Before becoming the 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. cut his political teeth in his raucous home state of New York, working his way from the state assembly to the New York Police Department to at the governor’s mansion. From the start, he followed his progressive impulses to fight corruption, temper unfettered capitalism, and uplift the less privileged. And he wasn’t afraid to make enemies in the process.
Roosevelt’s political journey to the White House began inside the Manhattan brownstone in which he was born in 1858. A member of one of New York’s wealthiest families, young Teddy was deeply influenced by his father, a revered philanthropist who contributed to charities for orphans and homeless newsboys and taught Sunday school. “His father taught him that with great wealth comes great responsibility,” says Richard Zacks, author of Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s quest to clean up sin-loving New York. “The Gilded Age was the most obscene display of wealth the country had ever seen, and Roosevelt was appalled.”
Uninterested in amassing more wealth, the future president shunned the business world after graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1880. He instead shocked his friends by choosing a career many considered inferior to its superior pedigree: politics. “It just meant that the people I knew weren’t from the ruling class and the others were – and that I intended to be part of the ruling class,” he recalls.
Young Roosevelt brought progressive energy to the State Assembly
Portrait of Theodore Roosevelt as a member of the New York State Assembly, c. 1884
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Three years after his father’s death, 23-year-old Roosevelt became the youngest man ever elected to the New York State Assembly. His progressive side was apparent from the start of his political career. The upstart lawmaker investigated a judge for taking bribes from Wall Street financier Jay Gould, backed improved conditions for cigar factory workers and targeted corruption with bills on civil service and municipal reform, even those his party opposes. Still in a whirlwind of energy, Roosevelt was dubbed “the cyclone assembler” by the press, who soon learned that he was good copy.
Tragedy struck when his beloved mother and wife, who had given birth to their first child two days earlier, died within hours of each other in the same house on Valentine’s Day in 1884.” The light has gone out of my life” were the only words he could summon for his diary. Three days after the double funerals, Roosevelt returned to Albany and devoted himself to legislative work, moving 21 bills out of committee in a single day. “I think I would go crazy if I wasn’t employed,” he told a friend.
The devastated Roosevelt, however, declined a nomination for a fourth term. Entrusting his new daughter to the care of a sister, he fled New York and sought solace in the solitude of remote Dakota Territory, where he became a cattle rancher.
READ MORE: 7 unsung legacies of Teddy Roosevelt
Roosevelt tried to reform the New York police
Night inspection by Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt and social reformer Jacob Riis to find delinquent New York City patrolmen, c. 1895.
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Roosevelt returned to New York in 1886 and ran for mayor, but the “cowboy candidate”, as the press dubbed him, finished third in a three-way race. Uncertain of his political future, Roosevelt wrote a series of books. “I’m a literary type, not a politician these days,” he wrote in 1888. But not for long. A year later, he accepted an appointment to the US Civil Service Commission in Washington, DC, where he targeted political patronage while serving both Republican and Democratic presidents.
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An appointment to the New York City Police Board in 1895 brought Roosevelt back to Manhattan. Mandated to reform a police force awash in bribes, Roosevelt fired corrupt law enforcement officers and led “midnight walks” to check that city cops were doing their rounds. Sometimes joined by the press and the photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis, Roosevelt saw with his own eyes how the “other half”—the poor and the foreign-born—lived. “All my work brings me into contact with all categories of people,” he wrote to his sister. “I get a glimpse of the real life of the millions who swarm.”
To tame a city teeming with vice, Roosevelt reinstated daytime use of the night baton, which had previously been retired for its brutality, and armed the police with a standard pistol. He tried to enforce every law in the city, including one banning the sale of alcohol on Sunday, but was blatantly flouted thanks to the bribery of police officers and political machines by the saloons. Roosevelt didn’t necessarily agree with the law – thinking it “too strict overall” – but he felt it was his duty to enforce it.
The attempt to close Manhattan’s 15,000 saloons on the Sabbath angered some, especially the German immigrants who frequented them on their day off. Tens of thousands of people protested Roosevelt in street rallies and two pipe bombs were sent to him. “I would rather see this administration prove to be enforcing the laws than see it succeed in breaking them,” he wrote, undeterred.
He quit his job after 15 months to do whirlwind campaign speeches for 1896 Republican presidential candidate William McKinley. “This is the last position I will hold,” he predicted to a friend. “I have offended so many powerful interests and so many powerful politicians.”
However, Roosevelt’s unique combination of progressive credentials and policing positioned him for higher office and proved popular across the country. “He got a reputation for law and order from what he did in New York,” Zacks says. “And he played it and congratulated himself in speeches about cleaning up the most corrupt city in the country.”
Roosevelt gained executive experience as Governor of New York
Theodore Roosevelt, Port of New York.
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After serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and organizing the Rough Riders to fight in the Spanish–American War, the self-proclaimed San Juan Hill hero returned to New York and state politics. Elected governor in 1898, Roosevelt signed nearly 1,000 bills, including those that taxed corporations, limited working hours for women and children, preserved forests, and improved sweatshop conditions.
Roosevelt’s refusal to hand out patronage jobs and support for tax bills, however, angered state Republican Party leader Thomas C. Platt, whose political machine had put him in power. Unable to control Roosevelt, Platt conspired to move him out of the governor’s office by maneuvering him into what Roosevelt considered a useless position – Vice President of the United States. “Ironically, Roosevelt ultimately succeeded by making himself so hateful to the greedy, corrupt, and powerful that they threw him up to get rid of him,” Zacks says.
Roosevelt reluctantly agreed to accept McKinley’s nomination as running mate in the 1900 election. “This election tonight signifies my political death,” he lamented after McKinley won a second term.
Less than a year later, after McKinley was assassinated by a gunman at the Pan American Exposition, Roosevelt, 42, became the youngest president in American history. He was rightly sworn in in his home state of New York.
