The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  ROOSEVELT SPENT the first full week of October on the hustings in New York City, expounding the merits of gold to all and sundry, and trying to persuade a rich uncle to lunch with Mark Hanna. He was amused by the old gentleman’s horrified refusal; it was the traditional Knickerbocker disdain for “dirty” politicians.44 Nouveau riche millionaires like James J. Hill and John D. Rockefeller had no such scruples, and the Chairman made the most of their huge contributions. Some 120 million books, pamphlets, posters, and preset newspaper articles poured out of Republican headquarters into all the “doubtful” states, while fourteen hundred speakers, including such luminaries as ex-President Harrison, Speaker Reed, and Carl Schurz, made expense-paid trips into every corner of the country. Masterful, tireless, and increasingly optimistic as this “educational campaign” caught fire, Mark Hanna supervised every itinerary and checked every invoice.45

  One of the Chairman’s tactical decisions was to cancel a plan to send Roosevelt into Maryland and West Virginia. Instead, he was put on Bryan’s trail in Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota during the second and third weeks of the month.46 Hanna obviously believed him to be an ideal foil to the Democratic candidate: an Easterner whom Westerners revered, an intellectual who could explain the complexities of the Gold Standard in terms a cowboy could understand.

  Roosevelt more than justified his faith. Oversimplifying brilliantly, as he sped from whistle-stop to whistle-stop, he spoke in parables and brandished an array of homely visual symbols, including gold and silver coins and odd-sized loaves of bread. (“See this big one. This is an eight-cent loaf when the cents count on a gold basis. Now look at this small one … on a silver basis it would sell for over nine cents …”)47 En route he discovered that audiences enjoyed his natural gifts of vituperation as much, if not more, than financial argument, so day by day the pejoratives flowed more freely. He scored his biggest success on 15 October in the Chicago Coliseum, where three months before Bryan had made the famous “cross of gold” speech. An audience of thirteen thousand rejoiced as “Teddy”—the name was all but universal now—went about his familiar business of emasculating the opposition.

  It is not merely schoolgirls that have hysterics; very vicious mob-leaders have them at times, and so do well-meaning demagogues when their minds are turned by the applause of men of little intelligence.…48

  Warming to this theme, he compared Bryan and various other prominent free silverites and Populists to “the leaders of the Terror of France in mental and moral attitude.” But he added reassuringly that such men lacked the revolutionary power of Marat, Barère, and Robespierre. Bryan, who sought to benefit one class by stealing the wealth of another, wished to negate the Eighth Commandment, while Governor Altgeld of Illinois, having recently pardoned the Haymarket rioters (“those foulest of criminals, the men whose crimes take the form of assassination”), was clearly in violation of the Sixth. Aware that his audience contained a large proportion of college boys, he warned against the seductions of “the visionary social reformer … the being who reads Tolstoy, or, if he possesses less intellect, Bellamy and Henry George, who studies Karl Marx and Proudhon, and believes that at this stage of the world’s progress it is possible to make everyone happy by an immense social revolution, just as other enthusiasts of a similar mental caliber believe in the possibility of constructing a perpetual-motion machine.”49

  As always, the harshness of Roosevelt’s words was softened by his beaming fervor, the sophomoric relish with which he pronounced his insults. For two hours he talked on, juggling his coins and loaves, grinning, grimacing, breathing sincerity from every pore, while the son of Abraham Lincoln sat behind him applauding, and the great hall resounded with cheers.50 Next morning the Chicago Tribune awarded him lead status on its front page, and printed his entire seven-thousand-word speech verbatim, running to almost seven full columns of type. “In many respects,” the paper remarked, “it was the most remarkable political gathering of the campaign in this city.”51

  There were one or two column-inches of space left over after Roosevelt’s peroration, and into this the editors inserted a filler, reporting an address, elsewhere in the city on the same evening, by an ex-Harvard professor, now head of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Chicago. One wonders with what feelings J. Laurence Laughlin read of the triumph of his former pupil, whom seventeen years before he had advised to go into politics.52

