“McClure,” said I with the cool and quiet resolution of despair, drawing him aside, “what in the —— do you want anyhow?”
He looked at me with swift intelligence and a sudden show of sympathy, and then over at the others with a withering glance.
“What? With those cranks? Nothing.”
Jupiter descended to earth. I am afraid we actually took a glass of wine together. Anyhow, from that moment to the hour of his death we were the best of friends. Without the inner circle of the Quadrilateral, which had taken matters into their own hands, were a number of persons, some of them disinterested and others simple curiosity and excitement seekers, who might be described as merely lookers-on in Vienna. The Sunday afternoon before the convention was to meet we, the self-elect, fell in with a party of these in a garden “over the Rhine,” as the German quarter of Cincinnati is called. There was first general and rather aimless talk. Then came a great deal of speech making. Schurz started it with a few pungent observations intended to suggest and inspire some common ground of opinion and sentiment. Nobody was inclined to dispute his leadership, but everybody was prone to assert his own. It turned out that each regarded himself and wished to be regarded as a man with a mission, having a clear idea how things were not to be done. There were Civil Service Reform Protectionists and Civil Service Reform Free Traders. There were a few politicians, who were discovered to be spoilsmen, the unforgivable sin, and quickly dismissed as such.
Coherence was the missing ingredient. Not a man jack of them was willing to commit or bind himself to anything. Edward Atkinson pulled one way and William Dorsheimer exactly the opposite way. David A. Wells sought to get the two together; it was not possible. Sam Bowles shook his head in diplomatic warning. Horace White threw in a chunk or so of a rather agitating newspaper independency, and Halstead was in an inflamed state of jocosity to the more serious-minded.
It was nuts to the Washington Correspondents—story writers and satirists who were there to make the most out of an occasion in which the bizarre was much in excess of the conventional—with George Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt to set the pace. Hyde had come from St. Louis to keep especial tab on Grosvenor. Though rival editors facing our way, they had not been admitted to the Quadrilateral. McCullagh and Nixon arrived with the earliest from Chicago. The lesser lights of the guild were innumerable. One might have mistaken it for an annual meeting of the Associated Press.
V
The convention assembled. It was in Cincinnati’s great Music Hall. Schurz presided. Who that was there will ever forget his opening words: “This is moving day.” He was just turned forty-two; in his physiognomy a scholarly Herr Doktor; in his trim lithe figure a graceful athlete; in the tones of his voice an orator.
Even the bespectacled doctrinaires of the East, whence, since the days when the Star of Bethlehem shone over the desert, wisdom and wise men have had their emanation, were moved to something like enthusiasm. The rest of us were fervid and aglow. Two days and a night and a half the Quadrilateral had the world in a sling and things its own way. It had been agreed, as I have said, to limit the field to Adams, Trumbull and Greeley; Greeley being out of it, as having no chance, still further abridged it to Adams and Trumbull; and, Trumbull not developing very strong, Bowles, Halstead and I, even White, began to be sure of Adams on the first ballot; Adams the indifferent, who had sailed away for Europe, observing that he was not a candidate for the nomination and otherwise intimating his disdain of us and it.
Matters thus apparently cocked and primed, the convention adjourned over the first night of its session with everybody happy except the D. Davis contingent, which lingered on the scene, but knew its “cake was dough.” If we had forced a vote that night, as we might have done, we should have nominated Adams. But inspired by the bravery of youth and inexperience we let the golden opportunity slip. The throng of delegates and the audience dispersed.