The loyal Dolliver, who had justifiably assumed he would lead the fight, was humiliated. Worse still, the president confronted a truly awkward dilemma. During Roosevelt’s first term, the hot-tempered, foul-mouthed, and slovenly Tillman, known as “Pitchfork Ben,” had engaged in a fistfight with a colleague on the Senate floor. In the aftermath, Roosevelt had publicly withdrawn Tillman’s invitation to a state dinner, incurring the senator’s abiding animosity. The two men had not spoken since. Aldrich calculated that with the irascible Tillman as floor leader, Roosevelt’s influence on the legislative process would be severely diminished. The press agreed. Roosevelt now suffered the indignity, declared the Charleston (South Carolina) News and Courier, of seeing his signal legislation “confided to the care of a man who is not only not of his own party, but one who entertains a personal antagonism toward him.” The president’s “old enemies” in the Republican Party, the Indianapolis News observed, seemed determined not only to defeat his legislation but also to “show at the same time that the President is not after all a formidable figure.”
In the following weeks, pro-railroad Republicans took to the floor, proposing a range of amendments designed to shatter the commission’s authority. They were particularly intent upon a provision granting the courts broad power to relitigate the commission’s revised rates, essentially leaving the pro-railroad judiciary as the true arbiter of rates.
Roosevelt nevertheless remained hopeful that the Hepburn bill would emerge intact, trusting that “public opinion may be relied upon to keep the Senate straight.” By the spring of 1906, public outrage over the railroads had indeed reached a crescendo. Hundreds of magazines and newspapers followed every aspect of the debate, clearly outlining what was at stake. These publications, one editorialist observed, were “never better,” and “never more influential,” than in their joint effort to foster an informed public opinion “compounded of knowledge, discrimination and judgment.”
In March, Baker published the most consequential piece in his railroad series, an exposé of the techniques the railroads employed to malign and falsify the Hepburn bill. Acknowledging the right of the railroads, “in common with all other citizens, to present facts and arguments to the people,” Baker proceeded to reveal the multifarious devices of the railroads’ lavishly funded propaganda campaign. A team of agents determined whether newspaper editors were “good” or “bad” on the issue of the railroads, then distributed free passes to those adjudged favorably inclined, while subjecting those deemed unfriendly to underhanded personal attacks. In one instance, a former city newspaperman was hired to write a pamphlet posing as a representative of farmers against regulation. In another scheme, small newspapers were supplied with free reading supplements seeded with attacks on Roosevelt’s railroad legislation. Subsidized pamphlets spread the rumor that if railroad discriminations were outlawed, separate Jim Crow cars for Negroes would be forbidden. If all such “ordinary devices” to co-opt the press failed, then the railroads purchased newspapers outright.
Baker’s description of this onslaught of covert railroad propaganda acquainted more than half a million men and women with the true methods of the anti-regulatory campaign. “It is a little startling,” one magazine editorialized, “to read how the railroad combines first to rob the country of millions, and then to use a portion of this fund stolen from the people to corrupt the sources of information and thus try to perpetuate their robbery through a blinded public opinion.” New subscriptions and letters commending Baker poured in to McClure’s. A Mississippi farmer wrote that “after plowing all day,” he and his boys had read the entire piece aloud. If he had the funds, he told Baker, he would send a copy to every family in the country. “Every member of Congress,” he added, “should have a chance to read this able presentation of the question between the people and the railroads.” One Wisconsin resident telegraphed McClure’s that he considered Baker’s article “worth all the publication will cost me for the next ten years.” The sensational article heightened public demand for regulation, much as the publication of the Standard Oil telegrams had done during the battle over the Bureau of Corporations.
To the dismay of Senator Aldrich, who had counted on Roosevelt’s pride to prevent any overture to the man he loathed, the president soon made it clear that he “was of course entirely willing to see Mr. Tillman personally,” or meet with any other party empowered to act on Tillman’s behalf. “I did not care a rap about Mr. Tillman’s getting credit for the bill, or having charge of it,” he later recalled. “I was delighted to go with him or with anyone else just so long as he was traveling my way.” Still unwilling to set foot in the White House, Tillman asked former senator William E. Chandler to serve as intermediary.
After a series of White House sessions with Chandler, Roosevelt agreed to support a Tillman-endorsed amendment that limited judicial review to a simple determination of whether the commission’s rate revision procedures were fair. By moving “to the left of his original position,” the president hoped to fashion a majority comprising both Republican progressives and Democratic populists. “The fight on the rate bill is growing hot,” Roosevelt told Kermit, explaining his ongoing efforts to save it: “I am now trying to see if I cannot get it through in the form I want by the aid of some fifteen or twenty Republicans added to most of the Democrats.”
“As for Tillman,” William Allen White wrote in the Emporia Gazette, “no member of the President’s own party could have pressed the bill more vigorously at all times. He demanded that all other state business be stopped until a rate bill was passed, and he kept the senate an hour earlier and an hour later than it was accustomed to sit.” Handed the greatest responsibility of his career, Benjamin Tillman had determined, he said, to “pocket my pride and lay aside my just indignation” in order to aid the president in securing “a good railroad law.” No better illustration of “the mysterious ways of Providence and politics” could be found, The Washington Post commented, than the alliance of “the pitchfork and the big stick.”
