The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [91]
In retrospect the most amazing part of Roosevelt’s European jaunt with Alice Lee—exemplified by climbing the Matterhorn—was his stamina. Zigzagging from city to city, he nevertheless kept assiduously working on The Naval War of 1812, preparing his manuscript for publication in May–June 1882. His powers of concentration that summer were amazing. No matter what task Roosevelt undertook, he was like a boll weevil eating its way through a bale of cotton. Over the years scholars of Roosevelt as a military man have garnered plenty of useful biographical tidbits from reading his diary entries about standing at Napoléon’s tomb and contemplating Caesar, Tamerlane, and Genghis Kahn. But for the conservationist-minded, the most interesting aspect of these months abroad was Roosevelt’s rejection of European nature in favor of American wilderness. He believed that the Europeans, with the exception of Scandinavians and British, had recklessly shot out all the wildlife. Because this was Roosevelt’s first foreign trip since experiencing Maine and Minnesota, he was now touting his glorious homeland as a Garden of Eden. “The summer I have passed traveling through Europe, and through I have enjoyed it greatly,” he wrote to Sewall, “yet the more I see, the better satisfied I am that I am an American; free born and free bred where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.”68
V
Upon returning from Europe, having squandered part of his inheritance, Roosevelt immediately threw himself back into the urban fray. He was happily married, enjoyed learning law, and, as an impassioned conversationalist, had an easy time making new friends. His asthma and weak heart weren’t giving him problems. He was finishing his book, which was scheduled for publication the following spring by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. To top the year off, that November he was elected to the New York state assembly from the twenty-first district.
When Roosevelt took office on January 2, 1882, he swore he’d be a steel-fisted reformer like Uncle Rob. He would hunt down thieves, swindlers, polecats, and robber barons; more controversially, he was willing to expose the frauds and shenanigans of the very governing class he was part of. He was itching to earn his spurs in the rough-and-tumble of New York politics. He wanted everything cleaner and better. It was no coincidence that the first bill he embraced would improve street cleaning in the city, and that it had a provision for the better treatment of workhorses.
Vivid stories abound about Roosevelt in Albany, dashing around in his frock coat trying to learn the rules of engagement. He was determined not to run with the wrong crowd, fearing being lampooned in the press as “politics as usual.” Fancying himself a change agent or reformer, he refused to see the world in gray, making snap judgments of his fellow legislators’ personalities that were oftentimes unfair. They were either good or evil, trustworthy or untrustworthy, front-parlor fresh or operators of smoke-filled backrooms. “He would come into that house like a thunderbolt,” Isaac Hunt, a fellow Republican legislator and Swiss cattle breeder from Watertown, recalled. “He would swing the door open and he would be half way up the stairs before that door would come together with a bang. Such a super-abundance of animal life was hardly condensed in a human life.”69
Nobody in the legislature knew quite what to make of Roosevelt. He was like a jaybird on the house roof, loud and sudden. Mocked as a “Squirt,” a “Punkin-Lily,” and a “Jane-Dandy”—and much worse—Roosevelt was held in contempt on both sides of the aisle.70 Annoyed by his reformist proclamations,