The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [132]
Flushed with victory, Roosevelt jumped across the aisle and confronted the shaken Senator. According to one reporter, he held out his hand and said, “Time makes all things even. The first of January is avenged.”29 But the reporter was a long distance away, in the press gallery, and got this quote by proxy. Actually Roosevelt’s hand was not so much extended as balled in a fist, and his words were rather less printable: “There, damn you, we beat you for last winter!”30
“What did you want to say that for?” asked Isaac Hunt afterward. They were walking back to Bagg’s Hotel behind Miller, who had somehow torn his trousers coming out of the Opera House, and now looked infinitely pathetic.
“I wanted him to know,” Roosevelt replied.
Hunt was not impressed. “Well, I should think he would know without being told.”31
This exchange in effect ended the three-year friendship of the two young Assemblymen, which had never been the same since Hunt’s disloyalty during the Speakership contest. There is no evidence that Roosevelt took any petty offense at his colleague’s words. But he knew now that it was time to unrope himself from Hunt, O’Neil, and the other “Roosevelt Republicans,” whose horizons extended no further than New York State, and eagerly search out new altitudes, wider vistas. Chicago beckoned, and beyond it the West; could he but rise high enough, he might see his future clear.
“He grew right away from me,” Hunt confessed ruefully in old age. “I knew he was born for some great emergency, but what he would do I could not tell … I never expected to see him go right up in the heavens.”32
ROOSEVELT RETURNED TO ALBANY on 24 April to receive the congratulations of his supporters in the Assembly. “For a while,” remarked the Times, “it was a doubtful question whether the Chamber was being used for legislative purposes or as a Roosevelt reception room.”33 During the next few days he enjoyed such adulation, both public and private, as he had never enjoyed before—and would not experience again for at least a decade. The New York Times hailed him as “the victor, the wearer of all the laurels” at Utica, and the Evening Post, in the course of a long and flattering editorial, called him “the most successful young politician of our day.”34 Curiosity mounted in Chicago and Washington about the twenty-five-year-old who had almost single-handedly made Senator Edmunds a serious candidate for the Presidency. Arthur Cutler, who kept closely in touch with political trends, and took pedagogic pride in his ex-pupil, assured Bamie, “Theodore’s reputation is national and even to us who know him it is phenomenal. Whatever the future may have in store for him, no man in the country has begun his public career more brilliantly.”35
Two hundred miles away in Boston, Henry Cabot Lodge, another Edmunds supporter and delegate-at-large to Chicago, decided that Roosevelt was a “national figure of real importance,”36 and made a mental note to cultivate him.
ROOSEVELT’S POST-CONVENTION GLOW was chilled by news that Grover Cleveland was threatening to veto some of his bills for the regulation of New York City. The Assemblyman reacted with understandable shock. He had been so frequent a visitor to the Executive Office recently, and Cleveland had seemed so agreeable to all his legislation, that Roosevelt no doubt expected full cooperation through the concluding weeks of the session. (Only a few days before Utica, Harper’s Weekly had published a Nast cartoon showing the Governor obediently signing a pile of these same bills in Roosevelt’s presence.)37
Others, however, had seen signs of a showdown long ago; it was not so much a question of politics as of diametrically opposed personalities. Roosevelt was nervy, inspirational, passionate. He arrived at conclusions so rapidly that he seemed to be acting wholly on impulse, and was impatient