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LIFE AND WORK OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT MEMORIAL

CHAPTER NINE

 GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK

Nominated at Saratoga—Chauncey M. Depew's Nominating Speech—Roosevelt and Plait—A Reform Administration—Taxation of Corporations—Nominated and Elected Vice-President of the United States.
The politics of New York State in the fall of 1898 were in a state of upheaval. The administration of Governor Black had proved unpopular, and it was recognized that unless a candidate could be found so popular on his own account as to pull the Republican ticket through, the chances were that the Democrats would carry the State.

The fame of Roosevelt's Rough Riders had given their organizer and leader an immense popularity in the United States, and for some time before he returned to New York he had been put forward prominently as the Republican candidate for the governorship. Governor Frank S. Black had been elected by an enormous plurality two years previously and according to all traditions would have been renominated. He was set aside, however, for the new hero, and in the convention at Saratoga held September 27, 1898, Colonel Roosevelt was nominated with great enthusiasm.

The friends of Governor Black opposed his nomination bitterly as long as there seemed a chance for success. The charge was made that Colonel Roosevelt was ineligible for the nomination, as he had relinquished his residence in New York when he went to Washington to enter the Navy Department. The leading politicians of the state were opposed to Colonel Roosevelt for other reasons. They had not forgotten the ways of the young man who overturned so many precedents in the State Assembly nearly twenty years before, the tenacity with which he had held to his principles when in the Civil Service Commission, and the quiet firmness with which he had refused to obey the demands of party leaders while he was president of the Police Board. He was not the man the politicians would have sought. But the people had decided to have Colonel Roosevelt for their next Governor and the delegates to the convention did not dare deny them.

Depew's Nominating Speech

Senator Horace White, of Syracuse, was chairman of the convention in which Colonel Roosevelt was nominated. Judge J. R. Cady, of Hudson, nominated Governor Black, and the Hon. Chauncey M. Depew presented the name of Colonel Roosevelt in the following speech:

Gentlemen: Not since 1863 has the Republican party met in convention when the conditions of the country were so interesting or so critical. Then the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, giving freedom and citizenship to four millions of slaves, brought about a revolution in the internal policy of our government which seemed to multitudes of patriotic men full of the gravest dangers to the Republic. The effect of the situation was the sudden and violent sundering of the ties which bound the present to the past and the future. New problems were precipitated upon our statesmen to solve, which were not to be found in the textbooks of the schools, nor in the manuals or traditions of Congress. The one courageous, constructive party which our politics has known for half a century solved these problems so successfully that the regenerated and disenthralled Republic has grown and prospered under its new birth of liberty beyond all precedent and every prediction.

Now, as then, the unexpected has happened. The wildest dream ever born of the imagination of the most optimistic believer in our destiny could not foresee, when Mr. McKinley was elected two years ago, the onrushing torrent of events of the past few months. We are either to be submerged by this break in the dikes erected by Washington about our government, or we are to find by the wise utilization of the conditions forced upon us how to be safer and stronger within our boundaries, and to add incalculably to American enterprise and opportunity by becoming master of the sea, and entering with the surplus of our manufactures the markets of the world. We cannot retreat or hide. We must "ride the waves and direct the storm." A war had been fought and won, and vast possessions near and far away have been acquired. In the short space of one hundred and thirteen days (duration of the Spanish War) politicians and parties have been forced to meet new questions and to take sides upon startling issues. The face of the world had been changed. The maps of yesterday are obsolete. Columbus, looking for the Orient and its fabled treasures, sailed four hundred years ago into the land-locked harbor of Santiago, and today his spirit sees his bones resting under the flag of a new and great country, which has found the way and conquered the outposts, and is knocking at the door of the farthest East. * *

The wife of a cabinet officer told me that when Assistant Secretary Roosevelt announced that he had determined to resign and raise a regiment for the war, some of the ladies in the Administration thought it their duty to remonstrate with him. They said: "Mr. Roosevelt, you have six children, the youngest a few months old, and the eldest not yet in the teens. While the country is full of young men that have no such responsibilities and are eager to enlist, you have no right to leave the burden upon your wife of the care, support and bringing up of that family." Roosevelt's answer was a Roosevelt answer: "I have done as much as anyone to bring on this war, because I believed it must come, and the sooner the better, and now that the war has come I have no right to let others do the fighting and stay at home myself."

The regiment of Rough Riders was an original American suggestion, and to demonstrate that patriotism and indomitable courage are common to all conditions of American life. The same great qualities are found under the slouch hat of the cowboy and the elegant imported tile of New York's gilded youth. Their mannerisms are the veneers of the West and East; their manhood is the same.

In that hot and pest-cursed climate of Cuba, officers had opportunities for protection from miasma and fever which were not possible for the men. But the Rough Riders endured no hardships nor dangers which were not shared by their Colonel. He helped them dig the ditches; he stood beside them in the deadly dampness of the trenches. No floored tent for him if his comrades must sleep on the ground and under the sky. In the world-famed charge of the Rough Riders through the hail of shot and up the hill of San Juan, their Colonel was a hundred feet in advance. The bullets whistling by him are rapidly thinning the ranks of those desperate fighters. The Colonel trips and falls and the line wavers, but in a moment he is up again, waving his sword, climbing and shouting. He bears a charmed life. He climbs the barbed-wire fence and plunges through, yelling, "Come on, boys! Come on, and we will lick hell out of them!" The moral force of that daring cowed and awed the Spaniards, and they fled from their fortified heights and Santiago was ours.

Colonel Roosevelt is the typical citizen-soldier. The sanitary condition of our army in Cuba may not have been known for weeks through the regular channels of inspection and report to the various departments. Here the citizen in the Colonel over came the official routine and reticence of the soldier. His graphic letter to the government and the "round robin" he initiated brought suddenly and sharply to our attention the frightful dangers of disease and death, and resulted in our boys being brought immediately home. He may have been subject to court-martial for violating the Articles of "War, but the humane impulses of the people gave him gratitude and applause.

It is seldom in political conflicts, when new and unexpected issues have to be met and decided, that a candidate can be found who personifies the popular and progressive side of these issues. Representative men move the masses to enthusiasm, and are more easily understood than measures. Lincoln, with his immortal declaration, made at a time when to make it assured his defeat by Douglas for the United States Senate, that '' a house divided against itself cannot stand; I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free," embodied the anti-slavery doctrine. Grant, with Appomattox and the parole of honor to the Confederate army behind him, stood for the perpetuity of union and liberty. McKinley, by his long and able advocacy of its principles, is the leading spirit for the protection of American industries. For this year, for this crisis, for the voters of the Empire State, for the young men of the country, and the upward, onward, and outward trend of the United States, the candidate of candidates is the hero of Santiago, the idol of the Rough Riders—Colonel Theodore Roosevelt.

A Hard Fight to Win
The roll-call of the convention showed 753 votes for Roosevelt and 218 for Black. Judge Cady, who had placed Governor Black in nomination, immediately moved to make the nomination of Colonel Roosevelt unanimous, and Senator Hobart Krum of Schoharie, who had been one of Governor Black's chief advisers, promised harmony in the party by saying: "On behalf of Governor Black and on behalf of every delegate who voted for him in this convention, I say they will stand by the nomination of Colonel Roosevelt as he took the heights at San Juan."

But after his nomination, Colonel Roosevelt had a hard fight to win—a fight that included innumerable opponents within his own party, politicians and business men who disliked his ever-present reform ideas. The campaign was an exciting and at times boisterous one, in which his "Rough Rider" character was made to play a prominent part. His Republican predecessor, Governor Frank S. Black, had been catapulted into Albany by a plurality of 213,022. Colonel Roosevelt was elected Governor by a bare plurality of 17,786 votes over Augustus Van Wyck, the Democratic candidate.
Roosevelt and Platt
Governor Roosevelt had accepted the Republican nomination unconditionally, but he had taken pains to announce several times during the campaign that on all important questions of policy and legislation he should consult with the Republican  state leader, Senator Platt. He made it clear, however, that he would not bind himself to act on the advice received if it were not in accordance with his own ideas of what was right.

Once installed in office, he carried out this policy to the letter. The reproaches of the reformers with which he was met when he breakfasted with Platt were turned to praise later when he refused to make the machine candidate, Francis Hendricks, Superintendent of Public Works, and removed Platt's man, Lou Payn, from the post of Superintendent of Insurance. He formed the habit of asking advice of Elihu Root, with whom his relations were ever after close, and it was more often Mr. Root's advice that was accepted than Platt's.

Many Sweeping Reforms
He had hardly begun to get the gubernatorial chair fairly warmed when he had the state bosses buzzing angrily about his ears—as had been expected. Always punching right and left, he waded in to establish reforms in the administration of the state.

Governor Roosevelt's two years at Albany, in fact, saw more constructive and reconstructive legislation placed on the statute books than the entire decade that preceded him. The Civil Service law was amended and enforced strictly—"putting the starch into it," the Governor called it.

The Governor personally investigated the tenement-house problem of New York City, with which he had previously made himself familiar during his term as Police Commissioner, and then secured the passage of a radical act that went far toward its solution.

Among the laws enacted affecting the laboring classes were an eight-hour law, a law providing for the licensing of employment agencies, and stringent factory laws, which, by the establishment of a licensing system, practically wiped out the worst abuses of the '' sweatshops.''
Taxed the Corporations
No piece of legislation was more earnestly pressed by Governor Roosevelt than the Corporation Franchise Tax law. It was his first step in the development of a policy which he afterward advocated in a wider field—namely, the requirement that corporate wealth be made to pay its just proportion of running the government. It was not a new idea with him. For years he had insisted that the state's willingness to give away valuable assets without adequate return was one of the weak points in the American practice of government.

It was in the franchise fight, so Colonel Roosevelt's friends assert, that he first uncovered the closeness of the relationship between boss legislation and big business; an abuse that he hammered at steadily in later years in a larger way, once destiny had led him into the fields of national affairs. Also he made it plain that he would like to have a second term as Governor to carry out still weightier schemes of reform.

Last Message as Governor
Governor Roosevelt's last message to the State Legislature in January, 1900, was of particular interest because it foreshadowed to a remarkable degree his later presidential programme. The germ or beginning of several policies which experience and study developed, is here clearly seen. In addition to advocacy of forest "preservation" and employers' liability, he took up the question of the state and public utilities. Of the accumulation of large fortunes, he said: "The point to be aimed at is the protection of the individual against wrong, not the attempt to limit and hamper the acquisition and output of wealth." Of the trust problem he wrote: 

"When a trust becomes a monopoly the state has an immediate right to interfere. * * Publicity is the one sure and adequate remedy which we can now invoke. There may be other remedies, but what these are we can only find out by publicity."
The Gospel of Work
On Appomattox Day, April 10, 1899, Governor Roosevelt was the guest of the Hamilton Club at a banquet in Chicago. There and then he enunciated the gospel of work—the doctrine of the strenuous life—with which his name was ever after associated. The first part of his address was as follows:
In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of the state which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who pre-eminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life; the life of toil and effort; of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.

A life of ignoble ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that what every self-respecting American demands from himself, and from his sons, shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who among you would teach your boys that ease, that peace, is to be the first consideration in their eyes—to be the ultimate goal after which they strive ? You men of Chi-cago have made this city great; you men of Illinois have done your share, and more than your share, in making America great, because you neither preach nor practice such a doctrine. You work yourselves, and you bring up your sons to work. If you
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are rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical research—work of the type we most need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation.

"We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor; who is prompt to help a friend; but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail; but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period not of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, even though perhaps not of vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer of the earth's surface; and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows, if the need to do so should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.

As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat. If in 1861 the men who loved the Union had believed that peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the worst of all things, and had acted up to their belief, we would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the blood and treasure we then lavished, we would have prevented
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the heart-break of many women, the dissolution of many homes; and we would have spared the country those months of gloom and shame, when it seemed as if our armies marched only to defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering simply by shrinking from strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we would have shown that we were weaklings, and that we were unfit to stand among the great nations of the earth.

Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln and bore sword or rifle in the armies of Grant! Let us, the children of the men who proved themselves equal to the mighty days—let us, the children of the men who carried the great Civil War to a triumphant conclusion, praise the God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels of peace were rejected; that the suffering and loss, the blackness or sorrow and despair, were unflinchingly faced, and the years of strife endured; for in the end the slave was freed, the Union restored, and the mighty American Republic placed once more as a helmeted queen among nations.
Elected Vice President
As the time approached for the Republican  National Convention of 1900, with the assurance of the renomination of William McKinley for President, speculation grew rife as to the candidate for second place on the ticket. Once more the people were heard from, and their voice was for Theodore Roosevelt for Vice-President. As the popular demand for his nomination grew in volume, it was encouraged and echoed by the machine politicians of New York State, headed by Senator Tom Platt, the "easy boss," from whose domination the Governor had gradually but surely freed himself.

There were, and always will be, those who are inclined to say that the seed of the demand for Theodore Roosevelt's nomination to the Vice-Presidency was first deliberately planted by the Republican  bosses who wished to "promote" Theodore Roosevelt to an office where he could do them no further harm. For two years he had been a thorn in the side of Senator Platt, and the New York bosses were quoted as saying in effect: "Let's bury him. Let's make him Vice-President of the United States. There's a little job, so the history of the country shows, that takes the intervention of the hand of God to lift a man out of eternal oblivion, now and forever."

