The last time I met Theodore Roosevelt was but a little while before
his death. A small party of us, Editor Moore, of Pittsburgh, and Mr.
Riggs, of the New York Central, at his invitation had a jolly midday
breakfast, extending far into the afternoon. I never knew him happier
or heartier. His jocund spirit rarely failed him. He enjoyed life and
wasted no time on trivial worries, hit-or-miss, the keynote to his
thought.
The Dutch blood of Holland and the cavalier blood of England mingled in
his veins in fair proportion. He was especially proud of the uncle, his
mother’s brother, the Southern admiral, head of the Confederate naval
organization in Europe, who had fitted out the rebel cruisers and sent
them to sea. And well he might be, for a nobler American never lived.
At the close of the War of Sections Admiral Bullock had in his
possession some half million dollars of Confederate money. Instead of
appropriating this to his own use, as without remark or hindrance he
might have done, he turned it over to the Government of the United
States, and died a poor man.
The inconsistencies and quarrels in which Theodore Roosevelt was now
and again involved were largely temperamental. His mind was of that
order which is prone to believe what it wants to believe. He did not
take much time to think. He leaped at conclusions, and from his premise
his conclusion was usually sound. His tastes were domestic, his
pastime, when not at his books, field sports.
He was not what might be called convivial, though fond of good
company—very little wine affecting him—so that a certain self-control
became second nature to him.
To be sure, he had no conscientious or doctrinal scruples about a third
term. He had found the White House a congenial abode, had accepted the
literal theory that his election in 1908 would not imply a third but a
second term, and he wanted to remain. In point of fact I have an
impression that, barring Jackson and Polk, most of those who have got
there were loath to give it up. We know that Grant was, and I am sure
that Cleveland was. We owe a great debt to Washington, because if a
third why not a fourth term? And then life tenure after the manner of
the Caesars and Cromwells of history, and especially the
Latin-Americans—Bolivar, Rosas and Diaz?
Away back in 1873, after a dinner, Mr. Blaine took me into his den and
told me that it was no longer a surmise but a fact that the group about
General Grant, who had just been reflected by an overwhelming majority,
was maneuvering for a third term. To me this was startling, incredible.
Returning to my hotel I saw a light still burning in the room of
Senator Morton, of Indiana, and rapping at the door I was bidden to
enter. Without mentioning how it had reached me, I put the proposition
to him. “Certainly,” he said, “it is true.”
The next day, in a letter to the Courier-Journal, I reduced what I had
heard to writing. Reading this over it seemed so sensational that I
added a closing paragraph, meant to qualify what I had written and to
imply that I had not gone quite daft.
“These things,” I wrote, “may sound queer to the ear of the country.
They may have visited me in my dreams; they may, indeed, have come to
me betwixt the sherry and the champagne, but nevertheless I do aver
that they are buzzing about here in the minds of many very serious and
not unimportant persons.”
Never was a well-intentioned scribe so berated and ridiculed as I,
never a simple news gatherer so discredited. Democratic and Republican
newspapers vied with one another which could say crossest things and
laugh loudest. One sentence especially caught the newspaper
risibilities of the time, and it was many a year before the phrase
“between the sherry and the champagne” ceased to pursue me. That any
patriotic American, twice elevated to the presidency, could want a
third term, could have the hardihood to seek one was inconceivable. My
letter was an insult to General Grant and proof of my own lack of
intelligence and restraint. They lammed me, laughed at me, good and
strong. On each successive occasion of recurrence I have encountered
the same criticism.