The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (150 page)

Comparisons between this piece and, say, the
Chicago Times-Herald
account of Roosevelt’s visit to Deadwood, South Dakota, on 3 October prove that Mr. Dooley’s imagination was not wholly without basis in fact.
⁹⁰

The trip also had its moments of poignancy, as when Roosevelt’s train snaked down into the Badlands of North Dakota and stopped at Medora. “The romance of my life began here,” said Roosevelt, to nobody in particular. Then, jumping down into the sagebrush, he looked around at the gray buttes, the Little Missouri, and what was left of Medora itself. “It does not seem right,” he said sadly, “that I should come here and not stay.”
⁹¹

O
N 6
N
OVEMBER 1900
, the Republican party won its greatest victory since the triumph of Grant in 1872. McKinley’s popular plurality was well over three-quarters of a million, and he swamped Bryan in the Electoral College, 292–155.
⁹²
Much of this favorable vote could be ascribed to the nation’s booming economy, and satisfaction with the successful conduct of the war; but the Vice-Presidentelect was entitled to much of the credit. Party professionals agreed that by his selfless exertions he had earned himself the Presidency in 1904.

If not earlier. “I feel sorry for McKinley,” said one Republican campaign worker, as he perused the election results. “He has a man of destiny behind him.”
⁹³

R
OOSEVELT DIVIDED
the rest of November and December between Albany and Oyster Bay. On the last day of the year his
Governorship came to an end. “I think I have been the best Governor of my time,” he claimed, “better either than Cleveland or Tilden.”
⁹⁴
His record had indeed been impressive, seen in the context of history, although the
Evening Post
sneered at his record of “partial and leisurely reform.”
⁹⁵
A wide disparity of other editorial comments indicates that contemporary critics found it difficult, if not impossible, to analyze Governor Roosevelt objectively.

Much of this difficulty arose out of the Roosevelt/Platt relationship, so subtle a combination of enmity and friendliness, clashes and compromise. Conservatives on the one hand, and radicals on the other, simply could not see how two such men could, in effect, be merged into one Governor, and produce legislation so puzzlingly satisfactory to both their traditional constituencies (although of course both regulars and reformers complained that it was neither). The evidence is that Platt himself was confused, and merely trying to make the best of an awkward alliance, whereas Roosevelt, as time would show, knew very well what he was about.

In brief summary, he was responding, along with such other leaders as John P. Altgeld of Chicago, Hazen Pingree of Detroit, and Samuel Jones of Toledo, to the progressive movement then developing in various parts of the country.
⁹⁶
He had been responding to it, indeed, throughout his career, as a reform Assemblyman in 1882, a reform Civil Service Commissioner in 1889, and a reform Police Commissioner in 1895; but aristocratic paternalism had dominated his thinking until 1898. The war, which brought him confessedly closer to his men than his officers,
⁹⁷
also awakened his conscience to the needs of those less fortunate, less virile, less intelligent than himself. Having achieved his own military catharsis on San Juan Hill, he was now a politician again, and found himself less interested in battles than in treaties. As such, his two gubernatorial messages could be viewed as social contracts acknowledging the continuing, though waning power of the Old Guard, and promising new powers to the progressives.

If not the first, Theodore Roosevelt was certainly one of the first politicians to act responsibly in view of the changing economics and class structure of late-nineteenth-century America. As such he deserves to be ranked only slightly behind Altgeld and Pingree and
Jones. If his governorship, which lasted only two years (and was subject to enormous distractions in the second), was less spectacular than some, it was spectacular enough in terms of his own membership in the social and intellectual elite. One thinks of his early contempt for unions, for Henry George, for the unwashed Populists, for the rural supporters of William Jennings Bryan. Yet as Governor, Roosevelt had shown himself again and again willing to support labor against capital, and the plebeians in their struggle against his own class.

After 1900, as progressivism rated a capital P and reform governors began to crowd the political landscape, Roosevelt’s legislative record would look more and more modest, even cautious. But as a modern historian asks, “who
in office
was more radical in 1899?”
⁹⁸

W
ITH THE TURN
of the century came private citizenship again, in preparation for the life of “a dignified nonentity” in his new job.
⁹⁹
Gratifying though it was to see a collected edition of
The Works of Theodore Roosevelt
put out by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, there was also something distressingly final about the fifteen volumes, as if he had already been tombstoned, a strenuous relic of the past.

Apart from boning up in a few issues of the
Congressional Record
, to see how to preside over the Senate, there was really little he could do. The frightening specter of inactivity loomed ahead. To fend it off, he left on 7 January for his first extended hunting trip in years—a chase after cougar in Colorado—and did not get back to Sagamore Hill until 23 February. A week later the Roosevelts headed southward en masse for the Inauguration on 4 March 1901. So did a party of maliciously amused organization men, headed by Senator Platt and the new Governor, Benjamin B. Odell. “We’re all off to Washington,” said Platt, “to see Teddy take the veil.”
¹⁰⁰

T
HEODORE
R
OOSEVELT’S FORMAL SERVICES
to the nation as Vice-President lasted exactly four days, from 4 March to 8 March 1901.
¹
The Senate then adjourned until December, and Roosevelt was free to lay down his gavel and return to Oyster Bay. Before doing so he asked Associate Justice Edward D. White for advice on resuming his long-abandoned legal studies in the fall
²
—a sure sign of confusion and pessimism about the future.

It was pleasant, all the same, to relax with his numerous children after so many busy years. Sagamore was at its most beautiful that spring, with spreading dogwood, blooming orchards, and the “golden leisurely chiming of the wood thrushes chanting their vespers” down below.

An old friend, Fanny Smith Dana, visited him that spring. “As always, Theodore was vital and stimulating, but there was a difference. The spur of combat was absent.”
³
In May he escorted Edith north to the opening of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and in July and August made two further restless trips West, to
Colorado and Minnesota. “I always told you I was more of a Westerner than an Easterner,” he explained, rather vaguely, to Lincoln Steffens.
⁴
In early fall his social schedule began to pick up, and on 4 September 1901, he arrived in Rutland, Vermont, for a short series of speaking engagements.

“He has a man of destiny behind him.”
The second Inauguration of William McKinley, 4 March 1901
. (
Illustration epl.1
)

Sometime that day Roosevelt’s eastbound train crossed the tracks of the Presidential Special, bearing William McKinley north to the exposition in Buffalo.
⁵

T
WO DAYS LATER
, on Friday, 6 September, the Vice-President attended an estate luncheon of the Vermont Fish and Game League on Isle La Motte, in Lake Champlain.
⁶
With a thousand other guests he sat under a great marquee and ate and drank leisurely until about four o’clock. Then, leaving the crowd to follow him, he strolled across the lawns to the home of his host, ex-Governor Nelson W. Fisk. An impromptu reception was planned inside, at which any member of the league might come forward and shake the Vice-President’s hand.