“The Direct Antithesis of McKinley”
THE MARCH 1901 INAUGURATION of William McKinley for a second term boded well for the Old Guard of the Republican Party. McKinley had overseen not only a successful war, but also an economic turnaround since the slump of the 1890s. With Ohio businessman Mark Hanna still his most important adviser, McKinley remained dedicated to the principles of competition in the marketplace and unregulated industry. Such ideas were already being challenged by the reform wing of the party—a wing that included the new vice president–elect, Theodore Roosevelt of New York. As vice president, Roosevelt would have little opportunity to shape the administration’s agenda over the next four years. Instead, he would have to wait his chance for the White House in 1904. Until then, barring some unforeseen tragedy befalling McKinley, Roosevelt’s progressive impulses would have to remain firmly in check. This was the grim situation facing Roosevelt as he prepared to leave New York.
On the streets of the nation’s capital, brass bands announced the arrival of military and civilian organizations from all over the country. By March 2, 1901, thousands of visitors had flocked to Washington, DC, to see President McKinley sworn in for a second time, and to watch the Rough Riding colonel from New York sworn in as vice president. Restaurant prices provided a clue to the large number of out-of-towners: the cost of a dinner advanced overnight from thirty to fifty cents. Windows along the route of the inauguration parade went for as much as twenty-five dollars. Seven thousand seats were set aside for spectators at the east front end of the Capitol building. Four thousand of these were placed at the disposal of members of Congress, whose offices were inundated with 12,000 requests for tickets. To deal with so many visitors who were unfamiliar with the city, the Committee on Public Comfort dispatched an army of volunteers sporting red badges to meet arriving trains at the Baltimore and Ohio and Pennsylvania stations. Those arriving with no reservations for accommodation were sent by committee members to offices where rooms could be engaged. When told that room and board at a certain boardinghouse would cost $1.50, one man replied, “That’s not what I want, I only want a place to sleep.” The clerk suggested the cheapest place on his list, which would cost the man fifty cents for only a bed. “Is 50 cents a night the cheapest?” the man asked. “That’s about the cheapest on the list,” replied the clerk. The man expressed some surprise that beds were not available for twenty-five cents, but in the end he took the fifty-cent room. Still, he grumbled that twenty-five cents was enough for a man to pay for a bed in a big city.
While the capital was doing a fine job welcoming strangers to the city, one prominent visitor arrived unnoticed. Theodore Roosevelt was due to arrive at the Pennsylvania Depot at 4:10 p.m. The reception committee planned to present the vice president–elect with a medal to commemorate the inauguration. The medal bore a portrait of McKinley and the words “Second Inauguration of William McKinley” on one side, and on the reverse an image of the Capitol with both Roosevelt and McKinley’s names. There was no picture of Roosevelt, and no special medal made for the vice president. The same medal had already been presented to McKinley at the White House. But when the train from New York arrived on time at 4:10, Roosevelt was not on it. The committee left the station disappointed. About an hour later, Roosevelt arrived accompanied by Edith and their children. No one at the station recognized him, and the next vice president made his way to the home of his brother-in-law, Captain William Sheffield Cowles. The reception committee learned of this and brought the medal to Cowles’s house, where it was presented to Roosevelt. With thanks all around, the short ceremony ended and the visitors quickly departed. Roosevelt settled down for dinner with his family, denying reporters’ requests for interviews. Here, perhaps, was a foretaste of the next four years. The next vice president had been met by no reception committee and went unrecognized at the train station. No medal had been struck for the inauguration of the vice president, and Roosevelt was forced to receive—almost curtly—a medal bearing only the face of the president. The strange events probably confirmed for Roosevelt the absolute uselessness of his next political office.
