The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (91 page)

R
OOSEVELT LOST NO TIME
in following Schurz’s advice. While awaiting the verdict of the House, he made his planned trip to the South with Elliott, who had agreed to manage Douglas Robinson’s estates in Virginia. The two brothers parted affectionately; Elliott declared he was completely cured, and anxious to atone for his misdeeds. Theodore went on to Kentucky, relieved that the long
family crisis was over. “It is most inadvisable, on every account, that you and I should have any leading part in Elliott’s affairs hereafter,” he wrote Bamie,
“especially
as regards his relations with Anna … We have done everything possible … anything more would simply be interference, would not ultimately help her or him, and would hurt us.”
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His business in Owensboro did not detain him long; neither did further business in Texas, for in early April he was at the ranch of a friend near the Mexican border. Here he spent two exhilarating days hunting wild hogs on horseback. Running down a band of five on the banks of the River Nueces, he managed to shoot a sow and a boar. “There was a certain excitement in seeing the fierce little creatures come to bay,” he mused afterward, “but the true way to kill these peccaries would be with the spear.”
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T
HE
H
OUSE VOTED
an investigation of the Baltimore affair by the Civil Service Reform Committee on 19 April 1892. John Wanamaker was asked how soon he could prepare a statement of his official position, and replied that “he would hold himself at the service of the Committee for any date on which Mr. Roosevelt was not to be present.”
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A special hearing of the Postmaster General was promptly scheduled for Monday, 25 April. Speaking with an air of weary dignity, Wanamaker said that he had not laid eyes on Roosevelt’s report until returning from vacation the previous September. Soon afterward Postmaster Johnson had written to him complaining that the document was based on warped evidence. According to Johnson, Commissioner Roosevelt had arrived in Baltimore without warning, and had “frightened” and “bulldozed” Post Office employees into making rash statements that they later begged to withdraw. He had conducted a “star-chamber investigation” in which “men of very ordinary intellect” were denied counsel, and subjected them to a barrage of “leading questions.”
¹⁰⁰
Wanamaker felt that the men were entitled to be heard on their own behalf, and had ordered his two most senior inspectors to reinvestigate the case. Their report—which he did not happen to have on him at the
moment—proved that Roosevelt’s victims had not been soliciting election expenses at all; on the contrary, they were merely raising funds for a pool table. It was the official view of his department, therefore, that “the facts do not justify the dismissal of … anyone for violation of the Civil Service Law as charged.”
¹⁰¹

Wanamaker, who regularly taught Sunday school in Philadelphia, was at his sanctimonious best in cross-examination. He said that Postmaster Johnson had been “reprimanded” for allowing his men “to give impressions to the Civil Service Commissioner which were not justified by facts.” Yet, on the whole, Johnson had done a remarkably good job in enforcing Civil Service rules. “The condition of the Baltimore Post Office is like the millenium in comparison with what it was in the previous Administration.” Then Wanamaker launched into a speech which must have made Roosevelt boggle when it appeared in the evening paper:

Roosevelt’s turn came a week later, on 2 May. He made his usual delayed entrance, interrupting testimony by Treasury Secretary Charles Foster, pumping hands right and left, waving aside a proffered chair. While awaiting his turn on the stand he “paced the floor nervously like a caged leopard,” and when sworn treated the committee to a series of dazzling grins, some of which clicked audibly. He pulled a typewritten statement from his pocket and read it with gusto.
¹⁰³

“In the first place,” said Roosevelt, “I stand by my Baltimore report not only in its entirety, but paragraph by paragraph. It is
absolutely impossible that my conclusions should be upset, for they are based upon the confessions of the accused persons made at the very time the events took place. It seems to me less a question of judgment in deciding on their guilt than it is a question of interpreting the English language as it is ordinarily used.” He offered no apologies for his methods of investigation. “Of course I used leading questions! I have always used them in examinations of this kind and always shall use them … to get at the truth.”
¹⁰⁴

Having established his own position, Roosevelt turned to an analysis of Wanamaker’s. Apparently “the Honorable Postmaster General” (he used this phrase, with heavy sarcasm, no fewer than eighteen times) put more faith in contradictory testimony, prepared after the fact with the help of lawyers, than in verbatim confessions recorded at the scene of the crime. “It is difficult for me to discuss seriously the proposition that a man when questioned as to something which has just happened will lie to his own hurt, and six months afterward tell the truth to his own benefit.”

He was glad the Honorable Postmaster General admitted there had been violations of the law in Baltimore during the last Administration, but “if the wrongdoing is not checked it will be found at the end of four years to have been just as great under this Administration.” Roosevelt concluded, “I honestly fail to see how there can be a particle of question as to these men’s guilt, after reading the evidence that is before you; and if these men are not guilty, then it is absolutely impossible that men ever can be guilty under the Civil Service law.”
¹⁰⁵

Before adjournment the committee voted a formal request for the Postmaster General’s report. “Ah! I presume I shall be allowed to see that testimony?” said Roosevelt eagerly. When the chairman nodded assent, he was as delighted as a child. “Thanks! Thanks!”
¹⁰⁶

D
ELIGHT CHANGED TO DISGUST
as he read the text of the nine-hundred-page document. Wanamaker’s inspectors had not been able to change the basic facts of the case—much of the testimony, indeed, was even more incriminating than before—but they blatantly ignored this evidence in presenting their conclusions. Commissioner
Roosevelt, the report declared, had been “malicious,” “unfair,” and “partial in the extreme” in his investigation, determined “to deceive or mislead” witnesses for “some political purpose.”
¹⁰⁷

Roosevelt reacted to these slurs with a dignity that merely emphasized the depths of his anger. He sent a registered letter to Wanamaker, saying that the Post Office inspectors had cast reflections not only on his actions, but on his motives. “There is no need in commenting on their gross impertinence and impropriety,” Roosevelt wrote,

Roosevelt waited nine days, but Wanamaker made no reply. On 25 May, therefore, he appeared at a final session of the Investigating Committee “with a typewritten statement under his athletic arm and fire in his eye.”
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H
E BEGAN
by reading his letter to Wanamaker, to the sound of excited scribbling in the press gallery. Then, in a lucid analysis of the two masses of evidence gathered in Baltimore by himself and Wanamaker’s inspectors, he showed that at least two-thirds of the latter was even more damaging than his own. Yet Wanamaker had
ignored this evidence in favor of the remaining third, which had obviously been gathered with intent to whitewash. “I have never sheltered myself behind my subordinates,” said Roosevelt loftily, “and I decline to let the Postmaster-General shelter himself behind his.” He would not accuse Wanamaker of an official cover-up, but “if the investigation in which this testimony was taken had been made with the deliberate intent of shielding the accused, covering up their wrongdoing, and attempting to perjure themselves, so that the [Post] Office could be cleared from the effect of their former truthful confessions, it would have been managed precisely as it actually was managed.”

In conclusion Roosevelt noted that the Postmaster General was in the habit of saying he cherished nothing but goodwill toward the Civil Service Commission. “I regret to say that I must emphatically dissent from this statement. Many of his actions … during the past two years seem to be explicable only on the ground of dislike of the Commission, and of willingness to hamper its work.”
¹¹⁰

It was a masterly performance. Roosevelt kept tight rein over his temper, let the facts speak for themselves, and stepped from the stand with an air of complete self-assurance. The reaction of the editors of
The New York Times
next morning typified that of honest men across the nation: