The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (109 page)

On the eve of the trial, as Lodge prepared to depart for St. Louis, Roosevelt admitted that he was more interested in what happened at the convention than anything else. He told Bamie that he felt “very nervous” about its probable outcome. “McKinley, whose firmness I utterly distrust, will be nominated; and this … I much regret.”
⁹⁷
On 18 June 1896, news of the first ballot at St. Louis flashed over the wires to New York: McKinley had scored
661
½ votes to Reed’s 84½ and Governor Morton’s 58.
⁹⁸

At once Roosevelt’s distrust of the candidate vanished, at least for public purposes. He was due to take the witness box that very day, and used the occasion to make his political sympathies clear:

Only in private did he continue to express reservations. “While I greatly regret the defeat of Reed, who was in every way McKinley’s superior, I am pretty well satisfied with the outcome at St. Louis … McKinley himself is an upright and honorable man, of very considerable ability and good record as a soldier and in Congress; he is not a strong man however; and unless he is well backed I should feel rather uneasy about him in a serious crisis …”
¹⁰⁰

M
AYOR
S
TRONG ADDED TO
Roosevelt’s sense of unease by fleeing New York as soon as the trial was over, saying that he wished to soothe his rheumatism, and consider his verdict, in the mud baths of Richfield Springs. “I will do nothing in the matter for several weeks.”
¹⁰¹
Roosevelt was left to ponder the larger implications of McKinley’s nomination. He could also look forward to a resumption of hostilities with Commissioner Parker.

A
CREEPING DISTASTE
for the job of Police Commissioner becomes apparent in Roosevelt’s correspondence from the summer of 1896 onward.
¹⁰²
He had never found the work attractive—“grimy” was his most frequent adjective—yet up until his confrontation with Parker he had exulted in its sheer bruising volume, as a strong man exults in shifting tons of rubble. But the collapse of his legal move against Parker, coinciding as it did with the emergence of William McKinley as the likely next President of the United States, made him realize that he had achieved about as much as he ever would in Mulberry Street. He summed up his feelings in an unusually revealing letter to Bamie, written with an air of finality, as if he had already resigned:

His use of the phrase “a couple of years,” while possibly unconscious, is interesting. Projected from his acceptance of the Commissionership in April 1895, it indicates that Roosevelt was looking forward to another offer in April 1897, in other words, about the time the new President would be making appointments.
¹⁰⁴

It was useless to hope for a Cabinet post, such as Thomas B. Reed would have given him; but if he ingratiated himself with McKinley now, and worked hard to ensure his election in November, he might count on some fairly high-level job next spring.

He needed no time to decide which particular appointment to push for. One area of national policy interested him more than any other, in view of what he saw as a gathering threat to American security in the Caribbean and Atlantic.
¹⁰⁵
Paging at random through his list of extracurricular activities in the months preceding the convention, one finds him dining with Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan in February; criticizing the weakness of Secretary Herbert’s Navy message in March; pumping the German diplomat Speck von Sternburg for “accurate Teutonic information” on world naval affairs in April; and spending “a rather naval week” in May, during which he inspects the
Indiana
from top to bottom, and lunches on
the
Montgomery
as she lies in the sun off Staten Island. In between times he reads a life of Admiral James, a two-volume British tome on
Modern Ironclads
, and Lord Brassey’s
Naval Annual
for 1896. He maintains a running correspondence with his new brother-in-law, Lieutenant Commander William Sheffield Cowles, USN,
¹⁰⁶
writing in June: “Brassey evidently thinks our battleships inferior to the British, because of their 6 inch quick firers … I am not at all sure they are right; though I dislike the superimposed turrets.”
¹⁰⁷

Finally, in July, he invites an old friend of William McKinley to visit him at Sagamore Hill. She arrives on the first day of August. Although the weather is very hot, he insists on rowing her across the glaring waters of Oyster Bay. As his oars spasmodically rise and fall, he tells her, “I should like to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy.”
¹⁰⁸

“The work of the Police Board has … nothing of the purple in it.”
New York City Police Commissioners Andrews, Parker, Roosevelt, and Grant
. (
Illustration 20.2
)

I
N ADDRESSING HIMSELF
to Mrs. Bellamy Storer rather than Mr. Bellamy Storer, Roosevelt flatteringly acknowledged that lady’s superior political muscle. He had known her since his early Washington days,
¹
and had plenty of opportunity to see her in action as a lobbyist for the Roman Catholic Church. Mrs. Storer was a wealthy and formidable matron whose eyes burned with religious fervor, and whose jaw brooked no opposition from anybody—least of all William McKinley, whom she considered to be in her debt. The Presidential candidate had gratefully accepted $10,000 of Storer funds in 1893, when threatened with financial and political ruin. Mrs. Storer was now, three years later, expecting to recoup this investment in the form of various appointments for her near and dear.
²

Roosevelt knew that she was fond of him, in an amused, motherly sort of way. She tended (like Edith) to treat him as if he were one of her own children. Years later, when events had conspired to embitter her toward him, she wrote that the “peculiar attraction and fascination” of the young Theodore Roosevelt “lay in the fact that he was like a child; with a child’s spontaneous outbursts of
affection, of fun, and of anger; and with the brilliant brain and fancy of a child.”
³

“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: