The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [357]
Faced with such resolution, Odell could only agree. By the time Roosevelt’s twin-unit Special left Weehawken, New Jersey, at 10:02 on Monday morning, 17 October, his party had been enlarged to include several other aspirants to high state offices, and half a dozen newspaper correspondents.104
THE COLONEL MADE seventeen stops that day along 212 miles of the Hudson Valley. Crowds, summoned by blasts from Cassi’s bugle, were encouragingly large and enthusiastic, amounting to some twenty thousand in under twelve hours. As he leaned again and again over the rear platform of his private car, he harped on Croker’s desire to corrupt the judiciary, mixed in a few stirring calls to Empire, and made some emphatically vague promises to investigate the canal scandal. He soon found that any remark to do with the Rough Riders stimulated applause from old and young, male and female. The citizens of Newburgh were duly reminded of his volunteer status in the war; those of Albany thrilled to the story of San Juan Hill; hecklers at Glens Falls were accused of making more noise than the guerrillas of Las Guásimas.105 Back in New York, the bookies of Broadway improved their odds in Roosevelt’s favor, typically offering $25,000 at 10 to 7, and $5,000 at 5 to 3. Knowledgeable punters said that the market had yet to settle.106
During the next two days, 18 and 19 October, the Special steamed around the Adirondacks as far north as Ogdensburg on the St. Lawrence River, then curved south again via Carthage.107 Roosevelt tailored his speeches (never more than ten minutes long, and seldom repeated) to his audiences with unfailing accuracy. He spoke jerkily and harshly, squinting as though his eyes hurt, yet he radiated a strange, mesmeric power, well described by Billy O’Neil:
Wednesday it rained all day and in spite of it there were immense gatherings of enthusiastic people at every stopping place. At Carthage, in Jeff. County, there were three thousand people standing in the mud and rain. He spoke about ten minutes—the speech was nothing, but the man’s presence was everything. It was electrical, magnetic. I looked in the faces of hundreds and saw only pleasure and satisfaction. When the train moved away, scores of men and women ran after [it], waving hats and handkerchiefs and cheering, trying to keep him in sight as long as possible.
… Perhaps I measured others by my own feelings, for as the train faded away I saw him smiling, and waving his hat at the people, and they in turn giving abundant evidence of their enthusiastic affection, my eyes filled with tears. I couldn’t help it though I am ordinarily a cold-blooded fish not easily stirred like that.108
The Colonel returned to New York that evening. During the next thirty-six hours he addressed seven major meetings. His histrionic gifts were everywhere in evidence, particularly when timing his entrances. “Out of the woods came a hero,” some warm-up speaker would declaim, and infallibly Roosevelt would sweep onto the platform, waving his military hat to wild cheers.109 Or he would burst unexpectedly into a German-American Versammlung while the chairman barked, “Herr Roosevelt is here!”110 Wherever he went, Color Sergeant Wright led the way and other Rough Riders brought up the rear, as if Roosevelt were still advancing through the jungles of Cuba.111 The candidate regaled every audience with a war story or two, discreetly rearranging the facts for rhetorical effect. For example, Bucky O’Neill’s celestial musings on the bridge of the Yucatán became his “last words” at the foot of Kettle Hill, and acquired expansionist overtones: “Who wouldn’t risk his life to add a new star to the flag?”112
District leaders meeting with Roosevelt on 21 October discovered that behind the showman lurked a coldly efficient