Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography,

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At the beginning of the year 1904, everybody began to discuss the
next Presidential campaign. Who should be the Republican
candidate? The President, naturally, wished to be elected and
thereby to hold the office in his own right and not by the chance
of assassination. Senator Hanna surprised many of the politicians
by bagging a good many delegates for himself. He probably did not
desire to be President; like Warwick he preferred the glory of
king-maker to that of king; but he was a shrewd business man who
knew the value of having goods which, although he did not care
for them himself, he might exchange for others. I doubt whether
he deluded himself into supposing that the American people would
elect so conspicuous a representative of the Big Interests as he
was, to be President, but he knew that the fortunes of candidates
in political conventions are uncertain, and that if he had a
considerable body of delegates to swing from one man to another,
he might, if his choice won, become the power behind the new
throne as he had been behind McKinley's. And if we could suspect
him of humor he may have enjoyed fun to a mild degree in keeping
the irrepressible Roosevelt in a state of suspense.

Senator Hanna's death, however, in March, 1904, removed the only
competitor whom Roosevelt could have regarded as dangerous.
Thenceforth he held the field, and yet, farseeing politician
though he was, he did not feel sure. The Convention at Chicago
nominated him, virtually, by acclamation. In the following months
of a rather slow campaign he had fits of depression, although all
signs pointed to his success. Talking with Hay as late as October
30, he said: "It seems a cheap sort of thing to say, and I would
not say it to other people, but laying aside my own great
personal interests and hopes,-- for of course I desire intensely
to succeed,--I have the greatest pride that in this fight we are
not only making it on clearly avowed principles, but we have the
principles and the record to avow. How can I help being a little
proud when I contrast the men and the considerations by which I
am attacked, and those by which I am defended?" *

* W. R. Thayer: John Hay, II, 356, 357.

Just at the end, the campaign was enlivened by the attack which
the Democratic candidate, Judge Alton B. Parker, made upon his
opponent. He charged that Mr. Cortelyou, the manager of the
Republican campaign, had received great sums of money from the
Big Interests, and that he had, indeed, been appointed manager
because, from his previous experience as Secretary of the
Department of Commerce, he had special information in regard to
malefactors of great wealth which would enable him to coerce them
to good purpose for the Republican Corruption Fund. President
Roosevelt published a letter denying Judge Parker's statements as
"unqualifiedly and atrociously false." If Judge Parker's attack
had any effect on the election it was to reduce his own votes.
Later, Edward H. Harriman, the railroad magnate, tried to smirch
Roosevelt by accusing him of seeking Harriman's help in 1904, but
this charge also was never sustained.

At the election on November 8, Roosevelt had a majority of nearly
two million and a half votes out of thirteen million and a half
cast, thus securing by large odds the greatest popular majority
any President has had. The Electoral College gave him 336 votes
and Parker 140. That same evening, his victory being assured, he
dictated the following statement to the press: "The wise custom
which limits the President to two terms, regards the substance
and not the form, and under no circumstances will I be a
candidate for and accept the nomination for another." Those who
heard this statement, or who had talked the matter over with
Roosevelt, under stood that he had in mind a renomination in
1908, but many persons regarded it as his final renunciation of
ever being a candidate for the Presidency. And later, when
circumstances quite altered the situation, this "promise" was
revived to plague him.

>From March 4, 1905, he was President "in his own right." Behind
him stood the American people, and he was justified in regarding
himself, at that time, as the most popular President since
Washington. The unprecedented majority of votes he had received
at the election proved that, and proved also that the country
believed in "his policies." So he might go ahead to carry out and
to extend the general reforms which he had embarked on against
much opposition. No one could question that he had a mandate from
the people, and during his second term he was still more
aggressive.

Now, however, came the little rift which widened and widened and
at last opened a great chasm between Roosevelt and the people on
one side and the Machine dominators of the Republican Party on
the other. For although Roosevelt was the choice of the
Republicans and of migratory voters from other parties, although
he was, in fact, the idol of millions who supported him, the
Republican Machine insisted on ruling. Before an election, the
Machine consents to a candidate who can win, but after he has
been elected the. Machine instinctively acts as his master. A
strong man, like President Cleveland, may hold out against the
Bosses of his party, but the penalty he has to pay is to find
himself bereft of support and his party shattered. This might
have happened in Roosevelt's case also, if he had not been more
tactful than Cleveland was in dealing with his enemies.

