The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [178]
RIGHT FROM THE START the candidate made it clear that he was going to run his own campaign. Establishing himself in luxurious headquarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, he informed the party bosses that he would pay “no assessment whatsoever” and would be “an adjunct to nobody.”21 These declarations aroused flattering comments in the press. “Mr. Roosevelt is a wonderful young man,” remarked the Democratic Sun. Even E. L. Godkin of the Post admitted: “If Roosevelt is elected, we have not a word to say against him.”22
Roosevelt remained sure that he could not win at least through the first four days of the campaign. He explained to Lodge that he was only running “on the score of absolute duty,” and hoped to enjoy, if nothing else, “a better party standing” afterward. “The George vote will be very large … undoubtedly thousands of my should-be supporters will leave me and vote for Hewitt to beat him.”23 But this did not prevent him from campaigning with all his strength. He worked eighteen-hour days, addressing three to five meetings a night, pumping hands, signing circulars, repudiating bribes, plotting strategy, and on at least one occasion dictating letters and holding a press conference simultaneously.24
As usual Roosevelt never minced words. He was determined to meet every issue head-on, even the touchy one of Labor v. Capital. George was so articulate on the left, and Hewitt so persuasive in the center, that Roosevelt might have been well advised to keep his own right-wing views tacit, and concentrate on other subjects; but that was not his style. When a Labor party official accused him of belonging to “the employing and landlord class, whose interests are best served when wages are low and rents are high,”25 Roosevelt shot back with a contemptuous public letter, dated 22 October 1886.
“The mass of the American people,” he wrote, “are most emphatically not in the deplorable condition of which you speak.” As for the accusation that he, Roosevelt, belonged to the landlord class, “if you had any conception of the true American spirit you would know that we do not have ‘classes’ at all on this side of the water.” In any case, “I own no land at all except that on which I myself live. Your statement that I wish rents to be high and wages low is a deliberate untruth … I have worked with both hands and with head, probably quite as hard as any member of your body. The only place where I employ many wage-workers is on my ranch in the West, and there almost every one of the men has some interest in the profits.”
Roosevelt conceded that “some of the evils of which you complain are real and can be to a certain degree remedied, but not by the remedies you propose.” But most would disappear if there were more of “that capacity for steady, individual self-help which is the glory of every true American.” Legislation could no more do away with them “than you could do away with the bruises which you receive when you tumble down, by passing an act to repeal the laws of gravitation.”26
To this the Labor man could only reply, “If you were compelled to live on $1 a day, Mr. Roosevelt, would you not also complain of being in a deplorable condition?”27 But by then Roosevelt’s campaign was going so well—to everybody’s surprise—that the mournful question was ignored.
ON THE NIGHT of Wednesday, 27 October, Roosevelt’s twenty-eighth birthday, bonfires belched in the street outside Cooper Union, reddening the huge building’s facade until it glowed like a beacon. For almost an hour, rockets