Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [30]
If black Republicans represented the least powerful branch of the party in New York City in 1896, perhaps the Union League Club represented the most powerful. Founded in 1863 to show support for the Union cause in a city with sharply divided loyalties, after the war the club turned its attention to civic projects, such as founding the Metropolitan Museum of Art and cleaning up New York city government. Theodore Roosevelt Sr. had been a prominent founding member of the club that had later supported Theodore Roosevelt Jr. for mayor in 1886. On August 4, Hanna had dinner at the club and received the greetings of men who were top contributors to the Republican Party. Yet by simply entering the club’s building, Hanna walked a fine line between the forces of political reform it represented and the state Republican machine run by “boss” Thomas Platt. It was a line Roosevelt himself would walk during much of his political career in New York, attempting to remain as independent as possible while necessarily dependent on the support of the Republican machine run by Platt.
Hanna had already been approached by anti-Platt men over the possibility of running the campaign through a county committee rather than a state committee controlled by Platt. Indeed they had approached Roosevelt over the very same issue earlier in the year, with New York Tribune journalist John E. Milholland and New York merchant Cornelius Bliss asking the police commissioner for his support. In spite of his fondness for reform, Roosevelt doubtlessly made the right choice in staying loyal to the Republican machine. At the club that night, Hanna himself made it clear to Milholland and Bliss that he would give them “no show in the management of the campaign in any other capacity than as good Republicans. As a faction they will not be recognized, for, as the case was put here by one of Mr. Hanna’s friends, ‘He will use the regulars for his fighting, and will not trust to the militia.’” With his future uncertain and desiring a new post in Washington, Roosevelt made sure he was one of Hanna’s “regulars.”
Hanna also struck a blow against Platt concerning the handling of the millions of dollars in campaign money. He had maintained Cornelius Bliss as Republican National Committee treasurer, a position Bliss had held since 1892. The millions of dollars that Hanna would raise for the 1896 campaign, then, would flow through Bliss’s hands. Opposing Platt and the machine’s dominance of any state campaign that fall, Bliss was able to take a measure of revenge through his position as committee treasurer. Hanna and Bliss decided to hand over to the Republican state campaign only a very small amount of the national committee’s funds, as most Republicans remained convinced that the main fight with Bryan would be in the West. In other words, Platt’s machine that fall would not be fueled by any McKinley campaign funds.
McKinley was not the man Platt wanted running for president. In 1895 at the Republican state convention, Platt had helped engineer a unanimous endorsement of New York governor Levi Morton for the Republican presidential nomination. Morton was known as a sound-money advocate even more than the tariff-championing McKinley, so his chances the following year seemed good. Even Roosevelt had written to Lodge the previous June saying, “This State shows very strong symptoms of going in good earnest for Morton,” and noting he had heard “there is an immense amount of talk about Morton in the West.”
Nevertheless, Morton was a creature of Platt, and as the Republican National Convention drew near in 1896, a revolt against Platt’s coronation of Morton began to grow. At Platt’s urging, Morton had signed the controversial Raines Liquor Bill and the Greater New York Consolidation Act, both of which were seen as conferring more power on the state political machine run by Boss Platt. When Morton then publicly