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Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography

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Title: Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography

Author: William Roscoe Thayer


        
Release date: November 1, 2000 [eBook #2386]
                Most recently updated: April 3, 2015

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2386


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEODORE ROOSEVELT: AN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY ***
Ver.04.29.93*END*



THEODORE ROOSEVELT

AN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY

BY

WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER

1919

PREFACE

In finishing the correction of the last proofs of this sketch, I
perceive that some of those who read it may suppose that I
planned to write a deliberate eulogy of Theodore Roosevelt. This
is not true. I knew him for forty years, but I never followed his
political leadership. Our political differences, however, never
lessened our personal friendship. Sometimes long intervals
elapsed between our meetings, but when we met it was always with
the same intimacy, and when we wrote it was with the same candor.
I count it fortunate for me that during the last ten years of his
life, I was thrown more with Roosevelt than during all the
earlier period; and so I was able to observe him, to know his
motives, and to study his character during the chief crises of
his later career, when what he thought and did became an integral
part of the development of the United States.

After the outbreak of the World War, in 1914, he and I thought
alike, and if I mistake not, this closing phase of his life will
come more and more to be revered by his countrymen as an example
of the highest patriotism and courage. Regardless of popular
lukewarmness at the start, and of persistent official thwarting
throughout, he roused the conscience of the nation to a sense of
its duty and of its honor. What gratitude can repay one who
rouses the con science of a nation? Roosevelt sacrificed his life
for patriotism as surely as if he had died leading a charge in
the Battle of the Marne.

The Great War has thrown all that went before it out of
perspective. We can never see the events of the preceding
half-century in the same light in which we saw them when they
were fresh. Instinctively we appraise them, and the men through
whom they came to pass, by their relation to the catastrophe. Did
they lead up to it consciously or un consciously? And as we judge
the outcome of the war, our views of men take on changed
complexions. The war, as it appears now, was the culmination of
three different world-movements; it destroyed the attempt of
German Imperialism to conquer the world and to rivet upon it a
Prussian military despotism. Next, it set up Democracy as the
ideal for all peoples to live by. Finally, it revealed that the
economic, industrial, social, and moral concerns of men are
deeper than the political. When I came to review Roosevelt's
career consecutively, for the purpose of this biography, I saw
that many of his acts and policies, which had been misunderstood
or misjudged at the time, were all the inevitable expressions of
the principle which was the master-motive of his life. What we
had imagined to be shrewd devices for winning a partisan
advantage, or for overthrowing a political adversary, or for
gratifying his personal ambition, had a nobler source. I do not
mean to imply that Roosevelt, who was a most adroit politician,
did not employ with terrific effect the means accepted as
honorable in political fighting. So did Abraham Lincoln, who
also, as a great Opportunist, was both a powerful and a shrewd
political fighter, but pledged to Righteousness. It seems now
tragic, but inevitable, that Roosevelt, after beginning and
carrying forward the war for the reconciliation between Capital
and Labor, should have been sacrificed by the Republican Machine,
for that Machine was a special organ of Capital, by which Capital
made and administered the laws of the States and of the Nation.
But Roosevelt's struggle was not in vain; before he died, many of
those who worked for his downfall in 1912 were looking up to him
as the natural leader of the country, in the new dangers which
encompassed it. "Had he lived," said a very eminent man who had
done more than any other to defeat him, "he would have been the
unanimous candidate of the Republicans in 1920." Time brings its
revenges swiftly. As I write these lines, it is not Capital, but
overweening Labor which makes its truculent demands on the
Administration at Washington, which it has already intimidated.
Well may we exclaim, "Oh, for the courage of Roosevelt!" And
whenever the country shall be in great anxiety or in direct peril
from the cowardice of those who have sworn to defend its welfare
and its integrity, that cry shall rise to the lips of true
Americans.

Although I have purposely brought out what I believe to be the
most significant parts of Roosevelt's character and public life,
I have not wished to be uncritical. I have suppressed nothing.
Fortunately for his friends, the two libel suits which he went
through in his later years, subjected him to a microscopic
scrutiny, both as to his personal and his political life. All the
efforts of very able lawyers, and of clever and unscrupulous
enemies to undermine him, failed; and henceforth his advocates
may rest on the verdicts given by two separate courts. As for the
great political acts of his official career, Time has forestalled
eulogy. Does any one now defend selling liquor to children and
converting them into precocious drunkards? Does any one defend
sweat-shops, or the manufacture of cigars under worse than
unsanitary conditions? Which of the packers, who protested
against the Meat Inspection Bill, would care to have his name
made public; and which of the lawyers and of the accomplices in
the lobby and in Congress would care to have it known that he
used every means, fair and foul, to prevent depriving the packers
of the privilege of canning bad meat for Americans, although
foreigners insisted that the canned meat which they bought should
be whole some and inspected? Does any American now doubt the
wisdom and justice of conserving the natural re sources, of
saving our forests and our mineral sup plies, and of controlling
the watershed from which flows the water-supply of entire States?

These things are no longer in the field of debate. They are
accepted just as the railroad and the telegraph are accepted. But
each in its time was a novelty, a reform, and to secure its
acceptance by the American people and its sanction in the statute
book, required the zeal, the energy, the courage of one man-
-Theodore Roosevelt. He had many helpers, but he was the
indispensable backer and accomplisher. When, therefore, I have
commended him for these great achievements, I have but echoed
what is now common opinion.

A contemporary can never judge as the historian a hundred years
after the fact judges, but the contemporary view has also its
place, and it may be really nearer to the living truth than is
the conclusion formed when the past is cold and remote and the
actors are dead long ago. So a friend's outlined portrait, though
obviously not impartial, must be nearer the truth than an enemy's
can be--for the enemy is not impartial either. We have fallen too
much into the habit of imagining that only hostile critics tell
the truth.

I wish to express my gratitude to many persons who have assisted
me in my work. First of all, to Mrs. Roosevelt, for permission to
use various letters. Next, to President Roosevelt's sisters, Mrs.
William S. Cowles and Mrs. Douglas Robinson, for invaluable
information. Equally kind have been many of Roosevelt's
associates in Government and in political affairs: President
William H. Taft, former Secretary of War; Senator Henry Cabot
Lodge; Senator Elihu Root and Colonel Robert Bacon, former
Secretaries of State; Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte, former
Attorney-General; Hon. George B. Cortelyou, former Secretary of
the Interior; Hon. Gifford Pinchot, of the National Forest
Service; Hon. James R. Garfield, former Commissioner of Commerce.

Also to Lord Bryce and the late Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, British
Ambassadors at Washington; to Hon. George W. Wickersham,
Attorney-General under President Taft; to Mr. Nicholas Roosevelt
and Mr. Charles P. Curtis, Jr.; to Hon. Albert J. Beveridge,
ex-Senator; to Mr. James T. Williams, Jr.; to Dr. Alexander
Lambert; to Hon. James M. Beck; to Major George H. Putnam; to
Professor Albert Bushnell Hart; to Hon. Charles S. Bird; to Mrs.
George von. L. Meyer and Mrs. Curtis Guild; to Mr. Hermann
Hagedorn; to Mr. James G. King, Jr.; to Dean William D. Lewis; to
Hon. Regis H. Post; to Hon. William Phillips, Assistant Secretary
of State; to Mr. Richard Trimble; to Mr. John Woodbury; to Gov.
Charles E. Hughes; to Mr. Louis A. Coolidge; to Hon. F. D.
Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy; to Judge Robert
Grant; to Mr. James Ford Rhodes; to Hon. W. Cameron Forbes.

I am under especial obligation to Hon. Charles G. Washburn,
ex-Congressman, whose book, "Theodore Roosevelt: The Logic of his
Career," I have consulted freely and commend as the best analysis
I have seen of Roosevelt's political character. I wish also to
thank the publishers and authors of books by or about Roosevelt
for permission to use their works. These are Houghton Mifflin
Co.; G. P. Putnam's Sons; The Outlook Co.; The Macmillan Co.

To Mr. Ferris Greenslet, whose fine critical taste I have often
drawn upon; and Mr. George B. Ives, who has prepared the Index;
and to Miss Alice Wyman, my secretary, my obligation is profound.

W. R. T.
August 10, 1919


CONTENTS

I. ORIGINS AND YOUTH
II. BREAKING INTO POLITICS
III. AT THE FIRST CROSSROADS
IV. NATURE THE HEALER
V. BACK TO THE EAST AND LITERATURE
VI. APPLYING MORALS TO POLITICS
VII. THE ROUGH RIDER
VIII. GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK--VICE-PRESIDENT
IX. PRESIDENT
X. THE WORLD WHICH ROOSEVELT CONFRONTED
XI. ROOSEVELT'S FOREIGN POLICY
XII. THE GREAT CRUSADE AT HOME
XIII. THE TWO ROOSEVELTS
XIV. THE PRESIDENT AND THE KAISER
XV. ROOSEVELT AND CONGRESS
XVI. THE SQUARE DEAL IN ACTION
XVII. ROOSEVELT AT HOME
XVIII. HITS AND MISSES
XIX. CHOOSING HIS SUCCESSOR
XX. WORLD HONORS
XXI. WHICH WAS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY?
XXII. THE TWO CONVENTIONS
XXIII. THE BRAZILIAN ORDEAL
XXIV. PROMETHEUS BOUND
XXV. PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

ABBREVIATIONS

Autobiography = "Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography." Macmillan
Co.; New York, 1914.

*** The titles of other books by Mr. Roosevelt are given without
his name as they occur in the footnotes.

Leupp = Francis E. Leupp: "The Man Roosevelt." D. Appleton & Co.;
New York, 1904.

Lewis = Wm. Draper Lewis: "The Life of Theodore Roosevelt." John
C. Winston Co.; Philadelphia, 1919.

Morgan = James Morgan: "Theodore Roosevelt; The Boy and the Man."
Macmillan Co., new ed., 1919.

Ogg = Frederic A.Ogg: "National Progress, 1907-1917." American
Nation Series. Harper& Bros.; New York, 1918.

Riis = Jacob A. Riis: "Theodore Roosevelt; the Citizen." Outlook
Co.; New York, 1904.

Washburn = Charles G. Washburn: "Theodore Roosevelt; The Logic of
His Career." Houghton Mifflin Co., 1916.



THEODORE ROOSEVELT

CHAPTER I. ORIGINS AND YOUTH

Nothing better illustrates the elasticity of American democratic
life than the fact that within a span of forty years Abraham
Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt were Presidents of the United
States. Two men more unlike in origin, in training, and in
opportunity, could hardly be found.

Lincoln came from an incompetent Kentuckian father, a pioneer
without the pioneer's spirit of enterprise and push; he lacked
schooling; he had barely the necessaries of life measured even by
the standards of the Border; his companions were rough frontier
wastrels, many of whom had either been, or might easily become,
ruffians. The books on which he fed his young mind were very few,
not more than five or six, but they were the best. And yet in
spite of these handicaps, Abraham Lincoln rose to be the leader
and example of the American Nation during its most perilous
crisis, and the ideal Democrat of the nineteenth century.

Theodore Roosevelt, on the contrary, was born in New York City,
enjoyed every advantage in education and training; his family had
been for many generations respected in the city; his father was
cultivated and had distinction as a citizen, who devoted his
wealth and his energies to serving his fellow men. But, just as
incredible adversity could not crush Abraham Lincoln, so lavish
prosperity could not keep down or spoil Theodore Roosevelt.

In his "Autobiography" he tells us that "about 1644 his ancestor,
Claes Martensen van Roosevelt, came to New Amsterdam as a
'settler'--the euphemistic name for an immigrant who came over in
the steerage of a sailing ship in the seventeenth century. From
that time for the next seven generations from father to son every
one of us was born on Manhattan Island." * For over a hundred
years the Roosevelts continued to be typical Dutch burghers in a
hard-working, God-fearing, stolid Dutch way, each leaving to his
son a little more than he had inherited. During the Revolution,
some of the family were in the Continental Army, but they won no
high honors, and some of them sat in the Congresses of that
generation--sat, and were honest, but did not shine. Theodore's
great-grandfather seems to have amassed what was regarded in
those days as a large fortune.

* Autobiography, 1.


His grandfather, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, a glass
importer and banker, added to his inheritance, but was more than
a mere money-maker.

His son Theodore, born in 1831, was the father of the President.
Inheriting sufficient means to live in great comfort, not to say
in luxury, he nevertheless engaged in business; but he had a high
sense of the obligation which wealth lays on its possessors. And
so, instead of wasting his life in merely heaping up dollars, he
dedicated it to spending wisely and generously those which he
had. There was nothing puritanical, however, in his way of
living. He enjoyed the normal, healthy pleasures of his station.
He drove his coach and four and was counted one of the best whips
in New York. Taking his paternal responsibilities seriously, he
implanted in his children lively respect for discipline and duty;
but he kept very near to their affection, so that he remained
throughout their childhood, and after they grew up, their most
intimate friend.

What finer tribute could a son pay than this which follows?

'My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew. He
combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and
great unselfishness. He would not tolerate in us children
selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.
As we grew older he made us understand that the same standard of
clean living was demanded for the boys as for the girls; that
what was wrong in a woman could not be right in a man. With great
love and patience and the most understanding sympathy and
consideration he combined insistence on discipline. He never
physically punished me but once, but he was the only man of whom
I was ever really afraid.' *

*Autobiography, 16.


Thus the President, writing nearly forty years after his father's
death. His mother was Martha Bulloch, a member of an old Southern
family, one of her ancestors having been the first Governor of
Georgia. During the Civil War, while Mr. Roosevelt was busy
raising regiments, supporting the Sanitary Commission, and doing
whatever a non-combatant patriot could do to uphold the Union,
Mrs. Roosevelt's heart allegiance went with the South, and to the
end of her life she was never "reconstructed." But this conflict
of loyalties caused no discord in the Roosevelt family circle.
Her two brothers served in the Confederate Navy. One of them,
James Bulloch, "a veritable Colonel Newcome," was an admiral and
directed the construction of the privateer Alabama. The other,
Irvine, a midshipman on that vessel, fired the last gun in its
fight with the Kearsarge before the Alabama sank. After the war
both of them lived in Liverpool and "Uncle Jimmy" became a rabid
Tory. He "was one of the best men I have ever known," writes his
nephew Theodore; "and when I have sometimes been tempted to
wonder how good people can believe of me the unjust and
impossible things they do believe, I have consoled myself by
thinking of Uncle Jimmy Bulloch's perfectly sincere conviction
that Gladstone was a man of quite exceptional and nameless infamy
in both public and private life."

Theodore Roosevelt grew up to be not only a stanch but an
uncompromising believer in the Union Cause; but the fact that his
parents came from the North and from the South, and that, from
his earliest memory, the Southern kindred were held in affection
in his home, must have helped him towards that non-sectional,
all-American point of view which was the cornerstone of his
patriotic creed.

The Roosevelt house was situated at No. 28 East Twentieth Street,
New York City, and there Theodore was born on October 27, 1858.
He passed his boyhood amid the most wholesome family life.
Besides his brother Elliott and two sisters, as his Uncle Robert
lived next door, there were cousins to play with and a numerous
kindred to form the background of his young life. He was,
fortunately, not precocious, for the infant prodigies of seven,
who become the amazing omniscients of twenty-three, are seldom
heard of at thirty. He learned very early to read, and his
sisters remember that when he was still in starched white
petticoats, with a curl carefully poised on top of his head, he
went about the house lugging a thick, heavy volume of
Livingstone's "Travels" and asking some one to tell him about the
"foraging ants" described by the explorer. At last his older
sister found the passage in which the little boy had mistaken
"foregoing" for "foraging." No wonder that in his mature years he
became an advocate of reformed spelling. His sense of humor,
which flashed like a mountain brook through all his later
intercourse and made it delightful, seems to have begun with his
infancy. He used to say his prayers at his mother's knee, and one
evening when he was out of sorts with her, he prayed the Lord to
bless the Union Cause; knowing her Southern preferences he took
this humorous sort of vengeance on her. She, too, had humor and
was much amused, but she warned him that if he repeated such
impropriety at that solemn moment, she should tell his father.

Theodore and the other children had a great fondness for pets,
and their aunt, Mrs. Robert, possessed several of unusual
kinds--pheasants and peacocks which strutted about the back yard
and a monkey which lived on the back piazza. They were afraid of
him, although they doubtless watched his antics with a fearful
joy. From the accounts which survive, life in the nursery of the
young Roosevelts must have been a perpetual play-time, but
through it all ran the invisible formative influence of their
parents, who had the art of shaping the minds and characters of
the little people without seeming to teach.

Almost from infancy Theodore suffered from asthma, which made him
physically puny, and often prevented him from lying down when he
went to bed. But his spirit did not droop. His mental activity
never wearied and he poured out endless stories to the delight of
his brother and sisters. "My earliest impressions of my brother
Theodore," writes his sister, Mrs. Robinson, "are of a rather
small, patient, suffering little child, who, in spite of his
suffering, was the acknowledged head of the nursery .... These
stories," she adds, "almost always related to strange and
marvelous animal adventures, in which the animals were
personalities quite as vivid as Kipling gave to the world a
generation later in his 'Jungle Books.'"

Owing to his delicate health Theodore did not attend school,
except for a little while, when he went to Professor MacMullen's
Academy on Twentieth Street. He was taught at home and he
probably got more from his reading than from his teachers. By the
time he was ten, the passion for omnivorous reading which
frequently distinguishes boys who are physically handicapped,
began in him. He devoured Our Young Folks, that excellent
periodical on which many of the boys and girls who were his
contemporaries fed. He loved tales of travel and adventure; he
loved Cooper's stories, and especially books on natural history.

In summer the children spent the long days out of doors at some
country place, and there, in addition to the pleasure of being
continuously with nature, they had the sports and games adapted
to their age. Theodore was already making collections of stones
and other specimens after the haphazard fashion of boys. The
young naturalist sometimes met with unexpected difficulties.
Once, for instance, he found a litter of young white mice, which
he put in the ice-chest for safety. His mother came upon them,
and, in the interest Of good housekeeping, she threw them away.
When Theodore discovered it he flew into a tantrum and protested
that what hurt him most was "the loss to Science! the loss to
Science!" On another occasion Science suffered a loss of unknown
extent owing to his obligation to manners. He and his cousin had
filled their pockets and whatever bags they had with specimens.
Then they came upon two toads, of a strange and new variety.
Having no more room left, each boy put one of them on top of his
head and clapped down his hat. All went well till they met Mrs.
Hamilton Fish, a great lady to whom they had to take off their
hats. Down jumped the toads and hopped away, and Science was
never able to add the Bufo Rooseveltianus to its list of Hudson
Valley reptiles.

In 1869 Mr. Roosevelt took his family to Europe for a year. The
children did not care to go, and from the start Theodore was
homesick and little interested. Of course, picture galleries
meant nothing to a boy of ten, with a naturalist's appetite, and
he could not know enough about history to be impressed by
historic places and monuments. He kept a diary from which Mr.
Hagedorn* prints many amusing entries, some of which I quote:

* H. Hagedorn: The Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt. Harper &
Bros. 1918.


Munich, October. "In the night I had a nightmare dreaming that
the devil was carrying me away and had collorer morbos (a
sickness that is not very dangerous) but Mama patted me with her
delicate fingers."

Little Conie also kept a diary: the next entry is from it:

Paris. "I am so glad Mama has let me stay in the butiful hotel
parlor while the poor boys have been dragged off to the orful
picture galary."

Now Theodore again:

Paris, November 26. "I stayed in the house all day, varying the
day with brushing my hair, washing my hands and thinking in fact
haveing a verry dull time."

"Nov. 27. I Did the same thing as yesterday."

Chamounix. "I found several specimens to keep and we went on the
great glacier called 'Mother of ice!'"

"We went to our cousins school at Waterloo. We had a nice time
but met Jeff Davises son and some sharp words ensued."

Venice. "We saw a palace of the doges. It looks like a palace you
could be comfortable and snug in (which is not usual)--We went to
another church in which Conie jumped over tombstones spanked me
banged Ellies head &c."

"Conie" was his nickname for his younger sister Corinne.*

* She subsequently married Mr. Douglas Robinson.


