Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography,

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The quick decisions of the Administration in Washington, which
accompanied the revolution in Panama and the recognition of the
new Republic, were made by Roosevelt. I have seen no evidence
that Mr. Hay was consulted at the last moment. When the stroke
was accomplished, many good persons in the United States
denounced it. They felt that it was high-handed and brutal, and
that it fixed an indelible blot on the national conscience. Many
of them did not know of the long-drawn-out negotiations and of
the Colombian premeditated deceit; others knew, but overlooked or
condoned. They upheld strictly the letter of the law. They could
not deny that the purpose of the Colombians was to exact
blackmail. It meant nothing to them that Herran, the official
envoy, had drawn up and signed a treaty under instructions from
Marroquin, the President of Colombia, and its virtual dictator,
who, having approved of the orders under which Herran acted,
could easily have required the Colombian Parliament to ratify the
treaty. Perfervidly pious critics of Roosevelt pictured him as a
bully without conscience, and they blackened his aid in freeing
the Panamanians by calling it "the Rape of Panama." Some of these
persons even boldly asserted that John Hay died of remorse over
his part in this wicked deed. The fact is that John Hay died of a
disease which was not caused by remorse, and that, as long as he
lived, he publicly referred to the Panama affair as that in which
he took the greatest pride. It is only in the old Sunday-School
stories that Providence punishes wrongdoing with such commendable
swiftness, and causes the naughty boy who goes skating on Sunday
to drown forthwith; in real life the "mills of God grind slowly."
Roosevelt always regarded with equal satisfaction the decision by
which the Panama Canal was achieved and the high needs of
civilization and the protection of the United States were
attended to. He lived long enough to condemn the proposal of some
of our morbidly conscientious people, hypnotized by the same old
crafty Colombians, to pay Colombia a gratuity five times greater
than that which General Reyes would have thankfully received in
December, 1903.

Persons of different temperaments, but of equal patriotism and
sincerity, will probably pass different verdicts on this incident
for a long time to come. Mr. Leupp quotes a member of Roosevelt's
Administration as stating four alternative courses the President
might have followed. First, he might have let matters drift until
Congress met, and then sent a message on the subject, shifting
the responsibility from his own shoulders to those of the
Congressmen. Secondly, he might have put down the rebellion and
restored Panama to Colombia; but this would have been to subject
them against their will to a foreign enemy--an enormity the
Anti-Imperialists were still decrying in our holding the
Philippines against the will of their inhabitants. Thirdly, he
might have withdrawn American warships and left Colombia to fight
it out with the Panamanians--but this would have involved
bloodshed, tumult, and interruption of transit across the
Isthmus, which the United States, by the agreement of 1846, were
bound to prevent. Finally, he might recognize any de facto
government ready and willing to transact business--and this he
did.*

* Leupp, 10-11.

That the Colombian politicians, who repudiated the treaty Herran
had framed, were blackmailers of the lowest sort, is as
indisputable as is the fact that whoever begins to compromise
with a blackmailer is lured farther and farther into a bog until
he is finally swallowed up. Americans should know also that
during the summer and autumn of 1903, German agents were busy in
Bogota. and that, since German capitalists had openly announced
their desire to buy up the French Company's concession, we may
guess that they did not urge Colombia to fulfill her obligation
to the United States.

Many years later I discussed the transaction with Mr. Roosevelt,
chaffing him with being a wicked conspirator. He laughed, and
replied: " What was the use? The other fellows in Paris and New
York had taken all the risk and were doing all the work. Instead
of trying to run a parallel conspiracy, I had only to sit still
and profit by their plot--if it succeeded." He said also that he
had intended issuing a public announcement that, if Colombia by a
given date refused to come to terms, he would seize the Canal
Zone in behalf of civilization. I told him I rather wished that
he had accomplished his purpose in that way; but he answered that
events matured too quickly, and that, in any case, where swift
action was required, the Executive and not Congress must decide.

CHAPTER XII. THE GREAT CRUSADE AT HOME

These early diplomatic settlements in Roosevelt's Administration
showed the world that the United States now had a President who
did not seek quarrels, but who was not afraid of them, who never
bluffed, because--unlike President Cleveland and Secretary Olney
with their Venezuela Message in 1895--he never made a threat
which he could not back up at the moment. There was no longer a
bed of roses to stifle opposition; whosoever hit at the United
States would encounter a barrier of long, sharp, and unbending
thorns.

