Part 10

“When I say a square deal I mean a square deal; exactly as much a square deal for the rich man as for the poor man; but no more. Let each stand on his merits, receive what is due him, and be judged according to his deserts. To more he is not entitled, and less he shall not have.”

“This government was formed with, as its basic idea, the principle of treating each man on his worth as a man, of paying no heed to whether he was rich or poor, no heed to his creed or social standing, but only to the way in which he performed his duties to himself, to his neighbor, to the state. From this principle we cannot afford to vary by so much as a hand’s breadth.”

It would be a mistake to think that while attacking the evils of corporate power he did not also attack those men of Bolshevik tendencies who out of mere discontent, tried to stir up class feeling.

This is what he had to say about these men:

“In dealing with both labor and capital and the questions affecting both corporations and trade unions, there is one matter more important to remember than aught else, and that is the infinite harm done by preachers of mere discontent. These are the men who seek to excite a violent class hatred against all men of wealth. They seek to turn wise and proper movements for the better control of corporations and for doing away with the abuses connected with wealth into a campaign of hysterical excitement and falsehood in which the aim is to inflame to madness the brutal passions of mankind....”

One shudders to think of what fate would have befallen the United States if the monopolies which Roosevelt curbed while he was President had been allowed to flourish until this era of revolution. That the working people of America are contented and peace-loving today is largely due to Roosevelt’s saving them from exploitation by the trusts.

CONSERVING OUR NATURAL WEALTH

Most important in his own estimation and from the standpoint of personal credit, was Roosevelt’s work for the conservation of the natural resources of the country. In May, 1908, he called a conference of the Governors of all the states for this purpose.

The natural wealth of the nation was disappearing at an alarming rate. The forests were being destroyed by wasteful methods of lumbering and by devastating fires. The coal supply was being wastefully handled. Ignorance and greed were exhausting the fisheries. These things needed wise and honest treatment and the conference led to the formation of a National Conservation Commission to take these matters in hand.

PRESIDENTIAL DIVERSIONS

While President Roosevelt coined many expressive terms that still remain as part of American speech--such phrases as “Malefactors of great wealth,” “Speak softly but carry a big stick,” “Swollen fortunes,” originated with him.

He branded so many men as liars that a newspaper humorist coined the name “Ananias Club,” and used it to include most of those who had incurred Mr. Roosevelt’s enmity. The name stuck, but it did not deter Mr. Roosevelt from going right on calling a spade a spade.

Roosevelt kept his mind fresh in the stifling political atmosphere of the Capitol by keeping in touch with his Rough Rider and cowboy friends.

In spite of his strenuous battles, Roosevelt always found time for play and diversion while he was an occupant of the White House. He it was who started the army upon a course of physical training that undoubtedly had a bearing upon its efficiency in France. Old swivel-chair officers secretly rebelled against his order that they should show their physical ability by periodical long-distance hikes and rides, but when the President showed that he was willing to lead the way and undergo the same tests, there was nothing to do but submit.

SELECTS TAFT TO SUCCEED HIM

Roosevelt was now confronted by the problem as to whether he should run for a third term. Previously, in a public address, he had made the statement that he would not be a candidate for a third term. If he had listened to the pleadings of his friends and allowed himself to be nominated there is no doubt that he would have been elected.

His answer to the pleas of his admirers and to the voice of perhaps his own ambition was to select William Howard Taft as his successor and to urge his nomination, taking care to let the Republican national convention know that he himself would refuse a nomination. Taft was nominated on the first ballot.

On March 4, 1909, William H. Taft was inaugurated as President of the United States. That day Roosevelt left Washington.

“Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave; to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.”

XIV

The “Bull Moose”

After more than a year’s absence in Africa and Europe, Roosevelt returned to the United States in June, 1910, and again, both by inclination and the compelling force of circumstances, took an active interest in politics.

While Roosevelt was hunting in Africa, there came a sharp division in the Republican party. The conservatives who supported Taft and the rebels who could see no good in his policies developed into bitter factions, each of which tried to win the support of Roosevelt when he returned home crowned with world honors. For a time Roosevelt kept silent, hearing both sides of the matter, weighing the evidence in the dispute, trying to determine whether it was wise to continue the support he had given Taft formerly, or to listen to these new but strong voices that had arisen in his party since he himself left the Presidency.

The first indication of the stand Roosevelt was to take appeared when he let it become known that he approved Gifford Pinchot’s stand in his controversy with Ballinger, whom Taft had supported. He also announced that he opposed certain treaties with Japan and South America which Taft was advocating. As the months passed Taft became the champion of conservative Republicanism, and the forceful personality and progressive spirit of Roosevelt made him the natural leader of the revolting group.

