All this left the old party machinery in disarray and provided opportunity of a kind not known for years for ambitious newcomers. The game had opened up just as Theodore commenced to play. Moreover, the reform spirit was gathering momentum on all sides—it was what had swept Cleveland into office—and so for someone like Theodore the timing could not have been better. In Washington that January, as Theodore started his second term, Congress was passing the Pendleton Act, the country’s first civil service reform legislation, which, irony of ironies, would be signed into law by ex-Collector Chester A. Arthur. When the bill went before the Senate, not a single Republican voted against it.
His first months back in Albany Theodore lashed out at the New York City Board of Aldermen (”miserable and servile tools”) and went after Jay Gould again, calling on the Attorney General to bring suit to dissolve the Manhattan Elevated. Sounding much like his Uncle Robert, he warned of a great popular uprising unless legal action was taken against such corrupt corporations. A bill comparable to the Pendleton Act was before the Assembly and this too he championed, gladly joining forces with the Democrat Cleveland.
He never doubted the moral virtue of any of his own positions or of the need to punish the wicked. (At one point he called for the return of the public whipping post as punishment for any man who inflicted brutal pain on a woman or a child.) Every issue was seen as a clash between the forces of light and dark. His side was right; the other was the side of corruption or self-interest. Among the several hundred clippings being pasted into the scrapbooks at 6 West 57th Street was one containing a remark by a New York editor that “there is an increasing suspicion that Mr. Roosevelt keeps a pulpit concealed on his person.”
So when suddenly he reversed himself on still another issue involving Jay Gould and the Manhattan Elevated, then took the floor to deliver an emotional apology for his earlier stand, he was the talk of the Capitol.
The Five-Cent Bill, as it was called, had been introduced to reduce by half the ten-cent fare on the elevated railway. It was seen as a way to strike a blow at the haughty Gould, who was supposedly reaping huge concealed profits, and, of course, to please the many thousands who rode the elevated railway. Theodore, like nearly everybody else in Albany, gave the bill his support—until Grover Cleveland, in a brave, forceful message, insisted it was unconstitutional, since it violated commitments made by the state in the company’s original charter. Cleveland vetoed the bill and sent it back, expecting the decision would prove ruinous for him politically.
The day the message was read in the Assembly, Theodore got the floor as quickly as possible. Like others, he realized Cleveland was right and that his own position had been wrong. He said this, which was somewhat remarkable in itself, but then he went on:
I have to say with shame that when I voted for this bill I did not act as I think I ought to have acted, and as I generally have acted on the floor of this House. . . . I have to confess that I weakly yielded, partly in a vindictive spirit towards the infernal thieves and conscienceless swindlers who have had the elevated railroad in charge and partly to the popular voice of New York.
For the managers of the elevated railroad I have as little feeling as any man here. If it were possible, I would willingly pass a bill of attainder on Jay Gould and all of Jay Goulds associates. . . . I regard these men as furnishing part of that most dangerous of all dangerous classes, the wealthy criminal class. Nevertheless, it is not a question of doing justice to ourselves. . . .
We have heard a great deal about the people demanding the passage of this bill. Now, anything the people demand that is right it is most clearly and most emphatically the duty of this Legislature to do; but we should never yield to what they demand if it is wrong. . . . If the people disapprove our conduct, let us make up our minds to retire to private life with the consciousness that we have acted as our better sense dictated; and I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I had acted as I ought not to.
It was a speech that was to be published and quoted widely as illustrative either of his rank duplicity and opportunism or of his innate decency. It was a wrenching confession, a little sermon, a crystallized declaration of political philosophy; noble and self-serving. To profess shame in oneself was something a politician did not do if he liked his job and it was something Theodore found personally distasteful and almost never indulged in, even among those closest to him. Any ostentatious baring of one’s transgressions smacked of self-pity or a desperate craving for attention, he thought. “Never indulge yourself on the sinner’s stool,” he would lecture his friend Owen Wister. “If you did any harm, that won’t undo it, you’ll merely rake it up. The sinner’s stool is often the only available publicity spot for the otherwise wholly obscure egotist.” Yet here he was doing exactly that.
