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 fellowmen:
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.