The year 1884 was a Presidential year, and Roosevelt was one of the four delegates-at-large* of New York State to the Republican National Convention at Chicago. The day seemed to have come for a new birth in American politics. The Republican Party was grown fat with four and twenty years of power, and the fat had overlain and smothered its noble aims. The party was arrogant, it was corrupt, it was unashamed. After the War, immense projects involving huge sums of money had to be managed, and the Republicans spent like spendthrifts when they did not spend like embezzlers. I do not imply that the Democrats would not have done the same if they had been in command, or that there were not among them many who saw where their profit lay, and took it. The quadrupeds which feed at the Treasury trough are all of one species, no matter whether their skins be black or white.
* The other delegates-at-large were President Andrew D. White ofCornell University, J. T. Gilbert, and Edwin Packard.
But now a new generation was springing up, with its leaven of hope and idealism and its intuitive faith in honesty.
More completely than any one else, Roosevelt embodied to the country the glorious promise of this new generation. But the old always dies hard after it has long been the blood and mind of a creed, a class, or a party. Terrible also is the blind, remorseless sweep of a custom which may have sprung up from good soil, not less than one spawned and nurtured in iniquity. Frankenstein laboriously constructing his monster seems to personify society at its immemorial task of creating institutions; each institution as it becomes viable rends its creator.
So the Republican Party lived on its traditions, its privileges, its appetites, its arrogance, and it refused to be transmuted by its youngest members. In 1876 it resorted to fraud to perpetuate its hold on power. Unchastened in 1880, three hundred and six of its delegates attempted through thick and thin to force the nomination of General Grant for a third term. The chief opposing candidate was James G. Blaine, whose unsavory reputation, however, caused the majority of the convention which was not pledged to Grant to repudiate Blaine and to choose Garfield as a compromise. Then followed four years of factional bitterness in the party, and when 1884 came round, Blaine's admirers pushed him to the front.
Blaine himself was not a person of delicate instinct. The repudiation which he had twice suffered by the better element of the Republican Party, seemed only to redouble his determination to be its candidate. He had much personal magnetism. Both in his methods and ideals, he represented perfectly the politicians who during the dozen years after Lincoln's death flourished at Washington, and at every State capitol in the Union. By the luck of a catching phrase applied to him by Robert G. Ingersoll, he stood before the imagination of the country "as the plumed knight," although on looking back we search in vain for any trait of knightliness or chivalry in him. For a score of years he filled the National Congress, House and Senate, with the bustle of his egotism. His knightly valor consisted in shaking his fist at the "Rebel Brigadiers " and in waving the "bloody shirt," feats which seemed to him heroic, no doubt, but which were safe enough, the Brigadiers being few and Blaine's supporters many. But where on the Nation's statute book do you find now a single important law fathered by him? What book contains one of his maxims for men to live by? Many persons still live who knew him, and remember him, but can any of them repeat a saying of his which passes current on the lips of Americans? So much sound and fury, so much intrigue and sophistry, and self-seeking, and now the silence of an empty sepulchre!
The better element of the Republican Party went to the Chicago Convention sworn to save the party from the disgrace of nominating Blaine. Roosevelt believed the charges against him, and by all that he had written and spoken, and by his political career, he was bound to oppose the politician, who, as Speaker of the National House, had, by the showing of his own letters, taken bribes from unscrupulous interests. In the convention, and in the committee meetings, and in the incessant parleys which prepare the work of a convention, Roosevelt fought unwaveringly against Blaine. The better element made Senator George F. Edmunds their candidate, and Roosevelt urged his nomination on all comers. When the convention met, Mr. Lodge, of Massachusetts, nominated J. R. Lynch, a negro from Mississippi, to be temporary chairman, thereby heading off Powell Clayton, a veteran Republican "war-horse" and office-holder. Roosevelt had the honor—and it was an honor for so young a man—to make a speech, which proved to be effective, in Lynch's behalf; and when the vote was taken, Lynch was chosen by 424 to 384. This first victory over the Blaine Machine, the Edmunds men hailed as a good omen.
Roosevelt was chairman of the New York State delegation. The whirling days and nights at Chicago confirmed his position as a national figure, but he strove in vain in behalf of honesty. The majority of the delegates would not be gainsaid. They had come to Chicago resolved to elect James G. Blaine, and no other, and they would not quit until they had accomplished this. Pleas for morality and for party concord fell on deaf ears, as did warnings of the comfort which Blaine's nomination would give to their enemies. His supporters packed the great convention hall, and when his name was put in nomination, there followed a riot of cheers, which lasted the better part of an hour, and foreboded his success.
As had been predicted, Blaine's nomination split the Republican Party. Many of the better element came out for Grover Cleveland, the Democratic candidate, who, as Governor of New York, had displayed unfailing courage, integrity, and intelligence. Others again, disgusted with many of the principles and leaders of both parties, formed themselves into a special group or party of Independents. They were hateful alike to the Bosses who controlled the Republican or Democratic organization; and Charles A. Dana, of the New York Sun, who took care never to be "on the side of the angels," derisively dubbed them "mugwumps"—a title which may carry an honorable meaning to posterity.
I was one of these Independents, and if I cite my own case, it is not because it was of any importance to the public, but because it was typical. During the days of suspense before the Chicago Convention met, the proposed nomination of Blaine weighed upon me like a nightmare. I would not admit to myself that so great a crime against American ideals could be committed by delegates who represented the standard of any political party, and were drawn from all over the country. I cherished, what seems to me now the sadly foolish dream, that with Roosevelt in the convention the abomination could not be done. I thought of him as of a paladin against whom the forces of evil would dash themselves to pieces. I thought of him as the young and dauntless spokesman of righteousness whose words would silence the special pleaders of iniquity. I wrote him and besought him to stand firm.
There followed the days of suspense when the newspapers brought news of the wild proceedings at the convention, and for me the shadow deepened. Then the telegraph reported Blaine's triumphant nomination. I waited, we all waited, to learn what the delegates who opposed him intended to do. One morning a dispatch in the New York Tribune announced that Roosevelt would not bolt. That very day I had a little note from him saying that he had done his best in Chicago, that the result sickened him, that he should, however, support the Republican ticket; but he intended to spend most of the summer and autumn hunting in the West.
I was dumfounded. I felt as Abolitionists felt after Webster's Seventh of March speech. My old acquaintance, our trusted leader, whose career in the New York Assembly we had watched with an almost holy satisfaction, seemed to have strangely abandoned the fundamental principles which we and he had believed in, and he had so nobly upheld. Whittier's poem "Ichabod" seemed to have been aimed at him, especially in its third stanza:
"Oh, dumb be passion's stormy rage,When he who mightHave lighted up and led his age,Falls back in night."
Amid the lurid gleams and heat of such a disappointment, men cannot see clearly. They impute wrong motives, base motives, to the backslider. In their wrath, they assume that only guilt can account for his defection.
We see plainly enough now that we misjudged Roosevelt. We assumed that because he was with us in the crusade for pure politics, he agreed with us in the estimate we put on party loyalty. Independents and mugwumps felt little reverence and set even less value on political parties, which we regarded simply as instruments to be used in carrying out policies. If a party pursued a policy contrary to our own, we left it as we should leave a train which we found going in the wrong direction. There was nothing sacred in a political party.
