Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [199]
“AN ENORMOUS PAINTING OF MARK HANNA … HUNG OVER THE SPEAKER’S PLATFORM.”
The Republican National Convention, Chicago, June 1904 (photo credit 21.1)
LONG BEFORE PROCEEDINGS began on Tuesday, word spread that the President would monitor every minute of every session, via a special telephone line running direct from his office to the basement of the Coliseum. Delegates began to get uneasy feelings of remote control. A disgusted Pennsylvanian decided not to attend. “The boss has fixed it all up and we might as well go home.”
One thing Roosevelt had neglected to “fix,” however, was the Coliseum’s decor. As a result, it was not his portrait that greeted people entering the hall at noon. An enormous painting of Mark Hanna, seven feet wide and twenty feet tall, hung over the speakers’ platform. Twenty-eight other Hannas looked down somberly from various angles. In further evidence of Old Guard aesthetics, a black-draped chair was “set aside” for Senator Quay, and the dead features of President McKinley appeared on every admission ticket. “In every corner of the hall there is a ghost,” a reporter observed. Even some of the living looked sepulchral when they sat under tobacco-blue sunbeams slanting down from the skylight.
A question buzzed from aisle to aisle: “Where is Roosevelt’s picture?” Sharp eyes eventually noticed a few small steel engravings, spaced around the upper gallery and almost smothered in festoons.
At 12:14, another pallid figure—Postmaster General Payne, clearly not long for the world—approached the rostrum and gaveled the Thirteenth Republican National Convention to order. Elihu Root rose to respectful applause, and began his keynote speech. In the vast space, his husky voice failed to carry. “The responsibility of government rests upon the Republican Party. The complicated machinery through which eighty million people—”
“Louder!” a voice called. “Louder!”
IN WASHINGTON, it was an hour later by the clock, and the President was having lunch. He knew exactly what themes were being sounded in Chicago. Root had promised to trumpet (insofar as quiet Elihu could trumpet anything) the achievements of the last four years, “from an administration rather than from a personal standpoint.” There would be solemn fanfares on the names of McKinley and Hanna, rising scales of economic statistics, a canon on Party and Patriotism, and always the reassuring basso ostinato of Continuity. Root may not be a virtuoso performer, but nobody could match his mastery of political polyphony.
IN TANGIER, it was nearly five hours further on. Late-afternoon sun beat on the seven white warships in Tangier Bay. They made a deceptively peaceful picture. Today, 21 June, was supposed to have seen the release of Mr. Perdicaris and his stepson—or so Consul Gummeré had been led to believe, after the Sultan’s latest yielding to Raisuli’s demands. But the trail down from Tsarradan had remained quiet: Morocco, as Gummeré complained, was “a country of delays.”
Aboard the Brooklyn, he and Admiral Chadwick had decided that the United States could not tolerate any more “double dealing and treachery,” either on the part of Raisuli or the Moroccan government. “We have come to a point when our position has now become undignified and humiliating,” Gummeré cabled Hay. Chadwick joined him in suggesting “an ultimatum immediately for large indemnity for every day’s further delay and that Marines will be landed and customs seized.”
BY NOW, Root’s voice had strengthened, and most delegates were with him. They applauded his depersonalized summary of the Administration’s fiscal, antitrust, agricultural, and foreign policies. They received in silence the news that five battleships, four cruisers, four monitors, and thirty-four torpedo destroyers and torpedo boats had joined the Navy since 1900, while another thirteen battleships and thirteen cruisers were under construction. As Root approached his peroration, the applause grew