Then it was Theodore’s turn. “Up from the midst of the Empire State Delegation rose a slight, almost boyish figure,” wrote the admiring correspondent for The New York Times. “Everybody knew the man, for there is not a State headquarters which he had not visited in his canvass for Edmunds, and scarce an individual delegate with whom he had not conversed in a straightforward, manly way, carrying conviction even when he could not convert.” He had handed someone his hat and climbed onto his chair. It was said he looked like a college boy.
“It was the first time I had ever had the chance of speaking to ten thousand people assembled together,” he would tell Bamie.
He had one hand on his hip. A reporter described how his “slight frame shook with the effort to make himself heard.”
“Mr. Chairman . . . I hold it to be derogatory to our honor, to our capacity for self-government, to say that we must accept the nomination of a presiding officer by another body; and that our hands are tied . . .” He asked that the vote on the temporary chairman be taken by an individual poll of the delegates. “Let each man stand accountable . . . let each man stand up here and cast his vote, and then go home and abide by what he has done.”
It is now, Mr. Chairman, less than a quarter of a century since, in this city, the great Republican Party for the first time organized for victory and nominated Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, who broke the fetters of the slave and rent them asunder forever. It is a fitting thing for us to choose to preside over this convention one of that race whose right to sit within these walls is due to the blood and treasure so lavishly spent by the founders of the Republican Party. And it is but a further vindication of the principles for which the Republican Party so long struggled. I trust that the Honorable Mr. Lynch will be elected temporary chairman of this convention.
Then, as quickly, he was back in his seat again, the “warmest applause” ringing in his ears, and once five or six others had spoken, the roll was called. Lynch won—Blaine had lost—by a margin of forty votes.
So for the moment, for one exhilarating, fleeting afternoon, it looked as if Blaine might be stopped after all. Certainly, he could not be nominated on the first ballot. In New York the Evening Post hailed the all-night efforts of Roosevelt and Lodge as a brilliant flanking movement. The New York Times singled Theodore out as not only the most conspicuous of the Edmunds men, but the most effective. But what the vote had actually done was to show that the balance of power was held by the reform contingent, the Edmunds people: the “Plumed Knight” could be stopped, but only if they were to give up on Edmunds and agree to Arthur, or resolve a way to unite the Edmunds and Arthur forces behind some acceptable alternative, such as John Sherman. It was clearly a case of Blaine against the field and the field could win only by uniting, which seemed just about hopeless, given the known preference of the Arthur people for Blaine as their second choice.
That night at the Grand Pacific, as a glee club hired by the Arthur forces paraded about the lobby singing the praises of the President, Theodore went back to work.
Wednesday, June 4, was taken up with routine business. The weather was cloudy and warm. “Young Roosevelt alone was buoyant. . .” The one bit of excitement was a resolution put forth by the Blaine people—an old Conkling resolution from the previous convention—calling for every delegate to pledge in advance his support of the nominee, irrespective of who it might be. It was aimed directly at George William Curtis and Curtis was instantly on his feet. The color was drained from his face, his hands clenched. Curtis had a magnificent voice—a famous voice—and he spoke now with what was described as “electric” intensity: “A Republican I came into this convention. By the grace of God, a Republican and a free man I will go out of this convention.” The resolution was withdrawn.
Thursday, June 5, petitions for women’s suffrage were read and referred to committee, there to die; the party platform, replete with praise for a high tariff and the gold standard, was read aloud in its entirety by William McKinley. Again the weather was correspondingly gray and dull, and again Theodore was extremely active, “quick, watchful, rather enjoying his brief lease on public life.” An Ohio delegate, Joseph Foraker, would later relate that he had found one conference with the indefatigable New Yorker “so trying upon the strength and the mental operations” that he was barely able to make it back to the convention hall that evening for the nominating speeches.
Sixteen nominating speeches were delivered, beginning at 7:35 and lasting more than five hours. Every seat was taken, every foot of standing room. The night was hot and close and thousands of little fans were moving in the mellow gaslight. Outside, thousands of people crowded about the building, waiting for whatever news was shouted down from those inside who were seated in the last rows of the galleries, up along the line of clerestory windows.
