American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  “All That Is Solid Melts into Air”

  One night in Greenwich Village in the spring of 1913, Big Bill Haywood was telling his Village friends of the bitter strike of the silk workers in nearby Paterson. Thousands of pickets had been arrested. Two strikers had been killed by police. Whole families were starving. The IWW-run strike needed money and publicity.

  Mabel Dodge Luhan spoke up. Why not move the strike right out of New Jersey and stage it in Manhattan as a pageant? Electrified, the group let its imagination soar. Artists, actors, writers would work together. John Sloan would paint a huge backdrop for the stage. The designer Robert Edward Jones would lay out a graphic program for the show. John Reed, who had written plays and songs for dramatic clubs, would draft a scenario and stage the spectacle. Big Bill was enthusiastic. He liked to tell Villagers that his workers were too busy fighting for decent wages to have time for culture. But now the strikers themselves would be the actors.

  Early on a June evening, over 1,000 silk workers ferried across the Hudson and marched to the old Madison Square Garden on 26th Street. Glowing red lights spelled out “IWW” as queues stretched twenty or more blocks. On a huge stage inside, against a two-hundred-foot-long backdrop reproducing the mill’s grim facade, the Paterson workers acted out the quiet start of the working day, sudden voices crying, “STRIKE! STRIKE!,” the hands pouring out of the factory, the shooting of a striker by the police, his burial, the mournful spectacle of strikers’ children being sent off to other cities, the climactic strike meeting. Big Bill, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Carlo Tresca gave fiery speeches, as they actually had earlier at a Paterson striker’s graveside. John Reed, who had been a Harvard football cheerleader, choreographed the huge cast and directed its singing of revolutionary words set to Harvard tunes. The pageant ended with actors and spectators hymning “The Internationale” in one mighty voice.

  “Who that saw the Paterson Strike Pageant in 1913 can ever forget that thrilling evening when an entire labor community dramatized its wrongs in one supreme outburst of group-emotion?” Randolph Bourne wrote. A new collective social art was coming in America, he felt. Other memories soon turned sour. A financial disaster, the pageant passed no money on to the silk workers. The strike collapsed within a month. Suffering from ulcers, Haywood left with friends for Provincetown. An exhausted Reed sailed off with Luhan to Europe.

  The spectacle had merely given the strikers a moment of pageantry, Flynn concluded bitterly, and left them back on the picket line. Doubtless he was expecting too much from art—which cannot resolve social problems—while understanding too little of art’s power to sharpen people’s awareness of these problems.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Reformation of Economic Power

  NOT SINCE THE FOUNDING decades had Americans eyed a national leader of such prodigious versatility as the man who took the oath of office that September afternoon in 1901. From childhood, Theodore Roosevelt had seemed to reach out hungrily for experience and to lose himself in action. Like Washington and Adams and Jefferson and the others, he had come to know and embrace the natural world around him as well as the political flora and fauna. If he had the attention span of a golden retriever, as some critics said, he had at least emulated the Founding Fathers in recording his experiences in correspondence, articles, and books.

  In his forty-three years, Roosevelt had already lived a half-dozen lives. The product of seven generations of Manhattan Roosevelts, he had fitted in with the Boston aristocracy as well, and had even married into it. As a Harvard student of mixed abilities but wide exposure—William James was one of his teachers—he had found time on the side to write scholarly studies on the birds of Oyster Bay and of the Adirondacks. He had come to know the West—the West of the Dakota Badlands—as few easterners had been able to. He had invaded the seamy Republican clubhouses of Manhattan and had courted or quelled their denizens.

