In chronicling the influences on his own education, TR’s noted contemporary historian Henry Adams observed that “knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.” In an attempt to know and understand human nature, TR’s political education would evolve over his lifespan. In the earlier-cited Morison letters, the editor parses TR’s apprenticeship years into two volumes covering the thirty “Gilded Age” years from 1868 to 1898, during which TR was a NYC assemblyman, D.C. civil service commissioner, president of the NYC police commission, assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy, and Spanish War hero; and the two years from 1899 to1900, when TR’s hero status reinvigorated his political career as NY governor and vice-president. Redolent of political reform in response to social activism, the “Progressive Age,” 1890 to 1920, overlapped this period, part of which Progressive scholar George E. Mowry—in his analysis of the later GOP schism—appropriately calls The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America 1900–1912. Beginning with his crusades against party cronyism as the youngest assemblyman in New York history, TR’s progressivism informed his entire political career. These preparatory years, when the brash, duck-out-of-water blueblood TR came into contact with Tammany Hall sleaze and graft, are thoroughly portrayed in the first volume of Morris’s incomparable trilogy, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. An accomplished researcher, Morris assesses Carleton Putnam’s decades-earlier Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858–1886—itself the initial volume in an unfinished four-volume life of TR—as a “neglected masterpiece.” In his Autobiography, TR would relate that “immediately after leaving college I went to the legislature. I was the youngest man there, and I rose like a rocket.” Almost thirty years later, Albany Times Union reporter Paul Grondahl would co-opt that phrase (I Rose like a Rocket: The Political Education of Theodore Roosevelt) to illustrate how TR assimilated Politics 101 while an Albany assemblyman (1881–84). TR would continue his political education through his years (1888–95) in Washington D.C. as a reform-minded civil service commissioner and in his years (1895–97) fraught with controversy as the president of the bipartisan NYC Board of Police Commission.
Since—as TR expert Kohn (Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt) conjectures—native son TR was “heir to the empire city” as its youngest and “blueblooded-est” assemblyman, and later its police commissioner and governor, the New York Times and other contemporary newspapers provide fascinating historical transcripts. Famously, TR used his office as a “Bully Pulpit,” a phenomenon which celebrated historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism) exquisitely examines against the backdrop of the investigative journalism of Ida Tarbell, Ray Standard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White. Drawing on the famous allusion from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, wordsmith TR coined the word “muckraking” to describe this journalism. In contrast to Kohn, Hazelgrove’s Forging a President: How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt postulates that the West influenced TR’s development: “The sickly asthmatic son of a rich man in Manhattan was born in the East; the Bull Moose who spoke for an hour and a half with a .38 caliber bullet in his chest, well, he was born in the West.” Channeling Republican “national boss” Mark Hanna’s derisive comment as his title, Texas history professor Michael L. Collins (That Damned Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and the American West)—and Hagedorn (Roosevelt in the Badlands) and Roger L. DiSilvestro (Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands: A Young Politician’s Quest for Recovery in the American West)—persuasively depicts TR’s western influences. The young TR, foppishly duded out in his custom-made buckskins and armed with a monogrammed ivory-handled colt and a silver Louis Comfort Tiffany knife, soon earned the respect of the cowboys he imitated.
In truth, many factors influenced TR during his years of preparation; certainly, as genius loci both New York and the Dakotas lastingly imprinted his psyche. As chronicled by both the early, out-of-print Ella Catherine Leppert (Theodore Roosevelt, Civil Service Commissioner) and the much more recent Richard D. White, Jr. (Roosevelt the Reformer: Theodore Roosevelt as Civil Service Commissioner, 1889–1895) examinations, TR’s six-year Washington D.C. stint as civil service commissioner no less influenced his developing political acumen. Appointed by President Harrison, the radically reform-minded TR fought to eliminate political spoilsmanship via a merit system at the federal level. Having been a New York state assemblyman, he resigned in 1895 from the Civil Service Commission. “In the New York political world just at present,” TR would write his sister that he had made his blows felt, although “every man’s hand is against me; every politician and every editor; and I live in a welter of small intrigue … I don’t see what else I could have done, I take things with much philosophy, and will abide the event unmoved.” Certainly, not every hand was against him at that time in New York, because Mayor William Lafayette Strong had purposely recruited the redoubtable reformer to head the city’s Board of Police Commissioners.
Zacks (Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York) and Jeffers’s equally important, more workmanlike, earlier approach (Commissioner Roosevelt: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and the New York City Police, 1895–1897) both record TR’s heroic attempts to professionalize the corrupt and dysfunctional NYC police department. A splendidly researched and engagingly written foray into this two-year period, Zacks’s jaunt reveals the Gomorrah-like profligacy rife in the Tenderloin district and elsewhere. He also explores other contraventions of the law, such as the ingenuous subversion of the 1896 Raines Law, which sought to ban consumption of alcohol on Sundays outside of hotels. Wearing his moral probity like a hussar’s medal, TR battled Mulberry Street’s Captain “Big Bill” Devery, Inspector Alexander “Clubber” Williams, and other Tammanyites. Also grappling with his three fellow commissioners, Republican Colonel Frederick Grant (the former president’s son) and Democrats Andrew Parker and Avery Andrews, TR chafed as they “meted out punishment [to recalcitrant officers] with a feather duster.”
Notwithstanding his increasing national exposure, so acerbic was his commissioner’s presidency that TR eagerly sought another positon by becoming the new McKinley administration’s assistant secretary of the Navy in 1897. From his equally brief tenure there, TR resigned, roused the Rough Riders into action, progressed to Cuba and up San Juan Hill … and the rest is history. Of those latter exploits, TR, of course, generated his own tendentious account in The Rough Riders. Friend and Spanish-American War correspondent Richard Harding Davis also recorded a rich contemporaneous, on-the-scene account (The Cuban and Porto [sic] Rican Campaigns). More contemporaneously, Evan Thomas provides “an intriguing examination of the pull that war has on men” in his The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898. This “pull” was inextinguishable in TR, who, with typical bravado, remarked to a dying Rough Rider on the San Juan battlefield, “Well, old man, isn’t this splendid?” Nearly a century later and after long scientific inquiry and investigation, western historian Mark Lee Gardner would also produce a riveting examination in his award-winning Rough Riders: Theodore Roosevelt, His Cowboy Regiment, and the Immortal Charge up San Juan Hill.
From his “crowded hour” in Cuba, TR emerged as a national hero and was subsequently elected Governor of New York. Prosecuting his progressive agenda from Albany, TR finally closed the door on his tortuous years as president of the NYC Board of Police Commissioners: Wallace Chessman faithfully documents (Governor Theodore Roosevelt: The Albany Apprenticeship, 1898–1900) how TR leveraged his celebrity to enact legislation to replace the NYC police commission and office of Police Chief with a single Police Commissioner. According to the TRA, Chessman’s Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Power, written for the Library of American Biography is the “best short biography of TR.” His hours would become incrementally more crowded after NY party boss Thomas C. Platt booted the meddling governor TR upstairs to the national stage, presumably to languish as McKinley’s Vice President (1900).
