The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [381]
Shortly afterward Hanna was seen crossing over and resignedly asking Quay what his price was. “If you will nominate Roosevelt,” said Quay, “I will withdraw the resolution. If you won’t, I shall insist upon its coming to a vote, and you know what will happen there.”
Hanna did. The resolution would pass on the grounds of simple fairness. He would lose his Southern delegates, and lose control of the convention; there would be no guarantee then even of President McKinley’s renomination.
That night Hanna, grimacing at the taste of wormwood, announced that in view of “strong and earnest sentiment … from all parts of the country,” he would support the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt for Vice-President.
“The best we can do,” he told his supporters, “is pray fervently for the continued health of the President.”74
Roosevelt, meanwhile, sat alone in his hotel room. He had already bowed to the inevitable, and would accept the nomination for what it was worth. Having finished one of the Histories of Josephus over the weekend, he was now reading Thucydides.75
SHORTLY AFTER TEN O’CLOCK the following morning the icy tones of Cabot Lodge announced that the business before the convention would be the nomination of candidates for President of the United States.
Senator Foraker spoke for an eloquent quarter of an hour on the glories of the McKinley Administration, and was awarded with an ovation that reminded one observer, Murat Halstead, of “the halcyon days of the Plumed Knight.” Then eighteen thousand voices joined in the singing of “The Union Forever”—an “incomparably moving” sound even to the dignified correspondent of Harper’s Weekly. “When one hears that sound one must either sing or cry.”76
Almost before the delegates resumed their seats, Governor Roosevelt had leaped up beside Lodge to second the nomination. He stared briefly into the eyes of his best friend, while applause rolled around them. Sixteen years before, as young delegates to the convention in Chicago, they had felt the pain of defeat together, and heard predictions of their political ruin; now they were two of the most powerful men in the country, and the party was shouting homage to them. It was a sweet moment—but Lodge’s face was distorted with “almost agonized anxiety,”77 and Roosevelt turned quickly to address the audience.
“Mr. Chairman and my fellow delegates, my beloved Republicans and Americans …” An accomplished orator now, he moved confidently through his prepared text, speaking at a torrential speed unusual even for him, his body trembling with the force of his gestures. A man in the audience was reminded of “a graduate in a school of acting”;78 a woman sighed that “he would make a first-class lover … from the stage point of view.” Here was no soft, hesitant wooer, she felt, “but one who would come at once to the question, and, if the lady repulsed him, bear her away despite herself, as some of his ancestors must have done in the pliocene age.…”79
While Rose Coghlan dreamed, so did Theodore Roosevelt.
We stand on the threshold of a new century big with the fate of mighty nations. It rests with us now to decide whether in the opening years of that century we shall march forward to fresh triumphs or whether at the outset we shall cripple ourselves for the contest. Is America a weakling, to shrink from the work of the great world-powers? No. The young giant of the West stands on a continent and clasps the crest of an ocean in either hand. Our nation, glorious in youth and strength, looks into the future with eager eyes and rejoices as a strong man to run a race.…80
He gazed through his tossing lenses at the thousands of banners, the streamers, the bright balloons, the tricolored bunches of pampas grass, the hanging Stars and Stripes. The whole auditorium looked, said a nearby reporter, like a kaleidoscope.81
MCKINLEY AND ROOSEVELT were nominated by votes of 926 and 925 respectively—the Governor casting the convention’s only vote