The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (140 page)

The Colonel returned to New York that evening. During the next thirty-six hours he addressed seven major meetings. His histrionic gifts were everywhere in evidence, particularly when timing his entrances. “Out of the woods came a hero,” some warm-up speaker would declaim, and infallibly Roosevelt would sweep onto the platform, waving his military hat to wild cheers.
¹⁰⁹
Or he would burst unexpectedly into a German-American
Versammlung
while the chairman barked, “Herr Roosevelt is here!”
¹¹⁰
Wherever he went, Color Sergeant Wright led the way and other Rough Riders brought up the rear, as if Roosevelt were still advancing through the jungles of Cuba.
¹¹¹
The candidate regaled every audience with a war story or two, discreetly rearranging the facts for rhetorical effect. For example, Bucky O’Neill’s celestial musings on the bridge of the
Yucatán
became his “last words” at the foot of Kettle Hill, and acquired expansionist overtones: “Who wouldn’t risk his life to add a new star to the flag?”
¹¹²

District leaders meeting with Roosevelt on 21 October discovered that behind the showman lurked a coldly efficient campaign strategist. He was “too strong a man to be susceptible to flattery,” asking not for “rosy” forecasts but facts as to where his campaign was weak and what could be done to strengthen it. The district leaders left Republican headquarters “enthusiastic, not so much over the Colonel’s personality as his capacity for details. He revealed himself a political fighter very much as he did in the charge of San Juan.”
¹¹³

T
HE
R
OOSEVELT
S
PECIAL
set off again that Friday afternoon on a quick swing up the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, followed on Monday by a six-day tour of central and western New York State.
It was noticed that the candidate had reduced his Rough Rider escort to two—Sergeant Buck Taylor and Private Sherman Bell of Cripple Creek, Colorado—and had dressed them in mufti, possibly to avoid offending the conservative sensibilities of rural voters.
¹¹⁴
If so, such scruples were groundless. Buck Taylor was listened to with the greatest deference en route, even at Port Jervis, when he pronounced the most resounding
faux pas
of the campaign:

“This hardly seemed a tribute to my military skill,” Roosevelt said afterward, “but it delighted the crowd, and as far as I could tell did me nothing but good.”
¹¹⁵

Depot by depot, valley by valley, the little train toiled on through the misty countryside. Roosevelt made sixteen formal speeches that first day, nineteen the second, fourteen the third, fifteen the fourth, eleven the fifth, and fifteen the sixth, plus twelve other impromptu speeches here and there—a total of 102 in all. He hurled them out against the din of brass bands, screaming hecklers, steam whistles, fireworks, and, most deafening of all, hundreds of boot soles clapped together by employees of a shoe factory. Choking cannon fumes greeted him at Lockport and Spencerport, sooty rain sprayed into his face at Tonawanda, and the sulfurous smoke of red flares at Rome made him cough, shout, and cough again until his voice gave out entirely. He pumped the dry hands of tinkers, the greasy hands of cooks, the bandaged hands of stevedores, the sweaty hands of foundry workers. He stood patiently through countless performances of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” (in Middletown, two bands, one black and one white, attempted to play it in counterpoint). He suffered the traditional humiliation of having the train pull out just as he was beginning to speak. He fought off drunks and had war-bereaved mothers cry on his shoulder.
¹¹⁶
In short, he enjoyed himself, as only the true political animal can.

And by all accounts his audiences enjoyed him. During the course of this long tour, Roosevelt so perfected his oratory that he was able at Phoenix to accomplish the most difficult trick in the actor’s book, namely, wordless persuasion. Two hundred dour farmers sat on their hands until he stopped in midspeech, leaned over the brake-handle and simply stared at them, wrinkling his face quizzically. “The first man he looked at laughed,” reported the
Sun
, “and the next, and the one afterward, and so on, [until] the Colonel and everyone in the crowd was laughing.”
¹¹⁷

At Syracuse, on 27 October, Theodore Roosevelt turned forty.

