by Max Byrd
“Fiat nox,” Cadwallader said; snorted; wrote “Let there be bullshit” on his pad.
Trist shifted in his chair and leaned forward. In the last few days he had devoted considerable energy to getting the players straight, the stakes right. Every national newspaper and magazine had already conceded the presidential nomination to Grant, and the National Committee had actually ordered “Grant for President” posters and badges, but the anti-third-term forces were putting up a stubborn struggle. Former Senator William E. Chandler was chief spokesman for perennial candidate James G. Blaine of Maine, the still-indignant villain of Democracy, and Chandler was attending an otherwise routine preliminary committee meeting for the sole purpose—everybody in Chicago knew it—of defeating Don Cameron in a crucial vote. The issue was the so-called “unit voting rule” of the convention, according to which states voted by blocs instead of by individual delegates, and Grant’s whole strategy depended on it: With the unit rule gone, dissenting delegates like the nineteen from Pennsylvania might be recognized on the floor and cast their votes for somebody other than Grant. And from all indications, the heavy-handed Cameron was about to lose the battle to keep it.
Whatever Trist had learned so far, however, was inconsequential compared to Cadwallader’s intimate knowledge of names and personalities. While the committee went about its preliminary business—a steady, remorseless series of victories for Chandler—Cadwallader kept up a muttered running commentary that had most of the reporters chuckling into their notebooks. Moments before the final vote of the day, which would not only eliminate the unit rule but also depose Don Cameron from the committee itself, Cadwallader turned around ostentatiously.
“There’s ‘Lord Roscoe,’ ” he said, loud enough to stop conversation all over the room. “Come to watch his horse get beat.”
At the rear, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, Grant’s other campaign manager, always dramatic, always arrogant, had suddenly appeared in the doorway like Banquo’s ghost. He made no move to speak or step inside. Instead he folded his arms across his massive chest and stared scornfully down the aisle. Cameron grimaced and shook his head. William Chandler stared back at Conkling defiantly, then rapped his gavel for the vote. Conkling vanished again into the corridor. Around the long committee table hands slowly began to rise.
“Chandler wins by nine,” Cadwallader said a moment before the total was announced. “Grant’s in trouble. Let’s go see Senator Don.”
By the time they reached the corridor outside the meeting room Cameron was pushing his way furiously through a knot of hangers-on and sympathizers, marching as fast as he could toward the Pennsylvania office where Trist had seen him last night. When he spotted Trist he walked quickly up.
“Mr. Trist,” he said. He paused, jammed his fists in his coat pockets, and for a split second Trist thought that last night was about to explode in his face, that somehow Elizabeth—Guilt made him stand up straight and square his shoulders. Cameron looked bigger, redder-faced than ever.
“Mr. Trist, you published an interview with me a while ago in which I said I was for Grant and had no second choice, and that I knew he would be nominated by acclamation on the first ballot.”
“I remember.”
“Just print that same interview over and over again and keep on printing it till everybody knows that Grant’s nomination and election, no matter what’s happened today, are as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise.”
Cadwallader had come up with a broken-off bit of toothpick, which he now stuck in the corner of his mouth like a rustic bit of straw. “What about Washburne, Senator? The way I figure, if Washburne don’t drop out and give his votes to Grant, then you don’t have any real chance at all.”
“Tell your friend,” Cameron said to Trist, “that he’s a goddam moron.” And turned on his heel.
When Trist looked back, Cadwallader was chuckling with undisguised satisfaction. He put his arm through Trist’s. “Buy a moron a drink,” he said.
ONE OF THE GREAT CURIOSITIES OF THE CONVENTION TO Trist—no one in Europe, he thought, could have believed it—was the large number of black delegates in attendance. Most were from the South. Some were members of Congress. One, the former slave Frederick Douglass of Washington, was scheduled to address the convention. And another, Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi, was being seriously proposed in certain quarters as a vice-presidential candidate.
“And every man jack,” Cadwallader said as they sat down at their restaurant table three drinks and two hours later, “has a lily-white ‘minder,’ keep ’em out of trouble, watch their votes, you can count on it.”
“I interviewed Bruce.” Trist picked up a printed leather-bound menu and winced at the prices. The Great Northwestern Steakhouse was Cadwallader’s choice, but not, he had made plain, his treat.
