With the presidential election of 1888, Roosevelt’s shrewd political instincts re-emerged. Republican Benjamin Harrison was challenging Grover Cleveland, and Roosevelt had what he called “immense fun” on a twelve-day trip through the Midwest campaigning for Harrison. He reveled in the cheers of large crowds and hoped to win an appointment as assistant secretary of state if Harrison was elected. But Harrison’s secretary of state, James G. Blaine, vetoed him as too “brilliant and aggressive.” Instead, Roosevelt was offered a position as one of three Civil Service Commissioners.

His family and friends considered the job beneath him, but Roosevelt thought it had possibilities. The 1883 Pendleton Act had called for one-fourth of all federal jobs to be filled by competitive exams rather than political reward under the old “spoils” system. But Cleveland’s administration had replaced two-thirds of the federal bureaucracy with Democrats, and the reformer in Roosevelt foresaw delectable battles to prevent Harrison’s men from reversing the process. Shrugging off Edith’s warning that his skimpy salary of $3,500 would not cover his expenses, he hurried to Washington to plunge into the fray. Edith, pregnant again, would stay at Sagamore Hill until their second child was born. To economize, Roosevelt would stay with Henry Cabot Lodge, who had just become a Massachusetts congressman.

He arrived in his new post like a gust of wind, commandeering the largest of the three commissioners’ offices and overwhelming the staff with his toothy grin, genial authority, and the sense that he could help people accomplish their goals. Almost immediately, he was immersed in a battle to root out the corruption that most of his colleagues saw as the natural order. His friends foresaw what one called “a long, hard, discouraging struggle,” and Roosevelt himself was under no illusions: Both parties profited from the spoils system, he wrote, “and when in opposition each party insincerely denounced its opponents for doing exactly what it itself had done and intended again to do.” But he believed passionately that the old axiom, “To the victors belong the spoils,” was “nakedly vicious” and a “cynical battle-cry.” Government jobs must be won on merit, he vowed, adding, “I intend to hew to the line, and let the chips fly where they will.”

As he had in Albany, Roosevelt knew he had to enlist the public in the fight to put pressure on the lawmakers. But few voters cared about the Civil Service system, so Roosevelt worked to interest the press in his cause. He launched an investigation into the New York Customs House, where clerks were selling the Civil Service exam questions to job candidates for $50. When he issued a scathing report calling for the firing and prosecution of the clerks, he got headlines and approving editorials across the country.

The New York investigation also established that party leaders were requiring low-level clerks and stenographers to pay “voluntary contributions” if they wanted to keep their jobs. Since such corruption was too widespread for the commission’s staff to address, Roosevelt enlisted a network of reporters to conduct local investigations, which the commission could then verify.

True to his vow to “let the chips fly,” he didn’t flinch when one trail led to the Indianapolis postmaster, a close friend of President Harrison’s; the man was publicly humiliated by Roosevelt’s charges. But when Roosevelt turned his sights on another postmaster, George Howard Paul of Milwaukee, it was too much for Harrison’s Postmaster General, John Wanamaker. Roosevelt wanted Paul fired for doctoring civil-service exam scores for candidates favored by Republicans. Wanamaker appealed to Harrison, who decreed a compromise in which Paul would resign. Roosevelt had no choice but to go along, but he resented it. “It was a golden chance to take a good stand, and it has been lost,” he said.

He promptly went after yet another post office, this time in Baltimore, where Roosevelt charged that postal appointments were being used as a “bribery chest.” Wanamaker retaliated with his own investigation of the case, which predictably found no wrongdoing except by Roosevelt, whom Wanamaker’s report called “unfair and partial in the extreme.” At that, Roosevelt sent Wanamaker an open letter accusing him of “gross impertinence and impropriety” and calling him the “head devil” of the spoils system.

