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LIFE AND WORK OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT MEMORIAL

 CHAPTER TEN 

HE SUCCEEDS McKinley

Inaugurated as Vice-President—Relations with McKinley Pleasant—Assassination of the President—Roosevelt in the Adirondacks—He Becomes President— Followed McKinley's Policies — An International Peacemaker.
When President McKinley and Vice-President Roosevelt were inaugurated at Washington on March 4, 1901, an interested spectator was Senator Thomas C. Platt of New York. When he started for the inauguration he said, "I am going down to see Roosevelt put on the veil," thereby expressing the attitude and hopes of the machine politicians of the new Vice-President's home state.

But Roosevelt's term as Vice-President was destined to be of short duration. He presided over the Senate at the week's extra session which followed the inauguration, and followed unconventional methods which promised to prove interesting for the grave and reverend seigniors of the Senate at subsequent sessions.

His relations with President McKinley and his cabinet were close and cordial. Unlike many former Vice-Presidents, he was in full agreement with the administration policy, and he was beginning to enjoy life in Washington, with definite plans for the useful occupation of his time, when the vacation season of 1901 opened and the members of the administration scattered in various directions for the summer.
September found the Vice-President with his family camping in the Adirondacks, and it was there that he received the news of the shooting of President McKinley, who was the victim of an assassin's (Czolgosz's) bullet at Buffalo on September 6, "President's Day" at the Pan-American Exposition. Mr. Roosevelt hurried at once to Buffalo, but at the end of three days, being assured by the attending physicians that the President would probably recover, he returned to the mountains. When the fatal complications set in, he was again sent for, but President McKinley died on September 13, seven days after he was shot, before Mr. Roosevelt again reached his bedside.
Notified by a Reporter
How Colonel Roosevelt received the news of the passing of the President has been told as follows:

"One day a reporter, throwing himself off a fagged horse in front of a camp in the fastnesses of the Adirondack woods, blurted the news to Roosevelt that McKinley was dead.

"The Colonel started violently. He didn't speak for minutes, gazing the while silently toward a distant mountain peak. Then he went into his camp, hastily threw his belongings together, and drove off at a hair-raising speed through the autumnal woods toward a railway station many miles away.

"Arrived at Buffalo he strode nervously, with fixed gaze, into a darkened room in the Milburn residence, a room adjoining the one in which the body of the martyred McKinley lay. Distinguished old men, their white heads bowed, sat about the darkened room as the youthful-looking Roosevelt entered with quick, alert step.
'' ' The President!' someone whispered suddenly; and the elder statesmen sprang to their feet.''

Thus Theodore Roosevelt became Chief Magistrate of the United States and succeeded to the chair of Washington, Lincoln, and McKinley.

One crack of a madman's revolver had ended the machine-made plans. And as the dying McKinley was carried from the scenes of hysteria in Buffalo on that September day, Wall Street stocks on the instant went tumbling; big business for the moment halted its mightiest plans; a whole nation, despite its shock and grief, took a frightened look into the future.

"Stocks went lower and lower. Teddy Roosevelt! The hot-headed Unterrified! The broncho-busting boy reformer—this heated, uncontrollable flake of dynamite, President of the United States for almost a full term!"

But Theodore Roosevelt soon mastered the situation. Continues 

McKinley Policy
He took the oath of office as President at Buffalo on the afternoon of September 14, in the presence of the Cabinet. Then, addressing the late President's advisers, he said: "In this hour of deep and terrible national bereavement, I wish it to be known that it shall be my intention and endeavor to continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley for the peace and prosperity and honor of our beloved country." He then asked the members of the Cabinet to continue in office, insisting that he could not consider the withdrawal of any one of them.

The people, even big business, took cheer and confidence. Stocks slowly began to recover. And by the time President Roosevelt had sent his first message to Congress in the following December, it was a reassured people, still doubting, a bit, perhaps, but wholly recovered from the first fears.

Policy Toward the South
Early in his administration he let it be known that he would appoint good Democrats to office rather than bad Republicans in the South. He said he did not believe in the South's non-participation in the work of the Federal Government whenever a Republican administration happened to be installed at Washington. As for the Negro, he declared that he must take his chances with the rest, and that no favor would be shown a bad Negro, just because he was a Negro, or because he was a Republican. He began by making appointments which electrified the South, and brought words of praise from those who had never before been known to praise anything Republican.

It was at this point that the Booker T. Washington incident took place. The President invited the Negro educator to discuss a special subject with him, and then asked him to stay to lunch. It was clearly not intended as an affront to the South, and apparently the President had not considered its possible consequences one way or the other. His position was to ignore the criticism entirely. He went on appointing "good Democrats" to office, and found no difficulty in getting men to serve; later he made an extended tour of the Southern States, and was everywhere received with cordiality.
His First Message
President Roosevelt's first message to Congress in December, 1901, was awaited with unusual interest as the first extended statement of his policy. Written while the horror of President McKinley's assassination was still fresh in the public mind, it naturally devoted considerable attention to the suppression of anarchy and the exclusion of anarchists from entering the country.

Turning to the Monroe Doctrine, Roosevelt laid particular emphasis on its application to commercial as distinguished from political relations. "It is really," he wrote, "a guarantee of the commercial independence of the Americas. We do not ask under this doctrine for any exclusive dealings with any other American State. We do not guarantee any state against punishment if it misconducts itself, provided that punishment does not take the form of the acquisition of territory by any non-American power."

Congratulating the country on the "timely and judicious" Gold Standard Act, the President turned his attention to the trust problem, and proclaimed the first step in the policy which, with its later developments, is so closely associated with his name. "In the interest of the public," he declared, "the government should have the right to inspect and examine the workings of the great corporations engaged in interstate business. Publicity is the only sure remedy which we can now evoke."

In that first message President Roosevelt insisted upon the passage of a Cuban reciprocity measure. The House backed him, but the Senate did not; whereupon the President appealed to the people with the plea that the United States was under obligation to keep its pledge to make Cuba a free nation. On May 20, 1902, President Roosevelt turned over to a Cuban President and Cuban Congress a truly republican government for Cuba and the Stars and Stripes were hauled down on the island.

The Great Coal Strike
In the autumn of 1902 a great strike in the anthracite coal regions of Pennsylvania threatened to cripple the country. With characteristic fighting spirit — called "meddling" by his opponents—the President started to untie the tangle into which coal operators and labor had got themselves. But in the matter of the coal strike, President Roosevelt thought long and carefully before he acted. Then with the exclamation, "I suppose this'11 end me, but I'll do it," he appointed an arbitrating commission—and the miners went back to work. The report of the commission, which was not completed until winter, settled, not only this particular strike, but fixed a point of departure for the settlement of labor disputes in the future.

The Venezuelan Affair
It was during the end of the same year, 1902, that Mr. Roosevelt was called upon to act in the role of international peacemaker, when our affairs dangerously shifted to a part of the world, Venezuela, which had almost led us into a European war during the Cleveland administration. A fleet of German and British warships came to anchor off La Guayra in December—first having obtained United States permission to do so—and told President Castro that if certain debts due Germans and Englishmen were not paid, the fleet would seize certain Venezuelan ports and custom-houses and hold them until the amounts in dispute had been obtained.

Castro's answer was immediate preparation for armed defense. The Europeans opened fire, ports were bombarded, and Venezuelans were killed.

Then ensued one of the momentous episodes of America's foreign relations in modern times, one of the bravest and most dramatic moves ever made by an American President on his own responsibility, and certainly President Roosevelt's most forcible act in assertion of the Monroe Doctrine. In his first message to Congress the President had stated clearly his idea of what the Monroe Doctrine meant to the South American States, that the United States would defend these nations against territorial encroachments of European powers, but would not prevent measures merely intended to enforce the payment of just debts.

Used Navy as "the Big Stick"
Quietly, consulting nobody, he used the navy, with complete success, as his Big Stick, over the swollen heads of the Kaiser and the Pan-Germans, eager to make their claims a pretext for a characteristic rape of Venezuelan territory. The episode never was known to the public until a few years ago, when an account of it authorized by Colonel Roosevelt, appeared in "The Life of John Hay," by Prof. William Roscoe Thayer. Here is that account :

'' President Roosevelt did not shirk the test. Although his action has never been described, there is no reason now for not describing it.

"One day, when the crisis was at its height, he summoned to the White House Dr. Holleben, the German Ambassador, and told him that unless Germany consented to arbitrate, the American squadron under Admiral Dewey would be given orders, by noon ten days later, to proceed to the Venezuelan coast and prevent any taking possession of Venezuelan territory.

"Dr. Holleben began to protest that his imperial master, having once refused to arbitrate, could not change his mind. The President said that he was not arguing the question, because arguments had already been gone over until no useful purpose would be served by repeating them; he was simply giving information which the Ambassador might think it important to transmit to Berlin.

