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 annulment 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.