Theodore Roosevelt; An Address Delivered Before The Congress Of The United States — Part 1

[Illustration] A tower is fallen, a star is set!

Alas!

Alas!

for Celin.

The words of lamentation from the old Moorish ballad, which in boyhood we used to recite, must, I think, have risen to many lips when the world was told that Theodore Roosevelt was dead.

But whatever the phrase the thought was instant and everywhere.

Variously expressed, you heard it in the crowds about the bulletin boards, from the man in the street and the man on the railroads, from the farmer in the fields, the women in the shops, in the factories, and in the homes.

The pulpit found in his life a text for sermons.

The judge on the bench, the child at school, alike paused for a moment, conscious of a loss.

The cry of sorrow came from men and women of all conditions, high and low, rich and poor, from the learned and the ignorant, from the multitude who had loved and followed him, and from those who had opposed and resisted him.

The newspapers pushed aside the absorbing reports of the events of these fateful days and gave pages to the man who had died.

Flashed beneath the ocean and through the air went the announcement of his death, and back came a world-wide response from courts and cabinets, from press and people, in other and far-distant lands.

Through it all ran a golden thread of personal feeling which gleams so rarely in the somber formalism of public grief.

Everywhere the people felt in their hearts that: A power was passing from the Earth To breathless Nature's dark abyss.

It would seem that here was a man, a private citizen, conspicuous by no office, with no glitter of power about him, no ability to reward or punish, gone from the earthly life, who must have been unusual even among the leaders of men, and who thus demands our serious consideration.

This is a thought to be borne in mind to-day.

We meet to render honor to the dead, to the great American whom we mourn.

But there is something more to be done.

We must remember that when History, with steady hand and calm eyes, free from the passions of the past, comes to make up the final account, she will call as her principal witnesses the contemporaries of the man or the event awaiting her verdict.

Here and elsewhere the men and women who knew Theodore Roosevelt or who belong to his period will give public utterance to their emotions and to their judgments in regard to him.

This will be part of the record to which the historian will turn when our living present has become the past, of which it is his duty to write.

Thus is there a responsibility placed upon each one of us who will clearly realize that here, too, is a duty to posterity, whom we would fain guide to the truth as we see it, and to whose hands we commit our share in the history of our beloved country--that history so much of which was made under his leadership.

We can not approach Theodore Roosevelt along the beaten paths of eulogy or satisfy ourselves with the empty civilities of commonplace funereal tributes, for he did not make his life journey over main-traveled roads, nor was he ever commonplace.

Cold and pompous formalities would be unsuited to him who was devoid of affectation, who was never self-conscious, and to whom posturing to draw the public gaze seemed not only repellent but vulgar.

He had that entire simplicity of manners and modes of life which is the crowning result of the highest culture and the finest nature.

Like Cromwell, he would always have said: "Paint me as I am."

In that spirit, in his spirit of devotion to truth's simplicity, I shall try to speak of him to-day in the presence of the representatives of the great Government of which he was for seven years the head.

The rise of any man from humble or still more from sordid beginnings to the heights of success always and naturally appeals strongly to the imagination.

It furnishes a vivid contrast which is as much admired as it is readily understood.

It still retains the wonder which such success awakened in the days of hereditary lawgivers and high privileges of birth.

Birth and fortune, however, mean much less now than two centuries ago.

To climb from the place of a printer's boy to the highest rank in science, politics, and diplomacy would be far easier to-day than in the eighteenth century, given a genius like Franklin to do it.

Moreover the real marvel is in the soaring achievement itself, no matter what the origin of the man who comes by "the people's unbought grace to rule his native land" and who on descending from the official pinnacle still leads and influences thousands upon thousands of his fellow men.

Theodore Roosevelt had the good fortune to be born of a well-known, long-established family, with every facility for education and with an atmosphere of patriotism and disinterested service both to country and humanity all about him.

In his father he had before him an example of lofty public spirit, from which it would have been difficult to depart.

But if the work of his ancestors relieved him from the hard struggle which meets an unaided man at the outset, he also lacked the spur of necessity to prick the sides of his intent, in itself no small loss.