Senator Shelby Cullom of Illinois nominated his colleague Logan; the principal speaker for Arthur was an elderly unknown from Troy, New York, named Martin Townsend, who was obviously unprepared; John Sherman was nominated by Foraker of Ohio; and the two speeches for Edmunds were delivered by John D. Long, a noted speaker, and George William Curtis. Theodore thought the speech by Long the finest he had ever heard. It struck the old theme of the Hayes inaugural: country before party. “We are here as Republicans, and yet. . . not in the interest of the Republican Party alone. Even in this tumultuous excitement, we feel that. . . we are here in the interests of the people and all the people . . . of the country and the whole country.” And then Long said, “Gentlemen, I nominate the Honorable—aye! the Honorable—George F. Edmunds of Vermont.”
But the overwhelming, unforgettable event of the night was the nominating speech for Blaine and what it did to the audience. No one could remember having witnessed anything comparable. It was one of the most memorable events in the whole history of national political conventions. To some it was appalling. Andrew D. White called it a scene “absolutely unworthy of a convention of any party, a disgrace to decency.” Godkin, from what he was told, would dismiss it as “a mass meeting of maniacs.” Theodore, in a moment of calm reflection afterward, would concede to Bamie that it had been “most impressive.”
The speaker was a blind man, Judge William H. West from Bellefontaine, Ohio, a tall, gaunt, white-bearded figure in an ancient blue cloak that reached nearly to the floor, who was led to the stage and up the steps by a small boy. He “stood looking with his sightless eyes towards the vast throng,” wrote Theodore, “. . . his voice rang like a trumpet. . .”
He had been in Chicago in 1860, said the speaker. He had been there when they nominated Abraham Lincoln.
Four and twenty years of the grandest history in recorded times have distinguished the ascendancy of the Republican Party. The skies have lowered and reverses have threatened, but our flag is still there, waving above the mansion of the Presidency. . . . Six times, in six campaigns, has that symbol of union, freedom, humanity, and progress, been borne in triumph . . .
The cadence was Biblical and he looked as if he might have been present at the Creation.
Gentlemen, the Republican Party demands of this convention a nominee whose inspiration and glorious prestige shall carry the Presidency.... Gentlemen, three millions of Republicans believe that the man to accomplish this is the Ajax Telamon of our party, who made and whose life is a conspicuous part of its glorious history. Through all the conflicts of its progress, from the baptism of blood on the plains of Kansas to the fall of the immortal Garfield, whenever humanity needed succor or freedom needed protection or a country a champion, wherever blows fell thickest and fastest, there, in the forefront of the battle, was seen to wave the white plume of James G. Blaine, our Henry of Navarre. . . . Nominate him, and the campfires and beacon lights will illuminate the continent from the Golden Gate to Cleopatra’s Needle. Nominate him, and the millions who are now waiting will rally to swell the column of victory that is sweeping on. In the name of the majority of the delegates from the Republican States and their glorious constituen
cies who must fight this battle, I nominate . . .
But he never completed his sentence. It was as if the huge auditorium had been rocked by an explosion. The noise was horrendous. Delegates were cheering, screaming, stamping their feet, shouting at the tops of their lungs. They climbed onto chairs, leaped and danced about in the aisles, grabbed one another in great bear hugs and went spinning around in circles. There were hats spinning on the tops of canes held overhead, hats flying into the air. Bonnets, coats, canes, umbrellas, thousands of white handkerchiefs, were waving frantically. People were singing, weeping. Flags and banners were being stripped from the walls. The noise went on and on. It was “pandemonium universal and all-pervading,” a scene “never equaled and utterly indescribable.” And just when everyone’s energy seemed to have been spent, somebody came down the aisle and onto the stage carrying a huge American flag on a long staff at the top of which rode a helmet of pink and white roses surmounted by a waving snow-white plume, “the helmet of Navarre.”
