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LIFE AND WORK OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT MEMORIAL

 CHAPTER FIFTEEN 

THE PRIVATE CITIZEN

Trip to South America—Lectures in Principal Cities Followed by Exploration of the Brazilian Jungle—• The "River of Doubt"—Visits to England and Spain —The Barnes Libel Suit—Outbreak of the Great War—The Campaign of 1916—He Declines Another Nomination.
Those who expected Theodore Roosevelt to be downcast over the result of the election of 1912 little knew the man. He believed that he had been in the right, that his candidacy had been fully justified, and he accepted the result with perfect equanimity. He was always a good loser, and resumed his literary labors as a private citizen without undue regrets.

In the summer of 1913, Colonel Roosevelt was invited to go to Argentina and deliver lectures on economic problems. He accepted the invitation, and then decided that, while he was about it, he would seize the opportunity to go into the interior of South America for exploration and hunting. He sailed on October 4,1913.

After filling his lecture engagements he plunged into the unknown primeval forests of Brazil, hunting, exploring, scientifically probing, enduring dreadful hardships, and coming several times within an ace of losing his life.

He nearly starved to death. He contracted a fever which possibly undermined his constitution. Some doctors have said so. But he gained the glory of putting a new river upon the map, the Kio da Duvia, "The River of Doubt." The Government of Brazil officially, after investigation had proved the explorer's claims, recognized the achievement, and further to honor a man greatly respected in Pan-American countries, renamed the river "Rio Teodoro."

During the South American trip the former President was given ovations in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and other cities where he made addresses.

Returning to the United States late in May, 1914, he sailed almost immediately for England and paid a visit to Spain. From this trip he returned late in June, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Great War.

Colonel Roosevelt was a sick man when he returned .to New York from South America. Fever was burning him and sores acquired in the jungle marked his body. It was a fairly long time, for him, before he could resume his usual aggressive activities.

The Barnes Libel Suit
In April of 1915, however, when William Barnes of Albany, then the so-called boss of the Republican party of the State, essayed to destroy Colonel Roosevelt's prestige by a libel suit, alleging that the Colonel had called him a corrupt boss, he was fit and ready for one of the greatest fights in his career, for fight it was, though staged in the dignified precincts of the Supreme Court of the State.

It stands, and will stand, as one of the great cases at law concerning libel. Colonel Roosevelt's chief counsel was the late John R. Bowers, no courtroom orator, but one of the shrewdest planners within the strategy of the law that ever bowed before the bench.

Mr. Barnes' chief counsel was the late William M. Ivins, a true orator, though scarcely less skillful than Mr. Bowers at legal strategy. But Mr. Ivins was hopelessly handicapped in that he had no Colonel Roosevelt for a chief witness.

From the moment the trial began until it ended with a complete victory for him and a virtual ruling by the jury (since that was the issue presented) in favor of Colonel Roosevelt's opinion of Mr. Barnes, the Colonel dominated the courtroom. He dominated it and electrified it.

His intensely magnetic and interest-compelling qualities were so strongly provoked during the six days and a half that he was under cross-examination by Mr. Ivins that even the judge on the bench found himself laughing aloud or half applauding.

At times the courtroom broke into a storm of cheering when Colonel Roosevelt was able to refute by his own extraordinary memory or out of an immensely competent filing-case of letters and documents (he seemed to have preserved everything in the way of correspondence received and copies of correspondence sent), statements made against his honor, his sincerity, his good faith, and his devotion to democracy.

On the witness stand he poured out of his active brain, words that filled a dozen columns of every big newspaper in the country for days on end. At the conclusion of the trial, the jury stood first 11 to 1 for Roosevelt, the one being Edward Burns, a Democrat. When the jury was sent back to ponder, the one came around and the verdict was solidly for Roosevelt.
Meeting With Chancellor Day
"It is too bad," says a chronicler of the period, "that no dictaphone was installed one night during the Barnes libel trial session, when Colonel Roosevelt was a guest at the home of Chancellor Day of Syracuse University, with whom in earlier years he had had more than one controversy, Dr. Day being the stanch friend and defender of the late John D. Archbold, whom the Colonel had once had occasion to put in the Ananias Club.

'' Their meeting was a little formal for three minutes, at the end of which the Colonel found out that the Chancellor too had once lived in the still wild West. From then till past midnight they sat close together, roaring and chuckling and slapping one another on the knee as they matched good frontier stories. The rest of the company listened in a kind of awed delight.'' The Colonel and a Boy

During that same visit of the Colonel to Syracuse he kept up his horseback exercise, riding about the residence streets on a mount which a local admirer had loaned. One afternoon a prominent Syracusan looked up from his newspaper on the front porch and called to his wife upstairs: 

"There goes Theodore Roosevelt on horseback."

At the moment the six-year-old son of the house was in the bathtub and in nothing else. He heard his father, rushed scampering and pattering downstairs, out the front door, and right down the walk to the middle of the street, hoping for a glimpse of his great idol. That night at a reception the father told the Colonel of it.

