The success of Roosevelt’s crusade was helped by his early insistence that he was acting out of duty, not bluenosed morality. But the temptation to preach, always strong in him, became irresistible on 7 August, when he appeared at the Catholic Total Abstinence Union’s national convention in Carnegie Hall. Sharing the platform with him were Mayor Strong, Commissioner Parker, and a phalanx of clergymen, headed by Archbishop Corrigan of New York. “Big Tim” O’Sullivan, a State Senator from Tammany Hall, represented the forces of iniquity.126
After a mass chorus of “While We Are Marching for Temperance,” sung to the tune of “Marching Through Georgia,” Senator O’Sullivan rose to give the first speech. He had not joined in the singing, and proceeded to make plain his contempt for “the Puritan’s gloomy Sabbath.” To an uproar of hisses and boos, he declared that the Excise Law discriminated against “the orderly citizen who drinks in moderation,” while encouraging the real drunkard to lay in supplies of hard liquor, and souse in front of his family.
Roosevelt’s face, during this speech, was a study of majestic disapproval. Throwing aside his prepared text, he followed O’Sullivan to the lectern and soothed the raging audience with a full display of his teeth. “I want to express my gratitude to the Catholic Church,” he intoned, “because it stands manfully for temperance, and for a day of rest and innocent enjoyment.” The next thirty minutes were devoted to a conversational defense of himself and his policies, remarkable for the roars of applause that greeted every quiet cadence. For the most part it was standard stuff, but Roosevelt inserted paragraphs of temperance rhetoric which worked his seven thousand listeners into a frenzy of righteous fervor. Senator O’Sullivan was mentioned only occasionally, in tones of sympathetic sorrow, as a lost sheep to be mourned by the rest of the flock. “Rub it in to him, Teddy,” yelled a voice, and Roosevelt swung into his peroration:
I hope to see the time when a man will be ashamed to take any enjoyment on Sunday which shall rob those who should be dearest to him, and are dependent on him, of the money he has earned during the week; when a man will be ashamed to take a selfish enjoyment, and not to find some kind of pleasure which he can share with his wife and children.127
“Never in my life,” he wrote afterward, “did I receive such an ovation.” It was fully five minutes before order could be restored. Commissioner Parker ran over to shake his hand, followed by a score of delighted priests. If the World is to be believed, Mayor Strong “actually stood up and cheered … while State Senator O’Sullivan looked as uncomfortable as any man could possibly look.”128
Reading the text of Roosevelt’s speech eight decades later, one is struck, as so often with his oratory, by the ordinariness of the language which aroused such enthusiasm. Yet the words, banal as they are, are arranged with consummate skill. At no point that evening did he espouse the doctrine of total abstinence; he made no specific condemnation of drink; yet somehow he managed to convince seven thousand diehard prohibitionists that he was wholly on their side. Experts in the study of mass-manipulation techniques could only shake their heads in admiration. “You are rushing so rapidly to the front,” wrote Henry Cabot Lodge, “that the day is not far distant when you will come into a large kingdom.”129
ROOSEVELT WORKED HARDER during the hot months of 1895 than ever before in his life.130 In addition to a grinding routine of ten- and twelve-hour days, interrupted only by rare weekends at Sagamore Hill, he expounded his board’s policy “again and again in packed halls on the East Side … with temperatures at boiling point, both as regards the weather and the audiences.” Boos greeted his every appearance, but he exuded such charm, vigor, and sincerity (flashing his teeth upon request, and dancing polkas with the girls of the Tee-To-Tum Club) that he usually bowed out to cheers.131
Meanwhile the Sunday Closing crusade went on. More and more saloonkeepers decided that their side-door business was not worth the risk of heavy fines and/or loss of license. On 23 August the Liquor Sellers’ Association, representing some nine thousand of the city’s twelve thousand saloons, came out in favor of total observation of the law, and threatened to expel any members who failed to comply. Its motive, of course, was to make political pressure for repeal overwhelming, but nevertheless the announcement was seen as a psychological victory for Roosevelt. Sunday, 1 September, replaced 28 July as the driest on record.132
