The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [206]
Roosevelt would have none of this laissez-faire policy. From the moment he returned from the White House on 14 May, he became a blur of high-speed activity. He mastered the Commission’s complex operations within days, throwing off a wealth of new ideas, devouring documents at the rate of a page a glance, dictating hundreds of letters with such hissing emphasis that the stenographer did not need to ask for punctuation marks. Staff and visitors alike were dazed by his energy, exuberance, and ruthless outmaneuvering. “He is a wonderful man,” said one caller. “When I went to see him, he got up, shook hands with me, and said, ‘So glad to see you. Delighted. Good day, sir, good day.’ Then he ushered me to the door. I wonder what I wanted to see him about.”35
The new Commissioner was not interested in audiences of one. Experience had taught him that he had in abundance the power of mass publicity,36 that it could be as effective, if not more so, than regular political clout. He intended so to dramatize the good gray cause of Civil Service Reform that the electorate would be forced to take notice of it—and if of himself as well, why, so much the better.
As a preliminary attention-getting exercise, Roosevelt went on 20 May to New York, where the press knew him, to check some recent examinations in the Custom House. He found that various questions had been leaked to favored candidates, at $50 a head, and issued a fiery report accusing the local examinations board of “great laxity and negligence,” “positive fraud,” and mismanagement for “personal, political, or pecuniary” reasons. The report called for the dismissal of three officials and the criminal prosecution of at least one of them. “This report astonished the spoilsmen,” wrote one prominent reformer. “It was the first emphatic notice that the Civil Service Act was a real law and was to be enforced.”37
Roosevelt returned to the capital and pondered his next move. The Eastern press was watching him now; it was time to get Western newspapers to do the same. On 17 June, therefore, he set off on an investigatory tour of some Great Lakes post offices with Commissioners Lyman and Thompson. Their first scheduled stop, he innocently announced, would be Indianapolis, where there were rumors of incompetence and partisanship involving the local postmaster, William Wallace. It did not take reporters long to realize that Wallace was the close personal friend, and Indianapolis the home city, of the President of the United States.38
LUCIUS BURRIE SWIFT, Indianapolis editor of the Civil Service Chronicle, was walking downtown on the morning of 18 June when “I saw Theodore Roosevelt coming towards me, his smile of recognition visible half a block away.”39 The two men knew each other well: it had been Swift who originally asked the Civil Service Commission to investigate Postmaster Wallace. While Roosevelt completed his postbreakfast “constitutional,” Swift went over the main facts of the case again. Three venal ex-employees of the Post Office, fired some years before by Wallace’s Democratic predecessor, had been given their jobs back simply because they were Republicans. One was rumored to be the operator of an illegal gambling den—clearly not the sort of civil servant the Commission should favor.40
The investigation, held that afternoon in the Indianapolis Post Office, confirmed the truth of Swift’s allegations. “These men must be removed today,” Roosevelt exclaimed. Wallace strenuously objected, but Commissioners Lyman and Thompson backed their young colleague up. The postmaster had no choice but to capitulate. He agreed to dismiss the offending employees, and promised that in future he would scrupulously observe the Civil Service law.41
Later, when Roosevelt was celebrating at Swift’s house, Wallace visited Lyman and Thompson at their hotel. He asked if he might produce “new evidence” exonerating himself before they wrote their final report. The Commissioners