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By Root 3323 0

well for Roosevelt now. He had shed his sophomoric tendencies, along with his side-whiskers, a good while back. The newspapers which had treated him so condescendingly in the past were now uniformly respectful, even admiring, in their tone. Republicans in the House regarded him as their leader de ipse; some of the more worshipful members put boutonnieres on his desk every morning. He, for his part, no longer felt snobbish toward his humbler colleagues; on the contrary, he rejoiced in his ability to work “with bankers and bricklayers, with merchants and mechanics, with lawyers, farmers, day-laborers, saloon-keepers, clergymen, and prize-fighters.”58 Except for occasional flare-ups of aggressive temper (“You damned Irishman, what are you telling around here, that I am going to make you an apology? … I’ll break every bone in your body!”),59 he was as a rule well-mannered and charming, and, when he chose to be, deliciously comic. Even the melancholy Isaac Hunt took pleasure in his wit. “Through it all and amid it all that humorous vein in him! You would be talking with him and he would strike that falsetto. He did that all the while … he was awful funny.” Unlike most comedians, Roosevelt also found other people’s jokes amusing, and the Assembly Chamber rang often with his honest, high-pitched laughter.60

He was never bored, and found entertainment in the dullest moments of parliamentary debate. With a writer’s eye and ear, he noted down incidents and scraps of Irish dialogue for future publication. There was Assemblyman Bogan, who “looked like a serious elderly frog,” standing up to object to the rules, and, on being informed that there were no rules to object to, moving “that they be amended until there are-r-e!”61 There was the member who accused Roosevelt, during a legal debate, of occupying “what lawyers would call a quasi-position on the bill,” only to be crushed by another member rising majestically in his defense: “Mr. Roosevelt knows more law in a wake than you do in a month; and more than that, Michael Cameron, what do you mane by quoting Latin on the floor of the House when you don’t know the alpha and omayga of the language?”62

He was a connoisseur of mixed metaphors, in which Assembly debate was rich, and took great delight in analyzing them. Of one Democrat’s remark that convict labor “was a vital cobra which was swamping the lives of the laboring men,” Roosevelt wrote:

Now, he had evidently carefully put together the sentence beforehand, and the process of mental synthesis by which he built it up must have been curious. “Vital” was, of course, used merely as an adjective of intensity; he was a little uncertain in his ideas as to what a “cobra” was, but took it for granted that it was some terrible manifestation of nature, possibly hostile to man, like a volcano, or a cyclone, or Niagara, for instance; then “swamping” was chosen as an operation very likely to be performed by Niagara, or a cyclone, or a cobra; and behold, the sentence was complete.63

Perhaps the best of Roosevelt’s Albany stories is his account of the committee meeting whose chairman, having “looked upon the rye that was flavored with lemon peel,” fell asleep during a long piece of testimony, and, on waking up, gaveled the witness to order, on the grounds that he had seen him before: “Sit down, sir! The dignity of the Chair must be preserved! No man shall speak to this committee twice. The committee stands adjourned.”64

AT THE BEGINNING of the morning session of the House on Wednesday, 13 February, Assemblymen were seen flocking around Theodore Roosevelt and shaking his hand.65 He had just received a telegram from New York, stating that Alice had given birth to a baby girl late the night before. The mother was “only fairly well,”66 but that was to be expected after the agonies of a first delivery. Roosevelt proudly accepted a father’s congratulations and requested leave of absence, to begin after the passage of his other bill that afternoon. “Full of life and happiness,” he proceeded to report fourteen other bills out of his Cities Committee.67