AS HE HAD IN PAST presidential campaigns, Roosevelt did good work for the party in 1900 by campaigning hard for the ticket. Born only eighteen months before William Jennings Bryan, Roosevelt was an excellent foil to the Boy Orator of the Platte. Roosevelt followed Bryan’s meandering election campaign throughout the country, often speaking to crowds shortly after the Democratic nominee’s departure. Given the recent conclusion of the Spanish-American War and annexation of the Philippines under the Treaty of Paris, American imperialism was a hot campaign topic. Here, too, Roosevelt was a good choice for the Republican ticket. Bryan opposed American annexation of the Philippines during the campaign, although he had urged the Senate to ratify the 1899 peace treaty that had authorized the annexation. For Bryan, an anti-imperialist, it was an awkward position to occupy. After all, annexation had already occurred. Did Bryan seriously urge Americans to depart and leave the Philippines for Japan or for European nations to colonize? Bryan had joined a militia regiment during the war, but had never seen combat, as Santiago had surrendered a week before Bryan’s Nebraska Third even reached Florida. Roosevelt, in contrast, had played a key role in the war, both as the assistant secretary of the navy, who gave Commodore Dewey his orders to move on the Philippines in case of war, and as the hero of Cuba. Indeed, Roosevelt often appeared at campaign stops flanked by uniformed members of the Rough Riders. The 1900 electoral results were even more lopsided than those of 1896. Bryan lost even his home state of Nebraska.
The elections of 1896 had handed the Easy Boss a sweeping victory in New York, but the end of 1900 found Thomas Platt more powerful than ever. Theodore Roosevelt, a possible rival to his power in the state, was preparing to move to Washington, DC, and in his place, Platt had gotten his man Benjamin Odell elected as governor. Odell had been chairman of the Republican state committee, and Platt replaced him there with the devoted George Dunn. Senator Platt even had three more years in his term before he had to worry about reelection. He must also have enjoyed the discomfort of New York reformers as they watched one of their allies depart the state. Such discomfort manifested itself in the grumbling over Platt’s success in “shelving” Roosevelt. This was a word frequently used at the time and one Roosevelt himself wrote to Lodge. Platt himself always denied he had been motivated by the desire to shelve Roosevelt, though. Instead, Platt liked to say that he “kicked Roosevelt upstairs” to the vice presidency. One of Platt’s allies in the New York press made the case in the upstate Lyons Republican. Those who thought Roosevelt had been “shelved,” wrote Charles Betts, were “actuated more by Mugwump malice than by reason.” Moreover, they did not understand how the campaign just past had elevated Roosevelt to prominence as a national Republican figure. This, Betts said, Platt had understood, and the election proved the Easy Boss’s genius. “Time has proven this,” Betts concluded, “and it has also vindicated Senator Platt’s judgment and made his critics and enemies, who impugned his motives, look mean and small indeed.” By the end of 1900, Platt had many reasons to be satisfied.
The vice president–elect felt stung by statements that he had been railroaded into the job against his will. Editorials and articles claiming this appeared in the New York Commercial Advertiser and Harper’s Weekly. Roosevelt pointed out time and again that at the Philadelphia convention he had swung a majority of the New York delegation against his nomination for the vice presidency, “beating both Platt and Odell combined.” Instead, his nomination had been brought about by the sheer enthusiasm of the western delegates. Replying to the Harper’s Weekly editorial, Roosevelt said that New York did not vote for a Roosevelt vice presidency until just about every other state had cast its vote for Roosevelt. “In other words,” he concluded, “I got the New York delegation shut as tight as a bear trap.” Roosevelt evidently felt the matter was important enough to correct the journal writer at length. New York and its Republican boss were shadowing Roosevelt all the way to Washington.
By early 1901, however, Platt was learning a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. No sooner had Odell become governor than he asserted his independence from the Easy Boss. Unlike Roosevelt, he failed to consult Platt over state appointments. Odell then publicly disowned and threatened to veto the State Constabulary bill that would have vested power over the New York City Police Department in the state government. Platt sought to bring Odell back into line by calling a conference of state Republican leaders. Odell simply refused to attend. Roosevelt expressed his “hearty approval” of Odell in a letter to a New York congressman, but the Mugwump press also made clear its feelings. The Evening Post in particular delighted in Odell’s independence and took the opportunity to take a swipe at the former governor. In praising Odell, the Post criticized Roosevelt as basically a coward. “It is the very irony of fate,” the paper stated in an editorial, “that the revolt against the boss should come in 1901 from an Executive who had always been a machine man before his election, instead of in 1899 or 1900 from a Governor whose independence before his accession had led the people to expect a display of backbone.” Even the New York Press, a reliably Republican organ, criticized Roosevelt, saying that Platt had him “in a harrowing fear from the day he went into the Executive Chamber.” Roosevelt’s critics knew exactly which words would cut deepest with the former governor. The Colonel may have charged up Kettle Hill in the face of Spanish sharpshooters, but the Mugwumps still labeled him a coward.
