Points of View (Sherman)/Oscar S. Straus
A wise book, charmingly written, is the autobiography of Oscar S. Straus, called Under Four Administrations. The reasons follow. Between an outspoken natural man and a public official there is something like the difference which exists between an "instructed" and an "uninstructed" delegate. By an apparent paradox the uninstructed delegate appears to possess more intelligence than the instructed delegate. This is really creditable to human nature, for it shows the superiority of a man over a marionette. An official is often so much a marionette, so fully operated by strings which are yet out of sight, that he is almost customarily credited by the press, before his term of office has expired, with being a blockhead. But no man, not even a journalist, can really believe that presidents, judges and Congressmen are actually as stupid as he says they are, or as they sometimes appear, even to the laity, to be. It is incredible. No one has a right to expect in an official such exhibition of heart and brains as one expects in an outspoken natural man, any more than one has a right to expect a satisfactorily thrilling embrace from William James's "automatic sweetheart," however plausibly the behavioristic philosophers may have argued that it ought to be "just as good" as the genuine article.
Whenever, from excessively reading the results of the intelligence tests, or the daily newspapers, or the weekly journals of opinion, or the seasonal output of small-town biographical novels—whenever from too long immersion in the turbulent surf of our discontent, one emerges, chilled and despairing of the Republic, one should read as a stimulant and as a restorative the biography of one of our representative men who have "returned to nature" by retiring from office.
The season's biographies and the season's fiction, as fiction is written nowadays, equally recite, with a fair degree of veracity, the adventures of contemporary men; but in the one case the hero is ordinarily a quite insignificant person enmeshed in a Freudian "complex" and depicted with entire disregard of the Aristotelian maxim that "no very minute animal can be beautiful," while, in the other case, the hero is usually a person by nature "of a certain magnitude," increased by his participation in the great affairs of the world. Whenever one wonders why so much of our fiction seems ugly and depressing and why, on the other hand, so much of our biography affects us as stimulating, consolatory and beautiful, one should recall that neglected assertion of Aristotle's: "Whatever is beautiful must be of a certain magnitude." And then one should recklessly thank whatever gods there be that America has not relied exclusively upon a hereditary public service nor a "trained diplomatic corps," steeped in the hopeless cynicism of the profession, but has so often picked unspoiled men of heart and brains, wherever she has found them—a Page, a Lane, a Hoover, a Straus—and has set them to work out, with splendid "indiscretions," the salvation of the people.
The career of Mr. Straus illustrates with peculiar force the wisdom of calling many, even when few are to be chosen. In a double sense, he belongs to the Chosen People, having been set apart by birth in a race which achieved civilization so many centuries before the Russians, Germans and Anglo-Saxons emerged from barbarism that the latter even now find it difficult to "keep up." There is reason to believe that he, with his eminent brothers, began life in America with a special family inheritance of intelligence and character. His success does not prove that a fool or a knave will find every door of opportunity in America wide open. But in other respects, the demonstration of "democratic opportunity" is here as complete as can be desired, since, but for the advantages of nature, Mr. Straus started at the scratch.
Nothing in his memoirs is more charming in tone than his simple and: affectionate treatment of the beginnings of the Straus family in America, with its pictures of the father, a Bavarian immigrant of 1852, first peddling his wares among the hospitable Georgia planters, then setting up his store in Talbottom, bringing over his young family in 1854, entering the children in school and swiftly adapting the ways of his household to the spirit of a new community. On the persuasion of a Baptist minister, the boys were sent to a Baptist Sunday School, but, remarks Mr. Straus significantly: "My main religious instruction came from conversations with my father and from the discussions the ministers of various denominations had with him, which I always followed with great interest." This Bavarian peddler, who seems to have had Franklin's attraction for "ministers of various denominations," had brought into the country something more than the small merchant's stock in trade; he had brought an ability to explain to the hard-shell, slaveryupholding Southern Baptists that the Bible is an his torical record, requiring historical interpretation, and that the Biblical sanction of slavery is a shaky foundation for modern institutions.
If one were to single out the dominant trait in the Straus family, which was to be most strikingly represented in Oscar Straus, it would be the instinct for civility in its broadest sense, including the duties of good citizenship and considerably more than the average sensual man's preference of intelligence to force in the adjustment of human relations. This instinct reveals itself at the outset in the promptitude with which the family allied itself with whatever intellectual and spiritual elements a small Georgia town afforded, in its appreciation of Southern courtesy and hospitality, in its dislike of slavery, its disgust at the immoderate gin and whisky drinking of the country squires, its revolt from the hazing of the Georgia Military Academy, and its general sense of dismay at the destruction of the elementary ideas of brotherhood by civil strife, in which incidentally most of its own savings were swept away by the looting and burning of a rabble led by drunken Federal soldiers. In consequence of the war, the family moved to New York; and there once more the members of the Straus family showed their practical instinct for civilization by pooling their resources in order to allow one of their number to contribute in their behalf to the intellectual and professional life of their adopted country—to be set apart and "chosen" for the second time and in the American sense.
