The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (110 page)

F
OR ALL THE OPTIMISM
flowing out of Sagamore Hill that summer weekend, Roosevelt and the Storers were uncomfortably aware of the proximity, in New York’s Waldorf Hotel, of a Cleveland millionaire who could turn their hopes to dust if he felt like it. Marcus Alonzo Hanna was more than McKinley’s manager and closest political adviser; he was now the party Chairman as well. In this double role he stood confirmed as the first countrywide political boss in American history.
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Cynical Democrats were saying that
Hanna, not McKinley, had been nominated at St. Louis; cartoonists depicted the candidate as a limp puppet hanging out of his pocket.

Roosevelt, reacting as usual with electric speed to any new political stimulus, had already been to see Hanna twice. On 28 July, the same day the Chairman arrived in town to set up Republican National Headquarters, he visited him at the Waldorf. In the evening he had returned to dine privately with him and two members of the Executive Committee.
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A letter to Lodge, dated 30 July, shows how quickly and accurately he summed Hanna up: “He is a good-natured, well-meaning, coarse man, shrewd and hard-headed, but neither very farsighted nor very broad-minded, and as he has a resolute and imperious mind, he will have to be handled with some care.”
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Roosevelt does not seem to have told the Storers about these two previous meetings with Hanna. Possibly he wished them to follow an independent line with McKinley. At any rate he visited the Chairman again on Monday evening, 3 August, and fulfilled his part of the weekend bargain.
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Whether he did so quite as forcefully as he afterward implied to Mrs. Storer (“I spoke of Bellamy as
the
man for the Cabinet, either for War or Navy, or else go to France”)
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is doubtful, since Hanna was tired, and in no mood to discuss anything other than ways and means of winning in November. Roosevelt “thought it wise not to pursue the matter further.”
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Hanna’s exhaustion was nervous as well as physical. After nearly two years of working with full-time devotion to secure the nomination of McKinley—at a personal cost of $100,000—he wanted nothing so much as to take a long cruise up the New England coast, and let other Republicans manage the fall campaign. But a certain phenomenon, occurring in Chicago on 10 July, had “changed everything,” in his opinion. Alarming predictions of class war, communism, and even anarchy were coming in daily from the West: the political future suddenly seemed fraught with doom.
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Now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party, and Hanna bent his stout body to the task. Word went out from headquarters that he needed all the money and all the stump speakers he could get. Roosevelt, having little of the former, promptly volunteered to be one of the latter.
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The phenomenon in Chicago was that of William Jennings Bryan, an obscure thirty-six-year-old ex-Congressman from Nebraska, who by making one speech to the Democratic National Convention had created something akin to an emotional earthquake. Rising to speak on a currency resolution, Bryan had pleaded inspiringly for those rural poor to whom questions of high finance were of less importance than food and shelter. As a result, he was now the Democratic candidate for President, on a ticket so extremely radical as to cause large numbers of his party to bolt. Yet nobody, and certainly not Mark Hanna, discounted the threat he posed to William McKinley. For Bryan had that most potent of all political weapons: a sumptuous, sonorous voice, upon which he played like an open diapason. He also had a natural constituency—the farmers and field-hands of the South, Midwest, and West—not to mention those disadvantaged millions (Riis’s “Other Half”) who labored in farms and mines, or begged for work at factory doors, and lined up for soup in filthy municipal kitchens. Such people were ravished by his promises of dollars—more dollars for everybody, unlimited silver dollars which could be produced by the simple method of minting them freely and cheaply at a ratio of 16 to 1. The much more expensive gold dollars which McKinley proposed to keep in circulation were just too few to go around—or so Bryan seemed to be saying. His listeners might not quite grasp why one ratio was preferable to another, and phrases like “international agreement for bimetallism” meant little to cornhuskers who had never seen more than a few square miles of Iowa; but they thought they could understand his magnificently vague metaphors, particularly the one with which he had turned Chicago’s Coliseum into a howling madhouse:

This was the phenomenon with which Mark Hanna had to deal in August 1896, and it is no wonder that he cut Roosevelt short on the subject of a Bellamy Storer. But he accepted his visitor’s offer of campaign help (perhaps the Chairman, in the back of his mind,
recalled that other Chicago Convention when he and McKinley had seen this same young man briefly, raspingly capture the attention of seven thousand delegates).
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Roosevelt liked Hanna.
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There was something engagingly piglike about the man, with his snouty nostrils, thick pink skin, and short, trotting steps. His very business was in pig iron, and he had a grunting disdain for fine food and polite conversation. When he laughed (which was often), he snorted, and his language reeked of the farmyard. Yet Hanna’s very fleshiness, his love of reaching out and touching, was attractive to someone as physical as Roosevelt. Hanna had none of old Tom Platt’s dry secretiveness: he was blunt, honest, friendly, and unassuming, shamelessly addicted to sweets, which he would suck all day in his large loose mouth. But for all his naturalness, the Chairman was obviously a man of calculating intelligence. “X-Rays,” wrote one who met him at this time, “are not more penetrating than Hanna’s glance.”
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Surprisingly, for someone with so much power, the Chairman was not corrupt.
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He had no desire for Cabinet office; his ambition, as he reminded Roosevelt, was to elect McKinley. His love for that placid politician was as frank as it was naive: “He is the best man I ever knew!” Or: “McKinley is a saint.”
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As for the millions he had set out to raise, Hanna was too rich to want anything for himself. He treated campaign contributions much as he did iron ore in his Cleveland foundry—as raw material to be amassed in great quantities for the smelting of something solid. And indeed McKinley had an amusingly metallic quality, with his expressionless, perfectly cast features.
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Hanna had no doubt that in forging him he had created an ideal President, a man of steel to symbolize the new Industrial Age. The idea of William Jennings Bryan bringing back the Age of Agriculture was more than regressive: it was revolutionary.

Roosevelt could not help but be affected by the Chairman’s worried mood. Before their meeting on 3 August he had been confident of a Republican victory in November, but after it he wrote gloomily to Cecil Spring Rice, “If Bryan wins, we have before us some years of social misery, not markedly different from that of any South American republic … Bryan closely resembles Thomas Jefferson, whose accession to the Presidency was a terrible blow to this nation.”
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With that characteristic thrust, he braced himself for the biggest administrative challenge of his career as Commissioner: Bryan’s imminent arrival in Manhattan. The Democratic candidate had chosen Madison Square Garden—of all places—to open his campaign on 12 August, and Roosevelt, as president of the Board of Police, would be responsible for protecting his Jeffersonian person.

I
T WOULD BE UNFAIR
to accuse Roosevelt of deliberately allowing the Bryan meeting to degenerate into a noisy, embarrassing shambles. However, he was conspicuous by his absence from the Garden that night, and supervision of the crowd was left in the hands of a Republican inspector. The police proved remarkably adept at allowing gate-crashers in, and keeping ticket-holders out.
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Next morning the
Sun
and
News
excoriated “Teddy’s Recruits” for gross incompetence and inefficiency, and even
The Times
agreed that the job was “very bunglingly done.”
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Bryan, however, was the real culprit of the evening. No degree of police efficiency could have altered the fact that he was a stupendous disappointment. For once his oratorical gifts deserted him. Intimidated by the size of his audience, he merely read a prepared text on silver, which dragged on for two hours, to a steady tramp of exiting feet and calls of “Good night, Billy!”
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“Bryan fell with a bang,” Roosevelt crowed to Bamie. “He was so utter a failure that he dared not continue his eastern trip, and cancelled his Maine and Vermont engagements … I believe that the tide has begun to flow against him.”
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When Bourke Cockran, another celebrated speaker, took over the Garden on 19 August to put the case of gold, Roosevelt was there to prevent any repetition of the previous week’s fiasco. He personally supervised all security arrangements, and the evening went off smoothly. It was agreed next morning that the police had “retrieved their reputations.”
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W
ITH SEVERAL WEEKS
to spare before plunging into his agreed schedule of speaking engagements, Roosevelt decided to go West for his first hunting vacation in two years. But first he was determined
to settle once and for all the vexed question of Brooks and McCullagh. Commissioner Parker was still boycotting promotion meetings, and using a variety of other tactics to perpetuate the deadlock. The Mayor’s continued reluctance to announce a verdict on the trial charges (Strong hated confrontations, and feebly hoped that Parker had “learned his lesson”)
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made it imperative that something be done.

On the morning after the Cockran meeting Parker happened to be at Police Headquarters, and Roosevelt promptly announced a special session of the Board “for the purpose of acting on the Inspectorship question.” Hoping to force Parker into at least a statement of his still-secret objections to the two acting inspectors, Andrews called for a vote on their immediate promotion. He, Roosevelt, and Grant voted aye. Parker, instead of voting, began a monologue of ambiguous dissent, whereupon Roosevelt lost his temper. Andrews quit the meeting in disgust, and even Grant showed signs of vague irritation as the two rivals leaped to their feet and began shaking their fists at each other. Eventually Roosevelt, thinking he had made a point, pounded the table and roared, “Case closed!” Although it manifestly was not, he stormed out of the room. “My, how you frighten me!” Parker called after him, then leaned back in his chair, tilted his head to the ceiling, and laughed for a long time.
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