“I have none. My only desire is to get the best man.”
“You are quoted as being opposed to Mr. Woodruff?”
“I have said when asked whether Mr. Woodruff was a candidate, that I hoped not, and I do not retract that statement. . . . As for Mr. Bliss, he is an admirable man, but he is out of the question; he cannot accept. Senator Allison? Well, I came over on the train with him, and he is absolute in his refusal. There is no doubt of his sincerity—in not wanting the place. And, as a matter of fact, we cannot spare him from his present place in the Senate.”
He was asked about Iowa’s young representative Jonathan Dolliver, a late entry in the mention game, favored by Grosvenor and Dawes.
“Mr. Dolliver,” said Hanna, “is an avowed candidate, and he has a good following among his friends in the House, but I cannot say more as to his prospects. The truth is that there is as yet no approach to a settlement of the matter.”
In fact Hanna had come to Philadelphia with two overarching aims: to get Bliss to accept the position and, barring that, to prevent Roosevelt from getting it. Although Bliss had declined the honor repeatedly in conversations with Hanna and others, the senator continued to work him in Philadelphia. But Bliss’s family opposed the idea so vehemently that the New Yorker simply couldn’t entertain it. Hanna was left with the task of identifying that “best man” he was looking for. But there didn’t seem to be anyone available who could meet Hanna’s standards and also galvanize the convention.
The only man who could galvanize the convention was the Rough Rider, who inexplicably arrived in Philadelphia wearing a hat reminiscent of his Cuban adventure. When he entered the Walton Hotel’s crowded lobby at two o’clock on June 16, it caused an instant stir.
“Here comes Teddy,” a man shouted, and the crowd rushed to him with cheers and chants of “Teddy, Teddy, Teddy.” When the air was filled with a chorus of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” according to one journalist, “Roosevelt blushed, doffed his hat and bowed his acknowledgements as he recognized the tune played after his charge up San Juan Hill.” Similar scenes emerged through the afternoon. One political wit, noting the hat, said slyly, “Gentlemen, that’s an acceptance hat.” Platt, employing his most devious cunning in efforts to ignite a TR firestorm without burning his fingers, observed with quiet satisfaction that the governor was “in a state of rare excitement, even for him.” Lodge, who initially had urged Roosevelt to embrace the vice presidency but later accepted his demurral, warned him to stay away from the convention if he didn’t want the position. What he thought of the hat was never recorded.
The next morning the governor’s hotel room was aflutter with sequential visits from state delegations imploring him to bow to the clear and powerful sentiment of the convention. First came the Western states: California, Colorado, the Dakotas, Nevada. The delegates chanted and sang to the accompaniment of “fife, drum and bugle” as they marched around the room. Then came the Eastern delegations, offering unqualified support and begging for the governor’s acquiescence. Nobody could resist this phenomenon of political energy—not Roosevelt, not McKinley, not Hanna. “The town was Roosevelt mad,” reported the Associated Press.
Hanna was the last to accept the inevitable. Though Roosevelt had assured the senator that he wasn’t a candidate, he continued his flirtatious ways. On Sunday evening, before the start of the proceedings, Charles Dick saw disaster looming. The Roosevelt wave was becoming irresistible, and yet Hanna seemed bent on resisting it. That could embarrass the president, who was following events from far-off Washington. Dick called Cortelyou at the White House to explain the deteriorating situation. Cortelyou had the president at his side as he conversed with Dick.
“The Roosevelt boom has let loose and it has swept everything,” said Dick. “The feeling is that the thing is going pell mell like a tidal wave.” Although TR had opposed the wave initially, said Dick, he now seemed beguiled by it. Dick suggested the president should talk to Hanna and flag him off his anti-TR machinations. “We cannot afford to have it said that something was done in spite of ourselves,” said the longtime McKinley loyalist.
