The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (51 page)

Arthur’s men were equally sullen and silent as they trooped into the Opera House.
²⁶
There was a round of polite applause for Chairman Warren when he mounted the stage. More applause, rather less polite, greeted Warner Miller. He took an aisle seat next to Titus Sheard on “Wood Pulp Row,” the section allotted to Herkimer County. Roosevelt, with his usual unerring sense of timing, waited until all three dignitaries were settled before making his own
entrance. Then he stomped briskly down the hall, to the sound of mounting applause “that was taken up by the gallery and prolonged for some moments” after he sat down—a mere yard away from Miller, on the opposite side of the aisle. Casually draping a leg over the chair in front, he allowed his personality to penetrate every corner of the auditorium. From that moment on, there was no doubt as to who was controlling the convention. When Chairman Warren had finished calling the roll, “he simply cast his eye” over toward Roosevelt, who leaped up and proposed that an Edmunds man be nominated temporary chairman of the meeting. The motion was approved.
²⁷

B
Y LATE AFTERNOON
, when the votes for delegates-at-large were counted, it was plain that Warner Miller had, as the
Sun
correspondent put it, “been pulverized finer than his own pulp.” Roosevelt’s name led the list with 472 votes. His three colleagues, all Independents, were President Andrew D. White of Cornell University with 407; State Senator John J. Gilbert with 342; and Edwin Packard, a millionaire spice merchant from Brooklyn, with 256. Boss Miller ran fifth with only 243 votes, scarcely half Roosevelt’s total, and 6 short of any kind of majority.
²⁸
His humiliation was complete. Word went around that his days as party chief were over.

Flushed with victory, Roosevelt jumped across the aisle and confronted the shaken Senator. According to one reporter, he held out his hand and said, “Time makes all things even. The first of January is avenged.”
²⁹
But the reporter was a long distance away, in the press gallery, and got this quote by proxy. Actually Roosevelt’s hand was not so much extended as balled in a fist, and his words were rather less printable: “There, damn you, we beat you for last winter!”
³⁰

“What did you want to say that for?” asked Isaac Hunt afterward. They were walking back to Bagg’s Hotel behind Miller, who had somehow torn his trousers coming out of the Opera House, and now looked infinitely pathetic.

“I wanted him to know,” Roosevelt replied.

Hunt was not impressed. “Well, I should think he would know without being told.”
³¹

This exchange in effect ended the three-year friendship of the two young Assemblymen, which had never been the same since Hunt’s disloyalty during the Speakership contest. There is no evidence that Roosevelt took any petty offense at his colleague’s words. But he knew now that it was time to unrope himself from Hunt, O’Neil, and the other “Roosevelt Republicans,” whose horizons extended no further than New York State, and eagerly search out new altitudes, wider vistas. Chicago beckoned, and beyond it the West; could he but rise high enough, he might see his future clear.

“He grew right away from me,” Hunt confessed ruefully in old age. “I knew he was born for some great emergency, but what he would do I could not tell … I never expected to see him go right up in the heavens.”
³²

R
OOSEVELT RETURNED TO
A
LBANY
on 24 April to receive the congratulations of his supporters in the Assembly. “For a while,” remarked the
Times
, “it was a doubtful question whether the Chamber was being used for legislative purposes or as a Roosevelt reception room.”
³³
During the next few days he enjoyed such adulation, both public and private, as he had never enjoyed before—and would not experience again for at least a decade.
The New York Times
hailed him as “the victor, the wearer of all the laurels” at Utica, and the
Evening Post
, in the course of a long and flattering editorial, called him “the most successful young politician of our day.”
³⁴
Curiosity mounted in Chicago and Washington about the twenty-five-year-old who had almost single-handedly made Senator Edmunds a serious candidate for the Presidency. Arthur Cutler, who kept closely in touch with political trends, and took pedagogic pride in his ex-pupil, assured Bamie, “Theodore’s reputation is national and even to us who know him it is phenomenal. Whatever the future may have in store for him, no man in the country has begun his public career more brilliantly.”
³⁵

Two hundred miles away in Boston, Henry Cabot Lodge, another Edmunds supporter and delegate-at-large to Chicago, decided that Roosevelt was a “national figure of real importance,”
³⁶
and made a mental note to cultivate him.

