Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  Now began a series of blows which Roosevelt could not at first parry. His oldest political ally, Senator Lodge, spoke out against regulation. So did Senator Knox, apparently forgetful of the days when he and the President had prosecuted illegal railroad combinations across state lines. So did Senator Spooner, author of the language that had facilitated the Panama Canal. So did every Republican of any legislative weight in the upper chamber. Joseph B. Foraker, emerging as the most aggressive of the “railroad senators,” made no fewer than eighty-seven speeches in defense of free enterprise.

  The issue of court power, again forced by Aldrich, became the main threat to the railroad bill. Roosevelt, Hepburn, and Dolliver had imagined that debate would focus on administrative power—the rate-fixing authority of the ICC. They wanted, at worst, a “narrow review” amendment, which would permit the courts to rule only on procedural questions.

  So, amid dry clouds of legalistic dust, the battle dragged on.

  WAS ONE TO believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog-personality was precious, to whom these hog-squeals and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his sacrifice?

  As prose, The Jungle left something to be desired, and Upton Sinclair’s ear for dialogue (“Eik! Eik! Uzdaryk-duris!”) was perhaps best appreciated in Lithuania, but Roosevelt was both fascinated and repulsed by the book Senator Beveridge had sent him. Although disguised as fiction, it had the tang—in this case the reek—of fact. He drew it to the attention of his Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson, along with a letter Sinclair had written him, calling for an investigation of the meatpacking industry. “I would like a first-class man to be appointed to meet Sinclair, as he suggests; get the names of witnesses, as he suggests; and then go to work in the industry, as he suggests.” The investigation, he stressed, must be kept “absolutely secret.” Attorney General Moody had already learned, from prosecuting the beef trust, that Packingtown was capable of any venality in defending its interests. “We don’t want anything perfunctory done in this matter.”

  Roosevelt’s was a mind in which literary images and political priorities floated interchangeably. Whether or not Sinclair’s description of immigrant workers bending over stinking masses of blood and offal and bits of bone under lights “like far-off twinkling stars” reminded him of Bunyan, he chose to cite a parallel passage in Pilgrim’s Progress when he addressed a white-tie dinner of the Gridiron Club on 17 March. It represented his current opinion of investigative journalists, and was fortunately articulated after the squab stuffed with chestnuts sur canapé.

  … the Man with the Muckrake, the man who could look no way but downward with muckrake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muckrake but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.

  Roosevelt’s subsequent remarks about “a certain magazine” that he had just read “with great indignation” could not be reported, due to the Gridiron’s tradition of confidentiality. He spoke for nearly three quarters of an hour over a white, twelve-foot model of the Capitol, glowing with internal lights. According to one member of the audience, he “sizzled” with moral disdain. Since his listeners represented all of official Washington, and since The Cosmopolitan had just published another installment of “The Treason of the Senate,” it was not long before the Man with the Muckrake was identified as David Graham Phillips.

  Nor was it long before the Man became plural—denoting all writers of Phillips’s type—and the noun a verb, as in muckrakers, muckraking, to muckrake. A new buzzword was born. Ray Stannard Baker reacted to it as if stung. Opprobrium cast on all investigative journalists, he wrote Roosevelt, might discourage the honest ones, leaving the field to “outright ranters and inciters.” Roosevelt’s reply indicated a determination to give the Gridiron speech again, in some more public forum. “People so persistently misunderstand what I said that I want to have it reported in full.”

  THE LAST THING Roosevelt needed, as he prepared for the final stages of debate on the Hepburn Bill, was escalation of the Algeciras Conference into another full-scale diplomatic crisis. But any proceedings involving the Kaiser seemed to slide toward war at some point, and this one was no exception. After six weeks of talk and translation, the conferring powers (most actively, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, and Great Britain) had deadlocked in a dangerous squabble about how Morocco was to be policed. France wanted gendarmes in control of all port cities. Wilhelm II objected, because German traders might then be denied access to the interior. His negotiants suggested that a multinational force, equally representing all parties to the conference, might keep order more peaceably.

  Roosevelt felt the first, distinct tuggings of a foreign entanglement absolutely contrary to his inclinations. With some asperity, he told an informal emissary from the Kaiser that Germany had “perhaps fourteen times less interests” in Morocco than France.

  “We do not admit that anyone except ourselves be the judge of our interests,” the German replied.

  “Then I do not understand this insistence upon having a conference. Why take the opinion of others if only your own counts for you?”

  Roosevelt repeated this exchange to Jusserand afterward, along with the alarming information that Germany’s ruling trinity—the Kaiser, Count von Bülow, and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz—apparently all believed that the Reich was now omnipotent in Europe.

  “Never have I seen the President so upset,” Jusserand reported to the Quai d’Orsay.

  Austria was now backing Germany at Algeciras, while Britain sided with France. As the confrontation worsened, both camps turned to Roosevelt to bring about another successful mediation. Jusserand and Speck von Sternburg plagued him with warnings and cajolements. He resisted them as he could. They did not seem to understand, or care, that he was more interested in trying to figure out why Senator Knox had so tersely rejected his offer of an appointment to the Supreme Court. (Justice Brown had resigned at the beginning of March; now Taft was considering the position.)

