INTRODUCTION
ByALBERT SHAW
Thematerials contained in the Addresses and State Papers of Theodore Roosevelt, while President of the United States, possess far more than a transitory interest and value. It is obvious indeed that for the future student of American politics and history their preservation in convenient and authentic form is not merely an important service, but an indispensable one; for it would have been impossible to collate them in any accurate or complete way from the scattered files of newspapers, especially since many of the addresses were delivered at points remote from news centers, and some of these were very inadequately reported by the press. This observation, it is needless to say, does not apply to the formal State Papers—chiefly messages to Congress—for such official deliverances are duly preserved and published by the Government itself. It is, however, suitable as well as convenient to include these State Papers in a collection of the recent utterances of President Roosevelt, for reasons so obvious as to need little comment.
The palpable fact is that President Roosevelt’s messages to Congress and a large number of his speeches, delivered in various parts of the country in his capacity as President, pertain to the same topics and serve a like public purpose. The messages must, of course, deal with matters affecting the welfare of the nation, and with various questions of public business or policy, in those aspects that bear upon the work of Congress. It is the President’s Constitutional right and duty to present information upon such topics, or to expound them from the standpoint of the Administration. In the long series of Presidential messages one may, indeed, read the history of this country for more than a hundred years. To that official narrative these messages by Mr. Roosevelt add some of the most fascinating chapters.
The speeches here collected, on the other hand, have a much wider range. Nevertheless, a great number of the addresses and speeches do in fact deal with precisely the same topics as those presented in the messages to Congress, and were intended not merely for a particular audience but for the whole country through the medium of the press. And for Mr. Roosevelt’s full disclosure of his views and policies touching some questions of large public concern, it is necessary to read his speeches in connection with his general or special messages to Congress. Since a number of his speeches here printed, likehis general messages, deal with a variety of matters, the reader who wishes to compare and collate his utterances upon a given subject—as, for example, the regulation of the trusts, the reorganization of the army, the relations of the United States to Cuba, or our methods and policies of administration in the Philippines—will find it desirable to consult the index, which is intended to make these volumes available for ready reference.
Quite apart from their obvious value for reference purposes to the student of our contemporary history and politics, or to the campaign speaker of one party or another—who may wish to know authoritatively what Mr. Roosevelt said about various public issues—this collection of addresses has several distinct merits and advantages that must give it a place among works relating to the national life and character. Mr. Roosevelt, as an exponent of the aims and ideals of a great portion of his own generation of men and women in the United States, stands unquestionably first. In two volumes of his previously collected essays and papers, one entitledAmerican Idealsand the otherThe Strenuous Life, both of which are included in the present edition of his works, Mr. Roosevelt has expressed with remarkable vigor,—as well as with an unwavering conviction and a wholesome philosophy of work and courage,—those views of politics, citizenship, and organized social and economic life to which thebest conscience and intelligence of his fellow-countrymen have made sympathetic response. These essays, it is true, set forth no abstract scheme of political or social philosophy. Yet out of them there might be evolved a systematic body of doctrine relating to the duties of citizenship in a democracy, and to the ethics of administration and government. The explanation is that the doctrines and principles have come to be embodied in the character and convictions of the man himself; and thus the essays and addresses have not been the mere intellectual products of a man addicted to the use of the pen or to the phrasing of sentences, but rather the direct and wellnigh spontaneous expression of Mr. Roosevelt in relation to topics rendered timely by events and occasions.
In like manner and in an even higher sense, these later speeches, made under the sobering sense of responsibility that must come with the holding of so great an office as the Presidency, express Mr. Roosevelt’s convictions respecting our American life and citizenship in such manner as to form a sort of record for the study of the psychology of the nation at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Furthermore, these addresses and public papers, while to some extent homely, unstudied and unconventional in their phraseology, have the quality of permanent literature in a much higher measure than the utterances of almost any other American publicman of our time. The traditional American political oratory is highly stilted and artificial—overloaded with rhetoric and figures of speech, lacking vernacular force and directness. While the orotund and rhetorical method of the past has largely disappeared, there has followed it another method almost equally artificial, in which the stately periods of the old-fashioned orator have been succeeded by the illustrative amusing anecdote, the highly burnished witticism, and the pointed phrase or apothegm.
