CHAPTER X. THE WORLD WHICH ROOSEVELT CONFRONTED
To understand the work of a statesman we must know something of the world in which he lived. That is his material, out of which he tries to embody his ideals as the sculptor carves his out of marble. We are constantly under the illusions of time. Some critics say, for instance, that Washington fitted so perfectly the environment of the American Colonies during the last half of the eighteenth century, that he was the direct product of that environment; I prefer to think, however, that he possessed certain individual traits which, and not the time, made him George Washington, and would have enabled him to have mastered a different period if he had been born in it. In like manner, having known Theodore Roosevelt, I do not believe that he would have been dumb or passive or colorless or slothful or futile under any other conceivable conditions. Just as it was not New York City, nor Harvard, nor North Dakota, which made him ROOSEVELT, so the ROOSEVELT in him would have persisted under whatever sky.
The time offers the opportunities. The gift in the man, innate and incalculable, determines how he will seize them and what he will do with them. Now it is because I think that Roosevelt had a clear vision of the world in which he dwelt, and saw the path by which to lead and improve it, that his career has profound significance to me. Picturesque he was, and picturesqueness made whatever he did interesting. But far deeper qualities made him significant. From ancient times, at least from the days of Greece and Rome, Democracy as a political ideal had been dreamed of, and had even been put into practice on a small scale here and there. But its shortcomings and the frailty of human nature made it the despair of practical men and the laughing stock of philosophers and ironists. Nevertheless, the conviction that no man has a right to enslave another would not die. And in modern times the English sense of justice and the English belief that a man must have a right to be heard on matters concerning himself and his government, forced Democracy, as an actual system, to the front. The demand for representation caused the American colonists to break away from England and to govern themselves independently. Every one now sees that this demand was the just and logical carrying forward of English ideals.
At about the same time, in France, Rousseau, gathering into his own heart, from many sources, the suggestions and emotions of Democracy, uttered them with a voice so magical that it roused millions of other hearts and made the emotions seem intellectual proofs. As the magician waves his wand and turns common pebbles into precious stones, so Rousseau turned the dead crater of Europe into a molten volcano. The ideals of Fraternity and Equality were joined with that of Liberty and the three were accepted as indivisible elements of Democracy. In the United States we set our Democratic principles going. In Europe the Revolution shattered many of the hateful methods of Despotism, shattered, but did not destroy them. The amazing genius of Napoleon intervened to deflect Europe from her march towards Democracy and to convert her into the servant of his personal ambition.
Over here, in spite of the hideous contradiction of slavery, which ate like a black ulcer into a part of our body politic, the Democratic ideal not only prevailed, but came to be taken for granted as a heaven-revealed truth, which only fools would question or dispute. In Europe, the monarchs of the Old Regime made a desperate rally and put down Napoleon, thinking that by smashing him they would smash also the tremendous Democratic forces by which he had gained his supremacy. They put back, so far as they could, the old feudal bases of privilege and of more or less disguised tyranny. The Restoration could not slumber quietly, for the forces of the Revolution burst out from time to time. They wished to realize the liberty of which they had had a glimpse in 1789 and which the Old Regime had snatched away from them. The Spirit of Nationality now strengthened their efforts for independence and liberty and another Spirit came stalking after both. This was the Social Revolution, which refusing to be satisfied by a merely political victory boldly preached Internationalism as a higher ideal than Nationalism. Truly, Time still devours all his children, and the hysterical desires bred by half-truths prevent the coming and triumphant reign of Truth. While these various and mutually clashing motives swept Europe along during the first half of the nineteenth century, a different current hurried the United States into the rapids. Should they continue to exist as one Union binding together sections with different interests, or should the Union be dissolved and those sections attempt to lead a separate political existence? Fortunately, for the preservation of the Union, the question of slavery was uppermost in one of the sections. Slavery could not be dismissed as a merely economic question. Many Americans declared that it was primarily a moral issue. And this transformed what the Southern section would gladly have limited to economics into a war for a moral ideal. With the destruction of slavery in the South the preservation of the Union came as a matter of course.
The Civil War itself had given a great stimulus to industry, to the need of providing military equipment and supplies, and of extending, as rapidly as possible, the railroads which were the chief means of transportation. When the war ended in 1865, this expansion went on at an increasing rate. The energy which had been devoted to military purposes was now directed to commerce and industry, to developing the vast unpeopled tracts from the Mississippi to the Pacific, and to exploiting the hitherto neglected or unknown natural resources of the country. Every year science furnished new methods of converting nature's products into man's wealth. Chemistry, the doubtful science, Midas-like, turned into gold every thing that it touched. There were not native workers enough, and so a steady stream of foreign immigrants flocked over from abroad. They came at first to better their own fortunes by sharing in the unlimited American harvests. Later, our Captains of Industry, regardless of the quality of the new comers, and intent only on securing cheap labor to multiply their hoards, combed the lowest political and social levels of southern Europe and of western Asia for employees. The immigrants ceased to look upon America as the Land of Promise, the land where they intended to settle, to make their homes, and to rear their children; it became for them only a huge factory where they earned a living and for which they felt no affection. On the contrary, many of them looked forward to returning to their native country as soon as they had saved up a little competence here. The politicians, equally negligent of the real welfare of the United States, gave to these masses of foreigners quick and unscrutinized naturalization as American citizens.
So it fell out that before the end of the nineteenth century a great gulf was opening between Labor and Capital. Now a community can thrive only when all its classes feel that they have COMMON interests; but since American Labor was largely composed of foreigners, it acquired a double antagonism to Capital. It had not only the supposed natural antagonism of employee to employer, but also the further cause of misunderstanding, and hostility even, which came from the foreignness of its members. Another ominous condition arose. The United States ceased to be the Land of Promise, where any hard-working and thrifty man could better himself and even become rich. The gates of Opportunity were closing. The free lands, which the Nation offered to any one who would cultivate them, had mostly been taken up; the immigrant who had been a laborer in Europe, was a laborer here. Moreover, the political conditions in Europe often added to the burdens and irritation caused by the industrial conditions there. And the immigrant in coming to America brought with him all his grievances, political not less than industrial. He was too ignorant to discriminate; he could only feel. Anarchy and Nihilism, which were his natural reaction against his despotic oppressors in Germany and Russia, he went on cultivating here, where, by the simple process of naturalization, he became politically his own despot in a year or two.
But, of course, the very core of the feud which threatens to disrupt modern civilization was the discovery that, in any final adjustment, the POLITICAL did not suffice. What availed it for the Taborer and the capitalist to be equal at the polls, for the vote of one to count as much as the vote of the other, if the two men were actually worlds apart in their social and industrial lives? Equality must seem to the laborer a cruel deception and a sham unless it results in equality in the distribution of wealth and of opportunity. How this is to be attained I have never seen satisfactorily stated; but the impossibility of realizing their dreams, or the blank folly of doting on them, has never prevented men from striving to obtain them. From this has resulted the frantic pursuit, during a century and a quarter, of all sorts of projects from Babuvism to Bolshevism, which, if they could not install Utopia overnight, were at least calculated to destroy Civilization as it is. The common feature of the propagandists of all these doctrines seems to be the throwing-over of the Past; not merely of the proved evils and inadequacies of the Past, but of our conception of right and wrong, of morals, of human relations, and of our duty towards the Eternal, which, having sprung out of the Past, must be jettisoned in a fury of contempt. In short, the destroyers of Society (writhing under the immemorial sting of injustice, which they believed was wholly caused by their privileged fellows, and not even in part inherent in the nature of things) supposed that by blotting out Privilege they could establish their ideals of Justice and Equality.
