TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0889> <link 93XV0004> <title> Before TIME: Theodore Roosevelt:The Turning Point </title> <history>TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1900s Highlights</history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> HEROES The Turning Point March 3, 1958 </hdr> <body> Down the wilderness trail from the Tahawus Club to North Creek in New York State's Adirondack Mountains a rattletrap buckboard jolted through the night, skidding off ruts, swaying past boulders and tree stumps, creaking and clattering through the silence of the forest. The night was black and misty. The horses were barely under control. The passenger sat tensed and hunched, eyes screwed up behind steel-rimmed spectacles, mouth clenched tight like a steel clamp beneath a prairie-dry mustache, his thoughts projected far out across a new century big with change. "Too fast?" the driver shouted. Theodore Roosevelt, Vice President of the U.S. and due before dawn to become President of the U.S., rattled back like a Gatling gun: "Go ahead...Go on...Go on." Around the man in the buckboard in the dark night hung the gathering storm of change. It was Sept. 14, 1901. Eight days before, in Buffalo, the old century's President William McKinley had been shot by an anarchist at an international festival of peace and commerce, and now McKinley was dying, the third U.S. President to be assassinated in 36 years. Theodore Roosevelt had made a quiet point in a note to a friend: "It was in the most naked way an assault not on power, not on wealth, but simply and solely upon free government, government by the common people, because it was government and because it yet stood for order as well as for liberty." Now the needs of the hour summoned Theodore Roosevelt back from a mountain-climbing trip with the urgency of the wire from McKinley's bedside: COME AT ONCE. That day at Buffalo, Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office as 26th President of the U.S. Faith & Doubt. Everywhere the new President was beset by signs of liberty sliding out of control. The endless sweep of the frontier had recently been shot off: the trend was on to the tenement. Capital, levering itself out of the chaos of cutthroat competition, was forming monoliths of monopoly. Labor was adolescent, agitated, angry. Government at best was minimal and at worst could be bought. The radical vote was rising. Said Theodore Roosevelt: "There had been in our country a riot of individualistic materialism..." But the darker portent, as the new President saw it, was that the nation was lurching out of certainty into uncertainty, from faith to doubt, from classlessness to class, from dedication to don't care, in a downgrading of the land of promise into a factory in which the gates of opportunity might snap shut. Theodore Roosevelt, peering out into the new century with the eye of the new century, was determined with soul of fire that the gates of opportunity would not snap shut. "I preach the gospel of hope...I ask that we see to it in our country that the line of division be drawn, never between section and section, never between creed and creed, never, thrice never, between class and class; but that the line be drawn on the line of conduct." And Theodore Roosevelt, aware that the ineluctable reduction of distance was thrusting the U.S. and the outside world together, was also aware that the U.S. had little time in which to revive, redefine and reorganize its humanity-spanning dream--and get its defenses in order--before foreign autocracy closed in. Said T.R.: "Our nation is that one among all the nations of the earth which holds in its hands the fate of the coming years. We enjoy exceptional advantages, and are menaced by exceptional dangers; and all signs indicate that we shall either fail greatly or succeed greatly... "Here is the task, and I have got to do it." Power & Hope. That Republican Roosevelt did not fail greatly and did succeed greatly at century's turning point is the great but little recognized fact behind the U.S.'s social health and world strength today. In every sense T.R., whose 100th birthday anniversary the U.S. celebrates this year, was a man for today. "My ambition," he once wrote to a friend, "is that, in however small a way, the work I do shall be along the Washington and Lincoln lines." Said T.R.: "The only true conservative is the man who resolutely sets his face toward the future." Theodore Roosevelt set the U.S. on course for the new century by deploying the steel of power to safeguard the warm glow of hope. At home he introduced a new kind of peacetime power--the power of the U.S. Government--to slap down robber barons and labor agitators in order to conserve the freedoms of U.S. business and U.S. labor as U.S. institutions. "A democracy can be such in fact," he wrote, "only if...we are all of about the same size." Abroad he introduced another new kind of power--deterrence, as symbolized by the U.S. armed forces--to promote the U.S. self-interest in world peace and world order. Said T.R., one of the most successful peacekeepers of U.S. history: "I have always been fond of the West African proverb: `Speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far.'" At home and abroad T.R. tempered his steel in his confidence that national character and national leadership would beget responsible national conduct. "Americanism," wrote Theodore Roosevelt, "means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity and hardihood--the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-time, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life." The Vital Quality. T.R. was the youngest President the U.S. had ever had--in office at 42, out of office at 50. He was also--despite asthma, puny arm muscles, nearsightedness and near blindness, near deafness, abscesses on thighs and legs, tropical fevers--the most vigorous President the U.S. ever had. "I do not like to see young Christians with shoulders that slope like a champagne bottle," said T.R., and he turned the White House years into a bully spectacle of romps and pillowfights with his sons, presidential judo battles with imported Japanese wrestlers, boxing matches with his aides, mass scrambles across Washington's Rock Creek with Cabinet members, Army officers and foreign diplomats--"being the right sort, to a man." T.R. was also a wide-ranging intellectual. He read Ronsard's verses while exploring the River of Doubt in Brazil; he wrote a biography of Missouri's Senator Thomas Hart Benton while running a couple of cattle ranches in North Dakota Territory; he identified 64 different bird calls in England's New Forest while strolling with Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey before World War I. At all times T.R. reserved his deepest contempt and his deepest rage for "the mollycoddle vote," "miserable little snobs" and "solemn reformers of the tomfool variety." They yelled back "Showoff!", "Blowhard!", "Jingo!", "Cad!" T.R. was constantly embroiled in controversy and debate, and he reveled in it. But the quality of T.R. that added the vital plus to his program was that he had learned, during long and full years of growth and experience, joy and hardship, that compromise is no substitute for decisiveness, that inspiration is made out of specific minute-by-minute leadership. He had also absorbed out of a long career of professional politics, precincts and patronage a healthy notion about how the presidency ought to be run. "I believe in a strong executive," said T.R. "I believe in power; but I believe that responsibility should go with power." Above all else, it was T.R.'s presidential presence--the glint behind spectacles, the mustache, the teeth, the granite jaw, the Gatling-gun voice--that rallied his dispirited countrymen behind his challenging precepts of freedom through order and venture and pride. Dear Rebs & Asthma. He was born at 28 East 20th Street in Manhattan on Oct. 27, 1858, a calm evening that followed days of strong northeast wind and record tides. His father, Theodore Roosevelt, a merchant-banker, of a Dutch family famous for seven generations in New York philanthropy, was a "Lincoln Republican." His mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, was a Georgia-bred secessionist. One of T.R.'s first memories was about how he cheered for the Union and about how he would cheer even louder to reply to his mother's discipline. One night at family prayers, Theodore Roosevelt fervently appealed to the Lord of Hosts to "grind the Southern troops into powder!" The Roosevelts came through the Civil War to raise Theodore ("Teedie"), a brother and two sisters amid days in which, sister Corinne recalled, "the hours flew on golden wings." But Theodore, as he grew older, was nonetheless a boy sorely beset. "I was a sickly, delicate boy," he wrote, "and suffered much from asthma. One of my memories is...of sitting up in bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me." His arm muscles were so weak that he could not stand up to other youngsters. One day his father encouraged him: "You have the mind but not the body...You must make your body. It is hard drudgery, but I know you will do it." Theodore organized a gymnasium with horizontal bars and a punching bag on the second floor of the town house and set about to do just that. Intensely he moved through years of private tutoring in the U.S. and Europe, began to develop a gleaming treasure house of ideals. He fastened onto the magazine Our Young Folks, with stories such as Cast Away in the Cold and Grandfather's Struggle for a Homestead--"good healthy stories...teaching manliness, decency and good conduct." He moved on to the heritage of the heroes of Valley Forge. Said Theodore: "I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world, and I had a great desire to be like them." Red Whiskers & Fair Play. In the fall of 1876 T.R. went to Harvard. Rarely had a young man and an old university seemed less compatible. T.R., reddish-whiskered and rampaging, was contemptuous, for example, of Harvard's "fair play" political consciousness. Wrote he: "I have not the slightest sympathy with debating contests in which each side is arbitrarily assigned a given proposition and told to maintain it...There is no effort to instill sincerity and intensity of conviction." As he moved out of Harvard, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, becoming a college boxer, courting and later marrying a Chestnut Hill belle named Alice Lee, he suffered all the torments of power hunger and high ideals that had no place to go. One night at an Alpha Delta Phi committee meeting, T.R. told his fraternity brothers: "I am going to try to help the cause of better government...But I don't know exactly how." The Years of Growth. Through the next 17 years T.R. groped toward power along what one friend called "an eccentric orbit." Shrugging off the wealthy, well-born friends who warned him that politics was "low," he joined Manhattan's 21st District Republican Club, got elected and re-elected to three rambunctious years in the lower house of the New York State legislature. In the winter of 1884 T.R.'s wife Alice died in childbirth, and he headed west to the solace of the silent spaces of the North Dakota Territory. "Black care," he said, "rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough." There T.R. ran the Maltese Cross and Elkhorn cattle ranches, rode the range beneath springtime stars and winter snowdust, got sworn in as a deputy sheriff by Sheriff "Hell-Roaring Bill" Jones, and generally gathered in the feel of what he called "the masterful, overbearing spirit of the West...the possession of which is certainly a most healthy sign of the virile strength of a young community." Revitalized, T.R. headed back to the power centers of the East. He was nominated as G.O.P. reform candidate for mayor of New York City--and lost. He went to London and married a childhood playmate named Edith Kermit Carow. He settled down in Washington for six years (1889-95) as Civil Service Commissioner (under Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland), then put in two years as police board chairman of New York City (1895-97), booting out corrupt cops, promoting the worthy and rewarding the brave, making headlines by prowling the slums with his reform-minded friend Jacob (How the Other Half Lives) Riis. Wrote T.R.: "I am dealing with the most important, and yet most elementary, problem of our municipal life...There is nothing of the purple in it; it is grimy." Fire When Ready! In April 1897 T.R. was appointed by G.O.P. President William McKinley as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Spanish reinforcements were pouring across the Atlantic to wipe out freedom fighters in Cuba. More ominously, Germany and Japan were building fleets to challenge Pax Britannica and tilt the world balance of power. T.R. argued for war with Spain to kick the Spaniards out of Cuba and to get the U.S. into world posture, a course also advocated by T.R.'s mentor and friend, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, as the only way to keep the world at peace. On Feb. 15, 1898, when the U.S. battleship Maine blew up and sank at Havana with the loss of 266 U.S. lives, the U.S. Navy was ready. Then T.R. added the final touch himself with a fantastic display of leadership and gall. One day slow-boating Navy Secretary John D. Long took the afternoon off, T.R., leaning on his powers of Acting Secretary, without reference to Long or anybody else, began sending out orders to concentrate U.S. ships of war, ammunitions and supplies. He even cabled a specific in-the-event-of-war operation order to Commodore George Dewey, commanding the Asiatic squadron, ordering him to prepare for action and to make sure that the Spanish Asiatic squadron did not leave the Asiatic coast. Next day Long came back to grumble only that T.R. had "gone at things like a bull in a china shop." When war came, it was T.R.'s early-warning order that made possible Dewey's great victory at Manila Bay. T.R. said in a letter to a friend: "I have been a very useful man in this." Charge! Charge! On April 30, 1898, five days after the declaration of war, T.R. telegraphed Manhattan's Brooks Brothers for "a blue cravenette lieutenant colonel's uniform without yellow on the collar and with leggings." He ordered his optician to make up a dozen pairs of steel-rimmed spectacles. He ordered "a couple of good, stout, quiet horses for my own use--not gun-shy." That done, T.R. helped raise, train, lead and inspire the blue-shirted, slouch-hatted Rough Riders--the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry--a wonderful T.R. concoction of sinewy ranch hands and fuzz-cheeked Ivy Leaguers, jaunty Southwesterners and ex-badmen, topped off by a T.R. type named "Dead Shot" Joe Simpson, who could "put a rifle bullet through a jack rabbit's eye at 1,000 yards while riding a wild horse." T.R. went into Cuba as second-in-command of the Rough Riders, was in the landing at Daiquiri, the advance to Siboney, the heavy skirmish at Las Guasimas. When Rough Riders' Colonel Leonard Wood was promoted to brigadier general, T.R. took over the command. Then, decked out in a sombrero and blue polka-dot handkerchief, on horseback at the head of his men, T.R. caught the nation's imagination by leading the Rough Riders on his slamming, successful charge through waist-high undergrowth against the Spanish defenses outside Santiago. "That Damned Cowboy." Only six weeks after landing