November 22. "In the evening Mama showed me the portrait of
Eidieth Carow and her face stirred up in me homesickness and
longings for the past which will come again never aback never."

The little girl, the sight of whose portrait stirred such
longings for the past in the heart of the young Theodore, was
Edith Carow, the special playmate of his sister Conie and one of
the intimate group whom he had always known. Years later she
became his wife.

The Roosevelt family returned to New York in May, 1870, and
resumed its ordinary life. Theodore, whom one of his fellow
travelers on the steamer remembers as "a tall thin lad with
bright eyes and legs like pipestems," developed rapidly in mind,
but the asthma still tormented him and threatened to make a
permanent invalid of him. His father fitted up in the house in
Twentieth Street a small gymnasium and said to the boy in
substance, "You have brains, but you have a sickly body. In order
to make your brains bring you what they ought, you must build up
your body; it depends upon you." The boy felt both the obligation
and the desire; he willed to be strong, and he went through his
gymnastic exercises with religious precision. What he read in his
books about knights and paladins and heroes had always greatly
moved his imagination. He wanted to be like them. He understood
that the one indispensable attribute common to all of them was
bodily strength. Therefore he would be strong. Through all his
suffering he was patient and determined. But I recall no other
boy, enfeebled by a chronic and often distressing disease, who
resolved as he did to conquer his enemy by a wisely planned and
unceasing course of exercises.

Improvement came slowly. Many were the nights in which he spent
hours gasping for breath. Sometimes on summer nights his father
would wrap him up and take him on a long drive through the
darkness in search of fresh air. But no matter how hard the
pinch, the boy never complained, and when ever there was a
respite his vivacity burst forth as fresh as ever. He could not
attend school with other boys and, indeed, his realization that
he could not meet them on equal physical terms made him timid
when he was thrown with them. So he pursued his own tastes with
all the more zeal. He read many books, some of which seemed
beyond a boy's ken, but he got something from each of them. His
power of concentration already surprised his family. If he was
absorbed in a chapter, nothing which went on outside of him,
either noise or interruption, could distract his attention. His
passion for natural his tory increased. At the age of ten, he
opened in one of the rooms of his home "The Roosevelt Museum of
Natural History." Later, he devoted himself more particularly to
birds, and learned from a taxidermist how to skin and stuff his
specimens.

In 1873, President Grant appointed Mr. Roosevelt a Commissioner
to the Vienna Exposition and the Roosevelt family made another
foreign tour. Hoping to benefit Theodore's asthma they went to
Algiers, and up the Nile, where he was much more interested in
the flocks of aquatic fowl than in the half-buried temples of
Dendera or the obelisks and pylons of Karnak. He even makes no
mention of the Pyramids, but records with enthusiasm that he
found at Cairo a book by an English clergyman, whose name he
forgot, on the ornithology of the Nile, which greatly helped him.
Incidentally, he says that from the Latin names of the birds he
made his first acquaintance with that language. While Mr.
Roosevelt attended to his duties in Vienna the younger children
were placed in the family of Herr Minckwitz, a Government
official at Dresden. There, Theodore, "in spite of himself,"
learned a good deal of German, and he never forgot his pleasant
life among the Saxons in the days be fore the virus of Prussian
barbarism had poisoned all the non-Prussian Germans. Minckwitz
had been a Liberal in the Revolution of 1848, a fact which added
to Theodore's interest in him.

On getting home, Theodore, who was fifteen years old, set to work
seriously to fit himself to enter Harvard College. Up to this
time his education had been unmethodical, leaving him behind his
fellows in some subjects and far ahead of them in others. He had
the good fortune now to secure as a tutor Mr. Arthur H. Cutler,
for many years head of the Cutler Preparatory School in New York
City, thanks to whose excellent training he was able to enter
college in 1876. During these years of preparation Theodore's
health steadily improved. He had a gun and was an ardent
sportsman, the incentive of adding specimens to his collection of
birds and animals outweighing the mere sport of slaughter. At
Oyster Bay, where his father first leased a house in 1874, he
spent much of his time on the water, but he deemed sailing rather
lazy and unexciting, compared with rowing. He enjoyed taking his
row-boat out into the Sound, and, if a high headwind was blowing,
or the sea ran in whitecaps, so much the better. He was now able
to share in all of the athletic pastimes of his companions,
although, so far as I know, he never indulged in baseball, the
commonest game of all.

When he entered Harvard as a Freshman in 1876, that institution
was passing through its transition from college to university,
which had begun when Charles W. Eliot became its President seven
years before. In spite of vehement assaults, the Great Educator
pushed on his reform slowly but resistlessly. He needed to train
not only the public but many members, perhaps a majority, of his
faculty. Young Roosevelt found a body of eight hundred
undergraduates, the largest number up to that time. While the
Elective System had been introduced in the upper classes,
Freshmen and Sophomores were still required to take the courses
prescribed for them.

To one who looks back, after forty years, on the Harvard of that
time there was much about it, the loss of which must be
regretted. Limited in many directions it was, no doubt, but its
very limitations made for friendship and for that sense of
intimate mutual, relationship, out of which springs mutual
affection. You belonged to Harvard, and she to you. That she was
small, compared with her later magnitude, no more lessened your
love for her, than your love for your own mother could be
increased were she suddenly to become a giantess. The
undergraduate community was not exactly a large family, but it
was, nevertheless, restricted enough not only for a fellow to
know at least by sight all of his classmates, but also to have
some knowledge of what was going on in other classes as well as
in the College as a whole. Academic fame, too, had a better
chance then than it has now. There were eight or ten professors,
whom most of the fellows knew by sight, and all by reputation;
now, however, I meet intelligent students who have never heard
even the name of the head of some department who is famous
throughout the world among his colleagues, but whose courses that
student has never taken.

In spite of the simplicity and the homelikeness of the Harvard
with eight hundred undergraduates, however, it was large enough
to afford the opportunity of meeting men of many different tastes
and men from all parts of the country. So it gave free play to
the development of individual talents, and its standard of
scholarship was already sufficiently high to ensure the
excellence of the best scholars it trained. One quality which we
probably took little note of, although it must have affected us
all, sprang from the fact that Harvard was still a crescent
institution; she was in the full vigor of growth, of expansion,
of increase, and we shared insensibly from being connected with
that growth. In retrospect now, and giving due recognition to
this crescent spirit, I recall that, in spite of it, Omar Khayyam
was the favorite poet of many of us, that introspection, which
sometimes deepened into pessimism, was in vogue, and that a
spiritual or philosophic languorous disenchantment sicklied o'er
the somewhat mottled cast of our thought.

Roosevelt took rooms at No. 16 Winthrop Street, a quiet little
lane midway between the College Yard and Charles River, where he
could pursue his hobbies without incessant interruption from
casual droppers-in. Here he kept the specimens which he went on
collecting, some live--a large turtle and two or three harmless
snakes, for instance--and some dead and stuffed. He was no
"grind"; the gods take care not to mix even a drop of pedantry in
the make-up of the rare men whom they destine for great deeds or
fine works. Theodore was already so much stronger in his health
that he went on to get still more strength. He had regular
lessons in boxing. He took long walks and studied the flora and
fauna of the country round Cambridge in his amateurish but
intense way. During his first Christmas vacation, he went down to
the Maine Woods and camped out, and there he met Bill Sewall, a
famous guide, who remained Theodore's friend through life, and
Wilmot Dow, Sewall's nephew, another woodsman; and this trip,
subsequently followed by others, did much good to his physique.
He still had occasional attacks of asthma--he "guffled" as Bill
Sewall called it--and they were sometimes acute, but his tendency
to them slowly wore away.

All his days Roosevelt was proud of being a Harvard man. Even in
the period when academic Harvard was most critical of his public
acts, he never wavered in his devotion to Alma Mater herself,
that dear and lovely Being, who, like the ideal of our country,
lives on to inspire us in spite of unsympathetic administrations
and unloved leaders.

"The One remains, the many change and pass."

Nevertheless, in his "Autobiography," Theodore makes very scant
record of his college life. "I thoroughly enjoyed Harvard," he
says, "and I am sure it did me good, but only in the general
effect, for there was very little in my actual studies which
helped me in after life." * Like nine out of ten men who look
back on college he could make no definite estimate of the actual
gains from those four years; but it is precisely the
indefiniteness, the elusiveness of the college experience which
marks its worth. This is not to be reckoned financially by an
increase in dollars and cents, or intellectually, by so many
added foot-pounds of knowledge. Harvard College was of
inestimable benefit to Roosevelt, because it enabled him to find
himself--to be a man with his fellow men.

*Autobiography, 27.


During his youth his physical handicap had rather cut him off
from companionship on equal terms with his fellows. Now, however,
he could enter with zest in their sports and societies. At the
very beginning of his Freshman year he showed his classmates his
mettle. During the presidential torchlight parade when the
jubilant Freshmen were marching for Hayes, some Tilden man
shouted derisively at them from a second-story window and pelted
them with potatoes. It was impossible for them to get at him, but
Theodore, who was always stung at any display of meanness-- and
it was certainly mean to attack the paraders when they could not
retaliate--stood out from the line and shook his fist at the
assailant. His fellow marchers asked who their champion was, and
so the name of Roosevelt and his pugnacious little figure became
generally known to them. He was little then, not above five feet
six in height, and under one hundred and thirty pounds in weight.
By degrees they all knew him. His unusual ways, his loyalty to
his hobbies, which he treated not as mere whims but as being
worthy of serious application, his versatility, his
outspokenness, his almost unbroken good-nature, attracted most of
the persons with whom he came in contact. He rose to be President
of the Natural History Society, a distinction which implied some
real merit in its possessor. His family antecedents, but still
more his personal qualities, made easy for him the ascent of the
social terraces at Harvard--the Dicky, the Hasty Pudding Club,
and the Porcellian. He was editor of the Harvard Advocate, which
opened the door of the O.K. Society, where he found congenial
intellectual companionship with the editors from the classes
above and below him; and when Dr. Edward Everett Hale wished to
revive and perpetuate the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity, Roosevelt
was one of the half-dozen men from the Class of 1880 whom he
selected.

My first definite recollection of him is at the annual dinner of
the Harvard Crimson in January or February, 1879. He was invited
as a guest to represent the Advocate. Since entering college I
had met him casually many times and had heard of his oddities and
exuberance; but throughout this dinner I came to feel that I knew
him. On being called on to speak he seemed very shy and made,
what I think he said, was his maiden speech. He still had
difficulty in enunciating clearly or even in running off his
words smoothly. At times he could hardly get them out at all, and
then he would rush on for a few sentences, as skaters redouble
their pace over thin ice. He told the story of two old gentlemen
who stammered, the point of which was, that one of them,--after
distressing contortions and stoppages, recommended the other to
go to Dr. X, adding, "He cured me."

A trifling bit of thistledown for memory to have preserved after
all these years; but still it is interesting to me to recall that
this was the beginning of the public speaking of the man who
later addressed more audiences than any other orator of his time
and made a deeper impression by his spoken word.

One other reminiscence of Roosevelt at Harvard, almost as
unsubstantial as this. Late in his Senior year we had a committee
meeting of the Alpha Delta Phi in Charles Washburn's room at 15
Holworthy. Roosevelt and I sat in the window-seat overlooking the
College Yard and chatted together in the intervals when business
was slack. We discussed what we intended to do after graduation.
"I am going to try to help the cause of better government in New
York City; I don't know exactly how," said Theodore.

I recall, still, looking hard at him with an eager, inquisitive
look and saying to myself, "I wonder whether he is the real
thing, or only the bundle of eccentricities which he appears."
There was in me then, as there has always been, a mingling of
skepticism and of deep reverence for those who dealt with
reality, and I had not had sufficient opportunity to determine
whether Roosevelt was real or not. One at least of his
classmates, however, saw portents of greatness in Theodore, from
their Freshman year, and most of us, even when we were amused and
puzzled by his " queerness," were very sure that the man from
whom they sprang was not commonplace.

So far as I remember, Roosevelt was the first undergraduate to
own and drive a dog-cart. This excited various comments; so did
the reddish, powder-puff side whiskers which no chaffing could
make him cut. There was never the slightest suggestion of the
gilded youth about him; though dog-carts, especially when owned
by young men, implied the habits and standards of the gilded
rich. How explain the paradox? On the other hand, Theodore taught
Sunday School at Christ Church, but he was so muscular a
Christian that the decorous vestrymen thought him an unwise guide
in piety. For one day a boy came to class with a black eye which
he had got in fighting a larger boy for pinching his sister.
Theodore told him that he did perfectly right--that every boy
ought to defend any girl from insult--and he gave him a dollar as
a reward. The vestrymen decided that this was too flagrant
approval of fisticuffs; so the young teacher soon found a welcome
in the Sunday School of a different denomination.

Of all the stories of Roosevelt's college career, that of his
boxing match is most vividly remembered. He enrolled in the
light-weight sparring at the meeting in the Harvard Gymnasium on
March 22 1879, and defeated his first competitor. When the
referee called "time," Roosevelt immediately dropped his hands,
but the other man dealt him a savage blow on the face, at which
we all shouted, "Foul, foul!" and hissed; but Roosevelt turned
towards us and cried out "Hush! He didn't hear," a chivalrous act
which made him immediately popular. In his second match he met
Hanks. They both weighed about one hundred and thirty-five
pounds, but Hanks was two or three inches taller and he had a
much longer reach, so that Theodore could not get in his blows,
and although he fought with unabated pluck, he lost the contest.
More serious than his short reach, however, was his
near-sightedness, which made it impossible for him to see and
parry Hanks's lunges. When time was called after the last round,
his face was dashed with blood and he was much winded; but his
spirit did not flag, and if there had been another round, he
would have gone into it with undiminished determination. From
this contest there sprang up the legend that Roosevelt boxed with
his eyeglasses lashed to his head, and the legend floated hither
and thither for nearly thirty years. Not long ago I asked him the
truth. "Persons who believe that," he said, "must think me
utterly crazy; for one of Charlie Hanks's blows would have
smashed my eyeglasses and probably blinded me for life."

In a class of one hundred and seventy he graduated twenty second,
which entitled him to membership in the Phi Beta Kappa, the
society of high scholars. To one who examines his academic record
wisely, the best symptom is that he did fairly well in several
unrelated subjects, and achieved preeminence in one, natural
history. He had the all-round quality which shows more promise
than does a propensity to light on a particular topic and suck it
dry; but he had also power of concentration and thoroughness. As
I have just said, he was a happy combination of the amateurish
and intense. His habit of absorption became a by-word; for if he
visited a, classmate's room and saw a book which interested him,
instead of joining in the talk, he would devour the book,
oblivious of, everything else, until the college bell rang for
the next lecture, when he would jump up with a start, and dash
off. The quiet but firm teaching of his parents bore fruit in
him: he came to college with a body of rational moral principles
which he made no parade of, but obeyed instinctively. And so,
where many young fellows are thrown off their balance on first
acquiring the freedom which college life gives, or are dazed and
distracted on first hearing the babel of strange philosophies or
novel doctrines, he walked straight, held himself erect, and was
not fooled into mistaking novelty for truth, or libertinism for
manliness.

Two outside events which deeply influenced him must be noted.
During his Sophomore year his father died; and during his Senior
year, Theodore became engaged to Miss Alice Hathaway Lee,
daughter of George C. Lee, of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.



CHAPTER II. BREAKING INTO POLITICS

Roosevelt was a few months less than twenty-two years old when he
graduated from Harvard. His career in college had wrought several
important changes in him. First of all, his strength was
confirmed. Although he still suffered occasionally from asthma,
he was no longer handicapped. In business, or in pleasure, he did
not need to consider his health. Next, he had come to some
definite decision as to what he would do. His earlier dream of
becoming a professor of natural history had faded away. With the
inpouring of vigor into his constitution the ideal of an academic
life, often sedentary in mind as well as in body, ceased to lure
him. He craved activity, and this craving was bound to grow more
urgent as he acquired more strength. Next, and this consideration
must not be neglected, he was free to choose. His father's death
left him the possessor of a sufficient fortune to live on
comfortably without need of working to earn his bread and
butter--the motive which determines most young men when they
start in life. Finally, his father's example, reinforced by
wholesome advice, quickened in Theodore his sense of obligation
to the community. Having money, he must use it, not for mere
personal gratification, but in ways which would benefit those who
were deprived, or outcast, or bereft. But Theodore was too young
and too energetic to be contented with the life of a
philanthropist, no matter how noble and necessary its objects
might be. He had already accepted Emerson's dictum:

"He who feeds men, serves a few;
He serves all who dares be true."

Young as he was, he divined that much of the charitable work, to
which good people devote them selves in order to lighten or
relieve the ills which the sins and errors of mankind beget,
would be needless if the remedy were applied, as it ought to be,
to fundamental social conditions. These, he believed, could be
reached in many cases through political agency, and he resolved,
therefore, to make a trial of his talents in political life. The
point at which he decided to "break into politics, " as he
expressed it, was the Assembly, or Lower House of the New York
State Legislature. Most of his friends and classmates, on hearing
of his plan, regarded it as a proof of his eccentricity; a few of
them, the more discerning, would not prejudge him, but were
rather inclined to hope. By tradition and instinct, he was a
Republican, and in order to learn the political ropes he joined
the Twenty-first District Republican Association of New York
City. The district consisted chiefly of rich, respectable, and
socially conspicuous inhabitants of the vortex metropolis, with a
leaven of the "masses." The "classes" had no real zeal for
discharging their political duty. They subscribed to the campaign
fund, but had too delicate a sense of propriety to ask how their
money was spent. A few of them--and these seemed to be endowed
with a special modicum of patriotism--even attended the party
primaries in which candidates were named. The majority went to
the polls and cast their vote on election day, if it did not rain
or snow. For a young man of Roosevelt's position to desire to
take up politics seemed to his friends almost comic. Politics
were low and corrupt; politics were not for "gentlemen"; they
were the business and pastime of liquor-dealers, and of the
degenerates and loafers who frequented the saloons, of horse-car
conductors, and of many others whose ties with "respectability"
were slight.

To join the organization, Roosevelt had to be elected to the
Twenty-first District Republican Club, for the politicians of
those days kept their organization close, not to say exclusive,
and in this way they secured the docility of their members. The
Twenty first District Club met in Morton Hall, a dingy, barnlike
room situated over a saloon, and furnished severely with wooden
benches, many spittoons, and a speaker's table decorated with a
large pitcher for ice-water. The regular meetings came once a
month and Roosevelt attended them faithfully, because he never
did things by halves, and having made up his mind to learn the
mechanism of politics, he would not neglect any detail.

Despite the shyness which ill health caused him in his youth, he
was really a good "mixer," and, growing to feel more sure of
himself, he met men on equal terms. More than that, he had the
art of inspiring confidence in persons of divers sorts and, as he
was really interested in knowing their thoughts and desires, it
never took him long to strike up friendly relations with them.

Jake Hess, the Republican "Boss" of the Twenty-first District,
evidently eyed Roosevelt with some suspicion, for the newcomer
belonged to a class which Jake did not desire to see largely
represented in the business of "practical politics," and so he
treated Roosevelt with a "rather distant affability." The young
man, however, got on well enough with the heelers--the immediate
trusty followers of the Boss--and with the ordinary members. They
probably marveled to see him so unlike what they believed a youth
of the "kid-glove" and "silkstocking" set would be, and they
accepted him as a "good fellow."

Of all Roosevelt's comrades during this first year of initiation,
a young Irishman named Joe Murray was nearest to him, an honest
fellow, fearless and stanch, who remained his loyal friend for
forty years. Murray began as a Democrat of the Tammany Hall
tribe, but having been left in the lurch by his Boss at an
election, he determined to punish the Boss, and this he did at
the first opportunity by throwing his influence on the side of
the Republican candidate. The Republicans won, although the
district was overwhelmingly Democratic, and Murray joined the
Republican Party. He worked in the district where Jake Hess
ruled. Like other even greater men, Jake became arrogant and
treated the gang under him with condescension. Murray resented
this and resolved that he would humble the Boss by supporting
Roosevelt as a candidate for the Assembly. Hess protested, but
could not prevent the nomination and during the campaign he seems
to have supported the candidate whom he had not chosen.

