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feminine” waywardness and “high-pitched screechings”; the Immigration Department for its unrestricted admission of “moral paupers and lunatics”; the Anti-Poverty Society for being “about as effective as an Anti-Gravitation Society”; anarchists and socialists for inciting labor demonstrators to violence (“there is but one answer to be made to the dynamite bomb, and that can best be made by the Winchester rifle”). For nearly an hour Roosevelt’s voice grated through the cigar-smoke. Again and again he hurled insults at the “hysterical and mendacious party of mugwumps,” even managing, somewhat anachronistically, to include Presidents Tyler and Johnson in that number “—and they were the most contemptible Presidents we have ever had.”

He sat down to considerable applause, although the faces of his listeners registered rather more shock than approval—as if they had been witnessing a bloody prizefight, and were relieved the punishment was over. For all the savagery of Roosevelt’s language, his personal force awed the gathering. Chauncey Depew rose to make some flattering follow-up remarks. “Buffalo Bill said to me in the utmost confidence, ‘Theodore Roosevelt is the only New York dude that has got the making of a man in him.’ ” Depew waggishly announced that the evening’s other scheduled speakers had all submitted their manuscripts to Roosevelt for checking, “so that when he runs for President no case of Burchard will interfere.”42 This was a reference to the unfortunate preacher whose gaffe had cost James G. Blaine the 1884 election.

Waggish or not, Depew was the first person ever to suggest in public that Roosevelt might be harboring presidential ambitions.43 The young man’s speech made nationwide headlines, and the question of his future was taken up seriously by several Republican newspapers. The Harrisburg Telegraph recommended him for Vice-President in 1888, on a ticket headed by Governor Foraker of Ohio;44 the Baltimore American went so far as to nominate him for President. “Mr. ROOSEVELT,” the paper commented, “has a stainless reputation and great personal magnetism. He is a tireless worker, an advocate of real reform in politics, and his speech before the Federal Club fairly reflects his ability to handle the political puzzles with which both parties must deal next year. It may be that the Federal Club have builded wiser than they intended by thus prominently drawing the attention of the country to this vigorous young Republican.”45

Few out-of-town editors, evidently, realized that Roosevelt was still only twenty-eight, and constitutionally debarred from the greatness they would thrust upon him. The New York Sun felt obliged to point out that, “owing to circumstances beyond his control, he will not be able to take the office of President of the United States before 1897.”46

Major newspapers, of course, paid no attention to such preposterous endorsements. They were (with the single exception of Whitelaw Reid’s Tribune) harshly disapproving of Roosevelt’s “vehement chatter.”47 He was “an immature and poorly posted thinker,” wasting “a good deal of breath which he may want someday” on “strained criticism” of the government.48 Even the Times, hitherto his most fervent supporter, admitted the speech had been “most unfortunate and disagreeable.”49 E. L. Godkin of the Post wrote that the Republican party no longer had any use for Theodore Roosevelt. “It was a mistake ever to take him seriously as a politician.”50 And on 25 May, Puck published a final valedictory:

Be happy, Mr. Roosevelt, be happy while you may. You are young—yours is the time of roses—the time of illusions … You have heard of Pitt, of Alexander Hamilton, of Randolph Churchill, and of other men who were young and yet who, so to speak, got there just the same. Bright visions float before your eyes of what the Party can and may do for you. We wish you a gradual and gentle awakening … You are not the timber of which Presidents are made.

THE SPRING OF 1887 settled down on Oyster Bay. Bloodroot and mayflower whitened the slopes around Cove Neck; on Sagamore