The President was gracious enough, on Friday, to issue a statement of congratulation to Cortelyou and “those conservative and substantial businessmen who in this crisis have acted with such wisdom and public spirit.” He used the words confidence and calm as often as possible, and managed to allay public nervousness, if not the unavoidable impression that he had been away from his desk, playing in the canebrakes, while conscientious financiers had been saving the American economy. For once they were not—and for a while yet were relieved of being—“malefactors of great wealth.”
ALTHOUGH A TOTAL crash had been averted, the crisis on Wall Street was by no means over. The next business week, starting on Monday, 28 October, was equally fraught, with New York City on the verge of defaulting for lack of cash to borrow, and another major financial institution, the Moore & Schley brokerage house, threatening to go the same way as Knickerbocker Trust. Morgan and his men came to the aid of the city, and devised an emergency plan to save Moore & Schley by persuading U.S. Steel to buy it—or rather, to buy the collateral shares for its loans, which were invested in the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. Elbert H. Gary did not seem to like this idea, which involved trading a large amount of U.S. Steel gold bonds for Tennessee Coal’s lower-rated stock. Nor did Frick, who worried that Roosevelt might seize on the acquisition as an excuse for yet another antitrust prosecution. The President had shown himself quite ready to bite the hand that fed him after begging for corporate campaign donations in 1904.
Judge Gary said he would endorse the Morgan plan, but only if Roosevelt endorsed it, too. He liked the President, and believed him to be a pragmatic man, responsive to reasoned argument. Early on Monday, 4 November, he and Frick visited the White House for breakfast. Roosevelt was so impressed by their willingness to consummate an undesirable deal in order to forestall a “general industrial smashup,” that he agreed within twenty minutes to let them go ahead. Immediately after their departure, he let Attorney General Bonaparte know that the acquisition had his approval.
The New York Stock Exchange had not yet opened when Gary called George Perkins to advise him of Roosevelt’s goodwill. Perkins passed on the news just before nine o’clock. Relief flooded the market, and within hours prices began to rally.
ON 11 NOVEMBER, Roosevelt signed forty-six copies of a document, which more than any other he had ever written could justifiably be called a “posterity letter,” in that it addressed itself, with the utmost urgency, to the future. It was his promised call for a national conservation conference. One copy went to each state and territorial governor, and a further five hundred copies to a cross-section of the most influential men in the country, from members of Congress and Justices of the Supreme Court to industrial tycoons and editors of major newspapers.
“It seems to me time for the country to take account of its natural resources,” the President wrote, “and to enquire how long they are likely to last.”
The suggestion that anything so unquantifiable as the mineral and vegetal and hydrological wealth of one of the world’s largest nations might, in fact, be rendered into an “account” was almost as shocking as the cold, hard tone of Roosevelt’s last seven words. He wrote with the finality of a man who had, with his own eyes, seen the last few flutterings of a species that had once been capable of blackening the sky.
“We are prosperous now,” he continued, not even bothering to qualify his statement. Wall Street’s current recession was as trivial, historically speaking, as a waver in one of a redwood’s hundreds of growth rings. “We should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time.” He repeated what he had said at Memphis about the gravity of the responsibility Americans had to pass on to their children a protected natural heritage. For more than a century, that endowment had been “depleted and in not a few cases exhausted,” especially in the northeastern states. The situation was already so serious that it was a matter for all government, not merely the federal government, to face:
I have therefore decided, in accordance with the suggestion of the Inland Waterways Commission, to ask the Governors of the States and Territories to meet at the White House on May 13, 14, and 15 [next], to confer with the President and with each other upon the conservation of natural resources.
It gives me great pleasure to invite you to take part in this conference.… I shall also invite the Senators and Representatives of the Sixtieth Congress to be present at the sessions as far as their duties will permit.
The matters to be considered at this conference are not confined to any region of groups of States, but are of vital importance to the Nation as a whole and to all the people. These subjects include the use and conservation of the mineral resources, of the resources of the land, and the resources of the waters in every part of our territory.…
Facts, which I cannot gainsay, force me to believe that the conservation of our natural resources is the most weighty question now before the people of the United States. If this is so, the proposed conference, which is the first of its kind, will be among the most important gatherings in our history in its effects upon the welfare of all our people.
WALL STREET’S currency drought lasted through November. Cortelyou, whose commitment of Treasury funds into the New York banks had increased to $69 million, got presidential permission to raise $150 million more in government and Panama bonds, just to keep the market buoyant. Not for at least a year, in expert opinion, would stocks rise back to pre-1907 levels. But a short recession after seven fat years seemed preferable to seven lean years, such as had followed the depression of 1893.
Roosevelt wrote Kermit to say that blame for the economic downturn would inevitably center on himself and his regulatory policies. He might have to spend the rest of his presidency answering to the two classes of people always most vociferous in hard times: the bewildered and the guilty. However, “I am absolutely certain that what I have done is right and ultimately will be of benefit to the country.”
