Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [149]
He announced that he would address a mass meeting at Madison Square Garden on the thirtieth. “I am in fine shape now,” he wrote his sister Bamie, while admitting to William Flinn that he might need pharmaceutical help.
HIRAM JOHNSON was warming up the crowd of sixteen thousand at the Garden when a sound of distant cheering betokened Roosevelt’s approach. It grew louder, and eventually drowned out Johnson’s words. A sudden influx of newcomers filled the main entrance. For a moment or two the man they were escorting was invisible, but when he appeared on the prow of the platform, looking out over the sea of heads like a figurehead breasting foam, the uproar surged to hysterical levels. Dowagers climbed onto their chairs and screamed. Groups of men competed with one another to improvise noises even more raucous than the moose calls heard in the Chicago Coliseum in August. Heels drummed on the auditorium floor. Time and again, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” rose above the din.
As far as reporters could tell, there was nothing orchestrated about the demonstration. Roosevelt had to wait for more than forty minutes, looking at first amused, then tired, then impatient, as if his First Amendment rights were being abused. He got order at last by banging on the flag-draped speaker’s table. Alert eyes noticed that he did so with his left hand. His face was ruddy, and when he began to speak, his voice easily filled the vast room. But there were no smacks of fist into palm. Occasionally he tried to raise his right arm, then winced and dropped it.
“Friends, perhaps once in a generation, perhaps not so often—” The crowd began roaring again. Roosevelt lost his temper and yelled, “Quiet, down there!” A hush ensued.
“—Perhaps not so often, there comes a chance for the people of a country to play their part wisely and fearlessly in some great battle of the age-long warfare for human rights.”
This was approximately his 150th formal address of the campaign, and he had nothing new to say about Progressivism, much less about himself. As he spoke on, reporters were struck by the absence of the rancor he had often shown against Taft and Wilson on the stump. He mentioned neither by name, and seemed content to talk vaguely, yet feelingly, about the humanitarianism of his Party. “The doctrines we preach reach back to the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount. They reach back to the commandments delivered at Sinai. All that we are doing is to apply those doctrines in the shape necessary to make them available for meeting the living issues of our own day.”
ON TUESDAY, 5 November, a pall of privacy descended on Sagamore Hill for the first time in many months. Roosevelt was driven down to Oyster Bay at noon, and voted in the firehouse. After lunch, he and Edith went for a long walk in the woods. George Perkins arrived on the 4:05 train from New York, visited briefly, and hurried back to the station without saying anything to reporters.
At seven the Colonel dressed for dinner as usual, and dined with his wife and a cousin, Laura Roosevelt. Most of the younger family members were at the Progressive headquarters in the city, watching returns come in over the wires. Alice was in Cincinnati, miserably pessimistic, her marriage as tenuous as Nick Longworth’s chances of another term in Congress.
The phone call Roosevelt was bracing for came at about eleven o’clock. Two hundred miles away, the bells of Princeton, New Jersey, began to peal, while those of Oyster Bay remained silent. Presently a servant came out of Sagamore Hill and hurried off with a telegram