He now had to learn the bitter knowledge of the trials which
beset a President whose vision outsoars that of the practical
rulers of his party. In the House of Representatives there was a
little group led by the Speaker, Joseph G. Cannon, of Illinois,
who controlled that part of Congress with despotic arrogance. In
the Senate there was a similar group of political oligarchs,
called the Steering Committee, which decided what questions
should be discussed, what bills should be killed, and what others
should be passed. Aldrich, of Rhode Island, headed this. A
multi-millionaire himself, he was the particular advocate of the
Big Interests. Next came Allison, of Iowa, an original
Republican, who entered Congress in 1863 and remained there for
the rest of his life, a hide-bound party man, personally honest
and sufficiently prominent to be "talked of" for Vice President
on several occasions. He was rather the peacemaker of the
Steering Committee, having the art of reconciling antagonists and
of smoothing annoying angles. A little older, was Orville H.
Platt, the Senator from Connecticut who died in 1905, and was
esteemed a model of virtue among the Senators of his time. As an
offset to the men of threescore and ten and over was Albert J.
Beveridge, the young Senator from Indiana, vigorous, eloquent,
fearless, and radical, whose mind and heart were consecrated to
Roosevelt. Beveridge, at least, had no ties, secret or open, with
the Trusts, or the Interests, or Wall Street; on the contrary, he
attacked them fiercely, and among other Anti-Trust legislation he
drove through the Meat Inspection Bill. How he managed to get on
with the gray wolves of the Committee it would be interesting to
hear; but we must rid ourselves of the notion that those gray
wolves sought personal profit in money by their steering. None of
them was charged with using his position for the benefit of his
purse. Power was what those politicians desired; Power, which
gave them the opportunity to make the political tenets of their
party prevail. Orville Platt, or Allison, regarded Republicanism
with al most religious fanaticism; and we need not search far in
history to find fanatics who were personally very good and
tender-hearted men, but who would put heretics to death with a
smile of pious satisfaction.

Roosevelt's task was to persuade the Steering Committee to
support him in as many of his Radical measures as he could. They
had done this during his first Administration, partly because
they did not see whither he was leading. Senator Hanna, then a
member of the Steering Committee, attempted to steady all
Republicans who seemed likely to be seduced by Roosevelt's
subversive novelties by telling them to "stand pat," and, as we
look back now, the Senator from Ohio with his stand-pattism broom
reminds us of the portly Mrs. Partington trying to sweep back the
inflowing Atlantic Ocean. During the second Administration,
however, no one could plead ignorance or surprise when Roosevelt
urged on new projects. He made no secret of his policies, and he
could not have disguised, if he would, the fact that he was
thorough. By a natural tendency the "Stand-Patters" drew closer
together. Similarly the various elements which followed Roosevelt
tended to combine. Already some of these were beginning to be
called "Insurgents," but this name did not frighten them nor did
it shame them back into the fold of the orthodox Republicans. As
Roosevelt continued his fight for reclamation, conservation,
health, and pure foods, and governmental control of the great
monopolies, the opposition to him, on the part of the capitalists
affected, grew more intense. What wonder that these men,
realizing at last that their unlimited privileges would be taken
away from them, resented their deprivation. The privileged
classes in England have not welcomed the suggestion that their
great landed estates shall be cut up, nor can we expect that the
American dukes and marquises of oil and steel and copper and
transportation should look forward with meek acquiescence to
their own extinction.

Nevertheless, there is no politics in politics, and so the gray
wolves who ran the Republican Party, knowing that Roosevelt, and
not themselves, had the determining popular support of the
country, were too wary to block him entirely as the Democrats had
done under Cleveland. They let his bills go through, but with
more evident reluctance, only after bitter fighting. And as they
were nearly all church members in good standing, we can imagine
that they prayed the Lord to hasten the day when this pestilent
marplot in the White House should retire from office. Trusting
Roosevelt so far as to believe that he would stand by his pledge
not to be a candidate in 1908, they cast about for a person of
their own stripe whom they could make the country accept.

