The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  ROOSEVELT’S HYPERACTIVITY did not diminish as the session wore on. If anything it increased, through two more phases of his City Investigation Committee, and two more reports totaling nearly a million words of testimony. The evidence of “blackmail and extortion” in the surrogate’s office, “gross abuses” in the sheriff’s, “no system whatever” in the Tax and Assessments Department, and “hush money” paid to policemen—interlarded with prison descriptions and brothel anecdotes which make strong reading even today—was so shocking that no fewer than seven of his nine corrective measures were passed by the Legislature.13

  Since these seven bills called, among other things, for prompt cancellation of the tenure of all New York City department heads, from the bejeweled Commissioner Thompson downward, they aroused frantic opposition in the House, including one free-for-all, on 26 March, which the Evening Post called “a scene of uproar and violence to all rules of decency.”14 Hissing, howling Assemblymen ran to and fro, some hiding in the lobby in an effort to break the quorum, others besieging the Clerk’s desk with threats and denunciations. “During all this tumult,” said Isaac Hunt, “TR was the presiding genius. He was right in his element, rejoicing like an eagle in the midst of a storm.”15

  The uproar was to no avail. All seven bills went on to achieve passage by overwhelming margins, despite parliamentary sabotage by Speaker Sheard.16 Roosevelt did not, however, pause to enjoy this moment of triumph over his erstwhile rival. A chance for even sweeter revenge—upon Sheard’s patron, Senator Warner Miller—lay ahead, at Utica, on 23 April.

  UTICA, A SHABBY canal-town in the middle of the Mohawk Valley, was the site of the New York State Republican Convention for 1884. Four delegates-at-large, plus 128 district and alternative delegates, would be chosen for the National Convention at Chicago. When Roosevelt checked into Bagg’s Hotel on 22 April, he knew that enormous issues were at stake—issues transcending the convention’s provincial locale and rather mundane agenda. Forces had gathered all over the country to nominate James G. Blaine at Chicago, instead of President Arthur, whose political support was eroding.17 If New York, the President’s own state, voted to send a pro-Blaine delegation to Chicago, Arthur might well be deposed after serving less than one full term.

  Roosevelt himself supported neither Arthur nor Blaine. The former, if only for his participation in the New York Collectorship struggle of 1877, was persona non grata to any son of Theodore Senior. The latter gave off a faint reek of legislative corruption which made the young moralist sniff with disdain. Blaine was a former Speaker of the House and Secretary of State; there was no denying his political stature and magnificent abilities. Yet for fifteen years he had been unable satisfactorily to explain certain improprieties during his Speakership, arising out of a favorable ruling in behalf of a railroad, whose bonds he had subsequently bought. As a result of this apparent self-interest, Blaine had twice been denied the Presidential nomination; but now, in 1884, party regulars seemed disposed to forgive him.18

  Not so Roosevelt, who early in the New Year had endorsed the third-running candidate, Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont.19 Edmunds was honest, industrious, unambitious, and dull, but for these very reasons he appealed to Independent Republicans—the young, idealistic reformers who identified neither with Stalwarts nor Half Breeds. Besides, he happened to suit Roosevelt’s present purpose, which was to force the state Convention to elect a pro-Edmunds delegation, and publicly humiliate Boss Miller, who was committed to Blaine.20 Utica’s Grand Opera House promised a suitably theatrical setting for his scenario.

  The plot was based on a few simple political facts. There were about five hundred Republicans in town. Roosevelt, as Senator Edmunds’s most prominent supporter, would influence the votes of perhaps 70 Independents. The remaining 430-odd votes were evenly divided between Arthur and Blaine.21 He thus stood in his favorite position—at the balance of power. Could he but persuade the 70 Independents to stand there with him, in a tight group that leaned neither one way nor the other, he would eventually be able to swing the convention in any direction he chose.

