The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [347]
Shortly before two o’clock the Colonel strode onto the beach, where the Cavalry Division had formed in double file, and mounted a horse beside General Wheeler. Color Sergeant Wright hoisted the ragged regimental flag, the band crashed out a march, and the Rough Riders trooped off to detention.13
MEANWHILE, AT THE OPPOSITE end of Long Island, the man whose power it was to nominate, or not to nominate, Roosevelt for Governor sat pondering the state political situation. Senator Thomas Collier Platt was taking his annual vacation at the Oriental Hotel on Sheepshead Bay.14 He had been aware since at least 20 July that various groups of Republicans were working up a “Roosevelt boom,” but not until yesterday, 14 August, had two trusted lieutenants approached him formally on the subject. These men were Lemuel Ely Quigg, Roosevelt’s backer for Mayor in 1894, and Benjamin B. Odell, Jr., chairman of the Republican State Committee. Since Quigg was, in turn, chairman of the New York County Committee, and as forceful as Odell was stubborn, Platt had no choice but to listen while they pleaded the cause of the man he still regarded as “a perfect bull in a china shop.”15
The Easy Boss knew that something drastic would have to be done to prevent the renomination, at the State Republican Convention in September, of Frank S. Black, New York’s present Governor. Black was a faithful protégé whose record victory in 1896 had covered Platt with glory; but he was also anathema to Republican Independents, who accused him, rather unjustly, of gross spoilsmanship in office.16 This negative reputation might be counterbalanced by positive support for Black in upstate rural areas, were it not for a new scandal which redounded to the Governor’s discredit. On 4 August a special investigative committee had reported on “improper expenditures” of at least a million dollars in the state’s stalled Erie Canal Improvement project.17 With the entire multimillion-dollar appropriation already spent, and less than two-thirds of the canal deepened, Platt was severely embarrassed. If he supported Black’s bid for reelection he would lay himself and the party open to charges of cynicism and irresponsibility—even though the Governor had not been personally involved in the scandal. If, on the other hand, Platt dropped Black, it would be tantamount to admitting that there had been high-level corruption.18
Platt weighed his alternatives, and chose the second, seeing it as the only way he might avoid a Democratic landslide in November. He agreed to let Quigg sound Roosevelt out, but made it clear that the Rough Rider was not his preference for the nomination. “If he becomes Governor of New York, sooner or later, with his personality, he will have to be President of the United States … I am afraid to start that thing going.”19
QUIGG, HOWEVER, was not the first kingmaker to visit Roosevelt at Montauk. On Thursday, 18 August, John Jay Chapman, one of the Independent party’s fiercest and brightest idealists, walked up Camp Wikoff’s Rough Rider Street in search of the Colonel.20
Tall, hook-nosed, flamboyantly scarfed even in the hottest weather, Chapman was a man of near-manic passions, both romantic and intellectual. As testimony to the former, he would brandish the stump of a missing left hand, which he had deliberately burned to a cinder as self-punishment during a stormy love affair.21 Like Theodore Roosevelt, his friend of many years, he was well-born, Harvard-educated, and drawn equally to politics and literature (his Emerson and Other Essays had won the high praises of Henry James).22 But there the resemblance ended. Chapman could neither compromise, nor join, nor lead; he was