Roosevelt sent the following laconic appeal to some of the voters
of his district:

New York, November 1, 1881.

DEAR SIR:

Having been nominated as a candidate for member of Assembly for
this District, I would esteem it a compliment if you honor me
with your vote and personal influence on Election day.

Very respectfully

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Certainly, nothing could be simpler than this card, which
contains no puff of either the party or the candidate, or no
promise. It drew a cordial response.

Twenty-first Assembly District.

40th to 86th Sts., Lexington to 7th Aves.

We cordially recommend the voters of the Twenty-first Assembly
District to cast their ballots for

Theodore Roosevelt

for member of Assembly

and take much pleasure in testifying to our appreciation of his
high character and standing in the community. He is conspicuous
for his honesty and integrity, and eminently qualified to
represent the District in the Assembly.

New York November 1, 1881

F. A. P. Barnard, William T. Black, Willard Bullard, Joseph H.
Choate, William A. Darling, Henry E. Davies, Theodore W. Dwight,
Jacob Hess, Morris K. Jesup, Edward Mitchell, William F. Morgan,
Chas. S. Robinson, Elihu Root, Jackson S. Shultz, Elliott F.
Shepard, Gustavus Tuckerman, S. H. Wales, W. H. Webb.

This list bears the names of at least two men who will be long
remembered. There are also several others which were doubtless of
more political value to the aspirant to office in 1881.

Just after the election Roosevelt wrote to his classmate, Charles
G. Washburn:

'Too true, too true; I have become a "political hack." Finding it
would not interfere much with my law, I accepted the nomination
to the Assembly and was elected by 1500 majority, leading the
ticket by 600 votes. But don't think I am going to go into
politics after this year, for I am not.'

Roosevelt's allusion to the law requires the statement that in
the autumn of 1880 he had begun to read law in the office of his
uncle, Robert Roosevelt; not that he had a strong leaning to the
legal profession, but that he believed that every one, no matter
how well off he might be, ought to be able to support himself by
some occupation or profession. Also, he could not endure being
idle, and he knew that the slight political work on which he
embarked when he joined the Twenty-first District Republican Club
would take but little of his time. During that first year out of
college he established himself as a citizen, not merely
politically, but socially. On his birthday in 1880 he married
Miss Lee and they set up their home at 6 West Fifty-seventh
Street; he joined social and literary clubs and extended his
athletic interests beyond wrestling and boxing to hunting, rifle
practice, and polo.

His law studies seem to have absorbed him less than anything else
that he undertook during all his life. He could not fail to be
interested in them, but he never plunged into them with all his
might and main as if he intended to make them his chief concern.
For a while he had a desk in the office of the publishers, G. P.
Putnam's Sons: but Major George Putnam recalls that he did little
except suggest wonderful projects, which "had to be sat down
upon." Already a love of writing infected him. Even before he
left Harvard he had begun "A History of the Naval War of 1812,"
and this he worked on eagerly. The Putnams published it in 1882.

One incident of Roosevelt's canvass must not be overlooked. The
Red Indians of old used to make their captives run the gauntlet
between two lines of warriors: political bosses in New York in
1880 made their nominee run the gauntlet of all the saloonkeepers
in their district. Accordingly, Jake Hess and Joe Murray
proceeded to introduce Roosevelt to the rum-sellers of Sixth
Avenue. The first they visited received Theodore with injudicious
condescension almost as if he were a suppliant. He said he hoped
that the young candidate, if elected, would treat the liquor men
fairly, to which the "suppliant" replied that he intended to
treat all interests fairly. The suggestion that liquor licenses
were too high brought the retort that they were not high enough.
Thereupon, the wary Hess and the discreet Joe Murray found an
excuse for hurrying Roosevelt out of the saloon, and they told
him that he had better look after his friends on Fifth Avenue and
that they would look after the saloon-keepers on Sixth Avenue.
That any decent candidate should have to pass in review before
the saloon-keepers and receive their approval, is so monstrous as
to be grotesque. That a possible President of the United States
should be the victim needs no comment. It was thoroughly
characteristic of Roosevelt that he balked at the first trial.

He says in his "Autobiography" that he was not conscious of going
into politics to benefit other people, but to secure for himself
a privilege to which every one was entitled. That privilege was
self-government. When his "kid-glove" friends laughed at him for
deliberately choosing to leap into the political mire, he told
them that the governing class ought to govern, and that not they
themselves but the bosses and "heelers" were the real governors
of New York City. Not the altruistic desire to reform, but the
perfectly practical resolve to enjoy the political rights to
which he had a claim was his leading motive. It is important to
understand this because it will explain much of his action as a
statesman. Roosevelt is the greatest idealist in American public
life since Lincoln; but his idealism, like Lincoln's, always had
a firm, intelligent, practical footing. Roosevelt himself thus
describes his work during his first year in the New York
Assembly:

I paid attention chiefly while in the Legislature to laws for the
reformation of Primaries and of the Civil Service and endeavored
to have a certain Judge Westbrook impeached, on the ground of
corrupt collusion with Jay Gould and the prostitution of his high
judicial office to serve the purpose of wealthy and unscrupulous
stock gamblers, but was voted down.

This brief statement gives no idea of either the magnitude or
quality of his work in which, like young David, he went forth to
smite Goliath, the Giant Corruption,, entrenched for years in the
Albany State House. I do not believe that in at tacking the
monster, Roosevelt thought that he was displaying unusual
courage, much less that he was winning the crown of a moral hero.
He simply saw a mass of abuse and wickedness which every decent
person ought to repudiate. Most decent persons saw it, too, but
convention, or self-interest, party affiliation, or unromantic,
every-day cowardice, made them hold their tongues. Being assigned
to committees which had some of the most important concerns of
New York City in charge, Roosevelt had the advantage given by his
initiation into political methods as practiced in the
Twenty-first District of knowing a little more than his
colleagues knew about the local issues. Three months of the
session elapsed before he stood up in the Chamber and attacked
point-blank,one formidable champion of corruption. Listen to an
anonymous writer in the Saturday Evening Post:

It was on April 6, 1882, that Roosevelt took the floor in the
Assembly and demanded that Judge Westbrook, of New bury, be
impeached. And for sheer moral courage that act is probably
supreme in Roosevelt's life thus far. He must have expected
failure. Even his youth and idealism and ignorance of public
affairs could not blind him to the apparently inevitable
consequences. Yet he drew his sword and rushed apparently to
destruction--alone, and at the very outset of his career, and in
disregard of the pleadings of his closest friends and the plain
dictates of political wisdom. That speech--the deciding act in
Roosevelt's career--is not remarkable for eloquence. But it is
remarkable for fear less candor. He called thieves thieves,
regardless of their millions; he slashed savagely at the judge
and the Attorney General; he told the plain unvarnished truth as
his indignant eyes saw it.*

* Riis, 54-55.


Astonishment verging on consternation filled the Assemblymen,
who, through long experience, were convinced that Truth was too
precious to be exhibited in public. Worldly wisdom came to the
aid of the veteran Republican leader who wished to treat the
assault as if it were the unripe explosion of youth. The
callowness of his young friend must excuse him. He doubtless
meant well, but his inexperience prevented him from realizing
that many a reputation in public life had been shattered by just
such loose charges. He felt sure that when the young man had time
to think it over, he would modify his language. It would be
fitting, therefore, for that body to show its kindliness by
giving the new member from New York City leisure to think it
over.

Little did this official defender of corruption understand Mr.
Roosevelt, whose business it was then to uphold Right. That was a
question in which expediency could have no voice. He regarded
neither the harm he might possibly do to his political future nor
to the standing of the Republican Party. I suspect that he
smarted under the leader's attempt to treat him as a young man
whose breaks instead of causing surprise must be condoned.
Although the magnates of the party pleaded with him and urged him
not to throw away his usefulness, he rose again in the Assembly
next day and renewed his demand for an investigation of Judge
Westbrook. Day after day he repeated his demand. The newspapers
throughout the State began to give more and more attention to
him. The public applauded, and the legislators, who had sat and
listened to him with contemptuous indifference, heard from their
constituents. At last, on the eighth day, by a vote of 104 to 6
the Assembly adopted Roosevelt's resolution and appointed an
investigating committee. The evidence taken amply justified
Roosevelt's charges, in spite of which the committee gave a
whitewashing verdict. Nevertheless the "young reformer" had not
only proved his case, but had suddenly made a name for himself in
the State and in the Country.

Before his first term ended he discovered that there were enemies
of honest government quite as dangerous as the open supporters of
corruption. These were the demagogues who, under the pretense of
attacking the wicked interests, introduced bills for the sole
purpose of being bought off. Sly fellows they were and sneaks.
Against their "strike" legislation Roosevelt had also to fight.
His chief friend at Albany was Billy O'Neil, who kept a little
crossroads grocery up in the Adirondacks; had thought for himself
on American politics; had secured his election to the Assembly
without the favor of the Machine; and now acted there with as
much independence as his young colleague of the Twenty first
District. Roosevelt remarks that the fact that two persons,
sprung from such totally different surroundings, should come
together in the Legislature was an example of the fine result
which American democracy could achieve.

The session came to a close, and although Roosevelt had protested
the year before that he was not going into politics as a career,
he allowed himself to be renominated. Naturally, his desire to
continue in and complete the task in which he had already
accomplished much was whetted. He would have been a fool if he
had not known, what every one else knew, that he had made a very
brilliant record during his first year. A false standard which
comes very near hypocrisy imposes a ridiculous mock modesty on
great men in modern times: as if Shakespeare alone should be
unaware that he was Shakespeare or that Napoleon or Darwin or
Lincoln or Cavour should each be ignorant of his worth. Better
vanity, if you will, than sham modesty. There was no harm done
that Roosevelt at twenty-three felt proud of being recognized as
a power in the Assembly. We must never forget also that he was a
fighter, and that his first contests in Albany had so roused his
blood that he longed to fight those battles to a finish, that is,
to victory. We must make a distinction also in his motives. He
did not strain every nerve to win a cause because it was his
cause; but having adopted a cause which his heart and mind told
him was good, he strove to make that cause triumph because he
believed it to be good.

So he allowed himself to be renominated and he was reelected by
2000 majority, although in that autumn of 1882 the Democratic
candidate for Governor, Grover Cleveland, swept New York State by
192,000 and carried into office by the momentum of his success
many of the minor candidates on the Democratic ticket.

The year 1883 opened with the cheer of dawn in New York politics.
Cleveland, the young Governor of forty-four, had proved himself
fearless, public-spirited, and conscientious. So had Roosevelt,
the young Assemblyman of twenty-three. One was a Democrat, one a
Republican, but they were alike in courage and in holding honesty
and righteousness above their party platforms.

Roosevelt pursued in this session the methods which had made him
famous and feared in the preceding. He admits that he may have
had for a while a "swelled head," for in the chaos of conflicting
principles and no-principles in which his life was thrown, he
decided to act independently and to let his conscience determine
his action on each question which arose. He flocked by himself on
a peak. He was too practical, however, to hold this course long.
Experience had already taught him that under a constitutional
government parties which advocate or oppose issues must rule, and
that in order to make your issues win you must secure a majority
of the votes. Not by playing solitaire, therefore, not by
standing aloof as one crying in the wilderness, but by honestly
persuading as many as you could to support you, could you promote
the causes which you had at heart. The professional politicians
and the Machine leaders still thought that he was stubborn and
too conceited to listen to reason, but in reality he had a few
intimates like Billy O'Neil and Mike Costello with whom he took
counsel, and a group of thirty or forty others, both Republican
and Democratic, with whom he acted harmoniously on many
questions.

They all united to fight the Black-Horse Cavalry, as the gang of
"strike" legislators was called. One of the most insidious bills
pushed by these rascals aimed at reducing the fares on the New
York Elevated Railway from ten cents to five cents. It seemed so
plausible! So entirely in the interest of the poor man! Indeed,
the affairs of the Elevated took up much of Roosevelt's attention
and enriched for years the Black-Horse Cavalrymen and the
lobbyists. He also forced the Assembly to appoint a commission to
investigate the New York City police officials, the police
department being at that time notoriously corrupt. They employed
as their counsel George Bliss, a lawyer of prominence, with a
sharp tongue and a contempt for self-constituted reformers. While
Roosevelt was cross-examining one of the officials, Bliss, who
little understood the man he was dealing with, interrupted with a
scornful and impertinent remark. "Of course you do not mean that,
Mr. Bliss," said the young reformer with impressive politeness,
"for if you did we should have to put you out in the street."
Even in those early days, when Roosevelt was in dead earnest, he
had a way of pointing his forefinger and of fixing his under jaw
which the person whom he addressed could not mistake. That
forefinger was as menacing as a seven shooter. Mr. Bliss, with
all the prestige of a successful career at the bar behind him,
quickly understood the meaning of the look, the gesture, and the
studied courtesy. He deemed it best to retract and apologize at
once; and it was.

Roosevelt consented to run for a third term and he was elected in
spite of the opposition of the various elements which united to
defeat him. Such a man was too. dangerous to be acceptable to Jay
Gould and the "interests," to Black-Horse Cavalry, and to gangs
of all kinds who made a living, directly or indirectly, by
office-holding. His friends urged him for the speakership; but
this was asking too much of the Democratic majority, and besides,
there were Republicans who had winced under his scourge the year
before and were glad enough to defeat him now. Occasionally, some
kind elderly friend would still attempt to show him the folly of
his ways, and we hear reports of one gentleman, a member of the
Assembly and an "old friend," who told him that the great concern
in life was Business, and that lawyers and judges, legislators
and Congressmen, existed to serve the ends of Business. "There is
no politics in politics," said this moral guide and sage. But he
could not budge the young man, who believed that there are many
considerations more important than the political.

During this third year, he made a straight and gallant fight to
improve the condition under which cigars were made in New York
City. By his own investigation, he found that the cigar makers
lived in tenements, in one room, perhaps two, with their families
and often a boarder; these made the cigars which the public
bought, in ignorance of the facts. Roosevelt proposed that, as a
health measure which would benefit alike the cigar-makers and the
public, this evil practice be prohibited and that the police put
a stop to it. His bill passed in 1884, but the next year the
Court of Appeals declared it unconstitutional, because it
deprived the tenement-house people of their liberty and would
injure the owners of the tenements if they were not allowed to
rent their property to these tenants. In its decision, the court
indulged in nauseating sanctimony of this sort: " It cannot be
perceived how the cigar-maker is to be improved in his health, or
his morals, by forcing him from his home and its hallowed
associations and beneficent influences to ply his trade
elsewhere." This was probably not the first time when Roosevelt
was enraged to find the courts of justice sleekly upholding
hot-beds of disease and vice, on the pretense that they were
protecting liberty. Commenting on this episode, Mr. Washburn well
says: "As applied to the kind of tenement I have referred to,
this reference to the 'home and its hallowed associations' seems
grotesque or tragic depending upon the point of view."*

* Washburn, 11.


Amid work of this kind, fighting and fearless, constantly adding
to his reputation among the good as a high type of reformer, and
adding to the detestation in which the bad held him, he completed
his third term. He resolutely refused to serve again and declined
the offers which were pressed upon him to run for Congress; nor
did he accept a place on the Republican National Committee.

The death of his mother on February 12, 1884, followed in
twenty-four hours by that of his wife, who died after the birth
of a daughter, brought sorrow upon Roosevelt which made the
burden of his political work heavier and caused him to consider
how he should readjust his life, for he was first of all a man of
deep family affections and the loss of his wife left him adrift.

To S. N. D. North, editor of the Utica Herald and a well-wisher
of his, he wrote from Albany on April 30, 1884:

Dear Mr. North: I wish to write you a few words just to thank you
for your kindness towards me, and to assure you that my head will
not be turned by what I well know was a mainly accidental
success. Although not a very old man, I have yet lived a great
deal in my life, and I have known sorrow too bitter and joy too
keen to allow me to become either cast down or elated for more
than a very brief period over success or defeat.

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 one can
realize 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 the very real and positive
hostility I have excited among the politicians. I 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. For very many
reasons I will not mind going back into private life for a few
years. My work this winter has been very harassing, and I feel
both tired and restless; for the next few months I shall probably
be in Dakota, and I think I shall spend the next two or three
years in making shooting trips, either in the Far West or in the
Northern woods--and there will be plenty of work to do writing.*

* Douglas, 41-42.


This letter is a striking revelation of the inmost intentions of
the man of twenty-five, who already stood on a pinnacle where
hard heads and mature might well have been dizzy. Evidently he
knew him self, and even in his brief experience with the world he
understood how uncertain and evanescent are the winds of Fame. If
he had ever suffered from a "swelled head," he was now cured. He
felt the emptiness of life's prizes when the dearest who should
have shared them with him were dead.



CHAPTER III. AT THE FIRST CROSSROADS

The year 1884 was a Presidential year, and Roosevelt was one of
the four delegates-at-large* of New York State to the Republican
National Convention at Chicago. The day seemed to have come for a
new birth in American politics. The Republican Party was grown
fat with four and twenty years of power, and the fat had overlain
and smothered its noble aims. The party was arrogant, it was
corrupt, it was unashamed. After the War, immense projects
involving huge sums of money had to be managed, and the
Republicans spent like spendthrifts when they did not spend like
embezzlers. I do not imply that the Democrats would not have done
the same if they had been in command, or that there were not
among them many who saw where their profit lay, and took it. The
quadrupeds which feed at the Treasury trough are all of one
species, no matter whether their skins be black or white.

* The other delegates-at-large were President Andrew D. White of
Cornell University, J. T. Gilbert, and Edwin Packard.


But now a new generation was springing up, with its leaven of
hope and idealism and its intuitive faith in honesty.

More completely than any one else, Roosevelt embodied to the
country the glorious promise of this new generation. But the old
always dies hard after it has long been the blood and mind of a
creed, a class, or a party. Terrible also is the blind,
remorseless sweep of a custom which may have sprung up from good
soil, not less than one spawned and nurtured in iniquity.
Frankenstein laboriously constructing his monster seems to
personify society at its immemorial task of creating
institutions; each institution as it becomes viable rends its
creator.

So the Republican Party lived on its traditions, its privileges,
its appetites, its arrogance, and it refused to be transmuted by
its youngest members. In 1876 it resorted to fraud to perpetuate
its hold on power. Unchastened in 1880, three hundred and six of
its delegates attempted through thick and thin to force the
nomination of General Grant for a third term. The chief opposing
candidate was James G. Blaine, whose unsavory reputation,
however, caused the majority of the convention which was not
pledged to Grant to repudiate Blaine and to choose Garfield as a
compromise. Then followed four years of factional bitterness in
the party, and when 1884 came round, Blaine's admirers pushed him
to the front.

Blaine himself was not a person of delicate instinct. The
repudiation which he had twice suffered by the better element of
the Republican Party, seemed only to redouble his determination
to be its candidate. He had much personal magnetism. Both in his
methods and ideals, he represented perfectly the politicians who
during the dozen years after Lincoln's death flourished at
Washington, and at every State capitol in the Union. By the luck
of a catching phrase applied to him by Robert G. Ingersoll, he
stood before the imagination of the country "as the plumed
knight," although on looking back we search in vain for any trait
of knightliness or chivalry in him. For a score of years he
filled the National Congress, House and Senate, with the bustle
of his egotism. His knightly valor consisted in shaking his fist
at the "Rebel Brigadiers " and in waving the "bloody shirt,"
feats which seemed to him heroic, no doubt, but which were safe
enough, the Brigadiers being few and Blaine's supporters many.
But where on the Nation's statute book do you find now a single
important law fathered by him? What book contains one of his
maxims for men to live by? Many persons still live who knew him,
and remember him, but can any of them repeat a saying of his
which passes current on the lips of Americans? So much sound and
fury, so much intrigue and sophistry, and self-seeking, and now
the silence of an empty sepulchre!

