Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
this day. It was one of the most serious setbacks which the cause of
industrial and social progress and reform ever received.
I had been brought up to hold the courts in especial reverence. The
people with whom I was most intimate were apt to praise the courts for
just such decisions as this, and to speak of them as bulwarks against
disorder and barriers against demagogic legislation. These were the same
people with whom the judges who rendered these decisions were apt
to foregather at social clubs, or dinners, or in private life. Very
naturally they all tended to look at things from the same standpoint. Of
course it took more than one experience such as this Tenement Cigar Case
to shake me out of the attitude in which I was brought up. But various
decisions, not only of the New York court but of certain other State
courts and even of the United States Supreme Court, during the quarter
of a century following the passage of this tenement-house legislation,
did at last thoroughly wake me to the actual fact. I grew to realize
that all that Abraham Lincoln had said about the Dred Scott decision
could be said with equal truth and justice about the numerous decisions
which in our own day were erected as bars across the path of social
reform, and which brought to naught so much of the effort to secure
justice and fair dealing for workingmen and workingwomen, and for plain
citizens generally.
Some of the wickedness and inefficiency in public life was then
displayed in simpler fashion than would probably now be the case. Once
or twice I was a member of committees which looked into gross and widely
ramifying governmental abuses. On the whole, the most important part I
played was in the third Legislature in which I served, when I acted as
chairman of a committee which investigated various phases of New York
City official life.
The most important of the reform measures our committee recommended was
the bill taking away from the Aldermen their power of confirmation over
the Mayor's appointments. We found that it was possible to get citizens
interested in the character and capacity of the head of the city, so
that they would exercise some intelligent interest in his conduct and
qualifications. But we found that as a matter of fact it was impossible
to get them interested in the Aldermen and other subordinate officers.
In actual practice the Aldermen were merely the creatures of the local
ward bosses or of the big municipal bosses, and where they controlled
the appointments the citizens at large had no chance whatever to make
their will felt. Accordingly we fought for the principle, which I
believe to be of universal application, that what is needed in our
popular government is to give plenty of power to a few officials, and to
make these few officials genuinely and readily responsible to the people
for the exercise of that power. Taking away the confirming power of the
Board of Aldermen did not give the citizens of New York good government.
We knew that if they chose to elect the wrong kind of Mayor they would
have bad government, no matter what the form of the law was. But we did
secure to them the chance to get good government if they desired, and
this was impossible as long as the old system remained. The change was
fought in the way in which all similar changes always are fought. The
corrupt and interested politicians were against it, and the battle-cries
they used, which rallied to them most of the unthinking conservatives,
were that we were changing the old constitutional system, that we were
defacing the monuments of the wisdom of the founders of the government,
that we were destroying that distinction between legislative and
executive power which was the bulwark of our liberties, and that we were
violent and unscrupulous radicals with no reverence for the past.
Of course the investigations, disclosures, and proceedings of the
investigating committee of which I was chairman brought me into
bitter personal conflict with very powerful financiers, very powerful
politicians, and with certain newspapers which these financiers and
politicians controlled. A number of able and unscrupulous men were
fighting, some for their financial lives, and others to keep out of
unpleasantly close neighborhood to State's prison. This meant that there
were blows to be taken as well as given. In such political struggles,
those who went in for the kind of thing that I did speedily excited
animosities among strong and cunning men who would stop at little to
gratify their animosity. Any man engaged in this particular type of
militant and practical reform movement was soon made to feel that he had
better not undertake to push matters home unless his own character was
unassailable. On one of the investigating committees on which I served
there was a countryman, a very able man, who, when he reached New York
City, felt as certain Americans do when they go to Paris--that the moral
restraints of his native place no longer applied. With all his ability,
he was not shrewd enough to realize that the Police Department was
having him as well as the rest of us carefully shadowed. He was caught
red-handed by a plain-clothes man doing what he had no business to do;
and from that time on he dared not act save as those who held his secret
permitted him to act. Thenceforth those officials who stood behind the
Police Department had one man on the committee on whom they could count.
I never saw terror more ghastly on a strong man's face than on the face
of this man on one or two occasions when he feared that events in the
committee might take such a course as to force him into a position where
his colleagues would expose him even if the city officials did not.
However, he escaped, for we were never able to get the kind of proof
which would warrant our asking for the action in which this man could
not have joined.
