The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

In the tired hand of a dying man, Theodore Senior had written: "The 'Machine politicians' have shown their colors... I feel sorry for the country however as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests, and I feel for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

It is not often that a man can make opportunities for himself. But he can put himself in such shape that when or if the opportunities come he is ready to take advantage of them.

Take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies.

[Bram Stoker] wrote in his diary: "Must be President some day. A man you can't cajole, can't frighten, can't buy.

[Speaker Reed's] wit was brilliant and usually cruel... Asked to attend the funeral of a political enemy, he refused, "but that does not mean to say I do not heartily approve of it.

Let’s ask him,” Lincoln Steffens suggested. The two men dashed across to headquarters and burst into Roosevelt’s office. Riis put the question directly. Was he working to be President? The effect, wrote Steffens, “was frightening.” TR leaped to his feet, ran around his desk, and fists clenched, teeth bared, he seemed about to throttle Riis, who cowered away, amazed. “Don’t you dare ask me that,” TR yelled at Riis. “Don’t you put such ideas into my head. No friend of mine would ever say a thing like that, you—you—” Riis’s shocked face or TR’s recollection that he had few friends as devoted as Jake Riis halted him. He backed away, came up again to Riis, and put his arm over his shoulder. Then he beckoned me close and in an awed tone of voice explained. “Never, never, you must never either of you remind a man at work on a political job that he may be President. It almost always kills him politically. He loses his nerve; he can’t do his work; he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility. I, for instance, I am going to do great things here, hard things that require all the courage, ability, work that I am capable of … But if I get to thinking of what it might lead to—” He stopped, held us off, and looked into our faces with his face screwed up into a knot, as with lowered voice he said slowly: “I must be wanting to be President. Every young man does. But I won’t let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will begin to work for it, I’ll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so—I’ll beat myself. See?” Again he looked at us as if we were enemies; then he threw us away from him and went back to his desk. “Go on away, now,” he said, “and don’t you ever mention the—don’t you ever mention that to me again.”141

Theodore," [Theodore Sr] said, eschewing boyish nicknames, "you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it.

For once, he could look back at the past without regret, and at the future without bewilderment. Simply and touchingly, he wrote in his diary: “I have had so much happiness in my life so far that I feel, no matter what sorrows come, the joys will have overbalanced them.

Better a thousand times err on the side of over-readiness to fight, than to err on the side of tame submission to injury, or cold-blooded indifference to the misery of the oppressed.

… I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to.

If a man has a very decided character, has a strongly accentuated career, it is normally the case of course that he makes ardent friends and bitter enemies.

One person who met him during these dark days was Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. After watching Roosevelt in action at a literary dinner table, and afterward dispensing summary justice in the police courts, Stoker wrote in his diary: “Must be President some day. A man you can’t cajole, can’t frighten, can’t buy.

Wall Street billionaires are predicting that Roosevelt-style railroad rate regulation will sooner or later bring about financial catastrophe. [ca. 1906]

[Joseph Bucklin Bishop said] "...The peculiarity about him is that he has what is essentially a boy's mind. What he thinks he says at once, says aloud. It is his distinguishing characteristic, and I don't know as he will ever outgrow it. But with it he has great qualities which make him an invaluable public servant--inflexible honesty, absolute fearlessness, and devotion to good government which amounts to religion. We must let him work his way, for nobody can induce him to change it.

[Henry James] privately characterized Roosevelt as "a dangerous and ominous jingo," and "the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise.

We Americans have many grave problems to solve, many threatening evils to fight, and many deeds to do, if, as we hope and believe, we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage and the virtue to do them. But we must face facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to a foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism …

Roosevelt conceded that “some of the evils of which you complain are real and can be to a certain degree remedied, but not by the remedies you propose.” But most would disappear if there were more of “that capacity for steady, individual self-help which is the glory of every true American.” Legislation could no more do away with them “than you could do away with the bruises which you receive when you tumble down, by passing an act to repeal the laws of gravitation.

Then he launched into a classic statement of his political philosophy. I appreciate all you say about what Bryanism means, and I also … [am] as strongly opposed to populism in every stage as the greatest representative of corrupt wealth, but … these representatives … have themselves been responsible for a portion of the conditions against which Bryanism is in ignorant, and sometimes wicked revolt. I do not believe it is wise or safe for us as a party to take refuge in mere negation and to say that there are no evils to be corrected. It seems to me that our attitude should be one of correcting the evils and thereby showing, that, whereas the populists, socialists and others really do not correct the evils at all … the Republicans hold the just balance and set our faces as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the other.66

It is idle to hope for the enforcement of a law where nineteen-twentieths of the people do not believe in the justice of its provisions.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Wednesday, Hendricks telephoned acceptance, and on Friday afternoon Roosevelt joyfully released news of the nomination to the press. Privately, to his old Assembly colleague Henry L. Sprague, he wrote: “I have always been fond of the West African proverb: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.’ ”28

It so happened that no job, short of the Presidency itself, so appealed to Roosevelt. Convinced as he might be that Cuba deserved its freedom from Spanish rule, he was equally convinced that the Philippines needed the benison of an American colonial administration. “I … feel sure that we can ultimately help our brethren so far forward on the path of self-government and orderly liberty that that beautiful archipelago shall become a center of civilization for all eastern Asia and the islands round about.…

As for the accusation that he, Roosevelt, belonged to the landlord class, “if you had any conception of the true American spirit you would know that we do not have ‘classes’ at all on this side of the water.

He castigates his habitual targets, “the dull, the feeble, and the timid good,” and proclaims himself a strong man, careless of class, color, or party politics. “If I find a public servant who is dishonest, I will chop his head off if he is the highest Republican in this municipality!

A FAIR IMPRESSION of the pace of Roosevelt’s candidacy for Mayor may be gained by following him through one night of his campaign—Friday, 29 October.44 At 8:00 P.M., having snatched a hasty dinner near headquarters, he takes a hansom to the Grand Opera House, on Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue, for the first of five scheduled addresses in various parts of the city. His audience is worshipful, shabby, and exclusively black. (One of the more interesting features of the campaign has been Roosevelt’s evident appeal to, and fondness for, the black voter.) He begins by admitting that his campaign planners had not allowed for “this magnificent meeting” of colored citizens. “For the first time, therefore, since the opening of the campaign I have begun to take matters a little in my own hands!” Laughter and applause. “I like to speak to an audience of colored people,” Roosevelt says simply, “for that is only another way of saying that I am speaking to an audience of Republicans.” More applause. He reminds his listeners that he has “always stood up for the colored race,” and tells them about the time he put a black man in the chair of the Chicago Convention. Apologizing for his tight schedule, he winds up rapidly, and dashes out of the hall to a standing ovation.45 A carriage is waiting outside; the driver plies his whip; by 8:30 Roosevelt is at Concordia Hall, on Twenty-eighth Street and Avenue A. Here he shouts at a thousand well-scrubbed immigrants, “Do you want a radical reformer?” “YES WE DO!” comes the reply.46

Roosevelt must have hogged the conversation as usual, for Parker was in an ill humor by the end of the evening. Walking home with Bishop, he suddenly said, “I wish you would stop him talking so much in the newspapers. He talks, talks, talks all the time. Scarcely a day passes that there is not something from him in the papers … and the public is getting tired of it. It injures our work.” Bishop laughed. “Stop Roosevelt talking! Why, you would kill him. He has to talk. The peculiarity about him is that he has what is essentially a boy’s mind. What he thinks he says at once, says aloud. It is his distinguishing characteristic, and I don’t know as he will ever outgrow it. But with it he has great qualities which make him an invaluable public servant—inflexible honesty, absolute fearlessness, and devotion to good government which amounts to religion. We must let him work his way, for nobody can induce him to change it.” Parker received this speech in cold silence.35

His duty, as he saw it, “was to combine both idealism and efficiency” by working with Platt for the people.5 This was easier said than done, since the interests of the organization and the community were often at variance; but Roosevelt thought he had a solution. “I made up my mind that the only way I could beat the bosses whenever the need to do so arose (and unless there was such a need I did not wish to try) was … by making my appeal as directly and emphatically as I knew how to the mass of voters themselves.”6 In other words, he looked as always to publicity as a means to wake up the electorate and ensure governmental responsibility. Men like Platt and Odell did not like to operate “in the full glare of public opinion”; their favorite venues were the closed conference room, the private railroad car, the whispery parlors of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Roosevelt was willing to meet in all these places with them, but he intended to announce every meeting loudly beforehand, and describe it minutely afterward. He would therefore not be asked to do anything that the organization did not wish the public to know about; but whenever Boss Platt had a reasonable request to make, Roosevelt would gladly comply, and see that the organization got credit for it.7

By now Ferris had come to the grudging conclusion that his client was “a plumb good sort.” Garrulous in the cabin, Roosevelt on the trail was quiet, purposeful, and tough. “He could stand an awful lot of hard knocks, and he was always cheerful.” The guide was intrigued by his habit of pulling out a book in flyblown campsites and immersing himself in it, as if he were ensconced in the luxury of the Astor Library. Most of all, perhaps, he was impressed by a casual remark Roosevelt made one night while blowing up a rubber pillow. “His doctors back East had told him that he did not have much longer to live, and that violent exercise would be immediately fatal.”64

Students at the University of Chicago were warned that the adult world was “rough and bloody … but if you have enough of the lust of battle in you, you will have a pretty good time after all.” Elsewhere in the Windy City, in a major address to mark Washington’s birthday, he thundered his gospel, “Life is strife,” against a backdrop of Stars and Stripes. “There is an unhappy tendency among certain of our cultivated people,” Roosevelt went on, “to lose the great manly virtues, the power to strive and fight and conquer.” He urged his audience, in the name of Washington, to be ready for the day when America had to uphold its honor “by an appeal to the supreme arbitrament of the sword.

Willing as both men were to suggest what and whom Roosevelt might attack—for he was clearly in a fighting mood—they cautioned him to “go a bit slow” at first, and to discuss a program of reform with his colleagues.26 But Roosevelt knew he could achieve little in this job by proceeding deliberately; it was about as powerful, in constitutional terms, as his last. Once again he must exercise his genius for press relations. Instinct told him that these scribes would be of more use to him than the three Commissioners now waiting in the hallway.27

October 17th Sunday [Dresden] I am by the fire with not another light but it … It is now after 5. All was dark excep the fire. I lay by it and listened to the wind and thought of the times at home in the country when I lay by the fire with some hickory nuts until like the slave who Again he is king by the banks of the niger Again he can hear the wild roar of the tiger Again I was lying by the roaring fire (with the cold October wind shrieking outside) in the cheerful lighted room and I turned around half expecting to see it all again and stern reality forced itself upon me and I thought of the time that would come never, never, never.