The better element of the Republican Party went to the Chicago
Convention sworn to save the party from the disgrace of
nominating Blaine. Roosevelt believed the charges against him,
and by all that he had written and spoken, and by his political
career, he was bound to oppose the politician, who, as Speaker of
the National House, had, by the showing of his own letters, taken
bribes from unscrupulous interests. In the convention, and in the
committee meetings, and in the incessant parleys which prepare
the work of a convention, Roosevelt fought unwaveringly against
Blaine. The better element made Senator George F. Edmunds their
candidate, and Roosevelt urged his nomination on all comers. When
the convention met, Mr. Lodge, of Massachusetts, nominated J. R.
Lynch, a negro from Mississippi, to be temporary chairman,
thereby heading off Powell Clayton, a veteran Republican
"war-horse" and office-holder. Roosevelt had the honor--and it
was an honor for so young a man--to make a speech, which proved
to be effective, in Lynch's behalf; and when the vote was taken,
Lynch was chosen by 424 to 384. This first victory over the
Blaine Machine, the Edmunds men hailed as a good omen.

Roosevelt was chairman of the New York State delegation. The
whirling days and nights at Chicago confirmed his position as a
national figure, but he strove in vain in behalf of honesty. The
majority of the delegates would not be gainsaid. They had come to
Chicago resolved to elect James G. Blaine, and no other, and they
would not quit until they had accomplished this. Pleas for
morality and for party concord fell on deaf ears, as did warnings
of the comfort which Blaine's nomination would give to their
enemies. His supporters packed the great convention hall, and
when his name was put in nomination, there followed a riot of
cheers, which lasted the better part of an hour, and foreboded
his success.

As had been predicted, Blaine's nomination split the Republican
Party. Many of the better element came out for Grover Cleveland,
the Democratic candidate, who, as Governor of New York, had
displayed unfailing courage, integrity, and intelligence. Others
again, disgusted with many of the principles and leaders of both
parties, formed themselves into a special group or party of
Independents. They were hateful alike to the Bosses who
controlled the Republican or Democratic organization; and Charles
A. Dana, of the New York Sun, who took care never to be "on the
side of the angels," derisively dubbed them "mugwumps"--a title
which may carry an honorable meaning to posterity.

I was one of these Independents, and if I cite my own case, it is
not because it was of any importance to the public, but because
it was typical. During the days of suspense before the Chicago
Convention met, the proposed nomination of Blaine weighed upon me
like a nightmare. I would not admit to myself that so great a
crime against American ideals could be committed by delegates who
represented the standard of any political party, and were drawn
from all over the country. I cherished, what seems to me now the
sadly foolish dream, that with Roosevelt in the convention the
abomination could not be done. I thought of him as of a paladin
against whom the forces of evil would dash themselves to pieces.
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.

There followed the days of suspense when the newspapers brought
news of the wild proceedings at the convention, and for me the
shadow deepened. Then the telegraph reported Blaine's triumphant
nomination. I waited, we all waited, to learn what the delegates
who opposed him intended to do. One morning a dispatch in the New
York Tribune announced that Roosevelt would not bolt. That very
day I had a little note from him saying that he had done his best
in Chicago, that the result sickened him, that he should,
however, support the Republican ticket; but he intended to spend
most of the summer and autumn hunting in the West.

I was dumfounded. I felt as Abolitionists felt after Webster's
Seventh of March speech. 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 upheld. Whittier's poem "Ichabod" seemed to have
been aimed at him, especially in its third stanza:

"Oh, dumb be passion's stormy rage,
When he who might
Have lighted up and led his age,
Falls back in night."

Amid the lurid gleams and heat of such a disappointment, men
cannot see clearly. They impute wrong motives, base motives, to
the backslider. In their wrath, they assume that only guilt can
account for his defection.

We see plainly enough now that we misjudged Roosevelt. We assumed
that because he was with us in the crusade for pure politics, he
agreed with us in the estimate we put on party loyalty.
Independents and mugwumps felt little reverence and set even less
value on political parties, which we regarded simply as
instruments to be used in carrying out policies. If a party
pursued a policy contrary to our own, we left it as we should
leave a train which we found going in the wrong direction. There
was nothing sacred in a political party.

In assuming that Roosevelt must have coincided with us in these
views, we did him wrong. For he held then, and had held since he
first entered politics, that party transcended persons, and that
only in the gravest case imaginable was one justified in bolting
his party because one disapproved of its candidate. He did not
respect Blaine; on the contrary, he regarded Blaine as a bad man:
but he believed that the future of the country would be much
safer under the control of the Republican Party than under the
Democratic. This doctrine exposes its adherents to obvious
criticism, if not to suspicion. It enables persons of callous
consciences to support bad platforms and bad candidates without
blushing; but after all, who shall say at what point you are
justified in bolting your party? The decision must rest with the
individual. And although it was hard for the bolting Independents
in 1884 to accept the tenet that party transcends persons, it was
Roosevelt's reason, and with him sincere. Some of his colleagues
in the better element who had struggled as he had to defeat
Blaine, and then, almost effusively, exalted Blaine as their
standard-bearer, were less fortunate than he in having their
sincerity doubted. George William Curtis, Carl Schurz, Charles
Francis Adams, and other Independents of their intransigent
temper formed a Mugwump Party and this turned the scale in
electing Grover Cleveland President.

There used to be much discussion as to who persuaded Roosevelt,
although he detested Blaine, to stand by the Republicans in 1884.
Those were the days when very few of his critics understood that,
in spite of his youth, he had already thought for himself on
politics and had reached certain conclusions as to fundamental
principles. These critics assumed that he must have been won over
by Henry Cabot Lodge, with whom he had been intimate since his
Harvard days, and who was supposed to be his political mentor.
The truth is, however, that Roosevelt had formed his own opinion
about bolting, and that he and Lodge, in discussing possibilities
before they went to the Chicago Convention, had independently
agreed that they must abide by the choice of the party there.
They held, and a majority of men in similar position still hold,
that delegates cannot in honor abandon the nominee chosen by the
majority in a convention which they attend as delegates. If the
rule, "My man, or nobody," were to prevail, there would be no use
in holding conventions at all. And after that of 1884, George
William Curtis, one of the chief leaders of the Independents,
admitted that Roosevelt, in staying with the Republican Party,
played the game fairly. While Curtis himself bolted and helped to
organize the Mugwumps, Roosevelt, after his trip to the West,
returned to New York and took a vigorous part in the campaign.
Nevertheless, Roosevelt's decision, in 1884, to cleave to the
Republican Party disappointed many of us. We thought of him as a
lost leader. Some critics in their ignorance were inclined to
impute false motives to him; but in time, the cloud of suspicion
rolled away and his action in that crisis was not laid up against
him. The election of Cleveland relieved him of seeming
perfunctorily to uphold Blaine.



CHAPTER IV. NATURE THE HEALER

A perfect biography would show definitely the interaction between
mind and body. At present we can only guess what this interaction
may be. In some cases the relations are evident, but in most they
are vague and often unsuspected. The psychologists, whose
pretensions are so great and whose actual results are still so
small, may perhaps lead, an age or two hence, to the desired
knowledge. But the biographer of today must beware of adopting
the unripe formulas of any immature science. Nevertheless, he
must watch, study, and record all the facts pertaining to his
subject, although he cannot explain them. Theodore Roosevelt was
a wonderful example of the partnership of mind and body, and any
one who writes his biography in detail will do well to pay great
heed to this intricate interlocking. I can do no more than allude
to it here. We have seen that Roosevelt from his earliest days
had a quick mind, happily not precocious, and a weak body which
prevented him from taking part in normal physical activity and
the play and sport of boyhood. So his intellectual life grew out
of scale to his physical. Then he set to work by the deliberate
application of will-power to develop his body, and when he
entered Harvard he was above the average youth in strength.
Before he graduated, those who saw him box or wrestle beheld a
fellow somewhat slim and light, but unusually well set up. During
the succeeding four years he never allowed his duties as
Assemblyman to encroach upon his exercise; on the contrary, he
played regularly and he played hard, adding new kinds of sport to
develop new faculties and to give the spice of variety. He rode
to hounds with the Meadowbrook Hunt; he took up polo; and he
boxed and wrestled as in his college days.

In a few years Roosevelt became physically a very powerful man. I
recall my astonishment the first time I saw him, after the lapse
of several years, to find him with the neck of a Titan and with
broad shoulders and stalwart chest, instead of the city-bred,
slight young friend I had known earlier. His body was now equal
to any burden or strain which his mind might have to endure; and
hence forth it is no idle fancy that suggests a perpetual
competition between the two. Thanks to his extraordinary will,
however, he never allowed his body to get control; but, as
appetite comes with eating, so his strong and healthy muscles
craved more and more exercise as he used them. And now he took a
novel way to gratify them.

Ever since his first taste of camp life, when he went into the
Maine Woods under the guidance of Bill Sewall and Will Dow,
Roosevelt felt the lure of wild nature, and on many successive
seasons he repeated these trips. Gradually, fishing and hunting
in the wilderness of Maine or the Adirondacks did not afford him
enough scope for his brimming vigor. He decided to go West, to
the real West, where great game and Indians still survived, and
the conditions of the few white men were almost as primitive as
in the days of the earliest explorers. When the session of 1883
adjourned, he started for North Dakota, then a territory with a
few settlers, and among the Bad Lands on the Little Missouri he
bought an interest in two cattle ranches, the Chimney Butte and
the Elkhorn. The following year, after the Presidential campaign
which placed Cleveland in the White House, Roosevelt determined,
as we saw in the letters I have quoted, to abandon the East for a
time and to devote himself to a ranchman's life. He was still in
deep grief at the loss of his wife and of his mother; there was
no immediate prospect of usefulness for him in politics; the
conventions of civilization, as he knew them in New York City,
palled upon him; a sure instinct whispered to him that he must
break away and seek health of body and heart and soul among the
re mote, unspoiled haunts of primeval Nature. For nearly two
years, with occasional intervals spent in the East, the Elkhorn
Ranch at Medora was his home, and he has described the life of
the ranchman and cow-puncher in pages which are sure to be read
as long as posterity takes any interest in knowing about the
transition of the American West from wilderness to civilization.
He shared in all the work of the ranch. He took with a "frolic
welcome" the humdrum of its routine as well as its excitements
and dangers. He says that he does not believe that there was ever
any more attractive life for a vigorous young fellow than this,
and assuredly no one else has glorified it as Roosevelt did with
his pen. At one time or another he performed all the duties of a
ranchman. He went on long rides after the cattle, he rounded them
up, he helped to brand them and to cut out the beeves destined
for the Eastern market. He followed the herd when it stampeded
during a terrific thunderstorm. In winter there was often need to
save the wandering cattle from a sudden and deadly blizzard. The
log cabin or "shack" in which he dwelt was rough, and so was the
fare; comforts were few. He chopped the cottonwood which they
used for fuel; he knew how to care for the ponies; and once at
least he passed more than twenty-four hours in the saddle without
sleep. According to the best standards, he says, he was not a
fine horseman, but it is clear that he could do everything with a
horse which had to be done, and that he never stopped from
fatigue. When they needed fresh meat, he would shoot it. In
short, he held his own under all the hardships and requirements
demanded of a cowboy or ranchman. To adapt himself to these wild
conditions of nature and work was, however, only a part of his
experience. Even more dangerous than pursuing a stampeding herd
at night over the plains, and plunging into the Little Missouri
after it, was intercourse with some of the lawless nomads of that
pioneer region. Nomads they were, though they might settle down
to work for a while on one ranch, and then pass on to another;
the sort of creatures who loafed in the saloons of the little
villages and amused them selves by running amuck and shooting up
the town. These men, and indeed nearly all of the pioneers, held
the man from the civilized East, the "tenderfoot," in scorn. They
took it for granted that he was a weakling, that he had soft
ideas of life and was stuck-up or affected. Now Roosevelt saw
that in order to win their trust and respect, he must show
himself equal to their tasks, a true comrade, who accepted their
code of courage and honor. The fact that he wore spectacles was
against him at the outset, because they associated spectacles
with Eastern schoolmasters and incompetence. They called him
"Four Eyes," at first with derision, but they soon discovered
that in him they had no "tenderfoot" to deal with. He shot as
well as the best of them; he rode as far; he never complained of
food or tasks or hardship; he met every one on equal terms. Above
all, he left no doubt as to his courage. He would not pick a
quarrel nor would he avoid one. Many stories of his prowess
circulated; mere heckling, or a practical joke, he took with a
laugh; as when some of the men changed the saddle from his pony
to a bucking broncho.

But he knew where to draw the line. At Medora, for instance, the
Marquis de Mores, a French settler, assumed the attitude of a
feudal proprietor. Having been the first to squat in that region
he regarded those who came later as interlopers, and he and his
men acted very sullenly. They even carried their ill-will and
intimidation to the point of shooting. In due time the Marquis
discovered cause for grievance against Roosevelt, and he sent him
a letter warning the newcomer that if the cause were not removed
the Marquis knew how one gentleman settles a dispute with
another. Roosevelt despised dueling as a silly practice, which
would not determine justice between disputants; but he knew that
in Cowboy Land the duel, being regarded as a test of courage,
must not be ignored by him. Any man who declined a challenge lost
caste and had better leave the country at once. So Roosevelt
within an hour dispatched a reply to the surly Marquis saying
that he was ready to meet him at any time and naming the rifle,
at twelve paces' distance, as the weapon that he preferred. The
Marquis, a formidable swordsman but no shot, sent back word,
expressing regret that Mr. Roosevelt had mistaken his meaning: in
referring to "gentlemen knowing how to settle disputes," he meant
that of course an amicable explanation would restore harmony.
Thenceforward, he treated Roosevelt with effusive courtesy.
Perhaps a chill ran down his back at the thought of standing up
before an antagonist twelve paces away and that the fighters were
to advance towards each other three paces after each round, until
one of them was killed.

So Theodore fought no duel with either the French Marquis or with
any one else during his life in the West, but he had several
encounters with local desperadoes. One cold night in winter,
having ridden far and knowing that he could reach no refuge for
many hours, he unexpectedly saw a light. Going towards it, he
found that it came from a cabin which served as saloon and
tavern. On entering, he saw a group of loafers and drinkers who
were apparently terrorized by a big fellow, rather more than half
drunk, who proved to be the local bully. The function of this
person was to maintain his bullyship against all comers:
accordingly, he soon picked on Roosevelt, who held his peace as
long as he could. Then the rowdy, who grasped his pistols in his
hands, ordered the "four-eyed tenderfoot" to come to the bar and
set up drinks for the crowd. Roosevelt walked deliberately
towards him, and before the bully suspected it, the "tenderfoot"
felled him with a sledgehammer blow. In falling, a pistol went
off wide of its mark, and the bully lay in a faint. Before he
could recover, Roosevelt stood over him ready to pound him again.
But the bully did not stir, and he was carried off into another
room. The crowd congratulated the stranger on having served him
right.

At another place, there was a "bad man" who surpassed the rest of
his fellows in using foul language. Roosevelt, who loathed
obscenity as he did any other form of filth, tired of this bad
man's talk and told him very calmly that he liked him but not his
nastiness. Instead of drawing his gun, as the bystanders thought
he would do, Jim looked sheepish, acknowledging the charge, and
changed his tone. He remained a loyal friend of his corrector.
Cattle-thieves and horse-thieves infested the West of those days.
To steal a ranchman's horse might not only cause him great
annoyance, but even put his life in danger, and accordingly the
rascals who engaged in this form of crime ranked as the worst of
all and received no mercy when they were caught. If the sheriff
of the region was lax, the settlers took the matter into their
own hands, enrolled themselves as vigilantes, hunted the thieves
down, hanged those whom they captured, and shot at sight those
who tried to escape. It happened that the sheriff, in whose
jurisdiction Medora lay, allowed so many thieves to get off that
he was suspected of being in collusion with them. The ranch men
held a meeting at which he was present and Roosevelt told him in
very plain words their complaint against him and their
suspicions. Though he was a hot-tempered man, and very quick on
the trigger, he showed no willingness to shoot his bold young
accuser; he knew, of course, that the ranchmen would have taken
vengeance on him in a flash, but it is also possible that he
recognized the truth of Roosevelt's accusation and felt
compunctions.

Some time later Roosevelt showed how a zealous officer of the
law--he was the acting deputy sheriff - ought to behave. He had a
boat in which he used to cross the Little Missouri to his herds
on the other side. One day he missed the boat, its rope having
been cut, and he inferred that it must have been stolen by three
cattle-thieves who had been operating in that neighborhood. By
means of it they could easily escape, for there was no road along
the river on which horsemen could pursue them. Notwithstanding
this, Roosevelt resolved that they should not go free. In three
days Bill Sewall and Dow built a flat, water-tight craft, on
which they put enough food to last for a fortnight, and then all
three started downstream. They had drifted and poled one hundred
and fifty miles or more, before they saw a faint column of smoke
in the bushes near the bank. It proved to be the temporary camp
of the fugitives, whom they quickly took prisoners, put into the
boat, and carried another one hundred and fifty miles down the
river to the nearest town with a jail and a court. Going and
coming, Roosevelt spent nearly three weeks, not to mention the
hardships which he and his trusty men suffered on the way; but he
had served justice, and Justice must be served at any cost. When
the story be came known, the admiration of his neighbors for his
pluck and persistence rose; but they wondered why he took the
trouble to make the extra journey, in order to deliver the
prisoners to the jail, instead of shooting them where he overtook
them.

I chronicle these examples of Roosevelt's courage among the
lawless gangs with whom he was thrown in North Dakota, because
they reveal several qualities which came to be regarded as
peculiarly Rooseveltian during the rest of his days. We are apt
to speak of "mere" physical courage as being inferior to moral
courage; and doubtless there are many heroes unknown to the world
who, under the torture of disease or the poignancy of social
injustice and wrongs, deserve the highest crown of heroism. Men
who would lead a charge in battle would shrink from denouncing an
accepted convention or even from slighting a popular fashion. But
after all, the instinct of the race is sound in revering those
who give their lives without hesitation or regret at the point of
deadly peril, or offer their own to save the lives of others.

Roosevelt's experience established in him that physical courage
which his soul had aspired to in boyhood, when the consciousness
of his bodily inferiority made him seem shy and almost timid. Now
he had a bodily frame which could back up any resolution he might
take. The emergencies in a ranchman's career also trained him to
be quick to will, instantaneous in his decisions, and equally
quick in the muscular activity by which he carried them out. In a
community whose members gave way to sudden explosions of passion,
you might be shot dead unless you got the drop on the other
fellow first. The anecdotes I have repeated, indicate that
Roosevelt must often have outsped his opponent in drawing.

We learn from them, too, that he was far from being the
pugnacious person whom many of his later critics insisted that he
was. Having given ample proof to the frontiersmen that he had no
fear, he resolutely kept the peace with them, and they had no
desire to break peace with him. Bluster and swagger were foreign
to his nature, and he loathed a bully as much as a coward. If we
had not already had the record of his. three years in the
Legislature, in which he surprised his friends by his wonderful
talent for mixing with all sorts of persons, we might marvel at
his ability to meet the cowboys and ranchmen, and even the
desperadoes, of the Little Missouri on equal terms, to win the
respect of all of them, and the lifelong devotion of a few. They
knew that the usual tenderfoot, however much he might wish to
fraternize, was fended from them by his past, his traditions, his
civilized life, his instincts; but in Roosevelt's case, there was
no gulf, no barrier.

Even after he became President of the United States, I can no
more imagine that he felt embarrassment in meeting any one, high
or low, than that he scrutinized the coat on a man's back in
order to know how to treat him.

To have gained solid health, to have gained mastery of himself,
and to have put his social nature to the severest test and found
it flawless, were valid results of his life on the Elkhorn Ranch.
It imparted to him also a knowledge which was to prove most
precious to him in the unforeseen future. For it taught him the
immense diversity of the people, and consequently of the
interests, of the United States. It gave him a national point of
view, in which he perceived that the standards and desires of the
Atlantic States were not all-inclusive or final. Yet while it
impressed on him the importance of geographical considerations,
it impressed, more deeply still, the fact that there are moral
fundamentals not to be measured by geography, or by time, or by
race. Lincoln learned this among the pioneers of Illinois; in
similar fashion Roosevelt learned it in the Bad Lands of Dakota
with their pioneers and exiles from civilization, and from
studying the depths of his own nature.



