The election over, Roosevelt went to Europe, and on December 2, 1886, at St. George"s, Hanover Square, London, he married Miss Edith Kermit Carow, of New York, whom he had known since his earliest childhood, the playmate of his sister Corinne, the little girl whose photograph had stirred up in him "homesickness and longings for the past," when he was a little boy in Paris.
Cecil Spring-Rice, an old friend (subsequently British Amba.s.sador at Washington), was his groomsman, and being married at St.
George"s, Theodore remarks, "made me feel as if I were living in one of Thackeray"s novels."
Mrs. Roosevelt"s father came of Huguenot stock, the name being originally Quereau; the first French immigrants of the family having migrated to New York in the seventeenth century at about the same time as Claes van Roosevelt. Like the Roosevelts, the Carows had so freely intermarried with English stock in America that the French origin of one was as little discernible in their descendants as was the Dutch origin of the other. Through her American line Mrs. Roosevelt traced back to Jonathan Edwards, the prolific ancestor of many persons who emerged above the common level by either their virtue or their badness.
After spending several months in Europe, Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt returned and settled at Oyster Bay, Long Island, where he had built, not long before, a country house on Sagamore Hill. His place there comprised many acres--a beautiful country of hill and hollow and fine tall trees. The Bay made in from Long Island Sound and seemed to be closed by the opposite sh.o.r.e, so that in calm weather you might mistake it for a lake. This home was thoroughly adapted for Roosevelt"s needs. Being only thirty miles from New York, with a railroad near by, convenient but not intrusive, it gave easy access to the city, but was remote enough to discourage casual or undesired callers. It had sufficient land to carry on farming and to sustain the necessary horses and domestic cattle. Mrs. Roosevelt supervised it; he simply loved it and got distraction from his more pressing affairs; if he had chosen to withdraw from these he might have devoted himself to the pleasing and leisurely life of a gentleman farmer. For a while his chief occupation was literary. Into this he pitched with characteristic energy. His innate craving for self-expression could never be satiated by speaking alone, and now, since he filled no public position which would be a cause or perhaps an excuse for speaking, he wrote with all the more enthusiasm.
Although he was less than seven years out of college, his political career had given him a national reputation, which helped and was helped by the vogue of his writings. The American public had come to perceive that Theodore Roosevelt could do nothing commonplace. The truth was, that he did many things that other men did which ceased to be commonplace only when he did them. Scores of other young men went on hunting trips after big game in the Rockies or the Selkirks, and even ranching had been engaged in by the enterprising and the adventurous, who hoped to find it a short way to a fortune. But whether as ranch man or as hunter, Roosevelt was better known than all the rest. His skill in describing his experiences no doubt largely accounted for this; but the fact that the experiences were his, was the ultimate explanation.
Roosevelt began to write very early. He thought that the instruction in rhetoric which he received at Harvard enlightened him, and during his Senior year he began the "History of the Naval War of 1812," which he completed and published in 1882.
This work at once won recognition for him, and it differed from the traditional accounts, embedded in the school histories of the United States, in doing full justice to the British naval operations. Probably, for the first time, our people realized that the War of 1812 had not been a series of victories, startling and irresistible, for the American Navy. Nearly ten years later, Roosevelt in the "Winning of the West" made his second excursion into history. These volumes, which eventually numbered six, are regarded by experts in the subject as of great value, and I suppose that in them Roosevelt did more than any other writer to popularize the study of the historical origin and development of the vast region west of the Alleghanies which now forms a vital part of the American Republic. One attribute of a real historian is the power to discern the structural or pregnant quality of historic periods and episodes; and this power Roosevelt displayed in choosing both the War of 1812 and the Winning of the West.
In his larger history Roosevelt had a swift, energetic, and direct style. He never lacked for ideas. Descriptions came to him with exuberant details of which he selected enough to leave his reader with the feeling that he had looked on a vivid and accurate picture. Here, for instance, is a portrait of Daniel Boon which seems remarkably lifelike, because I remember how difficult other writers find it to individualize most of the figures of the pioneers.