  Then he soared. At the age of twenty-three he won nomination and election as New York assemblyman and took on the legislative bosses in Albany. At twenty-six he was an influential delegate at the Republican convention that nominated Blaine. At twenty-eight he ran for mayor of New York City and finished third behind an old-line Democrat and Henry George, the single-taxer. At thirty-one he took office in Washington as a Civil Service commissioner; at thirty-seven he was New York City Police Commissioner; at thirty-nine Assistant Secretary of the Navy and Rough Rider; at forty governor of New York; at forty-two Vice-President of the United States. In between he raised a family, shot buffalo and grizzlies, published writings that ranged from serious works in western and naval history to appalling potboilers.

  If Roosevelt embodied much of the history of late nineteenth-century America, he also reflected its contradictions and contrarieties. Like other upper-class fathers, he was a “devoted family man” who again and again deserted his family for weeks at a time as he pursued his ambitions. He adored his first wife, who died in childbirth, but in his grief exorcised her from his memory and from history by destroying their love letters and tearing her photographs out of their frames. He talked peace but carried a gun on any plausible occasion. He loved animals but slaughtered them, and when bothered by a neighbor’s dog, he pulled out his revolver and shot it dead. He believed in liberty but of the “orderly” type. He believed in equality but only with people he respected—and never with those, including fellow legislators who were Irish, whom he termed “a stupid, sodden vicious lot, most of them being equally deficient in brains and virtue.” He was a snob of the first water who made friends with cowboys and politicians once they were able to see past the side-whiskers, the monocle, the gold-headed cane, the silk hat, the cutaway coat—all of which accoutrements he brought with him in his first appearance in the New York Assembly.

  His had been a life of almost continual conflict—fighting bosses in both parties, knocking down “muckers” who accosted him in saloon or clubhouse, hunting down western desperadoes, reprimanding constables asleep at their posts, charging up San Juan Hill, endlessly tangling with fellow commissioners, governmental superiors, pacifists, and members of the “wealthy criminal class.” Life was strife. Not by nature a compassionate man, he had a contempt for “weak, spineless” men of inaction, effete intellectuals like Henry Adams and Henry James, milk-and-water reformers. This contempt stemmed in part from his own childhood weaknesses and insecurities—his small, frail body racked by asthma and other ills, his myopic eyes, his reedy voice that easily slipped into a falsetto. Through home exercises, days on end of horseback riding, and incredible feats of endurance in the Badlands he had built a bull neck and a protruding chest, over a slowly expanding waistline.

  Inevitably, as an intensely competitive man, he was something of a Social Darwinist. Many industrial evils would disappear, he said, if there were more of that “capacity for steady individual self-help which is the glory of every true American.” There were higher things than the “soft and easy enjoyment of material comfort,” he told an audience. “It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness.” If the “best classes” did not reproduce themselves, he said, the “nation will of course go down; for the real question is encouraging the fit, and discouraging the unfit, to survive.” Thus he favored sterilizing the criminal and the feebleminded. He viewed the yellow and black peoples as backward and ignorant. Yet he did not embrace Social Darwinist dogma consistently, and increasingly he saw the state as protecting people, without “paternalism.”

  Nor was he likely to read the turgid works of Spencer or Sumner. He devoured books in great gulps, even while riding horseback or boating down streams, and his reading reflected both his catholicity and his love of battle. If he admired Francis Parkman and James Fenimore Cooper and Frederick Jackson Turner and anyone else who wrote about the West, he positively adored epics of fighting men. Naturally he abhorred critics of America, whether Frank Norris (“preposterous”) or Henry Adams and his Democracy (“mean and foolish”), and he cherished a par
ticular contempt for Henry James as a “very despicable creature, no matter how well equipped with all the minor virtues and graces, literary, artistic, and social.” Tolstoy he esteemed, as long as the Russian steered clear of unclean sex. Longfellow he found “simply sweet and wholesome” but Chaucer “needlessly filthy.”

  Still, it was difficult for Theodore Roosevelt to leave for long the subject of himself. If, as a family member remarked, “Uncle Ted” wanted to be the groom at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral, family friends also noted that he wrote a biography of Thomas Hart Benton that seemed mainly about Roosevelt, and a biography of Oliver Cromwell that was a “fine imaginative study of Cromwell’s qualifications for the Governorship of New York.” Henry Adams lampooned him as “pure act,” but Adams and other writers were nearer the mark when they compared his career to an express locomotive, speeding to an inevitable destination.