These particular achievements in foreign affairs, and others
which I shall mention later, gave Roosevelt and his country great
prestige abroad and the admiration of a large part of his
countrymen. But his truly significant work related to home
affairs. Now at last, he, the young David of the New Ideals, was
to go forth, if he dared, and do battle with the Goliath of
Conservatism. With him there was no question of daring. He had
been waiting for twenty years for this opportunity. Such a
conflict or duel has rarely been witnessed, because it rarely
happens that an individual who consciously embodies the aims of
an epoch is accepted by that epoch as its champion. Looking
backward, we see that Abraham Lincoln typified the ideals of
Freedom and Union which were the supreme issues of his time; but
this recognition has come chiefly since his death. In like
fashion I believe that Roosevelt's significance as a champion of
Liberty, little suspected by his contemporaries and hardly
surmised even now, will require the lapse of another generation
before it is universally understood.

Many obvious reasons account for this. Most of the internal
reforms which Roosevelt struggled for lacked the dramatic quality
or the picturesqueness which appeals to average, dull,
unimaginative men and women. The heroism of the medical
experimenter who voluntarily contracts yellow fever and dies--and
thereby saves myriads of lives--makes little impression on the
ordinary person, who can be roused only by stories of battle
heroism, of soldiers and torpedoes. And yet the attacks which
Roosevelt made, while they did not involve death, called for the
highest kind of civic courage and fortitude.

Then again a political combat with tongues and arguments seldom
conveys the impression that through it irrevocable Fate gives its
decision to the same extent that a contest by swords and volleys
does. Political campaigns are a competition of parties and only
the immediate partisans who direct and carry on the fight, grow
very hot. The great majority of a party is not fanatical, and a
citizen who has witnessed many elections, some for and some
against him, comes instinctively to feel that whoever wins the
country is safe. He discounts the cries of alarm and the abuse by
opponents. And only in his most expansive moments does he flatter
himself that his party really represents the State. The
Republican Party, through which President Roosevelt had to work,
was by no means an ideal instrument. He believed in
Republicanism, with a faith only less devoted than that with
which he embraced the fundamental duties and spiritual facts of
life. But the Republicanism which he revered must be interpreted
by himself; and the party which bore the name Republican was
split into several sections, mutually discordant if not actually
hostile. It seems no exaggeration to say that the underlying
motive of the majority of the Republican Party during Roosevelt's
Presidency was to uphold Privilege, just as much as the
underlying purpose of the great Whig Party in England in the
eighteenth century was to uphold Aristocracy. Roosevelt's
purpose, on the contrary, was to clip the arrogance of Privilege
based on Plutocracy. To achieve this he must, in some measure,
compel the party of Plutocracy to help him. I speak, so far as
possible, as a historian,--and not as a partisan,--who recognizes
that the rise of a Plutocracy was the inevitable result of the
amassing, during a generation, of unprecedented wealth, and that,
in a Republic governed by parties, the all-dominant Plutocracy
would naturally see to it that the all dominant party which
governed the country and made its laws should be plutocratic. If
the spheres in which Plutocracy made most of its money had been
Democratic, then the Democratic Party would have served the
Plutocracy. As it was, in the practical relation between the
parties, the Democrats got their share of the spoils, and the
methods of a Democratic Boss, like Senator Gorman, did not differ
from those of a Republican Boss, like Senator Aldrich. Roosevelt
relied implicitly on justice and common sense. He held, as firmly
as Lincoln had held, to the inherent rightmindedness of the
"plain people." And however fierce and formidable the opposition
to his policies might be in Congress, he trusted that, if he
could make clear to the average voters of the country what he was
aiming at, they would support him. And they did support him. Time
after time, when the Interests appeared to be on the point of
crushing his reform, the people rose and coerced Congress into
adopting it. I would not imply that Roosevelt assumed an
autocratic manner in this warfare. He left no doubt of his
intention, still less could he disguise the fact of his
tremendous personal vigor; but rather than threaten he tried to
persuade; he was good-natured to everybody, he explained the
reasonableness of his measures; and only when the satraps of
Plutocracy so far lost their discretion as to threaten him, did
he bluntly challenge them to do their worst.