  NO SOONER HAD ROOSEVELT arrived in the hotel lobby than he was besieged by excited Independents. At least forty of them followed him upstairs, and his suite immediately became known as “Edmunds headquarters.” Although the Opera House was not due to open its doors until noon the following day, negotiations began at once, in an atmosphere of whispered secrecy. Messengers sped back and forth between Roosevelt’s rooms and those of Boss Miller, representing Blaine, and those of State Chairman James D. Warren, representing President Arthur. Few serious observers believed that the Independent strength would last through the evening. “The Edmunds men … are showing their teeth,” reported the New York World, “and refuse to be coaxed by either side; but they lack organization and may find themselves outwitted.”22

  Actually Roosevelt’s organization was very good. He himself was doing the outwitting. By periodically appearing in the corridors to announce, in conversational tones, that he was “no leader” of the Independents and had “no personal ambitions” at Utica, and by giving ambiguous replies to both Blaine and Arthur emissaries, he gave the impression that he was holding on to his seventy votes with difficulty. Miller and Warren thus separately assumed that Roosevelt was bargaining to release them. All the young dude wanted, obviously, was to be made a delegate-at-large. Well, if that was his price …

  At six o’clock the negotiants emerged for dinner, greeted one another politely, and arranged themselves in enigmatic groups of tables. Newspapermen tried to guess, from the movement of complimentary bottles of champagne, which way the political currents were flowing; but the bottles circulated in all directions. A Sun reporter captured something of the tension in the atmosphere. “Bagg’s Hotel is filled to suffocation tonight,” he cabled. “There are no Blaine hurrahs, or Arthur enthusiasm, or Edmunds sentiment here. The old party managers are simply … groping in the dark for the coming man. There is harmony everywhere; but it is the harmony of men who are afraid of each other.”23

  To Boss Miller’s bewilderment, Roosevelt proved no more tractable after dinner than he had been before. He not only rejected an offer to send one Independent delegate-at-large, i.e., himself, to Chicago, along with three Blaine men, but also refused to make the ratio two and two. News of the second rejection, which leaked out about midnight, greatly excited Chairman Warren, who offered the Independents three places on the ticket, in exchange for just one Arthur supporter; but Roosevelt also rejected that. At 2:30 A.M., the President’s men made their final, humiliating offer, an offer so weak it amounted to capitulation. All four delegates-at-large could be Independents for Edmunds, as long as there was no danger of them ultimately switching to Blaine. Roosevelt graciously accepted, knowing very well who the leader of those delegates would be.24

  THERE WAS SOMETHING faintly comic, to newspaper reporters, about the sight of machine Republicans filing through the streets next morning in somber black, their tall silk hats shining in the sun. They looked for all the world like mourners at a funeral. Boss Miller walked alone, a large, portly, graying man with troubled eyes.25 Roosevelt’s rejection of his advances last night had stunned and shamed him; his mood today was not improved by an editorial in the World calling him “a pigmy” in comparision with his “giant” predecessor, Roscoe Conkling.

  Arthur’s men were equally sullen and silent as they trooped into the Opera House.26 There was a round of polite applause for Chairman Warren when he mounted the stage. More applause, rather less polite, greeted Warner Miller. He took an aisle seat next to Titus Sheard on “Wood Pulp Row,” the section allotted to Herkimer County. Roosevelt, with his usual unerring sense of timing, waited until all three dignitaries were settled before making his own entrance. Then he stomped briskly down the hall, to the sound of mounting applause “that was taken up by the gallery and prolonged for some moments” after he sat down—a mere yard away from Miller, on the opposite side of the aisle. Casually draping a leg ov
er the chair in front, he allowed his personality to penetrate every corner of the auditorium. From that moment on, there was no doubt as to who was controlling the convention. When Chairman Warren had finished calling the roll, “he simply cast his eye” over toward Roosevelt, who leaped up and proposed that an Edmunds man be nominated temporary chairman of the meeting. The motion was approved.27

  BY LATE AFTERNOON, when the votes for delegates-at-large were counted, it was plain that Warner Miller had, as the Sun correspondent put it, “been pulverized finer than his own pulp.” Roosevelt’s name led the list with 472 votes. His three colleagues, all Independents, were President Andrew D. White of Cornell University with 407; State Senator John J. Gilbert with 342; and Edwin Packard, a millionaire spice merchant from Brooklyn, with 256. Boss Miller ran fifth with only 243 votes, scarcely half Roosevelt’s total, and 6 short of any kind of majority.28 His humiliation was complete. Word went around that his days as party chief were over.