with his Rough Riders at Montauk Point, N.Y. on the trip home from war, T.R. got the G.O.P. nomination for New York state governor; six weeks after that he was elected. For two years he was one of the best governors New York ever had--"better," T.R. himself told a relative, "than either Cleveland or Tilden." Longtime Working Politician Roosevelt would cooperate with Boss Tom Platt's state G.O.P. machine, then fight it, then cooperate again, as he put it, in anything that did not infringe "the Eighth Commandment and general decency." T.R.'s maxim: "It may be the highest duty of the patriotic public servant to work with the big boss on certain points." Such an operator Boss Platt wanted out of New York State, and Boss Platt thought he knew just the place--the Vice Presidency of the U.S. In the summer of 1900 the G.O.P. National Convention nominated T.R. for Vice-President. "Don't any of you realize," said the G.O.P. Old Guard national chairman, Ohio's Mark Hanna, in private, "that there's only one life between this madman and the White House?" In the fateful September of 1901, when McKinley was shot by Anarchist Leon Czolgosz at Buffalo, word swept the nation that Boss Hanna had devised a new phrase: "That damned cowboy is in the White House." The First Breakthrough. At 42, Theodore Roosevelt stood at the pinnacle of the power he had long sought. He understood power: he understood the power of the nation and its parts; he understood the power that the nation had--or ought to have--in the world. But although T.R. controlled the White House, it was National Committee Chairman Hanna who controlled the G.O.P. organization. Mark Hanna who could water down or wreck T.R.'s programs in Congress. Mark Hanna who could ruin T.R.'s influence by blocking his nomination in 1904. So T.R., ruthlessly shrugging off Hanna's loyal promises to cooperate, condemned Hanna to political death. Method of death: rapidfire dismissal of pro-Hanna Republicans from patronage jobs in Hanna's Midwestern strongholds, installation of pro-T.R. types--"the right sort." His power base secure, T.R. kicked off a momentous new- century campaign to save his countrymen from "government by plutocracy or by mob." His first milestone breakthroughs: 1) first successful antitrust suit brought by an American President to dissolve a corporate monopoly--the Northern Securities Co.--to safeguard right of free competition; 2) first mediation between management and labor by an American President--in the great anthracite coal strike--to safeguard the public welfare, including the rights of labor. But T.R., conservative, added: "I wish the labor people absolutely to understand that I set my face like flint against violence and lawlessness of any kind on their part, just as much as against arrogant greed by the rich." Dig the Canal. "More and more," T.R. adjured Congress in 1902, "the increasing interdependence and complexity of international relations render it incumbent on all civilized and orderly powers to insist on the proper policing of the world." T.R. began to keep the peace with a big stick. With a threat of intervention by the Fleet, he effectively warned rampaging German Kaiser Wilhelm II away from Venezuela. He landed U.S. forces in Santo Domingo to forestall European attempts to "collect debts," put U.S. agents backed up by marines to work at the customs houses, collected enough revenue to pay the debts, then withdrew. Roosevelt astonished the world by honoring the U.S.'s Spanish-American War pledge to Cuba not to trespass upon but rather to support Cuban independence. T.R. moved beyond policing to make one of the greatest decisions of his life. He sent the U.S.S. Nashville into the port of Colon in Panama to give implicit support to a Panamanian rebellion against Panama's colonial overlord, Colombia. His eventual intention, of course, was to seize or to negotiate possession of a canal zone in Panama, dig the canal, and that way safeguard the defenses of both coasts of the U.S. Said T.R.: "It was imperative...of vital necessity." Damn the Malefactors! In March 1905 T.R. was inaugurated President in his own right. Around him his ever-present ex- Rough Riders yip-yipped while bands blared the old Rough Rider song, There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight. But day by day the U.S.'s pell-mell progress and social stresses kept getting ahead of T.R.'s promises of "A Square Deal All Around." T.R. began to press harder against what he called "malefactors of great wealth." He hurled forth antitrust suit after antitrust suit after antitrust suit that led to indictments, including a heavy blow at John D. Rockefeller Sr.'s mammoth Standard Oil Co. "Darkest Abyssinia never saw anything like the course of treatment we received," cried Standard Oil's John D. Archbold. The President maneuvered through Congressional bear traps to get the U.S.'s first Pure Food bill. He got the U.S.'s first law providing for federal inspection of slaughterhouses. After a power play in Congress with the G.O.P. right wing after a masterful display of coalition-juggling and issue-juggling, T.R. also got for the Interstate Commerce Commission the right to fix railroad