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  To the farmers, shopkeepers, barbers, and tradesmen who made up the Assembly, young Roosevelt was an alien being. Isaac Hunt, a country lawyer from the pastoral town of Jefferson, eventually a close friend, recalled his first sight of Roosevelt: “He came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult. He pulled off his coat. He was dressed in full dress, he had been out to dinner somewhere.” With his side-whiskers and pince-nez eyeglasses attached to a silken cord, Roosevelt seemed an arrogant dandy even when he wasn’t carrying his gold-headed cane and silk top hat.

  In his diary, Roosevelt’s impression of his colleagues was no more flattering. His fellow Republicans were “bad enough”; he described one of them as “entirely unprincipled, with the same idea of Public Life and Civil Service that a vulture has of a dead sheep.” The Democrats were even worse, “a stupid, sodden, vicious lot, most of them being equally deficient in brains and virtue.” The Tammany Hall crew from New York seemed “totally unable to speak with even an approximation to good grammar.” He particularly despised one of them, “a gentleman named MacManus, a huge, fleshy, unutterably coarse and low brute, who was formerly a prize fighter, at present keeps a low drinking and dancing saloon, and is more than suspected of having begun his life as a pickpocket.”

  The legislature spent most of its time at loggerheads, and Roosevelt’s first Assembly session marked time for several weeks in a stalemate. The eight Tammany members held the balance of power but refused to vote for either the Republican or Democratic choice as speaker, leaving the chamber unable to function. Roosevelt had kept uncharacteristically quiet for the first few weeks, feeling, he said, like “a boy in a strange school.” But he made his first substantive impression in Albany when he shot down a GOP compromise to break the stalemate. In his maiden speech, Roosevelt argued that his party had no interest in healing what was essentially a quarrel among Democrats. His own constituents, he said, “do not seem to care whether the deadlock is broken or not. In fact, they seem rather relieved! And if we do no business till February fifteenth, I think the voters of the State will worry along through without it.” There were bursts of applause, and the compromise died.

  He made a probably more important impression when he heard MacManus was planning to fight him. Roosevelt confronted his nemesis and hissed: “By God! MacManus, if you try anything like that, I’ll kick you, I’ll bite you, I’ll kick you in the balls, I’ll do anything to you. You’d better let me alone.” There were no more threats.

  But insults came to blows at Hurst’s Roadhouse, a tavern favored by lawmakers and reporters six miles outside Albany, where three men taunted Roosevelt one evening for his foppery and the fact that he wasn’t wearing a winter coat. “Won’t Mama’s boy catch cold?” they jeered. He ignored them for a while, then stood to confront them. According to a reporter at the scene, one of the men took a swing at Roosevelt. “But, quick as lightning, Roosevelt slipped his glasses into his side pocket, and in another second, he had laid out two of the trio on the floor. The third quit cold.” Then Roosevelt bought beers for all three of his would-be tormentors.

  The young legislator soaked up information. He would arrive at his hotel breakfast room loaded with newspapers, rapidly scanning them and tossing loose pages aside in table-high piles on the floor. The Brooklyn Eagle’s William C. Hudson, who was staying at the same hotel, said: “Roosevelt saw everything, grasped the sense of everything, and formed an opinion on everything which he was eager to maintain at any risk.” He was equally voracious in tapping his colleagues for political lore, said George Spinney of The New York Times: “He would just stand a man up against a wall and interview him and ask, ‘How do you do this in your district and county’ and ‘What is this thing and that thing.’ He went right to the bottom of the whole thing. He knew more about State politics at the end of that first session than 90 percent of them did.” That year, said his friend Isaac Hunt, “I thought I knew more than he did. But before we got through, he grew right away from me.”

  Roosevelt soon revised his appraisal of his colleagues, sorting them into three groups. A few, including Hunt, were reformers and “very good men,” there to fight corrupt leaders for good government. The second group, the majority, was made up of time-servers who would blow with the prevailing wind. But the rest, perhaps a third of the members, were “very bad men” who took bribes and were owned by corporate interests. These were the shock troops of corruption; Roosevelt called them the “black horse cavalry.”

