Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography,

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

* Riis, 268-69.

But at home Roosevelt had affection, not compliments, whether
these were unintentional and sincere, like that of the lady just
quoted, or were thinly disguised flattery. And affection was what
he most craved from his family and nearest friends, and what he
gave to them without stint. As I have said, he allowed nothing to
interrupt the hours set apart for his wife and children while he
was at the White House; and at Oyster Bay there was always time
for them. A typical story is told of the boys coming in upon him
during a conference with some important visitor, and saying
reproachfully, "It's long after four o'clock, and you promised to
go with us at four." "So I did," said Roosevelt. And he quickly
finished his business with the visitor and went. When the
children were young, he usually saw them at supper and into bed,
and he talked of the famous pillow fights they had with him.
House guests at the White House some times unexpectedly caught
sight of him crawling in the entry near the children's rooms,
with two or three children riding on his back. Roosevelt's days
were seldom less than fifteen hours long, and we can guess how he
regarded the laboring men of today who clamor for eight and six,
and even fewer hours, as the normal period for a day's work. He
got up at half-past seven and always finished breakfast by nine,
when what many might call the real work of his day began.

The unimaginative laborer probably supposes that most of the
duties which fall to an industrious President are not strictly
work at all; but if any one had to meet for an hour and a half
every forenoon such Congressmen and Senators as chose to call on
him, he would understand that that was a job involving real work,
hard work. They came every day with a grievance, or an appeal, or
a suggestion, or a favor to ask, and he had to treat each one,
not only politely, but more or less deferently. Early in his
Administration I heard it said that he offended some Congressmen
by denying their requests in so loud a voice that others in the
room could hear him, and this seemed to some a humiliation.
President McKinley, on the other hand, they said, lowered his
voice, and spoke so softly and sweetly that even his refusal did
not jar on his visitor, and was not heard at all by the
bystanders. If this happened, I suspect it was because Roosevelt
spoke rather explosively and had a habit of emphasis, and not
because he wished in any way to send his petitioner's rebuff
through the room.

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

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

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

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

No President ever lived on better terms with the newspaper men
than Roosevelt did. He treated them all with perfect fairness,
according no special favors, no "beats," or "scoops to any one.
So they regarded him as "square"; and further they knew that he
was a man of his word, not to be trifled with. "It is generally
supposed," Roosevelt remarked, "that newspaper men have no sense
of honor, but that is not true. If you treat them fairly, they
will treat you fairly; and they will keep a secret if you impress
upon them that it must be kept."

The great paradox of Roosevelt's character was the contrast
between its fundamental simplicity and its apparent spectacular
quality. His acts seemed to be unusual, striking, and some
uncharitable critics thought that he aimed at effect; in truth,
however, he acted at the moment as the impulse or propriety of
the moment suggested. There was no premeditation, no swagger.
Dwellers in Berlin noticed that after William the Crown Prince
became the Kaiser William II, he thrust out his chest and adopted
a rather pompous walk, but there was nothing like this in
Roosevelt's manner or carriage. In his public speaking, he
gesticulated incessantly, and in the difficulty he had in pouring
out his words as rapidly as the thoughts came to him, he seemed
sometimes almost to grimace; but this was natural, not studied.
And so I can easily understand what some one tells me who saw him
almost daily as President in the White House. "Roosevelt," he
said, "had an immense reverence for the Presidential office. He
did not feel cocky or conceited at being himself President; he
felt rather the responsibility for dignity which the office
carried with it, and he was humble. You might be as intimate with
him as possible, but there was a certain line which no one ever
crossed. That was the line which the office itself drew."

Roosevelt had that reverence for the great men of the past which
should stir every heart with a capacity for noble things. In the
White House he never forgot the Presidents who had dwelt there
before him. "I like to see in my mind's eye," he said to Mr.
Rhodes, the American historian, "the gaunt form of Lincoln
stalking through these halls." During a visit at the White House,
Mr. Rhodes watched the President at work throughout an entire day
and set down the points which chiefly struck him. Foremost among
these was the lack of leisure which we allow our Presidents. They
have work to do which is more important than that of a railroad
manager, or the president of the largest business corporation, or
of the leader of the American Bar. They are expected to know the
pros and cons of each bill brought before them to sign so that
they can sign it not only intelligently but justly, and yet
thanks to the constant intrusion which Americans deem it their
right to force on the President, he has no time for deliberation,
and, as I have said, Mr. Roosevelt was often obliged, when he
wished to have an undisturbed consultation with one of his
Cabinet Secretaries, to take him off on a long ride.

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

* Rhodes: Historical Essays, 238-39.