But whoever made the first suggestion of Governor Roosevelt for the Vice-Presidency, it was caught up with genuine enthusiasm by the people, in the East as well as in the West. Whoever planted the seed soon saw it sprout and become a plant of sturdy growth. The Governor, anxious to go on with his work at Albany and looking forward to a renomination, tried in vain to stop the swelling movement. He endeavored to make it clear that he would decline the proffered honor. As early as February, 1900, months before the National Convention was to assemble, he stated his attitude in emphatic terms. "Under no circumstances," he said, "could I or would I accept the nomination for the Vice-Presidency."

Even this declaration, however, failed to stop the wave of popular sentiment for him. No doubt it was then encouraged and stimulated by the political elements desirous of shelving him.
Nominated by Acclamation
When the Republican convention met in June, 1900, in Philadelphia, his presence as a delegate-at-large from New York was hailed with enthusiasm. It was his first appearance in a National Convention since the Blaine convention of 1884, sixteen years before, and the famous Rough Rider, successful Governor of New York, was the lion of the day. He made a nomination speech for Mr. McKinley for President, but when he himself was nominated for Vice-President with a roar of acclamation, he was absent from the scene. In a room nearby, he was calmly reading a book by one of his favorite Greek authors.
A Memorable Campaign
Accepting the nomination which had been thus thrust upon him, the Colonel threw himself with all his boundless energy into the campaign which resulted in the re-election of McKinley and his own election as Vice-President. Little did the bosses who had smiled in their sleeves at his nomination dream that an assassin's act was soon to remove President McKinley and place the Rough Rider in the chief magistracy of the nation—to make him in politics the indisputable chieftain and leader of his party.

The campaign carried Governor Roosevelt all over the land. For eight weeks he toured the country, visiting twenty-four states, traveling more than 21,000 miles, and delivering more than 700 speeches to audiences aggregating 3,000,000 people.
How He Spent the Day
A record of the way Mr. Roosevelt employed his time was made by a man who accompanied him on his tour of the country as a candidate for the Vice-Presidency in 1900. It is the schedule of a day's occupations, and for variety of interest it would be difficult to find it equaled in the lives of any other two men. Here it is:

7:00 A. M.—Breakfast.
 7:30 A. M.—A speech.
 8:00 A. M.—Reading an historical work.
 9:00 A. M.—A speech. 
10:00 A. M.—Dictating letters.
11:00 A. M.—Discussing Montana mines. 
11:30 A. M.—A speech. 
12:00 M.—Reading an ornithological work. 
12:30 P. M.—A speech.
1:00 P. M.—Lunch.
1:30 P. M.—A speech.
2:30 P. M.—Reading Sir Walter Scott.
3:00 P. M.—Answering telegrams.
3:45 P. M.—A speech.
4:00 P. M.—Meeting the press.
4:30 P. M.—Reading.
5:00 P. M.—A speech.
6:00 P. M.—Reading.
7:00 P. M.—Supper.
8:00 to 10:00 P. M.—Speaking.
 11 .-00 P. M.—Reading alone in his car.
 12:00 P. M.—To bed.
How He Met Opposition
Colonel Roosevelt was always happy where things were happening. He said once that he liked to be where something was going on, and he generally managed to make something happen where he was. Danger aroused in him a keen sense of enjoyment, as was illustrated in a small way in Victor, Colorado, during the campaign of 1900. The opposition in Colorado to the Republican position on the coinage issue was bitter, and a mob tried to prevent him from speaking in Victor. One man hit Mm in the breast with a piece of scantling six feet long from which an insulting banner had been torn. Another man tried to strike him' in the face, but was prevented by a miner. The same observer who recorded the routine of a day's work on the tour said afterward:

"When the storm of the mob swept up to him I stood on the lower step of the Pullman sleeper with George "W. Ogden. Ogden exclaimed:

" 'See the Colonel's face!
"I looked. Rocks were flying over him and the scantling waved savagely. And he? He was smiling and his eyes were dancing; and he was coming ahead to safety as composedly as though he were approaching the entrance to his own home among friends."

When it was all over he exclaimed enthusiastically:

"This is magnificent. Why, it's the best time I've had since I started. I wouldn't have missed it for anything."

He seemed to enjoy everything in the same enthusiastic way, and he had "a bully time" throughout the campaign, which resulted in the triumphant election of McKinley and Roosevelt.