“And I saw that story.” Cadwallader glanced indifferently at the menu, turned in his chair to survey the room. “You were too damn gullible. Blanche Bruce is a sop to New England. Most self-righteous place on earth, New England. Slavery’s gone, but up in Massachusetts they still vote the abolition ticket out of sheer lunatic fanaticism. There comes John Sherman.”
Trist wrote “chicken and rice” on his order slip, the cheapest thing on the list, and the easiest to eat with one hand, then looked up to follow Cadwallader’s gaze. The Great Northwestern was the biggest restaurant in Chicago, and by far the most popular with the convention. Characteristically, Cadwallader had chosen a table next to the door with a view of everybody in the room, coming and going. Secretary of Treasury John Sherman was indeed standing at the double-curtained entrance, shoulders and hair still wet from the rain, waiting stiffly in front of the maitre d’. When he bent forward to listen to something, Trist saw that he was accompanied by his wife, and then, behind her, dressed in a stunning pale blue evening gown with jeweled tiara, his niece.
“Lizzie Cameron,” Cadwallader said, chewing a breadstick.
John Sherman waved at Cadwallader, nodded to half a dozen other men. Somebody stood up to shake his hand. A booth of diners far in the back broke into applause. Elizabeth Cameron looked straight ahead, chin high. Did she see him? Would she see him? In another moment the procession had disappeared around a corner, into a private room.
Cadwallader, as he might have expected, was a rapid drinker, greedy eater. He ordered oyster stew as a first course. A bearded waiter in both tuxedo and full-length white apron—with an effort Trist put Elizabeth Cameron out of his mind and made a mental note for L’Illustration—ladled it from a huge steaming tureen into a china bowl the size of a derby hat. Then fish; then slices of both pork and beef, mountains of white potatoes covered with redeye gravy and also (another mental note) grated cheese. The waiters knew Cadwallader. They came at a steady pace, heels clicking like ponies on the tessellated marble floors. Trist poked at his chicken, watched the never-ending stream of chattering delegates and wives going back and forth. At the end of the pie and whiskey course Cadwallader belched softly, signalled for the check; pushed back his chair.
“Contrast,” he said, rising with a little wobble. “Secret of great prose. Show you something.”
Outside the rain had stopped for the moment. In the early-evening darkness State Street smelled fresh, newly washed. Cadwallader walked slightly ahead, slightly unsteadily, and in answer to Trist’s question merely repeated, “Show you something.”
They entered the Palmer House Hotel by a side door. Cadwallader stopped in the middle of the corridor to drink two swallows from a hammered brass flask, then led Trist down one hall, down another, past the barbershop, which was still open, catering to a lonely unshorn Western delegate. At a double door marked only “Storage” he greeted by name a watchman sitting on a stool and offered him a pull at his flask.
“Going up on Friday,” Cadwallader told Trist when the watchman had let them in and turned on the two wall-mounted gas lamps. “Supposed to go up last week, but they had hell’s own problem with some kind of switch.”
It was a fair-sized roo
m, crowded with surplus hotel equipment: stacked chairs and tables, boxes of linen, broken sets of trays and dishes. Along the right-hand wall were a large black metal box shaped like a Dutch oven, a tangle of copper-colored wires, and what appeared to be several dozen two-by-four six-foot-long planks studded with oversized gas-lamp bulbs, but on closer inspection had no gas-pipe fitting and no on-and-off cock.
“Secret of prose,” Cadwallader said, “is contrast. You write well, Trist, damn nice for all that time in France, but you keep missing your chances. Point about Blanche Bruce ain’t that he’s coal-black. Point is, he’s coal-black in a room full of white reporters and white manipulators, starched-white Massachusetts abolitionists. Point about Roscoe Conkling ain’t that he looks like a bird of paradise that’s wandered into a country barnyard—although that’s contrast—point is, U. S. Grant is the quietest, dullest, most self-effacing little brown rooster in the barn, but look how his chosen number-one campaign spokesman is Conkling—what does that tell you about Grant? What does it tell you about Conkling?”
Cadwallader pulled one of the chairs off its stack and sat down. He wiped sweat from his brow with a handkerchief, then used the handkerchief to clean the mouth of his flask.
“These are Brush arc lights,” he said.
“Electric lamps.” Trist stooped to look at them with new curiosity.