In assuming that Roosevelt must have coincided with us in these views, we did him wrong. For he held then, and had held since he first entered politics, that party transcended persons, and that only in the gravest case imaginable was one justified in bolting his party because one disapproved of its candidate. He did not respect Blaine; on the contrary, he regarded Blaine as a bad man: but he believed that the future of the country would be much safer under the control of the Republican Party than under the Democratic. This doctrine exposes its adherents to obvious criticism, if not to suspicion. It enables persons of callous consciences to support bad platforms and bad candidates without blushing; but after all, who shall say at what point you are justified in bolting your party? The decision must rest with the individual. And although it was hard for the bolting Independents in 1884 to accept the tenet that party transcends persons, it was Roosevelt's reason, and with him sincere. Some of his colleagues in the better element who had struggled as he had to defeat Blaine, and then, almost effusively, exalted Blaine as their standard-bearer, were less fortunate than he in having their sincerity doubted. George William Curtis, Carl Schurz, Charles Francis Adams, and other Independents of their intransigent temper formed a Mugwump Party and this turned the scale in electing Grover Cleveland President.
There used to be much discussion as to who persuaded Roosevelt, although he detested Blaine, to stand by the Republicans in 1884. Those were the days when very few of his critics understood that, in spite of his youth, he had already thought for himself on politics and had reached certain conclusions as to fundamental principles. These critics assumed that he must have been won over by Henry Cabot Lodge, with whom he had been intimate since his Harvard days, and who was supposed to be his political mentor. The truth is, however, that Roosevelt had formed his own opinion about bolting, and that he and Lodge, in discussing possibilities before they went to the Chicago Convention, had independently agreed that they must abide by the choice of the party there. They held, and a majority of men in similar position still hold, that delegates cannot in honor abandon the nominee chosen by the majority in a convention which they attend as delegates. If the rule, "My man, or nobody," were to prevail, there would be no use in holding conventions at all. And after that of 1884, George William Curtis, one of the chief leaders of the Independents, admitted that Roosevelt, in staying with the Republican Party, played the game fairly. While Curtis himself bolted and helped to organize the Mugwumps, Roosevelt, after his trip to the West, returned to New York and took a vigorous part in the campaign. Nevertheless, Roosevelt's decision, in 1884, to cleave to the Republican Party disappointed many of us. We thought of him as a lost leader. Some critics in their ignorance were inclined to impute false motives to him; but in time, the cloud of suspicion rolled away and his action in that crisis was not laid up against him. The election of Cleveland relieved him of seeming perfunctorily to uphold Blaine.
A perfect biography would show definitely the interaction between mind and body. At present we can only guess what this interaction may be. In some cases the relations are evident, but in most they are vague and often unsuspected. The psychologists, whose pretensions are so great and whose actual results are still so small, may perhaps lead, an age or two hence, to the desired knowledge. But the biographer of today must beware of adopting the unripe formulas of any immature science. Nevertheless, he must watch, study, and record all the facts pertaining to his subject, although he cannot explain them. Theodore Roosevelt was a wonderful example of the partnership of mind and body, and any one who writes his biography in detail will do well to pay great heed to this intricate interlocking. I can do no more than allude to it here. We have seen that Roosevelt from his earliest days had a quick mind, happily not precocious, and a weak body which prevented him from taking part in normal physical activity and the play and sport of boyhood. So his intellectual life grew out of scale to his physical. Then he set to work by the deliberate application of will-power to develop his body, and when he entered Harvard he was above the average youth in strength. Before he graduated, those who saw him box or wrestle beheld a fellow somewhat slim and light, but unusually well set up. During the succeeding four years he never allowed his duties as Assemblyman to encroach upon his exercise; on the contrary, he played regularly and he played hard, adding new kinds of sport to develop new faculties and to give the spice of variety. He rode to hounds with the Meadowbrook Hunt; he took up polo; and he boxed and wrestled as in his college days.
In a few years Roosevelt became physically a very powerful man. I recall my astonishment the first time I saw him, after the lapse of several years, to find him with the neck of a Titan and with broad shoulders and stalwart chest, instead of the city-bred, slight young friend I had known earlier. His body was now equal to any burden or strain which his mind might have to endure; and hence forth it is no idle fancy that suggests a perpetual competition between the two. Thanks to his extraordinary will, however, he never allowed his body to get control; but, as appetite comes with eating, so his strong and healthy muscles craved more and more exercise as he used them. And now he took a novel way to gratify them.
Ever since his first taste of camp life, when he went into the Maine Woods under the guidance of Bill Sewall and Will Dow, Roosevelt felt the lure of wild nature, and on many successive seasons he repeated these trips. Gradually, fishing and hunting in the wilderness of Maine or the Adirondacks did not afford him enough scope for his brimming vigor. He decided to go West, to the real West, where great game and Indians still survived, and the conditions of the few white men were almost as primitive as in the days of the earliest explorers. When the session of 1883 adjourned, he started for North Dakota, then a territory with a few settlers, and among the Bad Lands on the Little Missouri he bought an interest in two cattle ranches, the Chimney Butte and the Elkhorn. The following year, after the Presidential campaign which placed Cleveland in the White House, Roosevelt determined, as we saw in the letters I have quoted, to abandon the East for a time and to devote himself to a ranchman's life. He was still in deep grief at the loss of his wife and of his mother; there was no immediate prospect of usefulness for him in politics; the conventions of civilization, as he knew them in New York City, palled upon him; a sure instinct whispered to him that he must break away and seek health of body and heart and soul among the re mote, unspoiled haunts of primeval Nature. For nearly two years, with occasional intervals spent in the East, the Elkhorn Ranch at Medora was his home, and he has described the life of the ranchman and cow-puncher in pages which are sure to be read as long as posterity takes any interest in knowing about the transition of the American West from wilderness to civilization. He shared in all the work of the ranch. He took with a "frolic welcome" the humdrum of its routine as well as its excitements and dangers. He says that he does not believe that there was ever any more attractive life for a vigorous young fellow than this, and assuredly no one else has glorified it as Roosevelt did with his pen. At one time or another he performed all the duties of a ranchman. He went on long rides after the cattle, he rounded them up, he helped to brand them and to cut out the beeves destined for the Eastern market. He followed the herd when it stampeded during a terrific thunderstorm. In winter there was often need to save the wandering cattle from a sudden and deadly blizzard. The log cabin or "shack" in which he dwelt was rough, and so was the fare; comforts were few. He chopped the cottonwood which they used for fuel; he knew how to care for the ponies; and once at least he passed more than twenty-four hours in the saddle without sleep. According to the best standards, he says, he was not a fine horseman, but it is clear that he could do everything with a horse which had to be done, and that he never stopped from fatigue. When they needed fresh meat, he would shoot it. In short, he held his own under all the hardships and requirements demanded of a cowboy or ranchman. To adapt himself to these wild conditions of nature and work was, however, only a part of his experience. Even more dangerous than pursuing a stampeding herd at night over the plains, and plunging into the Little Missouri after it, was intercourse with some of the lawless nomads of that pioneer region. Nomads they were, though they might settle down to work for a while on one ranch, and then pass on to another; the sort of creatures who loafed in the saloons of the little villages and amused them selves by running amuck and shooting up the town. These men, and indeed nearly all of the pioneers, held the man from the civilized East, the "tenderfoot," in scorn. They took it for granted that he was a weakling, that he had soft ideas of life and was stuck-up or affected. Now Roosevelt saw that in order to win their trust and respect, he must show himself equal to their tasks, a true comrade, who accepted their code of courage and honor. The fact that he wore spectacles was against him at the outset, because they associated spectacles with Eastern schoolmasters and incompetence. They called him "Four Eyes," at first with derision, but they soon discovered that in him they had no "tenderfoot" to deal with. He shot as well as the best of them; he rode as far; he never complained of food or tasks or hardship; he met every one on equal terms. Above all, he left no doubt as to his courage. He would not pick a quarrel nor would he avoid one. Many stories of his prowess circulated; mere heckling, or a practical joke, he took with a laugh; as when some of the men changed the saddle from his pony to a bucking broncho.
