a certain instinctive antipathy to the concrete aristocrat and in
particular to the aristocrat's private code--the product, no doubt,
of his essentially _bourgeois_ origin and training. But if he could
not go with the Junkers all the way, he could at least go the whole
length of their distrust of the third order--the undifferentiated
masses of men below. Here, I daresay, he owed a lot to Nietzsche. He
was always reading German books, and among them, no doubt, were "Also
sprach Zarathustra" and "Jenseits von Gut und Böse." In fact, the
echoes were constantly sounding in his own harangues. Years ago, as an
intellectual exercise while confined to hospital, I devised and printed
a give-away of the Rooseveltian philosophy in parallel columns--in one
column, extracts from "The Strenuous Life"; in the other, extracts
from Nietzsche. The borrowings were numerous and unescapable. Theodore
had swallowed Friedrich as a peasant swallows Peruna--bottle, cork,
label and testimonials. Worse, the draft whetted his appetite, and
soon he was swallowing the Kaiser of the _Garde-Kavallerie-mess_
and battleship-launching speeches--another somewhat defective
Junker. In his palmy days it was often impossible to distinguish his
politico-theological bulls from those of Wilhelm; during the war,
indeed, I suspect that some of them were boldly lifted' by the British
press bureau, and palmed off as felonious imprudences out of Potsdam.
Wilhelm was his model in _Weltpolitik,_ and in sociology, exegetics,
administration, law, sport and connubial polity no less. Both roared
for doughty armies, eternally prepared--for the theory that the way to
prevent war is to make all conceivable enemies think twice, thrice,
ten times. Both dreamed of gigantic navies, with battleships as long
as Brooklyn Bridge. Both preached incessantly the duty of the citizen
to the state, with the soft pedal upon the duty of the state to the
citizen. Both praised the habitually gravid wife. Both delighted in
the armed pursuit of the lower fauna. Both heavily patronized the
fine arts. Both were intimates of God, and announced His desires with
authority. Both believed that all men who stood opposed to them were
prompted by the devil and would suffer for it in hell.
If, in fact, there was any difference between them, it was all in favor
of Wilhelm. For one thing, he made very much fewer speeches; it took
some colossal event, such as the launching of a dreadnaught or the
birthday of a colonel-general, to get him upon his legs; the Reichstag
was not constantly deluged with his advice and upbraiding. For another
thing, he was a milder and more modest man--one more accustomed, let us
say, to circumstance and authority, and hence less intoxicated by the
greatness of his state. Finally, he had been trained to think, not only
of his own immediate fortunes, but also of the remote interests of a
family that, in his most expansive days, promised to hold the throne
for many years, and so he cultivated a certain prudence, and even a
certain ingratiating suavity. He could, on occasion, be extremely
polite to an opponent. But Roosevelt was never polite to an opponent;
perhaps a gentleman, by American standards, he was surely never a
gentle man. In a political career of nearly forty years he was never
even fair to an opponent. All of his gabble about the square deal was
merely so much protective coloration, easily explicable on elementary
Freudian grounds. No man, facing Roosevelt in the heat of controversy,
ever actually got a square deal. He took extravagant advantages; he
played to the worst idiocies of the mob; he hit below the belt almost
habitually. One never thinks of him as a duelist, say of the school
of Disraeli, Palmerston and, to drop a bit, Blaine. One always thinks
of him as a glorified longshoreman engaged eternally in cleaning out
bar-rooms--and not too proud to gouge when the inspiration came to
him, or to bite in the clinches, or to oppose the relatively fragile
brass knuckles of the code with chair-legs, bung-starters, cuspidors,
demijohns, and ice-picks.
Abbott and Thayer, in their books, make elaborate efforts to depict
their hero as one born with a deep loathing of the whole Prussian
scheme of things, and particularly of the Prussian technique in combat.
Abbott even goes so far as to hint that the attentions of the Kaiser,
during Roosevelt's historic tour of Europe on his return from Africa,
were subtly revolting to him. Nothing could be more absurd. Prof. Dr.
