Title: Theodore Roosevelt and His Times: A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement
Author: Howland, Harold, 1877-
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Theodore Roosevelt and His Times: A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement" ***


THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND HIS TIMES,

A CHRONICLE OF THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT


By Harold Howland



CONTENTS

     I.    THE YOUNG FIGHTER
     II.   IN THE NEW YORK ASSEMBLY
     III.  THE CHAMPION OF CIVIL SERVICE REFORM
     IV.   HAROUN AL ROOSEVELT
     V.    FIGHTING AND BREAKFASTING WITH PLATT
     VI.   ROOSEVELT BECOMES PRESIDENT
     VII.  THE SQUARE DEAL FOR BUSINESS
     VIII. THE SQUARE DEAL FOR LABOR
     IX.   RECLAMATION AND CONSERVATION
     X.    BEING WISE IN TIME
     XI.   RIGHTS, DUTIES, AND REVOLUTIONS
     XII.  THE TAFT ADMINISTRATION
     XIII. THE PROGRESSIVE PARTY
     XIV.  THE GLORIOUS FAILURE
     XV.   THE FIGHTING EDGE
     XVI.  THE LAST FOUR YEARS

     BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE



THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND HIS TIMES



CHAPTER I. THE YOUNG FIGHTER

There is a line of Browning's that should stand as epitaph for Theodore
Roosevelt: "I WAS EVER A FIGHTER." That was the essence of the man, that
the keynote of his career. He met everything in life with a challenge.
If it was righteous, he fought for it; if it was evil, he hurled the
full weight of his finality against it. He never capitulated, never
sidestepped, never fought foul. He carried the fight to the enemy.

His first fight was for health and bodily vigor. It began, at the age
of nine. Physically he was a weakling, his thin and ill-developed body
racked with asthma. But it was only the physical power that was wanting,
never the intellectual or the spiritual. He owed to his father, the
first Theodore, the wise counsel that launched him on his determined
contest against ill health. On the third floor of the house on East
Twentieth Street in New York where he was born, October 27, 1858, his
father had constructed an outdoor gymnasium, fitted with all the usual
paraphernalia. It was an impressive moment, Roosevelt used to say in
later years, when his father first led him into that gymnasium and said
to him, "Theodore, you have the brains, but brains are of comparatively
little use without the body; you have got to make your body, and it lies
with you to make it. It's dull, hard work, but you can do it." The boy
knew that his father was right; and he set those white, powerful teeth
of his and took up the drudgery of daily, monotonous exercise with bars
and rings and weights. "I can see him now," says his sister, "faithfully
going through various exercises, at different times of the day, to
broaden the chest narrowed by this terrible shortness of breath, to
make the limbs and back strong, and able to bear the weight of what was
coming to him later in life."

All through his boyhood the young Theodore Roosevelt kept up his fight
for strength. He was too delicate to attend school, and was taught by
private tutors. He spent many of his summers, and sometimes some of
the winter months, in the woods of Maine. These outings he thoroughly
enjoyed, but it is certain that the main motive which sent him into the
rough life of the woods to hunt and tramp, to paddle and row and swing
an axe, was the obstinate determination to make himself physically fit.

His fight for bodily power went on through his college course at Harvard
and during the years that he spent in ranch life in the West. He was
always intensely interested in boxing, although he was never of anything
like championship caliber in the ring. His first impulse to learn to
defend himself with his hands had a characteristic birth.

During one of his periodical attacks of asthma he was sent alone to
Moosehead Lake in Maine. On the stagecoach that took him the last stage
of the journey he met two boys of about his own age. They quickly
found, he says, in his "Autobiography", that he was "a foreordained and
predestined victim" for their rough teasing, and they "industriously
proceeded to make life miserable" for their fellow traveler. At last
young Roosevelt could endure their persecutions no loner, and tried to
fight. Great was his discomfiture when he discovered that either of them
alone could handle him "with easy contempt." They hurt him little, but,
what was doubtless far more humiliating, they prevented him from doing
any damage whatever in return.

The experience taught the boy, better than any good advice could have
done, that he must learn to defend himself. Since he had little natural
prowess, he realized that he must supply its place by training. He
secured his father's approval for a course of boxing lessons, upon which
he entered at once. He has described himself as a "painfully slow and
awkward pupil," who worked for two or three years before he made any
perceptible progress.

In college Roosevelt kept at boxing practice. Even in those days no
antagonist, no matter how much his superior, ever made him "quit." In
his ranching days, that training with his fists stood him in good stead.
Those were still primitive days out in the Dakotas, though now, as
Roosevelt has said, that land of the West has "'gone, gone with the lost
Atlantis,' gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories." A
man needed to be able to take care of himself in that Wild West then.
Roosevelt had many stirring experiences but only one that he called
"serious trouble."

He was out after lost horses and came to a primitive little hotel,
consisting of a bar-room, a dining-room, a lean-to kitchen, and above
a loft with fifteen or twenty beds in it. When he entered the bar-room
late in the evening--it was a cold night and there was nowhere else
to go--a would-be "bad man," with a cocked revolver in each hand, was
striding up and down the floor, talking with crude profanity. There were
several bullet holes in the clock face, at which he had evidently been
shooting. This bully greeted the newcomer as "Four Eyes," in reference
to his spectacles, and announced, "Four Eyes is going to treat."
Roosevelt joined in the laugh that followed and sat down behind the
stove, thinking to escape notice. But the "bad man" followed him, and
in spite of Roosevelt's attempt to pass the matter over as a joke, stood
over him, with a gun in each hand and using the foulest language. "He
was foolish," said Roosevelt, in describing the incident, "to stand so
near, and moreover, his heels were closer together, so that his position
was unstable." When he repeated his demand that Four Eyes should treat,
Roosevelt rose as if to comply. As he rose he struck quick and hard with
his right fist just to the left side of the point of the jaw, and, as he
straightened up hit with his left, and again with his right. The bully's
guns went off, whether intentionally or involuntarily no one ever knew.
His head struck the corner of the bar as he fell, and he lay senseless.
"When my assailant came to," said Roosevelt, "he went down to the
station and left on a freight." It was eminently characteristic of
Roosevelt that he tried his best to avoid trouble, but that, when he
could not avoid it honorably, he took care to make it "serious trouble"
for the other fellow.

Even after he became President, Roosevelt liked to box, until an
accident, of which for many years only his intimate friends were aware,
convinced him of the unwisdom of the game for a man of his age and
optical disabilities. A young artillery captain, with whom he was boxing
in the White House, cross-countered him on the left eye, and the blow
broke the little blood-vessels. Ever afterward, the sight of that eye
was dim; and, as he said, "if it had been the right eye I should have
been entirely unable to shoot." To "a mighty hunter before the Lord"
like Theodore Roosevelt, such a result would have been a cardinal
calamity.

By the time his experiences in the West were over, Roosevelt's fight
for health had achieved its purpose. Bill Sewall, the woodsman who had
introduced the young Roosevelt to the life of the out-of-doors in Maine,
and who afterward went out West with him to take up the cattle business,
offers this testimony: "He went to Dakota a frail young man, suffering
from asthma and stomach trouble. When he got back into the world again,
he was as husky as almost any man I have ever seen who wasn't dependent
on his arms for his livelihood. He weighed one hundred and fifty pounds,
and was clear bone, muscle, and grit."

This battle won by the force of sheer determination, the young Roosevelt
never ceased fighting. He knew that the man who neglects exercise and
training, no matter how perfect his physical trim, is certain to "go
back." One day many years afterward on Twenty-third Street, on the way
back from an Outlook editorial luncheon, I ran against his shoulder, as
one often will with a companion on crowded city streets, and felt as if
it were a massive oak tree into which I had bumped. Roosevelt the grown
man of hardened physique was certainly a transformation from that "reed
shaken with the wind" of his boyhood days.

When Theodore Roosevelt left Harvard in 1880, he plunged promptly into
a new fight--in the political arena. He had no need to earn his living;
his father had left him enough money to take care of that. But he had no
intention or desire to live a life of leisure. He always believed that
the first duty of a man was to "pull his own weight in the boat"; and
his irrepressible energy demanded an outlet in hard, constructive work.
So he took to politics, and as a good Republican ("at that day" he said,
"a young man of my bringing up and convictions, could only join the
Republican party") he knocked at the door of the Twenty-first District
Republican Association in the city of New York. His friends among the
New Yorkers of cultivated taste and comfortable life disapproved of his
desire to enter this new environment. They told him that politics were
"low"; that the political organizations were not run by "gentlemen,"
and that he would find there saloonkeepers, horse-car conductors,
and similar persons, whose methods he would find rough and coarse and
unpleasant. Roosevelt merely replied that, if this were the case, it
was those men and not his "silk-stocking" friends who constituted the
governing class--and that he intended to be one of the governing class
himself. If he could not hold his own with those who were really in
practical politics, he supposed he would have to quit; but he did not
intend to quit without making the experiment.

At every step in his career Theodore Roosevelt made friends. He made
them not "unadvisedly or lightly" but with the directness, the warmth,
and the permanence that were inseparable from the Roosevelt character.
One such friend he acquired at this stage of his progress. In that
District Association, from which his friends had warned him away,
he found a young Irishman who had been a gang leader in the
rough-and-tumble politics of the East Side. Driven by the winter wind
of man's ingratitude from Tammany Hall into the ranks of the opposite
party, Joe Murray was at this time one of the lesser captains in "the
Twenty-first" Roosevelt soon came to like him. He was "by nature as
straight a man, as fearless, and as staunchly loyal," said Roosevelt,
"as any one whom I have ever met, a man to be trusted in any position
demanding courage, integrity, and good faith." The liking was returned
by the eager and belligerent young Irishman, though he has confessed
that he was first led to consider Roosevelt as a political ally from the
point of view of his advantages as a vote-getter.

The year after Roosevelt joined "the governing class" in Morton Hall,
"a large barn-like room over a saloon," with furniture "of the canonical
kind; dingy benches, spittoons, a dais at one end with a table and
chair, and a stout pitcher for iced water, and on the walls pictures
of General Grant, and of Levi P. Morton," Joe Murray was engaged in
a conflict with "the boss" and wanted a candidate of his own for the
Assembly. He picked out Roosevelt, because he thought that with him he
would be most likely to win. Win they did; the nomination was snatched
away from the boss's man, and election followed. The defeated boss
good-humoredly turned in to help elect the young silk-stocking who had
been the instrument of his discomfiture.



CHAPTER II. IN THE NEW YORK ASSEMBLY

Roosevelt was twice reelected to the Assembly, the second time in 1883,
a year when a Republican success was an outstanding exception to the
general course of events in the State. His career at Albany was marked
by a series of fights for decency and honesty. Each new contest showed
him a fearless antagonist, a hard hitter, and a man of practical common
sense and growing political wisdom. Those were the days of the famous
"black horse cavalry" in the New York Legislature--a group of men whose
votes could always be counted on by the special interests and those
corporations whose managers proceeded on the theory that the way to get
the legislation they wanted, or to block the legislation they did not
want, was to buy the necessary votes. Perhaps one-third of the members
of the Legislature, according to Roosevelt's estimate, were purchasable.
Others were timid. Others again were either stupid or honestly so
convinced of the importance of "business" to the general welfare that
they were blind to corporate faults. But Theodore Roosevelt was neither
purchasable, nor timid, nor unable to distinguish between the legitimate
requirements of business and its unjustifiable demands. He developed as
a natural leader of the honest opposition to the "black horse cavalry."

The situation was complicated by what were known as "strike bills."
These were bills which, if passed, might or might not have been in the
public interest, but would certainly have been highly embarrassing to
the private interests involved. The purpose of their introduction was,
of course, to compel the corporations to pay bribes to ensure their
defeat. Roosevelt had one interesting and illuminating experience with
the "black horse cavalry." He was Chairman of the Committee on Cities.
The representatives of one of the great railways brought to him a bill
to permit the extension of its terminal facilities in one of the big
cities of the State, and asked him to take charge of it. Roosevelt
looked into the proposed bill and found that it was a measure that ought
to be passed quite as much in the public interest as is the interest of
the railroad. He agreed to stand sponsor for the bill, provided he were
assured that no money would be used to push it. The assurance was given.
When the bill came before his committee for consideration, Roosevelt
found that he could not get it reported out either favorably or
unfavorably. So he decided to force matters. In accordance with
his life-long practice, he went into the decisive committee meeting
perfectly sure what he was going to do, and otherwise fully prepared.

There was a broken chair in the room, and when he took his seat a leg of
that chair was unobtrusively ready to his hand. He moved that the bill
be reported favorably.

The gang, without debate, voted "No." He moved that it be reported
unfavorably. Again the gang voted "No." Then he put the bill in his
pocket and announced that he proposed to report it anyhow. There was
almost a riot. He was warned that his conduct would be exposed on the
floor of the Assembly. He replied that in that case he would explain
publicly in the Assembly the reasons which made him believe that the
rest of the committee were trying, from motives of blackmail, to prevent
any report of the bill. The bill was reported without further protest,
and the threatened riot did not come off, partly, said Roosevelt,
"because of the opportune production of the chair-leg." But the young
fighter found that he was no farther along: the bill slumbered soundly
on the calendar, and nothing that he could do availed to secure
consideration of it. At last the representative of the railroad
suggested that some older and more experienced leader might be able to
get the bill passed where he had failed. Roosevelt could do nothing but
assent. The bill was put in charge of an "old Parliamentary hand,"
and after a decent lapse of time, went through without opposition. The
complete change of heart on the part of the black horsemen under the
new leadership was vastly significant. Nothing could be proved; but much
could be surmised.

Another incident of Roosevelt's legislative career reveals the bull-dog
tenacity of the man. Evidence had been procured that a State judge
had been guilty of improper, if not of corrupt, relations with certain
corporate interests. This judge had held court in a room of one of the
"big business" leaders of that time. He had written in a letter to this
financier, "I am willing to go to the very verge of judicial discretion
to serve your vast interests." There was strong evidence that he had
not stopped at the verge. The blood of the young Roosevelt boiled at the
thought of this stain on the judicial ermine. His party elders sought
patronizingly to reassure him; but he would have none of it. He rose in
the Assembly and demanded the impeachment of the unworthy judge. With
perfect candor and the naked vigor that in the years to come was to
become known the world around he said precisely what he meant. Under the
genial sardonic advice of the veteran Republican leader, who "wished to
give young Mr. Roosevelt time to think about the wisdom of his course,"
the Assembly voted not to take up his "loose charges." It looked like
ignominious defeat. But the next day the young firebrand was back to the
attack again, and the next day, and the next. For eight days he kept up
the fight; each day the reputation of this contest for a forlorn hope
grew and spread throughout the State. On the eighth day he demanded that
the resolution be voted on again, and the opposition collapsed. Only six
votes were cast against his motion. It is true that the investigation
ended in a coat of whitewash. But the evidence was so strong that no
one could be in doubt that it WAS whitewash. The young legislator, whose
party mentors had seen before him nothing but a ruined career, had won a
smashing moral victory.

Roosevelt was not only a fighter from his first day in public life
to the last, but he was a fighter always against the same evils. Two
incidents more than a quarter of a century apart illustrate this fact.
A bill was introduced in the Assembly in those earlier days to prohibit
the manufacture of cigars in tenement houses in New York City. It was
proposed by the Cigar-Makers' Union. Roosevelt was appointed one of a
committee of three to investigate the subject. Of the other two members,
one did not believe in the bill but confessed privately that he must
support it because the labor unions were strong in his district. The
other, with equal frankness, confessed that he had to oppose the bill
because certain interests who had a strong hold upon him disapproved it,
but declared his belief that if Roosevelt would look into the matter
he would find that the proposed legislation was good. Politics, and
politicians, were like that in those days--as perhaps they still are
in these. The young aristocrat, who was fast becoming a stalwart and
aggressive democrat, expected to find himself against the bill; for,
as he has said, the "respectable people" and the "business men" whom
he knew did not believe in such intrusions upon the right even of
workingmen to do what they would with their own. The laissez faire
doctrine of economic life was good form in those days.

But the only member of that committee that approached the question with
an open mind found that his first impressions were wrong. He went down
into the tenement houses to see for himself. He found cigars being made
under conditions that were appalling. For example, he discovered
an apartment of one room in which three men, two women, and several
children--the members of two families and a male boarder--ate, slept,
lived, and made cigars. "The tobacco was stowed about everywhere,
alongside the foul bedding, and in a corner where there were scraps of
food." These conditions were not exceptional; they were only a little
worse than was usual.

Roosevelt did not oppose the bill; he fought for it and it passed. Then
he appeared before Governor Cleveland to argue for it on behalf of the
Cigar-Makers' Union. The Governor hesitated, but finally signed it. The
Court of Appeals declared it unconstitutional, in a smug and well-fed
decision, which spoke unctuously of the "hallowed" influences of the
"home." It was a wicked decision, because it was purely academic, and
was removed as far as the fixed stars from the actual facts of life. But
it had one good result. It began the making of Theodore Roosevelt into
a champion of social justice, for, as he himself said, it was this case
which first waked him "to a dim and partial understanding of the fact
that the courts were not necessarily the best judges of what should be
done to better social and industrial conditions."

When, a quarter, of a century later, Roosevelt left the Presidency and
became Contributing Editor of The Outlook, almost his first contribution
to that journal was entitled "A Judicial Experience." It told the story
of this law and its annulment by the court. Mr. William Travers Jerome
wrote a letter to The Outlook, taking Roosevelt sharply to task for his
criticism of the court. It fell to the happy lot of the writer as a cub
editor to reply editorially to Mr. Jerome. I did so with gusto and
with particularity. As Mr. Roosevelt left the office on his way to the
steamer that was to take him to Africa to hunt non-political big game,
he said to me, who had seen him only once before: "That was bully. You
have done just what my Cabinet members used to do for me in Washington.
When a question rose that demanded action, I used to act. Then I would
tell Root or Taft to find out and tell me why what I had done was legal
and justified. Well done, coworker." Is it any wonder that Theodore
Roosevelt had made in that moment another ardent supporter?

Those first years in the political arena were not only a fighting
time, they were a formative time. The young Roosevelt had to discover
a philosophy of political action which would satisfy him. He speedily
found one that suited his temperament and his keen sense of reality.
He found no reason to depart from it to the day of his death. Long
afterward he told his good friend Jacob Riis how he arrived at it. This
was the way of it:

"I suppose that my head was swelled. It would not be strange if it was.
I stood out for my own opinion, alone. I took the best mugwump stand: my
own conscience, my own judgment, were to decide in all things. I would
listen to no argument, no advice. I took the isolated peak on every
issue, and my people left me. When I looked around, before the session
was well under way, I found myself alone. I was absolutely deserted.
The people didn't understand. The men from Erie, from Suffolk, from
anywhere, would not work with me. 'He won't listen to anybody,' they
said, and I would not. My isolated peak had become a valley; every bit
of influence I had was gone. The things I wanted to do I was powerless
to accomplish. What did I do? I looked the ground over and made up my
mind that there were several other 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. We did not agree in all things, but we did in some, and
those we pulled at together. That was my first lesson in real politics.
It is just this: if you are cast on a desert island with only a
screw-driver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go
make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you
haven't. So with men. Here is my friend in Congress who is a good man, a
strong man, but cannot be made to believe in some things which I trust.
It is too bad that he doesn't look at it as I do, but he DOES NOT, and
we have to work together as we can. There is a point, of course, where
a man must take the isolated peak and break with it all for clear
principle, but until it comes he must work, if he would be of use, with
men as they are. As long as the good in them overbalances the evil, let
him work with that for the best that can be got."

From the moment that he had learned this valuable lesson--and Roosevelt
never needed to learn a lesson twice--he had his course in public life
marked out before him. He believed ardently in getting things done. He
was no theoretical reformer. He would never take the wrong road; but, if
he could not go as far as he wanted to along the right road, he would
go as far as he could, and bide his time for the rest. He would
not compromise a hair's breadth on a principle; he would compromise
cheerfully on a method which did not mean surrender of the principle.
He perceived that there were in political life many bad men who
were thoroughly efficient and many good men who would have liked to
accomplish high results but who were thoroughly inefficient. He realized
that if he wished to accomplish anything for the country his business
was to combine decency and efficiency; to be a thoroughly practical
man of high ideals who did his best to reduce those ideals to actual
practice. This was the choice that he made in those first days, the
companionable road of practical idealism rather than the isolated peak
of idealistic ineffectiveness.

A hard test of his political philosophy came in 1884 just after he had
left the Legislature. He was selected as one of the four delegates at
large from New York to the Republican National Convention. There he
advocated vigorously the nomination of Senator George F. Edmunds for the
Presidency. But the more popular candidate with the delegates was James
G. Blaine. Roosevelt did not believe in Blaine, who was a politician of
the professional type and who had a reputation that was not immaculate.
The better element among the delegates fought hard against Blaine's
nomination, with Roosevelt wherever the blows were shrewdest. But
their efforts were of no avail. Too many party hacks had come to the
Convention, determined to nominate Blaine, and they put the slate
through with a whoop.

Then, every Republican in active politics who was anything but a rubber
stamp politician had a difficult problem to face. Should he support
Blaine, in whom he could have no confidence and for whom he could have
no respect, or should he "bolt"? A large group decided to bolt. They
organized the Mugwump party--the epithet was flung at them with no
friendly intent by Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun, but they made of
it an honorable title--under the leadership of George William Curtis and
Carl Schurz. Their announced purpose was to defeat the Republicans, from
whose ranks they had seceded, and in this attempt they were successful.

Roosevelt, however, made the opposite decision. Indeed, he had made the
decision before he entered the Convention. It was characteristic of him
not to wait until the choice was upon him but to look ahead and make
up his mind just which course he would take if and when a certain
contingency arose. I remember that once in the later days at Oyster Bay
he said to me, "They say I am impulsive. It isn't true. The fact is that
on all the important things that may come up for decision in my life, I
have thought the thing out in advance and know what I will do. So when
the moment comes, I don't have to stop to work it out then. My decision
is already made. I have only to put it into action. It looks like
impulsiveness. It is nothing of the sort."

So, in 1884, when Roosevelt met his first problem in national politics,
he already knew what he would do. He would support Blaine, for he was
a party man. The decision wounded many of his friends. But it was the
natural result of his political philosophy. He believed in political
parties as instruments for securing the translation into action of the
popular will. He perceived that the party system, as distinguished from
the group system of the continental peoples, was the Anglo-Saxon, the
American way of doing things. He wanted to get things done. There was
only one thing that he valued more than achievement and that was the
right. Therefore, until it became a clean issue between right and wrong,
he would stick to the instrument which seemed to him the most efficient
for getting things done. So he stuck to his party, in spite of his
distaste for its candidate, and saw it go down in defeat.

Roosevelt never changed his mind about this important matter. He was a
party man to the end. In 1912 he left his old party on what he believed
to be--and what was--a naked moral issue. But he did not become an
independent. He created a new party.



CHAPTER III. THE CHAMPION OF CIVIL SERVICE REFORM

The four years after the Cleveland-Blaine campaign were divided into two
parts for Roosevelt by another political experience, which also
resulted in defeat. He was nominated by the Republicans and a group
of independents for Mayor of New York. His two opponents were Abram S.
Hewitt, a business man of standing who had been inveigled, no one knows
how, into lending respectability to the Tammany ticket in a critical
moment, and Henry George, the father of the Single Tax doctrine, who
had been nominated by a conference of some one hundred and seventy-five
labor organizations. Roosevelt fought his best on a personal platform of
"no class or caste" but "honest and economical government on behalf of
the general wellbeing." But the inevitable happened. Tammany slipped in
between its divided enemies and made off with the victory.

The rest of the four years he spent partly in ranch life out in the
Dakotas, partly in writing history and biography at home and in travel.
The life on the ranch and in the hunting camps finished the business,
so resolutely begun in the outdoor gymnasium on Twentieth Street, of
developing a physical equipment adequate for any call he could make upon
it. This sojourn on the plains gave him, too, an intimate knowledge of
the frontier type of American. Theodore Roosevelt loved his fellow men.
What is more, he was always interested in them, not abstractly and in
the mass, but concretely and in the individual. He believed in them.
He knew their strength and their virtues, and he rejoiced in them. He
realized their weaknesses and their softnesses and fought them hard. It
was all this that made him the thoroughgoing democrat that he was. "The
average American," I have heard him say a hundred times to all kinds
of audiences, "is a pretty good fellow, and his wife is a still better
fellow." He not only enjoyed those years in the West to the full, but he
profited by them as well. They broadened and deepened his knowledge
of what the American people were and meant. They made vivid to him
the value of the simple, robust virtues of self-reliance, courage,
self-denial, tolerance, and justice. The influence of those hard-riding
years was with him as a great asset to the end of his life.

In the Presidential campaign of 1888, Roosevelt was on the firing line
again, fighting for the Republican candidate, Benjamin Harrison.
When Mr. Harrison was elected, he would have liked to put the young
campaigner into the State Department. But Mr. Blaine, who became
Secretary of State, did not care to have his plain-spoken opponent and
critic under him. So the President offered Roosevelt the post of Civil
Service Commissioner.

The spoils system had become habitual and traditional in American public
life by sixty years of practice. It had received its first high sanction
in the cynical words of a New York politician, "To the victor belong the
spoils." Politicians looked upon it as a normal accompaniment of their
activities. The public looked upon it with indifference. But finally a
group of irrepressible reformers succeeded in getting the camel's nose
under the flap of the tent. A law was passed establishing a Commission
which was to introduce the merit system. But even then neither the
politicians nor the public, nor the Commission itself, took the matter
very seriously. The Commission was in the habit of carrying on its
functions perfunctorily and unobtrusively. But nothing could be
perfunctory where Roosevelt was. He would never permit things to be
done--or left undone unobtrusively, when what was needed was to obtrude
the matter forcibly on the public mind. He was a profound believer in
the value of publicity.

When Roosevelt became Commissioner things began swiftly to happen. He
had two firm convictions: that laws were made to be enforced, in the
letter and in the spirit; and that the only thing worth while in the
world was to get things done. He believed with a hot conviction in
decency, honesty, and efficiency in public as in private life.

For six years he fought and infused his fellow Commissioners with some
of his fighting spirit. They were good men but easy-going until the
right leadership came along. The first effort of the Commission under
the new leadership was to secure the genuine enforcement of the law. The
backbone of the merit system was the competitive examination. This was
not because such examinations are the infallible way to get good public
servants, but because they are the best way that has yet been devised
to keep out bad public servants, selected for private reasons having
nothing to do with the public welfare. The effort to make these
examinations and the subsequent appointments of real service to the
nation rather than to the politicians naturally brought the Commission
into conflict with many men of low ideals, both in Congress and without.
Roosevelt found a number of men in Congress--like Senator Lodge, Senator
Davis of Minnesota, Senator Platt of Connecticut, and Congressman
(afterward President) McKinley--who were sincerely and vigorously
opposed to the spoils system. But there were numbers of other Senators
and Congressmen who hated the whole reform--everything connected with
it and everybody who championed it. "Sometimes," Roosevelt said of these
men, "to use a legal phrase, their hatred was for cause, and sometimes
it was peremptory--that is, sometimes the Commission interfered with
their most efficient, and incidentally most corrupt and unscrupulous
supporters, and at other times, where there was no such interference,
a man nevertheless had an innate dislike of anything that tended to
decency in government."

Conflict with these men was inevitable. Sometimes their opposition took
the form of trying to cut down the appropriation for the Commission.

Then the Commission, on Roosevelt's suggestion, would try the effect of
holding no examinations in the districts of the Senators or Congressmen
who had voted against the appropriation. The response from the districts
was instantaneous. Frantic appeals came to the Commission from aspirants
for office. The reply would be suave and courteous. One can imagine
Roosevelt dictating it with a glint in his eye and a snap of the jaw,
and when it was typed, inserting a sting in the tail in the form of an
interpolated sentence in his own vigorous and rugged script. Those added
sentences, without which any typewritten Roosevelt letter might almost
be declared to be a forgery, so uniformly did the impulse to add them
seize him, were always the most interesting feature of a communication
from him. The letter would inform the protesting one that unfortunately
the appropriation had been cut, so that examinations could not be held
in every district, and that obviously the Commission could not neglect
the districts of those Congressmen who believed in the reform and
therefore in the examinations. The logical next step for the hungry
aspirant was to transfer the attack to his Congressman or Senator. In
the long run, by this simple device of backfiring, which may well have
been a reminiscence of prairie fire days in the West, the Commission
obtained enough money to carry on.

There were other forms of attack tried by the spoils-loving legislators.
One was investigation by a congressional committee. But the appearance
of Roosevelt before such an investigating body invariably resulted in
a "bully time" for him and a peculiarly disconcerting time for his
opponents.

One of the Republican floor leaders in the House in those days was
Congressman Grosvenor from Ohio. In an unwary moment Mr. Grosvenor
attacked the Commission on the floor of the House in picturesque
fashion. Roosevelt promptly asked that Mr. Grosvenor be invited to
meet him before a congressional committee which was at that moment
investigating the activities of the Commission. The Congressman did
not accept the invitation until he heard that Roosevelt was leaving
Washington for his ranch in the West. Then he notified the committee
that he would be glad to meet Commissioner Roosevelt at one of its
sessions. Roosevelt immediately postponed his journey and met him. Mr.
Grosvenor, says Roosevelt in his Autobiography, "proved to be a person
of happily treacherous memory, so that the simple expedient of arranging
his statements in pairs was sufficient to reduce him to confusion." He
declared to the committee, for instance, that he did not want to repeal
the Civil Service Law and had never said so. Roosevelt produced one of
Mr. Grosvenor's speeches in which he had said, "I will not only vote
to strike out this provision, but I will vote to repeal the whole law."
Grosvenor declared that there was no inconsistency between these two
statements. At another point in his testimony, he asserted that a
certain applicant for office, who had, as he put it, been fraudulently
credited to his congressional district, had never lived in that district
or in Ohio, so far as he knew. Roosevelt brought forth a letter in
which the Congressman himself had categorically stated that the man in
question was not only a legal resident of his district but was actually
living there then. He explained, says Roosevelt, "first, that he had
not written the letter; second, that he had forgotten he had written
the letter; and, third, that he was grossly deceived when he wrote
it." Grosvenor at length accused Roosevelt of a lack of humor in not
appreciating that his statements were made "in a jesting way," and
declared that "a Congressman making a speech on the floor of the House
of Representatives was perhaps in a little different position from
a witness on the witness stand." Finally he rose with dignity and,
asserting his constitutional right not to be questioned elsewhere as to
what he said on the floor of the House, withdrew, leaving Roosevelt and
the Committee equally delighted with the opera bouffe in which he had
played the leading part.

In the Roosevelt days the Commission carried on its work, as of course
it should, without thought of party. It can be imagined how it made
the "good" Republicans rage when one of the results of the impartial
application system was to put into office from the Southern States a
hundred or two Democrats. The critics of the Commission were equally
non-partisan; there was no politics in spoilsmanship. The case of
Mr. Grosvenor was matched by that of Senator Gorman of Maryland, the
Democratic leader in the Senate. Mr. Gorman told upon the floor of the
Senate the affecting story of "a bright young man from Baltimore," a
Sunday School scholar, well recommended by his pastor, who aspired to
be a letter carrier. He appeared before the Commission for examination,
and, according to Mr. Gorman, he was first asked to describe the
shortest route from Baltimore to China. The "bright young man" replied
brightly, according to Mr. Gorman, that he didn't want to go from
Baltimore to China, and therefore had never concerned himself about the
choice of routes. He was then asked, according to Mr. Gorman, all about
the steamship lines from America to Europe; then came questions in
geology, and finally in chemistry. The Commission thereupon turned the
bright young applicant down. The Senator's speech was masterly. It must
have made the spoilsmen chuckle and the friends of civil service reform
squirm. It had neither of these effects on Roosevelt. It merely exploded
him into action like a finger on a hair-trigger. First of all, he set
about hunting down the facts. Facts were his favorite ammunition in a
fight. They have such a powerful punch. A careful investigation of
all the examination papers which the Commission had set revealed not a
single question like those from which the "bright young man," according
to Mr. Gorman, had suffered. So Roosevelt wrote to the Senator asking
for the name of the "bright young man." There was no response. He also
asked, in case Mr. Gorman did not care to reveal his identity, the date
of the examination. Still no reply. Roosevelt offered to give to any
representative whom Mr. Gorman would send to the Commission's offices
all the aid he could in discovering in the files any such questions. The
offer was ignored. But the Senator expressed himself as so shocked at
this doubting of the word of his brilliant protege that he was unable to
answer the letter at all.

