Meanwhile the managers of the French Company became greatly alarmed at the prospect of losing the sum which the United States had agreed to pay for its rights and diggings, and it took steps to avert this total loss. The most natural means which occurred to it, the means which it adopted, was to incite a revolution in the State of Panama. To understand the affair truly, the reader must remember that Panama had long been the chief source of wealth to the Republic of Colombia. The mountain gentry who conducted the Colombian Government at Bogota treated Panama like a conquered. province, to be squeezed to the utmost for the benefit of the politicians. There was neither community of interest nor racial sympathy between the Panamanians and the Colombians, and, as it required a journey of fifteen days to go from Panama to the Capital, geography, also, added its sundering influence. Quite naturally the Panamanians, in the course of less than half a century, had made more than fifty attempts to revolt from Colombia and establish their own independence. The most illiterate of them could understand that, if they were independent, the money which they received and pa.s.sed on to Bogota., for the bandits there to spend, would remain in their own hands. An appeal to their love of liberty, being coupled with so obvious an appeal to their pockets, was irresistible.
Just what devices the French Company employed to instigate revolution, can be read in the interesting work of M.
Bunau-Varilla, one of the most zealous officers of the French Company, who had devoted his life to achieving the construction of the Trans-Isthmian Ca.n.a.l. He was indefatigable, breezy, and deliberately indiscreet. He tells much, and what he does not tell he leaves you to infer, without risk of going astray. Mr. William Nelson Cromwell, of New York; the general counsel of the Company, offset Varilla"s loquacity by a proper amount of reticence.
Bunau-Varilla hurried over from Paris, and had interviews with President Roosevelt and Secretary Hay, but could not draw them into his conspiracy. The President told him that, at the utmost, he would only order American warships, which were on the Panama coast, to prevent any attack from outside which might cause bloodshed and interfere with the undisturbed pa.s.sage across the Isthmus, a duty which the United States was pledged to perform.
The French zealot-conspirator freely announced that the revolution at Panama would take place at noon on November 3d. It did take place as scheduled without violence, and with only the accidental killing of a Chinaman and a dog. The next day the Revolutionists proclaimed the Republic of Panama, and on November 6th the United States formally recognized its existence and prepared to open diplomatic relations with it. The Colombian Government had tried to send troops to put down the rebellion, but the American warships, obeying their orders to prevent bloodshed or fighting, would not allow the troops to land.
As soon as the news of these events reached Bogota, the halls of Parliament there resounded with wailing and gnashing of teeth and protests, and curses on the perfidious Americans who had connived to free the Panamanians in their struggle for liberty. The mountain bandits perceived that they had overreached themselves.
Instead of the $10,000,000 which their envoy Herran had deemed sufficient; instead of the $40,000,000 and more, which their greed had counted on in 1904, they would receive nothing. The Roosevelt Government immediately signed a contract with the Republic of Panama, by which the United States leased a zone across the Isthmus for building, controlling, and operating, the Ca.n.a.l. Then the Colombians, in a panic, sent their most respectable public man, and formerly their President, General Rafael Reyes, to Washington, to endeavor to persuade the Government to reverse its compact with the Panama Republic. The blackmailers were now very humble. Mr. Wayne MacVeagh, who was counsel for Colombia, told me that General Reyes was authorized to accept $8,000,000 for all the desired concessions, "and," Mr.
MacVeagh added, "he would have taken five millions, but Hay and Roosevelt were so foolish that they wouldn"t accept."
