The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [265]
Reading the text of Roosevelt’s speech eight decades later, one is struck, as so often with his oratory, by the ordinariness of the language which aroused such enthusiasm. Yet the words, banal as they are, are arranged with consummate skill. At no point that evening did he espouse the doctrine of total abstinence; he made no specific condemnation of drink; yet somehow he managed to convince seven thousand diehard prohibitionists that he was wholly on their side. Experts in the study of mass-manipulation techniques could only shake their heads in admiration. “You are rushing so rapidly to the front,” wrote Henry Cabot Lodge, “that the day is not far distant when you will come into a large kingdom.”129
ROOSEVELT WORKED HARDER during the hot months of 1895 than ever before in his life.130 In addition to a grinding routine of ten- and twelve-hour days, interrupted only by rare weekends at Sagamore Hill, he expounded his board’s policy “again and again in packed halls on the East Side … with temperatures at boiling point, both as regards the weather and the audiences.” Boos greeted his every appearance, but he exuded such charm, vigor, and sincerity (flashing his teeth upon request, and dancing polkas with the girls of the Tee-To-Tum Club) that he usually bowed out to cheers.131
Meanwhile the Sunday Closing crusade went on. More and more saloonkeepers decided that their side-door business was not worth the risk of heavy fines and/or loss of license. On 23 August the Liquor Sellers’ Association, representing some nine thousand of the city’s twelve thousand saloons, came out in favor of total observation of the law, and threatened to expel any members who failed to comply. Its motive, of course, was to make political pressure for repeal overwhelming, but nevertheless the announcement was seen as a psychological victory for Roosevelt. Sunday, 1 September, replaced 28 July as the driest on record.132
“There has not been a more complete triumph of law in the municipal history of New York,” wrote the London Times correspondent. Roosevelt had managed to achieve the impossible by closing the saloons, and getting large crowds of poor people to respect him for it. He himself boasted that he had “never had such a success as in the last four months”—adding the usual disclaimer, “I am not a bit taken in, and … shall not be in the least disappointed when it ends.”133
He scored yet another publicity coup on 25 September, when the United Societies for Liberal Sunday Laws staged a protest parade through Germantown, and sent him a cynical invitation to attend. Few imagined that he would accept. When Roosevelt came drumming up the steps of the reviewing stand on Eighty-sixth Street, Herman Ridder, publisher of the Staats-Zeitung, was convinced he was an impostor. “I’ll go bail he is the genuine article,” laughed the City Comptroller.134
The parade, which took two hours to pass by, was a spectacular demonstration of Teutonic irony.135 Flagstaffs and building facades were draped with purple bunting, symbolizing the death of the “Continental Sunday.” The advance guard consisted of a dozen bicyclists with blue noses and bunches of whiskers under their chins, impersonating upstate “hayseed” legislators. Some thirty thousand marchers followed on in leather trousers, Bismarck helmets, and other ethnic paraphernalia. Saloonkeepers rolled by in open carriages, waving bottles of Rhine wine and a poster declaiming, “T’AINT SUNDAY.” A gilt wagon carried a pretty Fräulein veiled in black, as the mourning Goddess of Liberty. She looked bewildered when Roosevelt loudly applauded her. Another float, labeled “The Millionaire’s Club,” showed three dress-suited toffs—one with prominent teeth and spectacles—swigging champagne, while behind them