Roosevelt thereupon announced publicly that no such questions had ever
been asked. Mr. Gorman was gravely injured by the whole incident. Later
he declared in the Senate that he had received a "very impudent letter"
from the young Commissioner, and that he had been "cruelly" called
to account because he had tried to right a "great wrong" which the
Commission had committed. Roosevelt's retort was to tell the whole story
publicly, closing with this delightful passage:

"High-minded, sensitive Mr. Gorman. Clinging, trustful Mr. Gorman.
Nothing could shake his belief in the "bright young man." Apparently he
did not even try to find out his name--if he had a name; in fact, his
name like everything else about him, remains to this day wrapped in the
Stygian mantle of an abysmal mystery. Still less has Mr. Gorman tried to
verify the statements made to him. It is enough for him that they were
made. No harsh suspicion, no stern demand for evidence or proof, appeals
to his artless and unspoiled soul. He believes whatever he is told, even
when he has forgotten the name of the teller, or never knew it. It would
indeed be difficult to find an instance of a more abiding confidence in
human nature--even in anonymous human nature. And this is the end of the
tale of the Arcadian Mr. Gorman and his elusive friend, the bright young
man without a name."

Even so near the beginning of his career, Roosevelt showed himself
perfectly fearless in attack. He would as soon enter the lists against a
Senator as a Congressman, as soon challenge a Cabinet member as either.
He did not even hesitate to make it uncomfortable for the President to
whom he owed his continuance in office. His only concern was for the
honor of the public service which he was in office to defend.

One day he appeared at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Civil
Service Reform Association. George William Curtis was presiding, and
Roosevelt's old friend, George Haven Putnam, who tells the story, was
also present. Roosevelt began by hurling a solemn but hearty imprecation
at the head of the Postmaster General. He went on to explain that his
explosive wrath was due to the fact that that particular gentleman was
the most pernicious of all the enemies of the merit system. It was one
of the functions of the Civil Service Commission, as Roosevelt saw it,
to put a stop to improper political activities by Federal employees.
Such activities were among the things that the Civil Service law was
intended to prevent. They strengthened the hands of the political
machines and the bosses, and at the same time weakened the efficiency of
the service. Roosevelt had from time to time reported to the Postmaster
General what some of the Post Office employees were doing in political
ways to the detriment of the service. His account of what happened was
this:

"I placed before the Postmaster-General sworn statements in regard to
these political activities and the only reply I could secure was,
'This is all second-hand evidence.' Then I went up to Baltimore at
the invitation of our good friend, a member of the National Committee,
Charles J. Bonaparte. Bonaparte said that he could bring me into direct
touch with some of the matters complained about. He took me to the
primary meetings with some associate who knew by name the carriers and
the customs officials. I was able to see going on the work of political
assessments, and I heard the instructions given to the carriers and
others in regard to the moneys that they were to collect. I got the
names of some of these men recorded in my memorandum book. I then
went back to Washington, swore myself in as a witness before myself as
Commissioner, and sent the sworn statement to the Postmaster-General
with the word, 'This at least is firsthand evidence.' I still got no
reply, and after waiting a few days, I put the whole material before
the President with a report. This report has been pigeonholed by the
President, and I have now come to New York to see what can be done to
get the evidence before the public. You will understand that the head
of a department, having made a report to the President, can do nothing
further with the material until the President permits."

Roosevelt went back to Washington with the sage advice to ask the Civil
Service Committee of the House to call upon him to give evidence in
regard to the working of the Civil Service Act. He could then get into
the record his first-hand evidence as well as a general statement of
the bad practices which were going on. This evidence, when printed as
a report of the congressional committee, could be circulated by the
Association. Roosevelt bettered the advice by asking to have the
Postmaster General called before the committee at the same time as
himself. This was done, but that timid politician replied to the
Chairman of the committee that "he would hold himself at the service
of the Committee for any date on which Mr. Roosevelt was not to be
present." The politicians with uneasy consciences were getting a little
wary about face-to-face encounters with the young fighter. Nevertheless
Roosevelt's testimony was given and circulated broadcast, as Major
Putnam writes, "much to the dissatisfaction of the Postmaster General
and probably of the President."

The six years which Roosevelt spent on the Civil Service Commission
were for him years of splendid training in the methods and practices
of political life. What he learned then stood him in good stead when he
came to the Presidency. Those years of Roosevelt's gave an impetus to
the cause of civil reform which far surpassed anything it had received
until his time. Indeed, it is probably not unfair to say that it has
received no greater impulse since.



CHAPTER IV. HAROUN AL ROOSEVELT

In 1895, at the age of thirty-six, Roosevelt was asked by Mayor Strong
of New York City, who had just been elected on an anti-Tammany ticket,
to become a member of his Administration. Mayor Strong wanted him for
Street Cleaning Commissioner. Roosevelt definitely refused that office,
on the ground that he had no special fitness for it, but accepted
readily the Mayor's subsequent proposal that he should become President
of the Police Commission, knowing that there was a job that he could do.

There was plenty of work to be done in the Police Department. The
conditions under which it must be done were dishearteningly unfavorable.
In the first place, the whole scheme of things was wrong. The Police
Department was governed by one of those bi-partisan commissions which
well-meaning theorists are wont sometimes to set up when they think that
the important thing in government is to have things arranged so that
nobody can do anything harmful. The result often is that nobody can do
anything at all. There were four Commissioners, two supposed to belong
to one party and two to the other. There was also a Chief of Police,
appointed by the Commission, who could not be removed without a trial
subject to review by the courts. The scheme put a premium on intriguing
and obstruction. It was far inferior to the present plan of a single
Commissioner with full power, subject only to the Mayor who appoints
him.

But there is an interesting lesson to be learned from a comparison
between the New York Police Department as it is today and as it was
twenty-five years ago. Then the scheme of organization was thoroughly
bad--and the department was at its high-water mark of honest and
effective activity. Now the scheme of organization is excellent--but the
less said about the way it works the better. The answer to the riddle is
this: today the New York police force is headed by Tammany; the name of
the particular Tammany man who is Commissioner does not matter. In those
days the head was Roosevelt.

There were many good men on the force then as now. What Roosevelt
said of the men of his time is as true today: "There are no better men
anywhere than the men of the New York police force; and when they go bad
it is because the system is wrong, and because they are not given the
chance to do the good work they can do and would rather do." The first
fight that Roosevelt found on his hands was to keep politics and every
kind of favoritism absolutely out of the force. During his six years as
Civil Service Commissioner he had learned much about the way to get good
men into the public service. He was now able to put his own theories
into practice. His method was utterly simple and incontestably right.
"As far as was humanly possible, the appointments and promotions were
made without regard to any question except the fitness of the man and
the needs of the service." That was all. "We paid," he said, "not the
slightest attention to a man's politics or creed, or where he was born,
so long as he was an American citizen." But it was not easy to convince
either the politicians or the public that the Commission really meant
what it said. In view of the long record of unblushing corruption in
connection with every activity in the Police Department, and of the
existence, which was a matter of common knowledge, of a regular tariff
for appointments and promotions, it is little wonder that the news that
every one on, or desiring to get on, the force would have a square deal
was received with scepticism. But such was the fact. Roosevelt brought
the whole situation out into the open, gave the widest possible
publicity to what the Commission was doing, and went hotly after any
intimation of corruption.

One secret of his success here as everywhere else was that he did things
himself. He knew things of his own knowledge. One evening he went
down to the Bowery to speak at a branch of the Young Men's Christian
Association. There he met a young Jew, named Raphael, who had recently
displayed unusual courage and physical prowess in rescuing women and
children from a burning building. Roosevelt suggested that he try
the examination for entrance to the force. Young Raphael did so, was
successful, and became a policeman of the best type. He and his family,
said Roosevelt, "have been close friends of mine ever since." Another
comment which he added is delicious and illuminating: "To show our
community of feeling and our grasp of the facts of life, I may mention
that we were almost the only men in the Police Department who picked
Fitzsimmons as a winner against Corbett." There is doubtless much in
this little incident shocking to the susceptibilities of many who would
consider themselves among the "best" people. But Roosevelt would care
little for that. He was a real democrat; and to his great soul there was
nothing either incongruous or undesirable in having--and in admitting
that he had--close friends in an East Side Jewish family just over from
Russia. He believed, too, in "the strenuous life," in boxing and in
prize fighting when it was clean. He could meet a subordinate as man to
man on the basis of such a personal matter as their respective judgment
of two prize fighters, without relaxing in the slightest degree their
official relations. He was a man of realities, who knew how to preserve
the real distinctions of life without insisting on the artificial ones.

One of the best allies that Roosevelt had was Jacob A. Riis, that
extraordinary man with the heart of a child, the courage of a lion, and
the spirit of a crusader, who came from Denmark as an immigrant, tramped
the streets of New York and the country roads without a place to lay his
head, became one of the best police reporters New York ever knew,
and grew to be a flaming force for righteousness in the city of his
adoption. His book, "How the Other Half Lives", did more to clean up
the worst slums of the city than any other single thing. When the book
appeared, Roosevelt went to Mr. Riis's office, found him out, and left
a card which said simply, "I have read your book. I have come down
to help." When Roosevelt became Police Commissioner, Riis was in the
Tribune Police Bureau in Mulberry Street, opposite Police Headquarters,
already a well valued friend. Roosevelt took him for guide, and together
they tramped about the dark spots of the city in the night hours when
the underworld slips its mask and bares its arm to strike. Roosevelt
had to know for himself. He considered that he had two duties as Police
Commissioner: one to make the police force an honest and effective
public servant; the other to use his position "to help in making the
city a better place in which to live and work for those to whom the
conditions of life and labor were hardest." These night wanderings of
"Haroun al Roosevelt," as some one successfully ticketed him in allusion
to the great Caliph's similar expeditions, were powerful aids to the
tightening up of discipline and to the encouragement of good work by
patrolmen and roundsmen. The unfaithful or the easy-going man on the
beat, who allowed himself to be beguiled by the warmth and cheer of a
saloon back-room, or to wander away from his duty for his own purposes,
was likely to be confronted by the black slouch hat and the gleaming
spectacles of a tough-set figure that he knew as the embodiment of
relentless justice. But the faithful knew no less surely that he was
their best friend and champion.

In the old days of "the system," not only appointment to the force and
promotion, but recognition of exceptional achievement went by favor. The
policeman who risked his life in the pursuit of duty and accomplished
some big thing against great odds could not be sure of the reward to
which he was entitled unless he had political pull. It was even the rule
in the Department that the officer who spoiled his uniform in rescuing
man, woman, or child from the waters of the river must get a new one
at his own expense. "The system" knew neither justice nor fair play. It
knew nothing but the cynical phrase of Richard Croker, Tammany Hall's
famous boss, "my own pocket all the time." But Roosevelt changed all
that. He had not been in Mulberry Street a month before that despicable
rule about the uniform was blotted out. His whole term of office on the
Police Board was marked by acts of recognition of bravery and faithful
service. Many times he had to dig the facts out for himself or ran upon
them by accident. There was no practice in the Department of recording
the good work done by the men on the force so that whoever would might
read.

Roosevelt enjoyed this part of his task heartily. He believed vigorously
in courage, hardihood, and daring. What is more, he believed with his
whole soul in men. It filled him with pure joy when he discovered a man
of the true stalwart breed who held his own life as nothing when his
duty was at stake.

During his two years' service, he and his fellow Commissioners singled
out more than a hundred men for special mention because of some feat of
heroism. Two cases which he describes in his "Autobiography" are typical
of the rest. One was that of an old fellow, a veteran of the Civil War,
who was a roundsman. Roosevelt noticed one day that he had saved a woman
from drowning and called him before him to investigate the matter. The
veteran officer was not a little nervous and agitated as he produced his
record. He had grown gray in the service and had performed feat after
feat of heroism; but his complete lack of political backing had kept him
from further promotion. In twenty-two years on the force he had saved
some twenty-five persons from drowning, to say nothing of rescuing
several from burning buildings. Twice Congress had passed special
acts to permit the Secretary of the Treasury to give him a medal for
distinguished gallantry in saving life. He had received other medals
from the Life Saving Society and from the Police Department itself. The
one thing that he could not achieve was adequate promotion, although his
record was spotless. When Roosevelt's attention was attracted to him,
he received his promotion then and there. "It may be worth mentioning,"
says Roosevelt, "that he kept on saving life after he was given his
sergeantcy."

The other case was that of a patrolman who seemed to have fallen into
the habit of catching burglars. Roosevelt noticed that he caught two
in successive weeks, the second time under unusual conditions. The
policeman saw the burglar emerging from a house soon after midnight and
gave chase. The fugitive ran toward Park Avenue. The New York Central
Railroad runs under that avenue, and there is a succession of openings
in the top of the tunnel. The burglar took a desperate chance by
dropping through one of the openings, at the imminent risk of breaking
his neck. "Now the burglar," says Roosevelt, "was running for his
liberty, and it was the part of wisdom for him to imperil life and
limb; but the policeman was merely doing his duty, and nobody could
have blamed him for not taking the jump. However, he jumped; and in this
particular case the hand of the Lord was heavy upon the unrighteous. The
burglar had the breath knocked out of him, and the 'cop' didn't. When
his victim could walk, the officer trotted him around to the station
house." When Roosevelt had discovered that the patrolman's record showed
him to be sober, trustworthy, and strictly attentive to duty, he secured
his promotion at once.

So the Police Commission, during those two years, under the driving
force of Roosevelt's example and spirit, went about the regeneration of
the force whose former proud title of "The Finest" had been besmirched
by those who should have been its champions and defenders. Politics,
favoritism, and corruption were knocked out of the department with all
the thoroughness that the absurd bipartisan scheme of administration
would permit.

The most spectacular fight of all was against the illegal operations of
the saloons. The excise law forbade the sale of liquor on Sunday.
But the police, under orders from "higher up," enforced the law with
discretion. The saloons which paid blackmail, or which enjoyed the
protection of some powerful Tammany chieftain, sold liquor on Sunday
with impunity. Only those whose owners were recalcitrant or without
influence were compelled to obey the law.

Now a goodly proportion of the population of New York, as of any great
city, objects strenuously to having its personal habits interfered with
by the community. This is just as true now in the days of prohibition as
it was then in the days of "Sunday closing." So when Roosevelt came
into office with the simple, straightforward conviction that laws on the
statute books were intended to be enforced and proceeded to close all
the saloons on Sunday, the result was inevitable. The professional
politicians foamed at the mouth. The yellow press shrieked and lied.
The saloon-keepers and the sharers of their illicit profits wriggled and
squirmed. But the saloons were closed. The law was enforced without fear
or favor. The Sunday sale of liquor disappeared from the city, until a
complaisant judge, ruling upon the provision of the law which permitted
drink to be sold with a meal, decreed that one pretzel, even when
accompanied by seventeen beers, made a "meal." No amount of honesty and
fearlessness in the enforcement of the law could prevail against such
judicial aid and comfort to the cause of nullification. The main purpose
of Roosevelt's fight for Sunday closing, the stopping of blackmail, was,
however, achieved. A standard of law enforcement was set which shows
what can be done even with an unpopular law, and in New York City
itself, if the will to deal honestly and without cowardice is there.

So the young man who was "ever a fighter" went on his way, fighting evil
to the death wherever he found it, achieving results, making friends
eagerly and enemies blithely, learning, broadening, growing. Already he
had made a distinct impression upon his times.



CHAPTER V. FIGHTING AND BREAKFASTING WITH PLATT

From the New York Police Department Roosevelt was called by President
McKinley to Washington in 1897, to become Assistant Secretary of the
Navy. After a year there--the story of which belongs elsewhere in this
volume--he resigned to go to Cuba as Lieutenant-Colonel of the Rough
Riders. He was just as prominent in that war for liberty and justice
as the dimensions of the conflict permitted. He was accustomed in after
years to say with deprecating humor, when talking to veterans of the
Civil War, "It wasn't much of a war, but it was all the war we had." It
made him Governor of New York.

When he landed with his regiment at Montauk Point from Cuba, he was met
by two delegations. One consisted of friends from his own State who were
political independents; the other came from the head of the Republican
political machine.

Both wanted him as a candidate for Governor. The independents were
anxious to have him make a campaign against the Old Guard of both the
standard parties, fighting Richard Croker, the cynical Tammany boss, on
the one side, and Thomas C. Platt, the "easy boss" of the Republicans,
on the other. Tom Platt did not want him at all. But he did want to win
the election, and he knew that he must have something superlatively
fine to offer, if he was to have any hope of carrying the discredited
Republican party to victory. So he swallowed whatever antipathy he may
have had and offered the nomination to Roosevelt. This was before the
days when the direct primary gave the plain voters an opportunity to
upset the calculations of a political boss.

Senator Platt's emissary, Lemuel Ely Quigg, in a two hours' conversation
in the tent at Montauk, asked some straight-from-the-shoulder questions.
The answers he received were just as unequivocal. Mr. Quigg wanted a
plain statement as to whether or not Roosevelt wanted the nomination.
He wanted to know what Roosevelt's attitude would be toward the
organization in the event of his election, whether or not he would "make
war" on Mr. Platt and his friends, or whether he would confer with them
and give fair consideration to their point of view as to party
policy and public interest. In short, he wanted a frank definition of
Roosevelt's attitude towards existing party conditions. He got precisely
that. Here it is, in Roosevelt's own words:

"I replied that I should like to be nominated, and if nominated would
promise to throw myself into the campaign with all possible energy.
I said that I should not make war on Mr. Platt or anybody else if
war could be avoided; that what I wanted was to be Governor and not a
faction leader; that I certainly would confer with the organization
men, as with everybody else who seemed to me to have knowledge of
and interest in public affairs, and that as to Mr. Platt and the
organization leaders, I would do so in the sincere hope that there might
always result harmony of opinion and purpose; but that while I would try
to get on well with the organization, the organization must with equal
sincerity strive to do what I regarded as essential for the public good;
and that in every case, after full consideration of what everybody had
to say who might possess real knowledge of the matter, I should have to
act finally as my own judgment and conscience dictated and administer
the State government as I thought it ought to be administered.... I told
him to tell the Senator that while I would talk freely with him, and
had no intention of becoming a factional leader with a personal
organization, yet I must have direct personal relations with everybody,
and get their views at first hand whenever I so desired, because I could
not have one man speaking for all." *

     *Autobiography (Scribner), pp. 271-72.

This was straight Roosevelt talk. It was probably the first time that
the "easy boss" had received such a response to his overtures. History
does not record how he liked it; but at least he accepted it. Subsequent
events suggest that he was either unwilling to believe or incapable of
understanding that the Colonel of the Rough Riders meant precisely what
he said. But Platt found out his mistake. He was not the first or the
last politician to have that experience.

So Roosevelt was nominated, made a gruelling campaign, was elected by
a small but sufficient majority, in a year when any other Republican
candidate would probably have been "snowed under," and became Governor
seventeen years after he entered public life. He was now forty years
old.

The governorship of Theodore Roosevelt was marked by a deal of fine
constructive legislation and administration. But it was even more
notable for the new standard which it set for the relationship in which
the executive of a great State should stand to his office, to the public
welfare, to private interests, and to the leaders of his party. Before
Roosevelt's election there was need for a revision of the standard. In
those days it was accepted as a matter of course, at least in
practice, that the party boss was the overlord of the constitutional
representatives of the people. Appointments were made primarily for
the good of the party and only incidentally in the public interest. The
welfare of the party was closely bound up with the profit of special
interests, such as public service corporations and insurance companies.
The prevalent condition of affairs was shrewdly summed up in a satiric
paraphrase of Lincoln's conception of the American ideal: "Government
of the people, by the bosses, for the special interests." The interests
naturally repaid this zealous care for their well-being by contributions
to the party funds.

Platt was one of the most nearly absolute party bosses that the American
system of machine politics has produced. In spite of the fair warning
which he had already received, both directly from Roosevelt's own
words, and indirectly from his whole previous career, he was apparently
surprised and unquestionably annoyed when he found that he was not to
be the new Governor's master. The trouble began before Roosevelt took
office. At a conference one day Platt asked Roosevelt if there were any
members of the Assembly whom he would like to have assigned to special
committees. Roosevelt was surprised at the question, as he had not known
that the Speaker of the Assembly, who appoints the committees, had yet
been agreed upon by the Assemblymen-elect. He expressed his surprise.
But Mr. Platt enlightened him, saying, "Of course, whoever we choose
as Speaker will agree beforehand to make the appointments we wish."
Roosevelt has recorded the mental note which he thereupon made, that
if they tried the same process with the Governor-elect they would find
themselves mistaken. In a few days they did try it--and discovered their
mistake.

Platt asked Roosevelt to come to see him. The Senator being an old and
physically feeble man, Roosevelt went. Platt handed him a telegram from
a certain man, accepting with pleasure his appointment as Superintendent
of Public Works. This was one of the most important appointive offices
in the State Administration. It was especially so at this time in view
of the scandals which had arisen under the previous Administration over
the Erie Canal, the most important responsibility of this department.
Now, the man whom the boss had picked out was an excellent fellow, whom
Roosevelt liked and whom, incidentally, he later appointed to an office
which he filled in admirable fashion. But Roosevelt had no intention of
having any one but himself select the members of his Administration. He
said so frankly and simply. The Senator raged. He was unaccustomed
to such independence of spirit. Roosevelt was courteous but firm.
The irresistible force had met the immovable obstacle--and the
force capitulated. The telegraphic acceptance was not accepted. The
appointment was not made.

Mr. Platt was a wise man, even if he was arrogant. He knew when he
had met one whom he could not drive. So he did not break with the new
Governor. Roosevelt was wise, too, although he was honest. So he did not
break with the "easy boss." His failure to do so was a disappointment
to his impractical friends and supporters, who were more concerned with
theoretical goodness than with achievement.

Roosevelt worked with Platt and the party machine whenever he could.
He fought only when he must. When he fought, he won. In Senator Platt's
"Autobiography", the old boss paid this tribute to the young fighter
whom he had made Governor: "Roosevelt had from the first agreed that he
would consult me on all questions of appointments, Legislature or party
policy. He religiously fulfilled this pledge, although he frequently did
just what he pleased."

One of the things that particularly grieved the theoretical idealists
and the chronic objectors was the fact that Roosevelt used on occasion
to take breakfast with Senator Platt. They did not seem to think it
possible that a Governor could accept the hospitality of a boss without
taking orders from him. But Mr. Platt knew better, if they did not. He
was never under any illusions as to the extent of his influence
with Roosevelt. It vanished precisely at the point where the selfish
interests of the party and the wishes of the boss collided with the
public welfare. The facts about the famous breakfasts are plain enough.
The Governor was in Albany, the Senator in Washington. Both found it
easy to get to New York on Saturday. It was natural that they should
from time to time have matters to discuss for both were leaders in their
party. Mr. Platt was a feeble man, who found it difficult to get
about. Roosevelt was a chivalrous man, who believed that courtesy and
consideration were due to age and weakness. In addition, he liked to
make every minute count. So he used to go, frankly and openly, to the
Senator's hotel for breakfast. He was not one of that class which he has
described as composed of "solemn reformers of the tom-fool variety,
who, according to their custom, paid attention to the name and not the
thing." He cared only for the reality; the appearance mattered little to
him.

The tom-fool reformers who criticized Roosevelt for meeting Platt at
breakfast were not even good observers. If they had been, they would
have realized that when Roosevelt breakfasted with Platt, it generally
meant that he was trying to reconcile the Senator to something he was
going to do which the worthy boss did not like. For instance, Roosevelt
once wrote to Platt, who was trying to get him to promote a certain
judge over the head of another judge: "There is a strong feeling among
the judges and the leading members of the bar that Judge Y ought not
to have Judge X jumped over his head, and I do not see my way clear to
doing it. I am inclined to think that the solution I mentioned to you
is the solution I shall have to adopt. Remember the breakfast at Douglas
Robinson's at 8:30." It is probable that the Governor enjoyed that
breakfast more than did the Senator. So it usually was with the famous
breakfasts. "A series of breakfasts was always the prelude to some
active warfare."

For Roosevelt and Platt still had their pitched battles. The most
epic of them all was fought over the reappointment of the State
Superintendent of Insurance. The incumbent was Louis F. Payn, a veteran
petty boss from a country district and one of Platt's right-hand
men. Roosevelt discovered that Payn had been involved in compromising
relations with certain financiers in New York with whom he "did not deem
it expedient that the Superintendent of Insurance, while such, should
have any intimate and money-making relations." The Governor therefore
decided not to reappoint him. Platt issued an ultimatum that Payn must
be reappointed or he would fight. He pointed out that in case of a fight
Payn would stay in anyway, since the consent of the State Senate was
necessary not only to appoint a man to office but to remove him from
office. The Governor replied cheerfully that he had made up his mind
and that Payn would not be retained. If he could not get his successor
confirmed, he would make the appointment as soon as the Legislature
adjourned, and the appointment would stand at least until the
Legislature met again. Platt declared in turn that Payn would be
reinstated as soon as the Legislature reconvened. Roosevelt admitted the
possibility, but assured his opponent that the process would be repeated
as soon as that session came to an end. He added his conviction that,
while he might have an uncomfortable time himself, he would guarantee
that his opponents would be made more uncomfortable still. Thus the
matter stood in the weeks before final action could be taken. Platt was
sure that Roosevelt must yield. But once more he did not know his man.
It is curious how long it takes feudal overlords to get the measure of a
fearless free man.

The political power which the boss wielded was reinforced by pressure
from big business interests in New York. Officials of the large
insurance companies adopted resolutions asking for Payn's reappointment.
But some of them privately and hastily assured the Governor that these
resolutions were for public consumption only, and that they would be
delighted to have Payn superseded. Roosevelt strove to make it clear
again and again that he was not fighting the organization as such, and
announced his readiness to appoint any one of several men who were good
organization men--only he would not retain Lou Payn nor appoint any man
of his type. The matter moved along to the final scene, which took place
at the Union League Club in New York.

Mr. Platt's chief lieutenant asked for a meeting with the Governor. The
request was granted. The emissary went over the ground thoroughly. He
declared that Platt would never yield. He explained that he was certain
to win the fight, and that he wished to save Roosevelt from such a
lamentable disaster as the end of his political career. Roosevelt again
explained at length his position. After half an hour he rose to go. The
"subsequent proceedings" he described as follows:

"My visitor repeated that I had this last chance, and that ruin was
ahead of me if I refused it; whereas, if I accepted, everything would
be made easy. I shook my head and answered, 'There is nothing to add to
what I have already said.' He responded, 'You have made up your mind?'
and I said, 'I have." He then said, 'You know it means your ruin?' and I
answered, 'Well, we will see about that,' and walked toward the door. He
said, 'You understand, the fight will begin tomorrow and will be carried
on to the bitter end.' I said, 'Yes,' and added, as I reached the
door, 'Good night.' Then, as the door opened my opponent, or visitor,
whichever one chooses to call him, whose face was as impassive and as
inscrutable as that of Mr. John Hamlin in a poker game, said: 'Hold on!
We accept. Send in so-and-so (the man I had named). The Senator is very
sorry, but he will make no further opposition!' I never saw a bluff
carried more resolutely through to the final limit." *

     * Autobiography (Scribner), pp. 293-94.

One other Homeric fight with the machine was Roosevelt's portion during
his Governorship. This time it was not directly with the boss himself
but with the boss's liegemen in the Legislature. But the kernel of the
whole matter was the same--the selfish interests of big corporations
against the public good.

In those days corporations were by common practice privileged creatures.
They were accustomed to special treatment from legislatures and
administrations. But when Roosevelt was elected Governor, he was
determined that no corporation should get a valuable privilege from the
State without paying for it. Before long he had become convinced that
they ought also to pay for those which they already had, free gifts
of the State in those purblind days when corporations were young and
coddled. He proposed that public service corporations doing business on
franchises granted by the State and by municipalities should be
taxed upon the value of the privileges they enjoyed. The corporations
naturally enough did not like the proposal. But it was made in no spirit
or tone of antagonism to business or of demagogic outcry against those
who were prosperous. All that the Governor demanded was a square deal.
In his message to the Legislature, he wrote as follows:

"There is evident injustice in the light taxation of corporations. I
have not the slightest sympathy with the outcry against corporations as
such, or against prosperous men of business. Most of the great material
works by which the entire country benefits have been due to the
action of individual men, or of aggregates of men, who made money for
themselves by doing that which was in the interest of the people as a
whole. From an armor plant to a street railway, no work which is really
beneficial to the public can be performed to the best advantage of the
public save by men of such business capacity that they will not do
the work unless they themselves receive ample reward for doing it. The
effort to deprive them of an ample reward merely means that they will
turn their energies in some other direction; and the public will be just
so much the loser.... But while I freely admit all this, it yet remains
true that a corporation which derives its powers from the State should
pay to the State a just percentage of its earnings as a return for the
privileges it enjoys."

This was quietly reasonable and uninflammatory doctrine. But the
corporations would have none of it. The Republican machine, which had
a majority in the Legislature, promptly repudiated it as well. The
campaign contributions from the corporations were too precious to be
jeopardized by legislation which the corporations did not want. The
Governor argued, pleasantly and cheerfully. The organization balked
sullenly. The corporations grinned knowingly. They had plenty of money
with which to kill the bill, but they did not need to use it. The
machine was working smoothly in their behalf. The bill was introduced
and referred to a committee, and there it lay. No amount of argument and
persuasion that the Governor could bring to bear availed to bring the
bill out of hiding. So he sent in a special message, on almost the last
day of the session. According to the rules of the New York Assembly,
when the Governor sends in a special message on a given measure, the
bill must be reported out and given consideration. But the machine was
dazzled with its own arrogance. The Speaker would not have the message
read. Some one actually tore it up.

This was more than a crime--it was a blunder. The wise ones in the
organization realized it. They had no desire to have the Governor appeal
to the people with his torn message in his hand. Roosevelt saw the error
too, and laughed happily. He wrote another message and sent it over with
the curt statement that, if it were not read forthwith, he would come
over and read it himself. They knew that he would! So the Speaker read
the message, and the bill was reported and hastily passed on the last
day of the session.

Then the complacent corporations woke up. They had trusted the machine
too far. What was more, they had underestimated the Governor's striking
power. Now they came to him, hat in hand, and suggested some fault in
the bill. He agreed with them. They asked if he would not call a special
session to amend the bill. Again he agreed. The session was called, and
the amendments were proposed. In addition, however, certain amendments
that would have frustrated the whole purpose of the bill were suggested.
The organization, still at its old tricks, tried to get back into its
possession the bill already passed. But the Governor was not easily
caught napping. He knew as well as they did that possession of the bill
gave him the whip hand. He served notice that the second bill would
contain precisely the amendments agreed upon and no others. Otherwise
he would sign the first bill and let it become law, with all its
imperfections on its head. Once more the organization and the
corporations emulated Davy Crockett's coon and begged him not to shoot,
for they would come down. The amended bill was passed and became
law. But there was an epilogue to this little drama. The corporations
proceeded to attack the constitutionality of the law on the ground of
the very amendment for which they had so clamorously pleaded. But they
failed. The Supreme Court of the United States, after Roosevelt had
become President, affirmed the constitutionality of the law.

The spectacular events of Roosevelt's governorship were incidents in
this conflict between two political philosophies, the one held by
Platt and his tribe, the other by Roosevelt. Extracts from two letters
exchanged by the Senator and the Governor bring the contrast between
these philosophies into clear relief. Platt wrote as follows:

"When the subject of your nomination was under consideration, there was
one matter that gave me real anxiety.... I had heard from a good many
sources that you were a little loose on the relations of capital and
labor, on trusts and combinations, and, indeed, on those numerous
questions which have recently arisen in politics affecting the security
of earnings and the right of a man to run his business in his own way,
with due respect, of course, to the Ten Commandments and the Penal
Code. Or, to get at it even more clearly, I understood from a number of
business men, and among them many of your own personal friends, that you
entertained various altruistic ideas, all very well in their way, but
which before they could safely be put into law needed very profound
consideration." *

* Roosevelt, "Autobiography" (Scribner), p. 299.