As a balance to the opportunity which was his without labor, he had not only the later difficulties which come to him to whom fate has been kind at the start; he had also spread before him the temptations inseparable from such inherited advantages as fell to his lot--temptations to a life of sports and pleasure, to lettered ease, to an amateur's career in one of the fine arts, perhaps to a money-making business, likewise an inheritance, none of them easily to be set aside in obedience to the stern rule that the larger and more facile the opportunity the greater and more insistent the responsibility.

How he refused to tread the pleasant paths that opened to him on all sides and took the instant way which led over the rough road of toil and action his life discloses.

At the beginning, moreover, he had physical difficulties not lightly to be overcome.

He was a delicate child, suffering acutely from attacks of asthma.

He was not a strong boy, was retiring, fond of books, and with an intense but solitary devotion to natural history.

As his health gradually improved he became possessed by the belief, although he perhaps did not then formulate it, that in the fields of active life a man could do that which he willed to do; and this faith was with him to the end.

It became very evident when he went to Harvard.

He made himself an athlete by sheer hard work.

Hampered by extreme near-sightedness, he became none the less a formidable boxer and an excellent shot.

He stood high in scholarship, but as he worked hard, so he played hard, and was popular in the university and beloved by his friends.

For a shy and delicate boy all this meant solid achievement, as well as unusual determination and force of will.

Apparently he took early to heart and carried out to fulfillment the noble lines of Clough's _Dipsychus_: In light things Prove thou the arms thou long'st to glorify, Nor fear to work up from the lowest ranks Whence come great Nature's Captains.

And high deeds Haunt not the fringy edges of the fight, But the pell-mell of men.

When a young man comes out of college he descends suddenly from the highest place in a little world to a very obscure corner in a great one.

It is something of a shock, and there is apt to be a chill in the air.

Unless the young man's life has been planned beforehand and a place provided for him by others, which is exceptional, or unless he is fortunate in a strong and dominating purpose or talent which drives him to science or art or some particular profession, he finds himself at this period pausing and wondering where he can get a grip upon the vast and confused world into which he has been plunged.

It is a trying and only too frequently a disheartening experience, this looking for a career, this effort to find employment in a huge and hurrying crowd which appears to have no use for the new-comer.

Roosevelt, thus cast forth on his own resources--his father, so beloved by him, having died two years before--fell to work at once, turning to the study of the law, which he did not like, and to the completion of a history of the War of 1812 which he had begun while still in college.

With few exceptions, young beginners in the difficult art of writing are either too exuberant or too dry.

Roosevelt said that his book was as dry as an encyclopedia, thus erring in precisely the direction one would not have expected.

The book, be it said, was by no means so dry as he thought it, and it had some other admirable qualities.

It was clear and thorough, and the battles by sea and land, especially the former, which involved the armaments and crews, the size and speed of the ships engaged in the famous frigate and sloop actions, of which we won eleven out of thirteen, were given with a minute accuracy never before attempted in the accounts of this war, and which made the book an authority, a position it holds to this day.

This was a good deal of sound work for a boy's first year out of college.

But it did not content Roosevelt.

Inherited influences and inborn desires made him earnest and eager to render some public service.

In pursuit of this aspiration he joined the Twenty-first Assembly District Republican Association of the city of New York, for by such machinery all politics were carried on in those days.

It was not an association composed of his normal friends; in fact, the members were not only eminently practical persons but they were inclined to be rough in their methods.

They were not dreamers, nor were they laboring under many illusions.

Roosevelt went among them a complete stranger.

He differed from them with entire frankness, concealed nothing, and by his strong and simple democratic ways, his intense Americanism, and the magical personal attraction which went with him to the end, made some devoted friends.

One of the younger leaders, "Joe" Murray, believed in him, became especially attached to him, and so continued until death separated them.

Through Murray's efforts he was elected to the New York Assembly in 1881, and thus only one year after leaving college his public career began.

He was just twenty-three.

Very few men make an effective State reputation in their first year in the lower branch of the State legislature.

I never happened to hear of one who made a national reputation in such a body.

