Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
street-cleaning) Joe and all his friends stood stiffly with the machine,
and my side, the reform side, was left with only some half-dozen votes
out of three or four hundred. I had expected no other outcome and took
it good-humoredly, but without changing my attitude.
Next fall, as the elections drew near, Joe thought he would like to make
a drive at Jake Hess, and after considerable planning decided that his
best chance lay in the fight for the nomination to the Assembly, the
lower house of the Legislature. He picked me as the candidate with whom
he would be most likely to win; and win he did. It was not my fight, it
was Joe's; and it was to him that I owe my entry into politics. I had
at that time neither the reputation nor the ability to have won the
nomination for myself, and indeed never would have thought of trying for
it.
Jake Hess was entirely good-humored about it. In spite of my being
anti-machine, my relations with him had been friendly and human, and
when he was beaten he turned in to help Joe elect me. At first they
thought they would take me on a personal canvass through the saloons
along Sixth Avenue. The canvass, however, did not last beyond the first
saloon. I was introduced with proper solemnity to the saloon-keeper--a
very important personage, for this was before the days when
saloon-keepers became merely the mortgaged chattels of the brewers--and
he began to cross-examine me, a little too much in the tone of one who
was dealing with a suppliant for his favor. He said he expected that I
would of course treat the liquor business fairly; to which I answered,
none too cordially, that I hoped I should treat all interests fairly.
He then said that he regarded the licenses as too high; to which I
responded that I believed they were really not high enough, and that
I should try to have them made higher. The conversation threatened to
become stormy. Messrs. Murray and Hess, on some hastily improvised plea,
took me out into the street, and then Joe explained to me that it was
not worth my while staying in Sixth Avenue any longer, that I had better
go right back to Fifth Avenue and attend to my friends there, and that
he would look after my interests on Sixth Avenue. I was triumphantly
elected.
Once before Joe had interfered in similar fashion and secured the
nomination of an Assemblyman; and shortly after election he had grown
to feel toward this Assemblyman that he must have fed on the meat which
rendered Caesar proud, as he became inaccessible to the ordinary mortals
whose place of resort was Morton Hall. He eyed me warily for a
short time to see if I was likely in this respect to follow in my
predecessor's footsteps. Finding that I did not, he and all my other
friends and supporters assumed toward me the very pleasantest attitude
that it was possible to assume. They did not ask me for a thing. They
accepted as a matter of course the view that I was absolutely straight
and was trying to do the best I could in the Legislature. They desired
nothing except that I should make a success, and they supported me with
hearty enthusiasm. I am a little at a loss to know quite how to express
the quality in my relationship with Joe Murray and my other friends of
this period which rendered that relationship so beneficial to me. When I
went into politics at this time I was not conscious of going in with
the set purpose to benefit other people, but of getting for myself a
privilege to which I was entitled in common with other people. So it was
in my relationship with these men. If there had lurked in the innermost
recesses of my mind anywhere the thought that I was in some way a
patron or a benefactor, or was doing something noble by taking part
in politics, or that I expected the smallest consideration save what
I could earn on my own merits, I am certain that somehow or other the
existence of that feeling would have been known and resented. As a
matter of fact, there was not the slightest temptation on my part to
have any such feeling or any one of such feelings. I no more expected
special consideration in politics than I would have expected it in the
boxing ring. I wished to act squarely to others, and I wished to be able
to show that I could hold my own as against others. The attitude of my
new friends toward me was first one of polite reserve, and then that of
friendly alliance. Afterwards I became admitted to comradeship, and then
to leadership. I need hardly say how earnestly I believe that men should
have a keen and lively sense of their obligations in politics, of their
duty to help forward great causes, and to struggle for the betterment of
conditions that are unjust to their fellows, the men and women who are
less fortunate in life. But in addition to this feeling there must be a
feeling of real fellowship with the other men and women engaged in the
same task, fellowship of work, with fun to vary the work; for unless
there is this feeling of fellowship, of common effort on an equal plane
for a common end, it will be difficult to keep the relations wholesome
and natural. To be patronized is as offensive as to be insulted. No one
of us cares permanently to have some one else conscientiously striving
to do him good; what we want is to work with that some one else for the
good of both of us--any man will speedily find that other people can
benefit him just as much as he can benefit them.
Neither Joe Murray nor I nor any of our associates at that time were
alive to social and industrial needs which we now all of us recognize.
But we then had very clearly before our minds the need of practically
applying certain elemental virtues, the virtues of honesty and
efficiency in politics, the virtue of efficiency side by side with
honesty in private and public life alike, the virtues of consideration
and fair dealing in business as between man and man, and especially as
between the man who is an employer and the man who is an employee.
