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By Root 3194 0

next morning, he begins a final long weekend of hearings (his committee’s report is due the following Friday). While awaiting counsel’s draft of this document, he makes another major speech on municipal government, reports out of various committees a total of thirty-five new bills—the final six on Thursday evening 13 March, as he simultaneously checks every word of the Investigative Report. That night he does not sleep at all, for the text does not satisfy him—it is “a whitewashing performance”10 that ignores his committee’s most sensational findings. Roosevelt retires to the Delavan House with 1,054 pages of testimony, summons relays of stenographers, and begins to dictate a new report; when the stenographers wilt in the small hours, he sends them home and takes up the pen himself. He writes on through breakfast; at ten, when the Assembly opens, he transfers his papers there, and continues to write all morning, undisturbed by the roar of debate (although he hears enough to jump to his feet at times and comment on bills before the House). As each sheet of manuscript is finished, it is rushed to the printer. By mid-afternoon the last page is printed and bound, and the 47-page, 15,000-word document is handed in. He delivers a “masterful presentation” on its behalf, introduces nine audacious bills arising from his findings, and concludes with a request for authority to investigate other areas of city government.11

NOTWITHSTANDING ROOSEVELT’S other preoccupations, it is probable that he found time to read a front-page article in The New York Times on 25 February, for its subject-matter was of intense interest to him. The headlines read DRESSED BEEF IN THE WEST—THE BUSINESS ENTERPRISE OF THE MARQUIS DE MORES, and the copy consisted of an interview with the Frenchman, just arrived at the Hotel Brunswick. Much was made of his elegant city attire, in contrast to the broad sombrero and buckskin suit he wore out West. “The Marquis is a young man of 26, with a clear-cut and refined face and expressive gray eyes. He wears a dark brown mustache and slight sidewhiskers. He went West 18 months ago to organize the dressed beef business on the Northern Pacific Railroad. He put his first slaughterhouse on the Little Missouri. Here it was that the trouble [between himself and the three frontiersmen] occurred.…” But de Morès would not discuss “the Buffalo Bill side” of life in Dakota. He was more interested in promoting Medora as a future capital of the beef industry. The little town’s population was put at 600, and it already boasted a newspaper, the Bad Lands Cowboy. De Morès was prepared to invest a million dollars in his enterprise, and was confident of profitable returns. “In his region, he says, are the most magnificent cattle farms to be found anywhere. Grass-fed cattle keep fat all Winter.”12

ROOSEVELT’S HYPERACTIVITY did not diminish as the session wore on. If anything it increased, through two more phases of his City Investigation Committee, and two more reports totaling nearly a million words of testimony. The evidence of “blackmail and extortion” in the surrogate’s office, “gross abuses” in the sheriff’s, “no system whatever” in the Tax and Assessments Department, and “hush money” paid to policemen—interlarded with prison descriptions and brothel anecdotes which make strong reading even today—was so shocking that no fewer than seven of his nine corrective measures were passed by the Legislature.13

Since these seven bills called, among other things, for prompt cancellation of the tenure of all New York City department heads, from the bejeweled Commissioner Thompson downward, they aroused frantic opposition in the House, including one free-for-all, on 26 March, which the Evening Post called “a scene of uproar and violence to all rules of decency.”14 Hissing, howling Assemblymen ran to and fro, some hiding in the lobby in an effort to break the quorum, others besieging the Clerk’s desk with threats and denunciations. “During all this tumult,” said Isaac Hunt, “TR was the presiding genius. He was right in his element, rejoicing