CHAPTER ELEVEN

“The One I Loved Dearest”

THEODORE ROOSEVELT SR. was a dutiful husband, the father of four children, and a faithful communicant at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, where on many Sundays he attended not one service but two. He belonged to the Union League Club and the Century Association. In 1877 he was 46 years old with an athletic build and a square Dutch jaw. His eyes were grayish-blue, and his hair and beard were chestnut brown. He wore suits of the finest fabric, beautifully tailored. He lavished attention on his stunning wife, Mittie, and when the couple attended dinners and balls together they left an indelible impression. “To see him put on her wraps and escort her from room to room was beautiful,” one man recalled. “It seemed to me that I never knew till then what the word ‘gentleman’ meant.”

Roosevelt had no great love for music and art, as Mittie did. He did not write, and could not charm his companions with sparkling after-dinner conversation. His passion was children—his own and others. He taught his two sons and two daughters to ride horses and climb trees, and often joined in their games. “My personal impression,” a nephew remembered, “is that he was a large, broad, bright, cheerful man with an intense sympathy with everything you brought to him. He loved children especially.” But even as his children bathed in “the sunshine of his affection,” they respected their father as the ultimate moral authority. He did not tolerate deceit or cowardice, selfishness or idleness.

Roosevelt was a junior partner in the prosperous family business—Roosevelt and Son, importers of plate glass—but he had little interest in the work. His true calling was providing aid to the needy and building up the city that he loved. Soon after the war, he helped launch the New York Orthopedic Dispensary and Hospital, for the treatment of children with spinal diseases. He also helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. “Whatever he had to do, he did all out,” the philanthropist and social worker Charles Loring Brace recalled. Roosevelt’s friend John Hay referred to his “maniacal benevolence.” In a letter to his wife, Theodore explained that, “as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live.”

One of Roosevelt’s favorite causes was the Children’s Aid Society, founded by Brace in 1853. There were more than 20,000 homeless children in New York. They sold newspapers and day-old flowers, indentured themselves to oyster peddlers, carried sloshing pails of beer for barkeeps, and begged outside the theaters and opera houses. The society tried to coax them off the streets with religious classes, reading rooms, industrial schools, and workshops. The ultimate goal was to return them to their families, if they had them, but more often to transport them on “orphan trains” to foster families in the Midwest. One of the society’s projects was the Newsboys’ Lodging House on West 18th Street, where every night several hundred boys, most of them newsboys, gladly paid five cents for a clean bed in a warm room. When Brace asked Theodore whether he’d be willing to visit the boys at the Lodging House every other Sunday evening, Theodore said his “troublesome conscience” would not allow it—he pledged to be there every Sunday.

In October 1877, President Hayes offered Roosevelt his first political post: collector of the New York Custom House. The year before, Grant’s scandals and Conkling’s presidential bid had persuaded Roosevelt to dip his toe into party politics for the first time in Cincinnati. Now this public-spirited man—Curtis called him “the image and figure of the citizen which every American should hope to be”—was being called upon to purify the nation’s most notorious patronage den. “I will take the office not to administer it for the benefit of a party,” he told the papers, “but for the benefit of the whole people.”

A week after Hayes submitted Roosevelt’s name to the Senate for its approval, the nominee appeared at City Hall on behalf of the State Board of Charities to report on conditions in New York’s hospitals, orphanages, asylums, and prisons. Roosevelt had seen criminals and patients confined together in overcrowded, filthy, and airless facilities at Bellevue Hospital and on Blackwell’s Island, Hart’s Island, and Randall’s Island. The food was rancid, and the hospital wards lacked linens, towels, and soap. The conditions were scandalous, but to Roosevelt they were merely symptoms of “the great fundamental evil of the system by which they are governed.” Like the clerks in the Custom House, the wardens and attendants in these institutions were hired based on their political connections, not on their fitness for the job. The result, predictably, was an absence of accountability and a workforce riddled with incompetence and “graver moral deficiencies.” Spending more money would not solve the problems he had found, Roosevelt said, because “there is no responsible head to any one of these hospitals or asylums; no Superintendent who has authority to issue orders and to punish his subordinates if they are disregarded.” He warned city leaders that, “so long as political pressure is allowed to have weight with you in the choice of employees, so long will the charitable institutions of the City be badly managed.”

So here was the connection between Roosevelt’s humanitarian work and Conkling’s machine. How could government improve the lives of citizens, or be trusted to try, if it was a repository for unqualified political hacks?

