Sometime during the first week in August, Congressman Lemuel Ely Quigg of New York, an attractive, prematurely grizzled political schemer, dropped a subtle hint regarding Roosevelt’s future. What a pity it was, he sighed, that Roosevelt was possessed of “such a variety of indiscretions, fads and animosities” that it would be impossible to nominate him for Mayor of New York in the fall.64 The odds of a Republican victory in that city were higher than they had been for years; what was more, there seemed to be a good chance of getting a reform ticket elected. Roosevelt rejected Quigg’s hint good-humoredly (“I have run once!”), but ambition stirred within him. He had never quite gotten over his failure to capture control of his native city in 1886, and the temptation to try and transcend that failure soon became irresistible. He broached the subject with Edith, but she protested vehemently. To run for Mayor, she said, would require him to spend money they simply did not have, and the prize was by no means assured. Pitiful as his present salary was, it was at least better than the nothing he would earn as a twice-defeated mayoral candidate. Roosevelt miserably told Quigg he would have to think the matter over.65
On 7 August, President Cleveland recognized the new Republic of Hawaii,66 to Roosevelt’s grim satisfaction. This meant that the United States at last had a firm ally and naval base in the Pacific, to counter the burgeoning might of Japan. Roosevelt had been fuming for sixteen months over Cleveland’s obstinate refusal to sign the annexation treaty prepared for him by President Harrison. “It was a crime against the United States, it was a crime against white civilization.”67 In his opinion the President should now start to build up the Navy, and order the digging of an interoceanic canal in Central America “with the money of Uncle Sam.”68 However Roosevelt knew there was not much chance of that, for the Democrats were “very weak” about foreign policy. “Cleveland does his best, but he is not an able man.”69
On Monday, 13 August, a telegram arrived to say that Elliott Roosevelt (drinking heavily again and reunited with his mistress in New York) was very ill indeed.70 Roosevelt, desk-bound in Washington, did not respond: he knew from experience that Elliott would not let any members of the family come near him. There had been many such messages in recent months. “He can’t be helped, and he must simply be let go his own gait.”71 The following day Elliott, racked with delirium tremens, tried to jump out of the window of his house, suffered a final epileptic fit, and died. Distraught, Theodore hurried to New York, and saw stretched out on a bed, not the bloated souse of recent years, but the handsome youth of “the old time, fifteen years ago, when he was the most generous, gallant, and unselfish of men.”72 The sight shattered him. “Theodore was more overcome than I have ever seen him,” Corinne reported, “and cried like a little child for a long time.”73
Theodore recovered his equanimity in time to veto “the hideous plan” that Elliott be buried with his wife. Instead, a grave was dug in Greenwood Cemetery, “beside those who are associated only with his sweet innocent youth.” At the funeral on Saturday, Roosevelt noted with some surprise that “the woman” and two of her friends “behaved perfectly well, and their grief seemed entirely sincere.”74
ON 4 SEPTEMBER he started West to shoot a few antelope and ponder the New York mayoralty. He felt depressed and ill, and Dakota’s drought-stricken landscape drove him back to Oyster Bay after only two weeks on the range. Edith was still adamantly against his running in October, and Theodore, who was as putty in her hands, decided to turn Quigg down. But this was by no means easy. Quigg was so sure of his acceptance that a special nominating Committee of Seventy had been formed, and was determined to nominate him as a reform candidate; he had to refuse four times before they would accept his decision.75 He sank into a mood of bitter remorse as his thirty-sixth birthday approached, for he felt himself a political failure. His whole instinct was to run: after well over five years of appointive office he craved the thrill of an election campaign. At all costs he must keep his chagrin private. “No outsider should know that I think my decision was a mistake.” Henry Cabot Lodge received the terse explanation, “I simply had not the funds to run.”76 But after a further period of brooding, Roosevelt had to unburden himself to his friend:
I would literally have given my right arm to have made the race, win or lose. It was the one golden chance, which never returns; and I had no illusions about ever having another opportunity; I knew it meant the definite abandonment of any hope of going on in the work and life for which I care more than any other. You may guess that these weeks have not been particularly pleasant ones … At the time, with Edith feeling as intensely as she did, I did not see how I could well go in; though I have grown to feel more and more that in this instance I should have gone counter to her wishes … the fault was mine, not Edith’s; I should have realized that she could not see the matter as it really was, or realize my feelings. But it is one of the matters just as well dropped.77
William L. Strong, a middle-aged businessman with little or no political experience, was duly nominated by the Republicans of New York; he ran on a popular reform ticket, and was elected. And so the mayoral campaign of 1894 joined that of 1886 as another of Roosevelt’s unspoken, passionate regrets.