In the forward nations of Europe, not less than in the United States, these ideals had been arrived at, at least in name, and so far as concerned politics. Even in Germany, the most rigid of Absolute Despot isms, a phantasm of political liberty was allowed to flit about the Halls of Parliament. But through the cunning of Bismarck the Socialist masses were bound all the more tightly to the Hohenzollern Despot by liens which seemed to be socialistic. Nevertheless, the principles of the Social Revolution spread secretly from European country to country, whether it professed to be Monarchical or Republican.
In the United States, when Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the Presidency in 1901, a similar antagonism between Capital and Labor had become chronic. Capital was arrogant. Its advance since the Civil War had been unmatched in history. The inundation of wealth which had poured in, compared with all previous amassing of riches, was as the Mississippi to the slender stream of Pactolus. The men whose energy had created this wealth, and the men who managed and increased it, lost the sense of their proper relations with the rest of the community and the Nation. According to the current opinion progress consisted in doubling wealth in the shortest time possible; this meant the employment of larger and larger masses of labor; therefore laborers should be satisfied, nay, should be grateful to the capitalists who provided them with the means of a livelihood; and those capitalists assumed that what they regarded as necessary to progress, defined by them, should be accepted as necessary to the prosperity of the Nation.
Such an alignment of the two elements, which composed the Nation, indicated how far the so-called Civilization, which modern industrialism has created, was from achieving that social harmony, which is the ideal and must be the base of every wholesome and enduring State. The condition of the working classes in this country was undoubtedly better than that in Europe. And the discontent and occasional violence here were fomented by foreign agitators who tried to make our workers believe that they were as much oppressed as their foreign brothers. Wise observers saw that a collision, it might be a catastrophe, was bound to come unless some means could be found to bring concord to the antagonists. Here was surely an amazing paradox. The United States, already possessed of fabulous wealth and daily amassing more, was heading straight for a social and economic revolution, because a part of the inhabitants claimed to be the slaves of industrialism and of poverty.
This slight outline, which every reader can complete for himself, will serve to show what sort of a world, especially what sort of an American world, confronted Roosevelt when he took the reins of government. His task was stupendous, the problems he had to solve were baffling. Other public men of the time saw its portents, but he alone seems to have felt that it was his duty to strain every nerve to avert the impending disaster. And he alone, as it seems to me, understood the best means to take.
Honesty, Justice, Reason, were not to him mere words to decorate sonorous messages or to catch and placate the hearers of his passionate speeches; they were the most real of all realities, moral agents to be used to clear away the deadlock into which Civilization was settling.
CHAPTER XI. ROOSEVELT'S FOREIGN POLICY
In taking the oath of office at Buffalo, Roosevelt promised to continue President McKinley's policies. And this he set about doing loyally. He retained McKinley's Cabinet,* who were working out the adjustments already agreed upon. McKinley was probably the best-natured President who ever occupied the White House. He instinctively shrank from hurting anybody's feelings. Persons who went to see him in dudgeon, to complain against some act which displeased them, found him "a bower of roses," too sweet and soft to be treated harshly. He could say "no" to applicants for office so gently that they felt no resentment. For twenty years he had advocated a protective tariff so mellifluously, and he believed so sincerely in its efficacy, that he could at any time hypnotize himself by repeating his own phrases. If he had ever studied the economic subject, it was long ago, and having adopted the tenets which an Ohio Republican could hardly escape from adopting, he never revised them or even questioned their validity. His protectionism, like cheese, only grew stronger with age. As a politician, he was so hospitable that in the campaign of 1896, which was fought to maintain the gold standard and the financial honesty of the United States, he showed very plainly that he had no prejudice against free silver, and it was only at the last moment that the Republican managers could persuade him to take a firm stand for gold.
* In April, 1901, J. W. Griggs had retired as Attorney-General and was succeeded by P. C. Knox; in January, 1902, C. E. Smith was replaced by H. W. Payne as Postmaster-General.
The chief business which McKinley left behind him, the work which Roosevelt took up and carried on, concerned Imperialism. The Spanish War forced this subject to the front by leaving us in possession of the Philippines and by bequeathing to us the responsibility for Cuba and Porto Rico. We paid Spain for the Philippines, and in spite of constitutional doubts as to how a Republic like the United States could buy or hold subject peoples, we proceeded to conquer those islands and to set up an American administration in them. We also treated Porto Rico as a colony, to enjoy the blessing of our rule. And while we allowed Cuba to set up a Republic of her own, we made it very clear that our benevolent protection was behind her.
All this constituted Imperialism, against which many of our soberest citizens protested. They alleged that as a doctrine it contradicted the fundamental principles on which our nation was built. Since the Declaration of Independence, America had stood before the world as the champion and example of Liberty, and by our Civil War she had purged her self of Slavery. Imperialism made her the mistress of peoples who had never been consulted. Such moral inconsistency ought not to be tolerated. In addition to it was the political danger that lay in holding possessions on the other side of the Pacific. To keep them we must be prepared to defend them, and defense would involve maintaining a naval and military armament and of stimulating a warlike spirit, repugnant to our traditions. In short, Imperialism made the United States a World Power, and laid her open to its perils and entanglements.
But while a minority of the men and women of sober judgment and conscience opposed Imperialism, the large majority accepted it, and among these was Theodore Roosevelt. He believed that the recent war had involved us in a responsibility which we could not evade if we would. Having destroyed Spanish sovereignty in the Philippines, we must see to it that the people of those islands were protected. We could not leave them to govern themselves because they had no experience in government; nor could we dodge our obligation by selling them to any other Power. Far from hesitating because of legal or moral doubts, much less of questioning our ability to perform this new task, Roosevelt embraced Imperialism, with all its possible issues, boldly not to say exultantly. To him Imperialism meant national strength, the acknowledgment by the American people that the United States are a World Power and that they would not shrink from taking up any burden which that distinction involved.
When President Cleveland, at the end of 1895, sent his swingeing message in regard to the Venezuelan Boundary quarrel, Roosevelt was one of the first to foresee the remote consequences. And by the time he himself became President, less than six years later, several events—our taking of the Hawaiian Islands, the Spanish War, the island possessions which it saddled upon us—confirmed his conviction that the United States could no longer live isolated from the great interests and policies of the world, but must take their place among the ruling Powers. Having reached national maturity we must accept Expansion as the logical and normal ideal for our matured nation. Cleveland had laid down that the Monroe Doctrine was inviolable; Roosevelt insisted that we must not only bow to it in theory, but be prepared to defend it if necessary by force of arms.