Sherman, in the article I have mentioned, blows up that nonsense by
quoting from a speech made by the tourist in Berlin--a speech arguing
for the most extreme sort of militarism in a manner that must have made
even some of the Junkers blow their noses dubiously. The disproof need
not be piled up; the America that Roosevelt dreamed of was always a
sort of swollen Prussia, truculent without and regimented within. There
was always a clank of the saber in his discourse; he could not discuss
the tamest matter without swaggering in the best dragoon fashion.
Abbott gets into yet deeper waters when he sets up the doctrine that
the invasion of Belgium threw his darling into an instantaneous and
tremendous fit of moral indignation, and that the curious delay in the
public exhibition thereof, so much discussed since, was due to his
(Abbott's) fatuous interference--a _faux pas_ later regretted with much
bitterness. Unluckily, the evidence he offers leaves me full of doubts.
What the doctrine demands that one believe is simply this: that the man
who, for mere commercial advantage and (in Frederick's famous phrase)
"to make himself talked of in the world," tore up the treaty of 1848
between the United States and Colombia (_geb._ New Granada), whereby
the United States forever guaranteed the "sovereignty and ownership"
of the Colombians in the isthmus of Panama--that this same man,
thirteen years later, was horrified into a fever when Germany, facing
powerful foes on two fronts, tore up the treaty of 1832, guaranteeing,
not the sovereignty, but the bald neutrality of Belgium--a neutrality
already destroyed, according to the evidence before the Germans, by
Belgium's own acts.
It is hard, without an inordinate strain upon the credulity, to
believe any such thing, particularly in view of the fact that this
instantaneous indignation of the most impulsive and vocal of men was
diligently concealed for at least six weeks, with reporters camped upon
his doorstep day and night, begging him to say the very thing that
he left so darkly unsaid. Can one imagine Roosevelt, with red-fire
raging within him and sky-rockets bursting in his veins, holding his
peace for a month and a half? I have no doubt whatever that Abbott,
as he says, desired to avoid embarrassing Dr. Wilson--but think of
Roosevelt showing any such delicacy! For one, I am not equal to the
feat. All that unprecedented reticence, in fact, is far more readily
explicable on other and less lofty grounds. What really happened I
presume to guess. My guess is that Roosevelt, like the great majority
of other Americans, was _not_ instantly and automatically outraged by
the invasion of Belgium. On the contrary, he probably viewed it as a
regrettable, but not unexpected or unparalleled device of war--if
anything, as something rather thrillingly gaudy and effective--a fine
piece of virtuosity, pleasing to a military connoisseur. But then came
the deluge of Belgian atrocity stories, and the organized campaign to
enlist American sympathies. It succeeded very quickly. By the middle of
August the British press bureau was in full swing; by the beginning of
September the country was flooded with inflammatory stuff; six weeks
after the war opened it was already hazardous for a German in America
to state his country's case. Meanwhile, the Wilson administration had
declared for neutrality, and was still making a more or less sincere
effort to practice it, at least on the surface. Here was Roosevelt's
opportunity, and he leaped to it with sure instinct. On the one side
was the adminstration that he detested, and that all his self-interest
(e. g., his yearning to get back his old leadership and to become
President again in 1917) prompted him to deal a mortal blow, and on the
other side was a ready-made issue, full of emotional possibilities,
stupendously pumped up by extremely clever propaganda, and so far
unembraced by any other rabble-rouser of the first magnitude. Is it
any wonder that he gave a whoop, jumped upon his cayuse, and began
screaming for war? In war lay the greatest chance of his life. In war
lay the confusion and destruction of Wilson, and the melodramatic
renaissance of the Rough Rider, the professional hero, the national
Barbarossa.
