Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
that he should be reinstated in office! It is needless to say that the
demand was not granted. There were two or three other acquittals, of
prominent outsiders. Nevertheless the net result was that the majority
of the worst offenders were sent to prison, and the remainder dismissed
from the Government service, if they were public officials, and if
they were not public officials at least so advertised as to render
it impossible that they should ever again have dealings with the
Government. The department was absolutely cleaned and became one of the
very best in the Government. Several Senators came to me--Mr. Garfield
was present on the occasion--and said that they were glad I was putting
a stop to corruption, but they hoped I would avoid all scandal; that if
I would make an example of some one man and then let the others quietly
resign, it would avoid a disturbance which might hurt the party. They
were advising me in good faith, and I was as courteous as possible in
my answer, but explained that I would have to act with the utmost rigor
against the offenders, no matter what the effect on the party, and,
moreover, that I did not believe it would hurt the party. It did not
hurt the party. It helped the party. A favorite war-cry in American
political life has always been, "Turn the rascals out." We made it
evident that, as far as we were concerned, this war-cry was pointless;
for we turned our own rascals out.
There were important and successful land fraud prosecutions in several
Western States. Probably the most important were the cases prosecuted in
Oregon by Francis J. Heney, with the assistance of William J. Burns,
a secret service agent who at that time began his career as a great
detective. It would be impossible to overstate the services rendered to
the cause of decency and honesty by Messrs. Heney and Burns. Mr. Heney
was my close and intimate adviser professionally and non-professionally,
not only as regards putting a stop to frauds in the public lands, but
in many other matters of vital interest to the Republic. No man in the
country has waged the battle for National honesty with greater courage
and success, with more whole-hearted devotion to the public good; and
no man has been more traduced and maligned by the wrong-doing agents
and representatives of the great sinister forces of evil. He secured the
conviction of various men of high political and financial standing
in connection with the Oregon prosecutions; he and Burns behaved with
scrupulous fairness and propriety; but their services to the public
caused them to incur the bitter hatred of those who had wronged the
public, and after I left office the National Administration turned
against them. One of the most conspicuous of the men whom they had
succeeded in convicting was pardoned by President Taft--in spite of the
fact that the presiding Judge, Judge Hunt, had held that the
evidence amply warranted the conviction, and had sentenced the man to
imprisonment. As was natural, the one hundred and forty-six land-fraud
defendants in Oregon, who included the foremost machine political
leaders in the State, furnished the backbone of the opposition to me in
the Presidential contest of 1912. The opposition rallied behind Messrs.
Taft and LaFollette; and although I carried the primaries handsomely,
half of the delegates elected from Oregon under instructions to vote for
me, sided with my opponents in the National Convention--and as regards
some of them I became convinced that the mainspring of their motive
lay in the intrigue for securing the pardon of certain of the men whose
conviction Heney had secured.
Land fraud and post-office cases were not the only ones. We were
especially zealous in prosecuting all of the "higher up" offenders
in the realms of politics and finance who swindled on a large scale.
Special assistants of the Attorney-General, such as Mr. Frank Kellogg,
of St. Paul, and various first-class Federal district attorneys in
different parts of the country secured notable results: Mr. Stimson and
his assistants, Messrs. Wise, Denison, and Frankfurter, in New York, for
instance, in connection with the prosecution of the Sugar Trust and of
the banker Morse, and of a great metropolitan newspaper for opening its
columns to obscene and immoral advertisements; and in St. Louis Messrs.
Dyer and Nortoni, who, among other services, secured the conviction and
imprisonment of Senator Burton, of Kansas; and in Chicago Mr. Sims,
who raised his office to the highest pitch of efficiency, secured the
conviction of the banker Walsh and of the Beef Trust, and first broke
through the armor of the Standard Oil Trust. It is not too much to say
that these men, and others like them, worked a complete revolution in
the enforcement of the Federal laws, and made their offices organized
legal machines fit and ready to conduct smashing fights for the people's
rights and to enforce the laws in aggressive fashion. When I took the
Presidency, it was a common and bitter saying that a big man, a rich
man, could not be put in jail. We put many big and rich men in jail;
two United States Senators, for instance, and among others two great
bankers, one in New York and one in Chicago. One of the United States
Senators died, the other served his term. (One of the bankers was
released from prison by executive order after I left office.) These were
merely individual cases among many others like them. Moreover, we
were just as relentless in dealing with crimes of violence among the
disorderly and brutal classes as in dealing with the crimes of cunning
and fraud of which certain wealthy men and big politicians were guilty.
