The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  114. Lod.56; See N.Y.T., Nov. 30, 1888: “Cleverly told, very handsome and interesting.” Also The Book Buyer, Dec. 1888: “To a most readable style of writing Mr. Roosevelt adds a thorough familiarity with his subject, happily combining accuracy with entertainment.”

  115. TR to B, July 13, 1888.

  116. Mor.145–9; TR to B, Sep. 18, 1888.

  117. Ib.; Mor.147.

  118. Mor.142.

  119. Pla.252: “… he was as glacial as a Siberian stripped of his furs.”

  120. Mor.148; Tha.84.

  121. Mor.149.

  122. Manuscript in New York Public Library.

  123. TR to B, n.d., 1888.

  124. COW.

  125. George Haven Putnam in TR.Wks.IX.xv; see also Mor.197.

  126. Mor.163.

  127. Ib., 156.

  128. Ib.

  129. Lod.74.

  130. Gar.104; Har.74.

  131. Mor.154.

  132. Lod.76; HCL to W. R. Thayer, Oct. 7, 1919.

  133. There is a good account of these celebrations in the Sun, May 1, 1889.

  134. Ib.; Foraker, Mrs. Julia, I Would Live It Again (Harpers, 1932) 167–8.

  16: THE SILVER-PLATED REFORM COMMISSIONER

  Important sources not listed in Bibliography: 1. 51st Congress, 1st session, Report of the House Committee on Civil Service Reform, Serial #2823, Document #2445 (1890). Hereafter cited as House Report 1. 2. Foulke, William D., Fighting the Spoilsmen: Reminiscences of the Civil Service Reform Movement (Putnam, 1919).

  1. The following description is based on the unexcelled reporting of “Carp” (Frank G. Carpenter, Washington correspondent of the Cleveland Daily Leader) excerpted in Carp’s Washington (McGraw-Hill, 1960). Other details from Green, Constance McLaughlin, Washington—Capital City, 1879–1950 (Princeton U. Press, 1962) Vol. 2 passim; contemporary guidebooks.

  2. G. W. Steevens, qu. Green, Washington, 77.

  3. Ib., 77–8.

  4. Green, Washington, 12.

  5. Carpenter, 102.

  6. Ib., 8, 296–7.

  7. Ib., 110, 306, 329, 80 ff.

  8. See, e.g., Gar.104.

  9. Washington Post, May 12, 19, 1889

  10. Green, Washington, 13.

  11. Figures projected from those qu. ib., 80.

  12. See Lod.77.

  13. Washington Star, May 13, 1889; ib., May 19. The appointment was made official on May 7, 1889.

  14. W. Star, May 13, 1889.

  15. The author may be forgiven this surmise. If anything was at all times predictable about TR, it was his habit of taking stairs two—or even three—at a time. William Loeb, Jr., his godson, remembers him in gouty old age, thundering upstairs with boyish energy. “I didn’t know any other adults that ran upstairs. The ones I knew generally walked.” (To author, Feb. 28, 1975.) The location of the Civil Service Commission (henceforth CSC) is given in Halloran, Matthew F., The Romance of the Merit System (Washington, 1929) 51–2 and 166–7. Note that Pringle’s location (Pri.121) is incorrect. The CSC did not move to Eighth and E until later.

  16. Halloran, Romance, 56.

  17. W. Star, May 13, 1891.

  18. Bis.I.46. Within ten months of becoming Commissioner, TR’s effective power in the agency was estimated as “two-thirds” by the Chicago Morning News (Mar. 28, 1890) and “seven-eighths” by another paper (TR.Scr.).

  19. Mor.192. At various points in the TR/Lodge correspondence Lyman is “dreary,” “mushy,” and “a chump.” (Oct. 27, 1889; Aug. 23, Sep. 23, 1890.)