Mr. Roosevelt’s method is wholly different from either of these. Except for being at times a trifle more earnest and hortatory, it is the method of some of the best contemporary English speakers. They do not posture, and do not attempt to be either orators or mere platform entertainers. Rather, they prefer to state in a direct, conversational manner certain things that they wish to say. Their language is that which naturally, and without conscious effort, clothes their thoughts as men of culture and mature intellectual life. Mr. Roosevelt being a man of trained mind, strong conviction, historical knowledge, and wide public experience, combined with great practical energy and executive force, and buoyant physical health, has both his own opinions and his own ready and forcible way of expressing them.
Thus many of the speeches contained in this collection are as nearly extemporaneous utterances asany which have ever been put into similarly permanent form. Here are addresses made in almost every State and Territory of the Union; and they were prepared and delivered within a very short range of time, during which a far greater number of briefer and more casual speeches have been made, thousands of letters written, and innumerable statements upon matters of a public character addressed to the Cabinet (collectively and individually), to Senators and members of Congress, to various executive officials, to public men and citizens from every part of every State of the Union, to committees and deputations representing all classes and interests, and to representatives and visitors from all countries—whether a royal prince from Germany or a defeated Boer general from South Africa. And when one considers all these demands upon a President’s time, and knows something of the prodigious industry with which the Chief Executive must devote himself to the almost innumerable duties that present themselves daily in connection with his executive work, it becomes plain that these speeches and addresses have been in the main the spontaneous utterances of a richly stored mind inspired by firm conviction and resolute will, and supported by extraordinary physical strength and vigor.
Yet Mr. Roosevelt’s speeches have not been carelessly prepared. Nor have they ever been left—as some speakers profess to leave theirs—to the “inspirationof the moment.” Mr. Roosevelt has unusual powers of concentration; and his achievement of so much work is due to his ability to turn promptly from one thing to another and to give each successive task his whole undivided attention. With an excellent memory and a disciplined mind, he is able to summon to his aid at a given moment all his past resources of reading, study, and thought upon a given topic. Thus, before going on several of the long trips in connection with which a great number of addresses in these volumes were made, the more important of the speeches for which dates had been fixed were dictated one after another to his stenographers late in the evening when the day’s work was cleared away, social or official guests had departed, and an hour or two of uninterrupted time was at his disposal.
This, indeed, is the same method by which a number of the essays and addresses which have become familiar in the collected volumes entitledAmerican Ideals, andThe Strenuous Life, had been prepared at former periods when Mr. Roosevelt was under stress of much occupation. There has been no attempt to polish sentences or to make fine phrases, yet there is the orderly and the deliberate expression that results from orderly processes of thinking. And there is the assured and confident tone that reveals a steadfast mind seldom tormented by doubts or misgivings.
Again, it is to be noted that these addresses are patriotic rather than partisan, and that where they deal with matters of controversy they show a spirit as little contentious or polemic as possible. While believing in the utility of the party system, Mr. Roosevelt spoke as President of the whole country and not merely as the chief of a party. His speeches, in short, are the utterances of a man who embodies the national spirit more broadly and fully than almost any other man of his day. He expresses himself upon a wide range of topics with a larger fund of experience and direct knowledge than is possessed by any other conspicuous public man of either party.
It is only through some understanding of the career that led up to his assumption of the Presidency that the richness, the fulness, and the authoritative quality of his observations on many varied themes can be appreciated. Mr. Roosevelt’s life has, amid much variety, possessed great unity. While still in college at Harvard, his mind became centered upon the study of American life, American history, and American government and policy. Whatever he undertook after leaving college added steadily to his understanding of the people of his own country and their institutions. Almost at once he threw himself into the politics of the great State of New York, served several terms in the Legislature, and made himself known throughout the country by the vigorand courage with which he applied himself to current problems of State and municipal reform. At a time when the so-called “spoils system” was powerfully rooted in the practical government of nation, State, and city, he became a civil service reformer.
Everything that was worth while was of interest to him and everything that he undertook to do was done whole-heartedly and thus made its contribution to his own development. He was an officer in the militia, and learned lessons which became, years afterward, valuable to him as a colonel in the Spanish-American war and later as commander-in-chief of the army by virtue of the Presidential office.
