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.