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POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

The  Life  and  Times  of 
THEODORE   ROOSEVELT 


POWER  AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

THE   LIFE   AND   TIMES 

OF  Theodore  Roosevelt 

By  William  Henry  Harbaugh 


FARRAR,    STRAUS    AND    CUDAHY      •      NEW    YORK 


Copyright  ©  1961  by  William  Henry  Harbaugh 
Library  of  Congress  catalog  number:  61-10128 
First  Printing:  1961 


Published  simultaneously  in  Canada  by 
Ambassador  Books,  Ltd.,  Toronto.  Manufactured 
in  the  U.S.A.  by  American  Book-Stratford  Press,  Inc. 


The  author  gratefully  acknowledges  permission  to  quote  brief  extracts 
from  the  following  books:  Howard  K.  Beale,  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the 
Rise  of  America  to  World  Power,  The  Johns  Hopkins  Press;  Elting  E. 
Morison,  Turmoil  and  Tradition:  A  Study  of  the  Life  and  Times  of 
Henry  L.  Stimson,  Houghton  Mifflin  Company;  Elting  E.  Morison  and 
John  M.  Blum  (editors),  The  Letters  of  Theodore  Roosevelt,  copyright 
1951,  1952,  1954  by  the  Harvard  University  Press;  George  E.  Mowry, 
The  Era  of  Theodore  Roosevelt,  Harper  &  Brothers;  George  E.  Mowry, 
Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the  Progressive  Movement,  The  University  of 
Wisconsin  Press;  Theodore  Roosevelt,  African  Game  Trails  (Vol.  IV  of 
the  National  Edition  of  The  Works  of  Theodore  Roosevelt),  and  Theodore 
Roosevelt,  An  Autobiography  (Vol.  XX  of  the  National  Edition),  Charles 
Scribner's  Sons.  Further  acknowledgment  will  be  found  in  the  Preface  of 
this  book  (page  v)  and  in  the  Notes  (page  523). 


PREFACE 


This  biography  is  written  for  the  general  reader — for  the  man  or 
woman  with  a  broad  interest  in  American  history,  and  for  the  college 
student.  I  have  based  it  partly  on  original  sources,  partly  on  memoirs 
and  other  works  by  Theodore  Roosevelt's  contemporaries,  and  partly 
on  the  collection  of  Roosevelt's  letters  and  the  numerous  scholarly 
reappraisals  of  his  turbulent  career  published  in  the  last  fifteen  years. 
Throughout,  I  have  tried  to  keep  Roosevelt  in  the  context  of  his  times 
while  yet  exercising  the  historian's  heavy  and  sobering  responsibility 
of  judging  his  subject's  deeds  in  the  perspective  of  time. 

Inevitably,  I  am  heavily  obligated — to  my  friend  and  former 
professor,  Arthur  S.  Link  of  Princeton,  on  whose  urging  I  decided 
to  undertake  the  project;  to  Elting  E.  Morison  of  M.I.T.  for  his 
thoughtful  appraisal  of  the  entire  manuscript;  to  Hermann  Hagedorn, 
director  emeritus  of  the  Theodore  Roosevelt  Association,  for  the 
generous  gift  of  his  time  and  for  his  many  provocative  and  informa- 
tive suggestions;  to  Alfred  Young  of  Patterson  State  College  for  his 
numerous  perceptive  criticisms  of  the  whole;  and  to  Richard  Lowitt 
of  Connecticut  College  for  Women,  who  was  a  source  of  intellectual 
sustenance  throughout,  criticizing,  encouraging,  and  sharing  always 
his  own  vast  knowledge  of  the  period. 

I  am  also  grateful  to  numerous  other  friends,  colleagues,  or 
graduate  students  for  reading  particular  chapters  or  discussing  special 
topics  with  me.  Among  them  are  Louis  L.  Gerson,  Peter  Schroeder, 
John  Thorkelson,  and  Sam  Witryol  of  the  University  of  Connecticut; 
Norman  Enhoraing  and  Ronald  Grele,  formerly  of  that  institution; 
Ernest  Cawcroft  of  Jamestown,  New  York;  Alexander  M.  Bickel 
and  Ward  S.  Bowman,  Jr.  of  the  Yale  Law  School;  Thomas  N. 


Vi  PREFACE 

Bonner  of  the  University  of  Omaha;  John  Wells  Davidson  and  David 
W.  Hirst  of  The  Papers  of  Woodrow  Wilson;  and  Captain  David 
Horner  of  the  United  States  Military  Academy. 

Edmund  A.  Moore,  my  former  chairman  at  the  University  of 
Connecticut,  and  Harrison  W.  Carter,  dean  of  the  college  of  arts  and 
sciences,  gave  me  the  understanding  without  which  books  can 
hardly  be  written  under  the  new  dispensation  of  overcrowded  classes 
and  increased  teaching  schedules.  Calvin  Woodard  read  the  galleys 
and  caught  a  number  of  errors  of  fact  and  interpretation.  Frances 
Stearns  met  my  typing  deadlines  with  skill  and  equanimity. 

I  am  also  indebted  to  Robert  H.  Haynes,  curator  of  the  Theodore 
Roosevelt  Collection  at  Harvard  University;  to  Leslie  C.  Stratton, 
formerly  director  of  the  Theodore  Roosevelt  Association,  and  to  Helen 
MacLachlan,  the  Association's  curator;  to  Roberta  Smith,  reference 
librarian  at  the  University  of  Connecticut;  and  to  the  staff  of  the  Manu- 
script Division  of  the  Library  of  Congress. 

I  should  like  further  to  record  my  warm  pleasure  in  the  stimulating 
cooperation  of  John  Farrar,  friend,  editor,  and  publisher,  and  of  John 
Peck,  associate  editor  of  Farrar,  Straus  and  Cudahy. 

Finally,  I  am  indebted  to  my  wife,  Wayne  Talbot  Harbaugh,  for 
more  than  the  usual  reasons.  She  not  only  compiled  the  index,  she 
made  clear,  logical,  and  penetrating  criticisms  of  many  parts  of  the 
manuscript.  In  a  different  way  I  am  also  grateful  for  the  diversions 
afforded  by  the  invasions  of  my  study  by  Lyn,  who  has  grown  to 
learn  that  daddy  was  not  really  writing  a  story  about  her  teddy  bear; 
by  her  friend  Clemency,  who  was  always  a  little  skeptical;  and  more 
recently  by  Billy,  to  whom  teddy  bear  and  Teddy  Roosevelt  are  just 
now  becoming  synonymous. 

Out  of  personal  affection,  and  in  appreciation  of  his  long  and  fruit- 
ful service  to  the  scholarship  and  memory  of  a  great  and  controversial 
man,  I  dedicate  this  book  to  Hermann  Hagedorn. 


CONTENTS 


Preface 


PART  I:      THE  MAKING  OF  A  MAN 


1.  The  First  Battle  3 

2.  A  Leader  Emerges  24 

3.  The  Westerner:  Rancher,  Hunter,  and  Historian  44 

PART  II:      THE  ROAD  TO  THE  WHITE  HOUSE 

4.  For  the  Good  of  the  Nation  65 

5.  The  Fight  for  the  Right  81 

6.  The  Great  Adventure  91 

7.  The  Final  Preparation  108 

8.  The  People's  Choice  131 

PART  III:     THE  SQUARE  DEAL  BEGINS 

9.  The  First  Fell  Blows  149 

1 0.  A  Historic  Departure  1 66 

11.  Affairs  of  State  182 

12.  Noble  Ends  and  Less  Noble  Means  198 

13.  In  His  Own  Right  212 

PART  IV:      THE  SQUARE  DEAL  MATURES 

14.  Another  Measured  Advance  23^ 

15.  Trials,  Triumph,  and  Tragedy  253 

vii 


Viii  CONTENTS 

16.  The  Peacemaker  I  270 

17.  The  Peacemaker  II  286 

18.  More  Troubles  and  Greater  Tribulations  303 

19.  For  Generations  Yet  Unborn  318 

20.  Toward  the  Welfare  State  337 

21.  The  Campaign  of  1908  349 

22.  The  Changing  of  the  Guard  363 

PARTY:     THE  HIGH  TIDE  OF  PROGRESSIVISM 

23.  The  New  Nationalism  377 

24.  The  Travails  of  Indecision  396 

25.  The  People  Shall  Rule  412 

26.  Thou  Shalt  Not  Steal  427 

27.  Armageddon  437 

PART  VI:     ONE  LAST  GREAT  CAUSE 

28.  The  Variety  of  Him  453 

29.  The  Bugle  that  Woke  America  466 

30.  The  Campaign  for  American  Rights  484 

31.  The  Last  Battle  498 

Notes  523 

Index  551 


PART   I 


THE  MAKING  OF  A  MAN 


CHAPTER 


THE  FIRST  BATTLE 


When  I  went  into  politics  at  this  time  I  was  not  conscious  of 
going  in  with  the  set  purpose  to  benefit  other  people,  but  of  get- 
ting for  myself  a  privilege  to  which  I  was  entitled  in  common 
with  other  people. 

— Theodore  Roosevelt,  An  Autobiography 


An  air  of  anticipation  fell  over  the  gilded  Chamber  of  the  State  House 
in  Albany,  New  York,  early  in  the  afternoon  of  April  5,  1882,  as 
Theodore  Roosevelt,  a  twenty-three-year-old  freshman  assemblyman 
from  New  York  City's  twenty-first  district,  started  to  speak. 

Roosevelt  was  already  a  young  man  apart.  He  stood  only  five  feet 
eight  inches  high  and  weighed  perhaps  140  pounds;  but  his  head  was 
so  large  and  distinctive  that  it  made  his  muscular  shoulders  appear 
slight.  It  rested  on  a  bull-like  neck  and  was  crowned  by  a  shock  of 
wavy  blond  hair  parted  a  bit  off  center.  Beneath  a  moderately  low 
brow,  blue-gray  eyes  squinted  behind  thick  pince-nez,  and  a  full  blond 
mustache  set  off  a  squaring  face  framed  by  extraordinarily  small  ears 
knit  close  to  the  head.  Roosevelt  wore  his  finely  tailored  clothes  with 
a  flair  that  belied  their  conservative  cut,  and  his  manner  was  at  once 
appealingly  callow  and  offensively  self-assured.  Though  he  pronounced 
his  A's  with  a  broad  accent  and  his  R's  with  a  soft  roll,  there  was  a 
kind  of  suppressed  vehemence  about  his  speech  even  in  conversation, 
and  when  excited  his  voice  would  shift  involuntarily  from  a  resonant 
tenor  to  a  shrill  falsetto. 

"What  on  earth  will  New  York  send  next?"  an  upstate  newspaper- 
man had  reflected  on  meeting  him  at  the  start  of  the  legislative  session. 


4  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

"We  almost  shouted  with  laughter  to  think  that  the  most  veritable 
representative  of  the  New  York  dude  had  come  to  the  Chamber," 
one  of  his  friends  recalled  long  afterward. 

Roosevelt's  remarks  that  April  afternoon  were  exceptional,  even 
for  him.  In  words  so  bold  that  the  press  described  them  as  "almost 
startling,"  he  demanded  that  the  Assembly  investigate  reports  that 
T.  R.  Westbrook,  a  Republican-appointed  justice  of  the  State  Supreme 
Court,  had  colluded  with  Jay  Gould,  Russell  Sage,  and  Cyrus  Field 
in  a  "stock- jobbing"  deal  for  control  of  the  Manhattan  Elevated  Rail- 
way. The  professionals  were  shocked.  Neither  the  G.O.P.  regulars  nor 
the  Tammany  Democrats  wished  to  cross  the  notorious  Gould  or  to 
impugn  state  officials  who  owed  their  positions  to  behind-the-scenes  ar- 
rangements by  the  leaders  of  both  parties;  they  designed  to  ignore  the 
matter.  But  Roosevelt,  who  had  obtained  an  unpublished  letter  in 
which  Westbrook  promised  Gould  that  he  would  "go  to  the  very  verge 
of  judicial  discretion"  to  advance  the  financier's  interests,  insisted  on 
pressing  for  an  investigation. 

The  youthful  crusader  was  peremptorily  crushed  both  then  and  on 
the  following  day,  April  6.  Roosevelt's  charges  had  so  aroused  civic 
leaders,  however,  that  when  the  Assembly  reconvened  after  the  Easter 
holidays,  the  Republican  leader,  Thomas  Alvord,  and  John  Kelly,  his 
Tammany  counterpart,  temporarily  lost  control  of  their  forces.  In 
spite  of  Alvord's  sarcastic  assertion  that  the  only  people  upholding 
the  attack  on  Westbrook  were  the  "unnaturalized  Englishmen  who 
edited  the  New  York  Times"  and  the  publisher  of  the  New  York 
Herald  who  "desired  merely  to  get  a  strike  at  John  Kelly,"  Roosevelt's 
resolution  for  an  inquiry  was  approved  on  April  12  by  104  to  6. 

The  victory  proved  short-lived,  the  Judiciary  Committee  exonerating 
Westbrook  late  in  May  over  the  young  New  Yorker's  outraged  pro- 
test. "To  you,  members  of  the  Legislature  of  the  greatest  Common- 
wealth in  this  great  Federal  Union,"  Roosevelt  grandiloquently  de- 
clared following  his  rebuff,  "I  say  you  cannot  by  your  votes  clear  the 
Judge.  He  stands  condemned  by  his  own  acts  in  the  eyes  of  all  honest 
people.  All  you  can  do  is  shame  yourselves  and  give  him  a  brief 
extension  of  his  dishonored  career.  You  cannot  cleanse  the  leper. 
Beware  lest  you  taint  yourself  with  his  leprosy." 

The  Westbrook  affair  was  a  political  landmark  for  Theodore  Roose- 
velt. For  the  first  time  he  had  tasted  popular  favor,  and  for  the  first 
time  he  had  emerged  as  the  leader  of  a  faction.  Although  his  brash- 


THE   FIRST   BATTLE  5 

ness  had  incited  resentment,  especially  among  the  regulars,  his  cour- 
age and  persistence  had  also  won  begrudged  respect.  From  then  until 
he  came  out  for  James  G.  Elaine  in  the  presidential  campaign  of  1884 
his  reputation  as  a  reformer  with  the  temerity  to  act  on  his  principles 
burgeoned;  and  from  then  until  1884  his  influence  on  independent- 
minded  men  inside  and  outside  the  legislature  heightened.  "I  think 
he  grew  faster  than  anybody  I  ever  knew,"  Isaac  Hunt,  a  taciturn 
farmer-lawyer-assemblyman  from  Jefferson  County  later  mused.  "He 
increased  in  stature,  in  strength,  mentally  all  the  time.  ...  I  thought 
I  knew  more  than  he  did,  but  before  we  got  through  he  grew  right 
away  from  me." 

Superficially,  the  way  had  been  easy  for  this  scion  of  the  old  New 
York  aristocracy.  Born  into  an  established  family  of  comfortable 
means,  Theodore  had  enjoyed  numerous  advantages — a  warm  and 
wholesome  family  circle,  tutors,  vacations  in  the  country  and  travel 
abroad,  a  gentleman's  education  at  Harvard,  and  a  modest  inheritance 
on  reaching  age.  Had  his  background  been  different,  in  fact,  had  he 
not  been  known  as  an  educated,  high-minded  gentleman  of  inde- 
pendent income,  he  would  not  even  have  been  nominated  for  the 
legislature  in  the  autumn  of  1881. 

Yet  the  difference  between  outward  appearances  and  inner  strivings 
is  often  great.  The  courageous,  fearless  man  whom  the  world  eventu- 
ally came  to  know — the  crusader  against  crime  and  corruption,  the 
heroic  soldier,  the  assailant  of  big  business,  the  creator  of  a  national 
political  party — was  not  always  the  man  that  Roosevelt  himself  knew, 
or  had  known.  His  vaunted  self-confidence  was  genuine;  but  it  seems 
to  have  been  more  the  product  of  experience  and  achievement  than 
of  inherent  security.  Roosevelt's  is  the  story  of  a  man  driven:  of  a  man 
whose  strength  derived  from  the  conquest  of  fear,  not  from  the  lack 
of  it;  of  a  man  compelled  again  and  again  to  prove  himself  and 
possessed,  happily,  of  the  moral  and  physical  stamina  to  do  so. 

Theodore  had  been  asthmatic  from  birth,  rarely  a  day  or  a  night 
passing  during  which  the  baby,  the  boy,  or  the  adolescent  did  not  in 
some  degree  suffer.  One  of  his  earliest  recollections,  he  later  said, 
was  of  his  father  "walking  up  and  down  the  room  with  me  in  his  arms 
at  night."  Relief  was  temporary  when  it  came.  Summers  in  the  Hudson 
River  country  or  the  New  Jersey  highlands  failed  to  induce  a  cure; 
nor  did  a  tour  of  Europe  help.  "I  was  very  sick  last  night  and  Mama 
was  so  kind  telling  me  story s  (sic)  and  rubbing  me  with  her  delicate 


6  POWER    AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

fingers,"  Theodore  wrote  from  abroad  when  he  was  eleven  years  old. 
"I  am  here  in  Richfield  now,"  he  reported  the  following  year.  "Of 
course  I  came  here  because  I  was  sick."  By  then,  however,  the  tide 
had  begun  to  turn.  Told  by  his  father  that  he  would  have  to  build 
himself  by  his  own  efforts,  the  twelve-year-old  youngster  had  thrown 
back  his  head,  flashed  his  already  prominent  teeth,  and  asserted:  "I'll 
make  my  body." 

That  fall  Theodore  began  daily  workouts  in  a  gymnasium  and  on 
apparatus  installed  on  the  back  porch  of  his  house;  and  whether  be- 
cause of  these  exertions  or  natural  causes,  he  improved  so  markedly 
by  the  following  summer  that  asthma  or  other  sickness  never  there- 
after seriously  interrupted  his  activities. 

Notwithstanding  his  physical  infirmities,  the  child  "Teedie"  showed 
an  extraordinary  zest  for  life.  His  affectionate  and  responsive  parents 
were  partly  responsible;  indeed,  their  affection  for  their  sickly  son  was 
so  strong  that  he  might  have  developed  abnormal  attachments  had  he 
been  an  only  child.  But  fortunately  there  were  brothers  and  sisters — 
Anna,  the  eldest,  then  Elliott  and  Corinne,  both  born  after  Theodore. 
There  was  also  direction  and  discipline,  perhaps  in  excess,  from  the 
father.  In  his  Autobiography,  written  when  he  was  fifty-four  years  old, 
Roosevelt  described  his  mother  as  "a  sweet,  gracious,  beautiful  South- 
ern woman,  a  delightful  companion  .  .  .  beloved  by  everybody"  and 
"blessed  with  a  strong  sense  of  humor."  But  he  lavished  praise  upon 
his  father.  "He  combined  strength  and  courage  with  gentleness,  tender- 
ness, and  great  unselfishness.  .  .  .  With  great  love  and  patience, 
and  the  most  understanding  sympathy  and  consideration,  he  combined 
insistence  on  discipline  ...  he  was  the  only  man  of  whom  I  was 
ever  really  afraid." 

Theodore's  anguished  diary  entries  following  the  senior  Roosevelt's 
death  in  1878,  during  Theodore's  nineteenth  year,  offer  even  more 
insight  into  the  unusual  relationship  between  father  and  son.  "I  feel 
that  if  it  were  not  for  the  certainty,  that  ...  'he  is  not  dead  but  gone 
before,'  I  should  almost  perish,"  he  wrote  five  days  after  his  father 
died.  A  month  later  he  said  that  it  seemed  as  if  his  heart  would  break 
when  he  thought  of  his  terrible  loss.  He  added  that  his  father  had 
"shared  all  my  joys,  and  in  sharing  doubled  them,  and  soothed  all  the 
few  sorrows  I  ever  had."  A  subsequent  entry  lamented  the  loss  of  "the 
only  human  being  to  whom  I  told  everything,  never  failing  to  get 


THE   FIRST   BATTLE  7 

loving  advice  and  sweet  sympathy  in  return;  no  one,  but  my  wife,  if 
ever  I  marry,  will  ever  be  able  to  take  his  place." 

Although  the  number  of  references  gradually  declined,  the  intensity 
remained.  "O,  Father,  Father  how  bitterly  I  miss  you,  mourn  you  and 
long  for  you!"  Theodore  exclaimed  several  months  later.  More  sig- 
nificant still,  he  despaired  that  he  could  live  up  to  his  image  of  his 
father.  "I  realize  more  and  more  every  day  that  I  am  as  much  inferior 
to  Father  morally  and  mentally  as  physically,"  he  confided  to  the 
diary  a  full  half  year  after  the  senior  Roosevelt  died.  "But,"  he  added 
in  a  display  of  fatalistic  resilience  that  would  lose  its  religious  cast  as 
he  grew  older,  "  'Trust  in  the  Lord  and  do  good!'  " 

Theodore  Roosevelt,  Sr.,  had  been  a  large-framed,  athletic  man 
with  a  leonine  head,  a  striking  beard,  and  a  buoyant,  dominant  man- 
ner, born  to  the  old  Dutch  mercantile  tradition.  He  loved  life  and  he 
regarded  business  as  merely  a  means  for  supplying  his  own  and  his 
family's  considerable  wants.  After  his  main  interest,  the  import  glass 
trade,  collapsed  some  years  before  his  death,  he  never  took  up  an- 
other, absorbing  himself  instead  in  social  life  and  the  philanthropic 
and  civic  matters  which  had  long  excited  his  interest.  His  understand- 
ing of  the  festering  social  and  economic  problems  of  the  times  was 
delimited  by  his  concern  with  individual  character  and  morality;  yet 
he  felt  obligated  to  aid  the  suffering  and  the  oppressed,  to  work  for 
reform  without  disturbing  the  existing  social  framework.  He  was  a 
founder  of  the  Orthopedic  Hospital,  the  Children's  Aid  Society,  and 
the  State  Charities  Aid  Association,  and  he  actively  supported  the 
Newsboys'  Lodging  House  and  the  Y.M.C.A.  To  Theodore,  Jr.,  he 
transmitted  his  sense  of  moral  duty  and  habit  of  noblesse  oblige. 

Whatever  the  psychological  nuances  of  their  relationship,  this  dis- 
tinguished gentleman  failed  his  eldest  son  in  only  one  overt  respect: 
He  remained  a  civilian  throughout  the  Civil  War,  probably  in  defer- 
ence to  his  Southern-born  wife.  True,  he  gave  abundantly  of  his 
energies  and  talents.  With  two  other  public-spirited  men  he  drafted 
and  pressed  Congress  to  pass  the  bill  establishing  an  Allotment  Com- 
mission and  then  toured  the  camps  in  an  exhaustive  effort  to  persuade 
enlisted  men  to  send  home  a  portion  of  their  monthly  salaries.  "I 
would  never  have  felt  satisfied  with  myself  after  this  war  is  over  if  I 
had  done  nothing,"  he  confided  to  his  wife  in  a  letter  from  the  field, 
"and  that  I  do  feel  now  that  I  am  only  doing  my  duty."  Yet  it  was 
the  duty  of  the  civilian  rather  than  that  of  the  soldier.  Theodore,  who 


8  POWER  AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

boundlessly  admired  two  maternal  uncles  who  served  the  Confederate 
navy  with  distinction,  was  always  sensitive  about  the  fact  that  his 
father  had  not  borne  arms. 

After  the  war  the  Roosevelt  family  again  enjoyed  the  perquisites  of 
moderate  wealth  and  social  position.  For  the  parents  there  were 
gracious  entertainments,  dinner  parties  and  balls,  fine  wines  and  small 
talk  with  relatives  and  friends,  as  well  as  continued  civic  activity.  For 
the  children  there  were  exciting  rides  in  the  rig  with  their  father,  who 
loved  to  race;  long  hours  reading  with  their  mother,  who  was  well 
read  in  a  limited,  genteel  sense;  most  of  the  toys  they  chanced  to  want; 
and  frequent  visits  with  other  youngsters  of  their  background.  On  the 
whole,  however,  the  children's  activities  centered  in  and  around  the 
four-story  brownstone  house  and  yard  at  28  East  20th  Street  where 
Theodore  had  been  born  on  October  27,  1858,  and  where  the  family 
lived  until  they  moved  into  another  brownstone  on  57th  Street. 

Theodore's  advantages  softened  the  misery  of  his  poor  health  some- 
what, and  his  effort  to  conquer  it  remains  a  striking  testament  to  his 
courage  and  determination.  Yet  to  explain  Roosevelt  the  man  solely, 
or  even  largely,  in  terms  of  his  sickly  childhood  and  adolescence  is  to 
do  injustice  to  other  of  his  natural  endowments.  Even  as  a  slender, 
almost  spindly  youngster,  he  possessed  such  surging  physical  and 
intellectual  energy  is  left  little  time  either  to  brood  or  to  rest  or,  in  a 
very  real  sense,  to  suffer.  From  the  beginning  he  capitalized  on  his 
keen  intelligence,  gave  vent  to  his  insatiable  curiosity,  and  sought  out- 
lets for  his  burning  desire  to  be  recognized. 

Of  the  passions  of  Theodore's  youth,  nature  was  the  most  con- 
suming. At  the  age  of  eight  he  started  the  practice  of  collecting  live 
mice  and  reptiles  which  would  be  emulated  by  his  own  sons  and 
would  keep  various  Roosevelt  family  servants  on  edge  for  upward  of 
forty  years.  By  the  age  of  fourteen  he  had  grasped  the  main  tenets 
of  Darwin.  And  when  he  entered  Harvard  in  the  autumn  of  1876  he 
probably  could  have  passed  an  examination  in  the  general  works  of 
the  most  renowned  naturalists  of  the  era.  By  then,  too,  he  had  built 
a  collection  of  bird  skins,  writes  the  zoologist,  Paul  R.  Cutright, 
"which  for  size,  variety,  and  skill  of  preparation  was  doubtless  un- 
equalled by  any  boy  his  age  in  the  United  States."  Based  on  that 
observation  and  study  which  always  distinguished  Roosevelt  from  the 
man  of  pure  action,  this  interest  later  enabled  him  to  discourse 
learnedly  with  eminent  professional  naturalists  and  to  make  modest 


THE  FIRST   BATTLE  9 

personal  contributions  to  the  over-all  body  of  scientific  classification; 
it  projected  him  into  one  of  the  most  celebrated  and  unnecessary 
controversies  of  his  presidential  years — that  over  the  "Nature  Fakers" 
— and  it  formed  the  springboard  for  one  of  his  greatest  accomplish- 
ments, the  vitalization  of  the  conservation  movement. 

If  nature  was  young  Roosevelt's  first  great  interest,  books  were  his 
second.  Even  as  a  child  he  read  omnivorously  and  with  surprising 
catholicity.  Works  of  maudlin  sentimentality,  pious  morality,  high 
adventure,  and  classical  quality  were  all  devoured  by  his  restless 
mind.  "I  worshipped  Little  Men  and  Little  Women  and  An  Old- 
Fashioned  Girl"  he  nostalgically  recalled.  But  "I  disliked  the  Swiss 
Family  Robinson  because  of  the  wholly  impossible  collection  of 
animals  met  by  that  worthy  family  as  they  ambled  inland  from  the 
wreck."  On  his  first  trip  to  Europe  at  the  age  of  eleven,  a  trip  that 
he  professed  not  to  enjoy  though  his  letters  indicate  that  he  did,  he 
and  Elliott  and  Corinne  reportedly  read  fifty  or  more  novels! 

Theodore's  travels  in  Europe,  his  fascination  with  nature,  his  read- 
ings, and  his  vacations  with  his  sisters,  cousins,  and  robust  brother 
Elliott,  who  for  a  while  served  as  his  protector — these  and  the  passage 
of  time  wrought  their  influence  upon  his  personality.  From  a  rather 
shy,  retiring  child  he  changed  into  an  outgoing,  uninhibited  adolescent 
with  a  developing  sense  of  humor  and  a  growing  tendency  toward 
mild  exhibitionism. 

"As  a  young  girl,"  wrote  one  of  the  family  friends,  "I  remember 
dreading  to  sit  next  him  at  any  formal  dinner  lest  I  become  so  con- 
vulsed with  laughter  at  his  whispered  sallies  as  to  disgrace  myself  and 
be  forced  to  leave  the  room."  Or,  as  Theodore  himself  once  wrote 
his  mother,  "I  went  to  Miss  Nelly  Dean's  wedding  yesterday,  and 
made  myself  so  agreable  (sic)  that  one  old  Lady  paid  me  a  compli- 
ment. She  evidently  had  a  great  deal  of  discrimination."  These  traits 
did  not  escape  his  contemporaries.  Theodore  "always  thought  he 
could  do  things  better  than  anyone  else,"  his  cousin,  Maude  Elliott, 
wrote  during  his  second  trip  abroad  when  he  was  fourteen. 

Maude  Elliott's  characterization  of  her  ebullient  cousin  was  not 
wholly  accurate.  Theodore  only  tried  to  do  things  better  than  every- 
body else.  In  spite  of  his  formidable  powers  of  rationalization,  he  had 
a  realistic  insight  into  his  own  abilities;  neither  as  a  boy  nor  as  a  man 
did  he  tend  to  overestimate  them.  If  he  too  often  indulged  in  self- 
praise,  it  was  because  of  deserved  pride  in  deeds  performed  and 


10  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

barriers  surmounted.  Life  was  an  unrelieved,  if  mainly  joyous,  strug- 
gle, and  false  modesty  was  not  among  its  virtues.  As  Theodore  wrote 
his  father  that  same  year,  "I  then  had  several  rounds  with  Johnie  and 
Edward,  in  which  I  kept  my  own,  as  Johnie  is  smaller,  though  more 
used  to  fighting,  and  Edward,  although  much  larger  does  not  know 
so  much  about  boxing."  A  few  years  later  he  would  remark  that  of 
his  five  closest  friends,  two  overestimated  him,  two  undervalued  him, 
and  only  one  gauged  his  true  worth. 

Young  Roosevelt  also  abounded  in  warmth,  sympathy,  and  affec- 
tion. His  letters  repeatedly  reveal  him  inquiring  solicitously  of  his 
parents'  health,  writing  fondly  of  "cunning"  young  children,  and 
pouring  out  his  love  for  "My  own  darling  little  Motherling"  and  "My 
dear  Papa."  Nor  were  the  diary  entries  of  his  college  years  less 
effusive:  "Elliott  is  a  noble  fellow,  wonderfully  grown  up  in  every 
way."  "What  a  wonderful  set  of  relations  I  have  got — cousins  and  all, 
especially  my  own  family."  "I  wonder  if  ever  a  man  had  two  better 
sisters  than  1  have!" 

In  maturity  Roosevelt  would  lose  little,  if  any,  of  those  qualities. 
They  would  be  modified  or  offset,  however,  by  an  extraordinary 
severity  of  judgment  and  by  a  strain  of  ruthlessness  and  a  capacity  for 
passing  hatred  which  so  often  mars  the  competitive  personality. 

If  there  was  anything  in  Theodore's  boyhood,  aside  from  the  sense 
of  duty  and  noblesse  oblige  that  he  got  from  his  father,  to  suggest  that 
he  would  someday  become  a  social  reformer  it  was  only  his  strident 
moralizing.  "Did  you  hear  that  Percy  Cushion  was  a  failure?"  he  once 
wrote  his  father  from  Dresden.  "He  swore  like  a  trooper  and  used 
disreputable  language,  so  I  gave  him  some  pretty  strong  hints,  which 
he  at  last  took,  and  we  do  not  see  much  more  of  him."  As  a  green 
college  freshman  a  few  years  later  Theodore  would  righteously  report 
that  of  the  eleven  other  boys  at  his  table,  "no  less  than  seven  do  not 
smoke  and  four  drink  nothing  stronger  than  beer."  As  a  more  sophis- 
ticated sophomore,  however,  he  would  concede  that  although  he  got 
rather  bored  with  the  drunken  brothers  of  D.K.E.  he  found  an  occa- 
sional fraternity  social  "good  enough  fun."  In  one  of  the  few  intima- 
tions in  his  diary  of  repressed  aggressions,  he  would  also  confess  that 
"Wine  makes  me  awfully  fighting." 

Roosevelt  had  entered  Harvard  in  1876  after  two  years  of  intensive 
preparation  under  a  private  tutor.  Because  of  his  lingering  asthma 
he  took  private  rooms,  and  in  spite  of  membership  in  the  best  clubs, 


THE   FIRST   BATTLE  11 

success  in  athletics  and  academics,  and  an  active  social  life  in  Cam- 
bridge he  remained  always  a  little  apart.  William  Roscoe  Thayer 
remembered  that  he  was  "a  good  deal  of  a  joke  .  .  .  active  and 
enthusiastic  and  that  was  all."  But  another  friend,  Charles  Washburn, 
who  knew  him  more  intimately,  contended  that  he  was  "loved  by 
many,"  was  "in  a  class  by  himself,"  and  was  recognized  as  "a  person 
sui  generis"  who  was  not  to  be  judged  by  ordinary  standards. 

Whether  Theodore,  as  he  preferred  to  be  called  until  his  service  in 
the  Spanish-American  War  earned  him  the  title  of  Colonel,  got  all  that 
he  should  have  from  Harvard  is  problematical.  Certainly  he  enjoyed 
himself.  "What  a  royally  good  time  I  am  having,"  he  wrote  in  his  diary 
as  a  junior.  "I  can't  conceive  of  a  fellow  possibly  enjoying  himself 
more."  Academically,  he  did  well  in  those  subjects  which  interested 
him,  notably  natural  history,  literature,  and  political  economy;  only 
passably  in  those  which  did  not.  But  his  over-all  performance  was 
sufficiently  high — he  finished  "second  among  the  gentlemen"  and 
twenty-first  in  a  class  of  158 — to  win  election  to  Phi  Beta  Kappa. 
And  his  writing  was  so  well  regarded  that  he  was  made  an  editor  of 
The  Advocate,  one  of  the  three  undergraduate  papers.  He  later  com- 
plained, however,  that  "There  was  very  little  in  my  actual  studies 
which  helped  me  in  after-life."  In  his  Autobiography,  written  just 
after  the  Progressive  campaign  of  1912,  he  lamented  that  "there  was 
almost  no  teaching  of  the  need  for  collective  action,  and  of  the  fact 
that  in  addition  to,  not  as  a  substitute  for,  individual  responsibility, 
there  is  a  collective  responsibility.  Books  such  as  Herbert  Croly's 
Promise  of  American  Life  and  Walter  E.  Weyl's  New  Democracy 
would  generally  at  that  time  have  been  treated  either  as  unintelligible 
or  else  as  pure  heresy." 

Perhaps.  Yet  Roosevelt  conceded  that  his  readings  at  Harvard  did 
reinforce  that  individual  morality — that  "self-reliance,  energy,  cour- 
age, the  power  of  insisting  on  his  own  rights  and  the  sympathy  that 
makes  him  regardful  of  the  rights  of  others" — which  had  been  his 
father's  teaching  as  well  as  the  lesson  of  Our  Young  Folks.  And  in 
spite  of  his  disappointment  in  some  of  his  courses,  he  was  obviously 
stimulated.  As  he  wrote  his  mother  in  October,  1878,  political 
economy  and  metaphysics  "are  even  more  interesting  than  my  Natural 
History  courses;  and  all  the  more  so,  from  the  fact  that  I  radically 
disagree  on  many  points  with  the  men  whose  books  we  are  reading 
(Mill  and  Ferrier)." 


12  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

Roosevelt's  extracurricular  activities  at  Harvard  further  confirm  his 
intellectual  awakening.  He  became  an  active  convert  to  the  free-trade 
movement,  probably  from  reading  John  Stuart  Mill  and  other  laissez- 
faire  economists.  He  served  as  undergraduate  head  of  the  Natural 
History  Society.  He  helped  organize  and  for  a  time  presided  over  the 
Finance  dub,  under  the  auspices  of  which  two  of  the  most  celebrated 
economists  in  the  country,  Professor  William  Graham  Sumner  and 
Professor  Francis  A.  Walker  of  Yale,  delivered  special  lectures  at 
Cambridge.  And  in  the  spring  of  1880  he  participated  in  a  mock 
presidential  election  in  which  he  cast  his  ballot  for  the  Democrat, 
Senator  Thomas  Bayard,  in  a  display  of  contempt  for  the  Republican 
candidates — Grant,  Sherman  and  Elaine.  "The  gentleman  [Roosevelt] 
in  charge  of  the  polls  is  a  proof  that  the  movement  is  not  one  of  idle 
curiosity,  but  of  earnest  purpose,"  The  Advocate  said  editorially. 

Roosevelt  also  belonged  to  a  literary-political  discussion  group  to 
which  he  submitted  a  paper,  "The  Machine  in  Politics";  was  a 
member  of  the  Art  Club;  and  supported  the  Glee  Club  in  a  non- 
singing  role.  He  was  "forever  at  it,"  one  of  his  classmates  recalled, 
"and  probably  no  man  of  his  time  read  more  extensively  or  deeply, 
especially  in  directions  that  did  not  count  on  the  honor-list  or 
marking-sheet.  He  had  the  happy  power  of  abstraction,  and  nothing 
was  more  common  than  a  noisy  roomful  of  college  mates  with  Roose- 
velt frowning  with  intense  absorption  over  a  book  in  the  corner." 
Theodore  himself  was  satisfied.  Reviewing  his  life  a  few  weeks  after 
graduation,  he  wrote  in  his  diary  that  there  was  nothing  he  would 
have  cared  to  change.  Indeed,  he  added,  "my  career  (both  in  and  out 
of  college)  has  been  more  successful  than  that  of  any  man  I  have 
known." 

It  was  at  Harvard,  too,  that  Roosevelt's  compulsion  to  exhort  and 
admonish  became  evident.  "He  used  to  stop  men  in  the  Yard,  or  call 
them  to  him,"  a  classmate  remembered.  "Then  he  would  block  the 
narrow  gravel  path  and  soon  make  sparks  from  an  argument  fly.  He 
was  so  enthusiastic  and  had  such  a  startling  array  of  deeply  rooted 
interests  that  we  all  thought  he  would  make  a  great  journalist."  But 
it  was  preacher-at-large  to  the  American  people  that  he  was  to  be.  The 
future  was  vaguely  foreshadowed  in  one  of  his  few  editorials  in  The 
Advocate.  Commenting  on  an  impending  football  game  with  Yale,  he 
warned  that  "nothing  but  very  hard  work  will  enable  our  men  to 
win  to  victory.  .  .  .  Last  year  we  had  good  individual  players,  but 


THE   FIRST   BATTLE  13 

they  did  not  work  together  nearly  as  well  as  the  Princeton  team,  and 
were  not  in  as  good  condition  as  the  Yale  men.  The  football  season 
is  short;  and  while  it  does  last,  the  men  ought  to  work  faithfully,  if 
they  expect  to  win  for  Harvard  the  position  she  held  three  years  ago." 
Twenty  years  later,  as  President  of  the  United  States,  Roosevelt  would 
address  the  captain  of  the  Harvard  squad  in  the  same  vein. 

Theodore  also  developed  into  a  competent  athlete  at  Harvard. 
After  being  soundly  thrashed  by  a  country  bully  as  a  youngster,  he 
had  characteristically  resolved  to  learn  to  box  well  enough  to  defend 
himself.  Long  after  he  fulfilled  that  purpose  (he  had  one  fight,  which 
he  won,  as  an  assemblyman  and  he  threatened  to  fight  in  at  least  one 
other  case)  he  continued  to  spar  regularly,  often  with  professionals. 
He  became  as  proficient  as  his  poor  eyesight  would  permit — his  right 
hand  was  said  to  have  been  powerful — and  in  his  junior  year  he 
reached  the  finals  in  the  lightweight  class.  He  lost  the  championship 
bout,  but  won  the  plaudits  of  the  spectators  by  commanding  them  to 
stop  hissing  his  opponent  for  bloodying  his  nose  after  the  referee  had 
called  the  end  of  a  round.  "It's  all  right,"  he  dramatically  exclaimed 
with  his  arm  upraised,  "he  didn't  hear  him."  (He  failed  to  mention 
the  incident  in  his  diaries.) 

Roosevelt  was  too  light  for  football;  so  besides  rowing,  tennis,  and 
riding,  he  channeled  his  cascading  energy  into  camping  trips  into  the 
Maine  wilderness,  where  he  fused  the  qualities  of  the  hunter  and 
naturalist  to  the  bewilderment  of  his  latter-day  critics.  It  was  a  long 
jump  from  high  tea  in  Back  Bay  to  boiled  coffee  in  the  Maine  woods, 
but  he  easily  made  it  both  ways.  As  W.  W.  "Bill"  Sewall,  a  brawny, 
bearded  woodsman  of  thirty-three  who  was  to  serve  Roosevelt  as 
guide,  counselor,  and  companion  for  several  years  thereafter,  recalled, 
"He  was  different  from  anybody  that  I  had  ever  met,"  especially  in 
that  "he  was  fair-minded." 

He  and  I  agreed  in  our  ideas  of  fair  play  and  right  and  wrong. 
Besides,  he  was  always  good-natured  and  full  of  fun.  I  do  not  think 
I  ever  remember  him  being  'out  of  sorts.'  He  did  not  feel  well 
sometimes,  but  he  never  would  admit  it.  ...  Some  folks  said  that 
he  was  headstrong  and  aggressive,  but  I  never  found  him  so  except 
when  necessary.  ...  Of  course  he  did  not  understand  the  woods, 
but  on  every  other  subject  he  was  posted.  The  reason  that  he  knew 
so  much  about  everything,  I  found,  was  that  wherever  he  went  he 
got  right  in  with  the  people  ...  he  was  quick  to  find  the  real  man 


14  POWER    AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

in  very  simple  men.  He  didn't  look  for  a  brilliant  man  when  he 
found  me;  he  valued  me  for  what  I  was  worth. 

Theodore's  contact  with  Sewall  and  other  woodsmen  was  the  one 
broadening  influence  in  his  social  development  during  his  under- 
graduate years.  He  otherwise  consorted  with  his  social  peers,  and 
though  he  gradually  lost  his  more  blatant  class-consciousness  (as  a 
freshman  he  had  found  the  Yale  undergraduates  a  "scrubby  set"  and 
had  been  reluctant  to  become  intimate  with  the  New  York  crowd  at 
Harvard  because  he  knew  nothing  of  their  "antecedents"),  he  always 
prided  himself  on  his  election  to  The  Hasty  Pudding  and  the  Porcel- 
lian.  As  President  of  the  United  States,  in  fact,  he  was  actually  con- 
cerned lest  his  sons  not  receive  the  same  distinctions.  A  letter  to  his 
"Darling  Motherling"  at  the  start  of  his  senior  year  describes  a  normal 
round  of  social  activities: 

Last  Monday  I  drove  Jack  Tebbets  over  to  call  on  the  Miss 
Bacons,  who  are  very  nice  girls.  Wednesday  I  dined  at  the  Lees, 
and  spent  the  loveliest  kind  of  an  evening  with  Rosy,  Alice  and 
Rose.  The  two  girls  must  come  on  to  Boston  next  month  if  only 
to  see  Chestnut  Hill;  and,  by  Jove,  I  shall  be  awfully  disappointed 
if  they  do'n't  like  it.  Mamie  Saltonstalls  birthday  was  on  Friday; 
I  gave  her  a  small  silver  fan-chain.  Saturday  I  spent  all  the  morning 
playing  tennis  with  the  two  Miss  Lanes.  .  .  . 

.  .  .  Wednesday  Harry  Shaw  and  I  give  a  small  opera  party  to 
Mr.  and  Mrs.  Saltonstall,  Rose  and  Alice. 

One  of  the  girls  mentioned  in  that  letter  was  Alice  Hathaway  Lee, 
a  tall,  graceful  young  lady  of  Brahmin  lineage,  classic  features,  and 
feminine  demeanor,  who  resided  on  Chestnut  Hill.  Theodore  had 
been  "courting"  her  since  early  in  his  junior  year  and  in  February, 
1880,  their  engagement  was  formally  announced.  "She  is  just  the 
sweetest,  prettiest  sunniest  little  darling  that  ever  lived,  and  with  all 
her  laughing,  teasing  ways,  she  is  as  loving  and  tender  as  she  can  be," 
Theodore  wrote  his  sister  Corinne.  Everything  had  been  "subordinate 
to  winning  her,"  he  confided  to  a  friend,  Henry  Minot,  at  the  time  of 
the  engagement,  "so  you  can  perhaps  understand  a  change  in  my 
ideas  as  regards  science  &c." 

Not  quite  "everything"  had  been  subordinated  to  romance  during 
that  final  year.  Although  Roosevelt  neglected  his  duties  as  an  editor 
of  The  Advocate  and  failed  to  deliver  the  commencement  "disserta- 


THE   FIRST   BATTLE  15 

tion"  to  which  his  rank  in  the  class  entitled  him  ("I  have  always 
studied  well  ...  so  I  can  afford  to  cut  now,"  he  commented  in  his 
diary  shortly  after  his  engagement)  he  won  honor  grades  in  four  of 
his  five  courses,  wrote  a  senior  thesis  on  "The  Practicability  of 
Equalizing  Men  and  Women  Before  the  Law,"  and  drafted  the  first 
two  chapters  of  his  Naval  War  of  1812,  which  was  published  two 
years  after  his  graduation.  A  work  of  limited  scope,  high  technical 
competence,  and  considerable  dramatic  power,  The  Naval  War  was 
to  win  favorable  reviews  in  the  United  States  and  be  so  well  received 
in  Great  Britain  that  Roosevelt  would  be  invited  to  do  the  section  on 
the  War  of  1812  for  Clowes's  History  of  the  Royal  Navy. 

Alice  Lee  was  only  eighteen  years  old  when  she  became  engaged  to 
Theodore  after  a  frenetic  courtship  of  eight  months.  "See  that  girl?" 
he  is  said  to  have  exclaimed  to  a  friend  at  one  point.  "I  am  going  to 
marry  her.  She  won't  have  me,  but  I  am  going  to  have  her."  Alice 
had  resisted  him,  however,  and  during  the  fall  of  1879  Theodore 
became  so  depressed  that  friends  sent  to  New  York  for  a  relative  to 
come  and  soothe  him.  "I  have  been  pretty  nearly  crazy,"  he  later 
confessed  in  his  diary  (night  after  night  he  had  wandered  through  the 
woods).  "But  I  do  not  think  any  outsider  suspected  it;  I  have  not 
written  a  word  about  it  in  my  diary  since  a  year  ago  last  Thanks- 
giving." 

On  January  25,  1880,  however,  Alice  Lee  had  submitted.  "I  am 
so  happy  that  I  dare  not  trust  in  my  own  happiness,"  Theodore  wrote 
in  his  diary  that  night.  "How  she,  so  pure  and  sweet  and  beautiful  can 
think  of  marrying  me  I  can  not  understand,  but  I  praise  and  thank 
God  it  is  so."  He  added  that  it  was  love  at  first  sight.  "Thank  heaven 
I  am  absolutely  pure,"  he  wrote  two  weeks  later.  "I  can  tell  Alice 
everything  I  have  ever  done." 

Alice's  parents  had  at  first  opposed  an  early  marriage,  but  after 
what  Theodore  described  as  "a  long  but  very  peaceable  argument," 
they  acceded  to  his  wishes.  On  October  27,  1880,  his  twenty-second 
birthday,  Theodore  and  Alice  Lee  were  married  in  the  Unitarian 
Church  of  Brookline.  A  short  honeymoon  at  Oyster  Bay,  Long  Island, 
followed.  "Our  intense  happiness  is  too  sacred  to  be  written  about," 
was  Theodore's  terse  diary  entry.  There  were  drives  in  the  buggy, 
tennis  games,  walks  in  the  woods,  and  reading  aloud  in  the  evenings 
from  the  Pickwick  Papers,  Quentin  Durward,  and  Keats.  Probably 
there  was  also  excited  planning  of  a  future  home  in  that  then  charm- 


16  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

ingly  rural  country,  for  a  few  months  later  Roosevelt  purchased  the 
first  of  three  deeds  totalling  155  acres  and  including  the  hilltop  over- 
looking the  Long  Island  Sound  where  Sagamore  Mohannis  and  other 
Indian  chieftains  had  held  their  councils  of  war  in  years  long  past. 
At  the  end  of  their  brief  honeymoon  Theodore  and  Alice  returned 
to  New  York  City  to  pass  the  winter  in  the  house  on  West  57th  Street 
with  Mrs.  Roosevelt,  Sr.,  preparatory  to  an  extended  tour  of  Europe 
in  the  spring.  Meanwhile  Alice  joined  the  Presbyterian  Church.  "Now 
we  are  one  in  everything,"  Theodore  said  in  his  diary.  "My  cup  is 
almost  running  over." 

It  was  to  the  study  of  law  rather  than  of  nature  that  Theodore 
turned  during  that  first  winter  of  his  marriage.  He  had  entered 
Harvard  determined  to  pursue  a  scientific  career  in  the  face  of  his 
father's  warning  that  the  financial  remuneration  would  be  small. 
Early  in  his  sophomore  year  he  and  Henry  Minot,  with  whom  he 
had  gone  camping  in  the  Adirondacks  the  previous  summer,  published 
a  short  paper,  "Summer  Birds  of  the  Adirondacks  in  Franklin 
County,  N.Y.,"  which  earned  a  commendation  from  the  zoologist 
C.  H.  Merriam,  who  would  later  term  Roosevelt  the  "world's  au- 
thority on  big  game  mammals."  And  in  his  junior  year  Roosevelt 
compiled  and  published  on  his  own  another  small  pamphlet,  "Notes 
on  Some  of  the  Birds  of  Oyster  Bay."  Meanwhile,  his  name  was  listed 
in  the  Naturalist's  Directory. 

But  as  his  letter  informing  Minot  of  his  engagement  suggests, 
Roosevelt  had  decided  to  forego  science  by  the  time  of  that  memora- 
ble event  and  possibly  before.  He  later  blamed  Harvard's  teaching 
methods  for  the  decision.  "They  treated  biology  as  purely  a  science 
of  the  laboratory  and  the  microscope,"  he  charged  in  his  Auto- 
biography. "There  was  a  total  failure  to  understand  the  great  variety 
of  kinds  of  work  that  could  be  done  by  naturalists,  including  what 
could  be  done  by  outdoor  naturalists."  There  was  truth  in  those 
charges,  but  there  is  little  evidence  that  Roosevelt  thought  so  at  the 
time.  In  fact,  his  diary  indicates  that  he  enjoyed  laboratory  work  but 
was  "perfectly  blue"  at  the  prospect  of  three  years  abroad  completing 
his  professional  training. 

Roosevelt's  interests  were  also  widening.  His  growing  fascination 
with  politics  was  part  of  his  intellectual  awakening  at  Harvard,  and 
it  antedated  his  courtship  of  Alice  Lee.  A  year  before  his  engagement 


THE  FIRST   BATTLE  17 

he  ended  his  habit  of  taking  field  notes.  And  at  almost  the  same  time 
he  severed  connections  with  the  Harvard  Natural  History  Society 
because  of  the  "press  of  other  duties  (in  my  studies  and  in  outside 
societies)."  It  was  during  this  formative  period,  also,  that  Roosevelt 
besought  the  advice  of  the  economist,  J.  Laurence  Laughlin,  then  on 
the  threshold  of  his  long  and  distinguished  career.  Should  he  continue 
in  biology  or  turn,  perhaps,  to  economics?  Laughlin's  response,  which 
may  well  have  been  an  adjuration  for  the  duty-conscious  Roosevelt, 
was  that  the  nation  needed  men  who  could  think  clearly  on  public 
questions. 

However  that  may  be,  Roosevelt  finally  decided  to  study  law. 
Following  his  honeymoon  he  read  law  in  the  offices  of  his  uncle, 
Robert  Barnhill  Roosevelt,  and  attended  the  Columbia  Law  School, 
where  he  distinguished  himself  for  his  egotism  and  energetic  ques- 
tioning of  the  lecturers.  He  lacked  the  air  of  the  professional  student, 
one  classmate  remembered,  but  he  was  a  "favorite"  and  was  "one  of 
the  best  men  there,  considered  as  a  man."  Theodore  was  already  too 
much  the  moralist  to  give  his  heart  to  the  law,  however,  and  though 
he  professed  in  his  diary  to  "like  the  law  school  work  very  much," 
he  soon  abandoned  it  without  genuine  regret.  "Many  of  the  big 
corporation  lawyers,  to  whom  the  ordinary  members  of  the  bar  then 
as  now  looked  up,  held  certain  standards  which  were  difficult  to 
recognize  as  compatible  with  the  idealism  I  supposed  every  high- 
minded  young  man  is  apt  to  feel,"  he  wrote  in  his  Autobiography. 
That  statement  has  too  much  of  the  ring  of  the  1912  Progressive 
campaign  to  be  taken  literally;  yet  it  probably  reflected  Roosevelt's 
views  during  1880-81  in  some  degree.  As  Carleton  Putnam  cogently 
phrases  it,  "he  aligned  the  moral  law  and  the  common  law  and  was 
shocked  at  the  discrepancy." 

The  event  which  changed  the  course  of  Roosevelt's  career  was  his 
nomination  as  the  Republican  candidate  for  assemblyman  from  the 
twenty-first  district  in  the  fall  of  1881.  He  had  joined  the  district  club 
the  year  before  because  "I  intended  to  be  one  of  the  governing  class." 
And  he  had  joined  the  Republican  club  in  particular  because  "a  young 
man  of  my  bringing-up  and  convictions  could  join  only  the  Republican 
party."  This  was  particularly  true  in  cities  such  as  New  York  and 
Boston,  where  the  Tammany  type  pervaded  Democratic  ranks.  In 
spite  of  the  G.O.P.'s  corruption  and  callous  disdain  for  the  needs  of 
the  masses,  it  still  loomed  large  as  the  heroic  preserver  of  national 


18  POWER  AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

union.  To  young  Roosevelt,  an  uncompromising  Unionist  since  boy- 
hood— he  had  once  prayed  to  "divine  Providence  to  grind  the  South- 
ern troops  to  powder" — and  a  strident  nationalist  from  the  time  of  his 
matriculation  in  college,  that  was  reason  enough  for  joining  it. 

Roosevelt's  baptism  as  a  reformer  occurred  at  one  of  the  meetings 
of  the  District  Club  during  the  winter  of  1880-81  when  he  and  a 
handful  of  idealistic  compatriots  stood  against  close  to  a  hundred 
regulars  in  hopeless  support  of  a  movement  for  nonpartisan  street 
cleaning.  He  otherwise  devoted  his  energies  that  year  to  breaking 
down  the  barriers  that  separated  him  from  the  lower-class  Republican 
brethren.  "I  went  around  there  often  enough  to  have  the  men  get 
accustomed  to  me  and  to  have  me  get  accustomed  to  them,  so  that 
we  began  to  speak  the  same  language,  and  so  that  each  could  begin 
to  live  down,  in  the  other's  mind,  what  Bret  Harte  has  called  'the 
defective  moral  quality  of  being  a  stranger.'  "  In  his  way,  he  suc- 
ceeded. Most  of  the  professionals  continued  to  regard  Roosevelt  as 
unique,  but  many  of  them  liked  him.  By  the  spring  of  1881  he  was  on 
fairly  good  terms  with  Jake  Hess,  the  German-American  district 
leader,  and  on  quite  close  terms  with  Joe  Murray,  an  Irish-born 
lieutenant  who  had  been  "raised  as  a  barefoot  boy  on  First  Avenue," 
served  in  the  Army  of  the  Potomac,  and  would  eventually  be  ap- 
pointed Deputy  Commissioner  of  Immigration  for  New  York  by 
Roosevelt  himself. 

While  Theodore  and  his  bride  of  less  than  a  year  were  leisurely 
wandering  through  Europe  in  the  summer  of  1881,  rumblings  of 
revolt  were  disturbing  the  harmony  of  the  Twenty-first  District  Re- 
publican Club.  Riled  by  the  failure  of  Hess's  man  to  support  the 
nonpartisan  street-cleaning  bill  in  the  last  legislative  session,  civic- 
minded  Republicans  were  threatening  defection,  or  at  least  a  tight- 
ening of  the  purse  strings.  Other,  less  civic-minded  Republicans  were 
champing  at  Hess's  inability  to  get  a  full  measure  of  patronage  from 
President  Chester  A.  Arthur. 

In  these  circumstances  Roosevelt's  new-found  friend,  Joe  Murray, 
decided  to  break  Hess's  control  by  backing  a  candidate  of  his  own 
for  the  Assembly.  Fastening  upon  Roosevelt  as  most  likely  to  appeal 
to  the  "better"  elements — the  Twenty-first  ran  from  the  pretentious 
stone  mansions  of  Fifth  Avenue  to  the  shabby  brick  tenements  of  the 
West  Side — Murray  prepared  his  ground  well.  And  when  the  nomi- 
nating convention  met  on  October  28  in  the  "large,  barn-like  room 


THE   FIRST   BATTLE  19 

over  a  saloon"  that  served  as  Club  headquarters,  he  mustered  a  16-9 
majority  for  Roosevelt  on  the  first  ballot.  Roosevelt,  who  had  allowed 
his  name  to  be  entered  with  some  reluctance,  meanwhile  announced 
that  he  was  owned  by  no  man,  would  go  to  Albany  untramrneled  and 
unpledged,  and  would  vote  independently  on  municipal  and  other 
public  matters.  He  added,  upon  formal  notification  of  his  nomination, 
that  he  would  vote  with  the  Republican  party  on  national  issues. 

Roosevelt's  nomination  struck  a  responsive  chord  except  among  a 
few  close  relatives.  One  Republican  newspaper  observed  that  the 
"substantial  property  owners"  of  the  district  needed  a  representative 
at  Albany  who  could  appreciate  the  "responsibility"  of  the  situation. 
Roosevelt  was  ideal  for  that  purpose  because  his  "family  has  been 
long  and  honorably  known  as  one  of  the  foremost  in  this  City." 
Another  declared  that  "no  better  representative  of  the  taxpayers  of 
New  York  could  have  been  selected."  And  a  group  of  prominent 
Republicans,  all  of  them  gentlemen  and  some  of  them  lawyers  of  the 
type  against  which  Theodore  would  later  inveigh,  applauded  him  as 
"conspicuous  for  his  honesty  and  integrity,  and  eminently  qualified." 

Meanwhile,  Hess  good-humoredly  mustered  the  machine  behind  the 
young  aristocrat  who  had  been  made  the  instrument  of  his  own  rebuke 
— but  not  until  after  he  and  Murray  found  it  expedient  to  change 
tactics  abruptly,  following  Roosevelt's  first  sally  into  the  heart  of  the 
district. 

"We  started  in  a  German  lager-beer  saloon  on  Sixth  Avenue," 
Murray  recalled: 

The  saloon  keeper's  name  was  Carl  Fischer.  Hess  was  well 
acquainted  with  him.  I  knew  him  slightly.  We  had  a  small  beer  and 
Hess  introduces  T.  R.  to  Fischer  and  Fischer  says,  "By  the  way, 
Mr.  Roosevelt,  I  hope  you  will  do  something  for  us  when  you  get 
to  Albany.  We  are  taxed  much  out  of  proportion  to  grocers,  etc., 
and  we  have  to  pay  $200  for  the  privilege." 

"Why  that's  not  enough!"  said  T.R. 

After  we  got  out  on  the  sidewalk  we  came  to  the  conclusion  that 
we  had  better  stop  the  canvass  right  then  and  there.  I  says,  "Mr. 
Roosevelt,  you  go  see  your  personal  friends.  Hess  and  I  will  look 
after  this  end.  You  can  reach  your  personal  friends,  we  can't." 

Roosevelt  heeded  their  advice;  on  election  day  he  mounted  a  hand- 
some majority  and  led  the  entire  Republican  ticket  by  600  votes. 
"Too  True!  Too  True!  I  have  come  a  'political  hack.  .  .  .' "  he 


20  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

wrote  Washburn  the  day  after  his  election.  "But  do'n't  think  I  am 
going  to  go  into  politics  after  this  year,  for  I  am  not."  A  little  less 
than  two  months  later,  on  January  2,  1882,  he  presented  himself  in 
pince-nez,  gold  fob,  and  evening  dress  to  the  Republican  caucus  at 
the  Delavan  House  in  Albany. 

What  Roosevelt  found  in  Albany  was  not  encouraging.  The 
Republicans  were  bad,  he  wrote  in  a  diary  he  kept  sporadically 
during  the  ensuing  months.  But,  he  added,  at  least  they  had  numbers 
of  lawyers  and  farmers  among  them.  The  Democrats  included  "six 
liquor  sellers,  two  bricklayers,  a  butcher,  a  tobacconist,  a  pawn 
broker,  a  compositer  (sic)  and  a  typesetter  ..."  Worse  yet,  twenty- 
five  were  Irish,  and  "the  average  catholic  Irishman  of  the  first  gen- 
eration as  represented  in  this  Assembly,  is  a  low,  venal,  corrupt  and 
unintelligent  brute."  The  Tammany  men  were  "managed  entirely  by 
the  commands  of  some  of  John  Kelly's  lieutenants  who  are  always 
in  the  Assembly  chamber";  the  County  Democrats  by  the  Commis- 
sioner of  Public  Works,  Hubert  O.  Thompson,  "a  gross,  enormously 
fleshy  man,  with  a  full  face  and  thick,  sensual  lips  .  .  ."  Still,  there 
were  a  few  who  seemed  "to  be  pretty  good  men."  Two  Republican 
farmers,  O'Neil  and  Sheehy,  were  "among  the  best  members  of  the 
house." 

Actually,  Roosevelt's  strictures  against  first-generation  Irish  Cath- 
olics were  grounded  more  on  observation  than  deep-seated  bias;  be- 
fore the  end  of  the  five-months  session  he  was  to  form  strong 
friendships  with  several  Irish  Democrats  of  anti-Tammany  persuasion. 
Nor  did  he  even  then  sympathize  with  those  of  his  class  who  tended 
"to  trace  all  evils,  from  the  absence  of  rain  to  the  fight  with  Arabi 
Pascha,  to  the  presence  of  Roman  Catholics  in  America."  He  rec- 
ognized Tammany  Hall  for  what  it  was — a  sink  of  corruption  domi- 
nated by  Irish  Catholics — and  he  saw  among  Republicans  a  somewhat 
better  class  of  citizen.  As  he  confided  to  his  diary,  "if  the  worst 
elements  of  all,  the  twenty  low  Irishmen,  were  subtracted,  the 
Republican  average  would  still  be  higher  than  the  Democratic." 
Roosevelt  failed  to  realize,  of  course,  that  up-state  Republicans  of 
Protestant  background  could  be  as  opposed  to  social  justice  in  their 
avowedly  moralistic  way  as  Tammany  Democrats  in  their  blatantly 
unscrupulous  way;  that  Democratic  iniquity  in  low  places  had  long 
been  surpassed  by  Republican  solicitude  for  private  business  interest  in 
high  places.  But  those  were  lessons  of  the  future. 


THE   FIRST   BATTLE  21 

Roosevelt  managed  to  contain  within  his  diary  most  of  his  opinions 
of  his  associates,  but  he  proved  unable  to  suppress  his  views  on  public 
matters.  Every  fiber  of  his  being  compelled  him  to  speak  out,  and 
he  several  times  took  positions  that  he  later  regretted  during  his  three 
terms  in  the  Assembly.  "He  was  the  most  indiscreet  guy  I  ever 
met.  .  .  ."  Isaac  Hunt  recalled.  "George  [Spinney],  Billy  O'Neil 
and  I  used  to  sit  on  his  coat-tails.  Billy  O'Neil  would  say  to  him: 
'What  do  you  want  to  do  that  for,  you  damn  fool;  you  will  ruin 
yourself  and  everybody  else!'  ...  He  was  the  most  impulsive  human 
being  I  ever  knew." 

Roosevelt's  impulsiveness  was  to  become  tempered  by  age  and 
responsibility;  only  rarely  in  later  years  would  he  act  without  delibera- 
tion on  matters  of  high  public  policy.  Even  as  he  matured,  however, 
he  continued  to  seem  impulsive,  for  he  could  phrase  the  most  care- 
fully balanced  speech  sensationally  and  make  the  most  considered 
action  appear  spontaneous.  To  the  end,  moreover,  he  remained  im- 
pulsive in  his  personal  habits,  especially  his  conversation;  and  to  the 
end  the  quality  constituted  one  of  the  mainsprings  of  his  hold  upon 
the  American  public.  Men  of  conservative  temperament  were 
alienated  and  Roosevelt's  friends  often  embarrassed  by  it.  But  the 
trust  and  devotion  of  the  middle  classes  were  inspired  by  it.  They 
seemed  to  believe  Roosevelt  incapable  of  dissemblance,  though  in 
truth  he  had  an  artful  side;  and  they  expected  that  he  would  act 
invariably  on  his  words,  though  in  fact  he  often  failed  to  do  so. 

Even  before  he  had  unloosed  his  attack  on  Judge  Westbrook, 
Roosevelt  had  laid  the  foundation  for  a  minor  reputation  as  a 
reformer.  His  maiden  speech  had  been  undistinguished,  indeed  pre- 
sumptuous and  partisan.  Delivered  in  a  halting,  almost  lisping  style, 
it  was  a  protest  against  a  movement  to  overcome  the  Democratic 
factionalism  that  had  prevented  the  Assembly  from  being  organized 
for  more  than  three  weeks  by  forming  a  coalition  of  Republicans  and 
Democrats.  "While  in  New  York  I  talked  with  several  gentlemen  who 
have  large  commercial  interests  at  stake,"  Theodore  condescendingly 
remarked  on  January  24,  1882,  "and  they  do  not  seem  to  care 
whether  the  deadlock  is  broken  or  not."  Indeed,  he  concluded,  "they 
felt  rather  relieved." 

Within  a  few  weeks,  however,  Roosevelt  proved  his  real  mettle. 
The  Syracuse  Ring,  as  one  group  of  Republican  spoilsmen  were 
known,  had  agreed  to  support  the  Tammany  legislative  program  in 


22  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

return  for  a  division  of  appointive  offices.  The  mechanics  of  the  deal 
called  for  the  transfer  of  a  number  of  positions  to  the  control  of  the 
Republican  Clerk;  and  on  February  21  the  veteran  war  horses  held 
a  G.O.P.  caucus  preparatory  to  feeding  at  the  Tammany  trough. 
Roosevelt,  Hunt,  and  a  number  of  like-minded  younger  Republicans 
raised  such  a  vigorous  protest,  however,  that  they  carried  the  majority 
with  them.  "I  did  not  believe  the  Republican  party  should  degenerate 
and  become  a  party  scrambling  for  the  spoils  of  office,  and  such 
action  would  certainly  drive  the  best  elements  of  the  party  from  it," 
Roosevelt  explained  to  a  reporter  just  after  the  caucus  ended.  "Rarely 
in  the  history  of  legislation  here  has  the  moral  force  of  individual 
honor  and  political  honesty  been  more  forcibly  displayed,"  the  New 
York  Herald  exuberantly  declared  the  next  morning.  Theodore's  diary 
entry  was  less  high  blown:  "I  firmly  and  sweetly  declined"  the 
preferments  offered  should  he  change  his  position,  he  wrote. 

Ten  days  after  that  first  minor  triumph,  Roosevelt  spoke  in  support 
of  a  bill  of  his  own  to  alter  the  procedure  for  electing  aldermen  in 
New  York  City.  He  contended  that  the  nominating  power  was  "largely 
divorced  from  the  mass  of  voters  of  the  same  party"  and  that  "every 
underhand  expedient  known  to  the  lowest  kind  of  trading  politics" 
was  thus  called  into  play.  He  proposed  to  eradicate  those  evils  by 
having  each  assembly  district  elect  its  own  alderman.  This  would 
have  reduced  the  number  of  seats  held  by  his  own  party  and  would 
have  weakened  the  influence  of  the  professionals  in  both  parties. 
The  bill  died  aborning. 

Theodore's  attitude  toward  labor  during  that  first  formative  year 
showed  few  signs  of  the  obsession  with  justice  which  otherwise  char- 
acterized him.  His  social  philosophy  still  encompassed  little  more  than 
the  Republican  predilection  for  low  taxes  and  minimal  social  services, 
and  when  a  measure  to  pay  municipal  laborers  a  minimum  of  two 
dollars  a  day  was  favorably  reported,  he  had  bolted  from  his  seat  to 
oppose  it.  "Why,  Mr.  Speaker,  this  bill  will  impose  an  expenditure  of 
thousands  of  dollars  upon  the  City  of  New  York,"  he  heatedly  said. 
Nor  was  that  all.  He  also  spiritedly  opposed  salary  increases  for 
New  York  City's  underpaid  policemen  and  firemen. 

Whatever  the  narrowness  of  his  views,  Roosevelt  had  not  lacked 
courage  during  this  baptismal  year.  He  alone  of  the  representatives 
from  New  York  City  had  spoken  out  against  the  popular  salary- 
increase  measures.  And  he  alone,  reported  the  militantly  Democratic 


THE   FIRST   BATTLE  23 

New  York  World,  had  "put  a  quietus  upon  a  gigantic  job  which  had 
been  quietly  reported"  to  grant  monopolistic  powers  over  the  con- 
struction of  bonded  warehouses  and  grain  elevators  along  the  water- 
fronts to  the  Terminal  Warehouse  Elevated  and  Docking  Company. 
He  had  capped  those  signal  actions  by  forcing  the  investigation  of 
Judge  Westbrook. 

The  result  was  reward,  and  in  certain  places,  approval.  The  New 
York  Evening  Post,  like  Roosevelt  a  bull  on  morality  and  a  bear  on 
social  reform,  asserted  at  the  end  of  the  session  that  he  "accomplished 
more  good  than  any  man  of  his  age  and  experience  has  accom- 
plished ...  in  years."  Carl  Schurz,  the  German-American  Civil 
War  general  and  civil  service  reformer  who  was  then  one  of  Roose- 
velt's political  idols,  declared  that  Roosevelt  and  two  other  assembly- 
men had  "stemmed  the  tide  of  corruption  in  that  fearful  legislative 
gathering."  And  a  group  of  the  young  Assemblyman's  personal 
friends  were  so  impressed  by  his  services  that  they  tendered  him  a 
testimonial  dinner  at  Delmonico's.  But  most  important  of  all,  Isaac 
Hunt  recollected,  he  was  now  "considered  a  full-fledged  man  worthy 
of  any  one's  esteem." 


CHAPTER  2 


A  LEADER   EMERGES 


But  as  yet  I  understood  little  of  the  effort  which  was  already 
beginning  ...  to  secure  a  more  genuine  social  and  industrial 
justice. 

— Theodore  Roosevelt,  An  Autobiography 


Roosevelt's  re-election  was  practically  inevitable,  so  illustrious  was 
his  reputation  by  the  end  of  his  first  term.  Nevertheless,  a  mild  flurry 
of  activity  marked  his  campaign  in  the  fall  of  1882.  He  was  com- 
mended for  his  "fearless,  honest,  and  independent  action"  by  a  group 
of  prominent  constituents.  Jake  Hess  and  his  regulars  fell  in  behind 
him  because  they  were  stuck  with  him.  And  the  New  York  Times, 
Herald,  and  Evening  Post  supported  him  on  the  grounds  that  he  had 
been  "self-sacrificing,"  "the  leader  of  the  younger  and  better  element," 
and  opposed  to  "corrupt  jobs  of  all  kinds."  On  November  7  Roosevelt 
led  the  entire  ticket  with  a  spectacular  two-to-one  majority  even 
though  Grover  Cleveland,  the  Democratic  candidate  for  governor, 
carried  his  district  by  1,800  votes. 

Roosevelt  had  made  only  one  important  campaign  speech.  On 
October  28,  to  an  overflow  crowd  of  friends  and  party  workers  hi 
Lyric  Hall,  he  had  forthrightly  stated  his  own  policies,  called  for 
party  regularity,  and  lashed  the  Democrats  with  that  partisan  fury 
which  would  almost  always  mar  his  campaign  speeches. 

"As  long  as  the  history  ...  of  our  nation  has  lasted,  the 
Democrats  have  been  one  and  the  same,"  he  asserted,  as  he  con- 
temptuously referred  to  Thomas  Jefferson,  "miscalled  the  Great,"  and 
James  Buchanan,  "the  Little."  The  Republicans?  Were  they  not  the 

24 


A   LEADER   EMERGES  25 

party  of  Hamilton,  Webster,  and  Clay;  the  "great  party  which  has 
produced  a  Lincoln  ...  the  party  within  whose  ranks  we  now  hold 
Schurz  and  Choate,  and  every  other  name  almost  that  tends  to  make 
this  city  illustrious"?  If  he  were  re-elected,  Roosevelt  declared,  he 
would  endeavor  to  carry  "honesty  and  courage"  as  well  as  "private 
morality"  into  public  office.  He  would  also  tackle  the  issue  of  "great 
importance" — monopoly.  ".  .  .  there  is  no  question  that  there  is  a 
vital  spirit  underlying  it;  that  we  as  a  people  are  suffering  from  new 
dangers;  that  as  our  fathers  fought  with  slavery  and  crushed  it,  in 
order  that  it  would  not  seize  and  crush  them,  so  we  are  called  on  to 
fight  new  forces." 

The  young  New  Yorker  kept  well  that  faith.  During  his  second  term 
he  again  stood  out  as  a  fearless  foe  of  corruption  and  an  unfailing 
champion  of  governmental  reform.  And  he  also  started  a  campaign 
to  control  monopoly  which  was  to  carry  into  his  governorship  and  on 
through  his  presidency.  His  record  was  so  striking,  in  fact,  that  half- 
way through  the  session  he  received  national  recognition  in  the  pages 
of  Harper's  Weekly  and  by  the  end  of  the  session  had  emerged  as 
the  leader  of  a  faction  openly  known  as  "The  Roosevelt  Republicans." 
In  his  third  and  final  term,  yet  more  honors  befell  him. 

Roosevelt's  near-meteoric  rise  was  the  result  of  a  partial  measure 
of  good  fortune  and  a  full  measure  of  initiative  and  daring.  It  was  his 
fortune  that  those  ignoble  exemplars  of  easy  political  virtue,  Roscoe 
Conkling  and  Thomas  C.  Platt,  were  without  great  power  during  his 
three  years  in  the  legislature.  And  it  was  probably  his  fortune,  too, 
that  his  last  terms  coincided  with  the  governorship  of  Grover  Cleve- 
land. Several  times  during  the  sessions  of  1883  and  1884  Cleve- 
land and  Roosevelt  caught  the  public  imagination  by  cooperating 
against  their  party  machines,  and  in  one  graphic  cartoon  the  stolid 
Democratic  Governor  and  the  ebullient  Republican  Assemblyman 
were  portrayed  with  arms  linked  surveying  a  disintegrated  Tammany 
tiger.  But  in  the  end  the  relationship  between  the  two  future  Presi- 
dents, the  one  forty-six  years  old  and  increasingly  conscious  of  his 
destiny,  the  other  twenty-four  and  still  uncertain  of  his  life's  work, 
was  marred  by  recrimination. 

The  event  that  first  joined  the  two  men  in  common  cause  was 
Cleveland's  veto  of  a  bill,  twice  supported  by  Roosevelt,  to  reduce 
the  fare  on  the  elevated  railways  from  ten  to  five  cents.  Always  a 
popular  issue,  it  had  special  significance  at  the  time  because  of  a 


26  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

public  indignation  against  Jay  Gould.  Many  of  the  most  respected 
elements  in  the  city  regarded  the  bill  as  a  means  of  dealing  that 
haughty  buccaneer  a  heavy  blow,  and  the  city's  Republican  delega- 
tion at  Albany  prepared  to  support  it  almost  to  a  man. 

Roosevelt  would  normally  have  opposed  such  a  radical  measure. 
The  laissez-faire  teachings  of  Harvard  had  held  that  the  regulation 
of  business  was  not  a  legislative  function.  The  social  milieu  in  which 
Theodore  had  been  reared  confirmed  the  tradional  ordained  rights  of 
property.  And  the  experience  of  the  previous  year  had  convinced  him 
that  "corporations  are  more  sinned  against  than  sinning."  Yet  the 
Westbrook  investigation  had  given  him  an  insight  into  the  machina- 
tions of  Jay  Gould  and  people  like  him.  He  allowed  himself  to  be 
carried  along  by  the  swelling  tide. 

The  tide  failed  to  engulf  the  ultra-conservative  gentleman  in  the 
Executive  Mansion,  however.  Convinced  that  the  fare-reduction  bill 
embodied  a  breach  of  contract,  Governor  Cleveland  vetoed  the 
measure  in  a  magnificent  display  of  courage.  "The  State  should  not 
only  be  strictly  just,"  he  solemnly  affirmed,  "but  scrupulously  fair." 

Young  Roosevelt  took  Cleveland's  words  to  heart.  No  sooner  was 
the  veto  message  read  to  the  Assembly  on  March  2,  1883,  than  he 
jumped  to  his  feet  (he  had  already  been  likened  to  a  jack  rabbit  by 
Gould's  New  York  World).  He  had  risen  to  confess,  he  dramatically 
announced,  that  he  had  blundered  grievously  in  supporting  the  bill 
originally.  "I  ...  weakly  yielded,  partly  in  a  vindictive  spirit  to- 
ward the  infernal  thieves  and  conscienceless  swindlers  who  have  the 
elevated  railroads  in  charge,  and  partly  to  the  popular  voice  of  New 
York."  The  measure  "breaks  the  plighted  faith  of  the  state"  and 
was  therefore  at  root  "a  question  of  justice  to  ourselves."  He  would 
rather  leave  politics  with  the  feeling  "that  I  had  done  what  was  right 
than  stay  in  with  the  approval  of  all  men,  knowing  in  my  heart  that 
I  had  acted  as  I  ought  not  to." 

Roosevelt's  courageous  sentiments  were  echoed  less  publicly  by 
many  of  his  colleagues,  and  on  March  7  the  veto  was  decisively 
sustained.  Although  the  sensationalist  press  continued  to  berate  him, 
many  responsible  newspapers  commended  his  action  warmly.  Roosevelt 
was  a  gentleman  "whose  probity  is  as  generally  recognized  as  his 
ability,"  the  New  York  Tribune  said  in  a  representative  editorial;  he 
had  acted  with  "characteristic  manliness"  in  reversing  himself  on 
the  five-cent-fare  bill. 


A   LEADER   EMERGES  27 

Nor  was  that  the  only  time  that  Roosevelt  made  a  manly  change  of 
front  that  spring.  For  some  months  Theodore  had  been  immaturely 
excoriating  an  aged  assemblyman  from  Richmond,  one  Erastus 
Brooks.  Finally,  near  the  close  of  the  session,  Brooks  delivered  a  full- 
dress  defense  of  his  actions,  and  he  also  attacked  Roosevelt  sharply. 
When  the  Richmond  Assemblyman  had  finished,  relates  Putnam, 
Roosevelt  strode  forward  with  tears  in  his  eyes  to  shake  his  adversary's 
hand.  "Mr.  Brooks,  I  surrender,"  he  contritely  exclaimed.  "I  beg 
your  pardon." 

In  the  meantime  Roosevelt  had  mounted  a  new  attack  on  Jay 
Gould.  Within  a  week  of  his  vote  in  support  of  Cleveland's  veto, 
he  introduced  a  resolution  directing  the  Attorney  General  to  bring 
3t&k>  for  the  dissolution  of  Gould's  Manhattan  Elevated  Railway  Com- 
pany. And  a  few  days  after  that  he  boldly  charged  that  the  New  York 
World  was  "a  local  stock-jobbing  sheet  of  limited  circulation  and 
versatile  mendacity,  owned  by  the  arch  thief  of  Wall  Street,  and 
edited  by  a  rancorous  kleptomaniac  with  a  penchant  for  trousers." 

The  words  were  impetuous,  but  the  theme  was  not.  A  year  before, 
so  Roosevelt's  Autobiography  suggests  and  his  record  seemingly 
confirms,  Roosevelt  had  come  to  a  personal  crossroads.  Some  time 
after  the  Westbrook  investigation  an  old  family  friend  had  taken 
Theodore  to  lunch.  After  remarking  that  it  had  been  a  good  thing 
for  Roosevelt  to  have  made  the  "reform  play,"  the  friend  advised 
him  to  leave  politics  and  identify  himself  with  "the  right  kind  of 
people,  the  people  who  would  always  in  the  long  run  control  others 
and  obtain  the  real  rewards."  Theodore  asked  if  this  meant  that  he 
should  yield  to  the  "ring."  The  patronizing  retort  was  that  the  so- 
called  "ring"  included  "certain  big  business  men,  and  the  politicians, 
lawyers  and  judges  who  were  in  alliance  with  and  to  a  certain  extent 
dependent  upon  them,  and  that  the  successful  man  had  to  win  his 
success  by  the  backing  of  the  same  forces,  whether  in  law,  business, 
or  politics." 

Meanwhile,  Roosevelt  and  Cleveland  had  come  together  in  support 
of  civil  service  reform,  the  bete  noire  of  machine  politicians  in  both 
parties.  Early  in  the  session  Cleveland  conferred  in  his  office  with 
Roosevelt  and  a  few  other  Republicans  in  an  effort  to  form  such  a 
coalition  of  antimachine  Republicans  and  anti-Tammany  Democrats 
as  would  prevent  the  machine  politicians  in  both  parties  from  thwart- 
ing his  program.  Roosevelt  was  amenable,  and  the  coalition  was 


28  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

formed.  Several  important  measures  were  enacted  in  consequence,  the 
most  far-reaching  of  which  created  a  Civil  Service  Commission.  In 
addition,  a  large  number  of  bills  conferring  special  privileges  on 
corporations  were  killed.  The  Roosevelt  Republicans,  the  New  York 
Times  correspondent  enthusiastically  reported  at  the  close  of  the 
session,  had  been  "as  effective  as  any  minority  the  writer  has  ever 
seen  in  the  Assembly." 

Governor  Cleveland's  resolve  to  brook  no  compromise  with  Tam- 
many had  split  the  Democrats  and  provoked  a  Republican  victory  in 
the  legislative  elections  of  1883.  Roosevelt  thereupon  decided  to  bid 
for  the  speakership,  for  which  post  he  had  received  his  party's  com- 
plimentary nomination  at  the  start  of  his  second  term.  Employing 
the  techniques  of  the  professional  politician  for  the  first  time,  he 
threw  himself  into  the  contest  with  remarkable  vigor.  He  went  into 
remote  rural  regions  to  seek  out  assemblymen-elect.  He  requested  and 
authorized  his  friends  to  work  for  him.  And  he  wrote  numerous  letters 
soliciting  support.  Yet  he  apparently  made  no  deals.  "I  am  a  Repub- 
lican, pure  and  simple,  neither  a  'half  breed'  nor  a  'stalwart';  and 
certainly  no  man,  nor  j  cl  any  ring  or  clique,  can  do  my  thinking  for 
me,"  he  informed  at  least  one  correspondent: 

As  you  say,  I  believe  in  treating  all  our  business  interests  equi- 
tably and  alike;  in  favoring  no  one  interest  or  set  of  interests  at  the 
expense  of  others.  In  making  up  the  committees  I  should  pay 
attention,  first,  to  the  absolute  integrity  of  the  men,  second,  to  their 
capacity  to  deal  intelligently  with  the  matters  likely  to  come  be- 
fore them — for  .  .  .  honesty  and  common  sense  are  the  two  prime 
requisites  for  a  legislator. 

Roosevelt  concluded  that  he  was  much  stronger  than  he  had  dared 
hope,  and  on  the  eve  of  the  contest  he  wrote  that  his  chances  were 
good  even  though  the  lobby  and  the  politicians  had  raised  the  free- 
trade  scarecrow  against  him.  Had  not  the  New  York  Times  remarked 
that  the  only  thing  against  him  was  "the  curable  defect  of  being  a 
young  man"?  When  the  Republican  caucus  met  on  New  Year's  Eve, 
however,  Titus  Sheard,  a  reputable,  self-made  manufacturer  from 
Herkimer  County  was  elected  by  42  votes  to  30.  Theodore  had 
suffered  his  first  political  defeat,  and  he  was,  he  conceded,  "cha- 
grined." 

Roosevelt's  strength  was  so  great,  however,  that  Sheard  appointed 


A    LEADER   EMERGES  29 

him  chairman  of  the  Committee  on  Cities  and  then  made  him  chair- 
man of  a  special  committee  to  investigate  the  Public  Works  Depart- 
ment. In  spite  of  the  personal  burdens  that  I  will  describe  in  the  next 
chapter,  Roosevelt's  special  committee  conducted  one  of  the  most 
sensational  investigations  of  municipal  government  to  that  time.  Day 
after  day  Theodore  and  his  colleagues  relentlessly  grilled  minor  and 
major  officeholders  as  they  sought  to  unravel  the  interlocking  hold  of 
corruption  on  New  York  City.  Finally,  on  March  14,  the  committee 
filed  its  report.  "Appalling  Condition  of  Affairs";  "Surrogate's  Office 
a  Place  for  Blackmailing";  "How  the  City  is  Robbed";  "Sweeping 
Changes  Urged";  "Roosevelt's  Blunderbuss" — so  the  newspapers 
heralded  it. 

The  findings  justified  the  headlines.  The  committee's  report  re- 
vealed that  the  county  clerk  had  netted  $250,000  through  the  fee 
system  and  that  the  register  of  deeds  and  mortgages  had  paid  ap- 
proximately $50,000  for  his  appointment.  It  showed  that  "a  system 
of  the  grossest  blackmail  and  extortion  prevailed  among  the  em- 
ployees" in  the  surrogate's  office.  The  Department  of  Taxes  and 
Assessments  was  found  to  have  "absolutely  no  system  whatever  in 
the  assessing"  of  real  estate,  while  the  "grossest  abuses"  were  dis- 
covered in  the  sheriff's  office.  Worse  still,  the  investigation  indicated 
that  the  real  governing  authorities  of  the  City  of  New  York  were 
"outside  parties  who  cannot  be  held  responsible  to  the  law." 

Roosevelt  proposed  to  eradicate  these  evils  by  a  comprehensive 
program  of  reform  legislation.  Shortly  after  the  special  committee  had 
reported  he  introduced  nine  bills,  seven  of  which  were  eventually 
enacted  into  law.  The  most  important  substituted  salaries  for  the  fee 
system,  deprived  the  board  of  aldermen  of  the  authority  to  confirm 
the  mayor's  appointments,  and  empowered  the  mayor  to  appoint  city 
department  heads  and  other  municipal  officials  as  well  as  to  remove 
them  for  cause  with  the  governor's  approval. 

Meanwhile  Roosevelt  drew  up  a  bill  designed  to  force  the  removal 
of  Commissioner  of  Public  Works  Hubert  O.  Thompson,  the  leader  of 
the  County  Democrats.  At  the  same  time  Roosevelt  openly  pressed 
Cleveland  to  investigate  again  Sheriff  Alexander  V.  Davidson,  who 
had  been  acquitted  of  extortion  following  a  grand-jury  indictment. 
Cleveland  was  thereby  caught  in  a  nightmarish  dilemma.  Both 
Thompson  and  Davidson  had  played  important  roles  in  his  rise  to 
the  governorship;  their  cooperation  would  be  urgently  needed  in  the 


30  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

drive  for  his  nomination  for  the  presidency.  He  had  already  broken 
with  Tammany.  Could  he  now  destroy  Thompson  and  Davidson  and 
yet  himself  survive? 

For  the  first  and  perhaps  the  only  time  during  his  governorship 
Cleveland  pursued  an  equivocal  course.  He  vetoed  the  bill  which 
would  have  effected  Thompson's  removal,  and  in  spite  of  Roosevelt's 
presentation  of  evidence  which  the  grand  jury  had  not  considered,  he 
failed  to  move  against  Davidson. 

Actually,  Cleveland's  veto  was  well  founded.  The  bill  had  been  so 
amended  by  Republican  allies  of  Tammany  that  it  probably  could  not 
have  accomplished  its  purpose.  As  its  original  draftsman  pointed  out 
in  a  letter  to  the  New  York  Times,  the  final  version  was  "unfit  to 
find  a  place  in  the  statute  book."  Nevertheless,  the  veto  and  the  dis- 
missal of  Roosevelt's  charges  against  Davidson  gave  the  Republicans, 
grown  desperate  for  an  issue  against  the  popular  Cleveland,  what  they 
had  almost  despaired  of  finding.  "Now  we  had  several  bills  that  bore 
upon  Tammany  Hall,"  Roosevelt  exclaimed  in  a  campaign  speech 
the  following  fall.  "The  Governor  signed  those  most  unflinchingly — 
with  reckless  heroism.  Then  we  had  several  that  affected  the  County 
Democracy,  and  the  leader  of  the  County  Democracy — my  esteemed 
fellow  citizen,  Mr.  Hubert  O.  Thompson,  and  those  measures  came 
to  an  untimely  end." 

Although  Roosevelt's  legislative  lodestar  was  political  reform,  his 
restless  mind  and  compelling  sense  of  duty  impelled  him  to  explore 
and  speak  out  on  a  wide  range  of  subjects.  In  1883  he  vigorously 
opposed  a  bill  to  tighten  the  newspaper  libel  law  on  the  grounds  that 
"it  is  a  great  deal  better  to  err  a  little  bit  on  the  side  of  having  too 
much  discussion  and  having  too  virulent  language  used  by  the  press, 
rather  than  to  err  on  the  side  of  having  them  not  say  what  they  ought 
to  say,  especially  with  reference  to  public  men  and  measures."  And  in 
1884  he  spoke  against  a  prohibition  bill,  arguing  that  it  would  play 
into  the  hands  of  the  very  elements  it  was  designed  to  repress. 

Roosevelt  also  took  a  firm  position  on  the  absolute  separation  of 
church  and  state.  Catholic  and  Protestant  charitable  organizations 
periodically  solicited  financial  support  from  the  legislature,  and  during 
the  1883  session  it  was  proposed  that  the  Catholic  Protectory  at 
Elmira  be  granted  $25,000  for  the  construction  of  a  new  sewerage 
plant.  Roosevelt  interposed  a  forceful  objection,  asserting  that  the 
connection  of  church  and  state  was  "wholly  wrong,"  that  it  brought 


A    LEADER  EMERGES  31 

religion  into  politics,  and  that  it  violated  the  spirit  of  the  Constitution. 
His  brief  was  unavailing,  however;  the  bill  passed  by  99  to  17.  A  few 
weeks  later  when  a  bill  to  grant  funds  to  a  Protestant  organization 
came  up  he  took  a  similar  position  and  was  again  resoundingly  de- 
feated. Yet  his  consistency  did  not  go  unnoticed.  "Mr.  ROOSEVELT 
enjoys  in  the  Assembly  the  distinction  of  having  convictions  and  acting 
up  to  them,"  the  New  York  Times  said. 

It  was  Roosevelt's  attitudes  toward  labor  which  were  most  reveal- 
ing of  his  development  during  these  formative  years.  He  was  slow  to 
comprehend  the  changes  brought  about  by  the  industrial  revolution — 
the  growing  impersonality  of  the  relations  between  employer  and  em- 
ployee, the  wearying  monotony  of  routine  labor,  the  frequent  intervals 
of  unemployment,  and  the  intense  competition  for  jobs  of  the  meanest 
sort.  Nor  did  he  then  understand  the  function  of  unions.  He  attributed 
the  deplorable  conditions  of  labor  to  the  workings  of  natural  law 
rather  than  to  the  gross  mismanagement  of  human  resources;  and 
natural  law,  in  the  prevailing  view,  was  inviolable.  As  the  Rev.  Henry 
Ward  Beecher,  who  was  as  convinced  that  God  was  on  the  side  of  the 
capitalists  as  he  was  certain  that  Satan  was  allied  with  the  saloon- 
keepers and  their  workingmen  customers,  declaimed:  "The  things 
required  for  prosperous  labor,  prosperous  manufactures,  and  pros- 
perous commerce  are  three.  First,  liberty;  second,  liberty;  and  third, 
liberty." 

It  is  a  tribute  to  Roosevelt's  capacity  for  growth  that  his  labor  views 
changed  at  all.  Unlike  Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  Elihu  Root  and  most 
leading  Republicans  of  his  generation,  he  gradually  came  to  possess 
some  comprehension  of  the  labor  problem.  And  though  he  failed  to 
emerge  of  a  sudden  as  an  advanced  labor  reformer,  his  three  years  as 
an  assemblyman  saw  his  first  cautious  wandering  from  the  hallowed 
highway  of  laissez  faire. 

True,  his  wanderings  were  inconsistent.  Even  in  his  final  term 
Roosevelt  opposed  a  bill  to  reduce  the  working  time  for  some  15,000 
streetcar  conductors  to  twelve  hours  per  day.  He  first  argued  that  to 
oppose  the  law  of  supply  and  demand  because  it  was  unfeeling  was 
like  trying  to  repeal  the  law  of  gravity  because  its  results  were  some- 
times brutal;  he  then  charged  that  the  twelve-hour  legislation  would 
tie  labor  to  the  apron  strings  of  the  state.  To  offer  a  worker  such 
protection,  he  exclaimed,  was  both  un-American  and  insulting!  Had 
not  Speaker  of  the  Assembly  Titus  Sheard  risen  from  laborer  to 


32  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

manufacturer  without  such  aid?  The  statement  was  correct,  Sheard 
acknowledged  in  reply.  He  added,  however,  that  he  had  found  work- 
ing fourteen  hours  a  day  painful,  brutalizing,  and  not  in  any  way 
related  to  his  subsequent  success.  Indeed,  Sheard  said,  he  believed 
that  he  would  have  been  even  more  self-reliant  if  his  hours  of  labor 
had  been  shorter  and  his  wages  higher! 

Nevertheless,  the  still  callow  Roosevelt  continued  to  oppose  the 
bill.  He  raised  the  haunting  specter  of  communism  and  socialism  and 
he  inveighed  against  the  Knights  of  Labor,  who  were  then  approach- 
ing the  peak  of  their  power.  Every  man  should  stand  on  his  own 
bottom,  he  self-righteously  declared  at  one  point,  only  to  be  reminded, 
in  what  should  have  been  the  most  mortifying  blow  of  his  legislative 
career,  that  his  own  bottom  was  his  inheritance  from  his  father,  the 
laboring  man's  nothing.  It  was  not  surprising  that  John  Swinton's 
Paper,  a  militant  labor  journal  edited  by  a  fiery  idealist,  called  him  a 
"crested  snob."  Yet  Roosevelt  won  his  point;  Grover  Cleveland,  who 
was  to  prove  far  less  sympathetic  to  labor  than  Theodore  Roosevelt 
in  the  summing  up,  vetoed  the  bill  on  the  grounds  that  it  was  "class 
legislation." 

John  Swinton's  bitter  characterization  of  Roosevelt  was  animated 
by  more  than  resentment  of  the  young  Assemblyman's  opposition  to 
the  twelve-hour  bill.  By  then  Roosevelt  had  several  times  flaunted 
labor  or  its  interests.  He  had  recommended  public  whipping  for 
certain  crimes.  He  had  dismissed  with  thinly  veiled  contempt  labor's 
charge  that  the  convict-labor  system  "was  a  vital  cobra  which  was 
swamping  [sic]  the  lives  of  laboring  men."  He  had  supported  an  anti- 
riot  bill  which  labor  quite  realistically  regarded  as  an  antistrike 
measure.  And  he  had  once  invited  "a  labor  agitator  from  Brooklyn" 
to  "step  outside"  to  defend  himself.  The  trouble  with  the  working- 
men,  he  wrote  in  a  patronizing  magazine  article  the  year  after  he 
retired  from  the  Assembly,  was  that  they  had  been  instilled  with  false 
hopes  by  "professional  agitators"  who  were  "always  promising  to 
procure  by  legislation  the  advantages  which  can  only  come  to  work- 
ingmen  ...  by  their  individual  or  united  energy,  intelligence,  and 
forethought." 

Years  later  Roosevelt  regretted  his  manifest  hostility  toward  unions 
and  most  labor  legislation  during  this  period.  "One  partial  reason  for 
my  slowness  in  grasping  the  importance  of  action  in  these  matters," 
he  wrote  in  his  Autobiography,  "was  the  corrupt  and  unattractive 


A    LEADER   EMERGES  33 

nature  of  so  many  of  the  men  who  championed  popular  reforms,  their 
insincerity,  and  the  folly  of  so  many  of  the  actions  which  they 
advocated." 

Samuel  Gompers,  the  convivial,  dedicated,  English-born  Jew  who 
gave  the  American  labor  movement  its  pragmatic  character,  was 
responsible  for  Roosevelt's  first  real  insight  into  the  degrading  effects 
of  his  vaunted  natural  law.  For  years  humanitarians  had  been  de- 
nouncing the  manufacture  of  cigars  in  New  York  tenements  by  un- 
organized immigrants  who  labored  for  wages  that  might  have  been 
termed  subsistence  had  not  their  death  rate  belied  it.  Finally,  in  1882, 
Gompers  arranged  the  introduction  of  a  bill  to  outlaw  the  manufacture 
of  cigars  in  tenements,  and  a  three-man  committee,  including  the 
freshman  Roosevelt,  was  appointed  to  investigate. 

Roosevelt  later  believed  that  he  was  put  on  the  committee  in  the 
cynical  expectation  that  he  would  perfunctorily  report  against  the 
tenement  bill.  Possibly  he  was.  Neither  the  Democratic  nor  the 
Republican  leadership  wanted  to  strike  against  the  status  quo;  nor  did 
the  two  other  members  of  the  committee  plan  to  act  in  full  con- 
science. The  Republican  member  confided  to  Roosevelt  that  he  would 
support  the  measure  because  of  labor  strength  in  his  district,  and  the 
Democrat,  "a  sporting  Tammany  man  who  afterward  abandoned 
politics  for  the  race-track,"  as  Theodore  remembered,  frankly 
admitted  that  he  had  to  oppose  the  bill  because  of  certain  powerful 
interests.  But  he  suggested  that  Roosevelt  look  into  the  situation, 
adding  that  he  believed  Roosevelt  would  favor  the  labor  proposal  on 
firsthand  knowledge. 

Impressed  by  Roosevelt's  "aggressiveness  and  evident  sincerity," 
Gompers  meanwhile  invited  the  young  Assemblyman  to  tour  the 
tenement  area  with  him.  Roosvelt  accepted,  though  he  was  then  in- 
clined to  oppose  the  bill.  As  he  afterward  wrote:  "The  respectable 
people  I  knew  were  against  it;  and  it  was  contrary  to  the  principles  of 
political  economy  of  the  laissez-faire  kind;  the  businessmen  who  spoke 
to  me  about  it  shook  their  heads  and  said  that  it  was  designed  to 
prevent  a  man  doing  as  he  wished  and  as  he  had  a  right  to  do  with 
what  was  his  own."  But  his  several  inspections  of  tenements — he  went 
once  with  Gompers  and  several  union  officials,  once  with  the  other 
members  of  the  committee,  and  once  or  twice  on  his  own — convinced 
him  of  the  need  for  the  legislation.  "I  have  always  remembered  one 
room  in  which  two  families  were  living,"  he  recalled.  "There  were 


34  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

several  children,  three  men,  and  two  women  in  this  room.  The 
tobacco  was  stowed  about  everywhere,  alongside  the  foul  bedding,  and 
in  a  corner  where  there  were  scraps  of  food.  The  men,  women,  and 
children  in  this  room  worked  by  day  and  far  on  into  the  evening,  and 
they  slept  and  ate  there.  They  were  Bohemians,  unable  to  speak  Eng- 
lish, except  that  one  of  the  children  knew  enough  to  act  as  interpreter." 

When  the  tenement  bill  was  brought  out  of  committee  late  that 
winter,  Roosevelt  supported  it  on  the  floor.  The  measure  got  through 
the  Assembly,  but  it  failed  to  be  considered  by  the  Senate,  the  copy 
of  the  bill  being  stolen  from  the  clerk's  files  by  a  member  of  the 
manufacturers'  lobby.  The  following  year,  however,  a  similar  measure 
passed  both  houses  and  was  sent  to  the  Governor  for  approval.  Cleve- 
land balked,  fearing  the  bill  was  unconstitutional;  but  he  did  agree  to 
hold  a  hearing  on  March  8.  Roosevelt  thereupon  consented,  as  he 
phrased  it,  to  act  "as  spokesman  for  the  battered,  undersized  foreigners 
who  represented  the  Union  and  the  workers,"  and  on  the  appointed 
day  he  argued  convincingly  for  its  adoption.  After  listening  impassively 
to  Roosevelt  and  other  interested  parties,  the  Governor  surmounted 
his  scruples  and  signed  the  measure  into  law. 

Refusing  to  accept  defeat,  the  manufacturers  took  the  issue  to  the 
courts.  Their  able  attorney,  former  Secretary  of  State  William  M. 
Evarts,  argued  that  tobacco  was  "a  disinfectant  and  a  prophylactic," 
that  socialism  and  communism  were  responsible  for  the  bill's  con- 
ception, and  that  home  manufacture  was  actually  conducive  to  "the 
proper  culture  of  growing  girls."  Apparently  convinced  by  Evarts's 
reasoning,  the  New  York  Court  of  Appeals  ruled  the  tenement  law 
unconstitutional  within  less  than  a  year  of  the  bill's  passage. 

Three  months  after  that  shocking  decision,  an  indignant  legislature 
overwhelmingly  passed  a  slightly  modified  bill.  Again,  Roosevelt 
vigorously  championed  the  measure  in  a  speech  in  which  he  strayed 
far  from  the  philosophical  tenets  of  his  youth.  He  conceded  that  the 
abolition  of  tenement  workshops  was  not  only  a  dangerous  departure 
from  prevailing  doctrines,  but  was  "in  a  certain  sense  a  socialistic 
one."  Nevertheless,  he  added  in  an  understanding  passage,  the  con- 
stantly increasing  extremes  of  poverty  and  wealth  demand  that  we 
"modify  the  principles  or  doctrines  on  which  we  manage  our  system 
of  government."  Otherwise,  he  continued,  neither  the  cigar  makers 
nor  their  children  would  ever  be  fit  to  perform  the  duties  of  American 
citizenship.  He  concluded  that  the  bill  merited  passage  as  a  "hygienic 


A   LEADER   EMERGES  35 

measure  alone,"  and  he  emphasized  that  he  was  supporting  the 
measure  on  the  basis  of  his  own  findings  rather  than  the  union's 
recommendations . 

Whatever  his  reservations  about  labor  unions,  the  struggle  over  the 
tenement  bill  was  a  powerfully  formative  experience  for  Roosevelt. 
For  the  first  time  he  had  faced  the  bleak  fact  that  the  American 
economic  system  was  cruelly  denying  social  development  to  hundreds 
of  thousands,  and  probably  millions,  of  working  people.  Either  their 
lot  would  be  ameliorated  or  democratic  capitalism  would  be  destroyed. 
Those  were  the  alternatives.  Young  Roosevelt  was  one  of  the  few  of 
his  class  or  party  to  perceive  them,  however  faintly. 

Theodore's  growth  was  evidenced  by  several  other  actions  during 
his  three  years  in  Albany.  He  sponsored  a  bill  to  regulate  the  work- 
ing conditions  of  women  and  children;  he  several  times  voted  for 
bills  instituting  safety  measures  in  factories  and  various  trades;  and 
he  gave  full  support  to  the  creation  of  a  labor  bureau.  Only  on  the 
wage  increases  for  firemen,  policemen,  and  city  laborers,  which  he 
regarded  as  politically  inspired,  did  he  stubbornly  hold  out. 

After  he  left  the  legislature  Roosevelt's  insight  into  the  character 
of  American  society,  and  especially  of  the  judiciary,  continued  to 
deepen.  In  January,  1885,  the  New  York  State  Court  of  Appeals 
found  in  the  In  re  Jacobs  case  that  the  tenement  law  passed  in  1884 
was  patently  unconstitutional.  How,  the  court  asked,  can  the  health 
and  morals  of  the  producer  be  improved  "by  forcing  him  from  his 
home  and  its  hallowed  associations  and  beneficent  influences,  to  ply 
his  trade  elsewhere?"  The  tenement  law,  the  court  continued,  was  an 
indisputable  abridgment  of  the  cigar  makers'  "fundamental  rights  of 
liberty." 

Roosevelt's  reaction  to  the  Jacobs  decision  at  the  time  is  uncertain. 
Probably  his  autobiographical  commentary  is  a  fair  statement  of  his 
attitude.  "It  was  this  case  which  first  waked  me  to  a  dim  and  partial 
understanding  of  the  fact  that  the  courts  were  not  necessarily  the  best 
judges  of  what  should  be  done  to  better  social  and  industrial  con- 
ditions," he  wrote.  "Of  course  it  took  more  than  one  experience  such 
as  this  Tenement  Cigar  Case  to  shake  me  out  of  the  attitude  in  which 
I  was  brought  up."  For  the  fact  was  "the  people  with  whom  I  was 
most  intimate  were  apt  to  praise  the  courts  for  just  such  decisions  as 
this,  and  to  speak  of  them  as  bulwarks  against  disorder  and  barriers 
against  demagogic  legislation."  But  as  a  result  of  numerous  such 


36  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

decisions,  he  continued,  "I  grew  to  realize  that  all  Abraham  Lincoln 
had  said  about  the  Dred  Scott  decision  could  be  said  with  equal  truth 
and  justice  about  the  numerous  decisions  which  in  our  own  day  were 
erected  as  bars  across  the  path  of  social  reform,  and  which  brought 
to  naught  so  much  of  the  effort  to  secure  justice  and  fair  dealings  for 
working  men  and  working  women,  and  for  plain  citizens  generally." 

Young  Roosevelt's  political  horizons  meanwhile  broadened  even 
more  rapidly  than  his  social  insights  deepened.  Eighteen  eighty-four 
was  a  presidential  election  year,  and  the  Grand  Old  Party's  con- 
trolling clique  was  determined  to  make  James  G.  Blaine,  of  Maine 
and  "Mulligan  letters"  fame,  the  Republican  nominee.  Repelled  by 
Elaine's  unsavory  political  character,  George  W.  Curtis,  Carl  Schurz, 
Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  and  other  reform-minded  Republicans  decided 
to  oppose  the  "Plumed  Knight"  with  Senator  George  F.  Edmunds  of 
Vermont,  an  honest,  conservative  Yankee  of  no  particular  distinction. 
Roosevelt,  who  was  not  less  repelled  by  Blaine  than  Curtis  and  the 
others,  joined  them.  He  announced  himself  for  Edmunds  in  mid- 
January,  though  the  Twenty-first  District  machine  was  for  President 
Arthur,  and  in  mid-April  his  slate  of  Edmunds  men  defeated  Jake 
Hess's  in  the  contest  for  delegates  to  the  Republican  State  Con- 
vention. 

Thereafter  the  story  blurs.  The  World  later  charged  that  Roosevelt 
had  compromised  with  John  J.  O'Brien,  the  city  Republican  leader,  in 
his  battle  against  Hess.  Contending  that  Roosevelt  had  needed 
O'Brien's  support  to  defeat  Hess,  the  World  claimed  that  he  failed  to 
make  a  sufficiently  strong  effort  to  pass  a  reform  bill — the  Bureau  of 
Elections  Bill — which  would  have  removed  O'Brien  as  Chief  of  the 
Bureau  of  Elections.  Had  Roosevelt  worked  as  hard  for  passage  of 
that  bill  as  he  had  for  the  Tenure-of-Office  bill,  the  World  wrote,  it 
would  have  gone  through. 

No  other  evidence  confirms  those  charges,  and  Putnam  concludes 
that  they  are  groundless.  Yet  Roosevelt  makes  the  following  admis- 
sion in  his  A  utobiography : 

I  at  one  period  began  to  believe  that  I  had  a  future  before  me,  and 
that  it  behooved  me  to  be  very  far-sighted  and  scan  each  action 
carefully  with  a  view  to  its  possible  effect  on  that  future.  This 
speedily  made  me  useless  to  the  public  and  an  object  of  aversion 
to  myself;  and  I  then  made  up  my  mind  that  I  would  try  not  to 
think  of  the  future  at  all,  but  would  proceed  on  the  assumption  that 


A   LEADER    EMERGES  37 

each  office  I  held  would  be  the  last  I  ever  should  hold,  and  that  I 
would  confine  myself  to  trying  to  do  my  work  as  well  as  possible 
while  I  held  that  office. 

Whether  that  passage  refers  to  the  World's  charges  is  unclear.  It  is 
certain,  however,  that  except  for  an  assertion  by  the  Evening  Post 
after  the  presidential  election  of  1884  that  Roosevelt  had  "showered 
certificates  of  good  character  and  promise  of  'support'  on  candidates 
for  all  sorts  of  city  offices,"  no  other  action  of  his  legislative  career 
remotely  suggests  such  a  compromise. 

The  New  York  Republican  party  was  torn  with  dissension  as  it 
prepared  to  convene  in  Utica  that  spring.  Most  "stalwarts"  lined  up 
behind  President  Chester  A.  Arthur,  who  had  drawn  on  theretofore 
untapped  resources  to  give  the  country  a  competent  administration. 
The  "half-breeds"  fell  in  behind  Elaine,  as  did  a  faction  of  stalwarts 
headed  by  State  Senator  Thomas  C.  Platt,  who  had  come  out  of 
seclusion  and  was  soon  to  build  the  machine  that  made  him  the 
dominant  power  in  New  York  politics  for  almost  two  decades.  The 
Oswego  druggist  was  for  Elaine  because  he  thought  he  would  win; 
and  also  because  he  hated  Arthur.  Between  the  stalwarts  and  the  half- 
breeds  were  the  independents.  Most  were  mildly  for  Edmunds,  but  all 
were  vehemently  against  both  Arthur  and  Elaine.  They  numbered 
perhaps  a  seventh  of  the  convention  delegates  and  they  were  led  by 
the  twenty-five-year-old  Roosevelt.  At  stake  was  the  selection  of  four 
delegates-at-large  to  the  national  convention,  scheduled  to  convene  in 
Chicago  six  weeks  after  the  state  meeting. 

Fresh  from  his  victory  over  Hess  four  days  before,  Roosevelt 
arrived  in  Utica  on  April  21.  Perceiving  the  Arthur  forces'  im- 
placable opposition  to  Elaine,  he  audaciously  insisted  that  they  sup- 
port the  entire  Edmunds  slate.  The  Arthur  men  bitterly  resented  his 
imperious  demand,  but  they  despised  Elaine  more.  Reluctantly  they 
submitted  after  a  final  conference  in  Roosevelt's  hotel  room  at  two 
A.M.,  April  22;  and  when  the  convention  met  in  the  Utica  Opera 
House  early  that  afternoon,  Roosevelt  and  three  other  Independents, 
including  Curtis  and  President  Andrew  D.  White  of  Cornell  University, 
were  elected  on  the  first  ballot.  In  his  youthful  exuberance  Roosevelt 
then  turned  to  ex-Governor  Warner  Miller,  who  had  spearheaded  his 
defeat  for  Speaker  in  January,  and  expostulated,  "There,  damn  you, 
we  beat  you  for  last  winter."  Meanwhile  a  great  cry  went  up  for 


38  POWER    AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Roosevelt  to  appear  on  the  platform.  The  New  York  Times  described 
the  scene: 

Mr.  Roosevelt  disregarded  the  call  for  a  moment,  and  then,  amid 
enthusiastic  cheers,  made  his  way  to  the  stage.  His  slender,  erect 
form,  bright  young  face  and  active  ways  have  made  him  familiar 
within  a  few  days  to  almost  every  one  who  took  part  in  the  con- 
vention, and  his  legislative  work  had  won  admiration  and  a  respect 
for  his  industry,  capacity,  and  judgment.  He  wisely  curbed  any 
natural  desire  he  may  have  had  to  make  a  speech.  Simply  and 
frankly  he  said:  "I  have  nothing  to  say  except  to  thank  you  for  the 
honor  you  have  conferred  upon  me.  I  shall  try  to  so  behave  myself 
as  to  serve  the  best  interests  of  the  Republican  Party,  and  to  make 
you  feel  no  regret  in  selecting  me." 

All  through  his  life,  even  in  moments  of  triumph,  Theodore  Roose- 
velt was  wont  to  have  forebodings  of  disaster;  the  aftermath  of  his 
victory  at  Utica  was  no  exception.  A  week  after  the  convention  ended 
he  unburdened  himself  to  a  friendly  Utica  newspaper  editor: 

I  have  very  little  expectation  of  being  able  to  keep  on  in  politics;  my 
success  so  far  has  only  been  won  by  absolute  indifference  to  my 
future  career;  for  I  doubt  if  any  man  can  realise  [sic]  the  bitter 
and  venomous  hatred  with  which  I  am  regarded  by  the  very 
politicians  who  at  Utica  supported  me,  under  dictation  from  masters 
who  were  influenced  by  political  considerations  that  were  national 
and  not  local  in  their  scope.  I  realize  very  thoroughly  the  absolutely 
ephemeral  nature  of  the  hold  I  have  upon  the  people,  and  a  very 
real  and  positive  hostility  I  have  excited  among  the  politicians.  1 
will  not  stay  in  public  life  unless  I  can  do  so  on  my  own  terms;  and 
my  ideal,  whether  lived  up  to  or  not,  is  rather  a  high  one. 

What  did  he  mean?  That  he  had  compromised  once  and  was  too 
conscience-ridden  to  do  it  again?  That  he  sensed  that  he  would  have 
to  support  Elaine  eventually  or  get  out  of  Republican  politics?  That 
he  was  not  yet  ready  to  accept  politics  as  the  art  of  the  possible? 

Whatever  he  meant,  he  characteristically  acted  rather  than  brooded. 
During  the  interim  between  the  state  convention  at  Utica  and  the 
national  convention  at  Chicago,  Roosevelt  worked  feverishly  to  bind 
together  the  scattered  Edmunds  delegates,  who  never  numbered  a 
hundred.  He  hoped  that  they  would  again  comprise  the  balance  of 
power,  though  he  was  far  from  sanguine.  "Unquestionably,  Elaine  is 


A   LEADER   EMERGES  39 

our  greatest  danger,"  he  warned  Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  who  was  work- 
ing for  Edmunds  in  Massachusetts,  "for  I  fear  lest,  if  he  come  too 
near  success,  the  bread-and-butter  brigade  from  the  south  will  leave 
Arthur  and  go  over  to  him.  We  who  stand  against  both  must  be 
organized  .  .  ." 

When  the  Republican  convention  convened  the  first  week  in  June 
in  Chicago,  however,  the  forces  of  emotionalism  and  materialism 
proved  overpowering.  Elaine's  magnetic  personality  inspired  loyalty 
and  enthusiasm  if  not  much  else,  and  on  the  fourth  ballot  the  Grand 
Old  Party  gave  him  its  nomination.  There  followed  a  wildly  climactic 
scene  which  saw  William  McKinley,  then  a  relatively  obscure  Ohio 
congressman,  push  his  way  through  to  Roosevelt  on  the  floor  and  ask 
him  to  make  a  unity  speech  for  the  "Plumed  Knight."  The  New  York 
leader  refused. 

The  first  of  a  long  succession  of  Gethsemanes  was  now  at  hand. 
Roosevelt  had  been  a  center  of  attention  throughout  the  convention. 
The  press,  remarks  Putnam,  had  treated  him  whimsically,  commenting 
on  his  "nobby  straw"  hat,  "jaunty"  attire,  "nervously  forcible"  ges- 
tures and  "pugnacious"  nose.  The  New  York  Sun  had  described  him 
as  "bubbling  over  with  martial  ardor"  as  he  vainly  sought  to  bolster 
the  dampened  spirits  of  the  Edmunds  men.  And  another  paper 
related  how  "Roosevelt,  Fish  and  Lodge  applauded  with  the  tips  of 
their  fingers  held  immediately  in  front  of  their  noses." 

Yet,  as  Putnam  also  observes,  Roosevelt's  remarkable  capacity  for 
leadership  had  come  through.  The  World  described  his  seconding 
speech  for  Thomas  R.  Lynch,  a  Mississippi  Negro  nominated  for 
temporary  chairman  by  Lodge  in  a  successful  maneuver  against  the 
Elaine  delegates,  as  blunt  and  manly.  The  New  York  Times  reported 
that  though  he  "scrambled  to  his  perch  on  the  chair  with  juvenile 
activity,"  he  spoke  with  the  authority  of  "a  positive  practical  man" 
rather  than  a  youth.  And  Joseph  B.  Foraker,  the  Ohio  spoilsman  with 
whom  Roosevelt,  when  President,  would  clash  bitterly,  recalled  that 
his  conferences  with  Roosevelt  had  been  "so  taxing  upon  the  strength 
and  the  mental  operations  .  .  .  that  I  felt  scarcely  able  to  attend  the 
evening  session  .  .  ."  Obviously,  McKinley  would  not  have  sought 
Roosevelt's  support  for  Elaine  had  the  convention  as  a  whole  re- 
garded the  young  reformer  as  sensationalist  reporters  portrayed  him. 

Roosevelt  and  the  other  independent-minded  New  Yorkers  had  "sat 
with  troubled  countenances  biting  their  lips,  crimson  with  vexation 


40  POWER  AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

and  dismay"  as  Blaine's  fourth-ballot  nomination  impended.  Now, 
in  the  agonizing  aftermath  of  the  "Plumed  Knight's"  victory,  they 
knew  they  would  have  to  decide  whether  they  would  support  him  in 
the  campaign  that  fall.  "I  was  at  the  birth  of  the  Republican  party, 
and  I  fear  I  am  to  witness  its  death,"  Curtis  exclaimed  as  he  awaited 
the  final  tally.  The  Harper's  editor  refused,  however,  to  comment 
once  the  final  result  was  announced.  Roosevelt  was  less  self-contained. 
He  was  variously  reported  as  declining  comment,  advising  reporters 
to  see  him  the  next  week,  and  attributing  Blaine's  nomination  to 
"mistaken  public  enthusiasm."  The  New  York  Times  quoted  him 
most  fully: 

To  say  that  I  am  satisfied  with  the  nomination  of  Mr.  Elaine 
would  be  false.  I  have  participated  in  a  Republican  convention,  and 
by  all  the  usages  of  the  party,  I  would  be  expected  to  support  its 
nominee.  I  could  have  given  an  earnest  and  enthusiastic  support  to 
a  ticket  headed  by  such  a  man  as  George  F.  Edmunds.  ...  I 
should  suppose,  from  what  I  have  heard  many  independents  say, 
that  they  would  not  give  Mr.  Elaine  any  support  whatever;  and 
I  believe  they  will  keep  their  promise. 

Roosevelt's  assertion  was  correct.  Curtis,  Carl  Schurz,  Henry  Ward 
Beecher  and  a  great  host  of  reformers  and  plain,  respectable  citizens 
throughout  the  nation  were  going  to  bolt.  That  Roosevelt  would  fail 
to  go  along  with  them  was  unthinkable.  William  Roscoe  Thayer,  upon 
whom  the  nomination  of  Elaine  weighed  "like  a  nightmare,"  described 
the  esteem  in  which  he  then  held  the  young  reformer.  "I  thought  of 
him  as  of  a  paladin  against  whom  the  forces  of  evil  would  dash  them- 
selves to  pieces,"  Thayer  wrote.  "I  thought  of  him  as  the  young  and 
dauntless  spokesman  of  righteousness  whose  words  would  silence  the 
special  pleaders  of  iniquity.  I  wrote  him  and  besought  him  to  stand 
firm."  Others  implored  him  to  do  the  same. 

When  it  became  evident  early  in  July  that  Roosevelt  would  "stand 
firm,"  but  with  the  Republican  party  rather  than  with  his  reformer 
friends,  it  was  as  though  a  piece  of  Thayer's  heart  had  been  cut  out. 
"I  felt  as  Abolitionists  felt  after  Webster's  Seventh  of  March  speech," 
he  later  recalled.  "My  old  acquaintance,  our  trusted  leader,  whose 
career  in  the  New  York  Assembly  we  had  watched  with  an  almost 
holy  satisfaction,  seemed  to  have  strangely  abandoned  the  fundamental 
principles  which  we  and  he  had  believed  in,  and  he  had  so  nobly 


A  LEADER  EMERGES  41 

upheld.  Whittier's  poem,  'Ichabod,'  seemed  to  have  been  aimed  at 
him." 

Not  all  the  fundamental  principles  had  been  on  the  side  of  the 
poet;  nor  were  they  now  all  aligned  with  the  reformers.  Roosevelt  had 
gone  to  Chicago  knowing  that  Elaine's  nomination  was  probable.  By 
the  rules  of  politics  he  was  bound  to  support  the  convention's  choice. 
As  his  earlier  speeches  reveal,  moreover,  he  regarded  the  Republican 
party  as  a  principle  itself.  Much  as  he  gloried  in  the  heroic  exploits 
o|  Confederate  soldiers,  he  deplored  the  states-rights  philosophy  upon 
wtich  secession  had  been  based  and  to  which  the  Democratic  party 
Sml  adhered.  He  would  write  the  next  year  that  Jefferson  Davis  "en- 
joys the  unique  distinction  of  being  the  only  American  with  whose 
public  character  that  of  Benedict  Arnold  need  not  fear  comparison"; 
and  when  he  himself  stormed  out  of  the  G.O.P.  in  1912  it  was  partly 
to  create  a  more  nationalistic  party  than  the  one  he  was  abandoning. 
If  ever  a  reformer  was  foreordained  to  swallow  the  bitterness  of 
personal  contempt  with  the  sweetness  of  party  loyalty,  it  was  Theodore 
Roosevelt  in  1884. 

Nevertheless,  it  is  hard  to  explflh  the  intensity  of  Roosevelt's 
activities  that  fall.  He  could  have  refused  to  issue  a  public  statement, 
or  he  might  have  sat  out  the  campaign  on  his  ranch  in  Dakota,  where 
he  had  sped  at  the  close  of  the  convention.  Either  course  would  have 
enabled  him  to  retain  his  party  standing.  Either  would  have  main- 
tained his  prized  reputation  for  independence.  But  he  chose  instead 
to  come  out  openly  for  the  "decidedly  mottled"  Blaine,  as  he  referred 
to  his  party's  nominee,  and  to  castigate  the  rock-ribbed  Cleveland. 

Roosevelt's  public  statement  evoked  a  bitter  outcry  from  the  in- 
dependents. The  Boston  banker,  Colonel  Henry  Lee,  is  said  to  have 
growled  to  his  cousin  George,  Roosevelt's  father-in-law:  "As  for  Cabot 
Lodge,  nobody's  surprised  at  him;  but  you  can  tell  that  young  whipper- 
snapper  in  New  York  from  me  that  his  independence  was  the  only 
thing  in  him  we  cared  for  ..."  The  New  York  Evening  Post  ob- 
served that  "There  is  no  ranch  or  other  hiding  place  in  the  world  in 
which  a  man  can  wait  for  Blaine  and  the  Mulligan  letters  to  'blow 
over'  .  .  ."  And  others  spared  Roosevelt  no  less. 

Roosevelt  never  forgave  the  mugwumps  for  their  failure  to  accept 
his  decision  to  support  the  Republican  ticket  in  1884.  As  that  astute 
English  observer,  James  Bryce,  perceived,  they  had  "impeached  his 
own  righteousness  and  classed  him  with  the  politicians."  They  had,  in 


42  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

addition,  abandoned  the  party  of  Union  for  that  of  secession.  "I  am 
glad  I  am  not  at  home,"  Roosevelt  wrote  Lodge  from  Dakota  just 
before  he  decided  to  enter  the  campaign  actively.  "I  get  so  angry 
with  the  'mugwumps,'  and  get  to  have  such  a  scorn  and  contempt  for 
them,  that  I  know  I  would  soon  be  betrayed  into  taking  some  step 
against  them,  and  in  favor  of  Blaine,  much  more  decided  than  I  really 
ought  to  take."  That  fall  he  lashed  them  almost  as  ferociously  as  he 
whipped  the  Democrats. 

Roosevelt  had  returned  on  October  9  to  New  York,  where,  in  what 
was  probably  the  most  revealing  of  his  statements  on  the  matter,  he 
told  a  reporter  from  the  Sun  that  "It  is  altogether  contrary  to  my 
character  to  occupy  a  neutral  position  in  so  important  and  exciting  a 
struggle."  Then,  in  a  series  of  speeches  delivered  in  Massachusetts, 
New  Jersey,  and  New  York,  he  revealed  the  depth  of  his  Republican 
convictions,  discreditably  capitalized  on  Cleveland's  moral  laxness 
and  conveniently  dismissed  Elaine's.  uNow  in  1864  nobody  that  I 
know  of  questioned  the  moral  character  of  George  B.  McClellan,  and 
yet  no  disaster  .  .  .  would  have  begun  to  equal  in  importance  the 
terrible  disaster  that  it  would  have  been  to  have  McClellan  elected  as 
President,"  he  said  at  Maiden,  Massachusetts.  Therefore,  he  continued, 
"everyone  in  his  senses  must  recognize  that  the  man  is  not  everything, 
that  the  man  is  not  even  so  much,  but  that  the  party  is  most  of  all." 
In  Winchester,  he  warned  that  there  was  a  chance  that  the  next 
President  would  appoint  as  many  as  four  new  justices  to  the  Supreme 
Court: 

Now  I  want  to  have  a  bench  that  will  decide,  should  the  question 
ever  come  before  them,  that  the  national  banks  are  constitutional, 
that  the  law  providing  for  the  suppression  of  pleuro-pneumonia  and 
of  kindred  [cattle]  diseases  by  the  National  Government  should  be 
held  constitutional.  Issues  like  that  are  not  decided  in  a  day.  They 
are  not  decided  in  20  years.  It  is  a  question  of  national  growth,  and 
the  same  fight  that  has  been  going  on  for  the  last  half  century  or 
more  will  continue  to  go  on  for  some  time  longer. 

Roosevelt  was  received  well  in  Massachusetts.  But  it  was  his  address 
to  the  Young  Men's  Republican  Club  in  New  York  that  evoked  the 
most  enthusiastic  response.  "A  gentleman  told  me  recently  he  doubted 
if  I  would  vote  for  the  Angel  Gabriel  if  found  at  the  head  of  the 
Democratic  party,  to  which  I  responded  that  the  Angel  Gabriel  would 


A   LEADER   EMERGES  43 

never  be  found  in  such  company,"  he  remarked  at  the  outset.  He  then 
commented  on  his  decision  to  remain  with  the  G.O.P.  "It  may  be 
right  to  bolt,"  he  acknowledged,  "but  you  must  be  certain  that  the 
time  is  right;  that  you  are  acting  to  reform,  not  to  destroy  the 
Republican  party."  He  had  opposed  Elaine's  nomination,  he  dis- 
ingenuously added,  "but  then  I  saw,  and  every  man  who  didn't  view 
the  scene  with  jaundiced  eyes  saw  too  that  Mr.  Elaine  was  nominated 
fairly  and  squarely  because  the  bulk  of  Republicans  in  the  Republican 
States  wishes  him  to  be  their  nominee."  Adding  that  these  were  the 
men  Abraham  Lincoln  used  to  call  the  "plain  people,"  he  concluded: 
"I  am  thankful  that  I  am  still,  where  by  inheritance  and  education 
I  feel  that  I  belong,  with  the  Republican  party." 


CHAPTER  3 


THE    WESTERNER:    RANCHER, 

HUNTER,    AND    HISTORIAN 


We  knew  toil  and  hardship  and  hunger  and  thirst;  and  we  saw 
men  die  violent  deaths  as  they  worked  among  the  horses  and 
cattle;  but  we  felt  the  best  of  hardy  life  in  our  veins,  and  ours 
was  the  glory  of  work  and  the  joy  of  living. 

— Theodore  Roosevelt,  An  Autobiography 


Roosevelt's  political  and  social  life  had  merged  only  infrequently 
during  his  three  years  in  the  legislature.  His  young  bride,  whom  Isaac 
Hunt  remembered  as  "a  very  charming  woman  .  .  .  tall  and 
willowy,"  had  spent  most  of  his  first  term  and  part  of  his  second  term 
with  him  in  a  suite  at  the  Delevan  House  in  Albany.  They  had  seen 
little  of  his  colleagues  except  at  official  functions,  however,  and  when 
Theodore's  third  term  started  in  January,  1884,  Alice  stayed  in  New 
York  to  wait  for  the  birth  of  their  first  child. 

Two  or  three  weeks  before  Alice's  baby  was  expected,  she  had 
entertained  three  of  her  husband's  colleagues,  one  of  them  an  Irish- 
American  Democrat,  at  lunch.  "All  of  the  men  were  perfectly  en- 
chanted with  their  visit,"  Theodore  wrote  after  he  had  returned  to 
Albany.  "They  could  hardly  believe  that  mother  was  really  our 
mother;  and  above  all  they  praised  my  sweet  little  wife.  I  was  very 
much  amused  by  Welch,  who  said  that  he  had  never  seen  anyone 
look  so  pretty  as  you  did  when  you  were  asking  me  not  to  tell  the 
'shaved  lion'  story;  he  said  'I  would  have  felt  just  as  badly  as  she 
would  have  if  you  had  gone  on  to  tell  it.'  So  I  felt  very  glad  we  had 
entertained  the  three  'pollys.'  " 

44 


THE   WESTERNER  45 

Seventeen  days  later  the  mother  and  the  wife  were  dead. 

Theodore  and  Alice's  three  years  of  marriage  had  been  extraor- 
dinarily happy.  Although  she  seems  never  to  have  matured — he  de- 
ferred to  her  as  to  a  child  during  the  whole  of  their  brief  life  to- 
gether— he  was  as  enamored  of  her  at  the  end  as  he  had  been  at  the 
beginning.  "How  I  did  hate  to  leave  my  bright,  sunny  little  love 
yesterday  afternoon,"  he  had  written  her  from  Albany  the  week 
before  she  died.  "I  love  you  and  long  for  you  all  the  time,  and  oh  so 
tenderly;  doubly  tenderly  now,  my  sweetest  little  wife." 

Roosevelt's  letters  from  Europe  during  a  tour  they  had  made  the 
first  year  of  their  marriage  are  similarly  illuminating.  "Really,  Alice 
is  an  excellent  traveller,"  he  informed  his  sister  Corinne.  "When  I 
reach  a  station  I  leave  her  in  a  chair  with  the  parcels,  and  there  she 
stays,  round  eyed  and  solemn,  but  perfectly  happy,  till  I  have  ex- 
tricated my  luggage,  had  it  put  on  a  hack  and  arranged  everything." 
In  other  letters  Theodore  referred  to  Alice  as  "Baby,"  indulgently 
reported  that  she  resented  being  addressed  in  any  other  language  than 
"english"  [sic],  and  described  how  she  had  been  convulsed  by  sea- 
sickness on  the  voyage  over  and  had  "requested  me  to  wear  a 
mustard  plaster  first,  to  see  if  it  hurts."  Yet  they  also  shared  many 
pleasures  maturely,  including  art,  and  Theodore  freely  conceded  that 
her  appreciation  was  "far  keener"  than  his. 

The  idyl  ended  on  February  14,  1884,  the  fourth  anniversary  of 
the  announcement  of  their  engagement.  In  Albany,  the  day  before, 
Theodore  had  reported  fourteen  bills  out  of  the  Cities  Committee  and 
was  planning  to  remain  in  the  Chamber  until  the  vote  was  taken  that 
afternoon  on  his  Aldermanic  Bill,  though  he  had  received  a  telegram 
that  morning  reporting  the  birth  of  a  daughter.  "I  shall  never  forget 
when  the  news  came  and  we  congratulated  him  .  .  .  ,"  Hunt  recalled. 
"He  was  full  of  life  and  happiness."  But  then,  Hunt  added,  "the 
news  came  of  a  sudden  turn  and  he  took  his  departure." 

After  a  depressingly  slow  trip  through  a  dense  fog  then  in  its  tenth 
day,  Roosevelt  reached  his  mother's  house  on  West  57th  Street  shortly 
before  midnight.  He  found  Alice  stricken  by  Bright's  disease  and 
barely  able  to  recognize  him.  All  that  night  he  held  her  in  his  arms, 
leaving  only  to  spend  a  few  minutes  with  his  mother  who  was  dying 
of  typhoid  fever  in  another  room.  At  about  three  o'clock  that  morn- 
ing Martha  Bulloch  Roosevelt  died.  Theodore,  standing  by  her  bed- 
side, repeated  the  words  his  brother  Elliott  had  greeted  him  with  a 


46  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

few  hours  earlier:  "There  is  a  curse  on  this  house."  He  then  returned 
to  Alice.  Dawn  came,  but  not  the  sun.  Alice  continued  to  sink  and 
at  two  o'clock  that  afternoon,  February  14,  she  also  died.  She  was 
twenty-two  and  one-half  years  old. 

The  senior  Mrs.  Roosevelt,  the  New  York  Herald  reported  the 
next  day,  was  the  "widow  of  the  distinguished  philanthropist"  who 
had  founded  the  Roosevelt  (Orthopedic)  Hospital.  "The  devotion  of 
her  four  children  to  her  person  was  akin  to  chivalrous  loyalty,  and 
was  remarked  by  all  who  came  under  her  roof  and  under  the  spell  of 
her  hospitable  manner  and  brilliant  powers  as  the  leader  of  a  salon." 
The  junior  Mrs.  Roosevelt,  the  Herald  continued,  "was  famed  for 
her  beauty  as  well  as  for  many  graces  of  the  heart  and  head."  The 
two  ladies  took  an  active  interest  in  the  late  Mr.  Roosevelt's  many 
charities,  the  obituary  concluded,  and  from  "visiting  hospital  wards 
to  dispensing  ice  cream  at  a  newsboys'  lodging  house,  both  found 
pleasure  in  making  this  world  less  of  a  sorrow  to  the  poor  and  more 
of  a  lesson  to  the  rich." 

In  Albany,  meanwhile,  seven  assemblymen,  including  two  or  three 
of  Theodore's  inveterate  opponents,  spoke  movingly  in  support  of  a 
resolution  to  adjourn  in  the  hope  that  Roosevelt  might  be  fortified  "in 
this  moment  of  his  agony  and  weakness."  When  finally  the  members 
arose  to  endorse  the  resolution  unanimously,  tears  swelled  many  of 
their  eyes.  It  was  "an  unusual  compliment,"  the  New  York  Times 
observed,  one  that  reflected  "the  high  position  in  the  general  esteem 
which  Mr.  Roosevelt  has  won  by  his  straightforward  and  courageous 
course  in  the  Legislature  and  in  politics." 

A  little  after  ten  o'clock  the  next  morning,  Saturday,  February  16, 
Theodore  entered  a  front  pew  of  the  Fifth  Avenue  Presbyterian 
Church.  The  choir  chanted  "Jesus,  Lover  of  My  Soul"  and  a 
quartet  sang  "Rock  of  Ages,"  after  which  his  mother's  friend  and 
pastor,  the  Rev.  Dr.  John  Hall,  who  was  visibly  moved,  preached  a 
short  sermon.  Following  the  benediction  the  choir  sang  "Angels  of 
Jesus,  Angels  of  Light."  Two  rosewood  coffins  covered  with  roses 
and  lilies  of  the  valley  were  then  borne  down  the  center  aisle  to  the 
muted  organ  strains  of  the  funeral  march  from  Beethoven's  Third 
Symphony  as  Theodore  and  the  immediate  family  walked  slowly 
behind.  They  entered  waiting  coaches  and  rode  slowly  behind  twin 
hearses  to  Greenwood  Cemetery. 

Theodore  was  "in  a  dazed,  stunned  state"  that  day,  his  old  tutor, 


THE   WESTERNER  47 

Arthur  Cutler,  wrote  Bill  Sewall.  "He  does  not  know  what  he  does 
or  says."  Sometime  that  day,  however,  probably  just  before  he  went 
to  bed,  Roosevelt  noted  in  his  diary  that  "we  spent  three  years  of 
happiness  greater  and  more  unalloyed  than  I  have  ever  known  fall 
to  the  lot  of  others."  He  added  that  "For  joy  or  for  sorrow  my  life 
has  now  been  lived  out." 

Yet  in  death  there  was  life.  The  four-day-old  baby,  Alice  Lee, 
survived;  and  within  less  than  a  week  her  twenty-five-year-old  father 
had  returned  to  Albany  and  immersed  himself  in  the  investigation  of 
corruption  in  New  York  City,  the  struggle  for  his  reform  bills,  and 
the  organization  of  the  Edmunds  forces.  By  every  law  of  nature  that 
Roosevelt  had  studied  and  by  most  of  those  he  had  superimposed  on 
human  history,  life  went  on.  Resolutely,  he  summed  up  his  philosophy 
in  a  letter  to  Sewall  three  weeks  later:  "It  was  a  grim  and  evil  fate, 
but  I  have  never  believed  it  did  any  good  to  flinch  or  yield  for  any 
blow,  nor  does  it  lighten  the  blow  to  cease  from  working." 

Nevertheless,  Theodore  suffered.  Alice  seems  hardly  to  have  in- 
fluenced his  basic  personality;  but  she  had  touched  the  depths  of  his 
sensitivity.  "You  could  not  talk  to  him  about  it,"  Hunt  recalled.  "You 
could  see  at  once  that  it  was  a  grief  too  deep.  .  .  .  There  was  a  sad- 
ness about  his  face  that  he  never  had  before.  ...  He  did  not  want 
anybody  to  sympathize  with  him." 

In  Dakota  that  summer  Roosevelt  penned  a  moving  memorial  to 
Alice  Lee.  "She  was,"  her  young  widower  wrote,  "beautiful  in  face 
and  form,  and  lovelier  still  in  spirit;  as  a  flower  she  grew,  and  as  a 
fair  young  flower  she  died." 

Her  life  had  been  always  in  the  sunshine;  there  had  never  come  to 
her  a  single  great  sorrow;  and  none  ever  knew  her  who  did  not 
love  and  revere  her  for  her  bright,  sunny  temper  and  her  saintly 
unselfishness.  Fair,  pure,  and  joyous  as  a  maiden;  loving,  tender, 
and  happy  as  a  young  wife;  when  she  had  just  become  a  mother, 
when  her  life  seemed  to  be  but  just  begun,  and  when  the  years 
seemed  so  bright  before  her — then,  by  a  strange  and  terrible  fate, 
death  came  to  her. 

"And  when  my  heart's  dearest  died,"  the  memorial,  which  he  had 
printed  and  circulated  among  his  friends  and  family,  concluded,  "the 
light  went  from  my  life  forever." 

Thereafter,  as  Henry  Pringle  observes,  a  door  closed  on  Alice  Lee. 


48  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Roosevelt  maintained  cordial  relations  with  her  relatives.  But  that  was 
all.  Within  three  years  he  had  married  again;  and  in  the  crowded 
years  that  followed  he  never  again  mentioned  her,  not  even  to  their 
daughter  Alice.  His  silence,  Putnam  concludes,  "seems  pathologically 
rigorous"  and  suggests  a  "discipline  approaching  cruelty." 

Fortunately,  Roosevelt  had  entered  the  cattle  business  in  the  Bad 
Lands  of  the  Dakota  Territory  the  autumn  before  his  double  bereave- 
ment. Following  the  Republican  Convention  in  Chicago  in  June,  1884, 
he  went  directly  West  to  lose  himself  in  the  challenge — of  the  round- 
up, of  exploration,  of  man-killing  animals,  and  of  near  total  isola- 
tion. He  found  that  and  more.  His  years  in  Dakota  constituted  one  of 
the  great  formative  experiences  of  his  life,  and  in  passing  moments 
he  even  considered  making  a  full-time  career  of  ranching,  hunting,  and 
writing. 

The  story  of  Roosevelt's  Western  adventures  has  been  told  many 
times — so  often,  in  fact,  that  it  has  become  a  kind  of  national  saga. 
Yet  certain  episodes  must  perforce  be  repeated,  and  of  these,  none  is 
more  revealing  than  that  of  his  gradual  acceptance  by  the  leathery 
cowhands,  guides,  and  ranchers  with  whom  he  associated. 

The  spurs  were  not  easily  won.  As  Roosevelt  later  half-seriously 
remarked,  glasses  were  considered  a  sign  of  "defective  moral  char- 
acter" in  the  Bad  Lands;  and  when  he  first  visited  Dakota  in  1883  he 
had  been  forced  to  use  all  his  persuasive  powers  merely  to  hire  a 
hunting  guide,  so  contemptuous  was  the  reaction  to  his  appearance 
and  manner.  Only  after  he  had  several  times  proved  his  mettle  did 
opinion  change,  and  then  but  slowly. 

Once,  Roosevelt  relates  in  his  Autobiography,  a  drunken  stranger 
accosted  him  in  a  hotel.  "Four-eyes  is  going  to  treat,"  bellowed  the 
drunk,  who  had  already  shot  up  the  face  of  the  barroom  clock.  Wav- 
ing two  cocked  pistols,  he  strode  over  to  Roosevelt,  who  had  quietly 
taken  to  a  chair  behind  the  stove,  and  repeated  his  demands  in  a 
stream  of  profanity.  Roosevelt  rose  from  his  chair  as  if  to  oblige, 
then  suddenly  struck,  first  with  a  short  right  and  left,  then  with  an- 
other right.  The  guns  discharged  aimlessly  as  the  drunk  fell  to  the 
floor. 

On  another  occasion  Roosevelt  brought  "Hell-Roaring"  Bill  Jones, 
the  sheriff  of  Billings  County,  to  bay.  Primitive,  shiftless,  and  quick- 
tempered, "Hell-Roaring"  Bill  was  "a  thorough  frontiersman,  excel- 
lent in  all  kinds  of  emergencies,  and  a  very  game  man,"  or  so  Roose- 


THE   WESTERNER  49 

veil  wrote.  He  was  also  "a  thoroughly  good  citizen  when  sober."  The 
encounter  occurred  in  the  office  of  the  Bad  Lands  Cowboy,  a  news- 
paper published  and  edited  in  Medora  by  A.  T.  Packard,  a  University 
of  Michigan  graduate  who  had  drifted  to  the  Bad  Lands  about  the 
same  time  as  Roosevelt.  "Hell-Roaring"  Bill  had  been  passing  the 
time  telling  off-color  stories  to  a  group  of  cowpunchers,  and  Roose- 
velt, who  had  no  taste  for  obscenity,  though  he  was  given  to  mild 
profanity  in  later  years,  finally  decided  that  he  had  heard  enough. 

"I  can't  tell  why  in  the  world  I  like  you,  for  you're  the  nastiest- 
talking  man  I  ever  heard,"  he  blurted  out  at  the  startled  sheriff. 
Packard  and  the  cowpunchers  froze  in  their  chairs,  for  "Hell-Roaring" 
Bill  had  been  known  to  shoot  on  less  provocation.  By  then,  however, 
Jones  had  come  to  respect  Roosevelt. 

"I  don't  mind  saying  that  mebbe  I've  been  a  little  too  free  with 
my  mouth,"  he  sheepishly  replied. 

It  was  these  and  similar  incidents  that  helped  Roosevelt  gain 
acceptance  in  the  Bad  Lands.  Even  after  he  had  won  it,  however,  he 
was  regarded  as  a  man  apart,  as  a  New  Yorker  turned  Westerner,  as 
a  captain  but  never  a  private.  Partly  this  was  the  result  of  his 
rancher  status.  But  in  the  main  it  reflected  his  natural  qualities  of 
leadership. 

Not  that  Roosevelt  ceased  to  amuse,  even  to  amaze,  the  hard- 
bitten Dakotans.  They  never  forgot  how  once  when  some  cattle  broke 
loose  on  a  roundup,  he  commanded  a  hand  to  "Hasten  forward 
quickly  there."  His  guides  and  hunting  companions  also  long  remem- 
bered his  ecstatic  outbursts  and  Indian  dances  over  a  successful  kill 
(they  were  often  climaxed  by  the  presentation  of  a  hundred  dollars 
to  his  guide).  Nor  did  they  fail  to  enjoy  Roosevelt's  penchant  for 
ostentatious  dress.  Whether  stepping  off  the  train  at  Little  Missouri  in 
a  derby  hat  or  riding  the  range  in  a  tailored  buckskin  suit,  Roosevelt 
created  an  effect  not  unlike  that  of  his  appearance  in  evening  clothes 
at  his  first  Republican  caucus  in  1882.  Yet  even  this  sartorial  bril- 
liance failed  to  enhance  the  gracefulness  of  his  seat  on  a  horse.  "He 
was  not  a  purty  rider,"  one  of  his  acquaintances  recalled,  "but  a  hell 
of  a  good  rider." 

Roosevelt's  experiences  as  a  hunter  also  enhanced  his  stature. 
Sooner  or  later  his  pluck  and  courage,  his  insistence  on  taking  the 
hard  way,  and  his  perseverance  under  adverse  conditions  became 


50  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

known.  He  captured  the  flavor  of  one  of  his  early  bear  hunts  in  the 
Big  Horn  Mountains  in  a  letter  to  his  sister  Bamie: 

I  shall  not  soon  forget  the  first  one  I  killed.  .  .  .  Cocking  my 
rifle  and  stepping  quickly  forward,  I  found  myself  face  to  face  with 
the  great  bear,  who  was  less  than  twenty-five  feet  off — not  eight 
steps.  He  had  been  roused  from  his  sleep  by  our  approach;  he  sat 
up  in  his  lair,  and  turned  his  huge  head  slowly  towards  us.  At  that 
distance  and  in  such  a  place  it  was  very  necessary  to  kill  or  disable 
him  at  the  first  fire;  doubtless  my  face  was  pretty  white,  but  the 
blue  barrel  was  as  steady  as  a  rock  as  I  glanced  along  it  until  I 
could  see  the  top  of  the  bead  fairly  between  his  two  sinister  looking 
eyes;  as  I  pulled  the  trigger  I  jumped  aside  out  of  the  smoke,  to  be 
ready  if  he  charged;  but  it  was  needless,  for  the  great  brute  was 
struggling  in  the  death  agony,  and,  as  you  will  see  when  I  bring 
home  his  skin,  the  bullet  hole  in  his  skull  was  as  exactly  between 
his  eyes  as  if  I  had  measured  the  distance  with  a  carpenters  rule. 
This  bear  was  nearly  nine  feet  long  and  weighed  over  a  thousand 
pounds.  Each  of  my  other  bears,  which  were  smaller,  needed  two 
bullets  apiece;  Merrifield  killed  each  of  his  with  a  single  shot. 

Drawing  on  the  experiences  of  that  and  other  hunting  trips,  Roose- 
velt in  1885  wrote  Hunting  Trips  of  a  Ranchman,  the  first  volume  of 
a  trilogy  on  hunting,  ranching,  and  nature  observation.  Three  years 
later  the  second,  Ranch  Life  and  the  Hunting  Trail  was  published, 
and  in  1893  the  last,  The  Wilderness  Hunter,  came  out.  The  three 
volumes  set  a  new  style  in  hunting  books,  embracing,  in  Paul  R. 
Cutright's  words,  "vivid  pictures  of  windswept  prairie  and  baldface 
mountain,  of  lovely,  sweet-smelling  flowers  and  endless  virgin  forests; 
thumbnail  sketches  of  birds  and  small  mammals;  and  fascinating 
biographies  of  large  game  animals,  from  buffalo  to  bighorn." 

All  three  books  were  warmly  praised  by  critics  though  they  had 
serious  deficiencies.  They  tended  to  be  repetitious,  to  draw  too  heavily 
on  unreliable  sources,  and  to  indulge  in  extravagant  statements. 
Roosevelt  himself  was  dissatisfied.  "I  wish  I  could  make  my  writings 
touch  a  higher  plane,"  he  confided  to  the  novelist  Owen  Wister,  "but 
I  don't  well  see  how  I  can.  ...  I  go  over  them  a  good  deal  and 
recast,  supply  or  omit,  sentences  and  even  paragraphs,  but  I  don't 
make  the  reconstruction  complete  in  the  way  that  you  do."  Neverthe- 
less, the  chapter  on  the  habits  of  the  grizzly  bear  in  The  Wilderness 
Hunter  was  the  most  comprehensive  to  that  time,  while  the  essay  on 


THE   WESTERNER  51 

the  Bighorn  in  Ranch  Life  and  the  Hunting  Trail  is  still  regarded  as 
superb.  As  Brander  Matthews,  the  Columbia  professor  and  arbiter 
of  Arts  and  Letters,  wrote  years  later,  Roosevelt's  writings  were  in- 
variably "Tinglingly  alive,  masculine  and  vascular." 

Impressed  with  the  natural  beauty  of  the  Bad  Lands,  desirous  of  a 
hunting  base  of  his  own,  and  pleased  by  a  financial  investment  in 
which  he  could  be  genuinely  interested,  Roosevelt  had  meanwhile 
expanded  his  original  stake  of  $14,000.  Shortly  after  Alice  died  he 
invested  $26,000  more;  then,  in  April  1885,  he  poured  in  an  addi- 
tional $12,500.  All  this  was  done  against  the  advice  of  his  banker 
uncle,  James  Roosevelt,  who  not  unreasonably  regarded  him  as 
impetuous  and  visionary  in  financial  matters. 

Roosevelt's  original  contract  was  a  "gentleman's  agreement"  with 
two  young  and  sinewy  Canadians,  Sylvane  Ferris  and  Bill  Merrifield, 
wherein  he  gave  them  a  check  of  $14,000  in  the  fall  of  1883  to  pur- 
chase cattle  for  him.  They  were  to  run  them  on  government  lands 
around  their  own  ranch,  the  Maltese  Cross.  When  Roosevelt  returned 
to  Dakota  in  June,  1884,  however,  he  bought  a  thousand  additional 
head  and  established  his  own  ranch  thirty  miles  down  the  Little 
Missouri  River.  It  was  called  Elkhorn,  and  it  was  managed  by  Bill 
Sewall  and  his  nephew  Will  Dow  under  a  contract  that  gave  them 
specified  salaries  and  a  percentage  of  the  profits  but  no  liability  for 
losses.  They  constructed  the  log  ranchhouse  that  summer  which  was 
to  be  Roosevelt's  headquarters  in  Dakota  until  he  sold  out  in  1897. 

Having  thus  established  his  stake,  Roosevelt  soon  plunged  into  the 
turbulent  affairs  of  the  region.  The  ranchers  were  ripe  for  organiza- 
tion. They  were  plagued  by  thieves,  marauders,  and  inadequate  range 
laws;  and  in  November,  after  riding  through  blizzards  in  temperatures 
of  twenty  below  to  talk  with  other  ranchers,  Roosevelt  issued  a  call 
for  a  meeting  the  next  month.  Out  of  it  came  the  Little  Missouri 
Stockmen's  Association.  Roosevelt  was  elected  chairman  and  was  re- 
elected  the  next  year.  "The  association  can  congratulate  itself,"  the 
Bad  Lands  Cowboy  commented.  "Under  his  administration,  every- 
thing moves  quickly  forward  and  there  is  none  of  that  time-consuming, 
fruitless  talk  that  so  invariably  characterizes  a  deliberative  assembly 
without  a  good  presiding  officer." 

Roosevelt  also  participated  actively  in  the  much  larger  Eastern 
Montana  Stockgrowers  Association,  and  in  April,  1886  he  attended 
a  three-day  convention  in  Miles  City,  a  thriving  frontier  town,  as  he 


52  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

described  it,  "thronged  with  hundreds  of  rough-looking,  broad-hatted 
men,  numbering  among  them  all  the  great  cattle  and  horse  raisers  of 
the  Northwest." 

"I  took  my  position  very  well  in  the  convention,"  Roosevelt  wrote 
shortly  after,  "and  indeed  these  Westerners  have  now  pretty  well 
accepted  me  as  one  of  themselves,  and  as  a  representative  stockman." 
He  was  appointed  a  member  of  a  committee  charged  to  influence  the 
establishment  of  stockyards  in  St.  Paul,  Minnesota,  and  in  1887  he 
persuaded  the  convention  to  modify  a  resolution  criticizing  the  newly 
established  Interstate  Commerce  Commission  on  the  grounds  that  the 
criticism  was  premature.  He  also  effected  the  discharge  of  the  in- 
competent livestock  inspector  at  Medora. 

By  then  Roosevelt's  interest  in  the  Montana  and  Little  Missouri 
Associations  had  already  begun  to  wane.  A  prolonged  drought  in  the 
summer  of  1886  followed  by  a  disastrously  severe  winter  had  wiped 
out  a  large  part  of  his  herd;  and  he  had  committed  himself  to  the 
East  for  personal  reasons  anyway.  Bill  Sewall,  who  had  viewed  the 
cattle  venture  with  pessimism  from  the  outset,  had  returned  with  Dow 
to  Maine  in  the  late  summer  of  1886.  A  raging  fire  had  destroyed  the 
office  and  press  of  the  Bad  Lands  Cowboy.  And  rancher  after  rancher 
had  gone  out  of  business  in  the  aftermath  of  the  disastrous  winter  of 
1886-1887.  A  brief  item  in  the  Dickinson  Press  summed  it  up: 
"D.  O.  Sweet  and  family  have  moved  from  Medora  to  Dickinson. 
Mr.  Sweet  desired  to  reside  where  there  was  some  life  and  prospect 
of  growth." 

Roosevelt  returned  to  the  Bad  Lands  on  hunting  trips  in  1888, 
1890,  1892,  1893,  and  1896;  but  he  never  again  took  an  active  part 
in  running  his  cattle.  When  he  finally  sold  out  in  1897  he  had  lost 
more  than  $20,000  plus  interest.  Yet  the  money  had  been  well  spent. 
In  spite  of  arduous  days  in  the  saddle,  almost  sleepless  nights  on  the 
roundup,  and  prolonged  exposure  to  near  intolerable  heat  and  cold, 
his  body  had  developed  remarkably.  "No  longer  was  he  the  slight  and 
somewhat  delicate-looking  young  man  whom  we  had  entertained  at 
the  Cannonball  camp  less  than  two  years  before,"  one  of  his  Western 
friends  recalled.  Roosevelt  "got  to  be  lookin'  more  like  a  rugged  man," 
another  added.  Even  more  important,  he  had  proved  what  he  was 
constrained  to  prove  again  and  again  throughout  his  life — that  he  was 
a  man  among  men.  Not  only  had  he  held  his  own  on  the  roundup, 


THE   WESTERNER  53 

captured  two  thieves  at  gun  point,  and  showed  his  mettle  in  dozens  of 
other  incidents,  he  had  comported  himself  with  dignity,  discretion, 
and  bravery  when  threatened  with  a  duel.  What  most  men  sublimated, 
Theodore  Roosevelt  had  experienced. 

Meanwhile,  the  young  rancher-hunter-historian  had  written  and 
published  a  biography  of  Thomas  Hart  Benton,  was  writing  a  second 
on  Gouverneur  Morris,  and  was  planning  a  multivolume  history  of  the 
settlement  of  the  West.  Both  the  biographies  were  highly  superficial. 
The  Life  of  Thomas  Hart  Benton  represented  not  more  than  three 
months  of  scholarship  and  three  months  of  intense,  but  spasmodic, 
writing,  much  of  it  done  in  the  ranchhouse  at  Elkhorn  and  some  of  it 
in  a  room  over  a  store  in  Medora.  Yet,  as  Putnam  suggests,  "To  pro- 
duce such  a  work  in  a  few  months,  with  all  its  faults,  required  both 
basic  knowledge  and  prior  deliberation  to  which  few  men  of  his  age 
and  varied  activities  could  aspire." 

However  serious  the  academic  deficiencies  of  the  lives  of  Benton 
and  Morris,  the  books  are  invaluable  for  the  light  they  cast  on  the 
future  President's  political  philosophy.  Here  Roosevelt  was  grappling 
with  currency  problems,  public  morality,  and  land  policy — with  the 
great  questions  of  the  American  past  and,  indeed,  of  the  American 
future.  He  was  the  politician  justifying  his  own  support  of  Blaine  in 
1884  and  visiting  his  resentment  on  the  mugwumps  with  broad  indict- 
ments of  extremist  reformers  and  spirited  defenses  of  party  regularity. 
And  he  was  also  the  young  politician-intellectual  forging  an  interpre- 
tation of  American  history  which  was  to  influence  his  own  actions 
until  the  end  of  his  life. 

Of  the  two  books,  Benton  was  the  most  complex  in  subject  and 
historical  content.  The  magniloquent  Senator  from  Missouri  repre- 
sented much  that  Roosevelt  admired.  He  was  at  once  a  sectionalist 
and  a  nationalist,  a  spokesman  of  the  West  and  a  staunch  defender  of 
the  Union.  He  disdained  the  abolitionists  and  proslavery  extremists 
alike.  He  energetically  championed  the  interests  of  individual  Western 
settlers  and  he  condemned  out  of  hand  the  great  land  engrossers  and 
speculators.  He  wanted  no  part  of  Mexico  to  the  Southwest,  but  he 
wanted  a  large  part  of  Canada  to  the  Northwest.  And  he  resisted  at 
all  times  infringement  by  the  states  of  the  rights  of  the  national  gov- 
ernment. Benton  "had  risen  and  grown  steadily  all  through  his  long 
term  of  service,"  Roosevelt  concluded  near  the  end  of  his  volume. 


54  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

"Compare  his  stand  against  the  slavery  extremists  and  disunionists, 
such  as  Calhoun,  with  the  position  of  Webster  at  the  time  of  his 
famous  7th  of  March  speech,  or  with  that  of  Clay  when  he  brought 
in  his  compromise  bill!  In  fact,  as  the  times  grew  more  troublesome, 
he  grew  steadily  better  able  to  do  good  work  in  them." 

Roosevelt's  own  comments  on  the  issues  were  even  more  revealing 
than  his  favorable  appraisal  of  the  broad  sweep  of  Benton's  career. 
He  viewed  the  Missouri  Senator's  fight  to  dispose  of  the  public  lands 
to  actual  settlers  at  low  cost  as  "a  move  of  enormous  importance  to 
the  whole  West,"  one  which  encountered  intense  opposition,  "espe- 
cially from  the  short-sighted  selfishness  of  many  of  the  northeastern- 
ers."  The  drive  toward  Mexico  was  a  "belligerent,  or,  more  properly 
speaking,  piratical  way  of  looking  at  neighboring  territory."  But  the 
land  claimed  by  Canada  in  the  old  Northwest,  so  Roosevelt  agreed 
with  the  vain  and  swaggering  Missourian,  "was  by  right  our  heritage." 

As  for  slavery,  Roosevelt  regarded  it  as  "a  grossly  anachronistic 
and  un-American  form  of  evil."  He  believed,  however,  that  it  might 
have  been  better  to  have  allowed  it  to  continue  a  century  longer,  "its 
ultimate  extinction  being  certain."  And  he  was  certain  that  non- 
abolitionist  political  leaders  such  as  Lincoln  and  Seward  "did  more 
than  all  the  professional  Abolitionists  combined  really  to  bring  about 
its  destruction."  The  abolitionists  "belonged  to  that  class  of  men  that 
is  always  engaged  in  some  agitation  or  other,"  he  sharply  asserted; 
"only  h  happened  that  in  this  particular  agitation  they  were  right." 

Roosevelt's  contempt  for  the  abolitionists  was  matched  by  his 
disapproval  of  Andrew  Jackson's  wholesale  removal  of  officeholders 
and  destructive  attack  on  the  Second  Bank  of  the  United  States.  The 
former  was  a  change  "for  the  worse";  the  latter  an  appeal  "to  the 
vague  fear  with  which  the  poorer  and  more  ignorant  voters  regard  a 
powerful  institution  whose  workings  they  do  not  understand."  Shifting 
back  to  the  other  extreme,  Roosevelt  then  extolled  Jackson  and 
Benton  for  standing  by  hard  money;  he  also  foreshadowed  his  own 
castigation  of  the  Populists  and  Free  Silver  Democrats  in  the  1890's: 

A  craze  for  "soft,"  or  dishonest,  money — a  greenback  move- 
ment, or  one  for  short-weight  silver  dollars — works  more  to  the 
disadvantage  of  the  whole  mass  of  the  people  than  even  to  that  of 
the  capitalists;  it  is  a  move  directly  in  the  interest  of  "the  money 
power,"  which  its  loud-mouthed  advocates  are  ostensibly  opposing 
in  the  interests  of  democracy. 


THE  WESTERNER  55 

The  biography  of  Gouverneur  Morris  was  poorer  history  than  the 
life  of  Benton,  but  it  offered  an  even  more  penetrating  insight  into 
Roosevelt's  thinking.  Morris  was  a  Federalist,  one  who  "embodied 
to  a  peculiar  degree  both  the  qualities  which  made  the  Federalist 
party  so  brilliant  and  so  useful,  and  those  other  qualities  which  finally 
brought  about  its  downfall."  He  possessed  those  attributes  "of  gen- 
erous daring  and  lofty  disinterestedness  which  we  like  to  associate 
with  the  name  American.  ...  He  stood  for  order.  He  stood  for  the 
honest  payment  of  debts."  However — and  here  was  Roosevelt's  brief 
against  the  Federalists  and  eventually  much  of  the  Republican  party 
as  well — Morris  "distrusted  the  mass  of  the  people,  and  especially  the 
mass  of  the  people  in  other  sections  of  the  country." 

Indeed,  Roosevelt  continued,  "the  force  and  subtlety  of  his  reason- 
ing were  all  marred  by  his  incurable  cynicism  and  deep-rooted  distrust 
of  mankind."  At  the  Constitutional  Convention  Morris  "throughout 
appears  as  advocatus  diaboli,"  frankly  avowing  "his  disbelief  in  all 
generous  and  unselfish  motives."  The  New  York  financier  "cham- 
pioned a  strong  national  government,  wherein  he  was  right;  but  he 
also  championed  a  system  of  class  representation,  leaning  toward 
aristocracy,  wherein  he  was  wrong."  Worse  still,  Morris  "feared  and 
dreaded  the  growth  of  the  Union  in  the  West,"  actually  desiring  the 
Convention  "to  commit  the  criminal  folly  of  attempting  to  provide 
that  the  West  should  always  be  kept  subordinate  to  the  East."  And 
most  grievous  of  all,  he  urgently  opposed  the  War  of  1812,  appearing 
as  the  "open  champion  of  treason  to  the  nation,  of  dishonesty  to  the 
nation's  creditors,  and  of  cringing  subservience  to  a  foreign  power." 
Still,  Roosevelt  concluded,  Morris's  over-all  contributions  were  im- 
pressive. 

Roosevelt  was  not  wont  to  brook  intellectual  confinement.  In 
writing  the  work  on  Morris  he  had  wandered  through  Hamilton  to 
Abraham  Lincoln,  whose  life  he  seems  really  to  have  wanted  to  write. 
Hamilton  remained  Roosevelt's  intellectual  hero,  for  he  was  the 
architect  of  the  base.  But  Lincoln,  who  had  both  preserved  and 
humanized  the  Federalist  system,  captured  his  heart. 

Yet  Roosevelt  rarely  acknowledged  Lincoln's  Jeffersonian  strain. 
Nor  could  he  willingly  admit  that  his  own  views  reflected  Jefferson's 
influences,  though  throughout  his  life  he  exhorted  the  Republican 
party  to  espouse  policies  that  by  a  humanistic  construction  were 
eminently  Jeffersonian.  Only  after  he  had  twice  been  President  was 


56  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Roosevelt  to  conclude,  and  then  but  temporarily,  that  the  marriage 
of  government  and  business  that  Hamilton  had  fostered  was  beyond 
the  power  of  high-minded  men  to  direct  in  the  public  interest.  Other- 
wise he  never  abandoned  hope  that  the  Republican  leaders  would 
rise  above  private  interest  and  exert  their  great  abilities  for  the  good 
of  all  as  they  had,  he  believed,  in  Lincoln's  time.  The  ennobled  Civil 
War  President,  Roosevelt  wrote,  "was  the  first  who  showed  how  a 
strong  people  might  have  a  strong  government  and  yet  remain  the 
freest  on  earth." 

He  seized — half  unwittingly — all  that  was  best  and  wisest  in  the 
tradition  of  Federalism;  he  was  the  true  successor  of  the  Federalist 
leaders;  but  he  grafted  on  their  system  a  profound  belief  that  the 
great  heart  of  the  nation  beat  for  truth,  honor,  and  liberty. 

If  the  fame  of  the  Benton  and  Morris  rests  largely  on  Roosevelt's 
political  eminence,  the  four-volume  Winning  of  the  West  endures  for 
its  merits.  It  stamped  its  author  as  a  historian  of  genuine  distinction: 
of  brilliant,  though  uneven,  literary  power;  of  broad,  and  often  acute, 
comprehension;  and  of  extraordinary  narrative  force.  As  the  foremost 
academic  historian  of  the  West,  Frederick  Jackson  Turner,  wrote  in 
his  review  of  the  final  volume,  "Mr.  Roosevelt  has  done  a  real  service 
to  our  history"  and  "has  rescued  a  whole  movement  in  American 
development  from  the  hands  of  unskillful  annalists."  With  "graphic 
vigor,"  he  continued,  "he  has  portrayed  the  advance  of  the  pioneer 
into  the  wastes  of  the  continent"  and  yet  "considered  his  subject 
broadly,  in  its  relations  to  world-history."  Roosevelt's  work  "will  be 
to  the  general  reader  a  revelation." 

Nevertheless,  The  Winning  of  the  West  failed  to  fulfill  Roosevelt's 
youthful  ambition  ("a  mere  dream,"  he  called  it)  to  write  someday 
a  book  "that  would  really  take  rank  as  in  the  very  first  class."  It 
lacked  reflection  and  sobriety  of  judgment,  and  it  was  weak  in  ana- 
lytical quality.  It  was  also  rife  with  partisanship  and  presentism.  The 
failings  were  unfortunate,  for  Roosevelt  could  be  forcefully  objective. 
That  later  tendency,  so  disconcerting  to  his  liberal  critics,  to  offset  the 
emphatic  criticism  with  the  emphatic  commendation,  was  even  then 
in  evidence;  and  many  of  his  appraisals  of  controversial  issues  were 
scrupulously  fair.  But  he  could  not  consistently  hold  the  high  ground. 
His  obsessive  contempt  for  the  Jeffersonians  and  their  political  de- 
scendants colored  The  Winning  of  the  West  no  less  than  his  other 


THE   WESTERNER  57 

writings,  and  with  grievous  consequence.  On  the  flimsiest  circum- 
stantial evidence  he  accused  Jefferson  of  engaging  in  a  "characteristic 
.  .  .  tortuous  intrigue"  against  President  Washington.  He  further 
failed,  as  Turner  pointed  out,  to  make  a  "detailed  study  of  the 
incompatibility  of  temperament  between  Federalism  and  the  West." 

There  were  other  shortcomings.  Roosevelt  drew  on  many  theretofore 
unexplored  manuscripts,  but  his  duties  were  so  heavy  (he  wrote  much 
of  the  work  while  he  was  Civil  Service  Commissioner  or  Police  Com- 
missioner) that  he  was  unable  to  exploit  them  properly.  He  also 
neglected  economic  and  institutional  history,  partly  because,  as  he 
revealingly  confided  to  Turner,  "I  have  always  been  more  interested 
in  the  men  themselves  than  in  the  institutions  through  and  under  which 
they  worked."  For  all  these  and  other  faults,  however,  The  Winning 
of  the  West  remains  a  pioneering  account  of  the  American  people's 
westward  advance;  one  that  justifies  its  author's  reputation  as  a  major 
American  historian  of  the  narrative  school. 

Although  the  main  focus  of  the  work  was  on  the  quarter  century 
between  1765,  when  the  intrepid  Daniel  Boone,  "a  tall,  spare,  sinewy 
man  with  eyes  like  an  eagle's  and  muscles  that  never  tired,"  made  his 
first  exploration,  until  roughly  1796,  when  the  British,  who  were 
"guilty  of  treachery  to  both  friend  and  foe,"  at  last  recognized  the 
American  conquest  of  the  West,  the  introductory  chapter  ranks  as  one 
of  the  classics  of  American  historical  literature  in  its  tersely  powerful 
description  of  the  spread  of  the  English-speaking  peoples.  "They  were 
led  by  no  one  commander,"  Roosevelt  wrote  of  those  who  thronged 
across  the  Alleghenies: 

They  acted  under  orders  from  neither  king  nor  congress;  they 
were  not  carrying  out  the  plans  of  any  farsighted  leader.  In  obedi- 
ence to  the  instincts  working  half  blindly  within  their  breasts, 
spurred  ever  onward  by  the  fierce  desires  of  their  eager  hearts,  they 
made  in  the  wilderness  homes  for  their  children,  and  by  so  doing 
wrought  out  the  destinies  of  a  continental  nation.  They  warred  and 
settled  from  the  high  hill  valleys  of  the  French  Broad  and  the  upper 
Cumberland  to  the  half-tropical  basin  of  the  Rio  Grande,  and  to 
where  the  Golden  Gate  lets  through  the  long-heaving  waters  of  the 
Pacific.  .  .  .  The  fathers  followed  Boone  or  fought  at  King's  Moun- 
tain; the  sons  marched  south  with  Jackson  to  overcome  the  Creeks 
and  beat  back  the  British;  the  grandsons  died  at  the  Alamo  or 
charged  to  victory  at  San  Jacinto.  They  were  doing  their  share  of 


58  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

a  work  that  began  with  the  conquest  of  Britain,  that  entered  on  its 
second  and  wider  period  after  the  defeat  of  the  Spanish  Armada, 
that  culminated  in  the  marvelous  growth  of  the  United  States. 

Within  those  broad  outlines  Roosevelt  wove  his  story,  retracing 
the  steps  of  the  pioneers,  superimposing  chronology  upon  chronology, 
wallowing  in  tales  of  Indian  massacres,  taking  swipes  at  the  French, 
the  British,  the  Indians — at  all  who  stood  in  the  way.  Within  that 
framework,  too,  he  discoursed  learnedly  and  perceptively  on  the 
character  of  the  frontiersmen  and  the  social  customs  of  those  who 
settled  in  their  wake;  he  waxed  eloquently  on  the  courage  of  friend  and 
foe  alike;  and  he  gloried,  always,  in  the  ceaseless  and  terrifying  ad- 
vance to  the  West. 

Roosevelt  saw  that  the  British  effort  to  forestall  the  colonists' 
occupation  of  the  trans-Appalachian  regions  was  one — he  regarded 
it  as  the  main — of  the  prime  causes  of  the  Revolution.  Great  Britain 
"wished  the  land  to  remain  a  wilderness,  the  home  of  the  trapper  and 
the  fur  trade,  of  the  Indian  hunter  and  the  French  voyageur,"  he 
asserted.  "She  desired  it  to  be  kept  as  a  barrier  against  the  growth  of 
the  seaboard  colonies  toward  the  interior.  She  regarded  the  new  lands 
across  the  Atlantic  as  being  won  and  settled,  not  for  the  benefit  of  the 
men  who  won  and  settled  them,  but  for  the  benefit  of  the  merchants 
and  traders  who  stayed  at  home.  It  was  this  that  rendered  the  Revolu- 
tion inevitable."  Roosevelt  conceded  that  "the  sins  and  shortcomings 
of  the  colonists  had  been  many — but  on  the  great  underlying  question 
they  were  wholly  in  the  right,  and  their  success  was  of  vital  conse- 
quence to  the  well-being  of  the  race  on  this  continent."  It  was  no  less 
true,  he  elsewhere  acknowledged,  that  Americans  might  have  stirred 
up  the  Indians  themselves  under  different  circumstances.  But,  he  con- 
cluded, "We  have  to  deal,  not  with  what  ...  the  Americans  might 
have  done,  but  with  what  the  British  actually  did;  and  for  this  there 
can  be  many  apologies,  but  no  sufficient  excuse." 

Roosevelt  recognized  no  moral  question  in  the  engrossment  of 
Indian  lands  by  the  American  pioneers  (his  "courageous  and  virile" 
treatment,  wrote  Turner,  "enables  the  reader  to  correct  the  ...  not 
altogether  well-founded  criticisms  ...  by  Eastern  writers"): 

There  were  a  dozen  tribes,  all  of  whom  hunted  in  Kentucky  and 
fought  each  other  there,  all  of  whom  had  equally  good  titles  to  the 
soil,  and  not  one  of  whom  acknowledged  the  right  of  any  other 


THE   WESTERNER  59 

.  .  .  save  the  right  of  the  strongest.  .  .  .  The  conquest  and  settle- 
ment by  the  Whites  on  the  Indian  lands  was  necessary  to  the  great- 
ness of  the  race  and  to  the  well-being  of  civilized  mankind.  It  was 
as  ultimately  beneficial  as  it  was  inevitable  ...  all  that  can  be 
asked  is  that  they  shall  be  judged  as  other  slayers  and  quellers  of 
savage  people  are  judged. 

And  so  Theodore  Roosevelt  judged  them,  extolling  their  intrepidity 
and  denouncing  their  regression  to  semibarbarity.  The  story  of  the 
white  man's  triumph  over  the  redman,  he  wrote, 

shows  us  a  stern  race  of  freemen  who  toiled  hard,  endured  greatly, 
and  fronted  adversity  bravely,  who  prized  strength  and  courage  and 
good  faith,  whose  wives  were  chaste,  who  were  generous  and  loyal 
to  their  friends.  But  it  shows  us  also  how  they  spurned  at  restraint, 
and  fretted  under  it,  how  they  would  brook  no  wrong  to  themselves, 
and  yet  too  often  inflicted  wrongs  on  others;  their  feats  of  terrible 
prowess  are  interspersed  with  deeds  of  the  foulest  and  most  wanton 
aggression,  the  darkest  treachery,  the  most  revolting  cruelty  .  .  . 
we  see  but  little  of  such  qualities  as  mercy  for  the  fallen,  the  weak, 
and  the  helpless,  or  pity  for  a  gallant  and  vanquished  foe. 

Roosevelt's  sketches  of  frontier  types  were  as  sharp  as  his  accounts 
of  the  long  hunt,  of  the  pursuit  of  new  lands,  and  of  the  Homeric 
battles  between  Indians  and  whites.  Among  the  best  was  that  of  the 
great  Iroquois  warrior,  Logan: 

He  was  a  man  of  splendid  appearance:  over  six  feet  high,  straight 
as  a  spear-shaft,  with  a  countenance  as  open  as  it  was  brave  and 
manly,  until  the  wrongs  he  endured  stamped  on  it  an  expression  of 
gloomy  ferocity.  He  had  always  been  the  friend  of  the  white  man, 
and  had  been  noted  particularly  for  his  kindness  and  gentleness  to 
children.  ...  A  skilled  marksman  and  mighty  hunter,  of  com- 
manding dignity,  who  treated  all  men  with  a  grave  courtesy  that 
exacted  the  same  treatment  in  return,  he  was  greatly  liked  and 
respected  by  all  the  white  hunters  and  frontiersmen  whose  friend- 
ship and  respect  were  worth  having;  they  admired  him  for  his 
dexterity  and  prowess,  and  they  loved  him  for  his  straightforward 
honesty,  and  his  noble  loyalty  to  his  friend. 

Francis  Parkman,  to  whom  Roosevelt  had  admiringly  dedicated 
The  Winning  of  the  West,  did  not  more  graphically  delineate  the 
backwoods  French.  "Three  generations  of  isolated  life  in  the  wilder- 


60  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

ness  had  greatly  changed  the  characters  of  these  groups  of  traders, 
bateau-men,  and  adventurous  warriors,"  Roosevelt  wrote: 

Hospitable,  but  bigoted  to  their  old  customs,  ignorant,  indolent, 
and  given  to  drunkenness,  they  spoke  a  corrupt  jargon  of  the  French 
tongue;  the  common  people  were  even  beginning  to  give  up  reckon- 
ing time  by  months  and  years,  and  dated  events,  as  the  Indians  did, 
with  reference  to  the  phenomena  of  nature,  such  as  the  time  of  the 
floods,  the  maturing  of  the  green  corn,  or  the  ripening  of  the  straw- 
berries. All  their  attributes  seemed  alien  to  the  polished  army 
officers  of  old  France;  they  had  but  little  more  in  common  with  the 
latter  than  with  the  American  backwoodsmen.  But  they  had  kept 
many  valuable  qualities,  and,  in  especial,  they  were  brave  and 
hardy,  and,  after  their  own  fashion,  good  soldiers. 

Of  all  the  frontiersmen,  Roosevelt  most  admired  the  Scotch-Irish. 
"These  Irish  representatives  of  the  Covenanters  were  in  the  West 
almost  what  the  Puritans  were  in  the  Northeast,  and  more  than  the 
Cavaliers  were  in  the  South,"  he  wrote.  "Mingled  with  the  descendants 
of  many  other  races,"  he  continued,  "they  nevertheless  formed  the 
kernel  of  the  distinctively  and  intensely  American  stock  who  were  the 
pioneers  of  our  people  in  their  march  westward,  the  vanguard  of  the 
army  of  fighting  settlers,  who,  with  axe  and  rifle,  won  their  way  from 
the  Alleghanies  to  the  Rio  Grande  and  the  Pacific." 

To  be  sure,  there  were  great  numbers  of  others — English,  German, 
Huguenots,  and  some  Dutch  and  Swedish.  But  a  single  generation 
"was  enough  to  weld  together  into  one  people  the  representatives  of 
these  numerous  and  widely  different  races."  Long  before  the  Revolu- 
tion they  had  "lost  all  remembrance  of  Europe  and  all  sympathy  with 
things  European,"  Roosevelt  wrote  in  a  passage  that  anticipated  many 
of  Turner's  formal  conclusions.  "Their  iron  surroundings  made  a 
mould  which  turned  out  all  alike  in  the  same  shape.  They  resembled 
one  another,  and  they  differed  from  the  rest  of  the  world — even  the 
world  of  America,  and  infinitely  more,  the  world  of  Europe — in  dress, 
in  customs,  and  in  mode  of  life."  Furthermore,  he  concluded,  "the 
influence  of  heredity  was  no  more  plainly  perceptible  than  was  the 
extent  of  individual  variation.  .  .  .  All  qualities,  good  and  bad,  are 
intensified  and  accentuated  in  the  life  of  the  wilderness." 

Similarly,  Roosevelt  maintained  his  faith  in  the  uplifting  influence 
of  the  battle  hard-won,  of  manly  physical  combat,  of  the  near-animal 
struggle  for  existence.  "The  first  lesson  the  backwoodsman  learnt  was 


THE  WESTERNER  61 

the  necessity  of  self-help;  the  next,  that  such  a  community  could  only 
thrive  if  all  joined  in  helping  one  another,  .  .  .  Their  lives  were 
harsh  and  narrow,  they  gained  their  bread  by  their  blood  and  sweat, 
in  the  unending  struggle  with  the  wild  ruggedness  of  nature.  .  .  . 
They  were  relentless,  revengeful,  suspicious,  knowing  neither  truth  nor 
pity";  but,  he  continued,  "they  were  also  upright,  resolute,  and  fearless, 
loyal  to  their  friends,  and  devoted  to  their  country."  And  so,  it  might 
be  said  of  those  last  words,  was  Theodore  Roosevelt.  But  his  per- 
spective was  deeper,  his  stage  of  action  wider,  and  his  values  more 
complex. 

Roosevelt  repeated  those  generalizations  many  times  in  The  Win- 
ning of  the  West.  He  also  touched  upon  the  democratizing  influence 
of  the  frontier,  a  thesis  Turner  was  already  developing  when  the  third 
and  fourth  volumes  were  published.  And  he  particularly  stressed  the 
deterministic  character  of  the  mighty  westward  advance.  Thus  Boone 
was  more  interesting  as  a  type  than  as  a  leader  or  an  explorer,  for  the 
West  was  neither  discovered,  won,  nor  settled  by  any  single  man. 
Of  George  Rogers  Clark  alone,  Roosevelt  concluded,  "can  it  be  said 
that  he  did  a  particular  piece  of  work  which  without  him  would  have 
remained  undone." 

Such,  then,  was  Theodore  Roosevelt's  literary  and  historical  contri- 
bution to  the  epochal  story  of  the  American  people.  As  the  political 
leader  of  those  people,  he  would  soon  project  that  epoch  onto  the 
world-wide  stage. 

The  Winning  of  the  West  had  been  started  shortly  after,  and  been 
completed  long  after,  Roosevelt  had  shifted  his  base  of  operations 
back  to  the  East  in  1886-1887.  But  his  own  experiences  in  the  Bad 
Lands  had  made  it  the  richer.  (Even  Turner  contended  that  he 
had  depicted  the  westward  movement  "as  probably  no  other  man  of 
his  time  could  have  done.")  Without  those  experiences  he  could  not 
have  written  so  perceptively  of  Boone  and  his  like;  nor  could  he  have 
understood  so  acutely  the  frontier's  tendency  to  barbarize  the  weak 
and  to  make  superior  men  of  those  who  were  already  strong.  "All 
qualities,  good  and  bad,  are  intensified  and  accentuated  in  the  life  of 
the  wilderness,"  he  had  written  in  a  passage  as  applicable  to  the  Bad 
Lands  in  the  1880's  as  to  the  black  forests  of  Kentucky  in  the  1770's. 

That  was  as  true,  probably,  of  Roosevelt  himself  as  of  Boone, 
Clark,  and  the  others.  Two  years  in  the  West  had  converted  Roose- 
velt's iron  resolve  to  one  of  steel.  They  had  reinforced  his  high  code 


62  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

of  personal  morality.  They  had  developed  his  natural  qualities  of 
leadership.  And  they  had  encouraged  his  growing  tendency  to  judge 
men  on  their  merits  rather  than  their  social  backgrounds.  They  had 
also  accentuated  his  intolerance  of  the  weak,  if  not  of  the  colorfully 
wicked.  They  had  whetted  his  craving  for  hardship.  And  they  had 
made  his  Darwinian  concept  of  struggle  more  harsh  and  inclusive 
than  ever. 

With  genuine  regret  Dakota  had  bade  him  what  it  knew  was 
good-by  when  he  went  East  in  the  fall  of  1886.  "Theodore  is  a 
Dakota  cowboy,  and  has  spent  a  large  share  of  his  time  in  the  Terri- 
tory for  a  couple  of  years,"  the  Sioux  Falls  Press  said. 

He  is  one  of  the  finest  thoroughbreds  you  ever  met — a  whole- 
souled,  clear-headed,  high-minded  gentleman.  When  he  first  went 
on  the  range,  the  cowboys  took  him  for  a  dude,  but  soon  they 
realized  the  stuff  of  which  the  youngster  was  built,  and  there  is  no 
man  now  who  inspires  such  enthusiastic  regard  among  them  as  he. 


PART    II 


THE    ROAD    TO    THE    WHITE    HOUSE 


CHAPTER 


FOR  THE  GOOD  OF  THE  NATION 


He  is  a  young  man  still,  with  all  the  impulsiveness  char- 
acteristic of  youth,  and  occasionally  this  leads  him  to  say  or  do 
zealous  things  which  seem  to  older  men  imprudent;  but  .  .  . 
he  is  so  honest  and  so  courageous  that  he  does  not  make  the 
serious  blunders  resulting  from  dishonesty  or  timidity. 

— The  Philadelphia  Record 


Within  two  and  one-half  years  of  his  return  to  New  York  in  the  fall 
of  1886  Roosevelt  had  begun  a  flamboyantly  creative  six-year  tenure 
on  the  Civil  Service  Commission  in  Washington.  Before  assuming  this 
new  charge,  however,  he  had  scored  labor  violence  in  a  memorable 
personal  letter,  engaged  in  a  "bully"  campaign  for  the  mayorship  of 
New  York,  and  made  an  eminently  successful  second  marriage  with 
a  childhood  playmate. 

TR's  epistolary  foray  against  labor  actually  occurred  five  months 
before  he  left  Dakota.  On  the  evening  of  May  4,  1886,  a  seething 
crowd  of  strikers,  socialists,  and  anarchists  had  gathered  in  Haymarket 
Square,  Chicago  to  protest  police  violence  in  particular  and  managerial 
repression  in  general.  The  meeting  had  been  proceeding  peaceably, 
though  passions  were  high  and  the  words  from  the  platform  in- 
cendiary, when  suddenly,  on  an  ill-considered  command  from  their 
captain,  one  hundred  and  eighty  policemen  had  moved  to  disperse  the 
assemblage.  Someone,  identity  unknown,  had  thereupon  heaved  a 
bomb  into  the  officers'  serried  ranks,  and  in  the  ensuing  melee  eight 
policemen  had  been  killed  and  sixty-seven  wounded. 

Eight  known  anarchists  were  subsequently  arrestfed  and  tried.  Al- 

65 


66  POWERANDRESPONSIBILITY 

though  no  one  of  them  was  ever  proved  to  have  thrown  a  bomb,  all 
eight  were  found  guilty:  first  by  an  inflamed  and  vengeful  public 
opinion,  then  by  courts  of  the  law  after  one  of  the  most  injudicious 
trials  in  American  legal  annals.  Seven  were  sentenced  to  death  and 
one  to  life  imprisonment. 

Like  most  other  vocal  Americans,  Roosevelt  had  been  outraged 
when  he  read  reports  of  the  Haymarket  tragedy  at  the  Chimney  Butte 
ranch  in  Dakota;  and  like  numerous  of  his  countrymen,  he  had  reacted 
instinctively  in  terms  of  counterviolence.  "My  men  are  hard  working, 
labouring  men,  who  work  longer  hours  for  no  greater  wages  than 
many  of  the  strikers  .  .  .  ,"  he  wrote  his  sister  Bamie  at  the  time. 
"I  believe  nothing  would  give  them  greater  pleasure  than  a  chance 
with  their  rifles  at  one  of  the  mobs.  ...  I  wish  I  had  them  with  me 
and  a  fair  show  at  ten  times  our  number  of  rioters;  my  men  shoot 
well  and  fear  very  little." 

To  this  day,  that  statement  has  haunted  Roosevelt's  reputation 
among  men  of  reflection.  It  is  possible  that  they  have  exaggerated  its 
significance;  that  they  have  failed  to  weigh  it  against  TR's  signal 
services  to  the  labor  movement  during  his  later  career.  He  was  only 
twenty-seven  years  old  at  the  time,  and  his  judgment  had  been  formed 
by  biased  newspaper  reports.  Moreover,  even  Henry  George  approved 
the  punishment  meted  out  to  the  anarchists.  And  as  Putnam  writes, 
"When  capitalists  like  Jay  Gould  broke  the  law,  Roosevelt  was 
[equally]  rampant  to  correct  and  avenge." 

Yet  TR  never  altered  the  broad  sense  of  that  first  violent  reaction. 
Long  after  the  evidence  was  in  he  continued  to  rail  against  the 
"murderous  rioters";  long  after  thoughtful  Chicagoans  had  soberly 
reconsidered  their  own  emotional  reactions  Roosevelt  remained  im- 
pervious to  the  injustice  of  his  attitude.  And  when,  seven  years  after 
the  Haymarket  tragedy,  Illinois's  German-born  governor,  John  Peter 
Altgeld,  responded  to  the  humane  dictates  of  his  Lincoln-like  con- 
science by  pardoning  the  three  surviving  victims  of  the  law's  mis- 
carriage, TR  angrily  relegated  him  to  the  ranks  of  Robespierre  and 
the  Jacobins.  The  conclusion  is  inescapable:  In  the  Haymarket  affair 
and  numerous  similar  cases  down  through  the  years,  TR's  compulsion 
for  order  and  a  Hebraic-like  justice  constrained  him  to  give  short 
shrift  to  the  historic  safeguards  of  the  Anglo-American  law. 

Roosevelt's  inability  to  fathom  the  wellsprings  of  industrial  violence 
reflected  in  part  his  failure  to  frame  the  passing  insights  of  his  legis- 


FORTHEGOODOFTHENATION  67 

lative  years  into  a  mature  philosophy  of  labor.  At  times  he  perceived 
the  near-controlling  force  of  the  external  environment;  but  he  could 
not,  or  would  not,  generalize  rationally  on  his  perceptions.  His 
mayorality  campaign  in  the  fall  of  1886  attests  further  to  this. 

TR  had  entered  the  race  with  reluctance.  The  real  contest  was 
between  the  Democratic  industrialist-philanthropist,  Abram  S.  Hewitt, 
and  Henry  George,  who  was  running  on  the  United  Labor  party's 
ticket.  George's  epochal  work,  Progress  and  Poverty,  had  terrorized 
defenders  of  the  status  quo  with  its  classic  indictment  of  poverty  and 
not  wholly  visionary  proposals  for  tax  reform,  and  it  was  widely 
understood  that  thousands  of  conservative  Republicans  would  vote 
Democratic  to  assure  his  defeat.  In  these  circumstances  no  Republican 
of  prominence  wanted  the  G.O.P.  nomination;  and  Tom  Platt,  the 
unsavory  Republican  boss,  had  turned  in  desperation  to  young  Roose- 
velt in  early  October.  "The  simple  fact  is  that  I  had  to  play  Curtius 
and  leap  into  the  gulf  that  was  yawning  before  the  Republican  party," 
TR  explained.  Had  the  party's  chances  of  winning  been  better,  he 
added,  he  would  not  have  been  asked. 

During  the  whirling  campaign  that  had  followed  Roosevelt's  accept- 
ance he  had  characteristically  acted  as  though  he  thought  he  could 
win.  He  tried  to  forestall  a  mass  defection  of  Republicans  to  Hewitt, 
whose  intemperate  and  irrational  attack  on  George  did  his  own 
reputation  no  honor,  by  treating  George's  advanced  views  lightly  and 
playing  on  the  Republicans'  traditional  revulsion  against  Tammany. 
He  charged  that  Hewitt  would  be  unable  to  divorce  himself  from  his 
unsavory  Tammany  supporters.  And  he  repeatedly  declared  that  he 
would,  if  elected,  "go  to  City  Hall  unpledged  to  any  one." 

More  significantly,  Roosevelt  reaffirmed  the  attitudes  of  his  years 
in  the  Assembly  by  excoriating  owners  of  slum  properties.  Then,  in 
an  apparent  effort  to  redress  a  balance  that  had  never  been,  he  had 
exhorted  labor  lo  rise  by  its  own  exertions.  Only  through  "steady, 
individual  self-help"  could  industrial  evils  be  eradicated,  he  admon- 
ished slum-imprisoned  workers  who  were  powerless  even  to  form  an 
effective  union.  Indeed,  he  continued,  industrial  evils  could  "no  more 
be  done  away  with  by  legislation  than  you  could  do  away  with  the 
bruises  which  you  receive  when  you  tumble  down,  by  passing  an  act  to 
repeal  the  laws  of  gravitation."  Not  until  after  TR  became  President 
would  he  finally  realize  that  the  repressive  force  of  capital  was  so 
powerful,  the  enervating  effect  of  subsistence  wages  so  pervasive, 


68  POWER    AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

that  for  all  but  the  very  strongest  "individual  self-help"  was  woefully 
less  than  enough.  Had  he  digested  Henry  George's  penetrating  analysis 
of  society  at  the  time,  he  would  have  known  it  then. 

Young  Roosevelt's  vigorous  campaigning  had  proved  unavailing; 
he  ran  third,  thirty  thousand  votes  behind  Hewitt  and  eight  thousand 
behind  George.  As  Jacob  Riis  reported,  "in  the  wild  dread  of  the 
disaster  that  was  [supposedly]  coming,  men  forsook  party,  principles, 
everything,  and  threw  themselves  into  the  arms  of  Tammany."  TR  was 
hurt.  "Am  badly  defeated,"  he  wired  Henry  Cabot  Lodge.  "Worse 
even  than  I  feared." 

A  few  days  after  the  returns  were  in,  Roosevelt  sailed  for  England 
to  be  married  again.  For  more  than  a  year  after  Alice  Lee's  death  in 
February,  1884,  he  had  contrived  to  avoid  meeting  Edith  Carow, 
whom  he  had  known  when  they  were  children  and  escorted  to  dances 
and  parties  as  a  youth.  Theodore  and  Edith's  friends  had  assumed 
before  he  met  Alice  that  they  would  be  married  after  he  was  gradu- 
ated from  Harvard,  but  they  had  gradually  drifted  apart,  perhaps, 
suggests  Hermann  Hagedorn,  because  "Her  ladyship,"  as  Roosevelt 
often  referred  to  Edith,  had  her  "bad  days"  as  well  as  her  "good 
days."  (Edith  would  later  hold  that  she  several  times  rejected  Theo- 
dore's proposals,  but  the  evidence  is  lacking.) 

There  is  no  record  of  what  Edith  thought  when  she  attended 
Theodore  and  Alice's  wedding  in  1880.  During  the  next  five  years, 
however,  her  lifelong  disposition  to  remain  aloof  from  society  was 
accentuated.  "I  believe  you  could  live  in  the  same  house  with  Edith 
for  fifty  years  and  never  really  know  her,"  a  former  classmate  at  Miss 
Comstock's  school  once  remarked.*  Nevertheless,  Edith  continued  to 
visit  Theodore's  sister  Bamie,  and  about  eighteen  months  after  Alice's 
death  she  accidentally  encountered  Theodore  himself  at  Bamie's 
house.  Theodore's  romantic  resolve  to  be  true  to  the  memory  of  his 
first  wife  thereupon  began  to  weaken.  For  days  the  letter  "E"  was  the 
only  entry  he  made  in  his  diary,  and  a  few  months  later,  on  November 
17,  1885,  they  became  secretly  engaged.  Although  Theodore  was 
reportedly  overheard  murmuring  fitfully  to  himself  the  following 
summer  that  he  wished  he  could  be  constant  to  Alice,  they  were 

*  Although  Edith  Roosevelt's  attitude  toward  scholars'  use  of  her  husband's 
papers  was  most  enlightened,  she  destroyed  the  personal  correspondence 
between  him  and  her  following  his  death  in  1919. 


FORTHEGOODOFTHENATION  69 

married  in  London  in  December,  1886.  Cecil  Spring-Rice,  an  urbane 
and  witty  young  English  diplomat,  was  best  man. 

Edith  Carow  Roosevelt  was  a  woman  of  many  moods  and  some 
paradoxes.  She  was  kind,  considerate,  and  tactful;  she  was  also 
shrewd,  calculating,  and  at  times  ruthless.  She  suffered  from  neuralgia, 
and  neither  Theodore  nor  the  children  knew  quite  what  to  expect  of 
her.  Her  tongue  was  sharp,  and  for  all  her  genuine  affection  for  her 
ebullient  husband,  she  often  silenced  him  with  a  rapier-like  word  or 
phrase.  She  is  said  to  have  been  possessive  and  demanding;  yet  she 
tolerantly  accepted  her  children  as  nature  had  variously  endowed 
them.  Her  intelligence  was  wide-ranging  and  sensitive  and  her  literary 
judgments  were  by  all  accounts  penetrating.  She  read  poetry  aloud 
with  quietly  dramatic  effect,  and  she  was  considered  by  her  friends 
to  be  an  authority  on  Shakespeare.  She  was  also  well  read  in  philoso- 
phy and  versed  in  current  affairs.  As  Theodore  observed  many  years 
after  their  marriage,  Edith  "is  not  only  cultured  but  scholarly." 

Down  through  the  years  Edith  became  as  indispensable,  probably, 
as  any  one  person  could  become  to  her  many-sided  and  resilient 
husband.  She  raised  Alice  Lee's  daughter  and  bore  four  sons  and  a 
daughter  of  her  own.  She  suffered  Theodore's  myriad  political  ac- 
quaintances and  she  tolerated  some  and  enjoyed  others  of  the  legions 
of  intellectuals  who  crossed  her  threshold  on  his  invitation.  When  she 
was  bored,  which  was  not  infrequent,  she  absented  herself  from  lunch 
or  retired  early  after  dinner.  And  though  she  was  invariably  gracious 
at  official  functions,  she  was  to  the  end  of  her  life  more  a  spectator 
than  participant. 

Edith  wisely  gave  sparingly  of  her  counsel  on  political  affairs — she 
seems  to  have  sensed  intuitively  when  her  advice  would  weigh  and 
when  it  would  not — and  she  resignedly  accepted  many  of  Theodore's 
most  disruptive  decisions  in  the  realization  that  they  "were  best  for 
him."  TR  was  aware  that  he  often  piqued  her,  and  when  Ted  Jr: 
became  engaged  in  1910  he  commented  revealingly  on  their  quarter 
century  together.  "Greatly  tho  I  loved  Mother,"  he  wrote  his  first- 
born son,  "I  was  at  times  thoughtless  and  selfish,  and  if  Mother  had 
been  a  mere  unhealthy  Patient  Griselda  I  might  have  grown  set  in 
selfish  and  inconsiderate  ways."  She  was,  he  elaborated,  "always 
tender,  gentle  and  considerate,  and  always  loving,  yet,  when  necessary 
pointed  out  where  I  was  thoughtless,  instead  of  submitting  to  it." 


70  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Had  she  done  otherwise,  he  concluded,  her  life  would  have  been 
"very  much  harder,  and  mine  very  much  less  happy." 

Nor  was  Edith  uninfluenced  by  her  gregarious  husband.  "One 
should  not  live  to  oneself,"  she  warned  Ted  in  her  own  congratulatory 
letter.  "It  was  a  temptation  to  me,  only  Father  would  not  allow  it. 
Since  I  have  grown  older  and  realize  that  it  is  a  great  opportunity 
when  one  has  a  house  that  one  can  make  pleasant  for  younger — and 
also  older — people  to  come  to,  I  have  done  better." 

Following  their  wedding  on  December  2,  1886,  Theodore  and 
Edith  had  taken  a  leisurely  tour  on  the  Continent.  Theodore  was 
captivated  by  Venice.  "...  the  architecture  has  a  certain  florid 
barbarism  about  it — Byzantine,  dashed  with  something  stronger — that 
appeals  to  some  streak  in  my  nature,"  he  wrote  home.  He  was  also 
enthusiastic  about  the  Dying  Gladiator,  Raphael,  Michael  Angelo, 
and  the  Milan  cathedral. 

The  lofty  aisle,  with  its  rows  of  towering  columns,  white  and 
shadowy,  and  the  fretted,  delicate  work  above,  all  seen  in  the  dim 
half  light  that  comes  through  the  stained  glass  windows,  really  awes 
me;  it  gives  me  a  feeling  I  have  never  had  elsewhere  except  among 
very  wild,  chasm-rent  mountains,  or  in  the  vast  pine  forests  where 
the  trees  are  very  tall  and  not  too  close  together.  I  think  I  care 
more  for  breadth,  vastness,  grandeur,  strength,  than  for  technique 
or  mere  grace  or  the  qualities  that  need  artistic  sense  or  training  to 
appreciate. 

On  March  19  after  a  short  visit  in  Paris  and  an  exciting  whirl  in 
high  British  social  and  intellectual  circles,  the  Roosevelts  embarked 
for  the  United  States.  They  were  to  make  their  home  at  Sagamore 
Hill,  the  spacious  gabled  house  which  Theodore  and  Alice  had  planned 
and  the  architects  Lamb  and  Rich  had  executed. 

The  house  "was  nothing  to  soothe  the  eye  or  melt  the  spirit  with 
subtle  harmonies  of  proportion  or  grace  of  line,"  Hagedorn  writes  in 
his  engaging  Roosevelt  Family  of  Sagamore  Hill.  Roosevelt  knew 
what  he  wanted  in  the  interior — a  library,  great  fireplaces,  and  a  big 
parlor  or  drawing  room — but  he  had  slight  conception  of  how  the 
exterior  should  look.  "So  the  architects  gave  him  on  the  outside  what 
self-respecting  men  of  substance  of  the  1880's  valued  more  than 
beauty,  and  what  architects  were  summoned  to  express:  solidity,  first 
of  all;  dignity,  hospitality,  comfort,  the  social  stability  of  the  owner, 
and  permanence.  The  foundations  were  twenty  inches  thick;  joists, 


FOR  THE  GOOD  OF  THE  NATION  71 

rafters  and  roof  boards  were  in  proportion.  Long  Island's  gales  were 
not  going  to  shake  this  house,  if  Mr.  Lamb  and  Mr.  Rich  could  pre- 
vent it.  Theodore's  desires  regarding  fireplaces  were  fully  covered, 
moreover,  with  four  on  the  first  floor,  four  on  the  second,  and  a  dumb- 
waiter for  firewood  rising  from  the  cellar  to  feed  them.  Apart  from 
the  satisfaction  of  crackling  logs  and  dancing  flames,  Theodore  was 
assuming — quite  correctly,  as  the  event  proved — that  even  two  hot-air 
furnaces  in  the  cellar  might  need  supplementing." 

At  Sagamore,  Theodore  soon  immersed  himself  in  the  pleasures  of 
family  life.  Alice  is  "too  sweet  and  good  for  anything,"  he  reported 
when  his  first  wife's  child  was  three  and  one-half  years  old.  "Eleanor" 
— the  shy  and  retiring  niece  who  in  1905  married  a  distant  cousin, 
Franklin  Delano  Roosevelt — "plays  all  the  time  with  her."  The  baby 
— Theodore  Jr.,  born  to  Edith  on  September  13,  1887 — "crawls 
everywhere,  does  his  best  to  stand  and  talk — but  fails — and  is  too 
merry  and  happy  for  anything.  I  go  in  to  play  with  them  every 
morning;  they  are  certainly  the  dearest  children  imaginable."  And  so 
it  was  over  the  years.  Kermit  came  in  1889,  Ethel  in  1891,  Archibald 
in  1894,  and  finally  Quentin  in  1897.  Each  was  "the  sweetest  little 
fellow  [or  girl]  in  the  world";  and  each  received  a  full  measure  of  the 
father's  time  and  attention. 

Meanwhile  Roosevelt  published  his  biography  of  Thomas  Hart 
Benton,  wrote  his  Gouverneur  Morris,  and  started  The  Winning  of 
the  West.  He  rode  to  the  hounds  and  he  helped  organize  a  polo  club. 
He  took  a  perverse  pleasure  in  falls — only  the  courageous  rode  hard 
enough  to  suffer  mishap — and  he  once  remounted  with  a  broken  arm 
and  continued  the  chase  to  the  kill.  He  talked  glowingly  of  his  tri- 
umphs and  humorously  of  his  foibles,  especially  in  tennis,  which  he 
played  with  more  energy  than  finesse.  "I  was  given  a  first  class  partner 
who  won  in  spite  of  me,"  he  typically  commented  after  a  tournament 
victory.  "I  have  turned  my  share  of  the  'cup'  into  a  new  Winchester 
rifle  that  I  have  been  longing  for."  He  also  went  West  to  hunt  during 
these  years;  and  partly  to  replenish  his  ranching  losses,  but  mainly 
because  of  his  compulsion  to  express  himself,  he  wrote  numerous 
articles  on  his  experiences. 

Gradually,  TR's  circle  of  friends  became  wider  and  more  cosmo- 
politan, but  it  was  with  Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  ten  years  his  senior  and 
his  opposite  in  personality,  that  the  deepest  friendship  developed.  A 
moralist  sans  fervor,  Lodge  began  his  long  career  as  a  moderate 


72  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

reformer  and  ended  it  as  the  archpartisan  of  his  age.  He  was  more 
intellectually  agile  and  polished  than  Roosevelt,  yet  he  lacked  his 
friend's  breadth  and  flexibility.  Nor  was  he  warm  and  spontaneous. 
His  letters  reveal  a  man  as  calculating  in  the  small  things  as  in  the  large 
things,  a  man  predisposed  to  read  the  meanest  motives  into  others. 
From  his  adolescence  to  his  old  age,  moreover,  there  was  about  him  a 
supercilious  quality  that  his  drooping  eyelids  sharply  accentuated;  and 
though  his  very  real  abilities  were  widely  recognized,  he  was  respected 
but  neither  liked  nor  generally  admired.  Never,  not  even  in  the  United 
States  Senate  where  he  held  the  seat  of  Webster  and  Sumner  for  thirty 
years,  was  Lodge  a  leader  in  the  classic  mold;  and  never,  for  all  his 
eminence,  was  he  seriously  considered  for  the  presidency,  except  by 
Roosevelt  in  1916.  Yet  his  intellectual  power  was  considerable,  and 
he  had  an  element  of  high-mindedness.  His  contributions  to  the  civil 
service  movement,  to  administrative  reform,  and  to  national  defense 
were  substantial  and  meritorious. 

Roosevelt  and  Lodge's  relationship  had  been  forged  on  the  political 
crucible  of  the  Elaine  campaign  and  tempered  by  common  interests 
uncovered  thereafter.  No  less  than  Roosevelt,  Lodge  loved  history; 
and  even  more  than  Roosevelt,  belles-lettres.  Both  men  had  been 
long  interested  in  civil  service  reform;  both  were  strident  nationalists 
and  budding  imperialists.  Until  Roosevelt  espoused  the  humanism  of 
Jefferson,  or  so  he  always  insisted,  of  Lincoln,  both  were  also  con- 
servative Hamiltonians.  Notwithstanding  his  public  hauteur,  Lodge 
was  affectionate  and  gracious  in  the  security  of  his  home.  And  though 
he  lacked  TR's  bubbling  zest,  he  was  an  impassioned  horseman  and 
polo  player.  His  wife,  Nannie,  had  a  scintillating  mind  and  surpassing 
charm  as  a  hostess;  Theodore  admired  and  enjoyed  her,  and  so, 
happily,  did  Edith. 

From  the  outset  Lodge  recognized  Roosevelt's  extraordinary  power 
and  potential;  through  the  three  and  one-half  decades  of  their  relation- 
ship he  labored  devotedly  and  at  times  almost  selflessly  to  advance 
TR's  political  career.  Roosevelt,  who  numbered  few  men  among  his 
friends  although  he  had  thousands  of  acquaintances,  responded  with 
his  greatest  gift.  To  Cabot  Lodge  more  than  to  any  other  man,  he 
gave  his  personal  confidence.  As  TR  confessed  to  him  at  one  point,  "I 
can't  help  writing  you,  for  ...  there  are  only  one  or  two  people  in 
the  world,  outside  of  my  own  family,  whom  I  deem  friends  or  for 
whom  I  really  care."  Such  was  the  strength  of  the  bond  that  bound 


FOR  THE  GOOD  OF  THE  NATION  73 

them  together  that  not  even  Roosevelt's  bolt  from  the  Grand  Old 
Party  in  1912  dissolved  it  completely. 

Following  his  return  from  abroad  in  1887,  Roosevelt  had  main- 
tained a  passing  interest  in  politics.  He  engaged  in  a  vendetta  with 
the  mugwump  editor,  E.  A.  Godkin  of  The  Nation.  He  unloosed  a 
bitingly  unfair  attack  on  Henry  George's  theories,  which  he  mis- 
represented. And  he  supported  Benjamin  Harrison  for  the  presidency 
in  1888,  though  he  had  again  steeled  himself  to  accept  Elaine  on  the 
grounds  that  "his  name  alone  wakens  enthusiasm,  and  ...  he  would 
poll  the  most  votes."  Even  as  he  stamped  himself  as  a  partisan 
Republican,  however,  he  worked  sincerely  and  energetically  to  reform 
the  G.O.P.  from  within. 

