Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
any man to hold that office for more than two consecutive terms.
But every shred of power which a President exercises while in office
vanishes absolutely when he has once left office. An ex-President stands
precisely in the position of any other private citizen, and has not one
particle more power to secure a nomination or election than if he had
never held the office at all--indeed, he probably has less because of
the very fact that he has held the office. Therefore the reasoning on
which the anti-third term custom is based has no application whatever
to an ex-President, and no application whatever to anything except
consecutive terms. As a barrier of precaution against more than two
consecutive terms the custom embodies a valuable principle. Applied
in any other way it becomes a mere formula, and like all formulas
a potential source of mischievous confusion. Having this in mind, I
regarded the custom as applying practically, if not just as much, to a
President who had been seven and a half years in office as to one
who had been eight years in office, and therefore, in the teeth of a
practically unanimous demand from my own party that I accept another
nomination, and the reasonable certainty that the nomination would be
ratified at the polls, I felt that the substance of the custom applied
to me in 1908. On the other hand, it had no application whatever to any
human being save where it was invoked in the case of a man desiring a
third consecutive term. Having given such substantial proof of my own
regard for the custom, I deem it a duty to add this comment on it. I
believe that it is well to have a custom of this kind, to be generally
observed, but that it would be very unwise to have it definitely
hardened into a Constitutional prohibition. It is not desirable
ordinarily that a man should stay in office twelve consecutive years as
President; but most certainly the American people are fit to take care
of themselves, and stand in no need of an irrevocable self-denying
ordinance. They should not bind themselves never to take action which
under some quite conceivable circumstances it might be to their great
interest to take. It is obviously of the last importance to the safety
of a democracy that in time of real peril it should be able to command
the service of every one among its citizens in the precise position
where the service rendered will be most valuable. It would be a
benighted policy in such event to disqualify absolutely from the
highest office a man who while holding it had actually shown the highest
capacity to exercise its powers with the utmost effect for the public
defense. If, for instance, a tremendous crisis occurred at the end of
the second term of a man like Lincoln, as such a crisis occurred at the
end of his first term, it would be a veritable calamity if the American
people were forbidden to continue to use the services of the one man
whom they knew, and did not merely guess, could carry them through the
crisis. The third term tradition has no value whatever except as it
applies to a third consecutive term. While it is well to keep it as
a custom, it would be a mark both of weakness and unwisdom for the
American people to embody it into a Constitutional provision which could
not do them good and on some given occasion might work real harm.
There was one cartoon made while I was President, in which I appeared
incidentally, that was always a great favorite of mine. It pictured an
old fellow with chin whiskers, a farmer, in his shirt-sleeves, with his
boots off, sitting before the fire, reading the President's Message. On
his feet were stockings of the kind I have seen hung up by the dozen in
Joe Ferris's store at Medora, in the days when I used to come in to town
and sleep in one of the rooms over the store. The title of the picture
was "His Favorite Author." This was the old fellow whom I always used to
keep in mind. He had probably been in the Civil War in his youth; he had
worked hard ever since he left the army; he had been a good husband and
father; he had brought up his boys and girls to work; he did not wish to
do injustice to any one else, but he wanted justice done to himself and
to others like him; and I was bound to secure that justice for him if it
lay in my power to do so.[*]
[*] I believe I realized fairly well this ambition. I shall turn to
my enemies to attest the truth of this statement. The New York _Sun_,
shortly before the National Convention of 1904, spoke of me as follows:
"President Roosevelt holds that his nomination by the National
Republican Convention of 1904 is an assured thing. He makes no
concealment of his conviction, and it is unreservedly shared by his
friends. We think President Roosevelt is right.
"There are strong and convincing reasons why the President should feel
that success is within his grasp. He has used the opportunities that
he found or created, and he has used them with consummate skill and
undeniable success.
"The President has disarmed all his enemies. Every weapon they had,
new or old, has been taken from them and added to the now unassailable
Roosevelt arsenal. Why should people wonder that Mr. Bryan clings to
silver? Has not Mr. Roosevelt absorbed and sequestered every vestige of
the Kansas City platform that had a shred of practical value?
Suppose that Mr. Bryan had been elected President. What could he have
accomplished compared with what Mr. Roosevelt has accomplished? Will his
most passionate followers pretend for one moment that Mr. Bryan could
have conceived, much less enforced, any such pursuit of the trusts as
that which Mr. Roosevelt has just brought to a triumphant issue? Will
Mr. Bryan himself intimate that the Federal courts would have turned to
his projects the friendly countenance which they have lent to those of
Mr. Roosevelt?
