ROOSEVELT, PRESIDENT 349 Then, on the evening of September 6, Roosevelt, just finishing an address at Isle la Motte, near Burlington, Vt., received a message that President McKinley had been shot by the anarchist Czolgosz.1 Roosevelt went at once to Buffalo. The President was still alive and seemed to improve. After two days the physicians gave Roosevelt such assurances that he, like the rest of the country, thought McKinley out of danger. Roosevelt went to join his family in the Adirondacks. On the afternoon of the 13th he with several members of his family climbed Mount Tahawus. As they were resting near the summit a guide came into view on the trail below. "I felt at once," wrote Roosevelt in his "Autobiography," "that he had bad news, and, sure enough, he handed me a A famous Roosevelt cartoon by Davenport: "He's good enough for me." telegram saying that the President's condition was much worse and that I must come to Buffalo immediately." Roosevelt was ten miles from the nearest horse. He reached the club-house after dark, procured with some difficulty a horse and wagon, and alone with the driver began the thirty-five-mile drive to the railroad-station. The road was not much more than a wilderness trail. The night was dark and foggy. Wherever they could they 1 An account of the assassination of McKinley will be found in Chapter 20. changed horses. It was dawn as Roosevelt stepped on the station platform at North Creek to find his secretary, William Loeb, waiting with a special train. From Loeb he learned that McKinley had died during the night. Late in the afternoon he reached Buffalo. Elihu Root, secretary of war, told him it was advisable that there should be no further delay in taking the oath of office. Roosevelt took the oath, in the house where McKinley was lying dead, on September 14. That ceremony was the beginning of the Roosevelt era. THE LARGER HISTORY Matters Other than Political Which, It Is Ventured, May Be THIS narrative has now covered the beginnings of Roosevelt and Bryan, together with the origins of some of the conditions that gave rise to these leaders and to the political and social movements of the years following 1900. These movements, and the personalities associated with them, compose the substance of most of the formal histories of the time, as indeed such movements and such personalities comprise the substance of most of the conventional histories of all times. For example, Mr. James Ford Rhodes's narrative of "The McKinley and Roosevelt Administrations, 1896 to 1907," is, like the same historian's previous volumes, a standard history of the period it covers, and a most excellent one.1 Being standard, it conforms to the almost universally accepted 1 Mr. Rhodes's equipment of scholarship, his painstaking accuracy-all his admirable qualities are supplemented, for the purposes of a history of this period, by the fact that he was the brother-in-law of Mark Hanna, and had that advantage of intimate access to the inner politics of the time. Moreover, Mr. Rhodes, before he was a historian, was a successful business man, and had that equipment for exceptional understanding of the economic life of the period. practice, in that it is almost wholly political. The politicians of the time, McKinley, Roosevelt, Bryan, Hanna, Taft, and the others, together with their activities, are treated exhaustively. But the book contains no mention of the perfection of the internal-combustion engine and the other mechanical devices which, resulting in the automobile, had so marked an effect on American life. Neither does it contain any allusion to the invention by which Orville and Wilbur Wright enabled man to ascend into the air and control his movements there. The political aspects of the controversy between the advocates of gold and those of silver are covered with admirably painstaking thoroughness; but there is no mention whatever of the two metallurgists, MacArthur and Forrest, whose discovery of the cyanide process of extracting gold from low-grade ores had, by increasing the world's supply of gold, rather more to do with the outcome of that contest than all the millions of words uttered by Bryan and the other political participants in the controversy. There is another concept of history. Among formal historians, it is most conspicuously followed by Macaulay, and the conception itself is eloquently expressed in a few sentences from his opening chapter, in which he felt obliged to explain his innovation, in words slightly suggesting the truculence of a man who knows he is going to encounter criticism: I should very imperfectly execute the task which I have undertaken if I were merely to treat of battles and sieges, of the rise and fall of administrations, . . . and of debates in Parliament. It will be my endeavour to relate the history of the people as well as the history of the government, to trace the progress of useful and ornamental arts, to describe the rise of religious sects and the changes of literary taste, to portray the manners of successive generations, and not to pass by with neglect even the revolutions which have taken place in dress, furniture, repasts, and public amusements. CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORY 353 Among American historians this conception is best illustrated by John Bach McMaster's "History of the American People." Mr. McMaster's statement of the conception is especially adapted to America, because his history makes more emphatic that aspect of events which Macaulay alluded to as "the progress of useful arts.' The subject of my narrative is the history of the people of the United States of America. . . . In the course of this narrative much, indeed, must be written of wars. of presidents, of congresses, of embassies, of treaties, of the ambition of political leaders in the senate-house, and of. parties. Yet the history of the people shall be the chief theme. At every stage of the splendid progress. . . it shall be my purpose to describe the dress, the occupations, the amusements, the literary canons of the times; to note the changes of manners and morals; to trace the growth of [the] humane spirit. Nor shall it be less my aim to recount the manifold improvements which, in a thousand ways, have multiplied the conveniences of life and ministered to the happiness of our race; to describe the rise and progress of that long series of mechanical inventions and discoveries which is now the ad |