The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [117]
There was feasting that night in the Langs’ little cabin. The buffalo steaks “tasted uncommonly good … for we had been without fresh meat for a week; and until a healthy, active man has been without it for some time, he does not know how positively and almost painfully hungry for flesh he becomes.”76
On the morning of 21 September Roosevelt bade farewell to his hosts and began the fifty-mile trek back to Little Missouri, where he would await his telegram from Minnesota. As the buckboard rattled away, and Lincoln Lang caught his last flash of teeth and spectacles, he heard his father saying, “There goes the most remarkable man I ever met. Unless I am badly mistaken, the world is due to hear from him one of these days.”77
CHAPTER 9
The Honorable Gentleman
Hoist up your sails of silk
And flee away from each other.
“HE’S A BRILLIANT MADMAN born a century too soon,” Assemblyman Newton M. Curtis complained, escaping from Theodore Roosevelt’s suite in the Delavan House, Albany.1 Mad or not, Roosevelt had been returned to serve a third term in the New York State Legislature, and was again a candidate for Speaker. With less than twenty-four hours to go before the Republican New Year’s Eve caucus, his nomination seemed almost certain.2 This time the honor would not be complimentary, for his party had recaptured both houses of the legislature with large majorities.3 To be nominated on 31 December 1883 was to step automatically into the Chair next morning.
Few Assemblymen agreed with Curtis as to Roosevelt’s precocity. The novelty of his extreme youth had long since worn off. If he had been a competent party leader at twenty-four, why not Speaker at twenty-five? The candidate himself might be forgiven for thinking that his time for real power had come. All political trends, citywide, statewide, and nationwide, were in his favor. New York State’s would-be Republican boss, Senator Warner (“Wood-Pulp”) Miller, had cautiously embraced such Rooseveltian principles as municipal reform, purified electoral procedures, and the elimination of unelected political middlemen. At the gubernatorial level, Grover Cleveland had publicly split with Tammany Hall, pledging an independent stance for the rest of his administration. He would obviously like to collaborate with a Speaker as independent as Roosevelt. And in Washington even President Arthur had proved to be surprisingly enlightened. That so notorious a machine politician should now be espousing the cause of Civil Service Reform, and vetoing pork-barrel legislation on moral grounds, must have made Roosevelt think ruefully of the days when “Chet” Arthur, as his father’s rival for the Collectorship of New York, had symbolized everything Theodore Senior despised. It was due largely to the President’s popularity and undeniable decency that the Republican party had recovered from the humiliations of 1882, and stood a good chance of retaining the White House in 1884.4
“There is a curse on this house.”
Hallway of the Roosevelt mansion at 6 West Fifty-seventh Street, New York City. (Illustration 9.1)
There is no doubt that Roosevelt passionately wanted to be Speaker. If nominated, he would become the number two elected officer in the nation’s number one state—and would play a vital role in what promised to be one of the most exciting election years in American history. As 1883 drew to a close, President Arthur himself was reported to be following events in Albany with anxious interest.5
ROOSEVELT HAD BEEN campaigning hard since November. Within days of his reelection, he had dispatched a series of characteristically terse letters to Assemblymen-elect:
Dear Sir: Although not personally acquainted with you, I take the liberty of writing to state that I am a candidate for Speaker. Last year, when we were in the minority, I was the party nominee for that position;