  20. TR to B, n.d., 1889 (TRB).

  21. See Halloran, n. 15 above.

  22. Thayer, William Roscoe, TR: An Intimate Biography (Houghton Mifflin, 1919) 88.

  23. For the early history of Civil Service Reform up to and including TR’s Commissionership, see Sageser, A. Bower, “The First Two Decades of the Pendleton Act,” Nebraska University Studies, Vols. 34–35 (1934–35); White, D., The Republican Era, 1869–1901 (Macmillans, 1958); van Riper, Paul, History of the USCSC (Evanston, Ill., 1958); Hoogenboom, Ari, “The Pendleton Act and the Civil Service,” American Historical Review, 64.2 (Jan. 1959).

  24. Mor.57, 154, 153 Foulke, Spoilsmen, 12.

  25. W. Star, May 14, 1889; Wise, John S., Recollections of Thirteen Presidents (NY, 1906) 200.

  26. See Sto.164; also 181–4; Depew, Chauncey, My Memories of Eighty Years (Scribner’s, 1922) 133–4.

  27. Qu. Carpenter, 305.

  28. W. Post, May 15, 1889.

  29. W. Star, May 14; W. Post, May 15, 1889.

  30. Ib.; Har.78; Pri.123. Carl Schurz wrote that Wanamaker’s appointment “was the first instance in the history of the Republic that a place in the Cabinet had been given for a pecuniary consideration.” Sageser, “Two Decades,” 135.

  31. Foulke, William D., Lucius Burrie Swift (Bobbs-Merrill, 1930) 39.

  32. Ib., 41; Pri.123.

  33. Foulke, Spoilsmen, 11–12; USCSC, Sixth Report (1889).

  34. Bis.I.45; Halloran, Romance, 52–5.

  35. Ib., 76.

  36. It is amusing for those familiar with TR’s love of making delayed entrances to follow the shrewd build-up of suspense that preceded his arrival in Washington. Although he had long since accepted the Commissionership, he deliberately avoided telling his colleagues when he would report for duty. The press daily enquired as to TR’s whereabouts, and the Commissioners daily replied that they did not know. Lyman even exclaimed, rather irritably, that he still had “no intimation” whether TR would indeed take the job. Consequently, when the laggard arrived at last, on May 13, his oath-taking rated front-page headlines in that evening’s paper, along with the information that he had established himself in the CSC’s largest office. See W. Star, May 8, 9, 10, and 13, 1889.

  37. Mor.8.1429; N.Y. Tribune, May 22, 1889; Foulke, Spoilsmen, 13.

  38. Mor.165; W. Star, June 18, 1889; Foulke, Swift, 37; Foulke, Spoilsmen, 13. According to the N.Y. Evening Post, June 19, Wallace was BH’s old law partner.

  39. W. Star, June 19, 1889; Foulke, Swift, 37.

  40. Foulke, Spoilsmen, 13–14; Swift, 37.

  41. Foulke, Spoilsmen, 14; see also W. Star, June 19, 1889.

  42. Mor.165, 166.

  43. Ib.

  44. Milwaukee Daily Journal, June 20, 1889; House Report 1, 307.

  45. Lod.79.

  46. House Report 1, 150, 161.

  47. Ib., 324, 326, and passim.

  48. Ib., 220, 263, 303

  49. Ib., 303.

  50. W. Post, June 25, 1889, has text of the first report; House Report 1, 324 ff. has text of the second. See also ib., 175.

  51. Ib., 327.

  52. Mor.167.

  53. Ib., 168.

  54. Sample editorial opinion, in Chicago Morning News, June 26, 1889: “One of the conspicuous successes of President Harrison’s administration is the Hon. Teddy Roosevelt … More power to him! He has made various spoilsmen of his party as mad as hornets, and he seems to be glad of it.” TR.Scr. give a good idea of the publicity surrounding his Midwestern “slam”: it made headlines as far away as San Francisco.

  55. Mor.168–9.

  56. N.Y. Trib., June 30, 1889.

  57. Mor.173.

  58. House Report 1, 177–80. See also testimony below.

  59. TR to HCL, July 11, 1889. A fair example of the invective which Lodge deleted when preparing his correspondence with TR for publication. See Bibl., LOD.