But Roosevelt himself felt too deeply involved in the cause of
Reform, which he had been pushing for seven years, to allow his
successor to be dictated by the Stand-Patters. So he sought among
his associates in the Cabinet for the member who, judging by
their work together, would most loyally carry on his policies,
and at length he decided upon William H. Taft, his Secretary of
War. "Root would make the better President, but Taft would be the
better candidate," Theodore wrote to an intimate, and that
opinion was generally held in Washington and elsewhere. Mr. Root
had so conducted the Department of State, since the death of John
Hay, that many good judges regarded him as the ablest of all the
Secretaries of that Department, and Roosevelt himself went even
farther. "Root," he said to me, "is the greatest intellectual
force in American public life since Lincoln." But in his career
as lawyer, which brought him to the head of the American Bar, he
had been attorney for powerful corporations, and that being the
time when the Government was fighting the Corporations, it was
not supposed that his candidacy would be popular. So Taft was
preferred to him.

The Republican Machine accepted Taft as a candidate with
composure, if not with enthusiasm. Anyone would be better than
Roosevelt in the eyes of the Machine and its supporters, and
perhaps they perceived in Secretary Taft qualities not wholly
unsympathetic. They were probably thankful, also, that Roosevelt
had not demanded more. He allowed the "regulars" to choose the
nominee for Vice-President, and he did not meddle with the
make-up of the Republican National Committee. One of his critics,
Dean Lewis, marks this as Roosevelt's chief political blunder,
because by leaving the Republican National Committee in command
he virtually predetermined the policy of the next four years.
Only a very strong President with equal zeal and fighting quality
could win against the Committee. In 1908 he had them so docile
that he might have changed their membership, and changed the
rules by which elections were governed if he had so willed, but,
just as before the election of 1904, Roosevelt had doubted his
own popularity in the country, so now he missed his chance
because he did not wish to seem to wrest from the unwilling
Machine powers which it lost no time in using against him.

The campaign never reached a dramatic crisis. Mr. Bryan, the
Democratic candidate, who still posed as the Boy Orator of the
Platte, although he had passed forty-eight years of age, made a
spirited canvass, and when the votes were counted he gained more
than a million and a third over the total for Judge Parker in
1904. But Mr. Taft won easily by a million and a quarter votes.

Between election and inauguration an ominous disillusion set in.
The Rooseveltians had taken it for granted that the new President
would carry on the policies of the old; more than that, the
impression prevailed among them that the high officials of the
Roosevelt Administration, including some members of his Cabinet,
would be retained, but when Inauguration Day came, it appeared
that Mr. Taft had chosen a new set of advisers, and he denied
that he had given any one reason to believe that he would do
otherwise.

March 4, 1909, was a wintry day in Washington. A snowstorm and
high winds prevented holding the inaugural exercises out of doors
as usual on the East Front of the Capitol. President Roosevelt
and President-elect Taft drove in state down Pennsylvania Avenue,
and Mr. Taft, having taken the oath of office, delivered his
inaugural address in the Senate Chamber. The ceremonies being
over, Mr. Roosevelt, instead of accompanying the new President to
the White House, went to the railway station and took the train
for New York. This innovation had been planned some time before,
because Mr. Roosevelt had arranged to sail for Europe in a few
days, and needed to reach Oyster Bay as soon as possible to
complete his preparations.

Many an eye-witness who watched him leave, as a simple civilian,
the Hall of Congress, must have felt that with his going there
closed one of the most memorable administrations this country had
ever known. Roosevelt departed, but his invisible presence still
filled the capital city and frequented every quarter of the
Nation.

CHAPTER XX. WORLD HONORS

What to do with ex-Presidents is a problem which worries those
happy Americans who have nothing else to worry over. They think
of an ex-President as of a sacred white elephant, who must not
work, although he has probably too little money to keep him alive
in proper ease and dignity. In fact, however, these gentlemen
have managed, at least during the past half-century, to sink back
into the civilian mass from which they emerged without suffering
want themselves or dimming the lustre which radiates from the
office. Roosevelt little thought that in quitting the Presidency
he was not going into political obscurity.

Roosevelt had two objects in view when he left the White House.
He sought long and complete rest, and to place himself beyond the
reach of politicians. In fairness, he wished to give Mr. Taft a
free field, which would hardly have been possible if Roosevelt
had remained in Washington or New York, where politicians might
have had access to him.

