Theodore Roosevelt Part 12

Jacob Riis, the most devoted personal follower of Roosevelt, gives this as the finest compliment he ever heard of him. A lady said that she had always been looking for some living embodiment of the high ideals she had as to what a hero ought to be. "I always wanted to make Roosevelt out that," she declared, "but somehow every time he did something that seemed really great it turned out, upon looking at it closely, that it was ONLY JUST THE RIGHT THING TO DO." *

* Riis, 268-69.

But at home Roosevelt had affection, not compliments, whether these were unintentional and sincere, like that of the lady just quoted, or were thinly disguised flattery. And affection was what he most craved from his family and nearest friends, and what he gave to them without stint. As I have said, he allowed nothing to interrupt the hours set apart for his wife and children while he was at the White House; and at Oyster Bay there was always time for them. A typical story is told of the boys coming in upon him during a conference with some important visitor, and saying reproachfully, "It's long after four o'clock, and you promised to go with us at four." "So I did," said Roosevelt. And he quickly finished his business with the visitor and went. When the children were young, he usually saw them at supper and into bed, and he talked of the famous pillow fights they had with him.

House guests at the White House some times unexpectedly caught sight of him crawling in the entry near the children's rooms, with two or three children riding on his back. Roosevelt's days were seldom less than fifteen hours long, and we can guess how he regarded the laboring men of today who clamor for eight and six, and even fewer hours, as the normal period for a day's work. He got up at half-past seven and always finished breakfast by nine, when what many might call the real work of his day began.

The unimaginative laborer probably supposes that most of the duties which fall to an industrious President are not strictly work at all; but if any one had to meet for an hour and a half every forenoon such Congressmen and Senators as chose to call on him, he would understand that that was a job involving real work, hard work. They came every day with a grievance, or an appeal, or a suggestion, or a favor to ask, and he had to treat each one, not only politely, but more or less deferently. Early in his Administration I heard it said that he offended some Congressmen by denying their requests in so loud a voice that others in the room could hear him, and this seemed to some a humiliation.

President McKinley, on the other hand, they said, lowered his voice, and spoke so softly and sweetly that even his refusal did not jar on his visitor, and was not heard at all by the bystanders. If this happened, I suspect it was because Roosevelt spoke rather explosively and had a habit of emphasis, and not because he wished in any way to send his pet.i.tioner's rebuff through the room.

Nor was the hour which followed this, when he received general callers, less wearing. As these persons came from all parts of the Union, so they were of all sorts and temperaments. Here was a worthy citizen from Colorado who, on the strength of having once heard the President make a public speech in Denver, claimed immediate friends.h.i.+p with him. Then might come an old lady from Georgia, who remembered his mother's people there, or the lady from Jacksonville, Florida, of whom I have already spoken. Once a little boy, who was almost lost in the crush of grown-up visitors, managed to reach the President. "What can I do for you?" the President asked; and the boy told how his father had died leaving his mother with a large family and no money, and how he was selling typewriters to help support her. His mother, he said, would be most grateful if the President would accept a typewriter from her as a gift. So the President told the little fellow to go and sit down until the other visitors had pa.s.sed, and then he would attend to him. No doubt, the boy left the White House well contented--and richer.

Roosevelt's official day ended at half-past nine or ten in the evening, and then, after the family had gone to bed, he sat down to read or write, and it was long after midnight, sometimes one o'clock, some times much later, before he turned in himself. He regarded the preservation of health as a duty; and well he might so regard it, because in childhood he had been a sickly boy, with apparently only a life of invalidism to look forward to. But by sheer will, and by going through physical exercises with indomitable perseverance, he had built up his body until he was strong enough to engage in all sports and in the hards.h.i.+ps of Western life and hunting. After he became President, he allowed nothing to interfere with his physical exercise. I have spoken of his long hikes and of his vigorous games with members of the Tennis Cabinet. On many afternoons he would ride for two hours or more with Mrs. Roosevelt or some friend, and it is a sad commentary on the perpetual publicity to which the American people condemn their Presidents, that he sometimes was obliged to ride off into the country with one of his Cabinet Ministers in order to be able to discuss public matters in private with him.

Roosevelt took care to provide means for exercise indoors in very stormy weather. He had a professional boxer and wrestler come to him, and when jiu-jitsu, the j.a.panese system of physical training, was in vogue, he learned some of its introductory mysteries from one of its foremost professors.