Roosevelt replied that he had known very well that the Senator had just
these feelings about him, and then proceeded to set forth his own view
of the matter. With his usual almost uncanny wisdom in human relations,
he based his argument on party expediency, which he knew Platt would
comprehend, rather than on abstract considerations of right and wrong,
in which realm the boss would be sure to feel rather at sea. He wrote
thus:

"I know that when parties divide on such issues [as Bryanism] the
tendency is to force everybody into one of two camps, and to throw out
entirely men like myself, who are as strongly opposed to Populism in
every stage as the greatest representative of corporate wealth but
who also feel strongly that many of these representatives of enormous
corporate wealth have themselves been responsible for a portion of
the conditions against which Bryanism is in ignorant revolt. I do not
believe that it is wise or safe for us as a party to take refuge in mere
negation and to say that there are no evils to be corrected. It seems to
me that our attitude should be one of correcting the evils and thereby
showing that whereas the Populists, Socialists, and others do not
correct the evils at all, or else do so at the expense of producing
others in aggravated form, on the contrary we Republicans hold the
just balance and set ourselves as resolutely against improper corporate
influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the
other."*

*Roosevelt, Autobiography (Scribner), p. 300.


This was the fight that Roosevelt was waging in every hour of his
political career. It was a middle-of-the-road fight, not because of any
timidity or slack-fibered thinking which prevented a committal to one
extreme or the other, but because of a stern conviction that in the
golden middle course was to be found truth and the right. It was an
inevitable consequence that first one side and then the other--and
sometimes both at once--should attack him as a champion of the other.
It became a commonplace of his experience to be inveighed against by
reformers as a reactionary and to be assailed by conservatives as a
radical. But this paradoxical experience did not disturb him at all. He
was concerned only to have the testimony of his own mind and conscience
that he was right.

The contests which he had as Governor were spectacular and exhilarating;
but they did not fill all the hours of his working days. A tremendous
amount of spade work was actually accomplished. For example, he
brought about the reenactment of the Civil Service Law, which under
his predecessor had been repealed, and put through a mass of labor
legislation for the betterment of conditions under which the workers
carried on their daily lives. This legislation included laws to increase
the number of factory inspectors, to create a tenement-house commission,
to regulate sweatshop labor, to make the eight-hour and prevailing rate
of wages law effective, to compel railways to equip freight trains with
air brakes, to regulate the working hours of women, to protect women
and children from dangerous machinery, to enforce good scaffolding
provisions for workmen on buildings, to provide seats for the use of
waitresses in hotels and restaurants, to reduce the hours of labor
for drug-store clerks, to provide for the registration of laborers for
municipal employment. He worked hard to secure an employers' liability
law, but the time for this was not yet come.

Many of these reforms are now matters of course that no employer would
think of attempting to eliminate. But they were new ideas then; and it
took vision and courage to fight for them.

Roosevelt would have been glad to be elected Governor for a second term.
But destiny, working through curious instruments, would not have it so.
He left behind him in the Empire State, not only a splendid record of
concrete achievement but something more than that. Jacob Riis has told
how, some time after, an old State official at Albany, who had seen many
Governors come and go, revealed this intangible something. Mr. Riis had
said to him that he did not care much for Albany since Roosevelt had
gone, and his friend replied: "Yes, we think so, many of us. The place
seemed dreary when he was gone. But I know now that he left something
behind that was worth our losing him to get. This past winter, for the
first time, I heard the question spring up spontaneously, as it seemed,
when a measure was up in the Legislature 'Is it right?' Not 'Is it
expedient?' not 'How is it going to help me?' not 'What is it worth to
the party?' Not any of these, but 'Is it right?' That is Roosevelt's
legacy to Albany. And it was worth his coming and his going to have
that."



CHAPTER VI. ROOSEVELT BECOMES PRESIDENT

There was chance in Theodore Roosevelt's coming into the Presidency
as he did, but there was irony as well. An evil chance dropped William
McKinley before an assassin's bullet; but there was a fitting irony in
the fact that the man who must step into his place had been put where
he was in large measure by the very men who would least like to see him
become President.

The Republican convention of 1900 was a singularly unanimous body.
President McKinley was renominated without a murmur of dissent. But
there was no Vice-President to renominate, as Mr. Hobart had died in
office. There was no logical candidate for the second place on the
ticket. Senator Platt, however, had a man whom he wanted to get rid of,
since Governor Roosevelt had made himself persona non grata alike to
the machine politicians of his State and to the corporations allied
with them. The Governor, however, did not propose to be disposed of so
easily. His reasons were characteristic. He wrote thus to Senator Platt
about the matter:

"I can't help feeling more and more that the Vice-Presidency is not an
office in which I could do anything and not an office in which a man
who is still vigorous and not past middle life has much chance of
doing anything.... Now, I should like to be Governor for another term,
especially if we are able to take hold of the canals in serious shape.
But, as Vice-President, I don't see there is anything I can do. I would
be simply a presiding officer, and that I should find a bore."

Now Mr. Platt knew that nothing but "sidetracking" could stop another
nomination of Roosevelt for the Governorship, and this Rough Rider was
a thorn in his flesh. So he went on his subterranean way to have him
nominated for the most innocuous political berth in the gift of
the American people. He secured the cooperation of Senator Quay of
Pennsylvania and another boss or two of the same indelible stripe; but
all their political strength would not have accomplished the desired
result without assistance from quite a different source. Roosevelt had
already achieved great popularity in the Middle and the Far West for the
very reasons which made Mr. Platt want him out of the way. So, while the
New York boss and his acquiescent delegates were stopped from presenting
his name to the convention by Roosevelt's assurance that he would fight
a l'outrance any movement from his own State to nominate him, other
delegates took matters into their own hands and the nomination was
finally made unanimously.

Roosevelt gave great strength to the Republican ticket in the campaign
which followed. William Jennings Bryan was again the Democratic
candidate, but the "paramount issue" of his campaign had changed since
four years before from free silver to anti-imperialism. President
McKinley, according to his custom, made no active campaign; but Bryan
and Roosevelt competed with each other in whirlwind speaking tours from
one end of the country to the other. The war-cry of the Republicans was
the "full dinner pail"; the keynote of Bryan's bid for popular support
was opposition to the Republican policy of expansion and criticism of
Republican tendencies toward plutocratic control. The success of the
Republican ticket was overwhelming; McKinley and Roosevelt received
nearly twice as many electoral votes as Bryan and Stevenson.

When President McKinley was shot at Buffalo six months after his
second term began, it looked for a time as though he would recover. So
Roosevelt, after an immediate visit to Buffalo, went to join his family
in the Adirondacks. The news of the President's impending death found
him out in the wilderness on the top of Mount Tahawus, not far from the
tiny Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, the source of the Hudson River. A ten-mile
dash down the mountain trail, in the course of which he outstripped all
his companions but one; a wild forty-mile drive through the night to the
railroad, the new President and his single companion changing the horses
two or three times with their own hands; a fast journey by special train
across the State--and on the evening of September 14, 1901, Theodore
Roosevelt took the oath of office as the twenty-sixth President of the
United States.

Before taking the oath, Roosevelt announced that it would be his aim "to
continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley for the
peace, prosperity, and honor of our beloved country." He immediately
asked every member of the late President's Cabinet to continue in
office. The Cabinet was an excellent one, and Mr. Roosevelt found it
necessary to make no other changes than those that came in the ordinary
course of events. The policies were not altered in broad general
outline, for Roosevelt was as stalwart a Republican as McKinley himself,
and was as firmly convinced of the soundness of the fundamentals of the
Republican doctrine.

But the fears of some of his friends that Roosevelt would seem, if he
carried out his purpose of continuity, "a pale copy of McKinley" were
not justified in the event. They should have known better. A copy of any
one Roosevelt could neither be nor seem, and "pale" was the last epithet
to be applied to him with justice. It could not be long before the
difference in the two Administrations would appear in unmistakable
terms. The one which had just passed was first of all a party
Administration and secondly a McKinley Administration. The one which
followed was first, last, and all the time a Roosevelt Administration.
"Where Macgregor sits, there is the head of the table." Not because
Roosevelt consciously willed it so, but because the force and power and
magnetism of his vigorous mind and personality inevitably made it
so. McKinley had been a great harmonizer. "He oiled the machinery of
government with loving and imperturbable patience," said an observer of
his time, "and the wheels ran with an ease unknown since Washington's
first term of office." It had been a constant reproach of the critics
of the former President that "his ear was always to the ground." But
he kept it there because it was his sincere conviction that it belonged
there, ready to apprize him of the vibrations of the popular will.
Roosevelt was the born leader with an innate instinct of command. He did
not scorn or flout the popular will; he had too confirmed a conviction
of the sovereign right of the people to rule for that. But he did not
wait pusillanimously for the popular mind to make itself up; he had too
high a conception of the duty of leadership for that. He esteemed it
his peculiar function as the man entrusted by a great people with the
headship of their common affairs--to lead the popular mind, to educate
it, to inspire it, sometimes to run before it in action, serene in the
confidence that tardy popular judgment would confirm the rightness of
the deed.

By the end of Roosevelt's first Administration two of the three groups
that had taken a hand in choosing him for the Vice-Presidency were
thoroughly sick of their bargain. The machine politicians and the
great corporations found that their cunning plan to stifle with the wet
blanket of that depressing office the fires of his moral earnestness and
pugnacious honesty had overreached itself. Fate had freed him and, once
freed, he was neither to hold nor to bind. It was less than two years
before Wall Street was convinced that he was "unsafe," and sadly shook
its head over his "impetuosity." When Wall Street stamps a man "unsafe,"
the last word in condemnation has been said. It was an even shorter time
before the politicians found him unsatisfactory. "The breach between
Mr. Roosevelt and the politicians was, however, inevitable. His rigid
insistence upon the maintenance and the extension of the merit system
alone assured the discontent which precedes dislike," wrote another
observer. "The era of patronage mongering in the petty offices ceased
suddenly, and the spoilsmen had the right to say that in this respect
the policy of McKinley had not been followed." It was true. When
Roosevelt became President the civil service was thoroughly demoralized.
Senators and Congressmen, by tacit agreement with the executive, used
the appointing power for the payment of political debts, the reward of
party services, the strengthening of their personal "fences." But
within three months it was possible to say with absolute truth that "a
marvelous change has already been wrought in the morale of the civil
service." At the end of Roosevelt's first term an unusually acute and
informed foreign journalist was moved to write, "No President has so
persistently eliminated politics from his nominations, none has been
more unbending in making efficiency his sole test."

There was the kernel of the whole matter: the President's insistence
upon efficiency. Roosevelt, however, did not snatch rudely away from the
Congressmen and Senators the appointing power which his predecessors had
allowed them gradually to usurp. He continued to consult each member of
the Congress upon appointments in that member's State or district and
merely demanded that the men recommended for office should be honest,
capable, and fitted for the places they were to fill.

President Roosevelt was not only ready and glad to consult with Senators
but he sought and often took the advice of party leaders outside of
Congress, and even took into consideration the opinions of bosses. In
New York, for instance, the two Republican leaders, Governor Odell and
Senator Platt, were sometimes in accord and sometimes in disagreement,
but each was always desirous of being consulted. A letter written by
Roosevelt in the middle of his first term to a friendly Congressman well
illustrates his theory and practice in such cases:

"I want to work with Platt. I want to work with Odell. I want to support
both and take the advice of both. But, of course, ultimately I must be
the judge as to acting on the advice given. When, as in the case of the
judgeship, I am convinced that the advice of both is wrong, I shall act
as I did when I appointed Holt. When I can find a friend of Odell's
like Cooley, who is thoroughly fit for the position I desire to fill, it
gives me the greatest pleasure to appoint him. When Platt proposes to me
a man like Hamilton Fish, it is equally a pleasure to appoint him."

This high-minded and common-sense course did not, however, seem to
please the politicians, for dyed-in-the-wool politicians are curious
persons to whom half a loaf is no consolation whatever, even when the
other half of the loaf is to go to the people--without whom there would
be no policies at all. Strangely enough, Roosevelt's policy was equally
displeasing to those of the doctrinaire reformer type, to whom there is
no word in the language more distasteful than "politician," unless it
be the word "practical." But there was one class to whom the results of
this common-sense brand of political action were eminently satisfactory,
and this class made up the third group that had a part in the selection
of Theodore Roosevelt for the Vice-Presidency. The plain people,
especially in the more westerly portions of the country, were
increasingly delighted with the honesty, the virility, and the
effectiveness of the Roosevelt Administration. Just before the
convention which was to nominate Roosevelt for the Presidency to succeed
himself, an editorial writer expressed the fact thus: "The people at
large are not oblivious of the fact that, while others are talking and
carping, Mr. Roosevelt is carrying on in the White House a persistent
and never-ending moral struggle with every powerful selfish and
exploiting interest in the country."

Oblivious of it? They were acutely conscious of it. They approved of
it with heartiness. They liked it so well that, when the time came to
nominate and elect another President, they swept aside with a mighty
rush not only the scruples and antagonisms of the Republican politicians
and the "special interests" but party lines as well, and chose Roosevelt
with a unanimous voice in the convention and a majority of two and a
half million votes at the polls.

As President, Theodore Roosevelt achieved many concrete results. But his
greatest contribution to the forward movement of the times was in the
rousing of the public conscience, the strengthening of the nation's
moral purpose, and the erecting of a new standard of public service in
the management of the nation's affairs. It was no little thing that when
Roosevelt was ready to hand over to another the responsibilities of his
high office, James Bryce, America's best friend and keenest student from
across the seas, was able to say that in a long life, during which he
had studied intimately the government of many different countries, he
had never in any country seen a more eager, high-minded, and efficient
set of public servants, men more useful and more creditable to their
country, than the men then doing the work of the American Government in
Washington and in the field.



CHAPTER VII. THE SQUARE DEAL FOR BUSINESS

During the times of Roosevelt, the American people were profoundly
concerned with the trust problem. So was Roosevelt himself. In this
important field of the relations between "big business" and the people
he had a perfectly definite point of view, though he did not have a cut
and dried programme. He was always more interested in a point of view
than in a programme, for he realized that the one is lasting, the other
shifting. He knew that if you stand on sound footing and look at a
subject from the true angle, you may safely modify your plan of action
as often and as rapidly as may be necessary to fit changing conditions.
But if your footing is insecure or your angle of vision distorted, the
most attractive programme in the world may come to ignominious disaster.

There were, broadly speaking, three attitudes toward the trust problem
which were strongly held by different groups in the United States. At
one extreme was the threatening growl of big business, "Let us alone!"
At the other pole was the shrill outcry of William Jennings Bryan and
his fellow exhorters, "Smash the trusts!" In the golden middle ground
was the vigorous demand of Roosevelt for a "square deal."

In his first message to Congress, the President set forth his point of
view with frankness and clarity. His comprehensive discussion of
the matter may be summarized thus: The tremendous and highly complex
industrial development which went on with great rapidity during the
latter half of the nineteenth century produced serious social problems.
The old laws and the old customs which had almost the binding force
of law were once quite sufficient to regulate the accumulation and
distribution of wealth. Since the industrial changes which have so
enormously increased the productive power of mankind, these regulations
are no longer sufficient. The process of the creation of great corporate
fortunes has aroused much antagonism; but much of this, antagonism has
been without warrant. There have been, it is true, abuses connected
with the accumulation of wealth; yet no fortune can be accumulated in
legitimate business except by conferring immense incidental benefits
upon others. The men who have driven the great railways across the
continent, who have built up commerce and developed manufactures, have
on the whole done great good to the people at large. Without such men
the material development of which Americans are so justly proud never
could have taken place. They should therefore recognize the immense
importance of this material development by leaving as unhampered as is
compatible with the public good the strong men upon whom the success of
business inevitably rests. It cannot too often be pointed out that to
strike with ignorant violence at the interests of one set of men almost
inevitably endangers the interests of all. The fundamental rule in
American national life is that, on the whole and in the long run, we
shall all go up or down together. Many of those who have made it their
vocation to denounce the great industrial combinations appeal especially
to the primitive instincts of hatred and fear. These are precisely the
two emotions which unfit men for cool and steady judgment. The whole
history of the world shows that legislation, in facing new industrial
conditions, will generally be both unwise and ineffective unless it is
undertaken only after calm inquiry and with sober self-restraint.

This is one side of the picture as it was presented by the President in
his message to Congress. It was characteristic that this aspect should
be put first, for Roosevelt always insisted upon doing justice to the
other side before he demanded justice for his own. But he then proceeded
to set forth the other side with equal vigor: There is a widespread
conviction in the minds of the American people that the great
corporations are in certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to
the general welfare. It is true that real and grave evils have arisen,
one of the chief of them being overcapitalization, with its many
baleful consequences. This state of affairs demands that combination and
concentration in business should be, not prohibited, but supervised
and controlled. Corporations engaged in interstate commerce should be
regulated if they are found to exercise a license working to the public
injury. The first essential in determining how to deal with the great
industrial combinations is knowledge of the facts. This is to be
obtained only through publicity, which is the one sure remedy we can
now invoke before it can be determined what further remedies are needed.
Corporations should be subject to proper governmental supervision, and
full and accurate information as to their operations should be made
public at regular intervals. The nation should assume powers of
supervision and regulation over all corporations doing an interstate
business. This is especially true where the corporation derives a
portion of its wealth from the existence of some monopolistic element
or tendency in its business. The Federal Government should regulate
the activities of corporations doing an interstate business, just as it
regulates the activities of national banks, and, through the Interstate
Commerce Commission, the operations of the railroads.

Roosevelt was destined, however, not to achieve the full measure of
national control of corporations that he desired. The elements opposed
to his view were too powerful. There was a fortuitous involuntary
partnership though it was not admitted and was even violently denied
between the advocates of "Let us alone!" and of "Smash the trusts!"
against the champion of the middle way. In his "Autobiography" Roosevelt
has described this situation:

"One of the main troubles was the fact that the men who saw the evils
and who tried to remedy them attempted to work in two wholly different
ways, and the great majority of them in a way that offered little
promise of real betterment. They tried (by the Sherman law method)
to bolster up an individualism already proved to be both futile and
mischievous; to remedy by more individualism the concentration that was
the inevitable result of the already existing individualism. They
saw the evil done by the big combinations, and sought to remedy it by
destroying them and restoring the country to the economic conditions of
the middle of the nineteenth century. This was a hopeless effort, and
those who went into it, although they regarded themselves as radical
progressives, really represented a form of sincere rural toryism. They
confounded monopolies with big business combinations, and in the effort
to prohibit both alike, instead of where possible prohibiting one and
drastically controlling the other, they succeeded merely in preventing
any effective control of either.

"On the other hand, a few men recognized that corporations and
combinations had become indispensable in the business world, that it was
folly to try to prohibit them, but that it was also folly to leave them
without thoroughgoing control. These men realized that the doctrine
of the old laissez faire economists, of the believers in unlimited
competition, unlimited individualism, were, in the actual state of
affairs, false and mischievous. They realized that the Government must
now interfere to protect labor, to subordinate the big corporation
to the public welfare, and to shackle cunning and fraud exactly as
centuries before it had interfered to shackle the physical force which
does wrong by violence. The big reactionaries of the business world and
their allies and instruments among politicians and newspaper editors
took advantage of this division of opinion, and especially of the fact
that most of their opponents were on the wrong path; and fought to
keep matters absolutely unchanged. These men demanded for themselves an
immunity from government control which, if granted, would have been as
wicked and as foolish as immunity to the barons of the twelfth century.
Many of them were evil men. Many others were just as good men as were
some of these same barons; but they were as utterly unable as any
medieval castle-owner to understand what the public interest really was.
There have been aristocracies which have played a great and beneficent
part at stages in the growth of mankind; but we had come to a stage
where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all
forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny
of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy." *

     * Autobiography (Scribner), pp. 424-25.

When Roosevelt became President, there were three directions in which
energy needed to be applied to the solution of the trust problem: in the
more vigorous enforcement of the laws already on the statute books; in
the enactment of necessary new laws on various phases of the subject;
and in the arousing of an intelligent and militant public opinion
in relation to the whole question. To each of these purposes the new
President applied himself with characteristic vigor.

The Sherman Anti-Trust law, which had already been on the Federal
statute books for eleven years, forbade "combinations in restraint
of trade" in the field of interstate commerce. During three
administrations, eighteen actions had been brought by the Government for
its enforcement. At the opening of the twentieth century it was a grave
question whether the Sherman law was of any real efficacy in preventing
the evils that arose from unregulated combination in business. A
decision of the United States Supreme Court, rendered in 1895 in the
so-called Knight case, against the American Sugar Refining Company, had,
in the general belief, taken the teeth out of the Sherman law. In the
words of Mr. Taft, "The effect of the decision in the Knight case upon
the popular mind, and indeed upon Congress as well, was to discourage
hope that the statute could be used to accomplish its manifest purpose
and curb the great industrial trusts which, by the acquisition of all
or a large percentage of the plants engaged in the manufacture of a
commodity, by the dismantling of some and regulating the output of
others, were making every effort to restrict production, control prices,
and monopolize the business." It was obviously necessary that the
Sherman act, unless it were to pass into innocuous desuetude, should
have the original vigor intended by Congress restored to it by a new
interpretation of the law on the part of the Supreme Court. Fortunately
an opportunity for such a change presented itself with promptness.
A small group of powerful financiers had arranged to take control of
practically the entire system of railways in the Northwest, "possibly,"
Roosevelt has said, "as the first step toward controlling the entire
railway system of the country." They had brought this about by
organizing the Northern Securities Company to hold the majority of the
stock of two competing railways, the Great Northern and the Northern
Pacific. At the direction of President Roosevelt, suit was brought
by the Government to prevent the merger. The defendants relied for
protection upon the immunity afforded by the decision in the Knight
case. But the Supreme Court now took more advanced ground, decreed that
the Northern Securities Company was an illegal combination, and ordered
its dissolution.

By the successful prosecution of this case the Sherman act was made once
more a potentially valuable instrument for the prevention of the more
flagrant evils that flow from "combinations in restraint of trade."
During the remaining years of the Roosevelt Administrations, this legal
instrument was used with aggressive force for the purpose for which it
was intended. In seven years and a half, forty-four prosecutions were
brought under it by the Government, as compared with eighteen in the
preceding eleven years. The two most famous trust cases, next to the
Northern Securities case and even surpassing it in popular interest,
because of the stupendous size of the corporations involved, were those
against the Standard Oil Company and the American Tobacco Company. These
companion cases were not finally decided in the Supreme Court until the
Administration of President Taft; but their prosecution was begun while
Roosevelt was in office and by his direction. They were therefore
a definite part of his campaign for the solution of the vexed trust
problem. Both cases were decided, by every court through which they
passed, in favor of the Government. The Supreme Court finally in 1911
decreed that both the Standard Oil and the Tobacco trusts were in
violation of the Sherman act and ordered their dissolution. There could
now no longer be any question that the Government could in fact exercise
its sovereign will over even the greatest and the most powerful of
modern business organizations.

The two cases had one other deep significance which at first blush
looked like a weakening of the force of the anti-trust law but which was
in reality a strengthening of it. There had been long and ardent debate
whether the Sherman act should be held to apply to all restraints of
trade or only to such as were unreasonable. It was held by some that it
applied to ALL restraints and therefore should be amended to cover only
unreasonable restraints. It was held by others that it applied to all
restraints and properly so. It was held by still others that it applied
only to unreasonable restraints. But the matter had never been decided
by competent authority. The decision of the Supreme Court in these two
outstanding cases, however, put an end to the previous uncertainty.
Chief Justice White, in his two opinions, laid it down with definiteness
that in construing and applying the law recourse must be had to the
"rule of reason." He made clear the conviction of the court that it was
"undue" restraints of trade which the law forbade and not incidental or
inconsiderable ones. This definitive interpretation of the law, while
it caused considerable criticism at the moment, in ultimate effect so
cleared the air about the Sherman act as effectually to dispose of
the demands for its amendment in the direction of greater leniency or
severity.

But the proving of the anti-trust law as an effective weapon against the
flagrantly offending trusts, according to Roosevelt's conviction, was
only a part of the battle. As he said, "monopolies can, although in
rather cumbrous fashion, be broken up by lawsuits. Great business
combinations, however, cannot possibly be made useful instead of noxious
industrial agencies merely by lawsuits, and especially by lawsuits
supposed to be carried on for their destruction and not for their
control and regulation." He took, as usual, the constructive point of
view. He saw both sides of the trust question--the inevitability and
the beneficence of combination in modern business, and the danger to
the public good that lay in the unregulated and uncontrolled wielding
of great power by private individuals. He believed that the thing to do
with great power was not to destroy it but to use it, not to forbid its
acquisition but to direct its application. So he set himself to the
task of securing fresh legislation regarding the regulation of corporate
activities.

Such legislation was not easy to get; for the forces of reaction were
strong in Congress. But several significant steps in this direction were
taken before Roosevelt went out of office. The new Federal Department
of Commerce and Labor was created, and its head became a member of
the Cabinet. The Bureau of Corporations was established in the same
department. These new executive agencies were given no regulatory
powers, but they did perform excellent service in that field of
publicity on the value of which Roosevelt laid so much stress.

In the year 1906 the passing of the Hepburn railway rate bill for the
first time gave the Interstate Commerce Commission a measure of real
control over the railways, by granting to the Commission the power
to fix maximum rates for the transportation of freight in interstate
commerce. The Commission had in previous years, under the authority of
the act which created it and which permitted the Commission to decide
in particular cases whether rates were just and reasonable, attempted
to exercise this power to fix in these specific cases maximum rates. But
the courts had decided that the Commission did not possess this right.
The Hepburn act also extended the authority of the Commission over
express companies, sleeping-car companies, pipe lines, private car
lines, and private terminal and connecting lines. It prohibited railways
from transporting in interstate commerce any commodities produced or
owned by themselves. It abolished free passes and transportation except
for railway employees and certain other small classes of persons,
including the poor and unfortunate classes and those engaged in
religious and charitable work. Under the old law, the Commission was
compelled to apply to a Federal court on its own initiative for the
enforcement of any order which it might issue. Under the Hepburn act
the order went into effect at once; the railroad must begin to obey the
order within thirty days; it must itself appeal to the court for the
suspension and revocation of the order, or it must suffer a penalty
of $5000 a day during the time that the order was disobeyed. The act
further gave the Commission the power to prescribe accounting methods
which must be followed by the railways, in order to make more difficult
the concealment of illegal rates and improper favors to individual
shippers. This extension and strengthening of the authority of the
Interstate Commerce Commission was an extremely valuable forward step,
not only as concerned the relations of the public and the railways,
but in connection with the development of predatory corporations of the
Standard Oil type. Miss Ida Tarbell, in her frankly revealing "History
of the Standard Oil Company", which had been published in 1904, had
shown in striking fashion how secret concessions from the railways had
helped to build up that great structure of business monopoly. In Miss
Tarbell's words, "Mr. Rockefeller's great purpose had been made possible
by his remarkable manipulation of the railroads. It was the rebate which
had made the Standard Oil trust, the rebate, amplified, systematized,
glorified into a power never equalled before or since by any business
of the country." The rebate was the device by which favored
shippers--favored by the railways either voluntarily or under the
compulsion of the threats of retaliation which the powerful shippers
were able to make--paid openly the established freight rates on
their products and then received back from the railways a substantial
proportion of the charges. The advantage to the favored shipper is
obvious. There were other more adroit ways in which the favoritism could
be accomplished; but the general principle was the same. It was one
important purpose--and effect--of the Hepburn act to close the door to
this form of discrimination.

One more step was necessary in order to eradicate completely this
mischievous condition and to "keep the highway of commerce open to all
on equal terms." It was imperative that the law relative to these abuses
should be enforced. On this point Roosevelt's own words are significant:
"Although under the decision of the courts the National Government had
power over the railways, I found, when I became President, that
this power was either not exercised at all or exercised with utter
inefficiency. The law against rebates was a dead letter. All the
unscrupulous railway men had been allowed to violate it with impunity;
and because of this, as was inevitable, the scrupulous and decent
railway men had been forced to violate it themselves, under penalty of
being beaten by their less scrupulous rivals. It was not the fault of
these decent railway men. It was the fault of the Government."

Roosevelt did not propose that this condition should continue to be the
fault of the Government while he was at its head, and he inaugurated a
vigorous campaign against railways that had given rebates and against
corporations that had accepted--or extorted-them. The campaign reached a
spectacular peak in a prosecution of the Standard Oil Company, in which
fines aggregating over $29,000,000 were imposed by Judge Kenesaw M.
Landis of the United States District Court at Chicago for the offense
of accepting rebates. The Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately determined
that the fine was improperly large, since it had been based on
the untenable theory that each shipment on which a rebate was paid
constituted a separate offense. At the second trial the presiding
judge ordered an acquittal. In spite, however, of the failure of this
particular case, with its spectacular features, the net result of the
rebate prosecutions was that the rebate evil was eliminated for good and
all from American railway and commercial life.

When Roosevelt demanded the "square deal" between business and the
people, he meant precisely what he said. He had no intention of
permitting justice to be required from the great corporations without
insisting that justice be done to them in turn. The most interesting
case in point was that of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. To this
day the action which Roosevelt took in the matter is looked upon, by
many of those extremists who can see nothing good in "big business," as
a proof of his undue sympathy with the capitalist. But thirteen years
later the United States Supreme Court in deciding the case against the
United States Steel Corporation in favor of the Corporation, added an
obiter dictum which completely justified Roosevelt's action.

In the fall of 1907 the United States was in the grip of a financial
panic. Much damage was done, and much more was threatened. One great New
York trust company was compelled to close its doors, and others were
on the verge of disaster. One evening in the midst of this most trying
time, the President was informed that two representatives of the United
States Steel Corporation wished to call upon him the next morning. As he
was at breakfast the next day word came to him that Judge Gary and Mr.
Frick were waiting in the Executive Office. The President went over at
once, sending word to Elihu Root, then Secretary of State, to join him.
Judge Gary and Mr. Frick informed the President that a certain great
firm in the New York financial district was upon the point of failure.
This firm held a large quantity of the stock of the Tennessee Coal and
Iron Company. The Steel Corporation had been urged to purchase this
stock in order to avert the failure. The heads of the Steel Corporation
asserted that they did not wish to purchase this stock from the point of
view of a business transaction, as the value which the property might be
to the Corporation would be more than offset by the criticism to which
they would be subjected. They said that they were sure to be charged
with trying to secure a monopoly and to stifle competition. They told
the President that it had been the consistent policy of the Steel
Corporation to have in its control no more than sixty per cent of
the steel properties of the country; that their proportion of those
properties was in fact somewhat less than sixty per cent; and that the
acquisition of the holdings of the Tennessee Company would raise it
only a little above that point. They felt, however, that it would be
extremely desirable for them to make the suggested purchase in order to
prevent the damage which would result from the failure of the firm in
question. They were willing to buy the stocks offered because in
the best judgment of many of the strongest bankers in New York the
transaction would be an influential factor in preventing a further
extension of the panic. Judge Gary and Mr. Frick declared that they were
ready to make the purchase with this end in view but that they would not
act without the President's approval of their action.

Immediate action was imperative. It was important that the purchase, if
it were to be made, should be announced at the opening of the New York
Stock Exchange at ten o'clock that morning. Fortunately Roosevelt
never shilly-shallied when a crisis confronted him. His decision was
instantaneous. He assured his callers that while, of course, he could
not advise them to take the action, proposed, he felt that he had no
public duty to interpose any objection.

This assurance was quite sufficient. The pure chase was made and
announced, the firm in question did not fail, and the panic was
arrested. The immediate reaction of practically the whole country was
one of relief. It was only later, when the danger was past, that critics
began to make themselves heard. Any one who had taken the trouble
to ascertain the facts would have known beyond question that the
acquisition of the Tennessee properties was not sufficient to change
the status of the Steel Corporation under the anti-trust law. But the
critics did not want to know the facts. They wanted--most of them, at
least--to have a stick with which to beat Roosevelt. Besides, many of
them did not hold Roosevelt's views about the square deal. Their belief
was that whatever big business did was ipso facto evil and that it was
the duty of public officials to find out what big business wanted to do
and then prevent its accomplishment.

