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THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1919

CHAPTER 26
ADDRESSES   BY   HON.   CHAUNCEY   DEPEW AND BISHOP WILSON
THE New York City Methodist Preachers' Meeting, composed of a thousand members, said to be the largest ministers' meeting in the world, held a Roosevelt Memorial Service the Monday morning after the Colonel's death at which the Hon. Chauncey Depew and Bishop Luther B. Wilson made eloquent addresses.

Mr. Depew, though eighty-five years old, spoke with his old-time fire, humor and eloquence for over an hour. He cheerfully gave me the full text of his address. Much of Mr. Depew's address is here given:
Mr fiends : It is a very great pleasure for me to meet you here this morning. I am glad to comply with your request to join in your service for Theodore Roosevelt. He was my friend from his boyhood until his death. No one could know him without having for him the profoundest affection and the greatest admiration. He was one of the most extraordinary men of our period, or of any period; he made history and was a most important factor in the history of his time. His whole public career is lined with monuments in beneficent legislation and individual achievement testifying to services for his country and the world of the greatest value. He was born two years before the breaking out of the Civil War and was President of the United States when it was the necessity of the Executive to have a united country in support of policies for the benefit of the whole United States. For this destiny he was fortunate in his ancestors: his father of Dutch and Scotch ancestry, was a leading citizen of New York and one of the most useful and prominent citizens of the North; his mother was from Georgia and represented the best blood and traditions of the South. He could appeal, as no President had been able to since the Civil War, to all sections of the country, North, South, East and West.

He had a consuming desire to be all the time doing something and .producing something. When he was Governor, with all the exactions of the place, he, nevertheless, found time to write books. He was under contract with his publishers on both the African hunting trip and the Brazilian journey of exploration. After a day of rough travel and perilous adventure, when all his companions were used up and asleep, he sat by a box on which was a candle and by its flickering light wrote the day's chapter for his book. He was daily contributing to the press and to weekly and monthly magazines, constantly giving interviews and making speeches, and yet in some mysterious way found time for conferences with political leaders, with men of letters, with distinguished visitors, with his publishers, the managers and the editors of his magazines and newspapers.

He was a frequent attendant at social functions, and the most desired and welcomed of guests at public and private dinners. He was temperate in all things, but a glutton for work.

His activities were during the greatest period of industrial development which this country has ever known, a period in which masterful men developed in an unprecedented way our natural resources, our manufacturing and our transportation with results that were enormously beneficial to communities and multitudes of people, but yielded fabulous returns to the architects.

Colonel Roosevelt admired these men and their achievements, but always looked upon them and what they did from the standpoint of public safety and public service. His clear vision was never obscured. He had no fear of big business, and to his mind the bigger the better, if the best results for all could be had that way; at the same time, if in his judgment the process was becoming dangerous to the public welfare because of its tendency to monopoly he became at once its enemy.

As New York Police Commissioner he startled, aroused and enraged a wide open city where the law against vice had always been laxly enforced, if at all, by announcing as his policy the rigid enforcement of the laws. Saloonkeepers and gamblers, votaries of pleasure and all that multitude who in a great city, if unrestrained, violate the law, were instantly up in arms. They formed a great parade for personal liberty, but to their amazement found occupying the front seat on the reviewing stand the new Police Commissioner. A German brewer shouting, "Where is Roosevelt now?" was amazed by hearing the Police Commissioner say, "Here I am, my friend, what can I do for you?" The surprise reversed the German mentality, the brewer called three cheers for Roosevelt and that part of the procession collapsed. Wherever in the district infested by gangs and gunmen the patrolman's life was always in danger, there, at all hours, would be found strolling along and in constant peril of assassination, Mr. Roosevelt. Discipline and efficiency soon made the New York police the finest body in the world.

In a few months after his inauguration, McKinley was assassinated, Roosevelt became President and gave to the country seven years of the most eventful and fruitful Presidential terms in our history. An incident of the convention may be of interest. There being no contests because the nominations were unanimously agreed upon, the orators of the convention had no opportunity of presenting the claims of various candidates, so they exhausted themselves and exhausted the audience by making practically the same speeches over and over again for Mr. McKinley and Governor Roosevelt. The crowd had ceased to listen and had begun to scrape the speakers down, when a Western delegation came to me and said, "You never get out our way, and we would like to hear you speak." Roosevelt as a fellow delegate sat immediately in front of me. He turned around and said in his quick way, "Yes, yes, he will speak. He must give us something new; if these bores keep this up any longer it will beat the ticket." And he seized me and practically threw me upon the platform. It was one of those occasions where a story is the only salvation for a speaker. Near me sat a portentously solemn United States Senator whose platitudinous speech had already been delivered three times. As I started the story he turned to the Chairman and in a horrified and tragic voice said, "Great Heavens! The solemnity and dignity of this historic occasion is to be ruined by a story."

Great and successful leadership requires many qualities. I have known, beginning with Lincoln, with considerable intimacy every President of the United States. None of them had all these qualities except Mr. Roosevelt. He was a born leader of men. His industry was phenomenal, but in addition was that intelligent work which knew where to find what he wanted and his marvelous intelligence which grasped, absorbed and utilized this material with the precision of a machine.

He loved companionship and found time to enjoy his friends. When that friend left, he had contributed all he possessed to the materials useful to this great Executive. He might be a college professor, a United States Senator, a Foreign Ambassador, a State Governor, a Justice of the Supreme Court, a labor leader, a cowboy from the ranches, a hunter from the mountains, a traveler from overseas—all were equally welcome and all equal contributors.

In looking over the acts recommended and the laws passed during Roosevelt's administration, we find a mass of constructive work, of progress and reform, which gathers, condenses and puts in practice the accumulated necessities which had arisen since the close of the Civil War.

We rejoiced in our marvelous prosperity, at the same time it was our greatest peril. A few masterful men were combining the industries of the country and had almost perfected the consolidation of its transportation. Roosevelt alone, of his co-temporaries, with his unequaled insight into public opinion, saw a gathering storm. He sensed an unrest which was culminating into dangerous hatred of success. He set about vigorously to correct these evils and succeeded. His railway legislation did away with many of the abuses which had necessarily grown up with the rapid progress of railway building and consolidation. He put a curb on great Trusts and blocked the way of general monopoly. He incurred the bitter and venomous hostility of powerful interests in the financial world, in speculative circles and in the stock exchanges, but when he sent, as he was 'in the habit of doing, for captains of industry, he converted at least one of the ablest of them by putting in a sentence a pregnant truth, "Sir, you have to deal with me now, or the mob later."

Mr. Roosevelt, on his way home from his hunting and exploration expedition in Africa, was received with signal honors, as if still President, by Great Britain, France and the Kaiser. He was hailed with the same enthusiasm and demonstrations which have greeted President Wilson, both in London and Paris.

It was the President's psychology of public men and public sentiment of foreign nations which led him to solve and settle threatened difficulties with Japan. Through the East specially, and to a large degree in Europe, there was almost absolute ignorance of the strength and power of the United States. The American battle fleet was ordered to sail around the world. This formidable array of war vessels of the most modern design and equipment and ready for immediate action produced a profound impression in all countries. It was peace by demonstration of preparedness and power. It was the fundamental article in Roosevelt's creed that preparedness and power in a free and liberty-loving nation instead of provoking war promoted peace.

He first among our public men saw what must be our position in this world war. He found the great mass of his countrymen satisfied with their isolation and pacifists in sentiment, but in season and out of season he preached preparedness and the peril to us at home and to our institutions of the triumph of autocracy upon the field of battle in Europe. It was the wonderful effect of his stirring appeals which made it possible for the President to secure universal assent for the declaration of war. Roosevelt was never more himself in that faculty, which was one of his strongest points, of practicing what he preached and placing himself in the forefront of danger than in what he did when our country entered the war. He proposed to raise a division and go with it at once to France. That was denied, but he sent his four sons. When one of them was wounded and the other killed the pathetic answer of this bereaved patriot was, "Better so, than that they should not have gone."

I was in the Senate during the whole of his Presidency and saw him nearly every day. It was a delight to visit the Executive office or to meet him in the closer associations of the White House. He was the most outspoken of public men. As I was entering his room one morning a Senator was coming out. This Senator had, made some request of the President which had angered him. He shouted to me so the Senator could hear him and everybody else: "Do you know that man?" I answered, "Yes, he is a colleague of mine in the Senate." "But," the President shouted, "he ia a crook." Subsequent events proved the President correct, the man came within the clutches of the criminal law.

Two of our ex-Presidents are still a force with their party and the people. They are Jefferson and Jackson. Jefferson's influence was because of his versatility, political foresight and a literary talent. Jackson's by his iron will and command of men. Mr. Roosevelt united in himself all the power, talent and force of these two remarkable leaders.

He was intensely human. He had no airs nor fads nor frills. His cordiality was infectious, his friendship never failed. No man of his generation has so long held public esteem and confidence with continuing admiration and expectation. His work in the world was great and greatly done. It is a commonplace when a great man dies to say: "It is not for his co-temporaries to pass judgment upon him, that must be left to posterity and to the historian after the passions of his time have been allayed." There are only two exceptions to this .maxim, one is Washington, the other is Roosevelt. The testimony at the time about Washington is the same as the judgment of posterity. With this magnificent fighter, this reckless crusader, this hard-hitter, the world is stilled and awed when the news of his death is flashed over wires and cables, but the instant voice of friend and enemy is the same. All recognize the purity of his motives, the unselfishness of his work and his unadulterated Americanism. His last expression sent to a public meeting in New York, the evening before he died, is the thought upon whose realization rests the security of our institutions and. the future of our country. It ia that there is no place in our land for divided allegiance. Every citizen must be wholly American.

   Bishop "Wilson, who had just come from the great work he had rendered his country in France, made a powerful address. The following is his estimate of Colonel Roosevelt:
The flags of the nation are at half-mast and the bells Of the cities have tolled out their solemn announcement that one, who for eight years had occupied the Presidency off the Great Republic, has passed from us. Beyond the formal recognition of the announcement, however, of' this event, the sorrow is registered in the heart of the world. Theodore Roosevelt represented in his personality the North and the South and the rugged loyalty to conscience of Holland, while the sunlight upon the mountain peaks of America, and the broad sweeping winds of 'her prairies, and the vibrant life of her cities were wrought together, with the culture of her schools and the reverence of her churches, in the fine ideals which for sixty years dominated his life. He was a comrade of men. There was no condition in which they lived into which he was not willing to enter, that he might understand the problems which they fought to solve and weigh the burdens under which they toiled. There was ho monotony of peaceful days, no danger of war troubled times was sufficient to discourage or disconcert him. He despised no groups of men, however lowly; he feared none, however lordly. No barrier, or race, or mountain, or tongue, or sea confined him. He was a comrade to all the world because he was a brother to humanity. But where he was welcomed as comrade, toe was likely to continue as leader.

There was a vitality in his thought, a keenness to his vision, which enabled him to penetrate the disguise of the superficial and feel the lure of the long road. There was an assertion of conscience in expressed hatred -of sham and of unreality, only equalled by his avowed love for reality and truth. His words quivered and blazed as he waged conflict with wrong, or as he assumed the advocacy of right. They ran like the tide of the sea. Measured from the base of his convictions to the altitudes of his ideals, he was the tallest American since the days of Lincoln, probably the best known citizen of the world in which he lived, and the best loved. His door stood open to the weak and to the mighty, to the individual and to the multitude, for his whole career seemed based upon the belief that the other man might easily add to the store of his knowledge, or help in rendering knowledge more effective in operation, -and as the door stood open for the entrance of others, so it stood open for the going forth of himself.

Sometimes it seemed to the friend or enemy that he was taking part in the affairs of the country, or of the world beyond, the limit of a fine propriety, but nothing on any side of any sea was foreign to him, while it concerned the welfare of men. If the ear of the too critical hearer missed the quality of the highest wisdom in what he said, or if, from a mere observer's' place of aloofness' it seemed that action lacked discretion, no one who came near enough to hear his word, or felt the impact of his personality, could doubt either the friendship for men or that, in what he said, he was seeking to follow the light as it was given to him to see the light. Whatever else he was, he was no "reed shaken by the wind," he was likely to hold steadfastly to the way on which the light fell, and that steadfastness and conviction was not ossified self-will. There was in his love of certain good, in his wrath against certain evil the fastness of the hills, and in his dealing with all things an undisguised constancy, but where movements of the times wrought change in the great outstanding facts of civilization, he was never unresponsive. Among his most recent words were those in which he came to advocate a union of America and Great Britain, a measure which would have been impossible in his thinking even five years ago. He was the towering American of our day, but, in his Americanism, the desire for his country's opulence, by commercial exploit, was not the first thing. It was the relation of America to the life of the American, the responsiveness of America to the claims of justice, the position of America among the nations of the world which he sought, and all the power of conviction and of ideal had their consummate expression in what he said during these last great years in which the processes of dissolution have convulsed civilization as when the foundations of the deep are broken up, but in which also new possibilities have come to light even as when out of the sea new mountains lift their heads. The words of this great American, backed by his offer of service, by his sacrifice in the willing surrender of his best loved to the peril of the field, can never be forgotten. His stalwart Americanism wrought for the stabilizing of those very conceptions of ethical ideals for which he stood, the sure foundation of the world's welfare, however nations may be leagued or humanity be united.

Standing, as we do, so near to the day of his departure, we cannot yet feel that he is gone away. Our personal friendship is so assertive that perhaps it is impossible for us rightly to voice our judgment of him in his broader relations to the nation .or the world. We recognize the immense forcefulness of his life, his friendship for all things worthy, his contribution to the city, the state and nation, his loyalty to learning, his reverence for religious things, his comradeship with men, his discipleship of the Master, and bowing in sorrow, not lessened because in every land where the sun is shining men mourn with us, we lift our hearts in thankfulness that such a man has lived, and having lived we rejoice that his influence cannot be buried. Lovers of home, and native land, friends of order and the common good, pilgrims on -the way, comrades in the great adventure of the better world, we are conscious of his presence as we sing of another great soul marching on.
Appropriate resolutions were prepared and read by Rev. G. W. Roesch expressing appreciation and sympathy which were sent to the family of Colonel Roosevelt. Old members say that the service was the most impressive one held in fifty years.