On all fundamental questions Joe Murray and I thought alike. We never
parted company excepting on the question of Civil Service Reform, where
he sincerely felt that I showed doctrinaire affinities, that I sided
with the pharisees. We got back again into close relations as soon as
I became Police Commissioner under Mayor Strong, for Joe was then made
Excise Commissioner, and was, I believe, the best Excise Commissioner
the city of New York ever had. He is now a farmer, his boys have been
through Columbia College, and he and I look at the questions, political,
social, and industrial, which confront us in 1913 from practically the
same standpoint, just as we once looked at the questions that confronted
us in 1881.
There are many debts that I owe Joe Murray, and some for which he was
only unconsciously responsible. I do not think that a man is fit to do
good work in our American democracy unless he is able to have a
genuine fellow-feeling for, understanding of, and sympathy with his
fellow-Americans, whatever their creed or their birthplace, the section
in which they live, or the work which they do, provided they possess
the only kind of Americanism that really counts, the Americanism of the
spirit. It was no small help to me, in the effort to make myself a good
citizen and good American, that the political associate with whom I was
on closest and most intimate terms during my early years was a man born
in Ireland, by creed a Catholic, with Joe Murray's upbringing; just
as it helped me greatly at a later period to work for certain vitally
necessary public needs with Arthur von Briesen, in whom the spirit of
the "Acht-und-Vierziger" idealists was embodied; just as my whole life
was influenced by my long association with Jacob Riis, whom I am tempted
to call the best American I ever knew, although he was already a young
man when he came hither from Denmark.
I was elected to the Legislature in the fall of 1881, and found myself
the youngest man in that body. I was reelected the two following
years. Like all young men and inexperienced members, I had considerable
difficulty in teaching myself to speak. I profited much by the advice
of a hard-headed old countryman--who was unconsciously paraphrasing
the Duke of Wellington, who was himself doubtless paraphrasing somebody
else. The advice ran: "Don't speak until you are sure you have something
to say, and know just what it is; then say it, and sit down."
My first days in the Legislature were much like those of a boy in a
strange school. My fellow-legislators and I eyed one another with mutual
distrust. Each of us chose his seat, each began by following the lead of
some veteran in the first routine matters, and then, in a week or two,
we began to drift into groups according to our several affinities. The
Legislature was Democratic. I was a Republican from the "silk stocking"
district, the wealthiest district in New York, and I was put, as one
of the minority members, on the Committee of Cities. It was a coveted
position. I did not make any effort to get on, and, as far as I know,
was put there merely because it was felt to be in accordance with the
fitness of things.
A very short experience showed me that, as the Legislature was then
constituted, the so-called party contests had no interest whatever for
me. There was no real party division on most of the things that were of
concern in State politics, both Republicans and Democrats being for and
against them. My friendships were made, not with regard to party
lines, but because I found, and my friends found, that we had the same
convictions on questions of principle and questions of policy. The only
difference was that there was a larger proportion of these men among the
Republicans than among the Democrats, and that it was easier for me at
the outset to scrape acquaintance, among the men who felt as I did, with
the Republicans. They were for the most part from the country districts.
My closest friend for the three years I was there was Billy O'Neill,
from the Adirondacks. He kept a small crossroads store. He was a young
man, although a few years older than I was, and, like myself, had won
his position without regard to the machine. He had thought he would
like to be Assemblyman, so he had taken his buggy and had driven around
Franklin County visiting everybody, had upset the local ring, and came
to the Legislature as his own master. There is surely something in
American traditions that does tend toward real democracy in spite of our
faults and shortcomings. In most other countries two men of as different
antecedents, ancestry, and surroundings as Billy O'Neill and I would
have had far more difficulty in coming together. I came from the biggest
city in America and from the wealthiest ward of that city, and he from
a backwoods county where he kept a store at a crossroads. In all the
unimportant things we seemed far apart. But in all the important things
we were close together. We looked at all questions from substantially
the same view-point, and we stood shoulder to shoulder in every
legislative fight during those three years. He abhorred demagogy just
as he abhorred corruption. He had thought much on political problems; he
admired Alexander Hamilton as much as I did, being a strong believer
in a powerful National government; and we both of us differed from
Alexander Hamilton in being stout adherents of Abraham Lincoln's views
wherever the rights of the people were concerned. Any man who has met
with success, if he will be frank with himself, must admit that there
has been a big element of fortune in the success. Fortune favored me,
whereas her hand was heavy against Billy O'Neill. All his life he had to
strive hard to wring his bread from harsh surroundings and a reluctant
fate; if fate had been but a little kinder, I believe he would have had