Theodore Roosevelt Read Online Free PDF Page A

the streets of merit-system Askelon.”
    But the great value to TR in these years was in getting to know official Washington and how it worked. He and Edith also developed a brilliant circle of friends there who enlivened their evenings with intellectual discussions and exchanges of wit: the Lodges, of course, and the John Hays and Henry Adamses. Adams found TR interesting but egocentric; he was amused but at times alarmed. He ascribed to him “that singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the quality that medieval theology assigned to God—he was pure act.” Hay, who was to become McKinley’s secretary of state and hence TR’s in 1901, enjoyed the latter’s highest esteem, both as a statesman and the author of the great biography of Lincoln, but in later years TR somewhat altered this opinion, writing in 1909 to Lodge:
    He was no administrator … he had a very easy loving nature … which made him shrink from all that was rough in life.… His intimacy with Henry James and Henry Adams—charming men but exceedingly undesirable companions for any man not of strong nature—and the tone of satirical cynicism which they admired and which he affected in writing them, marked that phase of his character which so impaired his usefulness as a public man.
    On Henry James, who visited Henry Adams in Washington at this time, TR was harsh indeed. What he considered the latter’s snobbish little tales about Yankees in Europe made him ashamed that James was an American. “Thus it is for the undersized man of letters, who flees his country because he, with his delicate effeminate sensitiveness, finds the conditions of life on this side of the water crude and raw, in other words, because he finds that he cannot play a man’s part among men.”
    James in his correspondence gave as good as he got. He called TR “a dangerous and ominous jingo” and “the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise.”
    But at least some of the quality of those evenings of friendship is amusingly reflected in TR’s later humorous inviting of himself to dinner at Mrs. (Nanny) Lodge’s:
    Then we could discuss the Hittite empire, the Pithecanthropus, and Magyar love songs and the exact relations of the Atli of the Volsunga Saga to the Etzel of the Nibelungenlied, and both to Attila—with interludes by Cabot about the rate bill.

Three
    In 1895 TR accepted the post of president of New York City’s Board of Police Commissioners, which he would hold for two years, and his family was able to move into the large country house that he had built in Oyster Bay for his first wife and which was to be the home he would always love. He had to have a residence in the city as well, for the job was very taxing—at least he soon made it so—and he gained an immediate public reputation for his lone checking on police beats at night, catching unwary officers asleep or in bars and curtly ordering them to their stations.
    The job was made more difficult by the fact that there were three other commissioners who by no means always agreed with the policy of the president. But the greatest trouble that he had was caused by his decision to enforce the Sunday Excise Law, which forbade the sale of liquor on the Sabbath. The law had been supported by Tammany, which “protected” the saloons from police interference on Sunday in return for extracted coin. As the poorer elements of the city, notably the German and Irish neighborhoods, relied for a principal amusement on saloon drinking on their one day off, there was a general outcry against TR, rendered more bitter by the general knowledge that the rich could quaff all Sunday in their private clubs. But Roosevelt stuck to his guns, and in the end, despite the unpopularity gained in the city, his tough stand on enforcing a law with whose enactment he had had nothing to do, and with whose aim