“There has not been a more complete triumph of law in the municipal history of New York,” wrote the London Times correspondent. Roosevelt had managed to achieve the impossible by closing the saloons, and getting large crowds of poor people to respect him for it. He himself boasted that he had “never had such a success as in the last four months”—adding the usual disclaimer, “I am not a bit taken in, and … shall not be in the least disappointed when it ends.”133
He scored yet another publicity coup on 25 September, when the United Societies for Liberal Sunday Laws staged a protest parade through Germantown, and sent him a cynical invitation to attend. Few imagined that he would accept. When Roosevelt came drumming up the steps of the reviewing stand on Eighty-sixth Street, Herman Ridder, publisher of the Staats-Zeitung, was convinced he was an impostor. “I’ll go bail he is the genuine article,” laughed the City Comptroller.134
The parade, which took two hours to pass by, was a spectacular demonstration of Teutonic irony.135 Flagstaffs and building facades were draped with purple bunting, symbolizing the death of the “Continental Sunday.” The advance guard consisted of a dozen bicyclists with blue noses and bunches of whiskers under their chins, impersonating upstate “hayseed” legislators. Some thirty thousand marchers followed on in leather trousers, Bismarck helmets, and other ethnic paraphernalia. Saloonkeepers rolled by in open carriages, waving bottles of Rhine wine and a poster declaiming, “T’AINT SUNDAY.” A gilt wagon carried a pretty Fräulein veiled in black, as the mourning Goddess of Liberty. She looked bewildered when Roosevelt loudly applauded her. Another float, labeled “The Millionaire’s Club,” showed three dress-suited toffs—one with prominent teeth and spectacles—swigging champagne, while behind them two policemen arrested a beer-drinker in working clothes. “As this float passed,” reported the World, “Mr. Roosevelt looked serious.”136
For most of the afternoon, however, he beamed with enjoyment. Since he stood on the most prominent part of the platform, it seemed “as if the whole affair were in his honor.”137 Word of his presence spread back down the line, and the paraders twisted their necks to stare at him. One short-sighted veteran peered at the stand and shouted, “Wo ist der Roosevelt?” The Commissioner leaned forward, thumping his chest, and screamed, “Hier bin ich!” At this the marchers, spectators, and everybody on the stand dissolved into helpless laughter. “Teddy, you’re a man!” yelled someone in the crowd.138
Afterward Roosevelt told his hosts he had never had such fun. “But,” he added, “a hundred parades can’t swerve us from doing our duty.” With that he left, carrying two souvenir banners for the wall of his office: “ROOSEVELT’S RAZZLE-DAZZLE REFORM RACKET” and “SEND THE POLICE CZAR TO RUSSIA.” 139
ROOSEVELT’S PUBLIC TRIUMPHS in the summer and early fall of 1895, coupled with his tireless campaigning on behalf of his board and his party, prompted rumors that he was actively working toward the nation’s highest office. The Commercial Advertiser’s above-quoted suggestion that he might succeed Grover Cleveland as President was taken up by the Ithaca Daily News, which formally endorsed him for the Republican nomination in 1896. In Brooklyn, a certain Reverend A. C. Dixon proclaimed from the pulpit the hope that Theodore Roosevelt might soon enter the White House, “as he incarnates the principles upon which Government is founded.”140 At No. 303 Mulberry Street, Jacob Riis serenely countered all criticism of the Commissioner’s high-handed actions with: “Of course! Teddy is bound for the Presidency.” What was more, said Riis, Teddy knew it.
“Let’s ask him,” Lincoln Steffens suggested. The two men dashed across to headquarters and burst into Roosevelt’s office. Riis p
ut the question directly. Was he working to be President? The effect, wrote Steffens, “was frightening.”
TR leaped to his feet, ran around his desk, and fists clenched, teeth bared, he seemed about to throttle Riis, who cowered away, amazed.
