Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
do. They often upheld ideals which were not merely impossible but highly
undesirable, and thereby played into the hands of the very politicians
to whom they professed to be most hostile. Moreover, if they believed
that their own interests, individually or as a class, were jeoparded,
they were apt to show no higher standards than did the men they usually
denounced.
One of their shibboleths was that the office should seek the man and not
the man the office. This is entirely true of certain offices at certain
times. It is entirely untrue when the circumstances are different.
It would have been unnecessary and undesirable for Washington to
have sought the Presidency. But if Abraham Lincoln had not sought the
Presidency he never would have been nominated. The objection in such a
case as this lies not to seeking the office, but to seeking it in any
but an honorable and proper manner. The effect of the shibboleth in
question is usually merely to put a premium on hypocrisy, and therefore
to favor the creature who is willing to rise by hypocrisy. When I ran
for Speaker, the whole body of machine politicians was against me, and
my only chance lay in arousing the people in the different districts. To
do this I had to visit the districts, put the case fairly before the men
whom I saw, and make them understand that I was really making a fight
and would stay in the fight to the end. Yet there were reformers who
shook their heads and deplored my "activity" in the canvass. Of course
the one thing which corrupt machine politicians most desire is to have
decent men frown on the activity, that is, on the efficiency, of the
honest man who genuinely wishes to reform politics.
If efficiency is left solely to bad men, and if virtue is confined
solely to inefficient men, the result cannot be happy. When I entered
politics there were, as there always had been--and as there always will
be--any number of bad men in politics who were thoroughly efficient,
and any number of good men who would like to have done lofty things in
politics but who were thoroughly inefficient. If I wished to accomplish
anything for the country, my business was to combine decency and
efficiency; to be a thoroughly practical man of high ideals who did his
best to reduce those ideals to actual practice. This was my ideal, and
to the best of my ability I strove to live up to it.
To a young man, life in the New York Legislature was always interesting
and often entertaining. There was always a struggle of some kind on
hand. Sometimes it was on a naked question of right and wrong. Sometimes
it was on a question of real constructive statesmanship. Moreover, there
were all kinds of humorous incidents, the humor being usually of the
unconscious kind. In one session of the Legislature the New York City
Democratic representatives were split into two camps, and there were
two rivals for leadership. One of these was a thoroughly good-hearted,
happy-go-lucky person who was afterwards for several years in Congress.
He had been a local magistrate and was called Judge. Generally he and I
were friendly, but occasionally I did something that irritated him. He
was always willing to vote for any other member's bill himself, and he
regarded it as narrow-minded for any one to oppose one of his
bills, especially if the opposition was upon the ground that it was
unconstitutional--for his views of the Constitution were so excessively
liberal as to make even me feel as if I belonged to the straitest sect
of strict constructionists. On one occasion he had a bill to appropriate
money, with obvious impropriety, for the relief of some miscreant whom
he styled "one of the honest yeomanry of the State." When I explained to
him that it was clearly unconstitutional, he answered, "Me friend, the
Constitution don't touch little things like that," and then added, with
an ingratiating smile, "Anyhow, I'd never allow the Constitution to
come between friends." At the time I was looking over the proofs of Mr.
Bryce's "American Commonwealth," and I told him the incident. He put it
into the first edition of the "Commonwealth"; whether it is in the last
edition or not, I cannot say.
On another occasion the same gentleman came to an issue with me in
a debate, and wound up his speech by explaining that I occupied what
"lawyers would call a quasi position on the bill." His rival was a man
of totally different type, a man of great natural dignity, also born in
Ireland. He had served with gallantry in the Civil War. After the close
of the war he organized an expedition to conquer Canada. The expedition,
however, got so drunk before reaching Albany that it was there
incarcerated in jail, whereupon its leader abandoned it and went into
New York politics instead. He was a man of influence, and later occupied
in the Police Department the same position as Commissioner which I
myself at one time occupied. He felt that his rival had gained too much
glory at my expense, and, walking over with ceremonious solemnity to
where the said rival was sitting close beside me, he said to him: "I
would like you to know, Mr. Cameron [Cameron, of course, was not the
real name], that Mr. Roosevelt knows more law in a wake than you do in a
month; and, more than that, Michael Cameron, what do you mane by quoting
Latin on the floor of this House when you don't know the alpha and
omayga of the language?"
There was in the Legislature, during the deadlock above mentioned, a man
whom I will call Brogan. He looked like a serious elderly frog. I
never heard him speak more than once. It was before the Legislature was
organized, or had adopted any rules; and each day the only business was
for the clerk to call the roll. One day Brogan suddenly rose, and the
following dialogue occurred:
Brogan. Misther Clu-r-r-k!
