Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography,

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Some of his backbiters and revilers at home whispered that his
head was turned by all these pageants and courtesies of kings,
and that he regretted that our system provided for no monarch.
This afforded him infinite amusement. "Think of it!" he said to
me after his return. "They even say that I want to be a prince
myself! Not I! I've seen too many of them! Do you know what a
prince is? He's a cross between Ward McAllister and
Vice-President Fairbanks. How can any one suppose I should like
to be that?" It may be necessary to inform the later generation
that Mr. Ward McAllister was by profession a decayed gentleman in
New York City who achieved fame by compiling a list of the Four
Hundred persons whom he condescended to regard as belonging to
New York Society. Vice-President Fairbanks was an Indiana
politician, tall and thin and oppressively taciturn, who seemed
to be stricken dumb by the weight of an immemorial ancestry or by
the sense of his own importance; and who was not less cold than
dumb, so that irreverent jokers reported that persons might
freeze to death in his presence if they came too near or stayed
too long.

All this was only the froth on the stream of Roosevelt's
experience in England. He took deep enjoyment in meeting the
statesmen and the authors and the learned men there. The City of
London bestowed the freedom of the city upon him. The
Universities of Cambridge and Oxford gave him their highest
honorary degrees. At the London Guildhall he made a memorable
address, in which he warned the British nation to see to it that
the grievances of the Egyptian people were not allowed to fester.
Critics at the moment chided this advice as an exhibition of bad
taste; an intrusion, if not an impertinence, on the part of a
foreigner. They did not know, however, that before speaking,
Roosevelt submitted his remarks to high officers in the
Government and had their approval; for apparently they were well
pleased that this burning topic should be brought under
discussion by means of Roosevelt's warning.

At Cambridge University he exhorted the students not to be
satisfied with a life of sterile athleticism. "I never was an
athlete," said he, "although I have always led an outdoor life,
and have accomplished something in it, simply because my theory
is that almost any man can do a great deal, if he will, by
getting the utmost possible service out of the qualities that he
actually possesses . . . . The average man who is successful--the
average statesman, the average public servant, the average
soldier, who wins what we call great success--is not a genius. He
is a man who has merely the ordinary qualities that he shares
with his fellows, but who has developed those ordinary qualities
to a more than ordinary degree."

The culmination of his addresses abroad was his Romanes Lecture,
delivered at the Convocation at Oxford University on June 7,
1910. Lord Curzon, the Chancellor, presided. Roosevelt took for
his theme, "Biological Analogies in History," a subject which his
lifelong interest in natural history and his considerable reading
in scientific theory made appropriate. He afterwards said that in
order not to commit shocking blunders he consulted freely his old
friend Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, head of the Museum of Natural
History in New York City, but the substance and ideas were
unquestionably his own.

Dr. Henry Goudy, "the public orator" at Cambridge, in a
Presentation Speech, eulogized Roosevelt's manifold activities
and achievements, declaring, among other things, that he had
"acquired a title to be ranked with his great predecessor Abraham
Lincoln--'of whom one conquered slavery, and the other
corruption.'" Lord Curzon addressed him as, "peer of the most
august kings, queller of wars, destroyer of monsters wherever
found, yet the most human of mankind, deeming nothing indifferent
to you, not even the blackest of the black."

This cluster of foreign addresses is not the least remarkable of
Roosevelt's intellectual feats. No doubt among those who listened
to him in each place there were carping critics, scholars who did
not find his words scholarly enough, dilettanti made tepid by
over-culture, intellectual cormorants made heavy by too much
information, who found no novelty in what he said, and were
insensible to the rush and freshness of his style. But in spite
of these he did plant in each audience thoughts which they
remembered, and he touched upon a range of interests which no
other man then alive could have made to seem equally vital.

