Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [135]
A day of steady drizzle dawned. Delegates found the visitor galleries of the Coliseum largely deserted when they filed in under the giant moose head, shaking their umbrellas. Hours of report-reading by various committee chairs, as well as presentation and adoption of the platform, had to be endured before the nominating speeches could begin. Since there was only one candidate, those were unlikely to be news. Only then would the convention be informed whom the Colonel had chosen as his running mate. Most bets were on Benjamin B. Lindsey of Colorado.
In the late afternoon, William A. Prendergast, comptroller of New York City, presented Roosevelt’s name to automatic cheers. His remarks cost him no effort, as he had written them over two months before to deliver at the Republican convention. “There is no other man in American life,” he said, “who, in public office or out of it, has by his devotion to its interests, made so complete and genereous a contribution to the cup of its achievements.”
When Judge Lindsey rose to give the first seconding speech, realization spread that the diminutive Democrat was not going to be on the ticket. Jane Addams followed him to the rostrum. “I second the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt because his is one of the few men in our public life who has been responsive to the social appeal, and who has caught the significance of the modern movement,” she said, in the first address ever made by a woman to a national convention.
Finally, at seven o’clock, Beveridge announced that the Colonel had chosen Governor Hiram Johnson of California to run with him.
The two men came out together (Johnson notably shorter and stockier) to a roar of acclaim that formalized their nomination. Roosevelt seemed genuinely moved. The religiosity in the hall surged to the point of delirium, but yesterday’s alarm was gone from his face. He stood arm-in-arm with Johnson as fifes and drums, a trombone quartet, and a full band led the crowd of ten thousand in singing the Doxology—its meter syncopated by the popping of a minute gun in the organ loft:
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host,
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
* Convention delegate, chairman of the Illinois Progressive Central Committee.
CHAPTER 12
There Was No Other Place on His Body
O no, not now! He’ll not be going now:
There’ll be time yet for God knows what explosions
Before he goes.
THE PROGRESSIVE NATIONAL CONVENTION did not strike everyone as a transcendental event. “In form, two thousand delegates, more or less, gathered in the Coliseum,” Senator George Sutherland of Utah told Vice President James S. Sherman. “In reality, Mr. Roosevelt met in convention at Chicago, made a confession of faith, gave his hand to the colored brother from the north and his foot to the colored brother from the south, adopted a platform, nominated himself and brother Johnson, and adjourned with the ease of a thoroughly trained thimblerigger plying his vocation among the rural visitors to the Midway plaisance.”
The more measured view of The New York Times was that Roosevelt’s statement of Progressive policy had been “the best, the ablest, the most persuasive of all his public utterances.” That did not alter the chilling fact that what the Colonel wanted was “a vast system of state socialism.” If returned to power, he would regulate business with a rod of iron, fixing prices and redistributing profits. He would make Washington the nation’s welfare center, and emulate Lloyd George in the profligate bestowal of old-age pensions and industrial insurance. Worse still, he would subject “the whole organic law” of the United States, including its constitutional checks and balances, “to an endless