The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [263]
“That was pretty good of the old man, was it not?” Roosevelt exulted to Cabot Lodge. “I was really greatly flattered.”111
In the same letter he acknowledged that his uncompromising attitude had sharply polarized the press. For a couple of months virtually every newspaper in the city had eulogized him—but now, almost overnight, “the World, Herald, Sun, Journal and Advertiser are shrieking with rage; and the [German-American] Staats-Zeitung is fairly epileptic.” He could still count on the support of the Tribune and Times, and also, to his ironic amusement, E. L. Godkin’s Evening Post. “However I don’t care a snap of my finger; my position is impregnable; I am going to fight whatever the opposition is.”112
If the “yellow,” or working-man’s press was shrieking then, its clamor rose to levels of real bedlam in the weeks that followed, as the weather grew hotter and the Sunday spigots ran drier. The World and Herald devoted page after full page to “Teddy’s Folly,” caricaturing him as a Puritan Dutchman bent on driving innocent citizens out of New Amsterdam. With such active encouragement, about half a million citizens did indeed leave town on Sunday, 21 July, to slake their thirsts in the country pubs of Long Island and New Jersey.113 They raised their tankards and drank many a bitter toast to Roosevelt’s downfall, while Presbyterian ministers and temperance societies sang hymns to his praise.
Controversy builds political stature, and Roosevelt saw no reason to be alarmed by the extremes of hostility and admiration his name seemed to arouse. Even the Commercial Advertiser saw that “the most despised and at the same time the best-loved man in the country” was destined for higher office. “Will he succeed Col. Strong as Mayor; or Levi P. Morton as Governor; or Grover Cleveland as President?”114
INSPIRED BY a midnight prowl on 23 July, which found every policeman on the Lower East Side patrolling with clockwork efficiency, Roosevelt announced that the following Sunday, the sixth of his campaign, would be “the dryest New York has ever known.”115 His prophecy proved correct: one newspaper compared the metropolis to the Sahara. A few side-doors were open for privileged customers, but the masses were obliged to go thirsty. Chewing-gum boys reported record sales; bums on the Bowery went into delirium tremens for lack of alcohol; one elderly lady was seen crossing over to Long Island City with an empty beer bucket. Fashionable neighborhoods were deserted as all who could afford to left town for the day. Some well-to-do youths chartered a pleasure-boat, recruited a band and a bevy of girls in white muslin, and cruised off to Idlewild Grove, towing two bargefuls of iced ale.116
Roosevelt, relaxing with his family at Oyster Bay, could not be reached for comment, but Commissioner Grant was in the city, and expressed doubt that the poor were really suffering. “Everybody would get on beautifully in hot weather,” he suggested, “if they would drink warm weak tea.”117
At midnight a downtown saloonkeeper named Levy, who had studied the statute-book and found that the hour from 12:00 P.M. Sunday to 1:00 A.M. Monday was not covered by any law, flagrantly opened his doors. Word traveled fast, and for the next hour saloons all over town were brilliant with lights and festivity.118 “MR. ROOSEVELT IS BEATEN,” claimed the Sun next morning, but it was plain he was not. The very scrupulousness with which Levy had observed the letter of the law testified to the efficiency of the Police Department in executing it.
As dry Sunday followed dry Sunday through the heat of August, public resentment of Roosevelt smoldered. The English poet John Masefield, then working as a pot-boy in a New York saloon, “often heard men wondering how soon he would be shot.”119 On 5 August a clerk at the post office tore open a suspicious-looking package addressed to Roosevelt, and was startled by “a puff of flame and smoke.” Miraculously, all that had exploded was a match-fuse on the wrapper: inside lay a live cartridge embedded in gunpowder.
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