Theodore Rex (87 page)

E. H.
Harriman was a heavy investor in the New York State Republican organization, and therefore wanted to avoid a Higgins defeat. He was also, according to rumor, keen to see his good friend Benjamin B. Odell in the United States Senate. Roosevelt needed to harness the energies of all three men: financier, candidate, and boss.

“
In view of the trouble over the State ticket in New York, I should much like to have a few words with you,” he wrote Harriman on 10 October. “Do you think you can get down here within a few days and take either lunch or dinner with me?” Harriman accepted the invitation, but found that his schedule would not allow him to come south in less than a week.

The President detected a whiff of coquettishness, and turned coy himself. “
Now, my dear sir, you and I are practical men,” he wrote again. “If you think there is any danger of your visit to me causing trouble, or if you think there is nothing special I should be informed about … why of course give up the visit for the time being.”

Harriman was thus put in the awkward position of having to push for a meeting he had postponed. Roosevelt casually added that there were “certain government matters not connected with the campaign” he had hoped to discuss. The implication was clear. If elected, he would be embarking on a program of railroad rate reform, such as a wise tycoon might want to know about in advance.

When Harriman called for an appointment, he was politely asked what he wanted to see the President about. In the event, he did not get down to Washington until the twentieth, by which time the “October scare” was moderating.
Twelve thousand New Yorkers rah-rahing for Roosevelt at Madison Square Garden indicated that the President was still strong in the Empire State, even if Higgins was not.

Roosevelt received Harriman—small, curt, dark, quick—late in the afternoon, alone except for William Loeb, who was soon excused. That evening, the financier returned to the White House for dinner. There were no other guests.
Roosevelt spent most of the time talking about New York politics.
Whatever else was said, Harriman went back north committed to raising $260,000 on behalf of New York GOP candidates.
He had a pleased sense of usefulness and high importance. “They are all in a hole,” he boasted to an aide, “and the President wants me to help them out.”

HARRIMAN PROVED AS
good as his word, personally contributing fifty thousand dollars and leaning on several of his Wall Street colleagues. J. P. Morgan,
who had once said that Roosevelt would be lucky to raise more than a four-figure sum in the whole financial district, gave one hundred thousand dollars, following up with fifty thousand more.
Millionaires virtually stood in line as realization spread that the President was likely to be elected by a historic majority. Chauncey Depew doffed his Senatorial hat, put on that of chairman of the New York Central Railroad, and gave $100,000. Henry Clay Frick gave $50,000, saying that he would be amenable to further requests. George Perkins wrote three separate checks totaling $450,000, with the good wishes of himself, the House of Morgan, and the New York Life Insurance Company. George J. Gould, of Western Union and the Great Northern Railway, gave fully half a million dollars.
Other donations came in from executives of Standard Oil, National City Life, General Electric, American Can, and International Harvester.

The flood became an embarrassment for Roosevelt. Did all these men imagine they were buying him? “
Corporate cunning has developed faster than the laws of nation and state,” he remarked to the reporter Lindsay Denison. “Sooner or later, unless there is a readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement.” Born to wealth, with an inherited sense that it must be repaid with public service, he found himself increasingly repelled by those who went after money for money’s sake, or used it to buy power. Unless wealth was chastened by culture or regulated by government, it was at worst predatory, at best boring. He did not care how little time he spent in future with E. H. Harriman. “
It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own businesses.”

DEMOCRATIC CAMPAIGN OFFICIALS
could not hide their disappointment in Alton B. Parker. Although James J. Hill and George F. Baer had been generous supporters of his candidacy, their primary desire was obviously to stop Roosevelt rather than support Parker. His refusal to do or say anything partisan was irritating reporters and alienating voters.
As one workingman complained, “The Jedge hain’t quite riz to the occasion.”

On 22 October, in New York, the veteran strategist Daniel S. Lamont tried to shock Parker’s complacency. “
Well, you are going to be licked, old fellow, but brace up and make the best fight you can, and when it is over, come down here and practice law.”

Like most presidential candidates, Parker could not believe bad news. “How do you know I am going to be defeated?”

“Why, they have underwritten it, just as they would underwrite building a railroad to San Francisco.”

The judge returned stunned to Esopus. He decided that if he could not win, he could at least speak out against the “menace” of corporate campaign funds.

As luck would have it, he was visited the next afternoon by a delegation of supporters. He managed to startle them with some semispecific allegations of “debasing and corrupt” payments to the GOP by “individuals of corporations … who would control the results of election contests.”
His remarks made modest headlines on 24 October.

John Hay, whose memories went back to the hellfire days of American political oratory, was not impressed by Parker’s tepid outrage. “
We are at the fag end of the most absurd political campaign of our time,” he wrote Henry Adams, “and it looks like Roosevelt to the gamblers and the Jews.”

ALICE LIKED TO TEASE
her father about his habit of writing “posterity letters” whenever anything occurred that might affect his historical reputation. It was a habit that went back to the earliest days of his political career, when he would write solemn screeds to Bamie and portentously sign them “Theodore Roosevelt,” as if she were unaware of his surname.

Some instinct warned him, on the eve of his birthday, that the Democrats might return to the theme of corporate contributions in the closing days of the campaign. The instinct was triggered when a reporter from New York mentioned seeing a check made out to the Republican National Committee by an executive of Standard Oil—still the most hated trust in popular mythology. Another reporter confirmed this, and said the check had been written after Cornelius Bliss intimated that a failure to be generous would be to the “disadvantage” of the Rockefeller interests.

Roosevelt’s reaction was to dictate not only a posterity letter, but a posterity telegram and posterity memorandum as well. The letter went to Cortelyou:

He did not explain why a check from John D. Archbold should be any less acceptable than one from E. H. Harriman, except to say that “in view of my past relations with the Standard Oil Company,” the transaction might be construed “as putting us under an improper obligation.”

By telegram, he demanded that Cortelyou confirm the refund, and by memo, he explained at length how he had heard about the check. Then, forsaking pomposity for his normal boyish good cheer, he celebrated his birthday.

Elihu Root, who over the years had developed an almost paternal tenderness for him, sent a note to the White House: “
I congratulate you on attaining the respectable age of 46. You have made a very good start in life and your friends have great hopes for you when you grow up.”

IN THE LAST DAYS
of October, Parker unexpectedly yielded to the pleas of the Democratic National Committee and undertook a speaking tour. He confined himself to a few pivotal counties in New York and New Jersey, but adopted an aggressive tone that kept him in the national headlines. His theme—“The trusts are furnishing the money with which they hope to control the election”—focused on the hapless Cortelyou, who was once again portrayed in yellow newspapers as a Wall Street toady.

Roosevelt was at first sympathetic, then nervous when the chairman failed to respond adequately to his letter about Standard Oil. He telegraphed again: “
Has my request been complied with? I desire that there be no delay.”

There was no reply. Loeb made a follow-up call to New York and got through only to Bliss, who said with distinct irritation, “No contribution has been received from the Standard Oil Company and none will be received.”

Roosevelt had to accept this denial. But restraint became more and more difficult as Parker began to repeat the “Ten Questions,” and suggest that Cortelyou’s rapid rise from presidential aide to Secretary to party chief had been engineered with the precise intent of dunning captains of industry. No man in the country, the judge implied, enjoyed such equal access to privileged information in his former fiefdom, the Bureau of Corporations. Hence his success in “demanding” support from tycoons too scared to resist him. “
Although this may be satisfactory to the conscience of Republican leaders,” Parker said, without actually naming the President, “it must, I firmly believe, be condemned as a shameless exhibition of a willingness to make compromise with decency.”