Two  of  the  most  agitated  issues  of  the  1880's  were  tariff  and  civil 
service  reform.  On  both  the  Republican  leadership  stood  militantly 
for  the  status  quo,  and  on  both  young  Roosevelt  took  a  position  well 
in  advance  of  his  party.  In  private  correspondence,  on  the  fringes  of 
the  inner  councils,  and  in  public  addresses,  young  Roosevelt  urged 
the  G.O.P.  to  rise  to  them.  As  the  presidential  campaign  of  1888 
impended,  he  even  tried  to  beard  the  lion  in  its  den.  It  would  be  a 
mistake,  he  told  the  Union  League  Club,  "for  the  Republican  party 
to  announce  that  the  inequalities  and  anomalies  in  the  present  tariff 
must  not  be  touched,  and  to  announce  that  the  high  tariff  is  a  fetich, 
something  to  which  every  other  issue  must  yield.  .  .  ."  There 
was  needed,  he  boldly  exclaimed,  "a  prudent  and  intelligent  revision 
of  the  tariff"  in  order  that  the  presidential  campaign  could  be  waged 
"on  the  broad  ground  of  Republicanism,  with  all  and  not  part  merely 
of  what  the  name  implies."  Thus  were  the  unregenerate  regulars, 
some  of  whom  had  feared  Roosevelt's  youthful  enthusiasms  more 
than  Henry  George's  radicalism  in  the  mayorality  contest  of  1886, 
confirmed  in  their  judgment. 

Following  Benjamin  Harrison's  election,  Roosevelt  had  sought  to 
stay  the  victorious  G.O.P.'s  gathering  assault  on  the  merit  system  in 
a  speech  to  the  Federal  Club  of  New  York  City.  After  conceding  that 
there  was  "an  immediate  necessity  to  remove  a  great  number  of  Mr. 
Cleveland's  more  vicious  and  incompetent  appointees,"  he  urged  that 
the  classified  system  be  substantially  extended  "on  the  lines  of  the 
excellent  bill  introduced  in  Congress  by  my  friend  Cabot  Lodge." 
He  was  speaking,  he  pointedly  exclaimed,  "on  behalf  of  very  many 


74  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

tens  of  thousands  of  Republicans  who  belong  to  the  party  because 
they  believe  in  it,  not  for  what  they  can  make  of  it.  ..."  A  few 
months  after  that  declaration  Roosevelt  commenced  his  notable  labors 
on  the  Civil  Service  Commission. 

For  some  time  TR  had  yearned  to  play  the  larger  role  for  which 
friends,  newspapermen,  and  his  own  consciousness  had  told  him  he 
was  destined.  Neither  his  interests  in  the  West  nor  his  writing  and 
diverse  activities  at  Sagamore  Hill  had  absorbed  his  vaulting  energies. 
And  he  had  begun  to  doubt  that  he  could  write  a  truly  great  book. 
Almost  three  years  before,  in  August,  1886,  he  had  rejected  over- 
tures to  serve  as  president  of  the  New  York  Board  of  Health.  That 
same  month  visions  of  military  glory — visions  that  would  never  die — 
had  brightened  momentarily  when  an  incident  along  the  Mexican 
border  precipitated  a  flurry  of  war  talk.  Eagerly,  Roosevelt  had  peti- 
tioned the  Secretary  of  War  for  authority  to  raise  an  outfit  of  horse 
riflemen  in  the  event  of  hostilities.  "I  haven't  the  least  idea  there  will 
be  any  trouble,"  he  explained  to  Lodge,  "but  as  my  chance  of  doing 
anything  in  the  future  worth  doing  seems  to  grow  continually  smaller 
I  intend  to  grasp  at  every  opportunity  that  turns  up."  Thereafter 
had  come  the  mayoralty  race,  and  following  it,  repeated  protestations 
that  he  was  through  with  politics. 

As  the  Harrison  administration  took  shape  in  the  spring  of  1889, 
TR's  political  ambition  flared  anew.  He  would,  he  now  confided  to 
Lodge,  "like  above  all  things  to  go  into  politics."  He  feared,  however, 
that  he  was  persona  non  grata,  and  he  resignedly  reconciled  himself 
to  a  literary  career,  planning  only  to  take  the  interest  in  politics  "that 
a  decent  man  should."  That  his  fears  were  warranted  is  shown  by 
the  reaction  of  the  new  Secretary  of  State,  the  tainted  James  G. 
Elaine,  to  Mrs.  Lodge's  suggestion  that  he  appoint  Roosevelt  Assistant 
Secretary  of  State.  "I  do  somehow  fear  that  my  sleep  at  Augusta  or 
Bar  Harbor  would  not  be  quite  so  easy  and  refreshing  if  so  brilliant 
and  aggressive  a  man  had  hold  of  the  helm,"  Blaine  replied  to  Mrs. 
Lodge.  "Matters  are  constantly  occurring  which  require  the  most 
thoughtful  concentration  and  the  most  stubborn  inaction.  Do  you 
think  that  Mr.  T.R.'s  temperament  would  give  guaranty  of  that 
course?" 

Blaine  knew  his  man.  And  so  did  Benjamin  Harrison.  The  Presi- 
dent was  reluctant  to  give  the  thirty-year-old  New  Yorker  any  post  in 
his  administration;  but  under  pressure  from  Lodge  and  others  Harrison 


FORTHEGOODOFTHENATION  75 

finally  agreed  to  offer  Roosevelt  one  of  the  four  posts  on  the  Civil 
Service  Commission.  To  the  President's  subsequent  dismay,  Roosevelt 
accepted  at  once. 

The  civil  service  system  was  in  a  precarious  state  when  Roosevelt 
breezed  into  office  on  May  13,  1889.  Although  Cleveland  had 
strengthened  the  rules  and  extended  the  classified  lists  as  he  left 
Washington,  he  had  made  a  virtually  inclusive  partisan  sweep  of  all 
positions  not  covered  by  the  law  during  the  preceding  four  years. 
Partly  in  vengeance,  but  mainly  because  they  also  believed  in  the 
spoils  system,  thousands  of  Republicans  had  swarmed  into  the  capital 
or  beseeched  their  congressmen  by  letter  for  government  positions  in 
the  weeks  preceding  Roosevelt's  appointment.  As  one  confirmed 
Republican  newspaper  blatantly  proclaimed  at  the  time:  "Hundreds 
of  Offices,"  "Places  to  Suit  All  Classes,"  "Take  Your  Choice." 

In  these  circumstances,  President  Harrison  decided  to  give  the  job- 
hunger  of  the  party  stalwarts  precedence  over  the  moral  fervor  of  the 
reformers.  Under  the  benign  dispensation  of  Postmaster  General  John 
Wanamaker,  pioneering  merchant,  Sunday  school  teacher,  and  G.O.P. 
"fat  cat,"  30,000  fourth-class  postmasters  were  soon  replaced  by 
loyal,  and  presumably  deserving,  Republicans.  Other  cabinet  officers 
were  more  restrained  because  their  departments  were  smaller;  but 
their  comparative  performances  were  as  good,  or  bad.  Harrison  had 
been  in  office  hardly  a  month  before  that  paladin  of  civil  service 
reform,  Harper's  Weekly,  was  in  despair  charging  that  "There  was 
never  in  our  history  a  grosser  violation  of  distinct  promises  and 
pledges  than  the  partisan  devastation  of  the  post  offices  under  this 
administration." 

The  belated  appointee  of  a  skeptical  President,  Roosevelt  was  none- 
theless determined  to  enforce  the  law  with  accustomed  zeal.  "I  am  a 
great  believer  in  practical  politics,"  he  wrote  Lodge  a  little  later, 
"but  when  my  duty  is  to  enforce  a  law,  that  law  is  surely  going  to  be 
enforced,  without  fear  or  favor.  I  am  perfectly  willing  to  be  turned 
out — or  be  legislated  out — but  while  in  I  mean  business."  In  truth, 
the  waters  ran  deeper.  Civil  service  reform  was  at  once  the  most 
confirmed  and  most  sustained  cause  of  Roosevelt's  career,  and  he 
read  into  it  both  the  gospel  of  efficiency  which  is  the  conservative's 
creed  and  the  open  society  which  is  the  democrat's  dream.  As  he  and 
his  colleagues  wrote  in  their  annual  report  of  1892-93,  "a  man  enters 
the  public  service  on  his  merits,  after  fair  trial,  in  comparison  with 


76  POWER  AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

others  of  his  fellow  citizens,  and  is  retained  as  long  as  he  honorably 
serves  the  public."  Roosevelt  also  regarded  it  as  a  prime  preventive 
of  moral  degradation.  The  "spoils  system,"  said  that  same  report,  "is 
a  fruitful  source  of  corruption  in  national  life,"  one  that  prevents 
"decent  men"  from  taking  part  in  politics  and  that  "degenerates  into 
a  mere  corrupt  scramble  for  plunder." 

Young  Roosevelt  believed  at  first  that  President  Harrison  would 
approve  his  rigorous  enforcement  of  the  existing  laws.  "I  have 
strengthened  the  administration  by  showing,  in  striking  contrast  to  the 
facts  under  Cleveland,  that  there  was  no  humbug  in  the  law  now," 
he  wrote  after  six  weeks  in  office.  Two  years  later,  however,  he  was 
not  so  sanguine;  on  count  after  count  Harrison,  who  privately  com- 
plained that  TR  "wanted  to  put  an  end  to  all  the  evil  in  the  world 
between  sunrise  and  sunset,"  had  failed  him.  "The  President  actually 
refuses  to  consider  the  changes  in  the  rules  .  .  .  necessary  to  enable 
us  to  do  our  work  effectively,"  Roosevelt  wrote  Lodge.  "He  has  never 
given  us  one  ounce  of  real  backing.  He  won't  see  us,  or  consider  any 
method  for  improving  the  service,  even  when  it  in  no  way  touches  a 
politician.  It  is  horribly  disheartening  to  work  under  such  a  Chief." 

Disillusioned  though  he  was,  Roosevelt  and  his  colleagues  had 
actually  accomplished  much  during  those  first  two  years.  They  issued 
critical  reports  on  examination  procedures,  they  relentlessly  pursued 
charges  of  fraud,  and  they  made  a  well-publicized  inspection  tour  of 
government  offices  in  the  West.  "We  have  to  do  two  things,"  Roose- 
velt, who  soon  became  head  of  the  Commission  in  title  as  well  as  in 
fact,  told  reporters  on  the  eve  of  their  departure.  "One  is  to  make  the 
officials  themselves  understand  that  the  law  is  obligatory,  not  optional, 
and  the  other  is  to  get  the  same  idea  into  the  heads  of  the  people." 

Roosevelt's  dynamic  exertions  continued  throughout  the  Harrison 
administration  though  he  privately  complained  of  inactivity.  The 
annual  reports  "revealed  the  presence  of  a  new  vigor  and  adminis- 
trative power,  and  of  a  mind  appreciative  at  once  of  ideal  ends  and 
practicable  possibilities,"  one  of  the  historians  of  the  movement  later 
wrote.  Stories  of  Roosevelt's  deeds  "are  handed  down  from  genera- 
tion to  generation  of  Commission  employees,"  the  Chairman  of  the 
Commission  reported  sixty-two  years  after  TR  had  resigned  his  post. 
And  understandably  so.  Roosevelt  lectured  a  recalcitrant  Congress  on 
means  to  improve  the  Pendleton  Law.  He  called  Southern  Democratic 
congressmen  into  his  office  to  explain  how  their  constituents  could 


FORTHEGOODOFTHENATION  77 

win  federal  jobs  by  competitive  examination.  And  he  firmly  refused 
to  jump  names  on  the  lists.  "You  saw  the  ...  register  when  you  were 
down  here,"  he  wrote  a  congressman  who  made  inquiries  for  a  con- 
stituent. "Her  average  was  good  .  .  .  but  it  was  not  good  enough." 
Or,  as  he  bluntly  admonished  a  job-seeker  who  had  the  temerity  to 
discuss  his  connections:  "No  political  influence  will  help  you  in  the 
least.  Not  both  your  Senators  and  all  your  Representatives  in  Congress 
together  could  avail  to  have  you  certified  from  our  registers." 

That  was  not  all.  Roosevelt  devised  new  and  practical  tests  for 
applicants.  "When  we  hold  an  examination  for  assistant  statistician  our 
aim  is  to  get  ...  an  assistant  statistician,  not  ...  a  Civil  Service 
Commissioner  or  Cabinet  Officer,"  he  explained  to  one  correspondent. 
"We  make  the  examinations  as  simple  as  the  duties  of  the  places  to  be 
filled  admit,"  he  informed  another.  He  also  placed  women  on  the  same 
competitive  plane  with  men  in  many  positions,  the  result  being  a 
notable  increase  in  the  number  of  women  employed  during  his  tenure. 
In  addition,  TR  wrote  numerous  magazine  articles,  delivered  un- 
counted speeches,  and  lobbied  vigorously  for  increased  appropriations 
for  the  Commission.  "The  last  few  years  politically  for  me  have  been 
largely  a  balancing  of  evils,"  he  revealingly  confided  to  Brander 
Matthews,  "and  I  am  delighted  to  go  in  on  a  side  where  I  have  no 
doubt  whatever." 

One  of  the  side  effects  of  Roosevelt's  relentless  enforcement  of  the 
civil  service  laws  was  his  restoration  to  grace  by  the  mugwumps.  The 
Old  Guardsmen  and  their  organs  fumed  over  his  refusal  to  play  the 
party  game,  the  Washington  Post  openly  labeling  him  "The  Rollicking 
Ranchman  of  Bogus  Reform."  But  President  Eliot  of  Harvard  praised 
him  as  the  "ideal  citizen,"  and  the  New  York  Evening  Post  began 
again  to  refer  to  TR's  "characteristic  candor."  Great  numbers  of  Re- 
publican and  Democratic  newspapers  also  endorsed  him  warmly.  He 
was,  the  Philadelphia  Record  said  editorially,  a  man  who  "believes 
rather  in  the  principles  than  the  practices  of  his  party." 

His  colleagues  were  quiet  men,  who  supported  him  to  a  con- 
siderable extent,  but  he  did  the  fighting  in  the  newspapers,  before 
congress  and  everywhere  else,  and  of  course  bore  the  brunt  of  the 
consequent  attack  which  by  and  by  came  largely  to  be  personal  to 
himself,  as  he  became  recognized  as  the  leading  spirit  of  the  Com- 
mission. 


78  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

TR  professed  to  resent  the  encomiums  of  the  mugwumps  and 
Democrats  on  the  grounds  that  they  would  "discredit  me  with  well- 
meaning  but  narrow  Republicans."  But  in  reality  it  was  his  own 
actions  that  alienated  him  from  the  party  warhorses.  For  he  not  only 
cut  their  feed  bags,  he  impugned  the  integrity  of  a  cabinet  officer  and 
spread  the  charges  on  the  record  in  the  election  year  1892. 

The  main  fight  centered  on  the  Post  Office  Department.  John  Wana- 
maker's  talents  were  those  of  a  near  administrative  genius.  And  al- 
though the  most  imaginative  of  his  proposals — those  for  parcel-post 
deliveries,  postal  savings  banks,  and  the  decentralization  of  administra- 
tion— were  blocked  by  the  indifference  of  Congress,  he  had  neverthe- 
less pushed  through  such  a  spate  of  reforms  as  made  his  tenure  the 
most  distinguished  since  the  Civil  War.  On  the  other  hand,  Wana- 
maker  had  continued  to  promote  the  political  interests  of  the  Grand 
Old  Party,  partly  because  he  hoped  for  congressional  support  of  his 
legislative  program,  partly  because  he  was  a  thoroughgoing  partisan. 
As  his  sympathetic  biographer  admits  and  his  30,000  removals  of 
fourth-class  postmasters  proves,  he  had  "no  profound  objection  to  the 
theory  that  to  the  victors  belong  the  spoils."  Nor  did  Wanamaker 
have  any  "profound"  respect  for  certain  laws  of  the  land. 

In  the  spring  of  1891  Roosevelt  had  investigated  reports  of  mal- 
administration in  the  Baltimore  office.  "We  certainly  struck  pay 
gravel,"  he  enthusiastically  wrote  Charles  J.  Bonaparte,  the  Baltimore 
patrician  reformer  who  would  later  serve  in  his  cabinet.  Actually, 
Roosevelt  had  found  that  the  Baltimore  postmaster  had  arbitrarily 
removed  about  half  the  employees  in  the  classified  service  and  that  he 
had  allowed  the  law  banning  compulsory  political  assessments  of 
classified  employees  to  be  flagrantly  violated.  Roosevelt  had  there- 
upon recommended  to  Wanamaker  and  the  President  that  twenty-five 
Republican  appointees  in  the  Baltimore  office  be  dismissed;  but  the 
report  was  pigeonholed.  Unable  long  to  endure  the  agony  of  inaction, 
TR  had  soon  unburdened  himself  at  a  tempestuous  meeting  of  the 
Civil  Service  Reform  Association  in  New  York.  Then,  following  a 
melodramatic  scene  in  which  he  exclaimed  "damn  John  Wanamaker," 
he  had  returned  to  Washington  on  the  advice  of  Carl  Schurz  and 
demanded  an  investigation  by  the  House  Civil  Service  Committee. 

The  Democratic-controlled  committee  readily  obliged.  For  days 
charges  and  countercharges  filled  the  air  as  Roosevelt  and  Wanamaker 
made  separate  appearances  before  the  Committee  and  Roosevelt  in- 


FORTHEGOODOFTHENATION  79 

directly  accused  the  Postmaster  General  of  "slanderous  falsehoods." 
The  consequence  was  a  boon  to  the  civil  service  movement  and  a 
body  blow  to  Harrison's  chances  of  remaining  in  the  presidency.  And 
TR  knew  it.  Contritely,  and  yet  resolutely,  he  wrote  the  President  that 
he  had  "used  every  effort  to  avoid  a  conflict  with  the  Post  Office 
Department"  and  explained  that  it  "has  now  become  merely  a  ques- 
tion of  maintaining  my  own  self-respect  and  upholding  the  civil  service 
law." 

By  then  the  damage  was  done.  The  "little  grey  man  in  the  White 
House,"  as  Roosevelt  referred  to  the  cold  and  distant  President,  had 
to  retain  his  maverick  Civil  Service  Commissioner,  for  TR  had  so 
dramatized  the  merit  system  that  his  dismissal  would  have  been  con- 
strued as  its  overt  repudiation.  To  be  sure,  Roosevelt  oiled  the  surging 
waters  by  speaking  energetically  for  Harrison's  re-election  in  the  cam- 
paign that  fall.  But  the  oil  proved  too  thin  or  the  waters  too  turbulent. 
The  Wanamaker  incident,  the  Populist  movement,  and  a  host  of  other 
factors  combined  to  defeat  the  President  and  make  Grover  Cleveland 
the  only  man  to  serve  two  interrupted  terms  in  the  White  House. 

Roosevelt  desired  to  continue  as  Commissioner  under  Cleveland 
in  spite  of  his  earlier  insults  to  that  sturdy  gentleman,  and  with  char- 
acteristic aggressiveness  he  encouraged  Carl  Schurz  to  intercede  with 
the  President-elect.  He  warned  Schurz,  however,  that  he  would  stay 
on  only  if  Cleveland  agreed  to  stand  by  him  and  appoint  a  strong 
commission.  Schurz  was  of  like  mind.  He  advised  Cleveland  that  he 
was  in  a  unique  position  to  "deal  a  blow  to  the  spoils  system  from 
which  it  will  never  recover"  and  he  pointed  out  that  he  could  "hardly 
find  a  more  faithful,  courageous  and  effective  aid  than  Mr.  Roosevelt" 
for  that  purpose.  Six  weeks  after  his  inauguration  the  President  re- 
appointed  TR. 

Many  of  the  old  problems  now  recurred,  for  the  Democratic  hosts 
proved  as  numerous  and  deserving  as  those  of  the  Grand  Old  Party. 
Indeed,  by  an  attorney  general's  opinion  rendered  in  June,  1893, 
political  parties  were  authorized  to  solicit  contributions  by  mail  from 
government  employees.  The  result,  reported  the  Commission,  was  that 
more  solicitation  occurred  in  the  congressional  campaign  of  1894 
than  in  any  recent  nonpresidential  canvass.  Nevertheless,  the  merit 
principle  steadily  advanced.  President  Cleveland  cooperated  whole- 
heartedly with  Roosevelt  and  he  encouraged  high  administration 
officials  to  do  likewise.  Early  in  his  tenure  he  removed  a  Democratic 


80  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

commissioner  who  was  out  of  sympathy  with  TR's  policies,  and  in 
the  one  instance  that  Roosevelt  quarreled  publicly  with  a  cabinet 
officer  the  President  backed  TR.  So  cordial  was  his  support  that  in 
the  summer  of  1893  Roosevelt  actually  defended  Cleveland  against 
remonstrations  by  Schurz. 

It  was  with  deep  satisfaction  in  the  accomplishments  of  the  preced- 
ing six  years,  therefore,  that  halfway  through  the  Cleveland  adminis- 
tration TR  resigned  to  become  a  member  of  the  Board  of  Police 
Commissioners  of  New  York  City.  He  had  not,  it  is  true,  prevailed 
on  Congress  to  place  a  sufficiently  large  number  of  high  government 
positions  under  the  civil  service  laws.  Nor,  for  all  the  excellence  of 
his  administrative  procedures,  had  he  found  a  full  solution  to  the 
perplexing  problem  of  promotion  for  merit  in  a  bureaucracy.  Yet  the 
classified  lists  had  been  more  than  doubled  during  his  regime,  while 
the  Commission's  position  had  become  so  firmly  established  that  the 
future  of  the  civil  service  movement  was  reasonably  assured. 

Others,  of  course,  had  shared  in  the  achievement.  The  Civil  Service 
Reform  Association,  major  elements  of  the  American  press,  and 
public-spirited  citizens  the  country  over  had  contributed  to  the 
climate  of  opinion  that  made  reform  possible.  President  Cleveland's 
cooperation  had  been  vital.  As  TR  wrote  in  a  letter  of  resignation 
that  warmly  commended  the  Chief  Executive  for  his  courtesy  and 
cooperation,  Cleveland's  "sweeping  reduction  ...  of  excepted 
places  .  .  .  worked  a  most  valuable  reform  in  the  execution  of  the 
law  itself."  Roosevelt's  colleagues  had  also  borne  a  share  of  the 
load;  and  TR  rejoiced  when  one  of  them,  the  "high-minded  and 
upright"  John  R.  Proctor,  ex-Confederate  soldier  and  Democrat,  was 
selected  by  the  President  to  replace  himself  as  head  of  the  Commis- 
sion. But  more  than  any  other  individual,  Roosevelt  had  been  respon- 
sible for  the  Commission's  rejuvenation  and  for  the  marshaling  of 
public  sentiment  behind  its  program.  His  imaginative  and  energetic 
enforcement  of  the  laws  had  virtually  institutionalized  the  civil  service 
system;  and  had  he  never  performed  another  service  for  the  American 
nation,  that  alone  would  have  assured  the  perpetuation  of  his  memory 
as  a  secondary  figure  of  substantial  accomplishment. 


CHAPTER 


THE   FIGHT   FOR   THE   RIGHT 


It  may  be  truthfully  said  that  Theodore  Roosevelt  at  no  time 
in  his  career  fought  more  effectively  for  the  basic  principles  of 
free  government  than  he  fought  for  them  as  New  York  Police 
Commissioner. 

— Former  Commissioner  Avery  D.  Andrews 


When  Roosevelt  resigned  his  New  York  police  commissionership 
two  years  after  he  left  Washington  he  could  also  look  back  to 
reforms  achieved  and  victories  hard  won.  But  the  reforms  would 
prove  even  more  tangible,  the  battles  yet  more  bitter  and  controversial, 
than  those  of  his  civil  service  years. 

Not  in  all  Roosevelt's  career  were  the  opponents  of  honest  govern- 
ment more  widely  and  deeply  entrenched  than  those  he  faced  when 
he  accepted  fusion  Mayor  William  L.  Strong's  appointment  in  April, 
1895.  Their  locus  was  Tammany  Hall,  or  so  it  seemed  to  the  un- 
initiated. But  Lincoln  Steffens  later  reported  that  they  actually  in- 
cluded "parts  of  the  Republican  machine,  the  saloons,  gambling- 
houses,  all  vice  interests,  sportsmen  generally,  and  to  [Steffens']  .  .  . 
curious  surprise  many  business  men — the  ablest,  biggest,  richest  busi- 
ness men  in  local  business;  gas,  transportation,  banks,  and  the  great 
financiers."  Periodically  sensational  civic  leaders  like  the  fiery, 
bearded,  Presbyterian  minister,  Dr.  Charles  H.  Parkhurst,  would  bring 
corruption  under  the  spotlight  with  such  penetrating  intensity  that  the 
citizenry  would  be  aroused.  But  the  "system"  described  by  Steffens 
was  too  well  organized,  its  tentacles  too  sharp  and  grasping,  for 
reform  waves  to  have  enduring  effect. 

81 


82  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Roosevelt  clearly  understood  the  formidable  nature  of  his  new 
assignment.  "I  must  make  up  my  mind  to  much  criticism  and  dis- 
appointment," he  confided  to  Bamie  as  he  decided  to  undertake  it,  for 
conditions  make  "it  absolutely  impossible  to  do  what  will  be  expected 
of  me."  He  was  nevertheless  convinced  that  the  reasons  for  accepting 
the  charge  were  more  compelling  than  those  for  rejecting  it:  to  wit, 
his  work  on  the  Civil  Service  Commission  was  becoming  routine;  he 
deemed  it  wise  to  identify  himself  again  as  a  Republican  in  his  native 
state;  and  his  competitive  spirit  was  whetted  by  the  challenge. 

Having  made  his  decision  and  expressed  his  forebodings,  TR 
reported  for  duty  on  May  6  in  high  hopes,  bounding  up  the  steps  of 
Police  Headquarters  on  Mulberry  Street  and  firing  questions  at  his 
devoted  friend  Jacob  Riis.  "Where  are  our  offices?  Where  is  the  board 
room?  What  do  we  do  first?"  he  asked  the  Danish-born  humanitarian 
and  newspaperman.  "It  was  all  breathless  and  sudden,"  Steffens,  whom 
Riis  introduced  to  Roosevelt  on  the  run,  recalled.  "It  was  just  as  if  we 
three  were  the  police  board,  T.R.,  Riis,  and  I,  and  as  we  got  T.R. 
calmed  down  and  made  him  promise  to  go  a  bit  slow,  to  consult  with 
his  colleagues  also.  Then  we  went  out  into  the  hall,  and  there  stood 
the  three  other  commissioners  together,  waiting  for  us  to  go  so  that 
they  could  see  T.R." 

Roosevelt's  fellow  commissioners  had  at  once  elected  him  president 
of  the  Board.  But  only  one  of  them,  Major  Avery  D.  Andrews,  was 
destined  to  support  him  for  long.  A  nominal  Democrat  and  a  West 
Pointer,  class  of  1886,  Andrews  had  forsaken  the  Army  for  the  law 
two  years  earlier.  He  was  soft-spoken  and  unobtrusively  efficient;  and 
following  his  appointment  a  few  months  before,  he  had  commenced 
the  reform  program  TR  would  now  expand.  The  other  two,  Colonel 
Frederick  D.  Grant  and  Andrew  D.  Parker,  were  soon  to  break  with 
Roosevelt  on  personal  or  political — probably  both — grounds.  Grant 
was  the  son  of  the  illustrious  General  and  hapless  President.  He  was 
slow-moving,  kindly,  and  weak,  and  the  press  compared  him  to  TR 
as  "a  freight  train"  to  a  "limited  express."  His  politics  were  Repub- 
lican. As  his  father  had  done  before  him,  he  also  would  seek  to 
advance  his  own  fortunes  by  joining  a  cabal  against  his  superior. 
Parker  was  a  handsome,  strong-willed  lawyer  of  considerable  in- 
tellectual endowment.  He  had  served  three  years  as  an  assistant  district 
attorney  and  he  was  affiliated  with  the  County  Democracy,  though 
not  because  he  opposed  Tammany  on  ethical  grounds.  Steffens  tol- 


THEFIGHTFORTHERIGHT  83 

erantly  described  him  as  "the  man  that  liked  to  sit  back  and  pull  wires 
just  to  see  the  puppets  jump."  But  Andrews,  who  had  more  insight 
into  Parker  than  that  celebrated  reporter,  recalled  simply  that  he 
"lacked  the  moral  character  .  .  .  essential  to  the  post." 

Buoyed  up  by  the  apparent  quality  of  his  colleagues,  TR  again 
plunged  into  his  new  duties  accompanied  by  the  customary  news- 
paper fanfare:  "Roosevelt  on  Deck;  Roosevelt  on  the  Board  for 
Business;  He  Wants  to  Know,  and  He  Asks  Some  Pointed  Questions; 
Trials  are  Trials  Now;  New  Police  Brooms  Busy;  Delinquent  Police- 
men Get  Short  Shrift  From  Roosevelt." 

Throughout  the  spring  of  1895  TR's  midnight  prowls  over  patrol- 
men's beats,  dramatic  changes  in  personnel,  and  emphatic  pronounce- 
ments combined  to  keep  him  favorably  in  the  news.  As  he  histrioni- 
cally exclaimed  at  the  end  of  his  second  month  in  office,  "Two  years 
and  eight  months  left  to  me  on  this  Board  and  that  is  time  enough 
to  make  matters  very  unpleasant  for  policemen  who  shirk  their  duty." 

Many  of  the  police  reporters — Steffens,  Arthur  Brisbane,  and 
Joseph  B.  Bishop — meanwhile  formed  strong  attachments  to  the 
effervescent  Commissioner.  They  gravitated  to  TR  because  his  nearly 
every  move  and  offhand  remark  were  lively  with  human  interest;  but 
they  supported  him  because  they  believed  in  what  he  was  doing.  "We 
have  a  real  Police  Commissioner,"  Brisbane  wrote  in  the  usually 
hostile  World.  "His  teeth  are  big  and  white,  his  eyes  are  small  and 
piercing,  his  voice  is  rasping.  He  makes  our  policemen  feel  as  the  .  .  . 
little  froggies  .  .  ."  However,  Brisbane  continued,  "he  looks  like  a 
man  of  strength  ...  a  determined  man,  a  fighting  man,  an  honest, 
conscientious  man,  and  like  the  man  to  reform  the  force." 

Bishop  was  not  less  perceptive.  "The  peculiarity  about  .  .  . 
[Roosevelt]  is  that  he  has  what  is  essentially  a  boy's  mind,"  he  wrote 
in  the  Evening  Post.  "What  he  thinks  he  says  at  once,  thinks  alive.  It 
is  his  distinguishing  characteristic."  However,  Bishop  added,  "with  it 
he  has  great  qualities  which  make  him  an  invaluable  public  servant — 
inflexible  honesty,  absolute  fearlessness,  and  devotion  to  good  govern- 
ment which  amounts  to  religion.  We  must  let  him  work  in  his  own 
way  for  nobody  can  induce  him  to  change  it."  Furthermore,  he  con- 
cluded, "he  is  talking  to  a  purpose.  He  wishes  the  public  to  know 
what  the  Police  Board  is  doing  so  that  it  will  have  popular  support." 

Unhappily,  the  "popular  support"  Roosevelt  deemed  so  necessary 
to  the  reformation  of  the  Police  Department  was  not  long  sustained. 


84  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

It  began  to  diminish  when  he  forced  out  Superintendent  Tom  Byrnes, 
an  extraordinarily  able  and  popular  officer  who  had  long  collaborated 
with  the  politicians,  vice  men,  and  business  men  including  Jay  Gould, 
who  comprised  the  grand  mesalliance.  And  it  suffered  a  body  blow 
when  he  persisted  in  enforcing  the  law  against  the  sale  of  intoxicating 
beverages  on  Sunday.  Put  on  the  statute  books  by  the  Tammany 
Democrats  and  kept  there  by  the  votes  of  well-meaning  Protestant 
legislators  from  upstate,  the  Raines,  or  Sunday  closing  law,  was  an 
open  sesame  of  graft.  Saloonkeepers  by  the  hundreds  regularly  paid 
off  the  police  for  the  privilege  of  opening  their  doors  in  defiance  of  its 
provisions. 

Roosevelt  realized  that  the  Raines  Law  should  have  been  repealed; 
and  at  one  point  he  publicly  stated  that  he  would  have  opposed  its 
enactment.  As  he  also  explained,  however,  he  had  "to  choose  between 
closing  all  the  saloons  and  violating  my  oath  of  office"  as  long  as  it 
remained  on  the  books.  More  important  still,  for  TR  was  never  so 
committed  to  a  literal  interpretation  of  his  duties  as  that  remark 
implied,  he  had  to  enforce  the  Raines  Law  in  order  to  attain  his  pre- 
eminent objective — the  creation  of  an  honest  police  force.  Not  until 
all  the  saloons  were  closed  on  Sundays  could  bribery  be  stamped  out; 
and  not  until  bribery  was  eliminated  could  the  administrative  reforms 
he  and  Andrews  were  fostering  become  truly  meaningful. 

Unfortunately,  the  Sunday  closing  law  ran  athwart  the  customs  of 
New  York's  large  and  reputable  German-American  population  which 
had  long  observed  the  Continental  Sunday.  The  German-Americans 
bitterly  resented  the  imputation  that  a  Sunday  afternoon  in  a  beer 
garden  with  a  string  ensemble  playing  Strauss  and  children  pattering 
around  the  tables  was  sordid.  And  all  that  summer  they  complained 
and  grumbled  over  the  forced  closing  of  their  neighborhood  drinking 
places.  Finally,  in  September,  they  vented  their  grievances  in  a  protest 
parade  which  saw  thousands  of  marchers,  many  bearing  placards 
emblazoned  with  remarks  such  as  "Good  Morning,  Have  You  Seen 
Roosevelt's  Name  in  Print?"  "Liberty,  Priceless  Gem,  Where  Hast 
Thou  Flown?  To  Hoboken!"  stream  by  a  reviewing  stand  where  TR, 
who  had  unabashedly  accepted  their  invitation  to  witness  the  parade, 
comported  himself  with  such  high  good  humor  that  he  drew  cheers 
from  the  protesting  paraders. 

Roosevelt's  troubles  were  compounded  meanwhile  by  misrepre- 
sentations in  unfriendly  newspapers.  As  the  protest  of  the  German- 


THEFIGHTFORTHERIGHT  85 

Americans  and  the  complaints  of  the  counsel  for  the  Liquor  Dealers' 
Association,  who  claimed  that  ninety  per  cent  of  the  saloonkeepers 
had  gone  bankrupt  from  loss  of  revenue,  attest,  the  Raines  Law  was 
broadly  and  effectively  enforced.  In  an  effort  to  discredit  TR,  how- 
ever, newspapermen  who  trailed  Roosevelt  and  Andrews  when  they 
made  Sunday  inspections  reported  that  saloons  were  doing  a  flourish- 
ing business  by  means  of  side  or  rear  doors.  "  'East  Side,  West  Side, 
all  around  the  town,'  yesterday  went  King  Roosevelt  I,  ruler  of  New 
York  and  patron  saint  of  dry  Sundays,"  William  Randolph  Hearst's 
Evening  Journal  commented  a  month  before  the  German-Americans 
organized  their  demonstration.  Even  Mayor  Strong,  who  understood 
what  Roosevelt  was  trying  to  do,  succumbed  to  the  popular  urge  and 
ridiculed  his  ubiquitous  commissioner.  "I  found  that  the  Dutchman 
whom  I  had  appointed  meant  to  turn  all  New  Yorkers  into  Puritans," 
he  laughingly  said  at  a  public  dinner  that  fall. 

Nor  was  all  the  criticism  humorous.  For  a  time  the  mail  brought 
in  anonymous  denunciations,  threats,  and,  at  least  once,  a  crudely 
designed  bomb.  TR  was  shadowed  at  night  in  a  vain  effort  to  black- 
mail him.  And  the  chairman  of  the  Republican  County  Committee 
angrily  read  Roosevelt  out  of  the  G.O.P.  in  a  desperate  attempt  to 
hold  the  German- American  vote.  Unmoved  by  these  and  other  pres- 
sures, including  an  implied  threat  by  Strong  that  he  would  turn  him 
out  unless  he  relaxed  his  enforcement  of  the  Raines  law,  TR 
resolutely  held  his  ground.  "We  have  no  right  to  consider  the 
[political]  results,"  he  righteously  declaimed  before  the  Republican 
Reform  Club  at  the  height  of  the  campaign  against  enforcement. 

The  consequence  was  disaster  for  Roosevelt's  party  and  vindication 
for  his  program.  The  Republicans  suffered  a  crushing  defeat  at  the 
polls  that  fall  as  30,000  German-Americans  reportedly  bolted  to  the 
Democrats.  But  the  Wine,  Liquor  and  Beer  Association  resolved  that 
it  would  expel  any  member  who  opened  his  shop  on  Sunday.  "There 
has  not  been  a  more  remarkable  triumph  of  law  in  the  municipal 
history  of  New  York,"  the  correspondent  for  the  London  Times  re- 
ported. "The  consensus  is  that  to  Theodore  Roosevelt's  courage  and 
ability  more  than  to  any  other  single  cause  this  victory  is  due." 

Notwithstanding  charges  to  the  contrary,  TR  had  enforced  the  law 
against  the  singing  and  drinking  places  of  the  rich  as  well  as  against 
the  beer  gardens  and  saloons  of  the  middle  and  lower  classes.  One  of 
the  most  sensational  incidents  of  the  enforcement  campaign,  in  fact, 


86  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

had  been  the  raiding  of  Sherry's  restaurant  during  a  dinner  attended  by 
many  eminent  New  Yorkers.  Partly  to  prevent  such  inconveniences  to 
gentlemen,  but  largely  to  circumvent  the  Sunday  closing  law  as  a 
whole,  a  measure  authorizing  the  sale  of  liquor  with  meals  in  hotels 
was  put  through  the  legislature  the  next  year.  The  law  was  so  loosely 
framed  that  it  spawned  a  host  of  fake  hotels  and  ramshackle  brothel- 
saloons,  and  Roosevelt  again  took  the  offensive.  As  he  reported  when 
he  left  office,  however,  it  proved  impossible  to  close  most  of  the  places 
legally. 

Roosevelt's  second  year  in  office  was  even  more  tumultuous  than 
his  first,  the  Board  of  Commissioners  being  virtually  paralyzed  by 
internal  dissension  and  deadlock  throughout  most  of  it.  Steffens  later 
placed  the  blame  on  personalities. 

T.R.  liked  to  lead  cavalry  charges  with  a  whoop  out  in  the  open, 
Parker  to  direct  his  troops  mysteriously  from  the  rear  unseen.  He 
hated  the  way  T.R.  took  command  of  the  police  from  the  first  day 
and  kept  saying  "1"  and  "my  policy".  .  .  .  Parker  enjoyed  turn- 
ing up  at  a  meeting  one  day  with  Grant  to  block  some  proposition 
of  the  president.  He  tried  to  get  Andrews,  too,  but  the  young  West 
Pointer  did  not  like  the  crafty  conspirator;  he  did  not  approve  of 
T.R.'s  cowboy  style  either,  but  he  stared  Parker  down  and  joined 
and  stood  by  the  president. 

Steffens  was  partly  right,  for  Roosevelt  was  dominating  if  not 
domineering.  Yet  Steffens'  statement  was  also  misleading.  Parker  was 
later  tried  for  maladministration,  and  if  his  trial  proved  nothing  else, 
it  demonstrated  that  he  would  have  fought  anyone  who  opposed  his 
drive  for  control  of  the  force. 

As  it  happened,  Parker  found  an  ally  in  Tom  Platt.  The  "Easy 
Boss"  was  angered  by  Roosevelt's  support  of  Thomas  B.  Reed's  presi- 
dential aspirations  (Platt  was  for  McKinley),  by  TR's  removal  of 
many  of  "his  men"  from  the  police  force  for  incompetency  and  worse, 
and  especially  by  his  enforcement  of  the  Sunday  closing  law.  Platt 
could  not  risk  offending  the  upstate  "drys"  by  repealing  the  law;  yet 
he  had  to  win  back  the  German-Americans.  He  decided,  therefore,  to 
deadlock  the  Board  of  Commissioners  in  the  hope  that  the  enforce- 
ment campaign  would  thereby  break  down.  He  used  Grant  as  his 
instrument. 

Roosevelt's  response  to  Platt's  diabolical  scheme  set  a  pattern  he 
was  to  follow  during  his  governorship  and  on  through  his  presidency. 


THEFIGHTFORTHERIGHT  87 

He  avoided  a  personal  break  with  Platt  and  the  other  party  leaders, 
and  he  continued  to  identify  himself  as  a  regular  Republican.  But  on 
the  main  issue,  the  enforcement  campaign,  he  held  absolutely  firm. 
"I  work  and  fight  from  dawn  until  dark,  almost";  he  wearily  wrote 
his  sister,  "and  the  difficulties,  the  opposition,  the  lukewarm  support 
I  encounter  give  me  hours  of  profound  depression;  but  at  bottom  I 
know  the  work  has  been  well  worth  doing." 

It  is  a  grimy  struggle,  but  a  vital  one.  .  .  .  All  day  I  strive  to 
push  matters  along;  to  keep  on  good  terms  with  the  Mayor,  while 
rejecting  his  advice  and  refusing  to  obey  his  orders;  not  to  be  drawn 
into  a  personal  quarrel  with  Platt;  not  to  let  my  colleagues  split 
either  among  themselves  or  with  me;  to  work  with  reformers  like 
Dr.  Parkhurst,  and  yet  not  let  them  run  away  with  the  Department; 
to  keep  weeding  out  the  bad  men;  to  attend  to  the  thousand 
complaints,  well  and  ill-founded,  of  citizens;  to  try  to  improve 
discipline,  and  to  build  up  the  detective  bureau,  and  develop 
leaders;  and  so  on  and  so  on. 

The  deadlock  continued  on  into  the  spring  of  1896.  "I  cannot 
shoot  .  .  .  [Parker],"  TR  complained  to  Lodge,  "or  engage  in  a 
rough-and-tumble  with  him — I  couldn't  even  as  a  private  citizen,  still 
less  as  the  chief  peace-officer  of  the  city;  and  I  hardly  know  what 
course  to  follow  as  he  is  utterly  unabashed  by  exposure  and  repeats 
lie  after  lie  with  brazen  effrontery."  Finally,  however,  Roosevelt, 
Andrews,  and  Dr.  Parkhurst  and  his  followers  forced  Mayor  Strong 
to  hold  the  public  hearing  that  exposed  Parker's  naked  mendacity, 
after  which  Strong  ordered  Parker's  dismissal.  At  the  instance  of 
"Boss"  Platt,  however,  the  Republican  governor  refused  to  approve 
the  order.  Parker  was  still  in  office  when  Roosevelt  resigned,  feuding 
anew  with  TR's  successor. 

The  Parker  hearing  was  highlighted  by  one  illuminating  colloquy. 
After  Roosevelt  had  charged  on  the  witness  stand  that  Parker  was 
"mendacious,  treacherous,  capable  of  double  dealing  and  exercising  a 
bad  influence  upon  the  force,"  he  was  asked  whether  he  would  refuse 
to  go  along  with  Parker  even  if  he  knew  him  to  be  right.  TR  forthwith 
replied: 

"No  sir.  I  would  be  glad  to  yield  to  him  if  he  was  right." 

"You  enjoy  yielding  to  a  man,  don't  you?" 

"By  George,  I  do,  and  that's  a  fact." 

Roosevelt  was  understandably  gratified  to  move  gracefully  out  by 


88  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

accepting  an  appointment  as  Assistant  Secretary  of  the  Navy  in  the 
spring  of  1897.  Not  until  the  last  year  of  his  presidency  would  he 
again  be  so  frustrated;  not  until  1912  so  embattled.  The  Rev.  Dr. 
Parkhurst  had  stood  by  him  until  the  end — he  even  blazed  out  at 
Platt,  who  attended  his  church,  from  the  pulpit.  Thousands  of  dis- 
interested citizens  and  dozens  of  reporters  and  editors,  especially  from 
out  of  state,  also  continued  to  support  him  unreservedly.  A  reporter 
for  the  Chicago  Times-Herald  termed  him  "undeniably  the  biggest 
man  in  New  York,"  and  others  boomed  him  for  the  presidency.  Yet 
his  enemies  had  proved  even  more  numerous  and  powerful  than  he 
had  expected.  They  included  not  only  Tammany  and  the  Republican 
machine,  not  only  the  German-Americans,  the  saloonkeepers  and  the 
vice  lords  generally,  but  clergymen  who  resented  his  refusal  to  ban 
a  professional  fight.  ("I  suffered  a  heavier  punishment  sparring  at 
Harvard,"  he  told  newspapermen  after  witnessing  the  bout,  "and  I 
have  been  knocked  out  at  polo  twice  for  a  ten  times  longer  period.") 

Roosevelt  had  also  antagonized  labor.  Union  leaders  had  lauded 
his  enforcement  of  the  Sunday  law  against  the  restaurants  and 
hostelries  of  the  rich.  And  they  had  warmly  endorsed  his  condemna- 
tion of  more  than  one  hundred  "wretched  and  crowded"  tenements, 
as  he  described  them.  (Twice  wrathful  landlords  had  tried  to  sue  TR.) 
But  they  deplored  his  terrifyingly  extreme  remarks  about  striking 
mobs,  and  they  felt  that  he  had  thrown  the  weight  of  the  police  force 
on  the  side  of  capital  by  giving  protection  to  strikebreakers. 

The  raging  controversies  of  Roosevelt's  two  years  as  president  of 
the  Board  have  lent  to  easy  sensationalism  and  facile  generalization. 
As  TR  had  foreseen  at  the  start,  he  was  unable  to  rid  New  York  City 
of  corruption;  and  as  he  had  not  wholly  foreseen,  the  leaders  of  his 
own  party  had  actively  opposed  him.  Only  the  moral  support  of  the 
decent  elements  had  prevented  the  machine  from  turning  him  out; 
only  his  extraordinary  courage  and  self-esteem  had  kept  him  from 
resigning  after  three  or  four  months  in  office.  Yet  he  had  compiled  a 
peerless  record.  Never  in  the  department's  history  had  the  law  been 
so  effectively  and  dramatically  enforced;  never  had  two  years  seen  so 
many  basic  and  sweeping  reforms.  When  Roosevelt  took  office  the 
price  of  a  captaincy  was  said  to  have  been  $10,000;  when  he  left 
office  it  was  nothing.  When  Roosevelt  assumed  his  duties  on  May  5, 
1895,  the  flow  of  dismissals  from  the  force  was  but  a  trickle;  when 


THEFIGHTFORTHERIGHT  89 

he  resigned  in  April  1897  it  had  become  a  flood.  Steffens  graphically 
described  the  scene  at  the  height  of  the  turnover: 

"Hey,  there,"  [Roosevelt]  yelled  to  me  from  his  window  one 
day,  "come  up  here."  I  ran  upstairs  to  his  outer  office,  which  was 
filled  with  all  sorts  of  respectable  people,  evidently  business  men, 
lawyers,  doctors,  women,  and  two  priests.  Waving  his  hand  around 
the  circle  of  them,  he  squeezed  through  his  teeth  aloud:  "I  just  want 
you  to  see  the  kind  of  people  that  are  coming  here  to  intercede  for 
proven  crooks.  Come  on,  come  into  my  office  and  listen  to  the 
reasons  they  give  for  letting  bribers,  clubbers,  and  crime-protectors 
stay  on  the  police  force  and  go  on  grafting  on  the  public." 

There  were  other,  more  permanent  reforms.  Roosevelt  had  early 
announced  that  "We  are  going  to  have  fitness,  physically,  mentally 
and  morally,  constitute  the  standard  and  basis  of  admission  to  and 
promotion  in  the  Department  .  .  .  ;"  and  within  a  few  months  of  his 
appointment  he  had  largely  achieved  that  objective.  An  examining 
board  was  created,  religious  and  political  affiliations  were  struck  off 
the  unwritten  criteria  for  appointment,  and  examinations  patterned  on 
the  federal  service  were  instituted.  The  eligibility  list  for  initial  ap- 
pointment was  zealously  observed,  though  TR  often  made  spot  promo- 
tions for  heroism  and  other  exceptional  acts.  A  probationary  period 
was  also  established.  So  effective  were  the  merit  aspects  of  the  new 
system,  indeed,  that  it  was  warmly  commended  by  a  committee  of  the 
Civil  Service  Reform  Association  headed  by  Carl  Schurz,  which  in- 
spected the  department  on  Roosevelt's  invitation. 

Repeatedly  and  unavailingly,  the  politicians  tried  to  break  it  down 
or  circumvent  it.  An  incident  related  by  the  novelist  Owen  Wister, 
who  was  visiting  TR  in  his  office  when  a  surgeon  named  Marvin 
Palmer  happened  in  bearing  a  letter  of  recommendation  from  the 
Surveyor  of  the  Port,  is  typical.  "I  entirely  agree  that  a  republican 
appointment  would  be  timely,"  Roosevelt  said  after  perusing  the 
letter.  "And  I  am  quite  sure,  Dr.  Palmer,  that  you  are  qualified  for  the 
position."  After  a  momentary  pause,  he  added:  "And  here's  the  way 
you  can  get  the  position.  .  .  .  Stand  first  on  the  Civil  Service  list!" 

Whereupon  the  physician  strode  out  of  the  office,  stopping  at  the 
door  just  long  enough  to  say,  "You  can  go  to  hell!" 

Meanwhile  the  force  was  partially  modernized.  A  bicycle  squad  was 
formed,  a  telephonic  system  of  communications  was  established,  and 
recruits  were  given  fairly  intensive  training  before  being  assigned 


90  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

to  beats.  The  force  as  a  whole  was  warned  to  be  polite  to  the  public 
("That  a  citizen  devoid  of  *pulT  has  any  rights  that  a  policeman  is 
bound  to  respect,  .  .  .  [is]  a  novel  proposition,"  the  Herald  sardoni- 
cally observed).  And  for  the  first  time  in  decades  election  officials 
were  honestly  selected.  ("If  nothing  but  this  one  reform  had  been 
gained  by  it,"  the  Tribune  commented,  "the  political  revolution  of 
last  year  would  not  have  been  in  vain.") 

But  above  everything  else,  above  the  administrative  reforms,  the 
modernization  program,  the  political  accusations  and  counteraccusa- 
tions,  towered  Roosevelt's  inspirational  power.  As  an  unnamed  patrol- 
man exclaimed  to  Steffens  when  the  press  reported  that  TR  was 
resigning  in  the  spring  of  1897,  "It's  tough  on  the  force,  for  he  was 
dead  square,  was  Roosevelt,  and  we  needed  him  in  the  business."  Nor 
did  it  die  with  TR's  passing.  Years  later  veteran  officers  confirmed 
what  the  New  York  Evening  Post  had  predicted  when  Roosevelt 
closed  his  desk  in  April:  "The  end  of  the  reign  of  Mr.  Roosevelt  .  .  . 
is  not  the  end  of  Rooseveltism.  Mr.  Roosevelt  may  disappear  ut- 
terly .  .  .  but  his  personality  will  persist  as  an  active  influence  in  the 
force  for  a  generation  at  least,  till  the  youngest  'reform  cop'  is  re- 
tired, and  then  he  will  not  'go  out  of  business'  entirely.  ...  He  will 
furnish  another  example  for  the  young  policeman  and  though  most 
of  them  may  choose  the  majority  ideal,  all  will  remember  Roosevelt." 


CHAPTER 


THE   GREAT   ADVENTURE 


No  qualities  called  out  by  a  purely  peaceful  life  stand  on  a 
level  with  those  stern  and  virile  virtues  which  move  the  men  of 
stout  heart  and  strong  hand  who  uphold  the  honor  of  their  flag 
in  battle. 

— Theodore  Roosevelt* 


Theodore  Roosevelt  "will  bring  with  him  to  Washington  all  that 
machinery  of  disturbance  and  upheaval  which  is  as  much  a  part  of 
his  entourage  as  the  very  air  he  breathes,"  the  Washington  Post  said 
the  day  the  Senate  confirmed  TR's  appointment  as  Assistant 
Secretary  of  the  Navy.  "He  is  inspired  by  a  passionate  hatred  of 
meanness,  humbug,  and  cowardice.  He  is  a  fighter,  a  man  of  indom- 
itable pluck  and  energy,  a  potent  and  forceful  factor  in  any  equation 
into  which  he  may  be  introduced.  A  field  of  immeasurable  usefulness 
awaits  him — will  he  find  it?" 

The  President  of  the  United  States  had  been  reluctant  to  appoint 
Roosevelt  to  the  Navy  Department  post.  William  McKinley  had  been 
eased  into  the  White  House  to  preserve  the  business  civilization 
against  William  Jennings  Bryan  and  his  rampant  agrarian  legions, 
not  to  build  up  the  battle  fleet  or  to  force  Spain  out  of  the  New  World. 
Would  there  be  a  clash  of  interests  if  TR  became  a  member  of  his 
administration?  "I  hope  he  has  no  preconceived  notion  which  he 
would  wish  to  drive  through  the  moment  he  got  in,"  McKinley  had 

*  In  a  review  of  Captain  Alfred  Mahan's  Life  of  Nelson  in  The  Bookman, 
June  1897. 

91 


92  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

remarked  to  Lodge  when  the  Massachusetts  Senator  had  pressed 
Roosevelt's  case  upon  him  in  the  winter  of  1897.  Whereupon  Lodge, 
with  what  reservations  we  may  never  know,  had  assured  him  that  he 
"need  not  give  himself  the  slightest  uneasiness  on  that  score." 

It  happened,  too,  that  the  President-elect  owed  a  political  debt  to 
the  New  York  Police  Commissioner.  Roosevelt  had  at  first  opposed 
McKinley's  nomination  for  President  in  the  belief  that  he  would  not 
hold  up  in  a  crisis,  whether  "a  soft-money  craze,  a  gigantic  labor 
riot,  or  danger  of  foreign  conflict."  But  the  confluence  of  Roosevelt's 
election-year  regularity  and  his  exaggerated  fears  of  Bryan — he  called 
the  convention  that  pressed  its  highest  accolade  upon  the  broad,  un- 
furrowed  brow  of  the  Boy  Orator  of  the  Platte  a  "Witches'  Sab- 
bath"— had  altered  his  perspective.  When  Mark  Hanna  invited  him 
to  join  his  multimillion-dollar  crusade  for  McKinley  and  the  gold 
standard,  TR  had  signed  on  with  a  vengeance;  and  during  the  late 
summer  and  fall  of  1896  he  had  campaigned  furiously  for  the 
Ohioan's  election  and  the  Great  Commoner's  defeat. 

Furthermore,  a  number  of  other  prominent  Republicans  including 
Tom  Platt  had  urged  Roosevelt's  appointment  upon  McKinley.  Platt 
had  been  hesitant  when  TR  first  asked  him  to  use  his  influence.  He 
was  eager  to  have  the  righteous  Police  Commissioner  out  of  his  hair, 
however,  and  after  concluding  that  TR  would  probably  "do  less  harm 
to  the  organization  as  Assistant  Secretary  of  the  Navy  than  in  any 
other  office  that  could  be  named,"  he  had  submitted  Roosevelt's  name. 
Under  these  pressures  the  President  had  finally  given  in,  and  on 
April  6,  1897,  a  month  and  two  days  after  his  inauguration,  he  sent 
in  Roosevelt's  appointment  to  the  Senate. 

TR's  desire  for  the  assistant  secretaryship  reflected  more  than  his 
wish  to  ease  out  of  his  untenable  situation  in  New  York.  That  quality 
of  destiny  which  the  newspapers,  his  friends,  and  even  his  political 
opponents  read  into  his  future  was  looming  larger;  and  he  could 
hardly  have  remained  long  as  Police  Commissioner  under  any  cir- 
cumstances. More  than  a  decade  earlier  A.  T.  Packard,  the  editor  of 
the  Bad  Lands  Cowboy,  had  suggested  to  Roosevelt  that  he  might 
someday  become  President  of  the  United  States.  TR  had  forthrightly 
replied:  "If  your  prophecy  comes  true,  I  will  do  my  part  to  make  a 
good  one."  But  that  had  been  in  Dakota  where  men  were  inclined  to 
be  direct.  Rarely  again  did  Roosevelt  admit  such  a  lofty  ambition,  and 
never  quite  so  simply. 


THE   GREAT   ADVENTURE  93 

Once,  during  Roosevelt's  police  commissionership,  Jacob  Riis  had 
asked  him  directly  if  he  was  working  for  the  presidency.  Angrily,  TR 
had  expostulated  that  no  friend  would  ever  suggest  such  an  idea. 
Quickly,  however,  he  had  regained  his  composure,  put  his  arm  over 
his  devoted  friend's  shoulder,  screwed  his  face  into  a  knot,  and  said 
softly:  "I  am  going  to  do  great  things  here,  hard  things  that  require 
all  the  courage,  ability,  work  that  I  am  capable  of."  Then,  in  a  flash 
of  self-revelation,  he  had  added:  "I  must  be  wanting  to  be  president. 
Every  young  man  does.  But  I  won't  let  myself  think  of  it;  I  must  not, 
because  if  I  do,  I  will  begin  to  work  for  it,  I'll  be  careful,  calculating, 
cautious  in  word  and  act,  and  so — I'll  beat  myself.  See?" 

Roosevelt  also  looked  forward  to  his  return  to  Washington  because 
the  Navy  Department  post  gave  him  a  seat  on  the  fringe  of  power. 
While  on  the  Civil  Service  Commission  he  had  chafed  under  the 
restrictions  of  his  bipartisan  office.  "I  often  have  a  regret  that  I  am 
not  in  with  you,  Reed,  and  others  in  doing  the  real  work,"  he  had 
confessed  to  Lodge.  During  all  the  years  of  his  political  apprentice- 
ship, moreover,  TR  had  been  actively  interested  in  foreign  policy  and 
military  preparedness.  He  had  commented  on  those  issues  in  the 
presidential  elections  of  1884  and  1888;  and  he  had  interjected  them 
into  his  campaign  for  mayor  in  1886.  He  had  long  fretted  over 
Cleveland  and  Harrison's  lack  of  interest  in  the  Navy,  but  he  had 
taken  heart  at  such  assertiveness  toward  Germany,  Spain,  and  Great 
Britain  as  they  had  sometimes  shown.  Cleveland's  belligerence  toward 
the  British  in  the  Venezuelan  boundary  dispute  had  won  Roosevelt's 
warm  endorsement,  while  his  emphatic  refusal  to  annex  Hawaii  had 
provoked  his  unbridled  contempt — "a  colossal  crime,"  he  called  it. 
Roosevelt  had  further  deplored  Cleveland's  steady  resistance  to  de- 
mands that  he  press  the  decadent  Spanish  government  into  granting 
independence  to  the  Cubans.  At  times,  also,  Roosevelt  had  looked 
forward  to  American  acquisition  of  Canada,  half  hoping  for  an  in- 
cident with  Great  Britain  as  the  means  to  effect  that  end.  He  was,  in 
addition,  disgusted  by  the  apathy  of  a  succession  of  presidential 
administrations  toward  construction  of  a  canal  across  the  Central 
American  isthmus,  for  he  had  long  foreseen  the  strategic  and  economic 
advantages  of  such  an  undertaking.  TR  had  no  illusions  that  his  new 
post  would  give  him  a  major  voice  in  the  formulation  of  such 
policies;  but  he  did  believe  that  it  would  give  him  access  to  some  of 
the  men  who  made  the  decisions. 


94  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

As  it  turned  out,  Roosevelt  was  to  exercise  a  far  greater  influence 
during  his  year's  tenure  as  Assistant  Secretary  of  the  Navy  than  he 
had  expected  and  probably  even  hoped.  Secretary  John  D.  Long,  an 
indulgent  gentleman  of  declining  energy,  was  often  away  from  the 
department;  and  in  any  event,  he  delegated  considerable  authority  to 
his  energetic  assistant.  Thus  Roosevelt  was  able  from  the  start  of  his 
service  to  establish  and  direct  his  energies  toward  the  realization  of 
three  broad  objectives:  the  improvement  of  morale,  administration, 
and  tactical  efficiency;  publicity  of  the  case  for  increased  naval  power; 
and  preparation  of  the  battle  fleet  for  war  with  Spain.  Within  the 
year  Roosevelt  had  firmly  impressed  his  character  on  all  three. 

Soon  after  assuming  office,  for  example,  Roosevelt  was  detailed 
to  investigate  an  accident  involving  a  torpedo  boat.  Dutifully,  he  stated 
in  his  official  report  that  commanders  should  take  proper  safety  pre- 
cautions. However,  he  added,  "it  is  more  important  that  our  officers 
should  handle  these  boats  with  dash  and  daring  than  that  the  boats 
should  be  kept  unscratched."  Shortly  thereafter  the  new  Assistant 
Secretary  visited  Newport  News  where  the  battleships  Kentucky  and 
Kearsarge  were  then  being  built.  He  was  enthusiastic  about  the  quality 
of  the  ships,  but  he  disapproved  their  double  turrets  on  the  well- 
founded  grounds  that  they  made  it  necessary  to  train  both  light  and 
heavy-caliber  guns  on  the  same  target.  In  June,  while  Secretary  Long 
was  on  vacation,  Roosevelt  undertook  to  lighten  the  paper  work 
assigned  torpedo-boat  commanders.  And  in  August,  with  Long  again 
away,  he  lightened  the  load  for  battleship  and  battle-cruiser  captains. 

Meanwhile  Roosevelt  zealously  guarded  the  prerogatives  of  Navy 
Department  employees  under  the  civil  service  system,  bombarded 
Secretary  Long  with  advice,  and  made  numerous  personal  inspections 
of  naval  installations.  At  the  Cramp  shipyard  in  Philadelphia,  where 
he  inspected  the  Iowa,  it  was  reported  that  he  "broke  the  record  for 
asking  questions"  and  that  he  surprised  officers  and  shipbuilders  by 
his  "evident  theoretical  knowledge  of  the  construction  of  ships  of  war 
down  to  the  details  of  bolts  and  rivets." 

During  the  fall  of  1897  Roosevelt  served  as  chairman  of  a  board 
on  naval  personnel  which  recommended  that  the  distinction  between 
engineering  and  line  officers  be  eliminated,  that  unfit  officers  be  pen- 
sioned, and  that  the  salaries  of  line  officers  be  increased.  Then,  over 
the  opposition  of  conservative  and  economy-minded  critics,  he  drew 
up  a  bill  incorporating  those  recommendations.  The  measure  was 


THE    GREAT   ADVENTURE  95 

passed  in  1899.  The  Assistant  Secretary  continued  meanwhile  to  rail 
against  the  advancement  of  officers  on  the  basis  of  tenure  rather  than 
ability. 

Roosevelt's  administrative  reforms  were  usually  made  in  coopera- 
tion with  Secretary  Long,  whom  he  regularly  posted  when  the  latter 
was  away  from  Washington.  Nevertheless,  TR's  tendency  to  exert 
even  more  authority  than  Long  had  granted  him  and,  especially,  his 
disposition  to  make  public  statements  on  policy  matters  made  conflict 
inevitable.  The  first  major  difference  occurred  in  August,  1897,  when 
Roosevelt  told  a  meeting  of  naval  reservists  in  Ohio  that  the  United 
States  ought  to  decide  whether  it  should  annex  Hawaii  without  regard 
to  the  attitude  of  Japan  or  any  other  power.  The  headlines,  TR  con- 
fided to  Lodge,  "nearly  threw  the  Secretary  into  a  fit,  and  he  gave  me 
as  heavy  a  wigging  as  his  invariable  courtesy  and  kindness  would 
permit."  A  few  weeks  after  that  Long  deleted  a  passage  urging  an 
increase  in  the  size  of  the  Navy  from  an  article  the  Assistant  Secretary 
was  preparing  for  publication.  Other  incidents  followed.  And  although 
the  two  men  were  still  on  good  terms  when  Roosevelt  resigned,  it 
was  mainly  because  of  the  Secretary's  easygoing  temperament  and 
his  personal  affection  for  his  irrepressible  subordinate.  Assuredly,  TR 
had  transgressed.  "My  chief  usefulness  has  arisen  from  the  fact  that 
when  I  was  Acting  Secretary  I  did  not  hesitate  to  take  responsibilities," 
he  confided  to  Lodge  shortly  before  he  resigned  in  the  spring  of 
1898,  "and  from  the  further  fact  that  I  have  continually  meddled  with 
what  was  not  my  business,  because  I  was  willing  to  jeopardize  my 
position  in  a  way  that  a  naval  officer  could  not."  Nor  did  Roosevelt 
overestimate  his  services.  During  the  years  from  1897  to  1909,  writes 
a  recent  naval  historian,  William  R.  Braisted,  Roosevelt  "was  per- 
haps more  responsible  than  any  other  individual  ...  for  the  shap- 
ing of  the  Navy  into  an  effective  instrument  of  war  and  diplomacy." 

Roosevelt  was  particularly  exercised  by  Long's  sensitivity  to  the 
economy  bloc  in  Congress,  and  though  he  hammered  at  the  Secretary 
to  request  funds  for  six  battleships — four  for  the  Atlantic,  where  he 
foresaw  ultimate  trouble  with  Germany,  and  two  for  the  Pacific, 
where  Japan's  growing  power  was  the  catalyst — the  best  he  could 
get  from  Long  was  a  recommendation  in  December,  1897,  for  the 
construction  of  one  new  battleship.  The  result,  concludes  Braisted, 
was  that  "American  naval  strategists,  with  but  a  one-ocean  navy,  were 
still  studying  the  means  to  defend  American  possessions  against  Japan 


96  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

without  opening  the  way  for  a  German  assault  in  the  Atlantic"  a 
decade  later.  Indeed,  as  early  as  May,  1897,  Roosevelt  had  assigned 
the  Naval  War  College  the  following  problem: 

Japan  makes  demands  on  Hawaiian  Islands. 

This  country  intervenes. 

What  force  will  be  necessary  to  uphold  the  intervention  and  how 

shall  it  be  employed? 

Keeping  in  mind  possible  complications  with  another  Power  on 

the  Atlantic  Coast  (Cuba). 

Meanwhile,  as  the  war  clouds  over  Cuba  continued  to  darken, 
Roosevelt  tried  to  convince  his  superior  that  he  should  dispose  the 
fleet  in  a  way  that  would  give  it  the  greatest  possible  striking  power 
in  the  shortest  time  span  should  war  break  out.  But  Long,  who  ap- 
parently lacked  the  power  of  bold  decision,  refused  to  act.  Indeed,  he 
even  failed  to  act  following  the  destruction  of  the  Maine  in  Havana 
Harbor  on  February  15,  1898.  Ten  days  after  that  epochal  event  he 
unwittingly  gave  Roosevelt  his  opportunity  by  absenting  himself  from 
the  Department  for  the  day.  He  warned  his  ebullient  subordinate  not 
to  take  "any  step  affecting  the  policy  of  the  administration  without 
consulting  the  President  or  me";  but  Roosevelt,  in  a  characteristic 
disregard  of  authority,  ignored  his  instructions.  That  very  afternoon 
he  dispatched  to  Commodore  Dewey  that  fateful  telegram  which 
prepared  the  way  for  the  defeat  of  the  Spanish  fleet  at  Manila  Bay 
and  the  acquisition  of  the  Philippines: 

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

Secretary  Long  was  furious  when  apprised  of  Roosevelt's  action. 
TR  had  "gone  at  things  like  a  bull  in  a  china  closet";  he  lacked  "a 
cool  head  and  discrimination."  Significantly,  however,  Long  failed  to 
countermand  the  order,  perhaps  because  he  was  relieved  that  the 
Assistant  Secretary  had  made  the  decision  for  him.  And  when  war 
was  declared  on  April  19,  Dewey  set  off  in  full  steam  for  his 
rendezvous  with  destiny. 

However  unpardonable  Roosevelt's  breach  of  personal  faith,  it  was 
a  right  move  from  an  internal  point  of  view;  nor  was  it  lightly  made, 


THE  GREAT  ADVENTURE  97 

though  the  act  of  sending  the  telegram  may  have  been  impulsive.  The 
plan,  which  had  been  conceived  by  Mahan,  was  one  that  Roosevelt 
had  long  pressed  upon  his  chief,  and  a  case  can  be  made  that  the 
authority  to  issue  the  order  was  technically,  if  not  morally,  Roosevelt's. 
As  TR  had  written  Secretary  Long  six  weeks  earlier,  the  nation  might 
suffer  "one  or  two  bitter  humiliations"  and  would  "certainly  be 
forced  to  spend  the  first  three  or  four  most  important  weeks  not  in 
striking,  but  in  making  those  preparations  to  strike  which  we  should 
have  made  long  before." 

The  tactical  wisdom  of  Assistant  Secretary  of  the  Navy  Roosevelt's 
order  to  Dewey  is  not  be  confused  with  his  unofficial  war-mongering 
as  war  impended  in  the  spring  of  1898.  For  many  years  Roosevelt 
had  been  extolling  the  warlike  virtues,  writing  contemptuously  of 
those  who  opposed  military  preparedness,  and  advocating  American 
expansion  as  the  manifest  right  of  a  superior  people.  Three  years 
after  he  sought  in  1886  to  raise  a  troop  of  "as  utterly  reckless  a  set 
of  desperadoes  as  ever  sat  in  the  saddle"  for  possible  conflict  with 
Mexico,  TR  was  hoping  for  "a  bit  of  a  spar  with  Germany."  To 
Spring-Rice  he  confided  that  "the  burning  of  New  York  and  a  few 
other  seacoast  cities  would  be  a  good  object  lesson  on  the  need  of  an 
adequate  system  of  coast  defences;  and  I  think  it  would  have  a  good 
effect  on  our  large  germ  an  [sic]  population  to  force  them  to  an 
ostentatiously  patriotic  display  of  anger  against  Germany."  By  1895 
he  was  requesting  Governor  Levi  P.  Morton  of  New  York  for  a 
captaincy  should  war  break  out  with  Spain  over  Cuba.  And  late  in 
the  same  year  he  was  scorning  "the  bankers,  brokers  and  Anglo- 
maniacs  generally"  who  opposed  Cleveland's  truculence  toward  the 
British  in  the  Venezuelan  crisis.  Then,  in  the  spring  of  1897,  less 
than  two  months  after  he  became  Assistant  Secretary  of  the  Navy, 
he  declared  in  a  prepared  address  at  the  Naval  War  College  that  "No 
triumph  of  peace  is  quite  so  great  as  the  supreme  triumph  of  war." 
Unquestionably,  as  Howard  K.  Beale  concludes  in  his  authoritative 
work  on  Roosevelt's  foreign  policies,  TR  "came  close  to  seeking  war 
for  its  own  sake." 

It  is  difficult  and  probably  impossible  to  square  many  of  Roose- 
velt's statements  on  war  with  Roosevelt  the  moral  man.  Doubtless,  as 
many  students  of  Roosevelt's  life  have  concluded,  his  aggressiveness 
derived  in  some  part  from  his  boyhood  struggle  against  illness.  It  is 
unlikely,  however,  that  the  experience  of  his  youth  did  more  than 


98  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

determine  the  degree  of  his  belligerence,  for  thousands  of  men  of 
divergent  psychological  make-up  subscribed  to  the  same  general 
theories.  Cabot  Lodge  and  John  Hay  shared  TR's  attitude  toward  war, 
though  they  were  more  circumspect  in  expressing  it.  Henry  Adams's 
brilliant,  introspective  younger  brother,  Brooks,  was  a  philosophical 
militarist.  And  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes,  Jr.,  whose  militarism  has 
curiously  escaped  the  obloquy  of  historians,  was  quite  convinced  that 
war  "was  divine"  and  that  "this  snug,  over-safe  corner  of  the  world" 
needed  one  in  order  that  the  people  might  "realize  that  our  comfort- 
able routine  is  no  eternal  necessity  of  things  .  .  .  and  .  .  .  that 
we  may  be  ready  for  danger."  Furthermore,  the  cult  of  military  valor 
was  world-wide.  Lord  Wolseley,  the  commander  in  chief  of  the 
British  forces,  merely  expressed  what  hosts  of  Englishmen  believed 
when  he  wrote  in  1889  that  "All  other  pleasures  pale  before  the  in- 
tense, the  maddening  delight  of  leading  men  into  the  midst  of  an 
enemy,  or  to  the  assault  of  some  well-defended  place."  The  generation 
that  thrilled  to  Alfred  Lord  Tennyson's  "Charge  of  the  Light  Brigade" 
was  followed  by  one  that  took  Rudyard  Kipling's  Barrack-Room 
Ballads  to  its  heart;  and  the  reception  accorded  the  poet  laureate  of 
imperialism  was  even  more  uncritical  in  Great  Britain  than  in  the 
United  States. 

Had  Roosevelt  been  born  in  a  later  era  he  might  have  vented  his 
primordial  instincts  on  the  athletic  field.  As  it  was,  he  thought  of  war 
in  terms  of  man-to-man  combat,  dashing  cavalry  charges,  and  bril- 
liant tactical  maneuvers;  not  of  mass  carnage,  germ-infested  prison 
camps,  and  endless,  stultifying  boredom.  Perhaps  his  heroic  visions 
should  not  have  been.  There  were  many,  even  in  Roosevelt's  time,  who 
cried  out  against  them;  among  them  his  quondam  friend,  Carl 
Schurz,  most  of  the  other  mugwumps,  and  tough-minded  William 
James.  It  was  James,  in  fact,  who  stripped  the  veneer  of  moral  pur- 
pose from  Roosevelt's  exhortations.  Not  only  is  he  "still  mentally  in 
the  Sturm  und  Drang  period  of  early  adolescence,"  the  Harvard 
philosopher  wrote  of  his  former  student,  he  regards  "one  foe  ...  as 
good  as  another,"  and  "swamps  everything  together  in  one  flood  of 
abstract  bellicose  emotion." 

For  all  who  had  eyes  to  see,  moreover,  the  Civil  War  had  been 
the  first  of  the  great  modern  holocausts.  But  for  reasons  that  cut  to 
the  core  of  the  human  experience,  a  generation  of  politicians,  par- 
ticipants, and  propagandists  of  a  lost  cause  had  endowed  it  with  an 


THE   GREAT   ADVENTURE  99 

ultraromantic  aura  before  Roosevelt  was  yet  an  adolescent,  and  to 
this  day  their  creation  survives.  TR  matured  in  that  milieu.  He 
despised  Jefferson  Davis,  whom  he  once  subjected  to  personal  insult, 
as  the  symbol  of  disunion;  but  he  esteemed  Robert  E.  Lee,  whose 
services  to  the  Confederacy  were  far  greater,  as  the  exemplar  of  the 
soldierly  virtues. 

The  views  of  Roosevelt,  Holmes,  and  the  rest  did  not  lack  an  in- 
tellectual rationale.  Their  emphasis  on  preparedness  and  the  will  to  fight 
reflected  a  reading  of  the  grand  sweep  of  human  history  from  a  social- 
Darwinian  frame  of  reference.  And  if  Roosevelt  did  not  necessarily 
regard  the  race  among  individuals  as  invariably  to  the  swift,  he  never- 
theless believed  that  it  was  almost  always  so  among  nations.  A  coun- 
try had  either  to  expand  its  influence  by  peaceful  means  if  possible  or 
by  war  if  not.  Otherwise  it  would  lose  place,  power,  and  prestige;  or 
at  the  least  it  would  fail  to  fulfill  its  potential,  of  which  failing  there 
was  none  greater,  whether  for  individual  or  nation,  in  Roosevelt's 
system  of  values.  This  required  strength,  determination,  and  sacrifice. 
It  presumed  the  development  of  the  soldierly  virtues  and  the  will  to 
use  them  when  challenged.  "If  our  population  decreases;  if  we  lose 
the  virile,  manly  qualities,  and  sink  into  a  nation  of  mere  hucksters, 
putting  gain  above  national  honor,  and  subordinating  everything  to 
mere  ease  of  life;  then  we  shall  indeed  reach  a  condition  worse  than 
that  of  the  ancient  civilizations  in  the  years  of  their  decay,"  Roosevelt 
wrote  in  his  review  of  Brooks  Adams's  The  Law  of  Civilization  and 
Decay.  Rome  began  to  decline,  he  declared  in  one  of  those  classic 
half  truths  of  which  he  was  sometimes  a  master,  when  the  "Roman 
army  became  an  army  no  longer  of  Roman  citizens,  but  of  barbarians 
trained  in  the  Roman  manner  .  .  ." 

Yet,  there  were  qualifications.  TR  was  too  buoyant,  too  much  in 
love  with  life,  to  imbibe  of  the  Adams  brothers'  pessimism.  And 
even  as  he  regretted  with  Brooks  the  passing  of  the  military  man,  he 
read  his  values  into  the  new  economic  man.  There  were  in  the 
American  capitalistic  system,  he  also  said  in  his  review  of  The  Law 
of  Civilization  and  Decay,  "great  branches  of  industry  which  call 
forth  in  those  that  follow  them  more  hardihood,  manliness,  and  cour- 
age than  any  industry  of  ancient  times.  ...  As  yet,  while  men  are 
more  gentle  and  more  honest  than  before,  it  cannot  be  said  that  they 
are  less  brave."  In  1917,  when  it  seemed  to  Roosevelt  that  Western 
civilization  stood  on  the  brink  of  disaster,  he  earnestly  sent  forth  his 


100  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

sons  to  war.  But  some  years  before,  when  it  had  been  time  for  his 
first-bora  to  choose  a  career,  he  urgently  advised  him  against  West 
Point  and  the  enervating  life  of  a  regular  army  officer. 

Meanwhile  there  was  a  war  at  hand.  Two  generations  of  American 
historians  have  deprecated  McKinley's  submission  to  the  hysteria 
generated  by  the  "yellow  journalists,"  Hearst,  Pulitzer  and  their 
imitators,  to  a  Protestant  clergy  irrational  with  compassion  for  the 
oppressed  Cubans,  to  statesmen  obsessed  with  illusions  of  national 
grandeur,  and  to  a  public  opinion  bursting  with  ultrapatriotism.  James 
Ford  Rhodes,  friend  of  McKinley,  brother-in-law  of  Mark  Hanna, 
and  judicious  defender  of  Republican  policies,  called  the  conflict  with 
Spain  "a  needless  war."  The  distinguished  student  of  American 
diplomacy,  Samuel  Flagg  Bemis,  termed  its  aftermath  the  "great 
aberration."  And  a  long  list  of  others  have  poured  forth  condemna- 
tions that  are  harsher  still.  Not  even  the  relatively  exemplary  adminis- 
tration of  the  colonial  empire  which  arose  in  its  wake  and  the  per- 
spective afforded  by  two  world  wars  have  substantially  changed  those 
judgments.  The  most  that  has  been  said  in  extenuation  is  that  resort 
to  the  sword  was  perhaps  the  only  way  to  cut  the  Gordian  Knot  of 
Spanish  barbarities  in  Cuba  and  to  heed  the  American  people's 
humanistic  demand  that  they  be  ended;  and  that  is  hardly  a  tenable 
thesis.  For  Theodore  Roosevelt,  however,  the  war  represented  intel- 
lectual and  emotional  fulfillment. 

Roosevelt  believed  that  "every  foot  of  American  soil,  including  the 
nearest  islands  in  both  the  Pacific  and  Atlantic,  should  be  in  the  hands 
of  independent  American  states,"  and  he  regarded  the  liberation  of 
Cuba  as  a  first  step  toward  that  end.  He  also  believed  that  war  with 
undermatched  Spain  would  prove  a  rewarding  tactical  exercise  for 
the  fleet  and  that  it  would  spur  sentiment  for  a  more  powerful  Navy, 
without  which,  he  argued,  the  United  States  had  no  justification  for 
retaining  Alaska  and  annexing  Hawaii  and  little  possibility  of  building 
up  its  Far  Eastern  trade.  Repeatedly  during  1897  and  early  1898  he 
pointed  out  to  Secretary  of  the  Navy  Long  and  others  that  Japan  was 
threatening  to  surpass  the  United  States  as  a  naval  power  and  that 
the  Imperial  German  government  showed  a  tendency  "to  stretch  out 
for  colonial  possessions  which  may  at  any  moment  cause  a  conflict 
with  us."  We  should  beware,  he  warned,  "of  letting  a  foolish  hatred 
of  England  blind  us  to  our  honor  and  interest."  Germany,  not  Eng- 


THE    GREAT   ADVENTURE  101 

land,  was  the  power  most  likely  to  conflict  with  the  United  States  over 
the  Monroe  Doctrine. 

As  war  actually  impended  in  the  winter  and  early  spring  of  1898 
Roosevelt's  emotions  came  to  rule  him.  Fearful  that  a  joint  inquiry 
with  Spain  into  the  causes  of  the  Maine  disaster  would  fail  to  impose 
responsibility  on  Spain,  he  urged  Secretary  Long  to  advise  the  Presi- 
dent against  such  an  investigation.  Meanwhile,  in  a  ratiocination  that 
gives  point  to  Arnold  Toynbee's  aphorism  that  patriotism  is  the  last 
infirmity  of  noble  minds,  he  concluded  that  Spain  was  in  fact  culpable, 
that  the  ill-fated  battleship  "was  sunk  by  an  act  of  dirty  treachery  on 
the  part  of  the  Spaniards."  And  again  and  again  as  the  crisis  height- 
ened he  pleaded  for  war.  On  the  eve  of  conflict  he  revealed  his 
frustrations  to  Brooks  Adams,  whose  courageous  great-grandfather, 
John,  had  won  historical  fame  and  contemporary  condemnation  by 
preventing  another  needless  war  just  one  hundred  years  before: 

The  blood  of  the  Cubans,  the  blood  of  women  and  children 
who  have  perished  by  the  hundred  thousand  in  hideous  misery,  lies 
at  our  door;  and  the  blood  of  the  murdered  men  of  the  Maine 
calls  not  for  indemnity  but  for  the  full  measure  of  atonement  which 
can  only  come  by  driving  the  Spaniard  from  the  New  World.  I 
have  said  this  to  the  President  before  his  Cabinet;  I  have  said  it  to 
Judge  Day,  the  real  head  of  the  State  Department;  and  to  my  own 
chief.  I  cannot  say  it  publicly,  for  I  am  .  .  .  merely  a  minor 
official  in  the  administration. 

Finally,  on  March  21,  the  naval  court  of  inquiry  reported  that  the 
Maine  had  been  destroyed  by  the  explosion  of  a  submarine  mine,  but 
that  it  had  been  "unable  to  obtain  evidence  fixing  the  respon- 
sibility. .  .  ."  Nor  has  that  responsibility  ever  been  determined.  Three 
weeks  later,  despite  the  Spanish  government's  last-minute  capitulation 
to  McKinley's  demand  that  it  agree  to  an  armistice  in  Cuba,  the 
President  submitted  a  militant  war  message  to  an  aroused  Congress. 
His  action,  write  three  recent  historians,  was  "one  of  the  most  dis- 
astrous failures  in  the  history  of  presidential  leadership." 

The  pressures  had  been  too  overwhelming  for  McKinley,  whom 
Roosevelt  had  characterized  as  having  the  backbone  of  a  "chocolate 
eclair,"  to  surmount.  So  great  was  the  demand  for  war  on  all  sides 
that  there  had  been  talk  of  Congress  passing  a  war  resolution  over 
the  President's  veto.  The  talk  was  probably  idle;  but  speculation  that 
McKinley  and  the  Republican  party  would  be  defeated  in  1900  if  he 


102  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

failed  to  take  the  country  into  the  war  may  have  been  well  founded. 
In  any  event,  it  was  the  latter  threat  that  apparently  caused  Mark 
Hanna,  business  leaders,  and  finally  the  President  to  decide  for  war 
in  the  face  of  their  own  reluctance  and  Spain's  near  total  submission. 
Elihu  Root's  warning  that  "Fruitless  attempts  to  hold  back  or  retard 
the  enormous  momentum  of  the  people  bent  upon  war  would  result 
in  the  destruction  of  the  President's  power  and  influence,  in  depriving 
the  country  of  its  natural  leader,  in  the  elevation  of  the  Silver 
Democracy  to  power"  was  but  one  of  several  such  counsels.  In  the 
face  of  them  McKinley  lost  the  will  to  resist.  "I  think  .  .  .  possibly 
the  President  could  have  worked  out  the  business  without  war,"  his 
friend  and  confidant,  Senator  John  C.  Spooner  of  Wisconsin,  mused 
three  weeks  later,  "but  the  current  was  too  strong,  the  demagogues  too 
numerous,  the  fall  elections  too  near." 

Theodore  Roosevelt  was  not  thinking  of  the  congressional  elections 
of  1898  nor  of  the  presidential  campaign  of  1900.  He  was  consumed 
as  few  men  have  ever  been  consumed  by  concern  with  the  role  he 
would  play  in  the  war  that  at  last  had  come,  and  he  at  once  made 
plans  to  resign  from  the  Navy  Department  and  organize  a  regiment  of 
volunteer  cavalry.  His  family,  his  friends,  and  his  superiors  wanted 
him  to  continue  as  Assistant  Secretary.  Edith  had  given  birth  to  her 
fifth  child,  Quentin,  the  previous  fall  and  was  even  then  convalescing 
after  a  major  operation.  She  hoped  that  her  husband  would  not  go, 
though  she  knew  that  he  must.  President  McKinley  twice  asked  him 
to  stay  on.  And  Secretary  Long,  who  continued  to  treat  TR  with 
fatherly  indulgence,  implored  him  not  to  go.  "His  heart  is  right,  and 
he  means  well,"  he  wrote  of  Roosevelt  in  his  diary,  "but  it  is  one  of 
those  cases  of  aberration-desertion-vain-glory;  of  which  he  is  utterly 
unaware." 

But  the  most  ironic  pressure  came  from  Roosevelt's  fellow  war- 
hawk,  Cabot  Lodge.  A  few  years  earlier  Lodge  had  collaborated  with 
TR  on  a  book  entitled  Hero  Tales  of  American  History.  Now,  in  the 
hour  of  trial,  he  sought  to  dissuade  both  his  own  spirited  son  and  his 
dearest  friend  from  volunteering.  There  was,  he  said,  no  need  for  them 
to  go  to  war.  Furthermore,  he  warned  Roosevelt,  his  resignation 
would  spell  the  end  of  his  political  career. 

Roosevelt  himself  professed  to  be  torn  by  conflicting  emotions.  He 
claimed  that  he  was  not  going  to  war  "with  any  undue  exhilarations 
of  spirits  or  ...  recklessness  or  levity."  And  he  several  times 


THE    GREAT   ADVENTURE  103 

protested  that  he  was  not  seeking  military  glory.  Yet,  as  he  must 
surely  have  realized,  all  his  life  had  been  a  preparation  for  the  test 
that  was  then  to  come.  Few  men  ever  went  forth  to  war  with  greater 
zest  and  higher  resolve  to  act  gallantly  than  TR  did  in  that  turbulent 
spring  of  1898;  and  when  he  wrote  from  the  battlefield  outside 
Santiago  three  months  later  that  the  charge  up  the  heights  had  been 
his  "crowded  hour,"  he  wrote  in  total  emotional  satisfaction.  No  other 
episode  in  Roosevelt's  career,  not  even  his  election  to  the  presidency 
in  his  own  right  in  1904,  quite  compared.  As  he  confided  to  his 
military  aide  several  years  afterward,  "I  know  now  that  I  would  have 
turned  from  my  wife's  deathbed  to  have  answered  that  call."  It  was, 
he  said,  "my  chance  to  cut  my  little  notch  on  the  stick  that  stands  as 
a  measuring  rod  in  every  family." 

Roosevelt's  sense  of  duty  was  so  compelling,  however,  it  is  prob- 
able that  he  would  have  volunteered  even  if  he  had  been  unmoved  by 
the  call  of  glory.  "I  want  to  go  because  I  wouldn't  feel  that  I  had  been 
entirely  true  to  my  beliefs  and  convictions,  and  to  the  ideal  I  had  set 
for  myself  if  I  didn't  go,"  he  wrote  Paul  Dana  of  the  New  York  Sun 
at  the  time: 

I  don't  want  you  to  think  that  1  am  talking  like  a  prig,  for  I  know 
perfectly  well  that  one  never  is  able  to  analyze  with  entire  accuracy 
all  of  one's  motives.  .  .  .  For  two  years  I  have  consistently 
preached  the  doctrine  of  a  resolute  foreign  policy,  and  of  readiness 
to  accept  the  arbitrament  of  the  sword  if  necessary;  and  I  have 
always  intended  to  act  up  to  my  preaching  if  occasion  arose.  Now 
the  occasion  has  arisen,  and  1  ought  to  meet  it  ...  if  we  who 
have  preached  the  doctrine  fail  to  put  our  words  into  effect  when 
the  time  comes,  our  preaching  will  lose  much  of  its  force. 

The  announcement  that  Theodore  Roosevelt  had  resigned  as  As- 
sistant Secretary  of  the  Navy  on  May  6,  1898,  to  organize  the  First 
Volunteer  Cavalry  Regiment  reverberated  throughout  the  United 
States.  A  flood  of  applications  for  service — twenty-three  thousand  all 
told — poured  in  from  men  in  all  walks  of  life  and  from  all  sections  of 
the  country.  Several  hundred  cowboys,  a  score  of  Indians,  a  handful 
of  New  York  policemen,  and  a  sizable  number  of  athletes  from  the 
Ivy  League  were  finally  accepted.  The  selection  process  was  erratic 
and  personal,  yet  nonetheless  effective,  as  the  following  incident 
suggests: 


104  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

"My  name  is  Dudley  Deane,"  said  a  fine,  athletic  young  man  to 
Col.  Theodore  Roosevelt  yesterday  afternoon. 

A  broad  and  cordial  smile  of  welcome  beamed  on  Col.  Roose- 
velt's face.  "Yes,"  he  said,  "I  know  you.  You  are  the  man  who 
saved  the  day  for  Harvard  in  the  great  football  game  with  Yale. 
You  are  one  of  the  kind  of  men  we  want." 

More  of  that  "kind"  were  taken — even  the  chaplain  had  played 
three  years  of  varsity  football  at  Wesleyan,  so  TR,  with  no  little 
earnestness,  pointed  out.  "You've  got  to  perform  without  flinching 
whatever  duty  is  assigned  you  regardless  of  the  difficulty  or  danger 
attending  it,"  Lieutenant  Colonel  Roosevelt  told  a  batch  of  recruits  in 
Washington.  "If  it  is  the  closest  kind  of  fighting  you  must  be  anxious 
for  it.  ...  No  matter  what  comes  you  mustn't  squeal." 

At  San  Antonio,  Texas,  that  spring,  Roosevelt  and  the  regiment's 
actual  commander,  Colonel  Leonard  Wood,  an  extraordinarily  able 
officer  who  had  won  the  Medal  of  Honor  for  his  pursuit  of  the  great 
Apache  chief,  Geronimo,  quickly  molded  their  troops  into  a  surpris- 
ingly efficient  fighting  force.  There  were,  inevitably,  minor  problems. 
TR  never  mastered  the  regular  army  formalities  though  he  main- 
tained a  rough  dignity,  and  when  he  detrained  in  San  Antonio  late 
in  April  he  responded  warmly  to  the  uproarious  cheers  of  troops  who 
should  have  received  him  in  a  formal  ceremony.  A  few  weeks  later 
Wood  was  forced  to  rebuke  him  for  buying  his  men  all  the  beer  they 
could  drink  after  a  hot  march  in  the  saddle.  "Sir,  I  consider  myself 
the  damnedest  ass  within  ten  miles  of  this  camp,"  he  contritely 
replied.  And  in  Tampa,  Florida,  shortly  before  the  Rough  Riders,  as 
the  First  Volunteer  Cavalry  Regiment  had  been  affectionately  dubbed 
by  the  press,  sailed  in  mid-June  for  Cuba,  Roosevelt  took  two  of  his 
sergeants  to  dinner  in  a  hotel  where  Wood  was  dining  with  the 
commanding  general  of  the  Army. 

The  Rough  Riders'  first  engagement  occurred  at  Las  Guasimas,  a 
small  Cuban  village,  on  June  24.  Their  point,  which  was  led  by 
Sergeant  Hamilton  Fish,  Jr.,  who  was  killed  on  the  spot,  ran  into 
a  force  of  Spaniards,  and  a  sharp  action  ensued.  The  enemy  mounted 
a  strong  resistance,  but  they  eventually  gave  way.  By  the  time 
American  reinforcements  arrived  the  fight  was  ended.  Sixteen  Rough 
Riders  lay  dead. 

The  supreme  test  came  one  week  later  after  Wood  had  been 
advanced  to  brigade  commander  and  Roosevelt  had  replaced  him  as 


THE   GREAT  ADVENTURE  105 

commanding  officer  of  the  First  Volunteers.  On  June  30  TR  was 
ordered  to  move  his  regiment,  which  was  without  mounts,  into  posi- 
tion for  an  attack  on  the  Spanish  stronghold  of  Santiago.  By  nightfall 
the  Rough  Riders  were  bivouacked  in  a  jungle  at  the  foot  of  a  series 
of  hills  flanking  the  east  side  of  the  city.  The  most  prominent  hill 
was  San  Juan,  but  there  were  entrenchments  on  all. 

Morning  came,  but  no  further  orders.  Roosevelt  champed,  and 
when  the  regulars  moved  out  from  cover  to  attack  he  was  about  to 
order  his  men  to  advance  to  the  sound  of  the  gunfire.  Before  he  could 
give  the  command,  a  message  came  directing  him  to  advance  through 
the  bush  toward  the  hill  directly  in  front  of  his  bivouac.  It  was  the 
one  next  to  San  Juan,  and  it  was  called  Kettle  Hill.  "The  instant  I 
received  the  order  I  sprang  on  my  horse,"  TR  later  wrote,  "and  then 
my  'crowded  hour'  began." 

It  lasted  most  of  the  day.  Through  the  whole  time  Roosevelt  was 
a  conspicuous  figure  as  he  exhorted  his  Rough  Riders  to  charge 
against  the  enemy  who  maintained  a  destructive  fire  from  behind  their 
fortifications.  "Are  you  afraid  to  stand  up  when  I  am  on  horseback?" 
he  shouted  at  one  terrified  trooper.  He  said  worse  to  others.  His  elbow 
was  nicked  by  a  bullet,  a  trooper  was  killed  at  his  feet,  and  he  had 
several  other  calls  as  close.  Early  that  afternoon  the  Rough  Riders 
and  fragments  of  other  regiments  took  the  hill  and  held  it  under  fire 
from  the  Spanish  on  San  Juan.  That  night  they  dug  in.  More  fights 
followed,  but  none  matched  the  intensity  of  that  charge.  It  was 
remarkable,  wrote  Richard  Harding  Davis,  one  of  a  coterie  of  news- 
paper man  whose  friendship  with  TR  assured  him  a  favorable  press, 
that  anyone  had  survived. 

The  campaign  had  brought  out  Roosevelt's  best  and  some  of  his 
worst.  He  took  pride  in  his  regiment's  heavy  casualties,  since  they 
had  proved  that  he  and  his  troops  had  been  in  the  thick  of  action.  He 
gloated  that  he  had  personally  "doubled-up"  a  Spaniard.  And  in 
one  of  those  desecrations  of  the  human  spirit  that  will  forever  bar  him 
from  attaining  the  immortality  of  Jefferson,  Lincoln,  and  Wilson,  he 
invited  post-battle  visitors  to  "look  at  those  damned  Spanish  dead." 
He  had  been  as  foolhardy  as  he  had  been  brave  and  daring.  And 
beyond  a  doubt  he  was  boastful.  "I  do  not  want  to  be  vain,  but  I  do 
not  think  anyone  else  could  have  handled  this  regiment  quite  as  I 
have,"  he  wrote  Lodge.  "I  rose  over  those  regular  army  officers  like 
a  balloon,"  he  said  to  Hermann  Hagedorn  many  years  later.  He  also 


106  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

wrote  as  much  in  a  book,  The  Rough  Riders,  the  title  of  which  Finley 
Peter  Dunne's  Mr.  Dooley  found  misleading.  "If  I  was  him,"  said 
Dooley,  "I'd  call  th'  book  'Alone  in  Cubia!'  or  Th'  Darin'  Ex- 
ploits iv  a  Brave  Man  be  an  Actual  Eye-Witness.'  " 

The  campaign  had  also  proved  what  there  had  been  no  need  to 
prove — Theodore  Roosevelt  was  an  inspiring  leader  of  men.  He  had, 
Leonard  Wood  later  wrote,  the  all-important  virtues  of  the  soldier. 
He  was  courageous,  solicitous  of  his  troops'  welfare,  and  accessible 
to  those  who  bore  complaints;  and  he  commanded  in  consequence  the 
respect  of  both  his  men  and  his  officers.  Stephen  Crane,  who  observed 
TR  in  the  field  hospitals  between  engagements,  wrote  at  the  time  that 
he  "worked  like  a  cider  press  ...  let  him  be  a  politician  if  he 
likes,  he  was  a  gentleman  down  here." 

It  was  perhaps  inevitable  that  even  in  Roosevelt's  hour  of  greatest 
glory  he  should  thrust  his  bull  neck  into  controversy  with  those  who 
had  it  in  their  power  to  do  him  honor.  Yellow  fever  raged  through 
the  camps  after  Santiago  fell,  and  when  a  group  of  ranking  regular 
officers  asked  TR,  who  was  by  then  a  brigade  commander,  to  request 
Secretary  of  War  Russell  A.  Alger  to  expedite  the  army's  transfer 
north,  the  Rough  Rider  consented.  With  the  tacit  approval  of  the  com- 
manding general,  W.  R.  Shafter,  he  wrote  a  letter  that  was  given 
out  to  the  press  before  it  reached  Washington. 

President  McKinley  and  Secretary  Alger  were  understandably  out- 
raged. Roosevelt's  letter,  together  with  one  which  the  regular  officers 
had  drawn  up  on  reconsideration,  was  an  indirect,  but  damning 
indictment  of  the  administration's  conduct  of  the  war.  It  also  ad- 
vertised to  the  Spaniards,  who  were  then  negotiating  peace,  that  the 
American  Army  in  Cuba  was  no  longer  a  disciplined  and  effective 
fighting  force.  Furthermore,  Alger  had  made  the  decision  to  evacuate 
just  the  day  before. 

On  August  15,  1898,  the  disease-ridden  but  all-conquering  Rough 
Riders  disembarked  from  the  transport  Miami  at  Montauk  Point, 
Long  Island.  A  month  later  Roosevelt  was  called  from  his  tent  on 
the  sands.  The  First  Volunteer  Cavalry  Regiment  was  formed  in  a  hol- 
low square  with  the  officers  and  color  sergeant  in  the  center.  Roosevelt 
strode  into  the  square  and  one  of  the  troopers  stepped  forward  and 
presented  him  with  a  reproduction  of  Frederick  Remington's  famed 
bronze,  "The  Bronco-Buster."  It  was  a  gift  from  the  enlisted  men. 
TR  was  visibly  moved  as  he  now  addressed  his  troops  for  the  last 


THE    GREAT   ADVENTURE  107 

time.  "I  am  proud  of  this  regiment  beyond  measure,"  he  declared. 
"It  is  primarily  an  American  regiment,  and  it  is  American  because 
it  is  composed  of  all  the  races  which  have  made  America  their  coun- 
try by  adoption  and  those  who  have  claimed  it  as  their  country  by 
inheritance."  He  closed  with  a  tribute  to  the  Negro  soldiers  who  had 
fought  with  distinction  beside  the  Rough  Riders.  Then,  as  the  entire 
regiment,  many  of  its  members  in  tears,  filed  by  him,  he  shook  hands 
with  each  man  and  officer.  The  great  adventure  had  ended. 

There  was  an  epilogue.  Roosevelt  had  been  recommended  for  the 
Medal  of  Honor.  He  wanted  it  painfully,  partly  because  he  believed 
it  would  help  him  in  his  political  career,  mainly  because  he  needed 
throughout  his  life  to  surround  himself  with  the  outward  symbols  of 
achievement.  After  the  original  recommendation  had  been  made,  TR 
had  written  numerous  letters  on  his  own  behalf,  sought  affidavits  from 
those  who  had  been  with  him  in  battle,  and  beseeched  Lodge  to  obtain 
the  War  Department's  endorsement.  But  Secretary  Alger  refused  to 
make  the  recommendation  to  Congress. 

There  was  a  pathetic  quality  about  it,  for  most  of  the  nation  knew 
anyway  that  Colonel  Theodore  Roosevelt  had  been  a  hero.  The 
medal  finally  came,  forty-six  years  late,  and  to  TR's  oldest  son,  who 
by  all  accounts  had  kept  his  father's  faith  on  a  beachhead  in  Nor- 
mandy where  he  died  in  1944.  For  his  own  bravery  under  fire  Con- 
gress posthumously  awarded  to  Brigadier  General  Theodore  Roose- 
velt, Jr.,  the  medal  which  Colonel  Theodore  Roosevelt,  Sr.,  had  also 
earned  but  never  received. 


CHAPTER 


THE   FINAL   PREPARATION 


An  honest   and  fearless   Governor — a   combination  of   con- 
science and  backbone — is  a  mighty  good  thing  to  have  at  Albany! 

—The  New  York  World 


The  Rough  Riders  were  still  convalescing  or  frolicking  on  the  wind- 
swept sands  of  Long  Island  when  their  Colonel  was  plunged  bodily 
into  politics.  At  issue  was  the  governorship  of  New  York. 

The  administration  of  the  incumbent,  the  Republican  Frank  S. 
Black,  was  proving  grievously  lacking.  Black  had  antagonized  Tom 
Platt  by  exerting  a  calculated  independence  and  he  had  offended 
decent  opinion  by  weakening  the  civil  service  system  and  by  failing 
to  act  decisively  to  rid  the  administration  of  the  Erie  Canal  of  graft 
and  corruption.  So  Platt,  who  was  no  sentimentalist,  began  casting 
about  for  a  gubernatorial  candidate.  He  wanted  a  man  whom  the 
people  would  elect  and  he  could  control. 

Theodore  Roosevelt  fitted  the  first  particular.  His  emergence  as  a 
military  hero,  coupled  with  his  sustained  reputation  as  a  reformer, 
gave  him  such  a  luster  that  he  was  commonly  recognized  as  the  only 
Republican  who  could  possibly  stave  off  the  threatening  Democratic 
landslide  in  the  November  elections.  Even  before  his  transport 
anchored  off  Montauk  Point  many  Republican  newspapers  had 
nominated  him,  and  some  all  but  elected  him. 

Senator  Platt  sensed  that  Roosevelt,  who  had  been  a  minor  irritant 
as  police  commissioner,  would  prove  a  major  sufferance  as  governor. 
He  also  had  forebodings  that  the  Colonel  would  move  from  the 
governorship  to  the  presidency.  As  an  anti-imperialist,  the  "Easy 

108 


THE   FINAL   PREPARATION  109 

Boss"  was  reluctant  to  place  Roosevelt  in  a  position  that  might  enable 
him  to  resolve  the  colonial  problems  growing  out  of  the  war  with 
Spain.  Yet  Thomas  Collier  Platt  was  a  practical  politician  to  the 
marrow.  As  Chauncey  M.  Depew,  the  witty  and  jaded  president  of 
the  New  York  Central  Railroad,  pointed  out,  the  G.O.P.'s  one  chance 
of  retaining  the  governorship  lay  in  diverting  attention  from  the  Black 
administration's  shortcomings.  When  questioned  about  the  canal 
frauds  during  the  campaign,  Depew  cynically  remarked,  he  could  say 
with  conviction: 

We  have  nominated  for  governor  a  man  who  has  demonstrated 
in  public  office  and  on  the  battlefield  that  he  is  a  fighter  for  the 
right,  and  always  victorious.  If  he  is  selected,  you  know  and  we 
all  know  from  his  demonstrated  characteristics,  courage  and 
ability,  that  every  thief  will  be  caught  and  punished.  .  .  .  Then 
I  will  follow  the  colonel  leading  his  Rough  Riders  up  San  Juan 
Hill  and  ask  the  band  to  play  the  "Star-Spangled  Banner." 

Platt  saw  Depew's  point.  He  feared,  however,  that  Roosevelt  would 
break  with  him  once  he  had  galloped  triumphantly  into  office;  so  he 
refused  to  endorse  the  Colonel  until  he  received  assurances  of  co- 
operation. Following  a  protracted  negotiation,  Roosevelt  finally 
thrashed  matters  out  with  Platt  at  the  latter's  apartment  in  the  Fifth 
Avenue  Hotel  on  September  17.  "We  buried  past  differences,"  Platt 
wrote  in  his  autobiography.  The  Colonel  agreed  to  "consult  with  me 
and  other  party  leaders  about  appointments  and  legislation  in  case 
he  were  elected." 

The  announcement  that  Roosevelt  had  visited  Tom  Platt  provoked 
howls  of  anguish  from  reformers,  who  had  naively  hoped  that  Roose- 
velt would  head  up  an  Independent  party  ticket.  "By  accepting  Platt 
he  becomes  the  standard  bearer  of  corruption  and  demoralization," 
Fulton  Cutting  charged  in  the  New  York  Evening  Post.  "The  matter 
is  a  question  of  honor,"  John  Jay  Chapman,  who  seemed  to  have  con- 
vinced himself  that  Roosevelt  had  committed  himself  to  their  project, 
confided  to  his  wife.  "I  do  not  believe  that  Teddy  Roosevelt  .  .  .  has 
so  far  humbled  himself  as  to  go  to  Mr.  Platt,"  TR's  old  ally,  the  Rev. 
Dr.  Parkhurst,  protested.  It  was  1884  and  the  fateful  decision  to  sup- 
port Blaine  all  over  again,  or  so  they  believed. 

The  reformers  might  have  known  better.  For  all  his  dedication  to 
good  government,  Roosevelt  was  too  wise  in  the  ways  of  politics  to 
be  anything  but  a  Republican  "regular."  Prepared  though  he  may  have 


110  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

been  to  make  the  supreme  sacrifice,  he  determined  that  it  should  be 
as  a  lion  and  not  as  a  lamb.  His  flaunting  of  Jay  Gould,  Benjamin 
Harrison  and  even  Tom  Platt  had  proved  that  before,  and  his  leader- 
ship of  the  Progressive  hosts  would  prove  it  again.  He  well  knew, 
however,  that  he  had  to  match  power  with  power;  that  he  had  to 
possess  office  before  he  could  act  constructively.  He  resigned  himself 
accordingly  to  accepting  the  thorns  with  the  roses. 

The  decision  hurt.  Had  Roosevelt's  ideals  been  lower,  his  con- 
temporary reputation  might  have  been  higher;  independent  reformers 
would  not  have  expected  so  much  of  him.  But  he  had  repeatedly 
proved  that  he  was  one  of  them  at  heart;  and  when,  because  he  was 
in  action  a  realist  rather  than  a  doctrinaire,  he  failed  to  fulfill  their 
every  ideal,  they  invariably  vented  upon  him  the  self-righteous  indigna- 
tion of  the  true  believer  for  the  heretic. 

The  Colonel  naturally  returned  their  venom.  Only  rarely  thereafter 
would  he  concede  that  the  ferment  whipped  up  by  these  and  other 
men  of  good  hope — the  mugwumps,  the  muckrakers,  the  social 
theorists  Henry  George  and  Edward  Bellamy,  the  social  reformers 
Jane  Addams  and  Ben  Lindsey,  and  the  humanistic  politicians  Bryan 
and  La  Follette — was  all  that  prevented  America  from  being  swallowed 
whole  by  the  voracious  materialism  he  himself  so  deplored.  It  was  an 
irony  that  history  long  afterward  crowned.  Notwithstanding  his  far- 
reaching  legislative  achievements,  Theodore  Roosevelt's  most  dramatic 
contribution  to  American  life,  most  historians  now  agree,  was  the 
arousal  of  the  public  conscience  to  the  need  for  even  further  reform. 

Roosevelt's  attitude  toward  his  compromise  with  the  machine  is 
set  forth  in  a  letter  to  the  civil  service  reformer,  Francis  E.  Leupp, 
written  before  TR  conferred  with  Platt  on  September  17.  "I  should 
be  one  of  the  big  party  leaders  if  I  should  take  it,"  he  wrote,  and  "I 
should  have  to  treat  with  and  work  with  the  organization." 

I  should  see  and  consult  the  leaders — not  once,  but  continuously 
— and  earnestly  try  to  come  to  an  agreement  on  all  important 
questions  with  them;  and  of  course  the  mere  fact  of  my  doing  so 
would  alienate  many  of  my  friends  whose  friendship  I  value.  On 
the  other  hand,  when  we  come  to  a  matter  like  the  Canal,  or  Life 
Insurance,  or  anything  touching  the  Eighth  Commandment  and 
general  decency,  I  could  not  allow  any  consideration  of  party  to 
come  in.  And  this  would  alienate  those  who,  if  not  friends,  were 
supporters. 


THE   FINAL   PREPARATION  111 

A  few  reformers  accepted  the  logic  of  Roosevelt's  necessity.  "No- 
body who  has  followed  his  career  can  doubt  that  in  him,  as  Governor, 
civil-service  reform  would  have  a  champion  whom  nothing  could 
intimidate  or  seduce,"  the  Nation  wrote  editorially.  But  others,  whom 
Roosevelt  termed  "the  idiot  variety  of  'Goo-Goos,'  "  viewed  his  fall 
from  grace  with  less  tolerance  ("That  goose  Parkhurst  is  giving  me 
some  trouble,"  the  Colonel  would  soon  complain).  And  some,  in- 
cluding Carl  Schurz,  now  opposed  him  because  of  their  still-seething 
resentment  of  his  imperialism. 

The  campaign  that  autumn  confirmed  the  prescience  of  Chauncey 
Depew.  The  cheers  at  the  Republican  state  convention  had  been 
louder  for  Platt  than  for  Roosevelt;  but  it  was  the  Colonel's  show  on 
the  hustings.  The  canal  frauds  were  all  but  ignored,  certainly  by 
Roosevelt,  who  promised  only  further  investigations,  and  presumably 
by  the  crowds,  which  partook  of  the  Rough  Rider's  hard-won  fame 
and  succumbed  to  his  vibrant  personality.  "Seven  Rough  Riders, 
wearing  their  uniforms  of  glory,  were  on  the  special  train  on  which 
Roosevelt  began  a  tour  on  October  17,"  writes  Pringle.  A  bugler 
would  sound  the  cavalry  charge  at  each  stop,  and  as  the  notes  died 
the  candidate  would  begin  his  address.  "  'You  have  heard  the  trumpet 
that  sounded  to  bring  you  here,5  he  exclaimed  at  Fort  Henry.  'I  have 
heard  it  tear  the  tropic  dawn  when  it  summoned  us  to  fight  at 
Santiago/  "  Roosevelt  would  then  urge  his  listeners  to  affirm  the 
results  of  the  war  by  electing  a  Republican  Congress  (also  a  Republi- 
can governor).  The  ultimate  came  at  Port  Jervis  when  ex-Sergeant 
Buck  Taylor,  one  of  the  seven  glorious  props,  was  allowed  to  speak. 
"I  want  to  talk  to  you  about  mah  Colonel,"  Taylor  told  the  crowd. 
"He  kept  ev'y  promise  he  made  to  us  and  he  will  to  you.  When  he 
took  us  to  Cuba  he  told  us  ...  we  would  have  to  lie  out  in  the 
trenches  with  the  rifle  bullets  climbing  over  us,  and  we  done  it.  ... 
He  told  us  we  might  meet  wounds  and  death  and  we  done  it,  but  he 
was  thar  in  the  midst  of  us,  and  when  it  came  to  the  great  day  he  led 
us  up  San  Juan  Hill  like  sheep  to  the  slaughter  and  so  he  will  lead 
you." 

It  was  a  remarkable  performance;  and  neither,  the  Colonel's  in- 
fectious pride  in  his  own  and  his  Rough  Riders'  heroics,  nor  the  need 
to  create  a  diversionary  political  issue,  quite  explains  it. 

A  possible  explanation  is  that  Roosevelt  had  no  program.  As  he 
wrote  James  Bryce  shortly  after  the  returns  came  in,  he  planned  only 


112  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

to  conduct  an  "honest  administration."  Another  consideration  was  the 
Colonel's  concern  with  the  impending  peace.  He  had  already  come 
out  for  annexation  of  the  Philippines,  and  he  was  devoutly  convinced 
that  the  anti-imperialistic  Democrats  constituted  the  gravest  possible 
threat  to  national  greatness.  "Do  you  wish  to  keep  or  throw  away  the 
fruits  of  what  we  won  in  the  war?"  he  admonished  the  crowds  that 
swarmed  about  the  rear  platform  of  his  campaign  train:  "We  cannot 
avoid  facing  the  fact  that  we  occupy  a  new  place  among  the  people 
of  the  world  .  .  .  Greatness  means  strife  for  nation  and  man  alike. 
.  .  .  We  must  dare  to  be  great  .  .  .  We  are  face  to  face  with  our 
destiny  and  we  must  meet  it  with  high  and  resolute  courage." 

But  the  most  compelling  explanation  is  Roosevelt's  desperate  desire 
to  win.  Even  John  Jay  Chapman  was  willing  to  overlook  the  Fourth 
of  July  aura  which  characterized  the  Colonel's  canvass  on  the  ground 
that  he  "really  believes  that  he  is  the  American  flag."  As  Chapman 
confided  to  his  wife,  however,  when  Roosevelt  "endorses  the  adminis- 
tration of  McKinley  in  words  that  are  intended  to  cover  and  do  cover 
Alger,  I  despise  him,  for  I  know  him  to  be  dishonest." 

Certainly  the  Colonel's  deft  glossing  over  of  Republican  corruption 
contrasted  sharply  with  his  full-bodied  criticisms  of  Democratic  mal- 
feasance; and  though  he  was  confined  at  first  to  generalizations  about 
Tammany,  the  revelation  late  in  the  campaign  that  Croker  had  refused 
to  permit  a  state  supreme  court  justice  to  be  renominated  because  he 
would  not  appoint  a  Tammany  hack  as  clerk  of  the  court  unexpectedly 
gave  him  the  issue  he  needed.  Croker's  action,  Roosevelt  wrote  in  his 
Autobiography,  enabled  me  to  "fix  the  contest  in  the  public  mind  as 
one  between  himself  and  myself."  It  paid  off;  and  so  probably  did 
$60,000— $10,000  of  it  reportedly  from  J.  P.  Morgan— which  Platt 
is  said  to  have  poured  into  Roosevelt's  cause  the  last  week  or  ten 
days.  In  any  event,  TR  defeated  his  opponent,  Augustus  Van  Wyck 
of  Brooklyn,  by  17,794  votes.  He  ran  well  ahead  of  his  ticket,  and 
for  the  first  time,  perhaps,  became  fully  conscious  of  his  extraordinary 
power  to  move  great  masses  of  people. 

Billy  O'Neil,  Roosevelt's  compatriot  in  reform  during  TR's  three 
terms  in  the  Assembly,  described  that  power  in  a  letter  to  Jonas  S. 
Van  Duzer,  another  of  the  old  group.  "Just  before  I  met  him  [TR]  I 
received  a  letter  from  a  friend  in  Albany  saying  Tor  God's  sake  tell 
Roosevelt  to  stop  his  self-adulation  and  talking  about  himself  so 
much,'  "  O'Neil  wrote.  After  listening  to  the  Colonel's  speeches,  how- 


THE   FINAL   PREPARATION  113 

ever,  O'Neil  advised  him  to  follow  "his  own  instincts  and  inspiration." 
He  continued: 

At  Carthage,  in  Jeff.  County,  there  were  three  thousand  people 
standing  in  the  mud  and  rain.  He  spoke  about  ten  minutes — the 
speech  was  nothing,  but  the  man's  presence  was  everything.  It  was 
electrical,  magnetic.  .  .  . 

Some  Democrats  say  it  was  only  the  idle  curiosity  of  the  crowd 
that  always  attends  the  entrance  of  a  circus  with  a  country  town. 
I  thought  it  something  else,  perhaps  my  own  love  and  admiration 
for  the  man  blinded  me  to  the  real  facts.  Perhaps  I  measured  others 
by  my  own  feelings,  for  as  the  train  faded  away  and  I  saw  him 
smiling,  and  waving  his  hat  at  the  people,  they  in  turn  giving 
abundant  evidence  of  their  enthusiastic  affection,  my  eyes  filled 
with  tears,  I  couldn't  help  it  though  I  am  ordinarily  a  cold-blooded 
fish  not  easily  stirred  like  that. 

"Senator  Platt,"  wrote  Roosevelt  when  he  was  still  Governor-elect, 
"is  to  all  intents  and  purposes  a  majority  of  the  Legislature."  The 
statement  was  accurate.  Yet  Roosevelt,  armed  with  his  own  righteous 
enthusiasm  and  supported  by  a  public  opinion  which  he  both  formed 
and  reflected,  was  soon  to  prove  that  Platt  was  not  always  an  intrac- 
table "majority."  By  the  end  of  Roosevelt's  administration  the  "Easy 
Boss"  had  deferred  more  to  the  Colonel  on  major  matters  than  Roose- 
velt had  to  him.  The  Governor  had  regularly  consulted  him,  after 
which  he  "frequently  did  just  what  he  pleased,"  Platt  ruefully  re- 
called years  later.  "My  desire  was  to  achieve  results,  and  not  merely 
to  issue  manifestoes  of  virtue,"  Roosevelt  explained  in  his  Auto- 
biography. "I  had  to  work  with  the  tools  at  hand.  ...  It  was  only 
after  I  had  exhausted  all  the  resources  of  my  patience  that  I  would 
finally,  if  he  still  proved  obstinate,  tell  him  that  I  intended  to  make 
the  fight  anyhow." 

Tom  Platt's  first  insight  into  the  Governor's  independence  came 
shortly  after  Roosevelt's  inauguration  on  January  1,  1899.  Roosevelt 
was  determined  that  the  state  canal  system  would  be  administered 
with  efficiency  and  honesty,  and  he  accordingly  proposed  the  appoint- 
ment of  former  Comptroller  James  A.  Roberts  of  Buffalo,  who  had 
clashed  with  the  "canal  ring"  in  the  past;  however,  as  Roberts  re- 
jected Roosevelt's  overtures  for  personal  reasons,  Platt  thereupon 
seized  the  initiative  by  offering  the  post  to  Francis  J.  Hendricks  of 
Syracuse.  A  machine  politician  of  integrity  and  ability,  Hendricks' 


114  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

acceptability  was  compromised  by  the  fact  that  he  came  from  a  canal 
county.  Nevertheless,  Hendricks  accepted  Platt's  offer,  and  when 
Platt  next  saw  the  Governor  in  New  York  City  he  presented  him  with 
his  fait  accompli. 

Roosevelt  was  invariably  polite  and  sometimes  deferential  to  Platt; 
he  replied  simply  that  he  was  "sorry,"  but  that  he  could  not  appoint 
the  Senator's  man.  Platt  then  lost  his  temper.  Finally,  however,  he 
realized  that  the  Governor  would  not  yield,  and  the  matter  was  settled 
when  Roosevelt  drew  up  a  list  of  four  names,  one  of  which  they  both 
agreed  upon.  A  master  at  playing  on  men's  weaknesses,  Platt  seems 
not  to  have  understood  their  strength.  As  William  Allen  White  long 
afterward  wrote,  he  "underestimated  Roosevelt  ,  .  .  because  he  had 
no  sort  of  conception  of  that  part  of  a  man  which  is  called  the  moral 
nature." 

Thereafter  Roosevelt  usually  pursued  the  course  followed  in  the 
Hendricks  case.  The  result  was  a  minimum  of  friction  and  a  generally, 
though  not  invariably,  high  level  of  major  appointments.  On  minor 
offices,  it  is  true,  the  Governor  gave  the  machine  a  relatively  free 
choice,  partly  out  of  physical  necessity,  partly  because  he  understood 
the  system.  Only  when  he  had  special  knowledge  or  desired  to  appoint 
a  personal  friend  would  he  intervene.  Joe  Murray,  his  original  sponsor 
in  the  Twenty-first  District  Republican  Club,  received  a  minor  post, 
as  did  an  occasional  former  Rough  Rider.  But  in  most  instances 
Roosevelt  refused  even  his  friends,  often  giving  needy  acquaintances 
money  from  his  own  pocket — roughly  a  thousand  dollars  during  his 
two  years  in  office — rather  than  put  them  on  the  public  payroll. 

It  was  in  the  legislative  arena,  however,  that  Roosevelt  most  force- 
fully threw  down  the  gauntlet  to  Platt.  Cynical  and  contemptuous  of 
the  democratic  process  though  he  was,  the  Senator  possessed  a  care- 
fully considered  socio-economic  frame  of  reference.  He  believed  that 
the  function  of  government  was  to  serve  business,  especially  big 
business,  and  he  was  intolerant  of  all  tampering  with  the  foundations, 
and  even  the  superstructure,  of  economic  power.  His  machine  was 
largely  financed  by  the  contributions  of  businessmen,  and  he  openly 
prided  himself  on  his  ability  to  elicit  contributions  from  J.  P.  Morgan 
and  other  titans.  When,  therefore,  Roosevelt  threw  his  influence 
behind  measures  designed  to  curtail  corporate  privileges  in  the  spring 
of  1 899,  Platt  became  thoroughly  alarmed. 


THE   FINAL   PREPARATION  115 

I  had  heard  from  a  good  many  sources  that  you  were  a  little 
loose  on  the  relations  of  capital  and  labor,  on  trusts  and  combina- 
tion ...  on  those  numerous  questions  .  .  .  affecting  the  security 
of  earnings  and  the  right  of  a  man  to  run  his  business  in  his  own 
way,  with  due  respect>  of  course,  to  the  Ten  Commandments  and 
the  Penal  Code. 

Actually,  Roosevelt's  first  message  to  the  legislature  had  given  the 
defenders  of  the  status  quo  slight  cause  for  uneasiness.  Many  of  its 
points  had  been  well  taken,  particularly  those  on  the  civil  service  and 
the  labor  welfare  laws;  but  they  portended  little  major  economic  re- 
form. Within  a  few  months,  however,  the  Governor  had  become  en- 
gaged in  a  full-scale  battle  over  a  series  of  bills  designed  to  establish 
stricter  controls  on  the  operations  of  gas  and  transportation  companies 
and  to  impose  taxes  on  their  franchises  or  earnings.  None  of  the 
measures  was  conceived  by  Roosevelt;  yet  all  received  his  considered 
support  once  he  decided  they  were  efficacious. 

The  most  significant  was  a  bill  for  the  taxation  of  the  value  and  the 
tangible  assets  of  all  street  railway,  gas,  electric,  and  water  franchises. 
The  measure  had  been  introduced  by  Senator  John  Ford,  a  Demo- 
cratic lawyer  and  economist,  and  it  was  brought  out  of  committee  in 
March,  1899.  Roosevelt  approved  the  Ford  bill  in  principle;  and 
over  the  remonstrations  of  Elihu  Root,  who  was  lobbying  for  the 
Astoria  Gas  Company  and  had  written  a  bill  responsive  to  that  com- 
pany's interests,  he  also  favored  proposals  to  level  a  specific  tax  on 
the  earnings  of  the  franchises.  "Ought  there  not  be  some  arrangement 
by  which,  if  the  franchises  prove  very  valuable,  a  portion  of  the  gross 
earnings  should  be  paid  to  the  public  treasury?"  the  Governor  wrote 
Platt  at  the  time.  "I  have  no  sympathy  whatsoever  with  the  demagogic 
cry  against  corporations  when  those  corporations  render  public  serv- 
ice," he  told  a  state  senator  the  same  day.  "But  where,  by  act  of  the 
legislature,  and  through  taking  possession  of  a  part  of  the  public 
domain,  state  or  municipal,  the  corporation  gets  advantages,  it  should 
be  taxed  for  them  in  some  intelligent  way." 

Jolted  by  this  threat  to  their  privileged  position,  the  corporations 
raised  a  tremendous  outcry  through  their  retainers  in  the  legislature 
and  elsewhere.  But  small  property  holders  all  over  the  state  stood  to 
gain  relief  in  the  amount  the  utilities  corporations  were  taxed;  they 
exerted  such  an  effective  counterpressure  on  members  of  the  legisla- 
ture that  passage  of  a  token  tax  bill  became  virtually  inevitable. 


116  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

Meanwhile,  Governor  Roosevelt  pondered  over  the  larger  question 
of  the  state's  over-all  tax  structure.  His  own  knowledge  was  deficient, 
so  he  characteristically  consulted  the  experts — Professor  Richard  T. 
Ely  of  the  University  of  Wisconsin,  George  Gunton  an  independent 
labor  economist,  and  Professor  E.  R.  A.  Seligman  of  Columbia  Uni- 
versity, the  nation's  foremost  authority  on  public  finance.  Impressed 
further  by  the  complexity  of  their  responses,  Roosevelt  on  March  27 
sent  a  special  message  to  the  legislature  recommending  the  creation 
of  a  joint  committee  to  study  the  situation  and  report  to  the  next 
legislature.  The  message  pointed  out  that  farmers,  mechanics,  and 
tradesmen  bore  a  disproportionate  share  of  the  tax  burden,  and  it 
pronounced  the  light  taxation  of  corporations  an  "evident  injustice." 

The  supporters  of  Senator  Ford  were  struck  dumb  by  the  Gover- 
nor's action.  Angrily,  they  interpreted  Roosevelt's  proposal  as  a 
shrewd  maneuver  to  evade  a  showdown  with  the  corporations  and  the 
Platt  machine.  Roosevelt  vehemently  denied  that  it  was;  yet  he  argued 
that  the  Ford  bill  might  prove  "so  crude  a  measure  as  to  provoke  a 
revolt,  or  else  be  inoperative."  In  spite  of  an  admission  that  special 
taxes  might  be  advisable,  moreover,  he  strongly  urged  consideration 
of  a  broader  and  more  inclusive  program  than  that  offered  by  Ford. 
Whatever  the  political  import  of  these  subterfuges,  it  is  nevertheless 
clear  that  Roosevelt's  belief  that  corporations  should  bear  a  tax 
burden  more  commensurate  with  their  resources  placed  him  at  an 
opposite  economic  pole  from  Tom  Platt,  Benjamin  Odell,  Chauncey 
Depew,  Elihu  Root,  and  most  of  the  other  leaders  of  his  party. 

During  the  next  month  the  Governor  reversed  himself  by  coming 
out  again  for  the  Ford  bill,  and  as  the  session  drew  to  a  close  he  threw 
the  full  force  of  his  office  and  powerful  personality  behind  it.  To  ease 
the  way  for  legislators  beholden  to  the  corporations — one  such  blandly 
explained  that  he  had  "received  orders  not  to  pass  it" — Roosevelt 
agreed  to  send  a  special,  emergency  message  to  the  Assembly.  He 
submitted  it  the  night  before  adjournment,  but  Speaker  Fred  Nixon, 
a  Platt  man,  refused  to  read  it  for  fear  of  offending  the  "Easy  Boss." 
Meanwhile  the  Governor  was  warned  that  he  could  not  expect  to  run 
for  office  again  "as  no  corporation  would  subscribe  to  a  campaign 
fund  if  I  was  on  the  ticket."  The  result,  Platt  later  affirmed,  was  that 
Roosevelt  "clinched  his  fist  and  gritted  his  teeth,  and  drove  the  fran- 
chise tax-law  through  the  legislature." 


THE    FINAL   PREPARATION  117 

Enraged  by  this  frontal  assault  on  his  power  base,  Platt  on  May  6 
wrote  the  letter  in  which  he  questioned  Roosevelt's  concept  of  the 
relations  between  capital  and  the  public.  "At  the  last  moment,  and  to 
my  very  great  surprise,  you  did  a  thing  which  has  caused  the  business 
community  of  New  York  to  wonder  how  far  the  notions  of  Populism, 
as  laid  down  in  Kansas  and  Nebraska,  have  taken  hold  upon  the 
Republican  party  of  the  State  of  New  York,"  the  irate,  sixty-five- 
year-old  boss  added.  Platt  concluded  by  predicting  that  the  Democrats 
would  capture  control  of  the  state  in  1900  unless  Roosevelt  changed 
his  ways. 

The  Governor  was  now  in  command,  the  bill  being  his  to  sign  or 
veto.  He  was  alternately  ingenuous  and  disingenuous.  He  wrote  Platt 
that  he  would  have  preferred  to  take  no  action  and  that  the  bill  was 
"forced  upon"  him.  But  he  also  wrote  that  his  study  of  the  problem 
had  convinced  him  that  the  bill  "was  along  the  right"  lines,  and  he 
responded  directly  to  Platt's  charge  that  he  was  fostering  Populism: 

I  do  not  believe  that  it  is  wise  ...  for  us  as  a  party  to  take 
refuge  in  mere  negation  and  to  say  that  there  are  no  evils  to  be  cor- 
rected. It  seems  to  me  that  our  attitude  should  be  one  of  correcting 
the  evils  and  thereby  showing  that  ...  the  Republicans  hold  the 
just  balance  and  set  our  faces  as  resolutely  against  improper  cor- 
porate influence  on  the  one  hand  as  against  demagogy  and  mob 
rule  on  the  other. 

Until  1912  that  remained  Roosevelt's  abiding  hope. 

Roosevelt  was  of  no  mind  to  veto  the  measure — he  later  termed  it 
"the  most  important  law  passed  in  recent  times  by  any  American 
state  legislature" — yet  he  wanted  to  remedy  its  imperfections.  He 
consequently  decided  to  call  immediately  a  special  session  to  amend 
the  bill.  Platt  and  his  cohorts  would  then  have  to  accept  his  construc- 
tive amendments  or  suffer  the  original  measure's  being  signed  into 
law  during  the  thirty-day  period  authorized  for  that  purpose.  The 
machine  was  thus  cornered.  As  Roosevelt  confided  to  Lodge,  many 
corporations  preferred  in  the  showdown  "to  be  blackmailed  by 
Tammany  rather  than  to  pay  their  just  dues  to  an  honest  Board  of 
Assessors."  Meanwhile,  so  Roosevelt  wrote,  Platt's  son,  Frank,  and 
the  corporation  attorneys  tried  to  sell  him  "a  gold  brick,  by  putting 
in  seemingly  innocent  provisions  which  would  have  made  the  taxation 
a  nullity."  He  refused,  however,  to  yield.  "I  told  them  that  unless 


118  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

they  passed  the  bill  exactly  as  I  wished  it,  I  should  sign  the  Ford  bill," 
he  reported  to  Lodge. 

Cowed  by  Roosevelt's  threat,  the  machine  reluctantly  swung  behind 
the  Governor's  amendments.  These  authorized  state  officials  to  make 
the  assessments  and  provided  for  evaluation  of  corporate  property  as 
realty  rather  than  in  terms  of  securities  which  could  easily  be  under- 
valued. 

The  conservatives'  wrath  at  the  Governor's  triumph  was  almost 
boundless.  The  New  York  Times  called  the  franchise  tax  "the  robber 
baron  science  of  taxation  ruthlessly  applied."  Chauncey  Depew, 
solicitous  of  the  small  interests  for  perhaps  the  only  time  in  his  career, 
mournfully  predicted  that  every  country  trolley  line  in  the  state  would 
be  driven  out  of  business.  And  the  Brooklyn  Daily  Eagle  first  labeled 
the  bill  "communistic,"  then  castigated  it  as  an  "invasion  of  Bryan's 
vocabulary  or  an  infringement  of  geographical  rights  of  use  and  sale 
in  Bryan's  territory." 

That  the  franchise  tax  was  as  significant  economically  as  Roosevelt 
thought  is  questionable.  There  is  no  doubt,  however,  that  it  was  a 
first  major  thrust  at  corporative  privilege  and  as  such  was  a  milestone 
in  the  development  of  economic  justice  in  New  York  State.  Even  more 
important,  it  nurtured  the  Governor's  growing  realization  that  many 
industrial  problems  were  beyond  the  capacity  of  local  authorities  to 
resolve.  Laissez-faire,  Roosevelt  came  more  and  more  to  see,  would 
have  to  be  abandoned  if  the  corporations  were  to  be  made  responsible 
to  the  society  that  sustained  them. 

Several  other  episodes  also  contributed  to  the  views  on  trusts  that 
later  characterized  Roosevelt's  presidency.  When,  during  his  third 
month  in  office,  Armour  &  Company  offered  to  settle  for  $20,000 
fines  totaling  $1,500,000  for  violations  of  the  law  against  the  sale  of 
oleomargarine  as  butter,  he  indignantly  refused  (Platt's  son  termed 
Roosevelt's  action  "admirable,  even  if  it  was  not  what  I  wanted"). 
And  when,  again,  he  learned  that  unsound  insurance  companies  were 
defaulting  in  their  obligations  to  the  public,  he  gave  his  signature  to 
a  measure  requiring  all  fire  or  marine  insurance  companies  to  have  a 
minimum  capitalization  of  $200,000.  He  also  signed  a  bill  designed 
to  strengthen  the  resources  of  savings  banks  by  limiting  their  invest- 
ments in  real  estate  mortgage  and  railroad  bonds  though  it  encouraged 
investment  in  the  large,  financially  sound  corporations  at  the  expense 
of  smaller  and  less  stable  companies  and  served  the  railroads'  interests 


THE   FINAL   PREPARATION  119 

as  well.  Finally,  he  approved  a  bill  authorizing  the  State  Supreme 
Court  or  its  agents  to  inspect  the  books  and  vouchers  of  corporations. 
Then,  in  the  special  session,  he  endorsed  antimonopoly  legislation 
bearing  on  transportation  rates.  His  first  year  in  office  was  further 
highlighted  by  the  passage  of  several  bills  designed  to  improve  the 
election  and  civil  service  laws. 

Roosevelt  had  not  won  every  issue;  nor  had  he  always  been  as 
independent  of  Platt  as  he  later  remembered.  His  most  crushing  defeat 
was  on  a  bill  to  place  the  New  York  City  police  department  under 
state  control.  Partly  in  order  to  stamp  out  election  frauds  by  Tam- 
many, Tom  Platt  had  pressed  a  bill  to  establish  a  single  police  com- 
missioner for  the  city,  said  commissioner  to  be  appointed  by  the 
governor.  Because  of  the  opposition  of  upstate  Republicans  and 
Tammany  Democrats,  however,  the  measure  failed.  Platt  thereupon 
had  a  group  of  attorneys  draw  up  a  new  bill,  the  so-called  Constabu- 
lary Bill,  which  would  have  created  a  state  police  commissioner  em- 
powered to  appoint  and  supervise  the  chiefs  in  all  major  cities. 

Roosevelt  was  thereby  impaled  on  the  horns  of  a  dilemma.  He  had 
bitterly  opposed  Plan's  effort  to  dominate  the  police  department  when 
he  headed  the  Board  of  Commissioners;  yet  the  New  York  force  had 
regressed  considerably  in  the  three  years  since  he  left  office.  Platt's 
bill  embodied  much  that  Roosevelt  approved,  especially  in  its  pro- 
visions for  civil  service  examinations  in  all  the  cities  affected,  and  he 
further  believed  that  it  was  probably  the  only  way  to  assure  honest 
elections.  After  much  soul-searching,  he  decided  to  give  the  Con- 
stabulary Bill  his  endorsement.  But  in  the  end  he  was  forced  to 
abandon  it,  so  concerted  and  vehement  was  the  opposition  to  it.  He 
was  similarly  forced  to  give  up  such  faint  hope  as  he  had  of  amending 
the  Raines  Law,  the  noxious  liquor  law  which  had  proved  such  a 
challenge  to  law  enforcement  during  his  term  as  police  commissioner. 

The  Governor's  labor  record  proved  no  less  controversial.  Although 
his  insight  into  the  causes  of  labor  strife  was  surely  deeper  than  in 
earlier  years,  the  memory  of  the  Haymarket  Riot,  the  Homestead,  the 
Pullman,  and  other  violent  strikes  lingered  on;  and  even  as  he  made 
measured  contributions  to  the  workingmen's  welfare  the  fear  of  labor 
on  the  march  was  always  close  to  the  surface. 

Thus  Roosevelt  once  accepted  uncritically  a  report  of  the  Board 
of  Mediation  which  wrongly  exonerated  a  traction  company  from 


120  POWER  AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

charges  that  it  was  violating  the  ten-hour  law.  On  another  occasion 
he  alerted  the  state  militia  for  strike  duty  without  real  cause.  And  on 
a  third  he  called  out  the  National  Guard  to  prevent  rioting  by  grossly 
underpaid  Italian  workmen  on  the  Croton  Dam  project.  A  riot,  one 
death,  and  suppression  of  a  valid  strike  resulted.  Roosevelt's  precipi- 
tate action,  like  that  of  President  Cleveland's  in  the  Pullman  strike 
five  years  before,  was  partly  instinctive,  but  fundamentally  it  reflected 
the  fact  that  society,  and  especially  responsible  government  officials, 
were  so  biased  that  objective  information  was  difficult  to  obtain. 
Unlike  Cleveland,  however,  Roosevelt  perceived  that  something  was 
basically  wrong.  He  characteristically  sought  remedial  action. 

Roosevelt's  first  message  as  governor  had  given  more  space  to  labor 
relations  than  to  any  other  subject.  The  problem  was  not  too  few 
laws,  he  asserted,  but  rather  "the  lack  of  proper  means  of  enforcing 
them."  He  consequently  recommended  that  their  enforcement  be 
placed  under  the  board  of  factory  inspectors,  that  the  number  of  in- 
spectors be  raised  to  fifty,  and  that  the  governor  be  authorized  to 
appoint  ten  unsalaried  workers,  presumably  interested  social  workers. 
These  proposals  had  been  widely  endorsed  by  union  leaders,  though 
radicals  complained  that  the  program  was  not  comprehensive  enough. 

As  the  session  unfolded,  the  labor  question  continued  to  absorb 
much  of  the  Governor's  energy.  He  counseled  with  union  officials  far 
more  than  any  of  his  predecessors  had  done.  And  within  the  limits  of 
his  philanthropic  point  of  view,  he  made  several  modest  advances  in 
redressing  the  balance  against  labor.  His  first  concrete  achievement 
came  on  April  1,  1899,  when,  over  the  concerted  opposition  of 
employer  representatives,  he  signed  bills  providing  for  more  stringent 
regulation  of  tenement  working  conditions,  for  increases  in  the  number 
and  authority  of  factory  inspectors,  and  for  limitations  on  the  hours 
of  women  and  minors. 

The  Governor  also  won  labor's  approval  by  supporting  a  bill  that 
strengthened  the  eight-hour-day  law  for  state  employees.  It  was  the 
duty  of  the  state,  he  said  in  a  memorandum  released  to  the  press  as 
he  signed  the  bill,  "to  set  a  good  example  as  an  employer  of  labor, 
both  as  to  the  number  of  hours  of  labor  exacted  and  as  to  paying  a 
just  and  reasonable  wage."  Conversely,  Roosevelt  aroused  labor's  ire 
by  vetoing  a  bill  to  reduce  the  long  hours  of  drug  clerks.  "I  am  very 
much  puzzled,"  he  explained  to  Jacob  Riis: 


THE    FINAL    PREPARATION  121 

.  .  .  You  and  Seth  Low  and  Reynolds  are  for  it  and  I  have  had 
some  touching  letters  from  drug  clerks  .  .  .  while  the  smaller  east 
and  west  side  druggists  who  keep  but  one  clerk  say  it  would  mean 
absolute  ruin.  .  .  .  What  I  am  anxious  to  do  is  whatever  will  really 
benefit  the  druggist  clerks  in  the  smaller  shops.  .  .  . 

I  wish  you  would  take  the  bill  .  .  .  and  ...  go  to  some  small 
druggists  anywhere  ...  on  the  East  Side,  and  find  out  if  you  can 
what  some  of  the  clerks  and  some  of  the  small  druggists  really  think 
about  it,  and  what  they  believe  its  effects  really  would  be. 

But  the  labor  issue  which  most  excited  Roosevelt  was  the  bitter 
struggle  of  New  York  City's  schoolteachers  for  a  minimum  salary 
schedule.  A  bill  embodying  their  demands  had  been  vetoed  by  Roose- 
velt's predecessor  on  the  grounds  that  teachers'  salaries  should  be 
fixed  by  city  officials.  Roosevelt  entertained  similar  views  at  first;  but 
after  conferring  with  Nicholas  Murray  Butler  and  the  New  York  City 
Superintendent  of  Schools  he  came  out  for  state  action  in  a  ringing 
public  statement.  The  prevailing  level  of  salaries  inflicts  "grinding 
injury  on  people  who  are  more  than  any  others  responsible  for  the 
upbringing  of  the  citizens  of  the  next  generation,"  he  declared.  The 
level  must  be  raised. 

Roosevelt  was  too  firm  an  advocate  of  the  merit  principle  to  endorse 
increases  based  solely  on  length  of  service,  however;  on  that  account 
he  opposed  the  bill  then  pending.  But  the  measure  sailed  through  both 
houses  of  the  legislature  over  his  objections.  Caught  thus  between  his 
conviction  that  a  general  increase  was  desirable  and  that  superiority 
rather  than  mediocrity  should  be  rewarded,  Roosevelt  finally  compro- 
mised. He  accepted  the  minimum-salary  feature  after  persuading  the 
teachers'  representatives  to  agree  to  inclusion  of  a  partial  merit  clause. 
He  then  combined  "pleasure  with  duty,"  and  signed  the  bill. 

The  action  was  characteristic  of  the  mature  Roosevelt.  He  deplored 
waste,  and  he  relentlessly  moved  against  it  whenever  feasible.  But  he 
no  longer  was  obsessed,  as  he  had  been  fifteen  years  before,  with  the 
need  for  low  taxes.  Only  infrequently  during  his  later  career  did  he 
permit  short-term  considerations  of  economy  to  thwart  programs  he 
deemed  in  the  public  interest. 

Those  first  four  and  one-half  months  in  Albany  had  been  the  most 
sustained  effort  of  all.  From  the  colorful  inaugural  parade  in  near 
zero  weather  and  the  reception  for  six  thousand  people  on  New  Year's 
Day  until  the  last  bill  was  studied  and  signed  into  law  in  May,  Roose- 


122  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

velt  had  been  immersed  in  his  duties.  Veteran  newspapermen  were 
amazed  at  his  energy  and  work  habits.  He  maintained  a  rigorous 
schedule,  conferred  with  numberless  visitors — corporation  lawyers, 
labor  leaders,  politicians,  social  workers,  college  professors — and 
usually  held  two  press  conferences  a  day.  "With  a  disregard  of 
precedent  that  puzzles  the  politicians,"  the  New  York  Times  observed, 
"he  has  torn  down  the  curtain  that  shut  in  the  Governor  and  taken 
the  public  into  his  confidence  .  .  .  beyond  what  was  ever  known 
before." 

It  was  during  the  governorship,  also,  that  TR  became  friendly  with 
Finley  Peter  Dunne.  "I  regret  to  state  that  my  family  and  intimate 
friends  are  delighted  with  your  review  of  my  book,"  he  wrote  Dunne 
shortly  after  his  "Mr.  Dooley"  had  retitled  Roosevelt's  The  Rough 
Riders  "Alone  in  Cubia."  What's  more,  he  informed  Dunne,  your 
work  is  full  of  "profound  philosophy,"  even  on  our  points  of  dis- 
agreement. "I  am  an  Expansionist,  but  your  delicious  phrase  about 
'take  up  the  white  man's  burden  and  put  it  on  the  coon,'  exactly  hit 
off  the  weak  spot  in  my  own  theory;  though  mind  you,  I  am  by  no 
means  willing  to  give  up  the  theory  yet." 

One  regrettable  incident  marred  the  Governor's  satisfaction  with 
his  first  year's  achievements.  About  a  month  after  he  took  office  he 
had  been  forced  to  decide  whether  a  Brooklyn  woman  who  had 
killed  her  stepdaughter  and  assaulted  her  husband  with  an  ax  in  a 
jealous  frenzy  should  be  executed.  Humanitarians,  women's  organiza- 
tions, and  sensational  newspapers  subjected  him  to  heavy  pressure  to 
commute  the  sentence.  He  was  also  warned  that  no  governor  who 
approved  the  execution  of  a  woman  could  possibly  be  elected  Presi- 
dent (such  a  threat,  he  wrote,  was  "the  last  thing  that  will  influence 
me").  Even  his  own  Victorian  consideration  for  the  gentler  sex 
pointed  toward  commutation.  But  his  compulsion  for  justice  and  his 
advanced  intellectual  views  toward  women  pulled  him  the  other  way. 
Roosevelt  had  never  abandoned  the  partially  feminist  attitudes  of  his 
Harvard  years  and  had,  in  fact,  won  the  plaudits  of  feminists  by 
advocating  woman  suffrage  for  school  board  elections  in  his  first 
annual  message.  After  studying  the  case  and  receiving  medical  reports 
that  the  murderess  was  sane,  he  approved  the  death  sentence,  ex- 
plaining at  a  press  conference  that  he  could  not  accept  sex  as  a  valid 
reason  for  clemency.  The  murderess  was  executed  on  March  20,  the 
first  woman  to  die  in  the  electric  chair  in  New  York  State. 


THE    FINAL   PREPARATION  123 

The  unpleasantness  of  that  episode  was  soon  forgotten.  In  April 
and  May  had  come  the  legislative  victories,  and  in  June  a  triumphal 
trip  by  special  train  to  Las  Vegas  for  the  Rough  Riders'  first  reunion. 
Roosevelt  was  greeted  warmly  all  through  the  Middle  West  and  from 
Kansas  onward  to  his  destination  he  received  one  thunderous  ovation 
after  another.  Again  and  again  local  newspapers  boomed  him  for  the 
vice-presidency  in  1900  and  the  presidency  in  1904,  and  many  small- 
town editors  even  proposed  that  he  supplant  McKinley  on  the  Re- 
publican ticket  in  1900.  He  repeatedly  sought  to  steer  them  off  by 
declaring  emphatically  for  the  President's  re-election,  and  after  he 
returned  home  he  visited  Washington  to  affirm  his  loyalty  to  the 
President.  Nevertheless,  he  could  no  longer  dismiss  the  presidency 
from  his  mind. 

Roosevelt's  second  year  in  office  was  in  substantially  the  same 
pattern  as  his  first.  In  December  Platt's  lieutenant,  Benjamin  Odell, 
undertook  to  advise  Roosevelt  on  his  annual  message,  urging  him  to 
abandon  his  campaign  for  stronger  employers'  liability  legislation  and 
to  modify  his  recommendations  for  increased  publicity  of  corporate 
earnings.  He  also  requested  the  Governor  to  tone  down  his  remarks 
on  the  canal  frauds.  But  the  Governor  was  too  far  committed  to  a 
constructive  approach  to  these  problems  to  heed  his  advice. 

In  compliance  with  his  original  agreement  to  consult  with  the 
machine,  however,  Roosevelt  submitted  a  proof  of  his  message  to 
Platt  before  it  was  delivered  on  January  3,  1900.  "All  the  important 
parts  I  had  gone  over  by  various  experts,"  he  disarmingly  explained. 
That  was  precisely  the  point.  The  Platt  forces  bitterly  resented  his 
association  with  intellectuals  or,  as  they  called  them,  "visionary  re- 
formers"; but  to  little  avail.  Roosevelt  was  too  astute  to  adopt  Platt's 
ways  as  his  own  and  he  was  too  aware  of  the  profundity  of  the 
problems  he  faced  to  attempt  to  devise  a  program  without  aid  from 
specialists.  "I  have  come  to  the  conclusion  that  I  have  mighty  little 
originality  of  my  own,"  he  wrote  President  Andrew  White  of  Cornell 
at  the  time.  "What  I  do  is  to  try  to  get  ideas  from  men  whom  I  regard 
as  experts  along  certain  lines,  and  then  try  to  work  out  those  ideas." 
To  Lemuel  Quigg,  another  Platt  lieutenant,  he  tried  further  to  explain 
himself: 

As  for  my  impulsiveness  and  my  alliance  with  labor  agitators, 
social  philosophers,  taxation  reformers  and  the  like,  I  will  also  go  over 
all  these  questions  with  you  when  we  meet.  I  want  to  be  perfectly 


124  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

sane  in  all  of  these  matters,  but  I  do  have  a  good  deal  of  fellow 
feeling  for  our  less  fortunate  brother,  and  I  am  a  good  deal  puzzled 
over  some  of  the  inequalities  in  life,  as  life  now  exists.  I  have  a 
horror  of  hysterics  or  sentimentality,  and  I  am  about  the  last  man 
in  the  world  who  sympathizes  with  revolutionary  tactics,  or  with 
the  effort  to  make  the  thrifty,  the  wise  and  the  brave  go  down  to 
the  level  of  the  unthrifty,  the  slothful  and  the  cowardly.  I  would  a 
great  deal  rather  have  no  change  than  a  change  that  would  put  a 
premium  upon  idleness  and  folly.  All  I  want  to  do  is  cautiously  to 
feel  my  way  to  see  if  we  cannot  make  the  general  conditions  of 
life  a  little  easier, — a  little  better. 

And  so  Roosevelt  continued  to  govern  by  consultation  with  experts. 
It  was  a  technique  that  Robert  M.  La  Follette  was  to  use  more  in- 
tensively, more  creatively,  and  more  dramatically  the  next  year  as 
governor  of  Wisconsin,  and  it  has  come  down  in  history  as  the 
Wisconsin  Idea. 

For  example,  the  trust  section  of  Roosevelt's  second  annual  message 
was  written  in  collaboration  with  President  Arthur  T.  Hadley  of  Yale, 
Professor  Jeremiah  W.  Jenks  of  Cornell,  and  Professor  Seligman  as 
well  as  Elihu  Root  and  James  B.  Dill,  who  had  recently  drafted  the 
New  Jersey  statute  on  holding  companies.  It  reflected  Roosevelt's 
acceptance  of  the  inevitability  of  corporate  growth  and  his  moral 
revulsion  against  corporate  malpractices.  And  it  came  out  forthrightly 
for  government  regulation.  It  advocated  publicity  of  corporate  earn- 
ings, proclaimed  the  right  of  the  state  to  intervene  against  monopoly, 
and  asserted  that  corporations  should  not  be  exempted  from  taxation 
because  of  their  own  mismanagement  of  resources.  "Our  laws,"  the 
message  stated  in  words  that  would  become  increasingly  familiar 
during  Roosevelt's  presidential  and  Bull  Moose  years,  "should  be  so 
drawn  as  to  protect  and  encourage  corporations  which  do  their  honest 
duty  by  the  public;  and  to  discriminate  sharply  against  those  organ- 
ized in  a  spirit  of  mere  greed,  for  improper  speculative  purposes." 

The  legislature  failed  to  act  on  the  proposals,  however,  and  Roose- 
velt went  out  of  office  with  his  program  unfulfilled.  Aside  from  bring- 
ing the  trust  problem  into  political  focus,  their  chief  value,  as  Wallace 
Chessman,  the  historian  of  Roosevelt's  governorship,  concludes,  was 
in  the  definition  they  gave  Roosevelt's  own  thought. 

The  Governor's  attitude  toward  public  utilities  was  similarly  re- 
vealing of  his  nondoctrinaire  quality  of  mind.  'There  is  grave  danger 


THE    FINAL   PREPARATION  125 

in  attempting  to  establish  invariable  rules,"  he  said  in  a  passage 
defending  public  ownership  of  the  New  York  City  water  supply.  "In 
one  instance  a  private  corporation  may  be  able  to  do  the  work  best. 
In  another  the  State  or  city  may  do  it  best.  In  yet  a  third,  it  may  be 
to  the  advantage  of  everybody  to  give  free  scope  to  the  power  of 
some  individual  captain  of  industry." 

The  Governor's  handling  of  the  canal  frauds  likewise  foreshadowed 
the  attitudes  of  his  presidency.  Early  in  his  first  year  he  had  appointed 
two  anti-Tammany  Democrats  of  high  repute,  Austen  G.  Fox  and 
Wallace  MacFarlane,  to  serve  as  special  counsel.  After  an  exhaustive 
investigation,  Fox  and  MacFarlane  reported  that  criminal  prosecution 
of  the  former  officials  charged  with  fraud  was  inadvisable  and  im- 
practicable. During  the  first  week  in  April,  1899,  however,  a  coalition 
of  Tammany  Democrats  and  Platt  Republicans  decided  to  refrain 
from  appropriating  $20,000  needed  to  complete  the  investigation. 
When  he  heard  the  reports,  Roosevelt  flew  into  a  rage.  With  flashing 
eyes  and  gleaming  teeth  he  vowed  that  the  investigation  would  go  on 
if  he  had  to  pay  for  it  out  of  his  own  pocket  or  raise  a  public  sub- 
scription. "Governor's  Ire  Kindles";  "Roosevelt  In  Fighting  Mood"; 
"Governor  Indignant!",  the  papers  reported.  Four  days  later  Roosevelt 
sent  in  a  special  message  urging  passage  of  the  appropriation.  Reluc- 
tantly, the  Democratic  and  Republican  machines  bowed  to  the  public 
outcry  set  off  by  the  Governor's  outburst. 

Many  were  immune  under  the  terms  of  the  statute  of  limitations; 
others  were  safe  because  they  had  acted  within  the  letter  of  a  badly 
drawn  law.  Reviewing  the  findings  in  his  message  of  January  3,  1900, 
Roosevelt  concluded,  just  a  little  ingenuously,  that  "the  one  remedy 
was  a  thorough  change  in  the  methods  and  management."  This  had 
been  accomplished,  he  reported,  by  enactment  of  a  law  during  the 
previous  session  and  by  improved  administrative  techniques  which 
had  decreased  the  cost  of  operating  the  canals  25  per  cent  in  spite  of 
an  increase  in  traffic. 

As  the  new  session  advanced  Roosevelt's  cold  war  with  Platt  again 
became  momentarily  hot.  This  time  conflict  centered  on  the  reappoint- 
ment  of  Superintendent  of  Insurance  Louis  F.  Payn,  an  upstate 
spoilsman  and  one-time  lobbyist  for  Jay  Gould  who  had  earlier 
abused  civil  service  procedures  and  originally  opposed  Roosevelt's 
nomination  as  governor.  By  October,  1899,  Roosevelt  had  decided 
not  to  reappoint  Payn  when  his  term  expired  in  February.  Payn's 


126  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

standing  with  Platt  was  reinforced  by  the  support  of  the  insurance 
industry's  responsible  and  irresponsible  elements  alike,  however,  and 
the  Governor  was  not  sanguine  that  he  could  name  a  successor 
acceptable  to  the  machine. 

The  conflict  was  still  in  the  formative  stage  when  a  new  scandal 
involving  Payn  was  aired.  Newspapers  reported  that  the  State  Trust 
Company  had  made  an  unsupported  loan  of  $435,000  to  Payn,  whose 
salary  was  $7,000,  presumably  because  several  of  the  bank's  directors 
also  served  on  the  boards  of  insurance  companies  under  Payn's  super- 
vision. The  Governor's  resolve  to  displace  Payn  was  strengthened 
by  these  charges,  and  he  now  reaffirmed  his  intent  to  Platt.  The 
Senator  was  amenable  at  first,  but  when  Payn  indicated  that  he  would 
fight  for  his  job,  Platt  changed  his  mind.  An  impasse  then  threatened: 
Roosevelt  could  refuse  to  make  the  reappointment;  and  Platt  could 
prevent  the  confirmation  of  his  successor.  In  these  circumstances,  the 
Governor  reluctantly  prevailed  on  Platt's  close  friend,  Francis  J. 
Hendricks  of  Syracuse,  to  accept  the  appointment. 

To  Roosevelt  the  displacement  of  Payn  was  another  hard-won 
victory  for  good  government.  But  to  many  reformers  the  selection  of 
Hendricks  was  a  sellout  to  Platt,  and  they  indignantly  labeled  it  such. 
Hurt  and  irritated,  Roosevelt  unburdened  himself  to  his  friend  Louisa 
Lee  Schuyler.  "I  can  say  with  all  sincerity,"  he  wrote,  "that  I  do  not 
believe  that  any  Governor  but  myself  could  have  put  Mr.  Payn  out, 
backed  as  he  was  by  the  strongest  political  influences  in  the  State,  and 
in  addition  the  entire  enormous  money  power  of  the  big  insurance 
companies." 

You  can  have  no  conception  of  the  pressure,  political,  financial,  and 
every  other  kind  that  has  been  brought  to  bear  upon  me  to  keep 
him  in.  ...  If  I  had  done  what  the  Evening  Post  and  Dr.  Parkhurst 
and  Mr.  Godkin  and  the  smaller  fry  like  Jack  Chapman  advised,  I 
would  not  have  had  ten  votes  in  the  Senate  to  confirm  my  man  and 
Payn  would  have  stayed  in  permanently. 

One  other  awkward  incident  marred  the  Payn  affair.  The  banking 
superintendent's  report  criticized  Elihu  Root,  the  State  Trust  Com- 
pany's legal  counselor  and  one  of  its  directors,  for  countenancing  the 
near  half-million-dollar  loan  to  Payn.  Roosevelt  responded  uncharac- 
teristically. He  buried  the  report,  ostensibly  to  avert  a  run  on  the  Trust 
Company,  but  also,  one  suspects,  to  protect  Root,  who  was  by  then 


THE   FINAL   PREPARATION  127 

Secretary  of  War,  from  unfavorable  publicity  (Root  and  the  other 
directors'  action  was  legally,  if  not  morally,  defensible).  So  at  least 
contended  the  World,  which  disclosed  Root's  involvement  and  charged 
that  the  Governor  had  wanted  "to  shield  a  personal  friend." 

It  might  be  argued,  though  surely  crudely,  that  Roosevelt  was  re- 
paying a  favor  (when  a  technicality  had  threatened  his  eligibility  to 
serve  as  governor,  Root  had  devised  an  argument  to  offset  it),  or  that 
he  was  reluctant  to  place  the  McKinley  administration  under  new 
embarrassment.  It  seems  more  likely,  however,  that  Roosevelt's  un- 
critical admiration  for  Root  was  in  this  case  his  controlling  motive. 

Incapable  of  panic,  loyal  yet  curiously  detached,  a  constructive 
adviser  on  programs  that  he  would  not  himself  have  initiated,  Elihu 
Root  was  to  his  intimates,  and  to  many  who  were  not,  the  embodiment 
of  wise  and  incisive  judgment.  He  was — and  the  comparison  is  not 
invidious — more  analytical  than  creative,  though  his  organizing  intelli- 
gence was  perhaps  the  finest  of  his  era;  and  his  mental  cast  was  both 
sharpened  and  narrowed  by  a  hard-tempered  realism  that  blunted  his 
resentments  even  as  it  dulled  his  enthusiasms.  He  was,  as  Morison 
with  his  usual  acuteness  puts  it,  "without  illusion  in  his  calculation  of 
what  had  to  be  done  or  could  be  done  by  the  human  agency,"  and 
he  had  no  conviction  that  "he  or  anyone  else  could  remold  the  con- 
dition of  things  much  closer  to  the  heart's  desire."  Lacking  the  moral 
fervor  that  inspires  men  to  supreme  acts  of  the  spirit,  Root's  appeal 
was  to  their  instinct  for  the  ordered  conditions  that  ease  the  imperfect 
path  of  progress  as  Roosevelt's,  for  all  his  own  similar  commitment, 
was  to  their  puissant  ideals  and  unfulfilled  emotions.  Such,  indubitably, 
was  Root's  pull  on  Roosevelt  himself. 

Understanding  intuitively  the  need  to  contain  his  rawer  impulses  as 
well  as  to  refine  his  nobler  ones,  Roosevelt  sought  in  this  confident, 
matter-of-fact  counselor,  thirteen  years  his  senior,  the  means  of  re- 
straint. And  Root,  standing  almost  always  firm  in  the  turbulent  back- 
wash of  Roosevelt's  surging  force,  supplied  the  want.  He  saw  as  few 
men  did  the  throbbing  tension  induced  by  Roosevelt's  unconscious 
urge  to  love  or  to  hate  and  even,  at  times,  to  rule  or  to  ruin,  and  he 
strove  in  his  quietly  self-assured  way  to  reduce  it;  and  also,  because 
he  was  at  heart  conservative,  to  keep  Roosevelt's  creative  drives 
within  bounds.  Repeatedly,  Root  turned  his  biting,  sardonic  humor 
on  his  ebullient  friend,  and  Roosevelt,  seemingly  sensing  the  need  for 
his  own  deflation,  delighted  in  its  edge. 


128  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Even  so,  the  relationship  was  not  without  impact  on  Root.  What 
this  eminent  public  servant  possessed  in  administrative  ability,  he 
lacked  in  boldness  of  imagination.  More  administrator  than  social 
philosopher,  he  recoiled  from  the  possible  ill  consequences  of  change 
as  other  men  were  attracted  by  its  potential  liberating  effect.  He 
suffered  especially  the  conservative's  dependence  on  convention,  and 
he  actually  opposed  Roosevelt's  corporate  tax  program  with  the  classic 
half-truth  that  "the  vast  preponderance  of  the  grand  fortunes"  had 
conferred  "great  benefits  on  the  community."  Yet  Root  was  never  a 
reactionary.  His  brief  was  for  a  moderate,  ordered,  and  closely  con- 
trolled progress.  And  in  the  daily  rub  of  minds  with  Roosevelt  during 
the  presidential  years,  his  conservatism  became  reasonably  viable. 
For  one  brief  decade,  indeed,  he  unenthusiastically  accepted  the  moral 
imperative  of  Roosevelt's  thrust  for  social  and  economic  justice. 

The  publicity  over  Payn  and  Root,  coupled  with  increasing  specu- 
lation about  the  Governor's  political  future,  detracted  from  the  other- 
wise substantial  enactments  of  Roosevelt's  second  year  in  office.  The 
law  of  1899  opening  corporation's  books  to  agents  of  the  supreme 
court  was  amended  to  open  them  to  stockholders  and  creditors.  A 
law  granting  a  monopoly  to  a  carriage  company  was  supplanted  by 
one  designed  to  preserve  competition  in  the  automotive  carriage  in- 
dustry. And  a  bill  forbidding  interest  charges  of  more  than  6  per  cent 
a  year  was  passed  and  signed. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  Governor  did  lose  or  concede  one  important 
round  to  the  machine.  Pursuant  to  the  recommendation  of  the  tax 
commission  appointed  in  the  spring  of  1899,  a  measure  instituting  a 
one  per  cent  tax  on  all  mortgages  and  banking  capital  was  introduced 
in  1900.  At  the  request  of  J.  P.  Morgan  and  other  finance  capitalists, 
however,  the  Platt  men  amended  it  so  as  to  exempt  the  New  York 
Central  Railroad  and  large  corporations  in  general  from  its  pro- 
visions. In  consequence,  the  state  lost  six  or  seven  million  dollars  in 
tax  revenue.  Although  Roosevelt  refused  to  support  the  Morgan-Platt 
amendments  because  of  their  discriminatory  nature,  he  inexplicably 
failed  to  fight  them  forcefully. 

Several  other  important  measures  were  enacted  in  1900  with 
Roosevelt's  active  support.  These  improved  the  civil  service  laws, 
standardized  the  labels  on  linen  cloth,  and  prohibited  newspapers 
from  soliciting  funds  from  candidates  for  political  office.  They  insti- 
tuted safeguards  on  the  letting  of  contracts  for  the  New  York  City 


THE    FINAL    PREPARATION  129 

water  supply,  and  they  prevented  the  traction  companies  from  laying 
four  sets  of  car  tracks  on  Bedford  Avenue  in  Brooklyn.  They  rounded 
out  the  Governor's  conservation  program  by  projecting  a  public  park 
on  the  Palisades  and  reorganizing  and  expanding  the  state  forest, 
fish,  and  game  program.  And  they  obliged  both  labor  and  the  farmers 
by  limiting  the  working  hours  of  drug  clerks  and  authorizing  bounties 
for  the  production  of  beet  sugar.  Rejecting  most,  though  regrettably 
not  all,  bills  he  believed  inimical  to  the  public  interest,  Roosevelt  also 
vetoed  or  returned  to  the  legislature  some  five  hundred  measures 
during  his  two-year  term. 

Among  the  approximately  one  thousand  bills  Roosevelt  signed  into 
law  were  two  that  strongly  affected  the  public  school  system.  The 
first,  which  he  spurred  on  with  an  emergency  message,  banned  race 
discrimination  and  repealed  a  previous  authorization  of  separate 
schools  for  Negroes  on  a  local-option  basis.  In  common  with  most 
white  Americans  of  the  period,  the  Governor  did  not  regard  Negroes 
in  general  as  the  equals  of  whites.  But  he  did  believe  that  many  indi- 
vidual Negroes  were  superior  to  individual  whites,  and  he  felt  deeply 
that  they  should  have  full  opportunity  to  prove  their  merit.  "My  chil- 
dren sit  in  the  same  school  with  colored  children,"  he  righteously 
remarked  when  the  bill  came  up. 

The  second  school  measure  carried  over  from  the  fight  for  higher 
salaries  for  teachers.  For  three  months  during  the  fall  of  1899  the 
Tammany-dominated  Board  of  Estimate  had  refused  to  pay  teachers 
their  salaries  in  Brooklyn  and  Queens.  Roosevelt  responded  by  push- 
ing through  an  emergency  bill  in  February,  1900,  that  directed  city 
officials  to  transfer  funds  to  meet  their  obligations  to  the  teachers. 
Then  in  May  he  approved  a  measure  designed  to  prevent  a  recurrence 
of  the  situation.  'The  difference  between  the  attitude  of  Tammany 
and  the  republicans,"  he  angrily  wrote  at  the  time,  "is  .  .  .  that 
Tammany  increased  the  salaries  of  all  the  useless  offices  but  reduced 
the  teachers  almost  to  bankruptcy;  whereas  the  republican  party 
which  is  pre-eminently  the  party  of  the  public  schools  has  stood  by 
these  schools  and  teachers." 

Reviewing  his  record  at  the  end  of  the  second  regular  session  in  the 
spring  of  1900,  Roosevelt  was  keenly  satisfied.  "I  think  I  have  been 
the  best  Governor  within  my  time,"  he  confided  to  his  uncle,  James 
Bulloch,  "better  either  than  Cleveland  or  Tilden." 

The  Governor's  estimate  of  his  relative  worth  was  probably  accu- 


130  POWER    AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

rate.  Within  the  shifting  limits  of  such  comparisons,  he  had  excelled 
both  Tilden  and  Cleveland.  All  three  were  men  of  estimable  integrity 
and  ability;  each  had  battled  corruption,  driven  through  important 
administrative  reforms,  and  yet  maintained  a  working  relationship 
with  elements  of  his  party  machine.  But  by  temperament  and  philoso- 
phy Tilden  and  Cleveland  had  been  more  passive  than  positive,  and 
their  administrations  had  suffered  for  it.  Where  they  had  refused  to 
tread,  Roosevelt  had  willingly  broken  new  ground.  They  had  been 
conservative  of  the  power  of  the  state;  but  Roosevelt,  conscientiously 
seeking  solutions  to  the  problems  forged  by  the  rampant  industrial 
order,  had  broken  sharply  with  the  laissez-faire  theory  and  existing 
concepts  of  state  and  local  relations.  They  had  been  solicitous  of  the 
traditional  prerogatives  of  corporations;  but  Roosevelt,  revealing  him- 
self receptive  to  the  moderate  progressive  thought  of  the  times,  had 
begun  to  believe  that  public  responsibilities,  including  tax  payments, 
were  correlative  to  the  possession  of  enormous  wealth  and  power. 
And  they  had  been  oblivious  to  the  plight  of  labor,  while  Roosevelt 
had  commenced  to  redress  its  prevailing  imbalance  with  capital. 

Besides  all  that,  Roosevelt  had  taken  major  steps  to  preserve  the 
wild  life,  forests,  and  natural  beauty  of  his  state.  He  had  made  a  stab 
at  arresting  the  spreading  curse  of  the  tenements.  And  he  had  imbued 
many  officials  with  a  sense  of  the  public  trust  and  instilled  in  others 
the  fear  of  dismissal.  Even  the  World,  implying  in  an  editorial  that 
it  might  have  crossed  party  lines  to  support  him  had  he  run  for  re- 
election, conceded  that  "the  controlling  purpose  and  general  course 
of  his  administration  have  been  high  and  good." 

It  would  be  an  exaggeration  to  say,  as  an  upstate  editor  did  say 
shortly  before  Roosevelt  was  nominated  for  Vice  President,  that  his 
"only  qualification  ...  for  the  office  of  Vice  President  is  fitness  for 
the  office  of  President."  But  it  would  not  be  extreme  to  suggest  that 
he  had  several  critical  qualifications  for  the  higher  office.  Of  these, 
none  was  more  significant  than  his  manifest  capacity  for  growth  and 
his  signal  ability  to  influence  the  flow  of  events  by  seizing  the  initiative 
at  the  strategic  moment — the  sure  measures  of  a  superior  leader.  In 
only  one  important  province,  and  that,  ironically,  the  one  he  regarded 
himself  as  strongest  in — foreign  affairs — were  Roosevelt's  qualifica- 
tions suspect  on  the  record.  Time  alone  would  reveal  whether  he 
also  possessed  the  strength  to  conquer  the  "Sturm  und  Drang"  im- 
pulses of  his  early  manhood. 


CHAPTER 


8 


THE    PEOPLE'S   CHOICE 


"Tis  Teddy  alone  that's  runnin',  and  he  ain't  r'runnin',  he's 
gallopinV 

— Mr.  Dooley 


Roosevelt  had  reached  the  fork  in  the  road.  From  June,  1899,  when 
Westerners  had  hailed  him  as  a  presidential  candidate  as  he  went 
out  to  the  Rough  Riders'  reunion  in  Las  Vegas,  until  June  of  the 
following  year,  when  the  Republican  convention  met  at  Philadelphia, 
his  political  future  evoked  recurrent  speculation.  And  by  the  time  the 
convention  delegates  detrained  in  the  Quaker  City  discussion  of 
whether  he  would  run  for  a  second  term  as  governor  or  would  be 
forced  up  and  out  to  the  vice-presidency  overshadowed  all  other 
questions. 

Roosevelt  most  wanted  to  return  to  Albany,  although  he  would 
have  settled  for  the  civil  governorship  of  the  Philippines.  But  he  had 
no  desire  to  accept  the  then  empty  honor  of  the  vice-presidency.  twl 
am  a  comparatively  young  man  .  .  .  and  I  like  to  work,"  he  wrote 
Lodge  in  February,  1900.  "I  do  not  like  to  be  a  figurehead."  Nor  did 
the  prospect  of  presiding  over  the  Senate  hold  any  appeal.  "I  should 
be  in  a  cold  shiver  of  rage  at  inability  to  answer  hounds  like 
Pettigrew  and  the  scarcely  more  admirable  Mason  and  Hale,"  he 
continued  uninhibitedly.  "I  would  be  seeing  continually  things  that 
I  would  like  to  do,  and  very  possibly  would  like  to  do  differently  from 
the  way  in  which  they  were  being  done."  Nevertheless,  a  number  of 
factors  militated  in  favor  of  the  vice-presidential  nomination.  Some 
were  within  his  control,  most  were  beyond  it. 

131 


132  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

On  January  20,  shortly  after  Roosevelt's  refusal  to  reappoint  Louis 
Payn  had  embarrassed  the  Platt  machine  anew,  the  "Easy  Boss"  had 
urged  the  vice-presidential  nomination  upon  the  Governor  during  one 
of  their  regular  meetings.  "Platt  is  afraid,"  Roosevelt  explained  to 
Lodge,  that  "unless  I  take  it  nobody  will  be  made  Vice-President  from 
New  York,  and  that  this  would  be  a  pity." 

The  Colonel's  naivete  was  characteristic.  He  almost  always  tended 
to  believe  well  of  those  he  was  thrown  in  with,  and  generally  with 
good  result.  His  confidence  brought  out  the  best  in  men  and  often 
inspired  near-fanatical  loyalty  and  devotion.  Sometimes,  however,  it 
backfired.  When  men's  moral  sensibilities  were  perverted  or  their 
material  stakes  were  great,  as  with  Tom  Platt  and  later  the  managers 
of  the  United  States  Steel  Corporation,  Roosevelt  could  be  deceived. 
Furthermore,  TR  never  quite  realized  the  overpowering  impact  of  his 
own  vibrant  personality.  Even  such  strong  characters  as  Elihu  Root 
and  Cabot  Lodge  sometimes  succumbed  to  it;  and  too  often  Roosevelt 
assumed  that  failure  to  challenge  his  enthusiastically  expressed  ideas 
implied  agreement.  On  the  whole,  however,  the  advantages  heavily 
outweighed  the  disadvantages. 

Roosevelt  had  left  Plan's  apartment  without  committing  himself  on 
the  vice-presidency.  Although  Lodge's  counsel  was  that  it  was  the 
"better"  and  "safer"  road  to  the  presidency,  he  soon  decided  against 
it.  "I  was  eager  to  have  a  regiment  in  the  war  and  if  there  was  another 
war  I  should  try  to  have  a  brigade,"  he  wrote  Benjamin  Odcll,  "but 
nothing  would  hire  me  to  continue  as  a  colonel  or  brigadier  general 
in  time  of  peace."  To  Platt  he  added  that  since  he  had  failed  to  amass 
a  fortune,  he  felt  honor  bound  to  leave  his  children  a  record  of 
achievement  in  politics  or  letters.  "Now,  as  Governor,  1  can  achieve 
something,"  he  concluded,  "but  as  Vice-President  I  should  achieve 
nothing." 

Both  Platt  and  Odell  were  unimpressed  by  the  Governor's  pro- 
tests; nor  did  they  change  their  attitude  when  TR  told  them  in  a 
second  conference  on  February  10  that  he  would  "a  great  deal  rather 
be  anything,  say  professor  of  history,  than  Vice-President."  Roose- 
velt's whole  program  as  governor — civil  service  reform,  corporate 
publicity  and  taxation,  and  enforcement  of  the  factory  laws — had  con- 
stituted a  near  frontal  assault  on  the  Republican  machine's  founda- 
tions, and  Platt  was  determined  to  avoid  a  second  and  possibly  more 


THE  PEOPLE'S  CHOICE  133 

sustained  attack.  Roosevelt's  gradual  realization  of  Platt's  real  motives 
is  set  forth  in  a  letter  to  Lodge: 

I  have  found  out  one  reason  why  Senator  Platt  wants  me 
nominated  ...  the  big-monied  men  with  whom  he  is  in  close 
touch  and  whose  campaign  contributions  have  certainly  been  no 
inconsiderable  factor  in  his  strength,  have  been  pressing  him  very 
strongly  to  get  me  put  in  the  Vice-Presidency,  so  as  to  get  me  out 
of  the  State.  It  was  the  big  insurance  companies,  possessing 
enormous  wealth,  that  gave  Payn  his  formidable  strength,  and  they 
to  a  man  want  me  out.  The  great  corporations  affected  by  the 
franchise  tax  have  also  been  at  the  Senator.  In  fact,  all  the  big- 
monied  interests  that  make  campaign  contributions  of  large  size 
and  feel  that  they  should  have  favors  in  return,  are  extremely 
anxious  to  get  me  out  of  the  State.  I  find  that  they  have  been  at 
Platt  for  the  last  two  or  three  months  and  he  has  finally  begun  to 
yield  to  them  and  to  take  their  view. 

Roosevelt's  resolve  to  serve  a  second  term  as  governor  was  sharp- 
ened by  his  insight  into  Platt's  design  and  especially,  one  suspects,  by 
his  desire  to  dissipate  the  lingering  suspicions  of  cowardice  left  by 
his  resignation  from  the  police  commissionership  four  years  before. 
As  he  also  wrote  Lodge,  "I  should  feel  like  a  coward  if  I  went  away 
from  this  work,  because  I  ran  the  risk  of  incurring  disaster  and  took 
a  position  where  I  could  not  fail,  for  the  simple  reason  that  I  could 
not  succeed."  Throughout  the  spring  of  1900,  therefore,  TR  sought 
diligently  to  suppress  the  developing  boom  for  his  nomination  as 
McKinley's  running  mate.  In  Chicago  on  April  26  he  told  reporters 
that  the  governorship  of  New  York  was  next  to  the  presidency  in  im- 
portance and  that  he  would  return  to  private  life  before  accepting  the 
vice-presidential  nomination;  and  in  a  formal  address  that  night  he 
refused  to  comment  though  his  audience  gave  him  a  standing,  fifteen- 
minute  ovation  and  chanted,  "We  want  you,  Teddy,  yes  we  do."  Two 
weeks  later  the  Governor  went  to  Washington  to  assure  McKinley 
and  Hanna  that  he  intended  to  stand  for  re-election  in  New  York. 
Roosevelt  also  reiterated  his  opposition  to  the  vice-presidency  to 
Secretary  of  War  Elihu  Root,  who  is  said  to  have  smiled  disarmingly 
and  replied:  "Of  course  not,  Theodore,  you're  not  fit  for  it." 

Meanwhile  Roosevelt  wrote  numerous  letters  to  his  Western  friends 
in  an  unavailing  effort  to  repress  their  mounting  enthusiasm.  He 
thought  for  a  while  that  he  had  contained  the  boom,  but  he  was  never 


134  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

overly  sanguine.  "If  I  were  actually  nominated;  and  if  I  were  unable 
to  stem  the  convention's  desire  to  nominate  me,  it  might  be  impossible 
to  refuse,"  he  confided  to  Joseph  B.  Bishop  in  April.  "Still,  maybe 
I  could  refuse  anyhow.  And  I  am  almost  sure  I  can  prevent  the 
nomination." 

Tom  Platt  viewed  the  Governor's  efforts  with  tongue  in  cheek,  for 
the  "Easy  Boss"  held  both  an  ace  and  a  trump.  The  ace  was  Senator 
Joseph  Foraker  of  Ohio,  a  number  of  lesser  anti-Hanna  men,  and 
Matthew  Quay  and  his  formidable  Pennsylvania  machine.  All  resented 
Mark  Hanna's  friendship  with  President  McKinley  and  his  hold  on 
the  Republican  National  Committee;  all  welcomed  the  opportunity  to 
cross  Hanna's  will  by  nominating  Roosevelt  for  the  vice-presidency. 

Platt's  trump  was  the  former  Rough  Rider's  irresistible  appeal  to 
the  Republican  rank  and  file  in  the  West.  During  the  sixteen  years 
that  had  passed  since  young  Roosevelt  had  staked  his  claim  in  the 
hearts  of  Westerners  they  had  followed  his  career  as  though  he  had 
been  a  native  son.  They  had  applauded  his  energetic  enforcement  of 
the  civil  service  laws  and  his  battles  against  vice  and  crime  in  New 
York  City,  and  they  had  thrilled  to  his  heroics  in  Cuba.  This  last 
circumstance  was  regrettable,  perhaps.  It  clouded  the  fact  that  TR's 
hold  upon  Westerners  was  actually  formed  by  his  prewar  record. 
The  Kansas  City  Star  pointed  this  out  editorially:  "Beneath  Roose- 
velt's chivalry  and  the  picturesque  style  which  has  aroused  the 
enthusiasm  of  the  Nation  there  is  an  intense  sense  of  duty  and  a 
moral  courage  that  is  invincible." 

The  record  of  Roosevelt  as  a  civil  officer  is  a  quite  sufficient  plea 
upon  which  to  go  before  the  people.  It  is  of  a  character  to  make 
plain  his  enmity  toward  corruption  and  his  devotion  to  public 
morality.  .  .  . 

The  Governor's  popularity  was  not  confined  to  the  West.  The 
Eastern  reformers  had  sometimes  recoiled  and  the  party  leaders  had 
frequently  squirmed,  but  TR  had  again  and  again  captured  the  im- 
agination of  the  great  middle  classes.  More  than  any  young  national 
leader  of  his  era,  Roosevelt  exemplified  the  perennial  personal 
virtues — honor,  courage,  and  duty — and  he  quickened  America's  con- 
science because  of  it.  Even  the  New  York  Sun,  which  was  always 
suspicious  of  TR's  economics,  conceded  as  much  just  after  the 
Republican  Convention  of  1900  ended: 


THE  PEOPLE'S  CHOICE  135 

People  got  to  saying,  'This  man  ROOSEVELT  seems  to  do  about 
what  he  thinks  is  right  and  doesn't  care  a  rap  for  the  consequences. 
He  must  be  all  right." 

When,  against  that  background,  Roosevelt  refused  to  say  that  he 
would  not  accept  if  chosen  and  insisted  on  going  to  Philadelphia  as 
a  delegate  on  the  grounds  that  it  would  be  cowardly  not  to  go,  his 
nomination  for  the  vice-presidency  was  virtually  foreordained.  As 
Platt  was  reported  to  have  said,  "Roosevelt  might  as  well  stand  under 
Niagara  Falls  and  try  to  spit  water  back  as  to  stop  his  nomination  by 
this  convention." 

The  New  York  boss  had  hardly  exaggerated.  Roosevelt  tried  for  a 
while  to  hold  back  the  flood.  And  when  Platt  told  him  the  night  the 
convention  opened  in  Philadelphia  on  June  19  that  he  would  prevent 
his  renomination  for  governor  if  he  turned  down  the  vice-presidential 
nomination,  TR  reportedly  replied  "that  this  was  a  threat,  which 
simply  rendered  it  impossible  for  me  to  accept,  that  if  there  was  to 
be  war  there  would  be  war,  and  that  that  was  all  there  was  to  it." 
Thereupon,  Roosevelt  added,  "I  bowed  and  left  the  room."  Platt's 
account  differs;  but  it  is  clear  that  there  had  been  a  tense  scene. 

Even  as  Roosevelt  resisted  Platt,  however,  the  waters  were  surging 
over.  Roosevelt  himself  had  earlier  sparked  a  spontaneous  demonstra- 
tion on  the  convention  floor  by  striding  briskly  to  his  seat  in  a  black 
civilian  version  of  the  Rough  Rider's  slouch  campaign  hat — "an 
acceptance  hat,"  so  one  delegate  dubbed  it.  And  for  hours  that  night 
scores  of  Western  delegates  noisily  paraded  up  and  down  the  cor- 
ridors outside  Hanna's  suite  shouting  "We  want  Teddy."  Meanwhile 
Quay's  Pennsylvania  forces  announced  their  endorsement  of  the  New 
York  Governor  while  Platt,  Quay,  and  Foraker  pressed  his  nomina- 
tion on  various  convention  leaders. 

All  through  the  next  day,  the  demands  for  Roosevelt's  nomination 
continued  to  mount.  The  Colonel  was  told  that  his  political  future 
hung  in  the  balance;  he  was  warned  that  the  West  might  go  to  Bryan 
if  he  rejected  the  nomination;  and  he  was  admonished  that  it  was  his 
duty  to  honor  the  wishes  of  his  legions  of  admirers.  He  may  also 
have  been  threatened  with  elimination  from  politics.  Succumbing 
finally  to  these  enormous  pressures,  he  agreed  to  accept  the  nomina- 
tion if  the  delegates  willed  it.  Late  that  night  Mark  Hanna,  who  had 
earlier  received  a  wire  from  McKinley  stating  that  he  did  not  intend 


136  POWER  AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

to  stand  in  Roosevelt's  way  if  the  convention  wanted  to  nominate  him, 
also  submitted. 

The  next  day,  after  McKinley  was  renominated,  a  portentous  hush 
fell  over  the  convention  as  LaFayette  Young,  head  of  the  Iowa  delega- 
tion, rose  to  his  feet  to  withdraw  the  name  of  Jonathan  Dolliver, 
Iowa's  favorite  son,  and  place  Theodore  Roosevelt's  in  nomination. 
It  was  the  moment  the  rank  and  file  had  been  waiting  for.  Hats  flew 
into  the  air,  state  standards  were  raised  from  the  floor,  and  pictures 
and  banners  appeared  out  of  nowhere  while  the  vast  assemblage 
sprang  to  its  feet  in  one  great  instinctive  movement.  The  band  struck 
up  "There'll  Be  a  Hot  Time  in  the  Old  Town  Tonight."  And  the 
delegations  roared  their  congratulations  at  the  Governor  as  they 
marched  exuberantly  past  the  New  York  section  where  Roosevelt  sat 
grimly  in  his  seat,  expressionless  except  for  a  tightening  of  lines 
around  his  mouth.  In  her  box  up  above,  Edith  Roosevelt  gasped 
momentarily,  then  flashed  a  smile. 

Finally  the  convention  quieted  for  the  seconding  speeches.  The 
most  eloquent  was  by  Chauncey  Depew,  whose  Republicanism  was 
the  antithesis  of  Theodore  Roosevelt's.  The  balloting  followed,  and 
when  Lodge  announced  the  near-unanimous  result,  the  rank  and  file 
gave  forth  the  mightiest  and  most  sustained  cheer  of  the  entire  con- 
vention. Roosevelt  was  nominated,  reported  an  obscure  country 
weekly,  not  because  of  the  bosses,  "but  because  the  convention  rec- 
ognized Theodore  Roosevelt  as  that  which  Henry  C.  Payne  of 
Wisconsin  had  called  him — 'not  New  York's  son,  but  the  nation's 
son.'  " 

Even  as  they  had  been  all  along,  however,  the  Governor's  emo- 
tions were  mixed.  Roosevelt's  "tail-feathers  were  all  down,"  Nicholas 
Murray  Butler,  who  saw  him  an  hour  after  he  had  made  his  decision 
to  submit  the  night  before,  remembered.  "The  fight  had  gone  out  of 
him  and  he  had  changed  his  former  tune  to  that  of  'I  cannot  disap- 
point my  Western  friends  if  they  insist.  ...  I  cannot  seem  to  be 
bigger  than  the  party.'  " 

Roosevelt's  personal  letters  say  much  the  same.  They  also  reveal 
that  he  was  reconciled  to  his  lot:  "It  was  simply  impossible  to  resist 
so  spontaneous  a  feeling."  "I  would  be  a  fool  not  to  appreciate  and  be 
deeply  touched  by  the  way  I  was  nominated."  "I  believe  it  all  for  the 
best  as  regards  my  personal  interests."  ".  .  .  had  I  been  running  for 
re-election  as  Governor  I  could  not  have  helped  feeling  an  uneasiness 


THE  PEOPLE'S  CHOICE  137 

of  mind  as  to  my  own  fate."  "Mrs.  Roosevelt  has  begun  to  look  at  the 
matter  our  way  now."  And  finally: 

Every  real  friend  of  mine  .  .  .  will  speak  of  me  as  exactly  what  I 
am — the  man  chosen  because  it  is  believed  he  will  add  strength  to 
a  cause  which  however  is  already  infinitely  stronger  than  any 
strength  of  his — a  man  absolutely  and  entirely  in  the  second  place 
whom  it  is  grossly  absurd  and  unjust  to  speak  of  in  any  other 
capacity. 

The  cause  was  Republicanism.  It  was  the  gold  standard,  the 
protective  tariff,  and  the  supremacy  of  the  nation  over  state  and 
region.  It  was  the  unrestricted  development  of  big  business  and  the 
casting  aside  of  the  old  isolation.  It  was  integrity,  efficiency,  and 
high-mindedness,  the  skullduggery  of  the  bosses,  the  maladministra- 
tion of  the  Army,  and  the  McKinley  administration's  assault  on  the 
civil  service  notwithstanding.  It  was  anti-Bryanism,  anti-Populism,  and 
anti  almost  everything  else  that  threatened  the  party's  success.  It  was, 
in  a  word,  whatever  the  Republican  orators  chose  to  make  it. 

Roosevelt  chose  to  make  the  coming  campaign  a  moral  crusade  for 
good  government  and  a  referendum  on  the  new  foreign  policy.  He  had 
virtually  a  free  rein  in  so  doing,  for  the  President  again  confined 
himself  to  nebulous  pronouncements  from  his  front  porch  in  Canton, 
Ohio. 

Mindful  of  the  dignity  of  his  new  situation,  Roosevelt  told  Hanna 
at  the  outset  that  he  was  emphatically  opposed  to  appearing  "like  a 
second-class  Bryan."  He  tried  to  nip  in  the  bud  a  plan  to  form  Rough 
Riders'  marching  units  all  over  the  country,  and  he  announced  that 
he  intended  to  campaign  on  his  accomplishments  as  governor,  not  on 
his  military  record.  But  he  also  declared  that  he  felt  "strong  as  a 
bull  moose." 

That  summer  and  fall  Roosevelt  canvassed  the  nation  with  a 
thoroughness  no  vice-presidential  candidate  had  theretofore  matched 
and  only  one  presidential  candidate,  Bryan,  had  surpassed.  Besides 
a  trip  to  Oklahoma,  where  he  fired  his  opening  volley  from  the  camp 
grounds  of  the  Rough  Riders'  reunion,  he  made  a  quick  excursion 
into  the  Middle  West  and  an  extended  tour  through  the  Rocky 
Mountain  states,  where  he  experienced  one  long  triumphal  home- 
coming: "RANGE  GREETS  ROOSEVELT";  "WYOMING  IS 
STIRRED  UP";  "ROOSEVELT  ROUSES  BUTTE." 


138  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

All  told,  Roosevelt  covered  21,000  miles  in  twenty-four  states, 
spent  eight  weeks  on  the  road,  and  made  several  hundred  speeches. 
Everywhere  he  preached  his  four-square  gospel  of  duty,  responsibility, 
Republicanism,  and  Americanism;  and  the  curious,  excited,  and 
adulatory  crowds  that  came  out  of  the  hinterland  to  swarm  about  the 
rear  platform  of  his  special  train  at  every  whistle  stop  could  no  more 
contain  their  enthusiasm  than  he  could  suppress  his  moralistic  ex- 
hortations. "Tis  Teddy  alone  that's  runnin',"  exclaimed  the  inimitable 
Mr.  Dooley,  "and  he  ain't  r'runnin',  he's  gallopin'." 

Roosevelt's  nominal  opponent  was  the  Democratic  vice-presidential 
candidate,  Adlai  E.  Stevenson  of  Illinois;  but  his  real  adversary  was 
William  Jennings  Bryan.  Few  pulses  ever  beat  more  quickly  for  the 
plain  people  everywhere  than  did  that  of  the  Great  Commoner  from 
Nebraska.  For  three  decades  the  farmers  and  small  townspeople  of 
the  South  and  the  Middle  West  basked  in  his  prairie-like  simplicity 
and  whole-souled  sentimentality,  and  three  times  they  bestowed  upon 
him  their  highest  accolade — the  Democratic  presidential  nomination. 
Nor  did  he  ever  fail  them  in  eloquence  and  devotion.  Nineteen  years 
after  they  first  gave  him  their  charge  he  selflessly  resigned  as  Secretary 
of  State  to  serve  better  by  his  lights  the  cause  of  peace  that  he  and 
they  loved,  and  as  he  neared  death  a  decade  after  that  he  fought 
unabashedly  to  uphold  their  fundamentalist  faith  against  an  evolu- 
tionary doctrine  that  Roosevelt  had  mastered  as  an  adolescent  a  half 
century  before.  Again  and  again  this  great-hearted  Christian  phrased 
with  poetic  insight  and  preached  with  evangelical  passion  their 
swelling  protest  against  the  cruel  maladjustments  wrought  by  the  new 
industrial  order;  and  it  was  for  his  broad  understanding  of  the 
economic  nature  of  their  problems,  even  more  than  for  his  abiding 
compassion  for  all  mankind,  that  he  was  truly  distinguished. 

As  Henry  Steele  Commager,  one  of  the  few  modern  historians  to  see 
Bryan  whole,  asserts,  he  was  the  link  between  the  agrarian  progressivism 
of  the  Populists  and  the  sophisticated  urban  progressivism  of  the  later 
Roosevelt.  And  if  he  did  not  conceive,  he  did  pioneer  in  the  advocacy  of 
"more  important  legislation  than  any  other  politician  of  his  generation." 
For  what  Bryan  lacked  in  profundity,  he  possessed  to  overflowing  in 
instinct.  He  had  a  firmer  grasp  of  the  public  essentials,  if  not  of  the 
technical  details,  of  the  money  and  tariff  questions  than  Mark  Hanna, 
McKinley,  and  their  Wall  Street  compatriots,  and  until  Roosevelt 
came  into  his  own  in  his  second  term,  Bryan's  social  thought  was 


THE  PEOPLE'S  CHOICE  139 

the  more  advanced.  His  one  great  failing — and  a  critical  one  it  was — 
was  his  lack  of  the  scientific  spirit  and  his  resultant  inability  to  refine 
his  arguments.  He  was  to  the  end  more  descriptive  than  analytical. 
A  born  generalizer,  it  was  enough  for  Bryan  that  he  should  conceive 
his  mission  as  the  liberation  of  the  government  from  the  hands  of  the 
plutocrats;  and  when  in  1896  he  first  burst  upon  the  national  scene, 
he  proclaimed  of  the  cause  he  led: 

On  the  one  hand  stand  the  corporate  interests  of  the  United 
States,  the  moneyed  interests,  aggregated  wealth  and  capital,  im- 
perious, arrogant,  compassionless.  .  .  .  On  the  other  side  stand 
an  unnumbered  throng,  those  who  gave  to  the  Democratic  party  a 
name  and  for  whom  it  has  assumed  to  speak.  Work-worn  and  dust- 
begrimed,  they  made  their  mute  appeal,  and  too  often  find  their 
cry  for  help  beat  in  vain  against  the  outer  walls,  while  others,  less 
deserving,  gain  ready  access  to  legislative  halls. 

That  had  been  in  1896.  Now,  four  years  later,  the  cause  was 
essentially  the  same,  though  Bryan's  early  campaign  speeches  focused 
on  the  imperialism  issue.  "Imperialism  finds  no  warrant  in  the  Bible," 
the  Great  Commoner  thundered  up  and  down  the  land.  uThe  com- 
mand, 'Go  ye  into  all  the  world  and  preach  the  gospel  to  every  crea- 
ture/ has  no  gatling  gun  attachment,"  he  declaimed.  "Love,  not  force, 
was  the  weapon  of  the  Nazarene;  sacrifice  for  others,  not  the  ex- 
ploitation of  them,  was  His  method  of  reaching  the  human  heart" — 
so  he  exclaimed  to  the  tens  of  thousands  of  Baptists,  Methodists,  and 
Presbyterians  who  made  his  campaign  even  more  revivalist-like  than 
Roosevelt's. 

In  effect,  Bryan  was  asking  the  American  people  to  deny  the 
righteousness  of  a  war  they  had  heroically  won  and  of  a  world 
prestige  they  had  suddenly  acquired.  This  was  an  underestimation  of 
human  passion.  The  emotions  that  had  carried  the  nation  exuberantly 
to  war  two  years  before  were  still  potent;  the  zealous  pride  in  the 
national  achievement  was  still  swollen.  The  colonial  empire  was  a 
fait  accompli  rather  than  a  debatable  political  issue;  and  the  United 
States  was  now  a  major  power  in  a  world  of  great  powers,  not  of 
Nazarenes.  The  insurrection  of  the  Filipino  patriot,  Aguinaldo,  In- 
voked the  application  of  force  rather  than  Christian  charity;  and  even 
as  Bryan's  impassioned  phrases  poured  forth,  American  troops  were 
relentlessly  applying  that  force.  Not  even  the  editorial  spokesmen  of 


140  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

American  Protestantism  succumbed  to  the  Great  Commoner's  rolling 
periods.  "God's  hand,"  said  the  Methodist  Episcopal  Zion's  Herald, 
was  behind  the  circumstance  "that  those  most  beautiful  islands  of  the 
Pacific,  named  for  one  of  the  worst  monarchs  that  ever  sat  on  the 
throne  of  Spain,  should  come  into  the  possession  of  the  most 
Protestant  nation  of  the  nineteenth  century.  .  .  .  The  present  year 
of  grace  is  1900,  and  not  1800." 

Roosevelt's  reactions  to  Bryan's  indictment  of  the  colonial  after- 
math of  the  war  with  Spain  embodied  his  cascading  fervor  for  honor, 
duty,  and  the  flag.  They  embraced  his  Social  Darwinian  conception  of 
the  evolutionary  stages  of  the  races.  And  they  reflected  his  continuing 
grasp  of  many  of  the  hard  facts  of  the  international  struggle  for  posi- 
tion. Thus  he  deprecated  the  suggestion  that  the  Philippines  be 
abandoned,  invoking  the  same  strategic,  commercial,  and  chauvinistic 
rationale  which  had  actuated  him,  Lodge,  and  Mahan  to  press  for 
their  acquisition  in  the  first  place.  We  would  have  "to  pledge  our- 
selves to  perpetual  war  with  them  and  for  them,"  he  argued.  He 
declared  that  the  American  guardianship  was  a  sacred  trust  deriving 
from  "the  most  righteous  foreign  war  that  has  been  waged  within 
the  memory  of  the  present  generation."  And  he  repeatedly  drew  a 
specious  parallel  between  Jefferson's  administration  of  the  Louisiana 
Territory  and  the  projected  Republican  administration  of  the  Philip- 
pine Islands. 

But  Roosevelt's  main  theme  was  that  the  United  States  stood  on 
the  threshold  of  greatness.  "It  rests  with  us  now  to  decide  whether 
...  we  shall  march  forward  to  fresh  triumphs  or  whether  at  the 
outset  we  shall  cripple  ourselves  for  the  contest,"  he  admonished  the 
Republican  convention  in  his  speech  seconding  McKinley's  renomina- 
tion.  "We  challenge  the  proud  privilege  of  doing  the  work  that 
Providence  allots  us,  and  we  face  the  coming  years  high  of  heart 
and  resolute  of  faith  that  to  our  people  is  given  the  right  to  win  honor 
and  renown  as  has  never  yet  been  vouchsafed  to  the  nations  of  man- 
kind." 

Roosevelt's  rhetoric,  romanticism,  and  egocentric  nationalism  to 
the  contrary,  his  remarks  at  least  touched  the  periphery  of  those 
momentous  questions  that  have  been  a  half  century  in  the  settling: 
Was  the  United  States  to  play  an  assertive  role  commensurate  with 
its  emerging  power  in  the  affairs  of  the  world?  Was  it  to  bury  itself 
in  an  ostrich-like  isolationism?  Or  was  it  to  indulge  in  a  nebulous 


THE  PEOPLE'S  CHOICE  141 

internationalism  unsupported  by  military  force.  Roosevelt  and  the 
other  imperialists  believed  that  there  was  no  real  choice.  They  sensed 
that  the  revolution  in  communications  had  so  altered  traditional  con- 
cepts of  time  and  space  that  the  old  isolationism  was  as  anachronistic 
by  the  turn  of  the  century  as  the  pony  express.  They  recognized  that 
the  sheer  fact  of  industrial  might  made  America  a  de  facto  member 
of  the  community  of  powers.  And  they  clearly  understood  what  the 
anti-imperialists,  and  especially  Bryan,  would  not  concede — to 
abandon  the  Philippines  was  to  invite  a  scramble  by  England,  Ger- 
many, Japan,  and  Russia,  and  possibly  to  precipitate  world  war. 

Nevertheless,  the  Colonel's  armor  was  penetrable.  The  Philippines 
were  militarily  indefensible,  and  within  the  decade  Roosevelt  himself 
would  pronounce  them  an  "Achilles'  heel" — a  tacit  admission  that 
the  overextension  of  lines  was  not  necessarily  synonymous  with  the 
emergence  from  isolationism.  Nor  would  the  imperialists'  loose  ex- 
pectations of  a  burgeoning  Far  Eastern  trade  be  realized  in  Roosevelt's 
generation,  or  even  in  the  two  that  followed.  But  the  most  glaring 
flaw  was  moral.  In  the  opinion  of  sensitive  men  then  and  since,  the 
"honor  and  renown"  that  Roosevelt  read  into  the  Philippine  venture 
came  not  with  the  brutal  subjugation  of  Aguinaldo's  partisans,  but 
rather  with  the  enlightened  administrative  policies  that  culminated  in 
Philippine  independence  in  1946.  It  is  a  tribute  to  Bryan's  right- 
mindedness,  if  not  to  his  tactical  wisdom,  that  he  worked  to  that  end 
from  the  beginning. 

If  Roosevelt's  insight  into  foreign  affairs  was  at  once  more  romantic 
and  more  realistic  than  the  Great  Commoner's,  his  comprehension  of 
domestic  issues  was  in  all  but  a  few  respects  far  shallower.  Like 
William  Allen  White,  whose  stirringly  vacuous  editorial,  "What's  the 
Matter  with  Kansas,"  had  catapulted  him  to  fame  in  the  summer  of 
1896,  TR  was  deluded  by  fear  of  free  silver.  Neither  in  1896  nor  in 
1900  did  Roosevelt  understand  that  the  Westerners  and  Southerners' 
grievances  derived  from  more  than  moral  laxity,  wool-hat  dem- 
agoguery,  or  a  bad  turn  in  the  weather.  Neither  in  1896  nor  in  1900 
did  he  concede  that  the  underlying  issue  involved  more  than  "decent 
government  and  the  honest  payment  of  debts."  He  wildly  charged  in 
1896  that  Bryan  and  the  Democrats  represented  the  "spirit  of  law- 
less mob  violence";  and  he  repeated  and  embellished  the  indictment 
in  1900.  As  White,  in  a  passage  as  applicable  to  Roosevelt  as  to 
himself,  wrote  long  afterward:  "How  intellectually  snobbish  I  was 


142  POWER    AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

about  'sound  economics.'  .  .  .  Being  what  I  was,  a  child  of  the 
governing  classes,  I  was  blinded  by  my  birthright.  ...  It  seemed 
to  me  that  rude  hands  were  trying  to  tear  down  the  tabernacle  of  our 
national  life,  to  taint  our  currency  with  fiat."  And  so,  White  continued, 
"swallowing  protection  as  a  necessary  evil  and  McKinley's  candidacy 
as  the  price  of  national  security,  I  went  into  the  campaign  with  more 
zeal  than  intelligence,  with  more  ardor  than  wisdom." 

Roosevelt's  delusion  both  in  1896  and  1900  was  made  the  easier 
by  the  character  of  Bryan's  impassioned  hosts.  One  major  element 
included  the  remnants  of  the  Populist  party.  And  though  TR  himself 
would  later  espouse  that  part  of  the  Populist  manifesto  of  1892  which 
read,  "We  believe  that  the  powers  of  government  .  .  .  should  be 
expanded  ...  to  the  end  that  oppression,  injustice,  and  poverty 
shall  eventually  cease  in  the  land,"  he  gave  little  evidence  of  his  future 
beliefs  in  1900  and  even  less  in  1896. 

Another  great  division  of  Bryan's  forces  was  spearheaded  by  John 
Peter  Altgeld,  who  had  compounded  his  "crime"  in  pardoning  the 
surviving  Haymarket  anarchists  by  courageously  attacking  Cleveland's 
handling  of  the  Pullman  strike  of  1894.  Roosevelt  seemed  not  to 
realize  that  Altgeld  was  actually  a  sensitive  and  responsible  spokes- 
man for  the  submerged  urban  masses;  and  in  both  campaigns  he  pum- 
meled  the  Illinois  Governor  unmercifully  and  unjustifiably,  expos- 
tulating at  one  point  that  Altgeld  "would  connive  at  wholesale  murder 
and  would  justify  it  by  elaborate  and  cunning  sophistry  for  reasons 
known  only  to  his  own  tortuous  soul."  So  sweeping  were  TR's 
charges,  in  fact,  that  Hanna  worriedly  consulted  him  about  them  after 
an  especially  unbalanced  speech  in  St.  Paul  in  the  fall  of  1 900. 

Hanna  failed,  of  course,  to  dampen  Roosevelt's  ardor;  nor  did 
anyone  else.  Neither  age  nor  experience  brought  moderation,  mellow- 
ing, or  development,  and  until  the  day  of  his  death  TR  remained  an 
extremist  in  speech  when  the  battle  was  on. 

Yet,  for  all  Roosevelt's  irresponsible  assertions,  for  all  his  failure 
to  speak  fairly  to  Bryan's  proposals  for  an  inheritance  tax,  graduated 
income  tax,  reduced  tariff,  and  expanded  money  supply,  TR  did 
come  out  with  one  constructive  proposal  in  1900 — the  regulation 
of  big  business.  Drawing  on  his  experience  as  governor,  he  recom- 
mended publicity  of  capitalization  and  profits,  taxation  of  corpora- 
tions, and  "the  unsparing  excision  of  all  unhealthy,  destructive  and 
anti-social  elements."  This  program  was  indefensibly  vague — it  failed, 


THE  PEOPLE'S  CHOICE  143 

for  example,  to  specify  whether  the  states  or  the  federal  government 
should  assume  responsibility  for  its  enactment,  and  it  was  a  pale 
shadow  compared  to  Bryan's  comprehensive,  if  also  inadequate,  pro- 
gram. Yet  its  emphasis  on  the  regulation  rather  than  the  dissolution 
of  the  great  corporations  dimly  foreshadowed  the  future. 

In  spite  of  McKinley's  front-porch  circumlocutions,  and  Bryan's 
perfervid  oratory,  the  President's  re-election  was  never  in  doubt.  On 
Election  Day  his  popular  vote  soared  several  hundred  thousands 
above  his  total  of  1896,  and  his  majority  reached  the  highest  level 
since  Grant's  re-election  in  1872.  Roosevelt's  contribution  to  this 
impressive  victory  cannot  be  measured  with  accuracy;  but  by  common 
agreement,  it  was  considerable.  He  had  borne  the  brunt  of  the 
canvass,  speaking,  however  egregiously  at  times,  to  the  issues  as  no 
other  Republican  of  prominence  had  done,  and  he  had  carried  into 
the  campaign  the  most  devoted  personal  following  ever  rallied  by  a 
vice-presidential  candidate.  As  Margaret  Leech,  McKinley's  sym- 
pathetic biographer,  acknowledges,  Roosevelt's  "forthright  censure  of 
the  trusts  did  much  to  counterbalance  the  deference  to  business  which 
paralyzed  Republican  leadership  on  economic  questions,  and  to 
attract  the  enthusiastic  support  of  younger  and  more  progressive 
elements  of  the  party."  Although  TR  claimed  that  he  had  dug  his  own 
political  grave,  the  testimony  of  the  rank  and  file  was  that  he  had 
laid  the  foundations  for  his  elevation  to  the  presidency  in  1904. 

The  special  session  of  Congress  following  the  inaugural  ceremonies 
four  months  later  lasted  only  four  days,  so  Vice-President  Roosevelt 
never  had  a  chance  to  prove  that  he  could  have  presided  over  the 
Senate  with  equanimity;  and  it  is  of  no  moment.  He  tarried  in 
Washington  less  than  a  week  after  Congress  adjourned,  then  returned 
to  Sagamore  Hill  for  the  spring  and  early  summer. 

Unburdened  by  pressing  duties  for  the  first  time  since  the  winter  of 
1889,  TR  there  experienced  perhaps  the  most  pleasant  vacation  of  his 
life.  His  seven  children  were  still  bound  to  the  family's  bosom, 
though  Alice,  witty,  contrary,  and  worldly  beyond  her  seventeen 
years,  was  straining  to  break  away.  TR  enjoyed  her  immensely  for 
she  shared  his  lust  for  life.  But  she  was  already  enamored  by  the 
superficially  unconventional,  and  he  could  only  with  difficulty  con- 
tain her.  She  eventually  married  a  stand-pat  Republican  politician, 
Nicholas  Longworth,  who  became  Speaker  of  the  House  when  the 
business  civilization  reached  its  apogee  under  Calvin  Coolidge. 


