American ideals, and other essays, social and political

by Theodore Roosevelt

He makes only one exception. A miner or speculator in mines may be many times a millionaire and yet remain in good standing in the Populist party. The Populist has ineradicably fixed in his mind the belief that silver is a cheap metal, and that silver money is, while not fiat money, still a long step toward it. Silver is connected in his mind with scaling down debts, the partial repudiation of obligations, and other measures aimed at those odious moneyed tyrants who lend money to persons who insist upon borrowing, or who have put their ill-gotten gains in saving banks and kindred wicked institutions for the encouragement of the vice of thrift. These pleasurable associations quite outweigh, with the Populist, the fact that the silver man himself is rich. He is even for the moment blind to the further fact that these pro-silver men, like Senator Stewart, Governor Altgeld, and their compeers, strenuously insist that the obligations to themselves shall be liquidated in gold; indeed this particular idiosyncrasy of the silver leaders is not much frowned upon by the bulk of the Populists, because it has at least the merit of savoring strongly of “doing” one’s creditors. Not even the fact that rich silver mine owners may have earned their money honestly can outweigh the other fact that they champion a species of currency which will make most thrifty and honest men poorer, in the minds of the truly logical Populist.

But Mr. Sewall has no fictitious advantage in the way of owing his wealth to silver. He has made his money precisely as the most loathed reprobate of Wall Street—or of New York, which the average Populist regards as synonymous with Wall Street—has made his. The average Populist does not draw fine distinctions. There are in New York, as in other large cities, scoundrels of great wealth who have made their money by means skilfully calculated to come just outside the line of criminality. There are other men who have made their money exactly as the successful miner or farmer makes his,—that is, by the exercise of shrewdness, business daring, energy and thrift. But the Populist draws no line of division between these two classes. They have made money, and that is enough. One may have built railroads and the other have wrecked them, but they are both railroad men in his eyes, and that is all. One may have swindled his creditors, and the other built up a bank which has been of incalculable benefit to all who have had dealings with it, but to the Populist they are both gold bugs, and as such noxious. Mr. Sewall is the type of man the contemplation of which usually throws a Populist orator into spasms. But it happens that he believes in free silver, just as other very respectable men believe in spirit rapping, or the faith-cure, or Buddhism, or pilgrimages to Lourdes, or the foot of a graveyard rabbit. There are very able men and very lovely women who believe in each or all of these, and there are a much larger number who believe in free silver. Had they lived in the days of Sparta they would have believed in free iron, iron coin being at that time the cheapest circulating medium, the adoption of which would give the greatest expansion of the currency. But they have been dragged on by the slow procession of the centuries, and now they only believe in free silver. It is a belief which is compatible with all the domestic virtues, and even occasionally with very good capacities as a public servant. Mr. Sewall doubtless stands as one of these men. He can hardly be happy, planted firmly as he is, on the Chicago platform. In the minds of most thrifty, hard-working men, who are given to thinking at all about public questions, the free-silver plank is very far from being the most rotten of the many rotten planks put together with such perverted skill by the Chicago architects. A platform which declares in favor of free and unlimited rioting and which has the same strenuous objection to the exercise of the police power by the general government that is felt in the circles presided over by Herr Most, Eugene V. Debs, and all the people whose pictures appear in the detective bureaus of our great cities, cannot appeal to persons who have gone beyond the unpolished-stone period of civilization.

The men who object to what they style “government by injunction” are, as regards the essential principles of government, in hearty sympathy with their remote skin-clad ancestors who lived in caves, fought one another with stone-headed axes, and ate the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros. They are interesting as representing a geological survival, but they are dangerous whenever there is the least chance of their making the principles of this ages-buried past living factors in our present life. They are not in sympathy with men of good minds and sound civic morality. It is not a nice thing to wish to pay one’s debts in coins worth fifty cents on the dollar, but it is a much less nice thing to wish to plunge one’s country into anarchy by providing that the law shall only protect the lawless and frown scornfully on the law-abiding. There is a good deal of mushy sentiment in the world, and there are always a certain number of people whose minds are weak and whose emotions are strong and who effervesce with sympathy toward any man who does wrong, and with indignation against any man who chastises the criminal for having done wrong. These emotionalists, moreover, are always reinforced by that large body of men who themselves wish to do wrong, and who are not sentimental at all, but, on the contrary, very practical. It is rarely that these two classes control a great political party, but at Chicago this became an accomplished fact.

