THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S path to the White House may have gone through the West, but it did not start there.
Biographers of Theodore Roosevelt have come to a consensus that he was really a westerner, or a man torn between East and West. The person most responsible for this image was Roosevelt himself. In his writings, including his 1913 Autobiography, he carefully painted a portrait of himself as a rancher, hunter, and cowboy. Before he ever charged up Cuba’s San Juan Heights, Roosevelt had published several books reflecting his western experience, including his four-volume history The Winning of the West. Roosevelt’s actions in Cuba in 1898 only underscored his western image, as did Frederic Remington’s famous painting Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill, which portrayed him as a leader on horseback in a broad-brimmed hat, waving a six-shooter. After becoming president, Roosevelt published Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, a 1905 work, and his 1913 memoirs seemed to leave little doubt to future historians of the impact of his Dakota days: “It was a fine, healthy life, too,” he wrote. “It taught a man self-reliance, hardihood, and the value of instant decision.” Without his time in the West, Roosevelt stated repeatedly during his life, he never would have been president.
Professional historians took up the theme almost immediately. Roosevelt’s first biographer, Hermann Hagedorn, published Roosevelt in the Bad Lands in 1921, only two years after the former president’s death. Since then, Roosevelt has appeared in books as a western phenomenon. His hunting and ranching have been credited not just with driving his later conservation efforts, but also with influencing his domestic and even his foreign policies as president.
But, however romantic, the western image of Roosevelt is incorrect, and it ignores the central facts of Roosevelt’s life. Theodore Roosevelt was born in Manhattan, not the West. He was raised in the most thoroughly urban setting of late nineteenth-century America. Roosevelt’s grandfather was one of New York City’s richest men, and his father one of its leading philanthropists. Even his love of nature and animals began in an urban rather than a rural setting. In the city, Roosevelt collected mice and frogs and studied taxidermy. In the attic of his Gramercy Park home, he established the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History,” a precocious mirror to one of the institutions his father helped to found, the American Museum of Natural History, which opened its doors to its first exhibits in its temporary Central Park quarters when Roosevelt was just twelve years old. And late nineteenth-century New York was not completely urban. With backyards full of chicken coops and exotic animals kept as pets, the young Roosevelt did not have to go far to immerse himself in flora and fauna.
Theodore Roosevelt’s early political career was also firmly rooted in New York City, not the Dakota Territory. He served for three years in the New York State Assembly representing his uptown brownstone district. In Albany, he sat on the Cities Committee that wrote laws for New York City, which did not then enjoy “home rule.” He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York in 1886. Later, his first act as US civil service commissioner was to return to the city of his birth and attack corruption in the New York Custom House. He served as New York City police commissioner for two years. Then, as governor, he constantly dealt with the affairs of New York City and the Republican boss Thomas Collier Platt, who held court at Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Hotel. As president, Roosevelt continued to concern himself with the minutiae of New York politics and government, from mayoral elections to police promotions and from Republican politics to the war on vice. Even while occupying the White House, Theodore Roosevelt was still a New Yorker, and his politics reflected this. Roosevelt was no agrarian populist from west of the Mississippi. He was an urban progressive, concerned with such issues as civil service, municipal reform, and political machines.
In addition to writing about the West, Roosevelt also wrote about urban affairs. In 1891, he published a history of New York from the time of its discovery by Henry Hudson in 1609. Years before he wrote his famous 1894 essay “True Americanism” in The Forum, Roosevelt wrote in New York that “the most important lesson taught by the history of New York City is the lesson of Americanism—the lesson that he among us who wishes to win honor in our life, and to play his part honestly and manfully, must be indeed an American in spirit and purpose, in heart and thought and deed.” In 1895, while he was police commissioner, Roosevelt penned the essay “The City in Modern Life,” as well as another essay entitled “The Higher Life of American Cities.” Throughout his career, he wrote essays on machine politics in New York, the New York police, and efforts at reform. In writing about the West, Roosevelt adroitly tapped into Americans’ romantic obsession in order to sell books and promote an image of himself, whereas in writing about New York, he arguably wrote about the experiences and ideas closest to his heart.
