The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [377]
Dana’s own opinion was “If they want you you had better take it.”45
BY THE END of the legislative session on 8 May, the Governor was having such doubts he decided to visit Washington and check the vice-presidential opinions of various eminent men in the capital. These dignitaries included Senators Foraker and Chandler, Secretaries Root and Long, and President McKinley himself, who gave a dinner in Roosevelt’s honor on 11 May.46
Accounts vary as to what Roosevelt was told and what he said in reply. Foraker remembered him asking for help in suppressing the nomination at Philadelphia, then returning next day to complain furiously that McKinley and his aides did not want him to run. “There is no reason why they should not want me, and I will not allow them to discredit me. If the Convention wants me, I shall accept.”47
On the other hand, John D. Long (whom Roosevelt discovered typically taking a postprandial stroll) got the impression that the Governor of New York wished to remain in Albany. This may well have been wishful thinking, because Long badly wanted the nomination himself.48
By far the best account of Roosevelt’s visit was written by Secretary of State John Hay, to Joseph Bucklin Bishop, after Roosevelt had returned north:
Teddy has been here: have you heard of it? It was more fun than a goat. He came down with a sombre resolution thrown on his strenuous brow to let McKinley and Hanna know once and for all that he would not be Vice President, and found to his stupefaction that nobody in Washington except Platt had ever dreamed of such a thing. He did not even have a chance to launch his nolo episcopari at the Major [McKinley]. That statesman said he did not want him on the ticket—that he would be far more valuable in New York—and Root said, with his frank and murderous smile, “Of course not—you’re not fit for it.” And so he went back quite eased in his mind, but considerably bruised in his amour propre.49
THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S BEHAVIOR at the Republican National Convention in June 1900, while entirely characteristic, was so puzzling as to defy logical analysis. Notwithstanding his genuine repugnance for the Vice-Presidency—it is impossible to read his private letters and not feel it palpably—he seems to have courted the nomination from the moment he stepped off the train in Philadelphia on Saturday the fifteenth. His very presence at the convention was a positive gesture. It would have been easy for him, as Governor, to prevent his nomination as a delegate-at-large, two months before; Lodge had mockingly warned him that to accept delegation was to be nominated; but he had responded that “I would be looked upon as rather a coward if I didn’t go.”50
By this reasoning, mere token attendance would have shown courage enough. Roosevelt could have then sought to deflate his boom by remaining as inconspicuous as possible, in order to avoid attracting the attention of delegates and reporters. But he chose to arrive in town wearing a large, soft, black, wide-rimmed hat, which stood out among Philadelphia’s countless straw boaters like a tent in a wheat-field. His fellow delegates-at-large, Senator Platt, Chairman Odell, and Chauncey Depew, noted with amusement how en route to the Hotel Walton he coveted the recognition of the crowd, and kept up a running conversation with the inevitable train of reporters.51
Nicholas Murray Butler, who had been sent ahead with express orders to nip any draft-Roosevelt movement in the bud, remembered the galvanic effect of his entrance into the Walton’s main lobby. “He walked in … with his quick nervous stride and at once the crowd waked up. T.R.’s name was on every lip and the question as to whether or not he should be forced to take the Vice-Presidency pushed every other question into the background … All Saturday evening the delegations kept coming and it was perfectly evident to me on Sunday morning that only the most drastic steps would prevent T.R.’s nomination.”52
The run began with the Kansas delegation, who had been reading