The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  THE CROSS-EXAMINATION continued. How did Roosevelt know the Postmaster General had been familiar with his report? “I did not read it aloud to him,” Roosevelt replied sarcastically, “but he had acted upon it, and the presumption is fair that he had read it.” Commissioner Thompson stood up to make a statement of full support for Roosevelt’s actions. But before the old man could say much, the door of the hearing room flew open and in strode John Wanamaker.135

  The Postmaster General was hurriedly sworn. Although wreathed in smiles as usual, he did not relish being implicated in Roosevelt’s testimony, and wished to make it clear that he had been an innocent party to the transfer. Roosevelt had spoken so glowingly of Shidy that he had been happy to agree. “I always express myself as pleased if employment is given to a person that Roosevelt might recommend.”136 If he had only known the truth about Shidy, of course …

  Stung, Roosevelt leaped to the attack.

  ROOSEVELT All these facts … are in a report that we made to the President of the United States on this matter. You had that report, and had acted upon it, had you not?

  WANAMAKER We had the report.

  ROOSEVELT And you had acted upon it, had you not?

  WANAMAKER How do you mean, “acted upon it”?

  ROOSEVELT You referred to it … in your letter notifying Mr. Paul that you had accepted his resignation. If there is any doubt in your mind, you can produce the letter, I presume?

  WANAMAKER I cannot say how much influence the Civil Service report had upon me …

  ROOSEVELT Would you send a copy of the letter? … My memory is very clear that in that letter you referred to this report.

  WANAMAKER I will furnish it with pleasure.137

  The letter was duly furnished, but with little pleasure, for it proved the accuracy of Roosevelt’s memory, as opposed to Wanamaker’s convenient amnesia.

  Although the hearings dragged on for another week, neither Hatton nor Ewart was able to uncover any evidence of maladministration by the Civil Service Commission. There was a series of interminable examinations by Roosevelt of George H. Paul, who had been brought in from Milwaukee especially for that purpose. The humiliated ex-postmaster sat for three days in his chair, helpless as a trussed turkey, while Roosevelt determinedly pulled out his feathers, one by one. Squawks of protest—that Paul had given all this testimony before and had already suffered amply for it—went unheeded. Roosevelt seemed determined to show the committee what an angry Civil Service Commissioner looked like in action. Not until late in the afternoon of Friday, 7 March, did the chairman tactfully suggest that enough was enough.138

  EVEN BEFORE the committee filed its formal report, it was plain that Roosevelt had scored a personal triumph. He had dominated the hearings from the first day to the last, and had somehow managed to arouse sympathy for his patronage of “Shady Shidy,” as that gentleman was now known. His prestige as Civil Service Commissioner had been greatly enhanced, at the expense of the discredited Lyman and the reticent Thompson. The committee was rumored to be in favor of recommending the creation of a single-headed Commission, with himself the obvious choice as chief, but Roosevelt, surprisingly, opposed this idea, saying that it was attractive but premature. To put a Republican in sole control, he argued, would compromise the Commission’s non-partisan image and make it vulnerable to changing majorities in Congress.139 This was true enough, but sophisticated observers could detect signs of a larger, more long-term ambition in Roosevelt’s modesty. He already had all the power the inadequate Civil Service Law allowed him; killing two colleagues off would not increase it. At thirty-one, he could afford to wait a few more years for real power.

  Roosevelt himself admitted, later in life, that it was about this time that he began to cast thoughtful eyes upon 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “I used to walk by the White House, and my heart would beat a little faster as the thought came to me that possibly—possibly—I would some day occupy it as President.”140 Jeremiah Curtin, the translator of Sienkiewicz, happened to catch him in the act one day, during a visit to the White House with Representative Frederick T. Greenhalge of the House Civil Service Committee. “That man,” said Curtin, “looks precisely as if he had examined the building and, finding it to his liking, had made up his mind to inhabit it.” “I must make you acquainted with him,” replied Green-halge. “But first listen to a prophecy: when he wants this house he will get it. He will yet live here as President.”141

