The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [268]
He reacted with oblique rage. On 5 November, the same night the returns came in, he wrote to one of his Civil War heroes, General James Harrison Wilson:
If I were asked what the greatest boon I could confer upon this nation was, I should answer, an immediate war with Great Britain for the conquest of Canada … I will do my very best to bring about the day … I want to drive the Spaniards out of Cuba. I want to stop Great Britain seizing the mouth of the Orinoco. If she does it, then as an offset I want to take the entire valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Saskatchewan, and the Columbia.…149
Next morning he called in his precinct captains and told them that “The Board will not tolerate the slightest relaxation of the enforcement of the laws, and notably of the Excise Law.” But for all this bluster, it was plain his authority had been dealt a mortal blow. Even the loyal New York Times doubted that he would ever again mobilize the police as effectively as he had during the long dry summer of 1895.150
THE YEAR DREW to a close amid rumors that Mayor Strong had formally asked for Roosevelt’s resignation. Both men denied the stories, but Strong was heard to complain at a public banquet, “I thought I would have a pretty easy time until the Police Board came along and tried to make a Puritan out of a Dutchman.” The remark was supposed to be jocular—Strong fancied himself as an amateur comedian—but Roosevelt, sitting at the same table, did not find it at all funny.151
The pace of his “grinding labor” at Police Headquarters did not slacken. If anything it increased, for he was trying to finish the neglected fourth volume of The Winning of the West in between appointments, as well as working full-time on it at weekends. “I should very much like to take a holiday,” he confessed, but felt too insecure in his job to leave town for long.
Friends worried about his health, emotional and physical. “He has grown several years older in the last month,” William Sturgis Bigelow wrote Henry Cabot Lodge. “At this rate it is only a question of time when he has a breakdown, and when he does it will be a bad one.… We shall lose one of the very few really first-class men in the country.”152
Roosevelt’s spirits sank lower as his reserves of physical strength dwindled. “It really seems that there must be some fearful short-coming on my side to account for the fact that I have not one New York City newspaper, nor one New York City politician of note on my side. Don’t think,” he reassured Lodge, “that I even for a moment dream of abandoning my fight; I shall continue absolutely unmoved from my present course and shall accept philosophically whatever violent end may be put to my political career.”153
One person who met him during these dark days was Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. After watching Roosevelt in action at a literary dinner table, and afterward dispensing summary justice in the police courts, Stoker wrote in his diary: “Must be President some day. A man you can’t cajole, can’t frighten, can’t buy.”154
“A man you can’t cajole, can’t frighten, can’t buy.”
Theodore Roosevelt as president of the New York City Police Board. (Illustration 19.2)
CHAPTER 20
The Snake in the Grass
Eric the son of Hakon Jarl
A death-drink salt as the sea
Pledges to thee,
Olaf the King!
THE ELECTION OF 1895, which cast such sudden shadows over Theodore Roosevelt, threw contrasting beams of light on an old man he had long managed to ignore, but would have to reckon with in future. Thomas Collier Platt was now, after years of powerful obscurity, the undisputed Republican manager of New York State,1 and a major force in the upcoming Presidential contest.
“The