T
WO MORE TRAIN TOURS
, of Long Island and southwestern New York, kept him raw-throated through the last hours of election eve, 7 November. Not until midnight could the candidate relax over a copy of
Die Studien des Polybius
as his Pullman rocked homeward.
¹¹⁸
He felt that he had made “a corking campaign,” and if the memory of it was tarnished by rumors of $60,000 in last-minute bribes at headquarters, his own image, at least, shone brightly. “There is no denying,” the
Troy Times
said, “that Theodore Roosevelt has grown mightily in the public estimation since he appeared in person in the campaign.”
¹¹⁹

The day just beginning would disclose that he had won the governorship of New York State by 17,794 votes—a narrow margin but a decisive one, given the odds of four weeks before.
¹²⁰
In the opinion of Chauncey Depew, who accompanied him on his six-day sweep, his victory was a triumph of sheer personality over discouraging conditions. Even Boss Platt would admit that Roosevelt was “the only man” who could have saved the party that year. Roosevelt himself was inclined in later life to ascribe his success to the decision to attack not his opponent, but the boss of his opponent.
¹²¹
Yet in the first flush of victory he could only invoke fortune. “I have played it with bull luck this summer,” he wrote Cecil Spring Rice. “First, to get into the war; then to get out of it; then to get elected. I have worked hard all my life, and have never been particularly lucky, but
this summer I
was
lucky, and I am enjoying it to the full. I know perfectly well that the luck will not continue, and it is not necessary that it should. I am more than contented to be Governor of New York, and shall not care if I never hold another office.…”
¹²²

As the last leaves fell around Sagamore Hill he began to dictate his war memoirs, inevitably called
The Rough Riders
. At $1,000 per serial installment (with the prospect of rich book royalties afterward), the work was the most profitable he had ever undertaken. He had also, before Christmas, to deliver eight Lowell lectures at Harvard, for a fee of $1,600; then in the New Year he could start drawing a state salary of $10,000.
¹²³
Affluence stared him in the face. All that was lacking to complete his happiness was “that Medal of Honor,” but no doubt it would be forthcoming.

“During the year preceding the outbreak of the Spanish War,” Roosevelt intoned, “I was Assistant Secretary of the Navy.”
¹²⁴
Eleven more times before his stenographer reached the end of her first page, he proudly repeated the words
I, my, me
.

O
N THE ICY MIDNIGHT OF
Sunday, 1 January 1899, the silence brooding over Eagle Street, Albany, was disturbed by the sound of smashing glass. Theodore Roosevelt, Governor, had stayed out late after dinner (talking too much, as usual), with the result that forgetful servants had locked him out of the Executive Mansion. Unwilling to disturb his sleeping family, he had no choice but to break into his new home.
¹

The noise of tinkling shards on the piazza was full of omens, both for himself and Senator Platt. Their brittle alliance had already undergone a severe strain in the matter of appointments.
²
How long could it last without cracking? Would Roosevelt, indeed, prove to be the “perfect bull in a china shop” that Platt had feared? Few of the professional politicians staying in the capital that night, in preparation for Monday morning’s Annual Message,
³
doubted that the first split would come soon.

Roosevelt himself was determined to proceed with the utmost
delicacy. He knew that he could achieve next to nothing in Albany without the Senator’s help—Platt was, as he phrased it, “to all intents and purposes … a majority of the Legislature.”
⁴
Yet if he allowed that majority to control him, as it had Governor Black, he would betray his campaign promises of an independent gubernatorial administration. His duty, as he saw it, “was to combine both idealism and efficiency” by working
with
Platt
for
the people.
⁵
This was easier said than done, since the interests of the organization and the community were often at variance; but Roosevelt thought he had a solution. “I made up my mind that the only way I could beat the bosses whenever the need to do so arose (and unless there was such a need I did not wish to try) was … by making my appeal as directly and emphatically as I knew how to the mass of voters themselves.”
⁶
In other words, he looked as always to publicity as a means to wake up the electorate and ensure governmental responsibility. Men like Platt and Odell did not like to operate “in the full glare of public opinion”; their favorite venues were the closed conference room, the private railroad car, the whispery parlors of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Roosevelt was willing to meet in all these places with them, but he intended to announce every meeting loudly beforehand, and describe it minutely afterward. He would therefore not be asked to do anything that the organization did not wish the public to know about; but whenever Boss Platt had a reasonable request to make, Roosevelt would gladly comply, and see that the organization got credit for it.
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