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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030930188 
 
TRUE STORIES OF GREAT AMERICANS 
 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
OTHER BOOKS BY MR. PEARSON 
 (Published by The Macmillan Company) 
 
 The Believing Years 
 
 The Voyage of the Hoppergeass 
 
 The Secbet Book 
 
 (Published elsewhere) 
 The Old Librakian's Almanack 
 The Library and the Libraiuan 
 The Librarian at Play 
 
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood. 
 
 MR. ROOSEVELT AT SAGAMORE HILL 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 BY 
 
 EDMUND LESTER PEARSON 
 
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 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 
 
 1920 
 
 
 
 
 A.tt right* reierved 
 
 
 
 
 
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OOPYBIOHT, 1920, 
 BT THE UAOMILLAN OOMPANT 
 
 Set up and electrotypcd. FubUslud July, igao. 
 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 The author wishes to express his gratitude for 
 permission to refer to the works which have been 
 consulted in writing this book, 
 book. 
 
 First and foremost, to Mr. William Roscoe 
 Thayer, for "Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate 
 Biography." (Houghton, MifHin Co.) 
 
 To Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons for these 
 writings of Theodore Roosevelt : " African Game 
 Trails " ; " Theodore Roosevelt : An Autobiogra- 
 phy " ; " The Rough Riders " ; " Through the Bra- 
 zilian Wilderness"; "History as Literature." 
 And for " Theodore Roosevelt and His Time " 
 by Joseph Bucklin Bishop, in Scribner's Magazine, 
 for December, 1919. 
 
 To Messrs. Harper and Brothers and to Mr. 
 Hermann Hagedom for " The Boys' Life of 
 Theodore Roosevelt " by Hermann Hagedom. 
 
 To The Century Company for these books by 
 Theodore Roosevelt : " The Strenuous Life " ; 
 " Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail." 
 
 To Messrs. G. P. Putnam's Sons for these 
 books by Theodore Roosevelt: "American 
 Ideals"; "The Wilderness Hunter." 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 To Mr. Charles G. Washburn for his " Theo- 
 dore Roosevelt; the Logic of His Career." 
 (Houghton, Mifflin Co.) 
 
 To Messrs Doubleday, Page & Co. and to Mr. 
 Lawrence F. Abbott for " Impressions of Theo- 
 dore Roosevelt " by Lawrence F. Abbott. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I The Boy Who Collected Animals . . i 
 
 II In College lo 
 
 III In Politics i8 
 
 IV "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail" 28 
 V Two Defeats 37 
 
 VI Fighting Office-Seekers 44 
 
 VII Police Commissioner 50 
 
 VIII The Rough Rider 58 
 
 IX Governor of New York 70 
 
 X President of the United States ... Br 
 
 XI The Lion Hunter 99 
 
 XII Europe and America no 
 
 XIII The Bull Moose 120 
 
 XIV The Explorer 131 
 
 XV The Man 137 
 
 XVI The Great American 149 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt About ro Years Old 
 Mr. Roosevelt as a Hunter .... 
 President Roosevelt Speaking in Alabama 
 The Rough Rider (Cartoon) .... 
 President Roosevelt in the Saddle . 
 President and Mrs. Roosevelt and Children 
 President Theodore Roosevelt .... 
 
 rAOiNO 
 
 PAGE 
 
 • 33 
 
 • 48 
 . 81 
 
 . 96 
 
 • "3 
 . 128 
 
 . 144 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE BOY WHO COLLECTED ANIMALS 
 
 If you had been in New York in 1917 or 1918 
 you might have seen, walking quickly from a 
 shop or a hotel to an automobile, a thick-set but ac- 
 tive and muscular man, wearing a soft black hat 
 and a cape overcoat. Probably there would have 
 been a group of people waiting on the sidewalk, 
 as he came out, for this was Theodore Roose- 
 velt, Ex-President of the United States, and there 
 were more Americans who cared to know what 
 he was doing, and to hear what he was saying, 
 than cared about any other living man. 
 
 Although he was then a private citizen, holding 
 no office, he was a leader of his country, which 
 was engaged in the Great War. Americans were 
 being called upon, — the younger men to risk 
 their lives in battle, and the older people to suffer 
 and support their losses. Theodore Roosevelt 
 had always said that it was a good citizen's duty 
 
2 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 cheerfully to do one or the other of these things in 
 the hour of danger. They knew that he had done 
 both; and so it was to him that men turned, as 
 to a strong and brave man, whose words were 
 simple and noble, and what was more important, 
 whose actions squared with his words. 
 
 He had come back, not long before, from one 
 of his hunting trips, and it was said that fever 
 was still troubling him. The people wish to 
 know if this is true, and one of the men on the 
 sidewalk, a reporter, probably, steps forward and 
 asks him a question. 
 
 He stops for a moment, and turns toward the 
 man. Not much thought of sickness is left in 
 the mind of any one there! His face is clear, 
 his cheeks ruddy, — the face of a man who lives 
 outdoors; and his eyes, light-blue in color, look 
 straight at the questioner. One of his eyes, it 
 had been said, was dimmed or blinded by a blow 
 while boxing, years before, when he was Presi- 
 dent. But no one can see anything the matter 
 with the eyes ; they twinkle in a smile, and as his 
 face puckers up, and his white teeth show for an 
 instant under his light-brown moustache, the 
 group of people all smile, too. 
 
 His face is so familiar to them, — it is as if they 
 were looking at somebody they knew as well as 
 their own brothers. The newspaper cartoonists 
 
COLLECTED ANIMALS 3 
 
 had shown it to them for years. No one else 
 smiled like that; no one else spoke so vigorously. 
 
 " Never felt better in my life ! " he answers, 
 bending toward the man. 
 
 "But thank you for asking!" and there is a 
 pleasant and friendly note in his voice, which per- 
 haps surprises some of those who, though they 
 had heard much of his emphatic speech, knew 
 but little of his gentleness. He waves his hand, 
 steps into the automobile, and is gone. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt was born October 27, 
 1858, in New York City, at 28 East Twentieth 
 Street. The first Roosevelt of his family to 
 come to this country was Klaes Martensen van 
 Roosevelt who came from Holland to what is 
 now New York about 1644. He was a " settler," 
 and that, says Theodore Roosevelt, remembering 
 the silly claims many people like to make about 
 their long-dead ancestors, is a fine name for an 
 immigrant, who came over in the steerage of a 
 sailing ship in the seventeenth century instead of 
 the steerage of a steamer in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. From that time, for the next seven genera- 
 tions, from father to son, every one of the family 
 was bom on Manhattan Island. As New 
 Yorkers say, they were " straight New York." 
 
 Immigrant or settler, or whatever Klaes van 
 
4 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Roosevelt may have been, his children and grand- 
 children had in them more than ordinary ability. 
 They were not content to stand still, but made 
 themselves useful and prosperous, so that the 
 name was known and honored in the city and 
 State even before the birth of the son who was 
 to make it illustrious throughout the world. 
 
 " My father," says the President, " was the 
 best man I ever knew. ... He never physically 
 punished me but once, but he was the only man 
 of whom I was ever really afraid." The elder 
 Roosevelt was a merchant, a man courageous and 
 gentle, fond of horses and country life. He 
 worked hard at his business, for the Sanitary 
 Commission during the Civil War, and for the 
 poor and unfortunate of his own city, so hard 
 that he wore himself out and died at forty-six. 
 The President's mother was Martha Bulloch from 
 Georgia. Two of her brothers were in the Con- 
 federate Navy, so while the Civil War was going 
 on, and Theodore Roosevelt was a little boy, his 
 family like so many other American families, had 
 in it those who wished well for the South, and 
 those who hoped for the success of the North. 
 
 Many American Presidents have been poor 
 when they were boys. They have had to work 
 hard, to make a way for themselves, and the same 
 strength and courage with which they did this has 
 
COLLECTED ANIMALS 5 
 
 later helped to bring them into the White House. 
 It has seemed as if there were magic connected 
 with being born in a log-cabin, or having to work 
 hard to get an education, so that only the boys 
 who did this could become famous. Of course it 
 is what is in the boy himself, together with the 
 effect his life has had on him, that counts. The 
 boy whose family is rich, or even well-off, has 
 something to struggle against, too. For with 
 these it is easy to slip into comfortable and lazy 
 ways, to do nothing because one does not have to 
 do anything. Some men never rise because their 
 early life was too hard; some, because it was too 
 easy. 
 
 Roosevelt might have had the latter fate. His 
 father would not have allowed idleness ; he did not 
 care about money-making, especially, but he did 
 believe in work, for himself and his children. 
 When the father died, and his son was left with 
 enough money to have lived all his days without 
 doing a stroke of work, he already had too much 
 grit to think of such a life. And he had too much 
 good sense to start out to become a millionaire 
 and to pile million upon useless million. 
 
 He had something else to fight against: bad 
 health. He writes : " I was a sickly, deHcate boy, 
 suffered much from asthma, and frequently had 
 to be taken away on trips to find a place where I 
 
6 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 could breathe. One of my memories is of my 
 father walking up and down the room with me in 
 his arms at night, when I was a very small per- 
 son, and of sitting up in bed gasping, with my 
 father and mother trying to help me. I went 
 very little to school. I never went to the public 
 schools, as my own children later did." ^ For a 
 few months he went to a private school, his aunt 
 taught him at home, and he had tutors there. 
 
 When he was ten his parents took him with his 
 brother and sisters for a trip to Europe, where he 
 had a bad time indeed. Like most boys, he cared 
 nothing for picture-galleries and the famous 
 sights, he was homesick and he wished to get back 
 to what really pleased him, — that is, collecting 
 animals. He was already interested in that. 
 And only when he could go to a museum and see, 
 as he wrote in his diary, " birds and skeletons " 
 or go " for a spree " with his sister and buy two 
 shillings worth of rock-candy, did he enjoy him- 
 self in Europe. 
 
 His sister knew what he thought about the 
 things one is supposed to see in Europe, and in 
 her diary set it down : 
 
 " I am so glad Mama has let me stay in the 
 butiful hotel parlor while the poor boys have been 
 dragged off to the orful picture galary." 
 1 " Autobiography." 
 
COLLECTED ANIMALS 7 
 
 These experiences are funny enough now, but 
 probably they were tragic to kim at the time. In 
 a church in Venice there were at least some mo- 
 ments of happiness. He writes of his sister 
 "Conie": 
 
 " Conie jumped over tombstones spanked me 
 banged EUies head &c." 
 
 But in Paris the trip becomes too monotonous ; 
 and his diary says: 
 
 November 26. " I stayed in the house all day, 
 varying the day with brushing my hair, washing 
 my hands and thinking in fact having a verry dull 
 time." 
 
 November 27. " I did the same thing as yes- 
 ' terday." 
 
 They all came back to New York and again he 
 could study and amuse himself with natural his- 
 tory. This study was one of his great pleasures 
 throughout life and when he was a man he knew 
 more about the animals of America than anybody 
 except the great scholars who devoted their lives 
 to this alone. 
 
 It started with a dead seal that he happened to 
 find laid out on a slab in a market in Broadway. 
 He was still a small boy, but when he heard that 
 the seal had been killed in the harbor, it reminded 
 him of the adventures he had been reading about 
 in Mayne Reid's books. He went back to the 
 
8 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 market, day after day, to look at the seal, to try to 
 measure it and to plan to own it and preserve it. 
 He did get the skull, and with two cousins started 
 what they gave the grand name of the " Roose- 
 velt Museum of Natural History " ! 
 
 Catching and keeping specimens for this mu- 
 seum gave him more fun than it gave to some of 
 his family. His mother was not well pleased 
 when she found some young white mice in the ice- 
 chest, where the founder of the " Roosevelt Mu- 
 seum " was keeping them safe. She quickly threw 
 them away, and her son, in his indignation, said 
 that what hurt him about it was " the loss to Sci- 
 ence ! The loss to Science ! " Once, he and his 
 cousin had been out in the country, collecting spec- 
 imens until all their pockets were full. Then two 
 toads came along, — such novel and attractive 
 toads that room had to be made for them. Each 
 boy put one toad under his hat, and started down 
 the road. But a lady, a neighbor, met them, and 
 when the boys took ofif their hats, the toads did 
 what any sensible toads would do, hopped down 
 and away, and so were never added to the 
 Museum. 
 
 The Roosevelt family visited Europe again in 
 1873, and afterwards went to Algiers and Egypt, 
 where the air, it was hoped, would help the boy's 
 asthma. This was a pleasanter trip for him, and 
 
COLLECTED ANIMALS 9 
 
 the birds which he saw on the Nile interested him 
 greatly. 
 
 His studies of natural history had been carried 
 on in the summers at Oyster Bay on Long Island, 
 on the Hudson and in the Adirondacks. They 
 soon became more than a boy's fun, and some of 
 the observations made when he was fifteen, six- 
 teen or seventeen years old have found their way 
 into learned books. When the State of New 
 York published, many years afterwards, two big 
 volumes about the birds of the state, some of these 
 early writings by Roosevelt were quoted as im- 
 portant. A friend has given me a four-page 
 folder printed in 1877, about the summer birds 
 of the Adirondacks " by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., 
 and H. D. Minot." Part of the observations 
 were made in 1874 when he was sixteen. Ninety- 
 seven different birds are listed. 
 
 When he was fifteen and had returned a second 
 time from Europe, he began to study to enter 
 Harvard. He was ahead of most boys of his age 
 in science, history and geography and knew some- 
 thing of German and French. But he was weak 
 in Latin, Greek and mathematics. He loved the 
 out-of-doors side of natural history, and hoped he 
 might be a scientist like Audubon. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 IN COLLEGE 
 
 Roosevelt entered the Freshman class of Har- 
 vard University in 1876. It is worth while to 
 remember that this man who became as much of 
 a Westerner as an Easterner, who was understood 
 and trusted by the people of the Western States, 
 was bom on the Atlantic coast and educated at a 
 New England college. 
 
 The real American, if he was bom in the East, 
 does not talk with contempt about the West; if 
 he is a Westerner he does not pretend that all the 
 good in the world is on his side of the Mississippi. 
 Nor, wherever he came from, does he try to keep 
 up old quarrels between North and South. Theo- 
 dore Roosevelt was an American, and admired 
 by Americans ever3rwhere. Foolish folk who 
 talk about the " effete East," meaning that the 
 East is worn out and corrupt, had best remember 
 that Abraham Lincoln did not believe that when 
 he sent his son to the same college which Theo- 
 dore Roosevelt's father chose for him. 
 
 At Harvard he kept up his studies and interest 
 
IN COLLEGE ii 
 
 in natural history. In the house where he lived 
 he sometimes had a large, live turtle and two or 
 three kinds of snakes. He went in to Boston and 
 came back with a basket full of live lobsters, to 
 the consternation of the other people in the horse- 
 car. He held a high office in the Natural History 
 Society, and took honors, when he graduated, in 
 the subject. His father had encouraged his de- 
 sire to be a professor of natural history, remind- 
 ing him, however, that he must have no hopes of 
 being a rich man. In the end he gave up this 
 plan, not because it did not lead to money, for 
 never in his life did he work to become wealthy, 
 but because he disliked science as it was then 
 taught. One of the bad things the German uni- 
 versities had done to the American colleges was to 
 make them worship fussy detail, and so science 
 had become a matter of microscopes and labora- 
 tories. The field-work of the naturalist was 
 unknown or despised. 
 
 He took part in four or five kinds of athletics. 
 He seems never to have played baseball, perhaps 
 because of poor eyesight which made him wear 
 glasses. But he practiced with a rifle, rowed and 
 boxed, ran and wrestled. In his vacations he 
 went hunting in Maine. Boxing was one of his 
 favorite forms of sport, — for two reasons. He 
 thought a boy or a man ought to be able to de- 
 
12 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 fend himself and others, and he enjoyed hard 
 exercise. 
 
 It is important to know what he thought and 
 did about self-defense and fighting. Many peo- 
 ple dodge this, and other difficult subjects, when 
 they are talking to boys. It was not Roosevelt's 
 way to hide his thoughts in silence because of tim- 
 idity, and then call his lack of action by some such 
 fine name as " tact " or " discretion." When 
 there was good reason for speaking out he always 
 did so. Since a boy who is forever fighting is 
 not only a nuisance, but usually a bully, some 
 older folk go to the extreme and tell boys that 
 all fighting is wrong. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt did not believe it. When 
 he was about fourteen, and riding in a stage-coach 
 on the way to Moosehead Lake, two other boys in 
 the coach began tormenting him. When he tried 
 to fight them off, he found himself helpless. 
 Either of them could handle him, could hit him 
 and prevent him from hitting back. He decided 
 that it was a matter of self-respect for a boy to 
 know how to protect himself and he learned to 
 box. 
 
 Speaking to boys he said later : 
 
 " One prime reason for abhorring cowards is 
 because every good boy should have it in him to 
 thrash the objectionable boy as the need arises." 
 
IN COLLEGE 13 
 
 And again : 
 
 " The very fact that the boy should be manly 
 and able to hold his own, that he should be 
 ashamed to submit to bullying, without instant re- 
 taliation, should in return, make him abhor any 
 form of bullying, cruelty, or brutality." ^ 
 
 When he was teaching a Sunday School class 
 in Cambridge, during his time at college, one of 
 his pupils came in with a black eye. It turned out 
 that another boy had teased and pinched the first 
 boy's sister during church. Afterwards there had 
 been a fight, and the one who tormented the little 
 girl had been beaten, but he had given the brother 
 a black eye. 
 
 " You did quite right," said Roosevelt to the 
 brother and gave him a dollar. 
 
 But the deacons of the church did not approve, 
 and Roosevelt soon went to another church. 
 
 Meanwhile he was learning to box. In his own 
 story of his life he makes fun of himself as a 
 boxer, and says that in a boxing match he once 
 won " a pewter mug " worth about fifty cents. 
 He is honest enough to say that he was proud of 
 it at the time, " kept it, and alluded to it, and I 
 fear bragged about it, for a number of years, and 
 I only wish I knew where it was now." 
 
 1 These two quotations from essay called " The American 
 Boy " in " The Strenuous Life," pp. 162, 164. 
 
14 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 His college friends tell a different story of him. 
 He was never one of the best boxers, they say, and 
 he was at a disadvantage because of his eyesight. 
 But he was plucky enough for two, and he fought 
 fair. He entered in the lightweight class in the 
 Harvard G)Tnnasium, March 22, 1879. He won 
 the first match. When time was called he 
 dropped his hands, and his opponent gave him a 
 hard blow on the face. The fellows around the 
 ring all shouted " Foul ! Foul ! " and hissed. 
 But Roosevelt turned toward them, calling 
 "Hush! He didn't hear!" 
 
 In the second match he met a man named 
 Charlie Hanks, who was a little taller, and had a 
 longer reach, and so for all Roosevelt's pluck and 
 willingness to take punishment. Hanks won the 
 match. 
 
 He was a member of three or four clubs, — the 
 Institute, the Hasty Pudding and the Porcellian. 
 He was one of the editors of the Harvard Advo- 
 cate, took part in three or four college activities, 
 and was fond of target shooting and dancing. It 
 is told that he never spoke in public, until about 
 his third year in college, that he was shy and had 
 great difficulty in speaking. It was by effort that 
 he became one of the best orators of his day. 
 
 Roosevelt did not like the way college debates 
 were conducted. He said that to make one side 
 
IN COLLEGE 15 
 
 defend or attack a certain subject, without regard 
 to whether they thought it right or wrong, had a 
 bad effect. 
 
 " What we need," he wrote, " is to turn out of 
 colleges young men with ardent convictions on the 
 side of right; not young men who can make a 
 good argument for either right or wrong, as their 
 interest bids them." 
 
 He did one thing in college which is not a mat- 
 ter of course with students under twenty-two 
 years old. He began to write a history, named 
 " The Naval War of 1812." It was finished and 
 published two years after he graduated, and in it 
 he showed that his idea of patriotism included 
 telling the truth. Most American boys used to 
 be brought up on the story of the American frigate 
 Constitution whipping all the British ships she 
 met, and with the notion that the War of 18 12 
 was nothing but a series of brilliant victories 
 for us. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt thought that Americans 
 were not so soft that they were afraid to hear the 
 truth, and that it was a poor sort of American 
 who dared not point out to his fellow-countrymen 
 the mistakes they had made and the disasters 
 which followed. It did not seem patriotic to him 
 to dodge the fact that lack of wisdom at Wash- 
 ington had let our Army run down before the 
 
i6 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 war, so that our attempts to invade Canada were 
 failures, and that we suffered the disgrace of hav- 
 ing Washington itself captured and burned by the 
 enemy. 
 
 There was a great deal to be proud of in what 
 our Navy did, and in the Army's victory in the 
 Battle of New Orleans, and these things Roose- 
 velt described with the pride of every good Amer- 
 ican. But he had no use for the old-fashioned 
 kind of history, which pretends that all the brav- 
 ery is on one side. He did his best to get ^t the 
 truth, and he knew that the English and Canadi- 
 ans had fought bravely and well, and so he said 
 just that. Where our troops or our ships failed 
 it was not through lack of courage, but because 
 they were badly led, and what was worse, since 
 it was so unnecessary, because the Government at 
 Washington had lost the battle in advance by neg- 
 lecting to prepare. 
 
 Before he was twenty-four, Roosevelt was so 
 well-informed in the history of this period that 
 he was later asked to write the chapter dealing 
 with the War of 1812 in a history of the British 
 Navy. 
 
 At his graduation from Harvard he stood 
 twenty-second in a class of one hundred and sev- 
 enty. This caused him to be elected to the Phi 
 Beta Kappa, the society of scholars. Before he 
 
IN COLLEGE 17 
 
 graduated he became engaged to be married to 
 Miss Alice Lee of Qiestnut Hill, Massachusetts. 
 
 He told his friend, Mr. Thayer, what he was 
 going to do after graduation. 
 
 " I am going to try to help the cause of better 
 government in New York City," he said. And 
 he added : 
 
 " I don't know exactly how." 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 IN POLITICS 
 
 When he graduated from college Roosevelt was 
 no longer in poor health. His boxing and exer- 
 cise in the gymnasium, and still more his outdoor 
 expeditions, and hunting trips in Maine, had made 
 a well man of him. He was yet to achieve 
 strength and muscle, and his life in the West was 
 to give him the chance to do that. 
 
 His father died while he was in college and he 
 was left, not rich, but so well off that he might 
 have lived merely amusing himself. He might 
 have spent his days in playing polo, hunting and 
 collecting specimens of animals. What he did 
 during his life, in adding to men's knowledge of 
 the habits of animals, would have gained him an 
 honorable place in the history of American sci- 
 ence, if he had done nothing else. So with his 
 writing of books. He earned the respect of lit- 
 erary men, and left a longer list of books to his 
 credit than do most authors, and on a greater 
 variety of subjects. But he was to do other and 
 
 i8 
 
IN POLITICS 19 
 
 still more important work than either of these 
 things. 
 
 He believed in and quoted from one of the no- 
 blest poems ever w^ritten by any man, — Tenny- 
 son's "Ulysses." And in this poem are lines 
 which formed the text for Roosevelt's life: 
 
 How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 
 To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use! 
 As tho' to breathe were life. 
 
