Roosevelt Read online

  Edith’s transition was facilitated by the circle of friends her husband had cultivated, including William Howard Taft, who had come from Ohio to serve as Harrison’s solicitor general – and who would become Roosevelt’s closest political ally. Henry Cabot Lodge’s wife, Nannie, loved literature and could recite Shakespeare by the hour. The Roosevelts were frequent guests at historian Henry Adams’ Lafayette Square mansion, along with Lincoln biographer John Hay and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The Roosevelts soon were hosting Sunday suppers “where the food was of the plainest and the company of the best,” as one guest recalled.

  Roosevelt faced an annual battle to get his agency’s budget through Congress and made slow progress in expanding and enforcing civil-service rules. After a second set of hearings on the Wanamaker controversy, the House committee ruled that Roosevelt was justified in his decision on the Baltimore case, while Wanamaker, clearly in “desperate straits,” had been “evasive” and “garbled” in his testimony, showing “either a determination not to enforce the law or negligence therein to the last degree.” Roosevelt’s position was stable - for a while at least.

  Personal tragedy intervened: Roosevelt’s brother Elliott, a heavy drinker for years, posed a danger to his wife and children. Moreover, one of Elliott’s housemaids was threatening a paternity suit against him. Theodore, outraged at his brother’s behavior, tried to have him declared insane. Though the family made a financial settlement with the maid and the paternity suit never became news, the insanity petition became a scandal. Elliott agreed to separate from his wife, establish a trust fund for her and their children, and stay sober for two years before rejoining his family. He relapsed, took another mistress, and died two years later. Theodore, relieved that the “horror” was over, wrote that “I only need to have pleasant thoughts of Elliott now. He is just the gallant, generous, manly boy whom everyone loved.”

  By 1892, Grover Cleveland had reclaimed the White House from Benjamin Harrison. To the surprise of many, including Roosevelt, Cleveland reappointed him to his Civil Service post. Though Roosevelt struggled with the finances and logistics required to maintain two households and move his family between Washington and Sagamore Hill, he and Edith were happy to remain on the Washington scene. One Harrison official, outgoing Navy Secretary Benjamin Tracy, departed with a compliment that delighted Roosevelt: “Well, my boy, you have been a thorn in our side for four years. I earnestly hope that you will remain a thorn in the side of the next Administration.”

  He did his best, fighting the same battles with Democratic spoilsmen he had waged with his own party. Even so, he got on relatively well with Cleveland; the Roosevelts were invited to dine at the White House, an honor Harrison had never offered. Roosevelt was also writing again, producing another nature book, The Wilderness Hunter, and working on volumes three and four of The Winning of the West. Nevertheless, when Republican Party leaders in New York asked him to run again for mayor in 1894, he was eager to enter the race. Edith, concerned about the cost of a campaign, begged him to stay in Washington. He reluctantly agreed, but he soon fell into a depression, lamenting that at the age of thirty-five he had passed up his “one golden chance” to forge his political career. Edith vowed never again to interfere with her husband’s decisions. The following year, when the recently elected Republican mayor of New York, William L. Strong, wanted to appoint Roosevelt police commissioner, she agreed.

  It was another job that Roosevelt’s advisers dismissed as beneath him, but one that called for even more of his reformer’s zeal than the Civil Service Commission had demanded. The New York Police Department was rife with corruption. In 1894, a State Senate investigative committee reported that jobs at every level of the department were openly for sale, with prices ranging from $300 for a rookie appointment to $15,000 for promotion to captain. All of them found the bribes profitable - they collected far more in payoffs by saloon keepers, brothel owners, gamblers, and merchants. By the committee’s reckoning, the department’s annual illicit income came to $15 million. By his own estimate, Superintendent Thomas F. Byrnes was worth $350,000, a considerable sum in those days. One of his inspectors, Alex “Clubber” Williams, implausibly claimed to have earned his fortune by speculating in Japanese real estate.

  But the committee’s report shocked even the cynical voters of New York, and the scandal triggered a surge of reform that swept Mayor Strong into office. The Tammany forces shrugged at what they considered a temporary setback. They would “be back at the next election,” said boss Richard Croker; the same voters who “could not stand the rotten police corruption . . . can’t stand reform either.”

