But by his sophomore year, Theodore had lost interest in the natural sciences as a career because Harvard “utterly ignored the possibilities of the faunal naturalist, the outdoor naturalist and observer of nature.” He wanted to be in the forest or in the jungle rather than in a laboratory.
When Theodore went home for Christmas he found that his father, who was only forty-six, looked notably older. And he was suffering from severe stomach pain. It turned out to be stomach cancer. On February 9, 1878, Thee died. “I felt as if I had been stunned, or as if part of my life had been taken away,” Theodore wrote. He was “the one I loved dearest on earth.” For months afterward, Theodore imagined his father was nearby. “I almost feel as if he were present with me,” he told his mother. That June in the Presbyterian church near the family’s rented summer home at Oyster Bay, New York, Theodore said he saw Thee in a pew “as distinctly as if he were alive.”
Theodore as a student at Harvard.
As his grief subsided, Theodore seemed more determined than ever to please his father. “With the help of my God,” he vowed, “I will try to lead such a life as he would have wished.” He began thinking seriously about adult responsibilities. “I wonder who my wife will be! ‘A rare and radiant maiden,’ I hope; one who will be as sweet, pure, and innocent as she is wise,” he confided to his diary. “Thank heaven I am at least perfectly pure.”
In the autumn of his junior year at Harvard, Theodore fell in love with a lively seventeen-year-old named Alice Lee. She was blond, blue-eyed, and, at five feet six inches, just a little shorter than he was. Her family was rich and old Boston. Immediately smitten, Theodore told Alice, “I care for nothing whatever else but for you.” On Valentine’s Day of 1880, four months before graduation, the couple announced their engagement. They were married October 27, which was Theodore’s twenty-second birthday. The night before the wedding the groom wrote, “My happiness is so great it makes me almost afraid.”
The newlyweds moved into Mittie’s Manhattan mansion. When they returned to New York in the autumn of 1881 from a five-month honeymoon in Europe, Theodore had to face a problem familiar to many young adults: what to do with his life.
It was curiosity, Theodore later explained, that led him to a saloon on 59th Street and up the stairs to a barnlike room furnished with benches and spittoons. It was the headquarters, “a kind of club-room” Theodore recalled, for the 21st District Republican Association, where lawyers, saloon keepers, horsecar conductors, and tough guys from the tenements spent many of their evenings.
At that time, the Republican and Democratic political parties were a bigger part of men’s lives than today. More than three-quarters of all voters belonged to one party or the other. (Today about two-thirds of all voters are affiliated with the two major parties.) In the days before radio, television, movies, and big-league sports, politics, with its passionate speakers and torch light parades at election time, was entertainment. But it was serious as well.
The United States was changing rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century. After the Civil War, European immigrants poured into New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and other already large cities, tripling the nation’s population. Instead of working on farms or in trades such as blacksmithing or barrel making, more people were working in corporations and factories. Government then didn’t regulate businesses or factories to make sure they were safe places to work or inspect food to make sure it was safe to eat. Previous generations of Americans hadn’t wanted government services or regulations. But as the United States grew larger and more complex, Americans believed government should try to make day-to-day life safe and orderly. Many political battles were over the role of government.
Theodore complained that too many young people in his crowd in Manhattan and at Harvard felt that public life was beneath them. There was a “deplorable lack of interest in the political questions of the day among respectable, well-educated men.” He knew that politics was “rough and brutal and unpleasant to deal with.” But, as Theodore wrote in one of his many letters to friends and family, which he often signed TR, he wanted to “be of the governing class.”
Theodore hadn’t planned on being a candidate for political office when Joe Murray, one of the 21st District Republican Association’s leaders, asked him to run for state assembly. Murray thought Theodore’s fresh face and prominent name would win votes. Murray was right. The candidate did little campaigning, and he won easily with 3,490 votes to the other guy’s 1,989. Although Theodore wouldn’t realize it until years later, he had embarked on his life’s work.
2
THE IMPRESSION THAT Theodore Roosevelt made when he first appeared as an assemblyman in Albany, New York, was not exactly the kind politicians dream of making.
“Suddenly our eyes … became glued on a young man who was coming in through the door,” a fellow assemblyman described the first time he saw Theodore. “His hair was parted in the center, and he had sideburns. He wore a single eyeglass, with a gold chain over his ear. He had on a cutaway coat with one button at the top, and the ends of its tails almost reached the tops of his shoes. He carried a gold-headed cane in one hand, a silk hat in the other, and he walked in the bent over fashion that was the style with the young men of the day. His trousers were as tight as a tailor could make them, and had a bell shaped bottom to cover his shoes.”
Republicans and Democrats alike in the state capitol immediately dismissed the new guy, who was the assembly’s youngest member, as a “society man and a dude” and a “kid glove, scented, silk stocking, poodle-headed, degenerate” aristocrat. The insults and bullying that first term, Theodore recalled, reminded him of being a new boy at school. And he was one new boy who didn’t back down from any kind of confrontation.
