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FEB 21 1920
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
TT THEN Theodore Roosevelt passed away January
^ ^ 6, 1919, he was sixty years and about two
months old. , Nearly forty years of that time
had been spent actively and vigorously in the public
service. He unquestionably was one of the great Ameri-
cans of his time. He won international fame as a states-
man and was known throughout the world for his
unusual versatility in politics, literature and science.
As an author he early attracted attention and his rare
faculty of leadership and achie\'ement in public affairs
impressed itself upon his fellow citizens throughout a
busy career.
Unlike many Americans who have won distinction,
Mr. Roosevelt was not bom in humble circumstances.
His parents were among the well-to-do in New York
city, his native place. His career was all the more won-
derful because in early youth he was far from being
robust. A fervent desire to serve the common people
v/as not inspired by his early environment because his
associations were those of the wealthy and not of the
more humble folk with whom he delighted to mingle and
to serve.
He was bom in New York city October 27, 1858.
On his father's side, whose mother was of Irish descent,
he was also descended from a Dutch immigrant of the
5
Theodore Roosevelt
seventeenth century. His progenitors were nearly all
New Yorkers. Although prominent at all times in the
commercial and social life of the city, there is no record
of Mr. Roosevelt's Dutch progenitors in New York city
having achieved distinction in public office.
Theodore Roosevelt's father was Theodore Roose-
velt, son of Cornelius Van Schaick Roosevelt, and the
family line goes back to medieval times in Dutch history.
His mother was Miss Bullock of Georgia, daughter of
James Dunwoodie Bullock, one of a family whose founder
came to this country from Scotland in the middle of the
seventeenth century. Her great-grandfather was the
first Revolutionary Governor of the State, and her
brother fired the last shot from the Alabama as she
sunk off Cherbourg under the guns of the old Kearsarge.
Governor Roosevelt's early education was received at
Cutler's private school, a famous institution in New
York. He entered Harvard at the age when young men
are supposed to enter upon college life. At Cambridge
he studied hard and took an unceasing interest in philos-
ophy, history and government. The foundation for his
literary career was laid there. He began by writing
for the Harvard Advocate of which he became editor.
Mr. Roosevelt did not spend all his time in his studies.
He entered heartily into all the college sports; he sprinted,
wrestled, sparred and played polo. In his youth he was
sickly and " pigeon-chested," and he therefore regarded
it as one of his first duties to make himself physically
strong.
6
Theodore Roosevelt
"I made my health what it is," he said. "I deter-
mined to be strong and well and did everything to make
myself so. I wrestled and sparred a great deal at col-
lege, and though I never came in first I got more out
of the exercise than those who did, because I enjoyed
and never injured myself. I was very fond of wrestling
and boxing. I think I was a good deal of a wrestler,
and though I never won a championship, yet more than
once I won my trial heats and got into the final heat.
I was captain of my polo team at one time, but since
I left college I have taken most of my exercise in the
'cow country' or hunting game in the mountains."
He especially excelled as a boxer when at Harvard,
and was the champion light-weight boxer in that college,
and was always ready to " put on the gloves " with any
other fellow student.
After his graduation from Harvard, Mr. Roosevelt
made a trip to Europe. This was in 1880. There, not
content with " doing " the continent in the orthodox
way, he roughed it, ascending the Jungfrau and Matter-
horn, tramped through the country districts of Germany
and became tolerably familiar with peasant life.
Upon his return to the United States he resolved,
if possible, to become a member of the Legislature, and
began taking an active part in political work, as a
Republican, in his assembly district, the twenty-first of
New York city. He quickly became a leader, and
finally, in 1881, was nominated for the Assembly by the
Republican party in the twenty-first district and was
elected over his Democratic opponent to the Assembly
of 1882. He put himself at the head of a body of
7
Theodore Roosevelt
assemblymen, Republicans and Democrats, who were
resolved that there should be reformation in some of the
evils from which the government of New York State was
suffering. Bill after bill was offered for this purpose,
some of which received the approval of the Legislature
and some did not. Speaker Patterson named him as
a member of the committee on cities and he rendered
great services to his constituency in that position.
In 1883 Mr. Roosevelt was once more an assembly-
man; Alfred C. Chapin, Democrat, was speaker. Mr.
Roosevelt was placed second on the cities committee
by the Democratic speaker. During this session of the
Legislature, Grover Cleveland, Democrat, was governor.
It was here that Mr. Roosevelt first met Mr. Cleveland.
A vigorous effort was made to secure the passage of
a five-cent fare bill on the elevated railroads of New
York city. The bill passed. To the amazement of
everybody, Governor Cleveland vetoed it. When the
veto was presented in the Assembly, Mr. Roosevelt,
then 24 years old, made this remarkable speech:
" I have to say with shame that when I voted for this
bill, I did not act as I ought to have acted, and as
I generally have acted on the floor of this house, for
the only time that I ever voted here, aside from what
I think to be exactly right, I did that time. I have to
confess that I weakly yielded to a vindictive spirit toward
the infernal thieves who have that railroad in charge,
and to the voice of New York. For the managers of the
elevated railroads I have as little feeling as any man here,
and if it were possible I would be willing to pass a bill
of attainder against the officials of that road. I realize
8
Theodore Roosevelt
that they have done the most incalculable harm to this
community — with their hired newspaper, with their
corruption of the judiciary and with their corruption of
this house. Nevertheless, I think that we ought never
to have passed this bill in the beginning, and that we
ought never to pass it over the veto now, and certainly
not until we have had a fair chance to look at it purely
in the light of reason. I question if the bill is con-
stitutional, and if the bill is constitutional, I think it is,
in any event, breaking the plighted faith of the State.
It isn't a question of doing right to them, for they are
merely common thieves. As to the resolution — a peti-
tion handed by the directors of the company — I would
pay more attention to a petition signed by Barney Arron,
Owney Geoghagan or Billy McGlory than I would pay
to that paper, because I regard these men as a part of
an infinitely dangerous order of men — the wealthy
criminal class."
This speech caused considerable amazement, and
numerous members arose denouncing Mr. Roosevelt's
allusion to corruption in the house.
Some days after this speech Mr. Roosevelt introduced
a resolution annulling the charter of the Manliattan
railroad; but it failed to pass.
The Assembly of 1884 was Republican. Mr. Roose-
velt was again a member; Titus Sheard of Herkimer,
Republican, was the speaker. iVIr. Roosevelt was placed
at the head of the committee on cities, and he at this
time secured the appointment of a committee to investi-
gate the affairs of the government of New York city.
A special committee was appointed, Mr. Roosevelt being
9
Theodore Roosevelt
appointed chairman. One of the results of the investi-
gation was the presentation of a bill taking away from
the aldermen of New York the confirmatory power of
appointments made by the mayor. During a prolonged
and fierce conflict over this bill, Mr. Roosevelt made
many characteristic speeches. In one of them he said:
" Nobody supposes for a moment that the aldermen act
for themselves, and although I would not say it would be
well for the city, it would be no worse for the city if they
did act for themselves, but they are confessedly simply
the tools of men who stand behind them. They have
nothing to do but register the decrees that those in
authority over them choose to issue. Since the beginning
of this session we have seen the consummation of one of
the most disgraceful deals that has ever disgraced even
the board of aldermen. I regret to say four of the
aldermen, nominally of the party to which I belong,
deliberately sold their votes. These four aldermen never
should have the slightest right to take part in the
proceedings of any Republican primary. They have
made themselves Democrats for hire. We complain very
loudly about a poor man who sells his vote for a dollar
or two; but what should we say of a man who sells his
vote for a chairmanship of one committee or for the sake of
two or three places, for a clerkship, for instance? I think
the so-called respectable people of New York have many
of the gravest political sins on their shoulders. They
are responsible for most of our bad government. The
better people of New York are responsible for having
let the rogues have their way."
The report made by Mr. Roosevelt's committee as to
10
Theodore Roosevelt
the condition of affairs in the offices of the county clerk,
the register, the surrogate and the sheriffs offices in
New Yorlv, disclosed evils which led him to introduce
reformatory bills in regard to them all. In three bills
introduced by him it was proposed to make the county
clerk, the register and the sheriff salaried officials and
to turn over their fees to the city of New York. Two of
these bills were passed by the Legislature and signed by
Governor Cleveland, and have since been laws of the
State.
The same year, 1884, the Assembly was asked to
pass a general railroad act, under which it was proposed
to build a street railway in Broadway, New York. It
was opposed by a corporation which wished to gridiron
the city with cable railroads. When Mr. Roosevelt came
to vote upon the bill, he said:
" Everyone who knows anything about the legislation
knows that the presence of certain men who have been
around this chamber for the last few days, for and against
the measure, bodes no good for honest and efficient
legislation." He said, " he stood between the devil and
the deep sea. That it was a case of that he would be
damned if he did and damned if he did not. If he voted
for the bill he would be accused of corrupt motives, and
if he voted against it the same charge would be made."
He asked to be excused from voting, but this being
denied him, he voted against the bill.
In 1884 Mr. Roosevelt also entered national politics.
He advocated the nomination of George F. Edmunds for
president, and was elected one of New York's delegates-
at-large to the Republican national convention of that
11
Theodore Roosevelt
year, leading the delegation. At the convention he was
a notable figure.
Retiring from public life for a time in 1884, Mr.
Roosevelt bought a ranch in western Dakota, near
Medera, on the Little Missouri river. It was not his first
visit to this part of the United States. He went west at
a time when the last of the buffalo were going down before
the " big hunts." The lAinters he passed in the Legis-
lature, and at the beginning of the long summers he
migrated to the "Bad Lands" and shot elk, deer,
buffalo and antelope. He made two hunting trips, one
in 1883, the last big hunt near Butte, when the whites
and Sioux from Standing Rock and Pine Ridge were
doing the Icilling. Mr. Roosevelt started his cattle ranch
in 1884, and from 1884 until he was appointed civil
service commissioner he passed all his summers in the
west and his winters in New York.
" I was never happier in my life," he said afterward.
" My house out there is a long, low house of hewn logs,
which I helped to build myself. It has a broad veranda
and rocking chairs and a big fireplace, and elk skins and
wolf skins scattered about — on the brink of the Little
Missouri, right in a clump of cottonwoods; and less than
three years ago I shot a deer from the veranda."
It was there in the west, where he mingled with the
cowboys and saw nature in all its simplicity, that Mr.
Roosevelt got his inspiration for several of the works
that have since come from his pen. In his book called
" Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," he describes most
interestingly the adventurous life he led as a ranchman
and hunter.
12
Theodore Roosevelt
In 1886 Mr. Roosevelt was nominated by the
Republicans, although only twenty-eight years old, as
their candidate for mayor of New York city. Abram S.
Hewitt was the Democratic nominee and Henry George
was the candidate on the Labor and Independent ticket.
Mr. Hewitt was elected, Mr. George was second in the
race and Mr. Roosevelt third.
In 1889 President Benjamin A. Harrison appointed
Mr. Roosevelt a civil service commissioner, and he
acted in that capacity for six years, from May, 1889, to
May, 1895, which included the administration of President
Harrison and the second one of Grover Cleveland.
During his term the merit system was extended for many
departments and employees of the Federal service, due
largely to the earnestness and enthusiasm of Commissioner
Roosevelt.
Upon his retirement from the civil service com-
mission, Mayor Strong of New York city appointed him
a member of the board of police of New York. In this
office, as in all of the others which he held, he made for
himself a reputation for thoroughness and efficiency.
His aim was to elevate the police department to a higher
standard; to enforce the laws against gambling and to
suppress disreputable resorts.
Governor William McKinley of Ohio was elected
president of the United States in 1898. Mr. Roosevelt
was urged by some of his friends as a man well qualified
to be secretary of the navy, but Mr. McKinley had already
promised the place to John D. Long of Massachusetts,
and finally Mr. Roosevelt was appointed assistant
secretary.
13
Theodore Roosevelt
One of the achievements of Assistant Secretary
Roosevelt was the fitting out of Admiral George Dewey's
squadron of ships just after he had been ordered to
Manila Bay, on the Philadelphia. The great victory of
Dewey over the Spaniards in the spring of 1898 was due
in no small measure to the foresight of this act of the
assistant secretary of the navy.
The beginning of the Spanish War of 1898 found
Mr. Roosevelt still assistant secretary of the navy, but
he resolved to resign his position and enter the United
States Army. Chauncey M. Depew, later referring to
this period in Mr. Roosevelt's life, said: " The wife of
a cabinet officer told me that when Assistant Secretary
Roosevelt announced that he had determined to resign
and raise a regiment for the war, some of the ladies
in the administration circle thought it their duty to
remonstrate with him. They said: 'Mr. Roosevelt
you have six children, the youngest a few months old
and the eldest not yet in the teens. While the country
is full of young men who have no such responsibilities
and are eager to enlist, you have no right to leave the
burden upon your wife of the care, support and bring-
ing up of that family.' Roosevelt's answer was a Roose-
velt answer: ' I have done as much as any one to
bring on this war, because I believed it must come, and
the sooner the better, and now that the war is declared,
I have no right to ask others to do the fighting and stay
at home myself.' "
Mr. Roosevelt raised a regiment of cavalry of rough
riders; instead of heading the regiment himself, he asked
President McKinley to appoint his personal friend,
14
Theodore Roosevelt
Dr. Leonard Wood, a West Point graduate, as colonel,
while he asked for himself the office of lieutenant-colonel.
The regiment was raised at San Antonio, Texas, from
among the mining prospectors, cowboys and hunters of
the southwest. They were the hardy men of the plains,
accustomed to living in the open air and skilled in the
use of the rifle. Roosevelt added to the regiment some
college men who had won laurels in the athletic fields.
The first fight that Colonel Roosevelt and his
exceptional regiment were engaged in was at La Guasimas,
near Santiago, where the first guns for Cuba's freedom
were fired. It was on the afternoon of June 23 when
General WTieeler, who was in command of the troops
ashore, was notified that the enemy was entrenched at
La Guasimas, cutting oflf all connection with Santiago.
At Siboney, which the Rough Riders had reached by
making forced marches at night, it was determined to
make the attack on the following morning. That night
was a restless one for the Rough Riders. At five o'clock
in the morning they made the ascent of the steep ridge
above Siboney, and started toward the rendezvous on
the trail to the west. As they were dismounted and
heavily burdened with blankets, robes, haversacks,
ammunition and carbines, the march under the hot sun
was slow and painful. It was not long before Colonel
Wood of the Rough Riders, returning from a trip down
the trail to meet Captain Capron of the artillery, passed
the word back to Roosevelt to keep silence in the ranks.
A halt was made at a place flanked on one side by a barb-
wire fence and on the other by fields of high grass, under-
growth and tangled trees, which were almost impenetrable.
15
Theodore Roosevelt
After reconnoitering, Colonel Wood returned and
began deploying his troops out at either side of the trail.
Capron was sent on ahead and the other troops stationed
to good advantage. They took their position none too
soon, for the enemy began firing immediately. The
Rough Riders fought their way through the bushes in the
direction from which the volleys came; it was a tremendous
task, for the thicket was very dense. They soon broke
through into a little open space and the men fell on one
knee and began firing rapidly into the space where they
supposed the Spaniards were concealed. The enemy's
fire was hot and not more than fifty to eighty yards away.
The Rough Riders were forced to lie flat in the grass and
in the hottest of the fight Colonel Roosevelt ran up and
lay down beside Captain Llewylan of Troop G, and
eagerly talked with him. Roosevelt pointed out that it
was impossible to go any further on accoimt of the
underwood of wild grapevines that screened the Spaniards.
He advised that the men cross the trail and move to
the left. Meanwhile the firing of the enemy was fast
and accurate, for in three minutes' time nine men were
disabled. The Riders went slowly to the left, and as the
aim of the enemy was low they were compelled to move
on their knees and crawl on their stomachs. After an
hour's fighting the American line had reached a more
open country. Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt moved his
men with the intention of taking an old distiller>^ occupied
by the enemy and a short distance from them. The
advance was made by short rushes, the men firing as
they ran. Roosevelt and his men showed the stuff they
were made of during this manoeuvre. Bullets whizzed
16
Theodore Roosevelt
close to them, so close in several instances that they left
a scar on the soldier's skin. One bullet struck a tree
next to Colonel Roosevelt, scattered and filled his eyes
and ears with the tiny splinters. Finally the firing from
the enemy became less fierce, and Roosevelt, who had
picked up a carbine which he fired occasionally to give
directions to the others, decided to make a charge. The
men broke out of the bushes behind the trees, cheering
wildly, and were met by volley after volley from the
enemy, but they rushed on, cheering. This extra-
ordinary exhibition of courage so dismayed the Spaniards
that they hurriedly retreated upon Santiago. In all,
there were 534 Rough Riders, and these men succeeded
in dispersing four times their own number of the enemy
entrenched safely behind rifle pits and bushes. This
fight of the Rough Riders will go down in history as
being one of the most daring exhibitions of bravery that
is recorded.
The taking of San Juan Hill and the part played in
that memorable engagement by the Rough Riders will
live in history long after those who participated in it
have gone to their final resting-place.
After leaving La Guasimas, Colonel Roosevelt said
in his speech to his fellow citizens at Oyster Bay, on
returning from Cuba, " We moved up to Santiago, and
camped on a hillside with a ridge in front of us. At dawn
our artillery got on that ridge and opened fire. That
was fine music to us, but pretty soon the Spaniards
began to reply, and instead of dislodging our artillery
they shot over it, and the shrapnel came at us. Of
course, they didn't mean to hit us, because they couldn't
17
Theodore Roosevelt
see us, but that was like the Spaniards. Well, while
Generals Lawton and Chaffee were pounding away at
El Caney we were ordered to take the blockhouses on
the hills. We went through the jungle in a hurry, forded
the river and were then halted for an hour under heavy
fire. I see by the papers that there has been some talk
as to whether we took San Juan Hill or not. I don't
know whether we did. We didn't stop to ask the name
of the hill — we just took it.
" The most trying part of it all was that wait, though,
for the men were being shot down like sheep. I recollect
giving an order to an orderly. He rose and saluted, then
fell dead across my knees. I saw Captain Buck O'Neill
walking up and down in front of his men. One of them
said: * Lie down, Captain; you'll be hit.' He laughed
and said: * The Spanish bullet has not been made that
can kill me.' The next minute he fell dead, a bullet
hole through the head. He was a man of absolute
courage, and one of the finest soldiers and men I ever
have known.
" We finally got our orders to go ahead, and then
began my crowded hour of glorious life, an hour I wouldn't
exchange for all the rest of my life. It is pleasant to
remember how the men behaved that day. I saw
thirteen wounded men refuse to go to the rear, and
I recall a new Mexican cow-puncher who was shot in the
side, and whom I ordered to the hospital myself. Twenty
minutes later he was at the front rank fighting again.
