The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [283]
Mrs. Storer told him that she was “sure” something could be arranged; she and her husband would speak to McKinley in due course.4 Roosevelt, overjoyed, promised in return to work up support on the Republican National Committee for Bellamy Storer as a Cabinet officer, or Ambassador. The atmosphere in the rowboat grew increasingly cozy, and for the rest of her visit Mrs. Storer basked in Roosevelt’s good humor:
One never knew what he would say next. He was certainly very witty in himself, and he valued wit in others. He used during this period to get on the warpath over Sienkiewicz’s novels—The Deluge and Fire and the Sword—and when he was quite sated with slaughter his face would be radiant and he would shout aloud with delight. He seemed as innocent as Toddy in Helen’s Babies, who wanted everything to be “bluggy”.… His vituperation was extremely amusing, and he had a most extraordinary vocabulary … Never in our lives have we laughed so often as when Theodore Roosevelt of those days was our host.5
FOR ALL THE OPTIMISM flowing out of Sagamore Hill that summer weekend, Roosevelt and the Storers were uncomfortably aware of the proximity, in New York’s Waldorf Hotel, of a Cleveland millionaire who could turn their hopes to dust if he felt like it. Marcus Alonzo Hanna was more than McKinley’s manager and closest political adviser; he was now the party Chairman as well. In this double role he stood confirmed as the first countrywide political boss in American history.6 Cynical Democrats were saying that Hanna, not McKinley, had been nominated at St. Louis; cartoonists depicted the candidate as a limp puppet hanging out of his pocket.
Roosevelt, reacting as usual with electric speed to any new political stimulus, had already been to see Hanna twice. On 28 July, the same day the Chairman arrived in town to set up Republican National Headquarters, he visited him at the Waldorf. In the evening he had returned to dine privately with him and two members of the Executive Committee.7 A letter to Lodge, dated 30 July, shows how quickly and accurately he summed Hanna up: “He is a good-natured, well-meaning, coarse man, shrewd and hard-headed, but neither very farsighted nor very broad-minded, and as he has a resolute and imperious mind, he will have to be handled with some care.”8
Roosevelt does not seem to have told the Storers about these two previous meetings with Hanna. Possibly he wished them to follow an independent line with McKinley. At any rate he visited the Chairman again on Monday evening, 3 August, and fulfilled his part of the weekend bargain.9 Whether he did so quite as forcefully as he afterward implied to Mrs. Storer (“I spoke of Bellamy as the man for the Cabinet, either for War or Navy, or else go to France”)10 is doubtful, since Hanna was tired, and in no mood to discuss anything other than ways and means of winning in November. Roosevelt “thought it wise not to pursue the matter further.”11
Hanna’s exhaustion was nervous as well as physical. After nearly two years of working with full-time devotion to secure the nomination of McKinley—at a personal cost of $100,000—he wanted nothing so much as to take a long cruise up the New England coast, and let other Republicans manage the fall campaign. But a certain phenomenon, occurring in Chicago on 10 July, had “changed everything,” in his opinion. Alarming predictions of class war, communism, and even anarchy were coming in daily from the West: the political future suddenly seemed fraught with doom.12 Now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party, and Hanna bent his stout body to the task. Word went out from headquarters that he needed all the money and all the stump speakers he could get. Roosevelt, having little of the former, promptly volunteered to be one of the latter.13
The phenomenon in Chicago was that of William Jennings Bryan, an obscure thirty-six-year-old ex-Congressman from Nebraska, who