Roosevelt’s speech to the assembly garnered widespread coverage, as he well knew it would. “Mr. Roosevelt has a most refreshing habit of calling men and things by their right names,” the Times editorialized, “and in these days of judicial, ecclesiastical and journalistic subserviency to the robber barons of the Street it needs some little courage in any public man to characterize them and their acts in fitting terms. There is a splendid career open for a young man of position, character and independence like Mr. Roosevelt.”
Not surprisingly, Jay Gould’s New York World castigated him in equal measure. “Before any official shall be subjected to the vexation and discredit of an investigation, some responsible person or association must prefer a charge accompanied with allegations of wrong-doing.” Yet in this instance, the World complained, “an inexperienced legislator gets up [from] his seat and recites in a somewhat intemperate speech sundry hearsay charges against Judge Westbrook based upon statements published in a newspaper.”
Roosevelt dismissed these attacks, according to Hunt, shedding criticism “like water poured on a duck’s back.” He held his ground, even when an old family friend gently insisted that while “it was a good thing to have made the ‘reform play,’ ” he should not “overplay” his hand. “I asked,” Roosevelt recalled, “if that meant I was to yield to the ring in politics. He answered somewhat impatiently that I was entirely mistaken (as in fact I was) about there being merely a political ring,” for the “inner circle” was, in truth, a miasma, an enormous knot of “big businessmen, and the politicians, lawyers, and judges who were in alliance with and to a certain extent dependent upon them, and that the successful man had to win his success by the backing of the same forces, whether in law, business, or politics.”
The day before the House adjourned for Easter recess, Roosevelt was again frustrated in his attempt to bring the issue to a vote. During the break, however, newspapers continued to headline the story. “By the time the Legislature came back again,” Hunt explained, “the Legislators had evidently heard from their home folks, because the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the investigation.” This first skirmish awakened Roosevelt to the massive persuasive capacity of the press to stir public resolve and exert pressure on otherwise unassailable insiders.
The investigation was entrusted to the Judiciary Committee which, over the course of seven weeks, conducted hearings in both New York and Albany. Despite an accumulation of damaging evidence, a majority declared that Judge Westbrook’s behavior, although indiscreet, did not warrant impeachment. Hunt later alleged that three decisive votes in favor of impeachment were lost in the middle of the night when the legislators were offered $2,500 each to sign the majority report. When the Judiciary Committee’s decision was announced, Hunt recalled, Roosevelt “was dancing and jumping about and full of fire and full of fury and full of fight.”
“Mr. Speak-ah! Mr. Speak-ah,” he called out, with a strident plea for his colleagues to accept the minority report calling for impeachment: “To you, members of the Legislature of the greatest commonwealth in this great Federal Union, I say you cannot by your votes clear the Judge. He stands condemned by his own acts in the eyes of all honest people. All you can do is to shame yourselves and give him a brief extension of his dishonored career. You cannot cleanse the leper. Beware lest you taint yourselves with his leprosy.”
Roosevelt’s dramatic exhortation brought “deathless silence” to the chamber, but the assembly nonetheless voted on May 31, 1882, to accept the majority report exonerating the judge. “It was apparent to those familiar with politics,” Spinney concluded, “that every wire that could be pulled in both the dominant political parties to prevent impeachment was stretched to the tautest.”
“The action of the Assembly last night in voting to exonerate Judge Westbrook is simply disgraceful,” declared the New York Herald. “We venture the assertion that the entire Bench and nine-tenths of the Bar of the State are convinced that Judge Westbrook ought to be impeached.” The New York Times titled its editorial “A Miscarriage of Justice”; the Brooklyn Eagle called the vote “an open avowal of contempt for public sentiment, for public intelligence and common honesty.” The Buffalo Express quoted from Roosevelt’s speech, and predicted that the young man’s indictment expressed “the general verdict.”
Though Roosevelt’s first joust at entrenched corruption had failed, he emerged as a champion of reform both within the assembly and in the court of public opinion. Hunt maintained that Roosevelt “won his spurs in that fight.” While he had been derided as “a society man and a dude” prior to the Westbrook debate, he was now “looked upon as a full-fledged man and worthy of anybody’s esteem.” When the session came to a close in early June, claimed Spinney, “Roosevelt’s name was known to every nook and corner of the State.”
“I ROSE LIKE A ROCKET,” Roosevelt remembered, proudly noting his reelection the following November with “an enormous majority” despite a Democratic sweep in the state elections. As a further sign of his swift and brilliant ascent, when the legislature convened in January 1883, his Republican colleagues selected him, the youngest member of the New York State Assembly, as their minority leader. Thereafter, he acknowledged, “I immediately proceeded to lose my perspective . . . I came an awful cropper, and had to pick myself up after learning by bitter experience the lesson that I was not all-important.”