After the fight he went to the hospital and had his wound
dressed. While lying on a cot he heard the surgeon say
that he was to be shipped home. That night he jumped
18
Theodore Roosevelt
out of the hospital window and came back to camp.
He fought with the regiment from then on."
Upon his return to the United States and while
still in camp with his regiment at Montauk Pc^int, Long
Island, Mr. Roosevelt was nominated for governor of
New York State. He was nominated at the Republican
State convention and elected over Judge Augustus Van
Wyck the Democratic candidate by a plurality of 17,794.
While serving his second year as governor, Mr.
Roosevelt was nominated, against his will, for vice-
president with President McKinley, at the Philadelphia
convention. It has always been stated by some of his
friends that this nomination was intended to " shelve "
him politically. The following year, 1901, President
McKinley was assassinated at the Pan-American expo-
sition, Buffalo, and Mr. Roosevelt succeeded to the
presidency. At the conclusion of that term, 1904, he
was nominated and elected president by the largest
majority every given to a candidate in any presidential
election.
Largely through his influence William H. Taft was
nominated and elected to succeed him in 1908. Mr.
Roosevelt, on account of serious difficulties with Presi-
dent Taft refused to support him for renomination and
election. After failing to receive the Republican nomi-
nation himself at the Chicago convention in 1912, he
was nominated for the office by the Progressive conven-
tion. This split in the Republican party resulted in the
election of Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate.
In 1916 Roosevelt was again a candidate for presi-
dent in the Republican convention. When Charles E.
19
Theodore Roosevelt
Hughes was made the nominee he declined to be a can-
didate on the Progressive ticket and supported Mr.
Hughes.
Charles Willis Thompson of the editorial staff of the
New York Tmes and for many years a correspondent
for New York city dailies at Washington, was an inti-
mate friend of Colonel Roosevelt. Few newspapermen
have followed Mr. Roosevelt's career so closely as Mr.
Thompson. From time to time he has written of inter-
esting incidents which came to his knowledge of the
Colonel's sayings and doings. Since his death, Mr.
Thompson has related some of these incidents in the
Times. One of them he writes as follows:
" It was always strange to me to see how the solemn
profundities and the unco' guid among our population
used to regard this trait of his as something discreditable
to him. He received visits from John L. Sullivan at the
White House ! He entertained Booker Washington there !
He was a friend of boxers and actors! With what a sneer
would they pronounce the words, 'Jack Abemathy, the
wolf-killer,' and * Bill Sewall, a guide ' in listing Roose-
velt's friends. Mean minds, imagining that a man would
not do anything except for advantage, cast about for
Roosevelt's motive. It must be that he had a motive;
by which they meant a selfish one. They hit on it —
it was spectacular drama to impress the crowd, or
demagogic ostensible democracy to get votes. It was not
possible to suppose that he actually liked these boxers
and wolf-killers and reporters and wanted to be with them.
" They would have been still more scandalized if they
had heard what he said to me, and to other people, too,
20
Theodore Roosevelt
I suppose, at a time when a steady stream of corpora-
tion magnates was flowing in at the Wliite House doors:
" ' It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a
man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a
man worth hearing; but as a rule they don't know any-
thing outside of their own business. You would be
astonished to know how small their range is and how
little they can talk about what an intelligent person
wants to hear.' "
In his literary work Mr. Roosevelt was as varied
as in his political activities. While in the Legislature
and a young man of only twenty-four, he wrote The
Naval War of 1812 which told the story of Commodore
Macdonough's victory on Lake Champlain and of the
victory of Commodore Perry on Lake Erie.
After he had spent several years in the West on a
ranch, he wrote Hunting Trips of a Ranchman which
appeared in 1885 and The Wilderness Hunter in 1893.
His historical work in 1896, under the title of The
Winning of the West, is an extensive description of the
development of that section of the United States west
of the Mississippi river. He was an enthusiastic lover
of the great West. Its origin and growth were studied
by him in every detail and he had become intimate with
its spirit by living in it and going through its pioneer
experiences.
American Ideals, in which Mr. Roosevelt discussed
social and political problems, appeared in 1904 — the
year that he was nominated and elected president of
the United States. Other works of his on widely dif-
ferent topics have appeared from time to time. His
21
Theodore Roosevelt
autobiography written several years before his death is
a voluminous and interesting contribution to American
history since it deals with a period of great events through
which the nation passed. He was a prolific contributor
also to magazines, newspapers and other periodicals,
especially since he retired from the presidency in 1909.
Mr. Roosevelt was twice married. In 1881 he mar-
ried Miss Alice Lee of Boston. She died in 1884, leaving
an infant daughter, Alice Lee, now the wife of Represen-
tative Nicholas Longworth of Ohio.
In 1886 Colonel Roosevelt married Edith Carow of
New York, by whom he had five children. They are
Theodore, Kermit, Ethel, Archibald B. and Quentin.
The latter was killed in the World War in July, 1918,
when he was over the German lines in a combat air-
plane. All of the Colonel's sons were in that war.
For more than thirty years Mr. Roosevelt had his
home at Oyster Bay, Long Island. It is known as
Sagamore Hill which commands a view of Oyster Bay
on Long Island Sound.
22
PROCEEDINGS OF THE LEGISLATURE
ON THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF
THE DEATH OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
January 8, 1919
PROCLAMATION
STATE OF NEW YORK
Executive Chamber
Albany, January 6, 1919
THEODORE ROOSEVELT, a distinguished citizen of this State
and known throughout the world, is dead.
Formerly a Governor of New York State, later Vice-President
and then President of the nation, we should unite in appropriate marks
of respect to the memory of one who for so many years was a leading
figure in all things which had to do with the welfare of the nation.
It is proper that official recognition of the loss of one of our native
sons of so much prominence be fittingly expressed in a manner due to
the character and services of the deceased.
NOW, THEREFORE I, Alfred E. Smith, Governor of the State
of New York, do hereby order the flag placed at half mast on all public
buildings of the State until after the final obsequies.
Given under my hand and the Privy
Seal of the State at the Capitol in
the City of Albany this sixth day
[l.S.1 of January in the year of our
Lord one thousand nine hundred
and nineteen.
(Signed)
^^..^^z//^-
By the Governor;
George R. V.-\n Namee,
Secrelarv to the Governor.
25
PROCEEDINGS IN THE SENATE
January 8, 1919
At the session of the Senate, January 8. 1919,
Lieut.-Gov. Harry C. Walker presiding, a resolution was
adopted in memory of Theodore Roosevelt. Several of
the Senators delivered brief addresses in memory of the
deceased.
Senator J. Henry Walters of Syracuse, President
pro tem, spoke as follows:
This nation has suffered irreparable loss. In the
death of Theodore Roosevelt we have lost a citizen
who personified the highest type of Americanism. I feel
that our loss is all the greater at this time because now
that we are entering the peace period his advice and
counsel would have been so helpful to the nation and to
its people. His name is reverently upon the lips of every
citizen of this country.
Mr. President, I offer the following resolution, and
move its adoption:
Welding into one dynamic personality the rare qualities of aristocracy
of both education and training with an all-pervading democracy of both
thought and action, uniting the ripe judgment of the scholar and philoso-
pher with the keen foresight of the visionary; firm and unyielding to
the point of hardness, yet cloaking refusal and rebuke with such evident
and overwhelming love for his fellows that they made friends instead of
enemies; of indomitable will, unconquerable courage and a power of
mental and physical endurance that yielded only to his Maker's demand,
Theodore Roosevelt stands preeminently the most lovable, the most
versatile, the greatest representative of a great and versatile people.
In his death America has lost a great statesman, a soldier who could
either command or obey, an unassuming philanthropist, an undaunted
27
Theodore Roosevelt
explorer; a beloved leader and wise counsellor and withal an unadulterated
American — a man among men.
Resolved, That when the Senate adjourn, it do so out of profound
respect for the memory of Theodore Roosevelt.
Senator Davenport : At the close of the day when
there has been laid to rest one of the greatest of the
sons of men, without sound of music or word of eulogy,
it is no time for ^eech. It is time to think and be still.
America is awed into silence. The nation feels, with
Rudyard Kipling, as if Bimyan's Greatheart had died
in the midst of his pilgrimage. Today there has been
laid to rest a great prophet of the whole of the American
people. Mr. President, I second the adjournment
resolution.
Senator Downing: Almost within the boundaries
of his native city, on a quiet hilltop on the shore of
Long Island, they laid all that was mortal of Theodore
Roosevelt to rest this afternoon, and we who come from
his native city do not mourn so much over his death
as we rejoice in his life, in its example, in its fruitfulness,
and all that it has been and all that it promises to be
for America and Americans. His soul is now with God,
yet the influence of his mortal life will long remain with
us to be an inspiration to real Americans until time
itself shall be no more. I voice the sorrow at his passing
that all Americans feel at this hour, and particularly all
New Yorkers. He honored his State, his country, and
humanity by his service in all capacities, national or
personal, and in his great mind. We mourn his passing
for what he did and for what he is now for us, and for
28
Theodore Roosevelt
what he will be to those who shall come after us. I
can think of no better words to say of him than those
said by the poet on the occasion of his death :
With something of the savant and the sage.
He was, when all is said and sung, a man;
The flower imperishable of this valiant age,
A True American.
Senator Sage: Mr. President, while I feel with the
first speaker that words are not the thing on this day, I feel
that I wish to say a very few of them, because I knew
Theodore Roosevelt when he first came to Albany and
because I have known him ever since. In all that time
which, when we look back on it, was a time when men
were becoming soft, Theodore Roosevelt was the apostle
of manliness. At a time like today, when, after this
great war, a great many people, not only abroad but in
this land, are talking of internationalism, are talking
against what I regard as the deepest passion in human
life — loyalty to one's native land — Theodore Roosevelt
stands like a shining light to show what loyalty and
patriotism mean and what they mean to humanity.
Manliness, loyalty and Americanism! There is nothing
more to say. There is nothing more that I could say in
praise. I am only paying a tribute.
Senator Foley: Those of us who had the sad duty
of attending the simple ceremonies at Oyster Bay today
were impressed with one great fact, and that was, the
contrast in Roosevelt's life and death. The utter sim-
plicity of the ceremonies in that small church — the
contrast with the pomp of emperors and kings that are
29
Theodore Roosevelt
passing, and the passing of the simple American citizen,
the bier decorated with the cavalry flag of the Rough
Riders, the body of the former president of the United
States was carried out in a simple, ordinary manner.
Now I said that Mr. Roosevelt's life was one of fierce
activity compared with the simplicity of his death, the
manner of his death. He answered to the "one clear
call " that Tennyson spoke about. His fierce activities
fighting his way up as a man in public life, from mem-
bership in the chamber on the other side of this build-
ing to the executive chamber on the second floor, up to
the highest office within the gift of the American peo-
ple — all carry a lesson to the youth of America. The
wonderful understanding he had of the American spirit,
the wonderful doctrines he expressed of humanitarianism
in the social side and the social needs of our people,
his sweeping aside of the smaller things in accomplishing
great results — as in the building of our great canal — all
were typical of this great man. There can be no par-
ties, no factions, in rendering our tribute to Mr. Roosevelt.
I therefore join in seconding this resolution.
The President: All in favor of the adoption of
the resolution as read please arise. (Carried.)
The Senate then adjourned out of respect to the
memory of Mr. Roosevelt.
30
PROCEEDINGS IN THE ASSEMBLY
January 8, 1919
In the Assembly, Speaker Thaddeus C. Sweet pre-
siding, speeches were made by Assemblyman Simon L.
Adler of Rochester, majority leader, by Assemblyman
Charles D. Donohue of New York city, minority leader,
and by other members, in memory of Mr. Roosevelt.
Mr. Adler spoke as follows:
Mr. Speaker, there was laid to rest this afternoon,
in the burying ground near the little village where he
made his home, a great American. Theodore Roosevelt
was typical of the spirit of America in its energy, in its
desire for progress and in its effort for constant improve-
ment. I will not attempt what has been attempted by
much abler persons than I, and will be attempted for
many years to come, to in any way enumerate those
qualities which have made him great and those qualities
which have made him practically an idol of the Amer-
ican people. I will refer only to one achievement of his,
or rather one type of achievement, which is particularly
proper in these halls, and that is the effort which he
made and the accomplishment which has come from it
in the effort to arouse the spirit of the American people
in the matter of political morality. I suppose that he
has done more than any other man in this respect in
the work of arousing the people to a sense of their politi-
cal responsibility, to a sense of the necessity of taking a
personal part in their government and in the choice of
31
Theodore Roosevelt
those who are to govern them. If he had done no more
than this, he would have made a place for himself in the
history of the country and in the hearts of the people.
I think it would not be inappropriate in this House
where he began his political career nearly forty years ago
to speak of his connection with this body. We are for-
tunate in having in his own words his impressions of the
Legislature of his day, an entirely different Legislature,
not so much in its makeup, but in its character, from
the Legislature we have nov/. As I have suggested,
political ideals have not changed. Methods and ideals
have improved since his day, and it was his work here
which started the improvement of which I speak. I have
found in the Century Magazine printed in April, 1885, an
article written by Mr. Roosevelt very shortly after the
conclusion of his three years' service in this House. This
article is entitled, " Phases of State Legislation," and it
goes with considerable detail into his study of conditions
in the Legislature of his time. I will read only a few
extracts from this article which I think will be interest-
ing to us now:
" Few persons realize the magnitude of the interests affected by
State legislation in New York. It is no mere figure of speech to call
New York the Empire State; and most of the laws directly and immediately
affecting the interests of its citizens are passed at Albany, and not at
Washington. In fact, there is at Albany a little Home Rule Parliament
which presides over the destines of a commonwealth more populous
than any one of two-thirds of the kingdoms of Europe, and one which,
in point of wealth, material prosperity, variety of interests, extent of
territory, and capacity for expansion, can fairly be said to rank next
to the powers of the first class.
This little parliament composed of one hundred and twenty-eight
members in the Assembly and thirty-two in the Senate is, in the fullest
32
Theodore Roosevelt
sense of the term, a rcpresenlalive body; there is hardly one of the many
and widely diversified interests of the State that has not a mouthpiece
at Albany, and hardly a single class of its citizens — not even excepting,
I regret to say, the criminal class — which lacks its representative among
the legislators. In the three Legislatures of which I have been a member,
I have sat with bankers and bricklayers, with merchants and mechanics,
witli lawyers, farmers, day laborers, saloon keepers, clergymen and prize
fighters. Among my colleagues there were many very good men; there
was a still more numerous class of men who were neither very good nor
very bad, but went one way or the other, according to the strength of the
various conflicting influences acting around, behind and upon them;
and finally, there v.'ere many very bad men. Still, the New York Legis-
lature, taken as a whole, is by no means as bad a body as we would be
led to believe if our judgment was based purely on what we read in the
great metropolitan papers; for the custom of the latter is to portray things
as either very much better or very much worse than they are. Where
a nimiber of men, many of them poor, some of them unscrupulous, and
others elected by constituents too ignorant to hold them to a proper
accountability for their actions, are put into a position of great temporary
power, where they are called to take action upon questions affecting
the welfare of large corporations and wealthy private individuals, the
chances of corruption are always great, and that there is much viciousness
and political dishonesty, much moral cowardice, and a good deal of
actual bribe taking in Albany, no one who has had any practical experience
of legislation can doubt; but, at the sa:ne time, I think that the good
members always outnumber the bad, and that there is never any doubt
as to the result when a naked question of right or wrong can be placed
clearly and in its true light before the Legislature. The trouble is that
on many questions the Legislature never does have the right and wrong
clearly shown it. Either some bold clever parliamentary tactician snaps
the measure through before the members are aware of its nature, or
else the obnoxious features are so combined with good ones as to procure
the support of a certain proportion of that large class of men whose
intentions are excellent, but whose intellects are foggy."
I will read another extract in a very much lighter
vein. After giving a number of experiences with mem-
bers of the Legislature, and examples of humor which
33
Theodore Roosevelt
occurred and for which the members were responsible,
he inserts this paragraph :
" After all, outsiders furnish quite as much fun as the legislators
themselves. The number of men who persist in writing one letters of
praise, abuse and advice on every conceivable subject is appalling; and the
writers are of every grade, from the lunatic and the criminal up. The
most difficult to deal with are the men with hobbies. There is the
Protestant fool, who thinks that our liberties are menaced by the
machinations of the Church of Rome; and his companion idiot, who
wants legislation against all secret societies, especially the Masons. Then
there are the believers in " isms " of which the women suffragists stand
in the first rank. (Now, to the horror of my relatives, I have always
been a believer in woman's rights, but I must confess I have never seen
such a hopelessly impracticable set of persons as the women suffragists
who came to Albany to get legislation.) They simply would not draw
up their measures in proper form; when I pointed out to one of them
that their proposed bill was dra.vn up in direct defiance of certain of the
sections of the Constitution of the State, he blandly replied that he did
not care at all for that, because the measure had been drawn up so as to
be in accord with the Constitution of Heaven. There was no answer
to this beyond the very obvious one that Albany was in no way akin
to Heaven."
He concludes his article with this paragraph:
" In concluding I would say that while there is so much evil at
Albany, and so much reason for our exerting ourselves to bring about
a better state of things, yet there is no cause for being disheartened or
for thinking that it is hopeless to expect improvement. On the contrary',
the standard of legislative morals is certainly higher than it was fifteen years
ago or twenty-five years ago, and, judging by appearances, it seems likely
that it will continue slowly and by fits and starts to improve in the future;
keeping pace exactly with the gradual awakening of the popular mind
to the necessity of having honest and intelligent representatives in the
State Legislature."
Mr. Adler offered for the consideration of the
house a resolution, in the words following:
34
Theodore Roosevelt
Welding into one dynamic personality the rare qualities of aristocracy
of birth, education and training with an all-per\'ading democracy of both
thought and action, uniting the ripe judgment of the scholar and phi-
losopher with the keen foresight of the visionary; firm and unyielding to
the point of hardness yet cloaking refusal and rebuke with such evident
and overwhelming love for his fellows that they made friends instead of
enemies; of indomitable will, unconquerable courage and a power of mental
and physical endurance that jaelded only to his Maker's demand,
Theodore Roosevelt stands preeminently the most lovable, the most
versatile, the greatest representative of a great and versatile people.
In his death America has lost a great statesman, a soldier who could
either command or obey, an imassuming philanthropist, an undaunted
explorer, a beloved leader and wise counsellor and withal an unadultered
American — • a man among men.
Resolved, That this House do now adjourn in respect to the memory
of Theodore Roosevelt.