 This was the doctrine of " the strenuous life " 
 which he preached, — and practiced. It was to 
 perform the hard necessary work of the world, 
 not to sit back and criticize. It was to do dis- 
 agreeable work if it had to be done, not to pick 
 out the soft jobs. It was to be afraid neither of 
 the man who fights with his fists or with a rifle, 
 nor of the man who fights with a sneering tongue 
 or a sarcastic pen. 
 
 To go into New York politics from 1 880-1 882 
 was, for a young man of Roosevelt's place in life, 
 just out of college, what most of his friends and 
 associates called " simply crazy." That young 
 men of good education no longer think it a crazy 
 thing to do, but an honorable and important one, 
 is due to Theodore Roosevelt more than to any 
 other one man. 
 
 As he sat on the window-seat of his friend's 
 
20 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 room in Holworthy Hall, that day, and said he 
 was going to try to help the cause of better gov- 
 ernment in New York, Mr. Thayer looked at him 
 and wondered if he were "the real thing." 
 Thirty-nine years later Mr. Thayer looked back 
 over the career of his college mate, and knew that 
 he had talked that day with one of the great men 
 of our Republic, with one who, as another of his 
 college friends says, was never a " politician " in 
 the bad sense, but was always trying to advance 
 the cause of better government. 
 
 The reason why it seemed to many good people 
 a crazy thing to go into politics was that the work 
 was hard and disagreeable much of the time. 
 Politics were in the hands of saloon-keepers, 
 toughs, drivers of street cars and other " low " 
 people, as they put it. The nice folk liked to sit 
 at home, sigh, and say : " Politics are rotten." 
 Then they wondered why politics did not instantly 
 become pure. They demanded " reform " in pol- 
 itics, as Roosevelt said, as if reform were some- 
 thing which could be handed round like slices of 
 cake. Their way of getting reform, if they tried 
 any way at all, was to write letters to the news- 
 papers, complaining about the " crooked politi- 
 cians," and they always chose the i?ewspapers 
 which those politicians never read and cared noth- 
 ing about. 
 
IN POLITICS 21 
 
 If any decent man did go into politics, hoping 
 to do some good, these same critics lamented 
 loudly, and presently announced their belief that 
 he, too, had become crooked. If it were said that 
 he had been seen with a politician they disliked, 
 or that he ate a meal in company with one, they 
 were sure he had gone wrong. They seemed to 
 think that a reformer could go among other office- 
 holders and do great work, if he would only begin 
 by cutting all his associates dead, and refusing to 
 speak to them. 
 
 It was a fortunate day for America when 
 Theodore Roosevelt joined the Twenty-first 
 District Republican Club, and later when he ran 
 for the New York State Assembly from the same 
 district. He was elected in November, 1881. 
 This was his beginning in politics. 
 
 In the Assembly at Albany, he presently made 
 discoveries. He learned something about the 
 crooked politicians whom the stay-at-home re- 
 formers had denounced from afar. He found 
 that the Assembly had in it many good men, a 
 larger number who were neither good nor bad, 
 but went one way or another just as things hap- 
 pened to influence them at the moment. Finally, 
 there were some bad men indeed. He found that 
 the bad men were not always the poor, the uned- 
 ucated, the men who had been brought up in 
 
22 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 rough homes, lacking in refinement. On the con- 
 trary, he found some extremely honest and useful 
 men who had had exactly such unfavorable begin- 
 nings. 
 
 Also, he soon discovered that there were, in 
 and out of politics, some men of wealth, of edu- 
 cation, men who boasted that they belonged to the 
 " best families," who were willing to be crooked, 
 or to profit from other men's crooked actions. 
 He soon announced this discovery, which natur- 
 ally made such men furious with him. They pur- 
 sued him with their hatred all his life. Some peo- 
 ple really think that great wealth makes crime re- 
 spectable, and if it is pointed out to a wealthy but 
 dishonest man, that he is merely a common thief, 
 and if in addition, the fact is proved to every- 
 body's satisfaction, his anger is noticeable. 
 
 Along with his serious work in the Assembly, 
 Roosevelt found that there was a great deal of 
 fun in listening to the debates on the floor, or the 
 hearings in committees. One story, which he 
 tells, is of two Irish AssembljTnen, both of whom 
 wished to be leader of the minority. One, he 
 calls the "Colonel," the other, the "Judge." 
 There was a question being discussed of money 
 for the Catholic Protectory, and somebody said 
 that the bill was " unconstitutional." Mr. Roose- 
 velt writes : 
 
IN POUTICS 23 
 
 The Judge, who knew nothing of the constitution, 
 except that it was continually being quoted against all 
 of his favorite projects, fidgetted about for some time, 
 and at last jumped up to know if he might ask the 
 gentleman a question. The latter said " Yes," and the 
 Judge went on, " I'd like to know if the gintleman has 
 ever personally seen the Catholic Protectoree ? " " No, 
 I haven't," said his astonished opponent. "Then, 
 phwat do you mane by talking about its being uncon- 
 stitootional ? It's no more unconstitootional than you 
 are ! " Then turning to the house with slow and with- 
 ering sarcasm, he added, " The throuble wid the gintle- 
 man is that he okkipies what lawyers would call a 
 kind of a quasi-position upon this bill," and sat down 
 amid the applause of his followers. 
 
 His rival, the Colonel, felt he had gained altogether 
 too much glory from the encounter, and after the non- 
 plussed countryman had taken his seat, he stalked sol- 
 emnly over to the desk of the elated Judge, looked at 
 him majestically for a moment, and said, " You'll ex- 
 cuse my mentioning, sorr, that the gintleman who has 
 just sat down knows more law in a wake than you do in 
 a month ; and more than that, Mike Shaunnessy, phwat 
 do you mane by quotin' Latin on the flure of this House, 
 when you don't know the alpha and omayga of the lan- 
 guage ! " and back he walked, leaving the Judge in hu- 
 miliated submission behind him.^ 
 
 Another story also relates to the " Colonel." 
 He was presiding at a committee meeting, in an 
 extremely dignified and severe state of mind. He 
 
 '^ " American Ideals," p. 93. 
 
24 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 usually came to the meetings in this mood, as a 
 result of having visited the bar, and taken a num- 
 ber of rye whiskies. The meeting was addressed 
 by " a great, burly man . . . who bellowed as if 
 he had been a bull of Bashan." 
 
 The Colonel, by this time pretty far gone, eyed him 
 malevolently, swaying to and fro in his chair. How- 
 ever, the first effect of the fellow's oratory was soothing 
 rather than otherwise, and produced the unexpected 
 result of sending the chairman fast asleep bolt up- 
 right. But in a minute or two, as the man warmed up 
 to his work, he gave a peculiar resonant howl which 
 waked the Colonel up. The latter came to himself with 
 a jerk, looked fixedly at the audience, caught sight of 
 the speaker, remembered having seen him before, for- 
 got that he had been asleep, and concluded that it must 
 have been on some previous day. Hammer, hammer, 
 hammer, went the gavel, and — 
 
 " I've seen you before, sir ! " 
 
 " You have not," said the man. 
 
 " Don't tell me I lie, sir ! " responded the Colonel, 
 with sudden ferocity. "You've addressed this com- 
 mittee on a previous day ! " 
 
 " I've never — " began the man ; but the Colonel 
 broke in again: 
 
 " Sit down, sir ! The dignity of the chair must be 
 preserved! No man shall speak to this committee 
 twice. The committee stands adjourned." And with 
 that he stalked majestically out of the room, leaving 
 the committee and the delegation to gaze sheepishly into 
 each other's faces.^ 
 
 1 " American Ideals,'' p. 96. 
 
IN POLITICS 25 
 
 There was in the Assembly a man whom Mr. 
 Roosevelt calls " Brogan." 
 
 He looked like a serious elderly frog. I never heard 
 him speak more than once. It was before the Legis- 
 lature was organized, or had adopted any rules; and 
 each day the only business was for the clerk to call 
 the roll. One day Brogan suddenly rose, and the fol- 
 lowing dialogue occurred : 
 
 Brogan. Misther Clu-r-r-k! 
 
 The Clerk. The gentleman from New York. 
 
 Brogan. I rise to a point of ordher under the rules ! 
 
 The Clerk. There are no rules. 
 
 Brogan. Thin I object to them. 
 
 The Clerk. There are no rules to object to. 
 
 Brogan. Oh ! (nonplussed; but immediately recover- 
 ing himself.) Thin I move that they be amended until 
 there ar-r-re ! ^ 
 
 Roosevelt was three times elected to the As- 
 sembly. He took an interest in laws to reform 
 the Primaries and the Civil Service, and he de- 
 manded that a certain corrupt judge be removed. 
 This astonished the Assembly, for the judge had 
 powerful and rich friends. His own party ad- 
 vised the twenty-three years old Assemblyman to 
 sit down and shut his mouth. The judge might 
 be corrupt, as it was charged, but it was " wiser " 
 to keep still about it. Roosevelt, they said, was 
 ^"Autobiography," p. pg. 
 
26 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 " rash " and " hot-headed " to make trouble. And 
 they refused to hear him. 
 
 But he got up next day, and the next, and the 
 next after that, and demanded that the dishonest 
 judge be investigated. And on the eighth day, 
 his motion was carried by a vote of 104 to 6. 
 The poHticians saw to it that the judge escaped, 
 but it was shown that Roosevelt's charges were 
 true ones. And New York State found that she 
 had an Assembl)mian with a back-bone. 
 
 Roosevelt carried some bills for the cause of 
 better government through the Assembly and they 
 were signed by a courageous and honest Governor, 
 named Grover Cleveland. Thomas Nast, Ameri- 
 ca's great cartoonist of those days, drew a car- 
 toon of the two men together. Cleveland was 
 forty-four and Roosevelt was twenty-three. 
 
 One of the most important events while he was 
 in the Assembly arose from a bill to regulate the 
 manufacture of cigars in New York City. He 
 had found that cigars were often made under the 
 most unhealthy surroundings in the single living 
 room of a family in a tenement. In one house 
 which he investigated himself, there were two 
 families, and a boarder, all living in one room, 
 while one or more of the men carried on the man- 
 ufacture of cigars in the same room. Every- 
 thing about the place was filthy, and both for the 
 
IN POLITICS 27 
 
 health of the families and of the possible users 
 of the cigars, it was necessary to have this state 
 of affairs ended. 
 
 He advocated a bill which passed, and was 
 signed by Governor Cleveland, forbidding such 
 manufacture. So far, so good; but there were 
 persons who found that the law was against their 
 interests. They succeeded in getting the Court 
 of Appeals to set the law aside, and in their 
 decision the judges said the law was an assault 
 upon the " hallowed associations " of the home ! 
 
 This made Roosevelt wake to the fact that 
 courts were not always the best judges of the 
 living conditions of classes of people with whom 
 they had no contact. They knew the law; they 
 did not know life. The decision blocked tene- 
 ment house reform in New York for twenty 
 years, and was one more item in Roosevelt's 
 political education. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 " RANCH LIFE AND THE HUNTING TRAIL " 
 
 At the end of Mr. Roosevelt's membership in 
 the New York Assembly, he began his life on a 
 ranch in North Dakota. In this way he not only 
 learned much about the Western people, but came 
 to know the ranchman's life, and to have his first 
 chance to shoot big game. 
 
 He had married Miss Lee in 1880, the autumn 
 of the year he left college. Less than four years 
 afterwards his wife died, following the birth of 
 a daughter. His mother died on the next day, 
 and Roosevelt under the sorrow of these two 
 losses, left New York, and spent almost all his 
 time on his ranch, the Elkhorn, at Medora. 
 
 The people in Dakota looked on this Eastern 
 tenderfoot with a little amusement, and, at first, 
 probably with some contempt. He was, to their 
 minds, a "college dude" from the East, and 
 moreover he wore eyeglasses. To some of the 
 people whom he met, this fact, he says, was 
 enough to cause distrust. Eyeglasses were under 
 suspicion. 
 
 But, with two men who had been his guides in 
 28 
 
"RANCH LIFE" 29 
 
 Maine, Bill Sewall and Wilraot Dow, he began 
 his life as a ranchman and a cow-puncher, and 
 went through all the hard work and all the fun. 
 He took long rides after cattle, rounded them up 
 and helped in the branding. He followed the 
 herd when it stampeded in a thunderstorm. He 
 hunted all the game that there was in the county, 
 and also acted as Deputy Sheriff and helped 
 clear the place of horse-thieves and " bad men." 
 In one of his adventures Roosevelt showed that 
 he had taken to heart the celebrated advice which, 
 in Hamlet, Polonius gives to his son : 
 
 Beware 
 Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, 
 Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee. 
 
 Mulvaney, in one of Kipling's stories, proved that 
 he knew something about Shakespeare, for he 
 put this advice into his own language so as to 
 express the meaning perfectly : 
 
 " Don't fight wid ivry scutt for the pure joy av 
 fightin', but if you do, knock the nose av him first 
 an' frequint." 
 
 Roosevelt tried to keep out of the fight, — but 
 this is the way it happened. He was out after lost 
 horses, and had to put up at a little hotel where 
 there were no rooms downstairs, but a bar, a 
 
30 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 dining-room and a kitchen. It was late at night, 
 and there was trouble on, for he heard one or two 
 shots in the bar as he came up. He disliked the 
 idea of going in, but it was cold outside and there 
 was nowhere else to go. Inside the bar, a cheap 
 " bad man " was walking up and down with a 
 cocked revolver in each hand. He had been shoot- 
 ing at the clock, and making every one unhappy 
 and uncomfortable. 
 
 When Roosevelt came in, he called him " Four 
 eyes," because he wore spectacles, and announced 
 " Four eyes is going to set up the drinks." 
 Roosevelt tried to pass it ofif by laughing, and 
 sat down behind the stove to escape notice, and 
 keep away from trouble. But the " bad man " 
 came and stood over him, a gun in each hand, 
 using foul language, and insisting that " Four 
 eyes " should get up and treat. 
 
 " Well," Roosevelt reluctantly remarked, " if 
 I've got to, I've got to ! " As he said this, he rose 
 quickly, and hit the gun-man with his right fist on 
 the point of the jaw, then with his left, and again 
 with his right. The guns went off in the air, as 
 the " bad man " went over like a nine-pin, strik- 
 ing his head on the corner of the bar as he fell. 
 Roosevelt was ready to drop on him if he moved, 
 for he still clutched the revolvers. But he was 
 senseless. 
 
"RANCH LIFE" 31 
 
 The other people in the bar recovered their 
 nerve, once the man was down. They hustled 
 him out into the shed, and there was no more 
 trouble from him. 
 
 'Roosevelt hunted geese and ducks, deer, 
 mountain sheep, elk and grizzly bear during his 
 stay in the West. It was still possible to find 
 buffalo, although most of the great herds had van- 
 ished. The prairie was covered with relics of 
 the dead buffalo, so that one might ride for 
 hundreds of miles, seeing their bones everywhere, 
 but never getting a glimpse of a live one. Yet 
 he managed, after a hard hunt of several days, 
 to shoot a great bull buffalo. 
 
 An encounter with a grizzly bear is much more 
 exciting, and he was nearly killed by one bear. 
 In later years Roosevelt killed almost every kind 
 of large and dangerous game that there is on the 
 earth, — lions, elephants, the African buffalo, and 
 the rhinoceros. The Indian tiger is perhaps the 
 only one of the large savage animals which he 
 never encountered. Yet after meeting all these 
 and having some close shaves, especially with a 
 wounded elephant in Africa, he said that his nar- 
 rowest escape was with this grizzly bear. 
 
 It was when he had returned to the West and 
 was on a hunt in Idaho. He had had trouble 
 with his guide, who got drunk, so they parted 
 
32 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 company, and Roosevelt was alone. Looking 
 down into a valley, from a rocky ridge, he saw a 
 dark object, which he discovered was a large 
 grizzly bear. He fired, and the bear giving a 
 loud grunt, as the bullet struck, rushed forward 
 at a gallop into a laurel thicket. Roosevelt 
 paused at the edge of the thicket and peered 
 within, trying to see the bear, but knowing too 
 much about them to go into the brush where he 
 was. 
 
 When I was at the narrowest part of the thicket, he 
 suddenly left it, directly opposite, and then wheeled and 
 stood broadside to me on the hillside, a little above. 
 He turned his head stiffly towards me; scarlet strings 
 of froth hung from his lips; his eyes burned like 
 embers in the gloom. 
 
 I held true, aiming behind the shoulder, and my bullet 
 shattered the point or lower end of his heart, taking 
 out a big nick. Instantly the great bear turned with 
 a harsh roar of fury and challenge, blowing the bloody 
 foam from his mouth, so that I saw the gleam of his 
 white fangs; and then he charged straight at me, 
 crashing and bounding through the laurel bushes, so 
 that it was hard to aim. I waited until he came to a 
 fallen tree, raking him as he topped it with a ball, 
 which entered his chest and went through the cavity 
 of his body, but he neither swerved nor flinched, and 
 at the moment I did not know that I had struck him. 
 He came steadily on, and in another second was almost 
 upon me. I fired for his forehead, but my bullet went 
 
Courtesy of Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT WHEN ABOUT 
 10 YEARS OLD 
 
" RANCH LIFE " 33 
 
 low, entering his open mouth, smashing his lower jaw 
 and going into the neck. I leaped to one side almost 
 as I pulled the trigger ; and through the hanging smoke 
 the first thing I saw was his paw as he made a vicious 
 side hlow at me. The rush of his charge carried him 
 past. As he struck he lurched forward, leaving a pool 
 of bright blood where his muzzle hit the ground; but 
 he recovered himself and made two or three jumps; 
 onwards, while I hurriedly jammed a couple of cart- 
 ridges into the magazine, my rifle holding only four, all 
 of which I had fired. Then he tried to pull up, but as 
 he did so his muscles seemed suddenly to give way, his 
 head drooped, and he rolled over and over like a shot 
 rabbit. Each of my first three bullets had inflicted a 
 mortal wound.'- 
 
 There were, once, near Mr. Roosevelt's ranch, 
 three men who had been suspected of cattle-killing 
 and horse-stealing. The leader was a tall fellow 
 named Finnegan, who had long red hair reaching 
 to his shoulders, and always wore a broad hat 
 and a fringed buckskin shirt. He had been in a 
 number of shooting scrajpes. The others were a 
 half-breed, and a German, who was weak and 
 shiftless rather than actively bad. They had a 
 bad reputation, and were trying to get out of the 
 country before the Vigilance Committee got them. 
 
 About the only way to travel — it was early in 
 March and the rivers were swollen — was by 
 
 1 " The Wilderness Hunter," pp. 305-6- 
 
34 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 boat down the river. So when the cowboys on 
 Mr. Roosevelt's ranch found that his boat was 
 stolen, they were sure who had taken it. As it 
 is every man's duty in a half-settled country to 
 bring law-breakers to justice, and as Roosevelt 
 was, moreover, Deputy Sherifif, he decided to go 
 after the three thieves. Two of his cow-boys, 
 Sewall and Dow from Maine, in about three days 
 built another boat. In this, with their rifles, food 
 enough for two weeks, warm bedding and thick 
 clothes, Roosevelt, Sewall and Dow set out down 
 the Little Missouri River. 
 
 There had been a blizzard, the weather was still 
 bitterly cold, and the river full of drifting ice. 
 They shot prairie fowl and lived on them, with 
 bacon, bread and tea. It was cold work poling 
 and paddling down the river, with the current, 
 but against a head wind. The ice froze on the 
 pole handles. At night where they camped the 
 thermometer went down to zero. Next day they 
 shot two deer, for they needed meat, as they were 
 doing such hard work in the cold. 
 
 On the third day they sighted smoke, — the 
 camp-fire of the three thieves. Two boats, one 
 of them the stolen one, were tied up to the bank. 
 It was an exciting moment, for they expected a 
 fight. As it turned out, however, it was a tough 
 job, but not a fighting one. The German was 
 
" RANCH LIFE " 35 
 
 alone in camp, and they captured him without 
 trouble. The other two were out hunting. 
 When they came back an hour or two later, they 
 were surprised by the order to hold up their 
 hands. The half-breed obeyed at once, Finni- 
 gan hesitated until Roosevelt walked in close, 
 covering him with a rifle, and repeated the com- 
 mand. Then he gave up. 
 
 But this was only the beginning of a long, 
 hard task. It was often the way to shoot such 
 men at once, but Sherifif Roosevelt did not like 
 that. He was going to bring them back to jail. 
 At night the thieves could not be tied up, as they 
 would freeze to death. So Roosevelt, Sewall and 
 Dow had to take turns in watching them at night. 
 After they started down river again, they found 
 the river blocked by ice, and had to camp out for 
 eight days in freezing weather. The food all but 
 gave out, and at last there was nothing left but 
 flour. Bread made out of flour and muddy water 
 and nothing else, is not, says Mr. Roosevelt, good 
 eating for a steady diet. Besides they had to be 
 careful of meeting a band of Sioux Indians, who 
 were known to be in the region. 
 
 At last they worked back to a ranch, borrowed 
 a pony, on which Roosevelt rode up into the 
 mountains to a place where there was a wagon. 
 He hired this, with two broncos and a driver. 
 
36 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Sewall and Dow took the boats down the river, 
 while Roosevelt set out on a journey which took 
 two days and a night, walking behind the wagon, 
 and guarding the three men. The driver of the 
 wagon was a stranger. 
 
 At night they put up at a frontier hut, and the 
 Deputy Sherifif had to sit up all night to be sure 
 the three prisoners did not escape. When he 
 reached the little town of Dickinson, and handed 
 the men over to the Sheriff, he had traveled over 
 three hundred miles. He had brought three out- 
 laws to justice, and done something for the cause 
 of better government in the country where he 
 lived. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 TWO DEFEATS 
 
 Although he was still under twenty-five when he 
 left the New York Assembly, Roosevelt was fav- 
 orably known throughout the State. He had 
 been heard of, by those who keep up with politics, 
 all over the country. In 1884, the year of a 
 Presidential election, he was one of the four dele- 
 gates-at-large from New York to the Republican 
 convention at Chicago. The leader for the Pres- 
 idential nomination was James G. Blaine, a bril- 
 liant man who had many warm admirers. Also, 
 there were many in his own party, who distrusted 
 him, who thought that in the past he had not been 
 strictly honest. Good men differed on this ques- 
 tion and differ still. 
 
 Roosevelt favored Senator Edmunds of Ver- 
 mont, but he had agreed beforehand, with other 
 young Republican delegates, that they would sup- 
 port for the election the man named by the con- 
 vention. Since, in later years, Roosevelt refused 
 to abide by the decision of a party convention, 
 and led one of the most extraordinary " bolts " in 
 37 
 
38 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 the history of American politics, it is important to 
 consider for a moment the question of political 
 parties and the attitude a man may take toward 
 them. 
 
