Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [10]
Aside from the New Jersey train disaster, this was the top story of the day. “Tiger Takes the Ticket,” the Times declared. “Swallowed by the Tiger,” echoed the Tribune. Yet everyone also noted that New York Democrats had taken the rather absurd step of endorsing Bryan, the convention’s nominee, but not free silver, its platform. “The resolution that turned Tammany over to the ‘Pops’ ticket absolutely ignored the platform,” the staunchly Republican Times smirked. “The Tiger even could not stomach that. He swallowed the ticket without much of a grimace, but even his stout stomach could not take the platform as well.”
The party was in a state of crisis. Faced with a nominee whose policies they could not abide, New York Democrats were already quietly defecting to support McKinley. Bryan’s campaign had to take action to salvage the support of his own party.
In a bold move to take the fight to the gold-standard capital of the country and reverse Democratic defections, the Bryan campaign decided to come east and officially accept the Democratic nomination at a huge rally in Madison Square Garden. The gravity of the situation facing Bryan necessitated such a move, even before Bryan knew of Tammany’s decision to support his candidacy. Bryan didn’t wait for news from Tammany: Two days before Bryan received its endorsement, he received word from New York that the auditorium had been booked.
The dates of Bryan’s trip to New York were now set. Accompanied by Mary, he would leave Lincoln, Nebraska, on Friday, August 7, and arrive in New York Tuesday evening, August 11. The following day, Bryan would address thousands at Madison Square Garden, thus kicking off his national campaign in a daring move that might make or break it only three months before the November election.
OUT ON LONG ISLAND, Theodore Roosevelt was also looking ahead to November. Saturday, August 1, was a warm, bright day, the sunlight almost blinding off Oyster Bay, beside which stood the Roosevelt family home, Sagamore Hill.
It was a large house, built near where Roosevelt had summered with his family as a child and initially designed for his first wife, Alice. With so many bedrooms, Theodore and Alice were apparently expecting to have a large family. Then in February 1884, soon after giving birth to a baby girl, Alice Hathaway Roosevelt died of Bright’s disease, an inflammation of the kidneys that had gone undiagnosed during her pregnancy. The same night Roosevelt’s mother, Mittie, died of typhoid fever, which had first appeared to be merely a bad cold. The devastated Roosevelt destroyed his diary entries relating to his wife, left his newborn baby in the care of his sister, and fled west to the Badlands.
Over Christmas 1886, Roosevelt married his childhood friend Edith Carow, and by August 1896, almost ten years after their marriage, Edith and Theodore had filled those bedrooms with four children in addition to Alice Lee, now twelve years old. These were Theodore Junior, who would turn nine the following month; Kermit, age six; Ethel, only two weeks away from her fifth birthday; and two-year-old Archie.
It was perhaps with his growing family in mind that Roosevelt hosted a special guest that weekend. Maria Longworth Storer was a wealthy Washington matron active in her support for the Catholic Church. Her husband, Bellamy Storer, was a former congressman from Ohio and son of a former congressman. (He was also uncle to Nicholas Longworth, another Ohio congressman, and Alice Lee Roosevelt’s future husband.) The Storers were longtime supporters of fellow Ohioan William McKinley. When the economic crash of 1893 had wiped out all of McKinley’s investments, thus threatening his promising political career, the Storers had bailed him out with a $10,000 loan. The Republican presidential nominee was literally in their debt, and Bellamy Storer had his eye on a cabinet post or ambassadorship. Roosevelt was hoping to leverage his friendship with the