Mr. Sims in Chicago was particularly efficient in sending to the
penitentiary numbers of the infamous men who batten on the "white
slave" traffic, after July, 1908, when by proclamation I announced
the adherence of our Government to the international agreement for the
suppression of the traffic.
The views I then held and now hold were expressed in a memorandum made
in the case of a Negro convicted of the rape of a young Negro girl,
practically a child. A petition for his pardon had been sent me.
WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D. C., August 8, 1904.
The application for the commutation of sentence of John W. Burley is
denied. This man committed the most hideous crime known to our laws, and
twice before he has committed crimes of a similar, though less horrible,
character. In my judgment there is no justification whatever for paying
heed to the allegations that he is not of sound mind, allegations made
after the trial and conviction. Nobody would pretend that there has ever
been any such degree of mental unsoundness shown as would make people
even consider sending him to an asylum if he had not committed this
crime. Under such circumstances he should certainly be esteemed sane
enough to suffer the penalty for his monstrous deed. I have scant
sympathy with the plea of insanity advanced to save a man from the
consequences of crime, when unless that crime had been committed it
would have been impossible to persuade any responsible authority to
commit him to an asylum as insane. Among the most dangerous criminals,
and especially among those prone to commit this particular kind of
offense, there are plenty of a temper so fiendish or so brutal as to be
incompatible with any other than a brutish order of intelligence; but
these men are nevertheless responsible for their acts; and nothing more
tends to encourage crime among such men than the belief that through the
plea of insanity or any other method it is possible for them to escape
paying the just penalty of their crimes. The crime in question is one
to the existence of which we largely owe the existence of that spirit
of lawlessness which takes form in lynching. It is a crime so revolting
that the criminal is not entitled to one particle of sympathy from any
human being. It is essential that the punishment for it should be not
only as certain but as swift as possible. The jury in this case did
their duty by recommending the infliction of the death penalty. It is
to be regretted that we do not have special provision for more summary
dealing with this type of case. The more we do what in us lies to
secure certain and swift justice in dealing with these cases, the more
effectively do we work against the growth of that lynching spirit which
is so full of evil omen for this people, because it seeks to avenge one
infamous crime by the commission of another of equal infamy.
The application is denied and the sentence will be carried into effect.
(Signed) THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
One of the most curious incidents of lawlessness with which I had to
deal affected an entire State. The State of Nevada in the year 1907
was gradually drifting into utter governmental impotence and downright
anarchy. The people were at heart all right; but the forces of evil had
been permitted to get the upper hand, and for the time being the decent
citizens had become helpless to assert themselves either by controlling
the greedy corporations on the one hand or repressing the murderous
violence of certain lawless labor organizations on the other hand. The
Governor of the State was a Democrat and a Southern man, and in the
abstract a strong believer in the doctrine of State's Rights. But his
experience finally convinced him that he could obtain order only through
the intervention of the National Government; and then he went over too
far and wished to have the National Government do his police work for
him. In the Rocky Mountain States there had existed for years what
was practically a condition of almost constant war between the wealthy
mine-owners and the Western Federation of Miners, at whose head stood
Messrs. Haywood, Pettibone, and Moyer, who were about that time indicted
for the murder of the Governor of Idaho. Much that was lawless, much
that was indefensible, had been done by both sides. The Legislature of
Nevada was in sympathy with, or at least was afraid of not expressing
sympathy for, Messrs. Moyer, Haywood, Pettibone, and their associates.
The State was practically without any police, and the Governor had
recommended the establishment of a State Constabulary, along the lines
of the Texas Rangers; but the Legislature rejected his request. The
Governor reported to me the conditions as follows. During 1907 the
Goldfield mining district became divided into two hostile camps. Half
of the Western Federation of Miners were constantly armed, and arms and
ammunition were purchased and kept by the union as a body, while the
mine-owners on their side retained large numbers of watchmen and guards
who were also armed and always on duty. In addition to these opposing
forces there was, as the Governor reported, an unusually large number of
the violent and criminal element, always attracted to a new and
booming mining camp. Under such conditions the civil authorities were
practically powerless, and the Governor, being helpless to avert civil
war, called on me to keep order. I accordingly threw in a body of
regular troops under General Funston. These kept order completely, and
the Governor became so well satisfied that he thought he would like
to have them there permanently! This seemed to me unhealthy, and on
December 28, 1907, I notified him that while I would do my duty, the
first need was that the State authorities should do theirs, and that
the first step towards this was the assembling of the Legislature.
I concluded my telegram: "If within five days from receipt of this
telegram you shall have issued the necessary notice to convene the
Legislature of Nevada, I shall continue the troops during a period of
three weeks. If when the term of five days has elapsed the notice has