The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  “A good-natured, well-meaning, coarse man, shrewd and hardheaded.”

  Mark Hanna, sketched the day Theodore Roosevelt went boating with Mrs. Bellamy Storer. (Illustration 21.1)

  Shrewdly playing upon her maternal sympathies in 1896, he said that his political unpopularity in New York was now so great that the future security of the Roosevelt “bunnies” depended on his getting a high-level post in Washington. Should he fail to negotiate one—or should McKinley (God forbid!) fail to win election, “I shall be the melancholy spectacle … of an idle father, writing books that do not sell!”

  Mrs. Storer told him that she was “sure” something could be arranged; she and her husband would speak to McKinley in due course.4 Roosevelt, overjoyed, promised in return to work up support on the Republican National Committee for Bellamy Storer as a Cabinet officer, or Ambassador. The atmosphere in the rowboat grew increasingly cozy, and for the rest of her visit Mrs. Storer basked in Roosevelt’s good humor:

  One never knew what he would say next. He was certainly very witty in himself, and he valued wit in others. He used during this period to get on the warpath over Sienkiewicz’s novels—The Deluge and Fire and the Sword—and when he was quite sated with slaughter his face would be radiant and he would shout aloud with delight. He seemed as innocent as Toddy in Helen’s Babies, who wanted everything to be “bluggy”.… His vituperation was extremely amusing, and he had a most extraordinary vocabulary … Never in our lives have we laughed so often as when Theodore Roosevelt of those days was our host.5

  FOR ALL THE OPTIMISM flowing out of Sagamore Hill that summer weekend, Roosevelt and the Storers were uncomfortably aware of the proximity, in New York’s Waldorf Hotel, of a Cleveland millionaire who could turn their hopes to dust if he felt like it. Marcus Alonzo Hanna was more than McKinley’s manager and closest political adviser; he was now the party Chairman as well. In this double role he stood confirmed as the first countrywide political boss in American history.6 Cynical Democrats were saying that Hanna, not McKinley, had been nominated at St. Louis; cartoonists depicted the candidate as a limp puppet hanging out of his pocket.

  Roosevelt, reacting as usual with electric speed to any new political stimulus, had already been to see Hanna twice. On 28 July, the same day the Chairman arrived in town to set up Republican National Headquarters, he visited him at the Waldorf. In the evening he had returned to dine privately with him and two members of the Executive Committee.7 A letter to Lodge, dated 30 July, shows how quickly and accurately he summed Hanna up: “He is a good-natured, well-meaning, coarse man, shrewd and hard-headed, but neither very farsighted nor very broad-minded, and as he has a resolute and imperious mind, he will have to be handled with some care.”8

  Roosevelt does not seem to have told the Storers about these two previous meetings with Hanna. Possibly he wished them to follow an independent line with McKinley. At any rate he visited the Chairman again on Monday evening, 3 August, and fulfilled his part of the weekend bargain.9 Whether he did so quite as forcefully as he afterward implied to Mrs. Storer (“I spoke of Bellamy as the man for the Cabinet, either for War or Navy, or else go to France”)10 is doubtful, since Hanna was tired, and in no mood to discuss anything other than ways and means of winning in November. Roosevelt “thought it wise not to pursue the matter further.”11

  Hanna’s exhaustion was nervous as well as physical. After nearly two years of working with full-time devotion to secure the nomination of McKinley—at a personal cost of $100,000—he wanted nothing so much as to take a long cruise up the New England coast, and let other Republicans manage the fall campaign. But a certain phenomenon, occurring in Chicago on 10 July, had “changed everything,” in his opinion. Alarming predictions of class war, communism, and even anarchy were coming in daily from the West: the political future suddenly seemed fraught with doom.12 Now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party, and Hanna bent his stout body to the task. Word went out from headquarters that he needed all the money and all the stump speakers he could get. Roosevelt, having little of the former, promptly volunteered to be one of the latter.13

