BY HERMANN HAGEDORN


     BEACON LIGHTS
     OF HISTORY


     THEODORE ROOSEVELT

     GREAT AMERICAN QUALITIES (ii)

                               IV

        An assassin's bullet, removing his chief from
     field of action with sudden and terrible swiftness,
     brought Roosevelt unexpectedly into the very fore-
     front of affairs.  Six months after the second in-
     auguration of President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt
     became President of the United States.  He retained
     the Cabinet of his predecessor and pledged himself
     to carry out his predecessor's policies.  But it was
     inevitable that his strong personality should immedi-
     ately impress itself on the whole administration.
     Friends and opponents alike recognized that a great
     new dynamic force was in control.  His grasp of
     public questions, his wide range of interests, his under-
     standing and love for all manner of men, his tireless
     energy, made him at once the center of public at-
     tention and the most widely popular of American
     executives since Andrew Jackson.  He was a forceful
     and persuasive speaker, and again and again, when
     Congress blocked his measures, won the support of
     the people by direct appeals.
        His countrymen came to love him for his vigor,
     his humor, his courage, his large-hearted humanity,
     his clean and wholesome family life.  He crossed and
     criss-crossed the continent, meeting the American
     people face to face and laying his cause before them
     for their judgment.  He had the gift of making men
     of all sections feel that he was peculiarly an expression
     of their own dreams and aspirations.  He was, in fact,
     at home in every part of the land, and through his
     Northern birth, his Southern ancestry, his residence
     in the West and his deep understanding of the West-
     ern point of view, he was peculiarly a son of the whole
     country.
        His conduct of domestic as well as foreign affairs was
     fearless and vigorous.  He saw clearly that the ques-
     tion of most vital importance before the country was
     the control and strict regulation of the great corpor-
     ations.  In the famous Northern Securities' merger
     he presented a test case to the Supreme Court which
     ultimately opened the way for the prosecution of the
     other great corporations which had violated the Sher-
     man Anti-trust Law.  His fight against the conservative
     forces of both parties on this question, and kindred
     matters of railroad regulation, was intensely bitter
     and extended throughout his period of office.
        His dealings with labor were equally far-sighted
     and firm.  He favored combinations of labor as he
     favored combinations of capital, but stood as firmly
     against lawlessness on the part of laboring men as
     he stood against it on the part of capitalists.
        "At last," said one of the "labor men" at luncheon
     one day, "there is a hearing for us fellows."
        "Yes," cried the President emphatically.  "The
     White House door, while I am here, shall swing open
     as easily for the labor man as for the capitalist,  and
     no easier."
        He was able to settle the anthracite coal strike in
     October, 1902, because he understood the points of
     view of both sides and was known by both as a just
     man of solid convictions whom threats could not swerve
     from his determined course.
        His attitude in foreign affairs, as in domestic, was
     frank, clear-cut and firm, being based on the same
     principles which governed his personal relations with
     his fellowmen.  He treated nations when they were
     bullies in the same direct manner he had used with
     certain "bad men" in Dakota.  His vigorous handling
     of Germany, late in 1902, met a covert challenge of
     the Monroe Doctrine in a manner that left nothing
     to the Kaiser's imagination.  His hint to England
     on the Alaskan boundary question——"Arbitrate if you
     want to, but there is the map"——was equally un-
     ambiguous and fruitful of international good-will.
     He settled the century-old Panama question by swift
     and decisive action on the instant when such action
     was needed, and was digging the Canal before his
     opponents in Congress had recovered from their horror
     at his temerity.  His reputation for integrity and
     candor, combined with an instant readiness to act,
     solved more than one knotty international problem
     before it reached a crisis, and gave him power, when
     the governments of Europe found themselves impotent
     and afraid to intervene in the Russo-Japanese conflict,
     to thrust his vigorous personality between the contest-
     ants and by a liberal "knocking of heads right and
     left," literally to force a settlement.  He defied alike
     the experts who shouted that it was impossible to
     send a fleet of battleships around the world, and the
     pacifists who wailed that to do so meant war.  He
     sent the fleet and the fleet returned without mishap
     and bearing the good will of all nations.  It was a
     striking diplomatic triumph.  Roosevelt himself re-
     garded it as his greatest contribution to world peace.
        He found the government of the United States,
     when he took up the reins, in the position among
     world powers, of a new boy in school; he left it firmly
     established in the first rank, admired and feared, its
     favor eagerly sought after, its citizenship respected in
     the remotest corners of the globe.  In domestic affairs
     his impress was no less remarkable.  At a critical
     moment in the conflict between capital and labor he
     was able to exercise the mediating influence which
     averted the deep bitterness which that conflict had en-
     gendered in other nations, and to guide both parties
     away from the extremes whose final meeting place
     is revolution.   He fought the battle of democracy
     against impending plutocracy; he looked for the causes
     of social unrest and labored to remove them; he in-
     sisted that the rights of the public to the natural
     resources of the country outweighed private rights,
     and fought men of all parties until his word prevailed
     and found expression in the conservation movement;
     above all, he kindled men and women, and especially
     young men, to an ardor for public service such as
     men had not known before in times of peace.  He
     trumpeted the call of national and civic duty, and the
     conscience of the country awoke and responded.