  ON HIS WAY HOME across Michigan, Roosevelt traveled so closely behind the campaign train of William Jennings Bryan that he was able to gauge local reactions to him at first hand.53 In one town he actually caught up with Bryan, and stood incognito in the crowd listening to him speak. Although there was no denying the beauty of the voice, nor the power of the eagle eye and big, confident body, he sensed that the average voter was curious rather than impressed. Bryan, he remarked on returning to New York, represented only “that type of farmer whose gate hangs on one hinge, whose old hat supplies the place of a missing window-pane, and who is more likely to be found at the cross-roads grocery store than behind the plough.”54 Yet in spite of encouraging reports of a McKinley swing in the Midwest, “we cannot help feeling uneasy until the victory is actually won.”55

  The last ten days in October saw him hurrying from meeting to meeting in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. In between times he geared the police force to ensure a rigorously honest election. Worn out and apprehensive as 3 November approached, he tried to convince himself that triumph was at hand, that he had done his part to avert “the greatest crisis in our national fate, save only the Civil War.”56

  WILLIAM MCKINLEY was elected President by an overwhelming plurality of 600,000 votes. His electoral college majority was 95; the total amount of votes cast was nearly 14 million. “We have submitted the issue to the American people,” telegraphed William Jennings Bryan, “and their will is law.”57 The Democratic candidate could afford to be magnanimous, having racked up some impressive statistics of his own. He had traveled 18,000 miles, addressed an estimated 5 million people, and was rewarded with the biggest Democratic vote in history.58 When Henry Cabot Lodge wondered if Bryan’s party would hesitate before nominating him again, Mark Hanna had a typically vulgar retort. “Does a dog hesitate for a marriage license?”59

  Hanna was now unquestionably the second most powerful man in America,60 and Roosevelt, celebrating with him at a “Capuan” victory luncheon on 10 November, felt a sudden twinge of revulsion at the part money and marketing had played in the campaign. “He has advertised McKinley as if he were a patent medicine!”61 Looking around the room, he realized that at least half the guests were money men. The Chairman might be easy in their company, but he, Roosevelt, was not. “I felt as if I was personally realizing all of Brooks Adams’s gloomy anticipations of our gold-ridden, capitalist-bestridden, usurer-mastered future.”62

  But such scruples faded as he basked in the general glow of Republican triumph. McKinley was hailed as “the advance agent of prosperity.” Out of a magically cleared sky, the Gold Dollar shone down, promising fair economic weather for the last four years of the nineteenth century.

  Roosevelt felt more hopeful than after any election since that of 1888. Then, as now, his party had swept all three Houses of the federal government, and piled up luxurious pluralities in state legislatures. Then, as now, he had campaigned hard for the Presidentelect, knowing that his efforts would be rewarded. And so he waited with joyful anticipation for news of his appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. It would probably come soon: before November was out, Henry Cabot Lodge and the “dear Storers” traveled separately to Canton to negotiate it.63

  LODGE GOT THERE FIRST, on 29 November, and lunched with McKinley the next day. He reported the conversation to Roosevelt with some delicacy:

  He spoke of you with great regard for your character and your services and he would like to have you in Washington. The only question he asked me was this, which I give you: “I hope he has no preconceived plans w
hich he would wish to drive through the moment he got in.” I replied that he need not give himself the slightest uneasiness on that score.…64

  Only Cabot Lodge, presumably, could make such an assurance with such a straight face. McKinley took it cordially enough, then changed the subject. Lodge felt cautiously optimistic at the end of the interview, “but after all I’m not one of his old supporters and the person to whom I look now, having shot my own bolt, is Storer.”65

  What the latter said to McKinley a day or two later is not of record. It could not have been much, for Storer was understandably more interested in an office for himself. However, his forceful wife, who seems to have already looked beyond the McKinley Administration to some future Roosevelt Administration, was as good as her word. Buttonholing the President-elect after dinner, she pleaded Roosevelt’s cause.

  McKinley studied her quizzically. “I want peace,” he said, “and I am told that your friend Theodore—whom I know only slightly—is always getting into rows with everybody. I am afraid he is too pugnacious.”