The Mugwump attacks on Roosevelt so early in his term as vice president must have had an impact. Such outsized praise of Odell and criticism of Roosevelt perhaps explained Roosevelt’s later erroneous assertion in his memoirs that Platt had favored him as vice president because of his independence. Roosevelt’s own actions as governor, and contemporary observers, certainly did not support this view. But making this claim twelve years later helped Roosevelt allay the force of Mugwump attacks that had dogged his career since 1884. Time and again Roosevelt had gotten on the bad side of these independent reformers, from backing Blaine for president to working with Boss Platt. Publishing an autobiography that stressed his dedication to reform and independence was clearly meant to answer such critics. But in the meantime, the Mugwump attacks seemed to underscore the very weakness of the office of vice president. Had Roosevelt risen from the governor’s mansion directly to the White House, it is unlikely that the New York press would have made such a bold attack on him. But with the vice presidency viewed as a powerless position, and one from which it was unlikely Roosevelt would rise any further, New York critics risked little by targeting the former governor. Finally, the March 1901 accusations that Roosevelt “knuckled under” to Platt and the Republican organization made it more likely that, if Roosevelt ever had the chance, he would be sure to affirm his independence from Platt, even to the extent of making war on the Easy Boss.
Odell’s success as governor also made Roosevelt look several years into the future to the 1904 election. Roosevelt was far from being the party’s favorite to succeed McKinley, whereas Odell was making a national name for himself. With this in mind, Roosevelt began inquiring about taking up the law back in New York City. Yet, as early as August 1901, he also attempted to nail down support for his own bid for the presidency. On a trip to Minnesota, Roosevelt stopped in Chicago, after which he concluded, “The Illinois people are openly for me.” After his return, Roosevelt planned to meet with both Platt and Colonel Dunn, who had replaced Odell as chairman of the state Republican committee. In correspondence with William Allen White, Republican editor of the Emporia Gazette in Kansas, Roosevelt noted that both Platt and Dunn had pledged their support to him for 1904. As always, though, Platt was an enigma. On the one hand, he and Roosevelt had worked together in New York, and the Easy Boss was not pleased with Odell. On the other hand, as Roosevelt observed, Platt was “growing very old and feeble.” “Under these circumstances I cannot be certain of the course Platt will really follow,” Roosevelt concluded. But, the vice president told White, he would meet with the New York party leaders soon and get a more concrete answer, probably at the end of September.
Dramatic and unforeseen events made such a meeting irrelevant. After his wife fell ill, President McKinley rescheduled a planned June trip to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo to September. On September 5, McKinley addressed a crowd of about 50,000 at the Exposition. The next day, the press reported, the president would visit Niagara Falls, returning to the Exposition’s Temple of Music to greet the public. Leon Czolgosz, inspired by anarchist Emma Goldman, approached the president in the Temple with a handkerchief covering the revolver in his hand. He fired twice, hitting the president once in the abdomen. The attending doctor on the grounds of the Exposition closed the wound with the bullet still inside. Roosevelt received word of the attempted assassination while camping in the Adirondacks. He immediately rushed to Buffalo. McKinley seemed to be recovering “splendidly,” wrote Roosevelt, and the vice president was so unconcerned about the president’s health that he made plans to see his sister Anna at the end of the month. He would then make October campaign trips to Iowa and Ohio—or so he thought. Within a week, McKinley was dead.
Theodore Roosevelt became (and remains, as of this writing) the only president ever born in New York City. Although Chester Arthur, another New York vice president who rose to the presidency after an assassination, made his career in the city, he was actually born in Vermont. With New York the most important state electorally, both parties had long placed New York politicians on their national tickets. Samuel Tilden, Grover Cleveland, Arthur, and Roosevelt all hailed from the Empire State. Only Roosevelt, however, was born and raised in the city, and always referred to himself as a New Yorker. No president had ever been so closely identified with America’s largest city. Oddly, Roosevelt’s New York City origins received virtually no attention in the city press after Roosevelt became president. New York papers noted his birth and career in the city, the eight previous generations of New York Roosevelts, and his father’s contributions to the city, but none speculated on what bearing Roosevelt’s New York roots might have on the new president.
