The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [445]
99. Lod.I.262.
100. Long had been a Congressman during TR’s CSC days, and was a regular guest with TR at Thomas B. Reed’s dinner table. McCall, Samuel W., Thomas B. Reed (Houghton Mifflin, 1914) 143. For TR’s first respectful impression of him as an orator at the 1884 Chicago Convention, see Ch. 10.
101. HCL in Woo.43; E.G.R. in un. clip, Aug. 31, 1919, TRB; Lee.137.
102. Mott, Herrick, 74. Pri.169 says that TCP was “singularly dull” not to have seen this before. The Easy Boss may have been many things, but he was not dull. His reasons for objecting to TR’s appointment were perfectly logical, and he made no secret of them. In the first place he felt that TR, as Assistant Secretary, would interfere with his powers of patronage at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In the second, he was annoyed that McK’s previous New York appointments—Secretary of the Interior Cornelius Bliss and Ambassador to France Horace Porter—were both of them anti-organization men. TR would make a third; and since McK was unlikely to give any more appointments to the Empire State, TCP felt that his organization, which had worked so hard on behalf of the President, had been slighted. Hence he refused to approve of TR. Of course TCP had other, less public reasons. He hoped (vainly) that TR would buy his approval by persuading Mayor Strong to replace him with a Commissioner friendly to the organization. Finally, this writer would suggest that TCP was simply exercising his political muscle. Not many Senators get a chance to say “no” to a President in the early days of their relationship, and the Roosevelt affair gave TCP an ideal opportunity to bully McK a little. “Anybody but that fellow!” he exploded when the President mentioned TR to him. Myron Herrick’s account (Mott, 72–74) shows how deferentially McK was forced to treat the old man. TCP was further soothed with a series of prize plums, including the Collectorship of New York. His own account of the affair, in Pla.540 ff., is patently untruthful. See Lod.244–5, 261, 263–4, and Lee.137.
103. Paullin, Charles O., Paullin’s History of Naval Administration, 1775–1911 (U.S. Naval Institute, 1968) 369; Lod.266.
104. N.Y. World, Apr. 9, 1897.
105. N.Y.T., Apr. 18, 1897.
106. Ib. See also Eve. Sun, Apr. 17, 1897, and Rii.29.
107. World, Apr. 8, 1897. Mayor Strong, for one, did not publicly regret TR’s departure. But see N.Y.T., Apr. 16 for the eulogies of those who did.
108. N.Y.T., Apr. 8, 1897.
109. AND.144; Brant, “TR, PC,” 31; TR in his resignation letter to Strong, Mor.595; AND.40–1; Mail & Express, May 1, 1897; AND.86–8; World, May 22, 1895. See also TR’s very funny compilation of specimen entrance examination answers in Mor.578–81, and Wis.51–2 for a good Civil Service List anecdote.
110. New York Police Department, Annual Reports, 1895 and 1897; Richardson, James F., The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901 (Oxford U. Press, 1970) 91; AND.86–89; Mor.600. See also “Who’ll be a Blue-coat?” in World, August 1, 1895, for TR’s recruitment policies, and Ber. 60–62 on “the military analogy.”
111. Mor.596; TR to Strong, ib., 594; Richardson, Police, 260 ff.; AND.44, 65–6,144–56; Brant, “TR, PC,” 31, 76; Trib., Sep. 12, 1895. See also Hurwitz, Howard L., TR and Labor in New York State (Columbia U. Press, 1943) 116 and passim. Not all of these achievements can be ascribed directly to TR, but as president of the Board, and member ex officio of all its committees, he undoubtedly deserves principal credit. In moral achievement, certainly, he stood alone. See E. L. Godkin to TR, modestly quoted in TR.Auto.408, Ber. 120–21, and Avery Andrews’s last word: “It may truthfully be said that Theodore Roosevelt at no time in his career fought more effectively for the basic principles of free government than he fought for them as New York Police Commissioner.” AND.9.
112. See, e.g., N.Y.T. ed., Apr. 8, 1897: “We cannot consider it [the Assistant Secretaryship] in any sense a promotion.”
113. The actual date of TR’s resignation was Apr. 19, 1897. Mor.594. Igl.121., quoting TR.
114. Harper’s Weekly, May 2, 1897.
115.