NOT SINCE THE FOUNDING decades had Americans eyed a national leader of such prodigious versatility as the man who took the oath of office that September afternoon in 1901. From childhood, Theodore Roosevelt had seemed to reach out hungrily for experience and to lose himself in action. Like Washington and Adams and Jefferson and the others, he had come to know and embrace the natural world around him as well as the political flora and fauna. If he had the attention span of a golden retriever, as some critics said, he had at least emulated the Founding Fathers in recording his experiences in correspondence, articles, and books.
In his forty-three years, Roosevelt had already lived a half-dozen lives. The product of seven generations of Manhattan Roosevelts, he had fitted in with the Boston aristocracy as well, and had even married into it. As a Harvard student of mixed abilities but wide exposure—William James was one of his teachers—he had found time on the side to write scholarly studies on the birds of Oyster Bay and of the Adirondacks. He had come to know the West—the West of the Dakota Badlands—as few easterners had been able to. He had invaded the seamy Republican clubhouses of Manhattan and had courted or quelled their denizens.
Then he soared. At the age of twenty-three he won nomination and election as New York assemblyman and took on the legislative bosses in Albany. At twenty-six he was an influential delegate at the Republican convention that nominated Blaine. At twenty-eight he ran for mayor of New York City and finished third behind an old-line Democrat and Henry George, the single-taxer. At thirty-one he took office in Washington as a Civil Service commissioner; at thirty-seven he was New York City Police Commissioner; at thirty-nine Assistant Secretary of the Navy and Rough Rider; at forty governor of New York; at forty-two Vice-President of the United States. In between he raised a family, shot buffalo and grizzlies, published writings that ranged from serious works in western and naval history to appalling potboilers.
If Roosevelt embodied much of the history of late nineteenth-century America, he also reflected its contradictions and contrarieties. Like other upper-class fathers, he was a “devoted family man” who again and again deserted his family for weeks at a time as he pursued his ambitions. He adored his first wife, who died in childbirth, but in his grief exorcised her from his memory and from history by destroying their love letters and tearing her photographs out of their frames. He talked peace but carried a gun on any plausible occasion. He loved animals but slaughtered them, and when bothered by a neighbor’s dog, he pulled out his revolver and shot it dead. He believed in liberty but of the “orderly” type. He believed in equality but only with people he respected—and never with those, including fellow legislators who were Irish, whom he termed “a stupid, sodden vicious lot, most of them being equally deficient in brains and virtue.” He was a snob of the first water who made friends with cowboys and politicians once they were able to see past the side-whiskers, the monocle, the gold-headed cane, the silk hat, the cutaway coat—all of which accoutrements he brought with him in his first appearance in the New York Assembly.
His had been a life of almost continual conflict—fighting bosses in both parties, knocking down “muckers” who accosted him in saloon or clubhouse, hunting down western desperadoes, reprimanding constables asleep at their posts, charging up San Juan Hill, endlessly tangling with fellow commissioners, governmental superiors, pacifists, and members of the “wealthy criminal class.” Life was strife. Not by nature a compassionate man, he had a contempt for “weak, spineless” men of inaction, effete intellectuals like Henry Adams and Henry James, milk-and-water reformers. This contempt stemmed in part from his own childhood weaknesses and insecurities—his small, frail body racked by asthma and other ills, his myopic eyes, his reedy voice that easily slipped into a falsetto. Through home exercises, days on end of horseback riding, and incredible feats of endurance in the Badlands he had built a bull neck and a protruding chest, over a slowly expanding waistline.
Inevitably, as an intensely competitive man, he was something of a Social Darwinist. Many industrial evils would disappear, he said, if there were more of that “capacity for steady individual self-help which is the glory of every true American.” There were higher things than the “soft and easy enjoyment of material comfort,” he told an audience. “It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness.” If the “best classes” did not reproduce themselves, he said, the “nation will of course go down; for the real question is encouraging the fit, and discouraging the unfit, to survive.” Thus he favored sterilizing the criminal and the feebleminded. He viewed the yellow and black peoples as backward and ignorant. Yet he did not embrace Social Darwinist dogma consistently, and increasingly he saw the state as protecting people, without “paternalism.”
Nor was he likely to read the turgid works of Spencer or Sumner. He devoured books in great gulps, even while riding horseback or boating down streams, and his reading reflected both his catholicity and his love of battle. If he admired Francis Parkman and James Fenimore Cooper and Frederick Jackson Turner and anyone else who wrote about the West, he positively adored epics of fighting men. Naturally he abhorred critics of America, whether Frank Norris (“preposterous”) or Henry Adams and his Democracy (“mean and foolish”), and he cherished a particular contempt for Henry James as a “very despicable creature, no matter how well equipped with all the minor virtues and graces, literary, artistic, and social.” Tolstoy he esteemed, as long as the Russian steered clear of unclean sex. Longfellow he found “simply sweet and wholesome” but Chaucer “needlessly filthy.”
Still, it was difficult for Theodore Roosevelt to leave for long the subject of himself. If, as a family member remarked, “Uncle Ted” wanted to be the groom at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral, family friends also noted that he wrote a biography of Thomas Hart Benton that seemed mainly about Roosevelt, and a biography of Oliver Cromwell that was a “fine imaginative study of Cromwell’s qualifications for the Governorship of New York.” Henry Adams lampooned him as “pure act,” but Adams and other writers were nearer the mark when they compared his career to an express locomotive, speeding to an inevitable destination.
The force of a locomotive, but to what end? Clearly, in Roosevelt’s case, the capture of power, but for what purpose? To satisfy his own ego? So many of his friends suspected; hence their reluctance to give him office and authority. Or to realize some nobler purpose? The answer was not wholly clear, even to Roosevelt.
Like many other American leaders, he lusted for power but feared it. When two journalist friends asked him, during his days as police commissioner, whether he was working to be President, he jumped to his feet, ran around his desk, and with clenched fists and bared teeth advanced on the cowering men. “Don’t you dare ask me that!” he shouted. Then he quieted down and explained: if a man in a political job was reminded that he might be President, he would “lose his nerve” and not do the great things, the hard things, that required “all the courage, ability, work that I am capable of.…”
The quality that distinguished the Founders from a man like Roosevelt was their capacity to ground their concept of power in a settled and sophisticated philosophy of majority rule and minority liberties, of democratic representation and republican checks and balances, whereas Roosevelt was at most an instant philosopher who looked on power as an all-purpose weapon for all seasons. In 1901, he held an enormous potential for either progress or regression; the tinder of popular hopes and expectations, fears and hatreds, lay around him, ready to be ignited by that spark of furious energy that burned within him.
Furious potential energy also glowed among the people. America was still a nation most sharply divided between the poor and the rich—a fact not lost on a Christian socialist poet, Edwin Markham, who for years had been haunted by a Millet painting, The Man with the Hoe, that he had seen reproduced in Scribner’s Magazine. During Christmas week 1898, he had gazed transfixed at the original painting, temporarily on exhibition in San Francisco, and returned to his home on the heights back of Oakland to write the most quoted poem of the time. Over and over his stanzas asked by whose handiwork had the Man created by Lord God been reduced to this “stolid and stunned” brother to the ox. And he closed with a warning that for some would haunt the century ahead:
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds and rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God
After the silence of the centuries?
“I was a sickly and timid boy,” Theodore Roosevelt had written to an editor friend two weeks after the Governor’s election as Vice-President. He was trying to explain a report from his friend’s son at school that young Ted had “licked all the boys in his form.” Roosevelt had to admit that he, the father, was responsible in some measure for some of Ted’s “fighting proclivities.” And he strove to explain why. His own father, the Governor wrote, had taken great and loving care of him “when I was a wretched mite suffering acutely with asthma.” But he “most wisely refused to coddle me” and made him feel “that I was always to be both decent and manly, and that if I were manly nobody would long laugh at my being decent.”