Traps were set for more than one of us, and if we had walked into these
traps our public careers would have ended, at least so far as following
them under the conditions which alone make it worth while to be in
public life at all. A man can of course hold public office, and many a
man does hold public office, and lead a public career of a sort, even if
there are other men who possess secrets about him which he cannot afford
to have divulged. But no man can lead a public career really worth
leading, no man can act with rugged independence in serious crises, nor
strike at great abuses, nor afford to make powerful and unscrupulous
foes, if he is himself vulnerable in his private character. Nor will
clean conduct by itself enable a man to render good service. I have
always been fond of Josh Billings's remark that "it is much easier to
be a harmless dove than a wise serpent." There are plenty of decent
legislators, and plenty of able legislators; but the blamelessness and
the fighting edge are not always combined. Both qualities are necessary
for the man who is to wage active battle against the powers that prey.
He must be clean of life, so that he can laugh when his public or his
private record is searched; and yet being clean of life will not
avail him if he is either foolish or timid. He must walk warily and
fearlessly, and while he should never brawl if he can avoid it, he must
be ready to hit hard if the need arises. Let him remember, by the way,
that the unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can
be avoided; but never hit softly.
Like most young men in politics, I went through various oscillations
of feeling before I "found myself." At one period I became so impressed
with the virtue of complete independence that I proceeded to act on each
case purely as I personally viewed it, without paying any heed to the
principles and prejudices of others. The result was that I speedily
and deservedly lost all power of accomplishing anything at all; and I
thereby learned the invaluable lesson that in the practical activities
of life no man can render the highest service unless he can act
in combination with his fellows, which means a certain amount of
give-and-take between him and them. Again, I at one period began to
believe that I had a future before me, and that it behooved me to be
very far-sighted and scan each action carefully with a view to its
possible effect on that future. This speedily made me useless to the
public and an object of aversion to myself; and I then made up my mind
that I would try not to think of the future at all, but would proceed on
the assumption that each office I held would be the last I ever should
hold, and that I would confine myself to trying to do my work as well as
possible while I held that office. I found that for me personally this
was the only way in which I could either enjoy myself or render good
service to the country, and I never afterwards deviated from this plan.
As regards political advancement the bosses could of course do a good
deal. At that time the warring Stalwart and Half-Breed factions of
the Republican party were supporting respectively President Arthur
and Senator Miller. Neither side cared for me. The first year in the
Legislature I rose to a position of leadership, so that in the second
year, when the Republicans were in a minority, I received the minority
nomination for Speaker, although I was still the youngest man in the
House, being twenty-four years old. The third year the Republicans
carried the Legislature, and the bosses at once took a hand in the
Speakership contest. I made a stout fight for the nomination, but the
bosses of the two factions, the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds, combined
and I was beaten. I was much chagrined for the moment. But the fact that
I had fought hard and efficiently, even though defeated, and that I had
made the fight single-handed, with no machine back of me, assured my
standing as floor leader. My defeat in the end materially strengthened
my position, and enabled me to accomplish far more than I could have
accomplished as Speaker. As so often, I found that the titular
position was of no consequence; what counted was the combination of the
opportunity with the ability to accomplish results. The achievement was
the all-important thing; the position, whether titularly high or
low, was of consequence only in so far as it widened the chance for
achievement. After the session closed four of us who looked at politics
from the same standpoint and were known as Independent or Anti-Machine
Republicans were sent by the State Convention as delegates-at-large
to the Republican National Convention of 1884, where I advocated, as
vigorously as I knew how, the nomination of Senator George F. Edmunds.
Mr. Edmunds was defeated and Mr. Blaine nominated. Mr. Blaine was
clearly the choice of the rank and file of the party; his nomination
was won in fair and aboveboard fashion, because the rank and file of the
party stood back of him; and I supported him to the best of my ability
in the ensuing campaign.
The Speakership contest enlightened me as regards more things than the
attitude of the bosses. I had already had some exasperating experiences
with the "silk stocking" reformer type, as Abraham Lincoln called it,
the gentlemen who were very nice, very refined, who shook their heads
over political corruption and discussed it in drawing-rooms and parlors,
but who were wholly unable to grapple with real men in real life. They
were apt vociferously to demand "reform" as if it were some concrete
substance, like cake, which could be handed out at will, in tangible
masses, if only the demand were urgent enough. These parlor reformers
made up for inefficiency in action by zeal in criticising; and they
delighted in criticising the men who really were doing the things which
they said ought to be done, but which they lacked the sinewy power to