"A week passed in silence. Then Dr. Holleben again called on the President, but said nothing of the Venezuelan matter. When he rose to go, the President asked him about it, and when he stated that he had received nothing from his government, the President informed Mm in substance that, in view of this fact, Admiral Dewey would be instructed to sail a day earlier than the day he, the President, had originally mentioned. Kaiser Finally Yields

"Much perturbed, the Ambassador protested. The President informed him that not a stroke of a pen had been put on paper; that if the Emperor would agree to arbitrate, he, the President, would heartily praise him for such action and would treat it as taken on German initiative; but that within forty-eight hours there must be an offer to arbitrate, or Dewey would sail with the orders indicated. Within thirty-six hours Dr. Holleben returned to the White House and announced to President Roosevelt that a dispatch had just come from Berlin saying that the Kaiser would arbitrate.

"Neither Admiral Dewey (who with an American fleet was then maneuvering in the West Indies) nor anyone else knew of the step that was to be taken; the naval authorities were merely required to be in readiness, but were not told what for.

"On the announcement that Germany had consented to arbitrate, the President publicly complimented the Kaiser on being so stanch an advocate of arbitration. The humor of this was probably more relished in the White House than in Berlin. The Kaiser suggested that the President should act as arbitrator, and Mr. Roosevelt was ready to serve, but Mr. Hay (then Secretary of State) dissuaded Mm. Venezuela's claims went to The Hague for arbitration.

"England and Italy, Germany's partners in the naval expedition, gladly complied. England, we presume, had never intended that her half-alliance with Germany should bring her into open rupture with the United States. Although her pact was kept as secretly as possible at home inklings of it leaked out. Whether Lord Salisbury or Mr. Balfour originated it, the friends of neither have cared to extol it, or indeed to let its details be generally known."

It was seven years and five months later that Colonel Roosevelt, duly visiting Berlin in the course of his triumphal tour of Europe at the end of the African hunt, and reviewing German troops at maneuvers in the Kaiser's company, was fulsomely addressed by the monarch he had thwarted: "My friend Roosevelt, I am glad to welcome you, the most distinguished American. You are the first civilian who has ever reviewed German soldiers!"

In 1903 the old Alaska boundary dispute between Great Britain and the United States began to erupt again. At Mr. Roosevelt's suggestion, the matter was settled once and for all by a joint commission that met in London—the commission deciding in favor of the American contentions.

The President's action in securing a reference of the Venezuelan difficulties to The Hague tribunal, it has been well said, saved the life of that court. In the fall of 1904 he took the first step toward the convening of a second peace conference of the nations.
Antagonizes Senator Tillman
In 1902 President Roosevelt made an enemy of Senator Tillman in a characteristic way. Prince Henry of Prussia was the nation's guest, and when he was in Washington an official dinner was given in his honor at the White House. As the Prince was an Admiral, the members of the Naval Affairs Committee were invited.

Just then Senator McLaurin called Tillman a liar in the Senate, and Tillman responded with a full-arm swing on McLaurin's jaw. President Roosevelt expressed his opinion of the proceedings by publicly rescinding his invitation to Tillman. Tillman never forgave him, and when five years later a woman named Mrs. Minor Harris was forcibly removed from the White House, when she was trying to get an interview with the President, Tillman took up the case in the Senate and made an issue of it. Mr. Roosevelt retaliated later by making charges against Tillman's personal probity, but they were not sustained.
A Doctrine That Failed
Mr. Roosevelt met one of the first real defeats of his life when the Federal Courts refused to accede to a new and extraordinary doctrine he attempted to set up— that an editor anywhere in the country might be criminally proceeded against in the District of Columbia for a libel against the United States Government, provided that it could be shown that copies of his newspaper were circulated in that District. It was really one of the most audacious attempts that Mr. Roosevelt ever made, but he believed he was right in his contention.

He never did agree very well with the courts and in private conversation he often complained humorously that whenever he appointed a judge to the bench that judge immediately began rendering decisions adverse to his policies. One such case was said to be that of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, of the United States Supreme Court.

"Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead"
As Mr. Roosevelt's "first term" drew to a close the eyes of the administration were suddenly turned upon Morocco. An American, Ion Perdicaris, and his English son-in-law were kidnapped from their home near Tangier by the notorious Moorish bandit, Raisuli, on May 18, 1904. Raisuli demanded a ransom and other favors from the Sultan of Morocco before he would release his prisoners. Nine days later, on orders from President Roosevelt, the United States cruiser Brooklyn with Rear Admiral Chadwick's flag flying was headed toward Tangier, Rear Admiral Jewell following with three more warships. British warships joined the fleet in African waters.

"Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!" Mr. Roosevelt [was quoted as saying, and whether he said it or not, the slogan blazed around the world. And a month later the American and the Englishman had been released, although Raisuli in the meantime had obtained from the Sultan almost all that the bandit had demanded.

Long before the meeting of the Republican National Convention, at Chicago, on June 24, 1904, it was certain that if he lived, President Roosevelt would be renomi-nated to succeed himself. He had never made any secret of his desire for an active election to the office to which he had succeeded on President McKinley's death.

Roosevelt in 1904
The personality of Theodore Roosevelt had made a wonderful impression upon the country by the end of his partial term in the White House. Frank A. Munsey described it in Munsey's Magazine for November, 1904, writing from intimate knowledge, as follows:

Train a pine sapling till you grow old and gray, and you will never make of it a hickory tree. It will not have the fiber, the character, the strength. It will be a pine stick all its days, and nothing more. And so with human life. Training and association can polish the brain and groom the body, and stimulate ambition and energy to their limits, but it cannot create new limits or fashion a new brain or a new body.

Character has a deeper foundation than that of training and association. It comes somewhere out of the dim and unknown past. The man who stands head and shoulders above his fellow men is bigger because he was born bigger. The size of a man is God's work. It was never anything else, and never will be anything else so long as the world stands. No man has ever done great things who wasn't created great in the fineness of his brain, the intensity of his nature, the clearness of his perception and the force of his application.

But why should genius favor one man more than another? It may be because his ancestors, perhaps a thousand years before his advent, suffered more, endured more, fought a better fight than others of their time. It may be this or that or something else. It's all a great, impenetrable mystery. If not, account for Lincoln, if you can—Lincoln and Jackson and Webster and Grant and Napoleon.

From a countless army of ancestors, known and unknown; from the sailor, the soldier, the herdsman, the farmer, the mechanic, the lawyer, the doctor, the man of letters, the aristocrat ; from women folk of all these classes and degrees; through toil and industry, poverty and affluence; through joy and sorrow, tenderness and affection, devotion to family, country and religion —from all these and through all these sprang the Roosevelt of today.

Roosevelt hasn't all the virtues. He has his faults. He is intensely human. He isn't immune from error of judgment. He makes mistakes. If he didn't he wouldn't be human and wouldn't be good for anything. He makes mistakes, but he likewise makes successes. In determining a man's mental stature, the question is not 'Does he make mistakes?' but, rather, 'Does he make more successes than mistakes?'
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HE SUCCEEDS McKINLEY
The Gatling gun doesn’t 't strike home its individual shots with the accuracy of the carefully, deliberately aimed rifle, but in battle, nevertheless, it does the deadly work. It brings results.

Of all Roosevelt's characteristics that one which is most marked and which has contributed most to his achievements is his intensity.

Without this quality no man, however brilliantly endowed in other respects, ever accomplishes much. With Roosevelt intensity is his power, his strenuosity, his life. It is a passion with him —the very soul of his genius.

Roosevelt, however, is not merely a man of intensity and action, but is a scholar as well. His books show thought and sound analysis. His style in writing, as in speaking, is forceful and convincing. His oratory, like himself, is rugged and intense.

He is a close student of men and affairs and of political history both at home and abroad. He is keen to discover merit in others, and is equally keen to retain and encourage it whether it be of his own political faith or that opposed to him, and for dishonesty and incompetence he has no place in the great business over which he presides.

Roosevelt's bravery is double barreled. It is both moral and physical. This is assuredly a rare combination—rare indeed when so highly developed.

We have many men whose courage in physical combat, in the hell of battle, is so fine, so grand, so supreme, that we can only feel our admiration with a thrill that sweeps us from head to foot. But apply to these same fearless men the test of moral bravery and our hearts will sink for pity of them. On the other hand, some men with the frailest of bodies and the most timid natures are giants—great, grand, heroic figures in the fiercer warfare of moral courage.

The combination, I repeat, is most rare, but in Roosevelt we have both. He can lead an army in the teeth of battle and never flinch, and with equal courage he can say, and say with terrible emphasis, 'Yes,' or 'No' He dares to do right as he understands the right, and he dares to defy wrong as he sees the wrong.