144  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

Ted,  who  would  become  thoroughly  imbued  with  his  father's  mili- 
tary values  and  moderately  imbued  with  his  social  attitudes  (he 
governed  Puerto  Rico  and  the  Philippines  with  enlightenment  and 
compassion  in  the  1920's  and  early  1930's),  was  then  just  short  of 
fourteen.  He  was  in  his  first  year  at  Groton  and  was  already  able  to 
best  TR  in  tennis.  The  others,  ranging  down  to  chubby  and  effusive 
Quentin,  who  at  three  and  one-half  wanted  and  often  got  in  on  the 
fun,  all  had  interests  their  father  enjoyed.  They  rowed,  hiked,  waded, 
and  swam  together  on  fair  days;  romped,  read,  and  recited  poetry  on 
rainy  days.  Inevitably,  TR  pushed  the  boys  too  hard  because  of  his 
obsession  that  they  should  prove  their  manliness — "I  would  rather 
one  of  them  should  die  than  have  them  grow  up  weaklings,"  he  once 
growled  at  a  woman  who  criticized  their  playing  football.  And  he 
apparently  drove  Ted  to  a  minor  nervous  breakdown  at  one  point. 
Yet  he  had  flashes  of  understanding  for  the  limitations  of  the  mind,  if 
not  of  the  will.  He  rarely  demanded  more  than  an  individual  could 
give,  and  as  Wagenknecht  points  out,  he  resignedly  accepted  the  fact 
that  most  men's  best  is  not  very  good.  "If  Archie,  through  sheer  in- 
ability, failed  in  mathematics,"  he  wrote  a  few  days  later,  "I  should 
not  in  the  least  hold  it  against  him;  but  where  Ted  gets  on  probation 
because  he  has  been  such  an  utter  goose  as  pointlessly  to  cut  his 
recitations  I  am  not  only  much  irritated  but  I  also  become  apprehen- 
sive as  to  how  Ted  will  do  in  after  life." 

The  new  Vice  President  continued  to  make  occasional  speeches 
during  the  spring  and  summer  of  1901.  In  April  he  spoke  at  the 
Newsboys'  Lodging  House.  In  May,  with  no  sense  of  foreboding,  he 
opened  the  Pan-American  Exposition  in  Buffalo.  And  in  June  he 
addressed  the  Long  Island  Bible  Society  at  Sagamore  Hill  and  his 
Harvard  class  dinner  at  Cambridge.  Then  in  July  on  the  piazza  at 
Sagamore  he  conducted  an  informal  seminar  for  a  selected  group  of 
Harvard  and  Yale  undergraduates  who  stayed  far  into  the  evening 
listening  to  him  and  a  few  other  idealistic  Republicans  urge  upon  them 
the  compelling  need  for  men  of  character  to  enter  politics.  In  August 
Roosevelt  participated  in  the  observance  of  Colorado's  twenty-fifth 
year  of  statehood,  and  on  September  6  he  spoke  at  the  annual  outing 
of  the  Fish  and  Game  League  on  Isle  la  Motte  in  Lake  Champlain. 

The  afternoon  that  the  Vice  President  addressed  the  Fish  and 
Game  League  on  Isle  la  Motte,  President  McKinley  was  mortally 
wounded  in  Buffalo.  For  the  next  five  days  McKinley  hovered  between 
life  and  death,  but  on  the  sixth  day,  Friday,  September  13,  he  sank 


THE  PEOPLE'S  CHOICE  145 

rapidly.  Repeating  the  title  of  his  favorite  hymn,  "Nearer,  My  God, 
to  Thee,"  he  murmured  finally  "It  is  God's  way,"  then  sank  into  semi- 
consciousness.  At  2:15  in  the  morning  of  September  14  the  President 
died. 

William  McKinley  had  been  a  well-intentioned  man,  uncertain  as 
to  the  staggering  challenges  of  his  times,  but  striving  slowly  and  as  con- 
scientiously as  he  could  to  rise  to  them.  His  last  public  address, 
delivered  the  day  before  he  was  shot,  had  been  his  finest.  He  had 
declared  that  the  old  isolationism  was  dead  and  he  had  counseled  the 
modification  of  that  tariff  system  of  which  he  himself  was  the  symbol. 
A  transitional  President  at  best,  his  election  in  1896  had  marked  the 
end  of  the  old  order,  his  passing  in  1901  the  ushering  in  of  the  new. 

McKinley  and  Roosevelt  had  never  been  close;  nor  had  cither's 
opinion  of  the  other  ever  been  high.  To  the  end,  McKinley  had  been 
unnerved  as  well  as  amused  by  Roosevelt's  shrill  bellicosity  and 
flagrant  disrespect  for  the  established  forms.  From  the  beginning, 
Roosevelt  had  been  contemptuous  of  McKinley's  caution  and  in- 
decisiveness,  his  lack  of  conviction  and  his  failure  to  respond  to  the 
moral  imperatives  of  his  office.  Yet  Roosevelt,  like  many  strong- 
minded  men  whose  lives  touched  McKinley's,  was  not  unmoved  by 
the  President's  homely  virtues — by  his  personal  honesty,  devotion  to 
his  invalid  wife,  unswerving  loyalty  to  friends,  and  reluctance  to  give 
hurt  even  to  those,  like  Roosevelt,  who  themselves  had  hurt  him.  He 
seemed  genuinely  saddened  by  his  death.  "He  comes  from  the  typical 
hard-working  farmer  stock  of  our  country,"  Roosevelt  wrote  Lodge  in 
a  letter  that  unwittingly  played  on  McKinley's  tragic  belief  that  it  was 
a  President's  function  to  reflect  rather  than  to  lead.  "In  every  instinct 
and  feeling  he  is  closely  in  touch  with  ...  the  men  who  make  up 
the  immense  bulk  of  our  Nation.  .  .  .  His  one  great  anxiety  while 
President  has  been  to  keep  in  touch  with  this  body  of  people  and  to 
give  expression  to  their  sentiments  and  desires." 

Roosevelt  had  rushed  by  special  train  from  Burlington,  Vermont, 
to  Buffalo  upon  being  informed  of  the  President's  misfortune.  There, 
so  his  most  critical  biographer  concedes,  he  comported  himself  with 
dignity  and  restraint  for  three  days.  On  September  10,  the  physician's 
reports  being  encouraging,  he  left  to  join  his  wife  and  the  children 
in  the  Adirondacks  on  the  theory  that  his  withdrawal  would  reassure 
the  country.  He  reached  the  Adirondacks,  Mrs.  Roosevelt  wrote 
Bamie,  "naturally  much  relieved  at  the  rapid  recovery  of  the  Presi- 
dent." On  Friday  morning,  as  the  President's  physician  in  Buffalo 


146  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

abandoned  hope,  Roosevelt  and  a  party  climbed  Mount  Marcy.  They 
had  descended  as  far  as  Lake  Tear  of  the  Cloud  and  were  having 
lunch  beside  a  brook  at  two  o'clock  in  the  afternoon  when  a  man 
came  puffing  up  the  trail  with  a  message  from  Elihu  Root:  "The 
President  appears  to  be  dying,  and  members  of  the  Cabinet  in 
Buffalo  think  you  should  lose  no  time  in  coming." 

Roosevelt  reached  his  base  at  six  that  night.  After  sending  a  mes- 
senger six  miles  ahead  to  the  nearest  telephone,  he  retired  at  nine,  to 
be  awakened  at  eleven  by  the  same  messenger.  The  President  was 
dying;  a  special  train  had  been  arranged  to  pick  up  the  Vice-President 
at  North  Creek,  thirty-five  miles  distant.  All  that  night  Roosevelt  sat 
on  a  buckboard  as  relays  of  horses  and  drivers  rushed  him  over  the 
gutted  roads  where  in  places  a  wrong  turn  meant  a  drop  over  a 
precipice.  He  arrived  at  North  Creek  at  5:30  Saturday  morning,  and 
he  reached  Buffalo  at  1:30  that  afternoon. 

The  new  President  went  at  once  to  the  house  where  the  old 
President  lay  dead.  After  paying  his  respects  to  the  bereaved  widow, 
he  was  driven  to  the  home  of  a  friend,  Ansley  Wilcox,  where  all  of  the 
McKinley  Cabinet  except  John  Hay  and  Secretary  of  the  Treasury 
Lyman  J.  Gage  solemnly  awaited  him.  Root  suggested  that  the  oath 
be  taken  at  once,  whereupon  Roosevelt  bowed  slightly  and  addressed 
the  group.  "I  wish  to  say  that  it  shall  be  my  aim  to  continue,  ab- 
solutely unbroken,  the  policy  of  President  McKinley  for  the  peace, 
the  prosperity,  and  the  honor  of  our  beloved  country."  The  oath 
followed,  Roosevelt  adding  his  own  redundant  touch:  "And  so 
I  swear." 

Following  the  ceremony  Roosevelt  took  a  brief  walk  with  Elihu 
Root.  They  returned  just  before  Mark  Hanna  drove  up  to  the  Wilcox 
house.  When  the  President  saw  Hanna  appear,  he  rushed  out  to  meet 
him.  It  was  a  tense  moment.  Hanna  had  loved  McKinley  like  a 
brother;  he  seems  also  to  have  aspired  to  the  office  Roosevelt  now 
held.  Yet  Hanna,  like  Roosevelt,  had  large  habits  of  mind.  When 
the  President  repeated  the  assurances  he  had  given  the  Cabinet,  he 
replied  that  although  he  would  not  then  commit  himself  to  Roosevelt's 
nomination  in  1904,  he  would  do  all  in  his  power  to  make  the 
administration  a  success  during  the  next  three  years.  "I  trust,"  he 
concluded,  "that  you  will  command  me  if  I  can  be  of  any  service." 

The  date  was  September  14,  1901,  six  weeks  before  Roosevelt's 
forty-third  birthday.  He  was  the  youngest  President  in  the  nation's 
history. 


PART    III 


THE   SQUARE   DEAL  BEGINS 


CHAPTER  9 


THE    FIRST    FELL   BLOWS 


When  I  became  President,  the  question  as  to  the  method  by 
which  the  United  States  Government  was  to  control  the  corpora- 
tions was  not  yet  important.  The  absolutely  vital  question  was 
whether  the  government  had  power  to  control  them  at  all. 

— Theodore  Roosevelt,  An  Autobiography 


For  five  months  after  Theodore  Roosevelt  took  the  presidential  oath 
in  the  simple  ceremony  at  Buffalo  an  uneasy  calm  hung  over  the 
American  business  community.  The  mighty  masters  of  industry  and 
finance  understood  that  Roosevelt  was  no  Eugene  V.  Debs,  nor  even 
a  William  Jennings  Bryan.  They  knew,  however,  that  he  lacked 
reverence  for  the  "system"  their  constructive  labor  and  political  in- 
fluence had  created.  They  remembered  how  he  had  struck  out  at 
monopoly  as  a  fledgling  legislator  two  decades  before.  They  recalled 
how  as  Civil  Service  Commissioner  he  had  flaunted  the  "system's" 
Grand  Old  Protector — the  Republican  party.  And  they  could  not 
forget,  for  they  were  still  challenging  the  legislation  in  the  courts,  how 
he  had  imposed  a  tax  on  corporations  while  governor.  Nevertheless, 
they  hoped  that  he  would  prove  himself  in  the  image  of  McKinley — 
their  "very  supple  and  highly  paid  agent,"  as  Henry  Adams  regarded 
the  late  President — though  by  what  process  of  alchemy  they  were 
not  quite  sure.  Until  Roosevelt  destroyed  their  forced  optimism  by 
striking  out  boldly  on  his  own,  their  editorial  spokesmen  worked 
heroically  to  imbue  him  with  his  lamented  predecessor's  heritage. 

President  Roosevelt  is  "in  perfect  sympathy  with  the  triumphant 
policies  of  Mr.  McKinley,"  the  New  York  Tribune  said.  It  would  be 

149 


150  POWER    AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

wrong  to  think,  warned  the  New  York  Times,  "that  the  temper  of 
President  Roosevelt's  mind  will  incline  him  to  seek  for  himself  some 
more  shining  glory  than  that  which  has  crowned  the  administration  of 
his  predecessor."  The  new  President,  the  New  York  Sun  added  in  a 
series  of  urgent  editorials  obviously  designed  for  Roosevelt's  eye,  "is 
a  man  on  whom  the  American  people  can  rely  as  a  prudent  and  a 
safe  and  sagacious  successor  to  William  McKinley." 

He  represents  the  same  political  party  and  spirit  and  policies  which 
were  represented  by  Mr.  McKinley;  his  political  future,  his  whole 
reputation,  depends  on  his  fidelity  to  the  sentiment  of  his  party. 
President  Roosevelt's  career  has  been  as  a  strict  party  man,  happily 
for  the  public.  His  policy  as  President  can  be  assumed  from  the 
policy  of  his  party.  It  will  not  depend  on  the  possible  vagaries  of  an 
individual  judgment. 

Yet  Wall  Street  half  sensed  that  these  statements  would  prove  more 
wishful  than  realistic.  It  assumed,  however,  that  the  President  would 
at  least  take  it  into  his  confidence  when  and  if  he  decided  to  alter 
McKinley's  policies.  Great  was  its  consternation,  therefore,  when  late 
in  the  afternoon  of  February  18,  1902,  Attorney  General  Philander 
C.  Knox  announced  that  the  President  had  directed  him  to  invoke  the 
Sherman  Antitrust  Law  against  J.  P.  Morgan's  latest  paper  creation, 
the  Northern  Securities  Company.  There  had  been  no  warning  save 
the  logic  of  Theodore  Roosevelt's  career. 

The  first  memorable  event  of  the  Roosevelt  era,  the  resurrection  of 
the  Sherman  Law,  struck  financial  circles  like  a  shattering  shaft  of 
lightning.  In  New  York  City,  where  he  was  giving  a  small  dinner, 
Pierpont  Morgan  received  the  news  with  stunned  dismay.  Roosevelt 
had  not  acted  as  a  "gentleman,"  he  plaintively  remarked  to  his  guests. 
Morgan's  partner  in  the  Northern  Securities  venture,  the  railroad 
magnate  James  J.  Hill,  was  yet  more  bitter.  "It  really  seems  hard," 
he  indignantly  wrote  a  friend,  "that  we  should  be  compelled  to  fight 
for  our  lives  against  the  political  adventurers  who  have  never  done 
anything  but  pose  and  draw  a  salary." 

The  lesser  men  of  the  business  world  mirrored  these  two  Goliaths' 
reactions.  As  the  uninhibited  Detroit  Free  Press  sardonically  ob- 
served, "Wall  Street  is  paralyzed  at  the  thought  that  a  President  of 
the  United  States  would  sink  so  low  as  to  try  to  enforce  the  law." 
When  the  Exchange  opened  the  next  day,  the  listings  dropped 


THE    FIRST   FELL   BLOWS  151 

markedly  across  the  board.  "Not  since  the  assassination  of  President 
McKinley  has  the  stock  market  had  such  a  sudden  shock,"  the 
Tribune  reported. 

What  was  behind  Roosevelt's  sensational  action?  Years  later  when 
Roosevelt  wrote  in  his  Autobiography  that  he  had  not  "entered  the 
Presidency  with  any  deliberately  planned  and  far  reaching  scheme 
of  social  betterment,"  he  did  himself  a  partial  injustice.  In  actual  fact, 
the  whole  body  of  his  ethical  beliefs  was  bound  up  in  the  question. 
The  lineage  of  the  presidential  Square  Deal  traced  directly  to  the 
antimonopoly  and  good-government  platforms  Roosevelt  had  ex- 
pounded when  he  first  entered  politics;  and  so,  indeed,  did  the  New 
Nationalism  of  1912. 

Assuredly,  the  details  differed.  The  problems  Roosevelt  now  con- 
fronted were  both  similar  to  and  more  complex  than  those  he  had 
earlier  faced.  Urban  slums  were  multiplying,  and  crime  and  corrup- 
tion were  growing  apace.  The  political  machines,  whether  based  on 
the  frustrations  of  the  repressed  lower  classes  or  grounded  on  the 
greed  and  fear  of  the  high  business  order,  were  tightening  their  grasp 
on  the  body  politic.  Nature's  heritage  was  being  ruthlessly  squandered 
out  of  apathy,  ignorance,  and  avarice.  And  worse,  even,  than  that, 
there  was  rising  such  a  concentration  of  business  power  as  made  a 
mockery  of  the  democratic  process  and  threatened  the  very  founda- 
tions of  the  American  republic.  The  Northern  Securities  Company, 
by  no  means  the  hub  of  Morgan's  empire,  was  but  the  most  recent 
example  of  monopoly's  arrant  growth.  So  long  as  these  freebooting 
activities  continued,  so  long  did  the  corrosive  trends  that  accompanied 
them  promise  to  flourish. 

In  the  face  of  these  foreboding  realities,  Theodore  Roosevelt  stood 
in  September,  1901,  as  the  accidental  head  of  a  political  party  whose 
leadership  was  openly  hostile  toward  moves  for  their  reformation.  The 
most  powerful  brake  on  the  new  President's  action  was  the  United 
States  Senate.  By  the  turn  of  the  century  that  body  had  arrogated  to 
itself  much  of  the  authority  that  Jefferson,  Jackson,  and  Lincoln  had 
vested  in  the  executive  office.  Most  of  its  members  owed  their  seats 
to  machine-dominated  state  legislatures,  and  the  ablest  among  them 
were  long  in  the  habit  of  flaunting  major  elements  of  public  opinion. 
Only  such  a  unique  concatenation  of  events  as  was  to  mark  the 
Roosevelt  era  would  force  them  to  compromise;  and  no  force  or  event 
would  compel  many  of  them  to  submit. 


152  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

The  Republican  leaders  of  the  Senate  were  at  once  more  ideologi- 
cal and  more  effective  than  their  counterparts  in  New  York.  Many 
were  men  of  personal  wealth,  the  fruit  of  earlier  careers  in  business 
or  of  continuing,  and  not  wholly  disinterested,  investment.  They  were 
often  leaders  of  their  state  machines.  And  they  frequently  radiated 
charm  and  graciousncss.  With  some  exceptions,  such  as  Matthew 
Quay  of  Pennsylvania,  who  narrowly  escaped  the  penitentiary,  their 
private  morality  was  high.  And  even  their  public  morality  was  estima- 
ble by  prevailing  standards.  The  powerful  "Four,"  Nelson  W. 
Aldrich  of  Rhode  Island,  John  C.  Spooner  of  Wisconsin,  Orville  H. 
Platt  of  Connecticut,  and  William  B.  Allison  of  Iowa  were  cut  of 
fine,  if  purely  conventional  cloth;  and  so  also  were  Mark  Hanna  and 
numbers  of  others.  They  were  not  to  be  compared  with  Quay  or  to 
Boise  Penrose,  the  Pennsylvania  aristocrat  whose  entire  political 
career  was  virtually  an  unrelieved  stench. 

Yet  even  the  best  of  these  men  were  unable  to  divorce  themselves 
from  their  backgrounds.  The  modern  concept  of  conflict  of  interest 
was  foreign  to  their  make-up,  and  they  freely  promoted  their  own  busi- 
ness interests  in  the  United  States  Senate.  They  were  generally 
purblind  to  the  most  elementary  considerations  of  social  or  economic 
justice.  And  they  were  supremely  confident  that  the  arrogant  business 
society  they  so  faithfully  represented  was  an  unexampled  blessing  to 
the  American  people.  Intelligent,  and  in  some  instances  even  learned, 
they  were  undistinguished  in  either  intellectual  depth  or  consistency. 
They  fixed  upon  those  theories  of  John  Stuart  Mill  and  William 
Graham  Sumner  which  subserved  their  purposes,  and  they  con- 
temptuously dismissed  those  that  confuted  them.  They  supported 
government  subsidies  for  business  both  overtly  and  covertly  (through 
the  protective  tariff  and  in  earlier  years  railroad  grants);  but  they 
self-righteously  invoked  the  doctrine  of  laissez  faire  against  reformist 
efforts  to  regulate  and  tax  either  corporate  or  individual  wealth. 
Calvin  Coolidge's  dictum  that  "the  business  of  the  United  States  is 
business"  well  stated  the  G.O.P.'s  dominant  philosophy  in  the  1920's; 
but  it  applied  even  more  pertinently  to  the  Republican  oligarchy 
Theodore  Roosevelt  inherited  from  William  McKinley  in  1901. 
"These  men  still  from  force  of  habit  applauded  what  Lincoln  had 
done  in  the  way  of  radical  dealing  with  the  abuses  of  his  day;  but 
they  did  not  apply  the  spirit  in  which  Lincoln  worked  to  the  abuses  of 
their  own  day,"  Roosevelt  wrote  in  his  autobiography. 


THE    FIRST   FELL    BLOWS  153 

So  it  was  that  party  leaders  gasped  and  outside  observers  chuckled 
when  the  President  unloosed  his  bolt  at  J.  Pierpont  Morgan's 
Northern  Securities  Company  five  months  after  he  took  office.  Sym- 
bolically, at  least,  Roosevelt  had  crashed  headlong  into  the  "system" 
that  made  business,  through  its  ideological  partners  or  political  hire- 
lings in  the  House  and  the  Senate,  the  de  facto  governing  body  of  the 
nation. 

From  the  start  of  his  administration  Roosevelt  had  seen  the 
difficulties  of  his  position.  He  also  realized,  and  doubtless  enjoyed, 
the  irony  of  his  sudden  rise  to  eminence.  But  whether  he  at  first  com- 
prehended the  power  and  latitude  that  lay  dormant  in  his  new  office  is 
debatable.  Possibly  he  did,  given  his  experience  as  Governor  of  New 
York.  Yet  he  also  knew  that  he  would  have  to  compromise  in  order 
to  get  legislation  passed.  Accordingly,  he  had  at  once  entered  into 
warm,  seemingly  deferential,  relations  with  the  men  of  power. 

In  spite  of  the  editorial  assurances  of  Roosevelt's  basic  conserva- 
tism, McKinley's  assassination  in  September  had  been  a  devastating 
blow  to  the  high  priests  of  the  market  place.  Stock  prices  had  declined 
when  news  of  the  shooting  had  first  come  through,  and  they  had 
fallen  again  when  the  President  died.  The  volcanic  Morgan  was 
variously  reported  to  have  been  enraged  and  stupified,  to  have  cursed 
wildly  and  to  have  muttered  soulfully.  And  from  the  depths  of  a 
seemingly  boundless  despair,  Charles  M.  Schwab  of  the  United  States 
Steel  Corporation  had  even  violated  the  unwritten  code  by  predicting 
as  McKinley  lay  on  his  deathbed  that  business  would  surely  suffer  if 
he  failed  to  recover. 

Business  leaders  had  been  unwilling  to  let  events  run  their  own 
course,  however.  Their  editorial  spokesmen  had  yet  to  publish  their 
wishful  affirmations  of  Roosevelt's  conservatism  when  they  tried  to 
exert  personal  pressure  upon  the  new  President  through  his  brother- 
in-law,  Douglas  Robinson.  He  had  been  urged,  Robinson  wrote 
Roosevelt  in  a  letter  dispatched  to  Buffalo  by  special  messenger,  "to 
impress  upon  you  the  fact  that  you  must  ...  be  as  close-mouthed 
and  conservative  as  you  were  before  your  nomination  for  Governor'* 
and  that  you  should  "assure  the  country  that  you  intend  to  carry  out 
the  administration  policy." 

I  must  frankly  tell  you  that  there  is  a  feeling  in  financial  circles 
here  that  in  case  you  become  President  you  may  change  matters  so 
as  to  upset  the  confidence  ...  of  the  business  world,  which  would 


154  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

be  an  awful  blow  to  everybody — the  West  as  well  as  the  East — as 
that  means  tight  money. 

The  advice  had  been  superfluous.  By  the  time  he  received  Robin- 
son's entreaty,  Roosevelt  had  already  announced  his  intention  of  con- 
tinuing the  McKinley  policies  in  a  statement  that  even  Democratic 
and  independent  newspapers  had  heartily  applauded.  You  have,  wrote 
Lodge  from  England  soon  afterward,  done  "admirably,  splendidly," 
and  have  not  "made  a  single  mistake." 

Nevertheless,  there  was  an  infectious  change  of  pace  in  the  White 
House.  "Every  day  or  two  .  .  .  [Roosevelt]  rattles  the  dry  bones  of 
precedent  and  causes  sedate  Senators  and  heads  of  departments  to 
look  over  their  spectacles  in  consternation,"  the  Detroit  News  ob- 
served. "Mr.  Roosevelt  talks  to  every  one  alike,"  a  British  embassy 
official  reported  to  his  government,  "and  apparently  in  President 
McKinley's  time  Senators  were  accustomed  to  have  their  views 
received  with  a  certain  deference."  The  President  was  receiving  scores 
of  people  such  as  had  rarely  crossed  the  White  House  threshold  in  the 
past  and  would  rarely  do  so  in  the  future — writers,  reformers,  sci- 
entists, professional  social  workers,  and  labor  leaders.  He  was 
walking  regularly  to  the  little  Grace  Reformed  Chapel  on  15th  and 
O  Streets  where  he  attended  services  almost  every  Sunday  he  was  in 
Washington.  And  he  was  beginning,  with  results  that  would  prove 
both  salutary  and  unsalutary,  to  conduct  diplomacy  on  horseback  or 
while  scrambling  among  the  wilds  of  Rock  Creek  Park.  Even  crabbed 
Henry  Adams  admitted  to  mild  exhilaration.  "Theodore  helps  us  by 
his  gaiety,  and  delights  Hay  by  his  sense  of  fun,"  Adams  wrote. 
"  'Cabot  didn't  mind  having  the  newspapers  say  that  he  was  head  of 
the  kitchen-cabinet,'  said  Theodore,  'but  he  was  frantic  with  fury 
when  they  said  he  was  learning  to  ride,  so  as  to  go  out  with  me.'  " 
In  numerous  other  ways  also,  including  the  borrowing  of  books  from 
the  Library  of  Congress,  Roosevelt  was  giving  his  administration  a 
uniquely  personal  distinction.  Mark  Sullivan  captured  its  essense  in 
his  Our  Times: 

Roosevelt's  first  three  months  in  the  Presidency  were  interesting, 
even  spectacular.  .  .  .  His  high  spirits,  his  enormous  capacity  for 
work,  his  tirelessness,  his  forthrightness,  his  many  striking  quali- 
ties, gave  a  lift  of  the  spirits  to  millions  of  average  men,  stimulated 
them  to  higher  use  of  their  own  powers,  gave  them  a  new  zest  for 


THE    FIRST   FELL    BLOWS  155 

life.  'He  brought  in,'  said  Harry  Thurston  Peck,  'a  stream  of  fresh, 
pure,  bracing  air  from  the  mountains,  to  clear  the  fetid  atmosphere 
of  the  national  capital.' 

There  was  still  no  word,  however,  on  the  key  question.  Would 
Roosevelt  continue  McKinley's  benevolent  policy  toward  big  business? 

The  first  insight  into  Roosevelt's  state  of  mind  came  with  the  release 
of  his  first  annual  message  on  December  3,  1901.  A  verbose  and 
lengthy  report,  that  message  was  well  designed  to  allay  the  fears  of 
business  while  yet  suggesting  a  program  of  moderately  positive  action. 
Paragraph  balanced  paragraph,  and  sentence  balanced  sentence  as 
Roosevelt  made  countless  mental  reservations  of  the  "on  the  one 
hand"  and  "on  the  other  hand"  variety.  Finley  Peter  Dunne's  Mr. 
Dooley  well  summed  up  its  apparent  spirit: 

"Th'  trusts,"  says  he,  "are  heejoous  monsthers  built  up  be  th' 
heightened  intherprise  iv  th'  men  that  have  done  so  much  to 
advance  progress  in  our  beloved  counthry,"  he  says.  "On  wan  hand 
I  wud  stamp  thim  undher  fut;  on  th'  other  hand  not  so  fast." 

What  Mr.  Dooley  and  other  contemporary  observers  did  not  know 
was  that  the  President  had  earlier  rejected  suggestions  by  the  House 
of  Morgan  that  he  revise  drastically  his  measured  call  for  business 
reform.  While  the  message  was  being  drafted,  Morgan  had  sent  two 
associates,  George  W.  Perkins  and  Robert  Bacon,  to  Washington  to 
persuade  the  President  to  stand  pat.  Roosevelt  had  received  them 
courteously  though  they  argued,  he  informed  Douglas  Robinson,  "like 
attorneys  for  a  bad  case."  They  would  not  have  done  so,  he  con- 
tinued, were  they  not  representatives  "of  a  man  so  strong  and 
dominant  a  character  as  Pierpont  Morgan."  The  President  added  that 
they  wanted  him  "to  go  back  on  my  messages  to  the  New  York 
Legislature  and  on  my  letter  of  acceptance  for  the  Vice-Presidency." 

I  intend  to  be  most  conservative,  but  in  the  interests  of  the  big 
corporations  themselves  and  above  all  in  the  interest  of  the  country 
I  intend  to  pursue,  cautiously  but  steadily,  the  course  to  which  I 
have  been  publicly  committed  again  and  again,  and  which  I  am 
certain  is  the  right  course. 

The  President  had  also  had  trouble  with  Mark  Hanna.  "  'Go 
slow,'  "  McKinley's  former  confidant  had  warned  Roosevelt  on  Octo- 
ber 12.  Soon  afterward  Hanna  had  taken  exception  to  the  President's 


156  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

criticism  of  overcapitalization  in  the  draft  of  his  message.  Not  even 
labor  wanted  corporation  control  "made  a  political  issue,"  he  ad- 
monished Roosevelt,  whereupon  the  President  had  agreed  to  delete 
the  questionable  passage.  In  the  message  as  sent  to  Congress,  how- 
ever, Roosevelt  stated  that  "one  of  the  chief"  of  the  "real  and  grave 
evils"  threatening  the  nation  was  "overcapitalization." 

Granting  the  indecisive  tone  of  that  first  message,  the  section  on 
corporations  was  still  a  reasoned  statement  of  the  President's  views. 
Roosevelt  never  had  taken  anything  but  a  Darwinian  view  of  big 
business  growth;  he  therein  reaffirmed  it.  The  corporations'  develop- 
ment "has  not  been  due  to  the  tariff  nor  to  any  other  government 
action,"  he  noted,  "but  to  natural  causes  in  the  business  world, 
operating  in  other  countries  as  they  operate  in  our  own."  Further- 
more, he  continued,  "concerns  which  have  the  largest  means  at  their 
disposal  and  are  managed  by  the  ablest  men  are  naturally  those  who 
take  the  lead  in  the  strife  for  commercial  supremacy  among  the 
nations  of  the  world."  Foreign  markets  are  "essential,"  and  it  would 
"be  unwise  to  cramp  or  to  fetter  the  youthful  strength  of  our  nation." 

Roosevelt  also  realized,  however,  that  there  were  abuses,  many  of 
them  grave  and  ominous.  These  should  be  eradicated  by  federal 
regulation.  "It  is  no  limitation  upon  property  rights  or  freedom  of 
contract  to  require  that  when  men  receive  from  government  the 
privilege  of  doing  business  under  corporate  form  .  .  .  they  shall  do  so 
upon  absolute  truthful  representations  as  to  the  value  of  the  property 
in  which  the  capital  is  to  be  invested,"  the  President  asserted.  As  a 
first  remedial  step  he  proposed  a  law  providing  for  compulsory  pub- 
licity on  the  theory  that  a  specific  program  of  regulation  and  taxation 
could  not  be  rationally  devised  until  after  the  facts  were  known. 

Conscious  that  his  proposals  for  national  regulation  would  affront 
the  numerous  and  vociferous  defenders  of  states'  rights,  the  President 
attempted  to  outflank  them  with  historical  reasoning.  "When  the 
Constitution  was  adopted,  at  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century,"  he 
wrote  in  a  passage  that  graphically  revealed  his  evolutionary  approach 
to  constitutional  law,  "no  human  wisdom  could  foretell  the  sweeping 
changes,  alike  in  industrial  and  political  conditions,  which  were  to 
take  place  at  the  beginning  of  the  twentieth  century": 

At  that  time  it  was  accepted  as  a  matter  of  course  that  the 
several  States  were  the  proper  authorities  to  regulate,  so  far  as  was 
then  necessary,  the  comparatively  insignificant  and  strictly  localized 


THE    FIRST   FELL    BLOWS  157 

corporate  bodies  of  the  day.  The  conditions  are  now  wholly  dif- 
ferent and  wholly  different  action  is  called  for.  I  believe  that  a  law 
can  be  framed  which  will  enable  the  National  Government  to 
exercise  control  along  the  lines  above  indicated.  ...  If,  however, 
the  judgment  of  the  Congress  is  that  it  lacks  the  constitutional 
power  to  pass  such  an  act,  then  a  constitutional  amendment  should 
be  submitted  to  confer  the  power. 

The  real  portent  of  these  recommendations  was  largely  unrec- 
ognized, and  the  President's  message  had  stirred  scarcely  a  ripple  of 
excitement  on  Wall  Street  and  among  conservatives  in  general.  Here 
and  there,  it  is  true,  an  isolated  outcry  was  heard.  In  conservative 
Connecticut  the  Hartford  Courant  unloosed  the  first  of  a  stream  of 
editorial  criticisms  of  the  new  President,  exclaiming  that  federal  con- 
trol "is  a  few  steps  ahead  of  government  ownership,  and  is  in  the 
same  path."  But  on  the  whole  the  reaction  was  favorable.  Many 
conservative  newspapers  heaved  a  great  sigh  of  relief  that  the  Presi- 
dent's recommendations  had  been  relatively  restrained;  some,  in- 
cluding the  Wall  Street  Journal,  endorsed  them  openly;  and  others, 
viewing  them  with  a  cynicism  born  of  realism,  suggested  that  Congress 
could  readily  ignore  them. 

Why  this  mild  reaction?  One  explanation  is  that  big  business  and 
its  defenders  had  feared  the  worst — an  explosive,  single-minded  as- 
sault on  the  iniquities  of  "the  criminal  rich"  and  the  "malefactors  of 
great  wealth."  Another  is  that  they  were  confident  that  the  President's 
proposals  would  be  buried  by  Congress.  William  McKinley  was  no 
longer  in  the  White  House,  but  God  was  in  his  heaven  and  Aldrich, 
Hanna,  Spooner,  and  those  who  thought  like  them  were  still  in  control 
of  the  United  States  Senate.  Did  they  not  stand  unalterably  for  the 
status  quo,  or  at  least  for  change  in  only  the  slightest  degree? 

If  more  assurance  were  needed,  the  conservative  Cabinet  that  came 
down  from  McKinley  must  have  given  it.  The  member  most  directly 
involved,  Attorney  General  Philander  C.  Knox,  was  able  and  public- 
spirited.  But  he  was  conservative  in  temperament  and  a  corporation 
lawyer  in  background.  He  might  be  expected,  also,  to  be  dwarfed  in 
influence  by  Elihu  Root,  whose  imposing  talents,  forceful  personality, 
and  intimate  friendship  with  Roosevelt  lent  credence  to  reports  that 
his  hand  would  extend  far  beyond  the  War  Department  where  he  was 
already  performing  with  brilliance.  Root's  attitude  toward  corporation 
control  was  no  secret;  he  largely  opposed  it. 


158  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Had  Pierpont  Morgan,  E.  H.  Harriman,  and  their  minions  been 
closer  students  of  human  nature,  they  might  have  been  more  appre- 
hensive. For  Roosevelt  had  at  his  command  the  means  for  independent 
executive  action.  Eleven  years  earlier  a  Republican  Congress  had 
responded  to  the  demands  of  social  critics  by  enacting  the  Sherman 
Antitrust  Law.  Modern  scholarship  indicates  that  the  measure  had 
been  passed  in  relatively  good  faith  despite  contemporaneous  asser- 
tions that  although  no  one  knew  what  it  would  do  to  the  trusts,  almost 
everyone  agreed  that  "something  must  be  flung  out  to  appease  the 
restive  masses."  Nevertheless,  a  succession  of  presidential  administra- 
tions had  invoked  it  sparingly,  when  at  all.  Harrison  instituted  seven 
suits,  Cleveland  eight,  and  McKinley,  under  whom  more  trusts  were 
formed  than  ever  before,  a  total  of  three.  Indeed,  the  most  notable 
effective  prosecution  under  the  Sherman  Law  had  been  against  the 
benighted  labor  leader,  Eugene  V.  Debs;  and  this  despite  Congress' 
apparent  conviction  that  labor  unions  were  exempted  from  its  pro- 
visions. Of  at  least  comparable  significance,  so  the  historian  Hans 
Thorelli  suggests,  is  the  fact  that  until  1902  not  a  single  action  against 
a  business  combine  had  been  instituted  on  the  initiative  of  the 
Department  of  Justice  headquarters  in  Washington;  excepting  only 
the  four  labor  cases  growing  out  of  the  Pullman  strike  of  1894,  every 
one  of  the  suits  under  Harrison,  Cleveland,  and  McKinley  had  been 
originated  by  zealous  district  attorneys  in  the  field.  Indubitably,  the 
utilization  of  the  Sherman  Law  as  a  broad  instrument  of  national 
policy  awaited  the  application  of  a  bold  and  imaginative  intelligence. 

Just  five  weeks  after  Theodore  Roosevelt  took  the  presidential  oath 
the  spawning  of  new  trusts  had  come  to  a  temporary  climax  as  in- 
corporation papers  for  the  Northern  Securities  Company  were  filed 
in  Trenton,  New  Jersey,  at  the  instance  of  J.  Pierpont  Morgan. 

"What  a  whale  of  a  man!"  was  the  way  one  of  his  contemporaries 
described  the  imperious  Morgan.  "There  seemed  to  radiate  something 
that  forced  the  complex  of  inferiority  .  .  .  upon  all  around  him,  in 
spite  of  themselves,"  he  continued.  "The  boldest  man  was  likely  to 
become  timid  under  his  piercing  gaze.  The  most  impudent  or  re- 
calcitrant were  ground  to  humility  as  he  chewed  truculently  at  his 
huge  black  cigar."  In  the  parlance  of  the  "Street,"  wrote  James  Ford 
Rhodes,  he  was  known  as  "Jupiter."  The  appellation  "was  properly 
bestowed,"  Rhodes  added,  "for  his  word  was  1  command.'  " 

This  First  Lord  of  American  Finance  was  no  more  committed  to 


THE    FIRST   FELL    BLOWS  159 

the  pure  theory  of  capitalism,  however,  than  the  propagandists  who 
fashioned  its  folklore.  He  too  idealized  the  concept  of  an  economy 
unfettered  by  governmental  restraints.  But  on  the  critical  abstrac- 
tion— that  of  a  genuinely  open  market — he  was  from  the  beginning  a 
radical  deviant.  Like  Aldrich  and  the  other  senators  whose  views 
reflected  or  paralleled  his  own,  Morgan  did  not  believe  in  free  com- 
petition. Always,  he  yearned  for  the  stability  and  security  of  an 
economy  ordered  by  gentlemen  bankers  and  corporation  managers; 
always,  he  feared  the  instability  of  the  hard  and  creative  clash  of  un- 
disciplined economic  units. 

Firm  in  the  conviction  that  competition  was  wasteful,  destructive 
of  confidence,  and  erratic  in  impact,  Morgan  had  been  striving  since 
1885  to  regularize  the  organization  of  the  railroads  in  particular.  By 
Roosevelt's  accession  he  had  already  reorganized  thousands  of  miles 
of  Eastern  lines  with  results  that  graphically  bore  out  the  injurious, 
no  less  than  the  beneficial,  effects  of  finance-capitalist  control.  He 
had  also  acquired  a  major  interest  in  James  J.  Hill's  Northern  Pacific 
and  Great  Northern  lines.  Striking  out  from  there  in  partnership  with 
Hill,  he  had  masterfully  extended  his  interests  over  the  Burlington 
road  into  Chicago. 

The  acquisition  of  the  Burlington  line  by  the  Morgan-Hill  interests 
had  been  a  bitter  blow  to  the  intrepid  E.  H.  Harriman,  long-time 
antagonist  of  Hill  and  dominant  figure  in  the  Union  Pacific  Railroad. 
Harriman  believed  that  the  conjunction  of  the  Burlington  and  the 
Northern  Pacific  threatened  his  own  "empire"  to  the  south;  and  he 
boldly  demanded  permission  to  buy  a  one-third  interest  in  the 
Burlington.  Morgan  and  Hill  had  peremptorily  refused,  whereupon 
Harriman  started  an  all-out  fight  for  control  of  Morgan  and  Hill's 
Northern  Pacific  road.  For  a  few  frenzied  hours  the  battle  of  the 
railroad  and  financial  titans  caused  Northern  Pacific  shares  to  soar 
to  more  than  $1,000  a  share;  but  finally  Harriman  failed  of  his 
objective  by  a  narrow  margin.  He  had  provoked  such  a  disturbance 
and  made  such  heavy  inroads  in  the  Northern  Pacific,  however,  that 
Morgan  and  Hill  retreated.  The  order  to  combine  rather  than  compete 
was  given  out,  and  the  Northern  Securities  Company  was  organized  to 
implement  it.  The  new  corporation  brought  together  the  stock  of  all 
three  roads,  the  Northern  Pacific,  Union  Pacific,  and  Burlington, 
under  a  board  composed  of  the  Morgan,  Hill,  and  Harriman  interests 
and  the  latter's  bankers,  Kuhn,  Loeb  &  Company.  One-third  of  the 


160  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Northern  Securities  Company's  stock  was  "water";  even  more  im- 
portant, shippers  through  the  entire  upper  West  had  no  recourse  but 
to  pay  such  charges  as  the  new  combine  fixed. 

President  Roosevelt  had  given  no  intimation  of  his  feelings  when 
the  Northern  Securities  Company  was  formed  in  the  fall  of  1901;  nor 
had  he  mentioned  the  company  in  his  December  message.  Some  time 
during  the  early  winter  of  1901-1902,  however,  perhaps  when  he 
learned  that  Minnesota  had  instituted  proceedings  against  it,  he  de- 
cided to  investigate.  Only  to  Attorney  General  Knox,  who  was  soon 
to  be  castigated  as  a  "country  lawyer"  by  irate  Wall  Street  men,  did 
Roosevelt  give  his  confidence. 

Pierpont  Morgan's  concern  encompassed  more  than  the  President's 
violation  of  the  "gentlemen's  code"  when  the  suit  against  the  Northern 
Securities  Company  was  announced  on  February  19.  He  feared  that 
the  government's  action  presaged  a  broadside  attack  on  his  other 
interests,  several  of  which  were  closer  to  his  leonine  heart  than  the 
Western  railroads;  and  soon  after  the  suit  was  instituted  he  sped  to 
Washington  to  impress  Roosevelt  with  the  gravity  of  his  action  and, 
particularly,  to  ascertain  his  future  intentions. 

"If  we  have  done  anything  wrong,"  the  lordly  financier  exclaimed 
to  the  President  of  the  United  States,  "send  your  man  [the  Attorney 
General]  to  my  man  [one  of  Morgan's  lawyers]  and  they  can  fix  it 
up."  Roosevelt,  who  seems  to  have  been  somewhat  awed  by  Morgan's 
commanding  presence  (though  not  enough  so  to  alter  his  policy), 
replied  simply,  "That  can't  be  done."  And  Knox  added  that  the 
administration  wanted  to  stop  such  combinations  rather  than  destroy 
them.  Morgan  then  came  to  the  main  point.  "Are  you  going  to  attack 
my  other  interests,  the  Steel  Trust  and  the  others?"  he  asked.  "Cer- 
tainly not,"  the  President  responded,  "unless  we  find  out  that  in  any 
case  they  have  done  something  we  regard  as  wrong." 

"That  is  a  most  illuminating  illustration  of  the  Wall  Street  point  of 
view,"  Roosevelt  remarked  after  Morgan  left  the  White  House.  "Mr. 
Morgan  could  not  help  regarding  me  as  a  big  rival  operator,  who 
either  intended  to  ruin  all  his  interests  or  else  could  be  induced  to 
come  to  an  agreement  to  ruin  none." 

Morgan  was  not  alone  in  resenting  the  President's  failure  to  reveal 
his  confidence.  Elihu  Root  felt  that  he  too  should  have  been  in- 
formed, and  he  vented  his  irritation  on  Knox  in  the  erroneous  belief 
that  he  was  responsible  for  the  President's  closemouthedness.  Mark 


THE    FIRST   FELL   BLOWS  161 

Hanna  must  also  have  been  irritated,  though  he  failed  to  show  it.  He 
had  accompanied  Morgan  on  one  of  his  two  visits  to  the  White 
House,  but  had  refused  to  urge  Roosevelt  to  change  his  policy.  "I 
warned  Hill  that  McKinley  might  have  to  act  against  his  company," 
the  large-minded  Ohioan  said.  "Mr.  Roosevelt's  done  it." 

The  reasons  for  Roosevelt's  cloak-and-dagger  attitude  are  unclear. 
His  only  recorded  comment  suggests  that  he  feared  the  stock  market 
would  have  been  upset  had  word  got  out.  It  is  more  likely,  however, 
that  he  simply  decided  that  an  independent  assertion  of  executive 
power  would  best  serve  his  interests.  More  effectively  than  any  words 
he  might  write  or  utter,  such  action  would  demonstrate  that  he  was 
President  in  fact  as  well  as  in  name;  that  he  had  finally  broken  free 
of  the  McKinley  nexus.  It  would  also  signify  the  weakening  of  that 
business-government  partnership  which  Roosevelt  was  compelled  by 
his  own  inner  necessity  to  attack.  And  most  important  of  all,  for 
Roosevelt  could  suppress  his  moral  compulsions  temporarily,  it  would 
win  the  support  of  the  middle  classes  while  impressing  Congress  with 
the  need  to  compromise  its  opposition  to  his  legislation  program  or 
suffer  the  consequences  in  the  executive  arena.  As  Mowry  concludes, 
"With  the  path  to  effective  regulation  blocked  by  a  stubborn,  con- 
servative Congress,  the  only  way  for  Roosevelt  to  bring  the  arrogant 
capitalists  to  heel  was  through  the  judicious  use  of  the  anti-trust  laws." 
Thus  the  President  would  have  seriously  weakened  his  position  or, 
at  the  least,  subjected  himself  to  agonizing  intellectual  turmoil,  had  he 
consulted  with  Root,  the  Senate  Four,  or  the  Morgan  group. 

For  nearly  two  years  after  suit  was  instituted  in  the  winter  of  1902, 
the  Northern  Securities  case  wended  its  way  through  the  lower  courts. 
The  feeling  was  strong  that  the  Supreme  Court  would  reaffirm  its 
opinion  in  the  Knight  Case  of  1 895 — to  wit,  a  mere  stock  transaction 
was  not  in  itself  an  act  of  commerce — and  upon  that  reasoning  the 
combine's  able  lawyers  based  the  burden  of  their  arguments.  When 
the  Northern  Securities  decision  was  finally  rendered  on  March  14, 
1904,  however,  the  government's  action  was  upheld  by  a  five  to  four 
majority.  John  Marshall  Harlan,  one  of  the  strongest  (and  paradoxi- 
cal) minds  to  grace  the  High  Tribunal  in  the  late  nineteenth  century 
and  the  author  of  the  dissenting  opinion  in  1895,  this  time  spoke  for 
the  majority. 

For  the  Court  to  accept  the  contention  that  the  act  violated  state 
sovereignty,  Justice  Harlan  declared,  would  mean  "nothing  less  than 


162  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

that  Congress,  in  regulating  interstate  commerce,  must  act  in  sub- 
ordination to  the  will  of  the  states  when  exerting  their  power  to  create 
corporations."  And  such  a  view,  the  tough-minded  jurist  concluded, 
could  not  "be  entertained  for  a  moment."  Thus  was  laid  another  major 
section  of  the  legal  roadbed  for  a  broad  extension  of  federal  regulatory 
powers  during  the  next  half  century. 

President  Roosevelt's  pleasure  in  the  Court's  ruling  was  tempered 
by  the  fact  that  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes,  the  first  and  most  eminent  of 
his  appointees  to  the  Supreme  Court,  cast  his  vote  with  the  minority. 
Harlan's  was  an  interpretation  of  the  law,  said  Holmes  in  his  dissent- 
ing opinion,  that  would  "disintegrate  society  so  far  as  it  could  into 
individual  atoms."  The  tremendous  size  of  the  railroad  combination 
was  but  "an  inevitable  incident"  in  their  development  and  was  hardly 
a  legitimate  reason  for  ordering  their  dissolution. 

Roosevelt  was  exacerbated  by  Holmes's  dissent,  which  he  char- 
acteristically blamed  on  lack  of  courage.  "I  could  carve  out  of  a 
banana  a  judge  with  more  backbone  than  that,"  he  reportedly  ex- 
claimed. Always  thereafter  Holmes  and  Roosevelt's  relationship  was 
subtly  hedged  in  though  they  continued  to  see  each  other.  "Holmes 
should  have  been  an  ideal  man  on  the  bench,"  Roosevelt  unforgivingly 
complained  to  Lodge  two  years  later.  "As  a  matter  of  fact  he  has 
been  a  bitter  disappointment."  The  great  jurist  carried  his  resentment 
beyond  Roosevelt's  grave.  Refusing  to  read  a  laudatory  biography  of 
the  late  President  in  1921,  he  mused  about  the  incident:  "[The 
affair]  .  .  .  broke  up  our  incipient  friendship.  .  .  .  [Roosevelt] 
looked  on  my  dissent  to  the  Northern  Securities  case  as  a  political 
departure  (or,  1  suspect,  more  truly,  couldn't  forgive  anyone  who 
stood  in  his  way).  We  talked  freely  later  but  it  was  never  the 
same.  .  .  ."  Holmes  added  a  characterization  not  unlike  the  one  he 
would  make  of  Franklin  D.  Roosevelt  a  decade  hence.  "[Theodore] 
.  .  .  was  very  likeable,  a  big  figure,  a  rather  ordinary  intellect,  with 
extraordinary  gifts,  a  shrewd  and  I  think  pretty  unscrupulous  politi- 
cian. He  played  all  his  cards — if  not  more.  R.i.p." 

The  incident  was  regrettable,  for  the  President's  conception  of 
the  law  roughly  paralleled  the  evolutionary  interpretation  Holmes  had 
written  into  his  epochal  Common  Law  more  than  twenty  years  earlier. 
(Holmes  never  acknowledged  the  coincidence,  preferring  the  formula- 
tion of  one  of  Roosevelt's  senatorial  contemporaries:  "What  the  boys 
like  about  Roosevelt  is  that  he  doesn't  care  a  damn  for  the  law/') 


THE   FIRST  FELL    BLOWS  163 

Indeed,  the  President  had  offered  Holmes  the  seat  in  1902  partly  in 
the  belief  that  he  would  bring  breadth  and  balance  to  the  corporation- 
oriented  High  Tribunal — Holmes's  prolabor  opinions  in  Massachu- 
setts had  especially  impressed  him.  And  though,  as  Holmes  com- 
plained, Roosevelt's  irritation  over  the  Northern  Securities  dissent 
was  both  personal  and  political,  it  was  also  ideological.  Too  percep- 
tive a  student  of  history  to  accept  the  fiction  that  legal  decisions  are 
made  in  a  social  and  political  vacuum,  Roosevelt  had  sought  a  jurist 
of  stature  whose  philosophy  was  consonant  with  his  own;  who  was, 
as  he  apparently  told  Holmes  before  he  appointed  him,  a  party  man 
in  the  tradition  of  Marshall.  "The  ablest  lawyers  and  greatest  judges 
are  men  whose  past  has  naturally  brought  them  into  close  relationship 
with  the  wealthiest  and  most  powerful  clients,"  the  President  wrote 
shortly  before  he  announced  the  appointment  of  Holmes,  "and  I  am 
glad  when  I  can  find  a  judge  who  has  been  able  to  preserve  his  aloof- 
ness of  mind  so  as  to  keep  his  broad  humanity  of  feeling  and  his 
sympathy  for  the  class  from  which  he  has  not  drawn  his  clients.  I 
think  it  eminently  desirable  that  our  Supreme  Court  should  show  in 
unmistakable  fashion  their  entire  sympathy  with  all  proper  effort  to 
secure  the  most  favorable  possible  consideration  for  the  men  who 
most  need  that  consideration.  .  .  ." 

Even  more  ironic  was  the  actual  coincidence  of  Holmes's  and 
Roosevelt's  views  on  business  combinations.  The  President  perceived 
that  monopoly  was  in  some  instances  as  advantageous  as  it  was  in- 
evitable; and  his  economic  brief  against  the  giant  trusts,  as  dis- 
tinguished from  his  political  brief,  was  that  they  were  free  to  exploit 
the  shippers  or  consumers.  His  much  lampooned  distinction  between 
"good"  and  "bad"  trusts  was  a  partial  manifestation  of  this;  and  his 
sustained  interest  in  regulation,  which  contrasted  sharply  with  his 
erratic  interest  in  dissolving  the  trusts,  was  a  clear  manifestation  of  it. 
To  the  end  he  regarded  the  Sherman  Law  as  a  special,  rather  than  a 
general,  weapon. 

The  administration's  prosecution  of  the  Northern  Securities  Com- 
pany, which  was  followed  shortly  by  a  successful  suit  against  Swift  & 
Company,  heartened  social  critics  everywhere,  the  more  so  because 
of  Congress'  hostility  to  comprehensive  regulatory  legislation.  The 
Republican  leaders  in  both  the  Senate  and  House  had  treated  the 
President's  moderate  recommendations  in  December,  1901,  with  the 
indifference  they  habitually  reserved  for  such  "visionary"  proposals; 


164  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

and  during  the  summer  of  1902  Roosevelt  had  taken  the  issue  to  the 
people,  who  gave  warm  approval  to  his  fighting,  yet  balanced, 
speeches.  When  the  new  Congress  convened  in  December,  1902,  the 
President  pressed  for  legislation  with  considerably  more  forcefulness 
than  he  had  done  the  year  before. 

"This  country  cannot  afford  to  sit  supine  on  the  plea  that  under 
our  peculiar  system  of  government  we  are  helpless  in  the  presence  of 
the  new  conditions,"  Roosevelt  declared  in  his  second  annual  mes- 
sage. "The  power  of  the  Congress  to  regulate  interstate  commerce  is 
an  absolute  and  unqualified  grant,  and  without  limitations  other  than 
those  prescribed  by  the  Constitution."  Should  the  proposed  laws 
transgress  the  authority  granted  to  Congress,  the  Chief  Executive 
asserted,  "we  should  not  shrink  from  amending  the  Constitution  so  as 
to  secure  beyond  peradventure  the  power  sought." 

These  were  forceful  generalizations;  however,  Roosevelt  finally 
accepted  a  modest  program  embracing  inspection  and  publicity  of 
corporate  earnings.  He  would  undoubtedly  have  welcomed  more;  and 
for  a  short  period  he  supported  a  sweeping  measure  offered  by 
Representative  Charles  E.  Littlefield  of  Maine.  But  when  Aldrich 
threatened  to  withdraw  support  of  the  administration  and  Senator 
Hoar  of  Massachusetts  blunderingly  appended  an  even  more  radical 
bill  of  Littlefield's  to  the  pending  measure  to  create  a  Department  of 
Commerce  and  Labor,  Roosevelt  backed  down.  He  had  no  alternative, 
given  Aldrich's  position.  Nevertheless,  the  President  characteristically 
deluded  himself.  It  was,  he  wrote  William  Howard  Taft,  "far  more 
satisfactory  to  work"  with  Aldrich,  Hanna,  Spooner  and  the  rest — 
"the  most  powerful  factors  in  Congress" — than  with  "the  radical 
'reformers,'  like  Littlefield." 

Roosevelt's  pique  was  understandable,  for  he  had  already  artfully 
threatened  to  call  a  special  session  if  Congress  failed  to  give  him  a 
Bureau  of  Corporations  within  the  Department  of  Commerce  and 
Labor  (he  ingeniously  told  the  press  that  John  D.  Rockefeller  was 
secretly  influencing  Congress  against  the  measure).  He  had  also  made 
arrangements  by  then  to  enact  the  Elkins  anti-rebate  measure  and  to 
pass  a  law  increasing  the  Attorney  General's  power  to  expedite 
antitrust  proceedings. 

Viewed  as  a  whole,  and  including  the  epochal  Supreme  Court  cases 
which  Roosevelt  initiated,  the  President's  corporation  program  was  a 
profoundly  creative  undertaking.  The  new  Department  of  Commerce 


THEFIRSTFELLBLOWS  165 

and  Labor  possessed  obvious  merits.  The  Bureau  of  Corporation's 
provisions  for  inspection  and  partial  publicity  of  corporative  activi- 
ties were  a  long  stride  forward.  The  Elkins  Act's  intended  elimination 
of  long-standing  abuses  by  powerful  shippers  was  a  major,  if  still 
inadequate,  reform.  And  the  legislation  strengthening  the  Attorney 
General's  authority  to  expedite  cases  under  the  Sherman  Law  was 
by  any  criterion  salutary. 

The  trust  problem  was  still  far  from  resolved.  Yet  the  way  was 
prepared  for  an  expansion  of  the  executive  power  by  Roosevelt  and 
those  of  his  successors  who  were  sensitive  to  the  increasingly  complex 
demands  of  the  twentieth-century  industrial  and  financial  order.  At 
a  time  when  the  American  people's  government  was  perilously  close 
to  becoming  a  mere  satellite  of  big  business,  Theodore  Roosevelt,  by 
a  masterful  assertion  of  both  his  moral  and  political  authority,  had 
reaffirmed  the  people's  right  to  control  their  affairs  through  their 
elected  representatives. 

Ironically,  it  was  a  devoted  Democrat  with  little  taste  for  the 
President's  personality  who  most  trenchantly  stated  this  overriding 
fact.  Recoiling  from  his  own  editor's  constant  "nagging"  of  Roose- 
velt, Joseph  Pultizer  in  the  spring  and  summer  of  1907  privately 
enjoined  them  to  stop.  "Support  him  on  the  main  line — no  hyper- 
criticism  of  his  minor  faults,"  the  brilliant  publisher  advised  the 
World's  leading  editorial  writer,  Frank  Cobb: 

If  Roosevelt  had  never  done  anything  else,  and  if  he  had  com- 
mitted a  hundred  times  more  mistakes,  and  if  he  were  one  hundred 
times  more  impulsive,  changeable,  unpresidential  in  dignity,  loud 
and  vociferating  in  manner  and  speech — .  .  .  if  he  had  done  noth- 
ing else  except  to  start  the  great  machinery  of  the  government  and 
the  most  powerful  force  and  majesty  of  the  law  in  the  direction  of 
prosecuting  these  great  offenders,  he  would  be  entitled  to  the 
greatest  credit  for  the  greatest  service  to  the  nation.  This  one  initia- 
tive impulse  and  persevering  instinct  must  be  held  as  offsetting  a 
hundred  wrong  impulses  of  a  minor  character.  The  greatest  breeder 
of  discontent  and  socialism  is  lack  of  confidence  in  the  justice  of 
the  law,  popular  belief  that  the  law  is  one  thing  for  the  rich  and 
another  for  the  poor. 

Theodore  Roosevelt,  wrote  the  man  whose  newspaper  had  opposed 
his  election  as  Governor  in  1898,  as  Vice  President  in  1900,  and  as 
President  in  1904,  "has  subjugated  Wall  Street." 


CHAPTER  10 


A   HISTORIC    DEPARTURE 


I  could  no  more  see  misery  and  death  come  to  the  great  masses 
of  the  people  in  our  large  cities  and  sit  by  idly,  because  under 
ordinary  conditions  a  strike  is  not  a  subject  of  interference  by 
the  President,  than  I  could  sit  by  idly  and  see  one  man  kill 
another  without  interference  because  there  is  no  statutory  duty 
imposed  upon  the  President  to  interfere  in  such  cases. 

— Roosevelt  to  Mrs.  W.  S.  Cowles 


"[The]  turbulence  and  violence  you  dread  is  just  as  apt  to  come  from 
an  attitude  of  arrogance  on  the  part  of  the  owners  of  property  and  of 
unwillingness  to  recognize  their  duty  to  the  public  as  from  any  im- 
proper encouragement  of  labor  unions,"  the  President  warned  Robert 
Bacon  in  the  fall  of  1902  as  a  summer-long  coal  strike  threatened  to 
set  off  an  outbreak  of  mass  strife  in  the  great  urban  centers  of  the 
East.  "Do  you  think  you  are  fully  alive  to  the  gross  blindness  of  the 
operators?"  Roosevelt  asked  his  old  friend  Bishop  of  the  New  York 
Evening  Post.  "Do  you  realize  that  they  are  putting  a  heavy  burden 
on  us  who  stand  against  socialism;  against  anarchic  disorder?" 

What  sophisticated  Mark  Hanna  had  averted  in  1900  had  come 
to  pass  in  1902.  On  May  12,  1902,  virtually  the  entire  anthracite  in- 
dustry in  the  gloomy,  cavernous  regions  of  eastern  Pennsylvania  had 
been  struck.  Two  years  before,  the  operators  had  made  a  10  per 
cent  wage  concession  to  the  mine  workers  in  response  to  Hanna's 
earnest  entreaties.  But  that  had  been  an  election  year,  and  almost  no 
price  had  seemed  too  high  for  William  Jennings  Bryan's  defeat. 

With  the  Great  Commoner  safely  consigned  to  the  Chautauqua 

166 


A   HISTORIC   DEPARTURE  167 

circuit  in  1902,  the  operators  felt  free  to  follow  their  normal  pre- 
dispositions. When  John  Mitchell,  the  United  Mine  Workers'  articu- 
late president,  invited  them  to  discuss  a  new  wage  scale  in  February, 
they  rebuffed  him  on  the  contention  that  he  did  not  really  represent 
the  mine  workers.  They  resented  their  strategic  retreat  of  1900,  and 
they  resolved  to  make  last-ditch  resistance  their  new  battle  order. 

Two  months  after  the  operators  thus  manned  the  ramparts,  the 
UMW  appealed  to  the  National  Civic  Federation,  a  recently  organized 
group  of  labor,  industrial,  and  political  leaders  under  Mark  Hanna's 
chairmanship.  Hanna  obligingly  arranged  for  the  UMW  officers  and 
the  presidents  of  the  major  coal  companies  to  meet  with  the  leaders 
of  the  Civic  Federation  in  New  York  City. 

The  ensuing  conference  proved  barren  of  results,  the  operators 
refusing  both  to  recognize  the  miners'  union  and  to  treat  their  griev- 
ances on  an  industry-wide  basis.  The  operators'  attitude  seemed 
reasonable.  The  right-of-the-employer  concept  was  deeply  ingrained 
in  the  public  consciousness,  and  there  were  few  in  America  aside  from 
labor  leaders  and  a  coterie  of  intellectuals  who  perceived  how 
anachronistic  the  rise  of  large-scale  industry  had  made  it.  Clinging  to 
the  historic,  agrarian-molded  conception  of  individual  liberty,  the 
middle  classes  refused  to  regard  mass  unionism  as  the  logical  counter- 
weight to  mass  industrialism;  and  though  they  often  conceded  that 
workers  should  be  free  to  join  a  union,  they  firmly  believed  that  the 
employer  should  suffer  no  compulsion  to  recognize  it.  Not  even  in 
the  darkest  days  of  this  bitter  strike,  therefore,  was  the  miners'  de- 
mand for  recognition  of  their  union  given  broad  popular  support. 

The  fact  was,  however,  that  the  average  coal  company's  holdings 
were  so  varied  and  its  financial  resources  so  great — six  railroad  cor- 
porations owned  upward  of  70  per  cent  of  the  anthracite  mines — that 
big  unionism  offered  the  only  possibility  of  relief  for  the  mine  workers. 
That  was  the  crux  of  the  recognition  issue,  and  the  operators,  who 
were  far  from  novices  in  the  field  of  labor  relations,  knew  it.  As 
Pulitzer's  World  argued  editorially  a  few  months  later,  "It  is  pre- 
posterous to  put  the  coal  trust  in  the  position  of  a  champion  of  free 
labor,  or  any  sort  of  freedom  except  the  freedom  to  mine  coal  or  to 
stop  mining  as  it  pleases — to  raise  prices  arbitrarily  at  will — to  pay  the 
wages  it  shall  decide  upon  and  exact  any  hours  or  conditions  of  work 
that  it  may  decree  without  regard  to  the  public,  to  its  miners,  or  to 
the  law." 


168  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

The  mine  workers'  decision  to  strike  on  May  12  had  not  been 
hastily  made.  Mitchell  had  persuaded  them  to  refrain  from  issuing  an 
immediate  strike  call  in  April;  and  at  the  final  meeting  sponsored  by 
the  Civic  Federation  he  offered  to  accept  a  5  per  cent  wage  increase 
though  the  rank  and  file  were  demanding  twenty.  But  in  the  face  of 
Mitchell's  moderation,  the  operators  remained  intransigent.  Even 
Mark  Hanna,  who  had  been  burning  the  long-distance  wires  and 
cabling  American  business  leaders  in  Europe  in  a  desperate  effort  to 
effect  a  compromise,  finally  threw  up  his  hands  in  disgust.  "Well! 
they  will  not  only  strike,"  he  angrily  exploded,  "but  they  will  get  ten 
per  cent  increase  before  they  settle." 

The  wage  issue,  at  least,  was  more  complex  than  later  appeared. 
The  anthracite  industry  was  even  then  "sick,"  and  the  operators  were 
probably  correct  in  arguing  that  an  increase  in  wages  would  neces- 
sitate a  rise  in  prices.  To  prove  their  point,  they  actually  offered  to 
open  their  books  to  Mitchell,  who  countered  by  suggesting  that  they 
raise  prices  if  necessary.  Their  reply  was  that  they  would  then  be 
subjected  to  inroads  by  bituminous  coal  dealers,  already  a  source  of 
stiff  competition.  "Anthracite  mining  is  a  business,  and  not  a  religious, 
sentimental,  or  academic  proposition,"  George  F.  Baer,  President  of 
the  Philadelphia  and  Reading  Coal  and  Iron  Company  and  the  indus- 
try's chief  spokesman,  remarked  a  week  before  the  strike  started. 
Later,  Baer  would  take  an  even  more  theological  view  of  manage- 
ment's right  to  direct  the  industry's  affairs. 

Contrariwise,  the  operators  failed  to  appreciate  the  psychology  of 
the  miners'  drive  for  an  ever  higher  standard  of  living — the  only 
tenable  excuse  for  their  beastlike  sweat  and  toil.  As  Roosevelt  re- 
flected a  decade  later,  "The  majority  of  the  men  ...  if  they  wished 
to  progress  at  all,  were  compelled  to  progress  not  by  ceasing  to  be 
wage-earners,  but  by  improving  the  conditions  under  which  all  the 
wage-earners  in  all  the  industries  of  the  country  lived  and  worked,  as 
well,  of  course,  as  improving  their  own  individual  efficiency."  In  the 
face  of  a  dramatic  increase  in  the  cost  of  living  that  almost  wiped 
out  the  miners'  wage  increases  of  two  years  before,  however,  the 
operators  persisted  in  holding  out. 

The  operators  were  not  disposed  to  treat  with  the  miners'  other 
grievances.  Hours  were  long  and  in  some  jobs  extreme.  Machinery  for 
a  fair  evaluation  of  the  individual  miner's  daily  output  was  deficient, 
ton  weight  varying  between  2,740  and  3,190  pounds,  and  the  men 


A   HISTORIC   DEPARTURE  169 

often  spent  many  hours  underground  without  compensation  because 
of  a  shortage  of  cars.  They  were  also  subjected  to  a  paternalism  that 
belied  the  American  dream.  Even  worse  was  the  destruction  of  life, 
limb,  and  health.  As  Irving  Stone  writes  in  his  passionate  biography 
of  Clarence  Darrow,  "Six  men  out  of  a  thousand  were  killed  every 
year;  hundreds  were  maimed  by  explosions  and  cave-ins;  few  escaped 
the  ravages  of  asthma,  bronchitis,  chronic  rheumatism,  consumption, 
heart  trouble.  By  the  age  of  fifty  the  miners  were  worn  out  and  broken, 
good  for  little  but  the  human  slag  heap." 

When,  against  this  background,  the  operators  turned  a  deaf  ear  to 
Mitchell  and  Hanna's  pleas  for  compromise — "[The  miners]  don't 
suffer,"  exclaimed  George  Baer,  "why,  they  can't  even  speak  Eng- 
lish"— the  coal  workers  had  little  recourse  but  to  strike.  Less  than 
three  weeks  after  they  went  out  on  May  12,  an  undetermined  but 
substantial  number  of  engineers,  firemen,  and  pumpmen  joined  them. 
It  was  the  greatest  work  stoppage  up  to  that  time. 

In  Washington  that  spring  President  Roosevelt  followed  the  strike 
with  increasing  alarm.  There  was  little  violence  in  the  coal  fields  at 
first;  and  at  the  outset  the  press  generally  sympathized  with  the  miners. 
Until  well  into  the  summer,  moreover,  the  stockpiles  held  up.  Yet 
the  strike  was  not  two  weeks  old  before  the  price  of  coal  began  to 
rise  sharply.  Meanwhile  accounts  of  clashes  between  strikers  and 
nonstrikers  began  to  appear  beside  reports  that  the  independent 
operators  were  prevented  from  coming  to  terms  by  the  six  great  rail- 
roads which  controlled  the  means  of  distributing  the  coal.  Nor,  ap- 
parently, were  the  operators  disposed  to  tighten  their  own  belts. 
"Official  after  official  has  had  his  salary  increased,"  the  United  Mine 
Workers'  Journal  irately  charged,  and  "President  Truesdale,  of  the 
Lackawanna,  got  an  increase  of  $10,000  per  year." 

Of  all  the  charges  and  countercharges,  that  which  most  interested 
the  President  was  one  that  the  anthracite  industry  was  a  powerful, 
closely  knit  trust.  Late  in  May  the  Springfield  Republican  pointed  out 
that  to  the  dealer  and  consumer  there  was  but  one  seller  of  coal  and 
that  they  must  meet  his  terms  or  go  without.  "It  would  be  difficult 
to  conceive  of  a  monopoly  more  perfectly  established  or  operated 
than  this  monopoly  which  holds  complete  possession  of  a  great  store 
of  nature  most  necessary  to  the  life  of  the  day,"  the  Republican  con- 
tended. "There  is  but  one  way  to  deal  with  [it]  .  .  .  public  control 
or  ownership." 


170  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Roosevelt's  response  was  to  direct  Commissioner  of  Labor  Carroll 
Wright  to  investigate  the  strike.  But  on  the  advice  of  the  President's 
conservative  intimates,  he  withheld  publication  of  Wright's  report. 
Nevertheless,  Roosevelt  became  increasingly  piqued  at  the  operators 
as  the  summer  wore  on,  and  in  August  he  seriously  considered  in- 
stituting antitrust  proceedings  against  the  coal  companies.  After 
Attorney  General  Knox  advised  him  that  suit  would  fail  for  want  of 
evidence  under  the  Sherman  Law,  however,  he  dropped  the  proposal. 
"There  is  literally  nothing,  so  far  as  I  have  yet  been  able  to  find  out, 
which  the  national  government  has  any  power  to  do  in  the  matter,"  he 
wrote  Lodge,  who  was  fretting  over  the  strike's  probable  impact  on 
the  congressional  elections  in  November.  "Nor  can  I  imagine  any 
remedial  measure  of  immediate  benefit  that  could  be  taken  in  Con- 
gress," Roosevelt  continued.  "That  it  would  be  a  good  thing  to  have 
national  control,  or  at  least  supervision,  over  these  big  coal  corpora- 
tions, I  am  sure;  but  that  would  simply  have  to  come  as  an  incident 
of  the  general  movement  to  exercise  control  over  such  corporations." 

The  President's  reflections  were  to  the  point,  given  the  conservative 
complexion  of  Congress.  Yet  the  public  temper  was  rising  daily  and 
would  obviously  continue  to  rise  until  the  strike  was  settled.  By 
early  August  pea  coal  had  soared  from  $2.40  a  ton  to  $6  in  the  New 
York  area,  while  coal  prices  as  a  whole  had  increased  50  per  cent 
or  more.  By  October  schools  in  New  York  and  many  New  England 
towns  would  be  forced  to  shut  down  for  lack  of  fuel,  while  available 
stocks,  which  were  almost  everywhere  low,  would  be  commanding 
from  $30  to  $35  per  ton. 

To  compound  the  problem,  conservative  allies  of  the  operators  were 
mounting  a  rising  attack  on  Mitchell  and  the  miners.  Late  in  the 
summer  Abram  S.  Hewitt,  Roosevelt's  erstwhile  mayoralty  opponent, 
charged  that  mild-mannered  John  Mitchell  was  trying  to  make  himself 
"the  dictator  of  the  coal  business"  and  extolled  the  operators  for 
fighting  for  "the  right  of  every  man  to  sell  his  labor  in  a  free  market." 
Although  Hewitt's  contention  was  forcefully  denied  by  many  moderate 
editorial  voices,  that  broad  prejudice  against  labor  which  had  been 
theretofore  tempered  by  the  manifest  arrogance  of  the  operators  was 
beginning  to  come  through.  And  when  reports  of  growing  violence — 
on-the-spot  observers  claimed  they  were  exaggerated  by  metropolitan 
newspapers — received  new  prominence  in  late  September,  many  con- 
servatives accepted  Hewitt's  assertions  as  conclusive.  The  real  issue, 


A  HISTORIC   DEPARTURE  171 

said  the  new  president  of  Princeton  University,  Woodrow  Wilson,  was 
the  union's  drive  "to  win  more  power." 

Whether  the  nation  as  a  whole  would  have  also  turned  against  the 
miners  is  an  open  question.  The  UMW's  resolve  to  prevent  nonunion 
men  from  returning  to  the  pits,  the  violence  that  must  inevitably  have 
ensued,  and  the  costly  discomfort  to  the  public  from  the  shortage 
of  coal  all  suggest  that  the  middle  classes  would  have  eventually 
shifted  their  sympathies;  the  unrelieved  arrogance  of  the  operators, 
together  with  the  popular  resentment  of  business  malpractices  in  gen- 
eral, suggest  that  support  of  the  mine  workers  would  have  continued. 
It  is  virtually  certain,  however,  that  Roosevelt  could  have  swung  them 
either  way  had  he  elected  to  take  a  one-sided  stand. 

The  President's  personal  intervention  came  only  after  all  pos- 
sibilities except  federal  seizure  of  the  mines  had  been  seemingly  ex- 
hausted. During  the  summer  effort  after  effort  had  failed  to  bring  the 
operators  to  terms.  Even  Hanna  proved  powerless  to  move  them. 
He  succeeded  in  persuading  the  bituminous  miners  from  going  out 
in  sympathy.  "It  is  one  of  the  proudest  moments  of  my  life  that  I  can 
state  .  .  .  that  the  men  stood  by  their  word,"  Hanna  told  a  Chau- 
tauqua  audience  after  the  bituminous  convention  voted  against  a 
sympathy  strike  on  July  17.  And  he  prevailed  on  J.  Pierpont  Morgan 
and  John  Mitchell  to  formulate  a  compromise  plan  to  end  the 
anthracite  stoppage.  But  as  he  despairingly  wrote  Roosevelt  on 
September  29,  George  Baer  rejected  it  outright. 

Meanwhile  Cabot  Lodge  importuned  Roosevelt  to  act.  "By  the 
first  week  in  November  if  the  strike  does  not  stop  and  coal  begins 
to  go  down  we  shall  have  [a  political]  .  .  .  overturn,"  he  warned. 
"Is  there  any  form  of  pressure  we  can  put  on  the  operators  who  are 
driving  us  to  ruin?  The  unions  are  just  as  obstinate  but  the  rising 
public  wrath  makes  for  them  and  they  stand  all  the  firmer." 

Roosevelt  was  too  astute  a  politician  to  be  insensitive  to  the 
politics  of  the  situation.  Yet  he  felt  helpless  to  act.  "1  am  genuinely 
independent  of  the  big  monied  men  in  all  matters  where  I  think  the 
interests  of  the  public  are  concerned,"  he  replied  to  Lodge,  "and 
probably  I  am  the  first  President  of  recent  times  of  whom  this  could 
be  truthfully  said.  .  .  .  But  where  I  do  not  grant  any  favors  to  these 
big  monied  men  which  I  do  not  think  the  country  requires  that  they 
should  have,  it  is  out  of  the  question  for  me  to  expect  them  to  grant 


172  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

favors  to  me  in  return.  ...  I  am,"  he  concluded,  "at  my  wits'  end 
how  to  proceed." 

Nevertheless,  the  President  continued  to  grope  for  a  practical  solu- 
tion. After  conferring  with  Root,  Knox,  Quay,  and  Governor  Murray 
Crane  of  Massachusetts,  he  decided  to  invite  the  operators  to  confer 
with  him.  He  contemplated  telling  them  that  he  would  "advise  action 
[presumably  to  Congress]  along  the  lines  I  have  explained  in  my 
speeches  but  of  a  much  more  radical  type  in  reference  to  their  busi- 
ness unless  they  wake  up."  The  same  day  he  made  that  decision,  how- 
ever, Crane  publicly  called  for  him  to  meet  with  both  the  operators 
and  miners.  Roosevelt  thereupon  abandoned  the  idea  of  negotiating 
with  the  operators  alone.  On  October  1  he  requested  the  leaders  of 
both  groups  to  confer  with  him.  There  would  have  been  no  warrant 
in  interfering  in  a  strike  of  iron  workers,  he  wrote  his  sister  Bamie 
two  weeks  later,  for  iron  was  not  a  necessity.  But,  he  continued,  "I 
could  .  .  .  [not]  see  misery  and  death  come  to  the  great  masses  of 
the  people  in  our  large  cities  and  sit  by  idly.  .  .  ." 

The  presidential  summonses  were  duly  honored,  though  not  in  good 
grace  by  the  operators.  A  little  before  eleven  in  the  morning  of  the 
appointed  day,  October  3,  the  leaders  of  the  operators  and  the  coal 
miners  entered  the  Blair  House  to  await  the  President.  For  a  few 
minutes  they  stood  in  knots  at  opposite  ends  of  a  long,  second-floor 
room  talking  self-consciously.  Shortly  the  President,  who  had  been 
painfully  injured  in  an  automobile  accident  three  weeks  before,  was 
wheeled  in. 

Roosevelt  opened  the  meeting  by  disclaiming  either  the  right  or 
the  duty  to  intervene.  He  presumed,  instead,  on  the  conferees'  good 
will.  "With  all  the  earnestness  there  is  in  me,"  he  solemnly  declared, 
"I  ask  that  there  be  an  immediate  resumption  of  operations  in  the 
coal  mines  in  some  such  way  as  will,  without  a  day's  unnecessary 
delay,  meet  the  crying  needs  of  the  people.  I  appeal  to  your 
patriotism,  to  the  spirit  that  sinks  personal  consideration  and  makes 
individual  sacrifices  for  the  general  good." 

John  Mitchell  then  rose  to  speak.  Never,  wrote  Mark  Sullivan  in 
his  dramatic  account  of  the  conference,  did  the  swarthy,  ex-breaker 
boy  appear  to  greater  advantage.  "His  natural  distinction  of  person 
and  manner  was  accentuated  by  his  affecting  the  sober  garb  and  the 
'reversed'  collar  of  the  clergyman,"  and  though  the  gathering  was  of 
the  strongest  men,  "he  stood  out  easily  as  the  most  intelligent  force 


A   HISTORIC   DEPARTURE  173 

of  all,  save  Roosevelt."  Eschewing  recrimination — for  many  weeks 
the  operators  had  been  abusing  Mitchell  vilely — he  spoke  simply  and 
directly : 

I  am  much  pleased,  Mr.  President,  with  what  you  say.  We  are 
willing  that  you  shall  name  a  tribunal  which  shall  determine  the 
issues  that  have  resulted  in  the  strike;  and  if  the  gentlemen 
representing  the  operators  will  accept  the  award  or  decision  of  such 
a  tribunal,  the  miners  will  willingly  accept  it,  even  if  it  be  against 
our  claims. 

George  Baer,  the  operators'  spokesman,  was  outraged  by  Mitchell's 
measured  remarks.  Two  and  one-half  months  before  the  Reading 
President  had  invoked  the  divine  right  of  plutocracy  against  sugges- 
tions that  he  agree  to  mediate  the  strike.  "The  rights  and  interests  of 
the  laboring  man  will  be  protected  and  cared  for,"  he  had  then 
written,  "not  by  the  labor  agitators,  but  by  the  Christian  men  to 
whom  God  in  His  infinite  wisdom  has  given  the  control  of  the  property 
interests  of  the  country,  and  upon  the  successful  Management  of 
which  so  much  depends."  Though  no  longer  blasphemous,  he  now 
stood  just  as  firmly  on  business'  right  to  conduct  its  own  affairs.  His 
flintlike  eyes  flashed  fire  at  the  President  no  less  than  at  Mitchell  as 
he  referred  to  the  "crimes  inaugurated  by  the  United  Mine  Workers, 
over  whom  John  Mitchell,  whom  you  invited  to  meet  you,  is  chief," 
and  admonished  Roosevelt  that  "the  duty  of  the  hour  is  not  to  waste 
time  negotiating  with  the  fomenters  of  this  anarchy."  Baer  added  that 
there  should  be  no  governmental  interference  except  through  the 
Courts  of  Common  Pleas  in  the  mining  districts  (the  established  bul- 
warks of  the  status  quo). 

Throughout  the  long  day,  broken  only  by  an  adjournment  for  lunch, 
the  operators  continued  to  castigate  Mitchell,  the  mineworkers,  and 
the  President.  Roosevelt,  the  chief  of  the  White  House  telegraphers 
later  said,  would  have  been  justified  in  heaving  chairs  at  the  operators. 
They  dismissed  the  union  members  as  anarchists  and  criminals;  they 
asked  the  President  if  he  was  not  suggesting  they  "deal  with  a  set  of 
outlaws";  and  they  openly  accused  him  of  making  "a  grandstand 
play."  There  was  "only  one  man  in  that  conference  who  behaved  like 
a  gentleman,"  Roosevelt  was  afterward  quoted  as  exclaiming,  "and 
that  man  was  not  I." 

Between  expletives,  the  operators  made  three  concrete  proposals: 


174  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

(1)  The  government  should  send  federal  troops  into  the  anthracite 
regions.  (2)  The  United  Mine  Workers  should  be  prosecuted  under 
the  terms  of  the  Sherman  Antitrust  Law.  And  (3),  the  miners  should 
be  forced  to  return  to  work  at  once,  their  grievances  to  be  adjudicated 
by  the  local  courts.  Mitchell,  who  comported  himself  with  stoic 
dignity  during  the  entire  proceedings,  rejected  all  three  proposals,  and, 
late  in  the  afternoon,  the  conference  terminated. 

That  night  Roosevelt  was  gripped  by  the  depression  that  so  often 
overcame  him  momentarily.  "I  have  tried  and  failed,"  he  wrote  Mark 
Hanna.  Mitchell's  proposition  was  "entirely  fair  and  reasonable,"  he 
continued.  "I  felt  he  did  very  well  to  keep  his  temper.  Between  times 
they  insulted  me  for  not  preserving  order."  Nor  did  he  know  what 
his  next  move  would  be.  "I  feel  most  strongly  that  the  attitude  of  the 
operators  is  one  which  accentuates  the  need  of  the  Government  having 
some  power  of  supervision  and  regulation  over  such  corporations.  I 
would  like  to  make  a  fairly  radical  experiment  on  the  anthracite  coal 
business  to  start  with!" 

To  Roosevelt's  credit,  he  resisted  the  step  that  would  have  at  once 
resolved  his  political  and  economic,  if  not  his  ideological,  dilemma.  He 
could  have  broken  the  strike  with  a  stroke  of  his  pen  by  calling  out 
federal  troops  as  the  operators  requested  and  President  Cleveland  had 
done  during  the  Pullman  strike  of  1 894.  Coal  would  then  have  been 
mined,  prices  would  have  dropped  in  time  for  the  November  elections, 
and  he  would  have  received  the  acclaim  that  is  the  man  of  action's 
desideratum.  So  acute  was  the  public  distress  and  so  widespread  the 
exaggerated  reports  of  union  violence,  that  he  conceivably  would  have 
won  overwhelming  support  from  all  but  labor  men  had  he  pursued 
such  a  decisive  course.  Even  newspapers  which  had  been  sympathetic 
to  the  United  Mine  Workers  were  demanding  an  end  to  conflict 
between  strikers  and  nonstrikers.  The  union  men  "can  not  expect,  and 
we  believe  do  not  ask,  for  public  support  of  a  strike  that  threatens  to 
degenerate  into  a  murderous  plot,"  the  Philadelphia  North  American 
remarked.  "It  is  not  a  coal  strike,  but  an  insurrection,"  the  New  York 
Journal  of  Commerce  contended. 

Notwithstanding  the  rising  hysteria,  the  President  maintained  his 
balance.  "Have  you  ever  read  Hay  and  Nicolay's  Lincoln?"  he  wrote 
Robert  Bacon.  "Just  as  Lincoln  got  contradictory  advice  from  the 
extremists  of  both  sides  at  every  phase  of  the  struggle  for  unity  and 
freedom,  so  I  now  have  carefully  to  guard  myself  against  the  ex- 


A  HISTORIC  DEPARTURE  175 

tremists  of  both  sides.  The  men  who  wish  me  to  proceed  under  the 
Sherman  antitrust  law  against  the  miners'  union  are  if  possible  one 
shade  more  foolish  than  the  others  who  wish  me  to  proceed  under  the 
same  law  against  the  coal  operators  as  such."  And  the  same  was 
true,  he  added,  of  those  who  wanted  him  to  call  out  the  troops  "on 
the  present  state  of  facts  and  without  further  investigation." 

In  the  midst  of  this  worst  crisis  of  his  first  administration,  Roose- 
velt stole  a  few  fleeting  hours  for  his  life's  most  consuming  passion; 
reading.  "I  owe  you  much!"  he  wrote  Librarian  of  Congress  Herbert 
Putnam,  who  had  recently  sent  him  a  shipment  of  books.  "I  am  now 
reveling  in  Maspero  and  occasionally  make  a  deviation  into  Sergis' 
theories  about  the  Mediterranean  races." 

It  has  been  such  a  delight  to  drop  everything  useful — everything 
that  referred  to  my  duty — .  .  .  and  to  spend  an  afternoon  in  read- 
ing about  the  relations  between  Assyria  and  Egypt;  which  could 
not  possibly  do  me  any  good  and  in  which  I  reveled  accordingly; 
while  my  wife,  who  prefers  belles-lettres,  has  read  Shakespeare, 
which  she  brought  down,  and  Tennyson  which  Ethel  brought 
down.  I  have  been  reading  Thackeray,  Dickens,  and  Scott  myself 
recently,  and  felt  as  if  I  simply  had  to  enjoy  a  few  days  of  history. 

The  President  did  not  know  it,  but  he  had  come  almost  to  the 
crossroads.  Shortly  after  the  failure  of  the  conference  in  the  Blair 
House,  he  sent  Carroll  Wright  to  Mitchell  with  a  proposal  that  the 
strikers  return  to  work  pending  an  investigation  by  a  presidential  com- 
mission, the  findings  of  which  he  pledged  himself  to  do  all  that  he 
could  to  implement.  But  as  Mitchell  explained  in  turning  it  down,  the 
miners  had  already  gone  halfway  and  had  no  reason  to  believe  the 
operators  would  "do  us  justice  in  the  future." 

At  this  juncture  there  occurred  an  event  which  served  powerfully 
to  make  the  operators  more  tractable.  For  some  time  the  operators 
had  claimed  that  great  numbers  of  miners  would  go  back  to  work  if 
protected  from  reprisals  by  the  more  zealous  union  members.  There 
was  a  grain  of  truth  in  their  contention,  for  a  small  minority  of  miners 
did  desire  to  end  the  strike.  When,  accordingly,  Governor  William  A. 
Stone  of  Pennsylvania  called  out  the  entire  state  militia  to  maintain 
order,  moderate  observers  sensed  that  the  critical  test  had  come.  Let 
the  operators  now  "put  100,000  men  to  work"  under  the  protection 
of  the  militia,  the  New  York  Times  asserted,  or  else  "send  for 


176  POWER    AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

Mitchell  and  settle  the  strike  on  the  best  terms  they  can  make." 

The  operators'  worst  fears  were  soon  realized,  for  the  great  majority 
of  strikers  continued  to  stay  out.  Baer  and  his  imperious  associates 
were  almost  trapped.  Just  one  alternative,  short  of  concessions  to  the 
miners,  remained.  The  government  might  still  be  persuaded  to  break 
the  strike  with  federal  troops.  It  was  a  thin  reed,  but  the  New  York 
Sun  waved  it  as  if  it  had  been  a  battle  standard.  ''Pennsylvania  is  in 
a  state  of  anarchy  beyond  the  power  of  her  entire  Guard  to  control," 
the  Sun  proclaimed.  The  public  demand  for  suppression  of  the 
Filipino  guerillas  had  been  fulfilled.  "Why  is  not  the  same  far-seeing 
patriotism  and  resolute  loyalty  to  the  flag  and  to  the  preservation  of 
the  rights  it  guarantees  to  its  citizens  now  guiding  those  concerned 
with  the  coal  strike,  officially  or  otherwise?" 

While  the  editors  of  the  Sun  and  other  conservatives  were  blasting 
Roosevelt  for  his  decision  to  bring  the  operators  and  strike  leaders 
together,  another  conservative  was  endorsing  the  President's  conduct. 
"I  am  especially  disturbed  and  vexed  by  the  tone  and  substance  of 
the  operators'  deliverances,"  Grover  Cleveland  wrote  Roosevelt.  Could 
not  the  operators  and  miners  be  persuaded  to  make  a  truce  until  the 
country's  most  pressing  needs  were  fulfilled?  Cleveland's  proposal 
was  even  more  impractical  than  the  one  Roosevelt  had  pressed  upon 
Mitchell  after  the  failure  of  the  conference;  yet  it  assured  the  President 
of  Cleveland's  good  will. 

Impressed  by  the  failure  of  the  strikers  to  return  to  work  under  the 
protection  of  the  Pennsylvania  troops,  and  emboldened  by  the  moral 
support  of  the  nation's  most  eminent  living  conservative,  Roosevelt 
now  evolved  a  plan  as  drastic  as  any  he  ever  formulated.  Unless  con- 
ditions soon  changed  for  the  better,  he  would  send  federal  troops  into 
the  anthracite  fields  to  seize  the  mines  and  run  them  as  a  receivership. 

The  President  had  not  come  lightly  to  this  momentous  decision. 
"You  were  no  alarmist,"  he  wrote  Murray  Crane  shortly  afterward, 
"and  when  you  saw  the  coal  famine  impending,  with  untold  misery 
as  the  result,  with  the  certainty  of  riots  which  might  develop  into 
social  war  to  follow,  I  did  not  feel  like  longer  delaying." 

The  position  of  the  operators,  that  the  public  had  no  rights  in 
the  case,  was  not  tenable  for  a  moment,  and  what  most  astounded 
me  therein  was  their  .  .  .  ignorance  of  the  fact  that  their  violence 
and  unreason  and  their  inability  or  refusal  to  consider  the  terrible 
nature  of  the  catastrophe  impending  over  the  poor  were  all  combin- 


A   HISTORIC   DEPARTURE  177 

ing  to  produce  a  most  dangerous  feeling  in  the  country  at  large — a 
feeling  which  might  have  effect  in  great  social  disturbance.  .  .  . 
Even  without  such  a  crisis  the  first  long-continued  spell  of  bitter 
weather  meant  misery  and  violence  in  acute  form  in  our  big  cities. 

Having  made  his  decision,  Roosevelt  apparently  called  in  Knox  and 
Root.  "I  explained  that  I  knew  this  action  would  form  an  evil  precedent 
.  .  .  and  that  they  should  both  write  letters  of  protest  against  it  if 
they  wished."  Reportedly,  Knox  challenged  the  President's  authority 
to  act  in  the  manner  he  proposed,  but  then  submitted.  ("Ah,  Mr. 
President,"  Knox  is  supposed  to  have  remarked  when  Roosevelt  sought 
his  advice  on  a  subsequent  occasion,  "why  have  such  a  beautiful 
action  marred  by  any  taint  of  legality?")  Root  seems  reluctantly  to 
have  acquiesced,  partly,  he  later  contended,  because  he  was  not  sure 
the  President  would  act.  "Theodore  was  a  bit  of  a  bluffer  occasion- 
ally," he  recalled,  "and  at  the  same  time  he  had  nerve  to  go  on — to 
take  a  chance  his  statements  would  have  the  deciding  effect  and,  if 
not,  to  go  on  and  trust  the  country  would  back  him  up." 

Actually,  Roosevelt's  rationale  was  the  broad  construction  principle 
he  had  always  espoused.  Representative  James  E.  Watson  recalled 
raising  the  issue  at  the  time.  "  'But,'  I  said  to  [the  President] 
'.  .  .  what  about  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States?  What  about 
seizing  private  property  for  public  purposes  without  due  process  of 
law?'  I  recall  very  vividly.  He  stopped  suddenly,  took  hold  of  my 
shoulder  and  turned  me  about  facing  him  and  looked  squarely  into 
my  eyes  as  he  fairly  shouted,  The  Constitution  was  made  for  the 
people  and  not  the  people  for  the  Constitution.'  " 

Like  so  many  other  "Roosevelt"  stories,  Watson's  may  have  been 
apocryphal.  Surely,  however,  its  point  was  accurate.  He  could  not, 
the  President  wrote  Murray  Crane  at  the  time,  act  "on  the  Buchanan 
principle  of  striving  to  find  some  constitutional  reason  for  inaction." 
He  added  in  his  A  utobiography  that  it  illustrated  what  "I  have  called 
the  Jackson-Lincoln  theory  of  the  presidency!" 

— that  is,  that  occasionally  great  national  crises  arise  which  call  for 
immediate  and  vigorous  executive  action,  and  that  in  such  cases  it 
is  the  duty  of  the  President  to  act  upon  the  theory  that  he  is  the 
steward  of  the  people,  and  that  the  proper  attitude  for  him  to  take 
is  that  he  is  bound  to  assume  that  he  has  the  legal  right  to  do  what- 
ever the  needs  of  the  people  demand,  unless  the  Constitution  or  the 
laws  explicitly  forbid  him  to  do  it. 


178  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

To  put  through  his  bold  and  imaginative  plan,  the  President  sought 
out  a  general  who  "possessed  the  necessary  good  sense,  judgment,  and 
nerve  to  act."  He  found  him  in  Major  General  J.  M.  Schofield,  "a 
most  respectable  looking  old  boy,  with  side-whiskers  and  a  black 
skull-cap,  without  any  of  the  outward  aspect  of  the  conventional 
military  dictator."  Roosevelt  told  Schofield  that  if  forced  to  move  it 
would  be  only  because  the  crisis  was  almost  as  serious  as  the  Civil 
War.  He  added  that  the  general  was  to  obey  only  his  orders  (the 
Commander  in  Chiefs)  and  that  if  served  with  a  writ  he  was  to  send 
it  to  the  President  as  had  been  done  under  Lincoln.  Roosevelt  had 
then  given  his  plan  an  aura  of  constitutionality  by  secretly  arranging 
for  Governor  Stone  of  Pennsylvania  to  request  federal  troops  on 
signal.  He  did  not,  however,  take  Stone  into  his  confidence;  nor  did 
he  really  delude  himself  that  he  was  acting  on  a  literal  interpretation 
of  the  Constitution.*  (A  half  century  later  Roosevelt's  "stewardship" 
theory  was  ringingly  denounced  in  the  federal  courts  when  a  govern- 
ment attorney  invoked  it  in  support  of  President  Truman's  seizure 
of  the  steel  industry  in  1952.  "With  all  due  deference  and  respect  for 
that  great  President  [Roosevelt]  .  .  . ,"  declared  Judge  David  A. 
Pine  of  the  District  of  Columbia  Federal  Court,  "I  am  obliged  to  say 
that  his  statements  do  not  comport  with  our  recognized  theory  of 
government,  but  with  a  theory  with  which  our  government  of  laws 
and  not  of  men  is  constantly  at  war.") 

Meanwhile,  in  a  move  that  subtly  testified  to  the  extraordinary 
power  Pierpont  Morgan  wielded  over  American  life,  Root  visited  the 
financier  in  New  York.  Root  had  asked  for  and  been  granted  permis- 
sion to  act  as  a  private  citizen.  Morgan  had  no  especial  sympathy  for 
the  miners  or  their  grievances;  but  he  was  incensed  at  the  operators 
for  botching  their  affairs  and  was  fearful  that  the  strike  would  have 
serious  social  consequences.  He  must  also  have  been  agitated  by 
Roosevelt's  plan  for  a  government  receivership.  Accordingly,  when 
Root  suggested  that  the  President  appoint  an  independent  arbitration 
commission,  Morgan  heartily  endorsed  the  idea. 

On  Sunday,  October  12,  Morgan  pressed  Root's  proposal  on 
George  Baer,  who  came  up  from  Philadelphia.  Then,  two  days  later, 

*  Article  IV,  Section  4  specifies  that  federal  troops  may  be  called  out  "on 
application  of  the  legislature,  or  of  the  executive  (when  the  legislature  cannot 
be  convened)  against  domestic  violence."  At  the  time  Roosevelt  contemplated 
action  there  was  no  evidence  that  the  state  militia  was  unable  to  control 
violence. 


A  HISTORIC   DEPARTURE  179 

Morgan  and  Robert  Bacon  speeded  to  Washington  to  present  the 
operators'  tentative  approval  to  the  President.  "It  was  a  strange  ex- 
perience for  Morgan,"  Frederick  Lewis  Allen  wrote  in  his  friendly 
biography  of  the  financier.  "Only  a  few  months  before  he  had  faced 
Roosevelt  as  a  man  accused  of  the  offense  of  setting  up  machinery  to 
bring  peace  among  warring  railroad  companies;  this  time  he  faced  him 
as  an  ally  in  setting  up  machinery  to  bring  peace  between  railroad 
companies  and  organized  labor." 

There  now  unfolded  a  high  drama,  or,  as  Roosevelt  more  fittingly 
dubbed  it,  "a  ludicrous  comedy."  The  agreement  Morgan  wrought 
from  the  operators  provided  that  the  arbitration  commission  should 
include  "a  man  who  by  active  participation  in  mining  and  selling  coal 
is  familiar  with  the  physical  and  commercial  features  of  the  business," 
but  it  failed  to  allow  for  a  labor  representative.  The  mine  workers 
resented  the  omission;  and  though  they  agreed  to  the  general  plan, 
they  requested  a  fairer  representation,  specifically  the  addition  of  a 
union  man  and  of  a  Roman  Catholic  cleric.  The  operators  demurred; 
nor  would  they  accept  former  President  Cleveland,  whom  Roosevelt 
wanted  to  appoint  in  place  of  the  army  engineer  called  for  in  the 
agreement.  An  impasse  again  threatened. 

Root  resolved  it  temporarily  by  telegraphing  Morgan,  who  had  re- 
turned to  New  York,  to  send  down  a  member  of  his  firm  for  consulta- 
tion. "That  night  Bob  Bacon  and  Perkins  came  on  from  Morgan,  both 
of  them  nearly  wild,"  Roosevelt  wrote  a  few  days  later.  "The  operators 
were  balking.  They  refused  positively  to  accept  the  two  extra  men, 
and  Morgan  said  he  could  not  get  them  to  accept.  It  appeared,"  the 
President  continued,  "that  the  men  who  were  back  of  them,  who  were 
in  the  narrow,  bourgeois,  commercial  world,  were  still  in  a  condition 
of  wooden-headed  obstinacy  and  stupidity." 

For  two  hours  the  President  argued  with  Morgan's  emissaries,  who 
kept  an  open  line  to  the  financier  and  the  uncompromising  Baer  in 
New  York.  The  operators  were  anxious  to  settle — they  had  undoubt- 
edly learned  that  drastic  action  was  in  the  offing — and  they  were  will- 
ing to  accept  a  Catholic  prelate,  even  a  liberal  one.  But  they  would 
not  agree  to  the  naming  of  a  labor  leader,  for  they  continued  to  regard 
union  recognition  as  the  pre-eminent  issue. 

Such,  then,  was  the  state  of  affairs  when  the  President  suddenly 
conceived  a  solution.  He  would  appoint  a  union  man  to  the  sociolo- 
gist's post,  but  would  call  him  a  sociologist.  "I  at  last  grasped  the 


180  POWER    AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

fact,"  Roosevelt  explained  to  Lodge,  "that  the  mighty  brains  of  these 
captains  of  industry  had  formulated  the  theory  that  they  would  rather 
have  anarchy  than  tweedledum,  but  if  I  would  use  the  word  tweedle- 
dee  they  would  hail  it  as  meaning  peace." 

With  that  brilliant  stroke,  the  President  cut  the  Gordian  knot.  The 
operators  saved  face,  among  themselves  if  no  one  else.  The  miners 
won  a  fair  representation,  Roosevelt  naming  E.  E.  Clark,  Grand 
Chief  of  the  Order  of  Railway  Conductors,  as  the  sociologist.  And 
the  President  avoided  an  action  that  was  clearly  extraconstitutional 
and  probably  unconstitutional.  The  infant  discipline  of  sociology  was 
also  given  a  new  distinction.  "Sociologist,"  wrote  Roosevelt  after 
Clark's  name  on  the  list  handed  the  press,  "means  a  man  who  has 
thought  and  studied  deeply  on  social  questions  and  has  practically 
applied  his  knowledge." 

The  miners  returned  to  the  pits  almost  at  once,  and  five  months 
later  the  arbitration  commission  submitted  a  report  moderately  favor- 
able to  the  workers.  Wages  were  broadly  increased  by  10  per  cent, 
and  hours  were  generally  reduced  to  nine,  and  in  a  few  jobs  to  eight 
per  day.  Many  of  management's  more  flagrant  abuses  were  corrected, 
though  the  old  method  of  weighing  coal  continued.  And  the  Anthra- 
cite Board  of  Conciliation  was  created  to  settle  future  differences.  The 
operators  won  their  point  on  nonrecognition,  but  only  formally,  for 
the  representatives  of  the  United  Mine  Workers  were  granted  a  seat 
on  the  new  Board  of  Conciliation.  The  operators  were  also  granted 
a  10  per  cent  increase  in  the  price  of  coal.  Peace  had  come  to  the 
anthracite  fields. 

The  passing  of  a  half  century  has  failed  to  diminish  the  historical 
significance  of  the  President's  achievement.  It  is  probably  true,  as  his 
detractors  assert,  that  he  was  more  animated  by  fear  of  social  up- 
heaval than  genuine  sympathy  for  the  mine  workers'  plight,  that  his 
plan  to  use  federal  troops  reflected  an  authoritarian  disregard  of  legal 
restraint,  and  that  Lodge's  hysterical  pleas  for  action  in  the  interest 
of  everyday  Republican  politics  probably  hastened  his  decision  to  act. 
But  it  is  also  true,  as  the  Springfield  Republican  declared  at  the  time, 
that  he  had  thwarted  the  operators'  drive  to  crush  the  United  Mine 
Workers: 

This  is  the  great  distinguishing  fact  of  what  is  to  be  the  memo- 
rable coal  strike  of  1902;  for  while  the  operators  still  nominally 


A  HISTORIC   DEPARTURE  181 

refuse  to  recognize  the  mine  workers'  union,  that  union  nevertheless 
is  a  party  to  the  President's  plan  of  arbitration  and  is  so  recognized 
by  him.  What  the  operators  said  they  never  would  concede  has  been 
conceded,  and  hence,  and  hence  only,  does  the  strike  draw  rapidly 
to  an  end. 

Perhaps  labor  could  have  got  even  more  than  it  did.  The  im- 
passioned agitator,  Mother  Jones,  thought  that  it  could  have;  and  she 
so  informed  John  Mitchell.  But  Samuel  Gompers  believed  otherwise; 
he  congratulated  Mitchell  on  the  UMW's  "splendid"  achievement. 
Clarence  Darrow,  who  served  as  counsel  to  the  mine  workers,  was 
similarly  pleased. 

The  personal  significance  of  the  President's  action  was  not  that  he 
ended  the  strike,  though  he  prided  himself  that  he  had.  Nor  was  it  in 
the  great  service  he  incidentally  rendered  the  American  labor  move- 
ment, though  he  also  took  satisfaction  in  that.  It  was,  rather,  that  in 
both  his  contemplated  use  of  federal  troops  and  in  his  actual  success 
in  winning  an  arbitration  agreement,  he  had  by  his  own  lights  acted 
in  fairness.  The  precedents  were  overwhelmingly  for  government 
intervention  in  management's  interest.  By  refusing  to  follow  them, 
by  making  the  government,  as  Mowry  phrases  it,  "a  third  force  and 
partner  in  major  labor  disputes,"  Roosevelt  gave  meaning  to  what  he 
was  to  call  his  "Square  Deal."  His  comportment  in  the  anthracite 
strike,  coupled  with  his  blows  against  the  trusts,  indelibly  stamped 
him  within  a  year  of  his  accession  as  the  first  President  of  the  modern 
era  who  was  not  indissolubly  wedded  to  the  business  point  of  view. 


CHAPTER  11 


AFFAIRS  OF  STATE 


"When  I  left  the  presidency,  I  finished  seven  and  a  half  years 
of  administration,  during  which  not  one  shot  had  been  fired 
against  a  foreign  foe.  We  were  at  absolute  peace,  and  there  was 
no  nation  in  the  world  .  .  .  whom  we  had  wronged,  or  from 
whom  we  had  anything  to  fear." 

— Theodore  Roosevelt,  An  Autobiography 


Of  all  the  functions  of  executive  leadership,  none  more  fascinated 
Roosevelt  nor  more  graphically  revealed  his  versatility  than  the  con- 
duct of  foreign  affairs.  He  was  zestfully  absorbed  by  the  responsi- 
bilities that  were  thrust  upon  him  and  went  out  of  his  way  to  shoulder 
others  that  were  not.  He  gloried  in  the  unfolding  opportunities  for 
national  expression  afforded  by  a  world  in  flux.  And  he  viewed  with 
impatience  and  at  times  forebodings  his  countrymen's  slowness  to  face 
the  realities  of  the  world  struggle  for  power.  He  acted  with  impetu- 
osity and  restraint,  with  bluster  and  sensitivity,  with  belligerence  and 
accommodation.  And  he  acted  always  to  promote  the  American 
national  interest  as  he  conceived  it.  Neither  the  idealistic  peace  move- 
ment of  the  Bryans  and  the  Carnegies  nor  the  gathering  international- 
ism of  the  era  diverted  him  from  that  course,  though  he  often  used 
the  internationalist  vocabulary  and  eventually  supported  arbitration 
agreements  not  affecting  the  nation's  vital  interests. 

During  Theodore  Roosevelt's  presidency  the  United  States  estab- 
lished a  proprietary  interest  in  Latin  America.  It  self-consciously  inter- 
jected itself  into  European  power  politics.  It  took  an  assertive  interest 
in  the  Pacific  and  parts  of  the  Far  East.  It  modernized  its  army  and 

182 


AFFAIRS    OF    STATE  183 

expanded  its  battle  fleet.  It  helped  negotiate  peace  between  the  Tsar- 
wearied  Russians  and  the  empire-minded  Japanese.  And  it  pursued 
a  generally  enlightened  policy  toward  its  newly  acquired  colonial 
dependencies. 

Roosevelt  was  not  the  sole  architect  of  these  momentous  policies 
and  events.  Some  were  inherited  from  the  McKinley  administration, 
some  were  conceived  by  the  President's  able  subordinates,  and  many 
grew  logically  out  of  the  stresses  and  strains  of  the  changing  world 
situation.  Still  others  reflected  the  influence  of  Admiral  Mahan,  with 
whom  Roosevelt  continued  to  maintain  his  stimulating  relationship. 
Yet  the  controlling  hand  was  Roosevelt's.  Concluding  that  there  was 
no  retreat  from  a  world  power  position  that  the  Spanish-American 
War  had  dramatized  and  accentuated  but  which  the  revolution  in 
communications  and  the  rise  of  America  as  an  industrial  power  had 
forged,  he  stamped  his  imprint  upon  American  foreign  policy  with  a 
force  exceeded  by  only  a  few  wartime  Presidents  and  equaled,  prob- 
ably, by  no  peacetime  President.  So  decisive  was  the  personal  equa- 
tion, in  fact,  that  the  unfolding  drama  of  American  foreign  relations 
from  1902  through  early  1909  is  essentially  the  story  of  the  vigorous 
interplay  of  Roosevelt's  personality  and  the  surging  mainstream  of 
events. 

Roosevelt  had  not  been  in  office  two  weeks  before  he  interjected 
himself  into  the  administration  of  the  colonial  dependencies.  His 
habit  of  noblesse  oblige,  his  belief  that  the  United  States  was  obli- 
gated to  impose  a  better  order  on  the  ruins  of  the  one  it  had  destroyed, 
and  his  conviction  that  despotism  was  the  high  road  to  disaster  all 
impelled  him  to  take  an  active  and  enlightened  interest  in  the  adminis- 
tration of  the  empire;  and  so  in  no  small  degree  did  his  urge  to  spread 
American  culture  in  the  manner  of  the  great  nations  of  the  past.  As 
he  had  explained  to  Frederic  Coudert  while  still  Vice  President: 

Rome  expanded  and  passed  away,  but  all  western  Europe,  both 
Americas,  Australia  and  large  parts  of  Asia  and  Africa  to  this  day 
continue  the  history  of  Rome.  .  .  .  Spain  expanded  and  fell,  but 
a  whole  continent  to  this  day  speaks  Spanish  and  is  covered  with 
commonwealths  of  the  Spanish  tongue  and  culture.  .  .  .  Eng- 
land expanded  and  England  will  fall.  But  think  of  what  she  will 
leave  behind  her  .  .  ." 

Accepting  literally,  therefore,  Rudyard  Kipling's  charge  to 


184  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

"Take  up  the  White  Man's  burden- 
Send  forth  the  best  ye  breed — " 

Roosevelt  announced  in  late  September,  1901,  that  "absolutely  no 
appointments  in  the  insular  possessions  will  be  dictated  or  controlled 
by  political  considerations"  lest  the  United  States  tread  the  path  that 
had  led  to  the  decay  of  Spanish  rule.  And  to  that  dictum  he  adhered 
with  slight  deviation  during  the  next  seven  years.  At  almost  the  same 
time  he  urged,  as  he  had  been  doing  from  the  time  of  the  great 
imperialism  debate,  that  the  United  States  make  the  Filipinos  "fit  for 
self-government  after  the  fashion  of  the  really  free  nations."  To  this 
estimable  goal  he  also  strove  during  the  whole  of  his  presidency, 
acting  always,  however,  within  the  limits  prescribed  by  his  conception 
of  America's  vital  interests. 

The  administration  of  the  insular  empire  under  Roosevelt  was 
neither  without  controversy  nor  frustration.  One  of  the  earliest  and 
most  revealing  incidents  involved  the  President's  effort  to  work  out  a 
rational  solution  to  a  long  quarrel  between  the  Filipinos  and  the 
Spanish  Dominicans  who  had  acquired  tremendous  holdings  of  choice 
farmlands  during  the  three  centuries  of  Spanish  rule.  When  the 
Filipino  patriots  had  risen  against  Spain  in  1896,  two  years  before 
Dewey's  victory  in  Manila  Bay,  the  fiery  Emilio  Aguinaldo  had  con- 
fiscated the  church  lands  by  executive  decree;  and  by  the  time  the 
Americans  encamped  on  the  archipelago  the  Filipinos  were  working 
them  as  their  own. 

Shortly  before  Roosevelt  became  President,  William  Howard  Taft 
had  proposed  that  the  United  States  purchase  title  to  the  disputed 
lands  and  then  restore  them  to  the  Filipino  farmers.  But  the  McKinley 
administration  had  shown  little  desire  to  press  the  issue.  Late  in 
February,  1902,  however,  after  conferring  with  Taft,  Root,  and 
Archbishop  Ireland,  Roosevelt  decided  to  send  Taft  to  the  Vatican 
to  make  the  necessary  arrangements.  Three  months  later  the  gargan- 
tuan Taft  was  received  with  gracious  circumspection  by  the  venerable 
Leo  XIII.  The  Vatican  consented  to  sell  the  friar's  lands,  but  the 
negotiations  broke  down  when  it  refused  to  withdraw  the  obnoxious 
monastic  orders  as  the  Filipinos  and  the  American  hierarchy,  which 
wanted  to  send  over  American  priests,  desired.  Taft  reopened  the 
negotiations  a  year  later.  "The  matter  assumed  all  the  aspects  of  a 
New  England  horse  trade,"  Henry  Pringle  later  wrote;  and  not  until 
November,  1903,  when  the  United  States  agreed  to  pay  approxi- 


AFFAIRS    OF   STATE  185 

mately  50  per  cent  more  than  the  appraised  value  of  the  lands  and 
to  abandon  the  demand  that  the  Vatican  withdraw  the  Spanish  friars, 
was  it  finally  settled. 

Superficially,  the  Vatican  had  won  its  case.  But  in  reality  the 
Roosevelt  administration  had  won  a  memorable  victory.  The  Spanish 
friars  failed  to  regain  their  power — only  two  hundred  stayed  on  in  the 
Islands — while  the  former  church  lands  became  the  basis  of  a  native 
yeoman  class.  By  1912,  fifty  thousand  Filipinos  worked  small  farms 
which  they  had  purchased  on  generous  terms  from  the  American 
government. 

Ironically,  this  enlightened  diplomacy  was  bitterly  criticized  by 
some  American  Catholics  who  refused  to  credit  the  charges  against 
the  friars  and  bitterly  resented  the  establishment  of  a  secular  school 
system  on  the  islands.  The  President  refused,  however,  to  yield  to 
their  protests.  Indeed,  he  heartily  endorsed  Taft's  effort  to  create  an 
educational  system  on  the  American  model  and  he  several  times 
warned  that  it  should  be  completely  nonsectarian.  "The  teachers  must 
not  only  be  careful  to  abstain  from  taking  sides  for  or  against 
Catholicism  or  any  other  creed,"  he  warned  Taft  in  July,  1902,  "but 
they  must  be  careful  to  abstain  from  action  which  gives  the  impression 
that  they  are  thus  taking  sides." 

To  compound  the  religious  problem,  an  articulate  minority  of 
American  Catholics  tried  frenetically  to  enlist  Roosevelt's  support  in 
crushing  a  group  of  Filipinos  who  had  severed  tics  with  Rome — the 
Aglipayans.  Roosevelt  bitterly  resented  this  high-handed  proposal, 
and  on  June  22,  1904  he  wrote  Bishop  Frederick  Z.  Rooker  of  Jaro 
in  the  Philippines  one  of  the  angriest  letters  he  ever  penned  to  a 
member  of  the  Roman  Catholic  hierarchy.  He  said  in  part: 

Now,  my  dear  Bishop  Rooker,  to  be  frank  with  you,  your  letter 
makes  it  evident  that  what  you  in  your  heart  desire  is  to  take  the 
place  of  the  friars,  and  have  American  troops  take  the  place  of  the 
Spanish  troops  in  upholding  a  clerical  and  political  despotism  in 
the  islands,  without  regard  to  the  wishes  of  the  islanders.  You  say 
that  you  wish  the  civil  government  to  come  to  an  end,  the  power 
to  be  taken  out  of  the  hands  of  the  natives,  and  a  military  govern- 
ment established  under  some  general  like  my  good  friend  Wood, 
with  instructions  instantly  and  without  regard  to  law  to  give  you 
and  your  colleagues  possession  of  all  the  churches  and  other  prop- 
erty which  the  Aglipayans  claim.  In  other  words,  you  desire  us  to 


186  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

establish  a  military  despotism  in  the  interests  of  the  Catholic 
Church.  I  think  you  must  be  singularly  ignorant  of  the  temper  of 
the  American  people  if  you  believe  such  a  proposition  feasible. 

Meanwhile,  the  President  sought  to  endow  the  island  dependencies, 
both  in  the  Caribbean  and  the  Pacific,  with  modest  economic  advan- 
tages. As  John  Blum  writes,  "he  defied  the  sugar  lobby,  the  Demo- 
crats, and  a  considerable  fraction  of  Republicans  to  obtain  for  Cuba 
a  tariff  advantage  essential  for  the  economic  stability  of  the  government 
he  had  helped  to  establish  there";  and  he  would  have  done  likewise  for 
the  Philippines  had  the  Republican  Old  Guard  permitted  him.  But  it 
would  not.  If  the  President  had  not  known  it  before,  he  knew  there- 
after that  no  consideration  of  rational  economics,  of  the  general  wel- 
fare, and  assuredly  not  of  the  "White  Man's  burden"  could  touch  the 
Grand  Old  Party's  most  sacred  of  cows. 

Fortunately,  other  areas  of  executive  action  remained  open.  Both 
before  and  after  Roosevelt's  inauguration  in  1905  the  economic, 
political,  and  social  uplifting  of  the  new  colonials  advanced  markedly. 
Railroads  were  built,  sanitation  facilities  were  introduced,  and  schools 
were  constructed  and  staffed  by  the  hundreds.  Meanwhile  Roosevelt 
cautiously,  yet  consistently,  urged  the  colonial  administrators  to  give 
the  islanders  greater  participation  in  the  conduct  of  their  affairs.  "I 
shall  endeavor,"  he  said  more  than  once,  "progressively  to  increase 
the  share  which  the  Filipinos  themselves  take  in  the  government  of 
the  islands,  letting  the  advance  in  this  direction  be  rapid  or  slow 
precisely  in  accordance  with  the  capacity  which  the  Filipinos  them- 
selves develop  for  self-restraint,  moderation,  and  ability  to  combine 
the  enjoyment  of  liberty  with  the  enforcement  of  order."  Failing 
finally  to  provide  enough  self-government  to  satisfy  the  anti-imperial- 
ists, and  giving  too  much  to  please  the  unregenerate  Old  Guard,  he 
yet  managed  to  turn  over  to  his  successor  a  colonial  empire  that  was 
the  most  progressively  governed  of  any  in  the  world. 

On  one  count  only,  aside  from  his  failure  to  strike  down  the  tariff 
barrier  and  otherwise  build  up  the  economy  of  the  archipelago,  did 
Roosevelt's  administration  of  the  Philippines  fail.  He  steadfastly  re- 
fused to  make  a  categorical  promise  of  independence.  He  feared,  for 
one  thing,  that  Japan  or  Germany  would  move  in  if  the  United  States 
moved  out;  he  believed,  for  another,  that  the  Filipinos  were  not  then 
capable  of  self-government.  In  a  moving  letter  in  June,  1902,  to  the 


AFFAIRS    OF    STATE  187 

high-minded   anti-imperialist,   Senator   Hoar   of   Massachusetts,   he 
emphasized  the  latter: 

I  am  encouraging  in  every  way  the  growth  of  the  conditions 
which  now  make  for  self-government  in  the  Philippines  and  which, 
if  the  Filipino  people  can  take  advantage  of  them,  will  assuredly 
put  them  where  some  day  we  shall  say  that  if  they  desire  independ- 
ence they  shall  have  it.  But  I  cannot  be  certain  when  that  day  will 
be,  and  of  course  there  is  always  the  possibility  that  they  may  them- 
selves behave  in  such  fashion  as  to  put  it  off  indefinitely.  Now  I 
do  not  want  to  make  a  promise  which  may  not  be  kept.  Above  all 
things,  I  want  for  myself  and  for  the  nation  that  there  shall  be  good 
faith.  Senator  Hoar,  I  honor  you  and  revere  you.  I  think  you  are 
animated  by  as  lofty  a  spirit  of  patriotism  and  of  devotion  to  and 
belief  in  mankind  as  any  man  I  have  ever  met  in  public  life.  I  hate 
to  seem  in  your  eyes  to  be  falling  short  of  my  duty  on  a  great 
question.  I  ask  you  to  believe  that  after  much  painful  thought,  after 
much  groping  and  some  uncertainty  as  to  where  my  duty  lay,  I  am 
now  doing  it  as  light  has  been  given  me  to  see  it. 

The  President's  attitude  might  have  been  more  favorably  reviewed 
before  the  bar  of  history  had  he  always  expressed  himself  on  that 
high  plane.  But  he  had  not.  Critics  have  never  forgotten  that  during 
the  campaign  of  1900  he  had  called  Aguinaldo's  beleagured  patriots 
"Talgal  bandits,"  "Chinese  halfbrceds,"  and  worse;  that  he  had  re- 
fused to  concede  the  legitimacy  (whatever  the  practicality)  of  the 
native  independence  movement;  and  that  he  had  defended  the  Ameri- 
can troops'  cruel  repression  of  Aguinaldo. 

The  organization  and  administration  of  the  new  possessions  and 
the  Cuban  protectorate  had  been  a  collective  enterprise.  Besides 
Roosevelt  and  Taft,  the  late  President  McKinley,  Elihu  Root,  Leonard 
Wood  and  three  physicians — Majors  Walter  Reed,  William  C.  Gorgas, 
and  Dr.  Jesse  W.  Lazcar,  had  all  made  contributions  which  radically 
affected  the  character  of  the  American  empire. 

But  it  was  Roosevelt  who  was  responsible  for  the  more  strictly 
diplomatic  accomplishments  of  his  administrations.  One  of  the  earliest 
of  these  was  the  settlement  of  the  long-standing  Alaskan  boundary 
dispute. 

Thirty-seven  years  before  Secretary  of  State  William  H.  Seward 
arranged  the  purchase  of  Alaska,  the  British  and  Russian  govern- 


188  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

ments  had  ratified  a  treaty  which  loosely  defined  the  line  between 
British  Columbia  and  the  Alaskan  Panhandle  as  running  thirty  miles 
inland  from  the  head  of  tidewater.  Following  the  discovery  of  gold 
in  the  Canadian  Klondike  in  1896,  however,  Canadians  sought  to 
have  the  boundary  redefined  so  as  to  give  them  access  to  the  gold 
fields.  National  passions  had  momentarily  flared  as  Whitehall  found 
itself  caught  between  the  Scylla  of  American  enmity  and  the  Charybdis 
of  Canadian  resentment  against  imperial  rule.  In  October,  1899,  how- 
ever, Secretary  of  State  Hay  arranged  to  give  the  Canadians  tempo- 
rary control  of  the  area  they  most  desired.  This  modus  vivendi  was 
in  force  when  Roosevelt  became  President. 

Roosevelt  never  had  believed  that  the  Canadian  claim  was  valid. 
"If  we  suddenly  claimed  a  part  of  Nova  Scotia  you  would  not  arbi- 
trate," he  wrote  Sir  Arthur  Lee  while  he  was  still  Vice-President . 
"This  Canadian  claim  ...  is  entirely  modern.  Twenty  years  ago  the 
Canadian  maps  showed  the  lines  just  as  ours  did."  For  several  months 
after  he  took  the  presidential  oath,  however,  Roosevelt  was  content 
to  "let  sleeping  dogs  lie."  Not  until  March,  1902,  when  he  learned 
that  gold  might  be  discovered  in  the  disputed  territory,  did  he  act. 
Then,  in  a  first  display  of  "Big  Stick"  diplomacy,  he  brought  the  full 
force  of  his  powerful  personality  to  bear  upon  the  British  and 
Canadians.  If  gold  is  discovered,  the  President  pointedly  told  a  Lon- 
don Times  correspondent  in  a  White  House  interview,  "I  shall  send 
up  engineers  to  run  our  line  as  we  assert  it  and  I  shall  send  troops  to 
guard  and  hold  it."  A  few  weeks  later,  after  discussing  the  matter 
with  Lodge,  he  ordered  Root  to  move  "additional  troops  ...  as 
quietly  and  unostentatiously  as  possible  to  Southern  Alaska,  so  as  to 
be  able  promptly  to  prevent  any  possible  disturbance."  Then,  as 
Howard  K.  Beale  points  out,  he  and  other  Americans  repeatedly 
"made  it  clear  to  the  British  Government  that  America  would  never 
yield." 

In  order,  so  he  admitted,  "to  save  his  face,"  Sir  Wilfrid  Laurier, 
the  Canadian  Prime  Minister,  finally  suggested  the  creation  of  an 
arbitration  commission.  Roosevelt  was  at  first  unsympathetic  to 
Laurier's  proposal,  for  he  was  absolutely  convinced  of  the  righteous- 
ness of  the  American  case.  Only  after  he  realized  that  the  presence 
of  three  Americans  on  the  proposed  six  man  commission  portended 
no  worse  than  a  deadlock  did  he  consent;  and  even  then  he  took  pains 


AFFAIRS    OF    STATE  189 

to  let  it  out  that  he  would  instruct  the  American  commissions  "in  no 
case  to  yield  any  of  our  claim."  As  he  informed  Hay,  who  was  prob- 
ably the  decisive  factor  in  his  decision  to  agree  to  a  form  of  arbitra- 
tion, "The  fact  that  they  have  set  up  an  outrageous  and  indefensible 
claim  and  in  consequence  are  likely  to  be  in  hot  water  with  their 
constituents  when  they  back  down,  does  not  seem  to  me  to  give  us 
any  excuse  for  paying  them  money  or  territory.  To  pay  them  anything 
where  they  are  entitled  to  nothing  would  .  .  .  come  dangerously  near 
blackmail." 

During  the  summer  and  fall  of  1902  negotiations  continued,  though 
the  President  diverted  much  of  his  energy  to  the  settlement  of  the 
anthracite  strike  and  the  Panama  Canal  controversy  with  Colombia. 
Finally,  in  January,  1903,  Hay  and  Sir  Michael  Herbert,  the  British 
Ambassador,  signed  a  treaty  providing  for  an  arbitration  tribunal  of 
six  "impartial  jurists  of  repute"  who  would  "consider  judicially  the 
question  submitted  to  them."  Three  were  to  be  selected  by  the  Presi- 
dent of  the  United  States;  three  by  His  Britannic  Majesty. 

The  treaty  received  a  rough  reception  in  the  Senate,  so  firm  was  the 
conviction  that  Canada  was  completely  in  the  wrong.  At  one  point  the 
President  was  forced  to  withdraw  it  temporarily  in  order  to  make  its 
wording  more  palatable,  and  for  a  while  it  was  doubtful  that  the 
Senate  would  ratify  it  under  any  circumstances.  Finally,  however, 
after  two  members  of  the  Supreme  Court  refused  to  serve  on  the 
proposed  commission,  Roosevelt  confided  to  Lodge  that  he  would 
appoint  Root,  Senator  George  Turner  of  Washington,  and  Lodge 
himself  if  the  Senate  approved  the  treaty.  Lodge  thereupon  whispered 
the  President's  intentions  about  the  Senate  chamber,  and  opposition 
vanished. 

The  formal  announcement  of  the  President's  appointments  pro- 
voked a  resoundingly  hostile  reaction.  "All  my  illusions  are  gone," 
Sir  Michael  Herbert  exclaimed.  Roosevelt  "is  obstinate  and  unreason- 
able." Laurier  was  no  less  outraged;  he  even  talked  of  breaking  off 
further  negotiations.  Nor  did  the  American  press  spare  the  President. 

"President  Roosevelt  ought  not  to  appoint  .  .  .  [Lodge]  to  the 
place,"  the  Springfield  Republican  declared.  "[Lodge]  has  been  play- 
ing for  years  to  the  gallery  where  the  England-haters  sit,"  the  Hartford 
Courant  added,  "and  to  the  determination  of  this  boundary  question 
he  does  not  bring  the  judicial  mind."  (The  Senator  confirmed  those 


190  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

judgments  by  delivering  a  violently  anti-Canadian  speech  in  Boston 
shortly  after  his  appointment  was  announced. ) 

The  President  must  have  known  that  his  nonjudicial  appointments 
would  evoke  a  thunderous  protest.  Neither  in  his  correspondence  nor 
in  his  Autobiography,  however,  does  he  offer  an  explanation.  The 
most  plausible  theory,  and  the  one  Beale  advances,  is  that  Lodge 
convinced  Roosevelt  that  his  own  and  Turner's  appointments  were 
necessary  to  see  the  treaty  through  the  Senate.  Certainly  the  opposi- 
tion in  that  body  had  collapsed  like  an  accordion  when  word  that 
Roosevelt  would  appoint  Lodge  and  Turner  was  passed  about  the 
Senate  cloakroom. 

Roosevelt  did  not  regard  his  selections  as  a  breach  of  faith.  Not- 
withstanding the  judicial  phraseology  of  the  treaty,  he  had  consistently 
made  clear  his  determination  to  secure  a  decision  favorable  to  the 
United  States.  Even  after  the  commissioners  had  been  selected,  he 
continued  to  press  the  validity  of  the  American  case  on  the  British 
Foreign  Office.  Lord  Alverstone,  the  British  appointee,  was  wined, 
dined,  and  politely  badgered.  And  when  Justice  Holmes  went  to 
England  for  a  vacation  that  summer,  he  carried  with  him  a  letter 
from  the  President  revealing  his  intense  belief  in  the  righteousness  of 
the  American  cause.  For  a  time,  also,  Roosevelt  considered  termi- 
nating negotiations  under  Lodge's  insistent  urgings.  Taking  counsel 
from  Hay  and  Ambassador  Choate,  however,  he  finally  repudiated 
that  unseemly  suggestion.  The  Alaskan  controversy  is  "altogether  too 
important  a  matter  to  take  a  snap  judgment  or  to  forfeit  a  single 
chance  of  bringing  it  to  a  successful  conclusion,"  Roosevelt  cabled 
Lodge.  "There  is  not  at  present  one  single  act  which  would  justify  so 
much  as  considering  the  breaking  off  of  the  negotiations." 

Nevertheless,  Roosevelt  refused  to  relax  his  resolve  to  run  the 
boundary  line  with  American  troops  should  a  settlement  fail.  In  this 
he  was  supported  by  Hay,  Choate,  and  Root,  all  of  whom  were  con- 
servative by  temperament,  and  two  of  whom,  Hay  and  Choate,  were 
extraordinarily  cordial  toward  the  British.  Indeed,  this  threat  may 
have  been  responsible  for  Lord  Alverstone's  support  of  the  burden  of 
the  United  States'  demands,  for  it  served  as  mute  testimony  of  the 
depth  of  American  feelings.  Thus,  Beale  concludes,  "The  plan  to  use 
troops  resulted  not  just  from  the  desire  of  an  impetuous  President  to 
bully  or  to  have  his  own  way;  it  grew  in  part  at  least  out  of  a  calm 
decision  of  cautious  advisers,  who  feared  growing  frontier  tension 


AFFAIRS    OF    STATE  191 

created  by  a  lawless  population  might  blow  up  into  a  dangerous 
international  incident  if  uncontrolled." 

The  Alaskan  boundary  dispute  was  neither  the  first  nor  the  last  time 
Roosevelt  "spoke  softly"  and  waved  a  "big  stick"  behind  the  scenes 
to  impress  upon  the  world  powers  the  righteousness,  or  dominance, 
of  American  claims.  During  the  whiter  of  1902-03  he  had  pressed 
Kaiser  Wilhelm  IFs  Imperial  Germany  hard;  and  in  1904  he  waved 
his  "stick"  clear  around  as  he  openly  informed  all  Europe  that  the 
United  States  was  assuming  the  time-worn  custom  of  policing  the 
financial  affairs  of  the  more  impecunious  Latin  American  nations. 

The  origins  of  the  Venezuelan  crisis  and  the  Roosevelt  Corollary 
to  the  Monroe  Doctrine  were  deep-rooted  and  tangled.  Both  grew 
out  of  the  perennial  instability  of  Latin  American  governments.  Both 
revealed  Roosevelt's  growing  concern  for  the  United  States'  strategic 
interests  in  the  Caribbean.  And  both  reflected  America's  new  power 
position  vis-a-vis  Europe.  Of  the  two,  the  Venezuelan  affair  was  the 
more  immediately  serious;  the  announcement  of  the  Roosevelt  Corol- 
lary the  more  far-reaching.  Out  of  the  one  grew  the  other. 

The  Venezuelan  crisis  had  come  to  a  head  in  early  December, 
1902,  when  Germany  and  Great  Britain,  despairing  of  diplomatic 
efforts  to  collect  debts  due  their  nationals,  attempted  to  coerce  the 
Venezuelan  government  by  blockading  that  nation's  coastline  and 
seizing  or  sinking  such  gunboats  as  comprised  its  navy.  The  American 
government  had  first  learned  of  German  intentions  to  move  against 
Venezuela  in  December,  1901.  Hay  seemingly  acquiesced  in  the  Ger- 
man design,  warning  only  that  the  United  States  would  tolerate  no 
territorial  aggrandizement;  but  the  administration  was  in  fact  gravely 
alarmed.  On  December  17  Roosevelt  ordered  Culebra,  off  Puerto 
Rico,  to  be  transferred  to  the  Navy  Department  in  order  that  a  base 
might  be  established  "in  case  of  sudden  war."  Further  precautionary 
measures  followed.  Arrangements  were  made  to  mobilize  the  fleet  in 
the  Caribbean  at  the  end  of  the  year,  and  in  the  early  summer  the 
General  Board  of  the  Navy  ordered  "a  careful  reconnaissance  of  the 
terrain  most  likely  to  be  occupied  by  German  forces  as  well  as  a 
detailed  examination  of  all  localities  where  landing  operations  might 
be  affected."  These  moves  were  climaxed  by  the  appointment  of 
Admiral  Dewey  to  the  command  of  the  Caribbean  fleet,  an  unprece- 
dented assignment  for  a  four-star  admiral. 


192  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

On  December  8,  1902,  the  day  the  hero  of  Manila  Bay  raised  his 
flag  on  the  gunboat  Mayflower,  Germany  and  Great  Britain  severed 
relations  with  Venezuela.  Within  a  fortnight  they  seized  several 
Venezuelan  naval  vessels,  bombarded  two  forts  at  Puerto  Cabello, 
and  established  a  formal  blockade  of  the  Venezuelan  coast.  Roosevelt 
responded  by  confirming  existing  orders  to  move  the  battle  fleet  to 
Trinidad,  five  hundred  miles  closer  to  Venezuela,  and  by  apparently 
talking  pointedly  to  the  German  ambassador. 

Results  were  soon  forthcoming.  The  day  the  order  to  move  the 
fleet  was  announced,  the  German  charge  d'affaires  hustled  over  to 
the  State  Department  where  Hay  raised  the  specter  of  a  congressional 
resolution  calling  on  the  President  to  act  to  uphold  the  Monroe 
Doctrine.  Meanwhile,  Ambassador  Theodor  von  Holleben  sent  two 
urgent  warnings  to  Berlin.  By  then,  it  appears,  the  self-centered 
Wilhelm  II  had  begun  to  realize  that  he  could  not  capitalize  indefi- 
nitely on  the  good  will  created  by  his  younger  brother's  recent  visit 
to  the  United  States,  and  on  December  10  Speck  von  Sternburg,  an 
old  friend  of  the  President's,  who  had  talked  with  Roosevelt  earlier 
that  fall,  was  called  to  Berlin  to  give  his  impressions  to  high  German 
officials.  He  stunned  them,  if  the  account  he  wrote  Roosevelt  is 
correct.  "Nothing  could  have  pleased  me  more,"  he  confided  to  the 
President,  "because  it  gave  me  a  chance  to  tell  them  the  truth.  I've 
told  them  every  bit  of  it  and  I  have  used  rather  plain  talk.  .  .  . 
Fear  I've  knocked  them  down  rather  roughly,  but  should  consider 
myself  a  cowardly  weakling  if  I  had  let  things  stand  as  they  were." 
Against  this  background  Germany  agreed  to  arbitration;  it  also  de- 
cided to  replace  Ambassador  von  Holleben  with  von  Sternburg,  a 
change  Roosevelt  had  long  urged. 

The  Venezuelan  affair  was  a  watershed  in  the  President's  thinking 
on  the  Monroe  Doctrine.  At  the  start  of  the  crisis  he  had  believed 
that  European  intervention  in  Latin  American  affairs  was  tolerable 
if  it  did  not  lead  to  territorial  aggrandizement.  By  its  end,  however, 
he  had  begun  to  see  the  potentialities  of  such  a  policy;  and  less  than 
a  month  afterward  he  had  taken  the  first  tentative  step  toward  formu- 
lation of  the  "Roosevelt  Corollary"  to  the  Monroe  Doctrine.  The 
catalytic  agent  was  a  talk  with  von  Sternburg  in  mid-March.  Thus 
Roosevelt  wrote  Hay  in  confidence:  "Speck  was  in  today,  evidently 
inspired  from  Berlin,  to  propose  for  our  consideration  in  the  future 
the  advisability  of  having  the  great  Powers  collectively  stand  back  of 


AFFAIRS   OF    STATE  193 

some  syndicate  which  should  take  possession  of  the  finances  of 
Venezuela." 

The  German  proposal  had  an  abstract  appeal,  for  there  was  no 
assurance  that  the  Venezuelan  dictator,  Castro,  who  clung  to  his 
shaken  authority,  had  reformed  permanently.  Nor  was  there  any 
guarantee  that  similar  crises  would  not  occur  in  any  of  a  dozen  or 
more  Latin  American  nations.  Yet  the  plan  implied  compromise  of 
the  substance,  if  not  the  form,  of  the  Monroe  Doctrine;  and  Roosevelt 
was  quick  to  sense  it.  His  "first  blush"  judgment,  he  told  the  new 
German  Ambassador,  was  that  it  "would  pave  the  way  for  reducing 
Venezuela  to  a  condition  like  that  of  Europe,  and  that  the  American 
people  interpreted  the  Monroe  Doctrine  as  meaning  of  course  that 
no  European  power  should  gain  control  of  any  American  republic." 
The  whole  debt-collection  process,  he  realistically  observed  to  Hay, 
could  prove  a  "subterfuge"  for  exercising  control. 

It  was  conditions  in  debt-ridden  and  revolution-wracked  Santo 
Domingo  that  finally  impelled  Roosevelt  to  decisive  action.  The  affairs 
of  that  island  republic  differed  from  those  of  a  number  of  other  Latin 
American  nations  only  in  their  particulars;  and  in  July,  1903,  four 
months  after  the  Venezuelan  crisis  had  ended,  the  German,  Italian, 
and  Spanish  governments  had  forced  the  Dominican  authorities  to 
sign  protocols  for  the  payment  of  monthly  installments  on  the  debts 
owed  their  nationals.  Thereafter  matters  had  moved  from  bad  to 
worse.  Finally,  in  January,  1904,  the  harried  Dominican  Minister  of 
Foreign  Affairs  made  a  special  trip  to  Washington  to  prevail  upon  the 
American  government,  in  Roosevelt's  words,  "to  establish  some  kind 
of  protectorate  over  the  islands,  and  take  charge  of  their  finances." 

The  President  would  have  preferred  to  avoid  involvement  com- 
pletely— he  had,  he  said  at  the  time,  "about  the  same  desire  to  annex 
it  as  a  gorged  boa  constrictor  might  have  to  swallow  a  porcupine 
wrong-end-to" — but  he  agreed  to  send  down  an  informal  mission. 
Then,  on  February  1,  insurrectionists  fired  on  an  American  cruiser, 
the  Yankee,  and  a  few  days  later  new  disturbances  occurred.  Ameri- 
can plantation  owners  and  investors  now  implored  the  government  to 
act,  and  on  February  5  Roosevelt  cabled  Rear  Admiral  Wise  to  take 
"immediate  steps  for  protection  of  United  States  citizens  and  prop- 
erty." Two  weeks  later  he  directed  Admiral  Dewey  to  go  to  Santo 
Domingo  and  give  him  "a  full,  impartial  searching  account  of  the 
situation  as  it  now  presents  itself  to  your  eyes."  He  was  still  reluctant* 


194  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

however,  to  undertake  a  major  intervention.  "I  hope  it  will  be  a  good 
while  before  I  have  to  go  further,"  he  wrote  Ted,  who  was  then  an 
undergraduate  at  Harvard.  "But  sooner  or  later  it  seems  to  me  in- 
evitable that  the  United  States  should  assume  an  attitude  of  protection 
and  regulation  in  regard  to  all  these  little  states  in  the  neighborhood 
of  the  Caribbean." 

Fearful  of  another  ugly  crisis  like  that  over  Venezuela  and  pre- 
disposed in  any  event  to  resolve  the  larger  problem,  Roosevelt  took 
a  decisive  step:  On  May  20,  in  a  letter  to  Root  which  the  latter  read 
at  a  Cuban  anniversary  dinner  in  New  York,  the  President  set  forth 
the  principles  of  what  became  known  as  the  Roosevelt  Corollary  to 
the  Monroe  Doctrine.  "If  a  nation  shows  that  it  knows  how  to  act 
with  decency  in  industrial  and  political  matters,  if  it  keeps  order  and 
pays  its  obligations,  then  it  need  fear  no  interference  from  the  United 
States,"  he  wrote  in  part.  "Brutal  wrongdoing,  or  an  impotence  which 
results  in  a  general  loosening  of  the  ties  of  civilizing  society,  may 
finally  require  intervention  by  some  civilized  nation;  and  in  the  West- 
ern Hemisphere  the  United  States  cannot  ignore  this  duty." 

A  violent,  and  mixed,  reaction  ensued;  and  though  Roosevelt  pro- 
fessed to  be  "amused  at  the  yell,"  he  was  actually  irritated  at  his 
critics'  refusal  to  face  reality.  It  was  "the  simplest  common  sense, 
and  only  the  fool  or  the  coward  can  treat  it  as  aught  else,"  he  angrily 
charged.  "If  we  are  willing  to  let  Germany  or  England  act  as  the 
policemen  of  the  Caribbean,  then  we  can  afford  not  to  interfere  when 
gross  wrong-doing  occurs.  But  if  we  intend  to  say  'Hands  off'  to  the 
powers  of  Europe,  sooner  or  later  we  must  keep  order  ourselves." 

Roosevelt  never  backed  down  from  that  position.  Emphasizing  in 
his  annual  message  six  months  later  that  the  United  States  entertained 
neither  "land  hunger"  nor  other  ulterior  ambitions  toward  the  "other 
nations  of  the  western  hemisphere  save  such  as  are  for  their  welfare," 
he  underlined  his  profound  reluctance  at  having  to  undertake  the 
policeman's  role.  "We  have  plenty  of  sins  of  our  own  to  war  against," 
the  President  observed,  "and  under  ordinary  circumstances  we  can 
do  more  for  the  general  uplifting  of  humanity  by  striving  with  heart 
and  soul  to  put  a  stop  to  civic  corruption,  to  brutal  lawlessness,  and 
violent  race  prejudices  here  at  home  than  by  passing  resolutions  about 
wrong-doing  elsewhere." 

The  ink  was  barely  dry  on  Roosevelt's  "Corollary"  message  to 
Congress  before  he  found  it  necessary  to  act  under  its  terms.  During 


AFFAIRS    OF    STATE  195 

the  summer  and  autumn  of  1904  conditions  in  Santo  Domingo  had 
steadily  deteriorated.  The  national  debt  had  soared  to  $32,000,000 
and  was  still  rising.  One  of  the  main  customs  houses  had  been  turned 
over  to  an  agent  of  a  New  York  corporation  which  claimed  an  unpaid 
debt  of  $4,500,000.  The  Italians,  French,  and  Belgians  were  angrily 
protesting  that  Santo  Domingo  was  violating  the  protocols  of  1905. 
And  the  Morales  administration  was  suffering  attack  from  within. 
It  was  Venezuela  all  over  again,  or  so  it  seemed;  and  Roosevelt  and 
Hay  were  determined  to  prevent  a  repetition  of  the  final  chapter.  On 
December  30,  accordingly,  the  Secretary  of  State  directed  the  Ameri- 
can minister  to  Santo  Domingo  to  ascertain  "discreetly  but  earnestly" 
whether  President  Morales  "would  be  disposed  to  request  the  United 
States  to  take  charge  of  the  collection  of  duties."  Morales  proved 
amenable,  and  on  February  7,  1905,  a  protocol  providing  for  Ameri- 
can control  of  the  republic's  customs  houses  was  finally  arranged. 
One  of  the  stormiest  and  most  prolonged  controversies  of  Roosevelt's 
presidential  career  followed. 

From  the  start,  many  senators  had  viewed  the  President's  proceed- 
ings with  grave  misgivings.  Led  by  Roosevelt's  standing  enemies, 
Senators  John  Morgan  of  Alabama  and  Augustus  O.  Bacon  of 
Georgia,  but  including  a  handful  of  Republican  anti-imperialists  as 
well,  they  charged  that  the  protocol  would  lead  to  an  American  pro- 
tectorate over  the  island  republic  and  they  accordingly  refused  to  vote 
approval  when  the  President  submitted  it  for  ratification  on  February 
15.  While  Roosevelt  fumed — "Bacon  is  a  man  of  meticulous  mind, 
a  violent  partisan,  with  no  real  public  spirit" — and  conditions  in  Santo 
Domingo  daily  grew  more  precarious,  the  Senate  sat  tight.  Both  the 
regular  and  special  sessions  of  Congress  expired  without  the  protocol 
coming  to  a  vote  on  the  floor,  although  the  Foreign  Relations  Com- 
mittee finally  reported  it  favorably. 

Whether  the  President  would  have  allowed  matters  to  drift  until 
Congress  met  in  December,  had  affairs  not  taken  a  turn  for  the  worse, 
is  conjectural.  Possibly  he  would  have.  On  March  14,  however,  an 
Italian  cruiser  appeared  off  the  coast  of  Santo  Domingo,  while  at 
almost  the  same  time  the  French  and  Belgians  renewed  pressure  for 
payment  of  their  debts.  The  crisis  Roosevelt  had  urgently  sought  to 
avert  was  thus  upon  him.  Either  the  United  States  moved  in,  or  the 
three  European  nations  took  action  on  their  own.  Even  Senator 
Morgan  recognized  that  something  had  to  be  done.  And  to  the 


196  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

President's  unmitigated  disgust,  the  Alabama  legislator  proposed  that 
the  great  powers  be  encouraged  to  act  in  concert — the  very  action 
that  Roosevelt's  diplomacy,  which  was  predicated  on  opposition  to 
the  spread  of  European  influence  in  Latin  America,  was  designed  to 
forestall. 

The  President  held  off  for  a  few  more  days  in  the  hope  that  the 
crisis  would  fail  to  jell.  On  March  28,  however,  the  American  minister 
cabled  that  the  Dominican  government  was  in  "domestic  peril,"  that 
a  modus  vivendi  was  "absolutely  necessary,"  and  that  the  European 
powers  awaited  an  American  decision  to  appoint  a  collector  of 
customs.  Roosevelt  thereupon  turned  to  individual  senators  for  advice. 
He  first  called  in  the  Republicans,  Spooner,  Foraker,  Lodge,  and 
Knox,  to  discuss  the  situation  with  him  and  Taft,  who  had  replaced 
Root  as  Secretary  of  War.  All  "heartily"  agreed  that  he  should  take 
over  the  Dominican  customs  as  President  Morales  wanted,  Minister 
Dawson  recommended,  and  the  European  nations  approved;  and  all 
submitted  to  Taft's  genial  chaffing  for  their  surrender  to  "usurption 
of  the  executive."  The  President  then  consulted  with  the  Democratic 
minority  leader,  Senator  Arthur  Pue  Gorman  of  Maryland,  an  old  foe. 
Gorman  also  agreed  that  the  President  should  appoint  a  customs 
collector  in  spite  of  the  Senate's  earlier  failure  to  ratify  the  protocol. 
Thus  fortified  by  the  support  of  the  leaders  of  both  parties,  Roosevelt 
directed  Acting  Secretary  of  State  Alvey  A.  Adee  to  make  the  neces- 
sary arrangements  for  the  collectorship. 

An  American  was  appointed  general  receiver  and  collector  of  Santo 
Domingo's  customs  in  due  course,  and  for  some  years  thereafter  the 
islanders  enjoyed  such  a  financial  stability  as  they  had  never  before 
experienced.  Roads  were  built,  schools  established,  and  a  revenue 
service  created.  The  foreign  debt  was  drastically  scaled  down,  and 
the  Dominican  share  of  customs  collections  soared  beyond  all  previous 
totals.  Moreover,  the  threat  of  European  intervention  was  dissipated. 
On  the  other  hand,  as  Mowry  points  out,  the  seeds  of  the  later 
"Dollar  Diplomacy"  were  sown  when  it  was  proposed  in  1906  that 
the  European-held  debt  be  taken  over  by  a  private  American  bank. 

The  success  of  the  experiment  in  Santo  Domingo  failed  to  cool  the 
tempers  of  the  anti-Roosevelt  forces  in  the  United  States  Senate.  So 
sustained  was  their  resentment  of  the  President  that  when  the  protocol 
again  came  to  a  vote  in  1906  it  failed  for  a  second  time  to  win  the 
necessary  two-thirds  majority.  Not  until  February,  1907,  was  the 


AFFAIRS    OF    STATE  197 

arrangement  formalized;  and  then  it  was  Root's  conciliatory  influence 
that  carried  the  day.  The  whole  affair  was  unfortunate.  The  measured, 
reluctant,  and  extraconstitutional  action  of  a  responsible  chief  execu- 
tive, it  gave  superficial  credence  to  the  charges  that  he  aspired  to 
powers  that  were  not  lawfully  his.  It  enlarged  the  partial  truth  that 
his  diplomacy  possessed  the  sensitivity  of  a  blunderbuss.  And  it 
deepened  Latin  American  hostility  toward  the  powerful  neighbor  to 
the  north. 

The  Santo  Dominican  incident  sharply  points  up  both  the  strength 
and  weakness  of  Roosevelt's  Latin  American  diplomacy.  The  Presi- 
dent's intervention  broke  the  crisis,  gave  relief  to  the  Santo  Domini- 
cans, and  made  the  eighty-three-year-old  Monroe  Doctrine  a  viable 
instrument  of  national  policy.  By  using  the  crisis  to  enunciate  the 
general  principle  of  American  obligation  to  intervene  in  future  crises 
— the  so-called  "Roosevelt  Corollary" — however,  Roosevelt  incited 
resentment  throughout  Latin  America  and  cost  the  United  States  the 
good  will  of  European  idealists.  Furthermore,  as  Dexter  Perkins  and 
other  scholars  have  pointed  out,  the  public  declaration  was  largely 
unnecessary.  When  President  Monroe  pronounced  his  memorable 
doctrine  in  1823  the  United  States  was  a  third-class  power  dependent 
upon  moral  suasion  and  the  British  Royal  Navy;  when  President 
Roosevelt  elaborated  his  corollary  in  1904  the  United  States  was  a 
first-class  power,  one  that  had  already  brought  Imperial  Germany  to 
bay  by  a  display  of  strength  and  determination.  Had  the  President 
stood  on  his  own  maxim — "actions  speak  louder  than  words" — and 
confined  his  intention  to  prevent  further  European  intervention  to 
diplomats  alone,  he  might  have  served  his  country's  purposes  more 
fully.  But  by  speaking  out  publicly,  he  converted  a  triumph  of  action 
into  a  near  tragedy  of  words. 


CHAPTER  12 


NOBLE  ENDS  AND  LESS  NOBLE  MEANS 


By  far  the  most  important  action  I  took  in  foreign  affairs 
.  .  .  related  to  the  Panama  Canal.  Here  again  there  was  much 
accusation  about  my  having  acted  in  an  "unconstitutional" 
manner —  .  .  .  and  at  different  stages  of  the  affair  believers  in  a 
do-nothing  policy  denounced  me  as  having  "usurped  authority" — 
which  meant,  that  when  nobody  else  could  or  would  exercise 
efficient  authority,  I  exercised  it. 

— Theodore  Roosevelt,  An  Autobiography 


From  that  September  day  in  1513  when  Vasco  Nunez  de  Balboa  first 
gazed  upon  the  placid  blue  waters  that  led  to  the  fabled  East,  men  of 
imagination  had  dreamed  of  linking  the  Atlantic  and  the  Pacific 
Oceans  with  a  canal  across  the  Central  American  isthmus.  For  four 
centuries,  however,  their  vision  had  been  thwarted  by  the  formidable 
engineering  obstacles  that  weighed  upon  it.  Not  even  the  genius  of 
Ferdinand  De  Lesseps  had  been  able  to  give  it  substance;  and  only 
after  Theodore  Roosevelt  marshaled  the  political,  financial,  and  scien- 
tific resources  of  the  United  States  behind  it  in  a  sustained  assertion 
of  power  was  it  finally  realized. 

A  hah0  century  before  Roosevelt  became  President  the  United 
States  and  Great  Britain  had  agreed  through  the  Clayton-Bulwer 
Treaty  of  1850  to  facilitate  construction  of  an  unfortified  canal  open 
to  the  commerce  of  all  nations  in  times  of  war  as  well  as  of  peace. 
As  the  United  States  grew  mighty  in  the  aftermath  of  the  Civil  War, 
however,  the  treaty  was  persistently  denounced  by  American  national- 
ists; and  when  the  battleship  Oregon  was  forced  to  steam  around 

198 


NOBLE    ENDS   AND   LESS   NOBLE   MEANS  199 

South  America  to  reinforce  the  fleet  off  Cuba  in  1898,  demands  for 
repudiation  of  the  treaty  and  for  construction  of  an  American-owned 
and  fortified  canal  reached  a  crescendo.  The  result  was  the  drawing 
up  of  a  new  treaty  early  in  1900 — the  First  Hay-Pauncefote  Treaty. 
Under  its  terms  the  United  States  was  authorized  to  construct  and 
administer  the  proposed  canal,  but  not  to  fortify  it  or  close  it  in  time 
of  war.  This  arrangement  was  poorly  calculated  to  appease  a  body 
politic  already  pressing  for  unilateral  action.  And  though  it  was  re- 
ceived with  moderate  favor  in  conservative  circles,  it  met  a  thunderous 
opposition  by  the  jingo  press,  partisan  Democrats,  Irish-Americans 
and  German-Americans,  and  professional  twisters  of  the  British  lion's 
tail.  It  also  incited  the  measured  and  articulate  opposition  of  Theo- 
dore Roosevelt,  who  was  then  governor  of  New  York. 

Roosevelt  was  hesitant  to  offend  his  old  friend,  Secretary  of  State 
John  Hay.  At  the  urging  of  friends  in  New  York,  however,  he 
reluctantly  came  out  against  the  treaty  in  February,  1900.  "I  most 
earnestly  hope  that  the  pending  treaty  .  .  .  will  not  be  satisfied  unless 
amended  so  as  to  provide  that  the  canal,  when  built,  shall  be  wholly 
under  the  control  of  the  United  States,  alike  in  peace  and  war,"  he 
declared  in  a  public  statement.  "This  seems  to  me  vital,  from  the 
standpoint  of  our  seapower,  no  less  than  from  the  standpoint  of  the 
Monroe  Doctrine." 

Hay  was  hurt  and  irritated  by  Roosevelt's  statement,  for  he  be- 
lieved that  defeat  of  the  treaty  would  prove  a  heavy  blow  to  the 
Anglo-American  entente  he  was  then  cultivating.  "Cannot  you  leave 
a  few  things  to  the  President  and  the  Senate  who  are  charged  with 
them  by  the  Constitution?"  he  angrily  wrote  the  Governor.  "Do  you 
really  think  the  Clayton-Bulwer  Treaty  preferable  to  the  one  now 
before  the  Senate?  There  is  no  third  issue,  except  dishonor." 

Roosevelt's  reply  had  been  tender  yet  firm.  "I  hesitated  long  before 
I  said  anything  about  the  treaty  through  sheer  dread  of  two  moments 
— that  in  which  I  should  receive  your  note,  and  that  in  which  I  should 
receive  Cabot's,"  he  wrote.  "You  have  been  the  greatest  Secretary  of 
State  I  have  seen  in  my  time,  but  at  this  moment  I  can  not,  try  as  I 
may,  see  that  you  are  right."  He  then  argued  that  a  canal  constructed 
under  the  treaty  terms  would  be  a  military  liability  on  the  grounds 
that  the  fleet  would  be  tied  up  in  its  defense.  He  also  contended  that 
it  would  vitiate  the  Monroe  Doctrine: 


200  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

If  we  invite  foreign  powers  to  a  joint  ownership,  a  joint  guar- 
antee, of  what  so  vitally  concerns  us  but  a  little  way  from  our 
borders,  how  can  we  possibly  object  to  similar  joint  action  say  in 
Southern  Brazil,  or  Argentina,  where  our  interests  are  so  much  less 
evident?  If  Germany  has  the  same  right  we  have  in  the  canal  across 
Central  America,  why  not  in  the  partition  of  any  part  of  Southern 
America?  To  my  mind,  we  should  consistently  refuse  to  all  Euro- 
pean powers  the  right  to  control,  in  any  shape,  any  territory  in  the 
Western  Hemisphere  which  they  do  not  already  hold. 

Meanwhile  Lodge,  who  was  then  emerging  as  the  most  powerful 
member  of  the  Foreign  Relations  Committee,  supported  amendments 
which  reserved  the  right  of  fortification  to  the  United  States  and 
excised  an  article  inviting  interested  powers  to  concur  in  the  treaty. 
As  thus  altered  the  First  Hay-Pauncefote  Treaty  was  approved  by  the 
Senate  on  December  20,  1900.  "Now  the  onus  is  on  England,"  the 
Massachusetts  Senator  triumphantly  wrote  in  his  personal  journal. 
"If  she  accepts  well.  If  she,  out  of  infinite  stupidity,  refuses,  then  we 
can  honorably  go  on,  &  abrogate  the  treaty  and  build  the  canal."  The 
way  was  now  opened  for  Theodore  Roosevelt  to  fulfill  the  dream  of 
four  centuries.  For  although  Great  Britain  rejected  the  amended 
treaty,  she  eventually  ratified  a  second  treaty  virtually  incorporating 
the  Senate  amendments. 

Except  for  his  public  statement  in  February,  Roosevelt  had  taken 
no  part  in  the  proceedings.  When  he  became  President  in  September, 
1901,  however,  the  Second  Hay-Pauncefote  Treaty  had  not  yet  been 
laid  before  the  Senate.  He  accordingly  urged  its  ratification  in  his  first 
annual  message  on  December  3,  and  thirteen  days  later  the  Senate 
so  acted.  The  United  States  had  only  to  choose  a  route  and  start  con- 
struction, or  so  it  appeared. 

Before  a  route  was  selected  and  work  on  the  canal  begun,  however, 
the  Roosevelt  administration  became  involved  in  such  a  stage  play  of 
high  and  low  comedy  as  the  American  people  had  seldom  before 
witnessed.  When  the  curtain  crashed  down  at  the  end  the  pockets  of 
a  mesalliance  of  American,  Colombian,  and  French  adventurers  were 
filled  to  overflowing,  Ferdinand  De  Lesseps's  vivid  imagination  and 
bold  daring  were  vindicated,  and  the  United  States  was  endowed  with 
a  legacy  of  ill-will  which  the  Good  Neighbor  policies  of  later  Presi- 
dents to  this  day  have  failed  to  dissipate  entirely.  In  addition,  Roose- 
velt's desire  for  achievement  was  gratified,  his  engineering  judgment 


NOBLE    ENDS   AND   LESS   NOBLE   MEANS  201 

affirmed,  and  the  strategic  interests  of  the  United  States  well  served. 

The  bizarre  events  preceding  the  final  curtain  call  have  been  many 
times  related,  often  with  a  fine  sense  of  drama,  occasionally  with  an 
informed  appreciation  of  their  complexity,  and  almost  always  with  an 
anti-Roosevelt  bias.  Biographical  unity  requires  that  they  be  retold 
once  more. 

When  Ferdinand  De  Lesseps's  grandiose  project  collapsed  in  1889 
with  a  boom  that  reverberated  around  the  world,  American  interest 
in  an  isthmian  canal  shifted  to  Nicaragua  where  engineering  diffi- 
culties seemed  less  imposing  and  the  political  climate  more  favorable. 
In  1899  a  commission  headed  by  Rear  Admiral  John  G.  Walker 
recommended  in  a  preliminary  report  based  largely  on  administrative 
considerations  that  the  Nicaraguan  route  be  used.  This  recommenda- 
tion had  been  well  received  in  the  Senate;  but  it  failed  to  win  support 
in  the  House,  which  demanded  that  a  new  commission  be  formed  to 
explore  all  possible  routes.  Nor  did  the  Walker  Commission's  pre- 
liminary report  evoke  favorable  response  in  scientific  circles.  By  the 
late  1890's  a  growing  body  of  technical  opinion  favored  resumption 
of  work  on  De  Lesseps's  uncompleted  project,  partly  on  the  grounds 
that  the  increasing  size  of  ocean-going  ships  would  soon  make  a 
Nicaraguan  canal  obsolete  because  of  its  dependence  on  narrow  and 
shallow  rivers.  As  the  Philadelphia  Times  observed: 

The  preference  for  the  Nicaraguan  route  is  determined  by  other 
than  purely  scientific  considerations,  and  it  leaves  a  doubt  in  the 
unprejudiced  mind  whether  the  commerce  of  the  world  might  not 
be  better  served,  after  all,  by  encouraging  the  completion  of  the 
Panama  canal  than  by  undertaking  a  competitive  canal  by  a  less 
advantageous  route. 

Over  these  measured  objections,  the  Nicaraguan  route  might  still 
have  been  selected  had  it  not  been  for  the  sensational  lobbying  cam- 
paign waged  by  the  De  Lesseps  company's  receivers.  Organized  as 
the  New  Panama  (Canal)  Company,  they  conspired  to  influence  a 
decision  favorable  to  Panama  and  to  unload  their  franchise  on  the 
American  government  for  the  princely  sum  of  $109  million.  To  these 
ends  an  enterprising  New  York  attorney,  William  N.  Cromwell,  was 
retained  to  press  the  company's  case  in  high  places.  A  $60,000 
contribution  was  made  to  the  Republican  campaign  fund  in  1900. 


202  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

And  a  comic-opera  revolution  was  instigated  in  the  long  restive  state 
of  Panama. 

The  manipulations  of  Cromwell  and  his  unfriendly  ally,  a  flam- 
boyantly imaginative  Frenchman  named  Philippe  Jean  Bunau- 
Varilla,  defy  complete  reconstruction.  It  is  clear,  however,  that  Crom- 
well was  responsible  in  some  part  for  the  omission  in  the  Republican 
platform  of  1900  of  a  preferential  statement  for  the  Nicaraguan  route; 
that  he  was  responsible  in  large  part  for  Mark  Marina's  decision  to 
carry  the  fight  for  a  Panamanian  route  to  the  floor  of  the  Senate; 
and  that  he  probably  reinforced  Roosevelt's  interest  in  the  Pana- 
manian route.  It  is  similarly  clear  that  the  versatile  Bunau-Varilla 
capitalized  on  every  opportunity,  the  most  notable  a  gift  from  nature, 
to  win  his  case.  Thus  when  Mt.  Momotombo  in  Nicaragua  spewed 
forth  a  molten  stream  of  lava  just  as  debate  on  Senator  Spooner's 
bill  for  the  Panama  route  was  coming  to  a  head  in  June,  1902,  Bunau- 
Varilla  hastily  purchased  ninety  Nicaraguan  stamps  portraying  the 
majestic  mountain  and  a  great  cloud  of  smoke  at  its  summit.  These 
he  had  placed  on  each  Senator's  desk  accompanied  by  an  appropriate 
inscription:  "An  official  witness  of  the  volcanic  activity  of  Nicaragua." 
Three  days  after  that  byplay,  the  Panama  faction  won  a  key  test  by 
a  42-to-34  vote. 

In  consequence  of  these  happenings,  a  wrong  inference  about  the 
administration's  decision  to  choose  the  Panama  route  has  often  been 
drawn.  It  is  undeniable  that  Cromwell  exerted  a  powerful  influence 
on  Hanna,  Hay,  and  the  President.  Again  and  again  they  reflected 
his  point  of  view,  and  in  the  end  they  accepted  a  settlement  consonant 
with  his  recommendations.  Yet  there  is  not  a  scrap  of  evidence  to 
indicate  that  they  were  animated  by  ulterior  considerations,  as  Crom- 
well assuredly  was.  Even  more  in  1902  than  in  1900,  the  overwhelm- 
ing burden  of  engineering  opinion,  including  that  of  the  Walker 
Commission,  was  for  the  Panama  route;  and  as  the  editors  of  Roose- 
velt's Letters  emphasize  in  a  suggestive  note,  the  President  was  fully 
informed  of  and  in  agreement  with  that  opinion. 

If  the  President's  decision  to  press  the  Panama  route  on  Congress 
was  measured  and  responsible,  his  negotiations  with  Colombia  for 
permission  to  construct  the  canal  through  the  isthmus  is  one  of  the 
ineradicable  blots  on  his  record.  It  is  the  measure  of  his  arrogance 
toward  smaller  and  less  highly  developed  states,  in  fact,  that  in  select- 
ing the  Panama  route  he  seems  not  even  to  have  considered  treating 


NOBLE  ENDS  AND  LESS  NOBLE  MEANS  203 

Colombia  as  a  truly  sovereign  power.  As  he  wrote  Hay  in  the  summer 
of  1902  when  apprised  that  preliminary  negotiations  were  proceeding 
unsatisfactorily,  "I  think  they  [the  Colombians]  would  change  their 
constitution  if  we  offered  enough." 

To  be  sure,  there  were  extenuating  circumstances.  The  most  im- 
portant of  these  grew  out  of  the  unsettled  state  of  affairs  in  Colombia, 
where  the  harassed  and  high-minded  dictator,  Jose  Manuel  Marro- 
quin,  sat  veritably  on  another  volcano — one  compounded  of  greed, 
nationalism,  and  political  intrigue.  Unfortunately  for  Roosevelt  and 
his  country,  it  also  erupted. 

Colombia  had  been  on  the  threshold  of  revolution  since  1899,  and 
in  the  fall  of  1902  fighting  actually  broke  out.  By  November  the 
Colombian  minister  to  the  United  States  had  been  discredited  by  his 
own  government's  minister  of  foreign  affairs.  Meanwhile  Secretary  of 
State  Hay,  who  was  to  prove  as  impervious  of  Colombian  sensibilities 
as  he  had  been  deferential  to  those  of  the  British,  wrung  an  agree- 
ment satisfactory  to  American  interests  from  the  new  Colombian 
minister,  one  Dr.  Tomas  Herrdn.  On  January  22  that  harried  gentle- 
man and  the  overbearing  American  Secretary  of  State  affixed  their 
signatures  to  the  Hay-Herran  Treaty,  and  a  little  less  than  two  months 
later  the  United  States  Senate  ratified  it  by  a  vote  of  73  to  5. 

Three  days  after  Dr.  Herran  signed  the  treaty  he  had  received  a 
cable  from  Bogota  instructing  him  to  withhold  his  signature.  The 
proposed  arrangements  were  substantially  unsatisfactory  to  the  Co- 
lombian government,  the  Colombian  senate,  and  the  Colombian  peo- 
ple. The  treaty  provided  for  the  payment  of  $40  million  to  the  New 
Panama  Canal  Company  and  but  $10  million  plus  $250,000  a  year 
to  the  Colombian  government.  It  granted  the  United  States  perpetual 
control  of  a  five-kilometers-wide  zone  across  the  isthmus.  And  it  pro- 
vided for  the  establishment  of  a  system  of  mixed  courts  that  would 
further  have  compromised  Colombia's  sovereignty.  So  vehement  was 
the  reaction  against  these  arrangements  that  Marroquin,  whose  dic- 
tatorship was  neither  as  total  nor  as  stable  as  Washington  assumed, 
refused  to  identify  himself  with  the  treaty;  he  forwarded  it  to  the 
Colombian  senate  without  his  signature  or  an  affirmative  recom- 
mendation. 

Roosevelt  and  Hay  were  infuriated  by  Colombia's  reaction.  Had 
not  the  Colombian  government  initiated  talks  in  December,  1900,  out 
of  fear  that  the  United  States  would  choose  the  Nicaraguan  route? 


204  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Why  should  it  now  oppose  terms  which  were  absolutely  necessary  to 
American  construction  and  operation  of  the  canal? — terms  which 
Colombia's  own  accredited  envoy  had  approved. 

The  fault  was  partly  Herran's.  He  had  made  no  effort  to  withdraw 
his  signature  upon  receipt  of  his  belated  instructions;  nor  had  he  in- 
formed Hay  of  their  import.  Furthermore,  American  intelligence  was 
poor  and  misleading.  The  American  minister  to  Colombia,  Charles 
B.  Hart,  failed  to  report  accurately  the  gathering  opposition  at  Bogota. 
And  neither  he  nor  his  successor,  Arthur  M.  Beaupre,  ever  fully 
informed  the  administration  of  the  importance  high  principled  Colom- 
bians attached  to  the  sovereignty  features  of  the  treaty.  Dismissing 
such  protests  as  "unimportant  and  largely  hypocritical,"  Beaupre 
gave  Hay  and  Roosevelt  the  impression  that  the  Colombian  govern- 
ment placed  gold  above  honor,  as  in  actual  fact,  many,  though  by  no 
means  all,  Colombian  officials  did. 

There  was  no  possibility  that  the  United  States  would  modify  its 
demands  for  control  over  the  projected  canal  zone,  given  the  dictates 
of  military  security.  Even  President  Marroquin  recognized  this.  "I  find 
myself  in  a  horrible  perplexity,"  he  pathetically  wrote  one  of  his 
generals,  ".  .  .  in  order  that  the  North  Americans  may  complete 
the  work  by  virtue  of  a  convention  with  the  Government  of  Colombia, 
it  is  necessary  to  make  concessions  of  territory,  of  sovereignty  and  of 
jurisdiction,  which  the  Executive  Power  has  not  the  power  of  yielding; 
and  if  we  do  not  yield  them  ...  we  will  lose  more  sovereignty  than 
we  should  lose  by  making  the  concessions  they  seek."  "History  will 
say  of  me,"  the  distraught  dictator  continued,  "that  I  ruined  the 
Isthmus  and  all  Colombia,  by  not  permitting  the  opening  of  the 
Panama  Canal,  or  that  I  permitted  it  to  be  done,  scandalously  injuring 
the  rights  of  my  country." 

Other  Colombian  leaders  also  recognized  their  government's 
dilemma;  and  in  a  desperate  effort  to  salvage  something,  they  sought 
to  place  what  amounted  to  a  lien  on  the  $40  million  the  United  States 
was  prepared  to  pay  the  New  Panama  Canal  Company.  Whether 
Colombia  would  have  then  ratified  the  treaty  is  a  moot  question;  but 
there  is  no  doubt  that  American  acquiescence  would  have  dispelled 
the  shadowy  charges  of  collusion  to  which  Cromwell's  backstage 
maneuvering  later  gave  birth. 

Cromwell's  main  design  was  to  protect  the  impending  $40  million 
settlement.  Arguing  that  it  would  be  immoral  for  the  United  States 


NOBLE    ENDS   AND   LESS    NOBLE   MEANS  205 

to  accept  an  amendment  that  would  allow  the  Colombian  government 
to  expropriate  any  of  the  $40  million  slated  for  the  New  Panama 
Canal  Company,  he  persuaded  Hay  to  send  the  American  minister  in 
Bogota  a  long  memorandum  that  in  effect  committed  the  United  States 
"to  the  complete  support  of  the  New  Company's  financial  interests." 
This  was  a  staggering  diplomatic  blunder.  Nothing  short  of  an  ulti- 
matum to  sign  or  submit  to  force  could  have  had  a  more  deleterious 
impact  on  the  treaty's  prospects;  and  if  any  single  action  constituted 
its  death  blow,  it  was  that  note,  a  copy  of  which  was  sent  to  the  New 
Panama  Canal  Company's  office  in  Paris. 

In  reality,  no  single  action  was  responsible.  President  Marroquin 
had  long  known  that  his  political  opposition  was  determined  to  pre- 
vent final  disposition  of  the  question  while  he  was  in  office  regardless 
of  the  terms.  And  Hay's  blunders — the  note  of  April  28  was  but  one 
of  several — served  more  to  accentuate  than  to  cause  the  Colombian's 
determination  to  reject  the  Hay-Herran  Treaty. 

When,  therefore,  the  Colombian  senate  decisively  rejected  the  Hay- 
Herran  Treaty  on  August  12,  1903,  Roosevelt  vented  his  indignation. 
The  "Dagos"  had  acted  "exactly  as  if  a  road  agent  had  tried  to  hold 
up  a  man,"  he  privately  wrote.  "They  are  mad  to  get  hold  of  the 
$40,000,000  of  the  Frenchmen."  "I  do  not  think  that  the  Bogota  lot 
of  jack  rabbits  should  be  allowed  permanently  to  bar  one  of  the  future 
highways  of  civilization." 

Unwisely  influenced  by  Cromwell,  misinformed  by  diplomatic  dis- 
patches from  Bogota,  and  victimized  by  Hay's  obtuseness,  Roosevelt's 
reaction  was  understandable,  if  not  excusable.  He  backtracked  just  a 
little  in  his  autobiographical  account  of  the  episode : 

I  am  well  aware  that  the  Colombian  people  have  many  fine 
traits;  that  there  is  among  them  a  circle  of  high-bred  men  and 
women  which  would  reflect  honor  on  the  social  life  of  any  country; 
and  that  there  has  been  an  intellectual  and  literary  development 
within  this  small  circle  which  partially  atones  for  the  stagnation  and 
illiteracy  of  the  mass  of  the  people;  and  I  also  know  that  even  the 
illiterate  mass  possesses  many  sterling  qualities.  But  unfortunately 
in  international  matters  every  nation  must  be  judged  by  the  action 
of  its  government.  The  good  people  in  Colombia  apparently  made 
no  effort,  certainly  no  successful  effort,  to  cause  the  government  to 
act  with  reasonable  good  faith  toward  the  United  States;  and 
Colombia  had  to  take  the  consequences. 


206  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Meanwhile,  Roosevelt  pondered  a  course  of  action.  The  United 
States  could  seize  Panama  under  the  so-called  right  of  "international 
domain,"  as  a  militant  minority  of  newspapers  were  demanding.  It 
could  construct  the  canal  under  an  attenuated  interpretation  of  an 
1846  "right  of  transit"  treaty  as  Professor  John  Bassett  Moore,  of 
Columbia  University,  was  urging.  It  could  support  a  revolution  in 
Panama,  which  had  revolted  against  Colombia  (New  Granada)  many 
times  in  the  past,  and  where  discontent  was  again  rife.  Or  it  could 
return  to  the  Nicaraguan  route  as  many  Southern  Democrats  were 
suggesting.  In  any  case,  the  decision  was  Roosevelt's  to  make. 

By  the  time  the  President  made  his  decision  he  had  also  emerged 
as  his  own  Secretary  of  State.  He  never  doubted  that  the  canal  would 
be  constructed,  and  he  doubted  very  little  that  it  would  be  routed 
through  Panama.  As  he  wrote  Hay  at  the  time,  "the  great  bulk  of  the 
best  engineers  are  agreed  that  that  route  is  best  .  .  .  [and]  what  we 
do  now  will  be  of  consequence,  not  merely  decades,  but  centuries 
hence,  and  we  must  be  sure  we  are  taking  the  right  step  before  we 
act." 

The  "right  step"  was  a  hard  one  to  choose.  Roosevelt's  first  inclina- 
tion was  to  act  on  the  basis  of  Professor  Moore's  sophistic  report. 
"If  under  the  treaty  of  1 846  we  have  a  color  of  right  to  start  in  and 
build  the  canal,"  he  wrote  Hay  after  reading  Moore's  memorandum 
at  Sagamore  Hill,  "my  offhand  judgment  would  favor  such  proceed- 
ing." By  early  autumn  Roosevelt  had  prepared  a  rough  draft  of  a 
message  to  Congress  requesting  authority  to  proceed  independently 
of  Colombia  on  the  grounds  that  it  was  "out  of  the  question  to  submit 
to  extortion."  The  interests  of  the  United  States  and  of  world  com- 
merce demanded  "that  the  canal  should  be  begun  with  no  needless 
delay,"  the  proposed  message  stated.  It  added  that  the  "testimony  of 
the  experts  is  very  strong,  not  only  that  the  Panama  route  is  feasible, 
but  that  in  the  Nicaraguan  route  we  may  encounter  some  unpleasant 
surprises." 

In  the  meantime  the  President  had  rejected  suggestions  that  the 
United  States  foment  a  revolt  by  the  Panamanians,  or  that  he  make  a 
militant  public  statement.  TR  unburdened  himself  on  October  10  to 
Albert  Shaw,  always  something  of  a  jingoist,  who  was  on  the  point  of 
coming  out  editorially  in  his  Review  of  Reviews  for  a  revolution: 

I  cast  aside  the  proposition  made  at  this  time  to  foment  the 
secession  of  Panama.  Whatever  other  governments  can  do,  the 


NOBLE  ENDS  AND  LESS  NOBLE  MEANS  207 

United  States  cannot  go  into  securing  by  such  underhand  means, 
the  secession.  Privately,  I  freely  say  to  you  that  I  should  be  de- 
lighted if  Panama  were  an  independent  State,  or  if  it  made  itself  so 
at  this  moment;  but  for  me  to  say  so  publicly  would  amount  to  an 
instigation  of  a  revolt,  and  therefore  I  cannot  say  it. 

Fortunately,  the  President  neither  had  to  "say  it,"  nor  to  submit 
his  proposed  message  to  Congress.  On  November  5  a  revolutionary 
junta  declared  Panama's  independence  of  Colombia,  and  four  days 
later  the  United  States  extended  de  facto  recognition  to  the  new 
republic. 

Of  all  the  events  in  the  Panama  story,  the  most  extraordinary  were 
those  encompassing  that  revolution.  They  revealed  Cromwell  and 
Bunau-Varilla  at  the  high  tide  of  their  resourcefulness  and  influence; 
they  showed  Roosevelt  and  Hay  at  their  circumspect  best;  and  they 
displayed  the  Colombian  government  at  its  confused  and  disorganized 
worst.  They  also  saw  the  Panamanians  fulfill  aspirations  a  half  cen- 
tury old.  It  was  these  very  aspirations,  in  fact,  that  formed  the  spring- 
board for  Cromwell  and  Bunau-Varilla's  activities  and  which  allowed 
Roosevelt  to  acquiesce  silently,  yet  in  reasonably  good  conscience,  to 
what  he  could  not  advocate  publicly. 

Panama  had  long  lacked  both  the  capital  and  political  climate 
essential  to  material  and  cultural  progress.  Separated  from  Bogota 
by  a  near  impenetrable  tropical  jungle  and  a  lofty  mountain  range, 
she  was  fifteen  days'  traveling  time  from  the  capital  city,  where  the 
ruling  gentry  regarded  her  alternately  with  disdainful  indifference  or 
avaricious  curiosity.  Neither  by  "community  of  interest  nor  racial 
sympathy"  were  the  Panamanians  drawn  to  their  Colombian  over- 
lords. They  had  repeatedly  demonstrated  by  armed  rebellion  their 
dissatisfaction  with  absentee  rule  over  the  years;  but  always  they  had 
been  beaten  down,  sometimes  by  American  troops.  Six  times  during 
the  fifty-three  years  prior  to  the  climactic  revolution  of  1903  Ameri- 
can sailors  or  marines  had  gone  ashore  to  restore  that  order  necessary 
to  the  open  transit  across  the  isthmus  guaranteed  by  the  Treaty  of 
1846;  and  four  times— in  1861,  1862,  1885,  and  1900— the  impotent 
Colombian  government  had  itself  requested  American  military  inter- 
vention. As  Roosevelt  contended  in  his  Autobiography,  Colombia's 
"connection  with  the  Isthmus  would  have  been  sundered  long  before 
it  was"  had  it  not  been  for  American  intervention. 

Against  such  a  background,  those  masters  of  intrigue  and  per- 


208  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

suasion,  Cromwell  and  Bunau-Varilla,  had  little  trouble  in  finding 
Panamanians  whose  revolutionary  fervor  burned  more  fiercely  than 
ever  when  confronted  with  the  prospect  of  an  independent  Republic 
of  Panama  endowed  with  the  $10  million  the  United  States  had  been 
prepared  to  pay  Colombia.  During  the  summer  of  1903  Cromwell 
and  Bunau-Varilla  sustained  the  hopes  of  a  small  band  of  Panamanian 
conspirators  and  in  the  early  autumn  of  1903,  when  the  conspirators 
were  on  the  point  of  abandoning  the  project  for  want  of  funds  and 
encouragement,  Bunau-Varilla  gave  them  both.  The  result  was  revolu- 
tion. 

Roosevelt  and  Hay  knew  from  reports  of  special  observers  and 
from  conversations  with  Cromwell  and  Bunau-Varilla  that  a  revolu- 
tion was  in  the  making.  The  President  could  readily  have  suppressed 
it;  but  in  accordance  with  his  interpretation  of  American  interest,  he 
gave  it  silent  approval,  Hay  advising  him  that  the  United  States  should 
act  "to  keep  the  transit  clear"  and  warning  that  American  interven- 
tion "should  not  be  haphazard  nor,  this  time  should  it  be  to  the 
profit,  as  heretofore  of  Bogota."  Hay  also  gave  Bunau-Varilla  the 
information  he  most  needed  by  confiding  to  the  flamboyant  French- 
man on  October  16  that  American  naval  forces  had  been  ordered  "to 
sail  towards  the  Pacific."  Coming  after  an  earlier  interview  with 
Roosevelt  which  Bunau-Varilla  construed  as  favorable  although  the 
President  failed  to  give  explicit  approval  to  his  design,  Bunau-Varilla 
hardly  needed  to  know  more.  The  stage  was  set  for  the  final  act. 

On  November  2  the  captains  of  United  States  warships  already 
dispatched  to  isthmian  waters  were  ordered  to  "maintain  free  and 
uninterrupted  transit"  and  to  "prevent  landing  of  any  armed  force, 
either  government  or  insurgent  at  any  point  within  fifty  miles  of 
Panama."  This  meant  that  Colombia  would  be  unable  to  reinforce 
its  tiny  garrison  in  Panama.  Then,  at  5:49  A.M.  on  November  3,  ex- 
actly forty-nine  minutes  after  the  Panama  City  fire  brigade  started  to 
distribute  weapons  to  crowds  in  the  streets,  the  revolution  against 
Colombia  was  accomplished.  Except  for  a  brief  shelling  by  a  Colom- 
bian gunboat  which  killed  an  innocent  bystander  and  mortally 
wounded  an  ass,  there  was  no  violence.  For  the  Colombian  governor 
of  Panama,  Jose  Domingo  de  Obaldia,  participated  in  the  conspiracy, 
and  the  Colombian  army  detachment  in  Panama  City  sold  its  services 
to  the  revolutionary  cause,  as  financed  by  the  New  Panama  Canal 
Company. 


NOBLE   ENDS   AND   LESS    NOBLE   ME\NS  209 

The  next  day  the  Panamanians  celebrated  their  independence  with 
a  formal  ceremony.  The  Colombian  general  was  presented  with 
$30,000,  most  of  his  officers  with  $10,000  each,  and  every  soldier 
in  the  ranks  with  fifty  gold  dollars.  The  American  consul,  Felix 
Ehrman,  joined  in  a  gala  parade,  and  the  President-to-be,  Dr.  Manuel 
Amador  Guerrero,  delivered  an  oration: 

The  world  is  astounded  at  our  heroism!  Yesterday  we  were  but 
the  slaves  of  Colombia;  today  we  are  free.  .  .  .  President  Roose- 
velt has  made  good.  .  .  .  Free  sons  of  Panama,  I  salute  you!  Long 
live  the  Republic  of  Panama!  Long  live  President  Roosevelt!  Long 
live  the  American  Government! 

Dr.  Amador  was  almost  premature.  The  same  day  he  was  pro- 
claiming long  life  to  the  new  republic  and  its  North  American  friends, 
the  commandant  of  the  five  hundred  Colombian  regulars  in  Colon 
was  threatening  to  kill  every  Yankee  in  the  city  unless  his  force 
received  rail  passage  to  Panama  City.  Before  he  summoned  the  neces- 
sary nerve,  however,  a  detachment  of  United  States  marines  was 
landed  under  orders  to  prevent  the  Colombians  from  using  the  rail- 
road. The  success  of  the  revolution  was  assured. 

Washington  learned  of  the  revolution's  success  the  morning  after 
this  last  threat  was  dissipated.  Within  an  hour  and  a  half  Secretary 
Hay,  in  conformance  with  instructions  from  Roosevelt,  directed  the 
American  consul  at  Panama  City  to  recognize  Dr.  Amador's  de  jacto 
government.  Within  five  days  the  President  received  the  ubiquitous 
Bunau-Varilla,  who  entered  the  White  House  as  Minister  Plenipoten- 
tiary of  the  Republic  of  Panama. 

Less  than  a  week  later,  Bunau-Varilla  signed  for  the  Republic  of 
Panama  a  treaty  which  enabled  the  Panama  Canal  to  be  constructed 
on  terms  favorable  to  Panama,  the  United  States,  the  New  Panama 
Canal  Company,  and  probably  civilization  as  a  whole.  Written  partly 
by  Bunau-Varilla  and  partly  by  Hay,  who  consulted  with  Roosevelt, 
Root,  Knox,  and  Albert  Shaw,  it  made  Panama  a  virtual  protectorate 
of  the  United  States.  The  treaty  granted  the  United  States  perpetual 
"use,  occupation,  and  control"  of  a  strip  across  the  Isthmus  ten  miles 
wide,  and  it  authorized  the  United  States  to  fortify  the  canal  and 
safeguard  the  independence  of  Panama.  Panama  was  awarded  $10 
million  and  a  $250,000  annual  payment  to  begin  nine  years  later. 


210  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

The  New  Panama  Canal  Company  received  $40  million;  Colombia 
nothing. 

For  Roosevelt,  the  sword  of  righteousness  had  again  thrust  through 
the  shield  of  iniquity.  Just  as  the  American  colonies  "had  revolted 
from  England  because  England  declined  to  treat  them  as  free  men 
with  equal  rights,"  so  had  "Panama  revolted  from  Colombia  because 
Colombia,  for  corrupt  and  evil  purposes  or  else  from  complete  gov- 
ernmental incompetency,  declined  to  permit  the  building  of  the  great 
work  which  meant  everything  to  Panama."  Nor  need  the  Colombians, 
who  offered  to  ratify  the  Hay-Herran  Treaty  by  executive  decree,  now 
expect  the  United  States  to  respond  to  their  change  of  front.  "In  their 
silly  efforts  to  damage  us  they  cut  their  own  throats,"  the  President 
charged.  "They  tried  to  hold  us  up;  and  too  late  they  have  discovered 
their  criminal  error."  Furthermore,  their  belated  offer  proves  beyond 
cavil  that  when  the  same  government  said  earlier  that  it  had  no  power 
to  take  that  step  "it  was  guilty  of  deliberate  bad  faith."  Consequently, 
the  President  concluded,  "nothing  could  be  more  wicked  than  to  ask 
us  to  surrender  the  Panama  people,  who  are  our  friends,  to  the 
Colombian  people,  who  have  shown  themselves  our  foes." 

Roosevelt  held  in  the  main  to  that  analysis  over  the  years.  True,  he 
allowed  his  boundless  pride  in  the  achievement  to  overrule  his  dis- 
cretion by  declaring  in  an  address  at  the  University  of  California  in 
1911,  "I  took  the  canal  zone  and  let  Congress  debate,  and  while  the 
debate  goes  on  the  canal  does  also."  And  in  his  Autobiography  he 
asserted  that  "From  the  beginning  to  the  end  our  course  was  straight- 
forward and  in  absolute  accord  with  the  highest  standards  of  inter- 
national morality."  But  other  statements  in  his  Autobiography  were 
more  representative: 

I  did  not  lift  my  finger  to  incite  the  revolutionists.  ...  I  simply 
ceased  to  stamp  out  the  different  revolutionary  fuses  that  were 
already  burning.  ...  I  deeply  regretted,  and  now  deeply  regret, 
the  fact  that  the  Colombian  Government  rendered  it  imperative  for 
me  to  take  the  action  I  took;  but  I  had  no  alternative,  consistent 
with  the  full  performance  of  my  duty  to  my  own  people,  and  to  the 
nations  of  mankind. 

It  is  doubtful  that  the  case  for  and  against  Roosevelt's  conduct  will 
ever  die.  The  story  is  too  dramatic,  the  characters  too  romantic,  the 
maneuverings  too  intricate.  This  much,  however,  is  clear:  Roosevelt's 


NOBLE    ENDS   AND   LESS    NOBLE   MEANS  211 

controlling  motive  was  his  conviction  of  the  United  States'  vital  inter- 
est in  constructing  a  canal  through  Panama  under  conditions  favorable 
to  the  national  security.  Had  he  not  been  so  compulsively  eager  to 
act;  had  he  not  been  so  quick  to  rise  to  the  challenge  thrown  up  by 
Colombia's  rejection  of  the  Hay-Herran  Treaty;  and  had  he  been 
more  accurately  and  broadly  informed,  he  might  have  realized  that 
great  objective  without  leaving  a  heritage  of  ill-will.  Indeed,  he  might 
even  have  assuaged  the  Colombians  by  paying  them  a  sum  equal  to 
that  paid  Cromwell's  group.  But  because  he  persisted  in  regarding  the 
Colombians  as  blackmailers,  and  because  delay  was  foreign  to  his 
nature  and  possibly  subversive  of  his  presidential  ambitions  in  1904, 
he  allowed  himself  to  pursue  a  blameworthy  course.  His  autobio- 
graphical explanation  is  illuminating  but  certainly  not  convincing: 

My  belief  then  was,  and  the  events  that  have  occurred  since  have 
more  than  justified  it,  that  from  the  standpoint  of  the  United  States 
it  was  imperative,  not  only  for  civil  but  for  military  reasons,  that 
there  should  be  the  immediate  establishment  of  easy  and  speedy 
communication  by  sea  between  the  Atlantic  and  the  Pacific.  These 
reasons  were  not  of  convenience  only,  but  of  vital  necessity,  and 
do  not  admit  of  indefinite  delay.  .  .  .  Colombia  proposed  to  wait 
a  year,  and  then  enforce  a  forfeiture  of  the  rights  and  property  of 
the  French  Panama  Company,  so  as  to  secure  the  forty  million 
dollars  our  government  had  authorized  as  payment  to  this  company. 
If  we  had  sat  supine,  this  would  doubtless  have  meant  that  France 
would  have  interfered  to  protect  the  company,  and  we  should  then 
have  had  on  the  Isthmus,  not  the  company,  but  France;  and  the 
gravest  international  complications  might  have  ensued. 


CHAPTER   13 


IN   HIS   OWN   RIGHT 


In  politics  we  have  to  do  a  great  many  things  we  ought  not 
to  do. 

— Theodore  Roosevelt 


March  4,  1905,  dawned  clear  and  brisk.  The  wind  was  fair  for  the 
season,  and  the  sky  was  blue  and  almost  cloudless.  To  the  East, 
where  the  oversized  dome  of  the  Capitol  broke  the  horizon,  a  tuft  of 
storm  clouds  hovered;  but  they  were  political,  and  from  noon  on, 
invisible.  Two  years  were  to  pass  before  they  would  burst  in  full  fury. 
This  was  Theodore  Roosevelt's  day  of  glory,  even  greater  perhaps 
than  that  day  seven  years  before  when  he  and  his  Rough  Riders  had 
braved  the  withering  Spanish  fire  in  Cuba. 

A  few  minutes  after  noon  Roosevelt  stepped  forward  on  the  east 
portico  of  the  Capitol  to  face  Chief  Justice  Melville  E.  Fuller.  In  the 
background  stood  an  honor  guard  of  Rough  Riders,  high  government 
officials,  foreign  diplomats  and  their  ladies,  personal  friends  of  many 
years  past,  and  the  ubiquitous  Roosevelt  family.  Slowly  and  deliber- 
ately, his  eyes  fastened  on  the  Chief  Justice,  Roosevelt  placed  his  left 
hand  on  an  open  Bible,  raised  his  right  hand,  and  repeated  the 
measured  phrases  of  the  presidential  oath. 

The  President  was  heavier  and  more  deeply  lined,  especially  around 
the  eyes,  than  he  had  been  four  years  before  when  he  was  sworn  in 
as  Vice-President.  His  face  was  wider,  his  shoulders  broader,  his  neck 
thicker.  He  was  much  larger  through  the  midriff,  and  he  seemed 
stronger  than  he  had  as  a  young  man,  when  his  square  face  alone 

212 


IN   HIS   OWN   RIGHT  213 

conveyed  the  impression  of  physical  strength.  His  power  and  confi- 
dence were  evident,  and  his  voice,  always  imperfect  and  too  high  in 
pitch,  had  the  timbre  of  a  man  proven;  proven  in  battle  in  another 
era,  and  proven  in  office  in  the  years  just  gone  by.  Roosevelt  on 
March  4,  1905,  was  in  command.  As  he  repeated  the  last  words  of 
the  presidential  oath,  the  throng  that  milled  about  the  plaza  between 
the  Capitol  and  the  Library  of  Congress  gave  forth  an  approving  roar 
— the  first  display  of  an  enthusiasm  that  was  to  eclipse  that  of  all 
previous  inaugurations  save  Andrew  Jackson's  first. 

The  President's  inaugural  address  was  undistinguished  in  form  and, 
on  first  reading,  in  substance.  Its  theme  was  the  familiar  one  of  duty, 
responsibility,  and  courage,  and  its  locus  was  the  relationship  of  those 
values  to  a  changing  society.  Its  generalizations  were  broad  enough 
to  be  trite  while  its  peroration  lacked  little  in  grandiosity.  Yet  when 
that  address  is  reread  against  what  had  already  transpired  and  what 
was  soon  to  transpire,  its  relevance  as  a  testament  of  Roosevelt's  faith 
and  intent  becomes  apparent.  The  "Giver  of  Good,"  said  the  Presi- 
dent, had  blessed  mightily  the  American  people.  "We  are  the  heirs 
of  the  ages,  and  yet  we  have  had  to  pay  few  of  the  penalties  which  in 
old  countries  are  exacted  by  the  dead  hand  of  a  bygone  civilization." 
Still,  we  had  faced  perils  which  "called  for  the  vigor  and  effort  with- 
out which  the  manlier  and  hardier  virtues  wither  away."  And  so  now 
did  we  continue  to  face  these,  the  perils  of  an  advanced  industrial 
civilization.  "The  conditions  which  have  told  for  our  marvelous  ma- 
terial wellbeing,  which  have  developed  to  a  very  high  degree  our 
energy,  self-reliance,  and  individual  initiative,  have  also  brought  the 
care  and  anxiety  inseparable  from  the  accumulation  of  great  wealth 
in  industrial  centers."  Upon  the  resolution  of  these  problems,  ex- 
claimed this  first  major  statesman  of  the  new  order,  depended  the 
welfare  of  the  American  people,  and  perhaps  of  mankind  itself.  "If 
we  fail,  the  cause  of  free  self-government  throughout  the  world  will 
rock  to  its  foundations."  But,  he  added,  we  need  not  fail.  For  the 
qualities  now  needed  were  not  different  from  what  they  had  ever 
been.  They  were  those  "of  practical  intelligence,  of  courage,  of  hardi- 
hood, and  endurance,  and  above  all  the  power  of  devotion  to  a  lofty 
ideal."  They  had  made  great  the  men  who  founded  the  Republic 
under  Washington,  and  they  had  made  great  the  men  who  preserved 
it  under  Lincoln.  They  could  also,  he  concluded,  make  great  the 
present  generation. 


214  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

Through  the  remainder  of  that  March  afternoon  Roosevelt  was 
zestful,  ebullient,  and  even  prideful.  On  the  reviewing  stand  an  hour 
or  two  later,  he  alternately  sat  and  stood,  grinned  and  laughed,  waved 
and  applauded.  He  stamped  his  feet  and  bent  his  knees  to  the  rhythm 
of  "There'll  Be  a  Hot  Time  in  the  Old  Town  Tonight."  He  glowed 
when  a  troop  of  Rough  Riders,  fortified  by  three  days  of  liquid 
preparation  for  the  indignity  of  riding  artillery  rather  than  cavalry 
mounts,  rode  uproariously  by.  And  he  chatted  freely,  almost  con- 
stantly, with  members  of  the  presidential  party. 

The  President  was  also  mindful  of  the  charges  that  he  had  usurped 
congressional  power  and  exploited  colonial  peoples,  or  so  the  news- 
papers, with  perhaps  more  license  than  veracity,  reported  him  as 
being.  "1  really  shuddered  today  as  I  swore  to  obey  the  Constitution," 
the  President  supposedly  joked  at  the  outset  of  the  parade.  Later,  as 
the  Puerto  Rican  contingent  passed  in  review,  he  turned  to  Senator 
Bacon,  the  anti-imperialist  from  Georgia,  and  remarked  with  a 
chuckle:  "They  look  pretty  well  for  an  oppressed  people,  eh,  Senator?" 
Roosevelt  again  fixed  his  gaze  on  the  discomfited  Georgian  when  a 
finely  drilled  body  of  Filipino  Scouts  swung  past  the  reviewing  stand 
to  the  buoyant  strains  of  "Gary  Owen."  "The  wretched  serfs  disguised 
their  feelings  admirably,"  he  shouted  as  Bacon  turned  his  face  from 
the  scene. 

The  President's  high  spirits  were  warranted.  He  was  acutely  aware 
that  his  effectiveness  during  his  first  term  had  been  circumscribed  by 
the  accidental  nature  of  his  elevation  to  power;  that  Congress  had 
tolerated  him  and  at  times  angrily  compromised  with  him,  but  had 
supported  him  only  when  his  recommendations  had  coincided  with  its 
own  views.  Now,  however,  he  was  President  by  popular  mandate 
rather  than  by  assassin's  hand.  He  had  swept  scores  of  Republicans 
into  office  with  him.  And  he  had  already  indicated  by  messages, 
speeches,  and  informal  maneuvers  that  he  would  no  longer  pay  lip 
service  to  the  dead  hand  of  McKinley  or  be  again  so  deferential  to 
the  will  of  the  Senate  oligarchy.  "Tomorrow  I  shall  come  into  my 
office  in  my  own  right,"  he  is  said  to  have  exclaimed  on  the  eve  of 
his  inauguration.  "Then  watch  out  for  me." 

If  the  President's  inaugural  address  exemplified  those  high  and 
statesman-like  ideals  to  which  Roosevelt  so  urgently  aspired,  the 
events  preceding  the  election  had  revealed  that  ruthlessness  and  low 
cunning  that  made  him  the  master  politician  of  his  own  age  and  one 


IN   HIS   OWN   RIGHT  215 

of  the  masters  of  all  ages.  During  the  three  years  the  President  was 
serving  the  nation  and  incidentally  enhancing  his  prestige  by  battling 
the  trusts,  intervening  in  the  coal  strike,  and  acquiring  the  Panama 
Canal  Zone,  he  had  also  been  waging  a  fiercely  single-minded  cam- 
paign for  his  nomination  and  election  in  1904.  He  manipulated  the 
patronage  with  cold  disingenuousness.  He  signed  a  controversial 
pension  bill.  And  during  the  third  of  those  years  he  slowed  the 
momentum  of  his  antitrust  campaign  and  temporarily  reaffirmed  that 
historic  alliance  between  the  Republican  party  and  big  business  that 
his  earlier  policies  had  begun  to  weaken. 

Roosevelt's  triumphal  election  in  November,  1904,  had  actually 
been  an  anticlimax.  The  real  contest  had  been  for  the  nomination, 
and  it  had  been  won  more  than  a  full  year  before — won,  ironically, 
against  Mark  Hanna,  the  man  who  symbolized  the  McKinley  policies 
Roosevelt  had  so  spontaneously  promised  to  continue  upon  assuming 
office. 

Marcus  Alonzo  Hanna  was  no  Joseph  G.  Cannon  committed  to  the 
preservation  of  the  status  quo  at  any  cost  but  the  political;  nor  was  he 
a  Nelson  W.  Aldrich  dedicated  to  its  preservation  at  almost  all  costs 
including  the  political.  Rather,  the  portly,  convivial  Ohioan  was  a 
genuinely  sophisticated  conservative.  An  eminently  successful  busi- 
nessman in  his  own  right,  he  is  said  to  have  tried  most  of  the 
customary  means  of  suppressing  labor  during  his  early  career  only  to 
have  concluded  that  an  open-handed  policy  was  more  profitable  in 
the  long  run  than  recurrent  strife.  Although  he  had  coined  the  slogan 
"Stand  pat"  for  the  campaign  of  1900,  Hanna  understood  that  the 
predatory  ways  of  capital  would  have  to  be  reformed,  the  rights  of 
labor  more  generally  affirmed,  if  social  upheaval  was  to  be  averted. 
And  he  had,  consequently,  little  sympathy  with  those  of  his  Republi- 
can colleagues  in  the  Senate  who  sought  to  convert  his  campaign 
slogan  of  1900  into  a  political  philosophy.  Why,  then,  did  Roosevelt 
choose  to  move  against  him? 

The  reason  was  power.  Hanna  had  it  and  Roosevelt  wanted  it. 
The  President  wanted  it,  assuredly,  to  satisfy  his  ego.  He  was  in  that 
sense  not  basically  different  from  Jackson  and  Lincoln,  Wilson  and 
Franklin  D.  Roosevelt,  nor  even  Washington  and  Jefferson.  Like 
several  of  those  storied  figures,  also,  he  took  an  extraordinary,  almost 
primitive  satisfaction,  in  the  free-wheeling  exercise  of  power.  Yet,  as 
Abraham  Lincoln  was  distinguished  from  Stephen  A.  Douglas  by  the 


216  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

depths  of  his  idealism  rather  than  his  ambition,  so  was  Theodore 
Roosevelt  set  apart  from  the  overwhelming  number  of  his  political 
contemporaries  by  his  dedication  to  the  public  interest.  Had  Roose- 
velt's moral  sensibilities  been  less  acute  he  might  have  been  likened 
to  Hanna  himself,  a  good  and  well-intentioned  man,  but  hardly  a 
great  man;  and  had  they  been  genuinely  dull  he  might  have  been 
compared  to  Platt,  or  Quay,  or  Penrose,  men  to  whom  power  was 
the  consuming  end  of  life.  Roosevelt  might  even  have  emerged  as  a 
violent  demagogue,  for  he  had  not  a  few  of  the  attributes,  among 
them  the  ability  to  oversimplify,  smear  his  opponents,  and  stir  the 
masses. 

If  Roosevelt  wanted  Hanna's  power  to  gratify  his  baser  urges — and 
it  bears  underlining  that  he  did — he  also  wanted  it  to  assure  the 
success  of  those  high  public  purposes  to  which  his  vaulting  ambition 
and  love  of  power  had  long  been  dedicated.  For  all  his  sophistication, 
Hanna  was  hardly  prepared  to  rally  the  Grand  Old  Party  behind  those 
parts  of  the  President's  program  which  were  too  advanced  for  his  own 
tastes.  The  question  of  whether  Roosevelt's  maturing  progressivism, 
a  progressivism  that  was  even  then  dimly  pointing  toward  basic 
changes  in  the  distribution  of  power  in  American  society,  or  Hanna's 
program  of  piecemeal  concessions  that  failed  to  modify  the  capitalists' 
control  of  the  body  politic,  was  far  from  idle.  And  since  Hanna 
wanted  at  the  least  to  continue  the  role  of  Warwick  and  at  the  most 
to  become  President  himself,  Roosevelt  believed  he  had  either  to 
crush  him  or  suffer  the  constriction  of  most  of  the  policies  he  himself 
represented. 

Whatever  the  baseness  or  loftiness  of  Roosevelt's  motives,  however 
groundless  some  of  his  rationalizations  and  praiseworthy  other  of  his 
justifications,  his  drive  to  unseat  the  man  who  had  made  McKinley 
was  at  once  subtle,  open,  and  pitiless.  It  saw  the  President  ally  him- 
self with,  and  even  be  obsequious  to,  the  unsavory  bosses  Quay  and 
Penrose  and  the  archconservative  Foraker  of  Ohio.  It  saw  him  appoint 
a  great  host  of  Quay,  Penrose,  and  Forakcr's  friends,  not  a  few  of 
them  the  "low  morality"  types  Civil  Service  Commissioner  Roosevelt 
had  so  despised,  to  the  government  service.  And  finally,  after  Foraker 
had  boxed  in  Hanna  by  calling  on  the  Ohio  Republican  Convention 
to  endorse  the  President  in  the  spring  of  1903,  it  saw  Roosevelt  force 
Hanna's  hand  by  publishing  a  private  telegram  from  the  Senator,  a 
low  blow  that  left  Hanna  little  alternative  but  to  allow  the  Convention 


IN   HIS   OWN   RIGHT  217 

to  endorse  the  President.  From  that  point  on,  in  fact,  Roosevelt  was 
the  head  of  the  Republican  party  outside  Congress.  "It  simplified 
things  all  around,"  he  exulted  to  Lodge.  "Hanna  was  my  only  formi- 
dable opponent  so  far  as  the  nomination  .  .  .  [was]  concerned." 

Nine  months  later  Mark  Hanna  lay  dead  of  typhoid  fever.  To  the 
end  he  had  maintained  cordial  relations  with  the  President,  and 
Roosevelt  had  visited  him  during  his  final  illness;  and  fittingly  so. 
More  than  any  man  in  the  United  States,  Hanna  could  have  ruined 
Roosevelt  in  the  formative  years,  1901-1902.  But  in  spite  of  his  own 
ambition  and  his  contempt  of  Roosevelt's  flamboyance  and  distaste 
for  many  of  his  policies,  Hanna  had  chosen  to  place  public  and  party 
interests  above  his  own  political  fortunes.  Roosevelt  acknowledged 
as  much  in  a  moving  letter  to  Elihu  Root  the  day  after  his  Olympian 
adversary  died: 

I  think  that  not  merely  I  myself,  but  the  whole  party  and  the 
whole  country  have  reason  to  be  grateful  to  him  for  the  way  in 
which,  after  I  came  into  office,  under  circumstances  which  were  very 
hard  for  him,  he  resolutely  declined  to  be  drawn  into  the  position 
which  a  smaller  man  of  meaner  cast  would  inevitably  have  taken; 
that  is,  the  position  of  antagonizing  public  policies  if  I  was  identified 
with  them.  He  could  have  caused  the  widest  disaster  to  the  country 
and  the  public  if  he  had  attacked  and  opposed  the  policies  referring 
to  Panama,  the  Philippines,  Cuban  reciprocity,  army  reform,  the 
navy  and  the  legislation  for  regulating  corporations.  But  he  stood  by 
them  just  as  loyally  as  if  I  had  been  McKinley. 

Hardly  less  than  his  obsession  with  power,  Roosevelt's  dextrous 
manipulation  of  the  patronage  in  his  campaign  against  Hanna  had 
been  disillusioning  to  the  President's  defenders.  Actually,  Roosevelt 
was  incomparably  more  restrained  than  Lincoln,  who  appointed  a 
string  of  inferior  men  to  high  civilian  and  military  offices  in  order  to 
secure  the  success  and  promote  the  great  objects  of  his  administration. 
But  because  Roosevelt  was  so  emphatically  on  the  record,  and  espe- 
cially because  he  was  so  boorishly  self-righteous,  his  compromises 
have  subjected  him  to  a  heavy  burden  of  censure. 

The  most  flagrant  violation  of  Roosevelt's  principles  was  the  ap- 
pointment of  James  S.  Clarkson  of  Iowa,  the  archspoilsman  who  had 
led  the  Republican  hosts  in  their  assault  on  the  fourth-class  post- 
masterships  under  Wanamaker,  to  a  non-policy-making  plum  in  New 


218  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

York  in  1902.  Clarkson,  the  President  explained  to  the  numerous  and 
vociferous  critics  of  his  startling  appointment,  was  "in  no  way  to  be 
criticized"  for  his  "occasional"  removals  of  Democratic  postmasters 
in  years  gone  by.  He  was,  indeed,  "an  honorable  and  capable  man." 
To  some,  however,  Roosevelt  was  more  candid.  "In  politics,"  he  con- 
fessed, "we  have  to  do  a  great  many  things  we  ought  not  do." 