  Roosevelt arrived at police headquarters on May 6, 1895, at a literal trot, leading three fellow reform commissioners. “Hello, Jake,” he greeted reporter Jacob Riis of the Evening Sun, a friend from his Assembly days. He raced up the stairs, beckoning the reporters to follow him, exclaiming, “Where are our offices? Where is the boardroom? What do we do first?”

  The new board elected Roosevelt its president; then he called Riis and Lincoln Steffens of the Evening Post into his office. As Steffens related in his Autobiography, “Riis and I were soon describing the situation to him, telling him which higher officers to consult, which to ignore and punish; what the forms were, the customs, rules, methods. It was just as if we three were the police board – T.R., Riis, and I.”

  As usual, Roosevelt was recruiting allies in the press to advance his cause. He couldn’t have found two better qualified tutors than Riis, the dedicated, Danish-born social reformer, and Steffens, the intellectual investigative reporter who would go on to produce some of the most influential journalism of that era. They warned him to introduce his reforms gradually, but he ignored that advice. Roosevelt knew his title held little power; politicians in both parties had little incentive to reform. He would have to overcome bureaucratic inertia with sheer energy and his talent for attracting attention.

  The new commissioner issued a public warning that appointments and promotions in the police force would be given on merit alone, and that “No political influence could save a man who deserved punishment.” Many in the ranks were astonished when Superintendent Byrnes resigned – with a full pension - rather than face the public investigation Roosevelt was threatening. Clubber Williams choose to do the same.

  Roosevelt spent a night on the streets to check the performance of officers on their beats. Wearing a long coat over his evening clothes and a floppy hat to disguise his too-recognizable glasses and mustache, he followed Riis down the East Side of Manhattan through a dozen patrol districts. They found few men on patrol, but spotted three officers chatting outside a liquor store, another snoring in a restaurant, and a fifth “partly concealed,” as the Tribune delicately put it, “by petticoats.” All received reprimands, but the commissioner promised harsher punishment in the future.

  The foray generated headlines and editorials across the country. A new epoch had dawned in New York, they agreed, and cartoonists depicted policemen cowering under the glare of round, gold-rimmed glasses and an enormous set of teeth. The Washington Star warned that New York’s policemen had better memorize their commissioner’s features if they wanted to stay out of trouble. Not all the officers were sensible; a week later, when Roosevelt’s next patrol found policeman William Rath in an oyster saloon on Third Avenue, the Herald reported this exchange:

  ROOSEVELT: Why aren’t you on your post, officer?

  RATH (swallowing oyster) What the ____ is it to you?

  COUNTER MAN: You gotta good nerve, comin’ in here and interferin’ with an officer.

  ROOSEVELT: I’m Commissioner Roosevelt.

  RATH (reaching for vinegar bottle) Yes, you are. You’re Grover Cleveland and Mayor Strong all in a bunch, you are. Move on now, or –

  COUNTER MAN: (whispering, horrified) Shut up, Bill, it’s His Nibs, sure. Don’t you spot his glasses?

  ROOSEVELT: Go to your post at once.

  (Exit Rath, running)

 
; No one knows how many nocturnal expeditions Roosevelt made; sometimes he went without reporters to attract less attention. The missions exhausted him - it was not unusual for him to stay awake for forty hours - but he kept his energy up. “These midnight rambles are great fun,” he wrote.

  Then Roosevelt embarked on probably the most quixotic battle of his career. When Riis and Steffens told him the “tap-root” of police corruption was the payoffs saloon owners made to keep their establishments open on Sundays, he concluded the only way to fix the system was strict enforcement of the Sunday closing law.

  The law had been passed by the Legislature to please upstate rural churchgoers; it was deeply unpopular among urban workers who wanted to drink with their friends on their only day off. The bar owners made more money on Sundays than any other day of the week, nearby merchants benefited from the traffic, and policemen and politicians prospered from the payoffs. The only people who would applaud a crackdown were ministers and temperance crusaders. Roosevelt understood all the objections, and even sympathized; the law was too strict, he believed, and should be repealed. But as long as it was on the books, it was his duty to enforce it.