  Flushed with victory, Roosevelt jumped across the aisle and confronted the shaken Senator. According to one reporter, he held out his hand and said, “Time makes all things even. The first of January is avenged.”29 But the reporter was a long distance away, in the press gallery, and got this quote by proxy. Actually Roosevelt’s hand was not so much extended as balled in a fist, and his words were rather less printable: “There, damn you, we beat you for last winter!”30

  “What did you want to say that for?” asked Isaac Hunt afterward. They were walking back to Bagg’s Hotel behind Miller, who had somehow torn his trousers coming out of the Opera House, and now looked infinitely pathetic.

  “I wanted him to know,” Roosevelt replied.

  Hunt was not impressed. “Well, I should think he would know without being told.”31

  This exchange in effect ended the three-year friendship of the two young Assemblymen, which had never been the same since Hunt’s disloyalty during the Speakership contest. There is no evidence that Roosevelt took any petty offense at his colleague’s words. But he knew now that it was time to unrope himself from Hunt, O’Neil, and the other “Roosevelt Republicans,” whose horizons extended no further than New York State, and eagerly search out new altitudes, wider vistas. Chicago beckoned, and beyond it the West; could he but rise high enough, he might see his future clear.

  “He grew right away from me,” Hunt confessed ruefully in old age. “I knew he was born for some great emergency, but what he would do I could not tell … I never expected to see him go right up in the heavens.”32

  ROOSEVELT RETURNED TO ALBANY on 24 April to receive the congratulations of his supporters in the Assembly. “For a while,” remarked the Times, “it was a doubtful question whether the Chamber was being used for legislative purposes or as a Roosevelt reception room.”33 During the next few days he enjoyed such adulation, both public and private, as he had never enjoyed before—and would not experience again for at least a decade. The New York Times hailed him as “the victor, the wearer of all the laurels” at Utica, and the Evening Post, in the course of a long and flattering editorial, called him “the most successful young politician of our day.”34 Curiosity mounted in Chicago and Washington about the twenty-five-year-old who had almost single-handedly made Senator Edmunds a serious candidate for the Presidency. Arthur Cutler, who kept closely in touch with political trends, and took pedagogic pride in his ex-pupil, assured Bamie, “Theodore’s reputation is national and even to us who know him it is phenomenal. Whatever the future may have in store for him, no man in the country has begun his public career more brilliantly.”35

  Two hundred miles away in Boston, Henry Cabot Lodge, another Edmunds supporter and delegate-at-large to Chicago, decided that Roosevelt was a “national figure of real importance,”36 and made a mental note to cultivate him.

  ROOSEVELT’S POST-CONVENTION GLOW was chilled by news that Grover Cleveland was threatening to veto some of his bills for the regulation of New York City. The Assemblyman reacted with understandable shock. He had been so frequent a visitor to the Executive Office recently, and Cleveland had seemed so agreeable to all his legislation, that Roosevelt no doubt expected full cooperation through the concluding weeks of the session. (Only a few days before Utica, Harper’s Weekly had published a Nast cartoon showing the Governor obediently signing a pile of these same bills in Roosevelt’s presence.)37

  Others, however, had seen signs of a showdown long ago; it was not so much a question of politics as of diametrically opposed personalities. Roosevelt was nervy, inspirational, passionate. He arrived at conclusions so rapidly that he seemed to be acting wholly on impulse, and was impatient when those with more laborious minds did not instantly agree with him.38 Cleveland, on the other hand, was slow, stolid, objective, almost maddeningly conscientious. No bill was too lengthy, or too complex, for him to scrutinize it down to the last punctuation-mark. His fathomless legal mind absorbed all data indiscriminately, sorted them into logical sequence, then issued an opinion which had about it the finality of a commandment chiseled in marble. One might as well try to sandpaper the marble smooth as to get Cleveland to change his mind.