His expression “the wealthy criminal class” was new and original and would not be forgotten. The righteousness he bespoke was the old Roosevelt family theme, the burden and spur of “our way.” (”I know I am blue and disagreeable often,” Elliott had told Anna Hall, “but please, darling, bear with me and I will come out all right in the end, and it really is an honest effort to do the right that makes me so often quiet and thoughtful about it all.”) Probably Theodore had not the least idea how arbitrary and self-righteous he sounded.
The reaction in the press and among other members was immediate and almost entirely adverse. The Tribune and one or two papers upstate said it took a special kind of courage to confess a lack of courage, but elsewhere he was dubbed a weakling and a bogus reformer, which doubtless hurt very much. Even the loyal Evening Post found it strange that he could think so little of the views of the people unless those views coincided with his own; and though ridicule in the World was to be expected, the remarks published there must have been the most painful of all. “It is quite bad enough that a son of Theodore Roosevelt could have brought this discredit upon a name made honorable by the private virtues and public services of the father,” said the World; friends of the late Theodore could only take satisfaction that at least he had been spared seeing the boy make a public spectacle of himself.
When the Five-Cent Bill was put before the Assembly, Theodore voted against it, with the majority as it turned out, but in doing so was parting company with Hunt, O’Neil, and others of his closest allies.
He was acting as though he were under some kind of emotional strain, seemed not to know how to handle himself. A day or so later he made another grandstand play on the floor, suddenly tendering his resignation from a committee when the Assembly refused to go along with the committees recommendation. The speech turned into a wild, childish diatribe against the whole Democratic Party. It was as if, like the tiny shrew in the cage, he would fling himself at the great Democratic snake and tear it to pieces before anyone knew what happened.
“The difference between our party and yours,” he shouted across the aisle, “is that your bad men throw out your good ones, while with us the good throw out the bad.” The entire history of their party was rotten.
You can run down the roll from Polk, the mendacious, through Pierce, the Copperhead, to Buchanan, who faced both ways. You can follow the record of their party from its inception down to this time. . . . You can take the record made by their party now in this House; the shameless partisanship they have displayed; the avidity they have shown for getting control of even the smallest offices . . .
When in an interview held in the quiet of the Harvard Club in New York, many years later, Ike Hunt referred to Theodore as “the most indiscreet guy I ever knew,” it was moments such as this that he had in mind. “Yesterday, in a speech,” reported the New York Observer, “Mr. Roosevelt got up and said in effect that he couldn’t have his own way in that House and he wouldn’t stand it, so there!”
As it was, the Assembly merely refused to accept his resignation and passed on to other matters.
“Billy O’N
eil and I used to sit on his coattails,” remembered Hunt. “Billy O’Neil would say to him: ’What do you want to do that for, you damn fool; you will ruin yourself and everybody else!’” Even Michael C. Murphy, the questionable guardian chosen by Uncle Rob, he of the swollen red face and shiny frock coat, could be heard from his seat nearby saying in fatherly fashion, “Now, Theodore, now, Theodore . . .”
But toward the end of the session another, smaller incident occurred, a different kind of apology having more to do with his make-up as a human being than with any question of moral principle. In his scathing attacks on the Democrats he had been concentrating on a particular member from Staten Island, the elderly Erastus Brooks, whom he picked on repeatedly. Brooks finally spoke up in his own defense and with great feeling, hitting hard at Theodore. When the speech ended and Brooks’ friends gathered about to congratulate him, Theodore came pushing through, tears in his eyes, holding out his hand. “Mr. Brooks,” he said, “I surrender. I beg your pardon.”
Success had come to him too fast, he later said; he had lost his perspective, “and the result was I came an awful cropper and had to pick myself up after learning by bitter experience the lesson that I was not all-important and that I had to take account of many different elements in life.”
