The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [358]
THE ROOSEVELT SPECIAL set off again that Friday afternoon on a quick swing up the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, followed on Monday by a six-day tour of central and western New York State. It was noticed that the candidate had reduced his Rough Rider escort to two—Sergeant Buck Taylor and Private Sherman Bell of Cripple Creek, Colorado—and had dressed them in mufti, possibly to avoid offending the conservative sensibilities of rural voters.114 If so, such scruples were groundless. Buck Taylor was listened to with the greatest deference en route, even at Port Jervis, when he pronounced the most resounding faux pas of the campaign:
I want to talk to you about mah Colonel. He kept ev’y promise he made to us and he will to you.… He told us we might meet wounds and death and we done it, but he was thar in the midst of us, and when it came to the great day he led us up San Juan Hill like sheep to the slaughter and so will he lead you.
“This hardly seemed a tribute to my military skill,” Roosevelt said afterward, “but it delighted the crowd, and as far as I could tell did me nothing but good.”115
Depot by depot, valley by valley, the little train toiled on through the misty countryside. Roosevelt made sixteen formal speeches that first day, nineteen the second, fourteen the third, fifteen the fourth, eleven the fifth, and fifteen the sixth, plus twelve other impromptu speeches here and there—a total of 102 in all. He hurled them out against the din of brass bands, screaming hecklers, steam whistles, fireworks, and, most deafening of all, hundreds of boot soles clapped together by employees of a shoe factory. Choking cannon fumes greeted him at Lockport and Spencerport, sooty rain sprayed into his face at Tonawanda, and the sulfurous smoke of red flares at Rome made him cough, shout, and cough again until his voice gave out entirely. He pumped the dry hands of tinkers, the greasy hands of cooks, the bandaged hands of stevedores, the sweaty hands of foundry workers. He stood patiently through countless performances of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” (in Middletown, two bands, one black and one white, attempted to play it in counterpoint). He suffered the traditional humiliation of having the train pull out just as he was beginning to speak. He fought off drunks and had war-bereaved mothers cry on his shoulder.116 In short, he enjoyed himself, as only the true political animal can.
And by all accounts his audiences enjoyed him. During the course of this long tour, Roosevelt so perfected his oratory that he was able at Phoenix to accomplish the most difficult trick in the actor’s book, namely, wordless persuasion. Two hundred dour farmers sat on their hands until he stopped in midspeech, leaned over the brake-handle and simply stared at them, wrinkling his face quizzically. “The first man he looked at laughed,” reported the Sun, “and the next, and the one afterward, and so on, [until] the Colonel and everyone in the crowd was laughing.”117
At Syracuse, on 27 October, Theodore Roosevelt turned forty.
TWO MORE TRAIN TOURS, of Long Island and southwestern New York, kept him raw-throated through the last hours of election eve, 7 November. Not until midnight could the candidate relax over a copy of Die Studien des Polybius as his Pullman rocked homeward.118 He felt that he had made “a corking campaign,” and if the memory of it was tarnished by rumors of $60,000 in last-minute bribes at headquarters, his own image, at least, shone brightly. “There is no denying,” the Troy Times said, “that Theodore Roosevelt has grown mightily in the public estimation since he appeared in person in the campaign.”119