Roosevelt did both.

When he left the assembly after three years' service he was a national figure, well known, and of real importance, and also a delegate at large from the great State of New York to the Republican national convention of 1884, where he played a leading part.

Energy, ability, and the most entire courage were the secret of his extraordinary success.

It was a time of flagrant corporate influence in the New York Legislature, of the "Black Horse Cavalry," of a group of members who made money by sustaining corporation measures or by levying on corporations and capital through the familiar artifice of "strike bills."

Roosevelt attacked them all openly and aggressively and never silently or quietly.

He fought for the impeachment of a judge solely because he believed the judge corrupt, which surprised some of his political associates of both parties, there being, as one practical thinker observed, "no politics in politics."

He failed to secure the impeachment, but the fight did not fail, nor did the people forget it;

and despite--perhaps because of--the enemies he made, he was twice reelected.

He became at the same time a distinct, well-defined figure to the American people.

He had touched the popular imagination.

In this way he performed the unexampled feat of leaving the New York Assembly, which he had entered three years before an unknown boy, with a national reputation and with his name at least known throughout the United States.

He was twenty-six years old.

When he left Chicago at the close of the national convention in June, 1884, he did not return to New York, but went West to the Bad Lands of the Little Missouri Valley, where he had purchased a ranch in the previous year.

The early love of natural history which never abated had developed into a passion for hunting and for life in the open.

He had begun in the wilds of Maine and then turned to the West and to a cattle ranch to gratify both tastes.

The life appealed to him and he came to love it.

He herded and rounded up his cattle, he worked as a cow-puncher, only rather harder than any of them, and in the intervals he hunted and shot big game.

He also came in contact with men of a new type, rough, sometimes dangerous, but always vigorous and often picturesque.

With them he had the same success as with the practical politicians of the Twenty-first Assembly District, although they were widely different specimens of mankind.

But all alike were human at bottom and so was Roosevelt.

He argued with them, rode with them, camped with them, played and joked with them, but was always master of his outfit.

They respected him and also liked him, because he was at all times simple, straightforward, outspoken, and sincere.

He became a popular and well-known figure in that western country and was regarded as a good fellow, a "white man," entirely fearless, thoroughly good-natured and kind, never quarrelsome, and never safe to trifle with, bully, or threaten.

The life and experiences of that time found their way into a book, _The Hunting Trips of a Ranchman_, interesting in description and adventure and also showing a marked literary quality.

In 1886 he ran as Republican candidate for mayor of New York and might have been elected had his own party stood by him.

But many excellent men of Republican faith--the "timid good," as he called them--panic-stricken by the formidable candidacy of Henry George, flocked to the support of Mr. Abram Hewitt, the Democratic candidate, as the man most certain to defeat the menacing champion of single taxation.

Roosevelt was beaten, but his campaign, which was entirely his own and the precursor of many others, his speeches with their striking quality then visible to the country for the first time, all combined to fix the attention of the people upon the losing candidate.

Roosevelt was the one of the candidates who was most interesting, and again he had touched the imagination of the people and cut a little deeper into the popular consciousness and memory.

Two years more of private life, devoted to his home, where his greatest happiness was always found, to his ranch, to reading and writing books, and then came an active part in the campaign of 1888, resulting in the election of President Harrison, who made him civil-service commissioner in the spring of 1889. He was in his thirty-first year.

Civil-service reform as a practical question was then in its initial stages.

The law establishing it, limited in extent and forced through by a few leaders of both parties in the Senate, was only six years old.

The promoters of the reform, strong in quality, but weak in numbers, had compelled a reluctant acceptance of the law by exercising a balance-of-power vote in certain States and districts.

It had few earnest supporters in Congress, some lukewarm friends, and many strong opponents.

All the active politicians were practically against it.

Mr. Conkling had said that when Dr. Johnson told Boswell "that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel" he was ignorant of the possibilities of the word "reform," and this witticism met with a large response.

Civil-service reform, meaning the establishment of a classified service and the removal of routine administrative offices from politics, had not reached the masses of the people at all.

