The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (32 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
T
O SAY THAT
Theodore Roosevelt made a vivid first impression upon his colleagues would hardly be an exaggeration. From the moment that he appeared in their midst, there was a chorus of incredulous and delighted comment. Memories of his entrance that night, transcribed many years later, vary as to time and place, but all share the common image of a young man bursting through a door and pausing for an instant while all eyes were upon him—an actor’s
trick that quickly became habitual.
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This gave his audience time to absorb the full brilliancy of his Savile Row clothes and furnishings. The recollections of one John Walsh may be taken as typical:
Suddenly our eyes, and those of everybody on the floor, became glued on a young man who was coming in through the door. His hair was parted in the center, and he had sideburns. He wore a single eye-glass, with a gold chain over his ear. He had on a cutaway coat with one button at the top, and the ends of its tails almost reached the tops of his shoes. He carried a gold-headed cane in one hand, a silk hat in the other, and he walked in the bent-over fashion that was the style with the young men of the day. His trousers were as tight as a tailor could make them, and had a bell-shaped bottom to cover his shoes.
“Who’s the dude?” I asked another member, while the same question was being put in a dozen different parts of the hall.
“That’s Theodore Roosevelt of New York,” he answered.
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Notwithstanding this ready identification, the newcomer quickly became known as “Oscar Wilde,” after the famous fop who, coincidentally, had arrived in America earlier the same day.
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At twenty-three, Roosevelt was the youngest man in the Legislature, recognized not only for his boyishness but for his “elastic movements, voluminous laughter, and wealth of mouth.”
16
More bitter epithets were to follow in the months ahead, as he proved himself to be something of an angrily buzzing fly in the Republican ointment: “Young Squirt,” “Weakling,” “Punkin-Lily,” and “Jane-Dandy” were some of the milder ones. “He is just a damn fool,” growled old Tom Alvord, who had been Speaker of the House the day Roosevelt was born.
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Nominated again for Speaker that night, Alvord cynically assessed Republican strength in the House as “sixty and one-half members.”
18
Roosevelt had return epithets of his own, and began to record them in a private legislative diary immediately after the 2 January caucus.
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At first, they were merely superficial, revealing him to be
as class conscious as his detractors, but as time went by, and the shabbiness of New York State politics (so at odds with the splendors of the Capitol) became clear to him, his pen jabbed the paper with increasing fury.
20
“There are some twenty-five Irish Democrats in the House,” the young Knickerbocker wrote. “They are a stupid, sodden, vicious lot, most of them being equally deficient in brains and virtue.”
21
Eight Tammany Hall Democrats, representing the machine element, drew his especial contempt, being “totally unable to speak with even an approximation to good grammar; not even one of them can string three intelligible sentences together to save his neck.” Roosevelt’s
bête noire
(and the feeling was reciprocated) was “a gentleman named MacManus, a huge, fleshy, unutterably coarse and low brute, who was formerly a prize fighter, at present keeps a low drinking and dancing saloon, and is more than suspected of having begun his life as a pickpocket.”
22
He was hardly less severe on members of his own party. Ex-Speaker Alvord he instantly dismissed as “a bad old fellow … corrupt.” Another colleague was “smooth, oily, plausible and tricky”; yet another was “entirely unprincipled, with the same idea of Public Life and Civil Service that a vulture has of a dead sheep.” His contempt dwindled reciprocally according to the idealism and independence of the younger members—in other words, those most like himself. Although they could be counted on the fingers of one hand, Roosevelt instinctively sought them out. One in particular caught his eye: “a tall, thin, melancholy country lawyer from Jefferson, thoroughly upright and honest, and a man of some parts.”
23
The melancholy youth was named Isaac Hunt. He, too, was serving his first term in the Assembly. But the two freshmen did not get to meet for several days, owing to a strange state of political paralysis in the House. The situation was succinctly summarized in Roosevelt’s diary of 3 January
:
The Legislature has assembled in full force; 128 Assemblymen, containing 61 Republicans in their ranks, and 8 Tammany men among the 67 Democrats. Tammany thus holds the balance of power, and as the split between her and
the regular Democracy is very bitter, a long deadlock is promised us.
24
His forecast proved correct. The very first piece of business before the House—electing a new Speaker—was stalled by the Tammany members, who refused to give their crucial block of votes to either of the major party nominees. Thus each candidate was kept just short of the sixty-four votes required to win.
25
Clearly the holdouts hoped that one side or the other would eventually make a deal with them, and that the elected Speaker would reward Tammany with some plum committee jobs. Until then, with nobody in the Chair, there could be no parliamentary procedure, and no legislation.
For the first week in Albany, Roosevelt had nothing to do except trudge daily up State Street and answer the roll call in the Assembly Chamber. Then, there being no further business, he would trudge back to the Delavan House and meditate on the “stupid and monotonous” work of politics.
