The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (69 page)

H
E WAS ANXIOUS NOW
to hurry East and console Bamie, who was in agony over the prospect of losing her surrogate daughter. But an urgent matter at Elkhorn detained him. Sewall and Dow had decided, in his absence, that they wanted to terminate their contract and go back to Maine. They had been unable to sell the fall shipment of beeves profitably: the best price Chicago would offer was ten dollars less than the cost of raising and transporting each animal. Both men felt that they were “throwing away his money,” and that “the quicker he got out of there the less he would lose.”
⁹²

Roosevelt, as it happened, had reached much the same conclusion. Although he was no businessman, simple figuring told him that his $85,000 investment in the Badlands was eroding away as inexorably as the grass on the range. In any case, he was fast losing his enthusiasm for ranching. Bill Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris could take the Elkhorn herd over; in future he would use the ranch house only as a stopover when checking on his cattle, or as a hunting base. His reaction to Sewall’s ultimatum, therefore, was mild. “How soon can you go?”
⁹³

While the three friends sat squaring their accounts that last week of September, a strange, soft haze settled over the Badlands, reducing trees and cattle to pale blue silhouettes.
⁹⁴
Weathermen dismissed the haze as an accumulation of fumes from the grass-fires that had smoldered all summer on the tinder-dry plains. Yet its strangeness made cowboys and animals uneasy. Although the heat was still tremendous, old-timers began to lay in six months’ supply of winter provisions, muttering that “nature was fixin’ up her folks for hard times.”
⁹⁵
Beavers worked double shifts cutting and storing their
lengths of willow brush; muskrats grew extra-thick coats and built their reed houses twice the usual height. Roosevelt, casting his ornithologist’s eye out of the window, noticed that the wild geese and songsters were hurrying south weeks earlier than usual. He may have heard rumors that the white Arctic owl had been seen in Montana, but only the Indians knew what that sign portended.
⁹⁶

S
EWALL AND
D
OW
were not ready to move their wives, babies, and baggage out of the ranch before 9 October. By then their impatient boss had already departed for the East. It was left to Sewall to close up the great log cabin and slam the door on what even he, in later life, would recall as “the happiest time that any of us have ever known.”
⁹⁷

And so silence returned to the Elkhorn bottom, broken only by the worried chomping of beavers down by the river.

T
HE MORNING OF 15
October 1886 was drizzly, and the East River heaved dull and gray as Roosevelt’s ferry pushed out from Brooklyn. On Bedloe’s Island, far across the Bay, he could mistily make out the silhouette that had been tantalizing New Yorkers for months: an enormous, headless Grecian torso, with half an arm reaching heavenward.
¹
But he probably gave it no more than a glance. His mind was on politics, and on this evening’s Republican County Convention in the Grand Opera House. He was curious to see who would be nominated for Mayor of New York. The forthcoming campaign promised to be unusually interesting—so much so he had delayed his departure to England until 6 November, four days after the election.

For the first time in the city’s history, a Labor party had been organized to fight the two political parties. What was more, it had nominated as its candidate the most powerful radical in America. Roosevelt had met Henry George before—on 28 May 1883, the same night he first met Commander Gorringe
²
—and the little man
had hardly seemed formidable. Balding, red-bearded, and runtlike, he was just the sort of “emasculated professional humanitarian” Roosevelt despised.
³
Yet George was famous as the author of
Progress and Poverty
(1879), one of those rare political documents which translate sophisticated social problems into language comprehensible to the ghetto. So simple was the book’s language, so inspirational its philosophy to the poor, that millions of copies had been sold all over the world.
⁴

“A pale young Englishman … with a combination of courtliness and inquisitiveness.”
Cecil Arthur Spring Rice at thirty-five
. (
Illustration 14.1
)

Henry George argued that because it takes many poor men to make one rich man, progress in fact creates poverty. The only way to solve this, “the great enigma of our times,” was to have a single tax on land, as the most ubiquitous form of wealth. Thus, the more a landlord speculated on Property, the more he would enrich Government, and the more Government would repay Labor, which had produced the wealth in the first place.
⁵

