The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Progressive reformers all across the country took notice. “There is no man in America today whose personality is rooted deeper in the hearts of the people than Theodore Roosevelt,” wrote William Allen White, the influential editor of the Emporia Gazette. “He is more than a presidential possibility in 1904, he is a presidential probability.… He is the coming American of the twentieth century.”

  TR campaigns in Cattaraugus. Upstate crowds were so noisily enthusiastic to see the war hero that he sometimes had to beg for quiet, asking them to “let this be as much of a monologue as possible.”

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  As this cartoon from Judge suggests, there was little love lost between Boss Platt and Theodore Roosevelt. Platt hoped heavy financial backing from businessmen would persuade TR to run a “business government.” Things didn’t turn out that way.

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  Wearing his military hat, the eager candidate leans down to grasp as many voters’ hands as he can. To his left is Emil Cassi, the Rough Rider bugler, holding the horn with which he heralded every one of the 102 speeches the candidate made in a single week.

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  The Thing Could Not Be Helped

  Roosevelt seemed likely to run for a second term as governor in 1900 and hoped to run for president four years later. But then, everything changed. On November 21, 1899, Vice President Garret A. Hobart died of a heart attack. Friends urged Roosevelt to make himself available for the post when McKinley ran for reelection the following year.

  He was against it at first. The vice presidency was a purely ceremonial office. He wanted to become president one day. No vice president had been elected to that office since Martin Van Buren in 1836. Mark Hanna of Ohio, McKinley’s closest adviser and party chairman, was against it, too. He thought Roosevelt was a “damned cowboy,” shrill and unreliable.

  But progressive Republicans admired him, as did westerners, and Boss Platt was determined to get him out of New York—and out of his hair—once and for all. “Roosevelt might as well stand under Niagara Falls,” he said, “and try to spit the water back as to stop his nomination by this convention.”

  It nominated him on the first ballot. The only vote cast against him was his own. “The thing could not be helped,” Roosevelt explained to Bamie. “The vital thing … is to reelect President McKinley and to this I shall bend all my energies.” He proved as good as his word, crisscrossing the country—673 speeches in 567 towns in 24 states.

  On election night, Roosevelt waited for the returns at Sagamore Hill. When it was clear that McKinley and he had won, a newspaperman congratulated him. “Please don’t,” Roosevelt said. “This election tonight means my political death.” Then, he paused and added, “Of course, gentlemen, this is not for publication.”

  “The best we can do,” Mark Hanna told some of his fellow conservatives, “is pray fervently for the continued health of the president.”

  The cartoonist J. Keppler Jr. captured the fear vice presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt struck in the hearts of Republican conservatives. “Don’t any of you realize,” Senator Mark Hanna asked convention delegates, “that there’s only one life between this madman and the presidency?”

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  Campaign poster, 1900. McKinley followed presidential tradition and stayed above the campaign fray, but his Democratic challenger, William Jennings Bryan, barnstormed across the country. Roosevelt was meant to match him, speech for speech. “ ’Tis Tiddy alone that’s running,” said Finley Peter Dunne’s fictional Irish bartender, Mr. Dooley, “and he ain’t running, he’s galloping.”

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  Theodore Roosevelt stumps for the whole Republican ticket at the Ramapo Iron Works in Hillburn, New York: “I am as strong as a bull moose,” he had assured McKinley’s campaign manager, “and you can use me to the limit.”

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  All alone, Vice President Roosevelt waits for a train at the Oyster Bay depot, August 18, 1901. “I hate having him in such a useless & empty position,” Edith told a friend. She and Bamie worried what four years of relative inactivity might do to a man so desperate for action. Less than a month after this photograph was taken, everything would change.

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  The Disgusting Business About Taddy

  Less than three weeks before election day, scandal had hit the Hyde Park Roosevelts. James Roosevelt Roosevelt, the troubled son and namesake of Franklin’s half brother, Rosy—known as “Taddy” within the family—had been an embarrassment to Franklin at Groton. At Harvard things got much worse. Taddy stopped attending classes in the spring of his freshman year, disappeared from campus for days at a time, and then vanished altogether. In mid-October, someone tipped off the newspapers that he had secretly married a Manhattan prostitute named Sadie Messinger, “Dutch Sadie” to her customers.

  Mr. James, already failing, suffered another heart attack. There had been scandals among the Oyster Bay Roosevelts in the past, but never among his Hyde Park branch of the clan. He could not sleep or stop talking about what his grandson had done. “Tell Franklin to be good and never be like Taddy,” he told Sara over and over again. Because of “the disgusting business about Taddy,” Franklin wrote his mother, “one can never again consider him a true Roosevelt.” So far as anyone knows, he and Franklin never saw one another again.

