by Jon Meacham
Justice John Marshall Harlan articulated a forward-leaning view, but his was the sole dissenting vote in Plessy. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country,” Harlan wrote. “And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power….But in the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.” However eloquent, Harlan was speaking against the overwhelming opinion of the time.
Whites reigned supreme. Within about three decades of Lee’s surrender, angry and alienated Southern whites who had lost a war had successfully used terror and political inflexibility (a refusal to concede that the Civil War had altered the essential status of black people) to create a postbellum world of American apartheid. Many white Americans had feared a postslavery society in which emancipation might lead to equality, and they had successfully ensured that no such thing should come to pass, North or South. Lynchings, church burnings, and the denial of access to equal education and to the ballot box were the order of the decades. A succession of largely unmemorable presidents served after Grant; none successfully marshaled the power of the office to fight the Northern acquiescence to the South’s imposition of Jim Crow.
“We fought,” a Confederate veteran from Georgia remarked in 1890, “for the supremacy of the white race in America.” That was a war they won—and, in a central American irony, they did so not alone but with the aid and comfort of many of their former foes on the field of battle.
Theodore Roosevelt, his daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth remarked, always wanted to be “the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral”; a contemporary thought him “a dazzling…spectacle of a human engine driven at full speed.”
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.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT, The Rough Riders and An Autobiography
A great party has pledged itself to the protection of children, to the care of the aged, to the relief of overworked girls, to the safeguarding of burdened men.
—JANE ADDAMS, cofounder of Chicago’s Hull-House, seconding TR’s 1912 Progressive Party nomination
FOR THE PRESIDENT, it was a quick half-mile trip from the White House to Washington’s Columbia Theater on F Street between Eleventh and Twelfth streets Northwest. On the evening of Monday, October 5, 1908—a lovely early autumn day in the capital—Theodore Roosevelt, nearing the end of his time in office, left the executive mansion with his wife, Edith, to take in a play. TR wanted to make a night of it, and the president’s party included three cabinet members and their wives—Elihu Root of State, Victor Metcalf of the Navy, and Oscar Straus of Commerce and Labor—as well as presidential secretary William Loeb and his wife.
The play was Israel Zangwill’s The Melting-Pot, the story of a Jewish man who had fled the deadly pogroms of Russia to make a new life in America. The action was set in the living room of a modest house in what Zangwill’s stage directions called a “non-Jewish borough of New York” on a February afternoon in the first years of the twentieth century. The play’s designers affixed a mezuzah—a tiny metal case to hold a parchment Hebrew scriptural passage—to a doorpost. An American flag was pinned on a wall; there were bookcases with “mouldering Hebrew books” and English-language volumes; pictures of Wagner, Columbus, and Lincoln hung in the room.
The protagonist, the Russian immigrant David Quixano, had reveled in America’s openness to new arrivals and rhapsodized about the flow of refugees from the Old World through New York Harbor. America, he said, was “God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot, where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!” Roosevelt, who was seated next to Zangwill’s wife, heartily approved. “Certain strong lines,” The New York Times reported, “caused Mr. Roosevelt to lean forward in his box and say in a perfectly audible tone, ‘That’s all right!’ ”
Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting-Pot spoke of America as “God’s Crucible.” President Roosevelt approved. “It’s great—it’s a great play,” he told Zangwill, who dedicated a published version to TR.
A climactic speech of Quixano’s prompted the president to lead an ovation. “There she lies, the great Melting-Pot….” Quixano says.
Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian…black and yellow…how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God….What is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labor and look forward!
Characteristically enthusiastic, Roosevelt was lavish in his praise. “It’s great—it’s a great play,” TR told Zangwill. “I never was so stirred in all my life!” Zangwill was understandably thrilled; he had written the play, he recalled, so that audiences would see “that, in the crucible of love…the most violent antitheses of the past may be fused into a higher unity.” Zangwill later dedicated a published version of The Melting-Pot to Roosevelt.
The play went on from Washington to Chicago and finally to Broadway. In 1915 the actor who had played Quixano on stage, Walker Whiteside, starred in a silent-film version, all of which helped popularize the image of the kind of nation that TR, before, during, and after his presidency, sought to sustain: one in which America was welcoming to certain groups if those groups put away their cultures of origin.
To Roosevelt, the sensible—and, in Rooseveltian terms, the right—position on the changing nature of the country was perfectly clear. “It is,” TR said, “a base outrage to oppose a man because of his religion or birthplace, and all good citizens will hold any such effort in abhorrence.”