The Interests had undeniably reached such proportions that unless
they were chastened and controlled, the freedom of the Republic
could not survive. And yet, in justice, we must recall that when
they grew up in the day of small things, they were beneficial;
their founders had no idea of their becoming a menace to the
Nation. The man who built the first cotton-mill in his section,
or started the first iron-furnace, or laid the first stretch of
railroad, was rightly hailed as a benefactor; and he could not
foresee that the time would come when his mill, entering into a
business combination with a hundred other mills in different
parts of the country, would be merged. in a monopoly to strangle
competition in cotton manufacture. Likewise, the first stretch of
railroad joined another, and this a third, and so on, until there
had arisen a vast railway system under a single management from
New York to San Francisco. Now, while these colossal monopolies
had grown up so naturally, responding to the wonderful expansion
of the population they served, the laws and regulations which
applied to them, having been framed in the days when they were
young and small and harmless, still obtained. The clothes made
for the little boy would not do for the giant man. I have heard a
lawyer complain that statutes, which barely sufficed when travel
and transportation went by stage-coach, were stretched to fit the
needs of the public in its relation with transcontinental
railroads. This is an exaggeration, no doubt, but it points
towards truth. The Big Interests were so swollen that they went
ahead on their own affairs and paid little attention to the
community on which they were battening. They saw to it that if
any laws concerning them had to be made by the State Legislatures
or by Congress, their agents in those bodies should make them. A
certain Mr. Vanderbilt, the president of one of the largest
railroad systems in America, a person whose other gems of wit and
wisdom have not been recorded, achieved such immortality, as it
is, by remarking, "The public be damned." Probably the president
and directors of a score of other monopolies would have heartily
echoed that impolitic and petulant display of arrogance.
Impolitic the exclamation was, because the American public had
already begun to feel that the Big Interests were putting its
freedom in jeopardy, and it was beginning to call for laws which
should reduce the power of those interests.

As early as 1887 the Interstate Commerce Act was passed, the
earliest considerable attempt to regulate rates and traffic. Then
followed anti-trust laws which aimed at the suppression of
"pools," in which many large producers or manufacturers combined
to sell their staples at a uniform price, a practice which
inevitably set up monopolies. The "Trusts" were to these what the
elephant is to a colt. When the United States Steel Corporation
was formed by uniting eleven large steel plants, with an
aggregate capital of $11100,000,000, the American people had an
inkling of the magnitude to which Trusts might swell. In like
fashion when the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern
Railroads found a legal impediment to their being run by one
management, they got round the law by organizing the Northern
Securities Company, which was to hold the stocks and bonds of
both railroads. And so of many other important industrial and
transportation mergers. The most powerful financial promoters of
the country, led by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, were busy setting up
these combinations on a large scale and the keenest corporation
lawyers spent their energy and wits in framing charters which
obeyed the letter of the laws, but wholly denied their spirit.

President Roosevelt worked openly, with a definite purpose.
First, he would enforce every law on the statute book, without
exception in favor of any individual or company; next, he
suggested to Congress the need of new legislation to resist
further encroachments by capitalists in the fields where they had
already been checked; finally, he pointed out that Congress must
begin at once to protect the national resources which had been
allowed to go to waste, or to be seized and exploited by private
concerns.

I do not intend to take up in chronological sequence, or in
detail, Roosevelt's battles to secure proper legislation. To do
so would require the discussion of legal and constitutional
questions, which would scarcely fit a sketch like the present.
The main things to know are the general nature of his reforms and
his own attitude in conducting the fight. He aimed directly at
stopping abuses which gave a privileged few undue advantage in
amassing and distributing wealth. The practical result of the
laws was to spread justice, and equality throughout the country
and to restore thereby the true spirit of Democracy on which the
Founders created the Republic. He fought fairly, but warily,
never letting slip a point that would tell against his opponents,
who, it must be said, did not always attack him honorably.

