The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [383]
Thanks—an’ spreads over the country… (Editor’s Note: here our rayporther was sthruck on th’ back iv th’ head with a piece iv castin’ … But we undherstand that Gov’nor Rosenfelt completed a delightful speech amid grreat enthusyasm an’ was escorted to th’ train be a large crowd. th’ list iv kilt an’ wounded will be found in another part iv this paper.)89
Comparisons between this piece and, say, the Chicago Times-Herald account of Roosevelt’s visit to Deadwood, South Dakota, on 3 October prove that Mr. Dooley’s imagination was not wholly without basis in fact.90
The trip also had its moments of poignancy, as when Roosevelt’s train snaked down into the Badlands of North Dakota and stopped at Medora. “The romance of my life began here,” said Roosevelt, to nobody in particular. Then, jumping down into the sagebrush, he looked around at the gray buttes, the Little Missouri, and what was left of Medora itself. “It does not seem right,” he said sadly, “that I should come here and not stay.”91
ON 6 NOVEMBER 1900, the Republican party won its greatest victory since the triumph of Grant in 1872. McKinley’s popular plurality was well over three-quarters of a million, and he swamped Bryan in the Electoral College, 292–155.92 Much of this favorable vote could be ascribed to the nation’s booming economy, and satisfaction with the successful conduct of the war; but the Vice-Presidentelect was entitled to much of the credit. Party professionals agreed that by his selfless exertions he had earned himself the Presidency in 1904.
If not earlier. “I feel sorry for McKinley,” said one Republican campaign worker, as he perused the election results. “He has a man of destiny behind him.”93
ROOSEVELT DIVIDED the rest of November and December between Albany and Oyster Bay. On the last day of the year his Governorship came to an end. “I think I have been the best Governor of my time,” he claimed, “better either than Cleveland or Tilden.”94 His record had indeed been impressive, seen in the context of history, although the Evening Post sneered at his record of “partial and leisurely reform.”95 A wide disparity of other editorial comments indicates that contemporary critics found it difficult, if not impossible, to analyze Governor Roosevelt objectively.
Much of this difficulty arose out of the Roosevelt/Platt relationship, so subtle a combination of enmity and friendliness, clashes and compromise. Conservatives on the one hand, and radicals on the other, simply could not see how two such men could, in effect, be merged into one Governor, and produce legislation so puzzlingly satisfactory to both their traditional constituencies (although of course both regulars and reformers complained that it was neither). The evidence is that Platt himself was confused, and merely trying to make the best of an awkward alliance, whereas Roosevelt, as time would show, knew very well what he was about.
In brief summary, he was responding, along with such other leaders as John P. Altgeld of Chicago, Hazen Pingree of Detroit, and Samuel Jones of Toledo, to the progressive movement then developing in various parts of the country.96 He had been responding to it, indeed, throughout his career, as a reform Assemblyman in 1882, a reform Civil Service Commissioner in 1889, and a reform Police Commissioner in 1895; but aristocratic paternalism had dominated his thinking until 1898. The war, which brought him confessedly closer to his men than his officers,97 also awakened his conscience to the needs of those less fortunate, less virile, less intelligent than himself. Having achieved his own military catharsis on San Juan Hill, he was now a politician again, and found himself less interested in battles than in treaties. As such, his two gubernatorial messages could be viewed as social contracts acknowledging the continuing, though waning power of the Old Guard, and promising new powers to the progressives.
If not the first, Theodore