HEROES
(See Cover)
Down the wilderness trail from the Tahawus Club to North Creek in New York State's Adirondack Mountains a rattletrap huckboard 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 Catling 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 shut 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 thaf the line of division in the deeper matters of our citizenship 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 distances 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.