Crossing the Rubicon: Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the 1884 Republican National Convention

by Edward Kohn, Bilkent University

In 1884, a twenty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt attended the Republican National Convention in Chicago as a delegate-at-large from New York. There, he and his new friend, Massachusetts delegate Henry Cabot Lodge, backed George Edmunds of Vermont against their party's overwhelming choice, the "Plumed Knight," James G. Blaine. Despite their energetic efforts, which received national attention, Blaine easily secured the nomination, and both Lodge and Roosevelt eventually backed the party's choice. For Lodge biographers, the Chicago convention represented Lodge's "personal Rubicon," the "turning point" of his career, leading to "the greatest crisis of Lodge's political life."1 Roosevelt historians also see the convention as "one of the crucial events of Theodore's life," "the great and deciding moment of TR's life," leading to "the most agonizing dilemma of his political career."2 The usual story of the convention is that by backing Blaine against the wishes of other Independent Republicans, both Lodge and Roosevelt did great damage to their immediate careers by alienating their natural allies. This led to Lodge losing his race for Congress that same fall and to Roosevelt fleeing west to his Dakota ranch with his political future uncertain. Moreover, Roosevelt's decision is often depicted as the moment he became a professional politician. David McCullough writes that the convention "marked the point at which he chose—had to choose— whether to cross the line and become a party man, a professional politician," while John Morton Blum asserts that by campaigning for Blaine, "Roosevelt declared not only for Blaine but also for professionalism."3	1
At the 1884 Republican State Convention in Utica, Roosevelt emerged as leader of a small group of Independents who would send four delegates-at-large to the national convention, among them Roosevelt and Harper's Weekly editor George William Curtis. After the state convention Harper's Weekly depicted the proceedings in a large cartoon montage, including a small portrait of "A Young Statesman," who though unnamed is almost certainly Roosevelt. From Harper's Weekly, May 8, 1884, p. 284. Courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.
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