After the publication of my article in the September Review of Reviews
on the vice-presidential candidates, I received the following very
manly, and very courteous, letter from the Honorable Thomas Watson, then
the candidate with Mr. Bryan on the Populist ticket for Vice-President.
I publish it with his permission:
Hon. Theodore Roosevelt:
It pains me to be misunderstood by those whose good opinion I
respect, and upon reading your trenchant article in the September number
of the Review of Reviews the impulse was strong to write to you.
When you take your stand for honester government and for juster
laws in New York, as you have so courageously done, your motives must be
the same as mine - for you do not need the money your office gives you.
I can understand, instinctively, what you feel - what your motives are.
You merely obey a law of your nature which puts you into mortal combat
with what you think is wrong. You fight because your own sense of
self-respect and self-loyalty compels you to fight. Is not this so?
If in Georgia and throughout the South we have conditions as
intolerable as those that surround you in New York, can you not realize
why I make war upon them?
Tammany itself has grown great because mistaken leaders of the
Southern Democracy catered to its Kellys and Crokers and feared to defy
them.
The first "roast " I ever got from the Democratic press of this
State followed a speech I had made denouncing Tammany, and denouncing
the craven leaders who obeyed Tammany.
It is astonishing how one honest man may honestly misjudge
another.
My creed does not lead me to dislike the men who run a bank, a factory,
a railroad or a foundry. I do not hate a man for owning a bond, and
having a bank account, or having cash loaned at interest.
Upon the other hand, I think each should make all the profit in
business he fairly can; but I do believe that the banks should not
exercise the sovereign power of issuing money, and I do believe that all
special privileges granted, and all exemptions from taxation, work
infinite harm. I do believe that the wealth of the Republic is
practically free from federal taxation, and that the burdens of
government fall upon the shoulders of those least able to bear them.
If you could spend an evening with me among my books and amid my
family, I feel quite sure you would not again class me with those who
make war upon the "decencies and elegancies of civilized life." And if
you could attend one of my great political meetings in Georgia, and see
the good men, and good women who believe in Populism, you would not
continue to class them with those who vote for candidates upon the "no
undershirt" platform.
In other words, if you understood me and mine your judgment of us
would be different.
The "cracker" of the South is simply the man who did not buy
slaves to do his work. He did it all himself - like a man. Some of our
best generals in war, and magistrates in peace, have come from the
"cracker" class. As a matter of fact, however, my own people, from my
father back to Revolutionary times, were slave owners and land owners.
In the first meeting held in Georgia to express sympathy with the Boston
patriots my great-great-grandfather bore a prominent part, and in the
first State legislature ever convened in Georgia one of my ancestors was
the representative of his county.
My grandfather was wealthy, and so was my father. My boyhood was
spent in the idleness of a rich man's son. It was not till I was in my
teens that misfortune overtook us, sent us homeless into the world, and
deprived me of the thorough collegiate training my father intended for
me.
At sixteen years of age I thus bad to commence life moneyless, and
the weary years I spent among the poor, the kindness I received in their
homes, and the acquaintance I made with the hardship of their lives,
gave me that profound sympathy for them which I yet retain - though I am
no longer poor myself.
Pardon the liberty I take in intruding this letter upon you. I
have followed your work in New York with admiring sympathy, and have
frequently written of it in my paper. While hundreds of miles separate
us, and our tasks and methods have been widely different, I must still
believe that we have much in common, and that the ruling force which
actuates us both is to challenge wrong and to fight the battles of good
government.
Very respectfully yours,
(Signed) Thos. E. Watson.
Thomson, Ga., August 30,1896.
I intended to draw a very sharp line between Mr. Watson and many
of those associated with him in the same movement; and certain of the
sentences which he quotes as if they were meant to apply to him were, on
the contrary, meant to apply generally to the agitators who proclaimed
both him and Mr. Bryan as their champions, and especially to many of the
men who were running on the Populist ticket in different States. To Mr.
Watson's own sincerity and courage I thought I had paid full tribute,
and if I failed in any way I wish to make good that failure. I was in
Washington when Mr. Watson was in Congress, and I know how highly he was
esteemed personally by his colleagues, even by those differing very
widely from him in matters of principle. The staunchest friends of order
and decent government fully and cordially recognized Mr. Watson's
honesty and good faith - men, for instance, like Senator Lodge of
Massachusetts, and Representative Bellamy Storer of Ohio. Moreover, I
sympathize as little as Mr. Watson with denunciation of the "cracker,"
and I may mention that one of my forefathers was the first Revolutionary
Governor of Georgia at the time that Mr. Watson's ancestor sat in the
first Revolutionary legislature of the State. Mr. Watson himself
embodies not a few of the very attributes the lack of which we feel so
keenly in many of our public men. He is brave, he is earnest, he is
honest, he is disinterested. For many of the wrongs which he wishes to
remedy, I, too, believe that a remedy can be found, and for this purpose
I would gladly strike hands with him. All this makes it a matter of the
keenest regret that he should advocate certain remedies that we deem
even worse than the wrongs complained of, and should strive in darkling
ways to correct other wrongs, or rather inequalities and sufferings,
which exist, not because of the shortcomings of society, but because of
the existence of human nature itself.
There are plenty of ugly things about wealth and its possessors in
the present age, and I suppose there have been in all ages. There are
many rich people who so utterly lack patriotism, or show such sordid and
selfish traits of character, or lead such mean and vacuous lives, that
all right-minded men must look upon them with angry contempt; but, on
the whole, the thrifty are apt to be better citizens than the
thriftless; and the worst capitalist cannot harm laboring men as they
are harmed by demagogues.
As the people of a State grow more and more intelligent the State
itself may be able to play a larger and larger part in the life of the
community, while at the same time individual effort may be given freer
and less restricted movement along certain lines; but it is utterly
unsafe to give the State more than the minimum of power just so long as
it contains masses of men who can be moved by the pleas and
denunciations of the average Socialist leader of to-day. There may be
better schemes of taxation than these at present employed; it may be
wise to devise inheritance taxes, and to impose regulations on the kinds
of business which can be carried on only under the especial protection
of the State; and where there is a real abuse by wealth it needs to be,
and in this country generally has been, promptly done away with; but the
first lesson to teach the poor man is that, as a whole, the wealth in
the community is distinctly beneficial to him; that he is better off in
the long run because other men are well off; and that the surest way to
destroy what measure of prosperity he may have is to paralyze industry
and the well-being of those men who have achieved success.
I am not an empiricist; I would no more deny that sometimes human
affairs can be much bettered by legislation than I would affirm that
they can always be so bettered. I would no more make a fetish of
unrestricted individualism than I would admit the power of the State
offhand and radically to reconstruct society. It may become necessary to
interfere even more than we have done with the right of private
contract, and to shackle cunning as we have shackled force. All I insist
upon is that we must be sure of our ground before trying to get any
legislation at all, and that we must not expect too much from this
legislation, nor refuse to better ourselves a little because we cannot
accomplish everything at a jump. Above all, it is criminal to excite
anger and discontent without proposing a remedy, or only proposing a
false remedy. The worst foe of the poor man is the labor leader, whether
philanthropist or politician, who tries to teach him that he is a victim
of conspiracy and injustice, when in reality he is merely working out
his fate with blood and sweat as the immense majority of men who are
worthy of the name always have done and always will have to do.
The difference between what can and what cannot be done by law is
well exemplified by our experience with the negro problem, an experience
of which Mr. Watson must have ample practical knowledge. The negroes
were formerly held in slavery. This was a wrong which legislation could
remedy, and which could not be remedied except by legislation.
Accordingly they were set free by law. This having been done, many of
their friends believed that in some way, by additional legislation, we
could at once put them on an intellectual, social, and business equality
with the whites. The effort has failed completely. In large sections of
the country the negroes are not treated as they should be treated, and
politically in particular the frauds upon them have been so gross aud
shameful as to awaken not merely indignation but bitter wrath; yet the
best friends of the negro admit that his hope lies, not in legislation,
but in the constant working of those often unseen forces of the national
life which are greater than all legislation.
It is but rarely that great advances in general social well-being
can be made by the adoption of some far-reaching scheme, legislative or
otherwise; normally they come only by gradual growth, and by incessant
effort to do first one thing, then another, and then another. Quack
remedies of the universal cure-all type are generally as noxious to the
body politic as to the body corporal.
Often the head-in-the-air social reformers, because people of sane
and wholesome minds will not favor their wild schemes, themselves
decline to favor schemes for practical reform. For the last two years
there has been an honest effort in New York to give the city good
government, and to work intelligently for better social conditions,
especially in the poorest quarters. We have cleaned the streets; we have
broken the power of the ward boss and the saloon-keeper to work
injustice; we have destroyed the most hideous of the tenement houses in
which poor people are huddled like swine in a sty; we have made parks
and playgrounds for the children in the crowded quarters; in every
possible way we have striven to make life easier and healthier and to
give man and woman a chance to do their best work; while at the same
time we have warred steadily against the pauper-producing, maudlin
philanthropy of the free soup-kitchen and tramp lodging-house kind. In
all this we have had practically no help from either the parlor
socialists or the scarcely more noxious beer-room socialists, who are
always howling about the selfishness of the rich and their unwillingness
to do anything for those who are less well off.
There are certain labor unions, certain bodies of organized labor,
- notably those admirable organizations which include the railway
conductors, the locomotive engineers and the firemen, - which to my mind
embody almost the best hope that there is for healthy national growth in
the future; but bitter experience has taught men who work for reform in
New York that the average labor leader, the average demagogue who shouts
for a depreciated currency, or for the overthrow of the rich, will not
do anything to help those who honestly strive to make better our civic
conditions. There are immense numbers of workingmen to whom we can
appeal with perfect confidence; but too often we find that a large
proportion of the men who style themselves leaders of organized labor
are influenced only by sullen, short-sighted hatred of what they do not
understand, and are deaf to all appeals, whether to their national or to
their civic patriotism.
What I most grudge in all this is the fact that sincere and
zealous men of high character and honest purpose, men like Mr. Watson,
men and women such as those he describes as attending his Populist
meetings, or such as are to be found in all strata of our society, from
the employer to the hardest-worked day laborer, go astray in their
methods, and are thereby prevented from doing the full work for good
they ought to. When a man goes on the wrong road himsel he can do very
little to guide others aright, even though these others are also on the
wrong road. There are many wrongs to be righted; there are many measures
of relief to be pushed; and it is a pity that when we are fighting what
is bad and championing what is good, the men who ought to be our most
effective allies should deprive themselves of usefulness by the
wrong-headedness of their position. Rich men and poor men both do wrong
on occasions, and whenever a specific instance of this can be pointed
out all citizens alike should join in punishing the wrong-doer. Honesty
and right-mindedness should be the tests; not wealth or poverty.
In our municipal administration here in New York we have acted
with an equal band toward wrong-doers of high and low degree. The Board
of Health condemns the tenement-house property of the rich landowner,
whether this landowner be priest or layman, banker or railroad
president, lawyer or manager of a real estate business; and it pays no
heed to the intercession of any politician, whether this politician be
Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile. At the same time the Police
Department promptly suppresses, not only the criminal, but the rioter.
In other words, we do strict justice. We feel we are defrauded of help
to which we are entitled when men who ought to assist in any work to
better the condition of the people decline to aid us because their
brains are turned by dreams only worthy of a European revolutionist.
Many workingmen look with distrust upon laws which really would
help them; laws for the intelligent restriction of immigration, for
instance. I have no sympathy with mere dislike of immigrants; there are
classes and even nationalities of them which stand at least on an
equality with the citizens of native birth, as the last election showed.