All the same, his legislative record surpassed that of the first term. The civil service bill was enacted. And so also was the Cigar Bill—by both houses this time—though after a protracted battle in the courts the Cigar Bill was to be found unconstitutional. The judges sided with the manufacturers, whose counsel, former Secretary of State William Evarts, argued that socialism and communism were in back of the bill and that such home industry was actually beneficial to the “proper culture of growing girls.” In its final judgment, in 1885, the New York Court of Appeals asked how possibly a cigarmaker’s health and morals could be improved by forcing him from his home and its “hallowed associations.”
Theodore had spoken for the bill both in the Assembly and at a hearing in the governor’s office. Conceding at one point that the measure was in a “certain sense a socialistic one,” he said the terrible growing extremes of poverty and wealth in the cities demanded something be done, even if it meant modifying certain doctrines and principles. No children raised under conditions such as he had seen in the tenements would ever be fit for citizenship, he argued, echoing the old theme espoused by Charles Loring Brace and by his own father. In the end, however, he had resorted to the plea that the measure be passed if for no other reason than hygiene, an appeal which seems to have had no small influence on the preponderant number of cigar smokers among his colleagues.
3
Elected a third time in the fall of ’83, he returned to Albany in advance of the new session, late the December of Elliott’s wedding, determined to be named Speaker. The Republicans had gained a majority in the Assembly, largely because of what he and his Roosevelt Republicans had accomplished the session before, and so it seemed his time was ripe. But he lost when John J. (”Johnny”) O’Brien, Republican boss of New York City, an old Conkling henchman, once one of the Customhouse “boys,” withdrew his support at the last moment. Senator Warner Miller (Platt’s replacement in Washington) had shown Johnny “the valuables in the Treasury” that could become available were he to see his way clear to voting the right way. O’Brien had been the first powerful figure among the “regulars” to line up behind Theodore, and a main reason for Theodore’s confidence. Many of Theodore’s admirers had been skeptical at the time, sure that something was afoot.
The defeat was a bitter blow. He had wanted the job badly and felt he had earned it. The day after Christmas he had hired a suite at the Delavan House, the somewhat seedy hotel where he often took breakfast and where in years past so many other political fortunes had been won or lost. Old Thurlow Weed and William Seward, Tweed, Conkling, Chester A. Arthur, had all practiced their craft in the lobby and corridors and private suites of the Delavan, cajoled and traded, entreated, listened, charmed, bribed, threatened, flattered unmercifully, all in the endless give-and-take of political maneuver. And Theodore, as he said, had managed “a stout fight.”
The problem was the prospect of the political year ahead. A presidential election was in the offing, a Republican national convention less than six months away. Rivalry in the party, along the old Stalwart-Half-Breed lines, was as intense as ever, the Blaine people feeling it was their turn at last. And given the importance of New York at the convention, not to say in the general election, there was abnormally high interest in who was to occupy the Speaker’s seat at Albany. To the professionals it was business of the most serious kind. Scouting the lobby of the Delavan just after Christmas, one reporter remarked on the numbers of “friends of the Administration in Washington” who were present, “friends of United States Senator Miller . . . representatives of the Customhouse . . . friends of the corporations.”
Refusing to align himself with any faction, Theodore had declared, “I am a Republican, pure and simple, neither a ’Half-Breed’ nor a ’Stalwart’; and certainly no man, nor yet any ring or clique, can do my thinking for me.” But he was called “unsound” by the professionals—”That young fellow might go off like a rocket,” one of them warned. The Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds joined ranks against him and that decided it. At the party caucus New Years Eve the position of Speaker went to a “regular,” an underwear manufacturer from Little Falls named Titus Sheard.
Theodore knew in advance he was beaten and it was he who moved that Sheard’s nomination be made unanimous. Allowing that the defeat left him “chagrined,” he would claim later that by waging his own fight he had assured his standing as floor leader and consequently accomplished more than he would have as Speaker. Achievement was “the all-important thing,” position mattered “only in so far as it widened the chance of achievement.”
His Cousin Emlen, recalling the eagerness with which Theodore persisted, said he was “the most ambitious man I ever knew ...”