“Not Edison’s,” Cadwallader said. Thomas Edison had invented a highly publicized electric lamp and J. P. Morgan had recently announced he was going to finance it, but Edison had many serious rivals. Trist had read of whole city blocks in the Midwest being illuminated by Charles F. Brush’s arc-lamp system, first in Cleveland, last month in Wabash, Indiana, while Edison was apparently still testing and refining.
“Company’s going to put them up in the Palmer House lobby, spell out ‘U. S. Grant’ behind the registration desk. Then probably do it again in Cincinnati for one of the Democrats.” Cadwallader put away his flask and stretched out his left hand to touch the nearest lamp. In his black-and-white houndstooth jacket, his unshined shoes, his battered old slouch hat, he looked more like a carnival pitchman down on his luck than a writer, a friend of cabinet officers and hotel watchmen—contrast, Trist thought wryly—but there was no mistaking the boozy sincerity in his voice. “This is the real story,” he said, stroking the glass bulb, “what’s being unleashed by people like Brush and Edison. It won’t matter a plugged nickel who they finally nominate here. Those old boys are living in the past—they can’t think of anything but Civil War generals. World stopped for them in ’65, started for everybody else.”
“I was in the war,” Trist said. He pulled out a chair for himself and straddled it, facing Cadwallader. An insane conversation, in a half-dark storage closet.
“You’re the younger generation. Besides, you didn’t think the Civil War was the number one high and bright point of your life, did you? You were at Cold Harbor. Buried your arm there. Then you saw the mess they made after the war. What did Emerson say? Generation of young men with knives in their brains. You’re pretty clever, friend Trist. But you’re a watcher like me, not a doer.”
“You’re a drunk watcher.”
Cadwallader grinned and poked the glass bulb harder with his finger. “Fiat booze,” he said.
“Is Grant going to win?”
“Think of a whole city,” Cadwallader said. “Think of Chicago or New York lit up at night from one end to the other, like a hundred thousand angels come down to earth at the flick of a switch.” He pushed an unconnected lever with a snap. “Keep your eye on Washburne,” he said.
CHAPTER THREE
THE NEXT TWO DAYS PASSED IN A BLUR OF INACTIVITY—A phrase Trist rather liked, but Hutchins irritably edited out. Still, it was accurate enough, he thought, as a description of the massive, epic tedium inside Exposition Hall.
Outside the Hall on opening day—contrast—the streets were choked, hot, clear weather had returned, and enterprising boys set up stands on one corner, hawking “Blaine lemonade.” New York Stalwarts for Grant marched about, six abreast like a drill team. Volunteers handed out free banners and badges—Red for Sherman; Red, White, and Blue for Grant—walking canes, even umbrellas. The first delegates crowding up on Wednesday morning already showed signs of wear and tear. Many had arrived in Chicago two and three days early, and they were bleary-eyed from hours without sleep, hours of arguing in hotel lobbies, waiting in endless lines for food, beds, even drink. At the entrance to the Hall there was still more waiting in line as guards bent officiously and inspected each credential.
Once inside, the wilting delegates faced a badly ventilated hothouse jammed with narrow row after row of straight-backed wooden chairs (ten thousand seats, no cushions). At eleven o’clock on Wednesday the mayor of Chicago and a legion of minor party officials began their welcoming speeches. A few privileged characters like Conkling roamed the Hall at will, but most of the ten thousand sat bumpishly and listened, fanning themselves, drinking yet more lemonade from the Negro boys with trays.
In the afternoon, welcoming speeches gave way to reports from committees. Fewer delegates kept to their seats. Some slept. Some stretched out on leather settees that had mysteriously appeared along one wall, under the portrait of Rutherford B. Hayes. Trist sat at the reporters’ table just below the speakers’ raised podium and scribbled long, unprintable descriptions of the Hall, which he tore up, started again. At three o’clock a reporter from the New York Tribune held up a hand-lettered sign announcing that the temperature inside the room was 96 degrees.
In the evening he attended John Sherman’s “hospitality suite,” now moved to the Palmer House—no sign yet of electric lamps—and caught another glimpse of Elizabeth Cameron, passing from one room to the next; but when he made his way around the bowl of “Sherman punch” and tried to reach her, his way was blocked by the swirling skirts of “Sherman ladies,” and a moment later she was gone.
