More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For the first time it was borne in upon me that wars were not only not necessary, but even ridiculous; that they were wholly man-made.… [I] questioned Socrates’ conclusion that to know the good is to practice it. Humanity is simply not built like that. Except for a few savage or half-savage tribes, we all know that war profits no one, that its only result in the world, in the words of Croesus, is that “In war the fathers bury their sons, whereas in peace the sons bury their fathers,”—the normal course. But we are no more normal than we are certain to practice the good if we know it. Those bits
...more
He did not notice, or bother to notice, the subtler signals they sent forth: the Tsar’s unconscious separation of himself from his subjects, the Kaiser’s readiness to speak for every person on the planet, the Mikado’s enigmatic formality. But neither did he let the praise go to his head.
This was carrying fervor too far, but Roosevelt saw no harm in encouraging political rhetoric more extreme than any he would use on Congress himself. Let Baker, Steffens, et al. do what advance guards had always done in battle: draw enemy fire from both sides while Caesar advanced down the middle. He responded to the page proofs, therefore, with the utmost delicacy:
More than any other previous occupant of the White House, Roosevelt understood that the way to manipulate reporters was to let them imagine they were helping shape policy. A “consultation” here, a confidence shared there, and the scribe was transformed into a pen for hire.
“You may not agree with me, Mr. President, but I believe that we cannot stop short of governmental ownership of the railroads.” Roosevelt became vehement. He said that he knew, better than anyone else, how “inefficient and undependable” federal employees were. It would be “a disaster” to have them in charge of free enterprises.
“Here is the thing you must bear in mind,” Roosevelt said, clearly irritated. “I do not represent public opinion: I represent the public. There is a wide difference between the two, between the real interests of the public, and the public’s opinion of these interests. I must represent not the excited opinion of the West, but the real interests of the whole people.”
David Graham Phillips’s literary style exemplified what was emerging as a common characteristic of the progressives: their fierce, preachy, perpetual grimness. They could no more convey the humor of a situation than they could view a perquisite without frowning.
Or maybe they honestly had a point.
Washington listened with misgivings as the President told him that he was about to dismiss 167 Negro soldiers, without honor and without trial. He had just been in Atlanta, and sensed that Roosevelt was making a terrible mistake. American blacks would have trouble understanding why “our friend” (as Washington always called him) should rush to judgment at such a time, without giving a single man of the Twenty-fifth Infantry a chance to testify in court. Even more distressing was the likelihood that redneck racists everywhere would applaud Roosevelt’s willingness to act on what passed for
...more
Washington was right. Roosevelt was wrong.
NEW YORK REPUBLICAN CLUB AND MANY OTHERS APPEALING FOR A SUSPENSION OF THE ORDER DISCHARGING COLORED TROOPS UNTIL YOUR RETURN.… MUCH AGITATION ON THE SUBJECT AND IT MAY BE WELL TO CONVINCE PEOPLE OF FAIRNESS OF HEARING BY GRANTING REHEARING. TAFT. If press reports were to be believed, Taft had actually granted such a suspension, pending the President’s return. Roosevelt was quick to countermand it. “Discharge is not to be suspended,” he wired back, “unless there are new facts of such importance as to warrant your cabling me. I care nothing whatever for the yelling of either the politicians or
...more
In this area, Taft actually looks more progressive than TR.
Read in sequence, the documents showed that every authority concerned, from Major Penrose to the President, had proceeded on an assumption of guilt and challenged the soldiers to prove their own innocence.
Beyond ambition, and in contrast to his otherwise negative disposition, Foraker had a passion for racial justice. As a young Union soldier, he had wanted the Civil War to go on “until slavery is abolished, and every colored man is made a citizen, and is given precisely the same civil and political rights that the white man
has.” Political opponents accused him of caring only for the Negro voters of Ohio. He certainly never professed any particular fondness for blacks in general. Senator Foraker merely felt the same about the Constitution in 1906 as Private Foraker had felt in 1862.
“A blacker,” he wrote, “never stained the annals of our Army.”
Oh, Teddy, Teddy!
The Secretary (who had accompanied Roosevelt to the Gridiron dinner) was actually a reluctant party to the Brownsville discharges. He had been on vacation at the time of the incident, and the first prosecutorial steps had been taken in Oyster Bay. Taft’s subsequent attempt to suspend the discharges and get a “rehearing” of the evidence against the soldiers had been prompted by an emotional appeal on their behalf from the president of the National Association of Colored Women. Most recently, he had annoyingly drawn Roosevelt’s attention to a conflict in the testimony of the eyewitness who “saw”
...more
Roosevelt had tried, and failed, to make the Golden State observe the Golden Rule. Some of the most passionate language in his last Message to Congress had been devoted to a plea for respect for Japan as “one of the greatest of civilized nations.” He noted that San Franciscans had been happy to accept one hundred thousand dollars in earthquake-emergency aid from the Japanese in 1906, before shutting their relatives out of the city school system and abusing them in other ways, simply “because of their efficiency as workers.”