Although  the  President  thus  lowered  the  bars  on  minor  offices,  he 
stood  firm  for  the  most  part  on  major  appointments.  His  attitude 
toward  the  Isthmian  Canal  Commission  was  a  case  in  point.  As 
Alfred  D.  Chandler,  Jr.  has  written,  the  construction  of  the  Panama 
Canal  by  the  first  great  government  corporation  in  American  history 
was  a  worthy  tribute  to  the  President's  pragmatic,  trial  and  error 
administrative  techniques.  He  took  more  pride  in  it  than  any  other 
of  his  concrete  achievements.  And  it  was  his  personal  decision  to 
support  Dr.  William  C.  Gorgas,  who  insisted  on  pursuing  Walter 
Reed's  theories  on  yellow  fever,  that  made  the  undertaking  possible. 
When,  accordingly,  Senator  Quay  asked  Roosevelt  to  appoint  one  of 
his  constituents  to  the  Isthmian  Commission  in  1904,  the  President 
forthrightly  turned  him  down.  "I  hate  to  be  in  any  way  unrecipro- 
cative,"  he  wrote  the  powerful  Pennsylvanian.  "But  it  does  seem  to 
me  that  in  handling  this  Commission  I  should  do  nothing  on  the 
ground  of  locality." 

I  have  had  to  refuse  to  appoint  an  admirable  young  fellow  in 
whom  Lodge  was  intensely  interested,  though  I  was  able  to  place 
him  on  the  Philippine  Commission.  Senator  Platt  has  been  inter- 
ested in  a  first-class  man,  Burr,  who  is  entirely  fit  for  the  position; 
yet  I  am  inclined  to  think  .  .  .  that  Parsons  is  the  better  man.  .  .  . 
In  any  ordinary  appointments  I  am  only  too  glad  to  consider  politi- 
cal recommendations  and  the  recommendations  of  my  friends,  and  I 
should  do  the  same  even  on  extraordinary  occasions  where  so  much 
was  not  involved.  But  when  we  come  to  a  position  like  this  I  feel 
as  I  do  when  I  am  choosing  a  judge  for  the  Supreme  Court,  that  I 
must  have  an  eye  single  to  the  way  the  work  will  be  done. 

Nor  was  that  the  only  instance  of  Roosevelt's  reaffirmation  of  the 
faith  of  his  civil  service,  police  commissionership,  and  governorship 
years.  The  undeniable  fact  is  that  even  as  he  used  the  patronage  to 
create  a  personal  political  machine,  he  advanced  efficiency,  integrity, 
nonpartisanship  at  an  unprecedented  rate.  The  year  before  he  came 


IN   HIS    OWN    RIGHT  219 

up  for  election  he  had  indictments  brought  against  an  imposing  array 
of  Republicans  for  defrauding  the  Post  Office  Department  and  he  also 
pushed  an  investigation  of  land  corruptionists  in  Oregon,  one  of 
whom  was  a  Republican  congressman.  He  instituted  a  rigid  civil 
service  system  in  the  Philippines,  backed  a  measure  sponsored  by 
Lodge  and  Root  for  the  improvement  of  the  consular  service,  and 
gave  forceful  and  informed  support  to  Root's  reorganization  of  the 
Army.  He  also  added  50,000  positions  to  the  classified  civil  service 
lists  during  his  seven  and  one-half  years  in  office.  Notwithstanding 
Roosevelt's  minor  concessions  to  the  bosses  and  paternal  solicitude 
for  unemployed  ex-Rough  Riders,  the  general  level  of  his  appoint- 
ments was  the  highest  since  the  halcyon  days  before  Jackson.  Never, 
said  Lord  Bryce,  had  he  seen  a  more  eager,  high-minded,  and  efficient 
set  of  public  servants,  men  more  useful  and  more  creditable  to  their 
country,  than  the  men  Theodore  Roosevelt  placed  in  positions  of  high 
responsibility. 

In  selecting  men  of  character  and  ability  for  government  office, 
Roosevelt  went  beyond  the  customary  geographical  considerations. 
Before  he  appointed  Oscar  Straus,  the  first  Jew  to  serve  in  a  Cabinet 
post,  Secretary  of  Commerce  and  Labor  in  1906,  for  example,  he 
besought  the  advice  of  the  respected  banker  and  pillar  of  New  York's 
civic-minded  German-Jewish  community,  Jacob  Schiff.  Later,  at  a 
banquet  of  prominent  Jews  in  honor  of  Straus,  Roosevelt  emphatically 
exclaimed  that  he  had  not  even  thought  about  Straus's  religion  when 
contemplating  his  appointment.  But  Schiff,  whose  hearing  was  failing, 
bungled  the  cue.  "Dot's  right,  Mr.  President,"  he  exclaimed.  "You 
came  to  me  and  said,  'Chake,  who  is  der  best  Jew  I  can  appoint 
Segretary  of  Commerce.'  " 

There  is,  regrettably,  reason  to  suspect  that  the  Schiff  story  is 
apocryphal.  But  there  is  no  evidence  to  indicate  that  its  larger  sense 
is  misleading.  In  similar  vein,  Roosevelt  sometimes  appointed  a 
Roman  Catholic,  a  labor  union  man,  a  white  Southern  Democrat  or 
a  Negro  Southern  Republican  as  he  strove  to  make  his  administration 
reflect  the  rich  ethnic  diversity  of  American  society.  Invariably,  he 
did  so  with  an  eye  for  the  immediate  political  advantage.  He  con- 
sorted with  Booker  T.  Washington,  the  first  American  Negro  ever 
invited  to  break  bread  in  the  White  House,  because  Washington  was 
supporting  him  in  his  fight  to  wrest  control  of  the  party  machinery 
from  Mark  Hanna;  and  he  gave  high  place  to  other  qualified  Negroes 


220  POWER    AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

for  the  same  reason.  Yet  he  also  recognized  Negroes  and  members  of 
other  suppressed  ethnic  and  religious  groups  in  ways  that  clearly 
transcended  his  political  interests. 

Roosevelt  was  too  sophisticated  a  Reform  Darwinist  to  believe 
blatantly  in  racial  supremacy  though  a  mild  undercurrent  of  racism 
seems  to  have  lingered  in  his  unconsciousness.  His  thought  coincided 
roughly  with  the  moderate,  informed  opinion  of  the  times;  and  it  was 
in  fact  more  advanced  than  that  of  reformer-economists  like  John  R. 
Commons  and  politician-intellectuals  like  Cabot  Lodge  and  Woodrow 
Wilson.  Yet  Roosevelt  was  never  enthusiastic  about  the  mass  immigra- 
tion of  Irish,  Slavs,  and  Southern  Europeans — of  Jews  and  Greeks 
and  Roman  Catholics.  He  believed  that  their  numbers  were  too  great, 
their  conditions  of  life  too  impoverished,  and  their  cultural  back- 
grounds too  different  for  easy  assimilation.  And  he  erroneously  con- 
cluded that  they  were  easy  prey  to  political  radicalism  as  well  as  to 
social  and  moral  degradation.  Unable  to  slow  their  influx — he  un- 
successfully recommended  immigration  restriction  and  then  appointed 
a  commission  of  exports  which  submitted  a  racist  report — he  charac- 
teristically reacted  by  promoting  their  assimilation.  To  this  end  he 
fulminated  against  discrimination  and  sought  actively  to  open  the 
channels  of  advancement  and  opportunity  to  the  more  distinguished 
among  them.  "I  grow  extremely  indignant  at  the  attitude  of  coarse 
hostility  to  the  immigrant,"  Roosevelt  wrote  the  Rev.  Lyman  Abbott, 
publisher  of  the  influential,  Protestant-oriented  Outlook,  after  he  had 
renounced  further  political  ambition: 

I  have  tried  to  ...  appeal  to  their  self-respect  and  make  it  easy 
for  them  to  become  enthusiastically  loyal  Americans  as  well  as  good 
citizens.  I  have  one  Catholic  in  my  Cabinet  and  have  had  another, 
and  I  now  have  a  Jew  in  the  Cabinet;  and  part  of  my  object  in 
each  appointment  was  to  implant  in  the  minds  of  of  our  fellow- 
Americans  of  Catholic  or  of  Jewish  faith,  or  of  foreign  ancestry 
or  birth,  the  knowledge  that  they  have  in  this  country  just  the  same 
rights  and  opportunities  as  every  one  else  .  .  .  just  the  same  ideals 
as  a  standard  toward  which  to  strive.  I  want  the  Jewish  young  man 
who  is  born  in  this  country  to  feel  that  Straus  stands  for  his  ideal 
of  the  successful  man. 

Roosevelt's  attitude  toward  the  declining  birth  rate  offers  additional 
insight  into  his  final  acceptance  of  the  "American  Dream"  and  its 
implicit  repudiation  of  racial,  as  distinct  from  national  or  cultural 


IN   HIS    OWN   RIGHT  221 

superiority.  "The  American  stock  is  being  cursed  with  the  curse  of 
sterility,  and  it  is  earning  the  curse,  because  the  sterility  is  wilful,"  he 
said  in  an  article  in  the  Outlook  in  1911.  "If  it  were  confined  to 
Americans  of  old  stock  ...  we  could  at  least  feel  that  the  traditions 
and  principles  and  purposes  of  the  founders  of  the  Republic  would 
find  their  believers  and  exponents  among  their  descendants  by  adop- 
tion." And  in  that  case,  he  wrote,  "I,  for  one,  would  heartily  throw 
in  my  fate  with  the  men  of  alien  stock  who  were  true  to  the  old 
American  principles  rather  than  with  the  men  of  the  old  American 
stock  who  were  traitors  to  the  old  American  principles."  But  un- 
fortunately, he  lamented,  "the  children  of  the  immigrants  show  the 
same  wilful  sterility  that  is  shown  by  the  people  of  the  old  stock." 

Roosevelt's  intense  preoccupation  with  Americanism,  an  Ameri- 
canism that  embraced  personal  morality  as  well  as  national  loyalty 
and  unity,  pervaded  his  views  on  religion.  Throughout  his  life  he  was 
a  regular  churchgoer,  and  by  the  testimony  of  some  of  his  intimates, 
a  devoutly  religious  man  as  well.  "When  a  man  believes  a  thing,  is  it 
not  his  duty  to  say  so?"  he  said  to  the  pastor  of  the  St.  Nicholas 
Dutch  Reformed  Church  in  New  York  at  the  age  of  seventeen.  "If  I 
joined  the  church,  wouldn't  that  be  the  best  way  for  me  to  say  to  the 
world  that  I  believed  in  God?" 

Over  the  years  Roosevelt  never  wavered  in  his  formal  commitment 
to  the  church,  nor  to  the  Bible  as  a  source  of  inspiration.  Bill  Sewall 
remembered  that  he  took  the  Bible  with  him  on  trips  into  the  North 
Woods  as  a  Harvard  undergraduate  and  that  he  would  slip  away  to 
peruse  it  by  himself.  "Some  folks  read  the  Bible  to  find  an  easier  way 
into  Heaven,"  Sewall  once  said.  But,  "Theodore  reads  it  to  find  the 
right  way  and  how  to  pursue  it."  Nevertheless,  Roosevelt's  innermost 
convictions  are  unclear  even  to  this  day.  As  Hagedorn  writes,  "He 
trumpeted  his  moral  convictions  from  the  housetops  and  up  and  down 
the  land,  until  even  his  friends  begged  for  mercy.  But  his  relation  to 
the  unseen  was  something  else."  Only  three  or  four  times  in  the  near 
forty  years  of  his  maturity  is  he  reported  to  have  spoken  freely  of  his 
faith;  and  in  most  of  those  instances  the  report  is  suspect  or  deficient. 

Curiously,  Roosevelt  had  been  even  more  dependent  on  religion 
than  most  young  men  during  his  adolescence  and  early  manhood — a 
reflection,  perhaps,  of  what  Elting  Morison  characterized  "his  capacity 
for  total  investment."  At  Harvard  he  taught  an  Episcopal  Sunday 
school  class  until  forced  to  resign  because  of  his  refusal  to  abandon 


222  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

his  Dutch  Reformed  affiliation;  and  he  prayed  regularly  each  morning 
during  his  college  years.  It  was  to  religion,  moreover,  that  he  had 
turned  for  solace  in  the  traumatic  aftermath  of  his  father's  death.  "It 
is  lovely  to  think  of  our  meeting  in  heaven.  .  .  ."  "Lord,  I  believe; 
help  thou  mine  unbelief."  "Nothing  but  my  faith  in  the  Lord  Jesus 
Christ  could  have  carried  me  through  this,  my  terrible  time  of  trouble 
and  sorrow."  These  were  his  diary  entries  at  the  time.  During  Roose- 
velt's twenty-first  year,  however,  the  evidences  of  deep  religious  feel- 
ing had  begun  to  abate;  nor  do  they  seem  to  have  resurged  in  the 
double  tragedy  of  his  mother's  and  his  first  wife's  death  when  he  was 
twenty-five. 

It  is  true  that  Roosevelt  continued  to  pay  formal  obeisance  to  the 
Judeo-Christian  God,  and  occasionally  to  the  Trinity  as  well.  But 
nowhere  in  the  published  addresses  and  writings  of  his  later  years  is 
there  anything  resembling  a  movingly  spiritual  confession  of  faith. 
Nor  was  he  ever,  so  far  as  is  known,  disturbed  by  the  Darwinian 
findings  which  were  rocking  the  very  substance  of  traditional  theology 
as  he  came  into  manhood.  "I  know  not  how  philosophers  may  ulti- 
mately define  religion,"  he  wrote,  "but  from  Micah  to  James  it  has 
been  defined  as  service  to  one's  fellowmen  rendered  by  following  the 
great  rule  of  justice  and  mercy,  of  wisdom  and  righteousness."  And 
that,  for  Theodore  Roosevelt,  who  lacked  even  Lincoln's  mysticism, 
was  enough.  As  Gamaliel  Bradford,  in  a  dozen  lines  that  atomize  the 
volume  and  more  of  essays  designed  to  prove  Roosevelt's  spirituality, 
concludes:  "I  cannot  find  God  insistent  or  palpable  anywhere  in  the 
writings  or  the  life  of  Theodore  Roosevelt.  He  had  no  need  of  him 
and  no  longing,  because  he  really  had  no  need  of  anything  but  his 
own  immensely  sufficient  self.  And  the  abundant,  crowding,  mag- 
nificent presence  of  this  world  left  no  room  for  another.  Bishop's  Life 
of  Roosevelt  ends  with  a  quotation  [from  Roosevelt]  which  seems  to 
sum  up  the  whole  story:  'It  is  idle  to  complain  or  to  rail  at  the 
inevitable;  serene  and  high  of  heart  we  must  face  our  fate  and  go 
down  into  the  darkness.'  I  do  not  see  God  here  anywhere  at  all." 

If  Roosevelt's  rejection  of  both  dogma  and  spirituality  made  for  a 
broad  tolerance  of  religious  diversity,  his  overwhelming  commitment 
to  religion  as  a  social  and  ethical  force  nevertheless  imposed  limits 
on  that  tolerance.  His  ultimate  test  was  whether  a  religion  transgressed 
the  moral  code  that  comprised  the  warp  of  the  Judeo-Christian  herit- 
age. He  was  chary,  accordingly,  of  the  Church  of  the  Latter-day 


IN   HIS    OWN   RIGHT  223 

Saints.  Yet,  with  uncharacteristic  restraint,  he  opposed  a  proposed 
constitutional  amendment  against  polygamy  partly  on  the  grounds 
"that  there  is  less  polygamy  among  the  Mormons  .  .  .  than  there 
have  been  bigamous  marriages  among  an  equal  number  of  Christians." 
Roosevelt  knew,  it  is  perhaps  no  exaggeration  to  conclude,  that  the 
history  of  mankind  is  writ  large  with  foolish  and  futile  religious 
persecutions. 

Roosevelt's  dedication  to  the  moral  law  coupled  with  his  insight 
into  the  steady  pressure  of  environment  forces  made  him  more  sympa- 
thetic to  Catholicism  than  most  middle-class  Americans  of  his  times. 
He  had  little  patience  with  the  doctrine  of  papal  infallibility  and  he 
especially  resented  the  Roman  Church's  authoritarian  structure.  His 
frequent  endorsements  of  the  separation  of  church  and  state,  his 
emphatic  support  of  the  free  public  school  system,  and  his  implied 
criticisms  of  parochial  education  even  suggest  a  latent  anti-Catholi- 
cism. But  in  the  final  analysis  he  was  most  impressed  with  Rome's 
beneficial  influences — with  its  potential  ability  to  impress  upon  the 
immigrants  those  Judeo-Christian  ethical  values  which  were  the  fount 
of  his  own  inspiration  and  out  of  which  Protestantism  itself  had 
sprung. 

Nor  was  Roosevelt  daunted  by  the  prospect  of  a  Catholic  residing 
in  the  White  House  at  some  future  date.  Indeed,  he  welcomed  it,  for 
it  implied  a  complete  assimilation.  Too  pragmatic  to  be  bound  by 
doctrinaire  principles  himself,  he  was  confident  that  other  men  of 
responsibility  and  patriotism  would  prove  similarly  chainless.  He 
accordingly  took  pleasure  in  striking  out  at  Protestant  bigots  and 
asserting  that  he  would  happily  support  a  Roman  Catholic  for  the 
presidency  if  he  happened  to  be  the  best  qualified  man.  Predicting  in 
September,  1904  (a  most  politic  timing,  it  is  true),  that  there  would 
be  many  Catholic  Presidents  in  the  years  to  come,  he  expressed  the 
hope  that  if  any  one  of  them  know  "anything  of  me  or  my  conduct, 
he  will  feel  that  I  have  acted  along  just  the  lines  that  he  can  afford 
to  act."  Over  the  years  Roosevelt  could,  and  did,  consort  in  good 
conscience  with  Catholic  and  Episcopalian  bishops,  with  Jewish  rabbis 
and  Methodist  ministers,  and  with  laymen  of  all  denominations,  in- 
cluding the  Unitarian  Taft. 

Against  this  background,  Roosevelt's  ceaseless  cultivation  of  politi- 
cal support  by  minority  groups  becomes  more  morally  defensible. 
Had  he  been  a  religious  bigot  or  an  Anglo-Saxon  supremacist  dedi- 


224  POWER    AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

cated  to  purity  of  the  so-called  race,  his  activities  might  have  stamped 
him  as  a  sheer  political  opportunist.  But  his  commitment  was  to  the 
preservation  of  American  institutions,  not  to  the  privileged  position 
of  a  particular  in-group,  and  it  was  more  intellectual  than  political  in 
origin.  To  discriminate  against  an  American  citizen  because  of  his 
own  or  his  father's  birthplace  was  to  the  mature  Roosevelt,  "a  base 
infamy — utterly  un-American  and  profoundly  unpatriotic." 

Had  Roosevelt  never  faced  an  electorate  he  would  probably  have 
been  as  deeply  involved  in  the  Americanization  of  the  newer  immi- 
grants as  he  was  as  an  active  politician.  But  since  he  had  to  face  the 
electorate,  and  since  he  believed  "in  being  thoroughly  practical  in 
politics,"  he  spared  no  effort  to  win  every  last  vote  in  every  last 
minority  group  or  organization  that  he  had  served  during  his  twenty- 
year  political  career.  During  the  presidential  campaign  of  1904  the 
word  went  out  in  a  dozen  different  tongues  from  the  professional  ward 
heelers  and  precinct  leaders  that  the  President  had  appointed  Jews 
and  Catholics  to  high  office;  that  he  had  defended  immigrant  working 
men  against  exploitation  by  the  great  coal  barons;  and  that  he  had 
represented  the  little  man  against  the  privileged  few  in  his  strike 
against  the  trusts. 

The  whole  man  in  1904  was  not  only  one  of  ideals,  courage,  and 
forthrightness;  he  was  a  man  of  surprising  fear  and  no  little  expedi- 
ency. If  the  appointment  of  Clarkson  in  1902  had  been  designed  to 
promote  Roosevelt's  cause  at  the  nominating  convention  of  1904,  a 
decision  the  President  made  to  broaden  the  pension  base  for  Union 
veterans  in  the  late  winter  of  1904  by  executive  decree  was  calculated, 
at  least  in  part,  to  advance  his  fortunes  in  the  election  that  followed 
that  convention.  The  President's  unilateral  action,  roared  W.  Bourke 
Cochran,  grandiloquent  orator,  Tammany  chieftain,  and  spoilsman 
of  the  first  order,  was  a  clear-cut  case  of  executive  usurption  of  con- 
gressional authority.  The  New  York  Times  claimed  that  the  American 
nation  had  rarely  witnessed  such  a  "remarkable"  and  "impudent" 
assertion  of  executive  power.  "There  is  an  impression  that  we  are  to 
elect  a  President  next  November,"  was  the  New  York  World's  com- 
ment. "It  is  a  mistake.  Unless  Mr.  Roosevelt  be  totally  at  sea  regard- 
ing the  nature  of  his  office,  we  are  to  elect  a  czar." 

The  Republicans  in  Congress  had  discreetly  held  their  tongues. 
They  had  paid  higher  prices  than  "executive  usurption"  for  the 
political  favors  of  the  Grand  Army  of  the  Republic  in  the  past.  As 


IN   HIS   OWN   RIGHT  225 

for  Roosevelt,  he  was  as  eager  as  they  to  reap  the  harvest  of  G.A.R. 
votes  in  November  though  he  undoubtedly  knew  that  his  order  would 
rub  Congress  the  wrong  way.  "I  came  to  the  conclusion,"  he  later 
explained,  that  if  we  waited  on  Congress  "we  would  either  have  no 
legislation  or  else  improper  legislation."  Yet  he  also  had  no  doubt 
that  he  was  morally  right;  that  the  pensions  were  deserved.  The  men 
who  were  to  receive  them  were  not  former  contractors  who  had  waxed 
rich  at  the  government  trough  during  the  war,  or  tariff  protected 
manufacturers  seeking  just  one  more  favor.  They  were,  as  Roosevelt, 
who  honored  them  years  before  he  became  a  politician,  appropriately 
said,  "the  men  who  fought  for  union  and  liberty"  and  "not  only  saved 
this  Nation  from  ruin,  but  rendered  an  inestimable  service  to  all 
mankind." 

Roosevelt  well  knew  that  during  the  four  years  the  "plain  people" 
had  been  at  war  Elihu  Root  took  his  degree  at  Hamilton  College  and 
Robert  Lincoln  finished  his  studies  at  Harvard.  J.  P.  Morgan,  a 
widower  without  children  at  twenty-four,  procured  a  substitute  to 
serve  in  the  Army  and  began  the  career  that  was  to  make  him  the 
most  powerful  man  in  the  nation  by  the  time  Roosevelt  became  Presi- 
dent. John  D.  Rockefeller,  who  also  hired  a  substitute,  bent  over  his 
books  in  the  produce  commission  business  in  Cleveland,  invested  in 
oil,  and  watched  his  annual  income  rise  to  $17,000  by  the  end  of  the 
conflict.  Philip  D.  Armour  made  his  first  great  "killing"  by  selling 
pork  "short"  as  Grant  marched  through  the  Wilderness  to  Richmond. 
And  Jay  Gould,  Jay  Cooke,  Andrew  Carnegie,  Colis  P.  Huntington, 
Jim  Fisk,  and  dozens  of  others  who  preferred  the  emoluments  of  the 
market  place  to  the  miseries  (or  glories)  of  the  battlefield  either 
launched  their  careers  or  embellished  their  already  sizable  fortunes 
while  the  muskets  rattled  and  the  cannon  roared.  When  the  silence 
finally  fell  on  Appomattox  their  futures  were  secure,  or  as  nearly  so 
as  money  could  make  them. 

It  was  for  "the  plain  people"  who  managed  to  survive  the  holocaust 
of  Civil  War  that  Roosevelt's  pension  order  was  designed.  Whatever 
the  political  nuances  of  his  decision  to  sign  it  (he  self-righteously 
refused  to  admit  any)  the  justification  he  offered  was  plausible.  Ad- 
mitting that  there  was  an  "unreasoning  or  demagogic  demand  for 
excessive  and  improper  amounts"  and  claiming  that  he  had  prevented 
Congress  from  submitting  to  it,  he  reminded  Jacob  Riis  that  "there 
are  very  many  excellent  people  who  have  lived  softly,  and  who  have 


226  POWER  AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

no  idea  of  what  it  is  all  one's  life  to  earn  one's  living  by  toil,  and  then, 
without  having  been  able  to  save,  to  face  failing  strength  at  the  end 
of  one's  days."  The  age  of  sixty-two  had  been  selected,  he  added  in 
a  passage  that  presaged  the  later,  more  socially  conscious  Roosevelt, 
"not  at  random,  but  after  careful  inquiry  which  satisfied  us  that  in 
most  great  manufacturing  and  railroad  establishments  new  men  of 
the  age  of  62  who  might  apply  for  work  were  peremptorily  refused. 
.  .  .  There  are  exceptions,  of  course,  but  the  average  toiler,  the 
average  wageworker,  whose  work  is  physical,  has  at  62  lost  half  his 
capacity  to  do  his  work.  In  New  Zealand,  at  65  such  a  man,  even 
if  a  civilian,  is  given  an  old-age  pension,  larger  in  amount  by  over 
one-half  than  the  amount  we  thus  allow."  The  Civil  War  veteran 
shall  have  such  a  pension,  TR  emphatically  concluded,  "because 
the  presumption  is  that  he  needs  it." 

In  a  world  that  was  beginning  to  become  aware  of  the  need  for 
industrial  societies  to  take  care  of  the  aged,  the  President's  ruling  was 
socially  meaningful,  however  inadequate,  exclusive,  and  political  its 
application.  Thirty-one  years  were  to  go  by,  and  five  Presidents  were 
to  pass  in  and  out  of  the  White  House,  before  Roosevelt's  reasoning 
would  be  applied  to  civilians  as  well  as  veterans;  and  then  it  would 
be  in  the  first  administration  of  his  distant  cousin  and  sometime 
disciple. 

Just  as  Roosevelt  sought  the  support  of  the  minority  groups  and 
Union  veterans  for  his  campaign  in  1 904,  he  welcomed  the  backing 
of  big  business  in  general  and  of  Wall  Street  in  particular.  In  a 
maneuver  that  had  further  confused  the  distinctions  between  the 
parties,  the  Cleveland  wing  of  the  Democratic  party  had  beaten  down 
attempts  to  include  free  silver  and  income  tax  planks  in  the  party 
platform  in  1904  and  then  named  Judge  Alton  B.  Parker  of  New 
York  to  carry  the  once  progressive  Democratic  standard.  A  confirmed 
Gold  Democrat,  and  a  colorless  campaigner,  Parker  was  a  moderate 
states'  rights  adherent  and  a  strong  anti-imperialist.  He  was  the 
antithesis  of  Bryan  in  personality,  and  he  differed  radically  from  the 
Great  Commoner  in  social  philosophy.  He  also  offered  a  striking 
contrast  to  Roosevelt,  "The  Republican  Bryan,"  as  embittered  mem- 
bers of  the  Old  Guard  were  by  1904  calling  the  President. 

Although  Democratic  newspapers  had  received  Parker's  nomination 
with  diverse  enthusiasm,  they  had  quickly  closed  ranks,  announcing 
from  one  end  of  the  country  to  the  other  that  the  campaign  would  be 


IN   HIS    OWN   RIGHT  227 

waged  on  the  issue  of  personalities.  Theodore  Roosevelt,  declared 
Colonel  Henry  Watterson's  Louisville  Courier-Journal,  embodies 
"absolutism"  and  the  "Gospel  of  Force";  Alton  B.  Parker,  said 
Pulitzer's  editors  on  the  World,  stands  for  "conservative  and  consti- 
tutional Democracy." 

Wall  Street  leaders  sulked.  There  was  enough  truth  in  these  asser- 
tions to  challenge  the  wisdom  of  their  supporting  Roosevelt  over  the 
conservative  Parker.  Until  the  day  of  Raima's  death  the  Morgan, 
Harriman,  Rockefeller  and  similar  interests  had  hoped  that  the  Ohio 
Senator  would  somehow  wrest  the  nomination  from  the  Rough  Rider 
in  the  White  House.  As  a  meeting  of  railroad  executives  had  urged 
Hanna  in  January,  1904:  "Stop  making  presidents  and  become  one 
yourself."  But  with  the  passing  of  that  monumental  symbol  of  "Mc- 
Kinleyism"  in  February,  they  had  resigned  themselves  to  the  inevi- 
table. Six  weeks  before  Roosevelt's  power-packed  steamroller  forced 
his  unanimous  nomination  at  Chicago  before  mechanically  cheering 
delegates  (the  galleries  were  wildly  enthusiastic),  even  the  New  York 
Sun  had  leaped  atop  the  boiler: 

RESOLVED:  That  we  emphatically  endorse  and  affirm  Theodore 
Roosevelt.  Whatever  Theodore  Roosevelt  thinks,  says,  does,  or 
wants  is  right.  Roosevelt  and  Stir  'Em  Up.  Now  and  Forever;  One 
and  Inseparable! 

The  rest  of  the  Old  Guard  had  gone  along,  or  were  soon  to  do  so. 
Henry  Adams  had  thought  that  they  would  not.  "Roosevelt  has  no 
friends,"  he  wrote  in  January  with  characteristic  effort  at  effect.  "I 
doubt  whether  he  has  in  all  Washington,  including  his  own  Cabinet, 
a  single  devoted  follower;  for  even  Cabot  can  hardly  be  called  a 
devoted  follower  of  anyone,  except  as  a  kitten  follows  its  own  tail 
.  .  .  every  man  in  the  organization  will  dread  his  re-election.  Half 
of  them,  and  all  the  money,  will  sell  him  out." 

That  summer  money  flowed  into  Republican  headquarters  like  a 
great  tidal  wave.  J.  P.  Morgan  contributed  $150,000;  H.  H.  Rodgers 
and  John  D.  Archbold  of  the  Standard  Oil  Company,  $100,000; 
C.  S.  Mellon,  $50,000;  E.  H.  Harriman,  $50,000;  and  William  Nelson 
Cromwell,  $5,000.  All  told,  $2,195,000  swelled  the  Republican  war 
chest,  12V2  per  cent  the  gift  of  corporations. 

Historians  still  differ  over  the  meaning  of  Wall  Street's  munificent 
support  of  Roosevelt's  campaign  in  1904.  Some  contend  that  it  proved 


228  POWER    AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

the  real  issue  was  one  of  parties  rather  than  of  men;  that  a  Demo- 
cratic Congress  was  a  more  potent  threat  to  the  established  order  than 
a  Republican  Congress,  even  with  Roosevelt  in  the  White  House. 
The  editors  of  the  New  York  Sun  so  believed:  "We  prefer  the  im- 
pulsive candidate  of  the  party  of  conservatism  to  the  conservative 
candidate  of  the  party  which  the  business  interests  regard  as  perma- 
nently and  dangerously  impulsive."  Others  claim  that  the  lords  of 
the  market  place  and  the  heads  of  the  counting  houses  were  too 
astute  to  fear  Roosevelt;  that  they  were  persuaded  by  Elihu  Root's 
logic:  "You  say  Roosevelt  is  an  unsafe  man.  I  tell  you  he  is  a  great 
conservator  of  property  and  rights."  And  many,  of  course,  interpret 
it  both  ways. 

Roosevelt  himself  badly  wanted  Wall  Street's  support.  But  he 
wanted  it,  or  so  he  wanted  to  believe,  on  his  own  terms.  And  though 
he  had  been  consistently  more  temperate  in  his  criticism  of  business- 
men and  their  policies  throughout  1904,  he  righteously  directed  the 
chairman  of  the  Republican  National  Committee  to  return  the  contri- 
butions of  officials  of  the  Standard  Oil  Company,  which  was  then 
under  investigation.  He  further  warned  the  chairman  that  there  should 
be  no  intimation  to  businessmen  that  the  administration  would  become 
conservative  in  return  for  their  financial  aid.  "I  should  hate  to  be 
beaten  in  this  contest,"  he  wrote,  but  I  should  not  merely  hate,  I 
should  not  be  able  to  bear  being  beaten  under  circumstances  which 
implied  ignominy.  To  give  any  color  for  misrepresentation  to  the 
effect  that  we  are  now  weakening  .  .  .  would  be  ruinous." 

The  force  of  the  President's  renouncement  of  Standard  Oil  money 
is  mitigated,  however,  by  his  failure  to  attempt  to  stay  the  main  stream 
of  contributions  from  other  corporations.  It  is  further  weakened  by  his 
remonstrations  to  Root  to  spread  through  the  financial  community  the 
gospel  that  he  was  really  protecting  business  from  revolution.  Root's 
text  bears  reading: 

There  is  a  better  way  to  protect  property,  to  protect  capital,  to 
protect  .  .  .  enterprises,  than  by  buying  legislatures.  There  is  a  bet- 
ter way  to  deal  with  labor,  and  to  keep  it  from  rising  into  the  tumult 
of  the  unregulated  and  resistless  mob  than  by  starving  it  or  by 
corrupting  its  leaders.  .  .  .  That  way  is,  that  capital  shall  be  fair 
.  .  .  fair  to  the  consumer,  fair  to  the  laborer,  fair  to  the  investor; 
that  it  shall  concede  that  the  laws  shall  be  executed.  .  .  .  Never 
forget  that  the  men  who  labor  cast  the  votes,  set  up  and  pull  down 


IN   HIS    OWN   RIGHT  229 

governments,  and  that  our  government  is  possible  ...  the  contin- 
ued opportunity  for  enterprise,  for  the  enjoyment  of  wealth,  for  in- 
dividual liberty,  is  possible,  only  so  long  as  the  men  who  labor  with 
their  hands  believe  in  American  liberty  and  American  laws. 

Those  remarks  had  laid  bare  the  essence  of  Roosevelt's  policies. 
No  competent  observer  or  biographer  has  challenged  them  as  a  state- 
ment of  what  Roosevelt  was  actually  doing.  But  many  historians  have 
used  Roosevelt's  endorsement  of  them  as  the  point  of  departure  for 
a  cynical  appraisal  of  his  motives  and  personality.  It  proves,  they 
suggest  or  declare,  that  he  was  at  heart  a  sophisticated  conservative 
rather  than  a  genuine  progressive,  that  he  hated  the  "malefactors  of 
great  wealth"  because  he  feared  their  excesses  would  provoke  revolu- 
tionary violence,  not  because  they  were  fundamentally  unjust. 

There  is  surely  a  large  measure  of  truth  in  that  analysis.  One  need 
but  recall  Roosevelt's  harangues  against  the  Haymarket  anarchists, 
against  Altgeld,  Bryan,  and  the  Silver  Democrats,  to  realize  how 
obsessive  was  his  fear  of  what  he  believed  was  upheaval  from  below. 
"We  shall  have  to  do  this  in  order  to  prevent  that,"  is  the  suggestive 
comment  of  Richard  Hofstadter.  Obviously,  many  of  the  sophisticated 
conservatives  with  whom  Roosevelt  associated — Lodge,  Hanna,  Root 
— were  drawn  to  him  because  of  this  phase  of  his  political  personality, 
though  none  was  willing  to  go  as  far  down  the  reform  path  as  he. 
Moreover,  Roosevelt  himself  conceived  his  role  in  much  the  same 
light.  As  he  explained  to  the  British  historian,  Sir  George  Trevelyan, 
"Somehow  or  other  we  shall  have  to  work  out  methods  of  controlling 
the  big  corporations  without  paralyzing  the  energies  of  the  business 
community." 

There  were,  nonetheless,  significant  differences  between  the  Presi- 
dent and  his  conservative  friends.  Roosevelt  was  temperamentally 
disposed  to  act;  they  were  inclined  to  stand  pat  until  the  external 
pressures  became  overwhelming.  Roosevelt  became  morally  indignant 
when  confronted  with  injustice;  they  remained  largely  indifferent. 
Roosevelt  would  become  intellectually  involved  in  the  reform  itself — 
in  its  social  and  economic  merit — and  would  make  it  part  of  his  body 
of  affirmative  beliefs;  they  would  view  it  as  a  necessary  evil.  Above 
all  else,  it  was  this  positive  accent  that  distinguished  Roosevelt  from 
his  sophisticated  conservative  consorts,  the  real  proponents  of  stra- 
tegic retreat.  The  President's  goal  was  a  better,  a  more  just  and  less 


230  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

privileged  America;  theirs  a  more  ordered  America.  This  had  been 
evidenced  by  Roosevelt's  actions  during  his  legislature  years,  by  the 
reforms  of  his  governorship,  most  notably  the  franchise  tax,  and  by 
several,  if  hardly  all,  of  the  policies  of  his  first  term  as  President. 
It  would  be  further  evidenced  by  the  policies  of  his  second  term. 

It  is  one  of  the  regrettable  ironies  of  Roosevelt's  career  that  there 
had  been  no  need  for  him  to  compromise  himself  as  he  did  during 
the  campaign  of  1904.  Having  wrested  control  of  the  party  machinery 
from  Hanna,  his  election  was  a  foregone  conclusion,  so  firm  was  his 
hold  upon  the  affections  of  the  American  people.  That  hold  had 
already  been  demonstrated  by  a  thousand  and  more  incidents,  and 
none  more  moving  than  by  the  reception  accorded  him  on  an  ex- 
tended whistle-stop  tour  through  the  West  in  the  spring  of  1903. 
Roosevelt,  as  always,  had  been  profoundly,  even  mystically,  stimu- 
lated. "Wherever  I  stopped  at  a  small  city  or  country  town,"  he  wrote 
John  Hay,  "I  was  greeted  by  the  usual  shy,  self-conscious,  awkward 
body  of  local  committeemen,  and  spoke  to  the  usual  audience  of 
thoroughly  good  American  citizens — a  term  I  can  use  in  a  private 
letter  to  you  without  being  thought  demagogic!" 

That  is  the  audience  consisted  of  ...  gaunt,  sinewy  farmers  and 
hired  hands  from  all  the  neighborhood,  who  had  driven  in  with  their 
wives  and  daughters  and  often  with  their  children,  from  ten  or 
twenty  or  even  thirty  miles  round  about.  For  all  the  superficial 
differences  between  us,  down  at  bottom  these  men  and  I  think  a 
good  deal  alike,  or  at  least  have  the  same  ideals,  and  I  am  always 
sure  of  reaching  them  in  speeches  which  many  of  my  Harvard 
friends  would  think  not  only  homely,  but  commonplace.  There 
were  two  bodies  which  were  always  gathered  to  greet  me — the 
veterans  and  the  school  children.  The  veterans  felt  that  I  had  fought 
too,  and  they  claimed  a  certain  right  of  comradeship  with  me  which 
really  touched  me  deeply;  and  to  them  I  could  invariably  appeal 
with  the  certainty  of  meeting  an  instant  response.  Whatever  their 
faults  and  shortcomings,  and  however  much  in  practise  they  had 
failed  to  come  up  to  their  ideal,  yet  they  had  this  ideal,  and  they 
had  fought  for  it  in  their  youth  of  long  ago.  .  .  . 

The  President  had  also  been  amused — by  the  gifts  of  two  bears, 
a  lizard,  a  horned  toad,  and  a  horse;  and  by  the  undiluted  democracy 
of  the  mayor  of  Butte,  Montana: 


IN   HIS   OWN   RIGHT  231 

...  As  soon  as  we  got  in  the  banquet  hall  and  sat  at  the  head 
of  the  table  the  mayor  hammered  lustily  with  the  handle  of  his  knife 
and  announced,  "Waiter,  bring  on  the  feed."  Then  in  a  spirit  of 
pure  kindliness  he  added,  "Waiter,  pull  up  the  curtains  and  let  the 
people  see  the  President  eat!" — but  to  this  I  objected.  ...  Of  the 
hundred  men  who  were  my  hosts  I  suppose  at  least  half  had  killed 
their  man  in  private  war.  ...  As  they  drank  great  goblets  of  wine 
the  sweat  glistened  on  their  hard,  strong,  crafty  faces.  They  looked 
as  if  they  had  come  out  of  the  pictures  in  Aubrey  Beardslee's 
[sic]  Yellow  Book. 

On  November  8,  1904  the  people  whose  ideals  Theodore  Roosevelt 
exemplified  had  turned  out  by  the  millions  to  give  him  the  greatest 
popular  majority  to  that  time.  Judge  Parker's  campaign  had  fallen 
flat,  as  it  had  been  foredoomed  to  do,  and  not  even  the  revelation  of 
the  President's  munificent  support  by  Wall  Street  did  more  than  create 
a  mild  flurry  of  excitement.  Roosevelt's  adroit  and  self-righteous 
handling  of  the  issue,  suggests  Mowry — the  President  dismissed  the 
exaggerated  implications  of  Parker's  charges  as  "unqualifiedly  and 
atrociously  false,"  but  ignored  the  objective  portions — may  even  have 
redounded  to  his  advantage. 

In  any  event,  the  returns  gave  the  President  a  popular  majority 
of  more  than  2,500,000  and  an  electoral  majority  of  196.  Roosevelt 
swept  every  state  in  the  North,  including  Missouri,  and  he  was  un- 
doubtedly responsible  for  much  of  the  Republicans'  near  one-hundred- 
seat  majority  in  the  House.  It  was,  the  New  York  Sun  conceded,  "one 
of  the  most  illustrious  personal  triumphs  in  all  political  history." 

On  the  state  level,  however,  the  President's  personal  popularity 
failed  to  offset  completely  the  growing  disenchantment  with  his  party; 
five  of  the  states  he  carried  elected  Democratic  governors.  Yet  there 
were  elements  of  vindication  even  in  that  circumstance;  also  of  irony. 
For  in  spite  of  Roosevelt's  baleful  campaign  compromises,  the  fact 
was,  as  the  British  Ambassador  reported  to  Whitehall,  the  President's 
long-standing  criticisms  of  "political  machines  and  party  government 
by  'bosses'  has  encouraged  ...  the  principle  of  independent  judg- 
ment." 

Roosevelt  was  astonished  and  elated  by  the  magnitude  of  his  vic- 
tory. He  was  also  sobered.  On  Election  night,  in  accordance  with  a 
decision  he  had  made  some  time  before,  he  issued  a  statement  of 
future  intentions.  "I  am  deeply  sensible  of  the  honor  done  me  by  the 


232  POWER    AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

American  people  .  .  .  ,"  he  said.  "I  appreciate  to  the  full  the  solemn 
responsibilities  this  confidence  imposes  upon  me,  and  I  shall  do  all 
that  in  my  power  lies  not  to  forfeit  it." 

On  the  fourth  of  March  next  I  shall  have  served  three  and  a  half 
years,  and  this  three  and  a  half  years  constitutes  my  first  term. 
The  wise  custom  which  limits  the  President  to  two  terms  regards 
the  substance  and  not  the  form.  Under  no  circumstances  will  I  be 
a  candidate  for  or  accept  another  nomination. 

A  sincere  and  high  purposed  affirmation  of  the  national  tradition, 
that  statement  was  nevertheless  the  worst  political  blunder  of  Theo- 
dore Roosevelt's  career. 


PART    IV 


THE  SQUARE  DEAL  MATURES 


CHAPTER  14 


ANOTHER  MEASURED   ADVANCE 


Three  of  the  most  cherished  powers  of  private  business  had 
been  the  right  to  set  its  own  prices  for  services,  the  right  to  main- 
tain its  books  and  records  in  secrecy,  and  the  right  to  negotiate 
with  labor  without  interference  by  a  third  party.  The  President's 
1905  message  challenged  .  .  .  all  these  rights.  .  .  . 

— George  E.  Mowry,  The  Era  of  Theodore  Roosevelt 


Roosevelt's  majestic  triumph  at  the  polls  in  November,  1904,  had  not 
altered  the  Old  Guard's  sentiments  toward  him.  To  the  leaders  of  his 
own  party  this  greatest  popular  hero  since  Andrew  Jackson  was  still 
a  maverick  who  must  be  contained  and  even  repressed;  and  as  they 
detrained  in  Washington  early  in  December  for  the  lame-duck  session 
of  the  Fifty-eighth  Congress,  the  Republicans  had  breathed  defiance. 
"Congress,"  growled  Joseph  G.  Cannon,  the  grizzled,  tobacco-chew- 
ing Speaker  of  the  House,  "will  pass  the  appropriation  bills  and  mark 
time." 

Cannon's  forecast  had  proved  substantially  correct.  By  Roosevelt's 
inauguration  on  March  4  Congress  had  pigeonholed  or  rejected  most 
of  the  recommendations — railroad  regulation,  employers'  liability 
legislation,  tariff  relief  for  the  Philippines,  and  a  child  labor  law  for 
the  District  of  Columbia — the  President  had  made  in  his  annual 
message  on  December  6.  Nor  had  it  acted  on  the  President's  special 
message  urging  ratification  of  the  critical  Santo  Domingo  treaty.  There 
had  been,  decidedly,  an  aura  of  resentment,  of  studied  insolence  about 
that  final  session  of  the  Fifty-eighth  Congress. 

The  President  had  not  really  expected  more.  "Congress  does  from 

235 


236  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

a  third  to  a  half  of  what  I  think  is  the  minimum  that  it  ought  to  do, 
and  I  am  profoundly  grateful  that  I  get  as  much,"  he  confessed  to 
Leonard  Wood  shortly  after  the  inauguration.  He  was,  it  is  true, 
exasperated  by  the  Senate's  cavalier  treatment  of  the  Santo  Domingo 
treaty.  "The  Senate  adjourns.  I  am  then  left  to  shoulder  all  the 
responsibility  due  to  their  failure  .  .  .  and  have  to  spend  an  in- 
dustrious summer  engaged  in  the  pleasant  task  of  making  diplomatic 
bricks  without  straw."  Yet  he  was  delighted  that  the  lame-duck 
session  had  voted  funds  for  the  construction  of  two  more  battleships. 
"This  navy  puts  us  a  good  second  to  France  and  about  on  a  par  with 
Germany.  .  .  .  For  some  years  now  we  can  afford  to  rest  and  merely 
replace  the  ships  that  are  worn  out  or  become  obsolete,  while  we 
bring  up  the  personnel."  And  he  was  quietly  confident  that  he  had 
won  the  first  skirmish  in  the  looming  battle  for  railroad  rate  regula- 
tion. 

Roosevelt  had  originally  hailed  the  Elkins  Anti-rebate  Act  of  1903 
as  one  of  his  administration's  signal  accomplishments.  Within  a  year 
of  its  enactment,  however,  he  had  concluded  that  a  more  comprehen- 
sive system  of  regulation  would  have  to  be  instituted.  But  he  had 
waited  until  the  people  gave  him  their  mandate  in  November,  1 904, 
before  pressing  the  case.  Then,  in  his  most  unequivocal  annual  mes- 
sage to  that  time,  he  had  forcefully  delineated  the  lines  of  advance. 

The  President's  paramount  objective  was  the  winning  of  authority 
for  the  Interstate  Commerce  Commission  or  a  similar  body  to  set 
"maximum"  railroad  rates.  This  was  necessary,  he  told  Congress, 
because  "as  the  law  now  stands  the  commission  simply  possess  the 
bare  power  to  denounce  a  particular  rate  as  unreasonable."  The  Com- 
mission's ruling  should  take  effect  immediately  after  it  had  been  made 
(instead  of  after  prolonged  and  immobilizing  litigation),  and  it  should 
remain  in  effect  unless  reversed  by  the  courts.  Otherwise  the  great  high- 
ways of  commerce  could  not  be  kept  "open  to  all  on  equal  terms." 
Nor  should  Congress  be  deterred  by  philosophical  objections  to  big 
government.  The  question  was  empirical.  National  supervision,  Roose- 
velt asserted,  was  the  only  means  by  which  "an  increase  of  the 
present  evils  ...  or  a  still  more  radical  policy"  could  be  prevented. 
The  President  had  struck  at  the  opportune  moment.  The  Elkins 
Act  had  diminished  the  rebate  evil,  but  many  powerful  shippers 
were  defying  or  circumventing  its  provisions.  Other  discriminatory 
practices,  including  freight  differentials  that  wrought  hardship  on 


ANOTHER   MEASURED   ADVANCE  237 

whole  sections  of  the  country,  were  rampant,  while  the  consolidation 
of  lines  for  purposes  of  efficiency  was  threatening  great  numbers  of 
farmers  and  small  manufacturers  with  the  loss  or  drastic  reduc- 
tion of  service.  It  was  also  widely,  and  exaggeratedly,  believed  that 
rates  in  general  were  excessive.  The  result  was  such  a  broadly  based 
demand  for  reform  as  the  nation  had  not  theretofore  witnessed. 

Militant  farmers  and  their  organizations  were  bitterly  prescribing 
the  old  Populist  remedy,  government  ownership  of  the  roads.  Southern 
and  Western  state  legislatures  were  memorializing  Congress  for  relief 
from  the  "iniquities"  of  the  railroad  operators  or  were  threatening  to 
act  on  their  own  as  they  had  done  during  the  Granger  era.  And  more 
important  still,  for  the  fanners  had  tried  and  failed  with  William 
Jennings  Bryan,  the  small-town  middle  classes  were  swelling  the 
mighty  protest.  Business  and  professional  men  who  had  cast  Demo- 
cratic ballots  only  when  Blaine  had  run  against  Cleveland,  men  who 
had  equated  Bryanism  with  social  revolution  and  financial  madness — 
these  and  many,  many  more  were  furiously  decrying  the  abuses  of  the 
railroads.  Even  conservative  churchmen  were  indignantly  viewing 
the  rate  issue  as  a  moral  problem.  The  sensational  revelations  of  the 
muckrakers,  spread  broadcast  on  the  pages  of  the  magazines  and 
newspapers,  had  finally  aroused  their  consciences. 

The  Old  Guard  was  visibly  shaken.  Repeatedly  in  the  past  it  had 
dismissed  or  deflected  mass  pressures  for  reform;  there  were  some 
who  now  argued  that  it  could  do  so  again.  There  were  others,  how- 
ever, who  painfully  concluded  that  it  could  no  longer  hold  the  weak- 
ening line.  These  realists  knew  that  the  corporations'  spokesmen  in 
the  Senate  could  still  turn  a  deaf  ear  to  the  outcries  of  the  agrarians 
and  ignore  with  impunity  the  feeble  demands  of  labor.  But  they  were 
not  so  confident  that  they  could  resist  the  combined  pressure  of  the 
agrarians  and  the  urban  middle  classes  and  yet  remain  indefinitely  in 
power.  From  Joseph  G.  Cannon  and  Nelson  W.  Aldrich  on  down, 
therefore,  the  leaders  of  the  Old  Guard  reluctantly  decided  to  give 
the  President  and  the  reformers  the  shadow  of  their  program.  They 
or  their  predecessors  had  done  this  before — with  the  original  Inter- 
state Commerce  Act  of  1887,  the  Sherman  Antitrust  Act  of  1890, 
and  even  the  Elkins  Act  of  1903.  They  would  now  do  it  again,  this 
time  by  endowing  the  courts  with  such  broad  powers  of  review  that 
the  Commission's  decisions  would  become  virtually  impossible  to 
implement.  Yet  even  this  devious  strategy  was  formulated  under 


238  POWER    AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

duress,  for  at  heart  many  preferred  inaction.  Had  it  not  been  for  the 
sustained  and  commanding  influence  of  Theodore  Roosevelt,  they 
might  well  have  done  nothing,  the  political  consequences  notwith- 
standing. 

The  struggle  that  marked  the  Old  Guard's  decision  to  hoist  the 
white  flag  proved  bitter  and  dramatic.  Waged  when  the  President's 
power  was  at  its  very  apex,  it  saw  him  abandon  hope  of  tariff  reform, 
submit  to  artful  insult  by  Aldrich  and  his  lieutenants,  and  back  down 
from  an  advanced  position.  Yet  it  also  saw  him  drive  the  Old  Guard 
from  its  bastions,  hold  together  a  political  party  that  a  wrong  move 
might  have  split  asunder,  and  give  the  American  people  meaningful 
railroad  legislation  for  the  first  time  in  the  nation's  history. 

The  first  skirmish  had  been  handily  won  by  the  President.  Flushed 
by  his  stunning  victory  in  November,  Roosevelt  had  considered 
urging  tariff  revision  as  well  as  railroad  reform  when  he  drafted  his 
annual  message.  Had  not  the  Republicans  beaten  "the  Democrats 
on  the  issue  that  protection  was  robbery,  and  that  when  necessary  we 
would  amend  or  revise  the  tariff  ourselves"?  He  would  take  action,  if 
only  because  the  existing  schedules  threatened  the  very  fabric  of 
the  enlightened  colonial  policy  to  which  he  was  so  firmly  committed. 
Privately  and  discreetly,  he  revealed  his  feelings  to  the  party  faithful. 
He  might  call  a  special  session  of  Congress  in  September  to  revise  the 
tariff,  he  wrote  Nicholas  Murray  Butler.  It  was  possible  that  he  would 
send  in  a  special  tariff  message  early  in  the  new  year,  he  confided  to 
Cannon.  Indeed,  he  had  composed  a  draft  of  his  proposed  remarks; 
perhaps  the  Speaker  would  be  interested  in  reviewing  them! 

The  President  neither  sent  in  a  special  message  nor  called  an 
extra  session.  Hardly  had  he  made  those  first,  perhaps  impulsive 
gestures  toward  revision,  in  fact,  than  he  began  to  draw  back.  The 
obstacles  were  too  imposing.  A  minority  of  Republicans,  mainly  from 
the  Middle  West,  favored  revision.  They  could  be  counted  on  for 
informed,  vociferous  support;  but  their  numbers  were  inconsequential. 
In  opposition  was  a  solid  phalanx  of  stand-patters.  They  were  headed 
by  Cannon  in  the  House  and  Orville  H.  Platt  in  the  Senate,  and  they 
included  virtually  the  entire  Republican  leadership.  Committed  by 
interest  and  conviction  to  the  protectionist  principle,  they  were  un- 
alterably opposed  to  a  major  reduction  in  schedules.  For  reasons  of 
political  expendiency,  they  were  also  opposed  to  minor  adjustments 
even  on  those  schedules  which  no  longer  served  a  protectionist 


ANOTHER   MEASURED   ADVANCE  239 

purpose.  As  Speaker  Cannon  candidly  explained  years  later,  "We 
know  from  long  experience  that  no  matter  how  great  an  improvement 
the  new  tariff  may  be,  it  almost  always  results  in  the  party  in  power 
losing  the  following  election." 

Roosevelt  nevertheless  made  measured  soundings  throughout 
November,  1904.  They  were  not  encouraging.  "I  am  having  great 
difficulty,"  he  reported  to  Butler  in  early  December.  "The  trouble  is 
that  there  are  large  parts  of  the  country  which  want  no  tariff 
revision.  .  .  .  They  say,  with  entire  truth,  that  neither  in  the  platform 
nor  in  any  communication  of  mine  is  there  any  promise  whatever  that 
there  shall  be  tariff  revision.  .  .  .  My  argument  in  response  is  that 
I  am  meeting  not  a  material  need  but  a  mental  attitude.  .  .  .  What 
I  am  concerned  about  is  to  meet  the  expectation  of  people  that  we 
shall  consider  the  tariff  question,  and  the  need  of  showing  that  the 
Republican  party  is  not  powerless  to  take  up  the  subject." 

Nine  days  later  the  President  despaired  of  the  chances  of  tariff 
revision,  at  least  by  the  lame-duck  Congress.  There  was,  he  informed 
Butler,  "a  strong  majority  against  it — a  majority  due  partly  to  self- 
interest,  partly  to  inertia,  partly  to  timidity,  partly  to  genuine  convic- 
tion. .  .  ."  Nor  was  there  anyone  among  the  small  minority  of 
revisionists  who  possessed  the  "remarkable  ability"  needed  to  frame 
the  law  and  steer  its  passage  through  Congress.  A  month  later  he 
privately  conceded  defeat.  "On  the  interstate  commerce  business, 
which  I  regard  as  a  matter  of  principle,  I  shall  fight,"  he  wrote  Lyman 
Abbott,  the  editor  and  publisher  of  the  Outlook.  "On  the  tariff,  which 
I  regard  as  a  matter  of  expediency,  I  shall  endeavor  to  get  the  best 
results  I  can,  but  I  shall  not  break  with  my  party." 

The  President's  statements  were  partly  rationalizations.  He  rec- 
ognized the  need  for  tariff  revision  and  he  would  have  liked  to  effect 
it;  his  letters  leave  no  doubt  of  that.  Yet  his  decision  to  subordinate, 
and  possibly  to  abandon,  the  issue  did  little  real  violence  to  his 
principles.  Roosevelt's  views  on  the  tariff  had  paralleled  the  change 
in  his  attitude  toward  government  regulation  of  industry  and  his 
repudiation  of  laissez-faire  in  general.  By  the  mid-1890's  and  pos- 
sibly before,  he  had  come  to  believe  that  protectionism  was  a  neces- 
sary instrument  of  national  policy,  one  consonant  with  the  obligation 
of  the  state  to  regulate  in  the  interests  of  the  whole.  The  mature 
Roosevelt  could  no  more  have  weakened  American  industry's  com- 
petitive advantage  over  foreign  manufacturers  by  promoting  free  trade 


240  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

than  he  could  have  jeopardized  America's  world  power  position  by 
jettisoning  the  battle  fleet.  The  issue  was  urgent,  not  open  to  com- 
promise, and  only  inadvertently  Republican.  Not  even  the  bitter 
protests  of  his  Western  followers  would  move  Roosevelt  from  his 
protectionist  commitment  when,  in  1912,  he  emerged  as  the  knight 
errant  of  the  long-gathering  progressive  movement. 

Still,  Roosevelt  was  acutely  aware  that  there  were  abuses,  that  the 
schedules  on  some  products  were  so  high  that  the  term  "competitive 
concept"  was  a  mere  play  on  words.  Except  in  their  impact  upon 
colonial  policy,  however,  he  hardly  regarded  these  abuses  as  critical. 
As  he  explained  to  Butler,  "I  think  there  are  certain  schedules  that 
should  be  reduced,  but  I  do  not  think  it  at  all  a  vital  matter  to  reduce 
them,  so  far  as  the  welfare  of  the  people  is  concerned."  Hence  his 
willingness  to  exchange  the  threat  of  tariff  reform  for  rate  regulation. 
This  was  regrettable,  for  Roosevelt's  inability  to  alter  the  tariff  stands 
as  one  of  the  signal  failures  of  his  presidency.  Yet  it  had  to  be,  so 
numerous  and  powerful  were  the  high  priests  of  protectionism  within 
his  party.  Had  he  made  a  genuine  effort  to  revise  the  tariff  at  any 
time  during  his  seven  and  one-half  years  in  office,  he  would  have 
destroyed  his  effectiveness.  Even  as  he  virtually  threw  in  the  sponge, 
however,  he  decided  to  use  the  threat  of  action  on  the  tariff  to  cajole 
and  soften  the  Old  Guard.  Thus,  as  Blum  shrewdly  points  out,  he 
raised  the  dreaded  specter  at  the  outset  of  the  fight  for  rate  regulation 
and  revived  it  at  strategic  moments  thereafter  until  his  offensive  was 
fairly  organized. 

Of  all  the  agitations  then  current,  that  for  tariff  reform  was  the 
most  baleful  to  "Uncle  Joe"  Cannon.  Railroad  reform  promised  to 
alienate  some  important  Republicans;  but  it  bid  to  appease  many 
more,  notably  the  farmers  and  small  shippers.  Tariff  reform,  however, 
threatened  to  antagonize  tens  of  thousands  of  party  stalwarts — the 
small  manufacturers  who  comprised  the  very  sinews  of  the  Republican 
party.  In  spite  of  his  plan  to  have  the  lame-duck  session  "mark  time," 
therefore,  Cannon  came  quickly  to  terms  in  the  winter  of  1904-05. 
In  return  for  inaction  on  the  tariff,  he  allowed  the  President's  railroad 
program  as  embodied  in  the  Esch-Townshend  bill  to  roll  through  the 
House  by  a  staggering  majority  of  356  to  17.  The  Senate,  of  course, 
then  refused  to  consider  the  measure;  but  it  did  provide  for  committee 
hearings  following  the  adjournment  of  Congress.  Hence  the  President's 
quiet  confidence  following  his  inauguration  in  March. 


ANOTHER   MEASURED   ADVANCE  241 

Meanwhile  Roosevelt  prepared  to  take  the  issue  to  the  people — and 
to  the  enemy.  He  went  to  the  enemy  first,  addressing  the  Union  League 
Club  of  Philadelphia  late  in  January,  1905.  He  had  drawn  his  ground 
well.  Philadelphia  was  long  notorious  for  its  craven  politics,  its  corrupt 
business  leaders,  its  complacent  "nice  people";  it  was  the  financial 
capital  of  the  state  that  regularly  sent  Quay  and  Penrose  to  the  United 
States  Senate;  and  it  was  one  of  the  great  railroad  centers  of  the 
nation.  Like  the  Old  Guard  it  indifferently  commissioned  to  represent 
it,  the  City  of  Brotherly  Love  stood  immovably  for  the  status  quo. 

The  President  said  little  in  Philadelphia,  or  anywhere  else,  that  he 
had  not  said  before.  But  he  did  speak  more  emphatically,  more  effec- 
tively, and  more  authoritatively.  His  listeners  could  not  but  perceive 
what  the  leaders  of  the  Senate  were  still  unwilling  to  concede — that 
Roosevelt  was  President  in  his  own  right.  He  reminded  the  Union 
Leaguers,  as  he  was  shortly  to  remind  the  nation  in  his  inaugural 
address,  that  "the  great  development  of  industrialism  means  that  there 
must  be  an  increase  in  the  supervision  exercised  by  the  Government 
over  business-enterprise."  He  observed,  as  he  had  done  in  his  first 
message  to  Congress  three  years  before,  that  the  framers  of  the  Con- 
stitution could  not  possibly  have  foreseen  present-day  developments, 
that  state  regulation  was  impractical  and  national  regulation  manda- 
tory. And  he  called  again  for  amendment  of  the  Constitution  if  neces- 
sary. His  peroration  nailed  down  his  conservative-progressive  Square 
Deal: 

.  .  .  there  must  be  lodged  in  some  tribunal  the  power  over  rates, 
and  especially  over  rebates  .  .  .  which  will  protect  alike  the  rail- 
road and  the  shipper  on  an  equal  footing.  .  .  .  We  do  not  intend 
that  this  Republic  shall  ever  fail  as  those  republics  of  olden  times 
failed,  in  which  there  finally  came  to  be  a  government  by  classes, 
which  resulted  either  in  the  poor  plundering  the  rich  or  in  the 
rich  .  .  .  exploiting  the  poor. 

From  then  until  the  rate  issue  was  finally  settled  eighteen  months 
later,  Roosevelt  maintained  his  fire.  After  the  lame-duck  session  ended 
without  Senate  action  on  the  day  of  his  inauguration,  he  again  feinted 
with  the  tariff.  In  April  and  May,  he  campaigned  through  the  Middle 
West  and  Southwest  while  en  route  to  the  annual  Rough  Riders' 
reunion  at  San  Antonio.  And  during  the  summer  of  1905  he  again 
warned  the  Old  Guard  that  tariff  reform  was  still  a  possibility.  Early 


242  POWER  AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

in  the  fall  he  even  went  into  the  Southeast  where  he  repeatedly  praised 
the  Confederate  military  leaders,  commented  pridefully  on  his  own 
Southern  blood,  and  declaimed  on  the  need  for  railroad  legislation.  It 
was  as  though  he  "himself  fired  the  last  two  shots  from  the  Alabama 
instead  of  his  uncle,"  the  incredulous  correspondent  for  the  Washing- 
ton Star  reported.  "Wherever  the  President's  visit  is  discussed  you 
will  hear  men  who  believed  in  and  fought  for  the  Confederate  cause 
speak  of  him  with  the  affection  of  a  comrade." 

It  was  well  that  Roosevelt  thus  mobilized  his  forces,  for  the  rail- 
roads, abetted  by  the  National  Association  of  Manufacturers,  had 
already  organized  theirs.  While  the  President  was  warning  that  his 
program  was  the  only  alternative  to  socialism,  an  imposing  battery  of 
railroad  lawyers  was  arguing  before  the  Senate  Committee  on  Inter- 
state Commerce  that  it  constituted  a  one  way  track  to  the  destruction 
of  private  property.  Nor  did  the  railroads  confine  their  fire  to  the 
Senate  committee  room.  The  distinguished  scholar,  William  Z.  Ripley, 
described  their  activities: 

Bogus  conventions,  packed  for  the  purpose  .  .  .  passed  resolu- 
tions unanimously,  to  be  scattered  broadcast  by  free  telegraphic 
dispatches  all  over  the  country.  "Associations  for  the  Maintenance 
of  Property"  held  conventions;  the  fact  being  duly  advertised. 
Palpably  garbled  news  items  from  Washington  were  distributed 
without  cost.  .  .  .  An  elaborate  card  catalogue  of  small  news- 
papers through  the  United  States  was  made;  in  which  was  noted  all 
the  hobbies,  prejudices,  and  even  the  personal  weakness  of  the 
editors.  .  .  .  Dakota  farmers  got  suggestions  as  to  the  danger  of 
the  proposed  legislation  affecting  their  rates.  Kentucky  planters 
were  warned  of  the  probable  effect  upon  tobacco  prices. 

This  powerful  propaganda  barrage  yet  failed  of  its  target,  mainly 
because  the  public  recognized  it  for  what  it  was  even  as  it  was  born. 
The  deep-seated  grievances  of  the  farmers  and  small  shippers,  the 
rising  indignation  of  professional  men,  the  continued  revelations  of 
the  muckrakers,  and  the  relentless  pounding  of  the  President  of  the 
United  States — all  these  combined  to  make  the  movement  for  regula- 
tion politically  irresistible.  Observer  after  observer  recognized  this  at 
the  time.  As  the  Chicago  Tribune  reported,  "Many  Senators  are  will- 
ing to  serve  the  railroads  and  big  shippers,  but  they  have  no  desire  to 
arouse  a  popular  sentiment  which  might  deprive  them  of  their  seats." 
By  December,  1905,  when  the  Fifty-ninth  Congress  finally  convened, 


ANOTHER    MEASURED   ADVANCE  243 

the  reform  wave  was  so  engulfing  that  such  stalwart  Old  Guardsmen 
as  William  B.  Allison  of  Iowa  and  John  Spooner  of  Wisconsin  had 
been  swept  onto  its  crest.  One  question,  and  one  question  alone, 
remained:  What  shape  would  the  impending  legislation  take? 

The  events  which  answered  that  question  afford  as  much  insight 
into  Roosevelt  as  any  in  his  presidential  career.  They  reveal  especially 
his  extraordinary  skill  and  balance.  The  President  insisted  from  the 
start  that  the  attack  be  organized  and  disciplined,  that  it  encompass 
the  enemy's  defeat,  but  not  its  annihilation.  His  order  of  battle,  written 
into  his  annual  message  to  Congress  hi  December,  1905,  was  a  model 
of  calculated  restraint.  The  President  counseled  that  the  railroads,  for 
all  their  faults,  "had  done  well  and  not  ill"  to  American  society.  He 
warned  that  rate  regulation  was  "a  complicated  and  delicate  problem." 
And  he  declared  that  because  of  the  "extraordinary  development  of 
industrialism  along  new  lines  .  .  .  which  the  lawmakers  of  old  could 
not  foresee  and  therefore  could  not  provide  against,"  the  well-meaning 
corporations  had  been  driven  into  malpractices  by  the  compulsions 
of  the  struggle  for  survival. 

Having  recognized  the  railroads'  constructive  services,  Roosevelt 
then  revealed  the  idealism  that  caused  him  always  to  reject  the  busi- 
ness civilization's  ultimate  values.  "There  can  be  no  delusion  more 
fatal  to  the  nation,"  he  warned,  "than  the  delusion  that  the  standard 
of  profits,  of  business  prosperity,  is  sufficient  in  judging  any  business 
or  political  question — from  rate  legislation  to  municipal  government." 
He  would,  accordingly,  set  up  a  moral  and  legal  standard  that  would 
free  "the  corporation  that  wishes  to  do  well  from  being  driven  into 
doing  ill,  in  order  to  compete  with  its  rival,  which  prefers  to  do  ill." 
The  rebate  evil  should  be  eliminated  completely,  the  Interstate  Com- 
merce Commission  should  be  empowered  to  fix  maximum  rates  after 
appeal  and  investigation,  and  delay  in  implementing  the  Commission's 
findings  should  be  drastically  reduced.  Those  were  his  objectives.  He 
would  go  a  little  beyond  them;  but  he  would  not  stop  short  of  them. 

As  incorporated  hi  the  Hepburn  bill,  Roosevelt's  rate  recommenda- 
tions passed  the  House  early  in  1906  by  a  majority  even  more  im- 
posing than  that  mounted  on  the  Esch-Townshend  bill  the  previous 
year.  The  Hepburn  bill  then  went  to  the  Senate,  where  progressives 
sought  vainly  to  correct  its  inadequacies  and  the  Old  Guard  tried 
urgently  to  compound  them. 

The  problem  in  part  was  that  the  Hepburn  bill  failed  to  provide  a 


244  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

means  for  determining  rates  realistically.  Roosevelt  had  called  for 
uniform  accounting  procedures  and  for  government  inspection  similar 
to  that  exercised  over  the  national  banks.  This  was  a  first,  and  im- 
portant, step  toward  a  full  solution;  but  it  was  inconclusive.  Without 
authority  for  the  Interstate  Commerce  Commission  to  evaluate  the 
worth  of  the  railroads,  it  was  impossible  to  fix  a  fair  rate.  This  was 
widely  recognized  at  the  time.  But  it  was  Senator  La  Follette  who 
most  forcibly  impressed  it  upon  the  President. 

Robert  Marion  La  Follette  had  stormed  out  of  Wisconsin,  which 
he  had  given  a  gubernatorial  administration  that  serves  to  this  day 
as  a  prototype  of  enlightenment  while  building  a  political  machine  that 
survived  until  the  rise  of  McCarthy,  to  be  sworn  in  at  the  opening 
session  of  the  Fifty-ninth  Congress  in  March,  1905.  A  radical  in  the 
traditional  sense — he  was  a  root  thinker  to  the  point  of  single-minded- 
ness — he  would  brook  neither  intellectual  nor  political  compromise. 
Again  and  again  during  the  twenty  years  he  sat  in  the  United  States 
Senate  this  humorless,  fiercely  intense  tribune  of  the  upper  Mississippi 
Valley  championed  unpopular  causes,  often  with  grave  risk  to  his 
influence  and  not  inconsiderable  ambition,  but  almost  always  with 
honor  to  his  convictions.  Historians  who  shared  his  isolationist  sym- 
pathies, and  many  who  did  not,  would  eventually  set  him  down  as 
the  greatest  twentieth-century  senator  of  the  progressive  persuasion, 
excepting  only,  perhaps,  George  W.  Norris  of  Nebraska. 

La  Follette  had  come  to  Washington  in  the  high  hope  that  the 
second  Roosevelt  administration  would  herald  the  full  flowering  of 
the  national  progressive  movement.  And  though  he  brought  reserva- 
tions about  the  President — there  was,  he  suspected,  too  much  of  the 
trimmer  in  his  make-up — he  yet  knew  that  Roosevelt  had  an  in- 
telligent regard  for  the  opinion  of  experts  and  that  he  was  reputedly 
open  to  advice. 

The  redoubtable  Wisconsin  freshman's  hopes  had  begun  to  sink 
when  Roosevelt  failed  to  come  out  for  evaluation  of  railroad  proper- 
ties in  his  annual  message.  They  sank  further  when  it  became  apparent 
that  the  Hepburn  bill  would  go  to  a  final  vote  in  the  Senate  without 
that  important  provision.  Rebelling  inwardly  against  the  tradition  that 
kept  freshmen  senators  out  of  debate,  La  Follette  maintained  his 
silence  for  week  after  week.  Nor  did  he  discuss  his  views  with  the 
President.  In  accordance  with  his  habit  of  working  with  those  in  whom 
the  real  power  was  vested,  Roosevelt  was  not  confiding  in  La  Follette 


ANOTHER    MEASURED   ADVANCE  245 

and  others  of  his  stamp.  In  February,  1906,  however,  the  Wisconsin 
Senator's  hopes  were  momentarily  revived  when  Lincoln  Steffens 
arranged  for  him  and  the  President  to  meet. 

For  two  hours  late  one  Sunday  night  these  two  embattled  leaders 
of  the  American  social-justice  movement  discussed  the  rate  problem 
in  the  privacy  of  the  White  House.  Conceding  the  logic  of  La  Fol- 
lette's  economic  analysis,  Roosevelt  rejected  its  politics.  "But  you 
can't  get  any  such  bill  as  that  through  this  Congress,"  he  exclaimed 
as  the  Wisconsin  Senator  finished.  "I  want  to  get  something  through." 

La  Follette  had  characteristically  replied  that  Roosevelt  should 
capitalize  on  the  popular  sentiment  for  rate  reform  by  sending  a 
special  message  to  Congress.  Failing  in  that,  he  should  take  the  issue 
to  the  next  Congress.  And  even  if  that  should  also  fail,  the  President 
would  have  at  least  familiarized  the  public  with  the  only  truly  effec- 
tive course  of  action;  and  that,  concluded  the  unyielding  Senator, 
would  be  a  monumental  achievement. 

Both  men  were  proved  right.  Roosevelt  went  on  to  win  his  im- 
mediate, and  limited,  objective,  then  took  the  more  advanced  issue  to 
Congress  and  the  people  in  succeeding  years.  La  Follette,  meanwhile, 
contributed  to  the  general  enlightenment,  or,  so  Roosevelt  com- 
plained, confusion,  by  raising  the  basic  question.  "I  became  utterly 
out  of  patience  with  his  attitude.  .  .  ."  he  wrote  of  La  Follette  a 
year  later,  "for  .  .  .  had  it  been  effective,  [it]  would  have  meant  the 
loss  of  the  bill  with  absolutely  no  compensating  gain."  Still,  the 
President  added,  he  "often  serves  a  very  useful  purpose  in  making  the 
Senators  go  on  record,  and  his  fearlessness  is  the  prime  cause  of  his 
being  able  to  render  this  service." 

The  futility  of  the  course  La  Follette  wanted  Roosevelt  to  pursue 
was  decisively  demonstrated  in  April,  1906,  when  the  Wisconsin 
freshman  resolutely  broke  with  tradition  and  took  the  floor  of  the 
Senate  chamber,  a  148-page  manuscript  clutched  in  his  hand.  As  he 
started  to  speak  senator  after  senator  stalked  off  the  floor,  but  before 
he  had  completed  his  presentation  two  days  later  most  had  returned — 
some  out  of  idle  curiosity,  some  to  engage  him  in  open  debate,  and 
some,  like  Jonathan  Dolliver  of  Iowa,  the  President's  floor  leader  of 
the  moment,  to  become  converts  to  his  point  of  view.  For  to  those 
whose  minds  were  open,  La  Follette's  logic  was  irrefutable.  As  Roose- 
velt well  knew,  however,  the  majority  of  the  Old  Guard's  minds  were 
closed.  Their  design  was  to  mitigate  the  popular  pressure,  not  to 


246  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

resolve  the  railroad  problem.  When  La  Follette's  ideas  were  put  to 
the  roll-call  test,  only  six  Republicans  supported  them.  By  a  vote  of 
40  to  27  the  proposal  for  physical  evaluation  of  the  railroad's  assets 
was  defeated. 

While  La  Follette  was  striving  for  the  impossible,  Roosevelt  was 
earnestly  mustering  votes  for  the  possible,  and  for  a  little  that  was 
not.  The  formidable  character  of  his  carefully  defined  task  had  again 
been  driven  home  when  Cabot  Lodge  declared  on  February  12  that 
freight  rates  were  not  generally  excessive.  "I  have  the  gravest  doubts," 
the  Massachusetts  Brahmin  exclaimed  in  the  Senate  Chamber,  "as  to 
the  wisdom  of  government  rate-making  even  in  the  most  limited 
form."  Lodge's  opposition  must  have  hurt  the  President.  So  highly 
did  he  esteem  his  friend's  purposes  and  affection,  however,  that  it 
failed  to  affect  their  relationship.  "I  say  deliberately,"  Roosevelt  wrote 
Lyman  Abbott  soon  afterward,  "that  during  the  twenty  years  [Lodge] 
has  been  in  Washington  he  has  been  on  the  whole  the  best  and  most 
useful  servant  of  the  public  to  be  found  in  either  house  of  Con- 
gress. .  .  .  Lodge  is  a  man  of  very  strong  convictions."  And  this 
means,  he  continued  in  a  flash  of  self-revelation,  "that  when  his  con- 
victions differ  from  mine  I  am  apt  to  substitute  the  words  'narrow' 
and  'obstinate'  for  'strong';  and  he  has  a  certain  aloofness  and  cold- 
ness of  manner  that  irritate  people  who  don't  live  in  New  England. 
But  he  is  an  eminently  fit  successor  of  Webster  and  Sumner."  Roose- 
velt never  really  changed  that  judgment  of  his  closest  friend. 

Even  as  Lodge  flailed  the  heart  of  the  President's  program,  the  Old 
Guard  leadership  concluded  that  Roosevelt  had  the  votes  to  win  the 
right  to  fix  maximum  rates.  It  decided,  therefore,  to  attack  the  flank 
by  amending  the  Hepburn  bill  with  such  broad  provisions  for  judicial 
review  that  the  I.C.C.'s  rate-making  power  would  be  dissipated.  The 
architect  of  this  strategy  was  Nelson  W.  Aldrich  of  Rhode  Island. 

A  natural  aristocrat  of  modest  birth,  Aldrich  was  by  some  estimates 
the  ablest  senatorial  conservative  of  his  times.  He  had  been  educated 
in  the  common  schools  of  the  mill  town,  East  Killingly,  Connecticut, 
gone  into  the  wholesale  grocery  business  in  Providence  as  a  youth, 
and  been  mobilized  into  the  federal  military  service  in  1862  at  the  age 
of  twenty.  Stricken  by  typhoid  fever  after  six  months  of  war,  he  had 
returned  to  Providence  to  move  up  the  business  and  social  ladder. 
By  his  middle  twenties  he  had  been  made  junior  partner  in  the  grocery 
firm,  and  by  his  middle  thirties  he  had  become  president  of  the  First 


ANOTHER   MEASURED   ADVANCE  247 

National  Bank  and  of  the  Providence  Board  of  Trade.  He  had  mean- 
while married  well. 

A  boyhood  interest  in  debate  (he  later  eschewed  oratory)  and  a 
mature  concern  with  civic  affairs  had  caused  Aldrich  to  gravitate  to 
politics.  He  became  head  of  the  City  Council  in  Providence,  served 
one  term  in  Congress  in  the  late  1870's,  and  was  made  a  United 
States  senator  by  the  Republican  organization  in  the  early  1880's.  In 
Washington,  where  the  irreverent  dubbed  him  "Morgan's  floor  broker 
in  the  Senate,"  Aldrich's  impressive  talents  soon  won  him  recognition 
as  one  of  the  most  persuasive  young  spokesmen  of  the  burgeoning  in- 
dustrial and  financial  order.  Witty,  urbane,  and  gracious  to  his  peers, 
a  connoisseur  and  patron  of  painting,  Aldrich  was  intellectually  facile 
if  not  profound.  He  was  imperious  by  nature,  and  he  was  both  more 
arrogant  and  less  flexible  than  Elihu  Root.  Aldrich  had  always  been 
vaguely  contemptuous  of  his  inferiors,  and  as  he  grew  older  he  be- 
came increasingly  aloof,  disdaining  the  intimacy  of  most  other  sena- 
tors, yet  wielding  greater  influence  perhaps  than  anyone  else  in  the 
Senate. 

Aldrich's  failing  was  the  common  one  of  the  self-made  man:  He 
was  insensitive  to  the  inequities  in  the  economic  system  that  had 
yielded  undue  preferment  to  his  own  superior  abilities.  The  welfare  of 
labor,  the  farmers,  and  the  consumers  fell  not  within  his  compass 
except  incidentally,  and  in  the  classic  manner  of  his  type  he  believed 
that  government  should  subsidize  and  otherwise  foster  the  ends  of 
business  while  desisting  from  regulatory  action.  A  millionaire  several 
times  over,  the  father-in-law  of  John  D.  Rockefeller,  Jr.,  the  holder  of 
vast  oil  and  railroad  securities,  Aldrich  nevertheless  failed  to  fit  the 
formula  of  David  Graham  Phillips'  muckraking  Treason  of  the 
Senate.  His  conservatism,  like  that  of  his  colleague  and  staunch  sup- 
porter, Orville  Platt  of  Connecticut,  who  had  no  millions  and  owned 
little  stock,  was  ideological,  and  in  the  field  of  finance,  narrowly 
constructive.  By  temperament,  by  experience,  and  by  conviction, 
Nelson  W.  Aldrich  was  a  Hamiltonian. 

It  was  probably  inevitable  that  the  distinguished  Rhode  Islander 
should  emerge  as  the  leader  of  Roosevelt's  opposition.  By  1906  Mark 
Hanna  was  two  years  in  his  grave.  Spooner  and  Allison  were  acting 
as  Roosevelt's  lieutenants  on  the  rate  bill  largely  for  reasons  of  ex- 
pediency. And  Platt,  "not  as  brilliant,  but  ...  of  fine  ability,  of 
entire  fearlessness,  and  of  a  transparently  upright  and  honorable 


248  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

nature"  in  the  President's  apt  description,  had  died  the  summer  before. 
Of  the  genuine  conservatives,  only  Philander  C.  Knox,  who  had  re- 
signed as  Attorney  General  to  become  junior  senator  from  Pennsyl- 
vania, approached  Aldrich  in  character.  And  he  led  no  faction. 

A  number  of  factors  gave  added  precision  to  Aldrich's  plan  to 
vitiate  Roosevelt's  railroad  program  by  amendment  during  the  critical 
months  of  early  1906.  The  most  fortuitous  of  these  was  the  Hepburn 
bill's  failure  to  specify  the  scope  of  the  review  the  courts  would  ex- 
ercise. Roosevelt  believed  that  the  right  of  limited  review  of  the 
I.C.C.'s  findings  was  both  necessary  and  proper;  and  upon  being 
advised  that  the  omission  of  a  definite  provision  would  result  in  a 
ruling  of  unconstitutional] ty,  he  had  his  lieutenants  attack  the  problem 
when  the  bill  reached  the  Senate.  His  object,  as  Blum  writes,  was  to 
devise  an  amendment  that  would  "perpetuate  explicitly  the  ambiguities 
implicit  in  the  House's  version."  But  in  thus  tampering  with  the  House 
bill,  Roosevelt  opened  the  door  for  the  Old  Guardsmen  to  cloak  their 
antiregulation,  prorailroad  arguments  in  the  hallowed  language  of 
constitutionalism. 

To  a  few,  such  as  Knox,  the  constitutional  question  was  substantive. 
In  a  memorable  speech  on  March  28  the  former  Attorney  General 
declared  that  judicial  review  was  "a  right  painfully  won  from  tyran- 
nies of  the  past"  and  that  it  "would  be  as  a  reproach  to  those  of  us 
who  are  lawyers  .  .  .  should  we  urge  the  bill  or  ...  supinely 
permit  it  to  become  law."  But  to  most  conservative  Republicans  the 
real  issue  was  how  best  to  circumvent  effective  regulation  of  maximum 
rates.  Little  or  nothing  in  the  backgrounds  of  Elkins  of  West  Virginia, 
Penrose  of  Pennsylvania,  Dcpew  of  New  York,  Foraker  of  Ohio,  and 
numerous  other  Old  Guardsmen  suggests  that  they  were  remotely 
animated  by  concern  for  the  preservation  of  a  great  legal  tradition. 

If  the  Old  Guard's  shift  of  focus  from  rate-making  to  judicial  review 
illuminated  the  art  of  political  sophistry,  Aldrich's  floor  leadership 
revealed  the  politics  of  desperation.  Unable  to  muster  a  majority  for 
such  a  broad  review  clause  as  would  have  thwarted  the  President's 
purposes,  his  fertile  mind  devised  still  another  stratagem.  He  would 
turn  over  floor  leadership  of  the  Hepburn  bill,  then  under  Dolliver's 
control,  to  a  Democrat.  Not  a  respectable  Democrat  with  whom  the 
President  could  cooperate,  but  a  beak-nosed,  one-eyed  master  of  per- 
sonal invective  whom  Roosevelt  had  once  compared  with  Robespierre 


ANOTHER   MEASURED   ADVANCE  249 

and  Marat  and  had  not  spoken  to  for  four  years — Benjamin  R. 
"Pitchfork  Ben"  Tillman  of  South  Carolina. 

The  South  Carolina  Senator  exemplified  both  the  worst  and  the 
best  in  the  Southern  "popocrat"  tradition.  A  vicious  Negro-baiter,  an 
early  anti-imperialist,  and  an  inveterate  dipper  into  the  federal  pork 
barrel,  Tillman  was  as  devoted  a  servant  of  his  white,  back-country 
constituents'  interests  as  most  Northern  Republicans  were  to  those 
of  the  railroad  managers  and  manufacturers.  Like  many  Southerners 
of  demagogic  bent,  his  compassion  was  considerable  if  erratic;  had 
he  not  been  perverted  by  the  curse  of  Southern  history  he  might  have 
emerged  as  a  respected  progressive.  "Pitchfork  Ben"  believed  with 
the  President  that  the  real  issue  was  railroad  legislation  in  the  public 
interest,  and  he  proposed  to  effect  it  by  spelling  out  the  narrowest 
possible  area  for  judicial  review.  He  even  sought  to  prohibit  tem- 
porary injunctions,  the  device  by  which  the  railroads  could  indefinitely 
delay  the  I.C.C.'s  rulings  from  going  into  effect. 

Roosevelt  was  exasperated  by  the  blow  the  Rhode  Island  Senator 
had  dealt  him.  "Aldrich,"  he  fumed  privately,  had  "completely  lost 
both  his  head  and  his  temper."  Indeed,  the  President  feared  he  might 
lose  everything  by  identifying  himself  with  the  Tillman-La  Follette 
radicals.  Not  only  was  it  possible  that  the  amendment  restraining  the 
use  of  temporary  injunctions  would  be  ruled  unconstitutional,  there 
was  no  assurance  that  Roosevelt  could  realign  his  forces  should  the 
alliance  with  Tillman  and  La  Follette  break  down.  Roosevelt  soon 
decided,  however,  to  take  the  gamble,  and  in  truth  it  was  not  too 
great.  "The  more  I  think  over  this  railroad  rate  matter  and  the  antics 
of  the  men  who  are,  under  all  kinds  of  colors,  trying  to  prevent  any 
kind  of  effective  legislation,"  he  wrote  to  Allison,  "the  more  I  think 
through  their  own  action  the  so-called  'conservative'  or  so-called 
'railroad  senators'  have  put  us  in  a  position  where  we  should  not 
hesitate  to  try  to  put  a  proper  bill  through  in  combination  with  the 
Democrats."  The  Republicans,  he  indignantly  complained  to  another 
correspondent,  "have  tried  to  betray  me." 

Roosevelt  accordingly  entered  into  negotiations  with  the  despised 
South  Carolinian  through  a  mutual  friend.  The  President  hoped  that 
they  could  agree  on  a  bill  that  would  be  acceptable  to  the  Spooner- 
Allison  Republicans  in  the  center;  but  when  this  failed  because  Till- 
man's  provisions  were  too  radical  for  Spooner  and  Allison,  Roosevelt 
agreed  to  go  all  the  way  with  Tillman  and  La  Follette  if  they  could 


250  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

muster  a  majority.  He  soon  pulled  back,  however,  Tillman  failing  by 
two  votes  to  win  from  the  Democratic  caucus  the  support  he  needed. 
Both  the  explicitly  narrow  review  concept  and  the  amendment  limit- 
ing the  use  of  injunctions  consequently  collapsed. 

The  President  thereupon  returned  to  his  original  position — that  of 
an  explicit  perpetuation,  as  Blum  terms  it,  of  "the  ambiguities  im- 
plicit in  the  House's  version" — and  under  Allison's  persuasive  cloak- 
room leadership  the  Republican  majority  then  closed  ranks  behind 
Roosevelt's  program.  The  Democrats  also  went  along,  and  on  May 
18,  1906,  with  only  two  states'-rights  Democrats  from  Alabama 
and  one  Republican,  Foraker  of  Ohio,  voting  in  the  negative,  the 
Hepburn  bill  passed  the  Senate.  The  President  had  carried  his  primary 
objective. 

Charges  and  countercharges  inevitably  followed:  Cries  of  betrayal 
from  the  Tillman-La  Follette  left;  claims  of  victory  by  the  Aldrich- 
Knox  right.  Notwithstanding  his  failure  to  form  the  majority  that 
would  have  made  his  amendments  possible,  Tillman  felt  that  the 
President  had  let  him  down.  With  injured  countenance  and  ostenta- 
tious restraint,  "Pitchfork  Ben"  had  arisen  from  his  seat  just  a  few 
days  before  the  final  vote  to  read  an  "inside  history  of  recent  events" 
from  a  carefully  prepared  manuscript.  He  "confessed"  that  he  had 
entered  into  a  "conspiracy"  with  the  President;  he  charged  that  the 
administration  had  surrendered  to  Aldrich;  and  he  flatly  asserted  that 
Roosevelt  had  spoken  derogatorily  of  prominent  Republicans,  namely, 
Knox,  Spooner,  and  Foraker. 

If  Tillman's  first  two  charges  were  routine,  the  third  was  sensational. 
Roosevelt  had  already  strained  intraparty  harmony  to  the  breaking 
point;  the  revelation  that  he  had  criticized  members  of  his  own  party 
to  the  leader  of  the  opposition,  if  proved,  could  sever  the  last  thin 
cord.  It  was  with  cold  discomfort,  therefore,  that  Lodge  listened  to 
the  colorful  South  Carolinian's  accusations.  As  soon  as  Tillman  con- 
cluded, he  rushed  to  a  telephone  to  read  to  the  President  a  steno- 
graphic report  of  the  South  Carolinian's  remarks.  Lodge  returned  to 
the  Senate  chamber  a  few  minutes  later  with  what  the  political  ex- 
igencies demanded — an  official  denial.  Tillman's  assertion,  said  the 
President  in  the  statement  that  Lodge  read  into  the  record,  was  "a 
deliberate  and  unqualified  falsehood." 

And  so  Benjamin  R.  Tillman  of  South  Carolina  was  initiated  into 
Roosevelt's  "Ananias  Club,"  a  society  whose  rolls  were  to  swell  as 


ANOTHER    MEASURED   ADVANCE  251 

its  director's  political  career  lengthened.  It  is  doubtful  that  "Pitch- 
fork Ben's"  membership  was  earned.  Roosevelt  was  never  wont  to 
speak  with  moderation  in  the  heat  of  controversy.  And  though  the 
President  repeated  his  denial  a  few  days  later  in  what  his  daughter 
Alice  dubbed  a  "posterity  letter,"  he  not  insignificantly  added:  "I 
cannot  remember  the  details  of  the  conversation." 

The  claims  of  victory  by  the  Aldrich  forces  were  devoid  of  founda- 
tion. When  Roosevelt  scuttled  the  Tillman-La  Follette  program,  he 
withdrew  only  to  his  original  position.  Blum  proves  beyond  cavil  that 
the  bill  that  finally  went  through  embodied  the  ambiguous  phraseology 
that  Roosevelt  had  first  insisted  upon.  Thus  it  was  Aldrich,  his  power 
compromised  by  Roosevelt's  leadership  and  Allison's  defection  to  the 
President's  side,  who  had  actually  submitted.  "[Aldrich]  .  .  .  has 
come  nearer  being  unhorsed  and  thrown  in  the  ditch  in  this  struggle," 
Tillman  observed,  "than  ever  before  since  I  have  been  here."  Only  by 
climbing  on  the  bandwagon  at  the  end  had  the  haughty  Rhode  Islander 
saved  his  face  and  a  measure  of  his  prestige. 

Largely  overlooked  at  the  time,  moreover,  was  a  clause  that  put  all 
interstate  pipelines  under  the  Commerce  Commission's  control.  On 
May  4,  two  weeks  before  the  final  vote  in  the  Senate,  Roosevelt  had 
sent  in  a  report  from  the  commissioner  that  described  how  the 
Standard  Oil  Company's  possession  of  a  near  monopoly  of  pipelines 
enhanced  its  already  favored  position.  He  accompanied  the  report 
with  a  forceful  special  message  pointing  out  that  Standard  Oil  was 
overcharging  New  England  consumers  three  to  four  hundred  thousand 
dollars  a  year,  mainly  "by  unfair  or  unlawful  methods."  Abandoning 
his  opposition  to  the  concept  of  rate-making,  Lodge,  who  was  rarely 
immune  to  pressures  from  his  Massachusetts  constituents,  had  framed 
an  amendment  that  classified  all  pipelines,  including  those  owned  by 
and  designed  for  the  use  of  a  single  corporation  as  in  the  case  of 
Standard's,  as  common  carriers. 

Roosevelt  had  earned  the  right  to  exult  and  even  to  exaggerate. 
The  Hepburn  bill  "contains  practically  exactly  what  I  have  both 
originally  and  always  since  asked  for,"  he  later  wrote.  Senator  Tillman 
knew  that  it  did  not  contain  what  the  President  had  "always"  re- 
quested. But  the  vituperative  South  Carolinian  also  knew  what 
Aldrich  tried  in  the  end  to  ignore:  Passage  of  the  Hepburn  bill  was 
an  extraordinary  testament  to  Roosevelt's  generalship.  In  a  speech 
made  after  his  relations  with  the  President  had  resumed  their  cus- 


252  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

tomarily  low  level,  the  unpredictable  Tillman  acknowledged  that  fact. 
Had  it  not  been  "for  the  work  of  Theodore  Roosevelt,  in  bringing 
this  matter  to  the  attention  of  the  country,"  he  graciously  said, 
".  .  .  we  would  not  have  had  any  bill  at  all,"  and  "whatever  success 
may  come  from  it  will  be  largely  due  to  him."  Of  course,  he  added, 
the  idea  was  proclaimed  in  three  successive  Democratic  platforms. 
Other  Democrats  echoed  Tillman's  words.  "I  do  not  believe  a  bill 
of  this  character  would  have  passed  the  Senate,"  Henry  M.  Teller  of 
Colorado  declared,  "if  the  President  had  not  given  life  to  this  enter- 
prise." Without  Roosevelt,  intoned  Joseph  A.  Bailey  of  Texas,  "even 
this  imperfect  and  insufficient  bill  could  have  never  become  a  law." 

Roosevelt  never  had  any  illusions  that  the  Hepburn  Act  was  perfect. 
It  is  probably  true  that  he  failed  to  comprehend  certain  of  its  in- 
adequacies, notably  its  failure  to  strike  at  freight  differentials.  And 
he  undoubtedly  overestimated  its  immediate  impact.  Even  as  he  had 
skillfully  fought  for  its  broad  principles,  however,  he  had  frankly 
regarded  it  as  experimental;  always,  his  plan  was  to  amend  it  on  the 
basis  of  practical  experience. 

To  dwell  on  the  Hepburn  Act's  limitations  is  to  obscure  the  real 
measure  of  the  President's  achievement.  Once  again  Roosevelt  had 
demonstrated  that  mastery  of  the  political  process  that  had  set  off 
his  administration  of  New  York;  once  again  his  bold  and  imaginative 
leadership  had  forged  the  Grand  Old  Party  into  an  untempered  in- 
strument of  reform.  By  feinting  and  threatening,  by  advancing  and 
retreating,  by  inciting  the  people  and  cooperating  with  the  opposition, 
he  had  wrung  from  the  leaders  of  his  own  party  legislation  that  many 
of  them  bitterly  opposed.  He  had  in  addition  forged  another  counter- 
force  to  the  overweening  power  of  monopoly.  To  the  conservative 
elements  of  the  nation,  government  by  commission  was  what  would 
later  be  called  "creeping  socialism";  to  the  extreme  left,  it  was 
perversion  of  the  socialist  dogma.  But  to  disinterested  observers  it 
represented  a  pragmatic  and  creative  response  to  the  need  to  curb 
the  railroads'  antisocial  power  while  yet  preserving  the  economic 
advantages  of  large-scale  organization.  The  appraisal  of  Professor 
Ripley,  who  had  been  disappointed  when  Roosevelt  failed  to  support 
amendments  he  had  urged  at  the  time,  is  still  persuasive.  The  Hepburn 
Act,  wrote  Ripley  many  years  later,  "was  an  historic  event — the  most 
important,  perhaps,  in  Theodore  Roosevelt's  public  career — and  a 
not  insignificant  one  in  our  national  history." 


CHAPTER  15 


TRIALS,   TRIUMPH,   AND  TRAGEDY 


But  for  all  that,  this  contemner  of  "reforms"  made  reform 
respectable  in  the  United  States,  and  this  rebuker  of  "muck- 
rakers"  has  been  the  chief  agent  in  making  the  history  of  "muck- 
raking" in  the  United  States  a  national  one,  conceded  to  be 
useful. 

— Robert  M.  La  Follette,  Autobiography 


Although  the  struggle  for  passage  of  the  Hepburn  bill  was  a  striking 
example  of  Roosevelt's  power  to  sustain  leadership,  it  illuminated 
only  a  few  of  his  many  facets  and  was  but  one  of  several  events  which 
made  1905  and  1906  the  most  constructively  turbulent  years  of  his 
presidency.  During  these  first  two  years  of  power  "in  his  own  right," 
Roosevelt  took  America  into  the  world,  impressed  his  image  upon  a 
score  and  more  of  domestic  issues,  and  engaged  in  a  ceaseless  round 
of  controversies.  He  jousted  good-naturedly  with  Bryan,  who  accused 
him  of  stealing  his  program.  He  harpooned  the  idealistic  authors  of 
reformist  magazine  articles  by  castigating  them  as  "muck-rakers."  And 
he  quarreled  publicly  with  his  ambassador  to  Austria-Hungary,  a 
pleasant  gentleman  whose  career  was  ruined  by  the  foibles  of  his 
ambitious  wife.  He  also  made  a  seriocomic  effort  to  convert  the 
nation  to  simplified  spelling.  And  he  gave  his  support  to  public  health 
measures  of  momentous  importance. 

Many  of  the  President's  controversies  hardly  merit  review  though 
they  were  sensational  enough  in  their  time.  His  quarrel  with  Ambas- 
sador and  Mrs.  Bellamy  Storer,  for  example,  proves  only  that  Roose- 
velt was  mildly  indiscreet  in  his  enthusiasm  for  the  advancement  of 

253 


254  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

Archbishop  Ireland  to  cardinal's  rank.  As  Pringle,  after  dismissing 
Storer's  charge  that  Roosevelt  had  authorized  him  to  inform  Pope 
Pius  X  of  the  President's  desire  for  Ireland's  promotion,  speculates: 
"It  is  not  difficult  to  imagine  Roosevelt  pacing  up  and  down  in  front 
of  his  guests  at  Oyster  Bay  and  insisting  explosively  that  'Ireland  is 
just  the  man  for  Cardinal  ...  the  Pope  should  appoint  him  ...  I 
fully  sympathize.'  " 

If  the  Ireland  affair  was  soon  forgotten,  the  President's  vain  effort 
to  impose  simplified  spelling  upon  an  anguished  people  lives  on  in 
the  minds  of  literary  purists.  Roosevelt  took  not  unnaturally  to  the 
recommendations  of  the  Spelling  Reform  Association,  a  learned 
organization  headed  by  his  friend,  Professor  Brander  Mathews  of 
Columbia  University.  And  when  the  Association  proposed  three  hun- 
dred changes  in  spelling  in  1906,  he  directed  the  Government  Print- 
ing Office  to  comply.  Although  about  90  per  cent  of  the  new  spellings 
were  already  in  the  standard  dictionaries  under  optional  or  alternative 
listings — they  mainly  embraced  such  changes  as  "honour"  to  "honor," 
"dropped"  to  "dropt,"  "fulfill"  to  "fulfil" — the  ensuing  reaction  was 
as  heated  as  the  one  provoked  by  another  Roosevelt's  effort  to  change 
the  date  of  Thanksgiving  Day  some  three  decades  later. 

The  New  York  Times  weightily  observed  that  all  newspapers  "will 
take  the  kindly  view  that  the  President's  heterographical  freaks  are 
misprints  and  will  correct  them  into  English.  .  .  ."  An  irate  contribu- 
tor to  the  Rochester  Post-Express  charged  that  the  whole  scheme 
is  backed  "by  certain  large  publishing  interests  and  designed  to  carry 
out  an  immense  project  for  jobbery  in  reprinting  dictionaries  and 
schoolbooks."  And  Henry  Watterson  declared  in  his  Louisville 
Courier-Journal  that  the  President's  name  should  be  written  "Ruce- 
felt,"  "the  first  silabel  riming  with  goose."  But  the  most  indignant 
outcry  was  raised  three  thousand  miles  away.  The  "President's 
American,"  it  was  freely  said  on  the  isle  that  had  spawned  the 
language,  is  usurping  the  "King's  English." 

For  six  months  and  more  the  fateful  controversy  raged.  Presidents 
Andrew  White  of  Cornell,  David  Starr  Jordan  of  Stanford,  and 
Nicholas  Murray  Butler  of  Columbia  aligned  themselves  with  Roose- 
velt. But  his  friend  Arthur  T.  Hadley  of  Yale  discreetly  refused  to 
comment,  while  Woodrow  Wilson  of  Princeton  expressed  open  dis- 
approval. The  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States  also  issued  an 
opinion.  Any  citation  of  a  previous  decision  which  invoked  the  new 


TRIALS,    TRIUMPH,    AND   TRAGEDY  255 

spelling  "was  not  a  literal  quotation,"  the  Chief  Justice  sternly  in- 
formed the  Solicitor  General. 

Roosevelt  knew  when  a  cause  was  lost.  "I  could  not  by  fighting 
have  kept  the  new  spelling  in,"  he  explained  to  Mathews  after  the 
House  angrily  directed  that  all  government  publications,  including 
those  emanating  from  the  executive  department,  observe  the  standard 
practice,  "and  it  was  evidently  worse  than  useless  to  go  into  an  un- 
dignified contest  when  I  was  beaten."  They  had  made  a  tactical  error. 
"Do  you  know  that  the  one  word  as  to  which  I  thought  the  new 
spelling  was  wrong — thru — was  more  responsible  than  anything  else 
for  our  discomfiture?"  The  President  would  not,  however,  concede 
complete  defeat.  "In  my  own  correspondence  I  shall  continue  using 
the  new  spelling,"  he  added.  He  did. 

Meanwhile,  more  substantial  matters  were  absorbing  the  President's 
energy.  For  a  decade  and  one-half  a  dedicated  group  of  reformers 
inspired  by  the  Department  of  Agriculture's  chief  chemist,  Dr. 
Harvey  Wiley,  "a  very  mountain  among  men,  a  lion  among  fighters," 
as  one  admirer  described  him,  had  been  agitating  for  a  federal  law 
to  require  the  accurate  labeling  of  preserved  foods,  beverages,  and 
drugs.  They  had  mobilized  an  articulate  opinion  in  support  of  their 
proposals,  and  they  had  twice  won  approval  for  their  bills  in  the 
House.  They  had  failed,  however,  to  make  headway  in  the  Senate,  the 
Republican  spokesmen  for  the  food  and  drug  industries  combining 
with  the  Southern  Democratic  proponents  of  states'  rights  to  keep 
their  bills  in  committee. 

The  President's  commitment  to  their  cause  was  belated — a  reflec- 
tion, perhaps,  of  that  accommodation  to  the  conservatives  which 
marked  much  of  his  conduct  in  the  election  year  1904.  Not  until  the 
summer  of  1905  after  talks  with  his  personal  physician,  Dr.  Samuel 
Lambert,  Dr.  Wiley,  and  others,  did  Roosevelt  agree  to  come  out  for 
their  proposals;  and  then  he  did  so  with  misgivings.  As  he  remarked 
in  November,  "it  will  take  more  than  my  recommendation  to  get 
the  law  passed,  for  I  understand  that  there  is  some  very  stubborn 
opposition."  And  as  he  did  not  say,  he  was  prepared  to  sacrifice 
almost  everything  for  passage  of  his  railroad  regulation  program. 
Nevertheless,  he  recommended  federal  regulation  of  "interstate  com- 
merce in  misbranded  and  adulterated  foods,  drinks,  and  drugs"  hi 
his  annual  message  on  December  5. 

Roosevelt's  brief  recommendation  (it  was  three  sentences  long) 


256  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

had  incited  a  short,  but  bitter,  fight  in  the  Senate.  Refusing  to  allow 
a  bill  sponsored  by  Weldon  Heyburn  of  Idaho  to  emerge  from  com- 
mittee, Aldrich  exposed  his  acrid  anti-intellectualism  by  sneering 
openly  at  the  "chemists  of  the  Agricultural  Department"  and 
speciously  asserting  that  "the  liberty  of  all  the  people  of  the  United 
States"  was  at  stake.  Nor  was  the  powerful  Rhode  Islander's  armor 
pierced  when  Porter  J.  McCumber  of  North  Dakota  rejoined  that  the 
real  issue  was  a  man's  right  to  receive  what  he  asks  and  pays  for,  "not 
some  poisonous  substance  in  lieu  thereof." 

For  a  month  and  one-half  after  Aldrich's  onslaught  the  Heyburn 
bill  lay  buried  in  committee.  On  February  15,  1906,  however, 
Aldrich  unexpectedly  informed  Beveridge  that  he  would  permit  it  to 
be  brought  out  for  consideration,  and  six  days  later  the  measure 
rolled  through  the  Senate.  Four  states'-rights  Democrats  voted  against 
it,  and  Aldrich,  in  a  not  unusual  gesture  of  contempt,  abstained. 
Characteristically,  Aldrich  offered  no  explanation  for  his  startling 
reversal;  nor  does  his  adulatory  biographer  explore  his  reasoning.  The 
circumstantial  evidence,  however,  is  overwhelming.  A  new  wave  of 
public  indignation  had  been  set  off  by  Samuel  Hopkins  Adams's  ex- 
posures of  the  patent  medicine  industry  in  Collier's.  The  American 
Medical  Association  was  threatening  to  take  the  issue  into  partisan 
politics.  And  Roosevelt  himself  had  entered  a  personal  appeal.  In 
addition,  and  perhaps  as  important,  Aldrich  wanted  to  clear  the 
decks  for  the  final  debate  on  the  railroad  bill. 

The  Pure  Food  bill  might  have  died  in  the  House.  Cannon  was 
indifferent,  and  Roosevelt  was  too  engrossed  in  the  fight  for  railroad 
legislation  to  give  it  much  attention.  But  the  publication  of  Upton 
Sinclair's  gruesome  indictment  of  the  meat-packing  industry,  The 
Jungle,  in  late  February  dramatically  altered  the  situation.  Both  the 
public  and  Roosevelt  were  so  revolted  by  Sinclair's  findings  that  the 
President  was  almost  instantaneously  galvanized  into  action.  On 
March  12  he  directed  Secretary  of  Agriculture  James  "Tama  Jim" 
Wilson  to  investigate  the  novelist's  charges: 

I  wish  you  would  carefully  read  through  this  letter  yourself  [he 
had  enclosed  a  personal  appeal  from  Sinclair].  .  .  .  The  experi- 
ences that  Moody  has  had  in  dealing  with  these  beef  trust  people 
convinces  me  that  there  is  very  little  that  they  will  stop  at.  You 
know  the  wholesale  newspaper  bribery  which  they  have  un- 
doubtedly indulged  in.  Now,  I  do  not  think  that  an  ordinary  in- 


TRIALS,    TRIUMPH,    AND   TRAGEDY  257 

vestigation  will  reach  anything.  I  would  like  a  first-class  man  to  be 
appointed  to  meet  Sinclair.  .  .  .  We  cannot  afford  to  have  any- 
thing perfunctory  done  in  this  matter. 

Meanwhile,  the  President  engaged  in  a  brisk  and  revealing  exchange 
with  Sinclair,  who  had  written  The  Jungle  as  a  brief  for  socialism.  "I 
agree  with  you  that  energetic,  and,  as  I  believe,  in  the  long  run 
radical,  action  must  be  taken  to  do  away  with  the  effects  of  arrogant 
and  selfish  greed  on  the  part  of  the  capitalist,"  Roosevelt  wrote  the 
young  and  sensitive  novelist.  However,  he  continued,  he  deplored  the 
"pathetic  belief"  of  the  characters  who  "preach  socialism"  in  the  last 
chapter  of  The  Jungle.  There  were  communities  where  "self-raising 
is  very  hard  for  the  time  being,"  the  President  added,  but  "there  are 
many,  many  men  who  lack  any  intelligence  or  character  and  who 
therefore  cannot  thus  raise  themselves."  He  would  help  those  crippled 
by  accident  (as  the  employers'  liability  bill  he  was  then  urging  Con- 
gress to  pass  was  designed  to  do),  and  he  would  regulate  big  business; 
but  he  was  not  then  ready  to  go  farther.  "A  quarter  of  a  century's 
hard  work  over  what  I  may  call  politico-sociological  problems  has 
made  me  distrust  men  of  hysterical  temperament,"  he  pointedly  re- 
marked. Yet,  he  resolutely  concluded,  "all  this  has  nothing  to  do  with 
the  fact  that  the  specific  evils  you  point  out  shall,  if  their  existence  be 
proved,  and  if  I  have  power,  be  eradicated." 

During  the  next  several  weeks  the  investigation  of  the  meat-packing 
industry  weighed  increasingly  heavily  on  the  President.  He  appointed 
two  special  investigators  of  unimpeachable  reputation,  Commissioner 
of  Labor  Charles  P.  Neill  and  the  veteran  social  worker,  James  B. 
Reynolds,  to  verify  Sinclair's  findings.  And  he  took  his  old  friend, 
Albert  J.  Beveridge  of  Indiana,  into  his  confidence.  Beveridge  was 
never  a  member  of  the  Senate's  inner  circle,  his  self-assurance,  in- 
dependence, and  progressive  viewpoint  offending  the  Old  Guard.  Like 
Roosevelt,  however,  he  had  continued  to  grow  intellectually.  He  had 
already  voted  consistently  for  railroad  regulation,  and  before  the  year 
was  out  he  would  become  a  passionate  partisan  of  the  graduated 
income  tax  and  child  labor  legislation. 

Beveridge  had  been  aware  of  the  nauseous  conditions  in  the  stock- 
yards and  packing  houses  for  some  time,  and  he  had  been  contemplat- 
ing legislation  even  before  Sinclair's  dramatic  indictment  captured 
the  national  imagination.  With  the  President's  hearty  assent,  but  with- 


258  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

out  a  promise  of  active  support,  he  now  framed  a  meat  inspection 
measure  which  passed  the  Senate  on  May  25  as  an  amendment  to 
the  Agricultural  Appropriations  bill.  The  House  committee  on  agricul- 
ture sat  on  it,  however;  and  for  a  while  it  appeared  that  the  impas- 
sioned outpourings  of  Sinclair,  Mark  Sullivan,  and  all  the  others  would 
come  to  naught.  For  in  the  committee  chairman,  James  W.  Wads- 
worth,  a  stand-pat,  walrus-mustached,  gentleman  farmer  from  Gen- 
eseo,  New  York,  the  packers  had  a  man  almost  as  solicitous  of  their 
interests  as  the  paid  lobbyists  who  milled  about  the  corridors  of  the 
Capitol. 

Meanwhile,  the  long  struggle  for  the  railroad  bill  described  in  the 
preceding  chapter  had  ended.  For  the  first  time,  accordingly,  Roosevelt 
was  free  to  throw  the  power  of  his  office  behind  the  pure  food  and 
meat  inspection  legislation;  and  with  customary  zest  and  no  little 
finesse,  he  did  so. 

The  facts  uncovered  by  Neill  and  Reynolds  are  "hideous,"  the 
President  wrote  Wadsworth  on  May  26.  "I  was  at  first  so  indignant 
that  I  resolved  to  send  in  the  full  report  to  Congress."  But  after  re- 
flection, he  continued,  he  had  decided  to  withhold  it  if  Wadsworth 
would  push  through  the  Beveridge  amendment.  "I  should  not  make 
the  report  public  with  the  idea  of  damaging  the  packers,"  he  ominously 
added.  "I  should  do  it  only  if  it  were  necessary  in  order  to  secure  the 
remedy." 

In  spite  of  this  veiled  threat,  Wadsworth  and  the  packers'  friends 
in  and  around  Congress  were  too  intent  on  preventing  effective  in- 
spection to  act  rationally.  They  soon  came  up  with  crippling  amend- 
ments, whereupon  Roosevelt  sent  the  House  a  special  message  urging 
passage  of  the  Beveridge  amendment.  The  first  part  of  the  Neill- 
Reynolds  report,  carefully  designated  as  "preliminary,"  was  appended. 
Again  the  inference  was  clear:  The  President  would  publish  the  full 
and  more  damning  report  should  the  House  fail  to  swing  into  line. 

As  Roosevelt  anticipated,  the  confirmation  of  the  charges  made  in 
Sinclair's  novel  had  a  devastating  impact  upon  the  packing  industry's 
sales,  especially  in  Western  Europe.  In  testimony  before  the  House 
committee  on  agriculture  a  few  days  later,  one  packing  executive 
described  the  decline  as  "disastrous";  another  reported  that  his  com- 
pany's sales  had  "been  more  than  cut  in  two." 

Under  this  pressure,  the  packers  decided  to  support  a  federal  meat- 
inspection  measure  in  the  hope  that  it  would  restore  public  confidence 


TRIALS,    TRIUMPH,    AND   TRAGEDY  259 

in  their  products.  Almost  overnight  many  of  the  same  lobbyists  who 
had  earlier  castigated  the  Beveridge  amendment  as  "unconstitutional" 
and  "socialistic"  reversed  themselves.  What  they  and  their  powerful 
employers  now  wanted,  and  what  Wadsworth  was  prepared  to  give 
them,  was  in  Mark  Sullivan's  words,  "an  inspection  law  .  .  .  strong 
enough  to  still  public  clamor,  while  not  so  drastic  as  to  inconvenience 
them  too  greatly."  But  what  the  President  wanted,  and  what  he  was 
prepared  within  limits  to  fight  for,  was,  in  his  words,  "a  thorough  and 
rigid,  and  not  a  sham,  inspection." 

The  result  was  conflict,  and  in  the  Roosevelt  pattern,  compromise. 
After  a  bitter  exchange  of  letters  in  which  the  President  heatedly 
wrote  Wadsworth  that  his  substitute  amendment  was  "very,  very  bad," 
and  the  Congressman  replied  that  Roosevelt  was  "wrong,  'very,  very 
wrong,' "  they  reluctantly  came  together.  The  President  agreed  that 
the  government  should  bear  the  cost  of  inspection  (Beveridge  had 
wanted  the  packers  to  pay  the  inspectors'  salaries,  but  as  Roosevelt, 
who  was  looking  for  minor  points  of  concession  anyway,  belatedly 
realized,  this  would  have  opened  the  door  to  collusion) .  The  President 
also  yielded  to  the  packers'  objections  to  Beveridge's  proposal  that 
the  date  of  inspection  be  stamped  on  the  cans.  But  Roosevelt  won 
clear-cut  victories  on  two  other  points.  It  was  agreed  that  inspectors 
were  to  be  appointed  under  the  civil  service  laws  and  that  the  govern- 
ment could  stop  inspections  in  plants  that  failed  to  comply  with  its 
recommendations.  This  meant  that  the  packers  would  have  either  to 
conform  or  lose  the  now  coveted  government  stamp  of  approval. 

The  President  also  won  a  substantive  victory  on  the  most  important 
issue  of  all — court  review.  Wadsworth  had  sought  to  include  a  clause 
that  would  have  enabled  the  packers  to  evade  the  law  by  endless 
litigation.  Roosevelt  was  outraged  by  this  proposal.  "I  wish  to  repeat 
that  if  deliberately  designed  to  prevent  the  remedying  of  the  evils  com- 
plained of,"  he  testily  wrote  Wadsworth  on  June  15,  "this  is  the  exact 
provision  which  the  friends  of  the  packers  and  the  packers  themselves 
would  have  provided.  .  .  .  Why  have  you  not  put  such  a  provision 
in  the  post-office  law  as  it  affects  fraud  orders;  in  the  law  as  it  affects 
fraudulent  entries  of  homesteads,  and  so  forth?" 

Roosevelt  then  published  his  "very,  very  bad"  letter.  Wadsworth 
was  crushed,  or  nearly  so.  Reluctantly,  he  submitted  to  a  compromise 
clause  which  restricted  the  packers'  right  to  appeal  the  inspectors' 
rulings  in  the  courts.  Meanwhile  the  way  was  cleared  for  passage  of 


260  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

the  original  pure  food  bill.  Four  months  later  Wadsworth  lost  the  seat 
he  had  held  almost  continuously  since  1881.  An  embittered  and  dis- 
credited man,  he  could  only  growl  that  the  "bloody  hero  of  Kettle 
Hill"  was  "unreliable,  a  faker,  and  a  humbug." 

Once  again  the  President  basked  in  the  glow  of  achievement.  "The 
railroad  rate  bill,  meat  inspection  bill  &  pure  food  bill  ...  mark  a 
noteworthy  advance  in  the  policy  of  securing  Federal  supervision 
and  control  over  corporations,"  he  told  Lyman  Abbott.  "I  send  you 
herewith  the  pen  with  which  I  signed  the  agricultural  bill,  containing 
the  meat  inspection  clauses,"  he  wrote  Beveridge  shortly  after  the 
signing  ceremony.  "You  were  the  man  who  first  called  my  attention  to 
the  abuses  in  the  packing  houses.  You  were  the  legislator  who  drafted 
the  bill  which  in  its  substance  now  appears  in  the  amendment  to  the 
agricultural  bill.  .  .  ." 

But  to  Upton  Sinclair,  Dr.  Wiley,  and  all  the  other  reformers  who 
had  recruited  the  armies  that  Roosevelt  had  so  brilliantly  maneuvered, 
the  President  sent  nothing.  Nor  did  he  mention  them  in  his  Auto- 
biography. It  was  not  that  Roosevelt  was  ungenerous;  nor,  even,  that 
he  was  contemptuous  or  wholly  impatient  of  men  of  theory.  Roose- 
velt himself  was  the  most  eminent  intellectual  to  sit  in  the  White 
House  since  John  Quincy  Adams;  and  his  administration  reflected  it. 
Never  had  a  President  shown  such  a  considered  respect  for  the 
opinion  of  experts — of  welfare  workers  and  social  critics,  of  natural 
scientists  and  experts  in  general,  never  had  there  been  such  a  triumph 
of  applied  theory  as  marked  the  conservation  movement  under 
Theodore  Roosevelt.*  And  never,  either,  had  a  President  been  so 
acutely  sensitive  to  the  compromises  forced  upon  him  by  political 
necessity  and  so  rankly  partisan  in  their  defense.  Incident  after  in- 
cident attests  to  this. 

Roosevelt  never  publicly  acknowledged  his  debt  to  Tillman  and  his 
Democratic  colleagues  on  the  Hepburn  bill  in  spite  of  the  sufferance 
the  coarse  South  Carolinian  and  other  Democrats  had  given  him.  Nor, 
until  late  in  his  second  administration,  did  he  begin  to  have  reserva- 
tions about  supporting  the  Republican  Old  Guardsmen  whose  opposi- 
tion to  his  own  advanced  theories  had  repeatedly  compelled  their 
compromise  and  at  times  their  emasculation.  During  the  congres- 
sional elections  of  1906  he  called  in  effect  for  a  united  Republican 

*  See  Chapter  19. 


TRIALS,    TRIUMPH,    AND   TRAGEDY  261 

front;  and  when  Samuel  Gompers  dared  to  challenge  it  with  a  scorch- 
ing indictment  of  "Uncle  Joe"  Cannon's  labor  record,  he  boiled  over 
with  resentment.  "This  administration  has  had  no  stouter  friend  than 
the  Speaker  of  the  House,"  Roosevelt  wrote  in  apparent  sincerity.  "I 
need  not  say  .  .  .  that  it  is  a  simple  absurdity  to  portray  him  as  an 
enemy  of  labor.  ...  He  is  a  patriotic  American.  He  is  for  every 
man,  rich  or  poor,  capitalist  or  labor  man,  so  long  as  he  is  a  decent 
American;  and  he  is  entitled  to  our  support  because  he  is  a  patriotic 
man." 

Meanwhile,  the  President  continued  to  give  William  Jennings  Bryan 
short  shrift.  The  closest  Roosevelt  ever  came  to  admitting  his 
affinity  with  the  Great  Commoner  was  at  a  Gridiron  Club  dinner  in 
January,  1905,  when  Bryan  disarmingly  accused  the  President  of 
abstracting  plank  after  plank  from  the  Democratic  platform.  Roose- 
velt had  ingenuously  confessed  the  crime.  The  trouble,  he  explained 
with  mock  regret,  was  that  he  had  to  expropriate  the  good  things  in 
the  Democratic  platform  since  Mr.  Bryan  would  never  be  in  a  position 
to  make  use  of  them. 

As  Pringle  has  cogently  written,  however,  Roosevelt  was  in  the 
main  "curiously  intolerant  toward  the  Commoner."  Even  in  late  1905 
and  early  1906  when  Bryan  was  publicly  threatening  to  read  out  of 
the  Democratic  party  those  members  who  opposed  the  President's 
effort  to  regulate  railroads,  Roosevelt  was  fulminating  against  him  in 
private:  "He  is  neither  a  big  nor  a  strong  man  ...  he  is  shallow, 
but  he  is  kindly  and  well-meaning,  and  singularly  free  from  rancor." 
"Bryan,  LaFollette,  and  others  like  them,  so  far  as  I  know,  have 
always  refused  to  attack  labor  people  or  to  denounce  their  wrong- 
doing, no  matter  how  flagrant — for  corporations,  though  their  in- 
direct influence  may  be  powerful,  have  practically  no  votes,  while  the 
labor  vote  is  very  strong  indeed."  "As  for  Bryan  .  .  .  what  a  shallow 
demagogue  he  is.  I  do  not  believe  he  is  a  bit  worse  than  Thomas 
Jefferson,  and  I  do  not  think  that  if  elected  President  he  will  be  a 
worse  President.  The  country  would  survive.  ..." 

There  was  more  than  partisan  Republicanism,  more  than  Roose- 
velt's concealed  discomfort  at  his  own  compromises,  in  those  stric- 
tures. For  even  as  the  President  picked  up  the  pieces  of  the  Populist- 
Democratic  platform  and  began  dimly  to  see  that  in  himself,  if  not  in 
his  party,  Hamiltonianism  and  Jeffersonianism  were  actually  merging, 
he  feared  where  the  advanced  reformers  might  take  him.  More  than 


262  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

ever  before  he  was  now  the  hero  of  the  moderate  left;  and  no  more 
than  before  did  he  believe  that  the  critical  problems  facing  the 
republic  could  be  resolved  by  supplanting  business  control  of 
American  society  with  that  of  the  agrarians  and  labor. 

The  lust  for  power  and  prestige,  the  self-interest  approach  to  public 
issues,  the  potential  for  political  corruption — all  these  Roosevelt  re- 
garded as  qualities  possessed  alike  by  the  right  and  the  left,  by  the 
exploiters  and  the  exploited,  the  favored  and  the  unfavored.  They 
buttressed  his  fears  of  unregulated  competition;  they  provoked  his 
consuming  aversion  to  government  in  the  interests  of  a  particular 
class;  and  they  served  inevitably  as  the  intellectual  springboard  for 
the  great  centralizing  tendencies  of  his  administrations.  They  also 
explain  his  obsession  with  personal  character,  for  upon  the  integrity 
of  the  office  holder  and  the  disinterested  intelligence  of  the  adminis- 
trator did  the  success  of  the  classless,  centralized  state  depend.  Even 
Lincoln  Steffens,  observing  in  1904  that  Roosevelt  "has  been  sneered 
at  for  going  about  the  country  preaching  .  .  .  good  conduct  in  the 
individual,  simple  honesty,  courage,  and  efficiency,"  was  moved  to 
conclude  that  "the  literal  adoption  of  Mr.  Roosevelt's  reform  scheme 
would  result  in  a  revolution,  more  radical  and  terrible  to  existing  in- 
stitutions, from  the  Congress  to  the  Church,  from  the  bank  to  the 
ward  organization,  than  socialism  or  even  anarchy.  Why,  that  would 
change  all  of  us — not  alone  our  neighbors,  not  alone  the  grafters, 
but  you  and  me." 

It  was  not  to  be.  Indeed,  Roosevelt's  critics  on  the  right  even  deny 
the  moral  and  intellectual  base  of  his  mighty  thrust  toward  the  na- 
tional welfare  state,  arguing  as  they  must  that  the  President's  real  goal 
was  the  personal  aggrandizement  of  power.  Contrariwise,  his  de- 
tractors on  the  left,  including  the  latter-day  Steffens,  scorn  both  his 
rationale  and  his  results.  No  basic  change  in  the  power  structure  was 
wrought  by  Roosevelt's  deeds  and  even  less  was  wrought  by  his  words, 
they  contend  to  this  day.  In  their  analysis,  his  projection  of  a  class- 
less government  was  chimerical.  And  perhaps  it  was.  But  the 
biographical  point  remains:  Roosevelt  regarded  himself  as  the  steward 
of  all  the  people's  interests — as  the  active  and  effective  proponent  of 
the  regulatory  theory  of  a  classless  government. 

Like  the  Founding  Fathers,  Roosevelt  believed  that  man's  lust  for 
power  had  to  be  contained.  But  he  went  far  beyond  that  monumental 
testament  to  their  conviction — the  separation  of  powers  and  the  crea- 


TRIALS,    TRIUMPH,   AND   TRAGEDY  263 

tion  of  an  artificial  system  of  checks  and  balances — in  bringing  his 
views  to  pass.  His  expansion  of  the  executive  branch  and  his  con- 
tinuing effort  to  convert  the  Supreme  Court  to  a  public  interest 
philosophy,  coupled  with  his  later  demand  for  the  recall  of  judicial 
decisions  on  the  state  level,  constituted  a  direct  assault  on  their 
creation.  And  it  had  to  be,  given  Roosevelt's  realization  that  business 
domination  of  the  judiciary  as  well  as  of  the  legislature  had  made 
separation  of  powers  more  theoretical  than  actual.  Yet  he  remained 
consistent  with  the  Founding  Fathers  in  one  regard:  He  insisted  al- 
ways that  the  left  be  kept  in  balance.  Hence  his  exaggerated  fear  of 
Bryan  and  La  Follette;  his  refusal  until  1912  to  align  himself  with 
any  of  the  great  movements  of  protest;  and  his  irrepressible  habit  of 
striking  verbal  blows  at  the  left  even  as  he  concretely  advanced  its 
interests. 

Whatever  the  enduring  value  of  Roosevelt's  theory  of  balance 
through  government  regulation,  it  had  practical  limitations  at  the  time. 
For  one  thing,  it  presupposed  that  government  control  of  the  cor- 
porations would  induce  more  fundamental  changes  than  it  actually 
did.  Long  after  Roosevelt  left  office  big  business  continued  to  have  a 
disproportionate  voice  in  Congress,  to  dominate  the  regulatory  agencies 
Roosevelt  had  devised  to  control  it,  and  to  send  its  political  spokes- 
men to  the  White  House,  though  never  again  with  quite  the  same 
freedom  to  trample  on  the  public  interest  as  in  the  pre-Roosevelt  era. 
For  another,  it  profoundly  overestimated  the  power  of  the  left  at 
that  point  in  history.  Neither  the  agrarians  nor  labor,  and  certainly 
not  the  reformers,  were  then  in  a  position  to  assume  effective  control 
of  American  society.  Bryan's  election  in  1896,  1900,  or  1908  might 
have  spawned  a  spate  of  reform  legislation,  but  it  would  hardly  have 
fathered  the  revolution  Roosevelt  feared.  By  the  President's  own 
analysis,  the  power  of  business  was  inextricably  intertwined  with  the 
social  and  political  fabric  of  the  nation,  and  especially  of  the  courts. 
But  Roosevelt,  his  mind's  eye  partly  on  the  future  and  partly  on  the 
past  (he  never  fully  weaned  himself  from  the  conservative  historians 
upon  whom  he  had  been  nurtured),  could  not  quite  see  this  during 
the  middle  years  of  his  presidency.  Nor  could  he  realize  that  the  rise 
of  labor,  the  agrarians,  and  even  the  intellectuals  to  a  rough  equality 
with  business  must  perforce  be  accompanied  by  excesses  and  prob- 
ably by  violence,  given  business'  persistent  and  entrenched  opposition 
to  that  rise.  More  than  anything  else,  in  fact,  his  failure  to  appreciate 


264  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

the  inevitability  of  such  convolutions  explains  his  flaming  intolerance 
of  the  militant  left. 

Probably  no  incident  of  Roosevelt's  presidential  career  more 
graphically  illustrates  this  intolerance  than  his  blistering  attack  on  the 
"muck-rakers,"  leveled  first  in  the  semiprivacy  of  a  Gridiron  Club 
dinner  in  late  January,  1906  and  repeated  publicly  in  the  middle  of 
April.  "In  Pilgrim's  Progress,"  the  President  exclaimed  on  the  latter 
occasion,  "the  Man  with  the  Muck-rake  is  set  forth  as  the  example  of 
him  whose  vision  is  fixed  on  carnal  instead  of  on  spiritual  things  .  .  . 
the  man  who  never  does  anything  else,  who  never  thinks  or  speaks 
or  writes,  save  of  his  feats  with  the  muck-rake,  speedily  becomes,  not 
a  help  to  society,  not  an  incitement  to  good,  but  one  of  the  most 
potent  forces  for  evil." 

Roosevelt's  indictment  had  apparently  been  sparked  by  the  publica- 
tion in  early  January  of  the  first  article  of  David  Graham  Phillips' 
sensational  series,  "The  Treason  of  the  Senate,"  in  William  Randolph 
Hearst's  Cosmopolitan.  Many  of  Phillips'  insights  pierced  the  veneer 
of  disinterestedness  that  the  most  confirmed  railroad  senators  presented 
to  the  public.  And  a  hard  stratum  of  truth  underlay  the  great  body  of 
his  work.  But  his  misstatements  of  fact,  innuendoes,  and  exaggerations 
offended  many  responsible  readers,  while  his  character  assassinations 
tended  to  obscure  the  fact  that  a  political  philosophy,  rather  than  per- 
sonal corruption,  was  actually  on  trial.  Roosevelt,  who  knew  "poor 
old  Chauncey  Depew,"  Aldrich,  Spooner  and  the  rest  for  what  they 
really  were — unreconstructed  Hamiltonians — was  understandably  ex- 
ercised. 

The  President  may  have  feared,  moreover,  that  the  coincidence 
of  Phillips'  indictment  and  the  administration's  renewed  attack  on 
the  trusts — three  major  railroads  had  been  indicted  in  December 
and  suit  was  filed  against  the  Standard  Oil  Company  in  March — 
would  stiffen  the  Old  Guard's  resistance  to  the  Hepburn  bill,  the 
fight  for  which  was  then  coming  to  a  climax.  There  is  also  a  sug- 
gestion that  the  real  object  of  Roosevelt's  assault  was  Hearst  himself. 
Certainly  he  had  long  yearned  to  strike  a  blow  at  that  demagogic 
tycoon,  whom  he  mercilessly  evaluated  in  a  letter  to  an  English  friend 
a  few  months  later: 

Hearst  has  edited  a  large  number  of  the  very  worst  type  of 
sensational,  scandal-mongering  newspapers  .  .  .  being  a  fearless 
man,  and  shrewd  and  farsighted,  Hearst  has  often  been  of  real  use 


TRIALS,    TRIUMPH,   AND   TRAGEDY  265 

in  attacking  abuses  which  benefited  great  corporations,  and  in 
attacking  individuals  of  great  wealth  who  have  done  what  was 
wrong.  ...  He  will  never  attack  any  abuse,  any  wickedness,  any 
corruption,  not  even  if  it  takes  the  most  horrible  form,  unless  he  is 
satisfied  that  no  votes  are  to  be  lost  by  doing  it.  He  preaches  the 
gospel  of  envy,  hatred  and  unrest.  ...  He  cares  nothing  for  the 
nation,  nor  for  any  citizens  in  it. 

Roosevelt  seems  to  have  been  motivated  most,  however,  by  fear 
that  the  reform  movement  was  getting  out  of  hand.  "The  dull,  purblind 
folly  of  the  very  rich  men;  their  greed  and  arrogance,  and  the  way  in 
which  they  have  unduly  prospered  by  the  help  of  the  ablest  lawyers, 
and  too  often  through  the  weakness  or  short-sightedness  of  the  judges 
or  by  their  unfortunate  possession  of  meticulous  minds" — all  this,  he 
worriedly  wrote,  was  exciting  the  popular  mind  and  sparking  an  enor- 
mous increase  in  socialistic  propaganda.  The  outpourings  of  Cosmo- 
politan, McClure's,  and  Collier  s  contained  "a  little  good,  a  little 
truth,"  but  it  was  mixed  in  with  a  "great  amount  of  evil,"  Roosevelt 
told  Secretary  of  War  William  Howard  Taft.  But  to  others,  and  espe- 
cially to  the  scholarly  journalist,  Ray  Stannard  Baker,  whose  revela- 
tions of  railroad  malpractices  in  McClure's  had  done  much  to  marshal 
public  sentiment  behind  the  President's  regulatory  program,  Roosevelt 
insisted  that  he  was  not  trying  to  thwart  the  advance  of  the  reform 
movement. 

Baker  had  been  shocked  and  hurt  when  he  learned  in  the  spring  of 
1906  that  Roosevelt  had  assailed  the  reform  writers  before  the  Grid- 
iron Club  in  January.  "It  was  difficult  for  me  to  understand  this 
attack,  considering  all  that  had  recently  happened,  all  that  the  Presi- 
dent owed  to  the  investigations  and  reports  of  at  least  some  of  the 
magazine  writers,"  he  later  wrote.  Baker  had  thereupon  tried  to 
dissuade  Roosevelt  from  repeating  the  "muck-rake"  speech  in  April. 
"Now,  the  letting  in  of  light  and  air  in  the  matter  of  current  business 
conditions,  toward  which  you  yourself  have  contributed  more  than 
any  other  man,  and  for  which  your  administration  will,  I  sincerely 
believe,  be  chiefly  remembered,"  he  wrote  the  President  on  April  7, 
"is  neither  pleasant  nor  profitable  for  the  rascals  upon  whom  the  light 
is  turned."  Conceding  that  some  of  the  exposures  had  been  extreme, 
Baker  asked  whether  they  "have  not,  as  a  whole,  been  honest  and 
useful?  and  would  not  a  speech,  backed  by  all  of  your  great  authority, 


266  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

attacking  the  magazines,  tend  to  give  aid  and  comfort  to  these  very 
rascals,  besides  making  it  more  difficult  in  the  future  not  only  to  get 
the  truth  told  but  to  have  it  listened  to?" 

Seemingly  unmoved  by  Baker's  appeal,  Roosevelt  had  promised 
only  that  he  would  try  to  make  clear  that  he  was  assailing  the 
extremists.  "One  reason  I  want  to  make  that  address,"  he  said  in 
reply,  "is  because  people  so  persistently  misunderstand  what  I  said, 
that  I  want  to  have  it  reported  in  full." 

Actually,  Roosevelt's  remarks  in  the  public  version  of  the  "muck- 
rake" speech  in  April  were  carefully  qualified.  He  hailed  "as  a  bene- 
factor" every  writer  who  attacks  evil,  provided  he  is  honest  and 
refrains  from  "indiscriminate  assault  upon  character."  He  warned 
against  misinterpreting  his  words  in  one  phrase,  and  predicted  in  the 
next  that  misinterpretation  would  be  their  fate.  "Some  persons  are 
sincerely  incapable  of  understanding  that  to  denounce  mud-slinging 
does  not  mean  the  endorsement  of  whitewashing,"  he  ruefully  ob- 
served. And  he  reiterated  his  respect  for  forthright  and  factual  ex- 
posures of  wrongdoing: 

At  the  risk  of  repetition  let  me  say  again  that  my  plea  is,  not  for 
the  immunity  to  but  for  the  most  unsparing  exposure  of  the  poli- 
tician who  betrays  his  trust,  of  the  big  business  man  who  makes  or 
spends  his  fortune  in  illegitimate  or  corrupt  ways. 

The  President's  request  for  a  fair  hearing  was  not  universally 
honored.  As  Baker  had  predicted,  within  twenty-four  hours  the  maga- 
zine writers  were  all  lumped  together  by  the  newspapers — the  sensi- 
tive, searching  ones  like  Baker  himself  and  Lincoln  Steffens,  the 
perfervid  emotionalists  like  Phillips  and  Thomas  Lawson,  the  author 
of  Frenzied  Finance.  Triumphantly,  the  conservative  press,  long 
starved  for  utterances  by  Roosevelt  it  could  endorse  without  strain, 
trumpeted  the  glad  tidings  across  the  land.  "It  was  a  great  day  while 
it  lasted,  but  it  came  too  hot,"  the  New  York  Sun  gloated.  "Muck- 
rakers  worked  merrily  for  a  time  in  their  own  bright  sunshine,  and  an 
unthinking  populace  applauded  their  performance.  Now  there  are 
few  to  do  them  reverence."  The  people,  the  Philadelphia  Press  hope- 
fully said,  "are  sick  of  the  muck-rake"  and  "a  healthy  reaction  has 
begun."  But  had  it? 

The  President's  speech  failed  to  stay  the  enveloping  wave  of 
reformism.  Many  moderate  newspapers,  including  the  New  York 


TRIALS,    TRIUMPH,    AND   TRAGEDY  267 

Times,  rallied  to  the  defense  of  the  responsible  "muck-rakers,"  and 
the  term  itself  became  one  of  approbation  rather  than  derogation. 
For  several  years  thereafter  the  muckrakers  flourished,  maintaining 
the  while  that  angry  excitement  which  contributed  so  markedly  to 
Roosevelt's  own  success  as  President.  When  finally  they  began  to  take 
to  their  deathbed  near  the  end  of  the  Taft  administration,  it  was  mainly 
of  old  age.  Public  interest  had  paled  and  their  writings  had  ceased 
to  be  news.  The  President's  attack  in  1906  had  done  little  more  than 
blunt  their  edge. 

Yet  many  of  the  muckrakers  were  embittered  even  so.  "I  met  the 
President  many  times  afterward,"  Baker,  who  was  to  become  a  confi- 
dant of  Woodrow  Wilson,  recalled,  "and  there  were  numerous  ex- 
changes of  letters,  but  while  I  could  wonder  at  his  remarkable  versa- 
tility of  mind,  and  admire  his  many  robust  human  qualities,  I  could 
never  again  give  him  my  full  confidence,  nor  follow  his  leadership." 
Lincoln  Steffens,  to  whom  Roosevelt  had  given  carte  blanche  to 
investigate  the  executive  branch  of  the  government  just  two  and  one- 
half  weeks  before  the  Gridiron  Club  speech,  professed  to  be  un- 
perturbed. The  President,  he  wrote,  "said  that  he  did  not  mean  me." 

The  indictment  of  the  muckrakers  was  a  minor  tragedy.  Sensible 
to  the  impetus  the  literature  of  exposure  gave  the  movement  for  re- 
form, historians  have  found  it  as  hard  as  Baker  to  understand  how 
Roosevelt  could  have  struck  such  a  devastating  blow  at  the  men  and 
women  whose  writings  had  so  abetted  his  own  program.  By  un- 
critically accepting  the  muckrakers'  reminiscences,  by  fastening  on 
the  letter  to  Taft  as  a  closed  statement  of  Roosevelt's  philosophy,  and 
by  misconstruing  the  broad  tenor  of  the  speech  itself,  they  have  even 
concluded  that  the  President  was  at  heart  a  pseudo-progressive.  In  so 
doing  they  have  underplayed  Roosevelt's  plaintive  warning  against 
misinterpretation  and  his  explicit  exoneration  of  those  "who  with 
stern  sobriety  and  truth  assail  the  many  evils  of  our  time."  And  more 
important,  perhaps,  they  have  discounted  or  ignored  the  fact  that  he 
concluded  the  public  version  of  the  "muck-rake"  address  with  two 
proposals  hardly  calculated  to  make  men  of  wealth  and  their  spokes- 
men in  the  Senate  rest  easy — federal  supervision  of  all  corporations 
engaged  in  interstate  commerce  and  a  progressive  inheritance  tax  on 
swollen  fortunes. 

Significantly,  those  recommendations  did  not  go  unheralded  by 
contemporary  commentators.  Many  reformers  and  moderates  who 


268  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

would  have  (and  had)  dismissed  the  inheritance  tax  proposal  disdain- 
fully had  it  come  from  Bryan  announced  their  support.  The  radical 
Democrats  feigned  displeasure  that  "that  Republican"  in  the  White 
House  had  stolen  another  plank  from  the  Democratic  platform.  And 
numerous  conservative  newspapers  lashed  both  proposals  mercilessly, 
often  in  the  same  editorials  that  glowingly  endorsed  Roosevelt's 
chastisement  of  the  muckrakers.  One  of  the  sharpest  lashes  came  from 
that  delight  of  the  political  reformers  and  despair  of  the  economic 
progressives,  the  New  York  Evening  Post: 

We  do  not  expect  any  terrible  results  from  the  President's 
happy-go-lucky  remark  about  a  subject  to  which,  it  is  plain,  he 
has  given  no  serious  thought.  It  will  be  a  mortification  to  his 
friends,  and  a  real  public  misfortune,  that  his  mouthing  has  made 
Bryan  appear  a  reactionary,  Hearst  a  conservative,  and  has  elevated 
Debs  and  Powderly  to  the  level  of  Presidential  statesmanship. 

In  reality,  the  President's  insight  into  tax  policy  was  less  acute  than 
Bryan's.  Except  for  Roosevelt's  firm  grasp  of  the  inevitability  of 
centralization  in  industry  and  the  imperative  need  to  devise  effective 
methods  of  federal  control,  his  knowledge  of  economics  was  rudi- 
mentary. He  construed  the  inheritance  tax  as  a  moral  rather  than  an 
economic  instrument;  and  not  until  later,  when  he  belatedly  took  up 
the  graduated  income  tax,  was  he  animated  so  much  by  a  considered 
appraisal  of  revenue  needs  or  a  desire  to  level  (though  the  enactment 
of  his  own  welfare  program  would  have  made  the  creation  of  new 
sources  of  tax  revenue  mandatory)  as  by  a  moralistic  urge  to  strike 
at  the  malefactors  of  great  wealth. 

There  should  be,  the  President  argued  in  the  "muck-rake"  speech, 
a  sharp  distinction  between  fortunes  "gained  as  an  incident  to  per- 
forming great  services  to  the  community  .  .  .  and  those  gained  in 
evil  fashion  by  keeping  just  within  the  limits  of  mere  law-honesty.'" 
He  added  that  "no  amount  of  charity  in  spending  [ill-won]  fortunes 
in  any  way  compensates  for  misconduct  in  making  them."  He  realized, 
of  course,  that  it  was  impossible  to  make  the  distinction;  and  because 
of  his  reluctance  to  penalize  those  whose  incomes  were  by  his  un- 
specified criteria  earned,  he  was  slow  to  espouse  the  income  tax.  Such 
was  his  contempt  for  the  idle  rich  and  their  offspring,  however,  that 
he  came  easily  to  the  conclusion  that  regardless  of  how  huge  fortunes 


TRIALS,    TRIUMPH,   AND   TRAGEDY  269 

were  amassed,  they  should  not  be  passed  down  in  full.  "They  rarely 
do  good  and  they  often  do  harm  to  those  who  inherit  them,"  he 
sermonized  in  his  last  annual  message  to  Congress.  From  the  attack 
on  the  muckrakers  on,  accordingly,  Roosevelt  repeatedly  urged  Con- 
gress and  nation  to  adopt  a  steeply  graduated  inheritance  tax. 


CHAPTER  16 


THE   PEACEMAKER    I 


Forty  years  before  Americans  were  willing  to  listen  .  .  . 
[Roosevelt]  urged  active  participation  in  world  decisions  for 
which  he  felt  we  shared  responsibility  and  whose  consequences  he 
felt  we  could  not  escape. 

— Howard  K.  Beale,  Theodore  Roosevelt 


Even  before  the  President's  domestic  program  reached  its  finest  flower 
in  1906,  Roosevelt  had  sounded  the  death  knell  over  the  old  isola- 
tionism and  won  recognition  for  his  country  as  a  world  power  of  the 
first  magnitude.  He  had  further  committed  the  United  States  to  inter- 
nationalism of  a  form.  Never  thereafter  would  the  American  people 
live  in  relative  isolation  from  the  affairs  of  Europe  or  the  Eastern 
Hemisphere,  though  they  would  often  imagine  that  they  were.  Never 
again  would  the  leaders  of  the  Old  World  act  without  regard  to 
American  interests,  though  they  would  sometimes  tragically  miscalcu- 
late America's  response  to  their  actions. 

The  Roosevelt  who  sheathed  the  sword  of  ultranationalism  to  plunge 
into  the  struggle  for  world  peace  in  1905  and  1906  was  a  wiser  and 
more  reflective  man  than  the  Roosevelt  who  had  exulted  over  war  in 
1898,  urged  repudiation  of  a  half-century-old  treaty  with  the  British 
in  1900,  and  rode  roughshod  over  Latin  American  sensibilities  in 
1902.  He  thought  as  much  as  always  in  terms  of  power — "I  never  take 
a  step  in  foreign  policy  unless  I  am  assured  that  I  shall  be  able  eventu- 
ally to  carry  out  my  will  by  force,"  he  asserted  in  1905  and  numerous 
times  before  and  after.  And  he  continued  to  press  urgently  and  effec- 
tively for  military  preparedness,  especially  for  the  strengthening  of 

270 


THE    PEACEMAKER   I  271 

the  battle  fleet.  But  he  now  possessed  a  clearer  perception  of  the 
ramifications  of  power. 

No  longer  did  Roosevelt  gauge  events  solely  in  terms  of  their 
impact  upon  the  immediate  interests  of  the  United  States,  as  he  had 
frequently  done  in  the  past.  No  longer  did  he  believe  that  a  display 
of  force  was  invariably  more  effective  than  patient  negotiation  or  that 
America  had  only  to  flex  its  muscles  and  go  it  alone.  When,  just  six 
months  before  he  brought  peace  to  Russia  and  Japan  in  1905,  he 
declared  in  his  inaugural  address  that  America's  attitude  toward  all 
the  nations  of  the  world  "must  be  one  of  cordial  and  sincere  friend- 
ship" and  that  it  must  be  shown  "not  only  in  our  words,  but  in  our 
deeds,"  he  indubitably  meant  it.  And  had  it  not  been  for  the  fetters 
imposed  by  his  own  views  on  colonialism,  he  might  well  have  fulfilled 
that  high  aspiration. 

Nowhere  were  these  changes  more  apparent  than  in  the  President's 
attitude  toward  the  Far  East.  He  still  clung  to  many  of  the  old  im- 
perialistic precepts,  and  he  believed  to  the  end  that  China  was  fraught 
with  opportunity  for  American  economic  penetration.  "Before  I  came 
to  the  Pacific  Slope  I  was  an  expansionist,"  he  exclaimed  in  San 
Francisco  in  May,  1903,  "and  after  having  been  here  I  fail  to  under- 
stand how  any  man  .  .  .  can  be  anything  but  an  expansionist."  Thus 
he  continued  to  give  vigorous  support  to  John  Hay's  "Open  Door" 
and  to  reflect  the  ideas  of  Captain  Mahan  and,  more  critically,  of 
Brooks  Adams.  Yet — and  this  is  the  real  measure  of  his  intellectual 
growth — Roosevelt  saw  the  world  in  more  and  more  complex  terms. 

"He  commenced  to  realize,"  writes  Beale,  "that  the  struggle  for 
supremacy  in  Eastern  Asia  was  closely  related,  sometimes  in  a  compli- 
cated and  baffling  fashion,  to  a  struggle  for  dominance  hi  Europe,  and 
that  both  of  these  component  struggles  were  parts  of  a  world  struggle 
that  encompassed  much  besides  either  Europe  or  the  Far  East.  .  .  . 
[He]  came  to  comprehend  the  discouraging  but  basic  fact  that,  if 
America  was  to  become  a  world  power  among  imperial  rivals  as  he 
wished  her  to  do,  she  must  enter  a  game  in  which,  through  compli- 
cated moves  and  countermoves,  each  nation  was  trying  to  increase  its 
own  power  but  was  determined  that  no  other  power  or  group  of 
powers  should  attain  sufficient  strength  to  threaten  it  and  its  friends." 

One  of  the  portentous  results  of  this  maturing  process  was  a 
volte-face  toward  Russia.  Roosevelt  had  originally  been  more  pleased 
than  displeased  by  that  giant's  remorseless  advance  into  Turkestan 


272  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

and  the  wild  reaches  of  Siberia  during  the  late  nineteenth  century, 
viewing  the  march  of  the  Russian  peoples  with  the  fascination  that 
he  had  written  into  his  own  Winning  of  the  West.  He  was  keenly  aware 
that  the  Russians  were  undemocratic,  if  not  barbaric,  and  he  had 
vague  forebodings  that  Russia  might  some  day  "take  possession  of 
Northern  China  and  drill  the  Northern  Chinese  to  serve  as  her  army." 
But  as  late  as  the  eve  of  his  elevation  to  the  presidency  he  professed 
to  be  undisturbed  by  that  latter  prospect.  "Undoubtedly  the  future  is 
hers  unless  she  mars  it  from  within,"  he  wrote  in  July,  1901.  "But 
it  is  the  future  and  not  the  present."  Meanwhile  Russia's  advance  into 
China  would  exert  a  stabilizing  influence  on  that  backward,  amor- 
phous, and  warlord-ridden  nation.  Consequently,  he  concluded,  it 
would  actually  prove  a  blessing  to  "civilization." 

Under  the  heavy  responsibility  of  the  presidential  office,  however, 
Roosevelt's  views  began  to  change.  America's  dynamic  thrust  toward 
world  power,  the  dream  of  economic  penetration  of  China  with  the 
clash  of  American  and  Russian  aspirations  that  it  portended — these 
and  the  growing  rapprochement  with  Great  Britain  shed  an  ominous 
new  light  on  the  Russian  question.  Where  once  Roosevelt  had  been 
enamored  of  the  Eurasian  giant's  latent  power  and  had  even  specu- 
lated that  Russia  might  be  "the  hope  of  a  world  that  is  growing  effete," 
he  now  began  to  ponder  the  implications  of  that  power.  A  note  of 
apprehension  and  distrust  of  Russian  ambitions  crept  into  his  cor- 
respondence; and  when  the  Russians  massacred  thousands  of  Jews 
at  Kishinev  in  1903  he  was  revolted,  though  he  discreetly  refused  to 
protest  openly.  He  was  further  incensed  by  the  tsarist  government's 
failure  to  withdraw  its  troops  from  Manchuria  in  accordance  with 
an  agreement  with  China  of  1902  and  by  its  resultant  flaunting  of 
the  Open  Door.  "I  wish,  in  Manchuria,  to  go  the  very  limit  I  think 
our  people  will  stand,"  he  informed  Hay  in  high  irritation  during  the 
summer  of  1903.  The  Russians  have  comported  themselves  with 
"well-nigh  incredible  mendacity,"  the  President  complained  to  Albert 
Shaw  about  the  same  time.  "I  believe  in  the  future  of  the  Slavs  if  they 
can  only  take  the  right  turn,"  he  later  confided  to  Spring-Rice,  who 
had  been  trying  to  impress  him  with  the  Russian  menace  for  almost 
a  decade.  "But  I  do  not  believe  in  the  future  of  any  race  while  it  is 
under  a  crushing  despotism.  .  .  ." 

Conversely,  Roosevelt's  once  harsh  attitude  toward  Japan  softened 
perceptibly.  There  was  much  in  the  Japanese  national  character  that 


THE   PEACEMAKER   I  273 

he  had  always  admired — military  competency,  industrial  efficiency, 
and  sacrificial  quality.  And  though  he  believed  that  the  Japanese  had 
much  to  learn  from  the  West,  particularly  about  the  treatment  of 
women,  he  felt  that  Americans  could  profit  from  contact  with  the 
Japanese.  He  was  notably  impressed  by  their  success  in  eliminating 
"the  misery"  that  so  cursed  America's  great  cities.  But  the  President 
was  not  wont  to  interject  consciously  his  personal  likes  and  dislikes 
into  his  appraisal  of  the  American  national  interest.  Even  after  he 
turned  against  the  Tsar's  government  he  continued  to  feel  warm 
toward  the  Russian  people;  and  he  always  did  respect  Germans 
heartily,  the  anti-German  tenor  of  much  of  his  diplomacy  notwith- 
standing. 

Roosevelt's  growing  cordiality  toward  Japan  was  animated  by 
several  factors.  The  most  critical  were  the  belief  that  Japan  had 
resigned  itself  to  American  possession  of  Hawaii  and  the  Philippines 
and  the  conviction  that  Japan  constituted  the  natural  counterweight 
to  Russia  in  the  Far  East.  Hence  the  administration's  approval  of  the 
Anglo-Japanese  Alliance  of  1902.  Yet  the  President  never  dropped 
his  guard  completely.  "It  is  always  possible  that  Russia  and  Japan 
will  agree  to  make  up  their  differences  and  assume  an  attitude  of 
common  hostility  toward  America,"  he  warned  his  ambassador  to 
Russia  in  December,  1904.  Or,  as  he  had  bluntly  phrased  it  to  the 
Japanese  ambassador  during  a  luncheon  conversation  six  months 
before,  "Japan  might  get  the  'big  head'  and  enter  into  a  general  career 
of  insolence  and  aggression."  But  he  did  not  think  this  was  likely  as 
long  as  the  United  States  treated  Japan  with  respect  and  recognized 
its  "paramount  interest  in  what  surrounds  the  Yellow  Sea." 

Convinced  that  the  interests  of  America  and  the  whole  civilized 
world  called  for  a  supreme  effort  to  promote  stability  in  the  Far  East, 
the  President  held  himself  ready  to  make  the  necessary  effort.  Nor 
did  he  feel  any  compunction  about  acting  on  this,  his  personal  esti- 
mate of  the  situation.  Indeed,  during  the  summer  of  1905,  in  an  action 
that  heavily  underlined  the  irreconcilables  faced  by  numerous  archi- 
tects of  twentieth-century  foreign  policy,  he  strained  the  executive 
authority  to  its  uttermost  limit  to  achieve  his  object. 

Shortly  before  the  President  opened  the  memorable  Russo-Japanese 
peace  conference,  his  special  representatives  in  London  and  Tokyo, 
Senator  Lodge  and  Secretary  of  War  Taft,  pledged  the  United  States 
to  silent  partnership  in  the  Anglo- Japanese  Alliance.  Of  necessity, 


274  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

the  commitment  was  unofficial.  Roosevelt  would  have  welcomed  a 
formal  treaty  with  His  Majesty's  government,  for  he  regarded  British 
and  American  interests  as  identical  in  their  larger  compass.  But  he 
was  too  able  a  political  leader  to  cut  himself  off  from  the  people  by 
proposing  such  a  radical  break  with  tradition.  So  he  settled  on  the 
personal  arrangements  made  by  Lodge  and  Taft.  They  were  not  bind- 
ing, except  in  a  gentlemanly  sense.  Yet  their  import  was  clear:  On 
the  word  of  its  President  and  without  the  knowledge  of  its  people,  the 
United  States  government  had  agreed  to  act  in  concert  with  Great 
Britain  and  Japan  should  a  Far  Eastern  crisis  develop.  As  Taft  had 
confidentially  explained  to  Count  Taro  Katsura,  the  Japanese  Prime 
Minister,  Tokyo  could  count  upon  his  government  "quite  as  confi- 
dently as  if  the  United  States  were  under  treaty  obligations." 

Two  decades  were  to  pass  before  the  American  people  learned  of 
this  signal  circumvention  of  the  treaty  making  power.  A  rumor  that 
the  United  States  had  unofficially  joined  the  Anglo-Japanese  Alliance 
was  published  in  Japan  a  few  months  after  the  fact,  but  it  was  denied 
by  Washington.  Only  when  the  historian  Tyler  Dennett  uncovered 
the  evidence  while  doing  research  for  his  Roosevelt  and  the  Russo- 
Japanese  War,  published  in  1925,  was  the  secret  out. 

Why  the  suppression?  The  startling  fact  seems  to  be,  as  Beale  con- 
cludes, that  Roosevelt  simply  did  not  "dare  tell"  the  American  people. 
Whether  this  restraint  was  justified  depends  on  the  latitude  one  feels 
the  executive  should  be  granted.  There  is  no  question,  however,  that 
the  President  had  exceeded  the  limits  of  his  authority  in  its  narrow 
construction;  that  he  had  comported  himself  in  the  grand  and  some- 
times circumspect  manner  of  the  strong  Presidents  from  Jefferson 
through  Truman.  Nor  is  there  any  question  that  he  had  acted  out  of 
deep-felt  concern  for  his  country's  well-being,  and  that  he  had  then 
acted  only  after  mature  reflection  and  extended  consultation  with 
responsible  advisers.  Confident  in  the  wisdom  of  his  policy,  serene  in 
the  knowledge  that  he  would  within  four  years  return  again  to  the 
people,  he  needed  no  other  justification. 

The  most  far-reaching  aspect  of  the  Anglo-American-Japanese 
accord  which  Roosevelt  had  thus  embraced  was  the  recognition  of 
Japanese  suzerainty  in  Korea — the  so-called  Taft-Katsura  Agreement. 
Korea  had  been  wrenched  from  its  tie  to  the  Confucian  state  by 
China's  defeat  in  the  Sino-Japanese  War  of  1894-95.  The  triumphant 
Japanese  and  the  watchfully  aggressive  Russians  had  then  guaranteed 


THE    PEACEMAKER   I  275 

her  nominal  independence;  but  the  Tsar's  government  had  persistently 
tightened  its  hold  upon  her  during  the  decade  that  followed.  Mean- 
while it  continued  its  occupation  of  Manchuria. 

Desperate  to  resolve  what  it  regarded  as  the  Russian  threat,  Japan 
finally  offered  Russia  a  free  hand  in  Manchuria  in  exchange  for  one  in 
Korea.  But  the  Russians,  as  Sir  Bernard  Pares  writes,  were  aiming 
"at  nothing  less  than  establishing  a  Russian  hegemony  over  Asia 
.  .  .  including  ...  the  expulsion  of  the  British  from  India."  Repeatedly 
the  Tsar  Nicholas  II  refused  to  respond  to  Japanese  entreaties  that 
he  evacuate  Manchuria  or  soften  his  Korean  policy.  Finally,  on 
February  5,  1904,  Tokyo  "gave  a  last  and  earnest  warning,"  and  then 
withdrew  its  minister  from  St.  Petersburg.  Three  days  after  that,  in  a 
maneuver  they  had  used  against  China  in  1894  and  would  develop  to 
perfection  thirty-seven  years  later,  the  Japanese  launched  a  surprise 
attack  on  the  Russian  fleet  at  Chemulpo.  They  made  no  formal 
declaration  of  this,  the  start  of  the  Russo-Japanese  War. 

Spectacularly  successful  both  on  land  and  sea,  the  Japanese  stood 
as  masters  of  all  Korea  and  part  of  Manchuria  as  well  by  the  spring 
of  1905.  They  thus  made  British  recognition  of  their  authority  in 
Korea  a  prime  factor  in  renewal  of  the  Anglo-Japanese  Treaty  of 
1902;  and  they  in  effect  demanded  a  similar  recognition  from  the 
United  States. 

Roosevelt  had  followed  the  course  of  the  war  with  absorbed  interest. 
He  was  informed  that  the  Japanese  occupation  forces  were  subjecting 
the  Koreans  to  indignities  that  made  the  white  imperialism  so  acidly 
characterized  by  "Mr.  Dooley"  and  others  seem  restrained.  And  he 
knew  that  the  Japanese  were  making  a  concerted  effort  to  restrict 
American  business  activity  in  Korea.  He  must  also  have  known, 
though  he  could  not  admit  it,  that  American  refusal  to  recognize 
Japan's  aggrandizement  of  Korea  might  have  restored  the  luster  to 
that  moral  leadership  which  the  subjugation  of  the  Filipino  guerillas 
had  so  badly  tarnished;  that  it  might  even  have  evoked  grudging 
words  of  praise  from  his  severest  domestic  critics,  the  "goo-goos." 
But  he  further  understood  that  such  action  would  have  spiked  his 
project  for  a  Far  Eastern  balance  of  power  built  on  the  friendship 
and  mutual  recognition  of  the  interests  of  his  own  country  and  Japan. 
Adapting  himself  to  conditions  as  he  found  them,  therefore,  he  warmly 
agreed  with  Taft  that  the  United  States  approved  Japan's  "suzerainty 
over"  Korea  while  Tokyo  disavowed  designs  on  the  Philippines.  "Your 


276  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

conversation  with  Count  Katsura  absolutely  correct  in  every  respect," 
the  President  cabled  Taft  on  July  31,  1905.  "Wish  you  would  state 
to  Katsura  that  I  confirm  every  word  you  have  said." 

Roosevelt  never  publicly  explained  his  Korean  policy  even  after 
he  left  the  presidency;  and  understandably,  given  the  continued 
delicacy  of  Japanese-American  relations.  Nevertheless,  his  intimates 
knew  why  he  had  acted  as  he  did.  Events  had  boxed  him  into  a 
situation  analogous  to  that  encountered  by  Franklin  D.  Roosevelt  at 
Yalta  when  the  Communists  had  de  facto  control  of  Poland.  As  Elihu 
Root,  irked  by  charges  that  his  beloved  friend  had  "sold  out"  the 
Koreans  (young  Syngman  Rhee  was  among  the  most  bitter  protestants 
at  the  time),  insisted  twenty-five  years  later,  the  President  had  no 
alternative  aside  from  complete  withdrawal.  "Many  people  are  still 
angry  because  we  did  not  keep  Japan  from  taking  Korea,"  Root 
reflected.  "There  was  nothing  we  could  do  except  fight  Japan;  Con- 
gress wouldn't  have  declared  war  and  the  people  would  have  turned 
out  the  Congress  that  had.  All  we  might  have  done  was  to  make 
threats  which  we  could  not  carry  out." 

By  the  time  the  Taft-Katsura  memorandum  had  made  formal  the 
Anglo-American-Japanese  comity,  the  President  stood  on  the  thresh- 
old of  his  most  magnificent,  and  in  a  sense  most  frustrating,  diplo- 
matic achievement — mediation  of  the  Russo-Japanese  War.  The  back- 
ground was  long  and  complex. 

Roosevelt  had  not  quite  assumed  full  direction  of  Far  Eastern 
affairs  when  the  war  broke  out  in  February,  1904.  His  initial  reaction 
followed  lines  Secretary  Hay  had  earlier  laid  down.  Both  Russia  and 
Japan  were  urged  to  observe  "the  neutrality  of  China,"  and  interested 
neutral  powers  were  adjured  to  cooperate  to  the  same  end.  That, 
apparently,  was  all.  Afterward  the  President  said  in  a  letter  to  Spring- 
Rice  that  he  "notified  Germany  and  France  in  the  most  polite  and 
discreet  fashion  that  in  the  event  of  a  combination  against  Japan" 
the  United  States  would  "promptly  side  with  Japan  and  proceed  to 
whatever  length  was  necessary  on  her  behalf."  But  neither  the  editors 
of  Roosevelt's  Letters  nor  Beale  have  found  evidence  that  he  delivered 
such  a  warning.  Possibly  Roosevelt  confused  what  he  actually  said 
with  what  was  in  his  mind  at  the  time,  or  with  what  he  later  believed 
he  should  have  said.  And  possibly  neither  Ambassador  Jusserand  nor 
Speck  von  Sternburg  reported  what  they  may  have  regarded  as  in- 
formal remarks  meant  for  them  rather  than  their  governments. 


THE    PEACEMAKER   I  277 

Meanwhile,  the  President's  enthusiasm  for  the  Nipponese  continued 
to  mount.  By  the  technological,  militaristic,  and  administrative  criteria 
that  loomed  so  large  in  his  thinking,  they  were  proving  themselves 
civilized.  "What  nonsense  it  is  to  speak  of  the  Chinese  and  the 
Japanese  as  of  the  same  race,"  the  President  said  to  Hay  at  one 
point.  "I  should  hang  my  head  in  shame  if  I  were  capable  of  dis- 
criminating against  a  Japanese  general  or  admiral,  statesman,  philan- 
thropist or  artist,  because  he  and  I  have  different  shades  of  skin,"  he 
wrote  on  the  eve  of  the  peace  conference.  The  white  Russians,  not 
the  yellow  Japanese,  were  the  inferior  people.  "They  are  utterly  in- 
sincere and  treacherous;  they  have  no  conception  of  the  truth  .  .  . 
and  no  regard  for  others  ...  no  knowledge  of  their  own  strength 
and  weakness."  Was  not  the  Tsar  "a  preposterous  little  creature." 

Even  at  the  height  of  his  enthusiasm  for  the  Japanese,  however,  the 
President  thought  basically  in  terms  of  an  American  interest  related 
to  that  of  civilization  as  a  whole.  To  be  sure,  he  sometimes  conjec- 
tured that  it  might  be  best  for  Russia  and  Japan  to  bleed  themselves 
to  cnfeeblement;  and  he  occasionally  contemplated  an  ultimate  war 
between  the  United  States  and  Japan.  But  he  never  gave  serious  con- 
sideration to  either  possibility.  Maturely  and  morally,  he  concluded 
that  the  war  should  be  ended  rather  than  prolonged,  and  that  Ameri- 
can and  world  interests  would  be  served  thereby.  A  friendly  America 
would  give  Japan  no  provocation  for  hostile  action;  and  in  any  event, 
Russia  was  more  dangerous.  "If  Russia  wins  she  will  organize  north- 
ern China  against  us,"  Roosevelt  predicted  to  Hay  when  the  war  was 
but  five  months  old.  "Therefore,  on  the  score  of  mere  national  self- 
interest,  we  would  not  be  justified  in  balancing  the  certainty  of  im- 
mediate damage  [from  Russia]  against  the  possibility  of  future  damage 
[from  Japan]." 

Consequently  the  President  strove  to  promote  a  peace  that  would 
end  the  war  and  yet  reflect  Japan's  military  victories.  To  Chentung 
Liang-Cheng  and  Baron  Takahira,  the  cordial  Chinese  and  Japanese 
ambassadors  to  Washington,  to  Count  Arturo  Cassini,  the  despised 
representative  of  the  Tsar,  and  to  those  old  stand-bys,  Speck  von 
Sternburg  and  Jean  Jules  Jusserand,  Roosevelt  repeatedly  proposed 
mediation.  But  for  more  than  a  year  he  was  cast  about  on  the  shoals 
of  European  rivalries.  No  nation  could  afford  to  antagonize  the 
Russians.  France  was  already  allied  with  them;  Germany  was  striving 
soulfully  to  woo  them;  and  Great  Britain  was  in  the  throes  of  a  fateful 


278  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

indecision.  Nor  would  the  Russians  themselves  listen  to  peace  pro- 
posals. "Cassini  throws  a  pink  fit  at  any  reference  to  peace,"  Hay 
remarked  as  late  as  November,  1904. 

In  these  circumstances  Roosevelt  shrewdly  decided  that  peace 
would  have  to  be  arranged,  if  at  all,  by  a  seemingly  disinterested  third 
power.  And  though  suggestions  were  offered  that  a  congress  of  nations 
attempt  mediation,  he  peremptorily  dismissed  them  for  fear  a  congress 
would  partition  China  irreparably  and  destroy  America's  growing 
friendship  with  Japan  in  the  process.  As  he  explained  to  Hay,  "We 
could  hardly  afford  to  allow  a  combination  of  R.  G.  &  F.  to  step  in 
and  deprive  Japan  of  the  results  of  this  war." 

-  Lacking  the  financial  resources  to  fight  indefinitely,  or  indeed  for 
many  more  months,  Japan  meanwhile  realized  the  wisdom  of  negoti- 
ating while  the  fortunes  of  war  were  still  so  munificently  with  her. 
Rumors  that  she  would  entertain  mediation  cropped  out  in  February, 
1905,  and  in  March  Ambassador  Takahira  and  Baron  Kaneko,  a 
Harvard  classmate  of  Roosevelt's,  began  secret  conferences  with  the 
President.  Their  government  demanded  victor's  terms,  including  an 
indemnity. 

The  Tsar,  who  was  an  obtuse  autocrat  at  worst  and  a  reckless 
gambler  at  best,  was  not  amenable.  He  preferred  to  stake  the  future 
on  one  more  showdown  with  the  Japanese  fleet;  and  this  over  against 
the  colossal  defeats  of  his  forces,  the  near  bankruptcy  of  his  govern- 
ment, and  the  massive  unrest  of  his  people.  The  showdown  came  in 
the  Battle  of  the  Sea  of  Japan  on  May  27  and  28,  when,  in  one  of  the 
most  impressive  naval  victories  yet  to  be  won,  Admiral  Togo  prac- 
tically destroyed  Admiral  Rozhdestvensky's  thirty-two-ship  fleet  which 
had  steamed  around  the  world  from  Europe  for  the  engagement.  And 
so,  wrote  Pares,  there  was  fulfilled  a  fate  that  had  been  sure  to  over- 
take it  "from  the  day  it  set  sail  on  its  desperate  errand  under  the 
ill-starred  flag  of  the  Romanoffs."  Three  days  later  the  Japanese, 
having  ascertained  that  Roosevelt  agreed  with  their  principal  demands, 
asked  the  President  to  initiate  mediation. 

Even  imperious  Wilhelm  II  now  importuned  his  stubborn  cousin, 
"Nicky,"  to  agree  to  mediation  on  the  grounds  that  the  cessation  of 
hostilities  was  the  only  alternative  to  revolution.  Under  this  and  other 
pressure,  the  Tsar  began  to  weaken,  though  hardly  to  break;  and  there 
ensued  a  difficult  preliminary  negotiation  which  has  been  brilliantly 
pieced  together  by  Beale.  Through  it  all  Roosevelt  showed  himself 


THE   PEACEMAKER  I  279 

wisely  sensitive  to  the  childlike  whims  of  the  Tsar  and  discreetly  firm 
with  the  Japanese,  who  were  beginning  to  stand  hard  on  their  new- 
won  dignity.  Privately  the  President  raged.  "The  more  I  see  of  the 
Czar,  the  Kaiser,  and  the  Mikado  the  better  I  am  content  with 
democracy,  even  if  we  have  to  include  the  American  newspaper  as  one 
of  its  assets,"  he  complained  to  Lodge.  But  in  his  relations  with  the 
principles  he  acted  with  "consummate  tact." 

During  the  early  summer  Roosevelt  ironed  out  most  of  the  surface 
conflict  in  separate  meetings  with  the  delegates:  Count  Sergei  Witte 
and  Baron  Roman  R.  Rosen  for  the  Russians;  Ambassador  Takahira 
and  Baron  Jutaro  Komura  for  the  Japanese.  Then,  on  August  5,  he 
surpassed  himself  with  a  memorable  display  of  social  urbanity  and 
diplomatic  finesse  aboard  the  presidential  yacht  Mayflower,  anchored 
in  the  harbor  of  Oyster  Bay.  The  occasion  was  a  luncheon  for  the 
envoys,  and  the  issue  was  precedence.  Who  would  be  seated  to  the 
President's  right?  Which  nation  would  be  toasted  first?  Who  would 
precede  whom  into  the  dining  room? 

That  the  fate  of  tens  of  thousands  of  common  soldiers  and  sailors 
should  have  depended  upon  such  trivialities  (and  still  often  does)  is 
incredible.  Witte,  who  admitted  to  being  "morbidly  sensitive"  to 
criticism  of  his  shaken  country,  was  beset  by  fear  that  the  President, 
"a  typical  American,  inexperienced  in  and  careless  of  formalities, 
would  make  a  mess  of  the  whole  business,"  and  that  the  Japanese 
might  "be  given  some  advantage"  over  the  Russian  envoys.  "I  will 
not  suffer  a  toast  to  our  Emperor  offered  after  one  to  the  Mikado," 
he  irritably  remarked  to  Baron  Rosen  on  the  eve  of  the  conference. 
Nor  were  Takahira  and  Komura,  who  stood  half  a  foot  under  Roose- 
velt and  a  full  foot  under  the  tall  and  powerful  Witte,  disposed  to 
waive  the  proprieties.  Their  country's  resounding  defeat  of  the  Rus- 
sians had  symbolized  nothing  if  not  the  yellow  man's  rise  to  equality 
and  more  with  the  white  man;  and  their  resultant  arrogance  had 
already  made  its  mark  on  American  public  opinion. 

Roosevelt,  however,  came  up  with  an  ingenious  solution.  After 
introducing  the  Russians  to  the  Japanese  when  they  came  aboard  the 
presidential  yacht,  he  engaged  in  general  conversation  in  French; 
then,  his  butchered  phrases  still  pouring  out,  he  simultaneously  guided 
the  chief  of  each  delegation  across  the  threshold  and  into  the  dining 
salon,  where  their  plates  were  filled  from  a  round  buffet  table.  After 
everyone  was  served,  he  exclaimed:  "Gentlemen,  I  propose  a  toast 


280  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

to  which  there  will  be  no  answer  and  which  I  ask  you  to  drink  in 
silence,  standing."  He  then  drank  "to  the  welfare  and  prosperity  of 
the  sovereigns  and  peoples  of  the  two  great  nations,  whose  representa- 
tives have  met  one  another  on  this  ship."  It  was,  he  said,  "my  most 
earnest  hope  and  prayer,  in  the  interest  ...  of  all  mankind  that  a 
just  and  lasting  peace  may  speedily  be  concluded  among  them." 

The  President  had  carried  it  off.  The  subsequent  conversation  was 
more  relaxed  even  than  circumstances  warranted,  and  when  Takahira 
and  Rosen  later  departed,  they  shook  hands  warmly.  Roosevelt  was 
tremendously  relieved;  and  also  pleased  with  himself.  "I  looked  for- 
ward to  this  affair  with  a  good  deal  of  anxiety,"  he  confided  that 
night  to  Joseph  B.  Bishop,  who  was  then  secretary  of  the  Isthmian 
Canal  Commission,  "knowing  that  a  single  slip  on  my  part  which 
could  be  construed  as  favoring  one  set  of  envoys  over  the  others  would 
be  fatal.  ...  I  think  we  are  off  to  a  good  start." 

The  luncheon  on  the  Mayflower  was  but  a  prelude  to  the  larger 
drama  that  constituted  the  mediation  itself.  From  any  perspective, 
President  Roosevelt  had  embarked  on  one  of  the  most  perilous 
courses  of  his  entire  career.  The  stakes  were  fabulously  high.  Success 
promised  peace — the  end  of  pointless  bloodletting,  the  extinction  of 
the  threat  of  worldwide  conflict.  It  meant  that  Roosevelt  would  be 
acclaimed  by  men  of  good  will  the  world  over;  that  he  would  be 
showered  with  laurels  such  as  no  American  had  ever  before  received. 
Failure  meant  that  the  war  would  continue,  or,  more  likely,  that  the 
powers  of  Europe  would  carve  out  a  peace  representative  of  their  own 
special  interests.  It  also  foreshadowed  personal  humiliation  for  the 
President  and  loss  of  prestige  for  his  country.  Nor  was  that  all. 
Success  in  the  primary  objective — peace — threatened  failure  in  the 
secondary  objective:  advancement  of  the  United  States'  interests.  For 
Japanese-American  friendship  hung  in  the  balance.  What  would  be 
the  fate  of  the  President's  good  neighbor  policy  toward  Japan  if  the 
terms  of  the  peace  he  had  promoted  failed  to  satisfy  the  Mikado's 
government? 

It  is  the  measure  of  Roosevelt's  character  that  knowing  all  this  he 
still  undertook  the  mission.  There  are,  of  course,  the  stock  psycho- 
logical explanations — his  unfailing  compulsion  to  act,  his  perpetual 
gravitation  toward  the  center  of  the  stage,  his  conviction  that  glory 
was  the  supreme  end  of  life.  But  in  all  probability,  higher  motives 
than  those  were  controlling.  Indeed  Beale,  whose  work  is  marred 


THE    PEACEMAKER  I  281 

neither  by  unreasoned  adulation  nor  by  undisciplined  prejudice,  con- 
cludes that  the  President's  purpose  was  purely  and  simply  to  end  the 
carnage  and  stabilize  the  balance  of  power  in  the  Far  East.  "I  thought 
it  my  plain  duty  to  make  the  effort,"  the  President  wearily,  yet  happily, 
remarked  to  Bishop  the  night  of  the  Mayflower  luncheon.  "I  should 
be  sorry  to  see  Russia  driven  completely  off  the  Pacific  coast,"  he  had 
confided  to  Lodge  two  months  before,  ".  .  .  and  yet  something  like 
this  will  surely  happen  if  she  refused  to  make  peace." 

The  final  terms  arranged  at  Portsmouth  were  actually  more  advan- 
tageous to  Russia  than  Roosevelt  thought  necessary.  The  Tsar  had 
remained  adamant,  disdaining  to  the  end  the  Japanese  demand  for 
an  indemnity;  he  also  opposed  transfer  of  Sakhalin  Island  to  Japan. 
Fortunately  for  his  obdurate  Majesty,  Sergei  Witte  had  managed 
through  a  combination  of  good  luck  and  high  skill  to  swing  the 
mercurial  American  temperament  from  support  of  Japan  to  sympathy 
for  Russia.  He  had  also  faithfully  reflected  his  sovereign's  obduracy 
at  the  council  table.  The  result  was  prolonged  deadlock.  Concluding 
that  the  negotiations  would  thus  terminate  in  failure,  with  all  that 
implied,  Roosevelt  had  made  an  indirect  personal  appeal  to  the 
Mikado  near  the  end.  And  well  that  he  had,  for  the  Russian  envoys 
were  under  orders  from  the  Tsar  to  "finish  the  negotiations  and  come 
home  at  once."  To  Witte's  astonishment  and  Komura's  despair,  Tokyo 
had  submitted.  On  August  30  the  Japanese  agreed  to  waive  the  in- 
demnity and  accept  the  southern  half  of  Sakhalin  Island,  rather  than 
the  whole  as  they  had  been  demanding. 

Peace  of  a  sort  had  finally  come  to  the  Far  East.  As  Roosevelt 
freely  acknowledged,  France  and  Germany  had  contributed  to  the 
final  achievement;  and  so  had  the  rugged  Russian  patriot,  Witte,  who 
had  earlier  been  dismissed  from  the  Tsar's  service  because  of  his 
opposition  to  the  aggressive  policies  which  had  provoked  the  war. 
Nevertheless,  it  was  a  uniquely  personal  triumph  for  the  President, 
one  that  earned  for  him  and  his  government  the  acclaim  of  the 
nations.  The  Tsar,  the  Mikado,  the  Kaiser,  the  King  of  England 
(whose  government  had  been  inactive),  and  hundreds  of  prominent 
men  the  world  over  effusively  poured  forth  their  congratulations. 
Some  were  perfunctory;  but  many  were  heartfelt. 

'This  is  the  happiest  news  of  my  life,"  exclaimed  the  aging  Pope 
Pius  X,  who  would  live  just  long  enough  to  protest  the  start  of  a  much 
greater  war.  "Thank  God  for  President  Roosevelt's  courage."  "You 


282  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

have  probably  saved  the  lives  of  a  quarter  of  a  million  men,"  the 
American  Ambassador  to  Russia  reported.  As  the  editors  of  the 
Literary  Digest  concluded,  "Whatever  the  actual  influences  which  in- 
duced the  Government  at  Tokyo  to  accept  the  terms,  the  whole  world 
is  agreed  that  President  Roosevelt  is  the  man  who  marshaled  them  in 
such  a  way  as  to  bring  about  the  desired  result. 

As  in  all  creative  acts,  however,  the  cost  was  high.  Even  as  many 
Americans  basked  in  their  President's  glory,  even  as  they  conceded 
that  Roosevelt  had  done  for  humanity  what  no  one  else  could  have 
done,  they  lamented  the  price  of  greatness.  They  spoke  critically  of 
"entangling  alliances";  they  remarked  nostalgically  of  the  old  isola- 
tionism; they  read  knowingly  of  the  riotous  wave  of  anti-Americanism 
that  rose  in  Japan  in  the  wake  of  the  settlement.  And  some,  Mark 
Twain  among  them,  even  protested  that  peace  had  preserved  the 
tottering  regime  of  the  autocratic  and  irresponsible  Nicholas  II.  Better 
that  the  Russians  should  be  liberated  from  their  "age-long  chains," 
said  that  master  satirist  of  royalty  and  its  works. 

And  perhaps  it  would  have  been  better — as  it  would  also  have  been 
better  if  the  United  States  had  not  become  identified  with  Japan's 
failure  to  realize  the  full  fruits  of  her  military  victories.  More  than 
one  historian  has  added  the  heavy  burden  of  hindsight  to  those 
ponderous  judgments.  But  to  what  real  enlightenment?  To  accept  the 
premises  of  those  who  argue  that  Roosevelt  should  have  forborne  the 
peacemaker's  role  that  fate  had  thrust  before  him  is  to  accept  premises 
which  lead  logically,  albeit  extremely,  to  preventive  war.  Not  yet  has 
moral  Western  man  succumbed  to  that  ultimate  degradation  of  the 
human  spirit.  So  the  wheel  perforce  turns  full  circle — back  to  the 
night  of  the  luncheon  aboard  the  Mayflower  and  the  President's  un- 
affected statement  to  his  friend  Bishop  that  he  had  felt  it  "my  plain 
duty  to  make  the  effort." 

John  Hay  had  not  lived  to  see  his  country  become  the  focal  point 
of  world  interest  at  Portsmouth.  Never  a  robust  man,  he  had  been 
steadily  declining  since  the  summer  of  1900.  Partly  out  of  loyalty  to 
party  and  friend,  largely  out  of  sheer  inertia,  he  had  hung  on  until 
after  the  inauguration  in  March — long  enough  for  the  Senate  to 
emasculate  a  series  of  arbitration  treaties  he  had  laboriously  negotiated 
and  then  insult  him  personally  by  declining  to  pass  a  resolution  au- 
thorizing him  to  accept  the  Grand  Cross  of  the  Legion  of  Honor  from 


THE    PEACEMAKER   I  283 

the  French  government.  Early  in  the  morning  of  July  1,  1905,  two 
weeks  after  he  had  returned  to  his  summer  home  in  New  Hampshire 
following  a  fruitless  trip  to  Europe  in  quest  of  health,  he  died. 

Private  secretary  to  Abraham  Lincoln,  friend  of  Roosevelt's  revered 
father,  and  one  of  the  main  architects  of  that  Anglo-American  amity 
to  which  Roosevelt  was  now  committed,  Hay  had  been  for  the  Presi- 
dent a  link  with  the  past.  "I  dearly  loved  him;  there  is  no  one  who 
with  any  of  us  can  quite  fill  the  place  he  held,"  Roosevelt  wrote 
Hay's  widow  the  day  of  his  death.  "He  was  not  only  my  wise  and 
patient  advisor  in  affairs  of  state;  he  was  the  most  devoted  and  .  .  . 
charming  of  friends."  The  sentiments  were  genuine,  if  not  inclusive. 

The  death  of  the  man  who  had  articulated  the  Open  Door  policy 
evoked  more  than  the  normal  spate  of  uncritical  newspaper  appraisals. 
Hay  was  given  rank  with  the  greatest  Secretaries  of  State;  he  was 
credited  with  achievements  that  were  more  Roosevelt's  than  his  and 
with  responsibility  for  the  administration's  "signal  success."  The 
President  was  irritated  by  these  lavish  encomiums,  though  he  had 
publicly  pronounced  Hay's  death  a  "national  bereavement."  And  in 
letters  to  Lodge,  Taft,  Beveridge  and  others  he  revealed  his  pique. 
But  not  until  the  publication  in  1909  of  three  volumes  of  Hay's  letters 
edited  by  Henry  Adams  did  he  give  full  vent  to  his  feelings. 

Curiously,  the  burden  of  Hay's  comments  was  favorable  to  Roose- 
velt. "He  has  plenty  of  brains,  and  as  you  know,  a  heart  of  gold,"  Hay 
had  written  in  one  letter.  However,  Hay  did  play  down  the  President's 
role  in  the  Panama  and  Alaskan  boundary  episodes,  and  otherwise 
showed  less  deference  presumably,  than  the  President  desired. 
"[Roosevelt]  .  .  .  began  talking  at  the  oysters,  and  the  pousse-cafe 
found  him  still  at  it,"  Hay  had  confided  to  Adams  near  the  end  of 
Roosevelt's  first  year  in  office.  "When  he  was  one  of  us,  we  could  sit 
on  him — but  who,  except  you,  can  sit  on  a  Kaiser?" 

On  January  28,  1909,  in  a  nine-page  posterity  letter  to  Lodge  that 
was  as  revealing  of  its  author's  values  as  of  its  subject's  character  and 
achievements,  Roosevelt  reduced  Hay  to  a  stature  somewhat  below 
that  which  many  historians  would  later  give  him. 

I  think  he  was  the  most  delightful  man  to  talk  to  I  ever  met,  for 
...  he  continually  made  out  of  hand  those  delightful  epigrammatic 
remarks  which  we  would  all  like  to  make,  .  .  .  [Roosevelt  wrote]. 
But  he  was  not  a  great  Secretary  of  State.  ...  He  had  a  very 
ease-loving  nature  and  a  moral  timidity  which  made  him  shrink 


284  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

from  all  that  was  rough  in  life.  .  .  .  His  close  intimacy  with  Henry 
James  and  Henry  Adams — charming  men,  but  exceedingly  un- 
desirable companions  for  any  man  not  of  strong  nature — and  the 
tone  of  satirical  cynicism  which  they  admired  .  .  .  marked  that 
phase  of  his  character  which  so  impaired  his  usefulness  as  a  public 
man.  [Hay]  .  .  .  never  initiated  a  policy  or  was  of  real  assistance  in 
carrying  thru  a  policy;  but  he  sometimes  phrased  what  I  desired 
said  in  a  way  that  was  of  real  service;  and  the  general  respect  for 
him  was  such  that  his  presence  in  the  Cabinet  was  a  strength  to  the 
administration.  He  was  always  afraid  of  Senators  and  Congressmen 
who  possest  any  power  or  robustness.  .  .  . 

Roosevelt  then  came  to  the  core  of  his  grievance:  He  reproduced 
documents  to  prove  that  he,  not  Hay,  had  been  principally  responsible 
for  settling  the  Alaskan  dispute.  He  wrote  that  he  himself  had  done 
the  "vital  work"  on  Panama.  He  charged  that  Hay  would  not  act  when 
a  crisis  had  occurred  in  China.  And  he  claimed  that  Hay  "could  not 
be  trusted  where  England  was  concerned." 

Many  of  the  President's  points  were  well  taken;  but  others,  espe- 
cially on  Panama  and  Alaska,  were  distorted.  There  was  also  an 
ironic  aspect  to  the  complaint  that  Hay  had  failed  to  initiate  policy. 
It  was  not  in  Roosevelt's  nature  to  have  permitted  Hay  or  anyone  else 
to  make  the  great  decisions  of  state.  With  less  assertiveness  than 
Roosevelt  respected,  perhaps,  Hay  had  often  and  sometimes  crucially 
proffered  sagacious  advice;  and  the  President  had  on  occasion  re- 
jected it.  Nevertheless,  as  the  burden  of  Roosevelt's  estimate  suggests, 
Hay  had  been  in  his  own  times  overrated. 

Neither  Roosevelt's  letter  to  Lodge  nor  the  remarks  in  Hay's  pub- 
lished letters  which  provoked  it  comprise  a  pleasant  chapter.  Lincoln, 
the  man  both  men  most  admired,  could  not  have  written  them.  But 
Roosevelt  apparently  had  to.  His  sense  of  history  and  his  extraor- 
dinary concern  for  his  place  in  history  would  not  permit  him  to  leave 
unchallenged  statements  that  he  regarded  as  misleading  or  derogatory 
to  himself. 

If  the  President's  reflections  on  Hay  reveal  his  own  hypersensitivity, 
his  selection  of  Elihu  Root  as  the  new  Secretary  of  State  reveals  his 
larger  strength.  His  natural  rapport  with  men  of  strong  character 
virtually  foreordained  that  he  would  turn  to  Root  in  the  urgency  of 
the  summer  of  1905,  though  he  thought  fleetingly  of  Taft,  who  had 
replaced  Root  as  Secretary  of  War  eighteen  months  before.  "I  wished 


THE    PEACEMAKER   I  285 

Root  .  .  .  partly  because  I  am  extremely  fond  of  him  and  prize  his 
companionship  as  well  as  his  advice,  but  primarily  because  I  think 
that  in  all  the  country  he  is  the  best  man  for  the  position,"  Roosevelt 
explained  to  Beveridge.  "He  will  be  a  tower  of  strength  to  us  all,"  he 
wrote  Lodge.  "I  not  only  hope  but  believe  that  he  will  get  on  well 
with  the  Senate,  and  he  will  at  once  take  a  great  burden  off  my  mind 
in  connection  with  various  subjects,  such  as  Santo  Domingo  and 
Venezuela." 

Root  was  to  meet  the  President's  hopes,  though  his  works  as 
Secretary  of  State  were  to  be  less  notable  than  those  of  his  years  in 
the  War  Department.  Then  he  had  been  a  host  unto  himself — efficient, 
constructive,  and  within  the  limits  of  his  cautious  outlook,  bold.  He 
had  contributed  substantially  to  the  creation  of  the  American  colonial 
system  and  he  had  essayed  a  noteworthy  reorganization  of  the  army. 
There  was  a  subtle  difference,  however,  in  the  circumstances  of  Root's 
two  secretaryships,  separated  as  they  were  by  eighteen  months. 

Elihu  Root  had  been  already  in  office,  already  engaged  in  his  con- 
structive labors,  when  Theodore  Roosevelt  became  President  of  the 
United  States  in  September,  1901.  And  he  had  continued  to  be  a  real 
power  until,  with  Roosevelt's  praises  ringing  in  his  ears — "I  shall 
never  have,  and  can  never  have,  a  more  loyal  friend,  a  more  faithful 
and  wiser  adviser" — he  had  resigned  on  February  1,  1904.  But  when 
Root  returned  to  Washington  in  July,  1905,  it  was  to  the  service  of  a 
man  who  had  been  resoundingly  endorsed  by  the  American  people, 
was  more  ebulliently  confident  than  ever,  and  had  for  many  months 
been  making  the  broad  decisions  in  foreign  policy  on  his  own.  The 
old  order  had  passed;  nor  could  it  be  re-created. 

Yet  Root  hardly  proved  subordinate.  As  Roosevelt  later  said,  "He 
fought  me  every  inch  of  the  way.  And,  together,  we  got  somewhere." 
The  President  took  Root  into  his  confidence  on  most  matters  of  state, 
and  he  fortunately  gave  him  almost  free  rein  in  the  formulation  and 
carrying  out  of  policy  for  the  Western  Hemisphere.  Root  resolved 
the  nettling  Santo  Domingo  situation  by  winning  Senate  approval  of 
a  new  treaty  with  the  Dominican  republic  in  February,  1907;  he  pro- 
moted cordial  relations  with  Canada;  and  he  emerged  as  one  of  the 
early  architects  of  the  modern  "Good  Neighbor"  policy.  He  was  also 
virtually  solely  responsible  for  the  administration's  Manchurian  policy. 


CHAPTER  17 


THE   PEACEMAKER   II 


"In  [Roosevelt's]  .  .  .  consciousness  of  the  possibility  of 
world  war  and  of  America's  involvement  in  it,  and  hence  of 
America's  concern  to  help  avoid  it,  he  was  unusual  in  an  America 
that  was  for  the  most  part  innocent  of  the  danger  of  war  and 
certain  that  a  war  in  Europe  or  Asia  would  not  concern  us  if  it 
did  come." 

— Howard  K.  Beale,  Theodore  Roosevelt 


The  muffled  outcry  of  the  isolationists  over  the  President's  mediation 
of  the  Russo-Japanese  War  became  an  angry  roar  when  Roosevelt 
interjected  America  into  a  smoldering  crisis  in  French  Morocco  at 
virtually  the  same  time.  In  this  action  as  in  the  Far  Eastern  one  the 
President  sought  to  promote  peace  through  an  uneasy  balance  of 
conflicting  interests.  And  in  this  crisis  as  in  that  one  Roosevelt  duti- 
fully shouldered  responsibilities  that  a  lesser  man  might  have  avoided. 
Once  again  he  emerged  as  the  only  statesman  possessed  of  the  prestige, 
power,  and  presumed  disinterest  to  be  acceptable  to  all  concerned. 
And  once  again  he  acted  in  the  realization  that  fulfillment  of  his 
larger  objective  might  compromise  the  lesser  interests  of  his  own 
country,  though  he  worked  adroitly  to  avoid  it. 

The  issues  were  not  basically  different  from  those  which  had  led 
to  war  between  Russia  and  Japan.  Nor  were  the  implications  less 
portentous.  They  involved  nothing  less  than  that  complex  of  ententes, 
alliances,  rivalries,  and  insecurities  which  was  to  drag  all  Europe  into 
war  in  1914. 

The  immediate  stake  was  the  Open  Door  in  Morocco.  By  agree- 

286 


THE    PEACEMAKER    II  287 

merits  completed  in  April,  1904,  the  British  had  recognized  French 
control  over  Morocco  in  return  for  French  recognition  of  British 
preeminence  in  Egypt.  These  arrangements  offended  the  Germans, 
who  had  come  too  late  on  the  imperialistic  stage  to  play  a  role  com- 
mensurate with  their  newly  consolidated  might,  and  their  seething 
ambitions  consequently  spilled  over.  On  March  31,  1905,  on  the 
urging  of  his  militant  Chancellor,  Von  Billow,  Emperor  Wilhelm  II 
disembarked  from  a  German  warship  off  Tangier  and  delivered,  as 
one  historian  phrases  it,  "a  defiant,  saber-rattling  speech"  in  which 
he  pointedly  declared  that  the  Sultan  was  an  independent  sovereign 
in  whose  domain  all  foreign  powers  were  entitled  to  equal  rights.  The 
war  clouds  that  had  hovered  over  Europe  since  the  end  of  the  Franco- 
Prussian  War  threatened  to  deluge  the  continent  once  more. 

Roosevelt  was  again  caught  in  a  dilemma.  France's  case  was  so 
weak,  her  breach  of  a  trust  arranged  in  1880  so  flagrant,  that  world 
opinion  might  normally  have  forced  her  to  abandon  her  Moroccan 
venture.*  But  the  Moroccan  situation  could  not  be  isolated  from  the 
European  power  matrix  nor,  indeed,  from  Britain's  interest  in  Egypt, 
where  Suez  was  already  regarded  as  the  Empire's  life  line.  To  stand 
against  France  in  Morocco  was  to  oppose  Great  Britain. 

Roosevelt's  friendship  with  the  British  was  emotional  in  the  broad 
usage  of  the  word;  but  it  was  not  blindly  so,  as  Hay's  sometimes  was. 
The  President  often  railed  at  the  supercilious  qualities  of  eminent  and 
not  so  eminent  Englishmen,  and  he  regarded  many  British  traits  as 
offensively  stupid.  Like  Lodge  and  numerous  other  ultranationalists, 
moreover,  he  shared  feelings  of  cultural  inferiority  toward  the  British 
— a  sure  sign  of  the  repressed  esteem  in  which  he  actually  held  them. 
Yet  his  strident  patriotism  would  not  allow  of  the  mother  country's 
supremacy;  and  even  in  his  historical  writings  he  had  only  begrudg- 
ingly  acknowledged  the  great  heritage  she  had  bequeathed  her  mighty 
offspring.  Nevertheless,  by  1905  Roosevelt  had  become  convinced 
that  American  and  British  interests  were  largely  similar;  and  in  the 
fall  of  that  year  the  British  Ambassador  was  reporting  to  Whitehall 
that  although  Roosevelt's  "prejudices  are  all  the  other  way,"  he  had  at 
times  "seemed  really  friendly."  Two  years  later  when  the  President 
received  as  the  new  ambassador  his  old  and  respected  friend,  James 
Bryce,  author  of  The  American  Commonwealth,  he  cast  aside  his 

*  Morocco's  independence  had  been  affirmed  by  an  international  congress  at 
Madrid  in  1880. 


288  POWER  AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

prepared  remarks,  so  Bryce  wrote,  "and  made  a  long  impromptu 
speech  full  of  expressions  of  friendliness  to  the  King  and  to  Great 
Britain  and  conveying  the  earnest  desire  for  best  relations  and  recipro- 
cal understanding  between  the  two  countries." 

Roosevelt's  feelings  toward  the  Germans  were  at  once  less  critical 
and  more  hostile  than  those  toward  the  British.  That  genius  for  order 
and  efficiency  he  so  admired  in  the  Japanese  was  magnified  in  the 
case  of  the  Germans,  and  many  of  his  own  domestic  measures  bear  the 
mark  of  the  German  example.  He  was  also  less  sensitive  than  many 
Americans  to  the  Germans'  nationalism,  militarism,  and  compulsive 
need  of  self-assertion.  Roosevelt  could,  it  is  true,  laugh  surreptitiously 
at  the  Kaiser's  pompous  struttings  and  imperious  boasting;  and  he  was 
never,  as  sometimes  has  been  claimed,  the  subordinate  partner  in  the 
calculated  friendship  he  and  that  haughty  gentleman  long  maintained. 
Still,  he  did  have  a  kind  of  admiration  for  Wilhelm  (which  he  astutely 
impressed  upon  German  diplomats  when  it  suited  his  purposes).  And 
he  once  paid  him  the  American  politician's  supreme  compliment  by 
declaring  that  he  could  have  carried  his  ward  in  a  democratic  election. 
Always,  however,  the  President  regarded  Imperial  Germany  as  a 
powerful  potential  rival. 

Although  Berlin  sensed  Roosevelt's  predisposition  toward  the 
British,  and  in  lesser  degree  the  French,  it  hoped  that  the  American 
President  would  serve  as  Germany's  amicus  curiae  in  the  Moroccan 
crisis.  His  cordial  relations  with  the  Kaiser  and  his  intimacy  with 
Speck  von  Sternburg,  together  with  America's  devotion  to  the  Open 
Door  in  China  and  absence  of  ambition  in  North  Africa,  suggested 
that  he  might.  And  from  early  1905  on  the  Germans  subjected  him 
to  unremitting  pressure  to  that  end.  They  pointed  out  that  France  and 
Spain's  primacy  in  Morocco  could  lead  to  the  exclusion  of  other 
commercial  nations  and  that  it  would  enable  them  to  control  the 
passage  to  the  East.  They  protested  that  Germany  had  no  ambitions 
in  Morocco  beyond  maintenance  of  the  Open  Door.  And  they  argued 
that  the  British  would  privately  welcome  action.  Would  not  the  United 
States  join  Germany  in  encouraging  the  Sultan  to  request  an  inter- 
national conference?  Would  not  Roosevelt  cooperate  by  releasing  a 
protest  of  his  own  simultaneously  with  one  by  Germany? 

The  President's  response  to  these  entreaties  was  circumspect.  He 
told  Speck  von  Sternburg  in  early  March,  1905,  that  an  active 
Moroccan  policy  would  only  expose  him  "to  the  bitterest  attacks"  in 


THE    PEACEMAKER   II  289 

Congress.  And  he  later  advised  him  that  "our  interests  in  Morocco 
are  not  sufficiently  great  to  make  me  feel  justified  in  entangling  our 
Government."  Gradually,  however,  the  onward  rush  of  events  over- 
took him.  Following  his  inflammatory  speech  at  Tangier  on  March  31, 
the  Kaiser  became  beset  by  fear  that  England  would  support  France 
in  a  showdown;  and  through  his  ambassador,  Wilhelm  importuned 
Roosevelt  to  urge  the  British  against  such  a  fateful  course.  But  the 
President,  who  was  then  on  a  bear  hunt  in  Colorado,  shrewdly  re- 
frained. As  he  explained  to  Taft,  who  was  handling  affairs  in  Hay's 
illness,  he  did  not  want  to  make  the  English  "think  we  are  acting  as 
decoy  ducks  for  Germany."  He  added,  however,  that  he  was  "sincerely 
anxious  to  bring  about  a  better  state  of  feeling  between  England  and 
Germany,"  and  he  suggested  that  the  Secretary  of  War  conduct  a 
cautious  inquiry  into  the  British  attitude,  but  only  if  he  found  the 
Ambassador,  Sir  Mortimer  Durand,  or  the  First  Secretary  "in  any 
rational  mood  and  you  think  the  nice  but  somewhat  fat-witted  British 
intellect  will  stand  it." 

During  May  and  early  June  tension  continued  to  rise,  especially 
after  the  Sultan  issued  an  invitation  for  a  conference  of  the  powers. 
The  dramatic  dismissal  on  June  6  of  Foreign  Minister  Theophile 
Delcasse,  the  resolutely  anti-German  architect  of  France's  Moroccan 
policy,  reduced  it  temporarily;  but  the  dismissal  served  also  to  em- 
bolden the  Kaiser.  As  rumors  of  an  impending  showdown  spread 
through  the  great  chancelleries  of  the  Western  World,  the  Imperial 
government  assumed  an  increasingly  belligerent  posture.  Fearing 
finally  that  war  might  ensue,  the  French  reluctantly  began  to  relax 
their  opposition  to  an  international  conference.  Roosevelt,  who  had 
been  keeping  an  eye  on  every  straw  in  the  wind,  thereupon  concluded 
that  the  time  to  intervene  had  come. 

The  President's  friendship  with  amiable  Jean  Jules  Jusserand,  with 
whom  he  had  often  played  tennis  and  scrambled  over  the  boulders  of 
Rock  Creek  Park,  now  proved  fruitful.  Taking  the  Ambassador  into 
his  confidence  almost  completely,  he  impressed  him  with  the  gravity 
of  the  crisis  and  convinced  him  of  his  own  disinterested  purposes 
(the  President's  problem  was  to  avoid  creating  the  impression  that 
he  was  pro-German).  A  measure  of  Roosevelt's  success  is  found  in 
part  in  the  sympathetic  report  Jusserand  later  made  to  this  govern- 
ment: 


290  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Examining  .  .  .  the  means  by  which  he  might  help  us  in  avoid- 
ing war,  the  very  idea  of  which  struck  him  with  horror,  the  Presi- 
dent has  concluded  that  the  only  chance  to  do  what  might  be  useful, 
would  be  perhaps  to  flatter  this  excessive  vanity  of  William  II,  to 
which  he  attributes,  in  large  measure,  the  present  difficulties. 

Roosevelt's  intercession,  combined  with  the  force  of  events,  had 
served  to  swing  over  the  French,  at  least  for  the  moment.  Within  a 
few  days,  however,  a  new  impasse  threatened.  France  demanded  a 
preliminary  understanding  before  meeting  at  the  council  table;  Ger- 
many insisted  that  the  issues  be  decided  at  the  formal  conference. 
The  fate  of  the  conference,  and  perhaps  of  world  peace,  hung  pre- 
cariously in  the  balance. 

The  President  reacted  with  characteristic  ingenuity.  Using  Speck 
von  Sternburg  as  a  sounding  board,  he  played  for  the  Kaiser's  ear 
such  a  song  of  praise  as  was  certain  to  beguile  a  man  of  Wilhelm's 
consummate  vanity.  He  said  the  Kaiser  "stands  as  the  leader  among 
the  sovereigns  of  to-day  who  have  their  faces  set  toward  the  future." 
He  argued  that  the  French  decision  to  accept  a  conference  was  "a 
genuine  triumph  for  the  Emperor's  diplomacy."  And  he  suggested 
that  the  Emperor's  "high  and  honorable  fame  might  be  clouded" 
should  "questions  about  minor  details"  produce  "the  dreadful  calamity 
of  war." 

Roosevelt's  resourcefulness  apparently  again  tipped  the  scales. 
Wilhelm  agreed  to  an  advance  agenda;  and  he  also  promised  that  if 
there  should  be  differences  at  the  conference  he  would  in  every  case 
support  whatever  decision  Roosevelt  regarded  as  "the  most  fair  and 
the  most  practical."  The  President  conveyed  this  promise  to  the 
French  with  the  resultant  resolution  of  their  doubts. 

The  President  would  have  preferred  to  have  taken  no  further  part 
in  the  proceedings.  Congressional  opposition  to  his  involvement  was 
strong  and  vociferous;  and  in  January,  1906,  Senator  Bacon  intro- 
duced a  resolution  designed  to  remind  the  President  of  the  Founding 
Fathers'  allegedly  isolationist  faith.  Even  Root  questioned  the  wisdom 
of  Roosevelt's  participation.  But  Lodge  rose  to  the  President's  defense 
with  a  high-blown,  if  somewhat  inaccurate,  assertion  that  it  was  in 
the  American  tradition  to  use  "moral  influence  ...  to  prevent  war." 
And  when  the  conference,  which  opened  at  Algeciras  in  southern 
Spain  on  January  16,  1906,  deadlocked,  Roosevelt  did  not  hesitate 
to  accept  the  challenge. 


THE   PEACEMAKER   II  291 

On  February  19,  with  talk  of  war  once  more  filling  the  air,  the 
President  offered  a  four-point  compromise  program.  In  consonance 
with  his  basic  sympathies,  as  well  as  his  estimate  of  the  total  situation, 
his  proposals  were  more  reflective  of  French  than  German  interests. 
They  provided  for  the  Open  Door  in  principle;  but  they  proposed  in 
effect  to  turn  over  control  of  the  Moroccan  police  to  France  and 
Spain.  The  Kaiser  understandably  demurred,  and  it  seemed  for  a 
while  that  the  conference  would  now  actually  fail.  On  the  basis  of 
representations  from  the  Russians,  however,  Roosevelt  decided  to 
make  a  direct  appeal  to  His  Imperial  Majesty  on  March  7.  Again 
playing  on  Wilhelm's  vanity,  and  also  his  honor,  he  quoted  Speck  von 
Sternburg's  earlier  promise  that  the  Emperor  would  defer  to  his  de- 
cision in  the  event  of  an  insoluble  difference  between  the  German 
government  and  France.  Wilhelm  could  do  little  but  submit;  after 
failing  to  convert  Roosevelt  to  a  compromise  plan  of  his  own,  he 
did  so. 

The  President's  imaginative  diplomacy  had  saved  the  conference, 
and  probably  the  peace  as  well.  He  had  strengthened  the  bonds  with 
his  country's  natural  allies,  France  and  Great  Britain,  and  had  man- 
aged at  least  to  preserve  the  bonds  with  Germany.  He  had  also  taken 
America  another  long  stride  into  the  world.  The  episode,  writes 
Mowry,  "was  eloquent  testimony  to  Roosevelt's  growing  appreciation 
that  the  frontiers  of  twentieth-century  American  security  often  lay 
along  the  Yangtse  and  the  Rhine,  at  Algeciras  and  Rome  and  Paris, 
and  in  a  host  of  other  places,  some  of  them  unknown  or  obscure  even 
to  members  of  Congress." 