 Because parties are responsible for a good many 
 small, mean, and sometimes dishonorable acts, we 
 often hear parties and partisanship denounced. 
 People express the wish that there might be an end 
 to " party politics " and to " partisanship," and 
 that " all good men might get together " fbr the 
 good of the whole country. This may happen 
 when there is Heaven on earth, but not before. 
 Even the good and honest men continue to differ 
 about which is the wisest way to do things, and so 
 the people who think the same way about most 
 matters get together in a party. The suggestion, 
 by the way, that people should give up " partisan- 
 ship " often comes from people who do not by any 
 means intend to give up their own partisanship, — 
 they wish other folk to come over to their own 
 way of thinking. We are all apt to wish that 
 others would only be reasonable enough to agree 
 with lis. 
 
 Nor is it at all sure that everything would be 
 fine if there were no parties. Countries which 
 have tried to do without parties, have not made a 
 great success of it. There must be some organ- 
 ized group to hold responsible if men in office do 
 
TWO DEFEATS 39 
 
 badly; some people to warn that the things they 
 are doing are not approved by the majority of the 
 people. 
 
 With parties in existence, as they have been for 
 almost all of our history as a nation, there are in 
 the main, four ways in which a man may act 
 toward them. He may be a hidebound party man, 
 always voting the party ticket, and swallowing the 
 party platforms whole. Such persons often get 
 into the newspapers when they are elderly, as hav- 
 ing voted for every candidate on this or thatjparty 
 ticket for fifty or sixty or seventy years;' It 
 simply means, of course, that these men are proud 
 of the fact that they let other people do their think- 
 ing for them. 
 
 Or, a man may look upon a party as the means 
 through which he may secure better government. 
 He is proud of its wise and good acts, and is will- 
 ing to forgive its mistakes, because he knows that 
 no large group of men can be perfect. He be- 
 lieves in remaining loyal to his party as long as 
 possible, but he does not. set it above his country, 
 nor agree to follow it when it goes absolutely 
 wrong, or falls into the hands of men who hold 
 party welfare above patriotism. Roosevelt was a 
 party man of this kind. 
 
 Furthermore, a man may be an Independent, 
 one who will not join any party for long. Many 
 
40 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 of these are highly honorable and wise citizens, 
 who are of great value to the country, although 
 they can usually be nothing but helpers in any 
 good cause. Their position nearly always pre- 
 vents their becoming the chief actors in bringing 
 about any good and desirable reform. 
 
 The fourth class in which a man may find him- 
 self in regard to parties, is that of the so-called in- 
 dependent, who mistakes his own fussiness for 
 nobility of character. He can find fault with 
 everybody and every party, but he can be loyal to 
 none. He is strong on leaving a party for the 
 smallest excuse ; never on staying with it. It is as 
 if a member of a foot-ball team, half an hour be- 
 fore the game, should refuse to play, because some 
 other member of the team had once cheated in an 
 examination. He satisfies his own conscience, but 
 he fails in the loyalty he owes to the team and its 
 friends. 
 
 At the convention in 1884 Roosevelt took an 
 important part for so young a man. He made 
 speeches and worked for Senator Edmunds, but 
 Mr. Blaine was nominated. This caused a split 
 in the party, and many of its members joined the 
 Democrats. They were called by their opponents 
 " Mugwumps," and since they believed they were 
 acting for the best, they did not mind being called 
 that or any other name. 
 
TWO DEFEATS 41 
 
 So many prominent and able Republicans joined 
 the Mugwumps it is sometimes forgotten that 
 many more equally good and wise Republicans re- 
 fused to " bolt," but stayed with the party and 
 voted for Mr. Blaine. Either they did not at all 
 believe the charges which had been made against 
 him — and it is as impossible now as it was then 
 to prove the charges — or else they thought that 
 the country would be far worse off with the Demo- 
 cratic party in power than with the Republicans 
 successful. 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt was disgusted with the result of 
 the convention, but did not believe that he was 
 justified in leaving the party. He therefore 
 stayed in it, and supported Mr. Blaine. 
 
 The Democrats nominated the courageous Gov- 
 ernor of New York, Grover Cleveland. Both be- 
 fore and after this, he and Mr, Roosevelt worked 
 together for measures of good government, and 
 respected each other, while belonging to different 
 parties. The presidential election turned out to 
 be close, and in the end several incidents besides 
 the split in the Republican party worked against 
 Blaine. He was narrowly defeated. The change 
 of a few hundred votes in the State of New York 
 would have made Blaine the President. As in 
 later years large election frauds were discovered to 
 have been going on in New York, some people 
 
42 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 contend with good show of reason, that Blaine 
 and not Cleveland was really the choice of the 
 voters. 
 
 Two years after this, in 1886, when Roosevelt 
 was on his Dakota ranch, the Republicans nomin- 
 ated him for Mayor of New York City. He was 
 about twenty-eight years old, and it is evident that 
 he had made a mark in politics. He came East, 
 accepted the nomination, and made the campaign. 
 
 The opponents were, first, Abram S. Hewitt, a 
 respectable candidate nominated by Tammany 
 Hall in its customary fashion of offering a good 
 man, now and then, to pull the wool over the eyes 
 of persons who naturally need some excuse for 
 voting to put New York into the hands of the 
 political organization whose existence has always 
 been one of America's greatest disgraces. 
 
 The other candidate was Henry George, a man 
 of high character, nominated by the United Labor 
 Party. Mr. Hewitt was elected, with Mr. George 
 second and Mr. Roosevelt third. 
 
 About a month after the election, Mr. Roosevelt 
 went to England, where he married Miss Edith 
 Kermit Carow, of New York. She had been his 
 friend and playmate when he was a boy, and was 
 his sister's friend. The groomsman was a young 
 Englishman, Mr. Cecil Spring-Rice. Years later 
 the groom and his "best man" came together 
 
TWO DEFEATS 43 
 
 again in Washington, when the American was 
 President Roosevelt, and the Englishman was Sir 
 Cecil Spring-Rice, the British Ambassador to the 
 United States. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 FIGHTING OFFICE-SEEKERS 
 
 To tell the story of Roosevelt's life it is necessary 
 to talk much about politics, and that to some 
 people is a dull subject. But he was in political 
 office over twenty years of his life, always inter- 
 ested and active in politics, and the vigor which he 
 brought to his duties made public affairs attractive 
 to thousands of Americans who had felt little con- 
 cern about them. 
 
 This alone was a great service. If a man is 
 going the wrong way in political life, if he is try- 
 ing to do unwise or evil things, he is a danger, but 
 a danger which may be corrected. He may be 
 made to turn his efforts in useful directions. But 
 the man who takes no interest at all in the gov- 
 ernment of his city, state or nation, who is so 
 feeble that he cannot even take the time to vote on 
 election day, but goes hunting or fishing instead, 
 — this man is a hopeless nuisance, who does not 
 deserve the liberty which he enjoys, nor the pro- 
 tection which his government gives him. 
 
 Politics, when Mr. Roosevelt was active, were 
 44 
 
FIGHTING OFFICE-SEEKERS 45 
 
 not dull. Few men have ever made them so lively 
 and interesting. Every activity in life meant 
 something to him, a chance for useful work or for 
 good fun. He had a perfectly " corking time," 
 he said, when he was President, and the words 
 shocked a number of good people who had par- 
 doned or overlooked dirty actions by other public 
 men, so long as these other men kept up a certain 
 copy-book behavior which they thought was 
 "dignity." 
 
 It is a question if any man ever had a better 
 time, ever had more real fun in his life, than did 
 Mr. Roosevelt. In spite of the hard work he put 
 in, in spite of long days and weeks of drudgery he 
 knew how to get happiness out of every minute. 
 He did not engage in drinking and gambling for 
 his amusements. He did not adopt a priggish 
 attitude on these matters, — he simply knew that 
 there were other things which were better sport. 
 He was a religious man, a member all his life of 
 his father's church, but religion did not sour him, 
 make him gloomy, or cause him to interfere with 
 other people about their belief or lack of it. 
 
 He got an immense amount of pleasure in his 
 family life, in half a dozen kinds of athletic sports, 
 especially the ones which led him outdoors, and in 
 books. In these things he was marvelously wise 
 or marvelously fortunate. Some men's lives are 
 
46 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 spent indoors, in an office or in a study among 
 books. Their amusements are indoor games, and 
 they come to despise or secretly to envy, the more 
 fortunate men who live outdoors. 
 
 Some of the outdoors men, on the other hand, 
 become almost as one-sided. Knowing nothing 
 of the good fun that is in books they deny them- 
 selves much pleasure, and take refuge in calling 
 " high-brows " the men who have simply more 
 common sense and capacity for enjoyment than 
 themselves. 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt, more than most men of his time, 
 certainly more than any other public man, could 
 enjoy to the utmost the best things the world has 
 in it. He knew the joy of the hard and active life 
 in the open, and he knew the keen pleasure of 
 books. So when he returned to America after his 
 marriage in 1886, he built a house on Sagamore 
 Hill at Oyster Bay on Long Island. Here he 
 could ride, shoot, row, look after his farm, and 
 here in the next year or two he wrote two books. 
 One was the life of Gouverneur Morris, American 
 minister to France in the early years of our na- 
 tion ; the other a life of Senator Thomas H. Ben- 
 ton of Missouri. 
 
 But he was not long to stay out of political 
 office. In 1888 President Cleveland had been de- 
 feated for reelection by the Republican candidate, 
 
FIGHTING OFFICE-SEEKERS 47 
 
 Benjamin Harrison. The new President appoint- 
 ed Mr. Roosevelt as one of the Civil Service Com- 
 missioners, with his office in Washington. 
 
 Most politicians are charged, certainly Mr. 
 Roosevelt was sometimes charged, with being a 
 selfish seeker after personal advancement. There 
 is not much on which to base this argument in 
 Mr. Roosevelt's acceptance of this office. For the 
 man who is looking out merely for his own ambi- 
 tions, for his own success in politics, is careful of 
 the position he takes, careful to keep out of offices 
 where there are many chances to make enemies. 
 The Civil Service Commission was, of all places 
 at that time, the last where a selfish politician 
 would like to be. Nobody could do his duties 
 there and avoid making enemies. It was a thank- 
 less job, consisting of trying to protect the public 
 interests against a swarm of office-seekers and 
 their friends in Congress. 
 
 It is ridiculous now to remember what a fight 
 had to be waged to set up the merit system of the 
 Civil Service in this country. The old system, 
 by which a good public servant was turned out to 
 make room for a hungry office-seeker of the suc- 
 cessful political party, was firmly established. 
 Men and women were not appointed to office be- 
 cause they knew anything about the work they 
 were to do, but because they were cousins of a 
 
48 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Congressman's wife, or political heelers who had 
 helped to get the Congressman elected. Nobody 
 thought of the offices as places where, for the good 
 of the whole country, it was necessary to have 
 the best men. Instead, the offices were looked on 
 as delicious slices of pie to be grabbed and de- 
 voured by the greediest and strongest person in 
 sight. 
 
 The Civil Service Commission, when Mr. 
 Roosevelt became a member, had been established 
 by Congress, but it was hated and opposed by 
 Congress and the Commission was still fought, - 
 secretly or openly. Congressmen tried to ridi- 
 cule it, to hamper it by denials of money, and to 
 overrule it in every possible way. A powerful 
 Republican Congressman and a powerful Demo- 
 cratic Senator tried to browbeat Roosevelt, and 
 were both caught by him in particularly mean lies. 
 Naturally they did not enjoy the experience.; r 
 
 At the end of his term, President Harrison was 
 defeated by Mr. Cleveland, who came back again 
 to the Presidency. He re-appointed Mr. Roose- 
 velt, who thus spent six years in the Commission. 
 When he retired he had made a good many 
 enemies among the crooked politicians, and some '[ 
 friends and admirers among well-informed men 
 who watch the progress of good government. > 
 He was still unknown to the great body of cit-. ' 
 
Mr. Roosevelt as a Hunter in his Ranching Days 
 
FIGHTING OFFICE-SEEKERS 49 
 
 izens throughout the country, although he had 
 been fighting their fight for six years. 
 
 He went from Washington to accept another 
 thankless and still more difficult position in New 
 York City. It was one which had been fatal to 
 political ambitions, and was almost certain to end 
 the career of any man who accepted it. This was 
 the Presidency of the Board of Police Commis- 
 sioners. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 POLICE COMMISSIONER 
 
 ExpERiEisrcED politicians always warn young men 
 who wish to rise in politics, who wish to hold high 
 office in the state or national government, to keep 
 out of city politics. It is a grave-yard for reputa- 
 tions, and it was that in 1895, when Roosevelt 
 took charge of the New York Police, even more 
 than to-day. 
 
 Between the unreasonable reformers, who ex- 
 pect perfection, arrived at in their own way ; the 
 sensible folk who demand an honest government; 
 the lax; and easy-going people who do not care 
 how much rottenness there is about, so that it is 
 kept partly covered up (and this is one of the 
 largest classes) and the plain criminals who are 
 out for graft and plunder, the city office-holder is 
 torn in a dozen ways at once. 
 
 If he is dishonest or weak, he goes under im- 
 mediately. If he is honest, but lacking in perfect 
 courage, he is nearly useless. And if he is both 
 honest and brave, but has not good brains, is not 
 able to use his mind quickly and well, he is either 
 
 so 
 
POLICE COMMISSIONER 51 
 
 helpless, or soon placed in a position where he 
 seems to have been dishonorable. For, of course 
 the first method which a crooked man uses to de- 
 stroy his honest opponent, is to try to make him 
 look crooked, too. Often during his life Roose- 
 velt insisted upon the fact that a man in public 
 life must not only be honest, but that he must 
 have a back-bone and a good head into the bar- 
 gain. 
 
 Nothing but a sense of public duty, nothing but 
 a desire to help the cause of better government, 
 could have made a man take the Police Commis- 
 sionership in 1895. Mayor Strong, on a Reform 
 ticket, had beaten Tammany Hall. He wanted an 
 able and energetic man and so sent for Roosevelt. 
 The condition of the P'olice Department souncls 
 more like a chapter from a dime novel gone mad, 
 than from any real state of things which could 
 exist in a modem city. Yet it did exist. 
 
 The police were supposed to protect the city 
 against crime. What they really did was to stop 
 some of the crime — when the criminal had no 
 " pull '" — and to protect the rest of it. The 
 criminal handed over a certain amount of his 
 plunder to the police, and they let him go on with 
 his crime. More than that, they saw that no one 
 bothered him. There was a regular scale of 
 prices for things varying all the way from serious 
 
52 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 crime down to small offenses. It cost more to 
 be a highway robber, burglar, gun-man or mur- 
 derer, for instance, than merely to keep a saloon 
 open after the legal time for closing. A man had 
 to pay more for running' a big gambling-house, 
 than simply for blocking the side-walk with rub- 
 bish and ash-cans. 
 
 Roosevelt found that most of the policemen 
 were honest, or wished to be honest. But, sur- 
 rounded as they were by grafters, it was almost 
 impossible for a man to keep straight. If he be- 
 gan by accepting little bribes, he ended, as he rose 
 in power, by taking big ones, and finally he was in 
 partnership with the chief rascals. The hideous 
 system organized by the powerful men in Tam- 
 many Hall spread outward and downward, and at 
 last all over the city. Roosevelt did not stop all 
 the crime, of course, nor leave the city spotless 
 when he ended his two years service. But he did 
 make it possible for one of his chief opponents, 
 one of the severest of all critics, Mr. Godkin, a 
 newspaper editor, to write him, at the end of his 
 term of oflGce: 
 
 " In New York you are doing the greatest work of 
 which any American to-day is capable, and exhibiting 
 to the young men of the country the spectacle of a 
 very important office administered by a man of high 
 
POLICE COMMISSIONER 53 
 
 character in the most efficient way amid a thousand 
 difficulties. As a lesson in politics, I cannot think of 
 anything more instructive." * 
 
 How did he do this? First, he tried to keep 
 politics out of the police-force, — to appoint men 
 because they would make good officers, not be- 
 cause they were RepubUcans or Democrats. 
 Next, he tried to reward and promote policemen 
 who had proved themselves brave, — who had 
 saved people in burning houses or from drowning, 
 or had arrested violent men at great danger to 
 themselves. This is commonly done in the New 
 York Police Department to-day: it was not so 
 common before 1895. Roosevelt and his fellow 
 commissioners found one old policeman who had 
 saved twenty-five people from drowning and two 
 or three from burning buildings. They gave him 
 his first promotion. He began to have the De- 
 partment pay for a policeman's uniform when it 
 was torn in making an arrest or otherwise ruined 
 in the performance of duty. Before, the police- 
 man had had to pay for a new uniform himself. 
 He had each policeman trained to use a pistol, so 
 that if he had to fire it at a criminal, he would hit 
 the criminal, and not somebody else. He did his 
 best to stop the custom of selling beer and whiskey 
 
 1 Thayer, " Theodore Roosevelt," p. 106. 
 
54 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 to children. Finally he stopped disrespect for 
 law by having law enforced, whether people liked 
 it or not. 
 
 Of course, this got him into hot water. One of 
 our worst faults in America lies in passing a tre- 
 mendous number of laws, and then letting them be 
 broken. In many instances the worst troubles are 
 with laws about strong drink. People in the State, 
 outside of New York City, and some of those in 
 the City, wished to have a law to close the saloons 
 on Sunday. So they passed it. But so few peo- 
 ple in the City really wished such a law, so many 
 of them wished to drink on Sunday, that the 
 saloons stayed open, and the saloon-keepers paid 
 bribes to the police for " protection." The result 
 was not temperance, but the opposite. Moreover 
 it led to disrespect for the law, and corruption for 
 the police. It was not Commissioner Roosevelt's 
 business whether the law was a wise one or not, 
 but it was his business to enforce it. 
 
 He enforced it, and had the saloons closed. As 
 he said : " The howl that rose was deafening. The 
 professional politicians raved. The yellow-press 
 surpassed themselves in clamor and mendacity. 
 A favorite assertion was that I was enforcing a 
 ' blue law,' an obsolete law that had never before 
 been enforced. As a matter of fact, I was en- 
 
POLICE COMMISSIONER 55 
 
 forcing honestly a law that had hitherto been en- 
 forced dishonestly." ^ 
 
 In the end, those who wished to drink on Sun- 
 days found a way to do it, and the law intended 
 to regulate drinking habits failed, as such laws 
 nearly always have done. A judge decided that 
 as drink could be served with meals, a man need 
 only eat one sandwich or a pretzel and he could 
 then drink seventeen beers, or as many as he liked. 
 But the result of Roosevelt's action had nearly 
 stopped bribe-giving to the police. So there was 
 something gained. 
 
 Roosevelt went about the city at night, some- 
 times alone, sometimes with his friend Jacob Riis, 
 a reporter who knew about police work and the 
 slum districts of the city. If he caught police- 
 men off their beat, they were. ordered to report at 
 his office in the morning and explain. When his 
 friends were dancing at fashionable balls, he was 
 apt to be looking after the police outside. 
 
 From about this time, Roosevelt began to be 
 known all over the United States. He had been 
 heard of ever since he was in the Assembly, but 
 only by those who follow politics closely. Now, 
 New York newspapers, with their cartoons, began 
 to make him celebrated everywhere. The fact 
 
 -"Autobiography," p. 210. 
 
56 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 that when he spoke emphatically, he showed his 
 teeth for an instant, was enlarged upon in pictures 
 and in newspaper articles, and it became connected 
 with him henceforth. 
 
 We demand amusing newspapers; we like the 
 fun in every subject brought out as no other na- 
 tion does. And we get it. Our newspapers are 
 by far the brightest and most readable in the 
 world. But we have to pay for it, and we often 
 pay by having the real truth concealed from us in 
 a mass of comedy. Newspapers seize upon a man 
 or woman who has something amusing in his life, 
 manner, or speech, and play upon that peculiarity 
 until at last the true character of the person is 
 hidden. 
 
 This happened with Roosevelt. About the time 
 of his Police Commissionership, the newspaper 
 writers and artists began to invent a grotesque and 
 amusing character called " Teddy," who was for- 
 ever snapping his teeth, shouting " Bully ! " or 
 rushing at everybody, flourishing a big stick. 
 This continued for years and was taken for truth 
 by a great many people. To this day, this imag- 
 inary person is believed in by thousands. And in 
 th6 meantime, the genuine man, a brave high- 
 minded American, loving his country ardently, 
 and serving her to the utmost of his great strength 
 
POLICE COMMISSIONER 57 
 
 and ability, was engaged in his work, known by 
 all who had personal contact with him to be stern 
 indeed against evil-doers, but tender and gentle to 
 the unfortunate, to women and children and to 
 animals. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE ROUGH RIDER 
 
 In 1897 the Republican Party came again into 
 power; Mr. McKinley was inaugurated as Presi- 
 dent. Roosevelt was appointed Assistant Secre- 
 tary of the Navy, and came with his family to 
 Washington. The Secretary of the Navy was 
 Mr. John D. Long. 
 
 America was within a year of getting into war, 
 and as usual was not ready for it. There are men 
 so foolish as to rejoice because we have never been 
 ready for the wars in which we have taken part 
 about every twenty or thirty years in our history. 
 This simply means that they rejoice at the un- 
 necessary deaths of thousands of other Americans 
 who die from disease in camp, or are killed in the 
 field through neglect to prepare in advance. 
 Preparation for war is not wholly the matter of 
 having weapons ready to fight the enemy. It also 
 means healthy camps for our soldiers to live in, 
 and readiness to furnish clothing, food and med- 
 ical supplies. For lack of these, thousands of our 
 
 S8 
 
THE ROUGH RIDER 59 
 
 friends and relatives die in every war we are in. 
 
 A rebellion had been going on in Cuba for years. 
 The cruel government of Spain had kept the 
 Cubans in misery and in rebellion, and disturbed 
 the friendship between Spain and the United 
 States. It was our duty to see that Cuban expe- 
 ditions did not sail from our coast to help their 
 friends, and in this work a gireat many ships of 
 our Navy were busy all the time. Nobody liked 
 to have to do this for we naturally sympathized 
 with the Cubans, who were making such a brave 
 fight against stupid and tyrannical governors sent 
 from Spain. One of the last of these was par- 
 ticularly bad. He herded the Cuban people into 
 camps where they died of disease and starvation, 
 and he had great numbers of them shot without 
 mercy. We had justly revolted against the mis- 
 government of King George III in 1776, but noth- 
 ing that King George's governors and generals 
 had done to us was as bad as the things the 
 Spaniards were doing in Cuba, in 1896 and 1897. 
 
 Many of the men ,in Washington felt that war 
 would come sooner or later. Roosevelt believed 
 it and worked constantly to have the Navy ready. 
 He had the support of the President and of Secre- 
 tary Long in nearly everything that he proposed, 
 and so was able to do some useful work. It is 
 important to tinderstand what Roosevelt thought 
 
6o THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 about war, not only about this, but about all wars. 
 Here it is in his own words. 
 
 I abhor unjust war. I abhor injustice and bullying 
 by the strong at the expense of the weak, whether 
 among nations or individuals. I abhor violence and 
 bloodshed. I believe that war should never be resorted 
 to when, or so long as, it is honorably possible to avoid 
 it. I respect all men and women who from high mo- 
 tives and with sanity and self-respect do all they can to 
 avert war. I advocate preparation for war in order to 
 avert war; and I should never advocate war unless it 
 were the only alternative to dishonor.^ 
 
 You will be able to see from what he did while 
 he was President, when he was in a position where 
 he could have plunged the country into war half a 
 dozen times, whether these words were true, or 
 whether he was really the fire-eater which some of 
 his enemies insisted he was. 
 