On June 18th Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt reached New York. All the way
up the harbor from Sandy Hook, he was escorted by a vast
concourse of vessels, large and small, tugs, steamboats, and
battleships. At the Narrows, Fort Wadsworth greeted him with the
Presidential salute of twenty-one guns. The revenue-cutter,
Androscoggin, took him from the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, on
which he had crossed the ocean, and landed him at the Battery.
There an immense multitude awaited him. Mayor Gaynor bade him
welcome, to which he replied briefly in affectionate words to his
fellow countrymen. Then began a triumphal procession up Broadway,
and up Fifth Avenue, surpassing any other which New York had
seen. No other person in America had ever been so welcomed. The
million or more who shouted and cheered and waved, were proud of
him because of his great reception in Europe, but they admired
him still more for his imperishable work at home, and loved him
most of all, because they knew him as their friend and fellow,
Theodore Roosevelt, their ideal American. A group of Rough Riders
and two regiments of Spanish War Veterans formed his immediate
escort, than whom none could have pleased him better.

His head was not turned, but his heart must have overflowed with
gratitude.

Later, when the crowds had dispersed, he went into a bookstore,
and some one in the street having recognized him, the word
passed, and a great crowd cheered him as he came out. Telling his
sister of the occurrence, he said, "And they soon will be
throwing rotten apples at me!"

CHAPTER XXI. WHICH WAS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY?

Did those words of Roosevelt spring from his sense of
humor--humor which recognizes the topsy-turvy of life and its
swift changes, and still laughs--or from the instinct which knows
that even in the sweetest of all experiences there must be a drop
of bitterness? Whatever their cause, they proved to be a true
foreboding. He had not been home twenty four hours before he
perceived, on talking with his friends, that the Republican Party
during his absence had drifted far from the course he had
charted. "His policies" had vanished with his control, and the
men who now managed the Administration and the party regarded
him, not merely with suspicion, but with aversion.

To tell the story of this conflict is the disagreeable duty of
the historian of. that period, especially if he have friends and
acquaintances on both sides of the feud. There are some facts not
yet known; there are others which must be touched upon very
delicately if at all; and, in the main, so much of the episode
grew out of personal likes and dislikes that it is hard to base
one's account of it on documents. In trying to get at the truth,
I have been puzzled by the point-blank contradictions of
antagonistic witnesses, whose veracity has not been questioned.
Equally perplexing are the lapses of memory in cases where I
happen to have seen letters or documents written at the time and
giving real facts. The country would assuredly have been alarmed
if it had suspected that, during the years from 1909 to 1912, the
statesmen who had charge of it, were as liable to attacks of
amnesia as they proved to be later.

The head and front of the quarrel which wrecked the Republican
Party must be sought in Roosevelt's thoroughly patriotic desire
to have a successor who should carry on the principles which he
had fought for and had embodied in national laws during the
nearly eight years of his Presidency. He felt more passionately
than anybody else the need of continuing the work he had begun,
not because it was his work, but because on it alone, as he
thought, the reconciliation between Capital and Labor in the
United States could be brought about, and the impending war of
classes could be prevented. So he chose Judge Taft as the person
who, he believed, would follow his lead in this undertaking. But
the experience of a hundred and ten years, since Washington was
succeeded by John Adams, might have taught him that no President
can quite reproduce the qualities of his predecessor and that the
establishment of a Presidential dynasty is not congenial to the
spirit of the American people. Jefferson did, indeed, hand on his
mantle to Madison, and the experiment partially succeeded. But
Madison was much nearer Jefferson in ability and influence than
Judge Taft was near Roosevelt.

During the campaign of 1908, and immediately after the election,
we can imagine that Mr. Taft was sincerely open to Roosevelt's
suggestions, and that he quite naturally gave Roosevelt the
impression that he intended to follow them, not because they were
Roosevelt's, but because they were his own also. As soon as he
began to realize that he was President, and that a President has
a right to speak and act on his own motion, Mr. Taft saw other
views rising within him, other preferences, other resolves. From
the bosom of his family he may have heard the exhortation, "Be
your own President; don't be any body's man or rubber stamp." No
doubt intimate friends strengthened this advice. The desire to be
free and independent, which lies at the bottom of every normal
heart, took possession of him also; further, was it not the
strict duty of a President to give the country the benefit of his
best judgment instead of following the rules laid down by
another, or to parrot another's doctrines?

Whatever may have been the process by which the change came, it
had come before Taft's inauguration. He chose a new Cabinet,
although Roosevelt supposed that several of the members of his
Cabinet would be retained. Before the Colonel started for Africa
he felt that a change had come, but he went away with the hope
that things would turn out better than he feared. His long
absence under the Equator would relieve any anxiety Taft might
have as to Roosevelt's intention to dictate or interfere.