Nothing could have pleased Roosevelt more than to hear that his son, small and bespectacled as he himself had been, was a “fighter.” Yet he had to write this long defense of Ted because he was defending himself, and he was doing so because of his own feelings of ambivalence and even guilt over physical conquest. He disclaimed ambition and the pursuit of power even as he feverishly pursued them, amid a loud self-righteousness, a high-minded moralizing, and a stubborn independence gained from the Roosevelts’ social status, his Harvard education, and his background in independent Republicanism. And if any would deny that the ethic of the family and the playground could be applied to national or world politics, Roosevelt testified to the contrary.
“It is exactly the same thing with history,” he continued in this same letter. “In most countries the ‘Bourgeoisie’—the moral, respectable, commercial, middle class—is looked upon with a certain contempt which is justified by their timidity and unwarlikeness. But the minute a middle class produces men like Hawkins and Frobisher on the seas, or men such as the average Union soldier in the civil war, it acquires the hearty respect from others which it merits.”
As Roosevelt assumed the powers of the presidency, his unquenchable blaze of energy not only would illuminate his own addiction to the elixir of power; it would spotlight the more portentous question of presidential power in a representative republic, and ultimately of popular rule in a democracy. Roosevelt possessed high office by virtue of an assassin’s bullet, not of a majority vote. He held one position of power in a system of dispersed authority, in a society dominated by economic and social elites. The country waited and wondered. Would he keep McKinley’s Cabinet and policies? Would he wait for Congress to act? Would he let the Senate dictate Supreme Court appointments? Could he deal with the economic barons whose influence pervaded the whole political system?
“The deep and damnable alliance between business and politics”—this challenge to public authority, and to his personal power, had increasingly preoccupied Theodore Roosevelt since his days in the legislature. During his navy days he had poured his “disgust” over this tie into the receptive ears of William Allen White, a young Kansas editor visiting Washington: so strong “was this young Roosevelt—hard-muscled, hard-voiced even when the voice cracked in falsetto, with hard, wriggling jaw muscles, and snapping teeth,” that he swept away any doubts White had held. As governor, Roosevelt had forced through the legislature a franchise tax bill making corporations holding public franchises “pay their just share of the public burden.” The actions of a single state, however, could hardly eliminate a national problem—the tightening concentration of economic control through pools, mergers, and holding companies—the “trust” problem.
And now, as President, Roosevelt was itching to attack this problem, indeed spoiling for a fight. At the start, nonetheless, he seemed to move slowly. His first message to Congress, in December 1901, presented a program of “moderately positive action,” intended somehow to abolish abuses without abolishing combinations—a program so restrained and limited as to dishearten his more militant supporters and provoke the press, including Finley Peter Dunne, who spoke through his alter ego, Mr. Dooley, with his usual gentle but penetrating wit.
“Th’ trusts are heejous monsthers built up be th’ inlightened intherprise iv th’ men that have done so much to advance progress in our beloved counthry,” Mr. Dooley represented the new President as saying. “On wan hand I wud stamp thim undher fut; on th’ other hand not so fast.”
Roosevelt had reason to be cautious. If he confronted economic power in United States Steel, Standard Oil, and a host of other titanic corporations, he confronted only two miles away—at the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue—citadels of political power on Capitol Hill. Since the President tended to conceive of power in terms of persons rather than institutions, he saw his opposition not as Senate, House, and judiciary, but as friendly or hostile leaders holding pivotal positions. Senate influence was clear; what was less clear was its relationship to “big business.”
Some senators were big business. Leland Stanford of California had died in 1893, but others in the upper house moved as easily between the business and political worlds as the railroad magnate had. Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, born of a poor farm family, had made a fortune in business, married wealth, and long acted in the Senate with aplomb for sugar, banking, and other enterprises in which he held investments. Suave, humorous, unflappable, he was the leader of a small coterie of Old Guard senators, of equal weight, who came to be known as the Big Four. Often allied with this group were men who held close ties to big business but were above all professional politicians and proud of it. Matthew Quay had fought his way to domination of Pennsylvania politics, masterminded Benjamin Harrison’s presidential campaign in 1888, run the Republican-party, —and become his state’s high-tariff man in the Senate, while amassing one of the finest private libraries in the nation. Thomas Platt, longtime Republican boss and businessman, continued to compete with Roosevelt for party influence in the Empire State. Also remaining in the Senate was old Mark Hanna, the “man who had made McKinley.” He had disliked Roosevelt almost as much as he had loved and admired his fellow Ohioan. “Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one life between this madman and the Presidency?” he had raged when other Republican leaders balanced the ticket in 1900 and eased Teddy into vice-presidential impotence. When word had reached Hanna of McKinley’s death he had cried, “Now look— that damned cowboy is President of the United States!”
Over in the House, power relationships converged in the Speaker and the men around him, especially those in the financial committees. Thomas Reed of Maine, the most powerful Speaker in memory, had quit both the Speakership and the House in 1899 in disgust over McKinley’s expansionist foreign policies, but Joseph Cannon of Illinois, beaten in the Democratic sweep of 1890, would soon gain the office. And in its small Capitol chamber between the two houses, the Supreme Court continued to arbitrate key sectors of the nation’s economic life. These gray eminences, appointed by a string of conservative Presidents, lay in potential ambush against antibusiness policy. Regarding the Court, the new President enjoyed one consolation: to the first vacancy that arose he would appoint a man he admired, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—though only after clearing his choice with his own good friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, another baron of state and Capitol Hill politics.
“Go slow,” the congressional Old Guard was urging Roosevelt, in Hanna’s words, and the President knew what they meant. Wall Street, the conservative press, and even his brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson, were urging him to be kind to business. Even before McKinley died, a letter had reached Roosevelt in Buffalo by special messenger from Robinson: “I must frankly tell you that there is a feeling in financial circles here that in case you become President you may change matters so as to upset the confidence … of the business world.” Later, two good friends of the new President, George Perkins and Robert Bacon, had come to the White House to urge caution. But they “were arguing like attorneys for a bad case,” Roosevelt wrote Robinson. “I intend to be most conservative,” he went on, yet he would pursue his course. He not only knew the cause Perkins and Bacon represented, but the man.
That man was J. Pierpont Morgan. Even Roosevelt had to grant that the financier’s “strong and dominant” personality made him worthy of his steel. With his great flaming red nose, piercing eyes, and bristling brows, he radiated a sense of power as commanding in the business world as Roosevelt’s would be in the political. He was indeed economic power incarnate. In the same year Roosevelt became President, Morgan had led a group of financiers in buying out Carnegie and other steel makers and forming the nation’s first billion-dollar corporation, a congeries of iron and steel works, ore holdings, and shipping properties. And during Roosevelt’s first weeks in the White House, the “First Lord of American Finance” had capped fifteen years of feverish railway acquisition by organizing the Northern Securities Company, combining the stock of the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, and the Burlington.
Roosevelt could hardly have felt more directly challenged. Well he knew, as did the Old Guard, that his predecessors in the White House had instituted remarkably few actions against business combinations under the Sherman Act; that the most vigorous prosecution under the law had been not against a businessman but a labor leader, Eugene Debs; that a federal action against the “Sugar Trust,” which controlled 98 percent of the nation’s sugar-refining, had been repudiated by a conservative Supreme Court in a decision notable for its tortured reasoning. Roosevelt vowed that he would not be a McKinley or a Cleveland or a Harrison. To him this was a question of power—the power of the people and of the President who represented them. Not trusting even his Cabinet, in great secrecy he instructed Philander Knox, his holdover Attorney General, to move against Morgan and the whole Northern Securities crowd, alleging conspiracy in restraint of trade.
