The beginning of any understanding of him must be made in his “stunts”: cow-punching, cross-country riding, big game hunting, endurance tests, soldiering, exploring. It is generally known he was a delicate youth and it is alleged he went West seeking invigoration. He went West for the same reason the Sun goes: it was a part of the divine order. Chains could not have thrust inactivity upon him. Physical activity was as fervently in his blood as lust in the blood of a normal man; no one can read his letters from Little Missouri, from Elkhorn Ranch, Dakota, or his account of participation in a fox-hunt with battered head and broken arm, and need further proof of his indomitable energy. He knew minutes of physical peace, but they were thrust upon him by mental activity; he had hours of bodily rest, but they were stolen from his urge that he might display or convey his emotional state. He had to a singular degree the capacity to concentrate all his energies on the job in hand, the task undertaken; to do it and fulfil it with all his might and main, to tolerate no distraction, to suffer no interruption, to brook no interference. Whether he was playing tennis, orienting the Civil Service Commission, directing the New York Police Department, scorning Mr. E. L. Godkin, organising the Rough Riders, framing the policies and administering the affairs of his country, or reading a book, he did it with all the punch there was in him and when his punch-exchequer got low he sought the services of a trainer. He liked to drink the wine of life with brandy in it, he says in one of these letters, and the brandy he used is now not even outlawed. As Henry Adams says, “Roosevelt more than any other man living within the range of notoriety showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the quality that mediæval theology assigned to God—he was pure act.”
The next most characteristic feature of Theodore Roosevelt is that he took himself, his beliefs and convictions with great seriousness. Early in life he convinced himself that he had come upon a brand of honesty that he must popularise and persuade his fellow citizens to use. If they would not use it after they had been appraised of its quality and source they were perfect asses like Vilas, malicious and dishonest scoundrels like Godkin, demented mugwumps like John Fiske, dogs like Carl Schurz, hypocrites like George W. Curtis and accessories to the deeds of the German governmental murderers both before and after the facts like Woodrow Wilson. G. W. Smalley’s attitude was contemptible, he would like to put the editors of the Evening Post and of the World in prison. President Eliot made himself ridiculous by his stand on civil service and ballot reform; and it would be a pleasure to shoot or thrash his colleague Parker. Only he and Cabot were right: straight talkers and hard hitters.
Theodore Roosevelt had a keen and profound sense of duty to his country, to his community, to his family and to his friends and he had a superhuman facility for conveying recognition of it to every one who saw him or heard him. To that and to his reputation for fearlessness he owed a popularity which has never been equalled in this country. He was the embodiment of the American ideal: fearless, impetuous, resourceful, self-confident, ready to throw his hat into any ring and to follow it up with a smile on his face and the exclamation, “This is bully,” escaping from his lips. He could inoculate his fellow citizens with his ideas more quickly than any man of his time and he could galvanise them into greater activity and more sustained determination than any President we have ever had. His qualities may outlive the children of those who knew him. One of the astonishing confessions of these letters is that he had few friends and fewer intimates. I have had friends who were convinced they knew him fundamentally and were in close communion with his thought and determination. From their conversation I could readily believe that he rarely made decisions without consulting them. Their names are not even mentioned in his correspondence.
Any one who has been inclined to doubt Roosevelt’s sincerity, i.e., to consider that he sometimes affected an enthusiasm which he did not feel, will have his doubts appeased by reading this correspondence. He believed in himself but he was not vain; he rated his abilities high, but his conduct displayed no arrogance; he valued his mental and physical possessions, but he was not proud. If he ever doubted his ability to do any job that presented itself, his most intimate correspondence does not betray it. What he doubted was that the opportunity would not be vouchsafed him.
The man to whom these letters were written was vain. It flattered his vanity that he had seen Theodore Roosevelt on the road to the White House while he was Police Commissioner, and that he had told him so with assurance; thus discharging in advance the obligation he was to incur by receiving such evidences of trust as the letters betray from so great a man as Roosevelt. He saw his own thoughts disseminated and his convictions popularised by his friend who knew how to gauge the feeling of the people and to raise their temperature; and in some inexplicable way there steals upon the reader a thought that when Lodge made up his mind that Roosevelt was going to the top he also made up his mind that he would link his name with that of the rising star in a correspondence that the world would not let perish.
Roosevelt was a many-sided man. He was gifted with foresight and hindsight. There has never been a President save Lincoln who had such capacity for learning by experience. For a man so emotional, he was a good judge of men and he could do team work. These qualities distinguished him from the man upon whose head he poured the vials of his wrath the last few years of his life and who may get from posterity both the laurel and the oak-leaf crowns. Scores of instances could be cited from this correspondence in support of his power to size up men, but none serves better than his letter to John Hay urging him to persuade the President to appoint General Wood to the command of all Cuba. “Wood is a born diplomat, just as he is a born soldier. I question if any nation in the world has now or has had within recent times any one so nearly approaching the ideal of a military administrator of the kind now required in Cuba.” No recorded prophecy has ever come truer than that.