Roosevelt would gladly have signed Tillman’s more radical revision of the Hepburn bill if his new coalition of progressive Republicans and Democrats had produced sufficient numbers to override the conservative Republican bloc. But in the end, a number of southern senators balked, deeming the bill a violation of states’ rights, and Tillman could not deliver enough Democratic votes to make it work. Roosevelt was left with no choice but to revert to the original Hepburn bill, which had simply assumed the constitutional guarantee of due process. Despite such setbacks, Roosevelt remained satisfied with this formulation. “The great object,” he insisted, “was to avoid the adoption of any of the broad amendments.”
But in order to forge a majority on the original bill, he would have to mollify moderate Republicans who feared that unless the courts were directly vested with judicial review, the bill might be held unconstitutional. To win over this reluctant bloc, Roosevelt called on two Old Guard senators, William Allison of Iowa and John Spooner of Wisconsin. Both had long been staunch lieutenants to Nelson Aldrich, and both were assumed to be supporters of his bid to emasculate the bill. The political landscape was shifting, however; in Iowa and Wisconsin, the momentum to regulate the railroads had reached a frantic pitch and the two senators understood that ignoring their constituents on this issue would put their Senate seats in grave jeopardy.
Allison and Spooner’s unexpected cooperation with Roosevelt made headlines. Two of the original Big Four, this “little knot of men” had ruled the upper branch in harmony for years. Nelson Aldrich found the break with Allison especially painful, for he relied upon Allison’s masterful knowledge of parliamentary procedure. “Everybody is now watching with eagerness to see which of the two great Senate chieftains will demonstrate superior generalship,” commented the New York Times. From his post at the Emporia Gazette, William Allen White noted that Aldrich appeared befuddled over the fact that he could “neither control the legislation of the upper branch affecting financial in
terests nor count upon the men he regarded as allies.” This rupture in the Senate oligarchy was widely regarded as “symbolic of the new popular alignment all over the country in preparation for the coming contest between the forces of amalgamated capital and those of popular will and sentiment.”
Straightaway, Allison devoted himself to fashioning his own amendment to the Hepburn bill, which stipulated the right to judicial review of ICC rulings—but cleverly leaving the scope of that review undetermined. The ambiguous language of the Allison amendment allowed the senator to forge a majority. Although Roosevelt had hoped to limit the court’s review to a determination of procedural fairness, he recognized that this compromise provided the only chance of passage. Once the amendment was accepted, Roosevelt later told White, “Aldrich and his people really threw up their hands.” Their chance to obtain a broad review provision had been eliminated. Indeed, when the Hepburn bill finally reached the Senate floor for a vote, Aldrich and a number of his older colleagues were noticeably absent. The bill passed by an overwhelming vote on June 29, 1906.
“No given measure and no given set of measures will work a perfect cure for any serious evil,” Roosevelt reminded critics of the compromised bill. Though flawed, the president maintained that the Hepburn Act represented “the longest step ever yet taken in the direction of solving the railway rate problem.” The legislation not only brought the railroads under federal control; it “lifted the idea of nationality to a point never before reached.” The authority granted the Interstate Commerce Commission became clearer in the months that followed as the first case involving rate revision reached the Supreme Court. By declining to review the specific facts, the High Court defined the scope of judicial review in favor of Roosevelt and the progressives.
The president enjoyed widespread credit for the passage of the bill, exhibiting, one Democratic newspaper remarked, “the politician’s gift of knowing when to fight, and, as well, when to surrender.” Roosevelt had sought a Republican majority for the original Hepburn bill; when his efforts were subverted by the leader of his own party, he had reached out to the Democrats; when that failed to produce a majority, he returned to his original provision, altered only slightly by Allison’s amendment. Even Benjamin Tillman grudgingly acknowledged that “but for the work of Theodore Roosevelt, we would not have had any bill at all.”
However astute Roosevelt proved in dealing with Congress, he would doubtless have failed to secure a meaningful bill without a galvanized public behind him. The combined efforts of Baker and his fellow journalists had generated a widespread demand for reform. “Congress might ignore a president,” the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Weekly Sentinel observed, “but could not ignore a president and the people.”
A letter discovered among Baker’s papers testifies to the impact of investigative journalism on the passage of the Hepburn Bill: “It is through writers like yourself, Mr. Steffens and Miss Tarbell that the country as a whole is beginning to understand. In the future your influence on the life of the Republic will be held to be greater than that of the men who now rule our Senate and our House.” Baker had reflected on their accomplishment and his growing confidence in the nation’s future in a January letter to his father: “This crusade against special privilege in high places is real war, a real revolution,” he wrote. “We may not have to go as far as you did, when you fought out the slavery question with powder & blood. At the present, when any of us is wounded we bleed nothing but ink. But ink may serve the purpose.”