Astonished by the move, Morgan seemed later to feel more hurt than intimidated. He had known Roosevelt for years. They were both gentlemen—New York gentlemen. Had not he, Morgan, endorsed young Roosevelt when he ran for the Assembly, contributed $10,000 through Platt when he ran for governor? To be sure, the young governor had sponsored a dubious corporation tax, but since then Theodore had seemed to be settling down. He had even as Vice-President-elect given a dinner for Morgan at the Union League Club—probably, Morgan may have (rightly) suspected, to show he was really a conservative in touch with the influential classes. And now this. There was only one way to settle such a difference between gentlemen. Morgan entrained for Washington and strode into the White House. After many handshakes the conversation reportedly went as follows:
Morgan: “If we have done anything wrong, send your man”—the Attorney General— “to my man and they can fix it up.”
Roosevelt: “That can’t be done.”
Knox: “We don’t want to fix it up, we want to stop it.”
Morgan: “Are you going to attack my other interests, the Steel Trust and the others?”
Roosevelt: “Certainly not, unless we find out that in any case they have done something that we regard as wrong.”
A most illuminating conversation, the President reflected after Morgan left. “Mr. Morgan could not help regarding me as a big rival operator, who either intended to ruin all his interests or else could be induced to come to an agreement to ruin none.” While the President turned to his next target, the beef trust, the Morgan group appealed to the federal courts.
The President delivered an even sharper blow to the “arrogance” of the “big monied men” during an anthracite coal strike later in 1902. The coal operators, including the six railroad corporations that owned most of the mines, were balking at a wage increase, but even more they sought to break the power of the United Mine Workers union and its young president, John Mitchell. George F. Baer, head of a large Pennsylvania coal and iron company and the industry’s main spokesman, typified the bland arrogance of the owners when he uttered his unforgettable pronunciamento, “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.”
As the strike continued, coal prices skyrocketed. Mayors and congressmen called for a settlement to avert a coalless winter. The specter loomed of children shivering in icy schoolrooms. At a White House conference, Mitchell said that he would accept an arbitration tribunal if the other side would, but the operators indulged in such denunciations of union anarchists and criminals that Roosevelt said later that only one man behaved like a gentleman and “that man was not I,” but Mitchell. Roosevelt was in a quandary. He would not call out federal troops, as Cleveland had done, but the operators still would not budge.
In desperation, the President let word filter into Wall Street that he was preparing to order federal seizure of the mines; and he put conciliatory feelers out to the House of Morgan through his friend Secretary of War Elihu Root. The financier and the Cabinet member worked out an arbitration proposal on Morgan’s yacht. There was a last-minute hitch when the operators refused to accept a union man for the arbitration board, but the President adroitly solved this problem by placing the Grand Chief Conductor of the Order of Railway Conductors on the board under the title “sociologist.” In the end, the arbitrators granted the workers a nine-hour day and a 10 percent pay increase—but not UMW recognition.
The President’s business foes charged that he was “playing politics” with his eye constantly cocked on the 1904 election. They were quite correct. Roosevelt indeed had been running for President since virtually the day he entered politics. In his brief half-year as Vice-President, he had begun maneuvering for the job, and he had been the most likely man to succeed McKinley if only because he would have fought the hardest. McKinley’s assassination simply speeded up the process.
Halfway through his term, with scalps from the Northern Securities case and the coal strike hanging from his belt, the President seemed to move toward the center of the GOP. He pulled back on his antitrust campaign, adopted a moderate position on the tariff and other simmering issues, placated the congressional Old Guard through word and deed, put out conciliatory feelings to Morgan and his people. He played ordinary old-fashioned presidential politics, courting blacks, labor, ethnic leaders, and other elements of the big Republican party coalition, exploiting patronage to the hilt, steering clear of state factional fights. He played his own brand of ruthless politics, as he coldly cut off Mark Hanna’s patronage base in the South, falsely denied receiving large campaign contributions from Wall Street, and even helped delay the admission of Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico because of the likelihood that they would vote Democratic in the 1904 election. When Hanna, already beaten, died from typhoid fever a few months before the convention, Roosevelt’s nomination was guaranteed. And when the Democrats, returning to their old strategy of the Northeast-South axis, chose an upright but conservative and colorless New York judge, Alton B. Parker, for President, Roosevelt’s reelection was guaranteed. He won in a sweep.
Roosevelt had camouflaged his campaign shenanigans in “boorishly self-righteous” protestations, in William Harbaugh’s words. Perhaps it was because of some sense of “power guilt,” some fear of power as an aphrodisiac, that on election night he made his fateful pronouncement, “Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.”
But he would exercise power while he had it, especially against power in hands he considered irresponsible. Inevitably he returned to the challenge of big business. He felt, according to John Blum, “that the central issue of his time pivoted on the control of business because this control determined conduct…. He feared not the size but the policies of big business.” And of all the sectors of big business, none concerned him more than the railroads. “The question of transportation,” he stated in his annual message to Congress in December 1905, “lies at the root of all industrial success,” and the revolution in transportation during the last half-century lay at the heart of the growth of industry. What was needed was “to develop an orderly system” through “the gradually increased exercise of the right of efficient Government control.”
Now a seasoned political leader after eight years in high offices, Roosevelt followed the Machiavellian advice to combine the prudence of the fox with the might of the lion in attacking the citadels of railroad power. Within a few weeks of election he launched suits against railroads and other corporations for giving and receiving rebates. The most powerful roads— the Burlington, the Great Northern, the Chicago & Alton—were indicted. An official report, Roosevelt declared, demonstrated that the Standard Oil Company had profited “enormously” from secret rail rates. Roosevelt focused on the issue of rebates, which had been outlawed in the Elkins Act of 1903 but still remained endemic in the railroad industry.
Roosevelt also favored tariff revision, but he viewed this issue as so subordinate to curbing the railroad barons that he used tariff reform as a bogey to frighten the Republican Old Guard, then in effect withdrew his tariff card in order to gain more leverage on the railroad issue. Meantime he put steady pressure on Congress to grant the ICC authority to set maximum railroad rates. Greeted with enthusiasm by shippers, farmers, and travelers, especially in the West, rate regulation passed through the House easily but ran head-on into the Republican Old Guard in the Senate. Most of the conservative senators, not willing to defy public opinion, favored the Hepburn regulatory bill but argued for proposals to broaden the power of the judiciary to review the ICC’s rate-making and thus in effect cripple the commission’s effectiveness.
This notion of broad court review touched a most sensitive nerve in Theodore Roosevelt, for it revived a painful memory. When, in 1902, he was considering Oliver Wendell Holmes as his first and stellar appointee to the Supreme Court, the President had written Lodge that he liked Holmes’s personality, his Americanism, his record as a gallant Civil War soldier, his earlier pro-labor decisions as a Massachusetts judge. In the low and ordinary sense of “partisan” and “politician,” Roosevelt went on to Lodge, a justice should be neither. “But in the higher sense, in the proper sense, he is not in my judgment fitted for the position unless he is a party man, a constructive statesman,” who could work with “his fellow statesmen” in the other branches of government. Chief Justice Marshall had been that sort of man, Chief Justice Taney a “curse to our national life” because of his narrow view of federal power. “Now I should like to know that Judge Holmes was in entire sympathy with your views and mine….”
