The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [73]
An old friend, separated from the Roosevelts by lesser means, caught sight of them emerging from an opera at the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street. Theodore had manifestly arrived at the social heights: “I remember thinking what an enormous start he had over youths like myself, whose daily bread depended on their daily effort.”28
New York at the dawn of the eighties stood poised between the sedate elegance of its past and the fabulous vulgarity of its future. This was at once the age of slippery horsehair furniture and Tiffany glass; of dignified quadrilles and the scandalously sexy waltz; of prephylloxera Burgundies and the harsh, but interesting new Cabernets from California; of copperplate invitations on silver trays and the first crackly telephone messages; of beaux arts filigree decorating old, blocky town houses. Millionaires’ Row was not without its vacant lots, and Alva Vanderbilt’s vast château at Fifty-second Street—designed to humble Mrs. Astor—was still a skeleton of limestone and marble dust. Not until its last turret was in place, and its doors thrown open to the “splendor seekers,” could New York’s Golden Age fairly be said to have begun.29
Yet already the pace of society was accelerating. For the young Roosevelts, hardly a night passed without some brilliant affair. Since the opera did not end until 11:30, and balls often continued through dawn, one wonders when Theodore ever found time to sleep. Early in the New Year, after a full day in the law school and the library, a meeting with some old college friends to organize a Free Trade Club, and an evening spent at the Astors’, he noted delightedly in his diary, “Every moment of my time occupied.”30 Should a spare moment occasionally present itself, he filled it not with rest but work. Owen Wister has left an anecdote of this period which reads like the opening scene of a Victorian drawing-room comedy. It is the pre-dinner hour; Theodore, standing on one leg at the bookcases in his New York house, is sketching a diagram for The Naval War of 1812. In rushes Alice, exclaiming in a plaintive drawl, “We’re dining out in twenty minutes, and Teddy’s drawing little ships!”31
But increasingly, as the season wore on, Theodore used the pre-dinner hour for another, more private activity, of which Mrs. Astor would definitely not have approved. Resplendent in evening dress, he would dash across Fifth Avenue, round the corner of Fifty-ninth Street, and up a shabby flight of stairs.32
MORTON HALL, AS THE headquarters of the Twenty-first District Republican Association was grandly called, was a barn-sized chamber over a store.33 It was furnished with rough benches and spittoons, a raised table and a chair. Two gloomy political portraits completed the decor. Here the cheap lawyers, saloonkeepers, and horsecar conductors who ran Theodore’s district—Irishmen, mostly—met together for political meetings once or twice a month. On other nights Morton Hall served as a sort of clubroom where the same clientele could chat informally. During these “bull sessions” Celtic eloquence, punctuated by regular squirts of plug-juice, tended to veer from politics to dirty stories. Theodore, whose distaste for tobacco matched his prudishness, must have winced many times during his first visits in the fall of 1880. He had been by no means welcome, for his side-whiskers and evening clothes made the “heelers” uncomfortable.34 But he came back again and again, until he was eventually accepted for membership in the association.35
When the news of Theodore’s unseemly activities leaked out, his family reacted with almost uniform horror. “We thought he was, to put it frankly, pretty fresh,” wrote Emlen Roosevelt. “We felt that his own father would not have liked it, and would have been fearful of the