The Young t.r

by LLOYD MORRIS

IN 1900, Senator Thomas C. Platt, Republican boss of New York State, determined to have Governor Theodore Roosevelt nominated as the party’s candidate for the Vice Presidency. Platt’s admiration for Roosevelt was rather less than tepid. He wanted to eliminate the Governor from New York politics, to cancel his influence by making him politically impotent.

Platt’s project aroused no enthusiasm in Senator Mark A. Hanna, President McKinley’s campaign manager and national party boss. “Don’t you realize,” Hanna reportedly exploded, “that there’s only one life between this madman and the White House?” A millionaire capitalist as well as an astute politician, Hanna considered Roosevelt a dangerous radical. This opinion was shared by the older financiers and industrialists who figured importantly in the party, and it was the view of Wall Street and the business community in general. Few Americans today think of T.R. as in any sense a radical.

The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, selected and edited by Elting E. Morison (Vols. I and II [18681900], Harvard University Press, $20), present T.R. against the background of his era, not ours. They make us contemporary with him, and admit us directly to his personal experience. That he was a picturesque figure is so obvious as to obscure the fact that, in one respect, he was likewise a significant one. More fully than any of his contemporaries, Roosevelt registered the currents that surged through the nation’s life during a period of transforming changes. As his correspondence shows, there was scarcely any area of controversy that, he did not feel obliged to invade — either because his official position required him to reach some conclusion, or his conscience impelled him to become a partisan, or his curiosity forced him to investigate whatever was stirring up other people.

This first installment of a complete edition of his letters carries Roosevelt from boyhood to his nomination for the Vice Presidency at the age of fortytwo. He graduated from Harvard in 1880. During the next twenty years he served three terms in the New Wk legislature; campaigned, unsuccessfully, for election as Mayor of New York; became Civil Service Commissioner, Commissioner of Police in New York City, Assistant Secretary of the Navy; formed and led a regiment of Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War; was elected Governor of New York on his return to civilian life. He had likewise been a rancher in Dakota and a hunter of big game in the Far West. He was the author of a dozen volumes that had brought him prestige as a naturalist, historian, and political analyst. The variety of his experience and the range of his interests were exceptional. His letters reveal him as a man whose personality was extremely complex but whose mind was so simple as often to seem naïve.

From youth onward, Roosevelt deliberately forged his personality as an instrument of effective action. He set up, and perpetually revised, an image of the man he wanted to be; by exercising his will, he kept trying to approximate his current image. His natural tendency was to subordinate knowing to doing, intelligence to character. “It is the doing of things after all which really makes life worth living,” he assured one friend. “ Normally the individual rises to greatness only through labor and strife,” he told another, asserting that this doctrine held true for the life of nations also: “It is only through strife — righteous strife — righteously conducted, but still strife, that we can expect to win to the higher levels where the victors in the struggle are crowned.” Roosevelt understood life best when he was able to interpret it as a contest between absolute good and absolute evil. This suggests the remarkable simplicity of his mind.

Since he was primarily a moralist, he seldom dealt with any problem without first translating it into an ethical issue. He was often indifferent to the real nature of the problem; what concerned him were the moral values that he attached to alternative solutions. But although his conclusions in every field were likely to be predicated on moral judgment, his judgment was seldom determined, as he liked to think, by his conscience. He was a practical politician with a marked talent for strategy. He was likewise an ambitious man whose selfconceit and outstanding aptitude for self-dramatization may have had their source in a profound, if unconscious, personal insecurity. These other facets of Roosevelt’s personality frequently shaped the decisions which he justified, so eloquently, on moral grounds.

Roosevelt’s egotism and his ability to dramatize himself appear early and often in his letters. When three horse-thieves stole a boat from Roosevelt’s Dakota ranch to make their escape from the region, he and two of his men went to capture them. In his correspondence, the adventure assumes epical proportions and, characteristically, Roosevelt informed his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, “I got the three horse-thieves in fine style.” The celebrated charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War became, in Roosevelt’s mind, his personal heroic exploit. He not only extracted from it every political advantage that it was capable of yielding, but schemed endlessly to secure the Medal of Honor. “If I didn’t earn it,“ he told Lodge, “then no commissioned officer ever can earn it.” He failed to obtain the Medal of Honor, and his book The Rough Riders drew a spoofing review from Finley Peter Dunne, the humorist “Mr. Dooley. There is abundant evidence in the letters that Roosevelt was what actors call a scene-snatcher. His avidity for the limelight sometimes made the voice of conscience very weak indeed.

As a practical politician, Roosevelt found that he had to adapt his convictions to existing circumstances. He was repeatedly compelled to compromise. This necessity disturbed him until he hit upon a characteristic justification; he gave expediency a moral status. He advocated learning “to accept the best possible in lieu of the unattainable best — a lesson which we all have to learn when we strive for results.” How far did his cult of expediency enable him to indulge in tergiversation with a clear conscience and develop a capacity for stretching the truth to suit the exigencies of the moment ? Lincoln Steffens, who knew him well, said that T.R. was an honest man: he could not tell a lie until he had made himself believe it.

Certain passages in Roosevelt’s letters illustrate this tendency. By New York law, only citizens who had been residents of the state for the five years preceding an election were eligible for the governorship. In 1898 Roosevelt had made an affidavit, for tax purposes, of residence in Washington that disqualified him for nomination — but with the help of Elihu Root he found a way around that. Again, while Roosevelt’s nomination for the governorship by the Republican Party was still uncertain, he was approached by the Independents to head their ticket. They always asserted that he accepted, but after a conference with Senator Platt, he ditched them. In the light of other information relating to this episode, two of Roosevelt’s letters about it — written on a plane of the highest ethical principle — seem to fall somewhat short of candor.

The terms on which Roosevelt accepted his nomination for the governorship were explicit, and they indicate his tolerance of expedient compromise. He undertook to adopt no policy, to agree to no important measure or appointment, without prior consultation with Boss Platt, and to consult Platt fully on all important matters. He promised to seek constantly to make the interests of the Republican machine identical with those of the public. But when Platt’s emissary, Lemuel Ely Quigg, reduced Roosevelt’s oral acceptance to writing, T.R. nervously protested, “Your representation of what I said was substantially right; that is, it gave just the spirit. But I don’t like the wording of some of your sentences.” He wished to make certain that he had not been represented as consenting to act otherwise than in accordance with his conscience. “In short,” he wrote Quigg, “I want to make clear that there was no question of pledges or promises, least of all a question of bargaining for the nomination; but that I promptly told you the position I would take if I was elected Governor and suggested what I thought it would be best for both Senator Platt and myself to do. . . .” He wanted the governorship. He had agreed to accept Platt’s domination. But he couldn’t endure facing that fact. It had somehow to be translated into its opposite.

It is no wonder that Roosevelt despised reformers” and, with contempt, described many of the leading ones of the time as “professional impracticablcs. At the end of his term as Governor, he asserted that he had never “compromised unworthily or for my own advantage.” He hoped that the public would realize “that I had striven to do the best work that I could possibly do with the tools as they actually were, and to accomplish results by coming to agreement with the men through whom alone they could be accomplished.

Roosevelt’s intellectual limitations were as marked as his indefatigable propensity for expressing himself on any subject under the sun. The results may have exasperated some of his eminent correspondents, but they will often amuse the contemporary reader. Like many another conscientious moralist, Roosevelt was a thoroughly happy man. He was seldom afflicted by doubts, and his abysmal ignorance of one subject was conducive to a perennial euphoria. That subject was himself.