best citizens has been frustrated by the popular spirit of
self-determination, the electoral apparatus can have to-day no other
significance than to give expression to the voice of the majority.
But now just this it is in the power of the electoral system
completely to suppress. Let us suppose that only two candidates are
in question. If the election were simply a direct one, of course
that candidate would win who received the most votes; but with
electors this is not the case, because the number of electors who
are pledged to vote for these two candidates need not at all
correspond to the number of ballots cast on the two sides. If in the
State of New York, for instance, three-fifths of the population are
for the first candidate and two-fifths for the second, the
three-fifths majority determines the whole list of 36 electors for
the first candidate, and not an elector would be chosen for the
other. Now it can very well happen that a candidate in those states
in which he secures all the electors will have small majorities,
that is, his opponent will have large minorities, while his opponent
in the states which vote for him will have large majorities; and in
this way the majority of electors will be pledged for that candidate
who has received actually the smaller number of votes. It is a fact
that both Hayes in 1877 and Harrison in 1889 were constitutionally
elected for the Presidency by a minority of votes.
While in form the voters choose only the electors from their state,
nevertheless these ballots thus actually count for a certain candidate.
At the last election 292 electors voted for McKinley, and 155 for Bryan,
while for the McKinley electors 832,280 more votes were cast than for
the Bryan electors. We have already seen how it is that the best man
will no longer, as in Washington’s time, be unequivocally elected by the
people, and why, although a unanimous choice of President has not taken
place since Washington’s time, nevertheless no more than two candidates
are ever practically in question. It was for this that we have discussed
the parties first. The parties are the factor which makes it impossible
for a President to be elected without a contest, and which, as early as
1797, when the successor of Washington had to be nominated, divided the
people in two sections, the supporters of Jefferson and of Adams. At the
same time, however, the parties prevent the division from going further,
and bring it about that this population of millions of people compactly
organizes itself for Presidential elections in only two groups, so that
although never less than two, still never more than two candidates
really step into the arena.
For both great parties alike, with their central and local committees,
with their professional politicians, with their leaders and their
followers, whether engaging in politics out of interest or in hope of
gain, as an ideal or as sport—for all alike comes the great day when the
President is to be elected. For years previous the party leaders will
have combined and dissolved and speculated and intrigued, and for years
the friends of the possible candidates have spoken loudly in the
newspapers, since here, of course, not only the election but also the
nomination of the candidate depends on the people. Although the election
is in November, the national conventions for nominating the party
candidates come generally in July. Each state sends its delegation,
numbering twice as many as the members of Congress from that state, and
each delegation is once more duly elected by a convention of
representatives chosen by the actual voters out of their party lists. In
these national conventions the great battles of the country are fought,
that is, within the party, and here the general trend of national
politics is determined. It is the great trial moment for the party and
the party heroes. At the last election McKinley and Bryan were the
opposing candidates, and it is interesting to trace in their elections
by the respective conventions two great types of party decision.
McKinley had grown slowly in public favour; he was the accomplished
politician, the interesting leader of Congress, the sympathetic man who
had no enemies. When the Republican convention met at Chicago, in 1888,
he was a member of the delegation from Ohio and was pledged to do his
utmost for the nomination of John Sherman. The ballots were cast five
different times and every time no one candidate was found to have a
majority. On the sixth trial one vote was cast for McKinley, and the
announcement of this vote created an uproar. A sudden shifting of the
opinions took place amid great acclamation, and the delegations all went
over to him. He jumped up on a stool and called loudly through the hall
that he should be offended by any man who voted for him since he himself
had been pledged to vote for Sherman. Finally a compromise was found in
Benjamin Harrison. At the convention in Minneapolis four years later
McKinley was chairman, and once more the temptation came to him. The
opponents of Harrison wished to oppose his re-election by uniting on the
Ohio statesman, and again it was McKinley himself who turned the vote
this time in favour of Harrison. His own time came finally in 1896. In
the national convention at St. Louis 661 votes were cast in the first
ballot for McKinley, while 84 were cast for Thomas Reed, 61 for Quay, 58
for Morton, and 35 for Allison. And when, in 1900, the national
convention met in Philadelphia, 926 votes were straightway cast for
McKinley, and none opposing. His was the steady, sure, and deserved rise
from step to step through tireless exertions for his party and his
country.