CHAPTER V. BACK TO THE EAST AND LITERATURE

One September day in 1886, Roosevelt was reading a New York
newspaper in his Elkhorn cabin, when he saw that he had been
nominated by a body of Independents as candidate for Mayor of New
York City. Whether he had been previously consulted or not, I do
not know, but he evidently accepted the nomination as a call, for
he at once packed up his things and started East. The political
situation in the metropolis was somewhat abnormal. The United
Democracy had nominated for Mayor Abram S. Hewitt, a merchant of
high standing, one of those decent persons whom Tammany Hall puts
forward to attract respectable citizens when it finds itself in a
tight place and likely to be defeated. At such a pinch, Tammany
even politely keeps in the background and allows it to appear
that the decent candidate is wholly the choice of decent
Democrats: for the Tammany Tiger wears, so to speak, a reversible
skin which, when turned inside out, shows neither stripes nor
claws. Mr. Hewitt's chief opponent was Henry George, put up by
the United Labor Party, which had suddenly swelled into
importance, and had discovered in the author of "Progress and
Poverty" and in the advocate of the Single Tax a candidate whose
private character was generally respected, even by those who most
hated his economic teachings. The mere thought that such a
Radical should be proposed for Mayor scared, not merely the Big
Interests, but the owners of real estate and intangible property.

Against these redoubtable competitors, the Independents and
Republicans pitted Roosevelt, hoping that his prestige and
personal popularity would carry the day. He made a plucky
campaign, but Hewitt won, with Henry George second. In his letter
of acceptance he went straight at the mark, which was that the
government of the city was strictly a business affair. " I very
earnestly deprecate," he says, "all attempts to introduce any
class or caste feeling into the mayoralty contest. Laborers and
capitalists alike are interested in having an honest and
economical city government, and if elected I shall certainly
strive to be the representative of all good citizens, paying heed
to nothing whatever but the general well-being."* When Tammany
reverses its hide, the Republicans in New York City need not
expect victory; and in 1886 Henry George drew off a good many
votes which would ordinarily have been cast for Roosevelt.

* Riis, 101.


Nevertheless, the fight was worth making. It reintroduced him to
the public, which had not heard him for two years, and it helped
erase from men's memories the fact that he had supported Blaine
in 1884. His contest with Hewitt and George set him in his true
light--a Republican by conviction, a party man, also by
conviction, but above all the fearless champion of what he
believed to be the right, in its struggle against economic heresy
and political corruption.

The election over, Roosevelt went to Europe, and on December 2,
1886, at St. George's, Hanover Square, London, he married Miss
Edith Kermit Carow, of New York, whom he had known since his
earliest childhood, the playmate of his sister Corinne, the
little girl whose photograph had stirred up in him "homesickness
and longings for the past," when he was a little boy in Paris.
Cecil Spring-Rice, an old friend (subsequently British Ambassador
at Washington), was his groomsman, and being married at St.
George's, Theodore remarks, "made me feel as if I were living in
one of Thackeray's novels."

Mrs. Roosevelt's father came of Huguenot stock, the name being
originally Quereau; the first French immigrants of the family
having migrated to New York in the seventeenth century at about
the same time as Claes van Roosevelt. Like the Roosevelts, the
Carows had so freely intermarried with English stock in America
that the French origin of one was as little discernible in their
descendants as was the Dutch origin of the other. Through her
American line Mrs. Roosevelt traced back to Jonathan Edwards, the
prolific ancestor of many persons who emerged above the common
level by either their virtue or their badness.

After spending several months in Europe, Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt
returned and settled at Oyster Bay, Long Island, where he had
built, not long before, a country house on Sagamore Hill. His
place there comprised many acres--a beautiful country of hill and
hollow and fine tall trees. The Bay made in from Long Island
Sound and seemed to be closed by the opposite shore, so that in
calm weather you might mistake it for a lake. This home was
thoroughly adapted for Roosevelt's needs. Being only thirty miles
from New York, with a railroad near by, convenient but not
intrusive, it gave easy access to the city, but was remote enough
to discourage casual or undesired callers. It had sufficient land
to carry on farming and to sustain the necessary horses and
domestic cattle. Mrs. Roosevelt supervised it; he simply loved it
and got distraction from his more pressing affairs; if he had
chosen to withdraw from these he might have devoted himself to
the pleasing and leisurely life of a gentleman farmer. For a
while his chief occupation was literary. Into this he pitched
with characteristic energy. His innate craving for
self-expression could never be satiated by speaking alone, and
now, since he filled no public position which would be a cause or
perhaps an excuse for speaking, he wrote with all the more
enthusiasm.

Although he was less than seven years out of college, his
political career had given him a national reputation, which
helped and was helped by the vogue of his writings. The American
public had come to perceive that Theodore Roosevelt could do
nothing commonplace. The truth was, that he did many things that
other men did which ceased to be commonplace only when he did
them. Scores of other young men went on hunting trips after big
game in the Rockies or the Selkirks, and even ranching had been
engaged in by the enterprising and the adventurous, who hoped to
find it a short way to a fortune. But whether as ranch man or as
hunter, Roosevelt was better known than all the rest. His skill
in describing his experiences no doubt largely accounted for
this; but the fact that the experiences were his, was the
ultimate explanation.

Roosevelt began to write very early. He thought that the
instruction in rhetoric which he received at Harvard enlightened
him, and during his Senior year he began the "History of the
Naval War of 1812," which he completed and published in 1882.
This work at once won recognition for him, and it differed from
the traditional accounts, embedded in the school histories of the
United States, in doing full justice to the British naval
operations. Probably, for the first time, our people realized
that the War of 1812 had not been a series of victories,
startling and irresistible, for the American Navy. Nearly ten
years later, Roosevelt in the "Winning of the West" made his
second excursion into history. These volumes, which eventually
numbered six, are regarded by experts in the subject as of great
value, and I suppose that in them Roosevelt did more than any
other writer to popularize the study of the historical origin and
development of the vast region west of the Alleghanies which now
forms a vital part of the American Republic. One attribute of a
real historian is the power to discern the structural or pregnant
quality of historic periods and episodes; and this power
Roosevelt displayed in choosing both the War of 1812 and the
Winning of the West.

In his larger history Roosevelt had a swift, energetic, and
direct style. He never lacked for ideas. Descriptions came to him
with exuberant details of which he selected enough to leave his
reader with the feeling that he had looked on a vivid and
accurate picture. Here, for instance, is a portrait of Daniel
Boon which seems remarkably lifelike, because I remember how
difficult other writers find it to individualize most of the
figures of the pioneers.

The backwoodsmen, he says, "all tilled their own clearings,
guiding the plow among the charred stumps left when the trees
were chopped down and the land burned over, and they were all, as
a matter of course, hunters. With Boon, hunting and exploration
were passions, and the lonely life of the wilderness, with its
bold, wild freedom, the only existence for which he really cared.
He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle's, and
muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of his life made
no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of any kind,
and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the end
of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often
portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who
never blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer
any wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance,
and indomitable resolution upon which to draw when fortune proved
adverse. His self-command and patience, his daring, restless love
of adventure, and, in time of danger, his absolute trust in his
own powers and resources, all combined to render him peculiarly
fitted to follow the career of which he was so fond."*

* Winning of the West, 1, 137, 138 (ed. 1889).


Roosevelt contributed two volumes to the American Statesmen
Series, one on Thomas Hart Benton in 1886, and the other on
Gouverneur Morris in 1887. The environment and careers of these
two men--the Missouri Senator of the first half of the nineteenth
century, and the New York financier of the last half of the
eighteenth--afforded him scope for treating two very diverse
subjects. He was himself rooted in the old New York soil and he
had come, through his life in the West, to divine the conditions
of Benton's days. Once again, many years later (1900) he tried
his hand at biography, taking Oliver Cromwell for his hero, and
making a summary, impressionistic sketch of him. Besides the
interest this biography has for students of Cromwell, it has also
interest for students of Roosevelt, for it is a specimen of the
sort of by-products he threw off in moments of relaxation.

More characteristic than such excursions into history and
biography, however, are his many books describing ranch-life and
hunting. In the former, he gives you truthful descriptions of the
men of the West as he saw them, and in the latter he recounts his
adventures with elk and buffalo, wolves and bears. The mere
trailing and killing of these creatures do not satisfy him. He
studies with equal zest their haunts and their habits. The
naturalist in him, which we recognized in his youth, found this
vent in his maturity. And long years afterward, on his
expeditions to Africa and to Brazil he dealt even more
exuberantly with the natural history of the countries which he
visited.

Two other classes of writings make up Roosevelt's astonishing
output. He gathered his essays and addresses into half a dozen
volumes, remarkable alike for the wide variety of their subjects,
and for the vigor with which he seized on each subject as if it
was the one above all others which most absorbed him. Finally,
skim the collection of his official messages, as Commissioner, as
Governor, or as President, and you will discover that he had the
gift of infusing life and color into the usually drab and
cheerless wastes of official documents.

I am not concerned to make a literary appraisal of Theodore
Roosevelt's manifold works, but I am struck by the fact that our
professional critics ignore him entirely in their summaries or
histories of recent American literature. As I re-read, after
twenty years, and in some cases after thirty years, books of his
which made a stir on their appearance, I am impressed, not only
by the excellence of their writing, but by their lasting quality.
If he had not done so many other things of greater importance,
and done them supremely, he would have secured lasting fame by
his books on hunting, ranching, and exploration. No other
American compares with him, and I know of no other, in English at
least, who has made a contribution in these fields equal to his.

Throughout these eight or ten volumes he proves himself to be one
of those rare writers who see what they write. As in the case of
Tennyson, than whom no English poet, in spite of nearsightedness,
has observed so minutely the tiniest details of form or the
faintest nuance of color, so the lack of normal vision did not
prevent Roosevelt from being the closest of observers. He was
also, by the way, a good shot with rifle or pistol. If you read
one of his chapters in "Hunting the Grizzly" and ask yourself
wherein its animation and attraction lie, you will find that it
is because every sentence and every line report things seen. He
does not, like the Realist, try to get a specious lifelikeness by
heaping up banal and commonplace facts; he selects. His
imagination reminds one of the traveling spark which used to run
along the great chandelier in the theatre, and light each jet, so
that its passage seemed a flight from point to point of
brilliance. Wherever he focuses his survey a spot glows vividly.

The eye, the master sense of the mind, thus dominates him, and I
think that we shall trace to its mastery much of the immediate
power which he exerted by his writings and speeches on public,
social, and moral topics. He struck off, in the heat of
composition or of speaking, phrases and similes which millions
caught up eagerly and made as familiar as household words. He
even remembered from his extensive reading some item which, when
applied by him to the affair of the moment, acquired new
pertinence and a second life. Thus, Bunyan's " muckraker" lives
again; thus, "the curse of Meroz," and many another Bible
reference, springs up with a fresh meaning.

No doubt the purist will find occasional lapses in taste or
expression, and the quibbling peddler of rhetoric will gloat over
some doubtful construction; but neither purist nor peddler of
rhetoric has ever been able in his writing to display the ease,
the rush, the naturalness, the sparkle which were as genuine in
Roosevelt as were the features of his face. On reading these
pages, which have escaped the attention of the professional
critics, I wonder whether they may not have a fate similar to
Defoe's; for Defoe also was read voraciously by his
contemporaries, his pamphlets made a great rustle in their time,
and then the critics turned to other and spicier writers. But in
due season, other critics, as well as the world, made the
discovery that only a genius could have produced Defoe's
"every-day," "commonplace" style.

His innate vigor, often swelling into vehemence, marks also
Roosevelt's political essays, and yet he had time for reflection,
and if you examine closely even some of his combative passages,
you will see that they do not spring from sudden anger or scorn,
but from a conviction which has matured slowly in him. He had not
the philosophic calm which formed the background of Burke's
political masterpieces, but he had the clearness, the simplicity,
by which he could drive home his thoughts into the minds of the
multitude. Burke spoke and wrote for thousands and for posterity;
Roosevelt addressed millions for the moment, and let posterity do
what it would with his burning appeals and invectives. He was not
so absolutely self-effacing as Lincoln, but I think that he
realized to the full the meaning of Lincoln's phrase, "the world
will little note, nor long remember what we may say here," and
that he would have made it his motto. For he, like all truly
great statesmen, was so immensely concerned in winning today's
battle, that he wasted no time in speculating what tomorrow, or
next year, or next century would say about it. Mysticism, the
recurrent fad which indicates that its victims neither see clear
nor think straight, could not spread its veils over him. The man
who visualizes is safe from that intellectual weakness and moral
danger. But although Roosevelt felt the sway of the true
emotions, he allowed only his intimates to know what he held most
intimate and sacred. He felt also the charm of beauty, and over
and over again in his descriptions of hunting and riding in the
West, he pauses to recall beautiful scenery or some unusual bit
of landscape; and even in remembering his passage down the River
of Doubt, when he came nearer to death than he ever came until he
died, in spite of tormenting pain and desperate anxiety for his
companions, he mentions more than once the loveliness of the
river scene or of the massed foliage along its banks. Naturalist
though he was, bent first on studying the habits of birds and
animals, he yet took keen delight in the iridescent plumage or
graceful form or the beautiful fur of bird and beast.

The quality of a writer can best be judged by reading a whole
chapter, or two or three, of his book, but sometimes he reveals a
phase of himself in a single paragraph. Read, for instance, this
brief extract from Roosevelt's "Through the Brazilian
Wilderness," if you would understand some of the traits which I
have just alluded to. It comes at the end of his long and
dismaying exploration of the River of Doubt, when the party was
safe at last, and the terrible river was about to flow into the
broad, lakelike Amazon, and Manaos was almost in sight, where
civilization could be laid hold on again, Manaos, whence the
swift ships went steaming towards the Atlantic and the Atlantic
opened a clear path home. He says:

'The North was calling strongly the three men of the North--Rocky
Dell Farm to Cherrie, Sagamore Hill to me; and to Kermit the call
was stronger still. After nightfall we could now see the Dipper
well above the horizon--upside down with the two pointers
pointing to a North Star below the world's rim; but the Dipper,
with all its stars. In our home country spring had now come, the
wonderful Northern spring of long, glorious days, of brooding
twilight, of cool, delightful nights. Robin and bluebird,
meadow-lark and song-sparrow were singing in the mornings at
home; the maple buds were red; windflowers and bloodroot were
blooming while the last patches of snow still lingered; the
rapture of the hermit thrush in Vermont, the serene golden melody
of the wood thrush on Long Island, would be heard before we were
there to listen. Each was longing for the homely things that were
so dear to him, for the home people who were dearer still, and
for the one who was dearest of all.' *

* Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 320.



CHAPTER VI. APPLYING MORALS TO POLITICS

I have said that Roosevelt devoted the two years after he came
back to New York to writing, but it would be a mistake to imagine
that writing alone busied him. He was never a man who did or
would do only one thing at a time. His immense energy craved
variety, and in variety he found recreation. Now that the
physical Roosevelt had caught up in relative strength with the
intellectual, he could take what holidays requiring exhaustless
bodily vigor he chose. The year seldom passed now when he did not
go West for a month or two. Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow were
established with their families on the Elkhorn Ranch, which
Roosevelt continued to own, although, I believe, like many
ranches at that period, it ceased to be a good investment.
Sometimes he made a hurried dash to southern Texas, or to the
Selkirks, or to Montana in search of new sorts of game. In the
mountains he indulged in climbing, but this was not a favorite
with him because it offered less sport in proportion to the
fatigue. While he was still a young man he had gone up the
Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, feats which still required endurance,
although they did not involve danger.

While we think of him, therefore, as dedicating himself to his
literary work--the "Winning of the West" and the accounts of
ranch life--we must remember that he had leisure for other
things. He watched keenly the course of politics, for instance,
and in 1888 when the Republicans nominated Benjamin Harrison as
their candidate for President, Roosevelt supported him
effectively and took rank with the foremost Republican speakers
of the campaign. After his election Harrison, who both recognized
Roosevelt's great ability and felt under obligation to him,
wished to offer him the position of an under-secretary in the
State Department; but Blaine, who was slated for Secretary of
State, had no liking for the young Republican whose coolness in
1884 he had not forgotten. So Harrison invited Roosevelt to be a
Civil Service Commissioner. The position had never been
conspicuous; its salary was not large; its duties were of the
routine kind which did not greatly tax the energies of the
Commissioners, who could never hope for fame, but only for the
approval of their own consciences for whatever good work they
did. The Machine Republicans, whether of national size, or of
State or municipal, were glad to know that Roosevelt would be put
out of the way in that office.

They already thought of him as a young man dangerous to all
Machines and so they felt the prudence of bottling him up. To
make him a Civil Service Commissioner was not exactly so final as
chloroforming a snarling dog would be, but it was a strong
measure of safety. Theodore's friends, on the other hand, advised
him against accepting the appointment, because, they said, it
would shelve him, politically, use up his brains which ought to
be spent on higher work, and allow the country which was just
beginning to know him to forget his existence. Men drop out of
sight so quickly at Washington unless they can stand on some
pedestal which raises them above the multitude.

The Optimist of the future, to hasten whose coming we are all
making the world so irresistibly attractive, will be endowed, let
us hope, with a sense of humor. With that, he can read history as
a cosmic joke-book, and not as the Biography of the Devil, as
many of us moderns, besides Jean Paul, have found it. How long it
has taken, and how much blood has been spilt before this or that
most obvious folly has been abolished! With what absurd tenacity
have men flown in the face of reason and flouted common sense! So
our Optimist, looking into the conditions which made Civil
Service Reform imperative, will shed tears either of pity or of
laughter.

As long ago as the time of the cave-dweller, who was clothed in
shaggy hair instead of in broadcloth or silk, prehistoric man
learned that the best arrow or spear was that tipped with the
best piece of flint. In brief, to do good work, you must have
good tools. Translated into the terms of today, this means that
the expert or specialist must be preferred to the untrained. In
nearly all walks of life this truth was taken for granted, except
in affairs connected with government and administration. A
President might be elected, not because he was experienced in
these matters, but because he had won a battle, or was the
compromise candidate between two other aspirants. As it was with
Presidents, so with the Cabinet officers, Congressmen, and State
and city officials. Fitness being ignored as a qualification to
office, made it easy for favoritism and selfish motives to
determine the appointment of the army of employees required in
the bureaus and departments. That good old political freebooter,
Andrew Jackson, merely put into words what his predecessors had
put into practice: "To the victors belong the spoils." And since
his time, more than one upright and intelligent theorist on
government has supported the Party System even to the point where
the enjoyment of the spoils by the victors seems justified. The
"spoils" were the salaries paid to the lower grade of placemen
and women--salaries usually not very large, but often far above
what those persons could earn in honest competition. As the money
came out of the public purse, why worry? And how could party
enthusiasm during the campaign and at the polls be kept up, if
some of the partisans might not hope for tangible rewards for
their services? Many rich men sat in Congress, and the Senate be
came, proverbially, a millionaires' club. But not one of these
plutocrats conducted the private business which made him rich by
the methods to which he condemned the business administration of
the government. He did not fill his counting-room with shirkers
and incompetents; he did not find sinecures for his wife's poor
relations; he did not pad his payroll with parasites whose
characteristics were an itching palm and an unconquerable
aversion to work. He knew how to select the quickest, cleverest,
most industrious assistants, and through them he prospered.

That a man who had sworn to uphold and direct his government to
the best of his ability, should have the conscience to treat his
country as he did not treat himself, can be easily explained: he
had no conscience. Fashion, like a local anaesthetic, deadens the
sensitiveness of conscience in this or that spot; and the
prevailing fashion under all governments, autocratic or
democratic, has permitted the waste and even the dishonest
application of public funds.