Under a later Administration, Roosevelt was invited to come before a
Congressional investigating committee to explain what he did in this
famous case. There he told the complete story of the occurrence simply,
frankly, and emphatically, and ended with this statement: "If I were on
a sailboat, I should not ordinarily meddle with any of the gear; but if
a sudden squall struck us, and the main sheet jammed, so that the boat
threatened to capsize, I would unhesitatingly cut the main sheet, even
though I were sure that the owner, no matter how grateful to me at the
moment for having saved his life, would a few weeks later, when he had
forgotten his danger and his fear, decide to sue me for the value of
the cut rope. But I would feel a hearty contempt for the owner who so
acted."

Two laws passed during the second Roosevelt Administration had an
important bearing on the conduct of American business, though in a
different way from those which have already been considered. They were
the Pure Food law, and the Meat Inspection act. Both were measures for
the protection of the public health; but both were at the same time
measures for the control of private business. The Pure Food law did
three things: it prohibited the sale of foods or drugs which were not
pure and unadulterated; it prohibited the sale of drugs which contained
opium, cocaine, alcohol, and other narcotics unless the exact proportion
of them in the preparation were stated on the package; and it prohibited
the sale of foods and drugs as anything else than what they actually
were. The Meat Inspection law required rigid inspection by Government
officials of all slaughterhouses and packing concerns preparing meat
food products for distribution in interstate commerce. The imperative
need for the passage of this law was brought forcibly and vividly to
the popular attention through a novel, "The Jungle", written by Upton
Sinclair, in which the disgraceful conditions of uncleanliness and
revolting carelessness in the Chicago packing houses were described with
vitriolic intensity. An official investigation ordered by the President
confirmed the truth of these timely revelations.

These achievements on the part of the Roosevelt Administrations were of
high value. But, after all Roosevelt performed an even greater service
in arousing the public mind to a realization of facts of national
significance and stimulating the public conscience to a desire to
deal with them vigorously and justly. From the very beginning of his
Presidential career he realized the gravity of the problems created by
the rise of big business; and he began forthwith to impress upon the
people with hammer blows the conditions as he saw them, the need
for definite corrective action, and the absolute necessity for such
treatment of the case as would constitute the "square deal." An
interesting example of his method and of the response which it received
is to be found in the report of an address which he made in 1907. It
runs thus:

"From the standpoint of our material prosperity there is only one
other thing as important as the discouragement of a spirit of envy and
hostility toward business men, toward honest men of means; this is the
discouragement of dishonest business men. [Great applause.]

"Wait a moment; I don't want you to applaud this part unless you are
willing to applaud also the part I read first, to which you listened in
silence. [Laughter and applause.] I want you to understand that I will
stand just as straight for the rights of the honest man who wins his
fortune by honest methods as I will stand against the dishonest man who
wins a fortune by dishonest methods. And I challenge the right to your
support in one attitude just as much as in the other. I am glad you
applauded when you did, but I want you to go back now and applaud
the other statement. I will read a little of it over again. 'Every
manifestation of ignorant envy and hostility toward honest men who
acquire wealth by honest means should be crushed at the outset by the
weight of a sensible public opinion.' [Tremendous applause.] Thank you.
Now I'll go on."


Roosevelt's incessant emphasis was placed upon conduct as the proper
standard by which to judge the actions of men. "We are," he once said,
"no respecters of persons. If a labor union does wrong, we oppose it as
firmly as we oppose a corporation which does wrong; and we stand equally
stoutly for the rights of the man of wealth and for the rights of the
wage-worker. We seek to protect the property of every man who acts
honestly, of every corporation that represents wealth honestly
accumulated and honestly used. We seek to stop wrongdoing, and we desire
to punish the wrongdoer only so far as is necessary to achieve this
end."

At another time he sounded the same note--sounded it indeed with a
"damnable iteration" that only proved how deeply it was imbedded in his
conviction.

"Let us strive steadily to secure justice as between man and man without
regard to the man's position, social or otherwise. Let us remember that
justice can never be justice unless it is equal. Do justice to the rich
man and exact justice from him; do justice to the poor man and
exact justice from him--justice to the capitalist and justice to the
wage-worker.... I have an equally hearty aversion for the reactionary
and the demagogue; but I am not going to be driven out of fealty to my
principles because certain of them are championed by the reactionary and
certain others by the demagogue. The reactionary is always strongly
for the rights of property; so am I.... I will not be driven away from
championship of the rights of property upon which all our civilization
rests because they happen to be championed by people who champion
furthermore the abuses of wealth.... Most demagogues advocate some
excellent popular principles, and nothing could be more foolish than for
decent men to permit themselves to be put into an attitude of ignorant
and perverse opposition to all reforms demanded in the name of the
people because it happens that some of them are demanded by demagogues."

Such an attitude on the part of a man like Roosevelt could not fail to
be misunderstood, misinterpreted, and assailed. Toward the end of his
Presidential career, when he was attacking with peculiar vigor the
"malefactors of great wealth" whom the Government had found it necessary
to punish for their predatory acts in corporate guise, it was gently
intimated by certain defenders of privilege that he was insane. At other
times, when he was insisting upon justice even to men who had achieved
material success, he was placed by the more rabid of the radical
opponents of privilege in the hierarchy of the worshipers of the
golden calf. His course along the middle of the onward way exposed him
peculiarly to the missiles of invective and scorn from the partisans on
either side. But neither could drive him into the arms of the other.

The best evidence of the soundness of the strategy with which he
assailed the enemies of the common good, with whirling war-club but with
scrupulous observance of the demands of justice and fair play, is to
be found in the measure of what he actually achieved. He did arouse
the popular mind and sting the popular conscience broad awake. He
did enforce the law without fear or favor. He did leave upon the
statute-book and in the machinery of government new means and methods
for the control of business and for the protection of the general
welfare against predatory wealth.



CHAPTER VIII. THE SQUARE DEAL FOR LABOR

It should go without saying that Roosevelt was vigorously and deeply
concerned with the relations between capital and labor, for he was
interested in everything that concerned the men and women of America,
everything that had to do with human relations. From the very beginning
of his public life he had been a champion of the workingman when the
workingman needed defense against exploitation and injustice. But his
advocacy of the workers' rights was never demagogic nor partial. In
industrial relations, as in the relations between business and the
community, he believed in the square deal. The rights of labor and
the rights of capital must, he firmly held, be respected each by the
other--and the rights of the public by both.

Roosevelt believed thoroughly in trade unions. He realized that one of
the striking accompaniments of the gigantic developments in business
and industry of the past few generations was a gross inequality in the
bargaining relation between the employer and the individual employee
standing alone.

Speaking of the great coal strike which occurred while he was President,
he developed the idea in this way:

"The great coal-mining and coal-carrying companies, which employed
their tens of thousands, could easily dispense with the services of any
particular miner. The miner, on the other hand, however expert, could
not dispense with the companies. He needed a job; his wife and children
would starve if he did not get one. What the miner had to sell--his
labor--was a perishable commodity; the labor of today--if not sold today
was lost forever. Moreover, his labor was not like most commodities--a
mere thing; it was a part of a living, human being. The workman saw, and
all citizens who gave earnest thought to the matter saw that the labor
problem was not only an economic, but also a moral, a human problem.
Individually the miners were impotent when they sought to enter a wage
contract with the great companies; they could make fair terms only by
uniting into trade unions to bargain collectively. The men were forced
to cooperate to secure not only their economic, but their simple human
rights. They, like other workmen, were compelled by the very conditions
under which they lived to unite in unions of their industry or trade,
and those unions were bound to grow in size, in strength, and in power
for good and evil as the industries in which the men were employed grew
larger and larger." *

     * Autobiography (Scribner), pp. 471-78.

He was fond of quoting three statements of Lincoln's as expressing
precisely what he himself believed about capital and labor. The first of
these sayings was this: "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if
labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and
deserves much the higher consideration."

This statement, Roosevelt used to say, would have made him, if it had
been original with him, even more strongly denounced as a communist
agitator than he already was! Then he would turn from this, which the
capitalist ought to hear, to another saying of Lincoln's which the
workingman ought to hear: "Capital has its rights, which are as worthy
of protection as any other rights.. .. Nor should this lead to a war
upon the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor;... property
is desirable; it is a positive good in the world."

Then would come the final word from Lincoln, driven home by Roosevelt
with all his usual vigor and fire: "Let not him who is houseless pull
down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one
for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from
violence when built."

In these three sayings, Roosevelt declared, Lincoln "showed the proper
sense of proportion in his relative estimates of capital and labor, of
human rights and property rights." Roosevelt's own most famous statement
of the matter was made in an address which he delivered before the
Sorbonne in Paris, on his way back from Africa: "In every civilized
society property rights must be carefully safeguarded. Ordinarily, and
in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are
fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears
that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the
upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property."

Several times it happened to Roosevelt to be confronted with the
necessity of meeting with force the threat of violence on the part of
striking workers. He never refused the challenge, and his firmness never
lost him the respect of any but the worthless among the workingmen.
When he was Police Commissioner, strikers in New York were coming into
continual conflict with the police. Roosevelt asked the strike leaders
to meet him in order to talk things over. These leaders did not know
the man with whom they were dealing; they tried to bully him. They
truculently announced the things that they would do if the police
were not compliant to their wishes. But they did not get far in that
direction. Roosevelt called a halt with a snap of his jaws. "Gentlemen!"
he said, "we want to understand one another. That was my object in
coming here. Remember, please, that he who counsels violence does the
cause of labor the poorest service. Also, he loses his case. Understand
distinctly that order will be kept. The police will keep it. Now,
gentlemen!" There was surprised silence for a moment, and then smashing
applause. They had learned suddenly what kind of a man Roosevelt was.
All their respect was his.

It was after he became President that his greatest opportunity occurred
to put into effect his convictions about the industrial problem. In
1909. there was a strike which brought about a complete stoppage of work
for several months in the anthracite coal regions. Both operators and
workers were determined to make no concession. The coal famine became
a national menace as the winter approached. "The big coal operators
had banded together," so Roosevelt has described the situation, "and
positively refused to take any steps looking toward an accommodation.
They knew that the suffering among the miners was great; they were
confident that if order was kept, and nothing further done by the
Government, they would win; and they refused to consider that the public
had any rights in the matter."

As the situation grew more and more dangerous, the President directed
the head of the Federal Labor Bureau to make an investigation of the
whole matter. From this investigation it appeared that the most feasible
solution of the problem was to prevail upon both sides to agree to a
commission of arbitration and promise to accept its findings. To this
proposal the miners agreed; the mine owners insolently declined it.
Nevertheless, Roosevelt persisted, and ultimately the operators
yielded on condition that the commission, which was to be named by the
President, should contain no representative of labor. They insisted that
it should be composed of (1) an officer of the engineer corps of
the army or navy, (2) a man with experience in mining, (3) a "man
of prominence, eminent as a sociologist," (4) a Federal Judge of the
Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and (5) a mining engineer. In the
course of a long and grueling conference it looked as though a
deadlock could be the only outcome, since the mine owners would have
no representative of labor on any terms. But it suddenly dawned on
Roosevelt that the owners were objecting not to the thing but to the
name. He discovered that they would not object to the appointment of any
man, labor man or not, so long as he was not appointed as a labor man
or as a representative of labor. "I shall never forget," he says in
his "Autobiography", "the mixture of relief and amusement I felt when I
thoroughly grasped the fact that while they would heroically submit to
anarchy rather than have Tweedledum, yet if I would call it Tweedledee
they would accept with rapture." All that he needed to do was to "commit
a technical and nominal absurdity with a solemn face." When he realized
that this was the case, Roosevelt announced that he was glad to accept
the terms laid down, and proceeded to appoint to the third position
on the Commission the labor man whom he had wanted from the first
to appoint, Mr. E. E. Clark, the head of the Brotherhood of Railway
Conductors. He called him, however, an "eminent sociologist," adding in
his announcement of the appointment this explanation: "For the purposes
of such a Commission, the term sociologist means a man who has thought
and studied deeply on social questions and has practically applied his
knowledge."

The Commission as finally constituted was an admirable one. Its report,
which removed every menace to peace in the coal industry, was an
outstanding event in the history of the relations of labor and capital
in the United States.

But the most interesting and significant part of Roosevelt's relation
to the great coal strike concerned something that did not happen. It
illustrates his habit of seeing clearly through a situation to the end
and knowing far in advance just what action he was prepared to take in
any contingency that might possibly arise. He was determined that work
should be resumed in the mines and that the country should have coal. He
did not propose to allow the operators to maintain the deadlock by sheer
refusal to make any compromise. In case he could not succeed in making
them reconsider their position, he had prepared a definite and drastic
course of action. The facts in regard to this plan did not become
public until many years after the strike was settled, and then only when
Roosevelt described it in his "Autobiography".

The method of action which Roosevelt had determined upon in the last
resort was to get the Governor of Pennsylvania to appeal to him as
President to restore order. He had then determined to put Federal troops
into the coal fields under the command of some first-rate general,
with instructions not only to preserve order but to dispossess the mine
operators and to run the mines as a receiver, until such time as the
Commission should make its report and the President should issue further
orders in view of that report. Roosevelt found an army officer with the
requisite good sense, judgment, and nerve to act in such a crisis in the
person of Major General Schofield. Roosevelt sent for the General and
explained the seriousness of the crisis. "He was a fine fellow," says
Roosevelt in his "Autobiography", "a most respectable-looking old boy,
with side whiskers and a black skull-cap, without any of the outward
aspect of the conventional military dictator; but in both nerve and
judgment he was all right." Schofield quietly assured the President that
if the order was given he would take possession of the mines, and would
guarantee to open them and run them without permitting any interference
either by the owners or by the strikers or by any one else, so long as
the President told him to stay. Fortunately Roosevelt's efforts to bring
about arbitration were ultimately successful and recourse to the novel
expedient of having the army operate the coal mines proved unnecessary.
No one was more pleased than Roosevelt himself at the harmonious
adjustment of the trouble, for, as he said, "It is never well to take
drastic action if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in
less drastic fashion." But there can be no question that the drastic
action would have followed if the coal operators had not seen the light
when they did.

In other phases of national life Roosevelt made his influence equally
felt. As President he found that there was little which the Federal
Government could do directly for the practical betterment of living and
working conditions among the mass of the people compared with what the
State Governments could do. He determined, however, to strive to make
the National Government an ideal employer. He hoped to make the Federal
employee feel, just as much as did the Cabinet officer, that he was one
of the partners engaged in the service of the public, proud of his work,
eager to do it efficiently, and confident of just treatment. The Federal
Government could act in relation to laboring conditions only in the
Territories, in the District of Columbia, and in connection with
interstate commerce. But in those fields it accomplished much.

The eight-hour law for workers in the executive departments had become
a mere farce and was continually violated by officials who made their
subordinates work longer hours than the law stipulated. This condition
the President remedied by executive action, at the same time seeing
to it that the shirk and the dawdler received no mercy. A good law
protecting the lives and health of miners in the Territories was passed;
and laws were enacted for the District of Columbia, providing for the
supervision of employment agencies, for safeguarding workers against
accidents, and for the restriction of child labor. A workmen's
compensation law for government employees, inadequate but at least a
beginning, was put on the statute books. A similar law for workers on
interstate railways was declared unconstitutional by the courts; but a
second law was passed and stood the test.

It was chiefly in the field of executive action, however, that Roosevelt
was able to put his theories into practice. There he did not have to
deal with recalcitrant, stupid, or medieval-minded politicians, as he so
often did in matters of legislation. One case which confronted him found
him on the side against the labor unions, but, being sure that he was
right, he did not let that fact disturb him. A printer in the Government
Printing Office, named Miller, had been discharged because he was a
non-union man. The President immediately ordered him reinstated.

Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, with
several members of its Executive Council, called upon him to protest.
The President was courteous but inflexible. He answered their protest by
declaring that, in the employment and dismissal of men in the Government
service, he could no more recognize the fact that a man did or did not
belong to a union as being for or against him, than he could recognize
the fact that he was a Protestant or a Catholic, a Jew or a Gentile,
as being for or against him. He declared his belief in trade unions and
said that if he were a worker himself he would unquestionably join a
union. He always preferred to see a union shop. But he could not allow
his personal preferences to control his public actions. The Government
was bound to treat union and non-union men exactly alike. His action in
causing Miller to be reinstated was final.

Another instance which illustrated Roosevelt's skill in handling a
difficult situation occurred in 1908 when the Louisville and Nashville
Railroad and certain other lines announced a reduction in wages. The
heads of that particular road laid the necessity for the reduction at
the door of "the drastic laws inimical to the interests of the railroads
that have in the past year or two been enacted." A general strike,
with all the attendant discomfort and disorder, was threatened in
retaliation. The President wrote a letter to the Interstate Commerce
Commission, in which he said:

"These reductions in wages may be justified or they may not. As to this
the public, which is a vitally interested party, can form no judgment
without a more complete knowledge of the essential facts and real merits
of the case than it now has or than it can possibly obtain from the
special pleadings, certain to be put forth by each side in case their
dispute should bring about serious interruption to traffic. If the
reduction in wages is due to natural causes, the loss of business being
such that the burden should be, and is, equitably distributed, between
capitalist and wageworker, the public should know it. If it is caused by
legislation, the public and Congress should know it; and if it is caused
by misconduct in the past financial or other operations of any railroad,
then everybody should know it, especially if the excuse of unfriendly
legislation is advanced as a method of covering up past business
misconduct by the railroad managers, or as a justification for failure
to treat fairly the wage-earning employees of the company."

The letter closed with a request to the Commission to investigate the
whole matter with these points in view. But the investigation proved
unnecessary; the letter was enough. The proposed reduction of wages was
never heard of again. The strength of the President's position in a case
of this sort was that he was cheerfully prepared to accept whatever an
investigation should show to be right. If the reduction should prove to
be required by natural causes, very well--let the reduction be made. If
it was the result of unfair and unwise legislation, very well--repeal
the legislation. If it was caused by misconduct on the part of railroad
managers, very well--let them be punished. It was hard to get the better
of a man who wanted only the truth, and was ready to act upon it, no
matter which way it cut.

In 1910, after his return from Africa, a speaking trip happened to
take him to Columbus, Ohio, which had for months been in the grasp of a
street railway strike. There had been much violence, many policemen had
refused to do their duty, and many officials had failed in theirs. It
was an uncomfortable time for an outsider to come and make a speech. But
Roosevelt did not dodge. He spoke, and straight to the point. His speech
had been announced as on Law and Order. When he rose to speak, however,
he declared that he would speak on Law, Order, and Justice. Here are
some of the incisive things that he said:

"Now, the first requisite is to establish order; and the first duty of
every official, in State and city alike, high and low, is to see that
order obtains and that violence is definitely stopped .... I have the
greatest regard for the policeman who does his duty. I put him high
among the props of the State, but the policeman who mutinies, or
refuses to perform his duty, stands on a lower level than that of the
professional lawbreaker.... I ask, then, not only that civic officials
perform their duties, but that you, the people, insist upon their
performing them... . I ask this particularly of the wage-workers, and
employees, and men on strike.... I ask them, not merely passively, but
actively, to aid in restoring order. I ask them to clear their skirts
of all suspicion of sympathizing with disorder, and, above all, the
suspicion of sympathizing with those who commit brutal and cowardly
assaults.... What I have said of the laboring men applies just as
much to the capitalists and the capitalists' representatives.... The
wage-workers and the representatives of the companies should make it
evident that they wish the law absolutely obeyed; that there is no
chance of saying that either the labor organization or the corporation
favors lawbreakers or lawbreaking. But let your public servants trust,
not in the good will of either side, but in the might of the civil arm,
and see that law rules, that order obtains, and that every miscreant,
every scoundrel who seeks brutally to assault any other man--whatever
that man's status--is punished with the utmost severity.... When
you have obtained law and order, remember that it is useless to have
obtained them unless upon them you build a superstructure of justice.
After finding out the facts, see that justice is done; see that
injustice that has been perpetrated in the past is remedied, and see
that the chance of doing injustice in the future is minimized."

Now, any one might in his closet write an essay on Law, Order, and
Justice, which would contain every idea that is here expressed. The
essayist might even feel somewhat ashamed of his production on the
ground that all the ideas that it contained were platitudes. But it is
one thing to write an essay far from the madding crowd, and it was
quite another to face an audience every member of which was probably
a partisan of either the workers, the employers, or the officials, and
give them straight from the shoulder simple platitudinous truths of this
sort applicable to the situation in which they found themselves. Any one
of them would have been delighted to hear these things said about his
opponents; it was when they were addressed to himself and his associates
that they stung. The best part of it, however, was the fact that those
things were precisely what the situation needed. They were the truth;
and Roosevelt knew it. His sword had a double edge, and he habitually
used it with a sweep that cut both ways. As a result he was generally
hated or feared by the extremists on both sides. But the average citizen
heartily approved the impartiality of his strokes.

In the year 1905 the Governor of Idaho was killed by a bomb as he was
leaving his house. A former miner, who had been driven from the State
six years before by United States troops engaged in putting down
industrial disorder, was arrested and confessed the crime. In his
confession he implicated three officers of the Western Federation of
Miners, Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone. These three men were brought from
Colorado into Idaho by a method that closely resembled kidnaping, though
it subsequently received the sanction of the United States Supreme
Court. While these prominent labor leaders were awaiting trial,
Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada seethed and burst into eruption. Parts of
the mining districts were transformed into two hostile armed camps.
Violence was common. At this time Roosevelt coupled the name of a giant
among American railroad financiers, with those of Moyer and Haywood,
and described them all as "undesirable citizens." The outbursts of
resentment from both sides were instantaneous and vicious. There was
little to choose between them. Finally the President took advantage of
a letter of criticism from a supporter of the accused labor leaders to
reply to both groups of critics. He referred to the fact that certain
representatives of the great capitalists had protested, because he had
included a prominent financier with Moyer and Haywood, while certain
representatives of labor had protested on precisely the opposite
grounds. Then Roosevelt went on to say:

"I am as profoundly indifferent to the condemnation in one case as in
the other. I challenge as a right the support of all good Americans,
whether wage-workers or capitalists, whatever their occupation or creed,
or in whatever portion of the country they live, when I condemn both the
types of bad citizenship which I have held up to reprobation.... You ask
for a 'square deal' for Messrs. Moyer and Haywood. So do I. When I
say 'square deal', I mean a square deal to every one; it is equally a
violation of the policy of the square deal for a capitalist to protest
against denunciation of a capitalist who is guilty of wrongdoing and for
a labor leader to protest against the denunciation of a labor leader who
has been guilty of wrongdoing. I stand for equal justice to both; and so
far as in my power lies I shall uphold justice, whether the man accused
of guilt has behind him the wealthiest corporation, the greatest
aggregations of riches in the country, or whether he has behind him the
most influential labor organizations in the country."

It should be recorded for the sake of avoiding misapprehension that
Roosevelt's denunciation of Moyer and Haywood was not based on the
assumption that they were guilty of the death of the murdered' Governor,
but was predicated on their general attitude and conduct in the
industrial conflicts in the mining fields.

The criticisms of Roosevelt because of his actions in the complex
relations of capital and labor were often puerile. For instance, he
was sternly taken to task on one or two occasions because he had labor
leaders lunch with him at the White House. He replied to one of his
critics with this statement of his position: "While I am President I
wish the labor man to feel that he has the same right of access to me
that the capitalist has; that the doors swing open as easily to the
wageworker as to the head of a big corporation--AND NO EASIER."



CHAPTER IX. RECLAMATION AND CONSERVATION

The first message of President Roosevelt to Congress contained these
words: "The forest and water problems are perhaps the most vital
internal questions of the United States." At that moment, on December 3,
1901, the impulse was given that was to add to the American vocabulary
two new words, "reclamation" and "conservation," that was to create two
great constructive movements for the preservation, the increase, and
the utilization of natural resources, and that was to establish a new
relationship on the part of the Federal Government to the nation's
natural wealth.

Reclamation and conservation had this in common: the purpose of both was
the intelligent and efficient utilization of the natural resources
of the country for the benefit of the people of the country. But
they differed in one respect, and with conspicuous practical effects.
Reclamation, which meant the spending of public moneys to render fertile
and usable arid lands hitherto deemed worthless, trod on no one's toes.
It took from no one anything that he had; it interfered with no one's
enjoyment of benefits which it was not in the public interest that he
should continue to enjoy unchecked. It was therefore popular from the
first, and the new policy went through Congress as though on well-oiled
wheels. Only six months passed between its first statement in the
Presidential message and its enactment into law. Conservation, on the
other hand, had to begin by withholding the natural resources from
exploitation and extravagant use. It had, first of all, to establish in
the national mind the principle that the forests and mines of the nation
are not an inexhaustible grab-bag into which whosoever will may thrust
greedy and wasteful hands, and by this new understanding to stop the
squandering of vast national resources until they could be economically
developed and intelligently used. So it was inevitable that conservation
should prove unpopular, while reclamation gained an easy popularity, and
that those who had been feeding fat off the country's stores of
forest and mineral wealth should oppose, with tooth and nail, the very
suggestion of conservation. It was on the first Sunday after he reached
Washington as President, before he had moved into the White House, that
Roosevelt discussed with two men, Gifford Pinchot and F. H. Newell, the
twin policies that were to become two of the finest contributions
to American progress of the Roosevelt Administrations. Both men were
already in the Government service, both were men of broad vision and
high constructive ability; with both Roosevelt had already worked
when he was Governor of New York. The name of Newell, who became chief
engineer of the Reclamation Service, ought to be better known popularly
than it is in connection with the wonderful work that has been
accomplished in making the desert lands of western America blossom and
produce abundantly. The name of Pinchot, by a more fortunate combination
of events, has become synonymous in the popular mind with the
conservation movement.

On the very day that the first Roosevelt message was read to the
Congress, a committee of Western Senators and Congressmen was organized,
under the leadership of Senator Francis G. Newlands of Nevada, to
prepare a Reclamation Bill. The only obstacle to the prompt enactment
of the bill was the undue insistence upon State Rights by certain
Congressmen, "who consistently fought for local and private interests
as against the interests of the people as a whole." In spite of this
shortsighted opposition, the bill became law on June 17, 1902, and the
work of reclamation began without an instant's delay. The Reclamation
Act set aside the proceeds of the sale of public lands for the purpose
of reclaiming the waste areas of the arid West.

Lands otherwise worthless were to be irrigated and in those new regions
of agricultural productivity homes were to be established. The money so
expended was to be repaid in due course by the settlers on the land and
the sums repaid were to be used as a revolving fund for the continuous
prosecution of the reclamation work. Nearly five million dollars was
made immediately available for the work. Within four years, twenty-six
"projects" had been approved by the Secretary of the Interior and work
was well under way on practically all of them. They were situated in
fourteen States--Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska,
Washington, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, California,
South Dakota. The individual projects were intended to irrigate areas
of from eight thousand to two hundred thousand acres each; and the grand
total of arid lands to which water was thus to be brought by canals,
tunnels, aqueducts, and ditches was more than a million and a half
acres.

The work had to be carried out under the most difficult and adventurous
conditions. The men of the Reclamation Service were in the truest sense
pioneers, building great engineering works far from the railroads, where
the very problem of living for the great numbers of workers required was
no simple one. On the Shoshone in Wyoming these men built the highest
dam in the world, 310 feet from base to crest. They pierced a mountain
range in Colorado and carried the waters of the Gunnison River nearly
six miles to the Uncompahgre Valley through a tunnel in the solid rock.
The great Roosevelt dam on the Salt River in Arizona with its gigantic
curved wall of masonry 280 feet high, created a lake with a capacity
of fifty-six billion cubic feet, and watered in 1915 an area of 750,000
acres.

The work of these bold pioneers was made possible by the fearless
backing which they received from the Administration at Washington.
The President demanded of them certain definite results and gave them
unquestioning support. In Roosevelt's own words, "the men in charge
were given to understand that they must get into the water if they would
learn to swim; and, furthermore, they learned to know that if they acted
honestly, and boldly and fearlessly accepted responsibility, I would
stand by them to the limit. In this, as in every other case, in the end
the boldness of the action fully justified itself."

The work of reclamation was first prosecuted under the United States
Geological Survey; but in the spring of 1908 the United States
Reclamation Service was established to carry it on, under the direction
of Mr. Newell, to whom the inception of the plan was due. Roosevelt paid
a fine and well-deserved tribute to the man who originated and carried
through this great national achievement when he said that "Newell's
single-minded devotion to this great task, the constructive imagination
which enabled him to conceive it, and the executive power and high
character through which he and his assistant, Arthur P. Davis, built up
a model service--all these made him a model servant. The final proof of
his merit is supplied by the character and records of the men who later
assailed him."

The assault to which Roosevelt thus refers was the inevitable aftermath
of great accomplishment. Reclamation was popular, when it was proposed,
while it was being carried out, and when the water began to flow in the
ditches, making new lands of fertile abundance for settlers and farmers.
But the reaction of unpopularity came the minute the beneficiaries
had to begin to pay for the benefits received. Then arose a concerted
movement for the repudiation of the obligation of the settlers to repay
the Government for what had been spent to reclaim the land. The baser
part of human nature always seeks a scapegoat; and it might naturally
be expected that the repudiators and their supporters should concentrate
their attacks upon the head of the Reclamation Service, to whose
outstanding ability and continuous labor they owed that for which they
were now unwilling to pay. But no attack, not even the adverse report
of an ill-humored congressional committee, can alter the fact of
the tremendous service that Newell and his loyal associates in the
Reclamation Service did for the nation and the people of the United
States. By 1915 reclamation had added to the arable land of the country
a million and a quarter acres, of which nearly eight hundred thousand
acres were already "under water," and largely under tillage, producing
yearly more than eighteen million dollars' worth of crops.

When Roosevelt became President there was a Bureau of Forestry in the
Department of Agriculture, but it was a body entrusted with merely the
study of forestry problems and principles. It contained all the trained
foresters in the employ of the Government; but it had no public forest
lands whatever to which the knowledge and skill of these men could be
applied. All the forest reserves of that day were in the charge of the
Public Land Office in the Department of the Interior. This was managed
by clerks who knew nothing of forestry, and most, if not all, of whom
had never seen a stick of the timber or an acre of the woodlands for
which they were responsible. The mapping and description of the timber
lay with the Geological Survey. So the national forests had no foresters
and the Government foresters no forests.

It was a characteristic arrangement of the old days. More than that,
it was a characteristic expression of the old attitude of thought
and action on the part of the American people toward their natural
resources. Dazzled and intoxicated by the inexhaustible riches of their
bountiful land, they had concerned themselves only with the agreeable
task of utilizing and consuming them. To their shortsighted vision there
seemed always plenty more beyond. With the beginning of the twentieth
century a prophet arose in the land to warn the people that the supply
was not inexhaustible. He declared not only that the "plenty more
beyond" had an end, but that the end was already in sight. This prophet
was Gifford Pinchot. His warning went forth reinforced by all the
authority of the Presidential office and all the conviction and driving
power of the personality of Roosevelt himself. Pinchot's warning cry was
startling:

"The growth of our forests is but one-third of the annual cut; and
we have in store timber enough for only twenty or thirty years at
our present rate of use.... Our coal supplies are so far from being
inexhaustible that if the increasing rate of consumption shown by
the figures of the last seventy-five years continues to prevail, our
supplies of anthracite coal will last but fifty years and of bituminous
coal less than two hundred years.... Many oil and gas fields, as in
Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the Mississippi Valley, have already
failed, yet vast quantities of gas continue to be poured into the air
and great quantities of oil into the streams. Cases are known in which
great volumes of oil were systematically burned in order to get rid
of it.... In 1896, Professor Shaler, than whom no one has spoken with
greater authority on this subject, estimated that in the upland regions
of the States South of Pennsylvania, three thousand square miles of
soil have been destroyed as the result of forest denudation, and that
destruction was then proceeding at the rate of one hundred square miles
of fertile soil per year.. .. The Mississippi River alone is estimated
to transport yearly four hundred million tons of sediment, or about
twice the amount of material to be excavated from the Panama Canal. This
material is the most fertile portion of the richest fields, transformed
from a blessing to a curse by unrestricted erosion.... The destruction
of forage plants by overgrazing has resulted, in the opinion of men most
capable of judging, in reducing the grazing value of the public lands by
one-half."