WHEN THEODORE ROOSEVELT ascended to the presidency in September 1901, the United States faced the same problems and challenges as New York City had in the previous forty years. At the time of Roosevelt’s birth, only one out of five Americans lived in urban areas. By 1901 that ratio had doubled, with 40 percent of the population living in towns and cities. Roosevelt himself noted this fact shortly after becoming president. “The growth of cities has gone beyond comparison faster than the growth of the country,” Roosevelt observed. It was true. By the early twentieth century, city populations were booming at a rate faster than the population growth of the nation as a whole. What had once been problems confined to a handful of big cities now tested Americans and political leaders across the country.
Industrialization and urbanization had changed the American economic landscape. Syndicates and trusts controlled entire industries. Working hours and conditions became increasingly intolerable for American laborers, and labor unrest grew. Once only city dwellers had reason to worry seriously about the condition and cleanliness of their food in the face of the typhus threat. Now, with railroads, refrigeration cars, and mass-produced canned food, all Americans faced the danger of the unregulated food industry. As a massive wave of immigration landed on American shores, urban populations exploded, requiring expanded urban infrastructure and larger municipal governments. City budgets skyrocketed. Along with these things came corrupt city management and the growth of the urban machines that both preyed on and manipulated American citizens, especially the new immigrants who were just arriving and most vulnerable to their schemes.
The situation demanded a response. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the country needed leaders who were equipped to deal with a variety of issues: economic concentration, such as trusts; labor crises, such as strikes and unemployment; an increasingly diverse American population; expanding government services and budgets; and political corruption and its apparent antidote, civil service reform. Such challenges required strong executive power as well as sensitivity to eastern, urban problems, aided by a sense of duty instilled by wealth and privilege. But who was best equipped to provide that leadership? Interestingly enough, Theodore Roosevelt came to the presidency remarkably well-prepared to face head-on the problems of modern America.
Few presidents had had such intimate contact with labor before reaching the White House. From his first New York tenement visit with labor leader Samuel Gompers, to his signing of the eight-hour workday legislation as governor, Roosevelt had shown remarkable sympathy with workers and support for workers’ rights. As police commissioner, he had even defended industrial workers’ right to strike peacefully. When nearly a quarter of a million coal miners and related workers went on strike in the spring of 1902, they were met with the hostility of mine owners and managers. As the strike dragged on into a chilly fall, President Roosevelt acted to prevent a situation in which millions of Americans would suffer through the winter without adequate heating. In an unprecedented move, the president directly mediated between labor and management, threatening to send in the US Army to seize the mines and have soldiers mine the coal. Both sides agreed to abide by the decision of a five-man Coal Strike Commission, and miners went back to work by the end of October. In the end, the miners received higher wages and shorter hours. Labor claimed victory, and membership in unions soared nationwide.
Roosevelt had been born into the economic bust of the 1850s, and most recently, he had witnessed firsthand, on the streets of New York City, the effect of the depression of the 1890s. The grandson of New York merchant prince C. V. S. Roosevelt, he was also his father’s son, having never worshipped at the altar of unfettered economic activity. Instead, he believed in, as he said in his first presidential Annual Message, “proper government supervision.” During Roosevelt’s presidency, his belief in government oversight of commerce resulted in the Elkins and Hepburn Acts, which regulated railroads. Roosevelt also created a new Department of Commerce and Labor to promote economic growth and collect economic data. Most famously, the president targeted trusts as dangerous concentrations of economic power that engaged in unfair business practices. In 1902, Roosevelt had his attorney general sue the massive railroad trust Northern Securities under the Sherman Antitrust Act. E. H. Harriman and J. P. Morgan had formed the holding company in order to join their railroad companies together and avoid the cutthroat competition that might ruin them. In 1904, the Supreme Court, in US v. Northern Securities, affirmed that the giant trust suppressed free competition. Roosevelt had won a stunning victory against the forces of unregulated capitalism. Northern Securities was dissolved.
