Theodore Roosevelt / An Address Delivered by Henry Cabot Lodge Before the Congress of the United States

by Henry Cabot Lodge

The regiment got into action immediately on landing and forced its way, after some sharp fighting in the jungle, to the high ground on which were placed the fortifications which defended the approach to Santiago. Colonel Wood was almost immediately given command of a brigade, and this left Roosevelt colonel of the regiment. In the battle which ensued and which resulted in the capture of the positions commanding Santiago and the bay, the Rough Riders took a leading part, storming one of the San Juan heights, which they christened Kettle Hill, with Roosevelt leading the men in person. It was a dashing, gallant assault, well led and thoroughly successful. Santiago fell after the defeat of the fleet, and then followed a period of sickness and suffering—the latter due to unreadiness—where Roosevelt did everything with his usual driving energy to save his men, whose loyalty to their colonel went with them through life. The war was soon over, but brief as it had been Roosevelt and his men had highly distinguished themselves, and he stood out in the popular imagination as one of the conspicuous figures of the conflict. He brought his regiment back to the United States, where they were mustered out, and almost immediately afterwards he was nominated by the Republicans as their candidate for governor of the State of New York. The situation in New York was unfavorable for the Republicans, and the younger men told Senator Platt, who dominated the organization and who had no desire for Roosevelt, that unless he was nominated they could not win. Thus forced, the organization accepted him, and it was well for the party that they did so. The campaign was a sharp one and very doubtful, but Roosevelt was elected by a narrow margin and assumed office at the beginning of the new year of 1899. He was then in his forty-first year.

Many problems faced him and none were evaded. He was well aware that the “organization” under Senator Platt would not like many things he was sure to do, but he determined that he would have neither personal quarrels nor faction fights. He knew, being blessed with strong common sense, that the Republican Party, his own party, was the instrument by which alone he could attain his ends, and he did not intend that it should be blunted and made useless by internal strife. And yet he meant to have his own way. It was a difficult role which he undertook to play, but he succeeded. He had many differences with the organization managers, but he declined to lose his temper or to have a break, and he also refused to yield when he felt he was standing for the right and a principle was at stake. Thus he prevailed. He won on the canal question, changed the insurance commissioner, and carried the insurance legislation he desired. As in these cases, so it was in lesser things. In the police commission he had been strongly impressed by the dangers as he saw them of the undue and often sinister influence of business, finance, and great money interests upon government and politics. These feelings were deepened and broadened by his experience and observation on the larger stage of State administration. The belief that political equality must be strengthened and sustained by industrial equality and a larger economic opportunity was constantly in his thoughts until it became a governing and guiding principle.

Meantime he grew steadily stronger among the people, not only of his own State but of the country, for he was well known throughout the West, and there they were watching eagerly to see how the ranchman and colonel of Rough Riders, who had touched both their hearts and their imagination, was faring as governor of New York. The office he held is always regarded as related to the Presidency, and this, joined to his striking success as governor, brought him into the presidential field wherever men speculated about the political future It was universally agreed that McKinley was to be renominated, and so the talk turned to making Roosevelt Vice President. A friend wrote to him in the summer of 1899 as to this drift of opinion, then assuming serious proportions. “Do not attempt,” he said, “to thwart the popular desire. You are not a man nor are your close friends men who can plan, arrange, and manage you into office. You must accept the popular wish, whatever it is, follow your star, and let the future care for itself. It is the tradition of our politics, and a very poor tradition, that the Vice Presidency is a shelf. It ought to be, and there is no reason why it should not be, a stepping-stone. Put there by the popular desire, it would be so to you.” This view, quite naturally, did not commend itself to Governor Roosevelt at the moment. He was doing valuable work in New York; he was deeply engaged in important reforms which he had much at heart and which he wished to carry through; and the Vice Presidency did not attract him. A year later he was at Philadelphia, a delegate at large from his State, with his mind unchanged as to the Vice Presidency, while his New York friends, anxious to have him continue his work at Albany, were urging him to refuse. Senator Platt, for obvious reasons, wished to make him Vice President, another obstacle to his taking it. Roosevelt forced the New York delegation to agree on some one else for Vice President, but he could not hold the convention, nor could Senator Hanna, who wisely accepted the situation. Governor Roosevelt was nominated on the first ballot, all other candidates withdrawing. He accepted the nomination little as he liked it.

Thus when it came to the point he instinctively followed his star and grasped the unvacillating hand of destiny. Little did he think that destiny would lead him to the White House through a tragedy which cut him to the heart. He was on a mountain in the Adirondacks when a guide made his way to him across the forest with a telegram telling him that McKinley, the wise, the kind, the gentle, with nothing in his heart but good will to all men, was dying from a wound inflicted by an anarchist murderer, and that the Vice President must come to Buffalo at once. A rapid night drive through the woods and a special train brought him to Buffalo. McKinley was dead before he arrived, and that evening Governor Roosevelt was sworn in as President of the United States.

