The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [367]
The Easy Boss remained silent, and on 22 May the Assemblymen and Senators were back at their desks in the Capitol.
LEAVING NOTHING TO CHANCE, the Governor delivered copies of his ultimatum to the Leader of the Senate and to Chairman Odell, and recruited two of the finest legal consultants in New York State to scrutinize every semicolon that came out of either House. He even arranged for delaying tactics in the event of a recall move, so that he could sign the Ford Bill into law before the pageboys reached his office.69
So short, indeed, was the distance between his pen and the document lying open before him that Platt’s leaders gave up the attempt to write a new bill more favorable to corporations. All they could do was to insert various strengthening clauses into the original bill, exactly as Roosevelt had intended. No amendment was made without his approval, and the revised measure cleared both Houses in three days. The Governor proudly and accurately described it as “the most important law passed in recent times by any State Legislature.” He signed it with a flourish on 27 May, and sat back to enjoy the sweetness of his victory.70
Whether he tasted the fruits to the full is doubtful. For all the praise that poured in from the anti-organization press (“Governor Roosevelt,” declared the Herald, “has given the finest exhibition of civic courage witnessed in this State in many a day”),71 he only knew that he was tired to his bones. “I have had four years of exceedingly hard work without a break, save by changing from one kind of work to another. This summer I shall hope to lie off as much as possible.…”72
BUT PRESSURE OF speaking engagements up and down the Hudson Valley kept him away from Oyster Bay until the middle of June. Even then he had only a week at home before setting off West to attend the first Rough Riders reunion in Las Vegas, New Mexico. The two-day celebration, “which I would not miss for anything in the world,” was timed to begin on the first anniversary of the Battle of Las Guásimas.73
As he journeyed West he pondered again “the relations of capital and labor … trusts and combinations.”74 Platt might think him “loose” on these subjects, but they preoccupied him more and more as he contemplated America’s entry into the twentieth century. The Ford Bill had been but a step, admittedly a pioneering one, toward resolving the giant inequities of the capitalist system; some future Chief Executive more powerful and visionary than William McKinley must bring about similar legislation on a national scale.
The thought of McKinley made Roosevelt slightly uneasy at present. Ever since taking the oath at Albany he had been receiving demands from the pesky Mrs. Bellamy Storer that he campaign for the promotion to Cardinal of her favorite Archbishop, John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota.75 She imagined that as Governor of New York State he could prevail upon the President to prevail upon the Pope. But Roosevelt was aware of various stately squabbles within the Church, and knew that Ireland was persona non grata at the Vatican. He had therefore hedged repeatedly, pleading lack of knowledge, lack of influence, and lack of propriety; but Mrs. Storer would not be put off, and he at last wrote the President a less than enthusiastic plea on her behalf. McKinley’s reply, which had arrived a few days before his departure for the West, was a polite refusal to intervene in the affairs of another State.76
Behind the politeness lurked a hostility that probably went back to the round-robin incident at the end of the war. (The final installment of The Rough Riders, containing Roosevelt’s own account of the affair, along with many hints of Administration mismanagement, was currently on the newsstands.) Roosevelt had long since given up hope of being awarded the Medal of Honor: no War Department board was