He would not put on the Court someone who was not “sane and sound” on such matters. Lodge had evidently reassured the President. But when the Court passed on Northern Securities in 1904 and supported the Administration’s trust-busting by a margin of one vote, Holmes had dissented. Roosevelt greeted the news with indignation: “I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that,” he was reported to have exclaimed—the same judgment he had made of McKinley on an earlier “backbone” issue.
Now, in 1906, to push the railroad rate bill through the Senate, Roosevelt had to thread his way between Aldrich’s group demanding broad review—even Lodge came out against federal rate-making—and a band of senators, headed by Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, demanding the addition to the bill of a most controversial provision for the evaluation of railroad properties. In a desperation effort, Aldrich turned over floor leadership on the bill to one of Roosevelt’s mortal enemies, Democrat Benjamin R. Tillman of South Carolina, the old populist and outspoken racist. In a virtuoso display of personal politics Roosevelt flirted with Tillman, but pulled back when Pitchfork Ben could not carry the Democratic caucus; then TR returned to a formula of ambiguous language on the issue of court review; and finally accepted a bill without provisions for physical valuation of the railroads, to La Follette’s chagrin.
The final version of the bill, however compromised, was a notable victory for the President. The Hepburn Act empowered an enlarged Interstate Commerce Commission to fix maximum railroad rates; extended the commission’s jurisdiction to include sleeping-car companies, ferries, bridges, and terminal facilities; and made its orders binding on carriers pending a court decision, thereby placing the burden of proof on the carrier. Nestled in the bill also was a provision for ICC control of interstate oil pipelines—a provision that could only have been aimed at the Standard Oil Company and its old master, John D. Rockefeller.
With teeth clenched and pince-nez flashing, Roosevelt would stride round his office, dictating letters; “The Colombia people proved absolutely impossible to deal with. They are not merely corrupt. They are governmentally utterly incompetent. They wanted to blackmail us and blackmail the French company … in spite of the plainest warnings they persisted in slitting their own throats from ear to ear.”
The President often shouted out paragraphs, punctuating them with fierce gestures as though he were haranguing a crowd. But, in the next moment, he might sit on the edge of his desk, feet dangling idly, and continue in a casual or ironic tone: “I am not as sure as you are that the only virtue we need exercise is patience. I think it is well worth considering whether we had better warn those cat-rabbits that great though our patience has been, it can be exhausted.” Sometimes he intermixed cool reason and savage denunciation, causing his secretaries alternately to marvel and to quail: “At present I feel that there are two alternatives. (1) To take up Nicaragua; (2) in some shape or way to interfere when it becomes necessary so as to secure the Panama route without further dealing with the foolish and homicidal corruptionists in Bogotá. I am not inclined to have any further dealings whatever with those Bogotá people.”
Not since the days of Andrew Jackson, it seemed, had an American President so strongly put his personal mark on the nation’s foreign policy. Teddy Roosevelt brought to diplomacy a quick temper, unquenchable energy, a rigid moral code, and a vocabulary of curses that Old Hickory would have admired. Yet at the same time Roosevelt could be charming, humorous, and a patient negotiator. His intensely personal style surprised and occasionally flustered members of the staid diplomatic establishment. “We drove out to the Rock Creek,” wrote British Ambassador Sir Mortimer Durand of one interview with the President; “he then plunged down … and made me struggle through bushes and over rocks for two hours and a half, at an impossible speed, till I was so done that I could hardly stand.” Roosevelt talked nonstop, much to the relief of the winded Englishman.
In an age when diplomacy-was still a leisurely ritual practiced by gentlemanly initiates, Roosevelt was eager to charge straight toward his goals with all the force of a locomotive. His barrages of letters, disregard of proper form, public gestures of friendship and defiance, all strained tempers from Caracas to St. Petersburg—and occasionally produced results.
The goal that Roosevelt eyed most impatiently was the building of a canal to link the Atlantic and Pacific. Schemes for digging a waterway across Central America had been a fixture in U.S. diplomacy since the 1840s, when the United States acquired California and Oregon, thus becoming a two-ocean power. The need for a canal was underlined during the war with Spain, when warships from the Pacific coast had to steam 14,700 miles, all the way around South America, to join in the fighting off Cuba.
During McKinley’s Administration, Secretary of State John Hay had already begun trying to clear away obstacles to the project. The first barrier was the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, a fifty-year-old agreement that bound America not to construct a Central American canal without the consent and participation of Britain. Hay persuaded the British to grant the United States exclusive control in exchange for a pledge not to fortify the waterway. But the Senate, inflamed by anti-British rhetoric in the election campaign of 1900, rejected the proposed pact. Hay was livid. “I felt sure that no one out of a mad house could fail to see that the advantages were all on our side,” he wrote. “But I underrated the power of ignorance and spite acting upon cowardice.” The negotiations collapsed; then McKinley died and TR became President.
The scholarly Secretary of State had been an aide to Abraham Lincoln when Roosevelt was still a toddler. Of frail health and a morbid cast of mind. Hay presented a sharp contrast to the new President, but the two men became good friends and made a working team. Under Roosevelt’s prodding and Hay’s gentle suasions, the British made further concessions. By the end of 1901, the two sides concluded a second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, which this time did survive the Senate.
The next step was to choose a site for the canal. Most congressmen—including Alabama’s Senator John T. Morgan, longtime leader of the pro-canal forces—favored a route through Nicaragua. But Roosevelt, at the advice of engineers and naval officers sent to inspect the possibilities, leaned toward the Isthmus of Panama, where a French company had dug about a third of a canal before collapsing in bankruptcy. Two members of the successor of the defunct company, lobbyist William Cromwell and engineer Philippe Bunau-Varilla, joined the President in trying to bring Congress around to the Panama route. Cromwell’s sizable cash contributions to GOP war chests won him a favorable hearing from Mark Hanna and other Republican leaders, but it was Bunau-Varilla who pulled off the flashiest coup of the campaign. When a volcano erupted in the West Indies, destroying a city of 30,000 people, the Frenchman bought ninety sets of Nicaraguan postage stamps that pictured one of that country’s volcanoes and sent one to each senator with the inscription, “An official witness of the volcanic activity of Nicaragua.” In June of 1902, after a long but futile fight by Morgan, Congress authorized Roosevelt to explore the Panamanian alternative.
Bunau-Varilla’s company avidly agreed to sell its assets in Panama to the United States for $40 million. Now all Roosevelt needed to do was to persuade Colombia, which after all owned the isthmus, to let the United States begin construction. The President offered the Colombians a cash payment of $10 million and a rent of $250,000 per year in exchange for control of the canal and a zone six miles around it. The Colombian government resisted, hoping to gain more money and a firmer guarantee of its sovereignty over the canal zone. Despite warnings from the U.S. envoy in Bogotá that his terms were unacceptable, TR kept up the pressure through the fall and winter of 1902. One Colombian ambassador resigned in disgust. The next, Tomás Herrán, fearing that the “impetuous and violent” President might seize Panama by force, signed the treaty despite instructions from Bogotá.
By unanimous vote, the Colombian Senate rejected the Hay-Herrán pact on August 12, 1903. Roosevelt fulminated, sending letters and expletives flying in every direction. Evidently the Colombians hoped to wait until October of 1904, when the lease of the French company would expire and the $40 million could be paid to Colombia instead. The obvious difficulty with waiting, for Roosevelt, was the approach of the 1904 election. If he was to get the canal started before he faced the voters, the President would either have to make a much better offer to Bogotá, open an entirely new set of negotiations with Nicaragua—or hope for some change in Panama itself. The Panamanians had revolted against Colombia a number of times in the past; would they do so again when faced with the prospect of losing the canal project forever?
