The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [99]
For the managers of the Elevated Railroad I have as little feeling as any man here, and I would willingly pass a bill of attainder on Jay Gould and all of his associates, if it were possible. They have done all possible harm to this community, with their hired newspapers, with their corruption of the judiciary and of this House. Nevertheless … I question whether the bill is constitutional … it is not a question of doing right to them. They are common thieves … they belong to that most dangerous of all classes, the wealthy criminal class.38
That acid phrase, “the wealthy criminal class,” etched itself into the public consciousness.39 Long after other details of the young Assemblyman’s career were forgotten, it survived as an early example of his gift for political invective. For the moment, its sting was such that Roosevelt’s audience took little notice of his concluding peroration, in which the future President spoke loud and clear.
We have heard a great deal about the people demanding the passage of this bill. Now anything the people demand that is right it is most clearly and most emphatically the duty of this Legislature to do; but we should never yield to what they demand if it is wrong … I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to.
Roosevelt’s speech, undoubtedly the best he ever made at Albany, earned him widespread scorn. He was denounced by both hostile and friendly newspapers as a “weakling,” “hoodlum,” and “bogus reformer.”40 Very few commentators realized that, in openly admitting he was wrong, Roosevelt was in fact a braver man than the Governor. He need not have said anything at all: any fool in the Assembly that morning could see that the majority would accept Cleveland’s veto. Roosevelt, as Minority Leader, merely had to record a token vote against it, and his political honor would be intact. Both Hunt and O’Neil urged him to do this, but he was more concerned with personal honor. So it was that on 7 March 1883 he found himself voting, along with Democrats and the hated members of Tammany Hall, to accept the Governor’s veto, while members of his “quartette” voted the other way.41
On top of this humiliation came the House’s decision, on 8 March, to unseat a Roosevelt associate named Sprague, on the suspicion of election irregularities. Roosevelt himself was a member of the Committee of Privileges and Elections, which had recommended that Sprague be allowed to stay. The House rejected its report. At once Roosevelt’s self-control cracked, and he furiously announced that he was resigning from the committee. As for the Democratic majority, he waxed Biblical in his wrath. “No good thing will come out of Nazareth … Exactly as ten men could have saved the ‘cities of the plains,’ so these twelve men [who had voted for Sprague] will not save the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Democracy. The small leaven of righteousness that is within it will not be able to leaven the whole sodden lump …”42
He went on, for almost fifteen minutes. This was the speech which reportedly left his audience “in tears—of uncontrollable laughter.” The House refused to accept Roosevelt’s resignation, and, ignoring his strident protests, went about its business.43
IF ROOSEVELT HAD BEEN a hero to the press before, he now found himself its favorite clown. Democratic newspapers joyfully quoted his “silly and scandalous gabble” and intimated that he, too, was a member of “the wealthy criminal class.” He was dubbed “The Chief of the Dudes,” and satirized as a tight-trousered snob, given to sucking the knob of an ivory cane. Some of these editorials were undeniably comic.44 What he read in the World, however, was not so funny. Jay Gould’s editors cruelly invoked a precious memory: “The friends who have so long deplored