So far ahead in some ways.
The only flaw in this commitment was something hard for imperialistic minds to understand: the government of a federal republic, while able to wage war, could not tell a local school board what to do.
The idea of arms limitation appealed to Roosevelt in theory. However, “I do not feel that England and the United States should impair the efficiency of their navies if it is permitted to other Powers, which may some day be hostile to them, to go on building up and increasing their military strength.”
“Ultra-conservatives who object to cutting out the abuses will do well to remember that if the popular feeling does become strong, many of those upon whom they rely to defend them will be the first to turn against them.”
Good point.
These new conditions make it necessary to shackle cunning as in the past we have shackled force. The vast individual and corporate fortunes, the vast combinations of capital, which have marked the development of our industrial system, create new conditions, and necessitate a change from the old attitude of the State and the Nation toward the rules regulating the acquisition and untrammeled business use of property.
“Every purseproud individual, as well as reactionary dullard, always considers a great character insane. In their littleness of heart, of soul, he seems so to them; but the people know that Frederick the Great was not insane, although he was called so all over Europe, just as well as they know and understand Theodore Roosevelt.”
Bryan’s presence (and controversial placement next to Moody) signaled the democratic nature of tomorrow’s conference “on the conservation of natural resources.” When wood and water were endangered, the political differences between men of power dissolved. To Roosevelt’s regret, his only living predecessor, Grover Cleveland, was unable to attend because of illness.
Applause again surged, acting as a drumroll to his next, thematic sentence: “The Constitution of the United States thus grew in large part out of the necessity for united action in the wise use of our natural resources.”
Boom!
But the mere thought of the President being, at last, “out of it” was enough to make Adams realize that there would soon be none left of his old Washington salon—excepting Henry Cabot Lodge, who was as much a cold stone statue, these days, as any of the capital’s growing population of sculpted statesmen. Whatever else might be said of Roosevelt, he had vigor di vita.
One estimate of Taft’s strength went even higher, to more than six hundred delegates. There was no question as to whose popularity, whose policies, whose rhetoric, whose patronage, and whose mastery of press relations had pumped up this formidable total. Reluctant or not, Taft could hardly avoid being seen as the inevitable successor of an irresistible party leader.
LaFollette was especially disturbed by Taft’s choice of “Sunny Jim” Sherman, a big, bluff conservative widely seen as a stooge for Speaker Cannon. All observers were agreed, however, that the Republican ticket, at five hundred pounds and counting, was the heaviest package ever offered to American voters.
“New issues are coming up. I see them. People are going to discuss economic issues more and more: the tariff, currency, banks. They are hard questions, and I am not deeply interested in them: my problems are moral problems, and my teaching has been plain morality.”
Democratic campaign planners felt that Taft’s biggest asset—his presidential backing—had counted more at the Republican Convention than it would on Election Day. By then, Roosevelt would be, ideologically, a spent force, and unless Taft built a big new political personality for himself, voters might well decide that twelve years of Republican continuity were enough.
“I came to the conclusion before the service was over that the President was at heart an Episcopalian, whatever his earlier training might have been.” Asked afterward what his favorite hymns were, Roosevelt listed “How Firm a Foundation,” followed by “Holy, Holy, Holy,” “Jerusalem the Golden,” and “The Son of God Goes Forth to War.”
He was everybody’s favorite fat uncle from childhood, dispensing coins and lollipops.
Taft came to Washington only once, on 18 October. He was fresh from a tour of the Baptist South, and feeling somewhat bruised by the hostility of evangelicals toward his Unitarian faith. Roosevelt sympathetically went to church with him. “I did this,” he wrote Kermit, “hoping that it would attract the attention of sincere but rather ignorant Protestants who support me, and would make them tend to support Taft also.”
“You have heard some things said against my administration, Archie, but they are nothing to what you will hear when I am completely robbed of power and in Africa. But when the history of this period is written down, I believe my administration will be known as an administration of ideals.”
In fact, he was making a special effort not to distract attention from the new President of the United States. An occasional curt nod indicated his approval of points made in Taft’s subsequent speech.
Less solidly but equally enduringly, he left behind a folk consensus that he had been the most powerfully positive American leader since Abraham Lincoln. He had spent much of his two terms crossing and recrossing the country, east and west, south and north, reminding anyone who would listen to him that he embodied all America’s variety and the
whole of its unity; that what he had made of his own life was possible to all, even to boys born as sickly as himself.
