Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  Roosevelt had tried to help Taft by repeating, forcefully and unequivocally, that he himself would not run for a third term. This had at least allayed lingering doubts about his determination to retire. But how to eliminate Hughes, whom he had backed strongly only fourteen months before? He was quite willing to act, if he could do so without seeming treacherous. The Governor was intelligent but humorless, and exuded such an aura of scraggy-bearded self-righteousness that Roosevelt had taken to calling him “Charles the Baptist.”

  An announcement that Hughes was to speak on national issues at the New York Republican Club on 31 January, in a clear bid for party attention, enabled the American people to observe, yet again, that Theodore Roosevelt was the most adroit tactician in American politics. Working at top speed, he wrote a Special Message to Congress, radical enough to excite the admiration of Upton Sinclair, and released it on the day of Hughes’s speech. Its first words deceptively suggested that it was a response to the Supreme Court’s antilabor ruling, but its later paragraphs, filling twelve and a half columns of dense print in Congressional Record, amounted to a rewrite, in much harsher language, of his neglected Message of two months before. As a result, he simultaneously wrested from Hughes all the lead headlines (HOTTEST MESSAGE EVER SENT TO CONGRESS), put both Court and Congress on the defensive, dulled Morgan’s “saviour of society” shine, and by the sheer audacity of his proposals made the progressive/conservative split in the Republican Party permanent, with himself—ambiguous no longer—aligned firmly on the left.

  He demanded that the employers’ liability law be re-enacted in a form that would satisfy the Supreme Court, yet apply even more strongly to interstate commerce. He declared that congressional unwillingness to write any remedial entitlements for job injuries into the so-called federal worker’s compensation law was an “outrage” and “humiliation” to the United States. “In no other prominent industrial country in the world could such gross injustice occur.… Exactly as the working man is entitled to his wages, so he should be entitled to indemnity for the injuries sustained in the natural course of his labor.” Ultimately, private employers should be compelled to apply federal principles of liability and compensation across the entire industrial landscape.

  Roosevelt proudly cited the Anthracite Coal Commission’s 1903 strike report as “a chart” for action against the abuse of court injunctions in strikes and walkouts. “Ultra-conservatives who object to cutting out the abuses will do well to remember that if the popular feeling does become strong, many of those upon whom they rely to defend them will be the first to turn against them.” The Interstate Commerce Commission’s powers should be extended to total financial supervision of railroads, and also physical control of interstate operations and the scheduling of deliveries of perishable products. It was the inadequacy of the Hepburn Act, not its introduction in 1906, that had created an “element of uncertainty” in railroad-stock speculations, and “contributed much to the financial stress of the recent past.” Lastly, the Sherman Act should be refocused to distinguish between beneficial combinations and “huge combinations which are both noxious and illegal.”

  Referring to himself not infrequently in the royal plural, Roosevelt admitted that he was engaged in a “campaign against privilege” that was “fundamentally an ethical movement.” His targets were stock gamblers “making large sales of what men do not possess,” writers who “act as the representatives of predatory wealth” (among them, probably, the entire editorial staff of the New York Sun), and “men of wealth, who find in the purchased politician the most efficient instrument of corruption.” He reserved his strongest language for these multimillionaires, not identifying them directly but taking care to repeat, with incantatory frequency, the names of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company and E. H. Harriman’s Santa Fe Railroad. Such men were “the most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminals of great wealth.”

  Americans upon whom such men preyed had three choices: to let them flourish without supervision, to control them at the state level, or to regulate them by federal action. He did not doubt that the last option was the only way, as common law no longer had power to deal with uncommon wealth.

  These new conditions make it necessary to shackle cunning as in the past we have shackled force. The vast individual and corporate fortunes, the vast combinations of capital, which have marked the development of our industrial system, create new conditions, and necessitate a change from the old attitude of the State and the Nation toward the rules regulating the acquisition and untrammeled business use of property.

