by Clay Risen
As the troopers piled into the city, rumors spread that they were set to wreak havoc. “When the Rough Riders struck New York there was mischief to pay,” reported Leslie’s Weekly. And it’s true that a few of the men went wild, drinking and carousing and having run-ins with the law. But mostly the soldiers behaved themselves—many never drank anything stronger than lemonade, and sat in bars and restaurants with infinite patience while mobs of onlookers crowded in. One reporter watched as six Rough Riders tried to walk down 23rd Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway; eventually unable to part the crowd, they were pinned against the wall in front of the Second National Bank. It wasn’t all torture, and the men were not exactly trying to avoid attention—they had dressed for the occasion, in full cartridge belts, revolvers, and even, hanging off one man’s belt, a machete given him by a Cuban rebel.42
Wherever they went, no one would let them pay—for drinks, for food, for theater tickets. One night Kirk and Allen McCurdy, two troopers from Philadelphia, went to see a play, and asked at the box office for standing-room tickets, since they were already late. “Why standing room?” the teller asked.
“You told the man ahead of us there were no seats,” Allen McCurdy replied.
“So I did. But you can’t buy any seats. Here’s a box, with the compliments of the theater.”43
When they weren’t sightseeing, they congregated at the Hoffman House, a hotel on the northern end of Madison Park. “They simply owned the place,” wrote Leslie’s Weekly. The hotel bar was famous as a hangout for Democratic politicians, and a popular watering hole for stockbrokers and wealthy out-of-towners. But for those days in August, the Rough Riders were the center of attention. “You could not get within two feet of the bar, for the Rough Riders and their friends.”44
Stories like this, celebrating the guts and glory of the Rough Riders, fill the New York newspapers from August 1898, and for the most part they are true. But other, smaller, and more poignant stories are tucked into the papers as well. On August 10 the Boston Globe reported about an unnamed Rough Rider, who had not been sent to Cuba and so was already in town. He was invited to a Manhattan garden party; he arrived, stood around quietly for a few minutes, then wandered off. Passersby found him standing by one of the lakes in Central Park, confused and anxious. They asked him what was wrong and he simply stared at them. Another man, Harry De Vol, a private, went absent without leave from Camp Wikoff for almost two weeks; when he returned, he was arrested and put in a guardhouse. Somehow he got a gun and shot himself in the head. De Vol and his troop had been left behind in Tampa. Perhaps, as some speculated, he was despondent because he had missed the adventure.45
And then there were the men who never made it to Camp Wikoff. On August 29 Roosevelt and twelve of his troopers took a train to Newport, Rhode Island, for another Rough Rider funeral, this time for William Tiffany, who had died of a disease he contracted in Cuba, most likely yellow fever. Like Hamilton Fish, Tiffany was a flower of the New York elite. One of his uncles was the tycoon August Belmont, who was so rich he had his own subway train. As New York did for Fish, so Newport did for Tiffany: When Roosevelt and his men arrived in the town, they found all the flags at half-staff and the streets lined with people.46
• • •
By the end of August thousands of the men at Camp Wikoff had been furloughed or discharged. But it had one last famous guest to greet. On the afternoon of September 2, a small knot of onlookers stood at the ferry landing at Manhattan’s 23rd Street, on the Hudson River. These were the only people in the entire city who turned out to greet President McKinley, a fraction of the number that had traveled out to see the Rough Riders in Montauk. After refreshing at the Manhattan Hotel, McKinley went to Camp Wikoff, arriving in the late evening. The vice president, Garret Hobart, was with him; and Secretary Alger was there, too, and the next morning the trio took a carriage ride around camp, trailing scores of reporters. When McKinley saw Roosevelt, on horseback, he leapt out of the vehicle and strode over to him. Roosevelt dismounted and fought to remove his glove, a whole fifteen awkward seconds; he finally pulled it off with his teeth. “Colonel Roosevelt, I’m glad to see you looking so well,” McKinley said.
“Thank you, Mr. President, there isn’t a healthier man in the camp than I am,” Roosevelt responded. “I am delighted to see you down here, sir, and hope you will enjoy the trip. I do wish you to come see my boys while you’re here.”
