For two years afterwards he devoted himself to writing, not only articles as contributing editor of the Outlook, but books of his own, and addresses and speeches which he was constantly called upon to make. No man in private life probably ever had such an audience as he addressed, whether with tongue or pen, upon the questions of the day, with a constant refrain as to the qualities necessary to make men both good citizens and good Americans. In the spring of 1912 he decided to become a candidate for the Republican nomination for the residency and a very heated struggle followed between himself and President Taft for delegations to the convention. The convention when it assembled in Chicago was the stormiest ever known in our history President Taft was renominated, most of the Roosevelt delegates refusing to vote, and a large body of Republicans thereupon formed a new party called the “Progressive” and nominated Mr. Roosevelt as their candidate. This division into two nearly equal parts of the Republican Party, which had elected Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft in succession by the largest majorities ever known, made the victory of the Democratic candidate absolutely certain. Colonel Roosevelt, however, stood second in the poll, receiving 4,119,507 votes, carrying six States and winning eighty-eight electoral votes. There never has been in political history, when all conditions are considered, such an exhibition of extraordinary personal strength. To have secured eighty-eight electoral votes when his own party was hopelessly divided, with no great historic party name and tradition behind him, with an organization which had to be hastily brought together in a few weeks, seems almost incredible, and in all his career there is no display of the strength of his hold upon the people equal to this.
In the following year he yielded again to the longing for adventure and exploration. Going to South America, he made his way up through Paraguay and western Brazil, and then across a trackless wilderness of jungle and down an unknown river into the Valley of the Amazon. It was a remarkable expedition and carried him through what is probably the most deadly climate in the world. He suffered severely from the fever, the poison of which never left him and which finally shortened his life.
In the next year the great war began, and Colonel Roosevelt threw himself into it with all the energy of his nature. With Major Gardner he led the great fight for preparedness in a country utterly unprepared He saw very plainly that in all human probability it would be impossible for us to keep out of the war. Therefore in season and out of season he demanded that we should make ready. He and Major Gardner, with the others who joined them, roused a widespread and powerful sentiment in the country, but there was no practical effect on the Army. The Navy was the single place where anything was really done, and that only in the bill of 1916, so that war finally came upon us as unread as Roosevelt had feared we should be. Yet the campaign he made was not in vain, for in addition to the question of preparation he spoke earnestly of other things, other burning questions, and he always spoke to an enormous body of listeners everywhere. He would have had us protest and take action at the very beginning, in 1914, when Belgium was invaded. He would have had us go to war when the murders of the Lusitania were perpetrated He tried to stir the soul and rouse the spirit of the American people, and despite every obstacle he did awaken them, so that when the hour came, in April, 1917, a large proportion of the American people were even then ready in spirit and in hope. How telling his work had been was proved by the confession of his country’s enemies, for when he died the only discordant note, the only harsh words, came from the German press. Germany knew whose voice it was that more powerfully than any other had called Americans to the battle in behalf of freedom and civilization, where the advent of the armies of the United States gave victory to the cause of justice and righteousness.
When the United States went to war Colonel Roosevelt’s one desire was to be allowed to go to the fighting line. There if fate had laid its hand upon him it would have found him glad to fall in the trenches or in a charge at the head of his men, but it was not permitted to him to go, and thus he was denied the reward which he would have ranked above all others, “the great prize of death in battle.” But he was a patriot in every fiber of his being, and personal disappointment in no manner slackened or cooled his zeal. Everything that he could do to forward the war, to quicken preparation to stimulate patriotism, to urge on efficient action, was done. Day and night, in season and out of season, he never ceased his labors. Although prevented from going to France himself, he gave to the great conflict that which was far dearer to him than his own life. I can not say that he sent his four sons, because they all went at once, as everyone knew that their father’s sons would go. Two have been badly wounded; one was killed. He met the blow with the most splendid and unflinching courage, met it as Siward, the Earl of Northumberland receives in the play the news of his son’s death:
| Siw. | Had he his hurts before? |
| Ross. | Ay, on the front. |
| Siw. | Why, then, God’s soldier be he! Had I as many sons as I have hairs, I would not wish them to a fairer death: And so his knell is knoll’d. |
Among the great tragedies of Shakespeare, and there are none greater in all the literature of man, Macbeth was Colonel Roosevelt’s favorite, and the moving words which I have just quoted I am sure were in his heart and on his lips when he faced with stern resolve and self-control the anguish brought to him by the death of his youngest boy, killed in the glory of a brave and brilliant youth.
He lived to see the right prevail; he lived to see civilization triumph over organized barbarism; and there was great joy in his heart. In all his last days the thoughts which filled his mind were to secure a peace which should render Germany forever harmless and advance the cause of ordered freedom in every land and among every race. This occupied him to the exclusion of everything else, except what he called and what we like to call Americanism. There was no hour down to the end when he would not turn aside from everything else to preach the doctrine of Americanism, of the principles and the faith upon which American government rested, and which all true Americans should wear in their heart of hearts. He was a great patriot, a great man; above all, a great American. His country was the ruling, mastering passion of his life from the beginning even unto the end.
So closes the inadequate, most incomplete account of a life full of work done and crowded with achievement, brief in years and prematurely ended. The recitation of the offices which he held and of some of the deeds that he did is but a bare, imperfect catalogue into which history when we are gone will breathe a lasting life. Here to-day it is only a background, and that which most concern us now is what the man was of whose deeds done it is possible to make such a list. What a man was is ever more important than what he did, because it is upon what he was that all his achievement depends and his value and meaning to his fellow men must finally rest.
Theodore Roosevelt always believed that character was of greater worth and moment than anything else. He possessed abilities of the first order, which he was disposed to underrate, because he set so much greater store upon the moral qualities which we bring together under the single word “character.”
Let me speak first of his abilities. He had a powerful, well-trained, ever-active mind. He thought clearly, independently, and with originality and imagination. These priceless gifts were sustained by an extraordinary power of acquisition joined to a greater quickness of apprehension, a greater swiftness in seizing upon the essence of a question, than I have ever happened to see in any other man. His reading began with natural history, then went to general history, and thence to the whole field of literature. He had a capacity for concentration which enabled him to read with remarkable rapidity anything which he took up, if only for a moment, and which separated him for the time being from everything going on about him. The subjects upon which he was well and widely informed would, if enumerated, fill a large space, and to this power of acquisition was united not only a tenacious but an extraordinarily accurate memory. It was never safe to contest with him on any question of fact or figures, whether they relate to the ancient Assyrians or to the present-day conditions of the tribes of central Africa, to the Syracusan Expedition, as told by Thucydides, or to protective coloring in birds and animals. He knew and held details always at command, but he was not mastered by them. He never failed to see the forest on account of the trees, or the city on account of the houses.