In 1910 Roosevelt made a tour of the country, in which he announced the doctrine of the New Nationalism. He advocated a closer relation between the states and the national government; making economic opportunity equal; conserving the resources of the nation; military preparedness; and the shifting of the viewpoints of the courts from too much emphasis on the security of property and contracts to a greater concern for the welfare of human beings.

To these principles Roosevelt added, in 1912, the issues of direct nominations, preferential primaries, the initiative, the referendum, and the recall for judicial decisions as well as for officials. These reforms he announced as a new Charter for Democracy and when, in 1912, in answer to the appeal of seven Governors, he announced that he would become a candidate for the Presidency, these doctrines were embodied in the platform of his party.

Roosevelt made a typically strenuous fight for the control of delegates to the national Republican Convention, and when he was defeated he and his supporters created the Progressive party, by which at Chicago, he was nominated for the Presidency. In response to those who criticised him for seeking a third term when he had previously announced that he would not accept another nomination, he explained that he had meant three consecutive terms.

It was while he was conducting a whirlwind campaign for election that he was shot by a crank. The shooting occurred in Milwaukee. Roosevelt was entering the automobile that was to drive him to the meeting place when the fanatic fired at him. The bullet lodged in his shoulder. With characteristic dauntlessness, Roosevelt insisted on going on the platform, where he told the waiting multitude that he had been shot, and then went on to deliver a rousing speech that lasted over an hour.

When Woodrow Wilson heard of the assault upon Roosevelt, he chivalrously offered to discontinue his own campaign, but the Colonel refused this concession. After a few days spent in recuperation he resumed his speaking tour with undiminished vigor. In the Presidential election which followed he received eighty-eight electoral votes. He had divided the Republican party in all states. In twenty-eight of the states he received a majority over Taft. Through this division in the Republican ranks, Woodrow Wilson became President.

WORLD PEACE

While Roosevelt and Wilson were for the most part in opposition to each other, some have wrongly said, with regard to the proposal for a league of nations, that Roosevelt was backward and reactionary in his attitude. This is directly confuted by the prophetic speech he delivered at Christiania, Norway, May 5, 1910, while on his world tour. His utterance there shows that fundamentally President Wilson and he were thinking alike on this subject:

“Something should be done as soon as possible to check the growth of armaments, especially naval armaments, by international agreement. No one power could or should act by itself; for it is eminently undesirable, from the standpoint of peace and righteousness, that a power which really does believe in peace should place itself at the mercy of some rival which may at bottom have no such belief and no intention of acting on it.

“But, granted sincerity of purpose, the great powers of the world should find no insurmountable difficulty in reaching an agreement which would put an end to the present costly and growing extravagances of expenditures on naval armaments. An agreement merely to limit the size of ships would have been very useful a few years ago, and would still be of use; but the agreement should go much further.

“Finally, it would be a master stroke if those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a league of peace, not only to keep peace among themselves, but to prevent by force if necessary, its being broken by others.

“The supreme difficulty in connection with developing the peace work of The Hague arises from the lack of any executive power, of any police power to enforce the decrees of the court. In any community of any size the authority of the courts rests upon actual or potential force; on the existence of a police, or on the knowledge that the able-bodied men of the country are both ready and willing to see that the decrees of judicial and legislative bodies are put into effect.

“In new and wild communities where there is violence, an honest man must protect himself, and until other means of securing his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him to surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community remain there. He should not renounce the right to protect himself by his own efforts until the community is so organized that it can effectively relieve the individual of the duty of putting down violence.

“So it is with nations. Each nation must keep well prepared to defend itself until the establishment of some form of international police power, competent and willing to prevent violence as between nations. As things are now, such powers to command peace throughout the world could best be assured by some combination between those great nations which sincerely desire peace and have no thought themselves of committing aggressions. The combination might at first be only to secure peace within certain definite limits and certain definite conditions; but the ruler or statesman who should bring about such a combination would have earned his place in history for all time and his title to the gratitude of all mankind.”

XV

From White House to Jungle

“Oh, our manhood’s prime vigor! No spirit feels waste, Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. Oh, the wild joys of living! The leaping from rock to rock; The strong rending of boughs from the fir-trees; the cool, silver shock Of the plunge in a pool’s living water; the hunt of the bear, And the sultriness showing the lion is crouched in his lair.

* * * * *

How good is man’s life, the mere living! How fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!”

