The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (92 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
The majority report of the investigating committee, dated 22 June, used even stronger language. It described Wanamaker’s testimony as “evasive” and “garbled,” and said he was clearly in “desperate straits.” The Postmaster General’s “extraordinary” failure to act in the Baltimore case indicated “either a determination not to enforce the law or negligence therein to the last degree.” As for the testimony taken by his inspectors, it “confirmed and corroborated fully” that taken in the original investigation.
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The righteousness of the law was upheld, and Theodore Roosevelt could enjoy the sweetest political triumph of his career as Commissioner.
T
HE STORY OF
the rest of the Harrison Administration can be briefly told. At
3:20 A.M
. on the morning after the investigating committee filed the above-quoted report, Grover Cleveland was renominated by the Democrats for President of the United States.
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This news, coinciding as it did with the public disgrace of John Wanamaker, and reports of “scandalous” use of patronage in the renomination of Benjamin Harrison at Minneapolis,
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came as a signal for all disillusioned reformers to desert the Republican party, as they had in 1884. Although memories of office-looting under the Democrats still lingered, they were neither as recent nor as disturbing as those publicized by the Republican Civil Service Commissioner. “Poor Harrison!” remarked the
New York Sun
. “If he has erred, he has been punished. The irrepressible, belligerent and enthusiastic Roosevelt has made him suffer, and has more suffering in store for him.”
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Actually Roosevelt ceased to pester the little general through the campaign of 1892, possibly because he knew Mrs. Harrison was
dying of tuberculosis. In July he wrote a long, flattering article, “The Foreign Policy of President Harrison,” for publication in the 11 August issue of
The Independent
. Although the policy in question was largely that of Secretary of State James G. Blaine, Roosevelt’s conclusion, “No other Administration since the Civil War has made so excellent a record in its management of our foreign relations,” could not but have gratified his melancholy chief.
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Roosevelt enjoyed a renewed burst of literary activity that summer, publishing at least four other major articles on subjects ranging from anglomania to political assessments. He also forced himself to read all of Chaucer, whose lustier lyrics had hitherto made him gag. Even now, he found such tales as the Summoner’s “altogether needlessly filthy,” but he confessed to enjoying the others.
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He exercised strenuously to work off the effects of a sedentary winter, galloping through the woods around Washington with Lodge, playing tennis at the British Legation, and whacking polo balls around the green fields of Long Island. “I tell you, a corpulent middle-aged literary man finds a stiff polo match rather good exercise!”
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At the beginning of August, Roosevelt left to go West as usual, but official engagements in South Dakota permitted him only a week or two in the Badlands. He was not sorry to leave Elkhorn, for game was scarce and the empty cabin depressed him.
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Hell-Roaring Bill Jones agreed to drive him south to Deadwood, with Sylvane Ferris as a companion. This trip gave Roosevelt the opportunity to luxuriate in cowboy conversation, of which he had been starved in recent years.
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On 25 August, the wagon rolled into Deadwood, and Roosevelt soon discovered that, in spite of his sunburn and rough garb, he was regarded as a visiting celebrity. This was due more, perhaps, to his fame as the captor of Redhead Finnegan than to any relationship with the current Administration. A deputation of citizens waited upon him at his hotel and announced that a mass meeting had been scheduled in his honor that evening. At the appointed hour a band escorted him willy-nilly to the Deadwood Opera House, where he was obliged to open President Harrison’s local reelection campaign. There was no point in protesting that as Civil Service Commissioner
he was not supposed to take sides in a political contest. Local comprehension of his title was typified by the sheriff of the Black Hills, who remarked genially, “Well, anything civil goes with me.”
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H
E SPENT THE NEXT MONTH
on a “tedious but important” tour of the neighboring Indian reservations. The dusty hopelessness of those sprawling communities seems to have wrought a profound change in his attitude to the American Indian. During his years as a rancher, Roosevelt had acquired plenty of anti-Indian prejudice, strangely at odds with his enlightened attitude to blacks. But his research into the great Indian military heroes for
The Winning of the West
had done much to moderate this. Now, touring Pine Ridge and Crow Creek on behalf of the Great White Father, he looked on the red man not as an adversary but as a ward of the state, whom it was his duty to protect. Pity, not unmixed with
honte du vainqueur
, flared into anger when he discovered that even here, in decaying federal agencies and flyblown schools, the spoils system was an accepted part of government. Clerks and teachers testified they were routinely assessed for amounts up to $200 per head by the South Dakota Republican Central Committee, on pain of losing their jobs.