rates. T.R. was thus the great working pioneer of the 20th century's whole new trend toward federal commissions to watch over key sectors of public welfare. Balance of Power. The miracle of T.R.'s second-term domestic struggles is that he won them while actually concentrating on foreign policy, while putting in the most definitive display of world peace-keeping by power politics that the U.S. had ever known. In T.R.'s second term the world stage was vaster than the Caribbean. World powers were in the mood for adventures. Secret treaties were being signed. The adolescent machine gun would cause untold loss of life. So T.R. began to move his ships and his diplomats in consort to try to head off history's first world war. Said T.R.: "I never take a step in foreign policy unless I am assured that I shall be able eventually to carry out my will by force." Across the Atlantic Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm was already brewing a world war that then seemed destined to start over Morocco. At the Algeciras Conference in 1906, T.R.--far from claiming neutrality--unexpectedly threw U.S. support against Germany, and the Kaiser backed down. Across the Pacific, the Russo-Japanese War exploded in 1904. T.R. later wrote an old friend that he had notified France and Germany "in the most polite and discreet fashion" not to combine against Japan, or the U.S. would "proceed to whatever length necessary." Later Japan began to thrash Russia. T.R., determined to balance the power of Japan, moved in secrecy and with great skill through intermediaries in Europe to signify a U.S. desire to mediate, and to douse the world with powder keg altogether. In August 1905, aboard the U.S.S. Mayflower on Long Island Sound off the Roosevelt summer place, Sagamore Hill, T.R. met the plenipotentiaries of Russia and Japan. These talks led to 1) the Treaty of Portsmouth, N.H.; 2) restoration of balance of power; 3) the Nobel Peace Prize for T.R. T.R.'s thought about the Treaty of Portsmouth: "Sometime soon I shall have to spank some little international brigand, and then all the well- meaning idiots will turn and shriek that this is inconsistent with what I did at the peace conference, whereas in reality it will be exactly in line with it." Balance of Peace. "I am more concerned over the Japanese situation than almost any other," T.R. said after the Treaty of Portsmouth. "Thank heaven we have the Navy in good shape." Into the White House trickled a stream of intelligence reports that Japan was preparing to attack the Philippines, or Panama, or both, indicating, too, that many European powers were not averse to balancing off new Japan against the emergent might of T.R.'s new U.S. What T.R. now did was the greatest single act of his presidency. He sent the U.S. fleet around the world. T.R. did it to show Japan, and Europe as well, that the U.S. was not only a world power but a great world power, able to defend its interests and deter war anywhere. He did it to show the people of the U.S. that from then on out the U.S. was part of the world. Around a narrowing world fraught with fear of a world war the 16 U.S. battleships steamed, all painted gleaming white, making good-will stopovers at such places as Japan and Australia, keeping up with target practice at sea, losing not a vessel from mechanical failure, missing not one planned landfall. The Great White Fleet was the unmistakable American word to the world that the American Dream had come to stay. Such was the meaning of the Great White Fleet that T.R.'s last significant act as President of the U.S. was to go down to Virginia to cheer the ships as they steamed homeward into Hampton Roads in a seven-mile line, belching black smoke, crashing out the presidential salute. The Yankee Prince. When T.R. left the White House he was 50 years old, and the nation was on course for the century. Far behind was the dark day of Sept. 14, 1901, when, according to the New York World, "the U.S. was never closer to a social revolution than at the time Roosevelt became President." Around T.R. in his last year in the White House, their productivity racing ahead of population, surged 88 million Americans, men in derbies in the new Model Ts, women in the new sheath gowns and Merry Widow hats, teenagers shouting Yip-I-Addy-I-Ay and Take Me Out to the Ball Game and taking in George M. Cohan in The Yankee Prince. In the midst of the pageant, Yankee Prince Teddy presided over all, indestructible, a mixture, according to one visiting British statesman, "of St. Vitus and St. Paul...a great wonder of nature." T.R.'s own overall judgment of his Administration: 1) "The most powerful men in this country were held to accountability before the law"; 2) "It was clear to all...that the labor problem in the country had entered upon a new phase"; 3) "We were at absolute peace, and there was no nation from whom we had anything to fear." The loyal opposition's point of view, put by Historian Henry Adams, personal friend and gadfly: "Theodore is never sober, only he is drunk with himself and not with rum." But when T.R. stepped out of the White House by choice--he could have been re-elected--Adams paused. Said Adams: "I shall