  Beginning on June 23, 1895, each Sunday was drier than the last. In late August, Riis and Roosevelt found 95 percent of the city’s 15,000 saloons were closed, with the rest sneaking a few patrons through back doors to shuttered barrooms. Even “King” Pat Callahan, an ex-Assemblyman and the city’s most notorious saloon-keeper, had been ordered by a rookie policeman to close his doors – and when Callahan punched the officer, he was served with a summons and tried for assault.

  Nearly everyone in the city was chafing at the crackdown. Dozens of angry telegrams flooded Roosevelt’s office, and the newspapers predicted that the Republican Party would be trounced in the next election. Rumors that Roosevelt would lose his job filled the streets and newspapers.

  As always, he relished the fight. When he got a mocking invitation to a massive parade organized to protest the Sunday closing law, he astonished the crowd when he took a seat on the reviewing stand. He turned jeers into cheers when he laughed and applauded as banners, placards, and floats swept by – all deriding him and calling for his ouster. He was particularly amused by a float depicting three gentlemen sipping champagne at a private club while a beer-drinking laborer was arrested. By then, many among the 30,000 marchers were shouting, “Bully for Teddy!” and “Teddy, you’re a man!”

  That did little for Roosevelt’s political standing in New York, but newspapers across the country ran articles speculating that he could become president. One day, Riis paid a visit to Roosevelt with Steffens and asked if he was running. Roosevelt jumped up, teeth bared, and fists clenched. “Don’t you dare ask me that,” he yelled. “Don’t you put such ideas into my head. No friend of mine would ever say a thing like that, you, you . . .” Softening, he said: “I must be wanting to be president. Every young man does. But I won’t let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will begin to work for it. I’ll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so – I’ll beat myself. See?”

  Hewing to that resolute daring, he wouldn’t change course, and as the November election drew near, both the mayor and the Republican bosses were calling for his ouster. When the Tammany slate won, Roosevelt was, insiders argued, to blame. His three fellow commissioners had backed him, but two had turned against him. With the board of commissioners deadlocked, even routine promotions were blocked. Morale was crumbling, and the crime rate was creeping up. Roosevelt kept his title, facing down the state Republican boss and winning the renewed support of Mayor Strong, but the deadlock continued. He was growing increasingly tired of the job.

  Roosevelt was back on the national stage in 1896, campaigning for Republican William McKinley against William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, a populist and former congressman from Nebraska, had swept the Democratic convention with his famous speech advocating silver-backed currency: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!” While Roosevelt had misgivings about McKinley’s “chocolate éclair backbone,” he was convinced that a Bryan victory would bring in a socialist and perhaps anarchistic administration “who want to strike down the well-to-do and who have been inflamed against the rich.” Roosevelt’s celebrity drew enthusiastic crowds wherever he spoke, and his efforts cemented his standing with the party. McKinley won the election.

  Roosevelt got a graceful exit from his frustrating New York job. But McKinley, who remembered Roosevelt’s reservations about his nomination and éclair comment, resisted giving him a post. “I want peace,” the new president explained. But Roosevelt’s friends lobbied for him. His interest in the Navy of 1812 had been reinvigorated by Alfred Thayer Mahan’s seminal book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, and he dedicated himself to improving America’s Navy. He knew McKinley would never make him Navy secretary, but he calculated correctly that he could get the number-two job if he pushed hard enough. McKinley appointed him assistant secretary of the Navy.

  Roosevelt was hoping for a conflict to restore the “soldierly virtues” he feared his countrymen were losing. Spain had been cracking down on guerrillas in Cuba, and U.S. newspapers under William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer had been reporting the details of martial law ninety miles off the coast of Florida, saying nearly a third of the Cuban population was imprisoned in concentration camps. Roosevelt decided war with Spain was inevitable and desirable.