But he knew where to draw the line. At Medora, for instance, the Marquis de Mores, a French settler, assumed the attitude of a feudal proprietor. Having been the first to squat in that region he regarded those who came later as interlopers, and he and his men acted very sullenly. They even carried their ill-will and intimidation to the point of shooting. In due time the Marquis discovered cause for grievance against Roosevelt, and he sent him a letter warning the newcomer that if the cause were not removed the Marquis knew how one gentleman settles a dispute with another. Roosevelt despised dueling as a silly practice, which would not determine justice between disputants; but he knew that in Cowboy Land the duel, being regarded as a test of courage, must not be ignored by him. Any man who declined a challenge lost caste and had better leave the country at once. So Roosevelt within an hour dispatched a reply to the surly Marquis saying that he was ready to meet him at any time and naming the rifle, at twelve paces' distance, as the weapon that he preferred. The Marquis, a formidable swordsman but no shot, sent back word, expressing regret that Mr. Roosevelt had mistaken his meaning: in referring to "gentlemen knowing how to settle disputes," he meant that of course an amicable explanation would restore harmony. Thenceforward, he treated Roosevelt with effusive courtesy. Perhaps a chill ran down his back at the thought of standing up before an antagonist twelve paces away and that the fighters were to advance towards each other three paces after each round, until one of them was killed.
So Theodore fought no duel with either the French Marquis or with any one else during his life in the West, but he had several encounters with local desperadoes. One cold night in winter, having ridden far and knowing that he could reach no refuge for many hours, he unexpectedly saw a light. Going towards it, he found that it came from a cabin which served as saloon and tavern. On entering, he saw a group of loafers and drinkers who were apparently terrorized by a big fellow, rather more than half drunk, who proved to be the local bully. The function of this person was to maintain his bullyship against all comers: accordingly, he soon picked on Roosevelt, who held his peace as long as he could. Then the rowdy, who grasped his pistols in his hands, ordered the "four-eyed tenderfoot" to come to the bar and set up drinks for the crowd. Roosevelt walked deliberately towards him, and before the bully suspected it, the "tenderfoot" felled him with a sledgehammer blow. In falling, a pistol went off wide of its mark, and the bully lay in a faint. Before he could recover, Roosevelt stood over him ready to pound him again. But the bully did not stir, and he was carried off into another room. The crowd congratulated the stranger on having served him right.
At another place, there was a "bad man" who surpassed the rest of his fellows in using foul language. Roosevelt, who loathed obscenity as he did any other form of filth, tired of this bad man's talk and told him very calmly that he liked him but not his nastiness. Instead of drawing his gun, as the bystanders thought he would do, Jim looked sheepish, acknowledging the charge, and changed his tone. He remained a loyal friend of his corrector. Cattle-thieves and horse-thieves infested the West of those days. To steal a ranchman's horse might not only cause him great annoyance, but even put his life in danger, and accordingly the rascals who engaged in this form of crime ranked as the worst of all and received no mercy when they were caught. If the sheriff of the region was lax, the settlers took the matter into their own hands, enrolled themselves as vigilantes, hunted the thieves down, hanged those whom they captured, and shot at sight those who tried to escape. It happened that the sheriff, in whose jurisdiction Medora lay, allowed so many thieves to get off that he was suspected of being in collusion with them. The ranch men held a meeting at which he was present and Roosevelt told him in very plain words their complaint against him and their suspicions. Though he was a hot-tempered man, and very quick on the trigger, he showed no willingness to shoot his bold young accuser; he knew, of course, that the ranchmen would have taken vengeance on him in a flash, but it is also possible that he recognized the truth of Roosevelt's accusation and felt compunctions.
Some time later Roosevelt showed how a zealous officer of the law—he was the acting deputy sheriff - ought to behave. He had a boat in which he used to cross the Little Missouri to his herds on the other side. One day he missed the boat, its rope having been cut, and he inferred that it must have been stolen by three cattle-thieves who had been operating in that neighborhood. By means of it they could easily escape, for there was no road along the river on which horsemen could pursue them. Notwithstanding this, Roosevelt resolved that they should not go free. In three days Bill Sewall and Dow built a flat, water-tight craft, on which they put enough food to last for a fortnight, and then all three started downstream. They had drifted and poled one hundred and fifty miles or more, before they saw a faint column of smoke in the bushes near the bank. It proved to be the temporary camp of the fugitives, whom they quickly took prisoners, put into the boat, and carried another one hundred and fifty miles down the river to the nearest town with a jail and a court. Going and coming, Roosevelt spent nearly three weeks, not to mention the hardships which he and his trusty men suffered on the way; but he had served justice, and Justice must be served at any cost. When the story be came known, the admiration of his neighbors for his pluck and persistence rose; but they wondered why he took the trouble to make the extra journey, in order to deliver the prisoners to the jail, instead of shooting them where he overtook them.
I chronicle these examples of Roosevelt's courage among the lawless gangs with whom he was thrown in North Dakota, because they reveal several qualities which came to be regarded as peculiarly Rooseveltian during the rest of his days. We are apt to speak of "mere" physical courage as being inferior to moral courage; and doubtless there are many heroes unknown to the world who, under the torture of disease or the poignancy of social injustice and wrongs, deserve the highest crown of heroism. Men who would lead a charge in battle would shrink from denouncing an accepted convention or even from slighting a popular fashion. But after all, the instinct of the race is sound in revering those who give their lives without hesitation or regret at the point of deadly peril, or offer their own to save the lives of others.
Roosevelt's experience established in him that physical courage which his soul had aspired to in boyhood, when the consciousness of his bodily inferiority made him seem shy and almost timid. Now he had a bodily frame which could back up any resolution he might take. The emergencies in a ranchman's career also trained him to be quick to will, instantaneous in his decisions, and equally quick in the muscular activity by which he carried them out. In a community whose members gave way to sudden explosions of passion, you might be shot dead unless you got the drop on the other fellow first. The anecdotes I have repeated, indicate that Roosevelt must often have outsped his opponent in drawing.
We learn from them, too, that he was far from being the pugnacious person whom many of his later critics insisted that he was. Having given ample proof to the frontiersmen that he had no fear, he resolutely kept the peace with them, and they had no desire to break peace with him. Bluster and swagger were foreign to his nature, and he loathed a bully as much as a coward. If we had not already had the record of his. three years in the Legislature, in which he surprised his friends by his wonderful talent for mixing with all sorts of persons, we might marvel at his ability to meet the cowboys and ranchmen, and even the desperadoes, of the Little Missouri on equal terms, to win the respect of all of them, and the lifelong devotion of a few. They knew that the usual tenderfoot, however much he might wish to fraternize, was fended from them by his past, his traditions, his civilized life, his instincts; but in Roosevelt's case, there was no gulf, no barrier.
Even after he became President of the United States, I can no more imagine that he felt embarrassment in meeting any one, high or low, than that he scrutinized the coat on a man's back in order to know how to treat him.
