Theodore Roosevelt and His Times | Page 9

not mean surrender of
the principle. He perceived that there were in political life many bad
men who were thoroughly efficient and many good men who would
have liked to accomplish high results but who were thoroughly
inefficient. He realized that if he wished to accomplish anything for the
country his 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 the choice that he made in
those first days, the companionable road of practical idealism rather
than the isolated peak of idealistic ineffectiveness.
A hard test of his political philosophy came in 1884 just after he had
left the Legislature. He was selected as one of the four delegates at
large from New York to the Republican National Convention. There he
advocated vigorously the nomination of Senator George F. Edmunds
for the Presidency. But the more popular candidate with the delegates
was James G. Blaine. Roosevelt did not believe in Blaine, who was a
politician of the professional type and who had a reputation that was
not immaculate. The better element among the delegates fought hard
against Blaine's nomination, with Roosevelt wherever the blows were
shrewdest. But their efforts were of no avail. Too many party hacks had
come to the Convention, determined to nominate Blaine, and they put
the slate through with a whoop.
Then, every Republican in active politics who was anything but a
rubber stamp politician had a difficult problem to face. Should he
support Blaine, in whom he could have no confidence and for whom he
could have no respect, or should he "bolt"? A large group decided to
bolt. They organized the Mugwump party--the epithet was flung at
them with no friendly intent by Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun,
but they made of it an honorable title--under the leadership of George
William Curtis and Carl Schurz. Their announced purpose was to
defeat the Republicans, from whose ranks they had seceded, and in this
attempt they were successful.
Roosevelt, however, made the opposite decision. Indeed, he had made
the decision before he entered the Convention. It was characteristic of
him not to wait until the choice was upon him but to look ahead and
make up his mind just which course he would take if and when a
certain contingency arose. I remember that once in the later days at
Oyster Bay he said to me, "They say I am impulsive. It isn't true. The
fact is that on all the important things that may come up for decision in
my life, I have thought the thing out in advance and know what I will
do. So when the moment comes, I don't have to stop to work it out then.
My decision is already made. I have only to put it into action. It looks
like impulsiveness. It is nothing of the sort."
So, in 1884, when Roosevelt met his first problem in national politics,

he already knew what he would do. He would support Blaine, for he
was a party man. The decision wounded many of his friends. But it was
the natural result of his political philosophy. He believed in political
parties as instruments for securing the translation into action of the
popular will. He perceived that the party system, as distinguished from
the group system of the continental peoples, was the Anglo-Saxon, the
American way of doing things. He wanted to get things done. There
was only one thing that he valued more than achievement and that was
the right. Therefore, until it became a clean issue between right and
wrong, he would stick to the instrument which seemed to him the most
efficient for getting things done. So he stuck to his party, in spite of his
distaste for its candidate, and saw it go down in defeat.
Roosevelt never changed his mind about this important matter. He was
a party man to the end. In 1912 he left his old party on what he
believed to be--and what was--a naked moral issue. But he did not
become an independent. He created a new party.

CHAPTER III.
THE CHAMPION OF CIVIL SERVICE REFORM
The four years after the Cleveland-Blaine campaign were divided into
two parts for Roosevelt by another political experience, which also
resulted in defeat. He was nominated by the Republicans and a group of
independents for Mayor of New York. His two opponents were Abram
S. Hewitt, a business man of standing who had been inveigled, no one
knows how, into lending respectability to the Tammany ticket in a
critical moment, and Henry George, the father of the Single Tax
doctrine, who had been nominated by a conference of some one
hundred and seventy-five labor organizations. Roosevelt