Lodge was at a loss to explain the delay in appointing his deserving young friend. “The only, absolutely the only thing I can hear adverse,” he wrote, “is that there is a fear that you will want to fight somebody at once.”96
This, indeed, was the essence of the problem. In all the welter of contradictory reports, rumors, and ambiguous memoirs surrounding the Navy Department negotiations, one rock constantly breaks the surface: McKinley’s belief that once Roosevelt came to Washington he would seek to involve the United States in war. The President wanted nothing so much as four years of peace and stability, so that the corporate interests he represented could continue their growth. He was by nature a small-town son of the Middle West, who shied away from large schemes and foreign entanglements. (The French Ambassador in Washington found him defensively aware of his own provincialism, “ignorant of the wide world.”)97 But as a Civil War veteran, he had a genuine horror of bloodshed. On the eve of his Inauguration he had told Grover Cleveland that if he could avert the “terrible calamity” of war while in office, he would be “the happiest man in the world.” Mark Hanna felt the same. “The United States must not have any damn trouble with anybody.”98
Roosevelt’s response was to send sweet assurances via Lodge to the Secretary of the Navy, that if appointed, he would faithfully execute Administration policies. What was more, “I shall stay in Washington, hot weather or any other weather, whenever he wants me to stay there …”99 No message could have been more shrewdly calculated to appeal to the Secretary, especially the heavy hint about looking after the department in summer. John D. Long, whom Roosevelt knew well from Civil Service Commission days, was a comfortable old Yankee, mildly hypochondriac, who liked nothing so much as to potter around his country home in Hingham Harbor, Massachusetts, and write little books of poetry with titles like At the Fireside and Bites of a Cherry.100 Long had been reported nervous about Roosevelt’s appointment. “If he becomes Assistant Secretary of the Navy he will dominate the Department within six months!” But now he told Lodge that he would be happy to have the young man aboard, and the pressure on McKinley redoubled.101
Senator Platt capitulated in early April, when he was persuaded by his lieutenants that Roosevelt in Washington would be much less of a nuisance to the organization than Roosevelt in New York. The Easy Boss grudgingly told McKinley to go ahead with the appointment, as long as nobody thought that he had suggested it. “He hates Roosevelt like poison,” remarked a Presidential aide.102
And so, on 6 April 1897, Theodore Roosevelt was nominated as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, at a salary of $4,500 a year. Moved almost to tears by the loyalty of his friends, he telegraphed congratulations:
HON. H. C. LODGE, 1765 MASS AVE., WASHINGTON D.C.
SINDBAD HAS EVIDENTLY LANDED THE OLD MAN OF THE SEA
Two days later the Senate confirmed the appointment. Senator Platt was a noticeable absentee from the floor when the vote was called.103
ANDREW D. PARKER was greatly amused when news of Roosevelt’s imminent departure circulated through Headquarters. “What a glorious retreat!” he exclaimed, and laughed for a long time.104 Contemptuous to the last, he stayed away from Roosevelt’s last Board meeting on Saturday, 17 April. So, too, did Grant, leaving only Avery Andrews to stare across the big table and express polite regrets on behalf of the Police Department. Since there was no quorum, a resolution thanking Roosevelt for his services could not be entered into the minutes. They waited until noon, and then, as Headquarters began to close down for the half-holiday, Roosevelt declared the meeting adjourned. “I am sorry,” he said wistfully. “There were matters of importance which I wished to bring up.” He shook a few hands, then went into his office to pack up his papers.105 Chief Conlin did not come in to say good-bye. Later, when Roosevelt walked down the main corridor for the last time, a guard on duty outside Conlin’s office threw the door open for him. “No,” said Roosevelt, with a gesture of disgust, “I am not going in there.” The guard hesitated. “Well, good-bye, Mr. President.” “Good-bye,” Roosevelt responded, taking his hand. Then, apparently as an afterthought: “I shall be sorry for you when I am gone.”106