To have gained solid health, to have gained mastery of himself, and to have put his social nature to the severest test and found it flawless, were valid results of his life on the Elkhorn Ranch. It imparted to him also a knowledge which was to prove most precious to him in the unforeseen future. For it taught him the immense diversity of the people, and consequently of the interests, of the United States. It gave him a national point of view, in which he perceived that the standards and desires of the Atlantic States were not all-inclusive or final. Yet while it impressed on him the importance of geographical considerations, it impressed, more deeply still, the fact that there are moral fundamentals not to be measured by geography, or by time, or by race. Lincoln learned this among the pioneers of Illinois; in similar fashion Roosevelt learned it in the Bad Lands of Dakota with their pioneers and exiles from civilization, and from studying the depths of his own nature.
One September day in 1886, Roosevelt was reading a New York newspaper in his Elkhorn cabin, when he saw that he had been nominated by a body of Independents as candidate for Mayor of New York City. Whether he had been previously consulted or not, I do not know, but he evidently accepted the nomination as a call, for he at once packed up his things and started East. The political situation in the metropolis was somewhat abnormal. The United Democracy had nominated for Mayor Abram S. Hewitt, a merchant of high standing, one of those decent persons whom Tammany Hall puts forward to attract respectable citizens when it finds itself in a tight place and likely to be defeated. At such a pinch, Tammany even politely keeps in the background and allows it to appear that the decent candidate is wholly the choice of decent Democrats: for the Tammany Tiger wears, so to speak, a reversible skin which, when turned inside out, shows neither stripes nor claws. Mr. Hewitt's chief opponent was Henry George, put up by the United Labor Party, which had suddenly swelled into importance, and had discovered in the author of "Progress and Poverty" and in the advocate of the Single Tax a candidate whose private character was generally respected, even by those who most hated his economic teachings. The mere thought that such a Radical should be proposed for Mayor scared, not merely the Big Interests, but the owners of real estate and intangible property.
Against these redoubtable competitors, the Independents and Republicans pitted Roosevelt, hoping that his prestige and personal popularity would carry the day. He made a plucky campaign, but Hewitt won, with Henry George second. In his letter of acceptance he went straight at the mark, which was that the government of the city was strictly a business affair. " I very earnestly deprecate," he says, "all attempts to introduce any class or caste feeling into the mayoralty contest. Laborers and capitalists alike are interested in having an honest and economical city government, and if elected I shall certainly strive to be the representative of all good citizens, paying heed to nothing whatever but the general well-being."* When Tammany reverses its hide, the Republicans in New York City need not expect victory; and in 1886 Henry George drew off a good many votes which would ordinarily have been cast for Roosevelt.
* Riis, 101.
Nevertheless, the fight was worth making. It reintroduced him to the public, which had not heard him for two years, and it helped erase from men's memories the fact that he had supported Blaine in 1884. His contest with Hewitt and George set him in his true light—a Republican by conviction, a party man, also by conviction, but above all the fearless champion of what he believed to be the right, in its struggle against economic heresy and political corruption.
The election over, Roosevelt went to Europe, and on December 2, 1886, at St. George's, Hanover Square, London, he married Miss Edith Kermit Carow, of New York, whom he had known since his earliest childhood, the playmate of his sister Corinne, the little girl whose photograph had stirred up in him "homesickness and longings for the past," when he was a little boy in Paris. Cecil Spring-Rice, an old friend (subsequently British Ambassador at Washington), was his groomsman, and being married at St. George's, Theodore remarks, "made me feel as if I were living in one of Thackeray's novels."
Mrs. Roosevelt's father came of Huguenot stock, the name being originally Quereau; the first French immigrants of the family having migrated to New York in the seventeenth century at about the same time as Claes van Roosevelt. Like the Roosevelts, the Carows had so freely intermarried with English stock in America that the French origin of one was as little discernible in their descendants as was the Dutch origin of the other. Through her American line Mrs. Roosevelt traced back to Jonathan Edwards, the prolific ancestor of many persons who emerged above the common level by either their virtue or their badness.
After spending several months in Europe, Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt returned and settled at Oyster Bay, Long Island, where he had built, not long before, a country house on Sagamore Hill. His place there comprised many acres—a beautiful country of hill and hollow and fine tall trees. The Bay made in from Long Island Sound and seemed to be closed by the opposite shore, so that in calm weather you might mistake it for a lake. This home was thoroughly adapted for Roosevelt's needs. Being only thirty miles from New York, with a railroad near by, convenient but not intrusive, it gave easy access to the city, but was remote enough to discourage casual or undesired callers. It had sufficient land to carry on farming and to sustain the necessary horses and domestic cattle. Mrs. Roosevelt supervised it; he simply loved it and got distraction from his more pressing affairs; if he had chosen to withdraw from these he might have devoted himself to the pleasing and leisurely life of a gentleman farmer. For a while his chief occupation was literary. Into this he pitched with characteristic energy. His innate craving for self-expression could never be satiated by speaking alone, and now, since he filled no public position which would be a cause or perhaps an excuse for speaking, he wrote with all the more enthusiasm.
Although he was less than seven years out of college, his political career had given him a national reputation, which helped and was helped by the vogue of his writings. The American public had come to perceive that Theodore Roosevelt could do nothing commonplace. The truth was, that he did many things that other men did which ceased to be commonplace only when he did them. Scores of other young men went on hunting trips after big game in the Rockies or the Selkirks, and even ranching had been engaged in by the enterprising and the adventurous, who hoped to find it a short way to a fortune. But whether as ranch man or as hunter, Roosevelt was better known than all the rest. His skill in describing his experiences no doubt largely accounted for this; but the fact that the experiences were his, was the ultimate explanation.
Roosevelt began to write very early. He thought that the instruction in rhetoric which he received at Harvard enlightened him, and during his Senior year he began the "History of the Naval War of 1812," which he completed and published in 1882. This work at once won recognition for him, and it differed from the traditional accounts, embedded in the school histories of the United States, in doing full justice to the British naval operations. Probably, for the first time, our people realized that the War of 1812 had not been a series of victories, startling and irresistible, for the American Navy. Nearly ten years later, Roosevelt in the "Winning of the West" made his second excursion into history. These volumes, which eventually numbered six, are regarded by experts in the subject as of great value, and I suppose that in them Roosevelt did more than any other writer to popularize the study of the historical origin and development of the vast region west of the Alleghanies which now forms a vital part of the American Republic. One attribute of a real historian is the power to discern the structural or pregnant quality of historic periods and episodes; and this power Roosevelt displayed in choosing both the War of 1812 and the Winning of the West.
In his larger history Roosevelt had a swift, energetic, and direct style. He never lacked for ideas. Descriptions came to him with exuberant details of which he selected enough to leave his reader with the feeling that he had looked on a vivid and accurate picture. Here, for instance, is a portrait of Daniel Boon which seems remarkably lifelike, because I remember how difficult other writers find it to individualize most of the figures of the pioneers.
The backwoodsmen, he says, "all tilled their own clearings, guiding the plow among the charred stumps left when the trees were chopped down and the land burned over, and they were all, as a matter of course, hunters. With Boon, hunting and exploration were passions, and the lonely life of the wilderness, with its bold, wild freedom, the only existence for which he really cared. He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle's, and muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of his life made no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of any kind, and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the end of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who never blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance, and indomitable resolution upon which to draw when fortune proved adverse. His self-command and patience, his daring, restless love of adventure, and, in time of danger, his absolute trust in his own powers and resources, all combined to render him peculiarly fitted to follow the career of which he was so fond."*
* Winning of the West, 1, 137, 138 (ed. 1889).