“Don’t you dare ask me that,” TR yelled at Riis. “Don’t you put such ideas into my head. No friend of mine would ever say a thing like that, you—you—”
Riis’s shocked face or TR’s recollection that he had few friends as devoted as Jake Riis halted him. He backed away, came up again to Riis, and put his arm over his shoulder. Then he beckoned me close and in an awed tone of voice explained.
“Never, never, you must never either of you remind a man at work on a political job that he may be President. It almost always kills him politically. He loses his nerve; he can’t do his work; he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility. I, for instance, I am going to do great things here, hard things that require all the courage, ability, work that I am capable of … But if I get to thinking of what it might lead to—”
He stopped, held us off, and looked into our faces with his face screwed up into a knot, as with lowered voice he said slowly: “I must be wanting to be President. Every young man does. But I won’t let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will begin to work for it, I’ll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so—I’ll beat myself. See?”
Again he looked at us as if we were enemies; then he threw us away from him and went back to his desk.
“Go on away, now,” he said, “and don’t you ever mention the—don’t you ever mention that to me again.”141
Riis and Steffens were so crestfallen that afterward they did not even mention it to each other. Yet Roosevelt himself could hardly ignore the specter they had raised. He could not stop people addressing him—quite correctly—as “President Roosevelt,” and he would have been less than human had his heart not lurched sometimes at the sound of that phrase.
THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS approached, bringing with them some wintry blasts of political discontent, all seemingly directed at Roosevelt. His anticorruption crusade had been tolerated by the state Republican organization as long as it contributed to the decline of Tammany Hall, but now it began to look as if the reverse effect might be true. There was an ominous contrast between rural and metropolitan voter registrations, the former promising a statewide sweep for the GOP, the latter indicating a Democratic backlash in New York City. Evidently the World’s constant presentation of Roosevelt as a reformer gone mad was having its effect. The Staats-Zeitung, ignoring his happy appearance at the Liberal Laws parade, accused him of having “a grudge against Irish-Americans and German-Americans.” Republican pollsters computed the potential vote loss in each of these communities and blanched. They were not encouraged by Roosevelt’s announced intention to police the election fairly. A less virtuous Commissioner might have been persuaded to influence the voting by a combination of intimidation and selective arrests, but that kind of loyal assistance could hardly be expected from “the Patron Saint of Dry Sundays.”142
Accordingly the Republican Convention at Saratoga endorsed the Excise Law in the vaguest possible terms, hoping to offend neither upstate rural prohibitionists nor thirsty urban workers. Pressure began to build on Roosevelt to moderate his crusade, at least through Election Day. His response was unequivocal and publicly expressed. “The implication is that for the sake of the Republican party, a party of which I am a very earnest member, I should violate my oath of office and connive at lawbreaking … Personally, I think I can best serve the Republican party by taking the police force absolutely out of politics. Our duty is to preserve order, to protect life and property, to arrest criminals, and to secure honest elections.”143
“I shall not alter my course one handsbreadth,” he wrote a worried Cabot Lodge, “even though Tammany carries the city by 50,000.”144
This intransigent attitude had immediate personal consequences. Edward Lauterbach, chairman of the Republican County Committee, issued a statement that the party “was not in any way responsible for Rooseveltism.” Lemuel Quigg, who had backed him for Mayor the year before, reproached him for “base ingratitude” and said their friendship was at an end. “He is a goose,” Roosevelt commented indifferently. Even Mayor Strong, anxious to placate the German-American lobby, said he should either “let up on the saloon” or quit his post. Roosevelt replied that he would do neither. Strong was enraged but powerless.145
Roosevelt put on a cheery front in public, but privately he was depressed by the sudden downturn of his political fortunes. It became increasingly apparent that the city’s Republican voters were going to “bolt” in droves, and that he would be held to blame. His support on the Police Board began to erode. “There is considerable irritation,” the World reported, “because Messrs. Parker, Grant, and Andrews have seemingly lost their identity, and … merged into the great and only Theodore Roosevelt.” He admitted having some “rough times” with his colleagues. “It has only been by a mixture of tact, good humor, and occasional heavy hitting that I have kept each one in line.”146
With the abnormal self-control that always restrained his abnormal pugnacity, Roosevelt managed to avoid an open fight with state party leaders. He knew that the organization could not do without his unique talents as a campaigner. Anxious to reaffirm his party loyalty, he stumped for Republican candidates all over the city, speaking two or three times a night, and made side-trips to local hustings in Boston and Baltimore. “I am almost worn out,” he wrote on his thirty-seventh birthday. “Thank heaven there is only a week more, and then the exhausting six months will be over, and I can ease up a little, no matter which way the battle goes.”147
THE BATTLE WENT to the enemy. Although Republicans won overwhelmingly elsewhere in the state, Tammany Hall saw its full slate of municipal candidates elected by landslide margins. Analysis of the polls showed that 80 percent of the German-American vote, hitherto solidly Republican, had gone Democratic.148 There could hardly have been a more crushing indictment of reform in general, and police reform in particular. The contrast between local and state returns only emphasized Roosevelt’s unpopularity in his native city.