Mr. C. D. Donohue: Appreciating that whatever
is said this evening will add neither lustre nor glory
nor honor to that great American who has found his
final resting-place today, nevertheless, I feel that it is
eminently proper this body should take action upon the
demise of one who had not only the respect, the confi-
dence, the esteem of all, but was loved by every one
who called himself an American. Theodore Roosevelt
was a statesman and a publicist. For over seven years
he served as chief executive of the United States, as
\-ice-president of the United States and likewise in the
exalted office of governor of the State of New York.
He typified in himself the ideal American. He served
in this body and his career while a member of this Legis-
lature presaged his usefulness in the future. His vigor
and his manhood were exemplified on many occasions in
his subsequent career, but above and beyond all, the
35
Theodore Roosevelt
one thing to my mind that I feel has ingratiated him
in the hearts of all Americans was his true ideal of
Americanism, his insistence that the rights of Americans
must be maintained at all times. For this, if nothing
else, America owes him an immense debt of gratitude.
The opposition his strong convictions and earnestness
created were captured by his courage and disarmed by
his honesty. He was a man of gi'eat force, a man of
religion. Not only was he loved by every true Amer-
ican, but there was a warm spot for him in the hearts
of the peoples of all the world. No man in modern
public life was connected with so many and different
important events. There was no office he ever occupied
which he did not adorn. His career is closed, but it is
closed with the respect and the admiration of every
American. His loss is a personal loss which I know
every one in this chamber feels and which will be felt
by all of our citizens.
Mr. Kennedy: I do not think it would be fair for
me to miss this opportunity to say that organized labor
throughout this nation has lost a great friend. Back in
the early nineties, v/hen the coal barons of this country
tried to have their way, the great man that we speak
of tonight was perhaps the first president of the United
States to raise his hand in defense of organized labor,
and I should not want to miss this opportunity to let
this body know, to let the people of our nation know,
that organized labor has lost a true friend.
Mr. Louis M. Martin: I hesitate about saying a
word in seconding the resolution offered by the leader
Theodore Roosevelt
of the majority, but I feel, perhaps, that I should do so.
Nineteen years seems to be quite a span in human life.
Still, looking back, nineteen years seems but a short
time. Tliree of us are here in this body tonight who
nineteen years ago were members. In those days, as
Mr. Adler has said, political conditions were somewhat
changed and somewhat different than at the present
time. Political organizations, sir, were much stronger
in their power and influence. Circumstances so changed
conditions in one of the party organizations that a young
man forty-two years of age, without any political experi-
ence except three years m this House, purely on his
military' record, was nominated, elected and inaugurated
governor of this State. He faced two powerful organiza-
tions of political affiliations. Those men here tonight
who were members then, Mr. Miller of Erie and Mr.
Witter of Tioga, can recall the various remarks that
went about this chamber and the Senate — what was
the boy governor going to do? Some suggested that it
would prove a disastrous failure, the administration con-
ducted by a military colonel of forty-two years of experi-
ence. We assembled here, as we assembled tonight, and
listened to his first message. It convinced us, Mr. Speaker,
as his actions during that year and the nexi; convinced
us, that we had at the helm of this State in the executive
chamber a man whose grasp of the public affairs of this
State, whose ideas of proper government, whose bent
and trend was forever towards what was right, and who
was so great that instead of dismembering the party
organization, sir, he built up party organization and left
it stronger and better because he occupied the place
37
Theodore Roosevelt
that he did. Such a man in our State government
should never be forgotten, and we men who look back
on those years that it was our privilege to be associated
with him here look back upon them as the brightest two
years in our lives. If any one thing can be cited as an
earmark of this man's life, it was the bill that was put
before this House imder his direction and special message
by which $600,000,000 of property in this State that had
never before paid a dollar's worth of taxes was attached
to the assessment-rolls of this State and continues imtil
the present time to bear its just burden of the expense
of government. Those of us here tonight who were here
at that time know what he did for the State during the
strenuous days that were used in passing this most
beneficial measure. It was one of the things that after-
wards made him vice-president and then the president
of this great country. After he retired there were those
of us who differed from this man, but the incident, thanlc
Heaven, has been closed long ago before we come here
to do honor to his memory. A great man has left us
and the nations and the rulers of the world send their
condolences to his bereaved family, but we in this State,
sir, have sustained a personal loss. Long after the three
of us Vv^ho are trying to say a word in his memory have
been forgotten, the great imprint that his magnificent
character has left upon this State will continue to act
as a guide for good government for future men to follow.
The Speaker : We have met under the shadow of
a great national sorrow. Words seem too weak to express
that which we all feel. As it has been said, Theodore
Theodore Roosevelt
Roosevelt began his political career in this chamber. He
closed it as the first citizen of the world, known and
respected in every nation on earth. As a citizen, hus-
band and father, legislator, soldier, governor, president
of the United States, and as a man, he met every obliga-
tion with a stout heart and fearless energy. The world
loses a wonderful character, but history gains a subject
which will live as long as men record and read the deeds
of our great men. His life was an inspiration to every
man who has faith in his country. By word and deed
he proved his loyalty. WTien the clouds of the World
War were gathering, he constantly urged the necessity
of preparedness, and he stood ready at all times to fight
for the country he loved, with his hands and his brain.
The sacrifices which he has been called upon to suffer
and which tested his heart and strength called for hero-
ism, but he never flinched in his devotion to his highest
ideals. American history will be richer because of his
services to his country. He loved nature, he loved his
home and made it to himself the happiest place on earth.
He always had faith in his fellowmen and led them
aright. He could differ with his people and still remain
their friend. In any test that can be applied he was
100 per cent American. There never was a greater need
of deeper national thinking than today. We shall miss
him and his counsels at every turn we make. In his
last public statement read last Sunday night in New-
York he said:
"There must be no sagging back in the fight for Americanism. If an
immigrant comes here he shall be treated on an equality with everyone
else regardless of his creed or birthplace or origin. This is predicated
39
Theodore Roosevelt
upon a man being in very fact an American and nothing but an American.
There cannot be divided allegiance at all. We have room in this countrj'
for but one flag ^ the American flag; we have room for but one language
— the English language; we have room for but one soul loyalty and that
is loyalty to the American people."
Today we have laid him away to sleep with the
immortals of the ages with the flag of his country under
which he served flying the signal of sorrow all around the
world. His life and his work shall inspire us now with
deeper faith in our institutions and a deeper determina-
tion to live and work for the best country in the world.
Theodore Roosevelt will always live in the history of
the nation he loved and served and as the years go by
his memory will grow dearer to all true Americans. His
last words were, " Please turn out the light." Shall we
then say that his Heavenly Father heard these words
and turned out the light of his life forever to face the
wonders of eternity?
Mr. Speaker put the question whether the House
would agree to said resolution and it was determined in
the affirmative by a unanimous rising vote, and the
House adjourned until Thursday, January 9th, at 11
o'clock A. M.
40
ROOSEVELT MEMORIAL DAY
PROCLAMATION
STATE OF NEW YORK
ExECUTU^ Chamber
Albany. /«)n((7Vv 13. 1919
WHEREAS, There is a sentiment throughout the country that
appropriate memorial exercises in honor of the late Colonel
Theodore R(X)sevelt be held in the near future; and
WHEREAS. The Congress of the United States has appointed
February ninth as a day for memorial services on the part of the National
Government, and a movement has been inaugurated in many States
to hold memorial exercises on the same date to honor the memory of one
of our great American statesmen;
NOW. THEREFORE. I, Alfred E. Smith. Governor of the State of
New York, do hereby proclaim Sunday. February ninth, as Roosevelt
Memorial Day in the State of New York, in order that our people may do
honor to one who was Governor of this State and President of the United
States; and I request that such memorial exercises be held by the Legis-
lature ot the State of New York, and by the people and organizations
throughout the State generally.
Given under my hand and the Privy
Seal of the State at the Capitol in
the City of Albany this thirteenth
[L.S.I day of January in the year of om-
Lord one thousand nine hundred
and nineteen.
(Signed )
^/j'^M^u^^^'
By the Governor:
George R. Van Namee,
Secrelary to the Governor
43
CONCURRENT RESOLUTION
In Assembly
January 29, 1919
The following resolution was offered by Franklin
A. Coles, Member of Assembly from the Second District
of Nassau County.
Whereas, In the death of Theodore Roosevelt the State and nation
have lost an ideal American; and
Whereas, He began his pohtical life as a member of the Assembly
of the State of New York and it is fitting that some aclvnowledgment
of his services to his country and State be made by the Legislature.
Resolved (if the Senate concur). That on February ninth, nineteen
h'ondred and nineteen, a memorial service be held in commemoration
of his death.
Resolved. That a committee consisting of three Senators, appointed
by the temporary president of the Senate, and three members of the
Assembly, appointed by the Speal;er of the Assembly, be ordered to
arrange for such memorial service.
Adopted.
Pursuant to above resolution the following committee
was appointed to arrange for the memorial service:
For Senate: George F. Thompson, George T. Burling
and Bernard Downing.
For Assembly: Franklin A. Coles, Louis M. Martin
and Peter A. McArdle.
45
MEMORIAL SERVICES
IN HONOR OF
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Capitol, Assembly Chamber, Albany, New York
Sunday, February Ninth
Nineteen Hundred Nineteen
MEMORIAL SERVICES
Assembly Chamber
Albany, February 9. 1919
Honorable Louis M. Martin, presiding:
The assemblage will please come to order. Invoca-
tion by the Rev. C. H. French of Albany.
Invocation by Rev. C. H. French,
Pastor Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, Albany
Let us all look to God for His blessing.
Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we ask Thee
to grant us Thy blessing as we have met together in
this memorial service. We rejoice that we may always
count upon Thy favor and upon Thy blessed presence
when we would be met together to consider matters
concerning the great affairs of time and eternity.
We pray that tonight Thou wilt abimdantly bless
us as our minds go out over the past, over the way in
which Thou hast raised up men to lead the affairs of
this great nation and people.
We thank Thee, our Heavenly Father, that amid
all the uncertainties of life that we may count upon
Thee, upon the everlasting arms that are beneath us
and upon the infinite hand that is guiding and shaping
the affairs of humanity.
We thank Thee, O God, that Thou hast revealed
Thyself unto us as the God of righteousness and tiaith
and life; that through the world and through Thy word
19
Theodore Roosevelt
and through Thy Divine Son, Thou hast made Thy-
self known unto us as our Father.
Tonight, we do thank Thee, O God, for the way
in which our Hves have been guided; we thank Thee for
the rich heritage that is ours; we thank Thee for the
splendid company of men who in days past have been
inspired by Thee to lead Thy people.
Especially, we would pray for him whom we are
met tonight to honor. We thank Thee, O God, for his
rich heritage, for his natural endowments. We thank
Thee for the earnest and the fruitful use that he made
of the talents that were committed to his care. We
thank Thee for his passionate devotion to the welfare
of this nation. We thank Thee, O God, for his manli-
ness, for his hatred of all shams and hypocrisies. We
thank Thee for the splendid ideals that he has set before
the manhood of this nation.
Wilt Thou so guide us in this service; wilt Thou
so use Thy servants who shall interpret unto us the
life of Theodore Roosevelt, that we may with one accord
more perfectly dedicate ourselves to whole-hearted ser-
vice of the nation and of all humanity.
We beseech Thee, O God, that Thou wilt look with
loving favor upon the president of the United States,
upon the governor of this State, and upon all those who
are in positions of influence and authority and power in
our land and in all the lands of the earth. Wilt Thou
in Thy wisdom and in Thy love so move upon their
hearts and minds that they may act and speak and will
so that light and order, truth and justice, may be main-
tained in all the world.
50
Theodore Roosevelt
So teach us, O God, to number our days that we
may apply our hearts unto wisdom, and in Thine own
time, O God, bring us home unto Thyself to receive the
reward of those who have labored faithfully in Tliine
earthly vineyard.
Through Christ Jesus, our Lord, Amen.
The Chairman, Honorable Louis M. Martin:
This magnificent outpouring of the citizens of the State
but illustrates the affection and the esteem the people
of this country had for America's first citizen.
Those of us whose privilege it was to serve in this
House when he was the governor of the State look back
upon those days as cherished days.
On behalf of the committee in charge, expression of
thanks is made for this outpouring of citizenship.
The chair will deviate from the usual expressions of
praise or of a laudatory nature in the introduction of the
distinguished gentlemen who have so kindly consented
to come here tonight and address us. So closely identi-
fied have they been with the civic and educational his-
tory of this State that laudatory words of introduction
from the chair will be entirely inappropriate.
First, will be a selection by the quartet.
Selection — "Lead, Kindly Light," by the quartet.
lead, kindly LIGHT!
Lead, kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom.
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home;
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet, I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
51
Theodore Roosevelt
I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou
Shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path; but now
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears.
Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!
So long Thy power has blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone.
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since and lost awhile!
The Chairman: Address by the Honorable Joseph
A. Lawson of the city of Albany.
Address by Honorable Joseph A. Lawson
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: In look-
ing over this wonderful concourse of men and women
of the State of New York, one must be deeply sensible
of the honor conferred upon him by the committee of
the two Houses of this great Legislature in being selected
to pay a sUght tribute at this time to the memory of
Theodore Roosevelt. I am not here to serve funeral-
baked meats, and I do not think that he would have it so.
As I am conscious of the fact that this is a gather-
ing to perpetuate and keep green his memory, I feel that
the personality of the man, and his life and work, should
lead one to view his going " over the top " with cheer-
fulness, even as he lived ; to view his taking-away with
hope and not with despair; to gaze upon the empty
chair with the moist eye of affection and warm-hearted
recollection.
52
Theodore Roosevelt
I want to dissipate, perhaps, an erroneous impres-
sion that has been circulated with regard to my personal
intimacy with Theodore Roosevelt. It was not great;
it was limited, but I came in contact with him at an
early period of his career.
In 1882, the men of Columbia university who were
being inducted into the mysteries of the legal profession
received their education in the old, now obsolete, build-
ing on Great Jones street, at the comer of Lafayette
place. The class was large, over four hundred in num-
ber, divided into sections, one portion receiving instruc-
tion in the morning, another in the afternoon. If you
didn't happen to belong to the morning section, you
never saw the men in that division of the class and
\ace versa with regard to the afternoon section. But
among my classmates was Theodore Roosevelt, and I
mind his passing to and from the lecture room, and the
casual acquaintance. But there are circumstances asso-
ciated with my pleasant acquaintance with him that
stand out with marked clearness in my recollection
because it afforded me both amusement and chagrin,
and illustrated a characteristic of Mr. Roosevelt that I
think all of those who knew him well appreciated.
During the course of the studies we were both pur-
suing, he found that broader field in which he labored
so assiduously. He came to the conclusion that the dry,
uninteresting details of the legal profession, the intricacies
of the rule in Shelly's case, the study of the feudal
tenures of England as exemplified in the great work of
Blackstone, were not the things upon which that avid
mind of his must feed, and so he entered the arena of
53
Theodore Roosevelt
politics and was elected to the Legislature of the State
of New York without graduating and taking his degree.
But it so happened that after he had arrived in
these halls of legislation, had made his mark emd became
distinguished as one of the younger members of the
lower body, down in old Columbia it was decided that
we wanted some special legislation for our institution.
In those days, the law^^ers were divided into two classes —
attorneys and counsellors. You were first admitted to
this wonderful profession as an attorney, and then when
you had learned to fill out a summons, serve a subpoena,
and empty the waste-basket, you might in due time be
advanced to the more dignified degree of counsellor.
Being ambitious, it seemed to us a fictitious distinction;
we wanted to go to work immediately and appear in
the highest court of the State, and so we decided to
have the distinction abolished, and to that end my con-
stituents in the law school for two reasons, I think —
one because of my being perhaps a little imafraid, and
second, having a home in tlie city of Albany, which
would save considerable expense — placed me upon the
committee to look after that legislation, and with me
a man from the far west, and very aptly named " West-
em Starr." And so we came to the Legislature and of
course our fellow classmate was the first man we inter-
viewed — Theodore Roosevelt. I can see it as though
it were yesterday. We sent in our cards, let him know
what we wanted and the wish was simply the fore-
runner of his energy, of his push, of his going ahead
with the proposition that we sought and that we were
here to accomplish.
54
Theodore Roosevelt
Time passed and I saw little of Theodore Roosevelt
until he became governor of the State of New York.
I went over to tlie gubernatorial mansion, which, I think,
he would rather have preferred to be called his home, and
as I stepped up to him I said, " Governor, do you recol-
lect that little incident when you were in Columbia law
school and I came with one Western Starr to enlist
your aid for the benefit of our old institution? " He
looked at me, exposing those expressive dentals, and said,
" I most assuredly do." " Why," he said, " it is a little
bit of a world, anyway; when I was out on my ranch,
I was appointed a deputy sheriff and I arrested a horse
thief and took him before a tenntorial judge and who
should that territorial judge be but our old friend, West-
em Starr." " Now," he continued, " if you had only
been there instead of the horse thief, our trio would
have been complete." (Laughter.)
Theodore Roosevelt was bom under circumstances
that would naturally be very much adverse to advance-
ment along the lines tliat he followed in after life. Theo-
dore Roosevelt's family was an old Dutch Hugenot
family in the city of New York, occupying a social posi-
tion second to none, and having wealth enough to place
Mr. Roosevelt in the very first circles of the metropol-
itan aristocracy. But he lived it down. (Laughter.)
The environment of the home was one of culture and
refinement. His father had an instinct that the son
inherited, because among the anecdotes published of the
elder Roosevelt none reaches further out to the human
understanding and the human heart than that he devoted
much of his time and his means to a philanthropic
55
Theodore Roosevelt
project that had for its object the rescuing of the waifs
from the streets of that great metropolis. Ah, there
must have been some of that milk of human kindness
that flowed through the veins of the boy Theodore.
Physically weak; describing himself as rickety and asth-
matic; he received his early training through the medium
of a tutor, not by the rough and tumble of the public
school but in the confines of a loving, luxurious, refined
home. He went to Harvard college. There realizing
his impotence physically, he bent those energies that
placed him in the White House to building up a consti-
tution that would have been a handicap to any other
young man. Oh! I often think how easy it would have
been, how easy along the lines of least resistance, for
young Roosevelt to have dropped gracefully back into
the social environment that was his; been quite content
to spend his afternoons amidst the soporific surroundings
of the five o'clock tea and find his excitement in the
tango that would have given him just enough exercise
and not overtaxed his physical capacity; how he could
just as well have chased the aniseed bag over the fields
of Long Island rather than to have ridden the broncho
on the plains of the west. It would have been so easy;
but there was sometliing in the mental makeup of the
boy and the man that kept him from being a dilettante,
that made him the hero of the boys of America, that
made him the man whose memory we honor tonight.