Roosevelt contributed two volumes to the American Statesmen Series, one on Thomas Hart Benton in 1886, and the other on Gouverneur Morris in 1887. The environment and careers of these two men—the Missouri Senator of the first half of the nineteenth century, and the New York financier of the last half of the eighteenth—afforded him scope for treating two very diverse subjects. He was himself rooted in the old New York soil and he had come, through his life in the West, to divine the conditions of Benton's days. Once again, many years later (1900) he tried his hand at biography, taking Oliver Cromwell for his hero, and making a summary, impressionistic sketch of him. Besides the interest this biography has for students of Cromwell, it has also interest for students of Roosevelt, for it is a specimen of the sort of by-products he threw off in moments of relaxation.
More characteristic than such excursions into history and biography, however, are his many books describing ranch-life and hunting. In the former, he gives you truthful descriptions of the men of the West as he saw them, and in the latter he recounts his adventures with elk and buffalo, wolves and bears. The mere trailing and killing of these creatures do not satisfy him. He studies with equal zest their haunts and their habits. The naturalist in him, which we recognized in his youth, found this vent in his maturity. And long years afterward, on his expeditions to Africa and to Brazil he dealt even more exuberantly with the natural history of the countries which he visited.
Two other classes of writings make up Roosevelt's astonishing output. He gathered his essays and addresses into half a dozen volumes, remarkable alike for the wide variety of their subjects, and for the vigor with which he seized on each subject as if it was the one above all others which most absorbed him. Finally, skim the collection of his official messages, as Commissioner, as Governor, or as President, and you will discover that he had the gift of infusing life and color into the usually drab and cheerless wastes of official documents.
I am not concerned to make a literary appraisal of Theodore Roosevelt's manifold works, but I am struck by the fact that our professional critics ignore him entirely in their summaries or histories of recent American literature. As I re-read, after twenty years, and in some cases after thirty years, books of his which made a stir on their appearance, I am impressed, not only by the excellence of their writing, but by their lasting quality. If he had not done so many other things of greater importance, and done them supremely, he would have secured lasting fame by his books on hunting, ranching, and exploration. No other American compares with him, and I know of no other, in English at least, who has made a contribution in these fields equal to his.
Throughout these eight or ten volumes he proves himself to be one of those rare writers who see what they write. As in the case of Tennyson, than whom no English poet, in spite of nearsightedness, has observed so minutely the tiniest details of form or the faintest nuance of color, so the lack of normal vision did not prevent Roosevelt from being the closest of observers. He was also, by the way, a good shot with rifle or pistol. If you read one of his chapters in "Hunting the Grizzly" and ask yourself wherein its animation and attraction lie, you will find that it is because every sentence and every line report things seen. He does not, like the Realist, try to get a specious lifelikeness by heaping up banal and commonplace facts; he selects. His imagination reminds one of the traveling spark which used to run along the great chandelier in the theatre, and light each jet, so that its passage seemed a flight from point to point of brilliance. Wherever he focuses his survey a spot glows vividly.
The eye, the master sense of the mind, thus dominates him, and I think that we shall trace to its mastery much of the immediate power which he exerted by his writings and speeches on public, social, and moral topics. He struck off, in the heat of composition or of speaking, phrases and similes which millions caught up eagerly and made as familiar as household words. He even remembered from his extensive reading some item which, when applied by him to the affair of the moment, acquired new pertinence and a second life. Thus, Bunyan's " muckraker" lives again; thus, "the curse of Meroz," and many another Bible reference, springs up with a fresh meaning.
No doubt the purist will find occasional lapses in taste or expression, and the quibbling peddler of rhetoric will gloat over some doubtful construction; but neither purist nor peddler of rhetoric has ever been able in his writing to display the ease, the rush, the naturalness, the sparkle which were as genuine in Roosevelt as were the features of his face. On reading these pages, which have escaped the attention of the professional critics, I wonder whether they may not have a fate similar to Defoe's; for Defoe also was read voraciously by his contemporaries, his pamphlets made a great rustle in their time, and then the critics turned to other and spicier writers. But in due season, other critics, as well as the world, made the discovery that only a genius could have produced Defoe's "every-day," "commonplace" style.
His innate vigor, often swelling into vehemence, marks also Roosevelt's political essays, and yet he had time for reflection, and if you examine closely even some of his combative passages, you will see that they do not spring from sudden anger or scorn, but from a conviction which has matured slowly in him. He had not the philosophic calm which formed the background of Burke's political masterpieces, but he had the clearness, the simplicity, by which he could drive home his thoughts into the minds of the multitude. Burke spoke and wrote for thousands and for posterity; Roosevelt addressed millions for the moment, and let posterity do what it would with his burning appeals and invectives. He was not so absolutely self-effacing as Lincoln, but I think that he realized to the full the meaning of Lincoln's phrase, "the world will little note, nor long remember what we may say here," and that he would have made it his motto. For he, like all truly great statesmen, was so immensely concerned in winning today's battle, that he wasted no time in speculating what tomorrow, or next year, or next century would say about it. Mysticism, the recurrent fad which indicates that its victims neither see clear nor think straight, could not spread its veils over him. The man who visualizes is safe from that intellectual weakness and moral danger. But although Roosevelt felt the sway of the true emotions, he allowed only his intimates to know what he held most intimate and sacred. He felt also the charm of beauty, and over and over again in his descriptions of hunting and riding in the West, he pauses to recall beautiful scenery or some unusual bit of landscape; and even in remembering his passage down the River of Doubt, when he came nearer to death than he ever came until he died, in spite of tormenting pain and desperate anxiety for his companions, he mentions more than once the loveliness of the river scene or of the massed foliage along its banks. Naturalist though he was, bent first on studying the habits of birds and animals, he yet took keen delight in the iridescent plumage or graceful form or the beautiful fur of bird and beast.
The quality of a writer can best be judged by reading a whole chapter, or two or three, of his book, but sometimes he reveals a phase of himself in a single paragraph. Read, for instance, this brief extract from Roosevelt's "Through the Brazilian Wilderness," if you would understand some of the traits which I have just alluded to. It comes at the end of his long and dismaying exploration of the River of Doubt, when the party was safe at last, and the terrible river was about to flow into the broad, lakelike Amazon, and Manaos was almost in sight, where civilization could be laid hold on again, Manaos, whence the swift ships went steaming towards the Atlantic and the Atlantic opened a clear path home. He says:
'The North was calling strongly the three men of the North—Rocky Dell Farm to Cherrie, Sagamore Hill to me; and to Kermit the call was stronger still. After nightfall we could now see the Dipper well above the horizon—upside down with the two pointers pointing to a North Star below the world's rim; but the Dipper, with all its stars. In our home country spring had now come, the wonderful Northern spring of long, glorious days, of brooding twilight, of cool, delightful nights. Robin and bluebird, meadow-lark and song-sparrow were singing in the mornings at home; the maple buds were red; windflowers and bloodroot were blooming while the last patches of snow still lingered; the rapture of the hermit thrush in Vermont, the serene golden melody of the wood thrush on Long Island, would be heard before we were there to listen. Each was longing for the homely things that were so dear to him, for the home people who were dearer still, and for the one who was dearest of all.' *
* Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 320.
I have said that Roosevelt devoted the two years after he came back to New York to writing, but it would be a mistake to imagine that writing alone busied him. He was never a man who did or would do only one thing at a time. His immense energy craved variety, and in variety he found recreation. Now that the physical Roosevelt had caught up in relative strength with the intellectual, he could take what holidays requiring exhaustless bodily vigor he chose. The year seldom passed now when he did not go West for a month or two. Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow were established with their families on the Elkhorn Ranch, which Roosevelt continued to own, although, I believe, like many ranches at that period, it ceased to be a good investment. Sometimes he made a hurried dash to southern Texas, or to the Selkirks, or to Montana in search of new sorts of game. In the mountains he indulged in climbing, but this was not a favorite with him because it offered less sport in proportion to the fatigue. While he was still a young man he had gone up the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, feats which still required endurance, although they did not involve danger.