The average voter knew and cared nothing about it.

When six years later Roosevelt resigned from the commission the great body of the people knew well what civil-service reform meant, large bodies of voters cared a great deal about it, and it was established and spreading its control.

We have had many excellent men who have done good work in the Civil Service Commission, although that work is neither adventurous nor exciting and rarely attracts public attention, but no one has ever forgotten that Theodore Roosevelt was once civil-service commissioner.

He found the law struggling for existence, laughed at, sneered at, surrounded by enemies in Congress, and with but few fighting friends.

He threw himself into the fray.

Congress investigated the commission about once a year, which was exactly what Roosevelt desired.

Annually, too, the opponents of the reform would try to defeat the appropriation for the commission, and this again was playing into Roosevelt's hands, for it led to debates, and the newspapers as a rule sustained the reform.

Senator Gorman mourned in the Senate over the cruel fate of a "bright young man" who was unable to tell on examination the distance of Baltimore from China, and thus was deprived of his inalienable right to serve his country in the post office.

Roosevelt proved that no such question had ever been asked and requested the name of the "bright young man."

The name was not forthcoming, and the victim of a question never asked goes down nameless to posterity in the Congressional Record as merely a "bright young man."

Then General Grosvenor, a leading Republican of the House, denounced the commissioner for crediting his district with an appointee named Rufus Putnam who was not a resident of the district, and Roosevelt produced a letter from the general recommending Rufus Putnam as a resident of his district and a constituent.

All this was unusual.

Hitherto it had been a safe amusement to ridicule and jeer at civil-service reform, and here was a commissioner who dared to reply vigorously to attacks, and even to prove Senators and Congressmen to be wrong in their facts.

The amusement of baiting the Civil Service Commission seemed to be less inviting than before, and, worse still, the entertaining features seemed to have passed to the public, who enjoyed and approved the commissioner who disregarded etiquette and fought hard for the law he was appointed to enforce.

The law suddenly took on new meaning and became clearly visible in the public mind, a great service to the cause of good government.

After six years' service in the Civil Service Commission Roosevelt left Washington to accept the position of president of the Board of Police Commissioners of the city of New York, which had been offered to him by Mayor Strong.

It is speaking within bounds to say that the history of the police force of New York has been a checkered one in which the black squares have tended to predominate.

The task which Roosevelt confronted was then, as always, difficult, and the machinery of four commissioners and a practically irremovable chief made action extremely slow and uncertain.

Roosevelt set himself to expel politics and favoritism in appointments and promotions and to crush corruption everywhere.

In some way he drove through the obstacles and effected great improvements, although permanent betterment was perhaps impossible.

Good men were appointed and meritorious men promoted as never before, while the corrupt and dangerous officers were punished in a number of instances sufficient, at least, to check and discourage evildoers.

Discipline was improved, and the force became very loyal to the chief commissioner, because they learned to realize that he was fighting for right and justice without fear or favor.

The results were also shown in the marked decrease of crime, which judges pointed out from the bench.

Then, too, it was to be observed that a New York police commissioner suddenly attracted the attention of the country.

The work which was being done by Roosevelt in New York, his midnight walks through the worst quarters of the great city, to see whether the guardians of the peace did their duty, which made the newspapers compare him to Haroun Al Raschid, all appealed to the popular imagination.

A purely local office became national in his hands, and his picture appeared in the shops of European cities.

There was something more than vigor and picturesqueness necessary to explain these phenomena.

The truth is that Roosevelt was really laboring through a welter of details to carry out certain general principles which went to the very roots of society and government.

He wished the municipal administration to be something far greater than a business man's administration, which was the demand that had triumphed at the polls.

He wanted to make it an administration of the workingmen, of the dwellers in the tenements, of the poverty and suffering which haunted the back streets and hidden purlieus of the huge city.

The people did not formulate these purposes as they watched what he was doing, but they felt them and understood them by that instinct which is often so keen in vast bodies of men.

The man who was toiling in the seeming obscurity of the New York police commission again became very distinct to his fellow countrymen and deepened their consciousness of his existence and their comprehension of his purposes and aspirations.