“My head was swelled,” he conceded, looking back upon his self-indulgent behavior in the aftermath of such sudden fame. “I would listen to no argument, no advice.” In that second session, Hunt recalled, Roosevelt became “a perfect nuisance,” interrupting the business of the House in a manner “so explosive, and so radical and so indiscreet” that even fellow reformers worried that he was becoming “a damn fool.” When contesting an issue, “he yelled and pounded his desk,” firing back “with all the venom imaginary.” Without restraint he castigated the New York World “as a paper of limited circulation and unlimited scurrility”; he denounced the “rotten” Democratic Party, belittling the political lineage that ran “down the roll from Polk, the mendacious, through Pierce, the Copperhead, to Buchanan, who faced both ways.” His colorful language invariably made headlines, spurring him to progressively more outlandish outbursts. His antics kept his name in print, but he finally acknowledged that he was “absolutely deserted” and lamented that “every bit of influence I had was gone. The things I wanted to do I was powerless to accomplish.”
This grim, isolate reality prompted a radical reassessment: “I thereby learned the invaluable lesson that in the practical activities of life no man can render the highest service unless he can act in combination with his fellows, which means a certain amount of give-and-take between him and them.” Restraining his histrionic rhetoric and making overtures to his fellow legislators, Roosevelt was able to establish common grounds of agreement. “I turned in to help them, and they turned to and gave me a hand,” he reflected, “and so we were able to get things done.”
Roosevelt’s developing sensibilities did not initially embrace the cause of labor seeking greater protection against the abusive onslaughts of the flourishing industrial order. Rather, he regarded union leaders as “exceedingly unattractive persons,” and considered the majority of labor bills introduced in the legislature “foolish.” The reigning laissez-faire doctrine—inculcated at Harvard as well as Yale, and accepted categorically by those within his privileged circle—had “biased” him, he later acknowledged, “against all governmental schemes for the betterment of the social and industrial conditions of laborers.” With unexamined confidence, he voted against increasing the minimum wage to 25 cents an hour, spoke in opposition to a bill that would limit streetcar conductors to twelve-hour workdays, and fought against legislation to raise the salaries of New York’s policemen and firemen.
When the Cigar-Makers’ Union introduced a bill to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in tenement houses, Roosevelt presumed from the outset he would vote against it. He had alw
ays believed that tenement owners had an absolute right to do as they wished with their own property. As he examined more closely the conditions leading to the bill, however, he began to question his inherited resistance to social legislation.
The labor leader Samuel Gompers had long considered the production of cigars in unsanitary tenements “one of the most dreadful, cancerous sores” on the city of New York. Realizing that the only hope of eradicating a system that employed nearly 10,000 people lay in exposing the “actual character of the evils,” he conducted a personal inspection of the tenements, gaining entrance in the guise of a book agent peddling copies of Charles Dickens. Gompers made detailed notes of his observations and published comprehensive reports of his findings. He discovered that the capitalists who owned the tenement factories demanded grueling hours from their workers, mainly Jewish immigrants, and charged absurd rents for their filthy, ill-ventilated apartments.
In one tenement house, fifteen families crowded into three floors. Fathers, mothers, and children were at work stripping, drying, and wrapping cigars from six in the morning until midnight. In the yard, “a breeding ground of disease” with “no drain to a sewer,” lay large mounds of decaying tobacco. Another building housed ninety-eight people from twenty families, with several families living and working together in one room. Everywhere piles of tobacco and fetid tobacco scraps littered the floors, filling the air with an overwhelming stench. The hallways were so “dark and gloomy” that even at midday it seemed like night.
Roosevelt was shaken by these reports. He agreed to accompany Gompers on an inspection tour, pledging that “if the conditions described really existed he would do everything in his power to secure the passage of the bill.” He admitted that he was “a good deal shocked” at what he found. While a few of the tenements provided living space for the workers apart from the sweatshops, the “overwhelming majority” had no separate accommodation. He long remembered one tenement in which five adults and several children were confined to a single room for sleeping, eating, and making cigars. “The tobacco was stowed about everywhere, alongside the foul bedding, and in a corner where there were scraps of food.” After two additional forays into this dark underworld, Roosevelt was “convinced beyond a shadow of doubt” that the manufacture of cigars in tenement houses “was an evil thing from every standpoint, social, industrial and hygienic.” Though the proposed bill was “a dangerous departure from the laissez-faire doctrine in which he thoroughly believed,” he championed its passage and joined a group of supporters urging Governor Grover Cleveland to sign it.
Once the bill became law in March 1883, the cigar makers straightaway brought suit, arguing their right to hold property, guaranteed by the state constitution, was violated by the new regulations. The case, In re Jacobs, eventually made its way to the New York Court of Appeals, where the justices declared that the law indeed deprived the cigar makers of their “fundamental rights of liberty . . . without due process of law.” Furthermore, the court argued, the legislation did not constitute a legitimate use of the state’s police power to regulate behavior detrimental to the public welfare, for tobacco was in no way “injurious to the public health.” On the contrary, it was “a disinfectant and a prophylactic.”
“It was this case,” Roosevelt later said, “which first waked me to . . . the fact that the courts were not necessarily the best judges of what should be done to better social and industrial conditions.” While the justices were well intentioned, they interpreted law solely from the vantage point of the propertied classes. “They knew nothing whatever of tenement house conditions,” he charged, “they knew nothing whatever of the needs, or of the life and labor, of three-fourths of their fellow-citizens in great cities.” In the years that followed, the court’s defense of free enterprise in this case would be repeatedly cited to block governmental regulation of industry. “It was,” Roosevelt observed, “one of the most serious setbacks which the cause of industrial and social progress and reform ever received.”