Manhattan left its mark on the Roosevelt presidency. The city had taught Roosevelt the need for strong executive power, which President Roosevelt wielded, from the Panama Canal to the Preservation of Antiquities Act. In Panama, he aided a revolution against Colombia to secure a zone for the proposed isthmian canal. “I took the isthmus, started the canal, and then left Congress—not to debate the canal, but to debate me,” Roosevelt later stated in one of the boldest affirmations of presidential executive power in American history. Likewise, the Preservation of Antiquities Act gave Roosevelt the power, without resort to Congress, to declare national monuments and historic sites. In 1906, he championed the Pure Food and Drug Act, allowing the federal government to inspect and regulate what Americans consumed. Understanding the needs of labor, calling for the regulation of the economy, ensuring Americans would not be poisoned by tainted food and drugs, with all measures backed by strong executive power—these were the hallmarks of Roosevelt’s Square Deal. The Square Deal was not shaped on western farms and ranches, but on the streets of New York City.
IN FOREIGN POLICY, Roosevelt kept McKinley appointees John Hay and Elihu Root, both of whom were New Yorkers, in the top positions in the State and War Departments. Roosevelt’s foreign policy reflected an assertion of American power in the Western Hemisphere, as reflected in the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted America’s “police power” in the Caribbean. The worldly Roosevelt, who had traveled through the Middle East, lived in Germany, and claimed intimate friends in all of Europe’s capitals, also understood the limits of American power and the need to work with other nations. Roosevelt made sure the United States had a presence at the Algeciras Conference of 1906, which solved the Tangier Crisis between France and Germany, when Germany objected to France’s attempt to establish a protectorate over Morocco. The president personally convened the 1905 Portsmouth Conference to end the Russo-Japanese War, for which Roosevelt won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. Students of Theodore Roosevelt are apt to place the roots of Roosevelt’s foreign policy in the West, claiming him as the first president to conduct “cowboy diplomacy.” In reality, Roosevelt’s foreign policy reflected the cosmopolitan, not the cowboy. Roosevelt had a broad understanding of the world that resulted from an urban upbringing, a Harvard education, extensive travel, and personal connections.
When Roosevelt became president, he became the leader of the Republican Party in name only. He was immediately hampered by two related Republican realities: Mark Hanna, and the party’s Old Guard. How Roosevelt overcame both obstacles reflected his twenty years of experience in New York politics.
For half a decade, since the campaign of 1896, the kingmaker within the party had been Mark Hanna, since 1897 a US senator from Ohio. In New York, Roosevelt had used the governor’s appointing power to challenge Thomas Platt. Now, he did the same thing with presidential appointment power, setting up a network of federal appointees loyal to himself. As he had promised as governor to consult Platt and the organization on appointments, he now made the same vow as president. But, he added, “it is an entirely different thing to say that I shall consult no one but the organization.” By 1903, it was evident that Hanna would challenge Roosevelt for the presidential nomination the following year. Roosevelt acted quickly and cleverly to remove the threat early. In May 1903, well over a year before Republicans would select their candidate for 1904, the senior US senator in Ohio, Joseph Foraker, submitted a resolution to the state Republican convention endorsing Roosevelt for president. If it was passed by the convention, the resolution would block opposition to Roosevelt in Ohio and neutralize Hanna. Hanna was stuck. If he rejected the resolution, he would appear to be in opposition to the president and attempting to secure the nomination for himself. If he accepted it, he would lose power to Foraker as the leader of the Roosevelt forces, and he would have to accept another four years of Roosevelt. Hanna made the mistake of putting his feelings on paper, sending a telegram to the president indicating his opposition to the resolution. Roosevelt wrote a reply and, more importantly, released a copy of it to the press. Hanna immediately wired back his changed position: he would not oppose the resolution endorsing Roosevelt for a second term. It was a brilliant stroke by Roosevelt and his allies, effectively securing the nomination a year in advance while illustrating in a very public way that power within the party had been transferred from Hanna to Roosevelt.
