(Chapter 7: "Master-Spirit")

Leading a democracy was no simple task. That Theodore Roosevelt was learning firsthand. Just as free government required certain qualities in its practitioners, so it demanded certain virtues from its leaders. A republican leader had to understand his countrymen. He had to know their capacities and their calling, grasp their possibilities. He had to know when to press forward and when to give way. This did not mean bending to every gust of popular sentiment. A responsible democratic ruler must be willing to risk the people's wrath, to tell them no and stand firm for right as he understood it. "[I]t is very essential that a man should have in him the capacity to defy his fellows if he thinks that they are doing the work of the Devil, and not the work of the Lord." But even then, perhaps especially then, circumspection was in order. "[H]e must be most cautious about mistaking his own views for those of the Lord; and also remember that as the Lord's work is accomplished through human instruments ... and therefore, imperfect, in the long run a man can do nothing of permanence, save by joining his zeal to sound judgment, moderation, and the desire to accomplish practical results." Sound judgment, moderation, courage with practicality. The more Roosevelt thought about it, the more he concluded that these were the qualities the free regime demanded of the free leader, the leader of great men. "The truth is, that a strong nation can only be saved by itself, and not by a strong man." Though he quickly added, "it can be greatly aided and guided by a strong man."

This was Roosevelt's homily on leadership, offered in the form of a biography of Oliver Cromwell. No English leader had surpassed him, Roosevelt thought. Cromwell was a master of men, strong, stern, noble-minded, and bold. When the English attempted in the middle seventeenth century to wrench themselves free from the "degrading superstition" of monarchy and the divine right of kings, Cromwell saved their faltering efforts. He united the splintered advocates of freedom into a single, mighty movement, the first modern movement of history.

Roosevelt interpreted the English civil war as a reform effort, aiming to secure popular self-government and religious freedom. And America he interpreted as its result. Indeed, at his hands, Cromwell's commonwealthmen became the forebears of Roosevelt's central convictions. This was historical presentism of the worst kind, but revealing. The evolution, Roosevelt said, "was the first great stride toward the practical achievement of civil rights and individual liberty as we now understand them." Roosevelt saw Cromwell as a proponent of religious toleration, even liberalism—"it was the era in which the old theological theory of the all-importance of dogma came into sharp conflict with the now healthily general religious belief in the superior importance of conduct." Roosevelt understood Cromwell to advocate a wide franchise, a protectionist, nationalist economic program—"like the system of protective tariffs"—and an aggressive foreign policy. Above all, Cromwell was vigilant for the character of the English people. For several generations their national fiber had rotted in ignoble peace. Cromwell led the people through "the fiery ordeal of Civil War" to reverse their decline and call them up toward liberty.

Yet his signal achievement, Roosevelt thought, the real measure of his greatness, made him sound like a politician of the late nineteenth century. According to Roosevelt, Cromwell had brought under a common banner the disparate, and sometimes competing, supporters of reform. "A very considerable portion [of the population] avowed extreme republican theories," Roosevelt noted. Some of the extremists were in advance of their age, but many others were "not in advance at all, but simply to one side or other of a great movement" or "lagging behind it, or trying to pilot it in the wrong direction." Roosevelt saw a moral. "If the movement is not checked at the right moment by the good-sense of moderation of the people themselves, or if some master-spirit does not appear, the extremists carry it even farther forward until it provokes the most violent reaction." Cromwell stopped the revolution at the right moment, at the place where it was sustainable and the coalition in support broadest. He brought the stragglers and the enthusiasts to common ground. And this was at the very heart of foresighted, progressive democratic leadership. Leadership was adjustment, wise balancing.

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