Before Roosevelt could replace Arthur and clean up the Custom House, he had to be confirmed by the Senate. The first step in that process was consideration by the Senate commerce committee—chaired by none other than Roscoe Conkling.

Hayes sent his nominations for the top Custom House posts to the Senate on October 24, 1877, less than two weeks after the 45th Congress convened in a special session. Conkling sat on the nomination for nearly a month. He expressed confidence that New Yorkers stood behind him, disparaging the reformers as a tiny minority. “There are about 300 persons here [in New York City] who believe themselves to occupy the solar walk and milky way, and even up there they lift their skirts very carefully for fear even the heavens might stain them,” he quipped to a Herald reporter. “Some of these people would vote against a man because he had been nominated.… They would have people fill their offices by nothing less than divine selection.” Almost sadly, he added that his enemies “were after the unattainable in human government.”

In the middle of November 1877, Conkling sent President Hayes a detailed request for all evidence related to “the question of removing Chester A. Arthur,” including all communications asking for Arthur’s removal or retention; any charges of personal or official misconduct; any communication from Hayes or Sherman censuring Arthur or disapproving of any of his actions; and Roosevelt’s recommendations for the job. Hayes, who was not legally obligated to explain why he was removing the collector or any other federal official, simply ignored the request. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Arthur and his allies were lobbying Democrats on the committee to ensure they voted with the chairman.

A week after Conkling made his request, Arthur wrote a letter to Secretary Sherman, protesting that the Jay Commission had “sought out all that could be said against the officers of the customs, and, of course, took a partial and one-sided view.” He accused the panel of relying heavily on hearsay, and complained that he and other Custom House officers were given “no opportunity for cross-examinations and little for rebuttal or explanation.”

On November 30, Conkling’s committee unanimously rejected Hayes’s Custom House nominations. (The three Democrats on the panel abstained.) Congress had been meeting in a special session, and it expired on December 3, 1877. But Conkling successfully lobbied his Senate colleagues to reconvene immediately, a maneuver that prevented Hayes from suspending Arthur and replacing him with Roosevelt during the recess, which he had the power to do.

Many Republicans were eager to make peace between Conkling and Hayes. In early December, two congressmen presented Hayes with a petition, signed by 15 of New York’s 17 representatives, urging the president not to resubmit the same names for the New York Custom House. Hayes refused. “I am now in a contest on the question of the right of Senators to dictate or control nominations,” Hayes wrote in his diary. “Mr. Conkling insists that no officer shall be appointed in New York without his consent, obtained previously to the nomination. This is the first and most important step in the effort to reform the civil service.”

Hayes resubmitted his Custom House nominations. This time Conkling’s committee confirmed Edwin A. Merritt as surveyor, but it again rejected Roosevelt and LeBaron Bradford Prince, Hayes’s choice for naval officer. Before the full Senate voted, Conkling spoke for nearly an hour and a half, defending Arthur, railing against Hayes and Roosevelt, and suggesting the nomination had been made with the express purpose of humiliating him. After a six-hour debate, senators voted 31–25 to reject Roosevelt and Prince. “The triumph of Senator Conkling is as complete as the defeat of Evarts, Hayes, and the fraudulent Administration is crushing,” the pro-Conkling Sun crowed. The newspaper saw the roots of Conkling’s victory in his now-famous speech at the Rochester convention. “When all the other would-be leaders of the Republican Party hesitated to assert their manhood and give voice to the sentiment of the millions of voters they were too faint-hearted to represent, he uttered the clarion notes that rallied a disheartened and disgusted following.”

Arthur was elated. “I cannot tell you how gratified I am at the splendid victory you have won, apart from & way beyond any personal considerations of my own,” he wrote to Conkling. “The whole town is excited by the event & the current of popular feeling is all with you.”

Despite the papers’ portrayal of the vote, Hayes believed it was just a temporary setback. “In the language of the press, ‘Senator Conkling has won a great victory over the Administration,’” Hayes wrote in his diary. “But the end is not yet. I am right, and shall not give up the contest.”

In a letter to his son Theodore, a Harvard sophomore, Roosevelt downplayed his personal disappointment. “The machine politicians have shown their colors and not one person has been able to make an accusation of any kind against me. Indeed, they have all done me more than justice,” he wrote. “I never told your mother but it would have practically kept me in the city almost all the time in summer and that would be no joke.”

But Roosevelt, who had suffered from severe intestinal pains during the final weeks of the nomination battle, dreaded what machine politicians might do to American democracy. “I feel sorry for the country, however, as it shows the power of the partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests,” he wrote his son. “I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.”

