The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [92]
Next morning, Thursday, Roosevelt called for a vote to lift his resolution from the table. Again, he was outwitted on the floor. The Speaker took advantage of the fact that he had forgotten to say what kind of vote he wanted, and called for members to stand up and be counted. A sea of anonymous heads bobbed quickly up and down. The deputy clerk pretended to count them, recorded a couple of imaginary figures, and the Speaker announced the result: 54 to 50 against.
“By Godfrey!” Roosevelt seethed. “I’ll get them on the record yet!”81
He waited until much later in the day, when the House was drowsing over unimportant business. This time he demanded a name vote. Forced to identify themselves, the members voted 59 to 45 in favor of considering the resolution.82 Roosevelt was still short of the two-thirds majority he needed to launch an investigation of Westbrook and Ward, but time, and public opinion, was on his side. Tomorrow, Good Friday, was the beginning of the Easter recess. During the long weekend, newspapers would continue to discuss his “bombshell” resolution, and by the time the Assembly reconvened on Monday evening, members would have heard from their constituents.
THE FORCES OF CORRUPTION, meanwhile, were very anxious that Roosevelt’s constituents—the wealthiest and most respectable in the state—should hear something about him. Since the young man was maddeningly immune to coercion and bribery,83 they tried to blackmail him with sex. Walking home to 6 West Fifty-seventh Street one night, he was startled to see a woman slip and fall on the sidewalk in front of him. He summoned a cab, whereupon she tearfully begged him to accompany her home; but he grew suspicious, and refused. As he paid the cabdriver, he took note of the address she gave, and immediately afterward dispatched a police detective to her house. The report came back that there had been “a whole lot of men waiting to spring on him.”84
THAT EASTER WEEKEND, which saw admiring articles on Roosevelt’s Westbrook Resolution appear in newspapers from Montauk to Buffalo, was sufficient to make his name a household word across New York State. At a time of growing disenchantment with the Republican Party (now widely believed to be controlled by men like Jay Gould), he leaped into the headlines, passionate and incorruptible, a defender of the people against the unholy alliance of politics, big business, and the bench. Particularly adoring were wealthy young liberals, such as his former classmates at Harvard and Columbia. “We hailed him as the dawn of a new era,” wrote Poultney Bigelow, “the man of good family once more in the political arena; the college-bred tribune superior to the temptations which beset meaner men. ‘Teddy,’ as we called him, was our ideal.”85
BY 12 APRIL, when Roosevelt again moved to lift his resolution from the table, public demand for an investigation of Westbrook and Ward was such that the Assembly voted 104 to 6 in its favor. Prominent among the holdouts were J. J. Costello and old Tom Alvord, the latter predicting darkly that certain “gentlemen who had gone after wool would come back shorn.”86 But Roosevelt, whatever the outcome of the investigation, had already scored a major political triumph. As the Judiciary Committee hearings got under way, his personality visibly expanded. The crudely fermenting energy of his early days in Albany sweetened into a bubbling joie de vivre that vented itself in exuberant slammings of doors, gallopings up stairs, and shouts of laughter audible, George Spinney guessed, at least four miles away.87 His hunger for knowledge on all subjects grew to the point that after every Rooseveltian breakfast, hotel waiters had to clear away piles of ravaged newspapers. A reporter who sat nearby recalled that he read these newspapers “at a speed that would have excited the jealousy of the most rapid exchange editor.” Roosevelt