The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [294]
Others found it sad—particularly the stoop-sitters of No. 303, who missed him more and more as life on Mulberry Street returned slowly to normal. The next president of the Police Board, Frank Moss, was an ardent reformer who insisted on continuing Roosevelt’s policies, but his teeth inspired no metaphors, and his ascent of the front steps of Police Headquarters lacked spectator interest. Board meetings were held twice weekly as usual, but with no “boss leader of men” to blow up at Parker’s taunts they were anticlimactic. As the Harper’s Weekly man remarked, the Roosevelt Commissionership “was never in the least dull.” It had been “one long elegant shindy” from the day he took office to the day he resigned.114
Ironically, Parker’s power began to wane in the months following Roosevelt’s departure.115 His partnership with Frederick D. Grant broke up in June, when the latter resigned in order to rejoin the Army, and was replaced by a Commissioner who naturally sided with Moss and Andrews. On 12 July, Governor Frank S. Black denied Mayor Strong’s attempt to oust Parker, saying that the evidence against him was patently “trivial.”116 But this proved a Pyrrhic victory, for the resignation of Chief Conlin on 24 July left Parker without an ally at Headquarters. He was unable to prevent the promotion—at last—of Roosevelt’s protégés, Brooks and McCullagh, along with a large number of other worthy officers whose rise had been blocked beneath them. Inspector McCullagh subsequently became Chief, to Roosevelt’s great delight.117 Mayor Strong did not run for reelection in November. As Boss Richard Croker had predicted, the people grew weary of reform, and voted for a return of the old Democracy. By the end of the year it was business as usual at Tammany Hall.118
WHAT HAPPENED TO Andrew D. Parker in the years that followed is not known. He vanishes from history as he entered it, a handsome, smiling enigma. The stoop-sitters were never able to agree as to the reason for his poisonous hostility to Theodore Roosevelt. Riis suggested pure “spite,” Steffens the more abstract pleasure of a man who “liked to sit back and pull wires, just to see the puppets jump.”119 Other theories were advanced, of greater and less complexity, but never, it seems, the most fundamental of all: that Parker simply hated Roosevelt and wished to do him ill. Those who loved Roosevelt were so many, and so ardent, that they found it hard to believe that a certain minority always detested him. Parker was of this ilk. He was also, as it happened, the only associate whom Roosevelt never managed to bend to his own will, and, significantly, the only adversary from whom that happy warrior ever ran away.
CHAPTER 22
The Hot Weather Secretary
With his own hand fearless
Steered he the Long Serpent,
Strained the creaking cordage,
Bent each boom and gaff.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S WELLSPRINGS of nostalgia for boyhood and youth tended always to surge and spill in moments of self-fulfillment. So, as he prepared to take office as Assistant Secretary of the Navy on 19 April 1897, memories flooded back of his revered uncle James Bulloch, builder of the Confederate warship Alabama, and of his mother, who used “to talk to me as a little shaver about ships, ships, ships, and fighting of ships, till they sank into the depths of my soul.” Allowing the stream of consciousness to flow unchecked, he recalled how as a Harvard senior he had dreamed of writing The Naval War of 1812: “when the professor thought I ought to be on mathematics and the languages, my mind was running to ships that were fighting each other.”1
The past was still much in his thoughts when he searched for a suitable desk in the Navy Department’s storage room. He selected the massive piece of mahogany used by Assistant Secretary Gustavus Fox, another juvenile hero, during