The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [120]
However cloying his love-talk, however reminiscent his attitude of David Copperfield’s to the “child-wife” Dora, Alice Lee was still, after three years and three months of marriage, his “heart’s dearest.”27
ROOSEVELT HAD PROMISED the electorate that his main concern in the session of 1884 would be to break the power of the machines, both Republican and Democratic, in New York City.28 As chairman of the Committee on Cities, he was now in a position to push through some really effective legislation. Accordingly he wasted no time getting down to business. “He would go at a thing as if the world was coming to an end,” said Isaac Hunt.29 On 11 January, three days after his appointment, he introduced three antimachine bills in the Assembly. The first proposed a sharp increase in liquor license fees; the second proposed a sharp decrease in the amount of money the city could borrow from unorthodox sources; the third proposed that the Mayor be made simultaneously much more powerful and much more accountable to the people.30
It was a foregone conclusion that the liquor license bill would fail, even though Roosevelt had now developed great influence in the Assembly. (The alliance between government and malt, in the late nineteenth century, was as unbreakable as that between government and oil in the late twentieth.) Still, he emerged with his reputation as a crusader enhanced, while in no way sounding like a prohibitionist. Any such image would be fatal to a politician living on so notoriously thirsty an island as Manhattan, with its huge, tankard-swinging German population. “Nine out of ten beer drinkers are decent and reputable citizens,” Roosevelt declared. “That large class of Americans who have adopted the German customs in regard to drinking ales and beers … are in the main … law-abiding.”31
Roosevelt’s second measure achieved passage, and added a needed touch of fiscal discipline to the New York treasury. The third, which he rightly regarded as the most important piece of legislation in the session of 1884, won tremendous popular support—and opposition in the Assembly to match. Grandly entitled “An Act to Center Responsibility in the Municipal Government of the City of New York,” it consisted of a mere forty words; but these words, if they became law, were enough to make political eunuchs of the city’s twenty-four aldermen. At the moment it was the Mayor who was the eunuch, since the Board of Aldermen enjoyed confirmatory power over all his appointments. Defenders of the status quo invoked the Jeffersonian principle that minimum power should be shared by the maximum number of people.32 Roosevelt, whose contempt for Thomas Jefferson was matched only by his worship of the autocratic Alexander Hamilton, believed just the opposite. He pointed out that New York’s aldermen were, almost to a man, “merely the creatures of the local ward bosses or of the municipal bosses.”33 It was the machine, therefore, which ultimately governed the city; and Roosevelt did not consider that democratic.
His major speech in support of the mayoralty bill, when it came up for a second hearing on 5 February, was so forceful as to create an instant sensation. Roosevelt himself considered it “one of my best speeches,”34 and the press agreed with him. A sampling of next day’s headlines tells the story:
ROOSEVELT ON A RAMPAGE
Whacking the Heads off Republican
Office-Holders in This City
MR. ROOSEVELT’S HARD HITS
Making a Lively Onslaught on New York’s Aldermen
TAMMANY DEFEATED
Mr. Roosevelt’s Brilliant Assault on Corruption35
The speech, as transcribed in black and white by Albany correspondents, loses much of the color which Roosevelt undoubtedly gave it in delivery,