“. . . James G. Blaine of Maine,” Judge West was able to exclaim at last, a half hour later, and then “another great roar went up like the noise of many waters, sweeping in great waves of sound around the hall, and the crowd without. . . answered in a muffled roar, which echoed within.”
Here and there on the floor, chiefly among the Massachusetts and New York delegations, could be seen small islands of silent men who sat with their arms folded and who, from the looks on their faces, might have been at a funeral.
Nothing said in the other speeches mattered greatly. Everything after the West speech was anticlimactic and by the time it was decided to adjourn, the hour then being past midnight, there was little doubt as to what would happen the next morning.
Yet once again Theodore and Lodge worked through the night. As a last-ditch effort they tried to unite the Arthur and Edmunds forces behind John Sherman, working behind closed doors with an Ohio delegate, a political nobody who was also attending his first convention and learning a great deal, Mark Hanna. Another idea was to stampede the convention for Robert Lincoln.
“It is a life or death struggle for the Republican Party in Chicago,” wrote the editor of The New York Times as the paper was put to bed that night in New York. “. . . [Blaine’s] nomination means a disastrous defeat for the Republican Party, and from that defeat the party would never recover except under other leaders and perhaps another name. The party has assuredly fallen upon evil days.” The Times had decided at this late hour to support Robert Lincoln.
“It quickly degenerates into ‘anything to beat Blaine,’” said a Chicago reporter who was on the scene.
It is eager, bitter, and peculiar. Dudes and roughs, civil service reformers and office-holding bosses, shorthairs and college presidents—many men of various kinds of ambition or selfishness join in midnight conferences. . . . Logan refuses all combination. The Lincoln boom collapses. . . . To throw Arthur to Edmunds is impossible. To transfer Edmunds to Arthur is merely to send Logan and Sherman to Blaine. Logan will not have Edmunds; the Edmunds men do not want Logan. Arthur also prefers Blaine to Sherman . . .
The balloting began the morning of the fourth day, Friday, June 6, the hall as packed as the previous night. “It was a tumultuous crowd, but a very good-natured one [noted a Chicago reporter]. . . . Tally sheets are ready, pencils are out, the delegates who are still toiling with the weak and weakening the stubborn, hurry to their places, while the gavel keeps up its heavy staccato.”
Blaine did not win on the first ballot, nor the second, nor the third, but he kept gaining, while Arthur held steady and Edmunds kept slipping, so that by the end of the third ballot Blaine needed only thirty-six votes for the nomination. The opposition could only fight for time. Foraker moved to recess, and when a delegate from Pennsylvania challenged him, Theodore was up shouting that the motion was not debatable or amendable. Blaine people pushed their way across the stage to the chairman, surrounding him. Theodore and the Pennsylvania delegate stood on their chairs shouting at each other, but the noise of the crowd was so great it was impossible to hear what they were saying. Theodore, thrashing his arms in the air, “vociferated and gesticulated in a dramatic manner amid the cheers and jeers of the vast audience . . .” No one was seated any longer, most people were standing on their chairs. Theodore was trying to get on stage to ask a question, and getting nowhere until he thrust aside “several officious persons who were attempting forcibly to exclude him.” But then William McKinley, the conventions great conciliatory figure, emerged from the crowd on stage, raised a small, pale hand, and “lo! as if Canute had found the sea obedient, the Blaine men drop into their seats, wipe their brows and puff out their short breath. . . . The storm is over.”
“The gentlemen representing the different states here have a right to the voice of this convention upon this subject,” said McKinley in a resolute voice, “and, as a friend of James G. Blaine, I insist that all his friends shall unite in having the roll of states called ...”
A vote was taken on the move to adjourn and the Blaine forces voted it down.
So it was on the fourth ballot that Blaine carried the day, Logan released his Illinois delegation, 34 votes, to Blaine. Minutes later Ohio made it final.
The final vote for Blaine was 541; for Arthur, 207. Edmunds ended with only 41. In one of the galleries Carl Schurz took out his watch and remarked to a neighbor, “This is the hour and minute which will go down in history as marking the death of the Republican Party.”