Striking as was the effect of this police work, it only lasted for two years.

In 1897 he was offered by President McKinley, whom he had energetically supported in the preceding campaign, the position of Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

He accepted at once, for the place and the work both appealed to him most strongly.

The opportunity did not come without resistance.

The President, an old friend, liked him and believed in him, but the Secretary of the Navy had doubts, and also fears that Roosevelt might be a disturbing and restless assistant.

There were many politicians, too, especially in his own State, whom his activities as civil-service and police commissioner did not delight, and these men opposed him.

But his friends were powerful and devoted, and the President appointed him.

His new place had to him a peculiar attraction.

He loved the Navy.

He had written its brilliant history in the War of 1812. He had done all in his power in stimulating public opinion to support the "new Navy" we were just then beginning to build.

That war was coming with Spain he had no doubt.

We were unprepared, of course, even for such a war as this, but Roosevelt set himself to do what could be done.

The best and most farseeing officers rallied round him, but the opportunities were limited.

There was much in detail accomplished which can not be described here, but two acts of his which had very distinct effect upon the fortunes of the war must be noted.

He saw very plainly--although most people never perceived it at all--that the Philippines would be a vital point in any war with Spain.

For this reason it was highly important to have the right man in command of the Asiatic Squadron.

Roosevelt was satisfied that Dewey was the right man, and that his rival was not.

He set to work to secure the place for Dewey.

Through the aid of the Senators from Dewey's native State and others, he succeeded.

Dewey was ordered to the Asiatic Squadron.

Our relations with Spain grew worse and worse.

On February 25, 1898, war was drawing very near, and that Saturday after-noon Roosevelt happened to be Acting Secretary, and sent out the following cablegram: Dewey--Hongkong.

Order the squadron, except the _Monocacy_, to Hongkong.

Keep full of coal.

In the event of declaration of war, Spain, your duty will be to see that the Spanish Squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast, and then offensive operations in the Philippine Islands.

Keep _Olympia_ until further orders.

Roosevelt.

I believe he was never again permitted to be Acting Secretary.

But the deed was done.

The wise word of readiness had been spoken and was not recalled.

War came, and as April closed, Dewey, all prepared, slipped out of Hongkong and on May 1st fought the battle of Manila Bay.

Roosevelt, however, did not continue long in the Navy Department.

Many of his friends felt that he was doing such admirable work there that he ought to remain, but as soon as war was declared he determined to go, and his resolution was not to be shaken.

Nothing could prevent his fighting for his country when the country was at war.

Congress had authorized three volunteer regiments of Cavalry, and the President and the Secretary of War gave to Leonard Wood--then a surgeon in the Regular Army--as colonel, and to Theodore Roosevelt, as lieutenant colonel, authority to raise one of these regiments, known officially as the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, and to all the country as the "Rough Riders."

The regiment was raised chiefly in the Southwest and West, where Roosevelt's popularity and reputation among the cowboys and the ranchmen brought many eager recruits to serve with him.

After the regiment had been organized and equipped they had some difficulty in getting to Cuba, but Roosevelt as usual broke through all obstacles, and finally succeeded, with Colonel Wood, in getting away with two battalions, leaving one battalion and the horses behind.

The regiment got into action immediately on landing and forced its way, after some sharp fighting in the jungle, to the high ground on which were placed the fortifications which defended the approach to Santiago.

Colonel Wood was almost immediately given command of a brigade, and this left Roosevelt colonel of the regiment.

In the battle which ensued and which resulted in the capture of the positions commanding Santiago and the bay, the Rough Riders took a leading part, storming one of the San Juan heights, which they christened Kettle Hill, with Roosevelt leading the men in person.

It was a dashing, gallant assault, well led and thoroughly successful.

Santiago fell after the defeat of the fleet, and then followed a period of sickness and suffering--the latter due to unreadiness--where Roosevelt did everything with his usual driving energy to save his men, whose loyalty to their colonel went with them through life.

The war was soon over, but brief as it had been Roosevelt and his men had highly distinguished themselves, and he stood out in the popular imagination as one of the conspicuous figures of the conflict.

