Theodore Roosevelt and His Times Roosevelt Becomes President byHowland, Harold
There was chance in Theodore Roosevelt's coming into the
Presidency as he did, but there was irony as well. An evil chance
dropped William McKinley before an assassin's bullet; but there
was a fitting irony in the fact that the man who must step into
his place had been put where he was in large measure by the very
men who would least like to see him become President.
The Republican convention of 1900 was a singularly unanimous
body. President McKinley was renominated without a murmur of
dissent. But there was no Vice-President to renominate, as Mr.
Hobart had died in office. There was no logical candidate for the
second place on the ticket. Senator Platt, however, had a man
whom he wanted to get rid of, since Governor Roosevelt had made
himself persona non grata alike to the machine politicians of his
State and to the corporations allied with them. The Governor,
however, did not propose to be disposed of so easily. His reasons
were characteristic. He wrote thus to Senator Platt about the
matter:
"I can't help feeling more and more that the VicePresidency is
not an office in which I could do anything and not an office in
which a man who is still vigorous and not past middle life has
much chance of doing anything . . . . Now, I should like to be
Governor for another term, especially if we are able to take hold
of the canals in serious shape. But, as Vice-President, I don't
see there is anything I can do. I would be simply a presiding
officer, and that I should find a bore."
Now Mr. Platt knew that nothing but "sidetracking" could stop
another nomination of Roosevelt for the Governorship, and this
Rough Rider was a thorn in his flesh. So he went on his
subterranean way to have him nominated for the most innocuous
political berth in the gift of the American people. He secured
the cooperation of Senator Quay of Pennsylvania and another boss
or two of the same indelible stripe; but all their political
strength would not have accomplished the desired result without
assistance from quite a different source. Roosevelt had already
achieved great popularity in the Middle and the Far West for the
very reasons which made Mr. Platt want him out of the way. So,
while the New York boss and his acquiescent delegates were
stopped from presenting his name to the convention by
Roosevelt's assurance that he would fight a l'outrance any
movement from his own State to nominate him, other delegates took
matters into their own hands and the nomination was finally made
unanimously.
Roosevelt gave great strength to the Republican ticket in the
campaign which followed. William Jennings Bryan was again the
Democratic candidate, but the "paramount issue" of his campaign
had changed since four years before from free silver to
anti-imperialism. President McKinley, according to his custom,
made no active campaign; but Bryan and Roosevelt competed with
each other in whirlwind speaking tours from one end of the
country to the other. The war-cry of the Republicans was the
"full dinner pail"; the keynote of Bryan's bid for popular
support was opposition to the Republican policy of expansion and
criticism of Republican tendencies toward plutocratic control.
The success of the Republican ticket was overwhelming; McKinley
and Roosevelt received nearly twice as many electoral votes as
Bryan and Stevenson.
When President McKinley was shot at Buffalo six months after his
second term began, it looked for a time as though he would
recover. So Roosevelt, after an immediate visit to Buffalo, went
to join his family in the Adirondacks. The news of the
President's impending death found him out in the wilderness on
the top of Mount Tahawus, not far from the tiny Lake
Tear-of-the-Clouds, the source of the Hudson River. A ten-mile
dash down the mountain trail, in the course of which he
outstripped all his companions but one; a wild forty-mile drive
through the night to the railroad, the new President and his
single companion changing the horses two or three times with
their own hands; a fast journey by special train across the
State--and on the evening of September 14, 1901, Theodore
Roosevelt took the oath of office as the twenty-sixth President
of the United States.
Before taking the oath, Roosevelt announced that it would be his
aim "to continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President
McKinley for the peace, prosperity, and honor of our beloved
country." He immediately asked every member of the late
President's Cabinet to continue in office. The Cabinet was an
excellent one, and Mr. Roosevelt found it necessary to make no
other changes than those that came in the ordinary course of
events. The policies were not altered in broad general outline,
for Roosevelt was as stalwart a Republican as McKinley himself,
and was as firmly convinced of the soundness of the fundamentals
of the Republican doctrine.
But the fears of some of his friends that Roosevelt would seem,
if he carried out his purpose of continuity, "a pale copy of
McKinley" were not justified in the event. They should have known
better. A copy of any one Roosevelt could neither be nor seem,
and "pale" was the last epithet to be applied to him with
justice. It could not be long before the difference in the two
Administrations would appear in unmistakable terms. The one which
had just passed was first of all a party Administration and
secondly a McKinley Administration. The one which followed was
first, last, and all the time a Roosevelt Administration. "Where
Macgregor sits, there is the head of the table." Not because
Roosevelt consciously willed it so, but because the force and
power and magnetism of his vigorous mind and personality
inevitably made it so. McKinley had been a great harmonizer. "He
oiled the machinery of government with loving and imperturbable
patience," said an observer of his time, "and the wheels ran with
an ease unknown since Washington's first term of office." It had
been a constant reproach of the critics of the former President
that "his ear was always to the ground." But he kept it there
because it was his sincere conviction that it belonged there,
ready to apprize him of the vibrations of the popular will.
Roosevelt was the born leader with an innate instinct of command.
