Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [11]
Roosevelt had decided to row Mrs. Storer across Oyster Bay before asking her for her support. Perhaps he wanted privacy, not wanting his family to see him as a supplicant. On the other hand, it may have been a shrewd psychological ploy, asking his guest for a favor when she was absolutely at his mercy in the middle of Oyster Bay. It was also typical Roosevelt, always needing an outlet for his seemingly boundless energy.
Whatever the reason, Roosevelt helped his guest into the rowboat and began pulling on the oars, while Mrs. Storer tried to shield herself from the sun. She liked Theodore. Though he was thirty-seven at the time, the “attraction” of Roosevelt, she would later write, “lay in the fact that he was like a child; with a child’s spontaneous outbursts of affection, of fun, and of anger; and with the brilliant brain and fancy of a child.”
Part of Roosevelt’s success was his ability to play on people’s image of him, whether as a cowboy, Rough Rider, reformer, or diplomat. Now rowing the matronly Mrs. Storer across Oyster Bay, he lamented to her that the future of his children depended on his getting a post in a new McKinley administration, without which, he cried, “I shall be the melancholy spectacle . . . of an idle father, writing books that do not sell!” Mrs. Storer assured Roosevelt that something could be secured for him, while Roosevelt promised to support Bellamy Storer in his quest for his own Washington post.
The conversation that warm August afternoon must have come as a great relief for Roosevelt. His current position in New York City had become sadly untenable, despite his long history there. He had been born in Manhattan to a wealthy New York family. From old Knickerbocker Dutch stock, his grandfather Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt was one of the richest New Yorkers of his day. His father, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., was one of the founders of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, two great New York landmarks. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. had started his career in New York, first elected to the New York Assembly from his Manhattan brownstone district in 1881. While in Albany he had served on the Cities Committee, dedicated mostly to legislation regarding New York itself, and in 1884 had chaired an investigating committee looking into the graft and corruption in city departments. He had also championed the Roosevelt Bill, signed by then-governor Grover Cleveland in 1884, taking power from the appointed Board of Aldermen and investing it instead in the elected mayor. Roosevelt ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York in 1886, sacrificing himself at the polls that year to unite a divided Republican Party.
In 1894, after spending six years in Washington as civil service commissioner, Roosevelt had been approached about again running for mayor. He turned the offer down, apparently because Edith did not think they could afford the campaign. Much to Roosevelt’s chagrin, that year a reform Republican very much like him won the election. Roosevelt wrote to his sister Anna with some regret: “I made a mistake in not trying my luck in the mayoralty race. The prize was very great; the expense would have been trivial; and the chances of success were good. I would have run better than Strong . . . But it is hard to decide when one has the interests of a wife and children to consider first; and now it is over, and it is best not to talk of it; above all, no outsider should know that I think my decision was a mistake.”
After Republican William Strong became mayor, he offered Roosevelt a place on the city’s Street Cleaning Commission. In other words, the ambitious Roosevelt would have been responsible for hauling away the city’s garbage. He turned the position down, though he still hoped to play a part in Strong’s reform government. Roosevelt wrote a letter to his old friend Jacob Riis, perhaps hoping Riis would soothe any ill feelings held by Strong: “As I told you, I am afraid the Mayor may have taken it a little amiss that I would not accept the