At midnight the president dictated a policy statement and had Cortelyou read it to Dick and other convention officials: “The President has no choice for Vice-President. Any of the distinguished names suggested would be satisfactory to him. The choice of the Convention will be his choice; he has no advice to give. The Convention is the lawfully constituted body to make nominations, and instead of giving advice he awaits its advice, confident now as always that it will act wisely and for the highest interest of the country and the party.” McKinley was never one to resist the inevitable.
But Hanna still resisted. He rushed to Roosevelt’s room and demanded to know if he was a candidate. The governor waffled, then said he would issue a withdrawal statement the next morning. But the statement dripped of ambiguity. Clearly he wasn’t prepared to slam the door on the vice presidency. Hanna, bewildered and irritated by McKinley’s statement and the passivity it reflected, fought through the night to solidify anti-TR sentiment within various delegations. “I am not in control!” he complained to convention colleagues. “McKinley won’t let me use the power of the administration to defeat Roosevelt. He is blind, or afraid, or something.”
Suffering intense pain from his rheumatism and hardly able to walk, Hanna seemed genuinely out of control, in danger of placing himself (and his boss) against the convention. On Tuesday, June 19, just after Hanna slammed down the big gavel to open the convention, Roosevelt entered the hall with a well-timed flourish that touched off a raucous rally for him. The inflamed Hanna employed all his political wiles and vaunted carrot-and-stick leverage to stop the TR movement on the convention floor.
Watching Hanna with growing alarm, Dawes pleaded with him to halt his anti-Roosevelt crusade. But the irritated Hanna insisted the president supported his actions. There was “almost an altercation,” Dawes recalled later, and then the young McKinley intimate retired to his hotel room and called Cortelyou. With the president listening on an extension line, Dawes said Hanna was fostering a convention split that was sure to humiliate himself and embarrass the president.
The president quickly produced yet another statement, which Cortelyou dictated to Dawes. This one could not be misinterpreted or ignored: “The President’s close friends must not undertake to commit the Administration to any candidate. It has no candidate. The convention must make the nomination; the Administration would not if it could. The President’s close friends should be satisfied with his unanimous renomination and not interfere with the vice-presidential nomination. The Administration wants the candidate of the convention, and the President’s friends must not dictate to the convention.”
Dawes rushed to Hanna with the statement, read it to him, and watched the recognition of reality slowly emerge upon his countenance. The game was up. Hanna was subdued. Dawes returned to his room to call the White House again with word that Hanna had been “a little perplexed” but would comply. Some McKinley partisans mounted a perfunctory vice presidential movement in behalf of Secretary Long, but nobody took it seriously, and it caused hardly a stir. Hanna played no role in it. He would do what he was told, he told Dawes. Indeed he got ahead of the wave by suggesting in a statement that Roosevelt, like McKinley, should be nominated by acclamation.
The convention approved a platform conforming to the president’s wishes, including a plank on trusts that “condemn[ed] all conspiracies and combinations intended to restrict trade, limit production and control prices” and favored legislation to “restrain and prevent all such abuses and protect and promote competition.” On foreign policy, the platform declared that “no other course was possible than to destroy Spain’s sovereignty throughout the West Indies and in the Philippine Islands.” That course “created our responsibility before the world . . . to provide for the maintenance of law and order, and for the establishment of good government.” But U.S. authority could not be
less than U.S. responsibility, and that principle justified the effort in the Philippines “to maintain [U.S.] authority, to put down armed insurrection, and to confer the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples.” The rest of the convention unfolded without controversy but with plenty of enthusiasm and with a robust confidence that the Republicans had the candidates, the platform, the narrative, and the popularity for another big election triumph in November.
Meanwhile the president went about his usual daily routine, spending his days at his desk in the Cabinet Room as the convention unfolded. When news flashes from Philadelphia reached the receiving room at the southeast corner of the White House, staffers rushed them to the president, who read them without emotion and returned to his paperwork. When he got word of his nomination at 12:46 p.m. on June 21, he “hastened with a light step” to the family quarters to tell Ida. But he remained only five minutes before returning to his desk. One task he took up quickly was a letter of appreciation to Hanna commending his “courage and sagacity of true leadership” and saying the senator had “added another claim to leadership and public confidence.” The senator responded, “Well, it was a nice little scrap at Phila. Not exactly to my liking with my hand tied behind me. However, we got through in good shape and the ticket is all right. Your duty to the country is to live for four years from next March.”
* * *
TWO WEEKS LATER, when the Democrats assembled at Kansas City, everyone knew the party once again would turn to William Jennings Bryan. But when some delegates suggested new economic circumstances justified a slight relaxation in the commitment to silver coinage at a 16-to-1 ratio, Bryan promptly threatened to appear personally, press the issue, and bolt the convention if it didn’t adhere strictly to the 1896 language. That settled the matter. On foreign policy, the platform declared, “We condemn and denounce the Philippine policy of the present administration. It has involved the Republic in unnecessary war, sacrificed the lives of many of our noblest sons, and placed the United States, previously known and applauded throughout the world as the champion of freedom, in the false and un-American position of crushing with military force the efforts of our former allies to achieve liberty and self-government.”
Then the delegates duly nominated Bryan and selected for vice president Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, who already had served in that role under President Cleveland. Bryan and Stevenson also captured the nomination of the populist People’s Party and the Silver Republicans, both relics of the free-silver fervor of recent years.
* * *
THE 1900 GENERAL election campaign proceeded along a number of tracks—issues, campaign strategies and techniques, the roles of the two candidates, Electoral College math, and candidate personalities. The New York Times, forged into a major journalistic voice after Adolph Ochs’s 1896 purchase, captured the candidates’ personalities in a penetrating editorial in 1899. Neither politician, stated the paper, possessed “that broad and philosophic sweep of mind that marks the creative statesman.” But both were “able” and displayed “gifts and capacities” for effective leadership. Bryan was “somewhat more alert” than his stolid rival but fostered mistrust among some by his call for “swift and sweeping changes in . . . substantially all of our institutions and customs,” including currency, the banks, bonds, taxes, trusts, wages, and labor laws. Bryan’s constituency was “the army of the discontented.”
McKinley, by contrast, spoke to the sober-minded, conservative, property-owning Americans who “are afraid of overtopping talent and brilliancy.” Not trusting “a man who leaps into fame by a single speech,” insisted the paper with a bit of slyness, these voters shun the Clays, Websters, and Blaines in favor of “far less shining but safer men” who understand them and their concerns. McKinley’s “chief and constant anxiety is not to stray from the path wherein he can command the confidence and support of this conservative majority.”
The issues embraced by the two men reflected these traits of temperament and outlook. Bryan waged a campaign of anger directed against established institutions and policies of the day—banks, trusts, the gold standard, protectionism, America’s new imperialism. The Nebraskan seized the issues that bubbled up as the campaign unfolded. By mid-September he had shifted his concentration from silver to imperialism and trusts, issues that seemed more resonant with his constituency. “Parties do not make issues,” said the candidate in explaining the shift. “Parties meet issues.” Republicans, by imposing colonial rule upon the Philippines, had struck “at the very foundation of free government.”
On trusts, Bryan pounced when Hanna maladroitly uttered remarks questioning the existence of trusts. “Everybody except Mr. Hanna knows that we have trusts,” retorted Bryan, adding that the senator’s remarks seemed particularly strange because “there is not a man in the country who knows more about the trusts than he does.” Hanna sought to clarify his remarks by saying he was speaking strictly in a legal context. But the damage was done, and McKinley found it “irksome” that his effort to neutralize the issue through platform language had been undermined.
But Hanna rebounded by cleverly reducing the campaign to a single word: prosperity. “There is but one issue,” he intoned constantly on the stump, “only one—the issue of prosperity and the continuation of it.” He said he wouldn’t even discuss imperialism—a “bugaboo,” a “fraud.” It was a “humbug,” he said, to think the American people would “resolve themselves into an empire” or that a man such as McKinley “would be an Emperor.”