Very naturally, therefore, Roosevelt encouraged the passing of legislation needed to complete the settlement of our relations with our new possessions. He paid especial attention to the men he sent to administer the Philippines, and later he was able to secure the services of W. Cameron Forbes as Governor-General. Mr. Forbes proved to be a Viceroy after the best British model and he looked after the interest of his wards so honestly and competently that conditions in the Philippines improved rapidly, and the American public in general felt no qualms over possessing them. But the Anti-Imperialists, to whom a moral issue does not cease to be moral simply because it has a material sugar-coating, kept up their protest.
There were, however, matters of internal policy; along with them Roosevelt inherited several foreign complications which he at once grappled with. In the Secretary of State, John Hay, he had a remarkable helper. Henry Adams told me that Hay was the first "man of the world" who had ever been Secretary of State. While this may be disputed, nobody can fail to see some truth in Adams's assertion. Hay had not only the manners of a gentleman, but also the special carriage of a diplomat. He was polite, affable, and usually accessible, without ever losing his innate dignity. An indefinable reserve warded off those who would either presume or indulge in undue familiarity His quick wits kept him always on his guard. His main defect was his unwillingness to regard the Senate as having a right to pass judgment on his treaties. And instead of being compliant and compromising, he injured his cause with the Senators by letting them see too plainly that he regarded them as interlopers, and by peppering them with witty but not agreeable sarcasm. In dealing with foreign diplomats, on the other hand, he was at his best. They found him polished, straightforward, and urbane. He not only produced on them the impression of honesty, but he was honest. In all his diplomatic correspondence, whether he was writing confidentially to American representatives or was addressing official notes to foreign governments, I do not recall a single hint of double-dealing. Hay was the velvet glove, Roosevelt the hand of steel.
For many years Canada and the United States had enjoyed grievances towards each other, grievances over fisheries, over lumber, and other things, no one of which was worth going to war for. The discovery of gold in the Klondike, and the rush thither of thousands of fortune-seekers, revived the old question of the Alaskan Boundary; for it mattered a great deal whether some of the gold-fields were Alaskan—that is, American-or Canadian. Accordingly, a joint High Commission was appointed towards the end of McKinley's first administration to consider the claims and complaints of the two countries. The Canadians, however, instead of settling each point on its own merits, persisted in bringing in a list of twelve grievances which varied greatly in importance, and this method favored trading one claim against another. The result was that the Commission, failing to agree, disbanded. Nevertheless, the irritation continued, and Roosevelt, having become President, and being a person who was constitutionally opposed to shilly-shally, suggested to the State Department that a new Commission be appointed under conditions which would make a decision certain. He even went farther, he took precautions to assure a verdict in favor of the United States. He appointed three Commissioners—Senators Lodge, Root, and Turner; the Canadians appointed two, Sir A. L. Jette and A. B. Aylesworth; the English representative was Alverstone, the Lord Chief Justice.
The President gave to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, of the Supreme Court, who was going abroad for the summer, a letter which he was "indiscreetly" to show Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Balfour, and two or three other prominent Englishmen. In this letter he wrote:
'The claims of the Canadians for access to deep water along any part of the Alaskan Coast is just exactly as indefensible as if they should now suddenly claim the Island of Nantucket ….
'I believe that no three men [the President said] in the United States could be found who would be more anxious than our own delegates to do justice to the British claim on all points where there is even a color of right on the British side. But the objection raised by certain Canadian authorities to Lodge, Root, and Turner, and especially to Lodge and Root, was that they had committed themselves on the general proposition. No man in public life in any position of prominence could have possibly avoided committing himself on the proposition, any more than Mr. Chamberlain could avoid committing himself on the question of the ownership of the Orkneys if some Scandinavian country suddenly claimed them. If this claim embodied other points as to which there was legitimate doubt, I believe Mr. Chamberlain would act fairly and squarely in deciding the matter; but if he appointed a commission to settle up all these questions, I certainly should not expect him to appoint three men, if he could find them, who believed that as to the Orkneys the question was an open one.
'I wish to make one last effort to bring about an agreement through the Commission [he said in closing] which will enable the people of both countries to say that the result represents the feeling of the representatives of both countries. But if there is a disagreement, I wish it distinctly understood, not only that there will be no arbitration of the matter, but that in my message to Congress I shall take a position which will prevent any possibility of arbitration hereafter; a position . . . which will render it necessary for Congress to give me the authority to run the line as we claim it, by our own people, without any further regard to the attitude of England and Canada. If I paid attention to mere abstract rights, that is the position I ought to take anyhow. I have not taken it because I wish to exhaust every effort to have the affair settled peacefully and with due regard to England's honor.'*
* W. R. Thayer: John Hay, II, 209, 210.
In due time the Commission gave a decision in favor of the American contention. Lord Alverstone, who voted with the Americans, was suspected of having been chosen by the British Government because they knew his opinion, but I do not believe that this was true. A man of his honor, sitting in such a tribunal, would not have voted according to instructions from anybody.
Roosevelt's brusque way of bringing the Alaska Boundary Question to a quick decision, may be criticised as not being judicial. He took the short cut, just as he did years before in securing a witness against the New York saloon-keepers who destroyed the lives of thousands of boys and girls by making them drunkards. Strictly, of course, if the boundary dispute was to be submitted to a commission, he ought to have allowed the other party to appoint its own commissioners without any suggestion from him. But as the case had dragged on interminably, and he believed, and the world believed, and the Canadians themselves knew, that they intended to filibuster and postpone as long as possible, he took the common-sense way to a settlement. If he had resolved, as he had, to draw the boundary line "on his own hook," in case there was further pettifogging he committed no impropriety in warning the British statesmen of his purpose. In judging these Rooseveltian short cuts, the reader must decide whether they were justified by the good which they achieved.
Of even greater importance was the understanding reached, under Roosevelt's direction, with the British Government in regard to the construction of a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. By the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, the United States and Great Britain agreed to maintain free and uninterrupted passage across the Isthmus, and, further, that neither country should "obtain or maintain to itself any control over the said ship-canal," or "assume or exercise any dominion . . . over any part of Central America." The ship canal talked about as a probability in 1850 had become a necessity by 1900. During the Spanish-American War, the American battleship Oregon had been obliged. to make the voyage round Cape Horn, from San Francisco to Cuba, and this served to impress on the people of the United States the really acute need of a canal across the Isthmus, so that in time of war with a powerful enemy, our Atlantic fleet and our Pacific fleet might quickly pass from one coast to another. It would obviously be impossible for us to play the role of a World Power unless we had this short line of communication. But the conditions of peace, not less than the emergencies of war, called for a canal. International commerce, as well as our own, required the saving of thousands of miles of distance.