“Privately,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend, “… I should be delighted if Panama were an independent State, or if it made itself so at this moment; but for me to say so publicly would amount to an instigation of a revolt, and therefore I cannot say it.”
The President’s reticence about encouraging the Panamanians was not shared by other Americans, however. In Panama City, a group of U.S. Army engineers, railroad employees, and even the American consul general became involved in the incipient plan for a revolt. In New York, in Room 1162 of the Waldorf, an emissary from the would-be insurgents, Dr. Manuel Amador, met with Cromwell—who promised $100,000 to speed up the revolt—and Bunau-Varilla. It was Bunau-Varilla who sounded out Roosevelt and the State Department as to the government’s attitude toward a revolt. Apparently satisfied with their responses, and with the news that a U.S. cruiser was on its way to the isthmus, the Frenchman urged the plotters to proceed.
Amador returned to Panama with a flag, a constitution, and a battle plan—all thoughtfully provided by Bunau-Varilla—and on November 3, 1903, the Republic of Panama was proclaimed. Acting on secret orders wired from Washington the day before, the captain of the U.S.S. Nashville prevented the Colombians from landing troops to stamp out the revolt. After more American naval forces arrived, the United States formally recognized the new nation.
Bunau-Varilla had stayed in New York to act as “Envoy Extraordinary” for the revolution. The French engineer opened negotiations with Hay and quickly struck a deal: Panama would receive the $10 million and $250,000 rent originally offered to Colombia, plus an explicit American guarantee of its independence. In return, the United States was granted absolute sovereignty over an enlarged canal zone. Bunau-Varilla signed the agreement for Panama on the evening of November 18. Just hours later, Acting President Amador arrived in Washington, only to find his new nation committed to a treaty that he had never seen. Realizing that Panama was totally dependent on the protection of the U.S. fleet, Amador and his government had little choice but to accept the deal.
The agreement was not greeted by universal acclaim in the United States. The head of the American Bar Association denounced America’s role in the insurrection as a “crime”; the New York Times termed it an “act of sordid conquest.” In the Senate, John Morgan led a concerted assault on the treaty, calling it a “caesarian operation” midwived by Roosevelt. But the country at large rallied behind the President; Morgan’s forces went down to defeat, and the senator himself reluctantly voted for the treaty in the end. Better a stolen canal than no canal at all, he and others reasoned. The 1904 Republican platform, however, expressed no shame at the outcome: “The great work of connecting the Pacific and Atlantic by a canal is at last begun, and it is due to the Republican Party.” Touting Roosevelt for a presidential term in his own right, it proclaimed that “foreign policy under his administration has not only been able, vigorous, and dignified, but in the highest degree successful.”
Roosevelt’s own account of the Panama Canal’s beginnings harked back to his days in the Badlands. Colombia was a “road agent” who had tried to hold the President up, but Roosevelt had been “quick enough” and had “nerve enough to wrest his gun from him.” In his analogy the Colombians’ gun was Panama, and TR refused to heed the protests of any “hysterical sentimentalist” who wanted him to return it.
Other observers, then and since, have also seen Panama as highway robbery—but with Roosevelt as the bandit. Nor was Roosevelt’s willingness to risk conflict confined to this one affair. He convinced Britain that he would use force to settle Alaska’s disputed boundary, thus causing the British to accept the line claimed by America. He sent gunboats to Morocco to secure the release of a person who turned out not to be a U.S. citizen. In the Caribbean, the President pressured the Germans over Venezuela, took control of the Dominican Republic’s customhouses, and sent troops to occupy revolution-torn Cuba. To the Monroe Doctrine he added the so-called Roosevelt Corollary, a warning that “flagrant cases of … wrongdoing or impotence” in the Western Hemisphere would be checked by the United States acting as an “international police power.” Once again TR painted himself as fighting outlaws as well as European powers who might take over weak Latin American states unable to pay debts or protect foreign nationals.
Roosevelt quite clearly relished conflict, confrontation, even the risk of war. “No merchant,” he declared, “no banker, no railroad magnate, no inventor of improved industrial processes, can do for any nation what can be done for it by its great fighting men. No triumph of peace can equal the armed triumph over malice domestic or foreign levy.” He was much influenced by the idea of the “competition of races,” preached by Josiah Strong and others who saw America as engaged in a tremendous struggle for the dominance of the fittest among nations. In effect, Strong’s doctrine was Social Darwinism applied to international relations—and Roosevelt subscribed to it heartily.
In the hands of Strong, Roosevelt, and other expansionists, Manifest Destiny became practically indistinguishable, as a concept, from the imperialism being practiced by the nations of Europe. The contrast with the dominant ideas of a century earlier was striking. In the early days of the American republic, with France setting all Europe aflame with revolution, men like Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson could well hope that democracy was destined to spread throughout the world. Theirs was a belief in the power of ideas—particularly in the idea of liberty. Theodore Roosevelt, President in an era when Europeans were using force to subjugate much of the globe, was wedded instead to the idea of power.
If Roosevelt, in his self-proclaimed role as policeman among nations, was open to the charge of imperialism, then other actions of his require a very different explanation. One strand in Rooseveltian diplomacy was composed of force and conflict, yet an opposing strand consisted of conciliation and quiet diplomacy. Behind the scenes, the blustering Rough Rider often acted as a force for moderation.
The most dramatic display of the “other” Roosevelt came in 1905, when he moved to end the Russo-Japanese War. Fighting had broken out a year earlier, when the two powers clashed over their rival interests in Manchuria and Korea. Japan won a series of naval victories and most of the land battles, only to find her economy in critical condition as the war dragged on. The Russians, meanwhile, were bedeviled with internal turmoil, terrible incompetence in their army, and the disastrous loss of their Baltic fleet at Tsushima Straits, after its epic voyage around the world. Neither side could afford to continue the struggle, yet neither would sue for peace. In desperation over the stalemate, Japan turned to Roosevelt in April of 1905.
Initially TR had favored Japan. “You must not breathe it to anyone,” he wrote TR, Jr., after the battle of Port Arthur; “I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory.” The Japanese seemed able and intelligent, while the Russians annoyed him with their “supine carelessness” and “contemptuous effrontery.” Throughout the war, Japan’s diplomats courted Roosevelt’s further goodwill by joining him for hikes and tennis games, arranging wrestling lessons for him, and deluging him with books on the island kingdom. Roosevelt was responsive to this kind of personal approach. He tended to draw advice from his “Tennis Cabinet,” a loose group of friends and sports cronies that already included several foreign diplomats. But apparently the Japanese miscalculated the effect of their efforts. Educated by his crash course of readings—and by the string of Japanese military successes—Roosevelt began to wonder aloud whether the Japanese “did not lump Russians, English, Americans, Germans, all of us, simply as white devils inferior to themselves” and were planning to “beat us in turn.”
Aware of the big stakes involved, Roosevelt brought to the peace-making process both his vigor and his finesse. While bombarding Czar Nicholas with plans and suggestions for a peace conference, he worked on the Japanese diplomats, urging them to moderate their terms. Notes and telegrams flowed between the President and officials in London, Paris, and Berlin as Roosevelt sought for every opening to influence the belligerents. In June, convinced that at last he would receive a favorable response, he formally invited Japan and Russia to come together for direct negotiations. The two powers consented, designating the United States as the site of their conference.