Firm  in  the  conviction  that  he  had  acted  in  the  right — that  the 
virtual  closing  of  the  Open  Door  in  Morocco  was  a  small  price  for 
the  maintenance  of  peace  and  the  support  of  the  British-French 
entente — Roosevelt  was  again  magnanimous  in  victory.  To  Jusserand 
he  wrote  that  he  had  been  able  to  give  him  his  confidence  only  because 
he  knew  that  "you  would  treat  all  that  was  said  and  done  between  us 
two  as  a  gentleman  of  the  highest  honor  treats  what  is  said  and  done 
in  the  intimate  personal  relations  of  life."  And  of  Speck  von  Sternburg, 
whose  contribution  was  perhaps  even  greater  than  Jusserand's,  he 
wrote:  "Loyal  though  Speck  was  to  his  Government,  down  in  his 
heart  the  honest,  brave  little  gentleman  did  not  believe  Germany  was 
acting  as  she  should  act."  But  to  His  Majesty,  Wilhelm  II,  the  Presi- 
dent was  less  than  candid.  In  a  message  that  Speck  von  Sternburg, 


292  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

though  presumably  not  Wilhelm,  saw  through,  he  extended  his  "sin- 
cerest  felicitations  on  this  epochmaking  political  success  at  Algeciras" 
and  asseverated  that  His  Majesty's  policy  "has  been  masterly  from 
beginning  to  end." 

As  for  his  own  role,  the  President  remained  discreetly  silent.  Only 
to  Ambassador  Whitelaw  Reid  in  London,  in  a  long,  heavily  docu- 
mented letter  which  he  warned  must  "be  considered  as  of  the  most 
strictly  confidential  character,"  did  he  set  forth  the  record  of  events. 
That  letter  was  designed  for  a  posterity  which  until  recently  rejected 
it.  Passing  over  the  European  sources  and  dismissing  the  claims  to  Reid 
as  a  figment  of  Roosevelt's  imagination,  American  historians  have 
tended  to  belittle,  or  at  least  underestimate,  the  President's  decisive 
influence  in  arranging  and  then  saving  the  Algeciras  Conference.  Not 
until  1956,  when  Beale  published  his  study  of  Roosevelt  after  ex- 
haustive research  in  the  sources,  including  those  in  Europe,  was  the 
President's  own  account  confirmed.  He  was,  Beale  concludes,  "an 
amazingly  accurate  reporter  in  this  instance." 

President  Roosevelt's  mediation  of  the  Russo-Japanese  War  and 
his  intervention  in  the  Moroccan  dispute  deservedly  earned  him  the 
Nobel  Peace  Prize  for  1906.  Thereafter  his  views  on  domestic  issues 
would  continue  to  develop;  his  convictions  on  foreign  affairs,  how- 
ever, had  by  then  reached  near  maturation.  This  was  confirmed  by  his 
admonishment  of  "those  who  would  lightly  undergo  the  chance  of 
war  in  a  spirit  of  mere  frivolity,  or  of  mere  truculence,"  and  by  his 
growing  concern  over  the  burgeoning  costs  and  frightful  implications 
of  the  international  armaments  race.  Thus  at  the  same  time  that 
Roosevelt  worked  for  the  particular  peace  he  made  a  sincere,  though 
severely  limited,  effort  to  secure  the  general  peace  through  inter- 
national limitation  of  naval  power  and  arbitration  of  minor  disputes. 
In  this,  however,  he  failed,  European  rivalries  proving  too  intense, 
the  United  States  Senate  too  chauvinistic,  and  the  President's  basic 
assumptions  (they  were  predicated  on  continued  Anglo-American 
naval  dominance)  too  transparent. 

Roosevelt  had  first  issued  a  call  for  an  international  conference  in 
October,  1904.  Because  of  the  Russo-Japanese  War,  however,  he 
shortly  afterward  withdrew  the  call.  Then,  when  the  Tsar  indicated 
the  next  year  that  he  would  like  to  call  the  conference  himself,  the 
President  readily  deferred.  The  Tsar's  sponsorship  would  give  the 
United  States  a  freer  hand;  and  it  would  happily  spare  Roosevelt,  who 


THE    PEACEMAKER   II  293 

still  scorned  the  "peace-at-any-price"  people  on  the  grounds  that  they 
failed  to  realize  that  "justice  is  greater  than  peace,"  the  odium,  as  he 
phrased  it,  of  "posing  too  much  as  a  professional  peacemaker." 

During  the  long  interval  between  the  original  call  and  the  actual 
convening  of  The  Second  Hague  Peace  Conference  on  June  15,  1907, 
Roosevelt  gave  considerable  thought  to  the  meeting's  agenda.  He 
warned  that  the  Conference  should  not  be  regarded  as  a  panacea. 
"Just  at  present  the  United  States  Navy  is  an  infinitely  more  potent 
factor  for  peace  than  all  the  peace  societies  of  every  kind  and  sort," 
he  wrote  President  Eliot  of  Harvard,  whom  he  viewed  as  an  im- 
practical visionary.  "At  The  Hague  I  think  we  can  make  some  real 
progress,  but  only  on  condition  of  our  not  trying  to  go  too  far."  And 
after  he  had  skirted  suggestions  for  limiting  the  size  and  quality  of 
armies,  he  drew  back  on  the  grounds  that  the  world  armaments 
manufacturers'  lobby  was  too  powerful  and  that  the  Kaiser,  especially, 
would  never  agree.  However,  he  continued  to  press  for  naval  limita- 
tions and  "obligatory  arbitration  as  broad  in  scope  as  now  appears  to 
be  practicable."  He  further  espoused  a  proposal  for  exemption  of 
private  property  from  capture  in  time  of  war. 

The  first  of  these  proposals  was  doomed  from  the  beginning.  The 
Russians  wanted  to  rebuild  their  fleet,  and  the  Japanese  wanted  to 
keep  ahead  of  them  and  gain  on  the  Americans  and  British.  The 
Germans  aspired  to  build  up  to  the  British.  And  the  Italians  were 
envious  of  the  French.  Neither  was  the  prospect  of  accepting  a  status 
quo  based  on  an  overwhelming  Anglo-American  supremacy  enticing 
to  any  of  the  other  major  powers  including  the  British,  who  equivo- 
cated. Hence  the  death  of  the  President's  proposal  and  the  continuance 
of  the  fateful  armaments  race  which  he  correctly  surmised  would 
eventuate  in  a  catastrophic  war. 

Roosevelt's  other  proposals  also  died  as  they  were  born.  He  was 
himself  unable  to  press  compulsory  arbitration  as  much  as  he  would 
have  liked  because  of  the  attitude  of  the  Senate.  As  he  explained  to 
the  British  Foreign  Secretary,  Sir  Edward  Grey,  "it  does  not  repre- 
sent any  real  advance  for  me  or  anyone  else  to  sign  a  general  arbitra- 
tion treaty  which  itself  merely  expresses  a  'pious  opinion'  that  there 
ought  hereafter  to  be  arbitration  treaties  whenever  both  parties  think 
they  are  advisable — and  this  was  precisely  the  opinion  that  most  even 
of  my  own  good  friends  in  the  Senate  took  as  regards  the  last  batch 
of  arbitration  treaties  which  I  sent  them."  Nevertheless,  he  added,  "I 


294  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

will  do  my  best  to  get  this  Government  to  agree  to  any  feasible 
scheme  which  will  tend  to  minimize  the  chances  for  war  occurring 
without  previous  efforts  to  secure  mediation  or  arbitration." 

Whether  the  President  could  have  persuaded  the  Senate  to  accept 
his  view  is  conjectural.  Before  he  had  a  chance  to  act,  eight  European 
states  led  by  Germany  refused  at  The  Hague  to  agree  to  arbitrate 
legal  disputes,  to  say  nothing  of  those  involving  national  interest.  Even 
the  recommendation  for  exemption  of  private  property  from  capture 
in  time  of  war  was  scuttled;  and  the  Conference  adjourned  on  October 
18,  1907,  without  material  accomplishment.  As  Joseph  H.  Choate, 
the  American  delegate,  succinctly  put  it  in  one  of  his  reports,  "There 
is  very  great  reluctance  on  the  part  of  these  fighting  nations  to  bind 
themselves  to  anything." 

The  President's  cautious  internationalism  and  his  mature  abhor- 
rence of  war  continued,  of  course,  to  be  delimited  by  his  unwavering 
devotion  to  the  national  interest  and  by  his  continued  contempt  for 
the  backward  nations.  He  never  agreed  to  endorse  arbitration  of 
disputes  involving  the  national  honor  or  interest.  Nor  did  he  ever 
abandon  his  belief  that  it  was  the  duty  of  the  "civilized"  nations  to 
discipline  the  "barbarous"  ones.  He  did,  it  is  true,  concede  that  the 
problem  was  relative,  that  it  was  difficult  to  "state  exactly  which 
power  ceases  to  be  free  and  civilized  and  which  comes  near  the  line 
of  barbarism  or  despotism."  But  in  practice  he  invariably  allowed  his 
own  conception  of  the  American  national  interest  to  rule. 

The  President's  China  policy  was  a  case  in  point.  Roosevelt  had 
the  intellectual  equipment  to  have  evolved  a  China  policy  that  would 
have  served  American  interests  and  kept  ill-will  at  a  minimum.  He 
had  a  keen  conception  of  the  Russian  menace,  an  almost  prophetic 
vision  of  China's  future  importance,  and  unparalleled  daring  and 
imagination.  But  because  he  held  firm  to  his  technological  criteria  of 
civilization,  because  he  overestimated  his  country's  economic  stake  in 
China,  and  because  he  insisted  on  upholding  false  values  of  prestige, 
he  failed. 

To  be  sure,  Roosevelt  inherited  his  China  policy  from  McKinley 
and  left  its  conduct  largely  in  Hay's  hands  until  1904.  Yet  Hay  kept 
him  informed.  He  agreed  in  the  main  with  Hay's  policies.  And  he 
himself  made  several  critical  decisions  during  Hay's  tenure.  As  Beale 
shows,  it  was  the  President  who  insulted  the  Chinese  by  insisting  that 
the  mixed  foreign  court  at  Shanghai  rather  than  the  Chinese  govern- 


THE   PEACEMAKER   II  295 

ment  should  be  authorized  to  sentence  a  group  of  Chinese  citizens 
found  guilty  of  "violent  incitements  to  insurrection"  against  the 
Chinese  government.  It  was  the  President  who  tried  to  compel  the 
Chinese  to  support  a  nominally  American  railroad  company  which 
had  laid  but  twenty-eight  miles  of  track  out  of  a  projected  thousand 
miles  in  five  years  of  financial  chicanery  and  general  mismanagement. 
(Lodge  and  Roosevelt  agreed  that  the  maintenance  of  American 
prestige  was  at  stake.)  And  it  was  the  President  who  directed  policy 
throughout  the  Chinese  boycott  of  American  goods  in  1905.  Of  these 
incidents,  the  latter  was  the  most  significant.  The  attitudes  and  actions 
which  provoked  it  were  deeply  enmeshed  in  the  American,  and  indeed 
the  Western,  social  fabric;  and  they  cut  to  the  core  of  the  imperialistic 
philosophy,  even  in  its  by  then  softened  version. 

The  precipitating  issue  was  the  Chinese  Exclusion  Treaty  of  1883, 
which  came  up  for  renewal  in  1904.  Roosevelt  had  long  favored  the 
exclusion  of  Chinese  laborers  on  economic  and  social  grounds.  "There 
is  no  danger  of  having  too  many  immigrants  of  the  right  kind,"  he 
said  in  his  annual  message  of  1905  and  in  numerous  private  letters. 
Nor,  he  also  wrote,  does  it  make  any  "difference  from  what  country 
they  come."  However,  he  argued,  "we  should  not  admit  masses  of 
men  whose  standards  of  living  and  whose  personal  customs  and  habits 
are  such  that  they  tend  to  lower  the  level  of  the  American  wage- 
worker." 

The  question  was  in  fact  actually  more  complex  than  that.  Immi- 
gration officials  and  private  citizens  frequently  visited  indignities  on 
those  Chinese  who  were  admitted,  many  of  them  high  government 
officials  and  distinguished  scholars.  The  United  States  refused  natural- 
ization to  all  Chinese  ("Congress  has  done  its  work  so  well  that  even 
Confucius  could  not  become  an  American,"  Hay  remarked  to  Roose- 
velt at  one  point).  And  West  Coast  politicians  were  so  intent  on 
playing  on  the  prejudices  of  their  constituents  that  they  demanded 
unilateral  exclusion  legislation  in  the  spring  of  1904  regardless  of  the 
outcome  of  the  then  pending  treaty  negotiations. 

Whatever  the  limitations  of  the  President's  own  views,  they  were 
far  in  advance  of  his  countrymen's  at  large.  He  personally  favored 
admission  of  qualified  Chinese  to  citizenship.  He  wanted  to  extend 
America's  developing  cultural  hold  on  China.  And  he  was  reluctant 
to  make  commercial  intercourse  with  China  more  difficult  than  it 
already  was.  But  in  the  spring  of  1904,  fearing  more  the  wrath  of  the 


296  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

West  Coast  voters  than  the  indignation  of  the  impotent  Chinese,  he 
sacrificed  statesmanship  to  politics.  On  April  5  of  that  election  year, 
he  informed  his  Cabinet  that  he  would  approve  a  separate  exclusion 
bill.  Then,  in  one  of  the  weakest  actions  of  his  presidential  career,  he 
signed  a  measure  so  providing. 

Meanwhile,  anti-American  sentiment  in  China  rose  feverishly.  It 
emanated  not  from  the  reactionary  Boxers,  but  from  the  men  of 
China's  future — the  progressive-minded  intellectuals,  students,  and 
businessmen  who  foresaw  for  China  the  industrialized  development 
that  Roosevelt  himself  foresaw  in  his  more  reflective  moments.  Led 
by  Sun  Yat-Sen  among  others,  these  new  nationalists  resolved  to 
assert  China's  independence;  and  they  proposed  as  a  first  step  toward 
that  end  the  boycotting  of  American  goods  in  protest  against  the 
contemptuous  treatment  of  their  countrymen  by  American  immigra- 
tion officials. 

The  President's  response  to  the  boycott  was  at  once  enlightened 
and  authoritarian.  He  was  so  angered  by  the  "barbarous  methods" 
which  inspired  the  boycott  that  he  ordered  reform  even  before  the 
textile  and  other  interested  American  business  groups  beseeched  him 
to  pursue  a  rational  policy  in  the  interest  of  their  commerce  with 
China.  "We  are  a  civilized  nation,"  Roosevelt  wrote  the  secretary  of 
the  Immigration  Bureau  on  June  12,  and  "we  are  trying  to  teach  the 
Chinese  to  be  civilized.  ...  We  ought  not  to  treat  a  Chinese  repre- 
sentative in  a  way  which  we  would  not  for  a  moment  tolerate  if 
applied  by  the  Chinese  to  some  of  our  representatives."  He  then 
issued  an  executive  order  prescribing  humane  treatment  of  visiting 
Chinese  by  American  immigration  officials  and  directing  "immediate 
dismissal"  of  any  official  who  failed  to  conform. 

Chinese  grievances  were  too  long  standing  and  the  new  nationalists' 
desire  to  assert  their  independence  too  intense,  however,  for  a  change 
in  the  form  rather  than  the  substance  of  American  policy  to  divert  the 
Chinese  nationalists;  on  July  20,  1905,  the  boycott  was  instituted. 
It  spread  rapidly  from  Shanghai  through  South  China  and  thence  to 
Hawaii,  the  Philippines,  and  the  Japanese  ports  of  Nagasaki  and 
Yokahama.  It  varied  widely  in  effectiveness  and  was  nowhere  total; 
yet  it  was  severe  enough  to  evoke  frantic  pleas  for  diplomatic  action 
by  the  American  interests  affected.  As  one  consul  reported,  our 
businessmen  in  China  have  "gone  mad"  and  are  acting  like  "regular 
wild  Indians." 


THE   PEACEMAKER   II  297 

The  President's  contempt  for  the  "inferior"  Chinese  now  began 
slowly  to  surge  to  the  surface.  He  continued  to  rail  against  the  obtuse- 
ness  that  had  incited  the  crisis.  "I  have  the  right,"  he  testily  wrote 
Senator  George  C.  Perkins  of  California,  "to  expect  that  the  Pacific 
coast  representatives  will  aid  me  in  undoing  the  injustice  in  our 
treaties  .  .  .  which  has  probably  been  the  whole,  and  certainly  the 
main,  cause  of  the  present  boycott."  But  he  was  unable  to  hold  to  that 
rational  viewpoint  entirely.  To  the  veteran  China  hand,  William  Rock- 
hill,  he  now  laid  bare  his  fatal  flaw.  The  Chinese,  wrote  Roosevelt, 
"despise  weakness  even  more  than  they  prize  justice,  and  we  must 
make  it  evident  both  that  we  intend  to  do  what  is  right  and  that  we 
do  not  intend  for  a  moment  to  suffer  what  is  wrong." 

Nevertheless,  the  President  resisted  his  rising  impulse  to  resort  to 
force  until  well  into  November,  1905.  Gratified  when  the  Chinese 
government  formally  condemned  the  boycott  on  August  31,  he  at- 
tempted to  marshal  public  opinion  behind  a  revision  of  the  exclusion 
laws.  The  United  States  had  failed  to  do  its  "duty  toward  the  people 
of  China,"  he  bluntly  told  an  export-conscious  audience  in  the  cotton 
belt  on  October  20.  At  the  same  time,  however,  he  warned  that 
America  must  maintain  its  "rights." 

Meanwhile  anti-American  sentiment  in  China  intensified  in  spite  of 
the  near  extinction  of  the  boycott.  The  President's  daughter,  Alice, 
who  had  accompanied  Taft  to  the  Far  East,  was  insulted  by  the 
Cantonese  and  forced  to  cancel  a  visit  to  their  city.  Riots  broke  out 
in  several  places,  including  Shanghai,  where  the  Chinese  nationalists 
sought  greater  jurisdiction  over  the  privileged  foreign  settlement.  And 
in  early  December  an  American  admiral  who  had  accidentally  shot  a 
Chinese  woman  was  mobbed. 

In  these  circumstances,  the  President  decided  to  pursue  the  firmest 
possible  course;  on  November  15  he  ordered  the  Secretary  of  the 
Navy  to  concentrate  "as  strong  a  naval  force  as  possible"  off  the 
China  coast.  Preparations  to  form  an  expeditionary  force  of  15,000 
troops  followed,  and  by  mid-February  the  battleship  Oregon  was 
hovering  off  Hong  Kong  and  Canton  while  the  gunboat  El  Cano  was 
cruising  on  the  Yangtse  River.  With  the  stage  thus  set,  the  President 
submitted  a  series  of  humiliating  demands  to  the  Imperial  government 
on  February  26.  Eight  days  later  the  Emperor  resignedly  submitted 
to  this  gunboat  diplomacy  by  issuing  an  Imperial  edict  condemning 
expressions  of  antiforeign  sentiment  by  his  subjects. 


298  POWER    AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

Roosevelt's  threat  of  force  had  restored  tranquillity,  maintained  the 
Open  Door,  and  refurbished  the  national  ego.  But  it  had  also  em- 
bittered China's  men  of  the  future.  It  would  be  absurd  to  blame  the 
whole  subsequent  China  tangle  on  the  President's  coercive  policies; 
many  and  graver  blunders  were  to  be  made  in  the  years  to  come.  It  is 
also  difficult  to  see  how  Roosevelt  could  have  avoided  a  firm  policy 
(except  for  the  unnecessary  display  of  force),  given  the  violence  of 
Chinese  activity,  the  frenetic  pressures  of  American  businessmen  and 
labor  leaders,  and  the  Western  milieu  of  which  the  United  States,  how- 
ever less  imperiously,  was  yet  a  part.  Within  this  frame  of  reference, 
Roosevelt  had  done  almost  all  that  was  possible.  He  had  upbraided 
American  officials  for  their  execrable  discourtesy;  he  had  urged 
Congress  to  modify  the  exclusion  policy  (though  after  he  himself  had 
submitted  to  it);  and  he  had  taken  the  question  to  the  people.  How 
then  had  he  failed? 

The  President  failed,  if  we  may  accept  Beale's  conclusions,  in  that 
he,  his  advisers,  and  all  but  a  handful  of  American  commentators 
persisted  in  regarding  China  as  a  colonial  with  all  that  the  term 
implied.  Ideally,  the  United  States  should  have  courted,  rather  than 
condemned,  the  new  nationalists.  It  should  have  encouraged,  rather 
than  discouraged,  Chinese  efforts  to  whittle  down  the  extraterritorial 
privileges  of  Occidentals.  And  as  Roosevelt  himself  wanted  to  do,  it 
should  have  opened  its  doors  to  cultivated  Chinese.  But  the  domestic 
political  maelstrom,  coupled  with  the  President's  inability  to  break 
totally  with  his  imperialistic,  might-is-right  heritage,  prevented  it  from 
so  doing.  Of  all  the  ironies  in  Theodore  Roosevelt's  career,  none  is 
more  revealing  than  that  he  should  have  professed  to  see  the  spirit 
of  the  American  Revolution  in  the  revolt  of  the  Panamanians  against 
Colombia,  but  refused  to  see  it  in  the  revolt  against  colonialism  of  the 
ancient,  the  proud,  and  the  civilized  Chinese. 

The  China  problem  had  not  yet  been  resolved  when  the  President 
became  involved  in  a  somewhat  similar  crisis  with  Japan.  For  several 
years  that  compound  of  economic  insecurity,  racial  prejudice  and 
political  demagoguery  which  lay  behind  the  Chinese  exclusion  law 
had  also  been  swelling  the  West  Coast's  resentment  of  the  Japanese. 
In  1905  the  California  legislature  openly  debated  an  Oriental  ex- 
clusion bill  before  settling  on  a  joint  resolution  that  was  almost  as 
offensive  as  the  proposed  bill.  And  in  the  fall  of  1906  the  dam  finally 
broke  as  the  San  Francisco  Board  of  Education,  its  resolve  weakened 


THE    PEACEMAKER   II  299 

by  heavy  pressure  from  organized  labor,  ordered  all  ninety-three 
Japanese,  Chinese,  and  Korean  students  in  the  public  educational 
system  to  attend  a  segregated  school. 

From  across  the  Pacific  there  now  rolled  a  great  wave  of  protest 
which  Roosevelt,  raging  and  storming  over  "the  idiots  in  the  Cali- 
fornia legislature,"  sought  desperately  to  roll  back.  "These  Pacific 
Coast  people  .  .  .  with  besotted  folly  are  indifferent  to  building  up 
the  navy  while  provoking  this  formidable  new  power — a  power 
jealous,  sensitive  and  warlike,  and  which  if  irritated  could  at  once 
take  both  the  Philippines  and  Hawaii  from  us  if  she  obtained  the 
upper  hand  on  the  seas,"  he  protested  to  Lodge.  "Let  me  repeat  that 
everything  in  my  power  will  be  done,"  he  confidentially  wrote  Baron 
Kaneko,  who  had  cabled  him  from  Tokyo.  "The  action  of  these  people 
in  San  Francisco  no  more  represents  American  sentiment  as  a  whole 
than  the  action  of  the  Japanese  seal  pirates  last  summer  represented 
Japanese  sentiment." 

The  Californians  proved  intractable,  however,  and  in  his  annual 
message  that  December  the  President  scorched  the  San  Francisco 
School  Board.  He  called  the  Board's  action  "a  wicked  absurdity"  and 
"a  crime  against  a  friendly  nation";  and  he  threatened  to  use  "all  the 
forces,  civil  and  military"  at  his  command  to  rectify  it.  Then,  early 
in  the  new  year,  he  sent  in  a  special  message  to  Congress  which  con- 
cluded with  an  expression  of  hope  that  the  people  of  San  Francisco 
would  resolve  the  issue  "as  a  matter  of  comity." 

Neither  the  President's  threats  nor  his  pleas  moved  the  emotion- 
wrought  San  Franciscans.  He  decided  therefore  to  intervene  directly. 
Early  in  February,  on  his  own  invitation,  he  received  at  the  White 
House  an  eight-man  delegation  from  the  San  Francisco  School  Board. 
After  several  conferences  (Elihu  Root  sat  always  on  Roosevelt's  left, 
prepared  to  interject  the  light  touch  or  to  tap  the  table  when  the 
President  became  too  vehement),  the  San  Franciscans  accepted 
Roosevelt's  contention  that  the  segregation  order  was  deleterious  to 
the  nation's  foreign  relations,  and  a  compromise  was  agreed  upon: 
Aliens  of  any  nationality  would  be  admitted  to  nonsegregated  schools 
provided  they  knew  English  and  were  in  the  proper  age  group;  the 
President  would  recommend  an  amendment  to  the  immigration  law 
which  would  in  effect  empower  him  to  exclude  coolie  labor. 

The  resultant  lessening  of  tension  proved  temporary.  That  same 
month  the  California  Assembly  passed  a  bill  limiting  ownership  of 


300  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

land  by  Japanese  and  Chinese,  and  the  next  month  the  California 
Senate  received  a  bill  to  exclude  Japanese  children  over  ten  years  of 
age  from  the  white  public  schools.  In  May  a  mob  attacked  a  Japanese 
restaurant  and  bath  house  in  San  Francisco,  and  in  June  the  Board  of 
Police  Commissioners  refused  licenses  to  six  Japanese  employment 
bureaus.  Meanwhile,  the  President  and  Secretary  Root  negotiated 
feverishly  with  the  Japanese  government  as  reports  of  possible  conflict 
between  the  United  States  and  Japan  filtered  in  through  diplomatic 
channels.  Finally,  Roosevelt  decided  to  send  Taft  to  Tokyo  to  mitigate 
Japanese  resentment. 

The  amiable  Secretary  of  War  reached  the  Japanese  capital  in 
October,  1907,  and  was  at  once,  so  he  enthusiastically  wrote  home, 
"feted  all  over  the  place."  Following  a  round  of  talks  with  high 
Japanese  officials  he  completed  arrangements  already  in  the  making 
for  the  so-called  Gentleman's  Agreement,  under  the  terms  of  which 
both  Japan  and  the  United  States  agreed  to  limit  emigration  of  their 
nationals  to  types  acceptable  to  each  other.  Practically,  this  meant  that 
the  trickle  of  coolies  into  California  would  almost  dry  up. 

Meanwhile  the  President  had  formulated  plans  for  a  gesture  on  the 
grand  scale — the  dispatch  of  the  American  battle  fleet  around  the 
world.  Roosevelt's  reasons  for  that  bold  decision  included  such  tactical 
considerations  as  giving  the  fleet  practice  in  coaling  at  sea  and  ascer- 
taining the  precise  time  it  would  take  to  move  it  from  one  ocean  to 
the  other.  Fundamentally,  however,  they  embodied  the  desire  to  stimu- 
late domestic  support  for  his  naval  construction  program  and  to 
dramatize  to  the  world,  and  especially  the  impressionable  Japanese, 
the  magnitude  of  American  naval  power. 

The  President's  willingness  thus  to  leave  the  Philippines  and 
Hawaii  unguarded  while  the  fleet  was  in  European  waters  suggests 
that  he  had  not  taken  the  war  talk  of  the  summer  of  1907  seriously. 
In  reality,  he  had  taken  it  seriously;  but  he  contemplated  a  future 
rather  than  an  immediate  war,  Japanese  naval  strength  being  at  least 
a  third  less  than  the  United  States'  at  that  time.  He  consequently 
viewed  the  visit  of  the  fleet  to  Japan  as  a  deterrent.  "My  own  judg- 
ment is  that  the  only  thing  which  will  prevent  war  is  the  Japanese 
feeling  that  we  shall  not  be  beaten,"  he  confided  to  Root  in  July,  1907. 

Nevertheless,  precautions  were  undertaken.  Early  in  July  Roosevelt 
sent  Leonard  Wood,  then  in  command  of  the  Philippines  defenses, 
coded  instructions  on  the  measures  to  be  taken  in  the  event  of  attack. 


THE    PEACEMAKER    II  301 

And  the  commander  of  the  Great  White  Fleet  that  steamed  out  of 
Hampton  Roads  on  December  1 6,  carried  firm  orders  to  be  prepared 
for  and  to  resist  attack. 

No  enemy  fired  a  gun  except  in  salute;  and  on  the  return  of  the 
fleet  fourteen  months  later  its  main  missions  had  been  accomplished 
or  were  being  accomplished.  The  Japanese  had  received  the  officers 
and  men  with  a  spectacular  demonstration  of  hospitality  and  bland- 
ness,  while  Congress  had  been  sufficiently  moved  (with  the  help  of 
war  talk  from  the  President)  to  have  authorized  the  construction  of 
two  additional  battleships.  There  had  also  been  controversy.  The 
chairman  of  the  Senate  Naval  Affairs  Committee  was  so  exacerbated 
by  the  President's  decision  to  dispatch  the  fleet  without  the  formal 
approval  of  Congress  that  he  had  threatened  to  refuse  funds  for  its 
supply — to  which  the  President  had  responded  that  enough  money 
was  already  available  to  get  the  fleet  to  the  Pacific,  that  it  would 
definitely  go  to  the  Pacific,  and  it  could  then  stay  in  the  Pacific. 
"There  was  no  further  difficulty  about  money,"  Roosevelt  tersely  re- 
called in  his  Autobiography. 

The  President  also  declared  in  his  Autobiography  that  the  world 
cruise  of  the  fleet  was  "the  most  important  service  that  I  rendered  to 
peace."  Historians  are  not  so  confident.  Beale  speculates  that  it  served 
to  spur  the  Japanese  naval  party  and  anti-American  elements  who 
were  even  then  in  conflict  with  pro-American  groups  in  Japan,  while 
Braisted  suggests  that  "a  powerful  American  fleet  defending  the 
Philippines  in  1909  was  potentially  no  less  threatening  to  Japan  than 
had  seemed  Japan's  intervention  in  Hawaii  to  the  United  States  only 
twelve  years  before."  It  is  also  likely  that  that  spectacle  of  American 
naval  might  quickened  Wilhelm  IFs  already  burning  resolve  to  build 
up  the  Imperial  German  Navy. 

By  the  end  of  Roosevelt's  presidency,  moreover,  the  Asiatic  balance 
he  had  striven  so  laboriously  to  create  was  working  against  American 
commercial  interests.  In  silent  defiance  of  the  Open  Door,  Russia  and 
Japan  had  agreed  to  divide  north  China,  Mongolia,  and  Korea  be- 
tween them,  and  by  an  exchange  of  notes  between  Secretary  Root 
and  Baron  Takahira  on  November  30,  1908,  the  United  States  had 
implicitly  recognized  Japan's  economic  ascendancy  in  Manchuria. 
It  is  bootless  to  contend,  however,  that  this  posture  of  affairs  was  the 
fault  of  the  administration.  Japan  was  coming  of  age  in  any  event,  and 
the  Root-Takahira  Agreement  had  actually  signaled  a  sort  of  clearing 


302  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

of  the  air.  The  only  alternative  to  Root's  measured  attempt  to  per-' 
suade  Japan  to  be  moderate  was  war,  or  a  firm  threat  of  war.  If  the 
display  of  force  implicit  in  the  fleet's  world  cruise  was  a  blunder,  what 
would  the  mustering  of  sufficient  power  to  disrupt  the  new  Russo- 
Japanese  comity  or  to  drive  the  Japanese  out  of  Korea  and  Manchuria 
have  been?  To  find  the  wellsprings  of  Russian  and  Japanese  aggres- 
sions in  Korea,  north  China,  and  Mongolia,  the  historian  must  probe 
far  beyond  the  policies  of  the  Roosevelt  administrations.  Short  of 
war,  the  unwisdom  of  which  is  clear,  or  of  complete  withdrawal  from 
the  Far  East,  the  wisdom  of  which  is  arguable,  Roosevelt  had  done 
almost  all  that  could  reasonably  be  demanded.  He  had  also  set  his 
country  off  from  all  the  other  powers  and  atoned  partly  for  his  own 
hardness  toward  China  by  accepting  the  suggestion  of  a  Congrega- 
tional missionary,  Arthur  Henderson  Smith,  that  a  portion  of  the 
Boxer  indemnity  be  used  to  support  Chinese  students  in  American 
universities. 


CHAPTER  18 


MORE   TROUBLES   AND  GREATER 
TRIBULATIONS 


If  a  man  has  a  very  decided  character,  has  a  strongly  ac- 
centuated career,  it  is  normally  the  case  of  course  that  he  makes 
ardent  friends  and  bitter  enemies.  .  .  . 

— Theodore  Roosevelt  to  G.  O.  Trevelyan 


The  President  continued,  meanwhile,  to  be  a  storm  center  of  contro- 
versy on  the  domestic  front.  He  created  it,  he  fell  into  it,  and  he 
searched  it  out.  When  he  was  not  rebuking  his  once  trusted  friends,  he 
was  taunting  his  long-sworn  enemies.  And  if  he  was  fleetingly  at  peace 
with  both,  as  occasionally  he  was,  it  was  rarely  the  peace  that  passeth 
understanding.  Nor  was  it  possible  to  predict  what  the  swirling  winds 
that  bore  his  wrath  would  next  envelop.  During  the  same  two  years 
the  President  was  making  his  mark  in  European  affairs,  pacifying  the 
Japanese,  and  flaunting  the  power  of  the  American  navy,  he  crossed 
swords  with  a  people  whom  he  had  sought  sincerely  to  uplift — the 
Negroes.  He  unloosed  his  fury  on  a  private  citizen  whose  sole  offense 
was  an  imagination  that  transcended  the  observed  facts  of  nature.  And 
he  was  himself  victimized  by  the  financial  and  industrial  barons  whose 
motives  he  had  so  long  suspected. 

The  President's  clash  with  the  Negroes  resulted  from  an  incident  at 
Brownsville,  Texas,  on  August  14,  1906,  when  a  group  of  Negro 
soldiers  from  nearby  Fort  Brown  allegedly  killed  a  white  bartender 
and  wounded  a  policeman  in  a  wild  midnight  raid  on  the  town.  No 
one  of  the  alleged  participants  was  ever  positively  identified;  nor  did 

303 


304  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

any  one  of  them  ever  admit  responsibility.  They  were  never  tried 
before  a  court  of  law,  military  or  civil,  and  to  this  day  their  guilt 
remains  unproved.  Yet  Roosevelt,  in  a  flagrant  breach  of  the  Anglo- 
American  code  of  justice,  punished  three  companies  of  Negro  troops 
with  extraordinary  severity.  He  was  substantially  influenced  to  this 
action  by  the  report  of  the  soldiers'  commanding  officer,  who  reluc- 
tantly concluded  that  his  troops  were  blameworthy,  and  by  the  find- 
ings of  two  separate  investigations,  one  by  a  Major  August  B.  Block- 
son,  the  other  by  the  Inspector  General  of  the  Army. 

Major  Blockson's  report  charged  that  the  raid  had  been  "pre- 
concerted" and  that  many  members  of  the  three  Negro  companies 
stationed  at  Fort  Brown  had  entered  into  a  "conspiracy  of  silence" 
to  protect  the  men  who  had  actually  done  the  shooting;  he  recom- 
mended that  they  "be  made  to  suffer  with  others  more  guilty."  After 
an  intensive  effort  to  break  the  "conspiracy"  failed,  possibly  because 
there  was  none,  the  President  ordered  almost  the  entire  complement 
of  the  three  companies  in  question  "discharged  without  honor  .  .  . 
and  forever  barred  from  re-enlistment."  Of  the  1 60  or  more  soldiers 
thus  summarily  dismissed,  several  were  near  retirement  and  six  had 
won  the  coveted  Medal  of  Honor  in  campaigns  against  the  Indians, 
the  Spaniards,  or  the  Filipino  insurrectionists. 

Although  the  order  was  signed  on  November  5,  Roosevelt  withheld 
its  release  until  after  the  congressional  elections  of  November  6, 
presumably  to  mitigate  its  political  impact.  So,  at  least,  contended 
the  New  York  Herald,  which  claimed  that  a  shift  in  the  Negro  vote 
would  have  reduced  the  Republican  majority  in  the  House  of  Repre- 
sentatives from  59  to  14,  and  the  Washington  Post,  which  pointed  out 
that  a  switch  of  one  half  the  Negro  votes  in  Cincinnati  could  have 
defeated  the  President's  son-in-law,  Representative  Nicholas  Long- 
worth. 

The  President's  action  provoked  a  country-wide  reaction.  Many 
Southern  newspapers  applauded  his  course,  but  the  Northern  press 
sharply  criticized  it  and  Negro  editors  and  civic  leaders  vehemently 
condemned  it.  The  New  York  Age  castigated  the  discharge  order  as 
an  "outrage  upon  the  rights  of  citizens  who  are  entitled  in  civil  life 
to  trial  by  jury  and  in  military  life  to  trial  by  court-martial."  And  the 
pastor  of  the  Abyssinian  Baptist  Church  of  New  York  exclaimed  that 
although  Roosevelt  was  "once  enshrined  in  our  love  as  our  Moses," 
he  is  now  "enshrouded  in  our  scorn  as  our  Judas."  Only  in  Tuskegee, 


MORE   TROUBLES   AND   GREATER   TRIBULATIONS  305 

Alabama,  was  there  silence;  and  there  it  was  brutally  painful.  The 
President  had  "blundered,"  Booker  T.  Washington,  to  whom  Roose- 
velt had  given  advance  notice,  privately  wrote  a  friend,  and  ".  .  .  the 
enemy  will,  as  usual,  try  to  blame  me  for  all  of  this.  They  can  talk; 
I  cannot,  without  being  disloyal  to  our  friend,  who  [sic]  I  mean  to 
stand  by  throughout  his  administration." 

Roosevelt  was  to  ride  out  the  storm,  though  at  no  enhancement  to 
his  reputation  as  a  man  of  justice.  For  in  Joseph  B.  Foraker,  who 
unexpectedly  emerged  as  the  beleaguered  Negro  soldiers'  amicus 
curiae,  he  encountered  a  bold  and  resourceful  adversary.  The  veteran 
Ohio  senator  aspired  to  the  presidency  in  1908,  and  as  one  of  his 
biographers  writes,  he  needed  "an  issue  which  would  lend  itself  to 
exploitation  before  the  public  at  large."  Although  Foraker  believed 
at  first  that  the  soldiers  were  guilty  as  charged,  he  made  an  intensive 
private  investigation  during  November,  1906,  in  the  hope  that  he 
might  turn  up  something  of  political  advantage;  and  by  early  De- 
cember, when  Congress  convened,  he  had  convinced  himself  that  the 
affair  was  in  truth  an  "American  Dreyfus  Case."  From  then  on  the 
Ohioan  carried  the  torch  of  justice  almost  alone.  But  not  until  March 
2,  1909,  two  days  before  Roosevelt  left  office  in  triumph  and  Foraker 
left  it  in  disgrace,  a  victim  of  the  President's  wrath  and  the  revelation 
of  his  unseemly  relations  with  the  Standard  Oil  Company,  was  it 
lighted;  and  then  but  dimly.  On  that  date  Roosevelt  signed  a  compro- 
mise measure  which  authorized  the  appointment  of  a  high  military 
court  to  review  the  individual  cases  of  all  the  discharged  soldiers. 

The  two-year  controversy  between  the  imperious  President  and  the 
audacious  Senator  was  brisk  with  acrimony.  The  most  regrettable 
incident  occurred  at  the  Gridiron  Club  dinner  in  January,  1907. 
Failing  for  once  to  accept  the  newspapermen's  barbs  in  good  grace, 
Roosevelt  delivered  a  long  and  humorless  defense  of  his  policies  and 
then  virtually  flung  the  gauntlet  at  Foraker,  who  sat  less  than  twenty 
feet  away,  his  face  ashen.  With  the  temerity  that  had  always  set  him 
off  from  the  herd,  Foraker  retrieved  it.  For  twenty  minutes,  his  words 
interrupted  only  by  applause  from  the  tables,  he  tongue-lashed  the 
President  of  the  United  States,  charging  finally  that  Roosevelt's  han- 
dling of  the  Brownsville  case  had  been  illegal,  unconstitutional,  and 
unjustifiable. 

Furious,  Roosevelt  had  sprung  to  his  feet  demanding  time  for  a 


306  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

reply.  He  got  it — after  the  applause  for  Foraker  slowly  abated. 
Through  clenched  teeth,  with  squinting  eyes  and  flushing  face,  the 
President  emphatically  denied  the  Senate's  right  to  interfere  and 
dogmatically  asserted  that  only  he  had  the  power  to  mete  out  justice 
to  the  discharged  soldiers.  "The  only  reason  I  didn't  have  them  hung 
was  because  I  couldn't  find  out  which  ones  .  .  .  did  the  shooting," 
he  emphatically  added.  Some  of  them  were  "bloody  butchers."  He 
had  thereupon  stormed  out  of  the  hall,  leaving,  so  Foraker  recalled, 
"no  good  taste  in  anybody's  mouth  and  no  good  feeling  in  anybody's 
heart." 

Less  than  twenty-four  hours  later  the  President  had  recovered  his 
balance.  "Foraker  ought  not  to  have  been  called  upon  to  speak,"  he 
wrote  Beveridge,  "but,  as  he  was  called  upon,  I  do  not  blame  him 
much  for  the  speech  he  did  make." 

The  saddest  part  of  the  Brownsville  affair,  sadder  even  than  the 
President's  comportment  at  the  Gridiron  Club  dinner,  was  the  im- 
pression it  gave  of  Roosevelt's  attitude  toward  Negroes.  It  is  con- 
ceivable, of  course,  that  the  President's  indictment  would  have  been 
less  sweeping  and  his  punishment  less  severe  had  white  troops  been 
involved.  Yet  his  published  correspondence  fails  to  suggest  it.  On  the 
surface,  at  least,  Roosevelt's  resort  to  guilt  by  association  was  ani- 
mated by  a  conscientious,  if  misguided,  compulsion  to  maintain 
military  discipline  rather  than  by  racial  prejudice.  A  statement  he 
made  two  days  after  the  discharge  order  was  issued  is  convincing  of 
his  conscious  motives: 

When  the  discipline  and  honor  of  the  American  Army  are  at 
stake  I  shall  never  under  any  circumstances  consider  the  political 
bearing  of  upholding  that  discipline.  ...  To  show  you  how  little 
the  question  of  color  enters  into  the  matter,  I  need  only  point  out 
that  when  a  white  officer  was  alleged  to  be  guilty  in  speaking  of 
the  incident  of  commenting  unfavorably  on  the  black  troops  gen- 
erally, I  directed  an  immediate  investigation  into  his  words  and 
suitable  proceedings  against  him  should  he  prove  to  have  been 
correctly  quoted. 

Roosevelt  never  deviated  from  that  position.  To  underscore  it  and 
to  embarrass  Foraker  politically,  he  revealed  while  the  conflict  was  at 
its  peak  that  he  planned  to  appoint  a  prominent  Negro  to  a  high 
federal  post  in  Cincinnati  (Foraker,  who  was  caught  unaware,  testily 


MORE    TROUBLES   AND    GREATER   TRIBULATIONS  307 

told  newspapermen  to  consult  "the  third  Senator  from  Ohio — Booker 
Washington").  The  President  also  tried  to  redress  the  balance  during 
these  last,  troubled  years  by  directing  the  Army  to  consider  the 
organization  of  a  Negro  battalion  of  heavy  artillery.  And  in  1908  he 
threatened  the  Nashville,  Chattanooga  &  St.  Louis  Railway  Company 
with  legal  action  unless  it  provided  Negro  passengers  with  facilities. 
Also,  in  his  annual  message  of  1906,  which  came  between  the  issuance 
of  the  discharge  order  and  the  clash  with  Foraker  at  the  Gridiron 
Club,  Roosevelt  coupled  a  ringing  denunciation  of  lynching  with  a 
rational  appeal  for  improved  Negro  education : 

It  is  out  of  the  question  for  our  people  as  a  whole  permanently 
to  rise  by  treading  down  any  of  their  own  number.  The  free  public 
school,  the  chance  for  each  boy  or  girl  to  get  a  good  elementary 
education,  lies  at  the  foundation  of  our  whole  political  situation. 
...  It  is  as  true  for  the  Negro  as  for  the  white  man. 

The  President's  effort  to  redeem  his  reputation  for  fair-mindedness 
met  only  moderate  success.  His  strictures  against  lynching  failed  to 
mollify  the  Negro  press  because  he  sapped  their  strength  by  estimating 
that  one-third  of  the  lynchings  in  the  South  were  actually  incited  by 
rape  (he  had  earlier  complained  to  Owen  Wister  about  Charleston 
aristocrats  who  "shriek  in  public  about  miscegenation,  but  .  .  .  leer 
as  they  talk  to  me  privately  of  the  colored  mistresses  and  colored  chil- 
dren of  white  men  whom  they  know").  And  to  the  end  Brownsville 
remained  an  open  wound,  one  that  historians  would  open  still  wider. 
There  were  some,  even  then,  who  were  able  to  place  the  affair  in 
perspective.  Among  them  was  Booker  T.  Washington  whose  views, 
admittedly,  were  influenced  by  the  primacy  in  Negro  circles  his  friend- 
ship with  Roosevelt  had  given  him.  "The  bulk  of  the  Negro  people 
are  more  and  more  inclined  to  reach  the  decision  that  even  though 
the  President  did  go  against  their  wishes  in  dismissing  the  soldiers  at 
Brownsville,"  Washington  wrote  in  June,  1908,  "he  has  favored  them 
in  nine  cases  out  of  ten  and  the  intelligent  portion  of  the  race  does  not 
believe  that  it  is  fair  or  wise  to  condemn  such  good  friends  as  Presi- 
dent Roosevelt  and  Secretary  Taft  because  they  might  have  done 
what  they  considered  right."  The  patient  educator,  whose  controversial 
counsel  to  fellow  Negroes  to  eschew  the  professions  for  the  manual 
arts  was  already  under  attack  by  radicals  like  William  E.  B.  DuBois 
(though  not  by  Roosevelt),  added  that  it  "is  not  the  part  of  common 


308  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

sense  to  cherish  ill  will  against  one  who  has  helped  us  in  so  many 
ways  as  the  President  has." 

Meanwhile  Roosevelt  was  forcing  other  of  his  friends  to  defend  his 
representations  against  the  nature-fakers.  Of  all  the  controversies  of 
the  presidential  years,  this  was  the  most  needless.  No  weighty  public 
matter  stood  in  the  offing;  no  election  hung  in  the  balance.  All  that 
the  President  could  gain  was  the  satisfaction  of  speaking  his  mind, 
and  he  could  gain  that  only  by  compromising  the  dignity  of  his  office. 

Like  so  many  of  Roosevelt's  seemingly  impulsive  acts,  the  assault 
on  the  nature-fakers  had  been  long  in  building  up.  The  first  round 
had  been  fired  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly  some  years  before  by  John 
Burroughs,  who  flailed  the  Rev.  William  J.  Long,  a  pseudo  nature 
writer  who  attributed  human  characteristics  and  other  absurdities  to 
wild  animals.  It  is  the  measure  of  Roosevelt's  devotion  to  science 
that  in  writing  Burroughs  that  he  was  "delighted"  with  his  forthright 
exposure  of  misrepresentation,  he  also  challenged  the  great  naturalist 
himself.  "Don't  you  think  that  you  perhaps  scarcely  allow  sufficiently 
for  the  extraordinary  change  made  in  the  habits  of  wild  animals  by 
experiences  with  man?"  he  wrote.  Burroughs  had  agreed.  "I  shall 
never  cease  to  marvel  at  the  variety  of  your  interests  and  the  extent 
of  your  knowledge,"  he  replied.  "You  seem  to  be  able  to  discipline 
and  correct  any  one  of  us  in  his  chosen  field.  My  Atlantic  paper  has 
some  hasty  streaks  in  it." 

During  the  next  several  years  other  prominent  naturalists  also 
criticized  the  Long  school  while  Roosevelt,  with  difficulty,  repressed 
his  own  rising  irritation.  Finally,  in  the  spring  of  1907,  he  lost  control, 
giving  out  an  interview  under  the  title  "Roosevelt  on  the  Nature 
Fakirs."  "You  will  be  pleased  to  know,"  he  wrote  Burroughs,  "that 
I  finally  proved  unable  to  contain  myself,  and  .  .  .  sailed  into  Long 
and  Jack  London  and  one  or  two  others  of  the  more  preposterous 
writers  of  'unnatural'  history."  "I  know  that  as  President  I  ought  not 
to  do  this,"  he  added,  "but  I  was  having  an  awful  time  toward  the 
end  of  the  session  and  I  felt  I  simply  had  to  permit  myself  some 
diversion." 

The  Reverend  Long  staggered  under  the  presidential  censure;  but 
only  momentarily.  In  two  forceful  public  letters  he  accused  Roosevelt 
of  "bad  taste  and  cowardice"  and  ridiculed  the  contention  that  the 
President  was  a  naturalist.  "I  find  after  carefully  reading  two  of  his 


MORE   TROUBLES   AND    GREATER   TRIBULATIONS  309 

big  books,"  he  vitriolically  wrote,  "that  every  time  Mr.  Roosevelt  gets 
near  the  heart  of  a  wild  thing  he  invariably  puts  a  bullet  through  it. 
From  his  own  records  I  have  reckoned  a  full  thousand  hearts  which 
he  has  thus  known  intimately.  In  one  chapter  alone  I  find  that  he 
violently  gained  knowledge  of  1 1  noble  elk  hearts  in  a  few  days." 

Rarely  had  the  President  given  his  hungry  critics  such  an  oppor- 
tunity. Many  people  felt  that  Long's  false  nature  writing  was  less 
offensive  than  Roosevelt's  wanton  killing;  and  many  more  concluded 
that  whatever  the  President's  reasons,  he  had  been  ungentlemanly  and 
cruel  in  attacking  a  private  citizen. 

Nevertheless,  neither  Roosevelt  nor  his  friends  were  willing  to  drop 
the  matter.  On  their  own  initiative  the  director  of  the  New  York 
Zoological  Park,  the  curator  of  Mammalogy  and  Ornithology  at  the 
American  Museum  of  Natural  History,  and  a  number  of  other  natural- 
ists defended  the  President  in  the  September,  1906,  issue  of  Every- 
body's. And  in  the  same  issue  Roosevelt  expounded  on  that  commit- 
ment to  truth  that  had  obviously  been  his  ruling  motive: 

We  abhor  deliberate  or  reckless  untruth  in  this  study  of  natural 
history  as  much  as  in  any  other,  and  therefore  we  feel  that  a  grave 
wrong  is  committed  by  all  who,  holding  a  position  that  entitles  them 
to  respect,  yet  condone  and  encourage  such  untruth. 

Resentment  against  the  President's  action  in  the  nature-fakers  inci- 
dent was  still  seething  when  he  became  involved  in  a  far  more  sig- 
nificant imbroglio.  This  time,  however,  his  role  was  confidential. 

Rumors  of  an  impending  break  in  the  stock  market  had  started  in 
December,  1906,  when  Roosevelt  submitted  to  Congress  his  most 
radical  annual  message  so  far.  An  expansion  of  the  constructive  parts 
of  his  muck-rake  speech  and  of  a  hard-hitting  address  he  had  de- 
livered at  Harrisburg,  Pennsylvania,  during  the  congressional  cam- 
paign, it  declared  that  all  big  business  was  really  engaged  in  interstate 
commerce  and  should  consequently  be  brought  under  federal  control. 
Specifically,  it  called  for  compulsory  publicity  of  corporations'  ac- 
counts, government  inspection  of  their  books,  and,  as  La  Follette  had 
argued  for  the  previous  spring,  physical  valuation  of  railroad  prop- 
erties. It  further  contended  that  the  "authority"  for  these  measures 
was  inherent  in  the  Constitution.  The  tough-mindedness  which  had 
always  distinguished  Roosevelt's  views  on  big  business  from  Bryan's 
pervaded  the  message.  The  President  dutifully  denounced  monopoly; 


310  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

but  he  proposed  no  inclusive  assault  on  the  trusts.  "Our  effort  should 
be  not  so  much  to  prevent  consolidation  .  .  .  ,"  he  wrote,  "but  so  to 
supervise  and  control  it  as  to  see  that  it  results  in  no  harm  to  the 
people."  Only  through  "such  adequate  control  and  regulation  .  .  . 
as  will  do  away  with  the  evils  which  give  rise  to  the  agitation  against 
them"  could  government  ownership  of  the  railroads  be  averted.  Ob- 
serving that  some  people  claimed  that  "such  control  would  do  away 
with  the  freedom  of  individual  initiative  and  dwarf  individual  effort," 
Roosevelt  flatly  asserted  that  "This  is  not  a  fact."  Indeed,  he  con- 
tinued, "the  deadening  and  degrading  effect  of  pure  socialism,  and 
especially  of  its  extreme  form,  communism  ...  are  in  part  achieved 
by  the  wholly  unregulated  competition  which  results  in  a  single  indi- 
vidual or  corporation  rising  at  the  expense  of  all  others." 

Whether  or  not  the  men  of  the  Street  agreed  with  the  Boston 
Herald,  which  termed  the  message  "a  fine  example  of  restrained 
radicalism  and  progressive  conservatism,"  the  stock  market  had  soon 
steadied.  Nevertheless,  rumors  persisted  that  the  President  would  make 
an  unsettling  move,  perhaps  against  the  great  Harriman  empire,  which 
was  then  under  investigation  by  the  Interstate  Commerce  Commission. 
And  when  the  market  suddenly  broke  sharply  on  March  14 — Harri- 
man's  Union  Pacific  dropped  twenty-five  points — railroad  officials 
openly  cried  "persecution."  "I  would  hate  to  tell  you  to  whom  I  think 
you  ought  to  go  for  an  explanation  of  all  this,"  Harriman  bitterly 
exclaimed  to  reporters. 

The  President  was  now  in  a  quandary.  Should  he  try  to  stave  off 
panic  by  directing  the  Interstate  Commerce  Commission  to  let  up? 
(The  Fifty-ninth  Congress  had  expired  without  taking  action  on  the 
proposals  made  in  his  annual  message. )  Or  should  he  encourage  the 
reform  movement  on  the  theory,  as  expounded  in  January  to  the 
president  of  the  Santa  Fe,  "that  we  have  got  to  make  up  our  minds 
that  the  railroads  must  not  in  the  future  do  things  which  cannot  bear 
the  light?"  Apparently,  Roosevelt  decided  to  hold  to  reform  but  to 
soften  its  impact  by  conciliatory  words.  On  March  15,  he  directed 
the  Commission  to  undertake  a  comprehensive  investigation  of  the 
railroad  industry  with  particular  reference  to  physical  evaluation, 
legitimacy  of  stock  issues,  and  vertical  and  horizontal  integration. 
"I  desire  from  you,"  he  wrote  the  Commission,  "recommendations 
definite  and  precise  in  character  to  secure  a  far  more  thoro-going 
supervision  and  control  than  we  now  have  over  the  great  agencies  of 


MORE    TROUBLES   AND   GREATER   TRIBULATIONS  311 

interstate  transportation."  Two  and  one-half  months  later,  however, 
with  talk  of  panic  still  current,  he  made  a  psychological  concession  to 
business  by  declaring  at  Indianapolis  that  he  did  not  believe  the  rail- 
roads were  overcapitalized. 

During  the  summer  of  1907  the  situation  worsened.  The  President 
was  subjected  to  heavy  pressure  from  businessmen  to  let  up,  especially 
after  Judge  Kenesaw  Mountain  Landis,  whom  Roosevelt  characterized 
as  having  "the  face  of  a  fanatic — honest,  fearless,  well-meaning,  but 
tense  to  a  degree  that  makes  me  apprehensive,"  rocked  the  corporate 
world  by  imposing  a  fine  of  more  than  $29  million  against  the  Stand- 
ard Oil  Company  for  violating  the  Elkins  Act  on  some  fourteen  hun- 
dred separate  counts. 

The  President  refused,  however,  to  give  substantial  ground.  "I  have 
tried  my  best  not  to  take  up  any  old  offenses,"  he  wrote  the  Boston 
banker  Henry  Lee  Higginson,  on  August  12,  "but  I  cannot  grant  an 
illegal  immunity.  If  we  have  to  proceed  against  anyone  it  is  because 
he  has  sinned  against  the  light."  Eight  days  later,  in  an  address  at 
Provincetown,  Roosevelt  dropped  a  bomb  of  his  own.  After  charging 
that  "certain  malefactors  of  great  wealth"  were  actually  forcing  a 
panic  in  the  hope  that  it  would  effect  a  "reversal"  of  his  regulatory 
policies  "so  that  they  may  enjoy  unmolested  the  fruits  of  their  own 
evil-doing,"  he  strongly  urged  the  criminal  prosecution  of  businessmen 
law-breakers.  Unfortunately,  he  observed,  "the  average  juryman 
wishes  to  see  trusts  broken  up  ...  but  is  very  reluctant  to  find  the 
facts  .  .  .  when  it  comes  to  sending  to  jail  a  reputable  member  of 
the  business  community  for  doing  what  the  business  community  has 
unhappily  grown  to  recognize  as  well-nigh  normal  in  business." 

Nothing  untoward  followed  the  President's  forceful  reaffirmation 
of  his  policies,  for  the  financial  disturbances  were  caused  by  an  inter- 
national overextension  of  credit  rather  than  by  Roosevelt's  various 
pronouncements.  Not  until  the  middle  of  October,  when  reports  of 
the  attempt  by  a  group  of  swashbuckling  banker-speculators  to  corner 
the  copper  market  with  funds  drawn  from  their  own  unstable  trust 
companies,  as  well  as  the  large  and  sound  Knickerbocker  Trust 
Company  of  New  York,  were  blazoned  across  the  headlines  did  a 
major  crisis  occur.  Overnight  long  lines  of  frantic  depositors  formed 
outside  the  affected  institution's  doors,  and  by  the  end  of  the  week 
the  runs  had  forced  them  all  to  close.  Throughout  the  nation,  but 
especially  in  New  York,  the  already  overdrawn  credit  lines  became 


312  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

taut.  The  Westinghouse  Company  went  into  receivership;  the  Stock 
Exchange  in  Pittsburgh  suspended  operations;  Western  banks  de- 
manded more  and  more  money  from  their  New  York  depositories. 
And  the  great  Trust  Company  of  America  faced  imminent  collapse. 

At  this  juncture  J.  Pierpont  Morgan  brought  the  force  of  his 
commanding  abilities  to  bear.  On  Wednesday  morning,  October  23, 
while  Roosevelt  was  hurriedly  returning  from  a  hunt  in  the  Louisiana 
canebrakes  and  before  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  George  B.  Cortelyou 
arranged  to  deposit  $25  million  of  government  funds  in  New  York's 
national  banks,  Morgan  prevented  the  Trust  Company  of  America 
from  closing  by  making  a  heavy  deposit  of  private  monies.  The  next 
morning  some  of  the  government's  deposits  were  added  to  Morgan's 
central  fund,  and  these,  together  with  a  new  pooling  of  Wall  Street's 
resources,  kept  both  the  Trust  Company  and  the  Stock  Exchange 
open  until  the  regular  closing  on  Friday. 

The  President  was  relieved.  On  Friday,  following  consultations 
with  Root  and  others,  he  wrote  Cortelyou  a  public  letter  designed  to 
call  attention  to  the  government's  role  in  staying  the  panic  and  to 
help  restore  general  confidence.  "I  congratulate  you  upon  the  admi- 
rable way  in  which  you  have  handled  the  present  crisis,"  Roosevelt 
said  in  part. 

I  congratulate  also  those  conservative  and  substantial  business- 
men who  in  this  crisis  have  acted  with  such  wisdom  and  public 
spirit.  By  their  action  they  did  invaluable  service  in  checking  the 
panic  which,  beginning  as  a  matter  of  speculation,  was  threatening 
to  destroy  the  confidence  and  credit  necessary  to  the  conduct  of 
legitimate  business. 

Within  limits,  the  President  was  right.  Whatever  their  past  errors, 
the  "conservative"  bankers  of  New  York  had  acted  wisely  and 
speedily.  Indeed,  Morgan  had  been  a  central  bank  unto  himself. 
"At  a  time  when  the  almost  universal  instinct  was  to  pull  one's  own 
chestnuts  out  of  the  fire,  to  escape  new  commitments,  to  dodge 
responsibility,"  wrote  Frederick  Lewis  Allen,  "he  risked  everything, 
again  and  again,  on  the  success  of  his  campaign."  He  had,  in  addition, 
wielded  power  greater  than  that  of  the  President  of  the  United  States 
— further  testimony  to  the  precarious  state  of  the  republic.  Roosevelt 
was  destined  to  go  out  of  office  without  having  substantially  modi- 
fied it. 


MORE    TROUBLES   AND   GREATER   TRIBULATIONS  313 

If  the  devoutly  religious  Morgan  had  greater  courage  and  a  higher 
conception  of  the  commonweal  than  most  of  his  fellow  financiers,  he 
was  nonetheless  willing  to  use  the  situation  to  his  own  advantage.  The 
money  shortage  had  carried  on  into  the  next  week,  and  by  the  week- 
end the  prominent  brokerage  firm  of  Moore  &  Schley,  which  held  a 
great  block  of  the  Tennessee  Coal  and  Iron  Company's  stock,  was  in 
danger  of  failing.  Morgan  again  responded  to  the  challenge. 

On  Saturday,  November  2,  an  emissary  of  Moore  and  Schley  sug- 
gested to  the  great  financier  that  his  United  States  Steel  Corporation 
buy  out  the  small,  but  competing,  Tennessee  Coal  and  Iron  Company. 
Its  bonds  could  then  be  substituted  for  the  Tennessee  Company's, 
saving  Moore  &  Schley  and  averting  a  crisis  among  brokerage  firms 
in  general.  Morgan  pondered  over  the  proposal.  He  could  possibly 
have  bailed  out  Moore  &  Schley  by  other  means.  Grant  B.  Schley  later 
admitted  to  a  congressional  committee  that  all  the  firm  really  needed 
was  five  or  six  million  dollars  in  "real  money,"  while  Judge  Elbert  H. 
Gary,  the  Steel  Corporation's  president,  conceded  that  a  loan  would 
have  sufficed.  At  the  time,  however,  Moore  and  Schley  rejected 
Morgan's  offer  of  a  five-million-dollar  loan  as  insufficient.  Spurred  by 
his  partner,  George  W.  Perkins,  Morgan  consequently  decided  to 
pursue  the  merger  proposal.  He  was  convinced  that  the  T.  C.  &  I.'s 
coal  and  iron  deposits  alone  were  worth  the  price,  and  after  prolonged 
argument  with  Henry  Clay  Frick  he  prevailed  on  the  Steel  Corpora- 
tion's Finance  Committee  to  buy  T.  C.  &  I.,  at  par  with  United  States 
Steel  bonds. 

But  Judge  Gary  was  at  once  more  cautious  and  more  subtle  than 
the  bull-like  Morgan;  at  his  insistence  the  deal  was  made  contingent 
on  President  Roosevelt's  agreement.  Twice  before  Gary  had  made 
arrangements  with  the  President  or  his  representatives — for  the  Steel 
Corporation  in  the  fall  of  1905  and  for  the  International  Harvester 
Company  in  the  winter  of  1907.  In  each  of  these  "gentlemen's  agree- 
ments" Gary  had  agreed  to  open  all  the  company's  books  and  records 
to  the  Bureau  of  Corporations  with  the  understanding  that  the  re- 
sultant information  would  be  used  "by  the  President  alone  for  his 
guidance  in  making  such  suggestions  to  Congress  concerning  legisla- 
tion as  might  be  proper,  expedient,  and  for  the  actual  benefit  of  the 
general  public."  In  each  case  the  administration  had  agreed  that  the 
President,  rather  than  the  Attorney  General,  would  have  the  final 
determination  of  what  matters  should  be  kept  confidential.  Although 


314  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

neither  agreement  specified  that  the  corporations  would  be  exempted 
from  prosecution  for  irregularities,  the  Morgan-Gary  group  assumed 
that  Roosevelt  would  not  take  such  action  until  after  they  had  been 
granted  time  to  make  their  practices  conform  to  the  law.  The  President 
was  too  astute  to  make  an  explicit  promise  to  that  effect.  But  as  his 
continued  failure  to  institute  suit  against  the  companies  suggests  and 
his  repeated  recommendations  to  Congress  for  more  comprehensive 
regulatory  legislation  confirm,  Wall  Street's  assumption  that  he  was 
more  interested  in  sustained  regulation  than  haphazard  dissolution 
was  correct.  Indeed,  so  the  historian  Robert  Wiebe  observes,  the  only 
broad  difference  in  outlook  was  that  the  Wall  Street  men  conceived 
themselves  as  equal  partners  in  the  business-government  relationship 
(a  marked  decline,  assuredly,  from  their  status  as  senior  partners 
when  Roosevelt  succeeded  McKinley),  and  the  President  regarded 
them  as  junior  partners. 

In  these  circumstances,  Morgan  readily  agreed  that  a  conference 
with  Roosevelt  was  desirable,  and  late  that  Sunday  night  Gary  and 
Frick  departed  for  Washington.  They  met  with  the  President  (whom 
they  found  at  breakfast)  and  Root  early  the  next  morning.  Blandly, 
Gary  explained  that  the  United  States  Steel  Corporation  had  an  oppor- 
tunity to  purchase  the  Tennessee  Coal  and  Iron  Company  at  a  "price 
somewhat  in  excess  of  its  true  value."  Should  the  President  approve 
the  purchase  before  the  Stock  Exchange  opened  at  ten  that  morning, 
he  continued,  it  "would  be  of  great  benefit  to  financial  conditions,  and 
would  probably  save  further  failure  of  important  business  concerns." 
Gary  and  Frick  had  then  professed  purity  of  motive.  "Judge  Gary 
and  Mr.  Frick  inform  me  that  as  a  mere  business  transaction  they  do 
not  care  to  purchase  the  stock,"  Roosevelt  afterward  wrote  Attorney 
General  Bonaparte  for  the  record.  They  say,  he  continued,  that  "but 
little  benefit  will  come  to  the  Steel  Corporation  from  the  purchase; 
that  they  are  aware  that  the  purchase  will  be  used  as  a  handle  for 
attack  upon  them  on  the  ground  that  they  are  striving  to  secure  a 
monopoly  of  the  business  and  prevent  competition.  .  .  .  But  they 
feel  that  it  is  immensely  to  their  interest,  as  to  the  interest  of  every 
responsible  businessman,  to  try  to  prevent  a  panic  and  general  in- 
dustrial smashup  at  this  time."  "I  answered  that  while  of  course  I 
could  not  advise  them  to  take  the  action  proposed,  I  felt  it  no  public 
duty  of  mine  to  interpose  any  objection." 

The  episode  haunted  Roosevelt  thereafter.  It  was  used  by  the 


MORE   TROUBLES   AND    GREATER   TRIBULATIONS  315 

Democrats  without  full  exposition  of  the  facts  as  a  campaign  issue 
in  1908;  it  was  raised  during  the  investigation  of  the  United  States 
Steel  Corporation  in  1911  with  portentous  consequences  to  the 
course  of  American  political  history;  and  it  was  sporadically  revived 
during  the  rest  of  Roosevelt's  life.  Pringle  has  woven  it  into  a  kind  of 
"babe  in  the  woods"  account  of  Roosevelt's  relations  with  "The 
Wicked  Speculators."  And  some  historians  regarded  it  as  prima  facie 
evidence  of  Roosevelt's  two-facedness. 

Indubitably,  Roosevelt  had  been  imposed  upon.  The  United  States 
Steel  Corporation's  acquisition  of  the  Tennessee  Coal  and  Iron  Com- 
pany strengthened  its  already  favored  position  within  the  industry  and 
measurably  increased  its  assets.  In  spite  of  the  impression  conveyed 
by  Gary  and  Frick,  moreover,  it  remains  an  open  question  whether 
the  merger  was  the  only  means  of  saving  Moore  &  Schley.  Yet  what 
else  could  the  President  have  done?  He  was  advised  that  rejection  of 
the  proposal  would  induce  a  new  panic  and  possibly  a  real  depression. 
He  was  told  that  time  was  of  the  essence  and  that  the  decision  had 
to  be  made  before  the  Stock  Exchange  opened  that  morning.  And  he 
was  assured  that  Morgan  and  the  others  were  acting  in  good  con- 
science. He  did,  accordingly,  what  circumstances  dictated;  he  accepted 
the  word  of  Gary  and  Frick  as  that  of  gentlemen. 

The  President's  tacit  consent  to  the  merger  should  also  be  viewed 
in  the  context  of  his  maturing  trust  philosophy.  As  his  call  for  a 
sweeping  regulatory  program  in  December,  1906  suggests,  he  by  then 
entertained  little  brief  for  the  Sherman  Law  except  as  a  political  or 
moral  weapon;  during  the  year  and  one  half  following  the  Panic  of 
1907  he  would  invoke  it  only  in  the  most  extreme  cases.  It  seems 
reasonable  to  contend,  therefore,  that  he  was  broadly  predisposed  to 
approve  the  merger.  And  though  he  hedged  in  his  letter  to  Bonaparte 
by  emphasizing  that  the  Steel  Corporation's  holdings  would  still  com- 
prise less  than  60  per  cent  of  those  of  the  industry  at  large,  the 
transaction  as  he  understood  it  was  consistent  with  his  own  philosophy 
on  monopoly. 

As  the  long  term  economic  consequences  of  the  merger  prove, 
however,  Roosevelt's  inability  to  give  a  specific  definition  to  the 
philosophy — to  define  the  indirect  no  less  than  the  direct  limits  of 
tolerance — was  critical.  The  contention  that  control  of  less  than  60 
per  cent  of  the  industry  failed  to  constitute  a  monopoly  had  a  super- 
ficial appeal;  and  in  1920  the  Supreme  Court  itself  succumbed  to  it, 


316  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

refusing  to  order  the  Steel  Corporation's  dissolution  after  a  long  and 
exhausting  suit.  But  the  apparent  effect  of  the  absorption  of  Tennessee 
Coal  and  Iron  by  U.S.  Steel  was  the  partial  subversion  of  the  interests 
of  a  section  of  the  nation.  Controlled  thereafter  from  Pittsburgh  and 
New  York,  T.  C.  &  I.  was  forced  to  pursue  policies  consonant  with 
the  interests  of  U.S.  Steel  rather  than  the  economy  of  the  Southeast. 
It  was  subjected  to  "basing  point"  prices  that  by  some  accounts  pre- 
vented it  from  capitalizing  fully  on  its  ability  to  produce  more  cheaply 
than  the  parent  corporation's  northern  subsidiaries;  its  natural  pro- 
pensity to  expand  and  diversify  its  production  was  seriously  curbed; 
and  the  steel-consuming  industries  throughout  the  region  it  served 
seemingly  grew  less  rapidly  than  they  would  have  had  T.  C.  &  I.  been 
free  to  meet  their  demands. 

Probably  neither  Morgan  nor  Gary,  and  surely  not  Frick,  foresaw 
all  this  at  the  time.  Whatever  their  misrepresentations  to  Roosevelt  in 
the  White  House  Conference,  the  conspiratorial  element  is  lacking  in 
their  talks  in  New  York  at  the  height  of  the  Panic.  Nevertheless,  the 
absorption  of  the  southern  company  gave  them  and  their  successors 
a  powerful  influence  over  the  fortunes  of  the  Southeast;  and  in  so 
doing  it  sharply  pointed  up  the  basic  weakness  in  the  President's 
approach  to  the  trust  problem. 

Otherwise,  the  Panic  of  1907  proved  salutary.  By  dramatizing  the 
inadequacies  of  the  banking  and  currency  system  it  set  the  stage  for 
meliorative  legislation  in  1908  and  thoroughgoing  reform  in  1913 
when  the  Federal  Reserve  Law  was  enacted  under  Woodrow  Wilson. 
After  Roosevelt  again  called  for  corrective  legislation  in  his  annual 
message  of  December,  1907,  Senator  Aldrich  introduced  a  bill  author- 
izing national  banks  to  issue  additional  notes  up  to  $500  million  in 
times  of  emergency.  The  notes  were  to  be  based  on  municipal,  state, 
and  railroad  bonds,  and  they  were  to  be  taxed  in  order  to  expedite 
their  retirement  once  the  money  market  loosened.  This  was  somewhat 
less  than  the  President  had  recommended. 

Meanwhile  a  bill  that  anticipated  the  Federal  Reserve  Act  in  many 
essentials  was  introduced  in  the  House.  Politics,  insecurity,  and  a  lack 
of  economic  imagination  combined,  however,  to  force  its  rejection. 
Cannon  and  Aldrich  found  it  too  unorthodox.  Roosevelt  himself  con- 
sidered it  inflationary;  also  "very  puzzling."  Furthermore,  he  leaned 
too  heavily  on  Aldrich.  As  he  facilely  wrote  in  defense  of  the  Rhode 
Islander's  measure  a  few  weeks  later: 


MORE    TROUBLES   AND    GREATER   TRIBULATIONS  317 

I  would  like  to  see  a  thoroly  good  system  of  banking  and  cur- 
rency .  .  .  and  yet  this  is  the  only  measure  that  has  been  pro- 
posed that  we  can  seriously  consider.  The  trouble  is  that  the  minute 
I  try  to  get  action  all  the  financiers  and  businessmen  differ  so  that 
nobody  can  advise  me,  nobody  can  give  me  any  aid;  and  only 
Senator  Aldrich  has  prepared  a  bill. 

A  substitute  administration  offering,  the  Vreeland  bill,  meanwhile 
passed  the  House.  As  merged  with  Aldrich's  bill  and  enacted  into 
law,  it  modified  the  former's  Eastern  bias  by  broadening  the  base  for 
note  issues  in  the  South  and  the  West.  It  still  gave  heavy  advantage 
to  the  East,  however,  and  Southern  Democrats  and  Republican  pro- 
gressives pummelled  it  unmercifully.  Carter  Glass  of  Virginia  charged 
that  the  three  man  committee  of  bankers  empowered  to  handle  the 
reserve  fund  in  time  of  crisis  would  reflect  the  interests  of  the  great 
financial  institutions  and  could  readily  strangle  small  country  banks. 
He  further  contended  that  it  "perpetuates  and  accentuates  the  rigidity 
of  a  bond-secured  currency  system,"  and  he  finally  dismissed  it  as 
"50  per  cent  House  infamy  and  50  per  cent  Senate  infamy."  John 
Sharp  Williams  of  Mississippi  claimed  that  it  ought  "to  be  entitled  the 
'Cannon-Aldrich  political  emergency  bill.'  "  And  La  Follette  was 
equally  vitriolic  and  considerably  more  voluble. 

The  criticisms  were  partisan  and  overdrawn.  The  Aldrich-Vreeland 
bill  was  designed  as  a  temporary  expedient  rather  than  an  inclusive 
reform,  and  its  provision  for  a  study  commission  was  of  momentous 
importance.  Nevertheless,  many  of  the  opposition's  points  were  well 
taken,  and  the  Federal  Reserve  Act  would  incorporate  them.  As 
Roosevelt's  critics  contend,  furthermore,  his  failure  to  fashion  sub- 
stantial banking  and  currency  reform  was  one  of  the  signal  defeats 
of  his  presidency. 

Like  Roosevelt's  other  failures,  however,  it  fades  into  insignificance 
beside  his  towering  contribution  to  the  conservation  movement. 


CHAPTER  19 


FOR  THE  GENERATIONS 
YET  UNBORN 


When  the  historian  .  .  .  shall  speak  of  Theodore  Roosevelt, 
he  is  likely  to  say  that  he  did  many  notable  things,  but  that  his 
greatest  work  was  inspiring  and  actually  beginning  a  world  move- 
ment for  staying  territorial  waste  and  saving  for  the  human  race 
the  things  on  which  alone  a  peaceful,  progressive,  and  happy  life 
can  be  founded. 

— Robert  M.  La  Follette,  Autobiography 


Of  all  Roosevelt's  constructive  endeavors,  the  movement  for  conser- 
vation was  the  most  remarkable  for  sustained  intellectual  and  adminis- 
trative force.  In  none  other  did  the  President  blend  the  scientific 
outlook  and  his  moralistic  conception  of  the  public  interest  quite  so 
effectively;  in  only  one  other,  foreign  policy,  did  he  submerge  partisan 
politics  nearly  so  decisively.  For  more  than  seven  years,  often  against 
the  avowed  opposition  of  the  most  powerful  leaders  of  his  own  party, 
and  at  the  bitter  end  against  the  combined  opposition  of  both  parties, 
he  pressed  Congress  and  the  states  to  place  the  future  public  interest 
above  the  current  private  interest.  And  though  he  was  repeatedly 
criticized,  rebuffed,  and  insulted,  he  refused  to  be  thwarted  or  even 
to  compromise  significantly. 

Roosevelt  was  always  frank  to  confess  that  his  conservation  pro- 
gram was  builded  upon  the  labors  and  visions  of  scientists  who  had 
given,  or  were  to  give,  the  flower  of  their  lives  to  its  advancement. 
"They  actually  did  the  job  that  I  and  the  others  talked  about,"  he 
pointed  out  in  an  address  at  Harvard  two  years  after  he  left  the  White 

318 


FOR  THE  GENERATIONS  YET  UNBORN  319 

House.  "I  know  what  they  did  because  it  was  something  in  which  I 
intensely  believed,  and  yet  it  was  something  about  which  I  did  not 
have  enough  practical  knowledge  to  work  except  through  them.  .  .  ." 
Yet,  as  virtually  everyone  who  has  written  about  the  conservation 
movement  has  warmly  conceded,  the  President's  was  the  ultimate 
responsibility. 

Roosevelt  would  have  undoubtedly  thrown  himself  into  the  move- 
ment whatever  the  circumstances  of  his  presidency.  His  empiricism, 
love  of  nature,  obsession  with  orderly  development,  and  devotion  to 
the  public  good  are  all  suggestive  of  that.  But  he  would  hardly  have 
promoted  it  with  such  extraordinary  boldness  and  imagination  had 
it  not  been  for  his  inspiring  relationship  with  Gifford  Pinchot,  Chief 
Forester  of  the  United  States  and  one  of  American  history's  most 
constructive  secondary  leaders. 

The  scion  of  an  old  Huguenot  family  of  moderate  wealth  and  high 
public  spirit  (the  Pinchots  in  1900  made  the  grant  that  started  the 
Yale  Forestry  School),  Gifford  was  thirty-six  years  old  when  Roose- 
velt became  President.  A  tall  and  sinewy  figure  with  piercing  eyes, 
a  thin  straight  nose,  and  a  long  sharp  chin  that  a  drooping  mustache 
barely  softened,  he  wore  an  air  of  compelling  urgency.  He  was  con- 
stantly converting,  or  trying  to  convert,  and  only  his  natural  gracious- 
ness  and  the  high  fortune  of  his  friendship  with  the  President  early 
spared  him  the  fate  of  many  another  zealot.  For  more,  even,  than 
most  men  with  a  mission,  Pinchot  was  fanatically  confident  of  the 
righteousness  of  his  cause.  Upon  its  altar  he  would  eventually  sacrifice 
his  governmental  career. 

Roosevelt  had  known  Pinchot  well  enough  to  sponsor  him  for 
membership  in  the  Boone  and  Crockett  Club  in  the  1890's.  But  not 
until  Roosevelt  became  governor  of,  New  York  did  the  two  men  be- 
come close.  Once,  during  the  winter  of  1899,  Pinchot  stopped  in 
Albany  for  an  overnight  visit,  arriving,  so  he  later  wrote,  "just  as  the 
Executive  Mansion  was  under  ferocious  attack  from  a  band  of 
invisible  Indians,  and  the  Governor  of  the  Empire  State  was  helping 
a  houseful  of  children  to  escape  by  lowering  them  out  of  the  second- 
story  window  on  a  rope."  After  the  children  had  been  "saved,"  the 
forester  had  proved  his  mettle  by  knocking  Roosevelt  "off  his  very 
solid  pins"  in  a  boxing  match.  He  and  his  host  had  then  discussed 
forestry. 

While  one  of  the  nation's  most  singularly  productive  friendships 


320  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

was  thus  being  sealed,  the  conservation  cause  had  been  going  badly  in 
Washington.  By  Roosevelt's  accession  in  1901  more  than  twenty-six 
million  acres  of  public  lands  had  been  withdrawn  from  private  entry; 
but  the  figures  were  deceptive.  Under  the  prevailing  leasing  system 
private  exploitation  of  minerals,  timber,  and  water-power  sites  went 
on  apace,  even  in  the  so-called  reserves.  Although  Cleveland  had 
abruptly  halted  the  leasing  process  by  executive  order  ten  days  before 
his  second  term  expired,  McKinley  had  soon  signed  a  compromise 
measure  which  suspended  Cleveland's  restraining  order  after  nine 
months  had  elapsed  and  thereafter  left  the  reserves  open  to  indis- 
criminate mining  and  prospecting.  Between  1898  and  1905,  when  this 
"vicious  piece  of  legislation,"  as  the  Public  Land  Commission  termed 
it,  was  repealed,  three  million  acres  of  government  timber  land  passed 
permanently  into  private  hands. 

President  Roosevelt  had  barely  moved  into  the  White  House  after 
McKinley's  death  in  September,  1901,  before  he  unloaded  his  bag- 
gage in  the  conservationists'  camp.  On  Roosevelt's  return  from  his 
predecessor's  funeral,  Pinchot  and  Frederick  H.  Newell,  who  may 
fairly  be  called  the  father  of  the  Reclamation  Service,  spelled  out  to 
him  the  far-reaching  forestry  and  reclamation  plans  they  and  their 
able  associates  had  long  hoped  to  institute.  "The  new  President  knew 
what  we  were  talking  about,"  Pinchot  recalled  in  his  autobiography. 
"We  left,  two  very  happy  men,  authorized  to  draft  for  the  Message 
what  we  thought  it  ought  to  say  on  our  twin  subjects.  It  was  a 
Heaven-sent  chance." 

The  message  President  Roosevelt  sent  in  to  the  Congress  two 
months  later  gave  forceful  expression  to  Pinchot  and  NewelFs 
advanced  scientific  views;  and  in  the  manner  of  all  Roosevelt's  partly 
ghost-written  statements,  to  his  own  as  well.  "The  fundamental  idea 
of  forestry  is  the  perpetuation  of  forests  by  use,"  Roosevelt  declared 
as  he  recommended  that  the  reserves  be  kept  open  to  "selective 
cutting."  They  should  also  be  utilized  as  natural  reservoirs,  supple- 
mented where  necessary  by  great  storage  dams  "too  vast  for  private 
effort"  to  finance.  Nor  was  this  to  be  accomplished  by  the  states  alone. 
"It  is  as  right  for  the  National  Government  to  make  the  streams  and 
rivers  of  the  arid  region  useful  by  engineering  works  for  water  stor- 
age," he  declared  in  a  passage  that  foreshadowed  his  later,  more 
strident  centralism,  "as  to  make  useful  the  rivers  and  harbors  of  the 
humid  region  by  engineering  works  of  another  kind."  Too  often,  he 


FOR  THE  GENERATIONS  YET  UNBORN  321 

testily  wrote,  the  states  had  defaulted  on  their  obligations  by  allowing 
streams  to  pass  into  private  ownership.  "Whoever  controls  a  stream 
practically  controls  the  land  it  renders  productive,"  he  reminded  the 
Congress,  and  "...  the  doctrine  of  private  ownership  of  water  apart 
from  land  cannot  prevail  without  causing  enduring  wrong."  The 
government's  reclamation  program  should  create  "the  best  possible 
social  and  industrial  conditions"  for  the  people  moving  into  the  re- 
claimed lands;  however,  he  added,  it  should  conform  to  state  laws 
and  should  be  accomplished  "in  such  manner  as  will  enable  the 
people  in  the  local  communities  to  help  themselves." 

Roosevelt  had  then  plunged  headlong  into  the  seven  years  struggle 
10  put  the  proposals  of  his  message  into  effect.  On  December  19,  1901, 
he  urged  Congress  in  a  special  message  to  create  a  national  forest  re- 
serve in  the  Appalachians.  Meanwhile  he  threw  his  as  yet  untested 
power  behind  a  Democratic-sponsored  irrigation  and  reclamation 
measure,  the  Newlands  bill,  which  McKinley  had  failed  to  support 
and  which  Joseph  G.  Cannon,  then  chairman  of  the  Appropriations 
Committee,  was  opposing.  Cannon's  opposition  was  animated  by  an 
unreasoned  commitment  to  economy,  by  fear  that  the  reclaimed  areas 
would  offer  competition  to  Midwestern  agriculture,  and  by  that 
coarse  anti-intellectualism  which  was  so  much  a  part  of  his  make-up. 
As  he  later  snapped  in  another  context,  he  stood  "not  one  cent  for 
scenery"  and  he  never  did  have  much  use  for  the  "college  professors, 
students,  wise  men  and  so  on  through  the  length  and  breadth  of  the 
country,  who  investigate.  .  .  ."  Nor  was  "Uncle  Joe"  moved  by  a 
presidential  appeal  couched  both  in  rational  terms  and  in  the  pork- 
barrel  language  that  he  understood  so  well.  "I  do  not  believe  that 
I  have  ever  before  written  to  an  individual  legislator  in  favor  of  an 
individual  bill,"  Roosevelt  wrote  the  Ohioan,*"but  I  break  through  my 
rule  to  ask  you  as  earnestly  as  I  can  not  to  oppose  the  Irrigation 
measure.  Believe  me  this  is  something  of  which  I  have  made  a  careful 
study,  and  great  and  real  though  my  deference  is  for  your  knowledge 
of  legislation,  and  for  your  attitude  in  stopping  expense,  I  yet  feel 
from  my  acquaintance  with  the  far  West  that  it  would  be  a  genuine 
and  rankling  injustice  for  the  Republican  party  to  kill  this  measure. 
I  believe  in  it  with  all  my  heart  from  every  standpoint." 

I  am  just  about  to  sign  the  River  and  Harbor  bill.  .  .  .  Now 
this  is  a  measure  for  the  material  benefit  of  your  State  and  mine 
and  of  the  other  states  with  harbors  and  navigable  rivers.  Surely  it 


322  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

is  but  simple  justice  for  us  to  give  to  the  arid  regions  a  measure  of 
relief,  the  financial  burden  of  which  will  be  but  trifling,  while  the 
benefit  to  the  country  involved  is  far  greater  than  under  the  River 
and  Harbor  bill.  I  cannot  too  strongly  express  my  feeling  upon 
this  matter. 

Cannon  refused  to  clarify  his  position,  and  the  Newlands  bill  rolled 
through  the  House  without  his  support,  and  on  June  17,  1902,  Roose- 
velt enthusiastically  signed  it  into  law.  The  first  important  enactment 
of  his  presidency,  it  authorized  the  creation  of  a  reclamation  service, 
assigned  revenues  from  land  sales  to  the  construction  of  reservoirs  and 
irrigation  works  by  the  federal  government,  and  established  a  broadly 
creative,  if  heavily  subsidized,  policy  toward  the  arid  lands.  By  its 
authority,  thirty  irrigation  projects  embracing  three  million  acres,  in- 
cluding the  Roosevelt  Dam  in  Arizona,  were  in  progress  or  already 
completed  when  Roosevelt  left  office  in  March,  1909. 

During  the  remainder  of  his  first  term  Roosevelt  continued  to  see 
much  of  Pinchot,  a  charter  member  of  his  "Tennis  Cabinet."  And  at 
the  forester's  suggestion  he  shortly  set  aside  the  Dismal  River  and 
Niobrara  Forest  Reserves  for  a  controlled  experiment  in  tree  planting 
in  Nebraska  where  an  earlier  and  more  limited  experiment  had 
shown  that  marketable  trees  could  grow  on  sand  hills  regarded  as 
worthless.  This  second  experiment  proved  similarly  successful,  serving, 
in  Pinchot's  words,  as  the  forerunner  of  the  "great  Shelter  Belt  Plan 
begun  under  President  Franklin  D.  Roosevelt,  and  so  brilliantly  sug- 
gested and  successfully  directed  by  Raphael  Zon." 

Not  until  after  he  was  elected  in  his  own  right,  however,  did  Roose- 
velt's flaming  conviction  really  scorch  the  anti-conservationists.  Rein- 
forced by  his  popular  mandate  and  by  the  Public  Land  Commission's 
(appointed  in  1903)  considered  recommendations  for  orderly  devel- 
opment, the  President  now  launched  a  full-scale  program  to  stay  the 
exploitative  processes  of  a  century  and  a  quarter  and  to  impress  upon 
the  nation  an  intelligent  awareness  of  nature's  beauteous  bounty  and 
munificent  industrial  potential.  From  the  winter  of  1905  on,  indeed, 
scarcely  a  detail  eluded  Roosevelt's  creative  attention  as  he  vigorously 
promoted  the  cause  of  conservation  through  regulated  use  in  his 
public  speeches,  messages  to  Congress,  and  executive  actions.  The 
consequence  was  such  an  enlightenment  as  the  nation  had  not  there- 
tofore seen  and  would  not  again  witness  until  Franklin  Roosevelt, 


FOR    THE    GENERATIONS    YET    UNBORN  323 

himself  nurtured  on  Theodore's  conservationist  principles,  came  to 
power. 

The  first  harvest  was  reaped  on  February  1,  1905,  when  Roosevelt 
signed  a  measure  transferring  the  Forest  Reserves  from  the  jurisdiction 
of  the  inefficient  Land  Office  in  the  Department  of  the  Interior  to  the 
Bureau  of  Forestry,  renamed  the  Forest  Service,  in  the  Department  of 
Agriculture.  The  measure  also  conferred  upon  Pinchot  that  tremen- 
dous grant  of  power  which  was  to  make  him  the  Galahad  of  the 
conservationists  and  the  bete  noire  of  their  opponents.  Two  months 
after  its  enactment,  the  Forest  Service  was  authorized  for  the  first  time 
to  make  arrests  for  the  violation  of  its  regulations. 

The  forestry  movement  was  now  coming  of  age.  The  most  power- 
ful interests  in  the  West,  including  the  National  Wholesale  Lumber 
Dealers'  Association,  had  finally  concluded  that  the  selective  cutting 
and  other  techniques  urged  upon  them  by  the  evangelical  Pinchot 
and  his  dedicated  colleagues  were  feasible.  It  was  no  accident  that  the 
transfer  bill  was  passed  just  after  they  expressed  their  approval  of  its 
intent  at  the  meetings  of  the  American  Forest  Congress  early  in 
January,  1905;  nor  that  Roosevelt  had  waited  until  after  the  election 
of  1904  to  push  it. 

The  Forest  Service  became  even  more  independent  of  Congress 
than  anticipated  in  ensuing  months.  By  a  little-noticed  clause  soon 
given  an  inclusive  interpretation  by  the  Attorney  General,  William 
H.  Moody,  the  Agriculture  Appropriations  Act  of  1905  authorized  the 
Service  to  use  the  revenues  from  the  sale  of  the  lands  or  products  of 
the  reserves  for  administration  of  existing  reserves  and  the  creation 
of  new  ones.  The  result  was  a  small  revolution.  "While  we  could  still 
say  nothing  but  Tlease'  to  private  forest  owners,"  Pinchot  recalled, 
"on  the  national  Forest  Reserves  we  could  say,  and  we  did  say,  'Do 
this,'  and  'Don't  do  that.'  We  had  the  power,  as  we  had  the  duty,  to 
protect  the  Reserves  for  the  use  of  the  people,  and  that  meant  stepping 
on  the  toes  of  the  biggest  interests  in  the  West.  From  that  time  on  it 
was  fight,  fight,  fight." 

Under  Roosevelt's  driving  leadership  the  Forest  Lieu  Act  of  1 897 
was  repealed.  This  measure,  writes  Roy  Robbins,  was  believed  by 
many  Westerners  to  have  "done  more  to  aid  the  speculators  and  cor- 
porations than  to  aid  the  actual  settler."  Hard  on  its  demise  came  an 
administration  order  establishing  a  leasing  system  for  use  of  the  grass 
lands  within  the  forest  reserves.  Under  and  in  violation  of  prevailing 


324  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

regulations,  pastures  had  been  ruthlessly  overgrazed,  government 
lands  had  been  fenced  in  by  private  operators,  cattlemen  had  fought 
bloody  battles  against  sheepmen,  and  both  had  made  life  miserable 
for  the  homesteaders  who  were  regarded  as  a  menace  by  the  large 
grazing  interests.  A  first,  and  partial,  step  toward  remedying  these 
conditions,  the  new  order  was  buttressed  by  Roosevelt's  resolve  to 
enforce  the  laws  against  fencing.  "I  cannot  consent  to  a  clause  con- 
tinuing for  a  year,  or  for  any  length  of  time,  the  present  illegal  fenc- 
ing," he  explained  to  Senator  Francis  E.  Warren  of  Wyoming,  whose 
solicitude  for  the  sheep  industry  would  later  earn  him  the  sobriquet, 
"the  greatest  shepherd  since  Abraham."  The  President  continued: 

The  opposition  we  have  .  .  .  now  comes  primarily  from  the  big 
men  who  graze  wandering  flocks  of  sheep,  and  who  do  not  promote 
the  real  settlement  of  the  country.  These  are  the  men  whose  in- 
terests are  diametrically  hostile  to  those  of  the  homemakers,  who 
wish  to  eat  out  and  destroy  the  country  where  he  desires  per- 
manently to  live,  and  who,  when  they  have  thus  ruined  the  land  of 
the  homesteader  and  small  stockman,  move  elsewhere  to  repeat  the 
process  of  devastation. 

Actually,  as  Samuel  P.  Hays'  penetrating  study  of  the  conservation 
movement  makes  clear,  Roosevelt's  understanding  of  the  problem  was 
deeper  than  his  strictures  against  illegal  fencing  implied.  He  knew 
that  many  homesteaders  and  small  cattlemen  had  also  resorted  to 
illegal  fencing,  if  only  in  self-defense.  He  shared  the  cattlemen's 
animus  toward  the  sheepmen.  And  he  realized  that  the  Public  Land 
Commission's  investigation  had  indicated  that  the  fenced-in  lands  were 
generally  less  overgrazed  than  the  open  range.  As  he  conceded  in  a 
special  message  the  next  year,  fencing  the  public  domain  "would  be 
thoroughly  desirable  if  it  were  legal." 

The  President  was  also  aware  that  the  160-acre  limitation  in  the 
existing  homestead  legislation  was  grossly  inadequate  for  the  semi- 
arid  country.  He  persistently  labored  to  correct  this,  and  shortly 
before  he  left  office  Congress  raised  the  allotment  to  320  acres.  As 
Roosevelt  contended,  however,  the  only  rational  solution  was  a  system 
basing  the  allotment  on  the  particular  needs  of  the  area.  Otherwise,  he 
observed  as  early  as  December,  1905,  "needless  suffering  and  failure 
on  the  part  of  a  very  considerable  proportion  of  the  bona-fide  settlers 
who  give  faith  to  the  implied  assurance  of  the  government  that  such 


FOR  THE  GENERATIONS  YET  UNBORN  325 

an  area  is  sufficient"  would  probably  result.  In  later  years  students  of 
the  Western  land  problem  would  confirm  his  judgment. 

Meanwhile  the  President  focused  his  sights  on  the  fast-growing 
electric  power  industry.  For  some  years,  writes  Pinchot,  utility  com- 
panies had  been  securing  the  best  water-power  sites  "through  every 
workable  use  or  misuse  of  the  public-land  laws  and  the  laws  relating 
to  navigable  rivers.  .  .  .  The  Government's  problem,  as  we  saw  it, 
was  to  ensure  the  fullest  possible  development  of  water  power  and  its 
sale  to  the  consumer  at  the  cheapest  possible  price.  That  meant  the 
prevention  of  monopoly  where  we  could,  and  effective  regulation  of 
it  where  we  couldn't."  To  these  ends  Roosevelt  had  vetoed  a  bill  on 
March  3,  1903,  that  would  have  turned  Muscle  Shoals,  which  later 
became  the  heart  of  the  TVA,  over  to  piecemeal  private  development. 
And  in  June,  1905,  Pinchot  was  given  the  authority  to  issue  permits 
for  the  use  of  water-power  sites. 

From  1906  on,  when  a  number  of  sites  were  leased  to  the  Edison 
Electrical  Company  of  California,  a  policy  of  controlled,  fifty-year 
leases  obtained.  To  assure  orderly  development,  Pinchot  withdrew 
2,565  sites  from  entry  during  the  next  two  years,  often  on  the  pretext 
that  he  planned  to  establish  ranger  stations  on  them.  In  these  actions, 
as  in  most  others,  he  leaned  heavily  on  the  President's  broad  shoulders. 
''Without  T.R.'s  support,"  he  wrote  forty  years  later,  "all  reasonable 
regulation  of  the  development  of  water  power  on  the  National  Forests 
would  have  broken  down." 

Thus  Roosevelt,  after  first  approving  a  number  of  loosely  framed 
special  acts  for  private  contraction,  several  times  vetoed  bills  which 
failed  to  conform  to  the  administration's  regulatory  program;  and  on 
January  15,  1909,  in  one  of  the  most  memorable  of  such  actions,  he 
sweepingly  rebuked  both  Congress  and  the  puissant  electric  power 
lobby.  "I  esteem  it  my  duty,"  he  said  in  rejecting  a  measure  that 
would  have  authorized  the  construction  of  an  unleased  and  unregu- 
lated dam  in  Missouri,  "to  use  every  endeavor  to  prevent  this  growing 
monopoly,  the  most  threatening  which  has  ever  appeared,  from  being 
fastened  upon  the  people  of  the  Nation."  This  bill  "does  not  contain 
the  conditions  essential  to  protect  the  public  interest." 

Shortly  after  Roosevelt  and  Pinchot  began  to  apply  the  principle 
that  "the  public  rights  come  first  and  private  interest  second"  to  the 
electric  power  industry,  the  President  imposed  it  upon  the  mining 
industry.  Under  the  prevailing  agricultural  land  laws,  valuable  coal 


326  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

lands  had  long  been  passing  into  private  hands  at  prices  wholly  dis- 
proportionate to  their  true  value.  Now,  by  direction  of  the  President 
on  June  29,  1906,  the  process  was  finally  slowed.  During  the  next  two 
years  more  than  fifty  million  acres  believed  to  contain  coal  and  other 
minerals  were  temporarily  withdrawn  from  public  entry  in  order  that 
they  might  be  classified,  and  before  Roosevelt  left  office  eighteen 
million  additional  acres  were  withdrawn  in  Alaska.  To  be  sure,  the 
President's  frequent  requests  that  Congress  establish  a  royalty  fee 
system  under  government  price  and  transportation  controls  fell  on 
deaf  ears.  But  as  Hays  concludes,  the  Geological  Survey  at  least 
"valued  the  coal  lands  according  to  the  quality  of  the  deposits  and 
their  accessibility,  and  established  prices  which  would  aid  develop- 
ment, while  preventing  speculation." 

By  1907  Congress,  the  timber,  grazing,  and  mining  interests  of  the 
West,  countless  other  interests,  and  the  overwhelming  majority  of 
conservatives  in  the  East  were  surfeited  with  Theodore  Roosevelt. 
From  1907  on  the  President  faced  a  manifestly  hostile  Congress,  one 
that  was  to  resist  him  on  almost  all  major  issues  and  actually 
repudiate  him  on  some.  Had  Roosevelt  been  a  less  resourceful  man, 
he  might  consequently  have  served  out  his  final  years  of  the  presi- 
dency in  fretful  impotence.  But  because  he  held  it  the  executive's  duty 
to  lead,  and  because  he  accepted  the  stewardship  theory  without 
reservation,  he  managed  to  maintain  the  authority  of  his  office.  By  his 
discriminating  use  of  the  veto  power  he  held  the  main  line  against 
his  opponents'  embittered  assaults;  and  by  continuing  that  audacious 
use  of  the  executive  power  that  had  characterized  his  tenure  from 
the  strike  against  the  Northern  Securities  Company  in  1902  on,  he 
even  advanced  in  some  areas.  His  conservation  program  reached  full 
maturity,  in  fact,  at  the  very  time  it  fell  under  the  sharpest  attack. 

The  first  of  the  succession  of  showdowns  between  President  and 
Congress  came  during  the  short  session  of  1907.  Senatorial  resentment 
of  Roosevelt  and  Pinchot's  policies  toward  the  forest  reserves  had 
seemingly  increased  in  direct  proportion  to  their  effectiveness;  and 
when  the  Agricultural  Appropriations  bill  was  sent  in  from  the 
House,  Senator  C.  W.  Fulton,  an  Oregon  Republican  who  bowed  not 
to  "Uncle  Joe"  Cannon  in  the  vigor  of  his  anti-intellectualism, 
castigated  the  Chief  Forester  and  his  colleagues  as  impractical 
"dreamers  and  theorists"  ensconced  within  "marble  halls"  and  op- 
posed a  provision  to  increase  Pinchot's  salary. 


FOR  THE  GENERATIONS  YET  UNBORN  327 

Less  than  a  month  later  Fulton  proposed  to  amend  the  Agricul- 
tural Appropriations  bill  with  a  clause  specifying  that  no  forest 
reserve  should  thereafter  be  created  within  the  states  of  Oregon, 
Washington,  Idaho,  Montana,  Colorado,  or  Wyoming  (extremist 
Westerners  actually  wanted  the  reserves  returned  to  the  states,  under 
whose  benign  authority  private  interests  had  already  ravaged  great 
blocks  of  land).  The  anti-Roosevelt  feeling  in  the  Senate  was  so  con- 
certed that  Fulton's  amendment  was  adopted  without  a  roll-call  vote, 
and  shortly  before  the  session  ended  the  amended  Agricultural  Ap- 
propriations bill  reached  the  President's  desk.  Fulton  and  his  friends 
waited,  serene  in  the  belief  that  Roosevelt  would  sign  it,  since  the 
Department  of  Agriculture  and  all  its  subordinate  agencies,  including 
the  forest  reserves,  depended  on  its  authorization  for  funds  during 
the  coming  fiscal  year.  They  were  completely  unprepared  for  the  ex- 
plosion that  followed. 

Responding  instinctively  to  what  he  and  Roosevelt  conceived  as  a 
sullen  threat  to  the  American  future,  Gifford  Pinchot  formulated  an 
ingenious  counterattack:  He  would  have  the  President  proclaim  Na- 
tional Forests  in  all  suitable  remaining  public  lands  during  the  ten 
days  Roosevelt  had  to  sign  or  reject  the  bill.  "We  knew  precisely 
what  we  wanted,"  Pinchot  recalled.  "Our  field  force  had  already 
gathered  practically  all  the  facts.  Speedily  it  supplied  the  rest.  Our 
office  force  worked  straight  through,  some  of  them  for  thirty-six  and 
even  forty-eight  hours  on  end,  to  finish  the  job."  As  the  proclama- 
tions were  completed,  Pinchot  took  them  to  the  White  House  for 
Roosevelt's  signature.  They  were  then  sent  to  the  State  Department 
for  safekeeping  until,  all  told,  twenty-one  new  forest  reserves,  embrac- 
ing sixteen  million  acres  in  the  six  states  affected  by  Fulton's  amend- 
ment, were  provided  for.  They  were  formally  proclaimed  on  March  2 
just  before  the  President  signed  the  Agricultural  Appropriations  bill 
into  law. 

Six  years  later  Roosevelt  wrote  with  transparent  glee  of  how  "the 
friends  of  the  special  interests  in  the  Senate"  had  been  outwitted.  "The 
opponents  of  the  forest  service  turned  handsprings  in  their  wrath,  and 
dire  were  their  threats  against  the  Executive;  but  the  threats  could  not 
be  carried  out,  and  were  really  only  a  tribute  to  the  efficiency  of  our 
action."  As  a  memorandum  he  dictated  at  the  time  reveals,  however, 
he  was  genuinely  concerned  lest  historians  interpret  his  action  as 
arbitrary.  "If  I  did  not  act  ...  and  if  Congress  differs  from  me  in 


328  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

this  position,"  he  wrote,  "it  will  have  full  opportunity  in  the  future 
to  take  such  position  as  it  may  desire.  .  .  ." 

Failure  on  my  part  to  sign  these  proclamations  would  mean  that 
immense  tracts  of  valuable  timber  would  fall  into  the  hands  of  the 
lumber  syndicates  ...  for  our  entire  purpose  in  this  forest  reserve 
policy  is  to  keep  the  land  for  the  benefit  of  the  actual  settler  and 
home-maker,  to  further  his  interests  in  every  way,  and,  while  using 
the  natural  resources  of  the  country  for  the  benefit  of  the  present 
generation,  also  to  use  them  in  such  manner  as  to  keep  them  un- 
impaired for  the  benefit  of  the  children  now  growing  up  to  inherit 
the  land.  This  is  the  final  and  exclusive  object  not  merely  of  our 
forest  policy  but  of  our  whole  public  land  policy. 

The  President's  "midnight"  proclamations  rang  down  the  curtain 
for  many  Westerners.  Forgotten  in  the  bitterness  of  the  hour  were 
the  ties  of  affection  that  had  once  made  them  regard  the  young 
reformer-ranchman  as  their  own;  that  had  moved  them  to  pour  out 
of  the  mountains  and  off  the  great  plains  to  serve  under  his  command 
in  1898;  that  had  turned  "Boss"  Platt's  cynical  maneuvering  into  an 
uncontrollable  stampede  at  the  Republican  Convention  of  1900.  Not 
only  to  the  lumber  syndicates,  the  mining  corporations,  and  the  great 
sheep  and  cattle  barons,  but  to  many  of  the  "plain  people"  Roosevelt 
professed  so  to  love,  the  President  by  1907  was  a  deadly  enemy  of 
their  region.  The  spurious  charge  that  the  governor  of  Washington 
now  leveled  against  Pinchot — he  "has  done  more  to  retard  the  growth 
and  development  of  the  Northwest  than  any  other  man" — could  only 
have  had  Roosevelt  as  its  real  object.  Within  a  month  of  the  proclama- 
tions a  call  (proposed  several  months  before  by  the  governor  of 
Colorado  at  the  instigation  of  the  sheepmen  and  farmers  rather  than 
the  lumber  interests)  had  gone  out  all  over  the  West  for  a  great 
protest  convention  to  meet  in  Denver  on  June  19. 

Not  all  the  opposition  to  the  Roosevelt-Pinchot  policies  was  un- 
founded; nor  did  it  all  emanate  from  the  servants  of  "special  privilege" 
as  the  President  and  his  devoted  forester  friend  too  sweepingly  im- 
plied. The  problems  were  so  diverse  and  the  interests  involved  so 
irreconcilable  that  there  remain  to  this  day  areas  of  unresolved  con- 
flict. The  complaint  of  the  states  that  the  national  reserves  reduced 
their  tax  base  is  reasonable,  if  not  in  the  broad  view  consequential. 
Understandable  also  are  the  protests  of  all  those  operators,  small  even 
more  than  large,  who  by  habit  or  custom  had  come  to  regard  the 


FOR  THE  GENERATIONS  YET  UNBORN  329 

nation's  resources  as  theirs  to  exploit.  Man  once  unfettered  does  not 
gracefully  submit  to  bureaucracy,  no  matter  how  great  its  flexibility 
or  laudable  its  social  and  scientific  purposes.  The  leasing  fees,  the 
proscriptions  of  illegal  fencing,  the  prohibition  of  excessive  grazing — 
these  and  numerous  other  regulations  were  anathema  to  free-wheeling 
Westerners  on  the  make. 

Furthermore,  all  Westerners  did  not  regard  the  administration's 
forest  policies  as  a  boon  to  the  small  entrepreneur.  Again  and  again 
there  arose  in  the  mountain  states  the  complaint  that  the  great  lumber 
companies  benefited  unfairly  from  the  creation  of  reserves  because 
they  had  already  engrossed  the  lands  that  gave  ingress.  Besides,  the 
selective-cutting  techniques  prescribed  by  the  Forest  Service  were 
easier  for  the  large  interests  to  finance.  The  gigantic  Weyerhaeuser 
Timber  Company  could  act  in  accordance  with  the  principles  of  a 
long-term  investment,  but  few  small  companies  or  independent  opera- 
tors had  the  financial  resources  to  take  the  long  view.  Inevitably,  they 
resented  having  it  imposed  upon  them. 

Roosevelt's  reaction  to  these  complaints  was  ambivalent  at  best 
and  disingenuous  at  worst.  He  continued  in  his  public  pronouncements 
to  emphasize  the  antimonopolistic  tenor  of  his  policies;  and  with  some 
justification,  for  a  million  and  one-half  acres  were  opened  to  settle- 
ment by  small  farmers  under  his  administration  while  his  water-power 
program  was  clearly  designed  to  bring  natural  monopolies  under  public 
control.  At  the  same  time,  however,  he  privately  complained  that  the 
"people  refuse  to  face  squarely  the  proposition  that  much  of  these 
lands  ought  to  be  leased  and  fenced  as  pastures,  and  that  they  cannot 
possibly  be  taken  up  with  profit  as  small  homesteads."  But  the  point 
is  hardly  worth  laboring.  The  President's  commitment  to  scientific 
forestry  was  so  total,  his  insight  into  the  advantages  of  corporate 
organization  in  a  technological  age  so  deep,  that  the  knowledge  that 
the  big  companies  were  profiting  and  growing  could  not  have  altered 
his  course.  Regulation  was  to  him  the  only  socially  desirable  solution. 

There  were  also  other  complaints  against  the  administration.  The 
grazing  interests  vehemently  protested  that  much  grassland  was  locked 
up  in  the  forest  reserves,  as  in  truth  it  temporarily  was.  On  the  eve  of 
the  militant  protest  convention  in  Denver  the  Forest  Service  released 
thousands  of  acres  of  such  land — a  well-timed  maneuver,  admittedly, 
but  also  part  of  an  already  considered  policy.  Beyond  or  beneath 
these  arguable  complaints  was  the  West's  vexation  at  Roosevelt's 


330  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

good-government  philosophy,  or  at  least  its  practical  application. 

Starting  in  1903  the  administration  had  relentlessly  proceeded 
against  a  great  host  of  land  swindlers  including  every  member  but 
one  of  Oregon's  all-Republican  congressional  delegation.  Their  in- 
dictment and  subsequent  prosecution  had  won  plaudits  for  Roosevelt 
throughout  most  of  the  country.  But  in  the  Northwest  they  had 
evoked  an  enthusiasm  similar  to  that  displayed  by  the  Tammany 
Democrats  when  Police  Commissioner  Roosevelt  had  tried  to  clean 
their  Augean  stables  in  the  mid-1 890's.  "Even  men  who  were  in  no 
way  implicated  .  .  .  felt  a  sympathy  for  the  ones  who  were  caught," 
writes  an  historian  of  the  movement,  "for  unquestionably  such  frauds 
had  been  too  common  .  .  .  to  be  viewed  seriously."  One  high  govern- 
ment official  whom  Roosevelt  had  dismissed,  though  not  prosecuted, 
was  elected  to  represent  an  Oregon  district  in  Congress  within  six 
months  of  his  forced  retirement;  and  Senator  Fulton  never  did  forgive 
Roosevelt  for  the  blow  he  had  dealt  his  colleagues. 

There  was  also  the  paradox  inherent  in  Pinchot's  personnel  policies. 
For  years  the  old  Forestry  Division  had  been  plagued  by  an  inferior 
staff,  especially  in  the  field,  where  ward  politicians,  ex-bartenders,  and 
other  misfits  had  comprised  an  embarrassing  large  part  of  the  ranger 
force.  Westerners  on  the  spot  had  understandably  chafed  at  being 
policed  by  such  a  motley  crowd;  and  at  Pinchot's  instance  Roosevelt 
had  placed  foresters  under  the  civil  service  laws  in  December,  1904. 
So  salutary  did  that  reform  prove  that  by  1908  a  New  York  con- 
sulting firm  compared  the  administration  of  the  Forest  Service  "most 
favorably"  with  private  industry  and  reported  that  its  investigators  had 
"rarely,  if  ever,  met  a  body  of  men  where  the  average  of  intelligence 
was  so  high  or  the  loyalty  to  the  organization  and  to  the  work  so 
great." 

From  Cannon  on  down,  however,  the  professional  politicians  re- 
sented the  resultant  loss  of  patronage.  More  ironical  still,  Westerners 
who  had  earlier  protested  the  low  quality  of  the  Forestry  Division 
fulminated  in  later  years  against  the  high  quality  of  the  reconstituted 
Forest  Service.  No  longer  could  they  evade  regulations  on  the  excuse 
that  the  men  who  devised  and  enforced  them  were  appallingly  in- 
competent. Like  the  meat  packers,  the  railroad  officials,  and  many 
other  businessmen  who  had  felt  Roosevelt's  controlling  hand,  their 
philosophy  was  thus  proved  under  fire  to  encompass  little  more  than 
their  own  self-interest. 


FOR  THE  GENERATIONS  YET  UNBORN  331 

Meanwhile  the  President's  appreciation  of  nature  was  carrying  him 
into  less  utilitarian  channels.  For  all  his  zest  for  hunting,  Roosevelt 
possessed  both  the  naturalist's  compulsion  to  conserve  and  the  demo- 
crat's desire  to  share.  Now,  as  he  fought  Congress  for  a  rational  policy 
toward  both  the  conservation  and  maximization  through  controlled 
use  of  the  nation's  natural  resources,  he  also  skirmished  for  the  pres- 
ervation of  its  magnificent  natural  monuments — for  Niagara  Falls 
and  Arizona's  Grand  Canyon,  for  Oregon's  Crater  Lake  and  New 
Mexico's  Petrified  Forest,  for  the  undulating  Blue  Ridge  Mountains 
and  dozens  upon  dozens  of  others.  In  his  private  letters,  his  speeches, 
and  even  in  his  messages  to  Congress  he  expressed  his  heartfelt  con- 
viction that  nature's  wonders  were  the  American  people's  own  right- 
ful heritage.  "I  cannot  too  often  repeat  that  the  essential  feature  in 
the  present  management  of  the  Yellowstone  Park,  as  in  all  similar 
places,  is  its  essential  democracy,"  he  said  on  April  24,  1903,  as  he 
laid  the  cornerstone  of  the  gateway  to  that  spectacular  park.  It  is,  he 
elaborated,  "the  preservation  of  the  scenery,  of  the  forests,  of  the 
wilderness  life  and  the  wilderness  game  for  the  people  as  a  whole, 
instead  of  leaving  the  enjoyment  thereof  to  be  confined  to  the  very 
rich  who  can  control  private  reserves." 

And  so  there  were  created  during  Roosevelt's  two  administrations 
five  National  Parks — Crater  Lake  in  Oregon,  Platt  National  Park  in 
Oklahoma,  Wind  Cave  in  South  Dakota,  Sully  Hill  in  North  Dakota, 
and  Mesa  Verde  in  Colorado.  These  doubled  the  number  established 
by  all  his  predecessors.  There  was  passed  under  Roosevelt's  spur  the 
National  Monuments  Act  of  June,  1906,  by  authority  of  which  he 
eventually  proclaimed  sixteen  National  Monuments,  including  Wyo- 
ming's Devil  Tower,  California's  Muir  Woods,  and  Washington's  Mount 
Olympus.  There  were  established  by  executive  orders  issued  between 
March  14,  1903,  when  Roosevelt  first  realized  he  had  the  power,  and 
March  4,  1909,  when  he  turned  over  the  power,  fifty-one  wildlife 
refuges  ("Is  there  any  law  that  will  prevent  me  from  declaring  Pelican 
Island  a  Federal  Bird  Reservation?"  he  had  asked.  Informed  that  there 
was  none,  he  had  replied:  "Very  well,  then  I  so  declare  it").  And 
there  was  launched  from  the  base  built  by  William  T.  Hornaday, 
George  Bird  Grinnell,  Frank  M.  Chapman,  the  National  Audubon 
Society,  and  others  a  nature-appreciation  movement  that  offers  one 
of  the  few  remaining  hopes  that  the  march  of  the  billboards,  the  gas 


332  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

stations,  and  the  bulldozers  may  somehow  be  stayed  and  that  such 
commercial  barbarisms  as  Wisconsin's  Dells  may  yet  be  redeemed. 

As  the  time  for  Roosevelt  to  yield  his  stewardship  drew  near,  he 
came  increasingly  to  realize  that  the  future  of  the  conservation  move- 
ment lay  preeminently  with  the  states.  They  must  be  persuaded  to 
abandon  their  particularism  in  order  that  regional,  multipurpose  river 
developments  might  be  undertaken;  they  must  be  imbued  with  a  sense 
of  responsibility  that  the  despoliation  of  their  own  public  lands  might 
be  halted.  To  these  ends  Roosevelt  appointed  a  path  finding  body,  the 
Inland  Waterways  Commission,  on  March  14,  1907.  Six  months  later 
he  announced  that  he  would  call  a  conference  of  governors  to  meet 
in  Washington  that  winter.  The  long-range  effect  of  both  these 
actions  was  momentous. 

The  President's  decision  to  create  the  Inland  Waterways  Commis- 
sion was  sparked  by  W  J  McGee  of  the  Bureau  of  Soils,  though  com- 
mercial groups  in  the  Mississippi  Valley  had  been  urging  action  for 
some  time.  At  issue  was  the  need  of  a  comprehensive  plan  for  the 
improvement  and  control  of  the  nation's  rivers.  Roosevelt  had  long 
realized  this,  and  his  letter  to  the  chairman  of  the  Commission  spelled 
out  the  charge: 

Works  designed  to  control  our  waterways  have  .  .  .  been  un- 
dertaken for  a  single  purpose,  such  as  the  improvement  of  naviga- 
tion, development  of  power,  the  irrigation  of  arid  lands,  the  protec- 
tion of  lowlands  from  floods,  or  to  supply  water  for  domestic  and 
manufacturing  purposes.  While  the  rights  of  the  people  to  these  and 
similar  uses  of  water  must  be  respected,  the  time  has  come  for 
merging  local  projects  and  uses  of  the  inland  waters  in  a  compre- 
hensive plan  designed  for  the  benefit  of  the  whole  country. 

Within  the  year  the  Inland  Waterways  Commission  confirmed  and 
amplified  the  President's  original  charge  in  a  report  that  reflected  the 
creative  imagination  of  McGee  and  the  engineering  brilliance  of 
Marshall  O.  Leighton,  Chief  Hydrographer  of  the  Geological  Survey. 
Presumably  because  he  feared  that  Congress  might  miss  the  point, 
Roosevelt  appended  to  it  a  sharp  blast  of  his  own  against  the  electric 
power  industry.  "Among  these  monopolies  .  .  .  ,"  he  wrote,  "there 
is  no  other  which  threatens,  or  has  ever  threatened,  such  intolerable 
interference  with  the  daily  life  of  the  people  as  the  consolidation  of 
companies  controlling  water  power." 


FOR  THE  GENERATIONS  YET  UNBORN  333 

...  I  call  your  special  attention  to  the  attempt  of  the  power  cor- 
porations, through  bills  introduced  at  the  present  session,  to  escape 
from  the  possibility  of  Government  regulation  in  the  interests  of  the 
people.  These  bills  are  intended  to  enable  the  corporations  to  take 
possession  in  perpetuity  of  national  forest  lands  for  the  purposes  of 
their  business,  where  and  as  they  please,  wholly  without  compensa- 
tion to  the  public. 

Neither  the  report  of  the  Inland  Waterways  Commission  nor  the 
angry  assertions  of  the  President  turned  Congress  from  its  pork- 
barreling,  philosophically  conservative  ways.  Resentful  of  Roosevelt's 
hold  on  the  popular  mind,  contemptuous  of  his  concern  for  social 
planning,  and  solicitous  as  always  of  the  varied  special  interests,  the 
Republican  majority  yearned  openly  for  the  day  when  its  leader  would 
no  longer  lead — when  it  would  have  again  a  President  in  the  mold  of 
McKinley.  Sullenly,  it  sat  on  its  hands.  It  got  off  them  only  to  prohibit 
the  President  from  appointing  new  commissions  without  congressional 
assent  following  Roosevelt's  return  to  the  subject  in  his  message  of 
December  8,  1908.  The  historic  handling  of  the  inland  waterways  has 
been  "short-sighted,  vacillating,  and  futile,"  the  President  charged  in 
that  last  annual  message.  The  army  engineers  responsible  for  the 
program  (the  Chief  of  the  Corps  was  actually  on  record  as  stating 
that  flood  control,  hydroelectric  power,  and  irrigation  should  be  sub- 
ordinate to  navigation)  were  "unsuited  by  their  training  and  traditions 
to  take  the  broad  view"  and  they  had  failed  above  all  "to  grasp  the 
great  underlying  fact  that  every  stream  is  a  unit  from  its  source  to 
its  mouth,  and  that  all  its  uses  are  interdependent."  Congress  should 
provide  funds,  the  President  fruitlessly  concluded,  "to  frame  and 
supervise  the  execution  of  a  comprehensive  plan." 

It  was  those  last  two  principles — "that  every  stream  is  a  unit  from 
its  source  to  its  mouth,  and  that  all  its  uses  are  interdependent" — which 
later  comprised  the  springboard  for  the  TVA,  that  monument  to 
George  W.  Morris's  persistence  and  the  New  Deal's  acceptance  of  its 
legacy  from  the  Square  Deal. 

Had  Theodore  Roosevelt's  service  to  conservation  ended  with  the 
proclamation  of  the  sixteen  million  acres  of  Forest  Reserves  in  1907, 
or  with  his  vigorous  exposition  of  the  findings  of  the  Inland  Water- 
ways Commission,  his  administrations  would  still  have  been  dis- 
tinguished beyond  those  of  all  of  his  predecessors.  But  it  did  not.  The 


334  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

Governors'  Conference  of  1908  added  one  more  star  to  his  already 
glittering  constellation. 

On  the  morning  of  May  13,  1908,  President  Roosevelt,  attired  in 
the  formal  clothes  he  deemed  appropriate  to  the  occasion,  mounted  a 
temporary  podium  in  the  East  Room  of  the  White  House.  For  fifty 
minutes  in  the  modulated,  cultured  tones  that  were  as  characteristic 
of  his  speech  as  the  shrill  falsetto  ascribed  to  him  by  caricaturists,  he 
spoke — to  the  members  of  his  Cabinet;  to  the  Associate  Justices  and 
the  Chief  Justice  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States;  to  the 
governors  of  thirty-eight  states  and  territories,  many  of  whom  spared 
no  love  for  either  him  or  conservation;  to  that  loyal  leader  of  the 
opposition,  William  Jennings  Bryan,  who  would  make  his  third  and 
last  bid  for  the  presidency  that  autumn;  to  Andrew  Carnegie,  dedicated 
for  some  years  past  to  peace,  philanthropy,  and  public  welfare;  to 
John  Mitchell,  still  the  dignified  idol  of  the  United  Mine  Workers;  to 
James  J.  Hill,  the  most  enlightened  of  the  great  railroad  magnates; 
and  to  a  host  of  scientists,  publicists,  and  representatives  of  the 
nation's  learned  societies.  Grover  Cleveland  would  also  have  been 
present  had  he  not  then  been  in  his  final  illness. 

The  President's  address  was  a  testament  of  faith  and  a  statement 
of  hope.  He  started  by  declaring  that  conservation  was  "the  chief 
material  question  that  confronts  us,  second  only — and  second  al- 
ways— to  the  great  fundamental  question  of  morality."  He  emphasized 
the  urgent  need  for  a  "coherent  plan"  of  development.  He  reaffirmed 
that  his  object  was  not  to  lock  up  natural  resources,  but  to  use  them 
in  a  way  that  would  increase  their  yield  for  the  next  generation.  "No 
wise  use  of  a  farm  exhausts  its  fertility,"  he  observed.  "So  with  the 
forests."  He  showered  encomiums  upon  Gifford  Pinchot,  "to  whom  we 
owe  so  much  of  the  progress  we  have  already  made."  And  he  con- 
cluded with  a  moralistic  assertion  that  the  rights  of  the  public  were 
paramount  to  those  of  private  individuals: 

In  the  past  we  have  admitted  the  right  of  the  individual  to  injure 
the  future  of  the  Republic  for  his  own  present  profit.  The  time  has 
come  for  a  change.  As  a  people  we  have  the  right  and  the  duty, 
second  to  none  other  but  the  right  and  duty  of  obeying  the  moral 
law,  of  requiring  and  doing  justice,  to  protect  ourselves  and  our 
children  against  the  wasteful  development  of  our  natural  resources, 
whether  that  waste  is  caused  by  the  actual  destruction  of  such 
resources  or  by  making  them  impossible  of  development  hereafter. 


FOR  THE  GENERATIONS  YET  UNBORN  335 

Probably  no  event  of  Roosevelt's  turbulent  career  evoked  a  more 
spontaneous  and  universally  favorable  reaction  that  the  three-day 
conference  he  had  then  opened.  Throughout  the  nation  his  address 
was  acclaimed  as  one  of  his  greatest  public  utterances,  perhaps  the 
greatest.  Even  the  New  York  Evening  Post  grudgingly  wrote  that 
"this  is  distinctly  a  case  where  Mr.  Roosevelt's  love  of  the  spectacular 
and  skill  in  advertising  have  proved  of  public  advantage."  The  New 
York  Sun,  noted  the  editors  of  the  Literary  Digest,  "is  the  only 
paper  we  yet  have  seen  which  holds  absolutely  aloof  from  the 
enthusiasm  of  the  occasion." 

The  monumental  significance  of  the  Governors'  Conference  can 
only  be  suggested.  Not  all  the  governors  were  sympathetic  to  the 
Roosevelt-Pinchot  program;  and  before  the  sessions  closed  several  of 
the  Westerners  militantly  defended  states'  rights,  that  "darling  of  the 
great  special  interests"  as  Pinchot  caustically  termed  them.  Thus 
Governor  Gooding  of  Idaho  demanded  that  the  National  Forests  be 
transferred  to  the  states  and  Governor  Norris  of  Montana  castigated 
the  grazing  fee  as  a  "levying  of  tribute."  Yet  even  they  gave  their 
names  to  the  notable  Declaration  of  the  Governors,  a  landmark  in 
the  history  of  the  conservation  movement  and  the  changing  concep- 
tion of  federal-state  relationships.  That  document  declared: 

We  agree  that  the  sources  of  national  wealth  exist  for  the  benefit 
of  the  People,  and  that  monopoly  thereof  should  not  be  tolerated. 

We  declare  the  conviction  that  in  the  use  of  the  natural  resources 
our  independent  States  are  interdependent  and  bound  together  by 
ties  of  mutual  benefits,  responsibilities,  and  duties. 

We  agree  that  further  action  is  advisable  to  ascertain  the  present 
condition  of  our  natural  resources  and  to  promote  the  conservation 
of  the  same;  and  to  that  end  we  recommend  the  appointment  by 
each  State  of  a  Commission  on  the  Conservation  of  Natural  Re- 
sources, to  co-operate  with  each  other  and  with  any  similar  com- 
mission of  the  Federal  Government. 

Roosevelt  proved  quick  to  take  a  first  stride  toward  activating  the 
declaration's  recommendations.  On  June  8,  1908,  he  appointed  the 
Federal  Commission  on  the  Conservation  of  Natural  Resources  under 
the  chairmanship  of  the  indefatigable  Pinchot.  Organized  into  four 
divisions — water,  forest,  land,  and  mineral  resources — the  Commis- 
sion was  charged  by  Roosevelt  to  cooperate  heartily  with  the  states  in 
the  interests  of  "the  permanent  welfare  of  the  people"  and  to  submit 


336  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

a  preliminary  report  by  January,  1909.  The  end  product,  writes  Rob- 
bins,  was  a  three-volume  report  that  comprises  "the  most  exhaustive 
inventory  of  our  natural  resources  that  has  ever  been  made."  Its  value 
to  scholars,  government  officials,  and  all  those  civic-minded  citizens 
who  have  since  concerned  themselves  with  the  conservation  movement 
has  been  inestimable. 

Most  of  the  state  executives  kept  the  faith  of  their  declaration 
during  the  first  great  outburst  of  enthusiasm  that  followed  the  con- 
ference. Within  a  year  or  so  of  the  final  session  forty-one  state  con- 
servation commissions  had  been  formed;  and  until  their  recommenda- 
tions began  actually  to  be  applied,  everyone,  or  almost  everyone,  was 
avowedly  for  conservation.  Only  "when  it  began  to  interfere  with  the 
profits  of  powerful  men  and  great  special  interests,"  complained 
Pinchot  with  some  exaggeration  and  considerable  truth,  did  the  honey- 
moon come  to  an  end. 

Yet  that  is  less  than  the  whole.  If,  a  half  century  later,  many  state 
governments  stand  paralyzed  before  the  special  interests  that  Roose- 
velt fought;  if,  thirty  years  after  Roosevelt's  death,  private  power 
companies  continue  to  build  dams  without  regard  for  the  multi- 
purposes  he  urged;  if,  only  rarely,  a  governor  emerges  with  the 
courage  and  vision  to  rise  above  the  short-sighted  economy  that 
Roosevelt  deplored;  if,  all  this  in  our  times  is  true,  it  is  also  true  that 
the  very  substantial  achievements  of  the  past  fifty  years  reflect  the 
animating  spirit  of  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  that  those  of  the  next 
half  century  will  doubtless  continue  to  reflect  it. 

There  was  much  difference  of  opinion  about  President  Roosevelt  the 
politician,  Dr.  Charles  Van  Rise,  pioneer  conservationist,  noted 
geologist,  and  president  of  the  University  of  Wisconsin  from  1903  to 
1918,  wrote  two  years  after  Roosevelt  left  the  presidency: 

He  has  been  severely  criticized  by  many,  warmly  commended 
by  others,  but  his  aggressive  action  for  the  conservation  of  our 
resources  has  been  commended  by  all  parties  alike  .  .  .  what  he 
did  to  forward  this  movement  and  to  bring  it  into  the  foreground  of 
the  consciousness  of  the  people  will  place  him  not  only  as  one  of  the 
greatest  statesmen  of  this  nation  but  one  of  the  greatest  statesmen 
of  any  nation  of  any  time. 


CHAPTER  20 


TOWARD   THE   WELFARE    STATE 


There  has  been  a  curious  revival  of  the  doctrine  of  State 
rights  ...  by  the  people  who  know  that  the  States  cannot  with 
justice  to  both  sides  practically  control  the  corporation  and  who 
therefore  advocate  such  control  because  they  do  not  venture  to 
express  their  real  wish,  which  is  that  there  shall  be  no  control 
at  all.  .  .  . 

— Theodore  Roosevelt  in  a  speech  at  Harvard,  1907 


Although  the  President's  inadvertent  submission  to  Wall  Street  during 
the  Panic  of  1907  and  its  aftermath  had  thrown  him  back  into  the 
arms  of  the  congressional  conservatives,  his  sustained  struggle  for 
conservation  suggests  that  the  rapprochement  was  not  of  the  spirit. 
True,  Roosevelt  maintained  the  working  alliance  with  the  Old  Guard 
on  some  issues  until  near  the  end,  though  it  daily  grew  more  pre- 
carious. And  in  the  manner  of  his  entire  career,  he  continued  to 
compromise,  holding  out  for  some  measures,  sacrificing  others,  and 
accepting  the  form  in  lieu  of  the  substance  on  still  others. 

The  President  wanted,  for  example,  to  reorganize  the  administration 
of  the  Navy  as  the  Army  had  earlier  been  reorganized  by  Elihu  Root. 
But  he  wanted  even  more  to  build  up  the  battle  fleet  and  establish  a 
naval  base  at  Pearl  Harbor.  Both  programs  were  opposed  by  powerful 
members  of  his  own  party.  Rather  than  risk  total  defeat,  accordingly, 
he  concentrated  his  energies  on  the  latter.  The  result  was  that  Con- 
gress in  1908  gave  him  two  battleships  (after  he  had  manufactured  a 
war  scare  with  Japan)  and  the  Pearl  Harbor  Base  while  the  reorgani- 
zation problem  was  left  to  his  successors. 

337 


338  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

A  letter  Roosevelt  wrote  to  Cannon  while  the  question  hung  in  the 
balance  is  revealing  of  the  President's  continued  mastery  of  the 
political  process:  "If  you  knew  the  stormy  time  I  have  been  having  on 
your  behalf  with  all  kinds  of  people  in  connection  with  the  tariff  com- 
mission, I  think  you  would  look  favorably  on  this  Pearl  Harbor 
request." 

Again,  Roosevelt  would  have  been  gratified  had  Congress  enacted 
a  national  child  labor  law.  But  on  that,  as  on  many  other  measures, 
he  was  thwarted  by  his  party's  massive  conservatism.  So  powerful 
was  the  manufacturers'  hold  upon  the  Republican  leadership  that  no 
executive  pressure,  no  marshaling  of  sociological  data,  no  high- 
minded  appeals  from  disinterested  reformers  could  have  broken  it. 
The  President  had  little  alternative,  therefore,  but  to  dismiss  as  im- 
practical the  impassioned  pleas  of  Beveridge,  who  had  taken  the  child 
labor  movement  to  his  heart,  and  to  support  instead  a  bill  sponsored 
by  Lodge  which  applied  only  to  the  District  of  Columbia,  an  area 
where  child  labor  was  virtually  nonexistent.  The  President  rationalized 
this  near-mockery  of  justice  by  contending  that  it  would  serve  to  warn 
the  states  that  they  must  either  pass  similar  legislation  or  be  subjected 
to  a  federal  law  in  the  future. 

To  dwell  on  Roosevelt's  forced  compromises  with  the  Sixtieth 
Congress  is  to  obscure  the  larger  significance  of  his  final  years  as 
President.  The  fact  is  that  on  front  after  front  he  was  moving  far  out 
in  advance  of  his  party — moving  so  far  and  so  rapidly  that  by  1908, 
a  year  before  Herbert  Croly  published  his  The  Promise  of  American 
Life,  Roosevelt  had  skirted  all,  and  occupied  most,  of  the  ground  he 
was  to  deploy  his  armies  over  in  1912.  Nor  is  it  surprising  that  the 
President's  ideas  continued  to  develop  during  these  last,  frantic  years. 
For  if  the  challenges  were  not  more  imposing  than  they  had  been  at 
the  beginning,  they  were  more  sharply  delineated;  and  in  great 
measure  because  of  Roosevelt's  own  actions  and  speeches.  It  was 
partly  the  momentum  of  his  own  earlier  attacks  on  special  privilege 
that  now  impelled  Roosevelt  to  set  forth  piecemeal  the  positivist- 
regulationist  program  that  the  theoretician  Croly  would  later  formalize 
and  expand. 

The  essence  of  this  program  was  a  broad  extension  of  federal 
authority  by  executive  action  and  by  act  of  Congress.  And  one  of 
the  most  widely  accepted  interpretations  of  it,  as  I  have  mentioned 
before,  is  that  it  represented  a  signal  reflection  of  Roosevelt's  lust  for 


TOWARDTHE   WELFARE    STATE  339 

personal  power.  Only  a  man  who  believed  in  power  could  have 
countenanced  such  a  concentration  of  authority  as  Roosevelt  re- 
peatedly urged;  only  a  man  unafraid  of  power  could  have  unloosed 
the  broadsides  that  Roosevelt  again  and  again  rained  upon  the 
states'-righters.  So  the  analysis  runs. 

There  is,  to  repeat,  a  measure  of  truth  in  those  assertions.  The 
reader  familiar  with  Blum's  perceptive  writings  on  Roosevelt  must  be 
impressed  by  the  influence  abstract  and  concrete  concerts  of  power 
exerted  upon  the  President's  policies.  Nor  can  he  disregard  Blum's 
suggestion  that  Roosevelt  resented  being  inhibited  by  the  law;  that 
he,  especially,  "may  have  benefited  from  the  limits  on  Presidential 
power  which  men  who  understood  the  problem  in  1787  created."  The 
Brownsville  affair  and  numerous  other  incidents  attest  weightily  to 
that.  So  does  one  of  Roosevelt's  candid  revelations.  "I  don't  think 
that  any  harm  comes  from  the  concentration  of  power  in  one  man's 
hands,"  he  wrote  as  his  tenure  neared  its  end,  "provided  the  holder 
does  not  keep  it  for  more  than  a  certain,  definite  time,  and  then 
returns  to  the  people  from  whom  he  sprang." 

Nevertheless,  an  even  larger  truth  emerges:  A  great  exertion  of 
federal  authority  was  the  only  feasible  means  of  meeting  the  challenge 
of  the  times.  That  challenge  was  dramatized  by  the  overweening 
arrogance  of  the  Morgans,  the  Harrimans,  the  meat  packers,  and  their 
like.  But  its  primal  force  was  the  impersonal  corporate  power  of  the 
burgeoning  industrial  age  and  that  shattering  revolution  in  communica- 
tions which  made  California  closer  to  New  York  in  Roosevelt's  day 
than  Virginia  had  been  to  Georgia  when  the  Constitution  was  framed. 
To  ignore  this,  to  attribute  the  growth  of  centralized  power  under 
Roosevelt  to  his  apparent  compulsion  for  power,  is  to  do  enormous 
violence  to  history  and  to  the  President  himself.  For  if  Roosevelt's 
glands  decreed  that  he  must  forever  act,  his  high  sense  of  justice  and 
his  empirical  approach  to  problems  determined  the  direction  of  his 
acts. 

Theodore  Roosevelt  had  never  been  alone  in  urging  the  positivist- 
regulationist  state  upon  a  reluctant  Congress.  By  comparison  to  the 
negative-minded  Cleveland  and  the  judicial-minded  Parker  he  may 
have  been  a  Caesar.  But  by  comparison  to  the  affirmative-minded 
Bryan  he  was  a  comrade  in  arms.  For  all  that  mental  fuzziness  which 
prevented  him  from  seeing  the  problem  in  detail,  the  Great  Commoner 
also  understood  that  the  upheavals  wrought  by  the  machine  civiliza- 


340  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

tion  made  national  action  mandatory;  and  on  numerous  particular 
issues  he  heartily  cheered  Roosevelt  on.  And  so,  even,  with  William 
Howard  Taft.  Notwithstanding  that  conservative  gentleman's  distaste 
for  personal  power,  the  rise  of  the  regulationist  state  was  to  continue 
throughout  the  four  years  of  his  presidency. 

Curiously,  the  high-minded  and  rational  motivation  of  Roosevelt's 
conservation  policies  has  rarely  been  challenged,  even  by  the  Presi- 
dent's most  psychoanalytically  oriented  critics,  though  they  embodied 
the  broadest  of  all  his  extensions  of  federal  authority.  It  is  perhaps 
fruitful,  therefore,  to  re-examine  his  evolving  corporation  and  labor 
policies,  and  especially  his  attitude  toward  the  judiciary. 

The  President's  move  against  the  Northern  Securities  Company  in 
1902  had  been  followed  by  a  spate  of  antitrust  proceedings — forty- 
three  all  told.  The  burden  of  these  had  been  instituted  hard  on  the 
election  of  1904  and  they  had  served  in  part  to  justify  Roosevelt's 
faith  in  himself,  to  prove  that  he  was  a  free  moral  agent  in  spite  of 
the  hostage  the  corporation's  tremendous  contributions  to  his  cam- 
paign had  purportedly  represented.  They  had  failed,  however,  to  re- 
solve the  trust  problem.  Antisocial  practices  continued  in  the  face  of 
the  dissolution  orders,  and  the  vast  majority  of  corporations  were  in 
no  wise  affected  anyway. 

The  President  was  accordingly  beset  by  misgivings  even  as  he 
encouraged  a  succession  of  attorney  generals  to  prosecute  the  most 
flagrant  violators  of  the  antitrust  laws.  At  the  risk  of  repetition,  it 
should  be  remarked  again  that  the  constructive  in  him  had  always 
rebelled  against  the  muckraking  mentality's  total  indictment  of  big 
business.  Roosevelt  rarely,  if  ever,  attacked  from  a  purely  anticorpora- 
tion  bias.  To  assert  the  supremacy  of  the  federal  government;  to  court 
(unconsciously  perhaps)  the  favor  of  the  "plain  people";  to  suppress 
the  most  flagrant  cases  of  "wrongdoing";  or  to  strike  down  the  most 
patent  monopolies — these,  and  the  need  to  force  Congress  to  support 
his  program,  as  with  the  Hepburn  bill,  were  seemingly  his  motives. 
But  now,  slowly  yet  ineluctably,  that  regulationist  philosophy  which 
had  all  along  dominated  his  policy  toward  the  railroads  came  in  his 
mind  to  reign  over  most  other  areas  as  well.  Without  abandoning  trust- 
busting  completely,  for  he  continued  to  believe  that  some  trusts  war- 
ranted dissolution,  Roosevelt  gave  regulation  greater  and  greater 
emphasis. 

By  March,  1907,  seven  months  before  he  tacitly  agreed  to  the 


TOWARD  THE    WELFARE    STATE  341 

merger  of  the  United  States  Steel  Corporation  and  the  Tennessee  Coal 
and  Iron  Company,  the  President  was  writing  the  Interstate  Commerce 
Commission  that  he  did  "not  believe  in  the  sweeping  and  indis- 
criminate prohibition  of  all  combination  which  has  been  so  marked 
and  as  I  think  so  mischievous  a  feature  of  our  anti-trust  legislation." 
Could  not  the  Commission  explore  further  the  possibility  of  authoriz- 
ing combinations  by  consent?"  he  inquired.  And  in  December  of 
that  year  he  realistically  asserted  that  "This  is  an  age  of  combina- 
tions." Then,  with  greater  emphasis  than  ever  before,  he  urged  Con- 
gress in  December,  1907,  to  get  behind  a  bold  and  comprehensive 
regulatory  program,  one  that  would  place  all  interstate  business  under 
federal  supervision.  "This  is  not  advocating  centralization,"  he  de- 
clared stridently.  "It  is  merely  looking  facts  in  the  face  and  realizing 
that  centralization  in  business  has  already  come  and  cannot  be  avoided 
or  undone,  and  that  the  public  at  large  can  only  protect  itself  from 
certain  evil  effects  of  this  business  centralization  by  providing  better 
methods  for  the  exercise  of  control  .  .  ." 

The  pure-food  law  was  opposed  so  violently  that  its  passage  was 
delayed  for  a  decade;  yet  it  has  worked  unmixed  and  immediate 
good.  The  meat-inspection  law  was  even  more  violently  assailed; 
and  the  same  men  who  now  denounce  the  attitude  of  the  National 
Government  in  seeking  to  oversee  and  control  the  workings  of 
interstate  common  carriers  and  business  concerns,  then  asserted 
that  we  were  "discrediting  and  ruining  a  great  American  industry." 

The  President's  assertions  drew  strong  support  from  a  small  coterie 
of  sophisticated  Wall  Street  men,  among  them  George  W.  Perkins, 
who  was  already  moving  along  the  road  that  would  carry  him  to 
Armageddon  with  Roosevelt  in  1912.  That  very  winter,  in  fact,  the 
House  of  Morgan  supported  proposals  that  would  have  regularized 
the  procedures  embodied  in  the  earlier  "gentlemen's  agreements"  with 
Judge  Gary  by  authorizing  the  Bureau  of  Corporations  to  pass  on 
business  projects  in  advance.  By  then,  however,  the  great  majority 
of  corporate  leaders  outside  the  Morgan-Gary-Perkins  axis  were  so 
exercised  by  Roosevelt's  penetrating  criticisms  of  businessmen  and  by 
his  increasing  receptivity  to  labor's  demands  that  they  were  blinded 
to  their  own  interests.  Nor  did  small  business  take  kindly  to  measures 
that  would  have  accelerated  the  inevitable  rise  of  giant  corporations 
by  sanctioning  "reasonable"  restraints  on  trade.  The  result  was  that 
neither  the  regular  session  of  the  Sixtieth  Congress  nor  the  short 


342  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

session  a  year  later  gave  serious  consideration  to  the  proposals.  The 
trouble,  the  President  wrote  Henry  Lee  Higginson  in  exasperation,  was 
that  the  corporations  preferred  that  the  existing  laws  be  "administered 
crookedly"  rather  than  be  revised  in  their  own  and  the  public 
interest.  "Of  course,"  he  added,  "as  far  as  I  am  concerned  such  ex- 
pectation is  in  vain." 

The  President's  charge  may  have  been  oversimplified;  but  it  was 
hardly  impetuous  and  certainly  not  ill-considered.  As  his  reflections 
at  the  time  of  Holmes'  appointment  to  the  Supreme  Court  suggest, 
he  had  long  seen  the  partial  truth  in  Brooks  Adams's  contention  that 
the  law  is  "the  expression  of  the  will  of  the  strongest  for  the  time 
being"  and  that  as  wealth  increases  "the  representatives  of  the  monied 
class  acquire  that  absolute  power  once  wielded  by  the  Roman  procon- 
sul, and  now  exercised  by  the  modern  magistrate."  He  recoiled,  how- 
ever, from  Adams'  pessimistic  conclusion  that  a  legal  system  serving 
poor  and  rich  alike  was  impossible  of  realization  and  probably  of  con- 
ception. Excepting  his  personal  transgressions,  which  were  more 
largely  those  of  the  man  of  action  than  of  theory,  the  whole  tenor  of 
Roosevelt's  approach  to  the  law  was  one  of  reconstruction.  His  goal 
was  a  legal  system  that  knew  neither  class  nor  favor;  he  had  sought 
often  in  the  past,  and  he  would  seek  more  often  in  the  future,  to 
attain  it. 

For  years  Roosevelt  had  been  angered  by  the  moral  anomaly  of 
imposing  heavy  prison  terms  on  petty  criminals  while  allowing  busi- 
nessmen to  violate  the  statutes  (criminal  as  well  as  civil)  with  relative 
impunity.  He  had  been  uncertain,  however,  as  to  a  course  of  action. 
He  believed  that  since  the  antitrust  laws  had  so  long  lain  dormant  it 
would  be  unfair  to  prosecute  for  offenses  which  the  government  had 
condoned,  in  effect,  by  default.  And  he  had  consequenty  overlooked 
many  businessmen's  earlier  transgressions.  But  now,  as  he  stepped 
his  campaign  to  bring  corporations  under  the  law,  he  concluded  that 
the  dictates  of  justice  required  that  businessmen  who  flaunted  the  law 
be  treated  with  neither  more  nor  less  consideration  than  other  crimi- 
nals. So  he  repeated  in  that  December  message  the  strictures  against 
juries  which  fail  "to  jail  a  member  of  the  business  community"  that 
he  had  uttered  at  Provincetown  the  previous  summer.  "The  two  great 
evils  in  the  execution  of  our  criminal  laws  today  are  sentimentality 
and  technicality,"  he  informed  the  Congress.  Both  should  be  rem- 


TOWARD  THE   WELFARE    STATE  343 

edied;  the  former  by  "the  gradual  growth  of  a  sound  public  opinion," 
the  latter  by  strengthening  and  more  clearly  defining  the  law. 

Nor  did  the  President  then  cover  his  guns.  On  January  31,  1908, 
over  the  protests  of  his  lieutenants,  he  fired  at  Congress  one  of  the 
most  bitter  and  radical  special  messages  on  record.  Reiterating  his 
standing,  if  still  general,  demand  for  a  constructive  revision  of  the 
Sherman  Antitrust  Law,  Roosevelt  charged  that  "the  representatives 
of  predatory  wealth — of  the  wealth  accumulated  on  a  giant  scale  by 
all  forms  of  iniquity,  ranging  from  the  oppression  of  wage  workers 
to  unfair  and  unwholesome  methods  of  crushing  out  competition,  and 
to  defrauding  the  public  by  stock  jobbing  and  the  manipulation  of 
securities,"  were  thwarting  his  program.  He  excoriated  those  "apolo- 
gists of  successful  dishonesty"  who  declaim  against  all  measures  to 
strike  down  corruption  "on  the  grounds  that  any  such  effort  will  'un- 
settle business.'  "  He  called  again  for  stringent  regulation  of  securities, 
adding  that  there  "is  no  moral  difference  between  gambling  at 
cards  .  .  .  and  gambling  in  the  stock  market"  (a  sentiment  that  he 
often  expressed  privately  as  well).  He  upbraided  "decent  citizens"  for 
permitting  "those  rich  men  whose  lives  are  evil  and  corrupt"  to  control 
the  nation's  destiny.  And  he  generalized  disdainfully  about  that  great 
body  of  editors,  lawyers,  and  politicians  "purchased"  by  the  corpora- 
tions as  "but  puppets  who  move  as  the  strings  are  pulled." 

The  President  then  vented  his  towering  rage  on  the  judiciary.  There 
has  been,  he  caustically  declared,  a  growing  tendency  for  judges  to 
"abuse"  the  injunction  process  in  labor  cases.  The  injunction  was  a 
necessary  device  for  the  prevention  of  violence  and  should  under  no 
circumstances  be  eliminated.  Nevertheless,  he  continued,  steps  should 
be  taken  to  remedy  the  "grave  and  occasionally  irreparable  wrong" 
sometimes  inflicted  upon  those  enjoined.  It  was  a  travesty  on  justice 
for  the  law  to  acknowledge  labor's  right  to  engage  in  peaceable, 
organized  action  on  the  one  hand  and  for  the  courts,  "under  the  guise 
of  protecting  property  rights,"  to  override  that  right  on  the  other 
hand. 

The  blazing  indictment  continued.  The  "high  office  of  judge" 
should  be  regarded  with  the  "utmost  respect,"  as  should  those  "brave 
and  upright  men"  who  in  the  main  comprised  the  judiciary,  the 
President  wrote.  However,  he  added,  the  judge  who  "truckles  to  the 
mob"  and  "shrinks  from  sternly  repressing  violence  and  disorder,"  or 
who  makes  the  wage  worker  bitter  "by  misuse  of  the  process  of 


344  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

injunction  or  by  his  attitude  toward  all  measures  for  the  betterment 
of  the  conditions  of  labor,"  or  by  failing  "to  stop  the  abuses  of  the 
criminal  rich,"  could  not  expect  to  escape  public  censure.  And  this, 
he  concluded,  "is  but  right,  for  except  in  extreme  cases  this  is  the 
only  way  he  can  be  reached  at  all." 

Not  in  all  Roosevelt's  seven  and  one-half  years  in  office  was  there 
an  emotional  outburst  comparable  to  the  one  that  followed  that 
message.  In  Congress,  where  the  Bryan  wing  of  the  Democracy 
punctuated  its  reading  with  round  after  round  of  spontaneous  ap- 
plause, the  great  body  of  Republicans  sat  glumly,  applauding  per- 
functorily, and  then  but  infrequently.  On  the  outside,  conservative 
Easterners  like  Nicholas  Murray  Butler  lost  all  sense  of  proportion 
and  the  New  York  Times  actually  wrote  editorially  that  the  President's 
"delusions  of  persecution  .  .  .  would  ordinarily  be  commended  to 
the  attention  of  a  psychiatrist." 

Across  the  nation,  however,  the  reaction  was  favorable.  The  agents 
of  special  privilege  who  wore  the  Republican  label  in  Congress  had 
never  been  broadly  representative  of  the  "plain  people"  who  com- 
prised the  bulk  of  the  Grand  Old  Party's  membership.  And  independ- 
ent Republican  editorial  voices  by  the  dozens  joined  their  Democratic 
counterparts  in  hailing  the  message  of  January  31  "as  a  classic,"  as 
one  of  "the  really  memorable  state  papers  in  the  history  of  the 
nation,"  and  as  "a  clarion  call  to  duty."  And  once  again  that  faithful 
tribune  of  the  people,  William  Jennings  Bryan,  rose  to  his  great  rival's 
support.  Roosevelt's  message,  exclaimed  Bryan,  was  a  "brave"  and 
timely  "call  to  arms";  he  urged  his  fellow  Democrats  "to  accept 
promptly  the  issues  that  have  been  presented  by  the  President." 

Fundamentally,  the  memorable  message  of  January  31  was  what 
the  President  claimed  it  was — an  exhortation  to  "national  honesty  in 
business  and  politics."  As  such  it  was  in  the  pattern  cut  out  more 
than  a  quarter  of  a  century  before  when  he  had  so  courageously  defied 
his  party  leaders  by  moving  the  investigation  of  Judge  Westbrook. 
There  was,  however,  one  significant  difference.  The  Roosevelt  of 
1882  had  seen  only  the  superficial  manifestations  of  corruption;  the 
Roosevelt  of  1908  knew  something  of  their  root  causes.  This  was 
exemplified  by  his  sweeping  arraignment  of  both  the  puppets  and  the 
men  who  actually  pulled  the  strings;  by  his  charge  that  the  courts  were 
partial  to  the  corporations;  and  by  his  asseveration  that  the  judiciary's 
overwhelming  commitment  to  the  status  quo  was  perverting  justice 


TOWARD   THE    WELFARE    STATE  345 

and  thwarting  organized  labor.  As  Roosevelt  had  explained  to  Justice 
William  R.  Day  a  few  weeks  before,  unless  the  spirit  behind  the 
decisions  that  had  recently  overruled  New  York's  bakery  and  tene- 
ment laws  was  changed,  "we  should  not  only  have  a  revolution,  but 
it  would  be  absolutely  necessary  to  have  a  revolution,  because  the 
condition  of  the  worker  would  become  intolerable."  What  he  wanted 
"from  some  of  you  judges,  whom  I  respect  more  than  I  do  any  other 
public  men,"  the  President  had  added,  is  "some  satisfactory  scheme, 
which  would  permit  of  the  necessary  protest  against  the  few  un- 
righteous, and  the  less  few  unwise  decisions,  without  impairment  of 
that  respect  for  the  law  which  must  go  hand  in  hand  with  respect  for 
the  courts.  .  .  ."  The  failure  to  get  that  "scheme"  would  be  respon- 
sible for  Roosevelt's  espousal  of  the  recall  of  judicial  decisions  in 
1912. 

Meanwhile  the  President  continued  his  efforts  to  meliorate  the  lot 
of  the  working  man  and  woman.  He  still  refused  to  accept  the 
principle  of  the  closed  shop  while  his  fear  of  labor  violence  and  dis- 
like for  "professional  labor  agitators"  remained  as  great  as  ever.  Less 
than  two  months  before  the  message  of  January  31,  in  fact,  he  had 
ordered  federal  troops  into  Nevada  to  suppress  reported  violence  dur- 
ing a  strike  in  the  mine  fields.  When  it  became  evident,  however,  that 
there  was  little  violence  and  that  the  pro-corporation  governor  of  the 
state  had  designed  to  use  the  troops  to  break  the  mine  workers' 
union,  Roosevelt  had  peremptorily  withdrawn  them. 

Roosevelt  did  not  even  then  subscribe  to  the  near  total  environ- 
mentalism  that  comprises  the  warp  and  the  woof  of  so  much  of 
twentieth-century  liberalism.  To  the  end  he  believed  in  the  individual's 
free  moral  capacity,  in  his  ability  to  control  and  rise  above  his 
environment.  And  he  was  unfailingly  disdainful  of  theoretical  so- 
cialism. To  Lincoln  Steffens,  whose  increasingly  critical  attacks  on 
Roosevelt  reflected  his  own  growing  commitment  to  socialism,  the 
President  wrote  in  June,  1908  that  "under  government  ownership 
corruption  can  flourish  just  as  rankly  as  under  private  ownership." 
Privilege  must  be  eliminated;  but  privilege  was  not  all.  "I  know  from 
actual  experience — from  experience  of  the  most  intimate  kind  in  the 
little  village  of  Oyster  Bay  and  out  in  the  West  at  Medora,  where 
there  was  not  a  special  privilege  of  any  kind  in  either  place — that 
what  is  needed  is  the  fundamental  fight  for  morality."  Yet,  as  he  wrote 
another  friend,  the  tenets  of  many  people  who  call  themselves  socialists 


346  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

"are  not  only  worthy  of  respect  but  represent  real  advances."  Among 
such  "advances,"  presumably,  were  major  features  of  Roosevelt's 
own  conservation  program. 

Even  as  Roosevelt  clung  to  the  vestiges  of  the  "survival  of  the 
fittest"  theory,  even  as  he  continued  to  believe  that  much  of  man's 
weakness  and  evil  was  inherent,  he  drastically  modified  his  application 
of  those  concepts.  By  1908  he  perceived  more  clearly  than  ever  before 
that  the  environment  was  of  tremendous,  if  not  quite  overpowering 
influence,  especially  on  the  weak  and  the  straitened.  So  in  the  newer 
mode  of  Reform  Darwinism  and  the  older  tradition  of  noblesse 
oblige  and  human  compassion,  he  strove  to  mitigate  the  conditions  of 
labor  through  government  action.  Warmly  and  persistently  he  sup- 
ported proposals  for  the  eight-hour  day  and  for  workmen's  compensa- 
tion measures.  "I  spoke  of  the  hard  case  of  P.  B.  Banton,  who  was 
crippled  for  life  while  doing  his  duty  on  the  Panama  Canal  and  is 
now  helpless  with  a  wife  and  three  children,"  he  wrote  a  congressman 
in  February,  1908.  "Will  it  not  be  possible  to  have  a  general  bill 
passed  to  remedy  the  injustice  .  .  .  ?  No  more  righteous  act  could 
be  passed  by  Congress."  Or,  as  he  wrote  in  his  message  of  January  3 1 : 

The  special  pleaders  for  business  dishonesty,  in  denouncing  the 
present  Administration  for  enforcing  the  law  against  the  huge  and 
corrupt  corporations  which  have  defied  the  law,  also  denounce  it 
for  endeavoring  to  secure  sadly  needed  labor  legislation,  such  as  a 
far-reaching  law  making  employers  liable  for  injuries  to  their  em- 
ployees. ...  It  is  hypocritical  baseness  to  speak  of  a  girl  who 
works  in  a  factory  where  the  dangerous  machinery  is  unprotected 
as  having  the  "right"  freely  to  contract  to  expose  herself  to  dangers 
to  life  and  limb.  She  has  no  alternative  but  to  suffer  want  or  else 
to  expose  herself  to  such  dangers  ...  it  is  a  moral  wrong  that 
the  whole  burden  of  the  risk  necessarily  incidental  to  the  business 
should  be  placed  with  crushing  weight  upon  her  weak  shoul- 
ders. .  .  .  This  is  what  opponents  of  a  just  employers'  liability  law 
advocate.  .  .  . 

Even  more  significant  than  Roosevelt's  widening  acceptance  of  the 
deterministic  postulates  of  Reform  Darwinism  was  his  strengthening 
conviction  of  the  need  for  big  unionism  He  continued  to  condone  the 
closed  shop,  but  he  came  more  and  more  to  believe  that  big  unionism 
was  as  necessary  as  big  business  was  inevitable;  and  within  the  limits 
imposed  by  his  ultimate  faith  in  individualism,  he  warmly  encouraged 


TOWARD   THE    WELFARE   STATE  347 

the  labor  movement.  The  principle  of  unionism  was  "beneficial,"  he 
repeatedly  asserted;  it  was  the  "abuses"  of  power  that  must  be  guarded 
against. 

The  first  President  to  keep  an  open  door  to  union  officials,  Roose- 
velt conferred  many  times  with  Gompers,  Mitchell,  and  other  labor 
leaders  during  his  seven  and  one-half  years  in  office.  And  though  he 
never  again  played  such  a  dramatic  role  as  he  had  in  the  Anthracite 
Strike  of  1902,  he  continued  to  the  end  to  make  a  modest  contribution 
to  labor's  uplifting.  For  example,  in  the  winter  of  1908  when  several 
railroads  contemplated  wage  reductions  in  order  to  redeem  losses 
caused  by  the  administration's  regulatory  program — or  so  the  Louis- 
ville and  Nashville  angrily  charged — Roosevelt  ordered  the  Interstate 
Commerce  Commission  to  investigate.  "These  reductions  in  wages 
may  be  warranted,  or  they  may  not,"  the  President  wrote.  But  in  any 
event,  the  Commission  should  be  prepared  to  mediate.  It  finally  did 
so,  arranging  a  settlement  that  held  the  line  on  wages  and  creating  in 
the  process  a  precedent  for  the  handling  of  future  controversies  in  the 
railroad  industry. 

Had  Roosevelt  had  his  way,  the  principle  of  government  mediation 
would  have  been  made  broadly  inclusive.  In  his  annual  message  of 
1906  and  again  in  that  of  1907  he  had  urged  "compulsory  investiga- 
tion of  such  industrial  controversies  as  are  of  sufficient  magnitude 
and  of  sufficient  concern  to  the  people  of  the  country  as  a  whole" — 
clear  evidence  that  in  the  President's  mind  labor  had  come  of  age. 
When  his  attitude  is  contrasted  to  that  of  the  National  Manufacturers 
Association,  which  was  then  girding  its  loins  for  an  anti-unionism 
campaign  that  persists  to  this  day  ("better  to  fight  than  be  assassinated 
in  the  interests  of  a  coalition  of  politics  and  labor,"  the  Association's 
journal  warned  in  May,  1908),  the  magnitude  of  Roosevelt's  progres- 
sivism  stands  in  perspective. 

Although  organized  labor  was  gratified  by  the  advances  in  the 
President's  thought,  it  still  refused  to  take  him  to  its  bosom.  Roose- 
velt's deep  distrust  of  union  officials  as  a  class  remained  ill-concealed. 
And  his  reluctance  to  place  labor  violence  in  its  social  context  con- 
tinued. Roosevelt  might  have  agreed  with  that  part  of  the  publisher 
E.  W.  Scripps's  defense  of  the  bomb-setting  McNamara  brothers 
which  read:  "We,  the  employers  .  .  .  have  the  jobs  to  give  or  with- 
hold; the  capital  to  spend,  or  not  spend,  for  production,  for  wages, 
for  ourselves;  we  have  the  press  to  state  our  case  and  suppress  theirs; 


348  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

we  have  the  Bar  and  the  Bench,  the  legislature,  the  governor,  the 
police  and  the  militia."  But  he  could  only  have  spewed  epithets  over 
Scripps's  conclusion  that  "violence  and  mob  force"  were  labor's  sole 
weapons  and  that  "Workingmen  should  have  the  same  belligerent 
rights  in  labor  controversies  that  nations  have  in  warfare." 

A  much  more  direct  cause  of  labor's  disenchantment  with  the 
President  was  his  failure  to  force  the  G.O.P.  to  write  his  advanced 
recommendations  into  law.  As  Samuel  Gompers,  whose  own  career 
was  the  epitome  of  moderation  and  gradualism,  later  charged,  Roose- 
velt "desired  to  maintain  party  leadership  and  that  led  to  compromise 
with  the  reactionaries  in  the  Republican  party." 

There  was  large  truth  in  that  analysis;  and  the  President's  devious 
handling  of  the  injunction  issue  in  the  1908  campaign  would  under- 
score it.  Nevertheless,  Gompers'  evaluation  begs  the  central  political 
question  of  Roosevelt's  presidency.  Could  Roosevelt  have  broken 
with  the  Old  Guard  and  yet  fulfilled  so  many  other  of  his  foreign  and 
domestic  objectives? 


CHAPTER  21 


THE    CAMPAIGN   OF   1908 


I  believe  in  a  strong  executive;  I  believe  in  power;  but  I 
believe  that  responsibility  should  go  with  power  and  that  it  is 
not  well  that  the  strong  executive  should  be  a  perpetual  executive. 

— Theodore  Roosevelt 


The  sands  were  running  out,  and  with  them  the  President's  waning 
influence  over  Congress  and  party.  Within  five  months  of  the 
memorable  special  message  of  January  3 1  Roosevelt's  successor  would 
be  nominated,  and  within  ten  months  he  would  be  elected.  For  the 
four  months  following  Roosevelt  would  be  in  name  what  he  already 
was  in  fact — a  "lame  duck"  President.  Then,  on  March  4,  1909,  just 
a  year  after  the  meeting  of  the  governors  at  the  White  House,  the 
middle-aged  man  who  had  committed  himself  to  the  "governing  class" 
as  a  youth  would  return  to  the  people,  though  not  really  to  become 
one  of  them. 

A  difficult  matter  for  normal  men,  the  loss  of  power  was  an  ex- 
cruciating prospect  for  this  man  of  such  extraordinary  drive  and 
talent — one  which  all  his  surging  emotions  rebelled  against;  one 
which  his  character  alone  supported,  and  then  only  after  a  supreme 
and  sustained  exertion  of  strength.  Rarely  has  history  witnessed  a 
more  painfully  high-minded  action  than  Roosevelt's  voluntary  re- 
linquishment  of  a  power  that  he  had  proudly  proclaimed  was  greater 
than  that  of  any  crowned  head  in  all  of  Europe.  And  rarely  has 
history  seen  a  great  man  come  nearer  to  true  nobility  than  Theodore 
Roosevelt  did  when  he  resolutely  refused  over  a  period  of  many 

349 


350  POWER    AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

months  to  submit  to  the  enormous  pressures  that  he  violate  his  elec- 
tion-eve promise  of  1904  and  accept  another  term. 

It  was  to  his  fellow  historian,  Sir  George  Otto  Trevelyan,  that  the 
President  wrote  most  revealingly  of  his  abnegation.  "It  is  a  very  un- 
healthy thing  that  any  man  should  be  considered  necessary  to  the 
people  as  a  whole,  save  in  the  way  of  meeting  some  given  crisis,"  he 
wrote.  "I  regard  the  memories  of  Washington  and  Lincoln  as  priceless 
heritages  for  our  people,  just  because  they  are  the  memories  of 
strong  men,  of  men  who  cannot  be  accused  of  weakness  or  timid- 
ity ...  who,  nevertheless,  led  careers  marked  by  disinterestedness 
just  as  much  as  by  strength.  .  .  ." 

Now,  my  ambition  is  that,  in  however  small  a  way,  the  work  I  do 
shall  be  along  the  Washington  and  Lincoln  lines.  ...  I  may  be 
mistaken,  but  it  is  my  belief  that  the  bulk  of  my  countrymen,  the 
men  whom  Abraham  Lincoln  called  "the  plain  people" — the 
farmers,  mechanics,  small  tradesmen,  hard-working  professional 
people — feel  that  I  am  in  a  peculiar  sense  their  President,  that  I 
represent  the  democracy  in  somewhat  the  fashion  that  Lincoln  did, 
that  is,  not  in  any  demagogic  way  but  with  the  sincere  effort  to 
stand  for  a  government  by  the  people  and  for  the  people.  Now  the 
chief  service  I  can  render  these  plain  people  who  believe  in  me  is, 
not  to  destroy  their  ideal  of  me. 

Continuing,  Roosevelt  related  an  incident  that  had  greatly  moved 
him.  "A  few  months  ago  three  old  back-country  farmers  turned  up 
in  Washington  and  after  a  while  managed  to  get  in  to  see  me,"  he 
said.  "They  were  rugged  old  fellows,  as  hairy  as  Boers  and  a  good 
deal  of  the  Boer  type.  They  hadn't  a  black  coat  among  them,  and 
two  of  them  wore  no  cravats;  that  is  they  just  had  on  their  working 
clothes,  but  all  cleaned  and  brushed.  When  they  finally  got  to  see 
me  they  explained  that  they  hadn't  anything  whatever  to  ask,  but  that 
they  believed  in  me,  believed  that  I  stood  for  what  they  regarded  as 
the  American  ideal,  and  as  one  rugged  old  fellow  put  it,  'We  want  to 
shake  that  honest  hand.'  " 

If  Roosevelt's  decision  to  step  down  was  an  act  of  high  statesman- 
ship, the  manner  and  choice  of  his  successor  was  something  less.  It 
was  marked  by  poor  judgment,  was  influenced  by  extraneous  con- 
siderations of  personality,  and  was  accomplished  in  typical  power- 
political  fashion. 

The  President's  real  preference  for  the  succession  was  Elihu  Root. 


THE    CAMPAIGN    OF    1908  351 

Down  through  the  tumultuous  years  of  the  second  administration 
that  ablest  of  Roosevelt's  intimates  had  continued  to  give  the  Presi- 
dent constructive  counsel  as  well  as  to  explain  him  to  his  own  Wall 
Street  friends.  To  the  end,  however,  Root  had  remained  a  skeptic. 
And  though  he  often  endorsed  Roosevelt's  advanced  recommenda- 
tions, including  that  for  an  inheritance  tax,  he  was  largely  unmoved 
by  the  humanism  that  had  already  pushed  Beveridge  and  would  soon 
drive  George  W.  Perkins  in  new  directions.  Never  did  Root  urge 
Roosevelt  on;  never  did  he  display  that  passion  for  social  and 
economic  justice  that  made  the  Square  Deal  an  end  in  itself.  After  he 
lost  close  contact  with  Roosevelt  and  entered  the  United  States 
Senate  in  1909,  moreover,  he  lost  even  the  veneer  of  his  ideological 
sophistication.  As  his  most  recent  biographer,  Richard  W.  Leopold, 
concludes,  from  then  until  his  retirement  in  1915,  Root  was  "as- 
tonished, puzzled,  irritated  and  eventually  overborne"  by  the  progres- 
sive ferment  that  challenged  the  values  of  his  early  manhood. 

That  Roosevelt  could  have  believed  Root  capable  of  carrying  on 
the  Square  Deal  is  a  measure  of  the  Secretary  of  State's  forceful 
personality  as  well  as  of  Roosevelt's  credulity.  It  is  also  a  measure  of 
the  President's  deep  concern  with  foreign  policy,  for  in  that  area 
Root  was  above  all  others  qualified.  Roosevelt  was  so  favorably  dis- 
posed toward  Root,  in  fact,  that  he  once  called  him  "without  question 
the  greatest  living  statesman"  and  purportedly  remarked  that  "I  would 
walk  on  my  hands  and  knees  from  the  White  House  to  the  Capitol  to 
see  Root  made  President."  But  he  was  shrewd  enough  to  realize 
that  Root's  corporate  background  and  conservative  associations  made 
him  politically  unpalatable,  and  he  wisely  refrained  from  making  him 
his  heir  apparent.  "What  the  people  do  not  understand  of  ... 
[Root],"  he  ruefully  concluded,  "is  that  if  he  were  President  they 
would  be  his  clients." 

The  best  qualified  man  all  around  was  probably  Charles  Evans 
Hughes  of  New  York.  A  stern,  unbending  Baptist,  Hughes's  heavy 
beard  and  pale  blue  eyes  masked  a  will  of  steel.  He  had  been  cata- 
pulted to  prominence  in  1905  on  the  force  of  his  brilliant  special 
investigation  of  the  corrupt  and  mismanaged  life  insurance  industry 
in  the  Empire  State.  Backed  handsomely  by  the  Roosevelt  administra- 
tion the  next  year,  he  had  narrowly  defeated  William  Randolph  Hearst 
in  a  gubernatorial  contest  that  Roosevelt  had  exuberantly  pronounced 
"a  victory  for  civilization."  As  governor,  Hughes  had  fused  the  old 


352  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

political  reformism  with  the  new  economic  progressivism  much  in 
the  manner  of  Roosevelt  himself,  and  he  became  in  consequence  the 
presidential  choice  of  many  progressive  Westerners  as  well  as  of 
Eastern  reformers  of  the  Evening  Post  variety.  Unfortunately,  how- 
ever, Hughes's  most  striking  personal  characteristic — his  fierce  in- 
dependence— proved  his  Achilles  heel. 

In  the  spring  of  1907  after  Roosevelt  removed  a  minor  federa 
officeholder  in  Rochester  who  was  opposed  to  both  Hughes  and 
himself,  the  Governor  had  righteously  announced  that  he  had  been 
neither  consulted  nor  informed.  This  studied  rebuff  to  the  President 
had  then  been  blown  up  into  a  major  declaration  of  independence  by 
a  feature  writer  for  the  Evening  Post,  and  Hughes  was  thus  forced 
into  the  camp  of  the  enemy — not  of  the  left  or  the  right,  but  of  the 
impracticable,  Roosevelt-baiting  "goo-goos."  The  President  never 
forgot  the  incident.  Hughes  is  "a  thoroly  selfish  and  cold-blooded 
creature,"  he  warned  Taft  more  than  a  year  later.  "I  strove  to  help 
him  and  he  started  the  entire  mugwump  press  cackling  with  glee  about 
the  way  in  which  he  had  repudiated  my  help  and  did  not  care  for  it, 
and  relied  purely  upon  the  people."  The  affair  had  sealed  Hughes's 
fate,  if  it  had  not  already  been  sealed  by  Roosevelt's  affection  for 
William  Howard  Taft. 

The  selection  of  this  distinguished  and  eminently  likable  public 
servant  was  not  as  incongruous  as  events  later  suggested.  By  per- 
formance and  apparent  conviction,  Taft  was  sympathetic  to  Roose- 
velt's program.  As  he  wrote  with  some  irritation  in  1907,  "Mr.  Roose- 
velt's views  were  mine  long  before  I  knew  Mr.  Roosevelt  at  all."  From 
the  President's  strictures  against  the  abuse  of  injunctions  through  his 
espousal  of  the  inheritance  tax,  Taft  had  conscientiously,  if  reservedly, 
supported  him.  And  he  had  been  on  the  tariff  issue  more  forthright 
than  Roosevelt  himself.  Furthermore,  he  had  proved  in  the  Philip- 
pines that  he  could  be  moved  by  enlightened  compassion.  And  if  he 
believed  with  the  President  and  others  of  the  inner  circle  that  reform 
was  necessary  to  preserve  the  capitalistic  structure,  he  also  believed 
with  Roosevelt,  though  not  with  all  the  others,  that  some  reforms 
were  ends  in  themselves. 

Behind  Taft's  affable  countenance,  walrus  mustache,  and  three 
hundred  and  more  pounds  of  undulating  flesh,  however,  was  a  man 
of  marked  limitations.  They  were  not  great;  and  they  would  not  have 
disqualified  Taft  from  the  presidency  in  normal  times.  But  the  times 


THE   CAMPAIGN    OF    1908  353 

were  not  normal.  By  the  sheer  force  of  his  political  genius,  Roosevelt 
had  made  his  party  moderately  responsive  to  the  challenges  that 
everywhere  confronted  it.  But  not  even  he  had  radically  changed  the 
Grand  Old  Party's  basic  character.  The  election  of  a  La  Follette,  the 
conversion  of  a  Beveridge,  the  surging  progressivism  of  the  rank  and 
file — notwithstanding  all  that,  the  party's  congressional  leadership  and 
corporate  supporters  remained  militantly  conservative  and  in  many 
cases  reactionary.  Never  during  the  Progressive  Era,  not  even  at  the 
height  of  insurgency  in  1910,  would  more  than  a  quarter  of  the  Re- 
publican delegation  in  either  the  Senate  or  the  House  raise  the  progres- 
sive battle  flag.  Taft  lacked  the  wherewithal  to  bear  it  for  the  other 
three-fourths. 

Taft  was  neither  bold  nor  dynamic;  nor  in  the  political  sense  re- 
sourceful. He  was  extraordinarily  lazy,  and  he  was  given  to  petulance 
rather  than,  like  Roosevelt,  to  wrath.  His  mental  processes  were  pain- 
fully conventional,  and  he  displayed  little  of  Roosevelt's  synthesizing 
intelligence  and  even  less  of  his  urge  to  create.  For  all  his  humanism 
and  unexpected  moral  courage,  he  was  then  and  would  always  be 
thereafter  a  conservative  in  all  his  instincts.  No  more  than  Elihu 
Root,  and  others  of  legalistic  frame  of  mind,  could  he  approve  all  of 
Roosevelt's  tactics,  even  though  he  thought  he  believed  in  his  objec- 
tives. Had  the  battle  been  won,  Taft  might  have  been  competent  to 
hold  the  line.  The  point  is  debatable,  perhaps.  But  the  lines  were 
actually  advancing  and  the  intermediate  objectives  changing.  The 
President's  great  battle  order  of  January  3 1 ,  which  Taft  had  professed 
to  approve,  had  called  for  an  offensive  that  Roosevelt  himself  would 
have  been  hard  pressed  to  push  to  victory.  Was  Taft,  whose  experi- 
ence had  been  that  of  a  loyal  lieutenant  and  a  top-drawer  liaison 
officer,  the  man  for  the  command? 

Taft's  ambitious  wife  and  his  father-like  half-brother  were  confident 
that  he  was;  but  only  because  they  were  enamored  of  the  presidency 
itself.  They  seemed  not  to  understand,  or  at  least  to  accept,  the 
formidable  obstacles  that  would  confront  any  Republican  successor 
to  Theodore  Roosevelt.  Indeed  Mrs.  Taft,  the  real  instrument  of  her 
husband's  tragedy  in  that  she  placed  her  own  desire  to  be  First  Lady 
above  his  more  reasonable  aspiration  to  a  post  on  the  Supreme  Court, 
seems  to  have  been  impervious  to  the  tidal  wave  of  reformism  that 
was  then  engulfing  the  country.  Recoiling  from  the  President's  special 
message  of  January  31,  she  advised  her  husband  as  early  as  Feb- 


354  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

ruary,  1908,  not  to  "make  any  more  speeches  on  the  Roosevelt 
policies." 

But  there  was  another  Taft  who  was  sure  that  William  Howard 
was  not  the  man  for  the  command.  "Roosevelt  is  a  good  fighter  and 
enjoys  it,  but  the  malice  of  politics  would  make  you  miserable,"  Taft's 
aged  mother  warned  her  son  shortly  before  she  died.  'They  do  not 
want  you  as  their  leader,  but  cannot  find  anyone  more  available." 
Nor  was  Roosevelt  absolutely  certain.  A  letter  he  sent  Taft  during 
the  heat  of  the  campaign  in  1908  is  implicitly  revealing  of  his  doubts: 
Be  sure  to  let  the  people  realize  "that  for  all  your  gentleness  and 
kindliness  and  generous  good  nature,  there  never  existed  a  man  who 
was  a  better  fighter  when  the  need  arose,"  he  wishfully  advised  his 
beloved  friend. 

By  then  Roosevelt  had  long  since  made  his  decision.  As  early  as 
1905,  in  fact,  he  had  decided  that  the  Secretary  of  War  was  his  most 
likely  successor,  and  thereafter  he  had  given  him  every  encouragement 
short  of  absolute  commitment.  True,  he  had  appeared  to  waver  in 
early  1906  when  he  again  offered  Taft  a  seat  on  the  High  Bench. 
There  was  a  compelling  need  for  distinguished  men  to  sit  on  "the 
greatest  court  in  Christendom"  and  pass  judgment  on  the  questions 
"which  seem  likely  vitally  and  fundamentally  to  affect  the  social,  in- 
dustrial and  political  structure  of  our  commonwealth,"  Roosevelt  had 
then  written.  However,  he  had  also  explained,  he  thought  that  Taft 
really  wanted  to  become  a  member  of  the  Court.  "What  you  say  in 
your  letter  and  what  your  dear  wife  says  [Mrs.  Taft  had  impressed  her 
views  on  the  President  in  an  urgent,  half-hour  interview  arranged  at 
her  instigation]  alter  the  case." 

Following  that  fateful  exchange,  the  President's  resolve  to  make 
Taft  his  successor  deepened,  though  he  did  not  act  decisively  until 
March,  1907.  During  the  interim  the  generous-minded  Secretary  of 
War  several  times  told  Root,  his  wife,  and  the  President  himself  that 
Roosevelt  should  run  again.  Although  Roosevelt  gave  that  sugges- 
tion short  shrift,  he  did  write  William  Allen  White,  who  was  cool  to 
Taft,  that  he  was  "not  going  to  take  a  hand  in  his  nomination  for  it  is 
none  of  my  business."  Then,  in  October,  1906,  he  strained  his  rela- 
tions with  the  aggressive  Mrs.  Taft,  if  not  with  her  husband,  by 
warning  that  if  Hughes's  popularity  continued  to  soar  and  Taft 
remained  aloof  he  might  have  to  back  the  New  Yorker.  In  March, 
1907,  however,  before  Roosevelt's  vendetta  with  Hughes  completely 


THE    CAMPAIGN    OF    1908  355 

soured  him,  the  President  virtually  made  the  final  commitment  by 
directing  that  "a  peculiar  regard"  for  Taft's  "judgment"  be  shown  in 
all  executive  appointments  in  Ohio. 

The  pre-convention  campaign  that  the  President  now  waged  for 
his  "beloved  Will"  was  as  ruthless,  and  probably  more  so,  than  the 
one  he  had  fought  against  Mark  Hanna  for  his  own  nomination  in 
1904.  And  the  justification  was  less,  for  Hughes  was  closer  to  Roose- 
velt ideologically  than  Hanna  had  been.  Once  again  the  President 
played  the  patronage  game  to  the  hilt;  and  once  again  he  artfully 
denied  that  he  had.  "I  appointed  no  man  for  the  purpose  of  creating 
Taft  sentiment;  but  ...  I  have  appointed  men  in  recognition  of  the 
Taft  sentiment  already  in  existence."  But  Roosevelt  needed  even 
more  than  that  to  win,  or  so  he  thought.  Late  in  January,  in  one  of 
those  brilliant  political  maneuvers  so  characteristic  of  himself  and 
that  later  Roosevelt,  he  stole  Hughes's  audience  in  the  Governor's 
very  hour  of  self-revelation. 

In  spite  of  Hughes's  public  indifference  and  the  President's  pref- 
erence for  Taft,  the  movement  for  Hughes's  nomination  had  con- 
tinued to  burgeon  during  all  of  1907.  The  Governor  was  repeatedly 
urged  to  declare  his  intentions,  and  he  finally  agreed  to  state  his  views 
on  national  issues  in  a  widely  advertised  address  to  the  Republican 
Club  of  New  York  on  January  31,  1908.  It  was  expected  that  the 
Governor's  statement  of  faith  (it  turned  out  to  be  friendly  to  Roose- 
velt and  his  policies)  would  be  spread  broadside  over  the  front  pages 
of  the  newspapers  the  morning  following.  The  headlines  on  February 
1,  however,  heralded  a  startlingly  different  event:  "Roosevelt's  on- 
slaught .  .  .";  "Big  Men  Roasted  .  .  .";  "Message  Dazes";  "Hottest 
Message  Ever  Sent  to  Congress.  .  .  ." 

On  the  afternoon  of  January  31,  too  late  for  publication  in  the 
evening  papers,  the  President  had  released  that  most  challenging  of 
all  his  messages  to  Congress.  "If  Hughes  is  going  to  play  the  game," 
he  blandly  remarked  to  reporters,  "he  must  learn  the  tricks." 

And  so — Roosevelt  the  king-maker.  Years  before,  in  his  biography 
of  Benton,  he  had  bitterly  criticized  Andrew  Jackson  for  acting 
similarly.  But  the  point  merits  no  belaboring.  The  selection  of  Taft, 
even  more  than  some  of  the  President's  other  aberrations,  was  the 
price  the  nation  paid  for  Roosevelt's  inherent  strength  and  manifest 
distinction.  Furthermore,  as  Mowry  remarks,  Roosevelt's  popularity 


356  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

was  so  great  that  he  had  either  to  choose  and  support  a  successor  or 
submit  to  his  own  renomination. 

Mrs.  Taft's  gnawing  suspicions  to  the  contrary,  the  President's 
support  of  her  husband  was  so  effective  that  Taft's  nomination  was 
a  foregone  conclusion  months  before  the  Republican  Convention 
opened  at  Chicago  on  June  19.  Only  a  stampede  for  the  President 
could  have  altered  the  outcome;  and,  as  Pringle  writes,  the  conven- 
tion consequently  proved  a  study  in  irony — "Roosevelt  the  politician 
used  machine  methods  to  crush  Roosevelt  the  popular  hero." 

Determined  to  prevent  his  own  nomination,  Roosevelt  had  com- 
missioned Lodge  to  stave  off  any  movement  for  his  selection.  It  was 
a  tough  assignment.  "If  you  think  it  was  pleasant  to  be  the  one  to 
close  the  door  &  do  what  we  both  thought  right  you  are  in  error," 
Lodge  later  wrote  his  friend.  "The  hardest  thing  I  ever  had  to  do  in 
public  life  was  to  use  all  the  great  tho'  temporary  powers  of  my  place 
at  Chicago  to  shut  you  out  of  the  White  House  &  put  some  one  else 
(much  as  I  love  &  admire  that  some  one  else)  in." 

But  Lodge  had  succeeded  admirably — succeeded  in  the  face  of  a 
record  forty-nine-minute  demonstration  for  Roosevelt  that  had  in- 
terrupted his  keynote  address  just  before  the  end.  "The  President  .  .  . 
retires  by  his  own  determination,"  this  devoted  friend  who  more  than 
any  one  else  except,  perhaps,  Edith  Roosevelt,  appreciated  the 
nobility  of  Roosevelt's  self-abnegation,  had  exclaimed  to  the  dele- 
gates after  order  was  restored.  "His  refusal  of  renomination  ...  is 
final  and  irrevocable.  Any  man  who  attempts  to  use  his  name  as  a 
candidate  for  the  presidency  impugns  both  his  sincerity  and  his  good 
faith.  .  .  .  That  man  is  no  friend  to  Theodore  Roosevelt." 

Throughout  the  campaign  that  summer  and  fall  the  President 
directed  a  steady  stream  of  thinly  veiled  instructions  at  the  un- 
comfortable Taft,  who  had  won  the  nomination  on  the  first  ballot. 
Many  were  exhortatory — "Hit  them  hard,  old  man!"  he  wrote  at  one 
point — and  many  more  were  shrewdly  practical.  Roosevelt  warned 
Taft  not  to  affront  Speaker  Cannon,  no  matter  how  insufferable  that 
aging  tyrant's  support.  He  suggested  that  Taft  curtail  his  golf  playing, 
or  at  least  refuse  to  be  photographed  "in  costume"  (he  had  always 
been  careful  about  his  own  tennis,  he  pointedly  explained).  And  he 
warned  the  Secretary  of  War  not  to  appear  on  the  same  platform 
with  the  loathsome  Foraker,  whose  unsavory  relationship  with  the 
Standard  Oil  Company  had  recently  been  aired  by  Hearst.  Roosevelt 


THE   CAMPAIGN    OF    1908  357 

further  urged  Taft  to  be  cautious  in  his  recommendations  for  tariff 
revision  (Taft  had  embarrassed  the  President  and  party  by  forth- 
rightly  coming  out  for  downward  tariff  revision  in  1906). 

It  was  hard,  even  so,  for  the  warrior-politician  to  avoid  the  smoke 
of  battle.  Mastering  his  swelling  frustration,  he  held  to  an  early 
decision  to  make  no  speeches.  He  also  tried  conscientiously  to  prevent 
his  own  booming  personality  from  overpowering  Taft's.  "I  think  that 
the  number  of  times  my  name  is  used  should  be  cut  down,"  he  wrote 
the  nominee  after  reading  the  draft  of  his  formal  message  of  accept- 
ance. "You  are  now  the  leader,  and  there  must  be  nothing  that  looks 
like  self-depreciation  or  undue  subordination  of  yourself."  But  in 
the  end,  Roosevelt  reached  the  front  through  a  series  of  public  letters; 
and  in  so  doing  he  again  scarred  his  reputation. 

There  was  much  in  the  Democratic  platform  of  1908  and  Bryan's 
exegesis  of  it  that  warranted  attack  from  Roosevelt's  point  of  view. 
This  was  particularly  true  of  the  foreign  policy  planks.  Not  only  did 
they  display  little  understanding  of  the  realities  of  world  power,  they 
threatened  a  disruption  of  Roosevelt's  delicately  negotiated  master- 
piece, the  "Gentlemen's  Agreement"  with  Japan.  As  the  President 
caustically  observed  to  Taft,  the  Democrats  "desire  to  insult  Japan 
by  excluding  all  Japanese  immigration,  and  at  the  same  time  recom- 
mend cutting  down  the  navy  so  it  could  only  be  used  for  coast 
defense."  In  addition,  the  Democratic  platform  called  for  an  im- 
mediate declaration  in  favor  of  Philippine  independence,  a  proposal 
Roosevelt  regarded  as  fatefully  premature. 

The  Democratic  planks  on  domestic  matters  were  not  above 
criticism  either.  The  President  regarded  the  statements  on  the  trusts, 
which  promised  a  limitation  on  the  size  of  corporations  rather  than 
regulation  of  their  activities,  as  impractical.  He  had  no  sympathy  for 
the  Democrats'  promise  of  over-all  reductions  in  the  tariff,  preferring 
instead  his  own  party's  ephemeral  promise  of  a  controlled  revision 
that  would  retain  the  protectionist  principle.  And  he  took  specious 
exception  to  the  Democrats'  proposal  for  a  federally  guaranteed  bank 
deposit  scheme  which  presaged  the  Federal  Deposit  Insurance  Cor- 
poration of  the  New  Deal.  Professing  to  approve  it  in  principle,  he 
urged  Taft  to  attack  it  on  the  grounds  that  the  banking  structure  must 
be  radically  changed  before  it  could  be  implemented.  But  it  was  the 
injunction  issue  that  inspired  Roosevelt  to  show  his  political  colors 
and  suffer  his  heaviest  wound. 


358  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

True  to  the  faith  of  his  message  of  January  31,  and  four  previous 
recommendations  to  Congress,  the  President  had  sent  Lodge  to  the 
Republican  Convention  at  Chicago  under  firm  instructions  to  frame 
an  injunction  plank  with  teeth  in  it.  But  the  Massachusetts  Senator 
had  failed,  partly  because  he  was  unsympathetic,  and  largely  because 
of  the  National  Association  of  Manufacturers'  decisive  authority  in 
Republican  councils.  The  plank,  as  rewritten  by  the  Association's 
president,  James  W.  Van  Cleave,  Aldrich,  and  other  conservative 
Republican  leaders,  pledged  the  party  to  "uphold  at  all  times  the 
authority  and  integrity  of  the  courts.  .  .  ."  Nor  did  it  propose  to 
limit  the  use  of  injunctions.  That  plank  "will  legalize  what  we  have 
been  trying  to  abolish,"  Samuel  Gompers  had  cried  out  in  anguish  at 
the  time.  Bitterly,  he  had  then  charged  that  labor  had  been  "thrown 
down,  repudiated  and  relegated  to  the  discard  by  the  Republican 
party."  The  Democrats,  meanwhile,  had  proved  as  superficially 
responsive  to  labor's  demands  as  the  Republicans  had  been  substan- 
tively  responsive  to  industry's.  At  Gompers's  urging,  their  convention 
at  St.  Louis  adopted  a  sweeping  plank  that  could  readily  be  interpreted 
as  outlawing  the  use  of  the  injunction  in  labor  disputes. 

Roosevelt  had  seized  upon  the  Democratic  plank  as  extreme,  and 
he  was  partly  honest  in  so  doing.  Nothing  he  ever  said  or  wrote 
suggests  that  he  favored  the  outright  abolition  of  injunctions.  Always 
his  brief  was  against  their  "abuse"  by  procorporation  or  antilabor 
judges.  In  a  characteristically  partisan  and  self-deluding  twist,  how- 
ever, he  now  contended  that  the  Republican  plank  was  truly  "mod- 
erate" and  that  the  G.O.P.  had  steered  a  middle  course  between  the 
demands  of  labor  and  the  manufacturers. 

The  issue  had  simmered  through  the  summer  of  1908.  It  flamed  up 
on  October  13  when  the  press  across  the  land  carried  an  open  letter 
from  Gompers  in  which  he  repeated  the  charge  that  the  Republicans 
had  sold  out  labor  and  boldly  urged  workingmen  to  vote  for  Bryan. 
Roosevelt  was  furious.  A  week  and  a  half  later  he  released  a  long  and 
indignant  letter  to  Senator  Philander  Knox  in  which  he  challenged 
Bryan,  who  had  been  silent  on  the  injunction  issue,  to  indicate  whether 
he  agreed  with  Gompers's  broad  construction  of  the  Democratic 
plank.  He  also  criticized  Gompers  for  charging  hi  words  that  were 
actually  less  vehement  than  his  own  that  the  judiciary  was  subservient 
to  corporate  power.  And  he  particularly  excoriated  Gompers's  sup- 
port of  legislation  that  would  have  attacked  the  secondary  boycott. 


THE   CAMPAIGN   OF    1908  359 

"No  court  could  possibly  exercise  any  more  brutal,  unfeeling,  or 
despotic  power  than  Mr.  Gompers  claims  for  himself  and  his  followers 
in  this  legislation,"  he  said.  Roosevelt  failed,  however,  to  reply  effec- 
tively to  the  basic  political  challenge — to  wit,  the  Republican  party 
was  so  submissive  to  the  National  Association  of  Manufacturers  that 
not  even  the  President  of  the  United  States  had  been  able  to  have  his 
reasonable  views  on  the  injunction  problem  written  into  the  party's 
platform.  For  that  letter,  for  past  compromises,  and  for  future  blasts, 
tens  of  thousands  of  working  men  would  in  1912  rally  behind  Eugene 
V.  Debs  or  Woodrow  Wilson. 

Meanwhile  Gompers  had  replied  in  kind.  "The  mere  fact  that  Mr. 
Roosevelt  denounces  a  proposition  as  wicked  does  not  so  constitute 
it,"  he  said  in  a  second  public  letter.  He  noted  that  Roosevelt  himself 
had  called  the  reversal  of  the  $29  million  fine  Judge  Landis  had 
imposed  on  the  Standard  Oil  Company  "a  gross  miscarriage  of 
justice."  He  quoted  the  President's  statement  of  January  31  that  "It 
is  futile  to  concede  ...  the  right  and  the  necessity  of  organized 
effort  on  the  part  of  wage  earners  and  yet  by  injunctive  process  to 
forbid  peaceable  action  to  accomplish  the  lawful  objects  for  which 
they  are  organized.  .  .  ."  He  twitted  Roosevelt  for  permitting  "Genial 
Uncle  Joe"  Cannon  and  other  Old  Guardsmen  to  "slap"  him  in  the 
face  by  nominating  the  archconservative  James  "Sunny  Jim"  Sherman 
for  Vice-President.  And  he  charged  that  Roosevelt,  after  failing  to 
get  the  Republican  platform  committee  to  accept  his  own  liberal 
platform,  "not  only  swallows  the  whole  pot  pourri,  but  .  .  .  directly 
and  indirectly  attack[s]  me  in  the  fight  which  my  fellow  workers  and 
I  are  making  in  defense  of  equality  before  the  law  of  the  men  of 
labor  with  all  other  citizens.  .  .  ."  He  added  an  ironic  footnote.  In 
January,  1908,  Roosevelt  himself  had  called  Gompers's  attention  to  a 
chapter  in  George  A.  Alger's  Moral  Overstrain  that  sharply  criticized 
the  courts  for  guaranteeing  the  workingman  "an  academic  and  theo- 
retic liberty  which  he  does  not  want"  and  "denying  him  industrial 
rights  to  which  he  thinks  he  is  ethically  entitled."  Then,  four  days 
before  the  memorable  Special  Message  of  January  31,  Roosevelt  had 
written  Gompers  that  he  would  "be  amused  to  know"  that  he  had  sent 
copies  of  Alger's  book  to  the  antilabor  Supreme  Court  Justices  Day 
and  McKenna. 

The  injunction  controversy  was  unpleasant,  but  it  had  been  waged 
openly  both  by  Roosevelt  and  by  Taft.  There  was,  in  fact,  a  refresh- 


360  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

ing  quality  in  Taft's  frank  defense  of  his  issuance  of  injunction  orders 
while  a  Federal  judge  in  Cincinnati  almost  a  decade  before.  But  there 
was  another  issue  in  the  campaign  of  1908  on  which  a  frank  defense 
seemed  politically  inexpedient — religion.  A  Unitarian  of  considered 
conviction,  William  Howard  Taft  did  not  believe  in  the  divinity  of 
Jesus  Christ.  He  stood  in  distinguished  company — with  Benjamin 
Franklin,  Thomas  Jefferson,  John  Adams,  and  John  Quincy  Adams 
probably;  with  Abraham  Lincoln  and  Theodore  Roosevelt  possibly; 
and  with  numbers  of  other  eminent  Americans  whose  services  to  their 
country  had  been  not  less  noteworthy  for  their  failure  to  conform  to 
the  reigning  theology.  But  Taft  in  1908  was  running  against  William 
Jennings  Bryan.  The  consequence  was  a  painful  experience  for  Taft 
and  a  frustrating  one  for  Roosevelt. 

All  during  the  summer  of  1908  the  President  fumed  privately  at 
the  undercover  campaign.  Bryan  was  playing  "strong  in  Chautauqua 
circles  and  elsewhere  for  the  church  vote,"  he  irritably  wrote  Taft. 
Meanwhile  others  raised  the  issue — "the  bigoted,  narrow-minded, 
honest,  evangelical  .  .  .  Methodists,  Lutherans,  Baptists,  and  some 
Presbyterians,"  as  Roosevelt,  who  received  hundreds  of  letters  pro- 
testing Taft's  unbelief,  referred  to  them.  "Think  of  the  United  States 
with  a  President  who  does  not  believe  that  Jesus  Christ  was  the  Son 
of  God,"  wrote  the  editor  of  one  religious  journal,  "but  looks  upon 
our  immaculate  Savior  as  a  common  bastard  and  low,  cunning  im- 
postor!" From  Chautauqua  came  the  report  that  the  Methodist  min- 
isters attending  an  Epworth  League  Convention  had  "gone  wild"  for 
Bryan.  "They  assert  that  no  good  Methodist  can  vote  for  a  man  who 
openly  declares  he  does  not  believe  in  the  divinity  of  Christ,"  the 
secretary  of  the  Assembly  said.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Literary  Digest 
reported  that  the  majority  of  religious  publications  viewed  Taft's 
religion  with  equanimity,  while  at  least  one  Catholic  paper  argued  that 
the  issue  was  irrelevant  since  the  "dominant  Protestantism  of  the  day 
is  unconfest  [sic]  Unitarianism." 

To  compound  Taft's  troubles,  many  Protestants  also  argued  that 
the  Republican  candidate  had  been  pro-Catholic  in  his  conduct  of 
affairs  in  the  Philippines.  The  charge  was  patently  unfair.  Although  the 
Vatican  had  driven  a  hard  bargain  when  it  finally  consented  to  sell  the 
friars'  lands,  militant  Catholics  had  bitterly  disapproved  the  secular 
emphasis  of  the  public  school  system  established  on  the  Islands  during 
Taft's  commissionership. 


THE   CAMPAIGN   OF    1908  361 

Confused,  surprised,  and  hurt,  Taft  proposed  to  issue  a  public 
statement.  But  under  advice  from  Root  and  Roosevelt,  he  decided 
against  it.  Meanwhile,  the  President  kept  silent  with  difficulty.  He 
continued  to  inveigh  against  bigotry  in  his  private  letters,  alluding 
repeatedly  to  Lincoln's  unorthodox  religious  beliefs.  And  he  once 
attended  Unitarian  services  with  Taft  in  the  hope,  as  he  phrased  it, 
"that  it  would  attract  the  attention  of  sincere  but  rather  ignorant 
Protestants  who  support  me."  But  in  deference  to  Taft's  interests  he 
waited  until  the  campaign  was  over  before  speaking  out.  Then,  in  a 
letter  that  reflected  that  Jeffersonian  strain  which  was  often  submerged 
but  never  drowned,  he  poured  forth  his  convictions  in  a  public  letter 
to  a  correspondent  from  Ohio:  "You  ask  that  Mr.  Taft  shall  let  the 
world  know  what  his  religious  belief  is.' " 

This  is  purely  his  own  private  concern;  it  is  a  matter  between 
him  and  his  Maker,  a  matter  for  his  own  conscience;  and  to  require 
it  to  be  made  public  under  penalty  of  political  discrimination  is  to 
negative  the  first  principle  of  our  Government,  which  guarantees 
complete  religious  liberty,  and  the  right  to  each  man  to  act  in 
religious  affairs  as  his  own  conscience  dictates.  .  .  . 

Discrimination  against  the  holder  of  one  faith  means  retaliatory 
discrimination  against  men  of  other  faiths.  The  inevitable  result  of 
entering  upon  such  a  practice  would  be  an  abandonment  of  our  real 
freedom  of  conscience  and  a  reversion  to  the  dreadful  conditions  of 
religious  dissension  which  in  so  many  lands  have  proved  fatal  to 
true  liberty,  to  true  religion,  and  to  all  advance  in  civilization. 

Except  for  his  seething  resentment  over  the  intrusion  of  the  reli- 
gious issue,  the  President  was  jubilant  in  Taft's  hour  of  victory.  "We 
have  them  beaten  to  a  frazzle,"  he  had  exclaimed  again  and  again  the 
night  of  the  election  as  the  returns  were  brought  into  him  at  Sagamore 
Hill.  And  on  November  10  he  wrote  the  President-elect  a  warm,  con- 
gratulatory letter  declaring  that  with  the  possible  exception  of  Hughes, 
Taft  was  the  only  man  who  could  have  been  elected.  "You  have  won 
a  great  personal  victory  as  well  as  a  great  victory  for  the  party,"  he 
said,  "and  all  those  who  love  you,  who  admire  and  believe  in  you 
and  are  proud  of  your  great  and  fine  qualities,  must  feel  a  thrill  of 
exaltation  over  the  way  in  which  the  American  people  have  shown 
their  insight  into  character,  their  adherence  to  high  principle." 

Roosevelt  was  partially  right.  It  was  "a  great  personal  victory";  but 
as  much  for  himself  as  for  Taft — the  President-elect's  margin  was  only 


362  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

half  of  Roosevelt's  record  plurality  in  1904.  Taft  had,  however,  run 
far  ahead  of  his  party.  Four  states — Ohio,  Indiana,  Minnesota,  and 
North  Dakota — elected  Democratic  governors  while  returning  majori- 
ties for  Taft.  And  in  New  York,  where  Hughes  was  re-elected,  Taft 
ran  considerably  ahead  of  the  Governor  and  the  ticket  as  a  whole. 
Nor  was  the  Republican  majority  in  the  congressional  elections  espe- 
cially large,  a  number  of  reactionaries  having  failed  to  be  returned. 
The  import  was  clear:  Neither  Roosevelt  nor  Taft  had  succeeded  in 
convincing  the  country  that  the  Grand  Old  Party  had  a  monopoly  on 
reform  and  progress. 

The  President-elect's  reaction  to  his  triumph  was  not  less  ominous. 
He  was  not  jubilant.  At  three  o'clock  the  morning  after  the  election 
Taft  wearily  told  a  crowd  outside  his  half-brother's  house  in  Cincinnati 
that  he  hoped  his  administration  would  prove  "a  worthy  successor  of 
that  of  Theodore  Roosevelt."  He  then  went  to  bed. 

A  few  weeks  later  he  confided  his  sense  of  inadequacy  to  a  friend. 
"If  I  were  now  presiding  in  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States  as 
chief  justice,  I  should  feel  entirely  at  home,"  wrote  the  man  whose 
mother  had  warned  him  he  was  not  qualified  for  the  presidency,  "but 
with  the  troubles  of  selecting  a  Cabinet,  and  the  difficulties  in  respect 
to  the  revision  of  the  tariff,  I  feel  just  a  bit  like  a  fish  out  of  water." 
He  concluded  by  saying  that  "my  wife  is  the  politician  and  she  will 
be  able  to  meet  all  these  issues."  It  was  not  to  be. 


CHAPTER  22 


THE   CHANGING    OF   THE    GUARD 


I  have  had  the  best  time  of  any  man  of  my  age  in  all  the 
world.  ...  I  have  enjoyed  myself  in  the  White  House  more 
than  I  have  ever  known  any  other  President  to  enjoy  himself, 
and  ...  I  am  going  to  enjoy  myself  thoroly  when  I  leave  the 
White  House. 

— Theodore  Roosevelt 


The  most  striking  aspect  of  the  postelection  interim  was  that  atten- 
tion continued  to  center  on  Roosevelt.  Between  the  election  in  No- 
vember and  the  inauguration  in  March  there  was  no  abatement  of 
the  controversy  that  had  enveloped  him  from  1902  on;  nor  was  there 
any  relaxation  of  the  President's  determination  to  spread  on  the  record 
his  blueprint  for  a  future  America.  Until  the  end  of  the  regime  Roose- 
velt was  a  raging  lion — spurred  by  prods  at  his  rear,  wounded  by 
attacks  on  his  flanks,  angered  by  barriers  at  his  front — but  roaring  all 
the  while. 

The  roar  was  as  lordly  as  it  was  angry.  The  hunting  hi  other 
seasons  had  been  good;  and  the  Congress  that  convened  in  December, 
1908,  to  bid  all  speed  to  this  powerful  personality  who  had  revitalized 
the  powers  of  this  office  and  made  it  responsive  as  never  before  to  the 
needs  of  the  industrial  age,  knew  it.  The  legislative  and  administrative 
achievements  of  the  past  seven  years — the  Hepburn  Act,  the  Pure 
Food  and  Drug  Act,  the  Meat  Inspection  Amendment,  the  Employer's 
Liability  Act,  the  antitrust  measures,  the  conservation  program,  the 
work  on  the  Panama  Canal,  the  expansion  of  the  fleet,  the  Roosevelt 
Corollary  to  the  Monroe  Doctrine,  and  the  intervention  in  European 

363 


364  POWER   AND    RESPONSIBILITY 

and  Far  Eastern  affairs — could  not  be  written  off.  The  pressures  that 
Roosevelt  had  generated  for  even  greater  reforms  could  not  be  dis- 
missed. 

The  President's  final  annual  message  on  December  8  proved  to  be 
more  a  call  to  action  than  a  valediction.  Roosevelt,  the  Washington 
Post  observed,  "looks  forward  and  not  back."  There  were,  assuredly, 
the  prideful  cadences  of  most  of  the  other  messages.  And  there  were 
few  new  ideas.  The  recommendations  for  judicial  reform,  labor  legis- 
lation, conservation,  and  naval  expansion  had  all  been  made  before, 
though  not  always  as  specifically.  Nevertheless,  that  message  was  a 
compelling  statement  of  the  President's  still  advancing  progressivism, 
one  that  boldly  laid  down  proposals  of  action  on  every  important 
issue  then  current  except  the  tariff,  and  one  that  categorically  declared 
that  the  workingman  should  be  guaranteed  "a  larger  share  of  the 
wealth"  he  produced.  It  provoked  the  New  York  Commercial  and 
Financial  Chronicle  to  complain  that  if  a  fraction  of  Roosevelt's 
recommendations  could  be  put  into  statute  "they  would  commit  the 
country  to  a  course  of  new  experiments  and  make  over  the  face  of 
social  creation."  And  it  inspired  in  the  New  York  Sun  a  ray  of  hope — 
hope  that  within  a  few  weeks  "the  seven-year  flood  of  words"  would 
at  last  dry  up! 

But  the  most  suggestive  comments  on  the  President's  urgent  call 
for  social  and  economic  justice  through  centralization  were  made  by 
independent  Democratic  newspapers.  Roosevelt  had  asserted  that  the 
telegraph  and  telephone  companies  should  be  placed  under  the 
jurisdiction  of  the  Interstate  Commerce  Commission.  And  he  had 
again  charged  that  corporate  wealth  was  using  the  "appeal  to  the  old 
doctrine  of  States'  rights"  as  a  "cover"  in  its  fight  against  "adequate 
control  and  supervision.  .  .  ."  The  charge  was  neither  new  nor  in- 
accurate. Roosevelt  had  leveled  it  many  times  before,  often,  as  in  the 
case  of  the  meat  packers,  with  fateful  precision.  But  the  significant 
point,  as  the  Literary  Digest  reported,  was  that  "a  number  of  Southern 
and  other  Democratic  papers  are  willing  to  give  it  a  tolerant,  and 
even  a  sympathetic  hearing,  while  some  of  the  most  strenuous  pro- 
tests come  from  Republican  sources." 