About 1880, the French under Count De Lesseps undertook to construct a canal from Panama to Aspinwall, but after half a dozen years the French company suspended work, partly for financial reasons, and partly on account of the enormous loss of life among the diggers from the pestilent nature of the climate and the country. Then followed a period of waiting, until it seemed certain that the French would never resume operations. American promoters pressed the claims of a route through Nicaragua where they could secure concessions. But it became clear that an enterprise of such far reaching political importance as a trans-Isthmian canal, should be under governmental control. John Hay had been less than a year in the Department of State when he set about negotiating with England a treaty which should embody his ideas. In Sir Julian Pauncefote, the British Ambassador at Washington, he had a most congenial man to deal with. Both were gentlemen, both were firmly convinced that a canal must be constructed for the good of civilization, both held that to assure the friendship of the two great branches of the English-speaking race should be the transcendent aim of each. They soon made a draft of a treaty which was submitted to the Senate,,but the Senators so amended it that the British Government refused to accept their amendments, and the project failed. Hay was so terribly chagrined at the Senate's interference that he wished to resign. There could be no doubt now, however, that if the canal had been undertaken on the terms of his first treaty, it would never have satisfied the United States and it would probably have been a continual source of international irritation. Roosevelt was at that time Governor of New York, and I quote the following letter from him to Hay because it shows how clearly he saw the objections to the treaty, and the fundamental principles for the control of an Isthmian canal:
Albany, Feb. 18, 1900
'I hesitated long before I said anything about the treaty through sheer dread of two moments—that in which I should receive your note, and that in which I should receive Cabot's.* But I made up my mind that at least I wished to be on record; for to my mind this step is one backward, and it may be fraught with very great mischief. You have been the greatest Secretary of State I have seen in my time—Olney comes second—but at this moment I can not, try as I may, see that you are right. Understand me. When the treaty is adopted, as I suppose it will be, I shall put the best face possible on it, and shall back the Administration as heartily as ever, but oh, how I wish you and the President would drop the treaty and push through a bill to build AND FORTIFY our own canal.
* Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who also opposed the first treaty.
'My objections are twofold. First, as to naval policy. If the proposed canal had been in existence in '98, the Oregon could have come more quickly through to the Atlantic; but this fact would have been far outweighed by the fact that Cervera's fleet would have had open to it the chance of itself going through the canal, and thence sailing to attack Dewey or to menace our stripped Pacific Coast. If that canal is open to the warships of an enemy, it is a menace to us in time of war; it is an added burden, an additional strategic point to be guarded by our fleet. If fortified by us, it becomes one of the most potent sources of our possible sea strength. Unless so fortified it strengthens against us every nation whose fleet is larger than our own. One prime reason for fortifying our great seaports, is to unfetter our fleet, to release it for offensive purposes; and the proposed canal would fetter it again, for our fleet would have to watch it, and therefore do the work which a fort should do; and what it could do much better.
'Secondly, as to the Monroe Doctrine. If we invite foreign powers to a joint ownership, a joint guarantee, of what so vitally concerns us but a little way from our borders, how can we possibly object to similar joint action, say in Southern Brazil or Argentina, where our interests are so much less evident? If Germany has the same right that we have in the canal across Central America, why not in the partition of any part of Southern America? To my mind, we should consistently refuse to all European powers the right to control in any shape, any territory in the Western Hemisphere which they do not already hold.
'As for existing treaties—I do not admit the "dead hand" of the treaty making power in the past. A treaty can always be honorably abrogated—though it must never be abrogated in dishonest fashion.'*
* W. R. Thayer: John Hay, II, 339-41.
Fortunately, Lord Salisbury, the British Prime Minister, remained benevolently disposed towards the Isthmian Canal, and in the following year he consented to take up the subject again. A new treaty embodying the American amendments and the British objections was drafted, and passed the Senate a few months after Roosevelt became President. Its vital provisions were, that it abrogated the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and gave to the United States full ownership and control of the proposed canal.
This was the second illustration of Roosevelt's masterfulness in cutting through a diplomatic knot. Arrangements for constructing the Canal itself forced on him a third display of his dynamic quality which resulted in the most hotly discussed act of his career.
The French Canal Company was glad to sell to the American Government its concessions on the Isthmus, and as much of the Canal as it had dug, for $40,000,000. It had originally bought its concession from the Government of Colombia, which owned the State of Panama: At first the Colombian rulers seemed glad, and they sent an accredited agent, Dr. Herran, to Washington, who framed with Secretary Hay a treaty satisfactory to both, and believed, by Mr. Hay, to represent the sincere intentions of the Colombian Government at Bogota. The Colombian politicians, however, who were banditti of the Tammany stripe, but as much cruder as Bogota was than New York City, suddenly discovered that the transaction might be much more profitable for themselves than they had at first suspected. They put off ratifying the treaty, therefore, and warned the French Company that they should charge it an additional $10,000,000 for the privilege of transferring its concession to the Americans. The French demurred; the Americans waited. Secretary Hay reminded Dr. Herran that the treaty must be signed within a reasonable time, and intimated that the reasonable time would soon be up.
The Bogotan blackmailers indulged in still wilder dreams of avarice; like the hasheesh-eater, they completely lost contact with reality and truth. In one of their earlier compacts with the French Company they stipulated that, if the Canal were not completed by a certain day in 1904, the entire concession and undertaking should revert to the Colombian Government. As it was now September, 1903, it did not require the wits of a political bandit to see that, by staving off an agreement with the United States for a few months, Colombia could get possession of property and privileges which the French were selling to the Americans for $40,000,000. So the Colombian Parliament adjourned in October, 1903, without even taking up the Hay-Herran Treaty.
Meanwhile the managers of the French Company became greatly alarmed at the prospect of losing the sum which the United States had agreed to pay for its rights and diggings, and it took steps to avert this total loss. The most natural means which occurred to it, the means which it adopted, was to incite a revolution in the State of Panama. To understand the affair truly, the reader must remember that Panama had long been the chief source of wealth to the Republic of Colombia. The mountain gentry who conducted the Colombian Government at Bogota treated Panama like a conquered. province, to be squeezed to the utmost for the benefit of the politicians. There was neither community of interest nor racial sympathy between the Panamanians and the Colombians, and, as it required a journey of fifteen days to go from Panama to the Capital, geography, also, added its sundering influence. Quite naturally the Panamanians, in the course of less than half a century, had made more than fifty attempts to revolt from Colombia and establish their own independence. The most illiterate of them could understand that, if they were independent, the money which they received and passed on to Bogota., for the bandits there to spend, would remain in their own hands. An appeal to their love of liberty, being coupled with so obvious an appeal to their pockets, was irresistible.
Just what devices the French Company employed to instigate revolution, can be read in the interesting work of M. Bunau-Varilla, one of the most zealous officers of the French Company, who had devoted his life to achieving the construction of the Trans-Isthmian Canal. He was indefatigable, breezy, and deliberately indiscreet. He tells much, and what he does not tell he leaves you to infer, without risk of going astray. Mr. William Nelson Cromwell, of New York; the general counsel of the Company, offset Varilla's loquacity by a proper amount of reticence. Bunau-Varilla hurried over from Paris, and had interviews with President Roosevelt and Secretary Hay, but could not draw them into his conspiracy. The President told him that, at the utmost, he would only order American warships, which were on the Panama coast, to prevent any attack from outside which might cause bloodshed and interfere with the undisturbed passage across the Isthmus, a duty which the United States was pledged to perform.