These splendid lines of Browning were Roosevelt’s outdoor creed. His exploits as a hunter in Africa were merely a development of his life as a naturalist and out-of-door man. At Harvard Roosevelt had devoted himself to a study of natural science, and had even thought seriously of making it his lifework. Politics claimed him then, but always underlying Roosevelt the statesman was Roosevelt the naturalist.

Francis Parkman--hunter, trapper, horticulturist and America’s most interesting historian--was Roosevelt’s example for his life in the open. There was a close relation between the careers of the two men. Parkman was handicapped in health and bad eyesight. Roosevelt, as a youth, had a weak frame and his sight was also poor. Parkman loved Nature and had a passion for writing. He had an indomitable will that enabled him to overcome his physical handicaps and to make a splendid mark in literature. Roosevelt possessed the same qualities.

It was with Parkman in mind that Roosevelt scaled the most difficult peaks of the Alps; plunged in the Canadian wilderness; took up prairie life. As a result of the trained eye and trained ear Roosevelt gained through these experiences, in his books will be found observations of animal life and bird life, and a knowledge of plants and trees that is enlightening to even the experienced naturalist.

John Burroughs, in his book “Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt,” states that when Roosevelt entered Yellowstone Park he wanted all the freedom and solitude possible. The Colonel craved to be alone with Nature. It was evident that he was hungry for the wild and the aboriginal. It was this hunger that came to him periodically and resulted in his going forth on hunting and exploring trips to the Far West, Africa and Brazil.

As an illustration of the fact that it was love of nature itself more than love of killing that drove Roosevelt into the wilds, Burroughs describes how, at their second camp, which they reached in mid-afternoon, their attention was attracted by a strange note in the spruce woods. The question arose as to whether it was a bird or a beast. Their guide thought it was an owl.

“Let’s run that bird down,” said the Colonel to Burroughs.

They ran across a small open plain and at last saw the bird on the peak of a spruce. Burroughs imitated its call, but they could not discern the species of the bird.

“Why did we not think to bring the glasses?” said Roosevelt.

“I will run and get them,” said Burroughs.

“No,” said Roosevelt, “you stay here and keep that bird treed and I will fetch them.”

Off the Colonel went like a boy, returning swiftly with the glasses. Then it was discovered that it was indeed an owl; a pigmy owl, not much larger than a bluebird. Roosevelt was as delighted as if he had slain a grizzly. He had never seen a bird like this before.

At one time Roosevelt and his companions camped at the Yellowstone Canyon, with the river four or five hundred feet below them. Mountain sheep appeared on the opposite side. The rules of the park forbade hunting, so the sheep showed no fear of them. Between the sheep and the riverbed there was a precipice. The question arose among the watchers as to whether these four-footed creatures could pass down this steep declivity to the riverbed. Roosevelt asserted that they could. Then he entered his tent to shave. When the shaving was half completed someone shouted that the sheep were going down. Roosevelt rushed out, with a towel around his throat and one side of his face white with lather. He watched the sure-footed sheep making their descent with great interest. Then he said: “I knew they could do it.”

While Roosevelt was on this trip in the Yellowstone he remarked:

“I heard a Bullock’s-oriole!”

“You may have heard one,” said a man familiar with the country, “but I doubt it. Those birds won’t come for two weeks yet.”

“I caught two bird notes which could not be those of any bird except an oriole,” the Colonel insisted.

“You may have the song twisted,” said another member of the party.

That evening at supper Roosevelt suddenly laid down his knife and fork, exclaiming, “Look! Look!”

On a shrub before the window was a Bullock’s-oriole. This vindication of his hearing pleased the Colonel immensely.

Burroughs, after visiting the Colonel at Sagamore Hill in 1907, wrote that the appearance of a new warbler in the woods “seemed an event that threw the affairs of state and the Presidential succession into the background.” He told a political visitor at that time that it would be impossible for him to discuss politics then as he wanted to talk and hunt birds, and for the purpose he took his visitor with him.

“Fancy,” said Burroughs, “a President of the United States stalking rapidly across bushy fields to the woods, eager as a boy and filled with the one idea of showing to his visitors the black-throated green warbler!”

Roosevelt told Burroughs that when he was President he would sometimes go on bird excursions in the White House grounds. People passing would stop and stare at him as he stood gazing up into the trees.

“No doubt they thought me insane,” he said.

“Yes,” added Mrs. Roosevelt, who was present, “and as I was always with him, they no doubt thought that I was the nurse that had him in charge.”

Roosevelt’s effective war on “nature fakirs” could not have been possible had he not known intimately the habits and nature of birds and animals, and never was he found wanting. Roosevelt’s intense interest in wild animals, it may be noted in passing, showed itself in his early boyhood. Of the minister of his church he demanded to know the nature of a “zeal.”