 He secured from Congress nearly a million dol- 
 lars, to permit the Navy to engage in target-prac- 
 tice. To those who were alarmed at such 
 " waste," he remarked that gun-powder was 
 meant to be burned, and that sailors must learn to 
 shoot, since in battle, the shots that hit are the 
 only ones that count. There is nothing wonder- 
 ful about such remarks. In looking back at them 
 
 1 " Autobiography," p. 226. 
 
THE ROUGH RIDER 6i 
 
 there seems to be nothing wonderful about many- 
 things that he said and did. They are merely 
 examples of plain, common-sense, and it appears 
 ridiculous that anybody should have had to make 
 such remarks, or to fight hard to get such clearly 
 necessary things done. Yet he did have to fight 
 for them. It had to be driven into the heads of 
 some of the men in Congress that it is not the 
 proper use of gun-powder to keep it stored up, 
 until war is declared, then bring it out, partly 
 spoiled, and give it to soldiers and sailors, who 
 for lack of practice, do not know how to shoot 
 straight. 
 
 Roosevelt also was able to help in having ap- 
 pointed to command the Asiatic squadron, a naval 
 officer named Commodore George Dewey. 
 
 On February 15, 1898, while affairs were at 
 their worst between America and Spain, our bat- 
 tleship Maine was blown up in Havana Harbor. 
 She had gone there on a friendly visit, but now 
 was destroyed and sent to the bottom. Over two 
 hundred and fifty of our men were killed. Al- 
 most every one knew that war was now certain. 
 For weeks the country debated as to the cause of 
 the explosion which sank the Maine, and the mat- 
 ter was investigated by naval officers assisted by 
 divers. They found that the explosion had come 
 
62 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 from the outside. Somebody had set off a mine 
 or torpedo beneath the ship. Nobody in America 
 disputed this, except a few of the peace-at-any- 
 price folk, who preferred to think that the care- 
 lessness of our own sailors had been the cause. 
 These gentlemen always think the best of the peo- 
 ple of other nations, which is a fine thing; but 
 they are always ready to believe the worst of their 
 own countrymen, which is, on the whole, rather a 
 nasty trait. 
 
 Roosevelt worked at top-speed in the Navy De- 
 partment, and began to lay plans for going to the 
 war himself. He believed that it was right and 
 necessary to fight Spain, and end the horrible suf- 
 fering in Cuba. And he believed that it was the 
 duty first and foremost of men like himself, who 
 advised war, to take part in it. He was nearly 
 forty years old, and had a family. Many other 
 men in his place would have discovered that their 
 services were most important in Washington. 
 They would have stayed in their offices, and let 
 oth^r men (whom they called " jingoes ") dd the 
 fighting for them. It was never Roosevelt's cus- 
 tom to act that way. 
 
 Later in February, while Mr. Long was away, 
 and Roosevelt was Acting-Secretary of the Navy, 
 he sent this cable message to Commodore 
 Dewey : 
 
THE ROUGH RIDER 63 
 
 Washington, February 25, '98. 
 
 Dewey, Hong Kong 
 
 Order the squadron, except the Monocacy, to Hong 
 
 Kong. Keep full of coal. In the event of declaration 
 
 of war Spain, your duty will be to see that the Spanish 
 
 squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast, and then 
 
 offensive operations in Philippine Islands. Keep 
 
 Olympia until further orders. ^ 
 
 Roosevelt. 
 
 War against Spain was declared in April, — the 
 month in our history which has also seen the be- 
 ginning of our Revolution, our Civil War, and 
 our entrance into the Great War against Germany. 
 Congress arranged for three regiments of volun- 
 teer cavalry to be raised among the men in the 
 Rockies and on the Great Plains who knew how 
 to ride and shoot. Here Roosevelt saw his 
 chance. He knew these men and longed to go to 
 war in their company. 
 
 The Secretary of War ofifered to make him 
 Colonel of one of these regiments. It is worth 
 while to notice what his reply was. He knew how 
 to manage a horse and a rifle, he had lived in the 
 open and could take care of himself in the field. 
 He had had three years in the National Guard in 
 New York, rising to the rank of Captain. Many 
 men in the Civil War without one half of his ex- 
 perience and knowledge, gayly accepted Brigadier- 
 Generalships. Also, in the Spanish War, another 
 
64 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 public man, Mr. William J. Bryan, allowed him- 
 self to be made a Colonel, and took full command 
 of a regiment, without one day's military expe- 
 rience. Yet Roosevelt declined the ofifer of a 
 Colonel's commission and asked to be made Lieu- 
 tenant-Colonel, with Leonard Wood, of the reg- 
 ular Army as his Colonel. 
 
 When you hear or read that Roosevelt was a 
 conceited man, always pushing himself forward, 
 it may be well to ask if that is the way a con,ceited 
 man would have acted. 
 
 Colonel Wood was an army surgeon, who had 
 been a fighting . officer in the campaign against 
 the Apaches. He had been awarded the Medal of 
 Honor, the highest decoration an American sol- 
 dier can win for personal bravery. 
 
 The new regiment, the First United States 
 Volunteer Cavalry, was promptly called, by some 
 newspaper or by the public, the " Rough Riders," 
 and by that name it is always known. Most of 
 the men in it came from Arizona, New Mexico, 
 Oklahoma and the Indian Territory, but it had 
 members from nearly every State. Many Eastern 
 college men were in it, including some famous 
 foot-ball players, polo-players, tennis champions 
 and oarsmen. The regiment trained at San An- 
 tonio, and landed in Cuba for the attack on Santi- 
 ago on June 22. The troopers had to leave their 
 
THE ROUGH RIDER 65 
 
 horses behind, so they were to fight on foot after 
 all. Roosevelt's Rough Riders, somebody said, 
 had become Wood's Weary Walkers. The walk- 
 ing was not pleasant to some of the cow-boys, who 
 never used to walk a step when there was a horse 
 to ride. 
 
 Within a day or two they were in a fight at 
 Las Guasimas. It was a confusing business, ad- 
 vancing through the jungle and fired at by an 
 enemy they could not see. The Rough Riders lost 
 eight men killed and thirty-four wounded. The 
 Spaniards were using smokeless powder, then 
 rather a new thing in war. Two of our regi- 
 ments at Santiago were still using black powder 
 rifles, and the artillery used black powder, which 
 by its smoke showed the enemy just where they 
 were. Our artillery was always silenced or driven 
 off, because this country had been so neglectful of 
 its Army and its men as to let poor, old backward 
 Spain get better guns, and more modern ammuni- 
 tion than ours. That never should happen with 
 a rich, progressive country like ours. 
 
 A few days later came the fight at San Juan. 
 Colonel Wood had been put in command of the 
 brigade, so Roosevelt led the regiment of Rough 
 Riders. It was a fearfully hot day; many men 
 dropped from exhaustion. The regular regiments 
 of cavalry, together with the Rough Riders, all 
 
66 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 fighting on foot, moved forward against the low 
 hills on which were the Spaniards in block-houses 
 or trenches. For some while they were kept wait- 
 ing in reserve, taking what shelter they could from 
 the Mauser bullets, which came whirring through 
 the tall jungle grass. This is the most trying part 
 of a fight. It is all right when at last you can 
 charge your enemy and come to close quarters 
 with him, but to lie on the ground under fire, 
 unable to see anybody to fire upon, is the worst 
 strain upbn the soldiers' nerves. As one after 
 another is shot, the officers begin to watch the men 
 closely to see how they are standing it. Roose- 
 velt received a trifling wound from a shrapnel 
 bullet at the beginning of the fight. Later his 
 orderly had a sun-stroke, and when he called an- 
 other orderly to take a message, this second man 
 was killed as he stood near, pitching forward dead 
 at Roosevelt's feet. 
 
 Finally came the order to charge. Roosevelt 
 was the only mounted man in the regiment. He 
 had intended to go into the fight on foot, as he had 
 at Las Guasimas, but found that the heat was so 
 bad that he could not run up and down the line 
 and superintend things unless he was on horse- 
 back. When he was mounted he could see his 
 own men better, and they could see him. So 
 could the enemy see him better, and he had one 
 
THE ROUGH RIDER 6^ 
 
 or two narrow escapes because of being so con- 
 spicuous. 
 
 He started in the rear of the regiment, which is 
 where the Colonel should be, according to the 
 books, but soon rode through the lines and led the 
 charge up " Kettle Hill," — so-called by the Rough 
 Riders because there were some sugar kettles on 
 top of it. His horse was scraped by a couple of 
 bullets, as he went up, and one of the bullets 
 nicked his elbow. Members of the other cavalry 
 regiments were mingled with the Rough Riders in 
 the charge, — their officers had been waiting for 
 orders, and were glad to join in the advance. 
 The Spaniards were driven out and the Rough 
 Riders planted their flags on the hill. 
 
 But there were other hills and other trenches 
 full of Spaniards beyond, and again the Rough 
 Riders, mixed with men of other regiments, went 
 forward. In cleaning out the trenches Roosevelt 
 and his orderly were suddenly fired on at less than 
 ten yards by two Spaniards. Roosevelt killed one 
 of them with his revolver. ' The Rough Riders 
 had had eighty-eight killed and wounded out of 
 less than five hundred men who were in the fight. 
 
 The American forces were now within sight of 
 Santiago, but they had to dig in and hold the 
 ground they had taken. There was a short period 
 in the trenches, which seemed tedious to the riders 
 
68 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 from the plains, but was nothing to what men, 
 years later, had to endure in the Great War against 
 Germany. At last Santiago surrendered, on 
 July 17. 
 
 The war ended within about a month. Com- 
 modore Dewey had beaten the Spanish Fleet at 
 Manila and Admiral Sampson and his fleet had 
 destroyed the Spanish cruisers which were forced 
 out of Santiago Harbor on July 3rd, as a result of 
 the Army getting within striking distance of the 
 city. One other thing of importance was done by 
 Roosevelt before the regiment was brought home 
 to Montauk Point and mustered out. After the 
 surrender of Santiago it was supposed that the 
 war was going on and that there would be a cam- 
 paign in the winter against Havana. But the 
 American Army was full of yellow fever. Half 
 the Rough Riders were sick at one time, and the 
 condition of other regiments was as bad. The 
 higher officers knew that unless the troops were 
 taken to some healthier climate to recover, there 
 would be nothing left of them. Over four thou- 
 sand men were sick, and not ten per cent, of the 
 Army was fit for active work. But the War De- 
 partment would not listen to the suggestion that 
 the army be sent for a while to a cooler climate. 
 
 What none of the regular Army officers could 
 afford to do, Roosevelt did. He wrote a letter to 
 
THE ROUGH RIDER 69 
 
 General Shafter, the commander of the expedition, 
 explaining the state of things, and setting out how 
 important it was, if any of the army was to be 
 kept alive, that they should be sent away from 
 Cuba, until the sickly season was over. General 
 Shafter really wished such a letter to be written, 
 and he allowed the Associated Press reporter to 
 have it as soon as it was handed to him. 
 
 Then, all the Generals joined with Roosevelt in 
 a " Round Robin " to General Shafter, saying the 
 same things. The Government at Washington 
 began to take notice, and in a short time ordered 
 the army home. 
 
 Roosevelt had taken a leading part in an act 
 which caused him to be severely blamed by many, 
 to be denounced by all who worship military eti- 
 quette, and charged with " insubordination " by 
 men who would rather make a mess of things and 
 do it according to the rules of the book, than suc- 
 ceed in something useful and do it by common- 
 sense rules made up at the time. He had shocked 
 the folks who like red tape, and he had helped Save 
 the lives of perhaps four thousand men. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK 
 
 When the Rough Riders were disbanded at Mon- 
 tauk Point in September 1898, Theodore Roose- 
 velt was the most popular man in America. 
 This is the judgment of his best historian, Mr. 
 Thayer, and it is undoubtedly correct. The war 
 had made known to the country a number of 
 professional soldiers or sailors — especially Ad- 
 miral Dewey and Admiral Sampson, whose con- 
 duct had been splendid. It had also created some 
 popular " heroes," whose fame was brief. But 
 Colonel Roosevelt was first and foremost a citizen, 
 his career as a soldier was for a few months only. 
 Behind that was a solid foundation of service in 
 civil office. Ahead of it were still finer achieve- 
 ments, also in civil life. He felt the pride which 
 all men feel — despite much pretense and hum- 
 bug — to have had the chance to lead men in 
 battle for a just cause, to have put his life in 
 danger when his country needed such ofifer of 
 sacrifice. 
 
 But the Santiago campaign, the charge up San 
 70 
 
GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK 71 
 
 Juan hill, did not " make " Roosevelt. It was a 
 dramatic episode in his history ; it attracted atten- 
 tion to him. Such are the peculiar conditions of 
 politics, it proved a short cut to the White House. 
 He said, frankly, that he would never have been 
 President if the Rough Riders had not gone to 
 Cuba. In this he underestimated himself, as he 
 often did. He had too much ability in politics, 
 too much courage in fighting for the cause of bet- 
 ter government, at a time when courage was 
 badly needed, to have failed to rise to the highest 
 office. Back in the days when he was Civil Serv- 
 ice Commissioner two visitors in the White House, 
 saw him, also a visitor, looking about the rooms. 
 
 " There is a young man," said one of them, who 
 knew him, " who is going to move into this house 
 himself, before long." 
 
 After Cuba, the next step was the Governorship 
 of New York State. Before he was out of uni- 
 form, the politicians began talking about him for 
 the place. The Republican party in New York 
 was in a bad way. They had quarreled among 
 themselves ; the Democrats had just beaten them in 
 an election. They knew they must have a strong 
 candidate for Governor, or the Democrats, (that 
 is, Tammany Hall) would get control at Albany. 
 
 This was the great day of the political Bosses. 
 Perhaps at no time since have they been quite as 
 
72 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 powerful as they were then. A man named 
 Croker was the Boss of the Democratic Party; a 
 man named Piatt, the Boss of the Republicans. 
 Men called the Boss of their own party the " Lead- 
 er," but they referred to the " Leader " of the 
 other party as the Boss, without wasting any 
 politeness. Most men do not pay much attention 
 to politics ; a Boss is a man who pays too much at- 
 tention to them. He exists because the average 
 citizen thinks he has done his whole duty if he 
 votes on election day. A Boss works at his busi- 
 ness, which is politics, night and day, all the year 
 round. He might be very useful if he could be 
 kept honest. He manages to get a great deal of 
 power, in ways that are shady, if not actually 
 criminal. Then, if he is one kind of a Boss, 
 greedy for money, he sells this power to the high- 
 est bidder. Men are nominated for office, because 
 the Boss has picked them out, as a poultryman 
 might select a fat goose. Usually he selects a man 
 who will obey orders. But another kind of Boss 
 does not especially care for money. He likes the 
 power which his position gives him, he likes to 
 be able to move men about as if they were toy- 
 soldiers. 
 
 Such apparently was Senator Piatt, the Re- 
 publican Boss of New York. People had so 
 neglected their duty of managing their own af- 
 
' GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK 73 
 
 fairs in politics, that he had seized the reins, and 
 could say who should be nominated. In the same 
 way Croker was the ruler of the Democratic party 
 in New, York, and could say who should be nomi- 
 nated in his party. 
 
 Now, in such a situation, what was an honest 
 man to do ? The best men in the Republican party 
 „ believed that Roosevelt was the only one who 
 could be elected, that the people believed so firmly 
 in his honor and courage that they would vote for 
 him. Senator Piatt did not want him, did not 
 like him, but he came to see that they could win 
 with him, and with no one else. So Roosevelt 
 was nominated, and elected, by a narrow lead of 
 i8,cxx5 votes. So far, the people could rule with 
 Roosevelt as their servant. But the Governor can 
 do little alone; he must have the support of the 
 Legislature and the other State officers. The 
 Boss hoped to rule through them, to say who 
 should be appointed to office, to decide which bill 
 should pass and which be defeated. 
 
 There were people who would have had Gover- 
 nor Roosevelt declare war on Piatt ; refuse to have 
 anything to do with him; refuse even to speak to 
 him. In that way he could have done nothing 'ftji", 
 the good of the State; he could have spent i|is 
 term in fighting Piatt, made a great show of in- 
 dependence and reform, but, in point of fact] ad- 
 
74 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 vanced the cause of good government not an inch. 
 All of his proposals would have been blocked by 
 Piatt's men in the Legislature. 
 
 Instead, he acted in accord with the facts as 
 they were; not as if they were the way he would 
 have liked them to be. If Piatt could not rule he 
 could ruin. So the Governor treated him politely, 
 and only disagreed with him when the Boss pro- 
 posed something actually bad. For instance, 
 there was a most important officer, the Super- 
 intendent of Public Works, to be appointed. 
 Senator Piatt informed Governor Roose- 
 velt that a certain man had been chosen; he 
 showed him the telegram with the man's ac- 
 ceptance. Roosevelt said, quietly, something like 
 this: 
 
 " I think not, Senator. The Governor appoints 
 that officer, and I am the Governor." 
 
 Piatt was very angry ; Roosevelt refused to get 
 angry, but stuck to his decision, and made his own 
 choice. Things like this happened again and 
 again, during the two years -fcvhile Roosevelt was 
 Governor of New York. 
 
 Every honorable man in American politics has 
 to fight against this evil of the Boss. Office- 
 holders, Presidents and Governors, come and go, 
 but the Bosses hold their power for a long time. 
 So long as they exist it is not wise for us to talk 
 
GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK 75 
 
 too much about Kings and their tyranny. For a 
 Boss is very like a King. Piatt and Croker 
 thought that the people were not fit to rule ; theirs 
 was much the same idea that King George the 
 Third and the German Kaiser had. The best and 
 wisest men have had to admit the strength of the 
 Boss and try to deal with him as well as they 
 could; Abraham Lincoln even had to appoint one 
 to his Cabinet. The Boss creeps into power while 
 the people are asleep. 
 
 Roosevelt pointed out that it is not hard for a 
 man to be good if he lives entirely by himself. 
 Nor is it difficult for him to get things done, if he 
 is careless about right and wrong. The hard 
 thing, yet the one which must be demanded of the 
 public man, is to get useful things done, and to 
 keep straight all the while. When Roosevelt was 
 elected Governor, John Hay, the Secretary of 
 State, wrote to him : 
 
 "You have already shown that a man may be ab- 
 solutely honest and yet practical ; a reformer by instinct 
 and a wise politician; brave, bold and uncompromis- 
 ing, and yet not a wild ass of the desert. The exhibi- 
 tion made by the professional independents in voting 
 ag-ainst you for no reason on earth except that some- 
 body else was voting for you, is a lesson that is worth 
 its cost." 1 
 
 1 " Autobipgraphy,'' p. 2g6. 
 
76' THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 The year 19CX) was the year of a Presidential 
 election. Mr. McKinley was to run again on the 
 Republican ticket, and later it appeared that Mr. 
 Bryan would oppose him again, as he had in 1896. 
 The Republican Vice-President, Mr. Hobart, had 
 died in office, so the Republicans had to find some- 
 one to go on the ticket with President McKinley. 
 Roosevelt was mentioned for the office, and Piatt 
 warmly agreed, hoping to get him out of New 
 York politics. Roosevelt, at first, refused to con^ 
 sider an office which has more dignity than use- 
 fulness about it. Another utterance of Secretary 
 of State John Hay is interesting. He wrote to a 
 friend : 
 
 "^eddy has been here: have you heard of it? It 
 was more fun than a goat. He came down with a 
 somber resolution thrown on his strenuous brow to let 
 McKinley and Hanna know once for all that he would 
 not be Vice-President, and found to his stupefaction 
 that nobody in Washington, except Hatt, had ever 
 dreamed of such a thing." ^ 
 
 Mr. Hay was one of the wisest of our states- 
 men; one of the most polished and agreeable men 
 in public life. Yet this letter shows how the 
 older men often mistook Roosevelt. For, 
 in less than a year after Mr. Hay had gently 
 poked fun at " Teddy " for thinking that he might 
 
 1 thayer, p. 148. 
 
GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK yy 
 
 be made Vice-President, and said that there was 
 not the slightest danger of such a thing happening, 
 Roosevelt had been elected to that office. His en- 
 joyment of his work, his bubbling merriment, his 
 lack of the old-fashioned, pompous manners which 
 used to be supposed proper for a statesman, made 
 many older men inclined to treat him with a sort 
 of fatherly amusement. They looked at his acts 
 as an older man might look at the pranks of a boy. 
 And then, suddenly, they found themselves serving 
 under this " youngster," in the Government ! It 
 was a surprise from which they never recovered. 
 I have said that the reporters, the makers of 
 funny pictures in the newspapers, and others, ex- 
 aggerated Roosevelt's traits, and created a false 
 idea about him. This is true. But it is also true 
 that there was a great deal of real and honest fun 
 poked at him throughout his life, and that it added 
 to the public enjoyment of his career. The 
 writers of comic rhymes, the cartoonists, and the 
 writers of political satire had a chance which no 
 other President has ever given them. Many of 
 our Presidents — wise and good men — and 
 many Senators, Governors, Cabinet officers and 
 others, have gone about as if they were all ready 
 to pose for their statues. Roosevelt never did 
 this. He bore himself in public with dignity, and 
 respect for the high offices to which the people 
 
78 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 elected him. But he did not suggest the old 
 style of portrait, in which a statesman is standing 
 stiffly, hand in the breast of his coat, a distant view 
 of the Capitol in the background. He had too 
 keen a sense of fun for anything of the sort. 
 
 Nobody laughed at the jokes about him more 
 heartily than he did himself. When " Mr. Doo- 
 ley " described his adventures as a Rough Rider, 
 and spoke of him as " Alone in Cubia," as if he 
 thought he had won the war all by himself, he 
 wrote to the author: 
 
 "Three cheers Mr. Dooley! Do come on and let 
 me see you soon. I am by no means so much alone as 
 in Cubia. ..." 
 
 " Let me repeat that Dooley, especially when he 
 writes about Teddy Rosenfelt has no more interested 
 and amused reader than said Rosenfelt himself." ^ 
 
 Mr. McKinley was re-elected President of the 
 United States and Mr. Roosevelt was elected Vice- 
 President in November 1900. Roosevelt had 
 taken part in the campaign before election, and 
 of this Mr. Thayer writes : 
 
 He spoke in the East and in the West, and for the 
 first time the people of many of the States heard him 
 speak and saw his actual presence. His attitude as a 
 
 1 Scribner's Magazine, December, 191 g, p. 658. 
 
GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK 79 
 
 speaker, his gestures, the way in which his pent up 
 thoughts seemed almost to strangle him before he could 
 utter them, his smile showing the white rows of teeth, 
 his fist clenched as if to strike an invisible adversary, 
 the sudden dropping of his voice, and leveling of his 
 forefinger as he became almost conversational in tone, 
 and seemed to address special individuals in the crowd 
 before him, the strokes of sarcasm, stern and cutting, 
 and the swift flashes of humor which set the great 
 multitude in a roar, became in that summer and 
 autumn familiar to millions of his countrymen; and 
 the cartoonists made his features and gestures familiar 
 to many other millions.^ 
 
 In the following March he was sworn in as 
 Vice-President. His duties as presiding officer of 
 the Senate were not severe, and he went on a 
 cougar hunt in Colorado in the winter before in- 
 auguration to enable him to bear the physical in- 
 activity of his new work. 
 