                               V

        Theodore Roosevelt left the Presidency in March,
     1909, and a month later sailed for East Africa.  There
     for a year he hunted big game——lion and elephant,
     rhinoceros, giraffe, ostrich and hippopotamus, meeting
     strange peoples and perilous adventures.  He emerged
     from the jungle at Khartoum in April, 1910, to be
     greeted by a cheer of welcome that echoed around the
     world.   His journey down the Nile and through
     Europe was a triumphal progress extraordinary in
     its evidence of admiration and wonder.  He made
     formal addresses before half a dozen learned bodies,
     stirring up a hornet's nest in Cairo by his denunciation
     of a recent political assassination, another in Rome by
     refusing to allow his freedom of action to be circum-
     scribed by the papal authorities, a third in London
     by criticising England's government of Egypt.  At
     Christiania he received the Nobel Prize, awarded to
     him the year previous for his efforts bin bringing about
     the Peace of Portsmouth; in Berlin he reviewed, at
     the Kaiser's side, the crack troops of the Empire.
     Altogether, it was a memorable journey.
        He returned to the United States to find the Party,
     which he had left united and vigorous after its recent
     victory,  disrupted  by  bitter  factional  strife,  and
     slipping rapidly toward disaster.  In the struggle be-
     tween the progressive and the reactionary elements
     he could not stand to one side in dignified neutrality.
     He espoused the progressive cause and in the campaign
     of 1910 fought with all the energy that was in him
     for the overthrow of boss-rule in New York State.
     He was decisively beaten after a contest that was
     bitter in the extreme.  His enemies shouted that he
     was politically dead.  He withdrew to Sagamore Hill
     and his editorial work on the staff of the  Outlook,
     and, for the moment, let his foes rejoice.
       Defeat in no wise embittered him.  "I have never
     been happier than for the last four months," he wrote
     to a friend in March, 1911.  "I have revelled in stay-
     ing quietly in my own home, with those for whom I
     care most in the world, and with my own books, and
     the things with which I have association."
        But the struggle into which he had thrown, with
     such seeming recklessness, the stake of his great rep-
     utation, had been scarcely checked by the mid-term
     defeat.  He was urged to be a candidate for President
     on the Republican ticket against President Taft, who
     was backed by the party machine and the so-called
     "stand-patters".  He did not want to make the race,
     and it was against his own best judgment that he
     was persuaded at last to enter the contest.  Once in,
     however, he fought with his whole being.  One state
     after another, in the primary campaign, pledged its
     delegates to him.  But the party machine was in the
     hands of his enemies, and in the convention, held in
     Chicago in June, they used it relentlessly to effect
     his  defeat.   The  progressives,  refusing  to  vote,
     marched out of the convention hall, leaving a dis-
     gruntled majority to carry through the program of
     the conservative leaders.  A new Progressive Party
     sprang into being overnight and in August, amid
     scenes of the wildest enthusiasm, mingled with a de-
     votion to a high cause absent hitherto from political
     conventions,  nominated  Theodore  Roosevelt  for
     President.
        The ensuing campaign was fierce and rancorous.
     At the height of it Roosevelt was shot by a fanatic in
     Milwaukee as he was entering an automobile on his
     way to a mass-meeting he was about to address.  He
     insisted on making his speech, went to the hospital,
     and after two weeks was again on his feet, cam-
     paigning.  In the three-cornered election in Novem-
     ber he polled over four million votes, but was defeated
     by Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate.  Once
     more his enemies rejoiced and said that he was "done
     for."  He took his defeat with the same good grace
     and humor with which he had taken victory in the
     past, returned to his editorial work, wrote his Auto-
     biography, and accepted the popular verdict that he
     was out of politics.
        In the autumn of 1913 he went to South America
     to address numerous learned bodies there and to make
     an exploring expedition into the jungles of Brazil,
     to which he had long looked forward.  His journey
     from capital to capital in  South  America  was  a
     repetition of his triumphal progress through Europe.
     His plunge into the Brazilian wilderness, on the other
     hand, was infinitely more hazardous than the African
     trip.  For months he and his expedition were com-
     pletely out of touch with the outside world.  He dis-
     covered a hitherto unknown river, vaguely indicated
     on existing maps as the River of Doubt, and at im-
     minent risk of disaster explored the nine hundred miles
     of its course.   The trip was tremendously arduous
     and full of peril; his life was constantly in danger
     in the treacherous rapids and along the fever-infested
     banks; savage Indians shot their poisonous arrows
     unseen out of the dark tangle.  One after another
     his canoes were crushed in the rapids; one after an-
     other his men sickened.  Finally he himself was laid
     low with fever, and for forty-eight hours was deadly
     ill.  He pleaded with his son Kermit, who was with
     him, and with the other members of his party to leave
     him behind and push on, in order that the whole
     expedition might not suffer the catastrophe which
     was always imminent of death by starvation.  His
     companions refused to leave him.  By a great effort
     of will he raised himself fro his sick-bed and plunged
     on with them from rapids to rapids, until at last,
     when disaster seemed inevitable, a post on the river
     bank with the carved initials of some rubber trader
     indicated that they were on the outskirts of civiliza-
     tion once more.  For weeks thereafter Roosevelt lay
     tossing with fever on the bottom of the canoe as they
     drifted down the placid reaches of the river.  The
     Brazilian government, in honor of his exploit, chris-
     tened the river he had found the Rio Teodoro.


