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The elder Theodore had first seen the Republican candidate in the flesh at the Philadelphia Exposition, during one of Hayes’s rare campaign appearances; and having seen him, Theodore felt even better about what had happened in Cincinnati.
“He talked very pleasantly,” Theodore wrote to his Harvard son, “and impressed one as being perfectly honest.” Most people found Hayes disappointing, dowdy. A reporter for The New York Times covering the same occasion despaired over the candidates “dreadfully shabby coat and shockingly bad hat, all brushed up the wrong way.” But Theodore concentrated on the face, finding in it no sign of “divided character.”
Theodore took most of what he knew of the campaign from his morning paper, the Tribune, as ardent a Hayes paper as any in New York, and his faith in Hayes held steady, even afterward, during the drawn-out winter months when nobody knew who—whether Hayes or Tilden—had been elected President. At first it seemed Tilden had. Tilden swept New York and nationally held a clear majority. But the votes in four states—Oregon and three in the Deep South—were in dispute, states that, if carried by the Republicans, would swing the electoral vote to Hayes. Republican “statesmen” rushed south to confer with election boards. Through February a special committee met daily in Washington to appraise the conflicting tallies, and outraged Democrats from all walks spoke of violence should the Republicans try to steal the election. In Columbus, Ohio, somebody fired a shot at Hayes’s house as he sat down to dinner.
Given the conscience he had, it is somewhat hard to picture Theodore wholly at ease with the declaration on March 2 that Hayes was the winner by a single electoral vote, but like countless others (including Hayes), he appears to have accepted the proposition that the Republicans really did carry all four of the disputed states and that claims to the contrary were but further evidence of the usual Democratic calumny. Like peaceable men of both parties he breathed a sigh of relief at Tilden’s refusal to contest the decision, and like every true liberal Republican he brightened at the news that Carl Schurz was to be the new Secretary of the Interior and that William Evarts, the eminent New York attorney and old Conkling foe, had been named Secretary of State. Even James Russell Lowell was to be rewarded with the post of minister to Spain.
Hayes’s inaugural address carried the memorable line, “he serves his party best who serves his country best.” And in another month came word of a full-scale investigation into the affairs of the New York Customhouse. A blue-ribbon investigating commission was announced, with John Jay, an old friend of Theodore’s, at its head. By the time Hayes made his first visit to New York as President in May, the hearings were under way downtown at the Customhouse and causing a stir wherever politics were talked. Quite obviously the Administration had decided it was time to cut Conkling down to size.
The record of what was going on behind the scenes is far from complete, but from all available evidence it appears that William Evarts was in charge of the assault. It was Evarts who proposed to Hayes that Chester Arthur be removed and that the new man at the Customhouse be Theodore Roosevelt.
Evarts was the law partner of Theodore’s close friend Joseph Choate, himself a crusading liberal Republican and somebody who had had ample opportunity to appraise Theodore’s executive abilities at close hand over many years. (It was Choate who, at Theodore’s request, had drawn up the original charter for the Museum of Natural History, for example.) And Evarts, too, had had his own dealings with Theodore only the year before, when Evarts headed a committee to raise the money for a pedestal for a promised gift from France of a giant Statue of Liberty. Theodore had served on the committee and served well, seeing at once the importance that so great a work—like his museums or the bridge to Brooklyn—would have to his beloved city.
At what point Theodore’s name was first broached for the Customhouse is impossible to determine, but judging by the attention he received during the days that the President was in town, it could have been as early as May. One gets the impression certainly that he was being looked over or lined up for something and it took no great acumen to see what an ideally suited choice for the post he was. Few men stood higher in the estimate of the community—or of those high-toned, high-placed liberals upon whom the Administration must count for support in any fight with Conkling. Theodore, moreover, had already proved himself admirably in a somewhat analogous situation at Vienna in 1873 when he stepped in as a commissioner at the Exposition. The authorized commissioner had been found to be dishonest and Theodore, at a moments notice, had righted a confused and embarrassing situation with both dispatch and tact, and the home papers had taken note.
His very name bespoke rectitude. Great wealth—supposedly—placed a man above such crass temptations as were traditional at the Customhouse. As a merchant and importer, he had ample knowledge of customs procedures. Yet with the Roosevelt family now divested of the glass trade, there could be no charge of conflicting allegiances. The point that Collector Arthur happened to be doing a rather respectable job, all things considered, was immaterial since the real target was Conkling.
Beyond all that there was William Evarts himself, who was not without his own ambitions concerning future control of party machinery in the state. A strong, reliable, honest man in the Customhouse—his man—would be as valuable to him as “Chet” Arthur was to Conkling. And the fact that Theodore had shown himself to be such a fiercely outspoken foe of Conkling meant he was not just a worthy ally but one whose appointment was guaranteed to enrage the unforgiving Conkling.
The Collectorship of the Port of New York was a government post like none other. Politically it was the ultimate plum. The power and responsibility attending the job were enormous, greater than those of most Cabinet officers; and the pay, as things were constituted, could exceed even that of the President.
