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Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography
Chapter XIII. The Two Roosevelts
by Thayer, William Roscoe
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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.
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