  The phenomenon in Chicago was that of William Jennings Bryan, an obscure thirty-six-year-old ex-Congressman from Nebraska, who by making one speech to the Democratic National Convention had created something akin to an emotional earthquake. Rising to speak on a currency resolution, Bryan had pleaded inspiringly for those rural poor to whom questions of high finance were of less importance than food and shelter. As a result, he was now the Democratic candidate for President, on a ticket so extremely radical as to cause large numbers of his party to bolt. Yet nobody, and certainly not Mark Hanna, discounted the threat he posed to William McKinley. For Bryan had that most potent of all political weapons: a sumptuous, sonorous voice, upon which he played like an open diapason. He also had a natural constituency—the farmers and field-hands of the South, Midwest, and West—not to mention those disadvantaged millions (Riis’s “Other Half”) who labored in farms and mines, or begged for work at factory doors, and lined up for soup in filthy municipal kitchens. Such people were ravished by his promises of dollars—more dollars for everybody, unlimited silver dollars which could be produced by the simple method of minting them freely and cheaply at a ratio of 16 to 1. The much more expensive gold dollars which McKinley proposed to keep in circulation were just too few to go around—or so Bryan seemed to be saying. His listeners might not quite grasp why one ratio was preferable to another, and phrases like “international agreement for bimetallism” meant little to cornhuskers who had never seen more than a few square miles of Iowa; but they thought they could understand his magnificently vague metaphors, particularly the one with which he had turned Chicago’s Coliseum into a howling madhouse:

  You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!14

  This was the phenomenon with which Mark Hanna had to deal in August 1896, and it is no wonder that he cut Roosevelt short on the subject of a Bellamy Storer. But he accepted his visitor’s offer of campaign help (perhaps the Chairman, in the back of his mind, recalled that other Chicago Convention when he and McKinley had seen this same young man briefly, raspingly capture the attention of seven thousand delegates).15

  Roosevelt liked Hanna.16 There was something engagingly piglike about the man, with his snouty nostrils, thick pink skin, and short, trotting steps. His very business was in pig iron, and he had a grunting disdain for fine food and polite conversation. When he laughed (which was often), he snorted, and his language reeked of the farmyard. Yet Hanna’s very fleshiness, his love of reaching out and touching, was attractive to someone as physical as Roosevelt. Hanna had none of old Tom Platt’s dry secretiveness: he was blunt, honest, friendly, and unassuming, shamelessly addicted to sweets, which he would suck all day in his large loose mouth. But for all his naturalness, the Chairman was obviously a man of calculating intelligence. “X-Rays,” wrote one who met him at this time, “are not more penetrating than Hanna’s glance.”17

  Surprisingly, for someone with so much power, the Chairman was not corrupt.18 He had no desire for Cabinet office; his ambition, as he reminded Roosevelt, was to elect McKinley. His love for that placid politician was as frank as it was naive: “He is the best man I ever knew!” Or: “McKinley is a saint.”19 As for the millions he had set out to raise, Hanna was too rich to want anything for himself. He treated campaign contributions much as he did iron ore in his Cleveland foundry—as raw material to be amassed in great quantities for the smelting of something solid. And indeed McKinley had an amusingly metallic quality, with his expressionless, perfectly cast features.20 Hanna had no doubt that in forging him he had created an ideal President, a man of steel to symbolize the new Industrial Age. The idea of William Jennings Bryan bringing back the Age of Agriculture was more than regressive: it was revolutionary.

  Roosevelt could not help but be affected by the Chairman’s worried mood. Before their meetin
g on 3 August he had been confident of a Republican victory in November, but after it he wrote gloomily to Cecil Spring Rice, “If Bryan wins, we have before us some years of social misery, not markedly different from that of any South American republic … Bryan closely resembles Thomas Jefferson, whose accession to the Presidency was a terrible blow to this nation.”21

  With that characteristic thrust, he braced himself for the biggest administrative challenge of his career as Commissioner: Bryan’s imminent arrival in Manhattan. The Democratic candidate had chosen Madison Square Garden—of all places—to open his campaign on 12 August, and Roosevelt, as president of the Board of Police, would be responsible for protecting his Jeffersonian person.