That  historic  reversal  in  philosophy  which  has  been  the  signal 
feature  of  twentieth-century  party  politics  was  thus  in  the  process  of 
delineation.  Repulsed  by  Roosevelt's  neo-Jeffersonian  ends,  the  Re- 
publicans were  openly  abandoning  their  commitment  to  Hamiltonian 


THE  CHANGING  OF  THE  GUARD  365 

means  in  order  to  thwart  the  fulfillment  of  those  ends;  attracted  by 
those  same  ends,  the  Democrats  were  abandoning  their  belief  in 
Jeffersonian  means  that  they  might  be  realized.  The  trend  was  by  no 
means  universal.  The  Republicans  would  waver  until  1912,  and  on 
some  issues,  long  after;  and  the  Democrats  would  not  even  be  certain 
where  they  stood  under  Woodrow  Wilson.  By  the  middle  of  the  cen- 
tury, however,  the  reversal  would  be  relatively  complete:  The  over- 
whelming majority  of  Democrats  in  Congress,  except  for  the  Southern 
states'-rightists,  would  be  wedded  to  the  centralized  welfare  state;  the 
great  majority  of  Republicans  would  be  in  varying  degrees  opposed 
or  unsympathetic  to  it.  Theodore  Roosevelt,  grown  increasingly 
sensitive  of,  and  frustrated  by,  the  tenets  of  his  own  party  during  his 
last  two  years  in  office,  served  mightily  to  hasten  this  momentous 
development.  Indeed,  his  messages,  speeches,  and  public  letters  had 
established  him  as  a  kind  of  advance  agent  for  reform.  The  Detroit 
News  said  that  "Measured  by  his  own  standard,  his  work  will  be 
seen  to  be  one  of  awakening  rather  than  accomplishment."  The  New 
York  Tribune  said  the  great  service  of  his  administration  "has  been 
in  calling  public  attention  to  social  problems  and  bringing  them  into 
politics." 

There  was  truth  in  those  appraisals.  The  history  of  twentieth- 
century  reform  that  fails  to  account  Roosevelt's  moral  and  political 
influence  upon  his  own  times  and,  through  then  young  men  like 
Franklin  Delano  Roosevelt,  Harold  Ickes,  Felix  Frankfurter,  Henry 
L.  Stimson,  Learned  Hand,  and  countless  others  upon  later  times, 
falls  woefully  short.  But  the  argument  is  not  all  inclusive.  For  if 
Roosevelt  failed  either  to  convert  his  party  to  his  own  regulatory 
philosophy  or  to  effect  such  an  orthodox  reform  as  revision  of  the 
tariff,  his  legislative  and  administrative  accomplishments  had  been 
nonetheless  concrete. 

Unfortunately,  the  President  had  distorted  the  larger  sense  of  his 
last  annual  message  by  an  acrimonious  attack  upon  Congress  itself. 
During  the  previous  session  an  amendment  had  been  adopted  limiting 
the  activities  of  the  Secret  Service  to  the  protection  of  the  President 
and  the  investigation  of  counterfeiting.  In  part  because  he  felt  the 
Secret  Service  was  needed  to  combat  anarchists,  and  mainly  because 
he  wanted  it  to  investigate  corporation  executives  who  had  violated 
the  law,  Roosevelt  had  vehemently  opposed  the  amendment.  The 
House,  however,  had  insisted  on  passing  it.  Some  members  of  that 


366  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

body  were  still  riled  over  the  President's  earlier  prosecutions  of  con- 
gressmen for  postal,  land,  and  timber  frauds.  Others  were  presumably 
reluctant  to  expedite  the  indictment  of  businessmen  whose  interests 
they  had  so  long  served.  And  still  others  opposed  the  expansion  of 
the  Secret  Service  on  high  civil  libertarian  grounds. 

Unable  longer  to  hold  back  what  he  believed  was  the  truth,  the 
President  had  baldly  charged  in  his  annual  message  of  December, 
1908,  that  the  chief  argument  for  the  amendment  had  been  "that  the 
congressmen  did  not  themselves  wish  to  be  investigated."  Congress 
was  outraged.  Never  during  Roosevelt's  seven  and  more  years  in 
office  did  his  relations  with  the  legislature  sink  to  a  lower  level  than 
they  did  under  the  weight  of  that  accusation.  Unanimously,  an  out- 
raged House  approved  the  formation  of  a  committee  to  investigate. 
Angrily,  Senator  Aldrich  drafted  a  resolution  of  inquiry  that  even 
Cabot  Lodge  supported. 

In  the  White  House,  meanwhile,  the  President  fumed.  On  January 
4  he  replied  to  the  House  with  a  special  message  that  modified  his 
charge  against  Congress,  but  repeated  the  assertion  that  weakening 
the  Secret  Service  was  a  boon  to  "the  criminal  class."  The  members 
of  the  House  were  not  edified;  in  an  action  that  goes  back  to  Jackson 
for  a  precedent,  they  voted  by  a  majority  of  211  to  36  to  lay  on  the 
table  that  portion  of  the  annual  message  which  referred  to  the  Secret 
Service  and  the  whole  of  the  special  message  of  January  4.  They 
further  resolved  that  the  message  be  viewed  as  an  invasion  of  the 
privileges  of  the  House.  Not  even  that  ponderous  rebuke  chastened 
the  President,  however,  and  for  weeks,  so  Ambassador  Bryce  reported 
to  Whitehall,  people  hardly  ventured  to  mention  Roosevelt's  name  at 
many  dinner  tables. 

To  make  matters  worse,  the  President  was  by  then  embarked  upon 
a  course  more  misguided  even  than  his  conduct  in  the  Brownsville 
affair.  Infuriated  by  charges  in  the  Indianapolis  News  and  the  New 
York  World  that  the  $40  million  paid  the  New  Panama  Canal  Com- 
pany had  gone  to  interested  American  businessmen,  including  his 
brother-in-law,  Douglas  Robinson,  Roosevelt  decided  to  have  the 
government  institute  libel  proceedings.  His  decision  was  made  after 
consultation  with  high  government  attorneys,  and  his  provocation  was 
understandable,  the  World  having  finally  charged  him  with  deliberate 
misstatement  of  fact.  Grand  juries  in  Indianapolis  and  New  York 
actually  returned  indictments  against  the  publishers  of  both  news- 


THE  CHANGING  OF  THE  GUARD  367 

papers,  while  Bryce  wrote  Sir  Edward  Grey  that  "The  moral  effect 
of  convictions  in  cases  of  this  kind  would  be  excellent."  In  the  end, 
however,  federal  district  judges  dismissed  the  cases.  And  well,  prob- 
ably, that  they  did.  For  as  the  editors  of  Roosevelt's  Letters  suggest, 
a  government  victory  "would  ...  in  the  opinion  of  many  men  at 
the  time  and  since,  have  placed  the  freedom  of  the  press  in  jeopardy." 

Until  the  end  of  the  reign  the  charges  and  countercharges  continued. 
Repeatedly,  Roosevelt  lost  his  powers  of  discretion;  but  only  rarely 
his  sense  of  humor.  "Taft  told  me  with  a  chuckle,"  he  wrote  his  son 
Kermit  the  second  week  in  January,  ".  .  .  that  one  of  his  friends  in 
New  York  has  said  to  him  that  he  supposed  that  between  the  election 
and  his  inauguration  there  would  be  a  period  of  stagnation  in  Wash- 
ington. I  have  felt  like  wiring  him,"  he  continued,  "that  the  period  of 
stagnation  continues  to  rage  with  uninterrupted  violence."  Congress, 
however,  lost  both  its  discretion  and  its  humor.  Critical  of  the  man, 
resentful  of  his  conception  of  his  office,  and  largely  unsympathetic  to 
his  broad  social  purposes,  it  struck  wildly,  even  irresponsibly  at  the 
President. 

In  early  January  Congress  approved  the  bill  authorizing  a  private 
power  project  in  Missouri  under  conditions  that  mocked  Roosevelt's 
plan  for  a  carefully  controlled  development  of  such  sites.  The  result 
was  the  irate  veto  message  discussed  in  Chapter  19.  On  January  12 
the  Senate  agreed  to  a  resolution  directing  the  Secretary  of  the  Treas- 
ury to  give  a  comprehensive  report  of  all  disbursements  under  the 
President's  emergency  fund.  (No  irregularities  were  found.)  Shortly 
later  a  bill  designed  to  create  4,000  positions  in  the  Census  Bureau, 
all  without  competitive  examination,  was  passed.  Refusing  to  submit, 
Roosevelt  sent  in  another  angry  veto  message.  Then,  when  the  Presi- 
dent transmitted  to  Congress  on  February  8  the  Report  of  the  Country 
Life  Commission,  a  document  of  surpassing  excellence  which  re- 
flected Roosevelt's  concern  for  the  conservation  of  human  no  less 
than  of  natural  resources,  the  House  refused  to  appropriate  funds  to 
publish  it. 

Those  were  not  the  only  examples  of  Congress'  consuming  desire 
to  insult,  to  defy,  and  to  expose  the  President  in  those  last  turbulent 
months.  The  supreme  act  of  spite  was  the  passing  of  the  amendment 
to  the  Sundry  Appropriation  Bill  discussed  in  Chapter  19,  which 
forbade  the  President's  appointing  commissions  of  inquiry  without 
specific  authority  from  Congress.  If  evidence  is  lacking  that  Congress 


368  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

understood  the  great  accretion  of  power  and  expansion  of  executive 
authority  which  had  occurred  during  the  Roosevelt  years,  that  action 
should  fill  the  void.  Yet  even  it  failed  to  beard  the  mighty  lion.  "I 
replied  to  Congress,"  Roosevelt  wrote  in  his  Autobiography,  "that  if 
I  did  not  believe  the  Amendment  to  be  unconstitutional,  I  would  veto 
the  Sundry  Civil  Bill  which  contained  it,  and  that  if  I  remained  in 
office  I  would  refuse  to  obey  it." 

Even  in  the  midst  of  the  raging  storm  there  were  moments  of 
triumph  and  actions  of  real  consequence.  The  most  memorable  came 
on  February  22,  1909,  when  the  Great  White  Fleet  steamed  into 
Hampton  Roads,  its  voyage  around  the  world  completed.  From  the 
deck  of  the  presidential  yacht  Mayflower  Roosevelt  reviewed  it,  serene 
in  the  knowledge  that  Congress  had  again  appropriated  funds  for  two 
new  battleships,  and  probably  mistakenly  confident  that  the  fleet's 
grand  tour  had  exerted  a  profoundly  salutary  impact  upon  world 
politics.  "Not  until  some  American  fleet  returns  victorious  from  a 
great  sea  battle  will  there  be  another  such  homecoming,  and  such  a 
sight,"  the  President  proudly  exclaimed. 

On  October  27,  1908,  Theodore  Roosevelt  had  turned  fifty  years 
of  age.  He  was  unsettled  about  his  future  plans;  but  he  was  none- 
theless sure  that  he  should  do  something  useful  "to  help  onward 
certain  movements  for  the  betterment  of  the  people."  As  he  wrote 
Ted,  who  had  gratified  him  by  entering  business  in  Hartford  after 
graduation  from  Harvard  "instead  of  leading  a  perfectly  silly  and 
vacuous  life  around  the  clubs  or  in  sporting  fields,"  he  was  also 
determined  to  enjoy  himself.  "Every  now  and  then  solemn  jacks  come 
to  me  to  tell  me  that  our  country  must  face  the  problem  of  'what  it 
will  do  with  its  ex-Presidents,'  "  he  confided  to  his  oldest  son. 

I  always  answer  them  that  there  will  be  one  ex-President  about 
whom  they  need  not  give  themselves  the  slightest  concern,  for  he 
will  do  for  himself  without  any  outside  assistance;  and  I  add  that 
they  need  waste  no  sympathy  on  me — that  I  have  had  the  best  time 
of  any  man  of  my  age  in  ah1  the  world,  that  I  have  enjoyed  myself 
in  the  White  House  more  than  I  have  ever  known  any  other  Presi- 
dent to  enjoy  himself,  and  that  I  am  going  to  enjoy  myself  thoroly 
when  I  leave  the  White  House,  and  what  is  more,  continue  just  as 
long  as  I  possibly  can  to  do  some  kind  of  work  that  will  count. 

Nor  did  he  fail  in  those  goals  during  the  decade  of  life  that  re- 
mained. 


THE  CHANGING  OF  THE  GUARD  369 

Actually,  Roosevelt  had  already  laid  his  immediate  plans.  He  would 
first  go  into  the  dark  depths  of  Africa,  there  to  hunt  big  game  and 
collect  data  and  specimens  for  the  Smithsonian  Museum  ("I  feel  that 
this  is  my  last  chance  for  something  in  the  nature  of  a  'great  adven- 
ture,'"  he  explained  to  St.  Loe  Strachey).  He  would  then  go  to 
Oxford  on  the  invitation  of  its  chancellor  to  deliver  the  Romanes 
Lectures  (these,  he  wrote  Lodge  with  mixed  pride  and  awe,  had  been 
given  by  Gladstone,  Huxley,  Morley,  and  Bryce  among  others).  The 
engagement  would  also  give  substantial  purpose  to  his  European  visit, 
for  he  said,  he  was  anxious  to  avoid  a  "kind  of  mock  triumphal  pro- 
cession." Upon  his  return  to  the  United  States  in  the  late  spring  of 
1910,  he  would  become  a  contributing  editor  to  Lyman  Abbott's 
Outlook  at  a  salary  of  $12,000  per  year  (he  had  rejected  vastly  more 
remunerative  offers  on  the  grounds  that  the  Outlook  connection  was 
the  more  appropriate  for  a  former  President). 

Roosevelt's  decision  to  become  a  popular  editorial  writer  was  not 
ideal.  But  he  had  too  much  contempt  for  the  money-making  process, 
too  much  suspicion  of  businessmen  and  their  values,  to  have  accepted 
a  position  in  industry.  There  was,  moreover,  that  irresistible  com- 
pulsion to  express  himself,  to  continue  to  influence  the  flow  of  events. 
"1  feel  that  I  can  still  for  some  years  command  a  certain  amount  of 
attention  from  the  American  public,"  he  explained,  "and  ...  I  want 
to  use  it  so  far  as  possible  to  help  onward  certain  movements  for 
the  betterment  of  our  people."  Short  of  a  return  to  politics  there  was 
only  one  other  possibility — a  college  presidency.  There  had  been 
speculation  in  1906  that  Roosevelt  would  succeed  Charles  Eliot  at 
Harvard.  But  the  offer  was  never  made.  Henry  Lee  Higginson  prob- 
ably expressed  the  common  doubt  when  he  questioned  whether 
Roosevelt  would  be  happy  in  such  a  cloistered  atmosphere.  He  also 
wondered  if  the  necessary  "judgment  is  to  be  found  coupled  with 
such  enormous  energy?"  A  greater  man  than  Higginson,  however, 
thought  that  it  might  be.  Roosevelt,  said  the  philosopher  William 
James,  was  qualified  in  many  ways. 

While  the  President  was  formulating  his  plans  and  his  enemies 
were  figuratively  wishing  luck  to  the  lions  ("Only  Four  Weeks  More 
of  Roosevelt,"  an  editorial  in  the  Sun  proclaimed  on  February  4),  a 
quieter  and  largely  unspoken  drama  was  playing  out  at  1600  Pennsyl- 
vania Avenue.  It  revealed  Roosevelt's  personality  in  yet  another 
dimension. 


370  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

It  will  be  recalled  that  the  President  had  been  unable  to  refrain 
from  counseling  Taft  during  the  campaign  of  1908,  or,  in  the  end, 
from  openly  participating  himself.  Taft  had  welcomed,  or  at  least 
accepted  graciously,  his  benefactor's  activities;  and  during  the  cam- 
paign he  had  made  little  effort  to  disengage  himself  from  the  Roose- 
velt record  or  from  the  President's  personal  influence.  Indeed,  he  had 
broadly  endorsed  the  Roosevelt  policies.  After  the  election,  Roosevelt 
had  continued  his  role  as  chief  of  staff  for  a  week  or  two,  long  enough 
to  advise  the  President-elect  against  a  move  to  prevent  Cannon's 
re-election  as  Speaker  on  the  grounds  that  the  effort  would  probably 
prove  abortive.  And  even  if  it  should  prove  successful,  he  had  added, 
"I  do  not  believe  it  would  be  well  to  have  him  in  the  position  of  the 
sullen  and  hostile  floor  leader  bound  to  bring  your  administration  to 
grief."  This  was  sound  advice;  but  it  was  also  frighteningly  ominous 
advice.  Sooner  even  than  Roosevelt  feared,  Taft  would  be  caught  in 
a  web  from  which  there  would  be  no  escape.  He  would  be  forced  to 
take  open  sides  with  either  the  insurgent  or  Old  Guard  wings  of  his 
party. 

The  decision  to  accept  Cannon  having  been  made,  Roosevelt  had 
rather  abruptly  abandoned  the  role  of  adviser.  His  wisdom  and  sense 
of  propriety  told  him  that  Taft  must  be  his  own  master;  and  with  an 
exertion  of  self-discipline  that  was  the  more  remarkable  for  his  earlier 
dominance  over  his  easygoing  friend,  Roosevelt  gave  the  President- 
elect his  rein.  Difficult  moments  followed,  especially  when  it  became 
apparent  that  Taft  was  unsympathetic  to  the  Roosevelt-Pinchot  con- 
servation policies  and  that  he  planned  to  drop  several  members  of  the 
Cabinet  (he  had  never  really  promised  to  keep  them  on,  though  at 
one  point  he  had  implied  that  he  would).  But  as  Henry  Pringle,  who 
sometimes  captures  Roosevelt  in  fuller  perspective  in  his  sober  life 
of  Taft  than  in  his  lively  biography  of  Roosevelt,  concludes,  the 
President  "loyally  suppressed,  save  on  one  or  two  occasions,  any 
temptation  to  give  expression  to  the  first  seeds  of  doubt  regarding  the 
man  he  had  pushed  into  glory."  Roosevelt  told  Archie  Butt,  his 
military  aide,  that  "Taft  is  going  about  this  thing  just  as  I  would  do, 
and  while  I  retained  McKinley's  Cabinet  the  conditions  were  quite 
different.  I  cannot  find  any  fault  in  Taft's  attitude  to  me." 

Indeed  the  President  did  not  request  his  successor  to  appoint  his 
friends  to  office  outside  the  Cabinet  except  in  a  very  few  cases.  He 
arranged  indirectly  for  his  private  secretary,  William  Loeb,  to  become 


THE  CHANGING  OF  THE  GUARD  371 

Collector  of  the  Port  of  New  York.  And  on  December  10  he  sent 
Taft  a  memorandum  listing  the  names  of  eleven  men  and  a  woman 
who,  he  wrote,  had  "been  staunch  adherents  of  Mr.  Taft  under  stress 
of  adverse  assault  hi  positions  not  of  the  first  rank."  He  asked  for 
nothing;  but  the  implication  was  clear.  Taft  caught  it.  He  eventually 
took  care  of  most  of  the  people  on  the  list,  which  included  a  few 
former  Rough  Riders,  though  he  dropped  Deputy  Commissioner  of 
Immigration  Joe  Murray,  who  had  given  Roosevelt  his  start  hi  politics 
in  1881,  and  one  other.  Only  for  his  old  hunting  guide  and  com- 
panion, Bill  Sewall,  did  Roosevelt  make  a  direct  plea;  and  on  Decem- 
ber 18  he  was  able  to  write  "Friend  William"  that  Taft  had  agreed 
to  keep  him  on  as  Collector  of  Customs  for  the  Eastern  District  of 
Maine.  After  thanking  Sewall  and  his  wife  for  their  gift  of  a  pair  of 
heavy  woolen  socks,  he  warned  Sewall  to  show  his  letter  of  recom- 
mendation to  no  one  except  Taft.  Otherwise,  he  explained,  "I  should 
be  deluged  with  requests  for  letters." 

There  were  additional  touches  of  loyalty,  affection,  and  appreciation 
as  the  time  for  the  changing  of  the  guard  drew  near.  To  Gifford 
Pinchot,  Roosevelt  implied  that  he  was  distressed  that  Taft  was  not 
reappointing  the  able  and  progressive  James  Garfield  Secretary  of  the 
Interior.  "There  had  been  a  peculiar  intimacy  between  you  and  Jim 
and  me,  because  all  three  of  us  have  worked  for  the  same  causes, 
have  dreamed  the  same  dreams,  have  felt  a  substantial  identity  of 
purpose,"  the  President  wrote.  "Jim  has  made  a  sacrifice  in  entering 
public  life  that  you  and  I  have  not  made.  ...  I  think  that  he  has 
been  the  best  Secretary  we  have  ever  had  in  the  Interior  Department." 
Now,  Roosevelt  concluded,  Garfield's  "law  practise  has  gone  to  the 
winds." 

But  it  was  on  his  relations  with  Pinchot  himself,  in  a  letter  that 
cast  a  long  shadow  over  the  future,  that  the  retiring  President  poured 
out  his  heart.  "As  long  as  I  live  I  shall  feel  for  you  a  mixture  of 
respect  and  admiration  and  of  affectionate  regard,"  he  wrote  the  emi- 
nent forester  two  days  before  he  left  office.  "I  am  a  better  man  for 
having  known  you  .  .  .  and  I  cannot  think  of  a  man  in  the  country 
whose  loss  would  be  a  more  real  misfortune  to  the  Nation  than  yours 
would  be.  For  seven  and  a  half  years,"  he  continued,  "we  have 
worked  together,  and  now  and  then  played  together — and  have  been 
altogether  better  able  to  work  because  we  have  played;  and  I  owe 


372  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

to  you  a  peculiar  debt  of  obligation  for  a  very  large  part  of  the 
achievement  of  this  administration." 

The  President  wrote  one  other  important  letter  in  those  final  days. 
Conscious,  perhaps,  of  the  partial  failure  of  his  Far  Eastern  policy, 
fearful  with  reason  of  Germany's  growing  lust  for  naval  power,  and 
faithful  as  always  to  the  views  of  Mahan,  he  addressed  himself  to  the 
President-elect  the  day  before  the  inauguration.  "Dear  Will,"  he  said, 
"one  closing  legacy.  Under  no  circumstances  divide  the  battle  fleet." 

There  remained  only  the  personal  farewells  and  the  inaugural  cere- 
mony itself.  On  March  1  the  President  gave  a  dinner  to  his  "Tennis 
Cabinet"  and  out-of-town  associates.  He  seated  Ambassador  Jean 
Jules  Jusserand  on  his  right,  Captain  Seth  Bullock,  United  States 
Marshal  of  Oklahoma  at  his  left,  and  twenty-nine  other  guests,  in- 
cluding Bill  Sewall,  a  professional  wolf  hunter  named  Jack  Abernathy, 
and  Elihu  Root  at  the  rest  of  the  table  ("there  will  never  be  such  a 
smashing  precedence  again  as  to  rank,"  wrote  Archie  Butt). 

At  the  end  of  the  luncheon  the  guests  gave  the  President  a  bronze 
cougar  by  Proctor,  Henry  L.  Stimson  making  the  presentation  when 
Seth  Bullock  choked  with  emotion.  Later  that  afternoon  the  President 
went  to  the  home  of  the  Garfields,  where  eleven  more  or  less  regular 
members  of  the  "Tennis  Cabinet"  presented  him  with  a  silver  bowl 
as  Jusserand,  who  was  to  have  presided,  broke  down.  The  next  after- 
noon at  a  reception  for  the  diplomatic  corps  in  the  East  Room  of 
the  White  House  many  in  the  line,  including  the  Japanese  Ambassa- 
dor's wife,  Baroness  Takahara,  wept  openly.  Meanwhile,  the  President 
himself  lost  his  composure  when  he  found  his  wife  and  their  daughter 
Ethel  crying  over  a  diamond  necklace  that  a  group  of  Washington 
society  women  had  presented  the  First  Lady.  "He  has  the  humour  to 
carry  these  little  scenes  off  well,"  Butt  wrote,  "and  says  he  feels 
heartily  ashamed  of  such  apparent  weakness."  However,  Butt  re- 
flected, "the  love  which  does  manifest  itself  on  all  sides,  coming  just 
now  after  the  bitter  attacks  from  the  political  world,  has  gone  to  their 
hearts." 

There  was  one  final  civility.  With  characteristic  generosity,  Roose- 
velt had  invited  the  Tafts  to  spend  the  night  of  March  3  at  the  White 
House.  In  a  letter  signed  "With  love  and  affection,  my  dear  Theo- 
dore," Taft  accepted  with  warm  protestations  of  their  continuing 
friendship.  Their  ladies  also  tried  to  be  friendly;  but  Mrs.  Taft  lacked 
the  grace.  Even  before  she  moved  into  the  White  House  she  had 


THE  CHANGING  OF  THE  GUARD  373 

made  arrangements  for  many  of  the  Roosevelts'  favorite  servants  to 
be  replaced  the  instant  the  change  in  mistresses  became  official.  Both 
the  President  and  his  wife  were  hurt,  but  they  did  not  show  it.  Taft 
later  described  the  dinner  that  night  as  a  "funeral";  and  the  Tafts  did 
not  invite  the  Wilsons  in  1913  though  Taft  made  several  other  gener- 
ous gestures  to  his  successor.  Archie  Butt  reported  that  the  dinner 
went  better  than  expected,  however,  the  President  "talking  as  naturally 
and  entertainingly  as  he  does  usually  at  his  luncheons"  and  the  salad 
course  being  reached  before  it  was  realized.  When  it  was  time  to 
retire,  Mrs.  Roosevelt  gently  took  Mrs.  Taft's  hand  and  expressed  the 
hope  that  her  sleep  would  be  sweet.  "Thoughtful  and  gentle  to  the 
last,"  wrote  Butt,  ".  .  .  she  has  stood,  the  embodiment  of  womanly 
dignity  and  social  culture,  before  the  entire  nation,  never  unbending 
in  the  matter  of  official  etiquette,  yet  always  the  gentle,  high-bred 
hostess;  smiling  often  at  what  went  on  about  her,  yet  never  critical  of 
the  ignorant  and  tolerant  always  of  the  little  insincerities  of  political 
life." 

The  inaugural  ceremony  the  next  day  was  ruled  by  the  pomp  and 
circumstance  of  tradition  though  it  was  held  indoors  because  of  a 
blustery  storm  that  Cabot  Lodge,  with  more  prescience  than  he  knew, 
pronounced  a  "calamity."  Solemnly  President  Taft  promised  in  his 
undistinguished  inaugural  address  to  maintain  and  enforce  his  prede- 
cessor's reforms;  and  enthusiastically  former  President  Roosevelt 
rushed  forward  to  congratulate  him.  "God  bless  you,  old  man,"  he 
exclaimed.  "It  is  a  great  state  document."  Then,  by  an  arrangement 
suggested  by  Roosevelt  and  warmly  endorsed  by  Mrs.  Taft,  the  parties 
divided.  Instead  of  riding  down  Pennsylvania  Avenue  with  the  new 
President,  Roosevelt  was  escorted  by  the  New  York  delegation  to  the 
railroad  station  where  he  and  his  wife  were  given  a  rousing  sendoff. 
Meanwhile  Mrs.  Taft  took  the  former  President's  place  at  her  hus- 
band's side  to  the  disgust  of  the  members  of  the  Congressional  com- 
mittee. The  seven  and  one-half  years  of  Theodore  Roosevelt's  presi- 
dency thus  ended;  the  era  of  Theodore  Roosevelt  was  yet  to  reach 
a  climax. 


PART 


THE  HIGH  TIDE  OF  PROGRESSIVISM 


CHAPTER  23 


THE   NEW   NATIONALISM 


The  whole  tendency  of  [Roosevelt's]  programme  is  to  give  a 
democratic  meaning  and  purpose  to  the  Hamiltonian  tradition 
and  method.  He  proposes  to  use  the  power  and  resources  of  the 
Federal  government  for  the  purpose  of  making  his  country-men 
a  more  complete  democracy  in  organization  and  practise.  .  .  . 

— Herbert  Croly,  The  Promise  of  American  Life 


Within  three  weeks  of  Taff s  inauguration  Theodore  Roosevelt,  his 
twenty-year-old  son  Kermit,  and  a  party  of  professional  naturalists 
had  embarked  for  Africa  from  the  grimy  port  city  of  Hoboken,  New 
Jersey.  The  new  President  had  not  seen  the  former  President  off.  But 
he  had  sent  gifts — a  gold  ruler  and  an  autographed  photograph  of 
himself — and  a  pathetically  revealing  letter.  "When  I  am  addressed  as 
'Mr.  President,'  "  Taft  wrote,  "I  turn  to  see  whether  you  are  not  at 
my  elbow."  He  predicted  that  Roosevelt  would  find  him  under  sus- 
picion by  theur  Western  friends  when  he  returned.  He  guilelessly  re- 
marked that  Cannon  and  Aldrich  had  promised  to  stand  by  the  plat- 
form and  follow  his  lead,  and  he  confessed  that  he  lacked  Roosevelt's 
facility  for  educating  the  public  and  arousing  popular  support.  "I  can 
never  forget  that  the  power  that  I  now  exercise  was  a  voluntary 
transfer  from  you  to  me,"  he  concluded,  "and  that  I  am  under  obliga- 
tion to  you  to  see  that  your  judgment  .  .  .  shall  be  vindicated.  .  .  ." 
Edith  Roosevelt  had  also  remained  at  home.  She  had  not  wanted 
Theodore  to  go;  but  as  in  1898  she  had  known  that  he  must.  His 
mother  "was  perfectly  calm  and  self-possessed,"  Kermit  confided  to 
Archie  Butt  aboard  ship  that  morning;  however,  he  added,  "her  heart 
was  almost  broken." 

377 


378  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Others  had  also  been  moved.  "In  all  the  striking  incidents  of  your 
career,"  wrote  Cabot  Lodge  the  following  week,  "I  never  saw  one 
which  impressed  me  more.  It  was  not  merely  the  crowd  but  the 
feeling  which  was  manifested  which  was  so  striking.  I  can  see  you 
now,  as  the  ship  moved  slowly  down  the  river,  waving  your  hand  to 
us  from  the  bridge,  .  .  .  The  newspapers  have  been  filled  daily  with 
minute  accounts  of  your  progress.  .  .  .  The  American  people  .  .  . 
follow  it  all  with  the  absorbed  interest  of  a  boy  who  reads  'Robinson 
Crusoe'  for  the  first  time." 

The  field  part  of  the  expedition  proved  a  spectacular  success. 
"Bwana  Makuba"  (Great  Master),  as  the  Africans  called  the  Colonel, 
took  seriously  the  Smithsonian  Institution's  sponsorship — repeatedly 
he  had  protested  that  he  was  "going  primarily  as  a  naturalist" — and 
he  was  able  to  ship  to  the  National  Museum  a  collection  of  flora, 
fauna,  and  mammals  that  raised  that  institution's  East  African  collec- 
tion to  among  the  world's  greatest.  He  impressed  his  companions  with 
the  breadth  of  his  knowledge.  "[Roosevelt]  .  .  .  had  at  his  command 
the  entire  published  literature  concerning  the  game  mammals  and  birds 
of  the  world,  a  feat  of  memory  that  few  naturalists  possess,"  Edmund 
Heller,  with  whom  he  later  collaborated  on  a  two-volume  scientific 
work,  reported.  "I  constantly  felt  while  with  him  that  I  was  in  the 
presence  of  the  foremost  field  naturalist  of  our  time,  as  indeed  I 
was.  .  .  ."  During  the  long  nights  in  camp,  the  Colonel  wrote  the 
Lodges,  he  even  came  into  his  "inheritance  in  Shakespeare"  whose 
works  were  among  the  sixty  classics  in  the  "pigskin  library"  he  carried 
with  him.  Roosevelt's  mood  was  poetically  re-created  in  the  foreword 
to  his  African  Game  Trails: 

"I  speak  of  Africa  and  golden  joys";  the  joy  of  wandering 
through  lonely  lands;  the  joy  of  hunting  the  mighty  and  terrible 
lords  of  the  wilderness,  the  cunning,  the  wary,  and  the  grim.  .  .  . 

But  there  are  no  words  that  can  tell  the  hidden  spirit  of  the 
wilderness,  that  can  reveal  its  mystery,  its  melancholy,  and  its 
charm  .  .  .  the  strong  attraction  of  the  silent  places,  of  the  large 
tropic  moons,  and  the  splendor  of  the  new  stars;  where  the 
wanderer  sees  the  awful  glory  of  sunrise  and  sunset  in  the  wide 
waste  spaces  of  the  earth,  unworn  of  man,  and  changed  only  by 
the  slow  change  of  the  ages  through  time  everlasting. 

The  ten-months'  adventure  had  been  free  of  conflict  except  for 
Roosevelt's  bouts  with  the  wild  beasts  of  the  jungle.  Almost  the  instant 


THE   NEW   NATIONALISM  379 

the  Colonel  emerged  at  Khartoum  in  mid-March,  however,  the  old 
order  returned.  In  speeches  that  he  himself  reported  "caused  an  out- 
burst of  anger  and  criticism  among  the  Egyptian  Nationalists,  the 
anti-English  and  fanatically  Moslem  party,"  he  applauded  British 
rule  in  the  Sudan  as  "really  the  rule  of  civilization"  and  declared  that 
it  was  "incumbent  on  every  decent  citizen  of  the  Sudan  to  uphold  the 
present  order  of  things." 

Two  weeks  after  those  impolitic  remarks,  the  Colonel,  Mrs.  Roose- 
velt and  Ethel,  who  had  met  him  at  Khartoum,  were  received  by  the 
King  and  Queen  of  Italy.  He  found  them,  as  he  was  to  find  most  of 
the  other  royalty  he  met  during  the  next  two  months,  "delightful 
people"  of  ordinary  endowment.  And  so,  perhaps,  he  might  also  have 
found  the  Pope,  Pius  X.  But  when  the  Papal  Secretary,  Merry  del  Val, 
informed  him  that  as  the  condition  of  an  audience  with  His  Holiness, 
the  ex-President  must  agree  not  to  see  a  group  of  offensive  American 
Methodist  Missionaries  in  Rome  (one  of  the  Methodists  had  referred 
to  Pius  X  as  "the  whore  of  Babylon"),  the  former  President  refused. 
The  Pope,  he  said,  was  a  "worthy,  narrowly  limited  parish  priest; 
completely  under  the  control  of  ...  Merry  del  Val."  Roosevelt  then 
refused  to  see  the  Methodists  who  issued  what  he  termed  a  "scur- 
rilous" address  of  exultation  when  it  was  learned  that  he  had  rebuffed 
the  Pope.  "The  only  satisfaction  I  had  out  of  the  affair,"  the  Colonel 
wrote  Lodge,  ".  .  .  was  that  on  the  one  hand  I  administered  a  needed 
lesson  to  the  Vatican,  and  on  the  other  hand  I  made  it  understood 
that  I  feared  the  most  powerful  Protestant  Church  just  as  little  as  I 
feared  the  Roman  Catholics."  He  added  that  it  was  a  good  thing  he 
had  no  further  interest  in  public  office,  for  the  incident  would  have 
compromised  his  usefulness  as  a  candidate. 

The  grand  tour  continued.  In  Paris  Roosevelt  captivated  the 
French  with  a  homely  exhortation  at  the  Sorbonne  on  the  "Duties  of 
Citizenship."  Even  he  was  surprised  by  the  favorable  reception  it 
evoked.  In  Holland  he  was  enchanted  by  Haarlem's  tulip  show.  And 
in  Christiania,  where  he  accepted  the  Nobel  Peace  Prize  at  Andrew 
Carnegie's  instance,  he  sparked  the  simmering  peace  movement  by 
calling  for  the  limitation  of  naval  armaments,  expansion  of  the  work 
of  The  Hague  Tribunal,  and  the  formation  of  a  League  of  Peace 
backed  by  force  if  necessary.  He  did  not,  however,  spell  out  the  details. 

After  a  brief  visit  in  Stockholm,  the  Colonel  and  his  party  went 
to  Germany  where  he  and  Wilhelm  II  held  their  much  remarked 


380  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

review  of  army  maneuvers.  Afterward  the  Kaiser  sent  Roosevelt  two 
photographs  of  them  watching  the  troops.  On  one,  in  the  Imperial 
hand,  was  the  inscription:  "When  we  shake  hands  we  shake  the 
world."  The  German  Foreign  Office  urgently  requested  Roosevelt  to 
return  the  photographs  even  before  he  left  Berlin,  but  the  Colonel 
refused.  "His  Majesty,  the  Kaiser,  gave  the  photographs  to  me,"  he 
said,  "and  I  propose  to  keep  them."  On  the  other  hand,  Roosevelt 
apparently  made  no  effort  to  impress  Wilhelm  with  his  disapproval 
of  his  naval  expansion  program,  perhaps  because  he  was  swept  up 
by  His  Majesty's  enthusiasm,  more  probably,  as  Elting  Morison  sug- 
gests, because  he  believed  the  cause  was  hopeless.  He  had,  moreover, 
thrown  down  the  gauntlet  at  Christiania.  "The  ruler  or  statesman," 
Roosevelt  exclaimed  after  coming  out  for  a  League  of  Peace,  "who 
should  bring  about  such  a  combination  would  have  earned  his  place 
in  history  for  all  time  and  his  title  to  the  gratitude  of  mankind." 

In  London  a  week  later  Roosevelt  served  as  the  American  repre- 
sentative at  the  funeral  of  Edward  VII.  The  formal  dinner  given  by 
King  George  V  the  night  before,  he  later  told  Taft,  was  the  most 
"hilarious  banquet"  he  ever  attended.  Eight  visiting  monarchs  were 
there,  and  "Everyone  went  to  the  table  with  his  face  wreathed  and 
distorted  into  grief."  But  even  before  the  first  course  was  over,  he 
continued,  "we  had  all  forgotten  the  real  cause  of  our  presence  in 
London."  In  the  line  of  procession  the  next  day,  the  former  President 
of  the  United  States  rode  with  the  French  Minister  of  Foreign  Affairs 
and  a  Persian  Prince  in  the  eighth  carriage. 

A  week  and  a  half  after  Edward's  funeral  Roosevelt  shook  the 
British  by  lecturing  them  on  their  administration  of  Egypt.  "Now, 
either  you  have  the  right  to  be  in  Egypt  or  you  have  not,"  he  de- 
clared at  the  Guildhall  in  London  on  May  3 1 ;  "either  it  is  or  it  is  not 
your  duty  to  establish  and  to  keep  order."  He  then  advised  them  to 
get  out  if  they  were  not  prepared  to  rise  to  their  responsibilities.  He 
expressed  the  earnest  hope,  however,  that  in  the  interest  of  civiliza- 
tion and  "fealty  to  your  own  great  traditions,"  they  would  decide  to 
rise  to  them. 

Seven  days  later  Roosevelt  delivered  the  Romanes  lecture,  "Bio- 
logical Analogies  in  History,"  that  had  figured  so  prominently  in  his 
original  decision  to  visit  Great  Britain  and  Europe.  It  was  not  an 
intellectual  success.  "In  the  way  of  grading  which  we  have  at  Oxford," 
the  Archbishop  of  York  later  said,  "we  agreed  to  mark  the  lecture 


THE   NEW   NATIONALISM  381 

'Beta  Minus,'  but  the  lecturer  'Alpha  Plus.'  While  we  felt  that  the 
lecture  was  not  a  very  great  contribution  to  science,  we  were  sure  that 
the  lecturer  was  a  very  great  man." 

On  June  18,  1910,  the  "very  great  man"  disembarked  at  New 
York.  During  the  fourteen  months  he  had  been  conquering  the  jungle, 
slighting  the  Pope,  enlightening  the  British,  and  sounding  the  hopeful 
moral  note  at  Christiania,  his  chosen  successor  had  been  proving  a 
political  failure.  And  even  as  the  Colonel  waved,  grinned,  thumped, 
and  expostulated  amidst  the  most  tumultuous  of  receptions,  troubles 
were  closing  in  on  him.  For  by  the  summer  of  1910  the  shifting 
coalitions  which  Roosevelt  had  so  skillfully  maneuvered  during  his 
presidency  had  crystallized  into  uncompromising  conservative  and 
progressive  factions;  and  in  the  face  of  his  promises  to  continue  the 
Roosevelt  policies,  Taft  had  aligned  himself  with  the  former. 

The  new  President's  misfortunes  were  only  partly  of  his  own 
making.  Almost  any  man  would  have  suffered  by  comparison  to 
Roosevelt,  one  of  the  three  or  four  greatest  natural  leaders  of  all 
American  history.  Nor  could  Taft  be  blamed  for  the  temper  of  the 
times  or  the  character  of  his  party.  At  the  very  moment  the  national 
progressive  movement  was  building  up  to  its  first  roaring  climax,  the 
long-champing  Republican  majority  in  Congress  was  angrily  re- 
affirming that  marriage  to  the  lords  of  the  market  place  that  Roosevelt 
had  fought  so  hard  to  sunder.  Only  Roosevelt  himself  could  have 
saved  the  situation;  and  not  even  he  could  have  saved  it  without 
taking  sides. 

Human  frailty  and  differences  also  figured  importantly  in  the  party's 
polarization.  As  Taft's  mother  had  feared,  William  Howard's  lack  of 
zest  for  conflict  proved  a  heavy  burden.  He  tended  to  submit  rather 
than  fight;  or,  because  of  his  laziness,  to  follow  the  course  of  least 
resistance.  He  delegated  too  much  authority;  and  for  want  of  in- 
formation or  willingness  to  explore  a  problem,  he  sometimes  made 
offhand  or  impulsive  decisions.  He  had  a  poor  sense  of  timing.  And 
he  lacked  the  ability  to  inspire.  Nor  did  he  read  so  voluminously  or 
productively  as  Roosevelt,  nor  welcome  to  the  White  House  such  a 
churning  stream  of  people  with  ideas  (if  Taft  ever  had  an  intellectual 
exchange  with  an  Upton  Sinclair  or  his  like,  it  is  not  a  matter  of 
record). 

Taft's  decision  to  surround  himself  with  legalists  also  hurt,  for  his 
Cabinet  supplemented  rather  than  complemented  his  own  viewpoints. 


382  POWER  AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

His  later  lament  that  "Roosevelt  has  no  one  to  advise  him  of  the 
conservative  type,  like  Root  or  Moody  or  Knox  or  myself,  as  he  did 
when  in  office,"  is  as  revealing  of  Taft  as  of  TR;  and  it  gives  point 
to  the  classic  remark  dropped  by  Senator  Jonathan  Dolliver,  the  Iowa 
insurgent,  who  observed  that  the  President  was  a  "ponderous  and 
amiable  man  completely  surrounded  by  men  who  know  exactly  what 
they  want."  Taft's  brother  Henry,  his  half-brother  Charles  and  the 
President's  wife,  who  was  ill  throughout  most  of  his  term,  added  to 
his  difficulties.  They  wielded  a  heavy  and  conservative  influence, 
wrongly  advising  him  as  to  the  temper  of  the  country  and  fanning  the 
flames  of  his  growing  suspicions  of  the  absent  Roosevelt. 

Ironically,  however,  it  was  Taft's  stubborn  courage  which  first  dis- 
rupted the  party.  True  at  first  to  his  personal  ideals  and  campaign 
promises,  Taft  had  called  a  special  session  to  revise  the  tariff  shortly 
after  his  inauguration.  The  House  had  responded  in  reasonably  good 
faith  by  approving  substantial  reductions  on  iron  and  steel  goods  and 
writing  in  an  inheritance  tax  provision.  When  the  House  bill  reached 
the  Senate,  however,  Aldrich  and  his  friends  blandly  amended  it  847 
times,  mostly  upward.  They  also  eliminated  the  inheritance  tax  clause, 
though  they  reluctantly  replaced  it  with  a  modest  tax  on  corporations. 
The  President  was  irritated;  but  after  he  secured  some  modifications 
he  lost  the  will  to  fight  or  even  to  veto  the  measure.  Then,  in  a  move 
that  adds  point  to  Mowry's  observation  that  Taft  suffered  himself 
through  life  to  be  "often  persuaded  to  act  against  his  own  basic 
instincts,"  he  rationalized  his  acquiescence  by  asserting  that  the  bill 
represented  "a  sincere  effort  on  the  part  of  the  Republican  party  to 
make  a  downward  revision."  Nor  was  that  all.  That  autumn  Taft  went 
into  the  Middle  West  where  the  Payne-Aldrich  tariff  was  regarded  as 
a  bare-faced  perversion  of  the  spirit  of  the  Republican  platform  of 
1908,  one  whose  rates  served  Eastern  interests  and  compromised 
those  of  the  West,  and  exclaimed  in  Winona,  Minnesota,  that  "I 
think  the  Payne  bill  is  the  best  bill  that  the  Republican  party  ever 
passed." 

Roosevelt  was  already  on  safari  in  Africa  when  the  controversy 
reached  its  peak.  Such  comment  as  he  did  make  was  hardly  to  his 
credit.  From  the  Juja  Farm  on  May  15,  1909,  he  wrote  Lodge,  who 
had  smugly  informed  him  that  the  Senate  would  virtually  maintain 
the  old  schedules,  that  there  was  no  real  issue: 


THE   NEW   NATIONALISM  383 

.  .  .  what  we  have  to  meet  is  not  an  actual  need,  but  a  mental 
condition  among  our  people,  who  believe  there  ought  to  be  a 
change;  and  I  also  agree  with  you  that  the  inevitable  disappoint- 
ment and  irritation  will  die  down  after  a  few  months  provided,  as 
of  course  will  be  the  case,  that  the  Bill  is  fundamentally  sound,  and 
provided  also,  as  you  say,  that  there  comes  a  return  of  prosperity 
when  once  the  tariffs  are  out  of  the  way. 

Triumphantly,  Lodge  had  shown  TR's  letter  to  Aldrich.  "He  put 
the  whole  situation  in  those  few  lines,"  the  Rhode  Islander  wrote  with 
enthusiasm.  "He  is  the  greatest  politician  we  have  had.  We  are  dealing 
with  a  mental  condition  and  that  is  the  exact  trouble  with  the  situa- 
tion." Thus  was  the  irony  compounded.  It  was  Roosevelt  who  emerged 
as  the  beneficiary  of  the  ensuing  reaction  against  Taft. 

If  the  Colonel's  views  were  clouded  on  this  first  of  the  two  issues 
that  set  his  successor  on  the  road  to  political  disaster,  they  were  clear 
and  consistent  on  the  second — conservation.  Taft  apparently  came 
into  the  presidency  with  no  conscious  intention  of  undoing  Roose- 
velt's great  work,  although,  as  Hays  aptly  suggests,  he  certainly  in- 
tended to  modify  it.  From  the  beginning  Gifford  Pinchot  (whom  he 
regarded  as  "a  good  deal  of  a  radical  and  a  good  deal  of  a  crank") 
was  suspicious,  and  with  cause.  "There  is  one  difficulty  about  the 
conservation  of  natural  resources,"  President-elect  Taft  had  declared 
to  the  second  Joint  Conservation  Conference  of  Governors  on  De- 
cember 8,  1908.  "It  is  that  the  imagination  of  those  who  are  pressing 
it  may  outrun  the  practical  facts."  It  was  Taft's  failure  to  make  a 
fighting  speech  on  that  occasion,  Pinchot  later  claimed,  coupled  with 
numerous  other  straws  in  the  wind,  including  the  dropping  of  Garfield, 
that  sparked  the  Roosevelt  administration's  last-minute  withdrawals 
of  potential  water-power  sites  on  the  theory  "that  the  incoming 
Executive  would  have  to  act  affirmatively  to  give  them  away." 

To  make  matters  worse,  Taft  had  selected  a  dubious  conservationist, 
Richard  Achilles  Ballinger,  to  replace  Garfield,  the  dedicated  Secre- 
tary of  the  Interior.  Ballinger  was  a  strict  constructionist;  or,  in 
Pinchot's  somewhat  overdrawn  characterization,  a  friend  of  the  special 
interests.  While  Commissioner  of  the  Land  Office  under  Roosevelt  in 
1907  he  had  opposed  the  President's  mineral-lease  program,  preferring 
outright  sale  to  rental.  And  on  that  and  other  accounts  he  had  re- 
signed his  position  after  exactly  a  year  in  office.  Returning  under  Taft 
to  the  government  service  in  a  higher  position  than  Pinchot  held,  it 


384  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

was  probably  inevitable  that  he  should  clash  with  the  zealous  Chief 
Forester. 

Taft's  legalism  further  complicated  matters.  Whatever  the  Presi- 
dent's views  on  conservation,  he  had  no  stomach  for  the  Roosevelt- 
Garfield-Pinchot  methods.  "After  T.R.  came  Taft,"  Pinchot  was  later 
to  write  in  high  irritation.  "It  was  as  though  a  sharp  sword  had  been 
succeeded  by  a  roll  of  paper,  legal  size."  Neither  did  Taft  approve  of 
the  Hamilton-Marshall  conception  of  implied  powers — a  doctrine 
Roosevelt  would  have  had  to  invent  had  it  not  already  been  in  the 
public  realm — or  of  Roosevelt  and  Pinchot's  reliance  on  scientific,  as 
opposed  to  congressional,  advice.  As  he  admonished  the  California 
conservationist,  William  Kent,  three  months  after  his  inauguration, 
"We  have  a  government  of  limited  power  under  the  Constitution, 
and  we  have  got  to  work  out  our  problems  on  the  basis  of  law." 

Now,  if  that  is  reactionary,  then  I  am  a  reactionary.  .  .  .  Pinchot 
is  not  a  lawyer  and  I  am  afraid  he  is  quite  willing  to  camp  outside 
the  law  to  accomplish  his  beneficent  purposes.  I  have  told  him  so 
to  his  face.  ...  I  do  not  undervalue  the  great  benefit  that  he  has 
worked  out,  but  I  do  find  it  necessary  to  look  into  the  legality  of 
his  plans. 

The  first  clash  between  Pinchot  and  the  new  administration  had 
come  over  the  water-power  sites.  "I  do  not  hesitate  to  say,"  Taft 
wrote  Kent  late  in  the  spring  of  1909,  that  the  presidential  power  to 
withdraw  public  lands  "was  exercised  far  beyond  legal  limitation 
under  Secretary  Garfield — and,  more  than  that,  unnecessarily  so." 
Resolutely,  Taft  authorized  Secretary  Ballinger  to  restore  them  to 
public  entry  pending  a  report  by  the  Geological  Survey.  So  the  die 
was  cast  early.  For  in  rejecting  the  view  that  the  spirit  of  the  law  and 
the  public  interest  could  best  be  served  by  temporary  withdrawals 
while  the  time-consuming  permanent  surveys  essential  to  controlled 
development  were  completed,  Taft  had  repudiated  one  of  Roosevelt's 
basic  policies. 

With  clocklike  regularity  clashes  between  Pinchot  and  Ballinger 
had  followed.  Ballinger  so  harassed  the  Reclamation  Service  that  a 
group  of  its  engineers  contemplated  resigning  in  a  body.  He  made 
establishment  of  legitimate  ranger  stations  difficult.  He  played  into 
the  hands  of  the  corrupt  "Indian  Ring"  by  canceling  an  arrangement 
whereby  the  Forest  Service  had  efficiently  managed  the  forests  in  the 


THE   NEW   NATIONALISM  385 

Indian  Reservations  to  the  Indians'  advantage.  And  he  allowed  the 
administration's  prime  dispenser  of  the  patronage,  Postmaster  General 
Hitchcock,  to  have  an  outsized  hand  in  appointments. 

Ballinger  justified  his  actions  on  strict  constructionist  grounds. 
Perhaps  he  did  act  in  good  faith.  But  if  so,  his  tendency  toward  loose 
construction  when  private  interests  were  at  stake  has  never  been 
adequately  explained.  The  most  generous  interpretation  is  that  he 
mirrored  the  Western  milieu  out  of  which  he  came:  He  was  intelligent 
enough  to  approve  conservation  in  principle,  and  less  broadly  in 
practice.  But  when  the  issue  was  drawn  his  commitment  almost  in- 
variably proved  to  be  to  the  private  entrepreneur;  and  hence,  in  the 
Roosevelt-Garfield-Pinchot  view,  to  the  ruthless  exploitation  or  in- 
efficient development  of  the  nation's  natural  resources.  Both  before 
Ballinger  entered  and  after  he  left  the  government  service,  moreover, 
he  recommended  that  the  public  domain  be  opened  to  all  comers,  and 
at  least  twice  during  his  tenure  as  Secretary  of  the  Interior,  Taft  him- 
self requested  that  he  cease  associating  with  the  known  opponents 
of  conservation. 

The  most  famous  example  of  Ballinger's  tergiversation  was  his 
attitude  toward  the  Morgan-Guggenheim  Syndicate's  acquisition  of 
the  Cunningham  coal  lands  claims  in  Alaska.  The  details  of  this 
cause  celebre  of  the  Taft  administration  need  not  concern  us  here. 
But  it  should  be  observed  that  the  case  dramatically  demonstrated  that 
more  than  legalism,  or  even  states'  rights,  differentiated  Ballinger's 
policies  from  Garfield's.  When,  in  the  spring  of  1910,  the  evidence 
was  finally  in,  Ballinger  was  revealed  to  have  played  fast  and  loose 
with  the  law  in  a  way  that  made  Pinchot  and  Garfield's  elastic  inter- 
pretations seem  rigid  by  comparison;  and  he  had  done  so  in  the 
private,  though  assuredly  not  in  his  personal,  interest,  rather  than  the 
public  interest.  Worse  still,  President  Taft  was  revealed  to  have 
compromised  his  integrity  by  signing  a  spuriously  dated  document 
designed  to  bolster  the  administration's  case  against  Pinchot's  charges 
that  Ballinger  was  promoting  a  "give-away"  of  the  disputed  Cunning- 
ham claims.  And  most  portentously  of  all,  Pinchot  had  been  forced 
to  resign. 

By  every  criterion  except  that  of  the  public  interest,  the  fault  was 
the  Chief  Forester's.  With  characteristic  single-mindedness,  he  had 
decided  within  six  months  of  Taft's  inauguration  to  force  the  larger 
issue  into  the  open.  During  the  summer  and  autumn  of  1909  he  had 


386  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

delivered  one  conservationist  speech  after  another  as  the  newspapers 
buzzed  with  rumors  of  his  differences  with  Ballinger.  And  in  late 
September,  after  it  became  clear  that  Taft  intended  to  support 
Ballinger's  handling  of  the  Cunningham  claims  (Ballinger  refused  to 
recognize  their  flagrantly  fraudulent  character),  Pinchot  told  Taft  he 
would  stick  to  his  guns  even  if  the  President  had  to  fire  him.  Three 
months  later,  in  defiance  of  a  presidential  order,  Pinchot  sent  Senator 
Dolliver  a  letter  defending  two  of  his  own  subordinates  who  had 
released  information  about  Ballinger  and  the  Cunningham  claims  to 
the  press.  By  prearrangement,  the  lowan  read  it  on  the  floor  of  the 
Senate  chamber.  "It  is  clear  not  only  that  they  acted  from  a  high 
and  unselfish  sense  of  public  duty,"  Pinchot's  defense  of  his  sub- 
ordinates ran,  "but  that  they  deliberately  chose  to  risk  their  official 
positions  rather  than  permit  what  they  believed  to  be  the  wrongful 
loss  of  public  property." 

By  his  own  admission,  Pinchot  had  been  insubordinate.  "There  is 
only  one  thing  for  you  to  do  now,"  Elihu  Root  told  the  President  as 
the  issue  was  joined;  and  on  January  7  the  President  called  for  the 
Chief  Forester's  resignation.  "I  would  not  have  removed  Pinchot  if 
I  could  have  helped  it,"  he  plaintively  observed  three  days  later.  Taft 
replaced  Pinchot  with  an  outstanding  conservationist,  but  he  kept 
Ballinger  on,  and  by  doing  so  fatally  stamped  his  administration  as 
anticonservationist  and  indirectly  as  anti-Roosevelt.  The  Congressional 
insurgents  thus  had  their  second  major  grievance  against  the  President. 

With  thirty  newspaper  editors  over  the  country  calling  for  Pinchot's 
nomination  for  President  in  1912  and  the  periodical  press,  which  was 
already  enraged  by  the  President's  call  for  an  increase  in  the  postal 
rates  for  magazines,  rising  almost  as  one  in  criticism  of  Taft,  the 
pressure  was  now  on  the  administration  and  the  Old  Guardsmen  in 
Congress.  On  June  25,  in  compliance  with  an  earlier  request  from 
Taft,  Congress  restored  the  President's  authority  to  withdraw  public 
lands  temporarily  from  entry — the  same  power  it  had  so  angrily 
wrested  from  Roosevelt  three  years  before.  And  from  then  on  Taft 
moved  so  relentlessly  that  by  the  end  of  his  term  of  office  his  record 
of  withdrawals  compared  most  favorably  with  Roosevelt's.  Whether 
this  represented  the  fulfillment  of  his  original  intent  or  reflected  his 
political  desperation,  as  Pinchot  asserted  and  Roosevelt  implied,  is 
impossible  to  say.  What  is  certain,  however,  is  that  he  failed  even 
then  to  grasp  Roosevelt's  conception  of  controlled  development. 


THE   NEW   NATIONALISM  387 

Indeed,  Taft  actually  reversed  TR's  policies  by  signing  a  number  of 
bills  authorizing  perpetual  and  unlimited  franchises  for  the  construc- 
tion of  dams,  among  them  one  for  the  James  River  in  Missouri,  the 
project  that  Roosevelt  had  so  angrily  vetoed  two  months  before  he 
left  office. 

Unquestionably,  the  removal  of  Pinchot  was  the  major  catalyst  in 
Roosevelt's  estrangement  from  Taft.  The  Colonel  tried  to  be  fair; 
and  he  even  sought  to  withhold  judgment  until  his  return  to  the 
United  States.  The  burden  was  unbearable.  On  each  side  there  were 
ties  of  loyalty  and  affection.  But  on  Pinchot's  side  there  was  also  a 
great  cause — one  of  the  greatest  of  Roosevelt's  presidency.  It  was 
inconceivable  that  Taft  should  have  dealt  it  such  a  blow.  "We  have 
just  heard  by  special  runner  that  you  have  been  removed,"  TR  wrote 
Pinchot  from  the  Lado  Enclave  in  Africa  on  January  17,  1910.  "I 
cannot  believe  it.  I  do  not  know  any  man  in  public  life  who  has 
rendered  quite  the  service  you  have  rendered.  ...  Do  write.  .  .  ." 

Pinchot  had  already  written.  On  December  31,  1909,  a  week  before 
he  was  forced  out,  he  sent  the  Colonel  a  sixteen-point  bill  of  par- 
ticulars against  Taft,  the  gist  of  which  was  that  "the  tendency  of  the 
Administration  thus  far,  taken  as  a  whole,  has  been  directly  away 
from  the  Roosevelt  policies."  Then  on  April  11,  to  the  regret  of 
Lodge,  who  advised  TR  not  to  see  him,  Pinchot  met  his  former 
chief  at  Porto  Maurizio  in  Italy. 

There  is  no  record  of  what  Roosevelt  and  Pinchot  said  at  that 
momentous  meeting.  "One  of  the  best  and  most  satisfactory  talks  with 
T.R.  I  ever  had,"  was  Pinchot's  terse  comment  in  his  diary.  "Lasted 
all  day,  and  till  about  10:30  at  night."  But  Pinchot  had  already  said 
enough  in  his  letter  of  December  3 1  to  make  his  position  clear.  And 
if  he  had  not,  he  bore  letters  from  Beveridge,  Jonathan  Dolliver,  and 
William  Allen  White  charging  that  the  Payne-Aldrich  Tariff  was  "just 
plain  dishonest"  and  that  Taft  had  taken  "the  certificate  of  character 
which  Mr.  Roosevelt  had  given  him  and  turned  it  over  to  the  Senator 
[Aldrich]  from  Rhode  Island." 

Roosevelt  never  felt  the  same  toward  Taft  after  that.  On  the  day 
he  saw  Pinchot  he  wrote  Lodge  that  Taft  had  virtually  failed.  "The 
qualities  shown  by  a  thoroughly  able  and  trustworthy  lieutenant  are 
totally  different,  or  at  least  may  be  totally  different,  from  those  needed 
by  the  leader,  the  commander,"  he  remarked.  Admitting  that  "a  man 
with  strong  convictions  is  always  apt  to  feel  overintensely  the  differ- 


388  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

ence  between  himself  and  others  with  slighter  convictions,"  he  had 
then  renounced  ambitions  of  his  own: 

I  have  played  my  part,  and  I  have  the  very  strongest  objection 
to  having  to  play  any  further  part;  I  very  earnestly  hope  that  Taft 
will  retrieve  himself  yet,  and  if,  from  whatever  causes,  the  present 
condition  of  the  party  is  hopeless,  I  most  emphatically  desire  that 
I  shall  not  be  put  in  the  position  of  having  to  run  for  the  Presidency, 
staggering  under  a  load  which  I  cannot  carry,  and  which  has  been 
put  on  my  shoulders  through  no  fault  of  my  own. 

Nor  was  Roosevelt  then  disposed  to  help  the  Republican  regulars. 
The  Colonel  had  had  almost  a  year  to  reflect  on  the  character  of  his 
party  and  his  presidency.  And  in  a  passage  that  the  Democrats  would 
have  given  their  party  treasury  to  have  made  public,  he  testily  rejected 
Lodge's  suggestion  that  he  campaign  for  the  G.O.P.  in  1910.  "Twice  I 
have  asked  the  American  people  to  elect  a  Republican  Congress," 
he  reminded  his  friend,  "in  one  case  in  spite  of  an  indifferent  record 
[1906],  and  in  the  other  in  spite  of  a  poor  record  [1908].  ...  In 
each  case  the  leaders  of  Congress  have  promptly  gone  back  on  their 
promises  and  have  put  me  in  the  position  of  having  promised  what 
there  was  no  intention  of  performing.  I  don't  see  how  I  can  put  myself 
in  such  a  position  again." 

Three  weeks  later  the  former  President  passed  another  revealing 
judgment:  "Our  own  party  leaders  did  not  realize  that  I  was  able  to 
hold  the  Republican  party  in  power  only  because  I  insisted  on  a 
steady  advance,  and  dragged  them  along  with  me.  Now  the  advance 
has  been  stopped.  .  .  ." 

Meanwhile  Roosevelt's  wife  reported  that  people  were  urging  her 
to  keep  her  husband  out  of  the  country  for  a  year  and  a  half  longer 
("Why  not  for  life?"  said  Henry  Adams).  Finally,  on  May  30,  Elihu 
Root  met  TR  at  the  Dorchester  House  in  London.  Root  defended 
Taft  for  an  hour,  after  which,  so  he  later  contended,  the  Colonel 
promised  to  stay  out  of  politics  for  sixty  days  following  his  return 
home. 

In  Washington  at  about  the  same  time,  the  troubled  President, 
whom  Adams  described  as  "feebly  wabbling  all  over  the  place,  and 
tumbling  about  the  curbs,"  penned  a  long,  poignant  letter  to  his 
predecessor.  Taft  remarked  on  the  heavy  burden  of  Mrs.  Taft's  illness. 
She  "is  not  an  easy  patient  and  an  attempt  to  control  her  only  in- 


THE   NEW   NATIONALISM  389 

creased  the  nervous  strain."  He  dismissed  the  criticisms  of  the  Payne- 
Aldrich  Tariff  measure,  terming  it  "a  good  bill  and  a  real  downward 
revision."  And  he  pointed  with  understandable  pride  to  the  construc- 
tive measures  already  enacted  or  about  to  be  enacted — railroad  legisla- 
tion, a  postal  savings  bank  system,  statehood  for  New  Mexico  and 
Arizona,  protection  for  railroad  employees,  and  restoration  of  the 
President's  authority  to  withdraw  land  from  the  public  domain.  He 
concluded  by  incorrectly  implying  that  the  insurgents,  rather  than  the 
Old  Guard,  had  failed  to  abide  by  the  party  platform: 

The  fight  for  a  year  to  move  on  and  comply  with  our  party 
promises  has  been  a  hard  one.  LaFollette,  Cummins,  Dolliver, 
Bristow,  Clapp  and  Beveridge,  and  I  must  add  Borah,  have  done  all 
in  their  power  to  defeat  us.  They  have  probably  furnished  ammuni- 
tion enough  to  the  press  and  the  public  to  make  a  Democratic 
House.  .  .  . 

Roosevelt  dictated  a  generous  but  pointed  reply  to  Taft's  letter, 
which  he  had  received  just  before  sailing.  We  are,  he  wrote,  aware 
that  the  "sickness  of  the  one  whom  you  love  most  has  added  im- 
measurably to  your  burden  .  .  .  and  feel  very  genuine  pleasure  at 
learning  how  much  better  she  is."  He  also  told  Taft  of  his  talk  with 
Root,  adding  significantly  that  he  did  not  know  the  situation  at  home. 
UI  am,  of  course,  much  concerned  about  some  of  the  things  I  see  and 
am  told."  "I  have  felt  it  best  to  do  ...  absolutely  nothing — and 
indeed  to  keep  my  mind  as  open  as  I  kept  my  mouth  shut!" 

The  mind  was  willing,  but  the  heart  and  the  flesh  were  weak.  For 
a  few  weeks  after  his  return  home  a  fortnight  later  the  Colonel 
managed  to  avoid  public  affront  to  Taft,  though  he  rejected  the 
President's  invitation  to  visit  him  in  Washington.  And  in  spite  of  the 
importunities  of  the  insurgents — Pinchot,  Garfield,  Beveridge,  La 
Follette  and  almost  every  one  else  of  consequence — who  made  the 
hegira  to  Sagamore  Hill  that  summer,  he  refused  to  identify  himself 
openly  with  the  opposition.  In  fact,  he  worked  conscientiously  to 
promote  party  unity  of  a  sort.  Yet  TR  proved  incapable  of  repressing 
his  feelings  completely.  Before  the  summer  was  out  he  had  so 
thoroughly  reaffirmed  the  advanced  progressivism  of  the  last  two 
years  of  his  presidency  (and,  at  Pinchot  and  Herbert  Croly's  urging, 
a  little  more  besides)  that  he  and  the  President  had  lost  all  rapport. 

The  first  break  occurred  in  August  when  Roosevelt  challenged  the 


390  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

reactionary  Barnes  machine  for  the  temporary  chairmanship  of  the 
New  York  State  Republican  Convention.  If  Taft  had  been  capable  of 
reading  the  signs,  he  would  have  seen  that  the  Colonel's  action  was 
providential.  A  firm  and  open  declaration  of  support  for  Roosevelt 
would  have  placed  TR  under  personal  obligation  and  would  have 
narrowed  their  ideological  gulf,  since  Barnes  was  an  incorrigible 
conservative.  But  with  characteristic  maladroitness  Taft  made  it  ap- 
pear that  he  favored  the  Barnes  forces;  nor  did  he  suppress  his  perverse 
satisfaction  when  news  that  the  New  York  County  organization  had 
refused  to  endorse  Roosevelt  reached  him  in  Washington.  The 
Colonel's  opinion  of  his  successor's  ineptitude  was  thus  confirmed. 
"Taft  is  utterly  helpless  as  a  leader,"  he  confided  to  Ted  soon  after- 
ward. 

I  fear  that  he  has  just  enough  strength  to  keep  with  him  the 
people  of  natural  inertia,  the  good  conservative  unimaginative 
people  who  never  do  appreciate  the  need  of  going  forward,  and 
who  fail  to  realize  that  unless  there  is  some  progressive  leadership, 
the  great  mass  of  the  progressives  for  lack  of  this  legitimate  leader- 
ship will  follow  every  variety  of  demagogue  and  wild-eyed  visionary. 

Less  than  two  weeks  later  TR  was  campaigning  in  support  of  his 
own  progressive  policies,  and,  so  he  professed  to  believe,  of  Taft  and 
party  unity.  On  August  23,  in  a  special  railroad  car  provided  by  the 
Outlook,  he  set  out  on  a  three  weeks'  speaking  tour  of  the  West  that 
carried  him  into  sixteen  states  and  saw  him  deliver  at  Osawatomie, 
Kansas,  perhaps  the  most  radical  speech  of  his  career.  More,  even, 
than  on  his  previous  forays  into  the  West,  he  was  wildly,  almost 
ecstatically  acclaimed  by  plainly  dressed  crowds  that  stood  long  hours 
in  the  baking  prairie  sun  awaiting  his  whistle-stop  appearances;  and 
more,  perhaps,  than  ever  before  they  saw  in  Roosevelt  the  Moses  who 
would  lead  them  to  the  promised  land. 

The  Colonel  scaled  the  status  quo's  outer  defenses  at  Denver  on 
August  29  when  he  attacked  the  Supreme  Court  for  its  decisions  in  the 
Knight  case  of  1895  and  the  Lochner  case  of  1905.  Both  cases,  he 
said,  were  against  national  rights  and  against  states'  rights.  But  in 
reality,  he  asserted,  they  were  "against  popular  rights,  against  the 
Democratic  principle  of  government  by  the  people,  under  the  forms 
of  law."  The  result  was  the  creation  of  a  "neutral  ground  .  .  .  which 
can  serve  as  a  place  of  refuge  for  the  lawless  man,  and  especially  for 


THE   NEW   NATIONALISM  391 

the  lawless  man  of  great  wealth,  who  can  hire  the  best  legal  talent  to 
advise  him  how  to  keep  his  abiding  place  equally  distant  from  the 
uncertain  frontiers  of  both  state  and  national  power." 

Two  days  later,  on  the  grounds  at  Osawatomie  where  John  Brown's 
centennial  was  being  celebrated,  TR  stormed  conservatism's  inner 
bastion.  "The  essence  of  any  struggle  for  liberty  has  always  been,  and 
must  always  be  to  take  from  some  one  man  or  class  of  men  the  right 
to  enjoy  power,  or  wealth,  or  position,  or  immunity,  which  has  not 
been  earned  by  service  to  his  or  their  fellows,"  he  declared  in  a 
passage  that  was  as  close  to  a  Marxist  interpretation  of  history  as  he 
ever  got. 

Anticipating  the  furore  those  words  would  incite,  Roosevelt  had 
preceded  them  with  a  quotation: 

Labor  is  prior  to,  and  independent  of,  capital.  Capital  is  only  the 
fruit  of  labor,  and  could  never  have  existed  if  labor  had  not  first 
existed.  Labor  is  the  superior  of  capital,  and  deserves  much  the 
higher  consideration. 

With  characteristic  directness,  he  had  then  rammed  the  point  home. 
"If  that  remark  was  original  with  me,  I  should  be  even  more  strongly 
denounced  as  a  Communist  agitator  than  I  shall  be  anyhow.  It  is 
Lincoln's.  I  am  only  quoting  it.  .  .  ." 

Roosevelt's  dream  was  actually  the  ancient  one  of  equality  of  op- 
portunity within  a  propertied  framework.  In  the  tradition  of  the 
Jacksonians  far  more  than  of  Lincoln,  he  sought  to  purge  business  of 
its  corrosive  influence  upon  men,  morals,  and  politics;  but  not  to 
destroy  it.  Even  at  Osawatomie  Roosevelt  preached  no  proletarian 
uprising  nor  envisioned  no  broad  destruction  of  private  property.  Nor, 
significantly,  did  he  call  for  the  upbuilding  of  labor  as  a  countervailing 
force.  The  "essence  of  the  struggle  is  to  destroy  privilege,  and  give 
to  the  life  and  citizenship  of  every  individual  the  highest  possible  value 
both  to  himself  and  to  the  commonwealth."  Only  then  could 
America's  mighty  creative  forces  fulfill  their  unparalleled  potential, 
he  exclaimed  in  a  passage  that  marked  the  full  flowering  of  his  views 
and  gave  title  to  his  speech  and  the  progressive  movement's  philos- 
ophy, the  "New  Nationalism  puts  the  national  need  before  sectional 
or  personal  advantage." 

It  is  impatient  of  the  utter  confusion  that  results  from  local 
legislatures  attempting  to  treat  national  issues  as  local  issues.  It  is 


392  POWER  AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

still  more  impatient  of  the  impotence  which  springs  from  over 
division  of  governmental  powers,  the  impotence  which  makes  it 
possible  for  local  selfishness  or  for  legal  cunning,  hired  by  wealthy 
special  interests,  to  bring  national  activities  to  a  deadlock.  This  New 
Nationalism  regards  the  executive  power  as  the  steward  of  the 
public  welfare.  It  demands  of  the  judiciary  that  it  shall  be  interested 
primarily  in  human  welfare  rather  than  in  property,  just  as  it  de- 
mands that  the  representative  body  shall  represent  all  the  people 
rather  than  any  one  class  or  section  of  the  people. 

TR  had  then  called  the  list  of  reforms  without  which  equality  of 
opportunity  would  remain  the  haphazard  process  the  industrial  revolu- 
tion had  made  of  it.  The  elimination  of  corporate  expenditures  for 
political  purposes;  physical  valuation  of  railroad  properties;  regulation 
(though  not  even  by  inference,  the  breaking  up)  of  industrial  com- 
binations; establishment  of  an  expert  tariff  commission  (to  func- 
tion within  the  protectionist  framework);  a  graduated  income  tax 
and,  especially,  a  graduated  inheritance  tax;  reorganization  of  the  na- 
tion's financial  system;  conservation  of  natural  resources  and  stringent 
regulation  of  their  exploitation;  comprehensive  workmen's  compensa- 
tion laws;  state  and  national  legislation  to  regulate  the  labor  of  women 
and  children;  and  complete  publicity  of  campaign  expenditures. 

Much  of  the  West  applauded  what  it  heard  at  Denver  and 
Osawatomie.  "The  West  loves  and  understands  Roosevelt,"  the  Den- 
ver Republican  observed.  This  region  "takes  it  for  granted  that 
Theodore  Roosevelt  will  be  the  next  Republican  candidate  for  Presi- 
dent," the  correspondent  of  the  New  York  World  wired  from 
Cheyenne,  "so  what  is  the  use  of  getting  excited  about  it."  The  New 
York  Tribune  urbanely  agreed.  Criticisms  of  Colonel  Roosevelt 
"afford  great  comfort  to  a  select  class  of  persons,"  it  remarked,  "for 
not  to  approve,  or  to  give  only  a  qualified  approval  to,  the  Colonel  is 
a  mark  of  distinction.  It  sets  you  apart  from  the  common  herd,  with 
its  love  of  moral  platitudes  and  its  incapacity  for  distinguishing  be- 
tween them  and  deep  and  original  thought." 

Other  Eastern  criticisms  were  not  so  light-hearted.  Elihu  Root  con- 
tinued to  be  patronizing  of  his  turbulent  friend,  aptly  remarking  that 
"the  only  real  objection"  was  that  Roosevelt  had  called  the  New 
Nationalism  "new!"  But  he  was  nonetheless  disturbed.  "I  shall  be 
curious  to  know  whether  he  really  meant"  that  he  would  deprive  the 
courts  of  their  power  to  pass  on  constitutional  questions,  he  wrote 


THE   NEW   NATIONALISM  393 

Taft.  Cabot  Lodge  also  managed  a  degree  of  equanimity  by  claiming 
that  Western  papers  had  quoted  Roosevelt  out  of  context.  But  he  too 
was  worried;  and  he  so  informed  the  Colonel.  Meanwhile  the  New 
York  Commercial  in  a  fair  sample  of  the  unsophisticated  Eastern 
reaction,  called  Roosevelt  a  "peripatetic  revolutionist"  and  his  tour 
"a  firebrand's  triumphal  march." 

It  was  President  Taft,  however,  who  was  hurt  and  angered  the  most. 
He  complained  that  Roosevelt  had  gone  far  beyond  the  advocations 
of  his  White  House  days  (which  was  not  substantially  true).  He 
commented  on  Roosevelt's  "ego,"  "swelled-headedness,"  and  "wild 
ideas."  And  he  argued  that  the  Colonel's  proposals  were  "imprac- 
ticable" since  they  could  be  brought  about  only  through  "revolution 
or  revision  of  the  Constitution."  But  above  all  he  was  enraged  that 
the  Colonel  had  aligned  himself  with  the  enemy.  "In  most  of  his 
speeches  he  has  utterly  ignored  me,"  he  lamented  to  his  brother 
Horace.  "His  attitude  toward  me  is  one  that  I  find  difficult  to  under- 
stand and  explain.  .  .  ."  "He  is  at  the  head  of  the  insurgents,  and 
for  the  time  being  the  insurgents  are  at  the  top  of  the  way.  They 
have  carried  Wisconsin  and  Kansas  and  California  and  Iowa,  and 
they  may  carry  Washington.  .  .  ." 

Subsequent  events  wrought  little  change  in  the  general  situation. 
In  spite  of  his  fear  that  the  G.O.P.  was  foredoomed  to  defeat  in  1910 
and  1912,  Roosevelt  seems  to  have  been  congenitally  unable  to  stay 
out  of  the  congressional  campaign.  His  own  ambitions  were  as  yet 
unformed — he  may  have  been  thinking  vaguely  of  1916 — but  he  still 
believed  that  only  the  Republicans  were  capable  of  governing.  He 
foresaw  with  fateful  accuracy,  furthermore,  that  complete  division 
foreboded  long-term  disaster.  He  accordingly  decided  to  veer  back 
toward  the  middle  and  even  to  endorse  the  Payne-Aldrich  tariff;  but 
to  little  constructive  result,  so  turbulent  was  the  backlash  of  Osawa- 
tomie  and  his  entente  cordiale  with  the  insurgents. 

In  New  York  the  Old  Guardsmen  simply  would  not  forgive  the 
Colonel — either  for  the  "crime"  at  Osawatomie  or  for  "sins"  com- 
mitted as  far  back  as  his  governorship.  Worse  still,  Roosevelt's 
reluctant  decision  to  resume  relations  of  a  sort  with  Taft  backfired. 
The  President  and  the  former  President  had  met  once  since  Roosevelt's 
return  from  Africa — at  Taft's  summer  residence  in  Beverly,  Massachu- 
setts, on  June  30.  Taft  had  made  a  heartfelt  effort  to  break  through 
the  formal  veneer.  "See  here  now,"  he  exclaimed  to  the  Colonel, 


394  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

"drop  the  'Mr.  President.'  "  But  for  all  his  effervescent  good  will,  his 
"bullies"  and  exclamations  of  "de-e-light,"  TR  had  refused  to  resume 
the  old  relationship.  They  had  parted  as  far  apart  as  they  had  been 
before  they  saw  each  other. 

They  met  again  on  September  19  at  New  Haven,  where  Taft  was 
attending  a  meeting  of  the  Yale  Corporation.  This  time  their  con- 
ference set  off  a  small  bomb.  TR  stole  the  early  headlines  by  streak- 
ing out  from  Oyster  Bay  in  a  motorboat,  putting  in  at  Stamford 
because  of  rough  weather,  and  proceeding  on  to  New  Haven  by 
motor.  He  and  the  President  had  conferred  alone  for  an  hour,  then 
departed  for  the  station  in  an  automobile.  The  Colonel  "told  stories 
and  the  President  wreathed  his  face  with  a  purely  physical  smile  and 
laughed  aloud,"  Archie  Butt  reported,  "but  it  was  all  strained." 

Up  to  that  point,  the  meeting  had  been  fruitful,  for  Taft  had  agreed 
to  support  Roosevelt  in  his  bid  for  the  temporary  chairmanship  of 
the  New  York  State  Convention.  Unfortunately,  however,  a  member 
of  Taft's  entourage  told  newspapermen  on  the  President's  train  that 
the  conference  had  been  arranged  at  Roosevelt's  request  and  that  he 
had  asked  the  President  to  help  him  out  of  his  difficulties  in  New  York. 
That  did  it  as  far  as  TR  was  concerned. 

Roosevelt  issued  a  denial  the  next  day  and  then  poured  out  his 
feelings  to  Lodge.  He  had  agreed  to  meet  Taft  on  the  representations 
of  a  third  party,  he  said.  "I  did  not  ask  Taft's  aid  or  support  in  any 
shape  or  way,  and  it  would  never  have  entered  my  head  to  do  so; 
although  of  his  own  accord  he  volunteered  the  statement  that  Barnes 
and  Company  were  crooks,  and  that  he  hoped  we  would  beat  them." 
For  his  part,  Taft  wrote  his  wife  that  "It  was  perfectly  characteristic 
that  after  having  sought  the  interview,  as  ...  [Roosevelt]  un- 
doubtedly did,  .  .  .  [he]  should  at  once  advertise  that  it  was  not  at 
his  instance.  .  .  ."  He  added  that  Roosevelt  had  asked  for  his  sup- 
port. To  Butt,  however,  Taft  explained  that  he  had  offered  his  support 
unsolicited,  and  that  he  had  done  so  because  he  knew  that  the  Colonel 
intended  to  ask  for  it. 

Taft's  later  support  of  Roosevelt  at  the  New  York  State  Conven- 
tion failed  to  mend  the  breach,  partly  because  Roosevelt  prevented 
that  body  from  endorsing  the  President  for  re-election.  And  when 
Root  in  "a  jollying  letter"  written  at  Taft's  request  asked  TR  to  speak 
for  the  President  in  Ohio,  he  categorically  refused.  "As  for  what  you 
say  about  the  President  having  helped  here  in  New  York,"  he  replied, 


THE    NEW   NATIONALISM  395 

"I  can  only  say  that  I  went  into  the  fight  at  all  simply  at  the  earnest 
request  of  the  Taft  men."  The  Colonel  added  that  he  had  "been 
cordially  helping  the  election  of  a  Republican  Congress,  having  split 
definitely  with  the  Insurgents,  including  good  Gifford  Pinchot,  on  this 
point." 

I  have  never  had  a  more  unpleasant  summer.  The  sordid  base- 
ness of  most  of  the  so-called  Regulars,  who  now  regard  themselves 
as  especially  the  Taft  men,  and  the  wild  irresponsible  folly  of  the 
ultra-Insurgents,  make  a  situation  which  is  very  unpleasant.  ...  I 
do  not  see  how  I  could  as  a  decent  citizen  have  avoided  taking  the 
stand  I  have  taken  this  year,  and  striving  to  reunite  the  party  and  to 
help  the  Republicans  retain  control  of  Congress  and  of  the  State  of 
New  York,  while  at  the  same  time  endeavoring  to  see  that  this 
control  within  the  party  was  in  the  hands  of  sensible  and  honorable 
men  who  were  progressives  and  not  of  a  bourbon  reactionary  type. 


CHAPTER  24 


THE   TRAVAILS    OF    INDECISION 


Even  so  clear-headed  a  man  as  Root  thinks  that  Theodore 
has  not  the  Presidency  in  his  mind,  but  that  he  aims  at  a  leader- 
ship far  in  the  future,  as  a  sort  of  Moses  and  Messiah  for  a  vast 
progressive  tide  of  a  rising  humanity. 

— Henry  Adams 


Had  Theodore  Roosevelt  been  not  quite  so  ambitious,  or  even  a 
shade  less  self-righteous,  the  history  of  twentieth-century  American 
politics  must  surely  have  been  different.  The  Taft  forces  had  been 
humiliatingly  defeated  in  the  congressional  elections  of  1910,  first 
by  the  insurgents  in  the  Republican  primaries  and  then  by  the  Demo- 
crats in  the  regular  contests.  For  the  first  time  since  Grover  Cleveland 
the  Democrats  had  won  control  of  the  House,  and  for  the  first  time 
in  the  Roosevelt  era  the  American  people  had  broadly  affirmed  their 
progressivism  by  electing  a  string  of  progressive  governors,  most  of 
them  Democrats.  They  had  also  returned  almost  all  the  incumbent 
progressive  Republican  senators  and  had  added  three  new  ones  to 
their  ranks.  The  import  was  clear:  Taft  and  the  Old  Guard  were 
headed  for  defeat  in  1912  and  Theodore  Roosevelt  was  destined  to 
have  his  party's  nomination  thrust  upon  him  four  years  after  that. 
Assuming  that  the  Colonel's  thoughts  were  on  1916,  and  he  was 
too  young  and  dynamic  for  them  not  to  have  been,  his  tactics  and 
strategy  were  sharply  limned.  He  must  avoid  giving  mortal  affront  to 
the  Old  Guard,  which  was  bowed  but  far  from  crushed,  and  he  must 
continue  to  cultivate  relations  with  the  party's  growing  band  of  pro- 
gressives. Following  Taft's  defeat  in  1912  he  would  resume  leader- 

396 


THE    TRAVAILS   OF   INDECISION  397 

ship  of  the  party.  Resignedly,  the  Old  Guard  would  accept  him  in  the 
realization  that  he  was  the  party's  strongest  candidate;  enthusiastically, 
the  progressives  would  embrace  him  in  the  belief  that  he  reflected 
their  views. 

This  course,  if  it  was  in  fact  a  course,  was  not  without  obstacles. 
On  the  one  side  stood  the  Roosevelt-haters.  Conservatives  by  and 
large,  they  also  included  politicians  of  no  apparent  ideology — men  to 
whom  politics  was  purely  a  play  for  power,  men  who  might  even  sup- 
port another  progressive,  so  eager  were  they  to  have  done  with  TR's 
disruptive  force.  Could  the  Colonel  compromise  with  such  types  in- 
definitely? He  had  done  so  for  seven  and  one-half  years  as  President, 
and  with  generally  constructive  results.  Without  office,  however,  he 
would  have  nothing  constructive  to  show;  nothing  but  party  regularity 
and  intellectual  inconsistency. 

On  the  other  side  stood  the  militant  progressives — the  men  and 
women  of  creative  vision  and  evangelical  good  will  whose  doctrinaire 
politics  Roosevelt  had  so  often  deplored  and  whose  fertile  ideas  he 
had  so  regularly  expounded.  Could  the  Colonel  indefinitely  please 
these — the  Jane  Addamses,  the  Gifford  Pinchots  and  all  those  other 
idealists  whose  lives  and  heritage  have  so  enriched  the  Republic — and 
yet  maintain  his  precarious  political  relationship  with  the  conserva- 
tives, including  his  beloved  friends  Root  and  Lodge?  Already,  by 
1910,  this  was  a  meaningful  question.  For  the  reform  sentiment  that 
Roosevelt  had  so  spectacularly  affirmed  at  Osawatomie  would  have 
to  be  consolidated  on  more  than  party  regularity  and  nurtured  on 
more  than  intellectual  equivocation.  Should  TR  pull  his  punches  too 
much,  should  he  imply  by  his  relations  with  the  conservatives  that  he 
had  not  really  meant  what  he  had  said,  then,  surely,  the  reformers 
would  gravitate  to  the  relentlessly  uncompromising  La  Follette,  as 
many  were  already  doing  or  threatening  to  do.  Probably  Roosevelt 
could  have  won  them  back;  it  was  not  the  Colonel's  nature,  however, 
to  view  his  political  future  with  optimism. 

In  the  center  stood  Roosevelt  himself — Roosevelt  the  progressive 
conservative  and  Roosevelt  the  conservative  progressive;  Roosevelt, 
the  man  of  surprising  subtlety  and  predictable  bluntness;  Roosevelt, 
the  ruthless  politician  and  the  idealistic  preacher;  Roosevelt,  the  con- 
temner  of  reformers  and  the  purveyor  of  reforms;  Roosevelt,  the  most 
consummate  man  of  action  the  American  public  has  ever  known. 
Could  he  avoid  stumbling  over  himself?  Could  he  for  five  years  do 


398  POWER  AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

and  say  the  contradictory  things  necessary  to  the  preservation  of  his 
hold  on  both  the  right  and  the  left?  Could  he  accept  the  inevitable 
even  after  he  had  convinced  himself  that  Taft's  nomination  in  1912 
was  in  fact  inevitable? 

For  well  on  to  a  year  the  Colonel  pursued  this,  the  course  of 
political  wisdom  and  expediency,  if  not  of  valor.  The  Colonel  re- 
sumed friendly  relations  with  Taft  even  as  he  was  cultivating  them 
with  La  Follette.  He  was  less  than  consistent  on  some  issues  and  he 
reversed  himself  ignobly  on  at  least  one,  tariff  reciprocity.  He  both 
defended  and  criticized  Taft  in  private,  and  he  did  the  same  with 
La  Follette,  Pinchot,  and  other  militant  progressives.  And  he  even 
backslid  a  bit  from  Osawatomie.  In  the  end,  however,  he  proved  emo- 
tionally incapable  of  walking  the  tightrope  that  both  he  and  circum- 
stances had  strung. 

The  rapprochement  with  Taft  proved  short-lived;  nor  did  it  ever 
quite  recapture  the  easy  informality  of  earlier  years.  Roosevelt  could 
rekindle  the  flames  of  friendship  as  readily  as  he  could  stamp  them 
out,  but  he  could  not  re-create  the  old  respect  for  Taft's  competency. 
Never,  not  even  with  his  beloved  brother  Elliott,  who  had  died  of 
alcoholism  eighteen  years  before,  was  Theodore  Roosevelt  tolerant  of 
weakness.  And  never,  almost  certainly,  was  he  tolerant  of  ineptitude 
in  men  of  public  responsibility.  For  all  those  flashes  of  courage  that 
made  his  downfall  a  minor  tragedy,  Taft  had  proved  both  weak  and 
inept.  "I  do  not  believe  he  has  been  a  bad  President,  and  I  am  sure 
he  has  been  a  thoroughly  well-meaning  and  upright  President,"  TR 
wrote  Arthur  Lee  in  September,  1910,  as  his  relations  with  Taft 
started  to  become  more  cordial.  "I  think  he  is  a  better  President  than 
McKinley  and  probably  than  Harrison,  but  the  times  are  totally  dif- 
ferent, and  he  has  not  the  qualities  that  are  needed  at  the  moment." 
After  Taft's  continuing  political  obtuseness  and  Roosevelt's  bustling 
vanity  had  brought  about  a  situation  beyond  repair,  the  Colonel 
would  alter  even  that  measured  judgment  of  his  chosen  successor. 

Meanwhile,  however,  TR  wrote  Taft  that  he  was  "a  trump"  to 
invite  him  again  to  the  White  House.  He  commended  him  in  De- 
cember, 1910,  after  reading  the  proof  of  his  annual  message  (though 
most  of  that  message  was  intransigently  conservative,  portions  of  it 
were  eminently  progressive).  And  he  rendered  friendly  advice  on 
foreign  policy.  Taft  responded  in  kind,  for  he  was  even  more  desirous 
of  harmony  than  Roosevelt.  Reporting  to  the  Colonel  on  the  progress 


THE   TRAVAILS   OF   INDECISION  399 

of  the  Panama  Canal  in  late  November,  he  observed  that  it  would  be 
completed  around  July,  1913,  "a  date  at  which  both  you  and  I  will 
be  private  citizens  and  .  .  .  can  then  visit  the  canal  together."  And 
in  March,  1911,  when  Roosevelt  requested  permission  to  raise  and 
command  a  cavalry  division  in  the  event  the  festering  Mexican  situa- 
tion exploded  into  a  major  war,  the  President  cordially  acquiesced. 

Three  months  later  the  President  and  the  former  President  met  in 
Baltimore  at  a  celebration  honoring  Cardinal  Gibbons,  where  as 
Mowry  writes,  they  "shook  hands  heartily,  whispered  together,  and 
at  times  broke  into  unrestrained  laughter."  A  few  days  later  Roose- 
velt sent  the  Tafts  a  silver  wedding  anniversary  gift.  Taft's  thank-you 
note,  dated  June  18,  1911,  was  the  last  personal  communication  ex- 
changed by  the  two  men  in  years.  By  the  third  week  in  August  Roose- 
velt was  writing  that  the  President  "is  a  flubdub  with  a  streak  of  the 
second-rate  and  the  common  in  him,  and  he  has  not  the  slightest  idea 
of  what  is  necessary  if  this  country  is  to  make  social  and  industrial 
progress."  Taft's  real  trouble,  he  explained  to  Hiram  Johnson  in 
October,  1911,  lay  in  his  values.  Like  those  of  McKinley,  Hanna,  and 
most  of  America's  business  leaders,  they  were  essentially  materialistic. 

What  caused  this  final  estrangement?  Certainly  Roosevelt's  per- 
sonality was  a  major  factor.  TR's  whole  career  was  marred  by  a  seem- 
ingly congenital  inability  to  view  his  competitors  with  normal  dispas- 
sion,  and  Mowry's  speculation  that  he  "could  not  have  thoroughly 
approved  of  the  leadership  of  any  successor,  much  less  that  of  a  per- 
sonal friend,"  is  powerfully  compelling.  It  is  not  unlikely,  in  fact,  that 
from  that  one  great  flaw  of  character  flowed  much  of  the  rest — the 
intolerance,  the  hypercriticism,  the  indignation  at  the  reversal  of  "my 
policies."  Even  at  their  unalloyed  worst,  however,  personality  con- 
siderations were  only  partially  determinative.  They  fixed  the  direction 
of  Roosevelt's  broad  bias,  and  they  governed  the  magnitude  of  the 
final  eruption;  but  they  would  have  been  historically  inconsequential 
had  they  not  been  compounded  by  ideological  issues  in  which  TR  had 
long  been  involved.  During  the  eight  or  ten  months  of  his  rapproche- 
ment with  Taft,  for  example,  the  Colonel  proved  quite  capable  of 
checking  his  more  egregious  compulsions.  It  is  reasonable  to  assume 
that  he  might  have  continued  to  hold  them  in  bounds  had  there  not 
unfolded  in  the  spring  and  fall  of  1911  a  new  series  of  disruptive 
issues.  One  of  the  most  important  of  these  was  foreign  policy. 

In  the  face  of  Roosevelt's  labors  in  the  vineyard  of  peace,  he  had 


400  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

never  lost  that  contempt  for  weakness  which  had  marred  his  conduct 
of  diplomacy  with  the  less  advanced  nations.  He  never  regarded  U.S. 
vital  interests  as  justiciable,  in  spite  of  his  own  efforts  in  behalf 
of  the  Second  Hague  Peace  Conference  and  the  endorsement  he  had 
given  limited  arbitration  treaties  while  President,  to  say  nothing  of 
his  Nobel  Prize  speech  in  the  spring  of  1910.  To  the  end  of  his  life 
the  Colonel  remained  a  Realpolitiker,  his  moral  principles  partly  sup- 
pressed by  his  own  strident  nationalism  or  merged  in  that  Zeitgeist 
which  identified  America's  national  interests  with  the  ultimate  welfare 
of  humanity.  When,  therefore,  Taft  backed  a  series  of  comprehensive 
arbitration  treaties  in  the  spring  of  1911,  Roosevelt  was  hard  pressed 
to  maintain  the  facade  of  approval  that  circumstances  demanded.  In- 
deed, he  soon  commenced  to  destroy  it  brick  by  brick. 

Privately,  the  Colonel  warned  Lodge,  who  needed  no  urging,  against 
sanctioning  such  "maudlin  folly"  as  the  negotiation  of  "honor  and 
independence."  He  also  said  much  the  same  publicly,  first  in  a  signed 
article  in  the  March  issue  of  the  Outlook,  later  in  a  seven-page  letter 
published  in  the  New  York  Times.  Hurt  and  embittered,  Taft  refused 
to  reply  in  kind  though  he  privately  attributed  Roosevelt's  opposition 
to  his  primitive  drives  and  personal  animosity  toward  himself.  "The 
truth  is  he  believes  in  war  and  wishes  to  be  a  Napoleon  and  to  die  on 
the  battlefield,"  he  wrote  of  his  predecessor.  "I  shall  continue  .  .  . 
to  discuss  the  treaties,  and  shall  not  notice  the  personal  turn  of  his 
remarks.  ...  It  is  curious  how  unfitted  he  is  for  courteous  debate. 
I  don't  wonder  he  prefers  the  battle-ax."  Roosevelt's  private  opinion 
of  Taft  was  hardly  more  complimentary. 

Actually,  the  controversy  transcended  both  personalities  and  poli- 
tics. The  two  men's  raging  disrespect  for  each  other  doubtless  con- 
tributed subconsciously  to  the  fanning  of  the  flames;  but  neither  it  nor 
Roosevelt's  as  yet  unformed  ambition  for  1912  was  causal.  Above  all 
else,  above  conservation  even,  this  was  an  ideological  conflict. 

Like  Bryan,  Carnegie,  and  eventually  Woodrow  Wilson,  William 
Howard  Taft  envisioned  the  ultimate  substitution  of  international  law 
for  sheer  force.  He  devoutly  believed  that  all  disputes  were  justiciable, 
including  those  involving  the  national  honor  and  interest.  And  in  a 
series  of  extraordinarily  frank  and  sensitive  speeches  in  defense  of  the 
arbitration  treaties  before  the  Senate  in  1911,  he  persuasively  ex- 
pounded his  internationalist  views.  "We  had  the  war  of  1812,  in 
which  our  neighbor,  England,  asserted  rights  that  she  would  not  now 


THE   TRAVAILS   OF    INDECISION  401 

think  of  pressing,"  Taft  said  at  Marquette  on  September  11.  "I  think 
that  war  might  have  been  settled  without  a  fight  and  ought  to  have 
been.  So  with  the  Mexican  War.  So,  I  think,  with  the  Spanish  war." 
The  climax  came  at  the  University  of  Idaho  on  October  7,  when  Taft 
directly  foreshadowed  Woodrow  Wilson's  "too  proud  to  fight"  as- 
sertion of  four  years  later.  "I  don't  think,"  the  President  exclaimed  to 
the  students  and  faculty,  "that  it  indicates  that  a  man  lacks  personal 
courage  if  he  does  not  want  to  fight,  but  prefers  to  submit  questions 
of  national  honor  to  a  board  of  arbitration." 

To  a  Theodore  Roosevelt,  a  Cabot  Lodge,  an  Admiral  Mahan,  and 
even  an  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes,  Taft's  subordination  of  the  national 
ego  was  the  rankest  heresy.  How  could  patriotism  be  fostered?  How 
could  the  manly  virtues,  without  which  the  nation  would  follow  the 
course  of  Rome  and  all  the  other  past  civilizations  grown  flaccid 
from  effeteness  and  ultramaterialism,  be  maintained  if  national  wrong 
were  admitted  and  the  will  to  assert  renounced? 

That  was  not  the  whole  of  Roosevelt's  brief  against  Taft's  arbitra- 
tion treaties.  If  the  Colonel  bore  the  national  honor  as  a  truculent 
youngster  carried  a  chip  on  the  tip  of  his  shoulder,  his  understanding 
of  power  politics  as  it  was  then  played  was  as  deep  as  that  of  the 
most  cynical  of  his  European  contemporaries.  He  entertained  no  ob- 
jection per  se  to  a  treaty  with  England,  for  he  now  believed  America 
and  Britain's  larger  national  interests  were  either  identical  or  comple- 
mentary. But  he  objected  strenuously  to  Taft's  plan  to  consummate 
similar  treaties  with  all  the  other  powers.  As  he  wrote  Lodge  late  in 
the  spring  of  1911: 

Of  course  as  regards  England  .  .  .  there  is  not  any  question 
that  we  could  not  arbitrate.  .  .  .  But  with  either  Germany  or 
Japan  it  is  perfectly  conceivable  that  questions  might  arise  which 
could  not  submit  to  arbitration.  If  either  one  of  them  asked  us  to 
arbitrate  the  question  of  fortifying  the  Isthmus;  or  asked  us  to 
arbitrate  the  Monroe  Doctrine,  or  the  fortification  or  retention  of 
Hawaii;  or  Germany's  right  to  purchase  the  Danish  islands  in  the 
West  Indies;  or  Japan's  right  to  insist  upon  unlimited  Japanese 
immigration — why!  we  would  not  and  could  not  arbitrate. 

There  was  and  is  no  easy  answer.  In  the  tradition  of  the  great 
idealists,  Taft  was  pushing  hard  on  the  only  course  that  offers  ulti- 
mate hope  for  the  preservation  of  world  civilization.  In  the  tradition 
of  the  great  realists,  Roosevelt  was  arguing  that  national  survival  was 


402  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

paramount  to  commitment  to  a  world  order.  Actually,  neither  states- 
man was  quite  as  extreme  as  his  words  of  the  moment  suggested.  The 
President,  for  example,  was  wholeheartedly  committed  to  the  fortifica- 
tion of  the  Panama  Canal  and  the  defense  of  the  Monroe  Doctrine. 
The  Colonel,  as  his  acceptance  of  Root's  treaties  and  his  Nobel  Prize 
speech  suggest,  was  willing  to  push  for  arbitration  as  an  eventual 
goal.  Like  Root  and  the  many  other  responsible  senators  who  helped 
emasculate  the  treaties  at  issue,  however,  he  felt  that  Taft  was  moving 
too  rapidly  and,  hence,  irresponsibly. 

Other  issues  continued  to  widen  the  ideological  gulf  between  the 
two  antagonists  throughout  1911.  One  was  conservation;  another, 
Roosevelt's  continuing  criticism  of  the  courts.  As  Taft's  administra- 
tion progressed  he  had  become  increasingly  responsive  to  the  needs 
of  the  conservation  movement.  In  June,  1910,  at  the  President's  re- 
quest, Congress  restored  to  his  office  the  power  to  withdraw  public 
lands  from  entry  (it  forbade  the  creation  of  or  addition  to  forest  re- 
serves in  Oregon,  Washington,  Idaho,  Montana,  Colorado,  or  Wyo- 
ming, however,  except  by  act  of  Congress),  and  during  the  remainder 
of  his  administration  Taft  actually  exercised  the  power  of  withdrawal 
more  liberally  than  Roosevelt  had  done. 

Notwithstanding  this  salutary  effort,  however,  Taft  failed  to  give 
the  conservation  movement  the  moral  support  that  had  made  it  a 
crusade  under  Roosevelt  and  Pinchot.  Had  he  spoken  for  conservation 
with  the  same  zeal  he  defended  the  Payne-Aldrich  Tariff  or  the 
arbitration  treaties,  he  might  have  spared  himself  a  heavy  burden  of 
pain.  Nevertheless,  by  late  April,  1911,  after  he  finally  accepted 
Secretary  of  the  Interior  Ballinger's  resignation  "with  great  reluc- 
tance," and  appointed  an  able  and  dedicated  conservationist  in  his 
place,  Roosevelt  was  writing  that  if  only  "Poor  Taft"  had  done  some 
of  the  things  he  was  now  doing  two  years  earlier,  his  lot  might  have 
been  substantially  different.  But  even  this  faint  glimmer  of  approval 
was  soon  obscured  by  the  black  cloud  that  fell  over  Taft's  Alaskan 
policy. 

Distressed  by  Taft's  appointment  of  "a  thoroughly  untrustworthy 
man"  as  governor  of  Alaska  in  1909,  and  disgusted  by  the  subsequent 
revelations  of  Ballinger's  handling  of  the  Guggenheim  claims,  Roose- 
velt needed  but  the  slightest  breeze  to  fan  the  white  coals  of  his  con- 
servationist zeal.  It  came  in  the  spring  of  1911  when  the  Taft  ad- 
ministration restored  to  public  sale  forest  lands  on  Controller  Bay 


THE   TRAVAILS   OF   INDECISION  403 

that  his  own  administration  had  withdrawn  from  public  entry.  The 
Colonel  interpreted  this  as  playing  into  the  hands  of  the  Guggenheim 
monopolists,  and  on  July  22,  a  little  more  than  a  month  after  he  and 
Taft  had  conversed  so  amiably  at  the  Gibbons  reception  in  Baltimore, 
he  published  in  the  Outlook  a  severe  attack  on  Taft's  conservation 
policies  in  general  and  his  Alaskan  policy  in  particular.  The  President, 
he  wrote,  had  created  conditions  which  would  make  it  possible  for 
the  Guggenheim  interests  to  acquire  control  of  the  only  remaining 
outlet  to  the  Bering  coal  fields.  Four  days  later  Taft  responded  to  this 
indictment  with  a  special  message  to  Congress  sharply  defending  his 
own  course  and  criticizing  by  implication  the  Roosevelt  administra- 
tion's action.  "I  fear,"  the  President  confided  to  poor  Archie  Butt, 
who  was  still  striving  manfully  to  be  loyal  to  Taft  without  being  dis- 
loyal to  Roosevelt,  that  the  Colonel  "will  regard  this  portion  of  my 
message  as  a  direct  slap  at  himself  and  will  answer  it  as  such." 

The  President's  fears  were  justified.  Encouraged  by  the  single 
minded  Pinchot,  who  would  no  longer  even  concede  that  Taft  was 
"upright,"  Roosevelt  struck  back  on  August  5  and  again  on  August  12 
through  editorials  in  the  Outlook.  One  was  signed,  the  other  unsigned, 
and  neither  spared  the  nettled  President's  feelings.  Even  as  the  con- 
troversy thus  degenerated,  however,  it  was  punctuated  by  new  ad- 
vances in  Roosevelt's  thought.  Eschewing  a  simple  recommendation 
for  lease,  as  opposed  to  sale,  of  the  Alaskan  coal  lands,  he  came  out 
for  government  construction  and  operation  of  the  port  facilities  and 
the  railroad  line  into  the  coal  fields.  This,  he  emphatically  believed 
and  openly  declared,  was  the  only  alternative  to  private  monopoly. 

If  Taft's  foreign  and  conservation  policies  were  central  to  Roose- 
velt's ideological  estrangement  from  the  President,  the  Colonel's  atti- 
tude toward  the  law  continued  to  be  the  most  critical  factor  in  Taft's 
divorcement  from  Roosevelt.  A  few  months  were  yet  to  pass  before 
TR  would  carry  his  slashing  criticisms  of  the  judiciary  to  their  logical 
conclusion — the  substitution  of  the  people's  will  for  the  courts'  judg- 
ment under  limited  conditions.  But  as  conservatives  long  feared, 
Roosevelt  was  advancing  rapidly  along  that  fateful  path  in  the  spring 
of  1911;  and  Taft  realized  it. 

Curiously,  the  legal  issue  was  confounded  by  the  trust  question.  In 
spite  of  his  protestations  in  1908  that  his  policies  were  the  same  as 
Roosevelt's,  Secretary  of  War  Taft  had  always  entertained  reserva- 
tions about  the  wisdom,  and  in  some  cases  the  legality,  of  many  of 


404  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Roosevelt's  policies.  He  had,  it  is  true,  demurred  only  mildly,  and 
he  had  even  acquiesced  in  the  President's  handling  of  the  Brownsville 
affair.  He  had  also  submitted  to  Roosevelt's  views  on  the  trusts,  which 
he  seems  not  to  have  grasped  fully.  "What  we  believe  in,  if  I  under- 
stand it,"  he  wrote  TR  shortly  after  his  own  nomination,  "is  the  regu- 
lation of  the  business  of  the  trusts  as  distinguished  from  its  destruc- 
tion." Once  Taft  had  assumed  Roosevelt's  sceptre,  however,  his 
compulsion  to  uphold  the  letter  of  the  law — a  compulsion  that  at  times 
caused  him  to  pursue  policies  more  redolent  of  form  than  of  substance 
— became  again  his  leitmotif.  The  result  was  the  most  unrelenting 
destruction  of  the  trusts  to  that  time  and  the  most  shattering  of  blows 
to  the  relations  between  the  President  and  the  former  President. 

The  signs  were  already  posted  when,  in  ordering  the  dissolution  of 
the  Standard  Oil  and  American  Tobacco  companies  in  the  spring  of 
1911,  the  Supreme  Court  laid  down  the  so-called  "rule  of  reason" 
doctrine.  In  so  far  as  that  doctrine  read  flexibility  into  the  interpreta- 
tion of  the  Sherman  Antitrust  law,  it  confirmed  Roosevelt's  long-held 
view;  he  can  perhaps  be  forgiven  the  smugness  that  crept  into  his 
comments.  "I  think  it  is  a  good  thing  to  have  had  those  two  de- 
cisions .  .  .  ,"  he  wrote  a  friend,  "but  they  do  not  reach  the  root  of 
the  matter."  What  was  needed,  he  wrote  in  the  Outlook  on  June  3, 
was  an  independent  commission  with  powers  similar  to  those  of  the 
Interstate  Commerce  Commission.  Regulation  of  corporations  could 
then  be  "accomplished  by  continuous  administrative  action,  and  not 
by  necessarily  intermittent  lawsuits."  Furthermore,  he  added,  the  com- 
mission should  be  empowered  to  fix  prices  indirectly. 

If  President  Taft  was  impressed  by  Roosevelt's  article  in  the  Out- 
look, there  is  no  record  of  it.  Conscious  that  he  was  enforcing  the 
Sherman  Law  as  it  had  not  been  enforced,  even  by  Roosevelt  himself, 
he  gave  his  energetic  Attorney  General,  George  W.  Wickersham,  his 
rein.  The  consequence  was  that  while  Standard  Oil  and  American 
Tobacco  Company  executives  were  privately  snickering  at  the  govern- 
ment (the  orders  seemed  not  to  affect  their  company's  real  power  posi- 
tions within  the  steel  and  tobacco  industries;  and,  as  Pringle  writes, 
who  among  them  "was  indicted,  fined  or  punished?"),  the  adminis- 
tration was  taking  its  most  fateful  step  of  all.  In  the  full  flower  of  that 
stubborn  innocence  that  was  both  his  charm  and  his  political  undoing, 
Taft  allowed  a  special  assistant  to  the  Attorney  General  to  file  suit 


THE   TRAVAILS   OF    INDECISION  405 

against  the  United  States  Steel  Corporation  on  October  26,  1911.  He 
did  not  even  read  the  government's  bill  of  particulars.  There  followed 
the  most  disastrous  explosion  in  the  Republican  party's  history. 

The  government's  petition  of  October  26  made  the  startling  in- 
ference that  President  Roosevelt  had  been  hoodwinked  by  Messrs. 
Frick  and  Gary  when  they  assured  him  in  October,  1907  that  the 
purchase  of  the  Tennessee  Coal  and  Iron  Company  by  the  United 
States  Steel  Corporation  was  essential  to  stoppage  of  the  panic  of  that 
year  and  that  no  advantage  would  accrue  to  U.S.  Steel  from  the 
merger.  In  spite  of  the  hard  truth  of  this  inference,  the  Colonel  was 
too  vain,  or  to  put  it  more  charitably,  too  human,  to  do  other  than 
deny  it.  He  did  so  at  once — vitriolically  in  his  private  letters  and 
vehemently  in  an  Outlook  article  of  November  18.  He  complained  to 
friends  that  Taft  had  been  "enthusiastic"  and  "emphatic  in  his  com- 
mendation of  the  merger"  when  Secretary  of  War.  "It  ill  becomes  him 
either  by  himself  or  through  another  afterwards  to  act  as  he  is  now 
acting,"  he  contended.  And  he  charged  in  the  article  in  the  Outlook 
that  Taft's  insistence  on  meeting  the  trust  problem  "by  a  succession 
of  lawsuits  .  .  ."  was  about  as  practical  as  "a  return  to  the  flintlocks 
of  Washington's  Continentals." 

The  wheel  had  finally  turned  full  circle.  Roosevelt  now  appeared  at 
one  with  Justice  Holmes  who  had  raised  similar  objections  to  the  dis- 
solution of  the  Northern  Securities  Company  in  1904.  Yet  the  wheel 
had  also  moved  forward;  and  in  so  doing  it  had  left  the  great  jurist, 
who  held  no  brief  for  regulation  either,  to  muse  alone  over  the  raw  So- 
cial Darwinian  theories  of  Herbert  Spencer  and  William  Graham  Sum- 
mer. "I  don't  disguise  my  belief,"  Holmes  had  written  his  friend  Pol- 
lock just  the  year  before,  "that  the  Sherman  Act  is  a  humbug  based  on 
economic  ignorance  and  incompetence,  and  my  disbelief  that  the  Inter- 
state Commerce  Commission  is  a  fit  body  to  be  entrusted  with  rate- 
making.  .  .  ." 

The  Colonel's  solution  was  the  one  that  he  had  been  pointing 
toward  as  early  as  1902  when  "Mr.  Dooley"  had  chided  him  for  his 
apparent  ambivalence  toward  the  trusts,  for  his  then  fuzzy  categoriza- 
tion of  "good"  and  "bad"  industrial  combinations.  TR  called  not  only 
for  continuous  and  comprehensive  government  regulation  as  he  had 
done  so  often  during  the  last  years  of  his  presidency  and  again  at 
Osawatomie,  for  the  first  time  in  a  public  statement  he  faced  the 


406  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

ultimate  question — government  control  of  wages,  hours  and  prices. 
After  defending  his  own  comportment  in  the  Steel  case  (he  implied 
that  the  Steel  Corporation  was  a  "good"  trust)  and  criticizing  the 
Taft  administration's  failure  to  dissolve  the  "bad"  Tobacco  Trust  in 
fact  no  less  than  in  theory,  he  concluded  that  in  extreme  cases  the 
government  should  be  empowered  to  exercise  "control  over  monopoly 
prices,  as  rates  on  railways  are  now  controlled.  .  .  ." 

Impressed  by  the  paeans  of  praise  for  TR  that  immediately  rose 
out  of  the  man-made  canyons  on  lower  Manhattan,  historians  have 
widely  interpreted  the  Outlook  article  as  a  direct  bid  for  Wall  Street's 
support.  And  so  it  was,  in  timing  at  least.  Wiebe's  studies  show  that 
the  Morgan-Gary-Perkins  forces  were  already  disaffected  by  the  Taft 
administration's  relentless  enforcement  of  the  Sherman  Law  and  that 
they  had  earlier  sought  to  avoid  suit  by  reviving  the  "gentlemen's 
agreements"  of  the  Roosevelt  years  and  offering  to  correct  in  advance 
such  practices  as  the  Department  of  Justice  found  offensive.  But 
Wickersham,  whose  devotion  to  the  letter  of  the  law  was  as  sustained 
as  Taft's,  had  flatly  refused.  Furthermore,  they  had  already  proved 
themselves  sympathetic  to  Roosevelt's  broad  regulatory  proposals,  in- 
cluding government  price-fixing.  As  Judge  Gary  told  the  congressional 
committee  that  investigated  the  Steel  Corporation  that  June,  price- 
fixing  would  diminish  cut-throat  competition;  and  as  he  did  not  tell 
the  committee,  it  would  also  have  assured  tremendous  profits  for  his 
organization  since  the  prices  would  have  to  be  set  high  enough  to 
cover  the  costs  of  the  small,  and  less  efficient,  companies.  Gary  also 
argued  that  it  was  "a  great  mistake  to  suppose  that  we  can  dominate 
the  market  price,  a  great  mistake."  Under  cross-examination,  how- 
ever, he  conceded  that  the  Steel  Corporation's  vertical  organization, 
coupled  with  the  benefits  derived  from  comparative  bookkeeping  in 
its  numerous  plants,  did  give  it  a  considerable  advantage. 

As  I  suggested  in  the  treatment  of  the  U.S.  Steel-T.  C.  &  I.  merger 
in  Chapter  18,  Roosevelt  seems  never  to  have  shown  any  real  insight 
into  the  purely  economic  effects  of  the  subordination  of  the  interests 
of  a  subsidiary  company  to  those  of  a  parent  company.  He  was  con- 
cerned with  the  more  obvious  abuses  of  power — railroad  rebates,  for 
example — rather  than  with  the  subtle  and  intangible,  yet  surely  sub- 
stantive, economic  consequences  of  monopoly  or  oligopoly.  Believing 
that  the  manufacturing  industries  were  impelled  by  the  same  natural 


THE   TRAVAILS   OF   INDECISION  407 

forces  as  the  utilities  to  become  monopolistic  or  oligopolistic,  he  came 
readily  to  the  conclusion  that  what  was  right  for  one  was  right  for  the 
other;  that  the  Steel  Corporation  should  be  regulated  in  the  manner  of 
the  railroads  rather  than  dissolved. 

There  were  refinements  and  exceptions  of  course;  also  inconsist- 
encies. As  a  moralist,  TR  was  concerned  preeminently  with  processes. 
Since  the  Standard  Oil  and  American  Tobacco  trusts,  unlike  the  Steel 
Corporation,  had  been  created  by  willfully  dishonest,  anti-social 
means,  they  were  "bad"  trusts  and  deserved  to  be  atomized.  This  was 
right;  this  was  retributive  justice,  so  essential  in  his  value  system  to  the 
good  and  ordered  society.  Yet — and  here  was  the  inconsistency — he 
did  not  believe  their  effective  dissolution  was  possible  even  though  he 
had  made  the  original  decision  to  prosecute  them  as  President.  Hence 
his  assertion  that  the  Tobacco  Trust  had  been  dissolved  in  theory  but 
not  in  fact. 

The  Colonel  was  not  alone  in  this  view.  Many  informed  observers 
believed  at  the  time  and  for  long  thereafter  that  the  decrees  against  the 
Standard  Oil  and  American  Tobacco  companies  failed  to  alter  their 
real  power  positions  within  their  industries.  Most  economic  historians 
now  hold,  however,  that  the  disruption  of  the  oil  and  tobacco  trusts 
had  a  constructive  impact  on  the  industries  concerned.  They  further 
contend  that  both  the  application  and  the  threatened  application  of  the 
Sherman  and  Clayton  acts  by  the  Roosevelt,  Taft,  and  Wilson  adminis- 
trations reduced  the  incidence  of  business  malpractices  and  retarded  the 
growth  of  monopoly.  As  Eugene  V.  Rostow  puts  it,  "The  example  of 
these  basic  decisions  served  as  a  powerful  negative  factor  in  business 
affairs.  Certain  lines  of  development  were  denied  to  ambitious  men." 

In  these  circumstances,  TR's  distinction  between  "good"  and 
"bad"  trusts  belongs  more  to  the  limbo  of  morals  than  economics. 
Conversely,  Taft's  wholesale  prosecution  of  the  trusts  gives  his  ad- 
ministration a  luster  often  denied  it.  (It  is  no  accident  that  his  majority 
opinion  in  the  Addyston  Pipe  &  Steel  Co.  case,  rendered  when  he  was 
a  Federal  judge  in  1898,  is  one  of  the  classic  statements  of  antitrust 
literature. )  Nevertheless,  there  is  widespread  agreement  that  more  than 
mere  trust-busting  was  needed;  that  an  incorporation  statute  such  as 
Roosevelt  had  proposed  and  Taft  had  failed  to  push,  or  an  agency  like 
the  Federal  Trade  Commission,  which  TR  had  also  envisioned  and 


408  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

Wilson  later  created,  was  also  necessary.  This  being  so,  it  is  fair  to 
conclude  that  Roosevelt's  perception  of  the  complexity  of  aspects  of 
the  trust  problem  and  his  sustained  call  for  the  rule  of  reason  were  as 
economically  hard-headed  as  his  belief  that  the  Steel  Corporation  was 
a  "good"  trust  was  economically  naive. 

Roosevelt  had  anticipated  that  his  article  would  provoke  charges  of 
collusion  between  himself  and  Wall  Street,  and  he  had  acted  to  dispel 
them  with  a  statement  at  once  forthright  and  disingenuous: 

Sincere  zealots  who  believed  that  all  combinations  could  be 
destroyed  and  the  old-time  conditions  of  unregulated  competition 
restored,  insincere  politicians  who  knew  better  but  made  believe 
that  they  thought  whatever  their  constituents  wished  them  to  think, 
crafty  reactionaries  who  wished  to  see  on  the  statute-books  laws 
which  they  believed  unenforceable,  and  the  almost  solid  "Wall 
Street  crowd"  or  representatives  of  "big  business"  who  at  that  time 
opposed  with  equal  violence  both  wise  and  necessary  and  unwise 
and  improper  regulation  of  business — all  fought  against  the  adop- 
tion of  a  sane,  effective,  and  far-reaching  policy. 

The  Colonel's  main  point  was  relevant.  The  business  community 
and  its  representatives  in  Congress  had  in  fact  prevented  the  enact- 
ment of  his  regulatory  program  in  1908.  What  TR  failed  to  observe, 
however,  was  that  the  Morgan-Gary-Perkins  part  of  the  "Wall  Street 
crowd"  he  had  so  sweepingly  arraigned  had  actually  cooperated  in  the 
preparation  of  much  of  that  program  and  had  then  supported  it. 

On  the  other  hand,  only  a  few  big  businessmen  were  willing  to 
accept  in  good  faith  Roosevelt's  most  crucial  hypothesis — big  business 
should  be  subordinate  to,  rather  than  a  partner  of,  the  government. 
Among  them  were  men  of  high  civic  purpose  and  personal  disinterest, 
like  the  canny,  freethinking  Scot,  Andrew  Carnegie;  also  some 
younger  men  like  the  sophisticated,  yet  increasingly  humanistic,  George 
Perkins.  Competition,  exclaimed  Perkins  in  the  spring  of  1911  in  a 
speech  that  blended  Gary's  concern  for  business  stability  with  Roose- 
velt's desire  for  social  justice,  had  largely  induced  "the  past  horrors 
of  the  factory  system" — low  wages,  restricted  production,  child  labor, 
and  "inadequate  care  for  the  safety  of  life  and  limb."  Within  a  month 
of  TR's  outburst  Carnegie  was  to  write  Perkins,  who  forwarded  his 
letter  to  Taft,  that  Roosevelt's  proposal  for  government  price-fixing 
was  the  only  effective  solution  to  the  trust  problem.  And  by  the  end 
of  the  year  Perkins  would  place  at  the  Colonel's  disposal  his  own 


THE    TRAVAILS   OF    INDECISION  409 

bulging  pocketbook,  the  product  of  that  service  to  the  Morgan  and 
other  interests  that  he  was  then  abandoning. 

However  all  that  may  be,  it  is  apparent  that  the  steel  suit  and 
Roosevelt's  resultant  enunciation  of  a  trust  program  so  advanced  that 
it  remains  unrealized  to  this  day  catapulted  him  into  that  presidential 
arena  which  he  had  been  theretofore  only  skirting.  As  the  Charleston 
Post  correctly  surmised,  ".  .  .  Theodore'  and  'Will'  have  parted 
political  company  sharply  at  last,  and  .  .  .  there  is  going  to  be  a 
struggle  between  them  as  representing  conflicting  schools  of  thought 
within  the  Republican  party." 

The  Colonel  himself  was  at  once  amused,  pleased,  and  confused. 
He  was  amused  that  there  should  be  so  much  interest  in  what  he 
contended  "was  really  merely  a  repetition  of  what  I  had  been  saying 
for  nine  years  at  least."  He  was  pleased  that  it  "seemed  to  be  the  one 
really  practical  platform  put  forth  by  any  leader,  the  one  platform 
that  represented  sincerity  of  belief  as  to  the  need  of  reform  and  prac- 
tical good  sense  in  advocating  what  could  be  really  achieved."  And  he 
was  confused,  or  so  he  protested,  by  the  demands  that  he  issue  a 
categorical  declaration  of  his  intentions.  "Most  men  seem  to  live  in 
a  space  of  two  dimensions;  and  so  they  wish  either  for  me  to  declare 
myself  a  candidate,  or  to  declare  that  I  will  not  accept  the  nomination 
under  any  circumstances,"  he  wrote  on  December  11,  1911.  "I  cannot, 
as  a  matter  of  duty,  take  either  position.  I  am  not  a  candidate,  I  shall 
not  become  one,  I  do  not  think  it  will  be  necessary  to  accept  the 
nomination;  but  if  the  matter  of  my  candidacy  should  appear  in  the 
guise  of  a  public  duty,  then  however  I  might  feel  about  it  personally, 
I  would  not  feel  that  I  ought  to  shirk  it.  But  I  see  no  signs  of  it  so 
appearing." 

Indubitably,  TR  was  honest,  even  to  himself.  Whatever  his  sub- 
conscious desires,  his  rational  self  opposed  a  bid  for  the  nomination. 
His  place  in  history  was  already  high  and  secure,  and  he  quite  agreed 
with  Nick  Longworth  and  other  conservative  intimates  that  it  would 
be  "a  veritable  calamity"  to  run  again.  He  would  even  have  moments 
of  regret  after  the  die  had  been  cast.  "I've  got  no  glory  to  get  out  of 
being  President  again,"  he  told  Felix  Frankfurter  that  winter.  "I  have 
no  particular  religious  beliefs"  and  no  sense  of  assurance  that  there 
is  a  hereafter.  "The  one  thing  I  want  to  leave  my  children,"  accord- 
ingly, ".  .  .  is  an  honorable  name.  They  have  that  now." 

Also,  the  Colonel's  near  superhuman  energy  was  beginning  to  flag. 
This  was  not  perceptible  to  the  public.  At  fifty-three  TR's  stamina  was 


410  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

still  incredible.  The  arduous  speaking  tour  in  the  spring  of  1911;  the 
scramble  walks,  long  hikes,  rowing  trips,  and  hunts;  the  whirling  talks 
with  visitors  at  Sagamore  or  in  the  Outlook  office  on  Fourth  Avenue; 
the  voluminous  outpouring  of  articles — all  are  suggestive  of  that. 
Roosevelt  would  not  measurably  weaken  until  after  he  had  been 
stricken  with  malarial  fever  during  his  exploration  of  the  River  of 
Doubt  in  South  America  in  1914.  And  even  in  the  five  years  of  life 
that  followed  that  setback  the  fighting  instinct  which  compelled  him 
again  and  again  to  rise  to  the  challenge  would  drive  him  to  remarkable 
feats  of  energy.  Nevertheless,  Roosevelt  m  1911  was  admitting  to 
himself  and  close  friends  that  he  felt  tired. 

Finally,  the  political  realities  had  not  changed  significantly.  The 
Taft  forces  firmly  controlled  the  party  machinery,  and  only  a  minor 
revolution  could  unseat  them.  Such  an  upheaval  would  not  be  easy 
to  accomplish,  given  La  Follette's  growing  resolve  to  strike  boldly 
on  his  own.  The  Wisconsin  Senator's  personal  following  was  large, 
though  not  large  enough  to  gain  him  the  nomination,  as  Roosevelt 
coldly  surmised.  And  much  of  it,  including  Roosevelt  partisans  like 
Gilford  Pinchot,  who  had  announced  for  La  Follette  only  after  con- 
cluding that  TR  would  not  run,  would  move  unhesitatingly  into  the 
Roosevelt  camp  should  the  Colonel  give  the  sign.  But  not  all  of  it 
would.  Inevitably,  there  would  be  resentment  and  recriminations 
among  La  Follette's  hard-core  supporters.  Nor  could  La  Follette 
himself  be  expected  to  submit  gracefully.  In  vanity,  in  creative  drive, 
in  moral  fervor,  and  in  lust  for  power — in  virtually  everything  but 
personal  charm  and  that  breadth  of  view  which  was  TR's  greatest 
distinction,  the  Midwestern  regionalist  was  Roosevelt's  peer.  And  in 
uncompromising  quality — or  stubbornness — he  was  his  superior. 
Should  TR  decide  to  fight  Taft  for  the  presidential  prize,  he  must 
first  give  battle  to  the  rock-hewn  senator  from  Wisconsin. 

There  were  even  more  compelling  reasons,  on  the  other  hand,  why 
Roosevelt's  resolve  to  remain  aloof  weakened  during  the  long  summer 
and  fall  of  1911.  Of  these,  the  most  powerful  was  the  mounting  evi- 
dence that  he,  and  he  alone,  was  the  popular  choice.  TR  still  thrived 
on  personal  popularity.  He  loved  to  be  engulfed  by  surging  crowds, 
to  preach  to  great  assemblages,  to  bask  in  their  roaring  shouts  of  ap- 
proval and  demonstrations  of  faith.  And  when,  therefore,  the  cry  for 
his  nomination  went  up  all  over  the  country  following  his  statements 
on  the  trusts,  it  was  practically  foreordained  that  he  should  reconsider 
his  position. 


THE    TRAVAILS   OP    INDECISION  411 

Nor  could  the  prospect  of  another  term  have  been  as  unappeal- 
ing in  late  1911  as  it  had  been  in  1908.  Notwithstanding  the  great 
popular  favor  under  which  Roosevelt  had  left  the  presidency,  there 
had  been  that  rankling  undercurrent  of  resentment  by  Congress  which 
had  so  comprised  the  dignity  and  effectiveness  of  his  last  year  in 
office.  Had  he  been  re-elected  in  1908  it  would  hardly  have  abated 
substantially.  But  by  1911  the  old  order  had  markedly  changed.  The 
archconservative  Aldrich  had  retired.  Allison  was  dead.  Foraker  had 
been  forced  out.  And  Joe  Cannon's  power  had  finally  been  circum- 
scribed by  a  coalition  of  Democrats  and  insurgent  Republicans  led  by 
an  emerging  progressive  star,  George  W.  Norris  of  Nebraska. 

More  important  still,  the  progressive  movement  was  surging  for- 
ward. In  spite  of  Roosevelt's  belief  in  1908  that  the  country  was 
surfeited  with  reform,  or  at  least  with  him,  notwithstanding  Taft's 
post-election  contentions  that  he  had  been  elected  to  consolidate 
rather  than  to  advance,  the  demand  almost  everywhere  was  for  more, 
not  less,  reform.  This  was  exemplified  by  the  early  reaction  against 
Taft's  conservation  policies,  by  the  signal  defeat  of  the  conservative 
Republicans  in  the  1910  congressional  elections,  and  by  the  meteor- 
like  rise  of  La  Follette;  it  was  further  attested  by  the  emergence  of 
men  like  Woodrow  Wilson  in  the  ranks  of  the  Democrats  and  by  the 
increasing  strength  of  the  progressive  Republicans  in  and  out  of  Con- 
gress; and  it  was  confirmed  by  the  popular  approval  accorded  Roose- 
velt's views  on  the  relations  of  capital  and  labor  and  kindred  problems. 

There  was,  it  is  true,  no  assurance  that  the  conservative  Republicans 
in  Congress  would  go  along  with  Roosevelt  much  more  than  they  had 
before  should  he  again  become  President.  Yet  TR  would  undoubtedly 
carry  many  progressive  Republicans  into  office  with  him.  And  he 
could  in  addition  count  on  considerable  support  from  the  Democrats, 
who,  in  combination  with  the  small  group  of  progressive  Republicans, 
had  been  responsible  for  enacting  most  of  Taft's  reforms  possible. 
Here  it  was — power,  prestige,  and  a  political  matrix  that  promised 
greater  opportunity  for  the  fulfillment  of  Roosevelt's  ideas  than  ever 
before.  The  times,  as  TR  acutely  sensed,  were  crying  for  action. 
Could  he  turn  his  back  on  them?  Could  he  again  contain,  as  he  had 
so  nobly  done  in  1908,  that  vaulting  personal  ambition  which  had 
been  the  springboard  for  so  many  long  plunges  in  the  past?  Could  he 
live  indefinitely  at  Sagamore  surrounded  by  the  mementos  of  a  past 
glory? — a  glory  which  however  great,  was  less  than  that  which  now 
beckoned. 


CHAPTER  25 


THE    PEOPLE    SHALL   RULE 


The  life  of  the  law  has  not  been  logic;  it  has  been  experience. 
The  felt  necessities  of  the  time,  the  prevalent  moral  and  political 
theories,  intuitions  of  public  policy,  avowed  or  unconscious,  even 
the  prejudices  which  judges  share  with  their  fellow-men,  have 
had  a  good  deal  more  to  do  than  the  syllogism  in  determining 
the  rules  by  which  men  should  be  governed. 

— Oliver  Wendell  Holmes,  The  Common  Law 


Seven  months  were  still  to  pass  before  Colonel  Roosevelt  would  stand 
at  Armageddon.  But  by  December,  1911,  the  forces  that  would  drive 
him  there  were  proving  hard  to  contain.  From  all  sides  and  from  all 
sections  of  the  country  letters  imploring  TR  to  run  were  pouring  in. 
They  came  from  Republican  regulars  who  coldly  calculated  that 
Roosevelt's  was  the  bandwagon  to  ride.  They  came  from  nationalists 
who  viewed  La  Follette  as  a  regionalist,  and  from  moderates  who  re- 
garded him  as  an  extremist.  They  came  from  radical  Westerners  who 
concluded  that  only  the  Colonel  could  win.  They  came  from  men  with 
little  or  no  place  in  politics — from  TR's  favored  "plain  people";  from 
friends  of  long  and  abiding  affection;  from  personal  supporters  of  no 
acquaintance  whatsoever.  And  they  came  from  social  reformers  like 
Colorado's  great  children's  judge,  Ben  Lindsey.  Inevitably,  under 
this  heartening  demonstration  of  confidence,  the  Colonel  began  to 
weaken. 

By  the  middle  of  December  Roosevelt  was  casting  an  appraising 
eye  at  the  trial  balloons  his  friends  had  sent  up.  And  by  the  end  of 
the  month  he  was  clearly  implying  that  he  would  accept  the  nomina- 

412 


THE  PEOPLE  SHALL  RULE  413 

tion  if  it  came  as  the  result  of  "an  overwhelming  public  sentiment." 
But  even  then  he  would  not  admit  that  he  earnestly  wanted  it.  "I 
should  regard  it  as  utterly  unfortunate";  it  "would  be  a  veritable 
calamity"; — such  was  his  constant  refrain.  Besides,  he  might  lose.  "If 
I  were  nominated,  very  possibly  I  should  be  beaten,"  he  confided  to 
the  president  of  the  University  of  California;  "and  if  I  were  elected, 
such  impossibilities  would  be  expected  of  me  that  I  do  not  see  how 
I  could  avoid  causing  bitter  disappointment  to  sincere  and  good 
people." 

TR  had  lost  little  of  those  fears  which  lingered  always  near  the 
surface  and  sometimes  surged  above  it.  Nor  was  this  fiercest  cam- 
paigner of  the  era  yet  prepared  to  command  a  lost  cause;  to  lead  his 
still  inadequate  armies  against  all  those  hoary  bastions  of  privilege  and 
complacency  he  had  so  often  verbally  harassed.  Until  July,  1912, 
Colonel  Theodore  Roosevelt  led  no  Pickett's  charges  and  ordered  no 
Rapido  crossings.  Only  when  he  became  convinced  that  victory  was 
possible,  if  not  absolutely  certain;  only  when  he  convinced  himself 
that  he  had  heard  the  clarion  call  of  duty,  then,  and  then  only,  did 
he  unfurl  his  battle  flag  and  plunge  his  sword.  In  December,  1911, 
the  chances  of  success  were  still  slight,  the  call  of  duty  still  muted, 
though  they  were  daily  growing  greater  and  louder. 

Yet  Roosevelt  had  already  made  a  major,  preparatory  step.  His 
moving  renunciation  of  1904,  he  now  said,  applied  only  to  three 
consecutive  terms.  The  real  danger  "would  come  from  a  man  who 
had  been  in  office  eight  years  and  may  be  thought  to  have  solidified 
his  power  by  patronage,  contracts  and  the  like,  using  that  power  to 
perpetuate  himself,"  he  explained  to  a  friend,  Herbert  Parsons.  "Oh! 
good  Herbert,"  he  added  parenthetically,  "I  cannot  help  grinning  as 
I  dictate  these  words  at  your  solemnity  over  the  possible  danger  to 
free  institutions  from  the  Contributing  Editor  of  The  Outlook  who 
has  just  come  to  Town  hanging  onto  a  strap  in  a  crowded  car." 

TR's  confessions  that  he  felt  tired  and  old  had  also  abated.  He 
never  conceded  the  point,  but  the  pleasures  of  Sagamore  and  the 
stimulations  of  his  editorial  work  were  not  enough.  As  Frankfurter, 
who  understood  his  drives  better  than  most,  remarked  after  their 
meeting  that  winter,  "when  a  fellow  was  gifted  like  TR  was  gifted  for 
public  life,  he  had  to  do  that,  just  as  Gutzon  [Borglum]  had  to  sculpt, 
work  with  his  hands.  You  could  see  that  [after  the  Colonel  had  ex- 
claimed, 'Oh,  if  only  Taft  knew  the  joys  of  leadership!']  he  just  sort 


414  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

of  jumped  out  and  was  going  to  lead  the  armies  for  regeneration.  All 
this  about,  'We  stand  at  Armageddon,'  wasn't  just  flapdoodle.  That's 
the  way  he  felt." 

Moreover,  the  prestige  and  power  Roosevelt  was  then  savoring 
would  wane  after  November,  1912.  The  steady  stream  of  visitors,  the 
tidal  wave  of  mail,  the  headlines  that  heralded  his  every  word — all 
this,  TR  well  knew,  stemmed  from  the  muddled  situation  created  by 
the  hapless  man  in  the  White  House.  Had  Taft's  administration  been 
popular  and  his  control  of  the  party  commanding,  then,  surely,  the 
politicians  and  the  idealists,  the  disaffected  and  the  men  of  good  hope, 
would  not  have  made  the  hegira  to  Sagamore  Hill. 

The  future  also  looked  less  promising  than  it  had  a  year  earlier. 
La  Follette's  bid  for  the  nomination  was  earnest  and  powerful,  if 
not  powerful  enough.  Should  the  Colonel  decline  the  authority  that 
was  being  urged  upon  him,  the  moral  and  political  leadership  of  the 
party's  progressive  hosts  would  repose  in  the  Wisconsin  Senator  fol- 
lowing Taft's  defeat  in  the  national  campaign.  Could  TR  wrest  it  back 
between  1912  and  1916?  Probably  he  could  have;  yet  the  question 
remains. 

If  all  the  above  is  speculative,  Roosevelt's  conscious  conclusion 
that  it  was  his  plain  duty  to  run  is  not.  Again  and  again  it  was  im- 
pressed upon  him  that  only  he  could  hold  the  Republican  party  to- 
gether. He  was  told  that  Taft's  defeat  for  re-election  would  split  the 
G.O.P.  beyond  repair;  that  La  Follette's  drive  for  the  nomination 
was  destined  to  end  in  bitter  frustration.  He  was  told  that  only  he 
could  advance  the  progressive  principles  he  had  so  persuasively  ex- 
pressed at  Osawatomie;  that  he,  not  La  Follette,  represented  a  pro- 
gressivism  that  was  both  sane  and  constructive.  And  most  important 
of  all,  probably,  for  his  thirst  for  power  was  never  quenched,  it  was 
borne  upon  him  that  he  had  a  chance  to  win. 

All  through  December  and  on  into  January,  however,  Roosevelt 
continued  to  hold  back.  He  repeatedly  protested  privately  that  he  was 
not  a  candidate  and  that  he  emphatically  did  not  want  to  run;  and  he 
pointedly  refused  to  give  overt  encouragement  to  his  friends.  Yet  he 
refrained  from  closing  the  door  with  a  Sherman-like  declaration.  And 
under  a  rapidly  rising  volume  of  appeals  to  declare  himself,  the 
emphasis  of  his  replies  perceptibly  changed;  no  longer  did  he  inter- 
lard with  reservations  his  statements  that  he  "might  conceivably" 


THE  PEOPLE  SHALL  RULE  415 

accept  the  nomination.  By  early  January  he  obviously  wanted  to  run 
— but  only  on  his  own  terms. 

The  crux  of  the  Colonel's  terms  was  that  the  people  should  de- 
mand his  nomination.  "My  usefulness  .  .  .  would  depend  not  merely 
upon  the  people  wishing  me  to  be  President,  but  upon  their  having 
good  reason  to  believe  that  I  was  President  because  of  their  wishes, 
because  of  their  desire  that  I  should  do  a  given  job,  which  they  felt 
I  could  do  better  than  anyone  else,  and  not  because  of  any  personal 
ambition  on  my  part."  Therefore,  he  wrote  the  publisher  Frank 
Munsey  on  January  16,  "I  must  not  put  myself  in  a  position  which 
would  look  as  if  I  were  seeking  the  office." 

From  then  on  events  moved  swiftly  to  their  fateful  climax.  Two 
days  later,  in  response  to  a  plea  from  Michigan's  Governor  Chase 
Osborn,  TR  virtually  threw  his  hat  into  the  ring.  "I  am  inclined  to 
come  to  the  conclusion  that  it  is  impossible  for  me  much  longer  to 
remain  silent,"  he  wrote.  "In  this  morning's  mail  came  two  letters 
from  Governor  Glasscock  of  West  Virginia  and  Governor  Hadley  of 
Missouri,  written  to  the  same  general  effect  as  yours."  He  would,  he 
continued,  agree  to  reply  openly  to  a  joint  letter  signed  by  these  and 
other  governors  stating  that  the  people  of  their  states  "desire  to  have 
me  run  for  the  Presidency,  and  [want]  to  know  whether  in  such  a  case 
I  would  refuse  the  nomination." 

I  want  to  make  it  very  clear  that  I  am  honestly  desirous  of  con- 
sidering the  matter  solely  from  the  standpoint  of  the  public  interest, 
and  not  in  the  least  from  my  own  standpoint;  that  I  am  not  seeking 
and  shall  not  seek  the  nomination,  but  that  of  course  if  it  is  the 
sincere  judgment  of  men  having  the  right  to  know  and  express  the 
wishes  of  the  plain  people  that  the  people  as  a  whole  desire  me, 
not  for  my  sake,  but  for  their  sake,  to  undertake  the  job,  I  would 
feel  in  honor  bound  to  do  so. 

This  "spontaneous  appeal"  of  the  governors  was  a  disingenuous  de- 
vice. Yet  it  was  neither  dishonest  nor  really  deceptive,  for  the  demand 
was  already  there.  Roosevelt  had  merely  manufactured  a  political 
vehicle  for  its  expression. 

There  was  now  no  holding  the  Colonel  back.  The  cat  jumped  out 
of  the  bag  early  in  February  when  a  copy  of  TR's  letter  to  Munsey 
was  published.  The  next  week  the  governors'  prearranged  request 
that  TR  "soon  declare  whether,  if  the  nomination  for  the  Presidency 


416  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

come  to  you  unsolicited  and  unsought,  you  will  accept  it"  was  re- 
leased. Then,  as  the  Colonel  arrived  in  Columbus  on  February  21  to 
deliver  an  address  at  the  Ohio  Constitutional  Convention,  he  casually 
remarked  to  a  reporter  that  "My  hat  is  in  the  ring."  Three  days  later 
he  replied  formally  to  the  petition  from  the  governors.  "I  will  accept 
the  nomination  for  President  if  it  is  tendered  to  me,"  he  wrote,  "and 
I  will  adhere  to  this  decision  until  the  convention  has  expressed  its 
preference."  The  die  was  thus  cast. 

The  Colonel  was  in  Boston  for  a  meeting  of  the  Harvard  Board  of 
Overseers  on  the  day  his  response  to  the  governors'  appeal  was  re- 
leased. A  month  later  his  host,  Robert  Grant,  graphically  reported 
his  impressions  to  James  Ford  Rhodes.  "Before  I  give  you  in  detail 
his  reasons  and  comments,"  Grant  wrote,  "let  me  say  that  I  never 
saw  him  in  better  physical  shape." 

He  is  fairly  stout,  but  his  color  is  good,  and  he  appeared  vigorous. 
I  saw  no  signs  of  unusual  excitement.  He  halts  in  his  sentences  oc- 
casionally; but  from  a  layman's  point  of  view  there  was  nothing  to 
suggest  mental  impairment,  unless  the  combination  of  egotism,  faith 
in  his  own  doctrines,  fondness  for  power  and  present  hostility  to 
Taft  .  .  .  can  be  termed  symptomatic  ...  I  have  never  spent  a 
more  absorbing  twenty-four  hours.  He  was  a  most  delightful  guest. 
He  had  his  usual  laugh  at  the  people  who  said  he  drank, — and  this 
story  has  been  revived  with  the  new  one  that  he  is  crazy.  He  drank 
nothing  but  the  wines  we  had  at  dinner  and  he  took  tea  in  the  after- 
noon. As  you  well  know,  his  habits  are  simply  normal.  .  .  . 

"But  you  will  agree  that  Taft  has  made  a  good  President  this 
last  year?"  He  acquiesced  without  enthusiasm.  .  .  .  That  if  he 
were  to  wait  for  four  years  the  Republican  party  would  be  in  a 
hopelessly  moribund  condition  and  that  this  was  the  crucial  mo- 
ment to  do  it.  ...  He  protested  that  he  owed  nothing  to  Mr.  Taft, 
but  that  the  President  owed  everything  to  him;  that  Mr.  Taft  had 
in  all  States  immediately  after  becoming  President  affiliated  himself 
with  the  factions  hostile  to  his  (Roosevelt's)  friends.  .  .  .  Indeed, 
he  asserted  that  he  was  interested  in  carrying  out  his  ideas,  and  that 
the  plea  of  disloyalty  did  not  weigh  with  him.  .  .  . 

"But  will  any  of  the  party  leaders  support  you?"  I  inquired. 

"No,"  he  said.  "None  of  them;  not  even  Lodge,  I  think.  I  don't 
see  how  he  can."  ...  "I  like  power;  but  I  care  nothing  to  be 
President  as  President.  I  am  interested  in  these  ideas  of  mine  and 
I  want  to  carry  them  through."  He  said  that  he  believed  the  most 
important  questions  today  were  the  humanitarian  and  economic 


THE  PEOPLE  SHALL  RULE  417 

problems,  and  intimated  that  the  will  of  the  people  had  been 
thwarted  in  these  ways,  especially  by  the  courts  on  constitutional 
grounds,  and  that  reforms  were  urgent.  .  .  . 

That  Theodore  is  in  earnest  and  sincere,  there  is  no  room  for 
doubt  in  my  mind.  People  who  hate  him, — and  their  number  is 
legion  in  our  walk  of  life — credit  him  neither  with  sincerity  nor 
honesty.  ...  At  the  same  time  it  is  to  be  remembered  that  he  has 
the  reputation  of  being  the  most  f  arsighted  politician  in  the  Country, 
and  he  unquestionably  believes  that  we  are  on  the  eve  of  an  eco- 
nomic revolution,  and  that  it  is  better  for  the  Country  that  the  Re- 
publican party  should  point  the  way  rather  than  the  Socialists  should 
control  the  situation  and  leadership.  .  .  . 

...  I  am  so  in  sympathy  with  his  desire  to  right  humanitarian 
wrongs,  and  such  a  true  admirer  of  his  ...  though  I  disapprove 
of  what  he  has  done,  and  feel  a  little  as  if  a  baby  had  been  left  on 
my  doorsteps.  ...  On  the  other  hand,  I  was  on  very  pleasant 
terms  with  Mr.  Taft,  who  I  hear  on  the  best  authority  is  much 
wounded  and  very  sad  over  Theodore's  defection.  .  .  . 

Roosevelt's  declaration  was  indeed  a  heavy  blow  to  the  distraught 
man  in  the  White  House,  though  it  was  expected.  "I  told  you  so  four 
years  ago  and  you  would  not  believe  me,"  Mrs.  Taft  is  said  to  have 
exclaimed  upon  hearing  the  news.  "I  know  you  did,  my  dear,  and  I 
think  you  are  perfectly  happy  now,"  the  President  replied.  "You 
would  have  preferred  the  Colonel  to  come  out  against  me  than  to 
have  been  wrong  yourself."  In  point  of  fact,  the  waters  ran  deeper. 

No  less  than  Theodore  Roosevelt,  William  Howard  Taft  believed 
that  his  cause  was  righteous  and  high;  and  he  at  once  announced  his 
resolve  to  keep  the  campaign  for  the  nomination  on  the  highest  pos- 
sible plane.  "I  believe  the  arguments  pro  and  con  will  force  them- 
selves upon  the  electorate  without  the  use  of  denunciation  and  per- 
sonal attack,"  he  warned  his  supporters  even  before  TR  made  his 
formal  announcement.  And  unlike  Roosevelt,  in  whom  the  vein  of 
sentiment  had  hardened  into  ice,  the  President  still  brooded  over  the 
destruction  of  their  friendship.  He  hoped,  so  a  mutual  friend  re- 
ported to  TR  after  visiting  Taft,  that  "when  all  this  turmoil  of  politics 
has  passed,  you  and  he  would  get  together  again  and  be  as  of  old." 

With  La  Follette,  however,  it  was  different.  No  memories  of  hap- 
pier years,  no  gratitude  for  past  favors  or  respect  for  peerless  abilities 
bound  the  iron-willed  Senator  to  the  dynamic  ex-President.  They  had 
sometimes  waged  common  cause  in  the  past,  it  is  true;  and  they 


418  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

seemed  during  1911  to  be  doing  it  again.  But  the  alliance  had  been 
cautious  and  always  informal.  Roosevelt's  belief  that  statesmanship 
was  the  art  of  the  possible  and  La  Follette's  conviction  that  it  was  the 
leadership  of  a  crusade  come  victory  or  defeat  made  mutual  trust 
impossible.  Thus  the  Colonel  had  commended  the  National  Progressive 
Republican  League,  formed  in  January,  1911,  to  advance  progres- 
sive principles  and  to  promote  La  Follette's  candidacy;  but  he  had 
refused  to  join  it.  And  though  he  had  been  friendly  to  the  Wisconsin 
Senator's  candidacy,  he  had  always  backed  off  from  a  categorical 
commitment.  For  his  part,  La  Follette  never  considered  anyone  except 
himself  an  acceptable  candidate  in  1912. 

So  swollen  was  La  Follette's  ego,  in  fact,  that  he  seems  to  have 
believed  that  the  Colonel  had  actually  pledged  himself  to  his  can- 
didacy. When,  therefore,  the  enthusiasm  of  many  of  his  own  sup- 
porters had  begun  to  wane  in  late  November  while  that  for  Roosevelt 
commenced  to  rise,  he  had  feared  conspiracy.  And  when  it  became 
apparent  early  in  the  near  year  that  Gifford  Pinchot,  Frank  Munsey, 
and  Medill  McCormick,  publisher  of  the  Chicago  Tribune,  would 
scuttle  La  Follette's  already  battered  ship  on  a  signal  from  the  former 
President,  his  fears  were  confirmed.  The  showdown  came  not  at  the 
memorable  Periodical  Publishers'  dinner  in  Philadelphia  on  February 
2,  where  the  overworked  and  harassed  Senator  virtually  broke  down, 
but  on  January  29  in  La  Follette's  Washington  headquarters. 

The  outlook  had  been  so  bleak  from  November  on  that  in  the 
second  week  of  December  La  Follette  had  actually  contemplated  with- 
drawing in  favor  of  Roosevelt.  On  December  11  he  had  authorized 
the  California  conservationist,  William  Kent,  and  the  two  Pinchot 
brothers,  Gifford  and  Amos,  to  draw  up  a  letter  to  that  effect;  but  he 
had  changed  his  mind  the  next  morning.  Thereafter,  as  the  Roosevelt 
boom  became  steadily  more  powerful,  La  Follette  became  correspond- 
ingly less  tractable.  He  agreed  to  have  lunch  with  Roosevelt  at  Amos 
Pinchot's  apartment  in  New  York  on  December  17,  then  backed 
down.  The  Colonel,  who  kept  the  engagement,  proved  still  noncom- 
mittal about  his  own  plans,  declaring  only  that  Taft  should  be  beaten 
but  that  he  doubted  that  he  could  be.  Meanwhile,  the  evidence  that 
La  Follette  had  no  following  of  consequence  in  the  East  continued 
to  mount. 

Finally,  without  consulting  the  Senator,  La  Follette's  lieutenants 
called  the  meeting  of  January  29  in  Washington.  There  now  began, 


THE    PEOPLE   SHALL   RULE  419 

wrote  Amos  Pinchot  in  his  History  of  the  Progressive  Party,  "another 
painful  and  long  drawn  out  series  of  conferences  with  La  Follette. 
.  .  .  Most  of  his  supporters  were  by  this  time  convinced  that  his 
strength,  always  confined  to  the  rural  districts  of  the  West  and  Middle 
West,  had  sunk  to  a  point  where  it  was  to  La  Follette's  own  interest 
to  get  out  of  the  campaign  as  quickly  as  possible.  .  .  ."  But  the 
Senator  could  not,  or  would  not  agree,  so  intense  was  his  hatred  of 
Roosevelt  and  so  confirmed  his  commitment  to  his  own  cause.  Indig- 
nantly, he  rejected  the  suggestion  that  he  withdraw.  "I  told  them,"  he 
wrote  in  a  1913  edition  of  his  autobiography,  "that  I  had  never 
played  that  kind  of  politics  and  never  would;  that  I  did  not  recognize 
Roosevelt  as  standing  for  Progressive  principles;  that  I  had  resisted 
from  the  time  of  its  proposal  every  effort  on  the  part  of  Pinchot  and 
others  to  make  me  serve  as  a  stalking  horse  for  Roosevelt's  can- 
didacy. .  .  ." 

And  so  another  chapter  of  the  tumultuous  progressive  movement 
was  written.  In  truth,  La  Follette  had  been  used  as  a  stalking  horse, 
but  by  Roosevelt's  supporters  rather  than  by  the  Colonel  himself.  And 
though  many  of  them  had  actually  preferred  La  Follette,  for  they  be- 
lieved his  progressivism  more  confirmed  than  Roosevelt's,  they  had 
known  all  along  what  the  Wisconsin  leader's  unconquerable  spirit 
would  not  openly  admit:  He  had  never  had  a  chance.  The  sensational 
publicity  given  La  Follette's  temporary  breakdown  at  the  publishers' 
dinner  four  days  later  was  but  the  coup  de  grace. 

Meanwhile,  Roosevelt  was  assuming  the  roles  of  strategist,  politi- 
cian, and  ideologist — or,  as  he  would  have  preferred  it,  practical 
idealist.  They  proved  not  always  complementary;  and  within  the  month 
his  commitment  to  progressive  principles  had  carried  him  into  a  situa- 
tion from  which  his  consummate  political  skill  never  succeeded  in 
extricating  him. 

The  occasion  was  Roosevelt's  speech  in  Columbus,  Ohio,  on  Feb- 
ruary 21,  where,  in  a  militant  address  that  bore  the  mark  of  Croly 
and  the  Pinchots'  advanced  progressivism,  TR  severed  the  faint  reed 
of  hope  that  G.O.P.'s  conservatives  might  support  him  out  of  fear  that 
Taft  could  not  be  re-elected. 

The  Colonel  started  by  evoking  the  heritage  of  Lincoln  and  repeat- 
ing phrases  become  familiar,  if  not  respectable,  with  the  passing  of 
time:  "We  Progressives  believe  that  .  .  .  human  rights  are  supreme 
.  .  .  that  wealth  should  be  the  servant,  not  the  master,  of  the  people. 


420  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

.  .  ."  As  Lincoln  said,  this  nation  "belongs  to  the  people."  "So  do  the 
natural  resources  which  make  it  rich."  Our  charge  is  to  "stop  the 
waste  of  human  life  in  industry  and  prevent  the  waste  of  human  wel- 
fare which  flows  from  the  unfair  use  of  concentrated  power  and  wealth 
in  the  hands  of  men  whose  eagerness  for  profit  blinds  them  to  the 
cost  of  what  they  do."  "The  only  prosperity  worth  having  is  that 
which  affects  the  mass  of  the  people.  We  are  bound  to  strive  for  the 
fair  distribution  of  prosperity."  But  this  can  be  accomplished  only  by 
encouraging  legitimate  business  enterprise.  We  must  "exercise  over 
big  business  a  control  and  supervision"  based  on  the  realization  that 
bigness  is  not  necessarily  bad.  Nor  should  we  shrink  "from  bringing 
governmental  regulation  to  the  point  of  control  of  monopoly  prices 
if  it  should  ever  become  necessary  to  do  so."  Unquestionably,  "our 
fundamental  purpose  must  be  to  secure  genuine  equality  of  oppor- 
tunity." 

More  followed  in  similar  vein.  Then,  about  one-third  of  the  way 
through,  Roosevelt  plunged  into  the  political  question  of  the  era — 
popular  representation.  "I  believe  in  ...  direct  preferential  prima- 
ries." "I  believe  in  the  initiative  and  the  referendum,  which  should  be 
used  not  to  destroy  representative  government,  but  to  correct  it  when- 
ever it  becomes  misrepresentative."  "I  do  not  believe  that  there  is  any 
great  necessity  for  [the  recall]  as  regards  short-term  elective  officers. 
...  I  believe  it  should  be  generally  provided,  but  with  .  .  .  restric- 
tions." 

All  that  was  uncomfortable,  if  not  quite  fatal.  Most  conservatives, 
including  Cabot  Lodge,  recoiled  from  one  or  all  of  those  proposals; 
but  they  regarded  them  as  only  mildly  revolutionary.  Had  the  Colonel 
stopped  there,  the  situation  might  yet  have  been  salvaged.  But  instead, 
he  deliberately  crashed  headlong  into  conservatism's  strongest  and 
most  hallowed  bastion — the  judiciary.  In  phrases  that  even  Pringle 
calls  "fine  and  courageous,"  he  boldly  came  out  for  the  recall  of 
judicial  decisions  involving  constitutional  interpretation  on  the  state 
level.  "In  New  York,  in  Illinois,  in  Connecticut,  lamentable  injustice 
had  been  perpetuated  .  .  .  ,"  Roosevelt  asserted.  There  have  been 
"foolish  and  iniquitous  decisions"  and  they  "have  almost  always  been 
rendered  at  the  expense  of  the  weak,"  of  the  "wage- workers,"  of  the 
men  who  "toil  on  the  farm  and  on  the  railway,  or  in  the  factory."  The 
judges  who  wrought  these  injustices  were  "well-meaning  men,"  but 
their  "prime  concern  was  with  the  empty  ceremonial  of  perfunctory 


THE  PEOPLE  SHALL  RULE  421 

legalism,  and  not  with  the  living  spirit  of  justice."  He  would  not  vote 
for  the  recall  of  judges  themselves,  TR  added,  even  "for  as  flagrant 
a  decision"  as  that  which  declared  unconstitutional  New  York  State's 
Workmen's  Compensation  law.  "But  most  emphatically  I  do  wish  that 
the  people  should  have  the  right  to  recall  the  decision  itself."  The 
prevailing  system  was  nothing  if  not  "a  monstrous  perversion  of  the 
Constitution  into  an  instrument  for  the  perpetuation  of  social  and 
industrial  wrong  and  for  the  oppression  of  the  weak  and  helpless." 
Roosevelt  realized  that  his  proposals  pitted  the  rule  of  men  against 
that  of  law;  or,  as  he  regarded  it,  the  rule  of  the  majority  of  men 
against  the  law  as  construed  by  a  minority  of  men.  He  knew,  too, 
that  the  latter  position  had  powerful  advocates,  many  of  them  his 
own  friends — men  who  "believe,  and  sometimes  assert,  that  the 
American  people  are  not  fitted  for  popular  government,  and  that  it 
is  necessary  to  keep  the  judiciary  'independent  of  the  majority  of  all 
the  people.' "  But  he  cared  not. 

I  take  absolute  issue  with  all  those  who  hold  such  a  position.  I 
regard  it  as  a  complete  negation  of  our  whole  system  of  govern- 
ment; and  if  it  became  the  dominant  position  in  this  country,  it 
would  mean  the  absolute  upsetting  of  both  the  rights  and  the  rule 
of  the  people. 

If  the  American  people  are  not  fit  for  popular  government,  and 
if  they  should  of  right  be  the  servants  and  not  the  masters  of  the 
men  whom  they  themselves  put  in  office,  then  Lincoln's  work  was 
wasted  and  the  whole  system  of  government  upon  which  this  great 
democratic  Republic  rests  is  a  failure. 

Whatever  the  merit  of  these  proposals,  TR's  purity  of  purpose  is 
beyond  cavil.  The  Roosevelt  who  spoke  at  Columbus  on  February  21, 
1912,  was  not  the  politician  who  supported  Blaine  in  1884.  Nor  was 
he  the  master  statesman  who  had  so  deftly  guided  the  Hepburn  bill 
to  passage,  constructively  cooperated  with  Cannon,  Aldrich,  and 
other  Old  Guardsmen,  and  made  his  party  moderately  responsive  to 
reform.  He  was,  rather,  the  compulsive  idealist:  the  kinetic  leader 
whose  career,  for  all  its  temporizing  and  equivocating,  for  all  its  bold 
pronouncements  and  weak  follow-throughs,  was  studded  with  more 
acts  of  courage,  with  more  audacious  maneuvers,  and  with  more 
frontal  assaults  on  the  sanctuaries  of  privilege  than  any  of  his  major 
contemporaries  except  La  Follette  or  Bryan. 


422  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Politically,  there  had  been  no  need  for  Roosevelt  to  say  the  things 
he  said  at  Columbus.  Except  for  the  most  intransigent  supporters  of 
La  Follette — and  their  numbers  were  never  great — the  Colonel  held 
the  insurgent  West  in  the  palm  of  his  hand.  All  that  he  had  to  do  was 
reaffirm  the  progressive  faith,  for  it  was  the  East,  not  the  West,  that 
had  to  be  won;  and  Roosevelt  knew  it. 

The  Colonel  was  also  well  aware  that  his  espousal  of  the  recall  of 
judicial  decisions  would  stir  up  a  whirlwind  in  moderate  circles  all 
over  the  country.  Henry  L.  Stimson,  tough-minded  Learned  Hand, 
and  other  men  of  similar  quality  had  all  warned  him  against  his  earlier 
flirtations  with  the  recall;  and  so  had  numbers  of  lesser  men.  But  to 
little  result.  TR's  passion  for  moral  justice  was  so  intense,  his  con- 
viction that  the  courts  had  become  the  servants  of  privilege  so  acute, 
that  he  had  to  act.  In  the  failure  of  his  long  campaign  to  convert  the 
judiciary  from  a  static  to  an  organic  conception  of  the  law,  he  had 
fastened  upon  the  recall  of  judicial  decisions  as  a  last  resort. 

The  reaction  against  the  "Charter  of  Democracy"  address  at  Co- 
lumbus proved  more  severe  than  any  Roosevelt  had  theretofore  pro- 
voked. The  New  York  World  suggested  that  it  might  better  have  been 
called  "the  charter  of  demagogy."  The  New  York  Times  observed 
that  it  would  be  "alarming"  and  "appalling,"  a  threat  "to  our  institu- 
tions" were  it  not  certain  that  Roosevelt  "had  gone  far  beyond"  public 
opinion.  And  the  New  York  Sun  labeled  it  "the  craziest  proposal  that 
ever  emanated  from  himself  or  from  any  other  statesman."  But  the 
Colonel  must  have  expected  as  much. 

Nor  could  TR  have  been  surprised  with  Cabot  Lodge's  heartfelt 
lament.  "I  have  had  my  share  of  mishaps  in  politics  but  I  never 
thought  that  any  situation  could  arise  which  would  have  made  me 
so  miserably  unhappy  as  I  have  been  during  the  past  week,"  the 
Senator  wrote  the  Colonel  on  February  28.  "I  knew  of  course  that 
you  and  I  differed  on  some  of  these  points  but  I  had  not  realized  that 
the  difference  was  so  wide."  To  this  and  Lodge's  assertion  that  he 
would  remain  silent  rather  than  openly  oppose  Roosevelt  in  conven- 
tion, TR  had  generously  replied: 

My  dear  fellow,  you  could  not  do  anything  that  would  make  me 
lose  my  warm  personal  affection  for  you.  For  a  couple  of  years  I 
have  felt  that  you  and  I  were  heading  opposite  ways  as  regards  in- 
ternal politics.  I  shan't  try  to  justify  my  viewpoint  because  it  would 
seem  as  if  I  were  attacking  yours. 


THE  PEOPLE  SHALL  RULE  423 

But  TR  could  hardly  have  anticipated  the  wave  of  disapproval  that 
swept  through  the  progressive  ranks.  From  Washington  came  the  re- 
port that  "even  the  more  radical  of  the  Progressives  in  Congress 
acknowledge  that  the  Colonel's  utterances  are  distasteful  to  the  law- 
yers among  the  Republican  insurgents,"  while  Roosevelt's  own  files 
reveal  that  many,  many  others  were  deeply  disturbed.  As  that 
quondam  progressive  and  sometime  lion,  Senator  William  E.  Borah 
of  Idaho,  snorted,  the  recall  of  judicial  decisions  was  "bosh." 

Wounded  and  hurting  though  he  was,  the  Colonel  remained  on  the 
firing  line.  On  the  urging  of  Learned  Hand  and  other  realistic  pro- 
gressives, he  expended  much  breath  and  even  more  stationery  ex- 
plaining exactly  what  he  had  and  had  not  recommended.  He  empha- 
sized that  he  did  not  favor  the  recall  of  judges  in  all  states;  that  his 
proposals  had  absolutely  no  relation  to  "ordinary  suits,  civil  or  crimi- 
nal, as  between  individuals";  and  that  they  did  not  apply  to  the 
Supreme  Court  (though  his  disgust  with  that  body  had  loomed  large 
in  his  thinking).  But  he  held  to  his  conviction  that  the  door  to  social 
and  economic  reform  hinged  on  political  reform;  and  in  speech  after 
speech  he  drove  deeper  and  deeper  this  wedge  that  was  breaking  the 
Grand  Old  Party  asunder. 

"I  have  scant  patience  with  this  talk  of  the  tyranny  of  the  majority," 
TR  heatedly  exclaimed  to  a  roaring  audience  at  Carnegie  Hall  on 
March  20.  "The  only  tyrannies  from  which  men,  women,  and  children 
are  suffering  in  real  life  are  the  tyrannies  of  minorities."  He  named 
them — the  coal  trust,  the  water-power  trust,  the  meat-packing  trust. 
"I  am  not  thinking  of  ...  bribery  and  crime,"  he  added.  "I  am 
thinking  as  much  of  their  respectable  allies  and  figureheads,  who  have 
ruled  and  legislated  and  decided  as  if  in  some  way  the  vested  rights 
of  privilege  had  a  first  mortgage  on  the  whole  United  States,  while 
the  rights  of  all  the  people  were  merely  an  unsecured  debt."  Either 
they  would  be  stripped  of  their  overweening  hold  on  the  body  politic 
or  the  Republic  would  fail.  "I  stand  on  the  Columbus  speech." 

If  on  this  new  continent  we  merely  build  another  country  of  great 
but  unjustly  divided  material  prosperity,  we  shall  have  done  noth- 
ing; and  we  shall  do  as  little  if  we  merely  set  the  greed  of  envy 
against  the  greed  of  arrogance,  and  thereby  destroy  the  material 
well-being  of  all  of  us.  ...  We  stand  against  all  tyranny,  by  the 
few  or  by  the  many.  We  not  merely  admit,  but  insist,  that  there 
must  be  self-control  on  the  part  of  the  people  .  .  .  but  we  also 


424  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

insist  that  the  people  can  do  nothing  unless  they  not  merely  have, 
but  exercise  to  the  full,  their  own  rights. 

Eight  days  later  TR  was  in  St.  Louis  pleading  the  cause  "of  the 
crippled  brakeman  on  a  railroad,  of  the  overworked  girl  in  a  factory, 
of  the  stunted  child  toiling  at  inhuman  labor,  of  all  who  work  exces- 
sively or  in  unhealthy  surroundings,  of  the  family  dwelling  in  the 
squalor  of  a  noisome  tenement,  of  the  worn-out  farmer  in  regions 
where  the  farms  are  worn  out  also.  .  .  ." 

Less  than  a  fortnight  later  Roosevelt  appeared  in  Philadelphia, 
where  he  had  bludgeoned  the  defenders  of  the  status  quo  more  than 
once  in  the  past.  Now,  in  a  bold  and  forthright  address  entitled  "The 
Recall  of  Judicial  Decisions,"  he  did  so  again.  Remarking  that  a 
group  of  eminent  New  York  lawyers,  headed  by  Joseph  Choate,  had 
formed  an  association  to  combat  the  referendum  and  the  recall  of 
judicial  decisions,  TR  charged  that  their  real  purpose  was  "to  uphold 
privilege  and  sustain  the  special  interests  against  the  cause  of  justice 
and  against  the  interest  of  the  people  as  a  whole."  In  similar  manner, 
he  added,  a  group  of  distinguished  New  Yorkers  had  defended  the 
Dred  Scott  decision  sixty-five  years  before. 

"This  is  a  strong  statement,"  Roosevelt  conceded,  "and  I  would 
not  make  it  of  ordinary  men  who  are  misled  by  reading  those  New 
York  papers  owned  or  controlled  by  Wall  Street."  But  Choate  and 
his  associates  were  not  ordinary  men.  "These  men  are  not  to  be 
excused  on  the  plea  of  ignorance."  As  Choate  knows,  the  proposal 
"is  precisely  and  exactly  in  line  with  Lincoln's  attitude  toward  the 
Supreme  Court  in  the  Dred  Scott  case,  and  with  the  doctrines  he  laid 
down  for  the  rule  of  the  people  in  his  first  inaugural  as  President." 
Its  purpose  was  not  to  make  the  legislature  supreme,  Roosevelt  con- 
tended, but  to  "make  legislature  and  court  alike  responsible  to  the 
sober  and  deliberate  judgment  of  the  people,  who  are  masters  of  both 
legislature  and  courts." 

In  the  long  run  this  country  will  not  be  a  good  place  for  any  of 
us  to  live  in  unless  it  is  a  reasonably  good  place  for  all  of  us  to  live 
in;  and  it  will  neither  become  nor  remain  a  good  place  for  all  of  us 
to  live  in  if  we  permit  our  government  to  be  turned  aside  from  its 
original  purpose  and  to  become  a  government  ...  by  corporation 
attorneys  on  the  bench  .  .  .  serving  the  cause  of  special  privilege 
and  not  the  cause  of  the  people. 


THE  PEOPLE  SHALL  RULE  425 

Such,  then,  were  the  intellectual  highlights  of  Theodore  Roosevelt's 
preconvention  campaign  for  the  Republican  presidential  nomination 
in  1912.  Men  will  always  differ  about  their  merits.  Roosevelt  had  no 
more  faced  the  long-range  question  of  the  tyranny  of  the  majority  and 
the  probable  corrosion  of  the  law  than  his  opponents  had  come  to 
grips  with  the  immediate  question  of  the  tyranny  of  the  minority.  ("An 
ignorant  judge  may  be  informed,  a  corrupt  judge  may  be  detected  and 
exposed,  but  a  judge  cowed  into  impotence  or  tempted  to  excess  by 
dependence  upon  the  constant  favor  of  the  appointing  power  or  the 
continued  smile  of  public  approval  is  of  all  men  most  pitiable  and 
most  dangerous,"  warned  Congressman  John  W.  Davis  of  West  Vir- 
ginia a  few  months  later.)  But  that  Roosevelt  had  pointed  up  the  then 
current  perversions  of  the  law,  that  he  had  offered  a  concrete,  if  ill- 
considered,  plan  for  their  resolution,  and  that  he  had  kept  his  own  and 
the  progressive  faith  while  comporting  himself  with  high  and  resolute 
courage,  no  man  can  deny. 

TR's  strictures  did  not  lack  constructive  result.  Nicholas  Long- 
worth  and  the  bulk  of  conservative  Republicans  in  Congress  remained 
supinely  inactive.  But  that  very  spring  John  W.  Davis  framed,  and  a 
majority  of  Democrats  and  a  few  handfuls  of  progressive  Republicans 
supported,  a  bill,  subsequently  incorporated  in  the  Clayton  Antitrust 
Act,  to  eliminate  that  abuse  of  the  labor  injunction  against  which 
Roosevelt  had  so  long  inveighed.  In  spite  of  the  American  Bar  Asso- 
ciation's condemnation  of  the  recall  of  judicial  decisions  in  a  resolu- 
tion passed  a  few  months  later,  moreover,  many  thoughtful  lawyers 
were  moved  to  reflect  on  the  problems  the  former  President  had  raised. 

"I  was  one  of  those  who  favored  the  resolution  .  .  .  ,"  Felix  Frank- 
furter wrote  the  next  winter.  "But  as  I  left  the  meeting,  I  had  a  con- 
viction that  the  ...  American  Bar  Association  fell  short  of  its  re- 
sponsibility in  not  going  beyond  negative  criticism  and  inquiring  into 
the  cause  of  the  ferment.  .  .  .  The  fallacy  of  a  specific  remedy  may 
be  crushingly  exposed,"  Holmes's  eminent  disciple  continued,  "but 
we  cannot  whistle  down  the  wind  of  a  widespread,  insistent,  and  ill- 
vouched  feeling  of  dissatisfaction."  When  the  conditions  of  life  are 
changing,  Frankfurter  added  in  a  comment  that  marked  the  coinci- 
dence of  his  own,  Holmes's  and  Roosevelt's  perception,  the  law  cannot 
remain  static. 

Eleven  years  later  when  La  Follette  revived  the  issue  in  his  presi- 
dential campaign  against  Coolidge  and  Davis,  Frankfurter  pronounced 


426  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

the  historical  verdict  on  the  impact  of  TR's  campaign  against  judicial 
excesses  in  1912.  "No  student  of  American  constitutional  law  can 
have  the  slightest  doubt  that  Mr.  Roosevelt's  vigorous  challenge  of 
judicial  abuses  was  mainly  responsible  for  a  temporary  period  of 
liberalism  which  followed  in  the  interpretation  of  the  due  process 
clause,"  he  wrote,  "however  abhorrent  the  remedy  of  judicial  recall 
appeared  to  both  bar  and  bench." 

The  public  opinion  which  the  Progressive  campaign  aroused 
subtly  penetrated  the  judicial  atmosphere.  In  cases  involving  social- 
industrial  issues,  public  opinion,  if  adequately  informed  and  suffi- 
ciently sustained,  seeps  into  Supreme  Court  decisions.  Roosevelt 
shrewdly  observed:  "I  may  not  know  much  about  law,  but  I  do 
know  one  can  put  the  fear  of  God  into  judges."  The  "fear  of  God" 
was  needed  to  make  itself  felt  on  the  bench  in  1912. 


CHAPTER  26 


THOU    SHALT   NOT    STEAL 


The  cause  of  our  opponents  has  now  become  naked — the 
cause  of  the  political  bosses  and  the  special  privilege  in  the 
business  world. 

— Theodore  Roosevelt 


The  Colonel  had  been  too  long  in  the  jungle  to  permit  the  enemy  to 
do  the  stalking.  Even  as  he  had  commandeered  the  high  ground  with 
his  principled  public  addresses,  his  scouts  were  scouring  the  under- 
brush for  the  convention  delegates  that  alone  would  sustain  his  cause. 
And  when  in  the  process  they  uncovered  the  main  quarry — the  Presi- 
dent of  the  United  States — TR  rushed  pell  mell  from  the  heights  to 
engage  in  that  hand-to-hand  combat  which  was  not  in  his  blood  to 
resist.  What  might  have  been  a  reasoned  debate  between  high-minded 
public  servants  of  divergent  outlook  degenerated  into  a  ferocious  per- 
sonal brawl. 

Ironically,  it  was  the  judicial-minded  Taft  who  made  the  first  lunge. 
On  Lincoln's  birthday,  1912,  less  than  two  weeks  before  Roosevelt 
formally  threw  his  hat  into  the  ring,  the  President  had  also  invoked 
the  heritage  of  the  Great  Emancipator.  He  contended,  however,  that 
Lincoln  was  a  constitutional  reformer,  one  who  would  have  dismissed 
those  "political  emotionalists  or  neurotics"  who  would  "reconstruct 
our  whole  society  on  some  new  principle,  not  definitely  formulated, 
and  with  no  intelligent  or  intelligible  forecast  of  the  exact  constitu- 
tional or  statutory  results  to  be  attained."  No  one  who  heard  Taft 
could  have  misinterpreted  the  implication. 

Meanwhile  Taft  gave  his  managers  free  rein  to  corral  convention 

427 


428  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

delegates;  and  in  a  manner  reminiscent  of  TR's  tactics  against  Mark 
Hanna,  they  soon  forced  almost  the  whole  great  conglomeration  of 
Southern  officeholders  into  line.  He  also  allowed  Congressional  Re- 
publicans to  revive  the  old  charge,  never  really  proved  or  disproved, 
that  TR  had  compromised  with  E.  H.  Harriman  in  1904.  And  then, 
after  Lodge's  son-in-law,  Rep.  Augustus  P.  Gardner  of  Massachu- 
setts, charged  in  late  April  that  Roosevelt  had  personally  interceded 
to  prevent  the  International  Harvester  Company  from  being  prose- 
cuted under  the  Sherman  Law  in  1907,  the  President  engaged  in  an 
acrimonious  exchange  with  his  once  beloved  friend. 

It  is  doubtful,  however,  that  any  one  or  all  such  incidents  sparked 
the  flow  of  venom  that  soon  issued  from  Roosevelt.  Elihu  Root,  whose 
flashes  of  insight  into  TR's  personality  are  illuminating  in  spite  of  the 
limitations  that  prevented  him  from  understanding  his  friend's  philo- 
sophic base,  had  known  it  would  come.  "I  have  an  immense  admira- 
tion for  him,"  he  wrote  in  March. 

I  think  that,  rightly  directed,  his  tremendous  personality  would 
be  a  great  national  asset.  All  these  things  combined  fill  me  with 
regret  over  what  he  is  now  doing.  He  is  essentially  a  fighter  and 
when  he  gets  into  a  fight  he  is  completely  dominated  by  the  desire 
to  destroy  his  adversary.  He  instinctively  lays  hold  of  every  weapon 
which  can  be  used  for  that  end.  Accordingly  he  is  saying  a  lot  of 
things  and  taking  a  lot  of  positions  which  are  inspired  by  the  desire 
to  win.  I  have  no  doubt  he  thinks  he  believes  what  he  says,  but  he 
doesn't.  He  has  merely  picked  up  certain  popular  ideas  which  were 
at  hand  as  one  might  pick  up  a  poker  or  chair  with  which  to  strike. 

Taft  had  yet  to  feel  the  full  force  of  Roosevelt's  attack  when  those 
lines  were  written  on  March  9.  But  the  first  blows  were  already  rain- 
ing. TR's  strategy  was  to  wage  primary  battles  in  those  states  which 
had  primaries  and  to  try  to  institute  primaries  in  states  that  did  not. 
Failing  in  the  latter,  he  would  appeal  directly  for  the  support  of  the 
convention  delegates.  His  tactics  were  less  clear,  though  a  pattern 
emerged  after  he  began  his  campaign.  He  identified  himself  with  pro- 
gressivism,  and  in  a  side-swipe  at  La  Follette,  contended  that  he  was 
the  only  progressive  who  had  a  chance  to  win  the  nomination  and 
carry  the  election.  He  labeled  Taft  a  conservative,  and  as  the  cam- 
paign became  more  intense,  a  reactionary.  And  he  further  identified 
the  President  with  the  political  bosses  and  finally  with  corruption  at 
the  polls. 


THOU   SHALT   NOT    STEAL  429 

Nevertheless  the  Colonel's  campaign  went  badly  through  March 
and  on  into  April.  The  Wisconsin  delegation  was  La  Follette's  to  the 
man.  North  Dakota  went  almost  two  to  one  for  the  insurgent  Senator 
(blandly,  TR  instructed  his  campaign  manager  to  declare  that  the 
North  Dakota  delegation  would  support  him  after  "a  complimentary 
vote  for  La  Follette").  New  York,  Indiana,  Michigan,  and  Kentucky 
selected  Taft  delegations.  And  the  South  made  ready  to  affirm  its 
loyalty  to  the  organization. 

Under  the  impact  of  these  defeats  Roosevelt  became  increasingly 
bitter.  He  vehemently  charged  the  Taft  people  with  "bare-faced 
fraud" — in  New  York  and  in  a  host  of  other  states.  He  denounced 
as  "deliberate  faking"  rumors  that  he  would  bolt  the  Grand  Old  Party 
if  Taft  were  nominated.  He  shamelessly  linked  Taft  with  the  notorious 
Senator  Lorimer  of  Illinois,  though  the  President  had  earlier  explained 
to  TR  his  own  desire  to  have  the  Senate  unseat  him.  And  throughout 
the  West  he  unabashedly  denounced  Taft's  Canadian  Reciprocity 
tariff  agreement — a  measure  adverse  to  midwestern  agricultural  in- 
terests. 

But  not  until  the  tide  suddenly  changed  and  Roosevelt  began  to 
roll  off  primary  victories  in  late  April  did  Taft  again  claw  back.  En 
route  to  Boston  on  April  25,  the  President  pathetically  told  the  milling 
crowds  at  the  whistle  stops  that  he  had  come  "to  reply  to  an  old  and 
true  friend  of  mine,  Theodore  Roosevelt,  who  has  made  many  charges 
against  me.  I  deny  those  charges.  I  deny  all  of  them.  I  do  not  want  to 
fight  Theodore  Roosevelt,  but  sometimes  a  man  in  a  corner  fights. 
I  am  going  to  fight."  And  fight  he  did,  giving  a  reasoned,  if  not  con- 
clusive, rebuttal  to  many  of  the  Colonel's  charges  in  two  surprisingly 
effective  speeches  in  Boston.  He  asserted  that  during  the  course  of 
"his  long  and  useful  and  honorable  life,"  Roosevelt  had  not  learned 
"to  be  a  good  loser."  He  ridiculed  the  Colonel's  trust  policy.  He  in- 
directly aligned  himself  with  the  conservatives  by  claiming  that  Roose- 
velt's nomination  would  cause  a  depression.  And  he  expressed  grave 
fear  that  the  third  term  tradition  should  be  broken: 

One  who  so  lightly  regards  constitutional  principles,  and  espe- 
cially the  independence  of  the  judiciary,  one  who  is  so  naturally 
impatient  of  legal  restraints,  and  of  due  legal  procedure,  and  who 
has  so  misunderstood  what  liberty  regulated  by  law  is,  could  not 
safely  be  intrusted  with  successive  presidential  terms. 


430  POWER  AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

The  strain  proved  unbearable.  That  night  Taft  returned  to  his  train 
weary,  depressed,  and  shaken.  The  thick  flesh  on  his  unlined  face 
sagged  almost  lifelessly  and  his  step,  usually  light  and  graceful,  was 
heavy,  even  ponderous.  He  sat  down  alone  on  one  of  the  lounges. 
There,  writes  Pringle,  Siebold  of  the  World  found  him  "slumped  over, 
with  his  head  between  his  hands."  The  President  looked  up  as  the 
newspaperman  entered.  "Roosevelt  was  my  closest  friend,"  he  blurted 
out.  He  then  broke  down  and  wept. 

Still,  Taft  kept  going.  He  argued  that  his  administration  had  put 
through  a  great  body  of  progressive  measures,  many  of  which  Roose- 
velt himself  had  tried,  but  failed  to  get  through  Congress.  He  did  not, 
of  course,  admit  that  they  were  a  tiny  creek  compared  to  the  surging 
waters  of  progressivism's  mighty  mainstream — a  mainstream  whose 
channels  Roosevelt  had  done  so  much  to  carve.  Nor  did  he  point 
out  that  most  of  them  had  been  pushed  through  by  a  majority  of 
Democrats  and  only  a  minority  of  Republicans,  mostly  progressives; 
or  that  dynamic  executive  leadership  could  have  produced  more  com- 
prehensive legislation.  On  the  other  hand  the  President  could  not  re- 
gard himself  as  other  than  he  was — a  man  of  pacific  temperament 
constrained  to  fight  desperately  for  the  semblance  of  self-respect. 
"Condemn  me  if  you  will,"  Taft  exclaimed  at  Lowell,  Massachu- 
setts, on  April  30,  "but  condemn  me  by  other  witnesses  than  Theodore 
Roosevelt.  I  was  a  man  of  straw,  but  I  have  been  a  man  of  straw 
long  enough.  Every  man  who  has  blood  in  his  body,  and  who  has 
been  misrepresented  as  I  have  been  is  forced  to  fight."  A  week  later 
from  Hyattsville,  Maryland,  newspapers  reported  a  yet  more  humiliat- 
ing remark.  "I  am  a  man  of  peace,  and  I  don't  want  to  fight.  But 
when  I  do  fight  I  want  to  hit  hard.  Even  a  rat  in  a  corner  will  fight." 
The  President  reached  his  nadir  a  few  days  after  that.  As  Roosevelt 
had  done  under  much  less  extenuating  circumstances  eight  years  be- 
fore, he  prepared  to  sign  a  pension  bill  which  he  thoroughly  disap- 
proved. A  veto  "would  certainly  lose  the  soldier  vote  in  Ohio  and 
elsewhere,"  he  pointed  out  to  Horace  Taft.  "I  feel  seriously  that  I 
represent  the  people's  cause,  that  I  represent  the  cause  of  constitu- 
tional government,  that  I  represent  the  cause  of  liberty  regulated  by 
law."  ".  .  .  under  these  conditions,  and  facing  as  I  do  a  crisis  with 
Mr.  Roosevelt,"  he  explained  in  a  deleted  passage  of  the  draft  of  a 
letter  to  Charles  Francis  Adams,  ".  .  .  the  question  is  whether  I 
ought  not  to  yield  and  sign  the  bill."  He  finally  did  so. 


THOU   SHALT   NOT   STEAL  431 

On  the  other  extreme,  where  the  indomitable  La  Follette  was  wag- 
ing a  futile  battle  against  fate,  there  was  no  sorrow,  no  yielding,  no 
heart-rending  appeal.  The  political  tenor  of  "Fighting  Bob's"  cam- 
paign was  captured  in  a  statement  sent  out  by  his  Nebraska  campaign 
manager:  "i  WANT  THE  NAMES  OF  ALL  WHO  ARE  READY  TO  FIGHT  FOR 
LA  FOLLETTE  TO  THE  END";  and  its  ideological  tone  was  embodied  in 
the  Senator's  repeated  reaffirmations  of  his  progressive  faith  and  his 
charges  that  Roosevelt  was  a  trimmer.  To  the  end  he  remained  an 
heroically  stubborn  figure,  a  "unique"  politician,  as  one  newspaperman 
termed  him. 

Supposedly  coming  from  a  sickbed,  .  .  .  [he]  looks  anything 
but  a  sick  man.  He  is  tense,  vigorous  and  full  of  fighting  ire.  Pic- 
ture this  "little  giant"  with  the  bushy  head  of  hair,  tramping  up 
and  down  the  platform,  face,  hands  and  figure  in  nervous  action  as 
he  drives  home  his  points.  Picture  him  leading  carefully  up  to  his 
arraignment  of  the  popular  idol  of  the  day  [Roosevelt]  and  as  one 
prominent  North  Dakotan  described  it,  "getting  away  with  it,"  and 
you  have  "Bob"  La  Follette  on  the  stump. 

Meanwhile  the  gargantuan  struggle  between  Roosevelt  and  Taft 
raged  thunderously  to  its  tumultuous  conclusion.  Early  in  April  the 
Colonel  captured  most  of  the  Pennsylvania  delegation  from  the  Presi- 
dent, who  had  the  support  of  the  corrupt  Penrose  machine  (TR  was 
backed  by  the  less  notorious,  but  hardly  less  corrupt,  Flinn  machine). 
And  from  then  until  early  June  victory  followed  victory.  California, 
Minnesota,  Nebraska,  Maryland,  and  South  Dakota  all  went  into 
Roosevelt's  column.  The  Colonel  swept  New  Jersey.  And  in  Taft's 
own  state,  Ohio,  he  carried  thirty-seven  out  of  forty-eight  delegates. 

TR's  resounding  triumph  in  the  President's  home  grounds  was  the 
most  exhilarating  and  portentous  of  all  his  victories.  The  campaign 
itself  had  been  degrading.  Exhausted  and  frayed  by  thousands  of 
miles  of  travel  and  scores  of  speeches,  both  men  had  lowered  the  bars 
more  than  ever  before.  The  beleaguered  President  had  called  Roose- 
velt a  "dangerous  egotist,"  a  "demagogue,"  and  a  "flatterer  of  the 
people";  the  high-riding  Colonel  had  labeled  Taft  a  "puzzlewit,"  a 
"fathead,"  and  worse.  Yet  they  had  also  spoken  on  the  philosophical 
questions  that  separated  them  and  their  respective  wings  of  the  party. 
As  the  independent  Philadelphia  Public  Ledger  observed  editorially: 


432  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Ohio  was  not  excited  by  a  coal  strike,  as  was  Pennsylvania;  nor 
was  it  aroused  over  the  Lorimer  case,  as  was  Illinois;  nor  were 
there  complications  of  a  primary  ballot,  as  in  Maryland;  nor  was 
there  the  new  element  of  woman-suffrage,  as  in  California.  The 
issue  was  fairly  drawn;  the  voters  had  every  opportunity  to  be  fully 
informed  in  a  campaign  of  unexampled  activity,  .  .  . 

The  outcome  in  Ohio  had  raised  the  lid,  and  the  smashing  triumph 
in  New  Jersey  had  blown  it  sky  high.  Roosevelt  could  now  claim  that 
he  had  won  enough  delegates  to  be  nominated.  "The  result  in  Ohio 
has  settled  the  contest,"  he  exclaimed  to  newspapermen.  "I  will  have 
a  great  deal  to  say,  and  I  won't  stand  it  for  a  moment"  if  "the  dis- 
credited bosses  and  politicians  .  .  .  decide  against  me." 

Actually,  the  Colonel  was  about  seventy  delegates  short  of  the 
majority  needed  for  nomination.  So  boldly  had  his  managers  pressed 
his  case,  however,  that  254  seats  were  open  to  contest.  About  one 
hundred  of  these  were  legitimate  challenges.  The  remainder  were 
manufactured — the  product  of  TR  and  his  followers'  frenetic  charges 
of  fraud.  But  that  Roosevelt  could  win  even  the  legitimate  challenges 
was  doubtful,  for  all  seats  at  issue  were  to  be  reviewed  by  the  Taft- 
controlled  Credentials  Committee,  a  body  selected  in  1908  when  TR 
was  using  the  power  of  his  office  to  compel  the  nomination  of  Taft. 
Final  decision  rested  with  the  Convention  itself.  More  ironically,  still, 
many  of  the  delegates  against  whom  Roosevelt  had  no  real  case  were 
from  the  South.  Just  four  years  before  TR  had  opposed  a  movement 
to  reduce  that  privileged  domain's  yield;  now  its  lush  harvest  was 
Taft's  to  reap. 

By  the  time  the  Credentials  Committee  began  hearings  on  June  7, 
eleven  days  before  the  Convention  convened,  TR  was  caught  ineluc- 
tably  in  his  own  momentum.  He  had  either  to  carry  the  Convention 
with  him  or  crash  through  and  out  on  his  own.  There  was  no  hon- 
orable alternative.  That  he  knew  this  is  uncertain;  nor  is  it  of  any  mo- 
ment given  the  powerful  compulsions  and  the  mighty  external  forces 
that  were  propelling  him  onward. 

Of  the  compulsions,  that  for  victory  was  the  most  gripping.  TR's 
mental  state  was  such  that  he  must  take  over  the  active  leadership 
of  the  Republican  majority  or  bequeath  it  his  ghost.  Compromise,  the 
great  constructive  tactic  of  the  past,  was  out,  for  to  swing  the  nomina- 
tion to  a  moderate  progressive  like  Charles  Evans  Hughes  or  Gov- 
ernor Herbert  S.  Hadley  of  Missouri  would  be  to  relegate  himself  to 


THOU  SHALT  NOT  STEAL  433 

political  oblivion.  "I'll  name  the  compromise  candidate,"  Roosevelt 
had  expostulated  just  after  his  triumph  in  Ohio.  "He'll  be  me.  I'll 
name  the  compromise  platform.  It  will  be  our  platform." 

Not  even  this  consuming  need  to  fulfill  himself  completely  explains 
TR's  absolute  determination  to  fight  to  a  finish,  however;  nor  does 
his  searing  desire  to  destroy  Taft.  The  fact  is  that  Roosevelt  and 
many  of  his  friends  were  sincerely  convinced  that  he  was  being  robbed; 
that  the  National  Committee,  which  found  in  favor  of  Taft  with  callous 
regularity  from  June  7  on,  was  positively  dishonest.  "Under  the  direc- 
tion, and  with  the  encouragement,  of  Mr.  Taft,"  declared  a  statement 
the  Colonel  released  on  June  22,  "the  majority  of  the  National  Com- 
mittee, by  the  so-called  'steamroller'  methods,  and  with  scandalous 
disregard  of  every  principle  of  elementary  honesty  and  decency  stole 
eighty  or  ninety  delegates.  .  .  ." 

In  the  face  of  those  partial  truths,  the  parallel  between  Taft's  com- 
portment in  1912  and  Roosevelt's  in  1904  loses  some  of  its  exactness. 
In  both  cases  TR's  engine  was  fired  by  the  coals  of  public  opinion; 
Hanna's  in  1904  and  Taft's  in  1912  were  sparked  by  the  Republican 
machine  and  little  else.  Indeed,  it  was  this  vast  preponderance  of  sup- 
port from  the  man  in  the  street — Roosevelt  had  polled  1,157,397 
votes  in  the  primaries  to  Taft's  761,716 — that  makes  TR's  cause  at 
least  as  righteous  as  it  was  self-righteous.  It  was  inconceivable  that 
the  Colonel,  riding  such  a  tidal  wave  of  popular  support,  should  have 
failed  to  invoke  prematurely  the  forms  of  democracy  which  the  wave 
bore  along  on  its  churning  crest.  "I  have  felt  that  we  are  fighting  for 
a  very  high  ideal,"  he  wrote  privately  three  days  before  the  National 
Committee  commenced  its  hearings.  "The  cause  of  our  opponents  has 
now  become  naked — the  cause  of  the  political  bosses  and  of  special 
privilege  in  the  business  world.  It  is  the  cause  of  corruption  and  of 
bad  government.  .  .  .";  or,  as  he  phrased  it  in  his  statement  of  June 
22,  his  opponents  placed  "on  the  temporary  roll  call  a  sufficient  num- 
ber of  fraudulent  delegates  to  defeat  the  legally  expressed  will  of  the 
people,  and  to  substitute  a  dishonest  for  an  honest  majority." 

The  story  of  the  Convention  itself  bears  little  retelling.  There  was 
the  Colonel,  his  countenance  wrought  with  indignation  and  determina- 
tion, arriving  in  Chicago  three  days  before  the  formal  opening  on  the 
urgent  entreaties  of  his  angry,  explosive  lieutenants.  "The  issue  is 
both  simpler  and  larger  than  that  involved  in  the  personality  of  any 
man,"  he  exclaimed  to  an  overflow  crowd  of  screaming  supporters  in 


434  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

the  Chicago  Auditorium  the  night  before  the  Convention  opened. 
"Tonight  we  come  together  to  protest  against  a  crime  which  strikes 
straight  at  the  heart  of  every  principle  of  political  decency  and  hon- 
esty, a  crime  which  represents  treason  to  the  people,  and  the  usurpa- 
tion of  the  sovereignty  of  the  people  by  irresponsible  political  bosses, 
inspired  by  the  sinister  influences  of  moneyed  privilege."  "We  fight 
in  honest  fashion  for  the  good  of  mankind;  ...  we  stand  at  Arma- 
geddon, and  we  battle  for  the  Lord." 

There  was  the  felt  presence  of  Robert  Marion  La  Follette,  more 
dogmatic  and  neither  less  self-righteous  nor  egocentric  than  Theodore 
Roosevelt,  spouting  orders  into  the  long-distance  telephone  at  Wash- 
ington. The  Wisconsin  progressive  was  willing  to  let  Taft  and  the  Old 
Guard  win  rather  than  throw  his  support  to  TR,  so  consuming  was 
his  hatred  of  his  progressive  adversary,  and  in  a  decision  that  probably 
cost  Roosevelt  the  nomination,  he  refused  to  combine  forces  in  sup- 
port of  a  temporary  chairman.  Then,  when  some  of  his  subordinates 
defied  his  wishes,  he  forthwith  repudiated  them.  "This  nomination  is 
not  with  Senator  La  Follette's  consent,"  a  lieutenant  dutifully  an- 
nounced. "We  make  no  deals  with  Roosevelt.  We  make  no  trades  with 
Taft."  And  thus,  La  Follette's  biographers  conclude,  the  Roosevelt 
forces  were  "robbed  ...  of  the  psychological  band-wagon  advantage 
they  had  hoped  to  gain  by  uniting.  .  .  .  The  convention  knew  that 
delegates  instructed  for  La  Follette  would  not  go  to  Roosevelt  on  the 
ballot  for  President." 

There  was  Elihu  Root  in  morning  coat  and  gray  striped  trousers, 
wielding  the  chairman's  gavel  and  vainly  calling  for  order  following  the 
defeat  of  TR's  candidate  for  temporary  chairman  by  558  to  502  votes. 
As  he  had  once  served  Roosevelt  and  the  nation,  and  before  and 
between  them  the  great  corporations,  this  eminent  lawyer,  whose  prin- 
ciples were  at  once  so  high  and  so  narrow,  was  now  serving  Taft  and 
the  Old  Guard;  or,  so  the  Colonel  phrased  it,  "the  representatives  of 
reaction."  With  heavy  heart,  for  he  had  accepted  the  chairmanship 
only  as  "a  difficult  and  embarrassing  duty,"  Root  fatefully  ruled  that 
delegates  whose  seats  were  in  contest  would  be  allowed  to  vote  on  all 
cases  except  their  own.  The  ruling  was  consonant  with  traditional 
procedure. 

There  was  the  spectacle  on  and  around  the  convention  floor:  the 
fist  fights  and  near  fist  fights;  the  vitriolic  cries  of  "liar,"  "swindler," 
"robber,"  and  "thief";  the  chants  of  "We  Want  Teddy"  that  swept 


THOU  SHALT  NOT  STEAL  435 

down  from  the  galleries  and  set  off  a  roaring  forty-five-minute  demon- 
stration in  the  aisles;  the  imitation  steamroller  toots  and  whistles  that 
rent  the  air  whenever  the  Taft  forces  offered  a  motion.  There  were 
the  flowery  words  and  empty  sentences  of  that  pathetic  pleaser  of 
crowds,  Warren  Gamaliel  Harding  of  Ohio,  whom  Taft  had  selected 
to  place  his  name  in  nomination;  and  there  was,  finally,  the  grim 
determination  of  the  344  Roosevelt  delegates  who  refrained  from  vot- 
ing on  the  Colonel's  order  and  then  marched  out  of  the  hall  as  it  was 
announced  that  the  President  had  been  renominated  on  the  first  ballot 
with  561  votes. 

There  were  also  the  scenes  in  the  Colonel's  suite  in  the  Congress 
Hotel,  where  TR  and  his  advisers  were  gathered  in  council  of  war. 
"We  are  frittering  away  our  time,"  Hiram  Johnson  of  California, 
whose  state  had  returned  a  77,000  majority  for  Roosevelt  only  to 
have  Root  rule  in  favor  of  the  Taft  slate,  grimly  asserted.  "We  are 
frittering  away  our  opportunity.  And,  what  is  worse,  we  are  frittering 
away  Theodore  Roosevelt."  There  was  the  Colonel  himself  silently 
walking  up  and  down  the  floor.  Could  he  bolt  from  the  party  he  had 
led  as  President  for  seven  and  one-half  years;  could  he  form  a  new  party 
without  financial  support  except  from  the  grass  roots?  Of  a  sudden, 
the  decision  was  made  for  him.  The  millionaires  Frank  Munsey  and 
George  Perkins,  who  had  been  bent  over  in  earnest  conversation  in  a 
corner  of  the  room,  straightened  up.  "And  with  a  decisive  gesture 
from  Munsey,  who  seemed  the  more  agitated  of  the  two,"  wrote  Amos 
Pinchot,  "both  men  .  .  .  moved  over  to  Roosevelt,  meeting  him  in 
the  middle  of  the  room.  Each  placed  a  hand  on  one  of  his  shoulders 
and  one,  or  both  of  them,  said,  'Colonel,  we  will  see  you  through.' 
At  that  precise  moment  the  Progressive  Party  was  born.  .  .  ." 

Finally,  there  was  the  climactic  scene  in  Orchestra  Hall  on  Saturday 
night,  June  22,  where  a  near  hysterical  throng  of  Roosevelt  men — the 
344  delegates  who  had  strode  out  of  the  convention,  the  scores  upon 
scores  of  delegates  who  had  been  refused  their  seats,  and  thousands 
of  alternates  and  spectators — met  in  rump  convention.  Shouting, 
stamping,  and  singing,  they  interrupted  the  Colonel  again  and  again 
as  he  started  the  most  historic  of  all  his  speeches  by  hissing  "Thou 
Shalt  Not  Steal"  and  ended  it  by  declaring  that  he  would  make  the 
third-party  fight  "even  if  only  one  State  should  support  me." 

What  is  the  historical  verdict?  Historians  generally  agree  that 
Roosevelt  had  been  "robbed";  not  of  the  seventy  to  a  hundred  dele- 


436  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

gates  he  loosely  claimed,  but  of  about  twenty-five.  These  would  have 
been  enough  to  control  the  convention  and  at  least  have  created  a 
deadlock.  Probably  the  nomination  would  then  have  gone  to  Roose- 
velt. As  Mowry  points  out,  the  Taft  commitment  of  many  delegates 
reflected  the  blandishments  of  their  local  machines  rather  than  devo- 
tion to  the  President.  Swept  up  by  the  moral  fervor  of  the  Roosevelt 
movement  at  Chicago,  many  had  begun  to  weaken.  Each  day  of  the 
convention  one  or  more  went  over  to  the  Colonel;  and  had  the  voting 
gone  beyond  one  ballot,  many  others  must  surely  have  done  the 
same.  Nor  could  Taft  have  held  indefinitely  his  sixty  Negro  delegates. 
The  product  of  the  most  insidious  politics — they  had  actually  sold  out 
the  interests  of  their  own  people — they  were  being  subjected  to  heavy 
pressure  by  sophisticated  Chicago  Negro  leaders  to  abandon  the 
President  who  had  largely  reversed  Roosevelt's  moderately  uplifting 
policies  toward  members  of  their  race.  And  they  were  also,  appar- 
ently, being  offered  cash  bribes  by  the  Roosevelt  forces.  It  is  doubtful 
that  La  Follette's  forty-one  delegates  would  have  suffered  the  fetters 
he  imposed  upon  them  until  the  end  of  the  convention  had  there  been 
a  deadlock.  Devoted  to  La  Follette  though  they  were,  they  were  not 
all  as  uncompromising  and  vindictive  as  their  extraordinary  leader. 

If  the  approximately  twenty-five  "stolen"  delegates  would  thus 
have  enabled  TR  to  win  the  convention,  he  could  also  have  won  it 
for  a  progressive  other  than  himself  or  La  Follette  without  them.  In 
fact,  some  of  the  Taft  leaders  did  offer  to  support  Governor  Hadley 
of  Missouri  as  a  compromise  candidate.  But  Roosevelt  angrily  rejected 
their  proposal.  Had  the  Colonel  remained  at  Oyster  Bay  he  might  have 
consented,  though  it  is  unlikely  that  his  vanity  would  really  have 
allowed  it.  On  the  scene  at  Chicago,  in  any  event,  he  was  caught  up 
in  the  swirling  adulation  of  his  outraged  followers  and  was  blinded 
by  the  wrathful  fervor  of  his  own  burning  indignation.  To  have 
divested  authority  over  this  holy  cause  in  a  more  ordinary  man,  to 
have  compromised  with  the  satanic  forces  who  had  defied  the  Eighth 
Commandment,  would  in  TR's  emotion  ridden  state  have  been  to 
make  hollow  mockery  of  the  tragic  drama  that  was  unfolding  before 
his  eyes.  He  was  right  when  he  ringingly  affirmed  before  the  rump 
convention  on  Saturday  night  that  the  cause  was  far  nobler  than  any 
one  man;  and  he  was  probably  also  right  when  he  implied  that  he 
alone  could  lead  it. 


CHAPTER  27 


ARMAGEDDON 


He  had  the  hold  of  the  hero.  By  his  words  and  deeds  he  gave 
a  defining  and  supporting  frame  for  the  aspirations  of  those 
insufficiently  clear  or  strong  to  support  their  aspirations  by  their 
own  endeavor.  Men,  in  the  hope  of  finding  their  better  selves, 
attached  themselves  to  him. 

— Elting  E.  Morison,  Turmoil  and  Tradition 


As  Roosevelt  knew  it  must,  the  Progressive  party  convention  that  met 
seven  weeks  later  in  the  same  auditorium  where  the  Republican  steam- 
roller had  flattened  the  Eighth  Commandment,  was  destined  to  prove 
a  failure  of  politics  and  a  triumph  of  ideals.  The  practical  politicians 
upon  whom  success  depended  were  notable  for  their  absence.  A  few 
came,  including  Flinn  of  Pennsylvania  and  Walter  Brown  of  Ohio, 
neither  of  whom  had  any  other  place  to  go.  A  handful  of  insurgent 
Republicans  led  by  Beveridge  of  Indiana,  handsome,  well  groomed, 
and  confident  as  always  of  his  intellectual  prowess,  also  came.  For 
Beveridge,  as  for  many  of  the  others,  the  interim  between  the  two 
conventions  had  been  a  time  of  painful  indecision.  He  had  opposed 
the  formation  of  the  new  party  and  had  refused  to  participate  in  the 
rump  convention  in  June  for  reasons  of  expediency.  But  now,  out  of 
devotion  to  principle,  not  a  small  measure  of  vanity,  and  fealty  to  the 
Colonel  and  their  mutual  friend  Perkins,  he  prepared  to  deliver  the 
keynote  address  and  serve  as  the  temporary  and  permanent  chairman. 
Otherwise  the  signs  were  ominous.  Of  the  seven  governors  who  had 
signed  the  round-robin  call  for  TR  to  wage  war  against  Taft  seven 
months  before,  only  two  were  courageous  or  foolish  enough  to  join 

437 


438  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

the  Progressive  party:  Chase  Osborn  of  Michigan  and  high-strung 
Hiram  Johnson  of  California,  who  militantly  agreed  to  become  Roose- 
velt's running  mate.  Hadley  of  Missouri  refused  to  come  over,  arguing 
that  progressive  control  of  his  state  could  be  achieved  only  through 
the  Republican  party;  and  so  with  most  of  the  other  governors. 
William  E.  Borah,  took  the  same  position;  and  the  majority  of  progres- 
sive Republican  senators  and  representatives  in  Congress  did  likewise 
though  some,  like  Nebraska's  Norris,  escaped  the  decision  by  win- 
ning the  endorsement  of  both  the  Republican  and  Progressive  parties. 

Roosevelt  was  understandably  bitter.  "What  a  miserable  showing 
some  of  the  so-called  Progressive  leaders  have  made,"  he  grumbled. 
"They  represent  nothing  but  sound  and  fury  .  .  .  they  have  not  the 
heart  for  a  fight,  and  the  minute  they  were  up  against  deeds  instead 
of  words,  they  quit  forthwith." 

Yet  the  Colonel  also  had  moments  of  understanding  for  some. 
"Nothing  has  touched  me  more  than  the  willingness  of  men  in  whom 
I  earnestly  believe  to  leave  their  official  positions  and  come  out  in 
this  fight,"  he  wrote  a  Department  of  Justice  agent  who  offered  to 
support  him  a  few  weeks  before  the  convention  convened.  "But  .  .  . 
I  feel  that  the  sacrifice  ought  not  to  be  made  unless  the  good  that  will 
be  done  outweighs  the  damage.  .  .  .  I  do  not  feel  that  our  cause  is 
sufficiently  bright  to  warrant  me  to  have  men  like  you  and  those  .  .  . 
named  [among  them,  Felix  Frankfurter]  come  out  for  me.  .  .  . 
Events  shaped  themselves  so  that  I  had  no  alternative  except  to  lead, 
but  I  am  under  no  illusion  about  it.  It  is  a  forlorn  hope."  Nevertheless, 
he  was  determined  to  sustain  it.  ".  .  .  do  not  let  it  get  beyond  the 
men  I  have  mentioned,"  he  warned,  "for  even  in  a  forlorn  hope  it  does 
not  do  to  let  your  soldiers  think  that  their  commander  won't  lead 
them  to  victory — although  there  are  occasions  when  it  is  his  highest 
duty  to  fight  no  matter  how  great  the  risk  of  defeat." 