Roosevelt’s political career grew and developed in concert with the city. During his lifetime, the population of New York City grew from 800,000 to an astonishing 5.5 million, which made it the second largest city in the world. The expanding population strained basic city services, such as water and sanitation. Limited housing forced the working class into ever more densely packed tenements, which became visible and decrepit symbols of poverty, crime, and disease. Such areas became fertile ground for social reformers, and political reformers, such as Roosevelt, took aim at the city government. A growing city and its infrastructure meant that New York politicians oversaw increasingly large budgets. Inevitably much of this money found its way into the pockets of unscrupulous city officials and their allies. There was never enough revenue to finance the building of roads, bridges, parks, and courthouses, and so the city depended increasingly on raising money by issuing bonds. Such bloated debt caused one New York mayor to note in 1882 that the city owed to creditors the equivalent of about 10 percent of the total value of all Manhattan real estate. At the same time, it became harder to understand who was actually in charge in the city. A shadowy, unelected Board of Aldermen checked the policies and appointments of the mayor, who was elected to only a two-year term. In turn, the party bosses, especially from the city Democratic organization known as Tammany Hall, manipulated mayors, aldermen, and city officials. Throughout his career in the city and Albany, Roosevelt championed measures that increased the executive power of the mayor while seeking to undermine the influence of party bosses and their puppets on the Board of Aldermen.
Roosevelt entered city politics at a time when New York was renowned as the most corrupt of American cities. The city lived under the shadow of William Tweed, Tammany Hall’s most notorious boss. Tweed had initially bought controlling interest in the companies that sold printing services and office supplies to the city at inflated prices. He soon had interest in or sat on the boards of half a dozen companies that did business with the city, including gas and light providers and railway lines. He protected his interests by exerting influence in Albany, where he was chair of the New York State Senate’s Committee on Cities, helping to craft legislation governing New York City. From this position in 1870, he helped usher through the legislature a new charter for the city that established a new Board of Audit to oversee municipal spending. Tweed staffed the board with his own men, who came to be known as the Tweed Ring. The board authorized numerous bond issues from which Tweed and his ring stole millions.
As a result, from 1869 to 1871 the city’s debt tripled and taxes rose. The most visible symbol of the ring’s malfeasance came to be the Tweed Courthouse, construction of which was used as a pretext to steal millions from the city. In 1871, the New York Times ran a series of articles exposing the ring, which eventually led to Tweed’s arrest and trial for hundreds of counts of fraud and embezzlement. Estimates of how much Tweed and his ring stole from the city range from $30 million to $200 million. Tweed’s prison sentence and eventual death did not bring Tammany’s corrupt practices to an end, however. Office seekers paid handsomely for city posts from which they would line their own pockets. To protect their interests with favorable legislation, the bosses spread the money around Albany as well. As a result, city Democrats wielded disproportionate influence in the legislature. Beginning in Albany, Roosevelt would witness this corruption firsthand.
New York City shaped Theodore Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt helped to shape the city. He was sophisticated and cosmopolitan, as comfortable in a silk top hat and tails in his box at the opera as he was sitting atop a horse on his ranch. The city afforded Roosevelt a network of important Americans of the late nineteenth century, from old friends of his father’s to top Republicans, reformers, and journal editors. It provided him with an in-depth and intimate education in the ills facing a growing America, including government corruption, police brutality, poor sanitation, poverty, and decrepit housing. Roosevelt became a champion of urban reform, with ideas that guided him throughout his nearly thirty years in public service. He consistently backed changes in civil service, housing laws, and labor relations, seeking to ameliorate the problems of the rapidly expanding city brought about by massive industrialization and immigration. Perhaps the most profound concept that Roosevelt would champion from the 1880s on was the radical notion of government responsibility for the welfare of individual Americans. He did not advocate a government that tried to create equality. Instead, he advocated government’s responsibility in creating equality of opportunity, equality in the marketplace, and equality before the law. Roosevelt’s contact with the laboring poor of New York, unique among presidents until that time, profoundly shaped his ideas, which in turn would resonate throughout American history. Governmental responsibility and equality of opportunity for the nation’s most vulnerable citizens became hallmarks of Roosevelt’s thought, and ultimately, of the Progressive Era that he promoted.