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Albany was an unattractive place to be bored in: a little old Dutch
burg
separated from New York by 145 miles of chilly river-valley. Back home, in Manhattan, the social season was at its height, and Fifth Avenue was alive with the sounds of witty conversation and ballroom music. Here it was so quiet at night the only sound in the streets was the clicking of telephone wires. There were, of course, several “disorderly houses” for the convenience of legislators, but such places revolted him.
To vent his surplus energy, he went for long walks around town, but the local air was insalubrious, even to a man with healthy lungs. Depending on the vagaries of the breeze, his nostrils were saluted with the sour effluvia of twenty breweries, choking fumes from the Coal Tar and Dye Chemical Works, and brackish smells from the river. Only on rare occasions did chill, pure Canadian air find its way down from the north, bringing with it the piny scent of lumberyards.
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E
SCAPING TO
N
EW
Y
ORK
for his first weekend, Roosevelt put on a cheerful front,
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but it was plain that his first exposure to government
had depressed him. With Alice still away (she had gone to Boston to visit her parents), Elliott abroad, and Mittie sweetly uncomprehending, he unburdened himself to Aunt Annie, mother-confessor to all young Roosevelts. The little lady, now married to a banker, James K. Gracie, held court in her brownstone at 26 West Thirty-sixth Street, surrounded by Bibles and fruitcake. It was on her knee that Teedie had learned his ABCs, and early displayed his contempt for arithmetic; now, twenty years later, Assemblyman Roosevelt returned to complain about Albany. “We talked of his book,” she wrote Elliott, “and his political interests. Thee thinks these will only help him in giving him some fame, but neither, he says, will be of
practical
value in his profession … he says he must begin again at the beginning in the Spring … having gained this
intermediate
experience.”
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These remarks, and the young man’s earlier avowal, “Don’t think I am going into politics after this year, for I am not,” might be taken with a pinch of salt. Throughout his life, in moments of triumph as well as despair, he would continue to insist he had no future in politics. Relatives and friends soon learned to ignore such protestations, knowing very well that they were insincere, or at best self-delusive. Theodore Roosevelt was addicted to politics from the moment he won his first election until long after he lost his last.
The weekend in New York was sufficiently recuperative for him to bounce back to Albany on Monday, 9 January, with optimistic energy. There was another Republican caucus that night, and although it dealt with the less than fascinating subject of the appointment of Assembly clerks, Roosevelt conscientiously attended. This time he was in even greater sartorial splendor, having dined out somewhere beforehand. Isaac Hunt, the melancholy member from Jefferson County, was standing by the fireplace in the committee room when “in bolted Teddy … as if ejected from a catapult.”
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Deliberately selecting the most prominent position in the room—directly in front of the chairman—Roosevelt sat down and pulled off his ulster. Underneath he was in full evening dress, with gold fob and chain. At the first opportunity he jumped to his feet and addressed the meeting in the affected drawl of Harvard and
Fifth Avenue. “We almost shouted with laughter,” Hunt remembered, “to think that the most veritable representative of the New York dude had come to the Chamber.” But as Roosevelt continued to speak, “our attention was drawn upon what he had to say because there was a force in his remarks … it mollified somewhat his unusual appearance.”
31
Roosevelt was about to sit down again when he caught sight of Hunt by the fireplace. Instantly he made his way over to him. Hunt, too, as it happened, was overdressed; he was sensitive about his rural background and had invested in a custom-made Prince Albert coat by way of disguise. He might as well have saved his money. “You,” shrilled Roosevelt triumphantly, “are from the country!”
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For the rest of that evening he interrogated Hunt on the minutiae of rural politics. His usual practice, after such an interview, was to discard his victim like a well-sucked orange;
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but something about the young lawyer appealed to him. Hunt, in turn, was charmed. At the end of the caucus the two Assemblymen parted “fast friends.”
34
Roosevelt had recruited his first legislative ally.
F
OR THE NEXT FIVE WEEKS
there was nothing substantial to be allied against. The deadlock over electing a Speaker seemed unresolvable. Roosevelt continued to vent his impatience with vitriolic diary entries and walks that ranged farther and farther out of Albany. He persuaded his new friend to join him on one of these excursions. The long-legged lawyer came back too tired to speak, and went straight to bed. When Roosevelt suggested another tramp, Hunt begged off. “You will have to get somebody else to walk with you. One dose is sufficient for me.”
35
On the second weekend of the session, Roosevelt went to Boston to pick up “the little pink wife,” as he was wont to call her.
36
They chose rooms together in a residential hotel on the corner of Eagle and State streets, just across the square from the Capitol. Isaac Hunt had rooms there too, and so saw much of both of them. “She was a very charming woman … tall, willowy-looking. I was very much taken with her.”
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