  Roosevelt would develop a formidable power to capture attention; each successive office he held gave him a higher platform to shout from, and when he came to the White House, he exulted, “I have got such a bully pulpit!” But it was in Albany that he began to learn public speaking – slowing the pace of his words, lowering his high-pitched voice, and using an orator’s cadence to trigger an audience’s emotions. His sheer conviction and the force of his character could rouse a crowd into a roaring frenzy. In Albany, though, he was only beginning that long process.

  It was also in Albany, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin maintains, that Roosevelt learned to use the press. In her book The Bully Pulpit, Goodwin says he decided that the only way corruption could be beaten was to enlist the public in the fight and thus put pressure on the torpid majority lawmakers. To get his message to the electorate, he had to cultivate the reporters who covered the legislature. He soon became a favorite of the Albany press corps, a congenial after-hours companion, and an always-quotable source of good copy on issues of all sorts. It was a tactic he would use throughout his career.

  Roosevelt’s next move was to follow up an investigative story that Spinney had helped report for The New York Times the previous year. The story charged that a corrupt judge had conspired with the infamous Wall Street robber baron Jay Gould to take control of New York City’s elevated rail system. It was a classic stock-jobbing scheme. First, Gould and his cronies filed a lawsuit against the company, which found the legal fight so expensive that it was forced into receivership. Gould connived to appoint Judge Theodore Westbrook, who had previously been Gould’s personal lawyer, to preside over the bankruptcy. Westbrook then issued a series of orders making it more difficult for the company to sort out its finances, so stockholders would dump their shares. When the stock price was driven down far enough, Gould and his partners bought a controlling block of the company’s shares, at which point Westbrook arbitrarily decreed that it was now solvent, and the price rebounded.

  The Times exposé had raised an outcry against Westbrook, but his stolid denials of wrongdoing and a lack of prosecutorial interest had let the scandal fade. In March, however, Roosevelt’s friend Hunt told him that Judge Westbrook had also approved the looting of insolvent insurance companies, and Roosevelt, remembering the earlier Times story, decided that the judge should be impeached.

  Painstakingly, the young legislator investigated the Times’ sources. He found the state’s attorney general was also part of the scheme; that Westbrook had named receivers for the street rail company who were on Gould’s payroll; and that the judge had held court on the case in some odd venues, including the offices and hotel rooms of Gould’s cronies. Roosevelt also found an unpublished letter in which Westbrook told Gould, “I am willing to go to the very verge of judicial discretion to protect your vast interests.”

  Roosevelt’s speech, demanding an investigation of both Judge Westbrook and Attorney General Hamilton Ward, caused a sensation. Members of the black horse cavalry managed to table his motion every time he tried to bring it to the floor, but in another fiery speech, Roosevelt denounced Gould and his cronies by name as nothing but “sharks” and “swindlers” whose “financial dishonesty is a matter of common notoriety.” This fearless blasphemy shocked the Assembly into silence, broken only by Roosevelt’s fervent words and the rhythmic smacking of his right fist against his left palm. The story rocked the state and stayed alive over the Easter recess, and by the time the legislature returned to Albany, public pressure was strong enough to force a
104-6 vote in favor of an investigation.

  In the end, the black horses won again. Amid widespread rumors that three members had taken bribes of $2,500 each, the Assembly’s Judiciary Committee reported that Westbrook had been indiscreet, but shouldn’t be impeached. Roosevelt made another impassioned speech – “I say you cannot by your votes clear the Judge. He stands condemned by his own acts in the eyes of all honest people. All you can do is to shame yourselves” – but the Assembly voted to accept the report.

  Despite that defeat, Roosevelt became a leader of the growing reform movement. His role in the fight had made his name known, Spinney wrote, in “every nook and corner of the State.” Despite a Democratic sweep of the state the following year, Roosevelt was overwhelmingly re-elected, and his fellow Republicans named him – still the youngest member of the legislature – the minority leader. “I rose like a rocket,” he was to write.