Roosevelt’s rise also reflected the fluid and intricate world of late nineteenth-century American politics. Such a world resembled, to use one of Roosevelt’s favorite metaphors, a kaleidoscope. Throughout his nearly thirty years in public office, Roosevelt constantly grappled with multiple party factions and interest groups at the city, state, and federal levels. New York’s Republican political machine struggled to maintain strict party unity in the face of such divisions, as independent reformers—so-called Mugwumps—frequently bolted the party. Roosevelt constantly railed at these two irreconcilable factions of his party. The divisions often split the Republican ticket, allowing the election of Tammany governments in the city. At the same time, Roosevelt often served as a bridge between the two groups, gaining a valuable skill that would serve him well both as a candidate and later as governor and president. Roosevelt’s experiences in New York politics prepared him, as President Roosevelt, to maneuver his progressive legislation through a skeptical and often hostile Congress. Despite his uneasy position between the two factions, Roosevelt was able to shape a remarkable agenda of reform. Of all his progressive ideas, the most important was that of civil service reform, the simple idea that government workers, from the policeman to the postal clerk, should receive posts and promotions based on merit. His career in public life reflected thirty years of continuous advocacy of civil service reform at the city, state, and federal levels. During those thirty years, the tide turned against political blackmail and graft, and Roosevelt played a vital role in that change. And all of this came about because Theodore Roosevelt was born between the East and Hudson Rivers in America’s largest city.
Placing Roosevelt in his proper, urban context requires following him as he walked through nineteenth-century New York City. Such a tour would start at his birthplace on 20th Street near Gramercy Park, and range north to his second family home on 57th Street, wedged between the mansions on Fifth Avenue and the saloons on Sixth. The young Roosevelt can be spied taking sleigh rides through Central Park with his Harvard friends and future Boston Brahmin bride. Later, he can be seen entering the dingy Republican Party headquarters at Morton Hall, possibly dressed in top hat and tails en route to the opera or Patriarch’s Ball. Even while an assemblyman in Albany, Roosevelt wrote laws for New York City and convened investigating committees in Manhattan. His brief detour to the West in the 1880s requires riding with Roosevelt on the numerous train rides he took back to New York every fall to ensure he kept a hand in Republican Party politics, which led to him eventually receiving his party’s nomination for mayor in 1886. Even while occupying appointed positions in Washington, DC, Roosevelt interested himself in all things New York, from family to politics. It was in 1891 that he penned his history of New York City. And when war with Spain broke out in 1898, Roosevelt did not attract cowboys to the Rough Riders as much as he attracted wealthy, educated, upper-class New Yorkers like himself. These “Ritz Riders” helped to make Roosevelt a household name and made him palatable to the New York state bosses for the gubernatorial nomination.
From the governor’s mansion in Albany, Roosevelt continued to insert himself into the life and politics of New York City, championing health and housing reform while backing fellow New York City reformers in Assembly elections. It was Governor Roosevelt’s very strength in New York City that prompted Republican boss Thomas Platt to kick Roosevelt upstairs to the vice presidency, with unintended consequences. With William McKinley’s assassination in 1901, President Roosevelt could apply to the nation progressive ideas learned on the streets of New York City. Moreover, from the White House Roosevelt reached into New York City politics in a way unprecedented for American presidents. In so doing, he contributed to the destruction of his old political nemesis, Boss Platt, and strengthened the executive power of the city’s mayor. In his thirty years of public life, Roosevelt helped to make New York cleaner, safer, and less corrupt, while New York helped to make him one of America’s greatest presidents.