UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES THEODORE ROOSEVELT THE CITIZEN BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM CHILDREN OF THE TENEMENTS THEODORE ROOSEVELT THE CITIZEN 2.3^/3 JACOB "A. mis AUTHOR OP "THE MAKING OP AN AMERICAN' "HOW THB OTHER HAW LIVES," BTC. NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1912 All rights reserved COPYMGHT 1903, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPAWY COPYRIGHT 1904, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY PUBLISHED MARCH, 1904 REPRINTED MARCH, 1904 SPECIAL EDITION JUNE, 1904 REPRINTED JANUARY, 1907 REPRINTED MAY, 1907 REPRINTED MARCH, 19! 2 Nortooob \9rnz : Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mais., U.S.A. To the Young Men of America CONTENTS y PAOB I. Boyhood Ideals 1 II. What He Got Out of College . 20 in. Early Lessons in Politics . . 45 iv. The Horse and the Gun Have Their Day 71 v. The Fair Play Department . . 97 vi. In Mulberry Street . . . .127 vn. The Clash of War .... 155 vin. Roosevelt and His Men . . .177 ix. Ruling by the Ten Commandments 201 x. The Summons on Mount Marcy . 231 Xi. What He Is Like Himself . . 251 xn. The Despair of Politicians . . 279 xin. At Home and at Play . . . 30JL, xiv. Children Trust Him .... 339 xv. The President's Policies . . . 363 xvi. A Young Men's Hero . . . 393 CONTENTS PAGE xvii. Roosevelt as a Speaker and Writer 411 xvin. Theodore Roosevelt's Father . 431 The Roosevelt Chronology . . 451 Books by Theodore Roosevelt . 455 Index . . 465 Nl I BOYHOOD IDEALS BOYHOOD IDEALS 2.3 2L> a A~ L summer I have been fighting for leeway to sit down and write about Theodore Roosevelt, and glad am I that I have come to it at last. For there is no- thing I know of that I would rather. But let us have a clear understanding about it. I am not going to write a " life " of him. I have seen it said in print that that was my intention. Well, it was. That was the shape it took in my mind at the start ; but not for long. Perhaps one of the kindest things the years do for us as they pass is to show us what things we can not do. In that way they have been very kind to me. When I was twenty, there was nothing I could not do. Now I am glad that there are stronger and fitter hands than mine to do many things I had set my heart on. They must do this, then. [3] THEODORE ROOSEVELT And, besides, it is both too early and too late for a life of Theodore Roosevelt. Too late for the mere formal details of his career ; every- body knows them. Much too early to tell the whole story of what that strong, brave life will mean to the American people, his people of whom he is so proud, when the story is all told. No one can know him and believe in the people without feeling sure of that. There remains to me to speak of him as the friend, the man. And this is what I shall do, the more gladly because so may it be my privi- lege to introduce him to some who know him only as the public man, the President, the par- tisan perhaps and a very energetic partisan he is and so really do not know him at all, in the sense which I have in mind. The public man I will follow because he is square, and will do the square thing always, not merely want to do it. With the partisan I will some- times disagree, at least I ought to, for I was before a Democrat and would be one now if the party would get some sense and bar Tam- many out in the cold for its monstrous wicked- ness. 1 ! ^ *ke P res ident I am proud with rea- 1 1 am hound to say that I see no signs of it, and also that I am rather relieved, with Roosevelt to run in another year. [4] BOYHOOD IDEALS son, but the friend I love. And if I can make you see him so, as a friend and a man, I have given you the master-key to him as a statesman as well. You will never need to ask any ques- tions. For still another reason I am glad that it is to be so: I shall be speaking largely to the young whose splendid knight he is, himself yet a young man filled with the high courage and brave ideals that make youth the golden age of the great deeds forever. And I want to show them the man Roosevelt, who through many a fight in which hard blows were dealt never once proved unfaithful to them; who, going forth with a young man's resolve to try to " make things better in this world, even a little better, because he had lived in it," l through fair days and foul, through good report and evil (and of this last there was never a lack), sounded his battle-cry, " Better faithful than famous,"- and won. A hundred times the mercenaries and the spoilsmen whom he fought had him down and " ruined " in the fight. At this moment, as I write, they are rubbing their hands with glee because at last he has undone himself, 1 His speech to the Long Island Bible Society, June 11, 1901. [5] THEODORE ROOSEVELT by bidding organized labor halt where it was wrong. Last winter, when it was right, he " killed himself " when he made capital stop and think. They were false prophets then as they are now. Nothing can ruin Theodore Roosevelt except his proving unfaithful to his own life, and that he will never do. / If I know anything of him, I know this, that he would rather be right than be President any day, and that he will never hesitate in his choice. \ That is the man I would show to our young people just coming into their birthright, and I can think of no better service I could render them. For the lying sneers are thick all about in a world that too often rates success as " what you can make." And yet is its heart sound; for when the appeal is made to it in simple faith for the homely virtues, for the sturdy man- hood, it is never made in vain. This is Theo- dore Roosevelt's message to his day, that honor goes before profit, that the moral is greater than the material, that men are to be trusted if you believe in the good in them ; and though it is an old story, there is none greater. At least there is none we have more need of learn- ing, since the world is ours, such as it is, to fit 16] BOYHOOD IDEALS for the kingdom that is to come, and nowhere is there another plan provided for doing it. So, then, it is understood that I am absolved from routine, from chronology, and from sta- tistics in writing this story. I am to have full leave to " put things in as I think of them," as the critics of my books say I do anyhow. A more absurd charge was never made against any one, it has always seemed to me ; for how can a man put things in when he does n't think of them? I am just to write about Theodore Roosevelt as I know him, of my own know- ledge or through those nearest and dearest to him. And the responsibility will be mine alto- gether. I am not going to consult him, even if he is the President of the United States. For one thing, because, the only time I ever did, awed by his office, he sent the copy back unread with the message that he would read it in print. So, if anything goes wrong, blame me and me only. And now, when I cast around for a starting- point, there rises up before me the picture of a little lad, in stiff white petticoats, with a curl right on top of his head, toiling laboriously along with a big fat volume under his arm, [7] THEODORE ROOSEVELT " David Livingstone's Travels and Researches in South Africa," and demanding of every member of the family to be told what were " the foraging ants " and what they did. It was his sister, now Mrs. Cowles, who at last sat down in exasperation to investigate, that the business of the household might have a chance to proceed, for baby Theodore held it up mercilessly until his thirst for information was slaked. Whereupon it developed that the supposedly grim warriors of the ant-hill were really a blameless tribe " the foregoing ants " in fact. We are none of us infallible. The " foraging ants " are a comfort to me when their discoverer is disposed to laugh at my ee-v.ee lamb that but for my foreign speech should have been a plain ewe. But, then, I dwelt content in the bliss of ignorance. He, explorer in baby petticoats, could not be ap- peased till he found out. I suppose they called him Ted in those days. In my own time I have never found any one to do it who knew him, and the better they knew him the less liable were they to. You can tell for a certainty that a man does not know him when he speaks of him as " Teddy." Not [8] BOYHOOD IDEALS that he frowns upon it ; I do not believe that he has often had the chance. But, somehow, there is no temptation to that kind of familiarity, which does not imply any less affection, but just the reverse. He may call me Jake and I like nothing better. But though I am ten years older than he, he was always Mr. Roosevelt with me. ' His rough-riders might sing of him as Teddy, but to his face they called him Colo- nel, with the mixture of affection and respect that makes troopers go to death as to a dance in the steps of a leader. The Western plains- men quickly forgot the tenderfoot in the man who could shoot and ride though he came out of the East and wore eye-glasses, and who never bragged or bullied but knew his rights and dared maintain them. He w T as Mister Roose- velt there from the second day on the ranch. But in those old days at home he was Ted with the boys, no doubt. For he was a whole boy and got out of it all that was going, after he got it going. He has told me that it took some time, that as a little fellow he was timid, and that when bigger boys came along and bullied him he did not know what to do about it. I have a notion that he quickly [9] THEODORE ROOSEVELT found out and that they did not come back often. . A woman who lived next door to the Roose- velts in East Twentieth Street told me of how, passing in the street, she saw young Theodore hanging out of a second-story window and ran in to tell his mother. " If the Lord," said she, as she made off to catch him, " had not taken care of Theodore, he would have been killed long ago." In after years the Governor of New York told me, with a reminiscent gleam in his eye, how his boy, the third Theodore in line, had " swarmed down " the leader of the Executive Mansion to go and hear the election returns, rather than go out through the door. There was no frightened neighbor to betray his ex- ploit then, for it was dark, which made it all the more exciting. It was the Governor him- self who caught him. The evidence is, I think, that the Theodores were cut out pretty much on the same pattern. Of that happy childhood's home, with the beautiful mother of blessed memory and the father who rode and played with the children, and was that, alas! rarest of parents, their [10] BOYHOOD IDEALS chum and companion as well as their just judge when occasion demanded, I have caught many a glimpse I wish I might reveal here, but that shaU be theirs to keep. The family romps at home, the strolls on forest paths which their father taught them early to love; their gleeful dashes on horseback, he watchfully leading on, the children scampering after, a merry crew; of how at his stern sum- mons to breakfast, " Children! " they one and all fell downstairs together in their haste to be there, they speak yet with a tenderness of love that discloses the rarely strong and beautiful soul that was his. It was only the other day that, speaking with an old employee of the Children's Aid Society, of which the elder \ Roosevelt was a strong prop, I learned from \ him how deep was the impression made by his \ gentle courtesy toward his wife when he brought her to the lodging-house on his visits. \* To see him put on her wraps and escort her from room to room was beautiful," he said.' " It seemed to me that I never knew till then what the word gentleman meant." How little we, any of us, know what our example may mean for good or for ill! Here, after thirty [ii] THEODORE ROOSEVELT years, the recollection of Mr. Roosevelt's sim- ple courtesy was a potent force in one man's life. With such ties of love binding the home together, the whirlwind of anger and passion that swept over the country in the years of the war had no power to break or to embitter, even though the mother was of the South, with roots that held, while his life and work were given to the Union cause as few men's were. Rather, it laid the foundations broad and deep of that abiding Americanism that is to- day Theodore Roosevelt's most distinguishing trait. It is no empty speech of his that caresses the thought of the men who wore the blue and those who wore the gray standing at last shoul- der to shoulder., It was an uncle of Theodore Roosevelt who built the privateer Alabama,, and another uncle, Irwin S. Bulloch, who fired the last gun aboard her when she went down before the fire of the Kearsarge, shifting it from one side of the ship to the other as she sank, to let it have the last word. The while at home his father raised and equipped regiments and sent them to the war, saw to it that they were fed and cared for and that those they left [12] BOYHOOD IDEALS behind did not suffer. I have never been able to make up my mind which was most like the Theodore of to-day. I guess they both were. I know that as he grew, the devotion of the one, the daring of the other, took hold of his soul and together were welded into the man, the patriot, to whom love of country is as a living fire, as the very heart's blood of his being. For play there was room in plenty in the home in which Theodore grew up ; for idleness none. His father, though not rich in the sense of to-day, had money enough to enable them all to live without working if they so chose. That they should not so choose was the constant aim and care of his existence. In his scheme of life the one man for whom there was no room was the useless drone. Whether he needed it or not, every man must do some hon- est, decent work, and do it with his might : the community had a right to it. We catch echoes of this inheritance in his son's writings from the very beginning, and as the years pass they ring out more clearly. I remember his inter- view with Julian Ralph, when as a Police Com- missioner he was stirring New York up as it [13] THEODORE ROOSEVELT had not been stirred in many a long day. I can see him now striding up and down the bare gray office. " What would you say to the young men of our city, if you could speak to them with command this day? " asked Mr. Ralph. " I would order them to work," said Mr. Roosevelt, stopping short and striking his hands together with quick emphasis. " I would teach the young men that he who has not wealth owes his first duty to his family, but he who has means owes his to the State. It is ignoble to go on heaping money on money. I would preach the doctrine of work to all, and to the men of wealth the doctrine of unre- munerative work." It was hardly unremunerative work that first enlisted young Theodore's energies. Looking at him now, I should think that nothing ever paid a better interest on the investment. He was not a strong child from earliest infancy liable to asthmatic attacks that sapped his vi- tality and kept back his growth. Probably that accounts for the temporary indecision in the matter of bullies which he remembers. But in the frail body there lived an indomitable BOYHOOD IDEALS spirit before which had risen already visions of a man with a horse and a gun, of travel and adventure. Mayne Reid's books had found their way to East Twentieth Street, and they went with the lad wherever the family tent was pitched to ease the little sufferer. One winter they spent in Egypt, floating down the Nile amid the ruins of empires dead and gone. But the past and its dead got no grip on the young American. He longed to go back to his own country of the mighty forests and the swelling plains where men worked out their own destiny. He would be a pathfinder, a hunter. But a hunter has need of strong thews; of a sound body. And to become strong became presently the business of his life. It was one of the things that early attracted me to Theodore Roosevelt, long before he had become famous, that he was a believer in the gospel of will. Nothing is more certain, hu- manly speaking, than this, that what a man wills himself to be, that he will be. Is he will- ing to put in all on getting rich, rich he will get, to find his riches turning to ashes in his dead hand; will he have power, knowledge, strength they are all within his grasp. The question [IS] THEODORE ROOSEVELT for him to decide is whether they are worth giv- ing up a life to, and, having decided, to give it to his ambition. The boy Theodore saw that to do anything he must first be strong, and chose that. There were many things he might have chosen which would have been easier, but if you are concerned about that, you will not have your way. He was not. He set about resolutely removing the reproach of his puny body, as it seemed to him. He ran, he rode, he swam, he roamed through the hills of his Long Island home, the same to which he yet comes back to romp with his children on his summer holiday. He rowed his skiff intrepidly over the white-capped waters of the Bay that once, when I had long been a man, carried mine, de- spite all my struggles, across to Center Island and threw me, skiff and all, upon the beach, a shipwrecked mariner doomed to be ignomini- ously ferried across on the yacht club's launch. I thought of it the other day when I came ashore from the Sylph, and half a mile from shore met young Kermit battling alone with the waves, hatless and with the salt spray in his eyes and hair, tossed here and there as in a nutshell, but laughing and undaunted. I do [16] BOYHOOD IDEALS not know where he was going. I doubt if he did. His father and mother were ashore and on their way home. He was just having it out and having a good time. It was his father over again, and we cheered him on and let him go. 1 don't suppose we could have stopped him had we tried. x /^ No more could you have stopped Theodore in his day. What he did he did with the will to win, yet never as a task. He got no end of fun out of it, or it would have been of little use, and one secret of that was that he made what he did serve an end useful in itself. On his tramps through the woods he studied and clas- sified the neighborhood birds. He knew their song, their plumage, and their nests. So he learned something he wanted to know, and cultivated the habits of study, of concentration, at the time when all boys are impatient of these things and most of them shirk them when they can, leaving every task unfinished. And all, as I said, along of a healthy, outdoor, romping life. The reward of that was not long in com- ing. Presently strong muscles knit themselves about his bones, the frail frame broadened and grew tough. The boy held his own with his [17] THEODORE ROOSEVELT fellows. He passed them, and now he led in their games. The horse was his; the gun loomed in the prospect. College was at hand, and then life. The buffaloes yet roamed the plains. One might unite the calling of a naturalist, a professor, with the interest of a hunter. So ran his dreams. It is the story of one American boy who won against odds, and though he did not become professor he be- came President; and it is a good story for all American boys to read. For they can do the same, if they choose to. And if they do not all become Presidents, they can all be right, and so be like him in that which is better still. I said he had his dreams. Every boy has, and if he does not stop at that, it is good for him. Into young Theodore's there had come a new element that spoke loudly for the plains, for the great West. The Leatherstocking stories had been added to his reading. It was with something of fear almost that I asked him once if he liked them. For I loved them. I had lived them all in my Danish home. They first set my eyes toward the west, and in later years, when I have heard it said, and read in reviews that Cooper is out of date; that he [18] BOYHOOD IDEALS never was a first-class writer, I have felt it as a personal injury and as if something had come between me and the day that cannot love Natty Bumppo and Uncas and Mabel Dun- ham. And so I say it was with a real pang that I asked him if he did not also like them. He whirled round with kindling eyes. " Like them," he cried, " like them! Why, man, there is nothing like them. I could pass examination in the whole of them to-day. Deerslayer with his long rifle, Jasper and Hurry Harry, Ishmael Bush with his seven stalwart sons do I not know them? I have bunked with them and eaten with them, and I know their strength and their weakness. They were narrow and hard, but they were mighty men and they did the work of their day and opened the way for ours. Do I like them? Cooper is unique in American literature, and he will grow upon us as we get farther away from his day, let the critics say what they will." And I was made happy. Afterward I remembered with sudden ap- prehension that he had spoken only of the white men in the books, for it came to me that he had lived in the West, where the only good Indian is [19] THEODORE ROOSEVELT esteemed to be the dead Indian. But it was needless treachery of my thought. The red man has no better friend than the Great White Father of to-day, none who burns with hotter indignation at the shame our dealings with him have brought upon the American name. Un- cas and Chingachgook, beloved friends of my boyhood, were safe with him. I have told you of Theodore Roosevelt's boy- hood as from time to time I have gathered glimpses of it from himself and from his sis- ter, and as I like to think of it. I did not meet him till long after both horse and gun had be- come living realities. When he was drifting and dreaming on the Nile I was sailing across the Atlantic to have my first tussle with the slum which in after years we fought together. And now you know one reason why I love him: it was when that same strong will, that honest endeavor, that resolute purpose to see right and justice done to his poorer brothers it was when they joined in the battle with the slum that all my dreams came true, all my ideals be- came real. Why should I not love him? The boy had grown into a man. Since I have here spoken to the boys of his country [20] BOYHOOD IDEALS and, thank God, of mine, let him speak now, and judge yourself how performance has squared with promise, practice with preaching : " Of course what we have a right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man. Now, the chances are strong that he won't be much of a man un- less he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He must work hard and play hard. He must be clean -minded and olean-lived, and able to hold his own under all circumstances and against all comers. It is only on these con- ditions that he will grow into the k'nd of a man of whom America can really be proud. " In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don't foul and don't shirk, but hit the line hard." [31] II WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE II WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE RVTHER a delicate-looking young fel- low yet, not over a hundred and thirty pounds on the scales, slender of frame and slim of waist, was the Theodore Roosevelt who made his entry into Harvard while the country yet rang with the echoes of the Electoral Commission and of the destruc- tive railroad riots of the summer that followed. They were troublous times to begin life in, and one would naturally think that they would leave their mark upon a spirit like Roosevelt's. I know that they did, but the evidence of it does not lie on the surface. Neither in the memory of his classmates nor in his record as an editor of the " Advocate " is there anything to suggest it. I was in Pennsylvania during those riots, when militiamen were burned like [25] THEODORE ROOSEVELT rats in a railroad round-house. I saw what they meant, and I have no difficulty in making out their stamp upon his ardent spirit when I read such comments as this on the draft riots in his history of New York, though written more than a dozen years after : " The troops and police were thoroughly armed, and attacked the rioters with the most wholesome desire to do them harm; ... a lesson was inflicted on the lawless and disor- derly which they never entirely forgot. Two millions of property had been destroyed and many valuable lives lost. But over twelve hun- dred rioters were slain an admirable object- lesson to the remainder." Perhaps they had more to do with shaping his later career, those cruel riots, than even he has realized, for I should not be surprised if, unconsciously, he acted upon their motion in joining the militia in his own State, and so got the first grip upon the soldiering that stood him in such good stead in Cuba. " I wanted," he said to me after he had become President, " to count for one in the fight for order and for the Republic, if the crisis were to come. I wanted to be in a position to take a man's stand [26] WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE in such a case, that was why." Counting for one in the place where he stood, when that was the thing to do, then and always, he has got to the place where he counts for all of us, should such days come back, as please God they will not; and nowhere, I think, in the land is there any one who doubts that " order and the Re- public " are safe in his hands. But in his youthful mind these things were working yet, unidentified. His was a healthy nature without morbid corners. The business of his boyhood had been to make himself strong that he might do the work of a man, by which he had in mind chiefly, no doubt, the horse and the gun the bully, perhaps, whom he had not forgotten but the hunt, the life in the open. Now, among his fellows, it was to get the most out of what their companionship offered. He became instantly a favorite with his class of a hundred and seventy-odd. They laughed at his oddities, at his unrepressed enthusiasm, at his liking for Elizabethan poetry, voted him " more or less crazy " with true Harvard con- servatism, respected him highly for his scholar- ship on the same solid ground, and fell in even with his notions for his own sake, as afterward [27] THEODORE ROOSEVELT some of them fell in behind him in the rush up San Juan hill, leaving lives of elegance and ease to starve with him in the trenches and do the chores of a trooper in camp under a tropi- cal sun. It is remembered that Theodore Roosevelt set Harvard to skipping the rope, a sport it % had abandoned years before with knickerbockers; but it suited this student to keep up the exercise as a means of strengthen- ing the leg muscles, and rope-skipping became a pastime of the class of 1880. In the gym- nasium they wore red stockings with their practice suits. Roosevelt had happened upon a pair that were striped a patriotic red and white, and he wore them, at first to the amaze- ment of the other students. He did not even know that they had attracted attention, but when some one told him he laughed and kept them on. It was what the legs could do in the stockings he was there to find out. Twenty years after I heard a policeman call him a dude when he walked up the steps of police head- quarters with a silk sash about his waist, some- thing no man had been known to wear in Mul- berry Street in the memory of the oldest there ; and I saw the same officer looking after him [28] WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE down the street, as long as he was in sight, the day he went, and turn back with a sigh that made him my friend forever: "There won't such another come through that door again in my time, that there won't." And there did not. The old man is retired long since. He joined the exclusive " Pork " Club, and forthwith smashed all its hallowed traditions and made the Porcellian blood run cold, by taking his fiancee to lunch where no woman ever trod before. He simply saw no reason why a lady should not lunch at a gentlemen's club; and when the shocked bachelor minds of the " Pork " Club searched the horizon for one to confront him with, they discovered that there was none. Accordingly the world still stood, and so did the college. He played polo, did athletic stunts with the fellows, and drove a two-wheeled gig badly, having no end of good times in it. When he put on the boxing-gloves, he hailed the first comer with the more delight if he happened to be the champion of the class, who was twice his size and heft. The pum- meling that ensued he took with the most hearty good will ; and though his nose bled and his glasses fell off, putting him at a disadvan- [29] THEODORE ROOSEVELT tage, he refused grimly to cry quarter, and pressed the fight home in a way that always reminds me of that redoubtable Danish sea- fighter, Peter Tordenskjold, who kept up the fight, firing pewter dinner-plates and mugs from his one gun, when on his little smack there was left but a single man of the crew, " and he wept." Tordenskjold killed the cap- tain of the Swedish frigate with one of his mugs and got away. Roosevelt was bested in his boxing-matches often enough, but, how- ever superior, his opponents bore away always the impression that they had faced a fighter. But the battle was not always to the strong in those days. I have heard a story of how Roosevelt beat a man with a reputation as a fighter, but not, it would appear, with the in- stincts of a gentleman. I shall not vouch for it, for I have not asked him about it ; but it is typi- cal enough to be true, except for the wonder how the fellow got in there. He took, so the story runs, a mean advantage and struck a blow that drew blood before Roosevelt had got his glove on right. The bystanders cried foul, but Roosevelt smiled one of his grim smiles. [30] WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE " I guess you made a mistake. We do not do that way here," he said, offering the other his gloved hand in formal salutation as a sign to begin hostilities. The next moment his right shot out and took the man upon the point of the jaw, and the left followed suit. In two min- utes he was down and out. Roosevelt was " in form " that day. All the fighting blood in him had been roused by the unfairness of the blow. I have seen him when his blood was up for good cause once or twice, and I rather think the story must be true. If I were to fight him and wanted to win, I should shun a foul blow as I would the pestilence. I am sure I would not run half the risk from the latter. Play was part of the college life, and he took a hand in it because it belonged. Work was the bigger part, and he did not shirk it, or any of it. I am not sure, but I have a notion that he did not like arithmetic. I feel it in my bones, somehow. Perhaps the wish is father to the thought. I know I hated it. But I will warrant he went through with it all the same, which I did not. I think he was among the first twenty in his class, which graduated a hundred and forty. He early picked out as his special- [31] THEODORE ROOSEVELT ties the history of men and things, animals in- cluded. The ambition to be a naturalist and a professor clung to him still, but more and more the doings of men and of their concerns began to attract him. It was so with all he did in col- lege, whether at work or play it was the life that moved in it he was after. Unconsciously yet, I think, his own life began to shape itself upon its real lines. He read the " Federalist " with the entire absorption that was and is his characteristic, and lived and thought with the makers of our government. There are few public men to-day who are more firmly grounded in those fundamentals than he, and the airy assumption of shallow politicians and critics who think they have in Roosevelt to do with a man of their own kind sometimes makes me smile. The faculty of forgetting all else but the topic in hand is one of the great se- crets of his success in whatever he has under- taken as an official. It is the faculty of getting things done. They tell stories yet, that go around the board at class dinners, of how he would come into a fellow-student's room for a visit, and, picking up a book, would become immediately and wholly absorbed in its con- WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE tents, then wake up with a guilty start to con- fess that his whole hour was gone and hurry away while they shouted after him. It was the student in him which we in our day are so apt. to forget in the man of action, of deeds. But the two have always gone together in him ; they belong together. In all the wild excitement of the closing hours of the convention that set him in the Vice-President's chair he, alone in an inner room, was reading Thucydides, says Albert Shaw, who was with him. He was rest- ing. I saw him pick up a book, in a lull in the talk, the other day, and instantly forget all things else. He was not reading the book as much as he was living it. So, men get all there is out of what is in hand, and they are few who can do it. However, of that I shall have more to say later, when I have him in Mulberry Street, where he was mine for two years. His college chums, sometimes, seeing the surface drift and judging from it, thought him " quite unrestrained," as one of them put it to me, meaning that he lacked a strong grip on himself. It was a natural mistake. They saw the enthusiasm that gave seemingly full vent to itself and tested men by the contact, not [33] THEODORE ROOSEVELT the cautious, almost wary, deliberation which in the end guided action, though he himself but half knew it. They laughed a little at his jump at the proposition to go to Greenland with a classmate and study the fauna there he was planning the trip before it had been fairly suggested and at the preparations he made for a tiger-hunting expedition to India with his brother Elliott. The fact that in both cases he acted upon the coolest judgment and stayed home occurred to them only long afterward. To me at this end, with his later life to interpret its beginning, it seems clear enough that al- ready the perfect balance that has distin- guished his mental processes since was begin- ning to assert itself. However he might seem to be speeding toward extremes, he never got there. He buried himself in his books, but he woke up at the proper seasons, and what he had got he kept. He went in for the play, all there was of it, but he never mistook the means for the end and let the play run away with him. Long years after, when the thing that was then taking shape in him had ripened, he wrote it down in the record of his Western hunts: " In a certain kind of fox-hunting lore [34] WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE there is much reference to a Warwickshire squire who, when the Parliamentary and Roy- alist armies were forming for the battle at Edgehill, was discovered between the hostile lines, unmovedly drawing the covers for a fox. Now, this placid sportsman should by rights have been slain offhand by the first trooper who reached him, whether Cavalier or Roundhead. He had mistaken means for ends, he had con- founded the healthful play which should fit a man for needful work with the work itself, and mistakes of this kind are sometimes crim- inal. Hardy sports of the field offer the best possible training for war; but they become con- temptible when indulged in while the nation is at death-grips with her enemies." One factor in this mental balance, his un- hesitating moral courage which shirked no dis- agreeable task and was halted by no false pride of opinion, had long been apparent. He was known as a good hand for a disagreeable task that had to be done, a reproof to be adminis- tered in justice and fairness I am thinking of how the man kept that promise of the youth, before Santiago, when for the twentieth time he " wrecked a promising career " with his fa- [35] THEODORE ROOSEVELT mous round-robin and also for the generous speed with which he would hasten to undo a wrong done by word or act. There were no half-way measures with him then. He owned right up. " He was fair always," said one of his classmates who was close to him. " He never tried to humbug others, or himself either, but spoke right out in meeting, telling it all." No wonder some within reach thought him erratic. There has never been a time in the history of the world when such a course would commend itself to all men as sane. It com- mended itself to him as right, and that was enough. A distinguishing trait in his father had been he died while Theodore was at college devotion to duty, and the memory of it and of him was potent with the son. He tried to walk in his steps. " I tried faithfully to do what father had done," he told me once when we talked about him, " but I did it poorly. I became Secretary of the Prison Reform Asso- ciation (I think that was the society he spoke of) , and joined this and that committee. Fa- ther had done good work on so many; but in the end I found out that we have each to work [36] WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE in his own way to do our best; and when I struck mine, though it differed from his, yet I was able to follow the same lines and do what he would have had me do." It was thus natural that Theodore Roosevelt should have sought out a Sunday-school and a chance to teach as soon as he was settled at Harvard, and that his choice should have fallen upon a mission school. He went there in pur- suit of no scheme, of philanthropy. Provi- dence had given him opportunities and a train- ing that were denied these, and it was simple fairness that he should help his neighbor who was less fortunate through no fault of his own. The Roosevelts were Dutch Reformed. He found no Dutch Reformed church at Cam- bridge, but there were enough of other denom- inations. The handiest was Episcopal. It happened that it was of high church bent. Theodore Roosevelt asked no questions, but went to work. With characteristic directness he was laying down the way of life to the boys and girls in his class when an untoward event happened. One of his boys came to school with a black eye. He owned up that he had got it in a fight, and on Sunday. His [37] THEODORE ROOSEVELT teacher made stern inquiry. " Jim " some- body, it appeared, who sat beside his sister, had been pinching her all through the hour, and when they came out they had a stand-up fight and he punched him good, bearing away the black eye as his share. The verdict was prompt. " You did perfectly right," said his teacher, and he gave him a dollar. To the class it was ideal justice, but it got out among the officers of the school and scandalized them dreadfully. Roosevelt w r as not popular with them. Unfa- miliar with the forms of the service, he had failed at times to observe them all as they thought he should. They wished to know if he had any objection to any of them. No, none in the world; he was ready to do anything required of him. He himself was Dutch Re- formed he got no farther. The idea of a " Dutch Reformed " teaching in their school, superimposed upon the incident of the black eye, was too much. They parted with some- what formal expressions of mutual regard. Roosevelt betook himself to a Congregational Sunday-school near by and taught there the rest of his four years' course in college. How it fared with Jim's conqueror I do not know. [38] WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE Before he had finished the course, Roosevelt had started upon his literary career. It came in the day's work, without conscious purpose on his part to write a book. They had at his Club James' history, an English work, and he found that it made detailed misstatements about the war of 1812. Upon looking up American au- thorities, it turned out that they gave no de- tailed contradictions of these statements. The reason was not wholly free from meanness: in nearly all the sea-fights of that war the Ameri- can forces had outnumbered the British, often very materially ; but the home historians, wish- ing not to emphasize this fact, had contented themselves with the mere statement that the " difference was trifling," thus by their fool- ish vaunts opening the door to exaggeration in the beaten enemy's camp. The facts which Roosevelt brought out from the official files with absolute impartiality grew into his first book, " The Naval War of 1812," which took rank at once as an authority. The British paid the young author, then barely out of college, the high compliment of asking him to write the chapter on this war for their monumental work on " The [39] THEODORE ROOSEVELT Royal Navy," and there it stands to-day, unchallenged. So with work and with play and with the class politics in which Theodore took a vigorous hand, the four years wore away as one. He was, by the way, not a good speaker in those days, I am told ; but such speeches as he made and he never farmed the duty out when it was his to do were very much to the point. One is remembered yet with amusement by a distinguished lawyer in this city. He had be.p-n making an elaborate and as he thought lucid argument in class-meeting, and sat down, properly proud of the impression he must have made ; when up rose Theodore Roosevelt. " I have been listening, Mr. Chairman," he spoke, " and, so far as I can see, not one word of what Mr. has said has any more to do with this matter than has the man in the moon. It is " but the class was in a roar, and what " it was " the indignant previous speaker never learned. But, as I said, the years passed, and, having graduated, Roosevelt went abroad to spend a yrnr with alternate study in Cermany and mountain climbing in Switzerland by way of [40] WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE letting off steam. Probably the verdict men might have set down against his whole col- lege career would have been that it was in no way remarkable. Here and there some one had taken notice of the young man, as hav- ing quite unusual powers of observation and of concentration, but nothing had happened of any extraordinary nature, though things enough happened where he was around. Later on, when the fact had long compelled public attention, I asked him how it was. His an- swer I recommend to the close attention and study of young men everywhere who want to /get on. " I put myself in the way of things happen- ing," he said, " and they happened." It may be that the longer they think of it, like myself, the more they will see in it. A plain and homely prescription, but so, when you look at it, has been the man's whole life so far a plain talk to plain people, on plain is- sues of right and wrong. The extraordinary thing is that some of us should have got up such a heat about it. Though, come to think of it, that is n't so extraordinary either; the issues are so very plain. " Thou shalt not steal " is [41] THEODORE ROOSEVELT not exactly revolutionary preaching, but it is apt to stir up feelings when it means what it says. \( No extraordinary ambitions, no other thought than to do his share of what there was to do, and to do it well, stirred in this young student now sailing across the seas to begin life in his native land, to take up a man's work in a man's country. None of his college chums had been found to predict for him a brilliant public career. Even now they own it. What, then, had he got out of his five years of study? They were having a reunion of his class when he was Police Commissioner, and he was there. One of the professors told of a student coming that day to bid him good-by. He asked him what was to be his work in the world. " Oh ! " said he, with a little yawn. " Really, do you know, professor, it does not seem to me that there is anything that is much worth while." Theodore Roosevelt, who had been sitting, listening, at the other end of the table, got up suddenly and worked his way round to the pro- fessor's seat. He struck the table a blow that was not meant for it alone. [43] WHAT HE GOT OUT OF COLLEGE " That fellow," said he, " ought to have been knocked in the head. I would rather take my chances with a blackmailing policeman than with such as he." That was what Theodore Roosevelt got out of his years at Harvard. And I think, upon the whole, that he could have got nothing bet- ter, for himself, for us, or for the college. [43] Ill EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS Ill EARLY LESSONS^ IN POLITICS IN the year when President Garfield died, New York saw the unusual sight of two young " silk-stockings," neither of whom had ever been in politics before, running for office in a popular election. One was the rep- resentative of vast inherited wealth, the other of the bluest of the old Knickerbocker blood: William Waldorf Astor and Theodore Roose- velt. One ran for Congress, pouring out money like water, contemptuously confident that so he could buy his way in. The news- papers reported his nightly progress from sa- loon to saloon, where " the boys " were thirstily waiting to whoop it up for him, and the size of " the wad " he left at each place, as with ill- suppressed disgust he fled to the next. The other, nominated for the State Legislature on [47] THEODORE ROOSEVELT an issue of clean streets and clean politics, though but a year out of college, made his can- vass squarely upon that basis, and astounded old-time politicians by the fire he put into the staid residents of the brownstone district, who were little in the habit of bothering about elec- tions. He, too, was started upon a round of the saloons, under management. At the first call the management and that end of the canvass gave out together. Thereafter he went it alone. He was elected, and twice re-elected to his seat, with ever-increasing majorities. Astor was beaten, and, in anger, quit the country. To- day he lives abroad, a self -expatriated Ameri- can. Theodore Roosevelt, who believes in the people, is President of the United States. There was no need of my asking him how he came to go into politics, for how he could have helped it I cannot see ; but I did. He thought awhile. " I suppose for one thing ordinary, plain, every-day duty sent me there to begin with. But, more than that, I wanted to belong to the governing class, not to the governed. When I said that I wanted to go to the Republican Association, they told me that I would meet [48] EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS the groom and the saloon-keeper there; that politics were low, and that no gentleman both- ered with them. ' Then,' said I, ' if that is so, the groom and the saloon-keeper are the gov- erning class and you confess weakness. You have all the chances, the education, the position, and you let them rule you. They must be better men ; ' and I went. " I joined the association, attended the meet- ings, and did my part in whatever was going. We did n't always agree, and sometimes they voted me down and sometimes I had my way. They were a jolly enough lot and I had a good time. The grooms were there, some of them, and some of their employers, and we pulled together as men should if we are to make any- thing out of our country, and by and by we had an election." There had been a fight about the dirty streets. The people wanted a free hand given to Mayor Grace, but the machine opposed. The Assemblyman from Roosevelt's district, the old Twenty-first, was in disgrace on that account. The Republican boss of the district, " Jake " Hess, was at odds with his lieuten- ants, " Joe " Murray and Major Bullard, and [49] THEODORE ROOSEVELT in making up the list of delegates to the As- sembly Convention they outgeneraled him, naming fifteen of the twenty-five. Thus they had the nomination within their grasp, but they had no candidate. Roosevelt had taken an active part in opposing the machine man, and he and Murray had pulled together. There is something very characteristic of Theodore Roosevelt in this first political alliance as re- lated by Murray. " When he found we were on the same side, he went to Ed Mitchell, who had been in the Legislature, and asked what kind of a man I was, and when he was told he gave me his confidence." It is another of the simple secrets of his success in dealing with men: to make sure of them and then to trust them. Men rarely betray that kind of trust. Murray did not. Presently he bethought himself of Theodore Roosevelt, who was fighting but didn't yet quite know how. As a candidate he might bring out the vote which ordinarily in that silk-stocking district came to the polls only in a Presidential year. He asked him to run, but Roosevelt refused. It might look as if he had come there for his personal advantage. Murray reasoned [50] EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS with him, but he was firm. He suggested several candidates, and one after another they were turned down. Roosevelt had an- other batch. Murray promised to look them over. " And if I can't find one to suit, will you take it then? " he asked. Yes, he would do that, as a last resort. " But I did n't look for no other candidate when I had his promise," says " Joe," placidly, telling of it. " Good reason : I could n't find any better, nor as good." " Joe " Murray is a politician, but that day he plotted well for his country. Roosevelt was nominated and began the can- vass at once. The boss himself took him around to the saloons that night, to meet " the peo- ple." They began at Valentine Young's place on Sixth Avenue. Mr. Hess treated and in- troduced the candidate. Mr. Young was happy. He hoped he was against high license ; he, Young, hated it. Now, Roosevelt was at- tracted by high license and promptly said so and that he would favor it all he could. He gave his reasons. The argument became heated, the saloon-keeper personal. The boss [51] THEODORA ROOSEVELT looked on, stunned. He did not like that way of making votes. Neither did Mr. Roosevelt. He sent "Jake" Hess home and quit the saloon canvass then and there. Instead he went among his neigh- bors and appealed to them. The " brown- stone " vote came out. " Joe " Murray rubs his hands yet at the thought of it. Sucji a follow- ing he had not dreamed of in his wildest flights. Men worth millions solicited the votes of their coachmen and were glad to get them. Dean Van Amringe peddled tickets with the Co- lumbia professors. Men became suddenly neighbors who had never spoken to one another before, and pulled together for the public good. Murray was charged with trading his candi- date off for Astor for Congress ; but the event vindicated him triumphantly. Roosevelt ran far ahead of the beaten candidate for Con- gress. He took his seat in the Legislature, the youngest member in it, just as he is now the youngest President. He was not received with enthusiasm by the old wheel-horses, and the fact did credit to their discernment, if not to their public spirit. I doubt if they would have understood what was [52] EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS meant by this last. They were there on the good old plan good so far always for the purpose it served that was put in its plainest, most brutal form, years after, by the champion of spoilsmen forever: "I am in politics work- ing for my own pocket all the time same as you." The sneer told of their weak spot. The man who has lost faith in man has lost his grip. He may not know it, but he has. I fancy they felt it at the coming of this young man who had taught the Commandments in Sunday- school because he believed in them. They laughed a little uneasily and guessed he would be good, if he were kept awhile. Before half the season had passed he had justified their fears, if they had them. There was an elevated railroad ring that had been guilty of unblushing corruption involving the Attorney-General of the State and a Judge of the Supreme Court. The scandal was flagrant and foul. The people were aroused, petitioned respectfully but chafed angrily under the yawn with which their remonstrances were received in the Assembly. The legislators " referred " the petition and thought it dead. But they had forgotten Roosevelt. [53] THEODORE ROOSEVELT He had been watching and wondering. To him an unsullied judiciary was the ground fabric of society. Here were charges of the most serious kind against a judge smothered unheard. He asked his elders on the Republi- can benches what was to be done about it. Nothing. Nothing? Then he would inquire publicly. They ran to him in alarm. Nothing but harm could come of it, to him and to the party. He must not; it was rank folly. The thing was loaded. " It was," wrote an unnamed writer in the " Saturday Evening Post," whose story should be framed and hung in the Assembly Cham- ber as a chart for young legislators of good intentions but timid before sneers, " it was ob- viously the counsel of experienced wisdom. So far as the clearest judgment could see, it was not the moment for attack. Indeed, it looked as if attack would strengthen the hands of cor- ruption by exposing the weakness of the oppo- sition to it. Never did expediency put a temptation to conscience more insidiously. " It was on April 6, 1882, that young Roose- velt took the floor in the Assembly and de- manded that Judge Westbrook, of Newburg, [54] EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS be impeached. And for sheer moral courage that act is probably supreme in Roosevelt's life thus far. He must have expected failure. Even his youth and idealism and ignorance of public affairs could not blind him to the ap- parently inevitable consequences. Yet he drew his sword and rushed apparently to destruc- tionalone, and at the very outset of his ca- reer, and in disregard of the pleadings of his closest friends and the plain dictates of po- litical wisdom. " That speech the deciding act in Roose- velt's career is not remarkable for eloquence. But it is remarkable for fearless candor. He called thieves thieves regardless of their mil- lions; he slashed savagely at the Judge and the Attorney-General; he told the plain, un- varnished truth as his indignant eyes saw it. " When he finished, the veteran leader of the Republicans rose and with gently contemp- tuous raillery asked that the resolution to take up the charges be voted down. He said he wished to give young Mr. Roosevelt time to think about the wisdom of his course. ' I,' said he, ' have seen many reputations in the State broken down by loose charges made in the [55] THEODORE ROOSEVELT Legislature.' And presently the Assembly gave ' young Mr. Roosevelt time to think ' by voting not to take up his ' loose charges.' " Ridicule, laughter, a ripple apparently it was all over, except the consequences to the bumptious and dangerous young man which might flow from the cross set against his name in the black books of the ring. " It was a disheartening defeat almost all of his own party voted against him; the most earnest of those who ventured to support him were Democrats; perhaps half of those who voted with him did so merely because their votes were not needed to beat him. " That night the young man was once more urged to be ' sensible,' to ' have regard to his future usefulness,' to ' cease injuring the party.' He snapped his teeth together and defied the party leaders. And the next day he again rose and again lifted his puny voice and his puny hand against smiling, contemptuous corruption. Day after day he persevered on the floor of the Assembly, in interviews for the press; a few newspapers here and there joined him ; Assemblymen all over the State began to hear from their constituents. Within a week [56] EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS his name was known from Buffalo to Montauk Point, and everywhere the people were ap- plauding him. On the eighth day of his bold, smashing attack the resolution to take up the charges was again voted upon at his demand. And the Assemblymen, with the eyes of the whole people upon them, did not dare longer to keep themselves on record as defenders of a judge who feared to demand an investigation. The opposition collapsed. Roosevelt won by 104 to 6." In the end the corruptionists escaped. The committee made a whitewashing report. But the testimony was damning and more than vin- dicated the attack. A victory had been won; open corruption had been driven to the wall. Roosevelt had met his party on a moral issue and had forced it over on the side of right. He had achieved backing. Out of that fight came the phrase " the wealthy criminal class " that ran through the country. In his essay on " true American ideals " he identifies it with " the conscienceless stock speculator who ac- quires wealth by swindling his fellows, by de- bauching judges and legislatures," and his kind. " There is not," he exclaims, "in the [57] THEODORE ROOSEVELT world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads him- self, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter." " Young Mr. Roosevelt " went into the next Legislature re-elected with a big majority in a year that saw his party go down in defeat all along the line, as its leader on the floor of the house. At twenty-four he was proposed for Speaker. Then came his real test. Long after, he told me of it. " I suppose," he said, " that my head was swelled. It would not be strange if it was. I stood out for my own opinion, alone. I took the best mugwump stand : my own conscience, my own judgment, were to decide in all things. I would listen to no argument, no advice. I took the isolated peak on every issue, and my people left me. When I looked around, before the session was well under way, I found my- [58] EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS self alone. I was absolutely deserted. The people did n't understand. The men from Erie, from Suffolk, from anywhere, would not work with me. * He won't listen to anybody,' they said, and I would not. My isolated peak had become a valley' every bit of influence I had was gone. The things I wanted to do I was powerless to accomplish. What did I do? I looked the ground over and made up my mind that there were several other excellent people there, with honest opinions of the right, even though they differed from me. I turned in to help them, and they turned to and gave me a hand. And so we were able to get things done. We did not agree in all things, but we did in some, and those we pulled at together. That was my first lesson in real politics. It is just this: if you are cast on a desert island with only a screw-driver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you have n't. So with men. Here is my friend in Congress who is a good man, a strong man, but cannot be made to believe in some things which I trust. It is too bad that he does n't look at it as I do, but he does not,, and [59] THEODORE ROOSEVELT we have to work together as we can. There is a point, of course, where a man must take the isolated peak and break with it all for clear principle, but until it comes he must work, if he would be of use, with men as they are. As long as the good in them overbalances the evil, let him work with that for the best that can be got." One can hardly turn a page of his writings even to this day without coming upon evidence that he has never forgotten the lesson of the isolated peak. The real things of life were getting their grip on him more and more. The old laissez faire doctrine that would let bad enough alone because it was the easiest way still pervaded the teaching of his college days, as applied to social questions. The day of the Settlement had not yet come; but his father had been a whole social settlement and a charity organiza- tion society combined in his own person, and the son was not content with the bookish view of affairs that so intimately concerned the wel- fare of the republic to which he led back all things. The bitter cry of the virtually enslaved tenement cigarmakers had reached Albany, [60]. EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS and Roosevelt went to their rescue at once. He was not satisfied with hearsay evidence, but went through the tenements and saw for him- self. The conditions he found made a pro- found impression upon him. They were after- ward, when I wrote " How the Other Half Lives," an introduction to him and a bond of sympathy between us. He told the Legisla- ture what he had seen, and a bill was passed to stop the evil, but it was declared unconsti- tutional in the courts. The time was not yet ripe for many things in which he was after- ward to bear a hand. A dozen years later, as Health Commissioner, he helped destroy some of the very tenements in which at that earlier day industrial slavery in its worst form was intrenched too strongly to be dislodged by law. The world " do move," with honest hands to help it. It was so with the investigation of the city departments he headed. There was enough to investigate, but we had not yet grown a con- science robust enough to make the facts tell. Parkhurst had first to prepare the ground. The committee sat for a couple of weeks, per- haps three, at the old Metropolitan Hotel, and [61] THEODORE ROOSEVELT it was there I first met Theodore Roosevelt, when the police officials were on the stand. I remember distinctly but one incident of that inquiry. It was when lawyer George Bliss, who could be very cutting when it suited his purpose, made an impertinent remark, as coun- sel for the Police Commissioners. I can see " young " Mr. Roosevelt yet, leaning across the table with the look upon his face that al- ways compelled attention, and saying with pointed politeness : " Of course you do not mean that, Mr. Bliss ; for if you did we should have to have you put out in the street." Mr. Bliss did not mean it. It was at that session, too, I think, that he struck his first blow for the civil service re- form which his father contended for when it had few friends ; for which cause the Republi- can machine rejected his nomination for Col- lector of the Port of New York. I know how it delighted the son's heart to carry on his fa- ther's work then and when afterward as Gov- ernor he clinched it in the best civil service law the State has ever had. But, more than that, he saw that this was one of the positions to be rushed if the enemy were to be beaten out. [62] EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS Another was the power of confirmation the Aldermen had over the Mayor's appointments in New York. Thus even the best administra- tion would be helpless with a majority of Tam- many members on the Board of Aldermen. Such a thing as the election of a reform Board of Aldermen was then unthinkable. He wrested that power from them and gave it to the Mayor, and, in doing it, all unconsciously paved the way for himself to the office in which, under Mayor Strong, he leaped into National importance. There are many striking coinci- dences of the kind in Theodore Roosevelt's career. I have noticed that they are to be found in the life of every man who goes straight ahead and does what he knows is right, taking the best counsel he can and learning from life as it shapes itself under his touch. All the time he is laying out grappling-hooks, without knowing it, for the opportunity that comes only to the one who can profit by it, and, when it passes, he lays hold of it quite naturally. It is only another way of putting Roosevelt's phi- losophy that things happen to those who are in the way of it. It is the idlers who prate of chance and luck. Luck is lassoed by the [63] THEODORE, ROOSEVELT masterful man, by the man who knows and who can. And it is well that it is so, or we should be in a pretty mess. I have spoken at considerable length about Theodore Roosevelt's early legislative expe- rience because I am concerned about showing how he grew to what he is. Men do not jump up in a night like mushrooms, some good cred- ulous people to the contrary notwithstanding, or shoot up like rockets. If they do, they are apt to come down like sticks. At least Mr. Roosevelt stays up a long time, they will have to admit. I have heard of him being " dis- covered " by politicians as Civil Service Com- missioner, as Police Commissioner, as fitter-out of the navy for the Spanish fight, as Rough- Rider almost as often as he has been ruined by his vagaries which no one could survive ; and I have about made up my mind that politicians are the most credulous of beings, instead of the reverse. The fact is that he is a perfectly logical product of a certain course of conduct deliberately entered upon and faithfully ad- hered to all through life, as all of us are who have any character worth mentioning. For that is what character means, that a man will [64] EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS do so and so as occasions arise demanding action. Now here is a case in point. When President Roosevelt speaks nowadays about the necessity of dropping all race and creed dis- tinctions, if we want to be good Americans, some one on the outskirts of the crowd winks his left eye and says " politics." When he promoted a Jew in the Police Department or in his regiment, it was politics, politics. Wep A this incident I am going to tell you about he had himself forgotten. When I asked him about it, he recalled it slowly and with diffi- culty, for it happened in the days before he had entered the Legislature. I had it from a friend of his, the head of one of our great institutions of learning, who was present at the time. It was at the Federal Club, a young Repub- lican club started to back up the older organ- ization and since merged with it. A young Jew had been proposed for membership. He was of good family, personally unobjection- able, had no enemies in the club. Yet it was proposed deliberately to blackball him. There was no pretense about it; it was a perfectly bald issue of Gentile against Jew in a club where it was easy to keep him out, at least so [65] THEODORE ROOSEVELT they thought till Koosevelt heard of it at the meeting. Then and there he got up and said what he thought of it. It was not com- plimentary to the conspirators. They were there as Republicans, as American citizens, he said, to work together for better things on the basis of being decent. The proposition to exclude a man because he was a Jew was not decent. For him, the minute race and creed were brought into the club, he would quit, and at once. " He flayed them as I never heard a body of men flayed in my life," said my informant " Roosevelt was pale with anger. The club sat perfectly still under the lashing. When he sat down amid profound silence, the vote was taken. There were no black balls. The Jew- never knew how narrowly he missed getting in." He had a chance to vote for Roosevelt three times for the Legislature in settlement of the account he did not know he owed, and I hope he did. When Mr. Roosevelt's third term was out, he had earned a seat in the National council of his party. He went to Chicago in 1884 as a delegate to the convention which nominated [66] EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS Elaine. He was strongly in opposition, and fought hard to prevent the nomination. The outcome was a sore thrust to him. Some of his associates never forgave him that he did not bolt with them and stay out. Roosevelt came back from the far West, where he had gone to wear off his disappointment, and went into the fight with his party. His training was bearing fruit. " At times," I read in one of his essays, " a man must cut loose from his as- sociates and stand for a great cause; but the necessity for such action is almost as rare as the necessity for a revolution." He did not join in the revolution; the time had not come, in his judgment, to take the isolated peak. There came to me just now a letter from one of his classmates in college who has heard that I am writing about Mr. Roosevelt. He was one of those who revolted, but I shall set his testimony down here as quite as good an explanation of Theodore Roosevelt's course as Mr. Roosevelt could furnish himself. " He was," he writes, speaking of his college friend, " next to my own father, the purest- minded man I ever knew. . . . He was free from any tinge of self-seeking. Indeed, he [67] THEODORE ROOSEVELT was free, as I knew liirn, from self -conscious- ness. What he said and did was simply the unstudied expression of his true self. . . . Al- though I very rarely see him, I have naturally followed his career with close interest. I am convinced that the few of his acts that I find it hard to condone (e.g., his advocacy of Mr. Elaine's election to the Presidency, and his own acceptance of nomination for the Vice-Presi- dency) are explained by the fact that he has from the start been a party man, not merely a believer in party government and a faithful party member, but a devout believer, appar- ently, in the dogma that the success of his party is essential to the welfare of the country." At that convention George William Cur- tis was also a delegate from New York. In a newspaper I picked up the other day were some reminiscences of the great fight by a newspaper man who was there. He told of meeting the famous Easy Chair at luncheon when the strife was fiercest. He expressed some surprise at the youth of Mr. Roosevelt, of whom the West then knew little. What followed sounds so like prophecy that I quote it here. The reporter wrote it down from mem- [68] EARLY LESSONS IN POLITICS ory that night, so he says, and by accident came across his notes, hence the item : Mr. Curtis moved his chair back from the table, threw his napkin beside his plate, and was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, in his quiet, modulated tones : " You'll know more, sir, later; a deal more, or I am much in error. Young? Why, he is just out of school almost, yet he is a force to be reckoned with in New York. Later the Nation will be criticising or praising him. While respectful to the gray hairs and experience of his elders, none of them can move him an iota from convictions as to men and measures once formed and rooted. He has integrity, courage, fair scholarship, a love for public life, a comfortable amount of money, honorable descent, the good word of the honest. He will not truckle nor cringe, he seems to court opposition to the point of being somewhat pug- nacious. His political life will probably be a turbu- lent one, but he will be a figure, not a figurehead, in future development or, if not, it will be because he gives up politics altogether. ' ' Such a verdict from such a man upon three years of the strife and sweat of very practical politics I should have thought worth all it cost, and I know so does Mr. Roosevelt. [69] IV THE HORSE AND THE GUN HAVE THEIR DAY IV THE HORSE AND THE GUN HAVE THEIR DAY PERHAPS no more striking description of a landscape was ever attempted than when Mr. Roosevelt said that in the Bad Lands he always felt as if they somehow looked just as Poe's tales and poems sound. It is with this as I said before: we sometimes forget the man of words in the man of deeds. Mr. Roosevelt's writings occasionally suffer from a lack of patience to edit and to polish, but they are always full of vigor and direct- ness; in other words, he is himself when he writes as when he talks ; and never more so than when he writes of the great West to which I often think he belongs more than to the East where he was born. His home ranch in western North Dakota was among the Bad Lands of [73] THEODORE! ROOSEVELT the Little Missouri. To grasp fully the mean- ing of the comparison with Poe, read this from his account of an elk -hunting trip out there : " The tracks led into one of the wildest and most desolate parts of the Bad Lands. It was now the heat of the day, the brazen sun shining out in 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 bot- toms; 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 yel- low. Others lay half under stones or twined [74] THE HORSE AND THE GUN 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 of certain men; while one or two coiled and rattled menacingly as I stepped near." Fit setting, that kind of a landscape, for a man who had come out of the sort of fight he had just been in, and lost. Many of those who had fought with him went out of the Republi- can party and did not return. Roosevelt had it out with the bucking bronchos on his ranch and with the grizzlies in the mountains, and came back to fight in the ranks for the man he had opposed and to go down with him to defeat. He had come to the bitter waters of which men must drink to grow to their full stature his most ambitious defeat, that of the Mayoralty campaign of 1886, was yet to come and, according to his sturdy way, he looked the well through and through, and drank deep. There stands upon a shelf in my library a copy of the " Wilderness Hunter," which he gave me when once I was going to the woods. On the fly-leaf he wrote: " May you enjoy the [75] THEODORE ROOSEVELT north woods as much as I enjoyed the great plains and the Rockies." It was during that fall that I received the first news from him, up there in the Canadian wilderness, of the sad and terrible doings at Buffalo, when William McKinley was already in his grave. I read in that letter that had been waiting many days for our canoe to come down the lake, even though he wrote hopefully of the President's recovery ; that a shadow had fallen across his path, be- tween him and those youthful days, through which he would never cross again the same man. He was himself going away to the woods, he wrote, with the children. The doctors had as- sured him all was well. There was even a note of glad relief that the dreadful suspense was over. Yet with it all there was a something, undefinable, that told me that the chase he loved so well, the free wild life of the plain, had lost one that understood them as few did; and the closing words of the preface of the book, on which the ink of his name was hardly yet dry, sounded to me like saddening prophecy: " No one but he who has partaken thereof can understand the keen delight of hunting in lonely lands. For him is the joy of the horse [76] THE HORSE AND THE GUN well ridden and the rifle well held ; for him the long days of toil and hardship, resolutely en- dured, and crowned at the end with triumph. In after years there shall come forever to his mind the memory of endless prairies shimmer- ing in the bright sun ; of vast snow-clad wastes lying desolate under gray skies ; of the melan- choly marshes ; of the rush of mighty rivers ; of the breath of the evergreen forest in sum- mer ; of the crooning of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds of winter ; of cataracts roar- ing between hoary mountain masses ; of all the innumerable sights and sounds of the wilder- ness ; of its immensity and mystery ; and of the silences that brood in its still depths." So all things pass. To the careless youth succeeds the man of the grave responsibilities. He would not have it different, himself. But out there, there are men to-day who cannot forgive the White House for the loss of the ranch ; who camp nightly about forgotten fires with their lost friend, the hunter and ranch- man, Theodore Roosevelt. When the world was young he came among them and straightway took their hearts by storm, as did they his, men " hardy and self- [77] THEODORE .ROOSEVELT reliant, with bronzed, set faces and keen eyes that look all the world straight in the face with- out flinching." I know how it is. You can- not help taking to them, those Western fel- lows, and they need not be cowboys either. The farther you go, the better you like them. My oldest son, who spent a year on a ranch, never wanted to come back. He was among Roosevelt's men, whose talk was still of his good-fellowship in camp and on the hunting trail, his unflinching courage, his even-handed justice that arraigned the sheriff of the county as stoutly before his fellows when he failed in his duty, as it led him in the bitter winter wea- ther on a month's hunt down-stream through the pack-ice after cattle thieves a story that reads like the record of an Arctic expedition. But he got the thieves, and landed them in jail, much to the wonderment of the ranchman at Killdeer Mountains, who was unable to under- stand why all this fuss " instead of hanging them offhand." The vigilantes had just had a cleaning up in the cattle country, and had despatched some sixty-odd suspects, some of them, Mr. Roosevelt says, through misappre- hension or carelessness. One is reminded of [78] THE HORSE AND THE GUN the apology of the captain of such a band to the widow of a victim of their " carelessness "; " Madam, the joke is on us." Every land has its ways. They have theirs out there, and if they are sometimes a trifle hasty, life bowls along with them at a pace we do not easily catch up with. On his recent trip across the continent, the President was greeted in a distant State .by one of his old men, temporarily out of his latitude. He ex- plained that he had had " a difficulty "; he had " sat into a poker game with a gentleman stranger," who raised a row. He used awful language, and he, the speaker, shot him down. He had to. " And did the stranger draw? " asked the President, who had been listening gravely. " He did not have time, sir." The affair with the sheriff sounds as though it were a chapter of Mulberry Street in his later years. It was the outcome of the struggle to put law and order in the place of the rude lynch justice of the frontier. There was rea- son to believe that the sheriff leaned toward the outlaws. Men talked of it in bar-rooms; the cattle-thieves escaped. A meeting was [79] THEODORE ROOSEVELT called of ranch-owners, the neighbors for half a hundred miles around, and in the meeting Mr. Roosevelt rose and confronted the sheriff squarely with the charges. He looked straight at him through his gold-rimmed eye-glasses, himself unarmed, while from the other's pockets stuck out the handles of two big six- shooters, and told him without mincing words that they believed the charges to be true and that he had forfeited their confidence and good will. A score of grave frontiersmen sat si- lently expectant of the reply. None came. The man made no defense. But he was not without sympathizers, and his reputation would have made most men think twice before beard- ing him as Roosevelt did. I asked him once why he did it. " There was no other way," he said, " and it had exactly the effect we desired. I do not think I was in any danger. I was unarmed, and if he had shot me down he knew he could not have escaped swift retribution. Besides, I was right, and he knew it! " How often since have I heard him weigh, with the most careful scrutiny of every argu- ment for and against, some matter to be de- [80] AND THE GUN cided in the public interest, and wind up with the brisk " There is no other way, and it is right; we will do it;" and heard his critics, who had given the matter no attention or the most superficial, and were taking no risks, cry out about snap judgments, while Roosevelt calmly went ahead and brought us through. Whether it was over this cattle matter or some other local concern that his misunder- standing 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 tilings it would have come sooner or later, on some pretext or another. The two were neighbors, their ranches being some ten or fif- teen miles apart. The Marquis was a gallant but exaggerated 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 yet 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 differ- ences," to which he invited his attention. Mr. Roosevelt promptly replied that he had heard a lie; that he, the Marquis, had no business to [81] THEODORE. ROOSEVELT believeit 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 Marquis with a gentleman's apology and a cordial invitation to dine with him in town. And that was all there was of the sensational " duel " with the French nobleman. How small this world is, to be sure, that we make so much of! It was only yesterday that a woman whom I had never seen spoke to me on a Third Avenue street-car and told me that she had been in the house of the Marquis de Mores at that very time. She was with the family as a trained nurse, she told me. Of course she knew Roosevelt. " The cowboys loved him," she said, and added: " Poor Mar- quis, he was a nice gentleman, but he was not so level-headed a man as Mr. Roosevelt." The physical vigor for which he had longed and labored had come to him in full measure now, and with it the confidence that comes of being prepared to defend one's rights. The [82] THE HORSE AND THE GUN bully and the brawler knew well enough that they had small chance against such an equip- ment, and kept out of the way. In all Mr. Roosevelt's life on the frontier, sometimes in unfamiliar towns keyed up to mischief, he was molested but once, and then by a drunken rowdy who took him for a tenderfoot and with a curse bade him treat, at the point of his two revolvers, enforcing the invitation with a lit- tle exhibition of " gun-play," while a roomful of men looked stolidly on. Roosevelt was a stranger in the town and had no friends there. He got up apparently to yield to the inevitable, practicing over mentally the while a famous left-hander that had done execution in the old Harvard days. The next instant the bully crashed against the wall and measured his length on the floor. His pistols went off harmlessly in the air. He opened his eyes to find the " four-eyed tenderfoot " standing over him, bristling with fight, while the crowd nod- ded calmly, " Served him right." He surren- dered then and there and gave up his guns, while Mr. Roosevelt went to bed unmolested. Such things carry far on the plains. No one was ever after that heard to express a wish to [83] THEODORE ROOSEVELT fill this tenderfoot " full of holes," even though he did wear gold spectacles and fringed angora " chaps " when on a hunt. And now that I have made use of my priv- ilege to put things in as I think of them, let me say that brawling was no part of his life in the West. I thought of it first partly because of some good people who imagine that there was nothing else on the frontier; partly because it was a test the frontier life put to a man, always does, that he shall not be afraid, seeing that in the last instance upon his personal fearlessness depends his fitness to exist where at any mo- ment that alone may preserve his life and the lives of others. There was room in plenty for that quality in the real business that brought him West, the quest of adventure. It was the dream of the man with the horse and the gun that was at last being realized. There was yet a frontier ; there were unknown wilds. The very country on the Little Missouri where he built his log house was almost untrodden to the north of him. Deer lay in the brush in the open glade where the house stood, and once he shot one from his door. The fencing in of cattle lands had not begun. The buffalo [84] THE HORSE AND THE GUN grazed yet in scattered bands in the mountain recesses far from beaten trails; the last great herd on the plains had been slaughtered, but five years later Mr. Roosevelt tracked an old bull and his family of cows and calves in the wilderness on the Wisdom River near where Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana come together. He trailed them all day and at last came upon them in a glade shut in by dark pines. As he gazed upon the huge, shaggy beasts, behind which towered the mountains, their crests crim- soned by the sinking sun, there mingled with the excitement of the hunter a " half -melan- choly feeling at the thought that they were the last remnant of a doomed and nearly vanished race." It did not prevent him, however, from eating the grilled meat of the old bull that night at the camp-fire, with a hungry hunter's relish. The great head of the mighty beast hangs over the fire-place at Sagamore Hill, an object of shuddering awe to the little ones. None of them will in their day ever bring home such a trophy from the hunt. I looked past it into the room where the piano stands, the other day, and saw two of them there, Ethel giving Archie, with the bewitching [85] THEODORE ROOSEVELT bangs and the bare brown boyish legs, his music lesson. One groping foot for the lesson would n't come dangled within reach of the ugliest grizzly's head a distorted fancy could conceive of. I know it, for I stumble over it regularly when I come there, until I have got it charted for that particular trip. The skin to which it is attached is one Mr. Roosevelt sets great store by. It is a memento of the most thrilling moment of his life, when he was hunt- ing alone in the foothills of the Rockies. He had made his camp " by the side of a small, noisy brook with crystal water," and had strolled off with his rifle to see if he could pick up a grouse for supper, when he came upon the grizzly and wounded it. It took refuge in a laurel thicket, where Roosevelt laid siege to it. While he was cautiously skirting the edge, peering in, in the gathering dusk, the bear suddenly came out on the hillside: " Scarlet strings of froth hung from his lips; his eyes burned like embers in the gloom." Roosevelt fired, and the bullet shattered the point of the grizzly's heart. " Instantly the great bear turned with a harsh roar of fury and challenge, blowing the bloody foam from [86] THE HORSE AND THE GUN his mouth, so that I saw the gleam of his white fangs; and then he charged straight at me, crashing and bounding through the laurel bushes, so that it was hard to aim. I waited until he came to a fallen tree, raking him as he topped it with a ball which entered his chest and went through the cavity of his body, but he neither swerved nor flinched, and at the moment I did not know that I had struck him. He came steadily on, and in another second was almost upon me. I fired for his forehead, but my bullet went low, entering his open mouth, smashing his lower jaw, and going into his 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 his charge carried him past. As he struck, he lurched forward, leaving a pool of bright blood where his muzzle hit the ground; but he re- covered himself, and made two or three jumps onwards, while I hurriedly jammed a couple of cartridges into the magazine my rifle holding only four, all of which I had fired. Then he tried to pull up, but as he did so his muscles seemed suddenly to give way, his head drooped, [87] THEODORE ROOSEVELT and he rolled over and over like a shot rabbit. Each of my first three bullets had inflicted a mortal wound." That was hunting of the kind that calls for a stout heart. When I think of it, there comes to me by contrast the echo of the laugh we had, when he lay with his Rough-Riders at Mon- tauk Point, over my one unlucky experience with a " silver-tip." I have a letter yet, dated Camp WikofF, Montauk, September 9, 1898, in which he has scribbled after the business on hand, an added note: "Good luck on your hunt! Death to grizzly-bear cubs." I can hear his laugh now. I am not a mighty hunter, but I know a bear when I see it at least so I thought and when, wandering in the forest primeval, far from camp, with only a fowling- piece, I beheld a movement in the top of a big pine, I had no difficulty in making out a bear- cub there with the last rays of the sun silvering the tip of its brief tail a " silver-tip " then; and likewise my knowledge of the world in general, if not of wood-craft, told me that where the cub was the mamma bear would not be far away. It was therefore, I insist, proof of fearless courage that I deliberately shot [88] THE HORSE AND THE GUN down the cub with one of my two No. 12 car- tridges, even if I made great haste to pick it up and carry it away before Madam Bruin should appear. It is all right to be bold, but when it comes to maddened she-bears I made a wild grab for my cub, and had my hand impaled upon a hundred porcupine quills. It was that kind of a cub. It is well enough to laugh, but it took me a little while before I could join in, with all those quills sticking in my fist, just like so many barbed fish-hooks. I remember we shot together once at the range, and that I made nearly as good a score as he. It was in the beginning of our ac- quaintance, when I had been staying at Saga- more Hill and the question was put by Mrs. Roosevelt at the breakfast-table whether I would rather go driving with her or "go with Theodore on the range." And I remember the perfidious smile with which he repeated the question, as if he should be so glad to have me go driving when he really wanted to try the new rifle on the range. He cannot dissemble worth a cent, and Mrs. Roosevelt laughed and sent us away, to my great relief; for going driving with her is a privilege one might well [89] THEODORE ROOSEVELT be proud of, and I well, we had looked at the rifle together the night before. Really, it is no use for me to try, either. But about the score; that was shooting at a target. Hitting a running animal is a differ- ent story, as I know to my sorrow. Though Mr. Roosevelt is near-sighted and wears glasses, and though his hand, he says himself, is none too steady, yet he has acquired a very formidable reputation as a hunter, and this, he adds with characteristic touch, because he has " hunted very perseveringly, and by much practice has learned to shoot about as well at a wild animal as at a target." It is the story of everything he undertook: his opportunities were in nothing unusually great, except in his marvelous mastery over his own mind, his rare faculty of concentration; sometimes he was at a clear disadvantage, as in the matter of physi- cal strength and promise at the outset; yet he won by sheer perseverance. He has killed in his day every kind of large game to be found on the North American continent. The " horse and the gun " were having their day. And while he hunted, with the instinct of the naturalist, who lets nothing escape that [90] THE HORSE AND THE GUN can contribute to our knowledge of the world about us, he made notes of the habits and habi- tats of the game he hunted. His hunting- books have been extensively quoted by the sci- entific periodicals. Which brings to my mind another Presidential sportsman who occasion- ally makes notes of his exploits with the rod. He will forgive me for telling of it, for never did man draw a clearer picture of himself than did Mr. Cleveland when over the dinner-table in a friend's house he told the story of the egg the neighbor's hen laid in his yard. We had been discussing the way of conscience whe- ther it was born in men, or whether it grew, and he supported his belief that it was born with the child by telling of how when he was a little chap the hen made the mistake aforesaid. "I could n't have been over five or six at most," said Mr. Cleveland, " but I remember the awful row I made until they brought back that egg to the side of the fence where it be- longed." That was Grover Cleveland, sure enough. My own conscience suffered twinges he knew not of during the recital, for I also had an egg to my account, but on the other side of the [91] THEODORE, ROOSEVELT ledger, though it was never laid. I remem- bered well the half of an idle forenoon I spent, when I was nearer fifteen than five, treacher- ously trying to decoy my neighbor's hen across the fence to lay her egg in my yard. The door- knob I polished a most alluring white and hid in some hay for a nest-egg, and the trail of corn I made they all rose up and spurned me. Who says the world is not getting better? Look upon this picture and upon that. No one would ever think of making me President. And when I thought of Mr. Roosevelt's proba- ble action with the hen cackling on his side of the fence, who can doubt that he would return the egg with a stern reprimand to its owner not to lead his neighbor into temptation again ? Mr. Cleveland might have registered the weight of the egg before returning it ; the fish- erman would not be denied. Mr. Roosevelt, had the hen been a wild fowl, would have taken note of its plumage and its futile habit of hid- ing its nest from mankind, even righteous mankind. A cat may look at a king. One may have a joke even with a President. I know they won't mind. They are two men alike in the best [92] THE HORSE AND THE GUN there is in man, sturdy, courageous, splendid types of American manhood, however they dif- fer. And though they do differ, Cleveland gave Roosevelt his strongest backing in the civil service fight, while the younger man holds the ex-President, even though his political op- ponent, in the real regard in which one true man holds another. And I who write this have had the good luck to vote for them both. The Republic is all right. But I was speaking just now of the western land he loved; whether in the spring, when " the flowers are out and a man may gallop for miles at a stretch with his horse's hoofs sinking at every stride into the carpet of prai- rie roses, . . . and where even in the waste places the cactuses are blooming, . . . their mass of splendid crimson flowers glowing against the sides of the gray buttes like a splash of flame " ; when " the thickets and groves about the ranch house are loud with bird music from before dawn till long after sunrise and all through the night " ; or in the hot noon- tide hours of midsummer, when the parched land lies shimmering in the sunlight and " from the upper branches of the cottonwoods comes [93] THEODORE ROOSEVELT every now and then the soft, melancholy coo- ing of the mourning dove, whose voice always seems far away and expresses more than any other sound in nature the sadness of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief.' The other birds are still. . . . Now and then the black shadow of a wheeling vulture falls on the sun-scorched ground; the cattle that have strung down in long files from the hills lie quietly on the sand- bars." Whether in the bright moonlight that " turns the gray buttes into glimmering silver, the higher cliffs standing out in weird gro- tesqueness while the deep gorges slumber in the black shadows, the echoing hoof -beats of the horses and the steady metallic clank of the steel bridle-chains the only sounds " ; or when the gales that blow out of the north have wrapped the earth in a mantle of death ; when "in the still, merciless, terrible cold ... all the land is like granite; the great rivers stand in their beds as if turned to frosted steel. In the long nights there is no sound to break the lifeless silence. Under the ceaseless, shifting play of the Northern Lights the snow-clad plains stretch out into dead and endless wastes of glimmering white." [94] THE HORSE AND THE GUN So he saw it, and so he loved it ; loved it when the work was hard and dangerous ; when on the ranchman's occasional holiday he lay stretched before the blazing log-fire reading Shake- speare to the cowboys and eliciting the patro- nizing comment from one who followed bron- cho-busting as a trade, that " that 'ere feller Shakespeare saveyed human nature some." Loved the land and loved its people, as they loved him, a man among men. He has drawn a picture of them in his " Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," from which I have quoted, that will stand as a monument to them in the days that are to come when they shall be no more. In that day we will value, too, the book, as a marvelous picture of a vanished day. " To appreciate properly his fine, manly qualities, the wild rough-rider of the plains should be seen in his own home. There he passes his days; there he does his life-work; there, when he meets death, he faces it as he faces many other evils, with quiet, uncom- plaining fortitude. Brave, hospitable, hardy and adventurous, he is the grim pioneer of our race; he prepares the way for the civilization from before whose face he must himself dis- [95] THEODORE ROOSEVELT appear. Hard and dangerous though his ex- istence is, it has yet a wild attraction that strongly draws to it his bold, free spirit. He lives in the lonely land where mighty rivers twist in long reaches between the barren bluffs ; where the prairies stretch out into billowy plains of waving grass, girt only by the blue horizon plains across whose endless breadth he can steer his course for days and weeks, and see neither man to speak to nor hill to break the level; where the glory and the burning splendor of the sunsets kindle the blue vault of heaven and the level brown earth till they merge together in an ocean of flaming fire." Working there, resting there, growing there, in that wonderland under the spell of which these words of his were written, there came to him, unheralded, the trumpet call to another life, to duty. Over the camp-fire he read in a newspaper sent on from New York that by a convention of independent citizens he had been chosen as their standard-bearer in the fight for the mayoralty, then impending. They needed a leader. And that night he hung up the rifle, packed his trunk, and, bidding his life on the plains good-by, started for the East. [96] V THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT V THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT r | VHE citizens had picked Roosevelt be- cause they needed a young man with JL fighting grit, a man with a name to trust, a Republican who was not afraid of the machine for one thing. The machine took him because there was nothing else left for it to do, and it did that. The thing has happened since: evidence that there is life in our theory and practice of government. When such things cease to happen, popular government will not be much more than a name. The ma- chine is useful indeed, it is indispensable as a thing to be run for a purpose. When the purpose becomes merely the running of the machine, however perfect that, the soul is gone out of it. And without a soul a man or a party is dead. [99] THEODORE ROOSEVELT Something had occurred in New York fit almost to wake the dead. Henry George had been nominated for Mayor, and the world that owned houses and lands and stocks was in a panic. The town was going to be sacked, at the very least. And, in wild dread of the dis- aster that was coming, men forsook party, principles, everything, and threw themselves into the arms of Tammany, as babies run in fear of the bogy man and hide their heads in their mother's lap. Nice mother, Tammany! even with Abram S. Hewitt as its candi- date. He lived to subscribe to that statement. I have sometimes wondered what the town thought of itself when it came to, and con- sidered Henry George as he really was. I know what Roosevelt thought of it. He laughed, rather contemptuously, married, and went abroad, glad of his holiday. But he had contributed something to that campaign that had life in it. Long years after it bore fruit ; but at that time I suppose people shrugged their shoulders at it, and ran on to their haven of refuge. It was just two para- graphs in his letter of acceptance to the Com- mittee of One Hundred, the briefest of that kind of documents I ever saw. [1001 THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT " The worst evils that affect our local gov- ernment," he wrote to R. Fulton Cutting and his colleagues (even the names sound as if it were yesterday, not nearly twenty years ago), " arise from and are the inevitable results of the mixing up of city affairs with the party poli- tics of the Nation and of the State. The lines upon which National parties divide have no necessary connection with the business of the city; . . . such connection opens the way to countless schemes of public plunder and civic corruption. I very earnestly deprecate all at- tempts to introduce any class or caste feeling into the mayoralty contest. Laborers and cap- italists alike are interested in having an honest and economical city government, and if elected I shall certainly strive to be the representative of all good citizens, paying heed to nothing whatever but the general well-being." He was not elected, as I said. We were not yet grown to that. Non-partisanship in mu- nicipal politics was a poet's dream, nice but so unsubstantial. It came true all the same in time, and it will stay true when we have dozed off a few times more and been roused up with the Tammany nightmare astride of us. Maybe then my other dream will come true, [101] THEODORE ROOSEVELT too. It is my own, and I have never told even him of it ; but I have seen stranger things hap- pen. It is this, that Theodore Roosevelt shall sit in the City Hall in New York as Mayor of his own city, after he has done his work in Washington. That would be an object-lesson worth while, one we need and that would show all the world what democracy really means. I shall never be satisfied till I see it. That year I would write the last chapter of my " battle with the slum," and in truth it would be over. For that which really makes the slum is not the foul tenement, not the pestilent alley, not the want and ignorance they stand for; but the other, the killing ignorance that sits in ease and plenty and knows not that it is the brother who suffers, and that, in one way or other, he must suffer with him unless he will suffer for him. Of that there must be an end. Roosevelt in the City Hall could mean only that. Witness his plea in the letter I quoted: " Laborers and capitalists alike are interested." Of course they are, or our country goes to the dogs. In that day we shall see it, all of us. He saw it always. When I hear any one saj^ that Roosevelt is doing this, or saying that, for ef- [102] THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT feet, I know I have to do with a man who does not read or reason; or he would have made out how straight has been his course from the beginning. What he said then to the electors of New York, he did as President when he appointed the Coal Strike Commis- sion, when he blocked the way of illegal trust combinations, and when he killed the power of " pull " in the Police Department and kept the peace of the city. He said it again the other day in his Labor Day speech at Syracuse. " They will say, most likely, that it is made up of platitudes," he told me when he had fin- ished it, referring to his newspaper critics; " and so I suppose it is. Only they need to be said just here and now." They did need to. The Ten Command- ments are platitudes, I expect; certainly they have been repeated often enough. And yet even the critics will hardly claim that we have had enough of them. I noticed, by the way, that they were dumb for once. Perhaps it oc- curred to them that it took a kind of courage to insist, as he did, on the elementary virtues in the dealings of man with man as the basis of all human fellowship, against which their shafts [103] THEODORE ROOSEVELT fell powerless. If so, it did more credit to their discernment than I expected ever to have to accord them. Two years of travel and writing, of work- ing at the desk and, in between, on the ranch, where the cowboys hailed him joyously; of hunting and play which most people would have called hard work ; years during which his " Winning of the West " took shape and grew into his great work. Then, in the third, Wash- ington and the Civil Service Commission. I suppose there is scarcely one who knows anything of Theodore Roosevelt who has not got the fact of his being once a Civil Service Commissioner fixed in his mind. That was where the country got its eye upon him; and that, likewise, was where some good people grew the notion that he was a scrapper first, last, and all the time, with but little regard for whom he tackled, so long as he had him. There was some truth in that ; we shall see how much. But as to civil service reform, I have some- times wondered how many there were who knew as little what it really meant as I did until not so very long ago. How many went about with a more or less vague notion that it was [104] THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT some kind of a club to knock out spoils politics with, good for the purpose and necessary, but in the last analysis an alien kind of growth, of aristocratic tendency, to set men apart in classes. Instead of exactly the reverse, right down on the hard pan of the real and only democracy: every man on his merits ; what he is, not what he has ; what he can do, not what his pull can do for him. And do you know what first shocked me into finding out the truth? I have to own it, if it does make me blush for myself. It was when I saw a report Roosevelt had made on political blackmail in the New York Custom- House. That was what he called it, and it was meaner than the meanest, he added, because it hit hardest the employees who did n't stand politically with the party in power and were afraid to say so lest they lose their places. Three per cent, of his salary, to a clerk just able to get along, might mean " the difference between having and not having a winter coat for himself, a warm dress for his wife, or a Christmas-tree for his children a piece of cruel injustice and iniquity." It was the Christmas-tree that settled it with me. The rest was bad, but I could n't allow that. Not [105] THEODORE ROOSEVELT with my Danish pedigree of blessed Christmas- trees reaching 'way back into the day of frocks and rag dolls, and my own children's tree to re- mind me of it never! So I overcame my repugnance to schedules and tables and examinations, and got behind it all to an understanding of what it really meant. And there I found the true view of this champion of civil service reform as I might have expected; fighting the spoilsman, yes! dragging the sting from his kind of politics; hitting him blow after blow, and with the whole pack of politicians, I came near saying good and bad together, in front hitting back for very life. That was there, aU of it. But this other was there too: the man who was determined that the fellow with no pull should have an even chance with his rival who came backed; that the farmer's lad and the mechanic's son who had no one to speak for them should have the same show in competing for the public service as the son of wealth and social prestige. That was really what civil service reform meant to Roosevelt. The other was good, but this was the kernel of it, and the kernel was sound. It was, as he said in his first Presidential mes- [106] THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT sage, " as democratic and American as the com- mon-school system itself." And as for the country's end of it: " This is my rule," said he, speaking of it at the time: " if I am in such doubt about an applicant's character and fitness for office as would lead me not to put my private affairs in his hands, then I shall not put public affairs in his hands." Simple and plain enough, is it not? For all that they called it a " first-class trouble job " and the wise, or those who thought they were wise, laughed in their sleeves when Roosevelt tackled it. For at last they had him where he would be killed off sure, this bump- tious young man who had got in the way of the established order in everything. And they wished him luck. President Harrison was in the White House, well disposed, but not ex- actly a sympathetic court of appeals for a pleader like Roosevelt. In fact, he would have removed him within a year or two of his ap- pointment for daring to lay down the law to a Cabinet officer, had it been expedient. It was not expedient; by that time Theodore Roosevelt had made his own court of appeals the country and public opinion. [107] THEODORE, ROOSEVELT Contrary to the general belief, Roosevelt was never President of the Civil Service Com- mission, though I am strongly inclined to think that where he sat was the head of the table. Until he came the Board had been in hard luck. Unpopular everywhere, it had tried the ostrich game of hiding its head, hoping so to escape observation and the onset of its enemies. Things took a sudden turn with Roosevelt in the Board. He was there to do a work he thor- oughly believed in, that was one thing. In the Legislature of New York he had forced through a civil service law that was substan- tially the same as he was here set to enforce; hence he knew. And when a man knows a thing and believes in it, and it is the right thing to do anyway, truly " thrice armed is he." The enemies of the cause found it out quickly. For every time they struck, the Commission hit back twice. Nor was the new Commissioner very particular where he hit, so long as the blow told. " The spectacle," wrote Edward Cary in reviewing his work when it was done, " of a man holding a minor and rather non- descript office, politically unimportant, taking a Cabinet officer by the neck and exposing him [108] THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT to the amused contempt of all honest Ameri- cans, was what the late Horace Greeley would have called ' mighty interesting.' It was also very instructive." It was that. The whole country took an in- terest in the show. Politics woke right up and got the ear of the White House. Mr. Roose- velt respectfully but firmly refused to back down. He w r as doing his sworn duty in en- forcing the law. That was what he was there for. He urged his reform measures once, twice, three times, then went to the people, telling them all about it. The measures went through. Surveying the clamoring crowd that railed at him and his work, he flung this chal- lenge to them in an address in the Madison Street Theater in Chicago in March, 1890, the year after he was appointed : " Every ward heeler who now ekes out a mis- erable existence at the expense of office-holders and candidates is opposed to our policy, and we are proud to acknowledge it. Every poli- tician who sees nothing but reward of office in the success of a party or a principle is op- posed to us, and we are not sorry for it. ... We propose to keep a man in office as long as [109] THEODORE .ROOSEVELT he serves the public faithfully and courteously. . . . We propose that no incumbent shall be dismissed from the service unless he proves un- trustworthy or incompetent, and that no one not specially qualified for the duties of the po- sition shall be appointed. These two state- ments we consider eminently practical and American in principle." Again, a year later, when the well-worn lies that still pass current in certain newspapers had got into the Senate, this was his answer : " One of the chief false accusations which are thrown at the Commission is that we test applicants by puzzling questions. There is a certain order of intellect sometimes an order of Senatorial intellect which thinks it funny to state that a first-class young man, thor- oughly qualified in every respect, has been rejected for the position of letter-carrier be- cause he was unable to tell the distance from Hongkong to the mouth of the Yangtsekiang, or answer questions of similar nature. " I now go through a rather dreary, monot- onous illustration of how this idea becomes current. A Senator, for instance, makes state- ments of that character. I then write to him, [110] THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT and ask him his foundation for such an asser- tion. Presumably, he never receives my letter, for he never answers it. I write him again, with no better results. I then publish a contra- diction in the newspapers. Then some enter- prising correspondent interviews him, and he states the question is true, but it is below his dignity to reply to Mr. Roosevelt. As a matter of fact, he either does know or ought to know that no such question has ever been asked." I wonder now, does any one of the editors who loudly wail over the " weak surrender " of the President, these days, to malign forces of their imagination, really believe that of the man who single-handed bade defiance to the whole executive force of the Government, when the knowledge that he was right was his only weapon; or is it just buncombe like the Senator's dignity? And yet, on the other hand, when he had to do with a different element, honest but not yet persuaded, note the change from blow to argu- ment. I quote from a speech he made to a club of business men in the thick of the fight : " We hear much of the question whether the Government should take control of the [in] THEODORA ROOSEVELT telegraph lines and railways of the country. Before that question can be so much as dis- cussed, it ought to be definitely settled that, if the Government takes control of either tele- graph line or railway, it must do it to manage it purely as a business undertaking, and must manage it with a service wholly unconnected with politics. I should like to call the special attention of the gentlemen in bodies interested in increasing the sphere of State action in- terested in giving the State control more and more over railways, over telegraph lines, and over other things of the sort to the fact that the condition precedent upon success is to es- tablish an absolutely non-partisan govern- mental system. When that point is once set- tled, we can discuss the advisability of doing what these gentlemen wish, but not before." Single-handed, I said. At least we heard from him only in those days. But afterward there came to join him on the Commission a Kentuckian, an old Confederate veteran, a Democrat, and withal as fine a fellow as ever drew breath John R. Procter and the two struck hands in a friendship that was for life. [112] THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT " Every day," said Mr. Procter as we lay in the grass up in the Berkshires last summer and looked out over the peaceful valley, " every day I went to the office as to an entertainment. I knew something was sure to turn up to make our work worth while, with him there. When he went away, I had heart in it no longer." The thing that turned up at regular inter- vals was an investigation by Congress. Some- times it was charges of one kind or another; sometimes the weapon was ridicule; always at the bottom the purpose was the same: to get rid of this impudent thing that was interposing itself between the legislator and the patronage that had been to him the sinews of war till then, costly sinews as he often enough had found out, but still the only ones he knew how to use. Mr. Roosevelt met every attack with his un- varying policy of candor ; blow for blow where that was needed; at other times with tact so finished, a shrewdness of diplomacy at which the enemy stared in helpless rage. For the country was visibly falling in behind this wholesome, good-humored fighter. I remember yet with amusement the " withering charge," as he called it, which one of the Washington LW THEODORE ROOSEVELT papers brought against him. It published one of his letters in facsimile and asked scorn- fully if this man could pass an examination in penmanship for the desk of a third-rate clerk in his own office; yet he sat in judgment on the handwriting of aspirants. Now, I have always thought Mr. Roosevelt's handwriting fine. It is n't ornate. Indeed, it might be called very plain, extra plain, if you like. But his char- acter is all over it : a child could read it. There can never be any doubt as to what he means, and that, it seems to me, is what you want of a man's writing. Here is a line of it now which I quoted before, still lying on my table. Squeezed in between lines of typewriting it is not a fair sample, but take it as it is: I haven't heard a ord about it from cy superior officers, bo r , ^^. ^JTTT' / Cordially yours However, Roosevelt made no bones about it. He owned up that he could n't pass for a clerk- ship, which was well, he said, for he would have made but a poor clerk, while he thought he [114] THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT could make a good Commissioner. " And," he added, " there it is. Under our system of civil service examinations I could n't get in, whereas under the old spoils system you ad- vocate I would have had pull enough to get the appointment to the clerkship I was n't fit for. Don't you see? " I presume the editor saw, for nothing more was said about it. In the hottest of the fighting, Mr. Roosevelt executed a flank movement of such consum- mate strategic skill and shrewdness that it fairly won him the battle. He ordered exami- nations for department positions at Washing- ton to be held in the States, not at the Capital. When the successful candidates came to take the places they had won when Congressman Smith met a young fellow from his county whom he knew in Washington, holding office under an administration hostile in politics as he knew, a great light dawned upon him. He felt the fetters of patronage, that had proved a heavier and heavier burden to him, falling from his own limbs, and from among the Congress- men who had hotly opposed Roosevelt came some of the warmest advocates of the new [115] THEODORE ROOSEVELT salvation. The policy of fairness, of perfect openness, had won. But it was a fight, sure enough. Mr. Roosevelt's literary labors in the cause alone were immense. Besides the six annual reports of the Commission during his incumbency the sixth to the eleventh, inclu- sive which were written largely by him, his essays and papers in defense of the reform cov- ered a range that would give a clerk, I was told at the Congressional Library, a good week's work if he were to make anything like a com- plete list of them. There never yet was a perfect law, and the civil service law was no exception. It did not put saints in office. It gave men a fair show, helped kill political blackmail, and kept some scoundrels out. Sometimes, too, it kept the best man out; for no system of examination can be devised to make sure he gets in. Roose- velt was never a stickler for the letter of any- thing. I know that perhaps better than any- body. If I were to tell how many times we have sat down together to devise a way of get- ting through the formal husk, even at the risk of bruising it some, to get at the kernel, the spirit of justice that is the soul of every law, [116] THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT however undeveloped, I might frighten some good people needlessly. I think likely it was the recognition of this quality in the man, the entire absence of pedantry in his advocacy of the reform, that won the people over to him as much as anything. Some good stories are told about that, but perhaps one he told himself of his experience as a regimental commander in the Spanish war sheds more light on that side of him than anything else. He had a man in his regiment, a child of the frontier, in whom dwelt the soul of a soldier in war, not in peace. By no process of reasoning or dis- cipline could he be persuaded to obey the camp regulations, while the regiment lay at San An- tonio, and at last he was court-martialed, sen- tenced to six months' imprisonment a tech- nical sentence, for there was no jail to put him in. The prison was another Rough-Rider fol- lowing him around with a rifle to keep him in bounds. Then came the call to Cuba, and the Colonel planned to leave him behind as useless baggage. When the man heard of it, his soul was stirred to its depths. He came and pleaded as a child to be taken along. He would always be good ; never again could he show up in Kan- [117] THEODORA ROOSEVELT sas if the regiment went to the war without him. At sight of his real agony Mr. Roose- velt's heart relented. " All right," he said. " You deserve to be shot as much as anybody. You shall go." And he went, flowing over with gratitude, to prove himself in the field as good a man as his prison of yore who fought beside him. Then came the mustering out. When the last man was checked off and accounted for, the War Department official, quartermaster or general or something, fumbled with his papers. " Where is the prisoner? " he asked. " The prisoner? " echoed Colonel Roosevelt; " what prisoner? " " Why, the man who got six months at a court-martial." " Oh, he! He is all right. I remitted his sentence." The official looked the Colonel over curi- ously. " You remitted his sentence," he said. " Sen- tenced by a court-martial, approved by the commanding general, you remitted his sen- tence. Well, you 've got nerve." [118] THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT Perhaps the Civil Service Commissioner's " nerve " had something to do with winning his fight. I like to think it had. With that added, one could almost feel like hugging civil ser- vice reform. One phase of this " Six Years' War " I can- not pass by, since it may serve as a chart to some inquiring minds much troubled to find out where the President will stand in matters of recent notoriety. They may give up their still-hunt for information and assume with per- fect confidence that he will stand where he al- ways has stood, on the square platform of fair dealing between man and man. Here is the letter that made me think of it. It was written to the Chairman of the Committee on Reform in the Civil Service of the Fifty-third Con- gress, in the spring of 1894, the year before he left the Commission: Congressman Williams, of Mississippi, attacked the Commission in substance because under the Commis- sion white men and men of color are treated with ex- act impartiality. As to this, I have to say that so !ong as the present Commissioners continue their of- ficial existence they will not" make, and, so far as in their power lies, will refuse to allow others to make, any discrimination whatsoever for or against any man [119] THEODORE ROOSEVELT because of his color, any more than because of his politics or religion. We do equal and exact justice to all, and I challenge Mr. Williams or any one else to show a single instance where the Commission has failed to do this. Mr. Williams specified the Railway Mail Service in Missouri as being one in which negroes are employed. The books of the Railway Mail Service for the division including South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi were shown me yesterday, and according to these books about three-fourths of the employees are white and one-fourth colored. Under the last administration it was made a reproach to us that we did full and entire justice to the Southern Democrats, and that through our examinations many hundreds of them entered the classified service, although under a Republican administration. Exactly in the same way, it is now made a reproach to us that under our examinations honest and capable colored men are given an even chance with honest and capable white men. I esteem this reproach a high compliment to the Commission, for it is an admission that the Com- mission has rigidly done its duty as required by law without regard to politics or religion and without re- gard to color. Very respectfully, THEODORE ROOSEVELT. " You cannot change him unless you con- vince him," said Mr. Procter to me, as we got up to go down into the valley, whence the gray evening shadows were reaching up toward us. [120] THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT If you think you can convince Theodore Roose- velt that a square deal is not the right thing, you can look for a change in him when he has taken a stand on a moral question; else you need n't trouble. President Cleveland was in office by that time, and the Democratic party was in. But Roosevelt stayed as Civil Service Commis- sioner, and abated not one jot of his zeal. I do not know what compact was made between the two men, but I can guess from what I knew of them both. An incident of the White House shows what kind of regard grew up between them as they came to know one another. It was the day President McKinley was buried. President Roosevelt had come in alone. Among the mourners he saw Mr. Cleveland. Now, the etiquette of the White House, which is in its way as rigid as that of any court in Europe, requires that the President shall be sought out; he is not to go to any one. But Mr. Roosevelt waved it all aside with one im- pulsive gesture as he went straight to Mr. Cleveland and took his hand. An official who stood next to them, and who told me, heard him say: [121] THEODORE ROOSEVELT " It will always be a source of pride and pleasure to me to have served under President Cleveland." Mr. Cleveland shook hands, mute with emotion. I learned afterward that among all the countless messages of sympathy and cheer that came to him in those hard days, the one of them all he prized highest and that touched him most deeply was from Grover Cleveland. The Six Years' War was nearly over when the summons came to him to take the helm in the Police Department in New York City, the then storm-center in the fight for civic regen- eration. He and his colleague, Mr. Procter, had their first and only falling out over his choice to go into the new fight. They quar- reled over it until Roosevelt put his arm over the other's shoulder and said: " Old friend! I have made up my mind that it is right for me to go." Mr. Procter shook him off almost roughly, and got up from the table. " All right," he said, " go I You always would have your way, and I suppose you are right, blank it and blank blank it! " and the grizzled old veteran went out and wept like a child. [122] THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT The outcome of it all? Figures convey no idea of it. To say that he found 14,000 govern- ment officers under the civil service rules, and left 40,000, does not tell the story ; not even in its own poor way, for there are 125,000 now, and when the ransomed number 200,000 it will still be Roosevelt's work. President Cleveland put it more nearly right in his letter to Mr. Roosevelt regretfully accepting his resigna- tion. " You are certainly to be congratulated," he wrote, " upon the extent and permanency of civil service reform methods which you have so substantially aided in bringing about. The struggle for its firm establishment and recogni- tion is past. Its faithful application and rea- sonable expansion remain, subjects of deep in- terest to all who really desire the best attainable public service." That was what the country got out of it. The fight was won wait, let me put that a little less strongly: the way to the victory is cleared. Just now, as I was writing that sen- tence, a man, an old friend, a teacher in Israel, came into my office and to him I read what I had just written. " That 's right," he said ; " I [123] THEODORA ROOSEVELT came in to ask you if you would n't help a young man who wants to get into the public employment. He is a fine fellow, has got all the qualifications. All he needs is influence to get him a place. Without influence you cannot do anything." The fight will be over the day the American people get that notion out of their heads, not before. They can drop it now, for it is all that really is left. Roosevelt won them the right to do that. He won his father's fight that he had made his own. I know how much that meant to him. The country got more out of it : it got a man to whom great tasks and great opportunities were to come with the years, trained in the school of all schools to perfect skill in dealing with men, in making out their motives and their worth as fighting units. The devious paths of diplomacy have no such training- school for leadership as he found in Washing- ton fighting for a great principle, touching el- bows every day with men from all over the country, with the leaders in thought and action, in politics, in every phase of public life. He went there, a fearless battler for the right, and THE FAIR PLAY DEPARTMENT came away with all his ideals bright and unsul- lied. It was in the Civil Service Commission's office the cunning was fashioned which, without giving offense, put the Kishineff petition into the hands of the Czar and his Ministers be- fore they had time to say they would not receive it, and gave notice to the Muscovite world that there was a moral sense across the sea to be reckoned with ; of which fact it took due notice. Still more did the country get out of that Six Years' War: from end to end of the land the men with ideals, young and old, the men and women who would help their fellows, help their cities, took heart from his example and his victory. Perhaps that was the greatest gain, the one that went farthest. It endures to this day. Wherever he fights, men fall in behind and fight on with new hope; they know they can win if they keep it up. And they will, let them be sure of it. All the little defeats are just to test their grit. It is a question of grit, that is all. [195] VI MULBERRY STREET VI IN MULBERRY STREET A "DOZEN years had wrought their changes since Roosevelt took his leg- islative committee down from Albany to investigate the Police Department of New York City. The only change they had brought to Mulberry Street * was that of aggravating a hundredfold the evils which had then at- tracted attention. He had put an unerring finger upon politics as the curse that was eat- ing out the heart of the force once called the finest in the world. The diagnosis was cor- rect; but the prescription written out by the spoilsmen was more politics and ever more poli- tics; and the treatment was about as bad as could have been devised. With the police be- come an avowedly political body with a bi-par- i The Police Headquarters of the city is in Mulberry Street. [129] THEODORE. ROOSEVELT tisan in stead of a non-partisan Board of Com- missioners, there grew up, primarily through the operation, or non-operation, of the Sunday saloon-closing law, a system of police blackmail unheard of in the world before. It was the disclosure of its slimy depths through the labors of Dr. Parkhurst and of the Lexow Committee which brought about the political revolution out of which came reform and Roosevelt. But in Mulberry Street they were hailed as freaks. The " system " so far had been invincible. It had broken many men who had got in its way. " It will break you," was the greeting with which Byrnes, the Big Chief, who had ruled Mulberry Street with a hard hand, but had himself bowed to " the system," received Mr. Roosevelt. " You will yield. You are but human." The answer of the new President of the Board was to close the gate of the politicians to police patronage. " We want," he said, " the civil service law applied to appointments here, not because it is the ideal way, but because it is the only way to knock the political spoilsmen out, and you [130] IN MULBERRY STREET have to do that to get anywhere." And the Board made the order. Next he demanded the resignation of the chief, and forbade the annual parade for which preparations were being made. " We will parade when we need not be ashamed to show ourselves." And then he grappled with the saloons. Here, before we go into that fight, let me turn aside a moment to speak of myself; then perhaps with good luck we shall have less of me hereafter. Though how that can be I don't really know; for now I had Roosevelt at last in my own domain. For two years we were to be together all the day, and quite often most of the night, in the environment in which I had spent twenty years of my life. And these two were the happiest by far of them all. Then was life really worth living, and I have a pretty robust enjoyment of it at all times. Else- where I have told how we became acquainted; how he came to my office one day when I was out and left his card with the simple words written in pencil upon it: "I have read your book, and I have come to help." That was the beginning. The book was " How the Other [131] THEODORE. ROOSEVELT Half Lives," in which I tried to draw an in- dictment of the things that were wrong, piti- fully and dreadfully wrong, with the tenement homes of our wage-workers. It was like a man coming to enlist for a war because he believed in the cause, and truly he did. Now had come the time when he could help indeed. Decency had moved into the City Hall, where shame- less indifference ruled before. His first thought was to have me help there. I preserve two letters from him, from the time between the election in 1894 that put Tammany out and the New Year when Mayor Strong and reform moved in, in which he urges this idea. t"< " It is very important to the city," he writes, " to have a business man's mayor, but it is more important to have a workingman's mayor, and I want Mr. Strong to be that also. ... I am exceedingly anxious that, if it is possible, the Mayor shall appoint you to some position which shall make you one of his official ad- visers. ... It is an excellent thing to have rapid transit, but it is a good deal more important, if you look at matters with a proper perspec- tive, to have ample playgrounds in the poorer [189] IN MULBERRY STREET quarters of the city, and to take the children off the streets to prevent them from growing up toughs. In the same way it is an admirable thing to have clean streets; indeed, it is an essen- tial thing to have them ; but it would be a better thing to have our schools large enough to give ample accommodation to all should-be pupils, and to provide them with proper play- grounds." You see, he had not changed. His was the same old plan, to help the man who was down ; and he was right, too. It was and is the es- sential thing in a country like ours : not to prop him up forever, not to carry him; but to help him to his feet so he can go himself. Else the whole machine won't go at length in the groove in which we have started it. The last letter concludes with regret that he had not seen his way clear to accept the street-cleaning com- missionership that was offered him by the Mayor, for " I should have been delighted to smash up the corrupt contractors and put the street-cleaning force absolutely out of the do- main of politics." No doubt he would; but it was well he did n't, for so Colonel Waring came into our city's life, and he was just such [133] THEODORE- ROOSEVELT another, and an engineer besides, who knew how. As to the share he wanted me to take in it, we had it out at the time over that ; and, though we had little tugs after that, off and on, it was settled then that I should not be called upon to render that kind of service to Mayor Strong's rather bewildered relief, I fancy. I think, to the end of his official life he did not get quite rid of a notion that I was nursing some sort of an unsatisfied ambition and reserv- ing my strength for a sudden raid upon him. I know that when I asked him to appoint an unofficial Small Parks Committee, and to put me on it, it took him a long time to make up his mind that there was not a nigger in that wood- pile somewhere. He was the only man, if I am right in that, who ever gave me credit for po- litical plotting. For when, afterward, as I re- corded in " The Making of an American," I marched the Christian Endeavorers and the Methodist ministers to the support of Roose- velt in the fight between him and his wicked partners in the Police Board, that was not plot- ting, though they called it so, but just war; a [134] IN MULBERRY STREET kind of hold-up, if you like, in the plain in- terests of the city's welfare. But " the system " Roosevelt was called to break up. I shall not attempt to describe it. The world must be weary of it to the point of disgust. We fought it then ; we fight it now. We shall have to fight it no one can tell how often or how long; for just as surely as we let up for ever so little a while, and Tammany, which is always waiting without, gets its foot between the door and the jamb, the old black- mail rears its head once more. It is the form corruption naturally takes in a city with twelve or thirteen thousand saloons, with a State law that says they shall be closed on Sundays, and with a defiant thirst which puts a premium on violating the law by making it the most profit- able day in the week to the saloon-keeper who will take the chances. Those chances are the opportunities of the politician and of the police where the two connect. The politicians use the law as a club to keep the saloons in line, all except the biggest, the keepers of which sit in the inner councils of ''the Hall"; the police use it for extorting blackmail. " The result [135] THEODORE ROOSEVELT was," said Roosevelt himself, when he had got a bird's-eye view of the situation, " that the officers of the law and the saloon-keepers be- came inextricably tangled in a network of crime and connivance at crime. The most pow- erful saloon-keepers controlled the politicians and the police, while the latter in turn terror- ized and blackmailed all the other saloon-keep- ers." Within the year or two that preceded Roosevelt's coming to Mulberry Street, this system of " blackmail had been brought to such a state of perfection, and had become so op- pressive to the liquor-dealers themselves, that they communicated first with Governor Hill and then with Mr. Croker." I am quoting now from a statement made by the editor of their organ, the " Wine and Spirit Gazette," the correctness of which was never questioned. The excise law was being enforced with " gross discrimination." " A committee of the Cen- tral Association of Liquor Dealers took the matter up and called upon Police Commis- sioner Martin ( Mr. Roosevelt's Tammany pre- decessor in the presidency of the Board) . An agreement was made between the leaders of Tammany Hall and the liquor-dealers, accord- [136] IN MULBERRY STREET ing to which the monthly blackmail paid to the police should be discontinued in return for po- litical support/' The strange thing is that they did not put it on the books at headquarters in regular form. Probably they did not think of it. But the agreement was kept only with those who had " pull." It did not hurt them to see their smaller, helpless rivals bullied and black- mailed by the police. As for the police, they were taking no chances. They had bought ap- pointment, or promotion, of Tammany with the understanding that they were to reimburse themselves for the outlay. Their hunger only grew as they fed, until they blackmailed every- thing in sight, from the push-cart peddler in the street, who had bought his license to sell, but was clubbed from post to post until he " gave up," to the brothel, the gambling-house, and the policy-shop, for which they had regular rates: so much for "initiation" every time a new captain came to the precinct, and so much per month for permission to run. The total ran up in the millions. New York was a wide- open town. The bosses at " the Hall " fairly rolled in wealth ; the police had lost all decency [137] THEODORE- ROOSEVELT and sense of justice. That is, the men who ran the force had. The honest men on the patrol posts, the men with the night-sticks as Roose- velt called them when he spoke of them, had lost courage and hope. This was the situation that confronted him in Mulberry Street, and with characteristic di- rectness he decided that in the saloon was the tap-root of the mischief. The thing to do was to enforce the Sunday-closing law. And he did. The storm that rose lives in my memory as the most amazing tempest I was going to say in a teapot that ever was. But it was a capital affair to those whose graft was at stake. The marvel was in the reach they had. It seemed for a season as if society was struck through and through with the rottenness of it all. That the politicians, at first incredulous, took the alarm was not strange. They had an interest. But in their tow came half the com- munity, as it seemed, counseling, praying, be- seeching this man to cease his rash upturning of the foundations of things, and use discre- tion. Roosevelt replied grimly that there was nothing about discretion in his oath of office, [138] IN MULBERRY STREET and quoted to them Lincoln's words, " Let rev- erence of law be taught in schools and colleges, be written in primers and spelling-books, be published from pulpits and proclaimed in leg- islative houses, and enforced in the courts of justice in short, let it become the political religion of the nation." He was doing nothing worse than enforcing honestly a law that had been enforced dishonestly in all the years. Still the clamor rose. The yellow newspapers pursued Roosevelt with malignant lies. They shouted daily that the city was overrun with thieves and murderers, that crime was rampant and unavenged, because the police were worn out in the Sunday-closing work. Every thief, cut-throat, and blackmailer who had place and part in the old order of things joined in the howl. Roosevelt went deliberately on, the only one who was calm amid all the hubbub. And when, after many weeks of it, the smoke cleared away ; when the saloon-keepers owned in court that they were beaten; when the warden of Bellevue Hospital reported that for the first time in its existence there had not been a " case," due to a drunken brawl, in the hospi- tal all Monday; when the police courts gave [139] THEODORE- ROOSEVELT their testimony, while savings-banks recorded increased deposits and pawn-shops hard times ; when poor mothers flocked to the institu- tions to get their children whom they had placed there for safe-keeping in the " wide- open " days then we knew what his victory meant. These were the things that happened. They are the facts. Living in this cosmopolitan city, where, year after year, the Sunday-closing law turns up as an issue in the fight for good gov- ernment, an issue, so we are told, with the very people, the quiet, peace-loving Germans, upon whom we, from every other point of view, would always count as allies in that struggle, I find myself impatiently enough joining in the demand for freedom from the annoyance, for a " liberal observance " of Sunday that shall rid us of this ghost at our civic banquet. And then I turn around and look at the facts as they were then ; at that Sunday which Roose- velt and I spent from morning till night in the tenement districts, seeing for ourselves what went on ; at the happy children and contented mothers we met whose homes, according to their self-styled defenders, were at that verv time [140] IN MULBERRY STREET being " hopelessly desolated by the enforce- ment of a tyrannical law surviving from the dark ages of religious bigotry " ; and I ask my- self how much of all the clamor for Sunday beer comes from the same pot that spewed forth its charges against Roosevelt so venom- ously. It may be that we shall need another emancipation before we get our real bearings: the delivery of the honest Germans from their spokesmen who would convince us that with them every issue of family life, of good govern- ment, of manhood and decency, is subordinate to the one of beer, and beer only. Blackmail was throttled for a season; but the clamor never ceased. Roosevelt shut the police-station lodging-rooms, the story of which I told in " The Making of an Ameri- can." Greater service was never rendered the city by any man. For it he was lampooned and caricatured. He was cruel! he who spent his waking and sleeping hours planning relief for his brother in distress. So little was he understood that even the venerable chairman of the Charter Revision Committee asked him sternly if he " had no pity for the poor." I can see him now, bending contracted brows [141] THEODORE ROOSEVELT upon the young man who struck right and left where he saw wrong done. Roosevelt an- swered patiently enough, with respect for the gray hairs, that it was poor pity for the tramp to enable him to go on tramping, which was all the lodging-houses did; and he went right ahead and shut them up. We had a law forbidding the sale of liquor to children, which was a dead letter. I stood in front of one East Side saloon and watched a steady stream of little ones with mugs and bottles going through the door, and I told Roosevelt. He gave orders to seize the worst offender, and had him dragged to court ; but to do it he had to permit the use of a boy to get evidence, a regular customer who had gone there a hundred times for a bad purpose, and now was sent in once for a good one. A howl of protest arose. The magistrate discharged the saloon-keeper and reprimanded the policeman. Like a pack of hungry wolves they snarled at Roosevelt. He was to be legislated out of office. He turned to the decent people of the city. " We shall not have to employ such means," he said, " once a year, but when we need to we shall not shrink from it. It is idle [142] IN MULBERRY STREET to ask us to employ against law-breakers only such means as those law-breakers approve. We are not playing ' puss in the corner ' with the criminals. We intend to stamp out these vermin, and we do not intend to consult the vermin as to the methods we shall employ." And the party managers at Albany he warned publicly that an attack upon the Police Board, on whatever pretext, was an attack upon its members because they had done their duty, and that the politicians must reckon with de- cent sentiment, if they dared punish them for declining to allow the police force to be used for political purposes, or to let law-breakers go unpunished. Roosevelt won. He conquered politics and he stopped law-breaking; but the biggest vic- tory he won was over the cynicism of a peo- ple so steeped in it all that they did not dream it could be done. Tammany came back, but not to stay. And though it may come back many times yet for our sins, it will be merely like the thief who steals in to fill his pockets from the till when the store-keeper is not look- ing. That was what we got out of having Roosevelt on the Police Board. He could not [143] THEODORA ROOSEVELT set us free. We have got to do that ourselves. But he cut our bonds and gave us arms, if we chose to use them. Of the night trips we took together to see how the police patrolled in the early hours of the morning, when the city sleeps and police- men are most needed, I told in the story of my own life, and shall not here repeat it. They earned for him the name of Haroun-al-Roose- velt, those trips that bore such sudden good fruit in the discipline of the force. They were not always undertaken solely to wake up the police. Roosevelt wanted to know the city by night, and the true inwardness of some of the problems he was struggling with as Health Commissioner; for the President of the Police Board was by that fact a member of the Health Board also. One might hear of overcrowd- ing in tenements for years and not grasp the subject as he could by a single midnight inspection with the sanitary police. He wanted to understand it all, the smallest with the greatest, and sometimes the information he brought out was unique, to put it mildly. I can never think of one of those expeditions without a laugh. We had company that night : [144] IN MULBERRY STREET Hamlin Garland and Dr. Alexander Lambert were along. In the midnight hour we stopped at a peanut-stand in Rivington Street for provender, and while the Italian made change Roosevelt pumped him on the economic prob- lem he presented. How could he make it pay ? No one was out ; it did not seem as if his sales could pay for even the fuel for his torch that threw its flickering light upon dark pavements and deserted streets. The peanut-man groped vainly for a meaning in his polite speech, and turned a bewildered look upon the doctor. " How," said he, coming promptly to the rescue, " how you make him pay cash pan out monish? " The Italian beamed with sudden under- standing. -" Nah! " he said, with a gesture elo- quent of resentment and resignation in one: " Wat I maka on de peanut I losa on de dam' banan'." Did the police hate Roosevelt for making them do their duty? No, they loved him. The crooks hated him; they do everywhere, and with reason. But the honest men on the force, who were, after all, in the great majority, even if they had knuckled under in discouragement [145] THEODORE ROOSEVELT to a system that could break them, but against which they were powerless, came quickly to accept him as their hope of delivery. For the first time in the history of the department every man had a show on his merits. Amazing as it was, " pull " was dead. Politics or religion cut no figure. No one asked about them. But did a policeman, pursuing a burglar through the night, dive running into the Park Avenue railroad tunnel, risking a horrible death to catch his man, he was promptly promoted ; did a bicycle policeman lie with broken and bruised bones after a struggle with a runaway horse that meant his life or the lives of helpless wo- men and children if he let go, he arose from his bed a roundsman with the medal for bravery on his breast. Did a gray-haired veteran swim ashore among grinding ice-floes with a drown- ing woman, he was called to headquarters and made a sergeant. I am speaking of cases that actually occurred. The gray-haired veteran of the Civil War had saved twenty-eight lives at the risk of his own, his beat lay along the river shore, had been twice distinguished by Con- gress with medals for valor, bore the life-sav- ing medal, and had never a complaint against [146] IN MULBERRY STREET him on the discipline-book; but about all the recognition he had ever earned from the Police Board was the privilege of buying a new uni- form at his own expense when he had ruined the old one in risking his life. Roosevelt had not been in Mulberry Street four weeks when the board resolved, on his motion, that clothes ruined in risking life on duty were a badge of honor, of which the board was proud to pay the cost. That the police became, from a band of blackmailers' tools, a body of heroes in a few brief months, only backs up my belief that the heart of the force, with which my lines were cast half a lifetime, was and is all right, with the Deverys and the Murphys out of the way. Led by a Roosevelt, it would be the most mag- nificent body of men to be found anywhere. Two years under him added quite a third to the roll-of -honor record of forty years under Tam- many politics. However, the enemy was quick to exploit what there was in that. When I looked over the roll the other day I found page upon page inscribed with names I did not know, behind one of a familiar sound, though I could not quite make it out. Tammany or [147] THEODORE ROOSEVELT Toomany either way would mean the same thing : it was no longer a roll of honor. These were some of the things Roosevelt did in Mulberry Street. He did many more, and they were all for its good. He did them all so simply, so frankly, that in the end he disarmed criticism, which in the beginning took it all for a new game, an " honesty racket," of which it had not got the hang, and could not, con- founded his enemies, who grew in number as his success grew and sat up nights hatching out plots by which to trip him. Roosevelt strode through them all, kicking their snares right and left, half the time not dreaming that they were there, and laughing contemptuously when he saw them. I remember a mischief-maker whose mission in life seemed to be to tell lies at head- quarters and carry tales, setting people at odds where he could. He was not an official, but an outsider, an idler with nothing better to do, but a man with a " pull " among politicians. Roosevelt came upon some of his lies, traced them to their source, and met the man at the door the next time he came nosing around. I was there and heard what passed. " Mr. So-and-so." said the President of the [148] IN MULBERRY STREET Board, " I hr,ve heard this thing, and I am told you said it. You know, of course, that it is a lie. I shall send at once for the man who says he heard you tell it, so that you may meet him; because you know if you did say it we cannot have you around here any more." The man got out at once and never came back while Roosevelt was there. It was all as simple as that, perfectly open and aboveboard, and I think he was buncoed less than any of his " wise " predecessors. There was that in his trust in uncorrupted hu- man nature that brought out a like response. There always is, thank heaven ! You get what you give in trust and affection. The man who trusts no one has his faith justified; no one will trust him, and he will find plenty to try their wits upon him. Once in a while Roosevelt's sympathies betrayed him, but not to his dis- credit. They laugh yet in the section-rooms at the police stations over the trick played upon him by a patrolman whose many peccadilloes had brought him at last to the " jumping-off place." This time he was to be dismissed. The President said so; there was no mercy. But the policeman had " piped him off." He knew [148] THEODORE ROOSEVELT his soft spot. In the morning, when the Com- missioner came fresh from his romp with his own babies, there confronted him eleven young- sters of all ages, howling dolefully. The doomed policeman mutely introduced them with a sorrowful gesture, motherless all. Mr. Roosevelt's stern gaze softened. What, no mother? all these children! Go, then, and take one more chance, one last chance. And the policeman went out with the eleven chil- dren which were not his at all. He had bor- rowed them, all but two, from the neighbors in his tenement. But there is no malice in the joking at his expense, rather affection. It is no mean trib- ute to human nature, even in the policeman's uniform, that for the men who tricked Roose- velt in the Police Board his recreant col- leagues and undid what they could of his work, there survives in the Department the ut- most contempt and detestation, while Roose- velt is held in the heartiest regard that is not in the least due to his exalted station, but to a genuine reverence for the man's character as Mulberry Street saw it when it was put to the severest test. [150] IN MULBERRY STREET I shall have, after all, to ask those who would know him at this period of his life, as I knew him, to read " The Making of an Ameri- can," because I should never get through were I to try to tell it all. He made, as I said, a large part of my life in Mulberry Street, and by far the best part. When he went, I had no heart in it. Of the strong hand he lent in the battle with the slum, as a member of the Health Board, that book wiU tell them. We had all the ammunition for the fight, the law and all, but there was no one who dared begin it till he came. Then the batteries opened fire at once, and it is largely due to him and his unhesitat- ing courage that we have got as far as we have. And that means something beyond the ordi- nary, for we were acting under an untried law, the failure of which might easily involve a man in suits for very great damages. Indeed, Mr. Roosevelt was sued twice by landlords whose tenements he destroyed. One characteristic in- cident survives in my memory from that day. An important office was to be filled in the Health Department, about which I knew. There were two candidates: one the son of a janitor, educated in the public schools, faithful [151] THEODORE ROOSEVELT and able, but without polish or special fitness; the other a college man, a graduate of how many foreign schools of learning I don't know, a gen- tleman of travel, of refinement. He was the man for the position, which included much con- tact with the outer world, so I judged, and so did others. Roosevelt had the deciding vote. We urged our man strongly upon him. He saw the force of our arguments, and yielded, but slowly and most reluctantly. His out- spoken preference was for the janitor's son, who had fought himself up to the point where he could compete. And he was right, after all. The other was a failure ; he was over-educated. I was glad, for Roosevelt's sake as well as for my own, when in after years the janitor's son took his place and came to his own. One incident, which I have told before, I cannot forbear setting down here again, for without it even this fragmentary record would be too incomplete. I mean his meeting with the labor men who were having constant trou- ble with the police over their strikes, their pickets, etc. They made me much too proud of them, both he and they, for me ever to for- get that. Roosevelt saw that the trouble was [152] IN MULBERRY STREET in their not understanding one another, and he asked the labor leaders to meet him at Claren- don Hall to talk it over. Together we trudged through a blinding snow-storm to the meeting. This was at the beginning of things, when the town had not yet got the bearings of the man. The strike leaders thought they had to do with an ambitious politician, and they tried bluster. They would do so and so unless the police were compliant; and they watched to get him placed. They had not long to wait. Roose- velt called a halt, short and sharp. " Gentlemen! " he said, " we want to under- stand one another. That was my object in coming here. Remember, please, that he who counsels violence does the cause of labor the poorest service. Also, he loses his case. Under- stand distinctly that order will be kept. The police will keep it. Now, gentlemen ! " There was a moment's amazed suspense, and then the hall rang with their cheers. They had him placed then, for they knew a man when they saw him. And he, he went home proud and happy, for his trust in his fellow-man was justified. He said, when it was all over, that there was [153] THEODORE. ROOSEVELT no call at all for any genius in the work of administering the police force, nor, indeed, for any unusual qualities, but just common sense, common honesty, energy, resolution, and readi- ness to learn; which was probably so. They are the qualities he brought to everything he ever put his hands to. But if he learned some- thing in that work that helped round off the man in him, though it was not all sweetness or light, he taught us much more. His plain per- formance of a plain duty, the doing the right because it was the right, taught us a lesson we stood in greater need of than of any other. Roosevelt's campaign for the reform of the police force became the moral issue of the day. It swept the cobwebs out of our civic brains, and blew the dust from our eyes, so that we saw clearly where all had been confusion before: saw straight, rather. We rarely realize, in these latter days, how much of our ability to fight for good government, and our hope of winning the fight, is due to the campaign of honesty waged by Theodore Roosevelt in Mulberry Street. [164] VII THE CLASH OF WAR VII THE CLASH OF WAR IT sounded like old times, to us who had stayed behind in Mulberry Street, when, within a few months after his departure for Washington, the wail came from down there that Roosevelt was playing at war with the ships, that he was spoiling for a row, and did not care what it cost. It seems he had been asking a million dollars or so for target practice, and, when he got that, demanding more another half million. I say it sounded like old times, for that was the everlasting re- frain of the grievance while he ran the police: there was never to be any rest or peace where he was. No, there was not. In Mulberry Street it was his business to make war on the scoun- drels who had wrecked the force and brought disgrace upon our city. To Washington he [157] THEODORE ROOSEVELT had gone to sharpen the tools of war. War he knew must come. They all knew it ; it was his business to prepare for it, since the first and hardest blows must be struck on the sea. Here let me stop a moment to analyze his attitude toward this war that was looming on the horizon even before he left Mulberry Street. It was perfectly simple, as simple as anything he ever did or said, to any one who had ever taken the trouble to " think him out." I had followed him to Washington to watch events for my paper, and there joined the " war party," as President McKinley called Roose- velt and Leonard Wood, poking fun at them in his quiet way. There was not a trace of self- seeking or of jingoism in Roosevelt's attitude, unless you identify jingoism with the stalwart Americanism that made him write these words the year before: " Every true patriot, every man of states- manlike habit, should look forward to the time when not a single European power shall hold a foot of American soil." Not, he added, that it was necessary to question the title of foreign powers to present holdings; but " it certainly will become necessary if the timid and selfish [158] THE CLASH OF WAR peace-at-any-price men have their way, and if the United States fails to check, at the out- set, European aggrandizement on this con- tinent." That was one end of it, the political one, if you please ; the Monroe Doctrine in its briefest and simplest form. Spain had by outrageous mismanagement of its West Indian colonies proved herself unfit, and had forfeited the right to remain. The mismanagement had be- come a scandal upon our own shores. Every year the yellow fever that was brewed in Cuban filth crossed over and desolated a thousand homes in our Southern States. If proof were wanted that it was mismanagement that did it, events have more than supplied it since, and justified the war of humanity. Plain humanity was the other end of it, and the biggest. I know, for I saw how it worked upon his mind. I was in Washington when a German cigar-manufacturer, whose business took him once or twice a year to Cuba, came to the capital seeking an interview with Senator Lodge, his home senator, since he was from Boston. I can see him now sitting in the committee-room and telling how on his last [159] THEODORE ROOSEVELT trip he had traveled to some inland towns where he was in the habit of doing business, but where now all had been laid waste ; how when he sat down in the inn to eat such food as he could get, a famished horde of gaunt, half -naked women, with starving babies at barren breasts, crept up like dogs to his chair, righting for the crumbs that fell from his plate. Big tears rolled down the honest German's face as he told of it. He could not eat, he could not sleep until he had gone straight to Washing- ton to tell there what he had witnessed. I can see the black look come into Roosevelt's face and hear him muttering under his breath, for he, too, had little children whom he loved. And the old anger wells up in me at the thought of those who would have stayed our hand. Better a thousand times war with all its horrors than a hell like that. That was mur- der, and of women and innocent children. The war that avenges such infamy I hail as the messenger of wrath of an outraged God. The war was a moral issue with him, as in- deed it was with all of us who understood. It was with such facts as these and there was no lack of them in mind and heart that he [160] THE CLASH OF WAR responded hotly to Senator Hanna pleading for peace for the sake of the country's com- merce and prosperity, that much as he appre- ciated those blessings, the honor of the country was of more account than temporary business prosperity. It has slipped my mind what was the particular occasion, some club gathering, but I have not forgotten the profound im- pression the Naval Secretary's words made as he insisted that our country could better afford to lose a thousand of the bankers that have added to its wealth than one Farragut ; that it were better for it never to have had all the rail- road magnates that have built it up, great as is their deserving, than to have lost Grant and Sherman ; better that it had never known com- mercial greatness than that it should miss from its history one Lincoln. Unless the moral over- balance the material, we are indeed riding for a fall in all our pride. So he made ready for the wrath to come. And now his early interest in naval affairs, that gave us his first book, bore fruit. When the work of preparation was over, and Roosevelt was bound for the war to practice what he had preached, his chief, Secretary Long, said, in [161] THEODORE ROOSEVELT bidding him good-by, that he had been literally invaluable in his place, and that the navy would feel the stimulus of his personality for a long time. His industry was prodigious. He bought ships for the invasion of Cuba, and fitted them out. He recruited crews and shot away fortunes with the big guns recklessly shouted the critics. He knew better. His ex- perience as a hunter had taught him that the best gun in the world was wasted on a man who did not know how to use it. The Spaniards found that out later. Roosevelt loaded up with ammunition and with coal. When at last the war broke out, Dewey found everything he needed at Hongkong where he sought it, and was able to sail across to Manila a week before they expected him there. And then we got the interest on the gun-practice that had fright- ened the economical souls at home. In Mulberry Street it was corruption that defied him; now it was the stubborn red tape of a huge department that dragged and dragged at his feet, and threatened to snare him up at every second step he took, the most disheartening of human experiences. The men he came quickly to like. " They are a fine lot [162] THE CLASH OF WAR of fellows," he wrote to me, " these naval men. You would take to them at sight." Of the other he never spoke, but I can imagine how it must have nagged him. To this day, when I have anything I want to find out or do in the Navy Department, it seems flatly impossible to make a short cut to the thing I want. So many bureaus, so many chief clerks, and so many what-you-may-call-'ems have to pass upon it. It is the way of the world, I suppose, to go on magnifying and exalting the barrel where the staves are men with their little in- terests and conceits, until what it is made to hold is of secondary importance or less. In the end he burst through it as he did through the jobs the police conspirators tried to put up on him ; kicked it all to pieces and went on his way. A new light shone through the dusty old windows. For generations, since steam came to replace sail, there had been a contention between the line and the engineer corps, as to rank and pay, that cut into the heart of the navy. It was the fight of the old against the new that goes on in all days. The old line-officer was loath to give equal place to the engineer, who, when he was young, was [163] THEODORE ROOSEVELT but an auxiliary, an experiment. The place of honor was still to be on the deck, though long since the place of responsibility had moved to the engine-room. The engineer in- sisted upon recognition; met the other upon the floor of Congress and checkmated him in his schemes of legislation. The quarrel was bitter, irreconcilable; on every ship there were hostile camps. Neither could make headway for the other. Roosevelt, as chairman of a board to reconcile the differences that were older than the navy itself as it is to-day, steered it successfully between the two fatal reefs and made peace. Under his " personnel bill " each side obtained its rights, and, with the removal of the pretext for future quarrels, the navy was greatly strengthened. Cadets now receive the same training; the American naval officer in the next war will be equally capable of commanding on deck and of mend- ing a broken engine. When it came to picking out the man who was to command in the East, where the blow must be struck, Roosevelt picked Dewey. They laughed at him. Dewey was a " dude," they said. It seems the red tape had taken notice of [164] THE CLASH OF WAR the fact that the Commodore was always trim and neat, and, judging him by its own stan- dard, thought that was all. Roosevelt told them no, he would fight. And he might wear whatever kind of collar he chose, so long as he did that. I remember, when Dewey was gone with his ships, the exultation with which Roose- velt spoke of the choice. We were walking down Connecticut Avenue, with his bicycle be- tween us, discussing Dewey. Leonard Wood came out of a side street and joined us. His mind was on Cuba. Roosevelt, with prophetic eye, beheld Manila and the well-stocked am- munition-bins in Chinese waters. " Dewey," he said, " is the man for the place. He has a lion heart." I guess none of us feels like disputing his judgment at this day, any more than we do the wisdom of the gun-practice. When Dewey was in the East, it was Roose- velt's influence in the naval board that kept his fleet intact. The Olympia had been ordered home. Roosevelt secured the repeal of the order. " Keep the Olympia" he cabled him, and " keep full of coal." The resistless energy of the man carried all before it till the day [165] THEODORE ROOSEVELT when orders were cabled under the Pacific to the man with the lion heart to go in and smash the enemy. " Capture or destroy! " We know the rest. Roosevelt's work was done. " There is no- thing more for me to do here," he said. " I 've got to get into the fight myself." They told him to stay, he was needed where he was. But he was right : his work was done. It was to prepare for war. With the fighting of the ships he had, could have, nothing to do. Merely to sit in an office and hold down a job, a title, or a salary, was not his way. He did not go lightly. His wife was lying sick, with a little baby; his other children needed him. I never had the good fortune to know a man who loves his children more devotedly and more sensibly than he. There was enough to keep him at home; there were plenty to plead with him. I did myself, for I hated to see him go. His answer was as if his father might have spoken: " I have done all I could to bring on the war, because it is a just war, and the sooner we meet it the better. Now that it has come, I have no business to ask others to do the fight- ing and stay at home myself." [166] THE CLASH OF WAR It was right, and he went. I have not for- gotten that gray afternoon in early May when I went with him across the river to the train that was to carry him and his horse South. He had made his will; the leave-taking was over and had left its mark. There was in him no trace of the " spoiling for a fight " that for the twentieth time was cast up against him. He looked soberly, courageously ahead to a new and untried experience, hopeful of the glad day that should see our arms victorious and the bloody usurper driven from Cuba. " I won't be long." He waved his hand and was gone; and to me the leaden sky seemed drearier, the day more desolate than before. Two weary months dragged their slow length along. There had been fighting in Cuba. Every morning my wife and I plotted each to waylay the newsboy to get the paper first and make sure he was safe before the other should see it. And then one bright and blessed July morning, when the land was ring- ing with the birthday salute of the nation, she came with shining eyes, waving the paper, in which we read together of the charge on San Juan Hill; how the Rough-Riders charged, [167] THEODORE ROOSEVELT with him at their head, through a hail of Span- ish bullets, the men dropping by twos and threes as they ran. " When they came 1 to the open, smooth hillside there was no protection. Bullets were raining down at them, and shot and shells from the batteries were sweeping everything. There was a moment's hesitation, and then came the order : ' Forward ! charge ! ' Lieutenant-Colo- nel Roosevelt led, waving his sword. Out into the open the men went, and up the hill. Death to every man seemed certain. The crackle of the Mauser rifles was continuous. Out of the brush came the riders. Up, up they went, with the colored troops alongside of them, not a man flinching, and forming as they ran. Roosevelt was a hundred feet in the lead. Up, up they went in the face of death, men dropping from the ranks at every step. The Rough-Riders acted like veterans. It was an inspiring sight and an awful one. " Astounded by the madness of the rush, the Spaniards exposed themselves. This was a fatal mistake. The Tenth Cavalry (the col- 1 This was the account^we read in the New York " Sun." [168] THE CLASH OF WAR ored troops) picked them off like ducks and rushed on, up and up. " The more Spaniards were killed, the more seemed to take their places. The rain of shells and bullets doubled. Men dropped faster and faster, but others took their places. Roosevelt sat erect on his horse, holding his sword and shouting for his men to follow him. Finally, his horse was shot from under him, but he landed on his feet and continued calling for his men to advance. He charged up the hill afoot. " It seemed an age to the men who were watching, and to the Rough-Riders the hill must have seemed miles high. But they were undaunted. They went on, firing as fast as their guns would work. " At last the top of the hill was reached. The Spaniards in the trenches could still have anni- hilated the Americans, but the Yankees' daring dazed them. They wavered for an instant, and then turned and ran. " The position was won and the block-house captured. ... In the rush more than half of the Rough-Riders were wounded." In how many American homes was that splendid story read that morning with a thrill [169] THEODORE .ROOSEVELT never quite to be got over! We read it toge- ther, she and I, excited, breathless; and then we laid down the paper and gave two such rousing cheers as had n't been heard in Rich- mond Hill that Fourth of July morning, one for the flag and one for Theodore Roosevelt. What was breakfast? The war was won and over! We live in a queer world. One man sees the glorious painting, priceless for all time; the other but the fly-speck on the frame. A year or two after, some one, I think he was an editor, wrote to ask me if the dreadful thing was true that in the rush up that hill Roosevelt said, "Hell!" I don't know what I replied-I want to forget it. I know I said it, anyhow. But, great Scott! think of it. Of that war and of his regiment, from the day it was evolved, uniformed, armed, and equipped, through " ceaseless worrying of ex- cellent bureaucrats who had no idea how to do things quickly or how to meet an emer- gency," * all through the headlong race with a worse enemy than the one in front, the ma- 1 1 am quoting " The Rough- Riders. " It seems, then, the navy has no patent on red tape. I thought as much. [170] THE CLASH OF WAR laria, upon which the Spaniards counted openly as their grewsome ally, down to the day when, the army's work done, Colonel Roosevelt " wrecked his career " finally and for good, by demanding its recall home, he himself has told the story in " The Rough-Riders. " Every school-boy in the land knows it. The Rough- Riders came out of the heroic past of our coun- try's history, held the forefront of the stage for three brief months, and melted back into college, and camp, and mine with never a rip- ple. But they left behind them a mark which this generation will not see effaced. To those who think it a sudden ambitious thought, a " streak of luck," I commend this reference to the " rifle-bearing horsemen " on page 249 of the second volume of his " Winning of the West," written quite ten years before: " They were brave and hardy, able to tread their way unerringly through the forests, and fond of surprises; and though they always fought on foot, they moved on horseback, and therefore with great celerity. Their operations should be carefully studied by all who wish to learn the possibilities of mounted riflemen." Before he or any one else dreamed of the war, he had [171] THEODORE , ROOSEVELT studied and thought it all out, and when the chance came he was ready for it and took it. That is all there ever was in " Roosevelt's luck " ; and that is about all there is in this luck business, anyhow, as I have said before. The chance came to one man beside him who was ready, and the world is the better for it. I saw the growing friendship between the two that year in Washington, and was glad; for Leonard Wood is another man to tie to, as one soon finds out who knows him. They met there for the first time, but in one brief year they grew to be such friends that when the command of the regiment was offered Roosevelt, he asked for second place under Wood; for Wood had seen service in the field, as Roosevelt had not. He had earned the medal of honor for un- daunted courage and great ability in the ar- duous campaigns against the Apaches. Both earned their promotion in battle afterward. I liked to see them together because they are men of the same strong type. When Roosevelt writes of his friend that, " like so many of the gallant fighters with whom it was later my good fortune to serve, he combined in a very high degree the qualities of entire manliness [172] THE CLASH OF WAR with entire uprightness and cleanliness of char- acter; it was a pleasure to deal with a man of high ideals who scorned everything mean and base, and who also possessed tfiose robust and hardy qualities of body and