There was chance in Theodore Roosevelt's coming into the Presidency
as he did, but there was irony as well. An evil chance dropped William
McKinley before an assassin's bullet; but there was a fitting irony in
the fact that the man who must step into his place had been put where
he was in large measure by the very men who would least like to see him
become President.
The Republican convention of 1900 was a singularly unanimous body.
President McKinley was renominated without a murmur of dissent. But
there was no Vice-President to renominate, as Mr. Hobart had died in
office. There was no logical candidate for the second place on the
ticket. Senator Platt, however, had a man whom he wanted to get rid of,
since Governor Roosevelt had made himself persona non grata alike to
the machine politicians of his State and to the corporations allied
with them. The Governor, however, did not propose to be disposed of so
easily. His reasons were characteristic. He wrote thus to Senator Platt
about the matter:
"I can't help feeling more and more that the Vice-Presidency is not an
office in which I could do anything and not an office in which a man
who is still vigorous and not past middle life has much chance of
doing anything.... Now, I should like to be Governor for another term,
especially if we are able to take hold of the canals in serious shape.
But, as Vice-President, I don't see there is anything I can do. I would
be simply a presiding officer, and that I should find a bore."
Now Mr. Platt knew that nothing but "sidetracking" could stop another
nomination of Roosevelt for the Governorship, and this Rough Rider was
a thorn in his flesh. So he went on his subterranean way to have him
nominated for the most innocuous political berth in the gift of
the American people. He secured the cooperation of Senator Quay of
Pennsylvania and another boss or two of the same indelible stripe; but
all their political strength would not have accomplished the desired
result without assistance from quite a different source. Roosevelt had
already achieved great popularity in the Middle and the Far West for the
very reasons which made Mr. Platt want him out of the way. So, while the
New York boss and his acquiescent delegates were stopped from presenting
his name to the convention by Roosevelt's assurance that he would fight
a l'outrance any movement from his own State to nominate him, other
delegates took matters into their own hands and the nomination was
finally made unanimously.
Roosevelt gave great strength to the Republican ticket in the campaign
which followed. William Jennings Bryan was again the Democratic
candidate, but the "paramount issue" of his campaign had changed since
four years before from free silver to anti-imperialism. President
McKinley, according to his custom, made no active campaign; but Bryan
and Roosevelt competed with each other in whirlwind speaking tours from
one end of the country to the other. The war-cry of the Republicans was
the "full dinner pail"; the keynote of Bryan's bid for popular support
was opposition to the Republican policy of expansion and criticism of
Republican tendencies toward plutocratic control. The success of the
Republican ticket was overwhelming; McKinley and Roosevelt received
nearly twice as many electoral votes as Bryan and Stevenson.
When President McKinley was shot at Buffalo six months after his
second term began, it looked for a time as though he would recover. So
Roosevelt, after an immediate visit to Buffalo, went to join his family
in the Adirondacks. The news of the President's impending death found
him out in the wilderness on the top of Mount Tahawus, not far from the
tiny Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, the source of the Hudson River. A ten-mile
dash down the mountain trail, in the course of which he outstripped all
his companions but one; a wild forty-mile drive through the night to the
railroad, the new President and his single companion changing the horses
two or three times with their own hands; a fast journey by special train
across the State--and on the evening of September 14, 1901, Theodore
Roosevelt took the oath of office as the twenty-sixth President of the
United States.
Before taking the oath, Roosevelt announced that it would be his aim "to
continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley for the
peace, prosperity, and honor of our beloved country." He immediately
asked every member of the late President's Cabinet to continue in
office. The Cabinet was an excellent one, and Mr. Roosevelt found it
necessary to make no other changes than those that came in the ordinary
course of events. The policies were not altered in broad general
outline, for Roosevelt was as stalwart a Republican as McKinley himself,
and was as firmly convinced of the soundness of the fundamentals of the
Republican doctrine.
But the fears of some of his friends that Roosevelt would seem, if he
carried out his purpose of continuity, "a pale copy of McKinley" were
not justified in the event. They should have known better. A copy of any
one Roosevelt could neither be nor seem, and "pale" was the last epithet
to be applied to him with justice. It could not be long before the
difference in the two Administrations would appear in unmistakable
terms. The one which had just passed was first of all a party
Administration and secondly a McKinley Administration. The one which
followed was first, last, and all the time a Roosevelt Administration.
"Where Macgregor sits, there is the head of the table." Not because
Roosevelt consciously willed it so, but because the force and power and
magnetism of his vigorous mind and personality inevitably made it
so. McKinley had been a great harmonizer. "He oiled the machinery of
government with loving and imperturbable patience," said an observer of
his time, "and the wheels ran with an ease unknown since Washington's
first term of office." It had been a constant reproach of the critics
of the former President that "his ear was always to the ground." But
he kept it there because it was his sincere conviction that it belonged
there, ready to apprize him of the vibrations of the popular will.