Accordingly, he planned to hunt big game in Africa for a year,
and in order to have a definite purpose, which might give his
expedition lasting usefulness, he arranged to collect specimens
for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. His second son,
Kermit, then twenty years of age, besides several naturalists and
hunters, accompanied him. His expedition sailed from New York on
March 23d, touched at the Azores and at Gibraltar, where the
English Commander showed him the fortifications, and transshipped
at Naples into an East-African liner. He found his stateroom
filled with flowers sent by his admiring friend, Kaiser William
II, with a telegram of effusive greeting, and with messages and
tokens from minor potentates. More important to him than these
tributes, however, was the presence of Frederick C. Selous, the
most famous hunter of big game in Africa, who joined the ship and
proved a congenial fellow passenger. They reached Mombasa on
April 23rd, and after the caravan had been made ready, they
started for the interior.

We need not follow in detail the year which Roosevelt and his
party spent in his African hunting. The railroad took them to
Lake Victoria Nyanza, but they stopped at many places on the way,
and made long excursions into the country. Then from the Lake
they proceeded to the Albert Nyanza and steamed down the Nile to
Gondokoro, which they reached on February 26, 1910. On March 14th
at Khartoum, where Mrs. Roosevelt and their daughter Ethel
awaited them, Roosevelt emerged into civilization again. He and
Kermit had shot 512 beasts and birds, of which they kept about a
dozen for trophies, the rest going to the Smithsonian Institution
and to the museums. A few of their specimens were unique, and the
total product of the expedition was the most important which had
ever reached America from Africa.

After spending a few days in visiting Omdurman and other scenes
connected with the British conquest of the Mahdists, less than a
dozen years before, the Roosevelts went down the river to Cairo,
where the ex-President addressed the Egyptian students. These
were the backbone of the so-called Nationalist Party, which aimed
at driving out the British and had killed the Prime Minister a
month before. They warned Roosevelt that if he dared to touch on
this subject he, too, would be assassinated. But such threats did
not move him then or ever. Roosevelt reproved them point-blank
for killing Boutros Pasha, and told them that a party which
sought freedom must show its capacity for living by law and
order, before it could expect to deserve freedom.

>From Egypt, Roosevelt crossed to Naples, and then began what must
be described as a triumphal progress through Central and Western
Europe. Only General Grant, after his Presidency, had made a
similar tour, but he did not excite a tenth of the popular
interest and enthusiasm which Roosevelt excited. Although Grant
had the prestige of being the successful general of the most
tremendous war ever fought in America, he had nothing picturesque
or magnetic in his personality. The peasants in the remote
regions had heard of Roosevelt; persons of every class in the
cities knew about him a little more definitely; and all were keen
to see him. Except Garibaldi, no modern ever set multitudes on
fire as Roosevelt did, and Garibaldi was the hero of a much
narrower sphere and had the advantage of being the hero of the
then downtrodden masses. Roosevelt, on the other hand, belonged
to the ruling class in America, had served nearly eight years as
President of the United States, and was equally the popular idol
without class distinction. And he had just come from a very
remarkable exploit, having led his scientific and hunting
expedition for twelve months through the perils and hardships of
tropical Africa. We Americans may well thrill with satisfaction
to remember that it was this most typical of Americans who
received the honors and homage of the world precisely because he
was most typically American and strikingly individual.

Before he reached Italy on his way back, he had invitations from
most of the sovereigns of Europe to visit them, and universities
and learned bodies requested him to address them. At Rome, as
guest of King Victor Emanuel II, he received ovations of the
exuberant and throbbing kind, which only the Italians can give.
But here also occurred what might have been, but for his common
sense and courage, a hitch in his triumphal progress. The
intriguers of the Vatican, always on the alert to edify the Roman
Catholics in the United States, thought they saw a chance to
exalt themselves and humble the Protestants by stipulating that
Colonel Roosevelt, who had accepted an invitation to call upon
the Pope, should not visit any Protestant organization while he
was in that city. Some time before, Vice-President Fairbanks had
incensed Cardinal Merry del Val, the Papal Secretary, and his
group, by remarks at the Methodist College in Rome. Here was a
dazzling opportunity for not only getting even, but for coming
out victorious. If the Vatican schemers could force Colonel
Roosevelt, who, at the moment, was the greatest figure in the
world, to obey their orders, they might exult in the sight of all
the nations. Should he balk, he would draw down upon himself a
hostile Catholic vote at home. Probably the good-natured Pope
himself understood little about the intrigue and took little part
in it, for Pius X was rather a kindly and a genuinely pious
pontiff. But Cardinal Merry del Val, apt pupil of the Jesuits,
made an egregious blunder if he expected to catch Theodore
Roosevelt in a Papal trap. The Rector of the American Catholic
College in Rome wrote: " 'The Holy Father will be delighted to
grant audience to Mr. Roosevelt on April 5th, and hopes nothing
will arise to prevent it, such as the much-regretted incident
which made the reception of Mr. Fairbanks impossible.' Roosevelt
replied to our Ambassador as follows: 'On the other hand, I in my
turn must decline to have any stipulations made or submit to any
conditions which in any way limit my freedom of conduct.' To this
the Vatican replied. through our Ambassador: 'In view of the
circumstances for which neither His Holiness nor Mr. Roosevelt is
responsible, an audience could not occur except on the
understanding expressed in the former message.'" *