It was in a boxing bout at the White House with his teacher that he lost the sight of an eye from a blow which injured his eyeball. But he kept this loss secret for many years. He had a wide acquaintance among professional boxers and even prize-fighters. Jeffries, who had been a blacksmith before he entered the ring, hammered a penholder out of a horseshoe and gave it to the President, a gift which Roosevelt greatly prized and showed among his trophies at Oyster Bay. John L. Sullivan, perhaps the most notorious of the champion prize-fighters of America, held Roosevelt in such great esteem that when he died his family invited the ex-President to be one of the pall-bearers. But Mr. Roosevelt was then too sick himself to be able to travel to Boston and serve.

At Oyster Bay in summer, the President found plenty of exercise on the place. It contained some eighty acres, part of which was woodland, and there were always trees to be chopped. Hay-making, also, was an equally severe test of bodily strength, and to pitch hay brought every muscle into use. There, too, he had water sports, but he always preferred rowing to sailing, which was too slow and inactive an exercise for him. In old times, rowing used to be the penalty to which galley-slaves were condemned, but now it is commended by athletes as the best of all forms of exercise for developing the body and for furnis.h.i.+ng stimulating compet.i.tion.

No President ever lived on better terms with the newspaper men than Roosevelt did. He treated them all with perfect fairness, according no special favors, no "beats," or "scoops to any one.

So they regarded him as "square"; and further they knew that he was a man of his word, not to be trifled with. "It is generally supposed," Roosevelt remarked, "that newspaper men have no sense of honor, but that is not true. If you treat them fairly, they will treat you fairly; and they will keep a secret if you impress upon them that it must be kept."

The great paradox of Roosevelt's character was the contrast between its fundamental simplicity and its apparent spectacular quality. His acts seemed to be unusual, striking, and some uncharitable critics thought that he aimed at effect; in truth, however, he acted at the moment as the impulse or propriety of the moment suggested. There was no premeditation, no swagger.

Dwellers in Berlin noticed that after William the Crown Prince became the Kaiser William II, he thrust out his chest and adopted a rather pompous walk, but there was nothing like this in Roosevelt's manner or carriage. In his public speaking, he gesticulated incessantly, and in the difficulty he had in pouring out his words as rapidly as the thoughts came to him, he seemed sometimes almost to grimace; but this was natural, not studied.

And so I can easily understand what some one tells me who saw him almost daily as President in the White House. "Roosevelt," he said, "had an immense reverence for the Presidential office. He did not feel c.o.c.ky or conceited at being himself President; he felt rather the responsibility for dignity which the office carried with it, and he was humble. You might be as intimate with him as possible, but there was a certain line which no one ever crossed. That was the line which the office itself drew."

Roosevelt had that reverence for the great men of the past which should stir every heart with a capacity for n.o.ble things. In the White House he never forgot the Presidents who had dwelt there before him. "I like to see in my mind's eye," he said to Mr.

Rhodes, the American historian, "the gaunt form of Lincoln stalking through these halls." During a visit at the White House, Mr. Rhodes watched the President at work throughout an entire day and set down the points which chiefly struck him. Foremost among these was the lack of leisure which we allow our Presidents. They have work to do which is more important than that of a railroad manager, or the president of the largest business corporation, or of the leader of the American Bar. They are expected to know the pros and cons of each bill brought before them to sign so that they can sign it not only intelligently but justly, and yet thanks to the constant intrusion which Americans deem it their right to force on the President, he has no time for deliberation, and, as I have said, Mr. Roosevelt was often obliged, when he wished to have an undisturbed consultation with one of his Cabinet Secretaries, to take him off on a long ride.

"I chanced to be in the President's room," Mr. Rhodes continues, "when he dictated the rough draft of his famous dispatch to General Chaffee respecting torture in the Philippines. While he was dictating, two or three cards were brought in, also some books with a request for the President's autograph, and there were some other interruptions. While the dispatch as it went out in its revised form could not be improved, a President cannot expect to be always so happy in dictating dispatches in the midst of distractions. Office work of far-reaching importance should be done in the closet. Certainly no monarch or minister in Europe does administrative work under such unfavorable conditions; indeed, this public which exacts so much of the President's time should in all fairness be considerate in its criticism." *

* Rhodes: Historical Essays, 238-39.

To cope in some measure with the vast amount of business thrust upon him, Roosevelt had unique endowments. Other Presidents had been indolent and let affairs drift; he cleared his desk every day. Other Presidents felt that they had done their duty if they merely dispatched the important business which came to them; Roosevelt was always initiating, either new legislation or new methods in matters which did not concern the Government. One autumn, when there was unusual excitement, with recriminations in disputes in the college football world, I was surprised to receive a large four-page typewritten letter, giving his views as to what ought to be done.