His Seventh Annual Message to Congress, delivered on 4 December, rang throughout with the same unapologetic note. “There may be honest differences of opinion as to many government policies; but surely there can be no such differences as to the need of unflinching perseverance in the war against successful dishonesty.”
BY NO HINT OF a frown, or a yawn, did he ever suggest that such routine work had become boring for him. But his animation whenever he mentioned Admiral Robley Evans’s battle fleet, now assembling at Hampton Roads, Virginia, for its pre-Christmas departure, was palpable. With 348,000 tons of white-painted armor and gunmetal ready to sail at his command, and most of the civilized world waiting to see if such an armada could possibly hold together for more than a few days at sea, executive paperwork offered few compensatory charms.
Except, perhaps, the pleasure of striking four names off his annual Christmas-card list: Mr. E. H. Harriman, Mrs. Harriman, and the Misses Harriman.
THE SIXTIETH CONGRESS, dominated even more than the Fifty-ninth by Speaker Cannon and Senator Aldrich, made immediately plain that it intended to stand as a conservative battlement against whatever progressive onslaughts—or Constitution-defying executive orders—Roosevelt might throw against it. Congressmen who prided themselves on their personal rectitude disliked the now habitual preachiness (more bully than pulpit) with which the President told them what laws to pass. They recalled Tom Reed’s famous jibe, “If there is one thing for which I admire you more than anything else, Theodore, it is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments.”
Cannon and Aldrich, respectively self-appointed as the protectors of laissez-faire on Capitol Hill, had had their worst fears of Roosevelt’s financial irresponsibility confirmed by the stock-market slump. Eugene Hale, chairman of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, issued a statement saying that Congress would not appropriate funds to send the Great White Fleet on its way. Roosevelt countered by informing him that the Navy already had enough money in
hand, and enough coal in store, to transfer its ships at least from one ocean to another—indeed, possibly as far as the Philippines. Congress was welcome to leave the fleet there—halfway around the world—if it wanted. As for his standing order to sail, “I am Commander-in-Chief, and my decision is absolute in the matter.”
This early skirmish established what would likely be the style of the two remaining legislative seasons of Roosevelt’s presidency: increasing obstructionism on Capitol Hill, more resort to surprise tactics at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Power attrition on both sides was the key factor. Only Senator Allison remained of Aldrich’s aging leadership. Orville Platt was dead, and John Spooner retired, a casualty of the LaFollette insurgency in Wisconsin. Cannon’s almost complete control of the House could not be denied, but if progressivism continued to change American attitudes toward government, he ran the risk of soon being perceived as a reactionary tyrant, determined to subvert the will of the people.
Roosevelt remained a formidable force, by virtue of his popularity, tactical skill, and unequaled political intelligence. But he had not much more than six months left as the leader of the Republican Party. By next June, a new claimant to that title would be nominated, and in less than a year, a new President elected. Senator Foraker was already a declared candidate, and “Uncle Joe” was not saying no to rumors that he might run, too. Senators LaFollette and Beveridge were separately wondering if they should mount token candidacies, to test the strength of the progressive movement, while William Howard Taft remained an oddly apathetic heir apparent.
Never again—unless Roosevelt withdrew his vow not to seek a third term—would “Theodore Rex” dominate the political scene as completely as he had for the last three years. And on 11 December, he removed all lingering doubts as to the seriousness of his post-election statement that he would not accept another nomination for President. “I have not changed and shall not change the decision thus announced.”
MONDAY, 16 DECEMBER, broke sunny, sharp, and clear over the James River estuary after a weekend of heavy rain. All sixteen ships of the battle fleet lay waiting for him, blindingly white in the eight o’clock light, as the Mayflower creamed into the Roads and proceeded past each gold-curlicued bow. The air drummed with 336 cannon blasts, not quite dividing into twenty-one-gun strophes.
“By George!” Roosevelt exulted to Secretary Metcalf. “Did you ever see such a fleet and such a day?”
When the presidential yacht came to anchor, gigs and barges brought aboard “Fighting Bob” Evans—a surprisingly small, fierce-faced man, limping with rheumatism—four rear admirals, and sixteen commanding officers. Roosevelt made no speech after shaking all their hands, only drawing Evans aside for a few minutes and muttering to him with earnest, snapping teeth. Bystanders watched the admiral’s cocked hat bobbing like a gull as Roosevelt bit off sentence after sentence. What scraps of dialogue floated on the breeze were mostly banal: “I tell you, our enlisted men … perfectly bully … best of luck, old fellow.”
Less audibly, the President was giving Evans secret orders to stay in the Pacific for several months, then proceed home via the Indian Ocean and Suez Canal. Cameras clicked as the two men bade each other farewell. The commanders returned to their ships, and, as the Mayflower got under way for Cape Henry, one by one the battleships weighed anchor and hauled around in stately pursuit. They overtook Roosevelt at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay and ground past him in a perfectly spaced, three-mile-long column. He watched with intent seriousness, periodically doffing his top hat, until the Kentucky, the last unit of the Fourth Division, moved by in a vast white wall, all its sailors saluting.