The French zealot-conspirator freely announced that the revolution at Panama would take place at noon on November 3d. It did take place as scheduled without violence, and with only the accidental killing of a Chinaman and a dog. The next day the Revolutionists proclaimed the Republic of Panama, and on November 6th the United States formally recognized its existence and prepared to open diplomatic relations with it. The Colombian Government had tried to send troops to put down the rebellion, but the American warships, obeying their orders to prevent bloodshed or fighting, would not allow the troops to land.
As soon as the news of these events reached Bogota, the halls of Parliament there resounded with wailing and gnashing of teeth and protests, and curses on the perfidious Americans who had connived to free the Panamanians in their struggle for liberty. The mountain bandits perceived that they had overreached themselves. Instead of the $10,000,000 which their envoy Herran had deemed sufficient; instead of the $40,000,000 and more, which their greed had counted on in 1904, they would receive nothing. The Roosevelt Government immediately signed a contract with the Republic of Panama, by which the United States leased a zone across the Isthmus for building, controlling, and operating, the Canal. Then the Colombians, in a panic, sent their most respectable public man, and formerly their President, General Rafael Reyes, to Washington, to endeavor to persuade the Government to reverse its compact with the Panama Republic. The blackmailers were now very humble. Mr. Wayne MacVeagh, who was counsel for Colombia, told me that General Reyes was authorized to accept $8,000,000 for all the desired concessions, "and," Mr. MacVeagh added, "he would have taken five millions, but Hay and Roosevelt were so foolish that they wouldn't accept."
The quick decisions of the Administration in Washington, which accompanied the revolution in Panama and the recognition of the new Republic, were made by Roosevelt. I have seen no evidence that Mr. Hay was consulted at the last moment. When the stroke was accomplished, many good persons in the United States denounced it. They felt that it was high-handed and brutal, and that it fixed an indelible blot on the national conscience. Many of them did not know of the long-drawn-out negotiations and of the Colombian premeditated deceit; others knew, but overlooked or condoned. They upheld strictly the letter of the law. They could not deny that the purpose of the Colombians was to exact blackmail. It meant nothing to them that Herran, the official envoy, had drawn up and signed a treaty under instructions from Marroquin, the President of Colombia, and its virtual dictator, who, having approved of the orders under which Herran acted, could easily have required the Colombian Parliament to ratify the treaty. Perfervidly pious critics of Roosevelt pictured him as a bully without conscience, and they blackened his aid in freeing the Panamanians by calling it "the Rape of Panama." Some of these persons even boldly asserted that John Hay died of remorse over his part in this wicked deed. The fact is that John Hay died of a disease which was not caused by remorse, and that, as long as he lived, he publicly referred to the Panama affair as that in which he took the greatest pride. It is only in the old Sunday-School stories that Providence punishes wrongdoing with such commendable swiftness, and causes the naughty boy who goes skating on Sunday to drown forthwith; in real life the "mills of God grind slowly." Roosevelt always regarded with equal satisfaction the decision by which the Panama Canal was achieved and the high needs of civilization and the protection of the United States were attended to. He lived long enough to condemn the proposal of some of our morbidly conscientious people, hypnotized by the same old crafty Colombians, to pay Colombia a gratuity five times greater than that which General Reyes would have thankfully received in December, 1903.
Persons of different temperaments, but of equal patriotism and sincerity, will probably pass different verdicts on this incident for a long time to come. Mr. Leupp quotes a member of Roosevelt's Administration as stating four alternative courses the President might have followed. First, he might have let matters drift until Congress met, and then sent a message on the subject, shifting the responsibility from his own shoulders to those of the Congressmen. Secondly, he might have put down the rebellion and restored Panama to Colombia; but this would have been to subject them against their will to a foreign enemy—an enormity the Anti-Imperialists were still decrying in our holding the Philippines against the will of their inhabitants. Thirdly, he might have withdrawn American warships and left Colombia to fight it out with the Panamanians—but this would have involved bloodshed, tumult, and interruption of transit across the Isthmus, which the United States, by the agreement of 1846, were bound to prevent. Finally, he might recognize any de facto government ready and willing to transact business—and this he did.*
* Leupp, 10-11.
That the Colombian politicians, who repudiated the treaty Herran had framed, were blackmailers of the lowest sort, is as indisputable as is the fact that whoever begins to compromise with a blackmailer is lured farther and farther into a bog until he is finally swallowed up. Americans should know also that during the summer and autumn of 1903, German agents were busy in Bogota. and that, since German capitalists had openly announced their desire to buy up the French Company's concession, we may guess that they did not urge Colombia to fulfill her obligation to the United States.
Many years later I discussed the transaction with Mr. Roosevelt, chaffing him with being a wicked conspirator. He laughed, and replied: " What was the use? The other fellows in Paris and New York had taken all the risk and were doing all the work. Instead of trying to run a parallel conspiracy, I had only to sit still and profit by their plot—if it succeeded." He said also that he had intended issuing a public announcement that, if Colombia by a given date refused to come to terms, he would seize the Canal Zone in behalf of civilization. I told him I rather wished that he had accomplished his purpose in that way; but he answered that events matured too quickly, and that, in any case, where swift action was required, the Executive and not Congress must decide.
CHAPTER XII. THE GREAT CRUSADE AT HOME
These early diplomatic settlements in Roosevelt's Administration showed the world that the United States now had a President who did not seek quarrels, but who was not afraid of them, who never bluffed, because—unlike President Cleveland and Secretary Olney with their Venezuela Message in 1895—he never made a threat which he could not back up at the moment. There was no longer a bed of roses to stifle opposition; whosoever hit at the United States would encounter a barrier of long, sharp, and unbending thorns.
These particular achievements in foreign affairs, and others which I shall mention later, gave Roosevelt and his country great prestige abroad and the admiration of a large part of his countrymen. But his truly significant work related to home affairs. Now at last, he, the young David of the New Ideals, was to go forth, if he dared, and do battle with the Goliath of Conservatism. With him there was no question of daring. He had been waiting for twenty years for this opportunity. Such a conflict or duel has rarely been witnessed, because it rarely happens that an individual who consciously embodies the aims of an epoch is accepted by that epoch as its champion. Looking backward, we see that Abraham Lincoln typified the ideals of Freedom and Union which were the supreme issues of his time; but this recognition has come chiefly since his death. In like fashion I believe that Roosevelt's significance as a champion of Liberty, little suspected by his contemporaries and hardly surmised even now, will require the lapse of another generation before it is universally understood.
Many obvious reasons account for this. Most of the internal reforms which Roosevelt struggled for lacked the dramatic quality or the picturesqueness which appeals to average, dull, unimaginative men and women. The heroism of the medical experimenter who voluntarily contracts yellow fever and dies—and thereby saves myriads of lives—makes little impression on the ordinary person, who can be roused only by stories of battle heroism, of soldiers and torpedoes. And yet the attacks which Roosevelt made, while they did not involve death, called for the highest kind of civic courage and fortitude.