At the U.S. naval base in Kittery, Maine, just across the river from Portsmouth, the two sides confronted each other. From Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt followed every nuance of the negotiations. It soon became clear that the talks would deadlock; Russia refused to concede defeat or pay an indemnity, while Japan would give up none of its military gains. “I am having my hair turned gray by dealing with the Russian and Japanese peace negotiators,” TR fumed to his son Kermit. “The Japanese ask too much, but the Russians … are so stupid and won’t tell the truth.” Again the telegraph wires to St. Petersburg burned with new arguments and proposals. First the Japanese and then the Russians were invited down to Oyster Bay for a private talk with the President. From Japan’s representative, he secured a compromise on two of the four points still at issue. Then, returning from a cruise beneath Long Island Sound in an experimental submarine, Roosevelt offered the Russians a change of wording that helped put a better face on their concessions. His skillful interventions helped to produce a treaty of peace.
Roosevelt displayed the same firm but gentle touch that made the Treaty of Portsmouth possible in other controversies between the major powers. When war threatened to break out between France and Germany over Morocco in 1905, the President again provided his good offices for settling the dispute. America’s participation in the ensuing Algeciras Conference was greeted with skepticism in Congress, but Roosevelt took considerable pride in the peaceful outcome. He also was the moving force behind the 1907 Hague Conference, which denounced the use of military force to collect foreign debts and tried to establish limits of civilized conduct in war. Watching the emergence of Roosevelt as a “diplomatist of high rank,” the London Morning Post professed to be amazed. “He has displayed … great tact, great foresight, and finesse really extraordinary. Alone … he met every situation as it arose, shaped events to suit his purpose, and showed remarkable patience, caution, and moderation.”
Roosevelt, notes biographer Elting Morison, had a “horror of anarchy, disorder, and … wanton bloodshed.” His experiences with the chaos of modern life were intensely personal: he lost a cherished wife in childbirth and a beloved younger brother to alcoholism, witnessed frontier violence, ascended to the presidency through the whim of an assassin, and watched his friend John Hay die as the Portsmouth negotiations commenced. Roosevelt courted strife because he could not seem to avoid it, yet he also was able to rise above the battle, to convert struggle into a personal and political source of power. “TR’s supporters focused on his ability to master seemingly uncontrollable forces and, in so doing, advance the cause of moral order,” according to Robert Dallek. The need to control events underlay Roosevelt’s words and beliefs as well as his actions; it was the thread that united TR the imperialist with TR the peacemaker.
Solid accomplishments were the only adequate response to life’s natural disorder. “The chief pleasure really worth having,” Roosevelt confided to a friend, “… is the doing well of some work that ought to be done.” Thus no prospect delighted him more than the actual construction of the isthmian canal. Although no President had ever before left the country while in office, Roosevelt could not keep away from Panama.
The President sailed to the Canal Zone on a battleship, purposely timing his arrival to coincide with the height of the rainy season so as to see the site at its most daunting. The weather pelted him as he rode through the streets of Panama City with Amador, wilted his white suit as he climbed aboard a huge steam shovel to do a little digging on his own, and threatened to derail his train as he inspected the locks. Everything had to be explained to him: engineers’ salaries, the crews’ kitchens, the controls of the various equipment.
“This is one of the great works of the world,” he assured the assembled diggers. “It is a greater work than you, yourselves, at the moment realize.”
On his return from Panama, Roosevelt had to take hold of a more prickly situation. The San Francisco Board of Education, under pressure to stem the flow of Japanese immigrants to California, had passed in 1906 an order that segregated all oriental students in the city’s public schools. Labeling the segregation order a “wicked absurdity,” the President tried to bring pressure to bear on the westerners, only to find himself stymied by the constraints of federalism. As Japanese indignation and Californian defiance mounted, TR turned on the charm instead. The mayor of San Francisco and seven school board members accepted his invitation to come to the White House, and in a series of meetings refereed by Hay’s successor, Elihu Root, Roosevelt and the local officials reached an understanding. San Francisco repealed the segregation order, and the President undertook to persuade the Japanese to limit their immigration to America.
The same mix of finesse and force was evident in Roosevelt’s negotiations with Japan. To fulfill his promise to the San Franciscans, Roosevelt sent another friend, Secretary of War William Howard Taft, to Tokyo. The genial Taft quickly found a face-saving formula for the Japanese: both sides would enter into a Gentlemen’s Agreement to reduce immigration to the other’s country. Roosevelt continued his efforts to assuage the Japanese and, in 1908, Root and Japan’s ambassador, Baron Kogoro Takahira, reached an agreement to maintain the status quo in the Pacific and uphold the continued independence of China. Both Taft’s and Root’s understandings were embodied in executive agreements rather than formal treaties; Roosevelt was not going to stake the fragile détente he had built in the Pacific on the uncertain outcome of a Senate ratification fight.
Yet while TR wooed Japan, he also sought to show the Tokyo government that he was not negotiating out of fear. In the summer of 1907, he conceived of a grand gesture of American might—a triumphant procession of the U.S. fleet around the world, with its first stops to include Japan. The sixteen sleek white battleships, many of them launched during his term, were other tangible proofs to TR of his success in wielding the power of the United States. In sending them to what the fleet commander thought might be a “feast, a frolic, or a fight,” Roosevelt was putting to the test the prestige of his personal leadership.
In its fourteen-month tour the fleet encountered much feasting, in Tokyo and elsewhere, some frolic—and a number of disturbing technical failures. The tremendous diplomatic success of the cruise tended to hide the fact that America could not fuel or repair a globe-circling navy, and that the ships themselves had distinct mechanical problems—ruptured boiler tubes, cracked armor plates, defective shell hoists. Nor did Roosevelt anticipate that his show of force would encourage navalists in Tokyo to speed up the expansion of the Japanese fleet, undermining the balance of power in the Orient.
Ironically, the cruise of the “Great White Fleet” pointed out the limits to Roosevelt’s reliance on the force of personality. Even as vigorous an executive as TR was unable to control all the factors at work on the disorderly world scene, or to judge correctly the consequences of all his actions. At home, too, there were forces for change at work, forces that also threatened to evade Roosevelt’s controlling hand.
At the time Roosevelt entered the White House, a new and intoxicating feeling of reform and change was pervading the nation. People were still reading George and Bellamy and Norris and the rest; an older generation could remember the exhortations of Phillips, Garrison, and Douglass, of Anthony, Stanton, and the Grimké sisters. But a different breed of reform leaders was now pushing forward and gaining public attention. The single-taxer Tom L. Johnson gained election as mayor of Cleveland, and the reform mayor of Toledo was winning reelection as “Golden Rule” Jones. A young reporter named Josiah Flynt, who had lived with tramps and pictured tramping as just another way of living, was starting a series on graft for McClure’s. The same journal was publishing Lincoln Steffens on bossism in St. Louis and Ida Tarbell on the Standard Oil Company.
Time was, Mr. Dooley opined to Mr. Hennessey, when magazines were very calming to the mind. “But now whin I pick me fav’rite magazine off th’ flure, what do I find? Ivrything has gone wrong…. All th’ pomes be th’ lady authoressesses that used to begin: ‘Oh, moon, how fair!’ now begin: ‘Oh, Ogden Armour, how awful!’ … Graft ivrywhere. ‘Graft in th’ Insurance Comp’nies,’ ‘Graft in Congress,’ …‘Graft be an Old Grafter,’ … ‘Graft in Its Relations to th’ Higher Life’….”
