American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Over in the House, power relationships converged in the Speaker and the men around him, especially those in the financial committees. Thomas Reed of Maine, the most powerful Speaker in memory, had quit both the Speakership and the House in 1899 in disgust over McKinley’s expansionist foreign policies, but Joseph Cannon of Illinois, beaten in the Democratic sweep of 1890, would soon gain the office. And in its small Capitol chamber between the two houses, the Supreme Court continued to arbitrate key sectors of the nation’s economic life. These gray eminences, appointed by a string of conservative Presidents, lay in potential ambush against antibusiness policy. Regarding the Court, the new President enjoyed one consolation: to the first vacancy that arose he would appoint a man he admired, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—though only after clearing his choice with his own good friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, another baron of state and Capitol Hill politics.

  “Go slow,” the congressional Old Guard was urging Roosevelt, in Hanna’s words, and the President knew what they meant. Wall Street, the conservative press, and even his brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson, were urging him to be kind to business. Even before McKinley died, a letter had reached Roosevelt in Buffalo by special messenger from Robinson: “I must frankly tell you that there is a feeling in financial circles here that in case you become President you may change matters so as to upset the confidence ... of the business world.” Later, two good friends of the new President, George Perkins and Robert Bacon, had come to the White House to urge caution. But they “were arguing like attorneys for a bad case,” Roosevelt wrote Robinson. “I intend to be most conservative,” he went on, yet he would pursue his course. He not only knew the cause Perkins and Bacon represented, but the man.

  That man was J. Pierpont Morgan. Even Roosevelt had to grant that the financier’s “strong and dominant” personality made him worthy of his steel. With his great flaming red nose, piercing eyes, and bristling brows, he radiated a sense of power as commanding in the business world as Roosevelt’s would be in the political. He was indeed economic power incarnate. In the same year Roosevelt became President, Morgan had led a group of financiers in buying out Carnegie and other steel makers and forming the nation’s first billion-dollar corporation, a congeries of iron and steel works, ore holdings, and shipping properties. And during Roosevelt’s first weeks in the White House, the “First Lord of American Finance” had capped fifteen years of feverish railway acquisition by organizing the Northern Securities Company, combining the stock of the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, and the Burlington.

  Roosevelt could hardly have felt more directly challenged. Well he knew, as did the Old Guard, that his predecessors in the White House had instituted remarkably few actions against business combinations under the Sherman Act; that the most vigorous prosecution under the law had been not against a businessman but a labor leader, Eugene Debs; that a federal action against the “Sugar Trust,” which controlled 98 percent of the nation’s sugar-refining, had been repudiated by a conservative Supreme Court in a decision notable for its tortured reasoning. Roosevelt vowed that he would not be a McKinley or a Cleveland or a Harrison. To him this was a question of power—the power of the people and of the President who represented them. Not trusting even his Cabinet, in great secrecy he instructed Philander Knox, his holdover Attorney General, to move against Morgan and the whole Northern Securities crowd, alleging conspiracy in restraint of trade.

  Astonished by the move, Morgan seemed later to feel more hurt than intimidated. He had known Roosevelt for years. They were both gentlemen—New York gentlemen. Had not he, Morgan, endorsed young Roosevelt when he ran for the Assembly, contributed $10,000 through Platt when he ran for governor? To be sure, the young governor had sponsored a dubious corporation tax, but since then Theodore had seemed to be settling down. He had even as Vice-President-elect given a dinner for Morgan at the Union League Club—probably, Morgan may have (rightly) suspected, to show he was really a conservative in touch with the influential classes. And now this. There was only one way to settle such a difference between gentlemen. Morgan entrained for Washington and strode into the White House. After many handshakes the conversation reportedly went as follows:

  Morgan: “If we have done anything wrong, send your man”—the Attorney General— “to my man and they can fix it up.”

  Roosevelt: “That can’t be done.”

  Knox: “We don’t want to fix it up, we want to stop it.”

  Morgan: “Are you going to attack my other interests, the Steel Trust and the others?”

  Roosevelt: “Certainly not, unless we find out that in any case they have done something that we regard as wrong.”

  A most illuminating conversation, the President reflected after Morgan left. “Mr. Morgan could not help regarding me as a big rival operator, who either intended to ruin all his interests or else could be induced to come to an agreement to ruin none.” While the President turned to his next target, the beef trust, the Morgan group appealed to the federal courts.

  The President delivered an even sharper blow to the “arrogance” of the “big monied men” during an anthracite coal strike later in 1902. The coal operators, including the six railroad corporations that owned most of the mines, were balking at a wage increase, but even more they sought to break the power of the United Mine Workers union and its young president, John Mitchell. George F. Baer, head of a large Pennsylvania coal and iron company and the industry’s main spokesman, typified the bland arrogance of the owners when he uttered his unforgettable pronunciamento, “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.”

  As the strike continued, coal prices skyrocketed. Mayors and congressmen called for a settlement to avert a coalless winter. The specter loomed of children shivering in icy schoolrooms. At a White House conference, Mitchell said that he would accept an arbitration tribunal if the other side would, but the operators indulged in such denunciations of union anarchists and criminals that Roosevelt said later that only one man behaved like a gentleman and “that man was not I,” but Mitchell. Roosevelt was in a quandary. He would not call out federal troops, as Cleveland had done, but the operators still would not budge.