Furthermore, the Chicago convention attacked the Supreme Court. Again this represents a species of atavism,—that is, of recurrence to the ways of thought of remote barbarian ancestors. Savages do not like an independent and upright judiciary. They want the judge to decide their way, and if he does not, they want to behead him. The Populists experience much the same emotions when they realize that the judiciary stands between them and plunder.

Now on all these points Mr. Sewall can hardly feel complete sympathy with his temporary allies. He is very anxious that the Populists shall vote for him for Vice-President, and of course he feels a kindly emotion toward those who do intend to vote for him. He would doubtless pardon much heresy of political belief in any member of the electoral college who feels that Sewall is his friend, not Watson,—Codlin, not Short. He has, of course, a vein of the erratic in his character, or otherwise he would not be in such company at all, and would have no quality that would recommend him to them. But on the whole his sympathies must lie with the man who saves money rather than with the man who proposes to take away the money when it has been saved, and with the policeman who arrests a violent criminal rather than with the criminal. Such sympathy puts him at a disadvantage in the Populist camp. He is loud in his professions of belief in the remarkable series of principles for which he is supposed to stand, but his protestations ring rather hollow. The average supporter of Bryan doubtless intends to support Sewall, for he thinks him an unimportant tail to the Bryan kite. But, though unimportant, he regards him with a slight feeling of irritation, as being at the best a rather ludicrous contrast to the rest of the kite. He contributes no element of strength to the Bryan ticket, for other men who work hard and wish to enjoy the fruits of their toil simply regard him as a renegade, and the average Populist, or Populistic Democrat, does not like him, and accepts him simply because he fears not doing so may jeopardize Bryan’s chances. He is in the uncomfortable position always held by the respectable theorist who gets caught in a revolutionary movement and has to wedge nervously up into the front rank with the gentlemen who are not troubled by any of his scruples, and who really do think that it is all very fine and glorious. In fact Mr. Sewall is much the least picturesque and the least appropriate figure on the platform or platforms upon which Mr. Bryan is standing.

Mr. Watson, whose enemies now call him a Georgia cracker, is in reality a far more suitable companion for Mr. Bryan in such a contest. It must be said, however, that if virtue always received its reward Mr. Watson and not Mr. Bryan would stand at the head of the ticket. In the language of mathematicians Mr. Watson merely represents Mr. Bryan raised several powers. The same is true of the Populist as compared to the Democratic platform. Mr. Bryan may affect to believe that free silver does represent the ultimate goal, and that his friends do not intend to go further in the direction of fiat money. Mr. Watson’s friends, the middle-of-the-road Populists, are much more fearless and much more logical. They are willing to accept silver as a temporary makeshift, but they want a currency based on corn and cotton next, and ultimately a currency based on the desires of the people who issue it. The statesmanlike utterance of that great financier, Mr. Bryan’s chief rival for the nomination and at present his foremost supporter, Mr. Bland, to the effect that he would “wipe out the national debt as with a sponge,” meets with their cordial approval as far as it goes, but they object to the qualification before the word “debt.” In wiping out debts they do not wish to halt merely at the national debt. The Populists indorsed Bryan as the best they could get; but they hated Sewall so that they took the extraordinary step of nominating the Vice-President before the President so as to make sure of a really acceptable man in the person of Watson.

