The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (28 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
Apart from his daily six-mile walk, sleigh-driving was Theodore’s only exercise that winter. He went about it with his usual energy, speeding around Manhattan in huge loops, up to thirty miles at a time, while the rest of society sedately circled Central Park. With his “sweet Baby” warmly wrapped in buffalo robes beside him, and Lightfoot’s hooves drumming up an exhilarating spray of snow, he would zigzag through the farms and shanties of the Upper West Side until the dark, ice-clogged waters of the Hudson opened out on their left. Spinning north along Riverside Drive, they would admire the snowy Palisades showing in fine relief against the gray winter skies, before curving east across the white fields of Harlem, and south past the great estates of the East River into the pine-forested freshness of Jones’ Woods.
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Emerging at Sixty-eighth Street, they would zigzag toward the mansions of midtown, massed like an interrupted avalanche along the southern fringe of Central Park.
S
HOULD THEY PASS
Mrs. William Astor’s carriage in Grand Army Plaza, Theodore could touch the brim of his beaver with his whip, and know that the gesture would be acknowledged, for the Roosevelt family was eminent enough to be included among the few
hundred that majestic lady deigned to recognize. Mrs. Astor’s dominance over New York’s drawing-rooms was so complete that her word was social law. She was a guest, along with Vanderbilts, Dodges, Harrimans, and Iselins, at Corinne Roosevelt’s coming-out party on 8 December.
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Although the
grande dame
was so stiff with diamonds she could barely turn from one guest to another, she liked what she saw of Theodore and Alice, and invited them to dinner at her austere brownstone on Thirty-fourth Street, whose boards the
nouveaux riches
Vanderbilts were not permitted to tread. As a double seal of her approval, she asked the young couple to her January Ball, the traditional climax of the social season.
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At this event, and at the scarcely less glittering Patriarch’s Ball, and at banquets with Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, and parties at Delmonico’s, and Monday nights at the opera, and at dozens of other receptions, teas, and “jolly little dinners” up and down Fifth Avenue, Theodore and Alice conducted themselves with the grace of natural aristocrats. “Alice is universally and greatly admired,” wrote her proud husband, “and she seems to grow more beautiful day by day.”
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An old friend, separated from the Roosevelts by lesser means, caught sight of them emerging from an opera at the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street. Theodore had manifestly arrived at the social heights: “I remember thinking what an enormous start he had over youths like myself, whose daily bread depended on their daily effort.”
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New York at the dawn of the eighties stood poised between the sedate elegance of its past and the fabulous vulgarity of its future. This was at once the age of slippery horsehair furniture and Tiffany glass; of dignified quadrilles and the scandalously sexy waltz; of prephylloxera Burgundies and the harsh, but interesting new Cabernets from California; of copperplate invitations on silver trays and the first crackly telephone messages; of beaux arts filigree decorating old, blocky town houses. Millionaires’ Row was not without its vacant lots, and Alva Vanderbilt’s vast château at Fifty-second Street—designed to humble Mrs. Astor—was still a skeleton of limestone and marble dust. Not until its last turret was in place, and its doors thrown open to the “splendor seekers,” could New York’s Golden Age fairly be said to have begun.
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Yet already the pace of society was accelerating. For the young
Roosevelts, hardly a night passed without some brilliant affair. Since the opera did not end until 11:30, and balls often continued through dawn, one wonders when Theodore ever found time to sleep. Early in the New Year, after a full day in the law school and the library, a meeting with some old college friends to organize a Free Trade Club, and an evening spent at the Astors’, he noted delightedly in his diary, “Every moment of my time occupied.”
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Should a spare moment occasionally present itself, he filled it not with rest but work. Owen Wister has left an anecdote of this period which reads like the opening scene of a Victorian drawing-room comedy. It is the pre-dinner hour; Theodore, standing on one leg at the bookcases in his New York house, is sketching a diagram for
The Naval War of 1812
. In rushes Alice, exclaiming in a plaintive drawl, “We’re dining out in twenty minutes, and Teddy’s drawing little ships!”
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But increasingly, as the season wore on, Theodore used the pre-dinner hour for another, more private activity, of which Mrs. Astor would definitely not have approved. Resplendent in evening dress, he would dash across Fifth Avenue, round the corner of Fifty-ninth Street, and up a shabby flight of stairs.
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M
ORTON
H
ALL, AS THE
headquarters of the Twenty-first District Republican Association was grandly called, was a barn-sized chamber over a store.