ALTHOUGH THE WORLD CLAIMED, with possible truth, that New Yorkers were pleased to see Roosevelt go,107 few could deny that his record as Commissioner was impressive. “The service he has rendered to the city is second to that of none,” commented The New York Times, “and considering the conditions surrounding it, it is in our judgment unequaled.”108 He had proved that it was possible to enforce an unpopular law, and, by enforcing it, had taught the doctrine of respect for the law. He had given New York City its first honest election in living memory. In less than two years, Roosevelt had depoliticized and deethnicized the force, making it once more a neutral arm of government. He had broken its connections with the underworld, toughened the police-trial system, and largely eliminated corruption in the ranks. The attrition rate of venal officers had tripled during his presidency of the Board, while the hiring of new recruits had quadrupled—in spite of Roosevelt’s decisions to raise physical admission standards above those of the U.S. Army, lower the maximum-age requirement, and apply the rules of Civil Service Reform to written examinations. As a result, the average New York patrolman was now bigger, younger, and smarter.109 He was also much more honest, since badges were no longer for sale, and more soldierlike (the military ideal having been a particular feature of the departing commissioner’s philosophy). Between May 1895 and April 1897, Roosevelt had added sixteen hundred such men to the force.110
Those officers he managed to promote before the deadlock began in March 1896 were, with one or two exceptions, men of good quality. They had brought about such an improvement in discipline that even when morale sank to its low ebb a year later, the force was still operating with a fair degree of efficiency. Crime and vice rates were down; order was being kept throughout the city; and police courtesy—a particular obsession of Roosevelt’s—had noticeably improved. During the reform Board’s administration, he had personally brought about the closure of a hundred of the worst tenement slums seen on his famous night patrols. Patrol-wagon response was quicker; many new station-houses had been built, and other ones modernized; marksmanship scores (thanks to the adoption of the standardized .32 Colt) were climbing; and the “bicycle squad,” first of its kind in the world, was being imitated all over the United States and in Europe.111
Unfortunately Roosevelt’s genius for moral warfare obscured his more practical achievements as Commissioner, both during his tenure and for some time after he left Mulberry Street. An inescapable aura of defeat clouded his resignation.112 He was the first among his colleagues to quit, having served less than one-third of a six-year term. No matter what he said about “an honorable way out of this beastly job,”113 the fact remained that he was leaving a position of supreme responsibility for a subservient one. Perhaps that is why Commissioner Parker found his retreat so funny.
Others found it sad—particularly the stoop-sitters of No. 303, who missed him more and more as life on Mulberry Street returned slowly to normal. The next president of the Police Board, Frank Moss, was an ardent reformer who insisted on continuing Roosevelt’s policies, but his teeth inspired no metaphors, and his ascent of the front steps of Police Headquarters lacked spectator interest. Board meetings were held twice weekly as usual, but with no “boss leader of men” to blow up at Parker’s taunts they were anticlimactic. As the Harper’s Weekly man remarked, the Roosevelt Commissionership “was never in the least dull.” It had been “one long elegant shindy” from the day he took office to the day he resigned.114
Ironically, Parker’s power began to wane in the months following Roosevelt’s departure.115 His partnership with Frederick D. Grant broke up in June, when the latter resigned in order to rejoin the Army, and was replaced by a Commissioner who naturally sided with Moss and Andrews. On 12 July, Governor Frank S. Black denied Mayor Strong’s attempt to oust Parker, saying that the evidence against him was patentl
y “trivial.”116 But this proved a Pyrrhic victory, for the resignation of Chief Conlin on 24 July left Parker without an ally at Headquarters. He was unable to prevent the promotion—at last—of Roosevelt’s protégés, Brooks and McCullagh, along with a large number of other worthy officers whose rise had been blocked beneath them. Inspector McCullagh subsequently became Chief, to Roosevelt’s great delight.117 Mayor Strong did not run for reelection in November. As Boss Richard Croker had predicted, the people grew weary of reform, and voted for a return of the old Democracy. By the end of the year it was business as usual at Tammany Hall.118
WHAT HAPPENED TO Andrew D. Parker in the years that followed is not known. He vanishes from history as he entered it, a handsome, smiling enigma. The stoop-sitters were never able to agree as to the reason for his poisonous hostility to Theodore Roosevelt. Riis suggested pure “spite,” Steffens the more abstract pleasure of a man who “liked to sit back and pull wires, just to see the puppets jump.”119 Other theories were advanced, of greater and less complexity, but never, it seems, the most fundamental of all: that Parker simply hated Roosevelt and wished to do him ill. Those who loved Roosevelt were so many, and so ardent, that they found it hard to believe that a certain minority always detested him. Parker was of this ilk. He was also, as it happened, the only associate whom Roosevelt never managed to bend to his own will, and, significantly, the only adversary from whom that happy warrior ever ran away.