Up until 1886, George had been content to propound his single-tax philosophy in print and on lecture platforms (for all his lack of glamour, he was a blunt and effective orator). But the recent rash of angry strikes across the country
⁶
persuaded him that it was time to submit his principles to the ballot. New York, with its abnormally wide gulf between rich and poor, was the obvious place to start. George let it be known that if thirty thousand workingmen pledged to support him for Mayor, he would run on an independent Labor ticket. Thirty-four thousand pledges flowed in, to the amazement of politicians all over the country. “I see in the gathering enthusiasm [of labor] a power that is stronger than money,” George crowed delightedly in his acceptance speech, “something that will smash the political organizations and scatter them like chaff before the wind.”
⁷

That had been on 5 October, and both Republicans and Democrats had scoffed at the little man’s hyperbole. Pledges of support bore, they knew, but fickle relation to actual voting figures: the most George could hope for was fifteen thousand. But now, only ten days later, George’s strength was increasing at a truly phenomenal rate. Professional politicians were seriously alarmed. If George, by some political fluke, captured City Hall, he would wield greater power than any former Mayor—thanks to legislation sponsored in 1884 by none other than Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt.
⁸

The latter’s first question, when he stepped off the ferry into a group of New York reporters, was about their latest estimate of George’s voting strength. The answer, “20,000, and probably much more,” surprised and flurried him. After remarking, irrelevantly, that he himself was “not a candidate” for Mayor (not even the most imaginative journalist thought that he might be), Roosevelt hurried uptown to the Union League Club.
⁹

D
OUBTLESS HE INTENDED
to attend the Republican County Convention as an observer. But during the afternoon he was visited by a group of influential Republicans, who, on behalf of party bosses, asked if he would accept the nomination for Mayor. This bombshell took him completely by surprise.
¹⁰
As a loyal party man, he could not refuse the honor; as a loyal (and still secret) fiancé, he could not reveal that he had a transatlantic steamship ticket in his pocket. Edith was looking forward to a leisurely, three-month honeymoon in Europe after their wedding, and would surely resent being hurried back to New York so that he could prepare to take office on 1 January. Moreover she was hardly the type to spend the next two years shaking ill-manicured hands at municipal receptions. All this was assuming he won, of course. If he
lost…

But the party bosses were expecting an answer. Roosevelt agreed, “with the most genuine reluctance,” to allow his name to be put before the convention.
¹¹
The emissaries departed, leaving him alone. Night came on. He remained ensconced in his club, waiting for the inevitable news from the Opera House.

H
E HAD A LOT
to think about during those solitary hours. Why had Johnny O’Brien, Jake Hess, Barney Biglin, and all the rest of the machine men offered him this unexpected honor? He was, after all, their ancient enemy. Perhaps they wished to reward him for his support of James G. Blaine in 1884; more likely they hoped he would lure the Independents back into the Republican fold, in order to have a united party behind Blaine—again—in 1888. Or perhaps they imagined (as many did) that he was a millionaire, and might
contribute a liberal assessment to the campaign chest.
¹²
They would soon learn the likelihood of
that:
half his capital was tied up in Dakota, and the interest on the remainder would barely support him and Edith at Sagamore Hill.
¹³

A cynical hypothesis which he did not want to consider, but which would come up in the press, was that the party bosses had decided no Republican could win a three-way contest for the mayoralty, and merely wanted a few thousand votes to trade on Election Day.
¹⁴
Certainly the campaign odds were against him. The Democrats had just nominated Representative Abram S. Hewitt, a man of mature years, vast wealth, moderate opinions, and impeccable breeding.
¹⁵
Hewitt also happened to be an industrialist, famous for his enlightened attitude to labor (during the depression years 1873–78 he ran his steel works at a loss in order to safeguard the jobs of his employees).
¹⁶
He would doubtless attract all but the most extreme George followers, along with those Republicans who felt nervous about Roosevelt’s youth. Only yesterday, the
Nation
had editorialized: “Mr. Hewitt is just the kind of man New York should always have for Mayor,” and Roosevelt’s instinct told him the voters would agree on 2 November
.
¹⁷