Then again a political combat with tongues and arguments seldom conveys the impression that through it irrevocable Fate gives its decision to the same extent that a contest by swords and volleys does. Political campaigns are a competition of parties and only the immediate partisans who direct and carry on the fight, grow very hot. The great majority of a party is not fanatical, and a citizen who has witnessed many elections, some for and some against him, comes instinctively to feel that whoever wins the country is safe. He discounts the cries of alarm and the abuse by opponents. And only in his most expansive moments does he flatter himself that his party really represents the State. The Republican Party, through which President Roosevelt had to work, was by no means an ideal instrument. He believed in Republicanism, with a faith only less devoted than that with which he embraced the fundamental duties and spiritual facts of life. But the Republicanism which he revered must be interpreted by himself; and the party which bore the name Republican was split into several sections, mutually discordant if not actually hostile. It seems no exaggeration to say that the underlying motive of the majority of the Republican Party during Roosevelt's Presidency was to uphold Privilege, just as much as the underlying purpose of the great Whig Party in England in the eighteenth century was to uphold Aristocracy. Roosevelt's purpose, on the contrary, was to clip the arrogance of Privilege based on Plutocracy. To achieve this he must, in some measure, compel the party of Plutocracy to help him. I speak, so far as possible, as a historian,—and not as a partisan,—who recognizes that the rise of a Plutocracy was the inevitable result of the amassing, during a generation, of unprecedented wealth, and that, in a Republic governed by parties, the all-dominant Plutocracy would naturally see to it that the all dominant party which governed the country and made its laws should be plutocratic. If the spheres in which Plutocracy made most of its money had been Democratic, then the Democratic Party would have served the Plutocracy. As it was, in the practical relation between the parties, the Democrats got their share of the spoils, and the methods of a Democratic Boss, like Senator Gorman, did not differ from those of a Republican Boss, like Senator Aldrich. Roosevelt relied implicitly on justice and common sense. He held, as firmly as Lincoln had held, to the inherent rightmindedness of the "plain people." And however fierce and formidable the opposition to his policies might be in Congress, he trusted that, if he could make clear to the average voters of the country what he was aiming at, they would support him. And they did support him. Time after time, when the Interests appeared to be on the point of crushing his reform, the people rose and coerced Congress into adopting it. I would not imply that Roosevelt assumed an autocratic manner in this warfare. He left no doubt of his intention, still less could he disguise the fact of his tremendous personal vigor; but rather than threaten he tried to persuade; he was good-natured to everybody, he explained the reasonableness of his measures; and only when the satraps of Plutocracy so far lost their discretion as to threaten him, did he bluntly challenge them to do their worst.
The Interests had undeniably reached such proportions that unless they were chastened and controlled, the freedom of the Republic could not survive. And yet, in justice, we must recall that when they grew up in the day of small things, they were beneficial; their founders had no idea of their becoming a menace to the Nation. The man who built the first cotton-mill in his section, or started the first iron-furnace, or laid the first stretch of railroad, was rightly hailed as a benefactor; and he could not foresee that the time would come when his mill, entering into a business combination with a hundred other mills in different parts of the country, would be merged. in a monopoly to strangle competition in cotton manufacture. Likewise, the first stretch of railroad joined another, and this a third, and so on, until there had arisen a vast railway system under a single management from New York to San Francisco. Now, while these colossal monopolies had grown up so naturally, responding to the wonderful expansion of the population they served, the laws and regulations which applied to them, having been framed in the days when they were young and small and harmless, still obtained. The clothes made for the little boy would not do for the giant man. I have heard a lawyer complain that statutes, which barely sufficed when travel and transportation went by stage-coach, were stretched to fit the needs of the public in its relation with transcontinental railroads. This is an exaggeration, no doubt, but it points towards truth. The Big Interests were so swollen that they went ahead on their own affairs and paid little attention to the community on which they were battening. They saw to it that if any laws concerning them had to be made by the State Legislatures or by Congress, their agents in those bodies should make them. A certain Mr. Vanderbilt, the president of one of the largest railroad systems in America, a person whose other gems of wit and wisdom have not been recorded, achieved such immortality, as it is, by remarking, "The public be damned." Probably the president and directors of a score of other monopolies would have heartily echoed that impolitic and petulant display of arrogance. Impolitic the exclamation was, because the American public had already begun to feel that the Big Interests were putting its freedom in jeopardy, and it was beginning to call for laws which should reduce the power of those interests.
As early as 1887 the Interstate Commerce Act was passed, the earliest considerable attempt to regulate rates and traffic. Then followed anti-trust laws which aimed at the suppression of "pools," in which many large producers or manufacturers combined to sell their staples at a uniform price, a practice which inevitably set up monopolies. The "Trusts" were to these what the elephant is to a colt. When the United States Steel Corporation was formed by uniting eleven large steel plants, with an aggregate capital of $11100,000,000, the American people had an inkling of the magnitude to which Trusts might swell. In like fashion when the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern Railroads found a legal impediment to their being run by one management, they got round the law by organizing the Northern Securities Company, which was to hold the stocks and bonds of both railroads. And so of many other important industrial and transportation mergers. The most powerful financial promoters of the country, led by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, were busy setting up these combinations on a large scale and the keenest corporation lawyers spent their energy and wits in framing charters which obeyed the letter of the laws, but wholly denied their spirit.
President Roosevelt worked openly, with a definite purpose. First, he would enforce every law on the statute book, without exception in favor of any individual or company; next, he suggested to Congress the need of new legislation to resist further encroachments by capitalists in the fields where they had already been checked; finally, he pointed out that Congress must begin at once to protect the national resources which had been allowed to go to waste, or to be seized and exploited by private concerns.
I do not intend to take up in chronological sequence, or in detail, Roosevelt's battles to secure proper legislation. To do so would require the discussion of legal and constitutional questions, which would scarcely fit a sketch like the present. The main things to know are the general nature of his reforms and his own attitude in conducting the fight. He aimed directly at stopping abuses which gave a privileged few undue advantage in amassing and distributing wealth. The practical result of the laws was to spread justice, and equality throughout the country and to restore thereby the true spirit of Democracy on which the Founders created the Republic. He fought fairly, but warily, never letting slip a point that would tell against his opponents, who, it must be said, did not always attack him honorably.
At first, they regarded the President as a headstrong young man— he was the youngest who had ever sat in the Presidential chair— who wished to have his own way in order to show the country that he was its leader. They did not see that ideals which dated back to his childhood were really shaping his acts. He had seen law in the making out West; he had seen law, and especially corporation law, in the making when he was in the New York Assembly and Governor of New York; he knew the devices by which the Interests caused laws to be made and passed for their special benefit, or evaded inconvenient laws. But he suffered no disillusion as to the ideal of Law, the embodiment and organ of Justice. Legal quibbles, behind which designing and wicked men dodged, nauseated him, and he made no pretense of wishing to uphold them.