But in the interest of our workingmen we must in the end keep out
laborers who are ignorant, vicious, and with low standards of life and
comfort, just as we have shut out the Chinese.
Often labor leaders and the like denounce the present conditions
of society, and especially of our political life, for shortcomings which
they themselves have been instrumental in causing. In our cities the
misgovernment is due, not to the misdeeds of the rich, but to the low
standard of honesty and morality among citizens generally; and nothing
helps the corrupt politician more than substituting either wealth or
poverty for honesty as the standard by which to try a candidate. A few
months ago a socialistic reformer in New York was denouncing the
corruption caused by rich men because a certain judge was suspected of
giving information in advance as to a decision in a case involving the
interests of a great corporation. Now this judge bad been elected some
years previously, mainly because he was supposed to be a representative
of the "poor man"; and the socialistic reformer himself, a year ago, was
opposing the election of Mr. Beaman as judge because he was one of the
firm of Evarts & Choate, who were friends of various millionaires and
were counsel for various corporations. But if Mr. Beaman had been
elected judge no human being, rich or poor, would have dared so much as
hint at his doing anything improper.
Something can be done by good laws; more can be done by honest
administration of the laws; but most of all can be done by frowning
resolutely upon the preachers of vague discontent; and by upholding the
true doctrine of self-reliance, self-help, and self-mastery. This
doctrine sets forth many things. Among them is the fact that though a
man can occasionally be helped when he stumbles, yet that it is useless
to try to carry him when he will not or cannot walk; and worse than
useless to try to bring down the work and reward of the thrifty and
intelligent to the level of the capacity of the weak, the shiftless, and
the idle. It further shows that the maudlin philanthropist and the
maudlin sentimentalist are almost as noxious as the demagogue, and that
it is even more necessary to temper mercy with justice than justice with
mercy.
The worst lesson that can be taught a man is to rely upon others
and to whine over his sufferings.
If an American is to amount to anything he must rely upon himself,
and not upon the State; he must take pride in his own work, instead of
sitting idle to envy the luck of others; he must face life with resolute
courage, win victory if he can and accept defeat if he must, without
seeking to place on his fellow-men a responsibility which is not theirs.
Let me say, in conclusion, that I do not write in the least from
the standpoint of those whose association is purely with what are called
the wealth classes. The men with whom I have worked and associated most
closely during the last couple of years here in New York, with whom I
have shared what is at least an earnest desire to better social and
civic conditions (neither blinking what is evil nor being misled by the
apostles of a false remedy), and with whose opinions as to what is right
and practical my own in the main agree, are not capitalists, save as all
men who by toil earn, and with prudence save, money are capitalists.
They include reporters on the daily papers, editors of magazines as well
as of newspapers, principals in the public schools, young lawyers, young
architects, young doctors, young men of business, who are struggling to
rise in their profession by dint of faithful work, but who give some of
their time to doing what they can for the city, and a number of priests
and clergymen; but as it happens the list does not include any man of
great wealth, or any of those men whose names are in the public mind
identified with great business corporations. Most of them have at one
time or another in their lives faced poverty and know what it is; none
of them are more than well-to-do. They include Catholics and
Protestants, Jews, and men who would be regarded as heterodox by
professors of most recognized creeds; some of them were born on this
side, others are of foreign birth; but they are all Americans, heart and
soul, who fight out for themselves the battles of their own lives,
meeting sometimes defeat and sometimes victory. They neither forget that
man does owe a duty to his fellows, and should strive to do what he can
to increase the well-being of the community; nor yet do they forget that
in the long run the only way to help people is to make them help
themselves. They are prepared to try any properly guarded legislative
remedy for ills which they believe can be remedied; but they perceive
clearly that it is both foolish and wicked to teach the average man who
is not well off that some wrong or injustice has been done him, and that
he should hope for redress elsewhere than in his own industry honest and
intelligence.
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