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CHAPTER TWO

Of Theodore Roosevelt And his Time Volume 2

HAGUE   CONFERENCE: 

ESTIMATE   OF   JEFFERSON: 

INTERVENTION IN CUBA: 

BROWNSVILLE INCIDENT: 

immediately after the adjournment of Congress in June, 1906, the President went with his family to Oyster Bay where he enjoyed a quiet and restful summer, in strong contrast to that of 1905 when he was directing the work of the Portsmouth Peace Conference. A letter which he wrote to Andrew Carnegie, August 5, 1906, is interesting as showing his views of the Hague tribunal:
"In such matter as the Hague Conference business the violent extremists who favor the matter are to be dreaded almost or quite as much as the Bourbon reactionaries who are against us. This is as true of the cause of International peace as it is of the cause of economic equity between labor and capital at home. I do not know whether in the French Revolution I have most contempt and abhorrence for the Marat, Hebert, Robespierre, and Danton type of revolutionists, or for the aristocratic, bureaucratic, and despotic rulers of the old regime; for the former did no good in the Revolution, but at the best simply nullified the good that others did and produced a reaction which re-enthroned despotism; while they made the name of liberty a word of shuddering horror for the time being.
"I hope to see real progress made at the next Hague Conference. If it is possible in some way to bring about a stop, complete or partial, to the race in adding to armaments, I shall be glad; but I do not yet see my way clear as regards the details of such a plan. We must always remember that it would be a fatal thing for the great free peoples to reduce themselves to impotence and leave the despotisms and barbarians armed. It would be safe to do so if there were some system of international police; but there is now no such system."
A glimpse of some of the annoyances to which a President on vacation is subjected is furnished in a letter to Senator Lodge on August 6, 1906:
"I have been having a real rest this summer, and incidentally have grown to realize that I have reached that time of life when too violent physical exercise does not rest a man when he has had an exhausting mental career. We have been having a delightful summer. The secret service men are a very small but very necessary thorn in the flesh. Of course they would not be the least use in preventing any assault on my life. I do not believe there is any danger of such an assault, and if there were it would be simple nonsense to try to prevent it, for as Lincoln said, though it would be safer for a President to live in a cage, it would interfere with his business. But it is not only the secret service men who render life endurable, as you would realize if you saw the procession of carriages that pass through the place, the procession of people on foot who try to get into the place, not to speak of the multitude of cranks and others who are stopped in the village. I have ridden and rowed and chopped and played tennis."
His estimate of Jefferson and Hamilton, as well as his views upon other interesting subjects are disclosed in a letter, August 9, 1906, to Frederick Scott Oliver, the English author of a 'Life of Alexander Hamilton' and 'Ordeal by Battle':
"I have so thoroughly enjoyed your book on Hamilton that you must allow me the privilege of writing to tell you so. I have just sent a copy to Lodge. There are naturally one or two points on which you and I would not quite agree, but they are very few, and it is really remarkable that you, an English man of letters, and I, an American politician largely of non-English descent, should be in such entire accord as regards the essentials. . . .
"Thank Heaven, I have never hesitated to criticize Jefferson; he was infinitely below Hamilton. I think the worship of Jefferson a discredit to my country; and I have as small use for the ordinary Jeffersonian as for the ordinary defender of the house of Stuart—and I am delighted to notice that you share this last prejudice with me. I think Jefferson on the whole did harm in public life. . . . He did thoroughly believe in the people, just as Abraham Lincoln did, just as Chatham and Pitt believed in England; and though this did not blind Lincoln to popular faults and failings any more than it blinded the elder and the younger Pitts to English failings, it was in each case a prerequisite to doing the work well. In the second place, Jefferson believed in the West and in the expansion of our people westward, whereas the northeastern Federalists allowed themselves to get into a position of utter hostility to western expansion. Finally, Jefferson was a politician and Hamilton was not. Hamilton's admirers are apt to speak as if this was really to his credit, but such a position is all nonsense. A politician may be and often is a very base creature, and if he cares only for party success, if he panders to what is evil in the people, and still more if he cares only for his own success, his special abilities merely render him a curse. But among free peoples, and especially among the free peoples who speak English, it is only in very exceptional circumstances that a statesman can be efficient, can be of use to the country, unless he is also (not as a substitute, but in addition) a politician.