CHAPTER 30
Moral Overstrain
He’s a gr’-reat man, an th’ thing I like best about him is that in th’ dark ye can hardly tell him fr’m a Dimmycrat.
“THE REACTION AGAINST ROOSEVELT, socially, is violent,” Henry Adams wrote to a friend as the last tremblings of the great panic subsided. “And, like all Presidents, he will probably find himself, in his last year, a severely dethroned king.”
When Adams used the adverb socially, he tended to restrict its compass to the community he belonged to with a sense of tranquil entitlement: old-moneyed, Ivy League, Yankee. The President himself was of this ilk, although his blood was not as blue as Adams’s, and his portfolio nothing like as black. Yet there were—always had been—“foreign” elements in Roosevelt, differences of will rather than mere quirks of character, disturbing to men and women who would otherwise have found him congenial. Ever since he had forsaken his background, at age twenty-three, for what he called the “governing class” of practical politicians, there had been something vaguely traitorous about him. It was not the mere fact that he had chosen a career in which breeding mattered little—Henry Cabot Lodge had done the same, with no loss of dignity. Nor was it his cultivation of cowboys and locomotive engineers and the occasional black dinner companion. It was that from the very start, and most disturbingly since October’s panic, Roosevelt had never shown much respect for wealth. As he said himself, “I find I can work best with those people in whom the money sense is not too highly developed.”
Essentially an independent, he mistrusted the tendency of the wealthy to form tight, self-protective social cliques or (when they went into business) combinations in restraint of trade. The tighter each formation, the more obsessed it became with its own cohesion, and the more resentful of outside monitoring. He had noticed a definite increase in this resentment since the panic, especially along Wall Street, where the rumors that he was an alcoholic had strengthened into reports that he was insane. At the annual banquet of the New York Chamber of Commerce, a toast to the health of the President of the United States had been met with almost total silence.
To Ambassador James Bryce, a scholarly septuagenarian who had followed Roosevelt’s career from afar for almost twenty years, there was something medieval about the current politico-economic struggle. (“Combinations in restraint of trade,” Bryce reminded his government, “are contrary to common law since Henry II.”) The castles of wealth had been owned by “the great trust barons,” who in theory owed allegiance to the state, but in truth were beholden only to Money. The only nationally empowered defender of the rights of “their villein consumers” had been Roosevelt, intervening “partly from benevolent disinterestedness, partly from statecraft, much as did the medieval Church.” In the process, he had won the devotion of an enormous plebeian following. By March 1907, the struggle had seemed “to be going à outrance,” leading to the collapse of the stock market in October, and looking more and more like an episode from a knightly chronicle:
The oppression of the weak, the perversion of justice to private ends, the petty warfare, such as that of Heinze with Amalgamated [sic] Copper, fought out from underground forts in Montana mines, excommunications such as those pronounced by the Attorney-General against “bad Trusts”: the temporary ascendancy of a strong personality with great authority, without direct means of control, but with the support of public faith in the constitution and sanction of that authority, all find political parallels in the Middle Ages.
Bryce left vague whom he meant by “strong personality with great authority,” although he did note that J. Pierpont Morgan had “for a time quite outshone Theodore Roosevelt as a saviour of society.” He was definite, though, in saying that 1907 had marked the end of the “individualistic” era of checking combinations—as exemplified by Roosevelt’s willingness to make discreet arrangements with the likes of Judge Gary and Cyrus H. McCormick. In the new year of 1908, “the guiding principle has been changed to the socialistic ambition to control and convert them.”
ALL THAT WAS NEEDED to precipitate a final, all-out battle was a direct challenge. It came on 6 January, and from an unexpected quarter: the Supreme Court of the United States. One of Roosevelt’s proudest legislative achievements, the Employers’ Liability Act of 1906, was struck down on the grounds that it applied to intrastate corporations as wel
l as interstate ones—thus unconstitutionally infringing upon states’ rights.
The President’s initial reaction was to send Justice William R. Day a book on the need for a federal liability law protecting workers, begging him to read what it had to say about two higher-court rulings inimical to bakers and tenement-house cigar makers in New York. “If the spirit which lies behind these two decisions obtained in all the actions of the Federal and State courts, we should not only have a revolution, but it would be absolutely necessary to have a revolution, because the condition of the worker would become intolerable.”
Justice Day, who had concurred with the majority opinion of Justice White, was not able to do much more than note the title of the little volume Roosevelt found so alarming: Moral Overstrain.
In the three weeks that followed, the President gave evidence of suffering from that condition himself. He became incensed by Congress’s obvious reluctance to act on his last Message, which included demands for inheritance and income taxes, national incorporation of interstate businesses, greater federal power over railroad rates, compulsory investigation of major labor disputes, wider application of the eight-hour day, and no fewer than four new battleships.
Not unconnectedly, he also viewed with concern two looming threats to the presidential candidacy of William Howard Taft. First, Senator Foraker had made his own candidacy official, and had called upon the Ohio GOP to choose between its two sons well in advance of the national convention, set for Chicago on 16 June. And in New York, the successful and popular Governor Charles Evans Hughes was showing strength as a national candidate as well.
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