Arthur had made little effort to get the nomination and professed he did not want it. His representatives on the scene were badly organized, poorly financed. When a New Yorker showed up with a suitcase full of cash amounting to $100,000, all for the Arthur cause, Arthur, by cable from Washington, ordered that the money be returned. But Arthur’s forces also included such able men as Elihu Root, such thorough professionals as Johnny O’Brien, who had no doubt that he wanted another term.
Besides Arthur and Blaine, there were a half-dozen different dark horses and favorite sons whose strength, if combined, could conceivably stop Blaine. There were John Sherman of Ohio and John A. Logan of Illinois, both United States senators, dainty little Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, and Robert Todd Lincoln. There was talk of Senator Sherman’s more famous brother, William Tecumseh Sherman, and of George William Curtis. But the only one with any substantial support, other than the two front-runners, was the candidate the reformers had settled on, the man upon whom Theodore was banking his fortunes, Senator George Franklin Edmunds of Vermont. Edmunds was the Bristow of this seasons crusade. He was bearded, scowling, capable, incorruptible, eligible, contentious, colorless, devoid of humor, and the very one, it had been decided, to rescue the party and restore it to the high ideals of the founders. (That Blaine, too, had been among the founders was a point left unsaid.) Theodore, so far as is known, had never met Edmunds, nor does he appear to have been aware that it was Edmunds, back at the time of his fathers nomination for the Customhouse, who made a special trip to the White House to urge Hayes to compromise with Conkling and choose another, more acceptable man.
The drumbeat for Edmunds had begun as far back as January, when Harper’s Weekly described him as “in full sympathy with the intelligent progressive spirit,” an “inflexible Republican of spotless personal character,” and it had been Curtis who led the campaign thereafter, joined by George Jones of The New York Times, Godkin of The Nation, President Eliot of Harvard, Andrew D. White, who was president of Cornell, and Henry Cabot Lodge. Of the bare handful of actual politicians who announced for Edmunds the two most frequently mentioned were John D. Long of Massachusetts, who was a congressman and former governor, and Theodore, who in that spring of furious, headlong work and sleepless nights had done all he could to further the Edmunds cause, and with notable results. At the state convention at Utica in April, working at fever pitch, he had neatly outmaneuvered the Blaine and Arthur forces and seen that the four who were elected as delegates-at-large to the national convention were all Edmunds men, he himself and Andrew D. White receiving the most votes. Henry Cabot Lodge, also newly elected as a delegate-at-large from Massachusetts, had written to suggest that they combine forces at Chicago, and that in the meantime they make a run down to Washington to see what Edmunds support could be found. The Washington trip proved nothing, except that Theodore and Lodge got to know each other. Lodge stopped over in New York, spending a weekend at 6 West 57th Street amid packing boxes and bare floors. “We are breaking up house,” Theodore had warned, “so you will have to excuse very barren accommodations.”
When Theodore departed for Chicago on the Pennsylvania Limited the evening of May 30, he traveled in a private car with the same two who had led his father’s one political crusade in 1876, Schurz and Curtis. (Again as in 1876, Schurz was going to the convention as an observer.) And when Theodore and Curtis were seen checking in at the Grand Pacific Hotel the next morning, amid the swarming Blaine crowd, they were at once the subjects of much talk and speculation. Curtis, with his white bangs and sallow, priestly look, was a face everyone knew. Theodore, according to the New York Evening Post, was “more specifically an object of curiosity than any other stranger in Chicago.” He was the boy wonder of Albany, New York’s “Cyclone Assemblyman,” the youngest delegate at the convention. Curtis and his cartoonist, Thomas Nast, had been giving Theodore handsome attention in Harper’s Weekly that spring. In one Nast cartoon he had been shown holding a whole sheaf of reform bills as Governor Grover Cleveland signed them into law.
They were there to work for Edmunds, Theodore told reporters. He was carrying a bamboo cane and wearing a “clipper” straw hat, the brim of which, on the underside, was bright blue. He talked extremely fast. He had “a mouth full of regular white teeth like a young lady,” it was noted, and his gold-rimmed spectacles kept sliding down his nose. He was asked by a man from the Chicago Tribune what he might do should Blaine be the nominee. Would he bolt the party? “I will not speak for the others, but for myself I say freely that under no circumstances will I cast a vote for either Blaine or Arthur in this convention. But I am a Republican, and should one or the other of them be nominated, then I will support him.”
Curtis, who was standing at his side, let the remark pass, but by saying what he had to the Tribune, Theodore had guaranteed that in a matter of hours it would be available in print for every delegate in town.
Later in the day, when Theodore, Curtis, and Schurz walked into the main dining room and stood waiting for a table, they looked, said one man, “as if the fate of the nation was in their keeping. Perhaps it is.”
Lodge, who arrived from Boston that same day, seems to have known from the start that there was no way to stop Blaine. And indeed to any experienced observer it looked as though the convention was already decided, three days before it officially opened. By nightfall New York reporters were cabling their home offices that the Blaine boom had “burst all bounds.”