  MARCH MERGED INTO APRIL, April into May, but the committee, plagued by absenteeism, kept postponing its report. Roosevelt grew impatient and nervous. “It is very important that the present Commission be given an absolutely clean bill of health … a verdict against us is a verdict against the reform and against decency.”142 Frank Hatton, too, seemed bothered by the suspense; his editorial attacks on Roosevelt grew hysterical. “This scion of ‘better blood,’ ” he raged, “this pampered pink of inherited wealth … this seven months’ child of conceited imbecility [is] a sham, a pretender and a fraud as a reformer and a failure as a business man.” Eventually the flow of vituperation ceased. “The Post … having passed the pestiferous Roosevelt between its thumb-nails, drops him and awaits the report of the investigating committee.”143

  As usual in times of stress, Roosevelt distracted himself with literature, and worked doggedly on his long-postponed history of New York City. “How I regret ever having undertaken it!” By way of relaxation he wrote three or four hunting pieces for Century, and, by way of duty, some very dull articles on Civil Service Reform. He apologized to George Haven Putnam for having to abandon—temporarily—Volumes Three and Four of his magnum opus. “I half wish I was out of this Civil Service Commission work, for I can’t do satisfactorily with The Winning of the West until I am; but I suppose I ought really to stand by it for at least a couple of years.”144

  HE SPENT ONE of the most important weekends of his life on 10 and 11 May, reading from cover to cover Alfred Thayer Mahan’s new book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History.145 Since the publication of his own Naval War of 1812 he had considered himself an expert on this very subject, and had argued, passionately but vaguely, that modernization of the fleet must keep pace with the industrialization of the economy. But he had never questioned America’s traditional naval strategy, based on a combination of coastal defense and commercial raiding. Now Mahan extended and clarified his vision, showing that real national security—and international greatness—could only be attained by building more and bigger ships and deploying them farther abroad. While advocating the constant growth of the American Navy, Mahan paradoxically insisted that its power be concentrated at various “pressure points” which controlled the circulation of global commerce. By striking quickly and sharply at any of these nerve centers, the United States could paralyze whole oceans. Mahan supported his thesis with brilliant analyses of the strategies of Nelson and Napoleon, proving that navies could be more effective than armies in determining the relative strength of nations. He also explained the intricate relationships between political power and sea power, warfare and economics, geography and technology. Roosevelt flipped the book shut a changed man. So, as it happened, did Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, when he read it—not to mention various Lords of the British and Japanese Admiralties, and officials throughout the Navy Department of the United States. More than any other strategic philosopher, Alfred Thayer Mahan was responsible for the naval buildup which preoccupied these four nations at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; more than any other world leader of the period, Theodore Roosevelt would glory in The Influence of Sea Power upon History, both as a title and as a fact.146

  THE REPORT OF the House committee’s investigation, filed 13 June 1890, stated that “the public service has been greatly benefited, and the law, on the whole, well-executed” by all three Commissioners. Charles Lyman was mildly censured for a certain “laxity of discipline” in administrative affairs, while his colleagues received unqualified praise. “We find that Commissioners Roo
sevelt and Thompson have discharged their duties with entire fidelity and integrity,” the document stated.147 “WHITEWASH!” screamed the Washington Post, but most press comment was approving. The New York Times and Evening Post went so far as to criticize President Harrison and Postmaster General Wanamaker for not supporting the Civil Service Commission. Roosevelt returned with some relief to bureaucratic work.148 During his first year in office he had attracted a greater glare of publicity than his eight predecessors put together. It was time to retire temporarily to the wings before he was accused of hogging the footlights. Already the Saturday Globe was warning: “There is, perhaps, no man in the country more ambitious than this young New York politician.”149