In college, not renowned for his successes, reading what
he loved to read, an omnivorous admirer of American
history, a great reader of that which led him into the
paths where the wild animals had their habitats, a natu-
56
Theodore Roosevelt
ralist, a botanist, a student of nature, but not distin-
guishing himself in the classics or in the realms of litera-
ture outside of those lines that he cared to pursue. But
he was making the most of himself; he was feasting
himself; I can imagine him imder the elms of Cambridge,
drinking in the spirit of Americanism; I can imagine him
in Boston, the hub of the universe, filling himself with
the legends of his country; I can imagine him reading
the lives of the great Americans who had preceded him
in those holy places and resolving in his heart of hearts
that he, too, would make of himself something of which
his country might be proud.
He came out of Harvard university and made his
choice of the two great political parties. I have no
fault to find with him for that. It was just at that
time that he attracted my attention, and up to this
ninth day of February, 1919, I have followed him step
by step in his career through the medium of the public
prints, the biographer, and the word of mouth of the
loving friend. I had some aspirations along political
lines myself, perhaps not as high-minded as Theodore
Roosevelt's, perhaps not as ambitious as his, and I chose
the other path. He took the "high road" and I took
the " low road," and I am traveling it yet. (Laughter.)
But our lives ran parallel because of our association in
the law school, our personal acquaintance in those yeai's
of young manhood when the mind is shaping itself and
the ideals are bright and untarnished by contact with
the world, and while I felt that he was wrong politically,
that he had committed an error of judgment, I couldn't
help admiring the manner in which he got away with
57
Theodore Roosevelt
it. (Laughter.) And so year by year I followed his
career, and ah, many is the time I have contrasted my
puny efforts with his magnificent successes; many is the
time I have said to myself: " If I could only make the
man of myself that my classmate and friend, Theodore
Roosevelt, has made of himself; if I could leave my mark;
if I could press my feet into the sands of time that there
might be left an impression that nothing should oblit-
erate; that I might have the strength and the force of
character and conscience of Theodore Roosevelt." And
so all these years have I watched liis successes.
When he came into this hall of legislation he came
at a time when New York State politics — and I speak
it with all due reverence to both Houses of this Legis-
lature, and to this magnificent structure, sacred to the
making of law and its enforcement — when New York
State politics had reached a point where reform was
necessary in both parties. There didn't seem to be a
place for a man with the ideals of Theodore Roosevelt,
and he realized it himself. And there was one thing
about his politics that appealed to me; it was the sin-
cerity of it; it wasn't self-seeking; it wasn't that kind of
politics that makes a man untrue to himself, and Theo-
dore Roosevelt fought what he believed to be the worst
elements in both the great political parties, and the
people began to see that he had the courage of his con-
victions and they accorded him the respect that was
his due, and finally the great party to which he belonged
mentioned him for the honorable position of Speaker of
this House. And so he went from one success to another.
I am to be followed by a most eloquent speaker, far
58
Theodore Roosevelt
more competent to deal with the life and times of Theo-
dore Roosevelt than I am, and I shall not trespass long;
I shall not endeavor to give you anything like a recapit-
ulation of the life of Theodore Roosevelt, simply sum-
marize it.
He was a member of the police commission in the
city of New York — president of it. Finding New York
city in a condition as a municipality where the enforce-
ment of law along certain hnes had become more honored
in the breach than in the observance, without any regard
for what effect it might have upon his political future,
Theodore Roosevelt obeyed the dictates of his conscience
and applied himself to the morale of the police force of
that great city. His history as a m.ember of that board
is well known to everyone who has read, but it must
have given him a marvelous knowledge of human nature.
I cannot conceive of a position that would have brought
a man of his mental calibre and physical attributes into
closer contact with the very elements that he needed to
mold him than the police force of the city of New York
in the years of which he was a member of the board.
United States Civil Service Commissioner. Civil
service that once was denominated by a great states-
man as "snivel service" but Theodore Roosevelt never
viewed it that way ; it was civil service to him. It meant
that the men for tlie positions should be the m.en fitted
for them and not the men with the pull. And so as a
m.ember of the United States Civil Ser\'ice Commission
he covered himself with glory because he continued to
obey the dictates of his conscience and live up to his
ideals.
59
Theodore Rooseveit
I think as I look back upon it now, as we approach
the twelfth day of February, and I recall those lines
that Abraham Lincoln loved so well —
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud;
Like a swift-glancing meteor, a fast-flying cloud,
A Hash of the lightning, a break of the wave;
He passes from life to his rest in the grave.
they seem to me to typify the career of this great man —
" a swift-glancing meteor," " a fast-flying cloud," " a
flash of the lightning," symbols of his career. Not the
cloistered hearth, not the withdrawal from touch with
humanity to the quiet and seclusion of the study, but
the hurly-burly, the fight, everlasting fight and grapple
with the things of evil to the betterment of that great
country he loved so well.
Governor of the State of New York — this great
Empire State with all the complexities of government
that surround one in that exalted station — wealth, labor,
anarchy, social preferments; all sorts and kinds of influ-
ences being brought to bear to sway the mind of the
chief executive, and he held himself steady and not one
blot upon the escutcheon.
Assistant secretary of the United States Navy. Why,
they say of him when he assum.ed that post that he went
to Congress and said: " I want eight million dollars for
powder." They knew his enthusiasm and said: " What
do you want with eight million dollars for powder? "
" I want to teach the boys to shoot." And they gave
him the eight million dollars, and he came back and
said: " I want five million more." Perhaps my figures
are wrong, but the newspaper boys will correct me.
60
Theodore Roosevelt
However, it was a very large sum and he came back for
the second sum, and they said: " Why, have you shot
that powder all away? " " Yes, it is shot away and to
good purpose." "All right," and he got the second
appropriation. Well, what has been the result in the
years just passed? WTien our navy sailed the blue waters
and lined herself up with Great Britain's magnificent
representation on the high seas, our boys shot true, our
boys shot home, our boys were prepared to annihilate
their enemies because back in Theodore Roosevelt's
time he burned up the powder to teach them how to
do it.
President of these United States. Ah, the greatest
gift in the choice of any people. President of these
United States — a career that sometimes starts on the
towpath, not often in the drawing-room. The first presi-
dent of these United States to realize the iniquitous use
that was being made of wealth by corporations that
were unmoral, by corporations that were dealing unlaw-
fully, by corporations that were banded together for pur-
poses that worked evil to the mass of the people, and the
man who had been out on the plains and busted the
broncho became the " trust-buster " of the United States.
And then and there his heart went out to mankind,
those yearnings toward the plain people he loved so well,
and all sorts and kinds of labor legislation were dear
to him. Federal bills for amelioration of the working
men were his constant care, and he didn't do it in the
spirit of demagogy; he didn't do it to make votes; he
didn't do it to advance himself; he did it because he was
true to himself and wanted to "do things."
61
Theodore Roosevelt
But as I look back over his career, and I sketch
it ill such broad lines tonight, there is one other element
in his presidential experience that appeals to me with
peculiar force because Theodore Roosevelt was the
father of legislation in the interests of the little ones,
what is called " child labor legislation." I sat in the
anteroom tonight before I came into this rostrum and
I heard the chairman of the committee tell an ancedote
of Theodore Roosevelt, how he was going to luncheon
with a very distinguished statesman and walking down
Broadway he saw a little urchin crying his heart out,
and he said to his friend: " Wait a moment." And he
gathered the little one up and asked: "What is the
matter? " And he found the little one was lost. The
president of the United States gathered the little one in
his arms and took him to the neare-st police station and
found the frenzied father and mother and restored the
little one. Just typical, just an illustration of the great
heart and the utter simplicity of the man and it was that
instinct that made him see the rotten injustice of the
little fellow with the great white plague working in his
system down underground in the coal mines from early
mom vuitil late at night, following the mule up and
down the tramway; and the other little one of the factory
behind the loom of the south or north, I care not which
side of Mason-Dixon's line it was, with his little lungs
filled with lint, with his little eyes glazed with watching
the warp and woof of the cloth before him, never seeing
God's blue sky, or listening to the birds singing, or
running about with his playmates and playing duck-on-
the-rock, leap frog, and all those concomitants of the
62
Theodore Roosevelt
natural American boy. He saw the needs of those little
ones, and I hope his mantle will fall on someone in
authority in these days of 1919.
You cannot make heroes; you cannot make boys in
khaki; you cannot make strong men and women out of
the puny, ill-nourished, undeveloped children of America.
Those efforts will always stand out in the history of
Theodore Roosevelt as significant of his character.
I mustn't use up all the material; I cannot; I might
draw on your patience imtil much later than this and
I would have given you but the most sketchy idea of the
life and work of Theodore Roosevelt.
I come now to what seems to me to be the tragedy
of his life. On the eleventh day of November last we all
joined in the shouts of joy and the ringing of bells and the
tooting of whistles and the demonstration which said
the armistice was signed, the war over, and the great
conflict of 1914-18 at an end. Yes, it was at an end.
And that recalls another incident in the career of Theodore
Roosevelt.
When Theodore Roosevelt came back from his
African explorations he had a triumphal progress through
Europe, and among the incidents that marked that
progress was the fact that the Imperial German Emperor
invited him to join him on his staff and they sat, side
by side, on their mettlesome steeds at a review of the
Prussian guards. But Emperor WiDielm will never see
Theodore Roosevelt again. (Laughter.)
The armistice was signed; the war was over, but
Theodore Roosevelt was not president of the United
States. In my mind's eye I can see that loving father,
63
Theodore Roosevelt
that great-hearted citizen, that ambitious man, in his
study at Sagamore Hill. I can see the expression of his
face as he listens to the wild clamor that said the war
was over and the boys were coming home, and he not
president of these great United States he loved so well.
During the conflict, and as victory became apparent,
Theodore Roosevelt, out of the bitterness that may have
come to him in those silent hours of contemplation, gave
expression to words that I myself in public have criticized,
and now that he has gone to his rest I am sorry for.
I say that even as Moses after leading the children of
Israel out of the house of bondage came in sight of the
Promised Land and from the heights of Nebo's lonely
mountain looked over into the fields and pastures where
he never could wander, so the great heart of Theodore
Roosevelt must have felt when he saw this beloved
country victor in the World War, and he not at the head
of its affairs. And I believe the recording angel will
drop a tear upon the book and blot out forever any
unworthy expression that Theodore Roosevelt ever may
have uttered under the stress of the times that followed
the lowering of the German standard.
Aye, and the end came. The end came as I think
he would like to have had it come. We speak of him
as " Our President," but the masses speak of him as
" Teddy;" we speak of him as the man who has received
the adulation of his own fellow countrymen and that
of the peoples of Europe, but we remember him as the
broncho-buster, as the man who rode across the plains
in search of big game. We give him all the glory and
honor that is due him for the exalted stations he has
64
Theodore Roosevelt
occupied, but that which knits him to us with hooks of
steel is his humanity. When the end came it was not
with bulletins signed by eminent surgeons giving pulse,
temperature and respiration, it was in the still watches
of the night that he laid down his armor and the
armistice was complete.
I can see in my mind's eye a great concourse
of people, and they are wending their way toward
Sagamore Hill and the modest cemetery at Oyster Bay.
They come to pay their tribute to Theodore Roosevelt,
dead. And in the midst of his plot there rises the white
pole that marks every little red school-house the country
over, and at the peak of the pole there flies the thirteen
bars and the forty-eight stars he loved so well, and in
a tree top at one side of this plot a big, full-tliroated,
red-breasted robin sings its song while this great con-
course of American people, of plain people, wend their
way. As they pass the spot, they see it marked by
a rugged granite block, — " how firm a foundation,"^
and one side of it is polished that it may bear an
inscription, and chiselled there in the plainest form of
script that he who runs may read, are the simple words:
" Teddy, the American." (Applause.)
Selection—" Beautiful Isle of Somewhere," by the
quartet.
BEAUTIFUL ISLE OF SOMEWHERE
Somewhere the sun is shining.
Somewhere the song-birds dwell ;
Hush, then, thy sad repining;
God lives and all is well.
65
Theodore Roosevelt
Somewhere, somewhere,
Beautiful Isle of Somewhere!
Land of the true, where we live anew —
Beautiful Isle of Somewhere!
Somewhere the day is longer.
Somewhere the task is done;
Somewhere the heart is stronger.
Somewhere the guerdon won.
Somewhere the load is lifted.
Close by an open gate;
Somewhere the clouds are rifted,
Somewhere the angels wait.
The Chairman : Chancellor Day of the University
of Syracuse.
Address by Chancellor James Roscoe Day
If ten years ago any one had told me that on this
9th day of February I would be found in our State Capitol
by your request delivering an eulogy of Theodore Roose-
velt, I would not have been impressed with his gift of
prophecy!
But that is Theodore Roosevelt. He was an
impossible man doing impossible things as no other men
could do them. You differed with him deeply and
radically. And you did not change your convictions,
but you found that you had not been in conflict with
him but with something incidental to him. Some men's
opinions are all there is of them. One opinion and you
have the whole man. With Roosevelt a conviction or
a doctrine was an incident. While you were fighting that
doctrine he was away into volumes of others leaving you
66
Theodore Roosevelt
to go on with your contentions. He was infinitely more
than an article of his economic or political creed. You
could not contend with such a man. Your controversy
was not with Iiini.
How to appreciate such a man in just proportions
is an almost impossible task.
No man lived a life more exposed to the public eye.
He never whispered. But men were always blundering
about his motives and the wisdom of his bold, uncom-
promising utterances. Where to stand to measure him
is the question. There is a position among the Himalayas
where vast mountains arise before you. One of them
is so far distant that you see only its summit. It is the
highest of the mighty range. But you can see only its
crown against the sky. You cannot see where it con-
nects with the earth or what its bases are. Another
is so near that it overwhelms you and you lose all power
of measurement. The first is the highest mountain in
all Asia if not in the world. The second is but little
less but it fills tlie valley out of which it springs with
a suddenness that confuses thought and is appalling.
Washington is that mountain now distant with its
base in tradition. Roosevelt is the mountain that fills
the valley before you and is radiant with refracted and
changing light. What he is will be the subject of varying
opinions and discussions as men see the earth connections
all visible and the far suinmit towering above them in the
clouds, refracting colors differing to each angle of vision.
There is too much of Roosevelt and there are too
many vividly related phases of his unusual personality
for one to discuss philosophically his great character,
Theodore Roosevelt
much less his work as a legislator, a soldier and the
chief executive of his great State and the nation.
No one fully competent has presented Theodore
Roosevelt to the world in outline. Certain traits were
so bold and outstanding that all could discover them as
he hurried past in the rush of his impetuous course.
But it will be years before this marvelous man will stand
out in the symmetry and harmony of all the traits of his
character and activity that have seemed to many of us
sometimes conflicting and inconsistent.
To measure force requires most delicate instruments
and great skill. To know men in themselves and in the
influence of their education, companionship and sur-
roundings is a task that often has to be handed over
to generations.
Mr. Roosevelt was a man with whom no one could
agree in all things and with whom many disagreed in
everything. He outstrode thinking men. The conser-
vative men could not keep pace with him. He violated
traditions one minute and the next was the reverent
defender of the men who created them. He betrayed his
party one hour and the next was at its head, the idolized
leader and defender.
Sometimes he attacked constituted forms with
violence, but he restrained his wrath when demagogues
threatened disaster. He made no use of anything in his
reformatory efforts for merely personal political purposes
and sometimes went too far in defiance of temporizing
politics.
Study Mr. Roosevelt over a space of sufficient
breadth and length and the conflicts of his personality
68
Theodore Roosevelt
harmonize. There were certain traits that were high
peaks in the range of his character. They must be
studied above the common level.
He had great force. And men like force. The
timid man shrinlcs from it when it has no visible orbit
or is not running on steel rails bolted down to a secure
roadway. But the average man likes force. That is
why he chances the ditch and death in a motor car or
a two thousand feet fall from an aeroplane. And force
brings things to pass. It does not stop, fortunately does
not, because of a wreck in the ditch or a fall from the
clouds. But there is force in established orbits, when it
has taken form and retained energy, where it has come
out of star mist and is a sun.
Colonel Roosevelt had force well in hand. It was an
endowment. It was not idly expended, if sometimes it
seemed erratic. It did not exhaust those who came in
contact with it. Its expression was greatest in himself.
It made him impatient with Taft's slow and judicial
statesmanship and Wilson's " single-track mind " which
worked on a schedule of " waiting and watching."
But it v/as a tremendous magnet. No man drew
such crowds without arts or tricks on all occasions.
They rallied to him instinctively. Whether you agreed
with him or not, he agreed with himself. And you found
it difficult to get away from his forcible thinking.
He walked with a firm stride. He chopped a tree
like a lumber jack on a wager. He liked a horse that
would throw a good rider. You never heard of his
hunting partridges. He himted lions and tigers. The
brook trout did not beguile him. He fished for tarpon
69
Theodore Roosevelt
and shark. Is it a wonder that the virile manhood of
America followed such a leader? They could disagree
with him, but they were forced by force to follow him.
Had he been president when Germany threatened
little heroic Belgium, a challenge would have been hurled
across the ocean that would have prevented the war,
or if not we would have closed it two years sooner.
Germany needed a friend like Theodore Roosevelt, who
would have warned her of the peril of her insane madness
in rushing into wai" against the civilized world and who
would not have dallied an hour in preparation for the
defense of civilization and of the firesides of all lands.
His defense would have begun before the war began.
Colonel Roosevelt was a courageous man and the
people like courage. It was not a blustering courage.
It was not braggadocio. There was no swagger about it.
Its highest test was in the face of dissenting public
opinion. It never flinched in the face of the clamor of
politics.
What is right? What ought to be done? It might
not always be right as subsequent events proved, but to
him with the light he had it was right. That was enough.
It is certain that men whether in political agreement or
political opposition conceded his courage. He was
incapable of making the mistake of the trimmer. He
never cultivated his fortunes or popular favor at the
expense of his manliood. It is a fatal mistake which has
defeated many a gi-eat man who was great in all but his
courage. The people are always sensitive to this char-
acteristic. It is as useless as the habit of the ostrich in
putting his head in the sand to escape his pursuers.
70
Theodore Roosevelt
The people will excuse mistakes but they have
contempt for a coward.
The man who dodges his vote, who hides his con-
victions lest some one disagree with him, is always
detected and quickly relegated to the rear. Respect
a man who honestly disagrees with you. Despise a man
who is afraid of you.
Roosevelt's courage was an element of strength.
