Roosevelt

by Brett Harper

  But for all his brio, Roosevelt’s tactics in pursuing his goals were anything but reckless. As he had done in New York, he reached out to party bosses who could block his bills. He asked Mark Hanna for advice, held conferences with his Cabinet members to discuss policy, and cultivated the Big Four, a group of senators who could pass or kill any proposed bill. Their undisputed chief was Nelson Aldrich of Long Island, a multimillionaire investor who was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and whose daughter Abby was married to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the son of Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. Roosevelt played to all of them as he slowly put together his first State of the Union speech.

  Collision was inevitable. The bosses in both parties had close ties with the country’s major corporations; so did both Houses of Congress, but especially the Senate, whose members at the time were elected by state legislatures, responsive to campaign contributions, and sometimes to bribery.

  In the year-and-a-half since Boss Platt had stymied Roosevelt’s efforts to regulate trusts in New York, Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan had assembled U.S. Steel, the world’s largest corporation. More than 1,000 corporate mergers took place nationwide. All too often, they were followed by higher prices, lower wages, miserable working conditions, and the corruption of state and local governments. Roosevelt knew that attacking the trusts would turn his party against him and doom any chance of progress. But he hoped to persuade the party that it could prosper in the long run by confronting and reforming the abuses of the trusts.

  The State of the Union message was designed to achieve that goal. Roosevelt opened with a denunciation of McKinley’s anarchist assassin and went on to argue that only a program of moderate, reasoned reform could defeat the forces of anarchism, socialism, and demagoguery. He hailed the virtues of capitalism, industry, and free enterprise, but maintained that the evils they brought with them must be kept in check. He maintained it would be a mistake to strike indiscriminately at the trusts, but he insisted that they must be “supervised and within reasonable limits controlled.” He urged Congress to create a new Department of Commerce to carry out the government’s right to “inspect and examine” the finances of the nation’s companies to determine whether new regulations or taxes were required.

  Reaction from the press and public was favorable, but the trusts and their allies in Congress took it for granted that Roosevelt’s program would gain no traction without a storm of public protest. They believed Roosevelt’s call for regulation of the trusts – along with his pleas for better working conditions, rail-rate reform, conservation measures, and a canal across Central America – would prove ineffective.

  Then, Roosevelt took his big stick off his shoulder. He instructed Attorney General Philander C. Knox to file an antitrust suit against the rail and shipping conglomerate Northern Securities Company, a recently merged holding company linking the interests of J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, E. H. Harriman, the Rockefellers, James J. Hill, and Jay Gould. The giant trust was second only to U.S. Steel in revenues. It had tens of thousands of miles of railroad track and hundreds of ships; a person might travel, as journalist Ray Baker reported, “from England to China on regular lines of steamships and railroads” without leaving Northern Securities’ jurisdiction. Baker called the trust an “absolute dictator in its own territory, with monarchical powers in all matters relating to transportation.”

  Before issuing his order, Roosevelt had asked Knox to assess the odds that prosecution under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 could succeed. Knox pondered the question for several weeks before concluding that he could win the case. Roosevelt told him to go ahead, without informing the rest of his Cabinet. The announcement shocked politicians, the public, and businesspeople. In its aftermath, Roosevelt had to deal with the market crash that many feared and predicted when he took office. Stocks fell as pundits predicted a wholesale war on industrial trusts.

  J. P. Morgan, with a palpable air of grievance, hastily arranged a meeting with Roosevelt and Knox, saying, “If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” “We don’t want to fix it up,” Knox replied. “We want to stop it.”

  After Morgan left, Roosevelt remarked that his attitude was pure Wall Street: “Mr. Morgan could not help regarding me as a big rival operator.”