Bryan was a young and unknown lawyer, who had sat for a couple of years
in the House of Representatives like any other delegate, and had warmly
upheld bimetallism. At the Democratic national convention at Chicago in
1896 almost nobody knew him. But it was a curious crisis in the
Democratic party. It had been victorious four years previous in its
campaign for Cleveland against Harrison, but the party as such had
enjoyed no particular satisfaction. The self-willed and determined
Cleveland, who had systematically opposed Congress tooth and nail, had
fallen out with his party and nowhere on the horizon had appeared a new
leader. And after a true statesman like Cleveland had come to grief, the
petty politicians, who had neither ideas nor a programme, came to their
own. Every one was looking for a strong personality when Bryan stepped
forth to ingratiate himself and his silver programme in the affections
of his party. His arguments were not new, but his catch-words were well
studied, and here at last stood a fascinating personality with a
forceful temperament which was all aglow, and with a voice that sounded
like the tones of an organ. And when he cried out, “You must not nail
humanity to a cross of gold,” it was as if an omen had appeared. He
became at once the Democratic candidate for the Presidency, and six
months later six and one-half million votes were cast for him against
the seven million for McKinley. Nor did the silver intoxication succumb
to its first defeat. When the Democrats met again in 1900, all the
endeavours of those who had adhered to a gold currency were seen to be
futile. Once again the silver-tongued Nebraskan was carried about in
triumph, and not until its second defeat did the Democratic party wake
up. Bryanism is now a dead issue, and before the next Presidential
election the programme of the Democratic party will be entirely
reconstructed.
Thus the presidents of the nation grow organically out of the party
structure, and the parties find in turn their highest duty and their
reward in electing their President. The people organized in a party and
the chief executive which that party elects belong necessarily together.
They are the base and the summit. Nothing but death can overthrow the
decision of the people; death did overthrow, indeed, the last decision
after a few months, in September, 1901, when the cowardly assassination
accomplished by a Polish anarchist brought the administration of
McKinley to an end. As the Constitution provides, the man whom the
people had elected to the relatively insignificant office of
Vice-President became master in the White House.
The Vice-Presidency is from the point of view of political logic the
least satisfactory place in American politics. Very early in the history
of the United States the filling of this office occasioned many
difficulties, and at that time the provisions of the Constitution
referring to it were completely worked over. The Constitution had
originally said that the man who had the second largest number of votes
for the Presidency should become Vice-President. This was conceived in
the spirit of the time when the two-party system did not exist and when
it was expected that the electors should not be restricted by the voting
public in their choice of the best man. As soon, however, as the
opposition between the two parties came into being, the necessary result
of such provision was that the presidential candidate of the defeated
party should become Vice-President, and therefore that President and
Vice-President should always represent diametrically opposed tendencies.
A change in the Constitution did away with this political impossibility.
Each elector was instructed to deposit separate ballots for President
and Vice-President, and that candidate became Vice-President who
received the largest number of votes for that office, both offices being
thus invariably filled by candidates of the same party.
In spite of this the position has developed rather unsatisfactorily for
an obvious reason. The Constitution condemns the Vice-President, so long
as the President holds office, to an ornamental inactivity. It is his
duty to preside at sessions of the Senate, a task which he for the most
part performs silently, and which has not nearly the political
significance enjoyed by the Speaker of the House of Representatives. On
the other hand, men still in the prime of life are almost always elected
to the Presidency; the possibility is therefore almost always lost sight
of that the President can die before the expiration of his four years’
term of office. The result has been that less distinguished men, who
have, nevertheless, served their parties, are usually chosen for this
insignificant and passive rôle. The office is designed to be an honour
and a consolation to them, and sometimes for one reason or another their
candidacy is supposed otherwise to strengthen the outlook of the party.
It is not accident that while in the several states the
Lieutenant-Governor is very often the next man to be elected Governor,
it has never so far happened that a Vice-President has been elected to
the Presidency.
Now in the unexpected event of the President’s death a man stands at the
helm whom no one really wants to see there; and it has five times
happened that the chief executive of the nation has died in office, and
four times, indeed, only a few months after being installed, so that the
Vice-President has had to guide the destinies of the country for almost
four years. When Tyler succeeded to the place of Harrison in 1841, there
arose at once unfavourable disputes with the Whig party, which had
elected him. When, after the murder of Lincoln in 1865, Johnson took the
reins, it was his own Republican party which regretted having elected
this impetuous man to the Vice-Presidency; and when, in 1881, after the
assassination of Garfield, his successor, Arthur, undertook the office,
and filled it indeed by no means badly, considerable consternation was
felt throughout the country when people saw that so ordinary a
professional politician was to succeed Garfield, on whom the country had
pinned its faith.