These anomalies at last roused the sense of humor of some of our
citizens, just as the injustice and dishonesty which the system
embodied roused the moral sense of others; and the Reform of the
Civil Service--a dream at first, and then a passionate cause
which the ethical would not let sleep--came into being. But to
the politicians of the old type, the men of "inflooence" and
"pull," the project seemed silly. They ridiculed it, and they
expected to make it ridiculous in the eyes of the American
people, by calling it "Snivel" Service Reform. Zealots, however,
cannot be silenced by mockery. The contention that fitness should
have something to do in the choice of public servants was
effectively confirmed by the scientific departments of the
government. The most shameless Senator would not dare to propose
his brother's widow to lead an astronomical expedition, or to
urge the appointment of the ward Boss of his city as Chairman of
the Coast Survey. So the American people perceived that there
were cases in which the Spoils System did not apply. The
reformers pushed ahead; Congress at last took notice, and a law
was passed bringing a good many appointees in the Post Office and
other departments under the Merit System. The movement then
gained ground slowly and the spoilsmen began to foresee that if
it spread to the extent which seemed likely, it would deprive
them of much of their clandestine and corrupting power. Senator
Roscoe Conkling, one of the wittiest and most brazen of these,
remarked, that when Dr. Johnson told Boswell that "patriotism is
the last refuge of a scoundrel," he had not sounded the
possibilities of "reform."

The first administration of President Cleveland, who was a great,
irremovable block of stubbornness in whatever cause he thought
right, gave invaluable help to this one. The overturn of the
Republican Party, after it had held power for twenty-four years,
entailed many changes in office and in all classes of
office-holders. Cleveland had the opportunity, therefore, of
applying the Merit System as far as the law had carried it, and
his actions gave Civil Service Reformers much though not complete
satisfaction. The movement was just at the turning-point when
Roosevelt was appointed Commissioner in 1 889. Under listless or
timid direction it would have flagged and probably lost much
ground; but Roosevelt could never do anything listlessly and
whatever he pushed never lost ground.

The Civil Service Commission appointed by President Harrison
consisted of three members, of whom the President was C. R.
Procter, later Charles Lyman, with Roosevelt and Hugh Thompson,
an ex-Confederate soldier. I do not disparage Roosevelt's
colleagues when I say that they were worthy persons who did not
claim to have an urgent call to reform the Civil Service, or
anything else. They were not of the stuff which leads revolts or
reforms, but they were honest and did their duty firmly. They
stood by Roosevelt "shoulder to shoulder," and Thompson's mature
judgment restrained his impetuosity. Roosevelt always
acknowledged what he owed to the Southern gentleman. In a very
short time the Commission, Congress, and the public learned that
it was Roosevelt, the youngest member, just turned thirty years
of age, who steered the Commission. Hostile critics would say, of
course, that he usurped the leadership; but I think that this is
inaccurate. It was not his conceit or ambition, it was destiny
working through him, which made where he sat the head of the
table. Being tremendously interested in this cause and
incomparably abler than Lyman or Thompson, he naturally did most
of the work, and his decisions shaped their common policy. The
appeal to his sense of humor and his sense of justice stimulated
him, and being a man who already saw what large consequences
sometimes flow from small causes he must have been buoyed up by
the thought that any of the cases which came before him might set
a very important precedent.

Roosevelt acted on the principle that the office holder who
swears to carry out a law must do this without hesitation or
demur. If the law is good, enforcing it will make its goodness
apparent to everybody; if it is bad, it will become the more
quickly odious and need to be repealed. Roosevelt enforced the
Civil Service Law with the utmost rigor. It called for the
examination of candidates for office, and the examiners paid some
heed to their moral fitness. Its opponents tried to stir up
public opinion against it by circulating what purported to be
some of its examination papers. Why, they asked, should a man who
wished to be a letter-carrier in Keokuk, be required to give a
list of the Presidents of the United States? Or what was the
shortest route for a letter going from Bombay to Yokohama? By
these and similar spurious questions the spoilsmen hoped to get
rid of the reformers. But "shrewd slander," as Roosevelt called
it, could not move him. Two specimen cases will suffice to show
how he reduced shrewd slanderers to confusion. The first was
Charles Henry Grosvenor, an influential Republican Congressman
from Ohio, familiarly known as the "Gentle Shepherd of Ohio,"
because of his efforts to raise the tariff on wool for the
benefit of the owners of the few thousand sheep in that State. A
Congressional Committee was investigating the Civil Service
Commission and Roosevelt asked that Grosvenor, who had attacked
it, might be summoned. Grosvenor, however, did not appear, but
when he learned that Roosevelt was going to his Dakota ranch for
a vacation, he sent word that he would come. Nevertheless, this
gallant act failed to save him, for Roosevelt canceled his ticket
West, and confronted Grosvenor at the investigation. The Gentle
Shepherd protested that he had never said that he wished to
repeal the Civil Service Law; whereupon Roosevelt read this
extract from one of his speeches: "I will vote not only to strike
out this provision, but I will vote to repeal the whole law."
When Roosevelt pointed out the inconsistency of the two
statements, Grosvenor declared that they meant the same thing.

Being caught thus by one foot in Roosevelt's mantrap, he quickly
proceeded to be caught by the other. He declared that Rufus P.
Putnam, one of the candidates in dispute, had never lived in
Grosvenor's Congressional district, or even in Ohio. Then Mr.
Roosevelt quoted from a letter written by Grosvenor: "Mr. Rufus
P. Putnam is a legal resident of my district, and has relatives
living there now." With both feet caught in the man-trap, the
Gentle Shepherd was suffering much pain, but Truth is so great a
stranger to spoilsmen that he found difficulty in getting within
speaking distance of her. For he protested, first, that he never
wrote the letter, next, that he had forgotten that he wrote it,
and finally, that he was misinformed when he wrote it. So far as
appears, he never risked a tilt with the smiling young
Commissioner again, but returned to his muttons and their
fleeces.

A still more distinguished personage fell before the enthusiastic
Commissioner. This was Arthur Pue Gorman, a Senator from
Maryland, a Democrat, one of the most pertinacious agents of the
Big Interests in the United States Congress. Evidently, also, he
served them well, as they kept him in the Senate for nearly
twenty-five years, until his death. They employed Democrats as
well as Republicans, just as they subscribed to both Democratic
and Republican campaign funds. For, "in politics there is no
politics." Gorman, who knew that the Spoils System was almost
indispensable to the running of a political machine, waited for a
chance to attack the Civil Service Commission. Thinking that the
propitious moment had come, he inveighed against it in the
Senate. He "described with moving pathos," as Roosevelt tells the
story, "how a friend of his, 'a bright young man from Baltimore,'
a Sunday-School scholar, well recommended by his pastor, wished
to be a letter-carrier;" but the cruel examiners floored him by
asking the shortest route from Baltimore to China, to which he
replied that, as he never wished to go to China, he hadn't looked
up the route. Then, Senator Gorman asserted, the examiners
quizzed him about all the steamship lines from the United States
to Europe, branched off into geology and chemistry, and "turned
him down."

Gorman was unaware that the Commissioners kept records of all
their examinations, and when Roosevelt wrote him a polite note
inquiring the name of the "bright young man from Baltimore,"
Gorman did not reply. Roosevelt also asked him, in case he shrank
from giving the name of his informant, to give the date when the
alleged examination took place. He even offered to open the files
to any representative the Senator chose to send. Gorman, however,
"not hitherto known as a sensitive soul," as Roosevelt remarks,
"expressed himself as so shocked at the thought that the veracity
of the bright young man should be doubted, that he could not
bring himself to answer my letter." Accordingly, Roosevelt made a
public statement that the Commissioners had never asked the
questions which Gorman alleged. Gorman waited until the next
session of Congress and then, in a speech before the Senate,
complained that he had received a very "impudent" letter from
Commissioner Roosevelt "cruelly" calling him to account, when he
was simply endeavoring to right a great wrong which the
Commission had committed. But neither then nor afterwards did he
furnish "any clue to the identity of that child of his fondest
fancy, the bright young man without a name."

Roosevelt must have chuckled with a righteous exultation at such
evidence as this that the Lord had delivered the Philistines into
his hands; and his abomination of the Spoils System must have
deepened when he saw its Grosvenors and its Gormans brazen out
the lies he caught them telling.

When the spoilsmen failed to get rid of the Commission by
ridicule and by open attack, they resorted to the trick of not
appropriating money for it in this or that district. But this did
not succeed, for the Commission, owing to lack of funds, held no
examinations in those districts, and therefore no candidates from
them could get offices. This made the politicians unpopular with
the hungry office-seekers whom they deprived of their food at the
public trough.

The Commission had to struggle, however, not only to keep unfit
candidates out of office, but to keep in office those who
discharged their duty honestly and zealously. After every
election there came a rush of Congressmen and others, to turn out
the tried and trusty employees and to put in their own
applicants. Such an overturn was of course detrimental to the
service; first, because it substituted greenhorns for trained
employees, and next, because it introduced the haphazard of
politicians' whims for a just scheme of promotion and retention
in office. Roosevelt lamented bitterly over the injustice and he
denounced the waste. Many cases of grievous hardship came to his
notice. Widows, whose only means of support for themselves and
their little children was their salary, were thrown upon the
street in order that rapacious politicians might secure places
for their henchmen. Roosevelt might plead, but the politician
remained obdurate. What was the tragic lot of a widow and
starving children compared with keeping promises with greedy
"heelers"? Roosevelt saw that there was no redress except through
the extension of the classified service. This he urged at all
times, and ten years later, when he was himself President, he
added more than fifty thousand offices to the list of those which
the spoilsmen could not clutch.

He served six years as Civil Service Commissioner, being
reappointed in 1892 by President Cleveland. The overturn in
parties which made Cleveland President for the second time,
enabled Roosevelt to watch more closely the working of the Reform
System and he did what he could to safeguard those Government
employees who were Republicans from being ousted for the benefit
of Democrats. In general, he believed in laying down certain
principles on the tenure of office and in standing resolutely by
them. Thus, in 1891, under Harrison, on being urged to retain
General Corse, the excellent Democratic Postmaster of Boston, he
replied to his friend Curtis Guild that Corse ought to be
continued as a matter of principle and not because Cleveland,
several years before, had retained Pearson, the Republican
Postmaster of New York, as an exception.

At the end of six years, Roosevelt felt that he had worked on the
Commission long enough to let the American people understand how
necessary it was to maintain and extend the Merit System in the
Civil Service. A sudden access of virtue had just cast out the
Tammany Ring in New York City and set up Mr. Strong, a Reformer,
as Mayor. He wished to secure Roosevelt's help and Roosevelt was
eager to give it. The Mayor offered him the headship of the
Street Cleaning Department, but this he declined, not because he
thought the place beneath him, but because he lacked the
necessary scientific qualifications, and Mayor Strong, was lucky
in finding for it the best man in the country, Colonel George E.
Waring. Accordingly, the Mayor ap pointed Roosevelt President of
the Board of Police Commissioners, and he accepted.

The Police System in New York City in 1895, when Roosevelt took
control, was a monstrosity which, in almost every respect, did
exactly the opposite from what the Police System is organized to
do. Moral values had been so perverted that it took a strong man
to hold fast to the rudimentary distinctions between Good and
Evil. The Police existed, in theory, to protect the lives and
property of respectable citizens; to catch law-breakers and hand
them over to the courts for punishment; to hunt down gamblers,
swindlers, and all the other various criminals and purveyors of
vice. In reality, the Police under Tammany abetted crime and
protected the vicious. This they did, not because they had any
special hostility to Virtue--they probably knew too little about
it to form a dispassionate opinion any way--but because Vice paid
better. They held the cynical view that human nature will always
breed a great many persons having a propensity to licentious or
violent habits; that laws were made to check and punish these
persons, and that they might go their pernicious ways unmolested
if the Police took no notice of them. So the Police established a
system of immunity which anybody could enjoy by paying the price.
Notorious gambling-hells "ran wide open" after handing the
required sum to the high police official who extorted it.
Hundreds of houses of ill-fame carried on their hideous traffic
undisturbed, so long as the Police Captain of the district
received his weekly bribe. Gangs of roughs, toughs, and gunmen
pursued their piratical business without thinking of the law, for
they shared their spoils with the supposed officers of the law.
And there were more degenerate miscreants still, who connived
with the Police and went unscathed. As if the vast sums collected
from these willing bribers were not enough, the Police added a
system of blackmail to be levied on those who were not
deliberately vicious, but who sought convenience. If you walked
downtown you found the sidewalk in front of certain stores almost
barricaded by packing-boxes, whereas next door the way might be
clear. This simply meant that the firm which wished to use the
sidewalk for its private advantage paid the policeman on that
beat, and he looked the other way. As there was an ordinance
against almost every conceivable thing, so the Police had a price
for making every ordinance a dead letter. Was this a cosmic joke,
a nightmare of cynicism, a delusion? No, New York was classed in
the reference books as a Christian city, and this was its
Christianity.

Roosevelt knew the seamless bond which connected the crime and
vice of the city with corrupt politics. The party Bosses,
Republicans and Democrats alike, were the final profiters from
police blackmail and bribery. As he held his mandate from a
Reform Administration, he might expect to be aided by it on the
political side; at least, he did not fear that the heads of the
other departments would secretly work to block his purification
of the Police. A swift examination showed him that the New York
Police Department actually protected the criminals and promoted
every kind of iniquity which it existed to put down. It was as if
in a hospital which should cure the sick, the doctors, instead of
curing disease, should make the sick worse and should make the
well sick. How was Roosevelt, equally valiant and honest, to
conquer this Hydra? He took the straight way dictated by common
sense. First of all, he gained the confidence and respect of his
men. He said afterwards, that even at its worst, when he went
into office, the majority of the Police wanted to do right; that
their instincts were loyal; and this meant much, because they
were tempted on all sides by vicious wrongdoers; they had
constantly before them the example of superiors who took bribes
and they received neither recognition nor praise for their own
worthy deeds.

The Force came very soon to understand that under Roosevelt every
man would get a "square deal." "Pulls" had no efficacy. The Chief
Commissioner personally kept track of as many men as he could.
When he saw in the papers one morning that Patrolman X had saved
a woman from drowning, he looked him up, found that the man had
been twenty-two years in the service, had saved twenty five
lives, and had never been noticed, much less thanked, by the
Commission. More than this, he had to buy his own uniform, and as
this was often rendered unfit for further use when he rescued
persons from drowning, or from a burning house, his heroism cost
him much in dollars and cents. By Roosevelt's orders the
Department henceforth paid for new uniforms in such cases, and it
awarded medals. By recognizing the good, and by weeding out as
fast as possible the bad members of the Force, Roosevelt thus
organized the best body of Police which New York City had ever
seen. There were, of course, some black sheep among them whom he
could not reach, but he changed the fashion, so that it was no
longer a point of excellence to be a black sheep.

Roosevelt rigorously enforced the laws, without regard to his
personal opinion. It happened that at that time the good people
of New York insisted that liquor saloons should do no business on
Sundays. This prohibition had long been on the statute book, but
it had been generally evaded because the saloon keepers had paid
the Bosses, who controlled the Police Department, to let them
keep open--usually by a side door--on Sundays. Indeed, the
statute was evidently passed by the Bosses in order to widen
their opportunity for blackmail; but in this they overreached
themselves. For the liquor-sellers at last revolted, and they
held conferences with the Bosses--David B. Hill was then the
Democratic State Boss and Richard Croker the Tammany Boss - and
they published in the Wine and Spirit Gazette, their organ, this
statement: "An agreement was made between the leaders of Tammany
Hall and the liquor-dealers, according to which the monthly
blackmail paid to the force should be discontinued in return for
political support." Croker and his pals, taking it as a matter of
course that the public knew their methods, neither denied this
incriminating statement nor thought it worth noticing. For a
while all the saloons enjoyed equal immunity in selling drinks on
Sunday. Then came Roosevelt and ordered his men to close every
saloon. Many of the bar-keepers laughed incredulously at the
patrol man who gave the order; many others flew into a rage. The
public denounced this attempt to strangle its liberties and
reviled the Police Chief as the would be enforcer of obsolescent
blue laws. But they could not frighten Roosevelt: the saloons
were closed. Nevertheless, even he could not prevail against the
overwhelming desire for drink. Crowds of virtuous citizens
preferred. an honest police force, but they preferred their beer
or their whiskey still more, and joined with the criminal
classes, the disreputables, and all the others who regarded any
law as outrageous which interfered with their personal habits.
Accordingly, since they could not budge Roosevelt, they changed
the law. A compliant local judge discovered that it was lawful to
take what drink you chose with a meal, and the result was that,
as Roosevelt describes it, a man by eating one pretzel might
drink seventeen beers.

Roosevelt himself visited all parts of the city and chiefly those
where Vice grew flagrant at night. The journalists, who knew of
his tours of inspection and were always on the alert for the
picturesque, likened him to the great Caliph who in similar
fashion investigated Baghdad, and they nicknamed him Haroun al
Roosevelt. He had for his companion Jacob Riis, a remarkable Dane
who migrated to this country in youth, got the position of
reporter on one of the New York dailies, frequented the courts,
studied the condition of the abject poor in the tenement-houses,
and the haunts where Vice breeds like scum on stagnant pools, and
wrote a book, "How the Other Half Lives," which startled the
consciences of the well-to-do and the virtuous. Riis showed
Roosevelt everything. Police headquarters were in Mulberry
Street, and yet within a stone's throw iniquity flourished. He
guided him through the Tenderloin District, and the wharves, and
so they made the rounds of the vast city. More than once
Roosevelt surprised a shirking patrolman on his beat, but his
purpose they all knew was to see justice done, and to keep the
officers of the Force up to the highest standard of duty.

One other anecdote concerning his experience as Police
Commissioner I repeat, because it shows by what happy touches of
humor he sometimes dispersed menacing clouds. A German
Jew-baiter, Rector Ahlwardt, came over from Berlin to preach a
crusade against the Jews. Great trepidation spread through the
Jewish colony and they asked Roosevelt to forbid Ahlwardt from
holding public meetings against them. This, he saw, would make a
martyr of the German persecutor and probably harm the Jews more
than it would help them. So Roosevelt bethought him of a device
which worked perfectly. He summoned forty of the best Jewish
policemen on the Force and ordered them to preserve order in the
hall and prevent Ahlwardt from being interrupted or abused. The
meeting passed off without disturbance; Ahlwardt stormed in vain
against the Jews; the audience and the public saw the humor of
the affair and Jew-baiting gained no foothold in New York City.
Although Roosevelt thoroughly enjoyed his work as Police
Commissioner, he felt rightly that it did not afford him the
freest scope to exercise his powers. Much as he valued executive
work, the putting into practice and carrying out of laws, he felt
more and more strongly the desire to make them, and his instinct
told him that he was fitted for this higher task. When,
therefore, the newly elected Republican President, William
McKinley, offered him the apparently modest position of Assistant
Secretary of the Navy, he accepted it.

There was general grieving in New York City--except among the
criminals and Tammany--at the news of his resignation. All sorts
of persons expressed regrets that were really sincere, and their
gratitude for the good which he had done for them all. Some of
them protested that he ought not to abandon the duty which he had
discharged so valiantly. One of these was Edwin L. Godkin, editor
of The Nation and the New York Evening Post, a critic who seldom
spoke politely of anything except ideals which had not been
attained, or commended persons who were not dead and so beyond
reach of praise.

Since Roosevelt himself has quoted this passage from Godkin's
letter to him, I think it ought to be reprinted here: "I have a
concern, as the Quakers say, to put on record my earnest belief
that in New York you are doing the greatest work of which any
American today is capable, and exhibiting to the young men of the
country the spectacle of a very important office administered by
a man of high character in the most efficient way amid a thousand
difficulties. As a lesson in politics I cannot think of anything
more instructive."

Godkin was a great power for good, in spite of the obvious
unpopularity which an incessant critic cannot fail to draw down
upon himself. The most pessimistic of us secretly crave a little
respite when for half an hour we may forget the circumambient and
all-pervading gloom: music, or an entertaining book, or a dear
friend lifts the burden from us. And then comes our
uncompromising pessimist and chides us for our softness and for
letting ourselves be led astray from our pessimism. His jeremiads
are probably justified, and as the historian looks back he finds
that they give the truest statement of the past; for the present
must be very bad, indeed, if it does not discover conditions
still worse in the past from which it has emerged. But Godkin
living could not escape from two sorts of unsympathetic
depreciators: first, the wicked who smarted under his just
scourge, and next, the upright, who tired of unremittent censure,
although they admitted that it was just.

