The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [101]
He did suffer many defeats during the session, but they were on the whole honorable ones, proving that he was a man who fought for his principles. The fact that the House majority was heavily Irish did not prevent him attacking a bill to appropriate money to a Catholic protectory, on the grounds that church and state must be separate. He fought reform of the New York City Charter, saying that the suggested changes were more corrupt than the status quo; he attempted to raise public-house license fees “to regulate the growing evil in the sale of intoxicating liquors.” He objected to bills designed to end the unfair competition of prison and free labor, which he believed preferable to having criminals live in idleness; he even introduced a bill “to provide for the infliction of corporal punishment upon [certain] male persons” at a public whipping-post. (One commentator mischievously predicted that, if this bill became law, Roosevelt would wish to restore “the thumbscrew and rack.”)56
As for losing “every bit” of his influence, he actually retained all of it, in the opinion of The New York Times. “The rugged independence of Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt and his disposition to deal with all public measures in a liberal spirit have given him a controlling force on the floor superior to that of any member of his party,” the paper reported. “Whatever boldness the minority has exhibited in the Assembly is due to his influence, and whatever weakness and cowardice it has displayed is attributable to its unwillingness to follow where he led.”57 Other reform-minded periodicals complimented him, if not quite so fulsomely.58
The most interesting appraisal of Roosevelt in the session of 1883 remained unspoken for a quarter of a century. “It was clear to me, even thus early,” Grover Cleveland remembered, “that he was looking to a public career, that he was studying political conditions with a care that I have never known any man to show, and that he was firmly convinced that he would some day reach prominence.”59
ON 28 MAY 1883, three weeks after the Legislature adjourned, the Honorable Theodore Roosevelt was a guest of honor at a bibulous party at Clark’s Tavern, New York City. The occasion was a meeting of the Free Trade Club; and although Roosevelt spoke seriously on “The Tariff in Politics,” the evening quickly became social. Bumpers of red and white wine and “sparkling amber” flowed freely, as the mostly young and fashionable audience toasted vague chimeras of future reform.60 Free Trade was in those days a doctrine almost as controversial as Civil Service Reform, and Roosevelt admitted that he was risking “political death” by espousing it.61 Although he indeed came to regret his speech, he never regretted going to Clark’s that hot spring night, for a chance meeting occurred which directly influenced the future course of his life.
There was at the party a certain Commander H. H. Gorringe, who happened to share Roosevelt’s dreams of a more powerful American Navy.62 It was natural that this retired officer should wish to meet the young author of The Naval War of 1812, and equally natural that, having discussed nautical matters at length, the two men should turn to another subject of mutual interest—buffalo hunting.
The recent return from India of Elliott Roosevelt, laden down with trophies of Oriental big game, had aroused a great longing in his brother to do something similarly romantic.63 The papers were full of newspaper articles about hunting ranches in the Far West, where wealthy dudes from New York were invited to come in search of buffalo. By a strange coincidence, Commander Gorringe had just been West, and was in the process of opening a hunting ranch there himself. When Roosevelt wistfully remarked that he would like to shoot a buffalo “while there