The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [232]
His business in Owensboro did not detain him long; neither did further business in Texas, for in early April he was at the ranch of a friend near the Mexican border. Here he spent two exhilarating days hunting wild hogs on horseback. Running down a band of five on the banks of the River Nueces, he managed to shoot a sow and a boar. “There was a certain excitement in seeing the fierce little creatures come to bay,” he mused afterward, “but the true way to kill these peccaries would be with the spear.”98
THE HOUSE VOTED an investigation of the Baltimore affair by the Civil Service Reform Committee on 19 April 1892. John Wanamaker was asked how soon he could prepare a statement of his official position, and replied that “he would hold himself at the service of the Committee for any date on which Mr. Roosevelt was not to be present.”99
A special hearing of the Postmaster General was promptly scheduled for Monday, 25 April. Speaking with an air of weary dignity, Wanamaker said that he had not laid eyes on Roosevelt’s report until returning from vacation the previous September. Soon afterward Postmaster Johnson had written to him complaining that the document was based on warped evidence. According to Johnson, Commissioner Roosevelt had arrived in Baltimore without warning, and had “frightened” and “bulldozed” Post Office employees into making rash statements that they later begged to withdraw. He had conducted a “star-chamber investigation” in which “men of very ordinary intellect” were denied counsel, and subjected them to a barrage of “leading questions.”100 Wanamaker felt that the men were entitled to be heard on their own behalf, and had ordered his two most senior inspectors to reinvestigate the case. Their report—which he did not happen to have on him at the moment—proved that Roosevelt’s victims had not been soliciting election expenses at all; on the contrary, they were merely raising funds for a pool table. It was the official view of his department, therefore, that “the facts do not justify the dismissal of … anyone for violation of the Civil Service Law as charged.”101
Wanamaker, who regularly taught Sunday school in Philadelphia, was at his sanctimonious best in cross-examination. He said that Postmaster Johnson had been “reprimanded” for allowing his men “to give impressions to the Civil Service Commissioner which were not justified by facts.” Yet, on the whole, Johnson had done a remarkably good job in enforcing Civil Service rules. “The condition of the Baltimore Post Office is like the millenium in comparison with what it was in the previous Administration.” Then Wanamaker launched into a speech which must have made Roosevelt boggle when it appeared in the evening paper:
I consider myself the highest type of Civil Service man. I have governed the Post Office Department strictly by Civil Service rules … It seems to me to be small and trifling business and unworthy of a great Government to discharge a man who declares that he gave five dollars to a pool table … And while I have not seen my way clear to order any discharge or indictment … I might, if I saw the least thing on the part of these men at the next election to prove that they had not been honest or fair, dismiss them and forty more, if necessary. I am a law-keeper.102
Roosevelt’s turn came a week later, on 2 May. He made his usual delayed entrance, interrupting testimony by Treasury Secretary Charles Foster, pumping hands right and left, waving aside a proffered chair. While awaiting his turn on the stand he “paced the floor nervously like a caged leopard,” and when sworn treated the committee to a series of dazzling grins, some of which clicked audibly. He pulled a typewritten statement from his pocket and read it with gusto.103
“In the first place,” said Roosevelt, “I stand by my Baltimore report not only in its entirety, but paragraph by paragraph. It is absolutely impossible that