Roosevelt soon demonstrated his broadening perspective as a legislator in the fight for civil service reform. Members of the Democratic Party he had lately termed “rotten” now became his allies in the construction of a civil service bill that would, he said, “do for the City of New York what the Pendleton bill has done for the United States. Its aim is to take the civil service out of the political arena, where it now lies festering, a reproach and a hissing to all decent men, and the most terrible source of corruption.” Recognizing Roosevelt’s ability to galvanize the reform element in the assembly, Governor Grover Cleveland summoned him and promised that “he would deliver the Cleveland Democrats in the House” if Roosevelt would corral his own faction. The deal was struck and genuine civil service reform came to New York.
Easily winning a third term in November 1883, when the Republicans recaptured a majority in the assembly, Roosevelt announced he would run for Speaker. With the Republican bosses lined up against him, he calculated that his “only chance lay in arousing the people in the different districts.” Never one for half-measures, Theodore Roosevelt campaigned tirelessly. He sent out letters to potential supporters and personally visited dozens of assembly members, traveling by horse, train, or on foot to remote villages and towns. His open pursuit of the post dismayed his patrician circle of friends, who insisted that “the office should seek the man and not the man the office.” Roosevelt countered that “if Abraham Lincoln had not sought the Presidency he never would have been nominated.”
Though his spirited campaign failed to break the hold of the machine, Roosevelt’s attempt to run independent of patronage from the bosses reinforced his leadership of the burgeoning reform element. His autonomy, he later maintained, enabled him “to accomplish far more than [he] could have accomplished as Speaker.” Selected as chairman of the influential Committee on the Cities, Roosevelt promptly introduced a series of bills aimed at dismantling the dominion of the Tammany Hall machine. The primary measure would invest greater power in the mayor rather than the aldermen, who were solely “the creatures of the local ward bosses.” To enlist public backing in the struggle to reorganize city government, Roosevelt launched investigations into various city departments, reaping headlines with dramatic exposés of venality and abuse of the public trust. “I feel now as though I had the reins in my hand,” he assured Alice in January 1884.
Years later, George Spinney fondly recalled that despite the punishing work hours Roosevelt kept, he found time for festive dinners and shared pints of ale with reporters and colleagues where conversation and song stretched into the early morning hours. Spinney would never forget the “great night” when Roosevelt challenged him for the title of amateur boxing champion. With the entire assembly watching, Spinney, taller and heavier than Roosevelt, conceded after three rounds that “he’d had enough.” Amid general good cheer, Roosevelt was declared victor.
EVERY WEEKEND, ROOSEVELT HASTENED HOME to be with his wife, who was expecting their first child in mid-February 1884. A year earlier, Theodore and Alice had moved from his mother’s house to a comfortable brownstone on West 45th Street. In diary entries, Roosevelt extolled the pleasure of being “in my own lovely little home, with the sweetest and prettiest of all little wives—I can imagine nothing more happy in life than an evening spent in my cozy little sitting room before a bright fire of soft coal, my books all around me.”
Confident that this baby would be the first of many, Theodore bought a spectacular piece of property on Oyster Bay and hired an architect to build a country home amid the fields and forests that had fostered his imagination and spurred his passion for nature. During their weekends together, the young couple spent hours poring over the architect’s designs for the spacious ten-bedroom house entirely skirted by a porch. He proposed to christen their nest “Leeholm,” in honor of Alice. “How I did hate to leave my bright, sunny little love,” Theodore lamented in early February after their weekend had drawn to a close. “I love you and long for you all the t
ime, and oh so tenderly; doubly tenderly now, my sweetest little wife. I just long for Friday evening when I shall be with you again.”
During the winter months, Theodore decided to sublet his little brown-stone and move back to his family’s spacious home on West 57th Street. There, his mother, his unmarried sister Bamie, and a host of family servants could watch over Alice while he was in Albany. His sister Corinne, married two years earlier to Douglas Robinson and mother to a baby boy, had also returned to the family home for the winter season. Clearly, Alice would not lack loving support in Theodore’s absence.
On Monday afternoon, February 11, with the arrival of the baby imminent, Theodore left for Albany to attend to several city bills then in progress. Alice had assured him that while she “hated” to see him leave, she was “feeling well.” The doctor did not expect her labor to begin until Thursday at the earliest. In fact, her gravest concern lay with Mittie, who had suffered for several days with what appeared to the family a severe cold, but which the doctor suspected might be typhoid.
“I do love my dear Thee so much,” Alice told him. “I wish I could have my little new baby soon.” Twenty-four hours later, at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday evening, February 12, she gave birth to a healthy eight-and-three-quarter-pound girl. According to the handwritten account that Mittie’s sister Anna kept for the child to read when she grew up, Alice was thrilled that her baby was a little girl. A nurse took the newborn to be washed and dressed before returning her to her mother, who cradled and kissed her.
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 12