American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  To Roosevelt, the cure for all this was not to break big business down into small, inefficient units through trust-busting, but strong, steady, central federal control, with big business serving at best as junior partner. But there was a fateful contradiction in his views. How could a political and governmental system as deeply corrupted as the American exert effective and responsible control over the corporations whose influence reached into every sector of American life? No one had excoriated that system more sharply than Roosevelt. In this very special message, he had denounced politicians as well as editors and lawyers who were “purchased” by big business and were “but puppets who move as the strings are pulled.” How could he propose putting corporations under the control of legislators who tended to be either radical extremists or corporate pawns, under judges who, on the one hand, “truckled” to the mob or, on the other, failed to “stop the abuses of the criminal rich”? If neither legislature nor judiciary could do the job, who could?

  Roosevelt’s answer to this question was of course the executive branch, the presidency, or really himself. He had been vigilant in fighting off what he viewed as excessive judicial or congressional control of policy-making bureaucrats. Yet he could hardly contend that the small, patronage-ridden, graft-tainted executive branch could handle the enormous task of corporate control. The most potentially powerful national organization that might deal with collective corporate power on at least equal terms was the Republican party, with its own roots in virtually every locality outside the South. But the GOP, with its hundreds of competing leaders in Congress, the executive, and the states, represented inchoate strength at best, and Roosevelt had done little with it other than use it to protect and enhance his personal authority.

  This left the presidency as the only feasible means of corporate control, and no one had greater confidence in the integrity, wisdom, and determination of Theodore Roosevelt than Theodore Roosevelt. Yet he knew that “one-man” presidential power was anathema to most Americans. The Revolutionists of 1775–83 had revolted in large part against executive “tyranny”; the constitution makers of 1787–89 had hemmed in the chief executive with a host of checks and balances; some of the great moments of American history had seen “liberty-loving” legislators and citizens pitted against governors and Presidents. Not since Lincoln had a President exploited his constitutional and extraconstitutional authority as intensively as had Roosevelt, or made fuller use of his presidential powers of publicity—“the bully pulpit”—and the arts of bargaining, rewarding, punishing, conniving, co-opting, persuading, threatening, manipulating, cooperating, of the strategy of almost indiscriminate use of the carrot and the stick.

  Lincoln had civil war as an excuse; Roosevelt had no war. But he had a temperament, and this was the problem. Increasingly, during his years in the White House, he exhibited the kind of volatility, emotionalism, anger, and overreactiveness, and indulged in the type of self-aggrandizement through personal politicking and policy-making, that had always worried prudent republicans about executive excess. At a Gridiron Club dinner in April 1906, he had suddenly and unaccountably turned on his journalistic reform friends and foes by branding them as “muckrakers,” meaning the person who “never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck-rake” and hence became “not an incitement to good” but “one of the most potent forces for evil.” At a later Gridiron Club affair, Roosevelt castigated senators to their faces on their lack of respect for the presidential office, only to be handed a senatorial lecture in return on presidential respect for the Senate; then he stalked out.

  Some of his aberrations seemed more quixotic than dangerous. He campaigned for “simplified spelling” and even ordered the government printer to use “nite” and “thoro” until the House of Representatives instructed the printer otherwise. He lashed out at “nature-fakirs” who imputed human qualities to animals; it was not the sort of thing a President should do, he admitted, but “I … proved unable to contain myself.” Neither did one of the “fakirs,” who denied that Roosevelt was a naturalist: “Every time Mr. Roosevelt gets near the heart of a wild thing he invariably puts a bullet through it.”

  But the most poignant and significant of Roosevelt’s aberrations was the “Brownsville affair.” A gang of black soldiers quartered near this Texas town conducted a wild midnight raid in which a white bartender was killed. The President ordered the incident investigated, but when no one in the whole black regiment would talk, he directed that the entire complement be “discharged without honor” and “forever barred from enlistment.” This punishment of 160 men—including six Medal of Honor winners— without a trial, military or civil, left a stain on the record of a man who had brooked Southern fury by having Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House, appointed or reappointed worthy blacks to federal positions over much white opposition, and in general tried to accord blacks as much recognition and status as the political situation allowed. All was forgotten during the furor over Brownsville.