Dejected reformers blamed Hayes for being outmaneuvered twice by the cagey Conkling. As 1877 turned into 1878, Arthur seemed secure in his Custom House redoubt, and the prospects for meaningful civil service reform were bleak. “The friends of reform are alternately disheartened and disgusted by performances that render the President’s pretensions ridiculous, while its enemies chuckle over his inconsistencies, and point mockingly to his tortuous, hesitating course,” the Times editorialized.

As the winter wore on, Roosevelt’s stomach pains grew worse. He was diagnosed with inflammation of the bowels, but in fact he had stomach cancer, and it was malignant and inoperable. On February 7, 1878, he was well enough—or sufficiently sedated—to take a sleigh ride with one of his daughters, and that afternoon he was cheered by a letter from his son Theodore. But the next day, after another sleigh ride, his excruciating pain returned and the family sent for a doctor. By now the newspapers had learned of his condition, and on February 9, a Saturday, a crowd gathered outside the Roosevelt home on West 57th Street, with many newsboys and ragged street children participating in the vigil. An urgent telegram was dispatched to young Theodore in Cambridge, instructing him to return home immediately.

At 11:15 p.m., the patient opened his eyes and his son Elliott motioned to the doctor, who tried to administer brandy through a tube. A few moments late, the suffering man groaned, threw up his arms and turned over with one hand under his head and the other hanging over the edge of the sofa. His wife and daughter were kneeling by his side, next to Elliott, when Theodore fluttered his eyelids, breathed deeply three times, and died.

Young Theodore, who idolized his father, was crushed by the death of “the one I loved dearest on earth.” He vowed to keep his father’s letters forever as “talismans against evil.” Perhaps the family believed Theodore’s crushing political defeat contributed to his demise, though nobody said so explicitly. But young Theodore almost certainly carried the memory of his father’s Custom House fight with him in his own bid to make government a force for good. “How I wish I could ever do something to keep up his name,” Theodore wrote in his diary shortly after his father’s death.

True to his word, Hayes refused to capitulate to Conkling. In the summer of 1878, with Congress in recess, he seized the opportunity to fire Arthur and put Merritt in his place. Without Senate approval the move was only temporary, but Democrats had gained a majority in the 1878 election. A few months later, their support proved decisive: Conkling could not muster the votes to reverse Hayes’s gambit, and Arthur was out for good.

It was a stunning turn of events, but Arthur landed on his feet. He returned to practicing law, and now he had so many friends and connections in New York he had no trouble making a comfortable living. He also owned real estate purchased during his lucrative Custom House years, and when Nell’s mother died in 1878 the couple inherited a modest sum. Arthur’s main focus, however, continued to be politics. In February 1879, he became the permanent president of the Republican Central Committee, which headed the New York City party and was the most important cog in the statewide machine.

Arthur’s immediate concern was preparing Republicans for the statewide election of 1879, the first in which all of the state’s chief officers, including the governor, would be elected at the same time. But he and Conkling also had a bigger prize in mind: the White House. Since Hayes had pledged to serve a single term, the 1880 presidential election would be an opportunity to erase the reforms implemented by “His Fraudulency.”

The man Arthur and Conkling envisioned as Hayes’s successor was on a worldwide tour with his wife and son, being feted by heads of state and hailed by cheering throngs from England to Egypt to Japan: Ulysses S. Grant. The Grants were traveling with a reporter from the Herald, who sent home glowing descriptions of the adulation that met the man who had saved the Union. Other newspapers published the reports, and before long, memories of Grant’s scandal-plagued administration began to fade. By the summer of 1878, a year into the Grants’ triumphant tour, many in the North were calling for the ex-president to run for an unprecedented third term. The calls grew louder in the fall, when the election left Democrats in control of both houses of Congress. Only Grant, many Republicans believed, could save their party.

In August 1879, Grant and his family were in Japan, staying at the summer palace of Emperor Mutsuhito and Empress Haruko. In New York, the state campaigns were beginning to heat up. But many New Yorkers were more interested in a story out of Rhode Island, one that was receiving front-page coverage in the Sun and the Times.

On August 10, Roscoe Conkling’s long affair with Kate Sprague finally came to a head when her husband, Senator William Sprague, returned home early from a business trip to discover that Kate had been hosting Conkling at their house in Narragansett Pier. Sprague ordered Conkling to leave immediately, but Conkling refused. “A few high words ensued,” and then Sprague went upstairs to retrieve his shotgun. When he realized he had no percussion caps for his weapon, he dashed into town to get some. He returned home to find Conkling still there. Again Sprague ordered him to leave, but Conkling demurred, pointing out that his baggage wasn’t packed and he had no carriage. Sprague pulled out his pocket watch and warned Conkling that if he didn’t leave in 30 seconds, he would blow his brains out.