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It was furnished with rough benches and spittoons, a raised table and a chair. Two gloomy political portraits completed the decor. Here the cheap lawyers, saloonkeepers, and horsecar conductors who ran Theodore’s district—Irishmen, mostly—met together for political meetings once or twice a month. On other nights Morton Hall served as a sort of clubroom where the same clientele could chat informally. During these “bull sessions” Celtic eloquence, punctuated by regular squirts of plug-juice, tended to veer from politics to dirty stories. Theodore, whose distaste for tobacco matched his prudishness, must have winced many times during his first visits in the fall of 1880. He had been by no means welcome, for his side-whiskers and evening clothes made the “heelers” uncomfortable.
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But he came back again and again, until he was eventually accepted for membership in the association.
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When the news of Theodore’s unseemly activities leaked out, his
family reacted with almost uniform horror. “We thought he was, to put it frankly, pretty fresh,” wrote Emlen Roosevelt. “We felt that his own father would not have liked it, and would have been fearful of the outcome. The Roosevelt circle as a whole had a profound distrust of public life.”
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So, too, did his father’s friends—bankers, lawyers, businessmen, clubmen. Politics, they assured him from the depths of their leather armchairs, was “low.” A gentleman of his upbringing might subscribe to campaign funds—without inquiring too closely as to how the money was spent—might even attend a primary or two, and of course he had a duty to cast his vote on Election Day, providing the weather was fine. But to traffic with men who were “rough and brutal and unpleasant” was decidedly
infra dig
. He should not soil his kid gloves on the levers of political machinery.
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Theodore reacted with predictable anger:
I answered that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class, and that the other people did—and that I intended to be one of the governing class; and if they proved too hard-bit for me I supposed I would have to quit, but that I certainly would not quit until I had made the effort and found out whether I really was too weak to hold my own in the rough and tumble.
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He could, of course, have entered the government the respectable way—by cultivating the society of men in leather armchairs, qualifying as a lawyer himself, and, in ten years or so, running for a seat in the United States Senate. But some instinct told him that if he desired raw political power—and from this winter on, for the rest of his life, he never ceased to desire it—he must start on the shop floor, learn to work those greasy levers one by one.
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Besides, he had a private score to settle. It had been the New York State Republican machine, still controlled by Boss Roscoe Conkling, that had destroyed Theodore Senior; might not Theodore Junior, by mastering its techniques, use that same machine to avenge him? Among his father’s letters, which he kept about him as “talismans against evil,”
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was one dated 16 December 1877, after Conkling’s victory in the Senate. In the tired hand of a dying man, Theodore
Senior had written: “The ‘Machine politicians’ have shown their colors … I feel sorry for the country however as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests, and I feel for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.”
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So the budding socialite turned his back on privilege, and spent more and more time at Morton Hall.
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Despite the glory he later attained, the clubby set never quite forgave him. He was considered “a traitor to his caste,” a man who “should have been on the side of capital.”
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Long after his death, when builders began to convert the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace into a national shrine, a family elder exclaimed, “I don’t know why you are making such a fuss. I used to hate to see him coming down the street.”
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T
HE STOUT MAN WHO
chaired meetings at Morton Hall, from behind a stout pitcher of iced water, was scarcely more pleased to hear Theodore’s feet drumming up the stairs. “Jake” Hess was a self-made, professional politician, and had little use for amateurs in evening clothes.
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His German-Jewish heritage had not prevented him from elbowing aside many Irish Catholic challengers to win control of the Twenty-first District. A loyal servant of the upstate Republican machine, Hess regularly supplied Albany with loyal, machine-minded Assemblymen. Since the Twenty-first was one of the few “safe” Republican districts in New York City, he was a man of unusual influence, and pompously aware of it.
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At first Theodore tried to cultivate Hess, but his efforts were received only with “rather distant affability.” The newcomer was forced to mingle instead with the rank and file of the party—and some were rank indeed—acquiring “the political habit” at the very lowest level. For most of the winter of 1880–81 he seemed content with this society.
I went around there often enough to have the men get accustomed to me and to have me get accustomed to them, so that we began to speak the same language, and so that each could begin to live down what Bret Harte has called “the defective
moral quality of being a stranger.” It is not often that a man can make opportunities for himself. But he can put himself in such shape that when or if the opportunities come he is ready to take advantage of them.
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By March he was taking a more active role in party politics, attending a series of primaries in addition to regular meetings, working his way up into the executive committee of the Young Republicans, and presuming to address the association on its new charter.
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