  Once again Washington began to drowse in summer heat. Edith and the children returned to Sagamore Hill; Cecil Spring Rice fled for the cool shores of Massachusetts; Henry Adams prepared to depart for the South Seas. Congress remained in session, with Speaker Reed presiding over the House in flannels and canvas shoes, a yellow scarf around his enormous waist.150 Roosevelt went to Oyster Bay as often as he could, but pressure of work (for the Commission was still backlogged) continually drew him back. He managed to finish his “very commonplace little book” on New York by the beginning of August, and spent the next three weeks feverishly trying to clear his desk. Another Western trip was in the offing, this time to Yellowstone, which he wished to inspect on behalf of the Boone & Crockett Club, but administrative difficulties nearly made him cancel it. “Oh, Heaven, if the President had a little backbone, and if the Senators did not have flannel legs!”151

  The first of September found Roosevelt in a large family party, including his wife and two sisters, heading West to Medora and the Rockies. Impressed as he was by the splendors of Yellowstone, he reserved his most admiring adjectives for Edith. The sight of that demure, book-loving lady cantering across the prairie on a wiry horse seemed to have shocked him into a renewed awareness of her charms. “She looks just as well and young and pretty as she did four years ago when I married her … she is as healthy as possible, and so young-looking and slender to be the mother of those two sturdy little scamps, Ted and Kermit.”152

  WASHINGTON WAS STILL deserted when he got back there in early October. Benjamin Harrison was at home, however, so Roosevelt paid a friendly call. Harrison, who had gotten into the habit of drumming his fingers nervously during their interviews, gave him a frigid reception. Evidently the White House wanted to have nothing further to do with Civil Service Reform. “Damn the President! He is a cold-blooded, narrow-minded, prejudiced, obstinate, timid old psalm-singing Indianapolis politician.”153

  The November Congressional elections were disastrous for the Republican party, due mainly to an unpopular tariff measure which William McKinley had pushed into law at the end of the last session. With prices on manufactured goods rising daily, voters threw the culprit out of office—severely damaging his presidential prospects—and filled the House with the largest Democratic majority in history.154 Roosevelt, who had never liked the McKinley bill, began to mutter dire predictions about Cleveland recapturing the White House in 1892. But with his family reinstalled in town, and Henry Cabot Lodge by great luck returned to Congress, he found it impossible to be gloomy. Indeed, Roosevelt was conspicuously the most cheerful Republican in Washington that winter. “He continues to wear the nattiest and most stylish grey trousers, and the most boyish hat he can buy,” reported a local correspondent, “and he whistles jovially as he legs it down to the rooms of the Civil Service Commission.”155

  Christmas was spent at 1820 Jefferson Place, and Roosevelt rejoiced in the event as much as any of his children:

  Such nice stockings, with such an entrancing way of revealing in their bulging outline the promise of what was inside! They burrowed into them with their eager, chubby little hands, and hailed each new treasure with shouts of delight. Then after breakfast we all walked into the room where the big toys, so many of them! were, on the tables; and I suppose Alice and Ted came as near to realizing the feelings of those who enter Paradise as they ever will on this earth.156

  That, according to his old friend Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, was the essence of Theodore Roosevelt, at least during his early years in Washington. “Life was the unpacking of an endless Christmas stocking.”157

  “He is evidently a maniac morally no less than mentally.”

  Elliott Roosevelt about the time of his marriage to Anna Hall. (Illustration 16.2)

  CHAPTER 17

  The Dear Old Beloved Brother

  In his house this malcontent

  Could the King no longer bear.

  IN JANUARY 1891 Roosevelt was forced to turn his attention to “a nightmare of horror”1 that had been brooding over him for at least three years. His preoccupation with literature, politics, and his own immediate family had caused him to ignore warnings that Elliott Roosevelt was determinedly drinking himself to death. The two brothers, so close in youth, had recently seen very little of each other. Twenty miles of country road, and a yawning social gulf, separated their respective Long Island establishments. At Sagamore Hill the talk was of books and public affairs; at Hempstead, of parties, fashions, and horseflesh. On the rare occasions when the brothers met, friends were struck by the reversal of their teenage roles: where once Theodore had been sickly and solitary, and Elliott an effulgent Apollo, now it was the elder who glowed, and the younger who was wasting away.2

