Roosevelt

by Brett Harper

  Then, an hour after Parker’s telegram of concession arrived and without consulting his advisors, Theodore Roosevelt made an announcement that he later said he would cut off his hand to take back. He had served three-and-a-half years as president, he said, and that should count as his first term. He would honor the custom established by George Washington limiting presidents to two terms, “and under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.”

  AFTER A TRIUMPHANT inauguration, Roosevelt left Washington for a two-month vacation in the Southwest and the Rockies. He attended a Rough Riders reunion, hunted bears and wolves, spending entire days in the saddle, and generally exhausted his companions. Asked how emergencies would be addressed in his absence, he said offhandedly, “Oh, things will be all right. I have left Taft sitting on the lid.” He was right. Taft dealt deftly with problems around the world. In Panama, he eased the canal’s chief engineer out of his job. “You are handling everything just right,” Roosevelt assured Taft from the West.

  After the president’s return to Washington, Taft went back to the Philippines, where his successor had squandered the public goodwill Taft had built during his tenure as governor general. Taft brought an entourage of eighty people, including seven senators, twenty-three congressmen, a dozen reporters, and the president’s daughter Alice.

  Alice had a reputation for smoking, dating older men, and carrying a miniature flask of whisky in her long glove. Her father wisecracked, “I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” During the trip to the Philippines, Alice spent considerable time with Ohio Congressman Nicholas Longworth. When Taft asked Alice if they were engaged, she demurred, saying, “More or less, Mr. Secretary, more or less.” Nonetheless, he reported, in light of “what she has gone through and who she is,” Alice was a pleasure to be with: “I have seen nothing about the girl to indicate conceit or a swelled head.” After easing tensions in the Philippines, Taft went to China and then to Japan, where he met secretly with Prime Minister Taro Katsura to confirm that Japan would welcome Roosevelt’s participation as a mediator in the country’s ongoing war with Russia.

  Roosevelt was delighted at the prospect. While he sympathized with Japan’s growing role in East Asia, he worried that its victory over Russia could upset the balance of power in the region. To hide the fact that the Japanese had proposed a summit, Roosevelt sent identical letters to Tokyo and Moscow suggesting peace talks and offering to arrange a venue. The talks took place at the U.S. Navy base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and The Treaty of Portsmouth was signed in a month. Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the war.

  That diplomatic coup set the stage for two of the most significant victories of Roosevelt’s presidency: breaking up Standard Oil and enacting a law cracking down on the railroads’ manipulation of freight rates. In both cases, Roosevelt collaborated with crusading journalists to muster the public indignation that forced Congress to bend to his will.

  The crackdown on Standard Oil was triggered by the company’s ruthless tactics in Kansas, where the biggest oilfields yet found in the country had been tapped in 1904. Rockefeller’s company moved in at the first news of a gusher, building tanks and refineries and constructing pipelines to wells. Because it controlled the state’s two refineries and all its pipelines, Standard became the only buyer and carrier of oil in Kansas. The company had promised independent producers they would be paid market prices for their oil, and it wasn’t until Standard “put on the screws,” as William Allen White put it, that the independents discovered what that meant: Rockefeller drove the price from $1.18 a barrel in 1904 down to $0.37 a year later.

  An upstart candidate for governor, Edward Hoch, challenged the Republican machine by calling for the state to build its own refinery to compete with Standard. Once elected, Hoch proposed to designate pipelines common carriers, which would make them subject to state supervision. When the refinery bill passed the state senate, Standard boycotted Kansas oil, leaving the independent producers without a market and throwing thousands of men out of work. This punitive tactic backfired, triggering public outrage that pushed the refinery bill through the legislature.

  If Roosevelt needed a reason to prosecute “the mother of all trusts,” said one Kansas newspaper, this was it. The White House was flooded with telegrams urging Roosevelt to come to the rescue, and soon he announced that he had ordered James R. Garfield, who had replaced Cortelyou as head of the Bureau of Corporations in 1903, to review Standard’s operations, “especially in the Kansas field.” A House resolution demanded an independent investigation, and its passage quickly ended Standard’s boycott of the state. But Garfield, son of President James A. Garfield, announced that he would broaden his inquiry to cover the entire country, and Ida Tarbell started work on another McClure’s piece about the company’s tactics in Kansas.

  Tarbell’s fiery two-part article accused Standard Oil of doing in Kansas “exactly what it did” thirty years earlier in Pennsylvania: colluding with railroads, fixing prices, operating pipelines to suit its purposes, and crushing independent competitors. When it came out, Garfield’s report confirmed Tarbell’s account - and went further.

  The first part of the report concluded the giant company had continued to receive “unjust and illegal” favors from railroads, obtaining bribes and kickbacks and offering secret rebates on freight rates to favored customers. Roosevelt sent this document to Congress, along with a message: “All the power of the government will be directed toward prosecuting the Rockefeller trust.” But it was the second part of Garfield’s report - documenting Standard’s control over the oil industry - that created a public sensation. It confirmed and vindicated Tarbell’s long crusade against the company, and Tarbell told a reporter that if Garfield could prove his charges, “he has rendered one of the most important public services in the history of the country.”

