Blaise pushed his way through the crowded anterooms to Hearst’s command post, a large salesman’s sample room, with a view of the river in the distance. The heat was terrible; the odor of sweat and tobacco and whiskey oppressive. Blaise tried not to breathe as he plunged through the crowd of delegates and hangers-on, all enjoying Hearst’s hospitality.
Blaise knocked on the ultimate door, which was opened a crack. Brisbane’s suspicious face appeared; then, appeased no doubt by the definite manly blueness of Blaise’s eyes, he admitted him to the presence.
Despite the heat, Hearst was dressed in a black unwrinkled frock-coat, unlike his brow, which was very wrinkled indeed as he spoke into a telephone. “But my Illinois delegates are the legitimate ones,” he said, acknowledging Blaise’s arrival with a wave of his hand. A dozen political types, in shirt-sleeves, sat about the room, reading newspapers, making calculations of delegate strength. A New York City appellate court judge named Alton B. Parker was the candidate of the party’s conservative wing, headed by August Belmont now that Whitney was dead.
Even Blaise had been impressed by the efficiency of Hearst’s political operators. Although the Eastern leadership of the party found Hearst intolerable, he had managed to collect so much support in the South and West that he had an excellent chance of winning the nomination if Parker failed to be nominated on the first ballot. At the moment, the Credentials Committee was faced with the problem of two delegations from Illinois. One had been put together by the Chicago boss, Sullivan; the other was committed to Hearst. “Then get Bryan. He hates Sullivan. He’ll stop this.” Hearst hung up. He looked at Blaise. “I can’t get through to Bryan. He’s staying right here in the hotel. But he won’t support me…”
“He won’t support Parker either,” said Brisbane, soothingly.
“He’s waiting for a miracle.” Hearst sat on top of a long display table. “There won’t be a miracle. For him, anyway.”
“What are your chances, on the first ballot?” Blaise had already made his own estimate.
“With Illinois, I’ve got two hundred sixty-nine votes, and Parker’s got two hundred forty-eight, without Illinois.”
James Burden Day, in shirt-sleeves, entered the suite. “I’ve just been with Bryan. He’s on his way to the convention hall. He’s going to fight for the seating of your delegates.”
The men in the room applauded; and Brisbane danced a small jig. “But,” asked Hearst, unimpressed, “will he support me?”
Day shrugged. “He’s not supporting anybody, so far. He wants to stop Parker, that’s all.”
“I’m the only one who can do that.” Hearst’s eyes seemed to have been electrified; they shone, balefully, at Day. “Doesn’t he know that? Doesn’t he know there’s only me now?”
Brisbane answered for Day. “He still thinks that when he gets up in front of that audience, all will be forgiven.”
Hearst turned to Day. “Make him any offer.”
“I’ll try. But he’s in a bad mood.” Jim left. He had not even noticed Blaise. Politics had that effect on everyone involved. Blaise had seen the same sort of total absorption only at gambling casinos, where men were so absorbed in the turn of a card or the throw of a pair of dice that not even the end of the world could distract them.
A number of delegates were then admitted, and the Chief received them with magisterial calm. Would he bolt the party if he failed to get the nomination? Of course he would not, he said: this was the party of the people, and he would never turn his back on what after all was the nation itself. Also, only the Democratic Party could keep peace in a world made more dangerous by the bellicosity of Theodore Roosevelt. But hadn’t he been impressed by the swift assurance of the President when, with a single telegram, he had freed an American citizen from his Barbary Coast kidnapper? Hearst shrugged this off as “mere sensationalism.” For Blaise, the Chief’s new respectability was as irresistibly comic as any Weber and Fields sketch.
Brisbane drew Blaise aside. “He’s got the nomination if only Bryan…”
“What’s wrong with Bryan?” Blaise was genuinely curious; but then he had no political sense, the turn of a card meant nothing to him.
“Oh, vanity, I suppose. The peerless leader of ’96 and 1900, wandering about the convention like a lost soul, his only power to help the Chief win-or lose.”
“He’ll want him to lose, so that Parker will be beaten by Roosevelt, and the next time-four years from now-Bryan will be back, crucifying mankind on that cross of gold of his.” Blaise was rather proud to have figured out what was so obvious to Brisbane that he did no more than nod, and say, “That’s about the size of it. But if he gets our Illinois delegates seated, that may do the trick.” John Sharp Williams made a stately entrance. Hearst pretended delight. Brisbane said, “I hear you’re buying your sister’s paper.”
“I’m trying to. That’s really why I’m here. Not that this isn’t,” he stared at Hearst’s alarmingly huge smile, “worth the trip. My sister’s more political than me. She’s here to write about the convention. She actually writes herself, you know.”
“Many of us,” said Brisbane, sourly, “do.”
On the Fourth of July, Hearst was nominated by a San Francisco politician, a friend of the late Senator George Hearst. Blaise sat with Caroline and John Sanford in the press gallery of the huge airless hall. A six-foot portrait of Hearst dominated the stage, while a Hearst band played first “America” and then, as a recognition of the South’s importance to the populist millionaire, “Dixie.” Although Thomas E. Watson was, that very day, being nominated for president by the Populist or People’s Party, he had brought a number of Democratic Southern politicians into Hearst’s organization.
After the nominating speeches for Hearst, the California delegation led a parade around the floor of the convention. Blaise was surprised at how genuinely popular the Chief had become. “Of course he has no chance,” said Caroline, rising from her wooden folding chair.
Blaise also stood up. “Why not?”
“His Illinois delegation wasn’t seated. So that’s fifty-four votes for Parker. And Bryan will never support him. Let’s go get some air. I am about to faint.”
For the delicate business at hand, Blaise had selected a river-boat. The owner had offered Blaise a suite when it was discovered that every hotel in the city was booked, and so he now had, all to himself, the wonders of the Delta Queen, a great Gothic wooden contraption with paddle-wheels of the sort celebrated in John Hay’s “Jim Bludso of the Prairie Bell.” The night was airless, damp, hot. The Delta Queen was moored to the levee near Market Street. At the gangplank, a single guard saluted Blaise casually; and bade them all welcome.
A steward received them on the first deck, and escorted them into an echoing mahogany bar, lit by a single bronze gas-lamp, beneath which sat, ominous in his cheerfulness, dreadful in his jovial smile, the pink-whiskered Mr. Houghteling. Blaise was relieved to find his ally in place. Now it was two to two. Before, he had felt outnumbered by Caroline and John-three rather than two to one, since Caroline had, in a sense, doubled herself through accomplishment while he had diminished himself by non-success. Mr. Houghteling rose, the dentured smile ghastly in the light from overhead. “Mrs. Sanford. Mr. Sanford. Mr. Sanford. At least one has no trouble with names…”
A figure stepped out of the shadows and said, “I’m Mr. Trimble-not Sanford.”
Blaise felt, again, outnumbered. But he greeted Trimble politely; then the five of them sat at a round table, and the steward brought them champagne with the compliments of the owner. Blaise noted a spittoon had been fastened to the deck beside each chair. How, he wondered, was it emptied? and what happened if one’s jet of tobacco juice changed its trajectory due to a lurch of the ship? He tried to recall the laws of physics that he had learned in school-and forgotten. Galileo on the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Spit on the deck. As Blaise thought, wildly, of spittoons, Sanford and Houghteling were covering the table with sheets of paper, and Caroline and Trimble were talking to each other in low collusive voices. Blaise knew that he should feel elated; instead, he was merely hot, tired, irritable. Sanford began, for the enemy. “You’ve had a chance to study the Tribune’s financial status…?”