  With that, each side’s position was clear. Roosevelt didn’t care for the Sherman Act, which he saw as a blunt instrument; he would have preferred new laws permitting regulation of corporate excesses before they occurred. But with Congress refusing to act on his proposals, he would rely on the only tool at his disposal – and he followed the Northern Securities suit by telling Knox to file another case against the “Beef Trust,” in which giant meat packers, such as Armour and Swift, had divided territories and fixed prices across much of the nation. Roosevelt would go on to use the Sherman Act more than forty times during his presidency. It would take years for the suits to play out and pass Constitutional muster, but in attacking Northern Securities, the new president had served notice on big business and the Republican Party that he meant to use - and expand - the power of his office.

  As midterm elections approached in 1902, Roosevelt launched a campaign to persuade voters that his proposal to regulate trusts was preferable to the Democrats’ plan to eradicate the trusts, which Roosevelt argued would destroy good and bad companies alike. He was campaigning in New England, enjoying fervent cheers and applause from large crowds, when calamity struck in Massachusetts: Traveling through Pittsfield, the horse-drawn carriage carrying Roosevelt and his party was struck by a trolley car. Three passengers, including the president, were thrown clear of the wreckage and escaped with minor injuries, but Roosevelt’s bodyguard, William Craig, was killed. Despite the loss, the president finished his day’s schedule, then rested at Sagamore Hill for a day before continuing his campaign. He had high praise for Craig, saying, “The man who was killed was one of whom I was fond and whom I greatly prized for his loyalty and faithfulness.”

  FOR YEARS, REPUBLICANS had advocated high protective tariffs on imported goods and had credited the levies with producing the nation’s prosperity. But the tariffs had come under Democratic attack for raising consumer prices, and the issue was dividing Republicans, splitting those representing Eastern manufacturers, who depended on the tariffs, from Western legislators clamoring for lower prices on goods their constituents needed to run ranches, mines, and factories. Roosevelt favored lowering tariffs, but he knew the issue was explosive. When he called a group of prominent senators to Oyster Bay to discuss the problem, his ally Cabot Lodge could give him no reassurance when Aldrich and Hanna warned, “You will never touch a schedule of the tariff act.” Roosevelt bowed to what he saw as reality. “I do not wish to split my own party wide open on the tariff question,” he said, “unless some good is to come.”

  The three-week trip through the West and Midwest, where the president spoke to uncharacteristically quiet crowds, was an uncomfortable journey because of more than party tensions. Roosevelt was suffering increasing leg pain due to the trolley accident in Pittsfield. When his physicians realized he had an abscess that required immediate surgery, Roosevelt refused anesthetic, underwent the operation, and was told to rest for several weeks. The trip west was cut short.

  Roosevelt reveled in the relief from his daily flood of visitors, but his recuperation was cut short by a strike of 140,000 Pennsylvania coal miners - the country’s worst-ever industrial deadlock. The five-month strike had caused little damage over the summer, but by the end of September, due to the shortage of coal, schools began closing, with hospitals and government buildings preparing to follow suit. In some cities, mobs plundered coal-carrying railroad cars. Clashes between striking miners and non-union replacements were growing more violent. By the mine owners’ count, hundreds of non-striking miners had been killed for breaking the strike line and continuing to work.

  The mine owners represented a coal trust, which had emerged after coal-carrying rail
roads began buying mines and using their control over freight rates to put independent coal operators out of business. Before the strike, the union, the United Mine Workers of America, offered to accept a wage increase of 5 percent, which would have cut $3 million from the industry’s profit of $75 million. The owners refused. The union president, John Mitchell, had offered to take the dispute to arbitration, but the owners’ spokesman, George Baer of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, refused to meet Mitchell. If the strike continued, Baer calculated, public outcry and demand for coal would crush the union and drive the miners back to work.

  Roosevelt said he was “at my wits’ end how to proceed.” He had no responsibility for the emergency and no authority to take a hand in it. But knowing the public would demand presidential leadership, he invited the owners and Mitchell to the White House to discuss the crisis.

  Mitchell was one of the most popular and charismatic labor leaders in the country’s history. It was said that on the day McKinley was assassinated, coal miners gathered in furious mobs, only to go home peaceably when they received news Mitchell was safe. At the White House meeting, he again offered to submit to arbitration and abide by an impartial panel’s decision. Baer said he would refuse “any proposition advanced by Mr. Mitchell.” Roosevelt was furious but managed to control his temper. So did Mitchell, and both felt vindicated when Roosevelt released a transcript of the meeting to the press, and public opinion swung to the miners’ side.

  If the impasse had lasted, Roosevelt was ready with his own solution. “Don’t hit till you have to,” he was fond of saying, “but when you do hit, hit hard.” To end the strike, he planned to defy the petty constraints of the Constitution by sending a hand-picked general and 10,000 Army troops to take over the coal mines, with orders to ignore any court orders or instructions from anyone except himself as commander in chief. General John Schofield, a Civil War veteran who had served as commanding general of the army and secretary of war, had agreed to lead the campaign.

  Fortunately, Roosevelt’s war secretary, Elihu Root, appealed to J. P. Morgan to intervene in the dispute. Despite his own anger at Roosevelt over the Northern Securities antitrust suit, Morgan agreed, and he called on the mine owners to submit to a presidential arbitration panel, almost exactly as Mitchell had proposed. The owners consented but refused to allow any union representative to sit on the panel. The owners would “heroically submit to anarchy rather than have Tweedledum,” he wrote, “yet if I would call it Tweedledee they would accept with rapture.” So Edgar E. Clark, head of the Order of Railway Conductors, was seated on the panel in the guise of an “eminent sociologist.” With that, Mitchell led his men back to work in the mines, and three months later, the panel gave the miners a retroactive wage increase of 10 percent – twice what they would have taken before the strike – along with a cut in their work day from ten hours to nine.

  The settlement of the coal strike reinvigorated the Republican Party; against most predictions, the party survived the midterm elections of 1902 with control of both houses of Congress intact. Roosevelt’s popularity rose as well. When, on a hunting trip to Mississippi, he refused to shoot a small bear members of his party had tied to a tree to ensure the president had a successful hunt, the nation’s cartoonists drew the bear smaller and smaller until it was a cub. Toymakers took the opportunity to market stuffed bears honoring the president, and the Teddy bear was on its way to becoming a fixture in every child’s bedroom.

  But none of this gave Roosevelt the political muscle to get bills regulating trusts through Congress – and he knew it. In his second State of the Union message in December 1902, Roosevelt repeated his call for a Commerce Department, but in measured tones. To prove his orthodoxy, he defended the accumulation of wealth and even argued against lower tariffs. Reformers lamented that it was “a very lame message” from a president who had been intimidated by “the vested interests of the country.” But Roosevelt was being pragmatic, trying to steer a course between the reformers and obstructionists in his party. “I pass my days in a state of exasperation,” he wrote his son Kermit, “first, with the fools who do not want any of the things that ought to be done, and second, with the equally obnoxious fools who insist on so much that they cannot get anything.” He knew public anger toward the country’s vested interests, still only simmering, was the key to compelling lawmakers to take action. Until then, he would have to wait.

  The wait wasn’t long. The January 1903 issue of McClure’s magazine galvanized the country with three sensational, but meticulously documented, exposés of corruption in America. The first was Ida Tarbell’s story of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust and the predatory tactics it used – including espionage, bribes, and harassment of small businessmen – to monopolize the oilfields. Next came Lincoln Steffens’ piece on Minneapolis Mayor Albert Alonzo “Doc” Ames and his plundering of the city’s treasury. Finally, Ray Baker exposed the brutality of the coal miners’ vengeance on 17,000 strikebreakers who had continued to work through the dispute. The issue sold out immediately.

  Tarbell’s Standard Oil series would go on for twelve installments, making her a household name and the most influential journalist in the nation. Steffens would write fourteen articles and two books on “The Shame of the Cities,” documenting civic corruption. And Baker’s piece on coal miners was the first of a string on labor and capital – stories that, while uniformly sympathetic to unions and unionism, never flinched from uncovering wrongs on both sides.