He reorganized the service in the White House, and not only that, he had the Executive Mansion itself remodeled somewhat according to the original plans so as to furnish adequate s.p.a.ce for the crowds who thronged the official receptions, and, at the other end of the building, proper quarters for the stenographers, typewriters, and telegraphers required to file and dispatch his correspondence. Promptness was his watchword, and in cases where it was expected, I never knew twenty-four hours to elapse before he dictated his reply to a letter.

The orderliness which he introduced into the White House should also be recorded. When I first went there in 1882 with a party of Philadelphia junketers who had an appointment to shake hands with President Arthur, as a preliminary to securing a fat appropriation to the River and Harbor Bill of that year, the White House was treated by the public very much as a common resort. The country owned it: therefore, why shouldn't any American make himself at home in it? I remember that on one of the staircases, Dr. Mary Walker (recently dead), dressed in what she was pleased to regard as a masculine costume, was haranguing a group of five or six strangers, and here and there in the corridors we met other random visitors. Mr. Roosevelt established a strict but simple regimen. No one got past the Civil War veteran who acted as doorkeeper without proper credentials; and it was impossible to reach the President himself without first encountering his Secretary, Mr. Loeb.

To the President some persons were, of course, privileged. If an old pal from the West, or a Rough Rider came, the President did not look at the clock, or speed him away. The story goes that one morning Senator Cullom came on a matter of business and indeed rather in a hurry. On asking who was "in there," and being told that a Rough Rider had been with the President for a half-hour, the Senator said, "Then there's no hope for me," took his hat, and departed.

Although, as I have said, Roosevelt might be as intimate and cordial as possible with any visitor, he never forgot the dignity which belonged to his office. Nor did he forget that as President he was socially as well as officially the first person in the Republic. In speaking of these social affairs, I must not pa.s.s over without mention the unfailing help which his two sisters gave him at all times. The elder, the wife of Admiral William S.

Cowles, lived in Was.h.i.+ngton when Roosevelt was Civil Service Commissioner, and her house was always in readiness for his use.

His younger sister, Mrs. Douglas Robinson, lived in New York City, and first at No. 422 Madison Avenue and later at No. 9 East Sixty-third Street, she dispensed hospitality for him and his friends. Nothing could have been more convenient. If he were at Oyster Bay, it was often impossible to make an appointment to meet there persons whom he wished to see, but he had merely to telephone to Mrs. Robinson, the appointment was made, and the interview was held. It was at her house that many of the breakfasts with Senator Platt--those meetings which caused so much alarm and suspicion among over-righteous reformers--took place while Roosevelt was Governor. Mr. Odell nearly always accompanied the Senator, as if he felt afraid to trust the astute Boss with the very persuasive young Governor. Having Mrs.

Robinson's house as a shelter, Theodore could screen himself from the newspaper men. There he could hold private consultations which, if they had been referred to in the papers, would have caused wild guesses, surmises, and embarra.s.sing remarks. His sisters always rejoiced that, with his wonderful generosity of nature, he took them often into his political confidence, and listened with unfeigned respect to their point of view on subjects on which they might even have a slight difference of opinion.

Mr. Charles G. Washburn tells the following story to ill.u.s.trate Roosevelt's faculty of getting to the heart of every one whom he knew. When he was hunting in Colorado, "he met a cowboy who had been with him with the Rough Riders in Cuba. The man came up to speak to Roosevelt, and said, 'Mr. President, I have been in jail a year for killing a gentleman.' 'How did you do it?' asked the President, meaning to inquire as to the circ.u.mstances.

'Thirty-eight on a forty-five frame,' replied the man, thinking that the only interest the President had was that of a comrade who wanted to know with what kind of a tool the trick was done.

Now, I will venture to say that to no other President, from Was.h.i.+ngton down to and including Wilson, would the man-killer have made that response." *

* Washburn, 202-03.

I think that all of us will agree with Mr. Washburn, who adds another story of the same purport, and told by Roosevelt himself.

Another old comrade wrote him from jail in Arizona: "Dear Colonel: I am in trouble. I shot a lady in the eye, but I did not intend to hit the lady; I was shooting at my wife." Roosevelt had large charity for sinners of this type, but he would not tolerate deceit or lying. Thus, when a Congressman made charges to him against one of the Wild Western appointees whom he accused of drinking and of gambling, the President remarked that he had to take into consideration the moral standards of the section, where a man who gambled or who drank was not necessarily an evil person. Then the Congressman pressed his charges and said that the fellow had been in prison for a crime a good many years before. This roused Roosevelt, who said, "He never told me about that," and he immediately telegraphed the accused for an explanation. The man replied that the charge was true, whereupon the President at once dismissed him, not for gambling or for drinking, but for trying to hide the fact that he had once been in jail.

