The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (103 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
Meanwhile the Sunday Closing crusade went on. More and more saloonkeepers decided that their side-door business was not worth the risk of heavy fines and/or loss of license. On 23 August the Liquor Sellers’ Association, representing some nine thousand of the city’s twelve thousand saloons, came out in favor of total observation of the law, and threatened to expel any members who failed to comply. Its motive, of course, was to make political pressure for repeal overwhelming, but nevertheless the announcement was seen as a psychological victory for Roosevelt. Sunday, 1 September, replaced 28 July as the driest on record.
132
“There has not been a more complete triumph of law in the municipal history of New York,” wrote the London
Times
correspondent. Roosevelt had managed to achieve the impossible by closing the saloons, and getting large crowds of poor people to respect him for it. He himself boasted that he had “never had such a success as in the last four months”—adding the usual disclaimer, “I am not a bit taken in, and … shall not be in the least disappointed when it ends.”
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He scored yet another publicity coup on 25 September, when the United Societies for Liberal Sunday Laws staged a protest parade through Germantown, and sent him a cynical invitation to attend. Few imagined that he would accept. When Roosevelt came drumming up the steps of the reviewing stand on Eighty-sixth Street, Herman Ridder, publisher of the
Staats-Zeitung
, was convinced he was an impostor. “I’ll go bail he is the genuine article,” laughed the City Comptroller.
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The parade, which took two hours to pass by, was a spectacular demonstration of Teutonic irony.
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Flagstaffs and building facades were draped with purple bunting, symbolizing the death of the “Continental Sunday.” The advance guard consisted of a dozen bicyclists with blue noses and bunches of whiskers under their chins, impersonating upstate “hayseed” legislators. Some thirty thousand marchers followed on in leather trousers, Bismarck helmets, and other ethnic paraphernalia. Saloonkeepers rolled by in open carriages, waving bottles of Rhine wine and a poster declaiming, “
T’AINT SUNDAY
.” A gilt wagon carried a pretty
Fräulein
veiled in black, as the mourning Goddess of Liberty. She looked bewildered when Roosevelt loudly applauded her. Another float, labeled “The Millionaire’s Club,” showed three dress-suited toffs—one with prominent teeth and spectacles—swigging champagne, while behind them two policemen arrested a beer-drinker in working clothes. “As this float passed,” reported the
World
, “Mr. Roosevelt looked serious.”
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For most of the afternoon, however, he beamed with enjoyment. Since he stood on the most prominent part of the platform, it seemed “as if the whole affair were in his honor.”
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Word of his presence spread back down the line, and the paraders twisted their necks to stare at him. One short-sighted veteran peered at the stand
and shouted, “Wo ist der Roosevelt?” The Commissioner leaned forward, thumping his chest, and screamed,
“Hier bin ich!”
At this the marchers, spectators, and everybody on the stand dissolved into helpless laughter. “Teddy, you’re a man!” yelled someone in the crowd.
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Afterward Roosevelt told his hosts he had never had such fun. “But,” he added, “a hundred parades can’t swerve us from doing our duty.” With that he left, carrying two souvenir banners for the wall of his office: “
ROOSEVELT’S RAZZLE-DAZZLE REFORM RACKET
” and “
SEND THE POLICE CZAR TO RUSSIA
.”
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R
OOSEVELT’S PUBLIC TRIUMPHS
in the summer and early fall of 1895, coupled with his tireless campaigning on behalf of his board and his party, prompted rumors that he was actively working toward the nation’s highest office. The
Commercial Advertiser’s
above-quoted suggestion that he might succeed Grover Cleveland as President was taken up by the
Ithaca Daily News
, which formally endorsed him for the Republican nomination in 1896. In Brooklyn, a certain Reverend A. C. Dixon proclaimed from the pulpit the hope that Theodore Roosevelt might soon enter the White House, “as he incarnates the principles upon which Government is founded.”
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At No. 303 Mulberry Street, Jacob Riis serenely countered all criticism of the Commissioner’s high-handed actions with: “Of course! Teddy is bound for the Presidency.” What was more, said Riis, Teddy knew it.
“Let’s ask him,” Lincoln Steffens suggested. The two men dashed across to headquarters and burst into Roosevelt’s office. Riis put the question directly. Was he working to be President? The effect, wrote Steffens, “was frightening.”
TR leaped to his feet, ran around his desk, and fists clenched, teeth bared, he seemed about to throttle Riis, who cowered away, amazed.
“Don’t you dare ask me that,” TR yelled at Riis. “Don’t you put such ideas into my head. No friend of mine would ever say a thing like that, you—you—”
Riis’s shocked face or TR’s recollection that he had few
friends as devoted as Jake Riis halted him. He backed away, came up again to Riis, and put his arm over his shoulder. Then he beckoned me close and in an awed tone of voice explained.