UPTON SINCLAIR, THE YOUNG NOVELIST and friend of Ray Baker and Lincoln Steffens, helped instigate the next battle in the crusade against special privilege. Sinclair thought very highly of the dramatic factual stories in McClure’s that mobilized public opinion but reproached his comrades for failing to endorse the panacea of socialism. At the age of twenty-four, Sinclair had concluded with certainty that socialism was the answer to the country’s ills; his experience of reading a socialist pamphlet in 1902, he later said, “was like the falling down of prison walls about my mind.”
Thus, unlike the members of the McClure team, Sinclair was not struggling to discover remedies for specific ills. “Perhaps it’ll surprise you,” he wrote to Baker during the railroad struggle, “but we socialists don’t agree with your rebate agony. The quicker the concentration of wealth is completed the better it suits us. . . . The point all you reforming folks seem to miss is that you are locking the stable doors after the horse is gone. The trusts are formed. The big shipper has got the money. Also with the money he’s bought the government.”
By twenty-five, Sinclair had already published two obscure novels when the editor of a popular socialist weekly, Appeal to Reason, offered to pay $500 for the right to publish his next fiction project in serial form. He quickly chose the “wage slavery” of industrial-era workers as his subject. The young socialist decided to set his novel in the Chicago stockyards, where an unsuccessful strike by workers in the meatpacking plants had aroused his sympathy. Dazzled by the brilliance of Frank Norris and a small cadre of writers devoted to realism, Sinclair took up residence in Packingtown, the stockyard district. For seven weeks, he recalled, “I sat at night in the homes of the workers, foreign-born and native, and they told me their stories, one after one, and I made notes of everything.” Wandering around the yards during the day, he noted, “I was not much better dressed than the workers, and found that by the simple device of carrying a dinner pail I could go anywhere.” Passing into rancid, hazardous places that outsiders rarely frequented, he watched with amazement as scraps of meat that were later sold to the public were swept from floors infested with rats and covered in human spit. The pressure to produce profits dictated that nothing was allowed to go to waste: condemned hogs were rendered into lard; moldy meats were “dosed with borax” and ground into sausage; spoiled hams were pumped with chemicals to mask a smell “so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them.”
After a month of watchfulness, Sinclair had collected the data but not yet conceived the protagonists for his novel. One Sunday afternoon, he chanced to attend the rollicking traditional wedding celebration of a young Lithuanian couple. Standing transfixed with his back to a wall as the festivities unfolded around him, Sinclair found his characters amid the whirl of music and dance—“the bride, the groom, the old mother and father, the boisterous cousin, the children, the three musicians, everybody.”
The Jungle tells the story of the young couple and their extended family as they immigrate to Chicago in pursuit of plentiful jobs, decent wages, and the fulfillment of the American dream. No one subscribes more completely to the idea that decency and hard work will earn a place in America than the central character, Jurgis Rudkus. Confident in his ferocious strength and determination to provide for his family, Jurgis immediately lands a job. He is “the sort of man the bosses like to get hold of. . . . When he was told to go to a certain place, he would go there on the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would stand round fidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was in him.” Filled with optimism, Jurgis saves every cent to buy a home for his wife and children: “He would work all day,” Sinclair wrote, “and all night too, if need be; he would never rest until the house was paid for and his people had a home.”
Before long, the predatory machine of Packingtown begins to corrode Jurgis’s optimism and assurance. For years, glib salesmen had counted upon the ignorance of the immigrants. If a single payment was missed, the house was lost, along with everything paid into it. Indeed, Sinclair observed, the houses “were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them.” The unscrupulous salesman could always count on a new wave of immigrants, clamoring desperately for jobs and needful of food and housing.
The meatpacking plants grind up workers as surely as they grind up hogs and cattle. Sinclair details the brutal hours of work with no compensation for injury and little hope of evading the diseases legion in unsanitary surroundings. During the h
oliday “speeding up” on the slaughtering floor, Jurgis is hurt. Finally able to return to work, he discovers that his job has been given to another man. Once “fresh and strong,” Jurgis becomes “a damaged article” his bosses no longer want. At once vividly individual and representative of an entire beleaguered class, Sinclair’s characters are callously denied any real hope of a livelihood or future. The devastation of the entire family has been set in motion, their tragedy engendered not through personal failure but through the savage capitalist system that pits man against man. When his young wife and then his son die, Jurgis is crushed in body and spirit. Finding himself at a socialist rally, he is at last spiritually reborn, awakened to revolution.
After five publishers rejected Sinclair’s manuscript outright, Doubleday finally considered publication. “The revelations in the story were so astounding,” the New York Times reported, “that the publishers commissioned a lawyer to go to Chicago to make a personal investigation of the author’s representations.” When the attorney’s report corroborated Sinclair, Doubleday agreed to move forward. In February 1906, as he nervously awaited official publication, Sinclair sent two advance copies to Ray Baker. One was autographed to the journalist; the second, Sinclair hoped, Baker might deliver to the White House and present to President Roosevelt.
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 66