"By George—by George!"—and the chuckle. "You bring that boy to me—I want to see him!" He was brought, duly clad, and was mounted for half an hour on the Roosevelt knee, and told stories about Injuns and lions and giraffes and grizzlies and "my grandchildren"; when taken home, in a trance state, and measured, was found, it is solemnly asserted, to have grown an inch!
The Campaign of 1916
As the Republican National Convention of 1916 approached, it was obvious that Colonel Roosevelt desired the nomination for the Presidency, not only from his own newly created party, the Progressives, but if he could get it, from the old-line Republican organization. There is no doubt also, that throughout the country there was a strong popular sentiment for the Colonel. People were weary of partisan strife. They would no doubt have supported Colonel Roosevelt in far larger numbers than his opponents estimated.

But the sentiment of the regular Republican leaders was unalterably opposed to his selection. They could not forget 1912. They went to Chicago with delegations described as "handpicked," delegations that nothing could sway or stampede from a coldly resolved upon course. At the same time the Progressive party met in Chicago with one candidate—Roosevelt, though it delayed naming him until it could see what the Republicans would do. They were eventful, thrilling days, though the outcome was another disappointment for the man from Oyster Bay.

The Republicans named Charles E. Hughes, taking him from the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, after it had declined to listen to Colonel Roosevelt’s suggestion to nominate either Senator Henry Cabot Lodge or General Leonard Wood. At Colonel Roosevelt's own insistence, which virtually dissolved the Progressive party then and there, his name was eliminated by them and they named a candidate for Vice-President only.

The result, of course, is well-known recent history. Mr. "Wilson again being successful, though by the narrowest margin and largely on the score of Ms persistent promise to keep the country out of the European war that had been raging for two years.

Opposed by Pacifists
Perhaps a certain knowledge of how Colonel Roosevelt would conduct himself and his country, were he to be elected, arrayed against him all of the pacifists, the timid, the non-understanding, that feared the mere mention of American participation. Except for a few weeks at the outset of the great conflict, when he held himself in check because of the President's pronouncement for perfect neutrality, he was never at a loss as to the real meaning of the conflict, as to the brutal ambition of the Central Powers, as to the peril not only to Europe but to America herself if the Germans should win.

He arose in all of the energy and might of his intellect and called upon America to awake to a realization of her peril. He burned with anger at the injustice of the invasion of Belgium, at the enormities practiced there and in France or wherever the German foot trod. He spoke in blasting anger against the U-boat warfare that destroyed American ships and lives as nonchalantly as it destroyed the ships and the lives of the then belligerent Powers. He had no patience with President Wilson's slow-going, tolerant attitude toward the war.

In May, 1915, Colonel Roosevelt was thrown from his horse while riding near his Oyster Bay home and suffered a broken rib; and he disclosed late in 1917, as already stated, that while boxing in the White House in 1905 he received a blow which had destroyed the sight of one of his eyes.

During the trouble on the Mexican border in 1915 Colonel Roosevelt was a critic of President Wilson's Mex-Lean policy, and from the beginning of the European War in 1914 he urged that this country join the conflict on the side of the Allies. When, in April, 1917, the United States did declare war on Germany, Colonel Roosevelt offered himself and a division of troops to be recruited from 285,000 volunteers for active service in France. This offer was refused by the War Department, and Colonel Roosevelt did not engage personally in war work, except in a civilian capacity, although his four sons, Theodore, Jr., Kermit, Archibald, and Quentin, and Dr. Richard Derby, the husband of his daughter Ethel, all volunteered for active service and were assigned to duty in Europe.

In the New York gubernatorial campaign of 1918 Colonel Roosevelt followed a neutral course and backed the organization candidate for Governor.
Leader of Public Opinion
Recurrent illnesses vexed him in the last years of his life, all signifying the breaking down of a wonderful constitution and of a body that had lived—what shall one say?—a century, no doubt, of the life of ordinary men. But to the day of his death he remained the leader of a tremendous section of the American people—of all, indeed, who maintained hard-headed views about the proper terms of peace as they maintained hard-headed views about the way the war should be waged, and as to when America should have entered the conflict.

Upon this tremendous mass of public opinion Theodore Roosevelt never lost his grip. He was the leader, and so he remained till the breath was out of his body. His courage of mind and heart was never better displayed than when men who had been his own friends rebuked him for assailing the President's courses, which to Colonel Roosevelt seemed to lack the force, decision, and vision necessary in the leader of the whole people. Though the criticism touched him, he never flinched from what he considered his duty to America. When he hit, he hit very hard, and Theodore Roosevelt the private citizen wielded an influence greater than that of any other individual in American history.

Views on Various Topics
Following are some quotations from addresses by Colonel Roosevelt, which show his versatility and his views on many subjects:

From Sorbonne, Paris, lecture, April 23, 1910:

"The greatest of all curses is the curse of sterility and the severest of all condemnations should be visited upon the willful sterile. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and the woman shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease.

"It is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly, who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop in a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world."
From address at Detroit, Mich., May 18,1916:

"The pacifists of today, the peace-at-any-price men, are the spiritual and moral heirs of the men who denounced and opposed Washington; of the men who denounced and voted against Abraham Lincoln.

"The working man, like the farmer and the business man, must be a patriot first or he is unfit to live in America; and the first duty of all patriots is to see that we are able to prevent alien conquerors from dictating our home policies.

"I believe in a thoroughly efficient navy, the second in size in the world.

"No nation will ever attack a unified and prepared America."
From a statement as President on November 8,1904: "I am deeply sensible of the honor done me by the American people in thus expressing their confidence in what I have done and have tried to do. I appreciate to the full the solemn responsibility this confidence imposes upon me, and I shall do all that in my power lies not to forfeit it"
From speech delivered at Auditorium, Chicago, September 3, 1903:

"There is a homely old adage which runs: 'Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.' If the American nation will speak softly, and yet build and keep at a pitch of the highest training a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe doctrine will go far."
From address at Logansport, Ind., September 24, 1902:

"It is the merest truism to say that in the modern world industrialism is the great factor in the growth of nations. Material prosperity is the foundation upon which a very mighty national structure must be built. Of course there must be more than this. There must be a highly moral purpose, a life of the spirit which finds its expression in many different ways; but unless material prosperity exists also there is scant room in which to develop the higher life."
From lecture on "The World Movement" at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910:

"It is no impossible dream to build up a civilization ^ in which morality, ethical development, and a true feeling of brotherhood shall all alike be divorced from false sentimentality, and from the rancorous and evil passions which, curiously enough, so often accompany professions of sentimental attachment to the rights of man."

"This world movement of civilization which is now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe, should bind the nations of the world together while yet leaving unimpaired that love of country in the individual citizen which in the present stage of the world's progress is essential to the world's well being."

"Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it; and woe thrice to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should arise."
Theodore  Roosevelt was a great maker of epigrams. The short and pithy phrases of his coinage now are part of the language of the country. It will be long before anyone who sees or hears the words "Bully!" and "Dee-lighted!" or the phrase, "the strenuous life," will not think at once of Colonel Roosevelt.

Some of the striking expressions of Colonel Roosevelt's making, or of such pointed use by him that, although he did not originate them, they always will be associated with him instead of the author, follow:

"Speak softly, but carry a Big Stick." This was his early definition of his political creed. And for years thereafter no cartoon of the Colonel was considered complete unless it contained the artist's conception of the Big Stick.

"My hat is in the ring," was the way he announced he was a candidate for President.

"My spear knows no brother," was a quotation that he used so effectively that it generally is associated with him.

"Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead," was the Roosevelt answer when the Moorish bandit Raisuli captured and held for ransom Perdicaris, an American citizen.

"I have teeth and I can use them." So said Roosevelt when he was arguing with General Miles over the case of Rear Admiral Schley.

"The short and ugly word," became a popular phrase throughout the country just as soon as Roosevelt used it in his verbal brush with the late E. H. Harriman.

"Malefactors of great wealth," was a phrase made famous by Roosevelt
"Damn the law! Build the canal!" That is what Roosevelt is reported to have said when his advisors started to tell him the legal obstacles in the way of linking the Atlantic and the Pacific at Panama.

"I am for the square deal," was one of the expressions in an early speech that gave the country a popular catchword.

"The police board does not make nor repeal laws. It enforces them." So said Roosevelt when he was Police Commissioner of New York City. And those were widely quoted words at the time.
  
^“rWe stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord." When Roosevelt used that phrase to describe the political fight he and his followers made in the so-called Bull Moose campaign there was great business of looking up Armageddon, which was found in the Bible.

"I feel like a Bull Moose," was an expression that gave that name to the Progressive wing of the Republican party.

"Better faithful than famous," was the aphorism he evolved for himself when he entered politics.

"I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate," was another widely quoted sentence.

"Never strike soft. If you must hit a man, put him to sleep." That was a sentiment frequently expressed by Roosevelt in his latter-day speeches.

"// you ever print anything without my permission, I shall deny it," he said when newly inaugurated as Governor to newspaper reporters. And they remembered it.

"Weasel words," was the phrase he applied to words of President Wilson.

"Mollycoddles!" "Ananias!" "Traitor!" "Pussy-footer!" "Cravens and Weaklings!" "Muckrakers!"were among the superlatives that Colonel Roosevelt put with verbs and names in public attacks on those with whom he was displeased.

"I do not number party loyalty among my commandments." This was one of his most famous expressions, made when he declared war on political bosses.

"Someone asked me why I did not get an agreement with Colombia," he said on another occasion. "They might just as well ask me why I do not nail cranberry jelly to the wall."