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

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

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

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

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

His younger sister, Mrs. Douglas Robinson, lived in New York
City, and first at No. 422 Madison Avenue and later at No. 9 East
Sixty-third Street, she dispensed hospitality for him and his
friends. Nothing could have been more convenient. If he were at
Oyster Bay, it was often impossible to make an appointment to
meet there persons whom he wished to see, but he had merely to
telephone to Mrs. Robinson, the appointment was made, and the
interview was held. It was at her house that many of the
breakfasts with Senator Platt--those meetings which caused so
much alarm and suspicion among over-righteous reformers--took
place while Roosevelt was Governor. Mr. Odell nearly always
accompanied the Senator, as if he felt afraid to trust the astute
Boss with the very persuasive young Governor. Having Mrs.
Robinson's house as a shelter, Theodore could screen himself from
the newspaper men. There he could hold private consultations
which, if they had been referred to in the papers, would have
caused wild guesses, surmises, and embarrassing remarks. His
sisters always rejoiced that, with his wonderful generosity of
nature, he took them often into his political confidence, and
listened with unfeigned respect to their point of view on
subjects on which they might even have a slight difference of
opinion.

Mr. Charles G. Washburn tells the following story to illustrate
Roosevelt's faculty of getting to the heart of every one whom he
knew. When he was hunting in Colorado, "he met a cowboy who had
been with him with the Rough Riders in Cuba. The man came up to
speak to Roosevelt, and said, 'Mr. President, I have been in jail
a year for killing a gentleman.' 'How did you do it?' asked the
President, meaning to inquire as to the circumstances.
'Thirty-eight on a forty-five frame,' replied the man, thinking
that the only interest the President had was that of a comrade
who wanted to know with what kind of a tool the trick was done.
Now, I will venture to say that to no other President, from
Washington down to and including Wilson, would the man-killer
have made that response." *

* Washburn, 202-03.

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

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

CHAPTER XVIII. Hits And Misses

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

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

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

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

To him President Roosevelt turned for some suggestions as to
appointing colored persons to offices in the South. It happened
that on the day appointed for a meeting Washington reached the
White House shortly before luncheon time, and that, as they had
not finished their conference, Roosevelt asked him to stay to
luncheon. Washington hesitated politely. Roosevelt insisted. They
lunched, finished their business, and Washington went away. When
this perfectly insignificant fact was published in the papers the
next morning, the South burst into a storm of indignation and
abuse. Some of the Southern journals saw, in what was a mere
routine incident, a terrible portent, foreboding that Roosevelt
planned to put the negroes back to control the Southern whites.
Others alleged the milder motive that he was fishing for negro
votes. The common type of fire-eaters saw in it one of
Roosevelt's unpleasant ways of having fun by insulting the South.
And Southern cartoonists took an ignoble, feeble retaliation by
caricaturing even Mrs. Roosevelt.

The President did not reply publicly. As his invitation to Booker
Washington was wholly unpremeditated, he was surprised by the
rage which it caused among Southerners. But he was clear-sighted
enough to understand that, without intending it, he had made a
mistake, and this he never repeated. Nothing is more elusive than
racial antipathy, and we need not wonder that a man like
Roosevelt who, although he was most solicitous not to hurt
persons' feelings and usually acted, unless he had proof to the
contrary, on the assumption that everybody was blessed with a
modicum of good-will and common sense, should not always be able
to foresee the strange inconsistencies into which the antipathy
of the white Southerners for the blacks might lead. A little
while later there was a religious gathering in Washington of
Protestant-Episcopal ministers. They had a reception at the White
House. Their own managers made out a list of ministers to be
invited, and among the guests were a negro archdeacon and his
wife, and the negro rector of a Maryland parish. Although these
persons attended the reception, the Southern whites burst into no
frenzy of indignation against the President. Who could steer
safely amid such shoals? * The truth is that no President since
Lincoln had a kindlier feeling towards the South than Roosevelt
had. He often referred proudly to the fact that his mother came
from Georgia, and that his two Bulloch uncles fought in the
Confederate Navy. He wished to bring back complete friendship
between the sections. But he understood the difficulties, as his
explanation to Mr. James Ford Rhodes, the historian, in 1905,
amply proved. He agreed fully as to the folly of the
Congressional scheme of reconstruction based on universal negro
suffrage, but he begged Mr. Rhodes not to forget that the initial
folly lay with the Southerners themselves. The latter said, quite
properly, that he did not wonder that much bitterness still
remained in the breasts of the Southern people about the
carpet-bag negro regime. So it was not to be wondered at that in
the late sixties much bitterness should have remained in the
hearts of the Northerners over the remembrance of the senseless
folly and wickedness of the Southerners in the early sixties.
Roosevelt felt that those persons who most heartily agreed that
as it was the presence of the negro which made the problem, and
that slavery was merely the worst possible method of solving it,
we must therefore hold up to reprobation, as guilty of doing one
of the worst deeds which history records, those men who tried to
break up this Union because they were not allowed to bring
slavery and the negro into our new territory. Every step which
followed, from freeing the slave to enfranchising him, was due
only to the North being slowly and reluctantly forced to act by
the South's persistence in its folly and wickedness.

* Leupp,231.

The President could not say these things in public because they
tended, when coming from a man in public place, to embitter
people. But Rhodes was writing what Roosevelt hoped would prove
the great permanent history of the period, and he said that it
would be a misfortune for the country, and especially a
misfortune for the South, if they were allowed to confuse right
and wrong in perspective. He added that his difficulties with the
Southern people had come not from the North, but from the South.
He had never done anything that was not for their interest. At
present, he added, they were, as a whole, speaking well of him.
When they would begin again to speak ill, he did not know, but in
either case his duty was equally clear. *

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