He did not scorn or flout the popular will; he had too confirmed
a conviction of the sovereign right of the people to rule for
that. But he did not wait pusillanimously for the popular mind to
make itself up; he had too high a conception of the duty of
leadership for that. He esteemed it his peculiar function as the
man entrusted by a great people with the headship of their common
affairs--to lead the popular mind, to educate it, to inspire it,
sometimes to run before it in action, serene in the confidence
that tardy popular judgment would confirm the rightness of the
deed.
By the end of Roosevelt's first Administration two of the three
groups that had taken a hand in choosing him for the
Vice-Presidency were thoroughly sick of their bargain. The
machine politicians and the great corporations found that their
cunning plan to stifle with the wet blanket of that depressing
office the fires of his moral earnestness and pugnacious honesty
had overreached itself. Fate had freed him and, once freed, he
was neither to hold nor to bind. It was less than two years
before Wall Street was convinced that he was "unsafe," and sadly
shook its head over his "impetuosity." When Wall Street stamps a
man "unsafe," the last word in condemnation has been said. It was
an even shorter time before the politicians found him
unsatisfactory. "The breach between Mr. Roosevelt and the
politicians was, however, inevitable. His rigid insistence upon
the maintenance and the extension of the merit system alone
assured the discontent which precedes dislike," wrote another
observer. "The era of patronage mongering in the petty offices
ceased suddenly, and the spoilsmen had the right to say that in
this respect the policy of McKinley had not been followed." It
was true. When Roosevelt became President the civil service was
thoroughly demoralized. Senators and Congressmen, by tacit
agreement with the executive, used the appointing power for the
payment of political debts, the reward of party services, the
strengthening of their personal "fences." But within three months
it was possible to say with absolute truth that "a marvelous
change has already been wrought in the morale of the civil
service." At the end of Roosevelt's first term an unusually acute
and informed foreign journalist was moved to write, "No President
has so persistently eliminated politics from his nominations,
none has been more unbending in making efficiency his sole test."
There was the kernel of the whole matter: the President's
insistence upon efficiency. Roosevelt, however, did not snatch
rudely away from the Congressmen and Senators the appointing
power which his predecessors had allowed them gradually to usurp.
He continued to consult each member of the Congress upon
appointments in that member's State or district and merely
demanded that the men recommended for office should be honest,
capable, and fitted for the places they were to fill.
President Roosevelt was not only ready and glad to consult with
Senators but he sought and often took the advice of party leaders
outside of Congress, and even took into consideration the
opinions of bosses. In New York, for instance, the two Republican
leaders, Governor Odell and Senator Platt, were sometimes in
accord and sometimes in disagreement, but each was always
desirous of being consulted. A letter written by Roosevelt in the
middle of his first term to a friendly Congressman well
illustrates his theory and practice in such cases:
"I want to work with Platt. I want to work with Odell. I want to
support both and take the advice of both. But, of course,
ultimately I must be the judge as to acting on the advice given.
When, as in the case of the judgeship, I am convinced that the
advice of both is wrong, I shall act as I did when I appointed
Holt. When I can find a friend of Odell's like Cooley, who is
thoroughly fit for the position I desire to fill, it gives me the
greatest pleasure to appoint him. When Platt proposes to me a man
like Hamilton Fish, it is equally a pleasure to appoint him."
This high-minded and common-sense course did not, however, seem
to please the politicians, for dyed-in-the-wool politicians are
curious persons to whom half a loaf is no consolation whatever,
even when the other half of the loaf is to go to the
people--without whom there would be no policies at all. Strangely
enough, Roosevelt's policy was equally displeasing to those of
the doctrinaire reformer type, to whom there is no word in the
language more distasteful than "politician," unless it be the
word "practical." But there was one class to whom the results of
this common-sense brand of political action were eminently
satisfactory, and this class made up the third group that had a
part in the selection of Theodore Roosevelt for the
Vice-Presidency. The plain people, especially in the more
westerly portions of the country, were increasingly delighted
with the honesty, the virility, and the effectiveness of the
Roosevelt Administration. Just before the convention which was to
nominate Roosevelt for the Presidency to succeed himself, an
editorial writer expressed the fact thus: "The people at large
are not oblivious of the fact that, while others are talking and
carping, Mr. Roosevelt is carrying on in the White House a
persistent and never-ending moral struggle with every powerful
selfish and exploiting interest in the country."
Oblivious of it? They were acutely conscious of it. They approved
of it with heartiness. They liked it so well that, when the time
came to nominate and elect another President, they swept aside
with a mighty rush not only the scruples and antagonisms of the
Republican politicians and the "special interests" but party
lines as well, and chose Roosevelt with a unanimous voice in the
convention and a majority of two and a half million votes at the
polls.
As President, Theodore Roosevelt achieved many concrete results.
But his greatest contribution to the forward movement of the
times was in the rousing of the public conscience, the
strengthening of the nation's moral purpose, and the erecting of
a new standard of public service in the management of the
nation's affairs. It was no little thing that when Roosevelt was
ready to hand over to another the responsibilities of his high
office, James Bryce, America's best friend and keenest student
from across the seas, was able to say that in a long life, during
which he had studied intimately the government of many different
countries, he had never in any country seen a more eager,
high-minded, and efficient set of public servants, men more
useful and more creditable to their country, than the men then
doing the work of the American Government in Washington and in
the field.