CHAPTER 22
The Hot Weather Secretary
With his own hand fearless
Steered he the Long Serpent,
Strained the creaking cordage,
Bent each boom and gaff.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S WELLSPRINGS of nostalgia for boyhood and youth tended always to surge and spill in moments of self-fulfillment. So, as he prepared to take office as Assistant Secretary of the Navy on 19 April 1897, memories flooded back of his revered uncle James Bulloch, builder of the Confederate warship Alabama, and of his mother, who used “to talk to me as a little shaver about ships, ships, ships, and fighting of ships, till they sank into the depths of my soul.” Allowing the stream of consciousness to flow unchecked, he recalled how as a Harvard senior he had dreamed of writing The Naval War of 1812: “when the professor thought I ought to be on mathematics and the languages, my mind was running to ships that were fighting each other.”1
The past was still much in his thoughts when he searched for a suitable desk in the Navy Department’s storage room. He selected the massive piece of mahogany used by Assistant Secretary Gustavus Fox, another juvenile hero, during the Civil War. Especially pleasing, to Roosevelt’s eye, were two beautifully carved monitors which bulged out of each side-panel, trailing rudders and anchors, and a group of wooden cannons protecting the wooden Stars and Stripes, about where his belly would be when he leaned forward to write.2 The desk was dusted and polished and carried up to his freshly painted office. When Roosevelt sat down behind it, he could swivel in his chair and gaze through the window at the White House lawns and gardens—a view equally as good as that enjoyed by the Secretary of the Navy himself.3
“No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.”
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt at the Naval War College, 2 June 1897. (Illustration 22.1)
“BEST MAN FOR THE JOB,” John D. Long wrote in his diary after his first formal meeting with Roosevelt. Whatever misgivings he may have had about him earlier soon changed to avuncular fondness. The young New Yorker was polite, charming, and seemed to be sincere in promising to be “entirely loyal and subordinate.”4 Long concluded that Roosevelt would be an ideal working partner, amply compensating for his own lack of naval expertise, yet unlikely, on the grounds of immaturity, to usurp full authority.
Certainly the Secretary was everything the Assistant Secretary was not. Small, soft, plump, and white-haired, Long looked and acted like a Dickensian grandfather, although he was in fact only fifty-eight.5 Nobody would want to hurt, or bewilder, such a “perfect dear”—to use Roosevelt’s own affectionate phrase.6 The mild eyes beamed with kindness rather than intelligence, and they clouded quickly with boredom when naval conversation became too technical. Abstruse ordnance specifications and blueprints for dry-dock construction were best left to specialists, in Long’s opinion; he saw no reason to tax his brain unnecessarily.7 Fortunately Roosevelt had a gargantuan appetite for such data, and could safely be entrusted with them. Long was by nature indolent: his gestures were few and tranquil, and there was a slowness in his gait which regular visits to the corn doctor did little to improve. From time to time he would indulge in bursts of hard, efficient work, but always felt the need to “rest up” afterward. On the whole he was content to watch the Department function according to the principles of laissez-faire.8
Roosevelt had no objection to this policy. The less work Long wanted to do, the more power he could arrogate to himself. His own job was so loosely defined by Congress that it could expand to embrace any duties “as may be prescribed by the Secretary of the Navy.” All he had to do was win Long’s confidence, while unobtrusively relieving him of more and more responsibility. By summer, with luck, he would be so much in control that Long might amble off to Massachusetts for a full two months, leaving him to push through his own private plans as Acting Secretary. But no matter how calculating this strategy, there was nothing insincere about Roosevelt’s frequently voiced praises of John D. Long. “My chief … is one of the most high-minded, honorable, and upright gentlemen I have ever had the good fortune to serve under.”9