At this point, a carriage pulled up outside the Sprague home—apparently somebody had summoned it while Sprague was in town searching for percussion caps. In some versions of the story, Conkling escaped through a bedroom window, clutching his trousers. However he exited the Sprague residence, Conkling scampered into the waiting carriage and rode off. His baggage followed sometime later.

Sprague, still boiling, decided to follow Conkling into town to reiterate his threat. He found the New York senator pacing on the sidewalk outside a café. “I want you,” Sprague said. Conkling approached cautiously, speaking softly to Sprague in an effort to calm him. This only fueled the rage of the Rhode Islander, who “denounced Conkling violently and told him plainly that he had had enough of his intimacy with Mrs. Sprague, and did not propose to have any more of it.” Sprague asked Conkling whether he was armed; Conkling said he was not. “Then go and arm yourself, and hereafter go armed. I don’t intend to shoot an unarmed man; but I tell you now that if you ever cross my path again, I will shoot you at sight.” With that, Sprague returned to his carriage and drove off.

Conkling refused to comment on the incident, but his enemies were overjoyed. “The Conkling scandal is the newspaper sensation of the time,” Hayes wrote in his diary. “This exposure of C’s rottenness will do good in one direction. It will weaken his political power, which is bad and only bad.”

Despite the scandal, Republicans triumphed in the 1879 New York elections. Conkling’s lieutenant, Alonzo Cornell, became governor, and Republicans won all but one of the other statewide offices and control of the state Senate and the Assembly. In early January 1880, Arthur left for Albany to help shape the structure of the legislature. Republicans had selected George Sharpe, another Conkling crony, to be Assembly speaker, and Arthur was helping Sharpe dole out committee assignments when he received an urgent telegram from home: a bad cold Nell caught while waiting outside for a carriage after a concert had turned into pneumonia.

The only way Arthur could get back to Manhattan on January 11, a Sunday, was to travel on a milk train, which had to stop at a succession of milk stands and creameries as it crawled downstate. Through the window, Arthur could see ice floes floating down the Hudson, broken up by two weeks of temperatures in the 40s. In Albany, his mind had been consumed by the cold math of committee assignments, but now it was suffused with warm images of Nell, the girl who tenderly kissed his eyelids on the Saratoga window seat, the lover whose photo he had kissed every morning in Kansas. As a young man, he had considered her happiness to be “a precious sacred trust, dearer than life itself.” Over time, other priorities had taken precedence. The social and financial benefits of his political career had thrilled both of them, but it had taken a heavy toll on their marriage. While Chester ate and drank and frolicked with waiter-girls in low-cut bodices, Nell had to find companionship on the arms of elderly friends. When Nell’s mother died in France in April 1878, she crossed the Atlantic alone to retrieve the body, because Chester was not willing to leave in the middle of the Custom House crisis. According to friends, “the shock and nervous tension caused by her bereavement and her long, sad journey” had been a serious blow to her health.

By the time Arthur finally reached his Lexington Avenue brownstone it was late at night and his ailing wife was asleep, sedated by morphine administered by her physician. For 24 hours he sat at her bedside, stroking her hair, holding her hand. But the “pulses of love” he had felt as far away as St. Joseph, Missouri, were growing fainter. Late on the night of January 12, Nell died. She was only 42.

At Nell’s funeral at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue, Arthur was surrounded by nearly every important member of the New York Republican machine. Their presence, a reminder of his neglect, must have provided little comfort as he stared at the silver-handled casket, draped in a black cloth with a crown of immortelles, which held the woman he loved “fondly, truly, devotedly, always.” The Mendelssohn Glee Club sang the hymn, “There Is a Blessed Home,” and then Arthur departed for a train to Albany, where his wife would be buried in the Rural Cemetery, just north of the city. Arriving there in the early afternoon, Arthur was met by Governor Cornell and a delegation of state lawmakers.

Arthur was “completely unnerved and prostrated” by Nell’s death, according to a friend. When he returned to Manhattan, he tried to find comfort in yet another late night with Tom Murphy. But the two men did not visit a saloon or theater. Instead, Arthur kept Murphy walking back and forth on 29th Street between Third and Fifth Avenues until 2 a.m., spilling out his sorrow.