The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (47 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
“Can I telephone that I am coming down?” he asked.
“Certainly,” said Roosevelt, nonplussed. With barely veiled insolence, Thompson turned to the messenger.
“Tell them I will leave here in five minutes,” he said, and sat back to enjoy the general laughter at Roosevelt’s expense.
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R
OOSEVELT WAS FORCED
to turn his attention to other areas of corruption, but they were so various, and his witnesses so infallible in their pleas of bad memory and reasons for non-appearance, that the investigation languished for several sessions without uncovering any important evidence. He began to fume with frustration, and on 26 January, when the city sheriff suggested a question regarding transportation costs was “going into a gentleman’s private affairs,”
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his anger exploded, and he shot forth a fusillade of angry
ps
.
“You are a public servant,” Roosevelt shouted, thumping the table. “You are
not
a private individual; we have a right to know what the expense of your plant is; we don’t ask for the expense of your private carriage that you use for your own conveyance; we ask what you, a public servant, pay for a van employed in the service of
the public; we have a right to know; it is a perfectly proper question!”
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The sheriff meekly supplied the information. But at a subsequent hearing, on 2 February, he was so shocked by the chairman’s request to state “how much his office had cost him” that he again pleaded privacy. “This offer threw Mr. Roosevelt into a white heat of passion,” reported the
World
, “and he declared that the answer must be given. The Sheriff showed no disposition to reply, and his counsel puffed serenely on his cigar.” Roosevelt was forced to accept that the question had indeed been indiscreet, and it took a fifteen-minute recess for him to calm down.
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Experiences like this disciplined his interrogative technique, and he soon became more effective.
On Monday 11 February the sheriff reluctantly yielded up his books for inspection. Beaming with delight, Roosevelt announced that the committee would stand adjourned for a week, while counsel audited these records.
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H
E HAD ANOTHER
, more private reason for declaring an adjournment. Alice’s baby was due at any moment. With luck, the child would be born on Thursday, 14 February—St. Valentine’s Day, and the fourth anniversary of the announcement of his engagement. The prospect of such a coincidence was apparently enough to reassure him that there was time for a quick trip to Albany, to see how “the Roosevelt Bill” was doing.
What Alice thought of this desertion on the eve of her first confinement is not recorded, but she could hardly have been pleased—particularly as Corinne was away, and Mittie was in bed with what seemed to be a heavy cold.
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That left only Bamie in the house to take care of both of them. But with the family doctor in attendance, Mr. and Mrs. Lee installed in the Brunswick, and Elliott only a few blocks away, her husband was not over-concerned. On Tuesday, 12 February, he caught an express train to the capital.
I
T WAS A RELIEF
for an asthmatic man to get out of New York that morning. For over a week the city had been shrouded in a chill,
dense, dripping mist. No wonder Mittie had caught cold. Longshoremen were calling it the worst fog in twenty years.
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What little light seeped out of streetlamps and shop windows diffused into a universal gray that one reporter compared to the limbo before the Creation. With no sun or stars to pierce the fog (for the skies, too, were veiled) it was difficult to distinguish dawn from dusk, except through the blind comings and goings of half a million workers. Train service was reduced to an absolute minimum, and river traffic canceled but for a few ferries feeling their way past each other. Bridges were jammed with groping multitudes. The all-pervading vapor muffled New York’s customary noise to an uneasy murmur, broken only by the hoarse calls of fog-whistles, and the occasional shriek of a woman having her furs torn off by invisible hands. Every brick and metal surface was slimy to the touch; sticky mud covered the streets; the air smelled of dung and sodden ashes. Meteorologists predicted yet more “cloudy, threatening weather,”
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and a
New York Times
editor wrote despairingly, “It does not seem possible that the sun will ever shine again.”
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Roosevelt found the weather in Albany clearer, if equally humid, for the entire Eastern seaboard was dominated by a fixed low-pressure system. The Assembly’s magnificent fresco
The Flight of Evil Before Good
was beginning to blister, and occasional flakes fell off in the saturated air. Whether from damp rot, or some more fundamental fault, the vaulted ceiling of the chamber was showing ominous cracks, and nervous Assemblymen had taken to walking around, rather than under, its three-ton keystone.
