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.
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 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 turn up for a Democratic rally Bryan volunteered to pinch hit. His speech was so successful that when he reached home he woke up his wife and told her, “I found I had power over the audience. I found I could move them as I chose … God grant I may use it wisely.” He knelt down by the bed and prayed.
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.