  It made him giddy. “My head was swelled,” he said. “I would listen to no argument, no advice.” He would yell at anyone who disagreed with him, pounding his desk and denouncing opponents – particularly the “rotten” Democratic Party – in colorful language that all but guaranteed they would not be converted. His self-righteousness grew, and he irked senior members of his party by referring to them as “my men.” Hunt recalled later that his friend had become “a perfect nuisance.” He was in the newspapers almost daily, but he finally realized that he had alienated almost the entire chamber: “Every bit of influence I had was gone. The things I wanted to do I was powerless to accomplish.”

  That epiphany displayed yet another of Roosevelt’s talents: He could admit he was wrong. He could also change, toning down his histrionics and wooing legislators he had driven away. “I turned in to help them, and they turned to and gave me a hand,” he wrote, “and so we were able to get things done.”

  In the same spirit, Roosevelt found his convictions changing. He began to temper the conservative, laissez-faire principles he had absorbed in his schooling with the humanizing experience of real life. For example, he had voted against a bill banning the manufacturing of cigars in tenement houses, on the ground that the landlords had a right to do whatever they wanted with their property. But labor leader Samuel Gompers persuaded Roosevelt to go with him on a tour of some of the tenements where cigars were being made. Roosevelt was “a good deal shocked.” In one building, five adults and several children occupied a single room where they ate and slept when they weren’t rolling cigars. The bedding was foul, tobacco was stored against the walls, and there were scraps of food in a corner. He was convinced that cigar production in tenement houses was “an evil thing from every standpoint - social, industrial, and hygienic.” He changed his vote and backed the bill, which was signed into law by New York’s new Democratic governor, Grover Cleveland.

  That victory, however, led to another setback. The New York Court of Appeals eventually ruled that laissez-faire should prevail and that the cigar makers had been shorn of their rights without due process of law. That decision was cited for years to block government regulation of industry, and Roosevelt said the case woke him to “the fact that the courts were not necessarily the best judges of what should be done to better social and industrial conditions.” The judges, he said, saw the case only from the viewpoint of their own moneyed class, and “knew nothing whatever of the needs, or of the life and labor, of three-fourths of their fellow citizens in great cities.”

  When the Republicans recaptured a majority in the Assembly in the election of 1883, Roosevelt ran for Speaker. But the GOP bosses refused to back him, so he campaigned for the job, appealing to voters across the state to tell their Assemblymen to vote for him; he lost, but he reinforced his stature in the reform movement as a man who was willing to buck the bosses. In partnership with Governor Cleveland, Roosevelt pushed through a Civil Service bill to end patronage and reduce corruption in state government. He also introduced bills to curb the power of Tammany Hall in New York City and sought public support by launching well-publicized investigations of embezzlement and abuses in several crannies of City Hall. Against heavy odds, he succeeded in passing a law that focused power in the hands of the mayor, at the expense of Tammany Hall and the notoriously corrupt Board of Aldermen.

  But if passionate persuasion was Roosevelt’s forte, parliamentary procedure and attention to detail were his weaknesses. Other reform bills were to fail, some because they were so poorly written that Cleveland felt compelled to veto them. Roosevelt suffered another defeat in his first venture into national politics, when he and fellow reformers at the 1884 GOP convention backed Vermont Senator George F. Edmunds for the presidency. Edmunds was pitted against President Chester A. Arthur, who had been elevated by the assassination of James Garfield, and a former secretary of state, James G. Blaine. At the State Republican convention, Roosevelt maneuvered to undercut party leaders and win endorsement for Edmunds, giving Edmunds credibility as a national figure. But at the convention in Chicago, the reformers’ campaign for Edmunds was overwhelmed by the machine and its candidate Blaine, despite a whiff of corruption dating from his maneuvers as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

  Theodore and Alice had moved into a brownstone on West Forty-Fifth Street, and Roosevelt took the train from Albany every Friday to spend the weekend there. His diary records his delight at being “in my own lovely little home, with the sweetest and prettiest of all little wives.” Their families had been concerned that Alice hadn’t produced children, but she became pregnant, with a child due in mid-February 1884. Roosevelt bought a plot of land near Oyster Bay and hired an architect to design a country house for what he was sure would be a large family. “I love you and long for you all the time,” he wrote Alice from Albany, “and oh so tenderly, doubly tenderly now, my sweetest little wife.”