Very little political news reached the Colonel while he was
hunting. On reaching Italy, on his return journey, he met Mr.
Gifford Pinchot, who had come post-haste from New York, and
conveyed to him the latest account of the political situation at
home. It was clear that the Republican Party had split into two
factions-the Regulars, who regarded President Taft as their
standard-bearer, and the Insurgents, who rallied round Roosevelt,
and longed desperately for his return. To the enemies of the
Administration, it seemed that Mr. Taft had turned away from the
Rooseveltian policies. In his appointments he had replaced
Roosevelt men by Regulars. His Secretary of the Interior, Mr.
Ballinger, came into conflict with Mr. Pinchot over conservation,
and the public assumed that the President was not only
unconcerned to uphold conservation, but was willing that the
natural resources of the Nation should fall again into the hands
of greedy private corporations. This assumption proved to be
false, and Secretary Ballinger was exonerated by a public
investigation; but for two years, at least, the cloud hung over
Mr. Taft's reputation, and, as always happens, the correction
being far less nimble than the accusation, took a much longer
time in remedying the harm that it had done.

When, therefore, Roosevelt landed at the Battery on June 18,
1910, the day of his apotheosis, he knew that a factional fight
was raging in the Republican Party. His trusty followers, and
every one who bore a grudge against the Administration, urged him
to unfurl his flag and check any further disintegration; but
prudence controlled him and he announced that he should not speak
on political matters for at least two months. He was sincere; but
a few days later at the Harvard Commencement exercises he met
Governor Hughes, of New York State, who was waging a fierce
struggle against the Machine to put through a bill on primary
elections. The Governor begged the Colonel as a patriotic
boss-hating citizen, to help him, and Roosevelt hastily wrote and
dispatched to Albany a telegram urging Republicans to support
Hughes. In the result, his advice was not heeded, a straw which
indicated that the Machine no longer feared to disregard him.

For several weeks Roosevelt waited and watched, and found out by
personal investigation how the Republican Party stood. It took
little inspection to show him that the Taft Administration was
not carrying out his policies, and that the elements against
which he had striven for eight years were creeping back. Indeed,
they had crept back. It would be unjust to Mr. Taft to assert
that he had not continued the war on Trusts. Under his able
Attorney-General, Mr. George W. Wickersham, many prosecutions
were going forward, and in some cases the legislation begun by
Roosevelt was extended and made more effective. I speak now as to
the general course of Mr. Taft's Administration and not specially
of the events of 1910. In spite of this continuation of the
battle with the Octopus--as the Big Interests, Wall Street, and
Trusts were indiscriminately nicknamed--the public did not
believe that Mr. Taft and his assistants pushed the fight with
their whole heart. Perhaps they were misjudged. Mr. Taft being in
no sense a spectacular person, whatever he did would lack the
spectacular quality which radiated from all Roosevelt's actions.
Then, too, the pioneer has deservedly a unique reward. Just as
none of the navigators who followed Columbus on the voyage to the
Western Continent could win credit like his, so the prestige
which Roosevelt gained from being the first to grapple with the
great monopolies could not be shared by any successor of his, who
simply carried on the work of "trust-busting," as it was called,
which had be come commonplace.

Nevertheless, although nobody doubted Mr. Wickersham's legal
ability, the country felt that during the Taft Administration
zeal had gone out of the campaign of the Administration against
the Interests. Roosevelt had plunged into the fray with the
enthusiasm of a Crusader. Taft followed him from afar, but
without feeling the Crusader's consecration or his terrible
sincerity. And during the first six months of his Administration,
President Taft had unwittingly given the country the measure of
himself.