'' This is a very rough-and-tumble, workaday world, and the persons, such as our 'anti-imperialist' critics over here, who sit in comfortable libraries and construct theories, or even the people who like to do splendid and spectacular feats in public office without undergoing all the necessary preliminary outside drudgery, are and deserve to be at a disadvantage compared to the man who takes the trouble, who takes the pains, to organize victory. Lincoln, who, as you finely put it, conscientiously carried out the Hamiltonian tradition, was superior to Hamilton just because he was a politician and was a genuine democrat, and therefore suited to lead a genuine democracy. He was infinitely superior to Jefferson of course; for Jefferson led the people wrong, and followed them when they went wrong; and though he had plenty of imagination and of sentimental inspiration, he had neither courage nor far-sighted common sense, where the interests of the nation were at stake.
"I have not much sympathy with Hamilton's distrust of the democracy. Nobody knows better than I that a democracy may go very wrong indeed, and I loathe the kind of demagogy which finds expression in such statements as 'the voice of the people is the voice of God'; but in my own experience it has certainly been true, and if I read history aright it was true both before and at the time of the Civil War, that the highly cultivated classes, who tend to become either cynically worldly-wise or to develop along the lines of the Eighteenth Century philosophers, and the moneyed classes, especially those of large fortune, whose ideal tends to the mere money, are not fitted for any predominant guidance in a really great nation. I do not dislike but I certainly have no especial respect or admiration for and no trust in, the typical big moneyed man of my country. I do not regard them as furnishing sound opinion as regards either foreign or domestic policies.
"Quite as little do I regard as furnishing such opinion the men who especially pride themselves on their cultivation—the men like many of those who graduate from my own college of Harvard, and who find their organs in the New York Evening Post and Nation. These papers are written especially for cultivated gentlefolk. They have many minor virtues, moral and intellectual; and yet during my twenty-five years in public life I have found them much more often wrong than right on the great and vital public issues. In England they would be howling little Englanders, would be raving against the expense of the navy, and eager to find out something to criticize in Lord Cromer's management of Egypt, not to speak of perpetually insisting upon abandoning the Soudan."
In August, 1906, an insurrection broke out in Cuba which the Cuban Government, headed by President Palma, was entirely unable to quell. It appealed to the President to intervene. It was evident that chaos was impending and that immediate intervention was imperative. "With his usual lack of hesitation, the President, without waiting to summon Congress to direct him, acted at once. "Thanks to the preparedness of our Navy," he said in his annual message to Congress in December following, "I was able immediately to send enough ships to Cuba to prevent the situation from becoming hopeless." He also sent the Secretary of War, Mr. Taft, and the Assistant Secretary of State, Mr. Robert Bacon, to take charge in behalf of the United States Government. When President Palma resigned and there was no quorum of the Cuban Congress to accept his resignation, the Cuban Government came to a halt. Acting in accordance with the so-called Platt Amendment embodied in the Cuban Constitution, President Roosevelt proclaimed a provisional government for the island, with Taft acting as Provisional Governor, until one could be appointed. The President then named for that position Charles E. Magoon, who had formerly been Governor of the Canal Zone and United States Minister to Panama. He also sent a small army of pacification to relieve the navy for the protection of the lives and property of citizens. The insurgent chiefs immediately had their troops lay down their arms and disband. The Provisional Government left unchanged as far as possible the personnel of the old government and the old laws and administered the island until tranquillity was restored and a new government, chosen at a properly conducted election, was installed in January, 1909. In a letter to Senator Lodge, September 27, 1906, the President thus explained his action:
"I did not send Taft and Bacon to Havana until Palma had repeatedly telegraphed us that his unalterable purpose was to resign forthwith; that the Vice-President and the members of his Cabinet would decline to take or remain in office, and that he was entirely unable to quell the insurrection. I have, I need hardly say, a horror of putting what is in effect a premium upon insurrection by letting the insurrectionists receive benefit from their action; but P alma's utter weakness—or, to speak with literal exactness, his impotence—to do anything effective toward quelling the revolt (for I treat as of less moment the undoubted and gross misbehavior of the party in power at the last election) made it absolutely imperative that I should take some step unless I wished to see chaos come in the island.
"Of course if I had announced, as Mr. Bryan advised, that under no circumstances would I use armed force; or if, as Foraker desires, I had stated I could take no action until Congress decided what to do—just imagine my following the Buchanan-like course of summoning Congress for a six weeks' debate by Bacon, John Sharp Williams, and Tillman as to whether I ought to land marines to protect American life and property—the fighting would have gone on without a break, the whole island would now be a welter of blood. Of course our permanent policy toward the island must depend absolutely upon the action of Congress, no matter what construction is given the Platt Amendment. Congress has nothing to do but to refuse appropriations to put it into effect, and the Platt Amendment vanishes into air, and any stay of marines and troops in the island becomes impossible.
"Equally of course, I should be ashamed to look anybody in the face if I hesitated to take important measures to try to secure peace, if necessary by landing sailors and marines or even troops, so as to try to reestablish some government in Cuba and keep the island so far as possible in decent condition until Congress meets, when it can itself take action.
"I hope that we shall not have to intervene in any permanent form at present, and that we can simply make temporary arrangements to keep order until an election can be held and a new government or modified government started. I am inclined to think that, thanks to the fact that I have shown that I was ready to intervene by force of arms if necessary, the necessity will be for the present avoided; but I am greatly disheartened at what has occurred and doubt very much whether in the end we shall not have to exercise a more immediate control over Cuba, and of course it is possible that we shall be unable to make a working scheme even now, and that we shall have to take possession of the island temporarily this fall. But I shall do all that I can to avoid this and I hope to be successful."
An incident which excited wide public interest and much partisan rancor at the time occurred also in August, 1906. This was the attack by a body of colored troops of the regular army upon the city of Brownsville in Texas. The troops were stationed at Fort Brown, close beside the city, and considerable hostility had developed between them and the citizens. Near midnight on August 13, a body of colored soldiers, numbering from nine to fifteen or twenty according to varying estimates, scaled the walls of the fort and went through the town, shooting whomsoever they saw moving and firing into houses wherever they saw lights. They fired upon and hit in the arm the lieutenant of police who approached them, fired also at two policemen, killed one man in a saloon and wounded another, and came very near to killing several women and children. Investigation showed that the bullets and shells found on the ground were from government rifles and that bullet-holes in the houses were made by such bullets. There were no bullet-holes in the structure of the fort, showing that there had been no attack upon it. The commander of the fort testified that he was convinced that the raiders had slipped out of their quarters, got possession of their rifles, shot up the town and returned to the barracks without being discovered. All efforts to extort confessions from the suspected soldiers, or to get their associates to give evidence against them failed.
After full investigation of the facts, the President ordered the discharge of nearly all the members of three companies of the regiment that were known to contain guilty members, holding that the innocent members had entered into a conspiracy of silence to protect their guilty associates, thereby violating their oaths of enlistment by refusing to help discover the criminals. The President's action led to a bitter partisan debate in the Senate, led by Senator Foraker of Ohio, which continued for many weeks, but in the end the President's course was sustained. Letters that he wrote at the time disclose his feelings and motives in the case. Writing to Mr. Silas McBee, editor of The Churchman, on November 27, 1906, he said:
"I have been amazed and indignant at the attitude of the negroes and of shortsighted white sentimentalists as to my action. It has been shown conclusively that some of these troops made a midnight murderous and entirely unprovoked assault upon the citizens of Brownsville—for the fact that some of their number had been slighted by some of the citizens of Brownsville, though warranting criticism upon Brownsville, is not to be considered for a moment as provocation for such a murderous assault. All the men of the companies concerned, including their veteran noncommissioned officers, instantly banded together to shield the criminals. In other words, they took action which cannot be tolerated in any soldiers, black or white, in any policeman, black or white, and which, if taken generally in the army would mean not merely that the usefulness of the army was at an end but that it had better be disbanded in its entirety at once. Under no conceivable circumstances would I submit to such a condition of things. There has been great pressure not only by the sentimentalists but by the Northern politicians who wish to keep the negro vote. As you know I believe in practical politics, and where possible, I always weigh well any action which may cost votes before I consent to take it; but in a case like this, where the issue is not merely one of naked right and wrong but one of vital concern to the whole country, I will not for one moment consider the political effect.

    "There is another side to this also.   In that part of my message about lynching, which you have read, I speak of the grave and evil fact that the negroes too often band together to shelter their own criminals, which action had an undoubted effect in helping to precipitate the hideous Atlanta race riots. I condemn such attitude strongly, for I feel that it is fraught with the gravest danger to both races. Here, where I have power to deal with it, I find this identical attitude displayed among the negro troops. I should be recreant to my duty if I failed by deeds as well as words to emphasize with the utmost severity my disapproval of it."
To Dr. B. Lawton Wiggins, Vice Chancellor, University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee:
"When I took the stand I did on these negro troops I of course realized that trouble would come of it politically because of the attitude certain to be taken, I regret to say, by unwise sentimentalists and self-seeking demagogues in our Northern States, especially in those where the negro vote is an important factor. But it was just one of those vital matters where I did not feel that I had any right to consider questions of political expediency, and still less of personal expediency. Do not misunderstand me. I believe in being thoroughly practical in politics, and in paying all proper heed to political considerations. As things actually are in this world, I do not feel that a man can accomplish much for good in public life unless he does so. But I believe still more strongly that when we come to root questions affecting the welfare of the entire nation, it is out of the question for an honorable man, whether in public or private life, to consider political expediency at all. In this instance the question was really one of those root questions. If the troops had been white troops, nothing would have been said about my action. It is a curious thing that these same politicians and sentimentalists who denounce me because I refuse to do injustice in favor of the colored troops, have always opposed me when I have endeavored to secure recognition for decent colored men by giving them appointments in their own northern communities."
To Mr. George F. Spinney, of New York City, on January 22, 1907:
"I have had a perfectly comic time with the Senate. They have been hopping about, insisting that they could not desert Foraker, because it would 'split the party'; and I finally told the most active of the compromisers that if they split off Foraker they split off a splinter; but if they split off me they would split the party nearly in two; and that I should state most unhesitatingly, and whenever it became necessary in public, that the opposition to me on Brownsville was simply a cloak to cover antagonism to my actions about trusts, swollen fortunes and the like. I added that this opposition would be shown by voting against the Blackburn amendment. Once this declaration was made, Foraker was left so completely without support that he actually came into line himself, and agreed to support an amendment a little stronger than the Blackburn amendment. That is, the Blackburn amendment merely said that they did not question the legality of my action; whereas the proposed amendment stated that they questioned neither the legality nor the justice of my action. I was sorry that Foraker was allowed the chance to offer the amendment, and it was against my earnest advice that the senators who were on my side permitted him to do so. But when he 'ate crow' and took the very amendment upon which I insisted, I did not see how I could make any open protest against it. There never has been a more complete case of backdown and humiliation than this of Foraker's."
I was stationed in Washington at the time and when talking with the President one morning I made a reference to the Brownsville debate in the Senate. "Oh," he said, "that is merely the latest log going down the stream." When in January following there appeared in the Century magazine, an article by him on "The Ancient Irish Sagas," which excited high praise from all persons most competent to judge of its merits, I asked him how he could find time for such research as the article showed. "I have always been interested in the subject," he replied, "and when this Brownsville row started in the Senate I knew it would be a long and possibly irritating business if I followed it; so I shut myself up, paid no heed to the row and wrote the article."
For William Jennings Bryan personally, Roosevelt always had a kindly feeling while abhorring his political opinions. When Mr. Bryan returned from his tour of the world in 1906 and made what was predicted would be the "greatest speech of his life" in Madison Square Garden, New York, the President wrote to Whitelaw Reid in London, on September 25, a brief and accurate account of the fiasco which occurred:
"Poor Bryan! I do not know whether I feel more irritated or sympathetic with him. I never saw a bubble pricked so quickly. No private citizen in my time, neither General Grant nor Mr. Blaine, for instance, has been received with such wild enthusiasm on his return from a foreign trip; and in twenty-four hours he made his speech and became an object of indignation and laughter. He has retained his good nature and kindliness; but he has still further lost credit since he made his speech and found out that his panacea of government ownership was unpopular, by attempting to craw-fish on it, and thereby has added an appearance of insincerity to an appearance of folly and recklessness."
The President's own views on government ownership were set forth in a speech which he made at the dedication of the new State Capitol Building at Harrisburg, Pa., on October 4, 1906: '' To exercise a constantly increasing and constantly more efficient supervision and control over the great common carriers of the country prevents all necessity for seriously considering such a project as the government ownership of railroads—a policy which would be evil in its results from every standpoint. . . . The Government ought not to conduct the business of the country; but it ought to regulate it so that it shall be conducted in the interest of the public."
He was deeply interested in the Republican candidacy of Charles E. Hughes for Governor of New York in the election of 1906, when the opposing Democratic candidate was W. B. Hearst. While he refused all efforts, and there were many and urgent ones, to induce him to exert influence openly in behalf of Mr. Hughes, he kept close watch upon the developments of the campaign and was in constant touch with the Republican managers. Writing to Senator Lodge, on October 8, 1906, he made these somewhat startling revelations:
"I have been more shocked than I can say by the attitude of some of the corporation men within the last two or three weeks. Last week Sherman called upon E. H. Harriman to ask for a contribution. Harriman declined flatly to give anything. He said he had no interest in the Republican party and that in view of my action toward the corporations he preferred the other side to win. Sherman told him that the other side was infinitely more hostile to corporations than we were; that all we were doing was to be perfectly honest with them, decline to give them improper favors, and so on, and that Harriman would have to fear, as other capitalists would have to fear, the other side more than us. To this Harriman answered that he was not in the least afraid, that whenever it was necessary he could buy a sufficient number of Senators and Congressmen or State Legislators to protect his interests, and when necessary he could buy the Judiciary. These were his own words. He did not say this under any injunction of secrecy to Sherman, and showed a perfectly cynical spirit of defiance throughout, his tone being that he greatly preferred to have in office demagogues rather than honest men who treated him fairly, because when he needed he could purchase favors from the former. At the same time the Standard Oil people informed Penrose that they intend to support the Democratic party unless I call a halt in the suits begun against the Standard Oil people, notably, a suit which Moody is inclined to recommend; and they gave the same reason as Harriman, namely, that rather than have" an administration such as the present they would prefer to have an administration of Bryans and Hearsts, because they could make arrangements with them—they did not use the naked brutality of language which Harriman used, but they did state in substance that they could bring about favors they needed.''
A valiant but unsuccessful effort was made by the President in 1906 to advance the cause of simplified spelling by committing the Government to the adoption of the system. On August 27, he sent an order to the Public Printer to use the system in all public documents thenceforward. The order was obeyed, and among the documents thus printed was the President's special message describing the results of his visit to the Isthmus of Panama and the canal in November, 1906, as noted in a previous chapter. The reform was not acceptable to Congress, however, and so much hostility was manifested that the President said that if the House would go on record against it he would rescind his order to the Public Printer. The House passed a resolution to that effect, and on December 13, the President rescinded the order. Brander Matthews, of New York, one of the chief advocates of the reform, wrote to the President remonstrating with him for abandoning the effort, and to him the President replied on December 16: "I could not by fighting have kept the new spelling in, and it was evidently worse than useless to go into an undignified contest when I was beaten. Do you know that the one word as to which I thought the new spelling was wrong— thru—was more responsible than anything else for our discomfiture? But I am mighty glad I did the thing anyhow. In my own correspondence I shall continue using the new spelling."
A "Dooley" article that Roosevelt had enjoyed especially was one on his campaign entitled "Alone in Cubia." Writing to the author on June 18, 1906, the President thus alludes to it: "Three cheers, Mr. Dooley! Do come on and let me see you soon. I am by no means as much alone as in Cubia, because I have an ample surrounding of Senators and Congressmen, not to speak of railroad men, Standard Oil men, beef packers, and venders of patent medicines, the depth of whose feelings for me cannot be expressed in words!"
Again, on January 9, 1907, he wrote: "Let me repeat that Dooley, especially when he writes about Teddy Rosen-felt, has no more interested and amused reader than said Rosenfelt himself. I have known that a few people have recently thought quite otherwise, as they have also told you that they thought; but this is not a feeling that I have shared in the least. On the contrary, I feel that what you have written about me, with exception too trivial to mention, has been written in just the nicest possible style—that what Dooley says shows 'the good-natured affection that the boys in the army felt for old Grant and the people in Illinois for Lincoln.' I hate to compare myself with two great men, even when I am only quoting you, and I do it of course merely to show how thoroughly I understand and appreciate our friend Mr. Dooley's attitude."