The champions of the Interests found out before long that the young President was neither headstrong nor a mere creature of impulse, but that he followed a thoroughly rational system of principles; and so they had to abandon the notion that the next gust of impulse might blow him over to their side. They must take him as he was, and make the best of it. Now, I must repeat, that, for these gentlemen, the very idea that anybody could propose to run the American Government, or to organize American Society, on any other standard than theirs, seemed to them preposterous. The Bourbon nobles in France and in Italy were not more amazed. when the Revolutionists proposed to sweep them away than were the American Plutocrats of the Rooseveltian era when he promoted laws to regulate them. The Bourbon thinks the earth will perish unless Bourbonism governs it; the American Plutocrat thought that America existed simply to enrich him. He clung to his rights and privileges with the tenacity of a drowning man clinging to a plank, and he deceived himself into thinking that, in desperately trying to save himself and his order, he was saving Society.
Most tragic of all, to one who regards history as the revelation of the unfolding of the moral nature of mankind, was the fact that these men had not the slightest idea that they were living in a moral world, or that a new influx of moral inspiration had begun to permeate Society in its politics, its business, and its daily conduct. The great ship Privilege, on which they had voyaged with pomp and satisfaction, was going down and they knew it not.
CHAPTER XIII. THE TWO ROOSEVELTS
I do not wish to paint Roosevelt in one light only, and that the most favorable. Had no other been shed upon him, his Administration would have been too bland for human belief, and life for him would have palled. For his inexhaustible energy hungered for action. As soon as his judgment convinced him that a thing ought to be done he set about doing it. Recently, I asked one of the most perspicacious members of his Cabinet, "What do you consider Theodore's dominant trait" He thought for a while, and then replied, "Combativeness." No doubt the public also, at least while Roosevelt was in office, thought of him first as a fighter. The idea that he was truculent or pugnacious, that he went about with a chip on his shoulder, that he loved fighting for the sake of fighting, was, however, a mistake. During the eight years he was President he kept the United States out of war; not only that, he settled long-standing causes of irritation, such as the dispute over the Alaskan Boundary, which might, under provocation, have led to war. Even more than this, without striking a blow, he repelled the persistent attempts of the German Emperor to gain a foothold on this continent; he repelled those snakelike attacks and forced the Imperial Bully, not merely to retreat ignominiously but to arbitrate. And in foreign affairs, Roosevelt shone as a peacemaker. He succeeded in persuading the Russian Czar to come to terms with the Mikado of Japan. And soon after, when the German Emperor threatened to make war on France, a letter from Roosevelt to him caused William to reconsider his brutal plan, and to submit the Moroccan dispute to a conference of the Powers at Algeciras.
Instead of the braggart and brawler that his enemies mispainted him, I saw in Roosevelt, rather, a strong man who had taken early to heart Hamlet's maxim and had steadfastly practiced it:
"Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake."
He himself summed up this part of his philosophy in a phrase which has become a proverb: "Speak softly, but carry a big stick." More than once in his later years he quoted this to me, adding, that it was precisely because this or that Power knew that he carried a big stick, that he was enabled to speak softly with effect.
No man of our time better deserved the Nobel Peace Prize than did he. The fallacy that Roosevelt, like the proverbial Irishman at Donnybrook Fair, had rather fight than eat, spread through the country, and indeed throughout the world, and had its influence in determining whether men voted for him or not. His enemies used it as proof that he was not a safe President, but they took means much more malignant than this to discredit and destroy him. When the Big Interests discovered that they could not silence him, they circulated stories of all kinds that would have rendered even the archangel Gabriel suspect to some worthy dupes.
They threw doubts, for instance, on his sanity, and one heard that the "Wall Street magnates" employed the best alienists in the country to analyze everything the President did and said, in the hope of accumulating evidence to show that he was too unbalanced to be President. Not content with stealing away his reputation for mental competence, they shot into the dark the gravest charges against his honor. A single story, still believed, as I know, by persons of eminence in their professions, will illustrate this. When one of the great contests between the President and the Interests was on, he remembered that one of their representatives in New York had damaging, confidential letters from him. Hearing that these might be produced, Roosevelt telephoned one of his trusty agents to break open the desk of the Captain of Industry where they were kept, and to bring them to the White House, before ten o'clock the following morning. This was done. To believe that the President of the United States would engage in a vulgar robbery of the jimmy and black-mask sort indicates a degree of credulity which even the alienists could hardly have expected to encounter outside of their asylums. It suggests also, that Baron Munchausen, like the Wandering Jew Ahasuerus, has never died. Does any one suppose that the person whose desk was rifled would have kept quiet? Or that, if the Interests had had even reasonably sure evidence of the President's guilt, they would not have published it? To set spies and detectives upon him with orders to trail him night and day was, according to rumor, an obvious expedient for his enemies to employ.
I repeat these stories, not because I believe them, but because many persons did, and such gossip, like the cruel slanders whispered against President Cleveland years before, gained some credence. Roosevelt was so natural, so unguarded, in his speech and ways, that he laid himself open to calumny. The delight he took in establishing the Ananias Club, and the rapidity with which he found new members for it, seemed to justify strong doubts as to his temper and taste, if not as to his judgment. The vehemence of his public speaking, which was caused in part by a physical difficulty of utterance—the sequel of his early asthmatic trouble—and in part by his extraordinary vigor, created among some of the hearers who did not know him the impression that he must be a hard drinker, or that he drank to stimulate his eloquence. After he retired from office, his enemies, in order to undermine his further political influence, sowed the falsehood that he was a drunkard. I do not recall that they ever suggested that he used his office for his private profit—there are some things too absurd for even malice to suggest—but he had reason enough many times to calm himself by reflecting that his Uncle Jimmy Bulloch, the best of men, believed just such lies, and the most atrocious insinuations, against Mr. Gladstone.
Of course, nearly all public men have to undergo similar virulent defamation. I have heard a well-known publicist, a lawyer of ability, argue that both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln did not escape from what seems now incredible abuse, and that they were, nevertheless, the noblest of men and peerless patriots; and then he went on to argue that President Woodrow Wilson has been the target of similar malignity, and to leave you to conclude that consequently Wilson is in the same class with Washington and Lincoln. If he had put his thesis in a different form, the publicist might have seen himself, as his hearers did, the absurdity of it. Suppose he had said, for instance: "In spite of the fact that Washington and Lincoln each kept a cow, they were both peerless patriots, therefore, as President Wilson keeps a cow, he must be a peerless patriot." One fears that logic is somewhat neglected even in the training of lawyers in our day.
The commonest charge against Roosevelt, and the one which seemed, on the surface at least, to be most plausible, was that he was devoured by insatiable ambition. The critical remarked that wherever he went he was always the central figure. The truth is, that he could no more help being the central figure than a lion could in any gathering of lesser creatures; the fact that he was Roosevelt decided that. He did use the personal pronoun "I," and the possessive pronoun "My," with such frequency as to irritate good persons who were quite as egotistical as he—if that be egotism—but who used such modest circumlocutions as "the present writer," or "one," to camouflage their self-conceit. Roosevelt enjoyed almost all his experiences with equal zest, and he expressed his enjoyment without reserve. He was quite as well aware of his foibles as his critics were, and he made merry over them. Probably nobody laughed more heartily than he at the pleasantly humorous remark of one of his boys: "Father never likes to go to a wedding or a funeral, because he can't be the bride at the wedding or the corpse at the funeral."