“What is a zeal?” repeated the puzzled parson.

“You read about him in the Psalms,” said Ted.

The minister picked up his Bible. There he found the answer: “For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.”

IN THE AFRICAN JUNGLE

How Roosevelt should employ his energy when he left the Presidency had been a problem he had thought about for many months before his second term closed.

Roosevelt was surrounded then by his famous “Tennis Cabinet.” This was an elastic term, for the cabinet included not only such old Western friends as Ben Daniels, Seth Bullock, Luther Kelly--who was formerly an army scout against the Sioux--and Abernathy, the wolf hunter, but also men like Leonard Wood, James Garfield, Secretary of the Interior, and Robert Bacon, afterward Secretary of State.

One of the chief of the many athletic diversions of the “Tennis Cabinet” was swimming in the Potomac. Roosevelt in his autobiography tells how one day, when the French Ambassador, Jusserand, was along, the members of the party, including the Ambassador, took off their clothes preliminary to swimming in the river.

Just as they were entering the water someone cried:

“Mr. Ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, you haven’t taken off your gloves!”

The Ambassador promptly replied:

“I think I will leave them on, we might meet ladies!”

Often big game hunters from abroad were entertained by Roosevelt and the “Tennis Cabinet,” and when the Colonel mentioned to this group his ambition to bring his hunting experiences to a grand climax in the wilds of Africa he received the enthusiastic encouragement that one would expect to come from these hunters and sportsmen.

On March 23, 1909, with his son Kermit, he sailed from New York to Naples, thence, by way of Suez, to British East Africa, for a hunting trip in its jungles.

The Smithsonian Institute had commissioned him to collect specimens, and the faunal and floral trophies he brought back from this almost unknown country show that he fulfilled this part of his mission with brilliant success.

Roosevelt was on his way to one of the wildest parts of the earth, yet he did not entirely cut himself off from the influences of culture. Always there were books to ease his mind when the strenuous hunt was over or when the journey into the jungle grew monotonous. With him he took his famous “Pigskin library,” bound in pigskin that they might be handled by powder-stained or oil-stained hands. This strangely assorted list, which showed the wide range of Roosevelt’s reading, included the following-named authors and works:

“The Federalist,” Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great”, the “Song of Roland,” the “Nibelungenlied,” the Bible and Apocrypha, Homer, Dante, Spenser and Milton, Shelley, Emerson, Longfellow, Tennyson, Keats, Poe, Bret Harte, Bacon, Lowell, Euripides, Froissart, Macaulay, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, Thackeray, Cooper and Scott. “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” were included for humor, and later were added such books as “Alice in Wonderland,” “Tartarin,” “Don Quixote” and works of Darwin, Goethe and Huxley.

The members of the Smithsonian African Expedition accompanying Roosevelt were Dr. and Colonel Edgar A. Mearns, U. S. A. (retired) one of the first field naturalists of the United States; Edmund Heller, of Stanford University, a thoroughly trained naturalist; J. Alden Loring, of Oswego, N. Y., a successful collector of birds and small animals.

Among the white pioneers who had preceded Roosevelt in the African jungles were such famous men as Livingstone and Stanley. In the footsteps of these self-sacrificing men came great hunters, drawn by the fascination of facing the lordly lion or the furious elephant or the dangerous rhinoceros. Among the boldest of these was Roosevelt, the first great American to track these savage creatures into the secret places of the Dark Continent.

Penetrating the jungles of East and Central Africa, he and his party remained for months almost entirely cut off from the outside world.

In his book, “African Game Trails,” published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, the hunter-naturalist-author has described fascinatingly the story of his encounters with lions, buffaloes, rhinoceroses, and other dangerous animals.

At Heatley’s ranch, a place seventeen miles long and four miles wide, he found the haunts of the buffalo, a creature it had been his desire for a long time to shoot. Of these animals he wrote:

“There is no doubt that under certain circumstances buffalo, in addition to showing themselves exceedingly dangerous opponents when wounded by hunters, become truculent and inclined to take the offensive themselves. There are places in East Africa where, as regards at least certain herds, this seems to be the case; and in Uganda the buffalo have caused such loss of life and such damage to the native plantations that they are now ranked as vermin and not as game, and their killing is encouraged in every possible way.”

Here is his account of his shooting of his first buffaloes:

“Cautiously threading our way along the edge of the swamp, we got within 150 yards of the buffalo before we were perceived. There were four bulls, grazing close by the edge of the swamp, their black bodies glistening in the early sun rays, their massive horns showing white, and the cow herons perched on their backs. They stared sullenly at us with outstretched heads from under their great frontlets of horn.