Here, then, was a problem of national significance, and it was one which
the President attacked with his usual promptness and vigor. His first
message to Congress called for the unification of the care of the forest
lands of the public domain in a single body under the Department of
Agriculture. He asked that legal authority be granted to the President
to transfer to the Department of Agriculture lands for use as forest
reserves. He declared that "the forest reserves should be set apart
forever for the use and benefit of our people as a whole and not
sacrificed to the shortsighted greed of a few." He supplemented this
declaration with an explanation of the meaning and purpose of the forest
policy which he urged should be adopted: "Wise forest protection does
not mean the withdrawal of forest resources, whether of wood, water, or
grass, from contributing their full share to the welfare of the people,
but, on the contrary, gives the assurance of larger and more certain
supplies. The fundamental idea of forestry is the perpetuation of
forests by use. Forest protection is not an end in itself; it is a means
to increase and sustain the resources of our country and the industries
which depend upon them. The preservation of our forests is an imperative
business necessity. We have come to see clearly that whatever
destroys the forest, except to make way for agriculture, threatens our
wellbeing."

Nevertheless it was four years before Congress could be brought to the
common-sense policy of administering the forest lands still belonging
to the Government. Pinchot and his associates in the Bureau of Forestry
spent the interval profitably, however, in investigating and studying
the whole problem of national forest resources and in drawing up
enlightened and effective plans for their protection and development.
Accordingly, when the act transferring the National Forests to the
charge of the newly created United States Forest Service in the
Department of Agriculture was passed early in 1905, they were ready for
the responsibility.

The principles which they had formulated and which they now began to
apply had been summed up by Roosevelt in the statement "that the rights
of the public to the natural resources outweigh private rights and must
be given the first consideration." Until the establishment of the Forest
Service, private rights had almost always been allowed to overbalance
public rights in matters that concerned not only the National Forests,
but the public lands generally. It was the necessity of having this new
principle recognized and adopted that made the way of the newly created
Forest Service and of the whole Conservation movement so thorny. Those
who had been used to making personal profit from free and unrestricted
exploitation of the nation's natural resources would look only with
antagonism on a movement which put a consideration of the general
welfare first.

The Forest Service nevertheless put these principles immediately into
practical application. The National Forests were opened to a regulated
use of all their resources. A law was passed throwing open to settlement
all land in the National Forests which was found to be chiefly valuable
for agriculture. Hitherto all such land had been closed to the settler.
Regulations were established and enforced which favored the settler
rather than the large stockowner. It was provided that, when conditions
required the reduction in the number of head of stock grazed in any
National Forest, the vast herds of the wealthy owner should be affected
before the few head of the small man, upon which the living of his
family depended. The principle which excited the bitterest antagonism of
all was the rule that any one, except a bona fide settler on the land,
who took public property for private profit should pay for what he got.
This was a new and most unpalatable idea to the big stock and sheep
raisers, who had been accustomed to graze their animals at will on the
richest lands of the public forests, with no one but themselves a penny
the better off thereby. But the Attorney-General of the United States
declared it legal to make the men who pastured their cattle and sheep in
the National Forests pay for this privilege; and in the summer of 1906
such charges were for the first time made and collected. The trained
foresters of the service were put in charge of the National Forests. As
a result, improvement began to manifest itself in other ways. Within two
years the fire prevention work alone had completely justified the new
policy of forest regulation. Eighty-six per cent of the fires that did
occur in the National Forests were held down to an area of five acres or
less. The new service not only made rapid progress in saving the timber,
but it began to make money for the nation by selling the timber. In 1905
the sales of timber brought in $60,000; three years later the return was
$850,000.

The National Forests were trebled in size during the two Roosevelt
Administrations with the result that there were 194,000,000 acres of
publicly owned and administered forest lands when Roosevelt went out of
office. The inclusion of these lands in the National Forests, where they
were safe from the selfish exploitation of greedy private interests,
was not accomplished without the bitterest opposition. The wisdom of the
serpent sometimes had to be called into play to circumvent the adroit
maneuvering of these interests and their servants in Congress. In 1907,
for example, Senator Charles W. Fulton of Oregon obtained an amendment
to the Agricultural Appropriation Bill forbidding the President to set
aside any additional National Forests in six Northwestern States.. But
the President and the Forest Service were ready for this bold attempt
to deprive the public of some 16,000,000 acres for the benefit of land
grabbers and special interests. They knew exactly what lands ought to
be set aside in those States. So the President first unostentatiously
signed the necessary proclamations to erect those lands into National
Forests, and then quietly approved the Agricultural Bill. "The opponents
of the Forest Service," said Roosevelt, "turned handsprings in their
wrath; and dire were their threats against the Executive; but the
threats could not be carried out, and were really only a tribute to the
efficiency of our action."

The development of a sound and enlightened forest policy naturally led
to the consideration of a similar policy for dealing with the water
power of the country which had hitherto gone to waste or was in the
hands of private interests. It had been the immemorial custom that the
water powers on the navigable streams, on the public domain, and in
the National Forests should be given away for nothing, and practically
without question, to the first comer. This ancient custom ran right
athwart the newly enunciated principle that public property should not
pass into private possession without being paid for, and that permanent
grants, except for home-making, should not be made. The Forest Service
now began to apply this principle to the water powers in the National
Forests, granting permission for the development and use of such power
for limited periods only and requiring payment for the privilege. This
was the beginning of a general water power policy which, in the course
of time, commended itself to public approval; but it was long before
it ceased to be opposed by the private interests that wanted these rich
resources for their own undisputed use.

Out of the forest movement grew the conservation movement in its broader
sense. In the fall of 1907 Roosevelt made a trip down the Mississippi
River with the definite purpose of drawing general attention to the
subject of the development of the national inland waterways. Seven
months before, he had established the Inland Waterways Commission and
had directed it to "consider the relations of the streams to the use of
all the great permanent natural resources and their conservation for the
making and maintenance of permanent homes." During the trip a letter was
prepared by a group of men interested in the conservation movement
and was presented to him, asking him to summon a conference on the
conservation of natural resources. At a great meeting held at Memphis,
Tennessee, Roosevelt publicly announced his intention of calling such a
conference.

In May of the following year the conference was held in the East Room
of the White House. There were assembled there the President, the
Vice-President, seven Cabinet members, the Supreme Court Justices, the
Governors of thirty-four States and representatives of the other twelve,
the Governors of all the Territories, including Alaska, Hawaii, and
Porto Rico, the President of the Board of Commissioners of the District
of Columbia, representatives of sixty-eight national societies, four
special guests, William Jennings Bryan, James J. Hill, Andrew Carnegie,
and John Mitchell, forty-eight general guests, and the members of the
Inland Waterways Commission. The object of the conference was stated by
the President in these words: "It seems to me time for the country to
take account of its natural resources, and to inquire how long they are
likely to last. We are prosperous now; we should not forget that it will
be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time."

At the conclusion of the conference a declaration prepared by the
Governors of Louisiana, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Utah, and South Carolina,
was unanimously adopted. This Magna Charta of the conservation movement
declared "that the great natural resources supply the material basis
upon which our civilization must continue to depend and upon which the
perpetuity of the nation itself rests," that "this material basis is
threatened with exhaustion," and that "this conservation of our natural
resources is a subject of transcendent importance, which should engage
unremittingly the attention of the Nation, the States, and the people
in earnest cooperation." It set forth the practical implications of
Conservation in these words:

"We agree that the land should be so used that erosion and soil wash
shall cease; and that there should be reclamation of arid and semi-arid
regions by means of irrigation, and of swamp and overflowed regions by
means of drainage; that the waters should be so conserved and used as
to promote navigation, to enable the arid regions to be reclaimed by
irrigation, and to develop power in the interests of the people; that
the forests which regulate our rivers, support our industries, and
promote the fertility and productiveness of the soil should be preserved
and perpetuated; that the minerals found so abundantly beneath the
surface should be so used as to prolong their utility; that the beauty,
healthfulness, and habitability of our country should be preserved and
increased; that sources of national wealth exist for the benefit of the
people, and that monopoly thereof should not be tolerated."

The conference urged the continuation and extension of the forest
policies already established; the immediate adoption of a wise, active,
and thorough waterway policy for the prompt improvement of the streams,
and the conservation of water resources for irrigation, water supply,
power, and navigation; and the enactment of laws for the prevention of
waste in the mining and extraction of coal, oil, gas, and other minerals
with a view to their wise conservation for the use of the people. The
declaration closed with the timely adjuration, "Let us conserve the
foundations of our prosperity."

As a result of the conference President Roosevelt created the National
Conservation Commission, consisting of forty-nine men of prominence,
about one-third of whom were engaged in politics, one-third in various
industries, and one-third in scientific work. Gifford Pinchot was
appointed chairman. The Commission proceeded to make an inventory of the
natural resources of the United States. This inventory contains the only
authentic statement as to the amounts of the national resources of the
country, the degree to which they have already been exhausted, and their
probable duration. But with this inventory there came to an end the
activity of the Conservation Commission, for Congress not only refused
any appropriation for its use but decreed by law that no bureau of
the Government should do any work for any commission or similar body
appointed by the President, without reference to the question whether
such work was appropriate or not for such a bureau to undertake.
Inasmuch as the invaluable inventory already made had been almost
entirely the work of scientific bureaus of the Government instructed by
the President to cooperate with the Commission, the purpose and animus
of this legislation were easily apparent. Congress had once more shown
its friendship for the special interests and its indifference to the
general welfare.

In February, 1909, on the invitation of President Roosevelt, a North
American Conservation Conference, attended by representatives of the
United States, Canada, and Mexico, was held at the White House. A
declaration of principles was drawn up and the suggestion made that
all the nations of the world should be invited to meet in a World
Conservation Conference. The President forthwith addressed to forty-five
nations a letter inviting them to assemble at The Hague for such a
conference; but, as he has laconically expressed it, "When I left the
White House the project lapsed."



CHAPTER X. BEING WISE IN TIME

Perhaps the most famous of Roosevelt's epigrammatic sayings is,
"Speak softly and carry a big stick." The public, with its instinctive
preference for the dramatic over the significant, promptly seized upon
the "big stick" half of the aphorism and ignored the other half. But
a study of the various acts of Roosevelt when he was President readily
shows that in his mind the "big stick" was purely subordinate. It was
merely the ultima ratio, the possession of which would enable a nation
to "speak softly" and walk safely along the road of peace and justice
and fair play.

The secret of Roosevelt's success in foreign affairs is to be found in
another of his favorite sayings: "Nine-tenths of wisdom is to be wise in
time." He has himself declared that his whole foreign policy "was
based on the exercise of intelligent foresight and of decisive action
sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis to make it improbable
that we would run into serious trouble."

When Roosevelt became President, a perplexing controversy with Great
Britain over the boundary line between Alaska and Canada was in full
swing. The problem, which had become acute with the discovery of gold in
the Klondike in 1897, had already been considered, together with eleven
other subjects of dispute between Canada and the United States, by a
Joint Commission which had been able to reach no agreement. The essence
of the controversy was this: The treaty of 1825 between Great Britain
and Russia had declared that the boundary, dividing British and Russian
America on that five-hundred-mile strip of land which depends from the
Alaskan elephant's head like a dangling halter rope, should be drawn
"parallel to the windings of the coast" at a distance inland of thirty
miles. The United States took the plain and literal interpretation of
these words in the treaty. The Canadian contention was that within the
meaning of the treaty the fiords or inlets which here break into the
land were not part of the sea, and that the line, instead of following,
at the correct distance inland, the indentations made by these arms of
the sea, should leap boldly across them, at the agreed distance from
the points of the headlands. This would give Canada the heads of several
great inlets and direct access to the sea far north of the point where
the Canadian coast had, always been assumed to end. Canada and the
United States were equally resolute in upholding their claims. It looked
as if the matter would end in a deadlock.

John Hay, who had been Secretary of State in McKinley's Cabinet, as
he now was in Roosevelt's, had done his best to bring the matter to a
settlement, but had been unwilling to have the dispute arbitrated, for
the very good reason that, as he said, "although our claim is as clear
as the sun in heaven, we know enough of arbitration to foresee the fatal
tendency of all arbitrators to compromise." Roosevelt believed that the
"claim of the Canadians for access to deep water along any part of the
Alaskan coast is just exactly as indefensible as if they should now
claim the island of Nantucket." He was willing, however, to refer the
question unconfused by other issues to a second Joint Commission of six.
The commission was duly constituted. There was no odd neutral member of
this body, as in an arbitration, but merely three representatives from
each side. Of the British representatives two were Canadians and the
third was the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Alverstone.

But before the Commission met, the President took pains to have conveyed
to the British Cabinet, in an informal but diplomatically correct way,
his views and his intentions in the event of a disagreement. "I wish to
make one last effort," he said, "to bring about an agreement through the
Commission which will enable the people of both countries to say
that the result represents the feeling of the representatives of
both countries. But if there is a disagreement, I wish it distinctly
understood, not only that there will be no arbitration of the matter,
but that in my message to Congress I shall take a position which will
prevent any possibility of arbitration hereafter." If this should seem
to any one too vigorous flourishing of the "big stick," let him remember
that it was all done through confidential diplomatic channels, and
that the judgment of the Lord Chief Justice of England, when the final
decision was made, fully upheld Roosevelt's position.

The decision of the Commission was, with slight immaterial
modifications, in favor of the United States. Lord Alverstone voted
against his Canadian than colleagues. It was a just decision, as most
well-informed Canadians knew at the time. The troublesome question was
settled; the time-honored friendship of two great peoples had suffered
no interruption; and Roosevelt had secured for his country its just
due, without public parade or bluster, by merely being wise--and
inflexible--in time.

During the same early period of his Presidency, Roosevelt found himself
confronted with a situation in South America, which threatened a serious
violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Venezuela was repudiating certain
debts which the Venezuelan Government had guaranteed to European
capitalists. German capital was chiefly involved, and Germany proposed
to collect the debts by force. Great Britain and Italy were also
concerned in the matter, but Germany was the ringleader and the active
partner in the undertaking. Throughout the year 1902 a pacific blockade
of the Venezuelan coast was maintained and in December of that year an
ultimatum demanding the immediate payment of the debts was presented.
When its terms were not complied with, diplomatic relations were broken
off and the Venezuelan fleet was seized. At this point the United States
entered upon the scene, but with no blare of trumpets.

In fact, what really happened was not generally known until several
years later.

In his message of December, 1901, President Roosevelt had made two
significant statements. Speaking of the Monroe Doctrine, he said, "We do
not guarantee any state against punishment, if it misconducts itself."
This was very satisfactory to Germany. But he added--"provided the
punishment does not take the form of the acquisition of territory by any
non-American power." This did not suit the German book so well. For a
year the matter was discussed. Germany disclaimed any intention to make
"permanent" acquisitions in Venezuela but contended for its right
to make "temporary" ones. Now the world had already seen "temporary"
acquisitions made in China, and it was a matter of common knowledge that
this convenient word was often to be interpreted in a Pickwickian sense.

When the "pacific blockade" passed into the stage of active hostilities,
the patience of Roosevelt snapped. The German Ambassador, von Holleben,
was summoned to the White House. The President proposed to him that
Germany should arbitrate its differences with Venezuela. Von Holleben
assured him that his "Imperial Master" would not hear of such a course.
The President persisted that there must be no taking possession, even
temporarily, of Venezuelan territory. He informed the Ambassador that
Admiral Dewey was at that moment maneuvering in Caribbean waters, and
that if satisfactory assurances did not come from Berlin in ten days,
he would be ordered to proceed to Venezuela to see that no territory was
seized by German forces. The Ambassador was firm in his conviction that
no assurances would be forthcoming.

A week later Von Holleben appeared at the White House to talk of
another matter and was about to leave without mentioning Venezuela. The
President stopped him with a question. No, said the Ambassador, no
word had come from Berlin. Then, Roosevelt explained, it would not
be necessary for him to wait the remaining three days. Dewey would be
instructed to sail a day earlier than originally planned. He added that
not a word of all this had been put upon paper, and that if the German
Emperor would consent to arbitrate, the President would praise him
publicly for his broadmindedness. The Ambassador was still convinced
that no arbitration was conceivable.

But just twelve hours later he appeared at the White House, his face
wreathed in smiles. On behalf of his Imperial Master he had the honor to
request the President of the United States to act as arbitrator
between Germany and Venezuela. The orders to Dewey were never sent,
the President publicly congratulated the Kaiser on his loyalty to the
principle of arbitration, and, at Roosevelt's suggestion, the case went
to The Hague. Not an intimation of the real occurrences came out till
long after, not a public word or act marred the perfect friendliness of
the two nations. The Monroe Doctrine was just as unequivocally invoked
and just as inflexibly upheld as it had been by Grover Cleveland eight
years before in another Venezuelan case. But the quiet private warning
had been substituted for the loud public threat.

The question of the admission of Japanese immigrants to the United
States and of their treatment had long disturbed American international
relations. It became acute in the latter part of 1906, when the city of
San Francisco determined to exclude all Japanese pupils from the public
schools and to segregate them in a school of their own. This action
seemed to the Japanese a manifest violation of the rights guaranteed by
treaty. Diplomatic protests were instantly forthcoming at Washington;
and popular demonstrations against the United States boiled up in
Tokyo. For the third time there appeared splendid material for a serious
conflict with a great power which might conceivably lead to active
hostilities. From such beginnings wars have come before now.

The President was convinced that the Californians were utterly wrong
in what they had done, but perfectly right in the underlying conviction
from which their action sprang. He saw that justice and good faith
demanded that the Japanese in California be protected in their treaty
rights, and that the Californians be protected from the immigration of
Japanese laborers in mass. With characteristic promptness and vigor
he set forth these two considerations and took action to make them
effective. In his message to Congress in December he declared: "In the
matter now before me, affecting the Japanese, everything that is in my
power to do will be done and all of the forces, military and civil, of
the United States which I may lawfully employ will be so employed ... to
enforce the rights of aliens under treaties." Here was reassurance for
the Japanese. But he also added: "The Japanese would themselves not
tolerate the intrusion into their country of a mass of Americans who
would displace Japanese in the business of the land. The people of
California are right in insisting that the Japanese shall not come
thither in mass." Here was reassurance for the Californians.

The words were promptly followed by acts. The garrison of Federal
troops at San Francisco was reinforced and public notice was given that
violence against Japanese would be put down. Suits were brought both in
the California State courts and in the Federal courts there to uphold
the treaty rights of Japan. Mr. Victor H. Metcalf, the Secretary of
Commerce and Labor, himself a Californian, was sent to San Francisco to
make a study of the whole situation. It was made abundantly clear to the
people of San Francisco and the Coast that the provision of the Federal
Constitution making treaties a part of the supreme law of the land,
with which the Constitution and laws of no State can interfere, would
be strictly enforced. The report of Secretary Metcalf showed that the
school authorities of San Francisco had done not only an illegal thing
but an unnecessary and a stupid thing.

Meanwhile Roosevelt had been working with equal vigor upon the other
side of the problem. He esteemed it precisely as important to protect
the Californians from the Japanese as to protect the Japanese from
the Californians. As in the Alaskan and Venezuelan cases, he proceeded
without beat of drum or clash of cymbal. The matter was worked out in
unobtrusive conferences between the President and the State Department
and the Japanese representatives in Washington. It was all friendly,
informal, conciliatory--but the Japanese did not fail to recognize the
inflexible determination behind this courteous friendliness. Out of
these conferences came an informal agreement on the part of the Japanese
Government that no passports would be issued to Japanese workingmen
permitting them to leave Japan for ports of the United States. It was
further only necessary to prevent Japanese coolies from coming into
the United States through Canada and Mexico. This was done by executive
order just two days after the school authorities of San Francisco had
rescinded their discriminatory school decree.

The incident is eminently typical of Roosevelt's principles and
practice: to accord full measure of justice while demanding full measure
in return; to be content with the fact without care for the formality;
to see quickly, to look far, and to act boldly.

It had a sequel which rounded out the story. The President's ready
willingness to compel California to do justice to the Japanese was
misinterpreted in Japan as timidity. Certain chauvinistic elements in
Japan began to have thoughts which were in danger of becoming inimical
to the best interests of the United States. It seemed to President
Roosevelt an opportune moment, for many reasons, to send the American
battle fleet on a voyage around the world. The project was frowned on
in this country and viewed with doubt in other parts of the world. Many
said the thing could not be done, for no navy in the world had yet done
it; but Roosevelt knew that it could. European observers believed
that it would lead to war with Japan; but Roosevelt's conviction was
precisely the opposite. In his own words, "I did not expect it;... I
believed that Japan would feel as friendly in the matter as we did;
but... if my expectations had proved mistaken, it would have been proof
positive that we were going to be attacked anyhow, and... in such
event it would have been an enormous gain to have had the three months'
preliminary preparation which enabled the fleet to start perfectly
equipped. In a personal interview before they left, I had explained
to the officers in command that I believed the trip would be one of
absolute peace, but that they were to take exactly the same precautions
against sudden attack of any kind as if we were at war with all the
nations of the earth; and that no excuse of any kind would be accepted
if there were a sudden attack of any kind and we were taken unawares."
Prominent inhabitants and newspapers of the Atlantic coast were deeply
concerned over the taking away of the fleet from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. The head of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, who hailed
from the State of Maine, declared that the fleet should not and could
not go because Congress would refuse to appropriate the money; Roosevelt
announced in response that he had enough money to take the fleet
around into the Pacific anyhow, that it would certainly go, and that if
Congress did not choose to appropriate enough money to bring the fleet
back, it could stay there. There was no further difficulty about the
money.

The voyage was at once a hard training trip and a triumphant progress.
Everywhere the ships, their officers, and their men were received with
hearty cordiality and deep admiration, and nowhere more so than in
Japan. The nations of the world were profoundly impressed by the
achievement. The people of the United States were thoroughly aroused
to a new pride in their navy and an interest in its adequacy and
efficiency. It was definitely established in the minds of Americans and
foreigners that the United States navy is rightfully as much at home in
the Pacific as in the Atlantic. Any cloud the size of a man's hand that
may have been gathering above the Japanese horizon was forthwith swept
away. Roosevelt's plan was a novel and bold use of the instruments of
war on behalf of peace which was positively justified in the event.



CHAPTER XI. RIGHTS, DUTIES, AND REVOLUTIONS

It was a favorite conviction of Theodore Roosevelt that neither an
individual nor a nation can possess rights which do not carry with them
duties. Not long after the Venezuelan incident--in which the right
of the United States, as set forth in the Monroe Doctrine, to prevent
European powers from occupying territory in the Western Hemisphere was
successfully upheld--an occasion arose nearer home not only to insist
upon rights but to assume the duties involved. In a message to the
Senate in February, 1905, Roosevelt thus outlined his conception of the
dual nature of the Monroe Doctrine:

"It has for some time been obvious that those who profit by the Monroe
Doctrine must accept certain responsibilities along with the rights
which it confers, and that the same statement applies to those who
uphold the doctrine.... An aggrieved nation can, without interfering
with the Monroe Doctrine, take what action it sees fit in the adjustment
of its disputes with American states, provided that action does not
take the shape of interference with their form of government or of the
despoilment of their territory under any disguise. But short of this,
when the question is one of a money claim, the only way which remains
finally to collect it is a blockade or bombardment or seizure of the
custom houses, and this means... what is in effect a possession, even
though only a temporary possession, of territory. The United States then
becomes a party in interest, because under the Monroe Doctrine it cannot
see any European power seize and permanently occupy the territory of
one of these republics; and yet such seizure of territory, disguised
or undisguised, may eventually offer the only way in which the power in
question can collect its debts, unless there is interference on the part
of the United States."

Roosevelt had already found such interference necessary in the case of
Germany and Venezuela. But it had been interference in a purely negative
sense. He had merely insisted that the European power should not occupy
American territory even temporarily. In the later case of the Dominican
Republic he supplemented this negative interference with positive
action based upon his conviction of the inseparable nature of rights and
obligations.

Santo Domingo was in its usual state of chronic revolution. The stakes
for which the rival forces were continually fighting were the custom
houses, for they were the only certain sources of revenue and their
receipts were the only reliable security which could be offered to
foreign capitalists in support of loans. So thoroughgoing was the
demoralization of the Republic's affairs that at one time there were
two rival "governments" in the island and a revolution going on against
each. One of these governments was once to be found at sea in a small
gunboat but still insisting that, as the only legitimate government,
it was entitled to declare war or peace or, more particularly, to make
loans. The national debt of the Republic had mounted to $32,280,000 of
which some $22,000,000 was owed to European creditors. The interest due
on it in the year 1905 was two and a half million dollars. The whole
situation was ripe for intervention by one or more European governments.

Such action President Roosevelt could not permit. But he could not
ignore the validity of the debts which the Republic had contracted or
the justice of the demand for the payment of at least the interest. "It
cannot in the long run prove possible," he said, "for the United
States to protect delinquent American nations from punishment for the
non-performance of their duties unless she undertakes to make them
perform their duties." So he invented a plan, which, by reason of
its success in the Dominican case and its subsequent application and
extension by later administrations, has come to be a thoroughly accepted
part of the foreign policy of the United States. It ought to be known
as the Roosevelt Plan, just as the amplification of the Monroe Doctrine
already outlined might well be known as the Roosevelt Doctrine.

A naval commander in Dominican waters was instructed to see that no
revolutionary fighting was permitted to endanger the custom houses.
These instructions were carried out explicitly but without any actual
use of force or shedding of blood. On one occasion two rival forces had
planned a battle in a custom-house town. The American commander informed
them courteously but firmly that they would not be permitted to
fight there, for a battle might endanger the custom house. He had no
objection, however, to their fighting. In fact he had picked out a
nice spot for them outside the town where they might have their battle
undisturbed. The winner could have the town. Would they kindly step
outside for their fight. They would; they did. The American commander
gravely welcomed the victorious faction as the rightful rulers of the
town. So much for keeping the custom houses intact. But the Roosevelt
Plan went much further. An agreement was entered into with those
governmental authorities "who for the moment seemed best able to speak
for the country" by means of which the custom houses were placed under
American control. United States forces were to keep order and to protect
the custom houses; United States officials were to collect the customs
dues; forty-five per cent of the revenue was to be turned over to the
Dominican Government, and fifty-five per cent put into a sinking fund in
New York for the benefit of the creditors. The plan succeeded famously.
The Dominicans got more out of their forty-five per cent than they had
been wont to get when presumably the entire revenue was theirs. The
creditors thoroughly approved, and their Governments had no possible
pretext left for interference. Although the plan concerned itself not
at all with the internal affairs of the Republic, its indirect influence
was strong for good and the island enjoyed a degree of peace and
prosperity such as it had not known before for at least a century.
There was, however, strong opposition in the United States Senate to the
ratification of the treaty with the Dominican Republic. The Democrats,
with one or two exceptions, voted against ratification. A number of the
more reactionary Republican Senators, also, who were violently
hostile to President Roosevelt because of his attitude toward great
corporations, lent their opposition. The Roosevelt Plan was further
attacked by certain sections of the press, already antagonistic on other
grounds, and by some of those whom Roosevelt called the "professional
interventional philanthropists." It was two years before the Senate was
ready to ratify the treaty, but meanwhile Roosevelt continued to carry
it out "as a simple agreement on the part of the Executive which could
be converted into a treaty whenever the Senate was ready to act."

The treaty as finally ratified differed in some particulars from the
protocol. In the protocol the United States agreed "to respect the
complete territorial integrity of the Dominican Republic." This covenant
was omitted in the final document in deference to Roosevelt's opponents
who could see no difference between "respecting" the integrity of
territory and "guaranteeing" it. Another clause pledging the assistance
of the United States in the internal affairs of the Republic, whenever
the judgment of the American Government deemed it to be wise, was also
omitted. The provision of the protocol making it the duty of the United
States to deal with the various creditors of the Dominican Republic in
order to determine the amount which each was to receive in settlement
of its claims was modified so that this responsibility remained with the
Government of the Republic. In Roosevelt's opinion, these modifications
in the protocol detracted nothing from the original plan. He ascribed
the delay in the ratification of the treaty to partisanship and
bitterness against himself; and it is certainly true that most of the
treaty's opponents were his consistent critics on other grounds.

A considerable portion of Roosevelt's success as a diplomat was the
fruit of personality, as must be the case with any diplomat who makes
more than a routine achievement. He disarmed suspicion by transparent
honesty, and he impelled respect for his words by always promising or
giving warning of not a hairsbreadth more than he was perfectly willing
and thoroughly prepared to perform. He was always cheerfully ready
to let the other fellow "save his face." He set no store by public
triumphs. He was as exigent that his country should do justly as he was
insistent that it should be done justly by. Phrases had no lure for him,
appearances no glamour.

It was inevitable that so commanding a personality should have an
influence beyond the normal sphere of his official activities. Only a
man who had earned the confidence and the respect of the statesmen of
other nations could have performed such a service as he did in 1905
in bringing about peace between Russia and Japan in the conflict then
raging in the Far East. It was high time that the war should end, in
the interest of both contestants. The Russians had been consistently
defeated on land and had lost their entire fleet at the battle of
Tsushima. The Japanese were apparently on the highroad to victory. But
in reality, Japan's success had been bought at an exorbitant price.
Intelligent observers in the diplomatic world who were in a position to
realize the truth knew that neither nation could afford to go on.

On June 8, 1905, President Roosevelt sent to both Governments an
identical note in which he urged them, "not only for their own sakes,
but in the interest of the whole civilized world, to open direct
negotiations for peace with each other." This was the first that the
world heard of the proposal. But the President had already conducted,
with the utmost secrecy, confidential negotiations with Tokyo and with
St. Petersburg to induce both belligerents to consent to a face to face
discussion of peace. In Russia he had found it necessary to go directly
to the Czar himself, through the American Ambassador, George von
Lengerke Meyer. Each Government was assured that no breath of the matter
would be made public until both nations had signified their willingness
to treat. Neither nation was to know anything of the other's readiness
until both had committed themselves. These advances appear to have been
made following a suggestion from Japan that Roosevelt should attempt to
secure peace. He used to say, in discussing the matter, that, while
it was not generally known or even suspected, Japan was actually "bled
white" by the herculean efforts she had made. But Japan's position
was the stronger, and peace was more important for Russia than for
her antagonist. The Japanese were more clear-sighted than the selfish
Russian bureaucracy; and they realized that they had gained so much
already that there was nothing to be won by further fighting.

When the public invitation to peace negotiations was extended, the
conference had already been arranged and the confidential consent
of both Governments needed only to be made formal. Russia wished the
meeting of plenipotentiaries to take place at Paris, Japan preferred
Chifu, in China. Neither liked the other's suggestion, and Roosevelt's
invitation to come to Washington, with the privilege of adjourning
to some place in New England if the weather was too hot, was finally
accepted. The formal meeting between the plenipotentiaries took place
at Oyster Bay on the 5th of August on board the Presidential yacht, the
Mayflower. Roosevelt received his guests in the cabin and proposed a
toast in these words: "Gentlemen, I propose a toast to which there will
be no answer and which I ask you to drink in silence, standing. I drink
to the welfare and prosperity of the sovereigns and the peoples of the
two great nations whose representatives have met one another on this
ship. It is my earnest hope and prayer, in the interest not only of
these two great powers, but of all civilized mankind, that a just and
lasting peace may speedily be concluded between them."

The two groups of plenipotentiaries were carried, each on an American
naval vessel, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and there at the Navy Yard
began their conference. Two-thirds of the terms proposed by Japan were
promptly accepted by the Russian envoys. But an irretrievable split on
the remainder seemed inevitable. Japan demanded a money indemnity and
the cession of the southern half of the island of Saghalien, which
Japanese forces had already occupied. These demands the Russians
refused.

Then Roosevelt took a hand in the proceedings. He urged the Japanese
delegates, through the Japanese Ambassador, to give up their demand
for an indemnity. He pointed out that, when it came to "a question
of rubles," the Russian Government and the Russian people were firmly
resolved not to yield. To Baron Rosen, one of the Russian delegates, he
recommended yielding in the matter of Saghalien, since the Japanese were
already in possession and there were racial and historical grounds
for considering the southern half of the island logically Japanese
territory. The envoys met again, and the Japanese renewed their demands.
The Russians refused. Then the Japanese offered to waive the indemnity
if the Russians would yield on Saghalien. The offer was accepted, and
the peace was made.

