The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [201]
He worked steadily all though December, finishing Volume One before Christmas.123 Early in the New Year he moved his family to 689 Madison Avenue. (Bamie, who was traveling in Europe, had placed her house at Edith’s disposal.)124 Seeking refuge from the children, Roosevelt set up a desk at Putnam’s, on West Twenty-third Street. For some reason the publishers were in a hurry to get the book out by the middle of June. Chapters of Volume Two were sent upstairs to the composing room as fast as Roosevelt could write them. Meanwhile Volume One was printed and bound on the topmost floors. Later, stacks of both volumes would be cranked downstairs for sale in the retail department at street level—permitting George Haven Putnam to boast that The Winning of the West had been in large part written, produced, and marketed under one roof.125
Roosevelt scrawled his last line of text on 1 April 1889, and spent the next couple of weeks blearily checking the galleys. With a touch of sadness he wondered “if I have or have not properly expressed all the ideas that seethed vaguely in my soul as I wrote it.”126 But he had little leisure to indulge in self-doubts, for on 27 April Cabot Lodge came up from Washington127 with a message from the White House.
ONLY A FEW DAYS BEFORE, Roosevelt had written, “I do hope the President will appoint good Civil Service Commissioners.”128 Lodge fully understood the plaintive tone of that remark. Since the beginning of the year he had been trying to get his friend a place in the incoming Administration. Roosevelt had affected nonchalance at first, yet while still engaged on the final chapters of The Winning of the West, confessed, “I would like above all things to go into politics.”129 Lodge had tried to persuade Harrison’s new Secretary of State—who was none other than James G. Blaine—to appoint Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary, but the Plumed Knight gracefully demurred. In words that proved prophetic, he wrote:
My real trouble in regard to Mr. Roosevelt is that I fear he lacks the repose and patient endurance required in an Assistant Secretary. Mr. Roosevelt is amazingly quick in apprehension. Is there not danger that he might be too quick in execution? I do somehow fear that my sleep at Augusta or Bar Harbor would not be quite so easy and refreshing if so brilliant and aggressive a man had hold of the helm. Matters are constantly occurring which require the most thoughtful concentration and the most stubborn inaction. Do you think that Mr. T.R.’s temperament would give guaranty of that course?130
Lodge had reported only the polite parts of this rejection. “I hope you will tell Blaine how much I appreciate his kind expressions,” Roosevelt replied.131
Lodge had then begun to negotiate directly with the President, urging him to appoint Roosevelt to some federal position, no matter how minor, in recognition of his help during the campaign. Several influential Republicans advised the same. Harrison was “by no means eager.”132 Perhaps he remembered the screeching, strawhatted young delegate at Chicago in 1884, and winced at the idea of having him within earshot of the White House. Eventually he thought of a dusty sinecure that paid little, and promised less in terms of real political power. Ambitious men invariably turned it down; if Roosevelt was crazy enough to want it, he might be crazy enough to make something of it.
Lodge hurried to New York, and, amid the din of the U.S. Government Centennial celebrations,133 told Roosevelt that Harrison was willing to appoint him Civil Service Commissioner, at a salary of $3,500 per annum. He doubted, however, that his friend would want the post. Such a pittance could only plunge him deeper into financial difficulties; bureaucratic