  Navy Secretary John Davis Long was happy to leave Roosevelt in charge in the long, hot summer of 1897 while he vacationed in Massachusetts, so Roosevelt went about preparing the Navy for war. He ordered war plans and gunnery drills, bought supplies, guns and ammunition, and made sure there was coal in every refueling station. Since initial encounters with Spain would almost surely involve its fleet in the Philippines, Roosevelt arranged for George Dewey, widely considered the Navy’s most talented officer, to command the Asiatic Fleet based in Hong Kong. He also called in admiral and naval strategist Alfred Mahan to consult on new battleships. As the summer wore on, he wrote a series of letters assuring Long that there was no need to rush back to the office. “Nothing important has arisen,” he wrote, and two weeks later, “You must be tired, and you ought to have an entire rest.” Three weeks later, he advised, “Stay there just exactly as long as you want to. There isn’t any reason you should be here before the first of October” – adding for good measure that Long was lucky to be missing the hottest summer in Washington memory. Meanwhile, Roosevelt crowed to a friend, “I am having immense fun running the Navy.”

  President McKinley, who had seen the bodies strewn across the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, didn’t share Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for military engagement and was resisting pressure to intervene in Cuba. But in January 1989, as “an act of friendly courtesy” to the Cuban people, McKinley agreed to station the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor. A month later, the Maine blew up and sank. Two hundred and sixty-six sailors died.

  Although the cause of the explosion was unexplained, Roosevelt called it “an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards” and urged McKinley to send the fleet to Havana. But the president insisted on a full investigation, and weeks went by as Roosevelt fulminated that those against war were “inspired by greed and fear” while “the forces that tell in favor of war are the belief in national honor and common humanity.”

  McKinley agreed to prepare for war, and Congress voted to spend $50 million for the effort. Roosevelt was consigned to buy merchant ships to convert into cruisers and quickly purchased a number of the vessels. But his haste worked against him. When American businessman Charles R. Flint offered him the Brazilian ship Nictheroy for $500,000, Roosevelt snapped, “I will take her.” When Flint offered to write a bill of sale, Roosevelt said he had no time to read one. But Flint said Roosevelt then wrote “one of the most concise and at the same time one of the cleverest contracts I have ever seen.” Instead o
f page after page of detailed specifications, the contract stipulated Flint should deliver the ship under its own steam – which couldn’t be done unless it was in top condition. “Mr. Roosevelt always had that faculty of looking through details to the result to be obtained,” Flint concluded.

  Roosevelt continued to rage against anyone who tried to avoid war. He published a collection of essays so full of self-righteousness, jingoism, and militarism that one of his friends told him, “If there is one thing more than another for which I admire you, Theodore, it is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments.” Never having seen combat, Roosevelt claimed to know a great deal about it: “Every man who has in him any real power or joy in battle,” he wrote, “knows that he feels it when the wolf begins to rise in his heart; he does not shrink from blood and sweat, or deem that they mar the fight; he revels in them, in the toil, the pain and the danger, as but setting off the triumph.”

  Public pressure to retaliate against Spain was gaining ground in Congress. McKinley gave in and asked Congress to authorize armed intervention in Cuba. Dewey steamed from Hong Kong to the Philippines and routed the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila, ensuring Spanish ships never left the coast of Asia.

  Roosevelt felt that he had done what he could for the Navy and had to take a personal hand in the war. Even though Edith had fallen ill after the birth of their fifth child, Quentin, the previous fall and ten-year-old Theodore, Jr., was suffering what his doctors called a nervous breakdown, Roosevelt was determined to join the fight. “I know now,” he said years later, “that I would have turned from my wife’s deathbed to have answered the call.” He nearly did. Edith was diagnosed with an abscess that required surgery; it would take her months to recover.

  Roosevelt’s friends, pundits in the press, and fellow government officials argued he would be far more useful running the Navy; one columnist called Roosevelt’s determination “the cowardly act of a brave man.” Navy Secretary Long mused that Roosevelt “thinks he is following his highest ideal, whereas, in fact, without exception every one of his friends advises him, he is acting like a fool. And, yet, how absurd all this will sound, if by some turn of fortune, he should accomplish some great thing and strike a very high mark.”