It was courage to defend an opinion cind it was courage to
correct a mistake. Moral courage is greater than physical
courage. " You are scared," said a soldier to a fellow
soldier whom he saw white and trembling as the battle
began. " Yes," was the reply, " if you were as scared
as I am you would run."
When Roosevelt was about to give an interview on
the piratical sinking of the Lusitania an intimate friend
who wanted him to answer deliberately suggested that
there were four hundred thousand German votes in this
country. Aroused he said, "If there were four million
I would condemn this fiendish act! " And he gave out
that phillipic which awoke the land to war.
He was clean. No bribe stuck to his hand. And
the people like that. His domestic life required no
apology. There were never whispers of impure liaisons
in his neighborhood. He never led two lives, nor had
two homes. His personal life required no explanation
nor apology. When he was away from home his face
was alvv^ays set homeward and you could no more face
him in other directions than you could change the instinct
of a carrier pigeon. And the people like that. Domestic
impurity and infidelity is the dry rot of society and states.
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Theodore Roosevelt
The pure home is the foundation of civilization. It has
been tremendously emphasized in the late war, when
virtue has been made the merchandise of a country that
started out to spread its kultur over the world by rapine
and the pitiless sword. The noblest thing about Roose-
velt is his home life. It was a holy example.
Another trait was the buoyancy, fullness and
exuberance of his life. No man enjoyed life more. And
the people like that. You may say that it was a radiancy
of health. We might think so but for the last two or
three years of fatal illness. Coming or going from the
hospital, wrenched vnth rheumatic pains, burning with
fever, he was always feeling " bully." It is a great thing
in this world of so many ills and misfortunes and sorrows
if one can carry hope on the outside and let any remnant
of happiness shine through.
No one can tell the agony of that solitary sorrow
when a grave was made on a foreign battlefield. But he
did not ask his fellow man to help him carry it. He
carried no emblem of death. He asked for more things
to do, to think about, and to say.
He said that he could not expect that four sons could
go into war with the peril of high explosives and all
return. It was tlie measure of his prompt sacrifice. An
unspeakable cur kindled his wrath when he said that
those boys were protected in safe positions by their
father's influence. But the cloud soon passed and he
was driving on, giving his own life to force that war to
its conclusions by matching his pen against the sword.
We will not ask why such a man was not used in
such a war, why he was denied the privilege of some
72
Theodore Roosevelt
active place at the front or in helpful counsel when clear
thinking and prompt action were demanded. The
American people do their own thinking and as a rule
they think correctly. The answer will come and be
written in letters that will bum the shame where it belongs.
He must be an intensely narrow partisan who does
not feel the loss that has fallen upon his country by the
death of ex-President Roosevelt.
The man we have hastily sketched, a statesman of
such prescient vision and superb loyalty and courage, was
tremendously needed in his own land in a time when
latent Bolshevism and slumbering Red Socialism could be
held in restraint only by men of the type of Colonel
Roosevelt and men of whom he was the acknowledged
captain.
It is an hour that calls for brave men, wise men,
American men without a taint or a remote mixture in
their loyalty and with consecration to the principles of
our fathers and mothers. Never have we needed as now a
recrudescence of the old-time Americanism that has been
overgrown with the poison ivy of imported destructive
thought and teachings of the ignorant that threaten
to choke and destroy its life. We need him to lead in
the readjustment of our labor economy.
We had looked to Colonel Roosevelt as the man
whom the remnant of thinking men would follow and
whose clear voice would restrain the mad hordes plunging
on behind the red flag they know not why, a man who
would not sacrifice his flag to his personal ambition,
a man whose words weighed with the artisan and the
working man because he never used them but always
73
Theodore Roosevelt
served them, a man who in his one own personality
would outnumber the thousands of riotous brutes, Hun-
like in their instincts, seeking to apply the torch to the
foundations of all government and law.
That task to save our land and country is upon us
without a leader. Striking evidences warn us that our
laborers must be kept within bounds of citizenship and
under self-restraint. That cannot be done by the political
cvinning and chicanery that plays our government into
the hands of any class at the price of its service at the
polls.
Mr. Roosevelt never magnified day labor above all
foiTns of labor. He held it to its responsibility. The
peril that has been increased in the past few years has
been in exalting the working man's labor into the chief
if not the only place of labor. As though none of the
rest of us labor and as if there were no problems except
to fill the working man's dinner pail! It is doubtless
true that the working man has not always received his
proportion of the world's incomes and profits. And it is
equally true that transportation and business have
suffered losses and depreciation which if not remedied
will leave the laborer with an empty dinner pail. Busi-
ness, capital, are the only sources from which he can
fill his pail, — unless he steals and robs and kills as red-
tongued and red-flagged socialism proposes to do, and
that would last only until business is destroyed. Then
what hope would be left to any man, rich or poor?
There is no question tliat business has been guilty
of profiteering the past two years. Much of it has taken
high prices simply because it could. It has forced up
74
Theodore Roosevelt
the cost of living without any justification. It has
turned business in some cases into a den of thieves.
When any man takes a price simply because he can get
it, and from a man who is unable to pay it, he is a
thief.
But this has not been done by manufacturers and
merchants only. It has been done by the honest, homy-
handed farmer who raises wheat and com emd cattle, —
though he usually suffers both at the beginning and the
ending of high prices. He is the victim of the packer
and the mill man who buys his wheat and sells him his
grain, and of the middleman who takes a hundred per
cent of profit for marketing his milk and his farm produce.
It is plain enough that we are in swiftly increasing
currents of a whirlpool where we need a leader to reverse
the order of things, to place the labor of the laboring man
in the Ust with the labor of the professional man, the
merchant and the manufacturer, and make him take his
chances with them, and stop the political caudle which
places him at the top and all others at the bottom and
robs the railroad, the steamship and all forms of business
to keep him there. Men in the Legislature and in Congress
and in great official positions have been doing our land
immense mischief because they lacked the rugged stamina
and wide-seeing statesmanship to maintain, at any political
cost, sound economic proportions and order. They have
tumed the country upside down and placed the labor
unions on top. That is disastrous to labor and ruinous
to any coimtry. You cannot run a wagon with the
wheels on top. The axles are as important as the wheels.
The wheels can carry nothing without tlie axles. The
Theodore Roosevelt
whole must harmonize in proper proportions and logical
relations. It is a fatal thing when labor and capital
pull apart. It is tearing the wagon to pieces.
We want the artisan and day labor working man to
have all the wage that business can pay him for an
honest day's work. The more he has the better home
he will have and the happier wife he will have and the
better educated and better citizens his children will
become and the better country we will have. Capital
cannot afford not to pay him all that the business will
pay him and leave a paying profit to the investments,
the risks, the toil and wear and tear of the business.
I want him to have reasonably short hours and reasonably
long wages, but I want him to give an eqmvalent and be
a man, an American man, a safe and useful citizen.
That man and I are neighbors. We vote at the same
poll. I work at the imiversity where I beg money to
educate his sons and daughters and I am proud of them.
But I hate and abhor the labor that would overturn
business which it could neither create nor manage, that
would smash machinery, kill men, starve and freeze
communities to force increase of wages or the recognition
of his organization as I do the Hun's mode of warfare
and rapine.
The laborer should be content with the reward of
his own labors and not insist upon the income that
belongs to the investments of his neighbor. The recent
suggestion that the government should purchase the
railroads and the laboring men should run them on shares
with the government, and if there is a deficiency it should
be covered by taxing the people, is crude enough and
76
Theodore Roosevelt
idiotic enough for the Bolsheviki. It does not sound Uke
the utterance of American citizens.
One man may be as good as another, one man is
as free as another. But one man is not as important
as another. One man offers the v.'ork of his hands and
he is important if intelligent, industrious and faithful.
Another man has by superior ability secured and saved
thousands of dollars of money. He may have justly
inherited it. This man offers his great ability and the
money he has saved equal perhaps to a hundred or
a thousand men. He has a right to greater pay in
proportion to what the supplies. And he works harder
than the man who works only with his hands, works
earlier and later and with anxiety the other man does not
know.
Our country needs as never before a supreme leader
to set in order business men and working men that each
may have a just appreciation of the other and that all
may secure to all liberty of action. We thought we
had that man in Theodore Roosevelt. It is a frightful
arena for the demagogue of destructive socialism and
Bolshevism. It is no time for the coward and the trimmer.
It is the hour of our supreme peril. Every man without
regard to party politics must have trembled when they
told us that Theodore Roosevelt was dead. Labor lost
an intelligent, fearless friend. Our coimtry lost a great
leader in its most perilous field.
It is a time when Colonel Roosevelt was saying some
vigorous and statesmanlike words with regard to our
world-wide problems. They were wholesome. They
centered on our own country. They contemplated
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Theodore Roosevelt
safety first for America. They looked to the future of
America. They remembered Washington's caution
against foreign entanglements.
The great and first problems over there today is
the relation to one another of adjacent lands recently
at war. That takes precedence over the League of
Nations. The first question is the settlement of new
boundaries, indemnities and guarantees of safety to
invaded countries. Those are live questions, and
immensely practical, to be settled by nations concerned.
How far are we called upon to mix in them? What
have we to do with rimning boimdary lines between
Poland and Czecho-Slovak, or Jugo-Slav and Italy,
or in the new republics of Germany and Austria? What
business have we with the amount of indemnity to be
paid by Germany to England, or to France, or to Belgium
or to Italy? It seems to me we have absolutely no
business with these questions, but should come home
tomorrow so far as they are concerned. I do not object
to our going over the ocean in the person of our president
and his retinue to secure expressions of approval for
what we have done in the war by music and salvos of
artillery and displays of gold plate and livery, if anyone
wants that thing. It is a matter of taste and that has
a wide range. After the great pressing questions between
the nations concerned are settled by the nations con-
cerned, there would be time to take up the question
of a League of Nations and the Freedom of the Seas,
and other of the fourteen international beatitudes.
W^e are not certain that we oppose the League of Nations
or that we favor it. We are certain that we have not
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Theodore Roosevelt
had time to know what we think yet. Our great delibera-
tive body has not been permitted to discuss that question
without the charge of partisan motives.
We need time for our Senate, that body which used
to be recognized as of co-ordinate authority and dignity,
to discuss the momentous questions on which we occupy
at least a border place.
We needed someone like Roosevelt to show us that
we- had the cart harnessed before the horse. Other men
might say it and the world would not listen. Men
listened to him.
It seems to me that having gone in late, almost
fatally late, it would have been modest when our boys
had finished their magnificent fighting to quietly fold
our tents and come home and stay at home ourselves until
we could settle as a people in our Congress, through
our representatives, the only question that concerned us,
the vast principles on which all nations should conduct
themselves toward one another. This would have been
American. We have never permitted one citizen to
make our laws nor to dictate terms beyond our written
instrument. No man rules us. No man is king over us.
We cannot afford the incursion of any man's reference to
Americans as " my people." That was the prerogative of
Kaisers and Czars. We cannot afford the humiliation
of dictated terms for the remaking of Europe through
one man without even the knowledge of our Senate or
of the people as to what those terms are. Never has
there been any such autocracy in the history of our land.
Never will it be attempted again if we are to remain
a free people.
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Theodore Roosevelt
The conditions of peace have not been sent to
European nations by the American people. But they
have been taken over in utter defiance and contempt of
the mind of our people. The people have not been
permitted to know what the supreme dictator himself
means by them. We have transplanted the rule of the
Kaiser and Czar into America and our President has done
what the King of England would not dare to do, and
what if he did do would cost him his crown.
Will you tell me how long the American government
will stand after one man becomes that government?
Is it not opening a way for our I. W. W. and our anarchistic
Red Bolshevists to defy our constitution, our courts
and our executives?
We must obey our traditions and our imwritten
laws and practices of a hundred and fifty years if we
expect others to obey them. We must not compromise
our form of government. It is not enough to say that it
is better done as it is being done. That is far from
certain and if it were true it is too perilous to take the
chance. Our only safety is within the law and traditions
that have become law.
There are too many wild elements among us trying
to usurp our body politic, for us to leave any bars down
or any gates open. The minute we disregard our con-
stitution and make a substitution of personal choice
or permit any official assumptions beyond the terms
laid down by our forms of action we are in danger that
liberty will be taken by destructive forces and that all
law and order will be over-ridden and trampled under
foot. The only way we can safely secure obedience
80
Theodore Roosevelt
to law by the people is for their representatives and
servants in all the offices from the lowest to the highest
to lead them witli law. I f we do not they will overwhelm
us without law. Nothing breeds riot with the destruction
of life and property like license with our institutions
by those set to sacredly defend them and obey them.
Our carelessness in recent years has permitted
broods of vipers to hatch and sting us in nearly all our
considerable communities. It is high time to sound
a warning and return to the democracy of our fathers who
dared not attempt national life and government without
a national constitution which they defended with their
lives and which they permitted no man carelessly or
ignorantly to ignore and set aside. In addition to the
peril that threatens by a loosening of reverence for the
Americanism which ex-President Roosevelt championed
with his last breath, is the price which we must pay for
mixing in the disputes among European nations that do
not concern us. Are we going to settle affairs over there
and they have no right of parity to settle things to
suit themselves over here?
We fought to defend our pathways across the seas
and to make it safe for our people to travel them. We
fought to hurl back the world's foe of small and defense-
less peoples. Though coming late we helped finish that
work. That was all we had to do until our Senate
should act on the larger question of the future. And
that was the work for the American people to do. Our
legislatures are our people. Our American Congress is
the American people. And our people have a right
to speak tlirough their Congress and it is their duty
81
Theodore Roosevelt
to speak. Their Congress cannot be ignored. That is
riding over the people themselves. And they cannot
permit themselves to be ignored without inviting disaster
to their land and country.
There must be a day of reckoning, immediate and
decisive reckoning. Colonel Roosevelt exhorted us " not
to sag back in our Americanism." Where has our
Americanism gone in the last six weeks? It has been put
in a bag and carried out to sea. And the men who
miss it and demand that it be returned are charged
with disloyalty and partisan politics! Thank God that
was one thing that Theodore Roosevelt did not fear
when he knew his cause was just. And why should
you and I?
In the name of our fathers, where are we going to
and what are we going from? Are we an American
republic? Are we a nation of freemen? Can anyone
wonder that unwashed Bolshevists and Red Flag Socialists
will dare to spit upon us and trample our flag in the
dust of the streets!
Can we afford to lose by death our bravest citizen,
our fearless champion of the whole people, our defender
of the constitution which secured to us the government
of the people, by the people, the only safe Magna Charta!
We have lost in our champion of a free America ten
thousand men, — ten thousand great men as great men
are measured today.
I did not always agree with all he did. I do not
accept the doctrine that only good must be said of the
dead. A man's character must carry his reputation in
life and in death. And we should see men as we knew
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Theodore Roosevelt
them in life or death. A discriminating appreciation is
the most just. With all impulses and mistakes reckoned,
and there were some, and sometimes serious, we bade
farewell a few hours ago to the greatest American citizen
since Abraham Lincoln.
It seems to us that he has gone too soon.
But God reigns. What has been will be. Other
men equal to their times will appear. They will be unlike,
as Roosevelt differed from Lincoln. All along the ages
great men have appeared who seemed indispensable
to the leadership of their times. But when they went
the world did not stop. In some instances they con-
tributed more by their death than by their life. When
Lincoln fell under the assassin's bullet a calamity over-
whelmed the nation. We felt, and some of us continue
to feel, that disaster came upon reconstruction and that
things would have been far different if he had lived.
The breach would have been sooner healed. The North
and South would have been one long ago. We could
not understand it. We cannot measure the divine
movements, the infinite wisdom, the things which He
permits that we would not permit. It seems to us that
the death of Roosevelt was a great calamity just now
when so many destructive elements lurk in the shadows
of timid men, to spring upon us and clutch our national
throat. They feared him enough to shoot him years ago.
They feared him more the day he died. Hell broke out
with wild laughter and shouts. A mighty obstacle was
removed. Why did God do it? Perhaps our faith is
misplaced. We put our faith in men, great men, and
they fall. Then we trust God.
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Theodore Roosevelt
God seems to depend upon men, but when we think
He is trusting them most and that He most depends
upon them He removes them. He moves in His
mysterious way, His wonders to perform, both by using
them and not using them.
It is our time to put our faith in Him who rules
over all.
Our country will stand. It is builded upon divine
principles, its industries, its business, its homes, its
government, its morals are founded on God's law. And
that never wears out. It cannot be overthrown. Try to
dig imder it. You cannot, it is as deep as the throne
of right and justice.
It will take time to adjust ourselves. But our
great leaders do not carry away with them the principles
of our national integrity. These principles remain for
other men to use and God furnishes those men.
The greatest fame that can come to men is to be
used in God's critical times, to help make constructive
epochs, to see them when they come, to use them with
no fear but the fear of God, to welcome consequences,
to venture all personal ambition and profit, to be used for
the common good, to live lives of service for all men,
that is to learn the great lesson from above that to save
one's life is to lose it, to lose one's life is to save it.
So far as men follow these standards their immortality
is safe. Their works cannot perish. What they put into
their country cannot be withdrawn from it.
The greatest debt we owe to Theodore Roosevelt
today is for his Americanism, his all- Americanism, boldly,
fearlessly declared in a time when perilous isms of all
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Theodore Roosevelt
kinds are striving to undermine our country. Mr.
Roosevelt insisted that there can be but one national
ism in this broad land and that is Americanism, — one
loyalty, one flag, one common language, one great and
prosperous people.
Selection — " How Firm a Foundation," by the
quartet.
HOW FIRM A FOUNDATION
How firm a foundation, ye saints of tlie Lord,
Is laid for your faith in His excellent word!
What more can He say than to you He hath said,
You who unto Jesus for refuge have fled?
■' Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed,
For I am Thy God, and will still give thee aid;
I'll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand.
Upheld by My righteous, omnipotent hand.
" When through the deep waters, I call thee to go.
The rivers of woe shall not thee overflow;
For I will be with thee thy trouble to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.
■' When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie.
My grace, all-sufficient, shall be thy supply;
The flame shall not hurt thee: I only design
Thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.
" E'en down to old age, all My people shall prove,
My sovereign, eternal, unchangeable love;
And when hoary hairs shall their temples adorn.
Like lambs they shall still in my bosom be borne.
" The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose
I will not, I will not desert to His foes;
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I'll never, no never, no never forsake."
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Theodore Roosevelt
The Ch.'MRMAN. Benediction — Bishop Richard H.
Nelson. The audience will please arise.