  In desperation, the President let word filter into Wall Street that he was preparing to order federal seizure of the mines; and he put conciliatory feelers out to the House of Morgan through his friend Secretary of War Elihu Root. The financier and the Cabinet member worked out an arbitration proposal on Morgan’s yacht. There was a last-minute hitch when the operators refused to accept a union man for the arbitration board, but the President adroitly solved this problem by placing the Grand Chief Conductor of the Order of Railway Conductors on the board under the title “sociologist.” In the end, the arbitrators granted the workers a nine-hour day and a 10 percent pay increase—but not UMW recognition.

  The President’s business foes charged that he was “playing politics” with his eye constantly cocked on the 1904 election. They were quite correct. Roosevelt indeed had been running for President since virtually the day he entered politics. In his brief half-year as Vice-President, he had begun maneuvering for the job, and he had been the most likely man to succeed McKinley if only because he would have fought the hardest. McKinley’s assassination simply speeded up the process.

  Halfway through his term, with scalps from the Northern Securities case and the coal strike hanging from his belt, the President seemed to move toward the center of the GOP. He pulled back on his antitrust campaign, adopted a moderate position on the tariff and other simmering issues, placated the congressional Old Guard through word and deed, put out conciliatory feelings to Morgan and his people. He played ordinary old-fashioned presidential politics, courting blacks, labor, ethnic leaders, and other elements of the big Republican party coalition, exploiting patronage to the hilt, steering clear of
state factional fights. He played his own brand of ruthless politics, as he coldly cut off Mark Hanna’s patronage base in the South, falsely denied receiving large campaign contributions from Wall Street, and even helped delay the admission of Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico because of the likelihood that they would vote Democratic in the 1904 election. When Hanna, already beaten, died from typhoid fever a few months before the convention, Roosevelt’s nomination was guaranteed. And when the Democrats, returning to their old strategy of the Northeast-South axis, chose an upright but conservative and colorless New York judge, Alton B. Parker, for President, Roosevelt’s reelection was guaranteed. He won in a sweep.

  Roosevelt had camouflaged his campaign shenanigans in “boorishly self-righteous” protestations, in William Harbaugh’s words. Perhaps it was because of some sense of “power guilt,” some fear of power as an aphrodisiac, that on election night he made his fateful pronouncement, “Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.”

  But he would exercise power while he had it, especially against power in hands he considered irresponsible. Inevitably he returned to the challenge of big business. He felt, according to John Blum, “that the central issue of his time pivoted on the control of business because this control determined conduct.... He feared not the size but the policies of big business.” And of all the sectors of big business, none concerned him more than the railroads. “The question of transportation,” he stated in his annual message to Congress in December 1905, “lies at the root of all industrial success,” and the revolution in transportation during the last half-century lay at the heart of the growth of industry. What was needed was “to develop an orderly system” through “the gradually increased exercise of the right of efficient Government control.”

  Now a seasoned political leader after eight years in high offices, Roosevelt followed the Machiavellian advice to combine the prudence of the fox with the might of the lion in attacking the citadels of railroad power. Within a few weeks of election he launched suits against railroads and other corporations for giving and receiving rebates. The most powerful roads— the Burlington, the Great Northern, the Chicago & Alton—were indicted. An official report, Roosevelt declared, demonstrated that the Standard Oil Company had profited “enormously” from secret rail rates. Roosevelt focused on the issue of rebates, which had been outlawed in the Elkins Act of 1903 but still remained endemic in the railroad industry.

  Roosevelt also favored tariff revision, but he viewed this issue as so subordinate to curbing the railroad barons that he used tariff reform as a bogey to frighten the Republican Old Guard, then in effect withdrew his tariff card in order to gain more leverage on the railroad issue. Meantime he put steady pressure on Congress to grant the ICC authority to set maximum railroad rates. Greeted with enthusiasm by shippers, farmers, and travelers, especially in the West, rate regulation passed through the House easily but ran head-on into the Republican Old Guard in the Senate. Most of the conservative senators, not willing to defy public opinion, favored the Hepburn regulatory bill but argued for proposals to broaden the power of the judiciary to review the ICC’s rate-making and thus in effect cripple the commission’s effectiveness.

  This notion of broad court review touched a most sensitive nerve in Theodore Roosevelt, for it revived a painful memory. When, in 1902, he was considering Oliver Wendell Holmes as his first and stellar appointee to the Supreme Court, the President had written Lodge that he liked Holmes’s personality, his Americanism, his record as a gallant Civil War soldier, his earlier pro-labor decisions as a Massachusetts judge. In the low and ordinary sense of “partisan” and “politician,” Roosevelt went on to Lodge, a justice should be neither. “But in the higher sense, in the proper sense, he is not in my judgment fitted for the position unless he is a party man, a constructive statesman,” who could work with “his fellow statesmen” in the other branches of government. Chief Justice Marshall had been that sort of man, Chief Justice Taney a “curse to our national life” because of his narrow view of federal power. “Now I should like to know that Judge Holmes was in entire sympathy with your views and mine….”