  60. Mor.171–2.

  61. House Report 1, 150.

  62. Details from Carpenter, 237–8; W. Post and Star, July–Aug. 1889, passim.

  63. Mor.169, 172, 177, 174.

  64. Ib., 172.

  65. Ib., fn.

  66. N.Y. Herald, July 28, 1889; W. Post, July 29, 1889.

  67. Reprinted in W. Post, July 31, 1889.

  68. W. Post, Aug. 1, 1889; Mor.182; Sievers, Harry J., Benjamin Harrison (New York, 1960), III, 86.

  69. Sun, Aug. 1, 1889.

  70. W. Post, Aug. 2 and 3, 1889.

/>   71. Ib., Aug. 5, 1889.

  72. W. Star, Aug. 5, 1889; Mor.1. 185–6. An intimate of the Harrison Administration remarked at this time that TR was altogether too fond of talking to the press. L. T. Michener to E. W. Halford, Aug. 9, 1889.

  73. Mor.182.

  74. The following two paras. are taken almost verbatim from TR.Wks.II. 240–1.

  75. Ib.

  76. Ib., 242; TR, qu. Cut.51.

  77. Mor. 175.

  78. See Utley, George B., “TR’s The Winning of the West: Some Unpublished Letters,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXX (1944) 469.

  79. Dial, Vol. X.112 (Aug. 1889).

  80. Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1889. See Utley, “TR’s WW,” 499 ff. for TR’s rueful but appreciative response, and for his subsequent relations with Poole. See, for other assessments of TR the historian, Har.53–61 and 526; Lasch, Christopher, ed., WW by TR (NY 1963) intro.; Wish, Harvey, American Historians: A Selection (NY, 1962); Gable, John A., “TR as Historian and Man of Letters,” cited Ch. 15, n. 55. For other contemporary reviews of WW, see N.Y.T., July 7, 1889; New Englander and Yale Review, 52 (1890); and The Critic, Aug. 3, 1889, which predicted that WW, with all its faults, “will rank among American historical writings of the first order.”

  81. Sun, Sep. 22, 1889; Mor.188–90.

  82. Mor.188 fn.

  83. Ib., 192.

  84. Sun, Oct. 6, 1889.

  85. The complete texts of both TR’s letters are in Mor. 194–7.

  86. TR to B, Oct. 15, 1889.

  87. Hag.RF.18; EKR to TR re finances, passim (Derby mss.); TR to B, Oct. 13, 1889.

  88. Cecil Spring-Rice, qu. Gwy.101.

  89. Lod.196; Mor.199.

  90. USCSC, Sixth Report (1889).

  91. Dun.I.20. Early in the year, Congressman Reed had obligingly helped Lodge in his attempts to get TR a place in the government. For the relationship of the two most charismatic figures in late-nineteenth-century American politics, see R. Hal Williams, “ ‘Dear Tom,’ ‘Dear Theodore’: The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas B. Reed,” Theodore Roosevelt Journal 20 (1995) 3–4.

  92. Lod.88.

  93. St.177; Mor.210.

  94. TR to B, Oct. 13, 1889.

  95. Ib., Dec. 31; Utley, “TR’s WW,” 505; Mor.200.

  96. Foraker, Julia, I Would Live It Again (Harpers, 1932) 133.

  97. See W. Post, Jan. 2, 1890.

  98. Sto.235; Foraker, Again, 7.

  99. Mor.3.486.

  100. TR to B, Feb. 13, 1890.

  101. Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (Houghton Mifflin, 1974) 332; Den.339.

  102. See, e.g., Pla.214–5; Foraker, Again, 170; Gar.109; Butler, Nicholas Murray, Across the Busy Years (Scribner’s, 1940) 297–8; Sto.189.

