The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [83]
TO SAY THAT Theodore Roosevelt made a vivid first impression upon his colleagues would hardly be an exaggeration. From the moment that he appeared in their midst, there was a chorus of incredulous and delighted comment. Memories of his entrance that night, transcribed many years later, vary as to time and place, but all share the common image of a young man bursting through a door and pausing for an instant while all eyes were upon him—an actor’s trick that quickly became habitual.13 This gave his audience time to absorb the full brilliancy of his Savile Row clothes and furnishings. The recollections of one John Walsh may be taken as typical:
Suddenly our eyes, and those of everybody on the floor, became glued on a young man who was coming in through the door. His hair was parted in the center, and he had sideburns. He wore a single eye-glass, with a gold chain over his ear. He had on a cutaway coat with one button at the top, and the ends of its tails almost reached the tops of his shoes. He carried a gold-headed cane in one hand, a silk hat in the other, and he walked in the bent-over fashion that was the style with the young men of the day. His trousers were as tight as a tailor could make them, and had a bell-shaped bottom to cover his shoes.
“Who’s the dude?” I asked another member, while the same question was being put in a dozen different parts of the hall.
“That’s Theodore Roosevelt of New York,” he answered.14
Notwithstanding this ready identification, the newcomer quickly became known as “Oscar Wilde,” after the famous fop who, coincidentally, had arrived in America earlier the same day.15 At twenty-three, Roosevelt was the youngest man in the Legislature, recognized not only for his boyishness but for his “elastic movements, voluminous laughter, and wealth of mouth.”16 More bitter epithets were to follow in the months ahead, as he proved himself to be something of an angrily buzzing fly in the Republican ointment: “Young Squirt,” “Weakling,” “Punkin-Lily,” and “Jane-Dandy” were some of the milder ones. “He is just a damn fool,” growled old Tom Alvord, who had been Speaker of the House the day Roosevelt was born.17 Nominated again for Speaker that night, Alvord cynically assessed Republican strength in the House as “sixty and one-half members.”18
Roosevelt had return epithets of his own, and began to record them in a private legislative diary immediately after the 2 January caucus.19 At first, they were merely superficial, revealing him to be as class conscious as his detractors, but as time went by, and the shabbiness of New York State politics (so at odds with the splendors of the Capitol) became clear to him, his pen jabbed the paper with increasing fury.20
“There are some twenty-five Irish Democrats in the House,” the young Knickerbocker wrote. “They are a stupid, sodden, vicious lot, most of them being equally deficient in brains and virtue.”21 Eight Tammany Hall Democrats, representing the machine element, drew his especial contempt, being “totally unable to speak with even an approximation to good grammar; not even one of them can string three intelligible sentences together to save his neck.” Roosevelt’s bête noire (and the feeling was reciprocated) was “a gentleman named MacManus, a huge, fleshy, unutterably coarse and low brute, who was formerly a prize fighter, at present keeps a low drinking and dancing saloon, and is more than suspected of having begun his life as a pickpocket.”22
He was hardly less severe on members of his own party. Ex-Speaker