  To the critics of Roosevelt’s abuse of executive power, he had one compelling answer; a President did not govern for life, he had only three or four years to do his work, and then had to yield. And Roosevelt’s term was to end March 4, 1909. The President had long since selected William Howard Taft as the best candidate to succeed him, and now he stuck to that commitment despite his conviction—which he did not conceal—that he himself could have the nomination by merely lifting his finger. Taft would indeed serve as a check on Rooseveltian power, for he dropped many of Roosevelt’s people, pursued an intensive trust-busting policy in which Roosevelt had little faith, and allied himself with the conservative elements of the Republican party in Congress and country that Roosevelt had battled.

  All this lay in the future. For the moment, Roosevelt could leave office knowing that he had been a vigorous and effective leader. If he had not solved the enigma of how a representative republic deals with concentrated economic power, at least he had sharply posed the issue and offered some answers. If he had not solved the questions of the role of strong leadership in a democracy, of the role of party in stabilizing and empowering leadership, of the powerful veto power left in the hands of the Congress and of the judiciary, at least he had made people think about these questions.

  And possibly he had helped avert tumult and rebellion. After Mr. Dooley had told his friend Hennessey that he was reading so much about graft that he had to lock “th’ cash dhrawer” at night, Hennessey claimed to have even sniffed a revolution. Mr. Dooley hastened to reassure him:

  “Th’ noise ye hear is not th’ first gun iv a rivolution. It’s on’y th’ people iv th’ United States batin’ a carpet.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The Cauldron of Leadership

  THE RISING WINTER STORM outside seemed hardly to chill the spirits of a small group gathered in the White House on the eve of March 4, 1909. The next day William Howard Taft would be inaugurated as twenty-seventh President of the United States, and President Roosevelt had invited the President-elect and Mrs. Taft to stay overnight in the home they would occupy for at least four years. Around the table in the State Dining Room the talk ran fast and free, punctuated by Roosevelt’s high-pitched chortling and Taft’s huge booming laughter.

  The two Republican leaders had much to celebrate. Their party had won all but two presidential elections since the Civil War. It had turned back the spellbinding Bryan three times. Republicans utterly dominated the legislatures of a swath of Northern states. The party had produced a series of leaders ranging from the safe and solid to the statesmanlike and even innovative. Symbolizing the power and continuity of the Grand Old Party on this very evening was the presence of Elihu Root, McKinley’s Secretary of War, Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, now with six years ahead as senator from New York.

  Yet all was not well that March evening under the bright chandeliers of the dining room. Taft was apprehensive about being President; he had wanted an administrative and especially a judicial career
. He admired Roosevelt’s political skill and sheer energy but had neither the desire nor the ability to become a strenuous President in the Teddy Roosevelt mold. He agreed with virtually all of Roosevelt’s policies, but not always with the rambunctious way the President had pursued them; and, like other party leaders, he had been worried by Roosevelt’s sharp turn to the left in the year or two just past. As for Roosevelt, he liked “Will,” this big hearty jovial fellow who had served him so well in the Cabinet and provided warm personal encouragement. In endorsing Taft, he had said that rarely had two public men “ever been so much at one in all the essentials of their beliefs and practices.” He expected that his chosen heir would carry on his policies. But he had doubts about Taft’s resolution and commitment.

