I Rose Like A Rocket: The Political Education of Theodore Roosevelt
by Paul Grondahl
Publisher: Free Press, 2004

Reviewed by: Robert B. Ward

Are you fed up with gridlock in Albany? Disgusted with dysfunction? Convinced nothing can change?

You'll find the perfect antidote to such despair in Paul Grondahl's book about events that happened more than a century ago.

"I Rose Like A Rocket" examines Theodore Roosevelt's amazing political journey before he succeeded to the presidency on William McKinley's assassination in 1901.

Scion of a family whose fortune was built on trade and real estate in Manhattan, TR came to Albany in 1882 as a 23-year-old member of the Republican conference in the Assembly. Then, as now, the GOP was very much the minority party in the chamber. His youth, inexperience, and lack of any political advantage other than his own character seemed to destine him for the near-obscurity in which most New York State legislators languish.

Instead, from his first days at the Capitol, the young Roosevelt made clear he simply would not accept such a role. He combined political will, personal courage, a broad knowledge of history, and an intense drive to improve the lives of average New Yorkers into a powerful recipe for both electoral and policy successes.

"The things I wanted to do I was powerless to accomplish," Roosevelt admitted in a letter to his fellow social reformer, Jacob Riis. "What did I do? I looked the ground over and made up my mind that there were excellent people there, with honest opinions of the right, even though they differed from me. I turned in to help them, and they turned to and gave me a hand. And so we were able to get things done."

Indeed. In just his second year in the Assembly (by which time he had become minority leader), TR played a key role in passage of Democratic Governor Grover Cleveland's legislation creating the state's first civil-service law, which reduced the power of political patronage brokers. Adept at playing to the press, he drew public attention to corruption involving a judge, the state attorney general, and railroad magnate Jay Gould. His investigations of bribes and mistreatment of prisoners in New York City jails drew favorable attention even from newspapers in other states.

After a dozen-year hiatus that included service as U.S. civil-service commissioner, New York City police commissioner and famed leader of the Rough Riders in Cuba, TR returned to Albany as governor in 1899. A quarter-century before Al Smith brought the modern, more powerful governor's office into existence, Governor Roosevelt found most power in the hands of the Legislature -- and thus, under the thumb of Republican boss Thomas Platt. But, using political skill and shrewdly building public support, the governor won passage of laws including the state's first general tax on corporations (then, as now, a popular measure). At the same time, he supported free trade and business growth, recognizing that wealth must be created before it can be redistributed. He gave state employees an eight-hour workday, one of the first such in the country. Presaging the comprehensive environmental laws that would come decades later, he ordered reduction of household and industrial waste being dumped into Saratoga Lake and other waterways.

Grondahl bills his book as a guide to TR's political education, and it's a fair description. Having learned in Albany when to push hard for his own way and when to negotiate, Roosevelt went on to be considered one of America's great presidents. He led the conservationist movement, and inspired what became known as Progressivism, whose adherents believed in making government more responsive and cost-efficient by removing the dead hands of political patronage and corruption. (Unlike today's self-described "progressives” whose agenda is often based on preserving the status quo.)

Without belaboring the point, Grondahl makes clear that TR had his flaws, as well. Although a loving father, he was absent from home for long stretches -- not only when public service demanded, but when he simply felt the need to spend a few weeks in the wilderness of the Adirondacks or the West. And of course, while today's liberals like to paint national Republicans as abandoning TR's progressive impulses, no one outdid him in using America’s power to impose its will around the world.

One of America’s most respected political historians, James MacGregor Burns, wrote of Grondahl’s book, "Those who may wonder how a smallish Harvard dandy was converted by that great educational system, the New York State Legislature, into a tough political leader will be fascinated by this sparking portrait of the indominatable young TR."

So, too, of those who may wonder whether real leadership is possible in Albany. There was a time when an energetic, principled legislator and governor could make a difference in New York. The conventional wisdom today holds that such days are gone forever. Don’t believe it.

Robert B. Ward is director of research for The Public Policy Institute/The Business Council of New York State Inc., and author of New York State Government: What It Does, How It Works (Rockefeller Institute Press, 2002).

12/15/2004