THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S INFLUENCE
When the virile figure of Theodore Roosevelt swung down the national
highway, Bok was one of thousands of young men who felt strongly the
attraction of his personality. Colonel Roosevelt was only five years
the senior of the editor; he spoke, therefore, as one of his own years.
The energy with which he said and did things appealed to Bok. He made
Americanism something more real, more stirring than Bok had ever felt
it; he explained national questions in a way that caught Bok's fancy
and came within his comprehension. Bok's lines had been cast with many
of the great men of the day, but he felt that there was something
distinctive about the personality of this man: his method of doing
things and his way of saying things. Bok observed everything Colonel
Roosevelt did and read everything he wrote.
The editor now sought an opportunity to know personally the man whom he
admired. It came at a dinner at the University Club, and Colonel
Roosevelt suggested that they meet there the following day for a
"talk-fest." For three hours the two talked together. The fact that
Colonel Roosevelt was of Dutch ancestry interested Bok; that Bok was
actually of Dutch birth made a strong appeal to the Colonel. With his
tremendous breadth of interests, Roosevelt, Bok found, had followed him
quite closely in his work, and was familiar with "its high points," as
he called them. "We must work for the same ends," said the Colonel,
"you in your way, I in mine. But our lines are bound to cross. You
and I can each become good Americans by giving our best to make America
better. With the Dutch stock there is in both of us, there's no limit
to what we can do. Let's go to it." Naturally that talk left the two
firm friends.
Bok felt somehow that he had been given a new draft of Americanism; the
word took on a new meaning for him; it stood for something different,
something deeper and finer than before. And every subsequent talk with
Roosevelt deepened the feeling and stirred Bok's deepest ambitions.
"Go to it, you Dutchman," Roosevelt would say, and Bok would go to it.
A talk with Roosevelt always left him feeling as if mountains were the
easiest things in the world to move.
One of Theodore Roosevelt's arguments which made a deep impression upon
Bok was that no man had a right to devote his entire life to the making
of money. "You are in a peculiar position," said the man of Oyster Bay
one day to Bok; "you are in that happy position where you can make
money and do good at the same time. A man wields a tremendous power
for good or for evil who is welcomed into a million homes and read with
confidence. That's fine, and is all right so far as it goes, and in
your case it goes very far. Still, there remains more for you to do.
The public has built up for you a personality: now give that
personality to whatever interests you in contact with your immediate
fellow-men: something in your neighborhood, your city, or your State.
With one hand work and write to your national audience: let no fads
sway you. Hew close to the line. But, with the other hand, swing into
the life immediately around you. Think it over."
Bok did think it over. He was now realizing the dream of his life for
which he had worked: his means were sufficient to give his mother every
comfort; to install her in the most comfortable surroundings wherever
she chose to live; to make it possible for her to spend the winters in
the United States and the summers in the Netherlands, and thus to keep
in touch with her family and friends in both countries. He had for
years toiled unceasingly to reach this point: he felt he had now
achieved at least one goal.
He had now turned instinctively to the making of a home for himself.
After an engagement of four years he had been married, on October 22,
1896, to Mary Louise Curtis, the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus H. K.
Curtis; two sons had been born to them; he had built and was occupying
a house at Merion, Pennsylvania, a suburb six miles from the
Philadelphia City Hall. When she was in this country his mother lived
with him, and also his brother, and, with a strong belief in life
insurance, he had seen to it that his family was provided for in case
of personal incapacity or of his demise. In other words, he felt that
he had put his own house in order; he had carried out what he felt is
every man's duty: to be, first of all, a careful and adequate provider
for his family. He was now at the point where he could begin to work
for another goal, the goal that he felt so few American men saw: the
point in his life where he could retire from the call of duty and
follow the call of inclination.
At the age of forty he tried to look ahead and plan out his life as far
as he could. Barring unforeseen obstacles, he determined to retire
from active business when he reached his fiftieth year, and give the
remainder of his life over to those interests and influences which he
assumed now as part of his life, and which, at fifty, should seem to
him best worth while. He realized that in order to do this he must do
two things: he must husband his financial resources and he must begin
to accumulate a mental reserve.
The wide public acceptance of the periodical which he edited naturally
brought a share of financial success to him. He had experienced
poverty, and as he subsequently wrote, in an article called "Why I
Believe in Poverty," he was deeply grateful for his experience. He had
known what it was to be poor; he had seen others dear to him suffer for
the bare necessities; there was, in fact, not a single step on that
hard road that he had not travelled. He could, therefore, sympathize
with the fullest understanding with those similarly situated, could
help as one who knew from practice and not from theory. He realized
what a marvellous blessing poverty can be; but as a condition to
experience, to derive from it poignant lessons, and then to get out of;
not as a condition to stay in.
Of course many said to Bok when he wrote the article in which he
expressed these beliefs: "That's all very well; easy enough to say, but
how can you get out of it?" Bok realized that he could not definitely
show any one the way. No one had shown him. No two persons can find
the same way out. Bok determined to lift himself out of poverty
because his mother was not born in it, did not belong in it, and could
not stand it. That gave him the first essential: a purpose. Then he
backed up the purpose with effort and an ever-ready willingness to
work, and to work at anything that came his way, no matter what it was,
so long as it meant "the way out." He did not pick and choose; he took
what came, and did it in the best way he knew how; and when he did not
like what he was doing he still did it as well as he could while he was
doing it, but always with an eye single to the purpose not to do it any
longer than was strictly necessary. He used every rung in the ladder
as a rung to the one above. He always gave more than his particular
position or salary asked for. He never worked by the clock; always by
the job; and saw that it was well done regardless of the time it took
to do it. This meant effort, of course, untiring, ceaseless,
unsparing; and it meant work, hard as nails.
He was particularly careful never to live up to his income; and as his
income increased he increased not the percentage of expenditure but the
percentage of saving. Thrift was, of course, inborn with him as a
Dutchman, but the necessity for it as a prime factor in life was burned
into him by his experience with poverty. But he interpreted thrift not
as a trait of niggardliness, but as Theodore Roosevelt interpreted it:
common sense applied to spending.
At forty, therefore, he felt he had learned the first essential to
carrying out his idea of retirement at fifty.
The second essential--varied interests outside of his business upon
which he could rely on relinquishing his duties--he had not cultivated.
He had quite naturally, in line with his belief that concentration
means success, immersed himself in his business to the exclusion of
almost everything else. He felt that he could now spare a certain
percentage of his time to follow Theodore Roosevelt's ideas and let the
breezes of other worlds blow over him. In that way he could do as
Roosevelt suggested and as Bok now firmly believed was right: he could
develop himself along broader lines, albeit the lines of his daily work
were broadening in and of themselves, and he could so develop a new set
of inner resources upon which he could draw when the time came to
relinquish his editorial position.
He saw, on every side, the pathetic figures of men who could not let go
after their greatest usefulness was past; of other men who dropped
before they realized their arrival at the end of the road; and, most
pathetic of all, of men who having retired, but because of lack of
inner resources did not know what to do with themselves, had become a
trial to themselves, their families, and their communities.
Bok decided that, given health and mental freshness, he would say
good-by to his public before his public might decide to say good-by to
him. So, at forty, he candidly faced the facts of life and began to
prepare himself for his retirement at fifty under circumstances that
would be of his own making and not those of others.
And thereby Edward Bok proved that he was still, by instinct, a
Dutchman, and had not in his thirty-four years of residence in the
United States become so thoroughly Americanized as he believed.
However, it was an American, albeit of Dutch extraction, one whom he
believed to be the greatest American in his own day, who had set him
thinking and shown him the way.