The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [82]
The Assembly was not due to open until the following morning, but Roosevelt had been asked to attend a preliminary caucus of Republicans in the Capitol that evening, for the purpose of nominating their candidate for Speaker.3 He thus had only an hour or two to unpack, change, and prepare to meet his colleagues.
“He was a perfect nuisance in that House, sir!”
The New York State Assembly Chamber in 1882. (Illustration 6.1)
Dusk came early, as always in Albany, for the little city straggles up the right bank of the Hudson, and is screened off from the plateau above by a two-hundred-foot escarpment of blue clay. But the western sky was clear, and lit by a rising full moon, when Roosevelt emerged from the Delavan House, and began his walk to the Capitol.4
At first he could not see “that building,” as it was locally known, for he had to walk south along the river for a block or two before ascending State Street. Yet already he was moving in its monstrous shadow. Roosevelt had probably read, in his Albany Hand Book, that the new Capitol was, by common consent, “one of the architectural wonders of the nineteenth century.”5 Whether it was a thing of beauty or not was questionable, but there was no doubt, as the Hand Book said, that it was “the grandest legislative building of modern times.” Roosevelt’s first glimpse of the eleven-million-dollar structure, as he rounded the corner of State and Broadway, and focused his pince-nez uptown, was a thrilling one.
Still not quite finished, the stupendous pile of white granite towered out of mounds of construction rubble at the very top of the hill. The Old Capitol, a Greek Revival hall awaiting demolition, stood a little farther down, obscuring some of Roosevelt’s view, yet its dark silhouette merely accentuated the brilliantly lit massiveness looming behind. Jagged against the skyline rose an improbable forest of steeples, turrets, dormers, and gables, all gleaming in the moonlight, for a snowfall the day before had exquisitely etched them out.6 An architect surveying the Capitol’s five stories could successively trace the influence of Romanesque, Italian Renaissance, and French Renaissance styles, with layers of arabesque in between; but to an untutored eye, such as Roosevelt’s, the overall effect was of Imperial Indian majesty.7 Perhaps for the first time the young Assemblyman realized that, as a New York State legislator, he now represented a commonwealth more populous than most of Europe’s kingdoms, rich enough and industrious enough to rank alongside any great power.8
Inspiring as the sight of his destination was, Roosevelt had to concentrate, for the moment, on the tricky business of getting up there without falling down. The steep sidewalks of State Street, when slicked with frozen snow, were notoriously dangerous, and that night blasts of icy air over the escarpment made them doubly so. All sane Assemblymen, of course, were taking horsecars in this weather, but any such indulgence was abhorrent to Roosevelt. Although the wind-chill factor was well below zero, he wore no overcoat.9 A man thus unprotected, yet well stoked with Delavan House coffee, might be able to negotiate two or three blocks of State Street without pain; but he will begin to throb before he is halfway to the top, and Roosevelt was undoubtedly hurting in every extremity by the time he crested the hill and ducked into the warmth of the Capitol lobby.10
As the pain faded to a glow, and his lenses defrosted, he could make out a labyrinth of stone passages and ground-glass doors through which came the busy clacking of typewriting machines. He was standing on the clerical floor. The halls of power, presumably, were somewhere overhead. To his left the Assembly staircase beckoned. One hundred rapid steps elevated him to the second floor, and the famous Golden Corridor opened out before him. Unquestionably the most sumptuous stretch of interior design in the United States,