In these days of upheaval, when the most ancient inst.i.tutions and laws are put in question, and anarchists and Bolshevists, blind like Samson, wish to throw down the very pillars on which Civilization rests, the Family, the fundamental element of civilized life, is also violently attacked. All the more precious, therefore, will Theodore Roosevelt's example be, as an upholder of the Family. He showed how essential it is for the development of the individual and as a pattern for Society. Only through the Family can come the deepest joys of life and can the most intimate duties be trans.m.u.ted into joys. As son, as husband, as father, as brother, he fulfilled the ideals of each of those relations, and, so strong was his family affection, that, while still a comparatively young man, he drew to him as a patriarch might, not only his own children, but his kindred in many degrees. With utter truth he wrote, "I have had the happiest home life of any man I have ever known." And that, as we who were his friends understood, was to him the highest and dearest prize which life could bestow.

CHAPTER XVIII. Hits And Misses

In this sketch I do not attempt to follow chronological order, except in so far as this is necessary to make clear the connection between lines of policy, or to define the structural growth of character. But in Roosevelt's life, as in the lives of all of us, many events, sometimes important events, occurred and had much notice at the moment and then faded away and left no lasting mark. Let us take up a few of these which reveal the President from different angles.

Since the close of the Civil War the Negro Question had brooded over the South. The war emanc.i.p.ated the Southern negroes and then politics came to embitter the question. Partly to gain a political advantage, partly as some visionaries believed, to do justice, and partly to punish the Southerners, the Northern Republicans gave the Southern negroes equal political rights with the whites. They even handed over the government of some of the States to wholly incompetent blacks. In self-defense the whites terrorized the blacks through such secret organizations as the Ku-Klux Klan, and recovered their ascendancy in governing. Later, by such specious devices as the Grandfathers' Law, they prevented most of the blacks from voting, and relieved themselves of the trouble of maintaining a system of intimidation. The real difficulty being social and racial, to mix politics with it was to envenom it.

Roosevelt took a man for what he was without regard to race, creed, or color. He held that a negro of good manners and education ought to be treated as a white man would be treated. He felt keenly the sting of ostracism and he believed that if the Southern whites would think as he did on this matter; they might the quicker solve the Negro Question and establish human if not friendly relations with the blacks.

The negro race at that time had a fine spokesman in Booker T.

Was.h.i.+ngton, a man who had been born a slave, was educated at the Hampton Inst.i.tute, served as teacher there, and then founded the Tuskegee Inst.i.tute for teaching negroes. He wisely saw that the first thing to be done was to teach them trades and farming, by which they could earn a living and make themselves useful if not indispensable to the communities in which they settled. He did not propose to start off to lift his race by letting them imagine that they could blossom into black Shakespeares and dusky Raphaels in a single generation. He himself was a man of tact, prudence, and sagacity with trained intelligence and a natural gift of speaking.

To him President Roosevelt turned for some suggestions as to appointing colored persons to offices in the South. It happened that on the day appointed for a meeting Was.h.i.+ngton reached the White House shortly before luncheon time, and that, as they had not finished their conference, Roosevelt asked him to stay to luncheon. Was.h.i.+ngton hesitated politely. Roosevelt insisted. They lunched, finished their business, and Was.h.i.+ngton went away. When this perfectly insignificant fact was published in the papers the next morning, the South burst into a storm of indignation and abuse. Some of the Southern journals saw, in what was a mere routine incident, a terrible portent, foreboding that Roosevelt planned to put the negroes back to control the Southern whites.

Others alleged the milder motive that he was fis.h.i.+ng for negro votes. The common type of fire-eaters saw in it one of Roosevelt's unpleasant ways of having fun by insulting the South.

And Southern cartoonists took an ign.o.ble, feeble retaliation by caricaturing even Mrs. Roosevelt.