On the death of McKinley a Vice-President succeeded him toward whom, in
one respect at least, the feeling was very different. If ever a man was
born to become President that man was Theodore Roosevelt. Nevertheless,
he had not been elected in expectation of becoming President, and at
first the whole country felt once more that it was a case which had lain
outside of all reasonable calculations. Roosevelt’s friends had asked
him to make a sacrifice and to accept a thankless office because they
knew that his name on the ballot of the Republican party—for his Rough
Rider reputation during the war was still fresh—would be pretty sure to
bring about the election of McKinley. The opponents also of this strong
and energetic young man, against his stoutest protestations, upheld his
candidacy with every means in their power. Firstly because they wanted
to get rid of him as Governor of the State of New York, where he made
life too hard for the regular politicians, and secondly because they
relied on the tradition that holding the Vice-Presidency would
invalidate him as a Presidential candidate in 1904. Neither friends nor
enemies had thought of such a possibility as McKinley’s death.
Roosevelt’s friends had rightly judged; the hero of San Juan did bring
victory to his party. His enemies, on the other hand, had entirely
missed their mark not only on the outcome, but from the very beginning.
Odell became Governor of New York, and quite unexpectedly he stood out
even more stoutly against the political corruptionists. And, on the
other hand, Roosevelt’s impulsive nature quickly found ways to break the
traditional silence of the Vice-President and to keep himself before the
eyes of the world. There is no doubt that in spite of all traditions his
incumbency would have been a preparation for the presidential candidacy.
But when, through the crime committed at Buffalo, everything came out so
differently from that which the politicians expected, it seemed to the
admirers of Roosevelt almost like the tragic hand of fate; he had done
his best to attain on his own account the Presidency, and now it came to
him almost as the gift of chance. Only the next election may be expected
to do him full justice.
The successive moments in his rapid rise are generally known. Roosevelt
was born in New York in 1858, his father being a prosperous merchant and
well-known philanthropist, and a descendant of an old Knickerbocker
family. The son was prepared for college and went to Harvard, where he
made a special study of history and political economy. After that he
travelled in Europe, and when he was still only twenty-four years old,
he plunged into politics. He soon obtained a Republican seat in the
state legislature of New York, and there commenced his tireless fight
for reform in municipal and state administration. In 1889 President
Harrison appointed him Commissioner of the Civil Service, but he
resigned this position in 1895 in order to become Chief of Police in New
York. Only two years later he was once more called from municipal to
national duties. He was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy. All
this time his administrative duties did not interrupt his literary,
historical, and scientific work. He had begun his career as an author
with his studies in the history of the navy and his admirable
biographies of American statesmen. When he was thirty years old he wrote
the first part of his great work, “The Winning of the West,” and often
between the publication of his scientific works he published lesser
books, describing his adventures as huntsman in the primeval wilderness,
and later on volumes in which his social and political essays were
collected.
Then the Spanish War arose and the Assistant Secretary could not bear to
sit at his desk while others were moving to the field of battle. He
gathered about him a volunteer regiment of cavalry, in which the
dare-devil cow-punchers of the prairie rode side by side with the
adventurous scions of the most distinguished families in Boston and New
York. Roosevelt’s friend, Wood, of the regular army, became Colonel in
this soon-famous regiment, and Roosevelt himself Lieutenant-Colonel. A
few days after they had successfully stormed the hill at San Juan, Wood
became General and Roosevelt Colonel.
His native State of New York received him on his home-coming with
general rejoicing, and he found himself a few months later Governor of
the State. At Albany he showed tremendous energy, put through popular
reforms, and fought against the encroachments of the industrial
corporations. It had been his personal wish to be Governor for a second
year, but this was denied him by the admirable doings of his Eastern
enemies and Western admirers at the national convention of June, 1900,
held in Pennsylvania, where he was forced to become candidate for the
position of Vice-President. On the 14th of September, 1901, in Buffalo,
he took the Presidential oath of office.
At that time a quiet anxiety for the future was mingled with the honest
sorrow which the whole land felt for the death of McKinley. A nation
which had been sunning itself in peace suddenly found itself under the
leadership of an impulsive colonel of cavalry, who carried in his hand
the banner of war. The nation was in the midst of an economic
development which needed before everything else to have a mature and
careful leader who was honoured and trusted by all classes, and who
would be able to effect some work of reconciliation between them; when
suddenly there stood in the place of a most conservative statesman an
impetuous young man who was not intimately connected with industrial
life, who had for a long time made himself unpopular with party
politicians, and whom even his admirers in the land seemed hardly to
trust on account of his hasty and determined impetuosity. Roosevelt had
been envisaged by the masses, through the cinematograph of the press, in
campaign hat and khaki uniform, just in the attitude of taking San Juan
hill. Nearly everybody forgot that he had for a long time quietly
carried on the exacting labours of Police Commissioner in the largest
city of the country; and forgot how, from his first year of study at
Harvard on, every day had been given to preparing himself for public
service and for acquiring a thorough understanding of all the political,
social, and economic problems which the country had to face; they forgot
also that he had wielded the sword for only a few months, but the pen of
the historian for about two decades. Roosevelt’s first public utterance
was a pledge to continue unchanged the peaceful policy of his
predecessor and always to consider the national prosperity and honour.
