The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (75 page)

T
HE SPRING AIR WAS WARM
, and blades of grass had begun to stipple the bare hills, when Roosevelt left Medora a few days later. But an air of wintry lifelessness still hung over the little cow-town. Already most of its citizens had departed to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Arthur Packard had abandoned the
Bad Lands Cowboy
, and his office was now a fire-blackened ruin. E. G. Paddock had moved to Dickinson, taking the old Pyramid Park Hotel with him on a flat-car. “Blood-Raw John” Warns offered no more “choice Western cuisine” in his Oyster Grotto, and Genial Jim’s Billiard Bar had run dry of Conversation Juice. Sad clouds of steam still floated out of Yach Wah’s Chinese Laundry, but he, too, would soon pack up his washboards and go.
²³

Most symbolic of all was the shuttered-up bulk of the Marquis de Morès’s slaughterhouse. Its doors had closed in November 1886, never to reopen. Even when Medora was booming, the Marquis had been unable to run his giant scheme at a profit. The supply of local steers was simply insufficient, and rangy, refrigerated beef had never appealed to the Eastern consumer.
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Impatiently shrugging off an estimated loss of $1 million, de Morès had gone off to dig a goldmine in Montana. When last seen—heading East as Roosevelt came West—he had been planning to build a railroad across China.
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In less than two years, Medora would become a ghost town, while Dickinson flourished, and a checkerboard of small, fenced-in ranches spread west across the prairie.
²⁶
Roosevelt had foreseen the destruction of Dakota’s open-range cattle industry in
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman,
²⁷
but he had not expected it to come so soon, nor that Nature would conspire to accelerate the process.

Although his Dakota venture had impoverished him, he was nevertheless rich in nonmonetary dividends. He had gone West sickly, foppish, and racked with personal despair; during his time there he had built a massive body, repaired his soul, and learned to live on equal terms with men poorer and rougher than himself. He had broken horses with Hashknife Simpson, joined in discordant choruses to the accompaniment of Fiddlin’ Joe’s violin, discussed homicidal techniques with Bat Masterson, shared greasy blankets with Modesty Carter, shown Bronco Charlie Miller how to “gentle” a horse, and told Hell-Roaring Bill Jones to shut his foul mouth.
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These men, in turn, had found him to be the leader they craved in that lawless land, a superior being, who, paradoxically, did not make them feel inferior.
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They loved him so much they would follow him anywhere, to death if necessary—as some eventually did.
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They and their kind, multiplied seven millionfold across the
country, became his natural constituency.
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“If it had not been for my years in North Dakota,” he said long afterward, “I never would have become President of the United States.”
³²

R
OOSEVELT’S ASSERTION
, on stepping off the S.S.
Etruria
, that he had no political plans “at present” impressed nobody. Yet for once the protestation was true. With a Democratic President in Washington, a Democratic Governor in Albany, and a Democratic Mayor in New York, his prospects for any kind of office were nil, at least through the election of 1888. And there was no guarantee that the Republican party would fare any better then than it had in 1884.

Every day saw a further strengthening of the opposition’s grip upon every lever of government.
³³
Quietly, ruthlessly, the Civil Service was being purged. Cleveland had promised, upon assuming office, that only those Republicans who were “offensive, indolent, and corrupt” would be dismissed. But the President’s aides saw fit to interpret such adjectives loosely: already two-thirds of the entire federal bureaucracy had been replaced.
³⁴

Although Cleveland was as stiff as ever in public, and openly contemptuous of the press, he had to a certain degree become popular. Labor respected him as the most industrious Chief Executive in living memory. Often as not his was the last light burning on Pennsylvania Avenue, as many a night watchman could testify. Capital admired his conservative attitude to all legislation, from multimillion-dollar appropriations to private pension bills; every Cleveland veto (and there were literally hundreds)
³⁵
meant more wealth in the nation’s coffers. Meanwhile that largest and most powerful voting bloc in America, Parlor Sentiment, had canonized the President for his sudden marriage to a pretty debutante half his age—and about one-third of his weight.
³⁶
Mrs. Cleveland was now the country’s sweetheart, and would undoubtedly prove a formidable campaign asset in 1888.

Indeed, at this midway point in Cleveland’s Administration, the Democratic party seemed assured of another six years in power. For an impatient and idealistic young Republican like Roosevelt, the spring of 1887 was a time of complete frustration.

The message was clear: he must once again forget about politics and seek surcease in literature. For the foreseeable future, he would have to earn a living with his pen.

O
NE FINAL POLITICAL HURRAH
was permitted him, at Delmonico’s Restaurant on 11 May, and he made the most of it. The occasion was the Inaugural Banquet of the New York Federal Club. This organization had been founded in the New Year by some of Roosevelt’s mayoral campaign supporters, with the object of keeping Reform Republicanism alive. Its membership consisted largely of young “dudes” from his old brownstone district.
³⁷
They were men he had, on the whole, grown away from, but he could not ignore their support, nor their invitation to be guest of honor.

