Class Book_ CupgtaN? 10 copyright DErosrr. Underwood & Underwood, N. Y. ^Vcy-t7-CJL-eo€^^^" THE LIFE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT BY WM. DRAPER LEWIS, Ph.D. FORMER DEAN OF THE LAW SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT EX-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES ILLUSTRATED THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY Philadelphia Chicago Copyright, 1919 By WM. ELLIS SCULL ©O.A525426 APR 19 1919 CONTENTS Chapter p AGE Introduction vii By William Howard Taft I. The Typical American 17 II. Childhood 25 III. School and College 40 IV. First Plunge into Politics .... 52 V. Elkhorn Ranch 68 VI. Roosevelt and the Civil Service . 84 VII. Police Commissioner 98 VIII. Assistant Secretary of the Navy . 119 IX. Colonel of the Rough Riders 134 X. Governor of New York 148 XI. From Governor to President ... 163 - XII. Roosevelt in the White House . . 175 .XIII. The First Term 194 XIV. The Panama Canal 216 y XV. The Campaign of 1904 229 XVI. President in His Own Right . . . 238 XVII. What He Did for the Navy . . . 259 XVIII. Big Business and Labor 274 XIX. Conservation of Natural Resources 288 XX. In the Heart of Africa 301 (v) VI Chapter XXI. XXII. XXIII. XXIV. XXV. XXVI. XXVII. XXVIII. XXIX. XXX. CONTENTS Paqb The Beginning of the Progressive Movement 319 The Right of the People to Rule 336 The Fight for the Nomination in 1912 346 The Founder of a New Party. . . 368 Roosevelt the Naturalist .... 384 The River of Doubt . 401 Political Career after 1912. . . . 415 Books and Speeches 432 Life at Sagamore Hill 447 The World War — His Last Great Service 459 Chronology 473 Index 475 5/3s5freO CD p' 3.0 3 a« ° » re o^ = p Be; g I ^ 3 o a S c+ p 3 c+ S- 2. CD CD (5 ^ ffi j p re ^ fD $ p ~ p§ - p p 3 ° re ptB ^ S". re Q £ re re p " 3 o g re p. ! p cri 3<< ' ^p! 13 i 0^0 3 3:^ Cm P 3 oa £T< 3 ^° ^^3; p gL^o P 3 E E3 < 3 n % Tp a-3-0 INTRODUCTION By William Howard Taft DR. LEWIS has asked me to write this introduction to his narrative history of Theodore Roosevelt. Dr. Lewis is a teacher and publicist, of wide experience and intimate knowledge of his subject, a man of high character and discrimination, with whom this history is a labor of love. He will write an impartial, non-partisan history of this great man, whom he knew personally, and with whose views he deeply sympathized. That he shall entirely escape the influence of his great personal affection for Theodore Roosevelt in the history he writes is not to be expected. Indeed no history written so soon after the passing of a great historical figure like Roosevelt, while the magnetic influence of his per- sonality is strong, could fail to show the effect of that influence. But Dr. Lewis is able with judicial poise to tell the events of Roosevelt's life and give to the world the benefit of his personal observation. He will thus explain much, and greatly aid the future historian, who, after fifty years, shall write a life like that of Lord Charn wood's "Life of Lincoln.' ' Theodore Roosevelt was a scholar and a man of wide and exact knowledge in many fields. He was a scholar in the true sense, but no one ever quite classed him as such, because he made his scholarship a constant instru- ment in his practical activities. He was a thinker and used his acquisition of knowledge and learning to regulate that thinking. His marvelous power of quick acqui- (vii) viii INTRODUCTION sition was only a tool in solving practical problems, political and social. More than any one I know, he believed in results. More than any one I know, he demanded success in effort by those who were associated with him in a common cause. He was the advocate and exemplar of continuous struggle toward a definite object and a strenuous life. To say, therefore, that he was a scholar in politics is misleading, because that phrase suggests one in whose life the scholarly ambition is the controlling motive. To such a one, politics and statesmanship are a diversion or at least subordinate. Theodore Roosevelt was a statesman and he subor- dinated all his tastes and all his abilities and all his know- ledge and his facility in using that knowledge to the achievement of political and social progress. He was not a lawyer, though he had been admitted to the Bar. He believed in law and order. Indeed that was one of the primary principles of his faith. But he was impatient at the delays in the administration of justice. He was impatient at judicial judgments when he considered them wrong and destructive to progress. He was, therefore, without the most sensitive consideration of the methods by which that progress might be safely attained. Precedents and their influence which are essential in a judicial system, to secure uniformity in the application of the law, did not greatly appeal to him. The suddenness with which, four years after grad- uation, he sprang into national prominence in the con- vention which nominated Blaine in 1884, and the vigor and effectiveness that he then displayed was Minerva- like, as of one who sprang full armed from the brain of Jove. It was a prominence like that of the younger INTRODUCTION ix Pitt who had prepared himself for immediate respon- sibility as a member of the Cabinet upon his graduation. Like all men, Roosevelt grew and profited by actual experience; but one finds in his early political career all the characteristics which so conspicuously marked him to the day of his death. His humor, his courage, his love of a controversy, his love of, and insistence upon definite practical results, his impatience at what Senator Lodge has felicitously called the sacrifice of the good for the better, were all with him in the New York Assembly and in his preliminary convention support of Edmonds against Blaine and his subsequent earnest advocacy of Blaine as the nominee of the party. His adherence to party as the best means of accomplishing reform, without a slavish submission to the authority of those in temporary control, was as clear when he was Civil Service Commis- sioner and Police Commissioner as in the later years of his life. When one seeks to detail the important accom- plishment of Roosevelt's life in the definite objects attained, the roll is a very long and most important one; yet one hesitates to attempt it lest it minimize his career. His greatest achievement was in his influence upon the ideals of his country, and his stimulation of the plain people to appreciate them. We may note the detail of what he accomplished by way of illustration therefore rather than the summation of the total. One of the great evils of American political life in the days of Lincoln and of Grant was the use of public patronage down to the lowest tidewater for political purposes. Dorman B. Eaton and Governor Jenckes, x INTRODUCTION of Rhode Island, inaugurated a movement in which Senator George Pendleton afterwards took part, to introduce the competitive merit principle into the civil service. President Grant lent his aid to the beginning of the reform, though the actual practice in his admin- istration did not represent great advance. George William Curtis was the protagonist of civil service reform, and the controversies between him and Senator Conkling, who was reactionary in this regard, are part of its history. Civil service reform is not only dependent on enabling legislation, but it is still more dependent for real results upon actual executive practice. The act of 1883 gave sufficient power to the President to take tens of thousands of employees of the government out of politics and to prevent their being used as pawns in the political game. It left it to the President to make very comprehensive regulations and to include within the classified service whose limits he defined, the great bulk of civil servants. Congress always was, and even now is, a hypocrite in respect to the civil servants. The members who are of the right political faith hate to part with the prestige which, if unrestricted under our system, they are certain to enjoy. When, therefore, the bureau of the Civil Service was established, it was one of the constant congressional comedies that the appro- priations needed for its maintenance and the bureaus under its jurisdiction should be voted down in the com- mittee of the whole in which no record was made of who voted against the appropriation and then be restored to the appropriation bill by a vote in the House in which the ayes and nays were recorded. It was at a time when this comedy was going on that Theodore Roosevelt was appointed by Grover Cleveland to the INTRODUCTION xi Civil Service Commission, and he entered upon his duties with eagerness and enthusiasm and a very prac- tical knowledge of the evils sought to be remedied by the law. He had had an experience in ward and district politics and an understanding of politicians that fitted him for the fight he was to make. He was aggressive. He bothered the successive occupants of the White House with his request for stiffer regulations. He was outspoken in his contempt for the opposition which was generated only by a desire for political pap. He allowed no attack upon the system or its administration to go without a prompt, accurate and defiant answer. The sneers of Congressmen were supported by unfounded stories of the absurdity of examination questions put to applicants obviously not germane to the duties of the office sought. Roosevelt traced every one of these stories and refuted them all. It brought him into news- paper disputes with General Grosvenor and other mem- bers of Congress, whose accuracy he questioned and whose blunders or misstatements he demonstrated. He came near having a personal encounter with Frank Hatton, the editor and proprietor of the Washington Post, a former Assistant Postmaster General, who abused him with a virulence that Roosevelt seemed really to enjoy, because of the prominence it gave to the cause he was fighting. It is not too much to say that in stimulating executive responsibility for the progress of civil service reform and in securing progres- sive executive practice, the country is indebted to Theo- dore Roosevelt more than to any other man. No one pointed with more humor and telling denunciation to the injustice and outrage of using government office for personal and party political advancement than did xii INTRODUCTION he, and no one gave more practical proof of the possi- bilities of reform in this matter. His work as Police Commissioner gave him an oppor- tunity to approach the social side of New York City from the position of authority and responsibility and to gratify his interest in the lowly and the poor and the suffering which he had inherited from his father, and which stimulated him to constant thought as to methods for their practical relief. Roosevelt was a supporter of Thomas B. Reed for the Presidency, when Mr. Reed and Mr. McKinley were rivals for the nomination. Roosevelt and Reed were great friends. They were different. Reed was a brilliant epigrammist, a man of great personality, a master of trenchant speech, a conservative and not a reformer of the enthusiastic type, a believer in good government, a strong protectionist, a partisan Repub- lican. I have said Mr. Reed was not a reformer. This does him injustice. He was a fine parliamentarian and he saw the absurdity of a procedure that enabled the minority in a great legislative body like that of the House of Representatives, to block the action of the majority long after there had been given a full opportunity for debate. By his personal rulings and against riotous opposition and bitter abuse, he ended forever the ridic- ulous anomaly that a man might be present in the House and yet prevent his being counted as part of a quorum by refusing to answer to his name. Roosevelt interested Reed and Reed interested Roosevelt, and they were great friends. Each poked fun at the other, and the other enjoyed it. So Roosevelt supported Reed. Reed was beaten. There were those who were friends of McKinley, Reed and Roosevelt. They thought that INTRODUCTION xiii it might bring two great Republican leaders closer together if McKinley should appoint Roosevelt to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy. When the matter was pressed upon McKinley, he hesitated and replied, "But Roosevelt is always in such a state of mind," but he nevertheless appointed him. This remark, if properly understood, reveals the temperamental differ- ence between McKinley and his successor. Roosevelt's interest in the Navy had begun with his college days when he began the preparation of the Naval History of the War of 1812, a book which Senator Lodge, no mean authority, declares to be the best and most reliable history extant of that war upon the sea. Roosevelt's chief was Secretary Long. Secretary Long was a Unitarian of Quaker proclivities and not urgent in respect to pre- paration for a war. The differences between them because of this difference in attitude toward naval preparation, were numerous. Roosevelt did, however, succeed in putting on the Pacific station a squad- ron of war ships under the command of a real Com- mander like Dewey, with ammunition enough to fight a battle. The Spanish War Roosevelt saw coming before either his Secretary or his President. As soon as it came, he determined to be in it. There were many reasons of a personal and family character that would have held other men, but not Roosevelt. It was charac- terestic of him that he got to Cuba, that he was in a fight the day he landed, and that he was in all the land fights there were in that war. He had a real soldier's ambition, but he was never able to gratify it. No death would have satisfied him as well as death in battle. He longed for such an epic ending of his career. xiv INTRODUCTION As Governor of New York he practiced the principles of his life with reference to progress and politics. He found Piatt entrenched in power. He needed Piatt to accomplish his progressive purposes as Governor of New York, and he dealt with Piatt as the only way by which he could achieve progress. He was attacked and bitterly criticised by the professional reformers and the Mugwump and Democratic press, but he had the courage of his convictions and he followed them. Much happened in the seven and one-half years of his Presidency, but in such an introduction as this, there is no space for reference except to two or three great achievements. If the name of the Panama Canal could be changed, it should be called the "Theodore Roosevelt Canal." It is more due to him than to any other man, and without him it may well be doubted whether it would now be begun. The hoggish and unjust attitude of Colombia toward the enterprise as well as toward Panama, whose people favored giving the United States an opportunity to build and own it, aroused the deep indignation of Roosevelt. He knew there was no equity in the position of Colombia. He welcomed the possibility of a revolution which should separate Panama from Colombia. He thought such a revolution entirely justified, and so must everyone from the standpoint of equity and world progress. He did not promise aid to the revolutionists in advance of their declaration and rebellion. He did not scheme with any one to bring it about, but it was not difficult to infer in advance that a separation of that kind without his assistance was something of which he was likely to take advantage. When the revolution came on, he sent one order that INTRODUCTION xv should not have been sent. He directed the U. S. Naval Officer in charge at Colon not to allow Colombia to send forces to attack within fifty miles of the Panama Rail- road, lest it should injure American interests. The order was never executed. The Colombian troops did reach the railroad and the order had no real effect upon events. But it served to make a basis for the charge upon the administration that the United States actually intervened to make the revolution a success. The truth is the bond between Panama and Colombia was very loose. Colombia had not the power to prevent the separation, and what happened was a good thing to happen. Roosevelt's recognition of the Republic of Panama within a week after the establishment of the government there was very prompt. The signing of the treaty guaranteeing the integrity of Panama was equally expeditious. While these acts pressed upon the line of international right, in the light of all the circumstances history will sustain Roosevelt in what he did. It enabled us to make a treaty with a nation which owned the territory where the canal had to be built, and which was anxious to have it built and was anxious to have the United States build it. Therefore, it was glad to give the United States the complete con- trol over the Canal Zone. It was necessary for the United States to have this control, in order to succeed in the great work of construction. Without saying that the French plan under De Lesseps could ever have been carried through either in its original form or as amended, one of the great reasons for its failure was the fact that Colombia retained complete police control over the territory in which the canal was built. The governmental obstructions and corruption xvi INTRODUCTION were some of the most formidable obstacles to French success. These the Hay-Varilla treaty completely removed, and the police control and dominion that the United States acquired not only over the Canal Zone itself but for health purposes over the cities of Colon and Panama, made it possible to take the first indis- pensable step in building the canal, to wit, to make the Isthmus safe for the health of 40,000 people who had to be imported to do the building. Under the Colom- bian Hay-Herran treaty, no such control of the Zone was given to the United States. As was to be expected, after Congress gave the President the authority to build the canal, Roosevelt pressed its construction with one civil engineer and another, and finally with an army engineer, to a point where completion within a few years was a certainty. It was finished before the great war. Discussion as to who actually built the canal occasionally crops out. Suffice it to say that the man who really gave substance to the world dream of four hundred years and made the canal, was Theodore Roosevelt. The man whose executive genius did the detailed work was George W. Goethals. President Roosevelt was in full sympathy with his predecessors in the Philippine policy, and he held the anti-imperialists in the utmost scorn. The argument that the United States was not a full sovereign nation, able to hold and administer territory in any part of the world to which it had acquired legal title and possession, was entirely repugnant to him, and he spoke in con- demnation of such views with his accustomed vigor. Elihu Root, who had continued as Secretary of War from the McKinley Cabinet, was a man in whose counsel and ability he had the utmost reliance, and the change INTRODUCTION xvii from McKinley to Roosevelt made not the slightest interruption in the important work of bringing the Philippine Islands into order and preparing their people for autonomy. The great domestic policy of his second term was typified in the railroad rate bill. This gave to the Inter- state Commerce Commission the right to fix rates. Theretofore under the decision of the Supreme Court, it had only the right to declare rates fixed by the rail- way to be unreasonable. Around this rather slight step forward in government control raged the great contest of his administration. It brought him into open and acute issue with the great railroad interests of the country, and it developed him into a knight with shining armor against evils of corporate control in politics. He had shown a disposition to throw down the gauntlet to the great corporate organizations of the country in his first term, but upon the rate bill the issue was clearly drawn. All the corporate abuses, including the overissue of stock and high finance, received his con- demnation. He sought to stir the nation to the neces- sity for establishing a higher business standard than that which these corporate abuses indicated. This standard applied in the various directions which his universal interest suggested, created a body of doctrines that were called the Roosevelt Policies, and were tersely described in the homely phrase he used, as "Giving every man a square deal." Agitation over the power of wealth organized into corporations which in open and subterranean methods sought to control political con- ventions and legislative bodies did not begin with him. But certainly Theodore Roosevelt is entitled to the credit of assuming the leadership of this movement xviii INTRODUCTION and giving it effectiveness. The public under his prop- aganda became sensitive in the highest degree to cor- porate evils and entered upon radical measures which often went much too far and worked injustice. But such a result is to be expected where the indignation of the public is justly aroused. The unwise excesses of popular action are to be laid at the door of those who were guilty of creating the evil which aroused the people. Theodore Roosevelt was not a radical man. He believed in law and order. He believed in the right of property. He had sound economic views, but injustice aroused him and led him into denunciation that often was mistaken for a radicalism that he really did not entertain. His radicalism, such as he had, took the form of undervaluing the necessity for orderly procedure and of seeking a short cut to the reform of evil. He did not fully realize the ultimate results of such short cuts. Roosevelt was a friend of labor and believed in its organization and recognition. The wage earners knew that he sympathized with them. There was no doubt that he did. His earnest desire to better their con- dition was manifest in his speech and proposed measures. But he resented deeply abuses to which the power of organization sometimes tempted trades unions, and he did not hesitate to denounce such abuses. The criminal conspiracies of the Western Federation of Miners and the undesirable character of such citizenship as that of Moyer and Haywood he emphasized in speeches and in letters. He had no hesitation in sending a member of his Cabinet to fight the Western Federation of Labor in their attempt to defeat Governor Gooding of Idaho INTRODUCTION xix for re-election because he had issued the requisition papers which brought Moyer and Haywood from Col- orado to Idaho to be tried for the crime of killing Governor Steunenberg of that state. He used the Presidency as a pulpit from which to preach on many different subjects not within federal \ jurisdiction, but his interests were so universal and his knowledge of conditions so correct that he was able to be helpful in teaching lessons that the people gratefully read and approved. A cartoon hung in his room in the White House during his term, in which an old farmer with a pipe was seated in front of a fire reading a long executive message of the President, and underneath was the legend, "His favorite author." This cartoon contained the kernel of truth as to the attitude of the plain people in the country toward Theodore Roosevelt's ideals. At the instance of Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt became very much interested in respect to the conser- vation of timber lands and of mineral resources of the United States from despoilers and fraudulent con- spiracies, and he initiated the vigorous prosecution of violation of federal laws on this subject. He was the first President to call a congress of governors to arouse the states to concurrent action. He was constantly getting up commissions to make investigations in fields where he thought good could be worked by changes. He appointed a Country Life Commission to see whether it was not possible in some way to make country life more attractive and to prevent the movement toward town. His commissions, after a while, rendered Congress impatient, and by statute it set specific limits to the President's power to appoint any commissions and to incur clerical and other expense xx INTRODUCTION in their transactions; but this legislation was not enacted in time to restrain him. It only affected his successors. His foreign policy was very vigorous. He asserted the Monroe Doctrine in the Venezuela matter. His action clarified the situation and prevented what might have become a violation of the Doctrine from reaching any such a point. He did not hesitate to become exceed- ingly active in seeking to bring peace between Japan and Russia. He wrote letters to the Emperor of Russia and the high authorities in Japan, and he exercised an influ- ence to secure the truce and the treaty that is most exceptional in the history of the United States and rare 4 even in the history of European countries. I shall say nothing of his explorations except that he pas- sionately loved a study of nature, a study of fauna and the excitement of hunting. He revelled in the novels of Sienk- iewicz and talked them over by the hour with their transla- tor, Jeremiah Curtis. He studied and knew much about the Irish Sagas. His range of interests from the poetry of Celtic Ireland to "Nature Faking" reveals his boundless activity of mind. Theodore Roosevelt would have made a great war President. He would have selected, without regard to party or political embarrassment, the men whom he regarded as best adapted to do the work in the various departments. He would have imparted to his lieutenants a spirit and confidence of successful achievement that would have overcome any obstacles. He had not only the dynamic force himself, but he had the power of communicating it to his subordinates and he could diffuse his spirit through the entire government down to the last messenger boy. There would have been an utter absence of fear that some subordinate of his INTRODUCTION xxi would rob him of credit as a leader, and his joy at success in any department would have led him to do more than justice in his public appreciation. He would have made the government move as one man. He would have been merciless in cutting off heads of men whether good or bad who could not do their job. Into every department and field of preparation, no matter how technical or complicated, he would have entered and with his lightning facility for acquisition, he would have learned enough to understand success or failure and would have acted on his judgment. I venture to conclude with something I have said of Mr. Roosevelt in another place: "Mr. Roosevelt, earlier than any other public man, saw the real issues in this war, and with characteristic courage demanded what the majority thought unwise, intervention by our government. He urged, with pro- phetic vision, adequate preparation for the struggle he saw about to be forced upon us. He suffered much in mind and soul as he saw things left undone by our government which he deemed essential to national safety and the performance of national duty. For over and above everything, Theodore Roosevelt was a deeply patriotic American. He had intensified his passionate love of his country that was natural in him by acquiring an intimate knowledge and a profound appreciation of the great sacrificial struggle needed to make her great. He left no doubt of his willingness himself to render the ultimate sacrifice in her behalf. His spirit of patriotic devotion was web and woof of his character. "He sent his four boys forth to war with the pride of a Roman tribune. Through his father's tears for XX11 INTRODUCTION Quen tin's death, there shone the stern joy that a son of his had been given to die the death he would himself have sought on the field of battle in his country's cause. "Theodore Roosevelt's example of real sacrifice was of inestimable value to our country in this war. The nation has lost the most commanding, the most original, the most interesting and the most brilliant personality in American public life since Lincoln." AUTHOR'S PREFACE THOSE who knew Theodore Roosevelt best honored him the most sincerely, not simply because they loved him, but because the intimacy of friendship showed no pettiness or meanness in him. My object has been to write the story of his life in such a way that the reader may not only know the main incidents of his full, joyous and varied career, and gain a correct idea of his great public services, but also come to know the man himself, his ideals, the motives of his public acts, and the road which he believed America must travel to be worthy of her place among the nations. During that period of his life when he was the object of bitter partisan attacks, I met hundreds of men and women who mistook his motives and had a grotesquely false idea of his personality. It is a satisfaction to know that the War gave him an opportunity to render a great service to his country and the world, and that that service was one which the majority of his former oppo- nents could and did appreciate. As a result, before his death, former misunderstandings were in great part swept away. My hope is that this book will help to end forever any misconceptions of the man and his purposes that may yet remain. It is needless to say that I have turned more often to his own books and articles than to any other source of information. It may be doubted whether any public man has ever left so large a collection of first-hand material for the assistance of his biographers. Through- out his life he was a constant writer of letters, addresses, (xxiii) xxiv AUTHOR'S PREFACE editorials, articles and books. His Autobiography, while not a complete history, includes many of the incidents of his life down to the end of his Presidency, and many of his personal impressions. Unless the quotation indi- cates a different source, where I have quoted his own words the quotation is drawn from this work. Much of the information and many of the incidents I have given could not have been recorded had it not been for the generous kindness of many friends of Colo- nel Roosevelt's and of mine who have placed at my disposal letters, diaries and other original material relating to his personal characteristics and to important events. I also here desire to acknowledge my great obligation to Mr. Shippen Lewis, of the Philadelphia Bar, who has given much of his time and thought to help me in the preparation of the book. Wm. Draper Lewis. Law School University of Pennsylvania March 6, 1919. CHAPTER I The Typical American THE news that Theodore Roosevelt was dead stunned America on the morning of January 6, 1919. The approaching Peace Conference in Paris, the dark cloud of Bolshevism advancing from Russia over Poland and East Germany, events big with civilization's future, were for the time being forgotten. In spirit, mil- lions of the American people stood in the room of the un- pretentious house on the outskirts of the little village of Oyster Bay where the man each felt he knew lay dead. The death of no other man could have brought such a universal sense of personal loss, a sense of loss which actual acquaintance served but to deepen and intensify. This was not because he had for seven and a half years been President of the United States and throughout the major part of his working life had held public office. It was not because he had been a leader in momentous polit- ical contests nor because the record of his public service is full of things done of enduring value. Neither was it be- cause of his wonderfully diversified ability. Since Caesar, perhaps no one has attained among crowding duties and great responsibilities such high proficiency in so many separate fields of human activity. His knowledge of his- tory was equaled by few. As a naturalist he won for him- self a recognized position in the front rank. He was a great explorer and hunter of wild game. Several of his books are more than well written and more than one of his speeches will live among the enduring utterances of our great statesmen. 2 (17) 18 THEODORE ROOSEVELT It was, however, something more than any one or all of these things which gave him his hold on the affections of the American people. We may admire a public man for the things he has accomplished, for his brilliant and versatile ability; we may trust him because we believe in the wisdom of his judgment; but our affection only finds root in his character. Theodore Roosevelt was no exception to this rule. The attainments of his mind, the exalted office which he held, the momentous character of the work he accom- plished all served but to bring him to the attention of mankind. Knowing him, people loved him, not for these things, but for certain great qualities of character ex- pressed in his high sense of honor, his burning hatred of injustice, his deep sense of the obligation for personal service and, above all, his intense love for his country. Again, perhaps, not a little of our affection for him arose from the fact that he was very human, which is only another way of saying that he had faults. Once he told me that he had made many mistakes; but just to himself as to others, he quickly added: "If I had not been willing to risk making mistakes I would have accomplished nothing worth while." Somehow, we feel the same way about his faults — his occasional impatience of temper, his unconscious unfairness to those whose point of view towards public questions led them to oppose measures which he believed essential to the moral well-being of the country. After all, these and other faults and foibles were not serious. No one of them had its origin in coldness of heart, or in anything mean, or petty or low. They were not indexes to serious defects of character, but rather to his intense feeling THE TYPICAL AMERICAN 19 for the enduring things of life — honor, truth, duty, service. He had the defects of his great qualities. Roosevelt is our typical American. Not that we are like him, but in that the worker in field, forest, mill and office, irrespective of financial position and social standing, sees in this great scholar and statesman, this vigorous, hearty, courageous out-of-door man, with his high ideals and intense love for the everyday simple things of life, the embodiment of a type which, above all others, he admires. The sense of personal loss referred to is too present and the public events in which he took part or discussed are too recent to make it possible to examine fully or weigh impartially the public measures he advocated or the wisdom of his criticisms. We are, however, better qualified than those who shall come after us to judge the effect of his words, his actions and his personality on the people of the United States. Many eulogies will hereafter be written upon his life's work, but we, his contemporaries, know that for us his greatest work is expressed in the simple statement: He raised the Ideals of the People. Compare the sordid commercialism, the low financial morale, the disregard of social welfare, prevalent in this country in the middle of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with the awakened social conscience of modern America. No one pretends that our ideals as a people are perfect, or that we even live up to our ideals; but, on the other hand, we have traveled a long distance in the last three decades towards an America of which he dreamed — an America which should be a better place to live in, not for some of the people, but for all of the people. The man in the street as well as the student of public opinion 20 THEODORE ROOSEVELT knows that to Theodore Roosevelt, because of the truths he dared to tell and the influences he dared to fight, are due, more than to any other one man, the improvement in our financial practices and the higher, better ideals of the rising generation. Neither do we need the perspective of time to learn the simple, but all-important, lessons of the main events of his life. These events speak for themselves. They need no comment or criticism to teach again the need for hard work and often of great courage to attain any end which is worth while; or to impress on us the age-old truth that opportunity, though she may come in an unexpected form, comes only to him who is prepared to meet her. Men marvel at the great amount of work he accomplished. There are two reasons: One is found in the fact that his youthful struggle against delicate health had given him a sound body to be the servant of his restless energy; the other is that he cultivated his tastes and ordered his time so that, though he played more than most busy men and usually obtained sufficient rest and relaxation, he never wasted or frittered away his time. The value of the conservation of time, of the relaxation which comes from complete change of mental occupation especially after moments of intense excitement, is the lesson he taught everyone who came into working contact with him. Twenty minutes after killing an elephant in an African jungle and being near death in the subsequent stampede of the others, found him reading Balzac. In the midst of the excitement of the Chicago Convention of 1912, the writer can bear witness that he spent every moment of the time that he was not needed reading Herodotus. Of his physical courage the stories are innumerable. In this, or indeed any other history of his life, it is only THE TYPICAL AMERICAN 21 possible to make a selection. He could fire as coolly and accurately at the charging lion or rhinoceros, where to miss meant serious injury or death, as at a mark. He could venture on a hazardous journey down an unknown river and risk death from disease and exhaustion in the tropical jungle of Central South America. He could face a great audience and make the speech he had prom- ised to make, within a few minutes after being shot by a would-be assassin, and when he had no certainty that the shot would not prove fatal. He did not believe that he was especially brave. He thought that by conscious effort he had gained control over his nerves. Be it so. Few men gain such complete control. There are innumerable instances also of his moral courage that make inspiring reading. I believe the highest test of courage in a public man is his willingness, if neces- sary, to accomplish an object he regards as right, to face the certainty of being misunderstood by those whose good opinion he earnestly desires. Colonel Roosevelt, on more than one occasion, proved that he had this kind of moral courage. In the fall of 1911, and the early part of 1912, he was confronted with a political situation which required him to decide whether he would become a candidate for the Republican nomination. Politicians of the Progressive wing of the Republican party flocked to Oyster Bay. They assured him that he could win the nomination, and, nominated, would be triumphantly elected. Always underestimating his own political strength, he had no idea at the time that he could be nominated. He knew that if he made the contest for the nomination, his motives would be misunderstood, not only by his political oppo- nents, but by many whose continued confidence he desired 22 THEODORE ROOSEVELT more, perhaps, than he desired anything else in the world, except to do the right as it was given to him to see the right. Knowing that he would be thus misunderstood, he made the contest because he believed that by so doing he would advance, not his own political fortunes, but the cause of orderly progress to better social and industrial conditions; that he could, in this way, most effectively combat those forces of reaction which, if not overcome, in the end would drive the country to violent revolution. Students of his life and times will always differ as to whether his judgment was correct and his action wise; but, unlike many of his contemporaries, they will not mis- understand his motives; they will appreciate the moral courage with which he faced the disapproval and mis- understanding of life-long friends. As he saw the truth, so he spoke it. It was not that he did not care for his own future, or was not accustomed to consider the effect of word or action. On the contrary, as a politician, he wanted support from all kinds of people, and he was always willing to use every honorable means to secure support for himself, his party or his political ideals. He was a past master in the art of handling men, and making them do what he wanted them to do. But by conscious effort, as a young man, he had so schooled himself that he never balanced what he regarded as right to say or do against its possible effect on his own fortune. No man was so highly placed in the political or business world that he feared to publicly condemn him. No interest or class was so powerful that it could control his action against his judgment. He could send a mes- sage to Congress which he knew would alienate the political support of some special interest. He could insist on the retention of a non-union man in the Govern- THE TYPICAL AMERICAN 23 ment printing office, against the vigorous protest of union labor, or tell a delegation of strikers that he would call out United States troops if there was the slightest dis- order, though the very object of their visit was to secure his assurance that the troops would not be used. Like all other of our great statesmen who have won a permanent place in the affections of the people, he had an intense love for his country. It is said that his whole life was an expression of "Jubilant Americanism." And this is so, if by it we mean that his life was an exuberant expression of dynamic force, a triumphant assertion of his country's greatness. With him, this love for country was based on complete knowledge. He knew his country's history as few men knew it. No other public man of his own or any other time was so intimately and personally acquainted with the conditions environing the life, with the outlook, and with the best aspirations of so many different classes. He could count among his personal friends officers of the army and navy, diplomats, pub- licists, professors, naturalists, hunters of big game, editors, explorers, ranchmen, social workers, captains of industry, labor leaders, Catholic priests, Protestant clergymen and Jewish rabbis. He was personally acquainted with every part of the country. His campaign trips had taken him to every state and to every town of consequence. He had spent summers in the Maine woods and on the Western plains; he had hunted grizzlies in the Rockies, visited remote Indian tribes in the great American desert, drilled troops in Texas, and herded cattle on the Little Missouri. At will he could visualize and describe the physical aspect of any mountain, stream, plain or desert he had ever seen, as only those can who are at once, as he was, a good naturalist, a keen huntsman and a lover of nature. 24 THEODORE ROOSEVELT Knowing his country, he was infinitely removed from the politician whose stock-in-trade is a loud-mouthed boasting of our superiority to others. With clear vision he saw, not only the good, but the defects in our national character and the dangers of the future. These defects and dangers he did not hesitate to point out. Unblinded by her faults, he knew and loved America as she is; spend- ing himself joyously to help her become the country of his dreams. I say joyously, because throughout his life, to the very end, there abided in him perfect faith in her glorious destiny. CHAPTER II Childhood JUST six years after the English Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock a company of Dutch emigrants, led by Peter Minuit, sailed up "the finest harbor in the world' ' and disembarked on a long, narrow island which the Indians had named Manhattan. Minuit bought this island, on which the best part of New York City is now located, for sixty guilders, or twenty-four dollars. Other pilgrims soon followed Peter Minuit's party. When the white settlement numbered about two hundred souls, they named the region New Netherland and its flourish- ing metropolis New Amsterdam. Eighteen years later, in 1644, the first of the Roosevelt family came from Holland to settle in this country. His name was Klaes Martensen Van Roosevelt. This ances- tor of the Roosevelt family was, like the forefathers of most Americans, an immigrant who came to the New World presumably to make his fortune, naturally choosing the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam as his new home. When Klaes Van Roosevelt reached Manhattan Island, he found on it a cosmopolitan town of four hundred or five hundred inhabitants who spoke eighteen different languages. The satisfaction of the worthy Dutchman and of his descendants with the city of his choice is indi- cated by the fact that every Roosevelt in the line from Klaes to Theodore has been born on Manhattan Island. New Netherland and New Amsterdam both became New York, and the Dutch province became a British (25) 26 THEODORE ROOSEVELT colony and then an American State. But for nearly two centuries the old Dutch families retained their ancestral language and many of the habits of their forbears. The Roosevelts prospered, as did others of the original set- tlers' descendants. One of the Roosevelts bought a large tract of land on the lower end of Manhattan Island which is now called the Battery, and there built his home. As the city increased in size, its lower part became more and more given over to business, and the old families were compelled to move farther and farther up town. Theodore Roosevelt's grandfather, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, lived in a big house at Fourteenth Street and Broadway. "Inside," said the Colonel years afterwards, "there was a large hall running up to the roof; there was a tessellated black and white marble floor, and a circular staircase round the sides of the hall, from the top floor down. We children much admired both the tes- sellated floor and the circular staircase. I think we were right about the latter, but I am not so sure as to the tes- sellated floor." Cornelius Roosevelt was a substantial citizen who had not only his business but a considerable fortune inherited from his father. He studied at Colum- bia College and then entered business as a glass mer- chant, an occupation to which he devoted himself for most of his life. He was deeply interested in charitable enterprises and gave largely to their support. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the father of the President, was the son of Cornelius, and succeeded him in the glass business. Like his father, he had an ample fortune and every social advantage of the city of New York. There was nowhere in the United States a more exclu- sive circle than the descendants of the original Dutch settlers of New York City. Washington Irving has so CHILDHOOD 27 well portrayed them in his "History of New York," writ- ten under the pen name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, that the word Knickerbocker has come to represent the city's best in lineage. The Roosevelt family was and is a Knick- erbocker family, and it is important to remember that fact in reading Theodore Roosevelt's life. He had the advantages and the disadvantages which come with social position, wealth, culture and refinement. From the beginning of his public life to its end he had the gift of easy personal approach to all sorts and conditions of men. He was at home in the mountains with hunters and, on the plains, with cow-punchers; but he was equally at home in the White House receiving distin- guished foreigners, or in a New York ball-room. This was one of the advantages of a heritage of culture, when combined, as in Roosevelt's case, with an intense interest in people. The disadvantage, of course, lay in the fact that wealth and culture open interests not shared by those who do not possess them, and these very interests un- shared by the average citizen, prove a barrier to political success in a democracy. He had to show that the compar- ative luxury of his upbringing had not deprived him of the ability to fend for himself, and what was more import- ant, of the ability to understand and sympathize with men and women of social environments other than his own Into such a family, then, Theodore Roosevelt was born on October 27th, 1858. The long dispute between the North and the South was rapidly taking on a more and more sinister aspect. In a final vain effort to bridge the chasm by compromise, the voters had united to elect a Democratic President, — destined to be the last Democrat in the White House till over twenty years should pass. Men were widely interested in political 28 THEODORE ROOSEVELT questions as they have probably never been interested since. It was a suitable time for the birth of a man who was to give the greater part of his life to public service. The house in which the Roosevelts lived and in which Theodore was born stood at 28 East Twentieth Street, in New York City. It was then a good-sized city house furnished in the solid, rather gloomy style which was gen- erally accepted in New York sixty years ago. Roosevelt's father, Theodore, Sr., had a strong influ- ence on the future President's life and character, although he died when his son was only nineteen years old. Of him President Roosevelt said, "My father was the best man I ever knew. " He was a busy man and a happy one, in which respects the Colonel resembled him. He was a devoted husband and father, a successful merchant and a tireless helper of the helpless. It was said of him after his untimely death at the age of forty-six that he was "a man of untiring energy, and of prodigious industry, the most valiant fighter of his day for the right, and the winner of his fights." He was in the prime of his youth when the Civil War brought its many problems to be solved. Those were four hard years for the Roosevelts. The Bulloch family of Georgia, of which the boy's mother was a member, were active and influential on the side of the South. Little Theodore's uncle, Captain James D. Bulloch, had been in the United States Navy, Re- signing at the opening of the war, he offered his serv- ices to the new Confederate government, and was sent to England to buy arms for the Confederacy. Then he was commissioned to purchase and equip vessels there to fight battles for the South. In spite of the protests of the government of the United States, Captain Bulloch man- CHILDHOOD 29 aged to equip and float a half dozen ships flying the flag of the Confederacy. One of these was the Alabama, which did so much damage that Great Britain, after the war, was compelled by arbitration to pay to the United States $15,000,000 for having allowed Captain Bulloch to build her in an English port. Irvine Stephens Bulloch, a younger brother of Mrs. Roosevelt, also enlisted in the Confederate Navy, and was a middy on the Alabama during her battle with the Kearsarge off the coast of France. When the Southern warship was sunk by the Kearsarge, young Bulloch com- manded the gun which fired the last shot aboard the Alabama before she went down. He was rescued by men from an English yacht, and afterward married the daugh- ter of one of his British rescuers. Young Theodore Roose- velt had reason to be proud of the character and ability of his Southern uncles, though he believed that they fought on the wrong side. The sufferings and sorrows of the war appealed strongly to Roosevelt the father. He did all he could to befriend and improve the condition of the soldier. He was a founder of the Union League, organized for the purpose of rallying men, money and munitions to carry on the cause of the North. He was also one of the first in getting in order the Sanitary Commission, which did much for the health and benefit of the soldiers at the front. Dur- ing the war, in addition to all these labors, he devoted much time to caring for the sick and wounded, as well as for the families and widows and orphans of soldiers. He drafted the Act of Congress which enabled soldiers to allot part of their pay to their dependants and was ap- pointed by President Lincoln as one of the commissioners to carry the act into effect in New York. In pursuance 30 THEODORE ROOSEVELT of his duties as a commissioner he traveled about among New York regiments at the front and induced many sol- diers then wasting their wages to assign certain monthly amounts to their families. When thousands of soldiers returned to New York City at the end of the war, with no means of livelihood, he organized at his own house, the Soldiers' Employment Bureau. A great number of the soldiers had not received their pay from the government, and so-called claim agents pretended to get their money for them x but robbed them instead. To combat this end, Roosevelt helped to form the Protective War Claims Association. Besides all this, he was president of the State Board of Charities and an active participant in the work of other similar organizations. He was particularly interested in societies to prevent cruelty to children and cruelty to animals. The Newsboys' Lodging-Houses were an effec- tive means of keeping boys off the street, and Mr. Roose- velt took an active interest in them. Years afterwards one of these newsboys was Governor Brady of Alaska and served under his former benefactor's son. Under Pres- ident Hayes, Mr. Roosevelt served as Collector of the Port of New York. But with all these manifold activities,, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., had plenty of time for his family. His son relates that he and his brother and sisters used to wait in the library in the evening until they heard their father's front door key rattling in the latch and then they would rush out to greet him and troop after him into his room while he was dressing for dinner. There they were regaled with novelties which their father extracted from his pocket for their amusement and with the trinkets which he kept in a little box on his dressing-table, which the children CHILDHOOD 3i always spoke of as "treasures." On special occasions each child would receive a special trinket for his "very own." Often, in the summer, Mr. Roosevelt would com- plete his business and take an early train to the country, where he and Mrs. Roosevelt had taken the children for their yearly outing. Mrs. Roosevelt and one or two of the children would meet him at the station in a four-in-hand, which he delighted to drive, and away they would all go at what appeared to the boy a tremendous pace. All this kind of family intimacy formed the basis of the strong love which Theodore had for his father. Long after his father's death, Roosevelt said of him that his father was the only man of whom he was ever really afraid, adding, "I do not mean that it was a wrong fear, for he was entirely just, and we children adored him." On one occasion only did the father administer corporal punishment to his son Theodore. It appears that Theodore had bitten his elder sister's arm and had in- stantly taken refuge, first in the yard and then under the kitchen table, from the punishment which he knew he deserved. His father followed him and, discovering his presence under the table, dropped on all fours and darted for him. The boy feebly hurled a handful of dough at his pursuer, and then ran for the stairs. Half way up the stairs his father caught him and administered the pun- ishment which he afterwards acknowledged that he richly deserved. Of his mother, Martha Bulloch, Roosevelt said, " She was a sweet, gracious, beautiful Southern woman, a delightful companion and beloved by everybody. She was entirely 'unreconstructed' to the day of her death." Mrs. Roosevelt had been born and brought up in a typ- ical Southern atmosphere. Her grandfather, Gen. Daniel 32 THEODORE ROOSEVELT Stewart, had joined the Revolutionary Army when a boy, was captured by the British and escaped from one of the enemy's prison ships. After his escape he served in the Continental Army as a captain under Sumter and Marion. Mrs. Roosevelt lived during her childhood at Roswell, Georgia, and was familiar with all of the delightful darky characteristics and stories which Joel Chandler Harris has immortalized in "Uncle Remus." Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., never saw his mother's birthplace until October 20, 1905, when he was forty-seven years old. He told the citizens of that little town, then, how deeply he was moved by coming to the place of which he had heard so much from her, and called attention to his great good fortune in having the right to claim that his blood was half South- ern and half Northern. Indeed, although his convictions, as a boy and as a man, were entirely with the Northern cause, he always had a sympathetic understanding of the Southern point of view, due, in part at least, to his love for his "unreconstructed" mother. All through the Civil War the father was a strong Lincoln Republican and the mother a strong secessionist, but this did not interfere with the affection and unity of the family. The Colonel relates that towards the close of the war he grew to have a partial but alert understand- ing of the family difference, "and once," he says, "when I felt that I had been wronged by maternal discipline during the day, I attempted a partial vengeance by pray- ing with loud fervor for the success of the Union arms, when we all came to say our prayers before my mother in the evening. She was not only a most devoted mother, but was also blessed with a strong sense of humor, and she was too much amused to punish me; but I was warned not to repeat the offense, under penalty of my father's CHILDHOOD 33 being informed — he being the dispenser of serious punish- ment." There were three other children in the Roosevelt family, Anna, who was three year older than Theodore, and his younger brother and sister, Elliot and Corinne, who were his juniors by one and three years respectively. Mrs. Roosevelt's mother, Mrs. Bulloch, also lived with the family, and a young unmarried aunt, Anna Bulloch. There were also as associates of his early childhood his cousins, two of whom lived next door, and Edith Carow, a friend of his sister Corinne's, who lived not far away on Union Square and who was, years later, to become his wife. Altogether this group of youngsters seem to have led a very happy, wholesome, normal life. During the winter they lived at the house on Twentieth Street, while during the summer they were always taken somewhere in the country. Of course they enjoyed the country very much more than the city. There they had all kinds of pets — cats, ducks, rabbits, a racoon and a Shetland pony named General Grant, for whom the Colonel's children named their own pony thirty years later. Christmas and Thanks- giving were times of special pleasure, as they are for most children. On Christmas Eve each child hung up the largest stocking which could be borrowed from the grown members of the family, and before dawn on Christmas morning they were all seated on their parents' bed explor- ing the treasures which had so miraculously arrived during the night. After breakfast the bigger Christmas presents were found in the drawing-room, each child's presents arranged on a separate table. "I never knew anyone else," said the Colonel, "have what seemed to me such attractive Christmases, and in the next generation I tried to reproduce them exactly for my own children." 34 THEODORE ROOSEVELT Next door to Theodore Roosevelt, Senior's house was that of his brother Robert. Both of these houses had wide porches looking upon the yards in the rear, and these porches formed the children's playground during the winters in the city. No doubt the future naturalist took special delight in the proximity of his uncle's house, be- cause its owners possessed, from time to time, tropical birds of beautiful plumage and, on one occasion, a monkey. During his early boyhood Theodore Roosevelt was sickly and delicate. From a very early age he suffered from asthma, which for years prevented him from sleep- ing except in a sitting posture. His later robust health was due partly to the loving care of his father and mother, and partly to his own determination to become strong. "One of my early memories," he says, "is of my father walking up and down the room with me in his arms at night when I was a very small person, and of sitting up in bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me." Often his father, in summer, would take him driving through the countryside in the darkness of night. Theodore recorded at one time in his diary, " T was sick of the asthma last night. I sat up for four successive hours and Papa made me smoke a cigar." The state- ment that he was "sick of the asthma last night" occurs frequently in this childish diary. In 1869 Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt took all the children on a long trip to Europe. To this trip Theodore did not look back afterwards with any particular pleasure. In fact he says that he cordially hated it, and that all the enjoyment that he and the other children got was in explor- ing ruins or mountains when they could get away from their parents, and in playing in the different hotels. The diary which he kept at the time bears witness to the CHILDHOOD 35 truth of his later impressions. Of Oxford, for instance, he writes, "We drove around it and saw some colages." His record of the Lake country is confined to a brief statement about a climb at Windermere: "The view was splendid on the top and it was very windy and I bought a sweet cracker." At York they seem to have had a more interesting time, for he records that he and his sister Corinne went to the museum, "where we saw birds and skeletons and Bamie and I went in for a spree and got two shillings' worth of rock candy." But, taken as a whole, the diary certainly indicates a little boy who was asthmatic and bored and homesick a good deal of the time. When the family visited Europe again, four years later, he had matured sufficiently to enjoy his trip and to profit by it. His sister Corinne, now Mrs. Douglas Robinson of New York, has given me an intimate sketch of his early childhood : "My earliest impressions," she writes "of my brother Theodore are those of a rather small, patient, suffering little child, who, in spite of his suffering, was always the acknowledged head of the nursery at No. 28 East Twen- tieth Street in New York City, where my brother Elliot and I were his loving followers in any game which he initiated, or where we listened with intense interest and admiration to the stories which he wove for us day by day, and often even month by month. These stories almost always related to strange and marvelous animal adventures, in which the animals were personalities quite as vivid as Kipling gave to the world a generation later in his Jungle Books. "Owing to acute and often agonizing asthma, he showed as a little boy, none of the vigorous quality which became 36 THEODORE ROOSEVELT part of his very atmosphere later in life. I remember well, in the same house in Twentieth Street, that my father had the third room of the second floor turned into an outdoor piazza gymnasium, with see-saws, horizontal and vertical bars, swings, etc., and my brother always told me of the deep impression it produced upon him when my father took him for the first time to this outdoor gymnasium, and said: 'Theodore, you have the brains, but brains are of comparatively little use without the body; you have got to make your body, and it lies with you to make it, and it's dull hard work, but you can do it,' and from that day this little boy of about nine years old started to make his body, and he never ceased in making that body until the day of his death. But in those early years it was a difficult task. I can see him now faithfully going through various exercises, at different times of the day, to broaden the chest narrowed by this terrible shortness of breath, to make the limbs and back strong and able to bear the weight of what was coming to him later in life. "Perhaps one of his most striking characteristics as a very young boy was his power of concentration. From the very fact that he was not able originally to enter into the most vigorous activities, he was always reading or writing, and was always able to detach himself from what- ever environment he was in and become so absorbed in the book or paper which was the matter on his mind that he was entirely forgetful of w r hat was going on around him. This intense power of concentration, learned so young, served him well in later life. I have frequently seen him, on some of his many presidential trips, detach himself in just the same way that he did when he was a little delicate boy at the old home in Twentieth Street, and on those very presidential trips I have seen him devour S ^ TS O S-' CD X5 ^ 2. t. ^ OfQ (A CD w a. CD n ~* < rt P i-» r+- O CD > u CHILDHOOD 37 'Ferrero,' 'Josephus' and similar works, while dele- gations would come and go in the train, with whom he would have short conversations and then immediately absorb himself in his reading again. "I can remember perfectly the feeling of life and spirit with which the whole house was infused when he came into it. Interesting as he had been mentally as a little child, one had perhaps been over-conscious of the sense of detachment with which his suffering had sur- rounded him. Later, when he was a young man in the New York Assembly, while he could still summon that sense of detachment at will, and could give one, if he so desired, the impression of being in another world when studying or reading — at other times he was the life and spirit of the whole family environment, and his work in the Assembly, with its far-reaching interest, was even then the pivot upon which the whole family life turned. He was then, as later, capable of the most unflagging power of achievement, and his reading was so universal, and yet so specialized that one could turn to him as an authority upon almost any subject. "Owing to delicacy in childhood he was not able to go to a boarding school, and was educated, more or less, by tutors, and when my father first settled at Oyster Bay, Theodore, who was then a boy of about fourteen, was under the tutelage of Mr. Arthur H. Cutler, who later formed the big boys' school in New York City and was always extremely proud that Theodore Roosevelt had been his first pupil. "In those early days at Oyster Bay, when he was beginning to get the benefit of his own making of his own body, I remember him as a great lover of the water, but only in a very active way. He never cared, as my 38 THEODORE ROOSEVELT brother Elliot did, to sail a boat; it might be scientific and difficult to sail a boat, but it wasn't half hard enough to suit his tastes. He liked the smallest rowboat that could live in the bay and Sound, and he liked to row it for miles himself, carrying it across points or strips of sand, shoot- ing ducks, taking long trips when the waters were rough on the Sound, when the danger was sufficiently exciting to make it worth while to keep the tiny boat straight in the waves or fog. And as he shot and ran and rowed he grad- ually became a much stronger and hardier boy. He always retained his love of natural history, and literature of all sorts and kinds. "Those early days at Oyster Bay are perhaps the most vivid of our childhood, for my father and mother had a wise attitude toward their children — making compara- tively few rules, The rules that were made had to be strictly kept, but otherwise we were given great leeway, and were allowed to roam the then exquisite lanes of Long Island at will on horseback, or to spend long, happy holi- days on the bay and Sound. "Theodore, at this time, was collecting birds and ani- mals of various kinds, studying their habits, skinning and stuffing them himself, and at that period my father always felt that his taste for science would probably be the dom- inant factor in his life, although he encouraged the 'stren- uous life' in every possible way, feeling that the boy's body required the boxing lessons, the running con- tests and the various types of exercises in which he indulged. "At eighteen, Theodore Roosevelt, although occa- sionally suffering from his old enemy, was a strong and normal young man and perfectly able to go into Harvard College and hold his own against any of the light-weight CHILDHOOD 39 boxers of that day, in spite of being handicapped, as he was, by near-sightedness from the beginning. "Just about the same time that he entered college he had begun to take long trips in the backwoods of Maine, under the guidance of the two fine Maine lumber- men — Bill Sewall and Bill Dow — who for so many years were a large influence in his physical and even his mental life. "His love of nature, accentuated by his knowledge of birds and beasts, was one of the very vital factors in his whole life, for he had that mixture of scientific interest and pure delight in the beauty of nature which rarely goes together. "When you ask my impressions of my brother as a boy and a young man, the qualities that stand out spe- cially before me are those qualities which meant in his extreme youth patience, concentration and determina- tion, and, in his maturer youth, equal determination, equal concentration, but with a greater physical power and courage added to those early qualities. There was an ardor for healthfulness, for righteousness and for patriotic endeavor which made one visibly aware in coming in con- tact with TheodoreRoosevelt that here was a great poten- tiality for the good of the world." CHAPTER III School and College DURING his days as a student, Roosevelt showed no unusual aptitude for any study except natural history. Speaking of his studies, he said himself, "In science and history and geography and in unexpected parts of German and French I was strong, but lamentably weak in Latin and Greek and mathematics." The interest in science and history and geography which this shows is borne out by the evidence of his later life, but there does not appear to have been such a strong inclina- tion towards any of these subjects as to have justified an observer, then, in prophesying any special kind of future for the boy. During his boyhood, his continual ill health kept him from regular attendance at school. For a few months he attended Professor McMullen's School on Twentieth Street, near his father's house, but most of the time he had tutors. One of these tutors, under whom he prepared to enter Harvard, was Mr. Arthur Cutler, who later founded the Cutler School in New York. The result of this absence of regular schooling was that the boy was left compara- tively free to develop his mind according to his own inclinations. With a strong interest in animals, it is not surprising that natural history captivated his attention at an early age. His career as a zoologist began when, one day, as a small boy, he was walking up Broadway past one of the city markets. Outside the market lay a dead seal on a (40) SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 41 slab of wood. He had been reading about seals in Mayne Reid's books, and the sight of this one so close to him instantly filled him with a sense of romance and adventure which was increased when he learned that the animal had just been killed in New York Harbor. He became pos- sessed with a longing to own the seal. Being unable to form or execute any plan for satisfying that longing, he contented himself with visiting the market day by day to gaze upon the object which proved so interesting to him. He took the seal's measurements carefully with a folding pocket rule and had considerable difficulty when he came to measuring its girth. Somehow or other he got the animal's skull and with it he and two of his cousins im- mediately founded the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History. At the same time his observations of the seal and the measurements which he had made of it were care- fully set down in a blank book purchased for the purpose. In another blank book were recorded further observa- tions in natural history. This work was entitled, "Natural History on Insects, by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.," and began in this fashion: "All these insects are native of North America. Most of the insects are not in other books. I will write about ants first." The beginning of the treatise on ants is entertaining, if not deeply scientific. "Ants," he writes, "are difided into three sorts for every species. These kinds are officer, soilder [soldier?] and work. There are about one officer to ten soilders and one soilder to two workers." The book then went on to describe other insects which he had observed, all of which he assured the reader "inhabit North America." At the end of the volume on insects were a few notes on fishes. Among these was a description of the crayfish. "I need not describe the form of the 42 THEODORE ROOSEVELT crayfish to you," wrote the author. "Look at the lobster and you have its form." These observations were recorded at the age of nine years, and are worth mention- ing because they show a real interest in the creatures of which he was writing. Roosevelt's father encouraged his study of natural history and, finding him absorbed in a book of Mayne Reid's on mammals, which was thrilling but not very accurate, presented the boy with a little book by J. G. Wood, the English naturalist, called "Homes without Hands." This was a real step towards the attainment of scientific knowledge. His father also, when he was about thirteen, sent him to take lessons in taxidermy from an old friend of Audubon's, named Bell, who kept a musty little shop which the pupil later likened to Mr. Venus' shop in "Our Mutual Friend." The study of taxidermy, of course, inspired the boy with a desire to procure his own specimens and his father consequently presented him with a gun for that purpose. When he first tried to use this gun, he was puzzled to find that he could not see the objects at which his com- panions were shooting. One day, some boys with him read aloud an advertisement written in huge letters on a bill-board some distance away, and Theodore then realized, for the first time, that there must be something the matter with his eyes, because he could not see the letters. His father soon got him a pair of spectacles which he says literally opened up a new world to him. When he was fourteen, he had become sufficiently interested in the study of natural history to get several new books on the subject, and to make a more careful study of it. In the winter of 1872 and 1873 the family visited the Old World for the second time, and, among SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 43 other expeditions, took a trip up the Nile. Before they started on this trip he picked up in Cairo a book which contained some account of the birds of that region. Armed with this book, and with the gun which his father had given him, he secured a number of specimens of birds in Egypt, which, together with others procured later in Palestine, he subsequently presented to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The fun of collecting was no doubt enhanced by the fact that before leaving home he and his two cousins, his fellow-directors of the Roosevelt Museum, had printed a set of museum labels in pink ink, expressly for use upon this expedition. Unfortunately for the rest of the family, Theodore insisted on carrying his natural history specimens about with him from place to place. One day when the family was in Vienna, his brother Elliot inquired plaintively of their father whether it would be possible that he should now and then have a room to hiinself in the hotels, instead of being obliged always to share one with Theodore. Mr. Roosevelt was perfectly willing to comply, but inquired the reason for Elliot's request. Elliot said, "Come and see our room, and you will understand." When they reached the boys' room, they found bottles of taxider- mist's supplies everywhere and in the basin the remains of specimens which Theodore had lately captured. Theodore himself records the fact that he was "grubby." "I suppose," he says, "that all growing boys tend to be grubby; but the ornithological small boy, or indeed the boy with the taste for natural history of any kind, is generally the very grubbiest of all." Some years before this expedition, his grandfather Roosevelt had made his summer home in Oyster Bay, on 44 THEODORE ROOSEVELT Long Island Sound, and his father's two brothers had also regularly rented country places there during the summer. Upon their return from Europe, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., also made Oyster Bay the summer home of his family. This gave the young naturalist increased opportunity for exploring trips and for observations. He did nothing which had any profound scientific significance, but he spent a great deal of time in what was to him an interesting, and profitable pursuit, and laid the founda- tion for a large part of the pleasure of his subsequent life. One more story of his boyhood should be related before leaving the subject of natural history. One of his sisters has told how, when he was a very small boy in petticoats with his hair in a curl on the top of his head, he dragged down from the book-shelf a huge volume describing David Livingstone's life in the heart of the Dark Continent, and held it on his lap. But this time it was not big game that little Theodore found. His sister said he struck something he did not understand. Clasping the big book in his short arms, he went from one to another to get light on a dark passage. After some effort he found a friend not too busy at the moment to listen to him. "What are * foraging' ants?" he asked. Of course no one in the family could give the required information off-hand. On investigation it was discovered that the baby naturalist had made a mistake in his reading. Livingstone had referred to *'the foregoing ants." It was not much easier to make a child in petticoats understand what "foregoing" ants might be. But that is the problem confronting older sisters in many a family where there is a small boy with an inquiring mind. Of reading young Theodore was very fond, although he did not show any marked sign of genius in the matter SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 45 and manner of his reading. All of the children were devoted to the magazine called, "Our Young Folks," which the Colonel, years afterward, said he really believed he enjoyed going over then as much as when he was a small boy. This magazine taught him much more than any of his text-books, and everything in it instilled the individual virtues and the necessity of character as the chief factor in any man's success. He also has recorded his fondness for girls' stories, such as "Little Men," "Little Women," and "An Old-Fashioned Girl." After the trip up the Nile, in the winter of 1873, the younger children were left to spend the summer in Dresden in the house of Herr Minckwitz, an old gentleman who had taken part in the German revolution of 1848. To this experience Roosevelt looked back with delight in later years. The kindness of the family and the fascina- tion of the two sons, who were dueling students from the University of Leipzig, made a deep impression on him. One of the sons was known in dueling circles as the "Red Duke," and the other as "Sir Rhinoceros" because the tip of his nose had been cut off in a duel and sewn on again. During his visit in Germany Roosevelt acquired a fairly good speaking knowledge of German, and a real fondness for German poetry. The impression which he gained of German character and German family life was still strong upon him when he wrote of it forty years later. During all this time, until he was about fifteen years old, the boy was not strong. His asthma troubled him incessantly, deprived him of sleep, and made violent exercise difficult and sometimes impossible. During one of his attacks of asthma he was sent off by himself to Moosehead Lake, in Maine. On the stage-coach he met a couple of other boys of his own age, who were not 46 THEODORE ROOSEVELT troubled with ill health, and who were determined to annoy Theodore. He finally became so exasperated that he tried to fight his tormenters, only to discover that either one of them could easily handle him without even the necessity of hurting him. This was a considerable blow to his pride, and was the immediate cause which led to his taking boxing lessons from John Long, an ex-prize fighter, in New York. Long used to hold "championship matches" for the different weights in order to stimulate interest among his patrons, and young Roosevelt was fortunate enough to win in one of these contests, a pewter mug, which he cherished and boasted about for some years afterwards. About this time, also, he began to visit the Maine woods regularly every summer and sometimes in the winter. There he walked, paddled and hunted small game, partly from a love of the sport and of outdoors, and partly from an earnest determination to acquire health at the cost of no matter what effort. His com- panions in these excursions were two woodsmen named Bill Sewall and Bill Dow, between whom and Roosevelt there grew up a strong affection. Thirty years later Sewall, as collector of customs on the Aroostook border, served under his old companion, who had become President of the United States. Roosevelt went to Harvard in the fall of 1876 and became a member of the class of 1880. Among his class- mates were a goodly number of men who later rose to prominence, and some who became national figures. Among the latter were Albert Bushnell Hart, the historian ; Josiah Quincy, who became Assistant Secretary of State, and Robert Bacon, who later was Secretary of State and Ambassador to France. One of his closest friends in after SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 47 life was Henry Cabot Lodge, then an instructor in history and now United States Senator from Massachusetts. The young collegian soon became a familiar figure in Cambridge and Boston — especially in Brookline — driv- ing about in a sort of sporting phaeton, then the height of the New York style in equipages. He had not yet taken up horseback riding as a regular exercise. Though he was especially fond of boxing and other vigorous sports, he astonished his student friends by skipping the rope. When he had explained that he engaged in this strange exercise because it strengthens the muscles of the legs and ankles, startled Cambridge saw college students skip- ping rope like school girls. His defective sight and his glasses were a handicap in boxing, baseball and kindred sports. But he boxed often — for the exercise and the physical discipline. He was still pale and thin, weighing only one hundred and thirty pounds. So he was rather dubious looking, even for a lightweight. His friends used to tell of an encounter he had, which especially illustrates his temper. He came into the ring with a huge pair of eyeglasses tied tight to his head. At the end of a lively round, time was called and Roosevelt quickly dropped his hands to his side. But his opponent dealt him a smashing blow between the eyes, covering the motionless lightweight's face with blood. "Foul! — foul!" cried the onlookers, and their angry protests showed that it might have gone hard with the other boxer. But Roosevelt rushed to the referee, shouting : "Stop stop!— He didn't hear!— He didn't hear!" On another occasion he entered the college lightweight boxing contest. After winning the preliminary round he was pitted against a master of the art named Hanks, who 48 THEODORE ROOSEVELT defeated him. "It was no fight at all," said one of the spectators afterward. "Hanks had the longer reach and was stronger, and Roosevelt was handicapped by his eyesight. I can see that little fellow yet, staggering about and banging into air. His opponent could not put him out and he would not give up. He showed his fighting qualities, but he never entered another bout." His closest associates at college were the members of the wealthy and cultured New York and Boston families. One of his classmates who has himself risen to a high place in his profession has told me that young Roosevelt was distinctly one of the "exclusive set;" that, though he was liked by most of those who came to know him, he had not at that time broken through the limitations of his birth. This means that his intense interest in the points of view of different classes and his ability to know and appreciate the best in a man, irrespective of his education or wordly condition, which became the marked and charming side of his character, was only fully developed after he left college and began to lay hold on life for himself. While he was at college Roosevelt taught a Sunday- school class at an Episcopal church, although he was not an Episcopalian He wrote of this later and added, "I do not think I made much of a success of it." One of the boys came to class one day with a black eye. The teacher was concerned at once. The lad explained that another boy had pinched his little sister and that he had acquired his black eye in an effort to resent the insult. This course of conduct met with the teacher's entire approval, which he signified by bestowing a dollar on the battle-scarred pupil. Later he was removed from his position of Sunday- SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 49 school teacher by the rector of the church because he was not a confirmed member of the Episcopal Church. But he did not appear to cherish any grudge against the denomi- nation whose minister had thus summarily ousted him, for he turned up next week in an Episcopal Sunday-school in East Cambridge, and later taught in one at Chestnut Hill. What people sometimes describe as his thoughtless impulsiveness and disregard for appearances was illus- trated by another story of his college days. Late one rainy night four students who lived in the house with him heard a horse neighing frantically in a barn nearby. They dressed and went out in the dark to explore. When they reached the barn they found Roosevelt already there, half -clothed and minus his almost indispensable spectacles, struggling to release the horse's leg from a hole in the side of the stall. Perhaps closer observation will show that though Roosevelt certainly had little regard for conven- tional appearances, his supposed impulsiveness was due to his ability to think and act with unusual quickness in emergencies. It is of course interesting to see how early a distin- guished man has developed the tastes or characteristics which give him his distinction. If we should pursue this line of inquiry in Roosevelt's case we should get little information from his college career. A good deal of lati- tude was allowed the students in the matter of selecting their studies, although certain courses were prescribed for all. When it came to these electives, Roosevelt devoted one-half of them to natural history, but not a single one to history. In history and English literature he took only what was required of him and nothing more, and yet, in his later years, he was a writer of history and an eager 50 THEODORE ROOSEVELT reader of the best literature. He took no interest in elocution or in debating, although he became afterward a forceful and convincing public speaker. He joined, of course, with others in the conduct of such organizations as the Finance Club and the "0. K.," before whom papers were prepared and lectures delivered on economic and political questions. In the fall of 1880 he was put in charge of the polls for the taking of a straw vote among the students during the campaign which cul- minated in the election of Garfield, and is said to have cast his own vote for Senator Bayard, a Democrat. Ac- cording to the Harvard Advocate, the undergraduate lit- erary paper of the period, "The gentleman in charge of the polls is a proof that the movement is not one of idle curiosity, but of earnest purpose/' The most ambitious work of his college life was the writing of "The Naval War of 1812." He began this in his senior year and published the work two years later. It was recognized as an authority on the subject, and brought from the British authors of the "History of the Royal Navy" a request that he should write for them the chapter of their work dealing with the War of 1812. During all this time he had become more and more deeply interested in Miss Alice Hathaway Lee, a young lady who lived in Chestnut Hill, which is a pleasant suburb of Boston. During his sophomore year he was a student in rhetoric under Professor Adams Sherman Hill. One day Hill was reading to his class a theme to which he ob- jected because it was over-romantic. In the middle of his reading he paused and suddenly asked Roosevelt to criticise the essay. The young man hesitated, and the professor then asked him specifically, "Mr. Roosevelt, what do you think of an undergraduate falling in love?" SCHOOL AND COLLEGE 51 Roosevelt, blushing furiously, made no answer, and so his secret was out. The culmination of this affair was his engagement to Miss Lee and their marriage on his twenty- second birthday, a few months after he had graduated from college. He was graduated from the college department in the spring of 1880, having acquired a Phi Beta Kappa Key for proficiency in scholarship, a number of interesting friends and a determination to succeed. He said him- self: "I left college and entered the big world owing more than I can express to the training I had received, especially in my home, but with much else also to learn if I were to become fitted to do my part in the work that lay ahead for the generation of Americans to which I belonged." His sister, Mrs. Robinson, writes of him at this time : "His college life broadened every interest and did for him what had hitherto not been done, which was to give him confidence in his relationship with young men of his own age. Up to that time, owing to his delicacy of health, he had been somewhat of a recluse, from the standpoint of relationship of boy to boy." CHAPTER IV The First Plunge into Politics THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S father died the 9th of February, 1878, while his son was a sophomore at Harvard. The loss of such a father, especially at a period of his life when he needed hirn most, was in a sense irreparable. It was his first great sorrow. It also modified the immediate course of his life, throwing on him the responsibilities of a man. The father and son had often talked over the boy's future course in life. The younger Theodore had been brought up with the distinct idea that he was expected to work. His father, though he had inherited a consider- able fortune, had worked hard all his life, and he expected his son to do likewise. On entering college, the son's ambition had been to devote his life to natural history. His father had told him that he could do so, provided he took up scientific work in a serious manner, but that if he was not going to earn money, he must "even things up by not spending it." If he was to be a scientist, his fortune would not be sufficient to do more than live quietly and comfortably. He would probably have persisted in a scientific career, at least for some time after leaving college, had it not been that the course of instruction at Harvard, as in all Amer- ican colleges at that time, discouraged any work that was not done in a laboratory. Instead of encouraging his taste for field work, they treated biology as purely a "closet" science, and required him to spend his time in the study of minute forms of marine life or else in section- (52) THE FIRST PLUNGE INTO POLITICS 53 cutting and the study of the tissues of the higher organisms under the microscope. He tells us that he had no more desire or ability to to be a microscopist and section-cutter than he had to be a mathematician. If he had to work with these things to be a scientist, then he would have to choose some other path in life. After his marriage, on October 27, 1880, he went to Europe. While in Switzerland he climbed the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn, sufficiently rare feats for those days to enable him to qualify as a member of the Alpine Club. On his return he and his wife took up their residence in New York and the young college graduate began to study law. His legal studies, however, did not last long. He believed himself that had he come in contact with some great professor of law, like the late Professor Thayer of the Harvard Law School, who had an understanding of social conditions as well as technical legal knowledge, he might have continued and become a member of the Bar. I doubt, however, whether he would ever have been a good lawyer, in spite of his ability to follow and grasp a legal argument, and I am quite sure that he was temperament- ally unfitted to be happy performing the ordinary services of the lawyer. As it was, it did not seem to him that the law was framed to discourage, as it should, sharp practice, and all other kinds of bargains except those which were fair and of benefit to both sides. "I was young," he tells us. "There was much in the judgment which I then formed on this matter which I should now revise; but, then as now, many of the big corporation lawyers, to whom the ordinary members of the Bar then, as now, looked up, held certain standards which were difficult to recognize as compatible with the idealism I suppose every high-minded young man is apt to feel." 54 THEODORE ROOSEVELT If he had been obliged to earn his living, though, he would probably not have continued in the study of law; he would have devoted all his energies to making both ends meet, for he always held the belief, "that a man's first duty is to pull his own string and to take care of those dependent upon him.' ' But his father had left him enough money to make it unnecessary for him to earn the neces- saries of life, and so, in abandoning the study of law he became absorbed in politics, and in the work necessary to complete his "History of the American Navy in the War of 1812." As stated, he graduated from college in 1880, and spent most of the first year thereafter abroad; and yet, in the fall of 1881, he was elected as a member of the Assembly, or lower House of the New York Legis- lature, the youngest member of that body. Re-elected at the end of the first year, and still the youngest man in the Legislature, he became the nominee of the minority, or Republican, party for speaker. Re-elected again for a third term, in the fall of 1883, though defeated for the speakership, he became floor leader. This is a remarkable record. I do not know that the records of any of our states show an equally rapid rise to prominence of a young man between twenty-three and twenty-six years of age. His election to the Assembly and his success as a member were due not so much to his ability, though of course without ability he could have accomplished little, as to traits of character and points of view. On gradua- tion from college he made up his mind that he would take an interest in politics, and when he settled in New York he at once proceeded to put the resolution in effect by making inquiries as to the whereabouts of the local Republican Association, and the means of joining it. The THE FIRST PLUNGE INTO POLITICS 55 fact that the persons of his own social set who lived near him laughed at him and told him that politics were low, and that the organization was controlled not by gentle- men but by saloon-keepers, horse-car conductors and the like did not deter him in the least. He expressed his atti- tude of mind to a protesting relative, "If the people who run these organizations, whoever they are, are the govern- ing class, then I propose to be one of the governing class.' ' Neither the resolution to become a member of the Dis- trict Association of his party, nor membership, itself would have gotten him into politics, had it not been for the fact that, unlike many persons of his birth and education, it never occurred to him that he was going into politics to obtain reform for the community, as if reform was a con- crete substance like a cake; neither did it occur to him that he was joining the organization for the purpose of doing good to a collection of ignorant and benighted per- sons. Not that he had not ideals — he had ideals; but he joined the District Association of his party because he wanted to get into the game, and exercise what he regarded as the right of every American, the right to take part, though it may be but a small and humble part, in governing the country. The District Association met in Morton Hall, a large, barnlike room over a saloon. Roosevelt came to the meeting just as the other members came, because he wanted to come, and not with any pat- ronizing ideas of doing good. Being a hearty, likable fellow, they soon began to like and respect him. The relationship I have described being once estab- lished, his birth, his education, his refinement, told polit- ically in his favor not against him. Every rich and "carefully" brought up young man in America who now may be wondering how he can get into politics can have 56 THEODORE ROOSEVELT the same experience, if he has young Roosevelt's point of view toward the politicians, saloon-keepers and hangers- on at Morton Hall, in the Twenty-first Assembly District of New York. For the reasons just expressed, his opportunity for election to public office would have come eventually; but it probably would not have come as quickly as it did had it not been for the circumstance that one Joseph Murray, the local political leader, determined to defeat the candi- date selected by the then political boss of the district, Jake Hess. Murray picked Roosevelt as a fellow candidate. He picked him because he believed that with Roosevelt he was most likely to win. He did win, and Roosevelt was nominated. Jake Hess had no hard feeling, and Joe and Jake started in to elect the nominee. Their first idea was to take the candidate through the saloons in the district. The first saloon-keeper visited assumed the attitude of dictating to the candidate, with the object of pledging his vote for a reduction of the amount of the liquor license. Roosevelt flatly told the man that he believed the charge for the license should be increased, and a hot altercation was about to take place when his two mentors on some excuse, grabbed the young candidate and took him out into the street. After that, they recommended him to seek votes on Fifth Avenue, and they would attend to the election on Sixth Avenue, the saloon quarter. This arrangement worked out satisfactorily and the candi- date was triumphantly elected. In the Legislature he found those conditions which were typical of conditions in most of our state legisla- tures at the time, and which with some modifications may be found today. The majority of the members were per- sonally honest, though many of them allowed their per- THE FIRST PLUNGE INTO POLITICS 57 sonal judgment to be controlled by the local boss, to whom they owed their election. There were a few men of high purpose, courage and capacity for self-sacrifice, and, on the other hand, there were what was known as the Black Horse Cavalry, the men who were thoroughly corrupt, and who largely looked upon their position in the Legislature as an opportunity to secure money from corporations interested in passing or defeating bills. Roosevelt's associates in the Legislature were Isaac Hunt, Jonas van Duzer, Walter Howe and Henry Sprague, whom he regarded as his closest friends and allies, as well, as "a gigantic one-eyed veteran of the Civil War, a gallant general, Curtis, from St. Lawrence County," and also, among the Democrats, Hampden Robb, Thomas Newbold and Tom Welch of Niagara, as well as a couple of members from New York and Brooklyn, Mike Costello and Pete Kelly. With the aid of some or all of these men, he suc- ceeded in securing the enactment of a Civil Service Law. He secured an investigation of the county offices of the state, by which it was discovered that the principal offi- cials in New York County "were drawing nearly a million dollars a year in fees, while discharging no duties what- ever;" he instituted an inquiry into the abuse of police powers and secured an amendment to the constitution of the state taking from the aldermen of New York City the executive power and placing it in the hands of the mayor. The last was a most important reform recommended by a committee of which he was chairman, appointed to look into various phases of New York City official life. As chairman, Roosevelt's energy and fearlessness enabled him to expose many of the corrupt practices then existing, thus arousing public sentiment in favor of concentrating power and responsibility in the mayor. At the time the mayor's 58 THEODORE ROOSEVELT appointments had to be confirmed by the alderman. The bill recommended by the committee took away this power. Roosevelt, throughout his life, always believed in the policy of this measure. He believed that the people should elect a few officials and hold them responsible; that it is impossible to get citizens interested in the character and ability of subordinate officials and that, therefore, subor- dinate officials should be appointed, not elected. Of the particular measure recommended by his committee, he said, "Taking away the confirming power of the board of aldermen would not give the citizens of New York good government. We knew that if they chose to elect the wrong kind of mayor they would have bad government, no matter what the form of law was. But we did secure to them the chance to get good government if they desired, and this was impossible as long as the old system remained.' ' The important result of his three years' experience in the Legislature, however, was not so much the legislation he succeeded in having adopted, but the results of his experiences on himself. He learned the invaluable lesson that in important activities of life no man can render the highest service unless he can act in combination with his fellows, which means a certain amount of "give and take." In other words, he passed through the phase of complete independence, that is, the acting on each case as he per- sonally viewed it, without paying any heed to the prin- ciples and prejudices of others. The resulting loss of any power of accomplishing anything at all soon taught him his mistake. Again, he learned the equally valuable les- son, that the man in public life loses the power to accom- plish any good at all if he falls into the habit of looking ahead to ascertain the effect of his present action on his THE FIRST PLUNGE INTO POLITICS 59 future political career. He tells us that at one period he began to believe that he had a future, and that it behooved him to be very farsighted and "scan each action carefully with a view to its possible effect on that future.' ' 'This," he adds, "speedily made me useless to the public and an object of aversion to myself." It is probable that, like most young men, he had gone to the Assembly believing that all the reputable men he knew, friends of his father and his family, really believed in good government, and were opposed to corruption in politics. His awakening to the knowledge that this assumption was false was as much of a shock to him as it usually is to other young men when they first realize the connection of some of their respected seniors with the rami- fications of crooked business and crooked politics. He made an attempt to impeach a certain judge. The judge had been used by some men connected with some great corporations of the time. Though there was considerable evidence against the judge, who had gone so far as to write a letter to a prominent financier in which he expressed himself as "willing to go to the very verge of judicial dis- cretion to serve your vast interests,' ' it was impossible to secure his impeachment. During the investigation, Roose- velt was taken out to lunch by an old family friend who he asserts had a genuine personal liking for him. We will let Colonel Roosevelt himself tell the rest of the story: "He explained that I had done well in the Legislature, that it was a good thing to have made the 'reform play,' that I had shown that I possessed ability such as would make me useful in the right kind of law office or business concern; but that I must not overplay my hand; that I had gone far enough, and that now was the time to leave politics and identify myself with the right kind of people, 60 THEODORE ROOSEVELT the people who would always in the long run control others and obtain the real rewards which were worth having. I asked him if that meant I was to yield to the ring in poli- tics. He answered somewhat impatiently that I was entirely mistaken (as in fact I was) about there being merely a political ring of the kind of which the papers were fond of talking; that the 'ring/ if it could be called such, that is, the inner circle, included certain big business men, and the politicians, lawyers and judges who were in alli- ance with, and, to a certain extent, dependent upon them, and that the successful man had to win his success by the backing of the same forces, whether in law, business or politics.' ' It is needless to remark that the old family friend did not attain the object which he sought in inviting young Roosevelt to take lunch with him. There were other experiences which made lasting impressions that were useful to him. Once certain large corporate influences came to him to ask him to take charge of a bill granting them certain terminal facilities in New York City. They told him quite frankly that the bill was one which exposed them to the demands of venal politicians because it would grant a valuable privilege. He looked into the subject and came to the conclusion that the legislation was proper and beneficial to the citi- zens of New York, and consented to take charge of the bill, provided they would not use any corrupt means to secure its passage. He was chairman of the committee to which the bill was referred. He was convinced that the majority of the committee were corrupt. Before a meet- ing of the committee in which he intended to bring up the bill, he noticed that a chair in the committee room was broken. In case of trouble, he secured one of the legs and THE FIRST PLUNGE INTO POLITICS 61 placed it where he could easily reach it. He then called the meeting to order. He made a motion to report the bill favorably. This was voted down. He then made a motion to have the bill reported unfavorably. Again the members of the Black Horse Cavalry present voted against the measure and the motion was defeated. This meant that the majority of the committee would try to smother the bill by refusing to vote it out of the committee until the corporation paid them their price. Taking the bill, he put it in his pocket, arose and told the members that he would report it. The members of the Black Horse Cav- alry saw the prospect of illicit gain disappearing. Threat- ening murmurs arose on all sides, but he walked out of the room with the bill unmolested; the convenient chair-leg firmly clasped in his hand probably had a quieting effect. However, though he could report the bill, he could not get it through. The representatives of the corporation told him that perhaps a person of more experience might suc- ceed. The bill was placed in charge of a "more experienced politician" and not long afterwards it was adopted, his enemies of the Black Horse Cavalry all voting for it. The chair-leg just referred to probably had the desired effect on the members of his committee because they knew that the slight young man was probably the best boxer in the House. Of this they had had tangible proof. Once a group of the members decided that this young man from the most fashionable district of New York would be improved and give less trouble in the future if he re- ceived a good beating. They therefore hired a person named "Stubby" Collins, of some repute as a slugger, to take the first opportunity "to do him up. " The collision occurred in the old Delavan House, a hotel where the members of the Assembly used to congregate in the eve- 62 THEODORE ROOSEVELT ning. As Roosevelt was leaving, he passed the door lead- ing to the buffet. A noisy crowd came out. "Stubby," who was one of their number ran into him and then struck at him, angrily demanding why Roosevelt had run into him. The blow never reached its mark, but it is recorded that "Stubby" was, in a few moments, a fit subject for the anxious care of his friends. Thereafter no one attempted to reform young Roosevelt's conduct by administering to him physical chastisement. One measure which came before the Assembly while he was a member, and when Cleveland was Governor, gave him an opportunity to display the kind of moral courage of which I spoke in the introductory chapter. A bill was passed reducing the fare on the elevated roads in New York City from ten cents to five cents. The bill was immensely popular. The corporation running the elevated railway was deservedly unpopular. Roosevelt had voted for the bill. Cleveland vetoed the measure on the ground of its unconstitutionality, because it violated the implied contract on the strength of which the stock- holders had subscribed their money to build the roads. Everyone expected that Roosevelt would lead the fight to pass the bill over the Governor's veto. Instead of doing this, he voted to sustain the Governor, and frankly apolo- gized for his previous vote in favor of the measure. "I have to say with shame that when I voted for this bill I did not act as I think I ought to have acted on the floor of this House. For the only time, I did at that time vote contrary to what I think to be honestly right. I have to confess that I weakly yielded, partly to a vindictive feeling toward the infernal thieves who have those rail- roads in charge and partly to the popular voice in New York. For the managers of the elevated railroads I have THE FIRST PLUNGE INTO POLITICS 63 as little feeling as any man here, and if it were possible I should be willing to pass a bill of attainder against Gould and all of his associates. I realize that they have done the most incalculable harm in this community, with their hired stock-jobbing newspaper, with their corruption of the judiciary, and with their corruption of this House. It is not a question of doing right to them, for they are merely common thieves. As to the resolution" — a peti- tion handed in by the directors of the company — "signed by Gould and his son, I would pay more attention to a petition signed by Barney Aaron, Owney Geoghegan, and Billy McGlory then I would pay to that paper, because I regard these men as part of an infinitely dangerous order — the wealthy criminal class." Many expected that he had written his political death warrant. His action would have had this effect if his whole course at Albany had not shown that he was above the suspicion of being subject directly or indirectly to corpo- rate influences. As it was, whether they agreed with him or not, the courage which it took to make the speech strengthened him, not only with his constituents but with hundreds of others. Then, as now, a representative who wished really to protect the interests of his constituents was on the look- out for snake bills, that is bills which, as originally intro- duced, have a most innocent appearance, but which are amended at the last moment to further some special inter- est willing to take advantage of any means, however low, to promote legislation from which they expect financial benefit. It was in connection with one of these bills that an exciting scene took place in the House, and in which Roosevelt was a center of interest. Roosevelt and Mike Costello used to spend a good deal of time examining the 64 THEODORE ROOSEVELT different bills introduced. One bill puzzled them. It proposed a constitutional amendment, harmless enough in character. The puzzling thing about it was not the bill, but the author, a saloon-keeper. Why should that par- ticular saloon-keeper take an interest in an amendment to the constitution? He belonged distinctly to that class of representatives who could refer to constitutional amend- ments as "local legislation," though history does not tell us if he was the same man who indignantly replied to Roose- velt's objection that his pet bill was unconstitutional — "What is the constitution between friends?" The bill was introduced and passed the House. It then went over to the Senate, where, just before its final passage, it was amended, by the simple process of striking out everything except the enacting clause, and by in- serting an entirely new bill to remit the unpaid taxes due by the elevated roads of New York City. By mere chance, Mike Costello heard the amendment read in the Senate. The bill had to be returned to the House for concurrence in the amendment. Those in charge of the measure waited until both Roosevelt and Costello were away, and then started to rush the bill through. Costello, in an anteroom, heard what was going on, rushed in and at once started a filibuster, at the same time send- ing for his young associate. Roosevelt thus described the scene that followed : "The speaker pro tern, called him to order. Mike con- tinued to speak and protest; the speaker hammered him down; Mike continued his protests; the sergeant-at-arms was sent to arrest and remove him; and then I bounced in, and continued the protest, and refused to sit down or be silent. Amid wild confusion the amendment was de- clared adopted, and the bill was ordered engrossed and THE FIRST PLUNGE INTO POLITICS 65 sent to the Governor. But we had carried our point. The next morning the whole press rang with what had happen- ed; every detail of the bill, and every detail of the way it had been slipped through the Legislature, were made public. All the slow and cautious men in the House, who had been afraid of taking sides, now came forward in sup- port of us. Another debate was held on the proposal to rescind the vote; the city authorities waked up to pro- test; the Governor refused to sign the bill. Two or three years later, after much litigation, the taxes were paid; in the newspapers it was stated that the amount was over $1,500,000. It was Mike Costello, to whom primarily was due the fact that this sum was saved the public, and that the forces of corruption received a stinging rebuff. He did not expect recognition or reward for his services; and he got none. The public, if it knew of what he had done, promptly forgot it. The machine did not forget it, and turned him down at the next election.' ' Throughout his course in the Legislature his primary interest was in reform as then understood; that is, in improving the methods of appointment to executive office, in defeating corrupt legislation and in antagonizing low political methods, as well as in improving, in details, the machinery of government. The larger questions of social and industrial justice and the need for a fundamental change in the citizen's individualistic outlook on life- questions which were to absorb so large a part of his energy during his career as President and afterwards, were not really considered by him, though he did have one useful experience in connection with an attempt to improve tenement-house conditions, an experience which made a lasting impression on him, and to which we will have occasion to refer later. 66 THEODORE ROOSEVELT It was natural that in the campaign for the Republi- can nomination, in the spring of 1884, he should be found with those in favor of the nomination of Senator George F. Edmunds, of Vermont. Edmunds was a man whose whole course in the Senate had justly won for him the admiration of men whose political interests and ideals were those of the young assemblyman. Together with a group of men from New York, Roosevelt went to the con- vention in the interests of the Vermont Senator. His position among his fellow-delegates from the state is evidenced by the fact that he was made their represen- tative on the Resolutions, or Platform, Committee. Prac- tically from the opening of the convention, he realized, what some of his older associates did not realize, that the nomination of "the man from Maine," James G. Blaine, was inevitable, not only because he was by far the strong- est candidate with the rank and file of the delegates, but because John A. Logan, himself a candidate, would prob- ably allow his strength to go to the "plumed knight,'' as Col. Robert G. Ingersoll called Blaine in his nomination speech. His belief in the ultimate result, however, did not interfere with his working hard to effect a combination with the forces of President Arthur to prevent Blaine's nomination. Blaine, however, was the real choice of the majority of the party. He was selected on the fourth ballot by a vote of 541 out of a total of 813. To Roosevelt, as to thousands of other Republicans, the nomination of Blaine presented a serious question. At the time, while Blaine was decidedly popular with those who had come in contact with his magnetic person- ality, his nomination was generally regarded as the triumph of policies to which the reform element of the party were generally opposed. Roosevelt had voted THE FIRST PLUNGE INTO POLITICS 67 against the resolution introduced prior to the balloting which bound the delegates to support the nominee of the convention. Thousands of Republicans on the nomina- tion of Mr. Cleveland decided to desert the Republican party and vote for the man whose course as Governor of New York had shown him a friend of Civil Service Reform, and a strong opponent of corruption in politics. Roose- velt remained Republican. He supported Blaine. Look- ing back now at this distance of time, it is not difficult to perceive that his decision was right. Not that those who at that period deserted the Republican party were neces- sarily wrong. Parties are but instruments through which men work to obtain ends. It was true of Roosevelt as it was probably not true of the majority of those who deserted the Republican party in the fall of 1884, that for him a greater opportunity for effective good lay within the Republican party than without it. Had he made the mistake of becoming what was known in the political parlance of the day as a "mugwump," his opportunity for the kind of service which he was capable of rendering would have been narrowed. CHAPTER V i The Elkhorn Ranch IN September, 1883, Roosevelt went to what was then the Territory of Dakota and bought a ranch known as the "Chimney Butte," on the Little Mis- souri. In June of the following year he purchased the Elkhorn Ranch lower down the river. Thereafter, and until his acceptance of the appointment as Civil Service Commissioner in 1889, he was engaged actively in the business of a rancher. Though he still spent the greater part of each winter in New York, he lived during the major portion of these years at one or other of his ranches. "It was still the Wild West in those days,' ' he tells us, "the Far West, the West of Owen Wister's stories and Frederic Remington's drawings, the West of the Indian and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cow-puncher. That land of the West has gone now, 'gone, gone with lost Atlantis,' gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories. It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman. It was a land of scattered ranches, of herds of long-horned cattle, and of reckless riders who unmoved looked in the eyes of life or of death." His determination not to seek re-election to the As- sembly in the fall of 1884, and to take up seriously the business of a ranchman on the Western plains was prob- ably due to a combination of causes. As we have seen, the nomination of Blaine, while it did not drive him out of the Republican party, as it did many of his associates, (68) THE ELKHORN RANCH 69 nevertheless left him out of sympathy with the then dominant elements of the party in national affairs. Again while he had intensely enjoyed his life at Albany and the game of politics, politics were not his only interest. He was always ambitious to become distinguished as a writer, and ranch life, while rough, with periods of arduous phys- ical work, nevertheless left for a man of his temperament much leisure for writing. There were also intimate personal reasons. On Feb- ruary 14, 1884, he lost both his wife and his mother, his wife dying two days after the birth of a daughter. This double loss severed the ties which would otherwise probably have prevented his taking up the life of a ranchman. His mind naturally sought relief in solitude rather than in the contests and excitements of politics at Albany. Besides these immediate and perhaps deter- mining causes, he loved the Western life. "I do not believe," he says, "there was any life more attractive to a vigorous young fellow than life on a cattle ranch in those days. It was a fine, healthy life too; it taught a man self-reliance, hardihood and the value of instant decision — in short, the virtues that ought to come from life in the open country. I enjoyed the life to the full." The rugged experiences of the outlying places of the world appealed to him. To borrow from Kipling, he heard the "Red Gods" calling, and looked beyond the skyline where the strange roads go down. At first the Chimney Butte ranch house was a one- room log structure with a dirt roof, a corral for the horses nearby, and a chicken-house jabbed against the rear of the ranch house. Later he brought out to the Elkhorn Ranch his old friends from Maine, Sewall and Dow. They 70 THEODORE ROOSEVELT were mighty with the axe and built for him a long low ranch house of hewn logs, with bed-rooms, and a sitting- room with a big fireplace. Here it was that he gathered about him the books he loved, Van Dyke's " Still Hunter/ ' Dodge's "Plains of the Great West," Caton's "Deer and Antelope of America" and Coues' "Birds of the North- west." "As for Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper, Lowell and the other standbys," he writes, "I suppose no man, either East or West, would willingly be long without them." For lighter reading he had "dreamy Ik Marvel, Burroughs' breezy pages, and the quaint, pathetic character sketches of the Southern writers, Cable, Craddock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris and sweet Sherwood Bonner." He prob- ably had Poe's tales and poems, for when he was in the Bad Lands he felt " as if they somehow looked just exactly as Poe's tales and poems sound.' ' He wrote books as well as read them — books on history, politics, and phases of his Western life. His "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman" appeared in 1886, and his "Life of Thomas Hart Benton " in 1887. The " Life of Gouverneur Morris," "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," and "Es- says in Practical Politics," which had first appeared as magazine articles, were published in 1888. It was here he received the inspiration for his four-volume work, "The Winning of the West," for his own experiences were attended with pioneer perils which put him in keenest sympathy with the experiences of Lewis and Clark less than a century before. He often expressed his regard for honest, courageous manhood, whether he found it in a cowpuncher, an Indian, or even in one of those Western desperadoes popularly known as a "bad man," if he betrayed generous impulses and was willing to improve and live squarely. In "The Strenuous Life" he wrote: THE ELKHORN RANCH 71 "Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln, and bore the sword in the army of Grant !' ' There was work on the ranch in plenty, and hard work, too, often full of danger, and sometimes privation. He knew what it was to ride under the scorching midsummer sun or in the freezing cold of the late fall round-up. He knew the biting wind of the winter blizzard, the monotony of guarding hour after hour the trail cattle or the beef herds at the slowest of walks, and the "minutes or hours teeming with excitement" when the herd stampeded, or when they had to be guided across ice-filled rivers or rivers full of dangerous quicksands. He had several experiences trying to ride bucking bronchos. One threw him off on a rock during a round-up and broke his arm, and another horse, known as "the Devil," fell backwards upon him and split the point of his shoulder. On both occasions there was nothing to do but remount and go on with the work of rounding up, for often the nearest doctor was more than one hundred miles away. He tells us that he never became a good rider accord- ing to Western standards. Yet he was, and remained all his life, according to Eastern standards, an excellent horseman. Though he could handle a rope, he could not always handle it with dexterity. Once he and George Meyer, who long afterwards, like many of his companions in those days, was a delegate to the First Progressive National Convention, were trying to get some cattle across a river. Two of the calves refused to budge. Meyer's calf was small, and he could carry it in his arms while he rode his horse, but Roosevelt's calf was too big for this process. 72 THEODORE ROOSEVELT So Roosevelt roped it, and attempted to pull it along. Owing to some lack of dexterity with the rope, the calf, bouncing and bleating, swung around the rear of the horse, bringing the rope under his tail. There was a bank four feet high on either side of the river. The horse bolted and went over the bank and into the water with a splash. The calf followed, described a parabola in the air, and landed "plunk" beside the horse. The calf could not buck in the stream, so across, horse, rider and calf went, the calf "making a wake like Pharaoh's army at the Red Sea." There were spring and early summer round-ups to brand the calves, and fall round-ups to collect the cattle for the winter. They were attended by all the cowboys for miles around, and there was lots of hard, exciting work and plenty of fun. He has left us a description of one of those comparatively rare occasions when the cattle stampeded : "One night there was a heavy storm, and all of us who were at the wagons were obliged to turn out hastily to help the night herders. After a while there was a terrific peal of thunder, the lightning struck right by the herd, and away all the beasts went, heads and horns and tails in the air. For a minute or two I could make out nothing except the dark forms of the beasts running on every side of me, and I should have been very sorry if my horse had stumbled, for those behind would have trodden me down. Then the herd split, part going to one side, while the other part seemingly kept straight ahead, and I galloped as hard as ever beside them. I was trying to reach the point — the leading animals — in order to turn them, when suddenly there was a tremendous splashing in front. I could dimly make out that the cattle immediately ahead and to one side of me were disappearing, and the next moment the THE ELKHORN RANCH 73 horse and I went off a cut bank into the Little Missouri. I bent away back in the saddle, and though the horse almost went down he just recovered himself, and, plunging and struggling through water and quicksand, we made the other side. Here I discovered that there was another cowboy with the same part of the herd that I was with; but almost immediately we separated. I galloped hard through a bottom covered with big cottonwood trees, and stopped the part of the herd that I was with, but very soon they broke on me again, and repeated this twice. Finally toward morning the few I had left came to a halt. "It had been raining hard for some time. I got off my horse and leaned against a tree, but before long the infernal cattle started on again, and I had to ride after them. Dawn came soon after this, and I was able to make out where I was and head the cattle back, collecting other little bunches as I went. After a while I came on a cow- boy on foot carrying his saddle on his head. He was my companion of the previous night. His horse had gone full speed into a tree and killed itself, the man, however, not being hurt. I could not help him, as I had all I could do to handle the cattle. When I got them to the wagon, most of the other men had already come in and the riders were just starting on the long circle. One of the men changed my horse for me while I ate a hasty breakfast, and then we were off for the day's work. "As only about half of the night herd had been brought back, the circle riding was particularly heavy, and it was ten hours before we were back at the wagon. We then changed horses again and worked the whole herd until after sunset, finishing just as it grew too dark to do any- thing more. By this time I had been nearly forty hours in the saddle, changing horses five times, and my clothes had 74 THEODORE ROOSEVELT thoroughly dried on me, and I fell asleep as soon as I touched the bedding. Fortunately some men who had gotten in late in the morning had had their sleep during the daytime, so that the rest of us escaped night guard and were not called until four next morning. Nobody ever gets enough sleep on a round-up.' ' At first he had to overcome not only the prejudice against all tenderfeet but the special prejudice which was attached to him on account of his eye-glasses. The cowboys called him "Four Eyes." He said it always took him at least twenty -four hours in a new place to live down this prejudice. Speaking of meeting a strange set of men at a round-up, he adds, "By this time I would have been accepted as one of the outfit, and all strange- ness would have passed off, the attitude of my fellow cow- punchers being one of friendly forgiveness, even towards my spectacles." Once a rowdy in a tavern where Roosevelt was to stay all night noticed this queer tenderfoot and, desiring to have some real fun yelled, "Look what's drifted in! Step up, boys, and take a look at Four Eyes!" The wearer of the offending glasses paying no atten- tion, the loafer, emboldened, pointed a pair of cocked pis- tols at him and informed the crowd that " Mr. Four-Eyes' ' would treat everyone to a drink. Roosevelt started to- wards the bar as if to comply, but, catching the bad man off his guard, landed a few blows under the man's chin and elsewhere. As he went over backwards his pistols went off, making holes in the ceiling, and he struck his head with such force against the edge of the bar that he failed to come to until some time after he had been car- ried out to a neighboring shed and Roosevelt had gone to bed. When he did come to, not liking to face the jeers of THE ELKHORN RANCH 75 the bystanders after such a beating, he drifted down to the station and disappeared from the place on the first passing freight train. "Mr. Four-Eyes" had proved to be the liveliest tenderfoot that that bad man had ever met. The story of another personal encounter of quite a different kind with a certain Frenchman of rank, known as the Marquis de Mores, is told by the late Jacob Riis. This marquis was one of the first settlers thereabout. He built Medora, the county seat, and named it for his wife. He was determined to rule in the region, and he had tried to do this by intimidating all comers. "Whether it was over a cattle matter," says Riis, or "some other local con- cern that his misunderstanding with the Marquis de Mores arose, of which there have been so many versions, I have forgotten. It does not matter. In the nature of things it had to come sooner or later, on one pretext or another. The two were neighbors, their ranches being some ten or fifteen miles apart. The marquis was a gallant but exag- gerated Frenchman, with odd feudal notions still clinging in his brain. He took it into his head to be offended by something Roosevelt was reported to have said, before he had met him, and wrote him a curt note telling him what he had heard, and that 'there was a way for gentlemen to settle their differences,' to which he invited Roosevelt's attention. Mr. Roosevelt promptly replied that he had heard a lie; that he, the marquis, had no business to be- lieve it true upon such evidence, and that he would follow his note in person within the hour. He despatched the letter to Medora, where the marquis was, by one of his men, and, true to his word, started himself immediately after. Before he came in sight of the little 'cow town' he was met by a courier traveling in haste from the mar- quis with a gentleman's apology and a cordial invitation 76 THEODORE ROOSEVELT to dine with hiin in town. And that was all there was of the sensational 'duel' with the French nobleman." Besides his experiences with cowboys and with a French gentleman of rank, there were experiences with Indians, though at the time Roosevelt lived on the Little Missouri, the Indians gave comparatively little trouble. Occasionally, however, parties of savage young bucks would treat lonely settlers badly, sometimes murdering them. These bands were usually composed of young fellows burning to distinguish themselves. He thus tells of what he calls a "trifling encounter with such a band:' ' "I was making my way along the edge of the bad lands, northward from my lower ranch, and was just crossing a plateau when five Indians rode up over the further rim. The instant they saw me they whipped out their guns and raced full speed at me, yelling and flogging their horses. I was on a favorite horse, Manitou, who was a wise old fellow, with nerves not to be shaken by anything. I at once leaped off him and stood with my rifle ready. " It was possible that the Indians were merely making a bluff and intended no mischief. But I did not like their actions, and I thought it likely if I allowed them to get hold of me they would at least take my horse and rifle, and possibly kill me. So I waited until they were a hundred yards off and then drew a bead on the first. Indians — and for the matter of that, white men — do not like to ride in on a man who is cool and means shooting, and in a twinkling every man was lying over the side of his horse, and all five had turned and were galloping backwards, having altered their course as quickly as so many teal ducks. "After this one of them made the peace sign, with his blanket first, and then, as he rode toward me, with his open hand. I halted him at a fair distance and asked him C TO p THE ELKHORN RANCH 77 what he wanted. He exclaimed, 'How? Me good Injun, me good Injun,' and tried to show rne the dirty piece of paper on which his agency pass was written. I told him with sincerity that I was glad that he was a good Indian, but that he must not come any closer. He then asked for sugar and tobacco. I told him I had none. Another Indian began slowly drifting toward me in spite of my calling out to keep back, so I once more aimed w T ith my rifle, whereupon both Indians slipped to the other side of their horses and galloped off, with oaths that did credit to at least one side of their acquaintance with English. I now mounted and pushed over the plateau on to the open prairie. In those days an Indian, although not as good a shot as a white man, was infinitely better at crawl- ing under and taking advantage of cover; and the worst thing a white man could do was to get into cover, whereas out in the open if he kept his head he had a good chance of standing off even half a dozen assailants. The Indians accompanied me for a couple of miles. Then I reached the open prairie, and resumed my northward ride, not being further molested.' ' Roosevelt owed much to his Western experience. His terms in the New York Legislature had brought him into intimate contact with political conditions in the East. His ranch life brought him into equally intimate contact with totally different conditions. Each condition was in its way typical of varied phases of our national life. There- after he knew the men of the "new' ' country, though that "new" country might be hundreds of miles further south- west or northeast than the Little Missouri. Just as many of the politicians in his Assembly district and in the New York Legislature became his life-long friends, so most of those who came into contact with him 78 THEODORE ROOSEVELT on the cattle ranch or in his various hunting trips ever afterwards respected and trusted him. As for politics I do not think that any of them ever had any politics, after he became a national political figure, They would have voted for him on any ticket, and that without reading the platform. Many years afterwards four of these men, the four with whom he had played old sledge and chased a bobcat the first night he spent at Chimney Butte, in Sep- tember, 1883, and who had been his closest associates, J. A. Ferris, S. N. Ferris, W. J. Merrifield and G. W. Meyer, came to the First National Progressive Convention as delegates. He had his picture taken with all four, and five more pleased men never stood before a camera. As we read his own account of the different characters he met, our first impression is that they must have been an extraordinarily fine lot. Undoubtedly some of them, men like Seth Bullock, for instance, justify his assertion that Owen Wister's "Virginian" is not exaggerated. But with most of them we soon perceive that our impression is due largely to the fact that he liked them and saw the best in them. They were just ordinary men, put into con- ditions with which the average liver in towns or on farms does not come in contact. Roosevelt got the best out of them because he gave them his best, He was not there to play at ranching, and to do a little hunting; but to do a man's part with men, in a world of men. It caught and held their imagination that this man, who could write books, who had wealth, education, and position in the great world of the East, was a good fellow and their friend. Is it any wonder that when the opportunity came, he could raise a regiment of Rough Riders? Is it any wonder that when he became President the chief event in the life of a far Western friend was to go to Washington and see the THE ELKHORN RANCH 79 President, or that, in trouble, often serious and sometimes deserved, they turned to him with the confidence of children? "Dear Colonel: I write you because I am in trouble." . . . His heart would sink, for he knew that the trouble of a cow-puncher friend would not infrequently be serious. Sometimes, however, his sense of humor over- came his sense of regret that the trouble was too well deserved to make it proper for him to interfere. One cor- respondent, to whom he gave the fictitious name of Gritto, wrote, "Dear Colonel: I write you because I am in trouble. I have shot a lady in the eye. But, Colonel, I was not shooting at the lady. I was shooting at my wife.' ' One Major Llewellyn, who was Federal District Attor- ney under him in New Mexico, often wrote him letters filled with bits of interesting gossip about the comrades. One ran in part as follows : "Since I last wrote you Comrade Ritchie has killed a man in Colorado. I understand that the comrade was playing a poker game, and the man sat into the game and used such language that Comrade Ritchie had to shoot. Comrade Webb has killed two men in Beaver, Arizona. Comrade Webb is in the Forest Service, and the killing was in the line of professional duty. I was out at the pen- itentiary the other day and saw Comrade Gritto, who, you may remember, was put there for shooting his sister- in-law (this was the first information the Colonel received as to the identity of the lady who was shot in the eye). Since he was in there, Comrade Boyne has run off to old Mexico with his (Gritto's) wife, and the people of Grant County think he ought to be let out." In commenting on this letter, Roosevelt calls attention to the fact that the sporting instinct of the inhabitants of 80 THEODORE ROOSEVELT Grant County had been aroused. They felt that as Com- rade Boyne had had a fair start, the other comrade should be let out — to see what would happen. These unfortunate ones, however, were the exceptions. Most of his friends of ranch days have changed with the country, and are now to be found as solid and substantial citizens, living in orderly communities where there are schools and paved streets and trolley-cars and other ad- juncts of a settled civilization. Occasionally he went on long hunting trips to the Rocky Mountains, usually with his foreman, Merrifield,or later with Tazewell Woody, John Willis or John Goff . In his "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman," he gives us the fol- lowing brief account of a bear hunt with Merrifield : "We could follow the tracks by the slight scrapes of the claws on the bark, or by bent and broken twigs; and we advanced with noiseless caution, slowly climbing over dead trunks and upturned stumps, and not letting a branch rustle or catch our clothes. When in the middle of the thicket we crossed what was almost a breastwork of fallen logs, and Merrifield, who was leading, paused by the upright stem of a large pine. "And there, not ten steps off, was the great bear, slowly rising from his bed among the young spruces. He had heard us, but apparently hardly knew where or what we were, for he reared up on his haunches sidewise to us. Then he saw us, and dropped down again on all fours, the shaggy hair on his neck and shoulders seeming to bristle as he turned to us. As he sank down on his forefeet I raised the rifle. His head was bent slightly down, and when I saw the top of his white head fairly between the small, glittering, evil eyes, I pulled the trigger. Half rising up, the huge beast fell over on the side in the death- THE ELKHORN RANCH 81 throes, the ball having gone into his brain, striking as fairly between the eyes as if the distance had been meas- ured by a carpenter's rule. The whole thing was over in twenty seconds from the time I sighted the game.' ' He describes another hunt, in Idaho, where he was less fortunate, and had a narrow escape from taking the bear's place as victim. This account also shows his vivid style of writing. After relating how he found the grizzly, he continues: "I held true, aiming behind the shoulder, and my bul- let shattered the point or lower end of his heart, taking out a big nick. Instantly the great bear turned with a hoarse 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 till 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 moment was almost upon me. I fired for his forehead, but my bul- let went low, 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 blow at me. "The rush of the 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 him- self and made two or three jumps onward, while I hur- riedly jammed a couple of cartridges into the magazine, my rifle holding but four, all of which I had fired. Then he tried to pull up; but as he did so, his muscles seemed 82 THEODORE ROOSEVELT to give way, his head dropped, and he rolled over and over like a shot rabbit. Each of my first two bullets had in- flicted a mortal wound." Roosevelt the hunter was also Roosevelt the lover of nature, and it was his hunting experiences that enabled him to give some of his most beautiful descriptions of nature. Take, for instance, this description of the Bad Lands, which not only shows his skill in word painting, but his love for nature as she exhibits herself in the great bare places of the world: "The tracks led into one of the wildest and most deso- late parts of the Bad Lands. It was now the heat of the day, the brazen sun shining out of a cloudless sky, and not the least breeze stirring. At the bottom of the valley, in the deep, narrow bed of the winding watercourse, lay a few tepid little pools almost dried up. Thick groves of stunted cedars stood here and there in the glen-like pockets of the high buttes, the peaks and sides of which were bare, and only their lower, terrace-like ledges thinly clad with coarse, withered grass and sprawling sage-brush; the parched hillsides were riven by deep, twisted gorges, with brushwood on the bottoms; and the cliffs of coarse clay were cleft and seamed by sheer-sided, canon-like gullies. "In the narrow ravines, closed in by barren, sun-baked walls, the hot air stood still and sultry; the only living things were the rattlesnakes, and of these I have never elsewhere seen so many. Some basked in the sun, stretched out at their ugly length of mottled brown and yellow. Others lay half under stones or twisted in the roots of the sage-brush, and looked straight at me with that strange, sullen, evil gaze, never shifting or moving, that is the property only of serpents — and certain men — while one or two coiled and rattled menacingly as I stepped near.' ' THE ELKHORN RANCH 83 But the lover of nature was also lover of the chase for the joy of it. " No one,' ' he writes, " but he who has partaken thereof can understand the keen delight of hunting in lonely lands. For him it is the joy of the horse well ridden and the rifle well held; for him the long days of toil and hardship reso- lutely endured, and crowned at the end with triumph. In after years there shall come forever to his mind the memory of endless prairies shimmering in the bright sun ; of vast snow-clad wastes lying desolate under gray skies ; of the melancholy marshes; of the rush of mighty rivers; of the breath of the evergreen forest in summer; of the crooning of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds of winter; of cataracts roaring between hoary mountain masses; of all the innumerable sights and sounds of the wilderness; of its immensity and misery; and of the silences that brood in its still depths." CHAPTER VI Roosevelt and the Civil Service WHILE Roosevelt was more than half immersed in his ranch life and in his book writing, he still found time for political activity. In 1886 he received the Republican nomination for Mayor of New York City. The contest, for several reasons, was hope- less from the start. Cleveland was at that time in the middle of his first presidential term and his personal popularity, of course, contributed to the strength of his party throughout the country. New York was naturally a Democratic city, and the Tammany braves were strong and well organized. And lastly, Henry George, the father of the single tax movement, whose writings had brought him into considerable prominence, was the nominee of an independent third party which recruited its strength largely from the Republican ranks. In the face of these difficulties, Roosevelt accepted the nomination and made a spirited campaign. Abram S. Hewitt, the Democratic nominee, won an easy victory, receiving ninety thousand votes, while George received sixty-eight thousand and Roosevelt sixty thousand. After the election of Harrison in 1888, Roosevelt hoped to be made Assistant Secretary of State. He was politically ambitious and was at that time particularly interested in our foreign relations. But Blaine, the Sec- retary of State, did not fancy such an appointment, and Roosevelt consequently failed to secure it; instead, Presi- dent Harrison offered him an appointment as one of the (84) THE CIVIL SERVICE 85 three Commissioners of the United States Civil Service. Many of his friends were rather surprised when he accepted, because it was generally supposed that the Civil Service Commission was a political graveyard. The work done by the Commission offered little opportu- nity for winning political advancement, because it lacked spectacular possibilities and because an honest enforcement of the law necessarily involved conflicts with the powers upon whom preferment almost necessarily depended. Roosevelt, however, accepted the appointment and at once threw himself with ardor into the work of the Commission. As a member of the New York Legislature he had, in 1883, drafted a Civil Service bill in New York. This bill and the act of Congress creating a real federal merit system were approved by Governor Cleveland and by President Arthur respectively, at about the same time. Ever since the beginning of his public career Roosevelt has been a staunch supporter of civil service reform. The evils of the spoils system were not then so obvious to the average citizen as they are now. Beginning with the administration of President Jackson it had been the uni- versal practice when an administration of one party was succeeded by another to make a clean sweep of all offices within the appointive power of the President. When Cleveland and Hendricks were elected in 1884, Hen- dricks rejoiced his followers by the statement that "he wished to take the boys in out of the cold to warm their toes." Their toes had been cold for twenty-four years and they were, of course, more than eager to get close to the fire. Hendricks* wish was gratified. During Cleveland's first administration, for instance, all of the railway mail service employees who were Republicans were turned out and Democrats were put in their places. The natural 86 THEODORE ROOSEVELT result of this action was an utter demoralization of the railway mail service. Four years later the Republicans came back into power and promptly reversed the process by sweeping out the Democrats. Fortunately, the pro- visions of the Civil Service law were made applicable to the railway mail service before this last process had been completed; but the party in power took advantage of the short time at their disposal to get rid of as many of their political enemies as possible. This system of removal and appointment had no relation whatever to the efficiency of the government employees nor to the good of the service, and certainly justified Roosevelt's statement that the spoils system "has been for seventy years the most po- tent of all forces tending to bring about the degradation of our politics." His fellow Commissioners were Charles Lyman of Connecticut and Hugh S. Thompson, ex-Governor of South Carolina. Thompson was later succeeded by George D. Johnston of Louisiana, who was in turn suc- ceeded by John R. Proctor of Kentucky. During the six years of Roosevelt's service, the Commission pursued its course with a single-minded devotion to the public welfare. In 1889 only a fraction of the government em- ployees fell within the scope of the Civil Service act; this fraction formed what was known as the classified service. It was the constant aim of the Commission to extend the classified service as rapidly as possible, and in addition, of course, to see that the law was administered thoroughly and fairly. The system of competitive examinations which was then comparatively new was not in Roosevelt's opinion perfect, but it was better than any other system which had yet been devised and the results obtained from its use were almost uniformly excellent. THE CIVIL SERVICE 87 In enforcing the Civil Service law the Commissioners adhered to three principles: publicity, absolute political impartiality, and continual investigation by the Com- mission. Under the preceding Commission there had been an honest attempt to enforce the law but its unpop- ularity with members of Congress had led the president of the Commission to avoid publicity as much as possible. He felt that to advertise its work was simply to invite unjust criticism, and so he and his associates performed their labors as inconspicuously as they could. Under the regime of the new Commissioners this was entirely reversed. Their theory was that since the Civil Service Act was a source of great good to the country, to advertise it was to insure its popularity. They accordingly took every occasion not only to advertise the holding of exam- inations but to publish the names of successful candidates and to invite an inspection of the records of their office by anyone who had a proper motive for inspecting them. Under the Civil Service law each state was permitted a certain quota of appointees in the classified service. During the first six years of the operation of the act all of the Southern states had continually been far behind in their quotas, due apparently to the prevalent idea that in making appointments the old system of political influence must still be the controlling one. In the summer of 1890, Congress passed an act which created six hundred new clerkships at Washington. The Commission imme- diately seized upon this opportunity to push the cause of civil service in the South. They advertised the coming examinations extensively in the Southern papers and took pains to point out that the appointees would be selected from those who passed the highest examinations and that no candidate need fear adverse political influence. Roose- 88 THEODORE ROOSEVELT velt called a meeting of the Southern Congressmen and of reporters from the Southern newspapers in his office and impressed upon them the fact that the examinations and recommendations for appointment would be con- ducted without any regard whatever for the political affiliations of those who came forward to be examined. The result was encouraging. Southern aspirants for clerk- ships plucked up heart and took the examinations in very considerable numbers, with the result that nearly three hundred of the six hundred clerks were appointed from the South. Most of these three hundred were, of course, Democrats, and the fact that they were appointed under a Republican administration went far to upset the popular Southern prejudice against the Civil Service Commission. If the law were to be properly enforced, it was of course necessary for the Commissioners to keep a constant watch upon the governmental offices which fell within the classified service. A large part of their work, there- fore, consisted in making investigations, either personally or by agent, which resulted more than once in recommen- dations for the removal of government appointees who had abused the opportunities of their positions. Roosevelt himself preferred personal investigations where possible. He said that he could get more information by a few minutes' talk with the clerk who had charge of the business under discussion than by a fortnight's formal corre- spondence with the head of the department. One of these investigations led to an incident which was the source of considerable comment at the time. Serious frauds had been practiced at the postoffice in Milwaukee, especially in the appointment of clerks with- out reference to the merit system. Roosevelt investi- gated the matter and soon found that the blame largely THE CIVIL SERVICE 89 centered upon a member of the local civil service board in Milwaukee, named Shidy, who had had access to the papers of the Commission. Roosevelt therefore inter- viewed Shidy personally and soon convinced himself that he had gone to the right man to get the information he needed. Shidy refused to talk unless he was promised immunity and the retention of his place in the postoffice. The Commissioner decided that it was important to get the man's testimony and accordingly gave him the required assurance. Shidy then told his story, which resulted in the dismissal of the Milwaukee postmaster. Shortly thereafter Shidy was himself dismissed. Roosevelt, in order to fulfil his promise, tried hard to have him rein- stated, and, failing in this, procured him a clerkship in the census office which did not fall within the classi- fied service. One of the Washington newspapers learned how Shidy had been taken care of and published a series of sensational charges against the Commission alleging, among other things, that Roosevelt himself was one of the worst of spoilsmen. The Commissioner's answer to this was to demand an immediate investigation, in the course of which he frankly told the whole story. As a result of this investigation the congressional committee fully supported him and in their findings endorsed the action he had taken. Most of the examinations held under the Civil Service act were, of course, written. Separate examinations were held then as now for different positions. For letter car- riers, for instance, one test was in reading addresses, and in this test they were marked partly for speed and partly for accuracy in their reading. Candidates for govern- ment inspectorships, on the other hand, were subjected to examinations bearing directly upon the work which they 90 THEODORE ROOSEVELT would be called upon to do. In one examination, for example, they were presented with this problem: "Some person will be pointed out to you for description; notice him carefully and then write as brief a telegram as pos- sible to the United States Marshal at Baltimore notifying him that this man will arrive on a designated train and that a warrant is out for his arrest on the charge of embezzling postal funds." Roosevelt suggested that customs inspectors on the Texas border should pass a practical examination in horsemanship and in the han- dling of a revolver, but the suggestion was not adopted at the time. It is interesting to find that, a good many years later, applicants for this position were required to produce special vouchers of their proficiency in the branches whose importance Roosevelt had thus emphasized. His attitude on the subject of promotion was a shock to many of his friends among the civil service reformers. During his service on the Commission there was no occa- sion for making his position in this matter public, because the Commission had no control over appointments or removals. But when he became one of the Police Commis- sioners of the City of New York, the question became a vital one for him. He said himself that in his position in the matter he split from the bulk of his "professional civil service reform friends." "The reason," he says, "for a written competitive entrance examination is that it is impossible for the head of the office, or the candidate's prospective immediate superior himself, to know the aver- age candidate or to test his ability. But when once in office, the best way to test any man's ability is by long experience in seeing him actually at work. His promotion should depend upon the judgment formed of him by THE CIVIL SERVICE 91 his superiors." He felt that the matter of civil service reform was purely practical. He advocated competitive examinations because he believed that they advanced the interests of the public service, but he had no particular interest in competitive examinations for their own sake, and did not feel that any moral principle was irrevocably associated with them. He could think of no better system for selecting non-political subordinates, and, therefore, he went with the civil service reformers in advocating a method of initial selection by examination; but when it came to promotion, experience had shown him that exam- inations were of little use and he therefore did not hesitate to abandon them. The Civil Service Commissioners under Harrison and Cleveland did not get very much assistance from the White House. Both of these Presidents were in favor of the system, but they hesitated in extending it because to do so necessarily involved conflict with their party leaders. But in the House and Senate there were several ardent champions of the cause of civil service reform. During Roosevelt's term of office there were many lively tilts in Congress with respect to the operation of the Civil Service act and the very existence of the Commis- sion was more than once threatened. The favorite method adopted by the opponents of the system was to attempt to cut off the annual appropriation for the work of the Commission. On one occasion they failed to cut the appropriation entirely but succeeded in considerably reducing the amount needed for the expense of conducting the examinations. Roosevelt's answer to this was characteristic. He found out which Congress- men had refused to vote the necessary money and then sent for the schedule of examinations. He carefully struck 92 THEODORE ROOSEVELT out from the list of districts where examinations would be held the districts which these men represented. Having done this, he called in the newspaper reporters and gave the matter due publicity, explaining just what he had done and why he had done it. There was loud complaint of his action by the offended Congressmen but in the future the Commission got the money that it needed. Senator Gorman of Maryland was, during Cleveland's administration, the leader of the majority party in the Senate. He was a strong opponent of the merit system. One day in a speech in the Senate he attacked the Com- mission and told the pathetic story of a "bright young man in the city of Baltimore" who had taken the exami- nation for the position of letter carrier. The bright young man, according to the Senator, had been asked to tell the most direct route from Baltimore to Japan, together with several other questions equally irrelevant. Roose- velt happened to read the speech as soon as it was pub- lished and immediately wrote the Senator asking him to give the date and place of the examination, and inviting him to inspect all of the Commission's examination papers for letter carriers to see whether he could find the partic- ular questions to which he had alluded in his speech. The Senator was unable to give the particulars and did not accept the invitation to inspect the examination papers. The incident was closed by a characteristic public letter from Roosevelt which ended thus: "High-minded, sensitive Mr. Gorman! Clinging, trustful Mr. Gorman! Nothing could shake his belief in that * bright young man.' Apparently, he did not even try to find out his name — if he had a name; in fact, his name, like everything else about him, remains to this day THE CIVIL SERVICE 93 wrapped in the Stygian mantle of an abysmal mystery, Still less has Mr. Gorman tried to verify the statements made to him. It is enough for him that they were made. No harsh suspicion, no stern demand for evidence or proof, appeals to his artless and unspoiled soul. He believes whatever he is told, even when he has forgotten the name of the teller, or never knew it. It would indeed be difficult to find an instance of a more abiding confidence in human nature — even in anonymous human nature. And this is the end of the tale of Arcadian Mr. Gorman and his elusive friend, the bright young man without a name!" During the sessions of the Fifty-third Congress, Rep- resentative Bynum of Indiana introduced a bill which provided that all the Democrats who had been turned out of the railway mail service by the Republicans more than four years ago should be reinstated. The bill received the solid support of the Democrats and passed the House. In the Senate it was pushed by Senator Vilas of Wiscon- sin and only failed through the vigilance of Senator Lodge, who was a warm friend both of Commissioner Roosevelt and of the merit system. The bill had been referred to the committee of which Vilas was chairman. When he reported it to the Senate he asked for its consideration by unanimous consent and for its passage on the ground that it related to a matter of small importance. When the bill was read the words "classified civil service" caught Senator Lodge's ear and he insisted upon an explanation. On finding out the true subject-matter of the bill Lodge refused to join in the unanimous consent for its consideration, with the result that the pressure of other business prevented it from coming up that session. Had the bill passed it would have formed a very danger- ous precedent. 94 THEODORE ROOSEVELT On another occasion an attempt was made by the enemies of the Commission to hinder its work by reducing the salary of the secretary. Congressman Breckenridge of Kentucky, in the course of the discussion upon the annual appropriation bill, objected, upon a technical par- liamentary ground, to the item which appropriated $2,000 to the secretary of the Commission, and caused the bill to be passed carrying an appropriation for only $1,600 for this particular position. The same parliamentary objection applied equally to the salaries of twenty or thirty other officers, including the President's private secretary and the First Assistant Postmaster General. Their salaries, however, were not touched by the House. When the matter reached the Senate, Senator Lodge and his friends were ready and they made such a determined fight that the salary was put back at $2,000, and the bill eventually became a law in that form. One of Roosevelt's last acts as Civil Service Commis- sioner was to write a letter to Judson Grenell, of Detroit, on April 25, 1895, by which he put an end to an amusing and illuminating controversy between Mr. Grenell and the Commission. It appeared that Grenell, who was a news- paper man, had taken the examination for the position of assistant statistican for the Department of Agriculture. Of the twelve men who took the examination Grenell, with a grade of forty-four, stood eleventh. He objected to the marking of the papers and to the recommendation of the Commissioners, and wrote them, asking for the averages of the other men who had taken the examination, and pointing out what he considered serious defects in the administration of the Civil Service act. To Roosevelt was assigned the duty of answering, and he did so with evident delight. First, he gave his correspondent all the THE CIVIL SERVICE 95 grades, beginning with ninety and ending with forty-two, and carefully pointed out that there was only one man who stood lower than Mr. Grenell in the final rating. He corrected the statement that there was "a rising tide of public opinion against the system of competitive exam- inations" by pointing to the results of recent elections in Chicago and New York State which had endorsed the merit system. He showed that the proficiency of the railway mail service, as measured by the percentage of correct routings, had almost tripled within the past five years and he ended with this statement which was undoubtedly correct: "The past year has witnessed greater progress toward the full accomplishment of the reform idea in national, city and municipal governments, taken as a whole, than in any other year since the original law was passed.' ' Roosevelt served four years under President Harrison and discharged the duties of his office so impartially and with such an entire disregard of political affiliations that he was reappointed by President Cleveland, and served under him until, in 1895, he resigned to become one of the Police Commissioners of the city of New York. During his six years as Commissioner fourteen thousand positions had been added to the classified service, and the total number of offices falling within the scope of the Commissioners' activities had increased from twenty-one thousand to nearly fifty thousand. What was more important, the methods of the Civil Service Commission and the possi- bilities of the classified service had been widely adver- tised and had won popular approval. In a public state- ment made after he had left the Commission, he said: "People sometimes grow a little downhearted about the reform. When they feel in this mood it would be well 96 THEODORE ROOSEVELT for them to reflect on what has actually been gained in the past six years. By the inclusion of the railway mail service, the smaller free delivery offices, the Indian school service, the internal revenue service, and other less im- portant branches, the extent of the public service which is under the protection of the law has been more than doubled, and there are now nearly fifty thousand em- ployees of the Federal government who have been with- drawn from the degrading influences that rule under the spoils system." When, six years later, Roosevelt became President, he still had, in full measure, the interest in the merit system which had been his since he entered politics. In his first message to Congress he urged the extension of the system to the insular possessions, and in his second annual mes- sage urged that it should be extended to the District of Columbia. By executive orders, made at various times during his administration, he was able to accomplish much that Congress had failed to do. For instance, he wished Congress to bring United States consuls within the clas- sified service, and upon their failure to do so, he issued an executive order requiring applications for the position of consul in certain grades to take competitive examinations. Similar orders covered many laborers in government employ. In addition to adding to the classified service the President promulgated other rules which increased the efficiency of the Commission. He forbade employees within the classified service to engage actively in politics and directed that recommendations for promotion must come in every case from a man's superior instead of from his political friends. During his presidency the Civil Service Commission reported that the number of classi- fied positions subject to competitive examinations had THE CIVIL SERVICE 97 nearly doubled, having grown from 110,000 in 1901 to 206,000 in 1908. During his six years on the Civil Service Commission, Roosevelt had abundant practical experience in the oper- ation of the merit system, experience which was to stand him in good stead in later life as Police Commissioner, Governor and President. He always remained a firm friend of civil service reform, but he had, in 1895, begun to see that civil service reform was not enough. He saw the signs of a great national awakening which was to concern itself not simply with political conditions but with social and industrial justice. In this awakening, he himself was destined to take the leading part. CHAPTER VH Police Commissioner THE head of a great police force in a modern city may be perfectly honest, and yet his conception of his full duty may be to do no more than to sit at his desk day after day receiving reports from his subor- dinates. Theodore Roosevelt was not that kind of a police head. He made a great success of his position as president of the Board of Police Commissioners of New York City, because, while he did not neglect his desk, he went out and got at essential facts for himself. He knew his force, not only his captains and lieutenants, but a large number of his sergeants and roundsmen and patrolmen. The re- forms which he instituted and carried out were based not merely on reports but on personal knowledge of conditions. No man knew better than he the value of arousing public attention by striking and vigorous action on the part of an executive. In the two years that he was Police Commis- sioner there were not many days when the pugnacious and forceful head of the police did not furnish the reporters with interesting copy and the city editors with headlines. During the early '90's, political corruption in New York City had reached its high-water mark. Under the dominance of Richard Croker, Tammany Hall owned the city, body and soul. Every official, from the policeman on his beat to the judge on the bench, was compelled not only to contribute to the Tammany war chest, but to discharge his official duties in the manner dictated by Mr. Croker and his lieutenants. The greatest (98) POLICE COMMISSIONER 99 evils were centered in the administration of the police force. Here the possibilities for blackmail were almost unlimited. The proprietors of disorderly houses and those interested in the liquor trade had formed with the police a conspiracy by virtue of which they were permitted to violate the law in return for their political support and for a share in the profits of their unlawful business. While the Democratic party controlled the city of New York, the Republicans usually had a working majority in the state. This fact gave rise to the conditions under which Roosevelt's appointment as Police Commissioner became possible. During the legislative session of 1894, the Republican majority procured the appointment of a committee to investigate political conditions in New York City. Senator Lexow was made the chairman of this committee. Numerous hearings were held, in the course of which there occurred revelations of the most startling nature. From the testimony it appeared that it was the prac- tice to sell appointments to office at fixed figures. For instance, the regular charge for an appointment as patrol- man was $300.00. The subordinates thus appointed re- couped themselves by collecting blackmail from liquor dealers and from the keepers of disorderly houses. The system became so businesslike that saloon-keepers who wished to remain open on Sunday were privileged to do so, in spite of the law, upon payment of a fixed sum. The game of policy flourished within prescribed geographical limits, each one of which was assigned to a "policy king" who handled the business and paid the necessary black- mail to the police. Shoeblacks, and push-cart and fruit venders were permitted to obstruct the streets and side- walks upon payment of money for the privilege. A regu- 100 THEODORE ROOSEVELT lar initiation fee was charged by the police, and thereafter annual dues were levied and in most cases readily paid. As a result of these exposures, the independents and the Republicans of the city combined in the fall of 1894 and succeeded in ousting Tammany and in electing Col- onel William L. Strong as mayor of the city. Strong was the first reform mayor who had ever taken office in New York and he made such use of his opportunities as circum- stances permitted. He offered the position of Chief of the Street Cleaning Bureau to Roosevelt and when he declined it, appointed Colonel George E. Waring, whose administration of that office is famous in the annals of New York. William Brookfield, an independent Repub- lican business man, became Commissioner of Public Works. On the municipal civil service board the new mayor placed Everett P. Wheeler and Godkin of the Evening Post, who were described by a contemporary writer as "experienced and obdurate reformers." The Legislature of 1895 had a considerable Republican majority and had been elected largely by the votes of resi- dents of New York City who were anxious for action in Albany which would help to cure the situation in the metropolis. But when the Legislature adjourned on May 16th, the reformers were sorely disappointed. The new statute for the government of the police force did not meet public expectations. It provided for four Commissioners, two of whom were to be appointed from one party and two from the other. There was also a Chief of Police, whom the Commissioners were to appoint, but whom they could not remove without a regular trial subject to review by the courts of law. The Chief of Police and any one Com- missioner had power, in most cases, to prevent action by the other three Commissioners. The granting of execu- POLICE COMMISSIONER 101 tive power to so numerous a body and the provision which made a dead-lock so easy became fruitful sources of trouble. Mayor Strong selected Roosevelt as president of the Board and as the other three members, Colonel Frederick D. Grant, son of General Grant, Avery D. Andrews, a young lawyer of West Point training, and Andrew D. Parker. The other Commissioners were, at first in entire harmony with their president, and the board started on its career with every chance for success. Two problems confronted the Commissioners at the outset. One of these was to take the police force entirely out of politics, and the other was to ensure the enforce- ment of the law. Of course all was not plain sailing by any means. Years of corruption had produced a growth which a single operation could not remove, and, in addition, the Board of Commissioners did not maintain, through- out the term of Roosevelt's service, the unanimity which characterized them at the beginning. The system of checks and balances to which I have already alluded offered con- siderable opportunity to the obstructionist. One of the members of the Board was to some extent affiliated with the type of politician against whom the people had risen to elect Mayor Strong. This Commissioner gradually grew more and more out of sympathy with his associates and became the source of considerable difficulty. Colonel Grant, too, although perfectly honest, was perhaps inclined to resent a little the leadership of a man who was consid- erably his junior. During the month of August, 1805, the hostile press was able to announce with considerable satis- faction that a real split in the board had taken place over the discharge of a police captain. Differences of temperament were exaggerated by the 102 THEODORE ROOSEVELT newspapers until they became moral differences, and Roosevelt's enemies lost no chance of imperiling the suc- cess of his work by endeavoring to alienate his associates. Heretofore it had been impossible to secure a position on the police force unless money and political influence were brought to bear. As a first step toward eliminating this system, the Commissioners announced that appoint- ments to the force would be given only to those who should satisfactorily pass a civil service examination. Any man within the proper age limits and a citizen of the United States who appeared was given the examination. He was obliged to furnish five vouchers for his good character and was subjected by the Commission to a searching test as to his physical and moral qualifications. This investigation eliminated four-fifths of the applicants. From those who remained, members of the police force were selected with- out any regard whatever for political connections, and usually with no knowledge of what their political connec- tions in fact were. When it came to promotions, Roosevelt differed from most of the civil service reformers. He held that promo- tions should be based principally upon a man's conduct as observed by his superiors. Consequently a list was kept of those policemen who had particularly distin- guished themselves by heroism and by physical prowess in the discharge of their duties. Those whose names were on this list were subjected to competitive examinations, upon the results of which their promotions in part depended. In selecting men for the positions of greatest responsibility special attention was given to the candidate's ability to handle men and to his success in repressing vice and disorder in the district within his control. Bravery in the discharge of duty was a sure road to the POLICE COMMISSIONER 103 favor of the president of the Board. Roosevelt has recorded more than one instance to illustrate this. One of the first promotions made by the new Board after they had begun their work was by way of reward for such conduct. A roundsman who was old enough to be a veteran of the Civil War, and who had been on the force for twenty-two years, saved a woman from drowning in the spring of 1895. Roosevelt read of the feat in the report submitted to him and sent for the rescuer. The roundsman appeared in a state of considerable nervousness and agitation. He had, during his service on the force, saved some twenty-five persons from death by drowning, and on more than one occasion had saved persons from burning buildings. Twice he had received, upon the authorization of Congress, medals for distinguished gallantry. He was efficient and trustworthy and there was no blemish on his record. But he had no political backing and consequently had all these years failed of promotion. Now he thought that perhaps his chance had come. As a result of his interview with Roosevelt he became a sergeant, and it was not long before he justified the Commission's action by effecting his twenty-sixth rescue from drowning. In another case which occurred at about the same time, a patrolman pursued a gang of toughs who had just robbed and beaten a man in the street. The toughs scat- tered and the policeman pursued the ringleader. Suddenly the criminal, finding that he was losing ground, turned and fired. The ball passed through the policeman's helmet and just grazed his scalp, but he had in the same instant fired his own revolver with truer aim. As the officer reeled back from the shock of the bullet which had so nearly caused him his life, his adversary fell dead, shot through the heart. This man was promoted to roundsman. 104 THEODORE ROOSEVELT In connection with this incident it is interesting to note what Roosevelt says in regard to the use of weapons by the police : "I may explain that I have not the slightest sympathy with any policy which tends to put the police- man at the mercy of a tough or which deprives him of efficient weapons. While Police Commissioner, we pun- ished any brutality by the police with such immediate severity that all cases of brutality practically came to an end. No decent citizen had anything to fear from the police during the two years of my service. But we con- sistently encouraged the police to prove that the violent criminal who endeavored to molest them or to resist arrest or to interfere with them in the discharge of their duty, was himself in grave jeopardy; and we had every 'gang' broken up and the members punished with whatever severity was necessary. Of course where pos- sible the officer merely crippled the criminal who was violent." Roosevelt himself took a keen personal interest in the individual success of his subordinates and in his personal relations with them. Shortly after he became Commis- sioner, a Jewish boy named Otto Raphael was introduced to him at a Bowery meeting. Raphael was a powerful, intelligent young fellow who had recently saved some women and children from a burning building by a display of pluck and strength which won the admiration of the Commissioner. At Roosevelt's suggestion Raphael took the civil service examination and secured an appointment to the force. This enabled him to educate his little broth- ers and sisters and to bring over from Russia two or three members of the family who had been left behind because of lack of funds. In speaking of this incident, Roosevelt characteristically remembers that he and Raphael were POLICE COMMISSIONER 105 the only men in the police department who picked Fitz- simmons as a winner against Corbett. This elimination of politics from the police force nat- urally incurred the enmity of those politicians who had been accustomed for years to control the actions of the department. They succeeded in obtaining the repeal of the civil service law and joined with others of Roosevelt's enemies in the vicious attacks made upon him during his service as a Commissioner. Bicycle policemen were added to the force soon after the new Commissioners took hold. The automobile speed fiend had not yet come into being, but his prototype, the bicycle scorcher, was bad enough. It was the duty of the mounted police to stop runaways and arrest scorchers. In controlling runaway horses some of them acquired mar- velous skill. They learned to ride at full speed beside the horse's bridle and by a steady pressure upon the bit gradually to bring the frightened animal to a standstill, or to jump from a bicycle into a runaway vehicle and arrest the occupant whose reckless driving had been the cause of the trouble. Under Roosevelt's leadership, also, a pistol school was instituted which was put in charge of a sergeant named Petty, who was one of the champion revolver shots of the country. Roosevelt himself was always in the thick of action. He threw his whole soul into the performance of his job and carried its problems with him night and day. Not long after he came into office a serious strike occurred in New York City accompanied by violence and bloodshed. Finding that the situation did not improve with the pas- sage of time, he arranged to meet certain of the strikers in Clarendon Hall to see whether the difficulty could not be settled at a conference between them. The strikers mis- 106 THEODORE ROOSEVELT took their man, and after explaining their grievances resorted to threats. Roosevelt's attitude of sympathetic interest gave way immediately to an expression of stern determination. "Wait a moment, gentlemen." he said, "I begin to think that some of you have mistaken the purpose of my invitation. Remember this, please, before we go one step further. The man among you who advises or encourages violence is the enemy of all. We shall have order in this place and peace in this city before we have anything else; and the police will preserve it. Now, if the air is clear we can go on." His boldness and candor appealed strongly to the strikers and instead of anger or defiance, moved them to cheers. His conviction that the enforcement of law and order was paramount to all other considerations was shared, before he left office, by many of the labor leaders with whom he had come in contact, so that before his departure several of them called upon him to express their regret at this going. One of these, the secretary of the Journeyman Bakers' and Con- fectioners' International Union, wrote him: "I am particularly grateful for your liberal attitude toward organized labor, your cordial championship of those speaking in behalf of the toilers, and your evident desire to do the right thing as you saw it at whatever cost." Jacob A. Riis was at this time a constant companion of Roosevelt. Riis, as a newspaper reporter, had become intensely interested in the life of New York City's East Side and had recorded some of his observations in his book " How the Other Half Live." Going back to his office one day after an absence of some hours, Riis found on his desk Theodore Roosevelt's card with the simple inscription "I have read your book and I have come to help." It is hard to overestimate the value of these two men to one POLICE COMMISSIONER 107 another during the next two years. Riis found a ready champion of the cause of his East Side friends and Roose- velt found a reliable man with an intimate knowledge of many matters which bore directly upon his work as a Police Commissioner. Many a night these two tramped the streets together, talking to policemen on their beats, find- ing others asleep or gossiping, observing conditions in the tenement districts and planning for the betterment of the city. Riis had concluded that the police lodging houses were nothing but free hotels for beggars, and at his instance they were discontinued. He had gathered con- siderable data in regard to health conditions in the tenements and these formed the basis of Roosevelt's action as an ex-officio member of the Health Board. During August of 1896, New York was visited with a wave of terrible heat which lasted for days. The death rate for some of these days increased from the normal average of twenty per thousand annually to fifty per thousand annually. To combat the pitiful effects of the heat, the city appropriated thousands of dollars to purchase ice which was distributed free under the direction of the Police Commissioners. The Health Department adopted stringent rules in regard to the milk supply. As a result of this and other precautions the death rate among babies was comparatively small. During the meeting at which Bryan was officially notified that he was the Democratic nominee for the Presidency, when 25,000 people were gathered in Madison Square Garden the Commissioners placed police surgeons in the basement of the building ready with ice- packs and other appliances to take care of cases of heat prostration. Before leaving the subject of the general conduct of the police force there is one instance winch will bear telling. 108 THEODORE ROOSEVELT A German preacher named Ahlwardt came over to New York to preach a crusade against the Jews. Many of the New York Jews took the matter very much to heart and asked Roosevelt to prevent the crusader from speaking. This the Commissioner refused to do. In the first place he doubted his right to stop the speech and in the second place he thought that to make the man ridiculous would be better than to make him a martyr. Accordingly, he detailed for Ahlwardt's protection a Jewish sergeant and a score or two of Jewish policemen, so that the worthy preacher delivered his invective against the Jews under the active protection of the objects of his attack. During the years of Roosevelt's service the Board of Police Commissioners accomplished much for the police force and for the city. But long after all other achieve- ments are forgotten, one will be remembered — the enforce- ment of the Sunday Closing Law. The statutes of the State of New York forbade the sale of liquor on Sunday. No one disputed this; in fact no one could dispute it. Under Tammany this law had been enforced, but only against those who were unable or unwilling to purchase immunity from its provisions. From Commissioner to patrolman the police force had exacted blackmail from the saloon-keepers. The liquor dealer who could not produce the necessary cash and votes found that his place of business was closed on Sunday, while his rival across the street was not only earning the biggest money of the week, but was swiftly stealing away his steady customers. "The police," says Roosevelt, "used the partial and spas- modic enforcement of the law as a means of collecting blackmail. The result was that the officers of the law, the politicians, and the saloon-keepers became inextrica- bly tangled in a network of crime and connivance at crime. POLICE COMMISSIONER 109 The most powerful saloon-keepers controlled the poli- ticians and the police, while the latter in turn terrorized and blackmailed all the other saloon-keepers. It was not a case of non-enforcement of the law. The law was very actively enforced, but it was enforced with corrupt discrimination. ' ' Roosevelt and his associates had no particular fond- ness for the Sunday Closing Law, but they were confronted with a situation which to their minds presented but two alternatives. One of these was to abandon any attempt whatever to enforce the law; the other was to enforce it impartially against every one. To Roosevelt it was un- thinkable that the Police Commissioners should permit the continuance of the outrageous system which had hitherto prevailed; and it was equally unthinkable that they should deliberately fail to enforce the law as it stood upon the statute books. There was then but one course left for them to pursue, and that was to close all saloons on Sunday without fear or favor. Under a recent act of Assembly the mayor had the power to remove the Tammany police magistrates and to appoint others in their places. Until this power was exer- cised it was idle for the Police Commissioners to attempt to carry out their project. As soon as Mayor Strong exercised the authority given him, Roosevelt prepared to act. The new magistrates were to take office on Monday, July 1, 1895, and it was consequently announced that on Sunday, June 30th, the police would see that all liquor saloons were closed. The threat was carried into effect and produced a roar of surprise and rage throughout the length and breadth of Manhattan Island. The newspapers on Mon- day morning were full of the subject, some condemning the action of the Commissioners, others remaining neutral, 110 THEODORE ROOSEVELT and only one or two favoring it. Roosevelt himself went about the city to see that the order was enforced. At the corner of Thirtieth Street and Seventh Avenue, he was seen early on Sunday personally superintending the closing of a saloon which had violated the order. The police were everywhere, but the arrests were not as numerous as one might suppose. On January 13th, four months before the new Board had taken office, the arrests under the old black- mailing system had risen to two hundred and fifty -four. On the first Sunday of the new plan there were only one hundred and twenty-four arrests. Numerous attempts were made to evade the provi- sions of the law by furnishing a meal to thirsty patrons to accompany the liquor which they ordered. The meal in most cases consisted of nothing more substantial than cheese and crackers, and the evasions by this means were not numerous. Many went out in the harbor thinking to escape the attentions of the police, but this scheme had been foreseen by the Commissioners. The County Cork Men's Association, for instance, hired an excursion boat and when she pulled out from the dock began freely to patronize the bar, but policemen in plain clothes had joined the festive party and immediately arrested the offenders. In some instances the arrest of saloon-keepers who had been accustomed to violate the law under the old regime was accompanied with considerable excitement. For instance, John Kelly sold liquor after midnight at his saloon on Avenue A. An officer named Kidney knew what was going on and made four attempts to enter the place but without success. He was assisted by another officer named Dunne, both of them being in citizens' clothes. Finally five men arrived in a group and were admitted by the watcher at the door. Dunne tried to go POLICE COMMISSIONER 111 in with them and was stopped by the watcher. During the wrangle a group of several hundred people collected. About this time Dunne noticed that Kidney had attached himself to another group of seven men whom the door- keeper seemed to know. Dunne accordingly retired and Kidney was admitted to the saloon. When he got inside Kidney found twenty-two patrons there drinking. He told Kelly who was behind the bar that he was under arrest. The watcher, who had been looking at Kidney, left his post, ran inside and grabbed him by the throat. Kidney was getting the better of it when two men inter- fered to help the watcher. The policeman shook himself free and backed up against the refrigerator, when Kelly and some of his friends made a rush at him. Kidney drew his revolver and the crowd fell back a moment. Edging toward the door, he pulled back the bolt and admitted Dunne who was all the time waiting outside. Dunne jumped on the nearest man and flung him into the hall. The next man was the watcher and Dunne threw him out so quickly that he did not hear Kidney shouting to him to hold him a prisoner. Then the two policemen having fairly cowed the men inside took Kelly prisoner and marched him to the station house. It seems extraordinary that the closing of the saloons on Sunday should have aroused such a storm of protest. Men who were accustomed to gratify their stomachs with liquor resented the slightest interference with the satis- faction of their appetites; and the liquor dealers, whose profits from Sunday sales were enormous, were of course not slow to raise the hue and cry against the Board of Police Commissioners and especially against its president. The question of Sunday closing immediately became a vital issue. On Tuesday the Young Men's Democratic 112 THEODORE ROOSEVELT Union met and prepared to carry the agitation for a liberal Sunday to the Legislature in Albany. A meeting of German-Americans, among whom were Carl Schurz and Jacob H. Schiff, signed a statement advocating a liberal Sunday but agreeing that the Police Commissioners were bound by their oath of office to enforce the law as it stood. Roosevelt's enemies were astute and powerful and lost no opportunity to attack him. The liquor dealers and the "respectable citizens," together with the larger part of the daily press, began a course of persecution which only had the effect of confirming him in the course which he had chosen to follow. They were also furious with Mayor Strong who was alleged to have said to certain represen- tatives of the liquor dealers a short time before; "Boys, if you can arrange among yourselves, you might keep open a little on Sunday afternoon and see how it works," and who was now charged with violation of his promise. But the chief burden of the attack of course fell upon the president of the Police Board. On July 4th a great Tammany celebration was ad- dressed by ex-Governor Campbell of Ohio. In the course of his speech Campbell said: "The Democracy united can sweep this city next fall by a plurality of 70,000 votes, and then the time will come when persons can get their Sun- day beer, when a poor man who cannot afford to stable his horse and cart can let them stand in the street before his door at night." This last was an allusion to the fact that Roosevelt had put an end to the free stabling of horses and carts in the narrow streets of the city, a privilege which had been well paid for under the old regime. Roosevelt's answer to this kind of criticism was the plain statement: "I would rather see this administration turned out because it enforced the laws than see it POLICE COMMISSIONER US succeed by violating them." In his mind there was absolutely no room for argument. The law was there and it had to be enforced. Of the second Sunday of the crusade, July the 8th, one of the city newspapers reported next day, " It was dry but not very dry." Only one hundred and five arrests were made on this day for failure to comply with the law. Thirty citizens went to Brooklyn where the police did not take so strict a view of their obligations. The steamer Bay Queen with four barges in tow started out with a crowd of excursionists. Eight hundred and fifty dollars had been paid for the bar privilege. The newspapers reported that when she got well underway "the men of Limerick came to the barkeeper and cried aloud for drink and he could not minister to them." The difficulty of course, was that members of the police force had joined the excursionists to see that no violation of the law occurred. The war against Roosevelt was waged unceasingly. The newspapers made fun of his spectacles, his teeth, his volubility and above all of his recklessness* in speaking directly of himself in the first person singular. The com- mon cry was that he was the rich man's friend and the poor man's enemy. The president of the Young Men's Demo- cratic Union wrote him an open letter calling him "A bitter Republican with aristocratic tendencies," and asked him to raid the Union League Club on the following Sun- day. "Do not be deterred," he wrote, "from the strict discharge of your duty by reason of the enormous sums of money annually contributed to the Republican com- mittees 'for protection.' ' Roosevelt answered that he would stop unlawful sales of liquor as quickly in the Union League Club as in any other place, and said, "I 8 114 THEODORE ROOSEVELT have seen plenty of base demagoguery in my career, but a baser demagoguery than that of those who protest against the enforcement of the law because it is against the poor man I have never seen." His enemies knew as well as he did that he was hurting not the poor man, but the rich liquor dealers who profited by the Sunday sales. The law was described as an antiquated blue law which no man of intelligence or liberality would attempt to enforce. Senator Hill, the Democratic leader of the state, wrote: "The chief difficulty in New York City today arises from the unreasonable construction which the new Police Commissioners and magistrates are giving the excise law, in their arbitrary and unintelligent enforce- ment of these provisions." One cartoon represented New York as a fair lady bound in the fetters of the blue laws while an unpleasant looking individual labeled "Puritan Reformer" looked unctuously on; another depicted Roosevelt sitting on Father Knickerbocker's lap holding a hobby-horse named Sunday Closing Law, while Father Knickerbocker says despairingly, "What a pity he doesn't cut his wisdom teeth." To this criticism Roosevelt made vigorous answer. It was idle to call a law antiquated which was only three years old. The Sunday closing provision had been inserted in the statute in 1857, but in 1892 the liquor law had been revised by a Democratic Legislature and the proposition to eliminate the Sunday provision had been deliberately rejected. To Hill's letter he replied that he was delighted as a party man to have the enforcement of the law made a party question, but that as an American citizen he was ashamed that it was possible to raise such an issue. Another charge was that the police took so much time POLICE COMMISSIONER 115 in the enforcement of the Sunday Closing Law that they had no leisure left for the prevention of other forms of crime. A cartoon showed Roosevelt in a policeman's uniform leaning idly against a closed bar, while two burglars looted a safe in the rear of the premises. Below the picture was the statement by Roosevelt, "It is a waste of time for the criminal classes and their allies to try to distract us from enforcing the vital laws by raising a clamor that we are not enforcing those of less impor- tance." The paper in which this cartoon appeared also reported the complaint of a citizen whose house was robbed while, as he said, "The cops told me they were too busy to help me out." In another daily there appeared a list of crimes which were said to have been successfully perpetrated without interference or punish- ment by the police. Roosevelt's answer was to produce the facts and to prove by the police records that the average number of felonies was one less per day than during the preceding year and that the average of arrests was one more per day. He took up the cases of crime of which the newspaper had complained and showed by means of the deadly parallel what the exact truth was. In one column he put the statements made by his enemies and in the other the reports of the cases as they appeared in the records of his department. In every case the accusations were proven to be unfounded. His enemies became considerably disturbed because the law was not enforced as strictly against the sellers of soda water as against the retailers of liquor. "It wasn't very dry," reported one of the newspapers after the third Sunday of the campaign. Soda was purchased quite readily and there was apparently little effort to prevent its sale, although the law covers soft drinks as 116 THEODORE ROOSEVELT well as alcoholic ones. Roosevelt retorted that it was impossible with the force at his command to compel obedience to every provision of the law; that he would do so as far as lay in his power, and that the enforcement of the more important provisions of the law necessarily would have the priority. He was determined to stamp out the Sunday sales of liquor because they had been in the past a source of blackmail and corruption. "If," he said, "a policeman finds a penny gambling game on one side of the street and a burglar on the other, I should not expect him to risk the escape of the burglar through his anxiety to arrest the gamblers." As the crusade went on, the press became more and more openly hostile. It was computed that the saloon keepers were losing every Sunday the profit on the sale of 30,000 kegs of beer, and this fact no doubt influenced the policy of the newspapers in which they advertised. New York was described in the Monday morning editions as "Roosevelt's Deserted Village," and was frequently likened to the Desert of Sahara. At intervals, violent conflicts occurred over the enforcement of the law, such as the fight of the first night between Kidney and Kelly. One saloon-keeper who stood high in political circles was known as "King" or "Bootsy" Callahan. When the campaign began, a patrolman named Edward J. Bourke was walking for the first time the beat on which Callahan's saloon was situated. After midnight the saloon was still running at full blast and Bourke stepping inside told Callahan to close up. Then he walked around the block and put his head in again to see if his order had been obeyed. Callahan resented this kind of persistence and went so far as to knock Bourke down. Bourke instantly got to POLICE COMMISSIONER 117 his feet and knocked Callahan down. They grappled, and as they rolled on the floor, Callahan's friends did their best to stamp on Bourke. Bourke, however, stuck to his job and finally shut the saloon and ran his man into the police station. The next morning Callahan's friends had the cards stacked against the policeman and were prepared not only to procure Callahan's release, but to charge Bourke with improper conduct in attempting to make an arrest. Fortunately, Roosevelt heard of the matter and started for the court-room. His appearance put a veiy different face on the situation and the result was a triumphant victory for Bourke and for the new system. By this time the matter of Sunday closing had become so much of a political issue that Republicans and Demo- crats alike were trying to make capital out of it at one another's expense. The idea that each community should decide the question for itself was advocated by many and attained considerable popularity. Roosevelt, however, was not interested in this phase of the matter. He was only concerned in enforcing the law as it stood and in discharging the sworn duties of his office. His attitude brought him many enemies, but friends were not wanting. In a great meeting in Carnegie Hall in August he spoke before the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America and received a tremendous ovation. Resolu- tions were adopted approving the course which he had pursued. At last the liquor men concluded that neither threats nor ridicule would swerve the Commissioners from their task. On September 5th at a meeting of the Liquor Dealers' Association, a resolution was adopted 118 THEODORE ROOSEVELT calling for the voluntary closing of the saloons on Sunday. This did not mean that all the trouble ceased; but a new step had been taken and things never slipped back to anything like they had been before. Roosevelt's record as Police Commissioner, and espe- cially his uncompromising and determined enforcement of the Sunday Closing Law stood him in good stead when, less than two years later, he made his successful campaign for the Governorship. CHAPTER VIII Assistant Secretary of the Navy ROOSEVELT became Assistant Secretary of the Navy in April, 1897. Following the Civil War, " the Nation had put away armaments and taken up happily the pursuits of peace. Weary of the financial burden of fleets and armies, and self-complacent in the security of the Monroe Doctrine and the belief that war with any foreign power was beyond the range of possi- bility, the government acquiesced in the general demand for disarmament. Consequently, the development in the science of naval warfare which had flourished during the days of the Rebellion ceased altogether, and for a long time there was no thought of naval reconstruction in consonance with the maritime evolution of the period. For two decades in the last half of the nineteenth century we had not a single armored ship. In the administra- tion of President Hayes our navy ranked lower than that of any nation in Europe. Chili, with her two ironclads, was stronger on the sea than we were. During the admin- istration of President Garfield twenty-five out of one hundred and forty vessels in our navy were ordinary sea tugs. Not a single ship was in condition for warfare. All were wooden ships; they included the side-wheel steamer Powhatan, and the very ancient frigate, Consti- tution. The mounts of these wooden tubs were smooth- bores — "left-overs" from the Civil War. Then, under President Arthur, came the awakening. The first program of the new era called for thirty-eight (119) 120 THEODORE ROOSEVELT unarmored cruisers, five rams, five torpedo gunboats and ten harbor torpedo-boats, mostly of steel. Following it came the celebrated "White Squadron." Next the government encouraged the creation of industries for the manufacture of guns, forgings and castings that formerly had been bought abroad. Finally, in 1890, the first American battleships were laid down. Thus when Roose- velt became Assistant Secretary, the condition of our navy was far better than it had been fifteen years before, when he wrote his "Naval History of the War of 1812." On the other hand, our navy was not prepared for war. Of this he was fully aware, and he devoted all his energy and force to making the navy ready, for he made no secret of his firm conviction that affairs in Cuba were in such a precarious state that intervention in the island by the United States would be necessary. Furthermore, he believed that it was the moral duty of the United States to end Spanish misrule in Cuba and to stop at once and forever the despotic tyranny of the Spanish Governor- General, Weyler, the shooting of unarmed men and women, and the herding of thousands of reconcentrados (country people forced to leave their homes) into camps and garrisoned towns. He made no pretense of concealing his own views, though it was currently believed in Washington at the time that his desire to speed up a war program was not shared by his chief The Secretary of the Navy, who had been president of the Massachusetts Peace Society, was perhaps inclined to view the activities of his assistant as those of a youthful zealot. But Roosevelt, eager to have the department placed upon a basis of prepared- ness, sought frequent audience with President McKinley. Washington told of a certain carriage ride along the Poto- ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF NAVY 121 mac when "the rattle of the wheels and the jangle of the harness was completely drowned out by the flow of con- versation that came from the interior of the brougham.'* The ride may be the creation of a reporter's brain but the story, like a good caricature, contains an essential truth. The President was striving to avert war; the Assistant Secretary of the Navy was striving to prepare the navy for the war that he deemed imminent. In a Cabinet meeting to which he was summoned one day in March, 1898, he is reported to have replied to some statement of a Cabinet officer: "The coming war — don't speak to me about the coming war, it's here. It's been war for six weeks and we have lost one of our battleships." He believed the blowing up of the Maine had forced the issue: he believed the people were ardently for war with Spain, and that they were right. Some of the mem- bers of the President's Cabinet held out for peace, others had formed no definite conclusion, and the President him- self was still deliberating on what course to pursue. But not the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He had a work- ing plan for the conduct of the war, and, furthermore, he submitted it. "When the President learned that Mr. Roosevelt had formed a definite opinion about what the situation de- manded," says Francis E. Leupp in "The Man Roose- velt," "he sent for him one morning and listened to his plans. When the question was discussed in the Cabinet the same day, the President remarked with a smile, 'Gen- tlemen, not one of you has put half as much enthu- siasm into his expression as Mr. Roosevelt, our Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He has laid out the whole pro- gramme of the war.' " 'Could you not induce him to work out a written 122 THEODORE ROOSEVELT report as a model for us?' queried one of the members of the Cabinet in the same tone as that of the President. "'I can do better than that,' replied President McKin- ley, 'I can call him in and let you hear for yourselves." It is related that Roosevelt accepted the invitation and in vigorous style, after the President had given him a few leading questions, ran through his programme, while every Cabinet officer listened intently. He put more enthusiasm in it, with facile expression and gesture, than the President had been able to give in his first report. When he left, the President smiled. A few of his Cabinet members smiled too, and there were still others who could find nothing impressive in what they were pleased to regard as "radicalism" and "exaggeration" and "enthu- siasm." But Washington rang with the story that night and for some days afterward. At the time of the sinking of the Maine our navy consisted of ninety vessels. Twenty-one of these were unserviceable, twenty-seven were out of commission and forty-two were in commission. Of those in commission, six were in the East Indies, eight on the coast of Africa, seven on the Pacific coast, twelve in home ports, three on the European station and six in South Atlantic waters. Had she struck at that moment Spain might have accom- plished mischief. But, just as Great Britain marshaled her fleet in the North Sea in the summer of 1914, so the Navy Department, in the winter of 1898, began calling our navy home. Roosevelt had a prominent and all- important part in that mobilization. The buying of new ships and the conversion of mer- chant marine into men-of-war devolved largely upon the Assistant Secretary. With consummate zeal he set about the task. Congress first voted $50,000,000 for war pur- ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF NAVY 123 poses, of which more than half went to the navy. Later the navy received more than $57,000,000 in all. Roosevelt sent Captain W. H. Brownson abroad to buy ships. But foreign nations were averse to any entanglements with a belligerent growing out of the disposition of ships of war and were loath to sell. However, he did succeed in get- ting the cruisers Ama2ones and Abreu from Brazil, the gun- boat Diogenes from England and two torpedo-boats. In quick succession ninety-seven merchantmen were pur- chased at home and transformed into auxiliary cruisers, gunboats and colliers. Fifteen revenue cutters, four lighthouse tenders and two U. S. Fish Commission vessels were pressed into service. Not the least of Roosevelt's troubles was the profiteer. One of the great needs of the hour was coaling vessels. And of these, "many were called but few were chosen." They were rejected in part because of their unseaworthy condition. In spite of the exercise of his best care and judgment he frequently found vessels wished upon the navy by designing agents which looked all right in port but not in the open sea laden with a full cargo. He pro- tested against the exorbitant prices asked, and the inferior bottoms offered. But the government had to have the ships and he found himself frequently in a dilemma. Mr. Leupp records a striking instance of the way he vented his wrath upon the "profiteers." " I burst in upon him one day at the department, with- out warning, and found him in the middle of the floor indulging in some very spirited talk to a visitor. As I was hastily withdrawing he called me back. '"Stay here,' said he, 'I want to see you.' Then he turned very abruptly from me and again faced the third party, in whom I recognized, as the light fell on his face, 124 THEODORE ROOSEVELT a lawyer of some prominence and an officeholder under a previous administration. Mr. Roosevelt's teeth were set, and very much in evidence, in the peculiar way they always are when he is angry. His spectacle lenses seemed to throw off electric sparks as his head moved quickly this way and that in speaking; and his right fist came down from time to time upon the opposite palm as if it were an adversary's face. And this was about the way he delivered himself: ' ' Don't you feel ashamed to come to me today with another offer after what you did yesterday? Don't you think that to sell one rotten ship to the government is enough for a single week? Are you in such a hurry that you couldn't wait even over Sunday to force your dam- aged goods upon the United States? Is it an excess of patriotism that brings you here day after day, in this way, or only your realization of our necessities?' " ' Why, our clients* — began the lawyer. "'Yes, I know all about your clients,' burst in the Assistant Secretary. T congratulate them on having an attorney who will do work for them which they wouldn't have the face to do for themselves. I should think, after having enjoyed the honors that you have had at the hands of the government, you'd feel a keen pride in your present occupation ! No, I don't want any more of your old tubs. The one I bought yesterday is good for nothing except to sink somewhere in the path of the enemy's fleet. It will be God's mercy if she doesn't go down with brave men on her — men who go to war and risk their lives, instead of staying home to sell rotten hulks to the government!' "The air of the attorney as he bowed himself out was almost pitiable. The special glint did not fade from Mr. Roosevelt's glasses, nor did his jaw relax or his fist unclinch ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF NAVY 125 till the door closed on the retreating figure. Then his face lighted with a smile as he advanced to greet me. "'You came just in time,' he cried. 'I wanted you to hear what I had to say to that fellow; not' — and here his voice rose on the high falsetto wave which is always a sign that he is enjoying an idea while framing it in words — 'not that it would add materially to the sum of your pleas- ure, but that it would humiliate him to have any one present while I gave him his punishment. It is the only means I have of getting even.' " Everywhere the lack of ships and materials and facil- ities crossed the path of the Assistant Secretary. He, however, cut through red tape, disregarded the conven- tions of the department and, upon his own initiative, proceeded with the task of making ready. Not content with speeding up manufacturing processes at home he went into foreign markets to procure munitions and sup- plies. Upon one occasion he ordered from Great Britain a shipload of smokeless powder. Ten days after the order had been given a big steamship appeared off the Maine coast. She was reported as a derelict. United States sailors were sent to board her, and they found the English crew had left her drifting with her cargo. She was taken to the Boston yard where the ammunition was unloaded. A short time later, after the war began, Sen- ator Gorman, of Maryland, a member of the Naval Committee, called upon President McKinley and urged that restrictions be placed upon authority to order muni- tions, incidentally using Mr. Roosevelt's action as an argument. With a smile, President McKinley, who had just received the resignation of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, with the announcement that he was going into 126 THEODORE ROOSEVELT the army, answered the irate Senator: "Mr. Roosevelt retires today to go to the front." In connection with his efforts to buy ships Roosevelt himself related the following story: "One day in the spring of 1898, when it fell to my lot to get the navy ready for war, I and my naval aid, Lieutenant Sharpe, went out to buy auxiliary cruisers. On this particular day we had spent about $7,000,000. It began to rain. 'Sharpe,' I said, 'I have only four cents in my pocket. Lend me a cent or five cents, will you, so that I can ride home?' Sharp answered: 'I haven't a single cent,' and I answered him, 'Never mind, Sharp, that's why we will beat the Spaniards! It isn't every country where two public serv- ants could spend $7,000,000 and not have a cent in their pockets after they are through." Facilities for taking care of the ships in the navy were so poor that at one time in 1897 the battleship Indiana had to be sent to Halifax to have the bottom scraped and cleaned. On the score of ammunition the Assistant Sec- retary made the remarkable discovery, when he came into the department in 1897, that nine shots for each ship were to serve for a year's target practice ! Appropria- tions for naval target practice had been utterly ridicu- lous. "Regulations for target practice, issued on June 22, 1897," says John R. Spears in "The History of our Navy," provided that each gun of a caliber of ten inches or greater should be fired once with a full service charge, and eight times with a reduced charge every — well, now, in what period of time does the uninformed reader sup- pose? Every month, in order to make our man behind the gun the most skilful in the world? That would be a reasonable guess, but those nine shots were to serve for a year's target-practice! .... Even the guns of ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF NAVY 127 the rapid-fire batteries of four-inch and five-inch caliber which we were to use in repelling a torpedo-boat destroyer later on, were to be fired but twenty-five times a year. But Roosevelt changed all that. The pop and roar of target-practice made the welkin ring the whole day long where the ships of our squadron lay." Although the relations between Secretary Long and his assistant were of the most pleasant nature, the two executives proceeded along different lines of action. While Long remained conservative and cautious Roose- velt forged ahead on an ambitious scale that kept em- ployees of the department, heads of bureaus and naval officers asking, " What next?" The difference in the heads of the Navy Department can be aptly illustrated by two stories that have come to my attention. When the Maine was blown up, hot indignation raged in the hearts of many naval officers. Among this number was "Fighting Bob" (Robley D.) Evans, who, in a few months, was to gain undying fame at Santiago. Evans, a few days after the Maine disaster, said to Secretary Long: "If I had been in Admiral Sicard's (then leader of the North Atlantic squadron) place I would have taken my entire squadron into Havana harbor next morning, and then I would have said to them, 'Now, we'll investigate this matter, and let you know what we think of it at once.' "If you had done that," the Secretary is recorded as having replied, "you would have been recalled and severely reprimanded." "I don't doubt that, sir:" "Fighting Bob" replied, "but the people would have made me President at the next election." Contrast the modus operandi of the Roosevelt 128 THEODORE ROOSEVELT brain! One day during the early part of his tenure of office in the Navy Department a high officer of the navy, noted for his knowledge of nautical technique, walked into Mr. Roosevelt's office and, in the course of a conversa- tion, remarked, in an absent-minded sort of way: "I certainly think the gunboat Annapolis should be barkantine rigged." Mr. Roosevelt, with his customary vigor, and perhaps recognizing the other's superior knowledge of naval mat- ters, impulsively jumped up from the chair, banged his fist on his desk and cried : "Why, of course she should, Admiral. Of course she should. I'll see that it is done." Taking his cue from the Admiral, the Assistant Sec- retary sat down at once and dictated a score of letters to naval constructors and naval officers asking their views on the matter. When the replies to the questionnaire were all in, Mr. Roosevelt sent for the chief constructor. "I have here," he said, "about twenty letters from some of the best men in the navy, and every one of them says he thinks the gunboat Annapolis should be barkantine rigged." "I think so, too,' ' said the constructor. "Then why isn't she barkantine rigged?" demanded Mr. Roosevelt with some heat. And forthwith the Annapolis was barkantine rigged! The alarmists were busy when the news came from the Cape Verde Islands that the Spanish fleet was headed across the Atlantic. The agitation resulted in changing some of the navy's plans. Mobilization of our fleets had begun in January, when the battleship Maine was ordered to Havana. The North Atlantic squadron was sent to the Florida drill grounds loaded with ammunition and ordered Vi ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF NAVY 129 to engage in daily target practice. Vessels in European station were ordered home. The South Atlantic squadron was ordered from Brazil to Key West. The Nation's naval resources were mobilized within ninety miles of Cuba and held ready for a surprise attack. But in the meantime the cry for protection of the Atlantic coast was raised in many quarters just as it developed after our entry into the world war and the alarmists felt apprehensive over possible German submarine attacks. Roosevelt helped dispel these fears by assisting Secretary Long in the organi- zation of a "Flying Squadron" to be maneuvered in defense of the Atlantic coast cities, and still another northern patrol fleet for service off the Middle Atlantic and New England coasts. Roosevelt regarded the send- ing of the Spanish fleet to Cuba as a cause of war, and approved of sending a squadron to it without waiting for a more formal declaration of war. Mr. Leupp gives the following account of a characteristic conversation: "One Sunday morning in March, 1898, we were sitting in his library discussing the significance of the news that Cervera's squadron was about to sail for Cuba, when he suddenly arose and brought his hands together with a resounding clap. "If I could do what I pleased,' he exclaimed, 'I would send Spain notice today that we should consider her despatch of that squadron a hostile act. Then, if she didn't heed the warning, she would have to take the con- sequences.' 'You are sure,' I asked, 'that it is with unfriendly intent that she is sending her squadron?' 'What else can it be? The Cubans have no navy; therefore the squadron can not be coming to fight the insurgents. The only naval power interested in Cuban 130 THEODORE ROOSEVELT affairs is the United States. Spain is simply forestalling the "brush" which she knows, as we do, is coming sooner or later.' "'And if she refused to withdraw the orders to Cervera?' "'I should send out a squadron to meet his on the high seas and smash it ! Then I would force the fighting from that day to the end of the war.' ' ' Even after Cervera's squadron was cornered in the harbor of Santiago there were many who held that the impending clash with the Spanish ships would be a minor matter, in so far as the strategic conduct of the war was concerned; that the decisive conflict would be fought on land in the vicinity of Havana. Roosevelt knew that the fleet had put into Santiago without coal instead of proceeding to Cienfuegos where it would be in rail contact with Havana. He figured that the squadron of Cervera must eventually make a break for liberty and take its chances with the American fleet on guard, and he reasoned that the small Spanish army in the vicinity of Santiago, shut off from reinforcements by the lack of rail connec- tion with Havana, would first be defeated by General Shafter's troops. With the army defeated he had no doubt as to the fleet's inability to stand up before the American navy. How well he reasoned in the matter was proved by subsequent events. His deductions were borne out in realistic detail ! This subtle knack of anticipating the enemy was characteristic. During all the time that he was aiding in the preparation of the navy for the task in hand, and months before the sinking of the Maine he pointed out that the twin theaters of the war would be the West Indies and the far Philippines. Examination of the ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF NAVY 131 records shows that the far-sighted steps taken by the Navy Department in planting coaling stations, supply depots and maintaining warships at strategic points, contributed valuably to the splendid victory of Dewey at Manila. Roosevelt had coal at Hong Kong. He sent colliers into the Pacific and bought other vessels to carry supplies. It was his order that turned back the Olympia, Dewey's flagship at Manila, when it was headed for the Mare Island Navy Yard, to the far Pacific station in the Yellow Sea. It was due in great measure to his sagacity that the cruiser Baltimore arrived at Hong Kong just in time to join Dewey and depart with the flotilla for Manila after the Chinese authorities had proclaimed the neutrality of the port. Roosevelt was a staunch supporter of Dewey. He stood solidly for his retention when high naval officials and politicians were urging the selection of another leader for the Pacific fleet. San Francisco and a few other western cities objected to the selection of Dewey. They had in mind a "favorite son." But Roosevelt stood to his guns. One day a delegation called upon him to protest against the Dewey appointment. Roosevelt heard them through and then answered them rather vehemently : "Gentlemen, I can't agree with you. We have looked up his record. We have looked him straight in the eyes. He is a fighter. We'll not change now. Pleased to have met you. Good-day, gentlemen." For a time there was the suggestion of a controversy as to who had sent the message to Admiral Dewey direct- ing him to proceed to Manila and destroy the Spanish fleet. It was Secretary Long who, on April 24, 1898, sent the following message to Dewey at Hong Kong: "War has commenced between the United States and 132 THEODORE ROOSEVELT Spain. Proceed at once to the Philippine Islands. Begin operations at once, particularly against the Span- ish fleet. You must capture vessels or destroy. Use utmost endeavors." It was Roosevelt, however, who did more than any one else in the department to enable Dewey to have his fleet on edge for a conflict that was to signalize to the whole world the prowess of the new American navy. On February 25th, just after the destruction of the Maine at Havana, and more than two months before Dewey's fleet defied Cavite and bearded the " Dons" in their Philippine den, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy sent the following message: "Secret and confidential. Order the squadron, except the Monocacy, to Hong Kong. Keep full of coal. In the event of declaration of war with Spain your duty will be to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast, and then offensive operations in the Philippine Islands. (Signed) Roosevelt." When the Navy Department ordered the Olympia home, it was Roosevelt who interceded and had the order revoked. He then sent this cablegram to Dewey: "Keep the Olympia. Provide yourself with coal." The coal ! It was Roosevelt who thus kept ready the essential supplies so that the ships might move when the time came. As against this policy of preparedness we may compare the policy of the Spanish Admiralty in ordering Cervera to sea without advance preparations for coaling his fleet. Had Cervera had coal he might have made Cienf uegos, to which point the bulk of the Spanish army of twenty thousand in the vicinity of Havana might have been transported. For lack of it, Cervera put into Santiago, at which point occurred the final disaster to Spanish arms. Secretary Long, in spite of rumors to the contrary, had ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF NAVY 133 a distinct admiration for Roosevelt, though he by no means always agreed with him. Their points of view and temperaments were as wide apart as the poles. The Sec- retary was not a man to "start something" every fifteen minutes; Roosevelt was. Writing some time after the war, Mr. Long, in recounting Roosevelt's connection with and work in the department, says : "His activity was characteristic. He was zealous in the work of putting the navy in condition for the appre- hended struggle. His ardor sometimes went faster than the President or the department approved. . . . He worked indefatigably, frequently incorporating his views in memoranda which he would place every morning on my desk. Most of his suggestions had, however, so far as applicable, been already adopted by the various bureaus the chiefs of which were straining every nerve and leaving nothing undone. When I suggested to him that some future historian reading his memoranda, if they were put on record, would get the impression that the bureaus were inefficient, he accepted the suggestion with the generous good nature which is so marked in him. Indeed, nothing could be pleasanter than our relations. He was heart and soul in his work. His typewriters had no rest. He, like most of us, lacks the rare knack of brevity. He was especially stimulating to the younger officers who gath- ered about him, and made his office as busy as a hive. He was especially helpful in the purchasing of ships and in every line where he could push on the work of preparation for war. ' ' Somewhat hesitating praise, perhaps, but enough to show that the country was right in its belief that it owed much that had been done in the year preceding the Span- ish War to the far-sightedness, energy and ability of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. CHAPTER IX Colonel of the Rough Riders A FEW weeks after the outbreak of the war with Spain, Mr. William Potter, of Philadelphia, form- erly the United States Ambassador to Italy, called on the Assistant Secretary of the Navy at his office in Washington. Roosevelt said: "I leave for the front tomorrow. Everybody in Washington whose opinion I respect, the President, the Secretary, and even Mrs. Roosevelt, think I can be of more service by remaining at my post in the Navy Department, but I have always said if my country ever engaged in war, I should take part, so I am going off tomorrow." He believed that as he had preached with all the fervor and zeal he possessed our duty to intervene in Cuba, now that war had come to drive the Spaniard from the western world it was incumbent on him to take an active part in it, not in Washington, but at the front. Even before war was declared, he and his friend, Doctor, now General, Leonard Wood, had been planning how to get to the front when war came. Roosevelt's first effort, which was to secure a position in a New York regiment, failed. Then the provision in the act of Congress providing for three cavalry regiments to be recruited in all parts of the United States gave him his opportunity. Leonard Wood was the physician of the Secretary of War, Russell Alexander Alger. As the one member of the Cabinet who always believed that war (134) 0-p O a) n i- » COLONEL OF THE ROUGH RIDERS 135 with Spain was inevitable, the Secretary had always sympathized with Roosevelt's point of view. It was therefore not a difficult matter for him to persuade the Secretary that Wood should be appointed colonel, and himself lieutenant-colonel of the "First United States Volunteer Cavalry." Indeed, Roosevelt might have secured the colonelcy for himself, making Wood lieu- tenant-colonel, but he wisely determined that he had not as yet sufficient experience to command a regiment. Colonel Wood at once devoted all his time to recruiting the regiment and securing the necessary supplies, the latter, in view of the entire unreadiness of the War Department for war, a most difficult undertaking. Wood preceded Roosevelt to San Antonio, the place selected for the mobilization of the regiment, Roosevelt remaining in Washington to finish his work at the Navy Department. Indeed, he did not resign as Assistant Secretary until May 6th. His chief, Secretary Long, has left us an inter- esting picture of this period of transition from one branch of the service to another: "His (Roosevelt's) room in the Navy Department, after his decision to enter the army, which preceded by some time his resignation as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was an interesting scene. It bubbled over with enthusiasm and was filled with bright young fellows from all over the country, college graduates and old associates from the western ranches, all eager to serve Roosevelt. The Rough Rider uniform was in evidence; it filled the corridors — guns, uniforms, all sorts of military traps, and piles of paper littered the Assistant Secretary's room, but it was all the very inspiration of young manhood." When it was announced that Wood and Roosevelt were organizing a cavalry regiment, telegrams poured in 136 THEODORE ROOSEVELT from men all over the country who were eager to join it. They could have raised a brigade, as far as men were concerned, without the slightest trouble. From the fact that many cowboys and other "rough-and-ready West- erners" were accepted, the regiment became known in the army and by the people as the "Rough Riders" — a term taken from the slang of the circus. Its colonels did not relish the title at first, but it "stuck," and, like many another term applied in humor or derision, it became a title of honor. It was made up of the greatest variety of men, with the strongest contrasts possible to bring together. Roosevelt, in his book, "The Rough Riders," has described its paradoxical make-up: "We drew recruits from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and many another college; from clubs like the Somerset of Boston, and Knickerbocker of New York; and from among the men who belonged neither to club nor to college. Four of the policemen who had served under me while I was president of the New York Police Board insisted on coming. It seemed to me that almost every friend I had in every state had some one acquaintance who was bound to go with the Rough Riders, and for whom I had to make a place. "Harvard being my own college, I had such a swarm of applications from it that I could not take one in ten. They did not ask for commissions. With hardly an exception they entered upon their duties as troopers in the spirit which they held to the end. Not a man of them backed out; not one of them failed to do his duty. "Then I went down to San Antonio, where Wood preceded me, and found the men from New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma already gathered, while those from Indian Territory came in soon after my arrival. COLONEL OF THE ROUGH RIDERS 137 "All — Easterners and Westerners, Northerners and Southerners, officers and men, cow boys and college graduates, wherever they came from, whatever their social position — possessed in common the traits of hardi- hood and a thirst for adventure. They were to a man born adventurers, in the old sense of the word. Some of them went by their own names; some had changed their names; and yet others possessed but half a name, colored by some adjective, like Cherokee Bill, Happy Jack of Arizona, Smoky Moore, the broncho-buster, and Rattlesnake Pete. Some were professional gamblers, and on the other hand, no less than four had been or were Baptist or Methodist clergymen — and proved first-class fighters, by the way. "From the Indian Territory there came a number of Indians — Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws and Creeks. One of the gamest and best fighters of the regiment was Pollock, a full-blooded Pawnee. Another Indian came from Texas. His name was Colbert; he was an excellent man, and a descendant of the old Chickasaw chiefs. "There were men who had won fame as Rocky Mountain stage-drivers, or who had spent endless days guiding the slow wagon-trains across the grassy plains. There were miners who knew every camp from the Yukon to Leadville, and cow-punchers in whose mem- ories were stored the brands carried by the herds from Chihuahua to Assinaboid." Also there was a North Carolina mountaineer who had hunted "moonshiners," a bear-hunter from Wyom- ing, and a big buffalo-hunter. One "high private" had been chief of scouts in the Kiel Rebellion, in the wild northwestern region of Canada, and there was a famous broncho-buster named McGinty, who could not march in 138 THEODORE ROOSEVELT step because he had spent most of his life on horseback. He said if he had a horse he could make it march all right. There was an Italian trumpeter who had seen service in Egypt and southern China. Of their names among themselves, their Colonel added: "The men speedily gave one another nicknames, largely conferred in a spirit of derision, their basis lying in contrast. A brave but fastidious member of a well- known eastern club, who was serving in the ranks, was christened 'Tough Ike;' and his bunkie, the man who shared his shelter-tent, who was a decidedly rough cow- puncher, gradually acquired the name of 'The Dude.' One unlucky and simple-minded cow-puncher, who had never been east of the great plains in his life, unwarily boasted that he had an aunt in New York, and ever afterward went by the name of 'Metropolitan Bill.' A huge, red-headed Irishman was named 'Sheeny Solo- mon.' A young Jew who developed into one of the best fighters in the regiment, accepted, with entire equanimity, the name of 'Pork-chop.' We had quite a number of professional gamblers, who, I am bound to say, usually made good soldiers. One, who was almost abnormally quiet and gentle, was called 'Hell Roarer; ' while another, who, in point of language and deportment, was his exact opposite, was christened 'Prayerful James.' : "Embarrassment of riches" was the greatest problem confronting the two colonels of the First Volunteer Cavalry. The question was not whom to accept, but whom to reject. The Rough Riders came together through the evolutionary process of "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" — -to fight, for they were a nondescript company of born fighters and fighters by preference and training. COLONEL OF THE ROUGH RIDERS 139 When the regiment was complete — up to the increased quota of one thousand men — its leading officers found that their troubles were only beginning — not on account of the men, however, but because of the delays in trans- portation and the improvident, if not absolutely corrupt, commissary conditions. On the 29th of May, 1898, they were enabled to leave San Antonio, Texas, for Tampa, Florida, where they were to embark for Cuba. They spent four hot days and humid nights on the way. Colonel Roosevelt, in order to see that his men were made as comfortable as possible, waited for the seventh and last train. Then he rode in a dirty old ramshackle day-coach, which was overcrowded and uncomfortable, because he had given his sleeping-car berth to a sick soldier. The rations issued, bad as they were, proved insufficient before they reached their port of embarkation. The Rough Riders had already appealed to the heart of the country — especially in hospitable, chivalrous Dixie — so that their trains were greeted by cheering crowds, and pretty girls met the boys at the stations, swapping bouquets for brass buttons, until the soldiers hardly had the necessary complement left. Their uniforms were a novelty, in America, at least, with the broad-brimmed hats and "dust-colored" suits. Uniforms of that hue were first worn by British soldiers in India — the word for dusty in the Hindoo speech being khaki. The British Indian "khaki" was afterward modified to olive green. When they finally reached Tampa, they found every- thing in confusion. After wasting nearly a week it was suddenly announced that they were to sail from Port Tampa, nine miles away, early the next day. Trains were supposed to be provided, but as they did not 140 THEODORE ROOSEVELT materialize, the two colonels and their men took pos- session of some empty coal cars and "by various means" not stated, induced the engineer to back down to Tampa, where they arrived covered with coal dust, but with all their belongings and before the hour named for departure. The wharf was jammed with over 10,000 troops. No one seemed to know which troops were to go upon any particular transport. When they finally were assigned a transport, the Yucatan, Roosevelt discovered that the same ship had been assigned to two other regiments, one of which was sufficient to fill the vessel to overflowing. Accordingly he ran at full speed back to the coal train, double-quicked the men on to the wharf, and had them take possession of the vessel the moment it touched the wharf. In this case, possession was eleven points of the law. The men were packed like sardines — hot, steaming and uncomfortable, but they would have reconciled them- selves to anything for the sake of getting into the fight. Next day they received word that the vessels were not to sail, but await further orders. There followed a delay of nearly a week in their cramped quarters, Colonel Roosevelt tells us that "The travel rations which had been issued to the men for the voyage were insufficient, because the meat was very bad indeed; and when a ration consists of only four or five items, which, taken together, just meet the requirements of a strong and healthy man, the loss of one item is a serious thing. If we had been given canned corn-beef, we would have been all right, but instead of this, the soldiers were issued horrible stuff called 'canned fresh beef/ There was no salt in it. At the best, it was stringy and tasteless; at the worst it was nauseating. Not one-fourth of it was ever eaten at all, even when the COLONEL OF THE ROUGH RIDERS 141 men became very hungry. There were no facilities for the men to cook anything. There was no ice for them; the water was not good; and they had no fresh meat or fresh vegetables." Finally the transport started. Sailing southward and east along the northern shore of Cuba, they rounded its eastern end and disembarked at Daiquiri, near the entrance to the harbor of Santiago de Cuba. The officers were permitted to bring their horses. Colonel Roosevelt brought two — "Texas" and "Rain-in-the-Face." In swimming ashore, "Rain-in-the-Face" was drowned. The landing was effected under the protection of a heavy bombardment from American warships. Accord- ing to a red-tape regulation by which uniforms for winter were issued in summer, the men received winter clothing for a midsummer campaign in the tropics. Their woolen clothing added to the horrors of the almost-equatorial sun and the daily downpour of warm rains. Throwing away their garments like a routed army, they trudged wearily back from the coast toward the town of Santiago. The regular foot-soldiers seemed to enjoy the predicament of the much-heralded Rough Riders and dubbed them "Wood's Weary Walkers." At night they dried their remaining clothing before their campfires. Colonels Wood and Roosevelt, unable to wait at the landing-place for their personal baggage, took with them only their raincoats and toothbrushes. Marching, Indian file, through jungles and morasses, they soon encountered the Spaniards. They were made aware of the presence of the enemy by hearing, overhead, a peculiar singing like that of telegraph wires. Then the singing changed to "zip — zip — zip" through the tall grass, but they did not realize the cause of the uncanny 142 THEODORE ROOSEVELT sounds till they heard sickening thuds and saw their comrades fall. The sounds were produced by Mauser bullets which, by revolving and exploding, made jagged and painful wounds. Both Colonel Wood and Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt persisted in sharing the hardships and privations of the men in the ranks, and in going before the men into battle, though the privates protested against their leaders expos- ing themselves in this reckless way. The plainsmen, accustomed to remounting and going on with a round-up, even with a broken arm or leg, could not understand why they should stop fighting when wounded. Colonel Roosevelt, noticing a broncho- buster bleeding profusely, ordered the man to the rear. He hobbled away, but had returned in fifteen minutes with his wound bandaged. Another case of humoring his superior officer was that of Rowland, of New Mexico. The Colonel noticed that he was wounded. " Where are you hurt, Rowland?" he inquired. "Aw, they caved in a couple of ribs on me, I reckon," answered the man. Colonel Roosevelt ordered him to go to the hospital and let them take care of him there. This being the New Mexican's first engagement, he argued against going; but the Colonel's order was peremptory, so he started back, grumbling. In about half an hour Colonel Roosevelt saw Rowland fighting again in the front ranks. "I thought you were told to go to the hospital," he said to the man. "Aw — I couldn't find the hospital," said Rowland, exasperated. Major-General "Fighting Joe" Wheeler was in com- COLONEL OF THE ROUGH RIDERS 143 mand of the whole force at this time, but the Rough Riders were brigaded with the First and Tenth Regular Cavalry, under General S. M. B. Young, who had said to Roosevelt and Wood, months before: "If war comes, I will try to have you attached to my command, if I have one, and I'll give you a chance to see some fighting." General Young kept his word. The action at Las Guasimas, on June 24th, two days after the landing at Daiquiri, was the Rough Riders' baptism of fire. They lost eight men killed and thirty-four wounded. It was in this battle that Captain Capron, who, Roosevelt said, was perhaps the best soldier in the regiment, and Sergeant Hamilton Fish, Jr., lost their lives. At first, Wood and Roosevelt had some difficulty with their men, who had a tendency to fight, each man on his own account, as Indians, or, in their eagerness, would crowd together and impede each other. The Rough Riders who fell are buried in a common grave. Of them, Colonel Roosevelt has said: "Indian and cowboy, miner, packer and college athlete — the man of unknown ancestry from the lonely western plains and the man who carried on his watch the crests of the Stuy- vesants and the Fishes — were one in the way they had met death, just as during life they had been one in their daring and their loyalty." That evening, a Spanish officer said to the British Consul at Santiago: "The Americans do not fight like other men. When we fire, they run right toward us. We are not used to fighting men who act so." General Young was taken ill with fever and as Colonel Wood had to take his place, Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt 144 THEODORE ROOSEVELT took command, as Colonel of the First Volunteer Cavalry. After nearly a week of inaction, an order came, on June 30th, to hold themselves in readiness. That night they slept on El Paso Hill, where the soldiers found some good food left by Spaniards in their flight. Colonel Roosevelt, instead of appropriating a building for his headquarters, slept on the ground, with his raincoat for covering, and his saddle for a pillow. Next morning, July 1st, the battle began, near San- tiago — at El Caney and San Juan Hill. Colonel Roosevelt rode Texas. They could see the enemy, intrenched on an eminence which was afterwards called "Kettle Hill." The regular troops did not advance. Colonel Roosevelt rode up to the regular army officer and said, "I am ordered to support you in your attack." The regular officer merely nodded assent. "And you are waiting for orders to advance?" Colonel Roosevelt continued. The officer nodded again. "Then I am the ranking officer here, and I give you the order to attack." The surprised officer hesitated, looking doubtfully at the insistent Colonel. "Then let my men through, Sir," said the Colonel, and his men went through, grinning. The regulars, with a whoop, followed them, and as the Colonel waved his hat, they all went up the hill in a rush. Colonel Roosevelt dismounted and turned Texas loose, leading his men on foot. There was hot and incessant firing on both sides. The Americans were at a disadvantage, as they had com- mon black powder, while the enemy's powder was smoke- less. It was here that Colonel Roosevelt received his only wound, when a bullet nicked his elbow. COLONEL OF THE ROUGH RIDERS 145 When they had taken Kettle Hill, the next objective was San Juan Hill. Of the famous capture of this strong- hold, Colonel Roosevelt has given the following account, in "The Rough Riders:" "The infantry got nearer and nearer the crest of the hill. At last we could see the Spaniards running from the rifle-pits as the Americans came on in their final rush. Then I stopped my men, for fear they should injure their comrades, and called to them to charge the next line of trenches on the hills in our front, from which we had been undergoing a good deal of punishment. "Thinking that the men would all come I jumped over the wire fence in front of us, and started at the double; but as a matter of fact, the troopers were so excited, what with shooting and being shot, and shouting and cheering, that they did not hear or did not heed me; and after running about a hundred yards, I found I had only five men along with me." (One of these was mor- tally wounded and another shot in the leg.) "There was no use going on with the remaining three men, and I bade them stay where they were while I went back and brought up the rest of the brigade. . . They cheerfully nodded and sat down in the grass, firing back at the line of trenches from which the Spaniards were shooting at them. "Meanwhile, I ran back, jumped over the wire fence, and went over the crest of the hill, filled with anger against the troopers, and especially those of my own regiment, for not having accompanied me. They, of course, were quite innocent of wrong-doing; and even while I taunted them bitterly for not having followed me, it was all I could do not to smile at the look of inquiry and surprise that came over their faces, while they cried out: 10 146 THEODORE ROOSEVELT "We didn't hear you — we didn't see you go, Colonel; lead on, now, we'll sure follow you." Back they went, up San Juan Hill, the regulars, white and black, mixed with the Rough Riders. The Rough Riders accepted the colored regulars with hearty good will, and were willing, in their own phrase, "to drink out of the same canteen." The day's losses were heavy. Out of less than five hundred Rough Riders engaged, eighty-nine were killed or wounded, the greatest loss of any regiment in the cavalry division engaged. This was the final engagement of the war. A fortnight later Santiago surrendered, and the army settled down to await further orders from Washington. The health of the troops was poor, and they were ravished by dysentery and malaria. The W T ar Department apparently took no interest in the situation, and could not be persuaded to issue the necessary orders for the return of the army to the United States. At last, General Shafter called a council of his division and brigade commanders and his chief medical officers. Roosevelt, who had been made commander of his brigade, attended the conference. All agreed that an authorita- tive publication should be made which would compel action by the War Department before it was too late. The officers of the regular army were afraid to incur the hostility of their superiors at Washington, and therefore persuaded Roosevelt to make the necessary statement. This he did, putting it in the form of a letter to Shafter. When he handed the letter to Shafter, the General refused to take it, but passed it on to the correspondent of the Associated Press, who was present. At the same time, General Ames made a statement to the correspondent, COLONEL OF THE ROUGH RIDERS 147 and General Wood wrote a round-robin letter addressed to General Shafter, in which Roosevelt and others joined, setting forth the precarious situation of the army. As a result of these representations, the necessary orders were finally issued, and the army began its home- ward journey. The Rough Riders debarked at Montauk Point, at the extreme eastern end of Long Island. The newspapers reported at the time that when the vessel neared the wharf, the Colonel was observed leaning over the stern. Some one on the wharf called to him, inquiring whether he had had a good time. "Yes," he shouted back, "we had a bully fight." True or not, the story is characteristic. CHAPTER X Governor of New York NO sooner had Roosevelt landed at Montauk Point, than he became the center of political interest. The situation of the Republican party in New York was at this time critical in the extreme. In the 1897 mayoralty contest in New York City, United States Senator Thomas C. Piatt's stalwarts had broken with the independents, and as a result the Democrats had not only elected their candidate for mayor but had also carried the state by a majority of 61,000. In the coming campaign for Governor, Governor Black was considered a weak candidate for re-election. During his administra- tion the control of the state canals had given rise to serious scandals, which afforded excellent campaign material for the Democrats. The Republicans faced defeat unless they could find a nominee who would be acceptable not only to the party leaders but also to the independents. Piatt was at this time the undisputed leader of the Republican party in New York State. He had been active in the organization for twenty-five years and he owned it, lock, stock and barrel. He was reluctant to endorse Roosevelt for the nomination, because Roosevelt was not the type of Republican to whom he was accustomed to give orders. But a desperate situation demanded a desperate remedy, and repeated suggestions from local leaders indicated that Roosevelt was the only man who might conceivably pull the party through. In this state of affairs Lemuel E. Quigg, an old friend (148) SLO p P 3» P» 75 — C ^ O ?a 3 2 i" 3 P. a 30? O C+ C+ tfl r p*p"„. to cd a> o 2 "a- *i t at I large U w p- P &. •o &g! » EP° ,-> O a r+P <_a'p p'< c+ TO I- 1 TO £ 3- 3' 3 _ 2. - 1 w a ^ « £l to a ^^-3 re o C re 3*3 ? § 8 2. "■* ri- o ^ 3 p«B\2 ^3 si ^3 3 &n C re 3 P-w. — re en 3-' 3 S-3 re 2 ^3" to p re p O c^3 w 1 1 |_> c+ re o re 5- > 2 >*■ 3 O 3 a* -, 3.p p r^ P* HH re ?&•» g 3 Q o S>3r^3 nj c re ^ p hh w w to 3 o 2 a re p a TO O 3* rT 3 p D 3 2 :^a 3. a P 3 3 ,rt> i-nT) MP U e re r+ P 3 2 re 3 < (a g ^ re to P> 3"~a O p 3 J5 p "> 3 2 - 5 ' Q •O u < Crq > ll^o £ 1 f z SI re 3 re 3 T3 « E, r ' 3 p 3 ~o§ P &■ a >-, en P» 3-3.o^2 re m ~ 3-8 ?re 3 3. 3, B. E ^ — • 3 3*3 J TO ft ». a. - 1 re a W ~to n- 1 HIS LAST GREAT SERVICE 467 should first be retained in this country to train troops, and should subsequently command any expedition which might be sent to Europe. After a final refusal by Baker, Congress passed the Draft Act in which they authorized the President to accept volunteer troops of the kind which Roosevelt was anxious to raise. Thereupon he telegraphed to the President on May 18th asking for permission to raise two divisions for immediate service at the front and announcing himself ready to raise four divisions if the President should so direct. Wilson's answ T er to this was a public statement in which he explained that the plan was rejected for purely military reasons. He also sent Roosevelt a telegram, in which he stated that his conclusions "were based entirely upon imperative considerations of public policy and not upon personal or private choice." There was nothing to do but to give up the idea entirely and to release the 300,000 and more men who had volunteered for service. All of the volunteers were men who would have been exempt from draft, and included such men as Seth Bullock, Henry L. Stimson, Taft's Secretary of War, James R. Garfield and Raymond Robbins. Roosevelt issued a statement addressed to all his volun- teers, in which he deplored their inability to go together and in which he emphatically and indignantly repudiated the suggestion that any motives of personal or political advantage had actuated him. Thus he failed to achieve his heart's desire. Although he was represented in the fighting forces by his four sons, the youngest of whom gave his life for his country, he could not be content with this kind of vicarious sacrifice. There is no doubt that the moral effect would have been tremendous had he been permitted to carry out his plan. 468 THEODORE ROOSEVELT His personal popularity, not only in this country but in Great Britain and France, coupled with the addition of his men to the fighting line long before any American soldiers, other than the regulars, could be placed there, would have been a mighty inspiration to the morale of the hard-pressed Allies. But if he were to be denied the service which he most craved, he was still determined to do all that he could behind the lines. His insistent desire to take troops immediately to the front helped to impress upon the American people the vital necessity of getting soldiers to Europe without the loss of a day. He was the Ad- ministration's most caustic critic if slackness or incom- petency appeared. He was boiling with impatience to see the day when an American army worthy of the name should face the Germans. Rhetoric in place of action stung him to madness. On June 7th, the Secretary of War stated in the Official Bulletin that there was "difficulty, disorder and confusion in getting things started, but it is a happy confusion. I delight in the fact that when we entered this war we were not, like our adversary, ready for it, anxious for it, prepared for it and inviting it. Accustomed to peace, we were not ready." We can well imagine what impression these words made upon Roosevelt's mind. Early in September, in commenting upon this statement, Roosevelt pointed to the deliberate failure to make any preparations until the actual formal declaration of war on April 6th, to the long-drawn squabble between the advocates of steel and wooden ships, and above all to the imperative necessity of throwing every human and material resource immediately into the military preparations before it should be too late. Underwood & Underwood, N. Y. Western Newspaper Union, Commitli Public Information, Arm t saociation. THE FOUR SOLDIER SONS OF COLONEL ROOSEVELT Upper left: Lieutenant-Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., U. S. A. Upper right: Captain Archibald Roosevelt, U. S. A. Lower left: Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt, U. S. A. (killed in aerial battle, July 17, 1918). Lower right: Captain Kermit Roosevelt, British Army, Mesopotamian Expedition. HIS LAST GREAT SERVICE 469 Early in October of 1917, the Secretary of War was authoritatively quoted in the press as having said, "We are well on the way to the battlefront." At that time we had only reached the battlefront with one division, although a state of war had actually, if not officially, existed since January 31st. "For comparison with this kind of military activity," said Roosevelt, "we must go back to the days of Tiglath Pileser, Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh. The United States should adopt the stand- ards of speed in war which belong to the twentieth century A. D.; we should not be content and still less boast about standards which were obsolete in the seven- teenth century B. C." One newspaper referred to the country's development into "a powerful fighting machine." "To speak of a powerful fighting machine," said Roosevelt, "which after ten months is not ready to do any fighting, is a ludicrous contradiction in terms." Again and again in addresses throughout the country, in magazine articles and in conversation with his friends, he pointed out the differ- ence between words and action. He had no sympathy with that type of mind which, if it must strike, thinks to accomplish its end by striking softly. When war came he believed that all other considerations should give way, and that the last ounce of the nation's strength should be spent, if necessary, on the righteous cause which she had espoused. Not only his friends, but many who had been estranged from him by the political heart-burnings of the past few years, responded to his call. Before the war was for us many months old, he was the recog- nized leader of those who really desired the use of all our resources without reservation. In February, 1918, he underwent a painful minor 470 THEODORE ROOSEVELT operation at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. The operation was successful, but mastoiditis developed in his left ear at the same time, and for a few hours his condition was critical. For a little over a month he stayed at the hospital gradually recuperating and late in the winter was able to go back again to Oyster Bay. In the last week of March he spoke before the Republican State Convention at Portland, Maine, and after that from time to time made addresses urging a tireless prosecution of the war. But his health was not what it had been and the news of his son Quentin's death, which occurred July 17, 1918, was a very serious blow. He bravely went to the New York Republican State Convention in Saratoga the day after he received the news of his loss, but his heart was sore within him. Toward the end of October he spoke in Carnegie Hall in behalf of Governor Whitman and displayed his old fire and vigor. A few days later he made his last public appearance at a meeting in honor of a negro hospital unit. Then, on the very day of the armistice, inflammatory rheumatism compelled him to go back again to the Roosevelt Hospital. Happily he was released in time to spend his last Christmas at home with all the children and grandchildren who were able to come to Oyster Bay. After a happy holiday together they parted, and Colonel and Mrs. Roosevelt were left together. January 5th was spent in reading and writing at his home. He had been reviewing a book on pheasants by Beebe, the naturalist, and wrote the author a letter in regard to the details of the work. In the evening the American Defense Society held a concert in New York, which Roosevelt, as honorary president of the society, had been asked to attend. He was unable to go and so Underwood & Underwood, A'. Y. THE LAST PUBLIC APPEARANCE Photograph taken at the last public appearance of Colonel Theodore R< » ise- velt just before the serious illness which resulted in his death. The Colonel, clearly showing the effects of age and his recent bereavement, is wearing a mourn- ing band in memory of his son, Quentin, killed in an airplane battle over the German lines in July, 1918. HIS LAST GREAT SERVICE 471 he sent a message — his last message to the American people. His brief letter ended with these words which epitomize his life's creed: "We have room for but one soul loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people." He spent that evening with his family and went to bed at eleven o'clock. When he was ready for sleep he turned to his personal attendant, James Amos, and said, "Put out the light, please." They were the last words he was heard to utter. Shortly after four o'clock the next morning Amos, who was sleeping in the next room, noticed that the Colonel's breathing was unnatural. He hurried to fetch the trained nurse who was sleeping nearby, but when they reached Roosevelt's bedside they found that a clot of blood, settling upon a vital spot, had brought him peaceful death in sleep. His burial without pomp or circumstance was what he wished it to be. He and Mrs. Roosevelt had chosen a beautiful spot on a knoll looking over Long Island Sound for their last resting place. On January 8th a few members of the family gathered at his house and joined in a brief service of prayer. All of his children were there except Theodore and Kermit, who were fighting in Europe. The coffin was borne from the house draped with the Rough Riders' flags which he had loved so well, and was carried to the village of Oyster Bay. There, in the little Episcopal church where he and his family had worshipped for many years, were gathered the country's representatives and many of those who had been nearest to him in life. There was no music, no eulogy, only the time-honored words of prayer and consolation. As they left the church and came out upon the quiet spot where he was to lie, there stretched before them the 472 THEODORE ROOSEVELT waters of the Sound, the woods and hills which he had roamed since boyhood, the trees which had grown with him — all the things of nature which he had loved so dearly all his life. It was a fitting place to leave him with a last farewell.' We who loved and trusted him will mourn his loss not only because our friend is gone, but because a great leader has been taken from us in the time of need. But we will rejoice for him that he was spared the further pain of severed friendships. Had he lived, he would surely have fought new battles and these might have opened again the wounds of six years before. He died when many of those wounds had been healed, and when many were friends again who for a time had been accounted foes. For four years he had labored for America in the time of her greatest danger, and had surrendered his own preferment for the common good. He reaped his reward; for before the end, the voice of faction had been stilled, and beside his grave constant friend and former foe alike united to do him honor. CHRONOLOGY (The numbers in parentheses indicate pages of the book.) 1858, October 27. Born in New York City (27). 1880, June 30. Graduated from Harvard University (51). October 27. Married Alice Hathaway Lee (51). 1881, November 8. Elected to New York Legislature (56). 1884, February 14. Death of his first wife (69). 1886, November 2. Defeated for Mayor of New York (84). December 2. Married Edith Kermit Carow (193). 1889, May 7. Appointed United States Civil Service Commis- sioner (84). 1895, May 6. Appointed New York Police Commissioner (101). June 30. Sunday closing first enforced in New York (109). 1897, April 6. Nominated Assistant Secretary of the Navy (119). 1898, Februarv 25. Cable to Admiral Dewey (132). May 6* Appointed Lieutenant-Colonel First Volunteer Cavalry (135). June 24. Battle of Las Guasimas (143). July 1. Battle of San Juan Hill (144). November 8. Elected Governor (152). 1899, January 2. Inaugurated as Governor (154). May 26. Signs Ford Franchise Bill (160). 1900, June 21. Receives Republican Nomination for Vice-President (166). November 6. Elected Vice-President (168). 1901, March 4. Takes office as Vice-President (168). September 14. Succeeds McKinley as President (171). 1902, June 17. Reclamation Act (289). June 28. Isthmian Canal Act (219). October 15. Coal Strike Settled (203). December 31. Settlement of Venezuela matter (211). 1903, January 24. Alaskan Boundary Matter referred to Com- mission (214). February 14. Department of Commerce and Labor Act (274J. February 19. Elkins Rebate Act (245). November 6. Recognition of Panama (225). November 18. Convention with Panama (225). December 17. Reciprocity Treaty with Cuba (210). 1904, February 23. Treaty with Panama ratified by Senate (227). June 23. Receives Republican nomination for President (230). November 8. Elected President (233). 1905, February 1. Act Creating U. S. Forest Service (292). March 4. Inaugurated as President (235). (473) 474 CHRONOLOGY 1905, June 8. Notes to Japan and Russia (238). August 5. Meeting of Peace Delegates (239). September 5. Signing of Russo-Japanese Treaty (241). 1906, June 11. Forest-Homestead Act (291). June 29. Hepburn Rate Act (247). June 29. Act authorizing lock canal at Panama (227). June 30. Food and Drugs Act (247). 1907, February 25. Convention with Santo Domingo ratified by Senate (213). March 14. Appoints Inland Waterways Commission (296). November 4. Tennessee Coal and Iron Conference (281). December 16. Fleet starts around the world (267). 1908, April 22. Employers' Liability Act (247). 1909, February 22. Fleet returns (272). March 4. Presidential term expires (301). March 23. Sails for Africa (301). April 22. Starts into the African wilderness (302). 1910, March 14. Arrives at Khartoum (311). June 1. Speech at Guildhall, London (317). June 18. Returns to New York (317). August 31. Ossawatomie speech (329). 1912, February 10. Letter from the seven Governors (334-5). February 21. Columbus, Ohio, speech (338). February 25. Announces candidacy for nomination (335). March 20. Carnegie Hall speech (344). June 15. Goes to Chicago (355). June 22. His supporters at Convention leave Republican Party (360). August 7. Nominated by Progressive Party (377). October 14. Shot at Milwaukee by John Schrank (380). November 5. Defeated by Woodrow Wilson (382). 1913, May 31. Verdict in Newett Libel Case (419). October 14. Leaves for South America (401). 1914, February 27. Starts down the River of Doubt (408). April 15. Arrives at civilization again (413). May 19. Returns to New York (415). June 30. Address at Pittsburgh (415). 1915, May 7. Statement on Lusitania sinking (462). May 22. Verdict in Barnes Libel Case (420). August 25. Address at Plattsburgh (463). 1916, June 10. Second nomination by Progressives (425). June 26. Withdraws to support Hughes (427). 1917, February 2. Offers Volunteer Division (466). May 21. Disbands Volunteer Division (467). 1919, January 6. Death (471). INDEX Abbott, Edwin H., 371. Abbott, Lawrence F., 460. Abbott, Lyman, 417. Addams, Miss Jane, 314. 370, 377. Africa, Hunting Trip in (Chapter XX), 301. Ahlwardt (Anti- Jewish Preacher), 108 Alaskan Boundary question, 214. Aldrich, Senator, 321, 326. Alger. Russell A., 134. American Sugar Refining Co., Fraud of, 280 et seq. American Tobacco Company, 275. Amos. James, 471. Andrews, Avery D., 101, 154. Andrews, Justice, 420. Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, 198 et seq. Appointments, Theory and Practice as to, 254 et seq. Arthur, Chester A.. 85, 119, 173, 229. Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Chapter VIII), 119 et seq. Bacon, Robert. 46, 179. 243. 255. Bacon, Theodore, 150. Baer, George F., 201. Baker, Newton D., 466. Ballinger, Richard A., 325. 328. Barnes, William, Jr., 419. Bayard, Senator, 50. Beebe, Capt. William, 393. Beecher, Henry Ward, 372. Beirut, Incident Relative to Vice Consul, 213 et seq. Belgium, Position in Regard to Germany's Invasion, 459 et seq. Bell, John G., 392. Beveridge, Albert W., 371. Birth, 27. Black, Governor, 148, 150. Black Horse Cavalry, 61. Blaine, James G., 66, 84, 217. 320. Bonaparte, Charles J.. 198, 257. Books: Account and Criticisms of (Chapter XXIII), 432. Bourke, Edward J., 116. Boutros, Premier, 312. Brandeis, Louis D., 328. Brazil, Trip Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 405 et seq. Bridges, Robert. 434. Bristow, Joseph L., 198. Brookfield, William, 100. Brownson, Capt. W. H., 123. Brownson, Rear Admiral, 266. Brownsville, Affair at, 248. Bryan, William J.. 168, 231, 320. Bryce, James, 258. Bulloch, Anna, 33. Bulloch, Capt. James D., 28. Bulloch, Irvine Stephens, 29. Bullock, Seth, 78, 467. Bunau-Varilla, M. Philippe, 224 et seq. Burroughs, John, 309. Cabinet. Changes in, 204 et seq., 256 et seq. Cairo, Speech at, 311. Cajazeira, Dr., 407. Campbell, ex-Governor, 112. Canal, The Panama (Chapter XIV), 216 et seq. Canal, New York Canal Investigation, 157 et seq. Cannon, Representative, 321. Capron, Captain Allyn, 143. Carow, Edith K. (Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt), 33, 193. Cherrie, George K.. 401, 407, 413. Childhood (Chapter II), 25 et seq. Citizens' Union Party, 149, 150. Civil Service Commissioner, Work as (Chapter VI), 84. Civil Service Law of New York. Work for. 57. Civil Service, White Civil Service Act of New York. 158. Civil War. 28, 32. Clark, Edward E., 204. Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 217. Cleveland, Grover, 62, 67, 85, 91, 95, 202, 218 Coal Strike of 1902, 198 et seq. Colored Persons, Appointment to Federal Office, 194 et seq. Colored Persons, Attitude Towards Dele- gates in Progressive Convention, 373. Commissions, Work as Police Com- missioner (Chapter VII), 98 et seq. Conrad, Holmes, 198. Conservation of Natural Resources (Chapter XIX), 288 et seq. (475) 476 INDEX Conventions. See Political Conventions. Corporations, Attitude Towards, 274 et seq. Cortelyou, George B., 169, 172, 201, 206. 231, 232, 256. Costello, Michael, 57, 63, 64, 65. Cowles, Mrs. Wm. S. See Roosevelt, Anna. Cox, Mrs. Minnie, 19*7. Crook, Colonel W. H., 178, 187, 436. Croker, Richard, 98, 151, 152. Crum, William D., 196. Cuba, Intervention, 1906, 243. Cuba, Relations With, During First Term, 207 et seq. Cummins, Senator, 346. Cuninghame, R. J., 301. 307, 308. Curtis, General, 57. Cutler, Arthur H., 37, 40. Czar of Russia, 314. de Barros, Senhor, 404. De Lesseps, 217. Democratic Conventions. See Political Conventions, de Mores, Marquis, 75. Depew, Chauncey M., 233. Derby, Mrs. Richard. See Roosevelt, Ethel. Dewey, Admiral George, 131, 211. Dewey, Roosevelt's Telegram to, 182. Dolliver, Senator, 163, 166. Dow, William, 39. 46, 69. Edmunds, Senator, 66. Edward, King, 237, 314 et seq. Elkhorn Ranch (Chapter V), 68. Elkins Act, 244 et seq. Emery, Rear Admiral William H., 268. Employers' Liability Act, 247. Europe, Journey Through, 1910, 312 et seq. European Addresses, 313 et seq. European Trips, 34, 42, 53. Evans, Rear Admiral Robley D., 127, 266, 267. Ferris, J. A., 78. Ferris, S. N., 78. Fiala, Anthony, 401. Fish, Sergeant Hamilton, Jr., 143. Flinn, William, 348, 349, 378. Food and Drugs Act, 247 el seq. Foraker, Senator, 230. Ford Franchise Bill, 158. Ford, John, 158. Forest Homestead Act, 293. Forest Transfer Act, 291. Franchise Taxation, Ford Franchise Bill. 158 et seq. Gage, Lyman J., 205. Garfield, James R., 50, 119, 173, 179, 257, 325, 365, 378. 418, 425, 427, 467. Garrison, Lindley, 463. Gaynor, Mayor, 318. George, Henry, 84. Germany, Venezuelan Incident, 210 et seq. Glavis, 327. Glynn, Martin H., 460. Godkin, Lawrence, 100. Goethals, Colonel George W., 227. Goff, John, 80. Gomez, General, 244. Gorgas, Dr., 227. Gorman, Senator, 92, 125. Governor of New York, Term as (Chapter X), 148. Grant, Col. Frederick D., 101. Gray, Judge George, 204. Greene, General Francis V., 157. Grenell, Judson, 94. Grey, Earl, 315. Haakon, King, 313. Hadley, Governor, 357, 359, 366. 367. Hague Tribunal, 214, 263. Hale, Senator, 321. Hampden, John, Miniature, 237. Hanna, Mark, 163, 165, 199, 229. Harriman, E. H., 232, 233. Harrison, President William H., 84, 91, 95, 173. Hart, Albert Bushnell, 46. Harvard University, 46 et seq. Hawley, Representative, 321. Hay, John, 151, 164, 168, 176, 210, 218. 233, 236, 250, 257. Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, 218. Hay-Herran Treaty, 219. Hayes, President, 217. Hazel, Judge John R., 171. Heller, Edmund, 301. Hendricks, Francis, 85, 155. Hepburn, Representative, 186. Hepburn Rate Act, 245 et seq. Herran, Dr., 219, 220. Hess, Jacob, 56. Hewitt, Abram S., 84. Hill, Prof. Adams Sherman, 50. Hill, Senator David B., 114. Hinman, Harvey D., 419. Hitchcock, Ethan Allen, 171. Hobart, Garrett A., 163. Holleben, Dr. (German Ambassador), 210. INDEX 477 Howe, Walter, 57. Hughes, Charles E., 422, 425, 427. Humphrey, Captain, 224. Hunt, Isaac, 57. Inaugural Address, 235 et seq. Inauguration, March 4, 1905, 235. Industrial Workers of the World. 285. Ingersoll, Col. Robert G., 66. Initiative, Position on, 339. Inland Waterways Commission, 297. Insurance, Appointment of New York State Superintendent of, 155 et seq. Ireland, Archbishop, 199. Jackson, Lieutenant Governor, 301. Japan, Treaty of Portsmouth, 238 et seq. Japanese, Exclusion from Schools, 241 et seq. Johnson, Sir Harry, 389. Johnson, Hiram W., 360, 365, 378, 416. Johnston, George D., 86. Jones, Thomas G., 194. Joseph, Archduke, 313. Joseph, Emperor Francis, 313. Jusserand, M., 179. Kaiser, Wilhelm, 314. Kaneko, Baron, 239. Kellv, John, 110. Kelly, Peter, 57. Kettle Hill, 144. Khartoum, Arrival at, 311. 312, 328. Kipling, Rudyard, 175. Kirchwey, Dean George W., 374. Knox, Attorney-General Philander C, 201, 206. Koester, George E., 194. Komura, Baron, 240. Kossuth, Francis, 313. Labor, Attitude Towards, 283 et seq. La Follette, Senator. 246, 333. 346, 347. Lambert. Dr. Alexander, 418 Land Frauds, 278 et seq. Las Guasimas, Battle of, 143. Lee Alice Hathaway (Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt), 50, 51, 69. Legal Studies, 53. Leishman, Ambassador, 312. Leupp, Francis E., 121, 129, 195. Lexow Committee, 99. Libel Suits, Barnes vs. Roosevelt, 419 et seq. Libel Suits, Roosevelt w. Newett, 417 et seq. Lincoln. Abraham, 319, 330. 338. 339. Lindsey, Judge Ben B., 378. Llewellyn, Major, 79. Lodge, Senator, 47, 93, 94. Loeb. William. Jr., 170, 172, 418. Logan, John A., 66. Long. John, 46. Long, John D., Secretary of Navy, 127, 131. 132, 133. 163, 171, 205. Longworth, Nicholas, 184. Longworth, Mrs. Nicholas. See Roose- velt. Alice. Loring. J. Alden. 301. Lusitania, Position in Regard to Sinking of, 461. Lyman, Charles, 86. Lyra, Lieutenant, 407. 409, 413. Magee, Christopher, 349. Magelssen, Consul at Beirut, 213. Magoon, Charles E., 244. Mahan, Admiral, 264. Maine, Sinking of the, 127. Maine, Visits to, 46. Maroquin, Vice-President, 219, 220. Martin, Elbert, 380. Marques, Senhor, 405. Marriage, 51, 193. McCarthy, Charles H., 374. McClain, Penrose A., 256. McCoach. William, 256. McCormick, Vance C, 441. McKinley. President William. 120, 125. 166, 168, 169, 172. McKinley, William, Assassination of, 169 et seq. McMullen, Prof., 40. Mearns, Lieutenant-Colonel Edgar A., 301. Merriam. Dr. C. Hart, 389, 395. Merrifield, W. J., 78. Metcalf. Victor H.. 206. 257. Meyer, George. 71, 78. Meyer, George Von L.. 240, 257. Milburn. John G., 171. Miller, Leo E.„ 401. 414. Minot, Henry D., 392. Minuit, Peter, 25. Mitchell. John, 199. 201. Mitchell. Lex N.. 358. Monroe Doctrine, Treaty with Santo Domingo, 212 et seq. Moody, William H., 205, 206. Moore, Alexander P., 348. Morgan. J. Pierpont, 200, 203. Morley, John, 175. Morton. Paul. 206, 245. MUller, Lauro, 402. Murphy, Lieutenant, 224. 478 INDEX Murray, Joseph, 56. Murray, Lawrence, 179. Natural History, Studies in, 42, 44, 193. Naturalist, Position and Work as (Chapter XXV), 384 et seq. Navy, Services for, as President (Chapter XVII.), 259. Navy, Trip of Fleet Around World, 265 et seq. Navy, Work as Assistant Secretary (Chapter VIII), 119 et seq. Negroes, Appointment to Federal Office, 194 et seq. Negroes, Attitude Towards Delegates in Progressive Convention, 373. Nevada, Federal Troops Sent to, 287. New Nationalism, Address on, 330. New York Legislature, Member of (Chapter IV), 52. Newberry, Truman II., 257. Newbold, Thomas, 57. Newett, George A., 417, 418. New Grenada Treaty, 217. Nobel Prize Committee, Speech to, 313. Nobel Peace Prize, 241. North American Conservation Con- ference, 297. Northern Securities Company, 276. Odell, Benjamin B., 163, 165, 233. Ohio Constitutional Convention, Address Before. 338 et seq. O'Laughlin, John Callan, 328. Orchestra Hall, Nomination for President at, 364 Ossawatomie, Speech at, 330. Palisades Interstate Park, 160. Palroa, President, 243. Panama Canal (Chapter XIV), 216 et seq. Parker, Judge Alton B., 231 et seq. Parker, Andrew D., 101. Parker, Edward W., 204. Parker, John M., 378, 428. Tartrid^e, John N., 154. Payn, Louis F., 155. Payne, Henry C, 197, 205, 207. Payne Tariff Bill, 326. Pease, Sir Alfred, 303. Pepper, George Wharton, 328. Perkins, George W., 423. Pinchot, Gifford. 178, 179, 251, 327, 328. 370, 373, 378, 415, 418, 441. Pinchot-Glavis-Builinger Controversy, 827 et seq. Pious Fund of the Californias, 214. Piatt, Senator, 148, 153. 156, 158, 162, 165, 207, 255, 419. Plimley, William, 255. Police Commissioner, Work as (Chapter VII), 98 et seq. Political Campaigns: 1884, 66, 67. 1898, for Governor of New York, 148 et seq. 1886, for Mayor of New York, 84. 1916, for Mr. Justice Hughes, 428 et seq. 1904. for President (Chapter XV). 229 et seq. 1912, for President, 378 et seq. 1914, for Progressive Party candi- dates, 415 et seq. Reason for becoming candidate for Republican nomination, 1912, 333 et seq. For the Republican nomination, 1912 (Chapter XXIIL), 346 et seq. Republican nomination, 1916, 420 et seq. 1900, for Vice President, 166 et seq. Political Conventions: Democratic, 1912, 379. Progressive Convention, 1912, 370 et seq. Progressive, 1916, 423 et seq. Republican, 1884, 66. Republican, N. Y. State Convention, 1898. 150. Republican, 1900, 164 et seq. Republican, 1904, 230. Republican, 1908, 323 et seq. Republican, 1912, 354 et seq. Republican, 1916, 422 et seq. Portsmouth, Treaty of, 238 et seq. Portsmouth, N. IL, 240. Post Office Department, Frauds in, 197 et seq. Potter, Bishop, 199. Potter, William, 134. Pound, James H., 417. Preparedness, Position on, 464. Presidency, Life Ir White House (Chap- ter XII.), 175 et seq. Presidency, First Term (Chapter XIII), 194 et seq. Presidency, Second Term (Chapter XVI.), 238 et seq. Presidential Commissions, Contention over, 325. Proctor, John R., 86. INDEX 479 Progressive Movement. Beginning* of (Chapter XXI), 319 et teq. Formation of P rogre ss ive Party (Chapter XXIV), 368 et teq. Ideas on Direct Control of People over Government (Chapter XXII), 336 etteq. Platforms of Progressive Party, 876, 424. 427. Progressive Party after 1912 (Chapter XXVII.), 415. Public Land Commission, 294. Quay. Senator Matthew S., 203, 256, 259. Quigg, Lemuel K., 148. Quincy, Josiah, 46. Ranch Life (Chapter V), 68. Ranquet. M.. 811. Raphael, Otto, 104. Recall of Executive Officers, Position on, 840. Recall of Judges, Position on, 840. Recall of Judicial Decisions, Position on. 841 et seq. Referendum, Position on, 839. Republican Conventions. See Political Conventions. Republican National Committee. 1912, Contests before, 351 et teq. Riis, Jacob A.. 75. 106, 183, 186, 417. River of Doubt, 407 et teq. Robb, Hampden. 57. Robbins, Raymond, 370. 378, 424, 467. Robins, Thomas, 430. 452, 456. Robinson, Mrs. Douglas. See Roosevelt, Corinne. Robinson, Mrs. Douglas; Sketch of Roosevelt's Childhood, 35. Rondon, Colonel. 402, 408, 407, 410, 411, 414. Roosevelt, Alice L., 184. Roosevelt, Anna (Mrs. William S. Cowles), 88. Roosevelt, Archibald B., 184 et seq. Roosevelt, Cornelius Van Schaack. 26, 48. Roosevelt, Corrinne (Mrs. Douglas Rob- inson), 33, 35. 335. Roosevelt, Elliott. 33, 35. 38. 43. Roosevelt. Ethel (Mrs. Richard Derby). 184 311 Roose'velt. Kermit. 184. 801. 807. 311. 401, 407. 408. 418. 415. 471. Roosevelt, Klaes Martensen Van, 25. Roosevelt, Quentin, 184 et teq. Roosevelt, Robert B., 84. Roosevelt, Mrs. Theo. (Alice Lee Hath- away), 69. Roosevelt. Mrs. Theo. (Edith Kermit Carow). 182, 188, 811, 854. 856. 881. 426. 444, 449, 470, 471. Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr.. 186, 471. Roosevelt. Theodore, Sr.. 26 et teq. SO, 44, 52. Roosevelt, Mrs. Theo., Sr., 81 et eeq., 69. Roosevelt, W. Emlen. 450. Root, Elihu. 164. 171, 208, 206, 280, 257, 858. 460. Rosen, Baron, 239. Rosewater, Victor, 857, 861. Rough Riders (Chapter IX). 134 et teq. Rowell, Chester A.. 373, 375. Russia, Treaty of Portsmouth, 238 et teq. Russo-Japanese Treaty, 313. Sagamore Hill. Life at (Chapter XXIX). 441. San Juan Hill, Battle of, 144 et teq. Santo Domingo, Treaty with, 212 et teq. Schiff, Jacob H., 112. Schofield. Major-General, 203. Schrank. John. 381. Schurz. Carl, 112. Secretary of the Navy, Work as (Chapter VIII.). 119* wo. Selous, Frederick Courteney, SOL Sewall, William, 39. 46. 69. Shafter, General, 146. Shaw. Albert. 222. 417. Shaw, Leslie M.. 205. Sheldon. George R., 255. Sherman Anti-Trust Act. 274 et teq. Sherman. Vice-President, 238. Shidy Case. 89. Sigg. Jacob, 401, 405, 407. Sloan, James. 178. Smith, Charles Emory, 171, 205. Smith, Herbert Knox, 179. Sorbonne Address. 313. South American Trip (Chapter XXIV), 401. Southern Appointments. Policy as to. 194 et teq. Spanish War (Chapter IX). 1S4 et teq. Sperry. C. S.. 268, 270. Sprague, Henry, 57. Standard Oil Company, 245. Stewart, General Daniel, 32. Stimson, Henry L., 467. Stone, Governor, 200. Stone. Witmer. 384, S85. 480 INDEX Straus. Oscar S„ 258. Strung, William L., 100. 101, 100. Sullivan. John L., 189. Taft, William H., 206, 243. 257, 301, 320, 325, 329, 334. 347, 351. Takahira, Mr., 240. Tardieu, Andre, 182. Tarlton, Leslie, 301, 306. Tenement House Investigation, N. Y. City, 100. Tennessee Coal & Iron Co., 281 et $eq. Thayer, William R., 53, 161. Thomas, C. M., 268. Thompson, Hugh S., 86. Tillman, Senator, 246. Treaty, Cuban Reciprocity, 207 et teq. Treaty, Portsmouth, 238. Treaty, with Republic of Panama, 225. Trusts, Attitude Towards, 274 et $eq. United Mine Workers of America, 199. United States Steel Corporation, 275. van Duzer, Jonas. 57. von Sternberg, Baron Speck. 161. Van Valkenburg, E. A., 348. Van Wyck, Augustus, 150. Vatican Incident, 312. Venezuela. German Incident, 210 et seq. Vice President (Chapter IX), 168 et teq. Walker. Admiral. 219. Ward. Mn. Humphrey, 315. Waring, Colonel George E., 100. Warner, Mrs. Langdon, 451. Warren, Herbert, 237. Washington, Booker T., 195. Watkins. Thomas II., 204. Welch, Thomas, 57. Western Federation of Miners, 285. Wheeler, Everett P., 100. Wheeler, General "Fighting Joe". 142. White. Henry. 164. * White House, Roosevelt's Life in (Chapter XII). 175. White, Dr. J. William, 384. Whitman, Governor, 470. Wileo*. Ansley. 171. Willis. John, 80. Wilson, General John M., 204. Wilson, Woodrow, 379. Wingatc, Sir Reginald. 311. Witte, Sergius, 240. Wood, Leonard. 134, 135, 142, 179, 207. 418, 463. Woodruff, Timothy L., 164. Woody, Tazewell, 80. World War, Services in, 459. Wright, Carroll D., 201. Wright. Luke E., 258. Wynne, Robert J., 207. Young, General S. M. B.. 143. Zahm, Father, 401, 407.