Others shared Mr. Dooley’s perplexity. How could reform become so popular, so fashionable, in a land that had been enjoying McKinley’s Full Dinner Pail, a nation that had easily bested an ancient European power, a society on the whole quite satisfied with itself? Time would bring some clues. People enjoying material well-being are more likely to move to higher needs and aspirations—such as the pursuit of liberty, equality, and happiness—than those desperately scrabbling for food and shelter. But to move people to higher levels of moral behavior, leadership is required, and not only was Roosevelt all too ready to provide moral leadership, but a “second cadre” consisting of hundreds of zealous young publishers, editors, and writers was now taking the lead.
The striking aspect of these two levels of leadership was the engagement between them. Roosevelt knew many of the reformers personally—he knew Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, Finley Peter Dunne, Norman Hapgood, William Allen White, Ray Stannard Baker. He read them, wrote to them, scolded them, praised them, inspired them. They read him, talked with him, corresponded with him, alternately loved him and hated him, sometimes at the same time. It was this mutually stimulating relationship that, in large part, pushed the President toward increasingly radical positions. The reformers liked his style, his gusto, his personality. “Teddy was reform in a derby,” William Allen White said, “the gayest, cockiest, most fashionable derby you ever saw.”
Perhaps even more important, however, in the rise of reform were other types of leaders—the inventors, printers, investors, and publishers who were developing new types of magazines that became the vehicles for disseminating reform ideas. The 1890s had seen the rise of the “cheap magazine,” selling for only ten cents but offering excellent illustrations with the help of improved engraving, lively and varied editorial fare, graphic descriptions of science and invention, and articles with broad popular appeal. The fine old journals—Harper’s, the Atlantic, Scribner’s, and the like—continued to flourish editorially and financially on the whole, but the ten-centers were stealing the show.
Their rise—and indeed the explosion of the whole magazine population—was as sensational as some of their feature articles. The number of periodicals in the United States rose from about 3,300 in 1885 to about 6,000 in 1905, thus almost doubling in one generation. Perhaps 7,500 magazines were actually founded in this twenty-year period, but many failed. The variety was also astonishing. “There is scarcely a province in the entire realm of science and scholarship which is now without an official organ in America,” the Philosophical Review stated as it added itself to the number. “Magazines, magazines, magazines!” exclaimed one of them. “The news-stands are already groaning under the heavy load, and there are still more coming.”
One of the earliest and most impressive of the ten-centers was McClure’s. Founded by young Samuel S. McClure and a college classmate, the journal almost collapsed when its first issue appeared during the slump of 1893 and 12,000 of the 20,000 copies were returned. But with the conviction that “if I like a thing,” then “millions will like it,” McClure found a winning editorial formula in articles about Napoleon, Lincoln, and other heroes. He also pridefully published Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Stephen Crane, and, unknowingly, a convict named O. Henry who sent a Christmas story to McClure through an intermediary. Part genius, part madman, and part inexplicable, in Eric Goldman’s profile, McClure was less a great reformer than a superb editor, but he became more and more engulfed in the reform wave as his investigating reporters helped boost his circulation to 370,000.
And what a remarkable stable of reporters they were—not only Flynt and Steffens and Tarbell but Ray Stannard Baker, Burton J. Hendrick, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and—later—Jane Addams. And as McClure’s circulation swelled, competing journals looked for crusading journalists. The Ladies’ Home Journal published Edward Bok on patent medicine evils; Everybody’s, Thomas W. Lawson on crooked finance and Charles Edward Russell on the beef trust; Cosmopolitan, David Graham Phillips on “The Treason of the Senate.” When McClure seemed to succumb to grandiose visions of out-combining the combines against which his reporters wrote, Baker, Steffens, and Tarbell left him, enlisted White and Dunne, and bought the American Magazine for more crusading.
To many, Steffens seemed the most gifted of the lot. Reared in an affluent home, in the half-commercial, half-rural hubbub of Sacramento, educated in philosophy and ethics at Berkeley, Heidelberg, Munich, Leipzig, London, and Paris, he found newspaper jobs in New York City in the mid-1890s before joining McClure’s. There he began a long career of exposing bossism, traction magnates, municipal corruption, timber frauds, and other perversions of democracy. Published under eye-catching titles—”The Shamelessness of St. Louis,” “Pittsburgh: Hell with the Lid Lifted,” “Philadelphia: A Defeated People”—his exposés won enormous interest in high places and low. Steffens had a knack for gaining the confidence of bosses and magnates, getting them to converse with amazing candor, and printing the exchanges with apparent line-by-line accuracy. But even more, he presented his subjects, their views, and their failings with such humorous tolerance and philosophical understanding as to raise his work far above the level of mere reportage.
In the long run, however, Ida Tarbell may have had more influence on reform, if only because at the start she penetrated to the heart of economic power in the form of the Standard Oil Company and stayed with it. She had reason to dislike Rockefeller and his ilk: her father, a stalwart Republican, had been forced out of business by the oil tycoon, and her mother, reduced to peddling milk while her husband labored in the oil fields, poured out her feelings to Ida about the twin evils of whiskey and monopoly. After winning some fame for her series on Napoleon for McClure’s, she won an assignment from McClure to write a detailed study of Standard Oil and of Rockefeller, the “Napoleon among businessmen,” as the press dubbed him. On the basis of five years of intensive research in archives and corporation records, including some of Henry Demarest Lloyd’s collection of documents, Tarbell produced a series of accounts “so heavily laden with questionable business maneuvers, so bound up with bribery, fraud, coercion, double-dealing and outright violence,” in Louis Filler’s summary, “that the fact of efficiency and organization inevitably gave place to the question of whether such a concern had the right to exist.”
Few could doubt the combustibility of reform, reformer, and Roosevelt after passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. For years, Department of Agriculture reformers headed by Harvey Wiley had been pressing for federal legislation to require accurate labeling of foods and drugs. A bill had twice passed the House, but Senate approval had been held up by an alliance of conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats. Aldrich, deriding the “chemists” in the Agriculture Department, claimed that the people’s “liberty” was at stake. Then exposés of the patent medicine industry in Collier’s by Samuel Hopkins Adams and a horrifying portrait of the meat-packing industry by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle aroused middle-class public anger to its peak.
Upton Sinclair—a new face on the reform scene. A product of City College of New York and Columbia, Sinclair had been a failed novelist until he produced a novel in which a failed novelist committed suicide. He won more attention with Manassas, a Civil War novel, and then took a $500 retainer to visit Chicago’s packing industry and write a novel about it. Sick at heart after seven weeks in Packingtown, Sinclair returned to his New Jersey home and poured into The Jungle all that he had seen of workers’ misery and the industry’s nauseating conditions.
Naturally Roosevelt read The Jungle. And after a long lecture to the young author in a letter that warned of the perils of socialism and “men of hysterical temperament,” he concluded with a handwritten postscript: “But all this has nothing to do with the fact that the specific evils you point out shall, if their existence be proved, and if I have power, be eradicated.” Roosevelt’s investigations soon proved that existence, and he gained power by threatening to publicize the investigations, pressing key congressmen unmercifully, and after some strenuous give-and-take, settling for essentially the measures he wanted. The food bill made illegal the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or falsely labeled food and drugs in interstate commerce; the Meat Inspection Act, passed the same day (June 30, 1906), provided for federal inspection of companies selling meats in interstate commerce.
Buoyed by the winds of reform, propelled by Old Guard opposition and his own reaction to it, Theodore Roosevelt during his last two years in office veered tempestuously to the left. This shift was partly rhetorical, but much of it embraced a series of most explicit proposals to Congress and the public. In December 1906, not content with passage of the Hepburn bill, he declared that all big business should be subject to federal inspection of its books, publicity of its accounts, and—to the satisfaction of La Follette—physical valuation of its railroad properties. He called again for a federal inheritance tax. He urged “compulsory investigation” of major labor disputes. After having long contended that he was an umpire and balance wheel between radicalism and conservatism, by 1907 he was, in George Mowry’s words, “trying to keep the left center together.”