  103. Qu. Sto.190.

  104. McCall, Samuel W., Thomas B. Reed (Houghton Mifflin, 1914) 248; character sketch, anon., TRB mss.

  105. McCall, Reed, 147–8; Gar.109; Butler, Years, 297–8; Gwy.105.

  106. Tha.55; Den.119. See J. B. Moore to Tyler Dennett, Nov. 18, 1929, Tyler Dennett Papers, LC, on the “distinctly effeminate” interdependence of Hay and Adams.

  107. Hay, John, with John G. Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols., 1890; Adams, Henry, History of the United States from 1801 to 1817, 9 vols., 1889–91.

  108. “Good luck,” he wrote toward the end of his life, “has pursued me like my own shadow.”—to Henry Adams, July 14, 1901.

  109. Qu. Samuels, Ernest, Henry Adams (Harvard, 1958–64) II.262.

  110. Ib., 3.32.

  111. Mor.6.1490.

  112. TR to HCL, Feb. 15, 1887 (LOD.).

  113. Mor.6.1490.

  114. This portrait, and that of Hay above, is the author’s own, based on his reading of the private and published words of Adams, Hay, and TR, as well as their respective biographies.

  115. Adams, Education, 417.

  116. Ada.350.

  117. Adams’s wife, a precociously intelligent woman with manic-depressive tendencies, had committed suicide in December 1885. See Samuels, Adams, II.270–276.

  118. Samuels, Adams, III passim; Cater, Harold, ed., Henry Adams and His Friends (Houghton Mifflin, 1947) intro., passim; Gwy. passim. See also Lacey, Michael J., “The Mysteries of Earth-Making Dissolve: A Study of Washington’s Intellectual Community and the Origins of American Environmentalism in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1979.

  119. Adams actually asked TR to live rent-free in his house with him in 1889, and was rather put out when the Commissioner declined to do so. See also Samuels, Adams, II.414; Cha.195.

  120. At the White House, E. W. Halford, the President’s secretary, thoughtlessly introduced TR to one of the leading Republican spoilsmen. A violent quarrel ensued, and would have led to fisticuffs had Halford not intervened. Halford in “R’s Introduction to Washington,” Leslie’s Magazine, Mar. 1, 1919.

  121. Mor.210.

  122. Williams, Cleveland, “TR, Civil Service Commissioner,” U. Chicago dissertation, June 1955, 86.

  123. W. Post, Jan. 21, 1890.

  124. Ib.

  125. House Report 1, 2. Other details covering the hearing are taken from Washington papers covering the proceedings, mainly Post and Star.

  126. W. Post, Feb. 27, 1890.

  127. House Report 1, 150.

  128. W. Post, Mar. 1, 1890; House Report 1, 153, 191. Dr. Shidy was hurriedly fired by the Census Bureau.

  129. W. Post, Mar. 1, 1890.

  130. House Report 1, 163.

  131. Ib., 164–5.

  132. Ib., 165–6; 168–71.

  133. Ib., 174–5.

  134. See Wag. 148–9, 203–7.

  135. House Report 1, 177.

  136. Ib., 178.

  137. Ib., 179–80.

  138. Ib., 313.

  139. Williams, “TR, CSC,” 87. The Committee, nevertheless, went ahead with its recommendation; but the House did not agree. White, Republican Era, 326.

  140. TR (1912) qu. Sto.7.

  141. Statement by J. J. Leary in TRB mss. There is another version of this anecdote (which Greenhalge confirmed) in Halloran, Romance, 85. The latter, however, appears to misdate it as 1891. Greenhalge must surely have made the remark in 1890, around the time he was personally encountering TR at the hearings. TR’s political stock was high then; as will be seen, it fell precipitately in 1891.

  142. Mor.220.

  143. W. Post, May 6, 1890. It may have been the morning after this editorial that TR was seen pacing up and down outside the Post Office building, waiting for Hatton to show up. “I want to punch his head.” Dun.I.19.

  144. Mor. 215; 211. TR’s “The Merit System versus the Patronage System” (Century, Feb. 1890) may be taken as his definitive statement on Civil Service Reform. It is reprinted in TR.Wks.XIV. 99 ff.

