Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
The last thing T.R. wanted was to lose himself in the western wilderness. Immediately an item appeared in The Bad Lands Cowboy, a recently established newspaper in the recently established tanktown of Medora: “Theodore Roosevelt the young New York reformer made us a very pleasant call Monday in full cowboy regalia.”
T.R. took to the cowhands and the cowhands took to him. He was affectionately known as Four Eyes. He didn’t drink or smoke. He couldn’t shake off his Harvard drawl. His profoundest cussword was By Godfrey, but his energy and nerve and knack for leadership won him the amazed admiration of the whole countryside.
He was made a deputy sheriff and helped round up some horsethieves and was asked to run for Congress. He lost every cent of the sixty thousand dollars he invested in cattle but he wrote a successful book on his experiences called Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. The frontispiece was a photograph of Theodore Roosevelt in sombrero hat, beaded buckskin shirt, chaps and boots with silver spurs: the greatest showoff of his generation.
Not many months later he was in England marrying Edith Carow at St. George’s, Hanover Square. Cecil Spring Rice, then a sprightly young fellow just out of Oxford whom T.R. had taken a shine to on the boat, was best man. Theodore and Edith had been playmates in Gramercy Park when she was a little girl and he was a small boy. Probably she had been a motherly little girl. All their lives it was to be Mrs. Roosevelt who would watch over Theodore along with the other children, seeing that he got the proper meals and didn’t spend his money foolishly and changed his clothes when he came home drenched from a hike in the snow.
After one of those European honeymoons popular with wealthy Americans in the nineteenth century the couple settled at Sagamore Hill, in the house Theodore had been building on some family property at Oyster Bay and was wondering how he would pay for. Private life was repugnant to him. He missed the admiring throng. He was an industrious writer but writing wasn’t enough. Right away he was back in Republican politics.
With the election of Benjamin Harrison came an appointment in Washington to the new Civil Service Commission. “I rose like a rocket,” wrote T.R. President Harrison’s comment on T.R.’s activities was: “He wanted to put an end to all the evil in the world between sunrise and sunset.”
When, twelve years later, he took over the presidency T.R. carried with him to Washington all the enthusiasms of the grubby little blueeyed sandyhaired boy who had filled the house with the smell of formaldehyde and with the pelts of dead animals; and all his adolescent joys in hunting and warfare and naval tactics and history and literature; to which, with burgeoning virility, had been added the naturalborn leader’s passion to make other people do what he wanted them to do, and a type of bull-headed moralizing which was entirely his own. His friends complained that Theodore never would grow up.
No man ever enjoyed being President more.
The New Nationalism
When T.R. took the oath of office at the age of fortytwo on September 14, 1901, at his friend Wilcox’s house in Buffalo, he was thought of as a jingo with a knack for personal publicity, a political embodiment of Kipling’s theory of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. It was characteristic of his complex personality that the first scandal he caused was by inviting Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House. It was typical too, of the less attractive side of him, that he tried to explain the story away by giving out that the Negro president of Tuskegee had merely been invited to lunch on the spur of the moment.
However the incident was twisted around in the war of words that followed, the fact remained that social or racial snobbery had no place in T.R.’s gentleman’s code. He didn’t need to put himself out to make Jews feel at home. It never occurred to him that he couldn’t ask a man he admired to dinner because he happened to have a dark skin. In his correspondence with his dear friend and passionate admirer, Owen Wister, whose head was a roost for all the snobberies acquired in undergraduate days at Harvard, T.R. showed more understanding of what men of diverse races and traditions had to face before finding acceptance by the then dominant Anglo-Saxon elite than any other public man of the day. For T.R. ‘a man was a man for a’ of that.’
Conservation of national resources and of the beauties of nature were among his many passions. He instigated enforcement of the antitrust laws. He cudgelled the mine operators into arbitrating their differences with John Mitchell’s United Mine Workers. For the miners it was the first step out of serfdom to the coal companies.
Coming into conflict with financial barons whom he dubbed “malefactors of great wealth” he found himself adopting, as time went on, planks from the platform of “Messrs. Bryan, Altgeld, Debs, Coxey and the rest,” whom he’d lumped together when he was fighting free silver during McKinley’s first presidential campaign, as “strikingly like the leaders of the Terror in France in mental and moral attitude.”
By the time T.R. was ready to go on the stump for a second term he had managed to appropriate a large part of these gentlemen’s following. This was a generation that read Henry George and Bellamy’s Looking Backward and listened to young Debs, the impassioned spokesman for the railroad workers. The more distant reaches of the cornbelt abounded in enthusiasts eager to make the nation over in accordance with their aspirations for a perfect democracy. Populists, freesilver men, greenbackers, pacifists, nonresisters, utopian socialists vied with each other for the speakers’ platforms in the raw middlewestern towns.
The century was new. When the frontier reached the Pacific some of its backwash rolled back to invigorate the entire nation. Americans were ready to discover the globe. Beyond the oceans lay lands benighted, open to adventure. The heathen must be taught the ways of Christian self-government. If only the grip of corrupt politicians and greedy businessmen could be loosened at home the great example of American democracy was ready to set all mankind on the path of progress.