RETURNING TO WORK at the Civil Service Commission now was “a little like starting to go through Harvard again after graduating,”78 and that telltale sign of Rooseveltian frustration, bronchitis, recurred in December. For a week he was confined to his bed. A strange tone of nostalgia for his native city crept into his correspondence, as he obsessively discussed Mayor Strong’s appointments and the prospects for real reforms of the municipal government. Shortly before Christmas a message arrived from Strong: would he care to accept the position of Street Cleaning Commissioner in New York?79
Roosevelt was “dreadfully harassed” by the offer. Thirteen years before, when he first stood up in his evening clothes to speak at Morton Hall, he had addressed himself to the subject of street cleaning. But something told him that his future lay elsewhere than in garbage collection. He declined with exquisite tact, obviously hoping for a more suitable offer.80 In the meantime there was more than enough federal business to keep him occupied. President Cleveland had at last begun to extend the classified service; John Procter was responding well to Roosevelt’s training; another season of hard work would “put the capstone” on his achievements as Civil Service Commissioner.81
THE YEAR 1895 opened snowy and crisp, and Roosevelt plunged into the familiar round of receptions and balls and diplomatic breakfasts, to which he was by now shamelessly addicted. “I always eat and drink too much,” he mourned. “Still … it is so pleasant to deal with big interests, and big men.”82
A particularly big interest loomed in February. Revolutionaries in Cuba, Spain’s last substantial fragment of empire in the New World, declared war on the power that had oppressed them for centuries. Instantly expansionists in the capital began to discuss the pros and cons of supporting the cause of Cuban independence. Henry Adams’s salon at 1603 H Street became a hotbed of international intrigue, with Cabot Lodge and John Hay weighing the strategic and economic advantages of U.S. intervention, and Clarence King rhapsodizing over the charms of Cuban women.83 Roosevelt, true to form, dashed off a note to Governor Levi P. Morton of New York, begging that “in the very improbable event of a war with Spain” he would be included in any regiment the state sent out. “Remember, I make application now … I must have a commission in the force that goes to Cuba!”84
As for “big men,” he encountered on 7 March a genius greater than any he had yet met, with the possible exception of Henry James.85 Rudyard Kipling was not quite thirty, but was already the world’s most famous living writer,86 and Roosevelt hastened to invite him to dinner. At first they did not get on too well. Kipling, Roosevelt wrote, was “bright, nervous, voluble and underbred,” and displayed an occasional truculence toward America which required “very rough handling.”87 Kipling’s manners improved, and the two men became fond of each other. Roosevelt introduced Kipling to his li
terary and political acquaintances, escorted him to the zoo to see grizzlies, and to the Smithsonian to see Indian relics. From time to time he thanked God in a loud voice that he had “not one drop of British blood in him.” When Kipling amusedly mocked the self-righteousness of a nation that had extirpated its aboriginals “more completely than any modern race has done,” Roosevelt “made the glass cases of the museum shake with his rebuttals.”88
Roosevelt’s activity became more and more strenuous as spring approached. He dashed in and out of town on Civil Service Commission business, taught himself to ski, bombarded his friends in the New York City government with advice and suggestions, continued to toil on Volume Four of The Winning of the West and collaborated with Cabot Lodge on a book for boys, Hero Tales from American History.89 Friends noticed hints of inner turbulence. He was seen “blinking pitifully” with exhaustion at a dinner for Owen Wister and Kipling,90 and his tirades on a currently fashionable topic—whether dangerous sports should be banned in the nation’s universities—became alarmingly harsh. “What matters a few broken bones to the glories of inter-collegiate sport?” he cried at a Harvard Club dinner. (Meanwhile, not far away in hospital, the latest victim of football savagery lay paralyzed for life.)91 He declared publicly that he would “disinherit” any son of his who refused to play college games. And in private, through clenched teeth: “I would rather one of them should die than have them grow up as weaklings.”92