 When he came back to Washington again, to 
 hold the second highest place in the national gov- 
 ernment, it troubled him to think that he had 
 never finished the study of law, begun in New 
 York many years before. He asked his friend. 
 Justice White of the Supreme Court, if it would 
 be wrong for him to take a legal course in a 
 Washington law school. The Justice told him 
 that it would hardly be proper for the Vice-Presi- 
 
 '■ Thayer, p. 51. 
 
8o THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 dent to do that, but offered to tutor him in law. 
 They agreed to study together the following 
 winter. 
 
 But Roosevelt's term as Vice-President was 
 coming to an end. He only occupied the office for 
 six months. He was soon to succeed to the high- 
 est office of all. 
 
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood. 
 
 PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT SPEAKING IN ALABAMA 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 
 
 In the first week of September 1901, President 
 McKinley was killed by an anarchist in Buffalo. 
 The young man who shot him, was rather weak- 
 minded, and had been led to believe, by the 
 speeches and writings of others, craftier and 
 wickeder than himself, that he could help the poor 
 and unfortunate by murdering the President. 
 This he treacherously did while shaking hands 
 with him. 
 
 One of the leaders of the poisonous brood who 
 had made this young man believe such villainous 
 nonsense was a foreign woman named Emma 
 Goldman, who for twenty or thirty years went up 
 and down the land, trying to overthrow the law 
 and government, yet always calling for the pro- 
 tection of both when she was in danger. 'The 
 American Government tolerated this mischief- 
 maker until 19 19, when it properly sent her, and 
 others of her stripe, back to their own country. 
 
 President McKinley, who was the gentlest and 
 kindest of men, did not die immediately from the 
 81 
 
82 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 bullet wound, but lingered for about a week. 
 Vice-President Roosevelt joined him in Bufifalo, 
 and came to believe, from the reports of the doc- 
 tors, that the President would get well. So he 
 returned to his family who were in the Adiron- 
 dacks. A few days later, while Mr. Roosevelt 
 was mountain-climbing, a message came that the 
 President was worse and that the Vice-President 
 must come at once to Buffalo. He drove fifty 
 miles by night, in a buckboard down the mountain 
 roads, took a special train, and arrived in Buffalo 
 the next afternoon. 
 
 Mr. McKinley was dead, and Theodore Roose- 
 velt took the oath of office as President. He was 
 under forty-three years of age, the youngest man 
 who had ever become President. 
 
 It is important to note his first act, It 
 was to insist that all of Mr. McKinley's Cabinet 
 remain in office. Thus he secured for the con- 
 tinued service of the Nation, some of its ablest 
 men : Mr. Hay, one of the most accomplished Sec- 
 retaries of State we have ever had, and Mr. Root, 
 Secretary of War, and afterwards Secretary of 
 State, whose highly trained legal mind placed him 
 at the head of his profession. 
 
 A test of a great man, as well as a test of a 
 modest man, in the true sense, is whether he is 
 willing to have other able and eminent men 
 
PRESIDENT 83 
 
 around him as his assistants and fellow-workers. 
 The most remarkable instances of this among our 
 Presidents were Washington and Lincoln. The 
 latter appointed men not because they admired 
 liim, or were personally agreeable to him ; indeed 
 some of his strongest and bitterest antagonists 
 were put in his Cabinet, because he knew that they 
 could well serve the country. 
 
 Mr. McKinley had chosen excellent Cabinet of- 
 ficers, and these Mr. Roosevelt kept in office, pro- 
 moting them and appointing other men of high 
 ability to other offices as the need arose. He did 
 not care to shine as a great man among a group 
 of second-rate persons; he preferred to be chief 
 among his peers, the leader of the strongest and 
 most sagacious of his time. 
 
 In saying this, I do not mean to compare Roose- 
 velt with Washington or Lincoln or any of the 
 noble figures of the past. Such comparisons are 
 made too often; every President for fifty years 
 has been acclaimed by his admirers as " the great- 
 est since Lincoln," or "as great as Lincoln." 
 This is both foolish and useless. There has been 
 no character in our land like Lincoln; he stands 
 alone. What we can say of Mr. Roosevelt, now, 
 is that he was admired and beloved by millions 
 of his fellow-countrjTTien while he lived; that his 
 was an extraordinary and entirely different char- 
 
84 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 acter from that of any of our Presidents; and 
 that upon his death thousands who had opposed 
 him and bitterly hated him but a few years before, 
 were altering their opinion and speaking of him 
 in admiration — with more than the mere respect 
 which custom pays to the dead. This has gone 
 on, and other unusual signs have been given of 
 the world's esteem for him. So much we can say ; 
 and leave the determination of his place in our 
 history for a later time than ours. 
 ■' One thing which many people feared when 
 Roosevelt became President was that he would get 
 the country into a war. They thought he liked 
 war for its own sake. Men said : " Oh ! this 
 Roosevelt is such a rash, impulsive fellow! He 
 will have us in a war in a few months ! " The 
 exact opposite was the truth. He kept our coun- 
 try and our flag respected throughout the world; 
 he avoided two possible wars ; he helped end a for- 
 eign war; we lived at peace. Of him it can truly 
 be said : he kept us out of war, and he kept us in 
 the paths of honor. 
 
 He preached the doctrine of the square deal. 
 
 " A man who is good enough to shed his blood 
 for his country, is good enough to be given a 
 square deal afterward. More than that no man is 
 entitled to, and less than that no man shall have." ^ 
 
 1 Springfield, 111., July 4, 1903. Thayer, p. 212. 
 
PRESIDENT 8s 
 
 He did not seek help and rewards from the rich 
 by enabling them to prey upon the poor; neither 
 did he seek the votes and applause of the poor by 
 cheap and imjust attacks upon the rich. To the 
 people who expect a public man tb lean unfairly 
 to one side or the other; who cannot understand 
 any different way of acting, he was a constant 
 puzzle. 
 
 " Oh ! we have got him sized up ! " they would 
 say, " he is for the labor unions against the cap- 
 italist ! " and in a few months they would be 
 puzzled again : " No ; he is for Wall Street and he 
 is down on the poor laboring man." 
 
 For a long time they could not get it into their 
 heads that he was for the honest man, whether 
 laboring man or capitalist, and against the dis- 
 honest man, whether laboring man or capitalist. 
 
 " While I am President the doors of the White 
 House will open as easily for the labor leader as 
 for the capitalist, — and no easier." ^ 
 
 Many Presidents might have said the first part 
 of that sentence. Few of them would have added 
 the last three words. 
 
 He annoyed many people in the South by in- 
 viting a very able and eminent Negro, Booker T. 
 Washington, to eat luncheon with him. Accord- 
 ing to the curious way of thinking on this subject, 
 
 ^ Hagedorn, p. 242. 
 
86 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Mr. Washington who had been good enough to 
 eat dinner at the table of the Queen of England, 
 was not good enough to eat at the White House. 
 Shortly after being violently denounced for being 
 too polite to a Negro, he was still more violently 
 denounced for being too harsh to Negroes. He 
 discharged from the Aomy some riotous and dis- 
 orderly Negro soldiers. Persons with small na- 
 tures had attacked him for showing courtesy to a 
 distinguished man; other persons with equally 
 small natures now attacked him for acting justly 
 towards mutinous soldiers. 
 
 What did he do while he was President ? What 
 laws were passed by Congress, which he advocated 
 or urged, and which he approved by his signature ? 
 Here are some of them as they are given by Mr. 
 Washburn,^ a Congressman of that time: 
 
 The Elkins Anti-Rebate Law, to end unjust 
 business dealings of the railroads. 
 
 The creation of the Department of Commerce 
 and Labor. 
 
 The law for building the Panama Canal. 
 
 The laws to prevent impure and poisonous food 
 being sold under false labels; and the law to es- 
 tablish the proper inspection of meat. 
 
 The creation of the Bureau of Immigration. 
 
 The law limiting the working hours of em- 
 
 1 Washburn, " Theodore Roosevelt," p. 128. 
 
PRESIDENT 87 
 
 ployees and protecting them in case of injury in 
 their occupations. 
 
 The law against child-labor in the District of 
 Columbia. 
 
 The reformation of the Consular Service. 
 
 The law to stop corporations from giving great 
 sums of money for political purposes at election 
 time. 
 
 You will notice that these were not laws to 
 enabie a few rich men to get richer still at the 
 expense of the many ; neither were they designed 
 to help dishonest labor leaders to plimder the em- 
 ployers. They were aimed to bring about justice 
 between man and man, to protect the weak. 
 
 There was, when Mr. Roosevelt'became Presi- 
 dent, a long standing dispute between this country 
 and England and Canada about the boundary of 
 Alaska. This was quickly settled by arbitration ; 
 our rights were secured ; and all possible causes of 
 war were removed. 
 
 The South American country, Colombia, made 
 an attempt to block the building of the Panama 
 Canal. This canal had been planned to run 
 through the State of Panama, which was part of 
 the Republic of Colombia. It was a part of that 
 country, however, separated by fifteen days' jour- 
 ney from the capital city, Bogota, and so sep- 
 arated in friendship from the rest of the country 
 
88 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 that it had made over fifty attempts in fifty years 
 to revolt and gain independence. Our State De- 
 partment, through Mr. Hay, had come to an un- 
 derstanding with the Minister from Colombia as 
 to the canal, and the amount we were to pay 
 Colombia for the privilege of building this im- 
 portant waterway, for the benefit of the whole 
 world. 
 
 But the Colombian Government at that time 
 were a slippery lot, — dealing with them, said 
 President Roosevelt, " was like trying to nail cur- 
 rant jelly to a wall." It struck them that they 
 would do well to squeeze more money yet out of 
 Uncle Sam, and that they might by twisting and 
 turning, get forty million dollars as easily as ten 
 millions. So they delayed and quibbled. 
 
 In the meantime, the people of Panama, not 
 wishing to lose the advantage of the canal, and 
 desiring greatly to take any opportunity to free 
 themselves from the Colombians who had plun- 
 dered them for years, declared a revolution, which 
 took place without bloodshed. Colombian troops, 
 coming to try to reconquer Panama, were for- 
 bidden to land by our ships, acting under Presi- 
 dent Roosevelt's orders. We were under treaty 
 agreement to preserve order on the Isthmus. Our 
 Government recognized the new Republic of Pan- 
 ama, an act which was promptly followed by all 
 
PRESIDENT 89 
 
 the nations of the earth. We then opened nego- 
 tiations with Panama, paid the money to her, and 
 built the Canal. 
 
 Of course the politicians in Colombia gave vent 
 to a piercing howl. A tricky horse-dealer, who 
 has a horse which he has abused for years, but 
 desires to sell to a customer for four times its 
 value, would be angry if the horse ran away, and 
 he lost not only the animal, but also his chances of 
 swindling the customer. So with the Colombians. 
 Some people in this country took up their cry, and 
 professed to feel great sorrow for Colombia. It 
 was noticed, however, that this sorrow seemed to 
 afflict most pitifully the people who were strongest 
 in their opposition to Mr. Roosevelt, and this 
 caused a suspicion that their pretended horror at 
 the act of our Government was not so much based 
 upon any knowledge of the facts, as upon a readi- 
 ness to think evil of the President. Others who 
 joined in an expression of grief at the time, and 
 later attempted to bolster up Colombia's claims 
 for damages,^ belonged to that class referred to in 
 connection with the sinking of the Maine, who al- 
 ways think the best of any foreign country and 
 suspect the worst of their own. 
 
 The fact that other countries instantly recog- 
 nized Panama, and that President Roosevelt's ac- 
 tion was completely and emphatically endorsed by 
 
90 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Secretary Hay, proved that the Panama incident 
 was an example of the promptness, wisdom and 
 courage in the conduct of foreign relations which 
 leads alike to justice and the satisfactory settle- 
 ment of difficult problems. For not the bitterest 
 opponent of Mr. Roosevelt's administration ever 
 dared to cast a shadow of doubt upon the honesty 
 of Secretary Hay. The canal is now built, thanks 
 in large part to President Roosevelt, and we have 
 had a chance to see that wise decisions may often 
 be reached swiftly; whereas dawdling, hesitation 
 and timidity, which are sometimes mistaken for 
 statesmanship, are more than apt to end, not only 
 in general injustice, but in practical failure. 
 
 The war between Russia and Japan took place 
 during President Roosevelt's term of office. Af- 
 ter it had been going on over a year, and Japan 
 had won victories by land and sea, the President 
 asked both countries to open negotiations for 
 peace. He continued to exert strong influence in 
 every quarter to help bring the two enemies to an 
 agreement. Only since his death has it become 
 generally known how hard he worked to this end. 
 A peace conference was held at Kittery Navy 
 Yard in Maine, and a treaty was signed which 
 ended the war. 
 
 For his action in this. President Roosevelt was 
 the first American to receive the Nobel Peace 
 
PRESIDENT 91 
 
 Prize. This was a sad reverse to the predictions 
 of those who had been so sure that he was longing 
 to start wars, instead of end them. Indeed, men 
 who prophesied evil about Mr. Roosevelt, as well 
 as those who tried to catch him in traps, had a 
 most disappointing experience. The Nobel Prize 
 consisted of a diploma, and an award in money of 
 $40,000. This he tried to devote to helping the 
 cause of peace between capital and labor in Amer- 
 ica. When Congress failed to take the needed 
 action to apply his money for this purpose, it was 
 returned to him. During the Great War he gave 
 all of it to different relief organizations, like the 
 Red Cross, and other societies for helping the 
 sufferers. 
 
 The President assembled the most powerful 
 fleet we had ever had together, sixteen battleships, 
 with destroyers, and sent them on a cruise around 
 the world. This was bitterly opposed at the time. 
 Public men and newspapers predicted that the 
 fleet could never make the voyage, or that even if 
 it could, its effect would be to cause war with 
 some other nation. The most emphatic predic- 
 tions were made by a famous newspaper that the 
 entrance of the fleet into the Pacific Ocean would 
 be the signal for a declaration of war upon us by 
 a foreign power. Nothing of the sort happened. 
 The cruise attracted to the American navy the 
 
92 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 admiration of the world; it immensely increased 
 the usefulness of the Navy itself by the experi- 
 ence it gave the officers and men; and it served 
 warning upon anybody who needed it (and some 
 folk did need it) that America was not a country 
 of dollar-chasing Yankees, rich and helpless, but 
 that it had the ability to defend itself. 
 
 This was an illustration of Roosevelt's use of 
 the old saying : " Speak softly and carry a big 
 stick; you will go far." When he first repeated 
 this, it was seized upon by the newspapers for its 
 amusing quality, and he was henceforth pictured 
 as carrying a tremendous bludgeon, of the sort 
 which giants usually bore in the tale of " Jack the 
 Giant Killer." Timid folk thought that it proved 
 their worst fears about his fondness for a fight. 
 They failed to notice the " Speak softly " part of 
 the saying. It was only a vivid way of advising 
 his countrymen to be quiet and polite in their deal- 
 ings with other nations, but not to let America 
 become defenseless. What hasty and shallow 
 critics denounced as the threat of a bully, proved 
 in practice to be the sagacious advice of a states- 
 man, whose promise when he took office, to pre- 
 serve the peace and honor of his beloved country, 
 was kept faithfully and precisely. 
 
 And he was able to keep the peace, to fill the 
 office of President for seven years without having 
 
PRESIDENT 93 
 
 a shot fired by our forces, because he made it clear 
 that this country would not submit to wrong, 
 would not argue or bicker with foreign tres- 
 passers, kidnappers, highwaymen or murderers, 
 but would promptly fight them. 'He did not fill 
 the air with beautiful words about his love of 
 peace; but we had peace. For as he knew per- 
 fectly well, there were countries, like Canada, with 
 which we could live at peace for a hundred years 
 and more, without needing forts or guns be- 
 tween them and us, because we think alike on most 
 subjects, and respect each other's honor. 
 
 And there were other countries, Germany in 
 particular, against whom all her neighbors have to 
 live armed to the teeth, and in deadly fear, because 
 the Germans respect nothing on earth except 
 force. To argue or plead with the Germans, as 
 he well knew, was not only a waste of time, it was 
 worse : it was a direct invitation to war. Because 
 since 1870 the Germans think that any country 
 which professes to love peace, any country whose 
 statesmen utter noble thoughts about peace, is 
 simply a cowardly country, bent on making money, 
 and afraid to fight. So when, — during Roose- 
 velt's administration, the biggest swaggering 
 " gun-man " of the world, the Kaiser Wilhelm of 
 Germany, made a threat against the peace of 
 America, Roosevelt no more read him pretty lee- 
 
94 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 tures about his love of peace, than he would have 
 recited poetry to that other gun-man in the hotel 
 in Dakota years before. He simply told the 
 Kaiser in a few words, just what would happen 
 if Germany didn't drop it. It was so quietly done 
 that nobody knew anything at all about it until 
 years afterward. There was no delay; there was 
 no endless note-writing; there was no blustering; 
 the Kaiser climbed down; and there was no war. 
 
 This, I am inclined to think, was one of the 
 most important events of Roosevelt's seven years 
 in the White House. If we wish America to live 
 henceforth in peace and in honor, there is no inci- 
 dent of the past thirty years which should be 
 studied by every American with more care. Ger- 
 many began her attack on the world long before 
 19 14. She bullied here, and she schemed and 
 plotted there, but she was at work for years. In 
 1898 she tried to range the countries of Europe 
 against us, as we went to war with Spain. Eng- 
 land stood our friend and kept her off. Germany 
 sent a fleet meddling into Manila Harbor to an- 
 noy and threaten Admiral Dewey. He refused to 
 be frightened by them however and as an English 
 squadron which was also there played the part of 
 a good friend, the German admiral had his trip 
 for nothing. 
 
 Later, about a year after Mr. Roosevelt became 
 
PRESIDENT 95 
 
 President, the German Kaiser discovered a way, 
 as he thought, to grab some territory in South 
 America. Our Monroe Doctrine, which insures 
 peace in the Western Hemisphere, by forbidding 
 European nations to seize land here, was an ob- 
 stacle to the Kaiser. He disliked it. But taking 
 as pretext the fact that some people in Venezuela 
 owed money to various Europeans, including Ger- 
 mans, he induced England and Italy to join in 
 sending a fleet for a blockade of the Venezuelan 
 coast. The English and Italians agreed, before 
 long, to arbitrate their difficulty with Venezuela, 
 and moreover they had no intention of seizing land. 
 The German plan was quite different. They 
 threatened to bombard Venezuelan towns, and we 
 know enough now of their methods to say that 
 they were hoping for something which might serve 
 as an excuse for landing troops and taking posses- 
 sion of towns and territory. This was in defiance 
 of our Monroe Doctrine ; it aimed at setting up an 
 Emperor's colonies in South America, and putting 
 the peace of both South and North America into 
 danger. Mr. Roosevelt did not mean to allow it. 
 But consider the situation. Germany was the 
 foremost military power of the world. Her army 
 was almost the greatest ; probably the best trained 
 and equipped. Ours was one of the smallest. 
 Germany was not engaged in difficulties elsewhere. 
 
96 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 She faced us across no barriers but the sea. No 
 great French and British armies held the lines 
 against her, as they did in later years when once 
 more she threatened America. No mighty British 
 fleet held the seas and kept the German Navy 
 cooped up where it could do no harm, — except to 
 such merchant ships, passenger steamers and hos- 
 pital boats as it could strike from under the water. 
 We faced Germany alone. But we had two 
 means of defense. One of them was Admiral 
 Dewey and his ships. The first of them, however, 
 and the only one needed, was the cool-headed and 
 brave-hearted man in the White House. 
 
 He told the German Ambassador, quietly and 
 without bluster, that unless the Kaiser agreed to 
 arbitrate his quarrel with Venezuela, and unless 
 he agreed within a short time, ten days or less. 
 Admiral Dewey would be ordered to Venezuela to 
 protect it against a German attack. The German 
 ambassador said that, of course, as the All Highest 
 Kaiser had refused once before to arbitrate, there 
 could be nothing done about it. All Highests do 
 not arbitrate. People simply have to step aside. 
 
 President Roosevelt informed the German Am- 
 bassador that this meant war. A few days later 
 when the German Ambassador was again at the 
 White House, the President asked if the Kaiser 
 had changed his mind. The Ambassador seemed 
 
THE ROUGH RIDER 
 
 With Mr. Punch's best wishes to Colonel Roosevelt, President of 
 the United States. 
 
 (A Cartoon in Punch when Colonel Roosevelt became President.) 
 
PRESIDENT 97 
 
 to think that it was a joke. The Kaiser change 
 his mind at the bidding of a Yankee President! 
 It was almost funny ! 
 
 " All right," said President Roosevelt, " I can 
 change my mind. Admiral Dewey will not even 
 wait until Tuesday to start for Venezuela. He 
 will go on Monday. If you are cabling to Berlin, 
 please tell them that." 
 
 The pompous Ambassador was much flustered. 
 He hurried away, but returned in about a day and 
 a half, still out of breath. 
 
 "Mr. President," he said, "His Imperial 
 Majesty the Emperor has agreed to arbitrate with 
 Venezuela." 
 
 So there was no delay, no long and distressing 
 argument ; and there was no war. The President 
 could do this because he knew his countrymen ; he 
 knew that they were not cowards. He knew they 
 never had failed to back up their leader in the 
 White House. He knew that no President need 
 worry about loyalty when he tells America that a 
 foreign enemy is making threats. He has seen his 
 courageous predecessor, Grover Cleveland, rouse 
 America, as one man, over another Venezuelan 
 incident, a dozen or more years before. And he 
 knew that the only occasion when America had 
 ever seemed about to fall into doubt and hesitation 
 in time of danger, was when that doubt and 
 
98 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 hesitation began in the White House, — in the 
 administration of Buchanan, before the Civil War. 
 America will always support her President, if war 
 threatens, — but America expects him to show 
 leadership. Timidity in the leader will make 
 timidity in the nation. 
 
 So the Kaiser changed his mind and gave in, — 
 why? Because he knew that there was a Presi- 
 dent in the White House whose words were easy 
 to understand ; they did not have to be interpreted 
 nor explained. And moreover, when these words 
 were uttered, the President would make them 
 good, every one. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE LION HUNTER 
 
 Other important events of President Roosevelt's 
 administration will best be described farther on. 
 For their importance increased after he was out 
 of ofifice, and they had a great influence upon a 
 later campaign. 
 
 Here, it should be said that in 1904, as the term 
 for which he was acting as Mr. McKinley's suc- 
 cessor, drew toward an end, he was nominated by 
 the Republican Party to succeed himself. There 
 was some talk of opposition within his party, es- 
 pecially from the friends of " big business " who 
 thought that he was not sufficiently reverent and 
 submissive to the moneyed interests. This op- 
 position took the form of a move to nominate 
 Senator Hanna. But the Senator died, and the 
 talk of opposition which was mostly moonshine, 
 faded away. 
 