Part of the Hanna-Roosevelt feud stemmed from Hanna’s leadership of the Republican Old Guard, those pro-business and pro-tariff conservatives who looked with alarm upon Roosevelt’s reform agenda. In Congress, Roosevelt secured support from a broad spectrum of allies opposing the Old Guard. In the House and Senate, these men reflected various ideological, geographical, and often personal interests: liberal progressives, such as Robert La Follette of Wisconsin; western senators, such as William Allison of Iowa and John Spooner of Wisconsin; and even Democrats such as Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina and Joseph Bailey of Texas. Roosevelt adroitly courted party leaders, followed proposed legislation through endless committee meetings and floor debates, and always attempted to influence events through careful use of the press and public opinion. The archetypical cowboy never backs down from fighting for what he knows is right. This was not Roosevelt, who at every moment of his presidential career carefully calculated what was practicable and attainable. The president also showed willingness to compromise. Roosevelt had at one time favored tariff revision, but he soon realized he could not achieve both that and his agenda to regulate railroads. When forced to choose, he sacrificed the tariff to the greater goal. By doing so he maintained party unity, showed to the public and press a united Republican front, and came to an understanding with the Old Guard. Here was Roosevelt the pragmatic politician, who had worked with boss Jake Hess in Morton Hall and attended countless “Sunday School” meetings with Boss Platt at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan. Roosevelt’s reform agenda, and his ability to achieve it, were born in the smoke-filled meeting rooms of New York.
And when Roosevelt became president in 1901, Platt was still there. Almost at once there came a test of Roosevelt’s relationship with both Platt and reformers in New York. In the fall of 1901, the Citizens’ Union once again nominated Seth Low for mayor. Only four years earlier, still in Washington, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt had watched the Republican debacle in New York unfold: Platt had refused to endorse Low, and in the city the Republicans had suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of Tammany. President Roosevelt was not going to allow a repeat of 1897.
Less than two weeks after becoming president, Roosevelt summoned to the White House Colonel Dunn, chairman of the New York Republican Committee. By that time, city Republicans and the Citizens’ Union had agreed on Low for a fusion, anti-Tammany candidate for mayor. But what would Platt’s and the state apparatus’s attitude be toward Low? In a long talk with Dunn, Roosevelt pressed the state Republican machine to back Low. About a week later, Platt himself visited the White House and heard the same thing from Roosevelt. Roosevelt followed that meeting by writing to Low, “Beyond the shadow of a doubt [Platt] and the Republican machine are doing everything in their power to elect you.” Although President Roosevelt could take no active part in the campaign, behind the scenes his influence was enormous. Before Election Day, he pressed Governor Odell to work actively for Low, assuring the governor that Low would not challenge his renomination the following year. Indeed, Roosevelt continued his role as broker among the various New York factions. Speaking with Odell, Roosevelt said, “I mentioned to [Low] how important I felt it was that all of us should work heartily together, each trying to help the others up; and that of course I knew that he felt as I did—that you must be renominated next year.” It was an interesting and unprecedented spectacle: the president of the United States taking an active role, albeit out of public view, in the New York City mayoralty contest. By doing so, Roosevelt simply continued playing the role he had played in New York City politics for two decades.
Low’s 1901 election further marginalized Platt. Low immediately made trips to Albany to confer with Odell, and even to Washington to speak with the president on municipal affairs. When Low did not indicate that he would speak to Platt, Roosevelt had to step in. “I think Senator Platt is a little disappointed at not seeing you sooner to talk over matters before you make your appointments,” the president wrote. “I wish you could see him. Often consultation may smooth down difficulties, even though the appointment made after consultation is the precise one that would have been made anyhow.” This is a nice insight into Roosevelt’s relationship with Platt while governor, one that included constant consultation with the Easy Boss to “smooth down difficulties.” Low immediately sent an invitation to Platt to “confer with me on matters relating to the city”—at Low’s headquarters, not Platt’s at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Even Governor Roosevelt had paid homage to Platt in consultations dubbed Platt’s “Sunday School.” There would be no Sunday School for Mayor Low.