The backwoodsmen, he says, "all tilled their own clearings, guiding the plow among the charred stumps left when the trees were chopped down and the land burned over, and they were all, as a matter of course, hunters. With Boon, hunting and exploration were pa.s.sions, and the lonely life of the wilderness, with its bold, wild freedom, the only existence for which he really cared.
He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle"s, and muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of his life made no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of any kind, and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the end of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who never bl.u.s.tered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fort.i.tude, endurance, and indomitable resolution upon which to draw when fortune proved adverse. His self-command and patience, his daring, restless love of adventure, and, in time of danger, his absolute trust in his own powers and resources, all combined to render him peculiarly fitted to follow the career of which he was so fond."*
* Winning of the West, 1, 137, 138 (ed. 1889).
Roosevelt contributed two volumes to the American Statesmen Series, one on Thomas Hart Benton in 1886, and the other on Gouverneur Morris in 1887. The environment and careers of these two men--the Missouri Senator of the first half of the nineteenth century, and the New York financier of the last half of the eighteenth--afforded him scope for treating two very diverse subjects. He was himself rooted in the old New York soil and he had come, through his life in the West, to divine the conditions of Benton"s days. Once again, many years later (1900) he tried his hand at biography, taking Oliver Cromwell for his hero, and making a summary, impressionistic sketch of him. Besides the interest this biography has for students of Cromwell, it has also interest for students of Roosevelt, for it is a specimen of the sort of by-products he threw off in moments of relaxation.
More characteristic than such excursions into history and biography, however, are his many books describing ranch-life and hunting. In the former, he gives you truthful descriptions of the men of the West as he saw them, and in the latter he recounts his adventures with elk and buffalo, wolves and bears. The mere trailing and killing of these creatures do not satisfy him. He studies with equal zest their haunts and their habits. The naturalist in him, which we recognized in his youth, found this vent in his maturity. And long years afterward, on his expeditions to Africa and to Brazil he dealt even more exuberantly with the natural history of the countries which he visited.
Two other cla.s.ses of writings make up Roosevelt"s astonishing output. He gathered his essays and addresses into half a dozen volumes, remarkable alike for the wide variety of their subjects, and for the vigor with which he seized on each subject as if it was the one above all others which most absorbed him. Finally, skim the collection of his official messages, as Commissioner, as Governor, or as President, and you will discover that he had the gift of infusing life and color into the usually drab and cheerless wastes of official doc.u.ments.
I am not concerned to make a literary appraisal of Theodore Roosevelt"s manifold works, but I am struck by the fact that our professional critics ignore him entirely in their summaries or histories of recent American literature. As I re-read, after twenty years, and in some cases after thirty years, books of his which made a stir on their appearance, I am impressed, not only by the excellence of their writing, but by their lasting quality.
If he had not done so many other things of greater importance, and done them supremely, he would have secured lasting fame by his books on hunting, ranching, and exploration. No other American compares with him, and I know of no other, in English at least, who has made a contribution in these fields equal to his.
Throughout these eight or ten volumes he proves himself to be one of those rare writers who see what they write. As in the case of Tennyson, than whom no English poet, in spite of nearsightedness, has observed so minutely the tiniest details of form or the faintest nuance of color, so the lack of normal vision did not prevent Roosevelt from being the closest of observers. He was also, by the way, a good shot with rifle or pistol. If you read one of his chapters in "Hunting the Grizzly" and ask yourself wherein its animation and attraction lie, you will find that it is because every sentence and every line report things seen. He does not, like the Realist, try to get a specious lifelikeness by heaping up ba.n.a.l and commonplace facts; he selects. His imagination reminds one of the traveling spark which used to run along the great chandelier in the theatre, and light each jet, so that its pa.s.sage seemed a flight from point to point of brilliance. Wherever he focuses his survey a spot glows vividly.