That was, however, a sentiment more easily articulated than widely realized—even for Roosevelt himself. It would be a mistake to hold Roosevelt up as a forerunner or as a prophet of the racially and ethnically diverse America of the twenty-first century. His vision of the country was, as the title of Zangwill’s play had it, of a melting pot, but for him the pot—to extend the metaphor—had been smelted from the achievements of the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of the American continent, and those who joined the American experience owed those conquerors their respect and fealty. “The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him,” Roosevelt wrote in his multivolume The Winning of the West. He was largely uninterested in revisiting questions of justice about the white conquest of that which had belonged to Native Americans. “During the past century,” Roosevelt wrote, “a good deal of sentimental nonsense has been talked about our taking the Indians’ land.”
TR’s capacity on some occasions to stand for equality and for openness and in other contexts to argue that it was the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to rule the world was a particular example of a more universal American inconsistency. We believed in life and liberty for some; we simultaneously believed in imposing our will on the lives and liberties of others on the grounds that they were innately inferior. The tension between these visions of identity, of assimilation, and of power have long shaped American life, and rarely more so than in the Age of the first Roosevelt.
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Born in a four-story brownstone on East Twentieth Street in New York City in 1858, a son of a prominent family, TR was a sickly child who suffered from terrible asthma attacks. “Nobody seemed to think I would live,” he recalled. Finding solace in stories and poetry of adventure, of exploration, and of martial valor, he thought of books as “the greatest of companions.” (As presid
ent of the United States he would read all the novels of Anthony Trollope.) Nicknamed “Teedie,” the young Roosevelt fought through his illnesses. “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first,” he recalled, “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,” TR added, “can have the same experience if they choose.”)
His imagination was filled with tales of strength and vigor. The Revolutionary soldiers of Valley Forge, for instance, were quite real to him, as were the soldiers of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. His mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, had grown up on a plantation in Georgia; his maternal uncles had fought against the Union. “My earliest training and principles were Southern,” he once remarked. Martha Roosevelt, her son recalled, was “entirely ‘unreconstructed’ to the day of her death.” TR had heard so many stories of the Old South from his mother that he knew his way around her family’s mansion in Roswell, near Atlanta, on his very first visit—as president of the United States.
He always remembered, too, a visit in New York from his two Confederate uncles shortly after Appomattox. Traveling under assumed names, they would eventually make their homes in England. One, an admiral in the Confederate navy, had built the warship the Alabama; the other, TR proudly recalled, was a midshipman who had fired the last rounds from the Alabama’s guns in a battle against the Union’s Kearsarge. The young Roosevelt adored “hearing of the feats performed by Southern forefathers and kinsfolk,” tales that, together with his readings of history and heroic fiction, gave him with a love of adventure. “I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world,” TR recalled, “and I had a great desire to be like them.” As he remembered it, it was not until he was fourteen that these visions became anything more than “day-dreams.”
A miserable stagecoach ride north changed him forever. “Teedie,” trying to recover from an asthma attack, was en route to Moosehead Lake in Maine when two boys his age started bullying him. Roosevelt tried to fight back, but failed. He was too weak to defend himself. Humiliated, he decided then and there to do something about it. “The experience taught me what probably no amount of good advice could have taught me,” TR recalled. “I made up my mind that I must try to learn so that I would not again be put in such a helpless position.” He would take boxing lessons under the tutelage of John Long, a former prizefighter.
Teedie willed himself to strength, lifting weights at a gymnasium on Twenty-eighth Street and at home. He wrestled, rode horses, hunted, hiked, and climbed. As a national politician in an increasingly visual media age, he was shrewd about how he appeared to the masses. “You never saw a photograph of me playing tennis,” Roosevelt wrote. “I’m careful about that. Photographs on horseback, yes. Tennis, no.” His conception of himself was clear and certain. “Powerful, vigorous men of strong animal development must have some way in which their animal spirits can find vent,” TR recalled, and he was surely such a man.
Once Roosevelt started, he never stopped. “Do you know the two most wonderful things I have seen in your country?” an English visitor said after talking with TR in the White House. “Niagara Falls and the President of the United States, both great wonders of nature!” To his daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth, he was irrepressible. Her father, she said, always wanted to be “the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.” A contemporary of TR’s was struck by the man’s raw energy, and wrote that Roosevelt was “a dazzling, even appalling, spectacle of a human engine driven at full speed—the signals all properly set beforehand (and if they aren’t, never mind!).” Watching him at a White House musicale, the investigative journalist Ida Tarbell thought the president might explode with energy. “I felt his clothes might not contain him,” she recalled, “he was so steamed up, so ready to go, to attack anything, anywhere.”