  It is difficult to say whether Elliott Roosevelt was victim or culprit in his own decline. His misfortunes were physical as well as psychological. Since puberty he had been afflicted with semiepileptic seizures, usually brought on by stress, and when still adolescent discovered that alcohol was an effective depressant.3 Long before his twenty-first birthday, Elliott was drinking heavily, although his good looks and athletic bearing tended to disguise the fact. After marrying the beautiful but (in Theodore’s view) “utterly frivolous” Anna Hall,4 he had become a confirmed alcoholic. Withdrawal from drink after binges only worsened his tendency to epilepsy. A series of inexplicable sporting accidents, which may have been caused by seizures, progressively wrecked his health. The most serious of these—a fall from a trapeze during amateur theatricals in 1888—temporarily crippled his leg, and he became dependent on laudanum and morphine during the agony of recuperation. There had been a complete physical collapse in 1889, followed by such desperate drinking during the early part of 1890 as to shock even himself into awareness of his impending doom. Swearing never to touch alcohol again, he left the United States for Europe that summer, taking his wife, six-year-old daughter, and baby son with him.5 From Vienna, in September 1890, came news of the inevitable relapse, followed shortly before Christmas by a cri de coeur from Anna.6 She was pregnant again, and was afraid of spending the winter alone with her unstable husband. If Bamie—ever-willing, ever-capable Bamie—would come over and look after her, Elliott could surely be persuaded to enter a sanitarium for treatment. By the time the baby was born he should be decently dried out, and they could all return happily to New York in time for the next social season.

  Although Theodore considered Anna’s optimism “thoroughly Chinese,” he did see the advisability of Bamie’s presence in Vienna.7 But no sooner had he given his official permission, as head of the family, than a bombshell announcement, on legal stationery, arrived from New York. His brother’s seed, apparently, was also sprouting in the body of a servant girl named Katy Mann. She claimed to have been seduced by Elliott shortly before his departure for Europe, and threatened a public scandal if she did not receive financial compensation for her pregnancy.8

  Roosevelt’s reaction to this “hideous revelation” was entirely characteristic. “Of course he was insane when he did it.”9 Alcoholism he believed to be a disease that could be treated and cured. But infidelity was a crime, pure and simple; it could be neither forgiven nor understood, save as an act of madness. It was an offense against order, decency, against civilization; it was a desecration of the holy marriage-bed. B
y reducing himself to the level of a “flagrant man-swine,” Elliott had forfeited all claim to his wife and children. For Anna to continue to live with him now would be “little short of criminal,” he told Bamie. “She ought not to have any more children, and those she has should be brought up away from him.”10

  Were it not for Anna’s present delicate condition (she was a frail person at the best of times), Theodore would no doubt have ordered Bamie to fetch her home at once. There was nothing to do but let Bamie go over as planned and privately confront Elliott with the news. If nothing else, it might sober him up long enough to commit himself to a sanitarium for treatment. Such an act of voluntary self-incarceration, wrote Theodore, “will serve to explain and atone for what cannot otherwise ever be explained.” As souls pass through Purgatory in order to wash away sin, so, presumably, could a repentant Elliott redeem his fit of “insanity.”11 In the meantime Theodore and the lawyers would await the birth of Katy Mann’s baby; should any Roosevelt blood be identifiable in it, they would pay her whatever hush-money was necessary.12

  Bamie sailed for Europe in early February 1891. While she was still on the high seas, Theodore received an affectionate and unsuspecting letter from Elliott. Despite his newfound contempt for “the dear old beloved brother,” memories of their happy closeness in the past crowded in on him, and he sank into the deepest gloom. “It is horrible, awful; it is like a brooding nightmare. If it was mere death one could stand it; it is the shame that is so fearful.”13 Much of the “shame,” of course, was his own: he felt acute distaste for the role he had inherited as go-between in a shabby paternity suit. If it ever got out that the Civil Service Commissioner was involved in blackmail payments, Frank Hatton would annihilate him. But he saw no other way of protecting his family from a catastrophic scandal.