While we think of him, therefore, as dedicating himself to his literary work—the "Winning of the West" and the accounts of ranch life—we must remember that he had leisure for other things. He watched keenly the course of politics, for instance, and in 1888 when the Republicans nominated Benjamin Harrison as their candidate for President, Roosevelt supported him effectively and took rank with the foremost Republican speakers of the campaign. After his election Harrison, who both recognized Roosevelt's great ability and felt under obligation to him, wished to offer him the position of an under-secretary in the State Department; but Blaine, who was slated for Secretary of State, had no liking for the young Republican whose coolness in 1884 he had not forgotten. So Harrison invited Roosevelt to be a Civil Service Commissioner. The position had never been conspicuous; its salary was not large; its duties were of the routine kind which did not greatly tax the energies of the Commissioners, who could never hope for fame, but only for the approval of their own consciences for whatever good work they did. The Machine Republicans, whether of national size, or of State or municipal, were glad to know that Roosevelt would be put out of the way in that office.
They already thought of him as a young man dangerous to all Machines and so they felt the prudence of bottling him up. To make him a Civil Service Commissioner was not exactly so final as chloroforming a snarling dog would be, but it was a strong measure of safety. Theodore's friends, on the other hand, advised him against accepting the appointment, because, they said, it would shelve him, politically, use up his brains which ought to be spent on higher work, and allow the country which was just beginning to know him to forget his existence. Men drop out of sight so quickly at Washington unless they can stand on some pedestal which raises them above the multitude.
The Optimist of the future, to hasten whose coming we are all making the world so irresistibly attractive, will be endowed, let us hope, with a sense of humor. With that, he can read history as a cosmic joke-book, and not as the Biography of the Devil, as many of us moderns, besides Jean Paul, have found it. How long it has taken, and how much blood has been spilt before this or that most obvious folly has been abolished! With what absurd tenacity have men flown in the face of reason and flouted common sense! So our Optimist, looking into the conditions which made Civil Service Reform imperative, will shed tears either of pity or of laughter.
As long ago as the time of the cave-dweller, who was clothed in shaggy hair instead of in broadcloth or silk, prehistoric man learned that the best arrow or spear was that tipped with the best piece of flint. In brief, to do good work, you must have good tools. Translated into the terms of today, this means that the expert or specialist must be preferred to the untrained. In nearly all walks of life this truth was taken for granted, except in affairs connected with government and administration. A President might be elected, not because he was experienced in these matters, but because he had won a battle, or was the compromise candidate between two other aspirants. As it was with Presidents, so with the Cabinet officers, Congressmen, and State and city officials. Fitness being ignored as a qualification to office, made it easy for favoritism and selfish motives to determine the appointment of the army of employees required in the bureaus and departments. That good old political freebooter, Andrew Jackson, merely put into words what his predecessors had put into practice: "To the victors belong the spoils." And since his time, more than one upright and intelligent theorist on government has supported the Party System even to the point where the enjoyment of the spoils by the victors seems justified. The "spoils" were the salaries paid to the lower grade of placemen and women—salaries usually not very large, but often far above what those persons could earn in honest competition. As the money came out of the public purse, why worry? And how could party enthusiasm during the campaign and at the polls be kept up, if some of the partisans might not hope for tangible rewards for their services? Many rich men sat in Congress, and the Senate be came, proverbially, a millionaires' club. But not one of these plutocrats conducted the private business which made him rich by the methods to which he condemned the business administration of the government. He did not fill his counting-room with shirkers and incompetents; he did not find sinecures for his wife's poor relations; he did not pad his payroll with parasites whose characteristics were an itching palm and an unconquerable aversion to work. He knew how to select the quickest, cleverest, most industrious assistants, and through them he prospered.
That a man who had sworn to uphold and direct his government to the best of his ability, should have the conscience to treat his country as he did not treat himself, can be easily explained: he had no conscience. Fashion, like a local anaesthetic, deadens the sensitiveness of conscience in this or that spot; and the prevailing fashion under all governments, autocratic or democratic, has permitted the waste and even the dishonest application of public funds.
These anomalies at last roused the sense of humor of some of our citizens, just as the injustice and dishonesty which the system embodied roused the moral sense of others; and the Reform of the Civil Service—a dream at first, and then a passionate cause which the ethical would not let sleep—came into being. But to the politicians of the old type, the men of "inflooence" and "pull," the project seemed silly. They ridiculed it, and they expected to make it ridiculous in the eyes of the American people, by calling it "Snivel" Service Reform. Zealots, however, cannot be silenced by mockery. The contention that fitness should have something to do in the choice of public servants was effectively confirmed by the scientific departments of the government. The most shameless Senator would not dare to propose his brother's widow to lead an astronomical expedition, or to urge the appointment of the ward Boss of his city as Chairman of the Coast Survey. So the American people perceived that there were cases in which the Spoils System did not apply. The reformers pushed ahead; Congress at last took notice, and a law was passed bringing a good many appointees in the Post Office and other departments under the Merit System. The movement then gained ground slowly and the spoilsmen began to foresee that if it spread to the extent which seemed likely, it would deprive them of much of their clandestine and corrupting power. Senator Roscoe Conkling, one of the wittiest and most brazen of these, remarked, that when Dr. Johnson told Boswell that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," he had not sounded the possibilities of "reform."
The first administration of President Cleveland, who was a great, irremovable block of stubbornness in whatever cause he thought right, gave invaluable help to this one. The overturn of the Republican Party, after it had held power for twenty-four years, entailed many changes in office and in all classes of office-holders. Cleveland had the opportunity, therefore, of applying the Merit System as far as the law had carried it, and his actions gave Civil Service Reformers much though not complete satisfaction. The movement was just at the turning-point when Roosevelt was appointed Commissioner in 1 889. Under listless or timid direction it would have flagged and probably lost much ground; but Roosevelt could never do anything listlessly and whatever he pushed never lost ground.
The Civil Service Commission appointed by President Harrison consisted of three members, of whom the President was C. R. Procter, later Charles Lyman, with Roosevelt and Hugh Thompson, an ex-Confederate soldier. I do not disparage Roosevelt's colleagues when I say that they were worthy persons who did not claim to have an urgent call to reform the Civil Service, or anything else. They were not of the stuff which leads revolts or reforms, but they were honest and did their duty firmly. They stood by Roosevelt "shoulder to shoulder," and Thompson's mature judgment restrained his impetuosity. Roosevelt always acknowledged what he owed to the Southern gentleman. In a very short time the Commission, Congress, and the public learned that it was Roosevelt, the youngest member, just turned thirty years of age, who steered the Commission. Hostile critics would say, of course, that he usurped the leadership; but I think that this is inaccurate. It was not his conceit or ambition, it was destiny working through him, which made where he sat the head of the table. Being tremendously interested in this cause and incomparably abler than Lyman or Thompson, he naturally did most of the work, and his decisions shaped their common policy. The appeal to his sense of humor and his sense of justice stimulated him, and being a man who already saw what large consequences sometimes flow from small causes he must have been buoyed up by the thought that any of the cases which came before him might set a very important precedent.