In all this, of course, I strip the process of its plumes and spangles,
and expose a chain of causes and effects that Roosevelt himself, if he
were alive, would denounce as grossly contumelious to his native purity
of spirit--and perhaps in all honesty. It is not necessary to raise
any doubts as to that honesty. No one who has given any study to the
developement and propagation of political doctrine in the United States
can have failed to notice how the belief in issues among politicians
tends to run in exact ratio to the popularity of those issues. Let the
populace begin suddenly to swallow a new panacea or to take fright at
a new bugaboo, and almost instantly nine-tenths of the master-minds
of politics begin to believe that the panacea is a sure cure for
all the malaises of, the republic, and the bugaboo an immediate and
unbearable menace to all law, order and domestic tranquillity. At the
bottom of this singular intellectual resilience, of course, there is a
good deal of hard calculation; a man must keep up with the procession
of crazes, or his day is swiftly done. But in it there are also
considerations a good deal more subtle, and maybe less discreditable.
For one thing, a man devoted professionally to patriotism and the
wisdom of the fathers is very apt to come to a resigned sort of
acquiescence in all the doctrinaire rubbish that lies beneath the
national scheme of things--to believe, let us say, if not that the
plain people are gifted with an infallible sagacity, then at least
that they have an inalienable right to see their follies executed.
Poll-parroting nonsense as a matter of daily routine, the politician
ends by assuming that it is sense, even though he doesn't believe
it. For another thing, there is the contagion of mob enthusiasm--a
much underestimated murrain. We all saw what it could do during the
war--college professors taking their tune from the yellow journals,
the rev. clergy performing in the pulpit like so many Liberty Loan
orators in five-cent moving-picture houses, hysteria grown epidemic
like the influenza. No man is so remote and arctic that he is wholly
safe from that contamination; it explains many extravagant phenomena of
a democratic society; in particular, it explains why the mob leader is
so often a victim to his mob.
Roosevelt, a perfectly typical politician, devoted to the trade, not
primarily because he was gnawed by ideals, but because he frankly
enjoyed its rough-and-tumble encounters and its gaudy rewards, was
probably moved in both ways--and also by the hard calculation that
I have mentioned. If, by any ineptness of the British press-agents,
tear-squeezers and orphan-exhibitors, indignation over the invasion
of Belgium had failed to materialize--if, worse still, some gross
infringement of American rights by the English had caused it to be
forgotten completely--if, finally, Dr. Wilson had been whooping for war
with the populace firmly against him--in such event it goes without
saying that the moral horror of Dr. Roosevelt would have stopped short
at a very low amperage, and that he would have refrained from making it
the center of his polity. But with things as they were, lying neatly to
his hand, he permitted it to take on an extraordinary virulence, and
before long all his old delight in German militarism had been converted
into a lofty detestation of German militarism, and its chief spokesman
on this side of the Atlantic became its chief opponent. Getting rid
of that old delight, of course, was not easily achieved. The concrete
enthusiasm could be throttled, but the habit of mind remained. Thus
one beheld the curious spectacle of militarism belabored in terms of
militarism--of the Kaiser arraigned in unmistakably _kaiserliche_ tones.
Such violent swallowings and regurgitations were no novelties to the
man. His whole political career was marked, in fact, by performances
of the same sort. The issues that won him most votes were issues that,
at bottom, he didn't believe in; there was always a mental reservation
in his rhetoric. He got into politics, not as a tribune of the plain
people, but as an amateur reformer of the snobbish type common in the
eighties, by the _Nation_ out of the Social Register. He was a young
Harvard man scandalized by the discovery that his town was run by
men with such names as Michael O'Shaunnessy and Terence Googan--that
his social inferiors were his political superiors. His sympathies
were essentially anti-democratic. He had a high view of his private
position as a young fellow of wealth and education. He believed in
strong centralization--the concentration of power in a few hands, the
strict regimentation of the nether herd, the abandonment of democratic
platitudes. His heroes were such Federalists as Morris and Hamilton; he
made his first splash in the world by writing about them and praising
them. Worse, his daily associations were with the old Union League
crowd of high-tariff Republicans--men almost apoplectically opposed
to every movement from below--safe and sane men, highly conservative
and suspicious men--the profiteers of peace, as they afterward became
the profiteers of war. His early adventures in politics were not
very fortunate, nor did they reveal any capacity for leadership.
