THE ROAD THAT WOULD LEAD Roosevelt into public life began at Morton Hall, the “barn-like room over a saloon” at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue that served as the Republican headquarters for the Twenty-first District. That district encompassed both the elegant neighborhoods along Madison Avenue and the more populous tenement sections on the West Side of Manhattan. While Roosevelt had found philanthropic administration ill-suited to his restless temperament, he longed to honor his father and family through his own efforts “to help the cause of better government in New York.” When he began inquiring about the local Republican organization, he was warned by his privileged circle that district politics were “low,” the province of “saloon-keepers, horse-car conductors, and the like,” men who “would be rough and brutal and unpleasant to deal with.” Their caution did nothing to deter Roosevelt. “I answered that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class,” he observed, “and that the other people did—and that I intended to be one of the governing class.”
In addition to attending the monthly meetings, Roosevelt stopped by in the evenings at the smoke-filled room with its benches, cuspidors, and poker tables that functioned as a club room. “I went around there often enough to have the men get accustomed to me and to have me get accustomed to them,” he explained, “so that we began to speak the same language, and so that each could begin to live down in the other’s mind what Bret Harte has called ‘the defective moral quality of being a stranger.’ ”
To the machine politicians who represented the tenement population, Roosevelt initially appeared very much an alien. “He looked like a dude, side-whiskers an’ all, y’ know,” one of them commented. Over time, however, as he had done at Harvard, he won over his comrades with the warmth, unabashed intensity, and pluck of his personality. He grew particularly close to Joe Murray, the thickset, red-haired Irish boss with “a fine head, a fighter’s chin, and twinkling eyes,” the man whom Roosevelt later credited with launching his political career. “He was by nature as straight a man, as fearless and as stanchly loyal, as any one whom I have ever met,” Roosevelt wrote in his Autobiography.
When Murray determined that the incumbent Republican assemblyman for the Twenty-first District could not hold his seat in the fall elections in 1881, having recently been linked to corruption, he surprised his compatriots by nominating the twenty-three-year-old Roosevelt, unknown to anyone in Morton Hall eight months earlier. The shrewd boss calculated that victory over the Democratic candidate would be assured if the Republican machine mustered its regular totals while Roosevelt mobilized the college-educated men and “the swells” who rarely voted in local elections. Murray’s instincts proved correct. On November 1, a list of eminent New Yorkers, including future Secretary of War Elihu Root and Columbia law professor Theodore W. Dwight, heartily endorsed Roosevelt as a man “of high character . . . conspicuous for his honesty and integrity.” A week later, Theodore Roosevelt was elected as the youngest member of the New York State Assembly, launching an unprecedented political career, one that would culminate less than two decades later in his becoming the youngest president in the history of the United States.
On January 2, 1882, Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in, along with 127 other assemblymen. “My first days in the Legislature were much like those of a boy in a strange school,” he recalled. “My fellow legislators and I eyed one another with mutual distrust. . . . The Legislature was Democratic. I was a Republican from the ‘silk-stocking’ district.” Assemblyman Isaac Hunt, who later became a close friend, would never forget the first time he saw Roosevelt. “He came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult,” Hunt recalled. “He pulled off his coat; he was dressed in full dress, he had been to dinner somewhere.” With hair parted in the middle, eyeglasses suspended by a silk cord, and elegant gloves, he cut a unique figure.
For the first six weeks, according to Hunt, Theodore Roosevelt was uncharacteristically taciturn. “He was like Moses in the Wilderness,” but all the while watching and learning. One night in his private diary, Roosevelt delineated “an analysis of the character of each man in that Legislature.” His initial reactions to the other assemblymen revealed that he was still far from overcoming Harte’s “defective moral quality of being a stranger.” His Republican colleagues, he wrote, were “bad enough; but over half the democrats, including almost all of the City Irish, are vicious, stupid looking scoundrels with apparently not a redeeming trait.” The men who belonged to the New York City Tammany Hall Democratic machine, furthermore, seemed “totally unable to speak with even an approximation to good grammar; not one of them can string three intelligible sentences together to save his neck.”
Clearly, the Tammany men were as contemptuous of and antagonistic to Roosevelt as he was of them. Tammany lieutenant John McManus, a practical joker nearly twice Roosevelt’s size, let it be known that he intended to toss the young upstart in a blanket. Outwardly uncowed, a belligerent Roosevelt confronted McManus: “By God! If you try anything like that, I’ll kick you, I’ll bite you, I’ll kick you in the balls. I’ll do anything to you—you’d better let me alone.” And he did.
The more serious altercation took place at Hurst’s Roadhouse, a popular gathering place for assemblymen and reporters six miles out of Albany. Late one winter afternoon Roosevelt entered Hurst’s and was greeted by three jeering bullies, who raucously mocked his appearance and lack of a winter coat. “Why don’t your mother buy you an overcoat? Won’t Mama’s boy catch cold?” A reporter present noted that Roosevelt ignored them until it was clear they would not let up. Finally, he confronted the three. “You—little dude,” taunted one, while his companion took a swipe at Roosevelt. “But, quick as lightning, Roosevelt slipped his glasses into his side pocket, and in another second he had laid out two of the trio on the floor. The third quit cold.” The story soon made the rounds in the statehouse, along with the significant fact that once the men got off the floor, Roosevelt invited them to join him in a glass of ale.
The lively natures displayed by young Taft and Roosevelt remained with them throughout their lives. The aftermath of their anger, however, was handled very differently. “When Taft gives way to his,” one reporter observed, “it is to inflict a merciless lashing upon its victim, for whom thereafter he has no use whatever. With Roosevelt it is a case of powder and spark; there is a vivid flash and a deafening roar, but when the smoke has blown away, that is the end.”
Roosevelt quickly determined that his colleagues could be divided into three groups: a small circle of “very good men,” fellow reformers like Isaac Hunt, William O’Neil, and Mike Costello, anxious to fight against corrupt political machines, made up the first; the second group, the majority, “were neither very good nor very bad, but went one way or the other, according to the strength of the various conflicting influences acting around, behind, and upon them”; finally, the “very bad men” in both parties, ever susceptible to bribery, made up a rough third of the assembly and were essentially owned by various business interests. Good legislation could be passed only if the conscience of the public was awakened, exerting pressure on the passive majority. Immediately, Roosevelt understood that the most effective means of circumventing the machines and transforming popular sentiment was to establish a good rapport with the press corps.
About thirty reporters from across the state covered the legislature in Albany, where a rigid hierarchy governed their assigned seats. In front-row box seats, facing the assemblymen, sat George F. Spinney of the New York Times, Hugh Hastings of the Albany Express, H. Calkins of the New York World, and A. W. Lyman of the New York Sun. Reporters for the New York Herald, the New York Tribune, and the Brooklyn Times sat in the second and third rows. Journalists representing smaller papers were consigned to the bleachers in the back of the chamber. Roosevelt’s expansive demeanor, manic energies, and often original, always articulate and quotable statements made him a favorite among the journalists. A mutually productive alliance was forged
between these journalists and Roosevelt that would boost his political career at every stage.
The New York Times reporter George Spinney took an immediate liking to Roosevelt, calling him a “good-hearted man,” with “a good, honest laugh.” Spinney, who would later become editor and publisher of the Times, was considered then one of the best reporters in the state, lauded for the “vigor, thoroughness and intelligence of his daily dispatches” from Albany. Spinney marveled at the speed with which the rookie assemblyman mastered every aspect of the state legislature. “He grew like a beanstalk,” he recalled in a conversation with Assemblyman Hunt forty years later. “He would just stand a man up against the wall and interview him and ask: ‘How do you do this in your district and county’ and ‘What is this thing and that thing.’ He went right to the bottom of the whole thing. He knew more about State politics at the end of that first session than ninety percent of them did.”
