Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [104]
The Cockran speech immediately invited contrasts with Bryan’s. The Nation called the Cockran speech at the Garden “immense in every way,” and said, “its effect upon the country as a contrast to the Bryan demonstration of the previous week must have been very great.” The Times commented editorially in a column entitled, “The Boy Orator and the Man Orator.” The paper noted the great improvement in the organization and the police arrangements of the Cockran meeting. Even the weather had been different. “The queer and picturesque element added to the Bryan meeting by the intense heat was absent last night,” the paper observed, “the spectacle of a coatless crowd relieving itself by the waving of fans. But the management provided an efficient substitute for it last night by furnishing every seat with a little American flag, which produced an effect equally bizarre and more attractive.”
The very replacement of 15,000 waving palm-leaf fans with 15,000 waving American flags provided a fitting symbol to the overall contrast between the two meetings. If Bryan’s speech had sunk into a welter of heat, Cockran’s had soared on a wave of patriotism. But in the end the speeches themselves provided the main contrasts. The Times said that Cockran’s “affluent eloquence flowed on, interrupted only by applause as spontaneous as the applause for Bryan was perfunctory and managed, and by the hearty laughter which Bryan did not once elicit.” In one week New Yorkers had had the chance to observe two of America’s greatest public speakers address differing sides of the same issue and provide a dramatic start to the campaign season. For those who had gone to both Garden speeches, the Times believed “there must have been many who remembered with dim and remote wonder how they had suffered less than a week before in the place in which they were now delighted, and marveled at the vastness of the difference between an orator and a bore.”
Gone were the headlines criticizing Roosevelt’s police and the embarrassing stories of the arrest of a journalist. In his letter to Lodge, Roosevelt took credit for the better police measures. “This time I supervised the police arrangements myself,” he wrote, noting that the chief of police had “run off to the country.” Of course, a week earlier, Roosevelt had missed the Bryan meeting as he, too, had run off to the country, remaining in the cooler climes of Oyster Bay. “Everything went off without a hitch; there was very little legitimate ground for complaint even at the first meeting; it was chiefly reporters’ grievances, as a number of their passes were not honored. This time I saw that they were all honored, and the police kept complete control of the crowd, having them thoroughly in hand; and yet they behaved with the utmost good nature. I determined that I would be able to testify as an eye witness to all that happened.” Roosevelt repeated these observations to reporters. “It would be simple justice for the newspapers to state that the police could do no better than they have done tonight,” he said. “This meeting is a bigger one than the Bryan meeting. I have seen no fault to find with the police. I have been at every point outside, and have nothing but praise for the police arrangements and the managements of the crowds.” Roosevelt may have exaggerated his involvement in the police arrangements. In truth, his main contribution to that evening most likely was to serve as spokesman and booster for the police, especially after the criticism leveled against New York