The quick decisions of the Administration in Washington, which accompanied the revolution in Panama and the recognition of the new Republic, were made by Roosevelt. I have seen no evidence that Mr. Hay was consulted at the last moment. When the stroke was accomplished, many good persons in the United States denounced it. They felt that it was high-handed and brutal, and that it fixed an indelible blot on the national conscience. Many of them did not know of the long-drawn-out negotiations and of the Colombian premeditated deceit; others knew, but overlooked or condoned. They upheld strictly the letter of the law. They could not deny that the purpose of the Colombians was to exact blackmail. It meant nothing to them that Herran, the official envoy, had drawn up and signed a treaty under instructions from Marroquin, the President of Colombia, and its virtual dictator, who, having approved of the orders under which Herran acted, could easily have required the Colombian Parliament to ratify the treaty. Perfervidly pious critics of Roosevelt pictured him as a bully without conscience, and they blackened his aid in freeing the Panamanians by calling it "the Rape of Panama." Some of these persons even boldly a.s.serted that John Hay died of remorse over his part in this wicked deed. The fact is that John Hay died of a disease which was not caused by remorse, and that, as long as he lived, he publicly referred to the Panama affair as that in which he took the greatest pride. It is only in the old Sunday-School stories that Providence punishes wrongdoing with such commendable swiftness, and causes the naughty boy who goes skating on Sunday to drown forthwith; in real life the "mills of G.o.d grind slowly."
Roosevelt always regarded with equal satisfaction the decision by which the Panama Ca.n.a.l was achieved and the high needs of civilization and the protection of the United States were attended to. He lived long enough to condemn the proposal of some of our morbidly conscientious people, hypnotized by the same old crafty Colombians, to pay Colombia a gratuity five times greater than that which General Reyes would have thankfully received in December, 1903.
Persons of different temperaments, but of equal patriotism and sincerity, will probably pa.s.s different verdicts on this incident for a long time to come. Mr. Leupp quotes a member of Roosevelt"s Administration as stating four alternative courses the President might have followed. First, he might have let matters drift until Congress met, and then sent a message on the subject, shifting the responsibility from his own shoulders to those of the Congressmen. Secondly, he might have put down the rebellion and restored Panama to Colombia; but this would have been to subject them against their will to a foreign enemy--an enormity the Anti-Imperialists were still decrying in our holding the Philippines against the will of their inhabitants. Thirdly, he might have withdrawn American warships and left Colombia to fight it out with the Panamanians--but this would have involved bloodshed, tumult, and interruption of transit across the Isthmus, which the United States, by the agreement of 1846, were bound to prevent. Finally, he might recognize any de facto government ready and willing to transact business--and this he did.*
* Leupp, 10-11.
That the Colombian politicians, who repudiated the treaty Herran had framed, were blackmailers of the lowest sort, is as indisputable as is the fact that whoever begins to compromise with a blackmailer is lured farther and farther into a bog until he is finally swallowed up. Americans should know also that during the summer and autumn of 1903, German agents were busy in Bogota. and that, since German capitalists had openly announced their desire to buy up the French Company"s concession, we may guess that they did not urge Colombia to fulfill her obligation to the United States.
Many years later I discussed the transaction with Mr. Roosevelt, chaffing him with being a wicked conspirator. He laughed, and replied: " What was the use? The other fellows in Paris and New York had taken all the risk and were doing all the work. Instead of trying to run a parallel conspiracy, I had only to sit still and profit by their plot--if it succeeded." He said also that he had intended issuing a public announcement that, if Colombia by a given date refused to come to terms, he would seize the Ca.n.a.l Zone in behalf of civilization. I told him I rather wished that he had accomplished his purpose in that way; but he answered that events matured too quickly, and that, in any case, where swift action was required, the Executive and not Congress must decide.
CHAPTER XII. THE GREAT CRUSADE AT HOME
These early diplomatic settlements in Roosevelt"s Administration showed the world that the United States now had a President who did not seek quarrels, but who was not afraid of them, who never bluffed, because--unlike President Cleveland and Secretary Olney with their Venezuela Message in 1895--he never made a threat which he could not back up at the moment. There was no longer a bed of roses to stifle opposition; whosoever hit at the United States would encounter a barrier of long, sharp, and unbending thorns.
These particular achievements in foreign affairs, and others which I shall mention later, gave Roosevelt and his country great prestige abroad and the admiration of a large part of his countrymen. But his truly significant work related to home affairs. Now at last, he, the young David of the New Ideals, was to go forth, if he dared, and do battle with the Goliath of Conservatism. With him there was no question of daring. He had been waiting for twenty years for this opportunity. Such a conflict or duel has rarely been witnessed, because it rarely happens that an individual who consciously embodies the aims of an epoch is accepted by that epoch as its champion. Looking backward, we see that Abraham Lincoln typified the ideals of Freedom and Union which were the supreme issues of his time; but this recognition has come chiefly since his death. In like fashion I believe that Roosevelt"s significance as a champion of Liberty, little suspected by his contemporaries and hardly surmised even now, will require the lapse of another generation before it is universally understood.
Many obvious reasons account for this. Most of the internal reforms which Roosevelt struggled for lacked the dramatic quality or the picturesqueness which appeals to average, dull, unimaginative men and women. The heroism of the medical experimenter who voluntarily contracts yellow fever and dies--and thereby saves myriads of lives--makes little impression on the ordinary person, who can be roused only by stories of battle heroism, of soldiers and torpedoes. And yet the attacks which Roosevelt made, while they did not involve death, called for the highest kind of civic courage and fort.i.tude.
Then again a political combat with tongues and arguments seldom conveys the impression that through it irrevocable Fate gives its decision to the same extent that a contest by swords and volleys does. Political campaigns are a compet.i.tion of parties and only the immediate partisans who direct and carry on the fight, grow very hot. The great majority of a party is not fanatical, and a citizen who has witnessed many elections, some for and some against him, comes instinctively to feel that whoever wins the country is safe. He discounts the cries of alarm and the abuse by opponents. And only in his most expansive moments does he flatter himself that his party really represents the State. The Republican Party, through which President Roosevelt had to work, was by no means an ideal instrument. He believed in Republicanism, with a faith only less devoted than that with which he embraced the fundamental duties and spiritual facts of life. But the Republicanism which he revered must be interpreted by himself; and the party which bore the name Republican was split into several sections, mutually discordant if not actually hostile. It seems no exaggeration to say that the underlying motive of the majority of the Republican Party during Roosevelt"s Presidency was to uphold Privilege, just as much as the underlying purpose of the great Whig Party in England in the eighteenth century was to uphold Aristocracy. Roosevelt"s purpose, on the contrary, was to clip the arrogance of Privilege based on Plutocracy. To achieve this he must, in some measure, compel the party of Plutocracy to help him. I speak, so far as possible, as a historian,--and not as a partisan,--who recognizes that the rise of a Plutocracy was the inevitable result of the ama.s.sing, during a generation, of unprecedented wealth, and that, in a Republic governed by parties, the all-dominant Plutocracy would naturally see to it that the all dominant party which governed the country and made its laws should be plutocratic. If the spheres in which Plutocracy made most of its money had been Democratic, then the Democratic Party would have served the Plutocracy. As it was, in the practical relation between the parties, the Democrats got their share of the spoils, and the methods of a Democratic Boss, like Senator Gorman, did not differ from those of a Republican Boss, like Senator Aldrich. Roosevelt relied implicitly on justice and common sense. He held, as firmly as Lincoln had held, to the inherent rightmindedness of the "plain people." And however fierce and formidable the opposition to his policies might be in Congress, he trusted that, if he could make clear to the average voters of the country what he was aiming at, they would support him. And they did support him. Time after time, when the Interests appeared to be on the point of crushing his reform, the people rose and coerced Congress into adopting it. I would not imply that Roosevelt a.s.sumed an autocratic manner in this warfare. He left no doubt of his intention, still less could he disguise the fact of his tremendous personal vigor; but rather than threaten he tried to persuade; he was good-natured to everybody, he explained the reasonableness of his measures; and only when the satraps of Plutocracy so far lost their discretion as to threaten him, did he bluntly challenge them to do their worst.
The Interests had undeniably reached such proportions that unless they were chastened and controlled, the freedom of the Republic could not survive. And yet, in justice, we must recall that when they grew up in the day of small things, they were beneficial; their founders had no idea of their becoming a menace to the Nation. The man who built the first cotton-mill in his section, or started the first iron-furnace, or laid the first stretch of railroad, was rightly hailed as a benefactor; and he could not foresee that the time would come when his mill, entering into a business combination with a hundred other mills in different parts of the country, would be merged. in a monopoly to strangle compet.i.tion in cotton manufacture. Likewise, the first stretch of railroad joined another, and this a third, and so on, until there had arisen a vast railway system under a single management from New York to San Francisco. Now, while these colossal monopolies had grown up so naturally, responding to the wonderful expansion of the population they served, the laws and regulations which applied to them, having been framed in the days when they were young and small and harmless, still obtained. The clothes made for the little boy would not do for the giant man. I have heard a lawyer complain that statutes, which barely sufficed when travel and transportation went by stage-coach, were stretched to fit the needs of the public in its relation with transcontinental railroads. This is an exaggeration, no doubt, but it points towards truth. The Big Interests were so swollen that they went ahead on their own affairs and paid little attention to the community on which they were battening. They saw to it that if any laws concerning them had to be made by the State Legislatures or by Congress, their agents in those bodies should make them. A certain Mr. Vanderbilt, the president of one of the largest railroad systems in America, a person whose other gems of wit and wisdom have not been recorded, achieved such immortality, as it is, by remarking, "The public be d.a.m.ned." Probably the president and directors of a score of other monopolies would have heartily echoed that impolitic and petulant display of arrogance.
Impolitic the exclamation was, because the American public had already begun to feel that the Big Interests were putting its freedom in jeopardy, and it was beginning to call for laws which should reduce the power of those interests.
As early as 1887 the Interstate Commerce Act was pa.s.sed, the earliest considerable attempt to regulate rates and traffic. Then followed anti-trust laws which aimed at the suppression of "pools," in which many large producers or manufacturers combined to sell their staples at a uniform price, a practice which inevitably set up monopolies. The "Trusts" were to these what the elephant is to a colt. When the United States Steel Corporation was formed by uniting eleven large steel plants, with an aggregate capital of $11100,000,000, the American people had an inkling of the magnitude to which Trusts might swell. In like fashion when the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern Railroads found a legal impediment to their being run by one management, they got round the law by organizing the Northern Securities Company, which was to hold the stocks and bonds of both railroads. And so of many other important industrial and transportation mergers. The most powerful financial promoters of the country, led by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, were busy setting up these combinations on a large scale and the keenest corporation lawyers spent their energy and wits in framing charters which obeyed the letter of the laws, but wholly denied their spirit.
President Roosevelt worked openly, with a definite purpose.
First, he would enforce every law on the statute book, without exception in favor of any individual or company; next, he suggested to Congress the need of new legislation to resist further encroachments by capitalists in the fields where they had already been checked; finally, he pointed out that Congress must begin at once to protect the national resources which had been allowed to go to waste, or to be seized and exploited by private concerns.
I do not intend to take up in chronological sequence, or in detail, Roosevelt"s battles to secure proper legislation. To do so would require the discussion of legal and const.i.tutional questions, which would scarcely fit a sketch like the present.
The main things to know are the general nature of his reforms and his own att.i.tude in conducting the fight. He aimed directly at stopping abuses which gave a privileged few undue advantage in ama.s.sing and distributing wealth. The practical result of the laws was to spread justice, and equality throughout the country and to restore thereby the true spirit of Democracy on which the Founders created the Republic. He fought fairly, but warily, never letting slip a point that would tell against his opponents, who, it must be said, did not always attack him honorably.
At first, they regarded the President as a headstrong young man-- he was the youngest who had ever sat in the Presidential chair-- who wished to have his own way in order to show the country that he was its leader. They did not see that ideals which dated back to his childhood were really shaping his acts. He had seen law in the making out West; he had seen law, and especially corporation law, in the making when he was in the New York a.s.sembly and Governor of New York; he knew the devices by which the Interests caused laws to be made and pa.s.sed for their special benefit, or evaded inconvenient laws. But he suffered no disillusion as to the ideal of Law, the embodiment and organ of Justice. Legal quibbles, behind which designing and wicked men dodged, nauseated him, and he made no pretense of wishing to uphold them.
The champions of the Interests found out before long that the young President was neither headstrong nor a mere creature of impulse, but that he followed a thoroughly rational system of principles; and so they had to abandon the notion that the next gust of impulse might blow him over to their side. They must take him as he was, and make the best of it. Now, I must repeat, that, for these gentlemen, the very idea that anybody could propose to run the American Government, or to organize American Society, on any other standard than theirs, seemed to them preposterous. The Bourbon n.o.bles in France and in Italy were not more amazed. when the Revolutionists proposed to sweep them away than were the American Plutocrats of the Rooseveltian era when he promoted laws to regulate them. The Bourbon thinks the earth will perish unless Bourbonism governs it; the American Plutocrat thought that America existed simply to enrich him. He clung to his rights and privileges with the tenacity of a drowning man clinging to a plank, and he deceived himself into thinking that, in desperately trying to save himself and his order, he was saving Society.
Most tragic of all, to one who regards history as the revelation of the unfolding of the moral nature of mankind, was the fact that these men had not the slightest idea that they were living in a moral world, or that a new influx of moral inspiration had begun to permeate Society in its politics, its business, and its daily conduct. The great ship Privilege, on which they had voyaged with pomp and satisfaction, was going down and they knew it not.
CHAPTER XIII. THE TWO ROOSEVELTS
I do not wish to paint Roosevelt in one light only, and that the most favorable. Had no other been shed upon him, his Administration would have been too bland for human belief, and life for him would have palled. For his inexhaustible energy hungered for action. As soon as his judgment convinced him that a thing ought to be done he set about doing it. Recently, I asked one of the most perspicacious members of his Cabinet, "What do you consider Theodore"s dominant trait" He thought for a while, and then replied, "Combativeness." No doubt the public also, at least while Roosevelt was in office, thought of him first as a fighter. The idea that he was truculent or pugnacious, that he went about with a chip on his shoulder, that he loved fighting for the sake of fighting, was, however, a mistake. During the eight years he was President he kept the United States out of war; not only that, he settled long-standing causes of irritation, such as the dispute over the Alaskan Boundary, which might, under provocation, have led to war. Even more than this, without striking a blow, he repelled the persistent attempts of the German Emperor to gain a foothold on this continent; he repelled those snakelike attacks and forced the Imperial Bully, not merely to retreat ignominiously but to arbitrate. And in foreign affairs, Roosevelt shone as a peacemaker. He succeeded in persuading the Russian Czar to come to terms with the Mikado of j.a.pan. And soon after, when the German Emperor threatened to make war on France, a letter from Roosevelt to him caused William to reconsider his brutal plan, and to submit the Moroccan dispute to a conference of the Powers at Algeciras.
Instead of the braggart and brawler that his enemies mispainted him, I saw in Roosevelt, rather, a strong man who had taken early to heart Hamlet"s maxim and had steadfastly practiced it:
"Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honour"s at the stake."
He himself summed up this part of his philosophy in a phrase which has become a proverb: "Speak softly, but carry a big stick." More than once in his later years he quoted this to me, adding, that it was precisely because this or that Power knew that he carried a big stick, that he was enabled to speak softly with effect.
No man of our time better deserved the n.o.bel Peace Prize than did he. The fallacy that Roosevelt, like the proverbial Irishman at Donnybrook Fair, had rather fight than eat, spread through the country, and indeed throughout the world, and had its influence in determining whether men voted for him or not. His enemies used it as proof that he was not a safe President, but they took means much more malignant than this to discredit and destroy him. When the Big Interests discovered that they could not silence him, they circulated stories of all kinds that would have rendered even the archangel Gabriel suspect to some worthy dupes.
They threw doubts, for instance, on his sanity, and one heard that the "Wall Street magnates" employed the best alienists in the country to a.n.a.lyze everything the President did and said, in the hope of acc.u.mulating evidence to show that he was too unbalanced to be President. Not content with stealing away his reputation for mental competence, they shot into the dark the gravest charges against his honor. A single story, still believed, as I know, by persons of eminence in their professions, will ill.u.s.trate this. When one of the great contests between the President and the Interests was on, he remembered that one of their representatives in New York had damaging, confidential letters from him. Hearing that these might be produced, Roosevelt telephoned one of his trusty agents to break open the desk of the Captain of Industry where they were kept, and to bring them to the White House, before ten o"clock the following morning. This was done. To believe that the President of the United States would engage in a vulgar robbery of the jimmy and black-mask sort indicates a degree of credulity which even the alienists could hardly have expected to encounter outside of their asylums. It suggests also, that Baron Munchausen, like the Wandering Jew Ahasuerus, has never died. Does any one suppose that the person whose desk was rifled would have kept quiet? Or that, if the Interests had had even reasonably sure evidence of the President"s guilt, they would not have published it? To set spies and detectives upon him with orders to trail him night and day was, according to rumor, an obvious expedient for his enemies to employ.
I repeat these stories, not because I believe them, but because many persons did, and such gossip, like the cruel slanders whispered against President Cleveland years before, gained some credence. Roosevelt was so natural, so unguarded, in his speech and ways, that he laid himself open to calumny. The delight he took in establishing the Ananias Club, and the rapidity with which he found new members for it, seemed to justify strong doubts as to his temper and taste, if not as to his judgment. The vehemence of his public speaking, which was caused in part by a physical difficulty of utterance--the sequel of his early asthmatic trouble--and in part by his extraordinary vigor, created among some of the hearers who did not know him the impression that he must be a hard drinker, or that he drank to stimulate his eloquence. After he retired from office, his enemies, in order to undermine his further political influence, sowed the falsehood that he was a drunkard. I do not recall that they ever suggested that he used his office for his private profit--there are some things too absurd for even malice to suggest--but he had reason enough many times to calm himself by reflecting that his Uncle Jimmy Bulloch, the best of men, believed just such lies, and the most atrocious insinuations, against Mr. Gladstone.
Of course, nearly all public men have to undergo similar virulent defamation. I have heard a well-known publicist, a lawyer of ability, argue that both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln did not escape from what seems now incredible abuse, and that they were, nevertheless, the n.o.blest of men and peerless patriots; and then he went on to argue that President Woodrow Wilson has been the target of similar malignity, and to leave you to conclude that consequently Wilson is in the same cla.s.s with Washington and Lincoln. If he had put his thesis in a different form, the publicist might have seen himself, as his hearers did, the absurdity of it. Suppose he had said, for instance: "In spite of the fact that Washington and Lincoln each kept a cow, they were both peerless patriots, therefore, as President Wilson keeps a cow, he must be a peerless patriot." One fears that logic is somewhat neglected even in the training of lawyers in our day.
The commonest charge against Roosevelt, and the one which seemed, on the surface at least, to be most plausible, was that he was devoured by insatiable ambition. The critical remarked that wherever he went he was always the central figure. The truth is, that he could no more help being the central figure than a lion could in any gathering of lesser creatures; the fact that he was Roosevelt decided that. He did use the personal p.r.o.noun "I," and the possessive p.r.o.noun "My," with such frequency as to irritate good persons who were quite as egotistical as he--if that be egotism--but who used such modest circ.u.mlocutions as "the present writer," or "one," to camouflage their self-conceit. Roosevelt enjoyed almost all his experiences with equal zest, and he expressed his enjoyment without reserve. He was quite as well aware of his foibles as his critics were, and he made merry over them. Probably n.o.body laughed more heartily than he at the pleasantly humorous remark of one of his boys: "Father never likes to go to a wedding or a funeral, because he can"t be the bride at the wedding or the corpse at the funeral."
Ambition he had, the ambition which every healthy-minded man ought to have to deserve the good-will and approbation of his fellows. This he admitted over and over again, and he made no pretense of not taking satisfaction from the popularity his countrymen showered upon him. In writing to a friend that he wished to be a candidate in 1904, he distinguished between the case of Lincoln in 1864 and that of himself and other Presidential candidates for renomination. In 1864, the crisis was so tremendous that Lincoln must have considered that chiefly, irrespective of his own hopes: whereas Roosevelt in 1904, like Jackson, Grant, Cleveland, and the other two-term Presidents, might, without impropriety, look upon reelection as, in a measure, a personal tribute.
One of my purposes in writing this sketch will have failed, if I have not made clear the character of Roosevelt"s ambition. He could not be happy unless he were busily at work. If that work were in a public office he was all the happier. But the way in which he accepted one office after another, each unrelated to the preceding, was so desultory as to prove that he did not begin life with a deep-laid design on the Presidency. He got valuable political notoriety as an a.s.semblyman, but that was, as I have so often said, because he could not be inconspicuous anywhere. He took the office of Civil Service Commissioner, although everybody regarded that as a commonplace field bounded on three sides by political oblivion; and only a dreamer could have supposed that his service as Chief Police Commissioner of New York City could lead to the White House. Only when he became a.s.sistant Secretary of the Navy can he be said to have come within striking distance of the great target. In enlisting in the Spanish War and organizing the Rough Riders, he may well have reflected that military prowess has often favored a Presidential candidacy; but even here, his sense of patriotic duty and his desire to experience the soldier"s life were almost indisputably his chief motives. As Governor of New York, however, he could not disguise from himself the fact that that position might prove again, as it had proved in the case of Cleveland, the stepping-stone to the Presidency. On finding, however, that Platt and the Bosses, exasperated by him as Governor, wished to get rid of him by making him Vice-President, and knowing that in the normal course of events a Vice-President never became President, he tried to refuse nomination to the lower office. And only when he perceived that the ma.s.ses of the people, the country over, and not merely the Bosses, insisted on nominating him, did he accept. This brief summary of his political progress a.s.suredly does not bear out the charge that he was the victim of uncontrollable ambition.
Roosevelt"s Ananias Club caught the imagination of the country, but not always favorably. Those whom he elected into it, for instance, did not relish the notoriety. Others thought that it betokened irritation in him, and that a man in his high position ought not to punish persons who were presumably trustworthy by branding them so conspicuously. In fact, I suppose, he sometimes applied the brand too hastily, under the spur of sudden resentment. The most-open of men himself, he had no hesitation in commenting on anybody or any topic with the greatest indiscretion. For he took it for granted that even the strangers who heard him would hold his remarks as confidential. When, therefore, one of his hearers went outside and reported in public what the President had said, Roosevelt disavowed it, and put the babbler in the Ananias cla.s.s. What a President wishes the public to know, he tells it himself. What he utters in private should, in honor, be held as confidential.
When I say that Roosevelt was astonishingly open, I do not mean that he blurted out everything, for he always knew the company with whom he talked, and if there were any among them with whom it would be imprudent to risk an indiscretion, he took care to talk "for safety." With him, a secret was a secret, and he could be as silent as an unopened Egyptian tomb. Certain diplomatic affairs he did not lisp, even to his Secretary of State. So far as appears, John Hay knew nothing about the President"s interviews with the German Amba.s.sador Holleben, which forced William II to arbitrate. And he sometimes prepared a bill for Congress with out consulting his Cabinet, for fear that the stock jobbers might get wind of it and bull or bear the market with the news.