Isaac Hunt himself, described by a contemporary as “a mighty tree that stood out in the forest,” had never encountered anyone like Roosevelt. “He would go away Friday afternoon,” Hunt remembered, “and Monday he would throw out new things he never had before, just like a child that you see grow from day to day, that is the way he grew. He increased in stature and strength materially all the time.” In that first session, Hunt wrote, “I thought I knew more than he did . . . but before we got through, he grew right away from me.”
Brooklyn Eagle reporter William C. Hudson, who resided at the same hotel as Roosevelt, was boggled by the young legislator’s early morning routine. “It was Roosevelt’s habit to come into the breakfast room with a rush, copies of all the morning papers he could lay his hands on under his arm, and, seating himself, to go through those papers with a rapidity that would have excited the jealousy of the most rapid exchange editor. He threw each paper, as he finished it, on the floor, unfolded, until at the end there was, on either side of him, a pile of loose papers as high as the table for the servants to clear away. And all this time he would be taking part in the running conversation of the table. Had anyone supposed that this inspection of the papers was superficial, he would have been sadly mistaken. Roosevelt saw everything, grasped the sense of everything, and formed an opinion on everything which he was eager to maintain at any risk.”
Roosevelt’s prodigious learning curve was tested after only two months in Albany, when he took a leading role in the battle to impeach a corrupt state supreme court judge, Theodore Westbrook. The battle pitted Roosevelt against a similar insidious alliance to the one Taft had uncovered in the Campbell debacle in Cincinnati. In December 1881, shortly before Roosevelt was sworn in, the New York Times had published a nine-column piece condemning Judge Westbrook’s collusion with the notorious Wall Street financier Jay Gould in an elaborate scheme to gain control of the elevated railway system in New York. “We went after him with yards of space,” recalled Spinney, who conducted several phases of the investigation.
Over the years, the swashbuckling Gould had amassed railroads, steamship lines, telegraph companies, and newspapers in a series of well-planned raids, stitching together an empire that stretched from coast to coast. In 1881, he moved to appropriate the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company, one of the first outfits to engineer and develop a steam-powered rapid-transit system for the city. A burdensome lawsuit devised by Gould’s accomplices was brought against the company, forcing it into receivership. Judge Westbrook, who had been Gould’s legal counsel, was selected to preside over the bankrupt company. Holding court in Gould’s private offices, Westbrook issued a series of onerous rulings calculated to panic stockholders into throwing their shares on the market, depressing the stock to almost nothing. At that point, the Gould syndicate began buying. Once Gould had gained control of the valuable property, Judge Westbrook mysteriously decreed the company solvent, and the stock rose sharply. This simple, perfidious maneuver cost thousands of innocent stockholders their life savings.
The comprehensive account of this stock-jobbing scheme created a stir in the newspaper world. At issue, the Brooklyn Eagle proclaimed, were not simply the transgressions of a justice who “prostituted” himself, but the fact that the “State Government in all its branches” has prostrated itself before the robber barons. “These things show where the wealth of the country is going; they show that the farmer, the artisan, and the merchant are sweating their lives out to enrich a little coterie of blooded knaves who regard their fellowmen as the spider does the fly or the wolf the sheep.” If the charges were substantiated, the Auburn (New York) Advertiser argued, nothing less than Westbrook’s impeachment would restore the “dignity and respect” of the state supreme court. “Officials should be taught that they are the servants of the people,” chided the Times, “not of rings and cliques.” All agreed that Westbrook could not “remain silent under the severe arraignment of the Times.”
In fact, that is precisely what Westbrook did; his strategic silence on these charges had nearly extinguished interest in the entire matter when Theodore Roosevelt picked up the case in March 1882. Isaac Hunt had prompted Roosevelt’s involvement after a second, unrelated article appeared in the New York Herald accusing Judge Westbrook of a flagrant abuse of power and conflict of interest. He had appointed receivers for defunct insurance companies and granted excessive fees to select lawyers (including his cousin and son) who handled the cases. Hunt suggested that Roosevelt introduce a resolution to investigate Judge Westbrook. Roosevelt agreed to consider the action “but would not take it up until he was sure there was evidence sufficient to warrant such a resolution.”
