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of course, attracted Roosevelt instantly. But the younger man was also drawn to Lodge’s mind, which was more erudite than his own. Lodge had not been deprived, by childhood invalidism, of a full classical education. After graduating from Harvard he had become an editor, with Henry Adams, of the North American Review, and had collaborated with that august intellectual in a book on the history of Anglo-Saxon law.50 More recently, he had published biographies of George Cabot (1877), Alexander Hamilton (1882), and Daniel Webster (1883), as well as A Short History of the American Colonies (1881). Lodge was now, in 1884, an overseer of Harvard College, chairman of the Massachusetts Republican party, and a candidate for Congress.51

No wonder Roosevelt admired this “Scholar in Politics.” Lodge, in turn, admired Roosevelt’s raw force and superior political instinct. The two had, besides, many things in common: aristocratic manners, wealth, a love of elegant clothes, membership in the Porcellian, early marriages to beautiful women (the Cabot blood shared by both Lodge and Alice Lee was another bond, albeit unspoken), massive egos, and a ruthless ambition.52 Theirs was a relationship in which occasional clashes of personality merely emphasized identical taste and breeding, as one or two dissonant notes enrich the larger harmonies of a major chord.

NO SOONER HAD ROOSEVELT checked into the Grand Pacific Hotel, New York’s headquarters, than newspapermen began to cluster around him. With his “chipper straw hat,” “natty cane,” and “new, French calf, low-cut shoes” he was “more specifically an object of curiosity than any other stranger in Chicago.”53 Lodge, too, attracted attention with his “crisp, short hair … full beard, and an appearance of half-shut eyes.”54

But it was politics, not appearances, that made reporters cluster around them. Word had spread that they might prove pivotal figures at the convention, beginning Tuesday. Under the patronage of old George William Curtis, the snowy-whiskered Civil Service Reformer and editor of Harper’s Weekly, Roosevelt and Lodge were leaders of the Independent forces. (They had spent most of the month rounding up Edmunds delegates by mail.)55 Although their power was too slight to affect the nomination of one clear favorite, they could possibly play two favorites off against each other, and then push the nomination of Senator Edmunds as a compromise. In other words, Roosevelt hoped to repeat his successful Utica performance. The numbers at Chicago were much larger, and the list of candidates longer (at least nine, as of midnight Saturday),56 but he had at least one trend in his favor: President Arthur and James G. Blaine were running neck and neck, with about three hundred delegates apiece. Edmunds lay third with ninety; all the other dark horses were far behind.

Making the most of their news value, Roosevelt and Lodge announced loudly and repeatedly that they would stay with their candidate until the end. Yet both added sotto voce, to at least one reporter, that if either Arthur or Blaine were nominated they, as loyal Republicans, would of course support him.57 It was a considerable admission, for their ideological rejection of both candidates, especially the “decidedly mottled” Blaine, was total. Editors buried the remarks beneath thousands of words of more frivolous preconvention copy.58

IN 1927 NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, president of Columbia University and an old friend of Theodore Roosevelt, remembered the Republican National Convention of 1884 as “the ablest body of men that ever came together in America since the original Constitutional Convention.”59 At the time, it was considered just the opposite—“a disgrace to decency, and a blot upon the reputation of our country,” to quote Andrew D. White.60 Roosevelt himself was unimpressed by most of his fellow conventioneers. Six days of politicking with them were enough to convince him that, often as not, vox populi was “the voice of the devil, or what is still worse, the voice of a fool.”61 All the same, he certainly met most of the emerging