“Oh I will, Colonel, I will” was the president’s reply.
When McKinley’s carriage returned, a few hours later, Roosevelt had arranged a riding demonstration by a few of the regiment’s cowboys. They performed various tricks with lariats and pistols, then formed a line and, at Roosevelt’s signal, charged across the field, right in front of the president.
“Mr. President, what do you think of my boys and my regiment?” Roosevelt asked when they were done.
His future running mate grinned. “Splendid, grand colonel.”47
Roosevelt then raised the question of a parade for the Rough Riders—in recent days several New Yorkers from the business and municipal elite had been calling for one down Broadway. Roosevelt loved the idea, and had offered to pay the incidentals himself. “I think New York would like to see my men,” he told a reporter from the Boston Globe. Roosevelt even had a parade route mapped out, a loop around the neighborhoods just north of Union Square. But before McKinley could say anything, Alger interjected. He refused to allow it—the cost to the military would be too high, he said, and it wasn’t fair to the other regiments. Plus, the Rough Riders were exhausted, and it would be wrong to put them through such an arduous march right before they mustered out. If Roosevelt and his men wanted to parade, they would have to do it as private citizens, in civilian attire and without their carbines or horses. Roosevelt, glaring at Alger, dropped the idea.48
Four days later Edith came out to visit with some of the Roosevelt family brood. Roosevelt had Billy McGinty take Ted and Kermit, ages ten and eight, on a horseback ride. McGinty was one of Roosevelt’s favorites: The diminutive cowboy had shown him the fastest way to shoe a horse, all that time ago in San Antonio, and Roosevelt had yet to forget it. When the trio returned from their ride, they saw a group of reporters and political hangers-on around Roosevelt’s tent. “I hope to be as great as my father some day,” Theodore Jr. said.49
• • •
The day before the regiment was to muster out, Roosevelt was sitting in his tent, finishing some paperwork. The last few weeks had been busy ones. Along with his official duties, the colonel had been quietly inquiring about the financial health of his men, and of the families that his deceased soldiers had left behind. From his own funds, he would hand out small clumps of bills to the men directly; in other cases, using money sent to him by rich acquaintances in New York, he dispensed checks in the name of William Tiffany.50
There was a fluttering at the tent flap, and Major (now Colonel) Alexander Brodie, who had been the regiment’s unofficial third in command in Cuba, put his head in and asked Roosevelt to step outside. Roosevelt pulled back the tent flap: 900 men—Rough Riders, plus several hundred from other regiments, plus reporters and a few civilian onlookers—stood in a neat hollow square around a table, upon which sat an object covered in a camp blanket. A private, William Murphy, a lawyer in his civilian life, approached and said they had all chipped in to buy their colonel “a very slight token of admiration, love and esteem.” Then another man pulled back the blanket. Underneath it was a bronze cast of Frederic Remington’s already iconic sculpture The Bronco Buster.51
Roosevelt smiled as he slowly caressed the artwork. He stumbled through tears to make a short speech:
Officers and men, I really do not know what to say. Nothing could possibly happen that would touch and please me as this has. . . . I would have been most deeply touched if the officers had given me this testimonial, but coming from you, my men, I appreciate it tenfold. It comes to me from you who shared the hardships of the campaign with me,
who gave me a piece of your hardtack when I had none, and who gave me your blankets when I had none to lie upon. To have such a gift come from this peculiarly American regiment touches me more than I can say. This is something I shall hand down to my children, and I shall value it more than the weapons I carried through the campaign.52
He had good words for the black regiments as well—men from the Ninth and 10th Cavalry Regiments stood in the crowd—and he singled them out for praise. “The Spaniards called them smoked Yankees but we came to know that they were an excellent breed of Yankees,” he said. “I speak the sentiments of every officer and every trooper here, I believe, when I say that there is a tie between those two cavalry regiments.” The men, who had been circled by visitors arriving to investigate the hubbub, exploded in cheers.53
Then Roosevelt asked the entire regiment to file past him, one by one. As they did, he had a compliment, a joke, or else some obscure but very personal anecdote for each of them. The men, with tears still in their eyes, walked off to be paid, receive their discharge papers, and leave the services of the United States Army. By the end of the next day, when the last man was handed his papers, the United States First Volunteer Cavalry had ceased to exist.54
CHAPTER 14
“THE STRENUOUS LIFE”
Most of the Rough Riders, their papers in hand, headed home after mustering out at Camp Wikoff. But about 100 remained in New York: Their colonel still needed them. Though the Republicans did not formally nominate Roosevelt for governor until October 4, his candidacy was an open secret, and he was already making plans to hit the campaign trail. And he could not have asked for a better booster club.
When the men returned to New York City, they found that Rough Rider fever had only grown stronger. With their now former colonel readying to run for the governor’s mansion, they were received not just as war heroes, but as Roosevelt’s praetorian guard. No longer in their uniforms, they played the part expected of them, dressing in slouch hats and cowboy duds, even when they went to the theater or dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria—all paid for by admirers.1
The Olive Tree Inn on East 23rd Street and a Red Cross center in Long Island City offered them free rooms. Not that they needed money—with five months pay, about $125, they were well-funded to take Manhattan. Newspapers reported on their daily movements: One group was seen trapshooting at Coney Island. Another visited the New York Stock Exchange, where the director brought them on the floor. Three men, walking along 28th Street, saw an automobile for the first time. The driver stopped and invited them along for the ride. They hopped in and waved their hats. “The driver seemed to enter into the spirit of the occasion and put on top speed” for six blocks, reported the New York Times. Others were seen in the Tenderloin, a block of town roughly between Madison Park and Bryant Park that was home to hundreds of bars, stages, and bordellos and that “welcomed the famous cowboy heroes with open arms,” reported the Chicago Tribune. As they moved around New York, they wore pins in their hats that read “Our Teddy for Governor.”2
Once again the men made the Hoffman House their base camp, and could be found playing Mexican monte in the saloon. On the morning of September 17, several dozen Rough Riders gathered in the early morning; Roosevelt had sent word that he would be in the city, and wanted to see his men. Apparently news of his visit got out, because hundreds of well-wishers had packed into the bar along with them. The Rough Riders were not the only people Roosevelt wanted to see that day: Also waiting for him at the Hoffman House, though hiding away in a private room upstairs, was Senator Thomas Platt. Roosevelt arrived, with Lemuel Quigg, Platt’s confidant, in a cab around three in the afternoon and went up to Platt’s room by the “ladies’ entrance” door. Platt wanted assurances that Roosevelt was not seeking an endorsement from the breakaway Independent Party, and that he would run for office—and hold it—as a loyal Republican. Realizing he was in a corner, Roosevelt agreed.
When he finished he walked downstairs to the bar. Before he could set foot on the floor, the Rough Riders charged him, jostling with a hundred other people trying to shake his hand. They had been waiting for two hours, and demanded he speak. Roosevelt began to oblige them: “I had a very pleasant conversation with Senator Platt and Mr. Odell—”
“Will you accept the nomination for governor?” someone demanded.