  “Give him a chance,” Mrs. Storer replied, “to prove that he can be peaceful.”66

  McKinley received this solicitation as smoothly as he had Lodge’s.67 He had the politician’s gift of sending people away imagining that their requests would be granted, and Mrs. Storer, too, sent an optimistic letter to New York.68 She suggested that Roosevelt now visit McKinley himself, to clinch the appointment. But desperately as he wanted it, pride would not let him:

  I don’t wish to go to Canton unless McKinley sends for me. I don’t think there is any need of it. He saw me when I went there during the campaign; and if he thinks I am hot-headed and harum-scarum, I don’t think he will change his mind now … Moreover, I don’t wish to appear as a supplicant, for I am not a supplicant. I feel I could do good work as Assistant Secretary, but if we had proper police laws I could do better work here and would not leave; and somewhere or other I’ll find work to do.69

  On 9 December a letter from McKinley arrived on his desk. But it contained nothing more than a polite acknowledgment of the recommendation he had written for Bellamy Storer.70

  “INDEED, I DO NOT THINK the Assistant Secretaryship in the least below what I ought to have,” he wrote fretfully to Lodge.71 His friend had perceived another obstacle in the way of his appointment, and suspected that it, rather than Roosevelt’s belligerency, might be the real reason for McKinley’s hesitation. This was the probable reelection, early in the New Year, of Thomas C. Platt to the United States Senate. If Platt won, he would take his old seat in the Capitol on the same day McKinley entered the White House; and since the Republican majority in the Senate hinged on that very seat, McKinley would not dare to offend the Easy Boss by appointing any New Yorker he disapproved of. Lodge had already asked Platt what he thought about Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary, and gotten a negative reaction. “He did not feel ready to say that he would support you, if you intended to go into the Navy Department and make war on him—or, as he put it, on the organization.”72

  It followed, therefore, that if Roosevelt would not ingratiate himself with McKinley, he must ingratiate himself with Platt. One way or another the unhappy Commissioner must eat humble pie. “I shall write Platt at once, to get an appointment to see him,” he replied.73

  The meeting was “exceedingly polite,”74 but inconclusive. Platt’s nomination for the Senate would not come up for another month, so there was no question of a premature deal. The old man was also waiting cruelly to see if Roosevelt would give active support to the nomination. His only rival was Joseph H. Choate,75 a distinguished liberal Republican who also happened to be Roosevelt’s oldest political confidant. At Harvard young Theodore had sought Choate’s counsel as a substitute father; Choate had been one of the eminent citizens who backed his first campaign for the Assembly, and had even offered to pay his expenses; after winning, Roosevelt had told Choate, “I feel that I owe both my nomination and my election more to you than to any other one man.”76

  Platt did not have to wait long for enlightenment. A day or two later Choate’s aides asked the Police Commissioner to speak for their candidate, and were flatly turned down. On 16 December 1896, when organization men gathered at No. 4 Fifth Avenue to endorse the Easy Boss, Roosevelt was prominently present, and seated at Platt’s table.77

  THE APPROACH OF THE festive season brought deep snow and zero temperatures, cooling the hot flush of politics. Roosevelt retired to Sagamore Hill to chop trees with his children (little Ted, at nine years old, was capable of bringing down a sixty-foot oak, and, though undersized, bore up “wonderfully” during ten-mile tramps). On Christmas Eve the family sleighed down “in patriarchal style” to Cove School, where Roosevelt played Santa Claus and distributed toys to the village children.78

  He returned to Mulberry Street on 30 December for the year’s final Board meeting, and found Commissioner Parker as tricky and obstructive as ever. After adjournment Roosevelt was moved to an admission of weary respect: “Parker, I feel to you as Tommy Atkins did toward Fuzzy-Wuzzy in Kipling’s poem … ‘To fight ’im ’arf an hour will last me ’arf a year.’ I’m going out of town tonight, but I suppose we’ll have another row next Wednesday.” Parker laughed. “I’ll be glad to see you when you get back, Roosevelt.”79

  IN THE NEW YEAR, Roosevelt’s longing to be appointed Assistant Secretary was spurred by renewed press criticism of the deadlock at Police Headquarters. Most complaints were directed at Parker, but they also reflected unfavorably on the president of the Board. Editors of all political persuasions agreed that the quarreling between Commissioners was “a discredit” to the department, and “a detriment to public welfare.” It was enough, remarked the Herald, to make citizens nostalgic for the corrupt but superefficient force of yesteryear. “The simple fact is that this much-heralded ‘Reform Board’ has proved a public disappointment and a failure.”80 The Society for the Prevention of Crime, which had strongly supported Roosevelt in the past, condemned the Commissioners for “lack of executive vigor” and “indignity of demeanor,” while the Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst, in a clear reference to Roosevelt’s courtship of Boss Platt, scorned “those who consent, spaniel-like, to lick the hand of their master.”81

