The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [287]
Before returning to New York and Boston they paid a brief call on William McKinley at his home in Canton, Ohio. Here the Republican candidate was conducting a “front-porch” campaign eminently suited to his sedentary personality. Owing to the convenient ill-health of Mrs. McKinley, he had announced early on that he would eschew the stump. “It was arranged, consequently,” writes a contemporary historian, “that inasmuch as McKinley could not go to the people, the people must come to McKinley.”41 The rail-roads, having much to gain by his election, were glad to cooperate with cheap group excursion rates from all over the country. Every day except Sunday several trainloads of party faithful would arrive in Canton and march up North Market Street to the beat of brass bands. Passing under a giant plaster arch adorned with McKinley’s portrait, they would break ranks outside his white frame house and crowd onto the front lawn. The candidate would then appear and listen benignly to a speech of salutation which he had himself edited in advance. In reply, McKinley would read a speech of welcome, then make himself available for handshakes on the porch steps. Occasionally he would invite some favored guests to stay for lunch or dinner.42
It is unlikely that Roosevelt and Lodge were granted this privilege. McKinley could hardly forget that they had supported Reed against him for the Speakership in 1890, and for the Presidential nomination earlier that year. “He was entirely pleasant with us,” Roosevelt reported to Bamie, “though we are not among his favorites.”43
ROOSEVELT SPENT the first full week of October on the hustings in New York City, expounding the merits of gold to all and sundry, and trying to persuade a rich uncle to lunch with Mark Hanna. He was amused by the old gentleman’s horrified refusal; it was the traditional Knickerbocker disdain for “dirty” politicians.44 Nouveau riche millionaires like James J. Hill and John D. Rockefeller had no such scruples, and the Chairman made the most of their huge contributions. Some 120 million books, pamphlets, posters, and preset newspaper articles poured out of Republican headquarters into all the “doubtful” states, while fourteen hundred speakers, including such luminaries as ex-President Harrison, Speaker Reed, and Carl Schurz, made expense-paid trips into every corner of the country. Masterful, tireless, and increasingly optimistic as this “educational campaign” caught fire, Mark Hanna supervised every itinerary and checked every invoice.45
One of the Chairman’s tactical decisions was to cancel a plan to send Roosevelt into Maryland and West Virginia. Instead, he was put on Bryan’s trail in Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota during the second and third weeks of the month.46 Hanna obviously believed him to be an ideal foil to the Democratic candidate: an Easterner whom Westerners revered, an intellectual who could explain the complexities of the Gold Standard in terms a cowboy could understand.
Roosevelt more than justified his faith. Oversimplifying brilliantly, as he sped from whistle-stop to whistle-stop, he spoke in parables and brandished an array of homely visual symbols, including gold and silver coins and odd-sized loaves of bread. (“See this big one. This is an eight-cent loaf when the cents count on a gold basis. Now look at this small one … on a silver basis it would sell for over nine cents …”)47 En route he discovered that audiences enjoyed his natural gifts of vituperation as much, if not more, than financial argument, so day by day the pejoratives flowed more freely. He scored his biggest success on 15 October in the Chicago Coliseum, where three months before Bryan had made the