The press relished this public feuding, which The Washington Post called “war, open, avowed, and to the knife.” Roosevelt’s two fellow commissioners, who had made no objections to his effective takeover of the Civil Service cause, began to grow restive, and President Harrison detested the commotion. In a letter to Bamie, Roosevelt called Harrison “the little gray man in the White House looking on with cold and hesitating disapproval.”

There were rumors that Roosevelt would be fired, but with so many influential newspapers backing the commissioner, Harrison remained silent. Congress, favoring the time-honored spoils system, could only starve the commission of resources, to the point that the shortage of workers left it three months behind in grading examinations. But in the end, public clamor was loud enough that the House Committee on Reform in the Civil Service launched an investigation into the controversy, with days of public testimony in which Roosevelt dominated the headlines. After months of delay, the committee’s report endorsed Roosevelt, saying he acted “with entire fidelity and integrity,” adding that “the public service has been greatly benefited, and the law, on the whole, well executed.” Vindicated, Roosevelt went back to work.

 

AFTER THE BIRTH of their second son, Kermit, Edith moved to Washington in December 1889, where the Roosevelts lived in a rented townhouse. She had dreaded leaving her quiet life at Sagamore Hill for the political obsessions of Washington society, but she quickly felt at home.

Edith’s transition was facilitated by the circle of friends her husband had cultivated, including William Howard Taft, who had come from Ohio to serve as Harrison’s solicitor general – and who would become Roosevelt’s closest political ally. Henry Cabot Lodge’s wife, Nannie, loved literature and could recite Shakespeare by the hour. The Roosevelts were frequent guests at historian Henry Adams’ Lafayette Square mansion, along with Lincoln biographer John Hay and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The Roosevelts soon were hosting Sunday suppers “where the food was of the plainest and the company of the best,” as one guest recalled.

Roosevelt faced an annual battle to get his agency’s budget through Congress and made slow progress in expanding and enforcing civil-service rules. After a second set of hearings on the Wanamaker controversy, the House committee ruled that Roosevelt was justified in his decision on the Baltimore case, while Wanamaker, clearly in “desperate straits,” had been “evasive” and “garbled” in his testimony, showing “either a determination not to enforce the law or negligence therein to the last degree.” Roosevelt’s position was stable - for a while at least.

Personal tragedy intervened: Roosevelt’s brother Elliott, a heavy drinker for years, posed a danger to his wife and children. Moreover, one of Elliott’s housemaids was threatening a paternity suit against him. Theodore, outraged at his brother’s behavior, tried to have him declared insane. Though the family made a financial settlement with the maid and the paternity suit never became news, the insanity petition became a scandal. Elliott agreed to separate from his wife, establish a trust fund for her and their children, and stay sober for two years before rejoining his family. He relapsed, took another mistress, and died two years later. Theodore, relieved that the “horror” was over, wrote that “I only need to have pleasant thoughts of Elliott now. He is just the gallant, generous, manly boy whom everyone loved.”

By 1892, Grover Cleveland had reclaimed the White House from Benjamin Harrison. To the surprise of many, including Roosevelt, Cleveland reappointed him to his Civil Service post. Though Roosevelt struggled with the finances and logistics required to maintain two households and move his family between Washington and Sagamore Hill, he and Edith were happy to remain on the Washington scene. One Harrison official, outgoing Navy Secretary Benjamin Tracy, departed with a compliment that delighted Roosevelt: “Well, my boy, you have been a thorn in our side for four years. I earnestly hope that you will remain a thorn in the side of the next Administration.”

He did his best, fighting the same battles with Democratic spoilsmen he had waged with his own party. Even so, he got on relatively well with Cleveland; the Roosevelts were invited to dine at the White House, an honor Harrison had never offered. Roosevelt was also writing again, producing another nature book, The Wilderness Hunter, and working on volumes three and four of The Winning of the West. Nevertheless, when Republican Party leaders in New York asked him to run again for mayor in 1894, he was eager to enter the race. Edith, concerned about the cost of a campaign, begged him to stay in Washington. He reluctantly agreed, but he soon fell into a depression, lamenting that at the age of thirty-five he had passed up his “one golden chance” to forge his political career. Edith vowed never again to interfere with her husband’s decisions. The following year, when the recently elected Republican mayor of New York, William L. Strong, wanted to appoint Roosevelt police commissioner, she agreed.