Within the narrow limits of an address it is impossible to give an account of an administration of seven years which will occupy hundreds of pages when the history of the United States during that period is written. It was a memorable administration, memorable in itself and not by the accident of events, and large in its accomplishment It began with a surprise. There were persons in the United States who had carefully cultivated and many people who had accepted without thought, the idea that Roosevelt was in some way a dangerous man. They gloomily predicted that there would be a violent change in the policies and in the officers of the McKinley administration. But Roosevelt had not studied the history of his country in vain. He knew that in three of the four cases where Vice Presidents had succeeded to the Presidency through the death of the elected President their coming had resulted in a violent shifting of policies and men, and, as a consequence, in most injurious dissensions, which in two cases at least proved fatal to the party in power. In all four instances the final obliteration of the Vice President who had come into power through the death of his chief was complete. President Roosevelt did not intend to permit any of these results. As soon as he came into office he announced that he intended to retain President McKinley’s Cabinet and to carry out his policies, which had been sustained at the polls. To those overzealous friends who suggested that he could not trust the appointees of President McKinley and that he would be but a pallid imitation of his predecessor he replied that he thought, in any event, the administration would be his, and that if new occasions required new policies he felt that he could meet them, and that no one would suspect him of being a pallid imitation of anybody. His decision, however, gratified and satisfied the country and it was not apparent that Roosevelt was hampered in any way in carrying out his own policies by this wise refusal to make sudden and violent changes.

Those who were alarmed about what he might do had also suggested that with his combative propensities he was likely to involve the country in war. Yet there never has been an administration, as afterwards appeared, when we were more perfectly at peace with all the world, nor were our foreign relations ever in danger of producing hostilities. But this was not due in the least to the adoption of a timid or yielding foreign policy; on the contrary, it was owing to the firmness of the President in all foreign questions and the knowledge which other nations soon acquired that President Roosevelt was a man who never threatened unless he meant to carry out his threat, the result being that he was not obliged to threaten at all. One of his earliest successes was forcing the settlement of the Alaskan boundary question, which was the single open question with Great Britain that was really dangerous and contained within itself possibilities of war. The accomplishment of this settlement was followed later, while Mr. Root was Secretary of State, by the arrangement of all our outstanding difference with Canada, and during Mr. Root’s tenure of office over thirty treaties were made with different nations, including a number of practical and valuable treaties of arbitration. When Germany started to take advantage of the difficulties in Venezuela the affair culminated in the dispatch of Dewey and the fleet to the Caribbean, the withdrawal of England at once, and the agreement of Germany to the reference of all subjects of different to arbitration. It was President Roosevelt whose good offices brought Russia and Japan together in a negotiation which closed the war between those two powers. It was Roosevelt’s influence which contributed powerfully to settling the threatening controversy between Germany, France, and England in regard to Morocco, by the Algeciras conference. It was Roosevelt who sent the American fleet of battleships round the world, one of the most convincing peace movements ever made on behalf of the United States. Thus it came about that this President, dreaded at the beginning on account of his combative spirit, received the Nobel prize in 1906 as the person who had contribute most to the peace of the world in the preceding years, and his contribution was the result of strength and knowledge and not of weakness.

At home he recommended to Congress legislation which was directed toward a larger control of the railroads and to removing the privileges and curbing the power of great business combinations obtained through rebates and preferential freight rates. This legislation led to opposition in Congress and to much resistance by those affected. As we look back, this legislation, so much contested at the time, seems very moderate, but it was none the less momentous. President Roosevelt never believed in Government ownership, but he was thoroughly in favor of strong and effective Government supervision and regulation of what are now known generally as public utilities. He had a deep conviction that the political influence of financial and business interests and of great combinations of capital had become so great that the American people were beginning to distrust their own Government, than which there could be no greater peril to the Republic. By his measures, and by his general attitude toward capital and labor both, he sought to restore and maintain the confidence of the people in the Government they had themselves created.

In the Panama Canal he left the most enduring, as it was the most visible, monument of his administration Much criticized at the moment for his action in regard to it, which time since then has justified and which history will praise, the great fact remains that the canal is there. He said him-self that he made up his mind that it was his duty to establish the canal and have the debate about it afterwards, which seemed to him better than to begin with indefinite debate and have no canal at all. This is a view which posterity both at home and abroad will accept and approve.

These, passing over as we must in silence many other beneficent acts, are only a few of the most salient features of his administration, stripped of all detail and all enlargement. Despite the conflict which some of his domestic policies had produce not only with his political opponents but within the Republican ranks, he was overwhelmingly reelected in 1904, and when the seven years had closed the country gave a like majority to his chosen successor, taken from his own Cabinet. On the 4th of March, 1909, he returned to private life at the age of fifty, having been the youngest President known to our history.

During the brief vacations which he had been able to secure in the midst of the intense activities of his public life after the Spanish War he had turned for enjoyment to expeditions in pursuit of big game in the wildest and most unsettled regions of the country. Open-air life and all its accompaniment of riding and hunting were to him the one thing that brought him the most rest and relaxation. Now, having left the Presidency, he was able to give full scope to the love of adventure, which had been strong with him from boyhood. Soon after his retirement from office he went to Africa, accompanied by a scientific expedition sent out by the Smithsonian Institution. He landed in East Africa, made his way into the interior, and thence to the sources of the Nile, after a trip in every way successful both in exploration and in pursuit of big game. He then came down the Nile through Egypt and thence to Europe, and no private citizen of the United States—probably no private man of any country—was ever received in a manner comparable to that which met Roosevelt in every country in Europe which he visited. Everywhere it was the same—in Italy, in Germany, in France, in England Every honor was paid to him that authority could devise, accompanied by every mark of affection and admiration which the people of those countries were able to show. He made few speeches while in Europe, but in those few he did not fail to give to the questions and thought of the time real and genuine contributions, set forth in plain language always vigorous and often eloquent. He returned in the summer of 1910 to the United States and was greeted with a reception on his landing in New York quite equaling in interest and enthusiasm that which had been given to him in Europe.