The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (46 page)

T
HE TRUTH IS
that Alice, now in her ninth month of pregnancy, was feeling lonely and somewhat neglected.
²⁰
No sooner had her
husband returned from Dakota, and hung up his buffalo-head, than he had plunged into the campaign for reelection; immediately after
that
, he plunged into the Speakership contest. Since 26 December she had seen him only on weekends; even these, now, were being eroded with work and political entertaining.

To avoid having Alice alone at such a time, Roosevelt sublet their brownstone and installed her at 6 West Fifty-seventh Street.
²¹
Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, who had recently had a baby herself, moved in for a temporary stay at about the same time. The two young women planned to run a nursery for both children on the third floor. With Mittie and Bamie also in residence, Alice was not short of feminine company—nor for affection, since all three women adored her.
²²
Yet she obviously longed for the lusty male presence of her spouse. Whenever he arrived from Albany, Alice was waiting at the door. “Corinne, Teddy’s here,” she would shout happily up the stairs. “Come and share him!”
²³

Alice Lee Roosevelt was now twenty-two and a half years old. Even at this extreme stage of her pregnancy, she was still, by more than one account, “flower-like” in her beauty.
²⁴
Such politicians whom Roosevelt brought home for the weekend were loud in praise of her afterward.
²⁵
Roosevelt himself remained as naively in love with Alice as he had been in Cambridge days. “How I did hate to leave my bright, sunny little love yesterday afternoon!” he wrote on 6 February. “I love you and long for you all the time, and oh
so
tenderly; doubly tenderly now, my sweetest little wife. I just long for Friday evening when I shall be with you again …”
²⁶

However cloying his love-talk, however reminiscent his attitude of David Copperfield’s to the “child-wife” Dora, Alice Lee was still, after three years and three months of marriage, his “heart’s dearest.”
²⁷

R
OOSEVELT HAD PROMISED
the electorate that his main concern in the session of 1884 would be to break the power of the machines, both Republican and Democratic, in New York City.
²⁸
As chairman of the Committee on Cities, he was now in a position to push through some really effective legislation. Accordingly he wasted
no time getting down to business. “He would go at a thing as if the world was coming to an end,” said Isaac Hunt.
²⁹
On 11 January, three days after his appointment, he introduced three antimachine bills in the Assembly. The first proposed a sharp increase in liquor license fees; the second proposed a sharp decrease in the amount of money the city could borrow from unorthodox sources; the third proposed that the Mayor be made simultaneously much more powerful and much more accountable to the people.
³⁰

It was a foregone conclusion that the liquor license bill would fail, even though Roosevelt had now developed great influence in the Assembly. (The alliance between government and malt, in the late nineteenth century, was as unbreakable as that between government and oil in the late twentieth.) Still, he emerged with his reputation as a crusader enhanced, while in no way sounding like a prohibitionist. Any such image would be fatal to a politician living on so notoriously thirsty an island as Manhattan, with its huge, tankard-swinging German population. “Nine out of ten beer drinkers are decent and reputable citizens,” Roosevelt declared. “That large class of Americans who have adopted the German customs in regard to drinking ales and beers … are in the main … law-abiding.”
³¹

Roosevelt’s second measure achieved passage, and added a needed touch of fiscal discipline to the New York treasury. The third, which he rightly regarded as the most important piece of legislation in the session of 1884, won tremendous popular support—and opposition in the Assembly to match. Grandly entitled “An Act to Center Responsibility in the Municipal Government of the City of New York,” it consisted of a mere forty words; but these words, if they became law, were enough to make political eunuchs of the city’s twenty-four aldermen. At the moment it was the Mayor who was the eunuch, since the Board of Aldermen enjoyed confirmatory power over all his appointments. Defenders of the status quo invoked the Jeffersonian principle that minimum power should be shared by the maximum number of people.
³²
Roosevelt, whose contempt for Thomas Jefferson was matched only by his worship of the autocratic Alexander Hamilton, believed just the opposite. He pointed out that New York’s aldermen were, almost to a man,
“merely the creatures of the local ward bosses or of the municipal bosses.”
³³
It was the machine, therefore, which ultimately governed the city; and Roosevelt did not consider that democratic.

His major speech in support of the mayoralty bill, when it came up for a second hearing on 5 February, was so forceful as to create an instant sensation. Roosevelt himself considered it “one of my best speeches,”
³⁴
and the press agreed with him. A sampling of next day’s headlines tells the story:

The speech, as transcribed in black and white by Albany correspondents, loses much of the color which Roosevelt undoubtedly gave it in delivery, for he was by now an accomplished, if awkward, orator. Privately he admitted that “I do not speak enough from the chest, so my voice is not as powerful as it ought to be.”
³⁶
Like a violinist without much tone, he had learned to compensate with agogic accents (“Mister Spee-KAR!”), measured phrasing, and percussive noise-effects. Observers noticed his habit of biting words off with audible clicks of the teeth,
³⁷
making his syllables literally more incisive.

One sound in which Roosevelt specialized—and which traveled very well in the cavernous Assembly Chamber—was the plosive initial
p
. He made full use of it in this speech, and since he stood in the back row, one can only feel sorry for the Assemblymen in his immediate vicinity.