It was another job that Roosevelt’s advisers dismissed as beneath him, but one that called for even more of his reformer’s zeal than the Civil Service Commission had demanded. The New York Police Department was rife with corruption. In 1894, a State Senate investigative committee reported that jobs at every level of the department were openly for sale, with prices ranging from $300 for a rookie appointment to $15,000 for promotion to captain. All of them found the bribes profitable - they collected far more in payoffs by saloon keepers, brothel owners, gamblers, and merchants. By the committee’s reckoning, the department’s annual illicit income came to $15 million. By his own estimate, Superintendent Thomas F. Byrnes was worth $350,000, a considerable sum in those days. One of his inspectors, Alex “Clubber” Williams, implausibly claimed to have earned his fortune by speculating in Japanese real estate.

But the committee’s report shocked even the cynical voters of New York, and the scandal triggered a surge of reform that swept Mayor Strong into office. The Tammany forces shrugged at what they considered a temporary setback. They would “be back at the next election,” said boss Richard Croker; the same voters who “could not stand the rotten police corruption . . . can’t stand reform either.”

Roosevelt arrived at police headquarters on May 6, 1895, at a literal trot, leading three fellow reform commissioners. “Hello, Jake,” he greeted reporter Jacob Riis of the Evening Sun, a friend from his Assembly days. He raced up the stairs, beckoning the reporters to follow him, exclaiming, “Where are our offices? Where is the boardroom? What do we do first?”

The new board elected Roosevelt its president; then he called Riis and Lincoln Steffens of the Evening Post into his office. As Steffens related in his Autobiography, “Riis and I were soon describing the situation to him, telling him which higher officers to consult, which to ignore and punish; what the forms were, the customs, rules, methods. It was just as if we three were the police board – T.R., Riis, and I.”

As usual, Roosevelt was recruiting allies in the press to advance his cause. He couldn’t have found two better qualified tutors than Riis, the dedicated, Danish-born social reformer, and Steffens, the intellectual investigative reporter who would go on to produce some of the most influential journalism of that era. They warned him to introduce his reforms gradually, but he ignored that advice. Roosevelt knew his title held little power; politicians in both parties had little incentive to reform. He would have to overcome bureaucratic inertia with sheer energy and his talent for attracting attention.

The new commissioner issued a public warning that appointments and promotions in the police force would be given on merit alone, and that “No political influence could save a man who deserved punishment.” Many in the ranks were astonished when Superintendent Byrnes resigned – with a full pension - rather than face the public investigation Roosevelt was threatening. Clubber Williams choose to do the same.

Roosevelt spent a night on the streets to check the performance of officers on their beats. Wearing a long coat over his evening clothes and a floppy hat to disguise his too-recognizable glasses and mustache, he followed Riis down the East Side of Manhattan through a dozen patrol districts. They found few men on patrol, but spotted three officers chatting outside a liquor store, another snoring in a restaurant, and a fifth “partly concealed,” as the Tribune delicately put it, “by petticoats.” All received reprimands, but the commissioner promised harsher punishment in the future.

The foray generated headlines and editorials across the country. A new epoch had dawned in New York, they agreed, and cartoonists depicted policemen cowering under the glare of round, gold-rimmed glasses and an enormous set of teeth. The Washington Star warned that New York’s policemen had better memorize their commissioner’s features if they wanted to stay out of trouble. Not all the officers were sensible; a week later, when Roosevelt’s next patrol found policeman William Rath in an oyster saloon on Third Avenue, the Herald reported this exchange:

ROOSEVELT: Why aren’t you on your post, officer?

