Theodore Roosevelt [71]
speech at Springfield, Illinois, in 1903, "is good enough to be given a square deal afterward. More than that no man is entitled to, and less than that no man shall have."
That phrase, "a square deal," stuck in the hearts of the American people. It summed up what they regarded as Roosevelt's most characteristic trait. He was the man of the square deal, who instinctively resented injustice done to those who could not protect themselves; the friend of the underdog, the companion of the self-reliant and the self-respecting. It is under this aspect that Roosevelt seems most likely to live in popular history.
So, from the time he became President, the public was divided into believing that there were two Roosevelts. His enemies made almost a monster of him, denouncing and fearing him as violent, rash, pugnacious, egotistical, ogreish in his mad, hatred of Capital, and Capitalists condemned him as hypocritical, cruel, lying, and vindictive. The other side, however, insisted on his courage; he was a fighter, but he always fought to defend the weak and to uphold the right; he was equally unmoved by Bosses and by demagogues; in his human relations he regarded only what a man was, not his class or condition; he had a great hearted, jovial simplicity; a far-seeing and steadfast patriotism; he preached the Square Deal and he practiced it; even more than Lincoln he was accessible to every one.
CHAPTER XIV. THE PRESIDENT AND THE KAISER
During the first years of Roosevelt's Administration he had to encounter many conditions which existed rather from the momentum they had from the past than from any living vigor of their own. It was a time of transition. The group of politicians dating from the Civil War was nearly extinct, and the leaders who had come to the front after 1870 were also much thinned in number, and fast dropping off. Washington itself was becoming one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with its broad avenues, seldom thronged, its circles and squares, whose frequenters seemed never busy, its spirit of leisure, its suggestion of opulence and amplitude, and of a not too zealous or disturbing hold on reality. You still saw occasionally a tiny cottage inhabited by a colored family cuddled up against a new and imposing palace, just as you might pass a colored mammy on the same sidewalk with a millionaire Senator, for the residential section had not yet been socially standardized.
Only a few years before, under President Cleveland, a single telephone sufficed for the White House, and as the telephone operator stopped work at six o'clock, the President himself or some member of his family had to answer calls during the evening. A single secretary wrote in long hand most of the Presidential correspondence. Examples of similar primitiveness might be found almost everywhere, and the older generation seemed to imagine that a certain slipshod and dozing quality belonged to the very idea of Democracy. If you were neatly dressed and wide awake, you would inevitably be remarked among your fellows; such remark would imply superiority; and to be superior was supposedly to be undemocratic.
Nevertheless this was a time of transition, and the vigor which emanated from the young President passed like electricity through all lines and hastened the change. He caused the White House to be remodeled and fitted on the one hand for social purposes which required much more spacious accommodation, and on the other for offices in which he could conduct the largely increased Presidential business. Instead of one telephone there were many working night and day, and instead of a single longhand secretary, there were a score of stenographers and typists. Before he left Washington he saw a vast Union Station erected instead of the over-grown shanties at Sixth Street, and he had encouraged the laying-out of the waste places beyond the Capitol, thus adding to the city another and imposing section. His interest did not stop at politics, nor at carrying through the reforms he had at heart. He attended with equal keenness and solicitude
That phrase, "a square deal," stuck in the hearts of the American people. It summed up what they regarded as Roosevelt's most characteristic trait. He was the man of the square deal, who instinctively resented injustice done to those who could not protect themselves; the friend of the underdog, the companion of the self-reliant and the self-respecting. It is under this aspect that Roosevelt seems most likely to live in popular history.
So, from the time he became President, the public was divided into believing that there were two Roosevelts. His enemies made almost a monster of him, denouncing and fearing him as violent, rash, pugnacious, egotistical, ogreish in his mad, hatred of Capital, and Capitalists condemned him as hypocritical, cruel, lying, and vindictive. The other side, however, insisted on his courage; he was a fighter, but he always fought to defend the weak and to uphold the right; he was equally unmoved by Bosses and by demagogues; in his human relations he regarded only what a man was, not his class or condition; he had a great hearted, jovial simplicity; a far-seeing and steadfast patriotism; he preached the Square Deal and he practiced it; even more than Lincoln he was accessible to every one.
CHAPTER XIV. THE PRESIDENT AND THE KAISER
During the first years of Roosevelt's Administration he had to encounter many conditions which existed rather from the momentum they had from the past than from any living vigor of their own. It was a time of transition. The group of politicians dating from the Civil War was nearly extinct, and the leaders who had come to the front after 1870 were also much thinned in number, and fast dropping off. Washington itself was becoming one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with its broad avenues, seldom thronged, its circles and squares, whose frequenters seemed never busy, its spirit of leisure, its suggestion of opulence and amplitude, and of a not too zealous or disturbing hold on reality. You still saw occasionally a tiny cottage inhabited by a colored family cuddled up against a new and imposing palace, just as you might pass a colored mammy on the same sidewalk with a millionaire Senator, for the residential section had not yet been socially standardized.
Only a few years before, under President Cleveland, a single telephone sufficed for the White House, and as the telephone operator stopped work at six o'clock, the President himself or some member of his family had to answer calls during the evening. A single secretary wrote in long hand most of the Presidential correspondence. Examples of similar primitiveness might be found almost everywhere, and the older generation seemed to imagine that a certain slipshod and dozing quality belonged to the very idea of Democracy. If you were neatly dressed and wide awake, you would inevitably be remarked among your fellows; such remark would imply superiority; and to be superior was supposedly to be undemocratic.
Nevertheless this was a time of transition, and the vigor which emanated from the young President passed like electricity through all lines and hastened the change. He caused the White House to be remodeled and fitted on the one hand for social purposes which required much more spacious accommodation, and on the other for offices in which he could conduct the largely increased Presidential business. Instead of one telephone there were many working night and day, and instead of a single longhand secretary, there were a score of stenographers and typists. Before he left Washington he saw a vast Union Station erected instead of the over-grown shanties at Sixth Street, and he had encouraged the laying-out of the waste places beyond the Capitol, thus adding to the city another and imposing section. His interest did not stop at politics, nor at carrying through the reforms he had at heart. He attended with equal keenness and solicitude