  145. Mor.221. TR knew Mahan slightly, having met him in 1887. Their relationship, which was to develop apace during the 1890s, will be analyzed in Ch. 22.

  146. See Chs. 22 and 23; also O’Gara, Gordon Carpenter, TR and the Rise of the Modern Navy (Princeton U. Press, 1969) for TR’s Presidential naval policies.

  147. House Report 1, v. Sageser, “Two Decades,” 146, says that Lyman was censured unjustly. The facts of the case indicate otherwise.

  148. See ib., 146 for an analysis of the media blitz following the committee’s report.

  149. Ib.; N.Y. Saturday Globe, Mar. 8, 1890.

  150. Gwy.106.

  151. Mor.229, 230; Cut.72.

  152. COW; Mor.233. Edith Roosevelt had just turned 29.

  153. Mor.234; Sullivan, Mark, The Education of an American (Doubleday, 1938), 272–74; TR to HCL, Oct. 4, 1890 (LOD.).

  154. Sto.215. The majority was 255 to 88.

  155. Mor.236; Boston Evening Transcript, Oct. 30, 1890.

  156. TR to B, Dec. 26, 1890.

  157. Cha.195.

  17: THE DEAR OLD BELOVED BROTHER

  Important sources not listed in Bi
bliography: 1. Report of Commissioner Roosevelt concerning Political Assessments and the use of Official Influence to Control Elections in the Federal Offices at Baltimore, Md. (USCS, Government Printing Office, May 1891). Hereafter cited as Baltimore Report. 2. 52nd Congress, 2nd session, Report of the House Committee on Reform in the Civil Service, June 21, 1892, Misc. Doc. #289, Report #1669. Hereafter cited as House Report 2.

  1. TR to B, May 23, 1891.

  2. See Las.30 ff. for an account of E’s life as a Hempstead “swell.” Wise, John S., Recollections of Thirteen Presidents (NY, 1906) 244.

  3. Las.8. “He became a drunkard because he was an epileptic … in the family we understood that.” Mrs. Longworth int., Nov. 1954, TRB.

  4. See p. 132; also TR to B, May 10, 1890, when he says that E has been drinking for “a dozen years.” TR to B, Apr. 30, 1890.

  5. Sun, World, Aug. 18, 1891, also Las.30–4.

  6. COW; Las.36; TR to B, passim, 1891.

  7. TR to B, Jan. 25, 1891.

  8. TR to B, passim, 1891, and below.

  9. TR to B, Jan. 25, 1891; ib., Mar. 1.

  10. See Wag.87–8; TR to B, Mar. 1, 1891.

  11. Ib., Jan. 25, 1891. For other examples of TR’s curious, neo-Christian morality, see Wag.85–92.

  12. Ib., and below.

  13. TR to B, Feb. 22, 1891; ib., Feb. 15.

  14. Ib., Mar. 1, 1891; COW; also Las.34 ff.

  15. The legitimate baby was due in late June 1891. For lack of evidence we can only assume that the illegitimate baby was due in March or April 1891, E having departed for Europe the previous July (Sun, Aug. 17, 1891). It may have been due earlier, but as Katy Mann began her legal action only in January 1891, her pregnancy was surely not far advanced.

  16. Mor.237.

  17. Mor.238. BH eventually yielded to TR’s entreaties, and extended the rules to cover a token 626 places in the Bureau. See below for TR’s further efforts on behalf of reservation Indians.

  18. Reed was an advocate of the spoils system, and his campaign for favorable votes during the appropriations crisis surprised many colleagues. “Well, I didn’t know you were in love with Civil Service Reform,” said a Tennessee member. “I don’t like it straight,” Reed admitted, “but mixed with a little Theodore Roosevelt, I like it well.” Columbus (O.) Press, May 8, 1892.

  19. New York (“Historic Towns” Series, Longmans, Green & Co., 1891—issued simultaneously in New York and London). Reprinted in TR.Wks.X.339–547.