The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [288]
It is not merely schoolgirls that have hysterics; very vicious mob-leaders have them at times, and so do well-meaning demagogues when their minds are turned by the applause of men of little intelligence.…48
Warming to this theme, he compared Bryan and various other prominent free silverites and Populists to “the leaders of the Terror of France in mental and moral attitude.” But he added reassuringly that such men lacked the revolutionary power of Marat, Barère, and Robespierre. Bryan, who sought to benefit one class by stealing the wealth of another, wished to negate the Eighth Commandment, while Governor Altgeld of Illinois, having recently pardoned the Haymarket rioters (“those foulest of criminals, the men whose crimes take the form of assassination”), was clearly in violation of the Sixth. Aware that his audience contained a large proportion of college boys, he warned against the seductions of “the visionary social reformer … the being who reads Tolstoy, or, if he possesses less intellect, Bellamy and Henry George, who studies Karl Marx and Proudhon, and believes that at this stage of the world’s progress it is possible to make everyone happy by an immense social revolution, just as other enthusiasts of a similar mental caliber believe in the possibility of constructing a perpetual-motion machine.”49
As always, the harshness of Roosevelt’s words was softened by his beaming fervor, the sophomoric relish with which he pronounced his insults. For two hours he talked on, juggling his coins and loaves, grinning, grimacing, breathing sincerity from every pore, while the son of Abraham Lincoln sat behind him applauding, and the great hall resounded with cheers.50 Next morning the Chicago Tribune awarded him lead status on its front page, and printed his entire seven-thousand-word speech verbatim, running to almost seven full columns of type. “In many respects,” the paper remarked, “it was the most remarkable political gathering of the campaign in this city.”51
There were one or two column-inches of space left over after Roosevelt’s peroration, and into this the editors inserted a filler, reporting an address, elsewhere in the city on the same evening, by an ex-Harvard professor, now head of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Chicago. One wonders with what feelings J. Laurence Laughlin read of the triumph of his former pupil, whom seventeen years before he had advised to go into politics.52
ON HIS WAY HOME across Michigan, Roosevelt traveled so closely behind the campaign train of William Jennings Bryan that he was able to gauge local reactions to him at first hand.53 In one town he actually caught up with Bryan, and stood incognito in the crowd listening to him speak. Although there was no denying the beauty of the voice, nor the power of the eagle eye and big, confident body, he sensed that the average voter was curious rather than impressed. Bryan, he remarked on returning to New York, represented only “that type of farmer whose gate hangs on one hinge, whose old hat supplies the place of a missing window-pane, and who is more likely to be found at the cross-roads grocery store than behind the plough.”54 Yet in spite of encouraging reports of a McKinley swing in the Midwest, “we cannot help feeling uneasy until the victory is actually won.”55
The last ten days in October saw him hurrying from meeting to meeting in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. In between times he geared the police force to ensure a rigorously honest election. Worn out and apprehensive as 3 November approached, he tried to convince himself that triumph was at hand, that he had done his part to avert “the greatest crisis in our national fate, save only the Civil War.”56
WILLIAM MCKINLEY was elected President by an overwhelming plurality of 600,000 votes. His electoral college majority was 95; the total amount of votes cast was nearly