Before pa.s.sing on, I must remark that some cases of apparent mendacity or inaccuracy on the part of a President--especially if he were as voluble and busy as Roosevelt--must be attributed to forgetfulness or misunderstanding and not to wilful lying. A person coming from an interview with him might construe as a promise the kindly remarks with which the President wished to soften a refusal. The promise, which was no promise, not being kept, the suppliant accused the President of faithlessness or falsehood. McKinley, it was said, could say no to three different seekers for the same office so balmily that each of them went away convinced that he was the successful applicant. Yet McKinley escaped the charge of mendacity and Roosevelt, who deserved it far less, did not.
In his writings and speeches, Roosevelt uttered his opinions so candidly that we need not fall back on breaches of confidence to explain why his opponents were maddened by them. Plutocrats and monopolists might well wince at being called "malefactors of great wealth," "the wealthy criminal cla.s.s." Such expressions had the virtue, from the point of view of rhetoric, of being so descriptive that any body could visualize them. They stung; they shed indefinable odium on a whole cla.s.s; and, no doubt, this was just what Roosevelt intended. To many critics they seemed cruel, because, instead of allowing for exceptions, they huddled all plutocrats together, the virtuous and the vicious alike. And so with the victims of his phrase, "undesirable citizens." I marvel rather, however, that Roosevelt, given his extraordinary talent of flashing epithets and the rush of his indignation when he was doing battle for a good cause, displayed as much moderation as he did. Had he been a demagogue, he would have roused the ma.s.ses against the capitalists and have goaded them to such a pitch of hatred that they would have looked to violence, bloodshed, and injustice, as the remedy they must apply.
But Roosevelt was farthest removed from the Revolutionists of the vulgar, red-handed cla.s.s. He consecrated his life to prevent Revolution. All his action in the conflict between Labor and Capital aimed at conciliation. He told the plutocrats their defects with brutal frankness, and if he promoted laws to curb them, it was because he realized, as they did not, that, unless they mended their ways, they would bring down upon themselves a Socialist avalanche which they could not withstand. What set the seal of consecration on his work was his treatment of Labor with equal justice. Unlike the demagogue, he did not flatter the "h.o.r.n.y-handed sons of toil" or obsequiously do the bidding of railroad brotherhoods, or pretend that the capitalist had no rights, and that all workingmen were good merely because they worked. On the contrary, he told them that no cla.s.s was above the law; he warned them that if Labor attempted to get its demands by violence, he would put it down. He ridiculed the idea that honest citizenship depends on the more or less money a man has in his pocket. "A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country," Roosevelt said in a Fourth-of-July speech at Springfield, Illinois, in 1903, "is good enough to be given a square deal afterward. More than that no man is ent.i.tled to, and less than that no man shall have."
That phrase, "a square deal," stuck in the hearts of the American people. It summed up what they regarded as Roosevelt"s most characteristic trait. He was the man of the square deal, who instinctively resented injustice done to those who could not protect themselves; the friend of the underdog, the companion of the self-reliant and the self-respecting. It is under this aspect that Roosevelt seems most likely to live in popular history.
So, from the time he became President, the public was divided into believing that there were two Roosevelts. His enemies made almost a monster of him, denouncing and fearing him as violent, rash, pugnacious, egotistical, ogreish in his mad, hatred of Capital, and Capitalists condemned him as hypocritical, cruel, lying, and vindictive. The other side, however, insisted on his courage; he was a fighter, but he always fought to defend the weak and to uphold the right; he was equally unmoved by Bosses and by demagogues; in his human relations he regarded only what a man was, not his cla.s.s or condition; he had a great hearted, jovial simplicity; a far-seeing and steadfast patriotism; he preached the Square Deal and he practiced it; even more than Lincoln he was accessible to every one.
CHAPTER XIV. THE PRESIDENT AND THE KAISER