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By Root 1101 0

and Bryan enjoyed hunting, yet neither were very good shots. Both men had made an effort to build up their bodies, which they relied on during cross-country political campaigns. Perhaps most importantly, though, both lived their entire lives in absolute awe of their fathers. After his father’s death, Bryan recalled that after being enjoined to follow his father’s shining example, he “could not help weeping . . . for I felt so unworthy to take my father’s place.” Roosevelt dedicated several pages of his Autobiography in describing the elder Roosevelt in glowing terms: “My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew.” Both Roosevelt and Bryan suffered through the deaths of their fathers when they were in college, Bryan at age twenty and Roosevelt at age nineteen. For both men, their grief for their fathers seemed to solidify the foundations on which they would build their public lives. A driving desire to live up to their fathers’ examples helped shape two of the most important figures of late-nineteenth-century America.

In the campaigns of 1896 and 1900, Bryan and Roosevelt often shadowed each other across the country. Indeed, with his western ranching experience and heroism in Cuba, Roosevelt served Republicans well by countering Bryan’s popularity in the West. And both men served as colonels at the head of regiments during the Spanish-American War, although Bryan never embarked for Cuba. For Bryan and Roosevelt, service in the military during wartime was an important duty of both the man and the citizen.

These common romantic ideas of the Victorian era hint at the basis of many of their similarities. Reverence of one’s father and of masculinity, faith in both Anglo-Saxon and American superiority, belief in the duties of citizenship and the necessity of fulfilling this duty on the battlefield all made up the creed of America’s civic religion of the time. Despite their differences, and despite their sincere concern for the poor, Roosevelt and Bryan absorbed the beliefs of America’s white, Protestant elite.

AUGUST WAS SHAPING UP to be an eventful month for New York. In less than two weeks Bryan was coming to town to accept the Democratic nomination at Madison Square Garden. McKinley’s headquarters had just opened at the Waldorf, with Hanna leading the Republican troops. Roosevelt’s fate was deeply entwined with that of all three men. As president of the board of police commissioners Roosevelt would be responsible for security at Bryan’s speech at Madison Square Garden. Meanwhile, Roosevelt would continually meet with Hanna to discuss the campaign and his possible role in it, in service to a McKinley victory.

Atlantic City hospitals remained full as officials identified the dead and injured from the New Jersey train crash. President Cleveland vowed that America would stay neutral in the new Cuban uprising against Spanish rule in the island. And St. Louis was suffering through a killer heat wave. In the past two weeks twenty-two babies had died as a result of the heat. For a week the maximum temperature recorded was 99 degrees. Newspapers reported many people dying every day, with the death rate “increasing at an alarming rate.” Little did New Yorkers realize what was in store for them: a heat wave whose death rate would dwarf the New Jersey railroad disaster.

I.

CHOLERA INFANTIUM

DURING THE SUMMER of 1896 Theodore Roosevelt fled Manhattan and his troublesome work as police commissioner as often as he could. As in his youth, the Roosevelt family summered on Long Island, offering him a needed reprieve from his public dispute with fellow commissioner Andrew Parker. The time at Sagamore Hill acted as a balm. Leaving on Sundays to return to his duties in the city must have caused him intense pain. He always remembered life there in the most idyllic of terms: the snow-covered woods during winters, the “blossom-spray of spring,” and the deep, leafy shades of summer, when he and Edith would spend entire days rowing out on Long Island Sound, sometimes accompanied by one of their boys and sometimes lunching