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the boiler; the engine leaps north at sixty miles an hour. For thirteen minutes, red and green lights flash by: all railroad traffic has been halted in his favor. He arrives at Tremont Station only one minute late, and runs into the neighboring hall. Ladies of the 24th Ward present him with an immense floral horseshoe. He says that it is appropriate for a youthful candidate to come to this “young” district of the city. “Three times three cheers for the Boy!” yells someone. Not forgetting his bouquet, Roosevelt jumps back on the train and hurries south across the Harlem River. He reaches the 22nd Assembly District Roosevelt Club in time for his final address of the evening at 10:30 P.M. Then, at last, he can walk home to Bamie’s house, where Baby Lee lies sleeping.48

Somebody asked him the following morning, Saturday, if he was not exhausted by the pace he was setting himself. “Not in the least!” Roosevelt replied.49 His wellsprings of energy continued to bubble through the last night of the campaign, but close observers noticed a gradual decline in his confidence of victory. “The ‘timid good,’ ” he exasperatedly wrote Lodge, “are for Hewitt.” The word “if” crept frequently into his speeches: “If I am not knifed in the house of my friends I shall win.”50

KNIVES FLEW thick and fast in those final days, and he could not be sure whether some of the throwers might be his fellow Republicans. A sudden rumor went around that James G. Blaine was coming to lend a hand in the campaign, just when Roosevelt thought he had at last explained away his support of the Plumed Knight in 1884. He was obliged to issue an angry statement that Blaine “had not and would not be invited to speak here.”51 At a large downtown rally for Hewitt, ex–State Senator David L. Foster made a devastating analysis of ex-Assemblyman Roosevelt’s democratization of the Board of Aldermen: “The result of this change in the first year of its adoption was that two of them died, five left the country, and about seventeen of them were indicted for crime.”52 Uptown, meanwhile, moonlighting newsboys delivered Democratic newspapers to Republican subscribers, and the slogan “A Vote for Roosevelt is a Vote for George” penetrated into the heart of his traditional constituency.53

These same newspapers shrewdly caricatured the “boy” image, knowing that thousands of voters felt nervous about putting a twenty-eight-year-old in charge of America’s largest city. “It has been objected that I am a boy,” said Roosevelt wearily—he had been hearing the charge for years—“but I can only offer the time-honored reply, that years will cure me of that.” He must have been humiliated by a full, front-page cartoon in the Daily Graphic, entitled “The Two Candidates,” showing Henry George and Abram Hewitt squaring off at each other like giants: only after close inspection did readers perceive the tiny, bespectacled head of Roosevelt peeping out of George’s tote-bag.54

Most damaging, perhaps, was the Star’s publication (on Sunday, 31 October, when the whole city was at home with the papers) of a remark President Cleveland had made as Governor, after vetoing Roosevelt’s Tenure of Office Bill: “Of all the defective and shabby legislation which has been presented to me, this is the worst and the most inexcusable.”55 The World reprinted this statement on Monday morning, aggravating Roosevelt’s embarrassment as his campaign entered its penultimate twenty-four hours.

Evidently sensing defeat now, Roosevelt dropped his hitherto courteous attitude to the opposition. Henry George was “a galled jade,” E. L. Godkin was “that peevish fossil,” Hewitt’s backers were “the same old gang of thieves who have robbed the city for years.”56 Those telltale signs of Rooseveltian frustration, the angry f’s and popping p’s, reappeared in his oratory: “They [the Democrats] are men who fatten on public plunder—I shall make no promises before election that I will not keep when in office: I propose to turn the plunderers out.”57

But for the most part he managed to preserve his dignity, as did Hewitt and George in their