  The force of a locomotive, but to what end? Clearly, in Roosevelt’s case, the capture of power, but for what purpose? To satisfy his own ego? So many of his friends suspected; hence their reluctance to give him office and authority. Or to realize some nobler purpose? The answer was not wholly clear, even to Roosevelt.

  Like many other American leaders, he lusted for power but feared it. When two journalist friends asked him, during his days as police commissioner, whether he was working to be President, he jumped to his feet, ran around his desk, and with clenched fists and bared teeth advanced on the cowering men. “Don’t you dare ask me that!” he shouted. Then he quieted down and explained: if a man in a political job was reminded that he might be President, he would “lose his nerve” and not do the great things, the hard things, that required “all the courage, ability, work that I am capable of. ...”

  The quality that distinguished the Founders from a man like Roosevelt was their capacity to ground their concept of power in a settled and sophisticated philosophy of majority rule and minority liberties, of democratic representation and republican checks and balances, whereas Roosevelt was at most an instant philosopher who looked on power as an all-purpose weapon for all seasons. In 1901, he held an enormous potential for either progress or regression; the tinder of popular hopes and expectations, fears and hatreds, lay around him, ready to be ignited by that spark of furious energy that burned within him.

  Furious potential energy also glowed among the people. America was still a nation most sharply divided between the poor and the rich—a fact not lost on a Christian socialist poet, Edwin Markham, who for years had been haunted by a Millet painting, The Man with the Hoe, that he had seen reproduced in Scribner’s Magazine. During Christmas week 1898, he had gazed transfixed at the original painting, temporarily on exhibition in San Francisco, and returned to his home on the heights back of Oakland to write the most quoted poem of the time. Over and over his stanzas asked by whose handiwork had the Man created by Lord God been reduced to this “stolid and stunned” brother to the ox. And he closed with a warning that for some would haunt the century ahead:

  O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

  How will the Future reckon with this Man?

  How answer his brute question in that hour

  When whirlwinds and rebellion shake the world?

  How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—

  With those who shaped him to the thing he is—

  When this dumb Terror shall reply to God

  After the silence of the centuries?

  The Personal Uses of Power

  “I was a sickly and timid boy,” Theodore Roosevelt had written to an editor friend two weeks after the Governor’s election as Vice-President. He was trying to explain a report from his friend’s son at school that young Ted had “licked all the boys in his form.” Roosevelt had to admit that he, the father, was responsible in some measure for some of Ted’s “fighting proclivities.” And he strove to explain why. His own father, the Governor wrote, had taken great and loving care of him “when I was a wretched mite suffering acutely with asthma.” But he “most wisely refused to coddle me” and made him feel “that I was always to be both decent and manly, and that if I were manly nobody would long laugh at my being decent.”

  Nothing could have pleased Roosevelt more than to hear that his son, small and bespectacled as he himself had been, was a “fighter.” Yet he had to write this long defense of Ted because he was defending himself, and he was doing so because of his own feelings of ambivalence and even guilt over physical conquest. He disclaimed ambition and the pursuit of power even as he feverishly pursued them, amid a loud self-righteousness, a high-minded moralizing, and a stubborn independence gained from the Roosevelts’ social status, his Harvard education, and his background in independent Republicanism. And if any would deny that the ethic of the family and the playground could be applied to national or world politics, Roosevelt testified to the contrary.

  “It is exactly the same thing with history,” he continued in this same letter. “In most countries the ‘Bourgeoisie’—the moral, respectable, commercial, middle class—is looked upon with a certain contempt which is justified by their timidity and unwarlikeness. But the minute a middle class produces men like Hawkins and Frobisher on the seas, or men such as the average Union soldier in the civil war, it acquires the hearty respect from others which it merits.”