Immediately Roosevelt was acclaimed by the world, including the Russians
and the Japanese, as a great peacemaker. The Nobel Peace Prize of a
medal and $40,000 was awarded to him. But it was not long before both in
Russia and Japan public opinion veered to the point of asserting that
he had caused peace to be made too soon and to the detriment of the
interests of the nation in question. That was just what he expected. He
knew human nature thoroughly; and from long experience he had learned
to be humorously philosophical about such manifestations of man's
ingratitude.

In the next year the influence of Roosevelt's personality was again
felt in affairs outside the traditional realm of American international
interests. Germany was attempting to intrude in Morocco, where France by
common consent had been the dominant foreign influence. The rattling of
the Potsdam saber was threatening the tranquillity of the status quo. A
conference of eleven European powers and the United States was held
at Algeciras to readjust the treaty provisions for the protection of
foreigners in the decadent Moroccan empire. In the words of a historian
of America's foreign relations, "Although the United States was of all
perhaps the least directly interested in the subject matter of dispute,
and might appropriately have held aloof from the meeting altogether,
its representatives were among the most influential of all, and it
was largely owing to their sane and irenic influence that in the end a
treaty was amicably made and signed." * But there was something behind
all this. A quiet conference had taken place one day in the remote
city of Washington. The President of the United States and the French
Ambassador had discussed the approaching meeting at Algeciras. There
was a single danger-point in the impending negotiations. The French must
find a way around it. The Ambassador had come to the right man. He
went out with a few words scratched on a card in the ragged Roosevelt
handwriting containing a proposal for a solution. ** The proposal went
to Paris, then to Morocco. The solution was adopted by the conference,
and the Hohenzollern menace to the peace of the world was averted for
the moment. Once more Roosevelt had shown how being wise in time was the
sure way to peace.

     * Willie Fletcher Johnson, "America's Foreign Relations",
     vol. II, p. 376.

     ** The author had this story direct from Mr. Roosevelt
     himself.

Roosevelt's most important single achievement as President of the United
States was the building of the Panama Canal. The preliminary steps which
he took in order to make its building possible have been, of all his
executive acts, the most consistently and vigorously criticized.

It is not our purpose here to follow at length the history of American
diplomatic relations with Colombia and Panama. We are primarily
concerned with the part which Roosevelt played in certain international
occurrences, of which the Panama incident was not the least interesting
and significant. In after years Roosevelt said laconically, "I took
Panama." In fact he did nothing of the sort. But it was like him to
brush aside all technical defenses of any act of his and to meet his
critics on their own ground. It was as though he said to them, "You
roundly denounce me for what I did at the time of the revolution which
established the Republic of Panama. You declare that my acts were
contrary to international law and international morals. I have a
splendid technical defense on the legal side; but I care little about
technicalities when compared with reality. Let us admit that I did
what you charge me with. I will prove to you that I was justified in so
doing. I took Panama; but the taking was a righteous act."

Fourteen years after that event, in a speech which he made in
Washington, Roosevelt expressed his dissatisfaction with the way in
which President Wilson was conducting the Great War. He reverted to what
he had done in relation to Panama and contrasted his action with the
failure of the Wilson Administration to take prompt possession of two
hundred locomotives which had been built in this country for the late
Russian Government. This is what he said:

"What I think, of course, in my view of the proper governmental policy,
should have been done was to take the two hundred locomotives and then
discuss. That was the course that I followed, and to which I have ever
since looked back with impenitent satisfaction, in reference to the
Panama Canal. If you remember, Panama declared itself independent and
wanted to complete the Panama Canal and opened negotiations with us. I
had two courses open. I might have taken the matter under advisement and
put it before the Senate, in which case we should have had a number of
most able speeches on the subject. We would have had a number of very
profound arguments, and they would have been going on now, and the
Panama Canal would be in the dim future yet. We would have had half a
century of discussion, and perhaps the Panama Canal. I preferred that
we should have the Panama Canal first and the half century of discussion
afterward. And now instead of discussing the canal before it was built,
which would have been harmful, they merely discuss me--a discussion
which I regard with benign interest."

The facts of the case are simple and in the main undisputed. Shortly
after the inauguration of Roosevelt as President, a treaty was
negotiated with Colombia for the building of a canal at Panama. It
provided for the lease to the United States of a strip six miles wide
across the Isthmus, and for the payment to Colombia of $10,000,000 down
and $250,000 a year, beginning nine years later. The treaty was promptly
ratified by the United States Senate. A special session of the Colombian
Senate spent the summer marking time and adjourned after rejecting the
treaty by a unanimous vote. The dominant motive for the rejection was
greed. An attempt was first made by the dictatorial government that held
the Colombian Congress in its mailed hand to extort a large payment from
the French Canal Company, whose rights and property on the Isthmus were
to be bought by the United States for $40,000,000. Then $15,000,000
instead of $10,000,000 was demanded from the United States. Finally an
adroit and conscienceless scheme was invented by which the entire
rights of the French Canal Company were to be stolen by the Colombian
Government. This last plot, however, would involve a delay of a year or
so. The treaty was therefore rejected in order to provide the necessary
delay.

But the people of Panama wanted the Canal. They were tired of serving
as the milch cow for the fattening of the Government at Bogota. So they
quietly organized a revolution. It was a matter of common knowledge that
it was coming. Roosevelt, as well as the rest of the world, knew it and,
believing in the virtue of being wise in time, prepared for it. Several
warships were dispatched to the Isthmus.

The revolution came off promptly as expected. It was bloodless, for the
American naval forces, fulfilling the treaty obligations of the United
States, prevented the Colombian troops on one side of the Isthmus
from using the Panama Railroad to cross to the other side where the
revolutionists were. So the revolutionists were undisturbed. A republic
was immediately declared and immediately recognized by the United
States. A treaty with the new Republic, which guaranteed its
independence and secured the cession of a zone ten miles wide across the
Isthmus, was drawn up inside of two weeks and ratified by both Senates
within three months. Six weeks later an American commission was on the
ground to plan the work of construction. The Canal was built. The "half
century of discussion" which Roosevelt foresaw is now more than a third
over, and the discussion shows no sign of lagging. But the Panama Canal
is in use.

Was the President of the United States justified in preventing the
Colombian Government from fighting on the Isthmus to put down the
unanimous revolution of the people of Panama? That is precisely all that
he did. He merely gave orders to the American admiral on the spot to
"prevent the disembarkation of Colombian troops with hostile intent
within the limits of the state of Panama." But that action was enough,
for the Isthmus is separated from Colombia on the one hand by three
hundred miles of sea, and on the other by leagues of pathless jungle.

Roosevelt himself has summed up the action of the United States in this
way:

"From the beginning to the end our course was straightforward and
in absolute accord with the highest of standards of international
morality.... To have acted otherwise than I did would have been on my
part betrayal of the interests of the United States, indifference to
the interests of Panama, and recreancy to the interests of the world at
large. Colombia had forfeited every claim to consideration; indeed, this
is not stating the case strongly enough: she had so acted that yielding
to her would have meant on our part that culpable form of weakness which
stands on a level with wickedness.... We gave to the people of Panama,
self-government, and freed them from subjection to alien oppressors. We
did our best to get Colombia to let us treat her with more than
generous justice; we exercised patience to beyond the verge of proper
forbearance.... I deeply regretted, and now deeply regret, the fact
that the Colombian Government rendered it imperative for me to take
the action I took; but I had no alternative, consistent with the full
performance of my duty to my own people, and to the nations of mankind."

The final verdict will be given only in another generation by the
historian and by the world at large. But no portrait of Theodore
Roosevelt, and no picture of his times, can be complete without the
bold, firm outlines of his Panama policy set as near as may be in their
proper perspective.



CHAPTER XIII. THE TAFT ADMINISTRATION

In the evening of that election day in 1904 which saw Roosevelt made
President in his own right, after three years of the Presidency given
him by fate, he issued a brief statement, in which he said: "The wise
custom which limits the President to two terms regards the substance and
not the form, and under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or
accept another nomination." From this determination, which in his mind
related to a third consecutive term, and to nothing else, he never
wavered. Four years later, in spite of a widespread demand that he
should be a candidate to succeed himself, he used the great influence
and prestige of his position as President and leader of his party to
bring about the nomination of his friend and close associate, William
Howard Taft. The choice received general approval from the Republican
party and from the country at large, although up to the very moment of
the nomination in the convention at Chicago there was no certainty that
a successful effort to stampede the convention for Roosevelt would not
be made by his more irreconcilable supporters.

Taft was elected by a huge popular plurality. His opponent was William
Jennings Bryan, who was then making his third unsuccessful campaign for
the Presidency. Taft's election, like his nomination, was assured by
the unreserved and dynamic support accorded him by President Roosevelt.
Taft, of course, was already an experienced statesman, high in the
esteem of the nation for his public record as Federal judge, as the
first civil Governor of the Philippines, and as Secretary of War in
the Roosevelt Cabinet. There was every reason to predict for him a
successful and effective Administration. His occupancy of the White
House began under smiling skies. He had behind him a united party and a
satisfied public opinion. Even his political opponents conceded that
the country would be safe in his hands. It was expected that he would
be conservatively progressive and progressively conservative. Everybody
believed in him. Yet within a year of the day of his inauguration the
President's popularity was sharply on the wane. Two years after his
election the voters repudiated the party which he led. By the end of his
Presidential term the career which had begun with such happy auguries
had become a political tragedy. There were then those who recalled the
words of the Roman historian, "All would have believed him capable of
governing if only he had not come to govern."

It was not that the Taft Administration was barren of achievement.
On the contrary, its record of accomplishment was substantial. Of two
amendments to the Federal Constitution proposed by Congress, one was
ratified by the requisite number of States before Taft went out of
office, and the other was finally ratified less than a month after the
close of his term. These were the amendment authorizing the imposition
of a Federal income tax and that providing for the direct election of
United States Senators. Two States were admitted to the Union during
Taft's term of office, New Mexico and Arizona, the last Territories of
the United States on the continent, except Alaska.

Other achievements of importance during Taft's Administration were the
establishment of the parcels post and the postal savings banks; the
requirement of publicity, through sworn statements of the candidates,
for campaign contributions for the election of Senators and
Representatives; the extension of the authority of the Interstate
Commerce Commission over telephone, telegraph, and cable lines; an act
authorizing the President to withdraw public lands from entry for
the purpose of conserving the natural resources which they may
contain--something which Roosevelt had already done without specific
statutory authorization; the establishment of a Commerce Court to
hear appeals from decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission; the
appointment of a commission, headed by President Hadley of Yale, to
investigate the subject of railway stock and bond issues, and to propose
a law for the Federal supervision of such railway securities; the Mann
"white slave" act, dealing with the transfer of women from one State to
another for immoral purposes; the establishment of the Children's
Bureau in the Department of Commerce and Labor; the empowering of the
Interstate Commerce Commission to investigate all railway accidents; the
creation of Forest Reserves in the White Mountains and in the southern
Appalachians.

Taft's Administration was further marked, by economy in expenditure, by
a considerable extension of the civil service law to cover positions in
the executive departments hitherto free plunder for the spoilsmen, and
by efforts on the part of the President to increase the efficiency and
the economical administration of the public service.

But this good record of things achieved was not enough to gain for
Mr. Taft popular approval. Items on the other side of the ledger were
pointed out. Of these the three most conspicuous were the Payne-Aldrich
tariff, the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy, and the insurgent movement in
Congress.

The Republican party was returned to power in 1908, committed to a
revision of the tariff. Though the party platform did not so state, this
was generally interpreted as a pledge of revision downward. Taft made
it clear during his campaign that such was his own reading of the party
pledge. He said, for instance, "It is my judgment that there are many
schedules of the tariff in which the rates are excessive, and there
are a few in which the rates are not sufficient to fill the measure of
conservative protection. It is my judgment that a revision of the tariff
in accordance with the pledge of the platform, will be, on the whole,
a substantial revision downward, though there probably will be a few
exceptions in this regard." Five months after Taft's inauguration the
Payne-Aldrich bill became law with his signature. In signing it the
President said, "The bill is not a perfect bill or a complete compliance
with the promises made, strictly interpreted"; but he further declared
that he signed it because he believed it to be "the result of a sincere
effort on the part of the Republican party to make downward revision."

This view was not shared by even all Republicans. Twenty of them in the
House voted against the bill on its final passage, and seven of them
in the Senate. They represented the Middle West and the new element
and spirit in the Republican party. Their dissatisfaction with the
performance of their party associates in Congress and in the White
House was shared by their constituents and by many other Republicans
throughout the country. A month after the signing of the tariff law,
Taft made a speech at Winona, Minnesota, in support of Congressman James
A. Tawney, the one Republican representative from Minnesota who had not
voted against the bill. In the course of that speech he said; "This is
the best tariff bill that the Republican party has ever passed, and,
therefore, the best tariff bill that has been passed at all."

He justified Mr. Tawney's action in voting for the bill and his own
in signing it on the ground that "the interests of the country, the
interests of the party" required the sacrifice of the accomplishment of
certain things in the revision of the tariff which had been hoped for,
"in order to maintain party solidity," which he believed to be much more
important than the reduction of rates in one or two schedules of the
tariff.

A second disaster to the Taft Administration came in the famous
Ballinger-Pinchot controversy. Louis R. Glavis, who bad served as a
special agent of the General Land Office to investigate alleged frauds
in certain claims to coal lands in Alaska, accused Richard Ballinger,
the Secretary of the Interior, of favoritism toward those who were
attempting to get public lands fraudulently. The charges were vigorously
supported by Mr. Pinchot, who broadened the accusation to cover a
general indifference on the part of the Secretary of the Interior to
the whole conservation movement. President Taft, however, completely
exonerated Secretary Ballinger from blame and removed Glavis for "filing
a disingenuous statement unjustly impeaching the official integrity
of his superior officer." Later Pinchot was also dismissed from the
service. The charges against Secretary Ballinger were investigated by a
joint committee of Congress, a majority of which exonerated the accused
Cabinet officer. Nevertheless the whole controversy, which raged with
virulence for many months, convinced many ardent supporters of the
conservation movement, and especially many admirers of Mr. Pinchot and
of Roosevelt, that the Taft Administration at the best was possessed of
little enthusiasm for conservation. There was a widespread belief, as
well, that the President had handled the whole matter maladroitly and
that in permitting himself to be driven to a point where he had to
deprive the country of the services of Gifford Pinchot, the originator
of the conservation movement, he had displayed unsound judgment and
deplorable lack of administrative ability.

The first half of Mr. Taft's term was further marked by acute
dissensions in the Republican ranks in Congress. Joseph G. Cannon was
Speaker of the House, as he had been in three preceding Congresses.
He was a reactionary Republican of the most pronounced type. Under his
leadership the system of autocratic party control of legislation in the
House had been developed to a high point of effectiveness. The Speaker's
authority had become in practice almost unrestricted.

In the congressional session of 1909-10 a strong movement of insurgency
arose within the Republican party in Congress against the control of
the little band of leaders dominated by the Speaker. In March, 1910,
the Republican Insurgents, forty in number, united with the Democratic
minority to overrule a formal decision of the Speaker. A four days'
parliamentary battle resulted, culminating in a reorganization of the
all-powerful Rules Committee, with the Speaker no longer a member of it.
The right of the Speaker to appoint this committee was also taken
away. When the Democrats came into control of the House in 1911, they
completed the dethronement of the Speaker by depriving him of the
appointment of all committees.

The old system had not been without its advantages, when the power
of the Speaker and his small group of associate party leaders was not
abused. It at least concentrated responsibility in a few prominent
members of the majority party. But it made it possible for these few
men to perpetuate a machine and to ignore the desires of the rest of
the party representatives and of the voters of the party throughout the
country. The defeat of Cannonism put an end to the autocratic power
of the Speaker and relegated him to the position of a mere presiding
officer. It had also a wider significance, for it portended the division
in the old Republican party out of which was to come the new Progressive
party.

When the mid-point of the Taft Administration was reached, a practical
test was given of the measure of popular approval which the President
and his party associates had achieved. The congressional elections
went decidedly against the Republicans. The Republican majority of
forty-seven in the House was changed to a Democratic majority of
fifty-four. The Republican majority in the Senate was cut down from
twenty-eight to ten. Not only were the Democrats successful in this
substantial degree, but many of the Western States elected Progressive
Republicans instead of Republicans of the old type. During the last two
years of his term, the President was consequently obliged to work with
a Democratic House and with a Senate in which Democrats and Insurgent
Republicans predominated over the old-line Republicans.

The second half of Taft's Presidency was productive of little but
discord and dissatisfaction. The Democrats in power in the House were
quite ready to harass the Republican President, especially in view
of the approaching Presidential election. The Insurgents in House and
Senate were not entirely unwilling to take a hand in the same game.
Besides, they found themselves more and more in sincere disagreement
with the President on matters of fundamental policy, though not one of
them could fairly question his integrity of purpose, impugn his purity
of character, or deny his charm of personality.

Three weeks after Taft's inauguration, Roosevelt sailed for Africa,
to be gone for a year hunting big game. He went with a warm feeling of
friendship and admiration for the man whom he had done so much to make
President. He had high confidence that Taft would be successful in his
great office. He had no reason to believe that any change would come in
the friendship between them, which had been peculiarly intimate. From
the steamer on which he sailed for Africa, he sent a long telegram of
cordial and hearty good wishes to his successor in Washington.

The next year Roosevelt came back to the United States, after a
triumphal tour of the capitals of Europe, to find his party disrupted
and the progressive movement in danger of shipwreck. He had no intention
of entering politics again. But he had no intention, either, of ceasing
to champion the things in which he believed. This he made obvious,
in his first speech after his return, to the cheering thousands who
welcomed him at the Battery. He said:

"I have thoroughly enjoyed myself; and now I am more glad than I can say
to get home, to be back in my own country, back among people I love. And
I am ready and eager to do my part so far as I am able, in helping solve
problems which must be solved, if we of this, the greatest democratic
republic upon which the sun has ever shone, are to see its destinies
rise to the high level of our hopes and its opportunities. This is the
duty of every citizen, but is peculiarly my duty; for any man who
has ever been honored by being made President of the United States is
thereby forever rendered the debtor of the American people and is bound
throughout his life to remember this, his prime obligation."

The welcome over, Roosevelt tried to take up the life of a private
citizen. He had become Contributing Editor of The Outlook and had
planned to give his energies largely to writing. But he was not to be
let alone. The people who loved him demanded that they be permitted to
see and to hear him. Those who were in the thick of the political fight
on behalf of progress and righteousness called loudly to him for aid.
Only a few days after Roosevelt had landed from Europe, Governor Hughes
of New York met him at the Commencement exercises at Harvard and urged
him to help in the fight which the Governor was then making for a direct
primary law. Roosevelt did not wish to enter the lists again until he
had had more time for orientation; but he always found it difficult to
refuse a plea for help on behalf of a good cause. He therefore sent a
vigorous telegram to the Republican legislators at Albany urging them to
support Governor Hughes and to vote for the primary bill. But the appeal
went in vain: the Legislature was too thoroughly boss-ridden. This
telegram, however, sounded a warning to the usurpers in the house of the
Republican Penelope that the fingers of the returned Odysseus had not
lost their prowess with the heroic bow.

During the summer of 1910, Roosevelt made a trip to the West and in a
speech at Ossawattomie, Kansas, set forth what came to be described as
the New Nationalism. It was his draft of a platform, not for himself,
but for the nation. A few fragments from that speech will suggest what
Roosevelt was thinking about in those days when the Progressive party
was stirring in the womb. "At many stages in the advance of humanity,
this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and
the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition
of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of free men to gain
and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests,
who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating
the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the
essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege,
and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest
possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.

"Every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled
to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in
any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property,
and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of
suffrage to any corporation.

"The absence of effective state and, especially, national restraint upon
unfair money getting has tended to create a small class of enormously
wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and
increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which
enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general
welfare that they should hold or exercise.

"We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property
to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of
property as against the rights of men have been pushing their claims too
far.

"The State must be made efficient for the work which concerns only the
people of the State; and the nation for that which concerns all the
people. There must remain no neutral ground to serve as a refuge for
lawbreakers, and especially for lawbreakers of great wealth, who can
hire the vulpine legal cunning which will teach them how to avoid both
jurisdictions.

"I do not ask for overcentralization; but I do ask that we work in
a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we work for what
concerns our people as a whole.

"We must have the right kind of character--character that makes a
man, first of all, a good man in the home, a good father, a good
husband--that makes a man a good neighbor.... The prime problem of our
nation is to get the right kind of good citizenship, and to get it, we
must have progress, and our public men must be genuinely progressive.

"I stand for the Square Deal. But when I say that I am for the square
deal I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present
rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as
to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for
equally good service."

These generalizations Roosevelt accompanied by specific recommendations.
They included proposals for publicity of corporate affairs; prohibition
of the use of corporate funds, for political purposes; governmental
supervision of the capitalization of all corporations doing an
interstate business; control and supervision of corporations and
combinations controlling necessaries of life; holding the officers and
directors of corporations personally liable when any corporation breaks
the law; an expert tariff commission and revision of the tariff schedule
by schedule; a graduated income tax and a graduated inheritance tax,
increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate; conservation
of natural resources and their use for the benefit of all rather than
their monopolization for the benefit of the few; public accounting for
all campaign funds before election; comprehensive workmen's compensation
acts, state and national laws to regulate child labor and work for
women, the enforcement of sanitary conditions for workers and the
compulsory use of safety appliances in industry.

There was nothing in all these proposals that should have seemed
revolutionary or extreme. But there was much that disturbed the
reactionaries who were thinking primarily in terms of property and only
belatedly or not at all of human rights. The Bourbons in the Republican
party and their supporters among the special interests "viewed
with, alarm" this frank attack upon their intrenched privileges. The
Progressives, however, welcomed with eagerness this robust leadership.
The breach in the Republican party was widening with steadily
accelerating speed.

In the fall of 1910 a new demand arose that Roosevelt should enter
actively into politics. Though it came from his own State, he resisted
it with energy and determination. Nevertheless the pressure from his
close political associates in New York finally became too much for him,
and he yielded. They wanted him to go as a delegate to the Republican
State Convention at Saratoga and to be a candidate for Temporary
Chairman of the Convention--the officer whose opening speech is
traditionally presumed to sound the keynote of the campaign. Roosevelt
went and, after a bitter fight with the reactionists in the party,
led by William Barnes of Albany, was elected Temporary Chairman over
Vice-President James S. Sherman. The keynote was sounded in no uncertain
tones, while Mr. Barnes and his associates fidgeted and suffered.

Then came a Homeric conflict, with a dramatic climax. The reactionary
gang did not know that it was beaten. Its members resisted stridently
an attempt to write a direct primary plank into the party platform. They
wished to rebuke Governor Hughes, who was as little to their liking
as Roosevelt himself, and they did not want the direct primary. After
speeches by young James Wadsworth, later United States Senator, Job
Hedges, and Barnes himself, in which they bewailed the impending demise
of representative government and the coming of mob rule, it was clear
that the primary plank was defeated. Then rose Roosevelt. In a speech
that lashed and flayed the forces of reaction and obscurantism, he
demanded that the party stand by the right of the people to rule.
Single-handed he drove a majority of the delegates into line. The plank
was adopted. Thenceforward the convention was his. It selected, as
candidate for Governor, Henry W. Stimson, who had been a Federal
attorney in New York under Roosevelt and Secretary of War in Taft's
Cabinet. When this victory had been won, Roosevelt threw himself
into the campaign with his usual abandon and toured the State, making
fighting speeches in scores of cities and towns. But in spite of
Roosevelt's best efforts, Stimson was defeated.

All this active participation in local political conflicts seriously
distressed many of Roosevelt's friends and associates. They felt that he
was too big to fritter himself away on small matters from which he--and
the cause whose great champion he was--had so little to gain and so much
to lose. They wanted him to wait patiently for the moment of destiny
which they felt sure would come. But it was never easy for Roosevelt
to wait. It was the hardest thing in the world for him to decline an
invitation to enter a fight--when the cause was a righteous one.

So the year 1911 passed by, with the Taft Administration steadily losing
prestige, and the revolt of the Progressives within the Republican party
continually gathering momentum. Then came 1912, the year of the Glorious
Failure.



CHAPTER XIII. THE PROGRESSIVE PARTY

The Progressive party and the Progressive movement were two things.
The one was born on a day, lived a stirring, strenuous span of life,
suffered its fatal wound, lingered on for a few more years, and received
its coup de grace. The other sprang like a great river system from
a multitude of sources, flowed onward by a hundred channels, always
converging and uniting, until a single mighty stream emerged to water
and enrich and serve a broad country and a great people. The one was
ephemeral, abortive--a failure. The other was permanent, creative--a
triumph. The two were inseparable, each indispensable to the other. Just
as the party would never have existed if there had been no movement,
so the movement would not have attained such a surpassing measure of
achievement so swiftly without the party.

The Progressive party came into full being at the convention held in
Chicago on August 5, 1912 under dramatic circumstances. Every drama must
have a beginning and this one had opened for the public when, on the
10th of February in the same year, the Republican Governors of West
Virginia, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Wyoming, Michigan, Kansas, and
Missouri addressed a letter to Roosevelt, in which they declared that,
in considering what would best insure the continuation of the Republican
party as a useful agency of good government, they had reached the
conclusion that a large majority of the Republican voters of the country
favored Roosevelt's nomination, and a large majority of the people
favored his election as the next President. They asserted their belief
that, in view of this public demand, he should soon declare whether, if
the nomination came to him unsolicited and unsought, he would accept it.
They concluded their request with this paragraph:

"In submitting this request we are not considering your personal
interests. We do not regard it as proper to consider either the
interest or the preference of any man as regards the nomination for the
Presidency. We are expressing our sincere belief and best judgment as to
what is demanded of you in the interests of the people as a whole. And
we feel that you would be unresponsive to a plain public duty if
you should decline to accept the nomination, coming as the voluntary
expression of the wishes of a majority of the Republican voters of
the United States, through the action of their delegates in the next
National Convention."

The sincerity and whole-heartedness of the convictions here expressed
are in no wise vitiated by the fact that the letter was not written
until the seven Governors were assured what the answer to it would be.
For the very beginning of our drama, then, we must go back a little
farther to that day in late January of 1912 when Theodore Roosevelt
himself came face to face with a momentous decision. On that day he
definitely determined that his duty to the things in which he profoundly
believed--and no less to the friends and associates who shared his
beliefs--constrained him once more to enter the arena of political
conflict and lead the fight.

Roosevelt had come to this conclusion with extreme reluctance. He had no
illusions as to the probable effect upon his personal fortunes. Twice
he had been President once by the hand of fate, once by a great popular
vote. To be President again could add nothing to his prestige or fame;
it could only subject him for four years to the dangerous vagaries
of the unstable popular mood. He had nothing to gain for himself by
entering the ring of political conflict again; the chances for personal
loss were great. His enemies, his critics, and his political adversaries
would have it that he was eaten up with ambition, that he came back from
his African and European trip eager to thrust himself again into the
limelight of national political life and to demand for himself again a
great political prize. But his friends, his associates, and those who,
knowing him at close range, understood him, realized that this was no
picture of the truth. He accepted what hundreds of Progressive leaders
and followers throughout the country--for the man in the ranks had as
ready access to him as the most prominent leader, and received as warm
consideration--asserted was his clear duty and obligation.

A letter which he had written two days before Christmas, 1911, shows
unmistakably how his mind was working in those days of prologue to the
great decision. The letter was entirely private, and was addressed to my
father who was a publisher and a friend and not a politician. There is,
therefore, no reason whatever why the letter should not be accepted as
an accurate picture of Mr. Roosevelt's mind at that time: "Now for the
message Harold gave me, that I should write you a little concerning
political conditions. They are very, very mixed. Curiously enough, my
article on the trusts was generally accepted as bringing me forward for
the Presidential nomination. Evidently what really happened was that
there had been a strong undercurrent of feeling about me, and that the
talk concerning the article enabled this feeling to come to the surface.
I do not think it amounts to anything. It merely means that a great many
people do not get the leadership they are looking for from any of the
prominent men in public life, and that under the circumstances they
grasp at any one; and as my article on the McNamaras possessed at least
the merit of being entirely clearcut and of showing that I knew my own
mind and had definite views, a good many plain people turned longingly
to me as a leader. Taft is very weak, but La Follette has not developed
real strength east of the Mississippi River, excepting of course in
Wisconsin. West of the River he has a large following, although there is
a good deal of opposition to him even in States like Kansas, Washington,
and California. East of the Mississippi, I believe he can only pick up
a few delegates here and there. Taft will have most of the Southern
delegates, he will have the officeholders, and also the tepid and
acquiescent, rather than active, support of the ordinary people who do
not feel very strongly one way or the other, and who think it is the
usual thing to renominate a President. If there were a strong candidate
against him, he would I believe be beaten, but there are plenty of men,
many of the leaders not only here but in Texas, for instance, in Ohio,
in New Hampshire and Illinois, who are against him, but who are even
more against La Follette, and who regard themselves as limited to the
alternative between the two. There is, of course, always the danger that
there may be a movement for me, the danger coming partly because the
men who may be candidates are very anxious that the ticket shall be
strengthened and care nothing for the fate of the man who strengthens
it, and partly because there is a good deal of honest feeling for me
among plain simple people who wish leadership, but who will not
accept leadership unless they believe it to be sincere, fearless, and
intelligent. I most emphatically do not wish the nomination. Personally
I should regard it as a calamity to be nominated. In the first place, I
might very possibly be beaten, and in the next place, even if elected I
should be confronted with almost impossible conditions out of which to
make good results. In the tariff, for instance, I would have to face
the fact that men would keep comparing what I did, not with what the
Democrats would or could have done but with an ideal, or rather with a
multitude of entirely separate and really incompatible ideals. I am
not a candidate, I will never be a candidate; but I have to tell the
La Follette men and the Taft men that while I am absolutely sincere in
saying that I am not a candidate and do not wish the nomination, yet
that I do not feel it would be right or proper for me to say that under
no circumstances would I accept it if it came; because, while wildly
improbable, it is yet possible that there might be a public demand which
would present the matter to me in the light of a duty which I could not
shirk. In other words, while I emphatically do not want office, and have
not the slightest idea that any demand for me will come, yet if there
were a real public demand that in the public interest I should do a
given job, it MIGHT be that I would not feel like flinching from the
task. However, this is all in the air, and I do not for one moment
believe that it will be necessary for me even to consider the matter. As
for the Democrats, they have their troubles too. Wilson, although still
the strongest man the Democrats could nominate, is much weaker than he
was. He has given a good many people a feeling that he is very ambitious
and not entirely sincere, and his demand for the Carnegie pension
created an unpleasant impression. Harmon is a good old solid Democrat,
with the standards of political and commercial morality of twenty years
ago, who would be eagerly welcomed by all the conservative crowd. Champ
Clark is a good fellow, but impossible as President.

"I think a good deal will depend upon what this Congress does. Taft may
redeem himself. He was fairly strong at the end of the last session, but
went off lamentably on account of his wavering and shillyshallying on so
many matters during his speaking trip. His speeches generally hurt
him, and rarely benefit him. But it is possible that the Democrats in
Congress may play the fool, and give him the chance to appear as the
strong leader, the man who must be accepted to oppose them."

This was what Roosevelt at the end, of December sincerely believed would
be the situation as time went on. But he underestimated the strength and
the volume of the tide that was rising.

The crucial decision was made on the 18th of January. I was in the
closest possible touch with Roosevelt in those pregnant days, and I
know, as well as any but the man himself could know, how his mind was
working. An entry in my diary on that date shows the origin of the
letter of the seven governors:

"Senator Beveridge called on T. R. to urge him to make a public
statement soon. T. R. impressed by his arguments and by letters just
received from three Governors, Hadley, Glasscock, and Bass. Practically
determined to ask these Governors, and Stubbs and Osborne, to send him a
joint letter asking him to make a public statement to the effect that
if there is a genuine popular demand for his nomination he will not
refuse-in other words to say to him in a joint letter for publication
just what they have each said to him in private letters. Such joint
action would give him a proper reason--or occasion--for making a public
declaration. T. R. telegraphed Frank Knox, Republican State Chairman of
Michigan and former member of his regiment, to come down, with intention
of asking him to see the various governors. H. H., at Ernest Abbott's
suggestion, asked him not to make final decision till he has had
conference--already arranged--with editorial staff. T. R. agrees, but
the inevitableness of the matter is evident."