If  the  Colonel's  army  lacked  regulars,  it  suffered  nothing  for 
volunteers.  Rarely,  and  perhaps  never,  has  a  modern  political  con- 
vention contained  such  a  concentration  of  substantial  and  dedicated 
citizens,  of  men  and  women  so  fervently  devoted  to  cause  and  leader 
alike,  as  now  closed  ranks  at  Chicago.  "Here  were  the  successful 
middle-class  country-town  citizens,"  wrote  William  Allen  White,  "the 
farmer  whose  barn  was  painted,  the  well-paid  railroad  engineer,  and 
the  country  editor." 


ARMAGEDDON  439 

It  was  a  well  dressed  crowd.  We  were,  of  course,  for  woman 
suffrage,  and  we  invited  women  delegates  and  had  plenty  of  them. 
They  were  our  own  kind,  too — women  doctors,  women  lawyers, 
women  teachers,  college  professors,  middle-aged  leaders  of  civic 
movements,  or  rich  young  girls  who  had  gone  in  for  settlement  work. 
Looking  over  the  crowd,  judging  the  delegates  by  their  clothes,  I 
figured  that  there  was  not  a  man  or  woman  on  the  floor  who  was 
making  less  than  two  thousand  a  year,  and  not  one,  on  the  other 
hand,  who  was  topping  ten  thousand.  Proletarian  and  plutocrat 
were  absent — except  George  Perkins.  .  .  . 

...  On  the  speaker's  stand,  we  had  notables  from  all  over  the 
land:  college  presidents,  heads  of  scientific  foundations.  Our  prize 
exhibit  was  Jane  Addams.  .  .  .  When  she  came  down  the  aisle 
back  of  the  speaker's  stand  where  the  other  notables  wearing  Bull 
Moose  badges  were  arrayed  in  proud  and  serried  ranks,  the  dele- 
gates and  the  scattered  spectators  in  the  galleries  rose  and  cheered. 
Not  even  the  Colonel  got  much  more  rousing  cheers  than  Jane 
Addams,  when  she  rose  to  second  his  nomination. 

Why  had  they  come?  Some,  obviously,  to  tie  their  kites  to  Roose- 
velt: the  cynical,  flint-faced  underlings  of  Flinn  and  his  like;  men  of 
vast  materialistic  design  and  little  if  any  moral  purpose.  Their  numbers 
were  not  great,  but  they  were  large  enough  to  be  embarrassing.  The 
true  fanatics  were  also  there,  come  to  this  convention  as  to  the  great 
protest  assemblages  of  the  past  to  indulge  in  an  orgy  of  political  emo- 
tionalism. Later  Roosevelt  would  ungraciously  designate  them  "the 
lunatic  fringe." 

But  what  of  the  convention's  real  leaders,  the  middle-class  re- 
spectables White  so  graphically  describes?  One  of  the  most  provocative 
analyses,  that  of  Richard  Hofstadter,  is  that  they  were  animated  by 
p^-jsonal  resentment  over  their  loss  of  general  status  to  the  new 
elite — the  coarse,  crude,  compassionless  men  of  business  and  finance 
who  surged  to  the  top  on  the  mighty  convulsions  of  the  industrial 
revolution;  the  crass  materialists  whom  Roosevelt  and  the  Adams 
brothers  so  feared  and  deplored;  the  vulgar  new  leaders  whose 
ostentatious  mansions  had  become  the  focal  points  of  the  new  high 
society  in  the  great  urban  centers  and  summer  resorts  of  the  nation; 
the  amoral  men  of  power  whose  puissant  wealth,  so  Roosevelt  had 
charged,  had  bought  off  the  editors,  the  lawyers,  and  the  college 
professors;  the  nouveaux  riches  whose  bulldozing  tactics  were  reduc- 
ing to  an  ant  heap  the  once  mountainous  influence  of  the  people  of 


440  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

long-established,  but  by  the  new  standards,  relatively  modest  means. 

What  was  more  natural  than  that  the  younger  members  of  these 
submerged  genteel  families  should  emerge  as  the  secondary  leaders  of 
the  Progressive  movement?  They  had  the  time,  the  money,  and  the 
political  habit  in  a  local,  dilettantish  way.  Their  grandfathers  and 
their  fathers  had  been  abolitionists,  mugwumps,  and  civil  service 
reformers.  They  themselves  were  active  in  civic  affairs,  their  declining 
power  notwithstanding.  Moreover,  they  now  realized,  if  only  because 
of  the  widespread  rise  of  prices  which  was  attributed  to  the  trusts, 
that  they  themselves  stood  in  the  lengthening  shadow  of  the  con- 
centration of  power  and  wealth  in  the  hands  of  the  new  barbarians. 

Unquestionably,  as  Hofstadter  emphasizes,  resentment  born  of  their 
declining  status  contributed  to  their  reform  impulses.  Undeniably, 
vanity,  ambition,  and  other  worldly  considerations  figured  large  in 
their  acceptance  of  Roosevelt's  commissions.  Cut  off  from  service  in 
the  Democratic  party  by  the  rise  of  the  recent  immigrants  under  the 
rampant  big-city  bosses,  frustrated  by  the  spokesmen  of  the  men  of 
new  wealth  in  their  desire  to  exert  influence  within  Republican 
councils,  they  inevitably  gravitated  to  Roosevelt.  With  him  they  could 
bask  in  the  prominence  and  assert  the  authority  they  deemed  their 
rightful  inheritance;  with  him  they  could  curb  the  plutocrats'  power 
and  recapture  in  part  their  own  lost  status. 

Yet,  as  other  studies  and  much  internal  evidence  indicate,  they 
could  also  strive  for  fulfillment  of  the  rational  ideas  and  humanitarian 
ideals  to  which  as  working  intellectuals  or  men  of  reflective  leisure 
they  had  long  been  attached. 

Assuredly,  the  striking  aspect  of  the  program  the  Progressives  met 
at  Chicago  to  adopt  was  its  high  intellectual  and  broad  humanitarian 
tone.  Their  platform  contained  a  full  measure  of  angry  indictees, 
sweeping  generalizations,  and  partisan  distortions.  But  it  also  em- 
bodied a  constructive  distillation  of  the  current  social  wisdom — a 
wisdom  that  derived  from  the  decade  and  more  of  analysis  of 
American  society  by  the  muckrakers,  by  economists  and  historians, 
by  the  new  psychologists  and  sociologists,  and  by  all  those  investiga- 
tory commissions  that  Roosevelt  as  President  had  appointed.  For  all 
that  platform's  naivetes,  including  the  colossal  one  of  the  recall  of 
judicial  decisions,  it  comprised  a  blueprint  for  a  more  humane,  en- 
lightened, and  constructive  America.  It  is  hardly  an  accident  that 
virtually  all  of  its  planks  have  since  been  written  into  law. 


ARMAGEDDON  441 

Nor  is  it  less  remarkable  that  the  Progressive  party  should  have 
attracted  the  type  of  people  it  did,  given  man's  capacity  for  compas- 
sion, his  compulsion  for  order,  and  his  urge  both  to  conserve  and 
create.  Roosevelt  expected  to  receive,  and  he  did  broadly  receive,  the 
support  of  college  professors  and  presidents  the  nation  over  (it  was, 
happily,  an  era  when  intellectual  attainment  was  a  requisite  for  the 
latter  position)  because  his  program  offered  them  an  opportunity  to 
implement  theories  that  their  minds  had  long  nurtured  and  cultivated. 
And  so  with  Pinchot's  scientific  management  conservationists,  those 
scientists  and  gentlemen  who  had  been  at  once  a  cause  and  an  effect 
of  the  Progressive  movement.  It  would  have  been  remarkable  had 
they  not  followed  their  unfailing  patron  into  a  party  which  offered 
them  complete  freedom  to  write  its  conservation  plank.  Nor  was  it 
much  different  with  Jane  Addams  and  all  those  other  well-born 
women  social  workers  who  had  become  reformers  out  of  resentment 
against  man's  inhumanity  to  man.  Aggrieved  though  they  were  by 
the  Colonel's  militant  preparedness  views,  they  saw  in  the  planks 
calling  for  minimum  wages  for  women  and  the  national  abolition  of 
child  labor  the  fruition  of  much  of  their  life's  labors.  The  same  may 
be  said  for  the  clergy  who  joined  the  crusade  in  liberal  numbers  in 
spite  of  Woodrow  Wilson's  powerful  pull.  Theodore  Roosevelt,  the 
greatest  preacher  and  the  most  strident  moralist  of  them  all,  was 
offering  nothing  less  than  an  opportunity  to  write  the  preachments  of 
the  Social  Gospel  movement  into  the  political  law. 

Nevertheless,  there  were  profound  differences  in  viewpoint,  espe- 
cially toward  the  trusts.  As  Alfred  D.  Chandler,  Jr.  has  shown  in  an 
investigation  that  probes  beneath  William  Allen  White's  graphic  gen- 
eralizations, the  vast  majority  of  Progressive  party  leaders  were  upper- 
class  Protestants  of  urban  background,  and  a  substantial  portion  of 
them  were  moderate-to-big  businessmen.  This  was  notably  true  of 
the  Easterners.  They  followed  Roosevelt  because  they  believed  his 
regulatory  program  offered  a  means  of  curbing  the  corporations' 
abuses  while  yet  preserving  the  economic  beneficences  of  the  cor- 
porate structure;  they  opposed  La  Follette  because  he  and  his  agrarian- 
minded  followers,  the  bulk  of  whom  nevertheless  swung  in  behind 
Roosevelt,  continued  to  adhere  to  the  atomistic  philosophy  of  the 
Sherman  Law. 

If  great  numbers  of  Progressive  leaders  were  thus  men  of  creative 
moral  vision  and  social  respectability,  they  were  nonetheless  emo- 


442  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

tional  for  it.  At  Chicago,  where  TR  arrived  the  night  before  the  con- 
vention opened  on  August  5  exuberantly  exclaiming  that  he  felt  "as 
strong  as  a  bull  moose,"  their  impassioned  outcries  soared  to  the 
rafters  and  thence  across  the  land.  At  the  slightest  provocation,  and 
sometimes  with  no  provocation  at  all,  ten  thousand  and  more  voices 
poured  out  the  soul-stirring  cadences  of  those  great  martial  hymns, 
"Onward  Christian  Soldiers"  and  "The  Battle  Hymn  of  the  Repub- 
lic." Again  and  again  thousands  of  delegates,  alternates,  and  alter- 
nates' alternates  who  had  come  at  their  own  expense  cheered,  waved, 
and  stamped  as  a  succession  of  speakers  affirmed  the  exaltation  of 
their  cause. 

"We  stand  for  a  nobler  America,"  thundered  the  emotion-wrought 
Beveridge  (listening  to  Beveridge  rehearse  the  keynote  address  in  his 
room  the  night  before,  George  Perkins  is  said  to  have  broken  into  a 
sob  and  left  the  room  with  tears  coursing  down  his  cheeks) .  We  know 
"the  price  we  must  pay,  the  sacrifice  we  must  make,  the  burdens  we 
must  carry  .  .  ,  yet  we  enlist  and  we  enlist  for  the  war.  For  we  know 
the  justice  of  our  cause,  and  we  know,  too,  its  certain  triumph." 

The  climax  came  on  the  afternoon  of  the  second  day  when  Roose- 
velt himself  appeared  before  the  convention.  He  had  come,  he  after- 
ward wrote,  to  say  the  things  that  were  "deepest"  in  his  heart,  and 
he  had  entitled  his  address  his  "Confession  of  Faith."  Mowry  describes 
the  scene. 

As  he  stood  on  the  platform  in  the  old  familiar  attitude,  his  body 
swaying  with  delight,  his  left  hand  in  his  pocket  and  his  right 
vigorously  waving  a  reply,  fifteen  thousand  people  roared  their 
welcome.  For  fifty-two  minutes,  wildly  waving  red  bandannas,  they 
cheered  him  as  they  had  never  cheered  anyone  else.  Here  were  no 
claques,  no  artificial  demonstration  sustained  by  artificial  devices. 
.  .  .  Men  and  women  simply  stood  on  their  feet  for  an  hour  to  wel- 
come a  man  because  they  liked  him  and  believed  in  him.  When 
Roosevelt  himself  finally  sought  to  stop  the  demonstration,  the 
crowd  once  more  broke  into  song: 

Thou  wilt  not  cower  in  the  dust, 

Roosevelt,  O  Roosevelt! 
Thy  gleaming  sword  shall  never  rust, 
Roosevelt,  O  Roosevelt. 

At  long  last  the  singing  stopped  and  Roosevelt  prepared  to  speak. 
A  newspaperman  observed  that  he  seemed  bewildered,  unable  to 


ARMAGEDDON  443 

understand  the  temper  of  his  audience.  "They  were  crusaders;  he  was 
not,"  the  reporter  wrote.  Yet  Roosevelt  the  politician  knew  what  the 
amateurs  who  filled  the  Coliseum  did  not  know  or  could  not  admit 
if  they  did  know — the  failure  of  progressive  Republican  politicians 
to  join  the  Progressive  party  on  the  state  level  had  foredoomed  him 
and  the  party  to  disaster  even  before  the  convention  had  begun.  And 
because  of  that  knowledge,  Roosevelt  at  that  moment  and  for  the 
three  months  that  followed  was  more  truly  a  crusader  than  he  had 
ever  before  been.  "Now,  friends,"  he  exclaimed  at  the  end  of  a  speech 
that  the  Wilson  scholar,  Arthur  S.  Link,  terms  a  classic  synthesis  of 
the  most  advanced  progressive  thought  of  the  times,  "this  is  my  con- 
fession of  faith."  "...  I  hope  we  shall  win.  .  .  .  But  win,  or  lose, 
we  shall  not  falter.  .  .  .  Our  cause  is  based  on  the  eternal  principle 
of  righteousness;  and  even  though  we  who  now  lead  may  for  the  time 
fail,  in  the  end  the  cause  itself  shall  triumph.  .  .  .  We  stand  at 
Armageddon,  and  we  battle  for  the  Lord." 

Yet  the  ways  of  the  Lord  are  sometimes  mysterious.  Even  before 
this  most  religious-like  convention  in  American  political  history  was 
ended,  Roosevelt's  handling  of  the  trust  question  had  sown  seeds  of 
doubt  in  the  minds  of  a  great  body  of  the  faithful. 

Reflecting  their  agrarian  frame  of  reference,  the  radical,  or  as 
Mowry  designates  them,  reactionary,  Midwestern  Progressives  and  a 
sprinkling  of  Easterners  insisted  that  the  party  platform  call  for  a 
strengthening  of  the  Sherman  Law.  The  day  after  Roosevelt's  address 
the  Committee  on  Resolutions  framed  a  plank  to  that  effect.  The 
platform  was  then  sent  up  to  Roosevelt's  rooms  where  George 
Perkins,  who  served  as  TR's  chief  aide  throughout  the  convention 
and  campaign,  persuaded  the  Colonel  to  delete  it. 

The  next  day  Perkins  sat  confidently  hi  the  Coliseum  as  Dean  Wil- 
liam Draper  Lewis  of  the  University  of  Pennsylvania  Law  School  read 
the  platform  to  the  convention.  Suddenly  Perkins  started.  Lewis  was 
apparently  reading  the  antitrust  plank  as  originally  approved  by  the 
Committee  on  Resolutions.  "That  does  not  belong  in  the  platform," 
Perkins  shouted  to  Amos  Pinchot,  according  to  one  account.  "We  cut 
it  out  last  night."  Thereupon  he  rushed  out  of  the  auditorium. 

Perkins  later  prevailed  on  Roosevelt  to  direct  the  party's  secretary 
to  delete  the  plank;  and  as  printed  and  distributed  the  Progressive 
party  platform  neither  endorsed  nor  called  for  the  strengthening  of 
the  Sherman  Antitrust  Act.  The  radicals'  distrust  of  Perkins,  whom  they 


444  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

believed  only  to  be  protecting  his  vast  holdings  in  the  United  States 
Steel  Corporation  and  the  International  Harvester  Company,  was  thus 
confirmed.  "Perkins  .  .  .  smiling  and  simpering  in  triumph  like  a 
sinister  specter — in  his  gray  alpaca  suit  to  match  the  slightly  sprinkled 
gray  of  his  brown  hair  and  gray  mustache,  and  .  .  .  steel-gray  heart 
.  .  .  was  not  one  of  us,"  William  Allen  White  wrote.  He  "misunder- 
stood" Roosevelt.  White's  characterization,  accepted  by  virtually  all 
the  Midwestern  Progressive  leaders  and  written  thence  into  the  his- 
tory books,  is  a  palpable  injustice  to  Perkins  as  Garraty's  recent 
biography  proves.  It  is  also  a  misreading  of  Roosevelt  himself,  one 
that  blithely  ignores  the  long  evolution  of  TR's  views  on  the  trusts 
as  well  as  the  categorical  denunciation  of  the  Sherman  Act  philosophy 
in  his  address  accepting  the  Bull  Moose  charge. 

"Half  of  ...  [the  Progressives]  are  really  representative  of  a  kind 
of  rural  toryism,  which  wishes  to  attempt  the  impossible  task  of  re- 
turning to  the  economic  conditions  that  obtained  sixty  years  ago," 
Roosevelt  had  angrily  written  of  the  Sherman  Act  proponents  just 
the  summer  before.  "The  other  half  wishes  to  go  forward  along  the 
proper  lines,  that  is,  to  recognize  the  inevitableness  and  the  necessity 
of  combinations  in  business,  and  meet  it  by  a  corresponding  increase 
in  governmental  power  over  big  business;  but  at  the  same  time  these 
real  progressives  are  hampered  by  being  obliged  continually  to  pay  lip 
loyalty  to  their  colleagues,  who,  at  bottom,  are  not  progressive  at  all, 
but  retrogressive." 

Many  Progressives  were  also  pained  by  Roosevelt's  handling  of 
the  party's  relations  with  Southern  Negroes.  Partly  to  win  the  Northern 
Negro  vote,  and  partly  because  of  their  militantly  humanitarian  senti- 
ments, Progressive  leaders  had  encouraged  Northern  Negroes  to  come 
into  the  Progressive  fold;  and  when  the  convention  convened  at 
Chicago  the  delegates'  ranks  were  studded  with  Negroes — mute 
testimony  to  their  faith  in  Roosevelt,  Brownsville  notwithstanding. 
Large  numbers  of  Negroes  had  also  sought  to  join  the  party  in  the 
South,  where  they  were  not  welcomed.  The  result  was  that  three 
Southern  states  sent  contesting  delegations,  mixed  and  all  white,  to 
Chicago.  Their  leaders  appealed  to  Roosevelt  in  advance,  and  on 
August  1  he  announced  his  decision  in  a  moving  letter  to  Julian  L. 
Harris,  son  of  the  author  of  Uncle  Remus. 

Observing  that  the  Republican  party  in  the  South  "exists  only  to 
serve  the  purposes  of  a  small  group  of  politicians,  for  the  most  part 


ARMAGEDDON  445 

white,  but  including  some  colored  men,  who  have  not  the  slightest 
interest  in  elections,"  Roosevelt  contended  that  a  similar  fate  would 
befall  the  Progressive  party  should  it  appeal  "to  the  Negroes  or  to  the 
men  who  in  the  past  have  derived  their  sole  standing  from  leading 
and  manipulating  the  Negroes." 

I  earnestly  believe  that  by  appealing  to  the  best  white  men  in 
the  South,  the  men  of  justice  and  of  vision  as  well  as  of  strength 
and  of  leadership,  and  by  frankly  putting  the  movement  in  their 
hands  from  the  outset  we  shall  create  a  situation  by  which  the 
colored  men  of  the  South  will  ultimately  get  justice  as  it  is  not  pos- 
sible for  them  to  get  justice  if  we  are  to  continue  and  perpetuate  the 
present  conditions. 

That  decision  plagued  TR  for  the  duration  of  the  campaign.  The 
majority  of  Northern  Negro  delegates  swallowed  hard  and  stayed 
on;  but  a  small  number  angrily  walked  out  of  the  party — a  few  into 
the  arms  of  Woodrow  Wilson,  who  was  to  treat  them  worse,  and  most 
into  those  of  Taft,  who  already  had  done  so.  The  Colonel  was  hurt, 
especially  when  Booker  T.  Washington  came  out  for  Taft;  neverthe- 
less, he  resolutely  adhered  to  the  policy. 

Meanwhile,  TR  girded  himself  for  battle  with  his  principal  ad- 
versary— Governor  Woodrow  Wilson  of  New  Jersey.  Roosevelt  and 
his  followers  had  hoped  that  the  bibulous  Champ  Clark  of  Missouri 
would  be  the  Democratic  nominee;  and  their  depression  ran  deep 
when  Wilson  won  a  grueling  contest  on  the  forty-sixth  ballot  at  Balti- 
more the  week  after  they  had  stormed  hopefully  out  of  the  Republican 
convention  in  Chicago. 

Wilson  and  Roosevelt  had  once  been  cordial,  if  not  intimate, 
friends,  "Woodrow  Wilson  is  a  perfect  trump,"  TR  had  written  in 
1902  when  Wilson  was  named  president  of  Princeton  University; 
and  Wilson  had  reciprocated.  Gradually,  however,  their  friendship 
weakened,  for  Wilson  strongly  disapproved  Roosevelt's  strident  na- 
tionalism. He  also  became  disenchanted  with  TR's  personality,  and  in 
November,  1907,  gave  out  an  interview,  which  he  afterward  par- 
tially disavowed: 

I  have  not  seen  much  of  Mr.  Roosevelt  since  he  became  Presi- 
dent, but  I  am  told  that  he  no  sooner  thinks  than  he  talks,  which 
is  a  miracle  not  wholly  in  accord  with  the  educational  theory  of 
forming  an  opinion. 


446  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

As  Governor  of  New  Jersey  in  1911,  however,  Wilson  had  won 
national  recognition  by  his  masterful  imposition  of  a  formidable  body 
of  progressive  legislation  upon  a  divided  legislature;  and  that  accom- 
plishment, together  with  his  conservative  mien  and  commanding 
eloquence,  made  him  the  strongest  nominee  the  Democrats  could  have 
named.  The  day  after  he  was  nominated,  Governor  Osborn,  one  of 
the  two  of  the  original  seven  governors  who  finally  voted  for  TR,  had 
spread  consternation  through  the  Colonel's  ranks  by  publicly  declar- 
ing that  there  was  now  "no  necessity  for  a  new  party"  and  urging 
Roosevelt  not  to  run.  Praising  Wilson  as  "a  Christian,  [sic]  a  scholar 
and  a  fearless  citizen,"  the  Michigan  Governor  added  that  Wilson 
was  "not  owned  by  anybody"  and  would  "lead  the  people  against  the 
financial  overlords  in  orderly  but  earnest  fashion." 

In  spite  of  TR's  realization  that  he  could  not  win  and  that  the 
party  he  was  founding  could  not  survive — "I  would  have  had  a  sport- 
ing chance  if  the  Democrats  had  put  up  a  reactionary  candidate,"  he 
lamented  to  Sir  Horace  Plunkett  on  the  eve  of  the  Bull  Moose  con- 
vention— the  Colonel  remained  adamant.  His  prejudices  against  the 
Democrats  were  too  deep,  his  desire  to  destroy  Taft  too  consuming, 
his  conviction  too  compelling,  and  his  urge  for  leadership  too  ir- 
resistible. He  replied  to  Osborn,  who  had  meanwhile  written  that 
"Woodrow  Wilson  represents  .  .  .  what  you  represent,"  that  Wilson's 
election  would  result  in  a  resurgence  of  the  Democratic  bosses  and 
that  two-thirds  of  his  own  supporters  would  go  to  Taft  if  he  withdrew. 
And  though  he  admitted  to  Plunkett  that  Wilson  "is  an  able  man  .  .  . 
and  would  not  show  Taft's  muddle-headed  inability  to  understand," 
he  deplored  the  fact  that  he  was  not  "a  Nationalist."  Indeed,  Roosevelt 
continued  with  considerable  accuracy,  until  Wilson  was  fifty  years 
old  "he  advocated  with  skill,  intelligence  and  good  breeding  the  out- 
worn doctrines  which  are  responsible  for  four-fifths  of  the  political 
troubles  of  the  United  States."  Then,  as  governor,  he  "turned  an 
absolute  somersault  so  far  as  at  least  half  of  these  doctrines  was 
concerned." 

Perhaps  the  most  significant  feature  of  the  campaign  that  ensued 
that  summer  and  fall  was  the  modification  Roosevelt  induced  in  the 
"other  half"  of  Wilson's  doctrines — and  also  the  partial  retreat  the 
New  Jersey  Governor,  who  was  counseled  by  that  great  people's 
attorney,  Louis  D.  Brandeis,  forced  the  Colonel  to  make.  Writing  off 
Taft  as  undeserving  of  serious  debate,  TR  charged  Wilson  with  "rural 


ARMAGEDDON  447 

toryism";  he  argued  that  his  proposal  to  resolve  the  trust  problem  by 
breaking  up  the  giant  corporations  was  anachronistic;  and  he  exag- 
geratedly contended  that  Wilson's  low-tariff  views,  which  he  inter- 
preted as  embracing  free  trade,  would  destroy  the  American  working- 
man.  But  he  hammered  most  forcefully  at  Wilson's  reluctance  to 
countenance  big  government.  "Mr.  Wilson  is  fond  of  asserting  his 
platonic  devotion  to  the  purposes  of  the  Progressive  party,"  TR  de- 
clared at  San  Francisco  on  September  14.  But,  he  continued,  Wilson 
also  holds  that  "  The  history  of  liberty  is  a  history  of  the  limitation 
of  governmental  power,  not  the  increase  of  it.' "  He  then  asked  how 
his  opponent  could  square  that  view  with  the  Progressive  proposals 
for  workmen's  compensation,  the  limitation  of  the  hours  of  labor, 
regulation  of  work  conditions  in  factories,  control  of  railroads  and 
the  trusts,  and  all  the  rest.  "We  propose  to  use  the  whole  power  of 
the  government  to  protect  all  those  who,  under  Mr.  Wilson's  laissez- 
faire  system,  are  trodden  down  in  the  ferocious,  scrambling  rush  of 
an  unregulated  and  purely  individualistic  industrialism,"  Roosevelt 
concluded. 

Actually,  as  John  Wells  Davidson's  work  on  Wilson  shows,  TR 
had  inadvertently  quoted  Wilson  out  of  context.  The  "history  of 
liberty"  remark,  made  in  New  York  on  September  16,  had  been 
preceded  by  a  qualifying  paragraph  which  the  newspapers  had  failed 
to  reproduce.  Nevertheless,  Wilson  and  Roosevelt  were  still  separated 
by  a  tremendous  gulf.  Wilson  sought  to  bridge  it,  for  he  was  wounded 
by  Roosevelt's  hammering.  The  first  break  came  in  a  speech  at  Scran- 
ton  in  early  October,  "I  realize  that  while  we  are  followers  of  Jeffer- 
son," Wilson  asserted,  "there  is  one  principle  of  Jefferson's  which  no 
longer  can  obtain  in  the  practical  politics  of  America." 

You  know  that  it  was  Jefferson  who  said  that  the  best  govern- 
ment is  that  which  does  as  little  governing  as  possible.  .  .  .  That 
was  said  in  a  day  when  the  opportunities  of  America  were  so  ob- 
vious .  .  .  that  all  that  was  necessary  was  that  the  government 
should  withhold  its  hand  and  see  to  it  that  every  man  got  an  op- 
portunity to  act  if  he  would.  But  that  time  is  past.  America  is  not 
now,  and  cannot  in  the  future  be,  a  place  for  unrestricted  individual 
enterprise. 

Wilson  also  focused  increasingly  on  social  justice  as  the  campaign 
progressed.  He  refused  to  endorse  the  Progressives'  demand  for  a 
minimum  wage  law  for  women,  arguing  that  it  would  drive  the  general 


448  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

wage  level  down  to  the  minimum.  Nor  did  he  come  out  for  a  national 
child  labor  law  as  Roosevelt  and  his  party  advocated.  By  the  end  of 
the  campaign,  however,  he  had  several  times  endorsed  the  Progressive 
party's  broad  social  objectives.  "I  want  to  say  here,  as  I  have  said  on 
so  many  other  occasions,"  the  Democratic  candidate  declared  in 
Minneapolis,  "that  there  is  a  great  deal  in  the  program  of  the  new 
third  party  which  attracts  all  public-spirited  and  hopeful  men,  that 
there  is  a  great  program  of  human  uplift  included  in  the  platform  of 
that  party." 

Meanwhile  Wilson  maintained  a  relentless  fire  on  Roosevelt's  pro- 
posal to  place  trust  regulation  under  a  commission  of  experts  without 
specifying  in  law  the  abuses  to  be  regulated.  Under  Wilson's  harass- 
ment and  the  concurrent  complaints  of  the  radical  Progressives,  the 
Colonel  finally  submitted.  In  mid-October  he  issued  a  statement  that 
virtually  reaffirmed  the  antitrust  plank  Perkins  had  struck  out  of  the 
platform  in  the  backstage  episode  at  Chicago. 

If,  for  instance,  a  corporation  should  be  found  crushing  out 
competition  by  refusing  to  sell  when  the  patron  bought  off  com- 
petitors, or  by  underselling  in  districts,  or  in  the  dozen  of  other 
ways  that  Congress  should  learn  were  being  practised  and  should 
say  were  illegal,  I  would  have  the  statute  say  point  blank,  with  no 
loophole  for  escape,  that  the  corporation  was  guilty. 

Roosevelt's  statement  had  been  issued  from  a  hospital  bed  in 
Chicago  where,  surrounded  by  his  wife  and  younger  children,  he  lay 
recuperating  from  a  bullet  wound.  On  October  14,  in  Milwaukee,  as 
he  stepped  into  his  car,  he  had  been  shot  by  a  fanatic.  The  bullet 
went  through  the  former  President's  overcoat,  spectacles  case,  and 
folded  manuscript,  fracturing  his  fourth  rib  and  lodging  a  little  short 
of  his  right  lung.  Stunned,  TR  had  fallen  backward  momentarily, 
coughed,  and  then  stood  up  again.  "Stand  back.  Don't  hurt  the  man," 
he  shouted  at  the  crowd.  Then,  over  the  protests  of  attending  physi- 
cians, he  had  insisted  that  he  be  driven  to  the  auditorium,  where  he 
was  scheduled  to  deliver  an  address. 

"Friends,"  he  exclaimed  to  the  crowd  that  sat  rigid  before  him  five 
minutes  later,  "I  shall  ask  you  to  be  as  quiet  as  possible.  I  don't  know 
whether  you  fully  understand  that  I  have  just  been  shot;  but  it  takes 
more  than  that  to  kill  a  Bull  Moose.  ...  I  had  my  manuscript — 
and  there  is  a  bullet — there  is  where  the  bullet  went  through  .  .  . 
and  it  probably  saved  me  from  it  going  into  my  heart.  The  bullet  is 


ARMAGEDDON  449 

in  me  now.  .  .  .  And  now,  friends  ...  I  want  you  to  understand 
that  I  am  ahead  of  the  game,  anyway.  No  man  has  had  a  happier 
life  than  I  have  led.  ...  I  cannot  understand  a  man  fit  to  be  a 
colonel  who  can  pay  any  heed  to  his  personal  safety.  .  .  .  Friends, 
I  am  thinking  of  the  movement.  ...  He  shot  to  kill.  He  shot — the 
shot,  the  bullet  went  in  here — I  will  show  you.  .  .  .  Now,  friends, 
I  am  not  speaking  for  myself  at  all.  I  give  you  my  word,  I  do  not 
care  a  rap  about  being  shot;  not  a  rap.  .  .  .  Now,  friends — [speak- 
ing to  someone  on  the  stage],  I  am  not  sick  at  all.  I  am  all  right.  .  .  . 
Now  friends,  what  we  Progressives  are  trying  to  do  is  to  enroll  rich 
or  poor  ...  to  stand  together  for  the  most  elementary  rights  of  good 
citizenship.  .  .  .  My  friends  are  a  little  more  nervous  than  I  am. 
Don't  you  waste  any  sympathy  on  me.  I  have  had  an  A-l  time  in  life 
and  I  am  having  it  now.  .  .  ." 

Of  a  sudden  TR  seemed  to  forget  all  about  his  wound.  "At  one 
time  I  promoted  five  men  for  gallantry  .  .  .  two  of  them  were 
Protestants,  two  Catholics,  and  one  a  Jew.  ...  If  all  five  of  them 
had  been  Jews  I  would  have  promoted  them.  .  .  ."  He  continued, 
moving  now  into  the  theme  of  his  prepared  address.  "I  make  the 
same  appeal  in  our  citizenship."  ".  .  .  It  is  essential  that  there  should 
be  organizations  of  labor.  This  is  an  era  of  organization.  Capital 
organizes  and  therefore  labor  must  organize."  Roosevelt  then  called 
for  capital  to  treat  labor  fairly  and  for  labor  to  repudiate  crime  and 
violence.  Finally,  he  struck  at  his  principal  opponent.  "I  know  these 
doctors,  when  they  get  hold  of  me,  will  never  let  me  go  back,  and 
there  are  just  a  few  things  more  that  I  want  to  say  to  you,"  TR 
declared.  "Mr.  Wilson  has  distinctly  committed  .  .  .  [himself]  to 
the  old  flintlock,  muzzle-loaded  doctrine  of  States'  rights.  .  .  .  We 
are  for  the  people's  rights.  If  they  can  be  obtained  best  through  the 
National  Government,  then  we  are  for  national  rights."  ".  .  .  Mr. 
Wilson  has  distinctly  declared  that  you  shall  not  have  a  national  law 
to  prohibit  the  labor  of  children.  ...  I  ask  you  to  look  at  our 
declaration  and  hear  and  read  our  platform  about  social  and  industrial 
justice  and  then,  friends,  vote  for  the  Progressive  ticket  without  regard 
tome.  .  .  ." 

The  Colonel  had  spoken  for  almost  an  hour.  Yet,  as  Pringle  writes, 
"Men  did  not  judge  .  .  .  [his  performance]  histrionic  or  childish." 
Such  was  Theodore  Roosevelt's  uniqueness. 

The  election  returns  a  few  weeks  later  confirmed  Roosevelt's  fears. 


450  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

Wilson  won  in  a  landslide  with  435  electoral  votes.  He  failed,  how- 
ever, to  win  a  popular  majority,  receiving  6,286,124  votes  to  Roose- 
velt's 4,126,020  and  Taft's  3,483,922.  And  although  one  embittered 
Socialist  pointed  out  that  "the  new  party,  which  goes  boldly  forth  to 
its  first  campaign  with  the  inscription  on  its  banners,  Thou  Shalt 
Not  Steal!'  begins  its  career  with  the  brazen  theft  of  half  the  working 
program  of  the  Socialist  party,"  Eugene  V.  Debs  polled  close  to  a 
million  votes.  It  was  a  remarkable  demonstration  of  the  left  wing's 
distrust  of  the  three  major  candidates,  their  parties,  and  their  pro- 
grams. On  the  other  hand,  the  Democrats  captured  both  houses  of 
Congress  and  numerous  governorships  while  the  Progressives  won  but 
a  scattering  of  congressional  seats  and  elected  only  one  governor. 

Roosevelt  ran  best  in  the  urban  areas — he  swept  Pennsylvania, 
Michigan,  California,  and  three  smaller  states — and  he  fared  poorer 
than  expected  in  the  West.  His  ringing  defenses  of  his  conservation 
policies  antagonized  anticonservationist  Westerners,  and  great  numbers 
of  them  reportedly  voted  Democratic  in  order  to  spite  him.  More 
significant  still,  he  failed  to  win  over  the  Democratic  and  independent 
progressives;  party  loyalty,  Wilson's  eloquence,  and  the  lingering 
belief  that  the  Colonel  was  a  trimmer  all  worked  against  him.  As  the 
reformer  Anna  Howard  Shaw  wrote  Jane  Addams  shortly  after  the 
Progressive  convention,  "I  wish  I  could  believe  .  .  .  [TR]  intended 
to  do  a  single  honest  thing,  or  that  he  would  carry  out  a  single  plank 
in  the  platform  if  he  were  elected  ...  I  cannot."  That  statement 
mirrored  the  views  of  thousands  of  nonpolitical  reformers  who  never 
understood  the  constructive  compromises  of  Roosevelt's  presidency. 

The  crusade,  nevertheless,  had  not  been  in  vain.  Roosevelt's 
vigorous  and  explicit  statement  of  the  case  for  social  justice  had 
sharpened  the  mounting  offensive  against  privilege  and  exploitation. 
And  just  as  importantly,  it  had  forced  Wilson  and  many  of  the 
leaders  of  his  party  to  face  the  paradox  inherent  in  their  commitment 
to  both  national  reform  and  the  philosophy  of  states'  rights. 

Theodore  Roosevelt's  personal  services  to  the  great  movement  that 
was  the  signal  feature  of  the  era  that  bears  his  name  virtually  ended 
with  the  Bull  Moose  campaign.  Within  the  following  four  years  the 
Democratic  party  under  Woodrow  Wilson  would  write  the  burden  of 
the  Bull  Moose  party's  planks  into  law,  and  Roosevelt  himself  would 
go  into  temporary  eclipse.  He  would  come  out  of  it  near  the  end  of 
Wilson's  first  administration  to  perform  one  last  memorable  service 
and  some  disservice  to  the  country  he  loved. 


PART 


VI 


ONE   LAST   GREAT  CAUSE 


CHAPTER  28 


THE   VARIETY  OF   HIM— 


.  .  .  the  vitality  of  him,  the  charm,  the  humor,  the  intellectual 
avidity,  the  love  of  people,  the  flaming  devotion  to  his  country. 

— Hermann  Hagedorn 


Although  its  leader  would  return  at  the  head  of  another  great  com- 
mand, the  Progressive  party  itself  was  doomed  to  die.  Its  fate  had  been 
sealed  in  the  summer  of  its  birth  by  the  failure  of  Republican  office- 
holders to  support  it;  and  with  all  his  personal  magnetism,  Theodore 
Roosevelt  had  not  the  power  to  sustain  it  indefinitely.  The  real  ques- 
tions were  how  long  the  death  rattle  would  last,  and  whether  the 
Great  Bull  Moose  would  make  a  final  ferocious  lunge  before  it  rolled 
over  and  died.  The  answers  lay  in  Roosevelt's  personality,  the 
metamorphosis  of  Woodrow  Wilson  and  the  Democratic  party,  and 
in  the  coming  of  World  War  I. 

The  Colonel's  first  inclination  was  to  drift  with  the  tide  of  events. 
He  considered  himself  finished  as  a  politician  and  early  in  1913  he 
plunged  into  the  writing  of  his  autobiography.  Yet  he  was  under  heavy 
obligations  to  those  more  than  four  million  Americans  who  had 
affirmed  their  faith  at  the  polls,  and  especially  to  those  thousands  of 
nonprofessionals  who  had  cut  loose  from  the  Grand  Old  Party  to 
serve  under  his  banner.  Great  hosts  of  these  still  believed  that  the  party 
could  eventually  supplant  the  G.O.P.;  a  sizable  number  were  deter- 
mined to  see  that  it  did.  Their  leader  felt  duty  bound  to  go  along  with 
them,  at  least  until  the  Congressional  elections  of  1914  clearly  ex- 
posed the  party's  fatal  weakness. 

The  first  order  of  business  was  to  suppress  a  movement  by  Gifford 

453 


454  POWER  AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

Pinchot  and  the  Western  radicals  to  deprive  George  Perkins  of  his 
influence  in  party  councils.  Ascribing  the  movement  to  "baseless  prej- 
udice," Roosevelt  emphatically  refused  to  "throw  to  the  wolves  one 
of  the  staunchest  allies  and  supporters  we  have  had.  .  .  ."  The 
radicals  thereupon  submitted,  although  they  won  from  both  Roosevelt 
and  Perkins  the  right  to  include  a  plank  favoring  the  strengthening  of 
the  Sherman  Antitrust  Act  in  the  platform  they  adopted  at  their 
Chicago  meeting  a  month  following  the  election.  The  Colonel  himself 
attended  the  Chicago  meeting,  and  on  December  10  reaffirmed  the 
Progressive  creed  in  a  typically  fervent  speech  before  fifteen  hundred 
delegates.  From  then  until  the  1914  congressional  elections,  moreover, 
he  repeatedly  declared  that  the  party  was  permanent.  "We  believe  that 
there  are  literally  millions  of  progressives  now  associated  with  the 
Democratic  and  Republican  parties  who  agree  with  our  principles,"  he 
wrote  a  group  of  leading  Minnesota  Progressives  in  January,  1913. 
"There  shall  be  no  retreat  from  the  position  we  have  taken.  High 
of  heart  and  strong  of  hand,  we  front  the  future;  and  the  future  is 
surely  ours." 

Yet  Roosevelt  scarcely  believed  his  own  words  as  he  uttered  them. 
"I  regret  to  add  that  I  agree  with  your  forecast,"  he  replied  to  a 
pessimistic  letter  from  Hiram  Johnson  in  January,  1913.  "Our  chance 
depends  upon  there  being  a  break  in  the  Democratic  party  .  .  . 
[Wilson]  showed  his  adroitness  during  the  campaign,  and  he  may 
well  be  able  to  show  similar  adroitness  during  the  next  four  years  in 
the  Presidency,  and  with  the  same  result." 

Well,  my  dear  Governor,  if  these  views  are  correct,  the  chances 
of  immediate  victory  or  at  least  of  victory  obtained  under  my 
leadership,  are  not  great.  ...  In  any  event  I  do  believe  that  great 
good  has  come  from  the  fight  we  have  made,  and  that  the  prin- 
ciples for  which  we  stand  have  made  and  will  make  real  progress. 

But  it  was  not  in  the  Colonel's  nature  to  withdraw  permanently 
from  the  surging  stream  of  events.  When  the  lower  Mississippi  Valley 
was  again  inundated  by  flood  waters  in  the  winter  of  1913,  he  reiter- 
ated his  demand  for  multipurpose  development  of  the  entire 
watershed.  It  was  "criminally  wasteful"  for  the  "richest  nation  on 
earth"  to  "hesitate  or  haggle"  over  adoption  of  such  a  program,  he 
angrily  wrote  John  M.  Parker,  the  Progressive  leader  of  Louisiana. 
There  must  be  a  "national  effort  to  turn  floods  into  power,  arid  regions 


THE   VARIETY   OF    HIM  455 

into  gardens,  and  marshes  into  farms"  through  a  single  enabling  act 
of  Congress,  "establishing  a  policy  and  providing  continuing  funds, 
exactly  as  was  done  in  the  case  of  the  Panama  Canal." 

Meanwhile  TR  commented  on  the  issues  of  the  day  through  the 
columns  of  the  Outlook.  He  contributed  to  the  settlement  in  the 
workers'  interest  of  a  major  garment  strike  in  New  York.  And  in  line 
with  his  belief  that  the  traditional  method  of  revising  the  tariff  was 
outmoded,  he  encouraged  the  little  band  of  Progressives  in  Congress 
to  foster  a  tariff  commission,  which  proposal  Wilson  finally  accepted 
in  1916.  Conversely  Roosevelt  failed  to  acknowledge  the  magnitude 
of  the  President's  achievement  in  forcing  through  Congress  the  first 
significant  downward  revision  of  the  tariff  since  before  the  Civil  War. 
And  though  TR  came  out  for  repeal  of  the  exemption  of  Panama 
Canal  tolls  granted  American  coastwise  shipping  in  violation  of  the 
treaty  of  1900  with  Great  Britain,  he  said  nothing  after  Wilson  took 
up  the  matter. 

But  in  the  main,  TR  devoted  himself  to  the  pleasures  of  life  at 
Sagamore — to  walks  with  his  wife,  to  whom  he  was  even  closer  in  his 
middle  age  than  he  had  been  in  his  youth;  to  letters  to  Quentin  and 
Archie  at  Groton  and  Harvard,  to  Kermit  in  Brazil,  where  he  was 
employed  as  an  engineer;  and  to  Ted,  a  successful  businessman  in 
California  and  father  of  the  Colonel's  first  grandchild  ("the  very 
dearest  baby  you  ever  saw,"  said  TR);  to  luncheons  with  that  great 
host  of  politicians,  scientists,  and  men  of  letters  who  poured  ceaselessly 
into  Oyster  Bay  or  the  Outlook  offices;  and  to  the  preparation  of 
speeches,  articles,  and  books. 

On  December  27,  1912,  seven  weeks  after  the  Bull  Moose  Cam- 
paign became  history,  Roosevelt  appeared  in  Boston  to  deliver  the 
presidential  address  to  the  American  Historical  Association.  "I  am  to 
deliver  a  beastly  lecture — 'History  as  Literature' — "  he  confided  to 
Lodge.  He  added  that  none  of  the  Association's  members  "believe 
that  history  is  literature"  but  that  he  had  spent  "much  care"  on  the 
address  even  so.  He  did  not  spare  the  disbelievers,  whom  he  had  long 
ago  characterized  to  Trevelyan  as  the  "small  men  who  do  most  of  the 
teaching,"  when  he  confronted  them. 

Roosevelt's  own  poetic  strain  was  too  strong  and  his  potential  as  a 
stylist  too  powerful  for  him  to  have  approved  the  dryness  of  much  of 
the  new  historical  writing — itself  a  reflection,  ironically,  of  that 
scientific  spirit  with  which  he  was  otherwise  so  imbued.  Inevitably, 


456  POWER  AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

he  overstated  the  case  for  literary  excellence,  though  with  such  lyric 
force  as  almost  to  win  it.  He  understood,  assuredly,  the  importance  of 
the  monograph,  if  not  of  economic  analysis.  And  he  paid  formal 
deference  at  the  outset  of  his  address  to  the  men  who  wrote  them. 
"I  pay  high  honor  to  the  patient  and  truthful  investigator,"  he  said. 
"He  does  an  indispensable  work."  But  he  wanted  more,  far  more  than 
most  men  could  give.  What  was  needed  was  "the  great  master  who 
can  use  the  materials  gathered,  who  has  the  gift  of  vision,  the  quality 
of  the  seer,  the  power  himself  to  see  what  has  happened  and  to  make 
what  he  has  seen  clear  to  the  vision  of  others."  His  protest,  Roosevelt 
explained,  was  against  those  "who  believe  that  the  extension  of  the 
activities  of  the  most  competent  mason  and  most  energetic  contractor 
will  supply  the  lack  of  great  architects."  The  distinguished  historian 
of  the  future  must  have  vision  and  imagination,  the  power  to  grasp 
the  essentials  and  reject  the  nonessentials,  the  "power  to  embody 
ghosts,  to  put  flesh  and  blood  on  dry  bones,  to  make  dead  men  living 
before  our  eyes."  He  must,  the  author  of  The  Winning  of  the  West 
declaimed,  "have  the  power  to  take  the  science  of  history  and  turn 
it  into  literature." 

Then,  in  passages  as  revealing  of  his  ultimate  affirmation  of  human 
kind  as  any  he  ever  wrote,  he  called  both  for  deeper  understanding 
and  firmer  moral  judgment.  "Side  by  side  with  the  need  for  the  per- 
fection of  the  individual  in  the  technic  of  his  special  calling,"  Roose- 
velt said,  "goes  the  need  of  broad  human  sympathy,  and  the  need  of 
lofty  and  generous  emotion  in  the  individual."  The  great  historian 
must  perforce  be  a  great  moralist.  "It  is  no  proof  of  impartiality  to 
treat  wickedness  and  goodness  as  on  the  same  level."  Agreed,  there 
were  dangers.  It  was  wrong,  for  example,  to  allow  abstract  principles 
to  intrude  upon  facts  as  Carlyle  had  done  in  his  Frederick  the  Great. 
Nevertheless,  Roosevelt  warned,  when  great  events  lack  a  great  his- 
torian the  poet  will  fix  them  in  the  minds  of  men.  Shakespeare  had 
so  fixed  the  character  of  Richard  III;  and  it  is  the  lines  of  Keats,  who 
had  even  forgotten  Balboa's  correct  name,  "which  leap  to  our  minds 
when  we  think  of  the  'wild  surmise'  felt  by  the  indomitable  explorer- 
conqueror  from  Spain  when  the  vast  new  sea  burst  on  his  vision." 

Warning  his  fellow  historians  that  the  revolt  against  the  spectacular 
and  the  exceptional,  against  war,  oratory,  and  politics,  had  gone  too 
far,  Roosevelt  declared  that  "there  are  hours  so  fraught  with  weighty 
achievement,  with  triumph  or  defeat,  with  joy  or  sorrow,  that  each 


THE  VARIETY   OF   HIM  457 

such  hour  may  determine  all  ...  that  are  to  come  thereafter."  Then, 
in  a  Churchillian  peroration  that  rings  down  through  the  years,  he 
challenged  his  listeners  to  re-create  the  truly  epochal  movements  of 
the  past.  "Some  day,"  he  concluded,  "the  historians  .  .  .  will  portray 
the  conquest  of  the  continent.  .  .  .  They  will  show  how  the  land 
which  the  pioneers  won  slowly  and  with  incredible  hardship  was  filled 
in  two  generations  by  the  overflow  from  the  countries  of  western  and 
central  Europe.  The  portentous  growth  of  the  cities  will  be  shown, 
and  the  change  from  a  nation  of  farmers  to  a  nation  of  business  men 
and  artisans.  .  .  .  The  formation  of  a  new  ethnic  type  in  this  melting- 
pot  of  nations  will  be  told.  The  hard  materialism  of  our  age  will 
appear,  and  also  the  strange  capacity  for  lofty  idealism  which  must  be 
reckoned  with  by  all  who  would  understand  the  American  char- 
acter. .  .  ." 

In  February,  1913,  Roosevelt's  autobiography  began  to  appear  in 
the  Outlook  in  serial  form.  Like  all  autobiographies  it  justified  its 
subject's  career,  and  like  most  autobiographies  it  was  marked  by 
grievous  omissions.  Its  literary  quality  was  uneven,  though  some  sec- 
tions were  superbly  written,  and  its  point  of  view  was  that  of  the 
Progressive  rather  than  the  Republican  Roosevelt.  But  for  all  of  that, 
it  was  and  is  the  most  illuminating  autobiography  ever  written  by  a 
former  President  and  probably  by  any  major  American  political 
leader. 

At  odd  hours  into  the  late  spring  of  1913  TR  also  wrote  his  part 
of  Life  Histories  of  African  Game  Animals,  a  two-volume  work  done 
in  collaboration  with  the  naturalist  Edmund  Heller.  Published  in  1914 
under  Roosevelt  and  Heller's  name  (TR  had  offered  to  list  the 
naturalist's  name  first),  it  was  commended  by  the  Bulletin  of  the 
American  Geographic  Society  as  "a  very  valuable  contribution  both 
to  geography  and  zoology,"  and  by  C.  Hart  Merriam  as  "far  and  away 
the  best  book  ever  written  on  the  big-game  animals  of  any  part  of 
the  world." 

Meanwhile  Ethel  was  married  to  Richard  Derby  in  the  little  Epis- 
copal church  in  Oyster  Bay  where  the  family  worshiped.  The  guest 
list  reflected  the  shattering  political  upheaval  of  the  previous  year; 
also  Roosevelt's  conviction  that  he  had  been  cheated  out  of  the 
Republican  nomination.  Cabot  Lodge  was  invited,  but  he  lacked  con- 
genial company.  "We  did  not  send  invitations  to  Root  or  Taft  or 
Nicholas  Murray  Butler  .  .  ."  TR  explained  to  Winthrop  Chanler, 


458  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

"because  they  would  have  been  just  as  unwelcome  guests  as  Barnes 
or  Penrose  or  Guggenheim."  "Root  took  part  in  as  downright  a  bit 
of  theft  and  swindling  as  ever  was  perpetrated  by  any  Tammany 
ballot  box  stuffer,  and  I  shall  never  forgive  the  men  who  were  the 
leaders  in  that  swindling." 

In  late  May  the  Colonel  pressed  a  libel  suit  against  an  obscure 
Michigan  editor  who  had  written  during  the  campaign  of  1912  that 
"Roosevelt  lies  and  curses  in  a  most  disgusting  way;  he  gets  drunk 
too,  and  that  not  infrequently,  and  all  of  his  intimates  know  about  it." 
Determined,  as  he  phrased  it,  "to  expose  the  infamy  of  these  slanders," 
the  Colonel  easily  won  the  suit.  The  editor  failed  to  produce  a  single 
witness  to  confirm  his  assertions,  though  in  actual  fact  TR  was  given 
to  mild  profanity  when  excited,  and  Roosevelt  produced  a  host  of 
depositions  to  disprove  them.  At  TR's  request,  damages  were  set  at 
six  cents. 

It  was  in  the  spring  of  1913,  also,  that  Roosevelt  made  a  memor- 
able sally  into  art  criticism.  He  had  never  been  as  sensitive  to  the  fine 
arts  as  to  literature  and  history.  Yet  his  curiosity  was  so  avid  and  his 
belief  in  the  ennobling  force  of  aesthetics  so  firm  that  he  was  un- 
failingly responsive.  He  considered  the  Gothic  cathedrals  of  Western 
Europe  "the  most  magnificent  architecture  that  our  race  has  ever 
been  able  to  produce,"  though  he  also  liked  the  Greek  temples, 
and  he  admired  Raphael,  Michelangelo,  and  Rembrandt  among  the 
painters.  His  favorite  contemporary  sculptor  was  Saint-Gaudens.  As 
President,  in  fact,  Roosevelt  had  directed  the  United  States  Mint  to 
employ  Saint-Gaudens  to  design  coins.  Then,  when  the  sculptor  de- 
cided for  artistic  reasons  to  omit  the  phrase  "In  God  We  Trust"  from 
the  new  coins,  Roosevelt  had  supported  him  in  the  face  of  a  popular 
outcry.  Roosevelt  had  also  appointed  a  Fine  Arts  Council  of  dis- 
tinguished architects,  painters,  and  sculptors  to  advise  the  government 
on  the  design  and  placement  of  public  buildings.  ("I  am  going  to  do 
what  these  men  want,  Gifford;  it  is  a  move  for  civilization;  it  is  the 
right  thing  to  do,"  he  said  to  Pinchot  at  the  time.  "It  is  a  great  deal 
better  than  appointing  third-class  postmasters.")  Before  the  council 
was  disbanded  under  Taft  at  the  behest  of  pork-barrel  congressmen 
and  commercial  interests,  an  enlightened  plan  for  the  preservation  and 
development  of  the  Mall  was  adopted.  The  result,  a  former  member 
of  the  Council  wrote  in  the  American  Architect  the  year  after  TR's 
death,  was  "an  epoch"  in  our  history.  Theodore  Roosevelt's  adminis- 


THE   VARIETY   OF    HIM  459 

trations  marked  the  first  real  case  "of  Executive  appreciation  of  the 
Fine  Arts"  since  John  Quincy  Adams. 

On  March  27,  1913,  after  viewing  the  historic  international  ex- 
hibition of  modern  art  at  the  Sixty-ninth  Regiment  Armory,  Roosevelt 
described  his  impressions  for  the  Outlook  under  the  title,  "A  Lay- 
man's View  of  an  Art  Exhibition."  Unabashedly,  the  former  President 
compared  the  Cubists  and  the  Futurists  or  Near-Impressionists  to  the 
"lunatic  fringe"  of  the  progressive  movement  in  one  passage  and  to 
the  "later  work  of  the  paleolithic  artists  of  the  French  and  Spanish 
caves"  in  the  next.  And  he  took  particular  exception  to  a  Duchamp 
which  "for  some  reason  is  called  'A  Naked  Man  Going  Down 
Stairs,' "  [sic]  but  could  just  as  fittingly  have  been  called  "  'A  Well- 
Dressed  Man  Going  Up  a  Ladder.' "  Yet  he  perceived,  even  as  he 
failed  wholly  to  understand;  his  appreciation  of  the  exhibition's  raging 
creativity  was  far  in  advance  of  some  of  the  best  professional  opinion 
of  the  times.  "It  is  vitally  necessary  to  move  forward  and  to  shake 
off  the  dead  hand,  often  the  fossilized  dead  hand,  of  the  reactionaries," 
Roosevelt  wrote.  The  necessary  penalty  of  creativity  "is  a  liability  to 
extravagance." 

There  was  one  note  entirely  absent  .  .  .  and  that  was  the  note 
of  the  commonplace.  There  was  not  a  touch  of  simpering,  self- 
satisfied  conventionality  anywhere  in  the  exhibition.  Any  sculptor 
or  painter  who  had  in  him  something  to  express  and  the  power  of 
expressing  it  found  the  field  open  to  him.  .  .  .  There  was  no  stunt- 
ing or  dwarfing,  no  requirement  that  a  man  whose  gift  lay  in  new 
directions  should  measure  up  or  down  to  stereotyped  and  fossilized 
standards. 

And  so  with  TR's  understanding  of  literature.  It  is  true  that  he 
allowed  the  moral  and  political  conventions  of  the  times  to  delimit  his 
appreciation — that  he  failed  in  part  to  come  into  rapport  with  the 
naturalistic  novelists  whose  rise  roughly  paralleled  his  own  because 
they  described  the  "unspeakable"  or  because  he  found  their  deter- 
ministic philosophy  indigestible.  As  he  explained  to  the  minor 
novelists  Owen  Wister  and  Winston  Churchill,  Mrs.  Roosevelt  could 
evaluate  literary  works  purely  on  their  aesthetic  quality,  but  he  could 
not.  "I  am  old-fashioned,  or  sentimental,  or  something,  about  books!" 
he  admitted.  "Whenever  I  read  one  I  want,  in  the  first  place,  to 
enjoy  myself,  and,  in  the  next  place,  to  feel  that  I  am  a  little  better 
and  not  a  little  worse  for  having  read  it."  TR  believed  with  Bernard 


460  POWER  AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

Shaw  that  comedy  is  more  realistic  than  tragedy,  and  he  more  than 
once  advised  Wister,  perhaps  with  deleterious  effect,  and  other  of  his 
novelist  friends  to  "Let  in  some  sunlight,  somehow  .  .  .  life,  after 
all,  does — go — on." 

The  result  was  a  string  of  social,  moral,  and  political  pronounce- 
ments that  have  sadly  compromised  Roosevelt's  reputation  in  ac- 
ademic circles.  Henry  James  was  "a  miserable  little  snob"  for 
abandoning  his  native  land  and  writing  of  the  drawing  room.  The 
characters  of  Zola  were  "hideous  human  swine."  To  find  the  merits 
of  Rabelais  and  Boccaccio  was  to  examine  "a  gold  chain  encrusted 
in  the  filth  of  a  pigpen."  Kipling's  Stalky  &  Co.  was  unhealthy,  "for 
there  is  hardly  a  single  form  of  meanness  which  it  does  not  ex- 
tol. ..."  Even  Peck's  Bad  Boy  was  unfortunate.  "I  want  every  boy 
to  be  manly  and  able  to  fight  for  his  own  rights  and  those  of  his 
country,"  TR  wrote  a  youngster  who  expressed  fondness  for  the  book, 
"but  I  want  him  to  be  gentle  and  upright  also." 

It  was  Roosevelt's  attitude  toward  Tolstoy,  however,  which  has 
exposed  him  to  the  severest  criticism.  TR  conceded  that  the  Russian 
giant  was  "a  great  writer,  a  great  novelist,"  and  that  "even  as  a 
professional  moralist  and  philosophical  adviser  of  mankind  in  re- 
ligious matters  he  has  some  excellent  theories  and  on  some  points 
develops  a  noble  and  elevating  teaching.  .  .  ."  But  he  feared  that  if 
Tolstoy's  preachments  were  broadly  diffused  among  the  people  they 
"would  have  an  influence  for  bad."  Hence  his  disapprobation.  There 
was  in  the  Kreutzer  Sonata,  the  Colonel  wrote  in  the  Outlook  in  1909, 
a  "moral  perversion"  that  must  inevitably  have  come  "from  a  man 
who,  however  high  he  may  stand  in  certain  respects,  has  in  him 
certain  dreadful  qualities  of  the  moral  pervert."  Significantly,  how- 
ever, when  the  former  President  lectured  the  militaristic  Germans  in 
Berlin  in  1910,  he  chose  to  say  of  the  pacifistic  Russian  novelist  that 
"it  would  also  be  a  bad  thing  not  to  have  Tolstoy,  not  to  profit  by  the 
lofty  side  of  his  teachings." 

The  criticism  of  Roosevelt's  views  on  literature  may  be  overdrawn. 
Indeed,  there  is  an  ironically  perverse  quality  in  the  harsh  judgments 
academicians  have  rendered  against  this  most  widely  read  and  most 
book-loving  President.  TR  was  invariably  interested,  and  for  all  his 
moralizing  and  banality,  for  all  his  forced  optimism,  his  letters  and 
essays  are  studded  with  perceptions  that  transcend  the  conventions 
that  controlled  his  conclusions.  And  if  it  is  true,  as  many  reflective 


THE  VARIETY   OF   HIM  461 

men  have  said,  that  insights  rather  than  generalizations  or  systematic 
expositions  survive,  Roosevelt's  literary  criticisms  cannot  be  totally 
dismissed. 

Certainly  the  mere  fact  of  TR's  love  of  reading  is  important.  Here 
was  a  statesman  whose  interests  were  more  catholic  than  all  but  a 
handful  of  his  country's  men  of  letters  and  probably  most  of  its 
college  professors.  He  may  have  lacked,  and  by  his  own  disarming 
confession  he  did,  the  critical  capacity  (more  likely  the  introspective 
turn  of  mind)  to  assess  Hamlet  and  Macbeth  in  depth.  But  as  Wagen- 
knecht,  one  of  the  few  scholars  to  cut  through  the  cliches  that  are  the 
life-blood  of  judgments  on  TR,  convincingly  shows,  Roosevelt's 
breadth  was  incredible.  He  knew,  often  in  the  original,  Villon,  Ron- 
sard,  Mistral,  Korner,  Topelius,  Goethe,  Dante,  Dumas,  and  hundreds 
of  others.  He  was  versed  in  the  minor  Scandinavian  sagas,  the 
Arabian  tales,  the  core  of  Rumanian  literature.  And  he  even  earned 
his  honorary  presidency  of  the  Gaelic  Literature  Association  by 
anticipating  the  revival  of  interest  in  Celtic  literature. 

Here  also  was  a  statesman  who  had  read  the  bulk  of  his  own  coun- 
try's literature  and  knew  personally  perhaps  a  majority  of  the  nation's 
best  writers.  A  rare  quality  in  any  man  of  action,  this  was  a  unique 
quality  in  a  President.  There  had  been  Presidents  before  who  were 
intellectuals — most  notably  Jefferson  and  the  Adamses;  and  there  was 
one  after  him — Woodrow  Wilson.  There  were  a  few  others  who  were 
receptive  to  intellectuals.  But  there  was  no  modern  President  save 
TR  who  had  such  deep  bonds  with  and  unaffected  interest  in  the 
nation's  writers.  Just  as  Roosevelt's  attacks  on  the  courts  worked  a 
subtle  change  on  the  judicial  mind,  just  as  his  responsiveness  to  social 
and  natural  scientists  quickened  the  acceptance  of  their  ideas,  so  did 
his  patronage  of  writers  (and  also  of  sculptors  and  architects)  in- 
fluence the  national  mood.  One  has  only  to  contrast  the  cultural 
vacuum  that  the  apotheosis  of  the  businessman  by  some  Presidents 
made  of  the  White  House  to  the  virile  intellectualism  that  filled  its 
corridors  and  flowed  out  onto  its  lawns  under  Roosevelt  to  appreciate 
this. 

Admittedly,  TR's  boyish  exuberance  in  all  things  made  him  a 
somewhat  deserving  foil  for  aesthetes  like  brooding,  cynical  Henry 
Adams.  Roosevelt,  wrote  Adams  in  one  of  those  searing  aphorisms 
that  live  more  for  the  prejudices  they  confirm  than  the  truths  they 
reveal,  was  "pure  act."  And  there  was  hardly  a  first-rate  literary  mind 


462  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

in  the  country  that  was  not  contemptuous  of  TR's  heavy-handed  im- 
position of  social  conventions  upon  aesthetic  standards.  Yet  the 
central  fact  remains:  Roosevelt  stimulated,  and  even  inspired,  dozens 
of  young  authors  over  the  years.  If  he  did  not  discover,  he  nevertheless 
exposed  to  the  public  eye  the  genius  of  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson, 
whom  he  appointed  to  a  minor  government  post  with  the  admonition 
"to  think  poetry  first  and  Treasury  second." 

Indeed,  it  was  Roosevelt's  patronage  of  his  friend  Robinson, 
Robert  Frost  recalled,  that  was  the  first  thing  he  himself  remembered 
about  TR.  "As  I  think  of  him,"  Frost  said,  "I  remember  him  as  the 
only  President  I  ever  met,  as  the  only  President  who  ever  took  that 
much  interest  in  a  poet  .  .  .  [TR]  was  our  kind.  He  quoted  poetry 
to  me.  He  knew  poetry.  Poetry  was  in  his  mind;  that  means  a  great 
deal  to  me." 

Stephen  Vincent  Ben6t  felt  much  as  Frost  did.  "I  do  not  mean  to 
say  in  the  least  that  his  [TR's]  judgment  of  books  was  infallible — no 
man's  is.  .  .  ."  Benet  wrote.  But,  he  added,  Roosevelt  had  "a  love 
for  the  thing  itself."  The  testimony  is  endless.  Hamlin  Garland  re- 
called the  Colonel  exclaiming  excitedly  at  lunch  one  day  during 
World  War  I:  "  'Do  you  know  that  the  rhythms  of  archaic  French  are 
much  finer  and  manlier  than  the  rhythms  of  modern  French?' 
Whereupon,  he  quoted  with  immense  gusto  and  dramatic  force  a 
page  or  two  from  the  Song  of  Roland  and  followed  it  up  by  the 
quotation  of  a  poem  from  a  modern  French  writer."  Van  Wyck 
Brooks  remembered  a  similar  performance — "the  most  remarkable 
exhibition  of  presence  of  mind  and  phenomenal  memory  I  had  ever 
heard  of,"  he  wrote.  "If  ever  there  was  obviously  a  man  of  genius," 
said  Brooks  in  a  judgment  that  TR  himself  never  accepted,  "it  was 
Theodore  Roosevelt." 

The  interim  between  the  Bull  Moose  compaign  and  the  outbreak 
of  World  War  I  was  marked  by  the  most  harrowing  physical  experi- 
ence of  Roosevelt's  life.  Early  in  the  summer  of  1913  he  decided  to 
combine  a  lecture  trip  to  South  America  with  an  ascent  of  the 
Paraguay  River.  "It  won't  be  anything  like  the  African  trip,"  TR 
wrote  Kermit,  who  postponed  his  marriage  in  order  to  join  his  father. 
"There  will  be  no  hunting  and  no  adventure." 

When  the  Colonel  reached  Rio  de  Janeiro  on  October  21,  how- 
ever, he  heard  of  an  unmapped  river,  the  River  of  Doubt,  which 


THE   VARIETY   OF    HIM  463 

flowed  north  toward  the  Amazon  from  the  Brazilian  plateau.  "We 
will  go  down  that  unknown  river!"  he  excitedly  exclaimed;  and  the 
Brazilian  government  thereupon  agreed  to  organize  a  major  expedi- 
tion, "the  Expedicao  Scientifica  Roosevelt-Rondon." 

On  February  27,  1914,  after  an  uneventful  trip  into  the  interior, 
the  Colonel,  Kermit,  and  twenty  others  began  the  hazardous  explora- 
tion of  the  River  of  Doubt.  They  were  soon  beset  with  troubles.  The 
insects  proved  almost  unbearable,  eating  through  their  clothes  and 
biting  painfully  into  their  flesh.  Two  boats  were  lost  when  the  river 
rose  unexpectedly  one  night.  Hostile  Indians  killed  one  of  their  dogs. 
Kermit's  boat  was  capsized  and  one  of  the  boatmen  was  lost — "In 
these  Rapids  died  Simplicio,"  read  the  inscription  they  placed  on  a 
marker.  Kermit  himself  escaped  death  after  being  swept  over  a  falls 
only  by  grasping  an  overhanging  limb.  Food  ran  dangerously  low. 
Another  boat  was  lost.  Equipment  was  discarded.  One  of  the  men 
went  insane,  killed  a  member  of  the  party,  and  fled  into  the  wilder- 
ness. Finally,  the  Colonel,  who  had  been  weakened  by  intermittent 
attacks  of  fever,  slipped  and  gashed  his  weak  leg  (broken  while  rid- 
ing years  before)  in  an  heroic  effort  to  prevent  two  capsized  boats 
from  being  ground  against  the  rocks. 

The  Colonel's  wound  became  infected;  he  was  striken  with  malaria 
and  dysentery  and  his  temperature  rose  to  105  degrees.  The  naturalist 
George  K.  Cherrie  expected  to  find  him  dead  each  morning,  and  once 
Roosevelt  reportedly  told  Kermit  and  Cherrie  to  go  on  without  him. 
"I  feel  I  am  only  a  burden  to  the  party."  TR  also  contemplated 
suicide,  but  decided  against  it  for  fear  that  Kermit  would  insist  on 
bringing  his  body  out.  "The  fever  was  high  and  father  was  out  of  his 
head,"  Kermit  later  wrote. 

The  scene  is  vivid  before  me.  Father  first  began  with  poetry;  over 
and  over  again  he  repeated,  "In  Xanadu  did  Kubla  Khan  a  stately 
pleasure  dome  decree,"  then  he  started  talking  at  random,  but 
gradually  he  centered  down  to  the  question  of  supplies,  which  was, 
of  course,  occupying  everyone's  mind.  Part  of  the  time  he  knew  that 
I  was  there,  and  he  would  then  ask  me  if  I  thought  Cherrie  had  had 
enough  to  eat  to  keep  going.  Then  he  would  forget  my  presence,  and 
keep  saying  to  himself:  "I  can't  work  now,  so  I  don't  need  much 
food,  but  he  and  Cherrie  have  worked  all  day  with  the  canoes,  they 
must  have  part  of  mine."  Then  he  would  again  realize  my  presence 
and  question  me  as  to  just  how  much  Cherrie  had  had. 


464  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

On  April  30,  two  months  after  they  had  started  the  descent,  the 
Colonel  and  his  party  ended  their  journey  at  Manaos.  They  had 
completed  a  major  exploration,  made  significant  collections  for  the 
American  Museum  of  Natural  History,  and  traveled  1,500  miles.  TR 
had  lost  fifty-seven  pounds,  satisfied  his  last  great  urge  for  non- 
military  adventure,  and  suffered  the  illnesses  that  would  be  respon- 
sible for  his  gradual  physical  disintegration.  He  had  also  written  the 
major  portion  of  a  minor  adventure  classic,  Through  the  Brazilian 
Wilderness,  and  had  had  his  name  formally  given  by  the  Brazilian 
government  to  the  River  of  Doubt.  "My  dear  Sir,"  the  fever-wracked 
former  President  of  the  United  States  telegraphed  the  Brazilian 
Minister  of  Foreign  Affairs  on  reaching  Manaos,  "I  thank  you  from 
my  heart  for  the  chance  to  take  part  in  this  great  work  of  exploration." 

Even  while  Roosevelt  had  been  fighting  for  his  life  in  the  jungle,  his 
name  had  been  embroiled  in  controversy  at  home.  On  April  6,  1914, 
the  new  Secretary  of  State,  William  Jennings  Bryan,  guilelessly  signed 
a  treaty  with  Colombia  which  virtually  admitted  that  the  United  States 
had  dealt  that  nation  less  than  substantial  justice  in  acquiring  the 
Panama  Canal  Zone.  The  treaty,  as  approved  by  President  Wilson, 
expressed  "sincere  regret  that  anything"  should  have  marred  relations 
between  the  two  nations  and  agreed  to  pay  Colombia  a  $25  million 
indemnity. 

The  Colonel  first  learned  of  the  treaty  with  Colombia  after  his 
descent  of  the  River  of  Doubt,  and  from  that  moment  until  his  death 
he  suffered  paroxysms  of  rage  at  its  mention.  "I  regard  the  proposed 
Treaty  as  a  crime  against  the  United  States,  an  attack  upon  the  honor 
of  the  United  States,  .  .  .  and  a  serious  menace  to  the  future  well- 
being  of  our  people,"  he  wrote  the  Democratic  leader,  Senator  William 
J.  Stone,  in  July,  1914.  "Either  there  is  warrant  for  paying  this 
enormous  sum  and  for  making  the  apology,  or  there  is  not."  And  he 
believed  emphatically  that  there  was  not.  "Every  action  we  took  was 
in  accordance  with  the  highest  principles  of  public  and  private 
morality,"  the  Colonel  concluded  in  a  statement  that  both  the  facts 
and  his  own  earlier  assertions  belied. 

The  United  States  Senate  eventually  rejected  the  Colombian  treaty. 
But  in  1921,  after  Roosevelt's  death,  the  Harding  administration  re- 
negotiated it  in  order  to  win  oil  concessions  for  American  corpora- 
tions. Although  the  apology  was  then  omitted,  the  $25  million  settle- 


THE  VARIETY   OF    HIM  465 

ment  which  TR  had  called  "blackmail"  was  still  included.  But  in  one 
of  the  most  casuistic  speeches  in  his  long  career  Cabot  Lodge  argued 
in  the  Senate  that  his  deceased  friend  would  have  approved. 

The  treaty  with  Colombia  was  not  the  only  brief  Roosevelt  held 
against  Wilson  and  Bryan.  The  Colonel  had  early  and  inconsistently 
taken  issue  with  Wilson's  handling  of  a  resurgence  of  anti-Japanese 
sentiment  in  California.  And  in  September,  1913,  he  had  projected, 
but  failed  to  deliver,  a  blistering  attack  on  the  President's  messianic 
Mexican  policy.  Nor  was  he  any  more  sympathetic  with  Wilson  and 
Bryan's  faith  in  arbitration  than  he  had  been  with  Taft's. 

On  August  1,  1914,  four  days  after  Austria-Hungary  declared  war 
on  Serbia,  he  unburdened  himself  on  that  and  other  counts  to  Arthur 
Lee.  "As  I  am  writing,  the  whole  question  of  peace  and  war  trembles 
in  the  balance;  and  at  the  very  moment  .  .  .  our  own  special  prize 
idiot,  Mr.  Bryan,  and  his  ridiculous  and  insincere  chief,  Mr.  Wilson, 
are  prattling  pleasantly  about  the  steps  they  are  taking  to  procure 
universal  peace  by  little  arbitration  treaties  which  promise  impossibili- 
ties, and  which  would  not  be  worth  the  paper  on  which  they  are 
written  in  any  serious  crisis,"  the  Colonel  wrote.  "It  is  not  a  good 
thing  for  a  country  to  have  a  professional  yodeler,  a  human  trombone 
like  Mr.  Bryan  as  Secretary  of  State,  nor  a  college  president  with  an 
astute  and  shifty  mind,  a  hypocritical  ability  to  deceive  plain  people, 
unscrupulousness  in  handling  machine  leaders,  and  no  real  knowledge 
or  wisdom  concerning  internal  and  international  affairs  as  head  of  the 
nation." 

Three  days  later  Kaiser  Wilhelm's  superbly  conditioned  armies 
goose-stepped  across  the  Belgian  border. 


CHAPTER  29 


THE   BUGLE   THAT   WOKE    AMERICA 


There  were  some  of  them  did  shake  at  what  was  told, 
And  they  shook  best  who  knew  that  he  was  right. 

— Edwin  Arlington  Robinson 


Within  three  months  of  the  Imperial  German  Government's  in- 
vasion of  Belgium  Theodore  Roosevelt  had  thrown  himself  into  the 
mightiest  struggle  of  his  career — the  campaign  to  persuade  the 
American  people  to  enter  World  War  I  and  to  prosecute  it  with  vigor 
after  they  had  entered  it.  In  the  four  and  one-half  years  of  life  that 
remained,  Roosevelt  was  to  deal  his  great  adversary,  Woodrow  Wil- 
son, even  heavier  blows  than  he  had  earlier  dealt  Taft.  He  was  to 
suppress  his  progressivism  for  the  first  two  of  those  years,  and  he  was 
then  to  liquidate  the  Bull  Moose  party  in  one  of  the  angriest  major 
conventions  in  American  history.  He  was  to  see  his  influence  sink  to 
its  lowest  point  since  1900,  and  he  was  to  see  it  resurge  and  soar  to 
new  heights  in  a  remarkable  testament  to  his  powers  of  leadership. 
And  he  was  to  set  for  his  countrymen  an  unparalleled  example  of  in- 
tolerance and  hatred,  of  duty  and  devotion,  and  of  high  and  resolute 
courage. 

Roosevelt's  early  reactions  to  the  coming  of  the  war  to  Europe 
elude  facile  generalization,  partly  because  he  said  one  thing  in  private 
and,  out  of  a  commendable  sense  of  propriety,  another  thing  in  public; 
also,  he  seems  to  have  reversed  himself  on  some  issues  as  the 
significance  of  the  war  gradually  emerged  in  sharper  relief.  Neverthe- 
less, his  views  on  two  or  three  of  the  principal  issues  are  clear.  He 
sympathized  wholeheartedly  with  Belgium.  He  believed  emphatically 

466 


THE   BUGLE   THAT   WOKE   AMERICA  467 

that  England  had  to  go  in  to  prevent  Germany  from  stamping  its  iron 
heel  on  all  Europe.  And  he  also  feared  the  long-term  implications  of 
German  defeat. 

Felix  Frankfurter,  who  with  Herbert  Croly,  one  or  two  other  young 
Americans,  and  Charles  Booth,  the  English  reformer  and  shipping 
executive,  was  visiting  the  Colonel  on  August  4,  the  day  England 
entered  the  war,  long  afterward  recalled  Roosevelt's  reaction.  "You've 
got  to  go  in!  You've  got  to  go  in!"  TR  passionately  exclaimed  to 
Booth  in  the  library  at  Sagamore  Hill.  "I  say  all  this,"  he  continued, 
"though  probably  in  a  few  years  Germany  will  be  an  ally  of  ours  in 
our  fight  against  Japan."  A  letter  Roosevelt  wrote  Hugo  Munsterberg, 
the  Harvard  psychologist  and  German  sympathizer,  three  months 
after  the  event,  confirms  and  supplements  Justice  Frankfurter's  ac- 
count. "At  the  outset  of  the  war,"  TR  said,  "I  happened  to  have 
visiting  me  a  half  a  dozen  of  our  young  men.  .  .  .  We  all  of  us 
sympathized  with  Belgium,  and  therefore  with  England  and 
France  .  .  .  ,  but  I  was  interested  to  find  that  we  all  of  us  felt  that 
the  smashing  of  Germany  would  be  a  world  calamity,  and  would 
result  in  the  entire  Western  world  being  speedily  forced  into  a  contest 
with  Russia." 

Even  more  revealing  of  the  emotional  depths  of  Roosevelt's  feeling 
toward  Germany  is  an  incident  that  occurred  two  or  three  days  after 
the  invasion  of  Belgium.  An  emissary  bearing  a  letter  from  the 
German  Embassy  sought  out  Roosevelt  at  Progressive  party  head- 
quarters in  New  York.  After  bowing  formally,  the  German  said  that 
his  Imperial  Majesty  wished  him  to  know  that  he  had  always  remem- 
bered the  great  pleasure  it  gave  him  to  receive  and  entertain  the 
Colonel  at  the  palace  in  Potsdam.  He  added  that  the  Emperor  felt  as- 
sured that  he  could  count  on  Roosevelt's  sympathetic  understanding 
of  Germany's  position.  TR  had  then  bowed,  looked  the  emissary 
straight  in  the  eye,  and  icily  replied:  "Pray  thank  his  Imperial  Majesty 
for  me  for  his  very  courteous  message  and  assure  him  that  I  am  deeply 
conscious  of  the  honor  done  me  in  Germany  and  that  I  shall  never 
forget  the  way  in  which  His  Majesty  the  Emperor  received  me  in 
Berlin,  nor  the  way  in  which  His  Majesty  King  Albert  of  Belgium 
received  me  in  Brussels." 

Regrettably,  however,  Roosevelt  soon  put  himself  on  the  record  in 
a  manner  he  later  rued.  On  August  22,  1914,  he  wrote  in  the  Out- 
look that  he  would  not  then  pass  judgment  on  the  violation  of  the 


468  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

treaties  guaranteeing  Belgium's  integrity.  "When  giants  are  engaged 
in  a  death  wrestle,  as  they  reel  to  and  fro  they  are  certain  to  trample 
on  whoever  gets  in  the  way  of  either  of  the  huge  straining  com- 
batants." He  amplified  his  views  the  next  month  in  a  curiously  con- 
tradictory article.  "We  can  maintain  our  neutrality  only  by  refusal  to 
do  anything  to  aid  unoffending  weak  powers  which  are  dragged  into 
the  gulf  of  bloodshed  and  misery  through  no  fault  of  their  own." 

Of  course  it  would  be  folly  to  jump  into  the  gulf  ourselves  to  no 
good  purpose;  and  very  probably  nothing  that  we  could  have  done 
would  have  helped  Belgium.  We  have  not  the  slightest  responsibility 
for  what  has  befallen  her,  and  I  am  sure  the  sympathy  of  this  coun- 
try for  ...  Belgium  is  very  real.  Nevertheless,  this  sympathy  is 
compatible  with  full  knowledge  of  the  unwisdom  of  uttering  a  single 
word  of  official  protest  unless  we  are  prepared  to  make  that  protest 
effective;  and  only  the  clearest  and  most  urgent  National  duty  would 
ever  justify  us  in  deviating  from  our  rule  of  neutrality  and  non- 
interference. 

Three  weeks  later  Roosevelt  repeated  himself  in  the  first  of  nine 
prolix  articles  hastily  written  for  the  New  York  Times;  and  not  until 
November  8  did  he  openly  castigate  President  Wilson's  failure  to 
protest  the  invasion  of  Belgium.  Thereafter,  however,  his  criticism 
of  the  President  on  that  count  was  unbounded. 

Early  in  1915  TR  published  these  essays  under  the  title  America 
and  the  World  War.  A  call  to  action  rather  than  a  historical  docu- 
ment, that  work  saw  the  equivocal  passage  in  the  Outlook  essay  of 
August  22  replaced  with  a  sweeping  indictment  of  Wilson's  call  for 
"a  neutrality  so  strict  as  to  forbid  our  even  whispering  a  protest  against 
wrong-doing,  lest  such  whispers  might  cause  disturbance  to  our  ease 
and  well-being." 

We  pay  the  penalty  of  this  action — or,  rather,  supine  inaction — 
on  behalf  of  peace  for  ourselves,  by  forfeiting  our  right  to  do  any- 
thing on  behalf  of  peace  for  the  Belgians  in  the  present.  ...  It  is  a 
grim  comment  on  the  professional  pacifist  theories  as  hitherto  de- 
veloped that,  according  to  their  view,  our  duty  to  preserve  peace 
for  ourselves  necessarily  means  the  abandonment  of  all  effective 
effort  to  secure  peace  for  other  unoffending  nations  which  through 
no  fault  of  their  own  are  trampled  down  by  war. 

The  Colonel's  critics  were  quick  to  pounce  upon  him  for  his  ap- 
parent change  of  front.  "I  was  pretty  lonely,  and  almost  everybody 


THE  BUGLE   THAT  WOKE   AMERICA  469 

attacked  me  for  not  'standing  by  the  President,'  "  he  later  mused.  "For 
the  first  sixty  days,  I  ...  supported  President  Wilson  ...  on  the 
assumption  that  he  was  speaking  the  truth,  had  examined  the  facts, 
and  was  correct  in  his  statement  that  we  had  no  responsibility  for 
what  had  been  done  in  Belgium."  Then,  he  continued,  "I  went  over 
the  Hague  Conventions  myself"  and  found  that  "they  did  demand 
action  on  our  part."  Indeed,  he  concluded,  "if  I  made  any  error 
whatever,  it  was  standing  by  ...  [Wilson]  just  sixty  days  too  long. 
I  have  never  committed  the  error  since.  .  .  ." 

TR's  explanation  of  his  dramatic  reversal  is  both  enlightening  and 
confusing.  It  ignores  that  fatalistic  acceptance  of  brute  power  implicit 
in  his  assertion  that  "giants  .  .  .  engaged  in  a  death  wrestle  .  .  . 
are  certain  to  trample  on  whoever  gets  in  the  way."  It  curiously  fails 
to  mention  his  own  qualifications — qualifications  that  prove  he  was 
far  from  pro-German.  We  should  make  no  official  protest,  Roosevelt 
had  written  in  the  original  version,  "unless  we  are  prepared  to  make 
that  protest  effective."  And  it  even  omits  reference  to  the  sympathy 
for  Belgium  implicit  in  the  statement  that  only  by  refusing  "to  do 
anything  to  aid  unoffending  weak  powers  which  are  dragged  into  the 
gulf  of  bloodshed  and  misery  through  no  fault  of  their  own"  can  the 
United  States  maintain  its  neutrality. 

The  Colonel's  explanation  further  ignores  the  fact  that  even  as 
he  was  publishing  his  ambivalent  defenses  of  Wilson's  neutrality  pro- 
gram in  the  summer  of  1914,  he  was  privately  concluding  that  the 
President  should  have  protested  the  invasion  of  Belgium.  As  he  wrote 
Arthur  Lee  on  August  22,  the  day  his  controversial  Outlook  article 
appeared,  "I  do  not  know  whether  I  would  be  acting  right  if  I  were 
President  or  not,  but  it  seems  to  me  that  if  I  were  President  I  should 
register  a  very  emphatic  protest,  a  protest  that  would  mean  some- 
thing, against  the  levy  of  the  huge  war  contributions  on  Belgium.  .  .  . 
The  Germans,  to  suit  their  own  purposes,  trampled  on  their  solemn 
obligations  to  Belgium  and  on  Belgium's  rights  .  .  .  any  power 
which  now  or  hereafter  may  be  put  at  the  mercy  of  Germany  will 
suffer  in  similar  shape."  Roosevelt  then  cautiously  prophesied  Ger- 
man defeat,  adding  that  he  saw  "no  reason  for  believing  that  Russia 
is  more  advanced  than  Germany  as  regards  international  ethics."  He 
also  suggested  that  Germany  might  have  to  be  supported  later  as  a 
bulwark  against  Russia.  There  is  "little  chance  of  hostility  between 


470  POWER  AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

us  and  Russia,"  he  added,  but  "there  is  always  the  chance  of  hostility 
between  us  and  Japan." 

The  Colonel  appended  to  that  letter  a  postscript  which  suggests 
that  he  was  holding  in  his  real  views  because  of  a  high-minded  desire 
to  avoid  compromising  President  Wilson's  conduct  of  diplomacy.  "Of 
course  this  letter  is  only  for  you  and  Ruth,"  he  wrote.  "I  am  an  ex- 
President;  and  my  public  attitude  must  be  one  of  entire  impartiality — 
and  above  all  no  verbal  or  paper  'on  to  Berlin'  business."  Meanwhile, 
he  informed  a  newspaperman  who  attempted  to  draw  him  out  that 
"what  we  have  to  do  is  not  to  put  obstacles  in  the  way  of  the  Ad- 
ministration." 

Roosevelt's  indignation  at  Belgium's  fate  and  Wilson's  refusal  to 
protest  it  had  continued  to  increase  as  the  summer  waned.  On  Sep- 
tember 5,  the  publisher  E.  A.  Van  Valkenberg  and  Dean  Lewis  met 
the  Colonel  on  a  train  bound  for  New  Orleans,  where  he  was  to  de- 
liver a  Labor  Day  speech  for  the  Progressive  congressional  candi- 
dates. "Germany  is  absolutely  wrong,"  TR  expostulated  as  the  two 
Progressive  leaders  entered  his  compartment.  "Her  own  White  Book 
places  her  squarely  in  the  wrong  .  .  .  [nothing]  she  can  possibly  do 
in  the  future  will  extricate  her." 

About  two  weeks  later  Roosevelt's  newspaperman  friend,  O.  K. 
Davis,  pointedly  asked  him  what  he  would  have  done  had  he  been 
President  at  the  outbreak  of  war.  The  Colonel  replied  that  Sir  Edward 
Grey  had  needed  only  a  few  more  days  to  force  a  conference  on 
Germany.  "We  certainly  could  have  supplied  those  few  days,  if 
Washington  had  cared  to  do  so,  or  had  known  how  ...  I  should 
have  felt  myself  a  criminal,  if  I  had  been  President,  and  had  not  done 
so."  Furthermore,  the  United  States  could  have  demanded  a  confer- 
ence as  one  of  the  signatories  to  the  Hague  Convention.  Or  perhaps 
it  could  have  suggested  that  it  was  prepared  to  act  to  fulfill  its  obliga- 
tions. "The  necessary  result  was  bound  to  be  the  few  days  of  delay 
Grey  so  desperately  needed,"  TR  added.  "The  Kaiser's  haste  in  de- 
claring war  shows  that  he  recognized  the  fact  that,  if  he  did  not  begin 
hostilities  at  once,  he  would  be  prevented  from  doing  so." 

Still,  the  Colonel  had  doubts.  "Of  course,"  he  reflected,  "it  might 
not  have  prevented  it  permanently,  for  the  Kaiser  and  Germany  were 
bent  on  attacking  France,  and  possibly  England  also.  ...  If  Ger- 
many— that  is,  the  Kaiser  and  von  Moltke  and  the  army  war-lords — 


THE   BUOLE   THAT   WOKE   AMERICA  471 

really  believe  that  they  can  dominate  the  whole  world,  then  nothing 
would  permanently  keep  them  from  making  the  effort." 

Two  weeks  later  the  Colonel  repeated  similar  sentiments  to  Spring- 
Rice.  "I  would  not  have  made  such  a  statement,"  he  added,  "unless 
I  was  willing  to  back  it  up.  I  believe  that  ...  the  American  people 
would  have  followed  me.  But  whether  I  am  mistaken  or  not  as  regards 
this,  I  am  certain  that  the  majority  are  now  following  Wilson.  Only 
a  limited  number  of  people  could  or  ought  to  be  expected  to  make  up 
their  minds  for  themselves  in  a  crisis  like  this;  and  they  tend,  and 
ought  to  tend,  to  support  the  President."  Adding  that  it  would  be 
"mere  clamor  and  nothing  else"  for  him  to  talk  about  "what  ought 
to  be  done  or  ought  to  have  been  done/'  TR  warned  that  his  views 
should  be  kept  confidential.  This  was,  he  remarked,  the  freest  ex- 
pression of  opinion  he  had  yet  allowed  himself.  Then,  almost  as  an 
afterthought,  he  sapped  the  strength  of  his  contention  that  Wilson 
could  have  delayed  the  outbreak  of  war: 

Of  course,  I  only  acted  in  the  Japanese-Russian  affair  when  I  had 
received  explicit  assurances,  verbally  from  the  Russians  and  in 
writing  from  the  Japanese,  that  my  action  would  be  welcome;  and 
three  or  four  months  of  talk  and  negotiation  had  preceded  this  ac- 
tion on  my  part. 

The  Colonel  might  have  openly  attacked  Wilson's  policies  long  be- 
fore November,  for  he  was  daily  growing  more  resentful  of  the  Presi- 
dent's unrealistic  adjuration  to  be  neutral  in  thought  as  well  as  in 
deed,  had  it  not  been  for  his  obligations  to  his  Progressive  supporters. 
In  spite  of  his  own  pessimism,  his  lieutenants  insisted  that  he  again 
lead  an  advance — Beveridge,  Bainbridge  Colby,  Garfield,  Johnson, 
Gifford  Pinchot,  and  Victor  Murdock  were  all  running  on  state  tickets. 
And  so  TR  had  dutifully  and  wearily  undertaken  the  assignment. 

On  the  stump  that  fall,  TR,  "always  cheerful  in  public,  always  with 
his  head  high,  and  with  his  old  appearance  of  confidence  and  unshaken 
determination,"  said  most  of  the  same  old  things  in  the  same  old  man- 
ner. But  they  lacked  the  same  old  meaning.  Wilson  and  the  Demo- 
cratic party  were  outflanking  Roosevelt  and  the  Bull  Moose  legions; 
and  even  if  the  Colonel  had  not  been  consumed  with  revulsion  for  the 
President's  diplomacy,  even  if  he  had  not  believed  the  Progressive 
party's  internal  weaknesses  assured  its  extinction,  he  had  sooner  or 
later  to  face  that  fact. 


472  POWER  AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

The  first  fruits  of  Roosevelt's  ideological  victory  over  Wilson  in 
1912  had  come  on  September  26,  1914  with  the  enactment  of  the 
Federal  Trade  Commission  Law.  Envisaging,  in  the  words  of  Arthur 
S.  Link,  "such  a  positive  regulation  of  business  as  Roosevelt  had  ad- 
vocated and  Wilson  had  condemned,"  that  measure  outlawed  unfair 
business  practices  in  a  sweeping  general  statement  that  delegated  the 
responsibility  for  interpretation  to  the  members  of  the  Commission. 
Three  weeks  later  Wilson,  who  was  actually  less  sympathetic  to 
unions  than  Roosevelt,  signed  the  Clayton  Antitrust  Bill  into  law. 
Under  that  measure's  famous  labor  section,  which  Samuel  Gompers 
enthusiastically  and  prematurely  labeled  "labor's  Magna  Carta,"  use 
of  the  injunction  against  labor  unions  was  theoretically  modified.  This 
was  ironical  indeed,  for  it  was  broadly  what  Roosevelt  had  called  for 
in  the  great  messages  of  his  last  two  years  in  office,  what  he  had  tried 
unsuccessfully  to  write  into  the  Republican  platform  of  1908,  and 
what  he  had  campaigned  so  eloquently  for  in  1912. 

However  grimly  satisfying  the  Colonel's  vindication  by  Wilson  and 
the  Democrats,  it  made  the  campaign  of  1914  more  difficult.  To  com- 
plicate matters  further — and  probably  to  explain  the  disparity  be- 
tween his  private  and  public  statements  from  September  on — Roose- 
velt was  also  constrained  to  soften  his  projected  attack  on  Wilson's 
foreign  policies.  As  Midwestern  Progressive  leaders  sharply  warned 
him  early  in  the  fall,  many  voters  felt  that  the  United  States  would 
be  at  war  with  Mexico  and  involved  in  Europe  were  he  President. 
The  result  was  the  most  fruitless  canvass  Roosevelt  had  undertaken 
since  1884. 

Tired  and  disheartened,  TR  sat  talking  with  O.  K.  Davis  on  a 
train  going  from  Philadelphia  to  New  York  near  the  end.  The  Colonel 
remarked  on  the  futility  of  it  all,  on  the  crowds'  enthusiasm  for  him- 
self and  their  lack  of  interest  in  the  Progressive  candidates  he  urged 
them  to  support.  After  a  while,  however,  his  mood  changed  dra- 
matically. "Well,  O.K.,"  he  exclaimed,  leaning  over  and  whacking  the 
newspaperman  on  the  knee  in  a  gesture  of  triumphant  liberation,  "I've 
got  only  a  few  hours  more  of  this  campaign,  and  then  I  shall  be 
through.  .  .  .  Hereafter  no  man  can  claim  anything  from  me  in 
politics.  Not  a  single  obligation  is  left.  I  have  done  everything,  this 
fall,  that  everybody  has  wanted.  This  election  makes  me  an  abso- 
lutely free  man.  Thereafter  I  am  going  to  say  and  do  just  what  I 
damned  please." 


THE   BUGLE   THAT  WOKE   AMERICA  473 

The  wraps  were  now  off.  Five  days  after  the  elections  the  Colonel 
for  the  first  time  publicly  criticized  Wilson's  failure  to  protest  Ger- 
many's invasion  of  Belgium.  Early  in  December  he  arraigned  the 
President  for  tolerating  violence  in  Mexico.  And  from  then  until  the 
night  before  his  death  four  years  later  he  maintained  an  unremitting 
fire  on  Wilson's  policies.  Roosevelt's  strictures  were  unvaryingly  col- 
ored by  partisanship.  But  they  were  almost  unfailingly  constructive 
and  they  were  never  remotely  obstructionist.  TR's  consuming  purpose 
was  the  advancement  of  his  country's  interests  as  he  conceived  them, 
and  neither  his  volcanic  hatred  of  Wilson  nor  his  emerging  ambition 
to  return  to  the  White  House  more  than  fanned  flames  that  were  al- 
ready raging.  It  was  no  different  with  Cabot  Lodge,  with  whom  TR 
again  became  bound  in  common  object.  For  all  his  contempt  of 
Woodrow  Wilson  and  disdain  for  the  President's  party,  that  cold 
Brahmin  only  incidentally  allowed  his  personal  feelings  to  influence 
his  actions  on  the  great  questions  of  foreign  policy  during  the  neu- 
trality years.  Not  until  the  epochal  struggle  over  the  League  of  Nations 
would  Lodge  emerge  as  a  bitter-end  obstructionist. 

The  controversy  over  Belgium  was  a  skirmish  as  compared  to  the 
battle  that  soon  raged  over  preparedness  policy.  The  lines  were  first 
drawn  early  in  the  fall  of  1914.  In  spite  of  the  soft-pedaling  of  his 
views  on  Belgium  and  Mexico,  TR  had  come  out  forthrightly  for  de- 
fense increases  during  the  congressional  campaign.  His  statements 
had  evoked  little  support  and  no  small  measure  of  derision;  and 
though  they  had  probably  sparked  a  handful  of  like-minded  men  to 
speak  out,  notably  Lodge's  son-in-law,  A.  P.  Gardner,  they  had  par- 
ticularly incited  the  President's  ire.  "We  shall  not  alter  our  attitude 
.  .  .  because  some  amongst  us  are  nervous  or  excited,"  Wilson  coldly 
remarked  in  his  annual  message  on  December  8,  1914.  A  change  of 
policy  "would  mean  merely  that  we  had  lost  our  self-possession,  that 
we  had  been  thrown  off  our  balance  by  a  war  with  which  we  had  noth- 
ing to  do,  whose  causes  cannot  touch  us,  whose  very  existence  affords 
us  opportunities  of  friendship  and  disinterested  service  which  should 
make  us  ashamed  of  any  thought  of  hostility  or  fearful  preparation 
for  trouble." 

This  meant  that  the  President  had  chosen  to  stake  everything  on 
the  hope  that  the  United  States  could  end  the  war  by  mediation.  It 
was  a  noble  dream,  one  that  Roosevelt  had  pursued  at  Portsmouth 


474  POWER  AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

and  was  even  then  criticizing  Wilson  for  not  having  tried  at  the  out- 
break of  hostilities.  Men  must  always  honor  the  President  for  it.  Yet 
mediation  and  preparedness  were  not  mutually  exclusive.  As  Roose- 
velt had  consistently  and  realistically  held,  strength  could  portend 
greater  force  for  peace  than  weakness  in  the  world  as  it  then  was. 

"Upon  my  word,"  TR  lamented  to  Lodge  when  Wilson  first  ridi- 
culed the  preparedness  agitation  in  October,  "Wilson  and  Bryan  are 
the  very  worst  men  we  have  ever  had  in  their  positions."  "If  Germany 
smashes  England  I  should  regard  it  as  certain  that  this  country  either 
had  to  fight  or  to  admit  that  it  was  an  occidental  China,"  he  confided 
to  another  friend.  "In  any  event  I  feel  that  an  alliance  between  Ger- 
many and  Japan,  from  which  we  would  suffer,  is  entirely  a  possibility, 
if  Germany  comes  out  even  a  little  ahead  in  the  present  war." 

The  Colonel's  growing  concern  over  the  implications  of  an  Allied 
defeat  was  widely  shared.  If  the  submarine  controversy  had  not  inter- 
jected a  major  diversionary  element  into  the  neutrality  question  in  the 
spring  of  1915,  the  preparedness  crusade  might  well  have  been  fought 
out  on  that  broader  issue.  As  it  was,  Roosevelt  and  Lodge  missed  no 
opportunity  to  advance  the  Allies'  cause.  They  supported  the  Presi- 
dent's refusal  to  institute  an  embargo  on  munitions  on  the  grounds 
that  it  would  hurt  Britain  and  France.  They  opposed  Wilson's  plan  to 
purchase  foreign-owned  ships  confined  to  American  ports  for  fear  it 
would  lead  to  conflict  with  the  British.  And  they  even  attacked  Wil- 
son's measured  protest  against  Great  Britain's  unnecessarily  inclusive 
contraband  policy.  The  President  "has  remained  silent  in  regard  to 
the  violation  of  Belgium's  neutrality  by  Germany,"  Lodge  complained 
to  TR  in  January,  1915,  ".  .  .  and  then  he  suddenly  finds  his  voice 
in  a  protest  to  England,  one  of  the  Allies,  about  interference  with 
our  trade." 

As  it  became  apparent  that  winter  that  the  war  might  develop  into 
one  of  attrition,  Roosevelt  advised  the  British  to  reconsider  their  con- 
traband policy.  To  both  Spring-Rice  and  Edward  Grey  in  January, 
1915,  he  pointed  out  that  His  Majesty's  government  had  been  inex- 
pedient and  lacking  in  foresight.  "Our  trade  ...  is  of  vastly  more 
service  to  you  and  France  than  to  Germany,"  he  wrote  Grey.  Should 
German  submarines  "now  begin  to  destroy  ships  carrying  foodstuffs 
to  Great  Britain,"  he  continued,  "the  effect  might  be  not  merely  seri- 
ous but  appalling." 


THE   BUGLE    THAT   WOKE   AMERICA  475 

Under  such  conditions,  it  would  be  of  the  utmost  consequence  to 
England  to  have  accepted  the  most  extreme  view  the  United  States 
could  advance  as  to  her  right  to  ship  cargoes  unmolested  ...  the 
trade  in  contraband  is  overwhelmingly  to  the  advantage  of  England, 
France  and  Russia,  because  of  your  command  of  the  seas.  You  as- 
sume that  this  command  gives  you  the  right  to  make  the  advantage 
still  more  overwhelming. 

TR  added  with  some  truth  and  more  exaggeration  that  the  majority 
of  administration  leaders  "see  that  political  advantage  will  unques- 
tionably lie  with  those  who  try  to  placate  the  German-American  vote 
and  the  professional  pacificist  vote." 

The  German-Americans  wish  to  put  a  stop  to  all  exportation  of 
contraband  because  such  action  would  result  to  the  benefit  of  Ger- 
many. The  pacificists  are  inclined  to  fall  in  with  the  suggestion,  be- 
cause they  feebly  believe  it  would  be  in  the  interest  of  'Peace' — just 
as  they  are  inclined  heartily  to  favor  any  peace  proposal,  even 
though  it  should  leave  Belgium  in  Germany's  hands  and  pave  the 
way  for  certain  renewal  of  the  war. 

At  the  same  time  the  Colonel  suggested  to  Spring-Rice  that  the 
British  and  French  governments  capitalize  upon  reports  of  German 
war  atrocities  and  objectives  by  publishing  official  versions  of  such 
stories.  He  warned,  however,  that  he  "should  most  heartily  reprobate 
putting  out  any  fact  which  was  not  absolutely  established."  With  the 
passing  of  time  and  the  deepening  of  his  emotional  involvement,  he 
was  to  disregard  that  warning. 

By  1915,  in  fact,  the  Colonel  was  practically  convinced  that  the 
United  States  should  enter  the  war.  Early  in  the  year  J.  Medill  Patter- 
son, the  publisher  of  the  Chicago  Tribune,  raised  the  question.  "You 
even  seem  to  want  to  get  us  into  war  on  the  Allied  side,"  Patterson  re- 
marked. "Is  it  just  Belgium,  or  do  you  feel  that  America  itself  is 
menaced?"  TR  replied  that  although  Germany  would  probably  not 
attack  the  United  States  at  once,  she  would  soon  challenge  American 
interests  in  the  Caribbean.  "In  this  way,"  he  continued,  "we  would  be 
thrown  into  hostilities  with  Germany  sooner  or  later  and  with  far  less 
chance  of  success  than  if  we  joined  with  the  powers  which  are  now 
fighting  her." 

TR  was  too  astute  to  destroy  his  effectiveness  by  openly  calling  for 
war  at  a  moment  when  Congress  was  willingly  acquiescing  in  the 


476  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

President's  rejection  of  preparedness.  So  he  continued  to  focus  on 
preparedness,  the  embargo,  and  Mexico. 

He  chafed  under  his  self-imposed  fetters;  and  he  almost  broke  out 
from  them  when  the  American  tanker  Gulflight  was  torpedoed  on 
May  1  with  the  loss  of  three  American  lives.  The  attack  was  "an 
act  of  piracy,  pure  and  simple,"  he  declared  in  a  ringing  public  state- 
ment. But  on  the  whole  he  disclosed  his  real  feelings  only  to  his 
friends. 

"Lord,  how  I  would  like  to  be  President  in  view  of  ...  the  huge 
German-Irish  element  and  the  possible  sinking  of  the  Lusitania,"  the 
Colonel  wrote  the  famed  reporter  Cal  O'Laughlin  on  May  6,  1915. 
Less  than  twenty-four  hours  later  the  giant,  unarmed  British  liner  was 
torpedoed  without  warning  off  the  coast  of  Ireland  with  a  loss  of 
more  than  eleven  hundred  men,  women,  and  children,  one  hundred 
and  twenty-eight  of  them  American  citizens. 

The  first  report  of  the  Lusitania  tragedy  came  to  Roosevelt  in  a 
crowded  courtroom  at  Syracuse  where  he  was  standing  trial  for  libel 
against  the  notorious  New  York  Republican  boss,  William  Barnes,  Jr. 
He  made  no  comment.  That  night,  however,  he  was  called  from  his 
bed  by  a  telephone  call  from  an  editor  in  New  York  City.  "That's 
murder!"  the  Colonel  exclaimed  as  the  immensity  of  the  disaster  was 
borne  upon  him.  "Will  I  make  a  statement?  Yes,  yes,  I'll  make  it  now. 
Just  take  this": 

This  represents  not  merely  piracy,  but  piracy  on  a  vaster  scale 
of  murder  than  old-time  pirates  ever  practiced.  ...  It  is  warfare 
against  innocent  men,  women,  and  children,  traveling  on  the  ocean, 
and  our  own  fellow  countrymen  and  countrywomen,  who  are  among 
the  sufferers.  It  seems  inconceivable  that  we  can  refrain  from  tak- 
ing action  in  this  matter,  for  we  owe  it  not  only  to  humanity  but  to 
our  own  national  self-respect. 

The  next  morning  TR  advised  his  lawyers  that  his  statement  had 
probably  alienated  the  two  German-Americans  on  the  jury.  "I  cannot 
help  it,"  he  added.  "There  is  a  principle  at  stake  here  which  is  more 
vital  to  the  American  people  than  my  personal  welfare  is  to  me."  His 
fears,  of  course,  were  groundless;  the  jury  returned  a  verdict  in  his 
favor. 

Meanwhile  the  President  embarked  upon  that  policy  of  note-writing 
which  was  to  eventuate  in  Bryan's  resignation  and  Germany's  partial 


THE   BUGLE    THAT   WOKE   AMERICA  477 

submission  to  the  American  position.  Like  Roosevelt,  Wilson  was 
outraged  by  Germany's  inhumanity;  but  unlike  the  Colonel,  he  be- 
lieved the  general  solution  was  a  negotiated  peace.  The  President  had 
no  intention  of  asking  Congress  for  a  war  resolution,  and  he  was  in 
fact  warned  by  powerful  Democratic  leaders  in  Congress  that  the 
people  would  not  support  a  war  over  the  Lusitania  incident.  The 
great  majority  of  newspapers  throughout  the  country  also  counseled 
moderation.  Even  Cabot  Lodge  confined  his  public  remarks  to  a  gen- 
eral affirmation  of  the  right  of  American  citizens  to  travel  on  the  ships 
of  belligerent  nations,  though  he  privately  argued  that  the  President 
should  sever  relations  with  Germany  and  seize  German  ships  in  Amer- 
ican ports  unless  the  Imperial  government  apologized  and  agreed  to 
pay  reparations.  As  the  Kansas  Progressive  leader,  Victor  Murdock, 
reported  to  Roosevelt,  the  Middle  West's  sense  of  outrage  "died  down 
as  suddenly  as  it  had  risen." 

TR's  later  contention  that  Wilson  could  readily  have  taken  the 
nation  into  war  at  the  time  is  thus  inconclusive.  Indeed,  when  the 
President  made  his  memorable  declaration  at  the  height  of  the  crisis 
that  "There  is  such  a  thing  as  a  man  being  too  proud  to  fight,"  Roose- 
velt was  virtually  alone  in  denouncing  him  publicly.  America  could 
not  act  on  the  President's  theory,  he  indignantly  declared,  "if  it  de- 
sires to  retain  or  regain  the  position  won  for  it  by  the  men  who  fought 
under  Washington  and  by  the  men  who,  in  the  days  of  Lincoln,  wore 
the  blue  under  Grant  and  the  gray  under  Lee." 

Roosevelt's  personal  letters  were  even  more  direct.  "There  is  a 
chance  of  our  going  to  war;  but  I  don't  think  it  is  very  much  of  a 
chance,"  he  wrote  his  son  Archie  on  May  19.  "Wilson  and  Bryan 
...  are  both  of  them  abject  creatures  and  they  won't  go  to  war  un- 
less they  are  kicked  into  it.  .  .  ."  Had  he  been  President,  TR  wrote 
his  English  friend,  Arthur  Lee,  "I  would  .  .  .  have  taken  a  stand 
which  would  have  made  the  Germans  either  absolutely  alter  all  their 
conduct  or  else  put  them  into  war  with  us."  "If  the  United  States  had 
taken  this  stand,"  he  significantly  added,  "in  my  judgment  we  would 
now  have  been  fighting  beside  you." 

The  sinking  of  the  Lusitania  obscured  the  real  issue — war  in  the 
broad  national  interest.  From  that  fateful  day  on,  TR  concentrated 
almost  solely  on  the  neutral  rights  issue.  And  though  he  never  lost  his 
conviction  that  the  national  interest  demanded  American  entry  into 
the  war  on  the  Allies'  side,  the  preservation  of  American  rights  against 


478  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Germany  now  became  an  end  in  itself.  On  that  issue  Roosevelt  based 
his  renewed  demands  for  preparedness;  and  upon  it  he  eventually 
based  his  call  for  war.  He  sensed,  at  times,  that  he  sounded  extreme; 
that,  as  he  phrased  it  to  Arthur  Lee,  he  was  "making  people  think 
that  I  am  a  truculent  and  bloodthirsty  person,  endeavoring  futilely  to 
thwart  able,  dignified,  humane  Mr.  Wilson  in  his  noble  plan  to  bring 
peace  everywhere  by  excellently  written  letters.  .  .  ."  But  he  be- 
lieved himself  morally  obligated  to  give  the  country  the  leadership 
that  he  felt  the  President  was  failing  to  offer.  "I  put  the  case  as 
strongly  as  I  can,"  he  explained.  "I  speak  as  often  as  I  think  will  do 
good." 

During  the  next  twenty-one  months  Roosevelt  did  more  than  any 
other  citizen,  not  excepting  the  President  of  the  United  States,  to  con- 
dition the  American  people  to  the  coming  of  war.  He  became  the 
avowed  enemy  of  the  rabid  German-Americans  and  the  Irish-Ameri- 
cans, of  the  agrarian  isolationists  and  the  urban  pacifists,  and  of  those 
men  and  women  of  good  hope  led  by  Hamilton  Holt  and  William 
Howard  Taft  who  anticipated  Woodrow  Wilson's  great  vision  of  an 
international  order  by  forming  the  League  to  Enforce  Peace.  He 
emerged,  conversely,  as  the  leader  and  spokesman  of  many  of  those 
same  Republican  conservatives  who  had  rejected  him  in  1912.  Even 
before  the  Lusitania  crisis  broke,  TR  was  writing  that  he  might  find 
it  necessary  to  vote  for  Elihu  Root  over  Wilson  and  Bryan.  And  by 
February,  1915,  his  relations  with  Lodge  so  improved  that  the  Sena- 
tor spent  a  weekend  at  Sagamore  Hill  for  the  first  time  in  four  years. 

The  Colonel  found  boundless  opportunities  to  fire  verbal  blasts  at 
the  despised  professor  in  the  White  House  during  these  twenty-one 
months.  He  tried  to  be  fair.  When  Bryan  resigned  as  Secretary  of 
State  in  protest  against  the  second  Lusitania  note,  he  issued  a  state- 
ment pledging  his  "heartiest  support"  to  Wilson  in  any  steps  he  might 
take  "to  uphold  the  honor  and  the  interests  of  this  great  Republic, 
which  are  bound  up  with  the  maintenance  of  democratic  liberty  and 
of  a  wise  spirit  of  humanity  among  all  the  nations  of  mankind."  But 
he  was  so  completely  out  of  sympathy  that  he  could  not  realize  that 
the  President's  note-writing  was  more  complicated  than  it  appeared. 
Nor  would  Roosevelt  concede  the  political  obstacles  under  which 
Wilson  labored.  For  all  TR's  charges  of  cowardice  and  lack  of  leader- 
ship, Wilson  courageously  pursued  policies  that  powerful  congres- 
sional blocs  representing  the  Democratic  and  Republican  agrarians, 


THE   BUGLE   THAT   WOKE   AMERICA  479 

the  urban  Irish-Americans,  and  the  Middle  Western  German-Ameri- 
cans bitterly  opposed.  His  suppression  of  the  Gore-McLemore  reso- 
lutions of  March,  1916,  which  comprised  a  full-scale  rebellion  against 
his  insistence  on  maintaining  the  very  rights  TR  was  castigating  him 
for  not  upholding,  is  but  the  most  dramatic  evidence  of  that. 

In  these  circumstances,  the  unrelieved  stream  of  expletives  that 
continued  to  pour  forth  from  Roosevelt's  lips  is  understandable  only 
in  the  context  of  his  larger  aim — war  in  the  national  interest,  and,  as 
the  generation  that  has  witnessed  Hitler's  ultimate  defilement  of  Bis- 
marck's creation  of  "blood  and  iron"  is  now  coming  to  believe,  in  the 
interest  of  the  civilized  world.  Certainly  TR,  who  had  feared  the  rise 
of  German  naval  power  as  early  as  1908,  so  regarded  the  issue. 

Unhappily,  however,  the  Colonel  seems  also  to  have  been  ani- 
mated by  that  rampant  nationalism  and  inflated  conception  of  the 
national  honor  which  forever  prevented  him  from  scaling  the  spir- 
itual heights.  Thus  the  ugly  suspicion  persists  that  he  would  have  been 
just  as  extreme  had  the  issue  been  merely  the  upholding  of  American 
rights  in  Mexico,  where  the  impoverished  masses  were  then  in  re- 
bellion against  their  aristocratic,  clerical,  and  foreign  overlords.  Even 
as  TR  referred  to  the  President  as  that  "infernal  skunk  in  the  White 
House"  and  irritably  dismissed  one  of  his  protests  to  Germany  as  "No. 
11,765,  series  B,"  he  excoriated  the  "feebleness,  timidity,  and  vacil- 
lation" of  the  President's  relations  with  the  Mexican  revolutionists. 

If  the  reasonableness  of  the  Colonel's  scorn  for  the  President's 
diplomacy  is  an  open  question,  his  broadsides  against  Wilson's  pre- 
paredness policy  were  justifiable,  given  the  President's  own  assump- 
tions. Wilson's  decision  to  hold  Germany  to  "strict  accountability" 
destroyed  the  premises  on  which  his  original  opposition  to  prepared- 
ness rested,  i.e.,  the  United  States  was  not  in  danger  of  becoming 
involved  in  the  war.  From  that  moment  on  Wilson  was  obligated  to 
prepare  for  the  war  that  must  inevitably  come  if  Germany  refused  to 
back  down.  But  in  the  face  of  all  the  warnings  raised  by  Roosevelt 
and  the  other  advocates  of  preparedness,  the  President  moved  with 
the  speed  of  a  glacier.  The  Lusitania  was  five  months  in  the  depths 
of  the  Atlantic  before  he  made  his  first  public  call  for  defense  in- 
creases, and  his  "strict  accountability"  policy  was  twelve  months  old 
before  he  took  the  issue  forcefully  to  the  people.  And  then  it  was 
largely  to  restate  propositions  that  Roosevelt  had  been  arguing  for  the 
seventeen  preceding  months. 


480  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

Ironically,  when  the  President  finally  acted  on  Roosevelt's  logic, 
TR  and  Lodge  convinced  themselves  that  he  was  inspired  by  purely 
political  considerations.  "Wilson  evidently  has  come  to  the  conclu- 
sion that  there  is  a  rising  popular  feeling  for  preparedness  and,  seeing 
votes  in  it,  is  prepared  to  take  it  up,"  Lodge  wrote  TR  in  the  summer 
of  1915  when  the  President  made  his  first  tentative  overtures  toward 
preparedness.  "Last  winter  he  did  everything  he  could  to  stop  any 
improvement  in  the  Army  and  Navy,  sneered  at  Gardner  and  held 
him  up  as  merely  trying  to  make  political  capital  because  he  was  urg- 
ing them,  as  he  is  now,  the  necessity  of  doing  something." 

There  was  probably  more  "political  capital"  in  playing  prepared- 
ness down  than  up,  so  intense  was  the  antiwar  sentiment  throughout 
the  country.  But  whatever  the  President's  motives,  it  is  clear  that  his 
dramatic  volte-face,  which  occurred  in  the  fall  of  1915,  confirmed 
Roosevelt's  judgment  on  the  preparedness  issue.  From  the  fall  of 
1915  on,  as  Bryan  lamented  to  his  friends,  Wilson  spoke  partially  in 
Rooseveltian  terms.  The  President  failed,  however,  to  act  with  Roose- 
veltian  dispatch,  or  to  propose  an  army  program  commensurate  with 
Roosevelt's  conception  of  the  nation's  needs. 

The  Colonel  quickly  seized  upon  the  opportunity  afforded  by  Wil- 
son's belated  espousal  of  preparedness  to  press  a  proposal  that  he  had 
never  deemed  possible  of  enactment  in  the  past — universal  military 
service.  As  the  preparedness  debate  came  to  a  head  in  the  winter  of 
1915-1916,  he  made  a  herculean  effort  to  persuade  the  public  and 
the  administration  to  support  it.  "I  would  have  the  son  of  the  multi- 
millionaire and  the  son  of  the  immigrant  who  came  in  steerage,  sleep 
under  the  same  dog-tent  and  eat  the  same  grub,"  TR  exclaimed  in 
October,  1915.  "It  would  help  mightily  to  a  mutual  comprehension  of 
life."  In  the  end,  however,  the  fight  for  universal  service  failed  for 
lack  of  support  from  the  "plain  people"  in  the  West  and  the  South 
and  from  organized  labor  throughout  the  country.  Nor  could  Wilson, 
who  was  having  to  coerce  and  cajole  Congress  into  passing  a  modest 
army  program,  have  got  it  through. 

Meanwhile,  the  administration's  program  was  taking  shape.  Instead 
of  calling  a  special  session  of  Congress  in  the  summer  or  fall  of  1915 
when  he  first  convinced  himself  of  the  need  for  a  preparedness  pro- 
gram, the  President  had  waited  for  the  regular  session  to  convene  in 
December.  Then,  on  the  urging  of  Secretary  of  War  Lindley  M.  Gar- 
rison, he  had  come  out  for  the  creation  of  a  volunteer  force  of  400,000 


THE   BUGLE   THAT   WOKE   AMERICA  481 

semireservists — the  so-called  Continental  Army.  Roosevelt,  whose 
relationship  to  Wilson  was  not  unlike  that  of  La  Follette's  to  himself 
during  the  fight  for  the  Hepburn  Act  ten  years  before,  at  once  charged 
that  the  proposal  was  inadequate;  and  when  Lodge,  the  National 
Security  League,  and  a  number  of  prominent  Republicans  endorsed 
it  in  the  realization  that  they  could  not  expect  more,  given  the  anti- 
preparedness  sentiment  of  Congress,  the  Colonel  was  furious.  "I  am 
so  out  of  sympathy  with  what  seems  to  be  the  prevailing  currents  of 
American  opinion  that  I  keep  my  judgment  suspended  .  .  .  ,"  he 
wrote  Lodge. 

Apparently  the  Republicans  are  expecting  to  beat  Wilson  by 
keeping  as  neutral  as  he  is  as  regards  international  duty,  by  sup- 
porting him  in  his  sham-preparedness  program  and  letting  him  pose 
before  the  country  as  the  author  of  that  program  and  as  the  cham- 
pion of  preparedness,  and  by  then  trusting  that  on  the  tariff  and  by 
some  more  or  less  secret  understanding  with  the  German  vote  they 
may  be  able  to  replace  him  by  some  one  to  whom  the  Germans 
won't  object.  .  .  . 

But  Lodge's  sensitivity  to  the  strength  of  the  agrarian-progressive 
opponents  of  preparedness  was  keener  than  Roosevelt's.  Rather  than 
hold  out  for  the  impossible,  he  decided  over  TR's  protests  to  compro- 
mise. "I  have  repeatedly  said  that  this  Administration  has  wasted  one 
year  in  providing  for  the  defense  of  the  country  and  I  want  to  prevent 
them  if  I  can  from  wholly  wasting  another  year,"  he  explained  to 
TR.  "We  may  not  be  able  to  get  much  but  every  little  counts." 

Meanwhile,  Southern  agrarians  under  the  firm  leadership  of 
Claude  Kitchin  of  North  Carolina  bore  out  Lodge's  reasoning  by  reso- 
lutely refusing  to  approve  the  Continental  Army  scheme.  Claiming 
that  it  was  militaristic  and  unnecessary,  they  insisted  instead  on  ex- 
panding the  inefficient  National  Guard.  In  this  they  were  supported 
by  the  majority  of  Republicans  in  the  House,  many  of  whom  suc- 
cumbed to  the  blandishments  of  the  powerful  National  Guard  lobby. 
The  President  was  thus  forced  to  compromise  or  suffer  the  complete 
defeat  of  his  army  program,  and  when  he  did  so  the  inflexible  Secre- 
tary of  War  resigned  in  disgust.  Garrison  became  in  consequence  a 
minor  martyr  to  many  preparedness  advocates,  but  not  to  TR. 

Legislation  to  increase  the  Army's  strength  from  a  little  over 
100,000  officers  and  men  to  about  220,000  was  finally  enacted,  but 


482  POWER  AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

only  after  a  protracted  battle  which  saw  Wilson  bring  all  the  great 
force  of  his  personality  and  the  power  of  his  office  to  bear  on  the 
resentful  agrarian-progressives  in  the  House.  Provision  was  also  made 
to  place  the  National  Guard  under  federal  supervision  and  to  increase 
substantially  its  strength. 

Understandably,  Roosevelt  was  too  exacerbated  by  the  uncon- 
scionable delay — the  National  Defense  Act  of  1916  followed  the  out- 
break of  war  by  two  years  and  the  enunciation  of  the  "strict  account- 
ability" policy  by  eighteen  months — to  appreciate  the  leadership  the 
President  had  at  long  last  exerted.  He  did  not  regard  the  measure  as 
a  victory  for  his  own  point  of  view.  It  was,  he  said,  "as  foolish  and 
unpatriotic  a  bit  of  flintlock  legislation  as  was  ever  put  on  the  statute 
book.  It  is  folly,  and  worse  than  folly,  to  pretend  that  the  National 
Guard  is  an  efficient  second  line  of  defense."  Roosevelt  realized,  more- 
over, that  Congress'  failure  to  provide  for  a  capable  reserve  force 
implicitly  repudiated  the  thesis  that  the  United  States  should  prepare 
for  participation  in  the  war  then  raging. 

The  naval  bill  was  another  matter.  Wilson's  request  in  December, 
1915,  for  a  vast  construction  program  incited  only  moderate  opposi- 
tion; and  after  he  gave  a  spectacular  series  of  addresses  in  the  Middle 
West,  climaxed  in  St.  Louis,  where  German-American  resentment  of 
British  naval  power  was  strong,  by  an  oratorical  call  for  "incom- 
parably the  greatest  navy  in  the  world,"  the  majority  of  Democrats 
and  Republicans  in  Congress  swung  behind  his  recommendations.  The 
result  was  the  largest  and  most  comprehensive  naval  program  to  that 
time,  a  program  based  on  two  propositions  Roosevelt  had  been  argu- 
ing since  the  start  of  the  war:  the  United  States  should  be  prepared 
to  negotiate  from  strength,  and  it  should  be  capable  of  defending  its 
far-flung  strategic  interests  upon  the  end  of  hostilities  in  Europe. 

Only  on  one  important  issue  had  TR  failed  the  preparedness  cru- 
sade. From  the  start  of  the  demands  for  increases  in  military  strength 
the  agrarian-progressives  and  their  allies  in  labor  and  reform  circles 
had  contended  that  the  movement  was  inspired  by  big  business  in 
general  and  the  munitions  makers  in  particular.  After  Wilson's  belated 
conversion  to  preparedness  in  1915,  they  had  laid  plans  to  impose  the 
cost  of  the  program  upon  those  groups.  Republicans  "will  vote  for 
the  biggest  preparedness  appropriation  and  then  fight  all  methods  to 
finance  it  ...  ,"  Kitchin  resentfully  wrote  Bryan.  "I  am  persuaded 
to  think  that  when  the  income  tax  will  have  to  pay  for  the  increase  in 


THE  BUGLE   THAT  WOKE   AMERICA  483 

the  army  and  navy,  they  will  not  be  one-half  so  frightened  over  the 
future  invasion  by  Germany." 

Kitchin's  analysis  was  partially  overdrawn.  Nevertheless,  when  he 
pushed  a  revenue  bill  late  in  the  summer  of  1916  that  drastically 
raised  the  income  tax  in  the  upper  brackets,  instituted  a  steeply 
graduated  inheritance  tax,  and  assessed  the  profits  of  munitions  mak- 
ers as  well,  the  overwhelming  majority  of  Republicans  in  both  houses 
of  Congress,  including  Roosevelt's  son-in-law,  Nicholas  Longworth, 
bitterly  fought  it.  Though  TR  himself  had  long  advocated  the  income 
and  inheritance  taxes,  he  failed  to  call  on  them  to  support  it. 

That  Lodge  and  other  like-minded  conservatives  should  have  op- 
posed a  more  equitable  tax  structure  was  to  be  expected.  But  that 
Roosevelt,  in  whom  the  Progressive  leadership  was  vested  until  July, 
1916,  should  have  failed  to  sound  a  clarion  call  for  a  great  democra- 
tization of  effort  (as  he  was  to  do  after  the  United  States  entered  the 
war)  is  one  of  the  minor  tragedies  of  his  career.  A  generation  was  to 
pass  before  the  naive  belief  that  the  munitions  makers  and  the  House 
of  Morgan  had  inspired  the  preparedness  movement  and  American 
entry  into  the  war  would  begin  to  down.  TR  could  have  at  least  struck 
it  a  blow  at  its  birth. 

How  much  the  preparedness  program  of  1916  owed  to  Roosevelt's 
driving  leadership  can  only  be  conjectured.  His  bitter  strictures  against 
Wilson,  the  pacifists,  and  the  so-called  hyphenated  Americans  un- 
doubtedly provoked  an  adverse  reaction  among  many  moderates.  His 
extremism  also  alienated  many  who  agreed  with  his  position.  Yet,  he 
just  as  certainly  roused  the  fears  and  inspired  the  courage  of  many, 
many  others.  There  was  not  a  preparedness  society  in  the  country 
that  did  not  look  to  TR  for  leadership,  scarcely  a  major  newspaper 
that  was  not  moved  to  discuss  editorially  the  issues  he  had  raised; 
nor,  probably,  was  there  a  politician  in  Washington  who  was  not  in- 
fluenced one  way  or  the  other  by  his  searing  pronouncements.  By 
1916  "preparedness"  and  "Roosevelt"  were  virtually  synonymous; 
and  if  the  Colonel  was  not  literally  "The  Bugle  That  Woke  America," 
he  was  surely  the  leader  of  the  corps  that  did. 


CHAPTER  30 


THE   CAMPAIGN   FOR 

AMERICAN   RIGHTS 


The  delegates  [Progressives]  who  go  to  Chicago  will  have  it  in 
their  power  to  determine  the  character  of  the  administration 
which  is  to  do  or  leave  undone  the  mighty  tasks  of  the  next  four 
years. 

— Theodore  Roosevelt 


While  the  preparedness  program  was  coming  to  a  head  in  the  spring 
of  1916,  Roosevelt  was  girding  for  yet  another  battle — one  that  would 
concentrate  all  his  surging  idealism  and  flaming  patriotism,  all  his 
political  artistry  and  personal  venom,  into  a  mighty  drive  to  supplant 
Wilson  with  a  President  whose  devotion  to  preparedness  and  Ameri- 
can rights  matched  his  own. 

With  each  twist  and  turn  in  President  Wilson's  diplomacy  during 
1915  and  early  1916  Roosevelt's  urge  to  remove  him  from  power  had 
become  more  compelling.  Months  before  the  election  of  1916  the 
Colonel  had  fastened  upon  a  strategy  that  made  suppression  of  his 
progressivism  mandatory  and  led  logically  to  his  ultimate  insult  to 
the  crusaders  of  1912 — the  proposal  that  they  give  Henry  Cabot 
Lodge  the  Bull  Moose  presidential  nomination.  It  was  to  win  the 
Republican  nomination  for  himself,  and,  failing  in  that,  to  force  the 
Republicans  to  select  a  candidate  who  was  "right"  on  the  great  issues 
of  the  times.  He  would  use  the  Progressive  party's  potential  strength 
at  the  polls  as  the  bludgeon  wherewith  to  achieve  one  or  the  other 
of  these  ends,  and  would  then  take  the  party  triumphantly  back  into 
the  organization  that  had  given  it  birth.  The  broad  outlines  of  this 

484 


THE    CAMPAIGN   FOR  AMERICAN   RIGHTS  485 

strategy  were  disclosed  as  early  as  January,  1916,  when  TR  com- 
pelled the  Progressive  National  Committee  to  issue  a  statement  call- 
ing on  its  members  to  return  to  the  Republican  fold  in  a  supreme 
effort  to  turn  out  the  Democrats. 

If  the  Colonel  was  thus  willing  to  draw  the  veil  on  the  progressive 
movement  in  the  vain  hope  that  he  could  compel  the  Republican 
party  to  rise  to  responsibilities  that  the  Democrats  had  eschewed,  he 
was  nonetheless  determined  that  his  own  nomination,  if  it  came,  would 
come  in  full  recognition  of  his  views  on  preparedness  and  Ameri- 
canism. He  fervently  wanted  the  nomination.  "Don't  imagine  that  I 
wouldn't  like  to  be  at  the  White  House  this  minute,"  he  exploded  to 
a  friend  that  winter.  "This  was  my  year — 1916  was  my  high  twelve," 
he  resignedly  confided  to  another  intimate  after  Wilson  had  been  re- 
elected.  "In  four  years  I  will  be  out  of  it.  ...  I  did  not  want  to  run 
in  1912.  Circumstances  compelled  me  to  run  then.  This  year  it  was 
different." 

But  except  for  that  deference  to  the  Old  Guard's  economic  preju- 
dices implicit  in  his  failure  to  endorse  the  agrarian-progressives'  tax 
program,  Roosevelt  cast  politics  to  the  winds  in  the  spring  of  1916. 
From  Trinidad,  where  he  and  Mrs.  Roosevelt  took  a  brief  vacation  in 
March,  he,  in  effect,  invited  the  American  people  to  elect  him  Presi- 
dent and  then  go  to  war.  "I  ...  say  that  it  would  be  a  mistake  to 
nominate  me  unless  the  country  has  in  its  mood  something  of  the 
heroic — unkss  it  feels  not  only  devotion  to  ideals  but  the  purpose 
measurably  to  realize  those  ideals  in  action,"  he  declared  in  a  public 
statement.  And  in  May  he  took  his  militant  message  to  the  Middle 
West,  the  seedbed  of  the  nation's  three  great  isolationist  strains — 
ruralism,  pacifism,  and  German- Americanism. 

In  Detroit,  where  Henry  Ford's  pacifist  views  had  received  a  long, 
full  hearing,  TR  gave  a  rousing  speech  for  universal  military  service 
highlighted  by  a  personal  exchange  with  a  slender  woman,  who  arose 
in  the  balcony,  American  flag  in  hand,  and  cried  out:  "I  have  two 
sons.  I  offer  them."  Gravely,  the  Colonel  replied  after  a  wave  of 
thunderous  applause  died  down,  "Madam,  if  every  mother  in  the 
country  would  make  the  same  offer,  there  would  be  no  need  for  any 
mother  to  send  her  sons  to  war." 

Later  that  month  Roosevelt  went  to  Kansas  City,  where  he  was 
engulfed  by  a  roaring  crowd  of  fifty  thousand,  and  then  to  St.  Louis, 
where  he  lashed  the  German-Americans  with  incredible  fury.  "It  is 


486  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

our  purpose  this  fall,"  he  declared  in  that  German-American  center 
on  the  Mississippi,  "to  elect  an  American  president  and  not  a  viceroy 
of  the  German  emperor."  One  week  later  the  Republican  convention, 
its  ranks  heavily  laden  with  German-Americans,  and  its  managers 
prepared  to  defer  to  German-American  sensibilities  at  any  cost,  con- 
vened at  Chicago. 

The  Colonel's  performance  had  destroyed  his  last  slim  hope  of 
winning  the  presidential  prize,  and  he  knew  that  it  had.  "If  there  had 
been  a  chance  of  winning  the  Republicans'  support,"  he  remarked 
after  his  return  to  Oyster  Bay,  "I  killed  it  by  my  tour  of  the  West." 

In  reality,  there  had  been  little  chance.  A  small  group  of  Eastern- 
ers were  willing  to  let  bygones  be  bygones.  And  a  great  host  of  the 
G.O.P.  rank  and  file  wanted  the  Colonel.  Just  two  spontaneous  out- 
bursts would  punctuate  the  Republican  convention  the  following 
week,  one  when  a  speaker  inadvertently  mentioned  Roosevelt's  name, 
the  other  when  it  was  placed  in  nomination.  But  the  Midwestern  pro- 
fessionals had  no  intention  of  letting  Roosevelt  capture  the  heights. 
Long  before  TR  dropped  his  hat  on  the  edge  of  the  ring,  they  had 
decided  to  nominate  a  man  tinged  with  enough  progressivism  to  be 
acceptable  to  the  Bull  Moosers,  orthodox  enough  on  the  tariff  to 
keep  contributions  from  manufacturers  rolling  in,  and  mild  enough 
on  the  war  to  appease  the  German-Americans.  They  went  to  the 
Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States  to  find  him. 

"I  wish  I  knew  something  about  [Charles  Evans]  Hughes,"  Repre- 
sentative Gardner  had  written  his  daughter  in  January,  1916,  as  the 
movement  for  the  jurist's  nomination  had  first  begun  to  gather  mo- 
mentum. "All  I  know  is  that  he  wears  a  beard  and  stopped  horse- 
racing  in  New  York.  .  .  .  The  machine  is  getting  ready  to  nominate 
.  .  .  [him]."  Roosevelt  added  in  May  that  the  movement  for  Hughes 
"is  primarily  a  politicians'  movement  made  for  the  very  reason  that 
no  one  knows  where  he  stands,  and  therefore  represents  the  ideal,  dear 
to  the  soul  of  the  politician,  of  the  candidate  against  whom  no  one 
can  say  anything."  Gardner  and  Roosevelt  were  not  far  wrong.  The 
Republican  party  would  have  to  wait  until  it  met  in  convention  on 
June  7  to  find  out  what  its  leading  candidate  stood  for,  and  even  then 
it  would  not  quite  be  certain.  Nor  would  it  know  much  more  after 
he  had  campaigned  for  four  months. 

Meanwhile,  some  Republican  leaders  sought  to  pave  the  way  for 
Roosevelt's  endorsement  of  the  Republican  candidate  by  framing  a 


THE   CAMPAIGN   FOR   AMERICAN   RIGHTS  487 

platform  consonant  with  the  Colonel's  views.  In  Washington,  before 
they  entrained  for  Chicago,  Lodge  and  Borah  drew  up  an  aggressive 
document  which  they  submitted  for  approval  to  George  Perkins,  who 
served  as  TR's  liaison  man.  When  they  reached  Chicago,  however, 
they  found  the  majority  too  intent  on  appeasing  the  German-Ameri- 
cans and  rural  isolationists  to  accept  their  draft.  Resignedly,  they  re- 
wrote it. 

The  first  plank  to  go  was  a  call  for  universal  military  service. 
"They  all  admitted,  readily  enough,  that  we  must  come  to  universal 
military  training,  but  they  did  not  think  the  people  were  ripe  for  it, 
and  were  afraid  to  risk  it,"  Lodge  afterward  explained  to  TR.  "I  did 
what  I  could  with  the  aid  of  Jimmy  Wadsworth."  Calls  for  an  army 
of  250,000  and  a  navy  second  to  none  were  also  deleted.  As  finally 
adopted,  the  planks  on  foreign  policy  paid  lip-service  to  the  Colonel's 
philosophy;  but  they  ignored  most  of  his  charges  against  Wilson's 
diplomacy.  They  also  called  for  "a  straight  and  honest  neutrality  be- 
tween the  belligerents,"  the  antithesis  of  what  Roosevelt,  Lodge,  and 
the  Eastern  interventionists  desired.  Not  without  perception  did  a 
Progressive  national  committeeman  later  write  TR  that  the  Republi- 
can platform  measured  "up  to  your  demands  to  about  the  same  degree 
the  Kaiser's  answers  did  to  Wilson's  notes." 

While  the  Republicans  were  meeting  in  the  Coliseum,  the  Bull 
Moosers  were  staging  a  remarkable  demonstration  of  fealty  to  TR  in 
the  Chicago  Auditorium.  A  great  body  of  Progressives — probably  the 
overwhelming  majority  of  the  convention — was  opposed  to  war, 
whether  against  Germany  or  Mexico.  But  their  affection  for  the 
Colonel  was  so  great  and  their  realization  that  they  could  not  survive 
without  him  so  acute,  that  they  unhesitatingly  prepared  to  swallow  the 
bitter  with  the  sweet.  Protesting  only  in  undertones,  they  endorsed  a 
platform  that  evaded  the  critical  taxation  issue,  that  only  perfunc- 
torily endorsed  the  memorable  reform  planks  of  1912,  and  that  called 
for  universal  military  service,  a  regular  army  of  250,000,  and  the 
second  largest  navy  in  the  world  (TR  continued  to  believe  that  Great 
Britain  should  have  the  largest).  Angrily,  the  New  Republic  summed 
it  up: 

The  platform  of  an  ostensibly  progressive  party  fails  to  utter  one 
single  conviction  which  need  cause  any  uneasiness  to  the  established 
order.  It  does  not  tamper  with  the  foundations  of  political  and  eco- 


438  POWER  AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

nomic  power.  .  .  .  Militant  progressivism  is  converted  into  a  nebu- 
lous nationalism  which  can  be  made  to  mean  all  things  to  all  men. 

The  blackest  hour  was  yet  to  come.  The  Republican  professionals 
in  the  Coliseum  could  neither  forget  1912  nor  ignore  the  seething 
hatred  the  German-Americans  now  felt  for  the  Colonel.  In  the  face 
of  a  minor  boom  for  Roosevelt  on  the  lower  echelons,  they  resolutely 
held  to  their  plan  to  nominate  Hughes,  who  remained  substantially 
uncommitted  on  the  great  questions  of  the  times.  TR  was  outraged 
when  apprised  by  telephone.  "I  guess  there  is  no  need  to  tell  you,"  he 
said  to  Medill  McCormick  over  a  private  line  connecting  Sagamore 
Hill  with  George  Perkins'  rooms  in  the  Blackstone  Hotel,  "that  I 
think  Hughes  a  good  deal  of  a  skunk  in  the  attitude  he  has  taken." 
He  would  "breathe  a  sigh  of  relief"  if  he  were  not  nominated  him- 
self, he  added  when  Lodge  came  on  the  wire,  "...  but  in  inter- 
national matters  and  in  the  present  situation  I  know  I  am  worth  two 
of  Hughes." 

The  Colonel's  contempt  for  Hughes  proved  less  than  consuming.  To 
be  sure,  he  vehemently  reiterated  his  opposition  to  the  jurist  in  tele- 
phone conversations  with  Perkins  and  other  Progressive  and  Republi- 
can leaders.  And  he  even  offered  the  notorious  Boise  Penrose,  who 
was  "right"  on  preparedness  and  Americanism  if  little  else,  the  ma- 
jority leadership  of  the  Senate  in  return  for  his  support  in  the  Re- 
publican convention.  He  refused,  however,  to  force  the  G.O.P.'s 
hand  by  letting  it  out  that  he  would  again  run  on  the  Progressive  ticket 
should  Hughes  receive  the  Republican  nomination.  Gifford  Pinchot 
implored  him  to  do  so.  "We  have  been  playing  poker  with  them,"  he 
heatedly  asserted,  ".  .  .  without  chips  in  that  direction."  But  Roose- 
velt brusquely  dismissed  the  proposal.  "I  wish  to  say  this,"  he  said 
to  his  forester  friend  when  he  again  raised  the  issue,  "...  there  is  a 
very  wide  difference  between  making  a  young  Colonel  and  a  retired 
Major  General  lead  a  forlorn  hope."  He  added  later  that  he  would 
refuse  to  support  Hughes  until  "he  repudiated  the  German-American 
alliance,"  but  that  he  was  "not  going  to  dictate  to  that  Convention  as 
if  I  were  a  Tammany  Chieftain." 

In  point  of  fact,  the  Colonel  was  already  dictating  to  the  Progres- 
sive convention.  The  Bull  Moosers  wanted  Roosevelt  and  no  one 
else,  and  they  were  straining  powerfully  to  nominate  him  and  have 
done  with  it.  But  against  the  urgent  entreaties  of  Pinchot,  William 


THE   CAMPAIGN   FOR  AMERICAN   RIGHTS  489 

Allen  White,  and  others,  TR  insisted  that  Perkins  prevent  the  Pro- 
gressives from  balloting  until  after  the  Republicans  had  made  their 
nomination.  Dutifully,  Perkins,  who  was  later  to  be  charged  by  the 
western  radicals  with  destroying  the  Progressive  party,  followed  his 
leader's  instructions.  By  Friday  night,  June  9,  however,  it  was  ap- 
parent that  Perkins  could  not  indefinitely  hold  back  the  flood.  The 
Bull  Moosers  were  going  to  nominate  Roosevelt  the  next  morning 
regardless  of  his  or  Perkins'  protests;  and  the  Republicans  were  just 
as  surely  going  to  bestow  their  accolade  on  Hughes. 

In  desperation  Perkins  put  Nicholas  Murray  Butler  on  the  phone 
with  the  Colonel  at  three  A.M.  Saturday  to  discuss  alternative  can- 
didates. "How  do  you  do,  President  of  Columbia  College,"  TR  re- 
marked when  the  pompous  Butler  came  on  the  wire.  He  then  dis- 
missed Butler's  three  suggestions — Elihu  Root,  Philander  C.  Knox, 
and  former  Vice  President  Charles  W.  Fairbanks — and  countered 
with  Leonard  Wood.  "Of  course  he  would  understand  very  speedily 
that  the  tariff  and  such  matters  were  entirely  outside  his  realm  and 
would  get  on  the  Army  and  Navy  question  and  Americanism  at  once," 
Roosevelt  added.  "He  wouldn't  have  to  do  as  Brother  Hughes  will 
have  to  do — improvise."  Although  W.  A.  White  had  said  earlier  that 
Wood's  selection  would  "suit  me  beautifully,"  Perkins  blanched  at  the 
prospect.  ".  .  .1  think  it  was  a  very  grave  mistake  to  suggest  Wood," 
he  admonished  the  Colonel  a  little  later.  "He  is  not  acceptable  to  any- 
body. He  is  a  military  man.  It  puts  you  in  a  bad  light."  Roosevelt  saw 
Perkins'  point.  "It  has  been  rejected  and  I  will  not  follow  it  up  at  all," 
he  replied. 

Meanwhile,  Roosevelt  suggested  Cabot  Lodge  as  his  alternative 
candidate.  Perkins  again  demurred,  proposing  instead  that  the  Pro- 
gressive convention  adopt  a  resolution  of  opposition  to  Hughes  and 
then  nominate  Roosevelt  as  Pinchot  and  White  had  earlier  urged. 
Vehemently,  the  Colonel  rejected  the  idea.  "That  is  one  of  the  most 
extraordinary  things  I  have  ever  heard,"  he  exclaimed.  "I  want  to 
say  right  here,  although  you  may  not  agree  with  me,  that  I  am  sure  I 
was  right  in  speaking  of  Wood  and  Lodge." 

Perkins  thereupon  backed  down,  conceding  that  Lodge  was  "the 
only  man  familiar  with  the  international  situation"  who  might  be 
acceptable  to  both  conventions.  "I  know  Lodge's  record  like  a  book," 
TR  replied.  "There  has  never  been  anything  against  it  at  any  time, 


490  POWER  AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

except,  of  course,  George,  that  he  does  not  have  as  advanced  views  as 
you  and  I." 

Nevertheless,  Perkins  remained  unenthusiastic,  and  early  that  morn- 
ing he  and  other  Progressive  leaders  made  a  last  effort  to  dissuade  TR 
from  submitting  Lodge's  name  to  the  Progressive  convention.  Roose- 
velt proved  implacable.  "I  do  not  ask  our  people  to  accept  one  of 
the  burglars,"  he  testily  remarked  to  former  Governor  Robert  Bass 
of  New  Hampshire.  "I  do  not  ask  them  to  accept  any  man  who  isn't 
of  the  highest  character  and  who  does  not  stand  absolutely  square  on 
the  issues  of  the  day."  That  ended  it. 

Late  that  morning  the  faithful  Perkins  went  resignedly  before  the 
Bull  Moose  convention  and  read  a  statement  from  Roosevelt  that 
warmly  commended  Lodge  as  one  of  the  "staunchest  fighters  for  dif- 
ferent measures  of  economic  reform  in  the  direction  of  justice."  As 
he  finished,  a  great  gasp  of  incredulity  went  up  from  the  floor.  The 
delegates  felt  that  Roosevelt  "had  done  something  not  merely  fan- 
tastic but  grossly  insulting,"  Amos  Pinchot  recalled.  "They  had  been 
kept  in  the  dark,  treated  like  children — pawns  in  a  game  into  the  na- 
ture of  which  they  had  had  no  inkling.  I  saw  men  and  women  sitting 
as  if  stunned,  like  unjustly  punished  children,  with  tears  streaming 
down  their  cheeks."  With  catcalls  and  boos  filling  the  air,  they  shouted 
down  a  new  appeal  from  Perkins  that  they  nominate  Hughes.  They 
were  done  with  dealings,  or  so  they  thought.  Deliberately,  and  with 
a  touch  of  irony  in  his  voice,  Bainbridge  Colby  thereupon  placed 
Roosevelt's  name  in  nomination.  Hiram  Johnson  seconded  it  with  a 
speech  calling  on  TR  to  rise  to  his  responsibilities.  And  then,  three 
minutes  after  the  Hughes  movement  reached  floodtide  in  the  Re- 
publican convention,  the  Progressives  angrily  and  overwhelmingly 
gave  their  unqualified  nomination  to  Theodore  Roosevelt.  Roose- 
velt's response  came  by  telegraph  that  afternoon,  Saturday,  June  10. 

"I  cannot  accept  it  at  this  time,"  the  message  read.  "I  do  not  know 
the  attitude  of  the  candidate  of  the  Republican  party  toward  the  vital 
questions  of  the  day.  Therefore,  if  you  desire  an  immediate  decision, 
I  must  decline  the  nomination."  Roosevelt  suggested,  however,  that 
his  conditional  refusal  to  run  be  submitted  to  the  national  committee. 
"If  Mr.  Hughes's  statements,  when  he  makes  them,  shall  satisfy  the 
committee  .  .  .  they  can  .  .  .  treat  my  refusal  as  definitely  accepted." 

The  Colonel  had  partially  carried  his  objective;  but  at  the  cost  of 
wounds  that  would  never  heal.  His  artfulness  had  been  bared  as  rarely 


THE    CAMPAIGN    FOR   AMERICAN   RIGHTS  491 

before.  And  his  commendation  of  Lodge  as  "one  of  the  staunchest 
fighters  ...  for  economic  reform  .  .  ."  lives  on  as  the  hollow  mock- 
ery of  a  once  glorious  crusade.  Cabot  Lodge  was  no  black  reactionary, 
nor  even  an  unyielding  defender  of  the  status  quo.  But  if  his  heart 
ever  throbbed  with  the  passion  for  social  justice  and  economic  re- 
form that  inspired  the  Bull  Moose  legions  and  their  leader,  its  beat 
has  never  been  recorded.  That  very  summer,  in  fact,  he  would  fail  to 
support  the  child  labor  bill  that  Wilson  would  drive  through  Congress. 
Yet,  as  the  radical  pacifist,  Amos  Pinchot,  whom  TR  was  soon  to 
consign  to  the  Progressive  party's  "lunatic  fringe,"  would  later  con- 
cede, the  circumstances  were  extenuating.  No  man  can  gainsay  that  in 
Roosevelt's  mind  the  cause  that  now  enveloped  him  was  not  noble; 
that  preparedness  for  war  did  not  transcend  all  other  issues.  The 
Colonel  may  have  suppressed  his  progressivism  more  than  was  neces- 
sary; and  he  undoubtedly  allowed  his  contempt  for  Wilson  to  becloud 
his  judgment  of  the  President.  But  he  was  absolutely  faithful  to  his 
own  conception  of  the  main  issues.  And  more  than  any  other  major 
political  figure  of  the  era,  Henry  Cabot  Lodge  stood  as  one  with  him 
in  support  of  those  issues.  That  Roosevelt  should  have  turned  to 
Lodge  in  the  hour  of  crisis  is  as  understandable  from  his  point  of 
view  as  it  was  unforgivable  from  that  of  the  Progressives.  As  Amos 
Pinchot  wrote  in  the  reflective  mood  of  a  later  year,  "There  are  gen- 
erally extenuating  circumstances  for  every  political  act  hi  which  the 
element  of  betrayal  seems  present."  The  Colonel's  treatment  of  the 
Bull  Moosers  "was  bad;  at  the  time  .  .  .  unforgivable." 

And  yet,  in  the  light  cast  on  these  events  by  Roosevelt's  own 
peculiar  philosophy,  there  was  a  certain  justification.  ...  He  be- 
lieved that  the  most  important  thing  hi  the  world  was  for  America 
to  enter  the  war  on  the  side  of  the  Allies.  Comparatively  speaking, 
domestic  issues  did  not  exist  for  him.  He  was  wrapped  up  in  the 
war.  .  .  .  In  1916  Wilson  was  a  pacifist. 

.  .  .  Roosevelt  felt — and  how  much  his  personal  animosity 
toward  Wilson  warped  his  judgment  cannot  be  told — that  the  es- 
sential thing  was  to  get  rid  of  Wilson.  For  him  to  run  as  a  Progres- 
sive would  have  meant  to  re-elect  Wilson.  .  .  . 

Actually  there  was  a  degree  of  logic  in  TR's  eventual  acceptance  of 
Hughes,  whom  he  had  earlier  passed  off  as  "another  Wilson  with 
whiskers."  The  Colonel  was  bitter  that  Hughes  had  been  nominated 
without  showing  his  colors.  "A  more  sordid  set  of  creatures  than  the 


492  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

Republicans  who  nominated  Hughes  could  not  be  imagined,"  he 
angrily  wrote.  "They  are  a  trifle  better  than  the  corrupt  and  lunatic 
wild  asses  of  the  desert  who  seem  most  influential  in  democratic  coun- 
cils, under  the  lead  of  that  astute,  unprincipled  and  physically  cow- 
ardly demagogue  Wilson;  but  they  are  a  sorry  lot."  As  always,  how- 
ever, Roosevelt  looked  to  the  future.  He  took  hope  in  reports  that 
Hughes  would  appoint  Elihu  Root  Secretary  of  State.  He  held  that 
Hughes's  understanding  of  the  progressive  philosophy,  though  de- 
ficient, was  at  least  "far  ahead  of  all  the  other  leading  Republicans." 
And  he  persuaded  himself  that  Hughes  was  "an  able,  upright  man" 
capable  of  learning  with  "comparative  quickness"  and  possessed  of 
the  temperament  to  "rise  to  a  very  big  height"  in  time  of  crisis. 

The  Colonel  had  also  had  a  gratifying  luncheon  conversation  with 
Hughes  on  June  28,  two  days  after  the  Progressive  National  Com- 
mittee reluctantly  submitted  to  TR's  judgment  and  agreed  to  support 
the  Republican  nominee.  "I  believe  as  you  do  that  he  will  make  a 
straight-out  fight  for  preparedness  and  national  defense,"  he  confided 
to  Lodge  soon  afterward.  "He  told  me  he  personally  believed  in  uni- 
versal service,  but  was  doubtful  as  to  the  expediency  of  coming  out 
for  it  at  this  time."  Furthermore,  Roosevelt  was  outraged  by  the 
Democrats'  comportment  at  St.  Louis,  where  ex-Governor  Martin 
Glynn  of  New  York  had  electrified  the  convention  and  given  the  party 
its  campaign  theme  with  a  rolling  reiteration  of  the  thesis  that  "We 
didn't  go  to  war"  every  time  an  American  right  had  been  violated  in 
the  past,  that  he  had  no  real  choice. 

TR's  hard-forced  enthusiasm  for  the  Republican  candidate  was 
destined  to  be  short-lived,  for  the  unwritten  terms  of  Hughes's  can- 
didacy made  a  forthright  campaign  politically  impossible.  "To  satisfy 
Mr.  Roosevelt,  Hughes  must  quarrel  with  the  Old  Guard,"  Joseph 
Pulitzer's  St.  Louis  Post  Dispatch  said  editorially  during  the  later 
stages  of  the  campaign. 

To  satisfy  the  pro-Germans  he  must  quarrel  with  the  pro-British, 
who  demand  war  with  Germany.  To  satisfy  Wall  Street,  he  must 
quarrel  with  the  Western  radicals.  To  satisfy  the  jingoes  and  the 
Munitions  Trust,  he  must  quarrel  with  most  of  the  country.  To 
satisfy  privilege  and  plutocracy,  he  must  quarrel  with  the  people. 
Even  as  a  candidate  Mr.  Hughes  dare  not  have  a  policy,  because  to 
have  a  policy  is  to  antagonize  one  element  or  another  of  his  fol- 
lowers. 


THE   CAMPAIGN   FOR   AMERICAN   RIGHTS  493 

Although  he  had  a  recurring  throat  condition  that  made  speech 
painful,  Roosevelt  meanwhile  agreed  to  campaign  for  Hughes.  Even 
as  he  decided  to  take  the  Republican  case  to  the  people,  G.O.P.  lead- 
ers cringed  at  the  offense  he  would  give  Hughes's  German-American 
supporters.  As  TR  was  to  confess  midway  through  the  campaign,  "it 
has  been  no  light  task  for  me  in  my  speeches  to  avoid  seeming  to 
clash  with  Hughes  and,  at  the  same  time,  not  to  go  back  on  any  of 
the  things  for  which  I  stand."  On  the  whole,  however,  the  Colonel 
gave  full  and  free  expression  to  his  views  on  the  hyphenates,  uni- 
versal military  training,  and  European  and  Mexican  policy.  Re- 
quested to  confine  his  remarks  to  the  tariff  at  one  point,  he  exploded: 
"I  did  not  come  here  to  talk  tariff,  the  crowd  did  not  come  here  to 
hear  me  talk  tariff,  and  I'll  be  hanged  if  I  do  talk  tariff.  I'll  talk  what 
is  in  me." 

The  one  question  on  which  Roosevelt  was  inconsistent  was  inter- 
vention. Sometimes  he  argued  that  a  firm  policy  would  have  pre- 
vented the  Lusitania's  destruction.  More  often,  however,  he  implied 
that  the  United  States  should  have  gone  to  war  when  the  British  liner 
was  torpedoed.  In  Battle  Creek,  Michigan,  he  charged  that  "men  who 
now  with  timid  hearts  and  quavering  voices  praise  Mr.  Wilson  for 
having  kept  us  out  of  war  are  the  spiritual  heirs  of  the  Tories  of  1776, 
and  the  Copperheads  of  1864."  And  in  Denver  he  declared  that  he 
would  have  gone  to  war  in  a  minute  had  he  been  President  when  the 
Lusitania  was  torpedoed.  Elsewhere  TR  asserted  that  when  he  was 
President  other  nations  knew  he  was  not  "too  proud  to  fight."  He  also 
attacked  the  professional  hyphenated  Americans  over  the  protests  of 
harried  Republican  managers,  and  he  raised  the  question  of  whether 
Wilson  would  not  fight  for  the  babies  murdered  on  the  Lusitania. 

The  climax  came  on  November  3  when  Roosevelt,  by  then  utterly 
consumed  with  revulsion  by  Wilson's  failure  to  make  a  sweeping 
repudiation  of  the  "He  kept  us  out  of  war"  theme,  spoke  at  Cooper 
Union  in  New  York.  Unable  to  contain  himself,  he  cast  aside  his 
manuscript  near  the  end  of  his  speech  and  remarked  in  a  voice  vibrant 
with  emotion  that  the  President  was  then  residing  at  Shadow  Lawn, 
a  summer  home  in  New  Jersey. 

There  should  be  shadows  now  at  Shadow  Lawn;  the  shadows  of 
the  men,  women  and  children  who  have  risen  from  the  ooze  of  the 
ocean  bottom  and  from  graves  in  foreign  lands;  the  shadows  of  the 
helpless  whom  Mr.  Wilson  did  not  dare  protect  lest  he  might  have 


494  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

to  face  danger;  the  shadows  of  babies  gasping  pitifully  as  they  sank 
under  the  waves;  the  shadows  of  women  outraged  and  slain  by 
bandits.  .  .  .  Those  are  the  shadows  proper  for  Shadow  Lawn; 
the  shadows  of  deeds  that  were  never  done;  the  shadows  of  lofty 
words  that  were  followed  by  no  action;  the  shadows  of  the  tortured 
dead. 

There  was  neither  cant  nor  hypocrisy,  and  certainly  not  conscious 
partisanship,  in  those  harsh  words.  In  the  mind  of  Theodore  Roose- 
velt, and  in  the  minds  of  thousands  of  responsible  citizens  the  coun- 
try over,  Woodrow  Wilson  had  failed  to  uphold  the  national  honor  as 
it  was  then  construed. 

The  Colonel  had  given  more  of  himself  in  the  campaign  than  he 
had  planned.  Yet  he  had  not  given  quite  enough.  Unlike  Wilson,  who 
understandably  believed  that  he  had  kept  the  country  out  of  war,  or 
Hughes,  who  mistakenly  believed  that  a  firmer  policy  would  continue 
to  prevent  war,  Roosevelt  stood  for  war.  The  war  that  he  was  asking 
for,  however,  was  more  largely  for  the  maintenance  of  American 
rights  rather  than  the  preservation  of  the  Anglo-Franco-American 
balance  of  power  or  even  of  international  law.  Not  once  during  the 
campaign  did  TR  state  his  rational  conviction:  The  United  States 
should  have  been  fighting  on  the  Allies'  side  regardless  of  the  sub- 
marine issue. 

It  is  easy  now  to  say  that  Roosevelt  and  his  friends  should  have 
stated  their  objectives  fully.  And  it  is  probably  true  that  their  failure  to 
treat  the  war  in  a  larger  context  than  American  rights  contributed  to 
the  disillusionment  of  the  postwar  generation.  But  that  only  under- 
scores the  realities  of  1916.  The  American  people  were  wracked  with 
dissension  over  the  submarine  issue;  and  Roosevelt,  almost  alone,  had 
spoken  frankly  to  that  question.  Had  it  not  been  for  his  scorching 
strictures,  the  nation  might  never  have  been  roused  to  a  war  pitch.  He 
had  led  the  country  just  as  far  as  it  was  willing  to  be  led,  or  dragged. 
He  could  not  have  done  more  and  maintained  a  position  of  leadership. 
Nor  did  he  believe  that  he  was  otherwise  obligated.  As  he  exclaimed 
in  effect  again  and  again,  "A  nation  is  not  wholly  admirable  unless  in 
time  of  stress  it  will  go  to  war  for  a  great  ideal  wholly  unconnected 
with  its  immediate  national  interest." 

The  Colonel's  postmortem  comments  on  the  campaign  are  reveal- 
ing of  the  fervor  of  the  convictions  that  had  inspired  him.  "I  was 
grimly  accepting,  at  great  personal  cost,  a  man  whose  election  would 


THE    CAMPAIGN    FOR   AMERICAN   RIGHTS  495 

have  been  hailed  as  a  great  personal  triumph  over  me  by  the  stand- 
patters," he  wrote  William  Allen  White,  "because  I  felt  that  Wilson's 
reelection  would  be  a  damage  to  the  moral  fibre  of  the  American 
people."  Roosevelt  agreed  with  White  that  Hughes's  failure  to  talk 
progressivism  had  cost  him  the  election;  that  the  West  "fixed  its  eyes 
on  Hughes'  pussy-footing  and  lack  of  vision,  and  on  the  machine  and 
reactionary  support  of  him."  And  he  heartily  approved  the  postelection 
movement  to  "progressivize"  the  Republican  party  launched  by  White, 
Gifford  Pinchot,  James  Garfield,  Harold  Ickes  and  other  Progressive 
leaders.  But  he  was  distraught  over  the  nation's  failure  to  respond  to 
the  American  rights  issue  and  by  the  character  of  the  Democrats'  cam- 
paign. "Hiram  Johnson  wrote  me  that  in  California  one  large  factor 
in  the  vote  for  Wilson  was  the  'he  kept  us  out  of  war  cry,'  especially 
affecting  the  women,"  TR  explained  to  White.  "This  is  yellow,  my 
friend!  plain  yellow!" 

During  the  interim  between  the  election  and  Woodrow  Wilson's 
classic  call  for  war  on  April  2,  1917,  TR's  impatience  with  the  Presi- 
dent's failure  to  read  a  great  moral  issue  in  the  Allied  cause  daily  grew 
greater.  When  accounts  of  the  deportation  of  tens  of  thousands  of 
Belgian  workers  to  Germany  were  published  in  the  United  States  in 
late  December,  Roosevelt  joined  Root,  Bacon,  Stimson  and  others  in 
urging  Wilson  to  act.  And  when  the  President  presciently  warned  the 
world  on  January  22  that  there  must  be  "a  peace  without  victory"; 
that  a  victor's  peace  would  rest  "only  as  upon  quicksand,"  he  stormed 
furiously.  "Any  peace,  which  does  not  mean  victory  over  those  re- 
sponsible for  these  outrages,  will  set  back  the  march  of  civilization," 
he  wrote. 

Any  announcement  by  the  United  States,  that  Belgium  and  Ger- 
many are  fighting  for  the  same  thing,  is  a  falsehood,  and  by  in- 
ference an  approval  of  wickedness.  Any  announcement  that  the 
United  States  desires  peace  to  come  without  a  victory  which  will 
restore  Belgium  to  her  people,  puts  the  United  States  in  an  attitude 
of  aiding  and  abetting  international  immorality,  and  ranks  this 
people  against  the  cause  of  international  righteousness. 

Wilson's  indecisiveness  after  the  severance  of  relations  with  Ger- 
many on  February  4  further  infuriated  the  Colonel.  "I  don't  think  he 
is  capable  of  understanding  the  emotion  of  patriotism,  or  the  emotion 
of  real  pride  in  one's  country,"  he  wrote  Hiram  Johnson  on  February 


496  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

17.  "Whether  we  will  really  go  to  war  or  not,  Heaven  only  knows,  and 
certainly  Mr.  Wilson  doesn't." 

The  Zimmerman  Note  was  the  final  blow.  Informed  by  newspaper- 
men at  Oyster  Bay  of  Germany's  startling  proposal  that  Mexico  re- 
capture its  "lost  territory  in  New  Mexico,  Texas,  and  Arizona"  in 
return  for  an  alliance  if  the  United  States  entered  the  war,  TR  un- 
loosed a  stream  of  expletives  at  the  President.  "Boys,"  he  said,  after 
recovering  himself  and  flashing  his  famous  grin,  "I'm  sorry,  but  you 
have  now  heard  some  of  the  more  or  less — mostly  less — justly  famed 
Roosevelt  profanity.  ...  I  don't  apologize  for  it — this  man  is  enough 
to  make  the  saints  and  the  angels,  yes,  and  the  apostles,  swear,  and  I 
would  not  blame  them.  My  God,  why  doesn't  he  do  something?  It's 
beyond  me." 

Roosevelt  refrained  from  attacking  the  President  publicly  for  a  few 
weeks  more  because,  as  he  explained  to  Lodge  on  February  28,  "I 
have  applied  for  leave  to  raise  a  division,  [and]  I  doubt  the  propriety 
of  doing  so."  He  added  that  he  wished  "Root  would  speak  up  un- 
equivocally, as  he  thinks."  "I  am  as  yet  holding  in,"  he  wrote  Lodge 
two  weeks  later,  "but  if  he  does  not  go  to  war  with  Germany  I  shall 
skin  him  alive."  Fearful  that  the  President  would  hold  indefinitely  to 
a  policy  of  armed  neutrality  or  resort  to  limited  naval  warfare,  Roose- 
velt finally  decided  to  speak  out.  "I  shall  write  a  brief  and  courteous, 
but  unequivocal  statement  of  our  present  condition  in  the  face  of 
Germany,"  he  confided  to  the  Massachusetts  Senator  on  March  18. 
"I  have  kept  silent  for  seven  weeks.  Whatever  the  effect  on  myself, 
I  think  that  the  situation  now  calls  for  some  statement  by  me." 

Two  days  later  TR  went  to  the  Union  League  Club  to  make  his 
statement.  Here  he  had  been  flailed  as  a  revolutionist  in  the  turbulent 
days  of  what  by  then  seemed  another  era.  He  failed  to  refer  directly 
to  the  President  or  to  the  events  of  the  preceding  two  and  one-half 
years.  But  he  argued  persuasively  and  eloquently  that  the  United 
States  was  hiding  behind  Great  Britain's  shield.  "Let  us  dare  to  look 
the  truth  in  the  face,"  he  declared.  "Let  us  dare  to  use  our  own 
strength  in  our  own  defense  and  strike  hard  for  our  national  interest 
and  honor.  There  is  no  question  about  'going  to  war.'  Germany  is  al- 
ready at  war  with  us.  The  only  question  for  us  to  decide  is  whether 
we  shall  make  war  nobly  or  ignobly." 

Meanwhile  the  tragedy  was  playing  out  at  1600  Pennsylvania  Ave- 
nue. On  March  20,  the  day  that  Roosevelt  issued  his  war  call  before 


THE   CAMPAIGN    FOR   AMERICAN   RIGHTS  497 

the  Union  League  Club,  President  Wilson  listened  to  his  Cabinet 
argue  that  war  existed  in  fact  and  advise  him  to  call  Congress  into 
session  on  April  2  to  declare  it.  Wilson  was  hesitant.  "Every  reform 
we  have  won  will  be  lost  if  we  go  into  this  war,"  predicted  the  man 
whose  administration  had  implemented  so  much  of  Roosevelt's  plat- 
form of  1912.  "War  means  autocracy.  The  people  we  have  unhorsed 
will  inevitably  come  into  the  control  of  the  country  for  we  shall  be 
dependent  upon  the  steel,  oil,  and  financial  magnates.  They  will  run 
the  nation." 

The  harried  President  continued  to  search  his  soul  through  the  last 
days  of  March.  Finally,  after  reluctantly  concluding  that  "the  right  is 
more  precious  than  peace,"  he  wrote  his  war  message  and  sent  for 
Frank  Cobb  of  the  New  York  World.  Cobb  reached  the  White  House 
in  the  early  hours  of  the  morning  of  April  2.  And  there,  in  a  scene 
that  will  live  forever  in  the  minds  of  sensitive  men,  Wilson  confided 
his  feelings  to  the  New  York  editor: 

"  'Once  lead  this  people  into  war,'  the  President  said,  'and  they'll 
forget  there  was  ever  such  a  thing  as  tolerance.  To  fight  you  must  be 
brutal  and  ruthless,  and  the  spirit  of  ruthless  brutality  will  enter  into 
the  very  fibre  of  our  national  life,  infecting  Congress,  the  courts,  the 
policeman  on  the  beat,  the  man  in  the  street.'  Conformity  would  be 
the  only  virtue,  said  the  President,  and  every  man  who  refused  to 
conform  would  have  to  pay  the  penalty. 

"He  thought  the  Constitution  would  not  survive  it;  that  free  speech 
and  the  right  of  assembly  would  go.  He  said  a  nation  couldn't  put  its 
strength  into  war  and  keep  its  head  level;  it  had  never  been  done. 

"  'If  there  is  any  alternative,  for  God's  sake,  let's  take  it,'  he  ex- 
claimed." 

That  night,  April  2,  1917,  the  President  asked  a  joint  session  of 
Congress  to  declare  a  war  "for  democracy,  for  the  right  of  those  who 
submit  to  have  a  voice  in  their  own  Governments,  for  the  rights  and 
liberties  of  small  nations,  for  a  universal  dominion  of  right  by  such 
a  concert  of  free  peoples  as  shall  bring  peace  and  safety  to  all  nations 
and  make  the  world  itself  at  last  free." 

Four  days  later  the  United  States  entered  the  war  upon  the  out- 
come of  which,  Theodore  Roosevelt  also  believed  and  had  longer,  if 
more  narrowly,  maintained,  the  ultimate  survival  of  freedom  de- 
pended. 


CHAPTER  31 


THE   LAST    BATTLE 


I  have  no  message  for  France;  I  have  already  given  her  the 
best  I  had. 

— Theodore  Roosevelt 


Woodrow  Wilson's  anguished  decision  to  take  the  American  people 
into  war  was  Theodore  Roosevelt's  ultimate  vindication.  During  the 
next  eighteen  months  as  his  countrymen  waged  war  on  the  Imperial 
German  Government  and  its  allies  the  Colonel  gave  heroically  of  his 
time,  his  energy,  and  his  health  in  support  of  their  efforts.  He  emerged 
as  the  acknowledged  leader  of  the  administration's  constructive  and, 
until  the  coming  of  peace,  loyal  opposition.  And  for  one  fleeting 
moment  at  the  start  he  even  stood  as  one  with  the  Democratic  Presi- 
dent. 

"The  President's  great  message  of  April  2  was  literally  unanswer- 
able," the  Colonel  wrote  in  the  Metropolitan.  "All  good  Americans 
will  back  .  .  .  [him]  with  single-minded  loyalty  hi  every  movement 
he  makes  to  uphold  American  honor,  defend  American  rights,  and 
strike  hard  and  effectively  in  return  for  the  brutal  wrong-doings  of 
the  German  Government." 

But  the  wounds  had  cut  too  deep  for  the  unity  long  to  endure. 
Wilson's  message  was  "a  terrible  indictment  of  everything  he  has 
done  and  said,  and  everything  he  has  left  undone  and  unsaid,  during 
the  past  two  years  and  eight  months,"  Roosevelt  meanwhile  confided 
to  James  Bryce.  "I  will  forgive  him  everything  if  he  will  see  that 
America  fights  not  only  with  swords  but  with  hatchets  also." 

If  Roosevelt  demanded  total  submission  before  he  would  forgive, 

498 


THE   LAST   BATTLE  499 

Woodrow  Wilson  demanded  that  and  more.  The  President  was  neither 
so  cold  and  arrogant  nor  so  inflexible  and  domineering  as  his  critics 
have  often  portrayed  him.  The  British  Foreign  Secretary,  Arthur 
Balfour,  found  him  "firm,  modest,  restrained,  eloquent,  well-informed, 
and  convincing."  And  others  found  him  similarly  appealing.  It  is  even 
said  that  his  sense  of  his  own  dignity  was  less  than  TR's.  Wilson  "did 
not  seem  to  value  it,  while  Roosevelt  sometimes  overvalued  his," 
wrote  one  who  knew  them  both.  Yet  the  failings  that  mark  those  who 
value  ideas  above  men  were  surely  there.  The  passing  of  a  generation 
and  the  waging  of  a  Second  World  War  were  to  see  the  triumphant 
resurgence  of  the  President's  noble  ideals,  but  they  would  not  see  the 
vindication  of  his  remorseless  Calvinism.  The  long  chain  of  broken 
friendships  that  he  left  behind — the  awe,  loyalty,  and  even  reverence 
frequently  lived  on — contrasts  starkly  with  the  web  of  affection  that 
even  the  "lying  thieves"  of  1912  spun  over  the  grave  of  the  Colonel. 
Roosevelt  never  suffered  from  Wilson's  inability  to  thrive  on  the  give 
and  take  of  strong  men;  nor  was  TR,  for  all  his  ruthlessness  in  the 
heat  of  conflict,  unable  to  forgive  and  forget  once  the  lines  had  shifted. 

The  first  clash  between  Roosevelt  and  Wilson  after  the  nation's 
entrance  into  the  war  was  personal,  though  it  had  powerful  public 
overtones.  For  more  than  a  year  TR  had  been  drawing  up  plans  for 
organizing  a  volunteer  division.  It  was  to  be  officered  on  the  higher 
levels  by  regulars  and  on  the  lower  echelons  by  business  and  pro- 
fessional men  ("The  broncho-buster  type  will  be  very  much  lacking," 
the  Colonel  pointedly  asserted).  After  six  weeks  training  in  the 
United  States  it  was  to  be  transported  to  France  for  combat  training  in 
order,  TR  explained,  "that  it  could  be  sent  to  the  front  in  the  shortest 
possible  time." 

As  war  impended  in  the  winter  of  1917,  Roosevelt  had  bombarded 
Secretary  of  War  Newton  D.  Baker  with  letters  and  telegrams  request- 
ing authorization  to  act.  He  offered  to  finance  the  division  privately 
until  Congress  took  action.  And  he  urgently  called  Baker's  attention 
to  his  record  in  the  Spanish-American  War — "I  served  in  the  first 
fight  as  commander  first  of  the  right  wing  and  then  of  the  left  wing  of 
the  regiment;  in  the  next,  the  big  fight,  as  Colonel  of  the  Regiment; 
and  I  ended  the  campaign  in  command  of  the  brigade."  "I  wish 
respectfully  to  point  out  that  I  am  a  retired  Commander  in  Chief  of 
the  United  States  Army,  and  eligible  to  any  position  of  command  over 
American  troops  to  which  I  may  be  appointed."  But  to  little  avail. 


500  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

"This  is  one  of  the  most  extraordinary  documents  I  have  ever  read!" 
Wilson  commented  to  Baker  after  examining  one  of  TR's  communi- 
cations. "Thank  you  for  letting  me  undergo  the  discipline  of  temper 
involved  in  reading  it  in  silence!" 

Finally,  on  April  10,  Wilson  granted  the  former  President  an  inter- 
view. Both  men  exuded  cordiality,  the  President's  secretary,  Joseph  P. 
Tumulty,  later  reported.  They  exchanged  anecdotes  and  "seemed  to 
enjoy  what  the  Colonel  was  accustomed  to  call  a  'bully'  time."  They 
also  sparred.  TR  told  Wilson  his  war  message  would  rank  "with  the 
great  state  papers  of  Washington  and  Lincoln"  //  he  made  it  good. 
The  President  explained  that  his  desk  was  piled  high  with  applications 
from  assorted  Indian  fighters,  Texas  Rangers,  and  Southern  "colonels" 
though  none,  of  course,  of  Roosevelt's  eminence.  He  outlined  his 
plans  for  a  selective  service  law  (which  TR  agreed  to  support  and  did 
support).  And  he  remarked  that  the  war  in  France  was  no  "Charge 
of  the  Light  Brigade." 

After  an  hour  the  Colonel  left  in  high  spirits,  thumping  Tumulty 
on  the  back  and  promising  him  a  place  in  the  division  (but  not,  he 
later  explained  to  a  confidant,  near  headquarters  where  Tumulty  could 
report  his  observations  to  the  White  House).  "I  had  a  plain  talk  with 
the  President,  and  if  it  were  anyone  but  Mr.  Wilson,  I'd  say  that  it  is 
all  fixed  up,"  TR  exclaimed  to  newspapermen  upon  his  return  to 
Sagamore  Hill.  "Yes,"  the  President  remarked  after  Roosevelt  breezed 
out  of  his  office,  "he  is  a  great  big  boy.  I  was  .  .  .  charmed  by  his 
personality.  There  is  a  sweetness  about  him  that  is  very  compelling. 
You  can't  resist  the  man." 

Roosevelt  had  also  talked  with  the  Secretary  of  War  while  in  Wash- 
ington. At  the  instance  of  Franklin  D.  Roosevelt,  whose  preparedness 
views  had  been  closer  to  TR's  than  to  Wilson's,  Baker  had  called  on 
the  Colonel  at  his  daughter's  home  shortly  after  TR  saw  the  President. 
He  found  him  surrounded  by  senators  and  friends  discussing  plans  to 
have  the  selective  service  bill  provide  for  volunteer  divisions.  "[TR] 
came  out  when  I  arrived  and  greeted  me  cordially,  put  his  hand 
through  my  arm  and  took  me  upstairs  to  one  of  the  bedrooms," 
Baker,  who  inadvertently  addressed  him  once  as  "My  dear  Mr.  Presi- 
dent," recalled.  Roosevelt  then  repeated  the  reasons  for  granting  his 
request.  The  Secretary  made  no  promises  although  Roosevelt,  doubt- 
less mistakenly,  felt  that  he  "could  twist  him  about  my  finger  could  I 
have  him  about  for  a  while."  The  trouble  with  Baker,  TR  subse- 


THE  LAST  BATTLE  501 

quently  wrote,  is  that  he  has  a  blind  faith  in  the  General  Staff  and 
graduates  of  the  Military  Academy.  "He  does  not  realize  that  a 
muttonhead,  after  an  education  at  West  Point — or  Harvard — is  a 
muttonhead  still.  .  .  .  The  Secretary  has  changed  his  position  so 
rapidly  he  reminds  me  of  the  flywheel  of  an  engine.  But,"  he  added 
of  the  courageous  ex-reform  mayor  of  Cleveland,  "the  dear  little 
fellow  isn't  to  blame." 

Inevitably,  the  "Roosevelt  Division"  became  a  cause  celebre. 
Applications  for  service  poured  in  by  the  tens  of  thousands  and  a 
rising  tide  of  public  opinion  called  on  Wilson  to  give  the  old  warrior 
his  rein.  "The  appearance  of  an  ex-President  of  the  United  States 
leading  American  soldiers  to  the  battle  front,"  wrote  "Marse"  Henry 
Watterson  in  his  Louisville  Courier- Journal,  would  "electrify  the 
world."  The  battered  hero  of  the  Marne,  Marshal  Joffre,  who  headed 
a  French  mission  to  the  United  States  early  that  spring,  emphatically 
agreed  that  it  would;  and  when  he  said  as  much  at  a  formal  dinner  in 
his  honor,  the  State  Department  reportedly  censored  newspaper  ac- 
counts of  his  remarks.  Meanwhile  passage  of  the  selective  service  bill 
was  delayed  for  two  weeks  while  Lodge  and  other  Roosevelt  men  in 
the  Senate  amended  it  to  authorize  volunteer  divisions  of  troops  above 
and  below  the  draft  ages.  "It  is  a  pity,"  General  Pershing  wrote 
privately  at  the  time,  "that  .  .  .  [Roosevelt]  has  not  been  able  to 
take  a  broader  view  .  .  .  but  I  presume  a  man's  ambition  eventually 
will  warp  his  view  of  things." 

The  amended  selective  service  measure  became  law  on  May  18, 
1917,  and  TR  at  once  telegraphed  the  President  for  authority  "to 
raise  two  divisions  for  immediate  service  at  the  front."  Wilson  replied, 
as  Hagedorn  remarks,  in  words  chosen  "to  reduce  the  patriot  to  the 
romantic  adventurer."  The  President  said  that  though  he  would  like 
to  pay  Roosevelt  the  compliment,  "this  is  not  the  time  for  compliment 
or  for  any  action  not  calculated  to  contribute  to  the  immediate  success 
of  the  war."  He  added  that  the  "business  now  in  hand  is  undramatic, 
practical,  and  of  scientific  definiteness  and  precision."  And  so  in  a 
sense  it  was. 

Yet,  as  the  man  soon  to  emerge  as  the  "Tiger  of  France"  under- 
stood all  too  well,  "scientific  definiteness  and  precision"  were  no 
substitute  for  courage,  inspiration,  and  hope.  In  a  graphic  open  letter 
to  Wilson  published  in  his  Paris  newspaper  L'Homme  Enchaine, 
Georges  Clemenceau  summed  up  the  case  for  TR: 


502  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

...  in  all  candor,  that  at  the  present  moment  there  is  in  France 
one  name  which  sums  up  the  beauty  of  American  intervention.  It  is 
the  name  of  Roosevelt,  your  predecessor,  even  your  rival  but  with 
whom  there  can  now  be  no  other  rivalry  than  heartening  success 
.  .  .  [Roosevelt]  is  an  idealist,  imbued  with  simple  vital  idealism. 
Hence  his  influence  on  the  crowd,  his  prestige,  to  use  the  right  ex- 
pression. .  .  .  The  cause  of  humanity,  which  is  also  your  cause, 
will  owe  to  ...  [the  soldiers  of  France]  something  approaching  a 
miracle.  Since  it  is  in  your  power  to  give  them  before  the  supreme 
decision  the  promise  of  reward,  believe  me — send  them  Roosevelt. 

Most  of  the  announced  reasons  for  refusing  Roosevelt's  request 
appear  untenable  today.  The  selective  service  principle  was  a  sober 
and  sensible  manifestation  of  democratic  doctrine,  but  its  effectiveness 
hardly  hinged  on  the  rejection  of  all  volunteer  forces.  The  only  other 
living  ex-President  of  the  United  States,  William  Howard  Taft,  was 
prepared  to  serve  in  a  nonmilitary  capacity  (and  also  to  wish  Theodore 
"no  worse  luck  than  to  be  sick  in  bed  while  Woodrow  runs  his  war"). 
Neither  was  TR  so  inflexible  that  he  would  not  have  agreed  to  staff 
his  divisions  with  other  than  the  regular  officers  he  had  chosen — the 
finest  in  the  army.  Even  the  argument  that  Roosevelt  lacked  military 
experience  breaks  down  before  the  facts,  which  TR  heatedly  urged 
upon  Baker,  that  the  regulars  would  have  to  undergo  almost  as  much 
training  in  the  new  warfare  as  the  draftees  and  that  he  was  prepared 
to  accept  a  subordinate  command.  On  the  evidence  then  available, 
many  a  general  officer  was  tragically  less  qualified  for  command  than 
Roosevelt,  the  most  brilliant  administrator  ever  to  occupy  the  White 
House  and  the  most  inspiring  leader  ever  to  quicken  the  nation's 
courage.  There  was  plausibility,  moreover,  in  a  painful  confession 
TR  made  Ambassador  Jusserand  shortly  before  the  issue  was  settled. 
"I  am  too  old.  ...  I  should  crack.  But,"  Roosevelt  continued, 

I  could  arouse  the  belief  that  America  was  coming.  I  could  show 
the  Allies  what  was  on  the  way  and  then,  if  I  did  crack,  the  Presi- 
dent could  use  me  to  come  back  and  rouse  more  enthusiasm  here 
and  take  some  more  men  over.  That  is  what  I  am  good  for  now, 
and  what  difference  would  it  make  if  I  cracked  or  not? 

One  factor  was  not  irrelevant — the  Colonel's  irrepressibility.  The 
President  touched  it  the  day  he  rejected  Roosevelt's  final  appeal  when 
he  remarked  to  a  guest  at  lunch  that  "it  would  be  dangerous  to  send 
over  someone  likely  to  try  to  show  Europe  how  it  should  manage  its 


THE   LAST   BATTLE  503 

affairs."  And  TR  himself  adverted  to  it  indirectly  by  assuring  Jusse- 
rand  that  "The  President  need  not  fear  me  politically."  But  could  the 
Colonel  have  kept  that  faith?  Would  he  have  accepted  Wilson's  de- 
cision not  to  drive  on  to  Berlin  in  November,  1918,  as  Pershing  and 
Foch  wanted  to  do?  Could  he  have  been  silent  or  discreet  about  a 
dozen  other  political-military  matters?  Could  he  have  comported  him- 
self as  an  Eisenhower  rather  than  as  a  MacArthur?  General  Hugh  L. 
Scott,  then  Chief  of  Staff,  thought  not.  "Consider  what  a  ridiculous 
figure  you  would  cut,"  he  warned  Secretary  Baker,  "attempting  to 
punish  Mr.  Roosevelt  by  court-martial!" 

The  episode  was  as  unfortunate  as  it  was  inevitable.  It  exposed  the 
President's  cold  self-possession.  (".  .  .1  really  think  the  best  way  to 
treat  Mr.  Roosevelt  is  to  take  no  notice  of  him,"  he  told  Tumulty  at 
one  point.  "That  breaks  his  heart  and  is  the  best  punishment  that  can 
be  administered.")  It  fanned  the  flames  of  TR's  already  raging  hatred 
of  Wilson.  And  it  sharpened  the  impression  that  the  Colonel  was  in 
fact  a  military  adventurer. 

The  impression  was  not  inaccurate.  The  romance  and  glory  of  the 
battlefield  still  burned  bright  in  TR,  and  even  before  the  United  States 
entered  the  war  he  had  written  William  Allen  White  that  "I  think 
I  could  do  this  country  most  good  by  dying  in  a  reasonably  honorable 
fashion,  at  the  head  of  my  division  in  the  European  War."  Now,  in 
the  bitterness  and  frustration  of  Wilson's  denial  of  his  heart's  desire, 
he  projected  himself  into  the  military  careers  of  his  four  sons:  "I  am 
immensely  delighted,  ...  for  I  had  no  idea  that  you  could  make  a 
regular  regiment  in  a  line  position,"  he  wrote  Ted,  who  had  been 
given  command  of  the  1st  battalion  of  the  26th  regiment  of  the  First 
Division.  "I  think  it  was  most  wise  of  ...  [Kermit]  to  get  transferred 
to  the  armored  car  service,"  he  told  his  second  son's  wife.  "Kermit 
is  a  natural  officer  of  the  fighting  line."  "One  of  your  Generals  gave 
.  .  .  [Archie]  the  Croix  de  Guerre,"  he  wrote  Clemenceau  in  March, 
1918,  "and  I  am  prouder  of  his  having  received  it  than  of  my  having 
been  President." 

Just  as  the  warrior  sent  forth  his  sons  to  battle  to  prove  their 
courage  and  share  with  him  the  greatest  satisfaction  he  ever  knew, 
so  did  the  statesman  send  them  forth  to  perform  their  national  duty. 
"We  must  dare  to  be  great;  and  we  must  realize  that  greatness  is  the 
fruit  of  toil  and  sacrifice  and  high  courage,"  wrote  the  man  whose 
career  had  come  as  close,  probably,  as  any  political  leader's  could  to 


504  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

exemplifying  those  values.  The  ultimate  measure  of  national  char- 
acter, he  wrote  in  typically  romanticist-realist  vein,  was  war:  "No 
qualities  called  out  by  a  purely  peaceful  life  stand  on  a  level  with 
those  stern  and  virile  virtues  which  move  the  men  of  stout  heart  and 
strong  hand  who  uphold  the  honor  of  their  flag  in  battle."  What 
anguish  would  have  been  his  had  he  not  had  four  sons  to  give  when 
the  offer  of  his  own  life  was  declined! 

Meanwhile,  the  Colonel  threw  himself  into  the  battle  of  the  home 
front  with  a  zeal  unsurpassed  in  all  his  career.  He  briefly  considered 
offering  his  services  to  Wilson  in  any  capacity.  But  partly  because  he 
feared  "the  President  would  treat  me  as  an  importunate  and  self- 
seeking  beggar,"  he  decided  against  it.  He  also  abandoned  thoughts  of 
asking  General  Pershing  for  command  of  a  brigade  of  regulars. 
"...  I  am  not  certain  that  to  give  it  to  me  would  mean  a  service  to 
any  one  except  myself,"  he  explained  to  A.  P.  Gardner,  who  was 
soon  to  die  on  active  duty,  "whereas  if  allowed  to  raise  four  divisions 
of  volunteers  I  would  be  doing  a  service  of  prime  importance  both  to 
this  country  and  to  the  Allies."  Instead,  he  cast  himself  in  the  roles 
of  preacher-at-large  to  the  American  people  and  critic-in-general  of 
the  Wilson  administration. 

Roosevelt  characteristically  chose  the  Kansas  City  Star,  which 
served  the  heartland  of  the  still  powerful  isolationist  sentiment,  as  his 
main  outlet.  Between  September,  1917,  and  January,  1919,  he  wrote 
more  than  one  hundred  syndicated  articles  for  its  pages.  He  also  made 
repeated  appearances  on  the  public  platform,  often  while  wracked 
with  pain  from  the  malignant  malarial  fever  he  had  suffered  in  Brazil 
and  from  recurring  abscesses  of  his  thigh  and  ear.  In  the  fall  of  1917 
and  again  the  spring  and  fall  of  1918  he  made  major  tours  of  the 
Middle  West,  and  on  each  trip  close  observers  perceived  that  his  iron 
determination,  and  little  more,  was  holding  him  together.  Indeed, 
TR  himself  thought  the  end  had  come  in  February,  1918,  when  a 
friend  found  him  lying  in  agony  on  a  bed  in  the  Hotel  Langdon  in 
New  York.  "I  don't  mind  having  to  die,"  he  slowly  remarked  as  he 
roused  himself.  "I've  had  my  good  time  .  .  .  and  I  don't  mind  having 
to  pay  for  it.  But,"  he  concluded  with  a  sudden  display  of  fire,  "to 
think  that  those  swine  will  say  that  I'm  out  of  the  game." 

Throughout  the  war  the  Colonel's  unvarying  theme  was  American- 
ism, a  "one  hundred  per  cent,  undivided  loyalty"  that  tolerated  neither 
dissent  from  nor  obstruction  of  the  war  effort.  He  expounded  it  with 


THE   LAST   BATTLE  505 

incredible  vigor  and  awesome  virulence,  and  he  scored  his  record  in 
so  doing  (as  Wilson  also  did  his)  with  scars  so  ugly  that  the  passing 
of  forty  years  has  failed  to  erase  them. 

Roosevelt  could  neither  sympathize  with  the  antiwar  attitudes  nor 
comprehend  the  moral  courage  of  the  conscientious  objectors,  whom 
he  regarded  as  "slackers,  pure  and  simple."  He  flailed  them  unmerci- 
fully and  he  relegated  them  finally  to  the  camp  of  the  enemy.  He 
endorsed  loyalty  oaths  for  teachers  and  urged  the  dismissal  of  those 
who  refused  to  take  them.  He  advocated  the  abolition  of  the  teaching 
of  German  in  the  public  schools.  He  suggested  that  German-language 
newspapers  be  compelled  gradually  to  publish  in  English  on  the  theory 
that  "moral  treason  in  English  is  at  least  open,  whereas  in  a  foreign 
language  it  is  hidden."  He  approved  the  prosecution  of  two  Columbia 
University  students  who  had  advised  their  fellow  students  not  to 
register  for  the  draft;  and  he  similarly  endorsed  the  indictment  of  the 
Milwaukee  Socialist  and  pro-German,  Victor  Berger.  He  regretted 
that  the  German  apologists  George  S.  Viereck  and  Bernard  Herman 
Ridder  were  not  given  the  same  treatment.  Yet — and  the  point  is  not 
irrelevant  in  view  of  the  informed  speculation  that  he  would  face  the 
electorate  as  the  Republican  presidential  candidate  in  1920 — he  was 
unfailingly  forthright.  Repeatedly  his  bitterest  excoriations  of  German- 
American  "disloyalty"  were  made  in  the  German-American  centers  of 
the  Middle  West. 

Even  as  TR  fanned  the  already  raging  flames,  moreover,  he  strove 
to  keep  the  fire  within  bounds.  In  the  summer  of  1917  he  denounced 
the  series  of  race  riots  that  swept  eastward  from  East  St.  Louis.  In 
the  spring  of  1918  he  condemned  the  lynching  of  a  German  alien  in 
Collinsville,  Illinois.  And  from  the  beginning  to  the  end  of  the  war 
he  warned  against  blanket  indictments  of  the  hyphenates.  "It  is,"  he 
asserted  again  and  again,  "an  outrage  to  discriminate  against  a  good 
American  in  civil  life  because  he  is  of  German  blood."  But  his  words 
fell  as  water  on  burning  kerosene;  the  conflagration  he  himself  had 
set  off  evaporated  them. 

TR  was  also  quick  to  read  "Bolshevist"  and  "German  Socialist" 
into  labor  strife.  And  at  the  end  of  the  war  he  was  preaching  that 
campaign  of  intolerance  which  catapulted  Attorney  General  A. 
Mitchell  Palmer  to  passing  fame  and  enduring  notoriety  in  1919. 
"Any  foreign-born  man  who  parades  with  or  backs  up  a  red  flag  or 
black  flag  organization  ought  to  be  instantly  deported  to  the  country 


506  POWER  AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

from  which  he  came,"  Roosevelt  wrote  in  the  Star  on  November  14, 
1918.  "Appropriate  punishment  should  be  devised  for  the  even  more 
guilty  native-born." 

Again  and  again  during  the  war  the  Colonel  spoke  out  for  a  press 
free  to  print  the  truth;  but  it  was  a  truth  that  collated  only  with  his 
own  one  hundred  per  cent  Americanism.  He  approved  the  administra- 
tions' suppression  of  the  famed  Socialist  periodical  Masses;  he  ex- 
coriated it  for  its  failure  to  take  the  same  action  against  the  powerful 
Hearst  papers  for  their  incitement  of  "the  hatred  of  our  people 
against  allies  who  are  faithfully  fighting  beside  us."  He  also  castigated 
the  administration  (and  he  properly  placed  the  responsibility  on  the 
President  rather  than  on  Postmaster  General  Albert  B.  Burleson)  for 
censoring  publications  for  partisan  political  purposes.  But  on  the  main 
line — the  right  to  impose  cloture  on  those  who  opposed  the  war  effort 
— he  held  firm.  Thus  his  celebrated  attack  on  the  Sedition  Bill  of 
1918,  an  attack  that  ironically  won  him  the  plaudits  of  the  Nation, 
was  directed  at  a  clause  that  proposed  to  prohibit  "contemptuous  or 
slurring  language  about  the  President,"  not  at  its  strictures  against 
disloyalty.  "If  it  is  passed,"  TR  wrote  in  the  Star,  "I  shall  certainly 
give  the  Government  the  opportunity  to  test  its  constitutionality." 

The  Colonel's  concern  for  the  right  to  criticize  was  real  and  per- 
sonal. By  the  late  autumn  of  1917  he  had  emerged  as  Wilson's  most 
powerful  and  effective  critic — so  embarrassingly  effective  that  it  was 
rumored  that  Burleson  planned  to  impose  the  iron  glove  of  censorship 
on  the  Metropolitan  and  Kansas  City  Star.  And  by  the  end  of  hos- 
tilities Roosevelt's  scathing  pen  had  exposed  all  of  the  administration's 
major  failings  (and  attributed  to  it  a  number  of  others  that  were  not 
its  fault).  He  seems  only  to  have  feared  that  the  President  would 
silence  him  by  appointing  him  to  official  position.  As  he  remarked  to 
a  friend  who  observed  him  hurrying  through  a  mass  of  proof,  "It's  a 
collection  of  my  war  articles  and  speeches.  I'm  afraid  Wilson  is  going 
to  appoint  me  to  something,  and  I  want  to  get  the  book  out  before 
he  shuts  me  up." 

Roosevelt  had  inaugurated  his  editorial  series  for  the  Star  with  a 
powerful  blast  at  America's  failure  to  have  "a  single  man  on  the 
fighting  line"  after  eight  months  of  war.  He  followed  it  with  an 
indignant  protest  against  the  War  Department's  failure  to  equip  the 
draftees  with  rifles — "Broomstick  Preparedness,"  he  called  it.  There- 
after he  hammered  furiously  at  the  administration's  indecisiveness  and 


THE   LAST   BATTLE  507 

lack  of  a  sense  of  urgency — its  failure  to  decide  quickly  on  a  specific 
rifle  for  infantrymen;  its  seeming  indifference  to  the  task  of  transport- 
ing a  great  army  to  France;  its  leisurely  approach  to  the  shipping 
crisis;  and  its  failure  to  produce  aircraft  and  artillery.  The  titles  of 
TR's  editorials  reveal  his  bent:  "Broomstick  Apologists,"  "A  Square 
Deal  for  the  Training  Camps,"  "Fighting  Work  for  the  Man  of  Fight- 
ing Age,"  "Mobilize  Our  Manpower,"  "Tell  the  Truth  and  Speed  up 
the  War,"  "The  Cost  of  Unpreparedness,"  "Let  George  Speed  up  the 
War,"  "Gird  Up  Our  Loins." 

Again,  it  is  impossible  to  measure  Roosevelt's  influence  accurately. 
Indubitably,  it  was  heavy.  Senator  George  E.  Chamberlain,  one  of  the 
Democrats'  few  earnest  preparedness  leaders,  would  probably  have 
demanded  an  investigation  of  the  mobilization  effort  in  December, 
1917,  regardless  of  TR's  strictures.  ("The  Military  Establishment  of 
America  has  fallen  down,"  Chamberlain  exclaimed  to  members  of 
the  National  Security  League  in  January.  ".  .  .  It  has  almost  stopped 
functioning.")  But  his  charges  could  not  have  received  such  wide- 
spread and  nonpartisan  endorsement  as  they  did  were  it  not  for  the 
seeds  that  the  Colonel  had  sown.  Indeed,  when  TR  went  to  Washing- 
ton the  third  week  in  January  to  rally  congressional  support  of 
Chamberlain's  bill  to  create  a  nonpartisan  war  cabinet,  the  fruits  of 
his  labor  were  clear  to  see.  Angrily,  the  President  deflected  this  frontal 
assault  on  his  war  leadership  by  responding  with  a  bold  and  con- 
structive proposal — the  Overman  bill — which  vested  vast  power  over 
production  in  himself.  He  also  reorganized  the  War  Industries  Board 
and  appointed  Bernard  M.  Baruch  its  chairman — with  such  salutary 
results  that  within  a  few  months  criticism  lost  much  of  its  substance. 

It  was  hardly  in  TR  to  speak  well  of  Wilson;  and  though  he  some- 
times did  so,  most  notably  when  the  President  also  called  for  com- 
plete victory  in  his  annual  message  to  Congress  in  December,  1917, 
such  occasions  were  far  from  frequent.  Yet,  Roosevelt's  partisanship 
should  not  be  overexaggerated.  It  prevented  him  from  appreciating  the 
President's  many  estimable  qualities,  and  it  infused  his  otherwise 
constructive  criticisms  with  personal  venom  and  rancor.  But  it  bears 
repeating  that  the  record  of  Roosevelt's  wartime  activities  fails  utterly 
to  suggest  that  he  was  even  remotely  obstructive. 

That  record  fails  to  reveal  TR  as  the  reactionary  that  his  harsh 
injunctions  against  the  pacifist-progressives  and  his  renewed  com- 
munion with  the  Republican  Old  Guard  imply.  He  privately  classified 


508  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

La  Follette  and  other  antiwar  progressives  with  "that  unhung  traitor, 
Hearst."  Thus  he  first  recommended  that  La  Follette  be  expelled  from 
the  Senate,  then  settled  on  a  recommendation  for  censure  as  the  more 
expedient  course  (he  feared  La  Follette  would  be  martyrized  and  re- 
elected).  And  he  still  refused  to  recognize,  much  less  endorse,  the 
memorable  progressive  enactments  of  Wilson's  first  administration. 
Yet,  the  embers  of  his  own  progressivism  continued  to  smolder,  and 
in  1918  again  to  flame.  At  war's  end  it  was  Woodrow  Wilson,  pre- 
occupied with  the  great  questions  of  the  peace  as  Theodore  Roosevelt 
had  been  preoccupied  with  those  of  preparedness  from  1914  to  1917, 
whose  progressivism  had  burned  down.  The  Colonel's  attitude  toward 
tax  policy  and  kindred  questions  are  revealing  of  this. 

TR's  understanding  of  finance  was  still  hazy  ("I  have  not  made  any 
speech  only  on  the  Liberty  Loan,  because  while  I  may  not  share  any 
other  quality  with  Abraham  Lincoln,  I  do  share  his  lack  of  intimate 
acquaintance  with  finance,"  he  wrote  Herbert  Hoover  in  the  fall  of 
1917).  However,  he  remained  actively  interested  in  the  social  and 
moral  aspects  of  such  problems.  He  regarded  the  administration's  bill 
for  a  60  per  cent  ceiling  on  excess  profits  taxes  as  inadequate.  And 
against  the  counsel  of  Lodge,  he  backed  Hiram  Johnson  and,  in- 
directly, Norris,  La  Follette,  and  Borah,  in  their  demand  for  an  even 
higher  tax.  With  the  blessing  of  George  Perkins,  he  stated  on  the 
platform  and  in  his  published  writings  that  it  would  be  "mischievous 
not  to  put  a  stop  to  the  making  of  unearned  and  improper  fortunes 
out  of  the  war,"  and  that  America  must  have  "a  heavily — a  very 
heavily — graduated  tax  on  the  excess  profits  ...  a  tax  as  heavy  as 
Great  Britain  has  now  imposed." 

The  Colonel  was  similarly  concerned  with  the  inequities,  actual  and 
proposed,  in  the  draft  system.  He  chided  the  Y.M.C.A.  for  including 
men  of  military  age  on  its  staff.  "It  is  an  ignoble  thing  for  an  able- 
bodied  man  to  be  in  ...  a  position  of  bodily  safety."  He  excoriated 
President  Wilson  for  allegedly  holding  up  Edsel  Ford's  induction  into 
service  until  he  could  be  legally  deferred.  "These  other  young  Ameri- 
cans face  death  and  endure  unspeakable  hardships  and  misery  and 
fatigue  .  .  .  and  have  surrendered  all  hope  of  money-getting,  of 
comfort  and  of  safety,"  he  indignantly  wrote.  "But  young  Mr.  Ford, 
in  ease  and  safety,  is  in  the  employ  of  his  wealthy  father."  And  he 
bitterly  attacked  the  program,  devised  late  in  the  war,  to  send  new 
draftees  to  college  preparatory  to  commissioning  them  without  service 


THE  LAST  BATTLE  509 

in  the  ranks  on  the  grounds  that  it  was  unfair  to  those  already  serving 
overseas  and  essentially  undemocratic. 

The  average  working-man  or  small  farmer  has  not  had  money 
enough  to  educate  his  son  so  that  the  boy  can  now  enter  college 
without  further  training.  Yet  that  boy  may  have  in  him  the  qualities 
of  leadership  which  especially  fit  him  for  command.  Such  a  working- 
man  or  farmer  ought  to  wish,  and  does  wish,  that  his  son  be  tested 
on  his  merits  by  actual  service  in  the  ranks,  alongside  of  all  other 
boys,  no  favors  being  shown  either  him  or  them.  .  .  .  [There  should 
be  no]  privilege  given  to  money.  .  .  . 

By  1918  Roosevelt's  booming  exhortations  had  made  him  the  loyal 
opposition's  uncrowned  leader  and  the  Republican  party's  foremost 
candidate  for  the  presidency  in  1920.  "I  suspect,"  Raymond  Robbins 
remarked  in  July  to  William  Barnes,  the  Old  Guardsman  who  had 
sued  Roosevelt  for  libel  three  years  before,  "we  are  going  to  nominate 
TR  in  1920  by  acclamation." 

"Acclamation,  hell!"  Barnes  reportedly  replied.  "We're  going  to 
nominate  him  by  assault." 

The  Colonel  was  pleased,  even  sanguine,  until  personal  tragedy 
finally  dulled  his  edge.  "Yes,  I  will  run,"  he  reportedly  said,  "if  the 
people  want  me,  but  only  if  they  really  want  me.  I  will  not  lift  a 
finger  for  the  nomination."  He  had,  he  continued,  discussed  the  matter 
with  a  number  of  Republican  senators  and  representatives  who  "ap- 
peared to  be  sincerely  desirous  of  accepting  the  fact  that  we  were 
about  to  face  a  changed  world  and  that  mere  negation  and  obstruction 
and  attempts  to  revive  the  dead  past  spelled  ruin."  And  he  had  told 
them  that  "I  am  not  in  the  least  concerned  with  your  supporting  me 
either  now  or  at  any  future  time;  all  I  am  concerned  with  is  that  you 
should  so  act  that  /  can  support  you." 

Roosevelt  meant  what  he  had  always  meant:  the  Republican  party 
should  become  "the  Party  of  sane,  constructive  radicalism,  just  as  it 
was  under  Lincoln."  Otherwise,  he  firmly  added,  "I  have  no  place 
in  it." 

It  was  an  idle  dream.  Had  TR  been  elected  President  in  1920  the 
shape  of  events  would  surely  have  been  different.  But  could  they  have 
been  much  different  than  in  the  last  years  of  his  presidency?  Roose- 
velt's party  had  shown  its  colors  during  his  own  turbulent  administra- 
tion and  under  Taft's  as  well.  It  had  shown  them  in  its  opposition  to 


510  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

the  progressive  legislation  of  the  first  Wilson  administration;  and  it 
would  show  them  again  in  the  administrations  of  Harding,  Coolidge, 
and  Hoover  and  thence  through  the  long,  bitter  years  of  obstruction 
to  the  New  and  Fair  Deals.  It  is  hard  to  believe  that  Roosevelt,  for 
all  the  excellence  of  the  administration  he  would  have  given  the 
nation,  could  have  done  in  the  1920's  what  he  had  failed  so  dra- 
matically to  do  from  1901  to  1912 — change  the  Republican  party's 
social  and  economic  bias.  A  handful  of  Republicans — La  Follette, 
Johnson,  Norris,  and  their  like — would  burn  the  progressive  candle 
down  through  the  twenties;  but  they  were  the  very  senators  whom  TR 
most  despised  because  of  their  opposition  to  the  war.  Nevertheless, 
the  Colonel,  satisfied  finally  that  the  preparedness  fight  was  won  and 
the  Bull  Moose  party  buried,  could  not  but  dream  of  a  progressive 
Republican  future. 

