighting for progressive principles for thirty years,” she said as she descended from the platform into a sea of well-wishers. “This is the biggest day in my life.”
The celebration went on and on. Eventually Roosevelt was left alone onstage, bowing to the crowd. Senator Root’s mocking prophecy appeared to have been fulfilled: He aims at a leadership far in the future, as a sort of Moses and Messiah for a vast progressive tide of a rising humanity. His smile betrayed a hint of alarm, as if he was bewildered by the religiosity that surged around him. Vitality he had, and passion too, for earthly attainments and even abstract ethical aims, but he could not abandon himself to this communal rapture. The crowd was unlike any other he had seen before, chaotic in its variety.
Here, waving bandannas, were former Democrats like Judge Benjamin B. Lindsey of Colorado, a power in the juvenile court movement, Raymond Robins, a wealthy labor activist, Don Dickinson, postmaster general under President Cleveland, and Bourke Cockran, the legendary orator of Tammany Hall. Senators Dixon, Poindexter, Clapp, Bristow, and Norris represented the Republican insurgency of recent