The president meanwhile campaigned simply by doing his job. He announced in September that he planned no public speeches or campaign tours, “despite . . . a movement to try to persuade him to take such action,” reported the Washington Post. He wouldn’t even consider another front-porch strategy. But he enjoyed plenty of adulation whenever he ventured into public.
“Major,” yelled one onlooker during a presidential stop at Johnstown, “what are you going to do with us the next four years?”
“It is more important just now,” replied the president with a smile, “to know what you are going to do with me the next four years.”
“We are going to stand by you,” yelled the man, to cheers from the crowd.
McKinley bundled his underlying campaign message into a well-crafted and widely disseminated letter acknowledging the official notification of his nomination and accepting the honor. He also took a jab at his rival in a letter sent to Alliance, Ohio, near Canton, to be read at a rally. The letter extolled “the friendly co-operation of labor and capital” and denounced “the wicked doctrine of class distinction.” When 143,000 anthracite coal miners went on strike in September, the possibility of violence loomed large as a threat to the coal industry as well as to McKinley’s reelection. Bryan supporters sought to exploit the strike by embracing the miners’ demands, but Hanna seized the issue more effectively. He leveraged his corporate stature and contacts to mediate the dispute—largely in favor of the miners. He declared, “Any man who would put a straw in the way of a settlement . . . should be taken out to the nearest lamp-post and hanged.”
Hanna revived the super-efficient organizational engine of four years earlier. By late September it produced seventy different documents (brochures, letters, pamphlets), as well as ten or more different posters and lithographs. It distributed 110 million individual items. Newspaper inserts and supplementary materials amounted to two million copies per week. McKinley speeches and utterances were translated into German, Norwegian, Swedish, French, Dutch, “and four or five other languages.” The aim was to break the electorate down into discrete ethnic groups for targeted messages. The speakers bureau was revived to ensure that McKinley’s message got to precisely the right location at the right time.
The key speaker turned out to be Roosevelt, who blitzed the country with his famous boundless enthusiasm in behalf of an administration he had never particularly believed in. But now he touted McKinley as one of the great presidents of U.S. history, i
n the process drawing huge crowds to auditoriums, sports arenas, and railroad stops. On one October day in Chicago he delivered a dozen speeches, including at the Coliseum and the First Regiment Armory, and still people had to be turned away for lack of space. He galvanized audiences with his stark and vivid expressiveness. On America’s overseas mission, he said, “We have got the wolf by the ears, and we can’t get away from these new duties. Now we must decide whether we are going to flinch or whether we are going to go on and finish this great work.” In eight weeks of campaigning he traveled 21,209 miles in delivering 673 speeches to an estimated three million people in twenty-four states encompassing 567 towns and cities.
Hanna, itching to get into the fray, proposed late in the campaign that he go after the enemy by touring Bryan’s home state of Nebraska and also South Dakota, where the outspoken silverite and anti-imperialist Richard Pettigrew, once a Republican but now a McKinley nemesis, faced a challenge to his Senate incumbency. Republican officials urged Hanna to abandon the idea, as the two states were hotbeds of populist rancor toward the administration and a dustup with Pettigrew could look like a vendetta. When Hanna persisted, McKinley sent Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith to dissuade the senator from what looked like a foolhardy mission.
“Return to Washington and tell the President that God hates a coward!” snapped Hanna to Smith. As Hanna’s secretary Elmer Dover recalled, “They doubted Mr. Hanna’s judgment and it irritated him.” Ignoring the president’s wishes, Hanna undertook the tour—and turned it into a significant success. He drew larger crowds than Roosevelt and dispelled the popular image of him as a fat, money-grubbing plutocrat with pinky rings and a smirk of self-satisfaction. “I have taken South Dakota out of the doubtful column,” claimed Hanna upon returning to Chicago. “I thoroughly believe Nebraska will also go for McKinley.”
President McKinley Page 52