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Any time now the collectors would be around to seek “contributions” for President Harrison. Roosevelt promptly called a press conference in Sioux City and blasted the “infamy of meanness that would rob women and Indians of their meager wages.”
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He demanded the prosecution of several high Republican officials, and announced that Indians in the classified service “need not contribute a penny” to any future assessments.
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The wretchedness he saw at Pine Ridge stayed with him long after he returned East. In a speech summing up his career as Civil Service Commissioner under President Harrison, Roosevelt sounded a note of human compassion rare in his early public utterances:
Here we have a group of beings who are not able to protect themselves; who are groping toward civilization out of the
darkness of heredity and ingrained barbarism, and to whom, theoretically, we are supposed to be holding out a helping hand. They are utterly unable to protect themselves. They are credulous and easily duped by a bad agent, and they are susceptible of remarkable improvement when the agent is a good man, thoroughly efficient and thoroughly practical. To the Indians the workings of the spoils system at the agencies is a curse and an outrage … it must mean that the painful road leading upward from savagery is rendered infinitely more difficult and infinitely more stony for the poor feet trying to tread it.
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On 25 October 1892, two days before Roosevelt’s thirty-fourth birthday, Mrs. Benjamin Harrison died, adding a final touch of doom to the moribund Republican campaign. The little general had not wanted to be renominated, and now, as grief crippled him, he wanted even less to be reelected. Privately he longed to go back to Indianapolis, but “a Harrison never runs away from a fight.”
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On 8 November, however, his wish for retirement was granted. Grover Cleveland returned to power with a 3 percent majority, thanks to the swing of the reform vote. “Well, as to the general result I am disappointed but not surprised,” Roosevelt wrote Lodge. “But how it galls to see the self-complacent triumph of our foes!”
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What probably galled him even more (although he did not say it) was the thought that Lodge, who had scored a personal coup in the Massachusetts election, was now in line for a seat in the U.S. Senate, while he would soon have to pack up his bags and return to Sagamore Hill. A few newspapers wanted him to be reappointed,
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but it was unlikely the Democrats would favor a Civil Service Commissioner who had attacked President Cleveland so sharply in the past. He could scarcely have survived even if Harrison had won; since the Wanamaker affair, Republican spoilsmen had been insisting “in swarms” that Roosevelt must go.
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“I … have the profound gratification of knowing that there is no man more bitterly disliked by many of the men in my own party,” he told a fellow reformer. “When I leave on March 5th, I shall at least have the knowledge that I have certainly not flinched
from trying to enforce the law during these four years, even if my progress has been at times a little disheartening.”
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A
NOTHER DEATH SHOOK HIM
on 7 December, and plunged the whole family into official mourning. Anna Roosevelt, her frail health broken by two years of humiliation, succumbed to diphtheria at the age of twenty-nine. The last message to Elliott in Virginia was a telegraphed “
DO NOT COME
.”
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One wonders if this gave any momentary pang to Theodore, who more than anyone else was responsible for their separation.
D
URING ITS LAST
few months in power, the Harrison Administration was possessed of immortal longings. A robe and a crown, of sorts, became available in the Pacific, and the President hastened to put them on.
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They belonged to Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii, who early in the New Year had proclaimed a policy of “Hawaii for the Hawaiians,” in an attempt to end half a century of economic domination by the United States. She was immediately deposed in an uprising of native sugar growers, aided by some American marines, and abetted by the American Minister. Within weeks, representatives of the revolutionaries arrived in Washington to negotiate a treaty of annexation. President Harrison complied, although it was unlikely the incoming Democratic Administration would allow the document to get very far in Congress.
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Washington society, meanwhile, embraced Hawaii as the theme of the season. Hostesses served lavish
luaus
to their guests, to the whine of native guitars. Fashionable couples, hurrying in furs from one party to another, hummed the latest hit, a serenade to the deposed island Queen: