Theodore Rex (102 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
THE MESSAGE ITSELF
, published on 5 December, was quieter and more rationally argued than readers of
McClure’s
might have expected. Indeed, its opening section, subheaded “Control of Corporations,” was written in a lucid, unemotional style that belied what Bazalgette had said about the President’s tendency toward rhetorical “roughness.”
In our industrial and social system the interests of all men are so closely intertwined that in the immense majority of cases a straight-dealing man who by his efficiency, by his ingenuity and industry, benefits himself must also benefit others. Normally the man of great productive capacity who becomes rich by guiding the labor of many other men does so by enabling them to produce more than they could produce without his guidance; and both he and they share in the benefit, which comes also to the public at large. The superficial fact that the sharing may be unequal must never blind us to the underlying fact that there is this sharing, and that the benefit comes in some degree to each man concerned.
Roosevelt was clearly addressing himself to Speaker Cannon and the conservative Senate leadership still managed by Nelson Aldrich—Republicans whose votes, and control of votes, he would need in the months ahead. He had to persuade them, without melodramatics, that unless they began to respond to the demands of the progressives (some of whom were now members of Congress), the Grand Old Party was likely to become two parties, and sooner rather than later.
The Department of Justice, he wrote, was devoting too much of its time to prosecuting antitrust cases on an individual basis. And experience had shown that individual states lacked the power, in an age of combination, to stop the abusive practices of trusts operating across their borders. What was needed was a regulatory and supervisory law enacted by the only body as big as the biggest trust—“that is, by the National Government.” The need was so great that if Congress would not move, the Constitution would have to be amended.
He emphasized that
the law should be positive rather than prohibitory, monitoring growth rather than slowing it, and imposing discipline only when the growth became destructive of competition.
Its prime focus must be on railroad rates, and in particular on rebate rates, which were discriminatory and should be forbidden “in every shape and form.” A commission should be created (or the ICC empowered) to establish a maximum reasonable rate whenever a rate was shown to be unfair—and unfairness meant “minimum” rates for big shippers as well as excessive ones for small. In the former instance, “the commission would have the right to declare this already established minimum rate as the maximum; and it would need only one or two such decisions by the commission to cure the railroad companies of the practice of giving improper minimum rates.”
The President kept reiterating that he was asking for an administrative agency, not an enforced partnership between government and private business. His Message proceeded to spin itself out, as usual, to prodigious length, and contained no fewer than seventy-three requests for moderately progressive
new laws. But already he had issued the war call most sure to bring him into direct conflict with Senator Aldrich: he had challenged free enterprise’s right to set its own prices in the competitive marketplace.
To Aldrich, Depew, Hale, Foraker, even to Senator Elkins, this was a blasphemy, however quietly uttered, against one of the fundamental tenets of the Constitution.
Roosevelt had until Christmas to work with a reform-minded legislator—probably that jovial Methodist bison Senator Jonathan P. Dolliver of Iowa—on the language of his railroad bill, and concentrate all the political momentum he had built up as President. Then in the new year, force must meet with force.
The Treason of the Senate
But now whin I pick me fav-rite magazine off th’ flure, what do I find? Ivrything has gone wrong. Th’ wurruld is little better thin a convict’s camp
.
“
YOU AND I
, of course, can never believe in the
benevolent despot.”
George F. Baer, president of the anthracite-carrying Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, had as much reason as his addressee, Senator Stephen B. Elkins, to view Theodore Roosevelt’s current ascendancy with misgivings. As an industrialist privately engaged in interstate commerce, he saw any governmental intrusion upon his right to set his own shipping rates, such as the President was now proposing, in the light of flames licking around the last copy of the Constitution.
Elkins—affable, unreliable, energetic, a chronic schemer personifying the West Virginian notion that all scenes and situations could be profitably mined—had been happy to sponsor Roosevelt’s Anti-Rebate Bill in 1903, if only because men like Baer wanted it.
The railroads were weary of handing out special favors to a widening roster of not-so-special customers. But the chairman of the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce was considerably less willing to endorse the idea of railroad rate regulation. Apart from opposing it on principle, he resented the way the President had chosen a junior Senator, Dolliver of Iowa, to draft the legislation.
Roosevelt did not see how Elkins could expect to be consulted on a bill that, in effect, proclaimed the failure of the Elkins Law. Three years before, the “accidental” President had to take what weak measures he could coax from the Senate; now he had power enough to get almost anything he wanted. That did not mean getting it would be easy, or quick. For the sake of future harmonious relations with the Upper House, he could only hope that Elkins and Aldrich and other stalwarts would accept the fact that he represented the will of the people.
The truth of the situation was that most Americans supported him unconditionally. Even “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman was forced to acknowledge that Theodore Roosevelt was “
the most popular President the country has ever had.” Speaking on the floor of the Senate, Tillman berated his colleagues for their subservience to Roosevelt’s public relations:
The newspapers are the men who have made him what he is, as far as the public knows, because he has never had the opportunity in all his journeyings and speeches to meet more than one in a thousand of his fellow-citizens, and it is through the great instrumentality represented in that press gallery that he has become puffed to such a degree that he “strides the world like a colossus, and we smaller men”—you, thank God, not I—“crawl around between his legs hunting for yourselves dishonorable graves or a piece of pork.”
It was not the most fortunate literary allusion from a senator who generally displayed a public appetite for pork such as the Armour Brothers meatpacking company might fail to satisfy. But Tillman made a valid point: the President had Washington correspondents working on his behalf as if they were in his employ, and he had the added support of the new investigatory journalists. More than any other previous occupant of the White House, Roosevelt understood that the way to manipulate reporters was to let them imagine they were helping shape policy. A “consultation” here, a confidence shared there, and the scribe was transformed into a pen for hire.
Another weapon in Roosevelt’s negotiatory arsenal was the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, revitalized by (now Senator) Philander Knox. Within days of the Message, Attorney General Moody had ordered wholesale prosecutions of shippers and conveyors still linked by concessionary arrangements. Indictments had already been returned against some of the most eminent corporate names in America, including the Great Northern Railway and three members of the notorious “beef trust”—concurrently the unwilling subjects of a series of articles in
Collier’s
investigating the food industry. The Justice Department’s own press releases further helped to whip up public support for the President’s program.
In consequence of all these factors, Roosevelt now commanded a bipartisan, proregulatory majority in the House of Representatives. Senator Elkins’s committee looked like an increasingly lonely redoubt as it braced to do battle with “progressives” both within and without the Capitol.
ONE OF THE
earliest aspirants to the new label loomed shock-headed among the President’s hand-shakers at a White House reception on 4 January 1906. Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin, just elevated from Governor to Senator,
was an insurgent even as to hairstyle. Dense and irrepressible, a pompadour did what it could to add to LaFollette’s height.
He was fifty years old and five feet five inches tall, opaque except for his facial flush: inside, he was all dark, dour aggression.
Roosevelt recognized him at once, and held up the reception line to recall their first meeting, seventeen years before in Washington. It had also been a formal occasion; Civil Service Commissioner Roosevelt had accidentally spilled some coffee on Mrs. LaFollette’s white satin gown.
“When I wake up in the dark, and think about that, I blush!” Roosevelt said.
Such naïve naturalness of expression was hard to resist. “
Mr. Roosevelt is one of the most likable men that I am acquainted with,” Mark Twain remarked a few days later, dictating his autobiography. The President was “the most popular human being that has ever existed in the United States,” by virtue of his “joyous ebullitions of excited sincerity.” Twain was nevertheless moved to express the misgivings of not a few thoughtful observers who wondered if a Roosevelt unrestrained might not become a Roosevelt moving too fast for his own good. “He flies from one thing to another with incredible dispatch.… each act of his, and each opinion expressed, is likely to abolish or controvert some previous act or expressed opinion.”
In private correspondence and conversation, the President gave quite the opposite impression. He was deliberate about his intent to use railroad rate reform as a switch between two different stages on the American economic journey. It was not he, but
the outdated system of
laissez-faire
, that was accelerating out of control.
Elihu Root, a conservative for life (and a favored member of the Aldrich poker circle), saw that “the central fact” for Theodore was that the last decades of the nineteenth century had been a period of risk for capital—risk demanding great courage from entrepreneurs, and rightly rewarding them with enormous wealth if their new modes of production paid off. When those modes became established modes, however, and risk declined in consequence, there would have to be “a surrender by capital … of its high percentage of profit.” Unfortunately, today’s conservatives—self-made men like Elkins and Aldrich, both of them railroad board members—believed with complete sincerity in the stand-pat values embodied by President McKinley and Mark Hanna. Roosevelt understood that a “profound reconstitution [had] taken place in modern industrial society,” and that change was in the direction of economic redress.
He also believed something else with complete sincerity, too: that unless capital consented to some redistribution of profits, piling up beyond reason now that times were stable and competition was often turning to complicity, “
the radical elements in society” would resort to violence.