The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [281]
At once Roosevelt’s distrust of the candidate vanished, at least for public purposes. He was due to take the witness box that very day, and used the occasion to make his political sympathies clear:
Mr. Roosevelt [reported The New York Times] attracted the attention of the whole room by appearing with an ivory-colored button, as large as a silver dollar, bearing the portraits of McKinley and [Vice-Presidential nominee] Hobart. The faces could be distinguished across the room. Mr. Roosevelt was very proud of the emblem, which, he said, was the first of its kind to reach New York. All concerned with the case, excepting Mr. Parker, seemed interested in it. Commissioner Roosevelt submitted it to close inspection with infinite good nature and evident gratification.99
Only in private did he continue to express reservations. “While I greatly regret the defeat of Reed, who was in every way McKinley’s superior, I am pretty well satisfied with the outcome at St. Louis … McKinley himself is an upright and honorable man, of very considerable ability and good record as a soldier and in Congress; he is not a strong man however; and unless he is well backed I should feel rather uneasy about him in a serious crisis …”100
MAYOR STRONG ADDED TO Roosevelt’s sense of unease by fleeing New York as soon as the trial was over, saying that he wished to soothe his rheumatism, and consider his verdict, in the mud baths of Richfield Springs. “I will do nothing in the matter for several weeks.”101 Roosevelt was left to ponder the larger implications of McKinley’s nomination. He could also look forward to a resumption of hostilities with Commissioner Parker.
A CREEPING DISTASTE for the job of Police Commissioner becomes apparent in Roosevelt’s correspondence from the summer of 1896 onward.102 He had never found the work attractive—“grimy” was his most frequent adjective—yet up until his confrontation with Parker he had exulted in its sheer bruising volume, as a strong man exults in shifting tons of rubble. But the collapse of his legal move against Parker, coinciding as it did with the emergence of William McKinley as the likely next President of the United States, made him realize that he had achieved about as much as he ever would in Mulberry Street. He summed up his feelings in an unusually revealing letter to Bamie, written with an air of finality, as if he had already resigned:
I have been so absorbed by my own special work and its ramifications that I have time to keep very little in touch with anything outside of my own duties; I see but little of the life of the great world; I am but little in touch even with our national politics. The work of the Police Board has … nothing of the purple in it; it is as grimy as all work for municipal reform over here must be for some decades to come; and it is inconceivably arduous, disheartening, and irritating … I have to contend with the hostility of Tammany, and the almost equal hostility of the Republican machine; I have to contend with the folly of the reformers and the indifference of decent citizens; above all I have to contend with the singularly foolish law under which we administer the Department. If I were … a single-headed Commissioner, with absolute power … I could in a couple of years accomplish almost all I could desire; but as it is I am one of four Commissioners, each of whom possesses a veto power in promotions … Add to this a hostile legislature, a bitterly antagonistic press, an unscrupulous scoundrel as Comptroller … However, I have faced it as best I could, and I have accomplished something.103
His use of the phrase “a couple of years,” while