The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [93]
Like a child, said Isaac Hunt, the young Assemblyman took on new strength and new ideas. “He would leave Albany Friday afternoon, and he would come back Monday night, and you could see changes that had happened to him. Such a superabundance of animal life was hardly ever condensed in a human [being].”89
This new vitality warmed everybody who came in contact with Roosevelt—in particular members of his immediate family. It warmed Alice, lonely in their Albany apartment during the long Assembly sessions; it warmed widowed Mittie and the spinsterish Bamie, coexisting irritably amidst the splendors of 6 West Fifty-seventh Street; it warmed plump, weepy Corinne, as he gave her away in marriage to Douglas Robinson, a man who left her cold;90 it even warmed Elliott, just returned from India, drinking heavily, and still undecided about his future. All huddled close to the glowing youth in their midst, while Theodore himself reveled in “the excitement and perpetual conflict” of politics, the feeling that he was “really being of some use in the world.”91
WHAT “USE” HE WAS in Albany became a matter of some debate as the months went by. Not for nothing was he known as “the Cyclone Assemblyman,”92 being primarily a destructive force in the House. Indeed, Roosevelt seemed better at scattering the legislation of other men than whipping up any of his own. Although he continued to talk loudly of “moral duty,” his scruples were usually economic. Halfway through the session the Tribune described him as “a watchdog over New York’s treasury.”93 Two months later, after the Aldermanic Bill finally achieved passage, the same newspaper remarked: “This is the only bill that Mr. Roosevelt has succeeded in passing through the Legislature; but as he has killed four score [other] … bills he is probably satisfied with his record.”94
Particularly surprising, in view of Roosevelt’s later renown as the most labor-minded of Presidents, was his attitude to social legislation. It was so harsh that even the loyal Hunt and O’Neil voted against him on occasion. For instance, he vigorously protested a proposal to fix the minimum wage for municipal laborers at $2.00 a day. “Why, Mr. Speaker, this bill will impose an expenditure of thousands of dollars upon the City of New York!”95 He also fought against raising the inadequate salaries of firemen and policemen. When somebody suggested that such people should at least have parity with civil service workers who got more and lived less dangerously, his response was facetious. “Just because we cannot stop all the large leaks, that is no reason why we should open up all the little ones.” Only seven other members agreed with this argument, and the bill was passed overwhelmingly.96
He even opposed a bill which sought to abolish the private manufacture of cigars in immigrant tenements—an abuse which turned slummy apartments into even slummier “factories.” But in this case Roosevelt proved he was not inflexible: a tour of some of the tenements involved revealed such horrors of dirt and overcrowding that he promptly came out in favor of the measure. “As a matter of practical common sense,” he afterward wrote, “I could not conscientiously vote for the continuation of the conditions which I saw.”97
It should be understood that Roosevelt’s attitude toward labor in 1882 was not unusual for a man of his class. Enlightened as he may have been on various outdated aspects of the American dream, he adhered to the classic credo that every citizen is master of his fate.98 His own fate had been an opulent one, in contrast to that of the average tenement-dweller, but he did not think this unfair. After all, his ancestors had worked their way up from a pig-farm in Old Manhattan.
THE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE did not conclude its investigation of Westbrook and Ward until 30 May, only days before the session of 1882 came to an end. Although the committee’s reports were not due to be made public until noon