  “He’s all right,” the President said to Mark Sullivan when the reporter had stopped in earlier that day. “He means well and he’ll do his best. But he’s weak. They’ll get around him. They’ll”—the President put his shoulder against Sullivan’s and pushed— “they’ll lean against him.” But neither the new nor the retiring President expressed his misgivings to the other. In the morning, as they sat down to breakfast, a heavy snow was falling outside, and Roosevelt exclaimed to Taft that he had known there would be a blizzard when he went out, but it would be over as soon as “I can do no further harm to the Constitution.” Taft said: “It is my storm. I always knew it would be a cold day when I became President of the United States.” Within a year, friends of the two men were drawing them apart. Within two years, they would become mortal political enemies, and within three, each would have killed the other politically. Neither man had expected such a fight. Neither man wanted it. Their gunplay at the high noon of Republicanism emerged from conflicts of personality, economic interests, political institutions, and—above all—ideology.

  Taft, TR, and the Two Republican Parties

  Taft proposed to be a party unifier and moderate. He was well aware that the Grand Old Party embraced two sets of traditions, leaderships, loyalties, and doctrines. But even Taft, a shrewd appraiser, could not fully comprehend how wide was the gulf between the party regulars, under their conservative Old Guard leadership, and the progressives or reformers or insurgents, as they were variously called, carrying on the great mugwump tradition of part of the party. Nor could he see that this gulf was deepening when he entered the White House, even apart from any threat from Theodore Roosevelt, who was leaving for a long trip to stalk lions in Africa and potentates in Europe.

  For a time, Taft followed a wavering middle course between the party regulars and progressives. He planned to continue the Square Deal policies, to ask Congress for tariff revision downward, to administer existing reform legislation, such as antitrust, more tenaciously—though less flamboyantly—than Roosevelt had. On the other hand, he kept some distance from the progressive leadership; he cramped his exercise of authority because of his deeply held views as to constitutional limitations on presidential power; and he filled his Cabinet with corporation lawyers, conspicuously replacing the Roosevelt men. And all the while, he sought to propitiate the absent Teddy and his present friends.

  Taft’s middle way was doomed from the start. He was dealing not simply with two wings of the party, which could be kept in harness through long accepted ways of distributing patronage and moderating policy; he was confronting two diverging structures—leadership-followership structures. The Old Guard leadership was rooted in the regular party organizations stretching across the North, in the federal and state officials who lived off patronage, in the malapportioned and gerrymandered state legislatures that overrepresented conservative rural areas and elected standpatters to the United States Senate, in the party offices and committee chairmanships in Congress. The Old Guard regulars had consolidated their power year after year because of the huge majorities they had rolled up over Democratic candidates, and during the first years of the new century they were still at the apogee of their power.

  The progressive leadership spoke for a new breed of mugwumps, entrenched in some states and districts, especially in the West, but emerging mainly from the nation’s growing professional and business elements both East and West. Most of them born and bred Republicans, they had often kept their distance from country populists, silverites, and labor groups, but many still passionately embraced the old causes of political purity and mugwump reform. By 1909, this was the party of the Square Deal, headed by Roosevelt and his reform leaders in Washington and the states.

  The stiffest challenge to Taft’s middle way was posed by the progressives’ attack on Cannonism and Aldrichism. In the House, Joe Cannon, after six years in the speakership, had established an autocratic leadership that rivaled Czar Reed’s of old. A bantam rooster of a man, as coarse in manner as he was reactionary in doctrine, Cannon controlled the committee system through his power to hand out choice committee memberships. Taft disliked both Cannon and Cannonism, and might have heeded the rumblings of George Norris and other progressives who planned to strip the Speaker of his appointing powers. But the President crumbled when Cannon and Senator Nelson Aldrich warned him to his face that a defeat for Cannon would jeopardize the President’s program, especially tariff revision.

  Rather, they offered him a deal: if the President stood by Cannon, the Speaker would help carry out the Republican platform. Taft agreed, to the consternation of the insurgents; soon he was out on the hustings, embracing Aldrich politically and Cannon literally. Then he had to stand by helplessly as the Speaker stripped rebel congressmen of choice committee assignments and continued to promote his own brand of Republicanism.