In spite of the New York Republicanism of his background T.R. managed, with his cowboy gear and his whooping escorts of Rough Riders, to appear as a Lochinvar off the western plains. He channelled the hopes and plans of the westerners for reform into his thoroughly personal program for justice and fair play. He spoke out with so much zest that soberer and older men found themselves following in his trail.
The Peerless Leader
The Democrats made Roosevelt’s task easy. For eight years the ardent and active wing of the party had been swayed by William Jennings Bryan’s silver tongue. At their convention in St. Louis in 1904 the gold-standard men took over and nominated as their candidate, amid the indignant groans of the westerners, an estimable but politically colorless New York judge named Alton B. Parker instead of the peerless leader.
It was Bryan’s ironical fate, in spite of his gift of eloquence, twice to clear the path that was to lead another man into the presidency. Bryan’s oratory helped arouse the enthusiasms that Theodore Roosevelt took advantage of in 1904, and in 1912 it was Bryan’s prestige as leader of the forces of righteousness in the Democratic party that assured Woodrow Wilson’s nomination.
Bryan was nurtured on righteousness from the cradle. His father, a Democratic politician in southern Illinois, who served a number of terms in the state legislature and prospered in later years as a judge of the circuit court, was a “praying Baptist.”
His mother, though the most dutiful of wives, clung to the Methodist faith she’d been brought up in. Bryan in later life explained in his memoirs how much he had been the gainer: as a boy he had doubled his “Sunday school opportunities” by attending both churches.
His parents were stern in their upbringing. Their boys shirked no chores. The young Bryans got their education between McGuffey’s Reader and the Holy Bible continually elucidated at prayer meeting and Sunday school. William Jennings studied law in Jacksonville, Illinois, married and moved his family out to Nebraska in search of opportunity.
Opportunity was not far to seek. He was an agreeably handsome young man with an extraordinarily resonant voice. One day when the speaker didn’t tu
He was soon recognized as the best speaker in the state and a few years later, although a teetotaller, he was backed by the Lincoln liquor interests who trusted him to oppose prohibition when he ran for Congress. The Republicans teased him with the nickname of “Boy Orator of the Platte.” Proudly bearing that title he arrived in Washington to represent his district in the Fiftysecond Congress.
He immediately let himself be heard from with a successful speech against the protective tariff. Adopting the “free and unlimited coinage of silver” as his personal plank, he was renominated in Nebraska and returned to Congress with the frenetic support of the populists. Operators of silver mines were glad to furnish his campaign funds.
Another successful oration in the House almost took the Democratic leadership away from Grover Cleveland, representing gold and the economic creeds of the Wall Street bankers, who as President was the party’s titular head. Bryan earned obloquy in financial circles and near deification from the western insurgents by following it up with a demand for a tax on the incomes of the rich. He was only thirtysix when in 1896 he joined the Nebraska delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
A few days before, as correspondent for the Omaha World-Herald in St. Louis, where the Republicans were convening, he had seen the freesilver men go storming out of the hall amid cries of “Take the Chicago train.” He had already tried out in the halls of Congress his peroration that was soon to be so famous: “I shall not help crucify mankind upon a cross of gold … I shall not aid in pressing down upon the bleeding brow of labor this crown of thorns.”
He had been experimenting for months with other booming passages of the great speech he was planning, at meetings in his home state and in private to his wife. Bryan was an orator who left nothing to chance.
His name had for some time been bruited about as presidential timber. His opportunity came when, in a conclave even more sharply torn than the Republican convention, but this time by antiplutocratic factions, he was called upon to speak. That speech was the climax of his career.
Edgar Lee Masters wrote down his recollections of the scene in the Colosseum: “Suddenly I saw a man spring up from his seat among the delegates, and with the agility and swiftness of an eager boxer hurry to the speaker’s rostrum. He was slim, tall, pale, raven-haired, beaked of nose … as this young man opened his great mouth all the twenty thousand persons present heard its thunder … He was smiling. A sweet reasonableness shone in his handsome face …”
Men and women present in the hall that day never tired of telling all who would listen of the magical effectiveness of the Cross of Gold speech. Bryan’s nomination for President followed. To the tune of Sousa’s “El Capitan” march, his oratory swept the country. Mark Hanna and the Wall Street “interests” had to strain every dollar to carry McKinley’s election.
Finding himself even in defeat one of the country’s great men and with the dignity of a presidential candidate to support, young Bryan had to find some suitable way of making a living. He had no taste for the drudgery of the law. He and his wife produced a book: The First Battle, which did well enough to clear up the debts of the campaign. As a permanent source of income he took up lecturing on the Chautauqua circuit.
When they moved to Nebraska the Bryans joined the Presbyterian Church. He soon became an elder. His speeches were lay sermons. A favorite was on reading the Bible. He tried to live the Christian life.