One dwells on these beginnings, because in spite of all that is occasionally achieved by vagrants who enter the vineyard at the eleventh hour, so much depends upon beginning right and beginning early. Mr. Frank Jewett Mather has a pretty passage in which he tells how John La Farge rebuked him for speaking as if an artist, after starting his picture, were free to develop it in various ways: "He went on to show how the first firm line set on a canvas excludes all incompatible lines thenceforth, so that by the third or fourth leading contour the design must advance by a kind of fatality."
When Oscar Straus entered Columbia College in 1867 he did not see the picture of himself escorted by eight royal carriages to the Sultan's palace or presiding over the Department of Labor in Roosevelt's Cabinet, but he had determined the "color" of the picture, he had set the "first firm line" on the canvas. He had already "a restless ambition to have a useful career," and in this environment his intellectual eagerness developed rapidly. He read widely in biography and history, which he then preferred, and still prefers, to fiction. He strove to excel in his studies, and was one of three nominated for the Alumni Prize, awarded to "the most deserving student in the graduating class." He records gleefully that he defeated Brander Matthews for the office of class poet. But perhaps the clearest premonitory sign of his diplomatic talent was his restoring to order an insubordinate class in the Evidences of Christianity—an incident which for inward sweetness is comparable only with the tumult of the bands playing "Onward, Christian Soldiers," at every town in New York where this progressive Jew spoke in his great campaign for Governor.
"The fervent aspiration" which animated him at Columbia was to devote his life to the nation. He had applied personally, with recommendations from President Barnard, to President Grant for an appointment to the United States Military Academy; but as these appointments were reserved for the sons of officers killed in the war he fortunately settled in his senior year upon the law as his vocation, and was graduated from the Columbia Law School in 1873. If one examines his photograph taken at about this period, with its thoroughly awakened, clear-eyed and almost luminous expression of intelligence and refinement, one has no difficulty in understanding the ease with which the young lawyer found his place in the best legal circles of New York and won the friendship and confidence of such eminent gentiles, for example, as Joseph Choate and Henry Ward Beecher—without, on the other hand, for feiting the confidence of his own people. It was indeed part of his ambition to prove that a man's Americanism is independent of his race and the form of his religion and "by a personal demonstration" to show the entire compatibility of his own race and religion with the most useful type of citizenship. In conjunction with his friends he organized the Young Men's Hebrew Association. He was secretary of the executive committee of an independent group organized to re-elect a good Mayor. He was secretary of the New York Business Men's Association organized in 1884 to assist in the election of Cleveland.
His diplomatic career began in this fashion. In 1885 he commenced as author with "The Origin of the Republican Form of Government." This book attracted the attention of Senator Gorman, who first proposed to him the Turkish mission. Carl Schurz, Straus's intimate friend, and the editors of the Times and the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung bestirred themselves to bring the matter to the attention of Cleveland. The President was impressed, but since the principal business of the Turkish Minister was to look after the interests of Christian missionaries, he hesitated to send a man who might be persona non grata. This objection was overcome by the hearty support of the Prudential Committee of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and by an urgent and enthusiastic letter from Henry Ward Beecher! Finally Cleveland seems to have made the appointment, not in spite of the fact that Mr. Straus was a Jew, but rather because he was a Jew and a Jew so without reproach that his appointment afforded an opportunity to emphasize the non-sectarian basis of American citizenship and eligibility for honorable service. From one point of view the most impressive thing in these memoirs is precisely this: Mr. Straus's ability to serve wisely and successfully all sorts of conflicting interests, and, on the other hand, their hearty concurrence in being served by him.
Without making a detailed review of his public services, certain significant features may be noted. The salary of Minister to Turkey when Mr. Straus accepted the mission was $7,500; he spent four times that sum and got his compensation in wide acquaintance with the world, in serving his country and in leaving an honorable name to his family. He won the applause of his government and the cordial favor of Abdul Hamid, and he threw himself with ardor and enjoyment into his work at Constantinople—as long as he was instructed and permitted to devote his energy chiefly to protecting educational interests and safeguarding human rights of Jews and Gentiles and removing occasions for armed conflict. When, however, under Mr. Taft's Administration, he was sent for a third time to Turkey, in despite of promises to retain him in the Cabinet, and when Mr. Knox instructed him to give his main attention to advancing "prestige" and commercial railway interests in the East, Mr. Straus asked to be relieved, being convinced that the Administration was preparing the way for dangerous and imperialistic entanglements, in which he was unwilling to be involved. He had entered public life to advance public, not private, interests.
