The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [47]
About the time he turned nineteen in October 1877, Theodore was informed that his father had been appointed Collector of Customs to the Port of New York by President Hayes. He dutifully expressed “the greatest interest” in subsequent movements toward confirmation by the Senate, but the interest was personal rather than political.43 Since his appearance at the Hayes demonstration a year before, he had shown no further concern for politics; his letters of the period, so full of bubbling curiosity about other aspects of life, are bare of any reference to national affairs. Now, however, events conspired to force politics brutally upon his attention.
Theodore Senior, who had himself just turned forty-six, was as politically naive as his son. He assumed at first that the Collectorship was a reward for distinguished services to New York City, but disillusionment came rapidly. President Hayes, it turned out, had chosen him merely as a symbol of the Administration’s commitment to Civil Service Reform. By elevating this decent and incorruptible man up to public office, Hayes hoped to embarrass Senator Roscoe Conkling, boss of the corrupt New York State Republican machine, who was demanding the reappointment of Chester A. Arthur as Collector. The fact that Arthur was himself decent and incorruptible only increased the savagery of the resultant battle for Senate confirmation. Roosevelt lay helpless as a pawn between the clashing forces of Old Guard “Spoils-men” and Reform Republicans.
Since Boss Conkling happened to sit on the Senate committee that must consider the appointment, it was subjected to endless delaying tactics. Yet Hayes would not withdraw his nomination, and Roosevelt, as a patriotic citizen, had no choice but to remain at the President’s disposal.44 He loathed Conkling with all his soul, and felt contaminated by any contact with the machine. Theodore Senior belonged to a class and a generation that considered politics to be a dirty business, best left, like street cleaning, to malodorous professionals. Humiliated by the scrutiny of his inferiors, exhausted by week after week of worry, he began to deteriorate physically under the strain. He was racked by mysterious intestinal cramps, which worsened as the struggle dragged on into December. By then the “Collectorship row” was making nationwide headlines, and while the nomination seemed doomed, suspense continued to torture the nominee.
His son, following daily developments in Cambridge, grew increasingly worried. “Am very uneasy about Father,” he wrote on 16 December, after the nomination had been finally rejected in the Senate by a vote of 25 to 31. “Does the Doctor think it is anything serious?”45 Two days later Theodore Senior collapsed with what was diagnosed as acute peritonitis. For a while he lay desperately ill, but as Christmas approached he began to recover. The Roosevelts celebrated with exhausted relief, vowing to have no more to do with politics.46
BACK AT HARVARD early in the New Year, Theodore recorded in a private diary his father’s parting assurance “that after all I was the dearest of his children to him.”47 As always, the deep voice and all-seeing eyes inspired a determination to be worthy of “the best and most loving of men.” He was cramming hard for his semiannual examinations when, late on