* Washburn, 164.

Ex-President Roosevelt did not, by calling upon the Pope, furnish
Cardinal Merry del Val with cause to gloat. A good while
afterward in talking over the matter with me, Roosevelt dismissed
it with "No self-respecting American could allow his actions or
his going and coming to be dictated to him by any Pope or King."
That, to him, was so self-evident a fact that it required no
discussion; and the American people, including probably a large
majority of Roman Catholics, agreed with him.

>From Rome he went to Austria, to Vienna first, where the aged
Emperor, Francis Joseph, welcomed him; and then to Budapest,
where the Hungarians, eager for their independence, shouted
themselves hoarse at sight of the representative of American
independence. Wherever he went the masses in the cities crowded
round him and the people in the country flocked to cheer him as
he passed. Since Norway had conferred on him the Nobel Peace
Prize after the Russo-Japanese War, he journeyed to Christiania
to pay his respects to the Nobel Committee, and there he
delivered an address on the conditions necessary for a universal
peace in which he foreshadowed many of the terms which have since
been preached by the advocates of a League of Nations. In Berlin,
the Kaiser received him with ostentatious friendliness. He
addressed him as "Friend Roosevelt." Since the Colonel was not a
monarch the Kaiser could not address him as "Brother" or as
"Cousin," and the word "Friend "disguised whatever condescension
he may have felt. There was a grand military review of twelve
thousand troops, which the Kaiser and his "Friend" inspected, and
he took care to inform Roosevelt that he was the first civilian
to whom this honor had ever been paid. An Imperial photographer
made snapshots of the Colonel and the Kaiser, and these were
subsequently given to the Colonel with superscriptions and
comments written by the Kaiser on the negatives. Roosevelt's
impression of his Imperial host was, on the whole, favorable. I
do not think he regarded him as very solid, personally, but he
recognized the results of the power which William's inherited
position as Emperor conferred on him.

Paris did not fall behind any of the other European capitals in
the enthusiasm of its welcome. There, Roosevelt was received in
solemn session by the Sorbonne, before which he spoke on
citizenship in a Republic, and, with prophetic vision, he warned
against the seductions of phrase-makers as among the insidious
dangers to which Republics were exposed.

His most conspicuous triumph, however, was in England. On May
6th, King Edward VII died, and President Taft appointed Colonel
Roosevelt special envoy, to represent the United States at the
royal funeral. This drew together crowned heads from all parts of
Europe, so that at one of the State functions at Buckingham
Palace there were no fewer than thirteen monarchs at table. The
Colonel stayed at Dorchester House with the American Ambassador,
Mr. Whitelaw Reid, and was beset by calls and invitations from
the crowned personages. I have heard him give a most amusing
account of that experience, but it is too soon to repeat it.
Then, as always, he could tell a bore at sight, and the bore
could not deceive him by any disguise of ermine cloak or Imperial
title. The German Kaiser seems to have taken pains to pose as the
preferred intimate of "Friend Roosevelt," but the "Friend"
remained unwaveringly Democratic. One day William telephoned to
ask Roosevelt to lunch with him, but the Colonel diplomatically
pleaded a sore throat, and declined. At another time when the
Kaiser wished him to come and chat, Roosevelt replied that he
would with pleasure, but that he had only twenty minutes at the
Kaiser's disposal, as he had already arranged to call on Mrs.
Humphry Ward at three-thirty. These reminiscences may seem
trifling, unless you take them as illustrating the truly
Democratic simplicity with which the First Citizen of the
American Republic met the scions of the Hapsburgs and the
Hohenzollerns on equal terms as gentleman with gentlemen.

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