Bits of good news . . . came thick and fast to cheer the partisans of Blaine and keep their enthusiasm at the boiling point. . . . To sum it all up, the drift today has been decidedly toward Blaine. He was never so near the nomination. . . .
Thousands more poured into the city the following day, Sunday, June 1, and it was emphatically “ANOTHER BLAINE DAY.” As a Boston correspondent observed, few people went to church. In New York the Times gave notice that if Blaine was nominated, the Times would abandon the Republican Party.
Monday, the papers were saying Arthur was clearly beaten and the word from the Arthur people was that if the nominee could not be their man, then it must be Blaine, which was about the same as saying Blaine was nominated. If noise and cheap enthusiasm were to be the deciding factors, said The New York Times indignantly, then Blaine was a certain victor. A sure sign, supposedly, was the swing to Blaine by the Ohio congressman William McKinley. No one talked of issues or programs, only of winning in November.
The first news of consequence came Monday night, and it was then that Theodore and Lodge went to work. Theodore, almost alone of the delegates, it would seem, was sure Blaine could be beaten.
The National Committee, dominated by Blaine people, had announced that the name to be placed in nomination for the honor of temporary chairman, the name to be put before the convention first thing in the morning, was that of Powell Clayton, a former Arkansas governor and Grand Army general who had lost an arm in the war and whose personal reputation was very low. Clayton, who had come to Chicago uncommitted, had offered his fourteen Arkansas votes to the Arthur people in trade for a Cabinet seat. “Not for forty nominations,” Arthur responded by wire, and so Clayton went immediately to see the Blaine people. He and Tom Platt, it was known, had been closeted most of that afternoon. (His Conkling past behind him, his “bit of scandal” in the Albany hotel fading from memory, Platt had “thrown in” with Blaine and as head of the New York Blaine delegates was realistically viewed as one of the two or three most important men at the convention.)
Naming Clayton had been a silly move by the Blaine people, the crudest kind of arrogance, and insulting to a large number of delegates. Even the most case-hardened veterans of political compromise were visibly stunned. Chauncey Depew is said to have received the news with his mouth hanging open, speechless for perhaps the first time in his career.
Theodore saw it at once as a chance to force a fight and test Blaine’s strength at the outset. Lodge came rushing to him with much the same idea and so the two “pull
ed together and went in for all we were worth,” as Theodore said. They were up most of the night, working the hotel corridors, seeing everyone they could. To challenge a decision of the National Committee at the start of a convention was unheard of. “Many of our men were very timid,” Theodore reported to Bamie, and chief among the “weak-kneed ones” was George William Curtis.
Just finding somebody willing to stand as a candidate against Clayton proved difficult and apparently it was Theodore’s personal appeal that made the difference. The volunteer was former Congressman John R. Lynch, a black delegate from Mississippi, who was pledged to Arthur.
When, at ten the next morning, the different delegations began forming up in the hotel lobbies for the march to the convention hall, Theodore had had perhaps two hours’ sleep. The day, June 3, 1884, marked his debut in national politics, his first chance on the national stage.
2
Probably he had his mind on business only as the march began—out of the hotel into the glare of the morning. But the day was spectacular, clear and surprisingly cool for June, and Chicago itself on such a day, and at that particular moment in history, could be a tonic. Four years earlier, when stopping there with Ellie, he had called “Chicagoe,” as he spelled it, a “marvelous city.” Chicago was the new America, the real thing, full of “go-aheadism,” as everyone heard from its outspoken citizenry. It exuded “a sense of big things to be done.” If Chicago had faults, it was because Chicago was “young yet”; Chicago was the “Phoenix City of America,” risen out of its own ashes, as the saying went. One could take heart in Chicago, from new life, energy, enterprise, even grandeur, springing forth from tragedy.
The parade to the Exposition Hall was under way by eleven, the crowds falling back and making way for the delegates to pass. They marched two by two in the glaring sunshine, everybody adorned with his proper badge. Their party, for all its failings, its scandals and fallen idols, was still the party of Lincoln, the party that saved the Union, freed the slaves, restored the national credit. Even to so sensitive a moralist as George William Curtis it remained “the party of the best instincts, of the highest desires of the American people.” Many men were Republicans as they were church elders or lodge brothers. It was as if one belonged to an order. Their loyalties, their faith and pride in party, were often deeper, more vital to their self-respect and sense of worth than they could express. Delegates to Republican national conventions, as Mark Sullivan noted, sometimes had their official badges cast in gold and passed them along in their wills as precious relics. When a man like Tom Platt talked about the depth of James G. Blaine’s loyalty to the party, he did so knowing full well the emotional content in those words—”loyalty” and “party.” He felt it himself, even Tom Platt. They all did, or nearly all. “What I liked about him [Blaine] then, as always,” Platt remembered, “was his bold and persistent contention that the citizen who best loved his party and was loyal to it, was loyal to and best loved his country.”
