The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [371]
A small boy named Thomas Beer happened to be standing in Grand Army Plaza as the parade came round the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and began its descent of the avenue. When Beer wrote the concluding pages of The Mauve Decade a quarter of a century later, Roosevelt rode in his impressionistic memory as a figure of strength and promise, great yet uncorrupted by the “disease of greatness,” looming head and shoulders above the fin de siècle pageantry all around him:
A bright dust of confetti, endless snakes of tinted paper began to float from hotels that watched the street … Why, you could see everything from here! … Brass of parading bandsmen and columns wheeled, turning at the red house to the south. Balconies and windows showered down confetti, and roses were blown. The very generous dropped bottles of champagne … The little admiral was a blue and gold blot in a carriage. The President, and the plump senator from Ohio, and all these great were tiny images of black and flesh in the buff shells of carriages in a whirling rain of paper ribbons, flowers, and flakes of the incessant confetti blown everlastingly, twinkling from the high blue of the sky. How they roared! Theodore Roosevelt! The increasing yell came from up the street. A dark horse showed and slowly paced until it turned where now the gilded general stares down the silly city. A blue streamer, infinitely descending from above, curled all around his coat and he shook it from the hat that he kept lifting. Theodore Roosevelt! The figure on its charger passed, and a roar went plunging before him while the bands shocked ears and drunken soldiers struggled out of line, and these dead great, remembered with a grin, went filing by.110
And then, on 21 November 1899, Vice-President Hobart died.
CHAPTER 28
The Man of Destiny
Round and round the house they go
Weaving slow
Magic circles to encumber
And imprison in their ring
Olaf the King
As he helpless lies in slumber.
THE PASSING OF Garret Augustus Hobart had several immediate political effects. One was to strengthen Henry Cabot Lodge’s strange conviction that Roosevelt should run with McKinley in 1900, in the hope of succeeding him in 1904. He was adamant: “I have thought it over a great deal and I am sure I am right.”1 Most people, including Roosevelt, were puzzled by this attitude. Henry Adams interpreted it cynically. “You may well believe,” he wrote Mrs. Cameron, “that Teddy’s presidential aspirations are not altogether to Cabot’s taste, and that the chapter now opening there, may have its dark adjectives.”2
Roosevelt’s own reaction, now that he was firmly back in office at Albany, was that the Vice-Presidency was “about the last thing for which I would care.”3 When Lodge first mentioned the idea it had admittedly seemed attractive. He loved Washington, loved the largeness of its politics in contrast to Albany’s “parochial affairs.” At that time, too, Platt had been meditating revenge over his sponsorship of the Ford Franchise Tax Bill, and Roosevelt had begun to feel insecure as Governor. But things seemed to be changing for the better. On 11 December 1899, Roosevelt wrote Lodge: “Platt told me definitely that of course he was for me for renomination—that everybody was.”4
“Don’t any of you realize there’s only one life between this madman and the Presidency?”
Governor Theodore Roosevelt at the time of his election to the Vice-Presidency. (Illustration 28.1)
But everybody was not. Even as Platt made his assurances to Roosevelt, representatives of the franchise corporations were urging that the Governor be forced out of Albany and onto the national ticket.5 They had heard rumors that Roosevelt was plotting further “altruistic” legislation, to do with the limitation of trusts and the preservation