• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3073 0

nearly two years. He says he saw him frequently until Elliott went to Europe in July 1890, and he had remarked the gradual impairment of his intellect. His conversation had been rambling and he could not tell a story consecutively … During the winter of 1890 he had several bad turns. He became violent and on three occasions threatened to take his own life. He had to be placed in surveillance. Mr. Roosevelt says he is “unable to say how far the result is due to indulgence in drink or other excesses.” He alleges that the property of his brother in this State consists of real estate, bonds, stocks, and is worth $170,000.

Substantially the same news item appeared in all the major dailies. Never before had the Roosevelts, that 250-year-old clan of unimpeachable respectability, been tarnished with such shameful revelations.71 The resentment of family elders against Theodore for having precipitated it may well be imagined, but he was convinced he had done the right thing for Anna and the children. It had been necessary to act hastily before Elliott was released from his French asylum and returned to the United States to claim his property. Even so, the court might not decide in time. “It is all horrible beyond belief,” Theodore wrote Bamie. “The only thing to do is go resolutely forward.”72

All in all, the summer of 1891 must have been a time of anguish for the beleaguered Commissioner. Its only discernible blessing was the birth, on 13 August, of his fourth child and second daughter, “a jolly naughty whacky baby” named Ethel.73 Even this was saddened by the almost simultaneous death of Wilmot Dow, the younger and more lovable of his Dakota partners. “I think of Wilmot all the time,” he wrote. “I can see him riding a bucker, paddling, shooting, hiking.…” Solace was to be found out West. At the end of the month he left for Medora and the Rockies.74

“AS USUAL, I come back to rumors of my own removal,” Roosevelt wrote Lodge on 10 October. But the tone of his letter was spirited. He had killed nine elk in four weeks, and felt “in splendid trim” for a fight.75 General opinion held that he was too popular to be fired. “Mr. Harrison could be consoled if Mr. Roosevelt would resign,” The New York Times remarked, “but he will not, and the President will not dare ask him to do so.” Amazingly, even Frank Hatton hoped the rumors were not true. “Mr. Roosevelt is a sincere and genuine Civil Service reformer … There have been times in the past when [his] ideas of reform did not exactly comingle with those of the Post, but … it will be a sad day for Civil Service Reform when he steps down and out.”76

Postmaster Johnson of Baltimore did not share this view. He publicly prayed “that lightning may strike Mr. Theodore Roosevelt.”77 John Wanamaker no doubt added a fervent Amen. It was clearly his responsibility to dismiss the twenty-five Post Office employees who had, by their own testimony, indicted themselves in Roosevelt’s report; yet his pride would not let him. Shortly after the pesky Commissioner returned to town, Wanamaker handpicked a team of Postal Department inspectors and ordered them to reinvestigate the Baltimore case “since the evidence gathered so far is inconclusive.”78

Now it was Roosevelt’s turn to be angry. “You may tell the Postmaster-General from me,” he roared at a messenger, “that I don’t like him for two reasons. In the first place he has a very sloppy mind, and in the next place he does not tell the truth.”79

EMBARRASSMENTS CROWDED IN thickly as the year drew to its close—so much so that Roosevelt forgot his own thirty-third birthday. The Maryland Civil Service Reform League complained about his ineffectiveness in securing the twenty-five dismissals, and said a golden opportunity to educate the rest of the country had been lost. Reformers in New York sent word that the law was being abused there just as cynically as it had been in Baltimore. And in Washington, President Harrison brushed aside a plan for new promotion methods in the classified service which Roosevelt had worked on for many months. Instead, Cabinet officers