  SUBSCRIBERS TO THE theory that Roosevelt was crazy found in his Special Message all the evidence they wanted. Chancellor James Roscoe Day of Syracuse University remarked that “much of it reads like the ravings of a disordered mind.” The New York Times and New York Evening Mail both spoke of the President’s tendency toward “delusion,” especially with regard to imaginary conspiracies against him, and the New York Sun said that his “portentous diatribe” might be referred better to psychologists than to the archivists of Congress. “It is an even more disturbing reflection that the hand which penned this message is the same hand which directs the American Navy, now on its mission toward unknown possibilities. God send our ships and all of us good luck!”

  Charles Lanier, of Winslow Lanier & Co., added drugs to the derangement theory. He claimed, in a rumor that tickled Roosevelt enormously, that “the President is crazy, and furthermore … indulging immoderately in drink and is an opium fiend.” Current Literature, in one of its regular roundups of public opinion, noted the curious fact that almost all the questions about Roosevelt’s mental health were being asked, loudly and querulously, in his home state. Calmer voices there were few, and none so salutary as that of a progressive judge, William J. Gaynor of Brooklyn: “Every purseproud individual, as well as reactionary dullard, always considers a great character insane. In their littleness of heart, of soul, he seems so to them; but the people know that Frederick the Great was not insane, although he was called so all over Europe, just as well as they know and understand Theodore Roosevelt.”

  Gaynor’s words were borne out by the echolike promptness and fidelity of the response of “Roosevelt Republicans” west of the Hudson. The Philadelphia North American placed the Special Message “in the forefront among the really memorable state papers in the history of the nation,” and the Chicago Evening Post found it “a profoundly conservative document” in its insistence upon basic moral liberties. In remarkable harmony, a chorus of Southern Democratic newspapers praised the President’s attack on his own Old Guard, and the Baltimore Sun seemed quite serious in proposing that he run for re-election as a Democrat, with William Jennings Bryan as his vice-presidential candidate.

  Bryan himself—improbably resurgent after the defeat of Alton B. Parker—had gracious things to say. “It is a brave message and needed at this time. All friends of reform have reason to rejoice that the President has used his high position to call attention to the wrongs that need to be remedied.”

  All friends of Roosevelt were not, however, friends of reform, as he discovered when he received a letter from Nicholas Murray Butler early in February. More than six years had passed since Butler had sat listening to the “accidental” President ruminate in Commander Cowles’s parlor—years in which Butler’s own self-discovery, as president of Columbia University, had hardened into chronic self-importance.

  Of all your real friends perhaps I, alone, am fond enough of you to tell you what a painful impression has been made on the public mind by your Special Message.…

  Surely the sorry record of Andrew Johnson is sufficient proof that a President, whether right or wrong, cannot afford to argue with his adversaries, after the fashion of a private citizen, other than in a state paper or in a formal public address. If you will read this Message over quietly, and then read any of the most important Presidential Messages which have preceded it, you will, yourself, see exactly what I mean. You will see
how lacking it is in the dignity, in the restraint, and in the freedom from epithet which ought to characterize so important a state paper.…

  My honest opinion is that so far as the Message has had any purely political effect, it is to bring Mr. Bryan measurably nearer the White House than he has ever been before.

  Roosevelt declined to accept Butler’s censure. “You regret what I have done. To me your regret is incomprehensible.”

  ON 7 FEBRUARY, the Great White Fleet, dispatched toward unknown possibilities by an allegedly deranged (William James preferred the term dynamogenic) Commander-in-Chief, entered the Strait of Magellan. Since leaving Hampton Roads, it had become a diplomatic phenomenon, attracting worldwide press attention and spreading as much goodwill as foam along the Brazilian and Argentine coastlines. Even Punta Arenas, Chile, a windswept wood-and-iron outpost near the extreme tip of the continent, welcomed Admiral Evans and his sailors with elaborate hospitality and specially hiked prices.

