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Theodore Roosevelt and His Times
Chapter II. In the New York Assembly
by Howland, Harold
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Roosevelt was twice reelected to the Assembly, the second time in
1883, a year when a Republican success was an outstanding
exception to the general course of events in the State. His
career at Albany was marked by a series of fights for decency and
honesty. Each new contest showed him a fearless antagonist, a
hard hitter, and a man of practical common sense and growing
political wisdom. Those were the days of the famous "black horse
cavalry" in the New York Legislature--a group of men whose votes
could always be counted on by the special interests and those
corporations whose managers proceeded on the theory that the way
to get the legislation they wanted, or to block the legislation
they did not want, was to buy the necessary votes. Perhaps
one-third of the members of the Legislature, according to
Roosevelt's estimate, were purchasable. Others were timid. Others
again were either stupid or honestly so convinced of the
importance of "business" to the general welfare that they were
blind to corporate faults. But Theodore Roosevelt was neither
purchasable, nor timid, nor unable to distinguish between the
legitimate requirements of business and its unjustifiable
demands. He developed as a natural leader of the honest
opposition to the "black horse cavalry."
The situation was complicated by what were known as "strike
bills." These were bills which, if passed, might or might not
have been in the public interest, but would certainly have been
highly embarrassing to the private interests involved. The
purpose of their introduction was, of course, to compel the
corporations to pay bribes to ensure their defeat. Roosevelt had
one interesting and illuminating experience with the "black horse
cavalry." He was Chairman of the Committee on Cities. The
representatives of one of the great railways brought to him a
bill to permit the extension of its terminal facilities in one of
the big cities of the State, and asked him to take charge of it.
Roosevelt looked into the proposed bill and found that it was a
measure that ought to be passed quite as much in the public
interest as is the interest of the railroad. He agreed to stand
sponsor for the bill, provided he were assured that no money
would be used to push it. The assurance was given. When the bill
came before his committee for consideration, Roosevelt found that
he could not get it reported out either favorably or unfavorably.
So he decided to force matters. In accordance with his life-long
practice, he went into the decisive committee meeting perfectly
sure what he was going to do, and otherwise fully prepared.
There was a broken chair in the room, and when he took his seat a
leg of that chair was unobtrusively ready to his hand. He moved
that the bill be reported favorably.
The gang, without debate, voted "No." He moved that it be
reported unfavorably. Again the gang voted "No." Then he put
the bill in his pocket and announced that he proposed to report
it anyhow. There was almost a riot. He was warned that his
conduct would be exposed on the floor of the Assembly. He
replied that in that case he would explain publicly in the
Assembly the reasons which made him believe that the rest of
the committee were trying, from motives of blackmail, to prevent
any report of the bill. The bill was reported without further
protest, and the threatened riot did not come off, partly, said
Roosevelt, "because of the opportune production of the
chair-leg." But the young fighter found that he was no farther
along: the bill slumbered soundly on the calendar, and nothing
that he could do availed to secure consideration of it. At last
the representative of the railroad suggested that some older and
more experienced leader might be able to get the bill passed
where he had failed. Roosevelt could do nothing but assent. The
bill was put in charge of an "old Parliamentary hand," and after
a decent lapse of time, went through without opposition. The
complete change of heart on the part of the black horsemen under
the new leadership was vastly significant. Nothing could be
proved; but much could be surmised.
Another incident of Roosevelt's legislative career reveals the
bull-dog tenacity of the man. Evidence had been procured that a
State judge had been guilty of improper, if not of corrupt,
relations with certain corporate interests. This judge had held
court in a room of one of the "big business" leaders of that
time. He had written in a letter to this financier, "I am
willing to go to the very verge of judicial discretion to serve
your vast interests." There was strong evidence that he had not
stopped at the verge. The blood of the young Roosevelt boiled at
the thought of this stain on the judicial ermine. His party
elders sought patronizingly to reassure him; but he would have
none of it. He rose in the Assembly and demanded the impeachment
of the unworthy judge. With perfect candor and the naked vigor
that in the years to come was to become known the world around he
said precisely what he meant. Under the genial sardonic advice of
the veteran Republican leader, who "wished to give young Mr.
Roosevelt time to think about the wisdom of his course," the
Assembly voted not to take up his "loose charges." It looked like
ignominious defeat. But the next day the young firebrand was back
to the attack again, and the next day, and the next. For eight
days he kept up the fight; each day the reputation of this
contest for a forlorn hope grew and spread throughout the State.
