The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [427]
Important sources not listed in Bibliography: 1. 51st Congress, 1st session, Report of the House Committee on Civil Service Reform, Serial #2823, Document #2445 (1890). Hereafter cited as House Report 1. 2. Foulke, William D., Fighting the Spoilsmen: Reminiscences of the Civil Service Reform Movement (Putnam, 1919).
1. The following description is based on the unexcelled reporting of “Carp” (Frank G. Carpenter, Washington correspondent of the Cleveland Daily Leader) excerpted in Carp’s Washington (McGraw-Hill, 1960). Other details from Green, Constance McLaughlin, Washington—Capital City, 1879–1950 (Princeton U. Press, 1962) Vol. 2 passim; contemporary guidebooks.
2. G. W. Steevens, qu. Green, Washington, 77.
3. Ib., 77–8.
4. Green, Washington, 12.
5. Carpenter, 102.
6. Ib., 8, 296–7.
7. Ib., 110, 306, 329, 80 ff.
8. See, e.g., Gar.104.
9. Washington Post, May 12, 19, 1889
10. Green, Washington, 13.
11. Figures projected from those qu. ib., 80.
12. See Lod.77.
13. Washington Star, May 13, 1889; ib., May 19. The appointment was made official on May 7, 1889.
14. W. Star, May 13, 1889.
15. The author may be forgiven this surmise. If anything was at all times predictable about TR, it was his habit of taking stairs two—or even three—at a time. William Loeb, Jr., his godson, remembers him in gouty old age, thundering upstairs with boyish energy. “I didn’t know any other adults that ran upstairs. The ones I knew generally walked.” (To author, Feb. 28, 1975.) The location of the Civil Service Commission (henceforth CSC) is given in Halloran, Matthew F., The Romance of the Merit System (Washington, 1929) 51–2 and 166–7. Note that Pringle’s location (Pri.121) is incorrect. The CSC did not move to Eighth and E until later.
16. Halloran, Romance, 56.
17. W. Star, May 13, 1891.
18. Bis.I.46. Within ten months of becoming Commissioner, TR’s effective power in the agency was estimated as “two-thirds” by the Chicago Morning News (Mar. 28, 1890) and “seven-eighths” by another paper (TR.Scr.).
19. Mor.192. At various points in the TR/Lodge correspondence Lyman is “dreary,” “mushy,” and “a chump.” (Oct. 27, 1889; Aug. 23, Sep. 23, 1890.)
20. TR to B, n.d., 1889 (TRB).
21. See Halloran, n. 15 above.
22. Thayer, William Roscoe, TR: An Intimate Biography (Houghton Mifflin, 1919) 88.
23. For the early history of Civil Service Reform up to and including TR’s Commissionership, see Sageser, A. Bower, “The First Two Decades of the Pendleton Act,” Nebraska University Studies, Vols. 34–35 (1934–35); White, D., The Republican Era, 1869–1901 (Macmillans, 1958); van Riper, Paul, History of the USCSC (Evanston, Ill., 1958); Hoogenboom, Ari, “The Pendleton Act and the Civil Service,” American Historical Review, 64.2 (Jan. 1959).
24. Mor.57, 154, 153 Foulke, Spoilsmen, 12.
25. W. Star, May 14, 1889; Wise, John S., Recollections of Thirteen Presidents (NY, 1906) 200.
26. See Sto.164; also 181–4; Depew, Chauncey, My Memories of Eighty Years (Scribner’s, 1922) 133–4.
27. Qu. Carpenter, 305.
28. W. Post, May 15, 1889.
29. W. Star, May 14; W. Post, May 15, 1889.
30. Ib.; Har.78; Pri.123. Carl Schurz wrote that Wanamaker’s appointment “was the first instance in the history of the Republic that a place in the Cabinet had been given for a pecuniary consideration.” Sageser, “Two Decades,” 135.
31. Foulke, William D., Lucius Burrie Swift (Bobbs-Merrill, 1930) 39.
32. Ib., 41; Pri.123.
33. Foulke, Spoilsmen, 11–12; USCSC, Sixth Report (1889).
34. Bis.I.45; Halloran, Romance, 52–5.
35. Ib., 76.
36. It is amusing for those familiar with TR’s love of making delayed entrances to follow the shrewd build-up of suspense that preceded his arrival in Washington. Although he had long since accepted the Commissionership, he deliberately avoided telling his colleagues when he would report for duty. The press daily enquired as to TR’s whereabouts, and the Commissioners daily replied that they did not know. Lyman even exclaimed, rather irritably, that he still had “no intimation” whether TR would indeed take the job. Consequently, when the laggard