Teddy and Booker T. by Brian Kilmeade

Author:Brian Kilmeade [Kilmeade, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

chapter fifteen

THE NEW CENTURY DAWNS

You have already shown that a man may be absolutely honest and yet practical; a reformer by instinct and a wise politician; brave, bold and uncompromising; and yet not a wild ass of the desert.

John Hay to Theodore Roosevelt, 1898

Booker and Theodore had yet to meet—they would in a matter of months—and life in the North was a world apart from Tuskegee. In Roosevelt’s home state, Black people were fewer in number and, though they had little status, violent episodes were much rarer than on Washington’s turf. New York’s battles were less likely to be life-or-death and more often fought over who wielded political power.

With Roosevelt at the head, the Republican ticket had swept New York’s election in November 1898. Though now the nominal head of the state, governor-elect Roosevelt, savvy in the ways of New York politics, knew very well that his next matchup would be with a man named Thomas C. Platt. He was the face of machine politics in the Empire State.

Elected to his first political office the year Theodore Roosevelt was born, Tom Platt had known Abraham Lincoln and every president since. He was genteel, his voice soft and low. But he had a rigid grip on the party’s purse strings, and Roosevelt saw “Boss” Platt, not the Democrats, as his chief obstacle to changing business as usual in Albany.

Even before Roosevelt took the oath of office, Platt asked him to call on him at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where Platt, then serving in the U.S. Senate, resided when in New York.[*] The sixty-five-year-old man who greeted the governor-elect was “physically feeble,” Roosevelt noted. Hunched in his chair, his frame frail and his skin parchment-like, “he looked more like a New England college professor or a retired clergyman [than] a seasoned political warrior.”[1]

Platt immediately turned the conversation to the appointment of a new superintendent of public works.

A scandal concerning the expansion of the Erie Canal had led to the departure of the previous occupant of the office after allegations surfaced that millions of taxpayer dollars had been mismanaged. Platt greeted Roosevelt with the news that he had just filled the very important job of directing such projects. “The senator informed me,” Roosevelt reported, “that he was glad to say that I would have a most admirable man as Superintendent of Public Works.”[2] Then Platt handed him a telegram, sent by a veteran Republican politician, accepting the job Platt had offered him.

This was unwelcome. Such appointments were the governor’s to make, and the underlying message was clear: Platt had no intention of relinquishing to a rookie governor any of his powers as the party’s chief puppeteer.

Confident that he was right, Roosevelt took a firm stand.

“I told the senator very politely that I was sorry, but that I could not appoint his man.” He had a good reason. Although Roosevelt held the candidate in high regard, he came from Syracuse, a city along the canal, which would give his appointment the appearance of a conflict of interest.

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