Although as a practicing Christian he deplored war, as a proselyting democrat he couldn’t help being stirred by the struggle for selfgovernment in Cuba that gave the American expansionists an opportunity to flex their youthful muscles by declaring war against the decrepit empire of the Spanish Bourbons.
“Universal peace cannot come until Justice is enthroned throughout the world,” Bryan declared to a shouting crowd at the Trans-Mississippi World’s Fair in Omaha. “As long as the oppressor is deaf to the voice of reason, so long must the citizen accustom his shoulder to the musket and his hand to the saber.”
The “young man eloquent” modestly enlisted as a private in the militia. Thereupon the governor of Nebraska commissioned him to raise a regiment and, after a summer spent with his troops fighting fever and mosquitoes in a Florida swamp, he emerged from the six weeks war as Colonel Bryan.
In uniform he had suffered acutely from what he called military lockjaw. His experience confirmed his inherent suspicion of the military way of doing things, and made him more than ever an opponent of the imperialism which was luring the youth of both parties away from the set-our-own-house-in-order-first creed of the reformers.
In the congressional debate over the disposition of Spain’s overseas empire, Bryan’s anti-imperialism took a turn which both his friends and his enemies found hard to explain. Ratification of the treaty by which the United States would assume sovereignty over the Philippines was bitterly contested in the Senate. In spite of remonstrances from such hearty pacifists as Andrew Carnegie and David Starr Jordan, Bryan used his influence among Democratic senators to “enthrone justice” in those distant islands by placing them under American rule. His supporters failed by a single vote to put through the justifying amendment he lobbied for desperately which would assure the Filipinos eventual independence.
The peerless leader was left impaled on the dilemma. The explanation, that the treaty, if ratified, would give the Democratic opposition to overseas expansion a better talking point in the coming campaign, never quite held water. His loss of a large part of the anti-imperialist vote had something to do with his defeat by McKinley in 1900.
After his defeat and his mistyeyed retirement from presidential politics Bryan made up for past inconsistencies by the increased ardor of his advocacy of the cause of peace. During the campaign he had been painting a picture of America as arbiter of the world’s disputes.
“Behold a republic,” he declaimed in President McKinley’s home town of Canton, “increasing in population, in wealth, in strength, and in influence … Behold a republic gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor in disputes.”
The Laird of Skibo
Bryan was not alone in these hopes. Peace by arbitration had been one of the themes of McKinley’s last speech. The world over, thoughtful men looked forward into the new century with the hope that at last they would see an end to the curse of war.
Andrew Carnegie, whom many good Bryan supporters had been excoriating as the plutocratic villain of the industrial warfare round Pittsburgh, was dedicating his vast fortune and his very considerable ability as a publicist to the cause of peace between nations.
Carnegie had early promulgated the theory that a businessman should spend half his life making money and the other half distributing his wealth “for the improvement of mankind.” He was as good as his word. After selling out his interests in steel and iron and coke to U. S. Steel for what was reputed to be the sum of two hundred and fifty million dollars in five percent gold bonds, the laird of Skibo Castle kept himself busy writing exhortatory letters to those in authority, accompanied by the relevant checks, in furtherance of the great cause.
Carnegie was the personal embodiment of the mythology of nineteenthcentury capitalism. Coming from a family of learned Scottish artisans, he was brought up in desperate poverty, since his father who was a weaver had lost his livelihood to the factories. America was the escape. The undersized towheaded boy, already a mighty reader, reached New York with his family on the old whaling ship Wiscasset in 1848.
Starting as bobbinboy at thirteen in an Allegheny textile mill, he worked as messenger for the telegraph office, then as telegraphist and private secretary to a railroad man who became Assistant Secretary of War in charge of transportation during th
His first benefaction was a public bath for the stony ancient capital of Scotland, Dunfermline, where he was born and had his schooling. He gave away libraries, bought a string of newspapers to promote republicanism among the English and engaged a large staff of wellpaid smoothies to talk peace at all seasons.
Prince of Peace
Arbitration had been in the air for a decade. The British and American governments had successfully arbitrated a dispute over the boundary between Colombia and Venezuela which had once seemed a casus belli. There had followed a long negotiation between the two governments for a permanent arbitration treaty. This treaty, in spite of urgent appeals from outgoing President Cleveland and incoming President McKinley, failed in ratification in the Senate in the spring of 1897. The short war with Spain, an unnecessary war if there ever was one, proved the need for renewed activity by the advocates of peace.
In 1899 they were much heartened by an appeal from Czar Nicholas of all the Russias to the principal powers to meet at The Hague to discuss the limitation of armaments, and to impose a humane code on nations that did have recourse to war. Out of this conference came a few rules of war more honored in the breach than the observance, and the Hague Tribunal. Carnegie furnished an endowment that housed the Tribunal in a handsome palace in the Dutch capital.
Bryan, having retired from the political battlefield like the sulking Achilles, kept his name and admonitions before the public by publishing a weekly magazine from his home in Lincoln “with the purpose to aid the common people in the protection of their rights, the advancement of their interests and the realization of their aspirations.” He named it The Commoner. The magazine found immediate circulation.