Theodore, who was five feet eight inches and weighed 140 pounds, stood up to “Big John” McManus, a “huge, fleshy, unutterably coarse and low brute” when he heard the Democratic assemblyman wanted to toss him in a blanket. Blanket tossing is a form of mild hazing in which a group of people hold the edges of a blanket and repeatedly toss their victim high into the air. “By God if you try anything like that,” he warned McManus, a former prize fighter, “I’ll bite you, I’ll kick you in the balls, I’ll do anything to you—you’d better leave me alone.”
In another incident, on a cold winter evening Theodore and two colleagues stopped by a popular Albany saloon. A Democratic assemblyman made a wisecrack about the short jacket Theodore was wearing. “Won’t Mama’s boy catch cold?” Theodore, one of his companions said, flared up and “knocked him down and he got up and he hit him again, and when he got up he hit him again.” Maybe it was his thick glasses and slight build, but few people would have guessed the “dude” had begun boxing at age twelve and in his junior year at Harvard had finished second in a boxing championship.
Verbal confrontations were more common for him, though, and Theodore was better with words than fists. He described one Democrat as “either dumb or an idiot; probably both.” Democrats of Irish heritage such as John McManus were “a stupid, sodden, vicious lot, most of them being equally deficient in brains and virtue.” Theodore used his harshest language on Democrats, but he didn’t spare fellow Republicans. About as smart as “an average balloon” is how he described one man. And another was “entirely unprincipled, with the same idea of Public Life and Civil Service that a vulture had of a dead sheep.”
Theodore stood out in many ways. He had a laugh that his own mother described as an “ungreased squeak,” and when he wanted to speak in the assembly, which was often, his high-pitched, upper-class voice pierced the capitol’s cathedral-like chamber, “mister spee-kar, mister spee-kar.” In political debates, a colleague explained there “wasn’t anything cool about him. He yelled and pounded his desk and when they attacked him, he would fire back with all the venom imaginable. He was the most indiscreet guy I ever met.” One journalist noted that Theodore fought tooth and nail with “a trait of ruthless righteousness.”
Th
eodore’s energy impressed everyone who knew him. In the Albany boardinghouse where he lived during the week, Assemblyman Billy Hunt recalled, he “would come into the house like a thunder bolt… . Such a super-abundance of animal life was hardly ever condensed in a human life.”
Because of his energy and combative personality one newspaper called him “the Cyclone Assemblyman.” The Cyclone ended his first legislative session by ripping into Judge T. R. Westbrook, a powerful state supreme court justice whose judicial opinions had made wealthy Wall Street businessman Jay Gould even wealthier. In his first major political speech in the assembly, Theodore introduced a resolution to impeach Westbrook.
He had done his homework by pouring over back issues of The New York Times and talking for hours with newspaper editors about the judge’s career. Theodore saw a letter Westbrook had written to Gould saying he was “willing to go to the very verge of judicial discretion” to protect the businessman’s interests. There had been rumors about Judge Westbrook, but corruption was so common in local, state, and national government no one had bothered to investigate until now.
In his speech, Theodore called Gould and his Wall Street cronies “sharks” and “swindlers.” They were “men whose financial dishonesty is a matter of common notoriety.” It was “of vital importance,” he stressed, “that the judiciary of this State shall be beyond reproach.”
The speech was “like the bursting of a bombshell,” wrote a fellow legislator; “a dead silence fell on the whole assembly.” The only sound was Theodore’s high-pitched, somewhat stuttering voice and his right fist smacking his left palm as though punctuating his words.
“I have drawn blood,” he bragged in a letter to Alice. “It is rather the hit of the season so far, and I think I have made a success of it. Letters and telegrams of congratulations come pouring in from all quarters.”
The state’s newspapers agreed. The speech had “a boldness that was almost scathing,” stated The New York Sun. “Mr. Roosevelt accomplished more good than a man of his age and experience has accomplished in years,” the New York Evening Post declared. He “has a most refreshing habit of calling men and things by their right names, and in these days of judicial, ecclesiastical, and journalistic subserviency to the robber-barons of the [Wall] Street, it needs some little courage in any public man to characterize them and their acts in fitting terms,” stated a New York Times editorial. The paper’s editors predicted “a splendid career” for the assemblyman.
Despite his memorable speech and the editorial praise, Theodore’s resolution failed. It was up to a handful of assemblymen on the judiciary committee to determine if there was enough evidence for impeachment. A bare majority of the committee voted no. It was later rumored that someone, probably connected to Gould, had paid several members $2,500 each to vote against impeachment.
It was the robber-baron era when rich businessmen like Gould, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller had a public-be-damned attitude as they wheeled and dealed to make as much money as possible. Many of these men lived in New York City, America’s largest and wealthiest city. They bribed judges, lawmakers, and government officials to get their way. New York State’s capital, wrote one journalist, was “evil and heart sickening … a cesspool.” Theodore estimated that at least a third of the 128 assembly members sold their votes to the highest bidder.
During the Westbrook hearings, over lunch an old family friend advised Theodore to “leave politics” and take his place “with the right kind of people.” Always, the friend explained, there would be an inner circle of businessmen, lawyers, and judges to “control others and obtain the real rewards.” This was “the first glimpse I had of that combination between business and politics,” Theodore later wrote, “which I was in after years so often to oppose.”
