Theodore Rex (80 page)

JOHN HAY FORWARDED
another demand from Raisuli to Roosevelt on 15 June. The Berber now wanted control of four more Moroccan districts. “You see there is no end to the insolence of this blackguard,” Hay wrote. “I feel that it would be most inexpedient to surrender to him. We have done what we can for Perdicaris.… Who knows what he will ask next?”

The Secretary’s desire to disengage betrayed a secret embarrassment. Researchers at the State Department were beginning to suspect that Mr. Perdicaris might not be an American citizen after all. Hay was anxiously awaiting their final report. How would delegates to the Chicago convention react if the President was found to have bombarded Morocco in behalf of a fraudulent old Greek?

Roosevelt, unsuspecting, asked Hay to explore the possibility of a joint military expedition with Britain and France. “
Our position must be to demand the death of those who harm him if he is harmed.”

Hay unhappily consulted with the envoys of both countries. Neither liked Roosevelt’s idea. Jules Jusserand was particularly wary: an American landing at Tangier might threaten France’s own program for total acquisition of Morocco—“pacification,” as it was called on the Quai d’Orsay. He was astute enough to sense that Hay did not really want him to agree.

“
The President’s will is, more and more, predominant in public affairs,” Jusserand informed Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé. “And he hesitates less and less to follow it, despite the advice of his Cabinet officers. They, to tell the truth, resist only very weakly.”

Similar complaints came from Chicago, where the Republican National Committee was already meeting. Senator Nathan B. Scott, the acting Chairman, objected bitterly to the way George Cortelyou had been foisted upon the party. Roosevelt, hearing that the Old Guard was plotting a last-minute revolt, responded forcefully, by telegram:
PEOPLE MAY AS WELL UNDERSTAND
THAT IF I AM TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT THEN CORTELYOU IS TO BE CHAIRMAN
…. 
I WILL NOT HAVE IT ANY OTHER WAY.
He asked for the names of the intriguers, whereupon their opposition faded, but not their resentment. “Your Uncle Theodore knows how to run things,” Scott growled at a newspaperman.

ON MONDAY, 20 JUNE
, the mass of Republican delegates arrived in Chicago. They looked languorous, almost bored under their straw hats. As Henry Cabot Lodge wrote Roosevelt, “
Excitement is impossible where there is no contest.”

Old-timers talked nostalgically about the last really fought-out Republican convention, in 1884. Some remembered twenty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt of New York, standing on a chair and yelling for a roll call in his high, harsh voice. They remembered drunken roars for James G. Blaine, glee clubs bellowing the praises of President Arthur, and that softest yet most penetrating of noises, the rustle of “boodle,” as Southern blacks sold and resold their votes.

Now, two decades later, Chicago could have been hosting a temperance chautauqua. No bunting brightened the streets. Sidewalks were bare of button-hawkers and barkers: every fakir with anything to sell had decamped to the World’s Fair in St. Louis. Dull clouds scudded over Lake Michigan. The wind felt heavy and wet.

THAT EVENING
, Roosevelt dictated a letter to Kermit. “Tomorrow the National Convention meets, and barring a cataclysm I shall be nominated.… How the election will turn out no one can tell.” The possibility, however remote, that he might be beaten caused an access of pride and gratitude for nearly three years of power:

“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.”