Roosevelt came, quite naturally, to set the doer above the
critic, who, he thought, quickly degenerated into a fault finder
and from that into a common scold. When a man plunges into a
river to save somebody from drowning, if you do not plunge in
yourself, at least do not jeer at him for his method of swimming.
So Roosevelt, who shrank from no bodily or moral risk himself,
held in scorn the "timid good," the " acidly cantankerous," the
peace-at-any-price people, and the entire tribe of those who,
instead of attacking iniquities and abuses, attacked those who
are desperately engaged in fighting these, For this reason he
probably failed to absorb from Godkin's criticism some of the
benefit which it might have brought him. The pills were bitter,
but salutary. While he was Police Commissioner one of Joseph
Choate's epigrams passed current and is still worth recalling.
When some one remarked that New York was a very wicked city,
Choate replied, "How can you expect it to be otherwise, when Dana
makes Vice so attractive in the Sun every morning, and Godkin
makes Virtue so odious in the Post every afternoon?" Charles A.
Dana, the editor of the Sun, the stanch supporter of Tammany
Hall, and the apologist of almost every evil movement for nearly
thirty years, was a writer of diabolical cleverness whose
newspaper competed with Godkin's among the intellectual readers
in search of amusement. At one time, when Godkin had been
particularly caustic, and the Mugwumps at Harvard were unusually
critical, Roosevelt attended a committee meeting at the
University. After talking with President Eliot, he went and sat
by a professor, and remarked, play fully, "Eliot is really a good
fellow at heart. Do you suppose that, if he bit Godkin, it would
take?" So Roosevelt went back to Washington to be henceforth, as
it proved, a national figure whose career was to be forever
embedded in the structural growth of the United States.



CHAPTER VII. THE ROUGH RIDER

When Roosevelt returned to Washington in March, 1897, to take up
his duties as a subordinate officer in the National Government,
he was thirty-eight years old; a man in the prime of life, with
the strength of an ox, but quick in movement, and tough in
endurance. A rapid thinker, his intellect seemed as impervious to
fatigue as was his energy. Along with this physical and
intellectual make up went courage of both kinds, passion for
justice, and a buoying sense of obligation towards his fellows
and the State. His career thus far had prepared him for the
highest service. Born and brought up amid what our society
classifiers, with their sure democratic instincts, loved to call
the "aristocratic" circle in New York, his three years in the
Assembly at Albany introduced him to the motley group of
Representatives of high and low, bank presidents and farmers,
blacklegs and philanthropists, who gathered there to make the
laws for New York State. There he displayed the preference,
characteristic of him through life, of choosing his intimates
irrespective of their occupation or social label. Then he went
out on the Plains and learned to live with wild men, for whom the
artificial distinctions of civilization had no meaning. He
adapted himself to a primeval standard in which courage and a
rough sense of honor were the chief virtues. But this experience
did still more for him than prove his personal power of getting
along with such lower types of men, for it revealed to him the
human extremes of the American Nation. How vast it was, how
varied, how intricate, and, potentially, how sublime! Lincoln,
coming out of the Kentucky back woods, first to Springfield,
Illinois, then to Chicago in its youth, and finally to
Washington, similarly passed in review the American contrasts of
his time. More specific was Roosevelt's training as a Civil
Service Commissioner. The public had been applauding him as a
youthful prodigy, as a fellow of high spirit, of undisputed
valor, of brilliant flashes, of versatility, but the
worldly-wise, who have been too often fooled, were haunted by the
suspicion that perhaps this astonishing young man would turn out
to be only a meteor after all. His six years of routine work on
the Civil Service Commission put this anxiety to rest. That work
could not be carried on successfully by a man of moods and
spurts, but only by a man of solid moral basis, who could not be
disheartened by opposition or deflected by threats or by
temptations, and, as I have before suggested, the people began to
accustom itself to the fact that whatever position Roosevelt
filled was conspicuous precisely because he filled it. A good
while was still to elapse before we understood that notoriety was
inseparable from him, and did not need to be explained by the
theory that he was constantly setting traps for
self-advertisement.

As Police Commissioner of New York City he continued his familiar
methods, and deepened the impression he had created. He carried
boldness to the point of audacity and glorified the "square
deal." Whatever he undertook, he drove through with the
remorselessness of a zealot. He made no pretense of treating
humbugs and shams as if they were honest and real; and when he
found that the laws which were made to punish criminals, were
used to protect them, no scruple prevented him from achieving the
spirit of the law, although he might disregard its perverted
letter.

Ponder this striking example. The City of New York forbade the
sale of liquor to minors. But this ordinance was so completely
unobserved that a large proportion of the common drunks brought
before the Police Court were lads and even young girls, to whom
the bar-tenders sold with impunity. The children, often the
little children of depraved parents, "rushed the growler";
factory hands sent the boys out regularly to fetch their bottle
or bucket of drink from the saloons. Everybody knew of these
breaches of the law, but the framers of the law had taken care to
make it very difficult to procure legal evidence of those
breaches. The public conscience was pricked a little when the
newspapers told it that one of the youths sent for liquor had
drunk so much of it that he fell into a stupor, took refuge in an
old building, and that there the rats had eaten him alive.
Whether it was before or after this horror that Chief
Commissioner Roosevelt decided to take the law into his own
hands, I do not know, but what he did was swift. The Police
engaged one of the minors, who had been in the habit of going to
the saloons, to go for another supply, and then to testify. This
summary proceeding scared the rum-dealers and, no doubt, they
guarded against being caught again. But the victims of moral dry
rot held up their hands in rebuke and one of the city judges wept
metaphorical tears of chagrin that the Police should engage in
the awful crime of enticing a youth to commit crime. The record
does not show that this judge, or any other, had ever done
anything to check the practice of selling liquor to minors, a
practice which inevitably led thousands of the youth of New York
City to become drunkards.

How do you judge Roosevelt's act? Do you admit that a little
wrong may ever be done in order to secure a great right?
Roosevelt held, in such cases, that the wrong is only technical,
or a blind set up by the wicked to shield themselves. The danger
of allowing each person to play with the law, as with a toy, is
evident. That way lies Jesuitry; but each infringement must be
judged on its own merits, and as Roosevelt followed more and more
these short cuts to justice he needed to be more closely
scrutinized. Was his real object to attain justice or his own
desires?

The Roosevelts moved back to Washington in March, 1897, and
Theodore at once went to work in the office of the Assistant
Secretary of the Navy in that amazing building which John Hay
called "Mullett's masterpiece," where the Navy, War, and State
Departments found shelter under one roof. The Secretary of the
Navy was John D. Long, of Massachusetts, who had been a
Congressman and Governor, was a man of cultivation and geniality,
and a lawyer of high reputation. Although sixty years old, he was
believed never to have made an enemy either in politics or at the
Bar. Those who knew the two gentlemen wondered whether the
somewhat leisurely and conservative Secretary could leash in his
restless young First Assistant, with his Titanic energy and his
head full of projects. No one believed that even Roosevelt could
startle Governor Long out of his habitual urbanity, but every one
could foresee that they might so clash in policy that either the
head or the assistant would have to retire.

Nothing is waste that touches the man of genius. So the two years
which Roosevelt spent in writing, fifteen years before, the
"History of-the Naval War of 1812," now served him to good
purpose; for it gave him much information about the past of the
United States Navy and it quickened his interest in the problems
of the Navy as it should be at that time. The close of the Civil
War in 1865 left the United States with a formidable fleet, which
during the next quarter of a century deteriorated until it
comprised only a collection of rotting and unserviceable ships.
Then came a reaction, followed by the construction of an
up-to-date fleet, and by the recognition by Congress that the
United States must pursue a modern policy in naval affairs.
Roosevelt had always felt the danger to the United States of
maintaining a despicable or an inadequate Navy, and from the
moment he entered the Department he set about pushing the
construction of the unfinished vessels and of improving the
quality of the personnel.

He was impelled to do this, not merely by his instinct to bring
whatever he undertook up to the highest standard, but also
because he had a premonition that a crisis was at hand which
might call the country at an instant's notice to protect itself
with all the power it had. Two recent events aroused his
vigilance. In December, 1895, President Cleveland sent to England
a message upholding the Monroe Doctrine and warning the British
that they must arbitrate their dispute with Venezuela over a
boundary, or fight. This sledgehammer blow at England's pride
might well have caused war had not sober patriots on both sides
of the Atlantic, aghast at this shocking possibility, smoothed
the way to an understanding, and had not the British Government
itself acknowledged the rightness of the demand for arbitration.
So the danger vanished, but Roosevelt, and every other thoughtful
American, said to himself, "Suppose England had taken up the
challenge, what had we to defend ourselves with?" And we compared
the long roll of the great British Fleet with the paltry list of
our own ships, and realized that we should have been helpless.

The other fact which impressed Roosevelt was the insurrection in
Cuba which kept that island in perpetual disorder. The cruel
means, especially reconcentration and starvation, by which the
Spaniards tried to put down the Cubans stirred the sympathy of
the Americans, and the number of those who believed that the
United States ought to interfere in behalf of humanity grew from
month to month. A spark might kindle an explosion. Obviously,
therefore, the United States must have a Navy equipped and ready
for any emergency in the Caribbean.

During his first year in office, Assistant Secretary Roosevelt
busied himself with all the details of preparation; he encouraged
the enthusiasm of the officers of the New Navy, for he shared
their hopes; he added, wherever he could, to its efficiency, as
when by securing from Congress an appropriation of nearly a
million dollars--which seemed then enormous--for target practice.
He promoted a spirit of alertness--and all the while he watched
the horizon towards Cuba where the signs grew angrier and
angrier.

But the young Secretary had to act with circumspection. In the
first place the policy of the Department was formulated by
Secretary Long. In the next place the Navy could not come into
action until President McKinley and the Department of State gave
the word. The President, desiring to keep the peace up to the
very end, would not countenance any move which might seem to the
Spaniards either a threat or an insult. As the open speeding-up
of naval preparations would be construed as both, nothing must be
done to excite alarm. In the autumn of 1897, however, some of the
Spaniards at Havana treated the American residents there with so
much surliness that the American Government took the precaution
to send a battleship to the Havana Harbor as a warning to the
menacing Spaniards, and as a protection, in case of outbreak, to
American citizens and their property.

But what was meant for a precaution proved to be the immediate
cause of war. Early in the evening of February 15??, 1898, the
battleship Maine, peaceably riding at her moorings in the harbor,
was blown up. Two officers and 266 enlisted men were killed by
the explosion and in the sinking of the ship. Nearly as many
more, with Captain Charles D. Sigsbee, the commander, were
rescued. The next morning the newspapers carried the report to
all parts of the United States, and, indeed, to the whole world.
A tidal wave of anger surged over this country. "That means war!"
was the common utterance. Some of us, who abhorred the thought of
war, urged that at least we wait until the guilt could be fixed.
The reports of the catastrophe conflicted. Was the ship destroyed
by the explosion of shells in its own magazine, or was it blown
up from outside? If the latter, who set off the mine? The
Spaniards? It seemed unlikely, if they wished war, that they
should resort to so clumsy a provocation! Might not the
insurgents themselves have done it, in order to force the United
States to interfere? While the country waited, the anger grew. At
Washington, nobody denied that war was coming. All that our
diplomacy attempted to do was to stave off the actual declaration
long enough to give time for our naval and military preparation.

I doubt whether Roosevelt ever worked with greater relish than
during the weeks succeeding the blowing-up of the Maine. At last
he had his opportunity, which he improved night and day. The Navy
Department arranged in hot haste to victual the ships; to provide
them with stores of coal and ammunition; to bring the crews up to
their full quota by enlisting; to lay out a plan of campaign; to
see to the naval bases and the lines of communication; and to
cooperate with the War Department in making ready the land
fortifications along the shore. Of course all these labors did
not fall on Roosevelt's shoulders alone, but being a tireless and
willing worker he had more than one man's share in the
preparations.

But the great fact that war was coming--war, the test-- delighted
him, and his sense of humor was not allowed to sleep. For the
peace-at-any-price folk, the denouncers of the Navy and the Army,
the preachers of the doctrine that as all men are good it was
wicked to build defenses as if we suspected the goodness of our
neighbors, now rushed to the Government for protection. A certain
lady of importance, who had a seaside villa, begged that a
battleship should be anchored just outside of it. Seaboard cities
frantically demanded that adequate protection should be sent to
them. The spokesman for one of these cities happened to be a
politician of such importance that President McKinley told the
Assistant Secretary that his request must be granted.
Accordingly, Roosevelt put one of the old monitors in commission,
and had a tug tow it, at the imminent risk of its crew, to the
harbor which it was to guard, and there the water-logged old
craft stayed, to the relief of the inhabitants of the city and
the self-satisfaction of the Congressman who was able to give
them so shining a proof of his power with the Administration.
Many frightened Bostonians transferred their securities to the
bank vaults of Worcester, and they, too, clamored for naval watch
and ward. Roosevelt must have been made unusually merry by such
tidings from Boston, the city which he regarded as particularly
prolific in "the men who formed the lunatic fringe in all reform
movements."

It did not astonish him that the financiers and the business men,
who were amassing great fortunes in peace, should frown on war,
which interrupted their fortune-making; but he laughed when he
remembered what they and many other vague pacifists had been
solemnly proclaiming. There was the Senator, for instance, who
had denied that we needed a Navy, because, if the emergency came,
he said, we could improvise one, and "build a battleship in every
creek." There were also the spread eagle Americans, the
swaggerers and braggarts, who amused themselves in tail-twisting
and insulting other nations so long as they could do this with
impunity; but now they were brought to book, and their fears
magnified the possible danger they might run from the invasion of
irate Spaniards. Their imagination pictured to them the poor old
Spanish warship Viscaya, as having as great possibility for
destruction as the entire British Fleet itself.

At all these things Roosevelt laughed to himself, because they
confirmed the gospel of military and naval preparedness, which he
had been preaching for years, the gospel which these very
opponents reviled him for; but instead of contenting himself by
saying to them, "I told you so," he pushed on preparations for
war at full speed, determined to make the utmost of the existing
resources. The Navy had clearly two tasks before it. It must
blockade Cuba, which entailed the patrol of the Caribbean Sea and
the protection of the Atlantic ports, and it must prevent the
Spanish Fleet, known to be at the

Philippines, from crossing the Pacific Ocean, harassing our
commerce, and threatening our harbors on our Western coast.
Through Roosevelt's instrumentality, Commodore George Dewey had
been appointed in the preceding autumn to command our Asiatic
Squadron, and while, in the absence of Governor Long, Roosevelt
was Acting-Secretary, he sent the following dispatch:

Washington, February 25,'98. Dewey, Hong Kong:

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

ROOSEVELT

I would not give the impression that Roosevelt was the dictator
of the Navy Department, or that all, or most, of its notable
achievements came from his suggestion, but the plain fact is,
wherever you look at its most active and fruitful preparations
for war, you find him vigorously assisting. The order he sent
Commodore Dewey led directly to the chief naval event of the war,
the destruction of the Spanish Fleet by our Asiatic Squadron in
Manila Bay, on May 1st. Long before this victory came to pass,
however, Roosevelt had resigned from the Navy Department and was
seeking an ampler outlet for his energy.

Having accomplished his duty as Assistant Secretary--a post which
he felt was primarily for a civilian--he thought that he had a
right to retire from it, and to gratify his long-cherished desire
to take part in the actual warfare. He did not wish, he said, to
have to give some excuse to his children for not having fought in
the war. As he had insisted that we ought to free Cuba from
Spanish tyranny and cruelty, he could not consistently refuse to
join actively in the liberation. A man who teaches the duty of
fighting should pay with his body when the fighting comes.

General Alger, the Secretary of War, had a great liking for
Roosevelt, offered him a commission in the Army, and even the
command of a regiment. This he prudently declined, having no
technical military knowledge. He proposed instead, that Dr.
Leonard Wood should be made Colonel, and that he should serve
under Wood as Lieutenant-Colonel. By profession, Wood was a
physician, who had graduated at the Harvard Medical School, and
then had been a contract surgeon with the American Army on the
plains. In this service he went through the roughest kind of
campaigning and, being ambitious, and having an instinct for
military science, he studied the manuals and learned from them
and through actual practice the principles of war. In this way he
became competent to lead troops. He was about two years younger
than Roosevelt, with an iron frame, great tenacity and endurance,
a man of few words, but of clear sight and quick decision.

While Roosevelt finished his business at the Navy Department,
Colonel Wood hurried to San Antonio, Texas, the rendezvous of the
First Regiment of Volunteer Cavalry. A call for volunteers,
issued by Roosevelt and endorsed by Secretary Alger, spread
through the West and Southwest, and it met with a quick response.
Not even in Garibaldi's famous Thousand was such a strange crowd
gathered. It comprised cow-punchers, ranchmen, hunters,
professional gamblers and rascals of the Border, sports men,
mingled with the society sports, former football players and
oarsmen, polo-players and lovers of adventure from the great
Eastern cities. They all had one quality in common--courage--and
they were all bound together by one common bond, devotion to
Theodore Roosevelt. Nearly every one of them knew him personally;
some of the Western men had hunted or ranched with him; some of
the Eastern had been with him in college, or had had contact with
him in one of the many vicissitudes of his career. It was a
remarkable spectacle, this flocking to a man not yet forty years
old, whose chief work up to that time had been in the supposed
commonplace position of a Civil Service Commissioner and of a New
York Police Commissioner! But Roosevelt's name was already known
throughout the country: it excited great admiration in many,
grave doubts in many, and curiosity in all. His friends urged him
not to go. It seemed to some of us almost wantonly reckless that
he should put his life, which had been so valuable and evidently
held the promise of still higher achievement, at the risk of a
Spanish bullet, or of yellow fever in Cuba, for the sake of a
cause which did not concern the safety of his country. But he
never considered risks or chances. He felt it as a duty that we
must free Cuba, and that every one who recognized this duty
should do his share in performing it. No doubt the excitement and
the noble side of our war attracted him. No doubt, also, that he
remembered that the reputation of a successful soldier had often
proved a ladder to political promotion in our Republic. Every
reader of our history, though he were the dullest, understood
that. But that was not the chief reason, or even an important
one, in shaping his decision. He went to San Antonio in May, and
worked without respite in learning the rudiments of war and in
teaching them to his motley volunteers, who were already called
by the public, and will be known in history, as the "Rough
Riders." He felt relieved when "Teddy's Terrors," one of the
nicknames proposed, did not stick to them. At the end of the
month the regiment proceeded to Tampa, Florida, whence part of it
sailed for Cuba on the transport Yucatan. It sufficiently
indicates the state of chaos which then reigned in our Army
preparations, that half the regiment and all the horses and mules
were left behind. Arrived in Cuba,, the first troops, accustomed
only to the saddle, had to hobble along as best they could, on
foot, so that some wag rechristened them " Wood's Weary Walkers."
The rest of the regiment, with the mounts, came a little later,
and at Las Guasimas they had their first skirmish with the
Spaniards. Eight of them were killed, and they were buried in one
grave. Afterward, in writing the history of the Rough Riders,
Roosevelt said: "There could be no more honorable burial than
that of these men in a common grave--Indian and cowboy, miner,
packer, and college athlete--the man of unknown ancestry from the
lonely Western plains, and the man who carried on his watch the
crests of the Stuyvesants and the Fishes, one in the way they had
met death, just as during life they had been one in their daring
and their loyalty." *

* The Rough Riders, 120.