With Mr. Bryan denunciation of the gold bug and the banker is largely a mere form of intellectual entertainment; but with Mr. Watson it represents an almost ferocious conviction. Someone has said that Mr. Watson like Mr. Tillman, is an embodied retribution on the South for having failed to educate the cracker, the poor white who gives him his strength. It would ill beseem any dweller in cities of the North, especially any dweller in the city of Tammany, to reproach the South with having failed to educate anybody. But Mr. Watson is certainly an awkward man for a community to develop. He is infinitely more in earnest than is Mr. Bryan. Mr. Watson’s followers belong to that school of southern Populists who honestly believe that the respectable and commonplace people who own banks, railroads, dry-goods stores, factories, and the like, are persons with many of the mental and social attributes that unpleasantly distinguished Heliogabalus, Nero, Caligula, and other worthies of later Rome. Not only do they believe this, but they say it with appalling frankness. They are very sincere as a rule, or at least the rank and file are. They are also very suspicious. They distrust anything they cannot understand; and as they understand but little this opens a very wide field for distrust. They are apt to be emotionally religious. If not, they are then at least atheists of an archaic type. Refinement and comfort they are apt to consider quite as objectionable as immorality. That a man should change his clothes in the evening, that he should dine at any other hour than noon, impress these good people as being symptoms of depravity instead of merely trivial. A taste for learning and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause them the deepest suspicion. A well-to-do man they regard with jealous distrust, and if they cannot be well-to-do themselves, at least they hope to make matters uncomfortable for those that are. They possess many strong, rugged virtues, but they are quite impossible politically, because they always confound the essentials and the non-essentials, and though they often make war on vice, they rather prefer making war upon prosperity and refinement.

Mr. Watson was in a sense born out of place when he was born in Georgia, for in Georgia the regular Democracy, while it has accepted the principles of the Populists, has made war on their personnel, and in every way strives to press them down. Far better for Mr. Watson would it have been could he have been born in the adjacent State of South Carolina, where the Populists swallowed the Democrats with a gulp. Senator Tillman, the great Populist or Democratic orator from South Carolina, possesses an untrammelled tongue any middle-of-the-road man would envy: and moreover Mr. Tillman’s brother has been frequently elected to Congress upon the issue that he never wore either an overcoat or an undershirt, an issue which any Populist statesman finds readily comprehensible, and which he would recognize at first glance as being strong before the people. It needs a certain amount of mental subtlety to appreciate that it is for one’s interest to support a man because he is honest and has broad views about coast defenses and the navy, and other similar subjects; but it does not need any mind at all to have one’s prejudices stirred in favor of a statesman whose claim to the title rests upon his indifference to the requirements of civilized dress.

Altogether Mr. Watson, with his sincerity, his frankness, his extreme suspiciousness, his distrust of anything he cannot understand, and the feeling he encourages against all the elegancies and decencies of civilized life, is an interesting personage. He represents the real thing, while Bryan after all is more or less a sham and a compromise. Mr. Watson would, at a blow, destroy all banks and bankers, with a cheerful, albeit vague, belief that thereby he was in some abstruse way benefiting the people at large. And he would do this with the simple sincerity and faith of an African savage who tries to benefit his tribe by a sufficiency of human sacrifices. But Mr. Bryan would be beset by ugly doubts when he came to put into effect all the mischievous beliefs of his followers, and Mr. Sewall would doubtless be frankly miserable if it ever became necessary for him to take a lead in such matters. Mr. Watson really ought to be the first man on the ticket, with Mr. Bryan second; for he is much the superior in boldness, in thorough-going acceptance of his principles according to their logical conclusions, and in sincerity of faith. It is impossible not to regret that the Democrats and Populists should not have put forward in the first place the man who genuinely represents their ideas.

However, it is even doubtful whether Mr. Watson will receive the support to which he is entitled as a vice-presidential candidate. In the South the Populists have been so crushed under the heel of the Democrats, and have bitten that heel with such eager venom, that they dislike entering into a coalition with them; but in the south the Democrats will generally control the election machinery. In the far West, and generally in those States where the Populist wing of the new alliance is ascendant, the Populists have no especial hatred of the Democrats. They know that their principles are substantially identical, and they think it best to support the man who seems to represent the majority faction among the various factions that stand behind Bryan.