  Unwilling as he was to intervene over White’s head, Roosevelt saw a definite if distant threat looming at Algeciras. He suspected that what the Kaiser really wanted was “the partition of Morocco”—followed by the establishment of a German or German-friendly port, too far west for American comfort. Von Sternburg was reminded that the conference would never have taken place if Wilhelm had not begged the United States to push for it, nine months before. As a return favor, Roosevelt suggested, His Majesty might consider fashioning a compromise out of existing proposals. The policing issue could be solved if Germany accepted a Moorish force in all ports, commanded by French and Spanish “instructing officers.” The force would be paid for by all conferees, and France and Spain would unequivocally declare an open door to all Morocco.

  In a letter of unusual frankness, Roosevelt told the Kaiser that though Germany would not get the multinational police it wanted, France was going to have to accept a considerable reduction of its current authority in Tangier.

  If the conference should fail because of Germany’s insisting upon pressing France beyond the measure of concession described in this proposed arrangement … Germany would lose that increase of credit and moral power that the making of this arrangement would secure to her, and might be held responsible, probably far beyond the limits of reason, for all the evils that may come in the train of a disturbed condition of affairs in Europe.

  Wilhelm responded by translating this proposal—with variations minor and not so minor—into German for Austria’s benefit, then retranslating it into English as a proposal of his own. Roosevelt was reminded, as so often in his presidency, of Tweedledum’s need to trump Tweedledee, and decided not to accept it. He told von Sternburg that he suspected Germany really did want a war with France. If so, the Kaiser would have to live with the consequences, and a severe decline in American goodwill.
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br />   Secretary Root added his own grave opinion, which the Ambassador cabled to the Wilhelmstrasse: that Germany’s conduct at the conference was “paltry and unworthy of a great power.”

  On 19 March, White cabled that yet another proposal, described as “Austrian” but more largely the President’s own, had been laid on the table at Algeciras. Again with feelings of déjà vu, Roosevelt allowed Wilhelm to retreat in glory. “Communicate to His Majesty,” he instructed Speck von Sternburg, “my sincerest felicitation on this epochmaking political success at Algeciras. The policy of His Majesty on the Morocco question has been masterly from beginning to end.”

  THE ARTICLE IN The Cosmopolitan that had so exercised Roosevelt’s wrath was a portrait of Senator Aldrich as “The Head of It All.” If that muck-spattered gentleman was grateful to him for returning the attack, there was no apparent lessening of Old Guard opposition to the railroad rate bill in the last days of March. Twenty-four implacable conservatives stood pat between Roosevelt and regulation. Many lesser items of presidential legislation, such as a statehood bill for Arizona and New Mexico and a tariff bill for the Philippines, were held up too, while in the House, Speaker Cannon had emerged as an eloquent spokesman for impure food. Sir Mortimer Durand revised his recent positive predictions. “At the present moment it seems as if the session were likely to close with a series of defeats for Mr. Roosevelt.… Some of the strongest men in the Republican party are at the head of the malcontents.”

  One of the weakest men in the Republican Party, influentially speaking, visited Roosevelt late at night to urge him to demand rates that were reasonable as well as nondiscriminatory. Robert LaFollette had been studying railroad finance for thirty years, and thought that the President might listen to him on the subject.

  “But you can’t get any such bill as that through Congress.”

  “That is not the first consideration, Mr. President.”

  A fault line instantly ran between the idealist and the practical politician. LaFollette did not see—or, seeing, did not understand that it was already unbridgeable, and must one day become a chasm.

  “But I want to get something through,” Roosevelt said.

  To do so, he needed forty-six of the Senate’s ninety votes. Assuming he got none of the Old Guard block of twenty-four, he would have to build a majority out of sixty-six votes, thirty-three of which belonged to the opposing party. Senator Tillman undertook to deliver only twenty-six Democrats, since not all his colleagues liked the idea of rate regulation, and very few liked Roosevelt. Washington insiders delighted in the paradox that “Teddy” now depended on the parliamentary tactics of “Pitchfork Ben.”

  A small group of proregulatory senators from the Plains states came to the President’s rescue on 31 March. There was something symbolic about their solidarity: they represented the old agrarian values of grain and grassland, eternally resisting the spread of smoke and steel. But they saw that Roosevelt, unless he compromised on the issue of court review, would never get the Hepburn Bill through the Senate. Some language had to be included to check and balance the ICC’s proposed rate-making power. This would persuade more Republicans to vote for the measure. Senator Chester I. Long of Kansas suggested adding an amendment that was “broad” enough to please more Republicans, yet still “narrow” in the sense that the ICC would retain plenty of regulatory power. Courts should be allowed to rule on whether any disputed order was “beyond the authority of the Commission,” or in violation of the constitutional rights of railroad operators.

