Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [60]
Bryan arrived in Pittsburgh just before 7:00, exhausted from his trip. Once again, thousands met the candidate’s train at Union Station, and the police had to force a path through the crowd to the Central Hotel. Bryan emerged briefly onto his hotel room’s balcony, bowed to the cheering crowd, but said nothing. He was saving his already strained voice for a large rally to be held that evening in the Grand Opera House.
After dinner the couple made their way to the opera house, and Bryan began to speak at 9:30 PM. One observer called his voice “husky,” saying it “showed signs of failing under the severe strain of the past few days.” The immense gathering in one of America’s biggest cities made this an important campaign stop, but Bryan could squeeze out only fifteen minutes of campaign boilerplate before heat and exhaustion made him stop. Flanked by representatives of the mine workers’ and steelworkers’ unions, he said little that was new, repeating his belief in the people of the United States and in their ability to make the correct judgment on every subject.
Despite his brief Pittsburgh speech, Bryan displayed his inexperience in a national campaign. Even in his foreshortened remarks, he repeated his jarring reference to the East being “enemy’s country,” an odd thing to say in any city east of the Mississippi. While the Republican press had enjoyed repeating this phrase on the eve of his arrival in New York City, portraying it as the sort of gaffe a young, inexperienced demagogue might make, in fact he seemed to like this particular turn of phrase. Furthermore, he lapsed once again into the martial rhetoric of one who had never experienced battle, pledging that during the campaign “not a single private in the ranks will stand nearer to the enemy’s lines than him in whose hand is the standard.” And once again he almost guaranteed a frosty reception in New York City. How many times would he refer to that city as “enemy’s country” before arriving to give perhaps the most important speech of the campaign? This was but one of the factors conspiring to make his New York visit a difficult one.
In the Grand Opera House that evening, with his voice failing and the exhaustion of the day taking a physical toll on him, the temperature inside the packed hall reached extreme levels. While there were no reports of heat prostration in the audience, every observer noted that “the heated atmosphere was almost unbearable.” It was a grim foreshadowing of what awaited Bryan inside Madison Square Garden.
IN NEW YORK, as of Monday, August 10, frantic preparations were still being made for Bryan’s big speech only two days away. One reporter described the situation at the Democratic headquarters at the Bartholdi Hotel as being “a mixed up mess,” as campaign officials ran about on different errands and no one could answer reporters’ questions. All the journalists could report was that New York’s Democratic leaders hoped to host a giant, loud rally like the one that accompanied Bryan’s nomination in Chicago. If they could pull it off, such an event would illustrate his popularity among New York’s working class and maintain what they referred to as his “boom,” or what later political pundits would call “momentum.”
The Democrats planned to pack the Garden with an unprecedented 10,500 seats, with as many as 7,000 more standing. Such a crowd had been seen but once before at the Garden, on its opening night in June 1890. That event had occurred on a mild early summer night. To pack the same hall in 100-degree heat was madness.
No other locale in the United States during the heat wave would have dared bring together such a mass of humanity, while headlines screamed the daily death toll. But the date had been reserved, Democrats from all over the country were even now pouring into town, and Bryan himself was but a day away. “Madison Square Garden,” the Times warned, “promises to be the most uncomfortable, and, some think, the most dangerous place in the country.” The consequences of packing so many people into the Garden on such a hot night “can