 When the campaign came in the autumn of 
 1904, his opponent was the Democratic nominee, 
 Judge Parker, also from New York. Mr. Roose- 
 velt was elected by a majority of more than two 
 
 99 
 
loo THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 million and a half votes, — the largest majority 
 ever given to a President in our history, either 
 before or since that time. 
 
 On the night of election day he issued a state- 
 ment in which he said : " Under no circumstances 
 will I be a candidate for or accept another nom- 
 ination." Of this he writes : 
 
 The reason for my choice of the exact phraseology 
 used was twofold. In the first place, many of my sup- 
 porters were insisting that, as I had served only three 
 and a half years of my first term, coming in from the 
 Vice-Presidency when President McKinley was killed, 
 I had really had only one elective term, so that the 
 third term custom did not apply to me ; and I wished to 
 repudiate this suggestion. I believed then (and I be- 
 lieve now) the third term custom or tradition to be 
 wholesome, and therefore, I was determined to regard 
 its substance, refusing to quibble over the words usually 
 employed to express it. On the other hand I did not 
 wish simply and specifically to say that I would not be 
 a candidate for the nomination in 1908, because if I 
 had specified the year when I would not be a candidate, 
 it would have been widely accepted asi meaning that I 
 intended to be a candidate some other year ; and I had 
 no such intention, and had no idea that I would ever be 
 a candidate again. Certain newspaper men did ask 
 me if I intended to apply my prohibition to 1912, and 
 I answered that I was not thinking of 1912, nor of 
 1920, nor of 1940, and that I must decline to say any- 
 thing whatever except what appeared in my statement.'^ 
 
 1 " Autobiography," pp. 422-3. 
 
THE LION HUNTER loi 
 
 From March 4, 1905, until March 4, 1909, he 
 was an elected President, not a President who had 
 succeeded to the office through the death of an- 
 other. When the end of his term approached he 
 threw his influence in favor of the nomination of 
 Mr. William H. Taft, Secretary of War in his 
 Cabinet. He could have had the nomination him- 
 self if he had wished it ; indeed he had to take pre- 
 cautions against being nomyiated. But Mr. Taft 
 was nominated, and in November, 1908, was 
 elected over Mr. Bryan, who was then running for 
 the Presidency for the third time. 
 
 President Roosevelt and President-elect Taft 
 drove up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to- 
 gether, March 4, 1909, in a cold gale of wind, 
 which had followed a sudden blizzard. The 
 weather was an omen of the stormy chanige which 
 was coming over the friendship of these two men. 
 An hour or two later it was President Taft who 
 drove back to the White House, while Mr. Roose- 
 velt, once more a private citizen, was hurrying to 
 his home in Oyster Bay, to get ready for his hunt- 
 ing trip to Africa. 
 
 This was the vacation to which he had been 
 looking forward for years. He had long been a 
 friend of a number of famous hunters, and had 
 corresponded with and received visits from some 
 
i,02 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 of them. Chief among these was Mr. Frederick 
 Selous, one of the greatest of African hunters. 
 Those who have read any of Rider Haggard's 
 fine stories of adventure (especially " King Sol- 
 omon's Mines " and " Allan Quartermain ") will 
 be interested to know that Mr. Selous was the 
 original of Quartermain. Adventures like these 
 of Selous, the opportunity to see the marvelous 
 African country, and the chance to shoot the dan- 
 gerous big game, made Roosevelt long to visit 
 Africa. 
 
 So he headed a scifentific expedition sent out 
 by the Smithsonian Institution to collect specimens 
 for the National Museum at Washington. With 
 him went his son Kermit, a student at Harvard; 
 and three American naturalists. They left Amer- 
 ica only two or three weeks after his term as 
 President had ended, and they came out of the 
 African wilderness at Khartoum about a year 
 later. With friends whom they met in Africa, 
 Enghsh and American hunters, and a long train 
 of native bearers and scouts, they visited the parts 
 of Africa richest in game, and killed lions, leop- 
 ards, hyenas, elephants, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, 
 zebra, giraflfe, buffalo, and dozens of other kinds 
 of animals. Mr. Roosevelt and Kermit shot 
 about a dozen trophies for themselves ; otherwise 
 nothing was killed which was not intended as a 
 
THE LION HUNTER 103 
 
 museum specimen or for meat. No useless butch- 
 ery of animals was allowed; often at great incon- 
 venience and even danger, animals were avoided 
 or driven oflf rather than let them be killed need- 
 lessly. Some of the finest groups of mounted 
 animals in the country are now standing in the 
 National Museum, as a result of this trip. 
 
 They saw many wonderful sights. They saw 
 a band of Nandi warriors, fierce savages, naked, 
 and armed only with shields and long spears, at- 
 tack and kill a big lion. Kermit Roosevelt took 
 photographs of most of the large game, coming 
 up to close quarters in order to get his pictures. 
 He took two or three photographs of a herd of 
 wild elephants in the forest, going at great risk 
 within twenty-five yards of the herd to be sure to 
 get a good view. 
 
 One day's hunting, which Mr. Roosevelt de- 
 scribes, shows what the country was like, how full 
 it was of all kinds of animals. Leaving camp at 
 seven in the morning they were out altogether over 
 fifteen hours. They were after a lion, so did not 
 look for other game. They soon passed some 
 zebra,^ and antelope, but left them alone. The 
 country was a dry, brown grassland, with few 
 trees, and in some places seems to have looked like 
 our Western prairie. At noon they sighted three 
 rhinoceros, which they tried to avoid, as they did 
 
I04 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 not wish to shoot them. Of course, in such cir- 
 cumstances it is necessary to do nothing to disturb 
 the temper of the animals — stupid, short-sighted 
 beasts — or else in their anger or alarm they will 
 blindly charge the hunter, who then is forced to 
 shoot to save himself from being tossed and gored 
 on that great horn. There was a hyena disturbing 
 the other game, and as these are savage nuisances, 
 Mr. Roosevelt shot this one at three hundred and 
 fifty paces. While the porters were taking the 
 skin, he could not help laughing, he says, at find- 
 ing their party in the center of a great plain, stared 
 at from all sides by enough wild animals to stock 
 a circus. Vultures were flying overhead. The 
 three rhinoceros were gazing at them, about half 
 a mile away. Wildebeest (sometimes called gnu) 
 which look something like the American buffalo or 
 bison, and hartebeest, stood around in a ring, look- 
 ing on. Four or five antelope came in closer to 
 see what was happening, and a zebra trotted by, 
 neighing and startling the rhinoceros. 
 
 After a rest for luncheon, they went on, looking 
 for lions. Two wart-hogs jumped up, and Mr. 
 Roosevelt shot the biggest of them. By this time 
 it was getting late in the afternoon ; time for lions 
 to be about. At last they saw one ; a big lioness. 
 She ran along the bed of a stream, crouching so 
 as not to be seen in the failing light. The two 
 
THE LION HUNTER 105 
 
 hunters rode past and would have missed her if 
 one of the native followers had not sighted her a 
 second time. Then Roosevelt and the other 
 hunter left their horses, and came in close on foot. 
 This is perhaps as dangerous as any hunting in 
 Africa. A man must be cool and a good shot to 
 go after lions; sooner or later almost every lion 
 hunter either gets badly hurt or gets killed. 
 
 This time all went well ; Roosevelt hit her with 
 his first shot; ran in close and finished her. She 
 weighed over three hundred pounds. The porters 
 — much excited, as they always are at the death 
 of a lion — wished to carry the whole body with- 
 out skinning it, back to camp. While they were 
 lashing it to a pole another lion began to growl 
 hungrily. The night was dark, without a moon, 
 and the work of getting back was hard for the 
 porters, as well as rather terrifying to them. 
 Lions were grunting all about ; twice one of them 
 kept alongside the men as they walked, — much to 
 their discomfort. Then a rhinoceros, nearby, let 
 of a series of snorts, like a locomotive. This did 
 not cheer up the porters to any great degree. 
 Roosevelt and the other white hunter had trouble 
 to keep them together and to keep on the watch, 
 with their rifles ready to drive off any animals 
 which might attack. 
 
 At last they came to the camp of a tribe of sav- 
 
io6 ^ THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 ages called Masai. As they were still four miles 
 from their own camp and as the porters were 
 about exhausted from carrying the lion, they de- 
 cided to go in there, skin the lion and rest for a 
 while. There was some trouble about this, as 
 the Masai feared that the scent of the dead lion 
 would scare their cattle. They agreed at last, 
 however, admitted the white men and the porters, 
 and stood about, in the fire-light, leaning on their 
 spears, and laughing, while the lion was being 
 skinned. They gave Roosevelt milk to drink and 
 seemed pleased to have a call from " Bwana 
 Makuba," the Great Chief, as the porters called 
 him. 
 
 So here was an Ex-President of the United 
 States, not many months from his work as Chief 
 Magistrate in the Capitol of a civilized nation, 
 talking to a group of savages, who in their 
 dwellings, weapons, clothing and customs had 
 hardly changed in three thousand years; the 
 twentieth century A. D. meeting the tenth century 
 B.C. 
 
 At ten o'clock they got back to their own camp, 
 and after a hot bath, sat down to a supper of eland 
 venison and broiled spurfowl, — " and surely no 
 supper ever tasted more delicious." 
 
 Another day, when hunting with the same com- 
 panion he had the experience of being charged by 
 
THE LION HUNTER 107 
 
 a wounded lion. It was a big, male lion, with a 
 black and yellow mane. They chased him on 
 horseback for about two miles. Then he stopped 
 and hid behind a bush. A shot wounded him 
 slightly and Mr. Tarlton, Roosevelt's companion, 
 an experienced lion-hunter, told him that the lion 
 was sure to charge. 
 
 Again I knelt and fired; but the mass of hair on the 
 lion made roe think he was nearer than he was, and I 
 onder&hot, inflicting a flesh wound that was neither 
 crippling nor fatal. He was already grunting savagely 
 and tossing his tail erect, with his head held low; and 
 at the shot the great sinewy beast came toward us with 
 the speed of a greyhound. Tarlton then very properly 
 fired, for lion bunting is no child's play, and it is not 
 good to run risks. Ordinarily it is a very mean thing 
 to experience joy at a friend's miss ; but this was not 
 an ordinary case, and I felt keen delight when the bullet 
 from the badly sighted rifle missed, striking the ground 
 many jrards short. I was sighting carefully from my 
 knee, and I knew I had the lion all right ; for though he 
 galloped at a great pace he came on steadily — ears laid 
 back, and uttering terrific coughing grunts — and there 
 was now no question of making allowance for distance, 
 nor, as he was out in the open, for the fact that he had 
 not before been distinctly visible. The bead of my fore- 
 sight was exactly on the center of his chest as I 
 pressed the trigger, and the bullet went as true as if 
 the place had been plotted with dividers. The blow 
 brought him up all standing, and he fell forward on 
 his head. 
 
io8 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 The soft-nosed Winchester bullet had gone straight 
 through the chest cavity, smashing the lungs and the 
 big blood-vessels of the heart. Painfully he recovered 
 his feet, and tried to come on, his ferocious courage 
 holding out to the last; but he staggered and turned 
 from side to side, unable to stand firmly, still less to 
 advance at a faster pace than a walk. He had not ten 
 seconds to live; but it is a sound principle to take no 
 chances with lions. Tarlton hit him with his second 
 bullet probably in the shoulder; and with my next shot I 
 broke his neck. I had stopped him when he was still a 
 hundred yards away, and certainly no finer sight could 
 be imagined than that of this great maned lion as he 
 charged.^ 
 
 To the man who can shoot straight, and shoot 
 just as straight at a savage animal as at a target, 
 African game-hunting is for part of the time not 
 very dangerous. Nine or ten lions or elephants 
 or rhinoceros may be killed, without seeming risk. 
 The tenth time something unexpected happens, 
 and death comes very near to the hunter. 
 
 In shooting an elephant in the forest one day, 
 Roosevelt had what was perhaps his closest call 
 since the bear nearly killed him, years before in 
 Idaho. He had just shot an elephant, when there 
 came a surprise: 
 
 But at that very instant, before there was a moment's 
 time in which to reload, the thick bushes parted im- 
 
 1 " African Game Trails," pp. 192-3. 
 
THE LION HUNTER 109 
 
 mediately on my left front, and through them surged 
 the'vast bulk of a charging bull elephant, the matted 
 mass of tough creepers snapping like packthread before 
 his rush. He was so close that he could have touched 
 me with his trunk. I leaped to one side and dodged be- 
 hind a tree trunk, opening the rifle, throwing out the 
 empty shells, and slipping in two cartridges. Mean- 
 time Cunninghame fired right and left, at the same time 
 throwing himself into the bushes on the other side. 
 Both his bullets went home, and the bull stopped short 
 in his charge, wheeled, and immediately disappeared in 
 the thick cover. We ran forward, but the forest had 
 closed over his wake. We heard him trumpet shrilly, 
 and then all sounds ceased.^ 
 
 *" African Game Trails," p. 351. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 EUROPE AND AMERICA 
 
 At Khartoum Mr. Roosevelt and his son were 
 joined by other members of his family. They 
 all crossed to Europe, for he had been invited 
 by the rulers and learned bodies of a num- 
 ber of countries to pay them a visit. He went 
 to Italy, Austria, Germany, Norway, Sweden, 
 Holland, France, Denmark, Belgium and Eng- 
 land, receiving the highest compliments from their 
 rulers, honorary degrees from the universities, 
 and a welcome from the people everywhere which 
 had been given with such heartiness to no other 
 American since General Grant traveled round 
 the world after the Civil War. 
 
 In Norway he spoke to the Nobel Committee 
 in thanks for the Peace Prize which they had 
 awarded him after the Russo-Japanese War. In 
 Germany, the Kaiser ordered a review of troops 
 for him; and he was received by the University 
 of Berlin. In Paris, he addressed the famous in- 
 stitution of learning, the Sorbonne. The Eng- 
 
 IIO 
 
EUROrK AND AMKRU A in 
 
 lish universities received him, and gave him their 
 honorary degrees. London made him a " free- 
 man." His speeches before the learned men of 
 Europe might not have been extraordinary for 
 a university teacher, but when we think that his 
 life had alternated between the hustle of politics, 
 the career of a ranchman, of a soldier, and of a 
 hunter of big game, it is evident that we shall have 
 to search long and far among our public men be- 
 fore we can find any to match him in the variety 
 of his interests and achievements. 
 
 In England, King Edward VII had just died, 
 and Mr. Roosevelt was appointed by President 
 Taft as the .American representative at the funeral. 
 There was a gathering in London of thirteen 
 reigning monarchs, and many curious stories are 
 told about the occasion. Of course the Kaiser 
 was there, strutting about and trying to patronize 
 everybody. Mr. Roosevelt had been politely re- 
 ceived by the Kaiser and believed, as did every 
 one, that beneath his arrogant manners, there was 
 a great deal of ability. But he did not allow him- 
 self to be treated by the " All Highest " with mag- 
 nificent condescension. 
 
 A story is repeated, of which one version is 
 that the Kaiser suddenly called out, at some re- 
 ception: 
 
 " Oh, G>lonel Roosevelt, I wish to see you be- 
 
112 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 fore I leave London, and can give you just thirty 
 minutes, to-morrow afternoon at two." 
 
 " That's very good of Your Majesty," replied 
 Mr. Roosevelt, " and I'll be there. But unfortu- 
 nately I have an engagement, so that I'll only be 
 able to give you twenty minutes." 
 
 Another story concerns a little boy, — the 
 Crown Prince of one of the countries where 
 royal folk have simpler and better manners than 
 in Germany. He and his parents and other per- 
 sons of royal rank were at the palace where Mr. 
 Roosevelt was staying. As any man would know, 
 boys are interested in much the same things 
 whether they are princes or not, and this one was 
 greatly taken by Mr. Roosevelt's stories of hunt- 
 ing, and by being taught some of the games which 
 the American father and his boys had played in 
 the White House, not many years before. So it 
 happened that as a group of the visitors, including 
 two or three kings and queens, stepped out of one 
 of the rooms of the palace into a corridor one 
 evening, they were astonished to see a gentleman 
 down on his hands and knees on a rug, playing 
 " bear " with a little boy. The gentleman was the 
 Ex-President of the United States, and the boy 
 was the future King of one of the countries of 
 Europe. 
 
 Roosevelt's return to New York was the signal 
 
Copyright, 1902, by Clinedinst, WaBhington, D.C. 
 
 President Roosevelt in the Saddle 
 
EUROPE AND AMERICA 113 
 
 for a tremendous reception. New York outdid 
 itself in salutes, parades, and wildly cheering 
 crowds. Nothing like it had been seen before. 
 Even after the excitement of the first day of his 
 return, he could not go out without being sur- 
 rounded by cheering crowds. He knew that it 
 could not last, and said to his sister: " Soon they 
 will be throwing rotten apples at me." 
 
 He was right. A period was about to begin 
 when he was to be defeated in every campaign 
 in which he engaged. All the enemies he had 
 made in his long fight for better government — 
 and they were many and bitter enemies — were 
 to join hands with all the people who opposed him 
 jo^ because they disliked him. He was to part 
 company from some of his nearest friends, and 
 persistently to be reviled, misunderstood and at- 
 tacked. Yet he was to rally around him a body 
 of devoted friends, and make these the greatest 
 years of his life. 
 
 It is partly comic and partly sad, to look back 
 and consider the things for which Roosevelt had 
 fought in his public life, and to recall that a fight 
 had to be made for things like these; that the 
 man advocating them had to stand unlimited 
 abuse. He had been abused for trying to stop 
 the sale of liquor to children, and opposed in his 
 eflforts to prevent the making of cigars in filthy 
 
114 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 bed-roooms. He had been violently attacked for 
 enforcing the liquor laws of New York. Law- 
 yers and public men had grown red with anger 
 as they denounced him as a tyrant, and an enemy 
 to the Constitution, because he wished to stop 
 a dishonest system of rebates by the railroads. A 
 man looks back and wonders if he were living 
 among sane people, or in a mad-house, when he re- 
 calls that Roosevelt was viciously attacked because 
 he proposed that the meat-packers of this country 
 should not be allowed to sell to their countrymen 
 rotten and diseased products which foreign coun- 
 tries refused even to admit. Sneers greeted his 
 attempts to prevent poisons being sold as medi- 
 cine, and laudanum being peddled to little children 
 as soothing-syrup. His fight to prevent greedy 
 folk from destroying the forests, wasting the 
 minerals, and spoiling the water supplies of 
 America had to be made in the face of every sort 
 of legal trickery and the meanest of personal 
 abuse. 
 
 The Republican Party had been founded dur- 
 ing one of the greatest efforts for human free- 
 dom ever made in our history. In its long years 
 in power, and in the amazing^ increase in pros- 
 perity and wealth in America, it had become the 
 defender of wealth. Many of its highest and 
 most powerful men could see no farther than the 
 
EUROPE AND AMERICA 115 
 
 cash drawer. Human rights and wrongs, human 
 soffering, or any attempt to prevent such suffer- 
 ings, simply did not interest them. They were 
 not cruel men personally, but they had heard re- 
 peated for so many years that this or the other 
 thing could not be done " because it would hurt 
 business," that they had come to worship " busi- 
 ness " as a savage bows his head before an idol. 
 Many of them could give money for an orphan 
 asylum or a children's hospital, and yet on the 
 same day, vote to kill a bill aimed to prevent 
 child-labor. To pass such a bill as that would 
 " hurt business." 
 
 The Democratic Party was no better. It was 
 simply weaker, and usually less intelligent. 
 Wherever it was powerful, it, too, was apt to be 
 the servant of corruption. The politicians of 
 both parties loved to keep up a continual fight 
 about the tariff, to distract public attention from 
 other important subjects. 
 
 There had been disagreements in the Repub- 
 lican Party for a number of years. These had 
 gone on during the Roosevelt administration. 
 In the main, these struggles can be described by 
 sajring that President Roosevelt and those who 
 agreed with him were looking out for the advan- 
 tage of the many, and for the welfare and health 
 of great masses of the people. His opponents 
 
ii6 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 were more interested to see that nothing checked 
 the activities of great corporations, railroads, and 
 manufacturing interests. They sincerely believed 
 that this was the first concern of all true patriots. 
 Roosevelt wished every man to have a square 
 deal, an equal chance, so far as possible, to earn 
 as good a living as he could. His opponents 
 thought that if the great business interests could 
 only go on, as they liked, without being annoyed 
 by the government, they would be able to give 
 employment to almost everybody, and to all the 
 unfortunates, who were crushed in the struggle, 
 they would give charity. 
 
 Between these two groups there was a cease- 
 less fight all the years Roosevelt was in the White 
 House. He had been strongly approved at the 
 polls ; many of the measures he advocated had been 
 made laws by Congress. So he thought, and the 
 larger part of the Republican Party thought, when 
 Mr. Taft became President, that the measures 
 which they had approved were going to be ad- 
 vanced still further. 
 
 It soon appeared that they were in for a dis- 
 appointment. Mr. Taft proved friendly to the 
 older politicians; the younger and progressive 
 men were not in favor. He made his associates, 
 and chose as his advisers, the men who called 
 
EUROPE AND AMERICA 117 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt " rash," " a socialist," " an an- 
 archist." Many of -the men who surrounded 
 President Taft were honest and patriotic. But 
 there were also a number of stick-in-the-mud 
 statesmen, — old gentlemen who had been say- 
 ing the same thing, thinking the same things, 
 doing the same things, for forty years. To 
 change, to be up with the times, to progress, to 
 alter methods to meet new conditions, struck 
 them as simply indecent. Their idea of a 
 happy national life was great " prosperity " for 
 a fortimate few, a lesser degree of success 
 for some others who could cling to the chariot 
 wheds of the rich, and, — charity for the rest. 
 That was always their answer to the old, hard 
 problem of wealth and poverty. Like quack 
 doctors they would try to cure the symp- 
 toms, rather than like wise physicians seek to 
 find the causes. They were like the Tories in 
 our Revolution who were for King George 
 against George Washington, because King George 
 was the legal King of the American colonies, or 
 like the Northern pro-slavery men, who defended 
 slavery because it was permitted by the Constitu- 
 tion and the slaves were legal " property." The 
 Constitution was, for them, an instrument to be 
 used to block all change, whether good or bad. 
 
ii8 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Other men, near to President Taft, were 
 neither patriotic nor innocent. They were 
 shrewd, powerful Bosses, — men of the type of 
 Piatt. Only, Mr. Taft did not stand on the 
 alert with them, as Roosevelt had done as Gov- 
 ernor, working with them when he could, and 
 fighting them when they went wrong. He al- 
 lowed them to influence his administration, and, 
 at last, accepted a nomination engineered by them 
 for their own selfish purposes. 
 
