The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [266]
For most of the afternoon, however, he beamed with enjoyment. Since he stood on the most prominent part of the platform, it seemed “as if the whole affair were in his honor.”137 Word of his presence spread back down the line, and the paraders twisted their necks to stare at him. One short-sighted veteran peered at the stand and shouted, “Wo ist der Roosevelt?” The Commissioner leaned forward, thumping his chest, and screamed, “Hier bin ich!” At this the marchers, spectators, and everybody on the stand dissolved into helpless laughter. “Teddy, you’re a man!” yelled someone in the crowd.138
Afterward Roosevelt told his hosts he had never had such fun. “But,” he added, “a hundred parades can’t swerve us from doing our duty.” With that he left, carrying two souvenir banners for the wall of his office: “ROOSEVELT’S RAZZLE-DAZZLE REFORM RACKET” and “SEND THE POLICE CZAR TO RUSSIA.” 139
ROOSEVELT’S PUBLIC TRIUMPHS in the summer and early fall of 1895, coupled with his tireless campaigning on behalf of his board and his party, prompted rumors that he was actively working toward the nation’s highest office. The Commercial Advertiser’s above-quoted suggestion that he might succeed Grover Cleveland as President was taken up by the Ithaca Daily News, which formally endorsed him for the Republican nomination in 1896. In Brooklyn, a certain Reverend A. C. Dixon proclaimed from the pulpit the hope that Theodore Roosevelt might soon enter the White House, “as he incarnates the principles upon which Government is founded.”140 At No. 303 Mulberry Street, Jacob Riis serenely countered all criticism of the Commissioner’s high-handed actions with: “Of course! Teddy is bound for the Presidency.” What was more, said Riis, Teddy knew it.
“Let’s ask him,” Lincoln Steffens suggested. The two men dashed across to headquarters and burst into Roosevelt’s office. Riis put the question directly. Was he working to be President? The effect, wrote Steffens, “was frightening.”
TR leaped to his feet, ran around his desk, and fists clenched, teeth bared, he seemed about to throttle Riis, who cowered away, amazed.
“Don’t you dare ask me that,” TR yelled at Riis. “Don’t you put such ideas into my head. No friend of mine would ever say a thing like that, you—you—”
Riis’s shocked face or TR’s recollection that he had few friends as devoted as Jake Riis halted him. He backed away, came up again to Riis, and put his arm over his shoulder. Then he beckoned me close and in an awed tone of voice explained.
“Never, never, you must never either of you remind a man at work on a political job that he may be President. It almost always kills him politically. He loses his nerve; he can’t do his work; he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility. I, for instance, I am going to do great things here, hard things that require all the courage, ability, work that I am capable of … But if I get to thinking of what it might lead to—”
He stopped, held us off, and looked into our faces with his face screwed up into a knot, as with lowered voice he said slowly: “I must be wanting to be President. Every young man does. But I won’t let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will begin to work for it, I’ll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so—I’ll beat myself. See?”
Again he looked at us as if we were enemies; then he threw us away from him and went back to his desk.
“Go on away, now,” he said, “and don’t you ever mention the—don’t you ever mention that to me again.”141
Riis and Steffens were so crestfallen that afterward they did not even mention it to each other. Yet Roosevelt himself could hardly ignore the specter they had raised. He could not stop people addressing him—quite correctly—as “President Roosevelt,” and he would have been less than human had his heart not lurched sometimes at the sound of that phrase.
THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS approached, bringing with them some wintry blasts