Roosevelt acted on the principle that the office holder who swears to carry out a law must do this without hesitation or demur. If the law is good, enforcing it will make its goodness apparent to everybody; if it is bad, it will become the more quickly odious and need to be repealed. Roosevelt enforced the Civil Service Law with the utmost rigor. It called for the examination of candidates for office, and the examiners paid some heed to their moral fitness. Its opponents tried to stir up public opinion against it by circulating what purported to be some of its examination papers. Why, they asked, should a man who wished to be a letter-carrier in Keokuk, be required to give a list of the Presidents of the United States? Or what was the shortest route for a letter going from Bombay to Yokohama? By these and similar spurious questions the spoilsmen hoped to get rid of the reformers. But "shrewd slander," as Roosevelt called it, could not move him. Two specimen cases will suffice to show how he reduced shrewd slanderers to confusion. The first was Charles Henry Grosvenor, an influential Republican Congressman from Ohio, familiarly known as the "Gentle Shepherd of Ohio," because of his efforts to raise the tariff on wool for the benefit of the owners of the few thousand sheep in that State. A Congressional Committee was investigating the Civil Service Commission and Roosevelt asked that Grosvenor, who had attacked it, might be summoned. Grosvenor, however, did not appear, but when he learned that Roosevelt was going to his Dakota ranch for a vacation, he sent word that he would come. Nevertheless, this gallant act failed to save him, for Roosevelt canceled his ticket West, and confronted Grosvenor at the investigation. The Gentle Shepherd protested that he had never said that he wished to repeal the Civil Service Law; whereupon Roosevelt read this extract from one of his speeches: "I will vote not only to strike out this provision, but I will vote to repeal the whole law." When Roosevelt pointed out the inconsistency of the two statements, Grosvenor declared that they meant the same thing.
Being caught thus by one foot in Roosevelt's mantrap, he quickly proceeded to be caught by the other. He declared that Rufus P. Putnam, one of the candidates in dispute, had never lived in Grosvenor's Congressional district, or even in Ohio. Then Mr. Roosevelt quoted from a letter written by Grosvenor: "Mr. Rufus P. Putnam is a legal resident of my district, and has relatives living there now." With both feet caught in the man-trap, the Gentle Shepherd was suffering much pain, but Truth is so great a stranger to spoilsmen that he found difficulty in getting within speaking distance of her. For he protested, first, that he never wrote the letter, next, that he had forgotten that he wrote it, and finally, that he was misinformed when he wrote it. So far as appears, he never risked a tilt with the smiling young Commissioner again, but returned to his muttons and their fleeces.
A still more distinguished personage fell before the enthusiastic Commissioner. This was Arthur Pue Gorman, a Senator from Maryland, a Democrat, one of the most pertinacious agents of the Big Interests in the United States Congress. Evidently, also, he served them well, as they kept him in the Senate for nearly twenty-five years, until his death. They employed Democrats as well as Republicans, just as they subscribed to both Democratic and Republican campaign funds. For, "in politics there is no politics." Gorman, who knew that the Spoils System was almost indispensable to the running of a political machine, waited for a chance to attack the Civil Service Commission. Thinking that the propitious moment had come, he inveighed against it in the Senate. He "described with moving pathos," as Roosevelt tells the story, "how a friend of his, 'a bright young man from Baltimore,' a Sunday-School scholar, well recommended by his pastor, wished to be a letter-carrier;" but the cruel examiners floored him by asking the shortest route from Baltimore to China, to which he replied that, as he never wished to go to China, he hadn't looked up the route. Then, Senator Gorman asserted, the examiners quizzed him about all the steamship lines from the United States to Europe, branched off into geology and chemistry, and "turned him down."
Gorman was unaware that the Commissioners kept records of all their examinations, and when Roosevelt wrote him a polite note inquiring the name of the "bright young man from Baltimore," Gorman did not reply. Roosevelt also asked him, in case he shrank from giving the name of his informant, to give the date when the alleged examination took place. He even offered to open the files to any representative the Senator chose to send. Gorman, however, "not hitherto known as a sensitive soul," as Roosevelt remarks, "expressed himself as so shocked at the thought that the veracity of the bright young man should be doubted, that he could not bring himself to answer my letter." Accordingly, Roosevelt made a public statement that the Commissioners had never asked the questions which Gorman alleged. Gorman waited until the next session of Congress and then, in a speech before the Senate, complained that he had received a very "impudent" letter from Commissioner Roosevelt "cruelly" calling him to account, when he was simply endeavoring to right a great wrong which the Commission had committed. But neither then nor afterwards did he furnish "any clue to the identity of that child of his fondest fancy, the bright young man without a name."
Roosevelt must have chuckled with a righteous exultation at such evidence as this that the Lord had delivered the Philistines into his hands; and his abomination of the Spoils System must have deepened when he saw its Grosvenors and its Gormans brazen out the lies he caught them telling.
When the spoilsmen failed to get rid of the Commission by ridicule and by open attack, they resorted to the trick of not appropriating money for it in this or that district. But this did not succeed, for the Commission, owing to lack of funds, held no examinations in those districts, and therefore no candidates from them could get offices. This made the politicians unpopular with the hungry office-seekers whom they deprived of their food at the public trough.
The Commission had to struggle, however, not only to keep unfit candidates out of office, but to keep in office those who discharged their duty honestly and zealously. After every election there came a rush of Congressmen and others, to turn out the tried and trusty employees and to put in their own applicants. Such an overturn was of course detrimental to the service; first, because it substituted greenhorns for trained employees, and next, because it introduced the haphazard of politicians' whims for a just scheme of promotion and retention in office. Roosevelt lamented bitterly over the injustice and he denounced the waste. Many cases of grievous hardship came to his notice. Widows, whose only means of support for themselves and their little children was their salary, were thrown upon the street in order that rapacious politicians might secure places for their henchmen. Roosevelt might plead, but the politician remained obdurate. What was the tragic lot of a widow and starving children compared with keeping promises with greedy "heelers"? Roosevelt saw that there was no redress except through the extension of the classified service. This he urged at all times, and ten years later, when he was himself President, he added more than fifty thousand offices to the list of those which the spoilsmen could not clutch.
He served six years as Civil Service Commissioner, being reappointed in 1892 by President Cleveland. The overturn in parties which made Cleveland President for the second time, enabled Roosevelt to watch more closely the working of the Reform System and he did what he could to safeguard those Government employees who were Republicans from being ousted for the benefit of Democrats. In general, he believed in laying down certain principles on the tenure of office and in standing resolutely by them. Thus, in 1891, under Harrison, on being urged to retain General Corse, the excellent Democratic Postmaster of Boston, he replied to his friend Curtis Guild that Corse ought to be continued as a matter of principle and not because Cleveland, several years before, had retained Pearson, the Republican Postmaster of New York, as an exception.
At the end of six years, Roosevelt felt that he had worked on the Commission long enough to let the American people understand how necessary it was to maintain and extend the Merit System in the Civil Service. A sudden access of virtue had just cast out the Tammany Ring in New York City and set up Mr. Strong, a Reformer, as Mayor. He wished to secure Roosevelt's help and Roosevelt was eager to give it. The Mayor offered him the headship of the Street Cleaning Department, but this he declined, not because he thought the place beneath him, but because he lacked the necessary scientific qualifications, and Mayor Strong, was lucky in finding for it the best man in the country, Colonel George E. Waring. Accordingly, the Mayor ap pointed Roosevelt President of the Board of Police Commissioners, and he accepted.
