The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [270]
LIKE THE LORD, Platt was wont to receive the faithful, and hear their supplications, on the Sabbath. This was not due to any messiah complex on his part: Sunday was simply the most convenient day for out-of-town legislators, big businessmen, and overworked Police Commissioners to visit him. Still, there was something quaintly religious about the little knot of worshipers that gathered every seventh day outside his sanctuary; regular attendants like Quigg, “Smooth Ed” Lauterbach, and Chauncey Depew were nicknamed “Platt’s Sunday School Class.” After seeing the old man they settled on plush sofas at the end of the corridor to await his decisions. This niche was called the “Amen” corner, on the grounds that no other response was possible once Platt had made up his mind. Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, and Harrison had all sat here, as well as James G. Blaine, who, in Platt’s opinion, “ought to have been President.”10 Roosevelt might have been excused some feeling of trepidation in following such august predecessors. If not, the sight of the Easy Boss was enough to give any young man pause.
Platt was then in his sixty-third year, and moved (when he moved at all) with the painful majesty of arthritis. Tall, stooped, bearded, and murmuring, he looked like some political Rip van Winkle who had fallen asleep in a more leisurely age, and had woken to find the new one not much to his liking. His handshake was loose, his jaw slack, even his skin seemed tired; it creased down on either side of his nose, and drooped in parchment-like folds over his large sad eyes. Oddly enough, for a man whose desk was always piled with dusty papers and pamphlets, Platt was the perfection of elegance in dress. His suit rippled into place as he rose on his cane, a pearl pin glowed in his silk cravat, and high starched collars scratched against his silvery jowls.11
Roosevelt was not deceived by this world-weary image, for Platt was known to be as tough in mind as he was frail in body.12 After some brief discussion of national affairs—the equivalent, among state politicians, of talk about the weather—the Commissioner asked point-blank if he was to be “kicked out by supplementary legislation after the Greater New York Bill had passed.” Platt’s reply was equally direct. “Yes.” Roosevelt could expect to be unemployed in about sixty days.13
Afterward, Roosevelt searched for adjectives to describe the interview. It was, he decided, “entirely pleasant and cold-blooded.”14
HE ALSO DECIDED that since he was now in “a fair fight” for survival, he would pick up Platt’s gauntlet in public.15 It so happened that the following morning, 20 January, he was due to address the New York Methodist Ministers’ Association at 150 Fifth Avenue. Knowing they were sympathetic to his crusade against the saloons, Roosevelt shrewdly presented himself as Christianity’s last hope in Gomorrah:
The other day the most famous gambler in New York, long known as one of the most prominent criminals in this city, was reported as saying that by February everything would again “be running wide open”; in other words, that the gambler, the disorderly-house keeper, and the lawbreaking liquor-seller would be plying their trades once more … Undoubtedly there are many politicians who are bent on seeing this … they will bend every energy to destroy us, because they recognize in us their deadly foes … The politician who wishes to use the Police Department for his own base purposes, and the criminal and the trafficker in vice … are quite right in using every effort to drive us out of office.