After that day, things moved rapidly. Two days later the diary contains
this record: "Everett Colby, William Fellowes Morgan, and Mark
Sullivan call on T. R. All inclined to agree that time for statement is
practically here. T. R.--The time to use a man is when the people want
to use him." M. S.--"The time to set a hen is when the hen wants to
set." Frank Knox comes in response to telegram. Nat Wright also present
at interview where Knox is informed of the job proposed for him. Gifford
Pinchot also present at beginning of interview while T. R. tells how
he views the situation, but leaves (at T. R.'s suggestion) before real
business of conference begins. Plan outlined to Knox, who likes it, and
subsequently, in H. H.'s office, draws up letter for Governors. Draft
shown to T. R., who suggests a couple of added sentences emphasizing
that the nomination must come as a real popular demand, and declaring
that the Governors are taking their action not for his sake, but for the
sake of the country. Knox takes copy of letter and starts for home, to
go out to see Governors as soon as possible.

On the 22d of January the Conference with The Outlook editorial staff
took place and is thus described in my diary:

"T. R. had long conference with entire staff. All except R. D. T.
[Mr. Townsend, Managing Editor of The Outlook] and H. H. inclined to
deprecate a public statement now. T. R.--'I have had all the honor the
American public can give me. If I should be elected I would go back not
so young as I once was, with all the first fine flavor gone, and take up
the horrible task of going in and out, in and out, of the same hole over
and over again. But I cannot decline the call. Too many of those
who have fought with me the good fight for the things we believe in
together, declare that at this critical moment I am the instrument that
ought to be used to make it possible for me to refuse. I BELIEVE I SHALL
BE BROKEN IN THE USING. But I cannot refuse to permit myself to be used.
I am not going to get those good fellows out on the end of a limb and
then saw off the limb.' R. D. T. suggested that it be said frankly that
the Governors wrote the joint letter at T. R.'s request. T. R. accepted
like a shot. Went into H. H.'s room, dictated two or three sentences to
that effect, which H. H. later incorporated in letter. [This plan was
later given up, I believe on the urging of some or all of the Governors
involved.] T. R.--'I can't go on telling my friends in private letters
what my position is, but asking them not to make it public, without
seeming furtive.' In afternoon H. H. suggests that T. R. write first
draft of his letter of reply soon as possible to give all possible time
for consideration and revision. T. R. has two inspirations--to propose
presidential primaries in order to be sure of popular demand, and to use
statement made at Battery when he returned home from Europe."

The next day's entry reads as follows:

"Sent revised letter to Knox. T. R. said, "Not to make a public
statement soon would be to violate my cardinal principle--never hit if
you can help it, but when you have to, hit hard. NEVER hit soft. You'll
never get any thanks for hitting soft." McHarg called with three men
from St. Louis. T. R. said exactly the same thing as usual--he would
never accept the nomination if it came as the result of an intrigue,
only if it came as the result of a genuine and widespread popular
demand. The thing he wants to be sure of is that there is this
widespread popular demand that he "do a job," and that the demand is
genuine."

Meanwhile Frank Knox was consulting the seven Governors, each one of
whom was delighted to have an opportunity to say to Roosevelt in this
formal, public way just what they had each said to him privately and
forcefully. The letter was signed and delivered to T. R. On the 24th
of February Roosevelt replied to the letter of the seven Governors in
unequivocal terms, "I will accept the nomination for President if it is
tendered to me, and I will adhere to this decision until--the convention
has expressed its preference." He added the hope that so far as possible
the people might be given the chance, through direct primaries, to
record their wish as to who should be the nominee. A month later, in a
great address at Carnegie Hall in New York, he gave voice publicly to
the same thought that he had expressed to his friends in that editorial
conference: "The leader for the time being, whoever he may be, is but
an instrument, to be used until broken and then cast aside; and if he
is worth his salt he will care no more when he is broken than a soldier
cares when he is sent where his life is forfeit that the victory may
be won. In the long fight for righteousness the watchword for all is,
'Spend and be spent.' It is of little matter whether any one man fails
or succeeds; but the cause shall not fail, for it is the cause of
mankind."

The decision once made, Roosevelt threw himself into the contest for
delegates to the nominating convention with his unparalleled vigor and
forcefulness. His main opponent was, of course, the man who had been
his friend and associate and whom he had done more than any other single
force to make President as his successor. William Howard Taft had
the undivided support of the national party organization; but the
Progressive Republicans the country over thronged to Roosevelt's support
with wild enthusiasm. The campaign for the nomination quickly developed
two aspects, one of which delighted every Progressive in the Republican
party, the other of which grieved every one of Roosevelt's levelheaded
friends. It became a clean-cut conflict between progress and reaction,
between the interests of the people, both as rulers and as governed,
and the special interests, political and business. But it also became
a bitter conflict of personalities between the erstwhile friends. The
breach between the two men was afterwards healed, but it was several
years after the reek of the battle had drifted away before even formal
relations were restored between them.

A complicating factor in the campaign was the candidacy of Senator La
Follette of Wisconsin. In July, 1911, La Follette had begun, at the
earnest solicitation of many Progressive leaders in Congress and out, an
active campaign for the Republican nomination. Progressive organizations
were perfected in numerous States and "in less than three months," as La
Follette has written in his Autobiography, his candidacy "had taken on
proportions which compelled recognition." Four months later a conference
of some three hundred Progressives from thirty States, meeting in
Chicago, declared that La Follette was, because of his record, the
logical candidate for the Presidency. Following this conference he
continued to campaign with increasing vigor, but concurrently the
enthusiasm of some of his leading supporters began to cool and their
support of his candidacy to weaken. Senator La Follette ascribes this
effect to the surreptitious maneuvering of Roosevelt, whom he credits
with an overwhelming appetite for another Presidential term, kept in
check only by his fear that he could not be nominated or elected. But
there is no evidence of any value whatever that Roosevelt was conducting
underground operations or that he desired to be President again. The
true explanation of the change in those Progressives who had favored the
candidacy of La Follette and yet had gradually ceased to support him,
is to be found in their growing conviction that Taft and the reactionary
forces in the Republican party which he represented could be defeated
only by one man--and that not the Senator from Wisconsin. In any event
the La Follette candidacy rapidly declined until it ceased to be
a serious element in the situation. Although the Senator, with
characteristic consistency and pertinacity, stayed in the fight till the
end, he entered the Convention with the delegates of but two States, his
own Wisconsin and North Dakota, pledged to support him.

The pre-convention campaign was made unusually dramatic by the fact
that, for the first time in the history of Presidential elections,
the voters of thirteen States were privileged not only to select the
delegates to the Convention by direct primary vote but to instruct them
in the same way as to the candidate for whom they should cast their
ballots. There were 388 such popularly instructed delegates from
California, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New
Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and
Wisconsin. It was naturally in these States that the two candidates
concentrated their campaigning efforts. The result of the selection
of delegates and of the preferential vote in these States was the best
possible evidence of the desire of the rank and file of the party as to
the Presidential candidate. Of these 388 delegates, Senator La Follette
secured 36; President Taft 71--28 in Georgia, 2 in Illinois, 18 in
Massachusetts, 14 in Ohio, and 9 in Pennsylvania; and Roosevelt 281--26
in California, 56 in Illinois, 16 in Maryland, 18 in Massachusetts,
16 in Nebraska, 28 in New Jersey, 34 in Ohio, 10 in Oregon, 67 in
Pennsylvania, and 10 in South Dakota. Roosevelt therefore, in those
States where the voters could actually declare at primary elections
which candidate they preferred, was the expressed choice of more than
five times as many voters as Taft.

When the Republican convention met in Chicago an interesting and
peculiar situation presented itself. There were 1078 seats in the
Convention. Of the delegates elected to those seats Taft had committed
to him the vast majority of the delegates from the States which have
never cast an electoral vote for a Republican candidate for President
since there was a Republican party. Roosevelt had in support of him
the great majority of the delegates from the States which are normally
Republican and which must be relied upon at election time if a
Republican President is to be chosen. Of the 1078 seats more than 200
were contested. Aside from these contested seats, neither candidate had
a majority of the delegates. The problem that confronted each side was
to secure the filling of a sufficient number of the disputed seats with
its retainers to insure a majority for its candidate. In the solution
of this problem the Taft forces had one insuperable advantage. The
temporary roll of a nominating convention is made up by the National
Committee of the party. The Republican National Committee had been
selected at the close of the last national convention four years before.
It accordingly represented the party as it had then stood, regardless
of the significant changes that three and a quarter years of Taft's
Presidency had wrought in party opinion.

In the National Committee the Taft forces had a strength of more than
two to one; and all but an insignificant number of the contests were
decided out of hand in favor of Mr. Taft. The temporary roll of the
Convention therefore showed a distinct majority against Roosevelt.
From the fall of the gavel, the Roosevelt forces fought with vigor and
determination for what they described as the "purging of the roll" of
those Taft delegates whose names they declared had been placed upon it
by fraud. But at every turn the force of numbers was against them; and
the Taft majority which the National Committee had constituted in
the Convention remained intact, an impregnable defense against the
Progressive attack.

These preliminary engagements concerned with the determination of the
final membership of the Convention had occupied several days. Meanwhile
the temper of the Roosevelt delegates had burned hotter and hotter.
Roosevelt was present, leading the fight in person--not, of course,
on the floor of the Convention, to which he was not a delegate, but
at headquarters in the Congress Hotel. There were not wanting in
the Progressive forces counsels of moderation and compromise. It was
suggested by those of less fiery mettle that harmony might be arrived
at on the basis of the elimination of both Roosevelt and Taft and
the selection of a candidate not unsatisfactory to either side. But
Roosevelt, backed by the majority of the Progressive delegates, stood
firm and immovable on the ground that the "roll must be purged" and that
he would consent to no traffic with a Convention whose make-up contained
delegates holding their seats by virtue of fraud. "Let them purge the
roll," he declared again and again, "and I will accept any candidate the
Convention may name." But the organization leaders knew that a yielding
to this demand for a reconstitution of the personnel of the Convention
would result in but one thing--the nomination for Roosevelt--and this
was the one thing they were resolved not to permit.

As the hours of conflict and turmoil passed, there grew steadily and
surely in the Roosevelt ranks a demand for a severance of relations
with the fraudulent Convention and the formation of a new party devoted,
without equivocation or compromise, to Progressive principles. A typical
incident of these days of confusion and uncertainty was the drawing up
of a declaration of purpose by a Progressive alternate from New Jersey,
disgusted with the progress of the machine steam roller and disappointed
at the delayed appearance of a positive Progressive programme of action.
Circulated privately, with the knowledge and approval of Roosevelt,
it was promptly signed by dozens of Progressive delegates. It read as
follows:

"We, the undersigned, in the event that the Republican National
Convention as at present constituted refuses to purge its roll of the
delegates fraudulently placed upon it by the action of the majority
of the Republican National Committee, pledge ourselves, as American
citizens devoted to the progressive principles of genuine popular rule
and social justice, to join in the organization of a new party founded
upon those principles, under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt."

The first signer of the declaration was Governor Hiram W. Johnson of
California, the second, Governor Robert S. Vessey of South Dakota, the
third, Governor Joseph M. Carey of Wyoming, and farther down the
list were the names of Gifford and Amos Pinchot, James R. Garfield,
ex-Governor John Franklin Fort of New Jersey, with Everett Colby and
George L. Record of the same State, Matthew Hale of Massachusetts,
"Jack" Greenway of Arizona, Judge Ben B. Lindsey of Colorado, Medill
McCormick of Illinois, George Rublee of New Hampshire, and Elon
Huntington Hooker, of New York, who was to become the National Treasurer
of the new party. The document was, of course, a purely informal
assertion of purpose; but it was the first substantial straw to predict
the whirlwind which the masters of the convention were to reap.

When at last it had become unmistakably clear that the Taft forces
were and would remain to the end in control of the Convention, the
Progressive delegates, with a few exceptions, united in dramatic action.
Speaking for them with passion and intensity Henry J. Allen of Kansas
announced their intention to participate no longer in the actions of
a convention vitiated by fraud. The Progressive delegates would, he
declared, remain in their places but they would neither vote nor take
any part whatever in the proceedings. He then read, by permission of
the Convention, a statement from Roosevelt, in which he pronounced the
following indictment:

"The Convention has now declined to purge the roll of the fraudulent
delegates placed thereon by the defunct National Committee, and the
majority which has thus indorsed the fraud was made a majority only
because it included the fraudulent delegates themselves who all sat as
judges on one another's cases.... The Convention as now composed has
no claim to represent the voters of the Republican party.... Any man
nominated by the Convention as now constituted would merely be the
beneficiary of this successful fraud; it would be deeply discreditable
for any man to accept the Convention's nomination under these
circumstances; and any man thus accepting it would have no claim to the
support of any Republican on party grounds and would have forfeited
the right to ask the support of any honest man of any party on moral
grounds."

So while most of the Roosevelt delegates sat in ominous quiet and
refused to vote, the Convention proceeded to nominate Taft for President
by the following vote: Taft 561--21 votes more than a majority;
Roosevelt 107; La Follette 41; Cummins 17; Hughes 2; absent 6; present
and not voting 344.

Then the Taft delegates went home to meditate on the fight which they
had won and the more portentous fight which they must wage in the coming
months on a broader field. The Roosevelt delegates, on the other
hand, went out to Orchestra Hall, and in an exalted mood of passionate
devotion to their cause and their beloved leader proceeded to nominate
Theodore Roosevelt for the Presidency and Hiram Johnson for the
Vice-Presidency. A committee was sent to notify Roosevelt of the
nomination and when he appeared in the hall all precedents of
spontaneous enthusiasm were broken. This was no conventional--if the
double entendre may be permitted--demonstration. It had rather the
quality of religious exaltation.

Roosevelt made a short speech, in which he adjured his hearers to go to
their several homes "to find out the sentiment of the people at home and
then again come together, I suggest by mass convention, to nominate for
the Presidency a Progressive on a Progressive platform that will enable
us to appeal to Northerner and Southerner, Easterner and Westerner,
Republican and Democrat alike, in the name of our common American
citizenship. If you wish me to make the fight I will make it, even if
only one State should support me."

Thus ended the first act in the drama. The second opened with the
gathering of some two thousand men and women at Chicago on August 5,
1912. It was a unique gathering. Many of the delegates were women; one
of the "keynote" speeches was delivered by Miss Jane Addams of Hull
House. The whole tone and atmosphere of the occasion seemed religious
rather than political. The old-timers among the delegates, who found
themselves in the new party for diverse reasons, selfish, sincere,
or mixed, must have felt astonishment at themselves as they stood and
shouted out Onward Christian Soldiers as the battle-hymn of their new
allegiance. The long address which Roosevelt made to the Convention he
denominated his "Confession of Faith." The platform which the gathering
adopted was entitled "A Contract with the People." The sessions of the
Convention seethed with enthusiasm and burned hot with earnest devotion
to high purpose. There could be no doubt in the mind of any but the most
cynical of political reactionaries that here was the manifestation of a
new and revivifying force to be reckoned with in the future development
of American political life.

The platform adopted by the Progressive Convention was no less a
novelty. Its very title--even the fact that it had a title marked it
off from the pompous and shopworn documents emanating from the usual
nominating Convention--declared a reversal of the time-honored view of
a platform as, like that of a street-car, "something to get in on, not
something to stand on." The delegates to that Convention were perfectly
ready to have their party sued before the bar of public opinion
for breach of contract if their candidates when elected did not do
everything in their power to carry out the pledges of the platform.
The planks of the platform grouped themselves into three main sections:
political reforms, control of trusts and combinations, and measures of
"social and industrial justice."

In the first section were included direct primaries, nation-wide
preferential primaries for the selection of candidates for the
Presidency, direct popular election of United States Senators, the
short ballot, the initiative, referendum and recall, an easier method
of amending the Federal constitution, woman suffrage, and the recall
of judicial decisions in the form of a popular review of any decision
annulling a law passed under the police power of the State.

The platform in the second place opposed vigorously the indiscriminate
dissolution of trusts and combinations, on the ground that combination
in the business field was not only inevitable but necessary and
desirable for the promotion of national and international efficiency. It
condemned the evils of inflated capitalization and unfair competition;
and it proposed, in order to eliminate those is evils while
preserving the unquestioned advantages that flow from combination, the
establishment of a strong Federal commission empowered and directed
to maintain permanent active supervision over industrial corporations
engaged in interstate commerce, doing for them what the Federal
Government now does for the national banks and, through the Interstate
Commerce Commission, for the transportation lines.

Finally in the field of social justice the platform pledged the party to
the abolition of child labor, to minimum wage laws, the eight-hour day,
publicity in regard to working conditions, compensation for industrial
accidents, continuation schools for industrial education, and to
legislation to prevent industrial accidents, occupational diseases,
overwork, involuntary unemployment, and other injurious effects incident
to modern industry.

To stand upon this platform and to carry out the terms of this "contract
with the people," the Convention nominated without debate or dissent
Theodore Roosevelt for President and Hiram W. Johnson of California for
Vice-President. Governor Johnson was an appropriate running mate for
Roosevelt. In his own State he had led one of the most virile and fast
moving of the local Progressive movements. He burned with a white-hot
enthusiasm for the democratic ideal and the rights of man as embodied
in equality of opportunity, freedom of individual development, and
protection from the "dark forces" of special privilege, political
autocracy and concentrated wealth. He was a brilliant and fiery
campaigner where his convictions were enlisted.

So passed the second act in the drama of the Progressive party.



CHAPTER XIV. THE GLORIOUS FAILURE

The third act in the drama of the Progressive party was filled with the
campaign for the Presidency. It was a three-cornered fight. Taft stood
for Republican conservatism and clung to the old things. Roosevelt
fought for the progressive rewriting of Republican principles with added
emphasis on popular government and social justice as defined in the New
Nationalism. The Democratic party under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson
espoused with more or less enthusiasm the old Democratic principles
freshly interpreted and revivified in the declaration they called the
New Freedom. The campaign marked the definite entrance of the nation
upon a new era. One thing was clear from the beginning: the day of
conservatism and reaction was over; the people of the United States
had definitely crossed their Rubicon and had committed themselves to
spiritual and moral progress.

The campaign had one dramatic incident. On the 14th of October, just
before entering the Auditorium at Milwaukee, Roosevelt was shot by a
fanatic. His immediate action was above everything characteristic. Some
time later in reply to a remark that he had been foolhardy in going on
with his speech just after the attack, Roosevelt said, "Why, you know,
I didn't think I had been mortally wounded. If I had been mortally
wounded, I would have bled from the lungs. When I got into the motor I
coughed hard three times, and put my hand up to my mouth; as I did not
find any blood, I thought that I was not seriously hurt, and went on
with my speech."

The opening words of the speech which followed were equally typical:

"Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know
whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes
more than that to kill a Bull Moose.... The bullet is in me now, so that
I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.... First of
all, I want to say this about myself; I have altogether too important
things to think of to feel any concern over my own death; and now I
cannot speak insincerely to you within five minutes of being shot. I
am telling you the literal truth when I say that my concern is for many
other things. It is not in the least for my own life. I want you to
understand that I am ahead of the game anyway. No man has had a happier
life than I have led; a happier life in every way. I have been able to
do certain things that I greatly wished to do, and I am interested in
doing other things. I can tell you with absolute truthfulness that I am
very much uninterested in whether I am shot or not. It was just as when
I was colonel of my regiment. I always felt that a private was to be
excused for feeling at times some pangs of anxiety about his personal
safety, but I cannot understand a man fit to be a colonel who can pay
any heed to his personal safety when he is occupied as he ought to be
occupied with the absorbing desire to do his duty."

There was a great deal of self-revelation in these words. Even the
critic accustomed to ascribe to Roosevelt egotism and love of gallery
applause must concede the courage, will-power, and self-forgetfulness
disclosed by the incident.

The election was a debacle for reaction, a victory for Democracy, a
triumph in defeat for the Progressive party. Taft carried two States,
Utah and Vermont, with eight electoral votes; Woodrow Wilson carried
forty States, with 435 electoral votes; and Roosevelt carried five
States, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington,
and eleven out of the thirteen votes of California, giving him 88
electoral votes. Taft's popular vote was 3,484,956; Wilson's was
6,293,019; while Roosevelt's was 4,119,507. The fact that Wilson was
elected by a minority popular vote is not the significant thing, for it
is far beyond the capability of any political observer to declare what
would have been the result if there had been but two parties in the
field. The triumph for the Progressive party lay in the certainty that
its emergence had compelled the election of a President whose face was
toward the future. If the Roosevelt delegates at Chicago in June had
acquiesced in the result of the steam-roller Convention, it is highly
probable that Woodrow Wilson would not have been the choice of the
Democratic Convention that met later at Baltimore.

During the succeeding four years the Progressive party, as a national
organization, continued steadily to "dwindle, peak, and pine." More and
more of its members and supporters slipped or stepped boldly back to the
Republican party. Its quondam Democratic members had largely returned to
their former allegiance with Wilson, either at the election or after it.
Roosevelt once more withdrew from active participation in public life,
until the Great War, with its gradually increasing intrusions upon
American interests and American rights, aroused him to vigorous and
aggressive utterance on American responsibility and American duty. He
became a vigorous critic of the Administration.

Once more a demand began to spring up for his nomination for the
Presidency; the Progressive party began to show signs of reviving
consciousness. There had persisted through the years a little band of
irreconcilables who were Progressives or nothing. They wanted a new
party of radical ideas regardless of anything in the way of reformation
and progress that the old parties might achieve. There were others who
preferred to go back to the Republican party rather than to keep up the
Progressive party as a mere minority party of protest, but who hoped in
going back to be able to influence their old party along the lines of
progress. There were those who were Rooseveltians pure and simple and
who would follow him wherever he led.

All these groups wanted Roosevelt as President. They united to hold a
convention of the Progressive party at Chicago in 1916 on the same days
on which the Republican Convention met there. Each convention opened
with a calculating eye upon the activities of the other. But both
watched with even more anxious surmise for some sign of intention from
the Progressive leader back at Oyster Bay. He held in his single hand
the power of life and death for the Progressive party. His decision as
to cooperative action with the Republicans or individual action as a
Progressive would be the most important single factor in the campaign
against Woodrow Wilson, who was certain of renomination. Three
questions confronted and puzzled the two bodies of delegates: Would
the Republicans nominate Roosevelt or another? If another, what would
Roosevelt do? If another, what would the Progressives do?

For three days the Republican National Convention proceeded steadily
and stolidly upon its appointed course. Everything had been done in
the stereotyped way on the stereotyped time-table in the stereotyped
language. No impropriety or infelicity had been permitted to mar the
smooth texture of its surface. The temporary chairman in his keynote
speech had been as mildly oratorical, as diffusely patriotic, and as
nobly sentimental as any Fourth of July orator of a bygone day. The
whole tone of the Convention had been subdued and decorous with the
decorum of incertitude and timidity. That Convention did not know what
it wanted. It only knew that there was one thing that it did not want
and that it was afraid of, and another thing it would rather not
have and was afraid it would have to take. It wanted neither Theodore
Roosevelt nor Charles E. Hughes, and its members were distinctly
uncomfortable at the thought that they might have to take one or the
other. It was an old-fashioned convention of the hand-picked variety.
It smacked of the former days when the direct primary had not
yet introduced the disturbing thought that the voters and not the
office-holders and party leaders ought to select their candidates.

It was a docile, submissive convention, not because it was ruled by a
strong group of men who knew what they wanted and proposed to compel
their followers to give it to them, but because it was composed of
politicians great and small to whom party regularity was the breath of
their nostrils. They were ready to do the regular thing; but the only
two things in sight were confoundedly irregular.

Two drafts were ready for their drinking and they dreaded both. They
could nominate one of two men, and to nominate either of them was to
fling open the gates of the citadel of party regularity and conformity
and let the enemy in. Was it to be Roosevelt or Hughes? Roosevelt they
would not have. Hughes they would give their eye teeth not to take. No
wonder they were subdued and inarticulate. No wonder they suffered and
were unhappy. So they droned along through their stereotyped routine,
hoping dully against fate.

The hot-heads in the Progressive Convention wanted no delay, no
compromise. They would have nominated Theodore Roosevelt out of hand
with a whoop, and let the Republican Convention take him or leave him.
But the cooler leaders realized the importance of union between the two
parties and knew, or accurately guessed, what the attitude of Roosevelt
would be. With firm hand they kept the Convention from hasty and
irrevocable action. They proposed that overtures be made to the
Republican Convention with a view to harmonious agreement. A conference
was held between committees of the two conventions to see if common
ground could be discovered. At the first session of the joint committee
it appeared that there was sincere desire on both sides to get together,
but that the Progressives would have no one but Roosevelt, while the
Republicans would not have him but were united on no one else. When the
balloting began in the Republican Convention, the only candidate who
received even a respectable block of votes was Hughes, but his total
was hardly more than half of the necessary majority. For several ballots
there was no considerable gain for any of the numerous candidates,
and when the Convention adjourned late Friday night the outcome was as
uncertain as ever. But by Saturday morning the Republican leaders and
delegates had resigned themselves to the inevitable, and the nomination
of Hughes was assured. When the Progressive Convention met that morning,
the conference committee reported that the Republican members of the
committee had proposed unanimously the selection of Hughes as the
candidate of both parties.

Thus began the final scene in the Progressive drama, and a more
thrilling and intense occasion it would be difficult to imagine. It was
apparent that the Progressive delegates would have none of it. They were
there to nominate their own beloved leader and they intended to do it.
A telegram was received from Oyster Bay proposing Senator Lodge as the
compromise candidate, and the restive delegates in the Auditorium could
with the greatest difficulty be held back until the telegram could be
received and read at the Coliseum. A direct telephone wire from
the Coliseum to a receiver on the stage of the Auditorium kept the
Progressive body in instant touch with events in the other Convention.
In the Auditorium the atmosphere was electric. The delegates bubbled
with excitement. They wanted to nominate Roosevelt and be done with it.
The fear that the other Convention would steal a march on them and make
its nomination first set them crazy with impatience. The hall rumbled
and sputtered and fizzed and detonated. The floor looked like a giant
corn popper with the kernels jumping and exploding like mad.

The delegates wanted action; the leaders wanted to be sure that they had
kept faith with Roosevelt and with the general situation by giving the
Republican delegates a chance to hear his last proposal. Bainbridge
Colby, of New York, put Roosevelt in nomination with brevity and vigor;
Hiram Johnson seconded the nomination with his accustomed fire. Then,
as the word came over the wire that balloting had been resumed in the
Coliseum, the question was put at thirty-one minutes past twelve, and
every delegate and every alternate in the Convention leaped to his feet
with upstretched arm and shouted "Aye."

Doubtless more thrilling moments may come to some men at some time,
somewhere, but you will hardly find a delegate of that Progressive
Convention to believe it. Then the Convention adjourned, to meet again
at three to hear what the man they had nominated would say.

At five o'clock in the afternoon, after a couple of hours of impatient
and anxious marking time with routine matters, the Progressive delegates
received the reply from their leader. It read thus:

"I am very grateful for the honor you confer upon me by nominating me as
President. I cannot accept it at this time. I do not know the attitude
of the candidate of the Republican party toward the vital questions of
the day. Therefore, if you desire an immediate decision, I must decline
the nomination.

"But if you prefer to wait, I suggest that my conditional refusal to
run be placed in the hands of the Progressive National Committee. If
Mr. Hughes's statements, when he makes them, shall satisfy the committee
that it is for the interest of the country that he be elected, they can
act accordingly and treat my refusal as definitely accepted.

"If they are not satisfied, they can so notify the Progressive party,
and at the same time they can confer with me, and then determine on
whatever action we may severally deem appropriate to meet the needs of
the country.

"THEODORE ROOSEVELT."

Puzzled, disheartened, overwhelmed, the Progressive delegates went
away. They could not then see how wise, how farsighted, how inevitable
Roosevelt's decision was. Some of them will never see it. Probably few
of them as they went out of those doors realized that they had taken
part in the last act of the romantic and tragic drama of the National
Progressive party. But such was the fact, for the march of events was
too much for it. Fate, not its enemies, brought it to an end.

So was born, lived a little space, and died the Progressive party. At
its birth it caused the nomination, by the Democrats, and the election,
by the people, of Woodrow Wilson. At its death it brought about the
nomination of Charles E. Hughes by the Republicans. It forced the
writing into the platforms of the more conservative parties of
principles and programmes of popular rights and social regeneration.
The Progressive party never attained to power, but it wielded a potent
power. It was a glorious failure.



CHAPTER XV. THE FIGHTING EDGE

Theodore Roosevelt was a prodigious coiner of phrases. He added scores
of them, full of virility, picturesqueness, and flavor to the every-day
speech of the American people. They stuck, because they expressed ideas
that needed expressing and because they expressed them so well that no
other combinations of words could quite equal them. One of the best,
though not the most popular, of his phrases is contained in the
following quotation:

"One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency
to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge. When
men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is always
danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness of
fiber."

He used the same phrase many times. Here is another instance:

"Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make
ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it!
And woe, thrice over, to the nation in which the average man loses the
fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need
should arise!"

That was it--THE FIGHTING EDGE. Roosevelt had it, if ever man had. The
conviction of the need for that combination of physical and spiritual
qualities that this represented, if a man is to take his place and keep
it in the world, became an inseparable part of his consciousness early
in life. It grew in strength and depth with every year that he lived.
He learned the need of preparedness on that day in Maine when he found
himself helpless before the tormenting of his young fellow travelers. In
the gymnasium on Twentieth Street, within the boxing ring at Harvard,
in the New York Assembly, in the conflicts with the spoilsmen in
Washington, on the frontier in cowboy land, in Mulberry Street and on
Capitol Hill, and in the jungle before Santiago, the lesson was hammered
into him by the stern reality of events. The strokes fell on malleable
metal.

In the spring of 1897, Roosevelt had been appointed Assistant Secretary
of the Navy, largely through the efforts of his friend, Senator Henry
Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. The appointment was excellent from every
point of view. Though Roosevelt had received no training for the post
so far as technical education was concerned, he brought to his duties a
profound belief in the navy and a keen interest in its development. His
first published book had been "The Naval War of 1812"; and the lessons
of that war had not been lost upon him. It was indeed a fortuitous
circumstance that placed him in this branch of the national service
just as relations between Spain and the United States were reaching the
breaking point. When the battleship Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor,
his reaction to that startling event was instantaneous. He was convinced
that the sinking of the Maine made war inevitable, but he had long been
certain that war ought to come. He believed that the United States had
a moral duty toward the Cuban people, oppressed, abused, starved, and
murdered at the hands of Spain.

He was not the head of the Navy Department, but that made little
difference. The Secretary was a fine old gentleman, formerly president
of the Massachusetts Peace Society, and by temperament indisposed to any
rapid moves toward war. But he liked his Assistant Secretary and did
not put too stern a curb upon his impetuous activity and Roosevelt's
activity was vigorous and unceasing. Secretary Long has described it,
rather with justice than with enthusiasm.

"His activity was characteristic. He was zealous in the work of putting
the navy in condition for the apprehended struggle. His ardor sometimes
went faster than the President or the Department approved.... He worked
indefatigably, frequently incorporating his views in memoranda which
he would place every morning on my desk. Most of his suggestions had,
however, so far as applicable, been already adopted by the various
bureaus, the chiefs of which were straining every nerve and leaving
nothing undone. When I suggested to him that some future historian
reading his memoranda, if they were put on record, would get the
impression that the bureaus were inefficient, he accepted the suggestion
with the generous good nature which is so marked in him. Indeed, nothing
could be pleasanter than our relations. He was heart and soul in his
work. His typewriters had no rest. He, like most of us, lacks the rare
knack of brevity. He was especially stimulating to the younger officers
who gathered about him and made his office as busy as a hive. He was
especially helpful in the purchasing of ships and in every line where he
could push on the work of preparation for war."

One suspects that the Secretary may have been more complacently
convinced of the forehandedness of the bureau chiefs than was his
impatient associate. For, while the navy was apparently in better
shape than the army in those days, there must have been, even in the
Department where Roosevelt's typewriters knew no rest, some of that
class of desk-bound officers whom he met later when he was organizing
the Rough Riders. His experience with one such officer in the War
Department was humorous. This bureaucrat was continually refusing
Roosevelt's applications because they were irregular. In each case
Roosevelt would appeal to the Secretary of War, with whom he was on
the best of terms, and would get from him an order countenancing the
irregularity. After a number of experiences of this kind, the harassed
slave of red tape threw himself back in his chair and exclaimed, "Oh,
dear! I had this office running in such good shape--and then along came
the war and upset everything!"