“I will ask the particular attention of the House to this bill,” said Roosevelt. “It simply proposes that the Mayor of the City of New York shall have absolute power in making appointments … At present we have this curious condition of affairs—the Mayor
possessing the nominal power and two or three outside men possessing the real power. I propose to put the power in the hands of the men the people elect. At present the power is in the hands of one or two men whom the people did not elect.”
³⁸

Roosevelt’s speech, however, was remarkable for more than alliteration—although the
ps
popped energetically to the end. His arguments in favor of an all-powerful Mayor, independent of and unanswerable to the city’s two dozen shadowy aldermen, were, to quote
The New York Times
, “conclusive.”
³⁹
In reply to criticism that he wished to create “a Czar in New York,” Roosevelt said simply, “A czar that will have to be reelected every second year is not much of an autocrat.” In any case, he went on, “I would rather have a responsible autocrat than an irresponsible oligarchy.” New York’s “contemptible” aldermen, whom scarcely any citizen could name, were “protected by their own obscurity.” But the Mayor, by virtue of his office, “stands with the full light of the press directed upon him; he stands in the full glare of public opinion; every act he performs is criticized, and every important move that he makes is remembered.”
⁴⁰

Reporters noted with approval that Roosevelt had lost his youthful tendency to ascribe all evil to the Democratic party. His remarks on municipal corruption were ruthlessly non-partisan. The four aldermen whom he chose to name as vote-sellers to Tammany Hall were all Republicans. “They have made themselves Democrats for hire,” said Roosevelt in tones of disgust. “If public opinion does its work effectively … no one of them would ever be returned to any office within the gift of the people.” He concluded with the extraordinary statement that he did not care if the passage of his bill removed every Republican officeholder from the municipal government—“the party throughout the state and nation would be benefited rather than harmed.”
⁴¹

Reading between the lines of this speech, one senses a fierce desire for revenge upon the Republican city bosses who betrayed him when he was about to win the Speakership. Subconsciously, no doubt, Roosevelt was
himself
mounting that autocratic pedestal, to bask “in the full glare of public opinion,” while men like O’Brien, Hess, and Biglin skulked in the shadows of “their own obscurity.”
Consciously, however, he was sincere in his arguments, and it was generally agreed that what he said made good sense. Rising to reply, the House’s ranking Democrat, James Haggerty, admitted that the moral character of New York aldermen was low. His objection to Roosevelt’s measure involved “a question of principle.”
⁴²
Jeffersonian arguments followed. The debate lasted all day, and, in spite of desperate lobbying by Tammany Hall, ended with a complete rout of the opposition. “The Roosevelt Bill,” as it would henceforth be called, was ordered engrossed for a third reading.

N
OT CONTENT WITH
his three municipal reform bills, Roosevelt simultaneously pushed for an investigation of corruption in the New York City government. This resolution was nothing new. Probes had been launched routinely in the past, and as routinely thrown off by the city’s smoothly spinning machine.
⁴³
But Roosevelt felt sure that if he were put in charge of his own investigation, he would be able to jam at least some of the levers. Permission was granted almost immediately by the Assembly. It could not very well have refused, because venality, inefficiency, and waste in New York had again become a national scandal, and an embarrassment to both Democrats and Republicans in this presidential election year. On 15 January Roosevelt found himself chairman of a Special Committee to Investigate the Local Government of the City and County of New York. His colleagues consisted of two Roosevelt Republicans and two sympathetic Democrats, giving him, in effect, a free hand to choose his own witnesses and write his own report.
⁴⁴

The committee’s hearings began four days later, at the Metropolitan Hotel in New York. Roosevelt symbolically opened the proceedings by calling for a Bible, and in the same breath, for Hubert O. Thompson, Commissioner of Public Works. As a freshman Assemblyman, he had been both repelled and fascinated by Thompson, who seemed to spend most of his time in Albany, and was the successful machine politician par excellence. “He is a gross, enormously fleshy man,” Roosevelt wrote then, “with a full face and thick, sensual lips; wears a diamond shirt pin and an enormous seal ring on his little finger. He has several handsome parlors in the
Delavan House, where there is always champagne and free lunch; they are crowded from morning to night with members of assembly, lobbyists, hangers-on, office holders, office seekers, and ‘bosses’ of greater or less degree.”
⁴⁵
For the last two years Roosevelt had looked on in dismay while Thompson’s department more than doubled its expenditures, without any noticeable increase in services.
⁴⁶
He had no doubt that much of the money was flowing directly into Thompson’s pockets.

Now the two men faced each other directly across a rectangular table, and Roosevelt plunged at once into his investigation. But for all the young man’s “sharp looks” and energy, it was evident to reporters that he was feeling his way. Thompson, a veteran of many investigations, handled him easily. No sooner had Roosevelt asked his first formal questions than the door opened and a messenger came in with a telegram for the witness. Thompson scanned it, laughed, then read it aloud to the committee. It was a summons to appear at an identical investigation, being conducted simultaneously by the Senate.