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Title: Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography

Author: Theodore Roosevelt

Release date: April 6, 2006 [eBook #3335]
Most recently updated: December 27, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3335

Credits: Produced by Dagny; John Bickers; David Widger

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEODORE
ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY ***

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY THEODORE
ROOSEVELT

By Theodore Roosevelt

PREPARER'S NOTE

This Etext was prepared from a 1920 edition,
published by Charles Scribner's Sons.
The book was first published in 1913.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD
THEODORE ROOSEVELT

CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B
CHAPTER VIII
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
APPENDIX
CHAPTER XIV
APPENDIX
CHAPTER XV
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
APPENDIX C

FOREWORD
Naturally, there are chapters of my autobiography which cannot now be
written.
It seems to me that, for the nation as for the individual, what is most
important is to insist on the vital need of combining certain sets of qualities,
which separately are common enough, and, alas, useless enough. Practical
efficiency is common, and lofty idealism not uncommon; it is the
combination which is necessary, and the combination is rare. Love of peace
is common among weak, short-sighted, timid, and lazy persons; and on the
other hand courage is found among many men of evil temper and bad
character. Neither quality shall by itself avail. Justice among the nations of
mankind, and the uplifting of humanity, can be brought about only by those
strong and daring men who with wisdom love peace, but who love
righteousness more than peace. Facing the immense complexity of modern
social and industrial conditions, there is need to use freely and
unhesitatingly the collective power of all of us; and yet no exercise of
collective power will ever avail if the average individual does not keep his
or her sense of personal duty, initiative, and responsibility. There is need to
develop all the virtues that have the state for their sphere of action; but
these virtues are as dust in a windy street unless back of them lie the strong
and tender virtues of a family life based on the love of the one man for the
one woman and on their joyous and fearless acceptance of their common
obligation to the children that are theirs. There must be the keenest sense of
duty, and with it must go the joy of living; there must be shame at the
thought of shirking the hard work of the world, and at the same time delight
in the many-sided beauty of life. With soul of flame and temper of steel we
must act as our coolest judgment bids us. We must exercise the largest
charity towards the wrong-doer that is compatible with relentless war
against the wrong-doing. We must be just to others, generous to others, and
yet we must realize that it is a shameful and a wicked thing not to withstand
oppression with high heart and ready hand. With gentleness and tenderness
there must go dauntless bravery and grim acceptance of labor and hardship
and peril. All for each, and each for all, is a good motto; but only on

condition that each works with might and main to so maintain himself as
not to be a burden to others.
We of the great modern democracies must strive unceasingly to make our
several countries lands in which a poor man who works hard can live
comfortably and honestly, and in which a rich man cannot live dishonestly
nor in slothful avoidance of duty; and yet we must judge rich man and poor
man alike by a standard which rests on conduct and not on caste, and we
must frown with the same stern severity on the mean and vicious envy
which hates and would plunder a man because he is well off and on the
brutal and selfish arrogance which looks down on and exploits the man with
whom life has gone hard.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL, October 1, 1913.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

CHAPTER I
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

My grandfather on my father's side was of almost purely Dutch blood.
When he was young he still spoke some Dutch, and Dutch was last used in
the services of the Dutch Reformed Church in New York while he was a
small boy.
About 1644 his ancestor Klaes Martensen van Roosevelt came to New
Amsterdam as a "settler"—the euphemistic name for an immigrant who
came over in the steerage of a sailing ship in the seventeenth century
instead of the steerage of a steamer in the nineteenth century. From that
time for the next seven generations from father to son every one of us was
born on Manhattan Island.
My father's paternal ancestors were of Holland stock; except that there
was one named Waldron, a wheelwright, who was one of the Pilgrims who
remained in Holland when the others came over to found Massachusetts,
and who then accompanied the Dutch adventurers to New Amsterdam. My
father's mother was a Pennsylvanian. Her forebears had come to
Pennsylvania with William Penn, some in the same ship with him; they
were of the usual type of the immigration of that particular place and time.
They included Welsh and English Quakers, an Irishman,—with a Celtic
name, and apparently not a Quaker,—and peace-loving Germans, who were
among the founders of Germantown, having been driven from their
Rhineland homes when the armies of Louis the Fourteenth ravaged the
Palatinate; and, in addition, representatives of a by-no-means altogether
peaceful people, the Scotch Irish, who came to Pennsylvania a little later,
early in the eighteenth century. My grandmother was a woman of singular
sweetness and strength, the keystone of the arch in her relations with her
husband and sons. Although she was not herself Dutch, it was she who
taught me the only Dutch I ever knew, a baby song of which the first line
ran, "Trippe troppa tronjes." I always remembered this, and when I was in
East Africa it proved a bond of union between me and the Boer settlers, not
a few of whom knew it, although at first they always had difficulty in

understanding my pronunciation—at which I do not wonder. It was
interesting to meet these men whose ancestors had gone to the Cape about
the time that mine went to America two centuries and a half previously, and
to find that the descendants of the two streams of emigrants still crooned to
their children some at least of the same nursery songs.
Of my great-grandfather Roosevelt and his family life a century and over
ago I know little beyond what is implied in some of his books that have
come down to me—the Letters of Junius, a biography of John Paul Jones,
Chief Justice Marshall's "Life of Washington." They seem to indicate that
his library was less interesting than that of my wife's great-grandfather at
the same time, which certainly included such volumes as the original
Edinburgh Review, for we have them now on our own book-shelves. Of my
grandfather Roosevelt my most vivid childish reminiscence is not
something I saw, but a tale that was told me concerning him. In his boyhood
Sunday was as dismal a day for small Calvinistic children of Dutch descent
as if they had been of Puritan or Scotch Covenanting or French Huguenot
descent—and I speak as one proud of his Holland, Huguenot, and
Covenanting ancestors, and proud that the blood of that stark Puritan divine
Jonathan Edwards flows in the veins of his children. One summer
afternoon, after listening to an unusually long Dutch Reformed sermon for
the second time that day, my grandfather, a small boy, running home before
the congregation had dispersed, ran into a party of pigs, which then
wandered free in New York's streets. He promptly mounted a big boar,
which no less promptly bolted and carried him at full speed through the
midst of the outraged congregation.
By the way, one of the Roosevelt documents which came down to me
illustrates the change that has come over certain aspects of public life since
the time which pessimists term "the earlier and better days of the Republic."
Old Isaac Roosevelt was a member of an Auditing Committee which shortly
after the close of the Revolution approved the following bill:

The State of New York, to John Cape Dr.

To a Dinner Given by His Excellency the Governor
and Council to their Excellencies the Minnister of
France and General Washington & Co.

1783
December
To 120 dinners at 48: 0:0

To 135 Bottles Madira 54: 0:0
" 36 ditto Port 10:16:0
" 60 ditto English Beer 9: 0:0
" 30 Bouls Punch 9: 0:0
" 8 dinners for Musick 1:12:0
" 10 ditto for Sarvts 2: 0:0
" 60 Wine Glasses Broken 4:10:0
" 8 Cutt decanters Broken 3: 0:0
" Coffee for 8 Gentlemen 1:12:0
" Music fees &ca 8: 0:0
" Fruit & Nuts 5: 0:0
156:10:0
By Cash . . . 100:16:0
55:14:0
WE a Committee of Council having examined
the above account do certify it (amounting to
one hundred and fifty-six Pounds ten Shillings)
to be just.
December 17th 1783.
ISAAC ROOSEVELT
JAS. DUANE
EGBT. BENSON
FRED. JAY
Received the above Contents in full
New York 17th December 1783
JOHN CAPE

Think of the Governor of New York now submitting such a bill for such
an entertainment of the French Ambassador and the President of the United
States! Falstaff's views of the proper proportion between sack and bread are
borne out by the proportion between the number of bowls of punch and
bottles of port, Madeira, and beer consumed, and the "coffee for eight
gentlemen"—apparently the only ones who lasted through to that stage of
the dinner. Especially admirable is the nonchalant manner in which,
obviously as a result of the drinking of said bottles of wine and bowls of
punch, it is recorded that eight cut-glass decanters and sixty wine-glasses
were broken.
During the Revolution some of my forefathers, North and South, served
respectably, but without distinction, in the army, and others rendered similar
service in the Continental Congress or in various local legislatures. By that
time those who dwelt in the North were for the most part merchants, and
those who dwelt in the South, planters.
My mother's people were predominantly of Scotch, but also of Huguenot
and English, descent. She was a Georgian, her people having come to
Georgia from South Carolina before the Revolution. The original Bulloch
was a lad from near Glasgow, who came hither a couple of centuries ago,
just as hundreds of thousands of needy, enterprising Scotchmen have gone

to the four quarters of the globe in the intervening two hundred years. My
mother's great-grandfather, Archibald Bulloch, was the first Revolutionary
"President" of Georgia. My grandfather, her father, spent the winters in
Savannah and the summers at Roswell, in the Georgia uplands near Atlanta,
finally making Roswell his permanent home. He used to travel thither with
his family and their belongings in his own carriage, followed by a baggage
wagon. I never saw Roswell until I was President, but my mother told me
so much about the place that when I did see it I felt as if I already knew
every nook and corner of it, and as if it were haunted by the ghosts of all the
men and women who had lived there. I do not mean merely my own family,
I mean the slaves. My mother and her sister, my aunt, used to tell us
children all kinds of stories about the slaves. One of the most fascinating
referred to a very old darky called Bear Bob, because in the early days of
settlement he had been partially scalped by a black bear. Then there was
Mom' Grace, who was for a time my mother's nurse, and whom I had
supposed to be dead, but who greeted me when I did come to Roswell, very
respectable, and apparently with years of life before her. The two chief
personages of the drama that used to be repeated to us were Daddy Luke,
the Negro overseer, and his wife, Mom' Charlotte. I never saw either Daddy
Luke or Mom' Charlotte, but I inherited the care of them when my mother
died. After the close of the war they resolutely refused to be emancipated or
leave the place. The only demand they made upon us was enough money
annually to get a new "critter," that is, a mule. With a certain lack of
ingenuity the mule was reported each Christmas as having passed away, or
at least as having become so infirm as to necessitate a successor—a solemn
fiction which neither deceived nor was intended to deceive, but which
furnished a gauge for the size of the Christmas gift.
My maternal grandfather's house was on the line of Sherman's march to
the sea, and pretty much everything in it that was portable was taken by the
boys in blue, including most of the books in the library. When I was
President the facts about my ancestry were published, and a former soldier
in Sherman's army sent me back one of the books with my grandfather's
name in it. It was a little copy of the poems of "Mr. Gray"—an eighteenth-
century edition printed in Glasgow.
On October 27, 1858, I was born at No. 28 East Twentieth Street, New
York City, in the house in which we lived during the time that my two
sisters and my brother and I were small children. It was furnished in the

canonical taste of the New York which George William Curtis described in
the Potiphar Papers. The black haircloth furniture in the dining-room
scratched the bare legs of the children when they sat on it. The middle room
was a library, with tables, chairs, and bookcases of gloomy respectability. It
was without windows, and so was available only at night. The front room,
the parlor, seemed to us children to be a room of much splendor, but was
open for general use only on Sunday evening or on rare occasions when
there were parties. The Sunday evening family gathering was the redeeming
feature in a day which otherwise we children did not enjoy—chiefly
because we were all of us made to wear clean clothes and keep neat. The
ornaments of that parlor I remember now, including the gas chandelier
decorated with a great quantity of cut-glass prisms. These prisms struck me
as possessing peculiar magnificence. One of them fell off one day, and I
hastily grabbed it and stowed it away, passing several days of furtive delight
in the treasure, a delight always alloyed with fear that I would be found out
and convicted of larceny. There was a Swiss wood-carving representing a
very big hunter on one side of an exceedingly small mountain, and a herd of
chamois, disproportionately small for the hunter and large for the mountain,
just across the ridge. This always fascinated us; but there was a small
chamois kid for which we felt agonies lest the hunter might come on it and
kill it. There was also a Russian moujik drawing a gilt sledge on a piece of
malachite. Some one mentioned in my hearing that malachite was a
valuable marble. This fixed in my mind that it was valuable exactly as
diamonds are valuable. I accepted that moujik as a priceless work of art,
and it was not until I was well in middle age that it occurred to me that I
was mistaken.
Now and then we children were taken round to our grandfather's house; a
big house for the New York of those days, on the corner of Fourteenth
Street and Broadway, fronting Union Square. Inside there was a large hall
running up to the roof; there was a tessellated black-and-white marble floor,
and a circular staircase round the sides of the hall, from the top floor down.
We children much admired both the tessellated floor and the circular
staircase. I think we were right about the latter, but I am not so sure as to the
tessellated floor.
The summers we spent in the country, now at one place, now at another.
We children, of course, loved the country beyond anything. We disliked the
city. We were always wildly eager to get to the country when spring came,

and very sad when in the late fall the family moved back to town. In the
country we of course had all kinds of pets—cats, dogs, rabbits, a coon, and
a sorrel Shetland pony named General Grant. When my younger sister first
heard of the real General Grant, by the way, she was much struck by the
coincidence that some one should have given him the same name as the
pony. (Thirty years later my own children had their pony Grant.) In the
country we children ran barefoot much of the time, and the seasons went by
in a round of uninterrupted and enthralling pleasures—supervising the
haying and harvesting, picking apples, hunting frogs successfully and
woodchucks unsuccessfully, gathering hickory-nuts and chestnuts for sale
to patient parents, building wigwams in the woods, and sometimes playing
Indians in too realistic manner by staining ourselves (and incidentally our
clothes) in liberal fashion with poke-cherry juice. Thanksgiving was an
appreciated festival, but it in no way came up to Christmas. Christmas was
an occasion of literally delirious joy. In the evening we hung up our
stockings—or rather the biggest stockings we could borrow from the
grown-ups—and before dawn we trooped in to open them while sitting on
father's and mother's bed; and the bigger presents were arranged, those for
each child on its own table, in the drawing-room, the doors to which were
thrown open after breakfast. I never knew any one else have what seemed
to me such attractive Christmases, and in the next generation I tried to
reproduce them exactly for my own children.
My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew. He
combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great
unselfishness. He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty,
idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness. As we grew older he made us
understand that the same standard of clean living was demanded for the
boys as for the girls; that what was wrong in a woman could not be right in
a man. With great love and patience, and the most understanding sympathy
and consideration, he combined insistence on discipline. He never
physically punished me but once, but he was the only man of whom I was
ever really afraid. I do not mean that it was a wrong fear, for he was entirely
just, and we children adored him. We used to wait in the library in the
evening until we could hear his key rattling in the latch of the front hall, and
then rush out to greet him; and we would troop into his room while he was
dressing, to stay there as long as we were permitted, eagerly examining
anything which came out of his pockets which could be regarded as an

attractive novelty. Every child has fixed in his memory various details
which strike it as of grave importance. The trinkets he used to keep in a
little box on his dressing-table we children always used to speak of as
"treasures." The word, and some of the trinkets themselves, passed on to the
next generation. My own children, when small, used to troop into my room
while I was dressing, and the gradually accumulating trinkets in the "ditty-
box"—the gift of an enlisted man in the navy—always excited rapturous
joy. On occasions of solemn festivity each child would receive a trinket for
his or her "very own." My children, by the way, enjoyed one pleasure I do
not remember enjoying myself. When I came back from riding, the child
who brought the bootjack would itself promptly get into the boots, and
clump up and down the room with a delightful feeling of kinship with Jack
of the seven-league strides.
The punishing incident I have referred to happened when I was four
years old. I bit my elder sister's arm. I do not remember biting her arm, but I
do remember running down to the yard, perfectly conscious that I had
committed a crime. From the yard I went into the kitchen, got some dough
from the cook, and crawled under the kitchen table. In a minute or two my
father entered from the yard and asked where I was. The warm-hearted Irish
cook had a characteristic contempt for "informers," but although she said
nothing she compromised between informing and her conscience by casting
a look under the table. My father immediately dropped on all fours and
darted for me. I feebly heaved the dough at him, and, having the advantage
of him because I could stand up under the table, got a fair start for the stairs,
but was caught halfway up them. The punishment that ensued fitted the
crime, and I hope—and believe—that it did me good.
I never knew any one who got greater joy out of living than did my
father, or any one who more whole-heartedly performed every duty; and no
one whom I have ever met approached his combination of enjoyment of life
and performance of duty. He and my mother were given to a hospitality that
at that time was associated more commonly with southern than northern
households; and, especially in their later years when they had moved up
town, in the neighborhood of Central Park, they kept a charming, open
house.
My father worked hard at his business, for he died when he was forty-six,
too early to have retired. He was interested in every social reform

movement, and he did an immense amount of practical charitable work
himself. He was a big, powerful man, with a leonine face, and his heart
filled with gentleness for those who needed help or protection, and with the
possibility of much wrath against a bully or an oppressor. He was very fond
of riding both on the road and across the country, and was also a great whip.
He usually drove four-in-hand, or else a spike team, that is, a pair with a
third horse in the lead. I do not suppose that such a team exists now. The
trap that he drove we always called the high phaeton. The wheels turned
under in front. I have it yet. He drove long-tailed horses, harnessed loose in
light American harness, so that the whole rig had no possible resemblance
to anything that would be seen now. My father always excelled in
improving every spare half-hour or three-quarters of an hour, whether for
work or enjoyment. Much of his four-in-hand driving was done in the
summer afternoons when he would come out on the train from his business
in New York. My mother and one or perhaps two of us children might meet
him at the station. I can see him now getting out of the car in his linen
duster, jumping into the wagon, and instantly driving off at a rattling pace,
the duster sometimes bagging like a balloon. The four-in-hand, as can be
gathered from the above description, did not in any way in his eyes
represent possible pageantry. He drove it because he liked it. He was always
preaching caution to his boys, but in this respect he did not practice his
preaching overmuch himself; and, being an excellent whip, he liked to take
chances. Generally they came out all right. Occasionally they did not; but
he was even better at getting out of a scrape than into it. Once when we
were driving into New York late at night the leaders stopped. He flicked
them, and the next moment we could dimly make out that they had jumped.
It then appeared that the street was closed and that a board had been placed
across it, resting on two barrels, but without a lantern. Over this board the
leaders had jumped, and there was considerable excitement before we got
the board taken off the barrels and resumed our way. When in the city on
Thanksgiving or Christmas, my father was very apt to drive my mother and
a couple of friends up to the racing park to take lunch. But he was always
back in time to go to the dinner at the Newsboys' Lodging-House, and not
infrequently also to Miss Sattery's Night School for little Italians. At a very
early age we children were taken with him and were required to help. He
was a staunch friend of Charles Loring Brace, and was particularly
interested in the Newsboys' Lodging-House and in the night schools and in

getting the children off the streets and out on farms in the West. When I was
President, the Governor of Alaska under me, Governor Brady, was one of
these ex-newsboys who had been sent from New York out West by Mr.
Brace and my father. My father was greatly interested in the societies to
prevent cruelty to children and cruelty to animals. On Sundays he had a
mission class. On his way to it he used to drop us children at our Sunday-
school in Dr. Adams's Presbyterian Church on Madison Square; I remember
hearing my aunt, my mother's sister, saying that when he walked along with
us children he always reminded her of Greatheart in Bunyan. Under the
spur of his example I taught a mission class myself for three years before
going to college and for all four years that I was in college. I do not think I
made much of a success of it. But the other day on getting out of a taxi in
New York the chauffeur spoke to me and told me that he was one of my old
Sunday-school pupils. I remembered him well, and was much pleased to
find that he was an ardent Bull Mooser!
My mother, Martha Bulloch, was a sweet, gracious, beautiful Southern
woman, a delightful companion and beloved by everybody. She was
entirely "unreconstructed" to the day of her death. Her mother, my
grandmother, one of the dearest of old ladies, lived with us, and was
distinctly overindulgent to us children, being quite unable to harden her
heart towards us even when the occasion demanded it. Towards the close of
the Civil War, although a very small boy, I grew to have a partial but alert
understanding of the fact that the family were not one in their views about
that conflict, my father being a strong Lincoln Republican; and once, when
I felt that I had been wronged by maternal discipline during the day, I
attempted a partial vengeance by praying with loud fervor for the success of
the Union arms, when we all came to say our prayers before my mother in
the evening. She was not only a most devoted mother, but was also blessed
with a strong sense of humor, and she was too much amused to punish me;
but I was warned not to repeat the offense, under penalty of my father's
being informed—he being the dispenser of serious punishment. Morning
prayers were with my father. We used to stand at the foot of the stairs, and
when father came down we called out, "I speak for you and the cubby-hole
too!" There were three of us young children, and we used to sit with father
on the sofa while he conducted morning prayers. The place between father
and the arm of the sofa we called the "cubby-hole." The child who got that
place we regarded as especially favored both in comfort and somehow or

other in rank and title. The two who were left to sit on the much wider
expanse of sofa on the other side of father were outsiders for the time being.
My aunt Anna, my mother's sister, lived with us. She was as devoted to
us children as was my mother herself, and we were equally devoted to her
in return. She taught us our lessons while we were little. She and my mother
used to entertain us by the hour with tales of life on the Georgia plantations;
of hunting fox, deer, and wildcat; of the long-tailed driving horses, Boone
and Crockett, and of the riding horses, one of which was named Buena
Vista in a fit of patriotic exaltation during the Mexican War; and of the
queer goings-on in the Negro quarters. She knew all the "Br'er Rabbit"
stories, and I was brought up on them. One of my uncles, Robert Roosevelt,
was much struck with them, and took them down from her dictation,
publishing them in Harper's, where they fell flat. This was a good many
years before a genius arose who in "Uncle Remus" made the stories
immortal.
My mother's two brothers, James Dunwoodie Bulloch and Irvine
Bulloch, came to visit us shortly after the close of the war. Both came under
assumed names, as they were among the Confederates who were at that
time exempted from the amnesty. "Uncle Jimmy" Bulloch was a dear old
retired sea-captain, utterly unable to "get on" in the worldly sense of that
phrase, as valiant and simple and upright a soul as ever lived, a veritable
Colonel Newcome. He was an Admiral in the Confederate navy, and was
the builder of the famous Confederate war vessel Alabama. My uncle Irvine
Bulloch was a midshipman on the Alabama, and fired the last gun
discharged from her batteries in the fight with the Kearsarge. Both of these
uncles lived in Liverpool after the war.
My uncle Jimmy Bulloch was forgiving and just in reference to the
Union forces, and could discuss all phases of the Civil War with entire
fairness and generosity. But in English politics he promptly became a Tory
of the most ultra-conservative school. Lincoln and Grant he could admire,
but he would not listen to anything in favor of Mr. Gladstone. The only
occasions on which I ever shook his faith in me were when I would venture
meekly to suggest that some of the manifestly preposterous falsehoods
about Mr. Gladstone could not be true. My uncle was one of the best men I
have ever known, and when I have sometimes been tempted to wonder how
good people can believe of me the unjust and impossible things they do

believe, I have consoled myself by thinking of Uncle Jimmy Bulloch's
perfectly sincere conviction that Gladstone was a man of quite exceptional
and nameless infamy in both public and private life.
I was a sickly, delicate boy, suffered much from asthma, and frequently
had to be taken away on trips to find a place where I could breathe. One of
my memories is of my father walking up and down the room with me in his
arms at night when I was a very small person, and of sitting up in bed
gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me. I went very little to
school. I never went to the public schools, as my own children later did,
both at the "Cove School" at Oyster Bay and at the "Ford School" in
Washington. For a few months I attended Professor McMullen's school in
Twentieth Street near the house where I was born, but most of the time I
had tutors. As I have already said, my aunt taught me when I was small. At
one time we had a French governess, a loved and valued "mam'selle," in the
household.
When I was ten years old I made my first journey to Europe. My birthday
was spent in Cologne, and in order to give me a thoroughly "party" feeling I
remember that my mother put on full dress for my birthday dinner. I do not
think I gained anything from this particular trip abroad. I cordially hated it,
as did my younger brother and sister. Practically all the enjoyment we had
was in exploring any ruins or mountains when we could get away from our
elders, and in playing in the different hotels. Our one desire was to get back
to America, and we regarded Europe with the most ignorant chauvinism and
contempt. Four years later, however, I made another journey to Europe, and
was old enough to enjoy it thoroughly and profit by it.
While still a small boy I began to take an interest in natural history. I
remember distinctly the first day that I started on my career as zoologist. I
was walking up Broadway, and as I passed the market to which I used
sometimes to be sent before breakfast to get strawberries I suddenly saw a
dead seal laid out on a slab of wood. That seal filled me with every possible
feeling of romance and adventure. I asked where it was killed, and was
informed in the harbor. I had already begun to read some of Mayne Reid's
books and other boys' books of adventure, and I felt that this seal brought
all these adventures in realistic fashion before me. As long as that seal
remained there I haunted the neighborhood of the market day after day. I
measured it, and I recall that, not having a tape measure, I had to do my best

to get its girth with a folding pocket foot-rule, a difficult undertaking. I
carefully made a record of the utterly useless measurements, and at once
began to write a natural history of my own, on the strength of that seal.
This, and subsequent natural histories, were written down in blank books in
simplified spelling, wholly unpremeditated and unscientific. I had vague
aspirations of in some way or another owning and preserving that seal, but
they never got beyond the purely formless stage. I think, however, I did get
the seal's skull, and with two of my cousins promptly started what we
ambitiously called the "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History." The
collections were at first kept in my room, until a rebellion on the part of the
chambermaid received the approval of the higher authorities of the
household and the collection was moved up to a kind of bookcase in the
back hall upstairs. It was the ordinary small boy's collection of curios, quite
incongruous and entirely valueless except from the standpoint of the boy
himself. My father and mother encouraged me warmly in this, as they
always did in anything that could give me wholesome pleasure or help to
develop me.
The adventure of the seal and the novels of Mayne Reid together
strengthened my instinctive interest in natural history. I was too young to
understand much of Mayne Reid, excepting the adventure part and the
natural history part—these enthralled me. But of course my reading was not
wholly confined to natural history. There was very little effort made to
compel me to read books, my father and mother having the good sense not
to try to get me to read anything I did not like, unless it was in the way of
study. I was given the chance to read books that they thought I ought to
read, but if I did not like them I was then given some other good book that I
did like. There were certain books that were taboo. For instance, I was not
allowed to read dime novels. I obtained some surreptitiously and did read
them, but I do not think that the enjoyment compensated for the feeling of
guilt. I was also forbidden to read the only one of Ouida's books which I
wished to read—"Under Two Flags." I did read it, nevertheless, with greedy
and fierce hope of coming on something unhealthy; but as a matter of fact
all the parts that might have seemed unhealthy to an older person made no
impression on me whatever. I simply enjoyed in a rather confused way the
general adventures.
I think there ought to be children's books. I think that the child will like
grown-up books also, and I do not believe a child's book is really good

unless grown-ups get something out of it. For instance, there is a book I did
not have when I was a child because it was not written. It is Laura E.
Richard's "Nursery Rhymes." My own children loved them dearly, and their
mother and I loved them almost equally; the delightfully light-hearted "Man
from New Mexico who Lost his Grandmother out in the Snow," the
adventures of "The Owl, the Eel, and the Warming-Pan," and the
extraordinary genealogy of the kangaroo whose "father was a whale with a
feather in his tail who lived in the Greenland sea," while "his mother was a
shark who kept very dark in the Gulf of Caribee."
As a small boy I had Our Young Folks, which I then firmly believed to be
the very best magazine in the world—a belief, I may add, which I have kept
to this day unchanged, for I seriously doubt if any magazine for old or
young has ever surpassed it. Both my wife and I have the bound volumes of
Our Young Folks which we preserved from our youth. I have tried to read
again the Mayne Reid books which I so dearly loved as a boy, only to find,
alas! that it is impossible. But I really believe that I enjoy going over Our
Young Folks now nearly as much as ever. "Cast Away in the Cold,"
"Grandfather's Struggle for a Homestead," "The William Henry Letters,"
and a dozen others like them were first-class, good healthy stories,
interesting in the first place, and in the next place teaching manliness,
decency, and good conduct. At the cost of being deemed effeminate, I will
add that I greatly liked the girls' stories—"Pussy Willow" and "A Summer
in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life," just as I worshiped "Little Men" and "Little
Women" and "An Old-Fashioned Girl."
This enjoyment of the gentler side of life did not prevent my reveling in
such tales of adventure as Ballantyne's stories, or Marryat's "Midshipman
Easy." I suppose everybody has kinks in him, and even as a child there were
books which I ought to have liked and did not. For instance, I never cared at
all for the first part of "Robinson Crusoe" (and although it is unquestionably
the best part, I do not care for it now); whereas the second part, containing
the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with the wolves in the Pyrenees, and
out in the Far East, simply fascinated me. What I did like in the first part
were the adventures before Crusoe finally reached his island, the fight with
the Sallee Rover, and the allusion to the strange beasts at night taking their
improbable bath in the ocean. Thanks to being already an embryo zoologist,
I disliked the "Swiss Family Robinson" because of the wholly impossible
collection of animals met by that worthy family as they ambled inland from

the wreck. Even in poetry it was the relation of adventures that most
appealed to me as a boy. At a pretty early age I began to read certain books
of poetry, notably Longfellow's poem, "The Saga of King Olaf," which
absorbed me. This introduced me to Scandinavian literature; and I have
never lost my interest in and affection for it.
Among my first books was a volume of a hopelessly unscientific kind by
Mayne Reid, about mammals, illustrated with pictures no more artistic than
but quite as thrilling as those in the typical school geography. When my
father found how deeply interested I was in this not very accurate volume,
he gave me a little book by J. G. Wood, the English writer of popular books
on natural history, and then a larger one of his called "Homes Without
Hands." Both of these were cherished possessions. They were studied
eagerly; and they finally descended to my children. The "Homes Without
Hands," by the way, grew to have an added association in connection with a
pedagogical failure on my part. In accordance with what I believed was
some kind of modern theory of making education interesting and not letting
it become a task, I endeavored to teach my eldest small boy one or two of
his letters from the title-page. As the letter "H" appeared in the title an
unusual number of times, I selected that to begin on, my effort being to
keep the small boy interested, not to let him realize that he was learning a
lesson, and to convince him that he was merely having a good time.
Whether it was the theory or my method of applying it that was defective I
do not know, but I certainly absolutely eradicated from his brain any ability
to learn what "H" was; and long after he had learned all the other letters of
the alphabet in the old-fashioned way, he proved wholly unable to
remember "H" under any circumstances.
Quite unknown to myself, I was, while a boy, under a hopeless
disadvantage in studying nature. I was very near-sighted, so that the only
things I could study were those I ran against or stumbled over. When I was
about thirteen I was allowed to take lessons in taxidermy from a Mr. Bell, a
tall, clean-shaven, white-haired old gentleman, as straight as an Indian, who
had been a companion of Audubon's. He had a musty little shop, somewhat
on the order of Mr. Venus's shop in "Our Mutual Friend," a little shop in
which he had done very valuable work for science. This "vocational study,"
as I suppose it would be called by modern educators, spurred and directed
my interest in collecting specimens for mounting and preservation. It was
this summer that I got my first gun, and it puzzled me to find that my

companions seemed to see things to shoot at which I could not see at all.
One day they read aloud an advertisement in huge letters on a distant
billboard, and I then realized that something was the matter, for not only
was I unable to read the sign but I could not even see the letters. I spoke of
this to my father, and soon afterwards got my first pair of spectacles, which
literally opened an entirely new world to me. I had no idea how beautiful
the world was until I got those spectacles. I had been a clumsy and
awkward little boy, and while much of my clumsiness and awkwardness
was doubtless due to general characteristics, a good deal of it was due to the
fact that I could not see and yet was wholly ignorant that I was not seeing.
The recollection of this experience gives me a keen sympathy with those
who are trying in our public schools and elsewhere to remove the physical
causes of deficiency in children, who are often unjustly blamed for being
obstinate or unambitious, or mentally stupid.
This same summer, too, I obtained various new books on mammals and
birds, including the publications of Spencer Baird, for instance, and made
an industrious book-study of the subject. I did not accomplish much in
outdoor study because I did not get spectacles until late in the fall, a short
time before I started with the rest of the family for a second trip to Europe.
We were living at Dobbs Ferry, on the Hudson. My gun was a breech-
loading, pin-fire double-barrel, of French manufacture. It was an excellent
gun for a clumsy and often absent-minded boy. There was no spring to open
it, and if the mechanism became rusty it could be opened with a brick
without serious damage. When the cartridges stuck they could be removed
in the same fashion. If they were loaded, however, the result was not always
happy, and I tattooed myself with partially unburned grains of powder more
than once.
When I was fourteen years old, in the winter of '72 and '73, I visited
Europe for the second time, and this trip formed a really useful part of my
education. We went to Egypt, journeyed up the Nile, traveled through the
Holy Land and part of Syria, visited Greece and Constantinople; and then
we children spent the summer in a German family in Dresden. My first real
collecting as a student of natural history was done in Egypt during this
journey. By this time I had a good working knowledge of American bird life
from the superficially scientific standpoint. I had no knowledge of the
ornithology of Egypt, but I picked up in Cairo a book by an English
clergyman, whose name I have now forgotten, who described a trip up the

Nile, and in an appendix to his volume gave an account of his bird
collection. I wish I could remember the name of the author now, for I owe
that book very much. Without it I should have been collecting entirely in
the dark, whereas with its aid I could generally find out what the birds were.
My first knowledge of Latin was obtained by learning the scientific names
of the birds and mammals which I collected and classified by the aid of
such books as this one.
The birds I obtained up the Nile and in Palestine represented merely the
usual boy's collection. Some years afterward I gave them, together with the
other ornithological specimens I had gathered, to the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, and I think some of them also to the American
Museum of Natural History in New York. I am told that the skins are to be
found yet in both places and in other public collections. I doubt whether
they have my original labels on them. With great pride the directors of the
"Roosevelt Museum," consisting of myself and the two cousins aforesaid,
had printed a set of Roosevelt Museum labels in pink ink preliminary to
what was regarded as my adventurous trip to Egypt. This bird-collecting
gave what was really the chief zest to my Nile journey. I was old enough
and had read enough to enjoy the temples and the desert scenery and the
general feeling of romance; but this in time would have palled if I had not
also had the serious work of collecting and preparing my specimens.
Doubtless the family had their moments of suffering—especially on one
occasion when a well-meaning maid extracted from my taxidermist's outfit
the old tooth-brush with which I put on the skins the arsenical soap
necessary for their preservation, partially washed it, and left it with the rest
of my wash kit for my own personal use. I suppose that all growing boys
tend to be grubby; but the ornithological small boy, or indeed the boy with
the taste for natural history of any kind, is generally the very grubbiest of
all. An added element in my case was the fact that while in Egypt I
suddenly started to grow. As there were no tailors up the Nile, when I got
back to Cairo I needed a new outfit. But there was one suit of clothes too
good to throw away, which we kept for a "change," and which was known
as my "Smike suit," because it left my wrists and ankles as bare as those of
poor Smike himself.
When we reached Dresden we younger children were left to spend the
summer in the house of Herr Minckwitz, a member of either the Municipal
or the Saxon Government—I have forgotten which. It was hoped that in this

way we would acquire some knowledge of the German language and
literature. They were the very kindest family imaginable. I shall never
forget the unwearied patience of the two daughters. The father and mother,
and a shy, thin, student cousin who was living in the flat, were no less kind.
Whenever I could get out into the country I collected specimens
industriously and enlivened the household with hedge-hogs and other small
beasts and reptiles which persisted in escaping from partially closed bureau
drawers. The two sons were fascinating students from the University of
Leipsic, both of them belonging to dueling corps, and much scarred in
consequence. One, a famous swordsman, was called Der Rothe Herzog (the
Red Duke), and the other was nicknamed Herr Nasehorn (Sir Rhinoceros)
because the tip of his nose had been cut off in a duel and sewn on again. I
learned a good deal of German here, in spite of myself, and above all I
became fascinated with the Nibelungenlied. German prose never became
really easy to me in the sense that French prose did, but for German poetry I
cared as much as for English poetry. Above all, I gained an impression of
the German people which I never got over. From that time to this it would
have been quite impossible to make me feel that the Germans were really
foreigners. The affection, the Gemuthlichkeit (a quality which cannot be
exactly expressed by any single English word), the capacity for hard work,
the sense of duty, the delight in studying literature and science, the pride in
the new Germany, the more than kind and friendly interest in three strange
children—all these manifestations of the German character and of German
family life made a subconscious impression upon me which I did not in the
least define at the time, but which is very vivid still forty years later.
When I got back to America, at the age of fifteen, I began serious study
to enter Harvard under Mr. Arthur Cutler, who later founded the Cutler
School in New York. I could not go to school because I knew so much less
than most boys of my age in some subjects and so much more in others. In
science and history and geography and in unexpected parts of German and
French I was strong, but lamentably weak in Latin and Greek and
mathematics. My grandfather had made his summer home in Oyster Bay a
number of years before, and my father now made Oyster Bay the summer
home of his family also. Along with my college preparatory studies I
carried on the work of a practical student of natural history. I worked with
greater industry than either intelligence or success, and made very few
additions to the sum of human knowledge; but to this day certain obscure

ornithological publications may be found in which are recorded such items
as, for instance, that on one occasion a fish-crow, and on another an Ipswich
sparrow, were obtained by one Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., at Oyster Bay, on
the shore of Long Island Sound.
In the fall of 1876 I entered Harvard, graduating in 1880. I thoroughly
enjoyed Harvard, and I am sure it did me good, but only in the general
effect, for there was very little in my actual studies which helped me in after
life. More than one of my own sons have already profited by their
friendship with certain of their masters in school or college. I certainly
profited by my friendship with one of my tutors, Mr. Cutler; and in Harvard
I owed much to the professor of English, Mr. A. S. Hill. Doubtless through
my own fault, I saw almost nothing of President Eliot and very little of the
professors. I ought to have gained much more than I did gain from writing
the themes and forensics. My failure to do so may have been partly due to
my taking no interest in the subjects. Before I left Harvard I was already
writing one or two chapters of a book I afterwards published on the Naval
War of 1812. Those chapters were so dry that they would have made a
dictionary seem light reading by comparison. Still, they represented purpose
and serious interest on my part, not the perfunctory effort to do well enough
to get a certain mark; and corrections of them by a skilled older man would
have impressed me and have commanded my respectful attention. But I was
not sufficiently developed to make myself take an intelligent interest in
some of the subjects assigned me—the character of the Gracchi, for
instance. A very clever and studious lad would no doubt have done so, but I
personally did not grow up to this particular subject until a good many years
later. The frigate and sloop actions between the American and British sea-
tigers of 1812 were much more within my grasp. I worked drearily at the
Gracchi because I had to; my conscientious and much-to-be-pitied professor
dragging me through the theme by main strength, with my feet firmly
planted in dull and totally idea-proof resistance.
I had at the time no idea of going into public life, and I never studied
elocution or practiced debating. This was a loss to me in one way. In
another way it was not. Personally I have not the slightest sympathy with
debating contests in which each side is arbitrarily assigned a given
proposition and told to maintain it without the least reference to whether
those maintaining it believe in it or not. I know that under our system this is
necessary for lawyers, but I emphatically disbelieve in it as regards general

discussion of political, social, and industrial matters. What we need is to
turn out of our colleges young men with ardent convictions on the side of
the right; not young men who can make a good argument for either right or
wrong as their interest bids them. The present method of carrying on
debates on such subjects as "Our Colonial Policy," or "The Need of a
Navy," or "The Proper Position of the Courts in Constitutional Questions,"
encourages precisely the wrong attitude among those who take part in them.
There is no effort to instill sincerity and intensity of conviction. On the
contrary, the net result is to make the contestants feel that their convictions
have nothing to do with their arguments. I am sorry I did not study
elocution in college; but I am exceedingly glad that I did not take part in the
type of debate in which stress is laid, not upon getting a speaker to think
rightly, but on getting him to talk glibly on the side to which he is assigned,
without regard either to what his convictions are or to what they ought to
be.
I was a reasonably good student in college, standing just within the first
tenth of my class, if I remember rightly; although I am not sure whether this
means the tenth of the whole number that entered or of those that graduated.
I was given a Phi Beta Kappa "key." My chief interests were scientific.
When I entered college, I was devoted to out-of-doors natural history, and
my ambition was to be a scientific man of the Audubon, or Wilson, or
Baird, or Coues type—a man like Hart Merriam, or Frank Chapman, or
Hornaday, to-day. My father had from the earliest days instilled into me the
knowledge that I was to work and to make my own way in the world, and I
had always supposed that this meant that I must enter business. But in my
freshman year (he died when I was a sophomore) he told me that if I wished
to become a scientific man I could do so. He explained that I must be sure
that I really intensely desired to do scientific work, because if I went into it
I must make it a serious career; that he had made enough money to enable
me to take up such a career and do non-remunerative work of value if I
intended to do the very best work there was in me; but that I must not dream
of taking it up as a dilettante. He also gave me a piece of advice that I have
always remembered, namely, that, if I was not going to earn money, I must
even things up by not spending it. As he expressed it, I had to keep the
fraction constant, and if I was not able to increase the numerator, then I
must reduce the denominator. In other words, if I went into a scientific

career, I must definitely abandon all thought of the enjoyment that could
accompany a money-making career, and must find my pleasures elsewhere.
After this conversation I fully intended to make science my life-work. I
did not, for the simple reason that at that time Harvard, and I suppose our
other colleges, utterly ignored the possibilities of the faunal naturalist, the
outdoor naturalist and observer of nature. They treated biology as purely a
science of the laboratory and the microscope, a science whose adherents
were to spend their time in the study of minute forms of marine life, or else
in section-cutting and the study of the tissues of the higher organisms under
the microscope. This attitude was, no doubt, in part due to the fact that in
most colleges then there was a not always intelligent copying of what was
done in the great German universities. The sound revolt against
superficiality of study had been carried to an extreme; thoroughness in
minutiae as the only end of study had been erected into a fetish. There was a
total failure to understand the great variety of kinds of work that could be
done by naturalists, including what could be done by outdoor naturalists—
the kind of work which Hart Merriam and his assistants in the Biological
Survey have carried to such a high degree of perfection as regards North
American mammals. In the entirely proper desire to be thorough and to
avoid slipshod methods, the tendency was to treat as not serious, as
unscientific, any kind of work that was not carried on with laborious
minuteness in the laboratory. My taste was specialized in a totally different
direction, and I had no more desire or ability to be a microscopist and
section-cutter than to be a mathematician. Accordingly I abandoned all
thought of becoming a scientist. Doubtless this meant that I really did not
have the intense devotion to science which I thought I had; for, if I had
possessed such devotion, I would have carved out a career for myself
somehow without regard to discouragements.
As regards political economy, I was of course while in college taught the
laissez-faire doctrines—one of them being free trade—then accepted as
canonical. Most American boys of my age were taught both by their
surroundings and by their studies certain principles which were very
valuable from the standpoint of National interest, and certain others which
were very much the reverse. The political economists were not especially to
blame for this; it was the general attitude of the writers who wrote for us of
that generation. Take my beloved Our Young Folks, the magazine of which I
have already spoken, and which taught me much more than any of my text-

books. Everything in this magazine instilled the individual virtues, and the
necessity of character as the chief factor in any man's success—a teaching
in which I now believe as sincerely as ever, for all the laws that the wit of
man can devise will never make a man a worthy citizen unless he has
within himself the right stuff, unless he has self-reliance, energy, courage,
the power of insisting on his own rights and the sympathy that makes him
regardful of the rights of others. All this individual morality I was taught by
the books I read at home and the books I studied at Harvard. But there was
almost no teaching of the need for collective action, and of the fact that in
addition to, not as a substitute for, individual responsibility, there is a
collective responsibility. Books such as Herbert Croly's "Promise of
American Life" and Walter E. Weyl's "New Democracy" would generally at
that time have been treated either as unintelligible or else as pure heresy.
The teaching which I received was genuinely democratic in one way. It
was not so democratic in another. I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued
with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of himself.
But I had also, consciously or unconsciously, been taught that socially and
industrially pretty much the whole duty of the man lay in thus making the
best of himself; that he should be honest in his dealings with others and
charitable in the old-fashioned way to the unfortunate; but that it was no
part of his business to join with others in trying to make things better for the
many by curbing the abnormal and excessive development of individualism
in a few. Now I do not mean that this training was by any means all bad. On
the contrary, the insistence upon individual responsibility was, and is, and
always will be, a prime necessity. Teaching of the kind I absorbed from both
my text-books and my surroundings is a healthy anti-scorbutic to the
sentimentality which by complacently excusing the individual for all his
shortcomings would finally hopelessly weaken the spring of moral purpose.
It also keeps alive that virile vigor for the lack of which in the average
individual no possible perfection of law or of community action can ever
atone. But such teaching, if not corrected by other teaching, means
acquiescence in a riot of lawless business individualism which would be
quite as destructive to real civilization as the lawless military individualism
of the Dark Ages. I left college and entered the big world owing more than I
can express to the training I had received, especially in my own home; but
with much else also to learn if I were to become really fitted to do my part

in the work that lay ahead for the generation of Americans to which I
belonged.

CHAPTER II
THE VIGOR OF LIFE

Looking back, a man really has a more objective feeling about himself as
a child than he has about his father or mother. He feels as if that child were
not the present he, individually, but an ancestor; just as much an ancestor as
either of his parents. The saying that the child is the father to the man may
be taken in a sense almost the reverse of that usually given to it. The child is
father to the man in the sense that his individuality is separate from the
individuality of the grown-up into which he turns. This is perhaps one
reason why a man can speak of his childhood and early youth with a sense
of detachment.
Having been a sickly boy, with no natural bodily prowess, and having
lived much at home, I was at first quite unable to hold my own when
thrown into contact with other boys of rougher antecedents. I was nervous
and timid. Yet from reading of the people I admired—ranging from the
soldiers of Valley Forge, and Morgan's riflemen, to the heroes of my
favorite stories—and from hearing of the feats performed by my Southern
forefathers and kinsfolk, and from knowing my father, I felt a great
admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the
world, and I had a great desire to be like them. Until I was nearly fourteen I
let this desire take no more definite shape than day-dreams. Then an
incident happened that did me real good. Having an attack of asthma, I was
sent off by myself to Moosehead Lake. On the stage-coach ride thither I
encountered a couple of other boys who were about my own age, but very
much more competent and also much more mischievous. I have no doubt
they were good-hearted boys, but they were boys! They found that I was a
foreordained and predestined victim, and industriously proceeded to make
life miserable for me. The worst feature was that when I finally tried to
fight them I discovered that either one singly could not only handle me with
easy contempt, but handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet to prevent
my doing any damage whatever in return.

The experience taught me what probably no amount of good advice could
have taught me. I made up my mind that I must try to learn so that I would
not again be put in such a helpless position; and having become quickly and
bitterly conscious that I did not have the natural prowess to hold my own, I
decided that I would try to supply its place by training. Accordingly, with
my father's hearty approval, I started to learn to box. I was a painfully slow
and awkward pupil, and certainly worked two or three years before I made
any perceptible improvement whatever. My first boxing-master was John
Long, an ex-prize-fighter. I can see his rooms now, with colored pictures of
the fights between Tom Hyer and Yankee Sullivan, and Heenan and Sayers,
and other great events in the annals of the squared circle. On one occasion,
to excite interest among his patrons, he held a series of "championship"
matches for the different weights, the prizes being, at least in my own class,
pewter mugs of a value, I should suppose, approximating fifty cents.
Neither he nor I had any idea that I could do anything, but I was entered in
the lightweight contest, in which it happened that I was pitted in succession
against a couple of reedy striplings who were even worse than I was.
Equally to their surprise and to my own, and to John Long's, I won, and the
pewter mug became one of my most prized possessions. I kept it, and
alluded to it, and I fear bragged about it, for a number of years, and I only
wish I knew where it was now. Years later I read an account of a little man
who once in a fifth-rate handicap race won a worthless pewter medal and
joyed in it ever after. Well, as soon as I read that story I felt that that little
man and I were brothers.
This was, as far as I remember, the only one of my exceedingly rare
athletic triumphs which would be worth relating. I did a good deal of
boxing and wrestling in Harvard, but never attained to the first rank in
either, even at my own weight. Once, in the big contests in the Gym, I got
either into the finals or semi-finals, I forget which; but aside from this the
chief part I played was to act as trial horse for some friend or classmate who
did have a chance of distinguishing himself in the championship contests.
I was fond of horseback-riding, but I took to it slowly and with difficulty,
exactly as with boxing. It was a long time before I became even a
respectable rider, and I never got much higher. I mean by this that I never
became a first-flight man in the hunting field, and never even approached
the bronco-busting class in the West. Any man, if he chooses, can gradually
school himself to the requisite nerve, and gradually learn the requisite seat

and hands, that will enable him to do respectably across country, or to
perform the average work on a ranch. Of my ranch experiences I shall
speak later. At intervals after leaving college I hunted on Long Island with
the Meadowbrook hounds. Almost the only experience I ever had in this
connection that was of any interest was on one occasion when I broke my
arm. My purse did not permit me to own expensive horses. On this occasion
I was riding an animal, a buggy horse originally, which its owner sold
because now and then it insisted on thoughtfully lying down when in
harness. It never did this under the saddle; and when he turned it out to
grass it would solemnly hop over the fence and get somewhere where it did
not belong. The last trait was what converted it into a hunter. It was a
natural jumper, although without any speed. On the hunt in question I got
along very well until the pace winded my ex-buggy horse, and it turned a
somersault over a fence. When I got on it after the fall I found I could not
use my left arm. I supposed it was merely a strain. The buggy horse was a
sedate animal which I rode with a snaffle. So we pounded along at the tail
of the hunt, and I did not appreciate that my arm was broken for three or
four fences. Then we came to a big drop, and the jar made the bones slip
past one another so as to throw the hand out of position. It did not hurt me
at all, and as the horse was as easy to sit as a rocking-chair, I got in at the
death.
I think August Belmont was master of the hunt when the above incident
occurred. I know he was master on another occasion on which I met with a
mild adventure. On one of the hunts when I was out a man was thrown,
dragged by one stirrup, and killed. In consequence I bought a pair of safety
stirrups, which I used the next time I went out. Within five minutes after the
run began I found that the stirrups were so very "safe" that they would not
stay in at all. First one went off at one jump, and then the other at another
jump—with a fall for me on each occasion. I hated to give up the fun so
early, and accordingly finished the run without any stirrups. My horse never
went as fast as on that run. Doubtless a first-class horseman can ride as well
without stirrups as with them. But I was not a first-class horseman. When
anything unexpected happened, I was apt to clasp the solemn buggy horse
firmly with my spurred heels, and the result was that he laid himself out to
do his best in the way of galloping. He speedily found that, thanks to the
snaffle bit, I could not pull him in, so when we came to a down grade he
would usually put on steam. Then if there was a fence at the bottom and he

checked at all, I was apt to shoot forward, and in such event we went over
the fence in a way that reminded me of Leech's picture, in Punch, of Mr.
Tom Noddy and his mare jumping a fence in the following order: Mr. Tom
Noddy, I; his mare, II. However, I got in at the death this time also.
I was fond of walking and climbing. As a lad I used to go to the north
woods, in Maine, both in fall and winter. There I made life friends of two
men, Will Dow and Bill Sewall: I canoed with them, and tramped through
the woods with them, visiting the winter logging camps on snow-shoes.
Afterward they were with me in the West. Will Dow is dead. Bill Sewall
was collector of customs under me, on the Aroostook border. Except when
hunting I never did any mountaineering save for a couple of conventional
trips up the Matterhorn and the Jungfrau on one occasion when I was in
Switzerland.
I never did much with the shotgun, but I practiced a good deal with the
rifle. I had a rifle-range at Sagamore Hill, where I often took friends to
shoot. Once or twice when I was visited by parties of released Boer
prisoners, after the close of the South African War, they and I held shooting
matches together. The best man with both pistol and rifle who ever shot
there was Stewart Edward White. Among the many other good men was a
stanch friend, Baron Speck von Sternberg, afterwards German Ambassador
at Washington during my Presidency. He was a capital shot, rider, and
walker, a devoted and most efficient servant of Germany, who had fought
with distinction in the Franco-German War when barely more than a boy;
he was the hero of the story of "the pig dog" in Archibald Forbes's volume
of reminiscences. It was he who first talked over with me the raising of a
regiment of horse riflemen from among the ranchmen and cowboys of the
plains. When Ambassador, the poor, gallant, tender-hearted fellow was
dying of a slow and painful disease, so that he could not play with the rest
of us, but the agony of his mortal illness never in the slightest degree
interfered with his work. Among the other men who shot and rode and
walked with me was Cecil Spring-Rice, who has just been appointed British
Ambassador to the United States. He was my groomsman, my best man,
when I was married—at St. George's, Hanover Square, which made me feel
as if I were living in one of Thackeray's novels.
My own experience as regards marksmanship was much the same as my
experience as regards horsemanship. There are men whose eye and hand are

so quick and so sure that they achieve a perfection of marksmanship to
which no practice will enable ordinary men to attain. There are other men
who cannot learn to shoot with any accuracy at all. In between come the
mass of men of ordinary abilities who, if they choose resolutely to practice,
can by sheer industry and judgment make themselves fair rifle shots. The
men who show this requisite industry and judgment can without special
difficulty raise themselves to the second class of respectable rifle shots; and
it is to this class that I belong. But to have reached this point of
marksmanship with the rifle at a target by no means implies ability to hit
game in the field, especially dangerous game. All kinds of other qualities,
moral and physical, enter into being a good hunter, and especially a good
hunter after dangerous game, just as all kinds of other qualities in addition
to skill with the rifle enter into being a good soldier. With dangerous game,
after a fair degree of efficiency with the rifle has been attained, the prime
requisites are cool judgment and that kind of nerve which consists in
avoiding being rattled. Any beginner is apt to have "buck fever," and
therefore no beginner should go at dangerous game.
Buck fever means a state of intense nervous excitement which may be
entirely divorced from timidity. It may affect a man the first time he has to
speak to a large audience just as it affects him the first time he sees a buck
or goes into battle. What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control,
cool-headedness. This he can get only by actual practice. He must, by
custom and repeated exercise of self-mastery, get his nerves thoroughly
under control. This is largely a matter of habit, in the sense of repeated
effort and repeated exercise of will power. If the man has the right stuff in
him, his will grows stronger and stronger with each exercise of it—and if he
has not the right stuff in him he had better keep clear of dangerous game
hunting, or indeed of any other form of sport or work in which there is
bodily peril.
After he has achieved the ability to exercise wariness and judgment and
the control over his nerves which will make him shoot as well at the game
as at a target, he can begin his essays at dangerous game hunting, and he
will then find that it does not demand such abnormal prowess as the
outsider is apt to imagine. A man who can hit a soda-water bottle at the
distance of a few yards can brain a lion or a bear or an elephant at that
distance, and if he cannot brain it when it charges he can at least bring it to
a standstill. All he has to do is to shoot as accurately as he would at a soda-

water bottle; and to do this requires nerve, at least as much as it does
physical address. Having reached this point, the hunter must not imagine
that he is warranted in taking desperate chances. There are degrees in
proficiency; and what is a warrantable and legitimate risk for a man to take
when he has reached a certain grade of efficiency may be a foolish risk for
him to take before he has reached that grade. A man who has reached the
degree of proficiency indicated above is quite warranted in walking in at a
lion at bay, in an open plain, to, say, within a hundred yards. If the lion has
not charged, the man ought at that distance to knock him over and prevent
his charging; and if the lion is already charging, the man ought at that
distance to be able to stop him. But the amount of prowess which warrants a
man in relying on his ability to perform this feat does not by any means
justify him in thinking that, for instance, he can crawl after a wounded lion
into thick cover. I have known men of indifferent prowess to perform this
latter feat successfully, but at least as often they have been unsuccessful,
and in these cases the result has been unpleasant. The man who habitually
follows wounded lions into thick cover must be a hunter of the highest skill,
or he can count with certainty on an ultimate mauling.
The first two or three bucks I ever saw gave me buck fever badly, but
after I had gained experience with ordinary game I never had buck fever at
all with dangerous game. In my case the overcoming of buck fever was the
result of conscious effort and a deliberate determination to overcome it.
More happily constituted men never have to make this determined effort at
all—which may perhaps show that the average man can profit more from
my experiences than he can from those of the exceptional man.
I have shot only five kinds of animals which can fairly be called
dangerous game—that is, the lion, elephant, rhinoceros, and buffalo in
Africa, and the big grizzly bear a quarter of a century ago in the Rockies.
Taking into account not only my own personal experience, but the
experiences of many veteran hunters, I regard all the four African animals,
but especially the lion, elephant, and buffalo, as much more dangerous than
the grizzly. As it happened, however, the only narrow escape I personally
ever had was from a grizzly, and in Africa the animal killed closest to me as
it was charging was a rhinoceros—all of which goes to show that a man
must not generalize too broadly from his own personal experiences. On the
whole, I think the lion the most dangerous of all these five animals; that is, I
think that, if fairly hunted, there is a larger percentage of hunters killed or

mauled for a given number of lions killed than for a given number of any
one of the other animals. Yet I personally had no difficulties with lions. I
twice killed lions which were at bay and just starting to charge, and I killed
a heavy-maned male while it was in full charge. But in each instance I had
plenty of leeway, the animal being so far off that even if my bullet had not
been fatal I should have had time for a couple more shots. The African
buffalo is undoubtedly a dangerous beast, but it happened that the few that I
shot did not charge. A bull elephant, a vicious "rogue," which had been
killing people in the native villages, did charge before being shot at. My son
Kermit and I stopped it at forty yards. Another bull elephant, also
unwounded, which charged, nearly got me, as I had just fired both
cartridges from my heavy double-barreled rifle in killing the bull I was after
—the first wild elephant I had ever seen. The second bull came through the
thick brush to my left like a steam plow through a light snowdrift,
everything snapping before his rush, and was so near that he could have hit
me with his trunk. I slipped past him behind a tree. People have asked me
how I felt on this occasion. My answer has always been that I suppose I felt
as most men of like experience feel on such occasions. At such a moment a
hunter is so very busy that he has no time to get frightened. He wants to get
in his cartridges and try another shot.
Rhinoceros are truculent, blustering beasts, much the most stupid of all
the dangerous game I know. Generally their attitude is one of mere stupidity
and bluff. But on occasions they do charge wickedly, both when wounded
and when entirely unprovoked. The first I ever shot I mortally wounded at a
few rods' distance, and it charged with the utmost determination, whereat I
and my companion both fired, and more by good luck than anything else
brought it to the ground just thirteen paces from where we stood. Another
rhinoceros may or may not have been meaning to charge me; I have never
been certain which. It heard us and came at us through rather thick brush,
snorting and tossing its head. I am by no means sure that it had fixedly
hostile intentions, and indeed with my present experience I think it likely
that if I had not fired it would have flinched at the last moment and either
retreated or gone by me. But I am not a rhinoceros mind reader, and its
actions were such as to warrant my regarding it as a suspicious character. I
stopped it with a couple of bullets, and then followed it up and killed it. The
skins of all these animals which I thus killed are in the National Museum at
Washington.

But, as I said above, the only narrow escape I met with was not from one
of these dangerous African animals, but from a grizzly bear. It was about
twenty-four years ago. I had wounded the bear just at sunset, in a wood of
lodge-pole pines, and, following him, I wounded him again, as he stood on
the other side of a thicket. He then charged through the brush, coming with
such speed and with such an irregular gait that, try as I would, I was not
able to get the sight of my rifle on the brain-pan, though I hit him very hard
with both the remaining barrels of my magazine Winchester. It was in the
days of black powder, and the smoke hung. After my last shot, the first
thing I saw was the bear's left paw as he struck at me, so close that I made a
quick movement to one side. He was, however, practically already dead,
and after another jump, and while in the very act of trying to turn to come at
me, he collapsed like a shot rabbit.
By the way, I had a most exasperating time trying to bring in his skin. I
was alone, traveling on foot with one very docile little mountain mare for a
pack pony. The little mare cared nothing for bears or anything else, so there
was no difficulty in packing her. But the man without experience can hardly
realize the work it was to get that bearskin off the carcass and then to pack
it, wet, slippery, and heavy, so that it would ride evenly on the pony. I was
at the time fairly well versed in packing with a "diamond hitch," the standby
of Rocky Mountain packers in my day; but the diamond hitch is a two-man
job; and even working with a "squaw hitch," I got into endless trouble with
that wet and slippery bearskin. With infinite labor I would get the skin on
the pony and run the ropes over it until to all seeming it was fastened
properly. Then off we would start, and after going about a hundred yards I
would notice the hide beginning to bulge through between two ropes. I
would shift one of them, and then the hide would bulge somewhere else. I
would shift the rope again; and still the hide would flow slowly out as if it
was lava. The first thing I knew it would come down on one side, and the
little mare, with her feet planted resolutely, would wait for me to perform
my part by getting that bearskin back in its proper place on the McClellan
saddle which I was using as a makeshift pack saddle. The feat of killing the
bear the previous day sank into nothing compared with the feat of making
the bearskin ride properly as a pack on the following three days.
The reason why I was alone in the mountains on this occasion was
because, for the only time in all my experience, I had a difficulty with my
guide. He was a crippled old mountain man, with a profound contempt for

"tenderfeet," a contempt that in my case was accentuated by the fact that I
wore spectacles—which at that day and in that region were usually held to
indicate a defective moral character in the wearer. He had never previously
acted as guide, or, as he expressed it, "trundled a tenderfoot," and though a
good hunter, who showed me much game, our experience together was not
happy. He was very rheumatic and liked to lie abed late, so that I usually
had to get breakfast, and, in fact, do most of the work around camp. Finally
one day he declined to go out with me, saying that he had a pain. When,
that afternoon, I got back to camp, I speedily found what the "pain" was.
We were traveling very light indeed, I having practically nothing but my
buffalo sleeping-bag, my wash kit, and a pair of socks. I had also taken a
flask of whisky for emergencies—although, as I found that the emergencies
never arose and that tea was better than whisky when a man was cold or
done out, I abandoned the practice of taking whisky on hunting trips twenty
years ago. When I got back to camp the old fellow was sitting on a tree-
trunk, very erect, with his rifle across his knees, and in response to my nod
of greeting he merely leered at me. I leaned my rifle against a tree, walked
over to where my bed was lying, and, happening to rummage in it for
something, I found the whisky flask was empty. I turned on him at once and
accused him of having drunk it, to which he merely responded by asking
what I was going to do about it. There did not seem much to do, so I said
that we would part company—we were only four or five days from a
settlement—and I would go in alone, taking one of the horses. He
responded by cocking his rifle and saying that I could go alone and be
damned to me, but I could not take any horse. I answered "all right," that if
I could not I could not, and began to move around to get some flour and salt
pork. He was misled by my quietness and by the fact that I had not in any
way resented either his actions or his language during the days we had been
together, and did not watch me as closely as he ought to have done. He was
sitting with the cocked rifle across his knees, the muzzle to the left. My rifle
was leaning against a tree near the cooking things to his right. Managing to
get near it, I whipped it up and threw the bead on him, calling, "Hands up!"
He of course put up his hands, and then said, "Oh, come, I was only
joking"; to which I answered, "Well, I am not. Now straighten your legs and
let your rifle go to the ground." He remonstrated, saying the rifle would go
off, and I told him to let it go off. However, he straightened his legs in such
fashion that it came to the ground without a jar. I then made him move

back, and picked up the rifle. By this time he was quite sober, and really did
not seem angry, looking at me quizzically. He told me that if I would give
him back his rifle, he would call it quits and we could go on together. I did
not think it best to trust him, so I told him that our hunt was pretty well
through, anyway, and that I would go home. There was a blasted pine on the
trail, in plain view of the camp, about a mile off, and I told him that I would
leave his rifle at that blasted pine if I could see him in camp, but that he
must not come after me, for if he did I should assume that it was with
hostile intent and would shoot. He said he had no intention of coming after
me; and as he was very much crippled with rheumatism, I did not believe he
would do so.
Accordingly I took the little mare, with nothing but some flour, bacon,
and tea, and my bed-roll, and started off. At the blasted pine I looked round,
and as I could see him in camp, I left his rifle there. I then traveled till dark,
and that night, for the only time in my experience, I used in camping a trick
of the old-time trappers in the Indian days. I did not believe I would be
followed, but still it was not possible to be sure, so, after getting supper,
while my pony fed round, I left the fire burning, repacked the mare and
pushed ahead until it literally became so dark that I could not see. Then I
picketed the mare, slept where I was without a fire until the first streak of
dawn, and then pushed on for a couple of hours before halting to take
breakfast and to let the little mare have a good feed. No plainsman needs to
be told that a man should not lie near a fire if there is danger of an enemy
creeping up on him, and that above all a man should not put himself in a
position where he can be ambushed at dawn. On this second day I lost the
trail, and toward nightfall gave up the effort to find it, camped where I was,
and went out to shoot a grouse for supper. It was while hunting in vain for a
grouse that I came on the bear and killed it as above described.
When I reached the settlement and went into the store, the storekeeper
identified me by remarking: "You're the tenderfoot that old Hank was
trundling, ain't you?" I admitted that I was. A good many years later, after I
had been elected Vice-President, I went on a cougar hunt in northwestern
Colorado with Johnny Goff, a famous hunter and mountain man. It was
midwinter. I was rather proud of my achievements, and pictured myself as
being known to the few settlers in the neighborhood as a successful
mountain-lion hunter. I could not help grinning when I found out that they

did not even allude to me as the Vice-President-elect, let alone as a hunter,
but merely as "Johnny Goff's tourist."
Of course during the years when I was most busy at serious work I could
do no hunting, and even my riding was of a decorous kind. But a man
whose business is sedentary should get some kind of exercise if he wishes
to keep himself in as good physical trim as his brethren who do manual
labor. When I worked on a ranch, I needed no form of exercise except my
work, but when I worked in an office the case was different. A couple of
summers I played polo with some of my neighbors. I shall always believe
we played polo in just the right way for middle-aged men with stables of
the general utility order. Of course it was polo which was chiefly of interest
to ourselves, the only onlookers being the members of our faithful families.
My two ponies were the only occupants of my stable except a cart-horse.
My wife and I rode and drove them, and they were used for household
errands and for the children, and for two afternoons a week they served me
as polo ponies. Polo is a good game, infinitely better for vigorous men than
tennis or golf or anything of that kind. There is all the fun of football, with
the horse thrown in; and if only people would be willing to play it in simple
fashion it would be almost as much within their reach as golf. But at Oyster
Bay our great and permanent amusements were rowing and sailing; I do not
care for the latter, and am fond of the former. I suppose it sounds archaic,
but I cannot help thinking that the people with motor boats miss a great
deal. If they would only keep to rowboats or canoes, and use oar or paddle
themselves, they would get infinitely more benefit than by having their
work done for them by gasoline. But I rarely took exercise merely as
exercise. Primarily I took it because I liked it. Play should never be allowed
to interfere with work; and a life devoted merely to play is, of all forms of
existence, the most dismal. But the joy of life is a very good thing, and
while work is the essential in it, play also has its place.
When obliged to live in cities, I for a long time found that boxing and
wrestling enabled me to get a good deal of exercise in condensed and
attractive form. I was reluctantly obliged to abandon both as I grew older. I
dropped the wrestling earliest. When I became Governor, the champion
middleweight wrestler of America happened to be in Albany, and I got him
to come round three or four afternoons a week. Incidentally I may mention
that his presence caused me a difficulty with the Comptroller, who refused
to audit a bill I put in for a wrestling-mat, explaining that I could have a

billiard-table, billiards being recognized as a proper Gubernatorial
amusement, but that a wrestling-mat symbolized something unusual and
unheard of and could not be permitted. The middleweight champion was of
course so much better than I was that he could not only take care of himself
but of me too and see that I was not hurt—for wrestling is a much more
violent amusement than boxing. But after a couple of months he had to go
away, and he left as a substitute a good-humored, stalwart professional
oarsman. The oarsman turned out to know very little about wrestling. He
could not even take care of himself, not to speak of me. By the end of our
second afternoon one of his long ribs had been caved in and two of my
short ribs badly damaged, and my left shoulder-blade so nearly shoved out
of place that it creaked. He was nearly as pleased as I was when I told him I
thought we would "vote the war a failure" and abandon wrestling. After that
I took up boxing again. While President I used to box with some of the
aides, as well as play single-stick with General Wood. After a few years I
had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling, for in one bout a young captain
of artillery cross-countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed the little
blood-vessels. Fortunately it was my left eye, but the sight has been dim
ever since, and if it had been the right eye I should have been entirely
unable to shoot. Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had
become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing. I then took up jiu-
jitsu for a year or two.
When I was in the Legislature and was working very hard, with little
chance of getting out of doors, all the exercise I got was boxing and
wrestling. A young fellow turned up who was a second-rate prize-fighter,
the son of one of my old boxing teachers. For several weeks I had him
come round to my rooms in the morning to put on the gloves with me for
half an hour. Then he suddenly stopped, and some days later I received a
letter of woe from him from the jail. I found that he was by profession a
burglar, and merely followed boxing as the amusement of his lighter
moments, or when business was slack.
Naturally, being fond of boxing, I grew to know a good many prize-
fighters, and to most of those I knew I grew genuinely attached. I have
never been able to sympathize with the outcry against prize-fighters. The
only objection I have to the prize ring is the crookedness that has attended
its commercial development. Outside of this I regard boxing, whether
professional or amateur, as a first-class sport, and I do not regard it as

brutalizing. Of course matches can be conducted under conditions that
make them brutalizing. But this is true of football games and of most other
rough and vigorous sports. Most certainly prize-fighting is not half as
brutalizing or demoralizing as many forms of big business and of the legal
work carried on in connection with big business. Powerful, vigorous men of
strong animal development must have some way in which their animal
spirits can find vent. When I was Police Commissioner I found (and Jacob
Riis will back me up in this) that the establishment of a boxing club in a
tough neighborhood always tended to do away with knifing and gun-
fighting among the young fellows who would otherwise have been in
murderous gangs. Many of these young fellows were not naturally criminals
at all, but they had to have some outlet for their activities. In the same way I
have always regarded boxing as a first-class sport to encourage in the
Young Men's Christian Association. I do not like to see young Christians
with shoulders that slope like a champagne bottle. Of course boxing should
be encouraged in the army and navy. I was first drawn to two naval
chaplains, Fathers Chidwick and Rainey, by finding that each of them had
bought half a dozen sets of boxing-gloves and encouraged their crews in
boxing.
When I was Police Commissioner, I heartily approved the effort to get
boxing clubs started in New York on a clean basis. Later I was reluctantly
obliged to come to the conclusion that the prize ring had become hopelessly
debased and demoralized, and as Governor I aided in the passage of and
signed the bill putting a stop to professional boxing for money. This was
because some of the prize-fighters themselves were crooked, while the
crowd of hangers-on who attended and made up and profited by the
matches had placed the whole business on a basis of commercialism and
brutality that was intolerable. I shall always maintain that boxing contests
themselves make good, healthy sport. It is idle to compare them with bull-
fighting; the torture and death of the wretched horses in bull-fighting is
enough of itself to blast the sport, no matter how great the skill and prowess
shown by the bull-fighters. Any sport in which the death and torture of
animals is made to furnish pleasure to the spectators is debasing. There
should always be the opportunity provided in a glove fight or bare-fist fight
to stop it when one competitor is hopelessly outclassed or too badly
hammered. But the men who take part in these fights are hard as nails, and
it is not worth while to feel sentimental about their receiving punishment

which as a matter of fact they do not mind. Of course the men who look on
ought to be able to stand up with the gloves, or without them, themselves; I
have scant use for the type of sportsmanship which consists merely in
looking on at the feats of some one else.
Some as good citizens as I know are or were prize-fighters. Take Mike
Donovan, of New York. He and his family represent a type of American
citizenship of which we have a right to be proud. Mike is a devoted
temperance man, and can be relied upon for every movement in the interest
of good citizenship. I was first intimately thrown with him when I was
Police Commissioner. One evening he and I—both in dress suits—attended
a temperance meeting of Catholic societies. It culminated in a lively set-to
between myself and a Tammany Senator who was a very good fellow, but
whose ideas of temperance differed radically from mine, and, as the event
proved, from those of the majority of the meeting. Mike evidently regarded
himself as my backer—he was sitting on the platform beside me—and I
think felt as pleased and interested as if the set-to had been physical instead
of merely verbal. Afterward I grew to know him well both while I was
Governor and while I was President, and many a time he came on and
boxed with me.
Battling Nelson was another stanch friend, and he and I think alike on
most questions of political and industrial life; although he once expressed to
me some commiseration because, as President, I did not get anything like
the money return for my services that he aggregated during the same term
of years in the ring. Bob Fitzsimmons was another good friend of mine. He
has never forgotten his early skill as a blacksmith, and among the things
that I value and always keep in use is a penholder made by Bob out of a
horseshoe, with an inscription saying that it is "Made for and presented to
President Theodore Roosevelt by his friend and admirer, Robert
Fitzsimmons." I have for a long time had the friendship of John L. Sullivan,
than whom in his prime no better man ever stepped into the ring. He is now
a Massachusetts farmer. John used occasionally to visit me at the White
House, his advent always causing a distinct flutter among the waiting
Senators and Congressmen. When I went to Africa he presented me with a
gold-mounted rabbit's foot for luck. I carried it through my African trip; and
I certainly had good luck.

On one occasion one of my prize-fighting friends called on me at the
White House on business. He explained that he wished to see me alone, sat
down opposite me, and put a very expensive cigar on the desk, saying,
"Have a cigar." I thanked him and said I did not smoke, to which he
responded, "Put it in your pocket." He then added, "Take another; put both
in your pocket." This I accordingly did. Having thus shown at the outset the
necessary formal courtesy, my visitor, an old and valued friend, proceeded
to explain that a nephew of his had enlisted in the Marine Corps, but had
been absent without leave, and was threatened with dishonorable discharge
on the ground of desertion. My visitor, a good citizen and a patriotic
American, was stung to the quick at the thought of such an incident
occurring in his family, and he explained to me that it must not occur, that
there must not be the disgrace to the family, although he would be delighted
to have the offender "handled rough" to teach him a needed lesson; he
added that he wished I would take him and handle him myself, for he knew
that I would see that he "got all that was coming to him." Then a look of
pathos came into his eyes, and he explained: "That boy I just cannot
understand. He was my sister's favorite son, and I always took a special
interest in him myself. I did my best to bring him up the way he ought to
go. But there was just nothing to be done with him. His tastes were
naturally low. He took to music!" What form this debasing taste for music
assumed I did not inquire; and I was able to grant my friend's wish.
While in the White House I always tried to get a couple of hours' exercise
in the afternoons—sometimes tennis, more often riding, or else a rough
cross-country walk, perhaps down Rock Creek, which was then as wild as a
stream in the White Mountains, or on the Virginia side along the Potomac.
My companions at tennis or on these rides and walks we gradually grew to
style the Tennis Cabinet; and then we extended the term to take in many of
my old-time Western friends such as Ben Daniels, Seth Bullock, Luther
Kelly, and others who had taken part with me in more serious outdoor
adventures than walking and riding for pleasure. Most of the men who were
oftenest with me on these trips—men like Major-General Leonard Wood; or
Major-General Thomas Henry Barry; or Presley Marion Rixey, Surgeon-
General of the Navy; or Robert Bacon, who was afterwards Secretary of
State; or James Garfield, who was Secretary of the Interior; or Gifford
Pinchot, who was chief of the Forest Service—were better men physically
than I was; but I could ride and walk well enough for us all thoroughly to

enjoy it. Often, especially in the winters and early springs, we would
arrange for a point to point walk, not turning aside for anything—for
instance, swimming Rock Creek or even the Potomac if it came in our way.
Of course under such circumstances we had to arrange that our return to
Washington should be when it was dark, so that our appearance might
scandalize no one. On several occasions we thus swam Rock Creek in the
early spring when the ice was floating thick upon it. If we swam the
Potomac, we usually took off our clothes. I remember one such occasion
when the French Ambassador, Jusserand, who was a member of the Tennis
Cabinet, was along, and, just as we were about to get in to swim, somebody
said, "Mr. Ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, you haven't taken off your
gloves," to which he promptly responded, "I think I will leave them on; we
might meet ladies!"
We liked Rock Creek for these walks because we could do so much
scrambling and climbing along the cliffs; there was almost as much
climbing when we walked down the Potomac to Washington from the
Virginia end of the Chain Bridge. I would occasionally take some big-game
friend from abroad, Selous or St. George Littledale or Captain Radclyffe or
Paul Niedicke, on these walks. Once I invited an entire class of officers who
were attending lectures at the War College to come on one of these walks; I
chose a route which gave us the hardest climbing along the rocks and the
deepest crossings of the creek; and my army friends enjoyed it hugely—
being the right sort, to a man.
On March 1, 1909, three days before leaving the Presidency, various
members of the Tennis Cabinet lunched with me at the White House.
"Tennis Cabinet" was an elastic term, and of course many who ought to
have been at the lunch were, for one reason or another, away from
Washington; but, to make up for this, a goodly number of out-of-town
honorary members, so to speak, were present—for instance, Seth Bullock;
Luther Kelly, better known as Yellowstone Kelly in the days when he was
an army scout against the Sioux; and Abernathy, the wolf-hunter. At the end
of the lunch Seth Bullock suddenly reached forward, swept aside a mass of
flowers which made a centerpiece on the table, and revealed a bronze
cougar by Proctor, which was a parting gift to me. The lunch party and the
cougar were then photographed on the lawn.

Some of the younger officers who were my constant companions on
these walks and rides pointed out to me the condition of utter physical
worthlessness into which certain of the elder ones had permitted themselves
to lapse, and the very bad effect this would certainly have if ever the army
were called into service. I then looked into the matter for myself, and was
really shocked at what I found. Many of the older officers were so unfit
physically that their condition would have excited laughter, had it not been
so serious, to think that they belonged to the military arm of the
Government. A cavalry colonel proved unable to keep his horse at a smart
trot for even half a mile, when I visited his post; a Major-General proved
afraid even to let his horse canter, when he went on a ride with us; and
certain otherwise good men proved as unable to walk as if they had been
sedentary brokers. I consulted with men like Major-Generals Wood and
Bell, who were themselves of fine physique, with bodies fit to meet any
demand. It was late in my administration; and we deemed it best only to
make a beginning—experience teaches the most inveterate reformer how
hard it is to get a totally non-military nation to accept seriously any military
improvement. Accordingly, I merely issued directions that each officer
should prove his ability to walk fifty miles, or ride one hundred, in three
days.
This is, of course, a test which many a healthy middle-aged woman
would be able to meet. But a large portion of the press adopted the view that
it was a bit of capricious tyranny on my part; and a considerable number of
elderly officers, with desk rather than field experience, intrigued with their
friends in Congress to have the order annulled. So one day I took a ride of a
little over one hundred miles myself, in company with Surgeon-General
Rixey and two other officers. The Virginia roads were frozen and in ruts,
and in the afternoon and evening there was a storm of snow and sleet; and
when it had been thus experimentally shown, under unfavorable conditions,
how easy it was to do in one day the task for which the army officers were
allowed three days, all open objection ceased. But some bureau chiefs still
did as much underhanded work against the order as they dared, and it was
often difficult to reach them. In the Marine Corps Captain Leonard, who
had lost an arm at Tientsin, with two of his lieutenants did the fifty miles in
one day; for they were vigorous young men, who laughed at the idea of
treating a fifty-mile walk as over-fatiguing. Well, the Navy Department
officials rebuked them, and made them take the walk over again in three

days, on the ground that taking it in one day did not comply with the
regulations! This seems unbelievable; but Leonard assures me it is true. He
did not inform me at the time, being afraid to "get in wrong" with his
permanent superiors. If I had known of the order, short work would have
been made of the bureaucrat who issued it.[*]

[*] One of our best naval officers sent me the following
letter, after the above had appeared:—

"I note in your Autobiography now being published in the
Outlook that you refer to the reasons which led you to
establish a physical test for the Army, and to the action
you took (your 100-mile ride) to prevent the test being
abolished. Doubtless you did not know the following facts:

"1. The first annual navy test of 50 miles in three days was
subsequently reduced to 25 miles in two days in each
quarter.

"2. This was further reduced to 10 miles each month, which
is the present 'test,' and there is danger lest even this
utterly insufficient test be abolished.

"I enclose a copy of a recent letter to the Surgeon General
which will show our present deplorable condition and the
worse condition into which we are slipping back.

"The original test of 50 miles in three days did a very
great deal of good. It decreased by thousands of dollars the
money expended on street car fare, and by a much greater sum
the amount expended over the bar. It eliminated a number of
the wholly unfit; it taught officers to walk; it forced them
to learn the care of their feet and that of their men; and
it improved their general health and was rapidly forming a
taste for physical exercise."

The enclosed letter ran in part as follows:—

"I am returning under separate cover 'The Soldiers' Foot and
the Military Shoe.'

"The book contains knowledge of a practical character that
is valuable for the men who HAVE TO MARCH, WHO HAVE SUFFERED
FROM FOOT TROUBLES, AND WHO MUST AVOID THEM IN ORDER TO
ATTAIN EFFICIENCY.

"The words in capitals express, according to my idea, the
gist of the whole matter as regards military men.

"The army officer whose men break down on test gets a black
eye. The one whose men show efficiency in this respect gets
a bouquet.

"To such men the book is invaluable. There is no danger that
they will neglect it. They will actually learn it, for
exactly the same reasons that our fellows learn the gunnery
instructions—or did learn them before they were withdrawn

and burned.

"B U T, I have not been able to interest a single naval
officer in this fine book. They will look at the pictures
and say it is a good book, but they won't read it. The
marine officers, on the contrary, are very much interested,
because they have to teach their men to care for their feet
and they must know how to care for their own. But the naval
officers feel no such necessity, simply because their men do
not have to demonstrate their efficiency by practice
marches, and they themselves do not have to do a stunt that
will show up their own ignorance and inefficiency in the
matter.

"For example, some time ago I was talking with some chaps
about shoes—the necessity of having them long enough and
wide enough, etc., and one of them said: 'I have no use for
such shoes, as I never walk except when I have to, and any
old shoes do for the 10-mile-a-month stunt,' so there you
are!

"When the first test was ordered, Edmonston (Washington shoe
man) told me that he sold more real walking shoes to naval
officers in three months than he had in the three preceding
years. I know three officers who lost both big-toe nails
after the first test, and another who walked nine miles in
practice with a pair of heavy walking shoes that were too
small and was laid up for three days—could not come to the
office. I know plenty of men who after the first test had to
borrow shoes from larger men until their feet 'went down' to
their normal size.

"This test may have been a bit too strenuous for old hearts
(of men who had never taken any exercise), but it was
excellent as a matter of instruction and training of
handling feet—and in an emergency (such as we soon may have
in Mexico) sound hearts are not much good if the feet won't
stand.

"However, the 25-mile test in two days each quarter answered
the same purpose, for the reason that 12.5 miles will
produce sore feet with bad shoes, and sore feet and lame
muscles even with good shoes, if there has been no practice
marching.

"It was the necessity of doing 12.5 MORE MILES ON THE SECOND
DAY WITH SORE FEET AND LAME MUSCLES that made 'em sit up and
take notice—made 'em practice walking, made 'em avoid
street cars, buy proper shoes, show some curiosity about sox
and the care of the feet in general.

"All this passed out with the introduction of the last test
of 10 miles a month. As one fellow said: 'I can do that in
sneakers'—but he couldn't if the second day involved a
tramp on the sore feet.

"The point is that whereas formerly officers had to practice
walking a bit and give some attention to proper footgear,
now they don't have to, and the natural consequence is that
they don't do it.

"There are plenty of officers who do not walk any more than
is necessary to reach a street car that will carry them from
their residences to their offices. Some who have motors do
not do so much. They take no exercise. They take cocktails
instead and are getting beefy and 'ponchy,' and something
should be done to remedy this state of affairs.

"It would not be necessary if service opinion required
officers so to order their lives that it would be common
knowledge that they were 'hard,' in order to avoid the
danger of being selected out.

"We have no such service opinion, and it is not in process
of formation. On the contrary, it is known that the
'Principal Dignitaries' unanimously advised the Secretary to
abandon all physical tests. He, a civilian, was wise enough
not to take the advice.

"I would like to see a test established that would oblige
officers to take sufficient exercise to pass it without
inconvenience. For the reasons given above, 20 miles in two
days every other month would do the business, while 10 miles
each month does not touch it, simply because nobody has to
walk on 'next day' feet. As for the proposed test of so many
hours 'exercise' a week, the flat foots of the pendulous
belly muscles are delighted. They are looking into the
question of pedometers, and will hang one of these on their
wheezy chests and let it count every shuffling step they
take out of doors.

"If we had an adequate test throughout 20 years, there would
at the end of that time be few if any sacks of blubber at
the upper end of the list; and service opinion against that
sort of thing would be established."

These tests were kept during my administration. They were afterwards
abandoned; not through perversity or viciousness; but through weakness,
and inability to understand the need of preparedness in advance, if the
emergencies of war are to be properly met, when, or if, they arrive.
In no country with an army worth calling such is there a chance for a man
physically unfit to stay in the service. Our countrymen should understand
that every army officer—and every marine officer—ought to be summarily
removed from the service unless he is able to undergo far severer tests than
those which, as a beginning, I imposed. To follow any other course is to put
a premium on slothful incapacity, and to do the gravest wrong to the Nation.
I have mentioned all these experiences, and I could mention scores of
others, because out of them grew my philosophy—perhaps they were in
part caused by my philosophy—of bodily vigor as a method of getting that
vigor of soul without which vigor of the body counts for nothing. The
dweller in cities has less chance than the dweller in the country to keep his

body sound and vigorous. But he can do so, if only he will take the trouble.
Any young lawyer, shopkeeper, or clerk, or shop-assistant can keep himself
in good condition if he tries. Some of the best men who have ever served
under me in the National Guard and in my regiment were former clerks or
floor-walkers. Why, Johnny Hayes, the Marathon victor, and at one time
world champion, one of my valued friends and supporters, was a floor-
walker in Bloomingdale's big department store. Surely with Johnny Hayes
as an example, any young man in a city can hope to make his body all that a
vigorous man's body should be.
I once made a speech to which I gave the title "The Strenuous Life."
Afterwards I published a volume of essays with this for a title. There were
two translations of it which always especially pleased me. One was by a
Japanese officer who knew English well, and who had carried the essay all
through the Manchurian campaign, and later translated it for the benefit of
his countrymen. The other was by an Italian lady, whose brother, an officer
in the Italian army who had died on duty in a foreign land, had also greatly
liked the article and carried it round with him. In translating the title the
lady rendered it in Italian as Vigor di Vita. I thought this translation a great
improvement on the original, and have always wished that I had myself
used "The Vigor of Life" as a heading to indicate what I was trying to
preach, instead of the heading I actually did use.
There are two kinds of success, or rather two kinds of ability displayed in
the achievement of success. There is, first, the success either in big things or
small things which comes to the man who has in him the natural power to
do what no one else can do, and what no amount of training, no
perseverance or will power, will enable any ordinary man to do. This
success, of course, like every other kind of success, may be on a very big
scale or on a small scale. The quality which the man possesses may be that
which enables him to run a hundred yards in nine and three-fifths seconds,
or to play ten separate games of chess at the same time blindfolded, or to
add five columns of figures at once without effort, or to write the "Ode to a
Grecian Urn," or to deliver the Gettysburg speech, or to show the ability of
Frederick at Leuthen or Nelson at Trafalgar. No amount of training of body
or mind would enable any good ordinary man to perform any one of these
feats. Of course the proper performance of each implies much previous
study or training, but in no one of them is success to be attained save by the

altogether exceptional man who has in him the something additional which
the ordinary man does not have.
This is the most striking kind of success, and it can be attained only by
the man who has in him the quality which separates him in kind no less than
in degree from his fellows. But much the commoner type of success in
every walk of life and in every species of effort is that which comes to the
man who differs from his fellows not by the kind of quality which he
possesses but by the degree of development which he has given that quality.
This kind of success is open to a large number of persons, if only they
seriously determine to achieve it. It is the kind of success which is open to
the average man of sound body and fair mind, who has no remarkable
mental or physical attributes, but who gets just as much as possible in the
way of work out of the aptitudes that he does possess. It is the only kind of
success that is open to most of us. Yet some of the greatest successes in
history have been those of this second class—when I call it second class I
am not running it down in the least, I am merely pointing out that it differs
in kind from the first class. To the average man it is probably more useful to
study this second type of success than to study the first. From the study of
the first he can learn inspiration, he can get uplift and lofty enthusiasm.
From the study of the second he can, if he chooses, find out how to win a
similar success himself.
I need hardly say that all the successes I have ever won have been of the
second type. I never won anything without hard labor and the exercise of
my best judgment and careful planning and working long in advance.
Having been a rather sickly and awkward boy, I was as a young man at first
both nervous and distrustful of my own prowess. I had to train myself
painfully and laboriously not merely as regards my body but as regards my
soul and spirit.
When a boy I read a passage in one of Marryat's books which always
impressed me. In this passage the captain of some small British man-of-war
is explaining to the hero how to acquire the quality of fearlessness. He says
that at the outset almost every man is frightened when he goes into action,
but that the course to follow is for the man to keep such a grip on himself
that he can act just as if he was not frightened. After this is kept up long
enough it changes from pretense to reality, and the man does in very fact
become fearless by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness when he does not

feel it. (I am using my own language, not Marryat's.) This was the theory
upon which I went. There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at
first, ranging from grizzly bears to "mean" horses and gun-fighters; but by
acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid. Most men can
have the same experience if they choose. They will first learn to bear
themselves well in trials which they anticipate and which they school
themselves in advance to meet. After a while the habit will grow on them,
and they will behave well in sudden and unexpected emergencies which
come upon them unawares.
It is of course much pleasanter if one is naturally fearless, and I envy and
respect the men who are naturally fearless. But it is a good thing to
remember that the man who does not enjoy this advantage can nevertheless
stand beside the man who does, and can do his duty with the like efficiency,
if he chooses to. Of course he must not let his desire take the form merely
of a day-dream. Let him dream about being a fearless man, and the more he
dreams the better he will be, always provided he does his best to realize the
dream in practice. He can do his part honorably and well provided only he
sets fearlessness before himself as an ideal, schools himself to think of
danger merely as something to be faced and overcome, and regards life
itself as he should regard it, not as something to be thrown away, but as a
pawn to be promptly hazarded whenever the hazard is warranted by the
larger interests of the great game in which we are all engaged.

CHAPTER III
PRACTICAL POLITICS

When I left Harvard, I took up the study of law. If I had been sufficiently
fortunate to come under Professor Thayer, of the Harvard Law School, it
may well be that I would have realized that the lawyer can do a great work
for justice and against legalism.
But, doubtless chiefly through my own fault, some of the teaching of the
law books and of the classroom seemed to me to be against justice. The
caveat emptor side of the law, like the caveat emptor side of business,
seemed to me repellent; it did not make for social fair dealing. The "let the
buyer beware" maxim, when translated into actual practice, whether in law
or business, tends to translate itself further into the seller making his profit
at the expense of the buyer, instead of by a bargain which shall be to the
profit of both. It did not seem to me that the law was framed to discourage
as it should sharp practice, and all other kinds of bargains except those
which are fair and of benefit to both sides. I was young; there was much in
the judgment which I then formed on this matter which I should now revise;
but, then as now, many of the big corporation lawyers, to whom the
ordinary members of the bar then as now looked up, held certain standards
which were difficult to recognize as compatible with the idealism I suppose
every high-minded young man is apt to feel. If I had been obliged to earn
every cent I spent, I should have gone whole-heartedly into the business of
making both ends meet, and should have taken up the law or any other
respectable occupation—for I then held, and now hold, the belief that a
man's first duty is to pull his own weight and to take care of those
dependent upon him; and I then believed, and now believe, that the greatest
privilege and greatest duty for any man is to be happily married, and that no
other form of success or service, for either man or woman, can be wisely
accepted as a substitute or alternative. But it happened that I had been left
enough money by my father not to make it necessary for me to think solely
of earning bread for myself and my family. I had enough to get bread. What
I had to do, if I wanted butter and jam, was to provide the butter and jam,

but to count their cost as compared with other things. In other words, I
made up my mind that, while I must earn money, I could afford to make
earning money the secondary instead of the primary object of my career. If I
had had no money at all, then my first duty would have been to earn it in
any honest fashion. As I had some money I felt that my need for more
money was to be treated as a secondary need, and that while it was my
business to make more money where I legitimately and properly could, yet
that it was also my business to treat other kinds of work as more important
than money-making.
Almost immediately after leaving Harvard in 1880 I began to take an
interest in politics. I did not then believe, and I do not now believe, that any
man should ever attempt to make politics his only career. It is a dreadful
misfortune for a man to grow to feel that his whole livelihood and whole
happiness depend upon his staying in office. Such a feeling prevents him
from being of real service to the people while in office, and always puts him
under the heaviest strain of pressure to barter his convictions for the sake of
holding office. A man should have some other occupation—I had several
other occupations—to which he can resort if at any time he is thrown out of
office, or if at any time he finds it necessary to choose a course which will
probably result in his being thrown out, unless he is willing to stay in at cost
to his conscience.
At that day, in 1880, a young man of my bringing up and convictions
could join only the Republican party, and join it I accordingly did. It was no
simple thing to join it then. That was long before the era of ballot reform
and the control of primaries; long before the era when we realized that the
Government must take official notice of the deeds and acts of party
organizations. The party was still treated as a private corporation, and in
each district the organization formed a kind of social and political club. A
man had to be regularly proposed for and elected into this club, just as into
any other club. As a friend of mine picturesquely phrased it, I "had to break
into the organization with a jimmy."
Under these circumstances there was some difficulty in joining the local
organization, and considerable amusement and excitement to be obtained
out of it after I had joined.
It was over thirty-three years ago that I thus became a member of the
Twenty-first District Republican Association in the city of New York. The

men I knew best were the men in the clubs of social pretension and the men
of cultivated taste and easy life. When I began to make inquiries as to the
whereabouts of the local Republican Association and the means of joining
it, these men—and the big business men and lawyers also—laughed at me,
and told me that politics were "low"; that the organizations were not
controlled by "gentlemen"; that I would find them run by saloon-keepers,
horse-car conductors, and the like, and not by men with any of whom I
would come in contact outside; and, moreover, they assured me that the
men I met would be rough and brutal and unpleasant to deal with. I
answered that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not
belong to the governing class, and that the other people did—and that I
intended to be one of the governing class; that if they proved too hard-bit
for me I supposed I would have to quit, but that I certainly would not quit
until I had made the effort and found out whether I really was too weak to
hold my own in the rough and tumble.
The Republican Association of which I became a member held its
meetings in Morton Hall, a large, barn-like room over a saloon. Its furniture
was of the canonical kind: dingy benches, spittoons, a dais at one end with a
table and chair and a stout pitcher for iced water, and on the walls pictures
of General Grant, and of Levi P. Morton, to whose generosity we owed the
room. We had regular meetings once or twice a month, and between times
the place was treated, at least on certain nights, as a kind of club-room. I
went around there often enough to have the men get accustomed to me and
to have me get accustomed to them, so that we began to speak the same
language, and so that each could begin to live down in the other's mind
what Bret Harte has called "the defective moral quality of being a stranger."
It is not often that a man can make opportunities for himself. But he can put
himself in such shape that when or if the opportunities come he is ready to
take advantage of them. This was what happened to me in connection with
my experiences in Morton Hall. I soon became on good terms with a
number of the ordinary "heelers" and even some of the minor leaders. The
big leader was Jake Hess, who treated me with rather distant affability.
There were prominent lawyers and business men who belonged, but they
took little part in the actual meetings. What they did was done elsewhere.
The running of the machine was left to Jake Hess and his captains of tens
and of hundreds.

Among these lesser captains I soon struck up a friendship with Joe
Murray, a friendship which is as strong now as it was thirty-three years ago.
He had been born in Ireland, but brought to New York by his parents when
he was three or four years old, and, as he expressed it, "raised as a
barefooted boy on First Avenue." When not eighteen he had enlisted in the
Army of the Potomac and taken part in the campaign that closed the Civil
War. Then he came back to First Avenue, and, being a fearless, powerful,
energetic young fellow, careless and reckless, speedily grew to some
prominence as leader of a gang. In that district, and at that time, politics was
a rough business, and Tammany Hall held unquestioned sway. The district
was overwhelmingly Democratic, and Joe and his friends were Democrats
who on election day performed the usual gang work for the local
Democratic leader, whose business it was to favor and reward them in
return. This same local leader, like many other greater leaders, became
puffed up by prosperity, and forgot the instruments through which he had
achieved prosperity. After one election he showed a callous indifference to
the hard work of the gang and complete disregard of his before-election
promises. He counted upon the resentment wearing itself out, as usual, in
threats and bluster.
But Joe Murray was not a man who forgot. He explained to his gang his
purposes and the necessity of being quiet. Accordingly they waited for their
revenge until the next election day. They then, as Joe expressed it, decided
"to vote furdest away from the leader"—I am using the language of Joe's
youth—and the best way to do this was to vote the Republican ticket. In
those days each party had a booth near the polling-place in each election
district, where the party representative dispensed the party ballots. This had
been a district in which, as a rule, very early in the day the Republican
election leader had his hat knocked over his eyes and his booth kicked over
and his ballots scattered; and then the size of the Democratic majority
depended on an elastic appreciation of exactly how much was demanded
from headquarters. But on this day things went differently. The gang, with a
Roman sense of duty, took an active interest in seeing that the Republican
was given his full rights. Moreover, they made the most energetic reprisals
on their opponents, and as they were distinctly the tough and fighting
element, justice came to her own with a whoop. Would-be repeaters were
thrown out on their heads. Every person who could be cajoled or, I fear,
intimidated, was given the Republican ticket, and the upshot was that at the

end of the day a district which had never hitherto polled more than two or
three per cent of its vote Republican broke about even between the two
parties.
To Joe it had been merely an act of retribution in so far as it was not
simply a spree. But the leaders at the Republican headquarters did not know
this, and when they got over their paralyzed astonishment at the returns,
they investigated to find out what it meant. Somebody told them that it
represented the work of a young man named Joseph Murray. Accordingly
they sent for him. The room in which they received him was doubtless some
place like Morton Hall, and the men who received him were akin to those
who had leadership in Morton Hall; but in Joe's eyes they stood for a higher
civilization, for opportunity, for generous recognition of successful effort—
in short, for all the things that an eager young man desires. He was received
and patted on the back by a man who was a great man to the world in which
he lived. He was introduced to the audience as a young man whose
achievement was such as to promise much for the future, and moreover he
was given a place in the post-office—as I have said, this was long before
the day of Civil Service Reform.
Now, to the wrong kind of man all this might have meant nothing at all.
But in Joe Murray's case it meant everything. He was by nature as straight a
man, as fearless and as stanchly loyal, as any one whom I have ever met, a
man to be trusted in any position demanding courage, integrity, and good
faith. He did his duty in the public service, and became devotedly attached
to the organization which he felt had given him his chance in life. When I
knew him he was already making his way up; one of the proofs and
evidences of which was that he owned a first-class racing trotter—"Alice
Lane"—behind which he gave me more than one spin. During this first
winter I grew to like Joe and his particular cronies. But I had no idea that
they especially returned the liking, and in the first row we had in the
organization (which arose over a movement, that I backed, to stand by a
non-partisan method of street-cleaning) Joe and all his friends stood stiffly
with the machine, and my side, the reform side, was left with only some
half-dozen votes out of three or four hundred. I had expected no other
outcome and took it good-humoredly, but without changing my attitude.
Next fall, as the elections drew near, Joe thought he would like to make a
drive at Jake Hess, and after considerable planning decided that his best

chance lay in the fight for the nomination to the Assembly, the lower house
of the Legislature. He picked me as the candidate with whom he would be
most likely to win; and win he did. It was not my fight, it was Joe's; and it
was to him that I owe my entry into politics. I had at that time neither the
reputation nor the ability to have won the nomination for myself, and
indeed never would have thought of trying for it.
Jake Hess was entirely good-humored about it. In spite of my being anti-
machine, my relations with him had been friendly and human, and when he
was beaten he turned in to help Joe elect me. At first they thought they
would take me on a personal canvass through the saloons along Sixth
Avenue. The canvass, however, did not last beyond the first saloon. I was
introduced with proper solemnity to the saloon-keeper—a very important
personage, for this was before the days when saloon-keepers became
merely the mortgaged chattels of the brewers—and he began to cross-
examine me, a little too much in the tone of one who was dealing with a
suppliant for his favor. He said he expected that I would of course treat the
liquor business fairly; to which I answered, none too cordially, that I hoped
I should treat all interests fairly. He then said that he regarded the licenses
as too high; to which I responded that I believed they were really not high
enough, and that I should try to have them made higher. The conversation
threatened to become stormy. Messrs. Murray and Hess, on some hastily
improvised plea, took me out into the street, and then Joe explained to me
that it was not worth my while staying in Sixth Avenue any longer, that I
had better go right back to Fifth Avenue and attend to my friends there, and
that he would look after my interests on Sixth Avenue. I was triumphantly
elected.
Once before Joe had interfered in similar fashion and secured the
nomination of an Assemblyman; and shortly after election he had grown to
feel toward this Assemblyman that he must have fed on the meat which
rendered Caesar proud, as he became inaccessible to the ordinary mortals
whose place of resort was Morton Hall. He eyed me warily for a short time
to see if I was likely in this respect to follow in my predecessor's footsteps.
Finding that I did not, he and all my other friends and supporters assumed
toward me the very pleasantest attitude that it was possible to assume. They
did not ask me for a thing. They accepted as a matter of course the view that
I was absolutely straight and was trying to do the best I could in the
Legislature. They desired nothing except that I should make a success, and

they supported me with hearty enthusiasm. I am a little at a loss to know
quite how to express the quality in my relationship with Joe Murray and my
other friends of this period which rendered that relationship so beneficial to
me. When I went into politics at this time I was not conscious of going in
with the set purpose to benefit other people, but of getting for myself a
privilege to which I was entitled in common with other people. So it was in
my relationship with these men. If there had lurked in the innermost
recesses of my mind anywhere the thought that I was in some way a patron
or a benefactor, or was doing something noble by taking part in politics, or
that I expected the smallest consideration save what I could earn on my own
merits, I am certain that somehow or other the existence of that feeling
would have been known and resented. As a matter of fact, there was not the
slightest temptation on my part to have any such feeling or any one of such
feelings. I no more expected special consideration in politics than I would
have expected it in the boxing ring. I wished to act squarely to others, and I
wished to be able to show that I could hold my own as against others. The
attitude of my new friends toward me was first one of polite reserve, and
then that of friendly alliance. Afterwards I became admitted to
comradeship, and then to leadership. I need hardly say how earnestly I
believe that men should have a keen and lively sense of their obligations in
politics, of their duty to help forward great causes, and to struggle for the
betterment of conditions that are unjust to their fellows, the men and
women who are less fortunate in life. But in addition to this feeling there
must be a feeling of real fellowship with the other men and women engaged
in the same task, fellowship of work, with fun to vary the work; for unless
there is this feeling of fellowship, of common effort on an equal plane for a
common end, it will be difficult to keep the relations wholesome and
natural. To be patronized is as offensive as to be insulted. No one of us
cares permanently to have some one else conscientiously striving to do him
good; what we want is to work with that some one else for the good of both
of us—any man will speedily find that other people can benefit him just as
much as he can benefit them.
Neither Joe Murray nor I nor any of our associates at that time were alive
to social and industrial needs which we now all of us recognize. But we
then had very clearly before our minds the need of practically applying
certain elemental virtues, the virtues of honesty and efficiency in politics,
the virtue of efficiency side by side with honesty in private and public life

alike, the virtues of consideration and fair dealing in business as between
man and man, and especially as between the man who is an employer and
the man who is an employee. On all fundamental questions Joe Murray and
I thought alike. We never parted company excepting on the question of
Civil Service Reform, where he sincerely felt that I showed doctrinaire
affinities, that I sided with the pharisees. We got back again into close
relations as soon as I became Police Commissioner under Mayor Strong, for
Joe was then made Excise Commissioner, and was, I believe, the best
Excise Commissioner the city of New York ever had. He is now a farmer,
his boys have been through Columbia College, and he and I look at the
questions, political, social, and industrial, which confront us in 1913 from
practically the same standpoint, just as we once looked at the questions that
confronted us in 1881.
There are many debts that I owe Joe Murray, and some for which he was
only unconsciously responsible. I do not think that a man is fit to do good
work in our American democracy unless he is able to have a genuine
fellow-feeling for, understanding of, and sympathy with his fellow-
Americans, whatever their creed or their birthplace, the section in which
they live, or the work which they do, provided they possess the only kind of
Americanism that really counts, the Americanism of the spirit. It was no
small help to me, in the effort to make myself a good citizen and good
American, that the political associate with whom I was on closest and most
intimate terms during my early years was a man born in Ireland, by creed a
Catholic, with Joe Murray's upbringing; just as it helped me greatly at a
later period to work for certain vitally necessary public needs with Arthur
von Briesen, in whom the spirit of the "Acht-und-Vierziger" idealists was
embodied; just as my whole life was influenced by my long association
with Jacob Riis, whom I am tempted to call the best American I ever knew,
although he was already a young man when he came hither from Denmark.
I was elected to the Legislature in the fall of 1881, and found myself the
youngest man in that body. I was reelected the two following years. Like all
young men and inexperienced members, I had considerable difficulty in
teaching myself to speak. I profited much by the advice of a hard-headed
old countryman—who was unconsciously paraphrasing the Duke of
Wellington, who was himself doubtless paraphrasing somebody else. The
advice ran: "Don't speak until you are sure you have something to say, and
know just what it is; then say it, and sit down."

My first days in the Legislature were much like those of a boy in a
strange school. My fellow-legislators and I eyed one another with mutual
distrust. Each of us chose his seat, each began by following the lead of
some veteran in the first routine matters, and then, in a week or two, we
began to drift into groups according to our several affinities. The
Legislature was Democratic. I was a Republican from the "silk stocking"
district, the wealthiest district in New York, and I was put, as one of the
minority members, on the Committee of Cities. It was a coveted position. I
did not make any effort to get on, and, as far as I know, was put there
merely because it was felt to be in accordance with the fitness of things.
A very short experience showed me that, as the Legislature was then
constituted, the so-called party contests had no interest whatever for me.
There was no real party division on most of the things that were of concern
in State politics, both Republicans and Democrats being for and against
them. My friendships were made, not with regard to party lines, but because
I found, and my friends found, that we had the same convictions on
questions of principle and questions of policy. The only difference was that
there was a larger proportion of these men among the Republicans than
among the Democrats, and that it was easier for me at the outset to scrape
acquaintance, among the men who felt as I did, with the Republicans. They
were for the most part from the country districts.
My closest friend for the three years I was there was Billy O'Neill, from
the Adirondacks. He kept a small crossroads store. He was a young man,
although a few years older than I was, and, like myself, had won his
position without regard to the machine. He had thought he would like to be
Assemblyman, so he had taken his buggy and had driven around Franklin
County visiting everybody, had upset the local ring, and came to the
Legislature as his own master. There is surely something in American
traditions that does tend toward real democracy in spite of our faults and
shortcomings. In most other countries two men of as different antecedents,
ancestry, and surroundings as Billy O'Neill and I would have had far more
difficulty in coming together. I came from the biggest city in America and
from the wealthiest ward of that city, and he from a backwoods county
where he kept a store at a crossroads. In all the unimportant things we
seemed far apart. But in all the important things we were close together. We
looked at all questions from substantially the same view-point, and we
stood shoulder to shoulder in every legislative fight during those three

years. He abhorred demagogy just as he abhorred corruption. He had
thought much on political problems; he admired Alexander Hamilton as
much as I did, being a strong believer in a powerful National government;
and we both of us differed from Alexander Hamilton in being stout
adherents of Abraham Lincoln's views wherever the rights of the people
were concerned. Any man who has met with success, if he will be frank
with himself, must admit that there has been a big element of fortune in the
success. Fortune favored me, whereas her hand was heavy against Billy
O'Neill. All his life he had to strive hard to wring his bread from harsh
surroundings and a reluctant fate; if fate had been but a little kinder, I
believe he would have had a great political career; and he would have done
good service for the country in any position in which he might have been
put.
There were other Republicans, like Isaac Hunt and Jonas van Duzer and
Walter Howe and Henry Sprague, who were among my close friends and
allies; and a gigantic one-eyed veteran of the Civil War, a gallant General,
Curtis from St. Lawrence County; and a capital fellow, whom afterwards,
when Governor, I put on the bench, Kruse, from Cattaraugus County. Kruse
was a German by birth; as far as I know, the only German from Cattaraugus
County at that time; and, besides being a German, he was also a
Prohibitionist. Among the Democrats were Hamden Robb and Thomas
Newbold, and Tom Welch of Niagara, who did a great service in getting the
State to set aside Niagara Falls Park—after a discouraging experience with
the first Governor before whom we brought the bill, who listened with
austere patience to our arguments in favor of the State establishing a park,
and then conclusively answered us by the question, "But, gentlemen, why
should we spend the people's money when just as much water will run over
the Falls without a park as with it?" Then there were a couple of members
from New York and Brooklyn, Mike Costello and Pete Kelly.
Mike Costello had been elected as a Tammany man. He was as fearless as
he was honest. He came from Ireland, and had accepted the Tammany
Fourth of July orations as indicating the real attitude of that organization
towards the rights of the people. A month or two in Albany converted him
to a profound distrust of applied Tammany methods. He and I worked hand
in hand with equal indifference to our local machines. His machine leaders
warned him fairly that they would throw him out at the next election, which
they did; but he possessed a seasoned-hickory toughness of ability to

contend with adverse circumstances, and kept his head well above water. A
better citizen does not exist; and our friendship has never faltered.
Peter Kelly's fate was a tragedy. He was a bright, well-educated young
fellow, an ardent believer in Henry George. At the beginning he and I failed
to understand each other or to get on together, for our theories of
government were radically opposed. After a couple of months spent in
active contests with men whose theories had nothing whatever to do with
their practices, Kelly and I found in our turn that it really did not make
much difference what our abstract theories were on questions that were not
before the Legislature, in view of the fact that on the actual matters before
the Legislature, the most important of which involved questions of
elementary morality, we were heartily at one. We began to vote together and
act together, and by the end of the session found that in all practical matters
that were up for action we thought together. Indeed, each of us was
beginning to change his theories, so that even in theory we were coming
closer together. He was ardent and generous; he was a young lawyer, with a
wife and children, whose ambition had tempted him into politics, and who
had been befriended by the local bosses under the belief that they could
count upon him for anything they really wished. Unfortunately, what they
really wished was often corrupt. Kelly defied them, fought the battles of the
people with ardor and good faith, and when the bosses refused him a
renomination, he appealed from them to the people. When we both came up
for reelection, I won easily in my district, where circumstances conspired to
favor me; and Kelly, with exactly the same record that I had, except that it
was more creditable because he took his stand against greater odds, was
beaten in his district. Defeat to me would have meant merely chagrin; to
Kelly it meant terrible material disaster. He had no money. Like every
rigidly honest man, he had found that going into politics was expensive and
that his salary as Assemblyman did not cover the financial outgo. He had
lost his practice and he had incurred the ill will of the powerful, so that it
was impossible at the moment to pick up his practice again; and the worry
and disappointment affected him so much that shortly after election he was
struck down by sickness. Just before Christmas some of us were informed
that Kelly was in such financial straits that he and his family would be put
out into the street before New Year. This was prevented by the action of
some of his friends who had served with him in the Legislature, and he
recovered, at least to a degree, and took up the practice of his profession.

But he was a broken man. In the Legislature in which he served one of his
fellow-Democrats from Brooklyn was the Speaker—Alfred C. Chapin, the
leader and the foremost representative of the reform Democracy, whom
Kelly zealously supported. A few years later Chapin, a very able man, was
elected Mayor of Brooklyn on a reform Democratic ticket. Shortly after his
election I was asked to speak at a meeting in a Brooklyn club at which
various prominent citizens, including the Mayor, were present. I spoke on
civic decency, and toward the close of my speech I sketched Kelly's career
for my audience, told them how he had stood up for the rights of the people
of Brooklyn, and how the people had failed to stand up for him, and the
way he had been punished, precisely because he had been a good citizen
who acted as a good citizen should act. I ended by saying that the reform
Democracy had now come into power, that Mr. Chapin was Mayor, and that
I very earnestly hoped recognition would at last be given to Kelly for the
fight he had waged at such bitter cost to himself. My words created some
impression, and Mayor Chapin at once said that he would take care of Kelly
and see that justice was done him. I went home that evening much pleased.
In the morning, at breakfast, I received a brief note from Chapin in these
words: "It was nine last evening when you finished speaking of what Kelly
had done, and when I said that I would take care of him. At ten last night
Kelly died." He had been dying while I was making my speech, and he
never knew that at last there was to be a tardy recognition of what he had
done, a tardy justification for the sacrifices he had made. The man had
fought, at heavy cost to himself and with entire disinterestedness, for
popular rights; but no recognition for what he had done had come to him
from the people, whose interest he had so manfully upheld.
Where there is no chance of statistical or mathematical measurement, it is
very hard to tell just the degree to which conditions change from one period
to another. This is peculiarly hard to do when we deal with such a matter as
corruption. Personally I am inclined to think that in public life we are on the
whole a little better and not a little worse than we were thirty years ago,
when I was serving in the New York Legislature. I think the conditions are a
little better in National, in State, and in municipal politics. Doubtless there
are points in which they are worse, and there is an enormous amount that
needs reformation. But it does seem to me as if, on the whole, things had
slightly improved.

When I went into politics, New York City was under the control of
Tammany, which was from time to time opposed by some other—and
evanescent—city Democratic organization. The up-country Democrats had
not yet fallen under Tammany sway, and were on the point of developing a
big country political boss in the shape of David B. Hill. The Republican
party was split into the Stalwart and Half-Breed factions. Accordingly
neither party had one dominant boss, or one dominant machine, each being
controlled by jarring and warring bosses and machines. The corruption was
not what it had been in the days of Tweed, when outside individuals
controlled the legislators like puppets. Nor was there any such
centralization of the boss system as occurred later. Many of the members
were under the control of local bosses or local machines. But the corrupt
work was usually done through the members directly.
Of course I never had anything in the nature of legal proof of corruption,
and the figures I am about to give are merely approximate. But three years'
experience convinced me, in the first place, that there were a great many
thoroughly corrupt men in the Legislature, perhaps a third of the whole
number; and, in the next place, that the honest men outnumbered the
corrupt men, and that, if it were ever possible to get an issue of right and
wrong put vividly and unmistakably before them in a way that would arrest
their attention and that would arrest the attention of their constituents, we
could count on the triumph of the right. The trouble was that in most cases
the issue was confused. To read some kinds of literature one would come to
the conclusion that the only corruption in legislative circles was in the form
of bribery by corporations, and that the line was sharp between the honest
man who was always voting against corporations and the dishonest man
who was always bribed to vote for them. My experience was the direct
contrary of this. For every one bill introduced (not passed) corruptly to
favor a corporation, there were at least ten introduced (not passed, and in
this case not intended to be passed) to blackmail corporations. The majority
of the corrupt members would be found voting for the blackmailing bills if
they were not paid, and would also be found voting in the interests of the
corporation if they were paid. The blackmailing, or, as they were always
called, the "strike" bills, could themselves be roughly divided into two
categories: bills which it would have been proper to pass, and those that it
would not have been proper to pass. Some of the bills aimed at corporations
were utterly wild and improper; and of these a proportion might be

introduced by honest and foolish zealots, whereas most of them were
introduced by men who had not the slightest intention of passing them, but
who wished to be paid not to pass them. The most profitable type of bill to
the accomplished blackmailer, however, was a bill aimed at a real corporate
abuse which the corporation, either from wickedness or folly, was unwilling
to remedy. Of the measures introduced in the interest of corporations there
were also some that were proper and some that were improper. The corrupt
legislators, the "black horse cavalry," as they were termed, would demand
payment to vote as the corporations wished, no matter whether the bill was
proper or improper. Sometimes, if the bill was a proper one, the corporation
would have the virtue or the strength of mind to refuse to pay for its
passage, and sometimes it would not.
A very slight consideration of the above state of affairs will show how
difficult it was at times to keep the issue clear, for honest and dishonest men
were continually found side by side voting now against and now for a
corporation measure, the one set from proper and the other set from grossly
improper motives. Of course part of the fault lay in the attitudes of
outsiders. It was very early borne in upon me that almost equal harm was
done by indiscriminate defense of, and indiscriminate attack on,
corporations. It was hard to say whether the man who prided himself upon
always antagonizing the corporations, or the man who, on the plea that he
was a good conservative, always stood up for them, was the more
mischievous agent of corruption and demoralization.
In one fight in the House over a bill as to which there was a bitter contest
between two New York City street railway organizations, I saw lobbyists
come down on the floor itself and draw venal men out into the lobbies with
almost no pretense of concealing what they were doing. In another case in
which the elevated railway corporations of New York City, against the
protest of the Mayor and the other local authorities, rushed through a bill
remitting over half their taxes, some of the members who voted for the
measure probably thought it was right; but every corrupt man in the House
voted with them; and the man must indeed have been stupid who thought
that these votes were given disinterestedly.
The effective fight against this bill for the revision of the elevated railway
taxes—perhaps the most openly crooked measure which during my time
was pushed at Albany—was waged by Mike Costello and myself. We used

to spend a good deal of time in industrious research into the various bills
introduced, so as to find out what their authors really had in mind; this
research, by the way, being highly unappreciated and much resented by the
authors. In the course of his researches Mike had been puzzled by an
unimportant bill, seemingly related to a Constitutional amendment,
introduced by a local saloon-keeper, whose interests, as far as we knew,
were wholly remote from the Constitution, or from any form of abstract
legal betterment. However, the measure seemed harmless; we did not
interfere; and it passed the House. Mike, however, followed its career in the
Senate, and at the last moment, almost by accident, discovered that it had
been "amended" by the simple process of striking out everything after the
enacting clause and unobtrusively substituting the proposal to remit the
elevated railway taxes! The authors of the change wished to avoid unseemly
publicity; their hope was to slip the measure through the Legislature and
have it instantly signed by the Governor, before any public attention was
excited. In the Senate their plan worked to perfection. There was in the
Senate no fighting leadership of the forces of decency; and for such
leadership of the non-fighting type the representatives of corruption cared
absolutely nothing. By bold and adroit management the substitution in the
Senate was effected without opposition or comment. The bill (in reality, of
course, an absolutely new and undebated bill) then came back to the House
nominally as a merely amended measure, which, under the rules, was not
open to debate unless the amendment was first by vote rejected. This was
the great bill of the session for the lobby; and the lobby was keenly alive to
the need of quick, wise action. No public attention whatever had so far been
excited. Every measure was taken to secure immediate and silent action. A
powerful leader, whom the beneficiaries of the bill trusted, a fearless and
unscrupulous man, of much force and great knowledge of parliamentary
law, was put in the chair. Costello and I were watched; and when for a
moment we were out of the House, the bill was brought over from the
Senate, and the clerk began to read it, all the black horse cavalry, in
expectant mood, being in their seats. But Mike Costello, who was in the
clerk's room, happened to catch a few words of what was being read. In he
rushed, despatched a messenger for me, and began a single-handed
filibuster. The Speaker pro tem called him to order. Mike continued to speak
and protest; the Speaker hammered him down; Mike continued his protests;
the sergeant-at-arms was sent to arrest and remove him; and then I bounced

in, and continued the protest, and refused to sit down or be silent. Amid
wild confusion the amendment was declared adopted, and the bill was
ordered engrossed and sent to the Governor. But we had carried our point.
The next morning the whole press rang with what had happened; every
detail of the bill, and every detail of the way it had been slipped through the
Legislature, were made public. All the slow and cautious men in the House,
who had been afraid of taking sides, now came forward in support of us.
Another debate was held on the proposal to rescind the vote; the city
authorities waked up to protest; the Governor refused to sign the bill. Two
or three years later, after much litigation, the taxes were paid; in the
newspapers it was stated that the amount was over $1,500,000. It was Mike
Costello to whom primarily was due the fact that this sum was saved the
public, and that the forces of corruption received a stinging rebuff. He did
not expect recognition or reward for his services; and he got none. The
public, if it knew of what he had done, promptly forgot it. The machine did
not forget it, and turned him down at the next election.
One of the stand-by "strikes" was a bill for reducing the elevated railway
fare, which at that time was ten cents, to five cents. In one Legislature the
men responsible for the introduction of the bill suffered such an
extraordinary change of heart that when the bill came up—being pushed by
zealous radicals who really were honest—the introducers actually voted
against it! A number of us who had been very doubtful about the principle
of the bill voted for it simply because we were convinced that money was
being used to stop it, and we hated to seem to side with the corruptionists.
Then there came a wave of popular feeling in its favor, the bill was
reintroduced at the next session, the railways very wisely decided that they
would simply fight it on its merits, and the entire black horse cavalry
contingent, together with all the former friends of the measure, voted
against it. Some of us, who in our anger at the methods formerly resorted to
for killing the bill had voted for it the previous year, with much heart-
searching again voted for it, as I now think unwisely; and the bill was
vetoed by the then Governor, Grover Cleveland. I believe the veto was
proper, and those who felt as I did supported the veto; for although it was
entirely right that the fare should be reduced to five cents, which was soon
afterwards done, the method was unwise, and would have set a mischievous
precedent.

An instance of an opposite kind occurred in connection with a great
railway corporation which wished to increase its terminal facilities in one of
our great cities. The representatives of the railway brought the bill to me
and asked me to look into it, saying that they were well aware that it was
the kind of bill that lent itself to blackmail, and that they wished to get it
through on its merits, and invited the most careful examination. I looked
carefully into it, found that the municipal authorities and the property-
owners whose property was to be taken favored it, and also found that it
was an absolute necessity from the standpoint of the city no less than from
the standpoint of the railway. So I said I would take charge of it if I had
guarantees that no money should be used and nothing improper done in
order to push it. This was agreed to. I was then acting as chairman of the
committee before which the bill went.
A very brief experience proved what I had already been practically sure
of, that there was a secret combination of the majority of the committee on
a crooked basis. On one pretext or another the crooked members of the
committee held the bill up, refusing to report it either favorably or
unfavorably. There were one or two members of the committee who were
pretty rough characters, and when I decided to force matters I was not sure
that we would not have trouble. There was a broken chair in the room, and I
got a leg of it loose and put it down beside me where it was not visible, but
where I might get at it in a hurry if necessary. I moved that the bill be
reported favorably. This was voted down without debate by the "combine,"
some of whom kept a wooden stolidity of look, while others leered at me
with sneering insolence. I then moved that it be reported unfavorably, and
again the motion was voted down by the same majority and in the same
fashion. I then put the bill in my pocket and announced that I would report
it anyhow. This almost precipitated a riot, especially when I explained, in
answer to statements that my conduct would be exposed on the floor of the
Legislature, that in that case I should give the Legislature the reasons why I
suspected that the men holding up all report of the bill were holding it up
for purposes of blackmail. The riot did not come off; partly, I think, because
the opportune production of the chair-leg had a sedative effect, and partly
owing to wise counsels from one or two of my opponents.
Accordingly I got the bill reported to the Legislature and put on the
calendar. But here it came to a dead halt. I think this was chiefly because
most of the newspapers which noticed the matter at all treated it in such a

cynical spirit as to encourage the men who wished to blackmail. These
papers reported the introduction of the bill, and said that "all the hungry
legislators were clamoring for their share of the pie"; and they accepted as
certain the fact that there was going to be a division of "pie." This
succeeded in frightening honest men, and also in relieving the rogues; the
former were afraid they would be suspected of receiving money if they
voted for the bill, and the latter were given a shield behind which to stand
until they were paid. I was wholly unable to move the bill forward in the
Legislature, and finally a representative of the railway told me that he
thought he would like to take the bill out of my hands, that I did not seem
able to get it through, and that perhaps some "older and more experienced"
leader could be more successful. I was pretty certain what this meant, but of
course I had no kind of proof, and moreover I was not in a position to say
that I could promise success. Accordingly, the bill was given into the charge
of a veteran, whom I believe to have been a personally honest man, but who
was not inquisitive about the motives influencing his colleagues. This
gentleman, who went by a nickname which I shall incorrectly call "the bald
eagle of Weehawken," was efficient and knew his job. After a couple of
weeks a motion to put the bill through was made by "the bald eagle"; the
"black horse cavalry," whose feelings had undergone a complete change in
the intervening time, voted unanimously for it, in company with all the
decent members; and that was the end. Now here was a bit of work in the
interest of a corporation and in the interest of a community, which the
corporation at first tried honestly to have put through on its merits. The
blame for the failure lay primarily in the supine indifference of the
community to legislative wrong-doing, so long as only the corporations
were blackmailed.
Except as above mentioned, I was not brought in contact with big
business, save in the effort to impeach a certain judge. This judge had been
used as an instrument in their business by certain of the men connected with
the elevated railways and other great corporations at that time. We got hold
of his correspondence with one of these men, and it showed a shocking
willingness to use the judicial office in any way that one of the kings of
finance of that day desired. He had actually held court in one of that
financier's rooms. One expression in one of the judge's letters to this
financier I shall always remember: "I am willing to go to the very verge of
judicial discretion to serve your vast interests." The curious thing was that I

was by no means certain that the judge himself was corrupt. He may have
been; but I am inclined to think that, aside from his being a man of coarse
moral fiber, the trouble lay chiefly in the fact that he had a genuine—if I
had not so often seen it, I would say a wholly inexplicable—reverence for
the possessor of a great fortune as such. He sincerely believed that business
was the end of existence, and that judge and legislator alike should do
whatever was necessary to favor it; and the bigger the business the more he
desired to favor it. Big business of the kind that is allied with politics
thoroughly appreciated the usefulness of such a judge, and every effort was
strained to protect him. We fought hard—by "we" I mean some thirty or
forty legislators, both Republicans and Democrats—but the "black horse
cavalry," and the timid good men, and the dull conservative men, were all
against us; and the vote in the Legislature was heavily against
impeachment. The minority of the committee that investigated him, with
Chapin at its head, recommended impeachment; the argument for
impeachment before the committee was made by Francis Lynde Stetson.
It was my first experience of the kind. Various men whom I had known
well socially and had been taught to look up to, prominent business men
and lawyers, acted in a way which not only astounded me, but which I was
quite unable to reconcile with the theories I had formed as to their high
standing—I was little more than a year out of college at the time. Generally,
as has been always the case since, they were careful to avoid any direct
conversation with me on a concrete case of what we now call "privilege" in
business and in politics, that is, of the alliance between business and politics
which represents improper favors rendered to some men in return for
improper conduct on the part of others being ignored or permitted.
One member of a prominent law firm, an old family friend, did, however,
take me out to lunch one day, evidently for the purpose of seeing just what
it was that I wished and intended to do. I believe he had a genuine personal
liking for me. He explained that I had done well in the Legislature; that it
was a good thing to have made the "reform play," that I had shown that I
possessed ability such as would make me useful in the right kind of law
office or business concern; but that I must not overplay my hand; that I had
gone far enough, and that now was the time to leave politics and identify
myself with the right kind of people, the people who would always in the
long run control others and obtain the real rewards which were worth
having. I asked him if that meant that I was to yield to the ring in politics.

He answered somewhat impatiently that I was entirely mistaken (as in fact I
was) about there being merely a political ring, of the kind of which the
papers were fond of talking; that the "ring," if it could be called such—that
is, the inner circle—included certain big business men, and the politicians,
lawyers, and judges who were in alliance with and to a certain extent
dependent upon them, and that the successful man had to win his success by
the backing of the same forces, whether in law, business, or politics.
This conversation not only interested me, but made such an impression
that I always remembered it, for it was the first glimpse I had of that
combination between business and politics which I was in after years so
often to oppose. In the America of that day, and especially among the
people whom I knew, the successful business man was regarded by
everybody as preeminently the good citizen. The orthodox books on
political economy, not only in America but in England, were written for his
especial glorification. The tangible rewards came to him, the admiration of
his fellow-citizens of the respectable type was apt to be his, and the severe
newspaper moralists who were never tired of denouncing politicians and
political methods were wont to hold up "business methods" as the ideal
which we were to strive to introduce into political life. Herbert Croly, in
"The Promise of American Life," has set forth the reasons why our
individualistic democracy—which taught that each man was to rely
exclusively on himself, was in no way to be interfered with by others, and
was to devote himself to his own personal welfare—necessarily produced
the type of business man who sincerely believed, as did the rest of the
community, that the individual who amassed a big fortune was the man who
was the best and most typical American.
In the Legislature the problems with which I dealt were mainly problems
of honesty and decency and of legislative and administrative efficiency.
They represented the effort, the wise, the vitally necessary effort, to get
efficient and honest government. But as yet I understood little of the effort
which was already beginning, for the most part under very bad leadership,
to secure a more genuine social and industrial justice. Nor was I especially
to blame for this. The good citizens I then knew best, even when themselves
men of limited means—men like my colleague Billy O'Neill, and my
backwoods friends Sewall and Dow—were no more awake than I was to
the changing needs the changing times were bringing. Their outlook was as
narrow as my own, and, within its limits, as fundamentally sound.

I wish to dwell on the soundness of our outlook on life, even though as
yet it was not broad enough. We were no respecters of persons. Where our
vision was developed to a degree that enabled us to see crookedness, we
opposed it whether in great or small. As a matter of fact, we found that it
needed much more courage to stand up openly against labor men when they
were wrong than against capitalists when they were wrong. The sins against
labor are usually committed, and the improper services to capitalists are
usually rendered, behind closed doors. Very often the man with the moral
courage to speak in the open against labor when it is wrong is the only man
anxious to do effective work for labor when labor is right.
The only kinds of courage and honesty which are permanently useful to
good institutions anywhere are those shown by men who decide all cases
with impartial justice on grounds of conduct and not on grounds of class.
We found that in the long run the men who in public blatantly insisted that
labor was never wrong were the very men who in private could not be
trusted to stand for labor when it was right. We grew heartily to distrust the
reformer who never denounced wickedness unless it was embodied in a rich
man. Human nature does not change; and that type of "reformer" is as
noxious now as he ever was. The loud-mouthed upholder of popular rights
who attacks wickedness only when it is allied with wealth, and who never
publicly assails any misdeed, no matter how flagrant, if committed
nominally in the interest of labor, has either a warped mind or a tainted
soul, and should be trusted by no honest man. It was largely the indignant
and contemptuous dislike aroused in our minds by the demagogues of this
class which then prevented those of us whose instincts at bottom were
sound from going as far as we ought to have gone along the lines of
governmental control of corporations and governmental interference on
behalf of labor.
I did, however, have one exceedingly useful experience. A bill was
introduced by the Cigar-Makers' Union to prohibit the manufacture of
cigars in tenement-houses. I was appointed one of a committee of three to
investigate conditions in the tenement-houses and see if legislation should
be had. Of my two colleagues on the committee, one took no interest in the
measure and privately said he did not think it was right, but that he had to
vote for it because the labor unions were strong in his district and he was
pledged to support the bill. The other, a sporting Tammany man who
afterwards abandoned politics for the race-track, was a very good fellow.

He told me frankly that he had to be against the bill because certain
interests which were all-powerful and with which he had dealings required
him to be against it, but that I was a free agent, and that if I would look into
the matter he believed I would favor the legislation. As a matter of fact, I
had supposed I would be against the legislation, and I rather think that I was
put on the committee with that idea, for the respectable people I knew were
against it; it was contrary to the principles of political economy of the
laissez-faire kind; and the business men who spoke to me about it shook
their heads and said that it was designed to prevent a man doing as he
wished and as he had a right to do with what was his own.
However, my first visits to the tenement-house districts in question made
me feel that, whatever the theories might be, as a matter of practical
common sense I could not conscientiously vote for the continuance of the
conditions which I saw. These conditions rendered it impossible for the
families of the tenement-house workers to live so that the children might
grow up fitted for the exacting duties of American citizenship. I visited the
tenement-houses once with my colleagues of the committee, once with
some of the labor union representatives, and once or twice by myself. In a
few of the tenement-houses there were suites of rooms ample in number
where the work on the tobacco was done in rooms not occupied for cooking
or sleeping or living. In the overwhelming majority of cases, however, there
were one, two, or three room apartments, and the work of manufacturing
the tobacco by men, women, and children went on day and night in the
eating, living, and sleeping rooms—sometimes in one room. I have always
remembered one room in which two families were living. On my inquiry as
to who the third adult male was I was told that he was a boarder with one of
the families. There were several children, three men, and two women in this
room. The tobacco was stowed about everywhere, alongside the foul
bedding, and in a corner where there were scraps of food. The men, women,
and children in this room worked by day and far on into the evening, and
they slept and ate there. They were Bohemians, unable to speak English,
except that one of the children knew enough to act as interpreter.
Instead of opposing the bill I ardently championed it. It was a poorly
drawn measure, and the Governor, Grover Cleveland, was at first doubtful
about signing it. The Cigar-makers' Union then asked me to appear before
the Governor and argue for it. I accordingly did so, acting as spokesman for
the battered, undersized foreigners who represented the Union and the

workers. The Governor signed the bill. Afterwards this tenement-house
cigar legislation was declared invalid by the Court of Appeals in the Jacobs
decision. Jacobs was one of the rare tenement-house manufacturers of
cigars who occupied quite a suite of rooms, so that in his case the living
conditions were altogether exceptional. What the reason was which
influenced those bringing the suit to select the exceptional instead of the
average worker I do not know; of course such action was precisely the
action which those most interested in having the law broken down were
anxious to see taken. The Court of Appeals declared the law
unconstitutional, and in their decision the judges reprobated the law as an
assault upon the "hallowed" influences of "home." It was this case which
first waked me to a dim and partial understanding of the fact that the courts
were not necessarily the best judges of what should be done to better social
and industrial conditions. The judges who rendered this decision were well-
meaning men. They knew nothing whatever of tenement-house conditions;
they knew nothing whatever of the needs, or of the life and labor, of three-
fourths of their fellow-citizens in great cities. They knew legalism, but not
life. Their choice of the words "hallowed" and "home," as applicable to the
revolting conditions attending the manufacture of cigars in tenement-
houses, showed that they had no idea what it was that they were deciding.
Imagine the "hallowed" associations of a "home" consisting of one room
where two families, one of them with a boarder, live, eat, and work! This
decision completely blocked tenement-house reform legislation in New
York for a score of years, and hampers it to this day. It was one of the most
serious setbacks which the cause of industrial and social progress and
reform ever received.
I had been brought up to hold the courts in especial reverence. The
people with whom I was most intimate were apt to praise the courts for just
such decisions as this, and to speak of them as bulwarks against disorder
and barriers against demagogic legislation. These were the same people
with whom the judges who rendered these decisions were apt to foregather
at social clubs, or dinners, or in private life. Very naturally they all tended to
look at things from the same standpoint. Of course it took more than one
experience such as this Tenement Cigar Case to shake me out of the attitude
in which I was brought up. But various decisions, not only of the New York
court but of certain other State courts and even of the United States
Supreme Court, during the quarter of a century following the passage of this

tenement-house legislation, did at last thoroughly wake me to the actual
fact. I grew to realize that all that Abraham Lincoln had said about the Dred
Scott decision could be said with equal truth and justice about the numerous
decisions which in our own day were erected as bars across the path of
social reform, and which brought to naught so much of the effort to secure
justice and fair dealing for workingmen and workingwomen, and for plain
citizens generally.
Some of the wickedness and inefficiency in public life was then
displayed in simpler fashion than would probably now be the case. Once or
twice I was a member of committees which looked into gross and widely
ramifying governmental abuses. On the whole, the most important part I
played was in the third Legislature in which I served, when I acted as
chairman of a committee which investigated various phases of New York
City official life.
The most important of the reform measures our committee recommended
was the bill taking away from the Aldermen their power of confirmation
over the Mayor's appointments. We found that it was possible to get citizens
interested in the character and capacity of the head of the city, so that they
would exercise some intelligent interest in his conduct and qualifications.
But we found that as a matter of fact it was impossible to get them
interested in the Aldermen and other subordinate officers. In actual practice
the Aldermen were merely the creatures of the local ward bosses or of the
big municipal bosses, and where they controlled the appointments the
citizens at large had no chance whatever to make their will felt. Accordingly
we fought for the principle, which I believe to be of universal application,
that what is needed in our popular government is to give plenty of power to
a few officials, and to make these few officials genuinely and readily
responsible to the people for the exercise of that power. Taking away the
confirming power of the Board of Aldermen did not give the citizens of
New York good government. We knew that if they chose to elect the wrong
kind of Mayor they would have bad government, no matter what the form
of the law was. But we did secure to them the chance to get good
government if they desired, and this was impossible as long as the old
system remained. The change was fought in the way in which all similar
changes always are fought. The corrupt and interested politicians were
against it, and the battle-cries they used, which rallied to them most of the
unthinking conservatives, were that we were changing the old constitutional

system, that we were defacing the monuments of the wisdom of the
founders of the government, that we were destroying that distinction
between legislative and executive power which was the bulwark of our
liberties, and that we were violent and unscrupulous radicals with no
reverence for the past.
Of course the investigations, disclosures, and proceedings of the
investigating committee of which I was chairman brought me into bitter
personal conflict with very powerful financiers, very powerful politicians,
and with certain newspapers which these financiers and politicians
controlled. A number of able and unscrupulous men were fighting, some for
their financial lives, and others to keep out of unpleasantly close
neighborhood to State's prison. This meant that there were blows to be
taken as well as given. In such political struggles, those who went in for the
kind of thing that I did speedily excited animosities among strong and
cunning men who would stop at little to gratify their animosity. Any man
engaged in this particular type of militant and practical reform movement
was soon made to feel that he had better not undertake to push matters
home unless his own character was unassailable. On one of the
investigating committees on which I served there was a countryman, a very
able man, who, when he reached New York City, felt as certain Americans
do when they go to Paris—that the moral restraints of his native place no
longer applied. With all his ability, he was not shrewd enough to realize that
the Police Department was having him as well as the rest of us carefully
shadowed. He was caught red-handed by a plain-clothes man doing what he
had no business to do; and from that time on he dared not act save as those
who held his secret permitted him to act. Thenceforth those officials who
stood behind the Police Department had one man on the committee on
whom they could count. I never saw terror more ghastly on a strong man's
face than on the face of this man on one or two occasions when he feared
that events in the committee might take such a course as to force him into a
position where his colleagues would expose him even if the city officials
did not. However, he escaped, for we were never able to get the kind of
proof which would warrant our asking for the action in which this man
could not have joined.
Traps were set for more than one of us, and if we had walked into these
traps our public careers would have ended, at least so far as following them
under the conditions which alone make it worth while to be in public life at

all. A man can of course hold public office, and many a man does hold
public office, and lead a public career of a sort, even if there are other men
who possess secrets about him which he cannot afford to have divulged.
But no man can lead a public career really worth leading, no man can act
with rugged independence in serious crises, nor strike at great abuses, nor
afford to make powerful and unscrupulous foes, if he is himself vulnerable
in his private character. Nor will clean conduct by itself enable a man to
render good service. I have always been fond of Josh Billings's remark that
"it is much easier to be a harmless dove than a wise serpent." There are
plenty of decent legislators, and plenty of able legislators; but the
blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined. Both
qualities are necessary for the man who is to wage active battle against the
powers that prey. He must be clean of life, so that he can laugh when his
public or his private record is searched; and yet being clean of life will not
avail him if he is either foolish or timid. He must walk warily and
fearlessly, and while he should never brawl if he can avoid it, he must be
ready to hit hard if the need arises. Let him remember, by the way, that the
unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but
never hit softly.
Like most young men in politics, I went through various oscillations of
feeling before I "found myself." At one period I became so impressed with
the virtue of complete independence that I proceeded to act on each case
purely as I personally viewed it, without paying any heed to the principles
and prejudices of others. The result was that I speedily and deservedly lost
all power of accomplishing anything at all; and I thereby learned the
invaluable lesson that in the practical activities of life no man can render the
highest service unless he can act in combination with his fellows, which
means a certain amount of give-and-take between him and them. Again, I at
one period began to believe that I had a future before me, and that it
behooved me to be very far-sighted and scan each action carefully with a
view to its possible effect on that future. This speedily made me useless to
the public and an object of aversion to myself; and I then made up my mind
that I would try not to think of the future at all, but would proceed on the
assumption that each office I held would be the last I ever should hold, and
that I would confine myself to trying to do my work as well as possible
while I held that office. I found that for me personally this was the only way

in which I could either enjoy myself or render good service to the country,
and I never afterwards deviated from this plan.
As regards political advancement the bosses could of course do a good
deal. At that time the warring Stalwart and Half-Breed factions of the
Republican party were supporting respectively President Arthur and Senator
Miller. Neither side cared for me. The first year in the Legislature I rose to a
position of leadership, so that in the second year, when the Republicans
were in a minority, I received the minority nomination for Speaker,
although I was still the youngest man in the House, being twenty-four years
old. The third year the Republicans carried the Legislature, and the bosses
at once took a hand in the Speakership contest. I made a stout fight for the
nomination, but the bosses of the two factions, the Stalwarts and the Half-
Breeds, combined and I was beaten. I was much chagrined for the moment.
But the fact that I had fought hard and efficiently, even though defeated,
and that I had made the fight single-handed, with no machine back of me,
assured my standing as floor leader. My defeat in the end materially
strengthened my position, and enabled me to accomplish far more than I
could have accomplished as Speaker. As so often, I found that the titular
position was of no consequence; what counted was the combination of the
opportunity with the ability to accomplish results. The achievement was the
all-important thing; the position, whether titularly high or low, was of
consequence only in so far as it widened the chance for achievement. After
the session closed four of us who looked at politics from the same
standpoint and were known as Independent or Anti-Machine Republicans
were sent by the State Convention as delegates-at-large to the Republican
National Convention of 1884, where I advocated, as vigorously as I knew
how, the nomination of Senator George F. Edmunds. Mr. Edmunds was
defeated and Mr. Blaine nominated. Mr. Blaine was clearly the choice of the
rank and file of the party; his nomination was won in fair and aboveboard
fashion, because the rank and file of the party stood back of him; and I
supported him to the best of my ability in the ensuing campaign.
The Speakership contest enlightened me as regards more things than the
attitude of the bosses. I had already had some exasperating experiences with
the "silk stocking" reformer type, as Abraham Lincoln called it, the
gentlemen who were very nice, very refined, who shook their heads over
political corruption and discussed it in drawing-rooms and parlors, but who
were wholly unable to grapple with real men in real life. They were apt

vociferously to demand "reform" as if it were some concrete substance, like
cake, which could be handed out at will, in tangible masses, if only the
demand were urgent enough. These parlor reformers made up for
inefficiency in action by zeal in criticising; and they delighted in criticising
the men who really were doing the things which they said ought to be done,
but which they lacked the sinewy power to do. They often upheld ideals
which were not merely impossible but highly undesirable, and thereby
played into the hands of the very politicians to whom they professed to be
most hostile. Moreover, if they believed that their own interests,
individually or as a class, were jeoparded, they were apt to show no higher
standards than did the men they usually denounced.
One of their shibboleths was that the office should seek the man and not
the man the office. This is entirely true of certain offices at certain times. It
is entirely untrue when the circumstances are different. It would have been
unnecessary and undesirable for Washington to have sought the Presidency.
But if Abraham Lincoln had not sought the Presidency he never would have
been nominated. The objection in such a case as this lies not to seeking the
office, but to seeking it in any but an honorable and proper manner. The
effect of the shibboleth in question is usually merely to put a premium on
hypocrisy, and therefore to favor the creature who is willing to rise by
hypocrisy. When I ran for Speaker, the whole body of machine politicians
was against me, and my only chance lay in arousing the people in the
different districts. To do this I had to visit the districts, put the case fairly
before the men whom I saw, and make them understand that I was really
making a fight and would stay in the fight to the end. Yet there were
reformers who shook their heads and deplored my "activity" in the canvass.
Of course the one thing which corrupt machine politicians most desire is to
have decent men frown on the activity, that is, on the efficiency, of the
honest man who genuinely wishes to reform politics.
If efficiency is left solely to bad men, and if virtue is confined solely to
inefficient men, the result cannot be happy. When I entered politics there
were, as there always had been—and as there always will be—any number
of bad men in politics who were thoroughly efficient, and any number of
good men who would like to have done lofty things in politics but who
were thoroughly inefficient. If I wished to accomplish anything for the
country, my business was to combine decency and efficiency; to be a
thoroughly practical man of high ideals who did his best to reduce those

ideals to actual practice. This was my ideal, and to the best of my ability I
strove to live up to it.
To a young man, life in the New York Legislature was always interesting
and often entertaining. There was always a struggle of some kind on hand.
Sometimes it was on a naked question of right and wrong. Sometimes it
was on a question of real constructive statesmanship. Moreover, there were
all kinds of humorous incidents, the humor being usually of the
unconscious kind. In one session of the Legislature the New York City
Democratic representatives were split into two camps, and there were two
rivals for leadership. One of these was a thoroughly good-hearted, happy-
go-lucky person who was afterwards for several years in Congress. He had
been a local magistrate and was called Judge. Generally he and I were
friendly, but occasionally I did something that irritated him. He was always
willing to vote for any other member's bill himself, and he regarded it as
narrow-minded for any one to oppose one of his bills, especially if the
opposition was upon the ground that it was unconstitutional—for his views
of the Constitution were so excessively liberal as to make even me feel as if
I belonged to the straitest sect of strict constructionists. On one occasion he
had a bill to appropriate money, with obvious impropriety, for the relief of
some miscreant whom he styled "one of the honest yeomanry of the State."
When I explained to him that it was clearly unconstitutional, he answered,
"Me friend, the Constitution don't touch little things like that," and then
added, with an ingratiating smile, "Anyhow, I'd never allow the
Constitution to come between friends." At the time I was looking over the
proofs of Mr. Bryce's "American Commonwealth," and I told him the
incident. He put it into the first edition of the "Commonwealth"; whether it
is in the last edition or not, I cannot say.
On another occasion the same gentleman came to an issue with me in a
debate, and wound up his speech by explaining that I occupied what
"lawyers would call a quasi position on the bill." His rival was a man of
totally different type, a man of great natural dignity, also born in Ireland. He
had served with gallantry in the Civil War. After the close of the war he
organized an expedition to conquer Canada. The expedition, however, got
so drunk before reaching Albany that it was there incarcerated in jail,
whereupon its leader abandoned it and went into New York politics instead.
He was a man of influence, and later occupied in the Police Department the
same position as Commissioner which I myself at one time occupied. He

felt that his rival had gained too much glory at my expense, and, walking
over with ceremonious solemnity to where the said rival was sitting close
beside me, he said to him: "I would like you to know, Mr. Cameron
[Cameron, of course, was not the real name], that Mr. Roosevelt knows
more law in a wake than you do in a month; and, more than that, Michael
Cameron, what do you mane by quoting Latin on the floor of this House
when you don't know the alpha and omayga of the language?"
There was in the Legislature, during the deadlock above mentioned, a
man whom I will call Brogan. He looked like a serious elderly frog. I never
heard him speak more than once. It was before the Legislature was
organized, or had adopted any rules; and each day the only business was for
the clerk to call the roll. One day Brogan suddenly rose, and the following
dialogue occurred:

Brogan. Misther Clu-r-r-k!
The Clerk. The gentleman from New York.
Brogan. I rise to a point of ordher under the rules!
The Clerk. There are no rules.
Brogan. Thin I object to them!
The Clerk. There are no rules to object to.
Brogan. Oh! [nonplussed; but immediately recovering himself].
Thin I move that they be amended until there ar-r-re!

The deadlock was tedious; and we hailed with joy such enlivening
incidents as the above.
During my three years' service in the Legislature I worked on a very
simple philosophy of government. It was that personal character and
initiative are the prime requisites in political and social life. It was not only
a good but an absolutely indispensable theory as far as it went; but it was
defective in that it did not sufficiently allow for the need of collective
action. I shall never forget the men with whom I worked hand in hand in
these legislative struggles, not only my fellow-legislators, but some of the
newspaper reporters, such as Spinney and Cunningham; and then in
addition the men in the various districts who helped us. We had made up
our minds that we must not fight fire with fire, that on the contrary the way
to win out was to equal our foes in practical efficiency and yet to stand at
the opposite plane from them in applied morality.
It was not always easy to keep the just middle, especially when it
happened that on one side there were corrupt and unscrupulous
demagogues, and on the other side corrupt and unscrupulous reactionaries.

Our effort was to hold the scales even between both. We tried to stand with
the cause of righteousness even though its advocates were anything but
righteous. We endeavored to cut out the abuses of property, even though
good men of property were misled into upholding those abuses. We refused
to be frightened into sanctioning improper assaults upon property, although
we knew that the champions of property themselves did things that were
wicked and corrupt. We were as yet by no means as thoroughly awake as
we ought to have been to the need of controlling big business and to the
damage done by the combination of politics with big business. In this
matter I was not behind the rest of my friends; indeed, I was ahead of them,
for no serious leader in political life then appreciated the prime need of
grappling with these questions. One partial reason—not an excuse or a
justification, but a partial reason—for my slowness in grasping the
importance of action in these matters was the corrupt and unattractive
nature of so many of the men who championed popular reforms, their
insincerity, and the folly of so many of the actions which they advocated.
Even at that date I had neither sympathy with nor admiration for the man
who was merely a money king, and I did not regard the "money touch,"
when divorced from other qualities, as entitling a man to either respect or
consideration. As recited above, we did on more than one occasion fight
battles, in which we neither took nor gave quarter, against the most
prominent and powerful financiers and financial interests of the day. But
most of the fights in which we were engaged were for pure honesty and
decency, and they were more apt to be against that form of corruption which
found its expression in demagogy than against that form of corruption
which defended or advocated privilege. Fundamentally, our fight was part
of the eternal war against the Powers that Prey; and we cared not a whit in
what rank of life these powers were found.
To play the demagogue for purposes of self-interest is a cardinal sin
against the people in a democracy, exactly as to play the courtier for such
purposes is a cardinal sin against the people under other forms of
government. A man who stays long in our American political life, if he has
in his soul the generous desire to do effective service for great causes,
inevitably grows to regard himself merely as one of many instruments, all
of which it may be necessary to use, one at one time, one at another, in
achieving the triumph of those causes; and whenever the usefulness of any
one has been exhausted, it is to be thrown aside. If such a man is wise, he

will gladly do the thing that is next, when the time and the need come
together, without asking what the future holds for him. Let the half-god play
his part well and manfully, and then be content to draw aside when the god
appears. Nor should he feel vain regrets that to another it is given to render
greater services and reap a greater reward. Let it be enough for him that he
too has served, and that by doing well he has prepared the way for the other
man who can do better.

CHAPTER IV
IN COWBOY LAND

Though I had previously made a trip into the then Territory of Dakota,
beyond the Red River, it was not until 1883 that I went to the Little
Missouri, and there took hold of two cattle ranches, the Chimney Butte and
the Elkhorn.
It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of Owen
Wister's stories and Frederic Remington's drawings, the West of the Indian
and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cow-puncher. That land of the
West has gone now, "gone, gone with lost Atlantis," gone to the isle of
ghosts and of strange dead memories. It was a land of vast silent spaces, of
lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing
horseman. It was a land of scattered ranches, of herds of long-horned cattle,
and of reckless riders who unmoved looked in the eyes of life or of death.
In that land we led a free and hardy life, with horse and with rifle. We
worked under the scorching midsummer sun, when the wide plains
shimmered and wavered in the heat; and we knew the freezing misery of
riding night guard round the cattle in the late fall round-up. In the soft
springtime the stars were glorious in our eyes each night before we fell
asleep; and in the winter we rode through blinding blizzards, when the
driven snow-dust burned our faces. There were monotonous days, as we
guided the trail cattle or the beef herds, hour after hour, at the slowest of
walks; and minutes or hours teeming with excitement as we stopped
stampedes or swam the herds across rivers treacherous with quicksands or
brimmed with running ice. We knew toil and hardship and hunger and
thirst; and we saw men die violent deaths as they worked among the horses
and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another; but we felt the beat of
hardy life in our veins, and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.
It was right and necessary that this life should pass, for the safety of our
country lies in its being made the country of the small home-maker. The
great unfenced ranches, in the days of "free grass," necessarily represented
a temporary stage in our history. The large migratory flocks of sheep, each

guarded by the hired shepherds of absentee owners, were the first enemies
of the cattlemen; and owing to the way they ate out the grass and destroyed
all other vegetation, these roving sheep bands represented little of
permanent good to the country. But the homesteaders, the permanent
settlers, the men who took up each his own farm on which he lived and
brought up his family, these represented from the National standpoint the
most desirable of all possible users of, and dwellers on, the soil. Their
advent meant the breaking up of the big ranches; and the change was a
National gain, although to some of us an individual loss.
I first reached the Little Missouri on a Northern Pacific train about three
in the morning of a cool September day in 1883. Aside from the station, the
only building was a ramshackle structure called the Pyramid Park Hotel. I
dragged my duffle-bag thither, and hammered at the door until the frowsy
proprietor appeared, muttering oaths. He ushered me upstairs, where I was
given one of the fourteen beds in the room which by itself constituted the
entire upper floor. Next day I walked over to the abandoned army post, and,
after some hours among the gray log shacks, a ranchman who had driven
into the station agreed to take me out to his ranch, the Chimney Butte ranch,
where he was living with his brother and their partner.
The ranch was a log structure with a dirt roof, a corral for the horses near
by, and a chicken-house jabbed against the rear of the ranch house. Inside
there was only one room, with a table, three or four chairs, a cooking-stove,
and three bunks. The owners were Sylvane and Joe Ferris and William J.
Merrifield. Later all three of them held my commissions while I was
President. Merrifield was Marshal of Montana, and as Presidential elector
cast the vote of that State for me in 1904; Sylvane Ferris was Land Officer
in North Dakota, and Joe Ferris Postmaster at Medora. There was a fourth
man, George Meyer, who also worked for me later. That evening we all
played old sledge round the table, and at one period the game was
interrupted by a frightful squawking outside which told us that a bobcat had
made a raid on the chicken-house.
After a buffalo hunt with my original friend, Joe Ferris, I entered into
partnership with Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris, and we started a cow ranch,
with the maltese cross brand—always known as "maltee cross," by the way,
as the general impression along the Little Missouri was that "maltese" must
be a plural. Twenty-nine years later my four friends of that night were

delegates to the First Progressive National Convention at Chicago. They
were among my most constant companions for the few years next
succeeding the evening when the bobcat interrupted the game of old sledge.
I lived and worked with them on the ranch, and with them and many others
like them on the round-up; and I brought out from Maine, in order to start
the Elkhorn ranch lower down the river, my two backwoods friends Sewall
and Dow. My brands for the lower ranch were the elkhorn and triangle.
I do not believe there ever was any life more attractive to a vigorous
young fellow than life on a cattle ranch in those days. It was a fine, healthy
life, too; it taught a man self-reliance, hardihood, and the value of instant
decision—in short, the virtues that ought to come from life in the open
country. I enjoyed the life to the full. After the first year I built on the
Elkhorn ranch a long, low ranch house of hewn logs, with a veranda, and
with, in addition to the other rooms, a bedroom for myself, and a sitting-
room with a big fire-place. I got out a rocking-chair—I am very fond of
rocking-chairs—and enough books to fill two or three shelves, and a rubber
bathtub so that I could get a bath. And then I do not see how any one could
have lived more comfortably. We had buffalo robes and bearskins of our
own killing. We always kept the house clean—using the word in a rather
large sense. There were at least two rooms that were always warm, even in
the bitterest weather; and we had plenty to eat. Commonly the mainstay of
every meal was game of our own killing, usually antelope or deer,
sometimes grouse or ducks, and occasionally, in the earlier days, buffalo or
elk. We also had flour and bacon, sugar, salt, and canned tomatoes. And
later, when some of the men married and brought out their wives, we had all
kinds of good things, such as jams and jellies made from the wild plums
and the buffalo berries, and potatoes from the forlorn little garden patch.
Moreover, we had milk. Most ranchmen at that time never had milk. I knew
more than one ranch with ten thousand head of cattle where there was not a
cow that could be milked. We made up our minds that we would be more
enterprising. Accordingly, we started to domesticate some of the cows. Our
first effort was not successful, chiefly because we did not devote the needed
time and patience to the matter. And we found that to race a cow two miles
at full speed on horseback, then rope her, throw her, and turn her upside
down to milk her, while exhilarating as a pastime, was not productive of
results. Gradually we accumulated tame cows, and, after we had thinned out
the bobcats and coyotes, more chickens.

The ranch house stood on the brink of a low bluff overlooking the broad,
shallow bed of the Little Missouri, through which at most seasons there ran
only a trickle of water, while in times of freshet it was filled brimful with
the boiling, foaming, muddy torrent. There was no neighbor for ten or
fifteen miles on either side of me. The river twisted down in long curves
between narrow bottoms bordered by sheer cliff walls, for the Bad Lands, a
chaos of peaks, plateaus, and ridges, rose abruptly from the edges of the
level, tree-clad, or grassy, alluvial meadows. In front of the ranch-house
veranda was a row of cottonwood trees with gray-green leaves which
quivered all day long if there was a breath of air. From these trees came the
far-away, melancholy cooing of mourning doves, and little owls perched in
them and called tremulously at night. In the long summer afternoons we
would sometimes sit on the piazza, when there was no work to be done, for
an hour or two at a time, watching the cattle on the sand-bars, and the
sharply channeled and strangely carved amphitheater of cliffs across the
bottom opposite; while the vultures wheeled overhead, their black shadows
gliding across the glaring white of the dry river-bed. Sometimes from the
ranch we saw deer, and once when we needed meat I shot one across the
river as I stood on the piazza. In the winter, in the days of iron cold, when
everything was white under the snow, the river lay in its bed fixed and
immovable as a bar of bent steel, and then at night wolves and lynxes
traveled up and down it as if it had been a highway passing in front of the
ranch house. Often in the late fall or early winter, after a hard day's hunting,
or when returning from one of the winter line camps, we did not reach the
ranch until hours after sunset; and after the weary tramping in the cold it
was keen pleasure to catch the first red gleam of the fire-lit windows across
the snowy wastes.
The Elkhorn ranch house was built mainly by Sewall and Dow, who, like
most men from the Maine woods, were mighty with the ax. I could chop
fairly well for an amateur, but I could not do one-third the work they could.
One day when we were cutting down the cottonwood trees, to begin our
building operations, I heard some one ask Dow what the total cut had been,
and Dow not realizing that I was within hearing, answered: "Well, Bill cut
down fifty-three, I cut forty-nine, and the boss he beavered down
seventeen." Those who have seen the stump of a tree which has been
gnawed down by a beaver will understand the exact force of the
comparison.

In those days on a cow ranch the men were apt to be away on the various
round-ups at least half the time. It was interesting and exciting work, and
except for the lack of sleep on the spring and summer round-ups it was not
exhausting work; compared to lumbering or mining or blacksmithing, to sit
in the saddle is an easy form of labor. The ponies were of course grass-fed
and unshod. Each man had his own string of nine or ten. One pony would
be used for the morning work, one for the afternoon, and neither would
again be used for the next three days. A separate pony was kept for night
riding.
The spring and early summer round-ups were especially for the branding
of calves. There was much hard work and some risk on a round-up, but also
much fun. The meeting-place was appointed weeks beforehand, and all the
ranchmen of the territory to be covered by the round-up sent their
representatives. There were no fences in the West that I knew, and their
place was taken by the cowboy and the branding-iron. The cattle wandered
free. Each calf was branded with the brand of the cow it was following.
Sometimes in winter there was what we called line riding; that is, camps
were established and the line riders traveled a definite beat across the
desolate wastes of snow, to and fro from one camp to another, to prevent the
cattle from drifting. But as a rule nothing was done to keep the cattle in any
one place. In the spring there was a general round-up in each locality. Each
outfit took part in its own round-up, and all the outfits of a given region
combined to send representatives to the two or three round-ups that covered
the neighborhoods near by into which their cattle might drift. For example,
our Little Missouri round-up generally worked down the river from a
distance of some fifty or sixty miles above my ranch toward the Kildeer
Mountains, about the same distance below. In addition we would usually
send representatives to the Yellowstone round-up, and to the round-up along
the upper Little Missouri; and, moreover, if we heard that cattle had drifted,
perhaps toward the Indian reservation southeast of us, we would send a
wagon and rider after them.
At the meeting-point, which might be in the valley of a half-dry stream,
or in some broad bottom of the river itself, or perchance by a couple of
ponds under some queerly shaped butte that was a landmark for the region
round about, we would all gather on the appointed day. The chuck-wagons,
containing the bedding and food, each drawn by four horses and driven by
the teamster cook, would come jolting and rattling over the uneven sward.

Accompanying each wagon were eight or ten riders, the cow-punchers,
while their horses, a band of a hundred or so, were driven by the two
herders, one of whom was known as the day wrangler and one as the night
wrangler. The men were lean, sinewy fellows, accustomed to riding half-
broken horses at any speed over any country by day or by night. They wore
flannel shirts, with loose handkerchiefs knotted round their necks, broad
hats, high-heeled boots with jingling spurs, and sometimes leather shaps,
although often they merely had their trousers tucked into the tops of their
high boots. There was a good deal of rough horse-play, and, as with any
other gathering of men or boys of high animal spirits, the horse-play
sometimes became very rough indeed; and as the men usually carried
revolvers, and as there were occasionally one or two noted gun-fighters
among them, there was now and then a shooting affray. A man who was a
coward or who shirked his work had a bad time, of course; a man could not
afford to let himself be bullied or treated as a butt; and, on the other hand, if
he was "looking for a fight," he was certain to find it. But my own
experience was that if a man did not talk until his associates knew him well
and liked him, and if he did his work, he never had any difficulty in getting
on. In my own round-up district I speedily grew to be friends with most of
the men. When I went among strangers I always had to spend twenty-four
hours in living down the fact that I wore spectacles, remaining as long as I
could judiciously deaf to any side remarks about "four eyes," unless it
became evident that my being quiet was misconstrued and that it was better
to bring matters to a head at once.
If, for instance, I was sent off to represent the Little Missouri brands on
some neighboring round-up, such as the Yellowstone, I usually showed that
kind of diplomacy which consists in not uttering one word that can be
avoided. I would probably have a couple of days' solitary ride, mounted on
one horse and driving eight or ten others before me, one of them carrying
my bedding. Loose horses drive best at a trot, or canter, and if a man is
traveling alone in this fashion it is a good thing to have them reach the
camp ground sufficiently late to make them desire to feed and sleep where
they are until morning. In consequence I never spent more than two days on
the journey from whatever the point was at which I left the Little Missouri,
sleeping the one night for as limited a number of hours as possible.
As soon as I reached the meeting-place I would find out the wagon to
which I was assigned. Riding to it, I turned my horses into the saddle-band

and reported to the wagon boss, or, in his absence, to the cook—always a
privileged character, who was allowed and expected to order men around.
He would usually grumble savagely and profanely about my having been
put with his wagon, but this was merely conventional on his part; and if I
sat down and said nothing he would probably soon ask me if I wanted
anything to eat, to which the correct answer was that I was not hungry and
would wait until meal-time. The bedding rolls of the riders would be strewn
round the grass, and I would put mine down a little outside the ring, where I
would not be in any one's way, with my six or eight branding-irons beside
it. The men would ride in, laughing and talking with one another, and
perhaps nodding to me. One of their number, usually the wagon foreman,
might put some question to me as to what brands I represented, but no other
word would be addressed to me, nor would I be expected to volunteer any
conversation. Supper would consist of bacon, Dutch oven bread, and
possibly beef; once I won the good graces of my companions at the outset
by appearing with two antelope which I had shot. After supper I would roll
up in my bedding as soon as possible, and the others would follow suit at
their pleasure.
At three in the morning or thereabouts, at a yell from the cook, all hands
would turn hurriedly out. Dressing was a simple affair. Then each man
rolled and corded his bedding—if he did not, the cook would leave it
behind and he would go without any for the rest of the trip—and came to
the fire, where he picked out a tin cup, tin plate, and knife and fork, helped
himself to coffee and to whatever food there was, and ate it standing or
squatting as best suited him. Dawn was probably breaking by this time, and
the trampling of unshod hoofs showed that the night wrangler was bringing
in the pony herd. Two of the men would then run ropes from the wagon at
right angles to one another, and into this as a corral the horses would be
driven. Each man might rope one of his own horses, or more often point it
out to the most skillful roper of the outfit, who would rope it for him—for if
the man was an unskillful roper and roped the wrong horse or roped the
horse in the wrong place there was a chance of the whole herd stampeding.
Each man then saddled and bridled his horse. This was usually followed by
some resolute bucking on the part of two or three of the horses, especially
in the early days of each round-up. The bucking was always a source of
amusement to all the men whose horses did not buck, and these fortunate
ones would gather round giving ironical advice, and especially adjuring the

rider not to "go to leather"—that is, not to steady himself in the saddle by
catching hold of the saddle-horn.
As soon as the men had mounted, the whole outfit started on the long
circle, the morning circle. Usually the ranch foreman who bossed a given
wagon was put in charge of the men of one group by the round-up foreman;
he might keep his men together until they had gone some ten or fifteen
miles from camp, and then drop them in couples at different points. Each
couple made its way toward the wagon, gathering all the cattle it could find.
The morning's ride might last six or eight hours, and it was still longer
before some of the men got in. Singly and in twos and threes they appeared
from every quarter of the horizon, the dust rising from the hoofs of the
steers and bulls, the cows and calves, they had collected. Two or three of
the men were left to take care of the herd while the others changed horses,
ate a hasty dinner, and then came out to the afternoon work. This consisted
of each man in succession being sent into the herd, usually with a
companion, to cut out the cows of his brand or brands which were followed
by unbranded calves, and also to cut out any mavericks or unbranded
yearlings. We worked each animal gently out to the edge of the herd, and
then with a sudden dash took it off at a run. It was always desperately
anxious to break back and rejoin the herd. There was much breakneck
galloping and twisting and turning before its desire was thwarted and it was
driven to join the rest of the cut—that is, the other animals which had been
cut out, and which were being held by one or two other men. Cattle hate
being alone, and it was no easy matter to hold the first one or two that were
cut out; but soon they got a little herd of their own, and then they were
contented. When the cutting out had all been done, the calves were branded,
and all misadventures of the "calf wrestlers," the men who seized, threw,
and held each calf when roped by the mounted roper, were hailed with
yelling laughter. Then the animals which for one reason or another it was
desired to drive along with the round-up were put into one herd and left in
charge of a couple of night guards, and the rest of us would loaf back to the
wagon for supper and bed.
By this time I would have been accepted as one of the rest of the outfit,
and all strangeness would have passed off, the attitude of my fellow cow-
punchers being one of friendly forgiveness even toward my spectacles.
Night guards for the cattle herd were then assigned by the captain of the
wagon, or perhaps by the round-up foreman, according to the needs of the

case, the guards standing for two hours at a time from eight in the evening
till four in the morning. The first and last watches were preferable, because
sleep was not broken as in both of the other two. If things went well, the
cattle would soon bed down and nothing further would occur until morning,
when there was a repetition of the work, the wagon moving each day eight
or ten miles to some appointed camping-place.
Each man would picket his night horse near the wagon, usually choosing
the quietest animal in his string for that purpose, because to saddle and
mount a "mean" horse at night is not pleasant. When utterly tired, it was
hard to have to get up for one's trick at night herd. Nevertheless, on
ordinary nights the two hours round the cattle in the still darkness were
pleasant. The loneliness, under the vast empty sky, and the silence, in which
the breathing of the cattle sounded loud, and the alert readiness to meet any
emergency which might suddenly arise out of the formless night, all
combined to give one a sense of subdued interest. Then, one soon got to
know the cattle of marked individuality, the ones that led the others into
mischief; and one also grew to recognize the traits they all possessed in
common, and the impulses which, for instance, made a whole herd get up
towards midnight, each beast turning round and then lying down again. But
by the end of the watch each rider had studied the cattle until it grew
monotonous, and heartily welcomed his relief guard. A newcomer, of
course, had any amount to learn, and sometimes the simplest things were
those which brought him to grief.
One night early in my career I failed satisfactorily to identify the
direction in which I was to go in order to reach the night herd. It was a
pitch-dark night. I managed to get started wrong, and I never found either
the herd or the wagon again until sunrise, when I was greeted with
withering scorn by the injured cow-puncher, who had been obliged to stand
double guard because I failed to relieve him.
There were other misadventures that I met with where the excuse was
greater. The punchers on night guard usually rode round the cattle in reverse
directions; calling and singing to them if the beasts seemed restless, to keep
them quiet. On rare occasions something happened that made the cattle
stampede, and then the duty of the riders was to keep with them as long as
possible and try gradually to get control of them.

One night there was a heavy storm, and all of us who were at the wagons
were obliged to turn out hastily to help the night herders. After a while there
was a terrific peal of thunder, the lightning struck right by the herd, and
away all the beasts went, heads and horns and tails in the air. For a minute
or two I could make out nothing except the dark forms of the beasts running
on every side of me, and I should have been very sorry if my horse had
stumbled, for those behind would have trodden me down. Then the herd
split, part going to one side, while the other part seemingly kept straight
ahead, and I galloped as hard as ever beside them. I was trying to reach the
point—the leading animals—in order to turn them, when suddenly there
was a tremendous splashing in front. I could dimly make out that the cattle
immediately ahead and to one side of me were disappearing, and the next
moment the horse and I went off a cut bank into the Little Missouri. I bent
away back in the saddle, and though the horse almost went down he just
recovered himself, and, plunging and struggling through water and
quicksand, we made the other side. Here I discovered that there was another
cowboy with the same part of the herd that I was with; but almost
immediately we separated. I galloped hard through a bottom covered with
big cottonwood trees, and stopped the part of the herd that I was with, but
very soon they broke on me again, and repeated this twice. Finally toward
morning the few I had left came to a halt.
It had been raining hard for some time. I got off my horse and leaned
against a tree, but before long the infernal cattle started on again, and I had
to ride after them. Dawn came soon after this, and I was able to make out
where I was and head the cattle back, collecting other little bunches as I
went. After a while I came on a cowboy on foot carrying his saddle on his
head. He was my companion of the previous night. His horse had gone full
speed into a tree and killed itself, the man, however, not being hurt. I could
not help him, as I had all I could do to handle the cattle. When I got them to
the wagon, most of the other men had already come in and the riders were
just starting on the long circle. One of the men changed my horse for me
while I ate a hasty breakfast, and then we were off for the day's work.
As only about half of the night herd had been brought back, the circle
riding was particularly heavy, and it was ten hours before we were back at
the wagon. We then changed horses again and worked the whole herd until
after sunset, finishing just as it grew too dark to do anything more. By this
time I had been nearly forty hours in the saddle, changing horses five times,

and my clothes had thoroughly dried on me, and I fell asleep as soon as I
touched the bedding. Fortunately some men who had gotten in late in the
morning had had their sleep during the daytime, so that the rest of us
escaped night guard and were not called until four next morning. Nobody
ever gets enough sleep on a round-up.
The above was the longest number of consecutive hours I ever had to be
in the saddle. But, as I have said, I changed horses five times, and it is a
great lightening of labor for a rider to have a fresh horse. Once when with
Sylvane Ferris I spent about sixteen hours on one horse, riding seventy or
eighty miles. The round-up had reached a place called the ox-bow of the
Little Missouri, and we had to ride there, do some work around the cattle,
and ride back.
Another time I was twenty-four hours on horseback in company with
Merrifield without changing horses. On this occasion we did not travel fast.
We had been coming back with the wagon from a hunting trip in the Big
Horn Mountains. The team was fagged out, and we were tired of walking at
a snail's pace beside it. When we reached country that the driver thoroughly
knew, we thought it safe to leave him, and we loped in one night across a
distance which it took the wagon the three following days to cover. It was a
beautiful moonlight night, and the ride was delightful. All day long we had
plodded at a walk, weary and hot. At supper time we had rested two or three
hours, and the tough little riding horses seemed as fresh as ever. It was in
September. As we rode out of the circle of the firelight, the air was cool in
our faces. Under the bright moonlight, and then under the starlight, we
loped and cantered mile after mile over the high prairie. We passed bands of
antelope and herds of long-horn Texas cattle, and at last, just as the first red
beams of the sun flamed over the bluffs in front of us, we rode down into
the valley of the Little Missouri, where our ranch house stood.
I never became a good roper, nor more than an average rider, according
to ranch standards. Of course a man on a ranch has to ride a good many bad
horses, and is bound to encounter a certain number of accidents, and of
these I had my share, at one time cracking a rib, and on another occasion
the point of my shoulder. We were hundreds of miles from a doctor, and
each time, as I was on the round-up, I had to get through my work for the
next few weeks as best I could, until the injury healed of itself. When I had
the opportunity I broke my own horses, doing it gently and gradually and

spending much time over it, and choosing the horses that seemed gentle to
begin with. With these horses I never had any difficulty. But frequently
there was neither time nor opportunity to handle our mounts so elaborately.
We might get a band of horses, each having been bridled and saddled two or
three times, but none of them having been broken beyond the extent implied
in this bridling and saddling. Then each of us in succession would choose a
horse (for his string), I as owner of the ranch being given the first choice on
each round, so to speak. The first time I was ever on a round-up Sylvane
Ferris, Merrifield, Meyer, and I each chose his string in this fashion. Three
or four of the animals I got were not easy to ride. The effort both to ride
them and to look as if I enjoyed doing so, on some cool morning when my
grinning cowboy friends had gathered round "to see whether the high-
headed bay could buck the boss off," doubtless was of benefit to me, but
lacked much of being enjoyable. The time I smashed my rib I was bucked
off on a stone. The time I hurt the point of my shoulder I was riding a big,
sulky horse named Ben Butler, which went over backwards with me. When
we got up it still refused to go anywhere; so, while I sat it, Sylvane Ferris
and George Meyer got their ropes on its neck and dragged it a few hundred
yards, choking but stubborn, all four feet firmly planted and plowing the
ground. When they released the ropes it lay down and wouldn't get up. The
round-up had started; so Sylvane gave me his horse, Baldy, which
sometimes bucked but never went over backwards, and he got on the now
rearisen Ben Butler. To my discomfiture Ben started quietly beside us,
while Sylvane remarked, "Why, there's nothing the matter with this horse;
he's a plumb gentle horse." Then Ben fell slightly behind and I heard
Sylvane again, "That's all right! Come along! Here, you! Go on, you! Hi, hi,
fellows, help me out! he's lying on me!" Sure enough, he was; and when we
dragged Sylvane from under him the first thing the rescued Sylvane did was
to execute a war-dance, spurs and all, on the iniquitous Ben. We could do
nothing with him that day; subsequently we got him so that we could ride
him; but he never became a nice saddle-horse.
As with all other forms of work, so on the round-up, a man of ordinary
power, who nevertheless does not shirk things merely because they are
disagreeable or irksome, soon earns his place. There were crack riders and
ropers who, just because they felt such overweening pride in their own
prowess, were not really very valuable men. Continually on the circles a
cow or a calf would get into some thick patch of bulberry bush and refuse to

come out; or when it was getting late we would pass some bad lands that
would probably not contain cattle, but might; or a steer would turn fighting
mad, or a calf grow tired and want to lie down. If in such a case the man
steadily persists in doing the unattractive thing, and after two hours of
exasperation and harassment does finally get the cow out, and keep her out,
of the bulberry bushes, and drives her to the wagon, or finds some animals
that have been passed by in the fourth or fifth patch of bad lands he hunts
through, or gets the calf up on his saddle and takes it in anyhow, the
foreman soon grows to treat him as having his uses and as being an asset of
worth in the round-up, even though neither a fancy roper nor a fancy rider.
When at the Progressive Convention last August, I met George Meyer for
the first time in many years, and he recalled to me an incident on one
round-up where we happened to be thrown together while driving some
cows and calves to camp. When the camp was only just across the river,
two of the calves positively refused to go any further. He took one of them
in his arms, and after some hazardous maneuvering managed to get on his
horse, in spite of the objections of the latter, and rode into the river. My calf
was too big for such treatment, so in despair I roped it, intending to drag it
over. However, as soon as I roped it, the calf started bouncing and bleating,
and, owing to some lack of dexterity on my part, suddenly swung round the
rear of the horse, bringing the rope under his tail. Down went the tail tight,
and the horse "went into figures," as the cow-puncher phrase of that day
was. There was a cut bank about four feet high on the hither side of the
river, and over this the horse bucked. We went into the water with a splash.
With a "pluck" the calf followed, described a parabola in the air, and landed
beside us. Fortunately, this took the rope out from under the horse's tail, but
left him thoroughly frightened. He could not do much bucking in the
stream, for there were one or two places where we had to swim, and the
shallows were either sandy or muddy; but across we went, at speed, and the
calf made a wake like Pharaoh's army in the Red Sea.
On several occasions we had to fight fire. In the geography books of my
youth prairie fires were always portrayed as taking place in long grass, and
all living things ran before them. On the Northern cattle plains the grass
was never long enough to be a source of danger to man or beast. The fires
were nothing like the forest fires in the Northern woods. But they destroyed
large quantities of feed, and we had to stop them where possible. The
process we usually followed was to kill a steer, split it in two lengthwise,

and then have two riders drag each half-steer, the rope of one running from
his saddle-horn to the front leg, and that of the other to the hind leg. One of
the men would spur his horse over or through the line of fire, and the two
would then ride forward, dragging the steer bloody side downward along
the line of flame, men following on foot with slickers or wet horse-blankets,
to beat out any flickering blaze that was still left. It was exciting work, for
the fire and the twitching and plucking of the ox carcass over the uneven
ground maddened the fierce little horses so that it was necessary to do some
riding in order to keep them to their work. After a while it also became very
exhausting, the thirst and fatigue being great, as, with parched lips and
blackened from head to foot, we toiled at our task.
In those years the Stockman's Association of Montana was a powerful
body. I was the delegate to it from the Little Missouri. The meetings that I
attended were held in Miles City, at that time a typical cow town. Stockmen
of all kinds attended, including the biggest men in the stock business, men
like old Conrad Kohrs, who was and is the finest type of pioneer in all the
Rocky Mountain country; and Granville Stewart, who was afterwards
appointed Minister by Cleveland, I think to the Argentine; and "Hashknife"
Simpson, a Texan who had brought his cattle, the Hashknife brand, up the
trail into our country. He and I grew to be great friends. I can see him now
the first time we met, grinning at me as, none too comfortable, I sat a half-
broken horse at the edge of a cattle herd we were working. His son Sloan
Simpson went to Harvard, was one of the first-class men in my regiment,
and afterwards held my commission as Postmaster at Dallas.
At the stockmen's meeting in Miles City, in addition to the big stockmen,
there were always hundreds of cowboys galloping up and down the wide
dusty streets at every hour of the day and night. It was a picturesque sight
during the three days the meetings lasted. There was always at least one big
dance at the hotel. There were few dress suits, but there was perfect
decorum at the dance, and in the square dances most of the men knew the
figures far better than I did. With such a crowd in town, sleeping
accommodations of any sort were at a premium, and in the hotel there were
two men in every bed. On one occasion I had a roommate whom I never
saw, because he always went to bed much later than I did and I always got
up much earlier than he did. On the last day, however, he rose at the same
time and I saw that he was a man I knew named Carter, and nicknamed

"Modesty" Carter. He was a stalwart, good-looking fellow, and I was sorry
when later I heard that he had been killed in a shooting row.
When I went West, the last great Indian wars had just come to an end, but
there were still sporadic outbreaks here and there, and occasionally bands of
marauding young braves were a menace to outlying and lonely settlements.
Many of the white men were themselves lawless and brutal, and prone to
commit outrages on the Indians. Unfortunately, each race tended to hold all
the members of the other race responsible for the misdeeds of a few, so that
the crime of the miscreant, red or white, who committed the original
outrage too often invited retaliation upon entirely innocent people, and this
action would in its turn arouse bitter feeling which found vent in still more
indiscriminate retaliation. The first year I was on the Little Missouri some
Sioux bucks ran off all the horses of a buffalo-hunter's outfit. One of the
buffalo-hunters tried to get even by stealing the horses of a Cheyenne
hunting party, and when pursued made for a cow camp, with, as a result, a
long-range skirmish between the cowboys and the Cheyennes. One of the
latter was wounded; but this particular wounded man seemed to have more
sense than the other participants in the chain of wrong-doing, and
discriminated among the whites. He came into our camp and had his wound
dressed.
A year later I was at a desolate little mud road ranch on the Deadwood
trail. It was kept by a very capable and very forceful woman, with sound
ideas of justice and abundantly well able to hold her own. Her husband was
a worthless devil, who finally got drunk on some whisky he obtained from
an outfit of Missouri bull-whackers—that is, freighters, driving ox wagons.
Under the stimulus of the whisky he picked a quarrel with his wife and
attempted to beat her. She knocked him down with a stove-lid lifter, and the
admiring bull-whackers bore him off, leaving the lady in full possession of
the ranch. When I visited her she had a man named Crow Joe working for
her, a slab-sided, shifty-eyed person who later, as I heard my foreman
explain, "skipped the country with a bunch of horses." The mistress of the
ranch made first-class buckskin shirts of great durability. The one she made
for me, and which I used for years, was used by one of my sons in Arizona
a couple of winters ago. I had ridden down into the country after some lost
horses, and visited the ranch to get her to make me the buckskin shirt in
question. There were, at the moment, three Indians there, Sioux, well
behaved and self-respecting, and she explained to me that they had been

resting there waiting for dinner, and that a white man had come along and
tried to run off their horses. The Indians were on the lookout, however, and,
running out, they caught the man; but, after retaking their horses and
depriving him of his gun, they let him go. "I don't see why they let him go,"
exclaimed my hostess. "I don't believe in stealing Indians' horses any more
than white folks'; so I told 'em they could go along and hang him—I'd never
cheep. Anyhow, I won't charge them anything for their dinner," concluded
my hostess. She was in advance of the usual morality of the time and place,
which drew a sharp line between stealing citizens' horses and stealing
horses from the Government or the Indians.
A fairly decent citizen, Jap Hunt, who long ago met a violent death,
exemplified this attitude towards Indians in some remarks I once heard him
make. He had started a horse ranch, and had quite honestly purchased a
number of broken-down horses of different brands, with the view of
doctoring them and selling them again. About this time there had been
much horse-stealing and cattle-killing in our Territory and in Montana, and
under the direction of some of the big cattle-growers a committee of
vigilantes had been organized to take action against the rustlers, as the horse
thieves and cattle thieves were called. The vigilantes, or stranglers, as they
were locally known, did their work thoroughly; but, as always happens with
bodies of the kind, toward the end they grew reckless in their actions, paid
off private grudges, and hung men on slight provocation. Riding into Jap
Hunt's ranch, they nearly hung him because he had so many horses of
different brands. He was finally let off. He was much upset by the incident,
and explained again and again, "The idea of saying that I was a horse thief!
Why, I never stole a horse in my life—leastways from a white man. I don't
count Indians nor the Government, of course." Jap had been reared among
men still in the stage of tribal morality, and while they recognized their
obligations to one another, both the Government and the Indians seemed
alien bodies, in regard to which the laws of morality did not apply.
On the other hand, parties of savage young bucks would treat lonely
settlers just as badly, and in addition sometimes murder them. Such a party
was generally composed of young fellows burning to distinguish
themselves. Some one of their number would have obtained a pass from the
Indian Agent allowing him to travel off the reservation, which pass would
be flourished whenever their action was questioned by bodies of whites of
equal strength. I once had a trifling encounter with such a band. I was

making my way along the edge of the bad lands, northward from my lower
ranch, and was just crossing a plateau when five Indians rode up over the
further rim. The instant they saw me they whipped out their guns and raced
full speed at me, yelling and flogging their horses. I was on a favorite horse,
Manitou, who was a wise old fellow, with nerves not to be shaken by
anything. I at once leaped off him and stood with my rifle ready.
It was possible that the Indians were merely making a bluff and intended
no mischief. But I did not like their actions, and I thought it likely that if I
allowed them to get hold of me they would at least take my horse and rifle,
and possibly kill me. So I waited until they were a hundred yards off and
then drew a bead on the first. Indians—and, for the matter of that, white
men—do not like to ride in on a man who is cool and means shooting, and
in a twinkling every man was lying over the side of his horse, and all five
had turned and were galloping backwards, having altered their course as
quickly as so many teal ducks.
After this one of them made the peace sign, with his blanket first, and
then, as he rode toward me, with his open hand. I halted him at a fair
distance and asked him what he wanted. He exclaimed, "How! Me good
Injun, me good Injun," and tried to show me the dirty piece of paper on
which his agency pass was written. I told him with sincerity that I was glad
that he was a good Indian, but that he must not come any closer. He then
asked for sugar and tobacco. I told him I had none. Another Indian began
slowly drifting toward me in spite of my calling out to keep back, so I once
more aimed with my rifle, whereupon both Indians slipped to the other side
of their horses and galloped off, with oaths that did credit to at least one
side of their acquaintance with English. I now mounted and pushed over the
plateau on to the open prairie. In those days an Indian, although not as good
a shot as a white man, was infinitely better at crawling under and taking
advantage of cover; and the worst thing a white man could do was to get
into cover, whereas out in the open if he kept his head he had a good chance
of standing off even half a dozen assailants. The Indians accompanied me
for a couple of miles. Then I reached the open prairie, and resumed my
northward ride, not being further molested.
In the old days in the ranch country we depended upon game for fresh
meat. Nobody liked to kill a beef, and although now and then a maverick
yearling might be killed on the round-up, most of us looked askance at the

deed, because if the practice of beef-killing was ever allowed to start, the
rustlers—the horse thieves and cattle thieves—would be sure to seize on it
as an excuse for general slaughter. Getting meat for the ranch usually
devolved upon me. I almost always carried a rifle when I rode, either in a
scabbard under my thigh, or across the pommel. Often I would pick up a
deer or antelope while about my regular work, when visiting a line camp or
riding after the cattle. At other times I would make a day's trip after them. In
the fall we sometimes took a wagon and made a week's hunt, returning with
eight or ten deer carcasses, and perhaps an elk or a mountain sheep as well.
I never became more than a fair hunter, and at times I had most
exasperating experiences, either failing to see game which I ought to have
seen, or committing some blunder in the stalk, or failing to kill when I fired.
Looking back, I am inclined to say that if I had any good quality as a hunter
it was that of perseverance. "It is dogged that does it" in hunting as in many
other things. Unless in wholly exceptional cases, when we were very
hungry, I never killed anything but bucks.
Occasionally I made long trips away from the ranch and among the
Rocky Mountains with my ranch foreman Merrifield; or in later years with
Tazewell Woody, John Willis, or John Goff. We hunted bears, both the black
and the grizzly, cougars and wolves, and moose, wapiti, and white goat. On
one of these trips I killed a bison bull, and I also killed a bison bull on the
Little Missouri some fifty miles south of my ranch on a trip which Joe
Ferris and I took together. It was rather a rough trip. Each of us carried only
his slicker behind him on the saddle, with some flour and bacon done up in
it. We met with all kinds of misadventures. Finally one night, when we were
sleeping by a slimy little prairie pool where there was not a stick of wood,
we had to tie the horses to the horns of our saddles; and then we went to
sleep with our heads on the saddles. In the middle of the night something
stampeded the horses, and away they went, with the saddles after them. As
we jumped to our feet Joe eyed me with an evident suspicion that I was the
Jonah of the party, and said: "O Lord! I've never done anything to deserve
this. Did you ever do anything to deserve this?"
In addition to my private duties, I sometimes served as deputy sheriff for
the northern end of our county. The sheriff and I crisscrossed in our public
and private relations. He often worked for me as a hired hand at the same
time that I was his deputy. His name, or at least the name he went by, was
Bill Jones, and as there were in the neighborhood several Bill Joneses—

Three Seven Bill Jones, Texas Bill Jones, and the like—the sheriff was
known as Hell Roaring Bill Jones. He was a thorough frontiersman,
excellent in all kinds of emergencies, and a very game man. I became much
attached to him. He was a thoroughly good citizen when sober, but he was a
little wild when drunk. Unfortunately, toward the end of his life he got to
drinking very heavily. When, in 1905, John Burroughs and I visited the
Yellowstone Park, poor Bill Jones, very much down in the world, was
driving a team in Gardiner outside the park. I had looked forward to seeing
him, and he was equally anxious to see me. He kept telling his cronies of
our intimacy and of what we were going to do together, and then got
drinking; and the result was that by the time I reached Gardiner he had to be
carried out and left in the sage-brush. When I came out of the park, I sent on
in advance to tell them to be sure to keep him sober, and they did so. But it
was a rather sad interview. The old fellow had gone to pieces, and soon
after I left he got lost in a blizzard and was dead when they found him.
Bill Jones was a gun-fighter and also a good man with his fists. On one
occasion there was an election in town. There had been many threats that
the party of disorder would import section hands from the neighboring
railway stations to down our side. I did not reach Medora, the forlorn little
cattle town which was our county seat, until the election was well under
way. I then asked one of my friends if there had been any disorder. Bill
Jones was standing by. "Disorder hell!" said my friend. "Bill Jones just
stood there with one hand on his gun and the other pointing over toward the
new jail whenever any man who didn't have a right to vote came near the
polls. There was only one of them tried to vote, and Bill knocked him
down. Lord!" added my friend, meditatively, "the way that man fell!"
"Well," struck in Bill Jones, "if he hadn't fell I'd have walked round behind
him to see what was propping him up!"
In the days when I lived on the ranch I usually spent most of the winter in
the East, and when I returned in the early spring I was always interested in
finding out what had happened since my departure. On one occasion I was
met by Bill Jones and Sylvane Ferris, and in the course of our conversation
they mentioned "the lunatic." This led to a question on my part, and
Sylvane Ferris began the story: "Well, you see, he was on a train and he
shot the newsboy. At first they weren't going to do anything to him, for they
thought he just had it in for the newsboy. But then somebody said, 'Why,
he's plumb crazy, and he's liable to shoot any of us!' and then they threw

him off the train. It was here at Medora, and they asked if anybody would
take care of him, and Bill Jones said he would, because he was the sheriff
and the jail had two rooms, and he was living in one and would put the
lunatic in the other." Here Bill Jones interrupted: "Yes, and more fool me! I
wouldn't take charge of another lunatic if the whole county asked me. Why"
(with the air of a man announcing an astounding discovery), "that lunatic
didn't have his right senses! He wouldn't eat, till me and Snyder got him
down on the shavings and made him eat." Snyder was a huge, happy-go-
lucky, kind-hearted Pennsylvania Dutchman, and was Bill Jones's chief
deputy. Bill continued: "You know, Snyder's soft-hearted, he is. Well, he'd
think that lunatic looked peaked, and he'd take him out for an airing. Then
the boys would get joshing him as to how much start he could give him
over the prairie and catch him again." Apparently the amount of the start
given the lunatic depended upon the amount of the bet to which the joshing
led up. I asked Bill what he would have done if Snyder hadn't caught the
lunatic. This was evidently a new idea, and he responded that Snyder
always did catch him. "Well, but suppose he hadn't caught him?" "Well,"
said Bill Jones, "if Snyder hadn't caught the lunatic, I'd have whaled hell out
of Snyder!"
Under these circumstances Snyder ran his best and always did catch the
patient. It must not be gathered from this that the lunatic was badly treated.
He was well treated. He become greatly attached to both Bill Jones and
Snyder, and he objected strongly when, after the frontier theory of treatment
of the insane had received a full trial, he was finally sent off to the territorial
capital. It was merely that all the relations of life in that place and day were
so managed as to give ample opportunity for the expression of individuality,
whether in sheriff or ranchman. The local practical joker once attempted to
have some fun at the expense of the lunatic, and Bill Jones described the
result. "You know Bixby, don't you? Well," with deep disapproval, "Bixby
thinks he is funny, he does. He'd come and he'd wake that lunatic up at
night, and I'd have to get up and soothe him. I fixed Bixby all right, though.
I fastened a rope on the latch, and next time Bixby came I let the lunatic out
on him. He 'most bit Bixby's nose off. I learned Bixby!"
Bill Jones had been unconventional in other relations besides that of
sheriff. He once casually mentioned to me that he had served on the police
force of Bismarck, but he had left because he "beat the Mayor over the head
with his gun one day." He added: "The Mayor, he didn't mind it, but the

Superintendent of Police said he guessed I'd better resign." His feeling,
obviously, was that the Superintendent of Police was a martinet, unfit to
take large views of life.
It was while with Bill Jones that I first made acquaintance with Seth
Bullock. Seth was at that time sheriff in the Black Hills district, and a man
he had wanted—a horse thief—I finally got, I being at the time deputy
sheriff two or three hundred miles to the north. The man went by a
nickname which I will call "Crazy Steve"; a year or two afterwards I
received a letter asking about him from his uncle, a thoroughly respectable
man in a Western State; and later this uncle and I met at Washington when I
was President and he a United States Senator. It was some time after
"Steve's" capture that I went down to Deadwood on business, Sylvane
Ferris and I on horseback, while Bill Jones drove the wagon. At a little
town, Spearfish, I think, after crossing the last eighty or ninety miles of
gumbo prairies, we met Seth Bullock. We had had rather a rough trip, and
had lain out for a fortnight, so I suppose we looked somewhat unkempt.
Seth received us with rather distant courtesy at first, but unbent when he
found out who we were, remarking, "You see, by your looks I thought you
were some kind of a tin-horn gambling outfit, and that I might have to keep
an eye on you!" He then inquired after the capture of "Steve"—with a little
of the air of one sportsman when another has shot a quail that either might
have claimed—"My bird, I believe?" Later Seth Bullock became, and has
ever since remained, one of my stanchest and most valued friends. He
served as Marshal for South Dakota under me as President. When, after the
close of my term, I went to Africa, on getting back to Europe I cabled Seth
Bullock to bring over Mrs. Bullock and meet me in London, which he did;
by that time I felt that I just had to meet my own people, who spoke my
neighborhood dialect.
When serving as deputy sheriff I was impressed with the advantage the
officer of the law has over ordinary wrong-doers, provided he thoroughly
knows his own mind. There are exceptional outlaws, men with a price on
their heads and of remarkable prowess, who are utterly indifferent to taking
life, and whose warfare against society is as open as that of a savage on the
war-path. The law officer has no advantage whatever over these men save
what his own prowess may—or may not—give him. Such a man was Billy
the Kid, the notorious man-killer and desperado of New Mexico, who was
himself finally slain by a friend of mine, Pat Garrett, whom, when I was

President, I made collector of customs at El Paso. But the ordinary criminal,
even when murderously inclined, feels just a moment's hesitation as to
whether he cares to kill an officer of the law engaged in his duty. I took in
more than one man who was probably a better man than I was with both
rifle and revolver; but in each case I knew just what I wanted to do, and,
like David Harum, I "did it first," whereas the fraction of a second that the
other man hesitated put him in a position where it was useless for him to
resist.
I owe more than I can ever express to the West, which of course means to
the men and women I met in the West. There were a few people of bad type
in my neighborhood—that would be true of every group of men, even in a
theological seminary—but I could not speak with too great affection and
respect of the great majority of my friends, the hard-working men and
women who dwelt for a space of perhaps a hundred and fifty miles along
the Little Missouri. I was always as welcome at their houses as they were at
mine. Everybody worked, everybody was willing to help everybody else,
and yet nobody asked any favors. The same thing was true of the people
whom I got to know fifty miles east and fifty miles west of my own range,
and of the men I met on the round-ups. They soon accepted me as a friend
and fellow-worker who stood on an equal footing with them, and I believe
the most of them have kept their feeling for me ever since. No guests were
ever more welcome at the White House than these old friends of the cattle
ranches and the cow camps—the men with whom I had ridden the long
circle and eaten at the tail-board of a chuck-wagon—whenever they turned
up at Washington during my Presidency. I remember one of them who
appeared at Washington one day just before lunch, a huge, powerful man
who, when I knew him, had been distinctly a fighting character. It happened
that on that day another old friend, the British Ambassador, Mr. Bryce, was
among those coming to lunch. Just before we went in I turned to my cow-
puncher friend and said to him with great solemnity, "Remember, Jim, that
if you shot at the feet of the British Ambassador to make him dance, it
would be likely to cause international complications"; to which Jim
responded with unaffected horror, "Why, Colonel, I shouldn't think of it, I
shouldn't think of it!"
Not only did the men and women whom I met in the cow country quite
unconsciously help me, by the insight which working and living with them
enabled me to get into the mind and soul of the average American of the

right type, but they helped me in another way. I made up my mind that the
men were of just the kind whom it would be well to have with me if ever it
became necessary to go to war. When the Spanish War came, I gave this
thought practical realization.
Fortunately, Wister and Remington, with pen and pencil, have made these
men live as long as our literature lives. I have sometimes been asked if
Wister's "Virginian" is not overdrawn; why, one of the men I have
mentioned in this chapter was in all essentials the Virginian in real life, not
only in his force but in his charm. Half of the men I worked with or played
with and half of the men who soldiered with me afterwards in my regiment
might have walked out of Wister's stories or Remington's pictures.
There were bad characters in the Western country at that time, of course,
and under the conditions of life they were probably more dangerous than
they would have been elsewhere. I hardly ever had any difficulty, however.
I never went into a saloon, and in the little hotels I kept out of the bar-room
unless, as sometimes happened, the bar-room was the only room on the
lower floor except the dining-room. I always endeavored to keep out of a
quarrel until self-respect forbade my making any further effort to avoid it,
and I very rarely had even the semblance of trouble.
Of course amusing incidents occurred now and then. Usually these took
place when I was hunting lost horses, for in hunting lost horses I was
ordinarily alone, and occasionally had to travel a hundred or a hundred and
fifty miles away from my own country. On one such occasion I reached a
little cow town long after dark, stabled my horse in an empty outbuilding,
and when I reached the hotel was informed in response to my request for a
bed that I could have the last one left, as there was only one other man in it.
The room to which I was shown contained two double beds; one contained
two men fast asleep, and the other only one man, also asleep. This man
proved to be a friend, one of the Bill Joneses whom I have previously
mentioned. I undressed according to the fashion of the day and place, that
is, I put my trousers, boots, shaps, and gun down beside the bed, and turned
in. A couple of hours later I was awakened by the door being thrown open
and a lantern flashed in my face, the light gleaming on the muzzle of a
cocked .45. Another man said to the lantern-bearer, "It ain't him"; the next
moment my bedfellow was covered with two guns, and addressed, "Now,
Bill, don't make a fuss, but come along quiet." "I'm not thinking of making

a fuss," said Bill. "That's right," was the answer; "we're your friends; we
don't want to hurt you; we just want you to come along, you know why."
And Bill pulled on his trousers and boots and walked out with them. Up to
this time there had not been a sound from the other bed. Now a match was
scratched, a candle lit, and one of the men in the other bed looked round the
room. At this point I committed the breach of etiquette of asking questions.
"I wonder why they took Bill," I said. There was no answer, and I repeated,
"I wonder why they took Bill." "Well," said the man with the candle, dryly,
"I reckon they wanted him," and with that he blew out the candle and
conversation ceased. Later I discovered that Bill in a fit of playfulness had
held up the Northern Pacific train at a near-by station by shooting at the feet
of the conductor to make him dance. This was purely a joke on Bill's part,
but the Northern Pacific people possessed a less robust sense of humor, and
on their complaint the United States Marshal was sent after Bill, on the
ground that by delaying the train he had interfered with the mails.
The only time I ever had serious trouble was at an even more primitive
little hotel than the one in question. It was also on an occasion when I was
out after lost horses. Below the hotel had merely a bar-room, a dining-room,
and a lean-to kitchen; above was a loft with fifteen or twenty beds in it. It
was late in the evening when I reached the place. I heard one or two shots in
the bar-room as I came up, and I disliked going in. But there was nowhere
else to go, and it was a cold night. Inside the room were several men, who,
including the bartender, were wearing the kind of smile worn by men who
are making believe to like what they don't like. A shabby individual in a
broad hat with a cocked gun in each hand was walking up and down the
floor talking with strident profanity. He had evidently been shooting at the
clock, which had two or three holes in its face.
He was not a "bad man" of the really dangerous type, the true man-killer
type, but he was an objectionable creature, a would-be bad man, a bully
who for the moment was having things all his own way. As soon as he saw
me he hailed me as "Four eyes," in reference to my spectacles, and said,
"Four eyes is going to treat." I joined in the laugh and got behind the stove
and sat down, thinking to escape notice. He followed me, however, and
though I tried to pass it off as a jest this merely made him more offensive,
and he stood leaning over me, a gun in each hand, using very foul language.
He was foolish to stand so near, and, moreover, his heels were close
together, so that his position was unstable. Accordingly, in response to his

reiterated command that I should set up the drinks, I said, "Well, if I've got
to, I've got to," and rose, looking past him.
As I rose, I struck quick and hard with my right just to one side of the
point of his jaw, hitting with my left as I straightened out, and then again
with my right. He fired the guns, but I do not know whether this was merely
a convulsive action of his hands or whether he was trying to shoot at me.
When he went down he struck the corner of the bar with his head. It was not
a case in which one could afford to take chances, and if he had moved I was
about to drop on his ribs with my knees; but he was senseless. I took away
his guns, and the other people in the room, who were now loud in their
denunciation of him, hustled him out and put him in a shed. I got dinner as
soon as possible, sitting in a corner of the dining-room away from the
windows, and then went upstairs to bed where it was dark so that there
would be no chance of any one shooting at me from the outside. However,
nothing happened. When my assailant came to, he went down to the station
and left on a freight.
As I have said, most of the men of my regiment were just such men as
those I knew in the ranch country; indeed, some of my ranch friends were in
the regiment—Fred Herrig, the forest ranger, for instance, in whose
company I shot my biggest mountain ram. After the regiment was
disbanded the careers of certain of the men were diversified by odd
incidents. Our relations were of the friendliest, and, as they explained, they
felt "as if I was a father" to them. The manifestations of this feeling were
sometimes less attractive than the phrase sounded, as it was chiefly used by
the few who were behaving like very bad children indeed. The great
majority of the men when the regiment disbanded took up the business of
their lives where they had dropped it a few months previously, and these
men merely tried to help me or help one another as the occasion arose; no
man ever had more cause to be proud of his regiment than I had of mine,
both in war and in peace. But there was a minority among them who in
certain ways were unsuited for a life of peaceful regularity, although often
enough they had been first-class soldiers.
It was from these men that letters came with a stereotyped opening which
always caused my heart to sink—"Dear Colonel: I write you because I am
in trouble." The trouble might take almost any form. One correspondent
continued: "I did not take the horse, but they say I did." Another

complained that his mother-in-law had put him in jail for bigamy. In the
case of another the incident was more markworthy. I will call him Gritto.
He wrote me a letter beginning: "Dear Colonel: I write you because I am in
trouble. I have shot a lady in the eye. But, Colonel, I was not shooting at the
lady. I was shooting at my wife," which he apparently regarded as a
sufficient excuse as between men of the world. I answered that I drew the
line at shooting at ladies, and did not hear any more of the incident for
several years.
Then, while I was President, a member of the regiment, Major Llewellyn,
who was Federal District Attorney under me in New Mexico, wrote me a
letter filled, as his letters usually were, with bits of interesting gossip about
the comrades. It ran in part as follows: "Since I last wrote you Comrade
Ritchie has killed a man in Colorado. I understand that the comrade was
playing a poker game, and the man sat into the game and used such
language that Comrade Ritchie had to shoot. Comrade Webb has killed two
men in Beaver, Arizona. Comrade Webb is in the Forest Service, and the
killing was in the line of professional duty. I was out at the penitentiary the
other day and saw Comrade Gritto, who, you may remember, was put there
for shooting his sister-in-law [this was the first information I had had as to
the identity of the lady who was shot in the eye]. Since he was in there
Comrade Boyne has run off to old Mexico with his (Gritto's) wife, and the
people of Grant County think he ought to be let out." Evidently the sporting
instincts of the people of Grant County had been roused, and they felt that,
as Comrade Boyne had had a fair start, the other comrade should be let out
in order to see what would happen.
The men of the regiment always enthusiastically helped me when I was
running for office. On one occasion Buck Taylor, of Texas, accompanied me
on a trip and made a speech for me. The crowd took to his speech from the
beginning and so did I, until the peroration, which ran as follows: "My
fellow-citizens, vote for my Colonel! vote for my Colonel! and he will lead
you, as he led us, like sheep to the slaughter!" This hardly seemed a tribute
to my military skill; but it delighted the crowd, and as far as I could tell did
me nothing but good.
On another tour, when I was running for Vice-President, a member of the
regiment who was along on the train got into a discussion with a Populist
editor who had expressed an unfavorable estimate of my character, and in

the course of the discussion shot the editor—not fatally. We had to leave
him to be tried, and as he had no money I left him $150 to hire counsel—
having borrowed the money from Senator Wolcott, of Colorado, who was
also with me. After election I received from my friend a letter running:
"Dear Colonel: I find I will not have to use that $150 you lent me, as we
have elected our candidate for District Attorney. So I have used it to settle a
horse transaction in which I unfortunately became involved." A few weeks
later, however, I received a heartbroken letter setting forth the fact that the
District Attorney—whom he evidently felt to be a cold-blooded formalist—
had put him in jail. Then the affair dropped out of sight until two or three
years later, when as President I visited a town in another State, and the
leaders of the delegation which received me included both my
correspondent and the editor, now fast friends, and both of them ardent
supporters of mine.
At one of the regimental reunions a man, who had been an excellent
soldier, in greeting me mentioned how glad he was that the judge had let
him out in time to get to the reunion. I asked what was the matter, and he
replied with some surprise: "Why, Colonel, don't you know I had a
difficulty with a gentleman, and . . . er . . . well, I killed the gentleman. But
you can see that the judge thought it was all right or he wouldn't have let me
go." Waiving the latter point, I said: "How did it happen? How did you do
it?" Misinterpreting my question as showing an interest only in the
technique of the performance, the ex-puncher replied: "With a .38 on a .45
frame, Colonel." I chuckled over the answer, and it became proverbial with
my family and some of my friends, including Seth Bullock. When I was
shot at Milwaukee, Seth Bullock wired an inquiry to which I responded that
it was all right, that the weapon was merely "a .38 on a .45 frame." The
telegram in some way became public, and puzzled outsiders. By the way,
both the men of my regiment and the friends I had made in the old days in
the West were themselves a little puzzled at the interest shown in my
making my speech after being shot. This was what they expected, what they
accepted as the right thing for a man to do under the circumstances, a thing
the non-performance of which would have been discreditable rather than
the performance being creditable. They would not have expected a man to
leave a battle, for instance, because of being wounded in such fashion; and
they saw no reason why he should abandon a less important and less risky
duty.

One of the best soldiers of my regiment was a huge man whom I made
marshal of a Rocky Mountain State. He had spent his hot and lusty youth on
the frontier during its viking age, and at that time had naturally taken part in
incidents which seemed queer to men "accustomed to die decently of
zymotic diseases." I told him that an effort would doubtless be made to
prevent his confirmation by the Senate, and therefore that I wanted to know
all the facts in his case. Had he played faro? He had; but it was when
everybody played faro, and he had never played a brace game. Had he
killed anybody? Yes, but it was in Dodge City on occasions when he was
deputy marshal or town marshal, at a time when Dodge City, now the most
peaceful of communities, was the toughest town on the continent, and
crowded with man-killing outlaws and road agents; and he produced
telegrams from judges of high character testifying to the need of the actions
he had taken. Finally I said: "Now, Ben, how did you lose that half of your
ear?" To which, looking rather shy, he responded: "Well, Colonel, it was bit
off." "How did it happen, Ben?" "Well, you see, I was sent to arrest a
gentleman, and him and me mixed it up, and he bit off my ear." "What did
you do to the gentleman, Ben?" And Ben, looking more coy than ever,
responded: "Well, Colonel, we broke about even!" I forebore to inquire
what variety of mayhem he had committed on the "gentleman." After
considerable struggle I got him confirmed by the Senate, and he made one
of the best marshals in the entire service, exactly as he had already made
one of the best soldiers in the regiment; and I never wish to see a better
citizen, nor a man in whom I would more implicitly trust in every way.
When, in 1900, I was nominated for Vice-President, I was sent by the
National Committee on a trip into the States of the high plains and the
Rocky Mountains. These had all gone overwhelmingly for Mr. Bryan on the
free-silver issue four years previously, and it was thought that I, because of
my knowledge of and acquaintanceship with the people, might accomplish
something towards bringing them back into line. It was an interesting trip,
and the monotony usually attendant upon such a campaign of political
speaking was diversified in vivid fashion by occasional hostile audiences.
One or two of the meetings ended in riots. One meeting was finally broken
up by a mob; everybody fought so that the speaking had to stop. Soon after
this we reached another town where we were told there might be trouble.
Here the local committee included an old and valued friend, a "two-gun"
man of repute, who was not in the least quarrelsome, but who always kept

his word. We marched round to the local opera-house, which was packed
with a mass of men, many of them rather rough-looking. My friend the two-
gun man sat immediately behind me, a gun on each hip, his arms folded,
looking at the audience; fixing his gaze with instant intentness on any
section of the house from which there came so much as a whisper. The
audience listened to me with rapt attention. At the end, with a pride in my
rhetorical powers which proceeded from a misunderstanding of the
situation, I remarked to the chairman: "I held that audience well; there
wasn't an interruption." To which the chairman replied: "Interruption? Well,
I guess not! Seth had sent round word that if any son of a gun peeped he'd
kill him!"
There was one bit of frontier philosophy which I should like to see
imitated in more advanced communities. Certain crimes of revolting
baseness and cruelty were never forgiven. But in the case of ordinary
offenses, the man who had served his term and who then tried to make good
was given a fair chance; and of course this was equally true of the women.
Every one who has studied the subject at all is only too well aware that the
world offsets the readiness with which it condones a crime for which a man
escapes punishment, by its unforgiving relentlessness to the often far less
guilty man who is punished, and who therefore has made his atonement. On
the frontier, if the man honestly tried to behave himself there was generally
a disposition to give him fair play and a decent show. Several of the men I
knew and whom I particularly liked came in this class. There was one such
man in my regiment, a man who had served a term for robbery under arms,
and who had atoned for it by many years of fine performance of duty. I put
him in a high official position, and no man under me rendered better service
to the State, nor was there any man whom, as soldier, as civil officer, as
citizen, and as friend, I valued and respected—and now value and respect—
more.
Now I suppose some good people will gather from this that I favor men
who commit crimes. I certainly do not favor them. I have not a particle of
sympathy with the sentimentality—as I deem it, the mawkishness—which
overflows with foolish pity for the criminal and cares not at all for the
victim of the criminal. I am glad to see wrong-doers punished. The
punishment is an absolute necessity from the standpoint of society; and I
put the reformation of the criminal second to the welfare of society. But I do
desire to see the man or woman who has paid the penalty and who wishes to

reform given a helping hand—surely every one of us who knows his own
heart must know that he too may stumble, and should be anxious to help his
brother or sister who has stumbled. When the criminal has been punished, if
he then shows a sincere desire to lead a decent and upright life, he should
be given the chance, he should be helped and not hindered; and if he makes
good, he should receive that respect from others which so often aids in
creating self-respect—the most invaluable of all possessions.

CHAPTER V
APPLIED IDEALISM

In the spring of 1899 I was appointed by President Harrison Civil Service
Commissioner. For nearly five years I had not been very active in political
life; although I had done some routine work in the organization and had
made campaign speeches, and in 1886 had run for Mayor of New York
against Abram S. Hewitt, Democrat, and Henry George, Independent, and
had been defeated.
I served six years as Civil Service Commissioner—four years under
President Harrison and then two years under President Cleveland. I was
treated by both Presidents with the utmost consideration. Among my
fellow-Commissioners there was at one time ex-Governor Hugh Thompson,
of South Carolina, and at another time John R. Proctor, of Kentucky. They
were Democrats and ex-Confederate soldiers. I became deeply attached to
both, and we stood shoulder to shoulder in every contest in which the
Commission was forced to take part.
Civil Service Reform had two sides. There was, first, the effort to secure
a more efficient administration of the public service, and, second, the even
more important effort to withdraw the administrative offices of the
Government from the domain of spoils politics, and thereby cut out of
American political life a fruitful source of corruption and degradation. The
spoils theory of politics is that public office is so much plunder which the
victorious political party is entitled to appropriate to the use of its adherents.
Under this system the work of the Government was often done well even in
those days, when Civil Service Reform was only an experiment, because
the man running an office if himself an able and far-sighted man, knew that
inefficiency in administration would be visited on his head in the long run,
and therefore insisted upon most of his subordinates doing good work; and,
moreover, the men appointed under the spoils system were necessarily men
of a certain initiative and power, because those who lacked these qualities
were not able to shoulder themselves to the front. Yet there were many
flagrant instances of inefficiency, where a powerful chief quartered friend,

adherent, or kinsman upon the Government. Moreover, the necessarily
haphazard nature of the employment, the need of obtaining and holding the
office by service wholly unconnected with official duty, inevitably tended to
lower the standard of public morality, alike among the office-holders and
among the politicians who rendered party service with the hope of reward
in office. Indeed, the doctrine that "To the victor belong the spoils," the
cynical battle-cry of the spoils politician in America for the sixty years
preceding my own entrance into public life, is so nakedly vicious that few
right-thinking men of trained mind defend it. To appoint, promote, reduce,
and expel from the public service, letter-carriers, stenographers, women
typewriters, clerks, because of the politics of themselves or their friends,
without regard to their own service, is, from the standpoint of the people at
large, as foolish and degrading as it is wicked.
Such being the case, it would seem at first sight extraordinary that it
should be so difficult to uproot the system. Unfortunately, it was permitted
to become habitual and traditional in American life, so that the conception
of public office as something to be used primarily for the good of the
dominant political party became ingrained in the mind of the average
American, and he grew so accustomed to the whole process that it seemed
part of the order of nature. Not merely the politicians but the bulk of the
people accepted this in a matter-of-course way as the only proper attitude.
There were plenty of communities where the citizens themselves did not
think it natural, or indeed proper, that the Post-Office should be held by a
man belonging to the defeated party. Moreover, unless both sides were
forbidden to use the offices for purposes of political reward, the side that
did use them possessed such an advantage over the other that in the long
run it was out of the question for the other not to follow the bad example
that had been set. Each party profited by the offices when in power, and
when in opposition each party insincerely denounced its opponents for
doing exactly what it itself had done and intended again to do.
It was necessary, in order to remedy the evil, both gradually to change the
average citizen's mental attitude toward the question, and also to secure
proper laws and proper administration of the laws. The work is far from
finished even yet. There are still masses of office-holders who can be used
by an unscrupulous Administration to debauch political conventions and
fraudulently overcome public sentiment, especially in the "rotten borough"
districts—those where the party is not strong, and where the office-holders

in consequence have a disproportionate influence. This was done by the
Republican Administration in 1912, to the ruin of the Republican party.
Moreover, there are numbers of States and municipalities where very little
has as yet been done to do away with the spoils system. But in the National
Government scores of thousands of offices have been put under the merit
system, chiefly through the action of the National Civil Service
Commission.
The use of Government offices as patronage is a handicap difficult to
overestimate from the standpoint of those who strive to get good
government. Any effort for reform of any sort, National, State, or
municipal, results in the reformers immediately finding themselves face to
face with an organized band of drilled mercenaries who are paid out of the
public chest to train themselves with such skill that ordinary good citizens
when they meet them at the polls are in much the position of militia
matched against regular troops. Yet these citizens themselves support and
pay their opponents in such a way that they are drilled to overthrow the
very men who support them. Civil Service Reform is designed primarily to
give the average American citizen a fair chance in politics, to give to this
citizen the same weight in politics that the "ward heeler" has.
Patronage does not really help a party. It helps the bosses to get control of
the machinery of the party—as in 1912 was true of the Republican party—
but it does not help the party. On the average, the most sweeping party
victories in our history have been won when the patronage was against the
victors. All that the patronage does is to help the worst element in the party
retain control of the party organization. Two of the evil elements in our
Government against which good citizens have to contend are, 1, the lack of
continuous activity on the part of these good citizens themselves, and, 2, the
ever-present activity of those who have only an evil self-interest in political
life. It is difficult to interest the average citizen in any particular movement
to the degree of getting him to take an efficient part in it. He wishes the
movement well, but he will not, or often cannot, take the time and the
trouble to serve it efficiently; and this whether he happens to be a mechanic
or a banker, a telegraph operator or a storekeeper. He has his own interests,
his own business, and it is difficult for him to spare the time to go around to
the primaries, to see to the organization, to see to getting out the vote—in
short, to attend to all the thousand details of political management.

On the other hand, the spoils system breeds a class of men whose
financial interest it is to take this necessary time and trouble. They are paid
for so doing, and they are paid out of the public chest. Under the spoils
system a man is appointed to an ordinary clerical or ministerial position in
the municipal, Federal, or State government, not primarily because he is
expected to be a good servant, but because he has rendered help to some big
boss or to the henchman of some big boss. His stay in office depends not
upon how he performs service, but upon how he retains his influence in the
party. This necessarily means that his attention to the interests of the public
at large, even though real, is secondary to his devotion to his organization,
or to the interest of the ward leader who put him in his place. So he and his
fellows attend to politics, not once a year, not two or three times a year, like
the average citizen, but every day in the year. It is the one thing that they
talk of, for it is their bread and butter. They plan about it and they scheme
about it. They do it because it is their business. I do not blame them in the
least. I blame us, the people, for we ought to make it clear as a bell that the
business of serving the people in one of the ordinary ministerial
Government positions, which have nothing to do with deciding the policy
of the Government, should have no necessary connection with the
management of primaries, of caucuses, and of nominating conventions. As a
result of our wrong thinking and supineness, we American citizens tend to
breed a mass of men whose interests in governmental matters are often
adverse to ours, who are thoroughly drilled, thoroughly organized, who
make their livelihood out of politics, and who frequently make their
livelihood out of bad politics. They know every little twist and turn, no
matter how intricate, in the politics of their several wards, and when
election day comes the ordinary citizen who has merely the interest that all
good men, all decent citizens, should have in political life, finds himself as
helpless before these men as if he were a solitary volunteer in the presence
of a band of drilled mercenaries on a field of battle. There are a couple of
hundred thousand Federal offices, not to speak of State and municipal
offices. The men who fill these offices, and the men who wish to fill them,
within and without the dominant party for the time being, make a regular
army, whose interest it is that the system of bread-and-butter politics shall
continue. Against their concrete interest we have merely the generally
unorganized sentiment of the community in favor of putting things on a
decent basis. The large number of men who believe vaguely in good are

pitted against the smaller but still larger number of men whose interest it
often becomes to act very concretely and actively for evil; and it is small
wonder that the struggle is doubtful.
During my six years' service as Commissioner the field of the merit
system was extended at the expense of the spoils system so as to include
several times the number of offices that had originally been included.
Generally this was done by the introduction of competitive entrance
examinations; sometimes, as in the Navy-Yards, by a system of registration.
This of itself was good work.
Even better work was making the law efficient and genuine where it
applied. As was inevitable in the introduction of such a system, there was at
first only partial success in its application. For instance, it applied to the
ordinary employees in the big custom-houses and post-offices, but not to
the heads of these offices. A number of the heads of the offices were
slippery politicians of a low moral grade, themselves appointed under the
spoils system, and anxious, directly or indirectly, to break down the merit
system and to pay their own political debts by appointing their henchmen
and supporters to the positions under them. Occasionally these men acted
with open and naked brutality. Ordinarily they sought by cunning to evade
the law. The Civil Service Reformers, on the other hand, were in most cases
not much used to practical politics, and were often well-nigh helpless when
pitted against veteran professional politicians. In consequence I found at the
beginning of my experiences that there were many offices in which the
execution of the law was a sham. This was very damaging, because it
encouraged the politicians to assault the law everywhere, and, on the other
hand, made good people feel that the law was not worth while defending.
The first effort of myself and my colleagues was to secure the genuine
enforcement of the law. In this we succeeded after a number of lively fights.
But of course in these fights we were obliged to strike a large number of
influential politicians, some of them in Congress, some of them the
supporters and backers of men who were in Congress. Accordingly we soon
found ourselves engaged in a series of contests with prominent Senators and
Congressmen. There were a number of Senators and Congressmen—men
like Congressman (afterwards Senator) H. C. Lodge, of Massachusetts;
Senator Cushman K. Davis, of Minnesota; Senator Orville H. Platt, of
Connecticut; Senator Cockrell, of Missouri; Congressman (afterwards

President) McKinley, of Ohio, and Congressman Dargan, of South Carolina
—who abhorred the business of the spoilsman, who efficiently and
resolutely championed the reform at every turn, and without whom the
whole reform would certainly have failed. But there were plenty of other
Senators and Congressmen who hated the whole reform and everything
concerned with it and everybody who championed it; and sometimes, to use
a legal phrase, their hatred was for cause, and sometimes it was peremptory
—that is, sometimes the Commission interfered with their most efficient,
and incidentally most corrupt and unscrupulous, supporters, and at other
times, where there was no such interference, a man nevertheless had an
innate dislike of anything that tended to decency in government. These men
were always waging war against us, and they usually had the more or less
open support of a certain number of Government officials, from Cabinet
officers down. The Senators and Congressmen in question opposed us in
many different ways. Sometimes, for instance, they had committees
appointed to investigate us—during my public career without and within
office I grew accustomed to accept appearances before investigating
committees as part of the natural order of things. Sometimes they tried to
cut off the appropriation for the Commission.
Occasionally we would bring to terms these Senators or Congressmen
who fought the Commission by the simple expedient of not holding
examinations in their districts. This always brought frantic appeals from
their constituents, and we would explain that unfortunately the
appropriations had been cut, so that we could not hold examinations in
every district, and that obviously we could not neglect the districts of those
Congressmen who believed in the reform and therefore in the examinations.
The constituents then turned their attention to the Congressman, and the
result was that in the long run we obtained sufficient money to enable us to
do our work. On the whole, the most prominent leaders favored us. Any
man who is the head of a big department, if he has any fitness at all, wishes
to see that department run well; and a very little practical experience shows
him that it cannot be run well if he must make his appointments to please
spoilsmongering politicians. As with almost every reform that I have ever
undertaken, most of the opposition took the guise of shrewd slander. Our
opponents relied chiefly on downright misrepresentation of what it was that
we were trying to accomplish, and of our methods, acts, and personalities. I
had more than one lively encounter with the authors and sponsors of these

misrepresentations, which at the time were full of interest to me. But it
would be a dreary thing now to go over the record of exploded mendacity,
or to expose the meanness and malice shown by some men of high official
position. A favorite argument was to call the reform Chinese, because the
Chinese had constructed an inefficient governmental system based in part
on the theory of written competitive examinations. The argument was
simple. There had been written examinations in China; it was proposed to
establish written examinations in the United States; therefore the proposed
system was Chinese. The argument might have been applied still further.
For instance, the Chinese had used gunpowder for centuries; gunpowder is
used in Springfield rifles; therefore Springfield rifles were Chinese. One
argument is quite as logical as the other. It was impossible to answer every
falsehood about the system. But it was possible to answer certain
falsehoods, especially when uttered by some Senator or Congressman of
note. Usually these false statements took the form of assertions that we had
asked preposterous questions of applicants. At times they also included the
assertion that we credited people to districts where they did not live; this
simply meaning that these persons were not known to the active ward
politicians of those districts.
One opponent with whom we had a rather lively tilt was a Republican
Congressman from Ohio, Mr. Grosvenor, one of the floor leaders. Mr.
Grosvenor made his attack in the House, and enumerated our sins in
picturesque rather than accurate fashion. There was a Congressional
committee investigating us at the time, and on my next appearance before
them I asked that Mr. Grosvenor be requested to meet me before the
committee. Mr. Grosvenor did not take up the challenge for several weeks,
until it was announced that I was leaving for my ranch in Dakota;
whereupon, deeming it safe, he wrote me a letter expressing his ardent wish
that I should appear before the committee to meet him. I promptly canceled
my ticket, waited, and met him. He proved to be a person of happily
treacherous memory, so that the simple expedient of arranging his
statements in pairs was sufficient to reduce him to confusion. For instance,
he had been trapped into making the unwary remark, "I do not want to
repeal the Civil Service Law, and I never said so." I produced the following
extract from one of his speeches: "I will vote not only to strike out this
provision, but I will vote to repeal the whole law." To this he merely replied
that there was "no inconsistency between those two statements." He

asserted that "Rufus P. Putnam, fraudulently credited to Washington County,
Ohio, never lived in Washington County, Ohio, or in my Congressional
district, or in Ohio as far as I know." We produced a letter which, thanks to
a beneficent Providence, he had himself written about Mr. Rufus P. Putnam,
in which he said: "Mr. Rufus P. Putnam is a legal resident of my district and
has relatives living there now." He explained, first, that he had not written
the letter; second, that he had forgotten he had written the letter; and, third,
that he was grossly deceived when he wrote it. He said: "I have not been
informed of one applicant who has found a place in the classified service
from my district." We confronted him with the names of eight. He looked
them over and said, "Yes, the eight men are living in my district as now
constituted," but added that his district had been gerrymandered so that he
could no longer tell who did and who didn't live in it. When I started further
to question him, he accused me of a lack of humor in not appreciating that
his statements were made "in a jesting way," and then announced that "a
Congressman making a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives
was perhaps in a little different position from a witness on the witness
stand"—a frank admission that he did not consider exactitude of statement
necessary when he was speaking as a Congressman. Finally he rose with
great dignity and said that it was his "constitutional right" not to be
questioned elsewhere as to what he said on the floor of the House of
Representatives; and accordingly he left the delighted committee to pursue
its investigations without further aid from him.
A more important opponent was the then Democratic leader of the
Senate, Mr. Gorman. In a speech attacking the Commission Mr. Gorman
described with moving pathos how a friend of his, "a bright young man
from Baltimore," a Sunday-school scholar, well recommended by his
pastor, wished to be a letter-carrier; and how he went before us to be
examined. The first question we asked him, said Mr. Gorman, was the
shortest route from Baltimore to China, to which the "bright young man"
responded that he didn't want to go to China, and had never studied up that
route. Thereupon, said Mr. Gorman, we asked him all about the steamship
lines from the United States to Europe, then branched him off into geology,
tried him in chemistry, and finally turned him down.
Apparently Mr. Gorman did not know that we kept full records of our
examinations. I at once wrote to him stating that I had carefully looked
through all our examination papers and had not been able to find one

question even remotely resembling any of these questions which he alleged
had been asked, and that I would be greatly obliged if he would give me the
name of the "bright young man" who had deceived him.
However, that "bright young man" remained permanently without a
name. I also asked Mr. Gorman, if he did not wish to give us the name of
his informant, to give us the date of the examination in which he was
supposed to have taken part; and I offered, if he would send down a
representative to look through our files, to give him all the aid we could in
his effort to discover any such questions. But Mr. Gorman, not hitherto
known as a sensitive soul, expressed himself as so shocked at the thought
that the veracity of the "bright young man" should be doubted that he could
not bring himself to answer my letter. So I made a public statement to the
effect that no such questions had ever been asked. Mr. Gorman brooded
over this; and during the next session of Congress he rose and complained
that he had received a very "impudent" letter from me (my letter was a
respectful note calling attention to the fact that, if he wished, he could by
personal examination satisfy himself that his statements had no foundation
in fact). He further stated that he had been "cruelly" called to account by me
because he had been endeavoring to right a "great wrong" that the Civil
Service Commission had committed; but he never, then or afterwards,
furnished any clue to the identity of that child of his fondest fancy, the
bright young man without a name.[*]

[*] This is a condensation of a speech I at the time made to
the St. Louis Civil Service Reform Association. Senator
Gorman was then the Senate leader of the party that had just
been victorious in the Congressional elections.

The incident is of note chiefly as shedding light on the mental make-up
of the man who at the time was one of the two or three most influential
leaders of the Democratic party. Mr. Gorman had been Mr. Cleveland's
party manager in the Presidential campaign, and was the Democratic leader
in Congress. It seemed extraordinary that he should be so reckless as to
make statements with no foundation in fact, which he might have known
that I would not permit to pass unchallenged. Then, as now, the ordinary
newspaper, in New York and elsewhere, was quite as reckless in its
misstatements of fact about public men and measures; but for a man in Mr.
Gorman's position of responsible leadership such action seemed hardly
worth while. However, it is at least to be said for Mr. Gorman that he was

not trying by falsehood to take away any man's character. It would be well
for writers and speakers to bear in mind the remark of Pudd'nhead Wilson to
the effect that while there are nine hundred and ninety-nine kinds of
falsehood, the only kind specifically condemned in Scripture, just as
murder, theft, and adultery are condemned, is bearing false witness against
one's neighbor.
One of the worst features of the old spoils system was the ruthless cruelty
and brutality it so often bred in the treatment of faithful public servants
without political influence. Life is hard enough and cruel enough at best,
and this is as true of public service as of private service. Under no system
will it be possible to do away with all favoritism and brutality and meanness
and malice. But at least we can try to minimize the exhibition of these
qualities. I once came across a case in Washington which very keenly
excited my sympathy. Under an Administration prior to the one with which
I was connected a lady had been ousted from a Government position. She
came to me to see if she could be reinstated. (This was not possible, but by
active work I did get her put back in a somewhat lower position, and this
only by an appeal to the sympathy of a certain official.) She was so pallid
and so careworn that she excited my sympathy and I made inquiries about
her. She was a poor woman with two children, a widow. She and her two
children were in actual want. She could barely keep the two children
decently clad, and she could not give them the food growing children need.
Three years before she had been employed in a bureau in a department of
Washington, doing her work faithfully, at a salary of about $800. It was
enough to keep her and her two children in clothing, food, and shelter. One
day the chief of the bureau called her up and told her he was very sorry that
he had to dismiss her. In great distress she asked him why; she thought that
she had been doing her work satisfactorily. He answered her that she had
been doing well, and that he wished very much that he could keep her, that
he would do so if he possibly could, but that he could not; for a certain
Senator, giving his name, a very influential member of the Senate, had
demanded her place for a friend of his who had influence. The woman told
the bureau chief that it meant turning her out to starve. She had been
thirteen or fourteen years in the public service; she had lost all touch with
her friends in her native State; dismissal meant absolute want for her and
her children. On this the chief, who was a kind man, said he would not have
her turned out, and sent her back to her work.

But three weeks afterwards he called her up again and told her he could
not say how sorry he was, but the thing had to be done. The Senator had
been around in person to know why the change had not been made, and had
told the chief that he would be himself removed if the place were not given
him. The Senator was an extremely influential man. His wants had to be
attended to, and the woman had to go. And go she did, and turned out she
was, to suffer with her children and to starve outright, or to live in semi-
starvation, just as might befall. I do not blame the bureau chief, who hated
to do what he did, although he lacked the courage to refuse; I do not even
very much blame the Senator, who did not know the hardship that he was
causing, and who had been calloused by long training in the spoils system;
but this system, a system which permits and encourages such deeds, is a
system of brutal iniquity.
Any man accustomed to dealing with practical politics can with difficulty
keep a straight face when he reads or listens to some of the arguments
advanced against Civil Service Reform. One of these arguments, a favorite
with machine politicians, takes the form of an appeal to "party loyalty" in
filling minor offices. Why, again and again these very same machine
politicians take just as good care of henchmen of the opposite party as of
those of their own party. In the underworld of politics the closest ties are
sometimes those which knit together the active professional workers of
opposite political parties. A friend of mine in the New York Legislature—
the hero of the alpha and omega incident—once remarked to me: "When
you have been in public life a little longer, Mr. Roosevelt, you will
understand that there are no politics in politics." In the politics to which he
was referring this remark could be taken literally.
Another illustration of this truth was incidentally given me, at about the
same time, by an acquaintance, a Tammany man named Costigan, a good
fellow according to his lights. I had been speaking to him of a fight in one
of the New York downtown districts, a Democratic district in which the
Republican party was in a hopeless minority, and, moreover, was split into
the Half-Breed and Stalwart factions. It had been an interesting fight in
more than one way. For instance, the Republican party, at the general
election, polled something like five hundred and fifty votes, and yet at the
primary the two factions polled seven hundred and twenty-five all told. The
sum of the parts was thus considerably greater than the whole. There had
been other little details that made the contest worthy of note. The hall in

which the primary was held had been hired by the Stalwarts from a
conscientious gentleman. To him the Half-Breeds applied to know whether
they could not hire the hall away from their opponents, and offered him a
substantial money advance. The conscientious gentleman replied that his
word was as good as his bond, that he had hired the hall to the Stalwarts,
and that it must be theirs. But he added that he was willing to hire the
doorway to the Half-Breeds if they paid him the additional sum of money
they had mentioned. The bargain was struck, and the meeting of the hostile
hosts was spirited, when the men who had rented the doorway sought to bar
the path of the men who had rented the hall. I was asking my friend
Costigan about the details of the struggle, as he seemed thoroughly
acquainted with them, and he smiled good-naturedly over my surprise at
there having been more votes cast than there were members of the party in
the whole district. Said I, "Mr. Costigan, you seem to have a great deal of
knowledge about this; how did it happen?" To which he replied, "Come
now, Mr. Roosevelt, you know it's the same gang that votes in all the
primaries."
So much for most of the opposition to the reform. There was, however,
some honest and at least partially justifiable opposition both to certain of
the methods advocated by Civil Service Reformers and to certain of the
Civil Service Reformers themselves. The pet shibboleths of the opponents
of the reform were that the system we proposed to introduce would give rise
to mere red-tape bureaucracy, and that the reformers were pharisees.
Neither statement was true. Each statement contained some truth.
If men are not to be appointed by favoritism, wise or unwise, honest or
dishonest, they must be appointed in some automatic way, which generally
means by competitive examination. The easiest kind of competitive
examination is an examination in writing. This is entirely appropriate for
certain classes of work, for lawyers, stenographers, typewriters, clerks,
mathematicians, and assistants in an astronomical observatory, for instance.
It is utterly inappropriate for carpenters, detectives, and mounted cattle
inspectors along the Rio Grande—to instance three types of employment as
to which I had to do battle to prevent well-meaning bureaucrats from
insisting on written competitive entrance examinations. It would be quite
possible to hold a very good competitive examination for mounted cattle
inspectors by means of practical tests in brand reading and shooting with
rifle and revolver, in riding "mean" horses and in roping and throwing

steers. I did my best to have examinations of this kind instituted, but my
proposal was of precisely the type which most shocks the routine official
mind, and I was never able to get it put into practical effect.
The important point, and the point most often forgotten by zealous Civil
Service Reformers, was to remember that the routine competitive
examination was merely a means to an end. It did not always produce ideal
results. But it was normally better than a system of appointments for spoils
purposes; it sometimes worked out very well indeed; and in most big
governmental offices it not only gave satisfactory results, but was the only
system under which good results could be obtained. For instance, when I
was Police Commissioner we appointed some two thousand policemen at
one time. It was utterly impossible for the Commissioners each to examine
personally the six or eight thousand applicants. Therefore they had to be
appointed either on the recommendation of outsiders or else by written
competitive examination. The latter method—the one we adopted—was
infinitely preferable. We held a rigid physical and moral pass examination,
and then, among those who passed, we held a written competitive
examination, requiring only the knowledge that any good primary common
school education would meet—that is, a test of ordinary intelligence and
simple mental training. Occasionally a man who would have been a good
officer failed, and occasionally a man who turned out to be a bad officer
passed; but, as a rule, the men with intelligence sufficient to enable them to
answer the questions were of a type very distinctly above that of those who
failed.
The answers returned to some of the questions gave an illuminating idea
of the intelligence of those answering them. For instance, one of our
questions in a given examination was a request to name five of the New
England States. One competitor, obviously of foreign birth, answered:
"England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Cork." His neighbor, who had
probably looked over his shoulder but who had North of Ireland prejudices,
made the same answer except that he substituted Belfast for Cork. A request
for a statement as to the life of Abraham Lincoln elicited, among other less
startling pieces of information, the fact that many of the applicants thought
that he was a general in the Civil War; several thought that he was President
of the Confederate States; three thought he had been assassinated by
Jefferson Davis, one by Thomas Jefferson, one by Garfield, several by
Guiteau, and one by Ballington Booth—the last representing a memory of

the fact that he had been shot by a man named Booth, to whose surname the
writer added the name with which he was most familiar in connection
therewith. A request to name five of the States that seceded in 1861
received answers that included almost every State in the Union. It happened
to be at the time of the silver agitation in the West, and the Rocky Mountain
States accordingly figured in a large percentage of the answers. Some of the
men thought that Chicago was on the Pacific Ocean. Others, in answer to a
query as to who was the head of the United States Government, wavered
between myself and Recorder Goff; one brilliant genius, for inscrutable
reasons, placed the leadership in the New York Fire Department. Now of
course some of the men who answered these questions wrong were
nevertheless quite capable of making good policemen; but it is fair to
assume that on the average the candidate who has a rudimentary knowledge
of the government, geography, and history of his country is a little better
fitted, in point of intelligence, to be a policeman than the one who has not.
Therefore I felt convinced, after full experience, that as regards very
large classes of public servants by far the best way to choose the men for
appointment was by means of written competitive examination. But I
absolutely split off from the bulk of my professional Civil Service Reform
friends when they advocated written competitive examinations for
promotion. In the Police Department I found these examinations a serious
handicap in the way of getting the best men promoted, and never in any
office did I find that the written competitive promotion examination did any
good. The reason for a written competitive entrance examination is that it is
impossible for the head of the office, or the candidate's prospective
immediate superior, himself to know the average candidate or to test his
ability. But when once in office the best way to test any man's ability is by
long experience in seeing him actually at work. His promotion should
depend upon the judgment formed of him by his superiors.
So much for the objections to the examinations. Now for the objections
to the men who advocated the reform. As a rule these men were high-
minded and disinterested. Certain of them, men like the leaders in the
Maryland and Indiana Reform Associations, for instances, Messrs.
Bonaparte and Rose, Foulke and Swift, added common sense, broad
sympathy, and practical efficiency to their high-mindedness. But in New
York, Philadelphia, and Boston there really was a certain mental and moral
thinness among very many of the leaders in the Civil Service Reform

movement. It was this quality which made them so profoundly antipathetic
to vigorous and intensely human people of the stamp of my friend Joe
Murray—who, as I have said, always felt that my Civil Service Reform
affiliations formed the one blot on an otherwise excellent public record. The
Civil Service Reform movement was one from above downwards, and the
men who took the lead in it were not men who as a rule possessed a very
profound sympathy with or understanding of the ways of thought and life of
their average fellow-citizen. They were not men who themselves desired to
be letter-carriers or clerks or policemen, or to have their friends appointed
to these positions. Having no temptation themselves in this direction, they
were eagerly anxious to prevent other people getting such appointments as a
reward for political services. In this they were quite right. It would be
impossible to run any big public office to advantage save along the lines of
the strictest application of Civil Service Reform principles; and the system
should be extended throughout our governmental service far more widely
than is now the case.
But there are other and more vital reforms than this. Too many Civil
Service Reformers, when the trial came, proved tepidly indifferent or
actively hostile to reforms that were of profound and far-reaching social and
industrial consequence. Many of them were at best lukewarm about
movements for the improvement of the conditions of toil and life among
men and women who labor under hard surroundings, and were positively
hostile to movements which curbed the power of the great corporation
magnates and directed into useful instead of pernicious channels the
activities of the great corporation lawyers who advised them.
Most of the newspapers which regarded themselves as the especial
champions of Civil Service Reform and as the highest exponents of civic
virtue, and which distrusted the average citizen and shuddered over the
"coarseness" of the professional politicians, were, nevertheless, given to
vices even more contemptible than, although not so gross as, those they
denounced and derided. Their editors were refined men of cultivated tastes,
whose pet temptations were backbiting, mean slander, and the snobbish
worship of anything clothed in wealth and the outward appearances of
conventional respectability. They were not robust or powerful men; they felt
ill at ease in the company of rough, strong men; often they had in them a
vein of physical timidity. They avenged themselves to themselves for an
uneasy subconsciousness of their own shortcomings by sitting in cloistered

—or, rather, pleasantly upholstered—seclusion, and sneering at and lying
about men who made them feel uncomfortable. Sometimes these were bad
men, who made them feel uncomfortable by the exhibition of coarse and
repellent vice; and sometimes they were men of high character, who held
ideals of courage and of service to others, and who looked down and warred
against the shortcomings of swollen wealth, and the effortless, easy lives of
those whose horizon is bounded by a sheltered and timid respectability.
These newspapers, owned and edited by these men, although free from the
repulsive vulgarity of the yellow press, were susceptible to influence by the
privileged interests, and were almost or quite as hostile to manliness as they
were to unrefined vice—and were much more hostile to it than to the
typical shortcomings of wealth and refinement. They favored Civil Service
Reform; they favored copyright laws, and the removal of the tariff on works
of art; they favored all the proper (and even more strongly all the improper)
movements for international peace and arbitration; in short, they favored all
good, and many goody-goody, measures so long as they did not cut deep
into social wrong or make demands on National and individual virility.
They opposed, or were lukewarm about, efforts to build up the army and the
navy, for they were not sensitive concerning National honor; and, above all,
they opposed every non-milk-and-water effort, however sane, to change our
social and economic system in such a fashion as to substitute the ideal of
justice towards all for the ideal of kindly charity from the favored few to the
possibly grateful many.
Some of the men foremost in the struggle for Civil Service Reform have
taken a position of honorable leadership in the battle for those other and
more vital reforms. But many of them promptly abandoned the field of
effort for decency when the battle took the form, not of a fight against the
petty grafting of small bosses and small politicians—a vitally necessary
battle, be it remembered—but of a fight against the great intrenched powers
of privilege, a fight to secure justice through the law for ordinary men and
women, instead of leaving them to suffer cruel injustice either because the
law failed to protect them or because it was twisted from its legitimate
purposes into a means for oppressing them.
One of the reasons why the boss so often keeps his hold, especially in
municipal matters, is, or at least has been in the past, because so many of
the men who claim to be reformers have been blind to the need of working
in human fashion for social and industrial betterment. Such words as "boss"

and "machine" now imply evil, but both the implication the words carry and
the definition of the words themselves are somewhat vague. A leader is
necessary; but his opponents always call him a boss. An organization is
necessary; but the men in opposition always call it a machine. Nevertheless,
there is a real and deep distinction between the leader and the boss, between
organizations and machines. A political leader who fights openly for
principles, and who keeps his position of leadership by stirring the
consciences and convincing the intellects of his followers, so that they have
confidence in him and will follow him because they can achieve greater
results under him than under any one else, is doing work which is
indispensable in a democracy. The boss, on the other hand, is a man who
does not gain his power by open means, but by secret means, and usually by
corrupt means. Some of the worst and most powerful bosses in our political
history either held no public office or else some unimportant public office.
They made no appeal either to intellect or conscience. Their work was done
behind closed doors, and consisted chiefly in the use of that greed which
gives in order that in return it may get. A boss of this kind can pull wires in
conventions, can manipulate members of the Legislature, can control the
giving or withholding of office, and serves as the intermediary for bringing
together the powers of corrupt politics and corrupt business. If he is at one
end of the social scale, he may through his agents traffic in the most brutal
forms of vice and give protection to the purveyors of shame and sin in
return for money bribes. If at the other end of the scale, he may be the
means of securing favors from high public officials, legislative or executive,
to great industrial interests; the transaction being sometimes a naked matter
of bargain and sale, and sometimes being carried on in such manner that
both parties thereto can more or less successfully disguise it to their
consciences as in the public interest. The machine is simply another name
for the kind of organization which is certain to grow up in a party or section
of a party controlled by such bosses as these and by their henchmen,
whereas, of course, an effective organization of decent men is essential in
order to secure decent politics.
If these bosses were responsible for nothing but pure wickedness, they
would probably last but a short time in any community. And, in any event,
if the men who are horrified by their wickedness were themselves as
practical and as thoroughly in touch with human nature, the bosses would
have a short shrift. The trouble is that the boss does understand human

nature, and that he fills a place which the reformer cannot fill unless he
likewise understands human nature. Sometimes the boss is a man who cares
for political power purely for its own sake, as he might care for any other
hobby; more often he has in view some definitely selfish object such as
political or financial advancement. He can rarely accomplish much unless
he has another side to him. A successful boss is very apt to be a man who, in
addition to committing wickedness in his own interest, also does look after
the interests of others, even if not from good motives. There are some
communities so fortunate that there are very few men who have private
interests to be served, and in these the power of the boss is at a minimum.
There are many country communities of this type. But in communities
where there is poverty and ignorance, the conditions are ripe for the growth
of a boss. Moreover, wherever big business interests are liable either to be
improperly favored or improperly discriminated against and blackmailed by
public officials—and the result is just as vicious in one case as in the other
—the boss is almost certain to develop. The best way of getting at this type
of boss is by keeping the public conscience aroused and alert, so that it will
tolerate neither improper attack upon, nor improper favoritism towards,
these corporations, and will quickly punish any public servant guilty of
either.
There is often much good in the type of boss, especially common in big
cities, who fulfills towards the people of his district in rough and ready
fashion the position of friend and protector. He uses his influence to get
jobs for young men who need them. He goes into court for a wild young
fellow who has gotten into trouble. He helps out with cash or credit the
widow who is in straits, or the breadwinner who is crippled or for some
other cause temporarily out of work. He organizes clambakes and chowder
parties and picnics, and is consulted by the local labor leaders when a cut in
wages is threatened. For some of his constituents he does proper favors, and
for others wholly improper favors; but he preserves human relations with
all. He may be a very bad and very corrupt man, a man whose action in
blackmailing and protecting vice is of far-reaching damage to his
constituents. But these constituents are for the most part men and women
who struggle hard against poverty and with whom the problem of living is
very real and very close. They would prefer clean and honest government, if
this clean and honest government is accompanied by human sympathy,
human understanding. But an appeal made to them for virtue in the abstract,

an appeal made by good men who do not really understand their needs, will
often pass quite unheeded, if on the other side stands the boss, the friend
and benefactor, who may have been guilty of much wrong-doing in things
that they are hardly aware concern them, but who appeals to them, not only
for the sake of favors to come, but in the name of gratitude and loyalty, and
above all of understanding and fellow-feeling. They have a feeling of clan-
loyalty to him; his and their relations may be substantially those which are
right and proper among primitive people still in the clan stage of moral
development. The successful fight against this type of vicious boss, and the
type of vicious politics which produces it, can be made only by men who
have a genuine fellow-feeling for and understanding of the people for and
with whom they are to work, and who in practical fashion seek their social
and industrial benefit.
There are communities of poor men, whose lives are hard, in which the
boss, though he would be out of place in a more advanced community, if
fundamentally an honest man, meets a real need which would otherwise not
be met. Because of his limitations in other than purely local matters it may
be our duty to fight such a boss; but it may also be our duty to recognize,
within his limitations, both his sincerity and his usefulness.
Yet again even the boss who really is evil, like the business man who
really is evil, may on certain points be sound, and be doing good work. It
may be the highest duty of the patriotic public servant to work with the big
boss or the big business man on these points, while refusing to work with
him on others. In the same way there are many self-styled reformers whose
conduct is such as to warrant Tom Reed's bitter remark, that when Dr.
Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel he was ignorant
of the infinite possibilities contained in the word reform. Yet, none the less,
it is our duty to work for the reforms these men champion, without regard to
the misconduct of the men themselves on other points. I have known in my
life many big business men and many big political bosses who often or even
generally did evil, but who on some occasions and on certain issues were
right. I never hesitated to do battle against these men when they were
wrong; and, on the other hand, as long as they were going my way I was
glad to have them do so. To have repudiated their aid when they were right
and were striving for a right end, and for what was of benefit to the people
—no matter what their motives may have been—would have been childish,
and moreover would have itself been misconduct against the people.

My duty was to stand with every one while he was right, and to stand
against him when he went wrong; and this I have tried to do as regards
individuals and as regards groups of individuals. When a business man or
labor leader, politician or reformer, is right, I support him; when he goes
wrong, I leave him. When Mr. Lorimer upheld the war for the liberation of
Cuba, I supported him; when he became United States Senator by improper
methods, I opposed him. The principles or methods which the Socialists
advocate and which I believe to be in the interest of the people I support,
and those which I believe to be against the interest of the people I oppose.
Moreover, when a man has done evil, but changes, and works for decency
and righteousness, and when, as far as I can see, the change is real and the
man's conduct sincere, then I welcome him and work heartily with him, as
an equal with an equal. For thirty years after the Civil War the creed of
mere materialism was rampant in both American politics and American
business, and many, many strong men, in accordance with the prevailing
commercial and political morality, did things for which they deserve blame
and condemnation; but if they now sincerely change, and strive for better
things, it is unwise and unjust to bar them from fellowship. So long as they
work for evil, smite them with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon! When
they change and show their faith by their works, remember the words of
Ezekiel: "If the wicked will turn from all the sins he has committed, and
keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely
live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed, they
shall not be mentioned unto him: in his righteousness that he hath done he
shall live. Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the
Lord God; and not that he should return from his ways and live?"
Every man who has been in practical politics grows to realize that
politicians, big and little, are no more all of them bad than they are all of
them good. Many of these men are very bad men indeed, but there are
others among them—and some among those held up to special obloquy, too
—who, even although they may have done much that is evil, also show
traits of sterling worth which many of their critics wholly lack. There are
few men for whom I have ever felt a more cordial and contemptuous dislike
than for some of the bosses and big professional politicians with whom I
have been brought into contact. On the other hand, in the case of some
political leaders who were most bitterly attacked as bosses, I grew to know

certain sides of their characters which inspired in me a very genuine regard
and respect.
To read much of the assault on Senator Hanna, one would have thought
that he was a man incapable of patriotism or of far-sighted devotion to the
country's good. I was brought into intimate contact with him only during
the two and a half years immediately preceding his death. I was then
President, and perforce watched all his actions at close range. During that
time he showed himself to be a man of rugged sincerity of purpose, of great
courage and loyalty, and of unswerving devotion to the interests of the
Nation and the people as he saw those interests. He was as sincerely
desirous of helping laboring men as of helping capitalists. His ideals were
in many ways not my ideals, and there were points where both by
temperament and by conviction we were far apart. Before this time he had
always been unfriendly to me; and I do not think he ever grew to like me, at
any rate not until the very end of his life. Moreover, I came to the
Presidency under circumstances which, if he had been a smaller man, would
inevitably have thrown him into violent antagonism to me. He was the close
and intimate friend of President McKinley. He was McKinley's devoted ally
and follower, and his trusted adviser, who was in complete sympathy with
him. Partly because of this friendship, his position in the Senate and in the
country was unique.
With McKinley's sudden death Senator Hanna found himself bereft of his
dearest friend, while I, who had just come to the Presidency, was in his
view an untried man, whose trustworthiness on many public questions was
at least doubtful. Ordinarily, as has been shown, not only in our history, but
in the history of all other countries, in countless instances, over and over
again, this situation would have meant suspicion, ill will, and, at the last,
open and violent antagonism. Such was not the result, in this case, primarily
because Senator Hanna had in him the quality that enabled him to meet a
serious crisis with dignity, with power, and with disinterested desire to work
for the common good. Within a few days of my accession he called on me,
and with entire friendliness and obvious sincerity, but also with entire self-
respect, explained that he mourned McKinley as probably no other man did;
that he had not been especially my friend, but that he wished me to
understand that thenceforward, on every question where he could
conscientiously support me, I could count upon his giving me as loyal aid
as it was in his power to render. He added that this must not be understood

as committing him to favor me for nomination and election, because that
matter must be left to take care of itself as events should decide; but that,
aside from this, what he said was to be taken literally; in other words, he
would do his best to make my Administration a success by supporting me
heartily on every point on which he conscientiously could, and that this I
could count upon. He kept his word absolutely. He never became especially
favorable to my nomination; and most of his close friends became bitterly
opposed to me and used every effort to persuade him to try to bring about
my downfall. Most men in his position would have been tempted to try to
make capital at my expense by antagonizing me and discrediting me so as
to make my policies fail, just for the sake of making them fail. Senator
Hanna, on the contrary, did everything possible to make them succeed. He
kept his word in the letter and the spirit, and on every point on which he felt
conscientiously able to support me he gave me the heartiest and most
effective support, and did all in his power to make my Administration a
success; and this with no hope of any reward for himself, of any gratitude
from me, or of any appreciation by the public at large, but solely because he
deemed such action necessary for the well-being of the country as a whole.
My experience with Senator Quay was similar. I had no personal
relations with him before I was President, and knew nothing of him save by
hearsay. Soon after I became President, Senator Quay called upon me, told
me he had known me very slightly, that he thought most men who claimed
to be reformers were hypocrites, but that he deemed me sincere, that he
thought conditions had become such that aggressive courage and honesty
were necessary in order to remedy them, that he believed I intended to be a
good and efficient President, and that to the best of his ability he would
support me in it making my Administration a success. He kept his word
with absolute good faith. He had been in the Civil War, and was a medal of
honor man; and I think my having been in the Spanish War gave him at the
outset a kindly feeling toward me. He was also a very well-read man—I
owe to him, for instance, my acquaintance with the writings of the Finnish
novelist Topelius. Not only did he support me on almost every public
question in which I was most interested—including, I am convinced, every
one on which he felt he conscientiously could do so—but he also at the time
of his death gave a striking proof of his disinterested desire to render a
service to certain poor people, and this under conditions in which not only
would he never know if the service were rendered but in which he had no

reason to expect that his part in it would ever be made known to any other
man.
Quay was descended from a French voyageur who had some Indian
blood in him. He was proud of this Indian blood, took an especial interest in
Indians, and whenever Indians came to Washington they always called on
him. Once during my Administration a delegation of Iroquois came over
from Canada to call on me at the White House. Their visit had in it
something that was pathetic as well as amusing. They represented the
descendants of the Six Nations, who fled to Canada after Sullivan harried
their towns in the Revolutionary War. Now, a century and a quarter later,
their people thought that they would like to come back into the United
States; and these representatives had called upon me with the dim hope that
perhaps I could give their tribes land on which they could settle. As soon as
they reached Washington they asked Quay to bring them to call on me,
which he did, telling me that of course their errand was hopeless and that he
had explained as much to them, but that they would like me to extend the
courtesy of an interview. At the close of the interview, which had been
conducted with all the solemnities of calumet and wampum, the Indians
filed out. Quay, before following them, turned to me with his usual
emotionless face and said, "Good-by, Mr. President; this reminds one of the
Flight of a Tartar Tribe, doesn't it?" I answered, "So you're fond of De
Quincey, Senator?" to which Quay responded, "Yes; always liked De
Quincey; good-by." And away he went with the tribesmen, who seemed to
have walked out of a remote past.
Quay had become particularly concerned about the Delawares in the
Indian Territory. He felt that the Interior Department did not do them
justice. He also felt that his colleagues of the Senate took no interest in
them. When in the spring of 1904 he lay in his house mortally sick, he sent
me word that he had something important to say to me, and would have
himself carried round to see me. I sent back word not to think of doing so,
and that on my way back from church next Sunday I would stop in and call
on him. This I accordingly did. He was lying in his bed, death written on his
face. He thanked me for coming, and then explained that, as he was on the
point of death and knew he would never return to Washington—it was late
spring and he was about to leave—he wished to see me to get my personal
promise that, after he died, I would myself look after the interests of the
Delaware Indians. He added that he did not trust the Interior Department—

although he knew that I did not share his views on this point—and that still
less did he believe that any of his colleagues in the Senate would exert
themselves in the interests of the Delawares, and that therefore he wished
my personal assurance that I would personally see that no injustice was
done them. I told him I would do so, and then added, in rather perfunctory
fashion, that he must not take such a gloomy view of himself, that when he
got away for the summer I hoped he would recover and be back all right
when Congress opened. A gleam came into the old fighter's eyes and he
answered: "No, I am dying, and you know it. I don't mind dying; but I do
wish it were possible for me to get off into the great north woods and crawl
out on a rock in the sun and die like a wolf!"
I never saw him again. When he died I sent a telegram of sympathy to his
wife. A paper which constantly preached reform, and which kept up its
circulation by the no less constant practice of slander, a paper which in
theory condemned all public men who violated the eighth commandment,
and in practice subsisted by incessant violation of the ninth, assailed me for
sending my message to the dead man's wife. I knew the editors of this
paper, and the editor who was their predecessor. They had led lives of
bodily ease and the avoidance of bodily risk; they earned their livelihood by
the practice of mendacity for profit; and they delivered malignant judgment
on a dead man who, whatever his faults, had in his youth freely risked his
life for a great ideal, and who when death was already clutching his breast
had spent almost his last breath on behalf of humble and friendless people
whom he had served with disinterested loyalty.
There is no greater duty than to war on the corrupt and unprincipled boss,
and on the corrupt and unprincipled business man; and for the matter of
that, on the corrupt and unprincipled labor leader also, and on the corrupt
and unprincipled editor, and on any one else who is corrupt and
unprincipled. But where the conditions are such, whether in politics or in
business, that the great majority of men have behaved in a way which is
gradually seen to be improper, but which at one time did not conflict with
the generally accepted morality, then the warfare on the system should not
include warfare on the men themselves, unless they decline to amend their
ways and to dissociate themselves from the system. There are many good,
unimaginative citizens who in politics or in business act in accordance with
accepted standards, in a matter-of-course way, without questioning these
standards; until something happens which sharply arouses them to the

situation, whereupon they try to work for better things. The proper course in
such event is to let bygones be bygones, and if the men prove by their
actions the sincerity of their conversion, heartily to work with them for the
betterment of business and political conditions.
By the time that I was ending my career as Civil Service Commissioner I
was already growing to understand that mere improvement in political
conditions by itself was not enough. I dimly realized that an even greater
fight must be waged to improve economic conditions, and to secure social
and industrial justice, justice as between individuals and justice as between
classes. I began to see that political effort was largely valuable as it found
expression and resulted in such social and industrial betterment. I was
gradually puzzling out, or trying to puzzle out, the answers to various
questions—some as yet unsolvable to any of us, but for the solution of
which it is the bounden duty of all of us to work. I had grown to realize
very keenly that the duty of the Government to protect women and children
must be extended to include the protection of all the crushable elements of
labor. I saw that it was the affair of all our people to see that justice
obtained between the big corporation and its employees, and between the
big corporation and its smaller rivals, as well as its customers and the
general public. I saw that it was the affair of all of us, and not only of the
employer, if dividends went up and wages went down; that it was to the
interest of all of us that a full share of the benefit of improved machinery
should go to the workman who used the machinery; and also that it was to
the interest of all of us that each man, whether brain worker or hand worker,
should do the best work of which he was capable, and that there should be
some correspondence between the value of the work and the value of the
reward. It is these and many similar questions which in their sum make up
the great social and industrial problems of to-day, the most interesting and
important of the problems with which our public life must deal.
In handling these problems I believe that much can be done by the
Government. Furthermore, I believe that, after all that the Government can
do has been done, there will remain as the most vital of all factors the
individual character of the average man and the average woman. No
governmental action can do more than supplement individual action.
Moreover, there must be collective action of kinds distinct from
governmental action. A body of public opinion must be formed, must make

itself felt, and in the end transform, and be transformed by, the gradual
raising of individual standards of conduct.
It is curious to see how difficult it is to make some men understand that
insistence upon one factor does not and must not mean failure fully to
recognize other factors. The selfish individual needs to be taught that we
must now shackle cunning by law exactly as a few centuries back we
shackled force by law. Unrestricted individualism spells ruin to the
individual himself. But so does the elimination of individualism, whether
by law or custom. It is a capital error to fail to recognize the vital need of
good laws. It is also a capital error to believe that good laws will
accomplish anything unless the average man has the right stuff in him. The
toiler, the manual laborer, has received less than justice, and he must be
protected, both by law, by custom, and by the exercise of his right to
increase his wage; and yet to decrease the quantity and quality of his work
will work only evil. There must be a far greater meed of respect and reward
for the hand worker than we now give him, if our society is to be put on a
sound basis; and this respect and reward cannot be given him unless he is as
ambitious to do the best possible work as is the highest type of brain
worker, whether doctor or writer or artist. There must be a raising of
standards, and not a leveling down to the standard of the poorest and most
inefficient. There is urgent need of intelligent governmental action to assist
in making the life of the man who tills the soil all that it should be, and to
see that the manual worker gets his full share of the reward for what he
helps produce; but if either farmer, mechanic, or day laborer is shiftless or
lazy, if he shirks downright hard work, if he is stupid or self-indulgent, then
no law can save him, and he must give way to a better type.
I suppose that some good people will misunderstand what I say, and will
insist on taking only half of it as representing the whole. Let me repeat.
When I say, that, even after we have all the good laws necessary, the chief
factor in any given man's success or failure must be that man's own
character, it must not be inferred that I am in the least minimizing the
importance of these laws, the real and vital need for them. The struggle for
individual advancement and development can be brought to naught, or
indefinitely retarded, by the absence of law or by bad law. It can be
immeasurably aided by organized effort on the part of the State. Collective
action and individual action, public law and private character, are both
necessary. It is only by a slow and patient inward transformation such as

these laws aid in bringing about that men are really helped upward in their
struggle for a higher and a fuller life. Recognition of individual character as
the most important of all factors does not mean failure fully to recognize
that we must have good laws, and that we must have our best men in office
to enforce these laws. The Nation collectively will in this way be able to be
of real and genuine service to each of us individually; and, on the other
hand, the wisdom of the collective action will mainly depend on the high
individual average of citizenship.
The relationship of man and woman is the fundamental relationship that
stands at the base of the whole social structure. Much can be done by law
towards putting women on a footing of complete and entire equal rights
with man—including the right to vote, the right to hold and use property,
and the right to enter any profession she desires on the same terms as a
man. Yet when this has been done it will amount to little unless on the one
hand the man himself realizes his duty to the woman, and unless on the
other hand the woman realizes that she has no claim to rights unless she
performs the duties that go with those rights and that alone justify her in
appealing to them. A cruel, selfish, or licentious man is an abhorrent
member of the community; but, after all, his actions are no worse in the
long run than those of the woman who is content to be a parasite on others,
who is cold, selfish, caring for nothing but frivolous pleasure and ignoble
ease. The law of worthy effort, the law of service for a worthy end, without
regard to whether it brings pleasure or pain, is the only right law of life,
whether for man or for woman. The man must not be selfish; nor, if the
woman is wise, will she let the man grow selfish, and this not only for her
own sake but for his. One of the prime needs is to remember that almost
every duty is composed of two seemingly conflicting elements, and that
over-insistence on one, to the exclusion of the other, may defeat its own
end. Any man who studies the statistics of the birth-rate among the native
Americans of New England, or among the native French of France, needs
not to be told that when prudence and forethought are carried to the point of
cold selfishness and self-indulgence, the race is bound to disappear. Taking
into account the women who for good reasons do not marry, or who when
married are childless or are able to have but one or two children, it is
evident that the married woman able to have children must on an average
have four or the race will not perpetuate itself. This is the mere statement of
a self-evident truth. Yet foolish and self-indulgent people often resent this

statement as if it were in some way possible by denunciation to reverse the
facts of nature; and, on the other hand, improvident and shiftless people,
inconsiderate and brutal people, treat the statement as if it justified heads of
families in having enormous numbers of badly nourished, badly brought up,
and badly cared for children for whom they make no effort to provide. A
man must think well before he marries. He must be a tender and considerate
husband and realize that there is no other human being to whom he owes so
much of love and regard and consideration as he does to the woman who
with pain bears and with labor rears the children that are his. No words can
paint the scorn and contempt which must be felt by all right-thinking men,
not only for the brutal husband, but for the husband who fails to show full
loyalty and consideration to his wife. Moreover, he must work, he must do
his part in the world. On the other hand, the woman must realize that she
has no more right to shirk the business of wifehood and motherhood than
the man has to shirk his business as breadwinner for the household. Women
should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and
when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly.
Yet normally for the man and the woman whose welfare is more important
than the welfare of any other human beings, the woman must remain the
housemother, the homekeeper, and the man must remain the breadwinner,
the provider for the wife who bears his children and for the children she
brings into the world. No other work is as valuable or as exacting for either
man or woman; it must always, in every healthy society, be for both man
and woman the prime work, the most important work; normally all other
work is of secondary importance, and must come as an addition to, not a
substitute for, this primary work. The partnership should be one of equal
rights, one of love, of self-respect, and unselfishness, above all a
partnership for the performance of the most vitally important of all duties.
The performance of duty, and not an indulgence in vapid ease and vapid
pleasure, is all that makes life worth while.
Suffrage for women should be looked on from this standpoint. Personally
I feel that it is exactly as much a "right" of women as of men to vote. But
the important point with both men and women is to treat the exercise of the
suffrage as a duty, which, in the long run, must be well performed to be of
the slightest value. I always favored woman's suffrage, but only tepidly,
until my association with women like Jane Addams and Frances Kellor,
who desired it as one means of enabling them to render better and more

efficient service, changed me into a zealous instead of a lukewarm adherent
of the cause—in spite of the fact that a few of the best women of the same
type, women like Mary Antin, did not favor the movement. A vote is like a
rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user. The mere
possession of the vote will no more benefit men and women not sufficiently
developed to use it than the possession of rifles will turn untrained Egyptian
fellaheen into soldiers. This is as true of woman as of man—and no more
true. Universal suffrage in Hayti has not made the Haytians able to govern
themselves in any true sense; and woman suffrage in Utah in no shape or
way affected the problem of polygamy. I believe in suffrage for women in
America, because I think they are fit for it. I believe for women, as for men,
more in the duty of fitting one's self to do well and wisely with the ballot
than in the naked right to cast the ballot.
I wish that people would read books like the novels and stories, at once
strong and charming, of Henry Bordeaux, books like Kathleen Norris's
"Mother," and Cornelia Comer's "Preliminaries," and would use these, and
other such books, as tracts, now and then! Perhaps the following
correspondence will give a better idea than I can otherwise give of the
problems that in everyday life come before men and women, and of the
need that the man shall show himself unselfish and considerate, and do his
full share of the joint duty:
January 3, 1913.
Colonel Theodore Roosevelt:
Dear Sir—I suppose you are willing to stand sponsor for the assertion
that the women of the country are not doing their duty unless they have
large families. I wonder if you know the real reason, after all. Society and
clubs are held largely to blame, but society really takes in so few people,
after all. I thought, when I got married at twenty, that it was the proper thing
to have a family, and, as we had very little of this world's goods, also
thought it the thing to do all the necessary work for them. I have had nine
children, did all my own work, including washing, ironing, house-cleaning,
and the care of the little ones as they came along, which was about every
two years; also sewed everything they wore, including trousers for the boys
and caps and jackets for the girls while little. I also helped them all in their
school work, and started them in music, etc. But as they grew older I got
behind the times. I never belonged to a club or a society or lodge, nor went

to any one's house scarcely; there wasn't time. In consequence, I knew
nothing that was going on in the town, much less the events of the country,
and at the same time my husband kept growing in wisdom and knowledge,
from mixing with men and hearing topics of the times discussed. At the
beginning of our married life I had just as quick a mind to grasp things as
he did, and had more school education, having graduated from a three years'
high school. My husband more and more declined to discuss things with
me; as he said, "I didn't know anything about it." When I'd ask he'd say,
"Oh, you wouldn't understand if I'd tell you." So here I am, at forty-five
years, hopelessly dull and uninteresting, while he can mix with the brightest
minds in the country as an equal. He's a strong Progressive man, took very
active part in the late campaign, etc. I am also Progressive, and tried my
best, after so many years of shut-in life, to grasp the ideas you stood for,
and read everything I could find during the summer and fall. But I've been
out of touch with people too long now, and my husband would much rather
go and talk to some woman who hasn't had any children, because she
knows things (I am not specifying any particular woman). I simply bore
him to death because I'm not interesting. Now, tell me, how was it my fault?
I was only doing what I thought was my duty. No woman can keep up with
things who never talks with any one but young children. As soon as my
children grew up they took the same attitude as their father, and frequently
say, "Oh, mother doesn't know." They look up to and admire their father
because he's a man of the world and knows how to act when he goes out.
How can I urge my daughters now to go and raise large families? It means
by the time you have lost your figure and charm for them they are all
ashamed of you. Now, as a believer in woman's rights, do a little talking to
the men as to their duties to their wives, or else refrain from urging us
women to have children. I am only one of thousands of middle-class
respectable women who give their lives to raise a nice family, and then who
become bitter from the injustice done us. Don't let this go into the waste-
basket, but think it over.
Yours respectfully,
—— ——.
New York, January 11, 1913.
My Dear Mrs. ——:

Most certainly your letter will not go into the waste-paper basket. I shall
think it over and show it to Mrs. Roosevelt. Will you let me say, in the first
place, that a woman who can write such a letter is certainly not "hopelessly
dull and uninteresting"! If the facts are as you state, then I do not wonder
that you feel bitterly and that you feel that the gravest kind of injustice has
been done you. I have always tried to insist to men that they should do their
duty to the women even more than the women to them. Now I hardly like to
write specifically about your husband, because you might not like it
yourself. It seems to me almost incredible that any man who is the husband
of a woman who has borne him nine children should not feel that they and
he are lastingly her debtors. You say that you have had nine children, that
you did all your own work, including washing, ironing, house-cleaning, and
the care of the little ones as they came along; that you sewed everything
they wore, including trousers for the boys and caps and jackets for the girls
while little; that you helped them all in their school work and started them
in music; but that as they grew older you got behind the times, that you
never belonged to a club or society or lodge, nor went to any one's house, as
you hardly had time to do so; and that in consequence your husband
outgrew you, and that your children look up to him and not to you and feel
that they have outgrown you. If these facts are so, you have done a great
and wonderful work, and the only explanation I can possibly give of the
attitude you describe on the part of your husband and children is that they
do not understand what it is that you have done. I emphatically believe in
unselfishness, but I also believe that it is a mistake to let other people grow
selfish, even when the other people are husband and children.
Now, I suggest that you take your letter to me, of which I send you back
a copy, and this letter, and then select out of your family the one with whom
you feel most sympathy, whether it is your husband or one of your children.
Show the two letters to him or her, and then have a frank talk about the
matter. If any man, as you say, becomes ashamed of his wife because she
has lost her figure in bearing his children, then that man is a hound and has
every cause to be ashamed of himself. I am sending you a little book called
"Mother," by Kathleen Norris, which will give you my views on the matter.
Of course there are base and selfish men, just as there are, although I
believe in smaller number, base and selfish women. Man and woman alike
should profit by the teachings in such a story as this of "Mother."
Sincerely yours,

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
January 21, 1913.
Colonel Theodore Roosevelt:
My dear Sir—Your letter came as a surprise, for I wasn't expecting an
answer. The next day the book came, and I thank you for your ready
sympathy and understanding. I feel as though you and Mrs. Roosevelt
would think I was hardly loyal to my husband and children; but knowing of
no other way to bring the idea which was so strong in my mind to your
notice, I told my personal story. If it will, in a small measure, be the means
of helping some one else by molding public opinion, through you, I shall be
content. You have helped me more than you know. Just having you
interested is as good as a tonic, and braces me up till I feel as though I shall
refuse to be "laid on the shelf." . . . To think that you'd bother to send me a
book. I shall always treasure it both for the text of the book and the sender. I
read it with absorbing interest. The mother was so splendid. She was ideal.
The situations are so startlingly real, just like what happens here every day
with variations.
—— ——.
A narrative of facts is often more convincing than a homily; and these
two letters of my correspondent carry their own lesson.
Parenthetically, let me remark that whenever a man thinks that he has
outgrown the woman who is his mate, he will do well carefully to consider
whether his growth has not been downward instead of upward, whether the
facts are not merely that he has fallen away from his wife's standard of
refinement and of duty.

CHAPTER VI
THE NEW YORK POLICE

In the spring of 1895 I was appointed by Mayor Strong Police
Commissioner, and I served as President of the Police Commission of New
York for the two following years. Mayor Strong had been elected Mayor the
preceding fall, when the general anti-Democratic wave of that year
coincided with one of the city's occasional insurrections of virtue and
consequent turning out of Tammany from municipal control. He had been
elected on a non-partisan ticket—usually (although not always) the right
kind of ticket in municipal affairs, provided it represents not a bargain
among factions but genuine non-partisanship with the genuine purpose to
get the right men in control of the city government on a platform which
deals with the needs of the average men and women, the men and women
who work hard and who too often live hard. I was appointed with the
distinct understanding that I was to administer the Police Department with
entire disregard of partisan politics, and only from the standpoint of a good
citizen interested in promoting the welfare of all good citizens. My task,
therefore, was really simple. Mayor Strong had already offered me the
Street-Cleaning Department. For this work I did not feel that I had any
especial fitness. I resolutely refused to accept the position, and the Mayor
ultimately got a far better man for his purpose in Colonel George F. Waring.
The work of the Police Department, however, was in my line, and I was
glad to undertake it.
The man who was closest to me throughout my two years in the Police
Department was Jacob Riis. By this time, as I have said, I was getting our
social, industrial, and political needs into pretty fair perspective. I was still
ignorant of the extent to which big men of great wealth played a
mischievous part in our industrial and social life, but I was well awake to
the need of making ours in good faith both an economic and an industrial as
well as a political democracy. I already knew Jake Riis, because his book
"How the Other Half Lives" had been to me both an enlightenment and an
inspiration for which I felt I could never be too grateful. Soon after it was

written I had called at his office to tell him how deeply impressed I was by
the book, and that I wished to help him in any practical way to try to make
things a little better. I have always had a horror of words that are not
translated into deeds, of speech that does not result in action—in other
words, I believe in realizable ideals and in realizing them, in preaching
what can be practiced and then in practicing it. Jacob Riis had drawn an
indictment of the things that were wrong, pitifully and dreadfully wrong,
with the tenement homes and the tenement lives of our wage-workers. In
his book he had pointed out how the city government, and especially those
connected with the departments of police and health, could aid in
remedying some of the wrongs.
As President of the Police Board I was also a member of the Health
Board. In both positions I felt that with Jacob Riis's guidance I would be
able to put a goodly number of his principles into actual effect. He and I
looked at life and its problems from substantially the same standpoint. Our
ideals and principles and purposes, and our beliefs as to the methods
necessary to realize them, were alike. After the election in 1894 I had
written him a letter which ran in part as follows:
It is very important to the city to have a business man's Mayor, but it is
more important to have a workingman's Mayor; and I want Mr. Strong to be
that also. . . . It is an excellent thing to have rapid transit, but it is a good
deal more important, if you look at matters with a proper perspective, to
have ample playgrounds in the poorer quarters of the city, and to take the
children off the streets so as to prevent them growing up toughs. In the
same way it is an admirable thing to have clean streets; indeed, it is an
essential thing to have them; but it would be a better thing to have our
schools large enough to give ample accommodation to all who should be
pupils and to provide them with proper playgrounds.
And I added, while expressing my regret that I had not been able to
accept the street-cleaning commissionership, that "I would have been
delighted to smash up the corrupt contractors and put the street-cleaning
force absolutely out of the domain of politics."
This was nineteen years ago, but it makes a pretty good platform in
municipal politics even to-day—smash corruption, take the municipal
service out of the domain of politics, insist upon having a Mayor who shall

be a workingman's Mayor even more than a business man's Mayor, and
devote all attention possible to the welfare of the children.
Therefore, as I viewed it, there were two sides to the work: first, the
actual handling of the Police Department; second, using my position to help
in making the city a better place in which to live and work for those to
whom the conditions of life and labor were hardest. The two problems were
closely connected; for one thing never to be forgotten in striving to better
the conditions of the New York police force is the connection between the
standard of morals and behavior in that force and the general standard of
morals and behavior in the city at large. The form of government of the
Police Department at that time was such as to make it a matter of extreme
difficulty to get good results. It represented that device of old-school
American political thought, the desire to establish checks and balances so
elaborate that no man shall have power enough to do anything very bad. In
practice this always means that no man has power enough to do anything
good, and that what is bad is done anyhow.
In most positions the "division of powers" theory works unmitigated
mischief. The only way to get good service is to give somebody power to
render it, facing the fact that power which will enable a man to do a job
well will also necessarily enable him to do it ill if he is the wrong kind of
man. What is normally needed is the concentration in the hands of one man,
or of a very small body of men, of ample power to enable him or them to do
the work that is necessary; and then the devising of means to hold these
men fully responsible for the exercise of that power by the people. This of
course means that, if the people are willing to see power misused, it will be
misused. But it also means that if, as we hold, the people are fit for self-
government—if, in other words, our talk and our institutions are not shams
—we will get good government. I do not contend that my theory will
automatically bring good government. I do contend that it will enable us to
get as good government as we deserve, and that the other way will not.
The then government of the Police Department was so devised as to
render it most difficult to accomplish anything good, while the field for
intrigue and conspiracy was limitless. There were four Commissioners, two
supposed to belong to one party and two to the other, although, as a matter
of fact, they never divided on party lines. There was a Chief, appointed by
the Commissioners, but whom they could not remove without a regular trial

subject to review by the courts of law. This Chief and any one
Commissioner had power to hold up most of the acts of the other three
Commissioners. It was made easy for the four Commissioners to come to a
deadlock among themselves; and if this danger was avoided, it was easy for
one Commissioner, by intriguing with the Chief, to bring the other three to
a standstill. The Commissioners were appointed by the Mayor, but he could
not remove them without the assent of the Governor, who was usually
politically opposed to him. In the same way the Commissioners could
appoint the patrolmen, but they could not remove them, save after a trial
which went up for review to the courts.
As was inevitable under our system of law procedure, this meant that the
action of the court was apt to be determined by legal technicalities. It was
possible to dismiss a man from the service for quite insufficient reasons,
and to provide against the reversal of the sentence, if the technicalities of
procedure were observed. But the worst criminals were apt to be adroit
men, against whom it was impossible to get legal evidence which a court
could properly consider in a criminal trial (and the mood of the court might
be to treat the case as if it were a criminal trial), although it was easy to get
evidence which would render it not merely justifiable but necessary for a
man to remove them from his private employ—and surely the public should
be as well treated as a private employer. Accordingly, most of the worst
men put out were reinstated by the courts; and when the Mayor attempted to
remove one of my colleagues who made it his business to try to nullify the
work done by the rest of us, the Governor sided with the recalcitrant
Commissioner and refused to permit his removal.
Nevertheless, an astounding quantity of work was done in reforming the
force. We had a good deal of power, anyhow; we exercised it to the full; and
we accomplished some things by assuming the appearance of a power
which we did not really possess.
The first fight I made was to keep politics absolutely out of the force; and
not only politics, but every kind of improper favoritism. Doubtless in
making thousands of appointments and hundreds of promotions there were
men who contrived to use influence of which I was ignorant. But these
cases must have been few and far between. As far as was humanly possible,
the appointments and promotions were made without regard to any question
except the fitness of the man and the needs of the service. As Civil Service

Commissioner I had been instructing heads of departments and bureaus
how to get men appointed without regard to politics, and assuring them that
by following our methods they would obtain first-class results. As Police
Commissioner I was able practically to apply my own teachings.
The appointments to the police force were made as I have described in
the last chapter. We paid not the slightest attention to a man's politics or
creed, or where he was born, so long as he was an American citizen; and on
an average we obtained far and away the best men that had ever come into
the Police Department. It was of course very difficult at first to convince
both the politicians and the people that we really meant what we said, and
that every one really would have a fair trial. There had been in previous
years the most widespread and gross corruption in connection with every
activity in the Police Department, and there had been a regular tariff for
appointments and promotions. Many powerful politicians and many corrupt
outsiders believed that in some way or other it would still be possible to
secure appointments by corrupt and improper methods, and many good
citizens felt the same conviction. I endeavored to remove the impression
from the minds of both sets of people by giving the widest publicity to what
we were doing and how we were doing it, by making the whole process
open and aboveboard, and by making it evident that we would probe to the
bottom every charge of corruption.
For instance, I received visits at one time from a Catholic priest, and at
another time from a Methodist clergyman, who had parishioners who
wished to enter the police force, but who did not believe they could get in
save by the payment of money or through political pressure. The priest was
running a temperance lyceum in connection with his church, and he wished
to know if there would be a chance for some of the young men who
belonged to that lyceum. The Methodist clergyman came from a little patch
of old native America which by a recent extension had been taken within
the limits of the huge, polyglot, pleasure-loving city. His was a small
church, most of the members being shipwrights, mechanics, and sailormen
from the local coasters. In each case I assured my visitor that we wanted on
the force men of the exact type which he said he could furnish. I also told
him that I was as anxious as he was to find out if there was any improper
work being done in connection with the examinations, and that I would like
him to get four or five of his men to take the examinations without letting
me know their names. Then, whether the men failed or succeeded, he and I

would take their papers and follow them through every stage so that we
could tell at once whether they had been either improperly favored or
improperly discriminated against. This was accordingly done, and in each
case my visitor turned up a few weeks later, his face wreathed in smiles, to
say that his candidates had passed and that everything was evidently all
straight. During my two years as President of the Commission I think I
appointed a dozen or fifteen members of that little Methodist congregation,
and certainly twice that number of men from the temperance lyceum of the
Catholic church in question. They were all men of the very type I most
wished to see on the force—men of strong physique and resolute temper,
sober, self-respecting, self-reliant, with a strong wish to improve
themselves.
Occasionally I would myself pick out a man and tell him to take the
examination. Thus one evening I went down to speak in the Bowery at the
Young Men's Institute, a branch of the Young Men's Christian Association,
at the request of Mr. Cleveland H. Dodge. While there he told me he wished
to show me a young Jew who had recently, by an exhibition of marked
pluck and bodily prowess, saved some women and children from a burning
building. The young Jew, whose name was Otto Raphael, was brought up to
see me; a powerful fellow, with a good-humored, intelligent face. I asked
him about his education, and told him to try the examination. He did,
passed, was appointed, and made an admirable officer; and he and all his
family, wherever they may dwell, have been close friends of mine ever
since. Otto Raphael was a genuine East Sider. He and I were both "straight
New York," to use the vernacular of our native city. To show our
community of feeling and our grasp of the facts of life, I may mention that
we were almost the only men in the Police Department who picked
Fitzsimmons as a winner against Corbett. Otto's parents had come over
from Russia, and not only in social standing but in pay a policeman's
position meant everything to him. It enabled Otto to educate his little
brothers and sisters who had been born in this country, and to bring over
from Russia two or three kinsfolk who had perforce been left behind.
Rather curiously, it was by no means as easy to keep politics and
corruption out of the promotions as out of the entrance examinations. This
was because I could take complete charge of the entrance examinations
myself; and, moreover, they were largely automatic. In promotions, on the
other hand, the prime element was the record and capacity of the officer,

and for this we had largely to rely upon the judgment of the man's
immediate superiors. This doubtless meant that in certain cases that
judgment was given for improper reasons.
However, there were cases where I could act on personal knowledge. One
thing that we did was to endeavor to recognize gallantry. We did not have to
work a revolution in the force as to courage in the way that we had to work
a revolution in honesty. They had always been brave in dealing with riotous
and violent criminals. But they had gradually become very corrupt. Our
great work, therefore, was the stamping out of dishonesty, and this work we
did thoroughly, so far as the ridiculous bi-partisan law under which the
Department was administered would permit. But we were anxious that,
while stamping out what was evil in the force, we should keep and improve
what was good. While warring on dishonesty, we made every effort to
increase efficiency. It has unfortunately been shown by sad experience that
at times a police organization which is free from the taint of corruption may
yet show itself weak in some great crisis or unable to deal with the more
dangerous kinds of criminals. This we were determined to prevent.
Our efforts were crowned with entire success. The improvement in the
efficiency of the force went hand in hand with the improvement in its
honesty. The men in uniform and the men in plain clothes—the detectives—
did better work than ever before. The aggregate of crimes where
punishment followed the commission of the crime increased, while the
aggregate of crimes where the criminal escaped punishment decreased.
Every discredited politician, every sensational newspaper, and every timid
fool who could be scared by clamor was against us. All three classes strove
by every means in their power to show that in making the force honest we
had impaired its efficiency; and by their utterances they tended to bring
about the very condition of things against which they professed to protest.
But we went steadily along the path we had marked out. The fight was hard,
and there was plenty of worry and anxiety, but we won. I was appointed in
May, 1895. In February, 1897, three months before I resigned to become
Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the Judge who charged the Grand Jury of
New York County was able to congratulate them on the phenomenal
decrease in crime, especially of the violent sort. This decrease was steady
during the two years. The police, after the reform policy was thoroughly
tried, proved more successful than ever before in protecting life and
property and in putting down crime and criminal vice.

The part played by the recognition and reward of actual personal prowess
among the members of the police force in producing this state of affairs was
appreciable, though there were many other factors that combined to bring
about the betterment. The immense improvement in discipline by punishing
all offenders without mercy, no matter how great their political or personal
influence; the resolute warfare against every kind of criminal who had
hitherto been able corruptly to purchase protection; the prompt recognition
of ability even where it was entirely unconnected with personal prowess—
all these were elements which had enormous weight in producing the
change. Mere courage and daring, and the rewarding of courage and daring,
cannot supply the lack of discipline, of ability, of honesty. But they are of
vital consequence, nevertheless. No police force is worth anything if its
members are not intelligent and honest; but neither is it worth anything
unless its members are brave, hardy, and well disciplined.
We showed recognition of daring and of personal prowess in two ways:
first, by awarding a medal or a certificate in remembrance of the deed; and,
second, by giving it weight in making any promotion, especially to the
lower grades. In the higher grades—in all promotions above that of
sergeant, for instance—resolute and daring courage cannot normally be
considered as a factor of determining weight in making promotions; rather
is it a quality the lack of which unfits a man for promotion. For in the
higher places we must assume the existence of such a quality in any fit
candidate, and must make the promotion with a view to the man's energy,
executive capacity, and power of command. In the lower grades, however,
marked gallantry should always be taken into account in deciding among
different candidates for any given place.
During our two years' service we found it necessary over a hundred times
to single out men for special mention because of some feat of heroism. The
heroism usually took one of four forms: saving somebody from drowning,
saving somebody from a burning building, stopping a runaway team, or
arresting some violent lawbreaker under exceptional circumstances. To
illustrate our method of action, I will take two of the first promotions made
after I became Commissioner. One case was that of an old fellow, a veteran
of the Civil War, who was at the time a roundsman. I happened to notice
one day that he had saved a woman from drowning, and had him
summoned so that I might look into the matter. The old fellow brought up
his record before me, and showed not a little nervousness and agitation; for

it appeared that he had grown gray in the service, had performed feat after
feat of heroism, but had no political backing of any account. No heed had
ever been paid him. He was one of the quiet men who attend solely to duty,
and although a Grand Army man, he had never sought to use influence of
any kind. Now, at last, he thought there was a chance for him. He had been
twenty-two years on the force, and during that time had saved some twenty-
five persons from death by drowning, varying the performance two or three
times by saving persons from burning buildings. Twice Congress had
passed laws especially to empower the then Secretary of the Treasury, John
Sherman, to give him a medal for distinguished gallantry in saving life. The
Life-Saving Society had also given him its medal, and so had the Police
Department. There was not a complaint in all his record against him for any
infraction of duty, and he was sober and trustworthy. He was entitled to his
promotion; and he got it, there and then. It may be worth mentioning that he
kept on saving life after he was given his sergeantcy. On October 21, 1896,
he again rescued a man from drowning. It was at night, nobody else was in
the neighborhood, and the dock from which he jumped was in absolute
darkness, and he was ten minutes in the water, which was very cold. He was
fifty-five years old when he saved this man. It was the twenty-ninth person
whose life he had saved during his twenty-three years' service in the
Department.
The other man was a patrolman whom we promoted to roundsman for
activity in catching a burglar under rather peculiar circumstances. I
happened to note his getting a burglar one week. Apparently he had fallen
into the habit, for he got another next week. In the latter case the burglar
escaped from the house soon after midnight, and ran away toward Park
Avenue, with the policeman in hot chase. The New York Central Railroad
runs under Park Avenue, and there is a succession of openings in the top of
the tunnel. Finding that the policeman was gaining on him, the burglar took
a desperate chance and leaped down one of these openings, at the risk of
breaking his neck. Now the burglar was running for his liberty, and it was
the part of wisdom for him to imperil life or limb; but the policeman was
merely doing his duty, and nobody could have blamed him for not taking
the jump. However, he jumped; and in this particular case the hand of the
Lord was heavy upon the unrighteous. The burglar had the breath knocked
out of him, and the "cop" didn't. When his victim could walk, the officer
trotted him around to the station-house; and a week after I had the officer up

and promoted him, for he was sober, trustworthy, and strictly attentive to
duty.
Now I think that any decent man of reasonable intelligence will agree
that we were quite right in promoting men in cases like these, and quite
right in excluding politics from promotions. Yet it was because of our
consistently acting in this manner, resolutely warring on dishonesty and on
that peculiar form of baseness which masquerades as "practical" politics,
and steadily refusing to pay heed to any consideration except the good of
the service and the city, and the merits of the men themselves, that we drew
down upon our heads the bitter and malignant animosity of the bread-and-
butter spoils politicians. They secured the repeal of the Civil Service Law
by the State Legislature. They attempted and almost succeeded in the effort
to legislate us out of office. They joined with the baser portion of the
sensational press in every species of foul, indecent falsehood and slander as
to what we were doing. They attempted to seduce or frighten us by every
species of intrigue and cajolery, of promise of political reward and threat of
political punishment. They failed in their purpose. I believe in political
organizations, and I believe in practical politics. If a man is not practical, he
is of no use anywhere. But when politicians treat practical politics as foul
politics, and when they turn what ought to be a necessary and useful
political organization into a machine run by professional spoilsmen of low
morality in their own interest, then it is time to drive the politician from
public life, and either to mend or destroy the machine, according as the
necessity may determine.
We promoted to roundsman a patrolman, with an already excellent
record, for gallantry shown in a fray which resulted in the death of his
antagonist. He was after a gang of toughs who had just waylaid, robbed,
and beaten a man. They scattered and he pursued the ringleader. Running
hard, he gained on his man, whereupon the latter suddenly turned and fired
full in his face. The officer already had his revolver drawn, and the two
shots rang out almost together. The policeman was within a fraction of
death, for the bullet from his opponent's pistol went through his helmet and
just broke the skin of his head. His own aim was truer, and the man he was
after fell dead, shot through the heart. I may explain that I have not the
slightest sympathy with any policy which tends to put the policeman at the
mercy of a tough, or which deprives him of efficient weapons. While Police
Commissioner we punished any brutality by the police with such immediate

severity that all cases of brutality practically came to an end. No decent
citizen had anything to fear from the police during the two years of my
service. But we consistently encouraged the police to prove that the violent
criminal who endeavored to molest them or to resist arrest, or to interfere
with them in the discharge of their duty, was himself in grave jeopardy; and
we had every "gang" broken up and the members punished with whatever
severity was necessary. Of course where possible the officer merely
crippled the criminal who was violent.
One of the things that we did while in office was to train the men in the
use of the pistol. A school of pistol practice was established, and the
marksmanship of the force was wonderfully improved. The man in charge
of the school was a roundsman, Petty, whom we promoted to sergeant. He
was one of the champion revolver shots of the country, and could hit just
about where he aimed. Twice he was forced to fire at criminals who resisted
arrest, and in each case he hit his man in the arm or leg, simply stopping
him without danger to his life.
In May, 1896, a number of burglaries occurred far uptown, in the
neighborhood of One Hundred and Fifty-sixth Street and Union Avenue.
Two officers were sent out each night to patrol the streets in plain clothes.
About two o'clock on the morning of May 8 they caught a glimpse of two
men loitering about a large corner house, and determined to make them
explain their actions. In order to cut off their escape, one officer went down
one street and one the other. The first officer, whose name was Ryan, found
the two men at the gateway of the side entrance of the house, and hailed to
know what they were doing. Without answering, they turned and ran toward
Prospect Avenue, with Ryan in close pursuit. After running about one
hundred feet, one of them turned and fired three shots at Ryan, but failed to
hit him. The two then separated, and the man who had done the shooting
escaped. The other man, whose name proved to be O'Connor, again took to
his heels, with Ryan still after him; they turned the corner and met the other
officer, whose name was Reid, running as hard as he could toward the
shooting. When O'Connor saw himself cut off by Reid, he fired at his new
foe, the bullet cutting Reid's overcoat on the left shoulder. Reid promptly
fired in return, his bullet going into O'Connor's neck and causing him to
turn a complete somersault. The two officers then cared for their prisoner
until the ambulance arrived, when he was taken to the hospital and
pronounced mortally wounded. His companion was afterward caught, and

they turned out to be the very burglars for whom Reid and Ryan had been
on the lookout.
In December, 1896, one of our officers was shot. A row occurred in a
restaurant, which ended in two young toughs drawing their revolvers and
literally running amuck, shooting two or three men. A policeman, attracted
by the noise, ran up and seized one of them, whereupon the other shot him
in the mouth, wounding him badly. Nevertheless, the officer kept his
prisoner and carried him to the station-house. The tough who had done the
shooting ran out and was seized by another officer. The tough fired at him,
the bullet passing through the officer's overcoat, but he was promptly
knocked down, disarmed, and brought to the station-house. In this case
neither policeman used his revolver, and each brought in his man, although
the latter was armed and resisted arrest, one of the officers taking in his
prisoner after having been himself severely wounded. A lamentable feature
of the case was that this same officer was a man who, though capable of
great gallantry, was also given to shirking his work, and we were finally
obliged to dismiss him from the force, after passing over two or three
glaring misdeeds in view of his record for courage.
We promoted another man on account of finding out accidentally that he
had performed a notable feat, which he had forborne even to mention, so
that his name never came on the roll of honor. Late at night, while
patrolling a lonely part of his post, he came upon three young toughs who
had turned highwaymen and were robbing a peddler. He ran in at once with
his night-stick, whereupon the toughs showed fight, and one of them struck
at him with a bludgeon, breaking his left hand. The officer, however, made
such good use of his night-stick that he knocked down two of his assailants,
whereupon the third ran away, and he brought both of his prisoners to the
station-house. Then he went round to the hospital, had his broken hand set
in plaster, and actually reported for duty at the next tour, without losing one
hour. He was a quiet fellow, with a record free from complaints, and we
made him roundsman.
The mounted squad have, of course, many opportunities to distinguish
themselves in stopping runaways. In May, 1895, a mounted policeman
named Heyer succeeded in stopping a runaway at Kingsbridge under rather
noteworthy circumstances. Two men were driving in a buggy, when the
horse stumbled, and in recovering himself broke the head-stall, so that the

bridle fell off. The horse was a spirited trotter, and at once ran away at full
speed. Heyer saw the occurrence, and followed at a run. When he got
alongside the runaway he seized him by the forelock, guided him
dexterously over the bridge, preventing him from running into the
numerous wagons that were on the road, and finally forced him up a hill
and into a wagon-shed. Three months later this same officer saved a man
from drowning.
The members of the bicycle squad, which was established shortly after
we took office, soon grew to show not only extraordinary proficiency on the
wheel, but extraordinary daring. They frequently stopped runaways,
wheeling alongside of them, and grasping the horses while going at full
speed; and, what was even more remarkable, they managed not only to
overtake but to jump into the vehicle and capture, on two or three different
occasions, men who were guilty of reckless driving, and who fought
violently in resisting arrest. They were picked men, being young and active,
and any feat of daring which could be accomplished on the wheel they were
certain to accomplish.
Three of the best riders of the bicycle squad, whose names and records
happen to occur to me, were men of the three ethnic strains most strongly
represented in the New York police force, being respectively of native
American, German, and Irish parentage.
The German was a man of enormous power, and he was able to stop each
of the many runaways he tackled without losing his wheel. Choosing his
time, he would get alongside the horse and seize the bit in his left hand,
keeping his right on the crossbar of the wheel. By degrees he then got the
animal under control. He never failed to stop it, and he never lost his wheel.
He also never failed to overtake any "scorcher," although many of these
were professional riders who deliberately violated the law to see if they
could not get away from him; for the wheelmen soon get to know the
officers whose beats they cross.
The Yankee, though a tall, powerful man and a very good rider, scarcely
came up to the German in either respect; he possessed exceptional ability,
however, as well as exceptional nerve and coolness, and he also won his
promotion. He stopped about as many runaways; but when the horse was
really panic-stricken he usually had to turn his wheel loose, getting a firm
grip on the horse's reins and then kicking his wheel so that it would fall out

of the way of injury from the wagon. On one occasion he had a fight with a
drunken and reckless driver who was urging to top speed a spirited horse.
He first got hold of the horse, whereupon the driver lashed both him and the
beast, and the animal, already mad with terror, could not be stopped. The
officer had of course kicked away his wheel at the beginning, and after
being dragged along for some distance he let go the beast and made a grab
at the wagon. The driver hit him with his whip, but he managed to get in,
and after a vigorous tussle overcame his man, and disposed of him by
getting him down and sitting on him. This left his hands free for the reins.
By degrees he got the horse under control, and drove the wagon round to
the station-house, still sitting on his victim. "I jounced up and down on him
to keep him quiet when he turned ugly," he remarked to me parenthetically.
Having disposed of the wagon, he took the man round to the court, and on
the way the prisoner suddenly sprang on him and tried to throttle him.
Convinced at last that patience had ceased to be a virtue, he quieted his
assailant with a smash on the head that took all the fight out of him until he
was brought before the judge and fined. Like the other "bicycle cops," this
officer made a number of arrests of criminals, such as thieves, highwaymen,
and the like, in addition to his natural prey—scorchers, runaways, and
reckless drivers.
The third member of the trio, a tall, sinewy man with flaming red hair,
which rather added to the terror he inspired in evil-doers, was usually
stationed in a tough part of the city, where there was a tendency to crimes of
violence, and incidentally an occasional desire to harass wheelmen. The
officer was as good off his wheel as on it, and he speedily established
perfect order on his beat, being always willing to "take chances" in getting
his man. He was no respecter of persons, and when it became his duty to
arrest a wealthy man for persistently refusing to have his carriage lamps
lighted after nightfall, he brought him in with the same indifference that he
displayed in arresting a street-corner tough who had thrown a brick at a
wheelman.
Occasionally a policeman would perform work which ordinarily comes
within the domain of the fireman. In November, 1896, an officer who had
previously saved a man from death by drowning added to his record by
saving five persons from burning. He was at the time asleep, when he was
aroused by a fire in a house a few doors away. Running over the roofs of the
adjoining houses until he reached the burning building, he found that on the

fourth floor the flames had cut off all exit from an apartment in which there
were four women, two of them over fifty, and one of the others with a six-
months-old baby. The officer ran down to the adjoining house, broke open
the door of the apartment on the same floor—the fourth—and crept out on
the coping, less than three inches wide, that ran from one house to the other.
Being a large and very powerful and active man, he managed to keep hold
of the casing of the window with one hand, and with the other to reach to
the window of the apartment where the women and child were. The firemen
appeared, and stretched a net underneath. The crowd that was looking on
suddenly became motionless and silent. Then, one by one, he drew the
women out of their window, and, holding them tight against the wall,
passed them into the other window. The exertion in such an attitude was
great, and he strained himself badly; but he possessed a practical mind, and
as soon as the women were saved he began a prompt investigation of the
cause of the fire, and arrested two men whose carelessness, as was
afterward proved, caused it.
Now and then a man, though a brave man, proved to be slack or stupid or
vicious, and we could make nothing out of him; but hardihood and courage
were qualities upon which we insisted and which we rewarded. Whenever I
see the police force attacked and vilified, I always remember my
association with it. The cases I have given above are merely instances
chosen almost at random among hundreds of others. Men such as those I
have mentioned have the right stuff in them! If they go wrong, the trouble is
with the system, and therefore with us, the citizens, for permitting the
system to go unchanged. The conditions of New York life are such as to
make the police problem therein more difficult than in any other of the
world's great capitals. I am often asked if policemen are honest. I believe
that the great majority of them want to be honest and will be honest
whenever they are given the chance. The New York police force is a body
thoroughly representative of the great city itself. As I have said above, the
predominant ethnic strains in it are, first, the men of Irish birth or parentage,
and, following these, the native Americans, usually from the country
districts, and the men of German birth or parentage. There are also Jews,
Scandinavians, Italians, Slavs, and men of other nationalities. All soon
become welded into one body. They are physically a fine lot. Moreover,
their instincts are right; they are game, they are alert and self-reliant, they

prefer to act squarely if they are allowed so to act. All that they need is to be
given the chance to prove themselves honest, brave, and self-respecting.
The law at present is much better than in our day, so far as governing the
force is concerned. There is now a single Commissioner, and the Mayor has
complete power over him. The Mayor, through his Commissioner, now has
power to keep the police force on a good level of conduct if with resolution
and common sense he insists on absolute honesty within the force and at the
same time heartily supports it against the criminal classes. To weaken the
force in its dealings with gangs and toughs and criminals generally is as
damaging as to permit dishonesty, and, moreover, works towards
dishonesty. But while under the present law very much improvement can be
worked, there is need of change of the law which will make the Police
Commissioner a permanent, non-partisan official, holding office so long as
he proves thoroughly fit for the job, completely independent of the
politicians and privileged interests, and with complete power over the force.
This means that there must be the right law, and the right public opinion
back of the law.
The many-sided ethnic character of the force now and then gives rise to,
or affords opportunity for, queer happenings. Occasionally it enables one to
meet emergencies in the best possible fashion. While I was Police
Commissioner an anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin, Rector Ahlwardt,
came over to New York to preach a crusade against the Jews. Many of the
New York Jews were much excited and asked me to prevent him from
speaking and not to give him police protection. This, I told them, was
impossible; and if possible would have been undesirable because it would
have made him a martyr. The proper thing to do was to make him
ridiculous. Accordingly I detailed for his protection a Jew sergeant and a
score or two of Jew policemen. He made his harangue against the Jews
under the active protection of some forty policemen, every one of them a
Jew! It was the most effective possible answer; and incidentally it was an
object-lesson to our people, whose greatest need it is to learn that there
must be no division by class hatred, whether this hatred be that of creed
against creed, nationality against nationality, section against section, or men
of one social or industrial condition against men of another social and
industrial condition. We must ever judge each individual on his own
conduct and merits, and not on his membership in any class, whether that
class be based on theological, social, or industrial considerations.

Among my political opponents when I was Police Commissioner was the
head of a very influential local Democratic organization. He was a State
Senator usually known as Big Tim Sullivan. Big Tim represented the morals
of another era; that is, his principles and actions were very much those of a
Norman noble in the years immediately succeeding the Battle of Hastings.
(This will seem flattery only to those who are not acquainted with the real
histories and antecedents of the Norman nobles of the epoch in question.)
His application of these eleventh-century theories to our nineteenth-century
municipal democratic conditions brought him into sharp contact with me,
and with one of my right-hand men in the Department, Inspector John
McCullough. Under the old dispensation this would have meant that his
friends and kinsfolk were under the ban.
Now it happened that in the Department at that time there was a nephew
or cousin of his, Jerry D. Sullivan. I found that Jerry was an uncommonly
good man, a conscientious, capable officer, and I promoted him. I do not
know whether Jerry or Jerry's cousin (Senator Sullivan) was more
astonished. The Senator called upon me to express what I am sure was a
very genuine feeling of appreciation. Poor Jerry died, I think of
consumption, a year or two after I left the Department. He was promoted
again after I left, and he then showed that he possessed the very rare quality
of gratitude, for he sent me a telegram dated January 15, 1898, running as
follows: "Was made sergeant to-day. I thank you for all in my first
advancement." And in a letter written to me he said: "In the future, as in the
past, I will endeavor at all times to perform my duty honestly and fearlessly,
and never cause you to feel that you were mistaken in me, so that you will
be justly proud of my record." The Senator, though politically opposed to
me, always kept a feeling of friendship for me after this incident. He served
in Congress while I was President.
The police can be used to help all kinds of good purposes. When I was
Police Commissioner much difficulty had been encountered in locating
illegal and fraudulent practitioners of medicine. Dr. Maurice Lewi called on
me, with a letter from James Russell Parsons, the Secretary of the Board of
Regents at Albany, and asked me if I could not help. After questioning him I
found that the local authorities were eager to prosecute these men, but could
not locate them; and I made up my mind I would try my hand at it.
Accordingly, a sealed order was sent to the commanding officer of each
police precinct in New York, not to be opened until just before the morning

roll call, previous to the police squad going on duty. This order required
that, immediately upon reaching post, each patrolman should go over his
beat and enter upon a sheet of paper, provided for that purpose, the full
name and address of every doctor sign there appearing. Immediately upon
securing this information, the patrolman was instructed to return the sheet
to the officer in charge of the precinct. The latter in turn was instructed to
collect and place in one large envelope and to return to Police Headquarters
all the data thus received. As a result of this procedure, within two hours the
prosecuting officials of the city of New York were in possession of the
name and address of every person in New York who announced himself as a
physician; and scores of pretended physicians were brought to book or
driven from the city.
One of the perennially serious and difficult problems, and one of the
chief reasons for police blackmail and corruption, is to be found in the
excise situation in New York. When I was Police Commissioner, New York
was a city with twelve or fifteen thousand saloons, with a State law which
said they should be closed on Sundays, and with a local sentiment which
put a premium on violating the law by making Sunday the most profitable
day in the week to the saloon-keeper who was willing to take chances. It
was this willingness to take chances that furnished to the corrupt politician
and the corrupt police officer their opportunities.
There was in New York City a strong sentiment in favor of honesty in
politics; there was also a strong sentiment in favor of opening the saloons
on Sundays; and, finally, there was a strong sentiment in favor of keeping
the saloons closed on Sunday. Unfortunately, many of the men who favored
honest government nevertheless preferred keeping the saloons open to
having honest government; and many others among the men who favored
honest government put it second to keeping the saloons closed. Moreover,
among the people who wished the law obeyed and the saloons closed there
were plenty who objected strongly to every step necessary to accomplish
the result, although they also insisted that the result should be
accomplished.
Meanwhile the politicians found an incredible profit in using the law as a
club to keep the saloons in line; all except the biggest, the owners of which,
or the owners of the breweries back of which, sat in the inner councils of
Tammany, or controlled Tammany's allies in the Republican organization.

The police used the partial and spasmodic enforcement of the law as a
means of collecting blackmail. The result was that the officers of the law,
the politicians, and the saloon-keepers became inextricably tangled in a
network of crime and connivance at crime. The most powerful saloon-
keepers controlled the politicians and the police, while the latter in turn
terrorized and blackmailed all the other saloon-keepers. It was not a case of
non-enforcement of the law. The law was very actively enforced, but it was
enforced with corrupt discrimination.
It is difficult for men who have not been brought into contact with that
side of political life which deals with the underworld to understand the
brazen openness with which this blackmailing of lawbreakers was carried
out. A further very dark fact was that many of the men responsible for
putting the law on the statute-books in order to please one element of their
constituents, also connived at or even profited by the corrupt and partial
non-enforcement of the law in order to please another set of their
constituents, or to secure profit for themselves. The organ of the liquor-
sellers at that time was the Wine and Spirit Gazette. The editor of this paper
believed in selling liquor on Sunday, and felt that it was an outrage to forbid
it. But he also felt that corruption and blackmail made too big a price to pay
for the partial non-enforcement of the law. He made in his paper a
statement, the correctness of which was never questioned, which offers a
startling commentary on New York politics of that period. In this statement
he recited the fact that the system of blackmail had been brought to such a
state of perfection, and had become so oppressive to the liquor dealers
themselves, that they communicated at length on the subject with Governor
Hill (the State Democratic boss) and then with Mr. Croker (the city
Democratic boss). Finally the matter was formally taken up by a committee
of the Central Association of Liquor Dealers in an interview they held with
Mr. Martin, my Tammany predecessor as President of the police force. In
matter-of-course way the editor's statement continues: "An agreement was
made between the leaders of Tammany Hall and the liquor dealers
according to which the monthly blackmail paid to the force should be
discontinued in return for political support." Not only did the big bosses,
State and local, treat this agreement, and the corruption to which it was due,
as normal and proper, but they never even took the trouble to deny what had
been done when it was made public. Tammany and the police, however, did
not fully live up to the agreement; and much discrimination of a very

corrupt kind, and of a very exasperating kind to liquor-sellers who wished
to be honest, continued in connection with the enforcing of the law.
In short, the agreement was kept only with those who had "pull." These
men with "pull" were benefited when their rivals were bullied and
blackmailed by the police. The police, meanwhile, who had bought
appointment or promotion, and the politicians back of them, extended the
blackmailing to include about everything from the pushcart peddler and the
big or small merchant who wished to use the sidewalk illegally for his
goods, up to the keepers of the brothel, the gambling-house, and the policy-
shop. The total blackmail ran into millions of dollars. New York was a
wide-open town. The big bosses rolled in wealth, and the corrupt policemen
who ran the force lost all sense of decency and justice. Nevertheless, I wish
to insist on the fact that the honest men on the patrol posts, "the men with
the night-sticks," remained desirous to see honesty obtain, although they
were losing courage and hope.
This was the situation that confronted me when I came to Mulberry
Street. The saloon was the chief source of mischief. It was with the saloon
that I had to deal, and there was only one way to deal with it. That was to
enforce the law. The howl that rose was deafening. The professional
politicians raved. The yellow press surpassed themselves in clamor and
mendacity. A favorite assertion was that I was enforcing a "blue" law, an
obsolete law that had never before been enforced. As a matter of fact, I was
only enforcing honestly a law that had hitherto been enforced dishonestly.
There was very little increase in the number of arrests made for violating
the Sunday law. Indeed, there were weeks when the number of arrests went
down. The only difference was that there was no protected class. Everybody
was arrested alike, and I took especial pains to see that there was no
discrimination, and that the big men and the men with political influence
were treated like every one else. The immediate effect was wholly good. I
had been told that it was not possible to close the saloons on Sunday and
that I could not succeed. However, I did succeed. The warden of Bellevue
Hospital reported, two or three weeks after we had begun, that for the first
time in its existence there had not been a case due to a drunken brawl in the
hospital all Monday. The police courts gave the same testimony, while
savings banks recorded increased deposits and pawnshops hard times. The
most touching of all things was the fact that we received letters, literally by
the hundred, from mothers in tenement-houses who had never been allowed

to take their children to the country in the wide-open days, and who now
found their husbands willing to take them and their families for an outing
on Sunday. Jake Riis and I spent one Sunday from morning till night in the
tenement districts, seeing for ourselves what had happened.
During the two years that we were in office things never slipped back to
anything like what they had been before. But we did not succeed in keeping
them quite as highly keyed as during these first weeks. As regards the
Sunday-closing law, this was partly because public sentiment was not really
with us. The people who had demanded honesty, but who did not like to pay
for it by the loss of illegal pleasure, joined the openly dishonest in attacking
us. Moreover, all kinds of ways of evading the law were tried, and some of
them were successful. The statute, for instance, permitted any man to take
liquor with meals. After two or three months a magistrate was found who
decided judicially that seventeen beers and one pretzel made a meal—after
which decision joy again became unconfined in at least some of the saloons,
and the yellow press gleefully announced that my "tyranny" had been
curbed. But my prime object, that of stopping blackmail, was largely
attained.
All kinds of incidents occurred in connection with this crusade. One of
them introduced me to a friend who remains a friend yet. His name was
Edward J. Bourke. He was one of the men who entered the police force
through our examinations shortly after I took office. I had summoned
twenty or thirty of the successful applicants to let me look over them; and
as I walked into the hall, one of them, a well-set-up man, called out sharply
to the others, "Gangway," making them move to one side. I found he had
served in the United States navy. The incident was sufficient to make me
keep him in mind. A month later I was notified by a police reporter, a very
good fellow, that Bourke was in difficulties, and that he thought I had better
look into the matter myself, as Bourke was being accused by certain very
influential men of grave misconduct in an arrest he had made the night
before. Accordingly, I took the matter up personally. I found that on the new
patrolman's beat the preceding night—a new beat—there was a big saloon
run by a man of great influence in political circles known as "King"
Calahan. After midnight the saloon was still running in full blast, and
Bourke, stepping inside, told Calahan to close up. It was at the time filled
with "friends of personal liberty," as Governor Hill used at that time, in
moments of pathos, to term everybody who regarded as tyranny any

restriction on the sale of liquor. Calahan's saloon had never before in its
history been closed, and to have a green cop tell him to close it seemed to
him so incredible that he regarded it merely as a bad jest. On his next round
Bourke stepped in and repeated the order. Calahan felt that the jest had gone
too far, and by way of protest knocked Bourke down. This was an error of
judgment on his part, for when Bourke arose he knocked down Calahan.
The two then grappled and fell on the floor, while the "friends of personal
liberty" danced around the fight and endeavored to stamp on everything
they thought wasn't Calahan. However, Bourke, though pretty roughly
handled, got his man and shut the saloon. When he appeared against the
lawbreaker in court next day, he found the court-room crowded with
influential Tammany Hall politicians, backed by one or two Republican
leaders of the same type; for Calahan was a baron of the underworld, and
both his feudal superiors and his feudal inferiors gathered to the rescue. His
backers in court included a Congressman and a State Senator, and so deep-
rooted was the police belief in "pull" that his own superiors had turned
against Bourke and were preparing to sacrifice him. Just at this time I acted
on the information given me by my newspaper friend by starting in person
for the court. The knowledge that I knew what was going on, that I meant
what I said, and that I intended to make the affair personal, was all that was
necessary. Before I reached the court all effort to defend Calahan had
promptly ceased, and Bourke had come forth triumphant. I immediately
promoted him to roundsman. He is a captain now. He has been on the force
ever since, save that when the Spanish War came he obtained a holiday
without pay for six months and reentered the navy, serving as gun captain in
one of the gunboats, and doing his work, as was to be expected, in first-rate
fashion, especially when under fire.
Let me again say that when men tell me that the police are irredeemably
bad I remember scores and hundreds of cases like this of Bourke, like the
case I have already mentioned of Raphael, like the other cases I have given
above.
It is useless to tell me that these men are bad. They are naturally first-rate
men. There are no better men anywhere than the men of the New York
police force; and when they go bad it is because the system is wrong, and
because they are not given the chance to do the good work they can do and
would rather do. I never coddled these men. I punished them severely
whenever I thought their conduct required it. All I did was to try to be just;

to reward them when they did well; in short, to act squarely by them. I
believe that, as a whole, they liked me. When, in 1912, I ran for President
on the Progressive ticket, I received a number of unsigned letters inclosing
sums of money for the campaign. One of these inclosed twenty dollars. The
writer, who did not give his name, said that he was a policeman, that I had
once had him before me on charges, and had fined him twenty dollars; that,
as a matter of fact, he had not committed the offense for which I fined him,
but that the evidence was such that he did not wonder that I had been
misled, and never blamed me for it, because I had acted squarely and had
given honest and decent men a chance in the Police Department; and that
now he inclosed a twenty-dollar bill, the amount of the fine inflicted on him
so many years before. I have always wished I knew who the man was.
The disciplinary courts were very interesting. But it was extraordinarily
difficult to get at the facts in the more complicated cases—as must always
be true under similar circumstances; for ordinarily it is necessary to back up
the superior officer who makes the charge, and yet it is always possible that
this superior officer is consciously or unconsciously biased against his
subordinate.
In the courts the charges were sometimes brought by police officers and
sometimes by private citizens. In the latter case we would get queer insights
into twilight phases of New York life. It was necessary to be always on our
guard. Often an accusation would be brought against the policeman because
he had been guilty of misconduct. Much more often the accusation merely
meant that the officer had incurred animosity by doing his duty. I remember
one amusing case where the officer was wholly to blame but had acted in
entire good faith.
One of the favorite and most demoralizing forms of gambling in New
York was policy-playing. The policy slips consisted of papers with three
rows of figures written on them. The officer in question was a huge
pithecoid lout of a creature, with a wooden face and a receding forehead,
and his accuser whom he had arrested the preceding evening was a little
grig of a red-headed man, obviously respectable, and almost incoherent
with rage. The anger of the little red-headed man was but natural, for he had
just come out from a night in the station-house. He had been arrested late in
the evening on suspicion that he was a policy-player, because of the rows of
figures on a piece of paper which he had held in his hand, and because at

the time of his arrest he had just stepped into the entrance of the hall of a
tenement-house in order to read by lamplight. The paper was produced in
evidence. There were the three rows of figures all right, but, as the accused
explained, hopping up and down with rage and excitement, they were all of
them the numbers of hymns. He was the superintendent of a small Sunday-
school. He had written down the hymns for several future services, one
under the other, and on the way home was stopping to look at them, under
convenient lamp-posts, and finally by the light of the lamp in a tenement-
house hallway; and it was this conduct which struck the sagacious man in
uniform as "suspicious."
One of the saddest features of police work is dealing with the social evil,
with prostitutes and houses of ill fame. In so far as the law gave me power, I
always treated the men taken in any raid on these houses precisely as the
women were treated. My experience brought me to the very strong
conviction that there ought not to be any toleration by law of the vice. I do
not know of any method which will put a complete stop to the evil, but I do
know certain things that ought to be done to minimize it. One of these is
treating men and women on an exact equality for the same act. Another is
the establishment of night courts and of special commissions to deal with
this special class of cases. Another is that suggested by the Rev. Charles
Stelzle, of the Labor Temple—to publish conspicuously the name of the
owner of any property used for immoral purposes, after said owner had
been notified of the use and has failed to prevent it. Another is to prosecute
the keepers and backers of brothels, men and women, as relentlessly and
punish them as severely as pickpockets and common thieves. They should
never be fined; they should be imprisoned. As for the girls, the very young
ones and first offenders should be put in the charge of probation officers or
sent to reformatories, and the large percentage of feeble-minded girls and of
incorrigible girls and women should be sent to institutions created for them.
We would thus remove from this hideous commerce the articles of
commerce. Moreover, the Federal Government must in ever-increasing
measure proceed against the degraded promoters of this commercialism, for
their activities are inter-State and the Nation can often deal with them more
effectively than the States; although, as public sentiment becomes aroused,
Nation, State, and municipality will all cooperate towards the same end of
rooting out the traffic. But the prime need is to raise the level of individual
morality; and, moreover, to encourage early marriages, the single standard

of sex-morality, and a strict sense of reciprocal conjugal obligation. The
women who preach late marriages are by just so much making it difficult to
better the standard of chastity.
As regards the white slave traffic, the men engaged in it, and the women
too, are far worse criminals than any ordinary murderers can be. For them
there is need of such a law as that recently adopted in England through the
efforts of Arthur Lee, M.P., a law which includes whipping for the male
offenders. There are brutes so low, so infamous, so degraded and bestial in
their cruelty and brutality, that the only way to get at them is through their
skins. Sentimentality on behalf of such men is really almost as unhealthy
and wicked as the criminality of the men themselves. My experience is that
there should be no toleration of any "tenderloin" or "red light" district, and
that, above all, there should be the most relentless war on commercialized
vice. The men who profit and make their living by the depravity and the
awful misery of other human beings stand far below any ordinary criminals,
and no measures taken against them can be too severe.
As for the wretched girls who follow the dreadful trade in question, a
good deal can be done by a change in economic conditions. This ought to
be done. When girls are paid wages inadequate to keep them from
starvation, or to permit them to live decently, a certain proportion are forced
by their economic misery into lives of vice. The employers and all others
responsible for these conditions stand on a moral level not far above the
white slavers themselves. But it is a mistake to suppose that either the
correction of these economic conditions or the abolition of the white slave
trade will wholly correct the evil or will even reach the major part of it. The
economic factor is very far from being the chief factor in inducing girls to
go into this dreadful life. As with so many other problems, while there must
be governmental action, there must also be strengthening of the average
individual character in order to achieve the desired end. Even where
economic conditions are bad, girls who are both strong and pure will remain
unaffected by temptations to which girls of weak character or lax standards
readily yield. Any man who knows the wide variation in the proportions of
the different races and nationalities engaged in prostitution must come to
the conclusion that it is out of the question to treat economic conditions as
the sole conditions or even as the chief conditions that determine this
question. There are certain races—the Irish are honorably conspicuous
among them—which, no matter what the economic pressure, furnish

relatively few inmates of houses of ill fame. I do not believe that the
differences are due to permanent race characteristics; this is shown by the
fact that the best settlement houses find that practically all their "long-term
graduates," so to speak, all the girls that come for a long period under their
influence, no matter what their race or national origin, remain pure. In every
race there are some naturally vicious individuals and some weak individuals
who readily succumb under economic pressure. A girl who is lazy and hates
hard work, a girl whose mind is rather feeble, and who is of "subnormal
intelligence," as the phrase now goes, or a girl who craves cheap finery and
vapid pleasure, is always in danger. A high ideal of personal purity is
essential. Where the same pressure under the same economic conditions has
tenfold the effect on one set of people that it has on another, it is evident
that the question of moral standards is even more important than the
question of economic standards, very important though this question is. It is
important for us to remember that the girl ought to have the chance, not
only for the necessaries of life, but for innocent pleasure; and that even
more than the man she must not be broken by overwork, by excessive toil.
Moreover, public opinion and the law should combine to hunt down the
"flagrant man swine" who himself hunts down poor or silly or unprotected
girls. But we must not, in foolish sentimentality, excuse the girl from her
duty to keep herself pure. Our duty to achieve the same moral level for the
two sexes must be performed by raising the level for the man, not by
lowering it for the woman; and the fact that society must recognize its duty
in no shape or way relieves, not even to the smallest degree, the individual
from doing his or her duty. Sentimentality which grows maudlin on behalf
of the willful prostitute is a curse; to confound her with the entrapped or
coerced girl, the real white slave, is both foolish and wicked. There are evil
women just as there are evil men, naturally depraved girls just as there are
naturally depraved young men; and the right and wise thing, the just thing,
to them, and the generous thing to innocent girls and decent men, is to wage
stern war against the evil creatures of both sexes.
In company with Jacob Riis, I did much work that was not connected
with the actual discipline of the force or indeed with the actual work of the
force. There was one thing which he and I abolished—police lodging-
houses, which were simply tramp lodging-houses, and a fruitful
encouragement to vagrancy. Those who read Mr. Riis's story of his own life
will remember the incidents that gave him from actual personal experience

his horror of these tramp lodging-houses. As member of the Health Board I
was brought into very close relations with the conditions of life in the
tenement-house districts. Here again I used to visit the different tenement-
house regions, usually in company with Riis, to see for myself what the
conditions were. It was largely this personal experience that enabled me
while on the Health Board to struggle not only zealously, but with
reasonable efficiency and success, to improve conditions. We did our share
in making forward strides in the matter of housing the working people of
the city with some regard to decency and comfort.
The midnight trips that Riis and I took enabled me to see what the Police
Department was doing, and also gave me personal insight into some of the
problems of city life. It is one thing to listen in perfunctory fashion to tales
of overcrowded tenements, and it is quite another actually to see what that
overcrowding means, some hot summer night, by even a single inspection
during the hours of darkness. There was a very hot spell one midsummer
while I was Police Commissioner, and most of each night I spent walking
through the tenement-house districts and visiting police stations to see what
was being done. It was a tragic week. We did everything possible to
alleviate the suffering. Much of it was heartbreaking, especially the gasping
misery of the little children and of the worn-out mothers. Every resource of
the Health Department, of the Police Department, and even the Fire
Department (which flooded the hot streets) was taxed in the effort to render
service. The heat killed such multitudes of horses that the means at our
disposal for removing the poor dead beasts proved quite inadequate,
although every nerve was strained to the limit. In consequence we received
scores of complaints from persons before whose doors dead horses had
remained, festering in the heat, for two or three days. One irascible man
sent us furious denunciations, until we were at last able to send a big dray to
drag away the horse that lay dead before his shop door. The huge dray
already contained eleven other dead horses, and when it reached this
particular door it broke down, and it was hours before it could be moved.
The unfortunate man who had thus been cursed with a granted wish closed
his doors in despair and wrote us a final pathetic letter in which he
requested us to remove either the horses or his shop, he didn't care which.
I have spoken before of my experience with the tenement-house cigar
factory law which the highest court of New York State declared
unconstitutional. My experience in the Police Department taught me that

not a few of the worst tenement-houses were owned by wealthy individuals,
who hired the best and most expensive lawyers to persuade the courts that it
was "unconstitutional" to insist on the betterment of conditions. These
business men and lawyers were very adroit in using a word with fine and
noble associations to cloak their opposition to vitally necessary movements
for industrial fair play and decency. They made it evident that they valued
the Constitution, not as a help to righteousness, but as a means for thwarting
movements against unrighteousness. After my experience with them I
became more set than ever in my distrust of those men, whether business
men or lawyers, judges, legislators, or executive officers, who seek to make
of the Constitution a fetich for the prevention of the work of social reform,
for the prevention of work in the interest of those men, women, and
children on whose behalf we should be at liberty to employ freely every
governmental agency.
Occasionally during the two years we had to put a stop to riotous
violence, and now and then on these occasions some of the labor union
leaders protested against the actions of the police. By this time I was
becoming a strong believer in labor unions, a strong believer in the rights of
labor. For that very reason I was all the more bound to see that lawlessness
and disorder were put down, and that no rioter was permitted to masquerade
under the guise of being a friend of labor or a sympathizer with labor. I was
scrupulous to see that the labor men had fair play; that, for instance, they
were allowed to picket just so far as under the law picketing could be
permitted, so that the strikers had ample opportunity peacefully to persuade
other labor men not to take their places. But I made it clearly and definitely
understood that under no circumstances would I permit violence or fail to
insist upon the keeping of order. If there were wrongs, I would join with a
full heart in striving to have them corrected. But where there was violence
all other questions had to drop until order was restored. This is a
democracy, and the people have the power, if they choose to exercise it, to
make conditions as they ought to be made, and to do this strictly within the
law; and therefore the first duty of the true democrat, of the man really loyal
to the principles of popular government, is to see that law is enforced and
order upheld. It was a peculiar gratification to me that so many of the labor
leaders with whom I was thrown in contact grew cordially to accept this
view. When I left the Department, several called upon me to say how sorry
they were that I was not to continue in office. One, the Secretary of the

Journeyman Bakers' and Confectioners' International Union, Henry
Weismann, wrote me expressing his regret that I was going, and his
appreciation as a citizen of what I had done as Police Commissioner; he
added: "I am particularly grateful for your liberal attitude toward organized
labor, your cordial championship of those speaking in behalf of the toilers,
and your evident desire to do the right thing as you saw it at whatever cost."
Some of the letters I received on leaving the Department were from
unexpected sources. Mr. E. L. Godkin, an editor who in international
matters was not a patriotic man, wrote protesting against my taking the
Assistant-Secretaryship of the Navy, and adding: "I have a concern, as the
Quakers say, to put on record my earnest belief that in New York you are
doing the greatest work of which any American to-day is capable, and
exhibiting to the young men of the country the spectacle of a very important
office administered by a man of high character in the most efficient way
amid a thousand difficulties. As a lesson in politics I cannot think of
anything more instructive."
About the same time I had a letter from Mr. (afterwards Ambassador)
James Bryce, also expressing regret that I was leaving the Police
Department, but naturally with much more appreciation of the work that
was to be done in the Navy Department. This letter I quote, with his
permission, because it conveys a lesson to those who are inclined always to
think that the conditions of the present time are very bad. It was written July
7, 1897. Mr. Bryce spoke of the possibility of coming to America in a
month or so, and continued: "I hope I may have a chance of seeing you if I
do get over, and of drawing some comfort from you as regards your
political phenomena, which, so far as I can gather from those of your
countrymen I have lately seen, furnish some good opportunities for a
persistent optimist like myself to show that he is not to be lightly
discouraged. Don't suppose that things are specially 'nice,' as a lady would
say, in Europe either. They are not." Mr. Bryce was a very friendly and
extraordinary competent observer of things American; and there was this
distinct note of discouragement about our future in the intimate letter he
was thus sending. Yet this was at the very time when the United States was
entering on a dozen years during which our people accomplished more
good, and came nearer realizing the possibilities of a great, free, and
conscientious democracy, than during any other dozen years in our history,

save only the years of Lincoln's Presidency and the period during which the
Nation was founded.

CHAPTER VII
THE WAR OF AMERICA THE UNREADY

I suppose the United States will always be unready for war, and in
consequence will always be exposed to great expense, and to the possibility
of the gravest calamity, when the Nation goes to war. This is no new thing.
Americans learn only from catastrophes and not from experience.
There would have been no war in 1812 if, in the previous decade,
America, instead of announcing that "peace was her passion," instead of
acting on the theory that unpreparedness averts war, had been willing to go
to the expense of providing a fleet of a score of ships of the line. However,
in that case, doubtless the very men who in the actual event deplored the
loss of life and waste of capital which their own supineness had brought
about would have loudly inveighed against the "excessive and improper
cost of armaments"; so it all came to about the same thing in the end.
There is no more thoroughgoing international Mrs. Gummidge, and no
more utterly useless and often utterly mischievous citizen, than the peace-
at-any-price, universal-arbitration type of being, who is always complaining
either about war or else about the cost of the armaments which act as the
insurance against war. There is every reason why we should try to limit the
cost of armaments, as these tend to grow excessive, but there is also every
reason to remember that in the present stage of civilization a proper
armament is the surest guarantee of peace—and is the only guarantee that
war, if it does come, will not mean irreparable and overwhelming disaster.
In the spring of 1897 President McKinley appointed me Assistant
Secretary of the Navy. I owed the appointment chiefly to the efforts of
Senator H. C. Lodge of Massachusetts, who doubtless was actuated mainly
by his long and close friendship for me, but also—I like to believe—by his
keen interest in the navy. The first book I had ever published, fifteen years
previously, was "The History of the Naval War of 1812"; and I have always
taken the interest in the navy which every good American ought to take. At
the time I wrote the book, in the early eighties, the navy had reached its
nadir, and we were then utterly incompetent to fight Spain or any other

power that had a navy at all. Shortly afterwards we began timidly and
hesitatingly to build up a fleet. It is amusing to recall the roundabout steps
we took to accomplish our purpose. In the reaction after the colossal
struggle of the Civil War our strongest and most capable men had thrown
their whole energy into business, into money-making, into the development,
and above all the exploitation and exhaustion at the most rapid rate
possible, of our natural resources—mines, forests, soil, and rivers. These
men were not weak men, but they permitted themselves to grow
shortsighted and selfish; and while many of them down at the bottom
possessed the fundamental virtues, including the fighting virtues, others
were purely of the glorified huckster or glorified pawnbroker type—which
when developed to the exclusion of everything else makes about as poor a
national type as the world has seen. This unadulterated huckster or
pawnbroker type is rarely keenly sympathetic in matters of social and
industrial justice, and is usually physically timid and likes to cover an
unworthy fear of the most just war under high-sounding names.
It was reinforced by the large mollycoddle vote—the people who are soft
physically and morally, or who have a twist in them which makes them
acidly cantankerous and unpleasant as long as they can be so with safety to
their bodies. In addition there are the good people with no imagination and
no foresight, who think war will not come, but that if it does come armies
and navies can be improvised—a very large element, typified by a Senator I
knew personally who, in a public speech, in answer to a question as to what
we would do if America were suddenly assailed by a first-class military
power, answered that "we would build a battle-ship in every creek." Then,
among the wise and high-minded people who in self-respecting and genuine
fashion strive earnestly for peace, there are the foolish fanatics always to be
found in such a movement and always discrediting it—the men who form
the lunatic fringe in all reform movements.
All these elements taken together made a body of public opinion so
important during the decades immediately succeeding the Civil War as to
put a stop to any serious effort to keep the Nation in a condition of
reasonable military preparedness. The representatives of this opinion then
voted just as they now do when they vote against battle-ships or against
fortifying the Panama Canal. It would have been bad enough if we had been
content to be weak, and, in view of our weakness, not to bluster. But we
were not content with such a policy. We wished to enjoy the incompatible

luxuries of an unbridled tongue and an unready hand. There was a very
large element which was ignorant of our military weakness, or, naturally
enough, unable to understand it; and another large element which liked to
please its own vanity by listening to offensive talk about foreign nations.
Accordingly, too many of our politicians, especially in Congress, found that
the cheap and easy thing to do was to please the foolish peace people by
keeping us weak, and to please the foolish violent people by passing
denunciatory resolutions about international matters—resolutions which
would have been improper even if we had been strong. Their idea was to
please both the mollycoddle vote and the vote of the international tail-
twisters by upholding, with pretended ardor and mean intelligence, a
National policy of peace with insult.
I abhor unjust war. I abhor injustice and bullying by the strong at the
expense of the weak, whether among nations or individuals. I abhor
violence and bloodshed. I believe that war should never be resorted to
when, or so long as, it is honorably possible to avoid it. I respect all men
and women who from high motives and with sanity and self-respect do all
they can to avert war. I advocate preparation for war in order to avert war;
and I should never advocate war unless it were the only alternative to
dishonor. I describe the folly of which so many of our people were formerly
guilty, in order that we may in our own day be on our guard against similar
folly.
We did not at the time of which I write take our foreign duties seriously,
and as we combined bluster in speech with refusal to make any preparation
whatsoever for action, we were not taken seriously in return. Gradually a
slight change for the better occurred, the writings of Captain Mahan playing
no small part therein. We built some modern cruisers to start with; the
people who felt that battle-ships were wicked compromising with their
misguided consciences by saying that the cruisers could be used "to protect
our commerce"—which they could not be, unless they had battle-ships to
back them. Then we attempted to build more powerful fighting vessels, and
as there was a section of the public which regarded battle-ships as
possessing a name immorally suggestive of violence, we compromised by
calling the new ships armored cruisers, and making them combine with
exquisite nicety all the defects and none of the virtues of both types. Then
we got to the point of building battle-ships. But there still remained a public
opinion, as old as the time of Jefferson, which thought that in the event of

war all our problem ought to be one of coast defense, that we should do
nothing except repel attack; an attitude about as sensible as that of a prize-
fighter who expected to win by merely parrying instead of hitting. To meet
the susceptibilities of this large class of well-meaning people, we provided
for the battle-ships under the name of "coast defense battle-ships"; meaning
thereby that we did not make them quite as seaworthy as they ought to have
been, or with quite as much coal capacity as they ought to have had. Then
we decided to build real battle-ships. But there still remained a lingering
remnant of public opinion that clung to the coast defense theory, and we
met this in beautiful fashion by providing for "sea-going coast defense
battle-ships"—the fact that the name was a contradiction in terms being of
very small consequence compared to the fact that we did thereby get real
battle-ships.
Our men had to be trained to handle the ships singly and in fleet
formation, and they had to be trained to use the new weapons of precision
with which the ships were armed. Not a few of the older officers, kept in the
service under our foolish rule of pure seniority promotion, were not
competent for the task; but a proportion of the older officers were excellent,
and this was true of almost all the younger officers. They were naturally
first-class men, trained in the admirable naval school at Annapolis. They
were overjoyed that at last they were given proper instruments to work
with, and they speedily grew to handle these ships individually in the best
fashion. They were fast learning to handle them in squadron and fleet
formation; but when the war with Spain broke out, they had as yet hardly
grasped the principles of modern scientific naval gunnery.
Soon after I began work as Assistant Secretary of the Navy I became
convinced that the war would come. The revolt in Cuba had dragged its
weary length until conditions in the island had become so dreadful as to be
a standing disgrace to us for permitting them to exist. There is much that I
sincerely admire about the Spanish character; and there are few men for
whom I have felt greater respect than for certain gentlemen of Spain whom
I have known. But Spain attempted to govern her colonies on archaic
principles which rendered her control of them incompatible with the
advance of humanity and intolerable to the conscience of mankind. In 1898
the so-called war in Cuba had dragged along for years with unspeakable
horror, degradation, and misery. It was not "war" at all, but murderous
oppression. Cuba was devastated.

During those years, while we continued at "peace," several hundred times
as many lives were lost, lives of men, women, and children, as were lost
during the three months' "war" which put an end to this slaughter and
opened a career of peaceful progress to the Cubans. Yet there were
misguided professional philanthropists who cared so much more for names
than for facts that they preferred a "peace" of continuous murder to a "war"
which stopped the murder and brought real peace. Spain's humiliation was
certain, anyhow; indeed, it was more certain without war than with it, for
she could not permanently keep the island, and she minded yielding to the
Cubans more than yielding to us. Our own direct interests were great,
because of the Cuban tobacco and sugar, and especially because of Cuba's
relation to the projected Isthmian Canal. But even greater were our interests
from the standpoint of humanity. Cuba was at our very doors. It was a
dreadful thing for us to sit supinely and watch her death agony. It was our
duty, even more from the standpoint of National honor than from the
standpoint of National interest, to stop the devastation and destruction.
Because of these considerations I favored war; and to-day, when in
retrospect it is easier to see things clearly, there are few humane and
honorable men who do not believe that the war was both just and necessary.
The big financiers and the men generally who were susceptible to touch
on the money nerve, and who cared nothing for National honor if it
conflicted even temporarily with business prosperity, were against the war.
The more fatuous type of philanthropist agreed with them. The newspapers
controlled by, or run in the interests of, these two classes deprecated war,
and did everything in their power to prevent any preparation for war. As a
whole the people in Congress were at that time (and are now) a shortsighted
set as regards international matters. There were a few men, Senators
Cushman K. Davis,[*] for instance, and John Morgan, who did look ahead;
and Senator H. C. Lodge, who throughout his quarter of a century of service
in the Senate and House has ever stood foremost among those who uphold
with farsighted fearlessness and strict justice to others our national honor
and interest; but most of the Congressmen were content to follow the worst
of all possible courses, that is, to pass resolutions which made war more
likely, and yet to decline to take measures which would enable us to meet
the war if it did come.

[*] In a letter written me just before I became Assistant
Secretary, Senator Davis unburdened his mind about one of

the foolish "peace" proposals of that period; his letter
running in part: "I left the Senate Chamber about three
o'clock this afternoon when there was going on a deal of
mowing and chattering over the treaty by which the United
States is to be bound to arbitrate its sovereign
functions—for policies are matters of sovereignty. . . .
The
aberrations of the social movement are neither progress nor
retrogression. They represent merely a local and temporary
sagging of the line of the great orbit. Tennyson knew this
when he wrote that fine and noble 'Maud.' I often read it,
for to do so does me good." After quoting one of Poe's
stories the letter continues: "The world will come out all
right. Let him who believes in the decline of the military
spirit observe the boys of a common school during the recess
or the noon hour. Of course when American patriotism speaks
out from its rank and file and demands action or expression,
and when, thereupon, the 'business man,' so called, places
his hand on his stack of reds as if he feared a policeman
were about to disturb the game, and protests until American
patriotism ceases to continue to speak as it had started to
do—why, you and I get mad, and I swear. I hope you will be
with us here after March 4. We can then pass judgment
together on the things we don't like, and together indulge
in hopes that I believe are prophetic."

However, in the Navy Department we were able to do a good deal, thanks
to the energy and ability of some of the bureau chiefs, and to the general
good tone of the service. I soon found my natural friends and allies in such
men as Evans, Taylor, Sampson, Wainwright, Brownson, Schroeder,
Bradford, Cowles, Cameron, Winslow, O'Neil, and others like them. I used
all the power there was in my office to aid these men in getting the material
ready. I also tried to gather from every source information as to who the
best men were to occupy the fighting positions.
Sound naval opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of Dewey to
command one squadron. I was already watching him, for I had been struck
by an incident in his past career. It was at a time when there was threat of
trouble with Chile. Dewey was off the Argentine, and was told to get ready
to move to the other coast of South America. If the move became necessary,
he would have to have coal, and yet if he did not make the move, the coal
would not be needed. In such a case a man afraid of responsibility always
acts rigidly by the regulations and communicates with the Department at
home to get authority for everything he does; and therefore he usually
accomplishes nothing whatever, but is able to satisfy all individuals with
red-tape minds by triumphantly pointing out his compliance with the
regulations. In a crisis, the man worth his salt is the man who meets the
needs of the situation in whatever way is necessary. Dewey purchased the

coal and was ready to move at once if need arose. The affair blew over; the
need to move did not occur; and for some time there seemed to be a chance
that Dewey would get into trouble over having purchased the coal, for our
people are like almost all other peoples in requiring responsible officers
under such conditions to decide at their own personal peril, no matter which
course they follow. However, the people higher up ultimately stood by
Dewey.
The incident made me feel that here was a man who could be relied upon
to prepare in advance, and to act promptly, fearlessly, and on his own
responsibility when the emergency arose. Accordingly I did my best to get
him put in command of the Asiatic fleet, the fleet where it was most
essential to have a man who would act without referring things back to the
home authorities. An officer senior to him, of the respectable commonplace
type, was being pushed by certain politicians who I knew had influence
with the Navy Department and with the President. I would have preferred to
see Dewey get the appointment without appealing to any politician at all.
But while this was my preference, the essential thing was to get him the
appointment. For a naval officer to bring pressure to get himself a soft and
easy place is unpardonable; but a large leniency should be observed toward
the man who uses influence only to get himself a place in the picture near
the flashing of the guns. There was a Senator, Proctor of Vermont, who I
knew was close to McKinley, and who was very ardent for the war, and
desirous to have it fought in the most efficient fashion. I suggested to
Dewey that he should enlist the services of Senator Proctor, which was
accordingly done. In a fortunate hour for the Nation, Dewey was given
command of the Asiatic squadron.
When the Maine was blown up in Havana Harbor, war became
inevitable. A number of the peace-at-any-price men of course promptly
assumed the position that she had blown herself up; but investigation
showed that the explosion was from outside. And, in any event, it would
have been impossible to prevent war. The enlisted men of the navy, who
often grew bored to the point of desertion in peace, became keyed up to a
high pitch of efficiency, and crowds of fine young fellows, from the interior
as well as from the seacoast, thronged to enlist. The navy officers showed
alert ability and unwearied industry in getting things ready. There was one
deficiency, however, which there was no time to remedy, and of the very
existence of which, strange to say, most of our best men were ignorant. Our

navy had no idea how low our standard of marksmanship was. We had not
realized that the modern battle-ship had become such a complicated piece
of mechanism that the old methods of training in marksmanship were as
obsolete as the old muzzle-loading broadside guns themselves. Almost the
only man in the navy who fully realized this was our naval attache at Paris,
Lieutenant Sims. He wrote letter after letter pointing out how frightfully
backward we were in marksmanship. I was much impressed by his letters;
but Wainwright was about the only other man who was. And as Sims
proved to be mistaken in his belief that the French had taught the Spaniards
how to shoot, and as the Spaniards proved to be much worse even than we
were, in the service generally Sims was treated as an alarmist. But although
I at first partly acquiesced in this view, I grew uneasy when I studied the
small proportion of hits to shots made by our vessels in battle. When I was
President I took up the matter, and speedily became convinced that we
needed to revolutionize our whole training in marksmanship. Sims was
given the lead in organizing and introducing the new system; and to him
more than to any other one man was due the astonishing progress made by
our fleet in this respect, a progress which made the fleet, gun for gun, at
least three times as effective, in point of fighting efficiency, in 1908, as it
was in 1902. The shots that hit are the shots that count!
Like the people, the Government was for a long time unwilling to prepare
for war, because so many honest but misguided men believed that the
preparation itself tended to bring on the war. I did not in the least share this
feeling, and whenever I was left as Acting Secretary I did everything in my
power to put us in readiness. I knew that in the event of war Dewey could
be slipped like a wolf-hound from a leash; I was sure that if he were given
half a chance he would strike instantly and with telling effect; and I made
up my mind that all I could do to give him that half-chance should be done.
I was in the closest touch with Senator Lodge throughout this period, and
either consulted him about or notified him of all the moves I was taking. By
the end of February I felt it was vital to send Dewey (as well as each of our
other commanders who were not in home waters) instructions that would
enable him to be in readiness for immediate action. On the afternoon of
Saturday, February 25, when I was Acting Secretary, Lodge called on me
just as I was preparing the order, which (as it was addressed to a man of the
right stamp) was of much importance to the subsequent operations. Admiral
Dewey speaks of the incident as follows, in his autobiography:

"The first real step [as regards active naval preparations] was taken on
February 25, when telegraphic instructions were sent to the Asiatic,
European, and South Atlantic squadrons to rendezvous at certain convenient
points where, should war break out, they would be most available.
"The message to the Asiatic squadron bore the signature of that Assistant
Secretary who had seized the opportunity while Acting Secretary to hasten
preparations for a conflict which was inevitable. As Mr. Roosevelt
reasoned, precautions for readiness would cost little in time of peace, and
yet would be invaluable in case of war. His cablegram was as follows:
"'Washington, February 25, '98.
"'Dewey, Hong Kong:
"'Order the squadron, except the Monocacy, to Hong Kong. Keep full of
coal. In the event of declaration of war Spain, your duty will be to see that
the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast, and then offensive
operations in Philippine Islands. Keep Olympia until further orders.
"'ROOSEVELT.'
"(The reference to keeping the Olympia until further orders was due to
the fact that I had been notified that she would soon be recalled to the
United States.)"
All that was needed with Dewey was to give him the chance to get ready,
and then to strike, without being hampered by orders from those not on the
ground. Success in war depends very largely upon choosing a man fit to
exercise such powers, and then giving him the powers.
It would be instructive to remember, if only we were willing to do so, the
fairly comic panic which swept in waves over our seacoast, first when it
became evident that war was about to be declared, and then when it was
declared. The public waked up to the sufficiently obvious fact that the
Government was in its usual state—perennial unreadiness for war.
Thereupon the people of the seaboard district passed at one bound from
unreasoning confidence that war never could come to unreasoning fear as to
what might happen now that it had come. That acute philosopher Mr.
Dooley proclaimed that in the Spanish War we were in a dream, but that the
Spaniards were in a trance. This just about summed up the facts. Our people
had for decades scoffed at the thought of making ready for possible war.
Now, when it was too late, they not only backed every measure, wise and

unwise, that offered a chance of supplying a need that ought to have been
met before, but they also fell into a condition of panic apprehension as to
what the foe might do.
For years we had been saying, just as any number of our people now say,
that no nation would venture to attack us. Then when we did go to war with
an exceedingly feeble nation, we, for the time being, rushed to the other
extreme of feeling, and attributed to this feeble nation plans of offensive
warfare which it never dreamed of making, and which, if made, it would
have been wholly unable to execute. Some of my readers doubtless
remember the sinister intentions and unlimited potentialities for destruction
with which the fertile imagination of the yellow press endowed the armored
cruiser Viscaya when she appeared in American waters just before war was
declared. The state of nervousness along much of the seacoast was funny in
view of the lack of foundation for it; but it offered food for serious thought
as to what would happen if we ever became engaged with a serious foe.
The Governor of one State actually announced that he would not permit
the National Guard of that State to leave its borders, the idea being to retain
it against a possible Spanish invasion. So many of the business men of the
city of Boston took their securities inland to Worcester that the safe deposit
companies of Worcester proved unable to take care of them. In my own
neighborhood on Long Island clauses were gravely put into leases to the
effect that if the property were destroyed by the Spaniards the lease should
lapse. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy I had every conceivable
impossible request made to me. Members of Congress who had actively
opposed building any navy came clamorously around to ask each for a ship
for some special purpose of protection connected with his district. It seems
incredible, but it is true, that not only these Congressmen but the Chambers
of Commerce and Boards of Trade of different coast cities all lost their
heads for the time being, and raised a deafening clamor and brought every
species of pressure to bear on the Administration to get it to adopt the one
most fatal course—that is, to distribute the navy, ship by ship, at all kinds of
points and in all kinds of ports with the idea of protecting everything
everywhere, and thereby rendering it absolutely certain that even the
Spanish fleet, poor though it was, would be able to pick up our own navy
ship by ship in detail. One Congressman besought me for a ship to protect
Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia, an island which derived its sole
consequence because it contained the winter homes of certain millionaires.

A lady whose husband occupied a very influential position, and who was
normally a most admirable and sensible woman, came to insist that a ship
should be anchored off a huge seaside hotel because she had a house in the
neighborhood.
There were many such instances. One stood out above the others. A
certain seaboard State contained in its Congressional delegation one of the
most influential men in the Senate, and one of the most influential men in
the lower house. These two men had been worse than lukewarm about
building up the navy, and had scoffed at the idea of there ever being any
danger from any foreign power. With the advent of war the feelings of their
constituents, and therefore their own feelings, suffered an immediate
change, and they demanded that a ship be anchored in the harbor of their
city as a protection. Getting no comfort from me, they went "higher up,"
and became a kind of permanent committee in attendance upon the
President. They were very influential men in the Houses, with whom it was
important for the Administration to keep on good terms; and, moreover,
they possessed a pertinacity as great as the widow who won her case from
the unjust judge. Finally the President gave in and notified me to see that a
ship was sent to the city in question. I was bound that, as long as a ship had
to be sent, it should not be a ship worth anything. Accordingly a Civil War
Monitor, with one smooth-bore gun, managed by a crew of about twenty-
one naval militia, was sent to the city in question, under convoy of a tug. It
was a hazardous trip for the unfortunate naval militiamen, but it was safely
accomplished; and joy and peace descended upon the Senator and the
Congressman, and upon the President whom they had jointly harassed.
Incidentally, the fact that the protecting war-vessel would not have been a
formidable foe to any antagonists of much more modern construction than
the galleys of Alcibiades seemed to disturb nobody.
This was one side of the picture. The other side was that the crisis at once
brought to the front any amount of latent fighting strength. There were
plenty of Congressmen who showed cool-headed wisdom and resolution.
The plain people, the men and women back of the persons who lost their
heads, set seriously to work to see that we did whatever was necessary, and
made the job a thorough one. The young men swarmed to enlist. In time of
peace it had been difficult to fill the scanty regular army and navy, and there
were innumerable desertions; now the ships and regiments were over-
enlisted, and so many deserters returned in order to fight that it became

difficult to decide what to do with them. England, and to a less degree
Japan, were friendly. The great powers of Continental Europe were all
unfriendly. They jeered at our ships and men, and with fatuous partisanship
insisted that the Spaniards would prove too much for our "mercenaries"
because we were a commercial people of low ideals who could not fight,
while the men whom we attempted to hire for that purpose were certain to
run on the day of battle.
Among my friends was the then Army Surgeon Leonard Wood. He was a
surgeon. Not having an income, he had to earn his own living. He had gone
through the Harvard Medical School, and had then joined the army in the
Southwest as a contract doctor. He had every physical, moral, and mental
quality which fitted him for a soldier's life and for the exercise of command.
In the inconceivably wearing and harassing campaigns against the Apaches
he had served nominally as a surgeon, really in command of troops, on
more than one expedition. He was as anxious as I was that if there were war
we should both have our part in it. I had always felt that if there were a
serious war I wished to be in a position to explain to my children why I did
take part in it, and not why I did not take part in it. Moreover, I had very
deeply felt that it was our duty to free Cuba, and I had publicly expressed
this feeling; and when a man takes such a position, he ought to be willing to
make his words good by his deeds unless there is some very strong reason
to the contrary. He should pay with his body.
As soon as war was upon us, Wood and I began to try for a chance to go
to the front. Congress had authorized the raising of three National Volunteer
Cavalry regiments, wholly apart from the State contingents. Secretary Alger
of the War Department was fond of me personally, and Wood was his
family doctor. Alger had been a gallant soldier in the Civil War, and was
almost the only member of the Administration who felt all along that we
would have to go to war with Spain over Cuba. He liked my attitude in the
matter, and because of his remembrance of his own experiences he
sympathized with my desire to go to the front. Accordingly he offered me
the command of one of the regiments. I told him that after six weeks'
service in the field I would feel competent to handle the regiment, but that I
would not know how to equip it or how to get it into the first action; but that
Wood was entirely competent at once to take command, and that if he
would make Wood colonel I would accept the lieutenant-colonelcy. General
Alger thought this an act of foolish self-abnegation on my part—instead of

its being, what it was, the wisest act I could have performed. He told me to
accept the colonelcy, and that he would make Wood lieutenant-colonel, and
that Wood would do the work anyway; but I answered that I did not wish to
rise on any man's shoulders; that I hoped to be given every chance that my
deeds and abilities warranted; but that I did not wish what I did not earn,
and that above all I did not wish to hold any position where any one else did
the work. He laughed at me a little and said I was foolish, but I do not think
he really minded, and he promised to do as I wished. True to his word, he
secured the appointment of Wood as colonel and of myself as lieutenant-
colonel of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry. This was soon
nicknamed, both by the public and by the rest of the army, the Rough
Riders, doubtless because the bulk of the men were from the Southwestern
ranch country and were skilled in the wild horsemanship of the great plains.
Wood instantly began the work of raising the regiment. He first
assembled several old non-commissioned officers of experience, put them
in office, and gave them blanks for requisitions for the full equipment of a
cavalry regiment. He selected San Antonio as the gathering-place, as it was
in a good horse country, near the Gulf from some port on which we would
have to embark, and near an old arsenal and an old army post from which
we got a good deal of stuff—some of it practically condemned, but which
we found serviceable at a pinch, and much better than nothing. He
organized a horse board in Texas, and began purchasing all horses that were
not too big and were sound. A day or two after he was commissioned he
wrote out in the office of the Secretary of War, under his authority,
telegrams to the Governors of Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Indian
Territory, in substance as follows:
The President desires to raise —- volunteers in your Territory to form
part of a regiment of mounted riflemen to be commanded by Leonard
Wood, Colonel; Theodore Roosevelt, Lieutenant-Colonel. He desires that
the men selected should be young, sound, good shots and good riders, and
that you expedite by all means in your power the enrollment of these men.
(Signed) R. A. ALGER, Secretary of War.
As soon as he had attended to a few more odds and ends he left
Washington, and the day after his arrival in San Antonio the troops began to
arrive.

For several weeks before I joined the regiment, to which Wood went
ahead of me, I continued as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, trying to get
some coherence of plan between the War Department and the Navy
Department; and also being used by Wood to finish getting the equipment
for the regiment. As regards finding out what the plans of the War
Department were, the task was simple. They had no plans. Even during the
final months before the outbreak of hostilities very little was done in the
way of efficient preparation. On one occasion, when every one knew that
the declaration of war was sure to come in a few days, I went on military
business to the office of one of the highest line generals of the army, a man
who at that moment ought to have been working eighteen hours out of the
twenty-four on the vital problems ahead of him. What he was actually doing
was trying on a new type of smart-looking uniform on certain enlisted men;
and he called me in to ask my advice as to the position of the pockets in the
blouse, with a view to making it look attractive. An aide of this general—
funnily enough a good fighting man in actual service—when I consulted
him as to what my uniform for the campaign should be, laid special stress
upon my purchasing a pair of black top boots for full dress, explaining that
they were very effective on hotel piazzas and in parlors. I did not intend to
be in any hotel if it could possibly be avoided; and as things turned out, I
had no full-dress uniform, nothing but my service uniform, during my brief
experience in the army.
I suppose that war always does bring out what is highest and lowest in
human nature. The contractors who furnish poor materials to the army or
the navy in time of war stand on a level of infamy only one degree above
that of the participants in the white slave traffic themselves. But there is
conduct far short of this which yet seems inexplicable to any man who has
in him any spirit of disinterested patriotism combined with any power of
imagination. Respectable men, who I suppose lack the imagination
thoroughly to realize what they are doing, try to make money out of the
Nation's necessities in war at the very time that other men are making every
sacrifice, financial and personal, for the cause. In the closing weeks of my
service as Assistant Secretary of the Navy we were collecting ships for
auxiliary purposes. Some men, at cost to their own purses, helped us freely
and with efficiency; others treated the affair as an ordinary business
transaction; and yet others endeavored, at some given crisis when our need
was great, to sell us inferior vessels at exorbitant prices, and used every

pressure, through Senators and Congressmen, to accomplish their ends. In
one or two cases they did accomplish them too, until we got a really first-
class board established to superintend such purchases. A more curious
experience was in connection with the point chosen for the starting of the
expedition against Cuba. I had not supposed that any human being could
consider this matter save from the standpoint of military need. But one
morning a very wealthy and influential man, a respectable and upright man
according to his own lights, called on me to protest against our choice of
Tampa, and to put in a plea for a certain other port, on the ground that his
railroad was entitled to its share of the profit for hauling the army and
equipment! I happened to know that at this time this very man had kinsfolk
with the army, who served gallantly, and the circumstances of his coming to
me were such as to show that he was not acting secretly, and had no idea
that there was anything out of the way in his proposal. I think the facts were
merely that he had been trained to regard business as the sole object in life,
and that he lacked the imagination to enable him to understand the real
nature of the request that he was making; and, moreover, he had good
reason to believe that one of his business competitors had been unduly
favored.
The War Department was in far worse shape than the Navy Department.
The young officers turned out from West Point are precisely as good as the
young officers turned out from Annapolis, and this always has been true.
But at that time (something has been done to remedy the worst conditions
since), and ever since the close of the Civil War, the conditions were such
that after a few years the army officer stagnated so far as his profession was
concerned. When the Spanish War broke out the navy really was largely on
a war footing, as any navy which is even respectably cared for in time of
peace must be. The admirals, captains, and lieutenants were continually
practicing their profession in almost precisely the way that it has to be
practiced in time of war. Except actually shooting at a foe, most of the men
on board ship went through in time of peace practically all that they would
have to go through in time of war. The heads of bureaus in the Navy
Department were for the most part men who had seen sea service, who
expected to return to sea service, and who were preparing for needs which
they themselves knew by experience. Moreover, the civilian head of the
navy had to provide for keeping the ships in a state of reasonable efficiency,

and Congress could not hopelessly misbehave itself about the navy without
the fact at once becoming evident.
All this was changed so far as the army was concerned. Not only was it
possible to decrease the efficiency of the army without being called to
account for it, but the only way in which the Secretary of War could gain
credit for himself or the Administration was by economy, and the easiest
way to economize was in connection with something that would not be felt
unless war should arise. The people took no interest whatever in the army;
demagogues clamored against it, and, inadequate though it was in size,
insisted that it should be still further reduced. Popular orators always
appealed to the volunteers; the regulars had no votes and there was no point
in politicians thinking of them. The chief activity shown by Congressmen
about the army was in getting special army posts built in places where there
was no need for them. Even the work of the army in its campaigns against
the Indians was of such a character that it was generally performed by small
bodies of fifty or a hundred men. Until a man ceased being a lieutenant he
usually had plenty of professional work to attend to and was employed in
the field, and, in short, had the same kind of practice that his brother in the
navy had, and he did his work as well. But once past this stage he had
almost no opportunity to perform any work corresponding to his rank, and
but little opportunity to do any military work whatsoever. The very best
men, men like Lawton, Young, Chaffee, Hawkins, and Sumner, to mention
only men under or beside whom I served, remained good soldiers, soldiers
of the best stamp, in spite of the disheartening conditions. But it was not to
be expected that the average man could continue to grow when every
influence was against him. Accordingly, when the Spanish War suddenly
burst upon us, a number of inert elderly captains and field officers were,
much against their own wishes, suddenly pitchforked into the command of
regiments, brigades, and even divisions and army corps. Often these men
failed painfully. This was not their fault; it was the fault of the Nation, that
is, the fault of all of us, of you, my reader, and of myself, and of those like
us, because we had permitted conditions to be such as to render these men
unfit for command. Take a stout captain of an out-of-the-way two-company
post, where nothing in the world ever occurred even resembling military
action, and where the only military problem that really convulsed the post
to its foundations was the quarrel between the captain and the quartermaster
as to how high a mule's tail ought to be shaved (I am speaking of an actual

incident). What could be expected of such a man, even though thirty-five
years before he had been a gallant second lieutenant in the Civil War, if,
after this intervening do-nothing period, he was suddenly put in command
of raw troops in a midsummer campaign in the tropics?
The bureau chiefs were for the most part elderly incompetents, whose
idea was to do their routine duties in such way as to escape the censure of
routine bureaucratic superiors and to avoid a Congressional investigation.
They had not the slightest conception of preparing the army for war. It was
impossible that they could have any such conception. The people and the
Congress did not wish the army prepared for war; and those editors and
philanthropists and peace advocates who felt vaguely that if the army were
incompetent their principles were safe, always inveighed against any
proposal to make it efficient, on the ground that this showed a natural
bloodthirstiness in the proposer. When such were the conditions, it was
absolutely impossible that either the War Department or the army could do
well in the event of war. Secretary Alger happened to be Secretary when
war broke out, and all the responsibility for the shortcomings of the
Department were visited upon his devoted head. He was made the
scapegoat for our National shortcomings. The fault was not his; the fault
and responsibility lay with us, the people, who for thirty-three years had
permitted our representatives in Congress and in National executive office
to bear themselves so that it was absolutely impossible to avoid the great
bulk of all the trouble that occurred, and of all the shortcomings of which
our people complained, during the Spanish War. The chief immediate cause
was the conditions of red-tape bureaucracy which existed in the War
Department at Washington, which had prevented any good organization or
the preparation of any good plan of operation for using our men and
supplies. The recurrence of these conditions, even though in somewhat less
aggravated form, in any future emergency is as certain as sunrise unless we
bring about the principle of a four years' detail in the staff corps—a
principle which Congress has now for years stubbornly refused to grant.
There are nations who only need to have peaceful ideals inculcated, and
to whom militarism is a curse and a misfortune. There are other nations,
like our own, so happily situated that the thought of war is never present to
their minds. They are wholly free from any tendency improperly to exalt or
to practice militarism. These nations should never forget that there must be
military ideals no less than peaceful ideals. The exaltation of Nogi's career,

set forth so strikingly in Stanley Washburn's little volume on the great
Japanese warrior, contains much that is especially needed for us of America,
prone as we are to regard the exigencies of a purely commercial and
industrial civilization as excusing us from the need of admiring and
practicing the heroic and warlike virtues.
Our people are not military. We need normally only a small standing
army; but there should be behind it a reserve of instructed men big enough
to fill it up to full war strength, which is over twice the peace strength.
Moreover, the young men of the country should realize that it is the duty of
every one of them to prepare himself so that in time of need he may
speedily become an efficient soldier—a duty now generally forgotten, but
which should be recognized as one of the vitally essential parts of every
man's training.
In endeavoring to get the "Rough Riders" equipped I met with some
experiences which were both odd and instructive. There were not enough
arms and other necessaries to go round, and there was keen rivalry among
the intelligent and zealous commanders of the volunteer organizations as to
who should get first choice. Wood's experience was what enabled us to
equip ourselves in short order. There was another cavalry organization
whose commander was at the War Department about this time, and we had
been eyeing him with much alertness as a rival. One day I asked him what
his plans were about arming and drilling his troops, who were of precisely
the type of our own men. He answered that he expected "to give each of the
boys two revolvers and a lariat, and then just turn them loose." I reported
the conversation to Wood, with the remark that we might feel ourselves safe
from rivalry in that quarter; and safe we were.
In trying to get the equipment I met with checks and rebuffs, and in
return was the cause of worry and concern to various bureau chiefs who
were unquestionably estimable men in their private and domestic relations,
and who doubtless had been good officers thirty years before, but who were
as unfit for modern war as if they were so many smooth-bores. One fine old
fellow did his best to persuade us to take black powder rifles, explaining
with paternal indulgence that no one yet really knew just what smokeless
powder might do, and that there was a good deal to be said in favor of
having smoke to conceal us from the enemy. I saw this pleasing theory
actually worked out in practice later on, for the National Guard regiments

with us at Santiago had black powder muskets, and the regular artillery
black powder guns, and they really might almost as well have replaced
these weapons by crossbows and mangonels. We succeeded, thanks to
Wood, in getting the same cavalry carbines that were used by the regulars.
We were determined to do this, not only because the weapons were good,
but because this would in all probability mean that we were brigaded with
the regular cavalry, which it was certain would be sent immediately to the
front for the fighting.
There was one worthy bureau chief who was continually refusing
applications of mine as irregular. In each case I would appeal to Secretary
Alger—who helped me in every way—and get an order from him
countenancing the irregularity. For instance, I found out that as we were
nearer the July date than the January date for the issuance of clothing, and
as it had long been customary to issue the winter clothing in July, so as to
give ample leisure for getting it to all the various posts, it was therefore
solemnly proposed to issue this same winter clothing to us who were about
to start for a summer campaign in the tropics. This would seem incredible to
those who have never dealt with an inert officialdom, a red-tape
bureaucracy, but such is the fact. I rectified this and got an order for khaki
clothing. We were then told we would have to advertise thirty days for
horses. This meant that we would have missed the Santiago expedition. So I
made another successful appeal to the Secretary. Other difficulties came up
about wagons, and various articles, and in each case the same result
followed. On the last occasion, when I came up in triumph with the needed
order, the worried office head, who bore me no animosity, but who did feel
that fate had been very unkind, threw himself back in his chair and
exclaimed with a sigh: "Oh, dear! I had this office running in such good
shape—and then along came the war and upset everything!" His feeling
was that war was an illegitimate interruption to the work of the War
Department.
There were of course department heads and bureau chiefs and assistants
who, in spite of the worthlessness of the system, and of the paralyzing
conditions that had prevailed, remained first-class men. An example of
these was Commissary-General Weston. His energy, activity, administrative
efficiency, and common sense were supplemented by an eager desire to help
everybody do the best that could be done. Both in Washington and again
down at Santiago we owed him very much. When I was President, it was

my good fortune to repay him in part our debt, which means the debt of the
people of the country, by making him a major-general.
The regiment assembled at San Antonio. When I reached there, the men,
rifles, and horses, which were the essentials, were coming in fast, and the
saddles, blankets, and the like were also accumulating. Thanks to Wood's
exertions, when we reached Tampa we were rather better equipped than
most of the regular regiments. We adhered strictly to field equipment,
allowing no luxuries or anything else unnecessary, and so we were able to
move off the field when ordered, with our own transportation, leaving
nothing behind.
I suppose every man tends to brag about his regiment; but it does seem to
me that there never was a regiment better worth bragging about than ours.
Wood was an exceptional commander, of great power, with a remarkable
gift for organization. The rank and file were as fine natural fighting men as
ever carried a rifle or rode a horse in any country or any age. We had a
number of first-class young fellows from the East, most of them from
colleges like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; but the great majority of the men
were Southwesterners, from the then territories of Oklahoma, Indian
Territory, Arizona, and New Mexico. They were accustomed to the use of
firearms, accustomed to taking care of themselves in the open; they were
intelligent and self-reliant; they possessed hardihood and endurance and
physical prowess; and, above all, they had the fighting edge, the cool and
resolute fighting temper. They went into the war with full knowledge,
having deliberately counted the cost. In the great majority of cases each
man was chiefly anxious to find out what he should do to make the
regiment a success. They bought, first and last, about 800 copies of the
cavalry drill regulations and studied them industriously. Such men were
practically soldiers to start with, in all the essentials. It is small wonder that
with them as material to work upon the regiment was raised, armed,
equipped, drilled, sent on trains to Tampa, embarked, disembarked, and put
through two victorious offensive—not defensive—fights in which a third of
the officers and one-fifth of the men were killed or wounded, all within
sixty days. It is a good record, and it speaks well for the men of the
regiment; and it speaks well for Wood.[*]

[*] To counterbalance the newspapers which ignorantly and
indiscriminately praised all the volunteers there were
others whose blame was of the same intelligent quality. The

New York Evening Post, on June 18, gave expression to the
following gloomy foreboding: "Competent observers have
remarked that nothing more extraordinary has been done than
the sending to Cuba of the First United States Volunteer
Cavalry, known as the 'rough riders.' Organized but four
weeks, barely given their full complement of officers, and
only a week of regular drill, these men have been sent to
the front before they have learned the first elements of
soldiering and discipline, or have even become acquainted
with their officers. In addition to all this, like the
regular cavalry, they have been sent with only their
carbines and revolvers to meet an enemy armed with long-range
rifles. There have been few cases of such military
cruelty in our military annals." A week or so after this not
wholly happy prophecy was promulgated, the "cruelty" was
consummated, first at Las Guasimas and then in the San Juan
fighting.

Wood was so busy getting the regiment ready that when I reached San
Antonio he turned most of the drilling of it over to me. This was a piece of
great good fortune for me, and I drilled the men industriously, mounted and
unmounted. I had plenty to learn, and the men and the officers even more;
but we went at our work with the heartiest good will. We speedily made it
evident that there was no room and no mercy for any man who shirked any
duty, and we accomplished good results. The fact is that the essentials of
drill and work for a cavalry or an infantry regiment are easy to learn, which
of course is not true for the artillery or the engineers or for the navy. The
reason why it takes so long to turn the average civilized man into a good
infantryman or cavalryman is because it takes a long while to teach the
average untrained man how to shoot, to ride, to march, to take care of
himself in the open, to be alert, resourceful, cool, daring, and resolute, to
obey quickly, as well as to be willing, and to fit himself, to act on his own
responsibility. If he already possesses these qualities, there is very little
difficulty in making him a soldier; all the drill that is necessary to enable
him to march and to fight is of a simple character. Parade ground and
barrack square maneuvers are of no earthly consequence in real war. When
men can readily change from line to column, and column to line, can form
front in any direction, and assemble and scatter, and can do these things
with speed and precision, they have a fairly good grasp of the essentials.
When our regiment reached Tampa it could already be handled creditably at
fast gaits, and both in mass and extended formations, mounted and
dismounted.
I had served three years in the New York National Guard, finally
becoming a captain. This experience was invaluable to me. It enabled me at

once to train the men in the simple drill without which they would have
been a mob; for although the drill requirements are simple, they are also
absolutely indispensable. But if I had believed that my experience in the
National Guard had taught me all that there was to teach about a soldier's
career, it would have been better for me not to have been in it at all. There
were in the regiment a number of men who had served in the National
Guard, and a number of others who had served in the Regular Army. Some
of these latter had served in the field in the West under campaign
conditions, and were accustomed to long marches, privation, risk, and
unexpected emergencies. These men were of the utmost benefit to the
regiment. They already knew their profession, and could teach and help the
others. But if the man had merely served in a National Guard regiment, or
in the Regular Army at some post in a civilized country where he learned
nothing except what could be picked up on the parade ground, in the
barracks, and in practice marches of a few miles along good roads, then it
depended purely upon his own good sense whether he had been helped or
hurt by the experience. If he realized that he had learned only five per cent
of his profession, that there remained ninety-five per cent to accomplish
before he would be a good soldier, why, he had profited immensely.
To start with five per cent handicap was a very great advantage; and if the
man was really a good man, he could not be overtaken. But if the man
thought that he had learned all about the profession of a soldier because he
had been in the National Guard or in the Regular Army under the conditions
I have described, then he was actually of less use than if he had never had
any military experience at all. Such a man was apt to think that nicety of
alignment, precision in wheeling, and correctness in the manual of arms
were the ends of training and the guarantees of good soldiership, and that
from guard mounting to sentry duty everything in war was to be done in
accordance with what he had learned in peace. As a matter of fact, most of
what he had learned was never used at all, and some of it had to be
unlearned. The one thing, for instance, that a sentry ought never to do in an
actual campaign is to walk up and down a line where he will be
conspicuous. His business is to lie down somewhere off a ridge crest where
he can see any one approaching, but where a man approaching cannot see
him. As for the ceremonies, during the really hard part of a campaign only
the barest essentials are kept.

Almost all of the junior regular officers, and many of the senior regular
officers, were fine men. But, through no fault of their own, had been forced
to lead lives that fairly paralyzed their efficiency when the strain of modern
war came on them. The routine elderly regular officer who knew nothing
whatever of modern war was in most respects nearly as worthless as a raw
recruit. The positions and commands prescribed in the text-books were
made into fetishes by some of these men, and treated as if they were the
ends, instead of the not always important means by which the ends were to
be achieved. In the Cuban fighting, for instance, it would have been folly
for me to have taken my place in the rear of the regiment, the canonical
text-book position. My business was to be where I could keep most
command over the regiment, and, in a rough-and-tumble, scrambling fight
in thick jungle, this had to depend upon the course of events, and usually
meant that I had to be at the front. I saw in that fighting more than one
elderly regimental commander who unwittingly rendered the only service
he could render to his regiment by taking up his proper position several
hundred yards in the rear when the fighting began; for then the regiment
disappeared in the jungle, and for its good fortune the commanding officer
never saw it again until long after the fight was over.
After one Cuban fight a lieutenant-colonel of the regulars, in command
of a regiment, who had met with just such an experience and had rejoined
us at the front several hours after the close of the fighting, asked me what
my men were doing when the fight began. I answered that they were
following in trace in column of twos, and that the instant the shooting began
I deployed them as skirmishers on both sides of the trail. He answered
triumphantly, "You can't deploy men as skirmishers from column
formation"; to which I responded, "Well, I did, and, what is more, if any
captain had made any difficulty about it, I would have sent him to the rear."
My critic was quite correct from the parade ground standpoint. The
prescribed orders at that time were to deploy the column first into a line of
squads at correct intervals, and then to give an order which, if my memory
serves correctly, ran: "As skirmishers, by the right and left flanks, at six
yards, take intervals, march." The order I really gave ran more like this:
"Scatter out to the right there, quick, you! scatter to the left! look alive, look
alive!" And they looked alive, and they scattered, and each took advantage
of cover, and forward went the line.

Now I do not wish what I have said to be misunderstood. If ever we have
a great war, the bulk of our soldiers will not be men who have had any
opportunity to train soul and mind and body so as to meet the iron needs of
an actual campaign. Long continued and faithful drill will alone put these
men in shape to begin to do their duty, and failure to recognize this on the
part of the average man will mean laziness and folly and not the possession
of efficiency. Moreover, if men have been trained to believe, for instance,
that they can "arbitrate questions of vital interest and national honor," if
they have been brought up with flabbiness of moral fiber as well as
flabbiness of physique, then there will be need of long and laborious and
faithful work to give the needed tone to mind and body. But if the men have
in them the right stuff, it is not so very difficult.
At San Antonio we entrained for Tampa. In various sociological books by
authors of Continental Europe, there are jeremiads as to the way in which
service in the great European armies, with their minute and machine-like
efficiency and regularity, tends to dwarf the capacity for individual
initiative among the officers and men. There is no such danger for any
officer or man of a volunteer organization in America when our country,
with playful light-heartedness, has pranced into war without making any
preparation for it. I know no larger or finer field for the display of an
advanced individualism than that which opened before us as we went from
San Antonio to Tampa, camped there, and embarked on a transport for
Cuba. Nobody ever had any definite information to give us, and whatever
information we unearthed on our own account was usually wrong. Each of
us had to show an alert and not overscrupulous self-reliance in order to
obtain food for his men, provender for his horses, or transportation of any
kind for any object. One lesson early impressed on me was that if I wanted
anything to eat it was wise to carry it with me; and if any new war should
arise, I would earnestly advise the men of every volunteer organization
always to proceed upon the belief that their supplies will not turn up, and to
take every opportunity of getting food for themselves.
Tampa was a scene of the wildest confusion. There were miles of tracks
loaded with cars of the contents of which nobody seemed to have any
definite knowledge. General Miles, who was supposed to have supervision
over everything, and General Shafter, who had charge of the expedition,
were both there. But, thanks to the fact that nobody had had any experience
in handling even such a small force as ours—about 17,000 men—there was

no semblance of order. Wood and I were bound that we should not be left
behind when the expedition started. When we were finally informed that it
was to leave next morning, we were ordered to go to a certain track to meet
a train. We went to the track, but the train never came. Then we were sent to
another track to meet another train. Again it never came. However, we
found a coal train, of which we took possession, and the conductor, partly
under duress and partly in a spirit of friendly helpfulness, took us down to
the quay.
All kinds of other organizations, infantry and cavalry, regular and
volunteer, were arriving at the quay and wandering around it, and there was
no place where we could get any specific information as to what transport
we were to have. Finally Wood was told to "get any ship you can get which
is not already assigned." He borrowed without leave a small motor boat,
and commandeered the transport Yucatan. When asked by the captain what
his authority was, he reported that he was acting "by orders of General
Shafter," and directed the ship to be brought to the dock. He had already
sent me word to be ready, as soon as the ship touched the pier, to put the
regiment aboard her. I found that she had already been assigned to a regular
regiment, and to another volunteer regiment, and as it was evident that not
more than half of the men assigned to her could possibly get on, I was
determined that we should not be among the men left off. The volunteer
regiment offered a comparatively easy problem. I simply marched my men
past them to the allotted place and held the gangway. With the regulars I
had to be a little more diplomatic, because their commander, a lieutenant-
colonel, was my superior in rank, and also doubtless knew his rights. He
sent word to me to make way, to draw my regiment off to one side, and let
his take possession of the gangway. I could see the transport coming in, and
could dimly make out Wood's figure thereon. Accordingly I played for time.
I sent respectful requests through his officers to the commander of the
regulars, entered into parleys, and made protestations, until the transport got
near enough so that by yelling at the top of my voice I was able to get into a
—highly constructive—communication with Wood. What he was saying I
had no idea, but he was evidently speaking, and on my own responsibility I
translated it into directions to hold the gangway, and so informed the
regulars that I was under the orders of my superior and of a ranking officer,
and—to my great regret, etc., etc.—could not give way as they desired. As
soon as the transport was fast we put our men aboard at the double. Half of

the regular regiment got on, and the other half and the other volunteer
regiment went somewhere else.
We were kept several days on the transport, which was jammed with
men, so that it was hard to move about on the deck. Then the fleet got under
way, and we steamed slowly down to Santiago. Here we disembarked,
higgledy-piggledy, just as we had embarked. Different parts of different
outfits were jumbled together, and it was no light labor afterwards to
assemble the various batteries. For instance, one transport had guns, and
another the locks for the guns; the two not getting together for several days
after one of them had been landed. Soldiers went here, provisions there; and
who got ashore first largely depended upon individual activity. Fortunately
for us, my former naval aide, when I had been Assistant Secretary of the
Navy, Lieutenant-Commander Sharp, a first-class fellow, was there in
command of a little ship to which I had succeeded in getting him appointed
before I left the Navy Department. He gave us a black pilot, who took our
transport right in shore, the others following like a flock of sheep; and we
disembarked with our rifles, ammunition belts, and not much else. In theory
it was out of our turn, but if we had not disembarked then, Heaven only
knows when our turn would have come, and we did not intend to be out of
the fighting if we could help it. I carried some food in my pockets, and a
light waterproof coat, which was my sole camp equipment for the next two
or three days. Twenty-four hours after getting ashore we marched from
Daiquiri, where we had landed, to Siboney, also on the coast, reaching it
during a terrific downpour of rain. When this was over, we built a fire, dried
our clothes, and ate whatever we had brought with us.
We were brigaded with the First and Tenth Regular Cavalry, under
Brigadier-General Sam Young. He was a fine type of the American regular.
Like General Chaffee, another of the same type, he had entered the army in
the Civil War as a private. Later, when I was President, it was my good
fortune to make each of them in succession Lieutenant-General of the army
of the United States. When General Young retired and General Chaffee was
to take his place, the former sent to the latter his three stars to wear on his
first official presentation, with a note that they were from "Private Young to
Private Chaffee." The two fine old fellows had served in the ranks, one in
the cavalry, one in the infantry, in their golden youth, in the days of the
great war nearly half a century before; each had grown gray in a lifetime of
honorable service under the flag, and each closed his active career in

command of the army. General Young was one of the few men who had
given and taken wounds with the saber. He was an old friend of mine, and
when in Washington before starting for the front he told me that if we got in
his brigade he would put us into the fighting all right. He kept his word.
General Young had actively superintended getting his two regular
regiments, or at least a squadron of each, off the transports, and late that
night he sent us word that he had received permission to move at dawn and
strike the Spanish advance position. He directed us to move along a ridge
trail with our two squadrons (one squadron having been left at Tampa),
while with the two squadrons of regulars, one of the First and one of the
Tenth, under his personal supervision, he marched up the valley trail.
Accordingly Wood took us along the hill trail early next morning, till we
struck the Spaniards, and began our fight just as the regulars began the fight
in the valley trail.
It was a mountainous country covered with thick jungle, a most
confusing country, and I had an awful time trying to get into the fight and
trying to do what was right when in it; and all the while I was thinking that I
was the only man who did not know what I was about, and that all the
others did—whereas, as I found out later, pretty much everybody else was
as much in the dark as I was. There was no surprise; we struck the
Spaniards exactly where we had expected; then Wood halted us and put us
into the fight deliberately and in order. He ordered us to deploy alternately
by troops to the right and left of the trail, giving our senior major, Brodie, a
West Pointer and as good a soldier as ever wore a uniform, the left wing,
while I took the right wing. I was told if possible to connect with the
regulars who were on the right. In theory this was excellent, but as the
jungle was very dense the first troop that deployed to the right vanished
forthwith, and I never saw it again until the fight was over—having a
frightful feeling meanwhile that I might be court-martialed for losing it. The
next troop deployed to the left under Brodie. Then the third came along, and
I started to deploy it to the right as before.
By the time the first platoon had gotten into the jungle I realized that it
likewise would disappear unless I kept hold of it. I managed to keep
possession of the last platoon. One learns fast in a fight, and I marched this
platoon and my next two troops in column through the jungle without any
attempt to deploy until we got on the firing line. This sounds simple. But it

was not. I did not know when I had gotten on the firing line! I could hear a
good deal of firing, some over to my right at a good distance, and the rest to
the left and ahead. I pushed on, expecting to strike the enemy somewhere
between.
Soon we came to the brink of a deep valley. There was a good deal of
cracking of rifles way off in front of us, but as they used smokeless powder
we had no idea as to exactly where they were, or who they were shooting at.
Then it dawned on us that we were the target. The bullets began to come
overhead, making a sound like the ripping of a silk dress, with sometimes a
kind of pop; a few of my men fell, and I deployed the rest, making them lie
down and get behind trees. Richard Harding Davis was with us, and as we
scanned the landscape with our glasses it was he who first pointed out to us
some Spaniards in a trench some three-quarters of a mile off. It was difficult
to make them out. There were not many of them. However, we finally did
make them out, and we could see their conical hats, for the trench was a
poor one. We advanced, firing at them, and drove them off.
What to do then I had not an idea. The country in front fell away into a
very difficult jungle-filled valley. There was nothing but jungle all around,
and if I advanced I was afraid I might get out of touch with everybody and
not be going in the right direction. Moreover, as far as I could see, there was
now nobody in front who was shooting at us, although some of the men on
my left insisted that our own men had fired into us—an allegation which I
soon found was almost always made in such a fight, and which in this case
was not true. At this moment some of the regulars appeared across the
ravine on our right. The first thing they did was to fire a volley at us, but
one of our first sergeants went up a tree and waved a guidon at them and
they stopped. Firing was still going on to our left, however, and I was never
more puzzled to know what to do. I did not wish to take my men out of
their position without orders, for fear that I might thereby be leaving a gap
if there was a Spanish force which meditated an offensive return. On the
other hand, it did not seem to me that I had been doing enough fighting to
justify my existence, and there was obviously fighting going on to the left. I
remember that I kept thinking of the refrain of the fox-hunting song, "Here's
to every friend who struggled to the end"; in the hunting field I had always
acted on this theory, and, no matter how discouraging appearances might
be, had never stopped trying to get in at the death until the hunt was
actually over; and now that there was work, and not play, on hand, I

intended to struggle as hard as I knew how not to be left out of any fighting
into which I could, with any possible propriety, get.
So I left my men where they were and started off at a trot toward where
the firing was, with a couple of orderlies to send back for the men in case
that proved advisable. Like most tyros, I was wearing my sword, which in
thick jungle now and then got between my legs—from that day on it always
went corded in the baggage. I struck the trail, and began to pass occasional
dead men. Pretty soon I reached Wood and found, much to my pleasure,
that I had done the right thing, for as I came up word was brought to him
that Brodie had been shot, and he at once sent me to take charge of the left
wing. It was more open country here, and at least I was able to get a
glimpse of my own men and exercise some control over them. There was
much firing going on, but for the life of me I could not see any Spaniards,
and neither could any one else. Finally we made up our minds that they
were shooting at us from a set of red-tiled ranch buildings a good way in
front, and these I assaulted, finally charging them. Before we came
anywhere near, the Spaniards, who, as it proved, really were inside and
around them, abandoned them, leaving a few dead men.
By the time I had taken possession of these buildings all firing had
ceased everywhere. I had not the faintest idea what had happened: whether
the fight was over; or whether this was merely a lull in the fight; or where
the Spaniards were; or whether we might be attacked again; or whether we
ought ourselves to attack somebody somewhere else. I got my men in order
and sent out small parties to explore the ground in front, who returned
without finding any foe. (By this time, as a matter of fact, the Spaniards
were in full retreat.) Meanwhile I was extending my line so as to get into
touch with our people on the right. Word was brought to me that Wood had
been shot—which fortunately proved not to be true—and as, if this were so,
it meant that I must take charge of the regiment, I moved over personally to
inquire. Soon I learned that he was all right, that the Spaniards had retreated
along the main road, and that Colonel Wood and two or three other officers
were a short distance away. Before I reached them I encountered a captain
of the Ninth Cavalry, very glum because his troopers had not been up in
time to take part in the fight, and he congratulated me—with visible effort!
—upon my share in our first victory. I thanked him cordially, not confiding
in him that till that moment I myself knew exceeding little about the
victory; and proceeded to where Generals Wheeler, Lawton, and Chaffee,

who had just come up, in company with Wood, were seated on a bank. They
expressed appreciation of the way that I had handled my troops, first on the
right wing and then on the left! As I was quite prepared to find I had
committed some awful sin, I did my best to accept this in a nonchalant
manner, and not to look as relieved as I felt. As throughout the morning I
had preserved a specious aspect of wisdom, and had commanded first one
and then the other wing, the fight was really a capital thing for me, for
practically all the men had served under my actual command, and
thenceforth felt an enthusiastic belief that I would lead them aright.
It was a week after this skirmish before the army made the advance on
Santiago. Just before this occurred General Young was stricken down with
fever. General Wheeler, who had commanded the Cavalry Division, was put
in general charge of the left wing of the army, which fought before the city
itself. Brigadier-General Sam Sumner, an excellent officer, who had the
second cavalry brigade, took command of the cavalry division, and Wood
took command of our brigade, while, to my intense delight, I got my
regiment. I therefore had command of the regiment before the stiffest
fighting occurred. Later, when Wood was put in command in Santiago, I
became the brigade commander.
Late in the evening we camped at El Poso. There were two regular
officers, the brigade commander's aides, Lieutenants A. L. Mills and W. E.
Shipp, who were camped by our regiment. Each of my men had food in his
haversack, but I had none, and I would have gone supperless to bed if Mills
and Shipp had not given me out of their scanty stores a big sandwich, which
I shared with my orderly, who also had nothing. Next morning my body
servant Marshall, an ex-soldier of the Ninth (Colored) Cavalry, a fine and
faithful fellow, had turned up and I was able in my turn to ask Mills and
Shipp, who had eaten all their food the preceding evening, to take breakfast
with me. A few hours later gallant Shipp was dead, and Mills, an
exceptionally able officer, had been shot through the head from side to side,
just back of the eyes; yet he lived, although one eye was blinded, and before
I left the Presidency I gave him his commission as Brigadier-General.
Early in the morning our artillery began firing from the hill-crest
immediately in front of where our men were camped. Several of the
regiment were killed and wounded by the shrapnel of the return fire of the
Spaniards. One of the shrapnel bullets fell on my wrist and raised a bump as

big as a hickory nut, but did not even break the skin. Then we were
marched down from the hill on a muddy road through thick jungle towards
Santiago. The heat was great, and we strolled into the fight with no definite
idea on the part of any one as to what we were to do or what would happen.
There was no plan that our left wing was to make a serious fight that day;
and as there were no plans, it was naturally exceedingly hard to get orders,
and each of us had to act largely on his own responsibility.
Lawton's infantry division attacked the little village of El Caney, some
miles to the right. Kent's infantry division and Sumner's dismounted cavalry
division were supposed to detain the Spanish army in Santiago until Lawton
had captured El Caney. Spanish towns and villages, however, with their
massive buildings, are natural fortifications, as the French found in the
Peninsular War, and as both the French and our people found in Mexico.
The Spanish troops in El Caney fought very bravely, as did the Spanish
troops in front of us, and it was late in the afternoon before Lawton
accomplished his task.
Meanwhile we of the left wing had by degrees become involved in a fight
which toward the end became not even a colonel's fight, but a squad leader's
fight. The cavalry division was put at the head of the line. We were told to
march forward, cross a little river in front, and then, turning to the right,
march up alongside the stream until we connected with Lawton.
Incidentally, this movement would not have brought us into touch with
Lawton in any event. But we speedily had to abandon any thought of
carrying it out. The maneuver brought us within fair range of the Spanish
intrenchments along the line of hills which we called the San Juan Hills,
because on one of them was the San Juan blockhouse. On that day my
regiment had the lead of the second brigade, and we marched down the trail
following in trace behind the first brigade. Apparently the Spaniards could
not make up their minds what to do as the three regular regiments of the
first brigade crossed and defiled along the other bank of the stream, but
when our regiment was crossing they began to fire at us.
Under this flank fire it soon became impossible to continue the march.
The first brigade halted, deployed, and finally began to fire back. Then our
brigade was halted. From time to time some of our men would fall, and I
sent repeated word to the rear to try to get authority to attack the hills in
front. Finally General Sumner, who was fighting the division in fine shape,

sent word to advance. The word was brought to me by Mills, who said that
my orders were to support the regulars in the assault on the hills, and that
my objective would be the red-tiled ranch-house in front, on a hill which we
afterwards christened Kettle Hill. I mention Mills saying this because it was
exactly the kind of definite order the giving of which does so much to
insure success in a fight, as it prevents all obscurity as to what is to be done.
The order to attack did not reach the first brigade until after we ourselves
reached it, so that at first there was doubt on the part of their officers
whether they were at liberty to join in the advance.
I had not enjoyed the Guasimas fight at all, because I had been so
uncertain as to what I ought to do. But the San Juan fight was entirely
different. The Spaniards had a hard position to attack, it is true, but we
could see them, and I knew exactly how to proceed. I kept on horseback,
merely because I found it difficult to convey orders along the line, as the
men were lying down; and it is always hard to get men to start when they
cannot see whether their comrades are also going. So I rode up and down
the lines, keeping them straightened out, and gradually worked through line
after line until I found myself at the head of the regiment. By the time I had
reached the lines of the regulars of the first brigade I had come to the
conclusion that it was silly to stay in the valley firing at the hills, because
that was really where we were most exposed, and that the thing to do was to
try to rush the intrenchments. Where I struck the regulars there was no one
of superior rank to mine, and after asking why they did not charge, and
being answered that they had no orders, I said I would give the order. There
was naturally a little reluctance shown by the elderly officer in command to
accept my order, so I said, "Then let my men through, sir," and I marched
through, followed by my grinning men. The younger officers and the
enlisted men of the regulars jumped up and joined us. I waved my hat, and
we went up the hill with a rush. Having taken it, we looked across at the
Spaniards in the trenches under the San Juan blockhouse to our left, which
Hawkins's brigade was assaulting. I ordered our men to open fire on the
Spaniards in the trenches.
Memory plays funny tricks in such a fight, where things happen quickly,
and all kinds of mental images succeed one another in a detached kind of
way, while the work goes on. As I gave the order in question there slipped
through my mind Mahan's account of Nelson's orders that each ship as it
sailed forward, if it saw another ship engaged with an enemy's ship, should

rake the latter as it passed. When Hawkins's soldiers captured the
blockhouse, I, very much elated, ordered a charge on my own hook to a line
of hills still farther on. Hardly anybody heard this order, however; only four
men started with me, three of whom were shot. I gave one of them, who
was only wounded, my canteen of water, and ran back, much irritated that I
had not been followed—which was quite unjustifiable, because I found that
nobody had heard my orders. General Sumner had come up by this time,
and I asked his permission to lead the charge. He ordered me to do so, and
this time away we went, and stormed the Spanish intrenchments. There was
some close fighting, and we took a few prisoners. We also captured the
Spanish provisions, and ate them that night with great relish. One of the
items was salted flying-fish, by the way. There were also bottles of wine,
and jugs of fiery spirit, and as soon as possible I had these broken, although
not before one or two of my men had taken too much liquor. Lieutenant
Howze, of the regulars, an aide of General Sumner's, brought me an order
to halt where I was; he could not make up his mind to return until he had
spent an hour or two with us under fire. The Spaniards attempted a counter-
attack in the middle of the afternoon, but were driven back without effort,
our men laughing and cheering as they rose to fire; because hitherto they
had been assaulting breastworks, or lying still under artillery fire, and they
were glad to get a chance to shoot at the Spaniards in the open. We lay on
our arms that night and as we were drenched with sweat, and had no
blankets save a few we took from the dead Spaniards, we found even the
tropic night chilly before morning came.
During the afternoon's fighting, while I was the highest officer at our
immediate part of the front, Captains Boughton and Morton of the regular
cavalry, two as fine officers as any man could wish to have beside him in
battle, came along the firing line to tell me that they had heard a rumor that
we might fall back, and that they wished to record their emphatic protest
against any such course. I did not believe there was any truth in the rumor,
for the Spaniards were utterly incapable of any effective counter-attack.
However, late in the evening, after the fight, General Wheeler visited us at
the front, and he told me to keep myself in readiness, as at any moment it
might be decided to fall back. Jack Greenway was beside me when General
Wheeler was speaking. I answered, "Well, General, I really don't know
whether we would obey an order to fall back. We can take that city by a
rush, and if we have to move out of here at all I should be inclined to make

the rush in the right direction." Greenway nodded an eager assent. The old
General, after a moment's pause, expressed his hearty agreement, and said
that he would see that there was no falling back. He had been very sick for a
couple of days, but, sick as he was, he managed to get into the fight. He was
a gamecock if ever there was one, but he was in very bad physical shape on
the day of the fight. If there had been any one in high command to
supervise and press the attack that afternoon, we would have gone right into
Santiago. In my part of the line the advance was halted only because we
received orders not to move forward, but to stay on the crest of the captured
hill and hold it.
We are always told that three-o'clock-in-the-morning courage is the most
desirable kind. Well, my men and the regulars of the cavalry had just that
brand of courage. At about three o'clock on the morning after the first fight,
shooting began in our front and there was an alarm of a Spanish advance. I
was never more pleased than to see the way in which the hungry, tired,
shabby men all jumped up and ran forward to the hill-crest, so as to be
ready for the attack; which, however, did not come. As soon as the sun rose
the Spaniards again opened upon us with artillery. A shell burst between
Dave Goodrich and myself, blacking us with powder, and killing and
wounding several of the men immediately behind us.
Next day the fight turned into a siege; there were some stirring incidents;
but for the most part it was trench work. A fortnight later Santiago
surrendered. Wood won his brigadier-generalship by the capital way in
which he handled his brigade in the fight, and in the following siege. He
was put in command of the captured city; and in a few days I succeeded to
the command of the brigade.
The health of the troops was not good, and speedily became very bad.
There was some dysentery, and a little yellow fever; but most of the trouble
was from a severe form of malarial fever. The Washington authorities had
behaved better than those in actual command of the expedition at one crisis.
Immediately after the first day's fighting around Santiago the latter had
hinted by cable to Washington that they might like to withdraw, and
Washington had emphatically vetoed the proposal. I record this all the more
gladly because there were not too many gleams of good sense shown in the
home management of the war; although I wish to repeat that the real blame
for this rested primarily with us ourselves, the people of the United States,

who had for years pursued in military matters a policy that rendered it
certain that there would be ineptitude and failure in high places if ever a
crisis came. After the siege the people in Washington showed no knowledge
whatever of the conditions around Santiago, and proposed to keep the army
there. This would have meant that at least three-fourths of the men would
either have died or have been permanently invalided, as a virulent form of
malaria was widespread, and there was a steady growth of dysentery and
other complaints. No object of any kind was to be gained by keeping the
army in or near the captured city. General Shafter tried his best to get the
Washington authorities to order the army home. As he failed to accomplish
anything, he called a council of the division and brigade commanders and
the chief medical officers to consult over the situation.
Although I had command of a brigade, I was only a colonel, and so I did
not intend to attend, but the General informed me that I was particularly
wanted, and accordingly I went. At the council General Shafter asked the
medical authorities as to conditions, and they united in informing him that
they were very bad, and were certain to grow much worse; and that in order
to avoid frightful ravages from disease, chiefly due to malaria, the army
should be sent back at once to some part of the northern United States. The
General then explained that he could not get the War Department to
understand the situation; that he could not get the attention of the public;
and that he felt that there should be some authoritative publication which
would make the War Department take action before it was too late to avert
the ruin of the army. All who were in the room expressed their agreement.
Then the reason for my being present came out. It was explained to me
by General Shafter, and by others, that as I was a volunteer officer and
intended immediately to return to civil life, I could afford to take risks
which the regular army men could not afford to take and ought not to be
expected to take, and that therefore I ought to make the publication in
question; because to incur the hostility of the War Department would not
make any difference to me, whereas it would be destructive to the men in
the regular army, or to those who hoped to get into the regular army. I
thought this true, and said I would write a letter or make a statement which
could then be published. Brigadier-General Ames, who was in the same
position that I was, also announced that he would make a statement.

When I left the meeting it was understood that I was to make my
statement as an interview in the press; but Wood, who was by that time
Brigadier-General commanding the city of Santiago, gave me a quiet hint to
put my statement in the form of a letter to General Shafter, and this I
accordingly did. When I had written my letter, the correspondent of the
Associated Press, who had been informed by others of what had occurred,
accompanied me to General Shafter. I presented the letter to General
Shafter, who waved it away and said: "I don't want to take it; do whatever
you wish with it." I, however, insisted on handing it to him, whereupon he
shoved it toward the correspondent of the Associated Press, who took hold
of it, and I released my hold. General Ames made a statement direct to the
correspondent, and also sent a cable to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy
at Washington, a copy of which he gave to the correspondent. By this time
the other division and brigade commanders who were present felt that they
had better take action themselves. They united in a round robin to General
Shafter, which General Wood dictated, and which was signed by Generals
Kent, Gates, Chaffee, Sumner, Ludlow, Ames, and Wood, and by myself.
General Wood handed this to General Shafter, and it was made public by
General Shafter precisely as mine was made public.[*] Later I was much
amused when General Shafter stated that he could not imagine how my
letter and the round robin got out! When I saw this statement, I appreciated
how wise Wood had been in hinting to me not to act on the suggestion of
the General that I should make a statement to the newspapers, but to put my
statement in the form of a letter to him as my superior officer, a letter which
I delivered to him. Both the letter and the round robin were written at
General Shafter's wish, and at the unanimous suggestion of all the
commanding and medical officers of the Fifth Army Corps, and both were
published by General Shafter.

[*] General Wood writes me: "The representative of the
Associated Press was very anxious to get a copy of this
despatch or see it, and I told him it was impossible for him
to have it or see it. I then went in to General Shafter and
stated the case to him, handing him the despatch, saying,
'The matter is now in your hands.' He, General Shafter, then
said, 'I don't care whether this gentleman has it or not,'
and I left then. When I went back the General told me he had
given the Press representative a copy of the despatch, and
that he had gone to the office with it."

In a regiment the prime need is to have fighting men; the prime virtue is
to be able and eager to fight with the utmost effectiveness. I have never
believed that this was incompatible with other virtues. On the contrary,
while there are of course exceptions, I believe that on the average the best
fighting men are also the best citizens. I do not believe that a finer set of
natural soldiers than the men of my regiment could have been found
anywhere, and they were first-class citizens in civil life also. One fact may
perhaps be worthy of note. Whenever we were in camp and so fixed that we
could have regular meals, we used to have a general officers' mess, over
which I of course presided. During our entire service there was never a foul
or indecent word uttered at the officers' mess—I mean this literally; and
there was very little swearing—although now and then in the fighting, if
there was a moment when swearing seemed to be the best method of
reaching the heart of the matter, it was resorted to.
The men I cared for most in the regiment were the men who did the best
work; and therefore my liking for them was obliged to take the shape of
exposing them to the most fatigue and hardship, of demanding from them
the greatest service, and of making them incur the greatest risk. Once I kept
Greenway and Goodrich at work for forty-eight hours, without sleeping,
and with very little food, fighting and digging trenches. I freely sent the
men for whom I cared most, to where death might smite them; and death
often smote them—as it did the two best officers in my regiment, Allyn
Capron and Bucky O'Neil. My men would not have respected me had I
acted otherwise. Their creed was my creed. The life even of the most useful
man, of the best citizen, is not to be hoarded if there be need to spend it. I
felt, and feel, this about others; and of course also about myself. This is one
reason why I have always felt impatient contempt for the effort to abolish
the death penalty on account of sympathy with criminals. I am willing to
listen to arguments in favor of abolishing the death penalty so far as they
are based purely on grounds of public expediency, although these
arguments have never convinced me. But inasmuch as, without hesitation,
in the performance of duty, I have again and again sent good and gallant
and upright men to die, it seems to me the height of a folly both
mischievous and mawkish to contend that criminals who have deserved
death should nevertheless be allowed to shirk it. No brave and good man
can properly shirk death; and no criminal who has earned death should be
allowed to shirk it.