  The President was agreeable to this idea, which he thought might yield fifteen or even twenty votes on top of Tillman’s twenty-six. But he was embarrassed by the fact that he could not discuss it with his legislative lieutenant. Tillman and he were not on speaking terms. In 1902, the Senator had been banned from the White House for punching out a colleague, mid-debate. That disinvitation was now canceled, but Tillman showed no inclination to drop by. He had never forgiven Roosevelt for some prepresidential wisecracks about Populists. (“A taste for learning and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause them the deepest suspicion.… Senator Tillman’s brother has been frequently elected to Congress upon the issue that he wore neither an overcoat nor an undershirt.”)

  Somebody suggested that the President enlist the aid of a distinguished former Senator, William Eaton Chandler, who was close to Tillman and presumably proregulatory, having been lobbied out of office by a railroad company some years before. Chandler was summoned to the White House that evening, massaged into complicity, and sent on to Tillman with secret expressions of Roosevelt’s wrath against the “lawyers” impeding reform in the Senate.

  Tillman knew he was being manipulated, but agreed to help build a bipartisan majority in favor of what he genuinely felt was “a great legislative bill.” For the next two weeks, he and Senator Bailey labored over the amendment with Attorney General Moody, while Roosevelt polished prose of his own. It was a restatement of the “Muckrake” speech, scheduled for delivery at the most public ceremony on his upcoming schedule, the dedication of the House Office Building on 14 April.

  BUNYAN’S NOISOME FIGURE, more interested in piling up dirt than stargazing, duly made every major newspaper in the country. But the very potency of the image, and the speed with which it became a cliché, distracted popular attention from the rest of Roosevelt’s address, which had ominous implications for the very rich.

  He noted that the United States was passing through a period of “social, political, and industrial unrest.” So far as the unrest took the form of a struggle between the “haves” and “have-nots,” those essential counterbalances of a capitalist economy, it was to be condemned. But where it was moral, and sought to punish evildoers of any stamp, it was a “sign of healthy life” that government should welcome.

  It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in business.… No amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in making them. As a matter of personal conviction, and without pretending to discuss the details or formulate the system, I feel that we should ultimately have to consider the adoption of some such scheme as that of a progressive tax on all fortunes, beyond a certain amount, either given in life or devised or bequeathed upon the death of any individual—a tax so framed as to put it out of the power of the owner of one of these enormous fortunes to hand on more than a certain amount to any one individual.

  If conservatives in the audience could believe their ears, the President was proposing that government should profit from, and even confiscate, the rewards of private enterprise. His subsequent warning that railroad rate regulation was but “a first step” toward greater federal control of the economy sounded a declaration of ideological war.

  Was it, though? Roosevelt’s by now compulsive habit of following every statement with a counterstatement (positives neutralizing negatives and on the other hand used as a kind of conjunction) muted the overall effect of his speech. Those who had heard him off the record at the Gridiron were disappointed. He sounded progressive one minute and reactionary the next, as he alternately scowled and smiled at muckraking and moneymaking, allowing that there were good and bad varieties of each.

  Reporters got plenty of quotes, but their editors were not too sure which way, ideologically, the President was headed. If in the direction of restraint of free speech, he would sooner or later collide with Justice Holmes. If he wanted more and more centralized government, then Senator LaFollette would be quick to march behind him, as would Upton Sinclair and a lengthening line of socialists and communists.

  Men with muckrakes continued their work—some, such as Baker, decently and doggedly, others, like David Graham Phillips, with waning fervor. Good investigative reporting was simply too expensive for most editors, and too slow for journalists paid by the piece. Baker felt betrayed by Roosevelt, who had seemed so encourag
ing of his work, yet had now twice trivialized it by association. He still admired the President’s “remarkable versatility of mind,” if not the seeming versatility of his principles.

  SENATORS TILLMAN AND Bailey learned a similar lesson on 4 May, the day after they introduced their Roosevelt-backed “narrow review” amendment to the Hepburn Bill. After five weeks of secret negotiations conducted through William E. Chandler, Tillman felt in honor bound to let the White House know that he was, as yet, one vote short of the twenty-six he had promised.

  At 3:00 that afternoon, Roosevelt called a press conference and announced, as if the Tillman-Bailey Amendment had suddenly ceased to exist, that he had decided to support a “broad review” amendment crafted by Senator Allison. Rambling for almost a half hour, he imputed his own switch to the Republican leadership, which had accepted the will of the American people.

  A disillusioned progressive reporter interrupted him. “But Mr. President, what we want to know is why you surrendered.”

  Tillman and Bailey wanted to know, more basically, how any self-respecting politician could yield to the embrace of the opposition for five weeks, then to that of his own party at the merest whiff of a winning vote. At any rate, their loss was Roosevelt’s gain. Republicans fell into line behind him like stock cars on the Santa Fe. Even Senator Elkins endorsed the Hepburn Bill, saying with a straight face that although he owned a large quantity of railroad stock, he was “ten times” more sympathetic toward shippers than toward carriers. The most ambitious legislative initiative since Reconstruction could now move to passage as a co-achievement of the White House and the Republican leadership. Democrats seeking re-election in the fall would have to find another law to boast about.

  “I love a brave man,” Bailey said, “I love a fighter, and the President of the United States is both—on occasions; but he can yield with as much alacrity as any man who ever went into battle.”