Clearly he was under considerable personal strain. The reason soon became evident. He was torn between his longing to join Mayor Strong’s reform administration in New York, and his instinct to stay put until the next presidential election. Toward the end of March he told Lemuel Quigg that he would like to be one of the four New York Police Commissioners, but waxed coy when Quigg said it could be arranged. He dispatched Lodge to New York to discuss the matter further. “The average New Yorker of course wishes me to take it very much,” Roosevelt mused on 3 April. “I don’t feel much like it myself …” On the other hand, it was a glamorous job—“one I could perhaps afford to be identified with.”93 Before the day was out, he had reached his decision:
TO LEMUEL ELY QUIGG
WASHINGTON, APRIL 3, 1895
LODGE WILL SEE YOU AND TELL YOU. I WILL ACCEPT SUBJECT TO HONORABLE CONDITIONS. KEEP THIS STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT94
THE APPOINTMENT WAS CONFIRMED on 17 April, by which time Roosevelt was quite reconciled to leaving Washington. “I think it a good thing to be identified with my native city again.”95 Mayor Strong asked him to be ready to take office about the first of May. Roosevelt promptly sent his resignation to President Cleveland.
I have now been in office almost exactly six years, a little over two years of the time under yourself; and I leave with the greatest reluctance … During my term of office I have seen the classified service grow to more than double the size that it was six years ago … Year by year the law has been better executed, taking the service as a whole, and in spite of occasional exceptions in certain offices and bureaus. Since you yourself took office this time nearly six thousand positions have been put into the classified service … it has been a pleasure to serve on the Commission under you.96
“There goes the best politician in Washington,” Cleveland said, after bidding him farewell.97
All the abrasiveness of recent months melted away as Roosevelt joyfully contemplated his achievements in Washington and the challenge awaiting him in New York. He hated to leave the capital at a time when the trees were dense with blossom, and the slow Southern girls—so different from their quick-stepping Northern sisters!—were strolling through the streets in their light summer dresses, to the sound of banjos down by the river. He was sorry to say good-bye to nice, peevish old Henry Adams, to “Spwing-Wice of the Bwitish Legation,”98 and Lodge and Reed and Hay and all “the pleasant gang” who breakfasted at 1603 H Street. He would miss the Smithsonian, to which he affectionately donated his pair of Minnesota skis, along with several specimens from the long-defunct Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.99 Most of all, perhaps, he would miss the Cosmos Club, the little old house on Madison Place where leaders of Washington’s scientific community liked to gather for polysyllabic discussions. Ever since Roosevelt’s first days as Civil Service Commissioner, when he astonished twenty Cosmos members by effortlessly sorting a pile of fossil-bones into skeletons, with running commentaries on the life habits of each animal, he had been a star attraction at the club.100 In later life Rudyard Kipling, looking back on these “spacious and friendly days” in Washington, would remember Roosevelt dropping by the Cosmos and pouring out “projects, discussions of men and politics, and criticisms of books” in a torrential stream, punctuated by bursts of humor. “I curled up in the seat opposite, and listened and wondered, until the universe seemed to be going round, and Theodore was the spinner.”101
CHAPTER 19
The Biggest Man in New York
Bitter as home-brewed ale were his foaming passions.
NEW YORK’S Police Headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street was a squat, square building with a marble facade long since yellowed by the fumes of Little Italy.1 Many a stiletto victim had been carried bleeding up its steep front steps, and countless padrones awaiting indictment had glared through its barred basement windows at a little group of reporters lounging on the stoop of No. 303, across the way.
