The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (112 page)

O
N 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.
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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.”
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Yet in spite of encouraging reports of a McKinley swing
in the Midwest, “we cannot help feeling uneasy until the victory is actually won.”
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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.”
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W
ILLIAM
M
C
K
INLEY
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.”
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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.
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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?”
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Hanna was now unquestionably the second most powerful man in America,
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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!”
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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.”
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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.
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L
ODGE GOT THERE FIRST
, on 29 November, and lunched with McKinley the next day. He reported the conversation to Roosevelt with some delicacy:

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.”
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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.”
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McKinley received this solicitation as smoothly as he had Lodge’s.
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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.
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She suggested that Roosevelt now visit McKinley himself, to clinch the appointment. But desperately as he wanted it, pride would not let him:

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.
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“I
NDEED
, I
DO NOT THINK
the Assistant Secretaryship in the least below what I ought to have,” he wrote fretfully to Lodge.
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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.”
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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.
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The meeting was “exceedingly polite,”
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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,
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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.”
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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.
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T
HE 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.
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