  IT WOULD BE UNFAIR to accuse Roosevelt of deliberately allowing the Bryan meeting to degenerate into a noisy, embarrassing shambles. However, he was conspicuous by his absence from the Garden that night, and supervision of the crowd was left in the hands of a Republican inspector. The police proved remarkably adept at allowing gate-crashers in, and keeping ticket-holders out.22 Next morning the Sun and News excoriated “Teddy’s Recruits” for gross incompetence and inefficiency, and even The Times agreed that the job was “very bunglingly done.”23

  Bryan, however, was the real culprit of the evening. No degree of police efficiency could have altered the fact that he was a stupendous disappointment. For once his oratorical gifts deserted him. Intimidated by the size of his audience, he merely read a prepared text on silver, which dragged on for two hours, to a steady tramp of exiting feet and calls of “Good night, Billy!”24

  “Bryan fell with a bang,” Roosevelt crowed to Bamie. “He was so utter a failure that he dared not continue his eastern trip, and cancelled his Maine and Vermont engagements … I believe that the tide has begun to flow against him.”25

  When Bourke Cockran, another celebrated speaker, took over the Garden on 19 August to put the case of gold, Roosevelt was there to prevent any repetition of the previous week’s fiasco. He personally supervised all security arrangements, and the evening went off smoothly. It was agreed next morning that the police had “retrieved their reputations.”26

  WITH SEVERAL WEEKS to spare before plunging into his agreed schedule of speaking engagements, Roosevelt decided to go West for his first hunting vacation in two years. But first he was determined to settle once and for all the vexed question of Brooks and McCullagh. Commissioner Parker was still boycotting promotion meetings, and using a variety of other tactics to perpetuate the deadlock. The Mayor’s continued reluctance to announce a verdict on the trial charges (Strong hated confrontations, and feebly hoped that Parker had “learned his lesson”)27 made it imperative that something be done.

  On the morning after the Cockran meeting Parker happened to be at Police Headquarters, and Roosevelt promptly announced a special session of the Board “for the purpose of acting on the Inspectorship question.” Hoping to force Parker into at least a statement of his still-secret objections to the two acting inspectors, Andrews called for a vote on their immediate promotion. He, Roosevelt, and Grant voted aye. Parker, instead of voting, began a monologue of ambiguous dissent, whereupon Roosevelt lost his temper. Andrews quit the meeting in disgust, and even Grant showed signs of vague irritation as the two rivals leaped to their feet and began shaking their fists at each other. Eventually Roosevelt, thinking he had made a point, pounded the table and roared, “Case closed!” Although it manifestly was not, he stormed out of the room. “My, how you frighten me!” Parker called after him, then leaned back in his chair, tilted his head to the ceiling, and laughed for a long time.28

  The following morning Roosevelt left for North Dakota, clutching in his hand a “new small-bore, smokeless powder Winchester, a 30-166 with a half-jacketed bullet, the front or point of naked lead, the butt plated with hard metal.”29

  DURING THE NEXT THREE WEEKS he grew burly and tanned from sleeping all night in the open and riding all day across the prairie. The Winchester gave him “the greatest satisfaction,” he wrote to Bamie. “Certainly it was as wicked-shooting a weapon as I ever handled, and knocked the bucks over with a sledge-hammer.”30

  With his belly full of antelope meat, and the oily perfume of sage in his nostrils, he rejoiced in rediscovering his other self, that almost-forgotten Doppelgänger who haunted the plains while Commissioner Roosevelt patrolled the streets of Manhattan. For the thousandth time he pondered the dynamic interdependence of East and West. No force of nature surely, not even the anarchistic Bryan, with his talk of grass growing in the streets of cities,31 could sunder those two poles, nor for that matter bring them any closer together. American energy lay in their mutual repulsion and mutual attraction. The money men of the East would vote for McKinley, of course. Bryan had already seen he could make no headway there; it was here in the West that the battle between Gold and Silver, Capitalism and Populism, Industry and Agriculture must be fought out.