  “I never see those two together,” said Daniel S. Lamont, the Governor’s secretary, “that I’m not reminded of a great mastiff solemnly regarding a small terrier, snapping and barking at him.”39 William Hudson, of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, used a different metaphor. Cleveland was the Immovable Object, whereas Roosevelt was the Irresistible Force. Any confrontation between them was bound to generate heat—and good copy besides. So when Hudson met Roosevelt in State Street, shortly after his return from Utica, he lost no time in telling him about Cleveland’s objections to his city reform bills.40 The reaction was predictable. “He musn’t do that! I can’t have that! I won’t let him do it! I’ll go up and see him at once.” With that, Roosevelt turned and began to sprint up the hill. The reporter, scenting a story, hurried after him.

  Roosevelt was already pounding on Cleveland’s desk when Hudson arrived in the Executive Office. The Governor proceeded to explain that the bills, while admirable in intent, had been too hastily written. They contained several inconsistencies which would render them ineffective as laws. Not the least of these non sequiturs was a clause in the Tenure of Office Bill specifying two different terms, of 4 years and 1 year 11 months respectively, for the same officer. There were sentences in other measures which were incomprehensible even by legal standards; the mere addition of a word or two would repair their logic; he would not sign them as presently drawn. Bristling, Roosevelt declared that “principle” was the main thing, that it was too late to worry about arcane details. “You must not veto those bills. You cannot. You shall not … I won’t have it!”

  At this, Cleveland gathered up all his three hundred pounds and considerable height, visibly mushrooming in his chair. “Mr. Roosevelt, I’m going to veto those bills!” His fist crashed down with such force as to make the Assemblyman seek sanctuary in a chair, muttering something about “an outrage.” But Cleveland had already returned to his work. The interview was over.41

  Thus ended the brief and unlikely political partnership of two future Presidents. They would work together again one day, and for the same cause that preoccupied them in Albany, but their relations would never be as friendly.

  ALTHOUGH ROOSEVELT WAS REPORTED to be “beaming with smiles” on his return to the Capitol, he was still privately tortured with sorrow. His colleagues in the House had found him “a changed man” since the double tragedy of 14 February. “You could not mention the fact that his wife and mother had been taken away … you could see at once that it was a grief too deep.”42 There were signs that the pain inside him was increasing, rather than diminishing, due no doubt to its too cruel suppression.

  Legislative work was no longer a distraction. He was offered renomination for a fourth term, but refused: he simply could not face the thought of another winter in Albany.43 With all his soul he longed now to get away from the “dull Dutch town,” away from New York with it
s bitter memories, away to the therapeutic emptiness of the Badlands. Even Chicago, which had so recently seemed such a thrilling prospect, now loomed like a wearisome chore. On 30 April he unburdened himself to the editor of the Utica Morning Herald, in an unusually self-revelatory letter.

  I wish to write you a few words just to thank you for your kindness towards me, and to assure you that my head will not be turned by what I well know was a mainly accidental success. Although not a very old man, I have yet lived a great deal in my life, and I have known sorrow too bitter and joy too keen to allow me to become either cast down or elated for more than a very brief period over any success or defeat.

  I have very little expectation of being able to keep on in politics; my success so far has only been won by absolute indifference to my future career; for I doubt if any man can realize the bitter and venomous hatred with which I am regarded by the very politicians who at Utica supported me, under dictation from masters who are influenced by political considerations that were national and not local in their scope. I realize very thoroughly the absolutely ephemeral nature of the hold I have upon the people, and a very real and positive hostility I have excited among the politicians. I will not stay in public life unless I can do so on my own terms; and my ideal, whether lived up to or not, is rather a high one.

  For very many reasons I will not mind going back into private [life] for a few years. My work this winter has been very harassing, and I feel tired and restless; for the next few months I shall probably be in Dakota, and I think I shall spend the next two to three years in making shooting trips, either in the Far West or in the Northern Woods—and there will be plenty of work to do writing.44