On  March  28,  1918,  at  Portland,  Maine,  in  his  last  creative  address 
on  domestic  affairs,  Roosevelt  urgently  warned  party  and  nation  that 
they  must  tread  the  moderate  progressive  path  during  the  postwar 
years.  He  reaffirmed  his  belief  in  a  tightly  and  federally  regulated 
capitalism.  He  called  for  the  encouragement  of  private  enterprise,  but 
not  at  the  expense  of  labor's  "full  right  to  cooperate  and  combine  and 
full  right  to  collective  bargaining  and  collective  action."  And  he  again 
adumbrated  the  New  Deal  by  advocating  aid  to  farmers,  multipurpose 
river  valley  developments,  public  housing  projects,  reductions  in  the 
hours  of  labor,  and  sundry  social  security  measures  including  old  age, 
sickness,  and  unemployment  insurance. 

The  Portland  address  was  Theodore  Roosevelt's  progressive  legacy. 
Though  they  would  soon  repudiate  it,  it  was  grist  for  the  Old  Guard's 
propaganda  mill  in  the  spring  of  1918;  and  the  more  so  because  it 
also  featured  a  broadside  attack  on  the  Democrats'  conduct  of  the 
war.  The  Republican  National  Committee  had  TR's  Portland  address 
printed  and  distributed  by  the  tens  of  thousands  during  the  con- 
gressional campaign  that  summer  and  fall. 

The  Colonel  was  delighted  with  the  fire  he  had  lit.  "I  think  I  do  not 
overstate  the  matter,  he  enthusiastically  wrote  William  Allen  White, 
"when  I  say  that  the  Maine  Progressives  felt  that  my  speech  and  its 
reception  amounted  to  the  acceptance,  by  the  Republicans  of  Maine, 
of  the  Progressive  platform  of  1912  developed  and  brought  up  to 
date."  He  did  not,  however,  really  deceive  himself.  Even  as  he  railed 
against  the  Bolsheviks  to  the  end  of  his  life,  he  continued  to  have 


THE  LAST   BATTLE  511 

forebodings  that  the  Grand  Old  Party  would  reject  his  counsel  and 
allow  "the  Romanovs  of  our  social  and  industrial  world"  to  return  to 
power. 

Meanwhile  the  pall  of  death  enveloped  Sagamore  Hill.  The  old 
warrior  never  expected  all  of  his  sons  to  return  and  he  and  Mrs. 
Roosevelt,  he  later  said,  were  "quite  prepared  that  none  of  them 
should  come  back."  Had  he  not  been  so  captivated  by  children 
throughout  his  life,  one  might  read  into  the  affection  he  now  lavished 
on  his  grandsons  and  daughters  an  urgency  born  of  the  war.  "I  came 
back  here  Monday  evening,"  he  wrote  Ted's  wife  who  was  with  the 
Y.M.C.A.  in  France,  in  October,  1917,  "and  day  before  yesterday 
your  three  darling  children  arrived." 

I  can't  say  how  I  have  enjoyed  them.  Gracie  is  the  most  winning 
little  thing  I  have  ever  known.  .  .  .  The  first  evening  I  read  her 
Peter  Rabbit  and  Benjamin  Bunny,  while  Mother  as  an  interlude 
read  her  Little  Black  Mingo — Gracie  felt  that  to  have  us  read 
alternately  prevented  monotony.  Ted's  memory  was  much  clearer 
about  the  pigs  than  about  me;  he  greeted  me  affably,  but  then  in- 
quired of  a  delighted  bystander  .  .  .  "What  is  that  man's  name?" 
.  .  .  This  afternoon  1  took  the  three  down  to  that  haven  of  delight, 
the  pig  pen;  .  .  .  Little  Edie  by  the  way  is  sometimes  laid  on  the 
sofa  in  my  room  for  me  to  take  care  of  while  I  am  dressing. 

But  it  was  on  twenty-year-old  Quentin,  the  most  promising  of  his 
own  boys,  that  the  Colonel's  thoughts  fastened  in  the  summer  of  1918. 
TR  had  earlier  sought  unsuccessfully  to  have  suspended  the  "idiotic 
ruling"  that  prevented  Quentin's  fiancee,  Flora  Payne  Whitney,  from 
going  to  France  to  marry  him.  For,  he  explained  to  Ted,  "It  is  well 
to  have  had  happiness,  to  have  achieved  the  great  ends  of  life,  when 
one  must  walk  boldly  and  warily  close  to  death."  It  was  not  to  be. 

The  second  week  in  July,  just  as  TR  was  preparing  to  serve  as  a 
pallbearer  for  former  Mayor  John  Purroy  Mitchel  who  had  been  killed 
in  a  training  accident  in  Louisiana,  he  was  told  that  Quentin  had 
destroyed  a  German  plane  in  combat  near  Chateau-Thierry.  "What- 
ever now  befalls  Quentin,"  the  Colonel  wrote  Ethel  a  few  days  later, 
"he  has  now  had  his  crowded  hour,  and  his  day  of  honor  and  triumph. 
Mitchell  [sic]  had  neither;  he  died  before  he  was  able  to  get  to  the 
front  and  to  render  service  and  to  feel  the  thrill  generous  souls  ought 
to  feel  when  they  have  won  the  honorable  renown  of  doing  their  duty 
with  exceptional  courage  and  efficiency." 


512  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Five  days  later  a  newspaperman  informed  Roosevelt  at  Sagamore 
Hill  that  Quentin  had  gone  down  behind  the  German  lines.  The  father 
received  the  news  in  silence,  striding  up  and  down  the  veranda. 
Finally,  after  wondering  aloud  how  he  would  break  the  news  to  Mrs. 
Roosevelt,  he  summoned  his  courage  and  entered  the  house.  A  half 
hour  later  he  reappeared  with  a  written  statement  for  the  press: 
"Quentin's  mother  and  I  are  glad  that  he  got  to  the  front  and  had  a 
chance  to  render  some  service  to  his  country,  and  show  the  stuff  that 
was  in  him  before  his  fate  befell  him."  The  date  was  July  17,  1918. 

Three  suspenseful  days  followed.  On  July  18  Roosevelt  kept  an 
engagement  to  deliver  the  keynote  address  to  the  Republican  State 
Convention  at  Saratoga  Springs,  resolutely  asserting  that  "It  is  more 
than  ever  my  duty  to  be  there."  He  received  at  Saratoga  the  most 
heartfelt  personal  ovation  of  his  career;  and  also  a  flicker  of  hope.  A 
cablegram  from  Ted's  wife  reported  that  Quentin's  death  was  "abso- 
lutely unconfirmed."  The  Colonel  returned  to  Sagamore  Hill  the  next 
day  to  find  similar  reports  from  his  son-in-law,  Richard  Derby,  and 
from  General  Pershing.  But  on  the  afternoon  of  July  20,  just  twenty 
minutes  before  TR  received  and  addressed  a  delegation  from  the 
Japanese  Red  Cross,  a  warm  and  sympathetic  telegram  from  President 
Wilson  confirmed  the  original  report.  Quentin  was  dead!  He  had  been 
buried,  the  Germans  reported,  "with  military  honors  by  German  air- 
men at  Cambrai  at  the  spot  where  he  fell." 

It  was  then,  wrote  the  Colonel's  young  friend,  Hermann  Hagedorn, 
that  the  boy  in  TR  died. 

For  five  and  a  half  more  months  the  man  in  TR  lived  on.  Never 
was  the  mature  Roosevelt's  conception  of  duty  and  honor  put  to  a 
harder  test.  For  a  while  Quentin's  last  letters  continued  to  arrive;  and 
once  Ethel's  young  son  Richard,  Quentin's  favorite  nephew,  heard 
an  airplane  overhead  and  exclaimed  to  the  Colonel,  "perhaps  that's 
Uncle  Quentin."  Finally,  in  late  July,  the  Roosevelts  fled  their  be- 
loved Sagamore  for  the  first  time  since  their  marriage  to  spend  two 
weeks  in  Dark  Harbor,  Maine,  with  Ethel  and  Quentin's  bereaved 
fiancee.  "It  is  no  use  pretending  that  Quentin's  death  is  not  very 
terrible,"  TR  wrote  Kermit's  wife.  ".  .  .  There  is  nothing  to  comfort 
Flora  at  the  moment;  but  she  is  young;  I  most  earnestly  hope  that 
time  will  be  very  merciful  to  her,  and  that  in  a  few  years  she  will 
keep  Quentin  only  as  a  loving  memory  of  her  golden  youth,  as  the 
lover  of  her  golden  dawn,  and  that  she  will  find  happiness  with  another 


THE   LAST   BATTLE  513 

good  and  fine  man.  But  of  course  it  would  be  all  wrong  for  me  to  tell 
her  this  now.  As  for  Mother,  her  heart  will  ache  for  Quentin  until  she 
dies." 

And  so  it  was  also  with  the  father.  The  public  never  heard  him 
express  his  grief.  But  his  valet  observed  him  sitting  on  a  chair,  an  open 
book  before  him,  gazing  out  at  the  horizon,  murmuring,  "Poor 
Quinikins!"  There  were  also  fleeting  moments  of  doubt.  "To  feel  that 
one  has  inspired  a  boy  to  conduct  that  has  resulted  in  his  death,  has 
a  pretty  serious  side  for  a  father,"  TR  wrote  to  a  stranger.  However, 
he  added,  "I  would  not  have  cared  for  my  boys  and  they  would  not 
have  cared  for  me  if  our  relations  had  not  been  just  along  that  line." 
To  the  novelist  Edith  Wharton  he  remarked  that  there  was  no  use  in 
his  writing  about  Quentin,  for  "I  should  break  down  if  I  tried."  And 
to  General  Pershing,  whose  wife  and  three  daughters  had  perished  in 
a  fire  three  years  before,  he  wrote  that  "I  should  be  ashamed  of 
myself  if  I  did  not  try  in  a  lesser  way  to  emulate  .  .  .  [your]  courage." 
But  it  was  to  Arthur  Lee  that  he  expressed  his  philosophy  most 
cogently:  "It  is  very  dreadful  that  [Quentin]  should  have  been  killed; 
it  would  have  been  worse  if  he  had  not  gone." 

The  father's  informal  memorial,  an  editorial  in  the  Kansas  City  Star 
entitled  "The  Great  Adventure,"  fittingly  made  no  mention  of  his 
son's  name. 

Only  those  are  fit  to  live  who  do  not  fear  to  die;  and  none  are 
fit  to  die  who  have  shrunk  from  the  joy  of  life  and  the  duty  of  life. 
Both  life  and  death  are  parts  of  the  same  Great  Adventure.  Never 
yet  was  worthy  adventure  worthily  carried  through  by  the  man  who 
put  his  personal  safety  first.  Never  yet  was  a  country  worth  living 
in  unless  its  sons  and  daughters  were  of  that  stern  stuff  which  bade 
them  die  for  it  at  need;  and  never  yet  was  a  country  worth  dying 
for  unless  its  sons  and  daughters  thought  of  life  not  as  something 
concerned  only  with  the  selfish  evanescence  of  the  individual,  but 
as  a  link  in  the  great  chain  of  creation  and  causation.  .  .  . 

But  honor,  highest  honor,  to  those  who  fearlessly  face  death  for 
a  good  cause;  no  life  is  so  honorable  or  so  fruitful  as  such  a  death. 
Unless  men  are  willing  to  fight  and  die  for  great  ideals,  including 
love  of  country,  ideals  will  vanish,  and  the  world  will  become  one 
huge  sty  of  materialism.  And  unless  the  women  of  ideals  bring  forth 
the  men  who  are  ready  thus  to  live  and  die,  the  world  of  the  future 
will  be  filled  by  the  spawn  of  the  unfit.  .  .  . 


514  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

For  Roosevelt  there  now  remained  one  last  struggle — the  winning 
of  the  peace.  He  did  not  survive  to  its  end;  and  the  tactics  he  would 
have  pursued  can  only  be  conjectured.  But  he  said  and  wrote  enough 
during  its  early  stages  to  make  his  ultimate  objective  clear.  He  stood 
for  a  peace  that  would  redress  Belgium  for  the  wounds  she  had 
suffered,  reduce  Germany  to  military  impotence,  and  perpetuate  the 
grand  alliance  that  had  won  the  war. 

Roosevelt  had  never  forgiven  Woodrow  Wilson  for  his  call  for  a 
"peace  without  victory"  in  January,  1917,  for  his  assertion  that  all 
the  belligerents  were  fighting  for  the  same  general  ends.  Upon  Ameri- 
ca's entrance  into  the  war  TR's  conviction  that  the  vital  interests  of 
the  United  States  and  the  Allies  were  virtually  identical  had  gained 
wide  acceptance;  and  what  he  had  so  often  said  privately  during  the 
long  ordeal  of  neutrality  he  thereafter  said  publicly  and  emphatically. 
He  upbraided  the  President  for  insisting  that  the  United  States  was  an 
associate,  rather  than  a  partner,  of  the  Allies.  He  vehemently  and 
repeatedly  demanded  that  America  declare  war  on  Turkey  and  Bul- 
garia. And  he  briefly  advocated  that  American  combat  troops  be 
placed  under  British  and  French  command  to  expedite  the  prosecu- 
tion of  the  war. 

Nor  did  TR  delude  himself  that  the  United  States  alone  was  win- 
ning or  had  won  the  war.  Five  weeks  after  Quentin  was  shot  from  the 
skies,  he  reminded  the  American  people  of  their  debt  to  Great  Britain. 
"If  she  had  not  controlled  the  seas,"  he  wrote  in  the  Kansas  City  Star, 
on  August  18,  "not  an  American  battalion  could  have  been  sent  to 
the  aid  of  France  as  she  struggled  to  save  the  soul  of  the  world,  and 
no  help  could  have  been  given  gallant  Italy  or  any  others  of  these 
Allied  nations  to  whose  stern  fighting  efficiency  we  owe  it  that  this 
earth  is  still  a  place  on  which  free  men  can  live." 

Several  weeks  after  the  armistice  Roosevelt  publicly  evaluated  the 
factors  responsible  for  victory:  (1)  the  French  army;  (2)  the  British 
navy;  (3)  the  British  army;  (4)  the  Italian  army.  "Our  own  gallant 
army  and  navy  did  exceedingly  well,"  he  added,  "but  came  in  so  late 
that  the  part  they  played,  taking  the  four  and  a  half  years  as  a  whole, 
does  not  entitle  them  to  rank  with  the  instrumentalities  given  above." 

It  was  this  appreciation  of  the  decisive  role  of  Allied  power,  coupled 
with  his  fear  that  Germany  would  come  back  with  a  vengeance,  that 
underlay  TR's  call  for  the  unconditional  surrender  of  Germany.  He 
was,  no  doubt,  influenced  by  a  thirst  for  revenge.  And  surely  his 


THE   LAST   BATTLE  515 

passion  was  heightened  by  his  contempt  for  Wilson.  "Let  us,"  he  had 
pointedly  exclaimed,  "dictate  peace  by  the  hammering  guns  and  not 
chat  about  peace  to  the  accompaniment  of  the  clicking  of  typewriters." 
Yet  at  root  he  was  rational,  however  unwise.  "A  premature  and  in- 
conclusive peace  now,"  he  wrote  in  May,  1918,  "would  spell  ruin  for 
the  world,  just  as  in  1864  a  premature  and  inconclusive  peace  would 
have  spelled  ruin  to  the  United  States.  .  .  .  Twenty  years  hence  by 
mere  mass  and  growth  Germany  would  dominate  the  Western  Euro- 
pean powers."  "Germany  must  accept  whatever  terms  the  United 
States  and  its  allies  think  necessary  in  order  to  right  the  dreadful 
wrongs  that  have  been  committed  and  to  safeguard  the  world  for  at 
least  a  generation  to  come  from  another  attempt  by  Germany  to  secure 
world  dominion,"  he  declared  on  the  eve  of  the  armistice.  "The  surest 
way  to  secure  a  peace  as  lasting  as  that  which  followed  the  downfall 
of  Napoleon  is  to  overthrow  the  Prussianized  Germany  of  the  Hohen- 
zollerns  as  Napoleon  was  overthrown." 

More,  even,  than  Roosevelt's  anger  at  Wilson's  call  for  a  Demo- 
cratic Congress  in  1918,  those  views  governed  Roosevelt's  attitude 
toward  the  President's  peace  program.  Arguing  that  Wilson's  Fourteen 
Points  portended  "not  the  unconditional  surrender  of  Germany  but 
the  conditional  surrender  of  the  United  States,"  he  openly  ridiculed 
them  as  "Fourteen  Scraps  of  Paper."  He  was  particularly  incensed  by 
the  proposals  for  freedom  of  the  seas  and  general  disarmament. 
Freedom  of  the  seas  "would  have  meant  Germany's  victory  and  the 
subjugation  of  not  only  Germany's  foes,  but  of  all  neutrals  like  our- 
selves," he  realistically  contended.  He  was  so  exacerbated  by  Wilson's 
failure  to  appreciate  the  importance  of  British  naval  power  to 
America's  well-being,  in  fact,  that  he  now  left  the  ranks  of  the  loyal 
opposition.  The  Republican  party,  he  wrote  Sir  Arthur  Balfour,  Lloyd 
George,  and  Clemenceau,  does  "not  believe  in  what  we  understand 
to  be  Mr.  Wilson's  interpretation  of  4the  Freedom  of  the  Seas.'  "  He 
declared  that  "in  any  free  country,  except  the  United  States,"  the 
Democratic  defeat  in  the  Congressional  elections  on  November  5 
"would  have  meant  Mr.  Wilson's  retirement  from  office  and  return  to 
private  life."  And  he  unashamedly  informed  them  that  his  party  did 
not  support  the  President's  startling  proposal  to  force  Britain's  hand 
by  threatening  a  naval  race.  (Of  all  men  in  the  United  States,  Roose- 
velt, the  onetime  master  diplomatist,  should  have  allowed  Wilson  to 
bluff.)  "We  feel  that  the  British  Navy  .  .  .  should  be  the  most  power- 


516  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

ful  in  the  world,  and  we  have  no  intention  of  rivaling  it,  any  more 
than  we  have  any  intention  of  rivaling  the  French  military  preparedness, 
because  we  recognize  that  France  must  prepare  her  army  in  a  way 
not  necessary  for  the  United  States,"  he  told  the  British  and  French 
leaders.  He  added  in  the  Star  that  the  "worse  thing  we  could  do  would 
be  to  build  a  spite  navy,  a  navy  built  not  to  meet  our  own  needs,  but 
to  spite  some  one  else." 

Elements  of  realism,  as  well  as  a  fateful  shortsightedness,  marked 
Roosevelt's  attitude  toward  the  League  of  Nations.  Here  too,  he  was 
surely  influenced  by  his  hatred  of  Wilson.  But  to  imply  that  his  spleen 
was  controlling  is  to  defile  one  of  the  purest  and  noblest,  if  also 
egocentric,  patriots  the  nation  has  yet  produced.  It  is  also  to  ignore 
the  consistency  of  the  Colonel's  career. 

It  will  be  recalled  that  Roosevelt  had  never  totally  dismissed  the 
ancient  dream  of  a  parliament  of  the  nations.  Even  in  his  Nobel  Peace 
Prize  address  at  Christiana  in  1910,  however,  his  commitment  had 
been  cautious  and  measured.  He  did  not  believe  that  the  nations  of 
the  world  were  yet  ready  to  subordinate  their  national  drives  to  the 
collective  will;  nor,  in  his  own  country's  case,  did  he  think  that  it  was 
desirable  to  do  so.  He  was  too  nationalistic — perhaps  realistic — to 
scuttle  the  Monroe  Doctrine.  "All  the  coasts  and  islands  which  in  any 
way  approach  the  Panama  Canal  must  be  dealt  with  by  this  Nation, 
and  by  this  Nation  alone,"  he  wrote  as  the  League  issue  was  coming 
to  a  head.  And  notwithstanding  the  great  blow  he  himself  had 
rendered  the  old  isolationism,  the  fateful  limitations  of  his  nationalism 
prevented  him  from  perceiving  that  America's  future  frontiers  lay 
beyond  the  Rhine.  "If  the  League  of  Nations  means  that  we  will  have 
to  go  to  war  every  time  a  Jugoslav  wishes  to  slap  a  Czecho-slav  in  the 
face,"  he  said  to  his  personal  physician,  "then  I  won't  follow  them." 
He  added  that  "we  don't  want  any  more  scraps  of  paper."  He  also 
wrote  in  the  Star  that  "the  affairs  of  hither  Asia,  the  Balkan  Peninsula, 
and  of  North  Africa  are  of  prime  concern  to  the  powers  of  Europe, 
and  the  United  States  should  be  under  no  covenant  to  go  to  war  about 
matters  in  which  its  people  have  no  concern  and  probably  no  intelli- 
gent interest." 

Even  so,  the  Colonel's  attitude  toward  the  League  was  cautiously 
affirmative.  Partly  because  Taft  and  Root,  with  both  of  whom  he  had 
resumed  cordial  relations,  favored  the  League,  and  partly  perhaps, 
because  of  his  own  commitment  to  the  ideal  in  1910,  he  prepared  in 


THE  LAST   BATTLE  517 

the  summer  of  1918  to  support  it  with  reservations.  "I  think  I  have 
found  a  modus  vivendi!"  he  wrote  Taft  on  August  15.  "I  will  back  it 
as  an  addition  to,  but  not  as  a  substitute  for,  our  preparing  our  own 
strength  in  our  own  defense." 

From  then  until  his  death  Roosevelt  gave  a  carefully  measured 
endorsement  to  the  plan  for  a  league,  arguing  always  that  it  should 
be  built  around  the  concert  of  powers  that  had  won  the  war.  He 
publicly  recommended  that  the  United  States  and  Great  Britain  sign 
a  universal  arbitration  treaty,  though  not,  he  hastened  to  advise 
Kipling  privately,  "on  the  hands-across-the-sea  or  Anglo-Saxon 
brotherhood  theory."  As  a  matter  of  fact,  he  added,  "I  doubt  if  there 
is  such  a  thing  as  an  Anglo-Saxon,  but  at  any  rate  I  am  not  one.  .  .  . 
I  am  just  plain  straight  American." 

Otherwise,  TR  disapproved  of  President  Wilson's  decision  to  go  to 
Paris,  approved  the  appointment  of  Henry  White,  whom  he  referred 
to  as  an  independent,  to  the  peace  commission,  and  supported  a  pro- 
posed congressional  resolution  to  separate  the  peace  treaty  from  the 
League  of  Nations  Covenant.  He  repeatedly  demanded  that  the 
Covenant  recognize  the  Monroe  Doctrine  and  that  its  members  be 
authorized  to  regulate  their  own  internal  affairs,  including  tariff  and 
immigration  policy.  And  in  his  last  public  statement,  an  editorial 
dictated  three  days  before  his  death,  he  endorsed  Taft's  proposed 
reservations,  which  were  substantially  the  ones  he  had  been  advocating 
himself. 

Whether,  as  Henry  Pringle  flatly  asserts,  the  Colonel  "would  have 
joined  the  battalion  of  death  that  killed  the  League  of  Nations"  had 
he  lived,  is  impossible  to  say.  Shortly  before  Christmas,  1918,  Lodge 
spent  two  mornings  at  TR's  hospital  bedside  in  New  York  reportedly 
formulating  the  general  reservations  upon  which  he  later  stood.  The 
report  is  probably  correct;  Lodge's  major  reservations,  as  distinct 
from  his  minor  ones,  were  not  really  different  from  those  Taft  and 
Roosevelt  had  already  advocated.  But  that  TR  would  have  indulged 
his  friend  in  all  his  obstructionist  maneuvering,  and  especially  in  his 
pandering  to  the  Irish-Americans,  is  conjectural.  TR  was  probably 
too  deeply  committed  to  Anglo-Franco-American  comity,  to  the 
moderate  reservations  of  William  Howard  Taft,  and  perhaps  to  his 
own  words  over  the  years  for  that.  Still,  he  would  surely  have  opposed 
the  treaty  as  Wilson  brought  it  home.  And  it  remains  an  open  question 
whether  as  President  in  1921  he  would  have  compelled  the  Republican 


518  POWER   AND  RESPONSIBILITY 

party  to  abide  by  the  campaign  promises  of  a  great  phalanx  of  its 
leaders  and  have  taken  the  United  States  into  a  modified  League  of 
Nations.  His  commitments,  and  especially  Britain's  willingness  to 
accept  America's  nationalistic  reservations,  suggest  that  he  would 
have;  his  belief  that  an  alliance  with  Great  Britain  would  prove  more 
substantive  than  membership  in  any  peace  organization,  coupled  with 
his  loathing  of  all  that  Woodrow  Wilson  represented,  suggests  that 
he  would  not  have. 

On  October  27,  1918,  Roosevelt  observed  his  sixtieth  birthday. 
"I  am  glad  to  be  sixty,"  he  wrote  Kermit,  "for  it  somehow  gives  me 
the  right  to  be  titularly  as  old  as  I  feel.  I  only  hope  that  when  you  are 
sixty  you'll  have  as  much  happiness  to  look  back  upon  as  I  have  had," 
and  he  added,  "be  as  proud  of  your  sons  and  daughters  as  I  am  of 
mine;  and  somehow  I  believe  you'll  then  still  be  as  much  in  love  with 
Belle  as  I  am  with  your  Mother,  and  will  feel  that  you  owe  her  as 
much  as  I  owe  your  Mother." 

The  next  day,  in  the  last  major  address  of  his  thirty-six-year 
political  career,  the  Colonel  answered  Wilson's  appeal  for  a  Demo- 
cratic Congress  before  a  full  house  in  Carnegie  Hall.  For  two  tense 
hours,  his  jaw  thrust  forward,  his  teeth  clicking,  and  his  manuscript 
waving  as  of  old,  he  blasted  the  President's  record,  motives,  and  pro- 
posals. He  seemingly  forgot  that  just  twenty  years  before,  a  Republi- 
can President  had  requested  that  there  be  no  "divided  councils"  as 
the  nation  prepared  to  make  peace,  and  that  the  then  Republican  can- 
didate for  governor  of  New  York  had  appealed  for  a  Republican  Con- 
gress on  the  grounds  that  the  world  would  interpret  a  Republican 
defeat  "as  a  refusal  to  sustain  the  efforts  of  our  peace  commission  to 
secure  the  fruit  of  war."  Still  the  circumstances  were  not  quite  identi- 
cal. For  if  Woodrow  Wilson's  appeal  was  justified,  as  in  a  sense  it  was, 
Theodore  Roosevelt's  thunderous  attack  on  that  appeal  was  at  least 
understandable  in  terms  of  his  party's  war  record.  ".  .  .  [The  Presi- 
dent] asks  for  the  defeat  of  pro-war  Republicans,"  the  Colonel  ex- 
postulated in  Carnegie  Hall.  "He  does  not  ask  for  the  defeat  of  anti- 
war Democrats.  On  the  contrary,  he  supports  such  men  if,  although 
anti-war,  they  are  pro- Administration." 

TR  had  returned  to  Sagamore  Hill  after  his  Carnegie  Hall  appear- 
ance to  take  to  his  bed  with  lumbago.  Six  days  after  the  Republicans 
swept  the  Congressional  elections,  on  the  day  the  armistice  was 
signed,  he  was  admitted  to  the  Roosevelt  Hospital,  where  his  illness 
was  diagnosed  as  inflammatory  rheumatism.  He  was  advised  that  he 


THE   LAST   BATTLE  519 

might  be  confined  to  a  wheel  chair  for  the  rest  of  his  life,  upon  which 
he  mused  a  moment,  then  replied:  "All  right!  I  can  work  that  way, 
too."  Old  friends  dropped  in  to  see  him,  among  them  William  Howard 
Taft.  The  novelist  Hamlin  Garland  came  with  a  proposal  that  a  garden 
be  planted  around  Quentin's  grave,  but  Mrs.  Roosevelt  vetoed  it. 
Someone  else  talked  of  the  reports,  which  many  political  observers 
by  then  regarded  as  a  foregone  conclusion,  that  TR  would  be  nomi- 
nated by  the  Republicans  in  1920.  To  these  the  Colonel  professed 
indifference.  "Since  Quentin's  death  the  world  seems  to  have  shut 
down  on  me,"  he  said.  "But  if  I  do  consent,"  he  added  with  a  flash 
of  the  old  fire,  "it  will  be  because  as  President  I  could  accomplish 
some  things  that  I  should  like  to  see  accomplished  before  I  die."  Then, 
probably  recalling  the  G.O.P.'s  long  hostility  toward  so  much  of  what 
he  represented,  TR  raised  himself  up  in  bed  and  asserted:  "And,  by 
George,  if  they  take  me,  they'll  take  me  without  a  single  modification 
of  the  things  I  have  always  stood  for!" 

Uncured  and  still  wracked  with  pain,  Roosevelt  returned  to  Saga- 
more Hill  on  Christmas  Day.  There,  chatting  with  neighbors  and 
family,  browsing  among  his  books,  and  surrounded  by  the  trophies 
and  mementos  of  his  tumultuous  career,  he  lived  on  for  almost  two 
weeks.  He  wrote  the  editorial  endorsing  Taft's  reservations  to  the 
League  which  appeared  in  the  Star  after  his  death,  and  he  composed 
a  scorching  and  intolerant  message  on  Americanism  that  was  read  to 
a  meeting  of  the  American  Defense  Society  in  the  Hippodrome  in 
New  York  the  night  before  he  died.  He  also  dictated  a  final  memo- 
randum that  suggests  that  he  was  prepared  again  to  hold  his  party 
together,  his  militant  progressive  declarations  notwithstanding:  "Hays 
— see  him;  he  must  go  to  Washington  for  10  days;  see  Senate  & 
House;  prevent  split  on  domestic  policies." 

On  the  eleventh  day,  Sunday,  January  5,  the  Colonel  remained  in 
his  bedroom  overlooking  Long  Island  Sound.  He  read  aloud  with  his 
wife,  dictated  a  letter  to  Kermit,  and  worked  over  the  proof  of  an 
article  for  the  Metropolitan.  Late  in  the  afternoon  as  Mrs.  Roosevelt, 
who  had  been  playing  solitaire,  rose  to  leave,  the  Colonel  looked  up 
from  his  book  and  said,  "I  wonder  if  you  will  ever  know  how  I  love 
Sagamore  Hill." 

A  little  earlier  than  usual  that  night,  the  Colonel  asked  his  Negro 
valet  if  he  thought  "I  might  go  to  bed  now."  The  valet,  James  Amos, 
almost  lifted  him  into  bed,  then  Mrs.  Roosevelt  came  in  and  kissed 
him  good  night  as  she  had  done  to  Quentin  the  night  he  slept  at 


520  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

Sagamore  Hill  for  the  last  time.  Between  eleven  and  twelve  o'clock 
the  Colonel  said,  "James,  please  put  out  the  light."  He  never  spoke 
again.  Sometime  after  four  the  next  morning,  January  6,  1919,  Theo- 
dore Roosevelt  died  in  his  sleep. 

He  was  buried  without  eulogy,  music,  or  military  honors  in  a  plain 
oak  casket  on  a  hillside  plot  near  Sagamore  Hill  that  he  and  Mrs. 
Roosevelt  had  earlier  selected.  About  four  hundred  personal  friends, 
fifty  children  from  the  public  school  in  Oyster  Bay  where  he  had 
sometimes  played  Santa  Claus,  and  one  hundred  dignitaries  attended 
the  simple  ceremony.  Among  them  was  the  man  he  had  hurt  the  worst 
and  who  had  loved  him  the  most — William  Howard  Taft.  Some  time 
after  the  assemblage  had  dispersed,  Taft  was  seen  standing  alone 
meditating  over  the  grave. 

For  weeks  the  tributes  poured  forth.  "ONE  WORD  is  repeated  a 
thousand  times.  .  .  ,"  the  Literary  Digest  reported.  "It  is  the  simple 
but  eloquent  word  'American.' "  America's  contribution  to  the  Great 
War,  said  the  Philadelphia  North  American  in  a  statement  echoed 
throughout  the  nation,  was  "the  product  of  the  will,  the  passionate 
conviction,  and  the  devoted  services  of  Theodore  Roosevelt,  private 
citizen,  more  than  any  other  force."  In  England  Rudyard  Kipling 
wrote  a  memorial,  "Great-heart."  And  in  the  chamber  of  the  Senate 
a  grief-stricken  Cabot  Lodge  closed  his  eloquent  eulogy  with  the 
quotation:  "So  Valiant-for-Truth  passed  over  and  all  the  trumpets 
sounded  for  him  on  the  other  side."  Even  the  man  who  had  served 
as  the  buffer  between  the  Colonel  and  President  Wilson  was  affected. 
"You  will,  no  doubt,  be  greatly  distressed  at  the  news,"  gentlemanly 
Newton  D.  Baker  wrote  General  Pershing  the  morning  Roosevelt  died. 
"About  many  things  my  disagreements  with  him  were  fundamental, 
but  like  all  Americans  I  had  a  sympathy  for  his  irresistible  energy  and 
courage.  ...  In  practically  every  field  of  human  endeavor  he  has 
made  his  mark.  .  .  ." 

As  Irvin  S.  Cobb  put  it,  "You  had  to  hate  the  Colonel  a  whole  lot 
to  keep  from  loving  him." 

Like  most  men  of  heroic  proportions,  Theodore  Roosevelt  had 
made  major  blunders  and  miscalculations.  He  had  suffered  an  acute 
and  far-ranging  vision  to  be  blurred  by  a  too  sweeping  commitment 
to  force  or  the  threat  of  force.  He  had  blinded  himself,  except  in  the 
memorable  year  of  his  Bull  Moose  heresy,  to  the  moral  limitations 
imposed  on  his  party  by  its  hostage  to  the  men  and  values  of  the 


THE   LAST   BATTLE  521 

market  place.  He  had  repelled  men  who  should  have  taken  him 
seriously  by  his  boyish  enthusiasms  and  matchless  lust  for  life.  And 
he  had  often  conveyed  the  impression  of  opportunism  by  the  ease 
with  which  he  had  shifted  causes  and  allegiances  in  the  harsh  con- 
viction that  politics  is  the  art  of  the  possible. 

Yet,  as  in  all  generalizations  about  this  extraordinary  man,  the 
need  to  qualify  and  elaborate  remains.  If  Roosevelt  the  conservative 
retained  to  the  end  a  Burkean  fear  of  revolution,  Roosevelt  the  pro- 
gressive had  proclaimed  from  the  beginning  a  democratic  functional- 
ism  that  was  grounded  in  almost  fuller  faith  in  man — in  his  free  moral 
capacity,  his  educability,  and  his  power  to  act  finally  with  disinterest 
— than  Jefferson's.  No  great  American  statesman  has  ever  been  more 
committed  to  an  open  society  based  on  talent;  no  American  President 
has  ever  flirted  more  seriously  with  majority  rule.  Nor,  paradoxically, 
has  any  major  American  political  leader  ever  reposed  greater  confi- 
dence in  government  by  experts;  nor,  still  more  paradoxically,  ex- 
pounded so  emphatically  a  philosophy  of  moral  absolutes. 

If,  in  the  summing  up,  Roosevelt  indulged  too  indiscriminately  in 
platitudes,  as  surely  he  did,  and  if  he  extolled  character  at  the  sacrifice 
of  depth  and  breadth  of  mind,  as  conservatives  have  immemorially 
done,  his  preachments  are  nonetheless  viable.  It  is  true  that  they  rested 
on  nothing  more  substantial  than  his  own  intuition  and  intelligence — 
as  he  once  exclaimed  when  asked  how  he  knew  that  justice  had  been 
done,  "Because  I  did  it."  And  it  is  also  true  that  although  this  was 
well  enough  for  him,  the  intuition  being  deep  and  the  intelligence 
penetrating,  it  was  not  enough  for  all  the  men  who  subsequently  held 
the  office  he  had  himself  so  distinguished.  Men  of  estimable  character 
with  one  exception  and  men  of  narrow  intellectual  horizons  with  some 
exceptions,  only  a  few  of  them  understood,  as  the  mature  Roosevelt 
finally  did,  that  a  moralism  unsupported  by  social  and  economic  reality 
is  the  most  meaningless  of  platitudes. 

For  all  of  that,  for  all,  even,  of  the  relativism  of  the  modern  mind, 
the  feeling  persists  that  men  of  character,  if  blessed  also  with  depth 
and  breadth  of  view,  will  always  come  to  a  working  concensus  as  to 
the  nature  of  justice  in  a  given  situation.  And  if  such  is  in  truth  the 
case,  the  ideal  of  the  morally  responsible  and  duty-conscious  citizen 
that  Roosevelt  so  imbued  in  the  minds  of  his  own  generation  must 
live  on  in  those  that  follow. 

Whatever  the  Colonel's  ultimate  place  in  the  hearts  of  his  country- 
men— and  it  yearly  grows  larger  and  wanner — there  is  no  discount- 


522  POWER   AND   RESPONSIBILITY 

ing  those  incisive  perceptions  and  momentous  actions  that  made  him 
such  a  dynamic  historical  force  from  his  civil  service  years  to  the  day 
of  his  death.  In  an  age  when  the  excesses  of  the  profit  system  were 
undermining  the  moral  foundations  of  American  society,  when  one 
great  body  of  reformers  was  invoking  the  antiquated  ways  of  the 
agrarian  order  and  another  was  uncritically  accepting  a  mechanistic 
interpretation  of  man  himself,  when  two  of  the  nation's  most  ripened 
historical  minds,  Brooks  and  Henry  Adams,  were  evolving  theories 
that  closed  the  ring  on  all  hope,  Roosevelt  the  practical  idealist  was 
molding  the  new  determinism  and  the  old  individualism  into  the  only 
synthesis  compatible  with  the  American  political  temperament;  the 
only  program  that  offers  hope  that  industrialism  will  ultimately  serve 
American  society  for  good  rather  than  ill.  Eschewing  laissez-faire 
capitalism  no  less  than  doctrinaire  socialism,  he  saw  with  the  prag- 
matist's  genius  that  "Ruin  faces  us  if  we  ...  permit  ourselves  to  be 
misled  by  any  empirical  or  academic  consideration  into  refusing  to 
exert  the  common  power  of  the  community  where  only  collective 
action  can  do  what  individualism  has  left  undone,  or  can  remedy  the 
wrongs  done  by  an  unrestricted  and  ill-regulated  individualism." 
More,  perhaps,  than  anything  else,  it  was  the  coincidence  of  that 
insight  and  Roosevelt's  disposition  to  act  that  explains  his  dramatic 
and  exhilarating  impact  on  his  times. 

Long  after  the  rationalizations,  the  compromises,  the  infights,  the 
intolerance  and  all  the  rest  have  been  forgotten,  Theodore  Roosevelt 
will  be  remembered  as  the  first  great  President-reformer  of  the  modern 
industrial  era — the  first  to  concern  himself  with  the  judiciary's  massive 
property  bias,  with  the  maldistribution  of  wealth,  and  with  the  sub- 
version of  the  democratic  process  by  businessmen  and  their  spokes- 
men in  Congress,  the  pulpits  and  the  editorial  offices;  the  first  to 
comprehend  the  conservation  problem  in  its  multiple  facets,  the  first 
to  evolve  a  broad  regulatory  program  for  capital,  and  the  first  to 
encourage,  however  cautiously,  the  growth  of  countervailing  labor 
unions;  the  first  President,  in  fine,  to  understand  and  react  construc- 
tively to  the  challenge  to  existing  institutions  raised  by  the  techno- 
logical revolution.  And  if,  for  the  affront  his  militarism  and  chauvinism 
gave  the  human  spirit,  he  will  never  be  truly  revered  as  is  Lincoln, 
he  will  yet  for  his  unique  personal  qualities  and  remarkably  con- 
structive achievements,  among  them  the  realistic  pursuit  of  peace  in 
a  world  that  he  understood  better  than  most,  be  greatly  loved  and 
profoundly  respected. 


NOTES 


GENERAL 


As  my  references  within  the  text  indicate,  I  have  written  this  book  mainly 
from  published  works.  There  are,  of  course,  significant  exceptions.  I  have 
done  supplementary  research  in  the  Roosevelt  Papers  at  the  Library  of 
Congress,  in  Roosevelt's  several  diaries  at  the  Library  of  Congress  and 
the  Houghton  Library  of  Harvard  University,  and  the  voluminous  scrap- 
books  kept  by  Roosevelt's  family  and  friends  and  now  on  deposit  in  the 
Widener  Library  at  Harvard.  I  have  also  used  many  of  the  relevant  public 
documents — legislative  journals,  Civil  Service  Commission  and  Police 
Commission  reports,  Congressional  Record,  and  Roosevelt's  published 
messages  as  governor  and  President.  In  connection  with  another  work, 
moreover,  I  have  done  systematic,  basic  research  for  most  of  Part  VI — the 
World  War  years.  But  in  general  I  have  relied  on  two  invaluable  sets  of 
Roosevelt's  writings:  Elting  E.  Morison  and  John  M.  Blum  (eds.),  The 
Letters  of  Theodore  Roosevelt  (8  vols.,  Cambridge,  1951-54);  and 
Hermann  Hagedorn  (ed.),  The  Works  of  Theodore  Roosevelt  (20  vols., 
National  Edition,  New  York,  1926).  I  doubt  that  I  could  have  written 
this  biography  without  either  of  them.  They  will  be  cited  hereafter  as  The 
Letters  and  The  Works  respectively.  Albert  Bushnell  Hart  and  Herbert 
Ronald  Ferleger  (eds.),  Theodore  Roosevelt  Cyclopedia  (New  York, 
1941)  has  been  useful  as  a  reference  guide. 

Since  the  following  chapter  notes  include  only  the  works  I  have  actually 
used,  as  distinct  from  the  hundreds  and  perhaps  thousand  or  more  books 
I  have  consulted  over  the  years,  the  serious  student's  attention  is  directed 
to  a  number  of  bibliographies.  The  most  exhaustive  such  work  on  Roose- 
velt himself,  one  that  merits  separate  publication,  is  in  Edward  Wagen- 
knecht,  The  Seven  Worlds  of  Theodore  Roosevelt  (New  York,  1958). 
The  best  general  bibliography  for  the  presidential  and  immediate  post- 
presidential  years  is  in  George  E.  Mowry,  The  Era  of  Theodore  Roosevelt 
(The  New  American  Nation  Series,  New  York,  1958);  the  best  for  the 

523 


524  NOTES 

years  1912-1916  in  Arthur  S.  Link,  Woodrow  Wilson  and  the  Progressive 
Era  (The  New  American  Nation  Series,  New  York,  1954).  Oscar 
Handlin,  et  al.  (eds.)  Harvard  Guide  to  American  History  (Cambridge, 
1954)  is  indispensable  for  the  whole  of  Roosevelt's  life  and  times. 

PART  I:    THE    MAKING    OF   A   MAN 

Chapter  1.  THE  FIRST  BATTLE 

Although  I  disagree  strongly  with  many  of  his  inferences  and  con- 
clusions, Henry  F.  Pringle's  scintillating  Theodore  Roosevelt:  A  Biography 
(New  York,  1931)  has  contributed  immeasurably  to  the  conception  of 
this  chapter  and  indeed  to  many  that  follow.  In  revision  I  have  profited 
from  Carleton  Putnam,  Theodore  Roosevelt:  The  Formative  Years  (New 
York,  1958),  the  superb  first  volume  of  a  projected  multi-volume  biog- 
raphy. Besides  The  Letters  and  The  Scrapbooks,  I  have  drawn  liberally 
on  TR's  unpublished  diaries  (the  diaries  covering  the  legislative  period 
have  been  published  in  part  as  Appendix  I,  The  Letters,  Vol.  II.  Other 
primary  sources  include  Theodore  Roosevelt,  An  Autobiography,  first 
published  in  1913  and  later  reissued  as  Volume  XX  of  The  Works;  Pro- 
ceedings of  the  Theodore  Roosevelt  Memorial  Meeting  of  the  State 
Charities  Aid  Association  (privately  printed,  New  York,  1878);  and  New 
York  State  Assembly,  Journal  of  the  Assembly,  1882  (6  vols.  Albany, 
1882-1884).  The  recollections  of  Isaac  Hunt  and  others,  quoted  herein, 
are  in  the  "Harvard  Club  Transcripts,"  a  transcript  of  the  proceedings 
at  a  Harvard  Club  dinner  in  New  York  in  1920,  at  the  Theodore  Roose- 
velt Memorial  Association  Library  in  the  Roosevelt  House,  New  York; 
also  the  recollections  of  Joe  Murray  as  told  to  Hermann  Hagedorn. 
Roosevelt's  The  Naval  War  of  1912  is  in  Volume  VI  of  The  Works. 

Of  the  secondary  materials,  Howard  Lawrence  Hurwitz,  Theodore 
Roosevelt  and  Labor  in  New  York  State,  1 880-1 900  (New  York,  1943) 
has  proved  informative  and  suggestive.  It  is,  I  think,  unnecessarily  harsh, 
and  it  should  be  read  against  the  broader  and  more  understanding  treat- 
ment in  Putnam's  The  Formative  Years.  In  addition,  I  have  drawn  on  or 
quoted  from  the  following  works:  Howard  K.  Beale,  "TR's  Ancestry,  A 
Study  in  Heredity,"  New  York  Genealogical  and  Biographical  Record, 
LXXXV  (1954);  Hermann  Hagedorn,  The  Boy's  Life  of  Theodore  Roose- 
velt (New  York,  1918);  Conine  Roosevelt  Robinson,  My  Brother, 
Theodore  Roosevelt  (New  York,  1923);  Paul  Russell  Cutright,  Theodore 
Roosevelt  the  Naturalist  (New  York,  1956),  a  good  appreciation  by  a 
professional  zoologist;  Frances  Theodora  Parsons,  Perchance  Some  Day 
(privately  printed,  New  York,  New  York,  1951),  cited  by  Putnam; 
William  Roscoe  Thayer,  Theodore  Roosevelt,  an  Intimate  Biography 
(New  York,  1919);  Charles  G.  Washburn,  Theodore  Roosevelt,  the  Logic 


NOTES  525 

of  His  Career  (New  York,  1916);  Owen  Wister,  Roosevelt:  The  Story  of 
a  Friendship  (New  York,  1930);  William  Wingate  Sewall,  Bill  Sewall's 
Story  of  T.R.  (New  York,  1919);  Donald  Wilhelm,  Theodore  Roosevelt 
as  an  Undergraduate  (Boston,  1910);  Curtis  Guild,  Jr.,  "TR  at  Harvard," 
Harvard  Graduate  Magazine,  X  (1938);  and  J.  Laurence  Laughlin, 
"Roosevelt  at  Harvard,"  Review  of  Reviews,  LXX  (1924).  Also,  Poultney 
Bigelow,  Seventy  Summers,  (2  vols.,  New  York,  1925). 

Chapter  2.  A  LEADER  EMERGES 

Besides  the  obvious  sources — The  Letters,  Autobiography,  Journal 
of  the  Assembly  for  the  relevant  years,  and  Scrapbooks — I  have  again 
used  Pringle,  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  Hurwitz,  Theodore  Roosevelt  and 
Labor  extensively.  Again,  too,  I  have  made  several  revisions  on  the  basis 
of  Putnam's  The  Formative  Years.  My  characterization  of  Cleveland 
reflects  Allan  Nevins'  excellent  and  highly  moralistic  Grover  Cleveland: 
A  Study  in  Courage  (New  York,  1932).  Among  the  many  other  works 
used  are:  Samuel  Gompers,  Seventy  Years  of  Life  and  Labor  (2  vols., 
New  York,  1925) ;  Jacob  Riis,  Theodore  Roosevelt  the  Citizen  (New  York, 
1904);  Chauncey  Depew,  My  Memories  of  Eighty  Years  (New  York, 
J922);  Henry  Cabot  Lodge  (ed.),  Selections  from  the  Correspondence  of 
Theodore  Roosevelt  and  Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  1884-1918  (2  vols.,  New 
York,  1925);  and  the  Proceedings  of  the  Eighth  Republican  Convention 
(Chicago,  1884).  I  have  evolved  my  account  of  the  Republican  Conven- 
tion of  1884  from  the  varying  interpretations  given  in  Pringle's  and 
Putnam's  biographies;  in  John  A.  Garraty,  Henry  Cabot  Lodge  (New 
York,  1953);  James  C.  Malin,  "Roosevelt  and  the  Elections  of  1884  and 
1888,"  Mississippi  Valley  Historical  Review,  XIV  (1927);  DeAlva  Stan- 
wood  Alexander,  A  Political  History  of  the  State  of  New  York  (4  vols., 
New  York,  1906-1923),  and  by  the  same  author,  Four  Famous  New 
Yorkers  (New  York,  1923);  contemporary  newspaper  accounts  as  found 
in  the  Scrapbooks;  and  numerous  general  works.  A  few  of  Roosevelt's 
campaign  speeches  are  in  Campaigns  and  Controversies,  Vol.  XIV,  The 
Works;  excerpts  from  others  may  be  found  in  the  Scrapbooks.  John 
Blum's  essay,  "Theodore  Roosevelt:  Years  of  Decision,"  published  as 
Appendix  IV,  The  Letters,  Vol.  II,  has  been  a  continuing  source  of 
stimulation.  For  reasons  implicit  in  my  treatment  throughout,  however,  I 
incline  to  be  more  tolerant  of  the  "eclectic  intellectual  home,"  so  in- 
cisively described  therein,  that  Roosevelt  created  to  accommodate  the 
divergent  pulls  of  pure  theory  and  pure  politics. 

Chapter  3.  THE  WESTERNER:  RANCHER,  HUNTER,  HISTORIAN 

The  best  account  of  the  death  and  funeral  of  Roosevelt's  wife  and 
mother  is  in  Putnam,  The  Formative  Years.  Pringle's  treatment  is  also 


526  NOTES 

moving.  I  have  supplemented  their  accounts  with  clippings  from  the 
Scrapbooks,  excerpts  from  The  Letters,  and  quotations  from  Theodore 
Roosevelt,  In  Memory  of  My  Darling  Wife  (privately  printed),  and 
Arthur  H.  Cutler's  typewritten  statement  as  cited  by  Putnam.  Hermann 
Hagedorn's  pioneering  narrative,  Roosevelt  in  the  Bad  Lands  (Boston, 
1921),  forms  the  base  for  my  brief  treatment  of  TR's  western  experience. 
In  revision  I  drew  on  the  seemingly  definitive  story  in  Putnam,  The 
Formative  Years.  Otherwise  I  used  The  Letters;  Scrapbooks;  Lincoln 
Lang,  Ranching  with  Roosevelt  (Philadelphia,  1926);  Cutright,  Theodore 
Roosevelt  the  Naturalist;  and  Ray  H.  Mattison,  "Roosevelt  and  the 
Stockmen's  Association,"  North  Dakota  History,  XVII  (1950).  I  have 
also  read  Roosevelt's  three  books,  Hunting  Trips  of  a  Ranchman,  Ranch 
Life  and  the  Hunting  Trail,  and  The  Wilderness  Hunter.  They  comprise 
Volume  I  and  part  of  Volume  II  of  The  Works. 

The  expositions  of  Roosevelt's  Thomas  Hart  Benton  and  Gouverneur 
Morris,  published  as  Volume  VII  of  The  Works,  are  my  own.  Briefer 
analyses  may  be  found  in  the  biographies  by  Putnam  and  Pringle.  I  have 
chosen  to  quote  liberally  from  Frederick  Jackson  Turner's  review  of  the 
fourth  volume  of  Roosevelt's  The  Winning  of  the  West,  which  appeared 
in  The  American  Historical  Review,  II  (1896),  in  order  to  emphasize 
how  seriously  professional  historians  regarded  the  work  at  the  time.  I  do 
not  agree  with  all  of  Turner's  judgments.  Further  evidence  of  Roosevelt's 
high  repute  among  contemporary  professional  historians  may  be  found 
in  the  analysis  of  the  reviews  of  Volumes  I  and  II  offered  by  George  B. 
Utley,  "Theodore  Roosevelt's  The  Winning  of  the  West:  Some  Unpub- 
lished Letters,"  The  Mississippi  Valley  Historical  Review,  XXX  (1944). 
A  brief,  favorable  assessment  may  also  be  found  in  Wagenknecht's 
uniquely  interesting  The  Seven  Worlds.  Two  severely  critical  appraisals  of 
TR  as  an  historian  are  the  essays  by  H.  J.  Thornton  and  Raymond  C. 
Miller  published  respectively  in  William  T.  Hutchison  (ed.),  The  Marcus 
W.  Jernegan  Essays  in  American  Historiography  (Chicago,  1937);  and 
James  Lea  Cate  and  Eugene  N.  Anderson  (eds.),  Medieval  and  Historio- 
graphical  Essays  in  Honor  of  James  West  fall  Thompson  (Chicago,  1938). 
Harvey  Wish,  The  American  Historian  (New  York,  1960),  also  gives  a 
brief  evaluation. 

PART  II:    THE   ROAD   TO   THE   WHITE   HOUSE 

Chapter  4.  FOR  THE  GOOD  OF  THE  NATION 

The  classic  account  of  the  Haymarket  tragedy  is  Henry  David, 
The  History  of  the  Haymarket  Affair  (New  York,  1936).  I  have  used  it 
along  with  The  Letters  and  Ray  Ginger,  Altgeld's  America  (New  York, 
1958).  Putnam's  treatment  of  TR's  attitude  is  more  sympathetic  than 


NOTES  527 

mine.  The  account  of  the  mayoralty  campaign  of  1886  is  drawn  from 
The  Letters;  Scrapbooks;  Hurwitz,  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  Labor;  Allan 
Nevins,  Abram  S.  Hewitt,  With  Some  Account  of  Peter  Cooper  (New 
York,  1935);  Louis  F.  Post  and  Fred  C.  Leubuscher,  An  Account  of  the 
George-Hewitt  Campaign  in  the  New  York  Municipal  Election  of  1886 
(New  York,  1886);  Albert  Jay  Nock,  Henry  George  (New  York,  1939); 
and  Jacob  Riis,  Theodore  Roosevelt.  I  have  found  the  chapter  on  George 
in  Daniel  Aaron,  Men  of  Good  Hope  (New  York,  1951)  especially 
illuminating.  The  estimate  of  Edith  Carow  Roosevelt  is  based  on  two 
confidential  sources;  on  Hermann  Hagedorn,  The  Roosevelt  Family  of 
Sagamore  Hill  (New  York,  1954);  and  on  scattered  references  in  The 
Letters  and  in  memoirs  too  numerous  too  cite.  Putnam  is  partial  to  TR's 
first  wife.  My  evaluation  of  Lodge,  in  so  far  as  it  is  moderate,  reflects 
Garraty's  multi-dimensional  study,  Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  Roosevelt's  re- 
lations with  Lodge  may  also  be  traced  in  Lodge  (ed.)  Selections.  Because 
of  the  unspecified  changes  made  by  Lodge  in  the  original  letters,  they 
should  be  used  with  caution. 

For  the  description  of  TR's  activities  as  Civil  Service  Commissioner, 
I  have  relied  heavily  on  The  Letters  and  Scrapbooks  and  particularly  on 
the  Annual  Reports  for  the  relevant  years.  I  have  also  quoted  from  the 
Letters  of  Theodore  Roosevelt:  Civil  Service  Commissioner,  1 889- J 895, 
a  pamphlet  issued  in  1958  under  the  direction  of  then  Commissioner 
Harrison  Ellsworth.  It  contains  several  theretofore  unpublished  letters.  In 
addition,  1  have  drawn  on  Theodore  Roosevelt,  "Six  Years  of  Civil  Service 
Reform,"  Scribners  Magazine,  XVIII  (1895);  Eric  F.  Goldman,  Charles 
J.  Bonaparte,  Patrician  Reformer  (Baltimore,  1943);  Dorothy  Canfield 
Fowler,  The  Cabinet  Politician:  The  Postmasters  General,  1829-1909 
(New  York,  1943);  Carl  Schurz,  Speeches,  Correspondence  and  Political 
Papers  (Frederic  Bancroft,  ed.,  6  vols.,  New  York,  1913);  Herbert  A. 
Gibbons,  John  Wanamaker  (2  vols.,  New  York,  1926);  and  William 
Dudley  Foulke,  Roosevelt  and  the  Spoilsmen  (New  York,  1925).  In  re- 
vision I  have  modified  my  treatment  slightly  on  the  basis  of  Leonard  D. 
White,  with  the  assistance  of  Jean  Schneider,  The  Republican  Era,  1869- 
1901  (New  York,  1958).  White  is  more  sympathetic  to  (and  probably 
more  understanding  of)  the  problems  faced  by  Wanamaker  and  others 
who  crossed  TR  than  I  am.  He  is  especially  appreciative  of  Wanamaker's 
organizational  and  executive  ability. 

Chapter  5.  THE  FIGHT  FOR  THE  RIGHT 

There  is  no  adequate  secondary  account  of  Roosevelt's  tenure  as 
Police  Commissioner  although  the  late  Howard  K.  Beale's  unpublished 
first  volume  of  TR's  life  is  said  to  contain  an  exhaustive  treatment.  The 
chapter  in  Pringle,  Theodore  Roosevelt,  is  palpably  unfair;  that  in  Lincoln 


528  NOTES 

Steffens,  The  Autobiography  of  Lincoln  Steffens  (2  vols.,  New  York, 
1931),  perceptive  but  cynical  and  not  wholly  reliable.  Riis,  Theodore 
Roosevelt,  is  informative,  but  uncritical.  My  reconstruction  of  the  com- 
missionership  is  based  mainly  on  The  Letters,  Scrapbooks,  Reports  of  the 
New  York  City  Police  Department,  and  especially  on  the  scrapbooks  kept 
by  TR's  fellow  commissioner,  Avery  D.  Andrews.  These  are  now  in  the 
collection  at  Harvard.  I  also  found  Andrews's  unpublished  manuscript, 
"Theodore  Roosevelt  as  Police  Commissioner,"  of  considerable  value.  A 
copy  is  in  the  Theodore  Roosevelt  Memorial  Association  Library.  In 
addition,  I  have  consulted  and  occasionally  quoted  from  Roosevelt's  An 
Autobiography;  Gustavus  Myers,  The  History  of  Tammany  Hall  (New 
York,  1901);  Joseph  Bucklin  Bishop,  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  His  Time 
(2  vols.,  New  York,  1920);  Wister,  Roosevelt;  Lodge  (ed.),  Selections; 
and  Charles  F.  Parkhurst,  My  Forty  Years  in  New  York  (New  York, 
1923).  I  have  further  used  Campaigns  and  Controversies,  Vol.  XIV, 
The  Works. 

Chapter  6.  THE  GREAT  ADVENTURE 

Besides  such  standard  sources  as  The  Letters,  Scrapbooks,  and  An 
Autobiography,  I  have  relied  on  Bishop's  and  Pringle's  biographies  of  TR 
and  Garraty's  of  Lodge.  I  have  also  quoted  from  William  Allen  White, 
Masks  in  a  Pageant  (New  York,  1930),  William  L.  Langer,  The  Diplo- 
macy of  Imperialism,  1890-1902  (2  vols.,  New  York,  1935),  Hermann 
Hagedorn,  Leonard  Wood:  A  Biography  (2  vols.,  New  York,  1931), 
Philip  C.  Jessup,  Elihu  Root  (2  vols.,  New  York,  1938),  and  Catherine 
Drinker  Bowen,  Yankee  from  Olympus:  Justice  Holmes  and  the  Supreme 
Court  (Boston,  1944).  The  excerpts  from  Long's  diary  are  taken  from 
Stefan  Lorant,  The  Life  and  Times  of  Theodore  Roosevelt  (New  York, 
1959);  the  statement  by  Will  James  from  the  excellent  chapter,  "Racism 
and  Imperialism,"  in  Richard  Hofstadter,  Social  Darwinism  in  American 
Thought,  rev.  ed.  (Boston,  1955).  Among  the  numerous  other  works 
I  have  used  are  James  Ford  Rhodes,  The  McKinley  and  Roosevelt 
Administrations  (New  York,  1922),  Julius  W.  Pratt,  Expansionists  of 
1898  (Baltimore,  1936),  Samuel  Flagg  Bemis,  A  Diplomatic  History  of 
the  United  States  (rev.  ed.,  New  York,  1950)  Richard  Hofstadter,  The 
American  Political  Tradition  and  the  Men  W ho  Made  It  (New  York, 
1948),  and  Matthew  Josephson,  The  Politico*,  (New  York,  1938),  and 
The  President  Makers  (New  York,  1940). 

I  have  found  the  analysis  of  Roosevelt's  views  on  Darwinism  and 
imperialism  in  Blum's  essay,  "Theodore  Roosevelt:  The  Years  of  De- 
cision," especially  discerning.  Margaret  Leech,  In  The  Days  of  McKinley 
(New  York,  1959)  supercedes  George  S.  Olcott,  The  Life  of  William 
McKinley  (Boston,  1916).  I  used  it  in  revision.  Although  I  continue  to 


NOTES  529 

believe  that  McKinley  could  have  and  should  have  averted  war,  In  The 
Days  of  McKinley  offers  the  best  account  yet  published  of  the  enormous 
pressures  to  which  he  was  subjected.  A  fine  brief  history  of  the  war  is 
Frank  Freidel,  The  Splendid  Little  War  (Boston,  1958).  Roosevelt's  own 
view  is  given  in  Theodore  Roosevelt,  The  Rough  Riders,  Vol.  XI,  The 
Works.  The  interested  student  might  also  consult  his  reviews  of  Alfred 
T.  Mahan's  The  Influence  of  Sea  Power  Upon  History  and  of  Brooks 
Adams'  The  Law  of  Civilization  and  Decay,  reprinted  in  Volumes  XII 
and  XIII  of  The  Works.  Charles  A.  Beard's  appreciative  comments  on 
TR's  review  of  Adams's  work  are  in  his  introduction  to  the  Vintage  Edition 
of  Brooks  Adams,  The  Law  of  Civilization  and  Decay  (New  York, 
1955).  Also  see  Albert  K.  Weinberg,  Manifest  Destiny:  A  Study  of  Na- 
tionalist Expansionism  in  American  History  (Baltimore,  1935);  Richard 
Hofstadter,  "Manifest  Destiny  and  the  Philippines,"  in  America  in  Crisis, 
Daniel  Aaron,  ed.  (New  York,  1952);  and  John  P.  Mallan,  "The 
Warrior  Critique  of  a  Business  Civilization,"  American  Quarterly,  VIII 
(1956).  I  have  also  quoted  from  William  Reynolds  Braisted,  The  United 
States  Navy  in  the  Pacific,  1897-1909  (Austin,  Texas,  1958). 

Chapter  7.  THE  FINAL  PREPARATION 

TR's  governorship  has  been  covered  exhaustively  in  a  doctoral  dis- 
sertation, regrettably  unpublished,  G.  Wallace  Chessman,  "Theodore 
Roosevelt,  Governor,"  (Harvard  University,  1950).  I  have  used  it  in 
revision.  There  is  no  published  work  of  consequence.  Pringle's  chapter 
is  superficial.  Alexander's  A  Political  History  is  limited.  Hurwitz  Theodore 
Roosevelt  and  Labor  is  informative,  but  unappreciative  of  the  multiple 
demands  made  on  TR.  It  is  nonetheless  useful.  A  number  of  other  works 
have  also  contributed  to  various  phases  of  my  treatment.  They  include: 
Harold  F.  Gosnell,  Boss  Plan  and  His  New  York  Machine  (Chicago, 
1924);  Thomas  Collier  Platt,  The  Autobiography  of  Thomas  Collier  Plait, 
edited  by  Louis  J.  Long  (New  York,  1910);  Roosevelt,  An  Autobiog- 
raphy; Richard  Hovey,  John  Jay  Chapman,  an  American  Mind  (New 
York,  1959) ;  Henry  Herman  Kohlsaat,  From  McKinley  to  Harding  (New 
York,  1923);  Jessup,  Root;  Chauncey  M.  Depew,  My  Memories  of 
Eighty  Years  (New  York,  1922);  and  Joseph  I.  C.  Clarke,  My  Life  and 
Memories  (New  York,  1925). 

The  substance  of  my  exposition  is  drawn  from  The  Letters,  Vol.  II, 
and  a  number  of  illuminating  notes  therein,  including  O'Neil's  report  to 
Van  Duzer;  the  Scrapbooks;  Public  Papers  of  Theodore  Roosevelt, 
Governor  (2  vols.,  Albany,  1899-1900);  Journal  of  the  Assembly  of  the 
State  of  New  York  (7  vols.,  Albany,  1899-1900);  and  the  Journal  of  the 
Senate  of  the  State  of  New  York  (4  vols.,  Albany,  1899-1900).  My  char- 
acterization of  Root,  originally  quite  harsh,  now  reflects  in  part  the  brief 


530  NOTES 

estimate  in  Elting  E.  Morison,  Turmoil  and  Tradition:  A  Study  of  the 
Life  and  Times  of  Henry  L.  Stimson  (Boston,  1960).  The  "Note  on 
Roosevelt's  Nomination  for  the  Governorship"  (no  author  named),  in 
Appendix  II,  The  Letters,  Vol.  II,  offers  the  most  plausible  explanation 
I  have  read  of  the  controversy  between  TR,  Chapman,  et  al  over  the 
issue  of  a  separate,  Independent  ticket  nomination. 

Chapter  8.  THE  PEOPLE'S  CHOICE 

The  most  inclusive  account  of  the  events  leading  to  TR's  nomina- 
tion is  G.  Wallace  Chessman,  "Theodore  Roosevelt's  Campaign  Against 
the  Vice  Presidency,"  The  Historian,  XIV  (1952).  Margaret  Leech,  In 
The  Days  of  McKinley  offers  new  insights  into  McKinley's  attitude  toward 
TR.  I  have  been  unable  to  weave  them  into  my  copy,  however.  Basically, 
I  have  depended  on  Chessman's  article  and  The  Letters,  Scrapbooks,  and 
numerous  memoirs,  including  Nicholas  Murray  Butler,  Across  the  Busy 
Years:  Recollections  and  Reflections  (2  vols.,  New  York,  1939,  1940); 
Kohlsaat,  From  McKinley  to  Harding;  Herbert  Croly,  Marcus  Alonzo 
Hanna,  His  Life  and  Works  (New  York,  1912);  Plait's  Autobiography; 
and  White's  Autobiography. 

The  story  of  the  campaign  has  been  reconstructed  in  part  from  most  of 
the  above  mentioned  works  and  largely  from  newspaper  clippings  in 
The  Scrapbooks.  My  appraisal  of  Altgeld  reflects  two  constructive  ap- 
praisals, Harry  Barnard,  Eagle  Forgotten:  The  Life  of  John  Peter 
Altgeld  (Indianapolis,  1938),  and  Ginger,  Altgeld's  America.  My  under- 
standing of  the  populist  movement  derives  from  John  D.  Hicks,  The 
Populist  Revolt  (New  York,  1931);  from  chapters  in  C.  Vann  Woodward, 
Origins  of  the  New  South  (Baton  Rouge,  La.,  1951);  Francis  B.  Simkins, 
Pitchfork  Ben  Tillman,  South  Carolinian  (Baton  Rouge,  La.,  1944); 
Theodore  Saloutos  and  John  D.  Hicks,  Agricultural  Discontent  in  the 
Middle  West  (Madison,  Wise.,  1951);  and  articles,  monographs,  and  doc- 
toral dissertations  too  numerous  to  cite  here.  I  agree  with  the  assertion 
in  Samuel  P.  Hays,  The  Response  to  Industrialism:  1885-1914  (Chicago, 
1957),  that  the  economic  analysis  in  works  such  as  Carl  C.  Taylor,  The 
Farmer's  Movement,  1620-1920  (New  York,  1953)  and  Allan  G.  Bogue, 
Money  at  Interest:  The  Farm  Mortgage  in  the  Middle  Border  (Ithaca, 
1955)  proves  that  the  farmers'  suffering  was  caused  less  by  money 
lenders,  whether  Eastern  or  Southern  and  Western,  and  tariff-protected 
industrialists  than  by  marketing  problems  that  we  have  yet  to  resolve. 
I  also  find  the  exposition  of  the  racist  and  other  egregious  impulses  of 
the  Populists  and  their  agrarian  successors  set  forth  in  Richard 
Hofstadter,  The  Age  of  Reform;  From  Bryan  to  F.D.R.  (New  York, 
1955)  suggestive,  if  hardly  inclusive.  But  I  see  little  in  these  newer  works 
that  refutes  the  validity  of  the  Populist-Bryan  program  (as  distinct  from 


NOTES  531 

its  analysis  of  the  reasons  for  the  farmers'  plight)  in  so  far  as  it  embraced 
lower  tariffs,  government-supported  regional  credit  devices,  graduated 
income  tax,  and  a  general  expansion  of  the  money  supply.  I  find,  accord- 
ingly, that  the  older  works  continue  to  be  illuminating. 

Bryan  awaits  a  good  biography.  Richard  Hofstadter,  The  American 
Political  Tradition  (New  York,  1948)  presents  a  devastating  portrait. 
The  picture  in  Eric  Goldman's  graphic  Rendezvous  with  Destiny  (New 
York,  1952)  is  similarly  penetrating  and  not  more  flattering.  I  lean  toward 
the  affirmative  assessment  in  Henry  S.  Commager,  The  American  Mind 
(New  Haven,  1952).  Bryan's  major  speeches  for  the  two  campaigns 
are  in  William  Jennings  Bryan,  The  First  Battle  (Chicago,  1896)  and 
The  Second  Battle  (Chicago,  1900).  Since  the  above  was  written,  an 
extended  essay,  Paul  W.  Glad,  The  Trumpet  Soundeth:  William  Jennings 
Bryan  and  His  Democracy,  1896-1912  (University  of  Nebraska  Press, 
1960),  has  been  published.  Glad  makes  Bryan  intelligible  to  the  urban 
mind  and  broadly  succeeds,  I  think,  in  giving  him  his  due.  Conversely, 
Leech,  In  the  Days  of  McKinley,  seems  to  me  to  give  McKinley  far  more 
than  his  due.  Yet  it  has  many  excellences.  It  contributes  particularly  to 
an  understanding  of  the  decision  to  take  the  Philippines.  But  also  see  the 
relevant  chapters  in  Bemis,  A  Diplomatic  History  and  Thomas  A.  Bailey, 
A  Diplomatic  History  of  the  American  People  (New  York,  3rd  ed., 
1946). 

It  occurs  to  me  as  this  goes  to  press  that  the  reader  may  infer  from  my 
treatment  of  the  campaign  of  1900  that  the  election  actually  turned  on 
the  imperialism  issue.  Historians  familiar  with  Thomas  A.  Bailey,  "Was 
the  Presidential  Election  of  1900  a  Mandate  on  Imperialism?"  Mississippi 
Valley  Historical  Review,  XXIV  (1937)  and  the  numerous  works  that 
touch  on  the  question  know  that  the  available  evidence  indicates  that  it 
did  not.  They  are  similarly  aware,  as  most  of  the  standard  diplomatic 
histories  point  out,  that  Bryan's  response  to  the  charge  that  other  powers 
would  take  the  Philippines  should  the  United  States  move  out  was  a 
nebulous  proposal  for  a  protectorate. 

A  General  Note  on  the  Presidential  Years 

George  E.  Mowry,  The  Era  of  Theodore  Roosevelt:  1900-1912  (New 
York,  1958)  is  the  best  work  on  the  presidential  years.  It  supercedes  the 
chapters  in  Pringle,  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  in  Rhodes,  The  McKinley 
and  Roosevelt  Administrations.  Mowry's  book  appeared  too  late  to  in- 
fluence my  conception.  I  have,  however,  made  some  revisions  and  in- 
cluded some  new  materials  on  the  basis  of  it.  Mowry  takes  Roosevelt 
seriously,  as  Pringle  and  most  of  the  historians  who  draw  on  him  did  not 
always  do;  he  succeeds  admirably  in  relating  him  to  his  times.  In  lighter 


532  NOTES 

vein,  there  is  much  colorful  material  on  the  Roosevelt  years  in  Volumes  II 
and  III  of  Mark  Sullivan,  Our  Times  (New  York,  1927,  1930). 

For  general  background  I  have  consulted,  but  not  used,  a  number  of 
political-intellectual  histories,  the  most  important  of  which  are:  Henry 
Steele  Commager,  The  American  Mind;  Goldman,  Rendezvous  With  Des- 
tiny; Arthur  Ekirch,  Jr.,  The  Decline  of  American  Liberalism  (New  York, 
1956) ;  and  Richard  Hofstadter's  Age  of  Reform. 

I  have  also  found  Harold  U.  Faulkner's  The  Quest  for  Social  Justice: 
1898-1914  (New  York,  1931),  and  the  same  author's  The  Decline  of 
Laissez-Faire:  1897-1914  (New  York,  1951)  informative.  Hays,  The 
Response  to  Industrialism  revises  many  of  the  older  judgments  found  in 
Faulkner  and  others. 

It  is  needless  to  add  that  I  have  based  much  of  the  following  chapters 
on  The  Letters,  Vols.  Ill- VI,  and  on  the  Homeward  Bound  Edition  of 
Roosevelt's  Presidential  Addresses  (8  vols.,  Review  of  Reviews  Co., 
1910).  The  Works,  Vol.  XV,  contains  a  comparatively  small  number  of 
TR's  messages  to  Congress.  I  have  continued  to  use  the  Scrapbooks  and 
have  supplemented  them  with  The  Literary  Digest  for  the  years  under 
review.  I  have  also  used  the  Congressional  Record  liberally,  though  not 
systematically,  a  detailed  and  exhaustive  study  of  the  legislative  process 
being  beyond  the  scope  of  this  volume. 

PART  III:    THE    SQUARE   DEAL   BEGINS 

Chapter  9.  THE  FIRST  FELL  BLOWS 

The  broad  outlines  of  the  sparkling  account  of  TR's  first  blows 
against  the  trusts  given  in  Pringle,  Theodore  Roosevelt,  have  not 
changed.  Mark  Sullivan,  Our  Times:  America  Finding  Herself  (Vol.  II 
of  Our  Times)  is  also  rich  in  human  interest.  I  have  extracted  the 
Pulitzer  correspondence  from  it.  I  have  also  used  Talthasar  Meyer,  A 
History  of  the  Northern  Securities  Case  (University  of  Wisconsin  Bulletin, 
No.  142,  Madison,  1906);  the  court  record,  Northern  Securities  Co.,  et  al. 
v.  United  States,  193  U.S.  360,  1904;  and  several  treatises  on  the  trust 
problem.  Of  the  latter,  Hans  B.  Thorelli,  Federal  Anti-Trust  Policy: 
Organization  of  an  American  Tradition  (Baltimore,  1955)  offers  a 
thorough,  up-to-date,  and  generally  favorable  appraisal  of  TR's  early 
antitrust  program.  A  keen  insight  into  the  business  mind  is  found  in 
Edward  C.  Kirkland,  Dream  and  Thought  in  the  Business  Community, 
1860-1900  (Ithaca,  N.Y.,  1956). 

Biographies  of  the  central  figures  include  Frederick  Lewis  Allen,  The 
Great  Pierpont  Morgan  (New  York,  1949);  James  G.  Pyle,  The  Life  of 
James  J.  Hill  (New  York,  1917);  and  George  Kennan,  E.  H.  Harriman 


NOTES  533 

(2  vols.,  Boston,  1922).  All  should  be  used  with  caution.  In  addition, 
see  Elmer  Ellis,  Mr.  Dooley's  America:  A  Life  of  Finley  Peter  Dunne 
(New  York,  1941). 

The  background  of  Roosevelt's  decision  to  appoint  Holmes  is  given 
in  John  Garraty,  "Holmes'  Appointment  to  the  Supreme  Court,"  The 
New  England  Quarterly,  XXII  (1949).  Garraty's  treatment  is  fuller 
than  mine  and  properly  emphasizes  TR's  interest  in  Holmes's  attitude 
toward  the  Insular  Cases.  Also  see  Mark  A.  DeWolfe  Howe,  The  Cor- 
respondence of  Mr.  Justice  Holmes  and  Sir  Frederick  Pollock  (2  vols., 
Cambridge,  1941);  Felix  Frankfurter,  Mr.  Justice  Holmes  and  the  Su- 
preme Court  (Cambridge,  1938);  and  Worthington  C.  Ford  (ed.),  The 
Letters  of  Henry  Adams:  1892-1918  (2  vols.,  Boston,  1932). 

An  informative  note  on  Littlefield's  activities  is  in  The  Letters,  Vol. 
III.  Arthur  M.  Johnson,  "Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the  Bureau  of  Cor- 
porations," Mississippi  Valley  Historical  Review,  XLV  (1959),  is  illumi- 
nating. 

Chapter  10.  AN  HISTORIC  DEPARTURE 

The  dramatic  account  in  Sullivan,  American  Finding  Herself,  has 
not  been  altered  substantially  by  recent  scholarship.  I  have  supplemented 
it  from  my  usual  primary  sources,  The  Letters,  Scrapbooks,  The  Literary 
Digest,  and  in  this  case  the  Report  of  the  Anthracite  Coal  Commission, 
U.S.  Department  of  Labor  Bulletin  No.  46  (Washington,  1903).  I  have 
also  used  Marguerite  Green,  The  National  Civic  Federation  and  the 
American  Labor  Movement,  1900-1925  (Washington,  1956);  a  number 
of  standard  labor  histories,  including  Foster  Rhea  Dulles,  Labor  in 
America:  A  History  (New  York,  1949);  and  especially  Robert  J.  Cornell, 
The  Anthracite  Coal  Strike  of  1902  (Washington,  1957).  Eliot  Jones, 
The  Anthracite  Coal  Combination  in  the  United  States  (Cambridge, 
1914)  has  been  useful,  and  so  has  Edward  Berman,  Labor  Disputes  and 
the  President  of  the  United  States  (New  York,  1924). 

Among  the  other  works  I  have  drawn  upon  or  quoted  from  are: 
Lodge  (ed.),  Selections;  Jessup,  Root;  Elsie  Gluck,  John  Mitchell,  Miner 
(New  York,  1929);  Irving  Stone,  Clarence  Darrow  for  the  Defense  (New 
York,  1941);  Mother  [M.  H.]  Jones,  Autobiography,  M.  F.  Parton  (ed.), 
(Chicago,  1925);  Gompers,  Life  and  Labor;  Mowry,  The  Era  of  Theo- 
dore Roosevelt;  and  Roosevelt,  An  Autobiography.  Judge  Pine's  state- 
ment is  in  the  New  York  Times,  April  30,  1952. 

Chapter  11.  AFFAIRS  OF  STATE 

The  secondary  literature  on  foreign  affairs  during  Roosevelt's 
presidency  is  enormous.  No  effort  will  be  made  to  survey  it.  As  I  hope 
my  text  makes  clear,  however,  I  have  been  strongly  influenced  by  Howard 


534  NOTES 

K.  Beale,  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the  Rise  of  America  to  World  Power 
(Baltimore,  1956).  Except  for  a  set  of  neo-isolationist  conclusions  that 
seem  curiously  distended  from  the  body  of  the  work,  Beale's  book  is  the 
most  exhaustive  and  balanced  treatment  extant  of  selected  phases  of 
Roosevelt's  conduct  of  diplomacy.  I  have,  of  course,  profited  from  many 
other  works  also.  Of  these,  special  mention  should  be  made  of  Julius 
W.  Pratt,  America's  Colonial  Experiment  (New  York,  1950);  Dexter 
Perkins,  The  United  States  and  the  Caribbean  (Cambridge,  1947);  the 
same  author's  classic  The  Monroe  Doctrine,  1867-1907  (Baltimore,  1937); 
Samuel  F.  Bemis,  The  Latin  American  Policy  of  the  United  States  (New 
York,  1943);  Garel  A.  Grunder,  The  Philippines  and  the  United  States 
(Norman,  Okla.,  1951);  M.  M.  Knight,  The  Americans  in  Santo  Domingo 
(New  York,  1928);  Russell  H.  Fitzgibbon,  Cuba  and  the  United  States, 
1900-1935  (Menasha,  Wis.,  1935);  and  many  other  specialized  studies. 

I  have  also  used  S.  W.  Livermore,  "Theodore  Roosevelt,  The  American 
Navy  and  the  Venezuelan  Crisis,"  American  Historical  Review,  LI 
(1946);  Thomas  A.  Bailey,  "Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the  Alaskan  Boun- 
dary Settlement,"  Canadian  Historical  Review,  XVIII  (1937);  H.  C.  Hill, 
Roosevelt  and  the  Caribbean  (Chicago,  1927);  and  Charles  C.  Tansill, 
Canadian-American  Relations,  1875-1911  (New  Haven,  1943).  Of  the 
biographies,  Henry  F.  Pringle,  The  Life  and  Times  of  William  Howard 
Taft  (2  vols.,  New  York,  1939);  Garraty,  Henry  Cabot  Lodge;  Jessup, 
Root;  and  Tyler  Dennett,  John  Hay,  From  Poetry  to  Politics  (New  York, 
1933)  have  been  most  helpful. 

Additional  sources  include:  Nelson  Manfred  Blake,  "Ambassadors  at 
the  Court  of  Theodore  Roosevelt,"  Mississippi  Valley  Historical  Review, 
XLII  (1955);  The  Literary  Digest  for  the  relevant  years;  Special  Report 
of  William  H.  Taft  on  the  Philippines,  Sixtieth  Congress,  First  Session, 
Sen.  Doc.,  VII,  No.  200;  Frederick  James  Zwierlein,  Theodore  Roosevelt 
and  Catholics  (St.  Louis,  1956);  and  a  microfilm  reel  of  reports  to 
Whitehall  by  British  ambassadors,  now  in  the  library  of  the  Theodore 
Roosevelt  Memorial  Association  at  the  Theodore  Roosevelt  House.  I  have 
also  used  Roosevelt's  An  Autobiography  and  The  Letters,  vols.  Ill  and 
IV. 

Chapter  12.  NOBLE  ENDS  AND  LESS  NOBLE  MEANS 

To  most  of  the  works  cited  for  the  previous  chapter  should  be 
added  the  fine  study  by  Dwight  C.  Miner,  The  Fight  for  the  Panama 
Route  (New  York,  1940).  I  have  followed  it  closely.  Also  see  Philippe 
Bunau-Varilla,  Panama;  the  Creation,  Destruction  and  Resurrection 
(London,  1913),  the  note  in  Vol.  Ill  of  The  Letters,  and  Gerstle  Mack, 
The  Land  Divided  (New  York,  1944),  a  superb  book.  I  have  found  the 


NOTES  535 

version  in  Chapter  26  of  Julius  W.  Pratt's  A  History  of  United  States 
Foreign  Policy  (New  York,  1955)  the  best  of  the  brief  accounts.  Pratt 
is  understanding  of  the  force  of  the  engineering  opinion  in  favor  of 
Panama,  critical  of  TR's  refusal  to  try  further  negotiations  with  Colombia. 
Pringle's  treatment  is  overdrawn  and  suffers  from  his  failure  to  consider 
the  impact  on  TR  of  the  engineering  aspects  of  the  situation.  Nevertheless, 
his  insight  into  certain  of  Roosevelt's  drives  cannot  be  dismissed.  Arthur 
H.  Dean,  William  Nelson  Cromwell  (New  York,  1957)  views  Crom- 
well's comportment  as  exemplary,  or  as  he  puts  it,  "unselfish  and  patriotic." 

Chapter  13.  IN  His  OWN  RIGHT 

The  account  of  the  inaugural  is  reconstructed  from  contempo- 
rary newspaper  reports  in  the  Scrapbooks  and  The  Literary  Digest.  For 
the  Hanna  incident  and  TR's  manipulation  of  the  patronage  in  general 
see  Croly,  Hanna;  Thomas  Beer,  Hanna  (New  York,  1929);  A.  Bower 
Sageser,  The  First  Two  Decades  of  the  Pendleton  Act  (Lincoln, 
Nebraska,  1935);  The  Letters  and  relevant  notes;  Mowry,  The  Era  of 
Theodore  Roosevelt;  and,  in  particular,  Blum,  Republican  Roosevelt.  For 
the  appointment  of  Straus,  also  see  Oscar  S.  Straus,  Under  Four  Adminis- 
trations: From  Cleveland  to  Taft  (Boston,  1922).  Straus  quotes  TR  in 
January,  1906,  when  he  first  asked  him  to  enter  the  Cabinet:  'There  is 
still  a  further  reason:  I  want  to  show  Russia  and  some  other  countries 
what  we  think  of  the  Jews  in  this  country." 

Alfred  D.  Chandler  Jr.'s  essay,  "Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the  Panama 
Canal:  A  Study  in  Administration,"  is  in  The  Letters,  Vol.  VI,  Appendix 
1.  An  analysis  of  the  report  of  the  Immigration  Commission  is  in  Oscar 
Handlin,  Race  and  Nationality  in  American  Life  (Boston,  1957).  John 
Higham,  Strangers  in  the  Land  (New  Brunswick,  N.J.,  1955)  has  also 
contributed  to  my  understanding  of  the  immigration  problem.  Roosevelt's 
religion  is  discussed  in  Hermann  Hagedorn,  "The  Unknown  Theodore 
Roosevelt,"  an  unpublished  essay,  in  Christian  F.  Reisner,  Roosevelt's 
Religion  (New  York,  1922),  a  compilation  of  conventional  observations 
by  contemporaries;  and  in  Gamaliel  Bradford,  The  Quick  and  the  Dead 
(Boston,  1931).  I  have  also  used  TR's  diaries.  The  best  biographies  of 
Booker  T.  Washington  are  Basil  Mathews,  Booker  T.  Washington, 
Educator  and  Interracial  Interpreter  (Cambridge,  1948);  and  Samuel  R. 
Spencer  Jr.,  Booker  T.  Washington  and  the  Negro's  Place  in  American 
Life  (Boston,  1955).  I  have  also  found  the  relevant  chapters  in  John 
Hope  Franklin,  From  Slavery  to  Freedom  (New  York,  1947)  stimulating. 
Professor  Franklin  is  more  critical  of  TR  and  Booker  T.  Washington  than 
my  conviction  that  economic  uplift  was  precedent  to  civil  rights  at  that 
time  permits  me  to  be.  Pringle,  Mowry,  and  Blum  all  write  perceptively 
of  the  campaign  of  1904  as  does  Josephson  in  his  The  President  Makers. 


536  NOTES 

I  have  filled  out  their  various  accounts  with  stories  from  contemporary 
newspapers  and  material  from  Jessup's  biography  of  Root.  I  have  also 
quoted  from  Ford  (ed.),  The  Letters  of  Henry  Adams.  Parker  has  no 
biographer.  The  reader  still  rankled  by  TR's  opportunism  in  the  Clarkson 
appointment  might  take  succor  in  his  statesmanship  and  sure  purpose  as 
appraised  by  William  Seal  Carpenter,  The  Unfinished  Business  of  Civil 
Service  Reform  (Princeton,  1952),  to  wit,  "Before  he  left  the  presidency, 
Theodore  Roosevelt  had  brought  many  thousands  of  positions  within  the 
classified  service  until  63.9  per  cent  of  the  whole  executive  civil  service 
was  included." 

PART  IV:    THE   SQUARE   DEAL   MATURES 

Chapter  14.  ANOTHER  MEASURED  ADVANCE 

This  chapter  is  largely  based  on  two  brilliant  essays  by  John  Blum, 
"Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the  Legislative  Process;  Tariff  Revision  and 
Railroad  Regulation,  1904-1906,"  and  "Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the 
Hepburn  Act:  Toward  an  Orderly  System  of  Control,"  published  as 
appendices  I  and  II  of  The  Letters,  vols.  IV  and  VI.  I  have  added  to  them 
and  revised  somewhat  with  materials  from  the  Scrapbooks  and  the  Con- 
gressional  Record.  I  have  also  drawn  from  the  following  biographies  or 
memoirs:  Nathaniel  Stephenson,  Nelson  W.  Aldrich  (New  York,  1930); 
Simkins,  Pitchfork  Ben  Tillman;  S.  H.  Acheson,  Joe  Bailey:  The  Last 
Democrat  (1932);  Blair  Bolles,  Tyrant  from  Illinois:  Uncle  Joe  Cannon's 
Experiment  with  Personal  Power  (New  York,  1951);  Robert  M.  La 
Follette,  Autobiography  (Madison,  1913);  Belle  Case  La  Follette  and 
Fola  La  Follette,  Robert  M.  La  Follette  (2  vols.,  New  York,  1953);  Le- 
land  L.  Sage,  William  Boyd  Allison:  A  Study  in  Practical  Politics  (Iowa 
City,  1956);  Ray  Stannard  Baker,  An  American  Chronicle  (New  York, 
1945);  and  Garraty,  Lodge. 

I  have  quoted  at  length  from  William  Z.  Ripley,  Railroads:  Rates  and 
Regulation  (New  York,  1912),  and  have  also  used  Russel  B.  Nye,  Mid- 
western Progressive  Politics  (East  Lansing,  Mich.,  1951).  The  best  ac- 
count of  the  pipeline  amendment  controversy  is  in  Arthur  Menzies 
Johnson,  The  Development  of  American  Petroleum  Pipelines:  A  Study  in 
Private  Enterprise  and  Public  Policy,  1862-1906  (Ithaca,  N.Y.,  1956), 
although  my  account  is  based  on  the  Congressional  Record.  Johnson 
points  out  that  the  amendment  had  little  economic  impact  on  the  oil 
industry,  but  that  it  was  nonetheless  a  landmark  in  the  expansion  of 
federal  regulatory  power.  An  illuminating  note  on  the  grievances  of 
Nebraskans  against  the  railroads  is  Richard  Lowitt,  "George  W.  Norris, 
James  J.  Hill,  and  the  Railroad  Rate  Bill,"  Nebraska  History,  XL  (1959). 


NOTES  537 

Chapter  15.  TRIALS,  TRIUMPHS,  AND  TRAGEDY 

I  have  added  little  to  Pringle's  sprightly  account  of  the  con- 
troversy over  simplified  spelling — a  few  contemporary  editorial  comments, 
but  no  more.  My  description  of  the  fight  for  the  Pure  Food  Act  and  the 
Meat  Inspection  Amendment  to  the  Agricultural  bill  comes  partly  from 
The  Letters,  The  Literary  Digest,  and  the  Scrapbooks,  partly  from  the 
exciting  story  in  Mark  Sullivan,  Our  Times,  vol.  II,  and  partly  from  the 
following  memoirs,  biographies,  and  monographs:  Dr.  Harvey  Wiley,  An 
Autobiography  (Indianapolis,  1930);  Oscar  E.  Anderson,  Jr.,  The  Health 
of  A  Nation:  Harvey  W.  Wiley  and  the  Fight  for  Pure  Food  (Chicago, 
1958),  an  able  study  that  describes  TR's  subsequent  falling  out  with 
Wiley;  Louis  Filler's  thoughtful  and  interesting  Crusaders  for  Liberalism 
(Yellow  Springs,  Ohio,  1950) ;  and  Claude  G.  Bowers's  full  dress  Beveridge 
and  the  Progressive  Era  (New  York,  1932).  I  have  also  used  Faulkner, 
The  Quest  for  Social  Justice. 

The  quotation  by  Steffens  is  from  his  introduction  to  his  The  Shame  of 
the  Cities  (New  York,  1904).  The  muck-raking  incident  is  drawn  from 
Filler,  Crusaders  for  Liberalism;  C.  C.  Regier,  The  Era  of  the  Muckrakers 
(Chapel  Hill,  N.C.,  1932);  Baker,  American  Chronicle;  Steffens,  Auto- 
biography;  and  Arthur  Wallace  Dunn,  Gridiron  Nights  (New  York, 
1915)  and  the  usual  contemporary  sources.  My  appraisal  has  also  been 
influenced  by  the  reflective  comments  of  Walter  Lippmann,  "The  Themes 
of  Muckraking,"  in  his  Drift  and  Mastery  (New  York,  1914),  and  by  the 
evaluation  in  Hofstadter,  The  Age  of  Reform.  TR's  speech  is  in  The 
Works,  Vol.  XVI.  The  suggestion  that  the  "muck-rake"  speech  may  have 
been  animated  by  TR's  desire  to  soften  the  Senate  in  preparation  for  the 
fight  over  the  Hepburn  bill  is  Richard  Lowitt's. 

Chapter  16.  THE  PEACEMAKER  I 

This  chapter  closely  follows  Beale,  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the 
Rise  of  America  to  World  Power.  I  have  supplemented  his  work  with 
excerpts  from  The  Letters,  Scrapbooks,  and  The  Literary  Digest.  I  have 
also  taken  advantage  of  such  standard  works  as  Alfred  W.  Griswold,  The 
Far  Eastern  Policy  of  the  United  States  (New  York,  1938);  Tyler  Den- 
nett, Roosevelt  and  the  Russo-Japanese  War  (New  York,  1925);  Thomas 
A.  Bailey,  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the  Japanese- American  Crises  (Stan- 
ford, 1934);  and  a  number  of  scholarly  articles. 

I  have  further  used  John  Hay,  Letters  and  Extracts  from  the  Diary, 
edited  by  Henry  Adams  (3  vols.,  Washington,  D.C.,  1908).  Jessup's  Root 
contains  much  good  material  on  Root's  tenure  as  Secretary  of  State,  while 
Richard  W.  Leopold,  Elihu  Root  and  the  Conservative  Tradition  (Boston, 
1954)  offers  a  thoughtful  evaluation.  William  Appleman  Williams,  The 
Tragedy  of  American  Diplomacy  (Cleveland,  1959),  and  George  F. 


538  NOTES 

Kennan,  American  Diplomacy,  1900—1950  (Chicago,  1951)  have  proved 
stimulating  in  different  ways;  so,  too,  Williams's  American-Russian  Rela- 
tions, 1781-1947  (New  York,  1952),  though  I  disagree  with  many  of  his 
underlying  assumptions. 

Chapter  17.  THE  PEACEMAKER  II 

Besides  the  works  of  Beale  and  the  other  authors  cited  under  the 
preceding  heading,  I  have  drawn  on:  E.  C.  Sandmeyer,  The  Anti-Chinese 
Movement  in  California  (Urbana,  111.,  1939);  Eleanor  Tupper  and  George 
E.  McReynolds,  Japan  in  American  Public  Opinion  (New  York,  1937); 
Pringle,  Taft;  Thomas  A.  Bailey,  "The  Root-Takahira  Agreement  of 
1908,"  Pacific  Historical  Review,  IX  (1940);  Eugene  N.  Anderson,  The 
First  Moroccan  Crisis,  1904-1906  (Chicago,  1930);  Outten  J.  Clinard, 
Japan's  Influence  on  American  Naval  Power,  1897-1917  (Berkeley,  Cal., 
1947),  Braisted,  The  United  States  Navy  in  the  Pacific,  1897-1909; 
Gordon  Carpenter  O'Gara,  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the  Rise  of  the 
Modern  Navy  (Princeton,  1943);  William  Clinton  Olson,  'Theodore 
Roosevelt's  Conception  of  an  International  League,"  World  Affairs 
Quarterly,  XXIX  (1959);  and  Raymond  A.  Esthus,  "The  Changing  Con- 
cept of  the  Open  Door,  1899-1910,"  The  Mississippi  Valley  Historical 
Review,  XLVI  (1959),  an  important  essay.  Also  three  other  important 
works:  Fred  H.  Harrington,  God,  Mammon,  and  the  Japanese  (Madison, 
Wis.,  1944)  Charles  Vevier,  The  United  States  and  China,  1906-1913 
(New  Brunswick,  N.J.,  1955);  and  Robert  E.  Osgood,  Ideals  and  Self- 
Interest  in  America's  Foreign  Relations  (Chicago,  1953),  which  covers 
these  and  all  the  other  chapters  on  foreign  policy.  The  citations  of  the 
reports  of  the  British  ambassadors  are  taken  from  the  microfilm  reel  of 
same  in  the  Roosevelt  Memorial  Association  Library. 

Chapter  18.  MORE  TROUBLES  AND  GREATER  TRIBULATIONS 

Pringle's  treatment  of  the  Brownsville  episode  has  not  been  sur- 
passed. I  have  filled  it  out  and  modified  it  slightly  on  the  basis  of  my 
reading  of  The  Letters.  I  have  further  drawn  from  Emma  Lou  Thorn- 
brough,  "The  Brownsville  Episode  and  the  Negro  Vote,"  The  Mississippi 
Valley  Historical  Review,  XLIV  (1957);  James  A.  Tinsley,  "Roosevelt, 
Foraker,  and  the  Brownsville  Affair,"  Journal  of  Negro  History,  XLI 
(1956);  and  Everett  Walters,  Joseph  Benson  Foraker:  An  Uncompromis- 
ing Republican  (Columbus,  Ohio,  1948).  Morison,  Turmoil  and  Tradition 
describes  Stimson's  support  of  Roosevelt.  It  is  less  critical  of  TR  than  my 
account  and  those  cited  above.  It  is  significant,  I  think,  that  Roosevelt 
did  not  mention  the  episode  in  his  An  Autobiography. 

Cutright's  exposition  in  depth  of  the  nature-fakers  affair  in  his 
Theodore  Roosevelt  The  Naturalist  supercedes  the  account  in  Pringle, 
Theodore  Roosevelt.  I  have  drawn  on  his  sources.  My  treatment  of  the 


NOTES  539 

Panic  of  1907  was  originally  based  on  the  conventional  sources,  notably, 
Pringle,  Theodore  Roosevelt;  Allen,  Pierpont  Morgan;  William  C. 
Schluter,  The  Pre-War  Business  Cycle,  1907-1914  (New  York,  1923); 
Alfred  D.  Noyes,  Forty  Years  of  American  Finance,  1865-1907  (New 
York,  1909);  and  several  extended  notes  in  The  Letters,  Vol.  V.  I  have 
tempered  my  evaluation  of  Morgan,  however,  on  the  basis  of  the  account 
set  forth  in  John  A.  Garraty,  Right-Hand  Man:  The  Life  of  George  W. 
Perkins  (New  York,  1960).  As  the  text  indicates,  I  have  also  drawn  on 
two  important  essays  by  Robert  H.  Wiebe,  "Business  Disunity  and  the 
Progressive  Movement,  1901-1914,"  Mississippi  Valley  Historical  Review, 
XLIV  (1958),  and  "House  of  Morgan  and  the  Executive,  1905-1913," 
American  Historical  Review,  LXV  (1959).  Wiebe's  statement  that  "a 
respectable  number  of  country  bankers  .  .  .  applauded"  the  Aldrich- 
Vreeland  Act  modifies  the  assertions  by  Glass,  Williams,  and  La  Follette 
which  I  have  taken  from  the  Congressional  Record,  Sixtieth  Congress, 
First  Session.  For  the  trust  problem  I  have  used  Henry  R.  Seager  and 
Charles  A.  Gulick  Jr.,  Trust  and  Corporation  Problems  (New  York, 
1929),  and  with  particular  profit,  George  W.  Stocking,  Basing  Point 
Pricing  and  Regional  Development:  A  Case  Study  of  the  Iron  and  Steel 
Industry  (Chapel  Hill,  N.C.,  1954).  On  the  other  hand,  Ward  S.  Bowman, 
Jr.  argues  in  a  review  article  in  The  University  of  Chicago  Law  Review, 
XXII  (1954)  that  Stocking's  evidence  fails  to  support  the  thesis  that  rela- 
tive retardation  in  the  South  was  caused  by  acquisition  or  basing  point 
prices.  He  does  not,  however,  disagree  with  the  proposition  that  the  merg- 
ing of  U.S.  Steel  and  T.  C.  &  I.  or  the  use  of  a  basing  point  system  had  no 
anti-competitive  effects  on  production  in  the  South  as  elsewhere.  Rather, 
Bowman's  point  is  that  the  relative  retardation  of  the  South  is  not  estab- 
lished by  Stocking's  analysis.  He  holds,  as  do  many  other  economists,  that 
the  South's  plight  was  attributable  to  numerous  other  factors. 

Chapter  19.  FOR  GENERATIONS  YET  UNBORN 

In  addition  to  The  Letters  and  their  several  informative  notes,  I 
have  relied  heavily  on  Gifford  Pinchot,  Breaking  New  Ground  (New 
York,  1947).  Pinchot's  book  is  partisan  and  fails  to  do  justice  to  some  of 
the  pro-conservation  men  with  whom  he  disagreed.  Nevertheless,  for  its 
anecdotes,  for  its  insights  into  the  best  sides  of  Roosevelt's  character,  and 
for  its  revelation  of  Pinchot's  missionary  zeal,  without  which  in  my  view 
the  conservation  movement  might  never  have  matured,  it  is  a  work  of 
surpassing  importance.  I  have,  of  course,  modified  its  conclusions  in  the 
light  of  such  standard  works  as  E.  Louise  Peffer,  The  Closing  of  the 
Public  Domain:  Disposal  and  Reservation,  1900-1950  (Stanford,  1951); 
Roy  M.  Robbins,  Our  Landed  Heritage:  The  Public  Domain,  1776-1936 
(Princeton,  1942);  John  Ise,  The  United  States  Forest  Policy  (New 


540  NOTES 

Haven,  1920);  Jerome  Kerwin,  Federal  Water-Power  Legislation  (New 
York,  1926);  Benjamin  Horace  Hibbard,  A  History  of  the  Public  Land 
Policies  (New  York,  1939);  Samuel  Trask  Dana,  Forest  and  Range 
Policy:  Its  Development  in  the  United  States  (New  York,  1956);  and 
Peggy  Heim,  "Financing  the  Federal  Reclamation  Program,  1902  to 
1919:  The  Development  of  Repayment  Policy"  (unpublished  Ph.D.  dis- 
sertation, Columbia  University,  1953).  I  have  also  drawn  on  William  T. 
Hornaday,  Thirty  Years  War  for  Wildlife  (New  York,  1931),  and 
Arthur  B.  Darling  (ed.),  The  Public  Papers  of  Francis  G.  Newlands  (2 
vols.,  New  York,  1932),  and  J.  A.  O'Callaghan,  "Senator  Mitchell  and 
the  Oregon  Land  Frauds,  1905,"  Pacific  Historical  Review,  XXI  (1952). 
Pringle,  Theodore  Roosevelt,  reviews  TR's  conservation  record  (favor- 
ably) in  two  paragraphs.  Roosevelt,  An  Autobiography,  has  a  good 
chapter,  perhaps  the  best  in  the  book.  Arthur  De  Witt  Frank,  The 
Development  of  the  Federal  Program  of  Flood  Control  on  the  Mississippi 
River  (New  York,  1930),  confirms,  in  so  far  as  it  expresses  any  judg- 
ments, the  validity  of  Roosevelt's  and  Pinchot's  strictures  against  the 
Army  engineers.  Erich  W.  Zimmermann,  Conservation  in  the  Production 
of  Petroleum  (New  Haven,  1957),  is  an  informed  and  scholarly  study. 
I  think,  however,  that  Zimmerman  reads  too  much  of  the  preservationist, 
as  distinguished  from  conservationist,  into  Roosevelt  and  Pinchot.  Cut- 
right,  Theodore  Roosevelt,  The  Naturalist,  has  much  fascinating  and 
relevant  material.  Whitney  R.  Cross,  "Ideas  in  Politics:  The  Conservation 
Policies  of  the  Two  Roosevelt's,"  Journal  of  the  History  of  Ideas,  XIV 
(1953)  is  suggestive  and  I  think  meritorious.  Indubitably,  the  ideals  and 
example  of  TR  influenced  FDR.  The  statement  by  Dr.  Van  Hise  is  from 
his  The  Conservation  of  Natural  Resources  in  the  United  States  (New 
York,  1911). 

As  my  text  suggests,  I  have  also  revised  a  number  of  judgments  on  the 
basis  of  Samuel  P.  Hays,  Conservation  and  the  Gospel  of  Efficiency:  The 
Progressive  Conservation  Movement,  1890-1920  (Cambridge,  1959),  the 
most  exhaustive  and  in  many  respects,  penetrating,  study  of  the  movement 
yet  published.  Hays  plays  down  too  much  the  anti-monopolistic  tenor  of 
the  Roosevelt-Pinchot  waterpower  policies,  but  he  puts  their  forest  and 
range  policies  in  sharp  perspective.  He  is  especially  informative  in  his 
analysis  of  the  roles  of  McGee  and  Leighton,  in  his  appreciation  of  the 
movement's  scientific  base,  and  in  his  analysis  of  the  differences  between 
the  conservationists  and  preservationists  (a  subject  I  have  been  forced  to 
ignore  for  reasons  of  space).  On  the  other  hand,  I  find  little  in  Hays  or 
anything  else  I  have  read  to  negate  the  contention  in  J.  Leonard  Bates, 
"Fulfilling  American  Democracy:  The  Conservation  Movement,  1907  to 
1921,"  Mississippi  Valley  Historical  Review,  XLIV  (June,  1957),  that 
"The  organized  conservationists  were  concerned  more  with  economic 


NOTES  541 

justice  and  democracy  in  the  handling  of  resources  than  with  mere 
prevention  of  waste." 

Chapter  20.  TOWARD  THE  WELFARE  STATE 

This  chapter  has  been  written  mainly  from  The  Letters,  The  Works, 
Scrapbooks,  and  The  Literary  Digest.  I  have  not  treated  Herbert  Croly  at 
length,  either  here  or  in  later  chapters,  mainly  because  I  am  convinced 
that  Roosevelt's  actions  and  speeches  had  as  much  impact  on  Croly, 
probably,  as  Croly's  writings  had  on  Roosevelt.  I  am  also  of  the  opinion 
that  Roosevelt  would  have  taken  almost  the  same  positions  he  did  had 
Croly  never  lived.  On  the  other  hand,  Croly  undeniably  had  a  sharp 
impact  on  the  intellectuals  of  his  times  and  thus  on  the  climate  of  opinion 
in  which  TR  functioned.  See,  for  example,  Goldman's  Rendezvous  With 
Destiny.  David  W.  Noble,  The  Paradox  of  Progressive  Thought  (Minne- 
apolis, 1958)  ably  dissects  Croly's  ideas.  The  statements  attributed  to 
Scripps  are  taken  from  Stone,  Clarence  Darrow;  that  by  Gompers  from 
his  Autobiography.  I  have  also  quoted  from  Brooks  Adams,  The  Law  of 
Civilization  and  Decay  (Vintage  Edition,  New  York,  1955).  Herman, 
Labor  Disputes  and  the  President  offers  a  measured  evaluation  of  TR's 
decision  to  send  troops  into  Nevada.  Herman  concludes:  "The  incident 
again  shows  the  necessity  for  investigation  by  some  impartial  agent  before 
the  President  orders  troops  sent  to  the  scene  of  a  strike.  The  alarming 
tone  of  Governor  Sparks'  first  telegram  to  the  President  probably  caused 
the  latter  to  fear  the  evil  consequences  of  delay,  but,  as  he  himself  said 
to  the  officer  in  charge  of  troops  .  .  .  'Better  twenty-four  hours  of  riot, 
damage,  and  disorder  than  illegal  use  of  troops.'  Though  his  action  in 
sending  soldiers  so  hastily  is  deserving  of  criticism,  his  insistence  that 
they  be  strictly  impartial  and  his  pressure  on  the  Governor  to  have  the 
legislature  convened  and  to  make  provision  for  doing  its  own  policing, 
when  he  realized  that  he  had  been  placed  in  a  false  position,  are  worthy 
of  praise." 

Chapter  21.  THE  CAMPAIGN  OF  1908 

Besides  the  obvious  sources — The  Letters,  Scrapbooks,  The  Lit- 
erary Digest,  and  The  Works — I  have  drawn  on  Leopold,  Root;  Lodge 
(ed.),  Selections;  and  numerous  other  secondary  works.  Pringle's  fine 
biography  of  Taft,  earlier  cited,  has  been  especially  useful.  Merlo  J. 
Pusey's  Charles  Evans  Hughes  (2  vols.,  New  York,  1951),  unfailingly 
informative,  though  not  always  critically  so,  has  also  been  helpful.  The 
comments  by  Archie  Butt  in  this  and  the  following  chapter  are  taken  from 
Lawrence  F.  Abbott  (ed.),  The  Letters  of  Archie  Butt  (New  York,  1924). 
The  correspondence  on  the  Roosevelt-Gompers  controversy  is  in  Injunc- 


542  NOTES 

tions:  Hearings  before  the  Committee  on  the  Judiciary,  House  of  Repre- 
sentatives. Sixty-Second  Congress,  Second  Session  (Washington,  D.C., 
1912).  Yet  another  irony  in  the  Roosevelt-Gompers  relationship  is  that  by 
1908  Roosevelt  perceived  the  greater  equity  in  workmen's  compensation, 
as  distinguished  from  employer's  liability,  laws.  He  persuasively  argued  for 
same  in  his  message  of  January  31  and  in  a  second  special  message  two 
months  later.  Congress  responded  by  establishing  a  limited  compensation 
system  for  government  employees.  Gompers,  however,  failed  to  support 
the  President.  Not  until  after  Roosevelt  left  the  presidency  did  the  A.F. 
of  L.  leader  finally  comprehend  the  superiority  of  the  compensation 
principle. 

Chapter  22.  THE  CHANGING  OF  THE  GUARD 

I  have  supplemented  The  Letters,  The  Works,  Scrapbooks,  and 
The  Literary  Digest  with  liberal  extractions  from  Pringle's  two  biographies, 
Theodore  Roosevelt  and  William  Howard  Taft;  also  from  Butt,  Intimate 
Letters.  The  italics  in  Roosevelt's  farewell  letter  to  Pinchot  are  mine.  The 
quote  from  Lord  Bryce  is  taken  from  the  microfilm  reel  previously  cited. 
Morison,  Turmoil  and  Tradition  offers  a  more  charitable  interpretation 
than  I  of  Roosevelt's  decision  to  press  the  libel  suits.  But  see  the  note  in 
Th?  Letters,  Vol.  VI.  Hays,  Conservation  and  the  Gospel  of  Efficiency 
confirms  Roosevelt's  and  Pinchot's  realization  before  the  inauguration 
that  Taft  was  unfriendly  toward  their  conservation  policies.  The  best 
analysis  of  the  report  of  the  Country  Life  Commission,  which  Congress 
refused  to  publish,  is  Clayton  S.  Ellsworth,  "Theodore  Roosevelt's 
Country  Life  Commission,"  Agricultural  History,  XXXIV  (1960).  Ells- 
worth reveals  Taft's  indifference  to  the  Commission's  recommendations. 
He  also  shows  that  the  Wilson  administration  put  many  of  the  Com- 
mission's recommendations,  some  indirect  and  others  direct,  into  law. 
Farm  organizations  were  exempted  from  the  Clayton  Anti-Trust  Act; 
extension  education  was  provided  by  the  Smith-Lever  Act  of  1914;  voca- 
tional education  was  promoted  by  the  Smith-Hughes  Act;  federal  aid  to 
roads  was  given  by  an  act  of  1916;  more  adequate  credit  facilities  were 
established  through  the  Federal  Reserve  Act  of  1913,  the  Federal  Ware- 
house Act  of  1916,  and  the  Federal  Land  Bank  Act  of  the  same  year; 
also,  the  Underwood-Simmons  Tariff  of  1914  reduced  the  rates  on  in- 
dustrial products  purchased  by  farmers. 

PARTV:    THE    HIGH   TIDE    OF   PROGRESSI VISM 

GENERAL 

The  ground  here  has  been  clearly  staked  out  by  George  E.  Mowry, 
Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the  Progressive  Movement  (Madison,  1946).  I 
have  followed  his  guide  lines,  though  wandering  here  and  there  and  modi- 


NOTES  543 

fying  certain  of  his  conclusions.  I  have  also  benefited  enormously  from 
Pringle's  Taft,  and  from  Arthur  S.  Link's  Wilson:  The  Road  to  the  White 
House  (Princeton,  1947),  and  Link's  Woodrow  Wilson  and  the  Pro- 
gressive  Era:  1910-1917  (New  York,  1954).  My  greatest  debt  continues 
to  be  to  the  editors  of  The  Letters,  Vol.  VII  of  which  covers  the  period 
under  review.  I  have  also,  of  course,  drawn  liberally  on  Roosevelt's  The 
Works. 

Chapter  23.  THE  NEW  NATIONALISM 

This  chapter  is  based  on  the  works  mentioned  above,  on  press 
commentaries  in  The  Literary  Digest,  and  on  numerous  books  cited 
earlier.  The  most  valuable  of  the  latter  include,  Goldman,  Rendezvous; 
Cutright,  Theodore  Roosevelt  the  Naturalist;  Lodge  (ed.),  Selections; 
Butt,  Intimate  Letters;  Pinchot,  Breaking  New  Ground;  Jessup,  Root; 
White,  Autobiography;  and  Roosevelt's  The  Works.  I  have  also  used 
Kenneth  W.  Hechler,  Insurgency:  Personalities  and  Politics  of  the  Taft 
Era  (New  York,  1940);  Ford  (ed.),  The  Letters  of  Henry  Adams;  and 
F.  W.  Taussig,  The  Tariff  History  of  the  United  States  (New  York,  1914). 
Conflicting  interpretations  of  the  Ballinger-Pinchot  affair  are  Pringle,  Taft, 
and  Mowry,  Progressive  Movement;  also,  Alpheus  T.  Mason,  Bureaucracy 
Convicts  Itself:  The  Ballinger-Pinchot  Controversy  of  1910  (New  York, 
1941).  Hays,  Conservation  and  the  Gospel  of  Efficiency  also  treats  it. 
Archibald  W.  Butt,  Taft  and  Roosevelt:  the  Intimate  Letters  of  Archie 
Butt  (2  vols.,  Garden  City,  N.Y.,  1930)  is  the  source  of  the  remarks  by 
Archie  Butt  in  this  and  the  three  following  chapters. 

Chapter  24.  THE  TRAVAILS  OF  INDECISION 

The  Letters,  The  Works,  Scrapbooks,  The  Literary  Digest,  and 
The  Outlook  together  with  Pringle's  Taft  and  Mowry's  Progressive  Move- 
ment are  the  main  sources  for  this  chapter.  I  have  also  drawn  from 
Mowry's  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the  Progressive  Era,  wherein  he  is  much 
more  sympathetic  to  and  understanding  of  Roosevelt's  approach  to  the 
trust  problem  than  in  the  earlier  Progressive  Movement.  Wiebe's  articles 
have  again  proved  enlightening,  while  Garraty's  Right-Hand  Man  has 
confirmed  my  own  conclusion  that  Perkins  was  sincere  and  conscientious. 
I  have  further  drawn  on  Amos  R.  E.  Pinchot,  History  of  the  Progressive 
Party,  1912-1916,  edited  by  Helene  Maxwell  Hooker  (New  York,  1958), 
and  Felix  Frankfurter,  Felix  Frankfurter  Reminisces:  Recorded  in  Talks 
with  Dr.  Harlan  B.  Phillips  (New  York,  1960).  Among  the  numerous 
other  works  I  have  used  are  Pinchot,  Breaking  New  Ground;  Hechler, 
Insurgency;  Hays,  Conservation  and  the  Gospel  of  Efficiency;  and  L.  E. 
Ellis,  Reciprocity,  1911  (New  Haven,  1939).  Of  further  interest  is  the 
statement  by  John  J.  Leary,  Jr.,  that  TR  told  him  in  1916  that  Taft's  failure 
to  reappoint  the  Country  Life  Commission  was  "the  last  straw."  It  is  in 


544  NOTES 

Talks  with  T.R.  From  the  Diaries  of  John  J.  Leary  Jr.  (Boston,  1930). 
Judge  Gary's  statements  are  extracted  from  Special  Committee  on  Investi- 
gation of  the  U.S.  Steel  Corporation.  Hearings.  House  of  Representatives 
(Washington,  1911). 

For  a  favorable  and  reflective  appraisal  of  Chief  Justice  White's  "rule 
of  reason"  doctrine,  see  Eugene  V.  Rostow,  Planning  for  Freedom,  The 
Public  Law  of  American  Capitalism  (New  Haven,  1959).  The  most  ex- 
haustive and  judicious  synthesis  of  antitrust  policy  I  have  read  is  Simon  N. 
Whitney,  Antitrust  Policies,  American  Experience  in  Twenty  Industries 
(2  vols.,  New  York,  1958).  Whitney  concludes,  as  does  Rostow,  that  the 
broad  deterrent  effect  of  the  antitrust  laws  has  been  greater  than  the  visible 
effects  of  special  prosecutions  would  suggest.  I  am  particularly  impressed 
by  Whitney's  implicit  confirmation  of  the  broad  outlines  of  Roosevelt's 
attitude  toward  big  business.  His  closing  statements  read  in  part:  "Few  if 
any  responsible  writers  would  push  such  a  program  [for  pure  competition] 
to  the  extreme,  lest  the  benefits  of  large-scale  operation  and  the  profit 
motive  be  lost.  .  .  ."  "The  pure  competition  of  small  firms  .  .  .  would 
not  be  dynamic  or  progressive."  "Not  competition  alone,  but  the  combined 
force  supplied  by  competition  and  by  ambitions  of  a  noncompetitive  na- 
ture, will  make  a  progressive  economy." 

Chapter  25.  THE  PEOPLE  SHALL  RULE 

I  have  here  drawn  on  almost  all  the  works  cited  under  the  three 
previous  headings.  Of  the  new  materials,  Robert  Grant's  letter  to  James 
Ford  Rhodes  is  in  The  Letters,  Vol.  VIII,  Appendix  II;  Felix  Frank- 
furter's retrospective  comments  on  the  recall  of  judicial  decisions  in 
Archibald  MacLeish  and  E.  F.  Prichard,  Jr.,  Eds.,  Law  and  Politics: 
Occasional  Papers  of  Felix  Frankfurter,  1913-1918  (New  York,  1939). 
The  quotation  by  John  W.  Davis  is  from  one  of  his  speeches  in  1912  in 
support  of  his  bill  to  eradicate  the  abuse  of  the  injunctive  power.  My 
general  statements  on  Davis  are  based  on  an  examination  of  his  papers 
which  are  temporarily  in  my  possession. 

The  reader  dissatisfied  with  my  analysis  of  Roosevelt's  motivation  in 
seeking  again  the  presidency  might  profitably  consult  Morison's  Turmoil 
and  Tradition.  Morison  puts  the  case  for  TR's  personal  ambition  more 
compellingly  and  more  succinctly  than  any  historian  I  have  read.  An 
interview  with  Judge  Learned  Hand  on  January  25,  1958,  is  the  basis  for 
my  statement  that  he  advised  TR  not  to  come  out  for  the  recall  of  judicial 
decisions  and  to  clarify  his  position  after  he  had  come  out  for  them. 

Chapter  26.  THOU  SHALT  NOT  STEAL 

Here  again  the  sources  are  essentially  the  same  as  those  listed 
under  General,  Chapter  XXIII,  and  Chapter  XXIV.  I  should  say,  how- 


NOTES  545 

ever,  that  in  addition  to  The  Letters  and  The  Literary  Digest,  I  have  drawn 
particularly  heavily  on  Pringle's  Taft.  Belle  Case  La  Follette  and  Fola 
La  Follette,  Robert  M.  La  Follette  has  also  contributed  new  material; 
and  so,  also,  Jessup's  Root.  My  account  of  the  convention  is  reconstructed 
partly  from  contemporary  newspaper  accounts,  partly  from  memoirs  and 
autobiographies  earlier  cited,  and  largely  from  Mowry's  Progressive 
Movement. 

Chapter  27.  ARMAGEDDON 

To  all  my  standard  sources  should  be  added  Hofstadter's  Age  of 
Reform;  George  E.  Mowry,  The  California  Progressives  (Berkeley,  1951); 
Bowers,  Beveridge;  and  Link,  Woodrow  Wilson  and  the  Progressive  Era. 
Also,  Woodrow  Wilson,  A  Crossroads  of  Freedom,  edited  by  John  Wells 
Davidson  (New  Haven,  1956);  Ira  Kipnis,  The  American  Socialist  Move- 
ment: 1897-1912  (New  York,  1920);  David  Shannon,  The  Socialist  Party 
of  America  (New  York,  1955);  Ray  Ginger,  The  Bending  Cross:  A 
Biography  of  Eugene  Victor  Debs  (New  Brunswick,  N.J.,  1949);  and  Nye, 
Midwestern  Progressivism.  Additional  sources  include  Henry  May,  Prot- 
estant Churches  and  Industrial  America  (New  York,  1949);  White,  Auto- 
biography; Robert  M.  Warner,  "Chase  S.  Osburn  and  the  Presidential 
Campaign  of  1912,"  Mississippi  Valley  Historical  Review,  XLVI  (1959); 
and  Alfred  D.  Chandler,  Jr.,  "The  Origins  of  Progressive  Leadership," 
The  Letters,  Vol.  VIII,  Appendix  III.  The  most  recent  and  most  inclusive 
treatment  of  the  controversy  over  the  anti-trust  plank  is  in  Garraty, 
Right-Hand  Man.  Garraty  points  out  that  the  records  have  been  lost  and 
that,  in  any  event,  the  changes  were  matters  of  detail  rather  than  of 
principle.  He  confirms,  however,  that  regardless  of  the  wording  of  the 
platform,  the  real  issue  was  trust-busting  versus  government  regulation. 
Roosevelt's  speech  at  Milwaukee  is  in  The  Works,  Vol.  XVII.  Also  see 
Robert  Donovan,  The  Assassins  (New  York,  1955).  For  insight  into  why 
one  group  of  conservationists — the  pure  nature  lovers  or  preservationists 
— who  were  at  odds  with  Pinchot  because  of  his  insistence  that  the  forests 
be  opened  to  controlled  commercial  use,  supported  Taft  rather  than  TR, 
see  Linnie  Marsh  Wolfe,  Son  of  the  Wilderness:  The  Life  of  John  Muir 
(New  York,  1945). 

PART  VI:    ONE   LAST   GREAT    CAUSE 

Chapter  28.  THE  VARIETY  OF  HIM 

See  Garraty,  Right-Hand  Man  for  evidence  that  Perkins  was  far 
more  dedicated  to  preserving  the  Progressive  Party  than  Harold  Ickes, 
W.  A.  White,  and  other  Westerners  believed.  The  most  discerning  short 
treatment  of  Wilson's  domestic  program  is  in  Link,  Woodrow  Wilson  and 
the  Progressive  Era.  A  vastly  more  detailed  account  of  the  first  phase  is 


546  NOTES 

in  the  same  author's  Wilson:  The  New  Freedom  (Princeton,  1956).  TR's 
address  to  the  American  Historical  Association  is  in  The  Works,  Vol. 
XII.  His  disparaging  remarks  to  Trevelyan  about  history  professors 
should  be  weighed,  perhaps,  against  his  several  deferential  letters  to 
Frederick  Jackson  Turner  printed  in  The  Letters,  Vol.  I.  I  have  drawn  on 
the  brief  and  interesting  account  of  TR's  South  American  expedition  in 
Cutright,  Theodore  Roosevelt  the  Naturalist.  The  record  of  the  libel  suit 
is  in  Roosevelt  vs.  Newett:  A  Transcript  of  the  Testimony  Taken  at 
Depositions  Read  at  Marquette,  Michigan  (Privately  printed,  1914).  TR's 
review  of  the  Armory  Show  is  in  The  Works,  Vol.  XII.  Sam  Hunter, 
Modern  American  Painting  and  Sculpture  (New  York,  1959)  gives  a 
good  account  of  the  Armory  Show's  critical  reception.  He  recognizes  the 
force  of  TR's  affirmation,  but  emphasizes  more  his  negative  views. 

As  I  said  in  the  text,  Wagenknecht,  The  Seven  Worlds  offers  the  most 
inclusive  appreciation  of  TR's  feeling  for  the  arts  I  have  read.  Wagen- 
knecht is  not  as  penetrating  as  many  of  Roosevelt's  negative  critics,  but 
TR  himself  never  professed  to  be  a  critic.  If  Roosevelt's  sophistication 
was  less  than  that  of  the  critics  and  academicians,  it  was  greater,  certainly, 
than  that  of  the  average  college  graduate  and  incomparably  superior  to 
that  of  most  politicians.  At  the  risk  of  being  didactic  I  repeat  the  judgments 
implied  in  my  text:  It  is  a  good  thing  to  have  a  President  or  former 
President  interested  in  the  arts;  TR  did  more  to  advance  them  than  any 
President  between  Jefferson  and  Franklin  Roosevelt,  whose  great  service 
was  performed  through  the  WPA. 

I  have  also  used  Homer  Saint-Gaudens,  "Roosevelt  and  Our  Coin 
Designs,"  Century,  XCIV  (1920);  Glenn  Brown,  "Roosevelt  and  the  Fine 
Arts,"  American  Architect,  CXVI  (1919);  and  Carl  J.  Weber,  "Poet  and 
President,"  New  England  Quarterly,  XVI  (1943).  I  have  also  drawn  on 
Owen  Wister,  Story  of  a  Friendship;  Henry  Adams,  The  Education  of 
Henry  Adams  (Boston,  1918);  and  Hermann  Hagedorn  and  Sidney  Wal- 
lach,  A  Theodore  Roosevelt  Round-Up  (New  York,  1958),  wherein  are 
printed  the  statements  by  Robert  Frost,  et  al.  These  have  the  ring  of  the 
memorium — they  were  written  after  TR's  death — but  they  are  surely  of 
value.  Hamlin  Garland's  affection  for  and  appreciation  of  TR  is  also 
brought  out  in  Jean  Holloway,  Hamlin  Garland,  A  Biography  (Austin, 
Texas,  1960).  The  most  recent  criticism  of  TR's  literary  values  is  Don 
D.  Walker,  "Wister,  Roosevelt  and  James:  A  Note  on  the  Western," 
American  Quarterly,  XII  (1960).  Walker  describes  how  TR  prevailed  on 
Wister  to  eliminate  the  gory  details  from  an  episode  in  The  Virginian 
and  suggests  that  TR  may  have  been  responsible  for  Wister's  subsequent 
failure  to  realize  his  potential.  In  the  same  article,  however,  Walker  quotes 
W.  D.  Howells,  the  then  dean  of  realism,  as  advising  Wister  that  he  not 


NOTES  547 

show  his  first  novel  to  a  publisher  because  "it  was  certain  to  shock  the 
public  gravely"  and  because  "a  whole  fig  tree  would  not  cover  the  Widow 
Taylor."  Many  of  TR's  letters  to  Wister  and  numerous  other  writers  are 
in  the  eight  volumes  of  The  Letters.  I  have  formed  my  conclusions  on  the 
whole  body  of  them. 

Chapter  29.  THE  BUGLE  THAT  WOKE  AMERICA 

The  title  for  this  chapter  is  taken  from  Hermann  Hagedorn,  The 
Bugle  That  Woke  America:  The  Saga  of  Theodore  Roosevelt's  Last  Battle 
for  His  Country  (New  York,  1940).  The  chapter  as  a  whole  is  a  con- 
densation of  part  of  my  doctoral  dissertation,  "Wilson,  Roosevelt,  and 
Interventionism,  1914-1917"  (Northwestern  University,  1954).  Readers 
interested  in  published  works  covering  the  same  period  might  consult 
Link,  Woodrow  Wilson  and  the  Progressive  Era,  or  William  E.  Leuchten- 
berg,  The  Perils  of  Prosperity  (Chicago,  1958);  also  most  of  the  works 
cited  in  the  notes  for  Chapter  31.  For  a  revealing  insight  into  Roosevelt's 
matured  views  on  the  need  to  extend  popular  control  of  the  government, 
his  continued  contempt  for  legalism,  his  belief  "that  strong  labor  unions 
are  indispensable  to  progress,"  and  his  reaffirmation  of  Charles  Van  Rise's 
theories  on  the  regulation  of  trusts — all  of  which  positions,  as  I  have  tried 
to  show,  he  had  come  to  during  the  last  years  of  his  presidency — see  his 
Outlook  review  (November  18,  1914)  of  Herbert  Croly's  Progressive 
Democracy  and  Walter  Lippmann's  Drift  and  Mastery.  It  is  republished  in 
The  Works,  Vol.  XII  under  the  title  "Progressive  Democracy."  The  letter 
by  TR  describing  his  meeting  with  the  German  emissary  is  in  Mrs.  Theo- 
dore Roosevelt,  Jr.,  Day  Before  Yesterday  (Garden  City,  1958). 

Chapter  30.  THE  CAMPAIGN  FOR  AMERICAN  RIGHTS 

This  chapter  is  also  a  condensation  of  a  part  of  my  dissertation  as 
cited  under  the  preceding  heading.  The  report  of  the  telephone  conversa- 
tions at  the  convention  was  originally  taken  from  John  A.  Garraty  (ed.), 
"TR  on  the  Telephone,"  American  Heritage,  IX  (1957).  I  have  since 
used  the  original.  It  is  in  the  Perkins  Papers  in  the  Special  Collections 
Room  of  the  Butler  Library  at  Columbia  University.  I  am  impressed  by 
the  evidences  of  TR's  hope,  expressed  over  the  phone  to  Lodge  and  others, 
that  a  militant  nominating  speech  by  Senator  Albert  Fall  on  the  Mexican 
situation  might  swing  the  Republican  convention  behind  him.  It  tends  to 
confirm,  regrettably,  my  speculation  that  TR  would  have  been  as  ready 
to  go  to  war  against  Mexico  as  against  Germany  had  there  been  no 
conflagration  in  Europe.  The  report  of  President  Wilson's  conversation 
with  Cobb  is  taken  from  John  L.  Heaton,  Cobb  of  "The  World"  (New 
York,  1924). 


548  NOTES 

Chapter  31.  THE  LAST  BATTLE 

I  have  based  this  chapter  partly  on  the  collections  of  the  Papers 
of  Theodore  Roosevelt,  Woodrow  Wilson,  Newton  D.  Baker,  John  J. 
Pershing,  and  Hugh  S.  Scott,  all  on  deposit  in  the  Manuscripts  Division 
of  the  Library  of  Congress.  I  have  also  drawn  liberally  from  TR's  war- 
time writings  as  published  in  Ralph  Stout  (ed.)  Roosevelt  in  the  Kansas 
City  Star  (Boston,  1921).  My  views  on  the  excesses  of  the  war  years 
have  been  formed,  if  they  needed  to  be  formed,  by  such  works  as  H.  C. 
Peterson  and  G.  C.  Fite,  Opponents  of  War,  1917-1918  (Madison,  Wis., 
1957);  Carl  Wittke,  The  German-Language  Press  in  America  (Lexington, 
1957);  Zachariah  Chafee,  Free  Speech  in  the  United  States  (Cambridge, 
1941);  J.  Weinstein,  "Anti-War  Sentiment  and  the  Socialist  Party,  1917- 
1918,"  Political  Science  Quarterly,  LXXIV  (1959);  Robert  K.  Murray, 
Red  Scare:  A  Study  in  National  Hysteria,  1919-1920  (Minneapolis, 
1955);  John  Blum,  "Nativism,  Anti-Radicalism,  and  the  Foreign  Scare, 
1917-1920,"  Midwest  Journal,  III  (1950-51),  and  Arthur  Ekirch,  Civilian 
and  the  Military  (New  York,  1956).  I  have  also  read  with  interest,  but 
not  used,  Harry  N.  Scheiber,  The  Wilson  Administration  and  Civil  Lib- 
erties, 1917-1921  (Ithaca,  N.Y.,  1960).  Scheiber  places  a  heavy  burden 
of  blame  on  President  Wilson. 

I  have  drawn  most  of  my  personal  anecdotes  from  Hagedorn,  The 
Bugle  That  Woke  America;  Oscar  K.  Davis,  Released  for  Publication 
(New  York,  1925);  Frederick  S.  Wood  (ed.),  Roosevelt  As  We  Knew 
Him  (Philadelphia,  1927);  Charles  Willis  Thompson,  Presidents  I  Have 
Known  (Indianapolis,  1929);  Leary,  Talks  With  T.R.;  Bishop,  Life  and 
Times;  James  Amos,  Theodore  Roosevelt  (New  York,  1927).  The  de- 
scription of  Taft  at  the  grave  is  from  a  letter  by  Kent  B.  Stiles  to  Hermann 
Hagedorn,  December  24,  1955.  Mr.  Stiles,  who  was  in  1919  a  reporter  for 
the  Associated  Press,  writes  that  the  "scene  was  too  sacred"  for  him  to 
report  at  the  time. 

I  am  aware,  of  course,  that  the  reports  of  TR's  various  sayings  as 
recorded  in  the  above  cited  memoirs  and  reproduced  in  my  text  may  not 
be  literally  accurate  in  all  cases.  Yet  every  one  of  them  seems  to  be  in 
character  with  TR's  personality  and  the  historical  situation.  Most  of  them 
were  recorded,  moreover,  by  trained  newspapermen  accustomed  to  taking 
down  verbatim  accounts  of  conversations.  On  the  theory  that  the  his- 
torian's charge  to  recreate  the  past  is  more  nearly,  if  still  imperfectly, 
achieved  by  using  such  materials  with  discrimination  rather  than  by  dis- 
missing them  in  the  interest  of  what  may  become  a  sterile  literalism,  I 
have  chosen  to  include  them. 

Scholarly  support  for  the  speculations  that  TR  would  have  been  the 
leading  contender  for  the  Republican  nomination  in  1920  may  be  found 


NOTES  549 

in  Howard  Scott  Greenlee,  "The  Republican  Party  in  Division  and  Re- 
union, 1913-1920,"  (Doctoral  dissertation,  University  of  Chicago,  1950). 
My  generalizations  about  the  nature  of  the  Republican  party  in  the  post- 
war era  are  substantiated  by  the  facts,  if  not  always  the  interpretations, 
set  forth  in  almost  any  textbook  on  the  period.  Also  see  Arthur  S.  Link, 
"What  Happened  to  the  Progressive  Movement  in  the  1920's?"  American 
Historical  Review,  LXIV  (1959).  Link  recounts  the  persistence  of  pro- 
gressivism  in  Congress,  but  also  speculates  that  neither  Wilson  nor  Roose- 
velt could  have  formed  a  viable  progressive  government.  The  most  dis- 
passionate account  I  have  read  of  the  wellsprings  of  Lodge's  opposition 
to  Wilson's  conception  of  the  League  of  Nations  is  in  Garraty's  Henry 
Cabot  Lodge.  Although  Garraty  does  not  discount  the  personal  equation, 
he  succeeds  in  showing  that  Lodge's  position  was  consistent  with  the  one 
he  (and  Roosevelt)  had  always  taken  on  national  sovereignty.  Thus  he 
writes  of  the  Lodge  reservations:  "Though  some  of  them  were  unneces- 
sary and  others  plainly  motivated  by  political  considerations,  the  chief 
purpose  of  most  of  them  was  to  define  the  obligations  of  the  United  States 
more  specifically  and  to  make  clear  the  right  of  Congress  to  control 
American  performance  of  these  duties." 

Elting  E.  Morison  and  John  M.  Blum  (eds.),  The  Letters  of  Theodore 
Roosevelt,  from  Vol.  VIII  of  which  is  taken  Clemenceau's  editorial,  have 
been  to  the  end  of  inestimable  value. 


INDEX 


Abbott,  Lyman:  220,  239,  246,  260; 
also  see  Outlook 

Abernathy,  Jack:  372 

Adams,  Brooks:  98,  99,  101,  271, 
342,  522 

Adams,  Charles  Francis:  430 

Adams,  Henry:  98,  149,  283-284, 
522 

Adams,  John:  101,  461 

Adams,  John  Quincy:   260,  459,  461 

Adams,  Samuel  Hopkins:  256 

Addams,  Jane:  110,  439,  441,  450 

Adee,  Alvey  A.:  196 

Addyston  Pipe  &  Steel  Company  case: 
407 

Aglipayans:  185 

Aguinaldo,  Emilio:  139,  141,  184, 
187 

Alaskan  Boundary  Dispute:  187-191; 
also  see  TR,  President 

Aldrich,  Nelson  W.:  and  banking  and 
currency  legislation,  316-317; 
characterization  of,  246-247;  in- 
junction plank  in  1908,  358; 
pure  food  and  drug  bills,  256; 
railroad  rate  bills,  237-256,  pas- 
sim; tariff,  382-383;  mentioned, 
152,  157,  264,  377,  387,  411 

Aldrich-Vreeland  Act:  316-317 

Algeciras  Conference:  290 

Alger,  George  A.:  359 

Alger,  Russell  A.:  106-107 

Allen,  Frederick  Lewis:  179,  312 

Allison,  William  B.:  and  railroad  rate 
bills,  243,  247,  249,  250;  men- 
tioned, 152,  411 


Altgeld,  John  Peter:  66,  142 

Alverstone,  Richard  E.  W.:  190 

Alvord,  Thomas:  4 

Amador,  Dr.  Manuel  Guerrero:  209 

American  Architect:  458 

American  Bar  Association:  425 

American  Defense  Society:  519 

American  Geographic  Society:  457 

American  Historical  Association:  455 

American    Medical   Association:    256 

American  Museum  of  Natural  His- 
tory: 464 

American  Tobacco  Company:  404, 
407 

"Ananias  Club":  250-251 

Andrews,  Avery  D.:  81,  82,  83,  86, 
87 

Anglo-Japanese  Alliance  of  1902: 
273-274 

Anthracite  Coal  Strike  of  1902: 
166-181 

Antitrust  policy:  see  TR,  President 
and  Views 

Archbold,  John  D.:  227 

Armour,  Philip  D.:  225 

Armour  &  Company:  118 

Arnold,  Benedict:  41 

Arthur,  Chester  A.:  36,  37 

Astoria  Gas  Company:  115 

Bacon,   Augustus  O.:    195,   214,  290 
Bacon,    Robert:    155,    166,    174-175, 

179,  495 

Bad  Lands  Cowboy:  49,  51,  52 
Baer,  George  F.:  168,  169,  171,  173, 

176,  178,  179 


551 


552 


INDEX 


Bailey,  Joseph  A.:  251 

Baker,   Newton   D.:    499,    500,   502, 

503,  520 

Baker,  Ray  Stannard:  265-267 
Balfour,  Arthur  James:  515 
Ballinger,  Richard  Achilles:  383-386, 

402 
Barnes,  William  Jr.:    390,   394,  458, 

476,  509 

Baruch,  Bernard  M.:  507 
Bass,  Robert:  490 
Bayard,  Thomas  F.:  12 
Beale,  Howard  K.:  97,  188,  190,  270, 
271,  274,  278,  280-281,  286,  292, 
294-295,  301 

Beecher,  Henry  Ward:  31,  40 
Belgium:  195,  465-469 
Bellamy,  Edward:  110 
Beaupre,  Arthur  M.:  204 
Bemis,  Samuel  Flagg:  100 
Benet,  Stephen  Vincent:  462 
Berger,  Victor:  505 
Benton,  Thomas  Hart:  53-54 
Beveridge,  Albert  J.:  railroad  regula- 
tion, 257;  income  tax,  257;  meat 
inspection,  257-260;  child  labor, 
257,    358;    Progressive    Conven- 
tion, 437,   442;  mentioned,  256, 
285,  306,  351,  353,  387,  389,  471 
Bishop,  Joseph  B.:  83,  134,  166,  222, 

280,  281 

Black,  FrankS.:  108 
Blaine,  James  G.:   12,  36-43,  74,  237 
Blockson,  August  B.:  304 
Blum,  John  Morton:  186,  240,  248 
Bonaparte,  Charles  J.:  78,  314-315 
Boone,  Daniel:  57,  61 
Booth,  Charles:  467 
Borglum,  Gutzon:  413 
Borah,   William    E.:    389,   423,    438, 

487,  508 

Boston  Herald:  310 
Bradford,  Gamaliel:  222 
Braisted,  William  R.:  95,  301 
Brandeis,  Louis  D.:  446 
Brisbane,  Arthur:  83 
Bristow,  Joseph  L.:  389 
Brooklyn  Daily  Eagle:  118 
Brooks,  Erastus:  27 
Brooks,  Van  Wyck:  462 
Brown,  Walter:  437 


Brownsville  Riot:  303-306 

Bryan,  William  Jennings:  Roosevelt's 
attitude  toward,  92,  261,  263; 
characterization  of,  138-139; 
presidential  campaigns,  139-140, 
360;  views  of  139-143,  268,  339- 
340,  400;  praises  Roosevelt's 
special  message  of  January  31, 
1908,  344;  as  Secretary  of  State, 
478,  480;  mentioned,  110,  149, 
166,  253,  273,  309,  334,  358, 
421,  464-465,  483 

Bryce,  James:  40,  111-112,  219,  287- 
288,  366-367,  498 

Buchanan,  James:  177 

Bulgaria:  514 

Bulloch,  James:  129 

Bullock,  Seth:  372 

Bunau-Varilla,  Philippe  Jean:  202, 
207-209 

Burleson,  Albert  B.:  506 

Burroughs,  John:  308 

Butler,  Nicholas  Murray:  and  NYC 
teachers'  salaries,  121;  on  Roo- 
sevelt's nomination  as  Vice  Presi- 
dent, 136;  and  tariff,  238-240; 
and  Roosevelt's  progressivism, 
457-458;  and  1916  nominations, 
489;  mentioned,  254,  344 

Butt,  Archibald  W.:  370,  373,  377, 
394,  403 

Calhoun,  John  C:  54 

,Canada:  188,285 

Cannon,  Joseph  Gurney:  and  Roose- 
velt's legislative  program,  235- 
240,  passim,  256,  316-317,  321- 
322;  and  labor,  261;  mentioned, 
356,  359,  370,  377 

Carlyle,  Thomas:  456 

Carnegie,  Andrew:  225,  334,  379, 
400,  408 

Carow,  Edith:  see  Roosevelt,  Edith 
Carow 

Cassini,  Arturo  P.:  277-278 

Catholic  Church:  184-186,  223;  also 
see  TR,  Views 

Chamberlain,  George  E.:  507 

Chandler,  Alfred  D.  Jr.:  218,  441 

Chanler,  Winthrop:  457 

Chapman,  Frank  M.:  331 


INDEX 


553 


Chapman,  John  Jay:  109,  112,  126 

Charleston  Post:  409 

Chentung  Liang-Cheng:  277 

Cherrie,  George  K.:  463 

Chessman,  G.  Wallace:  124 

Chicago  Times-Herald:  88 

Chicago  Tribune:  242 

Child  labor:  338,  441,491 

China:  296-298,  301-302 

Chinese  Exclusion  Treaty  of  1883: 
295-296,  298 

Choate,  Joseph  H.:  25,  190,  294,  424 

Churchill,  Winston  (the  novelist): 
459 

Civil  Service:  27-28,  137,  330;  see 
also  TR,  Civil  Service  Commis- 
sioner 

Civil  Service  Reform  Association:  78, 
80,89 

Civil  War:  7,  98-99,  225 

Clapp,  Moses  E.:  389 

Clark,  Champ:  445 

Clark,  E.  E.:  180 

Clark,  George  Rogers:  61 

Clarkson,  James  S.:   217-218,  224 

Clay,  Henry:  25,  54 

Clayton  Antitrust  Act:  407,  425,  472 

Clay  ton-Bui  wer  Treaty:  198 

Clemenceau,   Georges:    501-502,   515 

Cleveland,  Grover:  as  governor  of 
New  York,  24-34,  passim,  129- 
130;  and  civil  service  reform,  27- 
28,  75-80,  passim;  actions  as 
President,  75-80,  93,  97,  120, 
158,  174,  320;  mentioned,  73, 
176,  179,  237,  334,  339 

Cobb,  Frank:  165,  497 

Cobb,  IrvinS.:  520 

Cochran,  W.  Bourke:  224 

Colby,  Bainbridge:  471,  490 

Collier's  Weekly:  256,  264 

Colombia:  202-211,  passim,  464-465 

Colonialism:  see  Imperialism 

Columbia  Law  School:  17 

Columbus,  Ohio:  Roosevelt's  speech 
in,  419-422 

Commager,  Henry  Steele:  138 

Commons,  John  R.:  220 

Conkling,  Roscoe:  25 

Conservation:     prior    to    Roosevelt, 


Conservation  (cont.) 

320;  also  see  TR,  President  and 
Views 

Continental  Army:  480-481 

Cooke,  Jay:  225 

Coolidge,  Calvin:  143,  152,  510 

Cortelyou,  George  B.:  312 

Cosmopolitan:  264 

Country  Life  Commission:  367 

Cowles,  Anna  Roosevelt  (TR's  sis- 
ter): 6,66,68,82,  166 

Crane,  Murray:  172,  176-177 

Crane,  Stephen:  106 

Croker,  Richard:  112 

Croly,  Herbert:  11,  338,  377,  389, 
419,  467 

Cromwell,  William  Nelson:  201-208, 
passim,  221 

Cuba:  tariff,  186;  also  see  TR,  Span- 
ish-American War 

Cummins,  Albert  B.:  389 

Curtis,  George  W.:  36,  37,  40 

Cutler,  Arthur:  46-47 

Cutright,  Paul  Russell:  50 

Cutting,  Fulton:  109 

Dakota:  see  TR,  Westerner 

Darrow,  Clarence:  181 

Davidson,  Alexander  V.:  29-30 

Davidson,  John  Wells:  447 

Davis,  Jefferson:  41,  99 

Davis,  John  W.:  425 

Davis,  Oscar  King:  470,  472 

Davis,  Richard  Harding:  105 

Day,  William  R.:  345,  359 

Debs,  Eugene  V.:   149,  158,  359,  450 

Delcasse,  Theophile:  289 

De  Lessens,  Ferdinand:  198,  200-201 

Democratic  Party:  and  centralism, 
364-365;  and  Progressive  Party 
program,  450,  471-472;  men- 
tioned, 142,  226,  357,  362,  396, 
492;  also  see  TR,  Views 

Dennett,  Tyler:  274 

Denver  Republican:  392 

Depew,  Chauncey  M.:  109,  116,  136, 
248,  264 

Derby,  Ethel  Roosevelt  (TR's  daugh- 
ter): 71,457-458,511 

Derby,  Richard:  512 

Detroit  Free  Press:  150 


554 


INDEX 


Detroit  News:  365 

Dewey,  George:  96,  191-192,  193 

DH1,  James  B.:  124 

Dolliver,   Jonathan:    136,    245,    248, 

382,  386-387,  389 

Dooley,  Mr.:  see  Dunne,  Finley  Peter 
Douglas,  Stephen  A.:  215 
Dow,  Will:  51,  52 
Dred  Scott  case:  36,  424 
DuBois,  William  E.  B.:  307 
Dunne,  Finley  Peter:    106,  122,   131, 

155,  275,  405 
Durand,  Sir  Mortimer:  289 

Edison  Electric  Co.  of  California:  325 

Edmunds,  George  F.:  36-39 

Ehrman,  Felix:  209 

Eisenhower,  Dwight  D.:  503 

Elevated  railway  fare  bill:  26-27 

Eliot,  Charles:  77,  293,  369 

Elkins,  Stephen  B.:  248 

Elkins  Act  of  1903:  164,  236-238 

Elliott,  Maude  (TR's  cousin) :  9 

Ely,  Richard  T.:  116 

England:  187-192,  198,  200,  29^;  also 

see  TR  Views 
Esch-Townshend  Bill:  240 
Evarts,  William  M.:  34 
Everybody's  Magazine:  309 
Excess  profits  tax:  508 

Fairbanks,  Charles  W.:  489 

Federal  Club  of  New  York  City:  73 

Federal  Commission  on  the  Conserva- 
tion of  Natural  Resources:  335- 
336 

Federal  Reserve  Act:  316 

Federal  Trade  Commission:  407-408, 
472 

Ferris,  Sylvane:  51 

Field,  Cyrus:  4 

Fine  Arts  Council:  458 

Fisk,  Jim:  225 

Flinn,  William:  431,  437,  439 

Foch,  Ferdinand:  502 

Foraker,  Joseph  B.:  and  Roosevelt, 
39,  134,  216,  305-306;  railroad 
rate  bill,  248,  250;  and  Standard 
Oil  Company,  305,  356;  defends 
Brownsville  soldiers,  305-306; 
mentioned,  196,  411 


Ford,  Edsel:  508 

Ford,  Henry:  485 

Ford,  John:  115,  116 

Forest  Service:    323,   329-330,   384- 

385 

Fox,  Austen  G.:  125 
France:  195,  277-278,  281,  289-291, 

293,  514,  517 

Franchise  Tax  Act:  115-118 
Frankfurter,    Felix:    365,    409,    413- 

414,  425-426,  438,  467 
Franklin,  Benjamin:  360 
Frick,  Henry  Clay:  313-316,  405 
Frost,  Robert:  462 
Fuller,  Melville  E.:  212 
Fulton,  Charles  W.:  326-327 

Gardner,  Augustus  P.:  428,  473,  480, 

486,  504 
Garfield,    James    R.:    371-372,    383- 

385,471,495 

Garland,  Hamlin:  462,  519 
Garraty,  John  A.:  444 
Garrison,  Lindley  M.:  480,  481 
Gary,  Elbert  H.:   313-316,  406,  408 
George  V:  381 
George,  David  Lloyd:  515 
George,  Henry:  66-73,  passim,  110 
German-Americans:  84-85,  198,  476- 
493,  passim;  also  see  TR,  Views 
Germany:     191-193,    277-278,    281, 
287,    294,    465,    495,    498,    505; 
also  see  TR,  Views 
Gibbons,  James:  399 
Glass,  Carter:  317 
Glasscock,  William  E.:  415 
Glynn,  Martin:  492 
Godkin,  E.  A.:  73,  126 
Gompers,  Samuel:  and  Roosevelt,  33, 
181,  261,  347-348,  358-359;  and 
injunction,  358-359,  472 
Gooding,  Frank  R.:  335 
"Good  Neighbor"  policy:  285 
Gore-McLemore  Resolutions:  479 
Gorgas,  William  C:  187,  218 
Gorman,  Arthur  Pue:  196 
Gould,  Jay:  4,  26-27,  66,  110,  225 
Governors  Conferences  on  Conserva- 
tion: 334-336,  383 

Grand  Army  of  the  Republic:   224- 
225 


INDEX 


555 


Grant,  Frederick  D.:  82,  86 

Grant,  Robert:  416 

Grant,  Ulysses  S.:  12 

Great  Britain:  see  England 

Grey,  Edward:    293-294,   470,   474- 

475 
Gridiron   Club:    261,   264-265,   305- 

306 

Grinnell,  George  Bird:  331 
Guggenheim  Syndicate:  385,  402-403, 

458 
Gunton,  George:  116 

Hadley,  Arthur  T.:  124,  254 

Hadley,  Herbert  S.:  415,  432,  436, 
438 

Hagedorn,  Hermann:  68,  70,  105, 
221,453,501,512 

Hague  Peace  Conference:  293,  469 

Hall,  John:  46 

Hamilton,  Alexander:  25,  55-56,  72, 
261,  364-365,  377,  384 

Hand,  Learned:  365,  422-423 

Hanna,  Marcus  A.:  as  party  leader, 
91,  133-136,  142,  146,  155-156, 
227;  and  coal  strike,  166-174, 
passim;  loses  control  of  party  to 
TR,  215-219;  political  philosophy 
of,  215-216;  TR's  tribute  to, 
217;  mentioned,  100,  102,  133, 
138,  152,  157,  161,  164,  202, 
229,  399 

Harding,  Warren  G.:  435,  510 

Harlan,  John  Marshall:  161-162 

Harper's  Weekly:  25,  75 

Harriman,  E.  H.:  158-159,  227,  310, 
428 

Harris,  Julian  L.:  444 

Harrison,  Benjamin:  and  civil  service 
reform,  74—76;  mentioned,  73, 
79,  110,  158,  398 

Hart,  Charles  B.:  204 

Hartford  Courant:  157,  189 

Harvard  University:  speculation  on 
TR  as  president  of,  369;  also 
see  TR,  Early  Life 

Hay,  John:  relations  with  TR,  154, 
283-284;  and  Alaskan  boundary 
dispute,  188-190;  and  Venezuela 
crisis,  191-192;  and  Panama 
Canal,  199-209,  passim;  and  Far 


Hay  (cont.) 

Eastern  policy,  271,  276-277, 
294;  illness  and  death,  282-283, 
288;  mentioned,  98,  230,  272 

Hay-Herran  Treaty:  203-205,  210 

Haymarket  Riot:  65-66 

Hay-Pauncefote  Treaties:  199-200 

Hays,  Samuel  P.:  324,  326,  383 

Hawaii:  see  TR  Views 

Hearst,  William  Randolph:  264-265, 
351,  356,  506,  508;  also  see  New 
York  Evening  Journal 

Heller,  Edmund:  378,  457 

Hendricks,  Francis  J.:    113-114,    126 

Hepburn  Act:  251-252;  also  see  TR, 
President 

Herbert,  Michael:  189 

Herran,  Tomas:  203-204 

Hess,  Jake:  18-19,36 

Hewitt,  Abram  S.:  67-68,  170 

Heyburn,  Weldon:  256 

Heyburn  bill:  see  TR,  President,  and 
Pure  Food  and  Drug  Act 

Higginson,  Henry  Lee:  311,  342,  369 

Hill,  James  J.:  150,  159,  161,  334 

Hitchcock,  Frank  H.:  385 

Hoar,  George  F.:  160,  186-187 

Hofstadter,  Richard:  229,  439-440 

Holleben,  Theodor  von:  192 

Holmes,  Oliver  Wendell  Jr.:  98,  162- 
163,  190,342,401,405,412 

Holt,  Hamilton:  478 

L'Homme  Enchaine:  501-502 

Hoover,  Herbert:  508,  510 

Hornaday,  William  T.:  331 

Hughes,  Charles  Evans:  as  governor, 
351-352,  355;  as  presidential 
candidate,  488-495,  passim;  men- 
tioned, 432 

Hunt,  Isaac:  5,  21-23,  44-45 

Huntington,  Colis  P.:  225 

Ickes,  Harold:  365,  495 

Immigrants:  see  TR,  Views 

Imperialism:  139-141;  also  see  TR, 
Views  on  U.S.  expansion,  and 
colonial  peoples 

Income  Tax:  see  TR,  Views  on  taxa- 
tion 

Indianapolis  News:  366 


556 


INDEX 


Inheritance  Tax:    see  TR,  Views  on 

taxation 
Inland  Waterways  Commission:  332- 

333 
International     Harvester     Company: 

313,428,444 
Interstate     Commerce     Commission: 

237,  246,  251,  310,  341,  347,  364 
Ireland,  John:  253-254 
Irish-Americans:  20,  198,  478-479 
Italy:  193,  195,  293,  379,  514 

Jacobs  case:  35 

Jackson,  Andrew:  54,  151,  174,  213, 
215,  219,  355,  391 

James,  Henry:  283,  460 

James,  William:  98,  369 

Japan:  274-282,  293,  298-301;  also 
see  TR,  President  and  Views 

Jefferson,  Thomas:  TR's  attitude  to- 
ward, 24,  55-57,  261;  mentioned, 
72,  105,  151,  261,  364-365,  447, 
461,  521 

Jenks,  Jeremiah  W.:  124 

Jews:  see  TR,  Views  on  immigrants 
and  minority  groups 

Joffre,  Joseph:  501 

Johnson,  Hiram:  399,  435,  437-438, 
454,  471,  495,  508,  510 

Jones,  Mother  [M.H.]:  181 

Jordan,  David  Starr:  254 

Jusserand,  Jean  Jules:  276-277,  289- 
291,  502-503 

Kaneko,  Kentaro:  278,  299 

Kansas  City  Star:  134,  504,  506-507, 
513,516,519 

Katsura,  Taro:  274,  276 

Kelly,  John:  4,  20 

Kent,  William:  384,418 

Kipling,  Rudyard:  98,  460,  517,  520 

Knickerbocker  Trust  Company:    311 

Knight  case:  160,  390 

Knights  of  Labor:  32 

Knox,  Philander  C:  as  attorney  gen- 
eral, 150,  157,  166,  170,  172, 
177,  196,  209,  382;  as  senator, 
248,  250,  489 

Komura,  Jutaro:  279,  281 

Korea:  275-276 


Labor:  attitude  toward  TR,  88,  347- 
348,  359;  injunction  issue,  358- 
359,  425,  472;  also  see  TR, 
Views 

La  Follette,  Robert  M.:  characteriza- 
tion of,  244;  railroad  regulation, 
244-246,  249-251,  309;  relations 
with  TR,  244,  253,  261,  263, 
318,  398,  417-418,  508;  1912 
campaign,  410,  414,  417-419, 
428,  431,  434;  mentioned,  110, 
124,  317,  353,  389,  421,  441, 
508,  510 

Lambert,  Samuel:  255 

Landis,  Kenesaw  Mountain:  311,  359 

Latin  America:  see  TR,  President 

Laughlin,  J.  Laurence:  17 

Laurier,  Sir  Wilfrid:  188 

Lawson,  Thomas:  266 

Lazear,  Jesse  W.:  187 

Lee,  Arthur:  188,  398,  465,  469- 
470,477,513 

Lee,  George  (TR's  father-in-law):  41 

Lee,  Henry:  41 

Lee,  Robert  E.:  99 

League  of  Nations:  516-518 

League  to  Enforce  Peace:  478 

Leech,  Margaret:  143 

Leighton,  Marshall  O.:  332 

Leo  XIII:  184 

Leopold,  Richard  W.:  351 

Leupp,  Francis  E.:  110 

Lewis,  William  Draper:  443,  470 

Library  of  Congress:  154 

Lincoln,  Abraham:  TR's  admiration 
for,  55,  56,  72;  TR  quotes  on 
precedence  of  labor,  391;  men- 
tioned, 25,  36,  43,  105,  151,  174, 
177,  215,  217,  284,  350,  419- 
420,  424,  427,  508,  509,  522 

Lincoln,  Robert:  225 

Lindsey,  Ben  B.:  110,412 

Link,  Arthurs.:  443,472 

Literary  Digest:  on  eulogies  of  TR, 
520 

Littlefield,  Charles  E.:  164 

Lochner  case:  390 

Lodge,  Henry  Cabot:  characterization 
of,  71-72;  relationship  with  TR, 
71_74,  9i_92,  102,  131-132, 
154,  171,  180,  246,  250,  290, 


INDEX 


557 


Lodge  (cont.) 

356,  378,  387-388,  393-394, 
422,  457,  478,  520;  legislation, 
73,  246,  251,  338,  358,  491; 
foreign  policy,  140,  188-190, 
196,  273,  465;  World  War  I, 
473-501,  passim,  517;  quotes 
from  TR's  letters  to,  68,  74,  75, 
87,  95,  105,  117-118,  133,  162, 
170,  179-180,  217,  279,  281, 
283-284,  288,  299,  378,  382- 
383,  400-401,  455;  mentioned, 
31,  36,  39,  41,  93,  98,  136,  188, 
218,  220,  227,  229,  295,  366, 
373,  387,  397,  401,  420,  483,  508 

Lodge,  Nannie  (Mrs.  Henry  Cabot): 
72,74 

Loeb,  William:  370-371 

Logan  (Iroquois  warrior) :  59 

London,  Jack:  308 

London  Times:  85 

Long,  John  D.:  94-96,  100,  102 

Long,  William  J.:  308-309 

Longworth,  Alice  Roosevelt  (TR's 
daughter):  45,  48,  71,  143,  251, 
297 

Longworth,  Nicholas:  143,  304,  409, 
425,  483 

Lorimer,  William:  429,  432 

Louisville  Courier-Journal:  227,  254; 
also  see  Watterson,  Henry 

Lusitania:  476—477 

Lynch,  Thomas  R.:  39 

MacArthur,  Douglas:  504 

McClellan,  George  B.:  42 

McClure's:  264 

McCormick,  Medill:  418,  488 

McCumber,  Porter  J.:  256 

MacFarlane,  Wallace:  125 

McGhee,  W.  J.:  322 

McKenna,  Joseph:  359 

McKinley,  William:  and  appointment 
of  TR  as  assistant  secretary  of 
navy,  91-92;  TR's  attitude  to- 
ward, 92;  and  Spanish- American 
War,  101-102;  and  TR's  nomina- 
tion to  vice-presidency,  135-136; 
and  campaign  of  1900,  137;  at- 
titude toward  TR,  145;  death  of, 
144_145;  characterization  of, 


McKinley  (cont.) 

145;  effect  of  death  on  business, 
153;  and  Sherman  Antitrust  Act, 
158;  mentioned,  39,  86,  91,  100, 
106,  112,  123,  133,  134,  136, 
138,  143,  149,  150,  155,  157, 
184,  187,294,320,321,398 

Mahan,  Alfred  Thayer:  97,  140,  183, 
271,  372,  401 

Maine  (U.S.S.):  96,  101 

Manchuria:  272,  275,  285 

Manhattan  Elevated  Railway  Com- 
pany: 4,  27 

Marroqufn,  Jose  Manuel:  203-205 

Masses:  506 

Matthews,  J.  Brander:  51,  77,  254- 
255 

Meat  Inspection  Amendment:  see  TR, 
President 

Mellen,  Charles  S.:  227 

Merriam,  C.  Hart:  457 

Merrifield,  A.  W.:  51 

Merry  del  Val,  Cardinal:   379 

Methodist  Episcopal  Zion's  Herald: 
140 

Methodists:  360,  379 

Metropolitan:  498,  506 

Mexico:  97,  399,  476,  489,  496;  also 
see  TR,  Views 

Mill,  John  Stuart:  152 

Miller,  Warner:  37 

Minot,  Henry:  14 

Mitchel,  John  Purroy:  511 

Mitchell,  John:  and  anthracite  coal 
strike,  167-175,  181;  mentioned, 
334,  347 

Monopoly:  see  TR  Views 

Monroe  Doctrine:    191-192,   194-197 

Moody,  William  H.:  323,  382 

Moore,  John  Bassett:  206 

Moore  and  Schley:  see  TR,  President 
and  T.  C.  &  I.  merger 

Morgan,  J.  Pierpont:  contributions  to 
TR's  campaigns,  112,  227;  and 
Northern  Securities  Company, 
150,  158;  characterization  of, 
158-159;  role  in  anthracite  coal 
strike,  171,  178-179;  during  Civil 
War,  225;  role  in  Panic  of  1907, 
312-314;  and  T.  C.  &  I.  merger, 
313-314;  and  TR's  regulatory 


558 


INDEX 


Morgan  (cont.) 

program,    406,    408;    mentioned, 

114,  128,385 

Morgan,  John  T.:  195-196 
Mormons:  222-223 
Morocco:  see  TR,  President 
Morris,  Gouverneur:  53,  55 
Morison,   Elting  E.:    127,   221,   380, 

437 

Morton,  LeviP.:  95 
Mowry,   George  E.:    161,    181,    196, 

231,  235,  355-356,  399,  436,  442, 

443 

Muckrakers:  237,  253,  265-267 
Mugwumps:  41,  77,  98,  110 
"Munitions  Makers":  483 
Munsey,  Frank:  415,  418,  435 
Miinsterberg,  Hugo:  467 
Murdock,  Victor:  471,  477 
Murray,  Joseph:  18,  19,  114,  371 
Muscle  Shoals:  325 

Nation:  73,  111,  506 
National  Association  of  Manufactur- 
ers: 342,347,358,359 
National  Audubon  Society:  331 
National  Civic  Federation:  167 
National  Defense  Act  of  1916:  481- 

482 

National  Forest:  327 
National  Guard:  120,  481-482 
National  Monuments  Act:  331 
National       Progressive       Republican 

League:    418 

National   Security   League:    481,   507 
"Nature-fakers" :  see  TR,  President 
Negroes:  129,  306-308,  436,  444-445 
Ncill,  Charles  P.:  257,  258 
New  Deal:  357,510 
Newell,  Frederick  H.:  320 
Newlands  Act:  321-322 
New  Nationalism:  151,  390-392;  also 

see  TR,  Progressive  Era 
New  Republic:  487-488 
New  Panama  Canal  Company:  203- 

210,  passim,  366 
New  York  Age:  304 
New  York  Central  Railroad:  128 
New  York  City:    22,   29-30,   67-68, 

119,    121;   also   see   TR,   Police 

Commissioner 


New  York  Commercial  and  Financial 

Chronicle:  364,  393 
New  York  Evening  Journal:  85 
New  York  Evening  Post:  23-24,  41, 

77,   83,  90,   109,   126,  335,  352 
New  York  Herald:  4,  22,  24,  46,  90, 

304 

New  York  Journal  of  Commerce:  174 
New  York  State:  see  TR,  Governor 
New  York  Sun:  39,  134-135,  150, 

176,  227-228,  231,  266,  335,  364, 

369 
New  York  Times:  4,  28,  30-31,  39, 

46,  118,  122,  149-150,  175-176, 

224,  254,  266-267,  344,  400,  468 
New  York  Tribune:  26,  90,  149,  151, 

365,  392 
New  York  World:  23,  26-27,  39,  83, 

126,    130,    167,    224,    227,    392, 

422,  430;  TR's  libel  suit  against, 

366 

Nicaragua:  201 
Nicholas  II,  Tsar:  275,  292 
Nixon,  Fred:  116 
Nobel  Peace  Prize:  292,  379 
Norris,    George   W.:    244,    333,   438, 

508,510 
Northern    Securities    Company:    151, 

153,  158-162 

O'Brien,  John  J.:  36 

Odell,  Benjamin:  116,  123,  132 

O'Laughlin,  John  C.:  476 

O'Neil,  William:  20-21,  112-113 

Osawatomie,  Kansas:   TR  speech  in, 

390-391 

Osborn,  Chase:  415,  437-438,  446 
Outlook:    369,    390,    400,    403,    404, 

455,  457,  467-468 
Overman  bill:  507 

Packard,  AT.:  49,92 

Palmer,  A.  Mitchell:  505 

Panama    Canal:    93,    198-200,   206- 

209,  398-399,  464-465 
Panic  of  1907:  311-313;  see  also  TR, 

President 

Pares,  Bernard:  275,  278 
Parker,  Alton  B.:  226,  231,  339 
Parker,  Andrew  D.:  82-83,  86-87 
Parker,  JohnM.:  454 


INDEX 


559 


Parkman,  Francis:  59 

Parsons,  Herbert:  413 

Patterson,  J.  Medill:  475 

Payn,  Louis  F.:  125-126 

Payne-Aldrich  Tariff:  382-383,  387, 
389,  393 

Peck,  Harry  Thurston:  155 

Pendleton  Act:  76 

Penrose,  Boise:  152,  216,  241,  248, 
431,458,488 

Perkins,  Dexter:  197 

Perkins,  George  C:  297 

Perkins,  George  W.:  as  Morgan  part- 
ner, 155,  179,  313;  supports  TR's 
regulatory  program,  341,  406, 
408-409;  and  Progressive  Party, 
435-444,  passim,  453-454,  488- 
490;  mentioned,  351,  508 

Pershing,  John  J.:  501-502,  504,  512- 
513 

Phi  Beta  Kappa:  11 

Philadelphia  and  Reading  Coal  and 
Iron  Company:  168 

Philadelphia  North  American:  174, 
520 

Philadelphia  Press:  266 

Philadelphia  Public  Ledger:  431-432 

Philadelphia  Record:  65,  77 

Philadelphia  Times:  201 

Philippines:  140-141,  184-186 

Phillips,  David  Graham:  247,  264, 
266 

Pinchot,  Amos:  418-419,  435,  443, 
491 

Pinchot,  Gifford:  characterization  of, 
319;  as  chief  forester,  320-335, 
passim;  TR's  attitude  toward, 
334,  371-372;  opposes  Taft  poli- 
cies, 383-386,  389,  403;  and  pro- 
gressive movement,  418-419, 
453-454,  471,  488-489,  495 

Pine,  David  A.:  178 

Pius  X:  254,  281,  379 

Platt,  Frank:  117-118 

Platt,  Orville  H.:  152,  218,  238, 
247-248 

Platt,  Thomas  C.:  25,  37,  67,  86-87, 
92,  108-134,  passim,  216 

Pringle,  Henry:  47,  111,  184,  254, 
261,315,356,370,449,517 

Plunket,  Horace:  446 


Police  reform:  see  TR,  Police  Com- 
missioner 

Portsmouth  Treaty:  281 

Proctor,  John  R.:  80 

Progressive  movement:  381,  396,  411; 
see  also  TR,  Progressive  Era 

Progressive  Party:  in  1912,  435-445, 
passim;  in  1914  congressional 
elections,  453;  in  1916,  485-492, 
passim 

Public  Lands  Commission:   322,  324 

Pulitzer,  Joseph:  100,  165;  also  see 
New  York  World 

Pure  Food  bill:  256-258 

Putnam,  Carleton:  17,  27,  39,  48, 
53,66 

Putnam,  Herbert:  175 

Quay,  Matthew:    134,  152,  172,  216, 

218,241 
Quigg,  Lemuel:  123 

Railroads:  ICC  investigation  of,  310; 
also  see  TR,  President;  Elkins 
Act;  Hepburn  Act;  Esch-Town- 
shend  bill 

Raines  Law:  84-86,  119 

Recall  of  judicial  decisions:  421-426; 
also  see  TR,  Views  on  judiciary 

Reclamation  Service:  320,  384;  also 
see  TR,  President 

Reed,  Thomas  B.:  86,  93 

Reed,  Walter:  187,218 

Reid,  Whitelaw:  292 

Republican  Party:  Old  Guard  leader- 
ship of,  151-152,  216,  227,  235- 
248,  passim,  338,  411;  convention 
of  1900,  135-136;  TR  wins  con- 
trol of,  216-217;  corporate  sup- 
port of  in  1904,  227;  1906  elec- 
tions, 260-261;  domination  of  by 
NAM  in  1908  convention,  358- 
359;  abandoning  centralism  for 
state's  rights,  364-365;  and  1910 
elections,  396;  and  1912  cam- 
paign, 431-436,  passim;  and  TR's 
Portland  speech,  509-510;  and 
progressivism,  510;  and  League 
of  Nations,  517-518;  and  1918 
elections,  518;  mentioned,  20-21, 
37-40,  85,  202,  216-217,  352, 


560 


INDEX 


Republican  Party  (cant.) 
356,  362,  381,  487 

Reynolds,  James  B.:  257-258 

Rhee,  Syngman:  276 

Rhodes,  James  Ford:  100,  416 

Ridder,  Bernard  Herman:  505 

Riis,  Jacob:  68,  82,  92,  120,  225-226 

Ripley,  William  Z.:  242,  252 

Robbins,  Raymond:  509 

Robbins,  Roy:  323,  336 

Roberts,  James  A.:  113 

Robinson,  Corinne  Roosevelt  (TR's 
sister):  6,  9,  14 

Robinson,  Douglas:  153-155,  366 

Robinson,  Edwin  Arlington:  462,  466 

Rochester  Post-Express:  254 

Rockefeller,  John  D.:  164,  225 

Rockefeller,  John  D.  Jr.:  247 

Rockhill,  William:  297 

Rodgers,  H.  H.:  227 

Roman  Catholicism:  see  Catholic 
Church 

Rooker,  Frederick  Z:  185 

Roosevelt,  Alice  Lee  (TR's  wife): 
courtship  of,  14,  15;  marriage 
to,  15,  16,  44-45;  death  of,  45- 
46;  TR's  memorial  to,  47;  his 
silence  about,  47-48 

Roosevelt,  Alice  Lee  (TR's  daugh- 
ter): see  Longworth,  Alice 
Roosevelt 

Roosevelt,  Anna  (TR's  sister):  see 
Cowles,  Anna  Roosevelt 

Roosevelt,  Archibald  (TR's  son):  71, 
144,  455,  477,  503 

Roosevelt,  Corinne:  see  Robinson, 
Corinne  Roosevelt 

Roosevelt,  Edith  Carow  (TR's  wife): 
marriage  to  TR,  65,  68-70,  102, 
136-137,  373,  377,  379,  512,  513, 
519;  personal  characteristics  of, 
69-70,  175,  373,  459;  mentioned, 
71-72,  145,  356,  372,  388,  455, 
511 

Roosevelt,  Eleanor  (Mrs.  FDR):   71 

Roosevelt,  Eleanor  Alexander  (Mrs. 
TRJr.):  511-512 

Roosevelt,  Elliott  (TR's  brother):  6, 
9,398 

Roosevelt,  Ethel  (TR's  daughter) :  see 
Derby,  Ethel  Roosevelt 


Roosevelt,  Franklin  Delano:  71,  215, 
226,  276,  322-323,  365,  500 

Roosevelt,  James  (uncle  of  TR):  51 

Roosevelt,  Kermit  (TR's  son):  71, 
367,  377,  455,  462-463,  503 

Roosevelt,  Martha  Bulloch  (TR's 
mother):  5,6,  16,45-46 

Roosevelt,  Quentin:  death  of  in 
World  War  I,  511-512;  men- 
tioned, 71,  144,  455 

Roosevelt,  Robert  Barnhill  (TR's 
uncle):  17 

ROOSEVELT,  THEODORE 

Early  Life:  family,  5,  8,  10;  father, 
6-8,  222;  mother,  5,  6;  health,  5-6, 
8;  interests,  8-9,  16;  camping  trip 
to  Maine,  13-14;  at  Harvard,  10- 
17,  passim;  studies  law,  17;  joins 
G.O.P.,  17-18;  courts  and  marries 
Alice  Lee,  14-18;  dependence  on 
religion 

Assemblyman:  Westbrook  investi- 
gation, 4;  candidate  for,  17-19,  23- 
25;  interest  in  reform,  5,  21-23, 
25-30;  describes  colleagues  in  di- 
ary, 20;  and  Grover  Cleveland,  25- 
30,  passim:  supports  separation  of 
church  and  state,  30-31;  and  labor, 
31-35;  and  1884  presidential  cam- 
paign, 37-40;  death  of  mother  and 
first  wife,  45-47 

Westerner:  wins  acceptance,  48-50, 
62;  on  hunting  trips,  49-50;  organ- 
izes Little  Missouri  Stockmen's  As- 
sociation, 51;  and  cattle  ranching, 
51-53;  hunting  trips,  52;  effect  of 
experience  on,  52-53,  61-62 
Civil  Service  Commissioner:  ap- 
pointed and  reappointed,  65,  74- 
75;  administrative  ability  of,  76; 
accomplishments  of,  76-77,  80;  un- 
der Harrison,  76,  78-79;  under 
Cleveland,  79-80;  resignation  and 
appraisal  of,  80,  82;  restrictions  on, 
93 

Police  Commissioner:  appointed, 
81-82;  accomplishments,  81,  88- 
90;  relations  with  other  commis- 
sioners, 82,  86-87;  removes  Tom 
Byrnes;  enforcement  of  Sunday 
Closing  Law;  testifies  against  An- 


INDEX 


561 


Roosevelt,  Theodore  (cont.) 
drew  Parker;  support  of,  88;  oppo- 
sition to,  88 

Assistant  Secretary  of  the  Navy: 
appointed,  88,  91-92;  administrative 
reforms,  94-95;  involvement  in 
policy  making,  94-97,  100;  instruc- 
tions to  Dewey,  96;  war-mongering 
of,  97;  resignation,  102 
Spanish-American  War:  attitude  to- 
ward, 93,  96,  97,  100-101;  partici- 
pation in,  102-106;  desire  for 
Medal  of  Honor,  107 
Governor:  nomination  and  cam- 
paign, 108-109,  111-113;  state 
canal  system,  113,  123,  125;  ap- 
pointments, 114,  125-126;  civil 
service,  115,  119,  128;  tax  legisla- 
tion, 115-118,  128;  use  of  experts, 
116,  123-124;  legislation  to  con- 
trol business,  118-119;  124-125, 
128;  constabulary  bill,  119;  labor 
legislation,  119-121;  education 
measures,  121,  129;  habits,  122; 
refuses  to  reprieve  murderess,  122; 
employer's  liability  legislation,  123; 
boomed  for  vice-presidency,  123; 
racial  segregation  in  schools,  129; 
evaluation  of  record,  129-130;  see 
also,  Platt,  Thomas  C. 
Vice-President:  nomination,  131- 
137;  campaign,  138-143;  activities 
as,  143-144;  and  McKinley's  death, 
145-146 

President:  takes  oath,  146;  and  Mc- 
Kinley's policies,  149-150,  153-154, 
157;  uses  Sherman  Antitrust  Act, 
150-151,  160-161,  163,  215,  340; 
habits  of,  154-155;  and  Mark 
Hanna,  155-156,  161,  215-217; 
annual  messages,  155-157,  164, 
200,  235-236,  243,  255,  307-309, 
347;  regulation  of  corporations, 
155-157,  160,  163-165,  267-268, 
309-310,  313,  340-343,  364;  ap- 
points Holmes,  162-163;  role  in 
Anthracite  Coal  Strike,  169-181, 
passim;  conduct  of  foreign  policy, 
182-183;  colonial  administration, 
183-187,  218-219,  235;  and  Alas- 


Roosevelt,  Theodore  (cont.) 
kan  boundary  dispute,  187-191; 
and  Venezuelan  crisis,  191-193; 
and  Santo  Domingo,  193-197,  235- 
236;  Roosevelt  Corollary,  191-197, 
passim,  363;  and  Latin  American 
policies,  197,  200;  and  Panama 
Canal,  189,  198-207,  218,  363; 
fight  for  control  of  party  in  1904, 
217-218,  227,  231;  inauguration  of 
in  1904,  212-214,  271;  quality  and 
character  of  appointments,  217- 
219;  civil  service,  259,  367;  immi- 
gration policies,  220;  veterans'  pen- 
sion order,  224-226;  decision  not  to 
run  for  third  term,  231-232,  349- 
350;  child  labor  legislation,  235, 
338;  employer's  liability  legislation, 
235,  257,  346,  363;  and  tariff  re- 
vision, 235,  238-241;  recommends 
railroad  rate  legislation,  235-239; 
gets  popular  support  for,  241-243; 
supports  Hepburn  bill,  243-244, 
248-252,  263;  works  with  Tillman 
and  La  Follette,  249-250;  and 
naval  program,  236,  270-271,  300- 
301,  337,  363,  368,  372;  and  simpli- 
fied spelling,  253-255;  and  Pure 
Food  and  Drug  Act,  255,  259-260; 
meat  inspection  amendment,  256, 
258-259,  363;  special  message 
on  meat  inspection  amendment, 
258,  320-321,  343-346,  366;  use 
of  experts,  260;  and  4kmuck-rakers," 
264-267;  urges  inheritance  tax, 
267-269;  foreign  policy  in  Far  East, 
271-277;  effect  of  world  trip  of 
fleet,  301-302;  foreign  policy  of 
toward  China,  272,  294-298;  Man- 
churia, 272;  Russia,  272;  and 
Anglo- Japanese  Naval  Alliance, 
273-274;  foreign  policy  of  toward 
Japan,  272-276,  298-302;  Korea, 
275-276;  mediation  of  Russo-Japa- 
nese War,  275-282,  471;  and  Hay 
as  secretary  of  state,  283-284;  and 
Root,  284-285;  Moroccan  Crisis, 
288-292;  wins  Nobel  Peace  Prize, 
292;  Second  Hague  Peace  Confer- 
ence, 292-293;  international  arbi- 


562 


INDEX 


Roosevelt,  Theodore  (con/.) 

tration  proposals,  293;  limitation  of 
naval  armaments,  293;  and  Browns- 
ville Riot,  304-307;  appeals  for  edu- 
cation of  Negroes,  307;  attacks 
"nature-fakers,"  308-309;  Panic  of 
1907,  310-316;  T.  C.  &  I.  merger, 
313-316,  405-407;  banking  and 
currency  legislation,  316-317;  on 
contribution  of  scientists  to  con- 
servation program,  318-319;  for- 
estry program,  320-321,  323;  ir- 
rigation and  reclamation,  320-322; 
national  forests,  321-328,  passim; 
leasing  system  for  grasslands,  323- 
324;  Forest  Lieu  Act  of  1897  re- 
pealed, 323;  homestead  policies  of, 
323-325,  329;  power  industry's  use 
of  water  resources,  325;  power 
industry's  misuse  of,  332-333;  con- 
servation of  water  power,  367,  383, 
387;  mineral  resources,  325-326; 
use  of  executive  power  to  further 
conservation,  326;  opposition  to, 
326-330;  complexity  of  problem, 
328-329;  attack  on  land  frauds, 
330;  creation  of  national  parks,  331; 
Inland  Waterways  Commission, 
332;  multipurpose  river  develop- 
ment, 332-333;  effect  of  Gov- 
ernors' Conference  on  conservation, 
334-336;  withdrawal  of  potential 
water  power  sites,  383;  impact  of 
TR  on  conservation,  336;  last  an- 
nual message,  333,  364,  366;  TR 
attacks  representatives  of  "preda- 
tory wealth,"  343-346;  use  of  fed- 
eral troops  to  quell  labor  violence, 
345;  supports  workmen's  compen- 
sation, 346;  supports  proposals  for 
eight  hour  day,  346;  urges  govern- 
ment mediation  of  labor  disputes, 
347;  choice  of  successor,  350-352; 
offers  Taft  appointment  to  Supreme 
Court,  supports  Taft  as  successor, 
354-356;  TR  attitude  toward  Presi- 
dent-elect Taft's  appointments,  370- 
371;  TR  opposes  abuse  of  labor 
injunction,  359;  use  of  Secret  Serv- 
ice, 365-366;  attacks  Congress, 
365-367;  libel  suit  against  Indian- 


Roosevelt,  Theodore  (con/.) 

apolis  News  and  New  York  World, 
366-367;  future  personal  plans, 
368-369,  388;  farewell  dinner  to 
'Tennis  Cabinet,"  372;  last  eve- 
ning in  White  House  with  the 
Tafts,  372-373;  at  Taft's  inaugu- 
ration, 373;  support  of  the  fine  arts 
and  literature,  458-459,  462 

j  Progressive  Era:  impact  on  re- 
form, 110,  253,  365;  becomes  con- 
tributing editor  of  Outlook,  369; 
African  trip,  369,  377-378,  382; 
European  trip,  369,  379-381,  387- 
388;  Romanes  Lecture,  380-381; 
ideological  differences  with  Taft, 
387-390,  393-395,  399-404;  New 
York  State  Republican  Convention 
of  1910,  390,  394-395;  western 
tour  in  1910,  390-393;  Osawatomie 
speech,  391;  TR's  program,  391- 
392;  future  relations  with  progres- 
sives and  conservatives,  396-398; 
Mexican  situation,  399;  opposes 
Taft  on  arbitration  treaties,  400- 
402;  attacks  Taft  conservation 
policies,  402-403;  opposes  Taft's 
antitrust  policies,  404-405;  TR's 
antitrust  program,  404-408;  politi- 
cal future,  409-415;  decides  to  seek 
Republican  nomination,  415-417; 
campaign  for  nomination,  419-433, 
passim;  supports  primaries,  initia- 
tive, referendum,  and  recall,  420- 
421;  commitment  to  progressivism 
at  Columbus,  419-423;  progressive 
speeches,  423-425;  loses  at  1912 
G.O.P.  convention,  433-436;  char- 
acter of  1912  supporters,  439-442; 
nominated  by  Progressive  Party, 
435;  TR's  attitude  toward  Progres- 
sive Party  in  1912,  438,  443;  ad- 
dresses party  convention,  442-443; 
antitrust  plank,  443-444,  448;  South- 
ern Negroes,  444-445;  TR's  reaction 
to  Wilson  s  nomination  in  1912, 446; 
campaign  against  Wilson,  446-449, 
450;  speaks  while  wounded,  448- 
449;  on  future  of  Progressive  Party, 
453-454;  encourages  congressional 
Progressives  to  push  for  tariff  com- 


INDEX 


563 


Roosevelt,  Theodore  (cont.) 
mission,  455;  calls  for  multipurpose 
development  of  Mississippi  River 
Valley,  454-455;  addresses  Ameri- 
can Historical  Convention  on  "His- 
tory as  Literature,"  455;  Outlook 
articles,  455;  helps  settle  garment 
strike  in  New  York,  455;  attitude 
toward  Wilson  administration,  455; 
wins  libel  suit  on  personal  habits, 
458;  South  American  trip  in  1913- 
1914,  462-464;  attacks  1914  treaty 
with  Colombia,  464;  opposes  Wil- 
son's policies  toward  Mexico,  465; 
opposes  Wilson  administration's  faith 
in  arbitration  treaties,  465;  1914 
congressional  campaign,  470-473; 
progressive  program  enacted  by 
Wilson,  471-472;  TR  wins  Barnes 
libel  suit,  476;  dictates  to  1916 
Progressive  convention,  487-491; 
last  progressive  speech  at  Portland, 
Maine,  509-510 

World  War  I:  attitude  toward  in- 
vasion of  Belgium,  466-468;  ad- 
vocates American  neutrality,  467- 
468;  criticizes  Wilson's  policies,  468, 
471,  473,  476-477,  493-494;  TR's 
early  attitude  toward  Germany, 
467-475,  passim;  and  midwestern 
Progressives  anti-war  sentiment, 
472;  preparedness,  473-474,  478- 
483,  passim;  supports  Allied  cause, 
474;  on  British  contraband  policy, 
474-475;  on  German  war  atrocities, 
475;  privately  advocates  entering 
the  war,  475;  favors  war  in  the 
broad  national  interest,  477,  479; 
and  preservation  of  American 
rights,  477-478,  494;  supports  uni- 
versal military  service,  480;  Con- 
gress and  anti-preparedness  senti- 
ment, 481-482;  and  naval  prepared- 
ness, 482;  TR  and  Congressional 
Democrats  on  financing  prepared- 
ness, 482-483,  485;  urge  to  defeat 
Wilson,  484-485;  preparedness  and 
American  rights  in  1916  pre-conven- 
tion  campaign,  485;  TR  attacks 
German-Americans,  485;  wants  Pro- 
gressives to  support  Republican, 


Roosevelt,  Theodore  (cont.) 
485;  Republican  and  Progressive 
enthusiasm  for  TR,  486-487;  TR 
and  1916  Republican  platform, 
486-487;  and  Progressive  party 
platform,  487-488;  suggests  Lodge 
as  compromise  candidate,  489-491; 
refuses  Progressive  nomination, 
490;  on  Hughes  as  Republican 
nominee,  491-492;  intervention 
speeches  in  1916  campaign,  493; 
reaction  to  Wilson's  "Peace  Without 
Victory"  speech,  495;  on  objectives 
of  the  war,  495,  497,  514-515; 
analysis  of  1916  campaign,  495; 
requests  volunteer  division,  496, 
499-503;  on  Wilson's  war  message, 
498;  son's  military  careers,  503; 
writes  for  Kansas  City  Star,  504, 
506-507;  intolerance  of  anti-war 
opinion,  504-506;  speaking  tour  in 
support  of  war  effort,  504-505; 
attacks  war  mobilization  effort,  506- 
507;  on  La  Follette,  507-508;  TR's 
progressivism  reemerges,  507-509; 
demands  higher  excess  profits  tax, 
508;  on  democracy  in  the  draft 
system,  508-509;  as  1920  presi- 
dential possibility,  509,  519;  wants 
Republican  party  to  become  pro- 
gressive, 510;  and  Quentin's  death, 
512-513;  assesses  Allied  and  Ameri- 
can war  efforts,  514;  criticizes 
"Fourteen  Points,"  515;  attitude 
toward  League  of  Nations,  516-519; 
and  peace  treaty,  517;  illness  and 
death,  519-520 

Elections  and  Campaigns:  mock 
vote  in  1880  at  Harvard,  12;  for 
New  York  Assembly  (see  TR, 
Assemblyman);  in  1884  presidential 
campaign,  36-43;  mayoralty  cam- 
paign, 65-68,  74;  presidential  cam- 
paign of  1888,  73;  of  1892,  79;  of 
1896,  86,  92,  141-142;  for  governor, 
111-113;  for  vice-presidency,  137- 
143,  passim;  in  1904  presidential 
campaign,  222-228,  230-231;  con- 
gressional campaign  of  1906,  260- 
261;  in  1908  presidential  campaign, 
356-361;  injunction  issue  in  1908 


564 


INDEX 


Roosevelt,  Theodore  (cont.) 
campaign,  358-359;  religious  issue 
in  1908  campaign,  360-361;  in  1910 
congressional  campaign,  388,  393- 
395;  presidential  campaign  of  1912 
(see  TR  in  Progressive  Era);  presi- 
dential campaign  of  1916  (see  TR 
in  World  War  /);  congressional 
campaign  in  1918,  518 
Personal  Characteristics:  appearance 
and  manner,  3,  20,  212-213;  drive, 
5;  health,  5-6,  8,  410,  464,  504; 
energy,  8,  91,  409-410;  interest  in 
natural  sciences,  8-9,  16-17,  71, 
308-309,  378,  457;  love  of  reading, 
9,  154,  175,  378,  461-462;  humor, 
9,  367;  love  of  family,  10,  71,  143- 
144,  511;  ruthlessness,  10,  214-215; 
popular  appeal,  21,  112-113,  230, 
410;  impulsiveness,  21;  leadership, 
49,  90,  106,  381,  437;  judgment, 
56,  63,  132,  369;  love  of  war,  74, 
91,  98-99,  103,  105,  503-504;  cour- 
age, 88;  political  ambition,  92-93; 
love  of  life,  99;  religious  views,  154, 
221-223,  409;  desire  for  power, 
215-216,  339,  349-350;  activism, 
229;  intellectualism,  260,  461;  af- 
finity for  controversy,  303;  com- 
petitive animosity,  399,  428;  ca- 
pacity for  friendship,  499;  irrepres- 
sibility,  502-503 

Personal  Relationships:  with  Bill 
Sewall,  13-14;  Joe  Murray,  18; 
Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  71-73,  246, 
422,  457,  473,  478;  Finley  Peter 
Dunne,  122;  Oliver  Wendell 
Holmes,  Jr.,  162;  Elihu  Root,  127- 
128,  285,  457-458,  516;  Robert  La 
Follette,  245,  417-418;  Speck  von 
Sternburg,  288,  291;  Jean  Jules 
Jusserand,  289;  GirTord  Pinchot, 
319,  371-372,  387;  William  Howard 
Taft,  352,  387-390,  393-399,  pas- 
sim, 446,  457-458,  516;  Woodrow 
Wilson,  445-446,  481,  498-501, 
503-504,  507 

Views  and  Attitudes:  on  tariff,  12, 
73,  239-240,  357,  383,  392;  ath- 
letics, 13,  71,  88;  consitution,  17, 
241,  309;  religious  groups,  20,  222- 


Roosevelt,  Theodore  (cont.) 
223,  379;  labor,  22,  31-36,  passim, 
67-68,  130,  168,  261-264,  346- 
347,  358-359,  391-392;  Republican 
Party,  24-25,  41-43,  56,  73,  109- 
110,  117,  137,  388,  393,  395,  509; 
Democratic  Party,  24-25,  41-43, 
142,  357;  government  regulation  of 
business,  26,  118-119,  124-125, 
130,  142-143,  155-157,  163,  170, 
228-230,  241,  243,  263,  309-310, 
315-316,  329,  339-343,  357,  392, 
404-409,  420,  448;  freedom  of  the 
press,  30,  506;  separation  of  church 
and  state,  30-31,  223;  labor  unions, 
32-33,  346-347,  449,  510;  judiciary, 
35-36,  162-163,  218,  263,  343- 
345,  357-359,  390-391,  420-421, 
423-426;  mugwumps,  41-42,  110; 
expansion  of  the  United  States,  54, 
93,  100,  112,  122,  140-141,  183, 
271;  slavery,  54;  banking  and  cur- 
rency, 54,  140-142,  357,  392;  Fed- 
eralists, 55-56;  England,  58,  274, 
288,  380,  514-517;  identification  of 
U.S.  interests  with  those  of  Eng- 
land, 287,  291,  401,  487,  496,  514, 
517;  immigrants  and  minority 
groups,  60,  107,  220,  223-224,  262, 
449;  Indians,  58-59;  Social  Darwin- 
ism, 62,  92,  99,  140,  220;  labor 
violence,  65-66,  120,  345,  347-348; 
art  and  architecture,  70,  458-459; 
civil  service  reform,  73-76,  89,  94, 
121;  war,  91,  97-99,  504,  513; 
Panama  Canal,  93,  455,  516; 
Hawaii,  96;  naval  power,  95,  100, 
515-516;  Far  East,  95-96,  100,  141, 
271-273,  467,  470;  German-Ameri- 
cans, 97,  475;  Germany,  100-101, 
288,  372,  381,  401,  467,  469-470, 
475,  479,  514-515;  muckraking, 
110,  253,  264-267;  Philippines, 
112,  131,  140-141;  Philippine  in- 
dependence, 184,  186-187,  357; 
taxation,  115-116,  121,  130,  483; 
inheritance  tax,  267-269,  392;  in- 
come tax,  268,  392;  excess  profits 
tax,  508;  Negroes,  129,  306-308; 
federal  supremacy,  156-157,  262, 
337-339,  364,  447;  executive  au- 


INDEX 


565 


Roosevelt,  Theodore  (cent.) 

thority,  164,  177,  262-263,  326, 
338-339,  367-368,  392;  "national 
interest"  in  foreign  policy,  182, 
271,  294;  personal  morality,  213, 
262;  birth  control,  220-221;  Catho- 
lic President,  223;  need  of  pensions 
by  workingmen,  225-226;  railroad 
rates,  236,  241,  243,  251-252; 
socialism,  257,  310,  345-346;  cor- 
ruption in  government,  262-263; 
agrarians,  262-264;  Russia,  271- 
273,  277,  294,  467,  469-470;  Japa- 
nese, 277;  international  arbitration, 
292-294,  379-380,  400-402,  465, 
516-519;  limitation  of  naval  arma- 
ments, 292-293,  379;  Chinese,  294- 
298;  colonial  peoples,  187,  294, 
297-298;  criminal  prosecution  of 
businessmen  lawbreakers,  311,  342; 
controlled  use  of  natural  resources, 
320-321,  328,  331,  334;  need  of 
multi-purpose  river  valley  develop- 
ments, 332-333,  454-455;  bigness, 
339;  employer's  liability  and  work- 
men's compensation,  346;  reform 
Darwinism,  346;  labor  injunction, 
358-359;  freedom  of  religion,  361; 
monopoly,  406-407;  initiative,  ref- 
erendum, recall,  420;  historical  writ- 
ing, 455-457;  literature,  459-461; 
Mexico,  465,  473,  479;  universal 
military  service,  480,  508;  balance 
of  power  in  Europe,  467,  469-470; 
social  security  (old  age,  sickness, 
unemployment  benefits),  510;  pub- 
lic housing,  510;  aid  to  farmers, 
510;  reduction  of  hours  of  labor, 
510;  League  of  Nations,  516-519; 
see  also  Thomas  Jefferson,  Alexan- 
der Hamilton,  Abraham  Lincoln 
and  William  Jennings  Bryan 
Writings:  TR's  criticism  of  own 
writing,  50;  senior  thesis  at  Harvard, 
15;  Naval  War  of  1912,  15;  "Sum- 
mer Birds  of  the  Adirondacks," 
and  "Notes  on  Some  of  the  Birds  of 
Oyster  Bay,"  16;  quotes  from  and 
comments  on  An  Autobiography, 
6,  11,  17,  32-33,  48,  112,  149,  151- 
152,  177,  182,  198,  207,  210-211, 


Roosevelt,  Theodore  (cont.) 

301,  453,  457;  Hunting  Trips  of  a 
Ranchman,  50;  Ranch  Life  and  the 
Hunting  Trail,  50-51;  The  Wilder- 
ness Hunter,  50;  Gouverneur  Mor- 
ris, 53,  55;  The  Life  of  Thomas 
Hart  Benton,  53-54,  71,  355;  His- 
tory of  the  Winning  of  the  West, 
56-61;  review  of  Brooks  Adams's 
The  Law  of  Civilization  and  Decay, 
99;  The  Rough  Riders,  106;  African 
Game  Trails,  368;  Life-Histories  of 
African  Game  Animals,  457; 
Through  the  Brazilian  Wilderness, 
464;  America  and  the  World  War, 
468;  see  also  Outlook  and  Metro- 
politan 

Roosevelt,  Theodore  Jr.:  engagement 
of,  69-70;  baby,  71;  awarded 
Congressional  Medal  of  Honor, 
107;  in  World  War  I,  503;  TR 
letters  to,  194,  368,  390;  men- 
tioned, 100,  455 

Roosevelt,  Theodore  Sr.:  character  of 
and  TR's  relations  with,  6-8; 
TR's  solace  in  religion  on  his 
death,  222 

Root,  Elihu:  characterization  of,  127- 
128,  351;  relations  with  TR,  127- 
128,  132,  457-458;  Alaskan 
boundary  dispute,  188-190;  Santo 
Domingo  Treaty,  196-197;  reads 
conservatism  into  TR,  228-229; 
as  secretary  of  war,  285,  337;  as 
secretary  of  state,  285;  Manchu- 
rian  policy  of,  301-302;  TR 
favors  Root  as  presidential  suc- 
cessor, 350;  defends  Taft,  388; 
disturbed  by  TR's  progressive 
speeches,  392;  at  1912  conven- 
tion, 434-435;  TR  rejects  as  com- 
promise choice  in  1916  campaign, 
489;  in  World  War  I,  495-496; 
supports  League  of  Nations,  516; 
mentioned,  31,  102,  115-116,  124, 
126-127,  133,  146,  157,  160,  172, 
177-178,  187,  194,  209,  217, 
225,  229,  247,  276,  290,  299- 
300,  312,  372,  382,  386,  394- 
397,  428,  478 
Root-Takahira  Agreement:  301-302 


566 


INDEX 


Rostow,  Eugene  V.:  407 

Rough  Riders:  103-104,  111,  114, 
123,  137,  214,  219,  240;  also 
see  TR,  Spanish- American  War 

Russo-Japanese  War:  275-282,  471 

Sagamore  Hill:  16,  70-71,  143-144, 
155,519 

Sage,  Russell:  4 

Saint-Gaudens,  Augustus:  458 

St.  Louis  Post-Dispatch:  492 

Sakhalin  Island:  281 

Santo  Domingo:  193-197,  235-236, 
285 

Schiff,  Jacob:  219 

Schley,  Grant  B.:  313 

Schofield,J.  M.:  178 

Schurz,  Carl:  23,  25,  36,  40,  78-80, 
89,  111,  126 

Schwab,  Charles  M.:  153 

Scotch-Irish:  60 

Scott,  Hugh  L.:  503 

Scripps,  E.  W.:  347 

Secret  Service:  365-366 

Sedition  Act:   see  TR,   World  War  I 

Selective  Service  Act:  501 

SeHgman,  E.  R.:  116,  124 

Sewall,  William  W.:  13-14,  47,  51- 
52,221,371-372 

Seward,  William  H.:  54,  187 

Shafter,  W.  R.:  106 

Shaw,  George  Bernard:  459-460 

Shaw,  Albert:  206-207,  209,  272 

Shaw,  Anna  Howard :  450 

Sherman  Antitrust  Act:  prior  to  TR, 
150,  158;  during  TR's  adminis- 
trations, 163,  165,  174-175,  237; 
during  Taft's  administration,  404, 
407,441,443,454 

Sherman,  James:  359 

Sherman,  John:  12 

Simplified  Spelling:  253-255 

Sino-Japanese  War  of  1894-1895:  274 

Sinclair,  Upton:  256-260,  381 

Smithsonian  Institute:  369,  377-378 

Sioux  Falls  Press:  62 

Slavs:  220 

Smith,  Arthur  Henderson:  302 

Social  Darwinism:  see  TR,  Views 

Social  Gospel  movement:  441 


Socialist  Party:  450;  also  see  TR, 
Views 

Spain:  193,  288;  also  see  TR,  Spanish- 
American  War 

Spencer,  Herbert:  405 

Spinney,  George:  21 

Spooner,  John  C.:  102,  152,  157,  164, 
196,  202,  243-264,  passim 

Spring-Rice,  Cecil:  27,  69,  97,  276, 
471,474-475 

Springfield  Republican:  169,  180-181, 
189 

Standard  Oil  Company:  pipeline 
monopoly,  251;  fined  for  vio- 
lations of  Elkins  Act,  311,  359; 
decree  against  under  Sherman 
Act,  404,  407;  mentioned  227- 
228,  264,  305,  356 

Steffens,  Lincoln:  on  TR  as  police 
commissioner,  81-90,  passim:  on 
TR's  emphasis  on  personal  mo- 
rality, 262;  mentioned  245,  266- 
267,  345 

Sternburg,  Speck  von:  in  Venezuelan 
crisis,  192;  role  in  Moroccan 
crisis,  288-291;  mentioned,  192, 
276-277 

Stewardship  Theory:  177-178;  also 
see  TR,  Views 

Stevenson,  Adlai  E.:  vice-presidential 
candidate  in  1900,  138 

Stimson,  Henry  L.:  365,  372,  422, 
495 

Stone,  Irving:  169 

Stone,  William  A.:  175,  178 

Stone,  William  J.:  464 

Storer,  Bellamy:  253-254 

Storer,  Mrs.  Bellamy:  253-254 

Strachey,  St.  Loe:  369 

Straus,  Oscar:  219 

Strong,  William  L.:  81,  85,  87 

Sullivan,  Mark:  154-155,  172-173, 
258-259 

Sun  Yat-Sen:  296 

Sunday  Closing  Law:  see  Raines  Law 

Sumner,  Charles:  72,  246 

Sumner,  William  Graham:  12,  152, 
405 

Supreme  Court:  "rule  of  reason,"  404; 
steel  case,  314-315;  also  see  TR, 
Views  on  judiciary 


INDEX 


567 


Swift  and  Company:  163 
Swinton,  John:  32 

Taft,  Charles:  382 

Taft,  Henry:  382 

Taft,  Horace:  393,  430 

Taft,  William  Howard:  and  Philip- 
pines, 184—187;  Unitarianism  of, 
223 ,  3  60-3  6 1 ;  Taf  t-Katsura 
Agreement,  273-276;  characteri- 
zation of,  352;  relations  with  TR, 
352-357,  passim,  371-382,  387- 
407,  passim,  417,  429,  430,  457- 
458,  519;  attitude  toward  law, 
353,  362,  403-404,  429;  tariff 
policy  of,  357,  382;  in  campaign 
of  1908,  352-362,  passim;  as 
President,  370-373,  381,  384, 
389,  430;  conservation  policies, 
370,  383-387,  402-403;  relations 
with  insurgents,  381,  389;  ac- 
complishments as  President,  389; 
internationalism  of,  400-402,  478, 
516-517,  519;  antitrust  policies, 
404-407;  in  1912  campaign,  435, 
427-430;  mentioned,  164,  196, 
265,  288,  297,  300,  340,  445,  502, 
520 

Taft,  Mrs.  William  Howard:  353-362, 
passim,  372-373,  382,  388-389, 
417 

Takahira,  Kogoro:  277-279,  301 

Takahira,  Baroness:  372 

Tammany  Hall:  20-21,  25,  28,  30, 
68,  112 

Tariff:  see  Payne-Aldrich  Tariff;  also 
see  TR,  President,  Progressive 
Era  and  Views 

Tariff  Commission:  455 

Taxation:  see  TR,  Views 

Teller,  Henry  M.:  251 

Tenement  Cigar  Law:  33-35 

Tennessee  Coal  &  Iron  Company: 
313-316,405 

Tennessee  Valley  Authority:  325,  333 

Tennyson,  Alfred  Lord:  98 

Thayer,  William  Roscoe:  1 1,  40-41 

Thompson,  Hubert  O.:  20,  29-30 

Thorelli,HansB.:  158 

Tilden,  Benjamin:  129-130 

Tillman,    Samuel    J.:    248-252,    260 


Tolstoy,  Leo:  460 

Toynbee,  Arnold:  101 

Trevelyan,    George   Otto:    229,   303, 

350,  455 

Truman,  Harry  S.:  178 
Trust  Company  of  America:  312 
Trusts:  see  TR,  President  and  Views 
Tumulty,  Joseph  P.:  500,  503 
Turkey:  514 

Turner,  Frederick  Jackson:  56-58,  60 
Turner,  George:  189-190 
Twain,  Mark:  282 

Union  League  Club  of  Philadelphia: 

241 
Union  League  Club  of  New  York:  73, 

496 

Unitarianism:  360-361 
United  Mine  Workers:  see  Anthracite 

Coal  Strike 
United  States  Steel  Corporation:  and 

T.  C.  &  I.  merger,  313-316;  as 

a  monopoly,  404-407;  mentioned, 

132, 153.  444 
Universal  Military  Service:   487;  also 

see  TR,  Views  and  World  War  I 

Van  Cleave,  James  W.:  358 
Van  Hise,  Charles:  336 
Van  Valkenberg,  E.  A.:  470 
Van  Wyck,  Augustus:  112 
Venezuela:  93,97,  191-193 
Viereck,  George  S.:  505 
VreelandBill:  317 

Wiley,  Harvey:  255,  260 
Wadsworth,  James  W.:  258-260 
Wadsworth,  James  W.  Jr.:  487 
Wagenknecht,  Edward:  144,  461 
Walker,  Francis  A.:  12 
Walker,  John  G.:  201 
Wall  Street:  222-228,  406,  408 
Wall  Street  Journal:  157 
Wanamaker,  John:  75,  78-79 
Warren,  Francis  E.:  324 
Washburn,  Charles:  11,  20 
Washington,    Booker,    T.:    219,    305, 

307-308,  445 

Washington,  George:  215,  350 
Washington  Post:  77,  91,  304 
Washington  Star:  242 


568 


INDEX 


Watson,  James  E.:  177 

Watterson,  Henry:  501 

Webster,  Daniel:  25,  54,  72,  246 

Westbrook  Investigation :  4 

Weyerhaeuser  Timber  Company:  329 

Weyl,  Walter  E.:  11 

Wharton,  Edith:  513 

White,  Andrew  D.:  37,  123,  254 

White,  Henry:  517 

White,  William  Allen:  views  on  free 
silver,  populism  quoted,  141-142; 
on  Progressive  convention's  com- 
position, 438-439;  at  1916  Pro- 
gressive convention,  488-489; 
and  Republican  party,  495;  men- 
tioned, 114,  355,  387,  444,  494- 
495,  503,  510 

Whitney,  Flora  Payne:  511-512 

Wickersham,  George  W.:  404,  406 

Wiebe,  Robert  H.:  406 

Wilcox,  Ansley:  146 

Wilhelm  II:  mediation  of  Russo-Japa- 
nese War,  278;  role  in  Moroccan 
crisis,  287-291;  mentioned,  192, 
301,  379-380 

Williams,  John  Sharp:  317 

Wilson,  James:  256 

Wilson,  Woodrow:  and  progressiv- 
ism,  316,  455,  472,  497,  508; 


Wilson  (cont.} 

treaty  with  Colombia,  464;  cam- 
paign of  1912,  441,  445-446, 
448,  450;  relations  with  TR,  445; 
neutrality  policy  of,  465,  473- 
479;  Mexican  policy  of,  465,  473; 
preparedness,  473,  479-482;  and 
war  message,  495-496;  character 
of,  499;  and  Roosevelt  Division, 
499-503;  conduct  of  war,  507; 
censorship  policies,  506;  men- 
tioned, 105,  170-171,  215,  220, 
254,  267,  359,  365,  400,  408, 
411,  461,  499-500,  503,  508,  512 

Wister,  Owen:   50,  89,  307,  459-460 

Witte,  Sergei:  279,281 

Wolseley,  Lord:  98 

Wood,  Leonard:  commands  Rough 
Riders,  104;  suggested  as  1916 
presidential  candidate,  389;  men- 
tioned, 187,235-236,  300 

Wright,  Carroll:  170,  175 

York,  Archbishop  of:  380-381 
Young,  LaFayette:  136 
Y.M.C.A.:  508 

Zimmerman  Note :  496 
Zon,  Raphael:  322 


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