The Republican platform adopted at Chicago declared
"unequivocally for a revision of the tariff by a special session
of Congress, immediately following the inauguration of the next
President .... In all tariff legislation the true principle of
protection is best maintained by the imposition of such duties as
will equal the difference between the cost of production at home
and abroad, together with a reasonable profit to American
industries. We favor the establishment of maximum and minimum
rates to be administered by the President under limitations fixed
in the law, the maximum to be available to meet discriminations
by foreign countries against American goods entering their
markets, and the minimum to represent the normal measure of
protection at home." The American public, regardless of party,
assumed that the "revision" referred to in this plank of the
Republican platform meant a revision downward; and it supposed,
from sayings and opinions of Mr. Taft, that he put the same
construction upon it. He at once called a special session of
Congress, and a new tariff bill was framed under the direction of
Sereno E. Payne, a Stand-Pat Republican member of Congress,
Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, and Nelson W.
Aldrich, Senator from Rhode Island, and guardian angel and
factotum for the Big Interests. For several months these
gentlemen conducted the preparation of the new bill. Payne had
already had experience in putting through the McKinley Tariff in
1890, and the Dingley Tariff in 1897. Again the committee-room
was packed by greedy protectionists who, for a consideration, got
from the Government whatever profit they paid for. Neither Payne
nor Aldrich had the slightest idea that to fix tariff rates to
enrich special individuals and firms was a most corrupt practice.
When a Republican Senator, who honestly supposed that the
revision would be downward, privately remonstrated, the reply he
heard was, "Where shall we get our campaign funds?" Finally,
after some discussion between the House and the Senate--a
discussion which did not lessen the enormities of the
measure--the Payne-Aldrich Bill was passed by Congress and signed
by President Taft, and it enjoyed the bad eminence of being worse
than the McKinley and the Dingley tariffs which had preceded it.

The public, which had seen more clearly than on former occasions,
how such charters to legalize industrial piracy were devised, was
somewhat dashed--by President Taft's approval. Perhaps it still
hoped that the creation of a non-partisan Tariff Commission of
experts would put an end to this indecent purchase and sale of
privileges and would establish rates after the scientific
investigation of each case. Soon, however, these hopes were swept
away; for on September 17, 1909, the President delivered at
Winona, Minnesota, a laudatory speech on the new tariff. He
admitted that some points in Schedule K--that comprising wool and
woolen goods--were too high. But, he said solemnly that this was
"the best tariff law the Republicans ever made, and, therefore,
the best the country ever had." In that Winona speech, Mr. Taft
hung a millstone round his own neck. His critics and his friends
alike had thrust upon them this dilemma: either he knew that the
Payne-Aldrich Tariff had been arrived at by corrupt ways and was
not a revision downward--in spite of which he pronounced it the
"best ever"; or he did not know its nature and the means used in
framing it. In the latter case, he could not be considered a
person sufficiently informed on great financial questions, or on
the practices of some of the politicians who made laws for him to
sign, to be qualified to sit in the President's chair. If, on the
other hand, knowing the measure to be bad he declared it the
"best ever," he was neither sincere nor honest, and in this case
also he was not a President whom the country could respect.

I would not imply that the American public went through this
process of reasoning at once, or arrived at such clear-cut
conclusions; Demos seldom indulges in the luxury of logic; but
the shock caused by the Winona speech vibrated through the
country and never after that did the public fully trust Mr. Taft.
It knew that the Interests had crawled back and dictated the
Payne-Aldrich Tariff, and it surmised that, although he
prosecuted the Trusts diligently, they did not feel greatly
terrified. But nobody whispered or suspected that he was not
honest.

While President Taft slowly lost his hold on the American people,
he gained proportionately with the Republican Machine. That
Machine was composed of the Regulars of the party, or the
Conservatives, as they preferred to be called, and it was losing
its hold on the country. There comes a time in every sect, party,
or institution when it stops growing, its arteries harden, its
young men see no visions, its old men dream no dreams; it lives
in the past and desperately tries to perpetuate the past. In
politics when this process of petrifaction is reached, we call it
Bourbonism, and the sure sign of the Bourbon is that, being
unconscious that he is the victim of sclerosis, he sees no reason
for seeking a cure. Unable to adjust himself to change and new
conditions he falls back into the past, as an old man drops into
his worn-out armchair.