  Mr. James never recovered from his grandson’s indiscretion. Early in the morning on December 8, 1900, with both his sons and Sara at his Manhattan bedside, the long battle she and Franklin had waged to keep him alive finally came to an end. He was buried alongside his first wife in the graveyard behind St. James’ Church at Hyde Park.

  Franklin did his best to comfort his mother. She was only forty-six. A long lonely widowhood stretched ahead of her. She would find what comfort she could in steady devotion to her son. His successes would be hers, as well.

  Franklin’s half nephew, Taddy, sits with his arms folded, third from the right in this photograph of his Groton class.

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  The notice of his unexpected marriage that so horrified his grandfather appeared in the New York Times on October 19, 1900.

  Franklin and his frail father at Campobello during the last summer of James Roosevelt’s life, 1900

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  Here Is the Task

  On the afternoon of September 13, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt was where he liked most to be: in the woods, miles from the nearest town, with his wife and children as companions. That morning, accompanied by two guides, he had climbed New York’s highest peak, Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks, and then clambered down again to have a picnic lunch on the shore of a lake named Tear of the Clouds.

  Seven days earlier, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, a young anarchist named Leon Czolgosz had shot President McKinley twice at point-blank range. At the news, Alice Roosevelt recalled, she and her siblings “put on long faces and then my brother [Ted] and I went outside and did a little jig.” The idea that her father might now become president, she remembered, was “sheer rapture.”

  One of McKinley’s wounds was only superficial. But the other had pierced both walls of his stomach and was irretrievable in that era before reliable X rays. His condition had quickly stabilized, nonetheless, and he seemed so certain to recover—one of his physicians told the press he was “first rate”—that Vice President Roosevelt had been encouraged to go ahead with his vacation.

  But at about 1:25, a park ranger struggled up the slope with a telegram:

  THE PRESIDENT IS CRITICALLY ILL.

  More messages followed.

  HIS CONDITION IS GRAVE.

  OXYGEN IS BEING GIVEN.

  ABSOLUTELY NO HOPE.

  THE PRESIDENT APPEARS TO BE DYING AND MEMBERS OF THE CABINET IN BUFFALO THINK YOU SHOULD LOSE NO TIME COMING.

  Roosevelt started for Buffalo, four hundred miles away. He became president at the moment of the president’s death, at two fifteen on the morning of the 14th, but he did not
reach Buffalo until one thirty that afternoon and did not take the oath of office in the library of a friend’s house until half past three—and then only after he had made sure that space was found for twenty-four reporters. He was the youngest president in American history, at just forty-two years old. “It is a dreadful thing to come into the Presidency this way, but it would be a far worse thing to be morbid about it,” he told Henry Cabot Lodge. “Here is the task, and I have got to do it to the best of my ability, and that is all there is about it.”

  Franklin Roosevelt was at sea, returning from a voyage to Europe meant to cheer his grieving mother, when he got the news from a passing ship by megaphone. It was a “terrible shock to all,” he noted, but it was also exciting. Cousin Theodore’s ascension to the nation’s highest office had provided him with vivid evidence of how far an ambitious Roosevelt might rise.

  The shooting of President William McKinley, as reported by Leslie’s Weekly. Leon Czolgosz waited in a receiving line, a handkerchief wrapped around his right hand. Inside the handkerchief was a pistol. As McKinley reached out to shake his left hand, thinking his right was injured, Czolgosz pulled the trigger.

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  Before beginning his vacation, Vice President Roosevelt met with reporters outside the house where the wounded president was then thought to be recovering.

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  Mourning crepe drapes the home of Roosevelt’s friend Ansley Wilcox at 641 Delaware Avenue in Buffalo; TR took the formal oath of office as president here on September 14, 1901.

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  CHAPTER 2

  In the Arena

  1901–1910

  Eager to be elected president in his own right, Theodore Roosevelt strides to the polls in Oyster Bay on election day, 1904.

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  The Gift of Leadership

  For the first few nights of his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt slept at the home of his sister Bamie and her husband, Commander William S. Cowles, at 1733 N Street, while the widow of his murdered predecessor packed up to leave Washington.

  His first night in the White House was to be September 23, 1901, and since his wife and children had not yet arrived, he asked Bamie and his younger sister, Corinne, and their husbands to join him for dinner. The day before had been the birthday of the man whose memory meant the most to him, his late father, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. “What would I not give if only he could have lived to see me here in the White House,” the president said.

  Then he noticed that the flowers on the dinner table were saffronia roses, the same variety his father had always worn in his buttonhole. “I feel as if my father’s hand were on my shoulder,” Roosevelt said, “as if there were a special blessing over the life I am to lead here.”

  Theodore Roosevelt would prove to be a new kind of president for a new century. In the decades since the death of Abraham Lincoln, most American presidents had largely been content to be caretakers. Real power lay with the Congress, with the party machines that controlled what did and did not happen on Capitol Hill, and with the financial giants whose power grew steadily after the Civil War and whose orders many senators followed without a second thought.

