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in Exposition Hall shortly after noon on Tuesday, 19 June. As the thwacking echoes died away and the band prepared to strike up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Theodore Roosevelt made the most famous of all his delayed entrances. Marching with military purposefulness, but not too quickly, he advanced down the aisle toward the New York delegation, his jaw clenched firm against floating spectacle-ribbons, looking neither to right nor left. Fifteen thousand pairs of eyes admired his broad black hat, so irresistibly reminiscent of Cuba (“that’s an Acceptance Hat,” somebody quipped),65 and at least ten thousand pairs of hands applauded him as yells of “We Want Teddy!” swept around the auditorium. Roosevelt took fully two minutes to reach his seat; only then did he stand to attention for the beginning of the anthem. From the podium, Mark Hanna, a temporarily forgotten man, gazed down with disgust. Roosevelt was holding the Acceptance Hat over his heart.66

For the rest of the day the convention was anticlimactic and boring. A blight of listlessness, to quote Harper’s Weekly, hung over the proceedings, intensified by steamy, cabbage-smelling heat wafting from the slums of West Philadelphia. Yet much aggressive activity was going on behind the scenes. Hanna, lobbying like a man possessed, bullied every delegate he could find into promises of support for John D. Long, or Representative Jonathen Dolliver of Iowa—anybody but Theodore Roosevelt. White House observers, fearful that the Chairman would split the party in two, telephoned Washington for advice on Tuesday night. The result was another request for decorum from McKinley: “The President’s friends must not undertake to commit the Administration to any candidate. It has no candidate … The Administration wants the candidate of the Convention, and the President’s friends must not dictate the Convention.”67

But the true dictators of the convention were not McKinley’s friends. Senator Platt, nursing a broken rib, was so confident about the preliminary arrangements he had made in behalf of Roosevelt’s nomination that he beat a wheezy retreat on Tuesday night. He left the task of actually creating the nomination in the hands of his old friend, Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania—in Platt’s judgment, “the ablest politician this country ever produced.”68

Quay was happy to undertake the work, not out of any especial love for Roosevelt so much as a deep desire to hurt Mark Hanna. Quay was an ex–United States Senator, and wanted to regain office, but Hanna had blocked his efforts.69 To strike the Chairman down in front of the National Convention would therefore be sweet revenge; and Platt, by turning Roosevelt over to him, had supplied Quay with an ideal missile.

Few delegates, least of all Roosevelt, took any notice of Quay on Wednesday morning, as he sat short, squat, silent, and Indian-eyed70 in his light suit at an inconspicuous place in the Pennsylvania delegation. He waited until Roosevelt had escorted Henry Cabot Lodge to the podium as elected chairman of the convention—a moment of great pride to both men—before rising to offer an amendment to the rules. Amid puzzled silence, Quay read a resolution to equalize, and where necessary reduce, the size of delegations at the convention, at a ratio of 1 to every 1,000 votes cast in their home states.71

Just what this had to do with nominating Roosevelt for Vice-President none of Platt’s aides could tell. But for the first time since the convention opened, there was real noise in the hall.72 The majority of the delegates from East and West roared approval, while those from the South howled with fear. They realized that Quay’s amendment would cut their ranks in half. Republican voting was traditionally light in Dixie. And since most of Chairman Hanna’s supporters hailed from the South, “equalization” would in effect neutralize his power over the convention. Quay’s true motive dawned on the politically astute: he was not remotely interested in delegate representation; he wanted something from Hanna. Sure enough, the Pennsylvanian suggested that a