This action was becoming in that kind of independent who may be described as at heart an old-school philosophical Democrat. Beginning his public service under Cleveland and continuing under two Republican Presidents, he was naturally twitted with being on both sides of the fence. He replied, half jestingly, that "the fence had moved." As a matter of fact, he seems to have devoted himself to the same sound human and truly American objects through all four of his administrations. In 1898, for example, he urged upon President McKinley a pacific plan for obtaining the virtual independence of Cuba and at the same time saving the face of Spain. The plan fell through because, though McKinley liked it and thought it feasible, he could not resist "the jingo agitation in Congress and the storming for war of the American press."
Mr. Straus does not conceal the fact that he was fascinated by the talents of McKinley's successor and by the heart-warming cordiality of his friendship. Whoever serves to some extent complies; yet he managed to serve even Roosevelt in his own way. It was he whose appeal to our greatest publicity expert not to outstep the modesty of nature elicited the famous retort: "This is a poster, not an etching." With regard to the Alaska boundary dispute, Roosevelt had expressed with characteristic vigor his repugnance to arbitration. He had made up his own mind: that was enough. Then he turned mockingly on Straus and exclaimed: "Straus, you are a member of The Hague Tribunal; don't you think I'm right?" "As a member of The Hague Tribunal," replied his Secretary, "I should first have to hear what the other side had to say." "And we all had a good laugh," adds Mr. Straus.
At what did they laugh—at The Hague Tribunal or at Mr. Roosevelt? Perhaps each at his own subject of merriment; but Mr. Straus, one feels sure, in the covert of his beard smiled at his Master with some of that secret irony which Disraeli employed toward his royal Mistress. In each case I believe the Jew was by instinct and inheritance a more thoroughly "civilized" being than the Gentile. He served Roosevelt indeed most truly by pressing upon our great advocate of the Big Stick the uses of "sweetness and light" in promoting industrial peace at home and harmonious relations abroad. While his friend, relying on the prestige of his own personality, gesticulated with the navy, Mr. Straus sought to strengthen the permanent instrumentalities of arbitral justice and international law.
Perhaps the most piquantly characteristic, if not the most important, bit of his diplomatic service was arresting the descent of the Big Stick. While he was in Constantinople he had discovered that in the Philippines, over which our inexperienced flag had newly risen, there were considerable Moslem elements which recognized the Sultan as their spiritual head. He suggested to the Sultan, to whom this fact seems also to have been a discovery, that he extend his spiritual jurisdiction by advising his co-religionists to submit to the authority of the United States. It was then ascertained by a telegram that two Sulu chiefs were on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Prompted by Mr. Straus, the Sultan instructed them to return home and prevent bloodshed, in consequence of which action the Sulu Mahometans refused to join Aguinaldo's insurrection. The sequel: In 1902 an American soldier in the Philippines was killed while laying a telegraph line in the territory of these Sulu Mahometans. Our press announced that a "punitive expedition" of twelve hundred men would be dispatched—according to the approved imperial methods of dealing with "subject peoples." Mr. Straus, then a private citizen in the United States, immediately advised President Roosevelt against this use of the "strong hand" as likely to provoke a general uprising. He urged instead a diplomatic inquiry, with the assistance of our Mahometan friends, whom his chiefs from Mecca had pacified. This course was successfully followed.
A man with a passion for peace is one thing. A man with the tact to get the Sultan of Turkey, Sulu chiefs and. Theodore Roosevelt working together for a solution of their problems without resort to brandished lance, shaken fist or shining armor possesses, as I have said, an instinct for civility. The spirit of this incident was curiously reproduced at a later period, when Mr. Straus, then devoting himself with full heart to his great work for industrial peace, found a basis upon which capitalists and laboring men could confer face to face at the White House, and Andrew Carnegie agreed to meet the leaders of the Homestead strike at the ex-Ambassador's dinner table. As one of the four United States members of the Court of Arbitration at The Hague, as Secretary of Commerce and Labor, as vice-president of the National Civic Federation and the International Law Association, as chairman of the overseas committee of the League to Enforce Peace and in all the various capacities in which he served during the late war and through the protracted ordeal of the so-called peace conference, Mr. Straus has wrought diligently and consistently at his lifelong purpose: to be useful to a nation whose higher spirit this memoir proves that he understands—a spirit which his entire activity as an author has been devoted to explaining. His life work has been crowned with as much success as can be sagely hoped for by a man who attempts to make the ideal of civility effective in a world which is still more than half barbaric.