The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (139 page)

O
N 4
O
CTOBER
a committee featuring all the major figures in the state Republican party—with one conspicuous exception—waited upon Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill and formally notified him of his nomination. Senator Thomas C. Platt sent his regrets, saying that he was “indisposed.”
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Arthritic or not, the Easy Boss had no desire to travel as a pilgrim to the Rooseveltian shrine. Candidate and committee were to remember that the party’s spiritual center remained the Amen Corner of the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

Roosevelt, for his part, was as determined to assert his own independence. He stood grim and motionless on the piazza as Chauncey M. Depew made the customary flowery address. In reply he read from a typewritten sheet, emphasizing some phrases with particular clarity: “If elected I shall strive so to administer the duties of this high office that the interests of the people as a whole shall be conserved
 … I shall feel that I owe my position to the people
, and to the people I shall hold myself accountable.”
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Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, another committee was notifying Judge Augustus van Wyck that he had been selected to run as the Democratic candidate for Governor.
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Although van Wyck was as obscure as Roosevelt was famous, he boasted an equally clean record, and had the added advantage of belonging to the out-of-power party in a time of corrupt status quo. Boss Richard Croker of Tammany Hall had engineered his nomination, much as Boss Platt had Roosevelt’s, yet the Democrat’s integrity could not be questioned.
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By close of business that afternoon, the bookies of Broadway were offering van Wyck at 3 to 5 and finding plenty of takers; one gambler plunked down $18,000 against $30,000 on the judge.
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The only even odds, as some wag remarked, were that the next Governor would be a Dutchman.

O
NE OF THE FIRST OUTSIDERS
to congratulate Roosevelt was William McKinley, who sent a handwritten expression of unqualified good wishes. This letter, said party pundits, “disposed of the rumor that the President regards Colonel Roosevelt as a possible rival two years hence.”
⁹¹
Yet McKinley could hardly have been reassured by Roosevelt’s first campaign speech, in Carnegie Hall on 5 October. It sounded more like the oratory of a Commander-in-Chief than plain gubernatorial rhetoric:

“He really believes he is the American flag,” John Jay Chapman remarked in disgust.
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Senator Platt, who had strongly opposed the Spanish-American War, did not like Roosevelt’s imperialistic overtones at all. Neither did any other local party leaders. They noticed an ominous tendency of the candidate to surround himself with khaki-clad veterans, several of whom seemed determined to stump the state with him. Chairman Odell felt that a “Rough Rider campaign” would be undignified and dangerous.
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Perhaps Roosevelt should go home to Oyster Bay and let Platt’s tame newspapers conduct the election.

As a result the Colonel found himself closeted at Sagamore Hill for a period of “absolute sloth” while his managers debated how to proceed through 7 November. The news from upstate was not
good.
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Voters were reported to be apathetic, as well they might be, considering the dullness of the issues. Apart from Democratic accusations of “thievery and jobbery” by Republican canal commissioners, there was little to excite the electorate one way or another. State control of excise rates and licensing fees, state management of the National Guard, state supervision of municipal election bureaus—these were not the sort of subjects to distract a fishmonger’s attention from the sporting pages.
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Indiscreet and irrelevant as Roosevelt’s Carnegie Hall address had been, it had at least drummed up a certain amount of enthusiasm. Odell began to regret silencing the candidate so hastily.

On 9 October, Governor Black suggested, in an apparently conciliatory gesture, that Roosevelt be sent to speak in Rensselaer, his own home town. Odell was tempted to agree for the sake of party unity, but hesitated until the evening of the thirteenth, when a second urgent telephone invitation came in from the coordinator of the Rensselaer County Fair. If Roosevelt paid a visit the following morning, said the caller, he would be sure of “a tremendous crowd.”
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Odell hesitated no longer. He relayed the invitation to Sagamore Hill and received a rather testy message of acceptance. It would be “inconvenient,” but Roosevelt would take the early-morning train into town.
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So began a day of the drizzly, hopeless kind all political candidates dread.
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The Colonel arose at dawn and reached New York City at eight. District Attorney William J. Youngs was waiting at Grand Central to escort him north to Albany, where Governor Black expressed the utmost surprise to see them. No advance warning of the visit had been sent, Black insisted. Due to pressure of other engagements, he unfortunately would not be able to accompany them to the fair.

