The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [224]
On November 21, 1899, Vice President Hobart died. His heart had given out. “No one outside of this home,” President McKinley said in Paterson, New Jersey, “feels this loss more deeply than I do.”56 Expectations ran high during the holiday season that Roosevelt would be McKinley’s replacement, at least for the reelection ticket in 1900. (Mark Hanna would serve as an interim number two in the chain of command.) The other names bandied about—for example, John D. Long and Timothy Woodruff—by contrast to Roosevelt, seemed stale. Disregarding all this speculation, Roosevelt unambiguously said forget it; he had no interest in the number two spot. Even though President McKinley had treated Hobart almost as a copresident, bringing the vice presidency up from its low estate, Roosevelt really wanted nothing to do with any kind of candidacy.57 Santa Claus was preparing to visit Oyster Bay, the nineteenth century was coming to a close, and he didn’t have time for guessing games or parlor politics. Much of what Roosevelt had to be grateful for—his colonelcy, his status as a war hero, his governorship—had come his way within the past two years. His strenuous life was on the upswing. He was considered an icon. Only Buffalo Bill took the oxygen out of a room as easily as Governor Roosevelt. While Roosevelt’s restless urge to make a mark on American politics persisted, he didn’t think riding on President McKinley’s coattails was the proper way for advancement.
Instead of corresponding about Vice President Hobart’s death on November 21, Roosevelt preferred to write about the newest addition to the household menagerie: a baby opossum, which he had requested from his friend Bradley Tyler Johnson. “The opossum arrived all right and Archie received it with such loving admiration that I gave it to him, a little to the jealousy of Ted and Kermit,” the governor wrote. “In spite of your assurance that it is tame, Archie does not venture to pet it, and its only intimate acquaintance with him is when I take it up by the nape of the neck, and on such occasions it always opens its jaws like an alligator. Archie still regards it with unqualified respect. It has utterly unsettled the nerves of the terrier who sits in front of its cage for hours, showing the most eager, but I fear unfriendly desire to get in.”58 About ten to fourteen days later Roosevelt, worried that Ted’s feelings were hurt because the opossum wasn’t his, got Ted a guinea pig to even the score.59
Roosevelt was always a fine correspondent, and that December the letters poured out of him. In many he expressed thanks to his close friends, such as George Bird Grinnell and Henry Cabot Lodge, for always being at his side. In others he reflected on how parochial Albany was compared with Washington, D.C. Already Pinchot was soliciting Roosevelt to side with him in a campaign to transfer the forest reserves from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture.60 But mainly they were a form of cheerleading; he was trying to unite his allies in his reform crusade through graciousness. “Oh Lord!” Roosevelt wrote Elihu Root, “I wish there were more of you. I think I have made a pretty good Governor, but I am quite honest in saying that I think you would have made a better one; for in just such matters as trusts and the like you have the ideas to work out whereas I have to try