The Police System in New York City in 1895, when Roosevelt took control, was a monstrosity which, in almost every respect, did exactly the opposite from what the Police System is organized to do. Moral values had been so perverted that it took a strong man to hold fast to the rudimentary distinctions between Good and Evil. The Police existed, in theory, to protect the lives and property of respectable citizens; to catch law-breakers and hand them over to the courts for punishment; to hunt down gamblers, swindlers, and all the other various criminals and purveyors of vice. In reality, the Police under Tammany abetted crime and protected the vicious. This they did, not because they had any special hostility to Virtue—they probably knew too little about it to form a dispassionate opinion any way—but because Vice paid better. They held the cynical view that human nature will always breed a great many persons having a propensity to licentious or violent habits; that laws were made to check and punish these persons, and that they might go their pernicious ways unmolested if the Police took no notice of them. So the Police established a system of immunity which anybody could enjoy by paying the price. Notorious gambling-hells "ran wide open" after handing the required sum to the high police official who extorted it. Hundreds of houses of ill-fame carried on their hideous traffic undisturbed, so long as the Police Captain of the district received his weekly bribe. Gangs of roughs, toughs, and gunmen pursued their piratical business without thinking of the law, for they shared their spoils with the supposed officers of the law. And there were more degenerate miscreants still, who connived with the Police and went unscathed. As if the vast sums collected from these willing bribers were not enough, the Police added a system of blackmail to be levied on those who were not deliberately vicious, but who sought convenience. If you walked downtown you found the sidewalk in front of certain stores almost barricaded by packing-boxes, whereas next door the way might be clear. This simply meant that the firm which wished to use the sidewalk for its private advantage paid the policeman on that beat, and he looked the other way. As there was an ordinance against almost every conceivable thing, so the Police had a price for making every ordinance a dead letter. Was this a cosmic joke, a nightmare of cynicism, a delusion? No, New York was classed in the reference books as a Christian city, and this was its Christianity.
Roosevelt knew the seamless bond which connected the crime and vice of the city with corrupt politics. The party Bosses, Republicans and Democrats alike, were the final profiters from police blackmail and bribery. As he held his mandate from a Reform Administration, he might expect to be aided by it on the political side; at least, he did not fear that the heads of the other departments would secretly work to block his purification of the Police. A swift examination showed him that the New York Police Department actually protected the criminals and promoted every kind of iniquity which it existed to put down. It was as if in a hospital which should cure the sick, the doctors, instead of curing disease, should make the sick worse and should make the well sick. How was Roosevelt, equally valiant and honest, to conquer this Hydra? He took the straight way dictated by common sense. First of all, he gained the confidence and respect of his men. He said afterwards, that even at its worst, when he went into office, the majority of the Police wanted to do right; that their instincts were loyal; and this meant much, because they were tempted on all sides by vicious wrongdoers; they had constantly before them the example of superiors who took bribes and they received neither recognition nor praise for their own worthy deeds.
The Force came very soon to understand that under Roosevelt every man would get a "square deal." "Pulls" had no efficacy. The Chief Commissioner personally kept track of as many men as he could. When he saw in the papers one morning that Patrolman X had saved a woman from drowning, he looked him up, found that the man had been twenty-two years in the service, had saved twenty five lives, and had never been noticed, much less thanked, by the Commission. More than this, he had to buy his own uniform, and as this was often rendered unfit for further use when he rescued persons from drowning, or from a burning house, his heroism cost him much in dollars and cents. By Roosevelt's orders the Department henceforth paid for new uniforms in such cases, and it awarded medals. By recognizing the good, and by weeding out as fast as possible the bad members of the Force, Roosevelt thus organized the best body of Police which New York City had ever seen. There were, of course, some black sheep among them whom he could not reach, but he changed the fashion, so that it was no longer a point of excellence to be a black sheep.
Roosevelt rigorously enforced the laws, without regard to his personal opinion. It happened that at that time the good people of New York insisted that liquor saloons should do no business on Sundays. This prohibition had long been on the statute book, but it had been generally evaded because the saloon keepers had paid the Bosses, who controlled the Police Department, to let them keep open—usually by a side door—on Sundays. Indeed, the statute was evidently passed by the Bosses in order to widen their opportunity for blackmail; but in this they overreached themselves. For the liquor-sellers at last revolted, and they held conferences with the Bosses—David B. Hill was then the Democratic State Boss and Richard Croker the Tammany Boss - and they published in the Wine and Spirit Gazette, their organ, this statement: "An agreement was made between the leaders of Tammany Hall and the liquor-dealers, according to which the monthly blackmail paid to the force should be discontinued in return for political support." Croker and his pals, taking it as a matter of course that the public knew their methods, neither denied this incriminating statement nor thought it worth noticing. For a while all the saloons enjoyed equal immunity in selling drinks on Sunday. Then came Roosevelt and ordered his men to close every saloon. Many of the bar-keepers laughed incredulously at the patrol man who gave the order; many others flew into a rage. The public denounced this attempt to strangle its liberties and reviled the Police Chief as the would be enforcer of obsolescent blue laws. But they could not frighten Roosevelt: the saloons were closed. Nevertheless, even he could not prevail against the overwhelming desire for drink. Crowds of virtuous citizens preferred. an honest police force, but they preferred their beer or their whiskey still more, and joined with the criminal classes, the disreputables, and all the others who regarded any law as outrageous which interfered with their personal habits. Accordingly, since they could not budge Roosevelt, they changed the law. A compliant local judge discovered that it was lawful to take what drink you chose with a meal, and the result was that, as Roosevelt describes it, a man by eating one pretzel might drink seventeen beers.
Roosevelt himself visited all parts of the city and chiefly those where Vice grew flagrant at night. The journalists, who knew of his tours of inspection and were always on the alert for the picturesque, likened him to the great Caliph who in similar fashion investigated Baghdad, and they nicknamed him Haroun al Roosevelt. He had for his companion Jacob Riis, a remarkable Dane who migrated to this country in youth, got the position of reporter on one of the New York dailies, frequented the courts, studied the condition of the abject poor in the tenement-houses, and the haunts where Vice breeds like scum on stagnant pools, and wrote a book, "How the Other Half Lives," which startled the consciences of the well-to-do and the virtuous. Riis showed Roosevelt everything. Police headquarters were in Mulberry Street, and yet within a stone's throw iniquity flourished. He guided him through the Tenderloin District, and the wharves, and so they made the rounds of the vast city. More than once Roosevelt surprised a shirking patrolman on his beat, but his purpose they all knew was to see justice done, and to keep the officers of the Force up to the highest standard of duty.
One other anecdote concerning his experience as Police Commissioner I repeat, because it shows by what happy touches of humor he sometimes dispersed menacing clouds. A German Jew-baiter, Rector Ahlwardt, came over from Berlin to preach a crusade against the Jews. Great trepidation spread through the Jewish colony and they asked Roosevelt to forbid Ahlwardt from holding public meetings against them. This, he saw, would make a martyr of the German persecutor and probably harm the Jews more than it would help them. So Roosevelt bethought him of a device which worked perfectly. He summoned forty of the best Jewish policemen on the Force and ordered them to preserve order in the hall and prevent Ahlwardt from being interrupted or abused. The meeting passed off without disturbance; Ahlwardt stormed in vain against the Jews; the audience and the public saw the humor of the affair and Jew-baiting gained no foothold in New York City. Although Roosevelt thoroughly enjoyed his work as Police Commissioner, he felt rightly that it did not afford him the freest scope to exercise his powers. Much as he valued executive work, the putting into practice and carrying out of laws, he felt more and more strongly the desire to make them, and his instinct told him that he was fitted for this higher task. When, therefore, the newly elected Republican President, William McKinley, offered him the apparently modest position of Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he accepted it.