  Following Garfield’s lead, the Justice Department filed two separate suits against Standard Oil. The first, narrowly framed, charged it with illegal rebates of rail rates. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, later the first commissioner of professional baseball, found the company guilty in a lengthy verdict that drew applause in the courtroom for his scathing criticism of Standard’s corrupt practices. Landis fined Standard the maximum penalty, $20,000, for each of the 1,462 carloads of oil that had been rebated - a total fine of $29.24 million. But Rockefeller, asked for comment while golfing, predicted that “Judge Landis will be dead a long time before this fine is paid.” An appellate court overturned the verdict on a technicality. Roosevelt could only denounce the judgment as proof of “too much power on the bench.”

  The second suit, charging Standard and its five dozen subsidiary companies with conspiracy to monopolize the oil industry, was widely seen as a fundamental blow to the power of the trusts. This time, too, a federal court ruled for the trustbusters, but after two years of wending through the appeals process, the case reached the Supreme Court. There, to the dismay of the corporate world, the justices affirmed the decision. The landmark ruling argued that Standard Oil was being punished “not because it is a trust, but because it has an infamous record,” and issued an open warning to “every trust that is tempted to oppress and destroy.”

  Roosevelt rejoiced at the victory, but still wanted laws that would regulate industry as needed instead of breaking up existing corrupt trusts. He wasn’t to get them; corporate power in Congress was still too strong, and the conservatives would argue successfully that regulation would give too much power to the federal government.

  If the president wouldn’t get to regulate wholesale, he still had hopes of setting rules where they might count most – which meant, in his judgment, regulating railroad freight rates. While the Standard Oil suits were making their way through the courts in the winter of 1905, Roosevelt concluded that the taproot of corporate corruption was the way railroads could evade the Elkins Act, which barred cas
h rebates, by manipulating their rates to give the trusts a cost advantage over their competitors. Through clever classifications and definitions, the railroads had created special rates that imposed exorbitant costs on small shippers. This must be stopped, Roosevelt told Congress: “Above all else, we must strive to keep the highways of commerce open to all on equal terms.”

  Roosevelt knew public opinion on the issue was strong enough to force a rail-rates bill through the House. The Senate, where popular election was still a distant vision and trusts could work their will through state legislatures, stood in the way. In his first attempt, the president backed a bill giving the Interstate Commerce Commission power to regulate rates, and it passed the House in the short winter session of 1905. But Senate leaders scheduled hearings on the matter only after adjournment on March 3, so the bill died. The president suspected he had lost power because of his promise to forego a third term. But he vowed to try again, hoping to focus public pressure on the Senate to force lawmakers to pass the bill.

  Roosevelt had a powerful ally in Sam McClure. The publisher also thought the railroad issue important, and he assigned Ray Baker to investigate the complex situation and explain it so clearly that readers would demand reform. Baker had already determined, based on his earlier reporting, that “the railroad problem is pretty nearly the basic problem of our life, and we know little or nothing about it!”

  By the fall of 1906, when a second bill was being debated, Baker was finishing a six-part series, “The Railroads on Trial.” A McClure’s editorial announced the series and alerted readers to pay attention despite the density of the railroads’ prestidigitation. Baker sent Roosevelt an advance copy of his first article, to appear in the November issue, and the president commended it. He added, “You have given me two or three thoughts for my own message.”

  Baker and the president stayed in contact as the new bill took shape, with Baker urging Roosevelt to make it stronger by setting definite rates rather than maximum and minimum figures. Roosevelt argued that his lawyers had warned him fixed rates could be ruled unconstitutional. The argument became heated, but the bill moved in Baker’s favor, with the final draft giving the Interstate Commerce Commission power to fix rates under certain conditions.

  By the time the bill was introduced in January, Baker’s first three articles had turned public opinion against the railroads. The bill passed the House a month later without a single amendment. An intricate battle in the Senate developed, with corporate-friendly senators led by Nelson Aldrich and the Big Four intending not to kill the bill – public furor ruled that out – but to amend the life out of it. The battle was to take some astonishing turns.

  Roosevelt called on the Senate to pass the bill without amendments. Predictably, conservatives were outraged, saying the chief executive’s demand showed his ignorance of the Senate’s historic duty, which was, as the Boston Herald said, “a check upon the half-baked and demagogic bills passed by the lower house.” Roosevelt chose a young, progressive senator, Jonathan Dolliver of Iowa, to shepherd the bill through the Interstate Commerce Committee, and Dolliver convinced three of eight Republicans to join five Democrats to win the majority that got the bill to the floor without amendments.

  Then Aldrich made a counterintuitive move: He offered to let a Democrat manage the bill on the floor - provided the Democrats would allow their fellow lawmakers to suggest amendments. When the Democrats agreed, Aldrich named “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman as the bill’s manager – not merely a foul-mouthed, rabid segregationist, but a man with an abiding grudge against Theodore Roosevelt.