  Later Roosevelt would attack Taft for his “bungling leadership,” which Roosevelt blamed for splitting the party. Taft was indeed inept in dealing with other politicians, especially progressive leaders. But he was no fool. He simply lacked the personal qualities necessary to carry out his strategy of “party unity.” To maintain links with both wings, to play one group against the other, to avoid alienating either side for good, called for rocklike self-confidence, unflagging energy, a firm direction, and a willingness to exploit and even expand presidential power. These strengths were not Taft’s. He lacked the steady willpower and purpose that enables strong leaders, with all their twists and turns, to move toward their goals; rather, as Secretary of Commerce and Labor Charles Nagel remarked, Taft had only the stubbornness of the uncertain man.

  He was indolent, too; his personal political voltage was not high and steady enough to energize the circuits of power leading out of the White House. Doubtless, part of the problem was his sheer corpulence, though by a mighty effort he had reduced his weight from 326 to 250 pounds. He believed that the Constitution restricted presidential power, and this inhibited him from “interfering” in the bill-making process during the early crucial stages on the Hill. He was too high-minded to use some of Roosevelt’s blustering, bullying methods; and he lacked what Mowry called Roosevelt’s catlike political touch.

  The more Taft succumbed to the Old Guard embrace, the more he was caught in the network of obligations and pressures surrounding the congressional party. He became more psychologically dependent on the Old Guard too. “When you and Senator Aldrich are both absent from the Senate,” the President wrote to the extreme right-wing Senator Hale of Maine in June 1910, “I yearn for the presence of an old parliamentary hand.” To Aldrich he wrote: “I long for your presence.” He was on such good terms with the Old Guard leadership that when Chauncey Depew in a jocular mood put his hand on the President’s huge stomach and asked, “What are you going to name it when it comes?” Taft shot back, “Well, if it is a boy, I’ll call it William; if it’s a girl, I’ll call it Theodora; but if it turns out to be just wind, I’ll call it Chauncey!”

  Taft’s marriage of convenience with the Old Guard helped bring him some major legislative victories during his first two years in the White House. Congress passed a controversial tariff act which Taft absurdly termed the best bill ever passed by the Republican party; the Mann-El
kins Act placing telephone and telegraph companies under the Interstate Commerce Commission; a postal savings bank law; and the Mann Act prohibiting interstate transportation of women for immoral purposes. But the more Taft compromised with the regulars to pass his bills, the more he frayed the frail cords still connecting him with the progressives.

  Theodore Roosevelt returned home in June 1910. He was fifty-one, restless, and jobless. He was apprehensive about Taft and the political situation, about himself and his ability to resist the siren call of ambition and power. His reception in New York—a welcome by the battleship South Carolina, a twenty-one gun salute followed by bugle calls, a reunion with his kinsfolk, including his young niece Eleanor and her husband Franklin, and a monster parade up Broadway headed by Rough Riders—boosted his self-esteem without slaking his ambition. And as he settled back into Oyster Bay life and met with old political cronies, his moral indignation began to accelerate.

  Even while in Africa, runners had brought him news of Taft’s dalliance with the Old Guard. Roosevelt’s United States Forester, Gifford Pinchot, had intercepted the former President in Paris with a long bill of complaints from outraged progressives. In particular, Pinchot had filled his ears about the most sensational political issue that had boiled up during Roosevelt’s absence—Taft’s sacking of Pinchot after the forester publicly attacked Taft’s Interior Secretary, Richard A. Ballinger, for harming conservation in order to aid corporate interests. Republican regulars, including Roosevelt’s old and close friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, urged on him that any man who publicly attacked his superior was asking to be fired, but to Roosevelt it was a moral issue.

  For a time, Roosevelt, despite his rising feeling, tried to follow a moderate and middle way. He could not forget his longtime friendship with good old Will, and he preferred not to antagonize the rank-and-file Republican regulars; yet progressive leaders were pressing him to move against the Old Guard. He tried to be a “regular with a conscience,” staying in touch with regulars like Lodge and with Taft, whom he placed in that category, while pouring out his progressive views in speeches and correspondence. But his heart was no longer in moderation or centrism. He had never had a more unpleasant summer, he told Root.