Although Roosevelt was trying to build a bridge between Low and Platt, he almost simultaneously struck at a pillar of Platt’s power in New York. It was one with which Roosevelt had been familiar since his college days: the New York Custom House. Only a month after becoming president, Roosevelt had used his new power to reach into New York City and remove, as head of the custom house, Collector George Bidwell, a stanch ally of Senator Platt’s. As a machine Republican from the city, Bidwell had often opposed Roosevelt. Moreover, as Bidwell also served as a district leader in the style of Roosevelt’s old nemesis Jake Hess, his position in the custom house violated the spirit of civil service reform. In an awkward move, Colonel Dunn strongly asserted an opposing view to reporters, saying it was the desire of the state Republican apparatus—in other words, Platt—to keep Bidwell. Platt and Dunn even dispatched Robert Morris, chairman of the Republican County Committee, to Washington to press this position on the new president. The move was to no avail, and Roosevelt removed Bidwell against Platt’s express wishes. It was a very public humiliation for Platt, coming in the midst of Low’s election and Odell’s growing independence. Still, President Roosevelt made a gesture to Platt’s waning authority by appointing in Bidwell’s place another organization man, just as Governor Roosevelt had once replaced insurance superintendent Lou Payn with a friend of Platt’s.
Roosevelt, however, continued to reach into New York City and State in an almost unprecedented way. In the spring of 1902, and once again against the wishes of Platt, the president removed both the commissioner of Ellis Island and the commissioner general of immigration. With nearly 60,000 immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in March 1902 alone, the president could not allow inefficient political appointees to remain in office. The New York Tribune, for one, saw this as another “setback” for Platt’s leadership. Still, the president was not finished. Slowly and quietly, changes to the New York State civil service system were enacted. The competitive system was extended to cover more applicants, rules were changed, and in general the Civil Service Reform Law was made more effective. Never before had a president so successfully asserted his power in New York, both the city and the state. As Platt himself would later say, “in some methods of dealing with public problems,” Roosevelt was “the direct antithesis of McKinley.”
It took another couple of years for Odell to completely replace Platt as head of the state Republican machine. Odell was renominated for—and reelected as—governor in 1902 over Platt’s initial opposition. Platt was reelected senator in early 1903. But the situation in New York had already changed immensely. In February 1903, Roosevelt appointed George Holt to the United States District Court in New York. Holt was an Odell ally, and Platt had instead favored one of his own men, M. Linn Bruce. Odell had actually removed Bruce as chairman of the New York Republican County Committee, a direct blow to Platt and a cause of the final split between the two men. Platt responded by writing a letter that journalist Joseph Bucklin Bishop later called “peevish.” Platt told the president that if Roosevelt went through with the appointment of Holt over his strong protest, he would “view it with absolute disgust”; moreover, he would “experience a diminution of that interest in public affairs that has been for so long a vital element of my life.” It was as if Platt were stomping his foot and threatening to no longer play the game if he did not get his way. Roosevelt replied that the sentiment “seems hardly worthy of you.” Perhaps as recompense, Roosevelt agreed the following month to approve Platt’s choice for assistant treasurer of New York, William Plimley. But when business leaders raised an outcry against the appointment of a political hack, Roosevelt withdrew Plimley’s name. Finally, in March 1904, Odell replaced Dunn as head of the state committee, making himself chairman. Roosevelt immediately recognized Odell’s new position. At the September 1904 state convention, Roosevelt and Odell agreed upon the new nominee for lieutenant governor, again steamrolling over Platt’s choice. Platt’s role as boss of Republican New York was at an end. For the fall elections of 1904, Odell, now both governor and state Republican committee chairman, took control of the Republican campaign, while Republicans swept to victory on Roosevelt’s popularity. Platt played virtually no part, and newspapermen barely bothered to ask for his opinion. In the decades-long struggle with the Easy Boss, Roosevelt had scored a complete victory. Platt was finished. Sunday School was adjourned.
BY THE TIME OF HIS fiftieth birthday on October 27, 1908, President Roosevelt was looking ahead to—if not looking forward to—his retirement. His chosen successor, William Howard Taft, seemed primed to defeat Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who was running for president for the third time. With Platt’s departure and friendly Republicans firmly in control of New York, Roosevelt had had little cause during his second term to involve himself with New York affairs. A Wall Street panic in October 1907 briefly drew his attention, but the situation quickly stabilized. Roosevelt spent his birthday quietly, riding alone in Rock Creek Park and dining with family in the White House. There was only one exception: Roosevelt welcomed a delegation of the Hungarian Republican Club of New York, of which the president was an honorary member.
