The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [291]
Afraid that some of this publicity would reach the ears of the President-elect, Roosevelt announced on 8 January, “I shall hereafter refuse to take part in any wranglings or bickerings on this Board. They are not only unseemly, but detrimental to the discipline of the force.”82 Commissioner Parker affably agreed to do the same, and a measure of peace returned to Mulberry Street.
Thomas Collier Platt was nominated for the Senate on 14 January 1897, by a Republican caucus vote of 147 to 7. His first reaction, on hearing the news, was to ask for a list of the seven Choate supporters and put it in his pocket. This suggests that Roosevelt had been prudent, if nothing else, in deserting Choate the month before.83 Platt was duly elected on 20 January, and immediately became a major, if inscrutable factor in Roosevelt’s campaign for office.
The Police Commissioner, meanwhile, optimistically prepared himself for his future responsibilities, inviting Alfred Thayer Mahan back to Sagamore Hill, addressing the U.S. Naval Academy on 23 January, and working with concentrated speed on a revised version of his Naval War of 1812.84 The manuscript had been commissioned by Sir William Laird Clowes, naval correspondent of the London Times and editor of the official history of the British Navy, then in preparation.85 Roosevelt inserted “a pretty strong plea for a powerful navy” into his text.86
February came and went, with no encouraging news—McKinley was preoccupied with Cabinet appointments and pre-Inaugural arrangements, and Platt remained silent—but Roosevelt continued to hope. “I shall probably take it,” he told Bamie, “because I am intensely interested in our navy, and know a good deal about it, and it would mean four years work.” He did not see himself surviving a year in his present job, even if obliged to remain.87
His truce with “cunning, unscrupulous, shifty”88 Parker lasted less than five weeks, and by the end of February he was complaining of “almost intolerable difficulty” at Mulberry Street.89 Commissioner Grant was now firmly allied with Parker, and Roosevelt paused, in a moment of bitter humor, to wonder how so great a general could have produced so lumpish a son. “Grant is one of the most interesting studies that I know of, from the point of view of atavism. I am sure his brain must reproduce that of some long-lost arboreal ancestor.”90
By 4 March, when William McKinley was inaugurated, the situation at Police Headquarters had become an open scandal. Newspapers that day carried reports of an almost total breakdown of discipline in the force, new outbreaks of corruption, tearful threats of resignation by Chief Conlin, and rabid partisan squabbles between Democratic and Republican officers—echoing those among the four Commissioners, who seemed scarcely able to stand the sight of one another anymore.91
“I am very sorry that I ever appointed Andrew D. Parker,” Mayor Strong commented sadly. “I am just as sorry that it is beyond my power to remove him from office.”92 A reporter pointed out that he had, nevertheless, the power to find Parker guilty of the charges leveled against him last summer. Strong hesitated for two weeks, then at last, on 17 March, dismissed Parker for proven neglect of duty.93 But the sentence was subject to gubernatorial approval;