The Clerk. The gentleman from New York.
Brogan. I rise to a point of ordher under the rules!
The Clerk. There are no rules.
Brogan. Thin I object to them!
The Clerk. There are no rules to object to.
Brogan. Oh! [nonplussed; but immediately recovering himself].
Thin I move that they be amended until there ar-r-re!
The deadlock was tedious; and we hailed with joy such enlivening
incidents as the above.
During my three years' service in the Legislature I worked on a very
simple philosophy of government. It was that personal character and
initiative are the prime requisites in political and social life. It
was not only a good but an absolutely indispensable theory as far as it
went; but it was defective in that it did not sufficiently allow for
the need of collective action. I shall never forget the men with whom
I worked hand in hand in these legislative struggles, not only my
fellow-legislators, but some of the newspaper reporters, such as Spinney
and Cunningham; and then in addition the men in the various districts
who helped us. We had made up our minds that we must not fight fire with
fire, that on the contrary the way to win out was to equal our foes in
practical efficiency and yet to stand at the opposite plane from them in
applied morality.
It was not always easy to keep the just middle, especially when
it happened that on one side there were corrupt and unscrupulous
demagogues, and on the other side corrupt and unscrupulous
reactionaries. Our effort was to hold the scales even between both. We
tried to stand with the cause of righteousness even though its advocates
were anything but righteous. We endeavored to cut out the abuses of
property, even though good men of property were misled into upholding
those abuses. We refused to be frightened into sanctioning improper
assaults upon property, although we knew that the champions of property
themselves did things that were wicked and corrupt. We were as yet by
no means as thoroughly awake as we ought to have been to the need of
controlling big business and to the damage done by the combination of
politics with big business. In this matter I was not behind the rest
of my friends; indeed, I was ahead of them, for no serious leader in
political life then appreciated the prime need of grappling with these
questions. One partial reason--not an excuse or a justification, but a
partial reason--for my slowness in grasping the importance of action in
these matters was the corrupt and unattractive nature of so many of the
men who championed popular reforms, their insincerity, and the folly
of so many of the actions which they advocated. Even at that date I had
neither sympathy with nor admiration for the man who was merely a money
king, and I did not regard the "money touch," when divorced from other
qualities, as entitling a man to either respect or consideration. As
recited above, we did on more than one occasion fight battles, in
which we neither took nor gave quarter, against the most prominent and
powerful financiers and financial interests of the day. But most of the
fights in which we were engaged were for pure honesty and decency, and
they were more apt to be against that form of corruption which found
its expression in demagogy than against that form of corruption which
defended or advocated privilege. Fundamentally, our fight was part of
the eternal war against the Powers that Prey; and we cared not a whit in
what rank of life these powers were found.
To play the demagogue for purposes of self-interest is a cardinal sin
against the people in a democracy, exactly as to play the courtier for
such purposes is a cardinal sin against the people under other forms of
government. A man who stays long in our American political life, if he
has in his soul the generous desire to do effective service for great
causes, inevitably grows to regard himself merely as one of many
instruments, all of which it may be necessary to use, one at one time,
one at another, in achieving the triumph of those causes; and whenever
the usefulness of any one has been exhausted, it is to be thrown aside.
If such a man is wise, he will gladly do the thing that is next, when
the time and the need come together, without asking what the future
holds for him. Let the half-god play his part well and manfully, and
then be content to draw aside when the god appears. Nor should he feel
vain regrets that to another it is given to render greater services and
reap a greater reward. Let it be enough for him that he too has served,
and that by doing well he has prepared the way for the other man who can
do better.
CHAPTER IV
IN COWBOY LAND
Though I had previously made a trip into the then Territory of Dakota,
beyond the Red River, it was not until 1883 that I went to the Little
Missouri, and there took hold of two cattle ranches, the Chimney Butte
and the Elkhorn.
It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of
Owen Wister's stories and Frederic Remington's drawings, the West of
the Indian and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cow-puncher. That
land of the West has gone now, "gone, gone with lost Atlantis," gone to
the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories. It was a land of vast
silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game
stared at the passing horseman. It was a land of scattered ranches, of
herds of long-horned cattle, and of reckless riders who unmoved looked
in the eyes of life or of death. In that land we led a free and hardy
life, with horse and with rifle. We worked under the scorching midsummer
sun, when the wide plains shimmered and wavered in the heat; and we knew
the freezing misery of riding night guard round the cattle in the late
fall round-up. In the soft springtime the stars were glorious in our
eyes each night before we fell asleep; and in the winter we rode through
blinding blizzards, when the driven snow-dust burned our faces. There