Originally the dinner was planned as a semiprivate affair of some fifty covers, but when it was announced in the papers an unusual number of ticket applications poured in from Republicans all over the state. The event, remarked
The New York Times
, “bade fair to assume as wide political significance as any this year.”
³⁸
A limit was set at 150 admissions, but when Roosevelt arrived at Delmonico’s he found over 200 guests sitting at six lavishly appointed tables. The company was, in the words of a
Sun
reporter, “brilliant and distinguished enough to have been a compliment to a veteran statesman.”
³⁹

Roosevelt was introduced after the coffee and cigars as “the man who, had the Republicans stood to their guns last fall, would now be the Mayor of this city.” Loud cheers greeted him as he stood up—looking, as he always did when preparing to speak, grim, resolute, tense as a bundle of wire.
⁴⁰
The knowledge that Edith was watching from the Ladies’ Gallery no doubt made him extra conscious of his dignity.

If his fellow diners expected a relaxed and humorous speech—for Charles Delmonico had not stinted on the champagne, and they were in a convivial mood—Roosevelt soon disillusioned them. He began by remarking sardonically that during the mayoralty campaign he had been praised as a party faithful; now, however, he was regarded as a member “of the extreme left.” (Here there was
some uneasy laughter among senior Republicans.) He proceeded to attack such a wide variety of targets that his listeners must have wondered if there was anything in the State of the Union that he approved of. President Cleveland was castigated for his clumsy English and “sheer hypocrisy” in the cause of Civil Service Reform;
⁴¹
the Independent press for its “thoroughly feminine” waywardness and “high-pitched screechings”; the Immigration Department for its unrestricted admission of “moral paupers and lunatics”; the Anti-Poverty Society for being “about as effective as an Anti-Gravitation Society”; anarchists and socialists for inciting labor demonstrators to violence (“there is but one answer to be made to the dynamite bomb, and that can best be made by the Winchester rifle”). For nearly an hour Roosevelt’s voice grated through the cigar-smoke. Again and again he hurled insults at the “hysterical and mendacious party of mugwumps,” even managing, somewhat anachronistically, to include Presidents Tyler and Johnson in that number “—and they were the most contemptible Presidents we have ever had.”

He sat down to considerable applause, although the faces of his listeners registered rather more shock than approval—as if they had been witnessing a bloody prizefight, and were relieved the punishment was over. For all the savagery of Roosevelt’s language, his personal force awed the gathering. Chauncey Depew rose to make some flattering follow-up remarks. “Buffalo Bill said to me in the utmost confidence, ‘Theodore Roosevelt is the only New York dude that has got the making of a man in him.’ ” Depew waggishly announced that the evening’s other scheduled speakers had all submitted their manuscripts to Roosevelt for checking, “so that when he runs for President no case of Burchard will interfere.”
⁴²
This was a reference to the unfortunate preacher whose gaffe had cost James G. Blaine the 1884 election.

Waggish or not, Depew was the first person ever to suggest in public that Roosevelt might be harboring presidential ambitions.
⁴³
The young man’s speech made nationwide headlines, and the question of his future was taken up seriously by several Republican newspapers. The
Harrisburg Telegraph
recommended him for Vice-President in 1888, on a ticket headed by Governor Foraker of Ohio;
⁴⁴
the
Baltimore American
went so far as to nominate him for
President. “Mr. ROOSEVELT,” the paper commented, “has a stainless reputation and great personal magnetism. He is a tireless worker, an advocate of real reform in politics, and his speech before the Federal Club fairly reflects his ability to handle the political puzzles with which both parties must deal next year. It may be that the Federal Club have builded wiser than they intended by thus prominently drawing the attention of the country to this vigorous young Republican.”
⁴⁵

Few out-of-town editors, evidently, realized that Roosevelt was still only twenty-eight, and constitutionally debarred from the greatness they would thrust upon him. The
New York Sun
felt obliged to point out that, “owing to circumstances beyond his control, he will not be able to take the office of President of the United States before 1897.”
⁴⁶

Major newspapers, of course, paid no attention to such preposterous endorsements. They were (with the single exception of Whitelaw Reid’s
Tribune)
harshly disapproving of Roosevelt’s “vehement chatter.”
⁴⁷
He was “an immature and poorly posted thinker,” wasting “a good deal of breath which he may want someday” on “strained criticism” of the government.
⁴⁸
Even the
Times
, hitherto his most fervent supporter, admitted the speech had been “most unfortunate and disagreeable.”
⁴⁹
E. L. Godkin of the
Post
wrote that the Republican party no longer had any use for Theodore Roosevelt. “It was a mistake ever to take him seriously as a politician.”
⁵⁰
And on 25 May,
Puck
published a final valedictory: