Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [873]
The City Reform Club planned to elect “honest and capable men” who, once installed, would “administer their offices on business principles as opposed to party methods.” In October 1882 Roosevelt himself ran for the state assembly, in a campaign during which, he prided himself, he never pandered to the populace or “paid for a drink or entered a saloon”—admittedly easier to do in a district where one did not have to deal with “the vast majority of the vicious and illiterate population.” Roosevelt later depicted his run as a daring departure from the ideals and practices of his class, but his own social set hailed him as a “college-bred tribune,” and he received strong backing from such clubmen and business leaders as Joseph H. Choate, J. P. Morgan, Elihu Root, and Morris K. Jessup.
Once elected—at twenty-three he was the youngest member of the legislature—TR set about making his mark. “He came in,” one Albany politico recalled, “as if he had been ejected by a catapult.” The assemblymen chortled at the foppish, bespectacled dandy who sought attention by calling, “Mr. Spee-kar!” in falsetto. Teddy, for his part, considered his new colleagues to be “vicious, stupid-looking scoundrels,” though he soon got on well with (and was indeed fascinated by) the machine politicians.
Placed on the powerful City Affairs Committee, Roosevelt worked hard for his wealthy constituents. He opposed salary increases for New York police and firemen, opposed establishing a minimum wage of two dollars a day for municipal workers, and opposed Knights of Labor attempts to improve working conditions for railroad men. Hailed in city clubs as a watchdog, denounced in labor circles as a silk-stocking tool, he announced grandly that “I represent neither capital nor labor,” and at times he did prove hard to type, as when he bitterly denounced Jay Gould as a member “of that most dangerous of all dangerous classes, the wealthy criminal class.”
On another occasion, Samuel Gompers of the Cigarmakers Union proposed a bill to outlaw tenement house cigar work, and it was referred to a subcommittee where Roosevelt was expected to make short work it. Gompers, however, presented evidence of horrifying conditions that he had gleaned from a house-to-house survey of the bohemian tenements, disguised as a book agent selling a set of Dickens. The union leader offered to take Roosevelt around to see for himself, and the dapper young legislator agreed. The tour shocked Roosevelt profoundly. To the amazement of his colleagues and constituents, and to Gompers’s delight, he supported the bill despite its being “in a certain sense a socialistic one” and got it signed into law. It was soon overturned by the courts, however, partly on the grounds it endangered the cigarmaker’s “morals by forcing him from his home and its hallowed associations.”
Mainly, however, Roosevelt concentrated on Good Government. His first success was a law reorganizing Brooklyn’s government that stripped the appointment power from the aldermen, Boss McGlaughlin’s creatures, and gave it to the mayor, along with authority to sack his appointees. He chaired a committee that investigated Manhattan’s governance, found it “absolutely appalling,” and in 1884 won passage of civil service reform.
With this triumph, his legislative career came to a sudden and tragic end. After his wife Alice died of Bright’s disease, almost simultaneously with the death of his mother from typhoid fever, Roosevelt resigned, sold his house, and spent much of the