The eye, the master sense of the mind, thus dominates him, and I think that we shall trace to its mastery much of the immediate power which he exerted by his writings and speeches on public, social, and moral topics. He struck off, in the heat of composition or of speaking, phrases and similes which millions caught up eagerly and made as familiar as household words. He even remembered from his extensive reading some item which, when applied by him to the affair of the moment, acquired new pertinence and a second life. Thus, Bunyan"s " muckraker" lives again; thus, "the curse of Meroz," and many another Bible reference, springs up with a fresh meaning.
No doubt the purist will find occasional lapses in taste or expression, and the quibbling peddler of rhetoric will gloat over some doubtful construction; but neither purist nor peddler of rhetoric has ever been able in his writing to display the ease, the rush, the naturalness, the sparkle which were as genuine in Roosevelt as were the features of his face. On reading these pages, which have escaped the attention of the professional critics, I wonder whether they may not have a fate similar to Defoe"s; for Defoe also was read voraciously by his contemporaries, his pamphlets made a great rustle in their time, and then the critics turned to other and spicier writers. But in due season, other critics, as well as the world, made the discovery that only a genius could have produced Defoe"s "every-day," "commonplace" style.
His innate vigor, often swelling into vehemence, marks also Roosevelt"s political essays, and yet he had time for reflection, and if you examine closely even some of his combative pa.s.sages, you will see that they do not spring from sudden anger or scorn, but from a conviction which has matured slowly in him. He had not the philosophic calm which formed the background of Burke"s political masterpieces, but he had the clearness, the simplicity, by which he could drive home his thoughts into the minds of the mult.i.tude. Burke spoke and wrote for thousands and for posterity; Roosevelt addressed millions for the moment, and let posterity do what it would with his burning appeals and invectives. He was not so absolutely self-effacing as Lincoln, but I think that he realized to the full the meaning of Lincoln"s phrase, "the world will little note, nor long remember what we may say here," and that he would have made it his motto. For he, like all truly great statesmen, was so immensely concerned in winning today"s battle, that he wasted no time in speculating what tomorrow, or next year, or next century would say about it. Mysticism, the recurrent fad which indicates that its victims neither see clear nor think straight, could not spread its veils over him. The man who visualizes is safe from that intellectual weakness and moral danger. But although Roosevelt felt the sway of the true emotions, he allowed only his intimates to know what he held most intimate and sacred. He felt also the charm of beauty, and over and over again in his descriptions of hunting and riding in the West, he pauses to recall beautiful scenery or some unusual bit of landscape; and even in remembering his pa.s.sage down the River of Doubt, when he came nearer to death than he ever came until he died, in spite of tormenting pain and desperate anxiety for his companions, he mentions more than once the loveliness of the river scene or of the ma.s.sed foliage along its banks. Naturalist though he was, bent first on studying the habits of birds and animals, he yet took keen delight in the iridescent plumage or graceful form or the beautiful fur of bird and beast.
The quality of a writer can best be judged by reading a whole chapter, or two or three, of his book, but sometimes he reveals a phase of himself in a single paragraph. Read, for instance, this brief extract from Roosevelt"s "Through the Brazilian Wilderness," if you would understand some of the traits which I have just alluded to. It comes at the end of his long and dismaying exploration of the River of Doubt, when the party was safe at last, and the terrible river was about to flow into the broad, lakelike Amazon, and Manaos was almost in sight, where civilization could be laid hold on again, Manaos, whence the swift ships went steaming towards the Atlantic and the Atlantic opened a clear path home. He says:
"The North was calling strongly the three men of the North--Rocky Dell Farm to Cherrie, Sagamore Hill to me; and to Kermit the call was stronger still. After nightfall we could now see the Dipper well above the horizon--upside down with the two pointers pointing to a North Star below the world"s rim; but the Dipper, with all its stars. In our home country spring had now come, the wonderful Northern spring of long, glorious days, of brooding twilight, of cool, delightful nights. Robin and bluebird, meadow-lark and song-sparrow were singing in the mornings at home; the maple buds were red; windflowers and bloodroot were blooming while the last patches of snow still lingered; the rapture of the hermit thrush in Vermont, the serene golden melody of the wood thrush on Long Island, would be heard before we were there to listen. Each was longing for the homely things that were so dear to him, for the home people who were dearer still, and for the one who was dearest of all." *
* Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 320.