He brought his regiment back to the United States, where they were mustered out, and almost immediately afterwards he was nominated by the Republicans as their candidate for governor of the State of New York.

The situation in New York was unfavorable for the Republicans, and the younger men told Senator Platt, who dominated the organization and who had no desire for Roosevelt, that unless he was nominated they could not win.

Thus forced, the organization accepted him, and it was well for the party that they did so.

The campaign was a sharp one and very doubtful, but Roosevelt was elected by a narrow margin and assumed office at the beginning of the new year of 1899. He was then in his forty-first year.

Many problems faced him and none were evaded.

He was well aware that the "organization" under Senator Platt would not like many things he was sure to do, but he determined that he would have neither personal quarrels nor faction fights.

He knew, being blessed with strong common sense, that the Republican Party, his own party, was the instrument by which alone he could attain his ends, and he did not intend that it should be blunted and made useless by internal strife.

And yet he meant to have his own way.

It was a difficult role which he undertook to play, but he succeeded.

He had many differences with the organization managers, but he declined to lose his temper or to have a break, and he also refused to yield when he felt he was standing for the right and a principle was at stake.

Thus he prevailed.

He won on the canal question, changed the insurance commissioner, and carried the insurance legislation he desired.

As in these cases, so it was in lesser things.

In the police commission he had been strongly impressed by the dangers as he saw them of the undue and often sinister influence of business, finance, and great money interests upon government and politics.

These feelings were deepened and broadened by his experience and observation on the larger stage of State administration.

The belief that political equality must be strengthened and sustained by industrial equality and a larger economic opportunity was constantly in his thoughts until it became a governing and guiding principle.

Meantime he grew steadily stronger among the people, not only of his own State but of the country, for he was well known throughout the West, and there they were watching eagerly to see how the ranchman and colonel of Rough Riders, who had touched both their hearts and their imagination, was faring as governor of New York.

The office he held is always regarded as related to the Presidency, and this, joined to his striking success as governor, brought him into the presidential field wherever men speculated about the political future It was universally agreed that McKinley was to be renominated, and so the talk turned to making Roosevelt Vice President.

A friend wrote to him in the summer of 1899 as to this drift of opinion, then assuming serious proportions.

"Do not attempt," he said, "to thwart the popular desire.

You are not a man nor are your close friends men who can plan, arrange, and manage you into office.

You must accept the popular wish, whatever it is, follow your star, and let the future care for itself.

It is the tradition of our politics, and a very poor tradition, that the Vice Presidency is a shelf.

It ought to be, and there is no reason why it should not be, a stepping-stone.

Put there by the popular desire, it would be so to you."

This view, quite naturally, did not commend itself to Governor Roosevelt at the moment.

He was doing valuable work in New York; he was deeply engaged in important reforms which he had much at heart and which he wished to carry through; and the Vice Presidency did not attract him.

A year later he was at Philadelphia, a delegate at large from his State, with his mind unchanged as to the Vice Presidency, while his New York friends, anxious to have him continue his work at Albany, were urging him to refuse.

Senator Platt, for obvious reasons, wished to make him Vice President, another obstacle to his taking it.

Roosevelt forced the New York delegation to agree on some one else for Vice President, but he could not hold the convention, nor could Senator Hanna, who wisely accepted the situation.

Governor Roosevelt was nominated on the first ballot, all other candidates withdrawing.

He accepted the nomination little as he liked it.

Thus when it came to the point he instinctively followed his star and grasped the unvacillating hand of destiny.

Little did he think that destiny would lead him to the White House through a tragedy which cut him to the heart.

He was on a mountain in the Adirondacks when a guide made his way to him across the forest with a telegram telling him that McKinley, the wise, the kind, the gentle, with nothing in his heart but good will to all men, was dying from a wound inflicted by an anarchist murderer, and that the Vice President must come to Buffalo at once.

A

rapid night drive through the woods and a special train brought him to Buffalo.

McKinley was dead before he arrived, and that evening Governor Roosevelt was sworn in as President of the United States.