When the Imperial Foreign Minister forwarded this report to the Kaiser he added a note: “The President is a great admirer of Your Majesty and would like to rule the world hand in hand with Your Majesty, regarding himself as something in the nature of an American counterpart of Your Majesty.” Kaiser Wilhelm, who was not without humor in those days, scrawled in the margin: “One must not divide the hide of a bear before he has been shot.”
From this seed sprang suggestions to Czar Nicholas in one direction and to the Mikado’s foreign office in the other, that President Roosevelt would be just the man to mediate between them. A few days after the Battle of the Sea of Japan destroyed Russian seapower it was announced that plenipotentiaries were on their way to Washington.
John Hay, already very ill, who had been in Europe trying to recoup his health at one of the spas that were considered so restorative, wrote T.R. “… the big news was of your success in bringing Russia and Japan into conference. It was a great stroke of that good luck which belongs to those who ‘know how’ and are not afraid.”
John Hay died the first of July. His death dealt a fatal blow to the curious little Washington circle which had grown up round Lafayette Square. T.R. felt it keenly. Hay was replaced in the State Department by Elihu Root, a dignified New York lawyer who was already one of the elders of the Republican Party.
Throughout Hay’s last illness T.R. had been conducting arbitration in his own way. When Washington got too hot for the negotiators, who had gone into a deadlock on the question of indemnities and of Sakhalin Island, T.R. suggested that the seabreezes would refresh them at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. For two months the beautiful old New England seaport was the center of all the power politics of the world. T.R. watched the proceedings from Sagamore Hill, cajoling, advising, remonstrating, until in early September Russia and Japan came to the agreement that ended the war.
Immediately the President put his enhanced prestige to work to try to unravel the tangle of discords between the French, the British and the Germans over spheres of influence in North Africa. If they did nothing more the negotiations at Algeciras postponed the showdown in Europe for a number of years.
His efforts in that direction came to a head in his proposal for limitation of armaments to the second Hague conference sponsored again by Czar Nicholas in 1907. Campbell-Bannerman, a convinced anti-imperialist, was Prime Minister in England. Andrew Carnegie had hopes of inducing Sir Edward Grey, who was already Foreign Minister, to back T.R.’s plan.
T.R. understood the difficulties he was facing. “I do not want this new Liberal government with which in so many matters I have such hearty sympathy, to go to any maudlin extremes at The Hague conference,” he wrote Whitelaw Reid, U. S. ambassador in London. “It is eminently wise and proper that we should take real steps in advance towards the policy of minimizing the chances of war among civilized people … but we must not grow sentimental and commit some Jefferson-Bryan-like piece of idiotic folly such as would be entailed if the free people that have free governments put themselves at a hopeless disadvantage compared with military despotisms and military barbarisms.”
The proposals put forth at The Hague proved no panacea, but they bettered the peacemaking machinery. T.R.’s faith in arbitration, at least between nations of similar background, continued a modest growth. After he’d left the presidency he wrote Admiral Mahan, “I am prepared to say … I think the time has come when the United States and the British Empire can agree to a universal arbitration treaty … and that no question can arise between them that cannot be settled in judicial fashion.”
This first decade of the century was a period of great hopes. Progressiveminded men looked forward to a golden age of peace. As civilization became established throughout the world, democratic institutions as they had developed in America and in Great Britain and her dominions would serve as a model for other nations. People were beginning to speak of the twentieth as the Anglo-Saxon century.
In foreign affairs T.R. did his best to avoid what he called shams, while he sought the peaceful solution in his own peculiar way. When the Japanese seemed to be allowing their victory over the Russians to go to their heads a little, he walked softly with them. At the same time he sent his new white fleet around the world to show off its gunpower and practice its marksmanship on a goodwill tour.
On the domestic stage he became more and more the radical leader. He had early stolen the thunder of the populists and the reformers. The demagogue in him made him adapt his slogans to the demands of his audience. He got the wildest applause when he lambasted “malefactors of great wealth.”
The voter was in revolt. From the Atlantic to the Pacific righteous men were speaking out against political corruption and the highhanded behavior of captains of industry. Reform leaders were convinced that the cure was to make the machinery of selfgovernment more effective.
The first reform had been the adoption of the secret or Australian ballot. In Oregon U’Ren’s People’s Power League passed a corrupt practices act, put through a referendum borrowed from Switzerland, instituted the recall of public officials, popular election of U. S. senators and a system of preferential primaries for the nomination of presidential candidates which it was hoped would take the party conventions out of the hands of the bosses. In Ohio there was an epidemic of reform mayors. In Colorado Judge Ben Lindsey and his friends fought the utilities. In California the Lincoln-Roosevelt League was gradually shaking the state Republican Party loose from the hired men of the railroads.
It was the day of the young firebrands in politics. From the governor’s mansion in Madison Bob La Follette was proclaiming the Wisconsin idea.
Born in a sure enough log house five years after his family moved out from Indiana in covered wagons to take up a tract of farmland some twentyfive miles out from the state capital, La Follette grew up with the country. His people were literate hardworking borderers, farmers and schoolteachers of Huguenot and Scotch-Irish stock. His father made the farm succeed but died while Bob was still an infant. His mother, who had been brought up a Baptist, married a Baptist deacon reputed to be the leading citizen of the little town of Argyle. The deacon was an opinionated old man who didn’t believe in sparing the rod, or the rawhide whip either.
His mother’s remarriage when he was seven left little Bob very much on his own. He worshipped the image of his father. He picked up some skill at carpenter work by using his father’s set of tools, helped out the family by huckstering produce from house to house in Madison. His stepfather mismanaged the farm, kept petitioning the court to sell off strips of La Follette land; his business ventures failed.
Bob had to pay for his own schooling. At an early age he learned to shave and to cut hair and picked up a little money acting as barber at the Argyle hotel. He was a smart wrestler and a clever mimic, the darling of the elocution teachers. Even his stepfather said he had a career ahead of him. He early developed a knack for public speaking.
Already the farmers were in revolt against railroad barons, and the lumber barons who strangled their market in a network of monopolies. Bob La Follette listened eagerly to speeches of Grangers and agrarian radicals. He read Henry George. He cut his teeth on the Shakespearean style.
When he was seventeen his stepfather died and left him the head of the family. He was a wiry handsome youth with lustrous dark eyes full of ambition to forge ahead. He couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be an actor or a lawyer.