Now Roosevelt had been, of course, the negation of Bourbonism. He
had led the Republican Party into new fields and set it to do new
work, and far off, shining clearly, its goal beckoned it on. His
followers were mostly young men; they saw that the world had
changed, and would change still further, and they went forward
valiantly to meet it and, if possible, to shape its changes. For
ten years past, these Radicals, as the Regulars named them some
what reproachfully, and who were better defined as "Insurgents,"
had played an increasingly important part in Congress. They would
not submit to the Bosses and the Machine, but voted
independently, and, although they were not all of them avowed
Rooseveltians, they all were going in his direction. In the
second year of Mr. Taft's Administration, they rebelled against
the rigid dictatorship of Joseph G. Cannon, the Speaker of the
House. "Uncle Joe," as the public nicknamed him, dated from
before the Civil War, and entered Congress in 1863, forty-seven
years before 1910. It was as if a rigid Bourbon, who had served
under Louis XV in France in 1763, had been chief law-maker under
Napoleon I in 1810. Mr. Cannon, however, had never learned that
the Civil War was over, whereas every Frenchman who survived the
Revolution knew that it had taken place. So the Insurgents rose
up against him, in his old age, deprived him of his dictatorial
power, and, at the next election, Democrats and Republicans
combined to sweep him out of office altogether.

The Jews who ridiculed Noah when he began to build the Ark were,
it proved, Bourbons, but they had some excuse, for when Noah was
working there was no portent of a flood and not even a black
cloud with a shower wrapped up in it hung on the horizon. But the
Republican Regulars, under Mr. Taft, could not complain that no
sign had been vouchsafed to them. The amazing rise in power and
popularity of Roosevelt during the decade, the surging unrest of
Labor throughout the world, the obviously altered conditions
which immense fortunes and the amassing of wealth by a few
corporations had produced, and such special symptoms as the
chafing at the Payne Aldrich Tariff, the defeat of Speaker
Cannon, and the election of a Democratic House of Representatives
ought to have warned even the dullest Republican. For good, or
for ill, a social and industrial revolution was under way, and,
instead of trimming their sails to meet it, they had not even
taken ship. Roosevelt and the Insurgents had long understood the
revolution of which they were a part, and had taken measures to
control it. Roosevelt's first achievement, as we have seen, was
to bring the Big Interests under the power of the law. The hawks
and vultures whose wings he clipped naturally did not like it or
him, but the laws had force behind them, and they submitted. The
leaders of the popular movement, however, declared that this was
not enough. They preached the right of the people to rule. The
people, they urged, must have a real share in electing the men
who were to make the laws and to administer and interpret them.

Every one knew that the system of party government resulted in a
Machine, consisting of a few men who controlled the preliminary
steps which led to the nomination of candidates and then decided
the election, so far as their control of the regular party
members could do this. It would be idle, said the advocates of
these popular rights, to make the best of laws in behalf of the
people and allow them to be enforced by representatives and
judges chosen, under whatever disguise, by the great capitalists.
And so these Progressives, bent on trusting implicitly the
intelligence, the unselfishness, and the honesty of the People,
proposed three novel political instruments for obtaining the pure
Democracy they dreamed of. First, the Initiative, by which a
certain number of voters could suggest new laws; second, the
Referendum, by which a vote should be taken to decide whether the
People approved or not of a law that was in operation; and third,
the judicial Recall, by which a majority of the voters could
nullify a decision handed down by a judge. This last was often
misnamed and misconstrued, the "Recall of Judges," but so far as
I know very few of the Progressive leaders, certainly not Colonel
Roosevelt, proposed to put the tenure of office of a judge at the
mercy of a sudden popular vote.

When Roosevelt returned from Africa, he found that the
Progressive movement had developed rapidly, and the more he
thought over its principles, the more they appealed to him. To
arrive at Social Justice was his life-long endeavor. In a speech
delivered on August 31, 1910, at Ossawatomie, Kansas, he
discoursed on the "New Nationalism." As if to push back hostile
criticism at the start, he quoted Abraham Lincoln: "Labor is
prior to, and independent of capital; capital is only the fruit
of labor and could never have existed but for labor. Labor is the
superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration.
Capital has its rights which are as worthy of protection as any
other rights .... Nor should this lead to a war upon the owners
of property. Property is the fruit of labor; property is
desirable; it is a positive good in the world. Let not him who is
houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work
diligently and build one for him self, thus, by example, showing
that his own shall be safe from violence when built."

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