The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [97]
There is some evidence that Roosevelt, while remaining strictly faithful to his wife, had developed a taste for the “stag” activities enjoyed by Albany legislators, most of whom also left their wives at home in the constituency. “There wasn’t anything vicious about him,” George Spinney hastened to say, “… he did not visit any bad houses, but anything and everything else.”24
Roosevelt’s best friends in the capital were still Isaac Hunt and Billy O’Neil, plus a new young Republican from Brooklyn, Walter Howe. Together they formed what their leader called “a pleasant quartette.” With George Spinney acting as a non-legislative fifth member, they would occasionally play hookey from the Assembly for a night on the town. By modern standards, these spells of wild abandon were laughably sedate; Roosevelt’s disdain for “low drinking and dancing saloons” was marked even in 1883.25 Since discovering at Harvard that wine made him truculent, he had begun a lifetime policy of near-total abstinence. However an extract from the Hunt/Spinney interviews suggests that a little could go a long way:
SPINNEY They concluded that I was worthy of a dinner, and we had … a damned good dinner. Of course we talked and we sang.
HAGEDORN He did?
SPINNEY You never heard Theodore sing?
HAGEDORN No, I never did.
HUNT Well, he sang that night.
SPINNEY On top of the table, too.
HUNT With the water bottle, do you remember that?26
Here Spinney changes the subject. But he moves on to another anecdote, which indicates that the forces of corruption were still out to besmirch Roosevelt’s public image.
SPINNEY What was that story about the cockfight? … They put up a job on Roosevelt. Roosevelt liked all sort of athletic sports, and cockfighting was something new to him.… Some of them had arranged for a cockfight in Troy, and I think the place was to be pulled by the police. Well … the place was pulled, but Roosevelt beat it for Albany, and came in puffing and panting into the Delavan House, and telling that he had escaped being pulled in up there …
HUNT Next morning some of the fellows had feathers on their coats.27
THERE WERE TIMES, during the early months of the session, when Roosevelt seemed not unlike a fighting cock himself. His raucous, repetitive calls of “Mister Spee-kar!,” his straining neck, wobbly spectacle ribbons, and rooster-red face were combined with increasing aggressiveness and a fondness for murderous, pecking adjectives. If his opponents were tough, and big enough to fight back, these adjectives could be effective and amusing—as when he denounced Jay Gould’s newspaper the World as “a local, stockjobbing sheet of limited circulation and versatile mendacity, owned by the arch thief of Wall Street and edited by a rancorous kleptomaniac with a penchant for trousers.”28 (The paper often lampooned Roosevelt’s fashionable attire.) But at other times, and on a more personal level, his words left wounds. As party leader in the Assembly, he admitted to no patience with “that large class of men whose intentions are excellent, but whose intellects are foggy,” and attacked them openly on the floor. An Irish Democrat was dismissed as “the highly improbable, perfectly futile, altogether unnecessary, and totally impossible statesman from Ulster.”29 One seventy-year-old Assemblyman, hurt beyond endurance by Roosevelt’s incessant vituperation, took the floor, on a point of personal privilege, to defend himself. His refutations were so eloquent that Roosevelt was moved to make a tearful apology. “Mr. Brooks, I surrender. I beg your pardon.”30
Many of the young man’s early gaucheries can be ascribed to that most powerful of political temptations, the desire to see one’s name on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. Ever since the Westbrook affair, reporters had clustered flatteringly around him. They had