He relished public life. In remarks at Groton School when he was governor of New York, Roosevelt said, “If a man has courage, goodness, and brains, no limit can be placed on the greatness of the work he may accomplish. He is the man needed in politics today.” One of his eager listeners was his young cousin, Franklin. In perhaps his most quoted speech, “Citizenship in a Republic,” delivered at the Sorbonne in 1910, TR offered a brilliant vision of the virtues of action:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
What was the purpose of action for Roosevelt? Born to great privilege, he adopted the progressive passion for reform that grew out of revulsion at the capitalistic excesses of an industrializing America. Roosevelt targeted those whom he referred to as the “malefactors of great wealth” and argued that the Jeffersonian rights in the Declaration included “the rights of the worker to a living wage, to reasonable hours of labor, to decent working and living conditions, and to freedom of thought and speech and industrial representation—in short…in return for his arduous toil, to a worthy and decent life according to American standards.” To him, “progress results not from the crowding out of the lower classes by the upper, but on the contrary from the steady rise of the lower classes to the level of the upper.”
A rich New York woman once regaled TR with her horror at the progressive campaign against the wealthy and well connected. “What are we going to do, Mr. Roosevelt?”
“What do you mean we?” Roosevelt replied.
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TR’s father, whom the son venerated as “the best man I ever knew,” laid the foundations for Roosevelt’s engagement with reform. “I never knew anyone who got greater joy out of living than did my father,” TR recalled, “or anyone who more whole-heartedly performed every duty”—two of the greatest tests of life in the Roosevelt universe. A bold driver of horses and a tender, attentive parent, the senior Roosevelt was also “interested in every social reform movement, and…did an immense amount of practical charitable work himself.” In TR’s memory, the father loomed large, strong, and generous. “He was a big, powerful man, with a leonine face,” TR recalled, “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.” It’s not difficult to see where the son first encountered what became the style and the substance of his own consequential life.
After graduating from Harvard College in 1880, Roosevelt won a seat in the New York assembly the next year. He spent the decade publishing a number of books, both about his adventures in the American West and on history. He adored Big Sky country; while in the Dakotas in the summer of 1886, he gave a Fourth of July address in Dickinson that weaved together his sundry passions. “Like all Americans,” he said, “I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads, and herds of cattle, too, big factories, steamboats and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefitted by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.” Roosevelt lost a race for mayor of New York that year and became the U.S. Civil Service commissioner in 1889. Six years later, he accepted the post of commissioner of police in New York City.
His emerging convictions about helping the poor and the persecuted were strengthened by the publication, in 1890, of Jacob A. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives. A pioneering urban journalist, R
iis, himself an immigrant from Denmark, had taken powerful photographs of tenement life. “By this time…I was getting our social, industrial, and political needs into pretty fair perspective,” Roosevelt recalled. He was, he said, “well awake to the need of making ours in good faith both an economic and an industrial as well as a political democracy.”
Reading Riis in this state of mind, Roosevelt was profoundly moved by How the Other Half Lives. He thought it “an enlightenment and an inspiration.” Describing garment sweatshops in “the Hebrew quarter” of the Lower East Side, Riis was struck, first, by the sounds of a crowded new America, by “the whir of a thousand sewing machines, worked at high pressure from earliest dawn till mind and muscle give out together. Every member of the family, from the youngest to the oldest, bears a hand, shut in the qualmy rooms, where the meals are cooked and clothing washed and dried besides, the live-long day. It is not unusual to find a dozen persons—men, women, and children—at work in a single small room.”
TR went to see Riis at the offices of the New York Evening Sun downtown “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.” Riis was out; Roosevelt left his card with a note. “I have read your book,” Roosevelt had written, “and I have come to help.” To Riis, the words amounted to a solemn pledge. “It was like a man coming to enlist for a war because he believed in the cause,” Riis said.
Riis, TR recalled, was to become “the man closest to me throughout my two years in the Police Department,” and Roosevelt longed to take concrete steps. “I have always had a horror of words that are not translated into deeds, of speech that does not result in action,” Roosevelt recalled. “I believe in realizable ideals and in realizing them, in preaching what can be practiced and then in practicing it.”