Roosevelt was not a modest man, but he had a sense of propriety and fitness that was very becoming. His letters to Lodge about the hesitation on the part of the War Department to recognise his military service in Cuba by giving him the Medal of Honour, are dignified and straightforward. There is no pumped up humility. He did a good job and the labourer is worthy of his hire. In the same way his letters, when he was being groomed for the nomination of running mate to McKinley, are full of good sense and sound reasoning. He is satisfied with what he has accomplished as Governor of New York, and so were the people. What he would really like, would be to be re-elected Governor with a first-class Lieutenant-Governor, and then be offered the Secretaryship of War for four years. He knew what he wanted, and he got it, the Presidency, but the letter that describes his visit to Buffalo after McKinley had been shot should be ample testimony to convince any one that he did not want it the way it came. Any one keen to learn the tricks of the political game will be aided by perusal of the letters written from the New York State Capital. They may also observe how statesmen develop. Roosevelt’s letters from the White House are just as frank, intimate and revealing as were those from New York Police Headquarters and from Albany: full of praise for Lodge’s potential and actual accomplishments; of proffered suggestions and requests for counsel; of enthusiasm about exhausting rides and the fording of turbulent streams, “altogether it was great” or “bully fun,” full of vigorous comment and of plain characterisation of men. Discussion of literary matters which was so conspicuous in the early letters has now practically disappeared, though occasionally he makes brief comment when relating his diversions. In September, 1903, he writes, “I have been reading Aristotle’s politics and Plutarch’s miscellany and as usual take an immense comfort out of the speeches of Lincoln.” It is extraordinary how his partisanship determined his likes and dislikes even in literary matters. “The more I study Jefferson the more profoundly I distrust him and his influence.” Lodge writes to him on returning the proof of his first inaugural address, “Literary form is after all the salt that keeps alive the savour of the thoughts we would not willingly have die.” Indeed his “form” had improved enormously since he wrote the life of Thomas H. Benton in 1887, when he stated “my style is very rough and I do not like a certain lack of sequitur that I do not seem able to get rid of.” That sentence alone is proof of the first allegation, but he bettered it before he reached the White House, and the lack of sequitur disappeared forever.
Though his letters to Lodge are chiefly concerned with his political activities, realisations and prospects; with justification of his conduct, refutation of the allegations of their opponents, and comment on their sinister motives and malign trends—there is much sentiment in them and not a little play. Commenting on something Lodge wrote about the death of John Hay, he says: “It should not make us melancholy. He died within a very few years of the period when death comes to us all as a certainty, and I should esteem any man happy who lived till sixty-five as John Hay has lived, who saw his children marry, his grandchildren born, who was happy in his home life, who wrote his name clearly in the records of our times, who rendered great and durable services to the Nation, both as statesman and writer, who held high public positions, and died in the harness at the zenith of his fame. When it comes our turn to go out into the blackness, I only hope the circumstances will be as favourable.” His hope was realised, save that he was four years younger when his turn came to go.
There are many high spots in the correspondence that reveal Roosevelt’s character; one of them is his appointments to ministerial and ambassadorial positions and the comments on the appointees; they are all scratch men; he never nominates a man with a handicap and he submits the name first to his friend. Another is the genesis of the thought that led to his bringing Japan and Russia to the council table at Portsmouth, the development and maturity of it, and its success. A third is his break with Lodge that came when he decided to seek the nomination of the Republican Party, and when that was shown to be not available to the Progressive Party—his own creation. Lodge’s political conduct in the last ten years of his life alienated many admirers, but it is in a measure offset by his conduct in the trying year of 1912. He was opposed to the constitutional changes advocated by Roosevelt, therefore he could not support him; “but as for going against you that I can not do. There is very little of the Roman in me for those I love best.” There was a lot in him for those he did not love! Finally the student of political events misses the inside story of the Progressive Party. It is likely there is a series of letters to some one else on that subject.
Another thing that he misses is an explanation of his break with Taft. There is a strange and inexplicable absence of any illuminating reference to it in these letters, the place where it should be. Unquestionably our Chief Justice has hundreds of Roosevelt’s letters which will one day be published. Until then we must curb our curiosity; but there has been something in Taft’s conduct since he became ex-President and in his speeches, that leads one to believe that, when the facts are submitted to the public, it will be seen that he was not responsible for the break or for the hard feeling it engendered.