Pausing only to growl that when he next came back to Rensselaer County, it would be as his own campaign manager, Roosevelt returned to the station. As his train rocked and swayed eastward to Troy, he tried to eat a few slippery oysters in the dining car. Six officials in four open carriages were waiting in the rain at Brookside Park Station. The fairground was just far enough away to ensure
that Roosevelt was thoroughly soaked en route; when he arrived in front of the main grandstand he found less than three hundred persons idly leaning against the railings.

The candidate did not even deign to step down from his carriage. Five minutes after entering the fairground he left it again, and returned to the station, only to find that his train had disappeared.

N
EXT MORNING
, S
ATURDAY
, as New Yorkers hooted over Roosevelt’s “wild goose chase” (Democratic newspapers saw it as a vengeful prank by Governor Black), the candidate brushed aside Odell’s apologies. With little more than three weeks to go before the election, and van Wyck gaining strength daily, it was plain that Republican strategy was not working. The campaign needed drama, and it needed an issue; he, Roosevelt, would supply both.
¹⁰⁰

Sometime during his damp peregrinations the day before, he had read a newspaper interview with Richard Croker in which the Tammany boss had made some amazingly arrogant remarks about the state judiciary. Croker said, for example, that Supreme Court Justice Daly, a respected Democrat with twenty-eight years on the bench, would be opposed by the machine in his bid for reelection. This was because he had recently refused to reappoint a Croker henchman to his staff. Tammany Hall would not endorse any judge who failed to show “proper consideration” for favors received.
¹⁰¹

Here, in Roosevelt’s opinion, was the issue of the campaign. He knew from his youthful experiences with Jay Gould and Judge Westbrook how strongly New Yorkers felt about the corruption of the judiciary. Starting immediately, he intended to stump the state as it had never been stumped before, attacking not van Wyck, but Boss Croker, as a defiler of white ermine.
¹⁰²

To make sure he was seen and heard at every whistle-stop, he would take along a party of six Rough Riders in full uniform, including Color Sergeant Albert Wright as flag-waver, Bugler Emil Cassi as herald, and Sergeant “Buck” Taylor, the most garrulous man in the regiment, in case he lost his voice.
¹⁰³

Faced with such resolution, Odell could only agree. By the time
Roosevelt’s twin-unit Special left Weehawken, New Jersey, at 10:02 on Monday morning, 17 October, his party had been enlarged to include several other aspirants to high state offices, and half a dozen newspaper correspondents.
¹⁰⁴

T
HE
C
OLONEL MADE
seventeen stops that day along 212 miles of the Hudson Valley. Crowds, summoned by blasts from Cassi’s bugle, were encouragingly large and enthusiastic, amounting to some twenty thousand in under twelve hours. As he leaned again and again over the rear platform of his private car, he harped on Croker’s desire to corrupt the judiciary, mixed in a few stirring calls to Empire, and made some emphatically vague promises to investigate the canal scandal. He soon found that any remark to do with the Rough Riders stimulated applause from old and young, male and female. The citizens of Newburgh were duly reminded of his volunteer status in the war; those of Albany thrilled to the story of San Juan Hill; hecklers at Glens Falls were accused of making more noise than the guerrillas of Las Guásimas.
¹⁰⁵
Back in New York, the bookies of Broadway improved their odds in Roosevelt’s favor, typically offering $25,000 at 10 to 7, and $5,000 at 5 to 3. Knowledgeable punters said that the market had yet to settle.
¹⁰⁶

During the next two days, 18 and 19 October, the Special steamed around the Adirondacks as far north as Ogdensburg on the St. Lawrence River, then curved south again via Carthage.
¹⁰⁷
Roosevelt tailored his speeches (never more than ten minutes long, and seldom repeated) to his audiences with unfailing accuracy. He spoke jerkily and harshly, squinting as though his eyes hurt, yet he radiated a strange, mesmeric power, well described by Billy O’Neil: