CHAPTER 21 Hermann Hagedorn’s: The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt.

'SO HE PASSED OVER AND ALL THE TRUMPETS SOUNDED"

ALMOST imperceptibly, Theodore Roosevelt had  / A risen for a second time to leadership in the nation.  The steps of his unconscious progress had scarcely been noted.  In 1914 men had said that he was definitely "done for" politically; his enemies had exultantly proclaimed his final downfall; even his friends had despaired of his return to his lost eminence.  But the American people, walking in strange paths amid storms and phantasms and perilous, seductive voices, were hungering for a clean, clear trumpet-call.  Roosevelt gave it.  For four years, regardless of political expediency, regardless of counselors imploring him to sacrifice truth to a sentimental phrase, regardless of all things but facts and the right behind the facts, he thundered through the land like a prophet in Israel; and millions from coast to coast thanked God for Theodore Roosevelt and, in troubled days, said what they had said ten years before: "It's all right.  Roosevelt is on guard!" He was never more deeply loved and never more bitterly hated.  The traitors and his old enemies, the "timid good," assailed him and ridiculed him and misrepresented his motives.  He fought with the splendid fury of the archbishop at Roncesvalles.  His sons had, long ago, nicknamed him "the Lion," and like a lion he fought and made his voice heard above the pipings of lesser men.  Without reservation, he flung himself into the battle, denouncing what seemed to him the unforgivable delays and evasions of the men responsible for the conduct of the war.  He struck without mercy; he gave no quarter.  Even his friends shuddered at times at the terrible nakedness of the truths he uttered, being more mindful of his future than he was himself.  He denounced what appeared to him as the collusion of high public officials with the traitorous elements of the yellow press in a powerful indictment that struck and quivered like a bare blade; he seized on complacent self-justifications and held them up to public scorn in words torn out of Scripture and fired with new splendor. 

Between himself and his opponents in power he knew no middle ground of compromise and party truce.  The issues that divided him from them were to his mind fundamental and to be evaded only at the sacrifice of those eternal verities which, in a career devoted to a "practical idealism," involving endless personal concessions, he had consistently re-fused to sacrifice.  To him the issues were not po-litical, but moral.  He fought the controlling forces of the administration not because they differed from him on certain political principles, but because, rightly or wrongly, he was convinced that they were governed not by any principles, either political or moral, but solely by the injunctions of day-by-day expediency. 

Roosevelt's personal life and public career had always equally been determined from day to day by certain clear and unalterable principles acting on the clearly discerned and unalterable facts of experience.  Rightly or wrongly, he was convinced that the course of the administration was determined by theories yielding not to facts, but only to political convenience.  To him, therefore, the battle was a battle to the death. 

On frequent speaking-tours and through the pages of the Metropolitan Magazine and the Kansas City Star, he adjured the American people to beware of seductive sentimentalities and to face facts.  The impression he made was profound, how profound, in the general reluctance, under the strain of war and of laws inhibitive of public criticism to reveal in words the restless stirrings of the spirit, only later events indicated. 

His sudden and dangerous illness early in 1918 revealed at the same time both his own complete absorption in the battle he was waging and the dependence of a great part of the people on his vigor-ous leadership. 

The Brazilian fever had seized him once more, complicated by a fistula and abscesses in his middle ears, and one dusk in the beginning of February, he lay on a couch at the Hotel Langdon, where he generally stayed when he spent the night in New York, dictating to his secretary.  His face was very gray. 
"You are tired, Colonel Roosevelt," his secretary said.  '' Suppose we leave the rest of these letters until to-morrow morning?"

"No, we'll finish up to-night," he said, biting off the words.  "When I was President I cleaned decks every day and I'm going to clean decks now. "

He finished dictating.  A minute later he fainted away with pain, rolling from the couch to the floor.  The couch was drenched with blood. 

A friend found him next morning lying across his bed, evidently in agony.  He believed that the end was not far off. 

"I don't mind pain," he said, slowly and with difficulty, "when I'm only paying for something that I've had.  I don't mind having to die.  I've had my good time.  I've had my full life. " The eyes in the pallid face flashed suddenly.  "But to think that those creatures will say that I'm out of the game!"

He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital for an operation on his ears.  The surgeon in charge was frank.  Only four similar operations had come under his personal observation; in every case the patient had died. 

"There are certain things I should like to live for," Roosevelt answered, quietly.  "I should like to live to see my sons come back from France.  But if it can't be, all right, doctor.  I don't give a hang!"

It seemed that the whole nation stood breathless as it waited to hear whether Theodore Roosevelt was to live or to die.  A rumor of his death flew through the city.  Everywhere men gathered in groups and asked each other for the latest news about "T.  R. " A morning paper sent this challenge to the man fighting with the assailing shadows:

Theodore Roosevelt, listen! You must be up and well-again.  We cannot have it otherwise.  We could not, run this world without you. 

He fought, and he won.  A week later he was working in bed, dictating the key-note address he was to deliver in April at a Republican Convention in Maine. 

He returned to the battle, declaring he felt "bully," and went West on a speech-making tour in which his hours on the public platform proved practically the only hours he did not spend in his state-room on the trains, fighting fever.  An infection in his left leg gave him much pain.  He admitted that perhaps it might be wise to restrict his public appearances. 

Apprehension for the safety of his sons was always the background of his thoughts, though when he spoke of them it was the pride and never the fear that found expression.  Archibald was wounded; Theodore was gassed and later wounded; Quentin fell fighting in the air, high over the German lines.  But a friend who approached him with words of condolence was met by him with an exclamation that was almost exultant: "Haven't I bully boys? One dead and two in the hospital!"

    About him rang the tumult of battle, the taunts and recriminations, the ridicule and the cheers.  He went his way, struggling to make the full force of America felt on the battle-lines in France. 

Republican politicians, preparing in the summer of 1918 for the presidential campaign of 1920, turned, with an accord which in 1914 would have seemed to them the ultimate impossibility, but which the facts of the situation now made inevitable, again to Theodore Roosevelt.  In the New York State Republican Convention at Saratoga the men who had fought him most bitterly appealed to him once more for leadership, realizing that in the great schism of 1912 he, and not they, had been right, and calling him the "savior of the party," the "savior of the country. " They begged him to accept the nomination for Governor.  He refused.  His whole heart was in the war, he said, and he would not attempt to serve two masters. 

Early in the autumn the Republican leader of one of the Atlantic states and a former Progressive leader of one of the Pacific states were seated with Roosevelt after dinner in the study at Sagamore Hill. 

"Are you going to run for President in 1920?" asked the man from the East. 

Roosevelt, looking odd a,nd unlike himself in his stiff white shirt-front and dinner-coat, with his right leg crossed over his left, answered promptly and without evasion:

"Yes, I will run if the people want me, but only if they want me.  I will not lift a finger for the nomination.  I will not make a contest for it.  It will have to come to me. It would be worthless on any other basis."

"Colonel, it will be yours, without strings, and on your own terms."

The statement, on the surface, was rashly confident, but it was not without justification. Roosevelt had throughout the war been the one outstanding figure in the Republican party, and now, at its close, was its acknowledged, undisputed leader. When, less than two weeks before the Congressional elections in November, the President issued an appeal for a Democratic Congress, it was inevitable that Roosevelt should be the one to answer him. In what proved one of the most powerful speeches of his career, Roosevelt drove the answer home. He struck, without mercy, blow on blow. His logic was clear, stern, and altogether relentless; before it the eloquent persuasiveness of the President's appeal dissolved like fog before a hot sun. He spoke four days after the event as the average man might dare to speak after the winds and rains of a hundred years had sifted and settled the issues. He knew he was right, and he spoke with the unqualified assurance which that knowledge gave him. His opponents cried out at his "hysteria," his "violence"; but the American people rallied behind him. In the elections the Democrats were disastrously defeated. The Republicans returned to power in Congress with the man they had rejected and who had rejected them as their unrivaled leader.

Roosevelt's health was, meanwhile, bothering him again. The abscess in his leg would not heal satisfactorily, and an attack of sciatica caused him much pain.  He was forced to return to the hospital, and as week followed week and seemed to bring no healing, his friends became uneasy.  The sciatica developed into inflammatory rheumatism.  The prospect was set before him as not out of the range of possibilities that, like his gallant sister, Mrs.  Cowles, he might be condemned to spend the rest of his life in a chair. 

"All right!" he answered, after a pause.  "I can live that way, too!"

But that fear seemed to prove without foundation.  He improved slowly and on Christmas Day left the hospital to spend the holidays with his family.  Christmas Day had always been a joy and a romp at Sagamore, but the death of Quentin had laid a shadow over all thoughts of festivities, and for the first time in years Roosevelt himself was not the presiding genius of the celebrations in the church at the Cove. 

His illness scarcely abated the boiling activity of his days.  His correspondence was more voluminous than at any time since the Progressive campaign, and his articles in the Metropolitan and the Kansas City Star, which were his periodic messages to the American people, suffered in neither volume nor force by the fact that they were written on a bed of pain.  The physicians, meanwhile, were encouraging, in spite of one or two sharp attacks which he had suffered in the hospital; and Roosevelt, restless for adventure after two years of ceaseless work, laid plans for an expedition early in March after devil-fish in the Gulf of Mexico with his "pirate-friend," Russell Coles. 

The old year went out and the new year came in.  For him, a prisoner in bed or in his chair, there was no cessation of activity.  He read, he wrote, he dictated endless letters; for the Kansas City Star he dictated an article pleading for realism in the conception of a league of nations; for the Metropolitan he dictated another article, calling on the new Republican Congress to keep "Eyes to the front!"

The first week of the year ended in a Sunday that was the happiest that Sagamore Hill had known since, one after the other, four sons had set sail for France.  For once there were no guests; none of the children even were home, and Roosevelt spent the day alone with their mother, reading aloud alternately with her.  In the afternoon he wrote a long letter to Kermit, in France, corrected the proofs of his Metropolitan article, browsed among books.  Altogether, it was one of those rare, happy days that fall at long intervals suddenly like the quiet of heaven into the noise and confusion of life. 

He had promised months before to speak that night at a patriotic meeting at the Hippodrome, but his illness had made public speaking for the moment impossible and he had sent a letter instead.  At nine o'clock that evening it was the fifth of January his message was read:

There must be no sagging back in the fight for Americanism merely because the war is over.  Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all.  We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile.  We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people. 

Roosevelt, reading aloud in the study at Sagamore, did not hear the cheers that echoed through the great hall.  He was not feeling altogether fit.  As he was about to retire, at eleven, he had difficulty breathing.  The trained nurse sent for the physician.  He came, and gave Roosevelt a treatment.  Roosevelt was curious about his physical state and discussed it with the physician.  He was not at all worried about himself; objectively, the thing interested him and he wanted to know all about it.  The physician thought "the Colonel" looked sturdier and ruddier than he had looked for many months.  At midnight Roosevelt went to bed. 

His mind had been occupied with the political situation in Washington and with the brilliant young chairman of the Republican National Committee who was one of the most potent factors in it; and he picked up a scratch-pad and pencil that lay on a table beside his bed. 
Hays [he wrote].  See him; he must go to Washington for ten days; see Senate and House; prevent split on domestic policies. 
Then he called to his valet, a negro servant who had been with him since the White House days:
"Please put out that light, James. "

James put out the light. 

