The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [378]
He found the Governor in the act of thumping a table and saying, “I can’t do it!” Platt was lying on the sofa, while his son Frank, Benjamin Odell, and “Smooth Ed” Lauterbach sat nearby. Nobody except Roosevelt seemed to mind Burton’s intrusion. “Colonel Roosevelt,… the delegation from the Imperial State of Kansas is waiting upstairs for you to keep your promise to see them,” said the delegate. His colleagues were prepared to forgive his discourtesy, having “the utmost admiration” for him, and were determined to place him before the convention; but if he did not meet with them at once, and choose his own nominator from among them, Burton would take charge of the nomination himself. At this, reported a bystander, Platt looked “friendly.” Odell said, “Well, that settles it.” And Roosevelt, with a melodramatic sigh, headed upstairs.53
Next morning a committee of the still more important Pennsylvania delegation called and also expressed unanimous support for Roosevelt. The California delegation followed on; all day long, as the excitement of conscripting a popular candidate spread through the convention hotels, the flattering flood continued.54 Roosevelt greeted all comers with expressions of regret that they had ignored his wishes, but he grinned so widely that his complaints lacked somewhat in force. His “resolve” to stand firm began to weaken during the afternoon, and by nightfall it was all but swept away. At 10:30 P.M. a White House observer telephoned McKinley’s private secretary, George B. Cortelyou. “The feeling is that the thing is going pell-mell like a tidal wave. I think up to this moment Roosevelt was against it, but they have turned his head.” If Senator Mark Hanna had not been spending the weekend out of town, wrote a Tribune reporter, the Governor might have withdrawn his statements of non-acceptance there and then.55
More calls flashed over the wires—to Haverford, Pennsylvania, where Hanna was dining with a shipping tycoon, and thence to the White House with a plea for McKinley to abandon his neutrality and come out in favor of some other candidate. About midnight a cold reply came back: “The President has no choice for Vice-President. Any of the distinguished names suggested would be satisfactory to him. The choice of the Convention will be his choice; he has no advice to give.”56
HANNA WAS IN A rage when he returned to the Hotel Walton on Monday, 17 June. McKinley’s refusal to advise him on the choice of a running mate was a blow to his prestige, and the first deliberately hostile act of their twenty-four-year-old friendship. All things considered, this was not a good morning for Professor Nicholas Murray Butler to approach the Chairman with what can only be described as an academic piece of advice. The only way to stop the nomination going to Roosevelt, Butler lectured, was to present the convention with another candidate of equally compelling personality. “You cannot beat somebody with nobody.” Hanna responded to this epigram with an outburst of profanity, and assured Butler that his precious Governor would not be nominated. He, Hanna, simply would not permit it. When Butler asked whom the Chairman might prefer, Hanna growled something about John D. Long.57
The Chairman’s mood worsened all morning. “Do whatever you damn please!” he bellowed in response to a routine question. “I’m through! I won’t have anything more to do with the Convention! I won’t take charge of the campaign!” Somebody tried to soothe him by pointing out that he still controlled the party. “I am not in control! McKinley won’t let me use the power of the Administration to defeat Roosevelt. He is blind, or afraid, or something!”58
Observers wondered again at the Chairman’s strange fear of Roosevelt.