At first, they regarded the President as a headstrong young man--
he was the youngest who had ever sat in the Presidential chair--
who wished to have his own way in order to show the country that
he was its leader. They did not see that ideals which dated back
to his childhood were really shaping his acts. He had seen law in
the making out West; he had seen law, and especially corporation
law, in the making when he was in the New York Assembly and
Governor of New York; he knew the devices by which the Interests
caused laws to be made and passed for their special benefit, or
evaded inconvenient laws. But he suffered no disillusion as to
the ideal of Law, the embodiment and organ of Justice. Legal
quibbles, behind which designing and wicked men dodged, nauseated
him, and he made no pretense of wishing to uphold them.

The champions of the Interests found out before long that the
young President was neither headstrong nor a mere creature of
impulse, but that he followed a thoroughly rational system of
principles; and so they had to abandon the notion that the next
gust of impulse might blow him over to their side. They must take
him as he was, and make the best of it. Now, I must repeat, that,
for these gentlemen, the very idea that anybody could propose to
run the American Government, or to organize American Society, on
any other standard than theirs, seemed to them preposterous. The
Bourbon nobles in France and in Italy were not more amazed. when
the Revolutionists proposed to sweep them away than were the
American Plutocrats of the Rooseveltian era when he promoted laws
to regulate them. The Bourbon thinks the earth will perish unless
Bourbonism governs it; the American Plutocrat thought that
America existed simply to enrich him. He clung to his rights and
privileges with the tenacity of a drowning man clinging to a
plank, and he deceived himself into thinking that, in desperately
trying to save himself and his order, he was saving Society.

Most tragic of all, to one who regards history as the revelation
of the unfolding of the moral nature of mankind, was the fact
that these men had not the slightest idea that they were living
in a moral world, or that a new influx of moral inspiration had
begun to permeate Society in its politics, its business, and its
daily conduct. The great ship Privilege, on which they had
voyaged with pomp and satisfaction, was going down and they knew
it not.

CHAPTER XIII. THE TWO ROOSEVELTS

I do not wish to paint Roosevelt in one light only, and that the
most favorable. Had no other been shed upon him, his
Administration would have been too bland for human belief, and
life for him would have palled. For his inexhaustible energy
hungered for action. As soon as his judgment convinced him that a
thing ought to be done he set about doing it. Recently, I asked
one of the most perspicacious members of his Cabinet, "What do
you consider Theodore's dominant trait" He thought for a while,
and then replied, "Combativeness." No doubt the public also, at
least while Roosevelt was in office, thought of him first as a
fighter. The idea that he was truculent or pugnacious, that he
went about with a chip on his shoulder, that he loved fighting
for the sake of fighting, was, however, a mistake. During the
eight years he was President he kept the United States out of
war; not only that, he settled long-standing causes of
irritation, such as the dispute over the Alaskan Boundary, which
might, under provocation, have led to war. Even more than this,
without striking a blow, he repelled the persistent attempts of
the German Emperor to gain a foothold on this continent; he
repelled those snakelike attacks and forced the Imperial Bully,
not merely to retreat ignominiously but to arbitrate. And in
foreign affairs, Roosevelt shone as a peacemaker. He succeeded in
persuading the Russian Czar to come to terms with the Mikado of
Japan. And soon after, when the German Emperor threatened to make
war on France, a letter from Roosevelt to him caused William to
reconsider his brutal plan, and to submit the Moroccan dispute to
a conference of the Powers at Algeciras.

Instead of the braggart and brawler that his enemies mispainted
him, I saw in Roosevelt, rather, a strong man who had taken early
to heart Hamlet's maxim and had steadfastly practiced it:

"Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake."

He himself summed up this part of his philosophy in a phrase
which has become a proverb: "Speak softly, but carry a big
stick." More than once in his later years he quoted this to me,
adding, that it was precisely because this or that Power knew
that he carried a big stick, that he was enabled to speak softly
with effect.

No man of our time better deserved the Nobel Peace Prize than did
he. The fallacy that Roosevelt, like the proverbial Irishman at
Donnybrook Fair, had rather fight than eat, spread through the
country, and indeed throughout the world, and had its influence
in determining whether men voted for him or not. His enemies used
it as proof that he was not a safe President, but they took means
much more malignant than this to discredit and destroy him. When
the Big Interests discovered that they could not silence him,
they circulated stories of all kinds that would have rendered
even the archangel Gabriel suspect to some worthy dupes.