RATH (swallowing oyster) What the ____ is it to you?

COUNTER MAN: You gotta good nerve, comin’ in here and interferin’ with an officer.

ROOSEVELT: I’m Commissioner Roosevelt.

RATH (reaching for vinegar bottle) Yes, you are. You’re Grover Cleveland and Mayor Strong all in a bunch, you are. Move on now, or –

COUNTER MAN: (whispering, horrified) Shut up, Bill, it’s His Nibs, sure. Don’t you spot his glasses?

ROOSEVELT: Go to your post at once.

(Exit Rath, running)

No one knows how many nocturnal expeditions Roosevelt made; sometimes he went without reporters to attract less attention. The missions exhausted him - it was not unusual for him to stay awake for forty hours - but he kept his energy up. “These midnight rambles are great fun,” he wrote.

Then Roosevelt embarked on probably the most quixotic battle of his career. When Riis and Steffens told him the “tap-root” of police corruption was the payoffs saloon owners made to keep their establishments open on Sundays, he concluded the only way to fix the system was strict enforcement of the Sunday closing law.

The law had been passed by the Legislature to please upstate rural churchgoers; it was deeply unpopular among urban workers who wanted to drink with their friends on their only day off. The bar owners made more money on Sundays than any other day of the week, nearby merchants benefited from the traffic, and policemen and politicians prospered from the payoffs. The only people who would applaud a crackdown were ministers and temperance crusaders. Roosevelt understood all the objections, and even sympathized; the law was too strict, he believed, and should be repealed. But as long as it was on the books, it was his duty to enforce it.

Beginning on June 23, 1895, each Sunday was drier than the last. In late August, Riis and Roosevelt found 95 percent of the city’s 15,000 saloons were closed, with the rest sneaking a few patrons through back doors to shuttered barrooms. Even “King” Pat Callahan, an ex-Assemblyman and the city’s most notorious saloon-keeper, had been ordered by a rookie policeman to close his doors – and when Callahan punched the officer, he was served with a summons and tried for assault.

Nearly everyone in the city was chafing at the crackdown. Dozens of angry telegrams flooded Roosevelt’s office, and the newspapers predicted that the Republican Party would be trounced in the next election. Rumors that Roosevelt would lose his job filled the streets and newspapers.

As always, he relished the fight. When he got a mocking invitation to a massive parade organized to protest the Sunday closing law, he astonished the crowd when he took a seat on the reviewing stand. He turned jeers into cheers when he laughed and applauded as banners, placards, and floats swept by – all deriding him and calling for his ouster. He was particularly amused by a float depicting three gentlemen sipping champagne at a private club while a beer-drinking laborer was arrested. By then, many among the 30,000 marchers were shouting, “Bully for Teddy!” and “Teddy, you’re a man!”

That did little for Roosevelt’s political standing in New York, but newspapers across the country ran articles speculating that he could become president. One day, Riis paid a visit to Roosevelt with Steffens and asked if he was running. Roosevelt jumped up, teeth bared, and fists clenched. “Don’t you dare ask me that,” he yelled. “Don’t you put such ideas into my head. No friend of mine would ever say a thing like that, you, you . . .” Softening, he said: “I must be wanting to be president. Every young man does. But I won’t let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will begin to work for it. I’ll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so – I’ll beat myself. See?”

Hewing to that resolute daring, he wouldn’t change course, and as the November election drew near, both the mayor and the Republican bosses were calling for his ouster. When the Tammany slate won, Roosevelt was, insiders argued, to blame. His three fellow commissioners had backed him, but two had turned against him. With the board of commissioners deadlocked, even routine promotions were blocked. Morale was crumbling, and the crime rate was creeping up. Roosevelt kept his title, facing down the state Republican boss and winning the renewed support of Mayor Strong, but the deadlock continued. He was growing increasingly tired of the job.