  It wasn’t the custom in those days for men to attend births, and a few days before the baby was due, Roosevelt left for Albany. On February 13, he got a telegram: Alice had a girl. There was celebration in the Assembly. But Alice wasn’t doing well, and her doctor realized that she was suffering from nephritis, a kidney disease whose early symptoms had been masked by her pregnancy. By the time it was diagnosed, she was seriously ill.

  At the same time, Mittie Roosevelt was suffering from typhoid fever, then a fast-charging killer. Heading to New York, Roosevelt fumed as his train crept along in a dense fog. Arriving at their Manhattan home near midnight, he cradled his comatose wife. Then the physician told him his mother was in critical condition, and Roosevelt raced down two flights of stairs to attend to her. Mittie died early in the morning. Alice died that afternoon. It was Valentine’s Day, and Roosevelt wrote in his diary: “The light has gone out of my life.”

  Stunned by his loss, Roosevelt told a friend: “There is now nothing left for me except to try to so live as not to dishonor the memory of those I love who have gone before me.” But he was inconsolable; his friend Isaac Hunt said Roosevelt “did not want anybody to sympathize with him. It was a grief that he had in his own soul.” From then on, he rarely spoke of his wife, and he burned her letters. Their baby’s name was Alice, but her father never used it, calling her Baby Lee or Mousiekins instead. As she grew up, Alice said later, “He never ever mentioned my mother to me . . . . It was awfully bad psychologically.”

  When Roosevelt went back to Albany after the double funeral, it was to work with ever more frantic energy, producing dozens of committee reports and shepherding bill after bill through the Assembly. His City Investigation Committee found “no system whatever” in New York City’s tax department, “blackmail and extortion” in the surrogate’s office, “gross abuses” by the sheriff and “hush money” paid to policemen. The seven bills he introduced to amend affairs triggered violent opposition, since they called, among other things, for the firing of the city’s department heads. One evening’s debate in the Assembly dissembled into bedlam, with some members hiding in the lobby to break the legislative quorum, others hissing and howling to drown deba
te, and a few yelling threats and denunciations. “During all this tumult,” Hunt wrote later, “TR was the presiding genius. He was right in his element, rejoicing like an eagle in the midst of a storm.” All seven bills passed.

  It was also in the months after Alice’s death that Roosevelt succeeded in winning the State Convention’s support for the reform candidate for president, Vermont’s George F. Edmunds, but was beaten at the national convention when the machine candidate, James G. Blaine, won in a landslide. Roosevelt and his colleague from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge, worked on the Edmunds campaign and both were disappointed at the outcome.

  It was after that defeat, still early in June, that a testy Roosevelt told a reporter, “I am going cattle-ranching in Dakota for the remainder of the summer and a part of the fall. What I shall do after that I cannot tell you.” Would he support his party’s nominee? “That question I decline to answer,” he snapped. “It is a subject that I do not care to talk about.” The next day, June 7, 1884, he went west.

  Roosevelt had first tasted frontier life on a hunting trip in 1880 with his brother Elliott to Iowa and Minnesota, on the edge of the Dakota Territory. It gave him a sense of the immensity of America and an abiding love of the big sky and endless rolling prairie, and tested the limits of the hardships he could overcome, from asthma attacks to a snakebite and torrential rains. In 1883, he took another month-long trip to the badlands of the Dakota Territory.

  Roosevelt fell in love with the rugged, multicolored buttes of the country, where lightning struck exposed veins of coal which sometimes burned for centuries, glowing in the dark and trailing smoke by day. He met an assortment of colorful characters, including Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent-Amat Manca de Valombrosa de Morès, a French marquis who planned to invest millions in the cattle business, and his enforcer E. G. Paddock, who was said to have killed three men. Cattle from the West had to be driven east to market, losing weight all the way; De Morès thought he could profit by slaughtering steers in the valley of the Little Missouri River and shipping them to market in refrigerated rail cars.