The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (145 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
N
IAGARA
F
ALLS
. Silver Lake. Chatauqua. Watertown. River-head. Otsego City. Mineola. In fair after fair, all through September, Roosevelt waved, spoke, pumped hands, tasted prize-winning pumpkin pies, and basked in the admiration of the public. Whenever he emerged from his train, whenever he walked past an apple tree full of children, he was greeted with shrieks of “Hello, Teddy, you’re all right!” or, “Three cheers for the next President!” He had a stock response to the latter: “No, no, none of that, Dewey’s not here.”
106
This invariably brought laughter and applause. The hero of Manila Bay, now steaming homeward in glory, had indeed emerged as a dark-horse candidate, despite his own protest, “I would rather be an admiral ten times over.” Few professional politicians, Roosevelt included, took the phenomenon seriously.
107
The
Olympia
was scheduled to enter New York Harbor on 28 September, and cruise up the Hudson next morning, to a welcoming thunder of more ammunition than had been expended to destroy the Spanish fleet. On Saturday, 30 September, Admiral Dewey, President McKinley, Senator Hanna, and thirty-five thousand marchers would proceed down Fifth Avenue to Twenty-third Street, where a seventy-foot triumphal arch, modeled after that of Titus in Rome, gleamed white as a symbol of America’s entry into world power. It was to be “the greatest parade since the Civil War,” and Roosevelt, as Governor of the Empire State, would ride at its head in top hat and tails.
108
“I am sorry for I happen to have … a particularly nice riding suit, with boots, spurs etc.,” he grumbled to Adjutant General Andrews. But when the great day came, he cut an unusually impressive
figure in black and gray. Seated on an enormous charger, with his tall hat flashing, he dwarfed the guests of honor rolling behind him in carriages.
109
A small boy named Thomas Beer happened to be standing in Grand Army Plaza as the parade came round the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and began its descent of the avenue. When Beer wrote the concluding pages of
The Mauve Decade
a quarter of a century later, Roosevelt rode in his impressionistic memory as a figure of strength and promise, great yet uncorrupted by the “disease of greatness,” looming head and shoulders above the fin de siècle pageantry all around him:
A bright dust of confetti, endless snakes of tinted paper began to float from hotels that watched the street … Why, you could see everything from here! … Brass of parading bandsmen and columns wheeled, turning at the red house to the south. Balconies and windows showered down confetti, and roses were blown. The very generous dropped bottles of champagne … The little admiral was a blue and gold blot in a carriage. The President, and the plump senator from Ohio, and all these great were tiny images of black and flesh in the buff shells of carriages in a whirling rain of paper ribbons, flowers, and flakes of the incessant confetti blown everlastingly, twinkling from the high blue of the sky. How they roared! Theodore Roosevelt! The increasing yell came from up the street. A dark horse showed and slowly paced until it turned where now the gilded general stares down the silly city. A blue streamer, infinitely descending from above, curled all around his coat and he shook it from the hat that he kept lifting. Theodore Roosevelt! The figure on its charger passed, and a roar went plunging before him while the bands shocked ears and drunken soldiers struggled out of line, and these dead great, remembered with a grin, went filing by.
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And then, on 21 November 1899, Vice-President Hobart died.
The Man of Destiny
Round and round the house they go
Weaving slow
Magic circles to encumber
And imprison in their ring
Olaf the King
As he helpless lies in slumber
.
T
HE PASSING OF
Garret Augustus Hobart had several immediate political effects. One was to strengthen Henry Cabot Lodge’s strange conviction that Roosevelt should run with McKinley in 1900, in the hope of succeeding him in 1904. He was adamant: “I have thought it over a great deal and I am sure I am right.”
1
Most people, including Roosevelt, were puzzled by this attitude. Henry Adams interpreted it cynically. “You may well believe,” he wrote Mrs. Cameron, “that Teddy’s presidential aspirations are not altogether to Cabot’s taste, and that the chapter now opening there, may have its dark adjectives.”
2
Roosevelt’s own reaction, now that he was firmly back in office at Albany, was that the Vice-Presidency was “about the last thing for which I would care.”
3
When Lodge first mentioned the idea it had admittedly seemed attractive. He loved Washington, loved the
largeness of its politics in contrast to Albany’s “parochial affairs.” At that time, too, Platt had been meditating revenge over his sponsorship of the Ford Franchise Tax Bill, and Roosevelt had begun to feel insecure as Governor. But things seemed to be changing for the better. On 11 December 1899, Roosevelt wrote Lodge: “Platt told me definitely that of course he was for me for renomination—that everybody was.”
4
“Don’t any of you realize there’s only one life between this madman and the Presidency?”
Governor Theodore Roosevelt at the time of his election to the Vice-Presidency
. (
Illustration 28.1
)
But everybody was not. Even as Platt made his assurances to Roosevelt, representatives of the franchise corporations were urging that the Governor be forced out of Albany and onto the national ticket.
5
They had heard rumors that Roosevelt was plotting further “altruistic” legislation, to do with the limitation of trusts and the preservation of the state’s natural resources. Clearly, if the man were permitted to serve another term, he would destroy the economy of New York State.
Senator Platt became sympathetic to these arguments when he saw the proofs of Roosevelt’s Annual Message for 1900.
6
Here was provocative language about the need for “increasing a more rigorous control” of public utility companies that had acquired wealth “by means which are utterly inconsistent with the highest laws of morality.” The state should be given power to inspect and examine thoroughly “all the workings of great corporations”—where necessary publishing its findings in the newspapers.
7
Here, too, were suggestions that New York’s “defective” lumbering laws should be changed so as to prohibit the dumping of wood-dyes, sawdust, and other industrial products “in any amount whatsoever” into Adirondack streams. There were pleas for the protection of birds, “especially song birds,” and eccentric remarks like “a live deer in the woods will attract to the neighborhood ten times the money that could be obtained for the deer’s dead carcass.” In addition Roosevelt recommended that the liability of management for labor accidents should be increased, and he had harsh things to say about Republican corruption in last year’s “canal steal.”
8
The message was, in short, alarmingly radical to a man of Platt’s conservative temperament. Even so, he would be inclined to tolerate it (in the knowledge that his lieutenants in the Legislature would
not) were Roosevelt not also contemplating the dismissal of Superintendent of Insurance Louis F. Payn. This official, an aging, rattoothed defender of corrupt businessmen, had once been described by Elihu Root as “a stench in the nostrils of the people of the State of New York.”
9
The Governor was entitled to plenty of animosity toward him, since Payn, a Black supporter, had been responsible for the publication of his embarrassing tax affidavit during the campaign of 1898.
10
There had been little opportunity for revenge during 1899, for Payn’s three-year-term appointment was not due to expire until January 1900. But Roosevelt had been marshaling evidence against him for months. He found that the Superintendent had “intimate and secret money-making relations” with New York’s biggest insurance companies. Moreover, in the matter of appointments, Payn “represented the straitest sect of the old-time spoils politician.” While the evidence was not enough to warrant criminal prosecution, it at least justified the Governor’s decision to displace him.
11
The problem was that the big insurance companies wished Payn reappointed. So, in consequence, did Senator Platt, and so did a majority of the Senate. This practically guaranteed Payn tenure, because until the Senate confirmed Roosevelt’s choice of a successor, the superintendent would remain in office under the state constitution.
12
Roosevelt tried to mollify the Easy Boss by suggesting Francis J. Hendricks as a replacement. Hendricks was the very man Platt had ordered him to appoint as Superintendent of Public Works, back in the fall of 1898. The Senator, as was his wont, listened impassively and said nothing, but when Roosevelt offered the job directly, Hendricks declined “for business reasons.”
13
The inference was he had been told not to accept.
Payn, meanwhile, declared his determination to stay, at a press conference on 12 December. “No one has ever charged that I have not performed my duties successfully,” he exclaimed in aggrieved tones.
14
During the next couple of weeks the relative positions of Governor and Boss hardened on the issue. “Platt does not want me to fight Payn and feels pretty bitterly about it,” Roosevelt told Lodge on 29 December. More ominously, Platt had stopped making
promises to protect him from the Vice-Presidency. He now merely quoted other people’s opinions that “it would not be a wise move … personally.” Then, as Albany filled up for the New Year’s opening of the Legislature, Roosevelt heard that Platt was telling intimates “that I would undoubtedly have to accept the Vice-Presidency; that events were shaping themselves so that this was inevitable.”
15