It was evidently expected that the southern gentleman would relieve his feelings, and it was also evident from a few ejaculations hap-hazardly emitted from the concourse, that the majority of those present was in his favor.
Mr. Snowden looked around him reflectively, and a sense of personal dignity forced its way against the almost over-powering impulse to appeal to popular approval, and convinced him that the place and the audience were inopportune for any further discussion. He could not, however, escape the demonstrated force of popular expectancy, and, with a consenting smile, a shrug of his shoulders, and with his hat raised above his head, swinging gently, he called out “Three cheers for Teddy and the Canal.”
In an instant the group seized the invitation, and under the cover, if it may be so violently symbolized, of the cloud of vocality, his enthusiasm evoked, Mr. Snowden, like the fortuitous and directive deities of the epics, vanished.
There remained an unsatisfied group to which more accessions were quickly made, the whole movement evidently animated by some emotion then predominant in the national capital. This group broke up into little knots of talkers, and as the day was closing, no urgency of business engagements and no immediate insistency of domestic duties interfered with the easily elicited Washingtonian tendency to settle, on the public curb, the vexed questions of state, if not to enlighten Providence on the more abstruse functions of His authority.
Alexander Leacraft willingly surrendered himself to the study of this representative public Althing, and felt his exasperating torpor so much overcome by a new curiosity as to make him not averse to stepping out into the hall of the hotel, descending the steps into the street, and engaging himself in the capacity of a rotational listener at the various groups, sometimes not exceeding two men, who had become vocally animated, and felt themselves called upon to supply the deficiency of objurgation, so disagreeably emphasized by the sudden departure of the northern and southern disputants.
The illuminative results of his ambulatory inspection, and his own expostulations or inquiry, may be thus succinctly summarized.
Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, elected in his own behalf in 1905, as president of the United States, after having served out the unexpired term of William McKinley, who was assassinated in November, 1901, and with whom he had been elected as vice president, had been again re-elected in the fall of 1908, against his emphatic rejection, at first, of a joint nomination of the Republican and Democratic parties. The campaign, if campaign it could be called, had been one of the most extraordinary ever recorded, and in its features of popular clamor, the grotesque conflict of the personal repugnance of an unwilling candidate nominated against his will, and in defiance of his own repeated inhibitions to nominate him at all, because of his solemn promise that he would defer to the unwritten law of the country, and not serve a third term, was altogether unprecedented, and to some observers ominous. He was reminded that his first term, although practically four years, was still only an accident, that there was no subversion of the unwritten law, in his serving again, as his actual election as president had occurred but once, that his popularity among the people was of such an intense, almost self-devouring ardor, that it was an act of suicidal negation, of unpatriotic desertion to shun or reject the people’s obvious need, that a war, yet unfinished, had been begun by him against corporate interests, that its logical continuance devolved upon him, that the unique occasion of a unanimous nomination to the presidency carried with it a sublime primacy of interest, that cancelled all previous conditions, promises or wishes on his part, and laid an imperious command upon its subject that deprived him of volition, and absolutely dissolved into nothingness any apparent contradiction of his words and acts. Finally, it was insisted that the Panama Canal was nearing completion, that its remarkable advance was due to Mr. Roosevelt that this fact had been prepotent in shaping the councils of southern Democrats in proposing the, otherwise unwarranted, endorsement of a Republican nomination, that a strong minority sentiment had crystallized around an angry group of capitalists who were only too anxious to get rid of Roosevelt altogether, and that in the case of his refusal, these men would so manipulate the newspapers, and inflame public apprehension, against some possible outbreak of social radicalism, financial heresy, and anarchistic violence, that a reaction begun would become unmanageable, and some tool of the reactionaries, and the railroads, would be swept into office, and with him a servile Congress, and Roosevelt’s work, so aggressively and successfully prosecuted, would be all sacrificed. Nor was this all. The return to a divided nomination, with an unmistakable intention on the part of the conservatists to repeal all disadvantageous legislation to the monopolies, corporations and trusts, would at once precipitate a conflict of classes.
A radical man, possibly a demagogue, would be placed in opposition to the choice of the plutocracy. His election was also not improbable. The powers of socialism, enormously strengthened by the adhesion of an educated class, might be triumphant, and the succeeding steps in social revolution would bring chaos.
This dilemma was so pertinaciously displayed, so forcibly accentuated, that Roosevelt had yielded at the last moment, not insensibly affected (as what spirited man would not be) by the magnificent assemblies (mass meetings) throughout the country, tumultuously vociferating the call of the people.
The southern people, with characteristic warmth, and through the suddenly consummated attachment of Senator Tillman to Roosevelt, and under the coercion of Senator Bailey’s logic and power of argumentative persuasion, had swelled the tide of popular approval. Roosevelt became an idol—his election was almost unanimous, a handful only of contestants having gathered in a kind of moral protest around Governor Hughes as a rival candidate. Governor Hughes’ nomination was achieved through a combination of opposite political interests, as anomalous as that which chose Roosevelt, and having precisely the same quality of coherence.