  He would not put on the Court someone who was not “sane and sound” on such matters. Lodge had evidently reassured the President. But when the Court passed on Northern Securities in 1904 and supported the Administration’s trust-busting by a margin of one vote, Holmes had dissented. Roosevelt greeted the news with indignation: “I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that,” he was reported to have exclaimed—the same judgment he had made of McKinley on an earlier “backbone” issue.

  Now, in 1906, to push the railroad rate bill through the Senate, Roosevelt had to thread his way between Aldrich’s group demanding broad review—even Lodge came out against federal rate-making—and a band of senators, headed by Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, demanding the addition to the bill of a most controversial provision for the evaluation of railroad properties. In a desperation effort, Aldrich turned over floor leadership on the bill to one of Roosevelt’s mortal enemies, Democrat Benjamin R. Tillman of South Carolina, the old populist and outspoken racist. In a virtuoso display of personal politics Roosevelt flirted with Tillman, but pulled back when Pitchfork Ben could not carry the Democratic caucus; then TR returned to a formula of ambiguous language on the issue of court review; and finally accepted a bill without provisions for physical valuation of the railroads, to La Follette’s chagrin.

  The final version of the bill, however compromised, was a notable victory for the President. The Hepburn Act empowered an enlarged Interstate Commerce Commission to fix maximum railroad rates; extended the commission’s jurisdiction to include sleeping-car companies, ferries, bridges, and terminal facilities; and made its orders binding on carriers pending a court decision, thereby placing the burden of proof on the carrier. Nestled in the bill also was a provision for ICC control of interstate oil pipelines—a provision that could only have been aimed at the Standard Oil Company and its old master, John D. Rockefeller.

  Foreign Policy with the TR Brand

  With teeth clenched and pince-nez flashing, Roosevelt would stride round his office, dictating letters; “The Colombia people proved absolutely impossible to deal with. They are not merely corrupt. They are governmentally utterly incompetent. They wanted to blackmail us and blackmail the French company ... in spite of the plainest warnings they persisted in slitting their own throats from ear to ear.”

  The President often shouted out paragraphs, punctuating them with fierce gestures as though he were haranguing a crowd. But, in the next moment, he might sit on the edge of his desk, feet dangling idly, and continue in a casual or ironic tone: “I am not as sure as you are that the only virtue we need exercise is patience. I think it is well worth considering whether we had better warn those cat-rabbits that great though our patience has been, it can be exhausted.” Sometimes he intermixed cool reason and savage denunciation, causing his secretaries alternately to marvel and to quail: “At present I feel that there are two alternatives. (1) To take up Nicaragua; (2) in some shape or way to interfere when it becomes necessary so as to secure the Panama route without further dealing with the foolish and homicidal corruptionists in Bogotá. I am not inclined to have any further dealings whatever with those Bogotá people.”

  Not since the days of Andrew Jackson, it seemed, had an American President so strongly put his personal mark on the nation’s foreign policy. Teddy Roosevelt brought to diplomacy a quick temper, unquenchable energy, a rigid moral code, and a vocabulary of curses that Old Hickory would have admired. Yet at the same time Roosevelt could be charming, humorous, and a patient negotiator. His intensely personal style surprised and occasionally flustered members of the staid diplomatic establishment. “We drove out to the Rock Creek,” wrote British Ambassador Sir Mortimer Durand of one interview with the President; “he then plunged down … and made me struggle through bushes and over rocks for two hours and a half, at an impossib
le speed, till I was so done that I could hardly stand.” Roosevelt talked nonstop, much to the relief of the winded Englishman.

  In an age when diplomacy-was still a leisurely ritual practiced by gentlemanly initiates, Roosevelt was eager to charge straight toward his goals with all the force of a locomotive. His barrages of letters, disregard of proper form, public gestures of friendship and defiance, all strained tempers from Caracas to St. Petersburg—and occasionally produced results.

  The goal that Roosevelt eyed most impatiently was the building of a canal to link the Atlantic and Pacific. Schemes for digging a waterway across Central America had been a fixture in U.S. diplomacy since the 1840s, when the United States acquired California and Oregon, thus becoming a two-ocean power. The need for a canal was underlined during the war with Spain, when warships from the Pacific coast had to steam 14,700 miles, all the way around South America, to join in the fighting off Cuba.

  During McKinley’s Administration, Secretary of State John Hay had already begun trying to clear away obstacles to the project. The first barrier was the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, a fifty-year-old agreement that bound America not to construct a Central American canal without the consent and participation of Britain. Hay persuaded the British to grant the United States exclusive control in exchange for a pledge not to fortify the waterway. But the Senate, inflamed by anti-British rhetoric in the election campaign of 1900, rejected the proposed pact. Hay was livid. “I felt sure that no one out of a mad house could fail to see that the advantages were all on our side,” he wrote. “But I underrated the power of ignorance and spite acting upon cowardice.” The negotiations collapsed; then McKinley died and TR became President.