I shall not attempt to follow in detail the story of the Rough
Riders, but shall touch only on those matters which refer to
Roosevelt himself. Wood, having been promoted to
Brigadier-General, in command of a larger unit, Theodore became
Colonel of the regiment. On July 1 and 2 he commanded the Rough
Riders in their attack on and capture of San Juan Hill, in
connection with some colored troops. In this engagement, their
nearest approach to a battle, the Rough Riders, who had less than
five hundred men in action, lost eighty-nine in killed and
wounded. Then followed a dreary life in the trenches until
Santiago surrendered; and then a still more terrible experience
while they waited for Spain to give up the war. Under a killing
tropical sun, receiving irregular and often damaged food, without
tent or other protection from the heat or from the rain, the
Rough Riders endured for weeks the ravages of fever, climate, and
privation. To realize that their sufferings were directly owing
to the blunders and incompetence of the War Department at home,
brought no consolation, for the soldiers could see no reason why
the Department should not go on blundering indefinitely. One of
the Rough Riders told me that, when stricken with fever, he lay
for days on the beach, and that anchored within the distance a
tennis-ball could be thrown was a steamer loaded with medicines,
but that no orders were given to bring them ashore!

The Rough Riders were hard hit by disease, but not harder than
the other regiments in the Army. Every one of their officers,
except the Colonel and another, had yellow fever, and at one time
more than half of the regiment was sick. A terrible depression
weighed them down. They almost despaired, not only of being
relieved, but of living. To face the entire Spanish Army would
have been a great joy, compared with this sinking, melting away,
against the invisible fever.

The Administration at Washington, however, although it knew the
condition of the Army in Cuba, seemed indifferent rather than
anxious, and talked about moving the troops into the interior, to
the high ground round San Luis. Thereupon, Roosevelt wrote to
General Shafter, his commanding officer:

To keep us here, in the opinion of every officer commanding a
division or a brigade, will simply involve the destruction of
thousands. There is no possible reason for not shipping
practically the entire command North at once ....

All of us are certain, as soon as the authorities at Washington
fully appreciate the conditions of the army, to be sent home. If
we are kept here it will in all human probability mean an
appalling disaster, for the surgeons here estimate that over half
the army, if kept here during the sickly season, will die.

This is not only terrible from the standpoint of the individual
lives lost, but it means ruin from the standpoint of military
efficiency of the flower of the American Army, for the great bulk
of the regulars are here with you. The sick-list, large though it
is, exceeding four thousand, affords but a faint index of the
debilitation of the army. Not ten per cent are fit for active
work.

This letter General Shafter really desired to have written, but
when Roosevelt handed it to him, he hesitated to receive it.
Still Roosevelt persisted, left it in the General's hands, and
the General gave it to the correspondent of the Associated Press
who was present. A few hours later it had been telegraphed to the
United States. Shafter called a council of war of the division
and brigade commanders, which he invited Roosevelt to attend,
although his rank as Colonel did not entitle him to take part.
When the Generals heard that the Army was to be kept in Cuba all
summer and sent up into the hills, they agreed that Roosevelt's
protest must be supported, and they drew up the famous "Round
Robin" in which they repeated Roosevelt's warnings. Neither
President McKinley nor the War Department could be deaf to such a
statement as this: "This army must be moved at once or perish. As
the army can be safely moved now, the persons responsible for
preventing such a move will be responsible for the unnecessary
loss of many thousands of lives."

This letter also was immediately published at home, and outcries
of horror and indignation went up. A few sticklers for military
etiquette professed to be astonished that any officer should be
guilty of the insubordination which these letters implied, and,
of course, the blame fell on Roosevelt. The truth is that
Shafter, dismayed at the condition of the Fifth Army, and at his
own inability to make the Government understand the frightful
doom which was impending, deliberately chose Roosevelt to commit
the insubordination; for, as he was a volunteer officer, soon to
be discharged, the act could not harm his future, whereas the
regular officers were not likely to be popular with the War
Department after they had called the attention of the world to
its maleficent incompetence.

Washington heard the shot fired by the Colonel of the Rough
Riders, and without loss of time ordered the Army home. The sick
were transported by thousands to Montauk Point, at the eastern
end of Long Island, where, in spite of the best medical care
which could be improvised, large numbers of them died. But the
Army knew, and the American public knew, that Roosevelt, by his "
insubordination," had saved multitudes of lives. At Montauk Point
he was the most popular man in America.

This concluded Roosevelt's career as a soldier. The experience
introduced to the public those virile qualities of his with which
his friends were familiar. He had not endured the hardships of
ranching and hunting in vain. If life on the Plains democratized
him, life with the Rough Riders did also; indeed, without the
former there would have been no Rough Riders and no Colonel
Roosevelt. He learned not only how to lead a regiment according
to the tactics of that day, but also--and this was far more
important--he learned how disasters and the waste of lives, and
treasure, and the ignominy of a disgracefully managed campaign,
sprang directly from unpreparedness. This burned indelibly into
his memory. It stimulated all his subsequent appeals to make the
Army and Navy large enough for any probable sudden demand upon
them. "America the Unready" had won the war against a decrepit,
impoverished, third-rate power, but had paid for her victory
hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives;
what would the count have mounted to had she been pitted against
a really formidable foe? Would she have won at all against any
enemy fully prepared and of nearly equal strength? Many of us
dismissed Roosevelt's warnings then as the outpourings of a
jingo, of one who loved war for war's sake, and wished to graft
onto the peaceful traditions and standards of our Republic the
militarism of Europe. We misjudged him.



CHAPTER VIII. GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK--VICE-PRESIDENT

While Roosevelt was at Montauk Point waiting with his regiment to
be mustered out, and cheering up the sick soldiers, he had direct
proof that every war breeds a President. For the politicians went
down to call on him and, although they did not propose that he
should be a candidate for the Presidency--that was not a
Presidential year--they looked him over to see how he would do
for Governor of New York. Since Cleveland set the fashion in
1882, the New York governorship was regarded as the easiest
stepping stone to the Presidency. Roosevelt's popularity was so
great that if the matter had been left in the hands of the
people, he would have been nominated with a rush; but the Empire
State was dominated by Bosses--Senator David B. Hill, the
Democratic State Boss, Senator Thomas C. Platt, the Republican
State Boss, and Richard Croker, Boss of Tammany,--who had
intimate relations with the wicked of both parties, and often
decided an election by throwing their votes or withholding them.

Senator Platt enjoyed, with Senator Quay of Pennsylvania, the
evil reputation of being the most unscrupulous Boss in the United
States. I do not undertake to say whether the palm should go to
him or to Quay, but no one disputes that Platt held New York
State in his hand, or that Quay held Pennsylvania in his. By the
year 1898, both were recognized as representing a type of Boss
that was becoming extinct.

The business-man type, of which Senator Aldrich was a perfect
exponent, was pushing to the front. Quay, greedy of money, had
never made a pretense of showing even a conventional respect for
the Eighth Commandment; Platt, on the other hand, seems not to
have enriched himself by his political deals, but to have taken
his pay in the gratification he enjoyed from wielding autocratic
power. Platt also betrayed that he dated from the last generation
by his religiosity. He used his piety as an elephant uses his
proboscis, to reach about and secure desired objects, large or
small, the trunk of a tree or a bag of peanuts. He was a
Sunday-School teacher and, I believe, a deacon of his church.
Roosevelt says that he occasionally interlarded his political
talk with theological discussion, but that his very dry theology
was wholly divorced from moral implications. The wonderful
chapter on "The New York Governorship," in Roosevelt's
"Autobiography," ought to be read by every American, because it
gives the most remarkable account of the actual working of the
political Machine in a great American State, the disguises that
Machine wore, its absolute unscrupulousness, its wickedness, its
purpose to destroy the ideals of democracy. And Roosevelt's
analysis of Platt may stand alongside of Machiavelli's portraits
of the Italian Bosses four hundred years before--they were not
called Bosses then.

Senator Platt did not wish to have Roosevelt hold the
governorship, or any other office in which the independent young
man might worry the wily old Senator.* But the Republican Party
in New York State happened to be in such a very bad condition
that the likelihood that it would carry the election that autumn
was slight: for the public had temporarily tired of Machine rule.
Platt's managers saw that they must pick out a really strong
candidate and they understood that nobody at that moment could
rival Roosevelt's popularity. So they impressed on Platt that he
must accept the Rough Rider Chief, and Mr. Lemuel Quigg, an
ex-Congressman, a journalist formerly on the New York Tribune, a
stanch Republican, who nevertheless recognized that discretion
and intelligence might sometimes be allowed a voice in Machine
dictation, journeyed to Montauk and had a friendly, frank
conversation with the Colonel.

* Platt and Quay were both born in 1833.


Quigg spoke for nobody but himself; he merely wished to sound
Roosevelt. Roosevelt made no pledges; he defined his general
attitude and wished to understand what the Platt Machine
proposed. Quigg said that Platt admitted that the present
Governor, Black, could not be reelected, but that he had doubts
as to Roosevelt's docility. Republican leaders and local chairmen
in all parts of the State, however, enthusiastically called for
Roosevelt, and Quigg did not wish to have the Republican Party
split into two factions. He believed that Platt would accede if
he could be convinced that Roosevelt would not "make war on him."
Roosevelt, without promising anything, replied that he had no
intention of making "war on Mr. Platt, or on anybody else, if war
could be avoided." He said:

'that what [he] wanted was to be Governor and not a faction
leader; that [he] certainly would confer with the organization
men, as with everybody else who seemed to [him] to have knowledge
of and interest in public affairs, and that as to Mr. Platt and
the organization leaders, [he] would do so in the sincere hope
that there might always result harmony of opinion and purpose;
but that while [he] would try to get on well with the
organization, the organization must with equal sincerity strive
to do what [he] regarded as essential for the public good; and
that in every case, after full consideration of what everybody
had to say who might possess real knowledge of the matter, [he]
should have to act finally as [his] own judgment and conscience
dictated, and administer the State Government as [he] thought it
ought to be administered.' *

* Autobiography, 295.


Having assured Roosevelt that his statements were exactly what
Quigg expected, Quigg returned to New York City, reported his
conversation to Platt, and, in due season, the free citizens of
New York learned that, with Platt's consent, the Colonel of the
Rough Riders would be nominated by the Republican State
Convention for the governorship of New York.

During the campaign, Roosevelt stumped the State at a pace
unknown till then. It was his first real campaign, and he went
from place to place in a special train speaking at every stop
from his car platform or, in the larger towns, staying long
enough to address great audiences out of doors or in the local
theatre. In November, he was elected by a majority of 18,000, a
slender margin as it looks now, but sufficient for its purpose,
and representing a really notable victory, because it had been
expected that the Democrats would beat any other Republican
candidate but him by overwhelming odds. So, after an absence of
fifteen years, he returned to dwell in Albany.

Before he was sworn in as Governor, he had already measured
strength with Senator Platt. The Senator asked him with amiable
condescension whether he had any special friends he would like to
have appointed on the committees. Roosevelt expressed surprise,
supposing that the Speaker appointed committees. Then Platt told
him that the Speaker had not been agreed upon yet, but that of
course he would name the list given to him. Roosevelt understood
the situation, but said nothing. A week later, however, at
another conference, Platt handed him a telegram, in which the
sender accepted with pleasure his appointment as Superintendent
of Public Works. Roosevelt liked this man and thought him honest,
but he did not think him the best person for that particular
work, and he did not intend as Governor to have his appointments
dictated to him, because he would naturally be held responsible
for his appointees. When he told Platt that that man would not
do, the Senator flew into a passion; he had never met such
insubordination before in any public official, and he decided to
fight the issue from the start. Roosevelt did not allow himself
to lose his temper; he was perfectly polite while Platt let loose
his fury; and before they parted Platt understood which was
master. The Governor appointed Colonel Partridge to the position
and, as it had chiefly to do with the canals of the State, it was
most important. In deed, the canal scandals under Roosevelt's
predecessor, Governor Black, had so roused the popular conscience
that it threatened to break down the supremacy of the Republican
Party.

Jacob Riis describes Roosevelt's administration as introducing
the Ten Commandments into the government at Albany, and we need
hardly be told that the young Governor applied his usual methods
and promoted his favorite reforms. Finding the Civil Service
encrusted with abuses, he pushed legislation which established a
high standard of reform. The starch which had been taken out of
the Civil Service Law under Governor Black was put back,
stiffened. He insisted on enforcing the Factory Law, for the
protection of operatives; and the law regulating sweat-shops,
which he inspected himself, with Riis for his companion.

Perhaps his hottest battle was over the law to tax corporations
which held public franchises. This touched the owners of street
railways in the cities and towns, and many other corporations
which enjoyed a monopoly in managing quasi-public utilities. "In
politics there is no politics," said that elderly early mentor of
Roosevelt when he first sat in the Assembly. Legislatures existed
simply to do the bidding of Big Business, was the creed of the
men who controlled Big Business. They contributed impartially to
the Republican and Democratic campaign funds. They had Republican
Assemblymen and Democratic Assemblymen in their service, and
their lobbyists worked harmoniously with either party. Merely to
suggest that the special privileges of the corporations might be
open to discussion was sacrilege. No wonder, therefore, that the
holders of public franchises marshaled all their forces against
the Governor.

Boss Platt wrote Roosevelt a letter--one of the sort inspired
more by sorrow than by anger--to the effect that he had been
warned that the Governor was a little loose on the relations of
capital and labor, on trusts and combinations, and, in general,
on the right of a man to run his business as he chose, always
respecting, of course, the Ten Commandments and the Penal Code.
The Senator was shocked and pained to perceive that this warning
had a real basis, and that the Governor's "altruism" in behalf of
the people had led him to urge curtailing the rights of
corporations. Roosevelt, instead of feeling contrite at this
chiding, redoubled his energy. The party managers buried the
bill. Roosevelt then sent a special message, as the New York
Governors are empowered to do. It was laid on the Speaker's desk,
but no notice was taken of it. The next morning he sent this
second message to the Speaker:

'I learn that the emergency message which I sent last evening to
the Assembly on behalf of the Franchise Tax Bill has not been
read. I, therefore, send hereby another. I need not impress upon
the Assembly the need of passing this bill at once .... It
establishes the principle that hereafter corporations holding
franchises from the public shall pay their just share of the
public burden.'*

* Riis, 221.


The Speaker, the Assembly, and the Machine now gave heed. The
corporations saw that it would be suicidal to bring down on
themselves the avalanche of fury which was accumulating. The bill
passed. Roosevelt had set a precedent for controlling corporate
truculence.

While Roosevelt was accomplishing these very real triumphs for
justice and popular welfare, the professional critics went on
finding fault with him. Although the passage of one bill after
another gave tangible proof that, far from being Platt's "man,"
or the slave of the Machine, he followed his own ideals, did not
satisfy these critics. They suspected that there was some
wickedness behind it, and they professed to be greatly disturbed
that Roosevelt frequently breakfasted or dined with Platt. What
could this mean except that he took his instructions from the
Boss? How could he, who made a pretense of righteousness, consent
to visit the Sunday School political teacher, much less to sit at
the table with him? The doubts and anxieties of these
self-appointed defenders of public morals, and of the Republic
even, found a spokesman in a young journalist who had then come
recently from college. This person, whom we will call X., met Mr.
Roosevelt at a public reception and with the brusqueness, to put
it mildly, of a hereditary reformer, he demanded to know why the
Governor breakfasted and dined with Boss Platt. Mr. Roosevelt
replied, with that courtesy of his which was never more complete
than when it conveyed his sarcasm, that a person in public
office, like himself, was obliged to meet officially all kinds of
men and women, and he added: "Why, Mr. X., I have even dined with
your father." X. did not pursue his investigation, and the
bystanders, who had vague recollections of the father's
misfortunes in Wall Street, thought that the son was a little
indiscreet even for a hereditary reformer. The truth about
Roosevelt's going to Platt and breakfasting with him was very
simple. The Senator spent the week till Friday afternoon in
Washington, then he came to New York for Saturday and Sunday.
Being somewhat infirm, although he was not, as we now reckon, an
old man, he did not care to extend his trip to Albany, and so the
young and vigorous Governor ran down from Albany and, at
breakfast with Platt, discussed New York State affairs. What I
have already quoted indicates, I think, that no body knew better
than the Boss himself that Roosevelt was not his "man."

One other example is too good to omit. The Superintendent of
Insurance was really one of Platt's men, and a person most
grateful to the insurance companies. Governor Roosevelt,
regarding him as unfit, not only declined to reappoint him, but
actually appointed in his stead a superintendent whom Platt and
the insurance companies could not manage, and so hated. Platt
remonstrated. Finding his arguments futile, he broke out in
threats that if his man was not reappointed, he would fight. He
would forbid the Assembly to confirm Roosevelt's candidate.
Roosevelt replied that as soon as the Assembly adjourned, he
should appoint his candidate temporarily. Platt declared that
when it reconvened, the Assembly would throw him out. This did
not, however, frighten Roosevelt, who remarked that, although he
foresaw he should have an uncomfortable time himself, he would
"guarantee to make his opponents more uncomfortable still."

Later that day Platt sent one of his henchmen to deliver an
ultimatum to the Governor. He repeated Platt's threats, but was
unable to make an impression. Roosevelt got up to go. "You know
it means your ruin?" said the henchman solemnly. "Well, we will
see about that," Roosevelt replied, and had nearly reached the
door when the henchman, anxious to give the prospective victim a
last chance, warned him that the Senator would open the fight on
the next day, and keep it up to the bitter end. "Yes," replied
the Governor; "good-night." And he was just going out, when the
henchman rushed after him, calling, "Hold on! We accept. Send in
your nomination. The Senator is very sorry, but will make no
further opposition."* Roosevelt adds that the bluff was carried
through to the limit, but that after it failed, Platt did not
renew his attempt to interfere with him.

* Autobiography, 317.


Nevertheless, Roosevelt made no war on Platt or anybody else,
merely for the fun of it. "We must use the tools we have," said
Lincoln to John Hay; and Lincoln also had many tools which he did
not choose, but which he had to work with. Roosevelt differed
from the doctrinaire reformer, who would sit still and do nothing
unless he had perfectly clean tools and pure conditions to work
with. To do nothing until the millennium came would mean, of
course, that the Machine would pursue its methods undisturbed.
Roosevelt, on the contrary, knew that by cooperating with the
Machine, as far as his conscience permitted, he could reach
results much better than it aimed at.

Here are three of his letters to Platt, written at a time when
the young journalist and the reformers of his stripe shed tears
at the thought that Theodore Roosevelt was the obsequious servant
of Boss Platt.

The first letter refers to Roosevelt's nomination to the Vice
Presidency, a possibility which the public was already
discussing. The last two letters, written after he had been
nominated by the Republicans, relate to the person whom he wished
to see succeed himself as Governor of New York.

ROOSEVELT TO PLATT

February 1, 1900

First, and least important. If you happened to have seen the
Evening Post recently, you ought to be amused, for it is
moralizing with lofty indignation over the cringing servility I
have displayed in the matter of the insurance superintendent. I
fear it will soon take the view that it cannot possibly support
you as long as you associate with me!

Now as to serious matters. I have, of course, done a great deal
of thinking about the Vice-Presidency since the talk I had with
you followed by the letter from Lodge and the visit from Payne,
of Wisconsin. I have been reserving the matter to talk over with
you, but in view of the publication in the Sun this morning, I
would like to begin the conversation, as it were, by just a line
or two now. I need not speak of the confidence I have in the
judgment of you and Lodge, yet I can't help feeling more and more
that the Vice Presidency is not an office in which I could do
anything and not an office in which a man who is still vigorous
and not past middle life has much chance of doing anything. As
you know, I am of an active nature. In spite of all the work and
all the worry, and very largely because of your own constant
courtesy and consideration, my dear Senator,--I have thoroughly
enjoyed being Governor. I have kept every promise, express or
implied, I made on the stump, and I feel that the Republican
Party is stronger before the State because of my incumbency.
Certainly everything is being managed now on a perfectly straight
basis and every office is as clean as a whistle.

Now, I should like to be Governor for another term, especially if
we are able to take hold of the canals in serious shape. But as
Vice President, I don't see there is anything I can do. I would
simply be a presiding officer, and that I should find a bore. As
you know, I am a man of moderate means (although I am a little
better off than the Sun's article would indicate) and I should
have to live very simply in Washington and could not entertain in
any way as Mr. Hobart and Mr. Morton entertained. My children are
all growing up and I find the burden of their education
constantly heavier, so that I am by no means sure that I ought to
go into public life at all, provided some remunerative work
offered itself. The only reason I would like to go on is that as
I have not been a 

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