"Where is 'government by injunction' gone to? The very emptiness of that
once potent phrase is beyond description! A regiment of Bryans could not
compete with Mr. Roosevelt in harrying the trusts, in bringing wealth to
its knees, and in converting into the palpable actualities of action the
wildest dreams of Bryan's campaign orators. He has outdone them all.
"And how utterly the President has routed the pretensions of Bryan, and
of the whole Democratic horde in respect to organized labor! How empty
were all their professions, their mouthings and their howlings in the
face of the simple and unpretentious achievements of the President! In
his own straightforward fashion he inflicted upon capital in one short
hour of the coal strike a greater humiliation than Bryan could have
visited upon it in a century. He is the leader of the labor unions of
the United States. Mr. Roosevelt has put them above the law and above
the Constitution, because for him they are the American people." [This
last, I need hardly say, is merely a rhetorical method of saying that I
gave the labor union precisely the same treatment as the corporation.]
Senator La Follette, in the issue of his magazine immediately following
my leaving the Presidency in March, 1909, wrote as follows:
"Roosevelt steps from the stage gracefully. He has ruled his party to a
large extent against its will. He has played a large part in the
world's work, for the past seven years. The activities of his remarkably
forceful personality have been so manifold that it will be long before
his true rating will be fixed in the opinion of the race. He is said to
think that the three great things done by him are the undertaking of the
construction of the Panama Canal and its rapid and successful carrying
forward, the making of peace between Russia and Japan, and the sending
around the world of the fleet.
"These are important things, but many will be slow to think them his
greatest services. The Panama Canal will surely serve mankind when in
operation; and the manner of organizing this work seems to be fine.
But no one can say whether this project will be a gigantic success or
a gigantic failure; and the task is one which must, in the nature of
things, have been undertaken and carried through some time soon, as
historic periods go, anyhow. The Peace of Portsmouth was a great thing
to be responsible for, and Roosevelt's good offices undoubtedly saved
a great and bloody battle in Manchuria. But the war was fought out, and
the parties ready to quit, and there is reason to think that it was
only when this situation was arrived at that the good offices of the
President of the United States were, more or less indirectly, invited.
The fleet's cruise was a strong piece of diplomacy, by which we informed
Japan that we will send our fleet wherever we please and whenever we
please. It worked out well.
"But none of these things, it will seem to many, can compare with some
of Roosevelt's other achievements. Perhaps he is loath to take credit as
a reformer, for he is prone to spell the word with question marks, and
to speak disparagingly of 'reform.'
"But for all that, this contemner of 'reformers' made reform respectable
in the United States, and this rebuker of 'muck-rakers' has been the
chief agent in making the history of 'muck-raking' in the United States
a National one, conceded to be useful. He has preached from the White
House many doctrines; but among them he has left impressed on the
American mind the one great truth of economic justice couched in the
pithy and stinging phrase 'the square deal.' The task of making reform
respectable in a commercialized world, and of giving the Nation a slogan
in a phrase, is greater than the man who performed it is likely to
think.
"And, then, there is the great and statesmanlike movement for the
conservation of our National resources, into which Roosevelt so
energetically threw himself at a time when the Nation as a whole knew
not that we are ruining and bankrupting ourselves as fast as we can.
This is probably the greatest thing Roosevelt did, undoubtedly. This
globe is the capital stock of the race. It is just so much coal and oil
and gas. This may be economized or wasted. The same thing is true of
phosphates and other mineral resources. Our water resources are immense,
and we are only just beginning to use them. Our forests have been
destroyed; they must be restored. Our soils are being depleted; they
must be built up and conserved.
"These questions are not of this day only or of this generation. They
belong all to the future. Their consideration requires that high moral
tone which regards the earth as the home of a posterity to whom we owe a
sacred duty.
"This immense idea Roosevelt, with high statesmanship, dinned into the
ears of the Nation until the Nation heeded. He held it so high that it
attracted the attention of the neighboring nations of the continent,
and will so spread and intensify that we will soon see the world's
conferences devoted to it.
"Nothing can be greater or finer than this. It is so great and so fine
that when the historian of the future shall speak of Theodore Roosevelt
he is likely to say that he did many notable things, among them that of
inaugurating the movement which finally resulted in the square deal,
but that his greatest work was inspiring and actually beginning a world
movement for staying terrestrial waste and saving for the human race
the things upon which, and upon which alone, a great and peaceful and
progressive and happy race life can be founded.
"What statesman in all history has done anything calling for so wide a
view and for a purpose more lofty?"
CHAPTER XI
THE NATURAL RESOURCES OF THE NATION
When Governor of New York, as I have already described, I had been in
consultation with Gifford Pinchot and F. H. Newell, and had shaped
my recommendations about forestry largely in accordance with their