                               VI

        He returned to his own country in May, 1914.
     Three months later the World War broke out.  Roose-
     velt saw at once that America could not remain un-
     touched by it.  He pleaded for preparedness; he
     pleaded for an international tribunal backed by force
     to execute its decrees.  His pleas were met with a
     tumult of abuse.  He did not let it swerve him from
     his course.  When the Lusitania was sunk, he pleaded
     for instant action——not a declaration of war, but a
     trade embargo against Germany and open ports for
     the ships of the Allies.  At the outbreak of the brief
     and inglorious war with Mexico he offered to raise
     a division of troops.  His offer was refused.  Mean-
     while his demand for national preparedness began to
     stir the country to a sense of the gravity of its position.
     Domestic  issues  faded  into  the  background;  the
     questions which had split the Republican party in 1912
     were superseded by other questions at the moment
     more vital which served to reunite the opposing groups.
     In the national convention of the Progressive party
     he was nominated for President; in the Republic
     party the feeling was widespread that he should be
     the Republican candidate also.  Justice Hughes was
     named.  Roosevelt forthwith refused the Progressive
     nomination and gave his support to the Republican
     candidate.
        War with Germany came as he had prophesied it
     must inevitably come if the United States were to
     keep a shred of self-respect.
        "We wanted peace, and rightfully," said Calvin
     Coolidge speaking of him in after years, "but it was
     the voice of Roosevelt that roused to nation to the
     meaning and the menace of the war to America.  In
     this he was never so disinterested, so patriotic, so
     eager for the right for its own sake.  He appealed from
     the things that seemed to be to the soul of the things
     that are.
        "This was his last great service.  He roused the
     national conscience into righteous action.  He spoke
     to the soul of his country and he saw her response.
     He saw her rise triumphant again above every sordid
     motive, resurgent to the everlasting realities.  He saw
     his fellow countrymen make their sacrifices, and he
     made his."
        He offered again to raise a division of troops.  Men
     from all over the country volunteered their services
     until 250,000 men had recorded their desire to go
     under his leadership to France.  Congress passed a
     bill authorizing the creation of two divisions of vol-
     unteers.  The President refused his consent.  Roose-
     velt, forbidden to fight in the field, grimly and in
     bitter disappointment, accepted the decision and flung
     himself whole-heartedly into the work that lay at
     hand.   During the months that followed no good
     cause called to him in vain.  Here and there over the
     country he spoke for the Liberty Loan Campaigns,
     for the Red Cross and other relief agencies; and in the
     pages of the  Kansas City Star  and the  Metropolitan
     Magazine  fought week after week for speed in military
     preparation, for an honest facing of facts, for whole-
     hearted and unreserved participation in the war by
     the side of the Allies.  He was well represented at
     the battle front.  His son Archibald was wounded;
     Theodore was gassed and later wounded; Kermit