Everything about the Customhouse was mammoth. If considered as a business operation, it stood in a class by itself, doing an annual dollar volume approximately five times that of the largest business office in the country. The revenues collected exceeded those of all the other American ports of entry combined. Roughly two-thirds of the country’s total tariff revenue was taken in at New York. Employees numbered more than a thousand. The building itself was colossal.
Customs collectors and clerks, importers, and customs brokers carried on their transactions in an echoing rotunda beneath a huge dome supported by marble columns, the desks of the collectors and clerks being arranged in concentric circles around a large four-faced clock at the center of the floor. Messengers darted in and out while visitors, there to enjoy one of the “sights” of downtown, watched from the periphery. Collector Arthur, tall, radiant, invariably dapper, paraded through to his private office usually around noon, ready for his official day.
The Collector had direct authority over the majority of employees. The next highest ranking officials were the Naval Officer, who was primarily a backup for the Collector; the Surveyor of the Port, who ran a staff of inspectors, weighers, gaugers, and “keepers of storage places”; and the Appraiser, whose people decided what incoming goods were worth and therefore determined the size of the duty to be paid. These officials had their deputies and the deputies had their deputies, and as previous investigations had shown, “overemployment” was standard down the line. Indeed, the customs service was notorious as an asylum for nonentities and has-beens, a kind of warm, dry dumping ground for failed merchants and broken-down sports with political connections, and for every kind of political hack. Numbers of customs service people were, of course, honest and hardworking. One, we know, was a genius, Herman Melville, who was finishing out his life in dreary anonymity as a customs inspector at a Hudson River wharf at $4 a day. But the opportunities for personal “rewards” in addition to salary—for emoluments, gratuities, and for plain bribery—were so great that almost any job could be made to pay handsomely.
Of greatest importance, and especially to those at the top, was the moiety system, as it was known, a practice deep
in the grain at the Customhouse and quite within the law. It was the chief reason why the Collectorship was known as the best-paying job “within the gift of government.”
Instituted as early as 1789, the system provided that employees share in all fines and forfeitures. The idea had been to inspire perseverance among inspectors, but the temptation, naturally, was for inspectors to find discrepancies where there were none, in order to collect their share of the fine and also win favor with those at the top—the lieutenants of the New York machine—whose own shares would be substantial. Every importer resented the system but it was not until Chester Arthur’s first year as Collector, with the sensational Phelps, Dodge case, that their feelings turned to outrage. Theodore, with his ties to the Dodge family, could hardly have been more stunned, one imagines, had his own firm been the victim.
The case can be summarized briefly as follows:
Phelps, Dodge and Company, importers of copper, lead, zinc, and other metals, was among the most respected firms in New York. It was headed by William E. Dodge, Sr., and by his son, William E. Dodge, Jr., Theodore’s lifelong friend. In 1872 the senior Dodge was summoned to the office of a special agent at the Customhouse, a man named Jayne, and was informed privately that by undervaluing certain shipments his firm had been defrauding the government. Dodge, who had been an outspoken critic of Customhouse mores, was impressed with the extreme seriousness of the situation and given a choice. He could either settle out of court for the amount owed to the government, all of which had been figured down to the penny ($271,017.23), whereupon the case would be closed, or he could face a lawsuit and whatever costs and publicity that might entail, in addition to an ultimate fine that conceivably could exceed a million dollars. Never bothering to question the authenticity of the charge, Dodge paid up, only to learn that in actual fact the government had been cheated of nothing. The few undervaluations committed by his firm had been minimal, less than its errors of overvaluation. He had been the victim of an extortion. He spoke out at once, a congressional investigation resulted, and in 1874 Congress put an end to the moiety system. But the money paid by Dodge had been divided up meantime. The Collector, the Naval Officer, and the Surveyor of the Port—good Conkling men all—got some $22,000 each; special agent Jayne received roughly three times that for his part; and for legal services rendered, Senator Conkling received a sizable fee. Claiming he knew nothing of the details of the case, Collector Arthur survived the investigation untouched.
Though the fixed salary of the Collector was $12,000, which was more than that of a Cabinet officer, Collector Arthur’s real annual income from his position ranged around $55,000. The present-day equivalent would be $500,000 or more.
“We look back upon it, and we think . . . that we were fools,” Dodge had told the congressional committee. The government, he said, must have intelligent men in the Customhouse, men of high character and standing.
Theodore, Collector Arthur, and both Dodges were present with several hundred others at the lavish Chamber of Commerce banquet given for the President at Delmonicos the night of May 14. Dodge, Sr., in fact, was seated with John Jay, Schurz, and William Evarts at the head table. The Jay Commission was in its third week of hearings by this time and Schurz, the main speaker of the evening, was at his rousing best. The time had come for a “thorough reform of the public service of the country [loud applause]—the organization, I mean, of a public service upon sound business principles [renewed applause]. . . . The public service ought not to be a souphouse to feed the indigent, a hospital and asylum for decayed politicians [great cheering]. . . .” The expression on Collector Arthurs face through all this is not recorded.
