The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (79 page)

This referred to
The Winning of the West
. Its text was beginning to drag alarmingly: with six months to go on his contract, he had written only half of Volume One. Vowing to “fall to … with redoubled energy,” he returned to Sagamore Hill on 5 October
¹¹⁷
—but Roosevelt the politician would not let him sit down at his desk.

The presidential campaign was well under way, and with Cleveland crippled by the tariff controversy, there seemed to be a real chance of a Republican victory. Duty required that he make at least a token appearance for Benjamin Harrison. Actually Roosevelt was more than willing, for he considered the little general an excellent candidate.
¹¹⁸
Despite a total lack of charisma, Harrison was a magnificent orator, capable of enthralling thousands—as long as he did not shake any hands afterward. It was said that every voter who touched his icy flesh walked away a Democrat.
¹¹⁹
Party strategy, therefore, called for maximum public exposure, minimum personal contact, and support appearances by fiery young Republicans like Roosevelt, who could be guaranteed to thaw anybody Harrison had frozen.

On 7 October, after only one day at home, Roosevelt answered the call. Jumping back onto the Chicago Limited, he set off on a speaking tour of Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota. The sight of crowds and bunting worked its usual magic on him, and he canvassed with great zest. His performance was good enough to establish him, within a week, as one of the campaign’s most effective speakers. “I can’t help thinking,” he wrote Lodge, “that this time we have our foes on the hip.”
¹²⁰

On 27 October, Theodore Roosevelt turned thirty. Nine days later he heard that his party had won not only the Presidency but the Senate and House of Representatives as well. “I am as happy as a king,” he told Cecil Spring Rice, “—to use a Republican simile.”
¹²¹

A
T LAST
, as winter settled down on Sagamore Hill, a measure of tranquillity returned to Roosevelt’s life. The sight of snow tumbling past his study window, and the sound of logs crackling in the grate, combined to produce that sense of calm seclusion a writer most prizes—when the pen seems to move across the paper almost of its own accord, and the words flow steadily down the nib, drying into whorls and curlicues that please the eye; when sentences have just the right rhythmic cadence, paragraphs fall naturally into place, and the pages pile up satisfyingly … Roosevelt’s characteristic interlineations and scratchings-out grew fewer and fewer as the pace of his narrative increased, and inspiration grew.
¹²²

He worked steadily all though December, finishing Volume One before Christmas.
¹²³
Early in the New Year he moved his family to 689 Madison Avenue. (Bamie, who was traveling in Europe, had placed her house at Edith’s disposal.)
¹²⁴
Seeking refuge from the children, Roosevelt set up a desk at Putnam’s, on West Twenty-third Street. For some reason the publishers were in a hurry to get the book out by the middle of June. Chapters of Volume Two were sent upstairs to the composing room as fast as Roosevelt could write them. Meanwhile Volume One was printed and bound on the topmost floors. Later, stacks of both volumes would be cranked downstairs for sale in the retail department at street level—permitting George Haven Putnam to boast that
The Winning of the West
had been in large part written, produced, and marketed under one roof.
¹²⁵

Roosevelt scrawled his last line of text on 1 April 1889, and spent the next couple of weeks blearily checking the galleys. With a touch of sadness he wondered “if I have or have not properly expressed all the ideas that seethed vaguely in my soul as I wrote it.”
¹²⁶
But he had little leisure to indulge in self-doubts, for on 27 April Cabot Lodge came up from Washington
¹²⁷
with a message from the White House.

O
NLY A FEW DAYS BEFORE
, Roosevelt had written, “I do hope the President will appoint good Civil Service Commissioners.”
¹²⁸
Lodge fully understood the plaintive tone of that remark. Since the beginning of the year he had been trying to get his friend a place in the incoming Administration. Roosevelt had affected nonchalance at first, yet while still engaged on the final chapters of
The Winning of the West
, confessed, “I would like above all things to go into politics.”
¹²⁹
Lodge had tried to persuade Harrison’s new Secretary of State—who was none other than James G. Blaine—to appoint Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary, but the Plumed Knight gracefully demurred. In words that proved prophetic, he wrote:

Lodge had reported only the polite parts of this rejection. “I hope you will tell Blaine how much I appreciate his kind expressions,” Roosevelt replied.
¹³¹

Lodge had then begun to negotiate directly with the President, urging him to appoint Roosevelt to
some
federal position, no matter how minor, in recognition of his help during the campaign. Several influential Republicans advised the same. Harrison was “by no means eager.”
¹³²
Perhaps he remembered the screeching, strawhatted young delegate at Chicago in 1884, and winced at the idea of having him within earshot of the White House. Eventually he thought of a dusty sinecure that paid little, and promised less in terms of real political power. Ambitious men invariably turned it down; if Roosevelt was crazy enough to want it, he might be crazy enough to make something of it.

Lodge hurried to New York, and, amid the din of the U.S. Government Centennial celebrations,
¹³³
told Roosevelt that Harrison was willing to appoint him Civil Service Commissioner, at a salary of $3,500 per annum. He doubted, however, that his friend would want the post. Such a pittance could only plunge him deeper into financial difficulties; bureaucratic entanglements would interfere with his upcoming book contracts; besides, the work was bound to make him unpopular, for everybody in Washington was heartily sick of the subject of Civil Service Reform.

Roosevelt accepted at once.

A
COUPLE OF DAYS LATER
the Centennial came to an end with the biggest banquet in American history, held at the Metropolitan
Opera House. About eleven o’clock, after the speeches were over, and $16,000 worth of wine had been drunk, the guests filed out into the crisp spring night. Most were tired and satiated, but one young man seemed anxious to dawdle and talk. His high, eager voice, as he stood on the sidewalk with a group of friends and pointed at the sky, sounded “quite charming” to a passerby, although he occasionally squeaked into falsetto. “It was young Roosevelt,” reported the observer. “He was introducing some fellows to the stars.”
¹³⁴

W
ASHINGTON
, D.C.,
IN THE SPRING
of 1889 was, for those who could afford to live there, one of the most delightful places in the world.
¹
Seen from various carefully-selected angles, it was a beautiful city, with its broad, black, spotless streets, its marble buildings and sixty-five thousand trees, its vistas of “the silvery Potomac” by day and the illuminated Capitol by night. A visiting Englishman remarked on its air “of comfort, of leisure, of space to spare, of stateliness … it looks the sort of place where nobody has to work for his living, or, at any rate, not hard.”
²

This was true above a certain bureaucratic level. Senior clerks and Cabinet officers alike breakfasted at eight or nine, lunched with all deliberate speed, and laid down their pens at four.
³
They then had several hours of daylight left for strolling, shopping, drinking, or philandering (Washington was reputed to be “the wickedest city in the nation”)—hours which lengthened steadily as the warm
weather approached, and Government prepared to shut down for the summer.

“Rich and talented people crowded Adams’s salon.”
Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, by John Singer Sargent, 1890
. (
Illustration 16.1
)