He reacted with oblique rage. On 5 November, the same night the returns came in, he wrote to one of his Civil War heroes, General James Harrison Wilson:
If I were asked what the greatest boon I could confer upon this nation was, I should answer, an immediate war with Great Britain for the conquest of Canada … I will do my very best to bring about the day … I want to drive the Spaniards out of Cuba. I want to stop Great Britain seizing the mouth of the Orinoco. If she does it, then as an offset I want to take the entire valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Saskatchewan, and the Columbia.…149
Next morning he called in his precinct captains and told them that “The Board will not tolerate the slightest relaxation of the enforcement of the laws, and notably of the Excise Law.” But for all this bluster, it was plain his authority had been dealt a mortal blow. Even the loyal New York Times doubted that he would ever again mobilize the police as effectively as he had during the long dry summer of 1895.150
THE YEAR DREW to a close amid rumors that Mayor Strong had formally asked for Roosevelt’s resignation. Both men denied the stories, but Strong was heard to complain at a public banquet, “I thought I would have a pretty easy time until the Police Board came along and tried to make a Puritan out of a Dutchman.” The remark was supposed to be jocular—Strong fancied himself as an amateur comedian—but Roosevelt, sitting at the same table, did not find it at all funny.151
The pace of his “grinding labor” at Police Headquarters did not slacken. If anything it increased, for he was trying to finish the neglected fourth volume of The Winning of the West in between appointments, as well as working full-time on it at weekends. “I should very much like to take a holiday,” he confessed, but felt too insecure in his job to leave town for long.
Friends worried abou
t his health, emotional and physical. “He has grown several years older in the last month,” William Sturgis Bigelow wrote Henry Cabot Lodge. “At this rate it is only a question of time when he has a breakdown, and when he does it will be a bad one.… We shall lose one of the very few really first-class men in the country.”152
Roosevelt’s spirits sank lower as his reserves of physical strength dwindled. “It really seems that there must be some fearful short-coming on my side to account for the fact that I have not one New York City newspaper, nor one New York City politician of note on my side. Don’t think,” he reassured Lodge, “that I even for a moment dream of abandoning my fight; I shall continue absolutely unmoved from my present course and shall accept philosophically whatever violent end may be put to my political career.”153
One person who met him during these dark days was Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. After watching Roosevelt in action at a literary dinner table, and afterward dispensing summary justice in the police courts, Stoker wrote in his diary: “Must be President some day. A man you can’t cajole, can’t frighten, can’t buy.”154
“A man you can’t cajole, can’t frighten, can’t buy.”
Theodore Roosevelt as president of the New York City Police Board. (Illustration 19.2)
CHAPTER 20
The Snake in the Grass
Eric the son of Hakon Jarl
A death-drink salt as the sea
Pledges to thee,
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Page 58