The President did not reply publicly. As his invitation to Booker Was.h.i.+ngton was wholly unpremeditated, he was surprised by the rage which it caused among Southerners. But he was clear-sighted enough to understand that, without intending it, he had made a mistake, and this he never repeated. Nothing is more elusive than racial antipathy, and we need not wonder that a man like Roosevelt who, although he was most solicitous not to hurt persons' feelings and usually acted, unless he had proof to the contrary, on the a.s.sumption that everybody was blessed with a modic.u.m of good-will and common sense, should not always be able to foresee the strange inconsistencies into which the antipathy of the white Southerners for the blacks might lead. A little while later there was a religious gathering in Was.h.i.+ngton of Protestant-Episcopal ministers. They had a reception at the White House. Their own managers made out a list of ministers to be invited, and among the guests were a negro archdeacon and his wife, and the negro rector of a Maryland parish. Although these persons attended the reception, the Southern whites burst into no frenzy of indignation against the President. Who could steer safely amid such shoals? * The truth is that no President since Lincoln had a kindlier feeling towards the South than Roosevelt had. He often referred proudly to the fact that his mother came from Georgia, and that his two Bulloch uncles fought in the Confederate Navy. He wished to bring back complete friends.h.i.+p between the sections. But he understood the difficulties, as his explanation to Mr. James Ford Rhodes, the historian, in 1905, amply proved. He agreed fully as to the folly of the Congressional scheme of reconstruction based on universal negro suffrage, but he begged Mr. Rhodes not to forget that the initial folly lay with the Southerners themselves. The latter said, quite properly, that he did not wonder that much bitterness still remained in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the Southern people about the carpet-bag negro regime. So it was not to be wondered at that in the late sixties much bitterness should have remained in the hearts of the Northerners over the remembrance of the senseless folly and wickedness of the Southerners in the early sixties.

Roosevelt felt that those persons who most heartily agreed that as it was the presence of the negro which made the problem, and that slavery was merely the worst possible method of solving it, we must therefore hold up to reprobation, as guilty of doing one of the worst deeds which history records, those men who tried to break up this Union because they were not allowed to bring slavery and the negro into our new territory. Every step which followed, from freeing the slave to enfranchising him, was due only to the North being slowly and reluctantly forced to act by the South's persistence in its folly and wickedness.

* Leupp,231.

The President could not say these things in public because they tended, when coming from a man in public place, to embitter people. But Rhodes was writing what Roosevelt hoped would prove the great permanent history of the period, and he said that it would be a misfortune for the country, and especially a misfortune for the South, if they were allowed to confuse right and wrong in perspective. He added that his difficulties with the Southern people had come not from the North, but from the South.

He had never done anything that was not for their interest. At present, he added, they were, as a whole, speaking well of him.

When they would begin again to speak ill, he did not know, but in either case his duty was equally clear. *

* February 20, 1905.

Inviting Booker Was.h.i.+ngton to the White House was a counsel of perfection which we must consider one of Roosevelt's misses.

Quite different was the voyage of the Great Fleet, planned by him and carried out without hitch or delay.

We have seen that from his interest in American naval history, which began before he left Harvard, he came to take a very deep interest in the Navy itself, and when he was a.s.sistant Secretary, he worked night and day to complete its preparation for entering the Spanish War. From the time he became President, he urged upon Congress and the country the need of maintaining a fleet adequate to ward off any dangers to which we might be exposed. In season and out of season he preached, with the ardor of a propagandist, his gospel that the Navy is the surest guarantor of peace which this country possesses. By dint of urging he persuaded Congress to consent to lay down one battles.h.i.+p of the newest type a year.

Congress was not so much reluctant as indifferent. Even the lesson of the Spanish War failed to teach the Nation's law-makers, or the Nation itself, that we must have a Navy to protect us if we intended to play the role of a World Power. The American people instinctively dreaded militarism, and so they resisted consenting to naval or military preparations which might expand into a great evil such as they saw controlling the nations of Europe.

Nevertheless Roosevelt, as usual, could not be deterred by opposition; and when the Hague Conference in 1907, through the veto of Germany, refused to limit armaments by sea and land, he warned Congress that one new battles.h.i.+p a year would not do, that they must build four. Meanwhile, he had pushed to completion a really formidable American Fleet, which a.s.sembled in Hampton Roads on December 1, 1907, and ten days later weighed anchor for parts unknown. There were sixteen battles.h.i.+ps, commanded by Rear Admiral Robley D. Evans. Every s.h.i.+p was new, having been built since the Spanish War. The President and Mrs. Roosevelt and many notables reviewed the Fleet from the President's yacht Mayflower, as it pa.s.sed out to sea. Later, the country learned that the Fleet was to sail round Cape Horn, to New Zealand and Australia, up the Pacific to San Francisco, then across to j.a.pan, and so steer homeward through the Indian Ocean, the Suez Ca.n.a.l, and the Mediterranean to Gibraltar, across the Atlantic, and back to Hampton Roads.