Benediction — Bishop Richard H. Nelson, Albany
Almighty Father, Who has raised up great men to
bring us, Thy people, to a place of power and honor among
the nations of the world, we beseech Thee to send Thy
blessing upon those who are gathered together here to
honor the memory of the gifted, patriotic, American
citizen. And grant that we may learn from the example
of his life to do our duty faithfully and fearlessly in these
grave times, and, like him, be ready to sacrifice that
which is dearest to us in life that our nation may be
true to its ideals and may accomplish its mission in the
world.
We ask in the name of Christ, our Lord. Amen.
86
APPENDIX
ADDRESS
OF
SENATOR HENRY CABOT LODGE
OF MASSACHUSETTS
IN HONOR OF
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Ex-President of the United States
BEFORE THE
CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1919
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
A tower is fnllen, a star is set ! Alas ! Alas ! for Ceiin.
THE words of lamentation from the old Moorish
ballad, which in boyhood we used to recite, must,
I think, have risen to many lips when the world
was told that Theodore Roosevelt was dead. But what-
ever the phrase the thought was instant and everywhere.
Variously expressed, you heard it in the crowds about
the bulletin boards, from the man in the street and the
man on the railroads, from the farmer in the fields, the
women in the shops, in the factories, and in the homes.
The pulpit found in his life a text for sermons. The
judge on the bench, the child at school, alike paused for
a moment, conscious of a loss. The cry of sorrow came
from men and women of all conditions, high and low,
rich and poor, from the learned and the ignorant, from
the multitude who had loved and followed him, and
from those who had opposed and resisted him. The
newspapers pushed aside the absorbing reports of the
events of these fateful days and gave pages to the man
who had died. Flashed beneath the ocean and through
the air went the announcement of his death, and back
came a world-wide response from courts and cabinets,
from press and people, in other and far-distant lands.
Through it all ran a golden thread of personal feeling
which gleams so rarely in the somber formalism of public
grief. Everywhere the people felt in their hearts that:
A power was passing from tlie Earth
To breathless Nature's dark abyss.
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Theodore Roosevelt
It would seem that here was a man, a private citizen,
conspicuous by no office, with no glitter of power about
him, no ability to reward or punish, gone from the
earthly life, who must have been unusual even among
the leaders of men, and who thus demands our serious
consideration.
This is a thought to be borne in mind to-day. We
meet to render honor to the dead, to the great American
whom we mourn. But there is something more to be
done. We must remember that when History, with
steady hand and calm eyes, free from the passions of
the past, comes to make up the final account, she will
call as her principal witnesses the contemporaries of
the man or the event awaiting her verdict. Here and
elsewhere the men and women who knew Theodore
Roosevelt or who belong to his period will give public
utterance to their emotions and to their judgments in
regard to him. This will be part of the record to which
the historian will turn when our living present has become
the past, of which it is his duty to write. Thus is there
a responsibility placed upon each one of us who will
clearly realize that here, too, is a duty to posterity,
whom we would fain guide to the truth as we see it,
and to whose hands we commit our share in the history
of our beloved country — that history so much of which
was made under his leadership.
We can not approach Theodore Roosevelt along the
beaten paths of eulogy or satisfy ourselves with the
empty civilities of commonplace funeral tributes, for he
did not make his life journey over main-traveled roads,
nor was he ever commonplace. Cold and pompous
90
Theodore Roosevelt
formalities would be unsuited to him who was devoid
of affectation, who was never self-conscious, and to whom
posturing to draw the public gaze seemed not only repel-
lent but vulgar. He had that entire simplicity of manners
and modes of life which is the crowning result of the
highest culture and the finest nature. Like Cromwell,
he would always have said: "Paint me as I am."
In that spirit, in his spirit of devotion to truth's simplicity,
I shall try to speak of him today in the presence of the
representatives of the great Government of which he was
for seven years the head.
The rise of any man from humble or still more from
sordid beginnings to the heights of success always and
naturally appeals strongly to the imagination. It fur-
nishes a vivid contrast which is as much admired as it
is readily imderstood. It still retains the wonder which
such success awakened in the days of hereditary law-
givers and high privileges of birth. Birth and fortune,
however, mean much less now than two centuries ago.
To climb from the place of a printer's boy to the highest
rank in science, politics, and diplomacy would be far
easier to-day than in the eighteenth century, given
a genius like Franklin to do it. Moreover the real
marvel is in the soaring achievement itself, no matter
what the origin of the man who comes by " the people's
unbought grace to rule his native land " and who on
descending from the official pinnacle still leads and
influences thousands upon thousands of his fellow men.
Theodore Roosevelt had the good fortune to be bom
of a well-known, long-established family, with every
facility for education and with an atmosphere of patriotism
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Theodore Roosevelt
and disinterested service both to country and humanity-
all about him. In his father he had before him an
example of lofty public spirit, from which it would have
been difficult to depart. But if the work of his ancestors
relieved him from the hard struggle which meets an
unaided man at the outset, he also lacked the spur of
necessity to prick the sides of his intent, in itself no small
loss. As a balance to the opportunity which was his
without labor, he had not only the later difficulties
which come to him to whom fate has been kind at the
start; he had also spread before him the temptations
inseparable from such inherited advantages as fell to his
lot — temptations to a Ufe of sports and pleasure, to
lettered ease, to an amateur's career in one of the fine
arts, perhaps to a money-making business, likewise an
inheritance, none of them easily to be set aside in obedi-
ence to the stern rule that the larger and more facile
the opportunity the greater and more insistent the respon-
sibility. How he refused to tread the pleasant paths that
opened to him on all sides and took the instant way
which led over the rough road of toil and action his
life discloses.
At the beginning, moreover, he had physical diffi-
culties not lightly to be overcome. He was a delicate
child, suffering acutely from attacks of asthma. He was
not a strong boy, was retiring, fond of books, and with
an intense but solitary devotion to natural history. As
his health gradually improved he became possessed by
the belief, although he perhaps did not then formulate
it, that in the fields of active life a man could do that
which he willed to do; and this faith was with him to
Theodore Roosevelt
the end. It became very evident when he went to Har-
vard. He made himself an athlete by sheer hard work.
Hampered by extreme near-sightedness, he became none
the less a formidable boxer and an excellent shot. He
stood high in scholarship, but as he worked hard, so
he played hard, and was popular in the university and
beloved by his friends. For a shy and delicate boy all
this meant solid achievement, as well as imusual deter-
mination and force of will. Apparently he took early
to heart and carried out to fulfillment the noble lines of
Clough's Dipsychus:
In light things
Prove thou the arms thou long'st to glorify.
Nor fear to worl^ up from the lowest ranks
Whence come great Nature's Captains. And high deeds
Haunt not the fringy edges of the fight,
But the pell-mell of men.
When a young man comes out of college he descends
suddenly from the highest place in a little world to a
very obscure corner in a great one. It is something of
a shock, and there is apt to be a chill in the air. Unless
the young man's life has been planned beforehand and
a place provided for him by others, wliich is exceptional,
or unless he is fortunate in a strong and dominating
purpose or talent which drives him to science or art or
some particular profession, he finds himself at this period
pausing and wondering where he can get a grip upon the
vast and confused world into which he has been plunged.
It is a trying and only too frequently a disheart-
ening experience, this looking for a career, this effort to
find employment in a huge and hurrying crowd which
93
Theodore Roosevelt
appears to have no use for the newcomer. Roosevelt,
thus cast forth on his own resources — his father, so
beloved by him, having died two years before — fell to
work at once, turning to the study of the law, which he
did not like, and to the completion of a history of the
War of 1812 which he had begun while still in college.
With few exceptions, young beginners in the difficult art
of writing are either too exuberant or too dry. Roosevelt
said that his book was as dry as an encyclopedia, thus
erring in precisely the direction one would not have
expected. The book, be it said, was by no means so
dry as he thought it, and it had some other admirable
qualities. It was clear and thorough, and the battles
by sea and land, especially the former, which involved
the armaments and crews, the size and speed of the
ships engaged in the famous frigate and sloop actions,
of which we won eleven out of thirteen, were given with
a minute accuracy never before attempted in the accounts
of this war, and which made the book an authority, a
position it holds to this day.
This was a good deal of sound work for a boy's
first year out of college. But it did not content Roose-
velt. Inherited influences and inborn desires made him
earnest and eager to render some public service. In
pursuit of this aspiration he joined the Twenty-first
Assembly District Republican Association of the city of
New York, for by such machinery all politics were car-
ried on in those days. It was not an association com-
posed of his normal friends; in fact, the members were
not only eminently practical persons but they were
inclined to be rough in their methods. They were not
94
Theodore Roosevelt
dreamers, nor were they laboring under many illusions.
Roosevelt went among them a complete stranger. He
differed from them with entire frankness, concealed noth-
ing, and by his strong and simple democratic ways, his
intense Americanism, and the magical personal attrac-
tion which went with him to the end, made some devoted
friends. One of the younger leaders, "Joe " Murray,
believed in him, became especially attached to him, and
so continued until death separated them. Through Mur-
ray's efforts he was elected to the New York Assembly
in 1881, and thus only one year after leaving college his
public career began. He was just twenty-three.
Very few men make an effective State reputation
in their first year in the lower branch of the State Legis-
lature. I never happened to hear of one who made a
national reputation in such a body. Roosevelt did both.
When he left the Assembly after three years' service he
was a national figure, well known, and of real impor-
tance, and also a delegate at large from the great State
of New York to the Republican national convention of
1884, where he played a leading part. Energy, ability,
and the most entire courage were the secret of his extra-
ordinary success. It was a time of flagrant corporate
influence in the New York Legislature, of the "Black
Horse Cavalr^^" of a group of members who made money
by sustaining corporation measures or by levying on cor-
porations and capital through the familiar artifice of
" strike bills." Roosevelt attacked them all openly and
aggressively and never silently or quietly. He fought
for the impeachment of a judge solely because he believed
the judge corrupt, which surprised some of his political
95
Theodore Roosevelt
associates of both parties, there being, as one practical
thinker observes, " no politics in politics." He failed to
secure the impeachment, but the fight did not fail, nor
did the people forget it; and despite^ perhaps because
of — the enemies he made, he was twice reelected. He
became at the same time a distinct, well-defined figure to
the American people. He had touched the popular
imagination. In this way he performed the unexampled
feat of leaving the New York Assembly, which he had
entered three years before an unknown boy, with a
national reputation and with his name at least known
throughout the United States. He was twenty-six
years old.
WTien he left Chicago at the close of the national
convention in June, 1884, he did not return to New
York, but went West to the " Bad Lands " of the Little
Missouri valley, where he had purchased a ranch in the
previous year. The early love of natural history which
never abated had developed into a passion for hvinting
and for life in the open. He had begun in the wilds of
Maine and then turned to the west and to a cattle ranch
to gratify both tastes. The life appealed to him and he
came to love it. He herded and rounded up his cattle,
he worked as a cow-puncher, only rather harder than
any of them, and in the intervals he hunted and shot
big game. He also came in contact with men of a new
type, rough, sometimes dangerous, but always vigorous
and often picturesque. With them he had the same
success as with the practical politicians of the Twenty-
first Assembly District, although they were widely dif-
ferent specimens of mankind. But all alike were human
96
Theodore Roosevelt
at bottom and so was Roosevelt. He argued with them,
rode with them, camped with them, played and joked
with them, but was always master of his outfit. They
respected him and also liked him, because he was at
all times simple, straightforward, outspoken, and sin-
cere. He became a popular and well-known figure in
that western country and was regarded as a good fel-
low, a " white man," entirely fearless, thoroughly good-
natured and kind, never quarrelsome, and never safe to
trifle with, bully, or threaten. The life and experiences
of that time found their way into a book, "The Hunting
Trips of a Ranchman," interesting in description and
adventure and also showing a marked literary quality.
In 1886 he ran as Republican candidate for mayor
of New York and might have been elected had his own
party stood by him. But many excellent men of Repub-
lican faith — the " timid good," as he called them —
panic-stricken by the formidable candidacy of Henry
George, flocked to the support of Mr. Abram Hewitt,
the Democratic candidate, as the man most certain to
defeat the menacing champion of single taxation. Roose-
velt was beaten, but his campaign, which was entirely
his own and the precursor of many others, his speeches
with their striking quality then visible to the country
for the first time, all combined to fix the attention of
the people upon the losing candidate. Roosevelt was
the one of the candidates who was most interesting, and
again he had touched the imagination of the people and
cut a little deeper into the popular consciousness and
memory.
Two years more of private life, devoted to his home,
97
Theodore Roosevelt
where his greatest happiness was always found, to his
ranch, to reading and writing books, and then came an
active part in the campaign of 1888, resulting in the
election of President Harrison, who made him civil ser-
vice commissioner in the spring of 1889. He was in
his thirty-first year. Civil service reform as a practical
question was then in its initial stages. The law estab-
lishing it, limited in extent and forced through by a
few leaders of both parties in the Senate, was only six
years old. The promoters of the reform, strong in quality,
but weak in numbers, had compelled a reluctant accept-
ance of the law by exercising a balance-of-power vote in
certain States and districts. It had few earnest sup-
porters in Congress, some lukewarm friends, and many
strong opponents. All the active politicians were prac-
tically against it. Mr. Conkling had said that when
Dr. Johnson told Boswell " that patriotism was the last
refuge of a scoundrel " he was ignorant of the possibilities
of the word " reform," and this witticism met with a
large response.
Civil service reform, meaning the establishment of
a classified service and the removal of routine adminis-
trative offices from politics, had not reached the masses
of the people at all. The average voter knew and cared
nothing about it. When six years later Roosevelt resigned
from the commission the great body of the people knew
well v^^hat civil service refonn meant, large bodies of
voters cared a great deal about it, and it was established
and spreading its control. We have had many excellent
men who have done good work in the civil service com-
mission, although that work is neither adventurous nor
98
Theodore Roosevelt
exciting and rarely attracts public attention, but no one
has ever forgotten that Theodore Roosevelt was once
civil service commissioner.
He found the law stmggling for existence, laughed
at, sneered at, surrounded by enemies in Congress, and
with but few fighting friends. He threw himself into
the fray. Congress investigated the commission about
once a year, which was exactly what Roosevelt desired.
Armually, too, the opponents of the reform would try
to defeat the appropriation for the commission, and this
again was playing into Roosevelt's hands, for it led
to debates, and the newspapers as a rule sustained the
reform. Senator Gorman mourned in the Senate over
the cruel fate of a " bright young man " who was unable
to tell on examination the distance of Baltimore from
China, and thus was deprived of his inalienable right
to serve his country in the postoffice. Roosevelt proved
that no such question had ever been asked and requested
the name of the " bright young man." The name was
not forthcoming, and the victim of a question never
asked goes down nameless to posterity in the Congres-
sional Record as merely a " bright yoimg man." Then
General Grosvenor, a leading Republican of the House,
denounced the commissioner for crediting his district
with an appointee named Rufus Putnam who was not
a resident of the district, and Roosevelt produced a
letter from the general recommending Rufus Putnam as
a resident of his district and a constituent. All this
was unusual. Hitherto it had been a safe amusement
to ridicule and jeer at civil service reform, and here was
a commissioner who dared to reply vigorously to attacks,
99
Theodore Roosevelt
and even to prove Senators and Congressmen to be
wrong in their facts. The amusement of baiting the
civil service commission seemed to be less inviting than
before, and, worse still, the entertaining features seemed
to have passed to the public, who enjoyed and approved
the commissioner who disregarded etiquette and fought
hard for the law he was appointed to enforce. The law
suddenly took on new meaning and became clearly visible
in the public mind, a great service to the cause of good
government.
After six years' service in the civil service com-
mission Roosevelt left Washington to accept the position
of president of the board of police commissioners of
the city of New York, which had been offered to him
by Mayor Strong. It is speaking within bounds to say
that the history of the police force of New York has
been a checkered one in which the black squares have
tended to predominate. The task which Roosevelt con-
fronted was then, as always, difficult, and the machinery
of four commissioners and a practically irremovable
chief made action extremely slow and uncertain. Roose-
velt set himself to expel politics and favoritism in appoint-
ments and promotions and to crush corruption every-
where. In some way he drove through the obstacles
and effected great improvements, although permanent
betterment was perhaps impossible. Good men were
appointed and meritorious men promoted as never before,
while the corrupt and dangerous officers were punished
in a number of instances, sufficient, at least, to check
and discourage evildoers. Discipline was improved, and
the force became very loyal to the chief commissioner,
100
Theodore Roosevelt
because they learned to realize that he was fighting for
right and justice without fear or favor. The results were
also shown in the marked decrease of crime, which judges
pointed out from the bench. Then, too, it was to be
observed that a New York police commissioner suddenly
attracted the attention of the country. The work which
was being done by Roosevelt in New York, his mid-
night walks tlarough the worst quarters of the great city,
to see whether the guardians of the peace did their
duty, which made the newspapers compare him to Haroun
Al Raschid, all appealed to the popular imagination. A
purely local office became national in his hands, and his
picture appeared in the shops of European cities. There
was something more than vigor and picturesqueness
necessary to explain these phenomena. The truth is
that Roosevelt was really laboring through a welter of
details to carry out certain general principles which
went to the very roots of society and government. He
wished the municipal administration to be something
far greater than a business man's administration, which
was the demand that had triumphed at the polls. He
wanted to make it an administration of the working-
men, of the dwellers in the tenements, of the poverty
and suffering which haunted the back streets and liidden
purlieus of the huge city. The people did not formu-
late these purposes as they watched what he was doing,
but they felt them and understood them by that instinct
which is often so keen in vast bodies of men. The man
who was toiling in the seeming obscurity of the New
York police commission again became very distinct to
his fellow countrymen and deepened tlieir consciousness
101
Theodore Roosevelt
of his existence and their comprehension of his purposes
and aspirations.
Striking as was the effect of this police work, it
only lasted for two years. In 1897 he was offered by
President McKinley, whom he had energetically sup-
ported in the preceding campaign, the position of assist-
ant secretary of the navy. He accepted at once, for the
place and the work both appealed to him most strongly.
The opportunity did not come without resistance. The
president, an old friend, liked him and believed in him,
but the secretary of the navy had doubts, and also
fears that Roosevelt might be a disturbing and restless
assistant. There were many politicians, too, especially
in his own State, whom his activities as civil service and
police commissioner did not delight, and these men
opposed him. But his friends were powerful and devoted,
and the president appointed him.
His new place had to him a peculiar attraction.
He loved the navy. He had written its brilliant history
in the War of 1812. He had done all in his power in
stimulating public opinion to support the " new navy "
we were just then beginning to build. That war was
coming with Spain he had no doubt. We were impre-
pared, of course, even for such a war as this, but Roose-
velt set himself to do what could be done. The best
and most farseeing officers rallied round him, but the
opportunities were limited. There was much in detail
accomplished which can not be described here, but two
acts of his which had very distinct effect upon the for-
tunes of the war must be noted. He saw very plainly —
although most people never perceived it at all — that
102
Theodore Roosevelt
the Philippines would be a vital point in any war with
Spain. For this reason it was highly important to have
the right man in command of the Asiatic squadron.