  From the first, Roosevelt was different. “I did not care a rap for the form and show of power,” he remembered. “I cared immensely for the use that could be made of the substance.”

  At first, no one knew precisely in which direction Roosevelt would lead the country. He had pledged to “continue, absolutely unbroken, the policy of President McKinley.” But he also had a reputation for independence and unpredictability, and had been taught by his father to view the world in terms of right and wrong—and to see himself always as the defender of the right. “I’m no orator, and in writing I’m afraid I’m not gifted at all,” he wrote. “If I have anything at all resembling genius it is the gift of leadership.”

  Bamie Roosevelt’s N Street home in Washington, D.C., where her brother stayed before moving to the White House.

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  TR on his way to work at the White House for the first time, September 20, 1901. His tall companion is thought to be his brother-in-law, Commander Cowles.

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  TR at his desk in the president’s office, a vase of his father’s favorite roses at his side

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  How Do You Like It?

  Within hours of moving into the White House, Roosevelt wired Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute and the best-known, most-admired black man in America, asking him to come and have dinner with him.

  Each man wanted something from the other. Jim Crow laws were systematically disenfranchising Negro citizens throughout the South. Washington wanted the new president’s assurance that he would continue to appoint African Americans to federal jobs and resist those Republicans who wanted to crack the solid Democratic South by turning the party of Lincoln “Lily White.”

  Roosevelt wanted Washington’s help in making sure that he—and he alone—controlled black delegates to the Republican national convention in 1904.

  A reporter for one of the wire services spotted Washington’s name in the visitors’ register and immediately filed a story. No black person had ever dined at the White House before. Not only had the president dined with Washington, but he had done so in the company of his wife and his teenage daughter, Alice.

  The southern press exploded. “White men of the South,” asked the New Orleans Times-Democrat, “how do you like it? White women of the South, how do you like it? … The Negro is not the equal of the white man. Mr. Roosevelt might as well try to rub the stars out of the firmament as to try to erase that conviction from the hearts of the American people.”

  The president was astonished at the furor. “I would not lose my self-respect by fearing to have a man like Booker T. Washington to dinner,” he wrote, “if it cost me every political friend I have got.” Washington remained Roosevelt’s most powerful African American ally, but Roosevelt never asked him, or any other black person, to dine at the White House again.

  The Minneapolis Journal reports the reaction of much of the white South to the news that the new president had dared to dine with an African American.

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  Button makers rushed to capitalize on white outrage: here, “Equality” is equated with white and black men daring to drink alcohol together.

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  A button dating from the presidential election of 1904 suggests that voters had to choose between Roosevelt and miscegenation and his Democratic opponent Alton B. Parker and racial purity. The memory of the Washington dinner plagued Roosevelt throughout his career.

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  Washington two years after his visit to the White House

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  Roosevelt, Washington, and other dignitaries review a parade at the Tuskegee Institute on Founder’s Day, 1905.

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  In Duty Bound

  By 1901, a handful of men dominated American finance and industry. Through the manipulation of some 250 big interlocking, interstate corporations, or “trusts,” they dictated the rates farmers paid to ship their products and the wages and hours and conditions industrial workers had to accept. They decided the cost to consumers of everything from coal to whiskey, canned meat to lamp oil. And they destroyed small businessmen who dared try to compete with them.

  J. Pierpont Morgan, the New York financial titan, who had been a friend of the president’s father, spoke for most of the men who ran the trusts. “I owe the public nothing,” he said.

  That attitude was anathema to Theodore Roosevelt. He had a patrician’s scorn for mere wealth and an inbred sense of responsibility toward society. But for all the fire of his rhetoric, he remained a man of the middle, seeking always to stake a position somewhere between what he saw as reaction on one side and revolution on the other. “I have been in a great quandary over Trusts,” he wrote a friend. “I do not know what attitude to take. I do not intend to pla
y a demagogue. On the other hand, I do intend … to see that the rich man is held to the same accountability as the poor man, and when the rich man is rich enough to buy unscrupulous advice from very able lawyers this is not always easy.”

  For five months, Roosevelt continued to honor his pledge to maintain the consistently pro-business policies of his predecessor, following the advice given by McKinley’s old Ohio ally, Senator Mark Hanna: “Go slow.”

  Then, without warning, on February 18, 1902, Roosevelt ordered his Justice Department to move against J. P. Morgan’s latest creation, the Northern Securities Company, whose goal was the monopolistic control of all the railroads between the Great Lakes and the Pacific Ocean.

  Wall Street was stunned. So was Morgan. He hurried to the White House.

  “If we have done anything wrong,” he told the president, “send your man to my man and they can fix it up.”

  “That can’t be done,” the president said.

  “We don’t want to fix it up,” his attorney general, Philander Knox, added. “We want to stop it.”

  Morgan asked if the administration planned to attack any of his other interests.