Ambition he had, the ambition which every healthy-minded man ought to have to deserve the good-will and approbation of his fellows. This he admitted over and over again, and he made no pretense of not taking satisfaction from the popularity his countrymen showered upon him. In writing to a friend that he wished to be a candidate in 1904, he distinguished between the case of Lincoln in 1864 and that of himself and other Presidential candidates for renomination. In 1864, the crisis was so tremendous that Lincoln must have considered that chiefly, irrespective of his own hopes: whereas Roosevelt in 1904, like Jackson, Grant, Cleveland, and the other two-term Presidents, might, without impropriety, look upon reelection as, in a measure, a personal tribute.
One of my purposes in writing this sketch will have failed, if I have not made clear the character of Roosevelt's ambition. He could not be happy unless he were busily at work. If that work were in a public office he was all the happier. But the way in which he accepted one office after another, each unrelated to the preceding, was so desultory as to prove that he did not begin life with a deep-laid design on the Presidency. He got valuable political notoriety as an Assemblyman, but that was, as I have so often said, because he could not be inconspicuous anywhere. He took the office of Civil Service Commissioner, although everybody regarded that as a commonplace field bounded on three sides by political oblivion; and only a dreamer could have supposed that his service as Chief Police Commissioner of New York City could lead to the White House. Only when he became Assistant Secretary of the Navy can he be said to have come within striking distance of the great target. In enlisting in the Spanish War and organizing the Rough Riders, he may well have reflected that military prowess has often favored a Presidential candidacy; but even here, his sense of patriotic duty and his desire to experience the soldier's life were almost indisputably his chief motives. As Governor of New York, however, he could not disguise from himself the fact that that position might prove again, as it had proved in the case of Cleveland, the stepping-stone to the Presidency. On finding, however, that Platt and the Bosses, exasperated by him as Governor, wished to get rid of him by making him Vice-President, and knowing that in the normal course of events a Vice-President never became President, he tried to refuse nomination to the lower office. And only when he perceived that the masses of the people, the country over, and not merely the Bosses, insisted on nominating him, did he accept. This brief summary of his political progress assuredly does not bear out the charge that he was the victim of uncontrollable ambition.
Roosevelt's Ananias Club caught the imagination of the country, but not always favorably. Those whom he elected into it, for instance, did not relish the notoriety. Others thought that it betokened irritation in him, and that a man in his high position ought not to punish persons who were presumably trustworthy by branding them so conspicuously. In fact, I suppose, he sometimes applied the brand too hastily, under the spur of sudden resentment. The most-open of men himself, he had no hesitation in commenting on anybody or any topic with the greatest indiscretion. For he took it for granted that even the strangers who heard him would hold his remarks as confidential. When, therefore, one of his hearers went outside and reported in public what the President had said, Roosevelt disavowed it, and put the babbler in the Ananias class. What a President wishes the public to know, he tells it himself. What he utters in private should, in honor, be held as confidential.
When I say that Roosevelt was astonishingly open, I do not mean that he blurted out everything, for he always knew the company with whom he talked, and if there were any among them with whom it would be imprudent to risk an indiscretion, he took care to talk "for safety." With him, a secret was a secret, and he could be as silent as an unopened Egyptian tomb. Certain diplomatic affairs he did not lisp, even to his Secretary of State. So far as appears, John Hay knew nothing about the President's interviews with the German Ambassador Holleben, which forced William II to arbitrate. And he sometimes prepared a bill for Congress with out consulting his Cabinet, for fear that the stock jobbers might get wind of it and bull or bear the market with the news.
Before passing on, I must remark that some cases of apparent mendacity or inaccuracy on the part of a President—especially if he were as voluble and busy as Roosevelt—must be attributed to forgetfulness or misunderstanding and not to wilful lying. A person coming from an interview with him might construe as a promise the kindly remarks with which the President wished to soften a refusal. The promise, which was no promise, not being kept, the suppliant accused the President of faithlessness or falsehood. McKinley, it was said, could say no to three different seekers for the same office so balmily that each of them went away convinced that he was the successful applicant. Yet McKinley escaped the charge of mendacity and Roosevelt, who deserved it far less, did not.
In his writings and speeches, Roosevelt uttered his opinions so candidly that we need not fall back on breaches of confidence to explain why his opponents were maddened by them. Plutocrats and monopolists might well wince at being called "malefactors of great wealth," "the wealthy criminal class." Such expressions had the virtue, from the point of view of rhetoric, of being so descriptive that any body could visualize them. They stung; they shed indefinable odium on a whole class; and, no doubt, this was just what Roosevelt intended. To many critics they seemed cruel, because, instead of allowing for exceptions, they huddled all plutocrats together, the virtuous and the vicious alike. And so with the victims of his phrase, "undesirable citizens." I marvel rather, however, that Roosevelt, given his extraordinary talent of flashing epithets and the rush of his indignation when he was doing battle for a good cause, displayed as much moderation as he did. Had he been a demagogue, he would have roused the masses against the capitalists and have goaded them to such a pitch of hatred that they would have looked to violence, bloodshed, and injustice, as the remedy they must apply.
But Roosevelt was farthest removed from the Revolutionists of the vulgar, red-handed class. He consecrated his life to prevent Revolution. All his action in the conflict between Labor and Capital aimed at conciliation. He told the plutocrats their defects with brutal frankness, and if he promoted laws to curb them, it was because he realized, as they did not, that, unless they mended their ways, they would bring down upon themselves a Socialist avalanche which they could not withstand. What set the seal of consecration on his work was his treatment of Labor with equal justice. Unlike the demagogue, he did not flatter the "horny-handed sons of toil" or obsequiously do the bidding of railroad brotherhoods, or pretend that the capitalist had no rights, and that all workingmen were good merely because they worked. On the contrary, he told them that no class was above the law; he warned them that if Labor attempted to get its demands by violence, he would put it down. He ridiculed the idea that honest citizenship depends on the more or less money a man has in his pocket. "A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country," Roosevelt said in a Fourth-of-July speech at Springfield, Illinois, in 1903, "is good enough to be given a square deal afterward. More than that no man is entitled to, and less than that no man shall have."
That phrase, "a square deal," stuck in the hearts of the American people. It summed up what they regarded as Roosevelt's most characteristic trait. He was the man of the square deal, who instinctively resented injustice done to those who could not protect themselves; the friend of the underdog, the companion of the self-reliant and the self-respecting. It is under this aspect that Roosevelt seems most likely to live in popular history.
So, from the time he became President, the public was divided into believing that there were two Roosevelts. His enemies made almost a monster of him, denouncing and fearing him as violent, rash, pugnacious, egotistical, ogreish in his mad, hatred of Capital, and Capitalists condemned him as hypocritical, cruel, lying, and vindictive. The other side, however, insisted on his courage; he was a fighter, but he always fought to defend the weak and to uphold the right; he was equally unmoved by Bosses and by demagogues; in his human relations he regarded only what a man was, not his class or condition; he had a great hearted, jovial simplicity; a far-seeing and steadfast patriotism; he preached the Square Deal and he practiced it; even more than Lincoln he was accessible to every one.