They threw doubts, for instance, on his sanity, and one heard
that the "Wall Street magnates" employed the best alienists in
the country to analyze everything the President did and said, in
the hope of accumulating evidence to show that he was too
unbalanced to be President. Not content with stealing away his
reputation for mental competence, they shot into the dark the
gravest charges against his honor. A single story, still
believed, as I know, by persons of eminence in their professions,
will illustrate this. When one of the great contests between the
President and the Interests was on, he remembered that one of
their representatives in New York had damaging, confidential
letters from him. Hearing that these might be produced, Roosevelt
telephoned one of his trusty agents to break open the desk of the
Captain of Industry where they were kept, and to bring them to
the White House, before ten o'clock the following morning. This
was done. To believe that the President of the United States
would engage in a vulgar robbery of the jimmy and black-mask sort
indicates a degree of credulity which even the alienists could
hardly have expected to encounter outside of their asylums. It
suggests also, that Baron Munchausen, like the Wandering Jew
Ahasuerus, has never died. Does any one suppose that the person
whose desk was rifled would have kept quiet? Or that, if the
Interests had had even reasonably sure evidence of the
President's guilt, they would not have published it? To set spies
and detectives upon him with orders to trail him night and day
was, according to rumor, an obvious expedient for his enemies to
employ.

I repeat these stories, not because I believe them, but because
many persons did, and such gossip, like the cruel slanders
whispered against President Cleveland years before, gained some
credence. Roosevelt was so natural, so unguarded, in his speech
and ways, that he laid himself open to calumny. The delight he
took in establishing the Ananias Club, and the rapidity with
which he found new members for it, seemed to justify strong
doubts as to his temper and taste, if not as to his judgment. The
vehemence of his public speaking, which was caused in part by a
physical difficulty of utterance--the sequel of his early
asthmatic trouble--and in part by his extraordinary vigor,
created among some of the hearers who did not know him the
impression that he must be a hard drinker, or that he drank to
stimulate his eloquence. After he retired from office, his
enemies, in order to undermine his further political influence,
sowed the falsehood that he was a drunkard. I do not recall that
they ever suggested that he used his office for his private
profit--there are some things too absurd for even malice to
suggest--but he had reason enough many times to calm himself by
reflecting that his Uncle Jimmy Bulloch, the best of men,
believed just such lies, and the most atrocious insinuations,
against Mr. Gladstone.

Of course, nearly all public men have to undergo similar virulent
defamation. I have heard a well-known publicist, a lawyer of
ability, argue that both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln
did not escape from what seems now incredible abuse, and that
they were, nevertheless, the noblest of men and peerless
patriots; and then he went on to argue that President Woodrow
Wilson has been the target of similar malignity, and to leave you
to conclude that consequently Wilson is in the same class with
Washington and Lincoln. If he had put his thesis in a different
form, the publicist might have seen himself, as his hearers did,
the absurdity of it. Suppose he had said, for instance: "In spite
of the fact that Washington and Lincoln each kept a cow, they
were both peerless patriots, therefore, as President Wilson keeps
a cow, he must be a peerless patriot." One fears that logic is
somewhat neglected even in the training of lawyers in our day.

The commonest charge against Roosevelt, and the one which seemed,
on the surface at least, to be most plausible, was that he was
devoured by insatiable ambition. The critical remarked that
wherever he went he was always the central figure. The truth is,
that he could no more help being the central figure than a lion
could in any gathering of lesser creatures; the fact that he was
Roosevelt decided that. He did use the personal pronoun "I," and
the possessive pronoun "My," with such frequency as to irritate
good persons who were quite as egotistical as he--if that be
egotism--but who used such modest circumlocutions as "the present
writer," or "one," to camouflage their self-conceit. Roosevelt
enjoyed almost all his experiences with equal zest, and he
expressed his enjoyment without reserve. He was quite as well
aware of his foibles as his critics were, and he made merry over
them. Probably nobody laughed more heartily than he at the
pleasantly humorous remark of one of his boys: "Father never
likes to go to a wedding or a funeral, because he can't be the
bride at the wedding or the corpse at the funeral."

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