The bosses of the day took him in rather humorously, played him for
what they could get out of him, and then turned him loose. In a few
years he became disgusted and went West. Returning after a bit, he
encountered catastrophe: as a candidate for Mayor of New York he was
drubbed unmercifully. He went back to the West. He was, up to this
time, a comic figure--an anti-politician victimized by politicians, a
pseudo-aristocrat made ridiculous by the mob-masters he detested.
But meanwhile something was happening that changed the whole color of
the political scene, and was destined, eventually, to give Roosevelt
his chance. That something was a shifting in what might be called
the foundations of reform. Up to now it had been an essentially
aristocratic movement--superior, sniffish and anti-democratic. But
hereafter it took on a strongly democratic color and began to adopt
democratic methods. More, the change gave it new life. What Harvard,
the Union League Club and the _Nation_ had failed to accomplish,
the plain people now undertook to accomplish. This invasion of
the old citadel of virtue was first observed in the West, and its
manifestations out there must have given Roosevelt a good deal more
disquiet than satisfaction. It is impossible to imagine him finding
anything to his taste in the outlandish doings of the Populists, the
wild schemes of the pre-Bryan dervishes. His instincts were against
all that sort of thing. But as the movement spread toward the East it
took on a certain urbanity, and by the time it reached the seaboard
it had begun to be quite civilized. With this new brand of reform
Roosevelt now made terms. It was full of principles that outraged all
his pruderies, but it at least promised to work. His entire political
history thereafter, down to the day of his death, was a history of
compromises with the new forces--of a gradual yielding, for strategic
purposes, to ideas that were intrinsically at odds with his congenital
prejudices. When, after a generation of that sort of compromising, the
so-called Progressive party was organized and he seized the leadership
of it from the Westerners who had founded it, he performed a feat
of wholesale englutination that must forever hold a high place upon
the roll of political prodigies. That is to say, he swallowed at one
gigantic gulp, and out of the same herculean jug, the most amazing
mixture of social, political and economic perunas ever got down by
one hero, however valiant, however athirst--a cocktail made up of all
the elixirs hawked among the boobery in his time, from woman suffrage
to the direct primary, and from the initiative and referendum to the
short ballot, and from prohibition to public ownership, and from
trust-busting to the recall of judges.
This homeric achievement made him the head of the most tatterdemalion
party ever seen in American politics--a party composed of such
incompatible ingredients and hung together so loosely that it began
to disintegrate the moment it was born. In part it was made up of
mere disordered enthusiasts--believers in anything and everything,
pathetic victims of the credulity complex, habitual followers of
jitney messiahs, incurable hopers and snufflers. But in part it was
also made up of rice converts like Roosevelt himself--men eager for
office, disappointed by the old parties, and now quite willing to
accept any aid that half-idiot doctrinaires could give them. I have no
doubt that Roosevelt himself, carried away by the emotional storms of
the moment and especially by the quasi-religious monkey-shines that
marked the first Progressive convention, gradually convinced himself
that at least some of the doctrinaires, in the midst of all their
imbecility, yet preached a few ideas that were workable, and perhaps
even sound. But at bottom he was against them, and not only in the
matter of their specific sure cures, but also in the larger matter of
their childish faith in the wisdom and virtue of the plain people.