On the eighth day he demanded that the resolution be voted on
again, and the opposition collapsed. Only six votes were cast
against his motion. It is true that the investigation ended in a
coat of whitewash. But the evidence was so strong that no one
could be in doubt that it was whitewash. The young legislator,
whose party mentors had seen before him nothing but a ruined
career, had won a smashing moral victory.
Roosevelt was not only a fighter from his first day in public
life to the last, but he was a fighter always against the same
evils. Two incidents more than a quarter of a century apart
illustrate this fact. A bill was introduced in the Assembly in
those earlier days to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in
tenement houses in New York City. It was proposed by the
Cigar-Makers' Union. Roosevelt was appointed one of a committee
of three to investigate the subject. Of the other two members,
one did not believe in the bill but confessed privately that he
must support it because the labor unions were strong in his
district. The other, with equal frankness, confessed that he had
to oppose the bill because certain interests who had a strong
hold upon him disapproved it, but declared his belief that if
Roosevelt would look into the matter he would find that the
proposed legislation was good. Politics, and politicians, were
like that in those days--as perhaps they still are in these. The
young aristocrat, who was fast becoming a stalwart and aggressive
democrat, expected to find himself against the bill; for, as he
has said, the "respectable people" and the "business men" whom he
knew did not believe in such intrusions upon the right even of
workingmen to do what they would with their own. The laissez
faire doctrine of economic life was good form in those days.
But the only member of that committee that approached the
question with an open mind found that his first impressions were
wrong. He went down into the tenement houses to see for himself.
He found cigars being made under conditions that were appalling.
For example, he discovered an apartment of one room in which
three men, two women, and several children--the members of two
families and a male boarder--ate, slept, lived, and made cigars.
"The tobacco was stowed about everywhere, alongside the foul
bedding, and in a corner where there were scraps of food." These
conditions were not exceptional; they were only a little worse
than was usual.
Roosevelt did not oppose the bill; he fought for it and it
passed. Then he appeared before Governor Cleveland to argue for
it on behalf of the Cigar-Makers' Union. The Governor hesitated,
but finally signed it. The Court of Appeals declared it
unconstitutional, in a smug and well-fed decision, which spoke
unctuously of the "hallowed" influences of the "home." It was a
wicked decision, because it was purely academic, and was removed
as far as the fixed stars from the actual facts of life. But it
had one good result. It began the making of Theodore Roosevelt
into a champion of social justice, for, as he himself said, it
was this case which first waked him "to a dim and partial
understanding of the fact that the courts were not necessarily
the best judges of what should be done to better social and
industrial conditions."
When, a quarter, of a century later, Roosevelt left the
Presidency and became Contributing Editor of The Outlook, almost
his first contribution to that journal was entitled "A Judicial
Experience." It told the story of this law and its annullment by
the court. Mr. William Travers Jerome wrote a letter to The
Outlook, taking Roosevelt sharply to task for his criticism of
the court. It fell to the happy lot of the writer as a cub editor
to reply editorially to Mr. Jerome. I did so with gusto and with
particularity. As Mr. Roosevelt left the office on his way to the
steamer that was to take him to Africa to hunt non-political big
game, he said to me, who had seen him only once before: "That was
bully. You have done just what my Cabinet members used to do for
me in Washington. When a question rose that demanded action, I
used to act. Then I would tell Root or Taft to find out and tell
me why what I had done was legal and justified. Well done,
coworker." Is it any wonder that Theodore Roosevelt had made in
that moment another ardent supporter?