 The Republicans who followed President Taft, 
 the " stand-patters," believed in property rights 
 first, and human rights second. If any of them 
 did not actually believe this, they joined people 
 who did thoroughly believe it, and so their action 
 counted toward putting that belief into practice. 
 The others, the " Insurgents " or Progressive Re- 
 publicans, (later called the Bull Moose) believed 
 in human rights first. That is as near as the 
 thing can be stated, remembering that it was a 
 disputed point, with good men on both sides. The 
 stand-patters said the Progressives were cranks, — 
 visionary and impractical; the Progressives re- 
 plied that it was better to be both of these things 
 than to be quite so near to the earth and selfish 
 as Mr. Taft's followers or managers. The 
 events of later years have not borne out the con- 
 tention that Roosevelt was " rash " and " dan- 
 
E U ROPE A .N U AM ERICA 1 1 .; 
 
 gerous"; while the charge that Mr. Taft made a 
 President more pleasing to the Bosses than to the 
 people was amply proved, in the campaign of 
 1912. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE BULL MOOSE 
 
 It was not personal ambition which made Roose- 
 velt become the leader of the revolt in the Re- 
 publican Party, and later head a new party. The 
 revolt had been growing while he was in Africa, 
 and he was long besought to become its leader. 
 At first, Senator La FoUette seemed a possible 
 leader, but he broke down in a nervous attack, and 
 the belief that he was not the man for the place 
 has been justified by later events. 
 
 As President Taft's administration drew to an 
 end, in 191 1 and 19 12, it was clear that he was 
 steadily losing the public confidence. State elec- 
 tions, and other straws, showed how the wind 
 was blowing. The Progressive Republicans 
 pointed out to their fellow-members of the party 
 that only where a Progressive ran for office in a 
 state election did the party win. Otherwise the 
 Democrats were victorious. The lesson was 
 plain; but the stand-patters did not care to see 
 it. By the beginning of 1912 it was freely pre- 
 dicted in print that the Democrats would nominate 
 120 
 
THE BULL MOOSE 121 
 
 Governor Wilson of New Jersey, their strongest 
 candidate, and that they would win if the Re- 
 publicans insisted on naming Mr. Taft. But the 
 old-line Republicans were above taking advice. 
 The Democrats were naturally gleeful about the 
 situation; they kept their faces straight and sol- 
 emnly warned the Republicans, in the name of the 
 safety of the country, not to listen to the " wild 
 man," Roosevelt, but to be sure to nominate Mr. 
 Taft And the Republicans listened to the advice 
 of their opponents. " Whom the Gods would de- 
 stroy they first make mad." 
 
 Roosevelt had been telling his friends that he 
 would not run again ; that he did not wish to op- 
 pose Mr. Taft, who had been his close friend and 
 associate. But neither he, nor the Republicans 
 who thought as he did, liked to see their party 
 drift tack and back to become the organization 
 for plunder which the Bosses would have made it 
 long before, if they had always had a " good- 
 natured" man in the White House. When the 
 governors of seven States — Michigan, West Vir- 
 ginia, Wyoming, Nebraska, New Hampshire, 
 Missouri and Kansas — united in an appeal to 
 Roosevelt for leadership, he began to change his 
 mind. 
 
 He said in private, that he knew it would be 
 hard, if not impossible, for him to get the nom- 
 
122 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 ination; President Taft had all the machinery on 
 his side. He knew that it meant parting with 
 many of his best friends; the older politicians 
 would mainly oppose him; he would have to go 
 directly to the people for his support, and rely 
 upon the younger leaders as his lieutenants. 
 
 In going straight to the people he was following 
 one of the principles of the Insurgent or Progres- 
 sive Republicans. In order to fight the Bosses, 
 and overcome the crooked and secret influence 
 of " big business " in politics, the Progressives 
 were proposing various methods by which it was 
 hoped the people might rule more directly, and 
 prevent a few men from overcoming the wishes 
 of the many. One of these methods was the direct 
 primary, so that the voters might choose their 
 candidates themselves, instead of leaving it to the 
 absurd conventions, where large crowds of men 
 are hired to fill the galleries, yell for one candi- 
 date, and try to out-yell the opposing crowd. 
 
 In February, 191 2, Roosevelt announced that 
 he was a candidate for the Republican nomination. 
 
 " My hat is in the ring," he said. 
 
 The storm of abuse which raged around him 
 now was terrific. All the friends of fattened 
 monopoly — and this included many of the most 
 powerful newspapers — screamed aloud in their 
 fright. Mostly they assailed him on three coimts : 
 
THE BULL MOOSE 1J3 
 
 that he was " disloyal " to his friend, Mr. Taft, 
 that he had promised never to run for President 
 again; and that it meant the overthrow of the Re- 
 public and the setting up of a monarchy if any 
 man ever disregarded Washington's example and 
 was President for three terms. 
 
 The charge of disloyalty to Mr. Taft does not 
 deserve discussion. Those who made it never 
 stopped to think that they were saying that a 
 man should set his personal friendships higher 
 than his regard for the nation ; that he must sup- 
 port his friend, even if he believed that to do so 
 would work harm to the whole country. More- 
 over, if there had been any disloyalty, it had not 
 been on Mr. Roosevelt's side ! He had remained 
 true to his principles. As for the promise never 
 to run again, we have already seen what he said 
 about that. The notion that Washington laid 
 down some law against reelecting a President for 
 more than two terms is an example of how a 
 complete error may pass into popular belief, and 
 become a superstition. Washington said and be- 
 lieved the very opposite. He did not wish a third 
 term himself, because he was old and weary, but 
 in regard to third terms he seems to have been 
 even more liberal than Roosevelt, who disapproved 
 of three terms in succession. But Washington 
 distinctly said that he saw no reason why a Presi- 
 
124 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 dent should not be reelected as often as the people 
 needed his services. He said nothing about four, 
 eight, or twelve years, but in discussing this very 
 question in a letter to Lafayette, wrote : 
 
 " I can see no propriety in precluding ourselves from 
 the services of any man, who on some emergency shall 
 be deemed most capable of serving the public." ^ 
 
 In the primary campaign, in the spring of 1912, 
 the Progressive Republicans and Mr. Roosevelt 
 proved their case up to the hilt. In every instance 
 but one, where it was possible to get a direct vote 
 of the people, Roosevelt beat President Taft, and 
 overwhelmingly. Thus, in California he beat him 
 nearly two to one; in Illinois, more than two to 
 one, in Nebraska more than three to one, in North 
 Dakota more than twenty to one, in South Dakota 
 more than three to one. In New Jersey, Mary- 
 land, Oregon and Ohio, Roosevelt won decisively ; 
 in Pennsylvania by a tremendous majority. 
 Massachusetts, the only remaining State which 
 held a direct primary, where both men were in 
 the field, split nearly even, giving Mr. Taft a 
 small lead. 
 
 In the face of this clear indication of what the 
 voters wished, for the Republican leaders to go 
 
 1 Sparks, " Writings of George Washington,'' ix. 358. 
 
THE BULL MOOSE 125 
 
 ahead and nominate Mr. Taft was sheer suicide 
 from a poHtical point of view. It was also some- 
 thing much worse: the few denying the will of 
 the many. This, of course, is tyranny, — what 
 our ancestors revolted against when they founded 
 the nation. But go ahead they did. It is prob- 
 able that even as early as this they had no idea of 
 winning the election ; they merely intended to keep 
 the party machinery in their own hands. Gravely 
 talking about law and the Constitution they pro- 
 ceeded to defy the first principles of popular gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 By use of the Southern delegates, from States 
 where the Republican Party exists mostly in 
 theory, by contesting almost every delegation, and 
 always ruling against Roosevelt, by every manipu- 
 lation which the " Old Guard "of the party could 
 employ, Mr. Taft was nominated. In at least 
 one important and crucial case, delegates were 
 seized for Mr. Taft by shameless theft. The 
 phrase is that used by Mr. Thayer, — a historian, 
 accustomed to weigh his words, and a non-parti- 
 san in this contest, since he favored neither Mr. 
 Taft nor Roosevelt. 
 
 In August the Progressive Party was founded 
 at a convention held in Chicago. Roosevelt and 
 Johnson were the nominees for President and 
 Vice-President. The men gathered at this con- 
 
126 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 vention were out of the Republican Party; they 
 had not left it, but the party had left them. Not 
 willingly did they take this action; men whose 
 grandfathers voted for Fremont in 1856 and for 
 Lincoln in i860, and again for Lincoln in 1864, 
 when the fate of the Republic really depended on 
 the success of the Republican Party. The sons of 
 men who had fought for the Union did not lightly 
 attack even the name of the old party. But there 
 was nothing left but its name; its worst elements 
 led it; many of the better men who stayed in it 
 kept silent. Probably even they realized the 
 nauseous hypocrisy of the situation when Mr. 
 William Barnes of New York came forward and 
 implored that the country be saved, that our liberty 
 be saved, that the Constitution be saved! 
 
 For the destroyer, from whom the country was 
 to be saved, was one of the greatest and most 
 honorable men of his time, — while it was later 
 established in court that it was no libel to say 
 that Mr. Barnes was a Boss and had used crooked 
 methods. 
 
 The Progressives, soon called the Bull Moose 
 Party, attracted the usual group of reformers, 
 and some cranks. Each new party does this. 
 Roosevelt had, many years before, spoken of the 
 " lunatic fringe " which clings to the skirts of 
 every sincere reform. 
 
THK BULL MOOSE 127 
 
 " But the whole body," writes Mr. Thayer, 
 " judged without prejudice, probably contained 
 the largest number of disinterested, public-spirited, 
 and devoted persons, who had ever met for a 
 national and political object since the group which 
 formed the Republican Party in 1854." 
 
 All the new measures which they proposed, al- 
 though denounced by the two old parties, were 
 in use in other democratic countries; many of 
 them have since been adopted here. Roosevelt 
 foresaw the radical wave which was later to sweep 
 over the country and was trying to make our 
 government more liberal, so as to meet the new 
 spirit of things. The more radical of Socialists 
 always hated him as their worst enemy, for they 
 knew that his reasonable reforms would make it 
 impossible for them to succeed in their extreme 
 proposals. 
 
 The jokes made about the new party were often 
 most amusing and added a great deal of interest 
 to an exciting campaign. The Bull Moosers were 
 very much in earnest, and had a camp-meeting 
 fervor, which laid them open to a good deal of 
 ridicule. But they could stand it, for they knew 
 that as between themselves and the Republicans, 
 the last laugh would be theirs. The Republicans 
 had nominated Mr. Taft by means of delegates 
 from rock-ribbed Democratic States like Alabama, 
 
128 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Florida and Georgia, let them now see if they 
 could elect him by such means ! 
 
 One phase of the campaign was a shame and a 
 disgrace. The Republican newspapers joined in 
 the use of abusive terms against Roosevelt, to a 
 degree which has never been paralleled, before 
 nor since. They described him as a monster, a 
 foul traitor, another Benedict Arnold, and for 
 weeks used language about him for which the 
 writers would be overcome with shame if it were 
 brought home to them now. This had its 
 natural result. Just as the speeches of Emma 
 Goldman and others stirred up the murderer of 
 President McKinley to his act, so this reiteration 
 of abuse, this harping on the assertion that Roose- 
 velt was the enemy of the country, the destroyer 
 of law and liberty, induced another weak-minded 
 creature to attempt murder. 
 
 A man named Schrank who said that he had 
 been led on by what he read in the papers, waited 
 for Roosevelt outside a hotel in Milwaukee. 
 This was during the campaign and Roosevelt was 
 leaving the hotel to make a speech in a public 
 hall. As he stood up in his automobile, Schrank 
 shot him in the chest. The bullet was partially 
 checked by a thick roll of paper — the notes for 
 his speech — and by an eye-glasses case. Never- 
 
THE BULL MOOSl' 129 
 
 theless, with the bullet in him, only stopping to 
 change his blood-soaked shirt, he refused to quit. 
 He went and made his speech, standing on the 
 platform and speaking for over an hour. 
 
 He thought of himself as a soldier fighting for 
 a cause, and he would no more leave because of a 
 wound than he would have deserted his fellow- 
 hunter in Africa, when that charging lion came 
 down on them. 
 
 For two weeks he had to keep out of the cam- 
 paign, recovering from his wound, first in a hos- 
 pital and then at home. Governor Wilson, the 
 Democratic nominee, soon to be the President- 
 Elect, generously oflfered to cease his campaign 
 speeches, but this oflFer was declined by Mr. 
 Roosevelt. 
 
 In the election, Mr. Wilson was the winner, 
 with Mr. Roosevelt second. The Progressive 
 candidate beat the Republican, as it had been pre- 
 dicted he would. Mr. Roosevelt received over 
 half a million more votes than Mr. Taft, and had 
 eighty-eight electoral votes to eight for Mr. Taft. 
 The Bosses were punished for defying the will of 
 the voters and a useful lesson in politics was ad- 
 ministered. 
 
 The testimony of Mr. Thayer is especially valu- 
 able, since he was a supporter of Mr. Wilson in 
 
I30 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 this election. He writes that since the election 
 showed that Roosevelt had been all the time the 
 real choice of the Republican Party " it was the 
 Taft faction and not Roosevelt which split the 
 Republican Party in 1912." 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE EXPLORER 
 
 I cannot rest from travel; I will drink 
 
 life to the lees. All times I have enjo/d 
 
 Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those 
 
 That loved me, and alone ; on shore, and when 
 
 Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 
 
 Vext the dim sea. I am become a name; 
 
 For always roaming whh a hungry heart 
 
 Much have I seen and known, — cities of men 
 
 And manners, climates, councils, governments, 
 
 Myself not least, bnt honor'd of them all, — 
 
 And drunk delight of battle with my peers. 
 
 Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. . . . 
 
 How dull it is to pause, to make an end. 
 
 To rust tmburnish'd, not to shine in use I 
 
 As tho" to breathe were life ! Life piled on life 
 
 Were all too little, and of one to me 
 
 Little remains ; but every hour is saved 
 
 From that eternal silence, something more, 
 
 A bringer of new things; and vile it were 
 
 For some three suns to store and hoard myself. 
 
 And this grey spirit yeartiing in desire 
 
 To follow knowledge like a sinking star. 
 
 Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 
 
 Tennyson's Ulysses. 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt took his defeat without whimp- 
 ering. When he was in a fight he gave blows 
 and expected to receive them. His enemies often 
 hit foul blows, and this his friends resented, es- 
 pecially when the attacks actually provoked an 
 
 131 
 
132 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 attempt at murder. When his private character 
 was assailed he defended himself, promptly and 
 successfully. But neither he nor any of his 
 friends asked that he should be sacred from all 
 criticism; nor feebly protested that he was above 
 ordinary mortals, and only to be mentioned with 
 a sort of trembling reverence. He was too much 
 of a man to be kept wrapped in wool. 
 
 In 19 13 he traveled through South American 
 countries to speak before learned bodies which 
 had invited him to come before them. After- 
 wards, with his son Kermit, some American nat- 
 uralists, and Colonel Rondon, a brave and dis- 
 tinguished Brazilian officer, he made a long trip 
 through the wilderness of Brazil, to hunt and 
 explore. Some of the country through which 
 they traveled was little known to white men ; some 
 of it absolutely unknown. They hunted and 
 killed specimens of the jaguar, tapir, peccary, 
 and nearly all of the other strange South Ameri- 
 can animals. 
 
 In February 1914, they set out upon an un- 
 known stream called the River of Doubt. They 
 did not know whether the exploration of this river 
 would take them weeks or months ; whether they 
 might have to face starvation, or savage tribes, or 
 worse than either, disease. They surveyed the 
 river as they went, so as to be able to map its 
 
THE EXPLORER 133 
 
 course, and add to geographical knowledge. 
 Strange birds haunted the river, and vicious 
 stinging insects annoyed the travelers. They 
 constantly had to carry the canoes around rapids 
 or waterfalls, so that progress was slow. Some 
 of the canoes were damaged and others had to be 
 builL Large birds, like the curassow, and 
 also monkeys, were shot for food. The pest 
 of stinging insects grew constantly worse, — bees, 
 mosquitoes, large blood-sucking flies and enor- 
 mous ants tormented them. The flies were called 
 piums and borashudas. Some of them bit like 
 scorpions. 
 
 Kermit Roosevelt's canoe was caught in the 
 rapids, smashed and sunk, and one of the men 
 drowned. Once they saw signs of some unknown 
 tribe of Indians, when one of the dogs belonging 
 to the party was killed in the forest, almost 
 within sight of Colonel Rondon, and found with 
 two arrows in his body. The river was dangerous 
 for bathing, because of a peculiar fish — the 
 piranha — a savage little beast which attacks men 
 and animals with its razor-like teeth, inflicts fear- 
 ful wounds and may even kill any unfortunate 
 creature which is caught by a school in deep 
 water. Some members of the party were badly 
 bitten by the piranhas. 
 
 As their long and difficult course down the river 
 
134 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 continued, and as their hardships increased, one of 
 the native helpers murdered another native — a 
 sergeant — and fled. Roosevelt, while in the 
 water helping to right an upset canoe, bruised his 
 leg against a boulder. Inflammation set in, as 
 it usually does with wounds in the tropics. For 
 forty-eight days they saw no human being outside 
 their own party. They were all weak with fever 
 and troubled with wounds received in the river. 
 Colonel Roosevelt (who was nearly fifty six years 
 old) wrote of his own condition : 
 
 The after effects of the fever still hung on ; and the 
 leg which had been hurt while working in the rapids 
 with the sunken canoe had taken a turn for the bad 
 and developed an abscess. The good doctor, to whose 
 unwearied care and kindness I owe much, had cut it 
 open and inserted a drainage tube; an added charm 
 being given the operation, and the subsequent dressings, 
 by the enthusiasm with which the piums and boroshudas 
 took part therein. I could hardly hobble, and was 
 pretty well laid up. " But " there aren't no ' stop con- 
 ductor,' while a battery's changing ground." No man 
 has any business to go on such a trip as ours unless 
 he will refuse to jeopardize the welfare of his associatesi 
 by any delay caused by a weakness or ailment of his. 
 It is hisi duty to go forward, if necessary on all fours, 
 until he drops. Fortunately, I was put to no such test. 
 I remained in good shape until we had passed the last 
 of the rapids of the chasms. When my serious trouble 
 came we had only canoe-riding aheid of us. It is not 
 
THE EXPLORER 135 
 
 ideal for a sick man to spend the hottest hours of the 
 day stretched on the boxes in the bottom of a small 
 open dugout, under the well-nigh intolerable heat of the 
 torrid sun of the mid-tropics, varied by blinding, 
 drenching downpours of rain; but I could not be suf- 
 ficiently grateful for the chance. Kermit and Cherrie 
 took care of me as if they had been trained nurses ; and 
 Colonel Rondon and Lyra were no less thoughtftil.^ 
 
 It is known that his illness was more serious, 
 and his conduct much more unselfish than he told 
 in his book. When he could not be moved, he 
 asked the others to go forward for their own 
 safety and leave him. They refused, naturally, 
 and he secretly resolved to shoot himself if his 
 condition did not soon improve, rather than be a 
 drag on the party. 
 
 In his report to the Brazilian Grovemment, 
 which had made the expedition possible by its 
 aid, Mr. Roosevelt was able to say: 
 
 " We have put on the map a river about 1500 
 kilometers in length running from just south of 
 the 13th degree to north of the 5th degree and 
 the biggest affluent of the Madeira. Until now 
 its upper course has been utterly unknown to 
 every one, and its lower course, although known 
 for years to the rubber men, utterly unknown to 
 cartographers." 
 
 ^ " Through the Brazilian Wilderness," p. 319. 
 
136 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 The Brazilian Government renamed the river 
 in his honor, first the Rio Roosevelt, later the Rio 
 Teodoro. Branches of it were named in honor 
 of other members of the party, the Rio Kermit and 
 the Rio Cherrie, — the latter for the American 
 naturalist, Mr. George K. Cherrie. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE MAN 
 
 What did Theodore Roosevelt do during his life 
 that raised him above other men ? What were his 
 achievements? Why are memorials and monu- 
 ments raised in his honor, books written about 
 him? Why do people visit his grave, and care to 
 preserve the house where he was bom ? 
 
 First, because he helped the cause of better 
 government all his life, as, while in college, he said 
 that he was going to do. 
 
 Second, because he had a good influence on 
 politics, upon business, and upon American life 
 generaUy. Dishonest and shady dealings which 
 were common when he left college, became very 
 much less common as a result of his work. No 
 other American did as much as he for this im- 
 provement. 
 
 Third, because he practiced the "square 
 deal." It did not matter to him if the evil-doer 
 was rich or poor, — Roosevelt was his enemy. 
 The criminal who had many friends in Wall 
 Street was a criminal still in his eyes; and the 
 137 
 
138 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 rascal who had friends in labor tinions was never- 
 theless a rascal to him. He would not denounce 
 one and go easy with the other. Poisoning peo- 
 ple with bad meat was no less a crime to him 
 because it was said to be done in the interests of 
 " business " ; blowing up people with bombs was 
 not to be considered any less than murder because 
 some one said it was done to help " labor." 
 
 Next, he practiced what he preached. When 
 the great time came, he was ready " to pay with 
 his body for his soul's desire." 
 
 While President, he proved by his conduct of 
 our relations with foreign countries, that it is 
 possible both to keep peace and to keep our self 
 respect, and that this can be done only by firmness 
 and courage. 
 
 He maintained our national defenses at the 
 highest possible level, scorning to risk his fellow- 
 countrymen's lives and fortunes through neglect 
 of the Army and Navy. 
 
 By his wisdom, promptness and moral courage 
 in an emergency he made the Panama Canal pos- 
 sible. 
 
 He led in a great fight for liberal politics, try- 
 ing to put the ruling power of the nation once 
 more in the hands of its citizens, and showing 
 by his action that his country was dearer to him 
 than any political party. 
 
THE MAN 139 
 
 Finally, in the very last years of his life, and in 
 a time of dreadful national trial, his great voice 
 became the true voice of America to lead his 
 countrymen out of a quagmire of doubt and dis- 
 loyalty. 
 
 You may have heard it said that he was con- 
 ceited, arrogant, head-strong. What did the men 
 nearest him think ? John Hay, the polished diplo- 
 mat, who had been private secretary to Abraham 
 Lincoln, wrote about Roosevelt in his diary. 
 November 28, 1904 : 
 
 I read the President's message in the afternoon. . . . 
 Made several suggestions as to changes and omissions). 
 The President came in just as I had finished and we 
 went over the matter together. He accepted my ideas 
 with that singular amiability and open-mindedness 
 which form so striking a contrast with the general 
 idea of his brusque and arbitrary character. 
 
 You may have heard it said that he acted 
 hastily, went ahead on snap- judgments. On this 
 subject, Mr. Hay wrote: 
 
 Roosevelt is prompt and energetic, but he takes in- 
 finite pains to get at the facts before he acts. In all 
 the crises in which he has been accused of undue haste, 
 his action has been the result of long meditation 
 and well-reasoned conviction. If he thinks rapidly, 
 that is no fault; he thinks thoroughly, and that is the 
 essential. 
 