  For twenty-two hours, the Chilean destroyer Chacabuco led Evans’s flagship Connecticut through the misty Strait—a surreal Doppelgänger of the waterway being carved across Panama—while fifteen other coal-heavy ships wallowed behind at four-hundred-yard intervals. No more than three men-of-war had ever performed this maneuver in convoy, and the going was hazardous even for single units. But the fleet steamed steadily through. It veered off course only once, when a sudden turbulence proclaimed the conflicting levels of two oceans. By the time the last vessel emerged into open sea, the first was already steaming toward Valparaiso, and the Pacific theater had received its largest-ever infusion of battleships.

  ROOSEVELT HAD still not announced his intention to send the fleet around the world—its official destination remained San Francisco. But Japan was aware that another war scare in the United States could quickly alter the fleet’s course; Admiral Dewey’s “ninety-day lag” no longer applied. This knowledge, combined with mounting diplomatic pressure from Elihu Root, now forced the conclusion of the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” on which Tokyo had been politely stalling for nearly a year.

  Throughout 1907, the influx of Japanese coolies into the United States had continued to pour unabated, making a mockery of the new immigration law. Root had tired of pointing out that the flow had to be restricted at its source, as per Tokyo’s verbal promise. Instead, he had taken advantage of the publicity attending the dispatch of the Great White Fleet to warn Ambassador Aoki that unless there was “a very speedy change in the course of immigration,” the Sixtieth Congress was certain to pass an exclusion act, greatly to the detriment of Japanese-American relations.

  By 29 February, as the fleet headed north from Callao, Peru, the Gentlemen’s Agreement was finally implemented. Coolies were no longer permitted to immigrate to Hawaii, passport restrictions were tightened, and illegal agencies were being prosecuted by Japanese authorities. And at last, the monthly “Yellow Peril” index compiled by the State Department began to decline.

  Roosevelt celebrated by confirming that the Great White Fleet, now en route to the Golden Gate, would proceed around the world after a couple of months’ rest and refitting. Its itinerary would include Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Japan (about two weeks before the presidential election), China, Ceylon, the Suez Canal, Egypt, the Mediterranean, and Gibraltar. Its due date for return to Hampton Roads was 22 February 1909, ten days before he was to leave the White House.

  PULVERIZING AS THE President’s Special Message had been to the boomlet for Governor Hughes, and however revealing of Roosevelt’s own changing ideology, it merely increased the opposition of congressional conservatives against him. Joseph Cannon in the House and Nelson Aldrich in the Senate vied with each other to deny him the reforms he had begged with such eloquence. However, a small band of progressive Republicans and a larger one of moderate Democrats (who had applauded repeatedly during the reading of the Message) helped him win at least three new laws: a re-enacted Federal Employers’ Liability Act, the Workman’s Compensation Act for federal employees, and the Child Labor Act for the District of Columbia.

  He also won, on 10 March, a nonlegislative victory with fruits that tasted distinctly sour. The Senate Committee on Military Affairs concluded its thirteen-month investigation of the Brownsville affair and found, by nine votes to four, that Roosevelt had justifiably dismissed without honor the soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry. Three thousand pages of testimony, and the congruent opinions of virtually all Army authorities from the Commander-in-Chief on down, were enough to convince five Democrats and four Republicans that the men were guilty. The dissenting members were all Republican, but they were themselves divided, in a way that paradoxically compromised the majority vote. Two found the testimony to be contradictory and untrustworthy, reflecting irreconcilable antipathies between soldiers and townspeople. Senators Foraker and Morgan G. Bulkeley insisted that “the weight of the testimony” showed the soldiers to be innocent.

  So did the weight of the only hard evidence in the case: thirty-three spent Army-issue cartridges found at the scene of the crime. Ballistics experts had testified that, while the shells had definitely been fired by Springfield rifles belonging to the Twenty-fifth, the actual firing had occurred during target practice at Fort Niobrara in Nebraska, long before the battalion was ordered to Texas. The mystery of the translocation of the shells to Brownsville was simply explained. Army budget officers frowned on waste of rechargeable ordnance, so 1,500 shells had been recovered from the range, sent south, and stored in an open box on the porch of a barracks hut at Fort Brown, available for any soldier—or passing civilian—to help himself.