  Afraid that some of this publicity would reach the ears of the President-elect, Roosevelt announced on 8 January, “I shall hereafter refuse to take part in any wranglings or bickerings on this Board. They are not only unseemly, but detrimental to the discipline of the force.”82 Commissioner Parker affably agreed to do the same, and a measure of peace returned to Mulberry Street.

  Thomas Collier Platt was nominated for the Senate on 14 January 1897, by a Republican caucus vote of 147 to 7. His first reaction, on hearing the news, was to ask for a list of the seven Choate supporters and put it in his pocket. This suggests that Roosevelt had been prudent, if nothing else, in deserting Choate the month before.83 Platt was duly elected on 20 January, and immediately became a major, if inscrutable factor in Roosevelt’s campaign for office.

  The Police Commissioner, meanwhile, optimistically prepared himself for his future responsibilities, inviting Alfred Thayer Mahan back to Sagamore Hill, addressing the U.S. Naval Academy on 23 January, and working with concentrated speed on a revised version of his Naval War of 1812.84 The manuscript had been commissioned by Sir William Laird Clowes, naval correspondent of the London Times and editor of the official history of the British Navy, then in preparation.85 Roosevelt inserted “a pretty strong plea for a powerful navy” into his text.86

  February came and went, with no encouraging news—McKinley was preoccupied with Cabinet appointments and pre-Inaugural arrangements, and Platt remained silent—but Roosevelt continued to hope. “I shall probably take it,” he told Bamie, “because I am intensely interested in our navy, and know a good deal about it, and it would mean four years work.” He did not see himself surviving a year in his present job, even if obliged to remain.87

  His truce with “cunning, unscrupulous, shif
ty”88 Parker lasted less than five weeks, and by the end of February he was complaining of “almost intolerable difficulty” at Mulberry Street.89 Commissioner Grant was now firmly allied with Parker, and Roosevelt paused, in a moment of bitter humor, to wonder how so great a general could have produced so lumpish a son. “Grant is one of the most interesting studies that I know of, from the point of view of atavism. I am sure his brain must reproduce that of some long-lost arboreal ancestor.”90

  By 4 March, when William McKinley was inaugurated, the situation at Police Headquarters had become an open scandal. Newspapers that day carried reports of an almost total breakdown of discipline in the force, new outbreaks of corruption, tearful threats of resignation by Chief Conlin, and rabid partisan squabbles between Democratic and Republican officers—echoing those among the four Commissioners, who seemed scarcely able to stand the sight of one another anymore.91

  “I am very sorry that I ever appointed Andrew D. Parker,” Mayor Strong commented sadly. “I am just as sorry that it is beyond my power to remove him from office.”92 A reporter pointed out that he had, nevertheless, the power to find Parker guilty of the charges leveled against him last summer. Strong hesitated for two weeks, then at last, on 17 March, dismissed Parker for proven neglect of duty.93 But the sentence was subject to gubernatorial approval; so in the meantime Parker smilingly stayed on.

  DURING THE REST OF MARCH, and on through the first five days of April, a cast of some twenty-five characters lobbied, fought, bartered, bullied, and pleaded for and against Roosevelt’s appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Lodge acted as coordinator of the pro-Roosevelt group, whose ranks included John Hay, Speaker Reed, Secretary of the Interior Cornelius Bliss, Judge William Howard Taft of Ohio, and even Vice-President Hobart. Mrs. Storer haughtily withdrew when McKinley, who disliked being beholden to anybody, gave her husband the second-rate ambassadorship to Belgium. Mark Hanna was reported favorable to Roosevelt’s nomination immediately after the Inauguration, but was so plagued by other rivals for McKinley’s favor that Lodge hesitated to approach him.94 The Chairman had been seen slinging a pebble at a skunk in a Georgetown garden and growling, “By God, he looks like an office-seeker!”95