On Thursday morning the day dawned even hotter. By ten o’clock the convention had entered into the drawn-out business of certifying delegations, but so acid with sarcasm and bad temper was the atmosphere that Conkling rose to suggest, sensibly, they adjourn till evening and cooler temperatures. It was inadvertently the first—and stupidest possible—test of Grant’s delegate strength. Out of dislike for Lord Roscoe’s imperious manner or out of sheer inertia, the anti-Grant forces combined to defeat the motion, and the convention remained in pointless, droning, steaming session until seven-thirty in the evening, when a Blaine man, stripped to sweat-soaked shirtsleeves, finally moved for adjournment.
IN GALENA THE NEXT AFTERNOON, FRIDAY, ROCKING GENTLY IN his chair on his front porch, Grant accepted first the cup of fresh coffee that the colored maid brought out, then the sheaf of new telegrams that his son Jesse laid carefully on his lap.
It was hot in Galena, hot for June, and the paved stretch of street just below the house was shimmering up white worms of heat, so that it was even hotter up where Grant was, on top of the hill. His own fault, he thought, because of course when he had come back to Washington in ’65, after Appomattox, and they had asked him about running for President, all he wanted, he’d said, was to go home and be mayor of Galena and fix up the sidewalk on the street by his house. Week later he had a new house, gift from the city, with a brand-new sidewalk.
He opened the first telegram in the stack and read it without expression. Conkling had lost another round in the unit-rule voting battle. Cameron thought Garfield had done himself some good with a speech. He shuffled methodically through the rest. Blaine was losing ground. John Sherman’s strength was beginning to fail. Elihu Washburne still insisted on having his name put in nomination as a favorite son of Illinois, which meant thirty-five or forty votes lost on the first ballot anyway. Washburne was loyal to Grant, no question of that, Cameron wrote, but Washburne was old and vain and hankered for the honor of nomination too.
Grant sipped his coffee and listened to the lazy rattle of horses’ hoofs and wagon harnesses down
on High Street. Galena was really not much more than a series of ascending shelves and bluffs running east and west from the Mississippi, cut in two by the river, but higher by far over on the northwest side where the cheaper houses were. From the porch of his old house Grant used to look down eighty or ninety wooden steps to West Street, or if the day was clear he could look over roofs and steeples and see a few distant steamboats or sails on the river. Back of the old house was a cemetery, headstones right up against his fence, which had made Julia uneasy and superstitious when they first moved in, back in 1860. On the opposite bank of the river, where he was now, stood the nicer houses, some of them actual two- and three-story white-columned mansions that made people think of Vicksburg and Natchez, though this was Illinois.
Grant took another sip of the coffee and watched a fat brown chicken hawk circling over the street. In the fifties Galena had bet its future on the steamboat, not the railroad, and it probably had fewer people now than it did thirty years ago, thanks to that. About the dullest, sorriest little town he had ever seen, to tell the truth.
He put down the cup and tugged at the points of his vest. Funny kind of loyalty. Washburne was from Galena too. Grant had made Washburne ambassador to Paris his first term in the White House, because Washburne’s wife was French and he thought Washburne would like it. Anybody would thank him, trading Galena for Paris, he supposed, any day of the month.
“Do you want to go downtown, Pa?” Jesse rapped on the windowsill for the maid to come and take his cup.
Grant nodded and put on his hat. About four o’clock in the afternoon was when the out-of-town newspapers arrived in Galena, and there might be a few more telegrams too, at the Western Union office.
“Do you remember when we moved here, Jesse?”
“You worked in Grandpa’s leather store.”
“Anything else?”
Jesse just shrugged and started on down the steps ahead of him. Grant knew what the boy really remembered: the war. From just before Vicksburg on, he’d kept either Jesse or Fred around headquarters, living right in his tent with him, as often as Julia would let one go—read later that was an ancient tradition, traced all the way back to the Greeks and Persians—the commander of an army always liked to keep a son with him on the field of battle if he could. Near Vicksburg little Fred had even been wounded slightly in the leg by a stray Rebel bullet, something neither father nor son ever bothered to tell Julia. Probably another tradition. What Jesse obviously didn’t remember was their evening ritual in Galena before the war, which never varied. When Grant came up the wooden steps home every night from the store, three-year-old Jesse would always be waiting for him in the parlor, and every time he greeted his father with the same words: “Mister, do you want to fight?” And Grant would reply—he could remember the very formula—“Well, I’m a man of peace, but I’ll not be hectored by a person of your size.” And then they would wrestle and caper and roll all over the floor till Grant would give up, flat on his back, and Jesse would run tell Julia he’d won again.