  Such technical information, however, could not explain away the “wooden, stolid look” that Inspector General Garlington had seen on the faces he interviewed. It was a look so evocative of Negro complicity that the War Department had briskly dispensed with the formality of allowing every soldier his day in court.

  Roosevelt’s other major legislative request, unsatisfied through the first weeks of spring, was for four new battleships. The House followed the recommendation of its Committee on Naval Affairs and appropriated funds for only two. Unappeased by an extra appropriation to build a naval base at Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt put his hopes in the Senate. Debate there began on 24 April, none too favorably. Senators seemed more inclined to question the legality of his battle-fleet cruise order than to double the battleship quota of the House bill. But they also had to take into account his still phenomenal popularity, and the hold the Great White Fleet had taken of the public imagination. Three days later, Roosevelt won a modified victory: two battleships plus a guarantee that two more would be funded before he left office.

  Sounding rather like a small boy, he claimed not to have expected four all at once, but had asked for them only because he wanted to be sure of getting two.

  ROOSEVELT’S ENDORSEMENT of the recommendations of the Inland Waterways Commission was not unallied with his own profound enjoyment of anything rocky, slimy, hardscrabble, and dangerous. In Washington, he had become a confirmed river rat, frequently cruising down the Potomac or up the Anacostia in the Sylph, and hiking, wading, and climbing for miles along the wild banks of Rock Creek. Invitations to accompany him on what he was pleased to call “walks” usually bore the cautionary superscript, Put on your worst clothes. This gave notice that, sooner or later, he and his companions would end up in water, irrespective of whether it was freezing, mud-choked, or dangerously turbulent.

  “But, Mr. President,” Jules Jusserand was reduced to saying, “I have no worst clothes left.”

  Roosevelt was so much at home in the creek that he often walked straight across it, absorbed in conversation, not seeming to notice the water around his hips, even when he was jostling ice floes. He was impervious to cold, and when necessary would start swimming, while his companions succumbed to cramps. “To succeed in such cases,” one of his former Rough Riders advised Jusserand, “you must have a good layer of fat under your skin.”

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p; The little Ambassador was not well padded, but he was as tough as an Alpine montagnard and had become Roosevelt’s favorite exercise partner. He even accompanied the President on an excursion across a Potomac water pipe, so high and slimy that they were forced eventually to admit defeat. Roosevelt, who wanted to follow the pipe to its destination on a midriver island, hailed a passing rowboat and asked to be ferried there. As the boat pushed out into the current, Roosevelt put his arm around Jusserand’s neck, struck an attitude, and intoned: “Washington and Rochambeau crossing the Delaware.”

  Shortly after the battleship vote, in warm May weather, the President led Jusserand, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Bacon, and three other hikers on a strenuous, cliff-hanging expedition along the Virginia side of the Potomac, near Chain Bridge. When all were pouring with perspiration, Roosevelt suggested a swim and stripped naked. His party followed suit, but Jusserand absentmindedly kept on his black kid climbing gloves. “Eh, Mr. Ambassador,” Roosevelt called from the water’s edge, “have you not forgotten something?”

  Jusserand shouted back, “We might meet ladies.”

  The river was still cold, and when the swimmers returned to shore they were obliged to step wet into their clothes, and pull their socks on over mud-plastered feet. A further rock-climb was prescribed to restore body heat. Jusserand admired the President’s bearlike ascent of a cliff so precipitous that it defeated everyone else except the athletic Bacon. When, finally, they trooped back to their waiting carriages, the Assistant Secretary’s trouser leg was slit from hip to ankle.

  “PUT ON YOUR WORST CLOTHES.”

  Roosevelt (invisible) leads a Rock Creek Park expedition (photo credit 30.1)