Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [175]
“Theodore! with all thy faults …” was the one-line editorial in which the New York Sun had expressed its Presidential preference in the election of the previous year. Its candidate, now President in his own right, was exuberantly in charge of a country booming with prosperity. With industry stimulated by the Spanish-American War, the depression, unemployment and savage labour troubles of the nineties had subsided and the bitter class feeling of the McKinley-Bryan campaign of 1896 was dulled by the full dinner pail. The Progressives, who were the new Left, were expansionist and believed America’s direction was “onward and upward.” President Roosevelt leading the march settled the coal strike, “took” Panama, began the building of the Canal, challenged the trusts, slapped the name “muck-rakers” on crusading journalists, bullied the Kaiser out of Venezuela, and when a presumed American citizen was kidnaped by bandits in Morocco, sent the American Fleet to the rescue with the resounding demand (phrased by John Hay): “We want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!”
“The President is in his best mood,” said his friend Jules Jusserand, the French Ambassador, “he is always in his best mood.” He had the memtal energy of a geyser and the flaws of Everyman. His Attorney-General, Philander Knox, rather admired the way the President ignored his advice and once remarked, “Ah, Mr. President, why have such a beautiful action marred by any taint of legality.” President Eliot still did not admire him, although when Roosevelt came to Cambridge in 1905 for his twenty-fifth reunion Eliot had felt obliged to invite him to stay at his house. On his arrival, perspiring and in need of a wash, Roosevelt pulled off his coat, rolled it up and flung it across the bedroom so violently it knocked a pillow to the floor, took a large pistol from his pocket and slammed it on the dresser. After washing up, “he came rushing downstairs as if his life depended on it,” and when Eliot asked, “Now, are you taking breakfast with me?” replied, “Oh no, I promised Bishop Lawrence I would take breakfast with him—and good gracious!”—clapping his right hand to his side—“I’ve forgotten my gun!” Retrieving it, the President of the United States rushed off to see the Bishop while the president of Harvard, horrified by violation of a Massachusetts law against carrying pistols, muttered, “Very lawless; a very lawless mind.”
The pistol represented, perhaps, less a lawless mind than the creed of the time that life was a fight. No one felt it more deeply than Roosevelt. He despised Tolstoy’s “foolish theory that men should never make war,” for he believed that “the country that loses its capacity to hold its own in actual warfare will ultimately show that it has lost everything.” He was infuriated when the peace advocates equated progress in civilization with “a weakening of the fighting spirit”; such a weakening, as he saw it, invited the destruction of the more advanced by the less advanced. He confused the desire for peace with physical cowardice and harped curiously on this subject: “I abhor men like [Edward Everett] Hale and papers like the Evening Post and the Nation in all of whom there exists absolute physical dread of danger and hardship and who therefore tend to hysterical denunciation and fear of war.” He deplored what seemed to him, as he looked around, a “general softening of fibre, a selfishness and luxury, a relaxation of standards” and especially