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Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography
Chapter X. The World Which Roosevelt Confronted
by Thayer, William Roscoe
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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 laborer 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.
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