The reporters, in turn, enjoyed one of the more entertaining vistas in Manhattan. Before them stretched a cobbled street, framed on both sides by tenement buildings, and looped around with strings of brilliant laundry. It was an arena always alive with drama, or at least the promise of drama. A sudden singing of the telegraph wires, which untidily connected Police Headquarters with every precinct in the city, might signify riots in Hell’s Kitchen, or a brothel-bust in the Tenderloin; sooner or later the latest victims of the law would be delivered in shiny patrol-wagons, and the press would dash across to meet them, pencils and pads at the ready.
Even when Mulberry Street was sunk in Monday-morning calm, as around ten o’clock on 6 May 1895,2 the stoop-sitters were loath to quit their airy perch for the “newspaper offices” upstairs—actually just stifling cells of the kind that, elsewhere in the neighborhood, sheltered whole families. As long as the breeze did not blow uptown from the reeking slums of Mulberry Bend, a man could enjoy his cigar, play poker, and shout humorous insults at the cop on duty opposite. If the sun grew uncomfortably hot, he could send around the corner for iced oysters at a penny each, or stop a passing aguajolo for fresh lemonade.
“Many a stiletto victim had been carried bleeding up its steep front steps.”
Police Headquarters, Mulberry Street, New York City. (Illustration 19.1)
Lincoln Steffens, the talented young correspondent of the Evening Post, was on the stoop that day when Jacob Riis of the Evening Sun came out into the street shouting a telephone message. Theodore Roosevelt had just been sworn in as Police Commissioner at City Hall, eighteen blocks south: he and his three colleagues were already on their way to headquarters to relieve the outgoing Commissioners.3
The news came as no surprise to Steffens. Riis was an old and worshipful friend of Roosevelt’s, and had been gloating over his appointment for weeks. It was the will of God that such a reformer should be chosen to purge the notoriously corrupt New York police. Neither did Riis doubt that his man would become president of the new Police Board. “I don’t care who the other Commissioners are. TR is enough.”4
About half-past ten an interestingly varied quartet walked around the corner. Leading the way was the bull-necked, bull-chested figure of Theodore Roosevelt. Behind him came a dumpy, middle-aged man bearing an uncanny resemblance to Ulysses S. Grant, and a military-looking youth, very tall and very pale, with a nervous vein beating in his temple. The fourth man seemed to walk somehow apart from the other Commissioners, although he was obviously their coequal—a handsome, lounging, bearded dandy of about thirty-five. Steffens identified them in
turn as Frederick D. Grant (R), an upstate politician and eldest son of the great general; Avery D. Andrews (D), a graduate of West Point and a rather undistinguished lawyer; and Andrew D. Parker (D), also a lawyer, but one of the cleverest in the city, and a rumored agent of the County Democratic organization.5
Roosevelt broke into a run when he caught sight of Riis waiting outside No. 303. As Steffens remembered it,
He came on ahead down the street; he yelled, “Hello, Jake,” to Riis, and running up the stairs to the front door of Police Headquarters, he waved us reporters to follow. We did. With the police officials standing around watching, the new Board went up to the second story … TR seized Riis, who introduced me, and still running, he asked questions: “Where are our offices? Where is the Board Room? What do we do first?” Out of the half-heard answers he gathered the way to the Board Room, where the three old Commissioners waited, like three of the new Commissioners, stiff, formal and dignified. Not TR. He introduced himself, his colleagues, with handshakes, and called a meeting of the new Board … had himself elected President—this had been prearranged—and then adjourned to pull Riis and me with him into his office.
“Now, then, what’ll we do?”6
Avery Andrews, writing more than sixty years later, confirmed the accuracy of this account, with the small qualification that Roosevelt’s election had not been prearranged. “As the senior Commissioner in length of service, I called the meeting to order and nominated Roosevelt as President of the Board; after which I was elected Treasurer.”7 Thus some semblance of bipartisanship was preserved at the outset by distributing control of the Police Department between the two political parties.
“The public,” Roosevelt announced in his first presidential statement, “may rest assured that so far as I am concerned, there will be no politics in the department, and I know that I voice the sentiment of my colleagues in that respect. We are all activated by the desire to so regulate this department that it will earn the respect and confidence of the community.… All appointments and promotions will be made for merit only, and without regard to political or religious considerations.”8
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Page 54