Theodore Roosevelt & His Times by Harold HowlandA Chronicle of the Progressive Movement (page 2)

By the successful prosecution of this case the Sherman act was made once more a potentially valuable instrument for the prevention of the more flagrant evils that flow from “combinations in restraint of trade.” During the remaining years of the Roosevelt Administrations, this legal instrument was used with aggressive force for the purpose for which it was intended. In seven years and a half, forty-four prosecutions were brought under it by the Government, as compared with eighteen in the preceding eleven years. The two most famous trust cases, next to the Northern Securities case and even surpassing it in popular interest, because of the stupendous size of the corporations involved, were those against the Standard Oil Company and the American Tobacco Company. These companion cases were not finally decided in the Supreme Court until the Administration of President Taft; but their prosecution was begun while Roosevelt was in office and by his direction. They were therefore a definite part of his campaign for the solution of the vexed trust problem. Both cases were decided, by every court through which they passed, in favor of the Government. The Supreme Court finally in 1911 decreed that both the Standard Oil and the Tobacco trusts were in violation of the Sherman act and ordered their dissolution. There could now no longer be any question that the Government could in fact exercise its sovereign will over even the greatest and the most powerful of modern business organizations.

The two cases had one other deep significance which at first blush looked like a weakening of the force of the anti-trust law but which was in reality a strengthening of it. There had been long and ardent debate whether the Sherman act should be held to apply to all restraints of trade or only to such as were unreasonable. It was held by some that it applied to ALL restraints and therefore should be amended to cover only unreasonable restraints. It was held by others that it applied to all restraints and properly so. It was held by still others that it applied only to unreasonable restraints. But the matter had never been decided by competent authority. The decision of the Supreme Court in these two outstanding cases, however, put an end to the previous uncertainty. Chief Justice White, in his two opinions, laid it down with definiteness that in construing and applying the law recourse must be had to the “rule of reason.” He made clear the conviction of the court that it was “undue” restraints of trade which the law forbade and not incidental or inconsiderable ones. This definitive interpretation of the law, while it caused considerable criticism at the moment, in ultimate effect so cleared the air about the Sherman act as effectually to dispose of the demands for its amendment in the direction of greater leniency or severity.

But the proving of the anti-trust law as an effective weapon against the flagrantly offending trusts, according to Roosevelt’s conviction, was only a part of the battle. As he said, “monopolies can, although in rather cumbrous fashion, be broken up by lawsuits. Great business combinations, however, cannot possibly be made useful instead of noxious industrial agencies merely by lawsuits, and especially by lawsuits supposed to be carried on for their destruction and not for their control and regulation.” He took, as usual, the constructive point of view. He saw both sides of the trust question–the inevitability and the beneficence of combination in modern business, and the danger to the public good that lay in the unregulated and uncontrolled wielding of great power by private individuals. He believed that the thing to do with great power was not to destroy it but to use it, not to forbid its acquisition but to direct its application. So he set himself to the task of securing fresh legislation regarding the regulation of corporate activities.

Such legislation was not easy to get; for the forces of reaction were strong in Congress. But several significant steps in this direction were taken before Roosevelt went out of office. The new Federal Department of Commerce and Labor was created, and its head became a member of the Cabinet. The Bureau of Corporations was established in the same department. These new executive agencies were given no regulatory powers, but they did perform excellent service in that field of publicity on the value of which Roosevelt laid so much stress.

In the year 1906 the passing of the Hepburn railway rate bill for the first time gave the Interstate Commerce Commission a measure of real control over the railways, by granting to the Commission the power to fix maximum rates for the transportation of freight in interstate commerce. The Commission had in previous years, under the authority of the act which created it and which permitted the Commission to decide in particular cases whether rates were just and reasonable, attempted to exercise this power to fix in these specific cases maximum rates. But the courts had decided that the Commission did not possess this right. The Hepburn act also extended the authority of the Commission over express companies, sleeping-car companies, pipe lines, private car lines, and private terminal and connecting lines. It prohibited railways from transporting in interstate commerce any commodities produced or owned by themselves. It abolished free passes and transportation except for railway employees and certain other small classes of persons, including the poor and unfortunate classes and those engaged in religious and charitable work. Under the old law, the Commission was compelled to apply to a Federal court on its own initiative for the enforcement of any order which it might issue. Under the Hepburn act the order went into effect at once; the railroad must begin to obey the order within thirty days; it must itself appeal to the court for the suspension and revocation of the order, or it must suffer a penalty of $5000 a day during the time that the order was disobeyed. The act further gave the Commission the power to prescribe accounting methods which must be followed by the railways, in order to make more difficult the concealment of illegal rates and improper favors to individual shippers. This extension and strengthening of the authority of the Interstate Commerce Commission was an extremely valuable forward step, not only as concerned the relations of the public and the railways, but in connection with the development of predatory corporations of the Standard Oil type. Miss Ida Tarbell, in her frankly revealing “History of the Standard Oil Company”, which had been published in 1904, had shown in striking fashion how secret concessions from the railways had helped to build up that great structure of business monopoly. In Miss Tarbell’s words, “Mr. Rockefeller’s great purpose had been made possible by his remarkable manipulation of the railroads. It was the rebate which had made the Standard Oil trust, the rebate, amplified, systematized, glorified into a power never equalled before or since by any business of the country.” The rebate was the device by which favored shippers–favored by the railways either voluntarily or under the compulsion of the threats of retaliation which the powerful shippers were able to make–paid openly the established freight rates on their products and then received back from the railways a substantial proportion of the charges. The advantage to the favored shipper is obvious. There were other more adroit ways in which the favoritism could be accomplished; but the general principle was the same. It was one important purpose–and effect–of the Hepburn act to close the door to this form of discrimination.

One more step was necessary in order to eradicate completely this mischievous condition and to “keep the highway of commerce open to all on equal terms.” It was imperative that the law relative to these abuses should be enforced. On this point Roosevelt’s own words are significant: “Although under the decision of the courts the National Government had power over the railways, I found, when I became President, that this power was either not exercised at all or exercised with utter inefficiency. The law against rebates was a dead letter. All the unscrupulous railway men had been allowed to violate it with impunity; and because of this, as was inevitable, the scrupulous and decent railway men had been forced to violate it themselves, under penalty of being beaten by their less scrupulous rivals. It was not the fault of these decent railway men. It was the fault of the Government.”

Roosevelt did not propose that this condition should continue to be the fault of the Government while he was at its head, and he inaugurated a vigorous campaign against railways that had given rebates and against corporations that had accepted–or extorted-them. The campaign reached a spectacular peak in a prosecution of the Standard Oil Company, in which fines aggregating over $29,000,000 were imposed by Judge Kenesaw M. Landis of the United States District Court at Chicago for the offense of accepting rebates. The Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately determined that the fine was improperly large, since it had been based on the untenable theory that each shipment on which a rebate was paid constituted a separate offense. At the second trial the presiding judge ordered an acquittal. In spite, however, of the failure of this particular case, with its spectacular features, the net result of the rebate prosecutions was that the rebate evil was eliminated for good and all from American railway and commercial life.

When Roosevelt demanded the “square deal” between business and the people, he meant precisely what he said. He had no intention of permitting justice to be required from the great corporations without insisting that justice be done to them in turn. The most interesting case in point was that of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. To this day the action which Roosevelt took in the matter is looked upon, by many of those extremists who can see nothing good in “big business,” as a proof of his undue sympathy with the capitalist. But thirteen years later the United States Supreme Court in deciding the case against the United States Steel Corporation in favor of the Corporation, added an obiter dictum which completely justified Roosevelt’s action.

In the fall of 1907 the United States was in the grip of a financial panic. Much damage was done, and much more was threatened. One great New York trust company was compelled to close its doors, and others were on the verge of disaster. One evening in the midst of this most trying time, the President was informed that two representatives of the United States Steel Corporation wished to call upon him the next morning. As he was at breakfast the next day word came to him that Judge Gary and Mr. Frick were waiting in the Executive Office. The President went over at once, sending word to Elihu Root, then Secretary of State, to join him. Judge Gary and Mr. Frick informed the President that a certain great firm in the New York financial district was upon the point of failure. This firm held a large quantity of the stock of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. The Steel Corporation had been urged to purchase this stock in order to avert the failure. The heads of the Steel Corporation asserted that they did not wish to purchase this stock from the point of view of a business transaction, as the value which the property might be to the Corporation would be more than offset by the criticism to which they would be subjected. They said that they were sure to be charged with trying to secure a monopoly and to stifle competition. They told the President that it had been the consistent policy of the Steel Corporation to have in its control no more than sixty per cent of the steel properties of the country; that their proportion of those properties was in fact somewhat less than sixty per cent; and that the acquisition of the holdings of the Tennessee Company would raise it only a little above that point. They felt, however, that it would be extremely desirable for them to make the suggested purchase in order to prevent the damage which would result from the failure of the firm in question. They were willing to buy the stocks offered because in the best judgment of many of the strongest bankers in New York the transaction would be an influential factor in preventing a further extension of the panic. Judge Gary and Mr. Frick declared that they were ready to make the purchase with this end in view but that they would not act without the President’s approval of their action.

Immediate action was imperative. It was important that the purchase, if it were to be made, should be announced at the opening of the New York Stock Exchange at ten o’clock that morning. Fortunately Roosevelt never shilly-shallied when a crisis confronted him. His decision was instantaneous. He assured his callers that while, of course, he could not advise them to take the action, proposed, he felt that he had no public duty to interpose any objection.

This assurance was quite sufficient. The pure chase was made and announced, the firm in question did not fail, and the panic was arrested. The immediate reaction of practically the whole country was one of relief. It was only later, when the danger was past, that critics began to make themselves heard. Any one who had taken the trouble to ascertain the facts would have known beyond question that the acquisition of the Tennessee properties was not sufficient to change the status of the Steel Corporation under the anti-trust law. But the critics did not want to know the facts. They wanted–most of them, at least–to have a stick with which to beat Roosevelt. Besides, many of them did not hold Roosevelt’s views about the square deal. Their belief was that whatever big business did was ipso facto evil and that it was the duty of public officials to find out what big business wanted to do and then prevent its accomplishment.

Under a later Administration, Roosevelt was invited to come before a Congressional investigating committee to explain what he did in this famous case. There he told the complete story of the occurrence simply, frankly, and emphatically, and ended with this statement: “If I were on a sailboat, I should not ordinarily meddle with any of the gear; but if a sudden squall struck us, and the main sheet jammed, so that the boat threatened to capsize, I would unhesitatingly cut the main sheet, even though I were sure that the owner, no matter how grateful to me at the moment for having saved his life, would a few weeks later, when he had forgotten his danger and his fear, decide to sue me for the value of the cut rope. But I would feel a hearty contempt for the owner who so acted.”

Two laws passed during the second Roosevelt Administration had an important bearing on the conduct of American business, though in a different way from those which have already been considered. They were the Pure Food law, and the Meat Inspection act. Both were measures for the protection of the public health; but both were at the same time measures for the control of private business. The Pure Food law did three things: it prohibited the sale of foods or drugs which were not pure and unadulterated; it prohibited the sale of drugs which contained opium, cocaine, alcohol, and other narcotics unless the exact proportion of them in the preparation were stated on the package; and it prohibited the sale of foods and drugs as anything else than what they actually were. The Meat Inspection law required rigid inspection by Government officials of all slaughterhouses and packing concerns preparing meat food products for distribution in interstate commerce. The imperative need for the passage of this law was brought forcibly and vividly to the popular attention through a novel, “The Jungle”, written by Upton Sinclair, in which the disgraceful conditions of uncleanliness and revolting carelessness in the Chicago packing houses were described with vitriolic intensity. An official investigation ordered by the President confirmed the truth of these timely revelations.

These achievements on the part of the Roosevelt Administrations were of high value. But, after all Roosevelt performed an even greater service in arousing the public mind to a realization of facts of national significance and stimulating the public conscience to a desire to deal with them vigorously and justly. >From the very beginning of his Presidential career he realized the gravity of the problems created by the rise of big business; and he began forthwith to impress upon the people with hammer blows the conditions as he saw them, the need for definite corrective action, and the absolute necessity for such treatment of the case as would constitute the “square deal.” An interesting example of his method and of the response which it received is to be found in the report of an address which he made in 1907. It runs thus:

“From the standpoint of our material prosperity there is only one other thing as important as the discouragement of a spirit of envy and hostility toward business men, toward honest men of means; this is the discouragement of dishonest business men. [Great applause.]

“Wait a moment; I don’t want you to applaud this part unless you are willing to applaud also the part I read first, to which you listened in silence. [Laughter and applause.] I want you to understand that I will stand just as straight for the rights of the honest man who wins his fortune by honest methods as I will stand against the dishonest man who wins a fortune by dishonest methods. And I challenge the right to your support in one attitude just as much as in the other. I am glad you applauded when you did, but I want you to go back now and applaud the other statement. I will read a little of it over again. ‘Every manifestation of ignorant envy and hostility toward honest men who acquire wealth by honest means should be crushed at the outset by the weight of a sensible public opinion.’ [Tremendous applause.] Thank you. Now I’ll go on.”

Roosevelt’s incessant emphasis was placed upon conduct as the proper standard by which to judge the actions of men. “We are,” he once said, “no respecters of persons. If a labor union does wrong, we oppose it as firmly as we oppose a corporation which does wrong; and we stand equally stoutly for the rights of the man of wealth and for the rights of the wage-worker. We seek to protect the property of every man who acts honestly, of every corporation that represents wealth honestly accumulated and honestly used. We seek to stop wrongdoing, and we desire to punish the wrongdoer only so far as is necessary to achieve this end.”

At another time he sounded the same note–sounded it indeed with a “damnable iteration” that only proved how deeply it was imbedded in his conviction

Let us strive steadily to secure justice as between man and man without regard to the man’s position, social or otherwise. Let us remember that justice can never be justice unless it is equal. Do justice to the rich man and exact justice from him; do justice to the poor man and exact justice from him–justice to the capitalist and justice to the wage-worker . . . . I have an equally hearty aversion for the reactionary and the demagogue; but I am not going to be driven out of fealty to my principles because certain of them are championed by the reactionary and certain others by the demagogue. The reactionary is always strongly for the rights of property; so am I . . . . I will not be driven away from championship of the rights of property upon which all our civilization rests because they happen to be championed by people who champion furthermore the abuses of wealth . . . . Most demagogues advocate some excellent popular principles, and nothing could be more foolish than for decent men to permit themselves to be put into an attitude of ignorant and perverse opposition to all reforms demanded in the name of the people because it happens that some of them are demanded by demagogues.

Such an attitude on the part of a man like Roosevelt could not fail to be misunderstood, misinterpreted, and assailed. Toward the end of his Presidential career, when he was attacking with peculiar vigor the “malefactors of great wealth” whom the Government had found it necessary to punish for their predatory acts in corporate guise, it was gently intimated by certain defenders of privilege that he was insane. At other times, when he was insisting upon justice even to men who had achieved material success, he was placed by the more rabid of the radical opponents of privilege in the hierarchy of the worshipers of the golden calf. His course along the middle of the onward way exposed him peculiarly to the missiles of invective and scorn from the partisans on either side. But neither could drive him into the arms of the other.

The best evidence of the soundness of the strategy with which he assailed the enemies of the common good, with whirling war-club but with scrupulous observance of the demands of justice and fair play, is to be found in the measure of what he actually achieved. He did arouse the popular mind and sting the popular conscience broad awake. He did enforce the law without fear or favor. He did leave upon the statute-book and in the machinery of government new means and methods for the control of business and for the protection of the general welfare against predatory wealth.

CHAPTER VIII. THE SQUARE DEAL FOR LABOR

It should go without saying that Roosevelt was vigorously and deeply concerned with the relations between capital and labor, for he was interested in everything that concerned the men and women of America, everything that had to do with human relations. >From the very beginning of his public life he had been a champion
of the workingman when the workingman needed defense against exploitation and injustice. But his advocacy of the workers’ rights was never demagogic nor partial. In industrial relations, as in the relations between business and the community, he believed in the square deal. The rights of labor and the rights of capital must, he firmly held, be respected each by the other– and the rights of the public by both.

Roosevelt believed thoroughly in trade unions. He realized that one of the striking accompaniments of the gigantic developments in business and industry of the past few generations was a gross inequality in the bargaining relation between the employer and the individual employee standing alone.

Speaking of the great coal strike which occurred while he was President, he developed the idea in this way:

“The great coal-mining and coal-carrying companies, which employed their tens of thousands, could easily dispense with the services of any particular miner. The miner, on the other hand, however expert, could not dispense with the companies. He needed a job; his wife and children would starve if he did not get one. What the miner had to sell–his labor–was a perishable commodity; the labor of today–if not sold today was lost forever. Moreover, his labor was not like most commodities–a mere thing; it was a part of a living, human being. The workman saw, and all citizens who gave earnest thought to the matter saw that the labor problem was not only an economic, but also a moral, a human problem. Individually the miners were impotent when they sought to enter a wage contract with the great companies; they could make fair terms only by uniting into trade unions to bargain collectively. The men were forced to cooperate to secure not only their economic, but their simple human rights. They, like other workmen, were compelled by the very conditions under which they lived to unite in unions of their industry or trade, and those unions were bound to grow in size, in strength, and in power for good and evil as the industries in which the men were employed grew larger and larger.”*

* Autobiography (Scribner), pp. 471-78.

He was fond of quoting three statements of Lincoln’s as expressing precisely what he himself believed about capital and labor. The first of these sayings was this: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

This statement, Roosevelt used to say, would have made him, if it had been original with him, even more strongly denounced as a communist agitator than he already was! Then he would turn from this, which the capitalist ought to hear, to another saying of Lincoln’s which the workingman ought to hear: “Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights . . . . Nor should this lead to a war upon the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; . . . property is desirable; it is a positive good in the world.”

Then would come the final word from Lincoln, driven home by Roosevelt with all his usual vigor and fire: “Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”

In these three sayings, Roosevelt declared, Lincoln “showed the proper sense of proportion in his relative estimates of capital and labor, of human rights and property rights.” Roosevelt’s own most famous statement of the matter was made in an address which he delivered before the Sorbonne in Paris, on his way back from Africa: “In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded. Ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property.”

Several times it happened to Roosevelt to be confronted with the necessity of meeting with force the threat of violence on the part of striking workers. He never refused the challenge, and his firmness never lost him the respect of any but the worthless among the workingmen. When he was Police Commissioner, strikers in New York were coming into continual conflict with the police. Roosevelt asked the strike leaders to meet him in order to talk things over. These leaders did not know the man with whom they were dealing; they tried to bully him. They truculently announced the things that they would do if the police were not compliant to their wishes. But they did not get far in that direction. Roosevelt called a halt with a snap of his jaws. “Gentlemen!” he said, “we want to understand one another. That was my object in coming here. Remember, please, that he who counsels violence does the cause of labor the poorest service. Also, he loses his case. Understand distinctly that order will be kept. The police will keep it. Now, gentlemen!” There was surprised silence for a moment, and then smashing applause. They had learned suddenly what kind of a man Roosevelt was. All their respect was his.

It was after he became President that his greatest opportunity occurred to put into effect his convictions about the industrial problem. In 1909. there was a strike which brought about a complete stoppage of work for several months in the anthracite coal regions. Both operators and workers were determined to make no concession. The coal famine became a national menace as the winter approached. “The big coal operators had banded together,” so Roosevelt has described the situation, “and positively refused to take any steps looking toward an accommodation. They knew that the suffering among the miners was great; they were confident that if order was kept, and nothing further done by the Government, they would win; and they refused to consider that the public had any rights in the matter.”

As the situation grew more and more dangerous, the President directed the head of the Federal Labor Bureau to make an investigation of the whole matter. From this investigation it appeared that the most feasible solution of the problem was to prevail upon both sides to agree to a commission of arbitration and promise to accept its findings. To this proposal the miners agreed; the mine owners insolently declined it. Nevertheless, Roosevelt persisted, and ultimately the operators yielded on condition that the commission, which was to be named by the President, should contain no representative of labor. They insisted that it should be composed of (1) an officer of the engineer corps of the army or navy, (2) a man with experience in mining, (3) a “man of prominence, eminent as a sociologist,” (4) a Federal Judge of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and (5) a mining engineer. In the course of a long and grueling conference it looked as though a deadlock could be the only outcome, since the mine owners would have no representative of labor on any terms. But it suddenly dawned on Roosevelt that the owners were objecting not to the thing but to the name. He discovered that they would not object to the appointment of any man, labor man or not, so long as he was not appointed as a labor man or as a representative of labor. “I shall never forget,” he says in his “Autobiography”, “the mixture of relief and amusement I felt when I thoroughly grasped the fact that while they would heroically submit to anarchy rather than have Tweedledum, yet if I would call it Tweedledee they would accept with rapture.” All that he needed to do was to “commit a technical and nominal absurdity with a solemn face.” When he realized that this was the case, Roosevelt announced that he was glad to accept the terms laid down, and proceeded to appoint to the third position on the Commission the labor man whom he had wanted from the first to appoint, Mr. E. E. Clark, the head of the Brotherhood of Railway Conductors. He called him, however, an “eminent sociologist,” adding in his announcement of the appointment this explanation: “For the purposes of such a Commission, the term sociologist means a man who has thought and studied deeply on social questions and has practically applied his knowledge.”

The Commission as finally constituted was an admirable one. Its report, which removed every menace to peace in the coal industry, was an outstanding event in the history of the relations of labor and capital in the United States.

But the most interesting and significant part of Roosevelt’s relation to the great coal strike concerned something that did not happen. It illustrates his habit of seeing clearly through a situation to the end and knowing far in advance just what action he was prepared to take in any contingency that might possibly arise. He was determined that work should be resumed in the mines and that the country should have coal. He did not propose to allow the operators to maintain the deadlock by sheer refusal to make any compromise. In case he could not succeed in making them reconsider their position, he had prepared a definite and drastic course of action. The facts in regard to this plan did not become public until many years after the strike was settled, and then only when Roosevelt described it in his “Autobiography”.

The method of action which Roosevelt had determined upon in the last resort was to get the Governor of Pennsylvania to appeal to him as President to restore order. He had then determined to put Federal troops into the coal fields under the command of some first-rate general, with instructions not only to preserve order but to dispossess the mine operators and to run the mines as a receiver, until such time as the Commission should make its report and the President should issue further orders in view of that report. Roosevelt found an army officer with the requisite good sense, judgment, and nerve to act in such a crisis in the person of Major General Schofield. Roosevelt sent for the General and explained the seriousness of the crisis. “He was a fine fellow,” says Roosevelt in his “Autobiography”, “a most respectable-looking old boy, with side whiskers and a black skull-cap, without any of the outward aspect of the conventional military dictator; but in both nerve and judgment he was all right.” Schofield quietly assured the President that if the order was given he would take possession of the mines, and would guarantee to open them and run them without permitting any interference either by the owners or by the strikers or by any one else, so long as the President told him to stay. Fortunately Roosevelt’s efforts to bring about arbitration were ultimately successful and recourse to the novel expedient of having the army operate the coal mines proved unnecessary. No one was more pleased than Roosevelt himself at the harmonious adjustment of the trouble, for, as he said, “It is never well to take drastic action if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion.” But there can be no question that the drastic action would have followed if the coal operators had not seen the light when they did.

In other phases of national life Roosevelt made his influence equally felt. As President he found that there was little which the Federal Government could do directly for the practical betterment of living and working conditions among the mass of the people compared with what the State Governments could do. He determined, however, to strive to make the National Government an ideal employer. He hoped to make the Federal employee feel, just as much as did the Cabinet officer, that he was one of the partners engaged in the service of the public, proud of his work, eager to do it efficiently, and confident of just treatment. The Federal Government could act in relation to laboring conditions only in the Territories, in the District of Columbia, and in connection with interstate commerce. But in those fields it accomplished much.

The eight-hour law for workers in the executive departments had become a mere farce and was continually violated by officials who made their subordinates work longer hours than the law stipulated. This condition the President remedied by executive action, at the same time seeing to it that the shirk and the dawdler received no mercy. A good law protecting the lives and health of miners in the Territories was passed; and laws were enacted for the District of Columbia, providing for the supervision of employment agencies, for safeguarding workers against accidents, and for the restriction of child labor. A workmen’s compensation law for government employees, inadequate but at least a beginning, was put on the statute books. A similar law for workers on interstate railways was declared unconstitutional by the courts; but a second law was passed and stood the test.

It was chiefly in the field of executive action, however, that Roosevelt was able to put his theories into practice. There he did not have to deal with recalcitrant, stupid, or medieval-minded politicians, as he so often did in matters of legislation. One case which confronted him found him on the side against the labor unions, but, being sure that he was right, he did not let that fact disturb him. A printer in the Government Printing Office, named Miller, had been discharged because he was a non-union man. The President immediately ordered him reinstated.

Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, with several members of its Executive Council, called upon him to protest. The President was courteous but inflexible. He answered their protest by declaring that, in the employment and dismissal of men in the Government service, he could no more recognize the fact that a man did or did not belong to a union as being for or against him, than he could recognize the fact that he was a Protestant or a Catholic, a Jew or a Gentile, as being for or against him. He declared his belief in trade unions and said that if he were a worker himself he would unquestionably join a union. He always preferred to see a union shop. But he could not allow his personal preferences to control his public actions. The Government was bound to treat union and non-union men exactly alike. His action in causing Miller to be reinstated was final.

Another instance which illustrated Roosevelt’s skill in handling a difficult situation occurred in 1908 when the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and certain other lines announced a reduction in wages. The heads of that particular road laid the necessity for the reduction at the door of “the drastic laws inimical to the interests of the railroads that have in the past year or two been enacted.” A general strike, with all the attendant discomfort and disorder, was threatened in retaliation. The President wrote a letter to the Interstate Commerce Commission, in which he said:

“These reductions in wages may be justified or they may not. As to this the public, which is a vitally interested party, can form no judgment without a more complete knowledge of the essential facts and real merits of the case than it now has or than it can possibly obtain from the special pleadings, certain to be put forth by each side in case their dispute should bring about serious interruption to traffic. If the reduction in wages is due to natural causes, the loss of business being such that the burden should be, and is, equitably distributed, between capitalist and wageworker, the public should know it. If it is caused by legislation, the public and Congress should know it; and if it is caused by misconduct in the past financial or other operations of any railroad, then everybody should know it, especially if the excuse of unfriendly legislation is advanced as a method of covering up past business misconduct by the railroad managers, or as a justification for failure to treat fairly the wage-earning employees of the company.”

The letter closed with a request to the Commission to investigate the whole matter with these points in view. But the investigation proved unnecessary; the letter was enough. The proposed reduction of wages was never heard of again. The strength of the President’s position in a case of this sort was that he was cheerfully prepared to accept whatever an investigation should show to be right. If the reduction should prove to be required by natural causes, very well–let the reduction be made. If it was the result of unfair and unwise legislation, very well–repeal the legislation. If it was caused by misconduct on the part of railroad managers, very well–let them be punished. It was hard to get the better of a man who wanted only the truth, and was ready to act upon it, no matter which way it cut.

In 1910, after his return from Africa, a speaking trip happened to take him to Columbus, Ohio, which had for months been in the grasp of a street railway strike. There had been much violence, many policemen had refused to do their duty, and many officials had failed in theirs. It was an uncomfortable time for an outsider to come and make a speech. But Roosevelt did not dodge. He spoke, and straight to the point. His speech had been announced as on Law and Order. When he rose to speak, however, he declared that he would speak on Law, Order, and Justice. Here are some of the incisive things that he said:

“Now, the first requisite is to establish order; and the first duty of every official, in State and city alike, high and low, is to see that order obtains and that violence is definitely stopped . . . . I have the greatest regard for the policeman who does his duty. I put him high among the props of the State, but the policeman who mutinies, or refuses to perform his duty, stands on a lower level than that of the professional lawbreaker . . . . I ask, then, not only that civic officials perform their duties, but that you, the people, insist upon their performing them . . . . I ask this particularly of the wage-workers, and employees, and men on strike . . . . I ask them, not merely passively, but actively, to aid in restoring order. I ask them to clear their skirts of all suspicion of sympathizing with disorder, and, above all, the suspicion of sympathizing with those who commit brutal and cowardly assaults . . . . What I have said of the laboring men applies just as much to the capitalists and the capitalists’ representatives . . . . The wage-workers and the representatives of the companies should make it evident that they wish the law absolutely obeyed; that there is no chance of saying that either the labor organization or the corporation favors lawbreakers or lawbreaking. But let your public servants trust, not in the good will of either side, but in the might of the civil arm, and see that law rules, that order obtains, and that every miscreant, every scoundrel who seeks brutally to assault any other man–whatever that man’s status–is punished with the utmost severity . . . . When you have obtained law and order, remember that it is useless to have obtained them unless upon them you build a superstructure of justice. After finding out the facts, see that justice is done; see that injustice that has been perpetrated in the past is remedied, and see that the chance of doing injustice in the future is minimized.”

Now, any one might in his closet write an essay on Law, Order, and Justice, which would contain every idea that is here expressed. The essayist might even feel somewhat ashamed of his production on the ground that all the ideas that it contained were platitudes. But it is one thing to write an essay far from the madding crowd, and it was quite another to face an audience every member of which was probably a partisan of either the workers, the employers, or the officials, and give them straight from the shoulder simple platitudinous truths of this sort applicable to the situation in which they found themselves. Any one of them would have been delighted to hear these things said about his opponents; it was when they were addressed to himself and his associates that they stung. The best part of it, however, was the fact that those things were precisely what the situation needed. They were the truth; and Roosevelt knew it. His sword had a double edge, and he habitually used it with a sweep that cut both ways. As a result he was generally hated or feared by the extremists on both sides. But the average citizen heartily approved the impartiality of his strokes.

In the year 1905 the Governor of Idaho was killed by a bomb as he was leaving his house. A former miner, who had been driven from the State six years before by United States troops engaged in putting down industrial disorder, was arrested and confessed the crime. In his confession he implicated three officers of the Western Federation of Miners, Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone. These three men were brought from Colorado into Idaho by a method that closely resembled kidnaping, though it subsequently received the sanction of the United States Supreme Court. While these prominent labor leaders were awaiting trial, Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada seethed and burst into eruption. Parts of the mining districts were transformed into two hostile armed camps. Violence was common. At this time Roosevelt coupled the name of a giant among American railroad financiers, with those of Moyer and Haywood, and described them all as “undesirable citizens.” The outbursts of resentment from both sides were instantaneous and vicious. There was little to choose between them. Finally the President took advantage of a letter of criticism from a supporter of the accused labor leaders to reply to both groups of critics. He referred to the fact that certain representatives of the great capitalists had protested, because he had included a prominent financier with Moyer and Haywood, while certain representatives of labor had protested on precisely the opposite grounds. Then Roosevelt went on to say:

“I am as profoundly indifferent to the condemnation in one case as in the other. I challenge as a right the support of all good Americans, whether wage-workers or capitalists, whatever their occupation or creed, or in whatever portion of the country they live, when I condemn both the types of bad citizenship which I have held up to reprobation . . . . You ask for a ‘square deal’ for Messrs. Moyer and Haywood. So do I. When I say ‘square deal’, I mean a square deal to every one; it is equally a violation of the policy of the square deal for a capitalist to protest against denunciation of a capitalist who is guilty of wrongdoing and for a labor leader to protest against the denunciation of a labor leader who has been guilty of wrongdoing. I stand for equal justice to both; and so far as in my power lies I shall uphold justice, whether the man accused of guilt has behind him the wealthiest corporation, the greatest aggregations of riches in the country, or whether he has behind him the most influential labor organizations in the country.”

It should be recorded for the sake of avoiding misapprehension that Roosevelt’s denunciation of Moyer and Haywood was not based on the assumption that they were guilty of the death of the murdered’ Governor, but was predicated on their general attitude and conduct in the industrial conflicts in the mining fields.

The criticisms of Roosevelt because of his actions in the complex relations of capital and labor were often puerile. For instance, he was sternly taken to task on one or two occasions because he had labor leaders lunch with him at the White House. He replied to one of his critics with this statement of his position: “While I am President I wish the labor man to feel that he has the same right of access to me that the capitalist has; that the doors swing open as easily to the wageworker as to the head of a big corporation–AND NO EASIER.”

CHAPTER IX. RECLAMATION AND CONSERVATION

The first message of President Roosevelt to Congress contained these words: “The forest and water problems are perhaps the most vital internal questions of the United States.” At that moment, on December 3, 1901, the impulse was given that was to add to the American vocabulary two new words, “reclamation” and “conservation,” that was to create two great constructive movements for the preservation, the increase, and the utilization of natural resources, and that was to establish a new relationship on the part of the Federal Government to the nation’s natural wealth.

Reclamation and conservation had this in common: the purpose of both was the intelligent and efficient utilization of the natural resources of the country for the benefit of the people of the country. But they differed in one respect, and with conspicuous practical effects. Reclamation, which meant the spending of public moneys to render fertile and usable arid lands hitherto deemed worthless, trod on no one’s toes. It took from no one anything that he had; it interfered with no one’s enjoyment of benefits which it was not in the public interest that he should continue to enjoy unchecked. It was therefore popular from the first, and the new policy went through Congress as though on well-oiled wheels. Only six months passed between its first statement in the Presidential message and its enactment into law. Conservation, on the other hand, had to begin by withholding the natural resources from exploitation and extravagant use. It had, first of all, to establish in the national mind the principle that the forests and mines of the nation are not an inexhaustible grab-bag into which whosoever will may thrust greedy and wasteful hands, and by this new understanding to stop the squandering of vast national resources until they could be economically developed and intelligently used. So it was inevitable that conservation should prove unpopular, while reclamation gained an easy popularity, and that those who had been feeding fat off the country’s stores of forest and mineral wealth should oppose, with tooth and nail, the very suggestion of conservation. It was on the first Sunday after he reached Washington as President, before he had moved into the White House, that Roosevelt discussed with two men, Gifford Pinchot and F. H. Newell, the twin policies that were to become two of the finest contributions to American progress of the Roosevelt Administrations. Both men were already in the Government service, both were men of broad vision and high constructive ability; with both Roosevelt had already worked when he was Governor of New York. The name of Newell, who became chief engineer of the Reclamation Service, ought to be better known popularly than it is in connection with the wonderful work that has been accomplished in making the desert lands of western America blossom and produce abundantly. The name of Pinchot, by a more fortunate combination of events, has become synonymous in the popular mind with the conservation movement.

On the very day that the first Roosevelt message was read to the Congress, a committee of Western Senators and Congressmen was organized, under the leadership of Senator Francis G. Newlands of Nevada, to prepare a Reclamation Bill. The only obstacle to the prompt enactment of the bill was the undue insistence upon State Rights by certain Congressmen, “who consistently fought for local and private interests as against the interests of the people as a whole.” In spite of this shortsighted opposition, the bill became law on June 17, 1902, and the work of reclamation began without an instant’s delay. The Reclamation Act set aside the proceeds of the sale of public lands for the purpose of reclaiming the waste areas of the arid West.

Lands otherwise worthless were to be irrigated and in those new regions of agricultural productivity homes were to be established. The money so expended was to be repaid in due course by the settlers on the land and the sums repaid were to be used as a revolving fund for the continuous prosecution of the reclamation work. Nearly five million dollars was made immediately available for the work. Within four years, twenty-six “projects” had been approved by the Secretary of the Interior and work was well under way on practically all of them. They were situated in fourteen States–Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Washington, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, California, South Dakota. The individual projects were intended to irrigate areas of from eight thousand to two hundred thousand acres each; and the grand total of arid lands to which water was thus to be brought by canals, tunnels, aqueducts, and ditches was more than a million and a half acres.

The work had to be carried out under the most difficult and adventurous conditions. The men of the Reclamation Service were in the truest sense pioneers, building great engineering works far from the railroads, where the very problem of living for the great numbers of workers required was no simple one. On the Shoshone in Wyoming these men built the highest dam in the world, 310 feet from base to crest. They pierced a mountain range in Colorado and carried the waters of the Gunnison River nearly six miles to the Uncompahgre Valley through a tunnel in the solid rock. The great Roosevelt dam on the Salt River in Arizona with its gigantic curved wall of masonry 280 feet high, created a lake with a capacity of fifty-six billion cubic feet, and watered in 1915 an area of 750,000 acres.

The work of these bold pioneers was made possible by the fearless backing which they received from the Administration at Washington. The President demanded of them certain definite results and gave them unquestioning support. In Roosevelt’s own words, “the men in charge were given to understand that they must get into the water if they would learn to swim; and, furthermore, they learned to know that if they acted honestly, and boldly and fearlessly accepted responsibility, I would stand by them to the limit. In this, as in every other case, in the end the boldness of the action fully justified itself.”

The work of reclamation was first prosecuted under the United States Geological Survey; but in the spring of 1908 the United States Reclamation Service was established to carry it on, under the direction of Mr. Newell, to whom the inception of the plan was due. Roosevelt paid a fine and well-deserved tribute to the man who originated and carried through this great national achievement when he said that “Newell’s single-minded devotion to this great task, the constructive imagination which enabled him to conceive it, and the executive power and high character through which he and his assistant, Arthur P. Davis, built up a model service–all these made him a model servant. The final proof of his merit is supplied by the character and records of the men who later assailed him.”

The assault to which Roosevelt thus refers was the inevitable aftermath of great accomplishment. Reclamation was popular, when it was proposed, while it was being carried out, and when the water began to flow in the ditches, making new lands of fertile abundance for settlers and farmers. But the reaction of unpopularity came the minute the beneficiaries had to begin to pay for the benefits received. Then arose a concerted movement for the repudiation of the obligation of the settlers to repay the Government for what had been spent to reclaim the land. The baser part of human nature always seeks a scapegoat; and it might naturally be expected that the repudiators and their supporters should concentrate their attacks upon the head of the Reclamation Service, to whose outstanding ability and continuous labor they owed that for which they were now unwilling to pay. But no attack, not even the adverse report of an ill-humored congressional committee, can alter the fact of the tremendous service that Newell and his loyal associates in the Reclamation Service did for the nation and the people of the United States. By 1915 reclamation had added to the arable land of the country a million and a quarter acres, of which nearly eight hundred thousand acres were already “under water,” and largely under tillage, producing yearly more than eighteen million dollars’ worth of crops.

When Roosevelt became President there was a Bureau of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture, but it was a body entrusted with merely the study of forestry problems and principles. It contained all the trained foresters in the employ of the Government; but it had no public forest lands whatever to which the knowledge and skill of these men could be applied. All the forest reserves of that day were in the charge of the Public Land Office in the Department of the Interior. This was managed by clerks who knew nothing of forestry, and most, if not all, of whom had never seen a stick of the timber or an acre of the woodlands for which they were responsible. The mapping and description of the timber lay with the Geological Survey. So the national forests had no foresters and the Government foresters no forests.

It was a characteristic arrangement of the old days. More than that, it was a characteristic expression of the old attitude of thought and action on the part of the American people toward their natural resources. Dazzled and intoxicated by the inexhaustible riches of their bountiful land, they had concerned themselves only with the agreeable task of utilizing and consuming them. To their shortsighted vision there seemed always plenty more beyond. With the beginning of the twentieth century a prophet arose in the land to warn the people that the supply was not inexhaustible. He declared not only that the “plenty more beyond” had an end, but that the end was already in sight. This prophet was Gifford Pinchot. His warning went forth reinforced by all the authority of the Presidential office and all the conviction and driving power of the personality of Roosevelt himself. Pinchot’s warning cry was startling:

“The growth of our forests is but one-third of the annual cut; and we have in store timber enough for only twenty or thirty years at our present rate of use . . . . Our coal supplies are so far from being inexhaustible that if the increasing rate of consumption shown by the figures of the last seventy-five years continues to prevail, our supplies of anthracite coal will last but fifty years and of bituminous coal less than two hundred years . . . . Many oil and gas fields, as in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the Mississippi Valley, have already failed, yet vast quantities of gas continue to be poured into the air and great quantities of oil into the streams. Cases are known in which great volumes of oil were systematically burned in order to get rid of it . . . . In 1896, Professor Shaler, than whom no one has spoken with greater authority on this subject, estimated that in the upland regions of the States South of Pennsylvania, three thousand square miles of soil have been destroyed as the result of forest denudation, and that destruction was then proceeding at the rate of one hundred square miles of fertile soil per year . . . . The Mississippi River alone is estimated to transport yearly four hundred million tons of sediment, or about twice the amount of material to be excavated from the Panama Canal. This material is the most fertile portion of the richest fields, transformed from a blessing to a curse by unrestricted erosion . . . . The destruction of forage plants by overgrazing has resulted, in the opinion of men most capable of judging, in reducing the grazing value of the public lands by one-half.”

Here, then, was a problem of national significance, and it was one which the President attacked with his usual promptness and vigor. His first message to Congress called for the unification of the care of the forest lands of the public domain in a single body under the Department of Agriculture. He asked that legal authority be granted to the President to transfer to the Department of Agriculture lands for use as forest reserves. He declared that “the forest reserves should be set apart forever for the use and benefit of our people as a whole and not sacrificed to the shortsighted greed of a few.” He supplemented this declaration with an explanation of the meaning and purpose of the forest policy which he urged should be adopted: “Wise forest protection does not mean the withdrawal of forest resources, whether of wood, water, or grass, from contributing their full share to the welfare of the people, but, on the contrary, gives the assurance of larger and more certain supplies. The fundamental idea of forestry is the perpetuation of forests by use. Forest protection is not an end in itself; it is a means to increase and sustain the resources of our country and the industries which depend upon them. The preservation of our forests is an imperative business necessity. We have come to see clearly that whatever destroys the forest, except to make way for agriculture, threatens our wellbeing.”

Nevertheless it was four years before Congress could be brought to the common-sense policy of administering the forest lands still belonging to the Government. Pinchot and his associates in the Bureau of Forestry spent the interval profitably, however, in investigating and studying the whole problem of national forest resources and in drawing up enlightened and effective plans for their protection and development. Accordingly, when the act transferring the National Forests to the charge of the newly created United States Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture was passed early in 1905, they were ready for the responsibility.

The principles which they had formulated and which they now began to apply had been summed up by Roosevelt in the statement “that the rights of the public to the natural resources outweigh private rights and must be given the first consideration.” Until the establishment of the Forest Service, private rights had almost always been allowed to overbalance public rights in matters that concerned not only the National Forests, but the public lands generally. It was the necessity of having this new principle recognized and adopted that made the way of the newly created Forest Service and of the whole Conservation movement so thorny. Those who had been used to making personal profit from free and unrestricted exploitation of the nation’s natural resources would look only with antagonism on a movement which put a consideration of the general welfare first.

The Forest Service nevertheless put these principles immediately into practical application. The National Forests were opened to a regulated use of all their resources. A law was passed throwing open to settlement all land in the National Forests which was found to be chiefly valuable for agriculture. Hitherto all such land had been closed to the settler. Regulations were established and enforced which favored the settler rather than the large stockowner. It was provided that, when conditions required the reduction in the number of head of stock grazed in any National Forest, the vast herds of the wealthy owner should be affected before the few head of the small man, upon which the living of his family depended. The principle which excited the bitterest antagonism of all was the rule that any one, except a bona fide settler on the land, who took public property for private profit should pay for what he got. This was a new and most unpalatable idea to the big stock and sheep raisers, who had been accustomed to graze their animals at will on the richest lands of the public forests, with no one but themselves a penny the better off thereby. But the Attorney-General of the United States declared it legal to make the men who pastured their cattle and sheep in the National Forests pay for this privilege; and in the summer of 1906 such charges were for the first time made and collected. The trained foresters of the service were put in charge of the National Forests. As a result, improvement began to manifest itself in other ways. Within two years the fire prevention work alone had completely justified the new policy of forest regulation. Eighty-six per cent of the fires that did occur in the National Forests were held down to an area of five acres or less. The new service not only made rapid progress in saving the timber, but it began to make money for the nation by selling the timber. In 1905 the sales of timber brought in $60,000; three years later the return was $850,000.

The National Forests were trebled in size during the two Roosevelt Administrations with the result that there were 194,000,000 acres of publicly owned and administered forest lands when Roosevelt went out of office. The inclusion of these lands in the National Forests, where they were safe from the selfish exploitation of greedy private interests, was not accomplished without the bitterest opposition. The wisdom of the serpent sometimes had to be called into play to circumvent the adroit maneuvering of these interests and their servants in Congress. In 1907, for example, Senator Charles W. Fulton of Oregon obtained an amendment to the Agricultural Appropriation Bill forbidding the President to set aside any additional National Forests in six Northwestern States.. But the President and the Forest Service were ready for this bold attempt to deprive the public of some 16,000,000 acres for the benefit of land grabbers and special interests. They knew exactly what lands ought to be set aside in those States. So the President first unostentatiously signed the necessary proclamations to erect those lands into National Forests, and then quietly approved the Agricultural Bill. “The opponents of the Forest Service,” said Roosevelt, “turned handsprings in their wrath; and dire were their threats against the Executive; but the threats could not be carried out, and were really only a tribute to the efficiency of our action.”

The development of a sound and enlightened forest policy naturally led to the consideration of a similar policy for dealing with the water power of the country which had hitherto gone to waste or was in the hands of private interests. It had been the immemorial custom that the water powers on the navigable streams, on the public domain, and in the National Forests should be given away for nothing, and practically without question, to the first comer. This ancient custom ran right athwart the newly enunciated principle that public property should not pass into private possession without being paid for, and that permanent grants, except for home-making, should not be made. The Forest Service now began to apply this principle to the water powers in the National Forests, granting permission for the development and use of such power for limited periods only and requiring payment for the privilege. This was the beginning of a general water power policy which, in the course of time, commended itself to public approval; but it was long before it ceased to be opposed by the private interests that wanted these rich resources for their own undisputed use.

Out of the forest movement grew the conservation movement in its broader sense. In the fall of 1907 Roosevelt made a trip down the Mississippi River with the definite purpose of drawing general attention to the subject of the development of the national inland waterways. Seven months before, he had established the Inland Waterways Commission and had directed it to “consider the relations of the streams to the use of all the great permanent natural resources and their conservation for the making and maintenance of permanent homes.” During the trip a letter was prepared by a group of men interested in the conservation movement and was presented to him, asking him to summon a conference on the conservation of natural resources. At a great meeting held at Memphis, Tennessee, Roosevelt publicly announced his intention of calling such a conference.

In May of the following year the conference was held in the East Room of the White House. There were assembled there the President, the Vice-President, seven Cabinet members, the Supreme Court Justices, the Governors of thirty-four States and representatives of the other twelve, the Governors of all the Territories, including Alaska, Hawaii, and Porto Rico, the President of the Board of Commissioners of the District of Columbia, representatives of sixty-eight national societies, four special guests, William Jennings Bryan, James J. Hill, Andrew Carnegie, and John Mitchell, forty-eight general guests, and the members of the Inland Waterways Commission. The object of the conference was stated by the President in these words: “It seems to me time for the country to take account of its natural resources, and to inquire how long they are likely to last. We are prosperous now; we should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time.”

At the conclusion of the conference a declaration prepared by the Governors of Louisiana, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Utah, and South Carolina, was unanimously adopted. This Magna Charta of the conservation movement declared “that the great natural resources supply the material basis upon which our civilization must continue to depend and upon which the perpetuity of the nation itself rests,” that “this material basis is threatened with exhaustion,” and that “this conservation of our natural resources is a subject of transcendent importance, which should engage unremittingly the attention of the Nation, the States, and the people in earnest cooperation.” It set forth the practical implications of Conservation in these words:

“We agree that the land should be so used that erosion and soil wash shall cease; and that there should be reclamation of arid and semi-arid regions by means of irrigation, and of swamp and overflowed regions by means of drainage; that the waters should be so conserved and used as to promote navigation, to enable the arid regions to be reclaimed by irrigation, and to develop power in the interests of the people; that the forests which regulate our rivers, support our industries, and promote the fertility and productiveness of the soil should be preserved and perpetuated; that the minerals found so abundantly beneath the surface should be so used as to prolong their utility; that the beauty, healthfulness, and habitability of our country should be preserved and increased; that sources of national wealth exist for the benefit of the people, and that monopoly thereof should not be tolerated.”

The conference urged the continuation and extension of the forest policies already established; the immediate adoption of a wise, active, and thorough waterway policy for the prompt improvement of the streams, and the conservation of water resources for irrigation, water supply, power, and navigation; and the enactment of laws for the prevention of waste in the mining and extraction of coal, oil, gas, and other minerals with a view to their wise conservation for the use of the people. The declaration closed with the timely adjuration, “Let us conserve the foundations of our prosperity.”

As a result of the conference President Roosevelt created the National Conservation Commission, consisting of forty-nine men of prominence, about one-third of whom were engaged in politics, one-third in various industries, and one-third in scientific work. Gifford Pinchot was appointed chairman. The Commission proceeded to make an inventory of the natural resources of the United States. This inventory contains the only authentic statement as to the amounts of the national resources of the country, the degree to which they have already been exhausted, and their probable duration. But with this inventory there came to an end the activity of the Conservation Commission, for Congress not only refused any appropriation for its use but decreed by law that no bureau of the Government should do any work for any commission or similar body appointed by the President, without reference to the question whether such work was appropriate or not for such a bureau to undertake. Inasmuch as the invaluable inventory already made had been almost entirely the work of scientific bureaus of the Government instructed by the President to cooperate with the Commission, the purpose and animus of this legislation were easily apparent. Congress had once more shown its friendship for the special interests and its indifference to the general welfare.

In February, 1909, on the invitation of President Roosevelt, a North American Conservation Conference, attended by representatives of the United States, Canada, and Mexico, was held at the White House. A declaration of principles was drawn up and the suggestion made that all the nations of the world should be invited to meet in a World Conservation Conference. The President forthwith addressed to forty-five nations a letter inviting them to assemble at The Hague for such a conference; but, as he has laconically expressed it, “When I left the White House the project lapsed.”

CHAPTER X. BEING WISE IN TIME

Perhaps the most famous of Roosevelt’s epigrammatic sayings is, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” The public, with its instinctive preference for the dramatic over the significant, promptly seized upon the “big stick” half of the aphorism and ignored the other half. But a study of the various acts of Roosevelt when he was President readily shows that in his mind the “big stick” was purely subordinate. It was merely the ultima ratio, the possession of which would enable a nation to “speak softly” and walk safely along the road of peace and justice and fair play.

The secret of Roosevelt’s success in foreign affairs is to be found in another of his favorite sayings: “Nine-tenths of wisdom is to be wise in time.” He has himself declared that his whole foreign policy “was based on the exercise of intelligent foresight and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis to make it improbable that we would run into serious trouble.”

When Roosevelt became President, a perplexing controversy with Great Britain over the boundary line between Alaska and Canada was in full swing. The problem, which had become acute with the discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1897, had already been considered, together with eleven other subjects of dispute between Canada and the United States, by a Joint Commission which had been able to reach no agreement. The essence of the controversy was this: The treaty of 1825 between Great Britain and Russia had declared that the boundary, dividing British and Russian America on that five-hundred-mile strip of land which depends from the Alaskan elephant’s head like a dangling halter rope, should be drawn “parallel to the windings of the coast” at a distance inland of thirty miles. The United States took the plain and literal interpretation of these words in the treaty. The Canadian contention was that within the meaning of the treaty the fiords or inlets which here break into the land were not part of the sea, and that the line, instead of following, at the correct distance inland, the indentations made by these arms of the sea, should leap boldly across them, at the agreed distance from the points of the headlands. This would give Canada the heads of several great inlets and direct access to the sea far north of the point where the Canadian coast had, always been assumed to end. Canada and the United States were equally resolute in upholding their claims. It looked as if the matter would end in a deadlock.

John Hay, who had been Secretary of State in McKinley’s Cabinet, as he now was in Roosevelt’s, had done his best to bring the matter to a settlement, but had been unwilling to have the dispute arbitrated, for the very good reason that, as he said, “although our claim is as clear as the sun in heaven, we know enough of arbitration to foresee the fatal tendency of all arbitrators to compromise.” Roosevelt believed that the “claim of the Canadians for access to deep water along any part of the Alaskan coast is just exactly as indefensible as if they should now claim the island of Nantucket.” He was willing, however, to refer the question unconfused by other issues to a second Joint Commission of six. The commission was duly constituted. There was no odd neutral member of this body, as in an arbitration, but merely three representatives from each side. Of the British representatives two were Canadians and the third was the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Alverstone.

But before the Commission met, the President took pains to have conveyed to the British Cabinet, in an informal but diplomatically correct way, his views and his intentions in the event of a disagreement. “I wish to make one last effort,” he said, “to bring about an agreement through the Commission which will enable the people of both countries to say that the result represents the feeling of the representatives of both countries. But if there is a disagreement, I wish it distinctly understood, not only that there will be no arbitration of the matter, but that in my message to Congress I shall take a position which will prevent any possibility of arbitration hereafter.” If this should seem to any one too vigorous flourishing of the “big stick,” let him remember that it was all done through confidential diplomatic channels, and that the judgment of the Lord Chief Justice of England, when the final decision was made, fully upheld Roosevelt’s position.

The decision of the Commission was, with slight immaterial modifications, in favor of the United States. Lord Alverstone voted against his Canadian than colleagues. It was a just decision, as most well-informed Canadians knew at the time. The troublesome question was settled; the time-honored friendship of two great peoples had suffered no interruption; and Roosevelt had secured for his country its just due, without public parade or bluster, by merely being wise–and inflexible–in time.

During the same early period of his Presidency, Roosevelt found himself confronted with a situation in South America, which threatened a serious violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Venezuela was repudiating certain debts which the Venezuelan Government had guaranteed to European capitalists. German capital was chiefly involved, and Germany proposed to collect the debts by force. Great Britain and Italy were also concerned in the matter, but Germany was the ringleader and the active partner in the undertaking. Throughout the year 1902 a pacific blockade of the Venezuelan coast was maintained and in December of that year an ultimatum demanding the immediate payment of the debts was presented. When its terms were not complied with, diplomatic relations were broken off and the Venezuelan fleet was seized. At this point the United States entered upon the scene, but with no blare of trumpets.

In fact, what really happened was not generally known until several years later.

In his message of December, 1901, President Roosevelt had made two significant statements. Speaking of the Monroe Doctrine, he said, “We do not guarantee any state against punishment, if it misconducts itself.” This was very satisfactory to Germany. But he added–“provided the punishment does not take the form of the acquisition of territory by any non-American power.” This did not suit the German book so well. For a year the matter was discussed. Germany disclaimed any intention to make “permanent” acquisitions in Venezuela but contended for its right to make “temporary” ones. Now the world had already seen “temporary” acquisitions made in China, and it was a matter of common knowledge that this convenient word was often to be interpreted in a Pickwickian sense.

When the “pacific blockade” passed into the stage of active hostilities, the patience of Roosevelt snapped. The German Ambassador, von Holleben, was summoned to the White House. The President proposed to him that Germany should arbitrate its differences with Venezuela. Von Holleben assured him that his “Imperial Master” would not hear of such a course. The President persisted that there must be no taking possession, even temporarily, of Venezuelan territory. He informed the Ambassador that Admiral Dewey was at that moment maneuvering in Caribbean waters, and that if satisfactory assurances did not come from Berlin in ten days, he would be ordered to proceed to Venezuela to see that no territory was seized by German forces. The Ambassador was firm in his conviction that no assurances would be forthcoming.

A week later Von Holleben appeared at the White House to talk of another matter and was about to leave without mentioning Venezuela. The President stopped him with a question. No, said the Ambassador, no word had come from Berlin. Then, Roosevelt explained, it would not be necessary for him to wait the remaining three days. Dewey would be instructed to sail a day earlier than originally planned. He added that not a word of all this had been put upon paper, and that if the German Emperor would consent to arbitrate, the President would praise him publicly for his broadmindedness. The Ambassador was still convinced that no arbitration was conceivable.

But just twelve hours later he appeared at the White House, his face wreathed in smiles. On behalf of his Imperial Master he had the honor to request the President of the United States to act as arbitrator between Germany and Venezuela. The orders to Dewey were never sent, the President publicly congratulated the Kaiser on his loyalty to the principle of arbitration, and, at Roosevelt’s suggestion, the case went to The Hague. Not an intimation of the real occurrences came out till long after, not a public word or act marred the perfect friendliness of the two nations. The Monroe Doctrine was just as unequivocally invoked and just as inflexibly upheld as it had been by Grover Cleveland eight years before in another Venezuelan case. But the quiet private warning had been substituted for the loud public threat.

The question of the admission of Japanese immigrants to the United States and of their treatment had long disturbed American international relations. It became acute in the latter part of 1906, when the city of San Francisco determined to exclude all Japanese pupils from the public schools and to segregate them in a school of their own. This action seemed to the Japanese a manifest violation of the rights guaranteed by treaty. Diplomatic protests were instantly forthcoming at Washington; and popular demonstrations against the United States boiled up in Tokyo. For the third time there appeared splendid material for a serious conflict with a great power which might conceivably lead to active hostilities. From such beginnings wars have come before now.

The President was convinced that the Californians were utterly wrong in what they had done, but perfectly right in the underlying conviction from which their action sprang. He saw that justice and good faith demanded that the Japanese in California be protected in their treaty rights, and that the Californians be protected from the immigration of Japanese laborers in mass. With characteristic promptness and vigor he set forth these two considerations and took action to make them effective. In his message to Congress in December he declared: “In the matter now before me, affecting the Japanese, everything that is in my power to do will be done and all of the forces, military and civil, of the United States which I may lawfully employ will be so employed . . . to enforce the rights of aliens under treaties.” Here was reassurance for the Japanese. But he also added: “The Japanese would themselves not tolerate the intrusion into their country of a mass of Americans who would displace Japanese in the business of the land. The people of California are right in insisting that the Japanese shall not come thither in mass.” Here was reassurance for the Californians.

The words were promptly followed by acts. The garrison of Federal troops at San Francisco was reinforced and public notice was given that violence against Japanese would be put down. Suits were brought both in the California State courts and in the Federal courts there to uphold the treaty rights of Japan. Mr. Victor H. Metcalf, the Secretary of Commerce and Labor, himself a Californian, was sent to San Francisco to make a study of the whole situation. It was made abundantly clear to the people of San Francisco and the Coast that the provision of the Federal Constitution making treaties a part of the supreme law of the land, with which the Constitution and laws of no State can interfere, would be strictly enforced. The report of Secretary Metcalf showed that the school authorities of San Francisco had done not only an illegal thing but an unnecessary and a stupid thing.

Meanwhile Roosevelt had been working with equal vigor upon the other side of the problem. He esteemed it precisely as important to protect the Californians from the Japanese as to protect the Japanese from the Californians. As in the Alaskan and Venezuelan cases, he proceeded without beat of drum or clash of cymbal. The matter was worked out in unobtrusive conferences between the President and the State Department and the Japanese representatives in Washington. It was all friendly, informal, conciliatory–but the Japanese did not fail to recognize the inflexible determination behind this courteous friendliness. Out of these conferences came an informal agreement on the part of the Japanese Government that no passports would be issued to Japanese workingmen permitting them to leave Japan for ports of the United States. It was further only necessary to prevent Japanese coolies from coming into the United States through Canada and Mexico. This was done by executive order just two days after the school authorities of San Francisco had rescinded their discriminatory school decree.

The incident is eminently typical of Roosevelt’s principles and practice: to accord full measure of justice while demanding full measure in return; to be content with the fact without care for the formality; to see quickly, to look far, and to act boldly.

It had a sequel which rounded out the story. The President’s ready willingness to compel California to do justice to the Japanese was misinterpreted in Japan as timidity. Certain chauvinistic elements in Japan began to have thoughts which were in danger of becoming inimical to the best interests of the United States. It seemed to President Roosevelt an opportune moment, for many reasons, to send the American battle fleet on a voyage around the world. The project was frowned on in this country and viewed with doubt in other parts of the world. Many said the thing could not be done, for no navy in the world had yet done it; but Roosevelt knew that it could. European observers believed that it would lead to war with Japan; but Roosevelt’s conviction was precisely the opposite. In his own words, “I did not expect it; . . . I believed that Japan would feel as friendly in the matter as we did; but . . . if my expectations had proved mistaken, it would have been proof positive that we were going to be attacked anyhow, and . . . in such event it would have been an enormous gain to have had the three months’ preliminary preparation which enabled the fleet to start perfectly equipped. In a personal interview before they left, I had explained to the officers in command that I believed the trip would be one of absolute peace, but that they were to take exactly the same precautions against sudden attack of any kind as if we were at war with all the nations of the earth; and that no excuse of any kind would be accepted if there were a sudden attack of any kind and we were taken unawares.” Prominent inhabitants and newspapers of the Atlantic coast were deeply concerned over the taking away of the fleet from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The head of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, who hailed from the State of Maine, declared that the fleet should not and could not go because Congress would refuse to appropriate the money; Roosevelt announced in response that he had enough money to take the fleet around into the Pacific anyhow, that it would certainly go, and that if Congress did not choose to appropriate enough money to bring the fleet back, it could stay there. There was no further difficulty about the money.

The voyage was at once a hard training trip and a triumphant progress. Everywhere the ships, their officers, and their men were received with hearty cordiality and deep admiration, and nowhere more so than in Japan. The nations of the world were profoundly impressed by the achievement. The people of the United States were thoroughly aroused to a new pride in their navy and an interest in its adequacy and efficiency. It was definitely established in the minds of Americans and foreigners that the United States navy is rightfully as much at home in the Pacific as in the Atlantic. Any cloud the size of a man’s hand that may have been gathering above the Japanese horizon was forthwith swept away. Roosevelt’s plan was a novel and bold use of the instruments of war on behalf of peace which was positively justified in the event.

CHAPTER XI. RIGHTS, DUTIES, AND REVOLUTIONS

It was a favorite conviction of Theodore Roosevelt that neither an individual nor a nation can possess rights which do not carry with them duties. Not long after the Venezuelan incident–in which the right of the United States, as set forth in the Monroe Doctrine, to prevent European powers from occupying territory in the Western Hemisphere was successfully upheld–an occasion arose nearer home not only to insist upon rights but to assume the duties involved. In a message to the Senate in February, 1905, Roosevelt thus outlined his conception of the dual nature of the Monroe Doctrine:

“It has for some time been obvious that those who profit by the Monroe Doctrine must accept certain responsibilities along with the rights which it confers, and that the same statement applies to those who uphold the doctrine . . . . An aggrieved nation can, without interfering with the Monroe Doctrine, take what action it sees fit in the adjustment of its disputes with American states, provided that action does not take the shape of interference with their form of government or of the despoilment of their territory under any disguise. But short of this, when the question is one of a money claim, the only way which remains finally to collect it is a blockade or bombardment or seizure of the custom houses, and this means . . . what is in effect a possession, even though only a temporary possession, of territory. The United States then becomes a party in interest, because under the Monroe Doctrine it cannot see any European power seize and permanently occupy the territory of one of these republics; and yet such seizure of territory, disguised or undisguised, may eventually offer the only way in which the power in question can collect its debts, unless there is interference on the part of the United States.”

Roosevelt had already found such interference necessary in the case of Germany and Venezuela. But it had been interference in a purely negative sense. He had merely insisted that the European power should not occupy American territory even temporarily. In the later case of the Dominican Republic he supplemented this negative interference with positive action based upon his conviction of the inseparable nature of rights and obligations.

Santo Domingo was in its usual state of chronic revolution. The stakes for which the rival forces were continually fighting were the custom houses, for they were the only certain sources of revenue and their receipts were the only reliable security which could be offered to foreign capitalists in support of loans. So thoroughgoing was the demoralization of the Republic’s affairs that at one time there were two rival “governments” in the island and a revolution going on against each. One of these governments was once to be found at sea in a small gunboat but still insisting that, as the only legitimate government, it was entitled to declare war or peace or, more particularly, to make loans. The national debt of the Republic had mounted to $32,280,000 of which some $22,000,000 was owed to European creditors. The interest due on it in the year 1905 was two and a half million dollars. The whole situation was ripe for intervention by one or more European governments.

Such action President Roosevelt could not permit. But he could not ignore the validity of the debts which the Republic had contracted or the justice of the demand for the payment of at least the interest. “It cannot in the long run prove possible,” he said, “for the United States to protect delinquent American nations from punishment for the non-performance of their duties unless she undertakes to make them perform their duties.” So he invented a plan, which, by reason of its success in the Dominican case and its subsequent application and extension by later administrations, has come to be a thoroughly accepted part of the foreign policy of the United States. It ought to be known as the Roosevelt Plan, just as the amplification of the Monroe Doctrine already outlined might well be known as the Roosevelt Doctrine.

A naval commander in Dominican waters was instructed to see that no revolutionary fighting was permitted to endanger the custom houses. These instructions were carried out explicitly but without any actual use of force or shedding of blood. On one occasion two rival forces had planned a battle in a custom-house town. The American commander informed them courteously but firmly that they would not be permitted to fight there, for a battle might endanger the custom house. He had no objection, however, to their fighting. In fact he had picked out a nice spot for them outside the town where they might have their battle undisturbed. The winner could have the town. Would they kindly step outside for their fight. They would; they did. The American commander gravely welcomed the victorious faction as the rightful rulers of the town. So much for keeping the custom houses intact. But the Roosevelt Plan went much further. An agreement was entered into with those governmental authorities “who for the moment seemed best able to speak for the country” by means of which the custom houses were placed under American control. United States forces were to keep order and to protect the custom houses; United States officials were to collect the customs dues; forty-five per cent of the revenue was to be turned over to the Dominican Government, and fifty-five per cent put into a sinking fund in New York for the benefit of the creditors. The plan succeeded famously. The Dominicans got more out of their forty-five per cent than they had been wont to get when presumably the entire revenue was theirs. The creditors thoroughly approved, and their Governments had no possible pretext left for interference. Although the plan concerned itself not at all with the internal affairs of the Republic, its indirect influence was strong for good and the island enjoyed a degree of peace and prosperity such as it had not known before for at least a century. There was, however, strong opposition in the United States Senate to the ratification of the treaty with the Dominican Republic. The Democrats, with one or two exceptions, voted against ratification. A number of the more reactionary Republican Senators, also, who were violently hostile to President Roosevelt because of his attitude toward great corporations, lent their opposition. The Roosevelt Plan was further attacked by certain sections of the press, already antagonistic on other grounds, and by some of those whom Roosevelt called the “professional interventional philanthropists.” It was two years before the Senate was ready to ratify the treaty, but meanwhile Roosevelt continued to carry it out “as a simple agreement on the part of the Executive which could be converted into a treaty whenever the Senate was ready to act.”

The treaty as finally ratified differed in some particulars from the protocol. In the protocol the United States agreed “to respect the complete territorial integrity of the Dominican Republic.” This covenant was omitted in the final document in deference to Roosevelt’s opponents who could see no difference between “respecting” the integrity of territory and “guaranteeing” it. Another clause pledging the assistance of the United States in the internal affairs of the Republic, whenever the judgment of the American Government deemed it to be wise, was also omitted. The provision of the protocol making it the duty of the United States to deal with the various creditors of the Dominican Republic in order to determine the amount which each was to receive in settlement of its claims was modified so that this responsibility remained with the Government of the Republic. In Roosevelt’s opinion, these modifications in the protocol detracted nothing from the original plan. He ascribed the delay in the ratification of the treaty to partisanship and bitterness against himself; and it is certainly true that most of the treaty’s opponents were his consistent critics on other grounds.

A considerable portion of Roosevelt’s success as a diplomat was the fruit of personality, as must be the case with any diplomat who makes more than a routine achievement. He disarmed suspicion by transparent honesty, and he impelled respect for his words by always promising or giving warning of not a hairsbreadth more than he was perfectly willing and thoroughly prepared to perform. He was always cheerfully ready to let the other fellow “save his face.” He set no store by public triumphs. He was as exigent that his country should do justly as he was insistent that it should be done justly by. Phrases had no lure for him, appearances no glamour.

It was inevitable that so commanding a personality should have an influence beyond the normal sphere of his official activities. Only a man who had earned the confidence and the respect of the statesmen of other nations could have performed such a service as he did in 1905 in bringing about peace between Russia and Japan in the conflict then raging in the Far East. It was high time that the war should end, in the interest of both contestants. The Russians had been consistently defeated on land and had lost their entire fleet at the battle of Tsushima. The Japanese were apparently on the highroad to victory. But in reality, Japan’s success had been bought at an exorbitant price. Intelligent observers in the diplomatic world who were in a position to realize the truth knew that neither nation could afford to go on.

On June 8, 1905, President Roosevelt sent to both Governments an identical note in which he urged them, “not only for their own sakes, but in the interest of the whole civilized world, to open direct negotiations for peace with each other.” This was the first that the world heard of the proposal. But the President had already conducted, with the utmost secrecy, confidential negotiations with Tokyo and with St. Petersburg to induce both belligerents to consent to a face to face discussion of peace. In Russia he had found it necessary to go directly to the Czar himself, through the American Ambassador, George von Lengerke Meyer. Each Government was assured that no breath of the matter would be made public until both nations had signified their willingness to treat. Neither nation was to know anything of the other’s readiness until both had committed themselves. These advances appear to have been made following a suggestion from Japan that Roosevelt should attempt to secure peace. He used to say, in discussing the matter, that, while it was not generally known or even suspected, Japan was actually “bled white” by the herculean efforts she had made. But Japan’s position was the stronger, and peace was more important for Russia than for her antagonist. The Japanese were more clear-sighted than the selfish Russian bureaucracy; and they realized that they had gained so much already that there was nothing to be won by further fighting.

When the public invitation to peace negotiations was extended, the conference had already been arranged and the confidential consent of both Governments needed only to be made formal. Russia wished the meeting of plenipotentiaries to take place at Paris, Japan preferred Chifu, in China. Neither liked the other’s suggestion, and Roosevelt’s invitation to come to Washington, with the privilege of adjourning to some place in New England if the weather was too hot, was finally accepted. The formal meeting between the plenipotentiaries took place at Oyster Bay on the 5th of August on board the Presidential yacht, the Mayflower. Roosevelt received his guests in the cabin and proposed a toast in these words: “Gentlemen, I propose a toast to which there will be no answer and which I ask you to drink in silence, standing. I drink to the welfare and prosperity of the sovereigns and the peoples of the two great nations whose representatives have met one another on this ship. It is my earnest hope and prayer, in the interest not only of these two great powers, but of all civilized mankind, that a just and lasting peace may speedily be concluded between them.”

The two groups of plenipotentiaries were carried, each on an American naval vessel, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and there at the Navy Yard began their conference. Two-thirds of the terms proposed by Japan were promptly accepted by the Russian envoys. But an irretrievable split on the remainder seemed inevitable. Japan demanded a money indemnity and the cession of the southern half of the island of Saghalien, which Japanese forces had already occupied. These demands the Russians refused.

Then Roosevelt took a hand in the proceedings. He urged the Japanese delegates, through the Japanese Ambassador, to give up their demand for an indemnity. He pointed out that, when it came to “a question of rubles,” the Russian Government and the Russian people were firmly resolved not to yield. To Baron Rosen, one of the Russian delegates, he recommended yielding in the matter of Saghalien, since the Japanese were already in possession and there were racial and historical grounds for considering the southern half of the island logically Japanese territory. The envoys met again, and the Japanese renewed their demands. The Russians refused. Then the Japanese offered to waive the indemnity if the Russians would yield on Saghalien. The offer was accepted, and the peace was made.

Immediately Roosevelt was acclaimed by the world, including the Russians and the Japanese, as a great peacemaker. The Nobel Peace Prize of a medal and $40,000 was awarded to him. But it was not long before both in Russia and Japan public opinion veered to the point of asserting that he had caused peace to be made too soon and to the detriment of the interests of the nation in question. That was just what he expected. He knew human nature thoroughly; and from long experience he had learned to be humorously philosophical about such manifestations of man’s ingratitude.

In the next year the influence of Roosevelt’s personality was again felt in affairs outside the traditional realm of American international interests. Germany was attempting to intrude in Morocco, where France by common consent had been the dominant foreign influence. The rattling of the Potsdam saber was threatening the tranquillity of the status quo. A conference of eleven European powers and the United States was held at Algeciras to readjust the treaty provisions for the protection of foreigners in the decadent Moroccan empire. In the words of a historian of America’s foreign relations, “Although the United States was of all perhaps the least directly interested in the subject matter of dispute, and might appropriately have held aloof from the meeting altogether, its representatives were among the most influential of all, and it was largely owing to their sane and irenic influence that in the end a treaty was amicably made and signed.”* But there was something behind all this. A quiet conference had taken place one day in the remote city of Washington. The President of the United States and the French Ambassador had discussed the approaching meeting at Algeciras. There was a single danger-point in the impending negotiations. The French must find a way around it. The Ambassador had come to the right man. He went out with a few words scratched on a card in the ragged Roosevelt handwriting containing a proposal for a solution. ** The proposal went to Paris, then to Morocco. The solution was adopted by the conference, and the Hohenzollern menace to the peace of the world was averted for the moment. Once more Roosevelt had shown how being wise in time was the sure way to peace.

* Willie Fletcher Johnson, “America’s Foreign Relations”, vol. II, p. 376.

** The author had this story direct from Mr. Roosevelt himself.

Roosevelt’s most important single achievement as President of the United States was the building of the Panama Canal. The preliminary steps which he took in order to make its building possible have been, of all his executive acts, the most consistently and vigorously criticized.

It is not our purpose here to follow at length the history of American diplomatic relations with Colombia and Panama. We are primarily concerned with the part which Roosevelt played in certain international occurrences, of which the Panama incident was not the least interesting and significant. In after years Roosevelt said laconically, “I took Panama.” In fact he did nothing of the sort. But it was like him to brush aside all technical defenses of any act of his and to meet his critics on their own ground. It was as though he said to them, “You roundly denounce me for what I did at the time of the revolution which established the Republic of Panama. You declare that my acts were contrary to international law and international morals. I have a splendid technical defense on the legal side; but I care little about technicalities when compared with reality. Let us admit that I did what you charge me with. I will prove to you that I was justified in so doing. I took Panama; but the taking was a righteous act.”

Fourteen years after that event, in a speech which he made in Washington, Roosevelt expressed his dissatisfaction with the way in which President Wilson was conducting the Great War. He reverted to what he had done in relation to Panama and contrasted his action with the failure of the Wilson Administration to take prompt possession of two hundred locomotives which had been built in this country for the late Russian Government. This is what he said:

“What I think, of course, in my view of the proper governmental policy, should have been done was to take the two hundred locomotives and then discuss. That was the course that I followed, and to which I have ever since looked back with impenitent satisfaction, in reference to the Panama Canal. If you remember, Panama declared itself independent and wanted to complete the Panama Canal and opened negotiations with us. I had two courses open. I might have taken the matter under advisement and put it before the Senate, in which case we should have had a number of most able speeches on the subject. We would have had a number of very profound arguments, and they would have been going on now, and the Panama Canal would be in the dim future yet. We would have had half a century of discussion, and perhaps the Panama Canal. I preferred that we should have the Panama Canal first and the half century of discussion afterward. And now instead of discussing the canal before it was built, which would have been harmful, they merely discuss me–a discussion which I regard with benign interest.”

The facts of the case are simple and in the main undisputed. Shortly after the inauguration of Roosevelt as President, a treaty was negotiated with Colombia for the building of a canal at Panama. It provided for the lease to the United States of a strip six miles wide across the Isthmus, and for the payment to Colombia of $10,000,000 down and $250,000 a year, beginning nine years later. The treaty was promptly ratified by the United States Senate. A special session of the Colombian Senate spent the summer marking time and adjourned after rejecting the treaty by a unanimous vote. The dominant motive for the rejection was greed. An attempt was first made by the dictatorial government that held the Colombian Congress in its mailed hand to extort a large payment from the French Canal Company, whose rights and property on the Isthmus were to be bought by the United States for $40,000,000. Then $15,000,000 instead of $10,000,000 was demanded from the United States. Finally an adroit and conscienceless scheme was invented by which the entire rights of the French Canal Company were to be stolen by the Colombian Government. This last plot, however, would involve a delay of a year or so. The treaty was therefore rejected in order to provide the necessary delay.

But the people of Panama wanted the Canal. They were tired of serving as the milch cow for the fattening of the Government at Bogota. So they quietly organized a revolution. It was a matter of common knowledge that it was coming. Roosevelt, as well as the rest of the world, knew it and, believing in the virtue of being wise in time, prepared for it. Several warships were dispatched to the Isthmus.

The revolution came off promptly as expected. It was bloodless, for the American naval forces, fulfilling the treaty obligations of the United States, prevented the Colombian troops on one side of the Isthmus from using the Panama Railroad to cross to the other side where the revolutionists were. So the revolutionists were undisturbed. A republic was immediately declared and immediately recognized by the United States. A treaty with the new Republic, which guaranteed its independence and secured the cession of a zone ten miles wide across the Isthmus, was drawn up inside of two weeks and ratified by both Senates within three months. Six weeks later an American commission was on the ground to plan the work of construction. The Canal was built. The “half century of discussion” which Roosevelt foresaw is now more than a third over, and the discussion shows no sign of lagging. But the Panama Canal is in use.

Was the President of the United States justified in preventing the Colombian Government from fighting on the Isthmus to put down the unanimous revolution of the people of Panama? That is precisely all that he did. He merely gave orders to the American admiral on the spot to “prevent the disembarkation of Colombian troops with hostile intent within the limits of the state of Panama.” But that action was enough, for the Isthmus is separated from Colombia on the one hand by three hundred miles of sea, and on the other by leagues of pathless jungle.

Roosevelt himself has summed up the action of the United States in this way:

“From the beginning to the end our course was straightforward and in absolute accord with the highest of standards of international morality . . . . To have acted otherwise than I did would have been on my part betrayal of the interests of the United States, indifference to the interests of Panama, and recreancy to the interests of the world at large. Colombia had forfeited every claim to consideration; indeed, this is not stating the case strongly enough: she had so acted that yielding to her would have meant on our part that culpable form of weakness which stands on a level with wickedness . . . . We gave to the people of Panama, self-government, and freed them from subjection to alien oppressors. We did our best to get Colombia to let us treat her with more than generous justice; we exercised patience to beyond the verge of proper forbearance . . . . I deeply regretted, and now deeply regret, the fact that the Colombian Government rendered it imperative for me to take the action I took; but I had no alternative, consistent with the full performance of my duty to my own people, and to the nations of mankind.”

The final verdict will be given only in another generation by the historian and by the world at large. But no portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, and no picture of his times, can be complete without the bold, firm outlines of his Panama policy set as near as may be in their proper perspective.

CHAPTER XIII. THE TAFT ADMINISTRATION

In the evening of that election day in 1904 which saw Roosevelt made President in his own right, after three years of the Presidency given him by fate, he issued a brief statement, in which he said: “The wise custom which limits the President to two terms regards the substance and not the form, and under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.” From this determination, which in his mind related to a third consecutive term, and to nothing else, he never wavered. Four years later, in spite of a widespread demand that he should be a candidate to succeed himself, he used the great influence and prestige of his position as President and leader of his party to bring about the nomination of his friend and close associate, William Howard Taft. The choice received general approval from the Republican party and from the country at large, although up to the very moment of the nomination in the convention at Chicago there was no certainty that a successful effort to stampede the convention for Roosevelt would not be made by his more irreconcilable supporters.

Taft was elected by a huge popular plurality. His opponent was William Jennings Bryan, who was then making his third unsuccessful campaign for the Presidency. Taft’s election, like his nomination, was assured by the unreserved and dynamic support accorded him by President Roosevelt. Taft, of course, was already an experienced statesman, high in the esteem of the nation for his public record as Federal judge, as the first civil Governor of the Philippines, and as Secretary of War in the Roosevelt Cabinet. There was every reason to predict for him a successful and effective Administration. His occupancy of the White House began under smiling skies. He had behind him a united party and a satisfied public opinion. Even his political opponents conceded that the country would be safe in his hands. It was expected that he would be conservatively progressive and progressively conservative. Everybody believed in him. Yet within a year of the day of his inauguration the President’s popularity was sharply on the wane. Two years after his election the voters repudiated the party which he led. By the end of his Presidential term the career which had begun with such happy auguries had become a political tragedy. There were then those who recalled the words of the Roman historian, “All would have believed him capable of governing if only he had not come to govern.”