The large number of Hungarians in New York—100,000 by some estimates—was one of the many changes witnessed by the city in the half-century since Roosevelt’s birth. It had become a modern city that would be recognizable even to later generations. The city’s population stood at an astonishing 4.5 million, an increase of more than 1 million in only the past decade. Electric lights had replaced gas along Broadway. The elevated line and subway had also been electrified. Along the city’s rivers, steamers had replaced police rowboats. The triangular Flatiron Building had been built at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth. Macy’s had moved uptown to Herald Square. The Staten Island Ferry began operating. Subways had been built connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn and the Bronx. The Plaza Hotel opened. The first metered taxi appeared. All horse-drawn trolleys had been replaced by gasoline-powered buses. New Yorkers even welcomed the New Year by watching the illuminated glass ball drop in Times Square.
For Roosevelt, however, these were only superficial changes in the city of his birth. He could take pride in his role in entrenching an impartial civil service in the city and the state. He had helped reform and professionalize the city police force. Roosevelt helped clean up both the notoriously corrupt city government and the notoriously filthy city itself. He had advocated health reform and building reform, and during a killer heat wave he had taken steps to alleviate the suffering of the city’s poor. He had helped shift the locus of power in the city from the Board of Aldermen to the mayor, who now enjoyed a four-year term. Currently that mayor was George B. McClellan Jr., son of the Civil War general. Although McClellan, a Democrat, had been backed by Tammany Hall, the mayor had then turned on Tammany and its boss, Charles Murphy. McClellan rooted out waste and inefficiency in city government, began public works projects to improve transportation, and embarked on a $100 million construction program in the Catskills to increase the city’s water supply. Although Roosevelt himself had never been elected mayor, he could take some credit for the greater power of that position—power that allowed McClellan to take on Tammany and usher in reform. Such strong executive power was essential to give future New York mayors the ability to address a myriad of problems in the twentieth-century city.
Throughout his political career, Roosevelt’s New York roots manifested themselves in unexpected ways. In the city he had grown up loving nature and the glimpse of it that the nineteenth-century city still allowed a small boy to enjoy. This ultimately led to Governor and President Roosevelt establishing parks and reserves to preserve America’s flora and fauna, from the Adirondacks to the Rockies. His father, a respected patron of charity and the arts, had instilled in Roosevelt a sense of duty to community and obligation to care for the most vulnerable citizens. Such noblesse oblige underpinned Roosevelt’s sense of government duty to address social ills, from handing out free ice during a heat wave to backing efforts at housing and labor reform. When war broke out with Spain in 1898, Roosevelt attracted to the Rough Riders New York’s college and clubmen, who fought and died alongside the cowboys and Indians from the US Southwest. Roosevelt was able to implement a progressive agenda while he was president because of his ability to balance party factions, a skill honed during twenty years in public service. Ever the amateur historian, Roosevelt even penned a history of his city.
As he looked to the future on his fiftieth birthday, beyond upcoming trips he had already planned to Africa and Europe, Roosevelt sought ways to stay connected with New York, eventually becoming an associate editor at the journal The Outlook with its offices on Fourth Avenue. Fittingly, one of his first columns related his experience observing the cigar-makers in New York tenements, and his backing of the law to stop the “evil” practice. Brownstone-born, Roosevelt’s life and career reflected an astounding evolution of thought about government responsibility. Roosevelt did not believe government could create equality, but he did believe it could foster equality of opportunity. From his first year in the Assembly to the last days of his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt pressed a view of government that reflected his father’s notion of noblesse oblige. Government and its representatives were responsible for the health and “general welfare” of its poorest and most vulnerable citizens. Roosevelt did not come to this conclusion on horseback during a cattle roundup in Dakota. Theodore Roosevelt became the leading figure of the Progressive Era because he was born and raised in America’s greatest city and followed a political career there before becoming president.