CHAPTER VI. APPLYING MORALS TO POLITICS
I have said that Roosevelt devoted the two years after he came back to New York to writing, but it would be a mistake to imagine that writing alone busied him. He was never a man who did or would do only one thing at a time. His immense energy craved variety, and in variety he found recreation. Now that the physical Roosevelt had caught up in relative strength with the intellectual, he could take what holidays requiring exhaustless bodily vigor he chose. The year seldom pa.s.sed now when he did not go West for a month or two. Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow were established with their families on the Elkhorn Ranch, which Roosevelt continued to own, although, I believe, like many ranches at that period, it ceased to be a good investment.
Sometimes he made a hurried dash to southern Texas, or to the Selkirks, or to Montana in search of new sorts of game. In the mountains he indulged in climbing, but this was not a favorite with him because it offered less sport in proportion to the fatigue. While he was still a young man he had gone up the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, feats which still required endurance, although they did not involve danger.
While we think of him, therefore, as dedicating himself to his literary work--the "Winning of the West" and the accounts of ranch life--we must remember that he had leisure for other things. He watched keenly the course of politics, for instance, and in 1888 when the Republicans nominated Benjamin Harrison as their candidate for President, Roosevelt supported him effectively and took rank with the foremost Republican speakers of the campaign. After his election Harrison, who both recognized Roosevelt"s great ability and felt under obligation to him, wished to offer him the position of an under-secretary in the State Department; but Blaine, who was slated for Secretary of State, had no liking for the young Republican whose coolness in 1884 he had not forgotten. So Harrison invited Roosevelt to be a Civil Service Commissioner. The position had never been conspicuous; its salary was not large; its duties were of the routine kind which did not greatly tax the energies of the Commissioners, who could never hope for fame, but only for the approval of their own consciences for whatever good work they did. The Machine Republicans, whether of national size, or of State or munic.i.p.al, were glad to know that Roosevelt would be put out of the way in that office.
They already thought of him as a young man dangerous to all Machines and so they felt the prudence of bottling him up. To make him a Civil Service Commissioner was not exactly so final as chloroforming a snarling dog would be, but it was a strong measure of safety. Theodore"s friends, on the other hand, advised him against accepting the appointment, because, they said, it would shelve him, politically, use up his brains which ought to be spent on higher work, and allow the country which was just beginning to know him to forget his existence. Men drop out of sight so quickly at Washington unless they can stand on some pedestal which raises them above the mult.i.tude.
The Optimist of the future, to hasten whose coming we are all making the world so irresistibly attractive, will be endowed, let us hope, with a sense of humor. With that, he can read history as a cosmic joke-book, and not as the Biography of the Devil, as many of us moderns, besides Jean Paul, have found it. How long it has taken, and how much blood has been spilt before this or that most obvious folly has been abolished! With what absurd tenacity have men flown in the face of reason and flouted common sense! So our Optimist, looking into the conditions which made Civil Service Reform imperative, will shed tears either of pity or of laughter.
As long ago as the time of the cave-dweller, who was clothed in s.h.a.ggy hair instead of in broadcloth or silk, prehistoric man learned that the best arrow or spear was that tipped with the best piece of flint. In brief, to do good work, you must have good tools. Translated into the terms of today, this means that the expert or specialist must be preferred to the untrained. In nearly all walks of life this truth was taken for granted, except in affairs connected with government and administration. A President might be elected, not because he was experienced in these matters, but because he had won a battle, or was the compromise candidate between two other aspirants. As it was with Presidents, so with the Cabinet officers, Congressmen, and State and city officials. Fitness being ignored as a qualification to office, made it easy for favoritism and selfish motives to determine the appointment of the army of employees required in the bureaus and departments. That good old political freebooter, Andrew Jackson, merely put into words what his predecessors had put into practice: "To the victors belong the spoils." And since his time, more than one upright and intelligent theorist on government has supported the Party System even to the point where the enjoyment of the spoils by the victors seems justified. The "spoils" were the salaries paid to the lower grade of placemen and women--salaries usually not very large, but often far above what those persons could earn in honest compet.i.tion. As the money came out of the public purse, why worry? And how could party enthusiasm during the campaign and at the polls be kept up, if some of the partisans might not hope for tangible rewards for their services? Many rich men sat in Congress, and the Senate be came, proverbially, a millionaires" club. But not one of these plutocrats conducted the private business which made him rich by the methods to which he condemned the business administration of the government. He did not fill his counting-room with shirkers and incompetents; he did not find sinecures for his wife"s poor relations; he did not pad his payroll with parasites whose characteristics were an itching palm and an unconquerable aversion to work. He knew how to select the quickest, cleverest, most industrious a.s.sistants, and through them he prospered.
That a man who had sworn to uphold and direct his government to the best of his ability, should have the conscience to treat his country as he did not treat himself, can be easily explained: he had no conscience. Fashion, like a local anaesthetic, deadens the sensitiveness of conscience in this or that spot; and the prevailing fashion under all governments, autocratic or democratic, has permitted the waste and even the dishonest application of public funds.
These anomalies at last roused the sense of humor of some of our citizens, just as the injustice and dishonesty which the system embodied roused the moral sense of others; and the Reform of the Civil Service--a dream at first, and then a pa.s.sionate cause which the ethical would not let sleep--came into being. But to the politicians of the old type, the men of "inflooence" and "pull," the project seemed silly. They ridiculed it, and they expected to make it ridiculous in the eyes of the American people, by calling it "Snivel" Service Reform. Zealots, however, cannot be silenced by mockery. The contention that fitness should have something to do in the choice of public servants was effectively confirmed by the scientific departments of the government. The most shameless Senator would not dare to propose his brother"s widow to lead an astronomical expedition, or to urge the appointment of the ward Boss of his city as Chairman of the Coast Survey. So the American people perceived that there were cases in which the Spoils System did not apply. The reformers pushed ahead; Congress at last took notice, and a law was pa.s.sed bringing a good many appointees in the Post Office and other departments under the Merit System. The movement then gained ground slowly and the spoilsmen began to foresee that if it spread to the extent which seemed likely, it would deprive them of much of their clandestine and corrupting power. Senator Roscoe Conkling, one of the wittiest and most brazen of these, remarked, that when Dr. Johnson told Boswell that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," he had not sounded the possibilities of "reform."
The first administration of President Cleveland, who was a great, irremovable block of stubbornness in whatever cause he thought right, gave invaluable help to this one. The overturn of the Republican Party, after it had held power for twenty-four years, entailed many changes in office and in all cla.s.ses of office-holders. Cleveland had the opportunity, therefore, of applying the Merit System as far as the law had carried it, and his actions gave Civil Service Reformers much though not complete satisfaction. The movement was just at the turning-point when Roosevelt was appointed Commissioner in 1 889. Under listless or timid direction it would have flagged and probably lost much ground; but Roosevelt could never do anything listlessly and whatever he pushed never lost ground.
The Civil Service Commission appointed by President Harrison consisted of three members, of whom the President was C. R.
Procter, later Charles Lyman, with Roosevelt and Hugh Thompson, an ex-Confederate soldier. I do not disparage Roosevelt"s colleagues when I say that they were worthy persons who did not claim to have an urgent call to reform the Civil Service, or anything else. They were not of the stuff which leads revolts or reforms, but they were honest and did their duty firmly. They stood by Roosevelt "shoulder to shoulder," and Thompson"s mature judgment restrained his impetuosity. Roosevelt always acknowledged what he owed to the Southern gentleman. In a very short time the Commission, Congress, and the public learned that it was Roosevelt, the youngest member, just turned thirty years of age, who steered the Commission. Hostile critics would say, of course, that he usurped the leadership; but I think that this is inaccurate. It was not his conceit or ambition, it was destiny working through him, which made where he sat the head of the table. Being tremendously interested in this cause and incomparably abler than Lyman or Thompson, he naturally did most of the work, and his decisions shaped their common policy. The appeal to his sense of humor and his sense of justice stimulated him, and being a man who already saw what large consequences sometimes flow from small causes he must have been buoyed up by the thought that any of the cases which came before him might set a very important precedent.
Roosevelt acted on the principle that the office holder who swears to carry out a law must do this without hesitation or demur. If the law is good, enforcing it will make its goodness apparent to everybody; if it is bad, it will become the more quickly odious and need to be repealed. Roosevelt enforced the Civil Service Law with the utmost rigor. It called for the examination of candidates for office, and the examiners paid some heed to their moral fitness. Its opponents tried to stir up public opinion against it by circulating what purported to be some of its examination papers. Why, they asked, should a man who wished to be a letter-carrier in Keokuk, be required to give a list of the Presidents of the United States? Or what was the shortest route for a letter going from Bombay to Yokohama? By these and similar spurious questions the spoilsmen hoped to get rid of the reformers. But "shrewd slander," as Roosevelt called it, could not move him. Two specimen cases will suffice to show how he reduced shrewd slanderers to confusion. The first was Charles Henry Grosvenor, an influential Republican Congressman from Ohio, familiarly known as the "Gentle Shepherd of Ohio,"
because of his efforts to raise the tariff on wool for the benefit of the owners of the few thousand sheep in that State. A Congressional Committee was investigating the Civil Service Commission and Roosevelt asked that Grosvenor, who had attacked it, might be summoned. Grosvenor, however, did not appear, but when he learned that Roosevelt was going to his Dakota ranch for a vacation, he sent word that he would come. Nevertheless, this gallant act failed to save him, for Roosevelt canceled his ticket West, and confronted Grosvenor at the investigation. The Gentle Shepherd protested that he had never said that he wished to repeal the Civil Service Law; whereupon Roosevelt read this extract from one of his speeches: "I will vote not only to strike out this provision, but I will vote to repeal the whole law."
When Roosevelt pointed out the inconsistency of the two statements, Grosvenor declared that they meant the same thing.
Being caught thus by one foot in Roosevelt"s mantrap, he quickly proceeded to be caught by the other. He declared that Rufus P.
Putnam, one of the candidates in dispute, had never lived in Grosvenor"s Congressional district, or even in Ohio. Then Mr.
Roosevelt quoted from a letter written by Grosvenor: "Mr. Rufus P. Putnam is a legal resident of my district, and has relatives living there now." With both feet caught in the man-trap, the Gentle Shepherd was suffering much pain, but Truth is so great a stranger to spoilsmen that he found difficulty in getting within speaking distance of her. For he protested, first, that he never wrote the letter, next, that he had forgotten that he wrote it, and finally, that he was misinformed when he wrote it. So far as appears, he never risked a tilt with the smiling young Commissioner again, but returned to his muttons and their fleeces.
A still more distinguished personage fell before the enthusiastic Commissioner. This was Arthur Pue Gorman, a Senator from Maryland, a Democrat, one of the most pertinacious agents of the Big Interests in the United States Congress. Evidently, also, he served them well, as they kept him in the Senate for nearly twenty-five years, until his death. They employed Democrats as well as Republicans, just as they subscribed to both Democratic and Republican campaign funds. For, "in politics there is no politics." Gorman, who knew that the Spoils System was almost indispensable to the running of a political machine, waited for a chance to attack the Civil Service Commission. Thinking that the propitious moment had come, he inveighed against it in the Senate. He "described with moving pathos," as Roosevelt tells the story, "how a friend of his, "a bright young man from Baltimore,"
a Sunday-School scholar, well recommended by his pastor, wished to be a letter-carrier;" but the cruel examiners floored him by asking the shortest route from Baltimore to China, to which he replied that, as he never wished to go to China, he hadn"t looked up the route. Then, Senator Gorman a.s.serted, the examiners quizzed him about all the steamship lines from the United States to Europe, branched off into geology and chemistry, and "turned him down."
Gorman was unaware that the Commissioners kept records of all their examinations, and when Roosevelt wrote him a polite note inquiring the name of the "bright young man from Baltimore,"
Gorman did not reply. Roosevelt also asked him, in case he shrank from giving the name of his informant, to give the date when the alleged examination took place. He even offered to open the files to any representative the Senator chose to send. Gorman, however, "not hitherto known as a sensitive soul," as Roosevelt remarks, "expressed himself as so shocked at the thought that the veracity of the bright young man should be doubted, that he could not bring himself to answer my letter." Accordingly, Roosevelt made a public statement that the Commissioners had never asked the questions which Gorman alleged. Gorman waited until the next session of Congress and then, in a speech before the Senate, complained that he had received a very "impudent" letter from Commissioner Roosevelt "cruelly" calling him to account, when he was simply endeavoring to right a great wrong which the Commission had committed. But neither then nor afterwards did he furnish "any clue to the ident.i.ty of that child of his fondest fancy, the bright young man without a name."
Roosevelt must have chuckled with a righteous exultation at such evidence as this that the Lord had delivered the Philistines into his hands; and his abomination of the Spoils System must have deepened when he saw its Grosvenors and its Gormans brazen out the lies he caught them telling.
When the spoilsmen failed to get rid of the Commission by ridicule and by open attack, they resorted to the trick of not appropriating money for it in this or that district. But this did not succeed, for the Commission, owing to lack of funds, held no examinations in those districts, and therefore no candidates from them could get offices. This made the politicians unpopular with the hungry office-seekers whom they deprived of their food at the public trough.
The Commission had to struggle, however, not only to keep unfit candidates out of office, but to keep in office those who discharged their duty honestly and zealously. After every election there came a rush of Congressmen and others, to turn out the tried and trusty employees and to put in their own applicants. Such an overturn was of course detrimental to the service; first, because it subst.i.tuted greenhorns for trained employees, and next, because it introduced the haphazard of politicians" whims for a just scheme of promotion and retention in office. Roosevelt lamented bitterly over the injustice and he denounced the waste. Many cases of grievous hardship came to his notice. Widows, whose only means of support for themselves and their little children was their salary, were thrown upon the street in order that rapacious politicians might secure places for their henchmen. Roosevelt might plead, but the politician remained obdurate. What was the tragic lot of a widow and starving children compared with keeping promises with greedy "heelers"? Roosevelt saw that there was no redress except through the extension of the cla.s.sified service. This he urged at all times, and ten years later, when he was himself President, he added more than fifty thousand offices to the list of those which the spoilsmen could not clutch.
He served six years as Civil Service Commissioner, being reappointed in 1892 by President Cleveland. The overturn in parties which made Cleveland President for the second time, enabled Roosevelt to watch more closely the working of the Reform System and he did what he could to safeguard those Government employees who were Republicans from being ousted for the benefit of Democrats. In general, he believed in laying down certain principles on the tenure of office and in standing resolutely by them. Thus, in 1891, under Harrison, on being urged to retain General Corse, the excellent Democratic Postmaster of Boston, he replied to his friend Curtis Guild that Corse ought to be continued as a matter of principle and not because Cleveland, several years before, had retained Pearson, the Republican Postmaster of New York, as an exception.
At the end of six years, Roosevelt felt that he had worked on the Commission long enough to let the American people understand how necessary it was to maintain and extend the Merit System in the Civil Service. A sudden access of virtue had just cast out the Tammany Ring in New York City and set up Mr. Strong, a Reformer, as Mayor. He wished to secure Roosevelt"s help and Roosevelt was eager to give it. The Mayor offered him the headship of the Street Cleaning Department, but this he declined, not because he thought the place beneath him, but because he lacked the necessary scientific qualifications, and Mayor Strong, was lucky in finding for it the best man in the country, Colonel George E.
Waring. Accordingly, the Mayor ap pointed Roosevelt President of the Board of Police Commissioners, and he accepted.
The Police System in New York City in 1895, when Roosevelt took control, was a monstrosity which, in almost every respect, did exactly the opposite from what the Police System is organized to do. Moral values had been so perverted that it took a strong man to hold fast to the rudimentary distinctions between Good and Evil. The Police existed, in theory, to protect the lives and property of respectable citizens; to catch law-breakers and hand them over to the courts for punishment; to hunt down gamblers, swindlers, and all the other various criminals and purveyors of vice. In reality, the Police under Tammany abetted crime and protected the vicious. This they did, not because they had any special hostility to Virtue--they probably knew too little about it to form a dispa.s.sionate opinion any way--but because Vice paid better. They held the cynical view that human nature will always breed a great many persons having a propensity to licentious or violent habits; that laws were made to check and punish these persons, and that they might go their pernicious ways unmolested if the Police took no notice of them. So the Police established a system of immunity which anybody could enjoy by paying the price.
Notorious gambling-h.e.l.ls "ran wide open" after handing the required sum to the high police official who extorted it.
Hundreds of houses of ill-fame carried on their hideous traffic undisturbed, so long as the Police Captain of the district received his weekly bribe. Gangs of roughs, toughs, and gunmen pursued their piratical business without thinking of the law, for they shared their spoils with the supposed officers of the law.
And there were more degenerate miscreants still, who connived with the Police and went unscathed. As if the vast sums collected from these willing bribers were not enough, the Police added a system of blackmail to be levied on those who were not deliberately vicious, but who sought convenience. If you walked downtown you found the sidewalk in front of certain stores almost barricaded by packing-boxes, whereas next door the way might be clear. This simply meant that the firm which wished to use the sidewalk for its private advantage paid the policeman on that beat, and he looked the other way. As there was an ordinance against almost every conceivable thing, so the Police had a price for making every ordinance a dead letter. Was this a cosmic joke, a nightmare of cynicism, a delusion? No, New York was cla.s.sed in the reference books as a Christian city, and this was its Christianity.
Roosevelt knew the seamless bond which connected the crime and vice of the city with corrupt politics. The party Bosses, Republicans and Democrats alike, were the final profiters from police blackmail and bribery. As he held his mandate from a Reform Administration, he might expect to be aided by it on the political side; at least, he did not fear that the heads of the other departments would secretly work to block his purification of the Police. A swift examination showed him that the New York Police Department actually protected the criminals and promoted every kind of iniquity which it existed to put down. It was as if in a hospital which should cure the sick, the doctors, instead of curing disease, should make the sick worse and should make the well sick. How was Roosevelt, equally valiant and honest, to conquer this Hydra? He took the straight way dictated by common sense. First of all, he gained the confidence and respect of his men. He said afterwards, that even at its worst, when he went into office, the majority of the Police wanted to do right; that their instincts were loyal; and this meant much, because they were tempted on all sides by vicious wrongdoers; they had constantly before them the example of superiors who took bribes and they received neither recognition nor praise for their own worthy deeds.