R
OOSEVELT’S POST-CONVENTION GLOW
was chilled by news that Grover Cleveland was threatening to veto some of his bills for the regulation of New York City. The Assemblyman reacted with understandable shock. He had been so frequent a visitor to the Executive Office recently, and Cleveland had seemed so agreeable to all his legislation, that Roosevelt no doubt expected full cooperation through the concluding weeks of the session. (Only a few days before Utica,
Harper’s Weekly
had published a Nast cartoon showing the Governor obediently signing a pile of these same bills in Roosevelt’s presence.)
³⁷

Others, however, had seen signs of a showdown long ago; it was not so much a question of politics as of diametrically opposed personalities. Roosevelt was nervy, inspirational, passionate. He arrived at conclusions so rapidly that he seemed to be acting wholly on impulse, and was impatient when those with more laborious minds did not instantly agree with him.
³⁸
Cleveland, on the other hand, was slow, stolid, objective, almost maddeningly conscientious. No bill was too lengthy, or too complex, for him to scrutinize it down to the last punctuation-mark. His fathomless legal mind absorbed all data indiscriminately, sorted them into logical sequence, then issued an opinion which had about it the finality of a commandment chiseled in marble. One might as well try to sandpaper the marble smooth as to get Cleveland to change his mind.

“I never see those two together,” said Daniel S. Lamont, the Governor’s secretary, “that I’m not reminded of a great mastiff solemnly regarding a small terrier, snapping and barking at him.”
³⁹
William Hudson, of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
, used a different metaphor. Cleveland was the Immovable Object, whereas Roosevelt was the Irresistible Force. Any confrontation between them was bound to generate heat—and good copy besides. So when Hudson
met Roosevelt in State Street, shortly after his return from Utica, he lost no time in telling him about Cleveland’s objections to his city reform bills.
⁴⁰
The reaction was predictable. “He musn’t do that! I can’t have that! I won’t let him do it! I’ll go up and see him at once.” With that, Roosevelt turned and began to sprint up the hill. The reporter, scenting a story, hurried after him.

Roosevelt was already pounding on Cleveland’s desk when Hudson arrived in the Executive Office. The Governor proceeded to explain that the bills, while admirable in intent, had been too hastily written. They contained several inconsistencies which would render them ineffective as laws. Not the least of these non sequiturs was a clause in the Tenure of Office Bill specifying two different terms, of 4 years and 1 year 11 months respectively, for the same officer. There were sentences in other measures which were incomprehensible even by legal standards; the mere addition of a word or two would repair their logic; he would not sign them as presently drawn. Bristling, Roosevelt declared that “principle” was the main thing, that it was too late to worry about arcane details. “You must not veto those bills. You cannot. You shall not … I won’t have it!”

At this, Cleveland gathered up all his three hundred pounds and considerable height, visibly mushrooming in his chair. “Mr. Roosevelt, I’m going to veto those bills!” His fist crashed down with such force as to make the Assemblyman seek sanctuary in a chair, muttering something about “an outrage.” But Cleveland had already returned to his work. The interview was over.
⁴¹

Thus ended the brief and unlikely political partnership of two future Presidents. They would work together again one day, and for the same cause that preoccupied them in Albany, but their relations would never be as friendly.

A
LTHOUGH
R
OOSEVELT WAS REPORTED
to be “beaming with smiles” on his return to the Capitol, he was still privately tortured with sorrow. His colleagues in the House had found him “a changed man” since the double tragedy of 14 February. “You could not mention the fact that his wife and mother had been taken away … 
you could see at once that it was a grief too deep.”
⁴²
There were signs that the pain inside him was increasing, rather than diminishing, due no doubt to its too cruel suppression.

Legislative work was no longer a distraction. He was offered renomination for a fourth term, but refused: he simply could not face the thought of another winter in Albany.
⁴³
With all his soul he longed now to get away from the “dull Dutch town,” away from New York with its bitter memories, away to the therapeutic emptiness of the Badlands. Even Chicago, which had so recently seemed such a thrilling prospect, now loomed like a wearisome chore. On 30 April he unburdened himself to the editor of the
Utica Morning Herald
, in an unusually self-revelatory letter.