The crowd was euphoric, as the night before, “crazy with rapture . . . sheer ecstasy.” The band was playing and somewhere in the distance a cannon boomed. There was a motion to make the nomination unanimous and William McKinley came pushing down the aisle to where Theodore and Curtis sat. He urged one or the other to go to the platform and speak for Blaine, but neither would budge. When Curtis shook his head, wrote one of the many reporters who were watching the whole interchange, it was not in anger but in sorrow. A reporter took hold of Theodore by the arm as he started toward the exit. He had nothing to say, Theodore insisted. His face was crimson, his “eyes flashed with indignation behind his gold-rimmed spectacles as he contemplated his first real defeat.”
“I decline to say anything ...”
“But you will certainly support Blaine, will you not?”
“That question I decline to answer. It is a subject that I do not care to talk about.”
“Will you not enter the campaign in the interests of the Republican Party?”
“I am going cattle ranching in Dakota for the remainder of the summer and part of the fall. What I shall do after that I cannot tell you.”
He brushed off another reporter by telling him to wait a week. To the man from the Times he said that by tradition he was expected to support the nominee, but refused to say more.
“A grave would be garrulous compared to me tonight,” he told still another man, this one from the Boston Transcript, but then suddenly he said that picking Blaine was the greatest possible blunder—and that he would support him.
Lodge and Curtis were being besieged with the same questions. “Don’t hit a fellow because he’s down,” Lodge responded. “I think on the whole I may join the machine and keep in politics. This country is in such a hurry it can’t stop for reform.”
Curtis, in Theodore’s presence, said he had been a Republican too long to break from the party now.
The convention ended that evening with the naming of John A. Logan as Blaine’s running mate. Logan, a profane, contentious figure, had been an excellent commander in the Union Army and in politics a “thick-or-thin” Grant supporter. He was on the ticket to please the old Conkling crowd and to bring in the soldier vote. It was Logan who, in 1868, had conceived the idea of Memorial Day. Blaine, like Cleveland, had hired a substitute during the war.
At the White House Chester A. Arthur sent off a cable pledging his “earnest and cordial support.” Two weeks later, he would confide to a friend that he was indeed suffering fro
m an advanced case of Bright’s disease and did not have long to live.
Jubilant crowds surged through the streets of Chicago most of the night, tying up traffic for blocks around the main hotels. Bonfires burned at several street corners; one, in front of the Vickers Theater, gave off such heat that passing horses were injured. Rockets flashed from housetops; “people—young and old—formed impromptu processions and marched . . . howling like madmen: ’Blaine, Blaine, hurrah for Blaine!’”
Bulletins reported similar demonstrations for Blaine in Pittsburgh, Dayton, Princeton. In San Francisco all business was suspended. The city had “gone wild.”
It was also that night, about midnight, according to one of the editors of the Evening Post, Horace White, that Theodore came into the Independent committee room at the Grand Pacific, where White was busy composing a dispatch to the New York office, predicting a revolt among the Independent Republicans. Theodore sat down, according to White’s account, and White read aloud what he had written, asking at the end if he had made it strong enough. No, he had not, said Theodore, his fury and fatigue having caught up with him. “If I were writing it, I would say, ’any proper Democratic nomination will have our hearty support.’” He thought the best Democrat would be Cleveland.
By midmorning the following day, Saturday, June 7, however, Theodore had packed and checked out. “ROOSEVELT TAKES TO THE WOODS,” scoffed a headline in the World. Roosevelt and Curtis, alone of all the delegates, had pouted and sulked like whipped schoolboys, said a Midwestern paper.
But then two days later came a report from St. Paul, Minnesota, quoting Theodore as saying, “I shall bolt the nomination of the convention by no means. I have no personal objections to Blaine . . . I believe Blaine will be elected. . . . I have been called a reformer but I am a Republican . . .” He had been interviewed by a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press during a stop en route to the Bad Lands. The story was picked up all over the East—the New York Tribune carried it on the front page—and so suddenly whether he was in or out of the party, with Blaine or against him, was cause for an uproar.
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