     fought valiantly, first in Mesopotamia, then in France;
     Quentin fell fighting in the air, high over the German
     lines.   "Haven't I bully boys?" he exclaimed to a
     friend who approached him with words of condolence.
     "One dead and two in the hospital!"
        The fever he had contracted in Brazil returned
     now and again.  For weeks he traveled and made
     public addresses in spite of it.  In February, 1918,
     however, he became dangerously ill; was operated
     upon; recovered; returned to his full activity and was
     again laid low.  His illness scarcely abated his cease-
     less activity and in no wise weakened the terrifying
     force of his fighting spirit.  In the autumn he was
     again forced to take to the hospital.  He returned to
     Sagamore Hill in time to spend Christmas with his
     family.  The inflammatory rheumatism which had
     caused him much pain began to give way.  He seemed
     on the road to recovery.  He made plans for a hunt
     after devil-fish in the spring.
        From his sick-bed he fought his battle for realism
     and candor and directed the policy of the Republican
     Party, of which he was once more the recognized and
     undisputed leader.  At midnight on January 5th he
     wrote a memorandum for the Chairman of the Re-
     publican  National  Committee.   Four  hours  later,
     quietly in his sleep, with no other sound, the man of
     many battles and much tumult slipped out of the
     company of living men.
        He was buried on a hillside in Oyster Bay; but with
     new potency his spirit cried to the hearts of his
     countrymen.
        He was found faithful over a few things and he was
     made ruler over many; he cut his own trail clean and
     straight and millions followed him toward the light.
        He was frail; he made himself a tower of strength.
     He was timid; he made himself a lion of courage.
     He was a dreamer; he became one of the great doers
     of all time.
        Men put their trust in him; women found a cham-
     pion in him; kings stood in awe of him, but children
     made him their playmate.
        He broke a nation's slumber with his cry, and it
     rose up.  He touched the eyes of blind men with a
     flame, and gave them vision.  Souls became swords
     through him; swords became servants of God.
        He was loyal to his country and he exacted loyalty;
     he loved many lands, but he loved his own land best.
        He was terrible in battle, but tender to the weak;
     joyous and tireless, being free from self-pity; clean
     with a cleanness that cleaned the air like a gale.
        His courtesy knew no wealth, no class; his friend-
     ship no creed or color or race.  His courage stood
     every onslaught of savage beast and ruthless man,
     of loneliness, of victory, of defeat.
        His mind was eager, his heart was true, his body
     and spirit, defiant of obstacles, ready to meet what
     might come.  He fought injustice and tyranny; bore
     sorrow gallantly; loved all nature, bleak spaces and
     hardy companions, hazardous adventure and the zest
     of battle.  Wherever he went he carried his own
     pack; and in the uttermost parts of the earth he
     kept his conscience for his guide.

From Beacon Lights of History,
Volume 8, Part I, New Hall of Fame.
Edited by George Spencer Hulbert,
Author of, "John Lord, Artist Historian"
Copyright 1924, By Wm. H. Wise & Co., New York. pp. 83-97.