Theodore Roosevelt [64]
now had a President who did not seek quarrels, but who was not afraid of them, who never bluffed, because--unlike President Cleveland and Secretary Olney with their Venezuela Message in 1895--he never made a threat which he could not back up at the moment. There was no longer a bed of roses to stifle opposition; whosoever hit at the United States would encounter a barrier of long, sharp, and unbending thorns.
These particular achievements in foreign affairs, and others which I shall mention later, gave Roosevelt and his country great prestige abroad and the admiration of a large part of his countrymen. But his truly significant work related to home affairs. Now at last, he, the young David of the New Ideals, was to go forth, if he dared, and do battle with the Goliath of Conservatism. With him there was no question of daring. He had been waiting for twenty years for this opportunity. Such a conflict or duel has rarely been witnessed, because it rarely happens that an individual who consciously embodies the aims of an epoch is accepted by that epoch as its champion. Looking backward, we see that Abraham Lincoln typified the ideals of Freedom and Union which were the supreme issues of his time; but this recognition has come chiefly since his death. In like fashion I believe that Roosevelt's significance as a champion of Liberty, little suspected by his contemporaries and hardly surmised even now, will require the lapse of another generation before it is universally understood.
Many obvious reasons account for this. Most of the internal reforms which Roosevelt struggled for lacked the dramatic quality or the picturesqueness which appeals to average, dull, unimaginative men and women. The heroism of the medical experimenter who voluntarily contracts yellow fever and dies--and thereby saves myriads of lives--makes little impression on the ordinary person, who can be roused only by stories of battle heroism, of soldiers and torpedoes. And yet the attacks which Roosevelt made, while they did not involve death, called for the highest kind of civic courage and fortitude.
Then again a political combat with tongues and arguments seldom conveys the impression that through it irrevocable Fate gives its decision to the same extent that a contest by swords and volleys does. Political campaigns are a competition of parties and only the immediate partisans who direct and carry on the fight, grow very hot. The great majority of a party is not fanatical, and a citizen who has witnessed many elections, some for and some against him, comes instinctively to feel that whoever wins the country is safe. He discounts the cries of alarm and the abuse by opponents. And only in his most expansive moments does he flatter himself that his party really represents the State. The Republican Party, through which President Roosevelt had to work, was by no means an ideal instrument. He believed in Republicanism, with a faith only less devoted than that with which he embraced the fundamental duties and spiritual facts of life. But the Republicanism which he revered must be interpreted by himself; and the party which bore the name Republican was split into several sections, mutually discordant if not actually hostile. It seems no exaggeration to say that the underlying motive of the majority of the Republican Party during Roosevelt's Presidency was to uphold Privilege, just as much as the underlying purpose of the great Whig Party in England in the eighteenth century was to uphold Aristocracy. Roosevelt's purpose, on the contrary, was to clip the arrogance of Privilege based on Plutocracy. To achieve this he must, in some measure, compel the party of Plutocracy to help him. I speak, so far as possible, as a historian,--and not as a partisan,--who recognizes that the rise of a Plutocracy was the inevitable result of the amassing, during a generation, of unprecedented wealth, and that, in a Republic governed by parties, the all-dominant Plutocracy would naturally see to it that the all dominant party which governed the country and made its laws should
These particular achievements in foreign affairs, and others which I shall mention later, gave Roosevelt and his country great prestige abroad and the admiration of a large part of his countrymen. But his truly significant work related to home affairs. Now at last, he, the young David of the New Ideals, was to go forth, if he dared, and do battle with the Goliath of Conservatism. With him there was no question of daring. He had been waiting for twenty years for this opportunity. Such a conflict or duel has rarely been witnessed, because it rarely happens that an individual who consciously embodies the aims of an epoch is accepted by that epoch as its champion. Looking backward, we see that Abraham Lincoln typified the ideals of Freedom and Union which were the supreme issues of his time; but this recognition has come chiefly since his death. In like fashion I believe that Roosevelt's significance as a champion of Liberty, little suspected by his contemporaries and hardly surmised even now, will require the lapse of another generation before it is universally understood.
Many obvious reasons account for this. Most of the internal reforms which Roosevelt struggled for lacked the dramatic quality or the picturesqueness which appeals to average, dull, unimaginative men and women. The heroism of the medical experimenter who voluntarily contracts yellow fever and dies--and thereby saves myriads of lives--makes little impression on the ordinary person, who can be roused only by stories of battle heroism, of soldiers and torpedoes. And yet the attacks which Roosevelt made, while they did not involve death, called for the highest kind of civic courage and fortitude.
Then again a political combat with tongues and arguments seldom conveys the impression that through it irrevocable Fate gives its decision to the same extent that a contest by swords and volleys does. Political campaigns are a competition of parties and only the immediate partisans who direct and carry on the fight, grow very hot. The great majority of a party is not fanatical, and a citizen who has witnessed many elections, some for and some against him, comes instinctively to feel that whoever wins the country is safe. He discounts the cries of alarm and the abuse by opponents. And only in his most expansive moments does he flatter himself that his party really represents the State. The Republican Party, through which President Roosevelt had to work, was by no means an ideal instrument. He believed in Republicanism, with a faith only less devoted than that with which he embraced the fundamental duties and spiritual facts of life. But the Republicanism which he revered must be interpreted by himself; and the party which bore the name Republican was split into several sections, mutually discordant if not actually hostile. It seems no exaggeration to say that the underlying motive of the majority of the Republican Party during Roosevelt's Presidency was to uphold Privilege, just as much as the underlying purpose of the great Whig Party in England in the eighteenth century was to uphold Aristocracy. Roosevelt's purpose, on the contrary, was to clip the arrogance of Privilege based on Plutocracy. To achieve this he must, in some measure, compel the party of Plutocracy to help him. I speak, so far as possible, as a historian,--and not as a partisan,--who recognizes that the rise of a Plutocracy was the inevitable result of the amassing, during a generation, of unprecedented wealth, and that, in a Republic governed by parties, the all-dominant Plutocracy would naturally see to it that the all dominant party which governed the country and made its laws should