Then the following afternoon, May 15, a soft, lovely spring day in New York, Theodore and Albert Bickmore escorted the President on a preview tour of the American Museum of Natural History, which was in its final stages before being officially opened to the public. They peered together at cases of Cherokee beadwork, arrowheads, spearpoints, and silver ornaments unearthed from burial mounds in Georgia.
Mittie was included at the reception for the President and Mrs. Hayes given that same evening by former governor Edwin D. Morgan at his Fifth Avenue mansion. And the morning of the sixteenth, when the President went downtown for an official welcome at City Hall, Theodore was again part of the official entourage, riding in the second carriage with old Thurlow Weed and Webb Hayes, the Presidents son. At the conclusion of still one more opulent affair that night, this at the home of John Jacob Astor III, Theodore and Mittie were asked to stay on for a small, private gathering with the President and the First Lady, as the wife of the Chief Executive was now being called.
In another few weeks rumors were in the wind of Arthur’s dismissal. Hayes refused to say anything officially until the Jay Commission completed its work, which consumed most of the summer, as witness after witness confirmed the worst suspicions of Customhouse corruption, inefficiency, waste, and stupidity. On June 22, however, Hayes issued an executive order forbidding party assessments of federal employees and forbidding federal employees any role in the running of party affairs—an order aimed squarely at Conkling and his “boys.” Chester Arthur, for whom nobody seems to have felt any ill will, was invited to Washington and quietly offered the consulship in Paris if he would simply resign, but this he refused to do. Presently, when the newspapers learned before he did that his resignation was to be requested, Arthur felt he had no choice but to stand fast. The New York Sun, a Democratic paper, speculated that perhaps Secretary Evarts’ real wish in bringing new management to the Customhouse was to foster some fresh Republican leadership in New York.
To date there had been no response from Roscoe Conkling, who had been abroad for the summer (Mrs. Sprague was currently living in Paris). It was not until September that he opened his attack, in a speech at a Republican state convention in Rochester, and with a savagery that appalled everyone, including many of his admirers.
Who were these men cracking the whip over him like schoolmasters, Conkling demanded, these man-milliners, these carpet knights of politics with their veneer of superior purity. George William Curtis, who had spoken in support of Hayes only moments before, sat muttering, “Remarkable! What an exhibition! Bad temper! Very bad temper!” Hammering on, glaring at Curtis, Conkling said no party was ever built on deportment or ladies’ magazines or gush. The speech was taken to be an unfortunate emotional outburst, the senator having momentarily lost hold of himself. The New York Times said he sounded like a maniac. But in fact it had all been quite carefully prepared and memorized, every breath of it timed for maximum effect.
“We are all excited here about politics just now, everybody outraged at the late performances at Rochester,” wrote Joseph Choate to his wife after spending the weekend with Theodore and the family at Oyster Bay.
For Theodore life went on all the same. He had become interested in a scheme to bring Cleopatra’s Needle to New York. He was busy at the office, busy as always with his good deeds, and working too hard, the family felt. In May he had taken a break to escort Bamie, Conie, Cousin Maud, and Edith Carow on a weekend visit to Harvard, and again in midsummer he and Bamie went off to stay with friends at Mount Desert Island in Maine. Back at his office later, he observed that he, the gay butterfly, had been reduced once more to a grub. Elliott had returned from Texas to stay and young Theodore was embarking on prodigious expeditions up and down Long Island Sound by rowboat, covering in one day as much as twenty-five miles. The long summer was a “capital time,” highlighted by a visit from Uncle Jimmie Bulloch. Then the first week in September Theodore went off to Saratoga to a State Board of Charities meeting to discuss the conditions of insane children.
The formal announcement that he was to replace Arthur at the Customhouse came in October. Two others—General Edwin A. Merritt and a lawyer with the majestic name of Le Baron Bradford Prince—had been picked to fill the posts of Surveyor and Naval Officer. The nominations went to the Senate on the twenty-fourth, by which time
it was obvious that more than the fate of the Customhouse or the Conkling machine was riding on the outcome. At issue was the power of the presidency as measured against that of the Senate, and the realities of Senate politics being what they were, and in view of the decline of presidential power since Lincoln, the chance for a Hayes victory looked slim. For one thing, the committee through which the nominations would first have to pass was the committee on commerce, of which Senator Conkling was chairman. Still, Hayes remained firm. “I am clear that I am right,” he wrote in his diary. “I believe that a large majority of the best people are in full accord with me.” Senator George Edmunds, Republican of Vermont, was delegated to warn Hayes of the risks he was running and to ask that he “cooperate.” “We must cooperate in the interests of the country,” Hayes responded.
To the reformers, of whom very few were members of the United States Senate, it had become a test case.
Conkling’s committee sat on the nominations for another month and more, during which, to the delight of reporters, Conkling gave forth with some of the choicest invective of his career. Stopped one day in New York by a man from the Herald, Conkling observed that there were in total perhaps three hundred in the city who opposed him, “who believe themselves to occupy the solar walk and the milky way, and even up there they lift their skirts very carefully for fear even the heavens might stain them. . . . They would have people fill the offices by nothing less than divine selection.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 295