Eight

John Morton Blum’s careful study of TR’s correspondence has made it clear how close a watch he kept on the appointments to state Republican committees and how deftly he constructed a personal organization within the party. As president he was always careful to consult the Republican senator of the state where any political appointment was to be made, but he also made sure it was understood that he was free to consult others as well. During his first term Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio, the old champion of McKinley, was still the dominant, or at least the rival, power in the party, and he had not only been opposed to Roosevelt but was known to be hankering for the next presidential nomination. TR’s own fierce ambition for the same goal was accentuated by his distaste for owing his present elevation to an assassin’s bullet; he yearned to be elected in his own right. After he had slowly but surely loosened Hanna’s grip on the party, he was able to say, with a sigh of relief: “He has caused me a little worry but not much.” Hanna’s premature death suddenly eliminated this threat, and TR and his running mate, Senator Charles W. Fairbanks of Indiana, were easily nominated in the 1904 Republican convention and as easily elected the following fall. Running against a conservative Democratic candidate, Judge Alton B. Parker, Roosevelt polled 7.6 million votes, 56.4 percent of the popular vote to Parker’s 37.6 percent, and swept the electoral college 336 to 140, carrying every state outside the South save the border state of Kentucky.

Industry and finance did not yet show the alarm about TR they were later to feel. Northern Securities had bothered them, but TR was still a Republican. Contributions to his campaign funds included $50,000 from Henry Clay Frick; $100,000 each from George J. Gould (son of Jay) and John Archbold (Standard Oil); and $150,000 from J. P. Morgan. The Republican treasurer, Cornelius Bliss, perhaps wisely, did not feel it necessary to inform the candidate of these.

TR, elated by his sweeping victory at the polls, felt at last that he had secured the confidence of the American people, and he became more open in the annunciation of his socially progressive principles, his “Square Deal,” as it came to be known. In his annual message to Congress in 1905 he called for a pure food and drug law, supervision of insurance companies, investigation of child labor, an employers’ liability law for the District of Columbia, and suits against railroad rebates.

He also made a public pronouncement that he was later bitterly to regret: “Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.”

Race relations occupy so much of our news today that it is natural to inquire what TR did about them. There is no question that he found any sort of racial or religious discrimination odious, but there was far less that a president could do about them in his day than in ours. Indeed, there was very little he could do. The South was solid in its determination to maintain segregation; states’ rights were deemed sacred, and the North was indifferent. TR could only express his helpless indignation at the counting of Negroes as part of the voting population without allowing them to vote: “It is an outrage that this one man [Congressman John S. Williams of Mississippi] should first be allowed to suppress the votes of three black men, and then to cast them himself in order to make his own vote the equal of that of four men.” And he could only add, “To acquiesce in this state of things because it is not possible at the time to attempt to change it without doing damage is one thing. It is quite another to seem formally to approve it.”

Early in his first term TR had invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, which had aroused a howl of protest in newspapers throughout the South. Roosevelt’s response was: “As things have turned out I am very glad that I asked him, for the clamor aroused by the act makes me feel as if the act was necessary.… I do not intend to offend the prejudices of anyone else, but neither do I allow their prejudices to make me false to my principles.”

But in private he admitted that the invitation had been a political mistake, which he did not repeat, and today we might feel that he was going a bit far in not offending the prejudices of others. Witness, for example, this letter of his about the reappointment of three Negroes to political offices in Georgia:

The three best offices in Georgia are filled by colored men who have done their work admirably. High-grade whites feel outraged that these three best offices should be given to colored men, and if it were a case of original appointments I should, as a matter of wisdom, from the standpoint of both races, certainly not make more than one of the three a colored man. But to refuse to reappoint or continue in office a good servant simply because he is colored is an entirely different thing; yet it is wholly impossible to make this distinction clear to most thoroughly good men in Georgia.

The “thoroughly good” may stick in a modern throat, but that was the world TR had to face. We should give him credit for making it clear that his condemnation of discrimination was not limited to hostility against any one race:

There is nothing that I protest more strongly, socially and politically, than any proscription or looking down upon decent Americans because they are of Irish or German ancestry; but I protest just exactly as strongly against any similar discrimination against or sneering at men because they happen to be descended from people who came over here three centuries ago.

Where hate crimes, however, occurred in nations beyond his jurisdiction, he refused to indulge in idle protests or empty threats. Citing the Old West of his younger days where a man didn’t draw a gun unless he was ready to shoot, he deplored the brandishing of weapons one had no idea of using. At a later time, during America’s neutrality in the first years of World War I, he would accuse Wilson, in his relations with Germany, of shaking first his fist and then his finger. And now we find him writing Jacob Schiff about the persecution of Jews in Russia:

Why, my dear Mr. Schiff, the case was much simpler as regards the Armenians a few years ago. There the Turkish government was responsible and was able to enforce whatever was desired. The outrages on the Armenians were exactly the same as those perpetrated on the Jews of Russia, both in character and in extent. But we did not go to war with Turkey. Inasmuch as it was certain that our people would not go into such a war … it would have been worse than foolish to have threatened it, and not the slightest good would have been or was gained by any agitation which it was known would not be backed up by arms.