Recalling the Westbrook article in the New York Times three months earlier (as he seemed to remember anything he had read), Roosevelt approached the city editor, Henry Loewenthal, and asked to examine the corroborating evidence behind the December exposé. The editor later described “an energetic young man” who “questioned and cross-questioned him” throughout the entire night. George Spinney, who had worked for Loewenthal before becoming the Albany correspondent, heard that “the presses in the basement were finishing that day’s edition in the early morning hours, when the young Assemblyman emerged with an armful of ammunition” that included an incriminating letter in which Judge Westbrook told Gould, “I am willing to go to the very verge of judicial discretion to serve your vast interests.”
On March 29, 1882, Roosevelt rose from his seat in the assembly. Noting that the newspaper charges made against Westbrook in relation to the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company had “never been explained or fairly refuted,” he offered a resolution empowering the Judiciary Committee to begin an investigation. This bold action created a sensation in the chamber. “By Jove!” Hunt recalled. “It was like the bursting of a bombshell.” Supporters of Westbrook and Gould quickly rallied, demanding a debate that automatically tabled the motion and threatened its indefinite postponement. The next day an editorial in the New York Times praised Roosevelt’s resolution: “Mr. Roosevelt correctly states that these charges have never been explained or fairly rebutted. . . . Those who believe that Judge Westbrook has been unjustly assailed ought to welcome so good a chance of vindicating his character.”
A week later, Spinney recalled, “Roosevelt suddenly interrupted the hum-drum routine, with the demand that all business be laid aside and his resolution of investigation be taken up.” The move was “so unexpected and so sudden that dilatory tactics were out of the question.” When Roosevelt began to speak, “the House, for almost the only time during the session grew silent.” Though Roosevelt was not then an accomplished speaker, he delivered his speech “slowly and clearly and his voice filled the chamber, abominable as were its acoustics. A frequent gesture of his determination was the resounding blow of his right fist as he smacked it in the palm of his left hand.”
“The men who were mainly concerned in this fraud,” Roosevelt began (alluding to Jay Gould, Russell Sage, and Cyrus Field), “were men whose financial dishonesty is a matter of common notoriety,” requiring of the ju
diciary extreme efforts to assure the appearance of probity. Instead, the judge answered petitions in the offices of one of the trio of investors and held court in the office of another who was “nothing but a wealthy shark.” To address one aspect of the case, Westbrook appointed a man who was employed by Jay Gould. Every decision was rendered to enable Gould and his conspirators to seize control of the railway at a baldly manipulated bargain price. “We have a right to demand that our judiciary should be kept beyond reproach,” Roosevelt ardently continued, “and we have a right to demand that if we find men against whom there is not only suspicion, but almost a certainty that they have had collusion with men whose interests were in conflict with the interests of the public, they shall, at least, be required to bring positive facts with which to prove there has not been such collusion; and they ought themselves to have been the first to demand such an investigation.”
“Beyond a shadow of doubt,” Spinney believed, “a vote at that juncture would have insured the passage of his resolution.” But former Governor Thomas Alvord took the floor and filibustered until the scheduled adjournment at two o’clock in the afternoon. Speaking in “disjointed sentences and fragmentary thoughts,” Alvord advised the rookie assemblyman to find proof for his accusations rather than stoop to “slanderous utterances or newspaper stories,” because “human reputation and human characters were too sacred to be trifled with.”
Though Roosevelt was temporarily outmaneuvered by veteran opposition, “the day’s proceedings,” Spinney observed, “made the youngest member of the Assembly the most talked of man in the State.” That night, from his room at the Kenmore Hotel, Roosevelt wrote to Alice with no small gratification: “I have drawn blood by my speech against the Elevated Railway judges, and have come in for any amount both of praise and abuse from the newspapers. It is rather the hit of the season so far, and I think I have made a success of it. Letters and telegrams of congratulation come pouring in on me from all quarters. But the fight is severe still.”