Roosevelt was the born leader with an innate instinct of command. He did
not scorn or flout the popular will; he had too confirmed a conviction
of the sovereign right of the people to rule for that. But he did not
wait pusillanimously for the popular mind to make itself up; he had too
high a conception of the duty of leadership for that. He esteemed it
his peculiar function as the man entrusted by a great people with the
headship of their common affairs--to lead the popular mind, to educate
it, to inspire it, sometimes to run before it in action, serene in the
confidence that tardy popular judgment would confirm the rightness of
the deed.
By the end of Roosevelt's first Administration two of the three groups
that had taken a hand in choosing him for the Vice-Presidency were
thoroughly sick of their bargain. The machine politicians and the
great corporations found that their cunning plan to stifle with the wet
blanket of that depressing office the fires of his moral earnestness and
pugnacious honesty had overreached itself. Fate had freed him and, once
freed, he was neither to hold nor to bind. It was less than two years
before Wall Street was convinced that he was "unsafe," and sadly shook
its head over his "impetuosity." When Wall Street stamps a man "unsafe,"
the last word in condemnation has been said. It was an even shorter time
before the politicians found him unsatisfactory. "The breach between
Mr. Roosevelt and the politicians was, however, inevitable. His rigid
insistence upon the maintenance and the extension of the merit system
alone assured the discontent which precedes dislike," wrote another
observer. "The era of patronage mongering in the petty offices ceased
suddenly, and the spoilsmen had the right to say that in this respect
the policy of McKinley had not been followed." It was true. When
Roosevelt became President the civil service was thoroughly demoralized.
Senators and Congressmen, by tacit agreement with the executive, used
the appointing power for the payment of political debts, the reward of
party services, the strengthening of their personal "fences." But
within three months it was possible to say with absolute truth that "a
marvelous change has already been wrought in the morale of the civil
service." At the end of Roosevelt's first term an unusually acute and
informed foreign journalist was moved to write, "No President has so
persistently eliminated politics from his nominations, none has been
more unbending in making efficiency his sole test."
There was the kernel of the whole matter: the President's insistence
upon efficiency. Roosevelt, however, did not snatch rudely away from the
Congressmen and Senators the appointing power which his predecessors had
allowed them gradually to usurp. He continued to consult each member of
the Congress upon appointments in that member's State or district and
merely demanded that the men recommended for office should be honest,
capable, and fitted for the places they were to fill.
President Roosevelt was not only ready and glad to consult with Senators
but he sought and often took the advice of party leaders outside of
Congress, and even took into consideration the opinions of bosses. In
New York, for instance, the two Republican leaders, Governor Odell and
Senator Platt, were sometimes in accord and sometimes in disagreement,
but each was always desirous of being consulted. A letter written by
Roosevelt in the middle of his first term to a friendly Congressman well
illustrates his theory and practice in such cases:
"I want to work with Platt. I want to work with Odell. I want to support
both and take the advice of both. But, of course, ultimately I must be
the judge as to acting on the advice given. When, as in the case of the
judgeship, I am convinced that the advice of both is wrong, I shall act
as I did when I appointed Holt. When I can find a friend of Odell's
like Cooley, who is thoroughly fit for the position I desire to fill, it
gives me the greatest pleasure to appoint him. When Platt proposes to me
a man like Hamilton Fish, it is equally a pleasure to appoint him."
This high-minded and common-sense course did not, however, seem to
please the politicians, for dyed-in-the-wool politicians are curious
persons to whom half a loaf is no consolation whatever, even when the
other half of the loaf is to go to the people--without whom there would
be no policies at all. Strangely enough, Roosevelt's policy was equally
displeasing to those of the doctrinaire reformer type, to whom there is
no word in the language more distasteful than "politician," unless it
be the word "practical." But there was one class to whom the results of
this common-sense brand of political action were eminently satisfactory,
and this class made up the third group that had a part in the selection
of Theodore Roosevelt for the Vice-Presidency. The plain people,
especially in the more westerly portions of the country, were
increasingly delighted with the honesty, the virility, and the
effectiveness of the Roosevelt Administration. Just before the
convention which was to nominate Roosevelt for the Presidency to succeed
himself, an editorial writer expressed the fact thus: "The people at
large are not oblivious of the fact that, while others are talking and
carping, Mr. Roosevelt is carrying on in the White House a persistent
and never-ending moral struggle with every powerful selfish and
exploiting interest in the country."
Oblivious of it? They were acutely conscious of it. They approved of
it with heartiness. They liked it so well that, when the time came to
nominate and elect another President, they swept aside with a mighty
rush not only the scruples and antagonisms of the Republican politicians
and the "special interests" but party lines as well, and chose Roosevelt
with a unanimous voice in the convention and a majority of two and a
half million votes at the polls.
As President, Theodore Roosevelt achieved many concrete results. But his
greatest contribution to the forward movement of the times was in the
rousing of the public conscience, the strengthening of the nation's
moral purpose, and the erecting of a new standard of public service in
the management of the nation's affairs. It was no little thing that when
Roosevelt was ready to hand over to another the responsibilities of his
high office, James Bryce, America's best friend and keenest student from
across the seas, was able to say that in a long life, during which he
had studied intimately the government of many different countries, he
had never in any country seen a more eager, high-minded, and efficient
set of public servants, men more useful and more creditable to their
country, than the men then doing the work of the American Government in
Washington and in the field.