The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [243]
Pearson’s theory that “the higher races” cannot long subjugate black and brown majorities finds Roosevelt in complete agreement, for “men of our stock do not prosper in tropical countries.” Only in thinly peopled, temperate regions is there any lasting hope for European civilization. A secure future is promised the English-speaking conquerors of North America and Australia, as well as the Russians, who “by a movement which has not yet fired the popular imagination, but which thinking men recognize as of incalculable importance, are building up a vast state in northern Asia.”43 But Europeans hoping “to live and propagate permanently in the hot regions of India and Africa” are doomed. In one of the earliest of his many remarkable flights of historical prophecy (flawed only by an exaggerated time-scale), he writes:
The Greek rulers of Bactria were ultimately absorbed and vanished, as probably the English rulers of India will some day in the future—for the good of mankind, we sincerely hope and believe in the very remote future—themselves be absorbed and vanish. In Africa south of the Zambesi (and possibly here and there on high plateaus north of it) there may remain white States, although even these States will surely contain a large colored population, always threatening to swamp the whites … It is almost impossible that they will not in the end succeed in throwing off the yoke of the European outsiders, though this end may be, and we hope will be, many centuries distant. In America, most of the West Indies are becoming negro islands … it is impossible for the dominant races of the temperate zones ever bodily to displace the peoples of the tropics.44
Roosevelt is serenely untroubled by Pearson’s fear that the black and yellow races of the world will one day attain great economic and military power and threaten their erstwhile masters. “By that time the descendant of the negro may be as intellectual as the Athenian … we shall then simply be dealing with another civilized nation of non-Aryan blood, precisely as we now deal with Magyar, Finn, and Basque.”45
Turning from global to national matters, Roosevelt discusses the phenomenon of the “stationary state,” in which a freely developing nation tends to become rigid and authoritarian as its period of upward mobility comes to an end. But again he sees no cause for concern. It is right and proper that the power of government should increase to counteract “the mercilessness of private commercial warfare.” As for that other tendency of a maturing civilization, the crowding out of the upper class by the middle and lower, Roosevelt welcomes it as he welcomes all natural processes. Every new generation, he says, will increase the proportion of mechanics, workmen, and farmers to that of scientists, statesmen, and poets, but as long as the aggregate population increases there will be no decline in cultural values. On the contrary, the nation’s overall quality will improve, thanks to “the transmission of acquired characters” by an ever-thinning, ever-refining aristocracy.46 This process “in every civilization operates so strongly as to counterbalance … that baleful law of natural selection which tells against the survival of the most desirable classes.”47
Reducing his focus yet again to the domestic environment, Roosevelt “heartily disagrees” with Pearson’s mistrust of Americanized, democratic families. “To all who have known really happy family lives,” he writes, “that is, to all who have known or who have witnessed the greatest happiness which there can be on this earth, it is hardly necessary to say that the highest idea of the family is attainable only where the father and mother stand to each other as lovers and friends. In these homes the children are bound to father and mother by ties of love, respect, and obedience, which are simply strengthened by the fact that they are treated as reasonable beings with rights of their own, and that the rule of the household is changed to