Meanwhile his first literary undertaking was the history of the naval war of 1812, which appeared in 1882, and which will always remain a vital and standard account of our last war with Great Britain, especially from the standpoint of naval strategy and actual operations. Whether taking part himself in the current life of his country and in the making of its history, or whether studying or writing about the part that others have taken in the development of the nation, there has been on Mr. Roosevelt’s part always a singleness of purpose and a harmony of effort. Thus, when he wrote about the War of 1812, as when in later years he wrote the graphic yet accurate and well-poised studies of those Western movements, military and civil, that created the Mississippi Valley (comprised in the series ofvolumes entitledThe Winning of the West), there was on his part just as much a sense of dealing with realities as when in 1899 he wrote out the story of the part played by his regiment of Rough Riders in the Spanish-American war of the year before. This single work, onThe Winning of the West, in the opinion of the authorities, justified the honorary degree conferred upon Colonel Roosevelt by the University of Norway on May 6, 1910.
The circumstances which took him to the West in 1884 to become for some years a cattle ranchman, a resident of the great plains, and an exponent of hunting and frontier life, involved in no manner an interruption of the career upon which he had made so propitious an entrance. On the contrary, this was the best possible step that could have been taken for the rounding out and development of the career of a man destined, either in letters or in action, to spend his life in dealing with American affairs from a broad standpoint.
Many of the most marked traits of the American people have been evolved through the process of pioneering. For three centuries our people have been engaged in subduing a continent that they had found a pathless wilderness. No man who has lacked contact with some concrete phases of our pioneering life can ever wholly enter into the spirit of the nation’s historical development, or perfectly understand the inherited qualities of our present day citizenship.Mr. Roosevelt’s Western life supplied that needful element of understanding, while it gave him physical hardihood and a continental breadth of view. It gave him, furthermore, that traditional American readiness with a horse and a gun, and that adaptability to the free life of field and of woods which is the heritage of the average young American, and which made the greater part of the Northern and Southern armies in the Civil War so unequaled, for effectiveness, in all military history.
Through these years of practical life in the West Mr. Roosevelt never lost the studious and literary habit, nor did he lose any of his zest for the public affairs of the country. In due time he returned to the East, took an active part in New York politics again, and was nominated for Mayor. Then he went to Washington, where for a number of years he served as Chairman of the Board of Civil Service Commissioners and became an expert in the field of national administration. After that came his two years as President of the Police Commissioners of New York City—a truly strenuous period that tested every quality of his mind and character. The navy had been at low ebb when Mr. Roosevelt in 1882 wrote hisNaval War of 1812, and that book fairly contributed toward the revival of interest which soon set on foot the movement for the creation of our modern fleet. The author of that book had ever afterward been regarded both at home andabroad as an expert student of naval history and of sea power, and he had retained an enthusiastic interest in the whole subject. He was well fitted, therefore, for the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy, to which President McKinley appointed him at the very time when, more clearly than most others, he foresaw the probability of a war with Spain.
He threw his whole intense energy into the work of fitting our navy for such a test, devoting himself especially to the questions of readiness and efficiency in practical detail. And then came the outbreak of war. With the feeling that he was no longer needed in the naval department, and that it was his duty to respond to the call for volunteer soldiers, he entered the army. The history of that service he has himself told in a fascinating way in the volume entitledThe Rough Riders, included in this edition of his works.
The war being ended, he returned to his own State of New York at a moment when his party was casting about for a candidate for Governor. The outlook was not propitious; but Mr. Roosevelt’s recent career had given him a great personal popularity, and he was accordingly nominated and elected. Great questions of administration are always pending in the State of New York, and there are few governmental offices in any country better adapted to train the incumbent for the tasks of practicalstatesmanship. Mr. Roosevelt took up the work of the Governorship with characteristic industry, and with results that were successful and valuable in many directions. So well had he satisfied the expectations of his party and of the State that his renomination as Governor was assured; and the whole country had its attention fixed upon him as the probable nominee of his party for the Presidency in the year 1904.
A variety of circumstances, however, most of them unexpected and some of them dramatic, led to an overwhelming demand by the Republican National Convention at Philadelphia in 1900 that he forego his prospect of a second term as Governor of New York in order to take the nomination for the Vice-Presidency on the ticket with Mr. McKinley. He was put forward by his party in that summer of 1900 as its most effective campaigner. But it has not been thought by him desirable that any of the speeches made in a hotly contested Presidential electoral campaign should be included in a collection of his public addresses. The tragic death of President McKinley, in September, 1901, occurred only six months after his entrance upon a second term, and thus it happened that Mr. Roosevelt had only a short time to serve in the office of Vice-President.
