The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [225]
On 4 April, an incensed party of Maryland spoilsmen visited the White House to demand Roosevelt’s dismissal.34 Harrison said he would wait for an official report of the investigation before deciding what to do. This was a clear warning to Roosevelt to modify, delay, or even suppress any embarrassing findings.
Aware that he had an ax hanging over him35—an ax that threatened to split asunder not only the Civil Service Commission, but the entire Administration—Roosevelt drafted his report with extreme caution. He returned to Baltimore three times, on 6, 13, and 18 April, to gather extra material.36 Every word of testimony was transcribed by a stenographer, lest the President doubt any of the evidence. Some interviews, despite his efforts to be severe, came out like music-hall dialogue:
Q. How do you do your cheating?
A. Well, we do our cheating honorably.37
Although Roosevelt quoted such non sequiturs with relish, the cheerful mendacity of witness after witness gradually sickened him. Out of their own mouths, he wrote, no fewer than twenty-five Harrison appointees stood convicted, and the President should dismiss them at once. His analysis of the evidence contained a typically aggressive plea for the abolition of the spoils system, on the grounds of pure political morality. “Resolved into its ultimate elements, the view of the spoils politician is that politics is a dirty game, which ought to be played solely by those who desire, by hook or crook, to win pecuniary reward [in] the form of money or of office. Politics cannot possibly be put upon a healthy basis until this idea is absolutely eradicated … As for the Government officeholder, he must be taught in one way or another that his duty is to do the work of the Government for the whole people, and not to pervert his office for the use of any party or any faction.”38
In conclusion, Roosevelt noted that Postmaster Johnson had weakly disclaimed responsibility for the politicking of his employees. Such men were loyal, not to him, but to their ward leaders, who had ordered Johnson to hire them in the first place. “This testimony,” Roosevelt remarked contemptuously, “… shows the utter nonsense of the talk that under the spoils system the appointing officers themselves make the appointments. They do nothing of the kind … outside politicians make the appointments for them.” There was not enough evidence to warrant indictment of either Johnson or Marshal Airey—although the latter had been seen tearing the coat-buttons off a recalcitrant judge. In an obvious attempt to placate the President, Roosevelt avoided direct censure of either official, but suggested that in future any such politicking by senior civil servants “shall be treated as furnishing cause for dismissal.”39
THE REPORT OF COMMISSIONER Roosevelt Concerning Political Assessments and the Use of Official Influence to Control Elections in the Federal Offices at Baltimore, Maryland40 was, and remains, a masterpiece in its genre. It was short (146 pages), dense with relevant information, yet so clearly written as to speed both reader and author irresistibly to the same conclusion. Indeed the document was so seductive, not to say seditious, in its indictment of Old Guard Republicanism that Roosevelt himself seems to have had second thoughts about sending it in, or at least to have yielded to the suggestions of Commissioners Lyman and Thompson that he delay its release until the summer vacations, when negative publicity would do the Administration least harm.41
As a result, he enjoyed a temporary lull in his “warfare with the ungodly,” and drifted into “the pleasant life one can lead in Washington in the spring, if there are several tolerably intimate families.”42 The Roosevelts dined the Reeds; the Reeds responded with lunch; the Hays dined the Roosevelts; and “good, futile, pathetic Springy” entertained everybody at the country club. Theodore and Edith made side trips to Senator Cameron’s estate in Pennsylvania, and to William Merritt Chase’s art studio in New York, where Carmencita performed