The line of march was east, toward the lake, along Adams Street to where it joined wide, wood-paved Michigan Avenue. The Exposition Hall, pale green with much glass and a red roof, stood straight ahead on the other side of the avenue, and from all its turrets, domes, and gable ends, a hundred or more flags and banners were flying in the breeze, flying and floating exactly as flags are supposed to, against a clear blue sky. The hall had been built expressly to show that Chicago could rise from the disaster of the Great Fire. It stood at the edge of a broad park and beyond the park was the lake, at the moment nearly violet in color and flat as a tabletop. Above the main portico hung a single, tremendous sign: NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONVENTION.
The crowd converging from all directions, stopping traffic, backing up at six or seven different entrances, was estimated at ten thousand. The scalpers’ price for tickets was $50.
The parading delegates entered through the main door, then moved along a passage beneath the back gallery which opened all at once on to several acres of faces turned in their direction. The Iowans came in first, followed by Rhode Island. Congressman McKinley—short, solid, close-shaven—walked at the head of the Ohio delegation.
The Pennsylvanians wore brilliant blue neckties and cream-colored plug hats and matching cream-colored silk handkerchiefs in their coat pockets, a spray of lily of the valley on the lapel. The New Yorkers, seventy-two in all, largest of the delegations, had white badges with gold fringe and as they started down the aisle the band struck up “When First I Put This Uniform On.” A Chicago reporter thought them “fine-looking fellows” and observed that nearly all were wearing the latest low-cut shoes. “The leader was Mr. George William Curtis with his handsome white whiskers. . . . He had on his arm Theodore Roosevelt who bowed right and left to delegates and newspapermen.” Theodore was wearing his straw hat. Immediately behind walked Andrew D. White and bringing up the rear was Tom Platt.
They had the priority position, four rows front and center. Curtis sat on the aisle, beside the New York pennon. As the others were getting settled, Theodore was seen to vault lightly over several chairs to sit directly in front of Curtis, after which Andrew D. White negotiated a seat beside Theodore. Platt, meantime, sat at the far end of the row from Curtis and appeared to have nothing more on his mind than the slow, rhythmic stroking of his beard.
The setting looked like nothing else so much as a tremendous, dressed-up railroad terminal. An enormous vaulted ceiling was carried overhead by iron girders, these springing upward from long clerestory windows through which great shafts of sunshine slanted onto portions of the crowd like theatrical spotlights. The ironwork was painted red; the ceiling, pale blue; and red-white-and-blue bunting, state flags, and shields of every color banked the galleries.
The stage was at the west end of the hall and back from the stage was a still higher platform reserved for a thousand or more who qualified as “distinguished persons.” Directly above this point, suspended at an angle of about sixty degrees, was a colossal sounding board, hung from the ceiling, a duplicate of which could also be seen at the other end of the hall. The combined surface of these two devices was twenty-five thousand square feet, about half the area of a football field, and their combined acoustical effect was quite amazing. A speaker on stage, talking in a normal voice, could be heard anywhere in the hall and the hall sat about twelve thousand people.
The stage itself was a big semicircle with a long, curving prow now all but buried in still more bunting. A speaker’s stand was flanked with battle flags. There were potted palms and several large bouquets of flowers and two large portraits of Washington and Lincoln.
Members of the press, of whom there were no less than eight hundred in attendance, were arranged behind a line of tables on a raised platform immediately in front of the stage. Then across the entire main floor, from the press section to midpoint in the hall, were the cane-seated oak chairs for the delegates, row after row, divided into three equal sections. The pennons marking each reserved section were of blue silk lettered in gold, one for each of the thirty-eight states, eight territories, and the District of Columbia. The boundary line between the delegates and all other ticketholders was a white picket fence running across the center of the hall, from which point the floor sloped steadily uphill to the bleachers at the very back. At the center of the bleachers, directly below the second sounding board, was a thirty-piece band under the direction of “Professor” Johnny Hand. The overhead galleries, running the length of the hall on two sides, were perhaps fifty feet above the main floor.
The opening gavel of the Eighth Republican National Convention fell at 12:28. A slender young clergyman with yellow hair stepped to the rostrum and with hands behind his back thanked God for Plymouth Rock, Yorktown, Appomattox, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Republican Party, then prayed for—in vain, as it happened—”dignity of temper” in the forthcoming campaign. The chairman of the National Committee, a senator from Minnesota named Sabin, spoke of Chicago as sacred gro
und (Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield had all been nominated in Chicago), after which he put Powell Clayton’s name before the convention.
Immediately, Lodge was on his feet calling to substitute Lynch of Mississippi. Lodge, tidy, prim, full-bearded, and close-buttoned, spoke without passion, as though he wished merely to express a polite difference of opinion. He offered the name of Lynch, he said, with no view of attempting to make a test vote, but simply to strengthen the party. His manner was described as “supercilious.”
Others demanded to be heard. The Blaine people claimed that any challenge to the National Committee would subject the party to needless divisiveness. The opposition insisted that the convention had the right to do as it pleased. Meantime, if we are to believe one of those observing the scene from the press section, the “rather dudish-looking” Roosevelt and the “properly English” Lodge “applauded with the tips of their fingers, held immediately in front of their noses.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 310