  Under publisher and founding editor S. S. McClure, McClure’s had been pursuing investigative journalism for years, but this issue marked the beginning of what became known as the muckraking era. Middle-class voters who had been only vaguely aware of economic and political corruption could now see evidence of the abuses and harm they inflicted on the public. Sensing a change in the political climate, Theodore Roosevelt took action.

  The president supported three bills in Congress. The first would outlaw the secret rebates on freight rates that railroads had been giving favored trusts, which the trusts could use to raise their profits or lower prices to drive competitors out of business. The second would make it easier and faster to prosecute companies under the Sherman Antitrust Act, giving them precedence on court calendars. The third, closest to Roosevelt’s heart, would establish a Cabinet-level Department of Commerce and Labor, with a Bureau of Corporations that would have the power to investigate the finances and operations of corporations conducting interstate commerce. The bureau could publicize its findings, which the president thought was the “first essential” effort in fighting corporate abuses ranging from unfair competition and stock-price manipulation to false advertising and bribery of public officials. The proposed bureau would have the power to subpoena records and force witnesses to testify.

  Ida Tarbell’s first Standard Oil story had shown how Rockefeller used freight rebates to “corner the oil interests of the country.” Roosevelt told a friend, “No respectable railroad or respectable shipping business can openly object to the rebate bill.” Moreover, there were other ways the trusts could strike favorable deals from the railroads. With token resistance, the ban on rebates passed both houses of Congress. When Roosevelt signed it, he proclaimed “the highways of commerce open on equal terms to all who use them.” Similarly, the rising public resentment of monopolies overwhelmed opposition to the bill to expedite antitrust suits. Congressmen who had opposed the law now “rather sullenly acquiesced” to it, Roosevelt wrote, and the measure passed with little debate.

  But large businesses and their Congressional compatriots remained opposed to federal oversight or regulation of commerce. As The Wall Street Journal explained, the leaders of the likes of Standard Oil saw antitrust laws as basically harmless, though annoying, “but publicity hurts. And the company will always, at all times, and in all ways, fight publicity.”

  Roosevelt employed every possible stratagem to pass the bill. He risked offending his allies in Congress by tracking every stage of its
progress through committee and floor debate. Knowing Hanna and Aldrich could muster a majority of Republican votes against him, he cultivated Democrats.

  Roosevelt wasn’t above one maneuver that probably sealed the bill’s passage. On February 7, 1903, as it was heading for a vote, he called in a select group of reporters to leak the story that John D. Rockefeller had sent telegrams to six senators, giving them “peremptory” instructions that the bill “must be stopped,” since Standard Oil was “unalterably opposed” to it.

  The president did not name the six senators or show the reporters a copy of the telegram; even if the wires were sent, the signature may have been not Rockefeller’s but his son’s. But there were no denials from Standard Oil, and the press reaction was predictably indignant. One newspaper said the message was clear: “We own the Republican Party, and it must do our bidding.” That should be no surprise, said another editorial: “It is pretty much his senate, anyway. Most of the members of the once-august body were elected on a pro-trust understanding . . . [Rockefeller is just] claiming the privileges he paid for, nothing more.”

  Aldrich, leader of the Senate’s Big Four, read the situation accurately. When three lawyers from Standard Oil arrived in Washington to help draft a crippling amendment to the bill, Aldrich said they would only “inflame the agitator element” and sent them away. The bill passed. The president, careful to share credit, congratulated House Speaker David B. Henderson for “a record of more substantial achievement for the public good” than any other Congress had achieved in recent years. Roosevelt also credited Tarbell and McClure’s for giving the trusts a public face, explaining their abuses, and mobilizing the public behind the issue.

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S PRESIDENCY left many enduring landmarks, including national parks, dams, and reservoirs, but none made a greater mark on the landscape than the Panama Canal. The maneuver he made to acquire the canal was devious, self-righteous, and high-handed; as California Senator S. I. Hayakawa was to say seven decades later, “We stole it fair and square.” The president called the acquisition “by far the most important action I took in foreign affairs.”