Those first years in the political arena were not only a fighting
time, they were a formative time. The young Roosevelt had to
discover a philosophy of political action which would satisfy
him. He speedily found one that suited his temperament and his
keen sense of reality. He found no reason to depart from it to
the day of his death. Long afterward he told his good friend
Jacob Riis how he arrived at it. This was the way of it:
"I suppose that my head was swelled. It would not be strange if
it was. I stood out for my own opinion, alone. I took the best
mugwump stand: my own conscience, my own judgment, were to decide
in all things. I would listen to no argument, no advice. I took
the isolated peak on every issue, and my people left me. When I
looked around, before the session was well under way, I found
myself alone. I was absolutely deserted. The people didn't
understand. The men from Erie, from Suffolk, from anywhere, would
not work with me. 'He won't listen to anybody,' they said, and I
would not. My isolated peak had become a valley; every bit of
influence I had was gone. The things I wanted to do I was
powerless to accomplish. What did I do? I looked the ground over
and made up my mind that there were several other excellent
people there, with honest opinions of the right, even though they
differed from me. I turned in to help them, and they turned to
and gave me a hand. And so we were able to get things done. We
did not agree in all things, but we did in some, and those we
pulled at together. That was my first lesson in real politics. It
is just this: if you are cast on a desert island with only a
screw-driver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why,
go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a
saw, but you haven't. So with men. Here is my friend in Congress
who is a good man, a strong man, but cannot be made to believe in
some things which I trust. It is too bad that he doesn't look at
it as I do, but he does not, and we have to work together as we
can. There is a point, of course, where a man must take the
isolated peak and break with it all for clear principle, but
until it comes he must work, if he would be of use, with men as
they are. As long as the good in them overbalances the evil, let
him work with that for the best that can be got."
From the moment that he had learned this valuable lesson--and
Roosevelt never needed to learn a lesson twice--he had his course
in public life marked out before him. He believed ardently in
getting things done. He was no theoretical reformer. He would
never take the wrong road; but, if he could not go as far as he
wanted to along the right road, he would go as far as he could,
and bide his time for the rest. He would not compromise a hair's
breadth on a principle; he would compromise cheerfully on a
method which did not mean surrender of the principle. He
perceived that there were in political life many bad men who were
thoroughly efficient and many good men who would have liked to
accomplish high results but who were thoroughly inefficient. He
realized that if he wished to accomplish anything for the country
his business was to combine decency and efficiency; to be a
thoroughly practical man of high ideals who did his best to
reduce those ideals to actual practice. This was the choice that
he made in those first days, the companionable road of practical
idealism rather than the isolated peak of idealistic
ineffectiveness.
A hard test of his political philosophy came in 1884 just after
he had left the Legislature. He was selected as one of the four
delegates at large from New York to the Republican National
Convention. There he advocated vigorously the nomination of
Senator George F. Edmunds for the Presidency. But the more
popular candidate with the delegates was James G. Blaine.
Roosevelt did not believe in Blaine, who was a politician of the
professional type and who had a reputation that was not
immaculate. The better element among the delegates fought hard
against Blaine's nomination, with Roosevelt wherever the blows
were shrewdest. But their efforts were of no avail. Too many
party hacks had come to the Convention, determined to nominate
Blaine, and they put the slate through with a whoop.
Then, every Republican in active politics who was anything but a
rubber stamp politician had a difficult problem to face. Should
he support Blaine, in whom he could have no confidence and for
whom he could have no respect, or should he "bolt"? A large group
decided to bolt. They organized the Mugwump party--the epithet
was flung at them with no friendly intent by Charles A. Dana of
the New York Sun, but they made of it an honorable title--under
the leadership of George William Curtis and Carl Schurz. Their
announced purpose was to defeat the Republicans, from whose ranks
they had seceded, and in this attempt they were successful.
Roosevelt, however, made the opposite decision. Indeed, he had
made the decision before he entered the Convention. It was
characteristic of him not to wait until the choice was upon him
but to look ahead and make up his mind just which course he would
take if and when a certain contingency arose. I remember that
once in the later days at Oyster Bay he said to me, "They say I
am impulsive. It isn't true. The fact is that on all the
important things that may come up for decision in my life, I have
thought the thing out in advance and know what I will do. So when
the moment comes, I don't have to stop to work it out then. My
decision is already made. I have only to put it into action. It
looks like impulsiveness. It is nothing of the sort."
So, in 1884, when Roosevelt met his first problem in national
politics, he already knew what he would do. He would support
Blaine, for he was a party man. The decision wounded many of his
friends. But it was the natural result of his political
philosophy. He believed in political parties as instruments for
securing the translation into action of the popular will. He
perceived that the party system, as distinguished from the group
system of the continental peoples, was the Anglo-Saxon, the
American way of doing things. He wanted to get things done. There
was only one thing that he valued more than achievement and that
was the right. Therefore, until it became a clean issue between
right and wrong, he would stick to the instrument which seemed to
him the most efficient for getting things done. So he stuck to
his party, in spite of his distaste for its candidate, and saw it
go down in defeat.
Roosevelt never changed his mind about this important matter. He
was a party man to the end. In 1912 he left his old party on what
he believed to be--and what was--a naked moral issue. But he did
not become an independent. He created a new party.
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