Roosevelt, for all his fluent mastery of democratic counter-words,
democratic gestures and all the rest of the armamentarium of the
mob-master, had no such faith in his heart of hearts. He didn't believe
in democracy; he believed simply in government. His remedy for all
the great pangs and longings of existence was not a dispersion of
authority, but a hard concentration of authority. He was not in favor
of unlimited experiment; he was in favor of a rigid control from
above, a despotism of inspired prophets and policemen. He was not for
democracy as his followers understood democracy, and as it actually is
and must be; he was for a paternalism of the true Bismarckian pattern,
almost of the Napoleonic or Ludendorffian pattern--a paternalism
concerning itself with all things, from the regulation of coal-mining
and meat-packing to the regulation of spelling and marital rights. His
instincts were always those of the property-owning Tory, not those
of the romantic Liberal. All the fundamental objects of Liberalism
--free speech, unhampered enterprise, the least possible governmental
interference--were abhorrent to him. Even when, for campaign purposes,
he came to terms with the Liberals his thoughts always ranged far
afield. When he tackled the trusts the thing that he had in his mind's
eye was not the restoration of competition but the subordination of
all private trusts to one great national trust, with himself at its
head. And when he attacked the courts it was not because they put their
own prejudice before the law but because they refused to put _his_
prejudices before the law.
In all his career no one ever heard him make an argument for the rights
of the citizen; his eloquence was always expended in expounding the
duties of the citizen. I have before me a speech in which he pleaded
for "a spirit of kindly justice toward every man and woman," but that
seems to be as far as he ever got in that direction--and it was the
gratuitous justice of the absolute monarch that he apparently had in
mind, not the autonomous and inalienable justice of a free society.
The duties of the citizen, as he understood them, related not only to
acts, but also to thoughts. There was, to his mind, a simple body of
primary doctrine, and dissent from it was the foulest of crimes. No
man could have been more bitter against opponents, or more unfair to
them, or more ungenerous. In this department, indeed, even so gifted
a specialist in dishonorable controversy as Dr. Wilson has seldom
surpassed him. He never stood up to a frank and chivalrous debate.
He dragged herrings across the trail. He made seductive faces at the
gallery. He capitalized his enormous talents as an entertainer, his
rank as a national hero, his public influence and consequence. The
two great law-suits in which he was engaged were screaming burlesques
upon justice. He tried them in the newspapers before ever they were
called; he befogged them with irrelevant issues; his appearances in
court were not the appearances of a witness standing on a level with
other witnesses, but those of a comedian sure of his crowd. He was, in
his dealings with concrete men as in his dealings with men in the mass,
a charlatan of the very highest skill--and there was in him, it goes
without saying, the persuasive charm of the charlatan as well as the
daring deviousness, the humanness of naïveté as well as the humanness
of chicane. He knew how to woo--and not only boobs. He was, for all his
ruses and ambuscades, a jolly fellow.
It seems to be forgotten that the current American theory that
political heresy should be put down by force, that a man who disputes
whatever is official has no rights in law or equity, that he is lucky
if he fares no worse than to lose his constitutional benefits of free
speech, free assemblage and the use of the mails--it seems to be
forgotten that this theory was invented, not by Dr. Wilson, but by
Roosevelt. Most Liberals, I suppose, would credit it, if asked, to
Wilson. He has carried it to extravagant lengths; he is the father
superior of all the present advocates of it; he will probably go
down into American history as its greatest prophet. But it was first
clearly stated, not in any Wilsonian bull to the right-thinkers of all
lands, but in Roosevelt's proceedings against the so-called Paterson
anarchists. You will find it set forth at length in an opinion prepared
for him by his Attorney-General, Charles J. Bonaparte, another curious
and almost fabulous character, also an absolutist wearing the false
whiskers of a democrat. Bonaparte furnished the law, and Roosevelt
furnished the blood and iron. It was an almost ideal combination;
Bonaparte had precisely the touch of Italian finesse that the Rough
Rider always lacked. Roosevelt believed in the Paterson doctrine--in
brief, that the Constitution does not throw its cloak around
heretics--to the end of his days. In the face of what he conceived to
be contumacy to revelation his fury took on a sort of lyrical grandeur.
There was nothing too awful for the culprit in the dock. Upon his head
were poured denunciations as violent as the wildest interdicts of a
mediæval pope.