But there were plenty of good men in the navy; and one of them was
Commodore George Dewey. Roosevelt had kept his eye on him for some time
as an officer who "could be relied upon to prepare in advance, and
to act promptly, fearlessly, and on his own responsibility when the
emergency arose." When he began to foresee the probability of war,
Roosevelt succeeded in having Dewey sent to command the Asiatic
squadron; and just ten days after the Maine was blown up this cablegram
went from Washington to Hong Kong:

"DEWEY, Hong Kong:

"Order the squadron, except the Monocacy, to Hong Kong. Keep full of
coal. In the event of declaration of war Spain, your duty will be to
see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast, and then
offensive operations in Philippine Islands. Keep Olympia until further
orders. Roosevelt."

The declaration of war lagged on for nearly two months, but when it
finally came, just one week elapsed between the sending of an order to
Dewey to proceed at once to the Philippines and to "capture vessels or
destroy" and the elimination of the sea power of Spain in the Orient.
The battle of Manila Bay was a practical demonstration of the value of
the "fighting edge," as exemplified in an Assistant Secretary who fought
procrastination, timidity, and political expedience at home and in a
naval officer who fought the enemy's ships on the other side of the
world.

When war actually came, Roosevelt could not stand inactivity in
Washington. He was a fighter and he must go where the real fighting was.
With Leonard Wood, then a surgeon in the army, he organized the First
United States Volunteer Cavalry. He could have been appointed Colonel,
but he knew that Wood knew more about the soldier's job than he, and he
insisted upon taking the second place. The Secretary of War thought him
foolish to step aside thus and suggested that Roosevelt become Colonel
and Wood Lieutenant-Colonel, adding that Wood would do the work anyway.
But that was not the Roosevelt way. He replied that he did not wish to
rise on any man's shoulders, that he hoped to be given every chance that
his deeds and his abilities warranted, that he did not wish what he
did not earn, and that, above all, he did not wish to hold any position
where any one else did the work. Lieutenant-Colonel he was made.

The regiment, which will always be affectionately known as the Rough
Riders, was "raised, armed, equipped, drilled, mounted, dismounted,
kept for two weeks on a transport, and then put through two victorious
aggressive fights, in which it lost a third of the officers, and a fifth
of the enlisted men, all within a little over fifty days." Roosevelt
began as second in command, went through the battle of San Juan Hill as
Colonel, and ended the war in command of a brigade, with the brevet of
Brigadier-General. The title of Colonel stuck to him all his life.

When he became President, his instinctive commitment to the necessity of
being prepared had been stoutly reinforced by his experience in what he
called "the war of America the Unready." His first message to
Congress was a long and exhaustive paper, dealing with many matters of
importance. But almost one-fifth of it was devoted to the army and the
navy. "It is not possible," he said, "to improvise a navy after
war breaks out. The ships must be built and the men trained long
in advance." He urged that Congress forthwith provide for several
additional battleships and heavy armored cruisers, together with the
proportionate number of smaller craft, and he pointed out the need for
many more officers and men. He declared that "even in time of peace a
warship should be used until it wears out, for only so can it be kept
fit to respond to any emergency. The officers and men alike should be
kept as much as possible on blue water, for it is there only they can
learn their duties as they should be learned." But his most vigorous
insistence was upon gunnery. "In battle," he said once to the graduates
of the Naval Academy, "the only shots that count are those that hit, and
marksmanship is a matter of long practice and intelligent reasoning." To
this end he demanded "unceasing" gunnery practice.

In every succeeding message to Congress for seven years he returned to
the subject of the navy, demanding ships, officers, men, and, above all,
training. His insistence on these essentials brought results, and by the
time the cruise of the battle fleet around the world had been achieved,
the American navy, ship for ship, was not surpassed by any in the world.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, ship's crew for ship's
crew; for it was the officers and men of the American navy who made it
possible for the world cruise to be made without the smallest casualty.

The question of marksmanship had been burned into Roosevelt's mind
in those days when the Spanish War was brewing. He has related in his
"Autobiography" how it first came to his attention through a man whose
name has in more recent years become known the world over in connection
with the greatest task of the American navy. Roosevelt's account is as
follows:

"There was one deficiency... which there was no time to remedy, and of
the very existence of which, strange to say, most of our best men were
ignorant. Our navy had no idea how low our standard of marksmanship
was. We had not realized that the modern battleship had become such
a complicated piece of mechanism that the old methods of training in
marksmanship were as obsolete as the old muzzle-loading broadside guns
themselves. Almost the only man in the navy who fully realized this was
our naval attach at Paris, Lieutenant Sims. He wrote letter after letter
pointing out how frightfully backward we were in marksmanship. I was
much impressed by his letters.... As Sims proved to be mistaken in his
belief that the French had taught the Spaniards how to shoot, and as
the Spaniards proved to be much worse even than we were, in the service
generally Sims was treated as an alarmist. But although I at first
partly acquiesced in this view, I grew uneasy when I studied the small
proportion of hits to shots made by our vessels in battle. When I was
President I took up the matter, and speedily became convinced that we
needed to revolutionize our whole training in marksmanship. Sims was
given the lead in organizing and introducing the new system; and to him
more than to any other one man was due the astonishing progress made by
our fleet in this respect, a progress which made the fleet, gun for gun,
at least three times as effective, in point of fighting efficiency, in
1908, as it was in 1902" *.

     *Autobiography (Scribner), pp. 212-13.

Theodore Roosevelt was a thoroughgoing, bred-in-the-bone individualist,
but not as the term is ordinarily understood. He continually emphasized
not the rights of the individual, but his duties, obligations, and
opportunities. He knew that human character is the greatest thing in the
world and that men and women are the real forces that move and sway the
world's affairs. So in all his preaching and doing on behalf of a great
and efficient navy, the emphasis that he always laid was upon the men
of the navy, their efficiency and their spirit. He once remarked, "I
believe in the navy of the United States primarily because I believe in
the intelligence, the patriotism, and the fighting edge of the average
man of the navy." To the graduating class at Annapolis, he once said:

"There is not one of you who is not derelict in his duty to the whole
Nation if he fails to prepare himself with all the strength that in him
lies to do his duty should the occasion arise; and one of your great
duties is to see that shots hit. The result is going to depend largely
upon whether you or your adversary hits. I expect you to be brave.
I rather take that for granted.... But, in addition, you have got to
prepare yourselves in advance. Every naval action that has taken place
in the last twenty years ... has shown, as a rule, that the defeated
party has suffered not from lack of courage, but because it could
not make the best use of its weapons, or had not been given the right
weapons... . I want every one here to proceed upon the assumption that
any foe he may meet will have the courage. Of course, you have got
to show the highest degree of courage yourself or you will be beaten
anyhow, and you will deserve to be; but in addition to that you must
prepare yourselves by careful training so that you may make the best
possible use of the delicate and formidable mechanism of a modern
warship."

Theodore Roosevelt was an apostle of preparedness from the hour that he
began to think at all about affairs of public moment--and that hour came
to him earlier in life than it does to most men. In the preface to his
history of the War of 1812, which he wrote at the age of twenty-four,
this sentence appears: "At present people are beginning to realize that
it is folly for the great English-speaking Republic to rely for defense
upon a navy composed partly of antiquated hulks, and partly of new
vessels rather more worthless than the old." His prime interest,
from the point of view of preparedness, lay in the navy. His sense
of proportion told him that the navy was the nation's first line of
defense. He knew that without an efficient navy a nation situated as
the United States was would be helpless before an aggressive enemy,
and that, given a navy of sufficient size and effectiveness, the nation
could dispense with a great army. For the army he demanded not size
but merely efficiency. One of his principal points of attack in his
criticism of the army was the system of promotion for officers. He
assailed sharply the existing practice of "promotion by mere seniority."
In one of his messages to Congress he pointed out that a system of
promotion by merit existed in the Military Academy at West Point. He
then went on to say that from the time of the graduation of the cadets
into the army "all effort to find which man is best or worst and reward
or punish him accordingly, is abandoned: no brilliancy, no amount of
hard work, no eagerness in the performance of duty, can advance him,
and no slackness or indifference, that falls short of a court-martial
offense, can retard him. Until this system is changed we cannot hope
that our officers will be of as high grade as we have a right to expect,
considering the material from which we draw. Moreover, when a man
renders such service as Captain Pershing rendered last spring in the
Moro campaign, it ought to be possible to reward him without at once
jumping him to the grade of brigadier-general."

It is not surprising to find in this message also a name that was later
to become famous in the Great War. Roosevelt had an uncanny gift of
prophecy.

More than once, as President, he picked out for appreciation and
commendation the very men who were to do the big things for America when
the critical hour came.



CHAPTER XVI. THE LAST FOUR YEARS

When the Great War broke out in August, 1914, Roosevelt instantly
stiffened to attention. He immediately began to read the lessons that
were set for the world by the gigantic conflict across the sea and it
was not long before he was passing them on to the American people. Like
every other good citizen, he extended hearty support to the President
in his conduct of America's foreign relations in the crisis. At the same
time, however, he recognized the possibility that a time might come when
it would be a higher moral duty to criticize the Administration than to
continue unqualified support. Three weeks after war had begun, Roosevelt
wrote in "The Outlook":

"In common with the immense majority of our fellow countrymen, I shall
certainly stand by not only the public servants in control of the
Administration at Washington, but also all other public servants, no
matter of what party, during this crisis; asking only that they with
wisdom and good faith endeavor to take every step that can be taken to
safeguard the honor and interest of the United States, and, so far
as the opportunity offers, to promote the cause of peace and justice
throughout the world. My hope, of course, is that in their turn the
public servants of the people will take no action so fraught with
possible harm to the future of the people as to oblige farsighted and
patriotic men to protest against it."

One month later, in a long article in "The Outlook", Roosevelt
reiterated this view in these words:

".... We, all of us, without regard to party differences, must stand
ready loyally to support the Administration, asking nothing except that
the policy be one that in truth and in fact tells for the honor and
interest of our Nation and in truth and in fact is helpful to the cause
of a permanent and righteous world peace."

In the early months of the war, Roosevelt thus scrupulously endeavored
to uphold the President's hands, to utter no criticism that might
hamper him, and to carry out faithfully the President's adjuration to
neutrality. He recognized clearly, however, the price that we must pay
for neutrality, and he set it forth in the following passage from the
same article: "A deputation of Belgians has arrived in this country to
invoke our assistance in the time of their dreadful need. What action
our Government can or will take I know not. It has been announced that
no action can be taken that will interfere with our entire neutrality.
It is certainly eminently desirable that we should remain entirely
neutral, and nothing but urgent need would warrant breaking our
neutrality and taking sides one way or the other. Our first duty is to
hold ourselves ready to do whatever the changing circumstances demand
in order to protect our own interests in the present and in the future;
although, for my own part, I desire to add to this statement the proviso
that under no circumstances must we do anything dishonorable, especially
toward unoffending weaker nations. Neutrality may be of prime necessity
in order to preserve our own interests, to maintain peace in so much of
the world as is not affected by the war, and to conserve our influence
for helping toward the reestablishment of general peace when the time
comes; for if any outside Power is able at such time to be the medium
for bringing peace, it is more likely to be the United States than any
other. But we pay the penalty of this action on behalf of peace for
ourselves, and possibly for others in the future, by forfeiting our
right to do anything on behalf of peace for the Belgians in the present.
We can maintain our neutrality only by refusal to do anything to aid
unoffending weak powers which are dragged into the gulf of bloodshed
and misery through no fault of their own. Of course it would be folly
to jump into the gulf ourselves to no good purpose; and very probably
nothing that we could have done would have helped Belgium. We have not
the smallest responsibility for what has befallen her, and I am sure
that the sympathy of this country for the men, women, and children of
Belgium is very real. Nevertheless, this sympathy is compatible with
full acknowledgment of the unwisdom of our uttering a single word of
official protest unless we are prepared to make that protest effective;
and only the clearest and most urgent national duty would ever justify
us in deviating from our rule of neutrality and noninterference. But
it is a grim comment on the professional pacifist theories as hitherto
developed that our duty to preserve peace for ourselves may necessarily
mean the abandonment of all effective efforts to secure peace for other
unoffending nations which through no fault of their own are dragged into
the War."

The rest of the article concerned itself with the lessons taught by the
war, the folly of pacifism, the need for preparedness if righteousness
is not to be sacrificed for peace, the worthlessness of treaties
unsanctioned by force, and the desirability of an association of
nations for the prevention of war. On this last point Roosevelt wrote as
follows:

"But in view of what has occurred in this war, surely the time ought to
be ripe for the nations to consider a great world agreement among all
the civilized military powers TO BACK RIGHTEOUSNESS BY FORCE. Such an
agreement would establish an efficient World League for the Peace of
Righteousness. Such an agreement could limit the amount to be spent on
armaments and, after defining carefully the inalienable rights of
each nation which were not to be transgressed by any other, could also
provide that any cause of difference among them, or between one of them
and one of a certain number of designated outside non-military nations,
should be submitted to an international court, including citizens of
all these nations, chosen not as representatives of the nations, BUT
AS JUDGES and perhaps in any given case the particular judges could
be chosen by lot from the total number. To supplement and make this
effectual it should be solemnly covenanted that if any nation refused to
abide by the decision of such a court the others would draw the sword on
behalf of peace and justice, and would unitedly coerce the recalcitrant
nation. This plan would not automatically bring peace, and it may be too
soon to hope for its adoption; but if some such scheme could be adopted,
in good faith and with a genuine purpose behind it to make it effective,
then we would have come nearer to the day of world peace. World peace
will not come save in some such manner as that whereby we obtain
peace within the borders of each nation; that is, by the creation
of reasonably impartial judges and by putting an efficient police
power--that is, by putting force in efficient fashion--behind the
decrees of the judges. At present each nation must in the last resort
trust to its own strength if it is to preserve all that makes life
worth having. At present this is imperative. This state of things can be
abolished only when we put force, when we put the collective armed power
of civilization, behind some body which shall with reasonable justice
and equity represent the collective determination of civilization to do
what is right."

From this beginning Roosevelt went on vigorously preaching preparedness
against war; and the Great War had been raging for a scant seven months
when he was irresistibly impelled to utter open criticism of President
Wilson. In April, 1915, in The Metropolitan Magazine, to which he had
transferred his writings, he declared that "the United States, thanks
to Messrs. Wilson and Bryan, has signally failed in its duty toward
Belgium." He maintained that the United States, under the obligations
assumed by the signature of The Hague Conventions, should have protested
to Germany against the invasion of Belgium.

For two years thereafter, while Germany slapped America first on one
cheek and then on the other, and treacherously stabbed her with slinking
spies and dishonored diplomats, Roosevelt preached, with growing
indignation and vehemence, the cause of preparedness and national honor.
He found it impossible to support the President further. In February,
1916, he wrote:

"Eighteen months have gone by since the Great War broke out. It needed
no prescience, no remarkable statesmanship or gift of forecasting the
future, to see that, when such mighty forces were unloosed, and when it
had been shown that all treaties and other methods hitherto relied upon
for national protection and for mitigating the horror and circumscribing
the area of war were literally 'scraps of paper,' it had become a vital
necessity that we should instantly and on a great and adequate scale
prepare for our own defense. Our men, women, and children--not in
isolated cases, but in scores and hundreds of cases--have been murdered
by Germany and Mexico; and we have tamely submitted to wrongs from
Germany and Mexico of a kind to which no nation can submit without
impairing its own self-respect and incurring the contempt of the rest
of mankind. Yet, during these eighteen months not one thing has been
done.... Never in the country's history has there been a more stupendous
instance of folly than this crowning folly of waiting eighteen months
after the elemental crash of nations took place before even making
a start in an effort--and an utterly inefficient and insufficient
effort-for some kind of preparation to ward off disaster in the future.

"If President Wilson had shown the disinterested patriotism, courage,
and foresight demanded by this stupendous crisis, I would have supported
him with hearty enthusiasm. But his action, or rather inaction, has
been such that it has become a matter of high patriotic duty to
oppose him.... No man can support Mr. Wilson without at the same time
supporting a policy of criminal inefficiency as regards the United
States Navy, of short-sighted inadequacy as regards the army,
of abandonment of the duty owed by the United States to weak and
well-behaved nations, and of failure to insist on our just rights when
we are ourselves maltreated by powerful and unscrupulous nations."

Theodore Roosevelt could not, without violating the integrity of his
own soul, go on supporting either positively by word or negatively by
silence the man who had said, on the day after the Lusitania was sunk,
"There is such a thing as a nation being too proud to fight," and who
later called for a "peace without victory." He could have nothing but
scorn for an Administration whose Secretary of War could say, two months
after the United States had actually entered the war, that there was
"difficulty. .. disorder and confusion... in getting things started,"
and could then add, "but it is a happy confusion. I delight in the fact
that when we entered this war we were not like our adversary, ready for
it, anxious for it, prepared for it, and inviting it."

Until America entered the war Roosevelt used his voice and his pen with
all his native energy and fire to convince the American people of three
things that righteousness demanded that the United States forsake its
supine neutrality and act; that the United States should prepare itself
thoroughly for any emergency that might arise; and that the hyphenated
Americanism of those who, while enjoying the benefits of American
citizenship, "intrigue and conspire against the United States, and do
their utmost to promote the success of Germany and to weaken the
defense of this nation" should be rigorously curbed. The sermons that he
preached on this triple theme were sorely needed. No leadership in
this phase of national life was forthcoming from the quarter where the
American people had every right to look for leadership. The White House
had its face set in the opposite direction.

In August, 1915, an incident occurred which set the contrast between
the Rooseveltian and Wilsonian lines of thought in bold relief. Largely
through the initiative of General Leonard Wood there had been organized
at Plattsburg, New York, an officers' training camp where American
business men were given an all too brief course of training in the art
and duty of leading soldiers in camp and in the field. General Wood was
in command of the Plattsburg camp. He invited Roosevelt to address the
men in training. Roosevelt accepted gladly, and in the course of his
speech made these significant statements:

"For thirteen months America has played an ignoble part among the
nations. We have tamely submitted to seeing the weak, whom we have
covenanted to protect, wronged. We have seen our men, women, and
children murdered on the high seas without protest. We have used
elocution as a substitute for action.

"During this time our government has not taken the smallest step in the
way of preparedness to defend our own rights. Yet these thirteen months
have made evident the lamentable fact that force is more dominant now
in the affairs of the world than ever before, that the most powerful of
modern military nations is utterly brutal and ruthless in its disregard
of international morality, and that righteousness divorced from force is
utterly futile. Reliance upon high sounding words, unbacked by deeds, is
proof of a mind that dwells only in the realm of shadow and of sham.

"It is not a lofty thing, on the contrary, it is an evil thing, to
practise a timid and selfish neutrality between right and wrong. It is
wrong for an individual. It is still more wrong for a nation.

"Therefore, friends, let us shape our conduct as a nation in accordance
with the highest rules of international morality. Let us treat others
justly and keep the engagements we have made, such as these in The Hague
conventions, to secure just treatment for others. But let us remember
that we shall be wholly unable to render service to others and
wholly unable to fulfill the prime law of national being, the law of
self-preservation, unless we are thoroughly prepared to hold our own.
Let us show that a free democracy can defend itself successfully against
any organized and aggressive military despotism."

The men in the camp heard him gladly and with enthusiasm. But the next
day the Secretary of War sent a telegram of censure to General Wood in
which he said:

"I have just seen the reports in the newspapers of the speech made
by ex-President Roosevelt at the Plattsburg camp. It is difficult to
conceive of anything which could have a more detrimental effect upon the
real value of this experiment than such an incident.... No opportunity
should have been furnished to any one to present to the men any matter
excepting that which was essential to the necessary training they were
to receive. Anything else could only have the effect of distracting
attention from the real nature of the experiment, diverting
consideration to issues which excite controversy, antagonism, and ill
feeling and thereby impairing if not destroying, what otherwise would
have been so effective."

On this telegram Roosevelt's comment was pungent: "If the Administration
had displayed one-tenth the spirit and energy in holding Germany and
Mexico to account for the murder of men, women, and children that it is
now displaying in the endeavor to prevent our people from being taught
the need of preparation to prevent the repetition of such murders in the
future, it would be rendering a service to the people of the country."

Theodore Roosevelt could have little effect upon the material
preparedness of the United States for the struggle which it was
ultimately to enter. But he could and did have a powerful effect upon
the spiritual preparedness of the American people for the efforts, the
trials, and the sacrifices of that struggle. No voice was raised more
persistently or more consistently than his. No personality was thrown
with more power and more effect into the task of arousing the people
of the United States to their duty to take part in the struggle against
Prussianism. No man, in public or private life, urged so vigorously and
effectively the call to arms against evil and for the right. His was
the "voice crying in the wilderness," and to him the American spirit
hearkened and awoke.

At last the moment came. Roosevelt had but one desire and one thought.
He wanted to get to the firing-line. This was no impulse, no newly
formed project. For two months he had been in correspondence with the
Secretary of War on the subject. A year or more before that he had
offered, in case America went into the war, to raise a volunteer force,
train it, and take it across to the front. The idea was not new to
him, even then. As far back as 1912 he had said on several different
occasions, "If the United States should get into another war, I should
raise a brigade of cavalry and lead it as I did my regiment in Cuba." It
never occurred to him in those days that a former Commander-in-Chief of
the United States Army, with actual experience in the field, would be
refused permission to command troops in an American war. The idea
would hardly have occurred to any one else. But that is precisely what
happened.

On February 2, 1917, Roosevelt wrote to the Secretary of War reminding
him that his application for permission to raise a division of infantry
was already on file in the Department, saying that he was about to sail
for Jamaica, and asking the Secretary to inform him if he believed there
would be war and a call for volunteers, for in that case he did not
intend to sail. Secretary Baker replied, "No situation has arisen which
would justify my suggesting a postponement of the trip you propose."
Before this reply was received Roosevelt had written a second letter
saying that, as the President had meanwhile broken off diplomatic
relations with Germany, he should of course not sail. He renewed his
request for permission to raise a division, and asked if a certain
regular officer whom he would like to have for his divisional Chief of
Staff, if the division were authorized, might be permitted to come to
see him with a view to "making all preparations that are possible in
advance." To this the Secretary replied, "No action in the direction
suggested by you can be taken without the express sanction of Congress.
Should the contingency Occur which you have in mind, it is to be
expected that Congress will complete its legislation relating to
volunteer forces and provide, under its own conditions, for the
appointment of officers for the higher commands."

Roosevelt waited five weeks and then earnestly renewed his request.
He declared his purpose to take his division, after some six weeks of
preliminary training, direct to France for intensive training so that
it could be sent to the front in the shortest possible time. Secretary
Baker replied that no additional armies could be raised without the
consent of Congress, that a plan for a much larger army was ready for
the action of Congress when ever required, and that the general officers
for all volunteer forces were to be drawn from the regular army. To
this Roosevelt replied with the respectful suggestion that, as a retired
Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army, he was eligible to any
position of command over American troops. He recounted also his
record of actual military experience and referred the Secretary to his
immediate superiors in the field in Cuba as to his fitness for command
of troops.

When war had been finally declared, Secretary Baker and Roosevelt
conferred together at length about the matter. Thereafter Mr. Baker
wrote definitely, declaring that he would be obliged to withhold his
approval from an expedition of the sort proposed. The grounds which he
gave for the decision were that the soldiers sent across must not be
"deprived... of the most experienced leadership available, in deference
to any mere sentimental consideration," and that it should appear from
every aspect of the expeditionary force, if one should be sent over (a
point not yet determined upon) that "military considerations alone had
determined its composition."

To this definite refusal on the part of the Secretary of War Roosevelt
replied at length. In his letter was a characteristic passage commenting
upon Secretary Baker's reference to "sentimental considerations":

"I have not asked you to consider any "sentimental value" in this
matter. I am speaking of moral effect, not of sentimental value.
Sentimentality is as different from morality as Rousseau's life from
Abraham Lincoln's. I have just received a letter from James Bryce urging
"the dispatch of an American force to the theater of war," and saying,
"The moral effect of the appearance in the war line of an American
force would be immense." From representatives of the French and
British Governments and of the French, British, and Canadian military
authorities, I have received statements to the same effect, in even more
emphatic form, and earnest hopes that I myself should be in the force.
Apparently your military advisers in this matter seek to persuade you
that a "military policy" has nothing to do with "moral effect." If so,
their militarism is like that of the Aulic Council of Vienna in the
Napoleonic Wars, and not like that of Napoleon, who stated that in war
the moral was to the material as two to one. These advisers will do
well to follow the teachings of Napoleon and not those of the pedantic
militarists of the Aulic Council, who were the helpless victims of
Napoleon."

Secretary Baker replied with a reiteration of his refusal. Roosevelt
made one further attempt. When the Draft Law passed Congress, carrying
with it the authorization to use volunteer forces, he telegraphed the
President asking permission to raise two divisions, and four if so
directed. The President replied with a definite negative, declaring that
his conclusions were "based entirely upon imperative considerations
of public policy and not upon personal or private choice." Meanwhile
applications had been received from over three hundred thousand
men desirous of joining Roosevelt's volunteer force, of whom it was
estimated that at least two hundred thousand were physically fit, double
the number needed for four divisions. That a single private citizen,
by "one blast upon his bugle horn" should have been able to call forth
three hundred thousand volunteers, all over draft age, was a tremendous
testimony to his power. If his offer had been accepted when it was first
made, there would have been an American force on the field in France
long before one actually arrived there. It was widely believed, among
men of intelligence and insight, not only in America but in Great
Britain and France, that the arrival of such a force, under the command
of a man known, admired, and loved the world over, would have been a
splendid reinforcement to the Allied morale and a sudden blow to the
German confidence. But the Administration would not have it so.

I shall never forget one evening with Theodore Roosevelt on a speaking
tour which he was making through the South in 1912. There came to our
private car for dinner Senator Clarke of Arkansas and Jack Greenway,
young giant of football fame and experience with the Rough Riders in
Cuba. After dinner, Jack, who like many giants, is one of the most
diffident men alive, said hesitatingly:

"Colonel, I've long wanted to ask you something."

"Go right ahead," said T. R., "what is it?"

"Well, Colonel," said Jack, "I've always believed that it was your
ambition to die on the field of battle."

T. R. brought his hand down on the table with a crash that must have
hurt the wood.

"By Jove," said he, "how did you know that?"

"Well, Colonel," said Jack, "do you remember that day in Cuba, when you
and I were going along a trail and came upon ____ [one of the regiment]
propped against a tree, shot through the abdomen? It was evident that he
was done for. But instead of commiserating him, you grabbed his hand
and said something like this, 'Well, old man, isn't this splendid!' Ever
since then I've been sure you would be glad to die in battle yourself."

T. R.'s face sobered a little.

"You're right, Jack," he said. "I would."

The end of Theodore Roosevelt's life seemed to come to him not in action
but in quietness. But the truth was other than that. For it, let us turn
again to Browning's lines:

     I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
     The best and the last!
     I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
     And bade me creep past.

On the fifth of January in 1919, after sixty years of life, full of
unwearied fighting against evil and injustice and falseness, he "fell on
sleep." The end came peacefully in the night hours at Sagamore Hill.
But until he laid him down that night, the fight he waged had known no
relaxation. Nine months before he had expected death, when a serious
mastoid operation had drained his vital forces. Then his one thought
had been, not for himself, but for his sons to whom had been given the
precious privilege, denied to him, of taking part in their country's
and the world's great fight for righteousness. His sister, Mrs. Corinne
Douglas Robinson, tells how in those shadowy hours he beckoned her to
him and in the frailest of whispers said, "I'm glad it's I that lie here
and that my boys are in the fight over there."

His last, best fight was worthy of all the rest. With voice and pen he
roused the minds and the hearts of his countrymen to their high mission
in defense of human rights. It was not given to him to fall on the field
of battle. But he went down with his face to the forces of evil with
which he had never sought a truce.


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The reader who is primarily interested in the career and personality
of Roosevelt would do well to begin with his own volume, "Theodore
Roosevelt, An Autobiography". But it was written in 1912, before the
great campaign which produced the Progressive party.

"Theodore Roosevelt the Citizen" (1904), by Jacob A. Riis, was published
just after Roosevelt became President. It is an intimate and naively
enthusiastic portrait by a man who was an intimate friend and an ardent
admirer.

There are two lives written since his death that are complete and
discriminating. They are "The Life of Theodore Roosevelt" (1919), by
William Draper Lewis, and "Theodore Roosevelt, an Intimate Biography"
(1919), by William Roscoe Thayer.

"Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt" (1919) is a volume of first-hand
experiences, written by Lawrence F. Abbott of "The Outlook". The author
was closely associated with Roosevelt on "The Outlook"; and after the
African hunting trip met him at Khartum and went with him on his tour of
the capitals of Europe.

A small volume by Charles G. Washburn,"Theodore Roosevelt, the Logic of
His Career" (1916), contains the interpretation of a long-time friend
and sincere admirer.

Collections of Roosevelt's writings and speeches covering the years from
his becoming Governor of New York to the end of his Presidential terms
are found in "The Roosevelt Policy", 2 vols. (1908) and "Presidential
Addresses and State Papers", 4 vols. (1904). "The New Nationalism"
(1910) is a collection of his speeches delivered between his return from
Africa and the beginning of the Progressive campaign. His writings and
speeches during the Great War are found in several volumes: "America and
the World War" (1915); "Fear God and Take Your Own Part" (1916); "The
Foes of Our Own Household" (1917); "The Great Adventure" (1919).

Material on the Progressive movement and the Progressive party are to be
found in "The Progressive Movement" (1915), by Benjamin Parke De Witt,
"The Progressive Movement, Its Principles and Its Programme" (1913), by
S. J. Duncan-Clark, "Presidential Nominations and Elections" (1916), by
Joseph Bucklin Bishop, and "Third Party Movements" (1916), by Fred E.
Haynes. The story of La Follette is set forth at greater length in his
"Autobiography; A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences" (1918).
Three other autobiographies contribute to an understanding of politics:
"The Autobiography of Thomas C. Platt" (1910); J. B. Foraker, "Notes
of a Busy Life", 2 vols. (1916). S. M. Cullom, "Fifty Years of Public
Service" (1911).

The history of the country during the years when Roosevelt became a
national figure is recounted by J. H. Latane in "America as a World
Power" and by F. A. Ogg in "National Progress", both volumes in the
"American Nation" Series. Briefer summaries of the general history of at
least a part of the period treated in the present volume are to be found
in Frederic L. Paxson's "The New Nation" (1915), and Charles A. Beard's
"Contemporary American History" (1914).

The prosecution of the trusts may be followed in "Trust Laws and Unfair
Competition" (Government Printing Office, 1916). Much useful material
is contained in "Trusts, Pools and Corporations", edited by W. Z. Ripley
(1916). W. H. Taft in "The Anti-Trust Law and the Supreme Court"
(1914) defends the Sherman Act as interpreted by the courts during his
administration.

The progress of social and industrial justice is outlined in "Principles
of Labor Legislation" (1916), by John R. Commons and John B. Andrews.
The problems of conservation and the history of governmental policy are
set forth by C. R. Van Hise in "The Conservation of Natural Resources in
the United States" (1910).

The "American Year Book" for the years 1910 to 1919 and the "New
International Year Book" for the years 1907 to 1919 are invaluable
sources of accurate and comprehensive information on the current history
of the United States for the period which they cover.

Willis Fletcher Johnson's "America's Foreign Relations", 2 vols. (1915)
is a history of the relations of the United States to the rest of the
world. A shorter account is given in C. R. Fish's "American Diplomacy"
(1915).

But much of the best material for the historical study of the first
decade and a half of the twentieth century is to be found in the pages
of the magazines and periodicals published during those years. "The
Outlook", "The Independent", "The Literary Digest", "Collier's", "The
Review of Reviews", "The World's Work", "Current Opinion", "The Nation",
"The Commoner", La Follette's "Weekly"--all these are sources of great
value. The Outlook is of especial usefulness because of Mr. Roosevelt's
connection with it as Contributing Editor during the years between 1909
and 1914.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Theodore Roosevelt and His Times: A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.