miss you very much." In a note of political advice to his chosen successor, War Secretary William Howard Taft, T.R. added a last touch of the political virtuosity that had made him his enemies but had got his results. Said T.R.: "About your playing golf...I have received literally hundreds of letters from the West protesting about it...It is just like my tennis. I never let any friends advertise my tennis and never let a photograph of me in tennis costume appear." And his last word to the next President of the U.S. was: "Under no circumstances divide the battleship fleet." Steps Going Down. From that point his life was of steps going down, of huge energy pounding at fate for an outlet, of rage and idealism that was frustrated by the lack of the mechanisms of power. T.R. was angered and then maddened by what he deemed to be Taft's surrender of the Republican Party to the Old Guard. He challenged Taft at the 1912 Republican convention, and because it was Taft who now controlled the G.O.P. organization, T.R. took a humiliating defeat. T.R. then launched his epic Bull Moose campaign--"We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord"--and thereby 1) split the G.O.P. vote, 2) handed the White House to Woodrow Wilson. T.R. went off again to explore a fabled River of Doubt in Brazil--"because it was my last chance to be a boy"--but he was stricken with jungle fever, lying in a canoe, saturated by blinding, drenching downpours. He returned to Sagamore Hill pallid, hollow-cheeked, 55 lbs. lighter. Once more he attempted to retire, even trying to get the phone cut off--"We could send notes by a boy on a pony"--but his nature would not permit it. He began to rage at Woodrow Wilson. Once Wilson had defined T.R.: "I am told that he no sooner thinks that talks, which is a miracle not wholly in accord with the educational theory of forming an opinion." T.R. feared that Wilson's idealistic foreign policy in war-mad Europe would beget world war. After world war did break out, after the Lusitania had been sunk, Wilson said that the U.S. was "too proud to fight." T.R. had criticized Wilson for "hopeless weakness" and "magniloquent vagueness." Soon T.R. was sneering at Wilson as "yellow." "Put Out the Light." When World War I came at last to the U.S., T.R. put on one last desperate struggle to serve his countrymen. He asked Woodrow Wilson for permission to raise a division of volunteers and rush it over to help the hard- pressed Allies on the Western Front. Two-hundred-fifty thousand Americans, still drawn by T.R.'s magic, volunteered. Wilson declined. So T.R. "never more beset by a sense of inadequacy," had to watch his four sons, Theodore Jr., Kermit, Archibald and Quentin, head off to war in his stead. One day T.R. wrote Quentin sadly: "I putter around like the other old frumps trying to help with the Liberty Loan and Red Cross and such like." Another day word came back to Sagamore Hill that Quentin, a pilot, aged 21, had been shot down over the trenches and killed. The father, grievously afflicted, wrote this tribute to his son: "Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die, and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joys of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are part of the same Great Adventure." Fiercely, never leaning back, the great man moved toward the close of his own Great Adventure. Around him at Sagamore Hill, faraway distances and memories kept crowding in--winter on the range in North Dakota Territory, the great plains an abode of iron desolation, the great rivers in their beds like frosted steel; or the children at Christmas in the White House, "a thrill of...exaltation and rapture...to see all the gifts like a materialized fairyland arrayed"; or a trip in a battleship to Panama, and a petty officer's cry for "Three cheers for Theodore Roosevelt--the typical American citizen." T.R. had liked that--"the way in which they thought of the American President." His health grew poor. He was now blind in one eye and half deaf. He would try summer evenings to be quiet, sitting on the porch with Mrs. Roosevelt beneath the stars, watching the lights of the Fall River boats glistening on Long Island Sound--but into the Trophy Room at Sagamore Hill the nation and world kept crowding at the rate of 2,000 or 3,000 letters a week. Theodore Roosevelt had said: "The world has set its face hopefully toward our democracy, and, oh my fellow citizens, each one of you carries on your shoulders the burden of doing well for the sake of your own country and of seeing that this nation does well for the sake of mankind." At 5 o'clock on the morning of Jan. 6, 1919, T.R. died in bed of an embolism in the coronary artery. His last words, spoken to his valet, were, "Please put out the light." But the light of the life of Theodore Roosevelt no American could put out. Even as he was dying, his country was throbbing with new vitality and new hope. Even as he was dying, his last words to the American people were read to a rip-roaring all-American benefit at the Hippodrome in New York. Said Theodore Roosevelt: "I cannot be with you, and so all I can do is wish you God- speed." </body> </article> </text>