Even if the family friend didn’t approve of Theodore’s work, many people did. Americans, weary of dishonest politicians and arrogant businessmen, applauded his attacks on corruption. He was our “ideal,” said a Harvard classmate. “We hailed him as the dawn of a new era.”
3
DESPITE THE PRAISE he had received that first year in the assembly, Theodore felt ambivalent about his work. “I have become a political hack,” he informed a friend. “But don’t think I am going into politics after this year, for I am not.”
Money might have been a concern, because as an assemblyman he earned just $1,500 a year. Thee had left each of his children $125,000, which was a substantial sum at a time when many people earned less than $1,000 a year. But Theodore was spending his inheritance quickly. There was $2,500 for Alice’s wedding presents; five expensive months in Europe; a town house on Manhattan’s West 45th Street; the cost of going out nearly every night to the opera, the theater, or dinner; and the $20,000 he had paid for ninety-six acres of land on Long Island’s North Shore, near Oyster Bay, where he planned to spend nearly as much building a huge home.
Theodore had taken a few law courses over the past two years at Columbia University. He enjoyed the classroom arguments, but he was disappointed because “the teachings of the law-books and of the classroom seemed to me to be against justice.” Theodore’s first book, The Naval War of 1812,which he began writing at Harvard, was published in the spring of 1882 to acclaim in both Great Britain and the United States. He liked writing, but not enough to do it full time.
In the fall of 1882, Theodore changed his mind and decided to run for another term in the assembly. It’s not clear what made him change his mind, but he enjoyed the rough and tumble of politics as well as the attention and praise. In the November election he won by a bigger margin, 2,200 votes, than in his first election. Unlike the previous year, his Republican colleagues didn’t laugh at him when they convened in January. Instead, they nominated Theodore to be speaker of the assembly, one of the most powerful political positions in the state. But the Democrats held the majority, so naturally they elected one of their own members to be speaker. For a twenty-four-year-old, second-term assemblyman, just receiving the nomination was quite an honor.
Each Monday morning that winter Theodore reluctantly left Alice in Manhattan for the 145-mile train trip upstate to Albany. “I felt as if my heart would break when I left my own little pink darling,” he wrote on one lonely Monday evening in the capital. After a long day of work, even when the temperature was well below freezing, he unwound by taking brisk ten- to fifteen-mile walks around the old Dutch city, or by hiring a boxer to come to his room to spar.
During the 1883 session, one of Theodore’s favorite targets was the “wealthy criminal class,” a term he used in a speech in 1883 and one of the many memorable phrases he coined. He was speaking of people such as Jay Gould, whom he called “the arch thief of Wall Street,” and other rich businessmen who pursued profit with little regard for the law or public welfare. And he led a group of assemblymen, who were dubbed Roosevelt Republicans, to defeat several bills giving special favors to corporations. Theodore battled both Democrats and Republicans, whose comfortable careers depended on pleasing businessmen.
Theodore’s dislike for rich businessmen didn’t mean he felt sympathy for ordinary working people. He voted against bills to reduce the workday for New York City streetcar conductors to twelve hours, against giving pensions to teachers, and against increasing firemen’s salaries to $100 a month. The assemblyman felt the city couldn’t afford such benefits.
One of Theodore’s biggest legislative accomplishments that second session was to team up with New York Democratic governor Grover Cleveland to establish a civil service commission to protect state government jobs from political interference. It was common for politicians to award government jobs to people who supported them rather than to people who had the necessary skills to do the jobs. New York State’s civil service commission, which was similar to one that Congress had created that year for the federal government, was a major first step in making government more stable and more efficient.
At the end of the legislative session, newspapers again prai
sed his fearlessness, honesty, and independence. Theodore himself said he “rose like a rocket.” It was the beginning, wrote one of his biographers, of “a political ascent without parallel in American history.” Life was good, and it was getting better.
In the summer of 1883, Theodore and Alice heard the best news a young couple could hope for: they were going to have a baby. The first, they hoped, of many children. But being an expectant father wasn’t enough to keep him at home.
Theodore’s asthma had been particularly bad that summer, and he used it as an excuse to go west to hunt buffalo. After a seventeen-hundred-mile trip to the Dakota Territory, he got off the train in a frontier town called Little Missouri, where he hired a hunting guide and horses to take him into the region that Indians and early explorers called the badlands. In one of his letters home, TR described the land as “a very desolate place … high, barren hills, scantily clad with coarse grass, and here and there in sheltered places a few stunted cotton wood trees; ‘wash-outs,’ deepening at times into great canyons, and steep cliffs of the most curious formation.”
Just a few years earlier, tens of thousands of buffalo had roamed the grassy prairie in the Dakota and nearby Montana territories. But white people pushing their way west had slaughtered nearly all of them. Theodore hunted for over a week with little other than bad luck. Nearly every day they were soaked by a cold rain. His horse threw him. While crawling through brush to get a good shot at a deer, he nearly crawled over a rattlesnake. Twice he shot at buffalo, but he missed and they galloped away. Yet he thought it was all fun.
Michael L. Cooper Page 2