140 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 He was never a humbug. He did not deny that 
 he enjoyed being President. He never let his 
 friends point to him, while he was in the White 
 House, as a martyr. He had a good time wher- 
 ever he was. As he wrote : 
 
 I remember once sitting at a table with six or eight 
 other public officials, and each was explaining how he 
 regarded being in public life — how only the sternest 
 sense of duty prevented him from resigning his office, 
 and how the strain of working for a thankless con- 
 stituency was telling upon him — and that nothing but 
 the fact that he felt that he ought to sacrifice his com- 
 fort to the welfare of his country kept him in the 
 arduous life of statesmanship. It went round the table 
 until it came to my turn. This was during my first 
 term of office as President of the United States. I said : 
 " Now, gentlemen, I do not wish there to be any mis^ 
 understanding. I like my job, and I want to keep it for 
 four years more." '• 
 
 As for the question whether he acted from per- 
 sonal ambition, or from devotion to the cause he 
 represented, the following incident is as strong a 
 piece of evidence as we have about any of our pub- 
 lic men. It is related by Mr. Travers Carman, 
 of the Outlook, who accompanied Colonel Roose- 
 velt to the Republican convention in 19 12. 
 
 Roosevelt, on the evening of this conference in 
 the Congress Hotel, lacked only twenty-eight 
 
 ''Abbott, p. 100. 
 
THE MAN 141 
 
 votes to secure the nomination for President. 
 Mr. Carman was in the room, when a delegate 
 entered, in suppressed excitement, announcing 
 that he represented thirty-two Southern delegates 
 who would pledge themselves to vote for the 
 Colonel, if they could be permitted to vote with 
 the " regular " Republicans on all matters of party 
 organization, upon the platform, and so on. 
 Here were thirty-two votes, — four more than 
 were needed to give him the nomination. 
 
 Without a moment's hesitation and in the death-like 
 silence of that room the Colonel's answer rang out, 
 clearly and distinctly : " Thank the delegates you repre- 
 sent, but tell them that I cannot permit them to vote 
 for me unless they vote for all progressive principles 
 for which I have fought, for which the Progressive 
 element in the Republican party stands, and by which 
 I stand or fall." Strong men broke down under the 
 stress of that night. Life-long friends of Mr. Roose- 
 velt endeavored to persuade him to reconsider his de- 
 cision. After listening patiently he turned to two who 
 had been urging him to accept the offer of the Southern 
 delegates, placed a hand on the shoulder of each, and 
 said: "I have grown to regard you both as brothers; 
 let no act or word of yours make that relationship im- 
 possible." 1 
 
 Two important law-suits occupied some of 
 Roosevelt's time after the Progressive campaign. 
 
 1 Abbott, p. 8s. 
 
142 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 One of the favorite slanders about Roosevelt, re- 
 peated mostly by word of mouth, was that he 
 drank to excess or was an habitual drunkard. At 
 last it began to be repeated in print; a Michigan 
 newspaper printed it, coupled with other false- 
 hoods concerning his use of profane language. 
 Few public men would have cared t6 bring suit, 
 because the plaintiff must stand a cross-examina- 
 tion. But Roosevelt was careful of his good 
 name; he did not intend that persons should be 
 able to repeat slander about him, except in delib- 
 erate bad faith. 
 
 He and his lawyers went to the trial, bringing 
 with them dozens of witnesses, life-long friends, 
 hunting companions, reporters who had accom- 
 panied him on political campaigns, fellow-soldiers; 
 Cabinet officers, physicians, officers of the Army 
 and Navy. These witnesses testified for a week 
 to his temperate habits, agreeing absolutely in 
 their testimony. The doctors pointed out that 
 only a temperate man could have recovered so 
 quickly from his wound. It was established that 
 he never drank anything stronger than wine, ex- 
 cept as a medicine ; that he drank very little wine, 
 and never got drunk. 
 
 At the end, the newspaper editor withdrew 
 his statement, apologized, was found guilty and 
 fined only nominal charges. Mr. Roosevelt was 
 
THE MAN 143 
 
 not after this small creature's money, but was 
 only bent on clearing his reputation. So it was at 
 his request that the fine was fixed at six cents. 
 
 Mr. William Barnes, the Albany politician, sued 
 Mr. Roosevelt for libel, because Roosevelt had 
 called him a Boss, and said that he used crooked 
 methods. This had been said in a political cam- 
 paign. The Republicans were looking for some 
 chance to destroy Roosevelt, and Mr. Barnes, 
 aided by an able Republican lawyer, thought that 
 they would be doing a great service if they could 
 besmirch Mr. Roosevelt in some way. 
 
 So they worked their hardest and best, cross- 
 examined him for days and searched every inci- 
 dent of his political life. At the end they joined 
 that large band of disappointed men who tried to 
 destroy Roosevelt or catch him in something dis- 
 reputable. For the jury decided in Mr. Roose- 
 velt's favor, indicating that he had uttered no 
 untruth when he made his remarks about Mr. 
 Barnes. 
 
 As a writer, Mr. Roosevelt would have made a 
 name for himself, if he had done nothing else. 
 The success of his books is not due to the high 
 offices which he held, for his best writings had 
 nothing to do with politics. As a writer on 
 politics he was forceful and clear. There was no 
 doubt as to the meaning of his state papers ; they 
 
144 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 never had to be explained nor " interpreted." 
 They were not designed to mean any one of two 
 or three things, according to later circumstances. 
 Strength and directness were the characteristics. 
 When writing about the by-ways of politics his 
 enjoyment of the ridiculous made his work es- 
 pecially readable. When he felt deeply about any 
 great issue, as in his last years, about the Great 
 War, and our part in it, his indignation found 
 its way into his pages, which became touched with 
 the fire of genuine eloquence. 
 
 He wrote about books and animals, and about 
 outdoor life, as no President has ever done. His 
 remarks upon literature are those of a great book- 
 lover, sensible, well-informed and free from pose. 
 
 Every one should read his " Autobiography," 
 his " Hero Tales from American History " which 
 he wrote in company with Senator Lodge, and his 
 " Letters to His Children." His early accounts 
 of hunting in the West make good reading, but in 
 his book about his African hunt, and in the one 
 on the South American trip, he probably reached 
 his highest level as a writer. If any American 
 has written better books of travel than these, 
 more continuously interesting, fuller of pleasing 
 detail about the little incidents, the birds and tiny 
 animals which he encountered, and at the same 
 time with a stricter regard for accuracy of obser- 
 
Courtesy of Charles Scribner's Sons 
 and Lord Lee of Fareham. 
 
 From a painting by P. Laszlo. 
 PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
THE MAN 145 
 
 vation, I do not know where they are to be found. 
 This man of politics had a true poetic feeling 
 for the countries he visited; time and again he 
 moves his readers in describing the wonders of 
 the great waste places, the melancholy deserts 
 and wildernesses, the deadly fascination of the 
 jungle, and the awful glory of the tropic dawns 
 and sunsets. When something awakened his im- 
 agination he could write passages full of the 
 magic of poetry. Witness this, it is not a 
 description of scenery, but a vision of the true 
 historian of the future : 
 
 The true historian will bring the past before our eyes 
 as if it were the present. He will make us see as living 
 men the hard-faced archers of Agincourt, and the war- 
 worn spear-men who followed Alexander down beyond 
 the rim of the known world. We shall hear grate on 
 the coast of Britain the keels of the Low-Dutch sea- 
 thieves whose children's children were to inherit un- 
 known continents. . . . Beyond the dim centuries we 
 shall see the banners float above armed hosts. . . Dead 
 poets shall sing to us of the deeds of men of might and 
 the love and beauty of women. We shall see the danc- 
 ing girls of Memphis. The scent of the flowers in the 
 hanging gardens of Babylon will be heavy to our senses. 
 We shall sit at feast with the kings of Nineveh when 
 they drink from ivory and gold. . . . For us the war- 
 horns of King Olaf shall wail across the flood, and the 
 harps sound high at festivals in forgotten halls. The 
 frowning strongholds of the barons of old shall rise 
 
146 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 before us, and the white palace-castles from whose 
 windows Syrian princes once looked across the blue 
 ^gean. . . . We shall see the terrible horsemen of 
 Timur the Lame ride over the roof of the world; we 
 shall hear the drums beat as the armies of Gustavus and 
 Frederick and Napoleon drive forward to victory.^ 
 
 Here is one of Mr. Roosevelt's anecdotes of an 
 incident in the White House. It shows why the 
 people were interested in that house while he lived 
 in it: 
 
 " No guests were ever more welcome at the 
 White House than these old friends of the cattle 
 ranches and the cow camps — the men with whom 
 I had ridden the long circle and eaten at the tail- 
 board of a chuck-wagon — whenever they turned 
 up at Washington during my Presidency. I re- 
 member one of them who appeared at Washington 
 one day just before lunch, a huge powerful man, 
 who, when I knew him, had been distinctly a 
 fighting character. It happened that on that day 
 another old friend, the British Ambassador, Mr. 
 Bryce, was among those coming to lunch. Just 
 before we went in I turned to my cow-puncher 
 friend and said to him with great solemnity, ' Re- 
 member, Jim, that if you shot at the feet of the 
 British Ambassador to make him dance, it would 
 be likely to cause international complications ' j to 
 
 1 " History as Literature," p. 32, et seq. 
 
THE MAN 147 
 
 which Jim responded with imaffected horror, 
 'Why, Colonel, I shouldn't think of it I I 
 shouldn't think of it!'"* 
 
 And here is one about his children : 
 ^ " The small boy was convalescing, and was 
 engaged in playing on the floor with some tin 
 ships, together with two or three pasteboard mon- 
 itors and rams of my own manufacture. He was 
 giving a vivid rendering of Farragut at Mobile 
 Bay, from memories of how I had told the story. 
 My pasteboard rams were fascinating — if a 
 naval architect may be allowed to praise his own 
 work — and as property they were equally di- 
 vided between the little girl and the small boy. 
 The little girl looked on with alert suspicion from 
 the bed, for she was not yet convalescent enough 
 to be allowed down on the floor. The small boy 
 was busily reciting the phases of the fight, which 
 now approached its climax, and the little girl evi- 
 dently suspected that her monitor was destined to 
 play the part of victim. 
 
 " Little boy. ' And then they steamed bang 
 into the monitor.' 
 
 " Little girl. ' Brother, don't you sink my 
 monitor ! ' 
 
 "Little boy (without heeding and hurrying 
 
 • " Autobiography,'' p. 132. 
 
148 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 toward the climax) . ' And the torpedo went at 
 the monitor ! ' 
 
 " Little girl. ' My monitor is not to sink ! ' 
 " Little boy, dramatically ; ' And bang the mon- 
 itor sank ! ' 
 
 " Little girl. * It didn't do any such thing. 
 My monitor always goes to bed at seven, and it's 
 now quarter past. My monitor was in bed and 
 couldn't sink! '"» 
 
 1 " Autobiography," p. 367. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE GREAT AMERICAN 
 
 Death doses all; but something ere the end, 
 
 Some work of noble note, may yet be done. . . . 
 
 Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' 
 
 We are not now that strength which in old days 
 
 Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, — 
 
 One equal temper of heroic hearts. 
 
 Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 
 
 To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. 
 
 Tennyson's Ulysses. 
 
 Not many months after Roosevelt came back 
 from South America, the Great War in Europe 
 broke out. It is but dreaming now to surmise 
 what might have been done in those fearful days 
 of July 19 14, when the German hordes were gath- 
 ering for their attack upon the world. Once be- 
 fore, and singlehanded, this country had made the 
 German Kaiser halt. Had there been resolution 
 in the White House in 1914, could all the neutral 
 nations have been rallied at our side, and could 
 we have spoken in tones so decisive to the Hun 
 that he would have drawn back even then, have 
 left Belgium unravaged, and spared the world the 
 misery of the next four years? It may be so; 
 149 
 
ISO THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Germany did not expect to have to take on Eng- 
 land as an enemy. If she had been told, so that 
 there was no mistaking ottr meaning, that she 
 would have us against her as well, then it might 
 have been her part to hesitate, and finally put 
 back her sword. 
 
 Roosevelt supported the President at first, in 
 his policy of neutrality, supposing him to have 
 some special information. He supported him 
 with hesitation, and with qualifications however, 
 pointing out that neutrality is no proud position, 
 and has many disadvantages. Perhaps he had 
 some inklings of the danger to the country when 
 our foreign affairs are managed by pacifists. 
 Certainly America had noticed the grim fact that 
 a Government which forever talked about peace 
 had in actual practice, shed more blood in a few 
 hours at Vera Cruz than had been spilled in all 
 the seven years while Roosevelt was President. 
 Moreover, this blood was shed uselessly; no ob- 
 ject whatever having been gained by it. 
 
 It is impossible to understand Roosevelt; it is 
 impossible to get any idea of what he did during 
 his term of office; it is impossible to learn any- 
 thing from his career, unless we contrast him 
 and his beliefs and actions with the conduct of our 
 Government during the Great War. An object 
 lesson of the most illuminating sort is afforded by 
 
THE GREAT AMERICAN 151 
 
 this contrast, and we may make up our minds 
 about the wisest paths to be followed in the 
 future if we notice what Roosevelt said and did 
 at this time, how far and how wisely his counsel 
 was accepted or rejected. 
 
 He disapproved, for instance, President Wil- 
 son's speech, made a day or two after the sinking 
 of the Lusitania in which the President spoke of a 
 nation being " too proud to fight." Roosevelt 
 said that a nation which announced itself as too 
 proud to fight was usually about proud enough to 
 be kicked ; and it must be admitted that the Ger- 
 mans took that view of it, and for a year and more 
 continued to kick. He did not deem it wise, 
 when President Wilson informed the Germans, ten 
 days later, that we remembered the " humane 
 attitude " of their Government " in matters of in- 
 ternational right," for he happened to recall that 
 Belgium was at that moment red with the blood 
 of its citizens, slain by the Germans in a sort 
 of warfare that combined highway robbery 
 with revolting murder. Neither did it seem 
 useful to him to speak about German influence 
 as always "upon the side of justice and hu- 
 manity." 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt had always been strong for hav- 
 ing the nation ready for war if war should come. 
 Mr. Wilson first said that persons who believed 
 
152 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 this were nervous and excited. Next he joined 
 these persons himself, so far as words went, and 
 finally he let the matter drop until we were at 
 war. Mr. Roosevelt believed that when you once 
 were at war it was a crime to " hit softly." Mr. 
 Wilson waited until we had been at war a year and 
 over, and then announced in a speech that he was 
 determined to use force ! 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt wrote regularly for The Out- 
 look, later for the Metropolitan Magazine and the 
 Kansas City Star. Thousands of his countrymen 
 read his articles, and found in them the only ex- 
 pression of the American spirit which was being 
 uttered. Americans were puzzled, troubled and 
 finally humiliated by the letters and speeches, 
 which came from Washington. To be told that 
 in this struggle between the blood-guilty Hun, 
 and the civilized nations of the earth, that we 
 must keep even our minds impartial seemed an 
 impossible command. School-boys throughout 
 the country must have wondered why President 
 Wilson, with every means for getting infor- 
 mation, should have to confess that he did not 
 know what the war was about ! And when Mr. 
 Wilson declared in favor of a peace without 
 victory, his friends and admirers were kept busy 
 explaining, some of them, that he meant without 
 victory for the Allies, and others that he meant 
 
THE GREAT AMERICAN 153 
 
 without victory for Germany, and still others that 
 he meant without victory for anybody in partic- 
 ular. 
 
 No wonder that Americans began to wonder 
 what country they were living in, and whether 
 they had been mistaken in thinking that America 
 had a heroic history, in which its citizens took 
 pride. No wonder they turned their eyes to 
 Europe, where scores of young Americans, sick- 
 ening at the state of things at home, had eagerly 
 volunteered to fight with France or England 
 against the Htm. One of these, named Alan 
 Seeger, who wrote the fine poem " I have a Ren- 
 dezvous with Death," died in battle on our In- 
 dependence Day. He also wrote a poem called 
 " A Message to America." ' In it he said that 
 America had once a leader : 
 
 . . . the man 
 Most fit to be called American. 
 
 In it he spoke further of the same leader 
 
 I have been too long from my country's shores 
 
 To reckon what state of mind is yours, 
 
 But as for myself I know right well 
 
 I would go through fire and shot and shell 
 
 And face new perils and make my bed 
 
 In new privations, if Roosevelt led. 
 
 ^ Seeger. Poems, pp. 164, 165. 
 
154 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 One did not have to be long with the men who 
 volunteered at the beginning of the war to know 
 that Roosevelt's spirit led these men, and that 
 they looked to him and trusted him as the great 
 American. The country's honor was safe in his 
 hands, and no mawkish nor cowardly words ever 
 came from his lips. 
 
 He pointed out the folly of the pacifist ty^ of 
 public men, like Mr. Bryan and Mr. Ford. The 
 latter, helpless as a butterfly in those iron years, 
 led his quarreling group of pilgrims to Europe, 
 on his " Peace Ship," and then left them to their 
 incessant fights with each other. The American 
 public was quick to see the contrast, when war 
 came, and Roosevelt's four sons and son-in-law all 
 volunteered, while Mr. Ford's son took advantage 
 of some law and avoided military duty, in order 
 to add more millions to his already enormous heap. 
 The lesson of Roosevelt's teaching and example 
 was not lost, and the people recognized that the 
 country would endure while it had men like the 
 Roosevelts, but that it would go down in infamy 
 if the other sort became numerous. 
 
 In the election of 1916 Mr. Roosevelt, after re- 
 fusing the Progressive nomination, supported Mr, 
 Hughes, the Republican, against President Wil- 
 son. He tried hard to get Mr. Hughes to come out 
 with some utterance which would put him plainly 
 
THE GREAT AMERICAN iS5 
 
 on record against the Germans and Pro-Germans 
 who were filling America with their poisonous 
 schemes. For we continued to entertain Ger- 
 man diplomats and agents (paymasters, as they 
 were, of murderers and plotters of arson) and to 
 run on Germany's errands in various countries. 
 The cry " He kept us out of war " was effectively 
 used to reelect Mr. Wilson, although members of 
 the Government must have been thoroughly well 
 aware that war was coming and coming soon. 
 
 It had long been Mr. Roosevelt's hope that if 
 war came he might be allowed to raise a division, 
 as he had once helped to raise a regiment, and take 
 them, after suitable training, to the front. He 
 knew where he could put his hands on the men, 
 regular army officers, ex-volunteers and Rough 
 Riders of the Spanish War, and other men of ex- 
 perience, who in turn could find other men, 
 who could be made into soldiers, for they knew 
 the important parts of a soldier's work, and could 
 be trained quickly. 
 
 But the War Department and the President 
 would have none of Mr. Roosevelt's services. 
 The President replied that the high officers of the 
 Army advised him against it, which was undoubt- 
 edly true. It is also extremely likely that the 
 high officers of the Democratic Party would ad- 
 vise against letting Mr. Roosevelt serve his coun- 
 
156 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 try, as they still feared him, and still vainly hoped 
 that they could lessen his influence with the Amer- 
 ican people. Unlike President Lincoln, who 
 would gladly accept the services of any man who 
 could serve the country, Mr, Wilson could 
 work only with men who were personally pleasing, 
 who thought as he did on all subjects. The officer 
 of the Army best known to European soldiers, 
 and the one who trained one of the best divisions, 
 was Roosevelt's old commander, General Leonard 
 Wood. But he, like a statesman, had been advis- 
 ing preparedness for years, and he was therefore 
 displeasing to the politicians who only began to 
 prepare after war was declared. America and 
 the Allies did not have the benefit of this dis- 
 tinguished officer's services in France. 
 
 Against the slothfulness of the Government in 
 these years, Roosevelt voiced the true opinion of 
 America. He did not merely criticize, for he of- 
 fered his own services, and when he disapproved 
 of what was being done, he pointed out what 
 might be done by way of improvement. In spite 
 of much condemnation of his course, his sugges- 
 tions were nearly all adopted — six months or a 
 year later. His offer to raise a division showed 
 how many men were eager to fight, and spurred 
 the Government into action. 
 
 The Germans and their friends in this cotintry, 
 
THE GREAT AMERICAN 157 
 
 the peace-at-any-price folk who defended or 
 apologized for the worst crimes of the Germans, 
 and all the band of disloyal persons who think 
 that patriotism is something to be sneered at, — all 
 these hated Roosevelt with a deadly hatred. M 
 was not a proud distinction to be numbered with 
 these, and all who joined with them have made 
 haste to forget the fact. 
 
 In his own family, his eldest son, Theodore 
 Roosevelt, Jr., became first a Major and later a 
 Lieutenant-Colonel of Infantry; Kermit and 
 Archibald were both Captains ; and Quentin was a 
 Lieutenant in the Aviation force. His son-in- 
 law, Dr. Richard Derby, was a Major in the Medi- 
 cal Corps. All of them sought active service, 
 made every effort to get to the front, and suc- 
 ceeded. Two of them were wounded, and Quen- 
 tin was killed in a battle in the air. 
 
 The death of his youngest son was a terrible 
 blow to him, but he would not wince. His son 
 had been true to his teaching; he had dared the 
 high fortune of battle. 
 
 " You cannot bring up boys to be eagles," said 
 he, " and expect them to act like sparrows ! " 
 
 Some distinguished Japanese visitors calling on 
 Mr. Roosevelt at this time came away deeply af- 
 fected. To them he recalled the Samurai, with 
 their noble traditions of utter self-sacrifice. 
 
158 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Throughout his life, but now as never before, 
 he told his countrymen, there was no place in 
 America for a divided loyalty. No German- 
 Americans, nor Irish-Americans, nor Scotch- 
 Americans. He would have no man try to split 
 even, and be a " 50-50 American." 
 
 Shortly after war had ended, he sent this mes- 
 sage to a patriotic meeting: 
 
 There must be no sagging back in the fight for Ameri- 
 canism merely because the war is over. Any man who 
 says he is an American, but something else also, isn't 
 an American at all. We have room for but one flag, 
 the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which 
 symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just 
 as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to 
 which we are hostile. We have room for but one lan- 
 guage here, and that is the English language, for we 
 intended to see that the crucible turns our people out 
 as Americans, of American nationality, and not as 
 dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house; and we have 
 room for but one soul loyalty, and that is loyalty to 
 the American people.^ 
 
 It was practically his last word to the country 
 he had loved and served so well. That was on 
 January 5, 1919. 
 
 Years before, when he and his children had 
 played together, he had told them a story about 
 lions. Some of the boys had been called the lion 
 
 1 Hagedorn, p. 384. 
 
THE GREAT AMERICAN 159 
 
 cubs, and henceforth their father was to them 
 " The Old Lion." 
 
 On the sixth of January, one of his sons, who 
 was at home recovering from his wounds, sent a 
 message to his brothers in France : 
 
 The Old Lion is dead. 
 
 He was buried in a small cemetery near his 
 Long Island home. A plain grave-stone marks 
 the place. To his grave have come a King and a 
 Prince and other men of great name from Europe, 
 to lay wreaths there, as they put them on the 
 tombs of Washington and Lincoln. But what 
 would have pleased him even more is that every 
 Sunday and holiday thousands of men, women 
 and children who knew him, thousands who loved 
 him, although they never saw him, men who 
 fought at his side, and men who fought against 
 him, go out to stand for a moment at his grave, 
 because they know him now as a wise, brave, and 
 patriotic American. 
 
 THE END 
 
 PEIWTED IN THE UNITED STATES 0» AMIBIOA