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However it would take more than a low-pressure system to affect Roosevelt’s natural good humor that Tuesday. With 330 pages of testimony already taken by his Investigative Committee, and the prospect of sensational revelations in the weeks that lay ahead, he was again making front-page headlines. His bill was sure of passage, and (if Alice managed to hold out until Thursday) he would be able personally to guide it through the House on Wednesday afternoon. To speed it on its way through the Senate, a mass meeting of citizens had been called in New York’s Cooper Union on Thursday evening.
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The guest-list was to be a brilliant one: General U. S. Grant himself had agreed to serve as vice-president. All this could
only enhance the stature of the Honorable Gentleman from the Twenty-first.
Things were certainly going well for Roosevelt now. He had shed his sophomoric tendencies, along with his side-whiskers, a good while back. The newspapers which had treated him so condescendingly in the past were now uniformly respectful, even admiring, in their tone. Republicans in the House regarded him as their leader
de ipse;
some of the more worshipful members put boutonnieres on his desk every morning. He, for his part, no longer felt snobbish toward his humbler colleagues; on the contrary, he rejoiced in his ability to work “with bankers and bricklayers, with merchants and mechanics, with lawyers, farmers, day-laborers, saloon-keepers, clergymen, and prize-fighters.”
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Except for occasional flare-ups of aggressive temper (“You damned Irishman, what are you telling around here, that I am going to make you an apology? … I’ll break every bone in your body!”),
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he was as a rule well-mannered and charming, and, when he chose to be, deliciously comic. Even the melancholy Isaac Hunt took pleasure in his wit. “Through it all and amid it all that humorous vein in him! You would be talking with him and he would strike that falsetto. He did that all the while … he was awful funny.” Unlike most comedians, Roosevelt also found other people’s jokes amusing, and the Assembly Chamber rang often with his honest, high-pitched laughter.
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He was never bored, and found entertainment in the dullest moments of parliamentary debate. With a writer’s eye and ear, he noted down incidents and scraps of Irish dialogue for future publication. There was Assemblyman Bogan, who “looked like a serious elderly frog,” standing up to object to the rules, and, on being informed that there were no rules to object to, moving “that they be amended until there are-r-e!”
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There was the member who accused Roosevelt, during a legal debate, of occupying “what lawyers would call a
quasi-position
on the bill,” only to be crushed by another member rising majestically in his defense: “Mr. Roosevelt knows more law in a wake than you do in a month; and more than that, Michael Cameron, what do you mane by quoting Latin on the floor of the House when you don’t know the alpha and omayga of the language?”
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He was a connoisseur of mixed metaphors, in which Assembly debate was rich, and took great delight in analyzing them. Of one Democrat’s remark that convict labor “was a vital cobra which was swamping the lives of the laboring men,” Roosevelt wrote:
Now, he had evidently carefully put together the sentence beforehand, and the process of mental synthesis by which he built it up must have been curious. “Vital” was, of course, used merely as an adjective of intensity; he was a little uncertain in his ideas as to what a “cobra” was, but took it for granted that it was some terrible manifestation of nature, possibly hostile to man, like a volcano, or a cyclone, or Niagara, for instance; then “swamping” was chosen as an operation very likely to be performed by Niagara, or a cyclone, or a cobra; and behold, the sentence was complete.
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Perhaps the best of Roosevelt’s Albany stories is his account of the committee meeting whose chairman, having “looked upon the rye that was flavored with lemon peel,” fell asleep during a long piece of testimony, and, on waking up, gaveled the witness to order, on the grounds that he had seen him before: “Sit down, sir! The dignity of the Chair must be preserved! No man shall speak to this committee twice. The committee stands adjourned.”
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A
T THE BEGINNING
of the morning session of the House on Wednesday, 13 February, Assemblymen were seen flocking around Theodore Roosevelt and shaking his hand.
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He had just received a telegram from New York, stating that Alice had given birth to a baby girl late the night before. The mother was “only fairly well,”
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but that was to be expected after the agonies of a first delivery. Roosevelt proudly accepted a father’s congratulations and requested leave of absence, to begin after the passage of his other bill that afternoon. “Full of life and happiness,” he proceeded to report fourteen other bills out of his Cities Committee.
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Joy, evidently, must not be allowed to interfere with duty.