Roosevelt was satisfied that Dewey was the right man,
and that his rival was not. He set to work to secure
the place for Dewey. Through the aid of the Senators
from Dewey's native state and others, he succeeded.
Dewey was ordered to the Asiatic squadron. Our rela-
tions with Spain grew worse and worse. On February
25, 1898, war was drawing very near, and that Saturday
afternoon Roosevelt happened to be acting secretary and
sent out the following cablegram :
Dewey — Hongkong:
Order the squadron, except the Monocacy, to Hongkong. 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 the Philippine Islands. Keep Olympia until
further orders.
Roosevelt.
I believe he was never again permitted to be acting
secretary. But the deed was done. The wise word of
readiness had been spoken and was not recalled. War
came, and as April closed, Dewey, all prepared, slipped
out of Hongkong and on May 1st fought the battle of
Manila Bay.
Roosevelt, however, did not continue long in the
Navy Department. Many of his friends felt that he
was doing such admirable work there that he ought to
remain, but as soon as war was declared he determined
to go, and his resolution was not to be shaken. Nothing
could prevent his fighting for his country when the
103
Theodore Roosevelt
country was at war. Congress had authorized three
volunteer regiments of cavalry, and the president and
the secretary of war gave to Leonard Wood — then a
surgeon in the regular army — as colonel, and to Theo-
dore Roosevelt, as lieutenant colonel, authority to raise
one of these regiments, known officially as the First
United States Volunteer Cavalry, and to all the country
as the " Rough Riders." The regiment was raised
chiefly in the southwest and west, where Roosevelt's
popularity and reputation among the cowboys and the
ranchmen brought many eager recruits to serve with
him. After the regiment had been organized and equipped
they had some difficulty in getting to Cuba, but Roose-
velt as usual broke through all obstacles, and finally
succeeded, with Colonel Wood, in getting away with two
battalions, leaving one battalion and the horses behind.
The regiment got into action immediately on land-
ing and forced its way, after some sharp fighting in
the jungle, to the high ground on which were placed
the fortifications which defended the approach to San-
tiago. Colonel Wood was almost immediately given
command of a brigade, and this left Roosevelt colonel
of the regiment. In the battle which ensued and which
resulted in the capture of the positions commanding
Santiago and the bay, the Rough Riders took a leading
part, storming one of the San Juan heights, which they
christened Kettle Hill, with Roosevelt leading the men
in person. It was a dashing, gallant assault, well led
and thoroughly successful. Santiago fell after the defeat
of the fleet, and then followed a period of sickness and
suffering — the latter due to unreadiness — where Roose-
104
Theodore Roosevelt
velt did everything with his usual driving energy to
save his men, whose loyalty to their colonel went with
them through life. The war was soon over, but brief
as it had been Roosevelt and his men had highly dis-
tinguished themselves, and he stood out in the popular
imagination as one of the conspicuous figures of the
conflict. He brought his regiment back to the United
States, where they were mustered out, and almost imme-
diately afterwards he was nominated by the Republi-
cans as their candidate for governor of the State of
New York. The situation in New York was unfavorable
for the Republicans, and the younger men told Senator
Piatt, who dominated the organization and who had no
desire for Roosevelt, that unless he was nominated they
could not win. Thus forced, the organization accepted
him, and it was well for the party that they did so.
The campaign was a sharp one and very doubtful, but
Roosevelt was elected by a narrow margin and assumed
office at the beginning of the new year of 1899. He was
then in his forty-first year.
Many problems faced him and none were evaded.
He was well aware that the " organization " under Sen-
ator Piatt would not like many things he was sure to
do, but he determined that he would have neither per-
sonal quarrels nor faction fights. He knew, being blessed
with strong common sense, that the Republican party,
his own party, was the instrument by which alone he
could attain his ends, and he did not intend that it
should be blunted and made useless by internal strife.
And yet he meant to have his own way. It was a diffi-
cult role which he undertook to play, but he succeeded.
105
Theodore Roosevelt
He had many differences with the organization man-
agers, but he declined to lose his temper or to have a
break, and he also refused to yield when he felt he was
standing for the right and a principle was at stake.
Thus he prevailed. He won on the canal question,
changed the insurance commissioner, and carried the
insurance legislation he desired. As in these cases, so
it was in lesser things. In the police commission he
had been strongly impressed by the dangers as he saw
them of the undue and often sinister influence of busi-
ness, finance, and great money interests upon govern-
ment and politics. These feelings were deepened and
broadened by his experience and observation on the
larger stage of state administration. The belief that
political equality must be strengthened and sustained
by industrial equality and a larger economic opportunity
was constantly in his thoughts until it became a govern-
ing and guiding principle.
Meantime he grew steadily stronger among the peo-
ple, not only of his own state but of the country, for
he was well known throughout the west, and there they
were watching eagerly to see how the ranchman and
colonel of Rough Riders, who had touched both their
hearts and their imagination, was faring as governor of
New York. The office he held is always regarded as
related to the presidency, and this, joined to his strik-
ing success as governor, brought him into the presiden-
tial field wherever men speculated about the political
future. It was universally agreed that McKinley was
to be renominated, and so the talk turned to making
Roosevelt vice-president. A friend wrote to him in the
106
Theodore Roosevelt
summer of 1899 as to this drift of opinion, then assum-
ing serious proportions. " Do not attempt," he said,
" to thwart the popular desire. You are not a man
nor are your close friends men who can plan, arrange,
and manage you into office. You must accept the popu-
lar wish, whatever it is, follow your star, and let the
future care for itself. It is the tradition of our politics,
and a very poor tradition, that the vice-presidency is
a shelf. It ought to be, and there is no reason why it
should not be, a stepping-stone. Put there by the popu-
lar desire, it would be so to you." This view, quite
naturally, did not commend itself to Governor Roosevelt
at the moment. He was doing valuable work in New
York; he was deeply engaged in important reforms which
he had much at heart and which he wished to carry
through; and the vice-presidency did not attract him.
A year later he v;as at Philadelphia, a delegate at large
from his state, with his mind unchanged as to the vice-
presidency, while his New York friends, anxious to have
him continue his work at Albany, were urging him to
refuse. Senator Piatt, for obvious reasons, wished to
make him vice-president, another obstacle to his taking
it. Roosevelt forced the New York delegation to agi'ce
on someone else for vice-president, but he could not
hold the convention, nor could Senator Hanna, who
wisely accepted the situation. Governor Roosevelt was
nominated on the first ballot, all other candidates with-
drawing. He accepted the nomination, little as he
liked it.
Thus when it came to the point he instinctively
followed his star and grasped the unvacillating hand of
107
Theodore Roosevelt
destiny. Little did he think that destiny would lead
him to the White House through a tragedy which cut
him to the heart. He was on a mountain in the Adiron-
dacks when a guide made his way to him across the
forest with a telegram telling him that McKinley, the
wise, the kind, the gentle, with nothing in his heart but
good will to all men, was dying from a woimd inflicted
by an anarchist murderer, and that the vice-president
must come to Buffalo at once. A rapid night drive
through the woods and a special train brought him to
Buffalo. McKinley was dead before he arrived, and that
evening Governor Roosevelt was sworn in as president
of the United States.
Within the narrow limits of an address it is impos-
sible to give an account of an administration of seven
years which will occupy hundreds of pages when the
history of the United States during that period is writ-
ten. It was a memorable administration, memorable in
itself and not by the accident of events, and large in
its accomplishment. It began with a surprise. There
were persons in the United States who had carefully
cultivated, and many people who had accepted without
thought, the idea that Roosevelt was in some way a
dangerous man. They gloomily predicted that there
would be a violent change in the policies and in the
oftkers of the McKinley administration. But Roosevelt
had not studied the history of his country in vain. He
knew that in three of the four cases where vice-presidents
had succeeded to the presidency through the death of
the elected president, their coming had resulted in a
violent shifting of policies and men, and. as a conse-
i08
Theodore Roosevelt
quence, in most injurious dissensions, which in two cases
at least proved fatal to the party in power. In all four
instances the final obliteration of the vice-president who
had come into power through the death of his chief
was complete. President Roosevelt did not intend to
permit any of these results. As soon as he came into
office he announced that he intended to retain President
McKinley's cabinet and to carry out his policies, which
had been sustained at the polls. To those overzealous
friends who suggested that he could not trust tlie appoin-
tees of President McKinley and that he would be but
a pallid imitation of his predecessor he replied tliat he
thought, in any event, the administration would be his,
and that if new occasions required new policies he felt
that he could meet them, and that no one would suspect
him of being a pallid imitation of anybody. His deci-
sion, however, gratified and satisfied the country, and
it was not apparent that Roosevelt was hampered in
any way in carrying out his own policies by this wise
refusal to make sudden and violent changes.
Those who were alarmed about what he might do
had also suggested that with his combative propensities
he was likely to involve the country in war. Yet there
never has been an administration, as afterwards ap-
peared, when we were more perfectly at peace with all
the world, nor were our foreign relations ever in danger
of producing hostilities. But tliis was not due in the
least to the adoption of a timid or yielding foreign pol-
icy; on the contrary, it was owing to the firmness of the
president in all foreign questions and the knowledge
which other nations soon acquired that President Roose-
109
Theodore Roosevelt
velt was a man who never threatened unless he meant
to carry out his threat, the result being that he was
not obliged to threaten at all. One of his earliest suc-
cesses was forcing the settlement of the Alaskan bound-
ary question, which was the single open question with
Great Britain that was really dangerous and contained
within itself possibilities of war. The accomplishment
of this settlement was followed later, while Mr. Root
was secretary of state, by the arrangement of all our
outstanding differences with Canada, and during Mr.
Root's tenure of office over thirty treaties were made
with different nations, including a number of practical
and valuable treaties of arbitration. When Germany
started to take advantage of the difficulties in Venezuela
the affair culminated in the dispatch of Dewey and the
fleet to the Caribbean, the withdrawal of England at
once, and the agreement of Germany to the reference
of all subjects of difference to arbitration. It was Presi-
dent Roosevelt whose good offices brought Russia and
Japan together in a negotiation which closed the war
between those two powers. It was Roosevelt's influence
which contributed powerfully to settling the threatening
controversy between Germany, France, and England in
regard to Morocco, by the Algeciras conference. It was
Roosevelt who sent the American fleet of battleships
round the world, one of the most convincing peace
movements ever made on behalf of the United States.
Thus it came about that this president, dreaded at the
begirming on account of his combative spirit, received
the Nobel prize in 1906 as the person who had con-
tributed most to the peace of the world in the preceding
110
Theodore Roosevelt
years, and his contribution was the result of strength
and knowledge and not of weakness.
At home he recommended to Congress legislation
which was directed toward a larger control of the rail-
roads and to removing the privileges and curbing the
power of great business combinations obtained through
rebates and preferential freight rates. This legislation
led to opposition in Congress and to much resistance
by those affected. As we look back, this legislation,
so much contested at the time, seems very moderate,
but it was none the less momentous. President Roose-
velt never believed in government ownership, but he
was thoroughly in favor of strong and effective govern-
ment supervision and regulation of what are now known
generally as public utilities. He had a deep conviction
that the political influence of financial and business
interests and of great combinations of capital had become
so great that the American people were beginning to
distrust their own government, than which there could
be no greater peril to the republic. By his measures, and
by his general attitude toward capital and labor both,
he sought to restore and maintain the confidence of the
people in the government they had themselves created.
In the Panama canal he left the most enduring, as
it was the most visible, monument of his administration.
Much criticized at the moment for his action in regard
to it, which time since then has justified and which his-
tory will praise, the great fact remains that the canal is
there. He said himself that he made up his mind that
it was his duty to establish the canal and have the
debate about it afterwards, which seemed to him better
111
Theodore Roosevelt
than to begin with indefinite debate and have no canal
at all. This is a view which posterity both at home
and abroad will accept and approve.
These, passing over as we must in silence many
other beneficent acts, are only a few of the most salient
features of his administration, stripped of all detail and
all enlargement. Despite the conflicts which some of
his domestic policies had produced not only with his
political opponents but within the Republican ranks, he
was overwhelmingly reelected in 1904, and when the
seven years had closed the country gave a like majority
to his chosen successor, taken from his own cabinet.
On the 4th of March, 1909, he returned to private life
at the age of fifty, having been the youngest president
known to our history.
During the brief vacations which he had been able
to secure in the midst of the intense activities of his
public life after the Spanish War he had turned for
enjoyment to expeditions in pursuit of big game in the
wildest and most unsettled regions of the country. Open-
air life and all its accompaniments of riding and hunt-
ing were to him the one thing that brought him the
most rest and relaxation. Now, having left the presi-
dency, he was able to give full scope to the love of
adventure, which had been strong with him from boy-
hood. Soon after his retirement from office he went to
Africa, accompanied by a scientific expedition sent out
by the Smithsonian Institution. He landed in East
Africa, made his way into the interior, and thence to
the sources of the Nile, after a trip in every way suc-
cessful, both in exploration and in pursuit of big game.
112
Theodore Roosevelt
He then canie down the Nile through Eg>-pt and thence
to Europe, and no private citizen of the United States —
probably no private man of any country — was ever
received in a manner comparable to that which met
Roosevelt in every country in Europe which he visited.
Everywhere it was the same — in Italy, in Germany, in
France, in England. Every honor was paid to him that
authority could devise, accompanied by every mark of
affection and admiration which the people of those
countries were able to show. He made few speeches
while in Europe, but in those few he did not fail to give
to the questions and thought of the time real and gen-
uine contributions, set forth in plain language, always
vigorous and often eloquent. He returned in the sum-
mer of 1910 to the United States and was greeted with
a reception on his landing in New York quite equaling
in interest and enthusiasm that which had been given
to him in Europe.
For two years afterwards he devoted himself to
writing, not only articles as contributing editor of The
Outlook, but books of his own and addresses and speeches
which he was constantly called upon to make. No man
in private hfe probably ever had such an audience as
he addressed, whether with tongue or pen, upon the
questions of the day, with a constant refrain as to the
qualities necessary to make men both good citizens and
good Americans. In the spring of 1912 he decided to
become a candidate for the Republican nomination for
the presidency, and a very heated struggle followed
between himself and President Taft for delegations to
the convention. The convention when it assem.bled in
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Theodore Roosevelt
Chicago was the stormiest ever known in our history.
President Taft was renominated, most of the Roosevelt
delegates refusing to vote, and a large body of Repub-
licans thereupon formed a new party called the " Pro-
gressive" and nominated Mr. Roosevelt as their candi-
date. This division into two nearly equal parts of the
Republican party, which had elected Mr. Roosevelt and
Mr. Taft in succession by the largest majorities ever
known, made the victory of the Democratic candidate
absolutely certain. Colonel Roosevelt, however, stood
second in the poll, receiving 4,119,507 votes, carrying
six states and winning eighty -eight electoral votes. There
never has been in political history, when all conditions
are considered, such an exhibition of extraordinary per-
sonal strength. To have secured eighty-eight electoral
votes when his own party was hopelessly divided, with
no great historic party name and tradition behind him,
with an organization which had to be hastily brought
together in a few weeks, seems almost incredible, and
in all his career there is no display of the strength of
his hold upon the people equal to this.
In the following year he yielded again to the long-
ing for adventure and exploration. Going to South
America, he made his way up through Paraguay and
western Brazil, and then across a trackless wilderness of
jungle and dowTi an unlmown river into the valley of
the Amazon. It was a remarkable expedition and car-
ried him through what is probably the most deadly
climate in the world. He suffered severely from the
fever, the poison of which never left him and which
finally shortened his life.
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Theodore Roosevelt
In the next year the great war began, and Colonel
Roosevelt threw himself into it with all the energy of
his nature. With Major Gardner he led the great fight
for preparedness in a country utterly unprepared. He
saw very plainly that in all human probability it would
be impossible for us to keep out of the war. Therefore
in season and out of season he demanded that we should
make ready. He and Major Gardner, with the others
who joined them, roused a widespread and powerful
sentiment in the country, but there was no practical
effect on the army. The navy was the single place
where anything was really done, and that only in the
bill of 1916, so that war finally came upon us as unready
as Roosevelt had feared we should be. Yet the cam-
paign he made was not in vain, for in addition to the
question of preparation he spoke earnestly of other things,
other burning questions, and he always spoke to an
enormous body of listeners everywhere. He would have
had us protest and take action at the very beginning,
in 1914, when Belgium was invaded. He would have
had us go to war when the murders of the Lusilania
were perpetrated. He tried to stir the soul and rouse
the spirit of the American people, and despite every
obstacle he did awaken them, so that when the hour
came, in April, 1917, a large proportion of the Ameri-
can people were even then ready in spirit and in hope.
How telling his work had been was proved by the con-
fession of his country's enemies, for when he died the only
discordant note, the only harsh words, came from the
German press. Germany knew whose voice it was that
more powerfully than any other had called Americans
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Theodore Roosevelt
to the battle in behalf of freedom and civilization, where
the advent of the armies of the United States gave
victory to the cause of justice and righteousness.
When the United States went to war Colonel Roose-
velt's one desire was to be allowed to go to the fighting
line. There if fate had laid its hand upon him it would
have found him glad to fall in the trenches or in a charge
at the head of his men, but it was not permitted to him
to go, and thus he was denied the reward which he
would have ranked above all others, " the great prize
of death in battle." But he was a patriot in every fiber
of his being, and personal disappointment in no manner
slackened or cooled his zeal. Everything that he could
do to forward the war, to quicken preparation, to stim-
ulate patriotism, to urge on efficient action, was done.
Day and night, in season and out of season, he never
ceased his labors. Although prevented from going to
France himself, he gave to the great conflict that which
was far dearer to him than his own life. I can not say
that he sent his four sons, because they all went at once,
as everyone knew that their father's sons would go.
Two have been badly wounded; one was killed. He
met the blow with the most splendid and unflinching
courage, met it as Siward, the Earl of Northumberland,
receives in the play the news of his son's death:
Siw. Had he his hurts before?
Ross. Ay, on the front.
Siw. Why, then, God's soldier be he!
Had I as many sons as I have hairs,
I would not wish them to a fairer death:
And so his knell is knoU'd.
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Theodore Roosevelt
Among the great tragedies of Shakespeare, and there
are none greater in all the literature of man, Macbeth
was Colonel Roosevelt's favorite, and the moving words
which I have just quoted I am sure were in his heart
and on his lips when he faced with stern resolve and
self-control the anguish brought to him by the death of
his youngest boy, killed in the glory of a brave and
brilliant youth.