As recompense he was named chairman of the City Affairs Committee. Within days he had issued three major bills, one to reduce the power of the New York City aldermen and strengthen the office of mayor, another to put a limit on the city’s debt, and a third to raise the license fee for the sale of liquor. None was designed to please the “regulars,” but the first, the Reform Charter Bill, as he called it, was the one aimed directly at what he, like many others, saw as the fundamental cause for big-city political corruption. The aldermen, the legislative side of city government, were an amorphous and anonymous body to all but the professionals and those who did business with them. Yet the power wielded by the aldermen was tremendous, including, most importantly, the power of approval over the appointment of department heads. City government in New York had become an exceedingly big business, with a payroll of some $12 million and twelve thousand jobs, making it a larger employer, for example, than the Carnegie iron and steel works. But the aldermen, those who really ran the city (taking their orders from the bosses), were cloaked in very carefully maintained obscurity. Scarcely any voter could name even one alderman or explain what his duties were. Who was to tell who was accountable, let alone remember at election time. Which was exactly as the machine wished to have it.
The remedy, according to reform theory, was to simplify and concentrate power; and to make power as conspicuous as possible: give someone the responsibility and hold him responsible, that someone being the mayor. And the model was the business corporation. “Some one man must be given the power of direction,” preached Mayor Seth Low of Brooklyn; “... they [the public] understand that power and responsibility must go together from the top to the bottom of every successful business organization.”
The arrangement by which Seth Low ran Brooklyn was exactly what Theodore hoped to attain in New York. Theodore knew a good deal about Low, not only from what had appeared in the papers, but through Uncle Robert, who had worked with the young mayor as part of his duties concerning the Brooklyn Bridge, th
at great work now having been finished at last. Low functioned under a new Brooklyn city charter put in effect in 1882 and unlike any other. It made the mayor of Brooklyn the real, as well as the nominal, head of government, with absolute authority over the appointment of police commissioner, fire commissioner, health officers, treasurer, tax collector, and on down the line. This, said Low, was “a great and direct gain . .. because it creates and keeps alert a strong public sentiment, and tends to increase the interest of all citizens in the affairs of their city.” And by “all citizens,” he, Theodore, and other high-minded gentlemen concerned with municipal reform had specifically in mind the hordes of immigrants who, like Theodores cigarmakers, spoke little English, who were illiterate, bewildered by the political system, and thus easily manipulated by the political bosses (who, as it also happened, knew considerably more about these same people and what their real needs were than did the high-minded gentlemen concerned with municipal reform). It was not that the system must be simplified merely for the average citizen, but for what Seth Low called “the simplest citizen.”
In Brooklyn the results were astounding. In Brooklyn more people had voted in the election for mayor than in the election for governor. And having such power as Seth Low had, said Low himself, “appeals to the best that is in a man as strongly as it exposes him to the fire of criticism if he does not do well.”
To strip the New York aldermen of their power—those “creatures” of the bosses, as Theodore called them—and give New York a mayor like Seth Low struck nearly everybody but the bosses as eminently sensible, and so with his Reform Charter Bill Theodore had placed himself squarely in the forefront of a very popular cause. Quite rightly he saw it as his most important effort since entering politics.
Samuel Gompers had been impressed by his aggressiveness. On January 15, or less than a week after introducing the Reform Charter Bill, Theodore was made head of a special committee to investigate New York City government. Four days later, at the Metropolitan Hotel in New York, he opened hearings into the affairs of the city’s Department of Public Works, which of late, under the direction of Commissioner Hubert O. Thompson, had shown an increase in expenditures of some sixty-five percent and with no discernible benefit to the city. Thompson was well known in Albany, where he spent a disproportionate amount of his time “conferring” at the Delavan House. Early in his first term, Theodore had picked him out as among the most blatantly odious and fascinating political “creatures”—”a gross, enormously fleshly man with full face and thick, sensual lips; wears a diamond shirt pin and an enormous seal ring on his little finger.” And though Thompson, who had had prior experience with investigative hearings, succeeded in making the first session something of a joke at Theodore’s expense, it was Theodore’s intention to keep the hearings going at the hotel every Friday, Saturday, and Monday until the job was done.
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