  From talking to his cowboys, and to friends he met in the depot in St. Paul, and to the staff of party headquarters in Chicago, Roosevelt returned to New York on 10 September convinced that “the drift is our way.”32 He serenely articulated his thoughts to an Evening Post reporter: “The battle is going to be decided in our favor because the hundreds and thousands of farmers, workingmen, and merchants all through the West have been making up their minds that the battle should be waged on moral issues … It is in the West that as a nation we shall ultimately work out our highest destiny.”33

  BUT HIS SURGE OF CONFIDENCE did not last long. By mid-September the “battle” initiative was clearly with the Democrats. A campaign map of the United States showed the frightening smallness of McKinley’s constituency (New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio) as opposed to the vast spread of states loyal to Bryan (the whole South plus Texas, and all of the mountain states). The Democratic candidate seemed to be everywhere, his big body tireless and his melodious voice unfailing. Republican planners, attempting to plot his every whistle-stop, stippled the Midwest with as many as twenty-four new dots a day; in some areas the concentration was so dense as to shade the paper gray.34 Now the dots were beginning to creep ominously across the Mississippi, into the traditionally Republican plains states, every one of which had been reclassified as doubtful.35

  Roosevelt, like Hanna, began to feel pangs of real dread. He was “appalled” at Bryan’s ability “to inflame with bitter rancor towards the well-off those … who, whether through misfortune or through misconduct, have failed in life.”36 Remarks like this suggest that Roosevelt, for all his public attacks upon “the predatory rich,” for all his night-walks through the Lower East Side, was congenitally unable to understand the poor. People who lacked wealth, even through “misfortune,” had “failed in life.”37

  Their votes, however, mattered, so he threw himself ardently into the campaign. Taking advantage of some space in Review of Reviews, which he was supposed to fill with an article on the Vice-Presidency, Roosevelt assailed the Populists (Bryan’s third-party backers on the extreme Left) to witty effect:

  Refinement and comfort they are apt to consider quite as objectionable as immorality. That a man should change his clothes in the evening, that he should dine at any other hour than noon, impress these good people as being symptoms of depravity instead of merely trivial. A taste for learning and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause them the deepest suspicion … Senator Tillman’s brother has been frequently elected to Congress upon the issue that he wore neither an overcoat nor an undershirt.38

  This, and a fiery New York speech criticizing the Democratic platform’s bias in favor of unrestricted job action (“It is fitting that with the demand for free silver should go the demand for free riot!”)39 so delighted Republican headquarters that he was sent to barnstorm upstate with Henry Cabot Lodge. In a five-day swing from Utica to Buffalo the two friends spoke to packed, respectful houses, and were encouraged by a general “intent desire to listen to full explanations of the questions at i
ssue.”40

  Before returning to New York and Boston they paid a brief call on William McKinley at his home in Canton, Ohio. Here the Republican candidate was conducting a “front-porch” campaign eminently suited to his sedentary personality. Owing to the convenient ill-health of Mrs. McKinley, he had announced early on that he would eschew the stump. “It was arranged, consequently,” writes a contemporary historian, “that inasmuch as McKinley could not go to the people, the people must come to McKinley.”41 The rail-roads, having much to gain by his election, were glad to cooperate with cheap group excursion rates from all over the country. Every day except Sunday several trainloads of party faithful would arrive in Canton and march up North Market Street to the beat of brass bands. Passing under a giant plaster arch adorned with McKinley’s portrait, they would break ranks outside his white frame house and crowd onto the front lawn. The candidate would then appear and listen benignly to a speech of salutation which he had himself edited in advance. In reply, McKinley would read a speech of welcome, then make himself available for handshakes on the porch steps. Occasionally he would invite some favored guests to stay for lunch or dinner.42

  It is unlikely that Roosevelt and Lodge were granted this privilege. McKinley could hardly forget that they had supported Reed against him for the Speakership in 1890, and for the Presidential nomination earlier that year. “He was entirely pleasant with us,” Roosevelt reported to Bamie, “though we are not among his favorites.”43