Roosevelt’s face turned from confused to agitated to a broad smile. “Of course I will! What do you think I am here for?”3
The crowd went wild. The reunion with his men was not going to happen that day. “Boys, this is too much for me,” he shouted over the din. “I cannot stand it any longer. You’ll have to excuse me, and if I get a chance later I’ll shake hands with all of you. I love you all. Good bye.” Police officers, standing nearby, made a corridor for him out the front door to a waiting carriage. As he moved outside, he saw two Rough Riders at the curb. He asked how they were enjoying the city. “Colonel, this good time is killing us,” one said. “It’s worse than San Juan.”4
Dozens of men agreed, and over the next week their ranks thinned further. “I ain’t got no use for a place like this, where everybody is touchin’ elbows and the air is full of smoke,” one trooper told a reporter for the Boston Globe. Signs in Grand Central Terminal advertised “Half Rates for Rough Riders,” and there was no shortage of takers. A few men, headed back West, made a stopover in Washington, to see McKinley. This being 1898, they were able to enter the Executive Mansion without an appointment (let alone a security check), and soon they were hobnobbing with the president of the United States.5
If there were any doubts about the centrality of his Cuban experience to Roosevelt’s gubernatorial campaign that fall, a party at his home on Long Island on September 21 put that to rest. Some 2,000 people turned out to hear him give his first public speech since returning from Cuba; the streets of Oyster Bay were lined with flags and firemen and onlookers of all ages and sizes. As a local brass band played “Listen to the Mockingbird,” Roosevelt mounted the dais in a black cutaway coat, wool trousers, a blue tie—and a giant cowboy hat. A man who had climbed a nearby tree for a better view shouted, “Three cheers for the old Rough Rider!”6
Roosevelt, ruddy-cheeked and full-bellied, having already put back some of the weight he’d lost in Cuba, thanked the crowd for the warm welcome, which he valued above nothing else save “the greeting of my own regiment.” Then he compared his troopers to the New York electorate: “Our men were likewise from all walks of life, all standing precisely alike as far as the regiment was concerned. Standing shoulder to shoulder were the man who has a one-dollar a day job and the man born in wealth and reared in luxury; both good Americans and both anxious to show that this was not a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. . . . They showed in this war, as in all wars, that when the nation called for her sons they demanded the right to shed their blood for her.”7
Roosevelt called up four Rough Riders and introduced them, one by one, before unrolling an extended run-through of the campaign—from San Antonio to Montauk, with references to the fallen, including Capron, Fish, and O’Neill. His disquisition might have been tedious were it not for Roosevelt’s enthusiasm in delivering it, and the audience’s eagerness to hear every word, whatever word, that came from his mouth. When he finished, and the applause died down, a chorus filed onto the dais beside him to sing a newly composed song, “The Brave Rough Riders.”8
Two weeks later, at their state convention, the Republicans nominated Roosevelt for governor. Following tradition, he was not in attendance; a delegation of party leaders brought the news to him at Sagamore Hill. The next day he gave his first campaign address, in New York’s Carnegie Hall. It sounded less like a gubernatorial stump speech and more like a declaration of a new American empire: “We cannot avoid facing the fact we occupy a new place among the people of the world, and have entered upon a new career . . . the guns of our warships in the tropic seas of the West and the remote East have awakened us to the knowledge of new duties. Our flag is
a proud flag, and it stands for liberty and civilization. Where it has once floated, there must be no return to tyranny or savagery.”9
And so he was off. With just weeks before the election, Roosevelt crisscrossed upstate New York, with a varying coterie of Rough Riders in tow, most often Albert Wright, the regiment’s color sergeant—who often preceded the colonel to the stage, flag flying—and Emil Cassi, the trumpeter. On October 17 Roosevelt made seventeen stops along 212 miles of Hudson Valley railway. Like a comic who hits on a surefire bit and learns to work it into every show, Roosevelt realized that the crowds could take or leave talk of corruption and reform and infrastructure; what they wanted to hear were stories of the war. So that’s what he gave them.10
Roosevelt understood that he was walking a narrow line—a reformer at heart, but running with the Platt machine’s backing. On September 19 he had told Chapman, the head of the reformist Independents, that he could not accept his party’s nomination, a decision that soon had Chapman and others attacking him in public as “a broken-backed half-good man” and a “standard-bearer of corruption.” Roosevelt dodged such accusations by relying on his recent war record: The Rough Rider story, by now a household legend, let him run as something other than a politician. He was instead a soldier, back from the war, full of glory and stories.11
When Roosevelt did dip into policy during his campaign speeches, it was often to push for military expansion and reform. Above all, he wanted a larger Army to promote and protect America’s growing foreign interests. “We don’t need it for policy purposes at home; we don’t need it to preserve order; for our people are quite able to preserve order themselves; but we do need it to protect our interests abroad,” he told a crowd the day after he received the nomination.12
But mostly, he surrounded himself with the pomp and circumstance of his recent martial successes. At Port Jervis, New York, one of his former troopers, Buck Taylor, told the crowd: “I want to talk to you about my colonel. He kept every promise he made to us and he will to you . . . he told us we might meet wounds and death and we done it, but he was there in the midst of us, and when it came to the great day he led us up San Juan Hill like sheep to the slaughter and so will he lead you.”13