Roosevelt went to sleep.  At two in the morning Mrs.  Roosevelt looked in on him.  He was sleeping quietly.  At four, James, watching at the foot of the bed, said to himself that there was something strange about "the Colonel's" breathing.  It had a hollow sound. 

He became alarmed and summoned the nurse. 

When she reached the bedside the breathing had stopped. 
So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side. 
Five hours later the headlines on the streets of New York carried the woeful tidings; but all the headlines and the pages of fine print that followed them said less than the message which a son, invalided home, sent to his brothers in France:

"The Lion is dead. "

A cheerless sky and chilly air and a downfall of mingled snow and rain gave way before a sun that was like early April.  A few hundred friends strode in whispering groups from the station through the awed streets of Oyster Bay to the church.  Otto Raphael, of the police-commissioner days, kept the door; Edward Bourke headed the squad of mounted police that was the only official guard.  "Joe" Murray, of the "Old Twenty-first," was there, and Leonard Wood, and Lodge, most loyal of friends and counselors, and Taft whom he had made President, and Root who had fought at his side, and fought against him and had lived to fight at his side once more in his last and mightiest battle. 

There was no organ music; there was no singing.  There was only a quiet, unemotional reading of the funeral service as the coffin was borne in under the flag and borne out again.  Over the snow of the steep slope to the grave the bearers carried their flag-draped burden.  The level rays of the sun blazed through the files of the wood across the hill. 

And so it was that the scarred body of a hero was laid to rest. 

But the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt did not sleep.  It stalked mightily through the hearts of his countrymen, raising dead souls to life. 

The end of volume one of Hermann Hagedorn’s: The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt. 
A concluding word from Robert J. Kuniegel

TR AMERICAN PATRIOT hopes you enjoy our books.  Theodore Roosevelt lived his life in a manner that is the only way possible to make government responsive to the people.  He has written how to make meaningful reform possible not only for his generation but for future generations, if we read what he has said.  We only need to interest others in reading what he has said to transform our government. 

Reading the books on TR AMERICAN PATRIOT DOT COM  and having others do the same, will develop citizens and leaders capable of transforming American politics into a system of government that will be honest, and responsive to “a square deal”.  A square deal has no special deals for the rich, the middle class, or the poor.  Our government today has degenerated into a system that rewards citizens for not being productive.  It promotes entitlements under the guise of helping people, when in fact it only helps politicians to protect their own royal positions.  Policies that foster a special privileged class was the type of government policies Theodore Roosevelt fought against and won.  He was a visionary.  He knew this fight would need to be fought through the ages if we were to keep our country strong.  He was an intrepid pioneer that blazed a trail through a jungle of corrupt government, so that others might follow his proven and highly successful common sense approach toward honest government.  His fearless course helped make America a beacon of hope to all that seek justice.  His endless devotion to America helped make America a super power that no just nation has needed to fear as long as our citizens value his lofty resolute square deal policy toward our fellow citizens and those of other nations. 

Theodore Roosevelt’s greatest gift to this country is before us.  It is not in the past, if we as Americans recognize that his message is not just a story from American history pages.  His message is an example, clearly defined.  It details actions that are required if we desire to do something meaningful for our country.  Join the good fight today.  You only need to read and interest others to do the same.  

David Boyd, repeating what he had read, once said, “The person we become is because of our experiences in life, the people we meet, and the books we read. ” It is time to have others meet Theodore Roosevelt.  It is time for a Theodore Roosevelt revival, “Fear God and do your own part”.  Dare to help make Theodore Roosevelt the standard and not the exception.  America needs to adopt a wise, fearless and honest role model as the standard we revere, so that our public servants know what we expect.  The first step to honest government is no harder than setting proper standards of conduct for our public servants through the use of a proper role model.  Can you find one quality in Theodore Roosevelt that is not right in a public servant?  If you think you can, I bet your conjecture is based upon something other than truth and honest reasoning and this American would love an opportunity to debate any such conjecture.