Still, people felt that no successor would be able to command that
experience, maturity, and party influence which McKinley had had.
There have been differences of opinion, and, as was to be expected,
complaints and criticisms have come from the midst of his own party. Yet
anyone who looks at his whole administration will see that in those
first years Roosevelt won a more difficult and brilliant victory than he
had won over the Spanish troops.
He had three virtues which especially overcame all small criticism. The
people felt, in the first place, that a moral force was here at work
which was more powerful than any mere political address or diplomatic
subtlety. An immediate ethical force was here felt which owned to ideas
above any party, and set inner ideals above merely outward success.
Roosevelt’s second virtue was courage. A certain purely ethical ideal
exalted above all petty expediencies was for him not only the nucleus of
his own creed, but was also his spring of action; and he took no account
of personal dangers. Here was the keynote of all his speeches—it is not
enough to approve of what is right, it is equally necessary to act for
it fearlessly and unequivocally. Then he went on to his work, and if,
indeed, in complicated political situations the President has had at
times to clinch some points by aid of compromise, nevertheless the
nation has felt with growing confidence that at no serious moment has he
wavered a hair’s breadth from the straight line of his convictions, and
that he has had the courage to disregard everything but what he held to
be right. And, thirdly, Roosevelt had the virtue of being sincere.
McKinley also had purposed to do right, but he had hardly an occasion
for displaying great courage since so incomparably discreet a politician
as he was could avoid every conflict with his associates, and he was
ever the leader on highways which the popular humour had indicated. Thus
the masses never felt that he was at bottom lacking in courage or that
he always put off responsibility on others. The masses did, however,
instinctively feel that McKinley’s astute and kindly words were not
always sincere; his words were often there to conceal something which
was locked up behind his Napoleonic forehead. And now there succeeded
him an enthusiast who brimmed over with plain expressions of what he
felt, and whose words were so convincingly candid and so without
reservation that every one had the feeling of being in the personal
confidence of the President.
There was a good deal more besides his moral earnestness, his courage,
and his frank honesty which contributed to Roosevelt’s entire success.
His lack of prejudice won the lower classes, and his aristocratic
breeding and education won the upper, while the middle classes were
enthusiastic over his sportsmanship. No President had been more
unprejudiced or more truly democratic. He met the poor miner on the same
footing as he met the mine owner; he invited the negro to the White
House; he sat down and broke bread with the cow-boys; and when he
travelled he first shook the sooty hand of the locomotive engineer
before he greeted the gentlemen who had gathered about in their silk
hats. And, nevertheless, he was in many years the first real aristocrat
to become President. The changes in the White House itself were typical.
This venerable Presidential dwelling had been, up to Roosevelt’s time,
in its inner arrangements a dreary combination of bare offices, somewhat
crudely decorated private dwelling, and cheerless reception-halls.
To-day it is a very proper palace, containing many fine works of art,
and office-seekers no longer have access to the inner rooms. His
predecessors, the Clevelands and Harrisons and McKinleys, had been, in
fact, very respectable philistines. They had come from the middle
classes of the country, which are in thought and feeling very different
from that upper class which, up to a short time ago, had bothered itself
less about practical politics than about general culture, literature,
art, criticism, and broadly conceived industrial operations, combined
with social high-life. This class, however, had begun at length to feel
that it ought not to disdain to notice political abuses, to walk around
the sea of troubles; but had begun to take up arms and by opposing end
them. Aristocracy had too long believed in political mercenaries.
Roosevelt was the first to lift himself from these circles and become a
great leader. Not alone the nobility of his character but also of his
culture and traditions was shown in his entire habit of mind. Never in
his speeches or writings has he cited that socially equalizing
Declaration of Independence, and while his speeches at banquets and
small gatherings of scholarly men have been incomparably more
fascinating than his strenuous utterances to the voters, which he has
made on his public tours, it has been often less the originality of his
thoughts and still less the peculiarly taking quality of his delivery,
than the evidences of ripe culture, which seem to pervade his political
thought. Thus the smaller the circle to which he speaks the greater is
his advantage; and in speaking with him personally on serious problems
one feels that distinction of thought, breadth of historical outlook,
and confidence in self have united in him to create a personality after
the grand manner.