Presidential addresses and state papers, Volume 1 (of 7)

by Theodore Roosevelt

Corruption, in the gross sense in which the word is used in ordinary conversation, has been absolutely unknown among our Presidents, and it has been exceedingly rare in our President’s Cabinets. Inefficiency, whether due to lack of will-power, sheer deficiency in wisdom, or improper yielding either to the pressure of politicians or to the other kinds of pressure which must often be found even in a free democracy, has been far less uncommon. Of deliberate moral obliquity there has been but very little indeed.

In the easiest, quietest, most peaceful times the President is sure to have great tasks before him. The simple question of revenue and expenditure is as important to the nation as it is to the average household, and the President is the man to whom the nation looks and whom it holds accountable in the matter both of expenditure and of revenue. It is an entirely mistaken belief that the expenditure of money is simply due to a taste for recklessness and extravagance on the part of the people’s representatives.

The representatives in the long run are sure to try to do what the people effectively want. The trouble is that although each group has, and all the groups taken together still more strongly have, an interest in keeping the expenditures down, each group has also a direct interest in keeping some particular expenditure up. This expenditure is usually entirely proper and desirable, save only that the aggregate of all such expenditures may be so great as to make it impossible for the nation to go into them.

It is a good deal the same thing in the nation as it is in a State. The demand may be for a consumptive hospital, or for pensions to veterans, or for a public building, or for an armory, or for cleaning out a harbor, or for starting irrigation. In each case the demand may be in itself entirely proper, and those interested in it, from whatever motives, may be both sincere and strenuous in their advocacy. But the President has to do on a large scale what every Governor of a State has to do on a small scale, that is, balance the demands on the Treasury with the capacities of the Treasury.

Whichever way he decides, some people are sure to think that he has tipped the scale the wrong way, and from their point of view they may conscientiously think it; whereas from his point of view he may know with equal conscientiousness that he has done his best to strike an average which would on the one hand not be niggardly toward worthy objects, and on the other would not lay too heavy a burden of taxation upon the people.

Inasmuch as these particular questions have to be met every year in connection with every session of Congress and with the work of every department, it may readily be seen that even the President’s every-day responsibilities are of no light order. So it is with his appointments. Entirely apart from the fact that there is a great pressure for place, it is also the fact that in all the higher and more important appointments there are usually conflicting interests which must somehow be reconciled to the best of the President’s capacity.

Here again it must be remembered that the matter is not always by any means one of merely what we call politics. Where there is a really serious conflict in reference to an appointment, while it may be merely a factional fight, it is more apt to be because two groups of the President’s supporters differ radically and honestly on some question of policy; so that whatever the President’s decision may be, he can not help arousing dissatisfaction.

One thing to be remembered is that appointments and policies which are normally routine and unimportant may suddenly become of absolutely vital consequence. For instance, the War Department was utterly neglected for over thirty years after the Civil War. This neglect was due less to the successive Presidents than to Congress, and in Congress it was due to the fact that the people themselves did not take an interest in the army. Neither the regular officer nor the regular soldier takes any part in politics as a rule, so that the demagogue and the bread-and-butter politician have no fear of his vote; and to both of them, and also to the cheap sensational newspaper, the army offers a favorite subject for attack. So it often happens that some amiable people really get a little afraid of the army, and have some idea that it may be used some time or other against our liberties.

The army never has been and, I am sure, it never will be or can be a menace to anybody save America’s foes, or aught but a source of pride to every good and far-sighted American. But it is only in time of actual danger that such facts are brought home vividly to the minds of our people, and so the army is apt to receive far less than its proper share of attention. But when an emergency like that caused by the Spanish War arises, then the Secretary of War becomes the most important officer in the Cabinet, and the army steps into the place of foremost interest in all the country.

It is only once in a generation that such a crisis as the Spanish War or the Mexican War or the War of 1812 has to be confronted, but in almost every administration lesser crises do arise. They may be in connection with foreign affairs, as was the case with the Chilean trouble under President Harrison’s administration, the Venezuelan matter in President Cleveland’s second term, or the Boxer uprising in China last year. Much more often they relate to domestic affairs, as in the case of a disastrous panic, which produces terrible social and industrial convulsions. Whatever the problem may be, the President has got to meet it and to work out some kind of a solution. In midwinter or midsummer, with Congress sitting or absent, the President has always to be ready to devote every waking hour to some anxious, worrying, harassing matter, most difficult to decide, and yet which it is imperative immediately to decide.