“Never, never, you must never either of you remind a man at work on a political job that he may be President. It almost always kills him politically. He loses his nerve; he can’t do his work; he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility. I, for instance, I am going to do great things here, hard things that require all the courage, ability, work that I am capable of … But if I get to thinking of what it might lead to—”
He stopped, held us off, and looked into our faces with his face screwed up into a knot, as with lowered voice he said slowly: “I must be wanting to be President. Every young man does. But I won’t let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will begin to work for it, I’ll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so—I’ll beat myself. See?”
Again he looked at us as if we were enemies; then he threw us away from him and went back to his desk.
“Go on away, now,” he said, “and don’t you ever mention the—don’t you ever mention that to me again.”
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Riis and Steffens were so crestfallen that afterward they did not even mention it to each other. Yet Roosevelt himself could hardly ignore the specter they had raised. He could not stop people addressing him—quite correctly—as “President Roosevelt,” and he would have been less than human had his heart not lurched sometimes at the sound of that phrase.
T
HE
N
OVEMBER ELECTIONS
approached, bringing with them some wintry blasts of political discontent, all seemingly directed at Roosevelt. His anticorruption crusade had been tolerated by the state Republican organization as long as it contributed to the decline of Tammany Hall, but now it began to look as if the reverse effect might be true. There was an ominous contrast between rural and metropolitan voter registrations, the former promising a statewide
sweep for the GOP, the latter indicating a Democratic backlash in New York City. Evidently the
World’s
constant presentation of Roosevelt as a reformer gone mad was having its effect. The
Staats-Zeitung
, ignoring his happy appearance at the Liberal Laws parade, accused him of having “a grudge against Irish-Americans and German-Americans.” Republican pollsters computed the potential vote loss in each of these communities and blanched. They were not encouraged by Roosevelt’s announced intention to police the election fairly. A less virtuous Commissioner might have been persuaded to influence the voting by a combination of intimidation and selective arrests, but that kind of loyal assistance could hardly be expected from “the Patron Saint of Dry Sundays.”
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Accordingly the Republican Convention at Saratoga endorsed the Excise Law in the vaguest possible terms, hoping to offend neither upstate rural prohibitionists nor thirsty urban workers. Pressure began to build on Roosevelt to moderate his crusade, at least through Election Day. His response was unequivocal and publicly expressed. “The implication is that for the sake of the Republican party, a party of which I am a very earnest member, I should violate my oath of office and connive at lawbreaking … Personally, I think I can best serve the Republican party by taking the police force absolutely out of politics. Our duty is to preserve order, to protect life and property, to arrest criminals, and to secure honest elections.”
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“I shall not alter my course one handsbreadth,” he wrote a worried Cabot Lodge, “even though Tammany carries the city by 50,000.”
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This intransigent attitude had immediate personal consequences. Edward Lauterbach, chairman of the Republican County Committee, issued a statement that the party “was not in any way responsible for Rooseveltism.” Lemuel Quigg, who had backed him for Mayor the year before, reproached him for “base ingratitude” and said their friendship was at an end. “He is a goose,” Roosevelt commented indifferently. Even Mayor Strong, anxious to placate the German-American lobby, said he should either “let up on the saloon” or quit his post. Roosevelt replied that he would do neither. Strong was enraged but powerless.
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Roosevelt put on a cheery front in public, but privately he was
depressed by the sudden downturn of his political fortunes. It became increasingly apparent that the city’s Republican voters were going to “bolt” in droves, and that he would be held to blame. His support on the Police Board began to erode. “There is considerable irritation,” the
World
reported, “because Messrs. Parker, Grant, and Andrews have seemingly lost their identity, and … merged into the great and only Theodore Roosevelt.” He admitted having some “rough times” with his colleagues. “It has only been by a mixture of tact, good humor, and occasional heavy hitting that I have kept each one in line.”
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With the abnormal self-control that always restrained his abnormal pugnacity, Roosevelt managed to avoid an open fight with state party leaders. He knew that the organization could not do without his unique talents as a campaigner. Anxious to reaffirm his party loyalty, he stumped for Republican candidates all over the city, speaking two or three times a night, and made side-trips to local hustings in Boston and Baltimore. “I am almost worn out,” he wrote on his thirty-seventh birthday. “Thank heaven there is only a week more, and then the exhausting six months will be over, and I can ease up a little, no matter which way the battle goes.”
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T
HE BATTLE WENT
to the enemy. Although Republicans won overwhelmingly elsewhere in the state, Tammany Hall saw its full slate of municipal candidates elected by landslide margins. Analysis of the polls showed that 80 percent of the German-American vote, hitherto solidly Republican, had gone Democratic.
148
There could hardly have been a more crushing indictment of reform in general, and police reform in particular. The contrast between local and state returns only emphasized Roosevelt’s unpopularity in his native city.