  When Roosevelt said he would be happy to consult with Tillman or any representative he might name, Aldrich’s maneuver failed, and Tillman accepted the offer. Then, in March, McClure’s published another Baker bombshell, this installment detailing the railroads’ propaganda campaign to discredit the bill. Newspaper editors had been given free rail passes for “favorable” coverage; those considered unfriendly were punished with personal attacks. Supposedly impartial pamphlets and free newspaper supplements were distributed that contained distorted “facts” about the bill. Rumors were spread in the South that the bill would outlaw separate Jim Crow cars for black passengers. In some cases, hostile newspaper owners were bribed to change their editorial policy. The scale of this operation amazed and outraged readers, and pressure on the Senate to pass the bill intensified.

  Weeks went by as pro-railroad Republicans offered amendment after amendment, each designed to weaken the legislation. Then Roosevelt agreed to Tillman’s proposal that any judicial review of the Interstate Commerce Committee’s rate decisions be reduced to the simple question of whether the procedures had been fair. Tillman used his unaccustomed authority to throw his support behind the bill, keeping the Senate in session for two hours a day past its usual adjournment and insisting all other business be suspended until the rate bill was passed or voted down. Tillman said he would “pocket my pride and lay aside my just indignation” to help the president pass “a good railroad law.” It was a remarkable demonstration of the transformative power of responsibility – or, as The Washington Post put it, “the mysterious ways of Providence and politics.” It began to look as if Roosevelt could make a majority out of the Senate’s Democrats and small number of Republicans.

  Aldrich was dismayed when two of his reliable Big Four, Iowa’s William Allison and Wisconsin’s John Spooner, defected to Roosevelt’s cause. The president needed to reassure moderate Republicans who feared the bill could be unconstitutional unless the courts had full power of judicial review. Allison and Spooner were getting so much pressure from the voters they felt their seats were vulnerable and chose to desert Aldrich. Allison, a master of parliamentary maneuvers, wrote an amendment that provided judicial review but left its scope vague; with that, Roosevelt had his Senate majority. When the bill came up for final vote - Aldrich and several of his remaining loyalists were absent – it passed into law by a lopsided margin.

  By hook and by crook, Roosevelt had prevailed, and he received the credit for it. Even Tillman conceded, “But for the work of Theodore Roosevelt, we would not have had any bill at all.” Though liberal critics complained about the law’s compromises, the president defended it as flawed, but “the longest step ever yet taken in the direction of solving the railway rate problem.” As Roosevelt was first to acknowledge, the real force that made the law possible was the public anger focused by Ray Baker, Sam McClure, and their fellow investigative journalists.

  Those investigative reporters inspired many imitators, with magazines eager to print their work, and they were at a peak of power and influence. Early in 1906, Upton Sinclair created another sensation with The Jungle, a work of fiction exposing the state of Chicago’s meatpacking industry: brutal working conditions, callous inhumanity of supervisors, filth of the plants, and the appalling state of much of the meat being sold. After sending inspectors to verify Sinclair’s account, Roosevelt used their report to push a tough meat inspection bill through Congress.

  In the wake of the meat bill, the uproar over The Jungle also helped revive a Pure Food and Drug Act that had languished for months in congressional committees. This bill had been introduced after a Collier’s exposé of the patent medicine business, then the nation’s largest source of newspaper advertising. The series showed that colored sugar-water was being sold as a cure for cancer and paralysis, that many patent medicines were liberally laced with opium or alcohol, and that laboratories claiming to have tested the drugs were either nonexistent or fraudulent. But House Speaker Joseph Cannon had refused to permit a vote on the bill. It took the national furor over diseased and rotten meat to force passage of a law to ensure drugs were not adulterated or misbranded.

  Journalists were in their element, sensing new triumphs ahead. “Signs everywhere now show a great moral awakening, the cleaning out of rotten business & still more rotten politics,” Ray Baker wrote his father. “But we’ve only begun!” The swelling ranks of writers exposing wrongs inc
luded few with the talent, energy, and diligence of the McClure’s crew; sensational stories were turning out to be not quite what they seemed. And it was up to Roosevelt to expose them.

  William Randolph Hearst a publisher and political rival whom Roosevelt detested, printed a sensational attack on the Senate in his Cosmopolitan magazine. The series, ostensibly intended to promote popular election of senators, instead attacked lawmakers loyal to their corporate patrons’ interests. “Treason is a strong word,” the writer began, “but not too strong, rather too weak . . . .” Roosevelt compared such journalists to the figure described in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as the Man with the Muck-Rake, who Roosevelt said “consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing.”

  At the annual Gridiron Club dinner of reporters and high government officials, the president again assailed the “muckrakers,” writers who dredged up all the filth they could find but “ignore[d] at the same time all the good in the world.” But since he named no names, he implied that all investigative writers were equally suspect. Steffens protested the next day that “you have put an end to all these journalistic investigations that have made you.”

  Roosevelt said he had no intention of blocking legitimate stories, and he continued to cooperate with reporters he respected. But Steffens understood the president had detected a growing public impatience with the increasing stream of slipshod accusations. He repeated his “Muckrake Man” speech in a formal address – which, despite his careful efforts to praise responsible reporters and endorse the fight against corruption, was widely seen as confirming his attack on investigative journalism.