So remarkable and so rapid a succession of valuable public experiences, all of a kind to give training for the duties of the Presidency, is probably unparalleledin our history, unless in the case of his successor, President Taft. Mr. Roosevelt had been the chief Civil Service Commissioner of this great nation, the head of the police administration of our metropolis, the active official of the naval department, the most energetic volunteer officer in the Spanish-American war, the Governor of New York, and the Vice-President of the United States. The man who had succeeded brilliantly in all these positions, and who had treated every one of them in turn as if it furnished the one great opportunity for rendering public service, could but bring to the Presidency an accumulated knowledge and experience that must make itself felt in every part of the work of that supreme office.
It is this wide range of experience and knowledge that has given Mr. Roosevelt the easy mastery of many subjects exhibited in the addresses and public papers that make up these volumes. Further, it is these speeches and messages, far more than anything else contained in his writings, that show him in his capacity as a practical statesman. They afford the unconscious but inevitable expression of the man in his relation to public affairs.
To sum up and to conclude: These addresses reveal the unity and consistency of Mr. Roosevelt’s character and career. He is indeed a many-sided and versatile man, but there is nothing mutually contradictory about the different phases of hisnature or of his past undertakings. His vital Americanism is shown equally in his historical studies of the pioneer movement that built up our great West and in his accounts of ranching life and his studies of the big game of America.
In his varied literary work, as in his other efforts and activities, there is little or nothing of an incidental ordilettantenature; all of it is the frank expression of the man himself. The book on the War of 1812 was written when he was still very young. It might well have proved to be the merely boyish effort of a young man who had said to himself, “Lo, I will go to work and write a book!” But, on the contrary, it was in fact the outgrowth of vital interest and of strong conviction regarding his subject; and so the book lives and will continue to live. Thus all of his work, whether literary in its character or active and official, has been done in the same direct, straightforward way as simply pertaining to the task in hand; and the task, whether great or small, has always been deemed worthy of the whole vital energy of the man.
The great assemblage of public papers and addresses which we are presenting in the eight volumes that follow, herewith, belong for the most part to the period of Mr. Roosevelt’s Presidential service, which ended March 4, 1909. Upon his reelection to the Presidency in 1904, Mr. Roosevelt had declared that he would not be a candidate in 1908 foranother term. Although great pressure was brought to bear upon him in 1907 and in the first half of 1908 to permit the party to place his name again at the head of the Presidential ticket, he remained firm in the view that no President should serve for more than two consecutive terms. One of the last, as it is also one of the best, addresses of his memorable Presidential period is the one delivered at the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, on February 12, 1909, and contained in the last of these volumes. For a period of more than a year there is no speech or paper of Mr. Roosevelt that finds record in this collection. Almost at once after retiring from the White House, Mr. Roosevelt, in pursuance of a long-cherished plan, accompanied by his son Kermit and several scientific experts, departed for Africa. He had been commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution to obtain a collection of African fauna, particularly the larger animals, for the Government’s museum at Washington. Mr. Roosevelt’s carrying out of this great project was with all his familiar vitality and enthusiasm, and with results as successful as could have been desired. His return by way of Egypt, and his experiences as traveler and lecturer in Europe, preliminary to his return to America in June, 1910, were matters of interest everywhere. Mr. Roosevelt, throughout Europe as well as in his own country, had been fully recognizedfor those qualities which these introductory pages have tried to set forth. His European travels, as originally planned, were to have been those of a private citizen seeking no honors or publicity. But wherever he went governments and rulers, as well as the masses of plain people, accorded him so great a welcome that it can fairly be said that few men have ever received such ovations at any time in history. The death of King Edward led to the appointment of Mr. Roosevelt as special ambassador to represent the American government in the formalities of the funeral. The diplomatic character thus given to his presence in England added a final touch to the varied experiences of this remarkable foreign journey. Our concluding volume contains the chief addresses delivered by him in Europe, notably those at the Sorbonne in Paris, the University of Berlin, and the University of Oxford.