The American press was largely optimistic about Long and Roosevelt as a team. “Nearly everybody in Washington is glad that Theodore Roosevelt [has come] back to the capital,” reported the Chicago Times-Herald correspondent. “He is by long odds one of the most interesting of the younger men seen here in recent years.” The Washington Post looked forward to lots of hot copy, now the famous headliner was back in town. “Of course he will bring with him … all that machinery of disturbance and upheaval which is as much a part of his entourage as the very air he breathes, but who knows that the [Navy Department] will not be the better for a little dislocation and readjustment?”10
Overseas newspapers, such as the London Times, took rather less pleasure in the “menacing” prospect of Roosevelt influencing America’s naval policy. With Cuba and Hawaii ripe for conquest and annexation, “what now seems ominous is his extreme jingoism.”11
Roosevelt knew that President McKinley and Chairman (now Senator) Hanna shared this nervousness, and he was at pains to reassure them, as well as Long, that he intended to be a quiet, obedient servant of the Administration. “I am sedate now,” he laughingly told a Tribune reporter. All the same he could not resist inserting four separate warnings of possible “trouble with Cuba” into a memorandum on fleet preparedness requested by President McKinley on 26 April. The document, which was written and delivered that same day, could not otherwise be faulted for its effortless sorting out of disparate facts of marine dynamics, repair and maintenance schedules, geography and current affairs. Roosevelt had been at his desk for just one week.12
“He is one hell of a Secretary,” Congressman W. I. Guffin remarked to Senator Shelby Cullom, unconsciously dropping the qualifier in Roosevelt’s title.13
SEDATE AS HIS OFFICIAL image may have been in the early spring of 1897, his private activities more than justified foreign dread of his appointment. Quickly, efficiently, and unobtrusively, he established himself as the Administration’s most ardent expansionist. A new spirit of intrigue affected his behavior, quite at odds with his usual policy of operating “in the full glare of public opinion.” Never more than a casual clubman, he began to lunch and dine almost daily at the Metropolitan Club, assembling within its exclusive confines a coterie much more influential than the old Hay-Adams circle, now broken up.14 It consisted of Senators and Representatives, Navy and Army officers, writers, socialites, lawyers, and scientists—men linked as much by Roos
evelt’s motley personality as by their common political belief, namely, that Manifest Destiny called for the United States to free Cuba, annex Hawaii, and raise the American flag supreme over the Western Hemisphere.
This expansionist lobby was not entirely Roosevelt’s creation. Its original members had begun to work together in the last months of the Harrison Administration, as America’s last frontier fell and Hawaii simultaneously floated into the national consciousness. But their organization had remained loose, and their foreign policy uncoordinated, all through the Cleveland Administration, partly due to the President’s own ambivalent attitudes to Hawaii on the one hand and Venezuela on the other. Not until William McKinley took office, amid reports of Japanese ambitions in the Pacific and increased Spanish repression in the Caribbean, did the expansionists begin to close ranks, and cast about for a natural leader.15
Whether they chose to follow Roosevelt, or Roosevelt chose to lead them, is a Tolstoyan question of no great consequence given the group’s unanimity of purpose. Examples of how he used Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan and Commodore George Dewey to advance his own interest, while also advancing their own, merit separate consideration. Other members of the lobby included Senators Henry Cabot Lodge, William E. Chandler, W. P. Frye, and “Don” Cameron, all powers on the Hill; Commander Charles H. Davis, Chief of Naval Intelligence; the philosopher Brooks Adams, shyer, more intense, and to some minds more brilliant than his older brother, Henry; Clarence King, whose desire to liberate Cuba was not lessened by his lust for mulatto women; and jolly Judge William H. Taft of the Sixth Circuit, the most popular man in town. Charles A. Dana, editor of the Sun, and John Hay, now Ambassador to the Court of St. James, represented the Roosevelt point of view in New York and London.16 Many other men of more or less consequence cooperated with these in the effort to make America a world power before the turn of the century, and they looked increasingly to Theodore Roosevelt for inspiration as 1897 wore on.17
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Page 64