  As Roosevelt assumed the powers of the presidency, his unquenchable blaze of energy not only would illuminate his own addiction to the elixir of power; it would spotlight the more portentous question of presidential power in a representative republic, and ultimately of popular rule in a democracy. Roosevelt possessed high office by virtue of an assassin’s bullet, not of a majority vote. He held one position of power in a system of dispersed authority, in a society dominated by economic and social elites. The country waited and wondered. Would he keep McKinley’s Cabinet and policies? Would he wait for Congress to act? Would he let the Senate dictate Supreme Court appointments? Could he deal with the economic barons whose influence pervaded the whole political system?

  “The deep and damnable alliance between business and politics”—this challenge to public authority, and to his personal power, had increasingly preoccupied Theodore Roosevelt since his days in the legislature. During his navy days he had poured his “disgust” over this tie into the receptive ears of William Allen White, a young Kansas editor visiting Washington: so strong “was this young Roosevelt—hard-muscled, hard-voiced even when the voice cracked in falsetto, with hard, wriggling jaw muscles, and snapping teeth,” that he swept away any doubts White had held. As governor, Roosevelt had forced through the legislature a franchise tax bill making corporations holding public franchises “pay their just share of the public burden.” The actions of a single state, however, could hardly eliminate a national problem—the tightening concentration of economic control through pools, mergers, and holding companies—the “trust” problem.

  And now, as President, Roosevelt was itching to attack this problem, indeed spoiling for a fight. At the start, nonetheless, he seemed to move slowly. His first message to Congress, in December 1901, presented a program of “moderately positive action,” intended somehow to abolish abuses without abolishing combinations—a program so restrained and limited as to dishearten his more militant supporters and provoke the press, including Finley Peter Dunne, who spoke through his alter ego, Mr. Dooley, with his usual gentle but penetrating wit.

  “Th’ trusts are heejous monsthers built up be th’ inlightened intherprise iv th’ men that have done so much to advance progress in our beloved counthry,” Mr. Dooley represented the new President as saying. “On wan hand I wud stamp thim undher fut; on th’ other hand not so fast.”

  Roosevelt had reason to be cautious. If he confronted economic power in United States Steel, Standard Oil, and a host of other titanic corporations, he confronted only two miles away—at the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue—citadels of political power on Capitol Hill. Since the President tended to conceive of power in ter
ms of persons rather than institutions, he saw his opposition not as Senate, House, and judiciary, but as friendly or hostile leaders holding pivotal positions. Senate influence was clear; what was less clear was its relationship to “big business.”

  Some senators were big business. Leland Stanford of California had died in 1893, but others in the upper house moved as easily between the business and political worlds as the railroad magnate had. Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, born of a poor farm family, had made a fortune in business, married wealth, and long acted in the Senate with aplomb for sugar, banking, and other enterprises in which he held investments. Suave, humorous, unflappable, he was the leader of a small coterie of Old Guard senators, of equal weight, who came to be known as the Big Four. Often allied with this group were men who held close ties to big business but were above all professional politicians and proud of it. Matthew Quay had fought his way to domination of Pennsylvania politics, masterminded Benjamin Harrison’s presidential campaign in 1888, run the Republican-party, —and become his state’s high-tariff man in the Senate, while amassing one of the finest private libraries in the nation. Thomas Platt, longtime Republican boss and businessman, continued to compete with Roosevelt for party influence in the Empire State. Also remaining in the Senate was old Mark Hanna, the “man who had made McKinley.” He had disliked Roosevelt almost as much as he had loved and admired his fellow Ohioan. “Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one life between this madman and the Presidency?” he had raged when other Republican leaders balanced the ticket in 1900 and eased Teddy into vice-presidential impotence. When word had reached Hanna of McKinley’s death he had cried, “Now look— that damned cowboy is President of the United States!”