He lived to see the right prevail; he lived to see
civilization triumph over organized barbarism; and there
was great joy in his heart. In all his last days the
thoughts which filled his mind were to secure a peace
which should render Germany forever harmless and
advance the cause of ordered freedom in every land
and among every race. This occupied him to the exclu-
sion of everything else, except what he called and what
we like to call Americanism. There was no hour down
to the end when he would not turn aside from every-
thing else to preach the doctrine of Americanism, of the
principles and the faith upon wliich American govern-
ment rested, and which all true Americans should wear
in their heart of hearts. He was a great patriot, a great
man; above all, a great American. His country was the
ruling, mastering passion of his life from the beginning
even unto the end.
So closes the inadequate, most incomplete accoimt
of a life full of work done and crowded with achieve-
ment, brief in years and prematurely ended. The reci-
tation of tlie offices which he held and of some of the
deeds that he did is but a bare, imperfect catalogue
into which history when we are gone will breathe a
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Theodore Roosevelt
lasting life. Here today it is only a background, and
that which most concerns us now is what the man was
of whose deeds done it is possible to make such a list.
What a man was is ever more important than what he did,
because it is upon what he was that all his achievement
depends and his value and meaning to his fellow men
must finally rest.
Theodore Roosevelt always believed that character
was of greater worth and moment than anything else.
He possessed abilities of the first order, which he was
disposed to imderrate, because he set so much greater
store upon the moral qualities which we bring together
under the single word " character."
Let me speak first of his abilities. He had a power-
ful, well-trained, ever-active mind. He thought clearly,
independently, and with originality and imagination.
These priceless gifts were sustained by an extraordi-
nary power of acquisition, joined to a greater quickness
of apprehension, a greater swiftness in seizing upon the
essence of a question, than I have ever happened to see
in any other man. His reading began with natural
history, then went to general history, and thence to the
whole field of literature. He had a capacity for con-
centration which enabled him to read with remarkable
rapidity anything which he took up, if only for a moment,
and which separated him for the time being from every-
thing going on about him. The subjects upon which he
was well and widely informed would, if enumerated, fill
a large space, and to this power of acquisition was united
not only a tenacious but an extraordinary, accurate
memory. It was never safe to contest with him on any
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Theodore Roosevelt
question of fact or figures, whether they related to the
ancient Assyrians or to the present-day conditions of the
tribes of central Africa, to the Syracusan Expedition, as
told by Thucydides, or to protective coloring in birds and
animals. He knew and held details always at command,
but he was not mastered by them. He never failed
to see the forest on account of the trees or the city on
account of the houses.
He made himself a writer, not only of occasional
addresses and essays, but of books. He had the trained
thoroughness of the historian, as he showed in his
" HisloTy of the War of 1812 " and of the " Winning
of the West," and nature had endowed him with that
most enviable of gifts, the faculty of narrative and the
art of the teller of tales. He knew how to weigh evi-
dence in the historical scales and how to depict character.
He learned to write with great ease and fluency. He
was always vigorous, always energetic, always clear and
forcible in everything he wrote — nobody could ever
misunderstand him — and when he allowed himself time
and his feelings were deeply engaged he gave to the world
many pages of beauty as well as power, not only in
thought but in form and style. At the same time he
made himself a public speaker, and here again, through
a practice probably unequaled in amount, he became
one of the most effective in all our history. In speaking,
as in writing, he was always full of force and energy;
he drove home his arguments and never was misunder-
stood. In many of his more carefully prepared addresses
are to be found passages of impressive eloquence, touched
with imagination and instinct with grace and feeling.
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Theodore Roosevelt
He had a large capacity for administration, clear-
ness of vision, promptness in decision, and a thorough
apprehension of what constituted efficient organization.
All the vast and varied work which he accomplished
could not have been done unless he had had most
exceptional natural abilities, but behind them, most
important of all, was the driving force of an intense
energy and the ever-present belief that a man could
do what he willed to do. As he made himself an athlete,
a horseman, a good shot, a bold explorer, so he made
himself an exceptionally successful writer and speaker.
Only a most abnormal energy would have enabled him
to enter and conquer in so many fields of intellectual
achievement. But something more than energy and
determination is needed for the largest success, especially
in the world's high places. The first requisite of leader-
ship is ability to lead, and that ability Theodore Roosevelt
possessed in full measure. Whether in a game or in
the hunting field, in a fight or in politics, he sought
the front, where, as Webster once remarked, there is
always plenty of room for those who can get there.
His instinct was always to say " com.e " rather than
" go," and he had the talent of command.
His also was the rare gift of arresting attention
sharply and suddenly, a very precious attribute, and
one easier to illustrate than to describe. This arresting
power is like a common experience, which we have all
had on entering a picture gallery, of seeing at once and
before all others a single picture among the many on
the walls. For a moment you see nothing else, although
you may be surrounded with masterpieces. In that
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Theodore Roosevelt
particular picture lurks a strange, capturing, gripping
fascination as impalpable as it is unmistakable. Roose-
velt had this same arresting, fascinating quality.
Whether in the Legislature at Albany, the civil service
commission at Washington, or the police commission in
New York, whether in the Spanish War or on the plains
among the cowboys, he was always vivid, at times start-
ling, never to be overlooked. Nor did this power stop here.
He not only without effort or intention drew the eager
attention of the people to himself, he could also engage
and fax their thoughts upon anything which happened
to interest him. It might be a man or a book, reformed
spelling or some large historical question, his traveling
library or the military preparation of the United States,
he had but to say, " See how interesting, how important,
is this man or this event," and thousands, even millions,
of people would reply, " We never thought of this before,
but it certainly is one of the most interesting, most
absorbing things in the world." He touched a subject
and it suddenly began to glow as when the high-power
electric cvirrent touches the metal and the white light
starts forth and dazzles the onlooking eyes. We know
the air played by the Pied Piper of Hamelin no better
than we know why Theodore Roosevelt thus drew the
interest of men after him. We only know they followed
wherever his insatiable activity of mind invited them.
Men follow also most readily a leader who is always
there before them, clearly visible and just where they
expect him. They are especially eager to go forward
with a man who never sounds a retreat. Roosevelt
was always advancing, always struggling to make things
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Theodore Roosevelt
better, to carry some much-needed reform, and help
humanity to a larger chance, to a fairer condition, to
a happier life. Moreover, he looked always for an
ethical question. He was at his best when he was
fighting the battle of right against wrong. He thought
soundly and wisely upon questions of expediency or
of political economy, but they did not rouse him or
bring him the absorbed interest of the eternal conflict
between good and evil. Yet he was never impractical,
never blinded by counsels of perfection, never seeking
to make the better the enemy of the good. He wished
to get the best, but he would strive for all that was
possible even if it fell short of the highest at which he
aimed. He studied the lessons of history, and did not
think the past bad simply because it was the past, or
the new good solely because it was new. He sought to
try all questions on their intrinsic merits, and that
was why he succeeded in advancing, in making govern-
ment and society better, where others, who would be
content with nothing less than an abstract perfection,
failed. He would never compromise a principle, but
he was eminently tolerant of honest differences of
opinion. He never hesitated to give generous credit
where credit seemed due, whether to friend or opponent,
and in this way he gathered recruits and yet never lost
adherents.
The criticism most commonly made upon Theodore
Roosevelt was that he was impulsive and impetuous;
that he acted without thinking. He would have been
the last to claim infallibility. His head did not turn
when fame came to him and choruses of admiration
122
Theodore Roosevelt
sounded in his ears, for he was neither vain nor credu-
lous. He knew that he made mistakes, and never hesi-
tated to admit them to be mistakes and to correct them
or put them behind him when satisfied that they were
such. But he wasted no time in mourning, explaining,
or vainly regretting them. It is also true that the
middle way did not attract him. He was apt to go far,
both in praise and censure, although nobody could
analyze qualities and balance them justly in judging
men better than he. He felt strongly, and as he had
no concealments of any kind, he expressed himself in
like manner. But vehemence is not violence, nor is
earnestness anger, which a very wise man defined as a
brief madness. It was all according to his nature, just
as his eager cordiality in meeting men and women, his
keen interest in otlier people's cares or joys, was not
assumed, as some persons thought who did not know
him. It was all profoundly natural, it was all real,
and in that way and in no other was he able to meet
and greet his fellow men. He spoke out with the most
unrestrained frankness at all times and in all companies.
Not a day passed in the presidency when he was not
guilty of what the trained diplomatist would call indis-
cretions. But the frankness had its own reward. There
never was a president whose confidence was so respected
or with whom the barriers of honor which surround
private conversation were more scrupulously observed.
At the same time, when the public interest required,
no man could be more wisely reticent. He was apt,
it is true, to act suddenly and decisively, but it was
a complete mistake to suppose that he therefore acted
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Theodore Roosevelt
without thought or merely on a momentary impulse.
When he had made up his mind he was resolute and
unchanging, but he made up his mind only after much
reflection, and there never was a president in the White
House who consulted not only friends but political
opponents and men of all kinds and conditions more
than Theodore Roosevelt. When he had reached his
conclusion he acted quickly and drove hard at his object,
and this it was, probably, which gave an impression that
he acted sometimes hastily and thoughtlessly, which was
a complete misapprehension of the man. His action
was emphatic, but emphasis implies reflection not
thoughtlessness. One can not even emphasize a word
without a process, however slight, of mental
differentiation.
The feeling that he was impetuous and impulsive
was also due to the fact that in a sudden, seemingly
vinexpected crisis he would act with great rapidity.
This happened when he had been for weeks, perhaps
for months, considering what he should do if such a
crisis arose. He always believed that one of the most
important elements of success, whether in public or in
private life, was to know what one meant to do under
given circumstances. If he saw the possibility of
perilous questions arising, it was his practice to think
over carefully just how he would act under certain
contingencies. Many of the contingencies never arose.
Now and then a contingency became an actuality, and
then he was ready. He knew what he meant to do, he
acted at once, and some critics considered him
impetuous, impulsive, and, therefore, dangerous, because
124
Theodore Roosevelt
they did not know that he had thought the question all
out beforehand.
Very many people, powerful elements in tlie com-
munity, regarded him at one time as a dangerous radical,
bent upon overthrowing all the safeguards of society and
planning to tear out the foundations of an ordered liberty.
As a matter of fact, what Theodore Roosevelt was trying
to do was to strengthen American society and American
govenunent by demonstrating to the American people
that he was aiming at a larger economic equality and
a more generous industrial opportunity for all men,
and that any combination of capital or of business, wliich
threatened the control of the government by the people
who made it, was to be curbed and resisted, just as
he would have resisted an enemy who tried to take
possession of the city of Washington. He had no
hostility to a man because he had been successful in
business or because he had accumulated a fortune.
If the man had been honestly successful and used his
fortune wisely and beneficently, he was regarded by
Theodore Roosevelt as a good citizen. The vulgar
hatred of wealth found no place in his heart. He had
but one standard, one test, and that was whether a
man, rich or poor, was an honest man, a good citizen,
and a good American. He tried men, whether they
were men of "big business" or members of a labor
union, by their deeds, and m no other way. The tyranny
of anarchy and disorder, such as is now desolating Russia,
was as hateful to him as any other tyranny, whether
it came from an autocratic system like that of Germany
Of from the misuse of organized capital. Personally he
125
Theodore Roosevelt
believed in every man earning his own living, and he
earned money and was glad to do so; but he had no
desire or taste for mailing money, and he was entirely
indifferent to it. The siniplest of men in his own habits,
the only thing he really would have liked to have done
with ample wealth would have been to give freely to
the many good objects which continually interested
him.
Theodore Roosevelt's power, however, and the main
source of all his achievement, was not in the offices
which he held, for those offices were to him only oppor-
tunities, but in the extraordinary hold which he established
and retained over great bodies of men. He had the
largest personal following ever attained by any man
in our history. I do not mean by this the following
which comes from great political office or from party
candidacy. There have been many men who have held
the highest offices in our history by the votes of their
fellow countrymen who have never had anything more
than a very small personal following. By personal
following is meant here that which supports and sustains
and goes with a man simply because he is himself; a
following which does not care whether their leader and
chief is in office or out of office, which is with him and
behind liim because they, one and all, believe in him
and love liim and are ready to stand by him for the sole
and simple reason that they have perfect faith that he
will lead them where they wish and where they ought
to go. This following Theodore Roosevelt had, as
I have said, in a larger degree than anyone in our history,
and the fact that he had it and what he did with it for
126
Theodore Roosevelt
the welfare of his fellow men have given him his great
place and his lasting fame.
This is not mere assertion; it was demonstrated, as
I have already pointed out, by the vote of 1912, and at
all times, from the day of his accession to the presi-
dency onward, there were millions of people in this
country ready to follow Theodore Roosevelt and vote
for him, or do anything else that he wanted, whenever
he demanded their support or raised his standard. It
was this great mass of support among the people, and
which probably was never larger than in these last
years, that gave him his immense influence upon public
opinion, and public opinion was the weapon which
he used to carry out all the policies which he wished to
bring to fulfillment and to consolidate all the achieve-
ments upon which he had set his heart. This extra-
ordinary popular strength was not given to him solely
because the people knew him to be honest and brave,
because they were certain that physical fear was an
emotion unknown to him, and that his moral courage
equaled the physical. It was not merely because they
thoroughly believed him to be sincere. All this knowl-
edge and belief, of course, went to making his popular
leadership secure; but there was much more in it than
that, something that went deeper, basic elements which
were not upon the surface which were due to qualities
of temperament interwoven with his very being,
inseparable from him and yet subtle rather than obvious
in their effects.
All men admire courage, and that he possessed in
the highest degree. But he had also something larger
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Theodore Roosevelt
and rarer than courage, in the ordinary acceptation
of the word. When an assassin shot him at Milwaukee
he was severely v/ounded; how severely he could not
tell, but it might well have been mortal. He went on
to the great meeting awaiting him and there, bleeding,
suffering, ignorant of his fate, but still unconquered,
made his speech and went from the stage to the hospital.
What bore him up was the dauntless spirit which could
rise victorious over pain and darkness and the unknown
and meet the duty of the hour as if all were well. A
spirit like this awakens in all men more than admira-
tion, it kindles affection and appeals to every generous
impulse.
Very different, but equally compelling, was another
quality. There is nothing in human beings at once
so sane and so sympathetic as a sense of humor. This
great gift the good fairies conferred upon Theodore
Roosevelt at his birth in unstinted measure. No man
ever had a more abundant sense of humor — joyous,
irrepressible humor — and it never deserted him. Even
at the most serious and even perilous moments if there
was a gleam of humor anywhere he saw it and rejoiced
and helped himself with it over the rough places and in
the dark hour. He loved fun, loved to joke and chaff,
and, what is more uncommon, greatly enjoyed being
chaffed himself. His ready smile and contagious laugh
made countless friends and saved him from many an
enmity. Even more generally effective than his humor,
and yet allied to it, was the universal knowledge that
Roosevelt had no secrets from the American people.
Yet another quality — perhaps the most engag-
128
Theodore Roosevelt
ing of all — was his homely, generous humanity which
enabled him to speak directly to the primitive instincts
of man.
He dwelt with the tribes of the marsh and moor,
He sate at the board of kings;
He tasted the toil of the burdened slave
And the joy that triumph brings.
But whether to jungle or palace hall
Or white-walled tent he came.
He was brother to king and soldier and slave.
His welcome was the same.
He was very human and intensely American, and
this knit a bond between him and the American people
which nothing could ever break. And then he had yet
one more attraction, not so impressive, perhaps, as the
others, but none the less very important and very
captivating. He never by any chance bored the American
people. They might laugh at him or laugh with him,
they might like what he said or dislike it, they might
agree with him or disagree with him, but they were
never wearied of him, and he never failed to interest
them. He was never heavy, laborious, or dull. If he
had made any effort to be always interesting and enter-
taining he would have failed and been tiresome. He
was unfailingly attractive because he was always per-
fectly nattiral and his own vinconscious self. And so all
these things combined to give him his hold upon the
American people, not only upon their minds, but upon
their hearts and their instincts, which nothing could ever
weaken, and v/hich made him one of the most remark-
able, as he was one of the strongest, characters that
the history of popular government can show. He was
129
Theodore Roosevelt
also — and this is very revealing and explanatory, too,
of his vast popularity — a man of ideals. He did not
expose them daily on the roadside with language fluttering
about them like the Thibetan who ties his slip of paper to
the prayer wheel whirling in the wind. He kept his
ideals to himself until the hour of fulfillment arrived.
Some of them were the dreams of boyhood, from which
he never departed, and which I have seen him carry out
shyly and yet thoroughly and with intense personal
satisfaction.
He had a touch of the knight errant in his daily life,
although he would never have admitted it; but it was
there. It was not visible in the medieval form of shining
armor and dazzling tournaments, but in the never-ceasing
effort to help the poor and the oppressed, to defend and
protect women and children, to right the wronged
and succor the downtrodden. Passing by on the other
side was not a mode of travel through Ufa ever possible
to him ; and yet he was as far distant from the professional
philanthropist as could well be imagined, for all he
tried to do to help his fellow men he regarded as part
of the day's work to be done and not talked about.
No man ever prized sentiment or hated sentimentality
more than he. He preached unceasingly the familiar
morals which lie at the bottom of both family and public
life. The blood of some ancestral Scotch covenanter or
of some Dutch reformed preacher facing the tyranny of
Philip of Spain was in his veins, and with his large
opportunities and his vast audiences he was always
ready to appeal for justice and righteousness. But his
own personal ideals he never attempted to thrust upon
130
Theodore Roosevelt
the world until the day came when they were to be
translated into realities of action.
When the future historian traces Theodore Roose-
velt's extraordinary career he will find these embodied
ideals planted like milestones along the road over which
he marched. They never left him. His ideal of public
service was to be found in his life, and as his life drew
to its close he had to meet his ideal of sacrifice face to
face. All his sons went from him to the war, and one
was killed upon the field of honor. Of all the ideals
that Uft men up, the hardest to fulfill is the ideal of
sacrifice. Theodore Roosevelt met it as he had all
others and fulfilled it to the last jot of its terrible
demands. His country asked the sacrifice and he gave
it with solemn pride and uncomplaining lips.
This is not the place to speak of his private life,
but within that sacred circle no man was ever more
blessed in the utter devotion of a noble wife and the
passionate love of his children. The absolute purity
and beauty of his family life tell us why the pride and
interest which his fellow countrymen felt in him were
always touched with the warm light of love. In the
home so dear to him, in his sleep, death came, and —
So Valiant-for-Truth passed over and all the trumpets sounded for
him on the other side.
131
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