Left center was far too left for the Republican party of McKinley, Aldrich, and Cannon. Roosevelt’s long struggle for conservation sharpened the divisions between “presidential” and “congressional” Republicans. Within a year of taking office he was pressing for passage of the Newlands bill, which would set aside proceeds of public-land sales in states in the South and West to pay for building and maintaining irrigation projects. This measure passed despite the noncooperation of Cannon, whose environmental views were summed up in his remark, “Not one cent for scenery.” While Congress also passed other conservation measures, Roosevelt relied more on his ample executive power, granted in previous legislation, to protect the nation’s resources by withdrawing lands from private exploitation, preventing lands from overgrazing, safeguarding forest lands, and curbing the depredations of cattle ranchers, sheepmen, mining companies, and timber cutters. When, in 1907, Congress amended an agriculture appropriations bill to ban the creation of new forest reserves in several western states, Roosevelt, rather than vainly fight the amendment, and with the help of his Chief Forester, Gifford Pinchot, in a series of “midnight” proclamations added twenty-one more forest reserves just before signing the amended bill—a foiling of Congress that gave the President immense satisfaction.
Roosevelt could not forget, however, that the main challenge to presidential and popular power came not from the congressional Old Guard or the parochial interests it represented but from big business. He knew too that corporate power did not speak with a single voice. Since Roosevelt tended to personalize that power—indeed, all power—he tended to divide his business foes into “good guys” and “bad guys,” or at least into bad guys and not-so-bad guys. What he was dealing with, in reality, was the continuing thrusts of the two capitalisms and their impact on politics.
One man personified Roosevelt’s bad capitalism—John D. Rockefeller. Not only had the oil magnate hired a substitute to serve for him during the Civil War, he was not a “gentleman” of old family wealth, eastern society, or college education. More fundamentally, Standard Oil, with its competitive methods and its power over transportation—railroads, pipelines, ships—was the biggest and most powerful combination of them all. Roosevelt knew of its reputation for “buying” senators and congressmen; during his 1904 campaign, he piously ordered the return of contributions from officials of Standard Oil. On the basis of investigations by the Bureau of Corporations, which he had persuaded Congress to establish, the President in 1905 reported that Standard Oil had wrung enormous profits from secret rail rates. By 1907, the federal government had seven suits pending against the corporation and its subsidiaries.
Even these challenges to Standard Oil hardly reflected Roosevelt’s bitter hostility to Rockefeller and the men he associated with him, such as Edward H. Harriman. Time and again during Roosevelt’s full term, his letters and conversations turned into diatribes against their “trickery,” “scoundrelism,” and sheer evil. He was convinced, moreover, that powerful corporate heads—often vulgar nouveaux riches, to boot—were plotting with their tools in press and bar and pulpit and classroom to gang up on him, discredit him, block his programs. He welcomed the news that Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis had fined Standard Oil over $29 million for violating the Elkins Act—and doubtless welcomed the ensuing fury in the business world against both the judge and himself.
But he still had to contend with the mighty Morgan, a capitalist of a different color. The banker was, of course, a gentleman with whom one could make arrangements. But he was a gentleman of power—of pervasive national influence and, with his wide international investments, of world stature. And Roosevelt needed such a banker friend in 1907. Worldwide credit expansion and price inflation amid the general prosperity of the time produced strained conditions in money markets in the United States as well as abroad. Rockefeller and other business leaders were already admonishing Roosevelt that the “political adventurer’s” attacks on capital were undermining business and risking a slump. After warning signals mounted in the summer, Roosevelt directed his Secretary of the Treasury, George Cortelyou, to work with the House of Morgan to shore up the securities market. When the Knickerbocker Trust Company closed its doors and a run threatened other banks and brokerages, the Morgan people proposed that the United States Steel Corporation be allowed to purchase controlling assets in the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company to prevent a collapse of the whole banking structure.
But there was a hitch: Would such an action violate the antitrust laws? After a hurried trip to Washington through the night, Morgan’s men judge Elbert H. Gary and Henry C. Frick called on the President and gained what they wanted—a statement by Roosevelt “that while of course I could not advise them to take the action proposed, I felt it no public duty of mine to interpose any objection.” Thus reassured, the House of Morgan did help rally the market and avert further panic—and then proceeded to add the rich Tennessee coal and iron properties to the vast holdings of Morgan’s U.S. Steel.
Roosevelt publicly congratulated “those conservative and substantial businessmen who in this crisis have acted with such wisdom and public spirit,” as compared with the bad capitalists’ “dishonest dealing and speculative enterprise.” Yet to share power on such equal terms even with the Morgans and the other “good” capitalists cost Roosevelt self-esteem, for his esteem for himself was closely allied to his feeling of possessing power to do good. More than ever, now, the issue for him was stronger federal supervision and regulation of big business and big money. In his annual message to Congress in December 1907, he called for an income as well as an inheritance tax, national regulation of interstate business, postal savings banks, and extension of the eight-hour workday to all employees of the federal government and of its contractors. Then, the next month, his sense of desperation and frustration overflowed in what Harbaugh called “one of the most bitter and radical special messages on record.”
He struck out at the “representatives of predatory wealth—of the wealth accumulated on a giant scale by all forms of iniquity, ranging from the oppression of wage workers to unfair and unwholesome methods of crushing out competition, and to defrauding the public by stock jobbing and the manipulation of securities.” Last year’s panic, he said, had been caused not by the Administration but by the “speculative folly and the flagrant dishonesty of a few men of great wealth.” He then even named the heads of the Standard Oil Company and the Santa Fe Railroad as examples of men who had fought with unlimited money and unscrupulous craft every measure for honesty in business that had been passed during his Administration.
To Roosevelt, the cure for all this was not to break big business down into small, inefficient units through trust-busting, but strong, steady, central federal control, with big business serving at best as junior partner. But there was a fateful contradiction in his views. How could a political and governmental system as deeply corrupted as the American exert effective and responsible control over the corporations whose influence reached into every sector of American life? No one had excoriated that system more sharply than Roosevelt. In this very special message, he had denounced politicians as well as editors and lawyers who were “purchased” by big business and were “but puppets who move as the strings are pulled.” How could he propose putting corporations under the control of legislators who tended to be either radical extremists or corporate pawns, under judges who, on the one hand, “truckled” to the mob or, on the other, failed to “stop the abuses of the criminal rich”? If neither legislature nor judiciary could do the job, who could?
Roosevelt’s answer to this question was of course the executive branch, the presidency, or really himself. He had been vigilant in fighting off what he viewed as excessive judicial or congressional control of policy-making bureaucrats. Yet he could hardly contend that the small, patronage-ridden, graft-tainted executive branch could handle the enormous task of corporate control. The most potentially powerful national organization that might deal with collective corporate power on at least equal terms was the Republican party, with its own roots in virtually every locality outside the South. But the GOP, with its hundreds of competing leaders in Congress, the executive, and the states, represented inchoate strength at best, and Roosevelt had done little with it other than use it to protect and enhance his personal authority.
This left the presidency as the only feasible means of corporate control, and no one had greater confidence in the integrity, wisdom, and determination of Theodore Roosevelt than Theodore Roosevelt. Yet he knew that “one-man” presidential power was anathema to most Americans. The Revolutionists of 1775–83 had revolted in large part against executive “tyranny”; the constitution makers of 1787–89 had hemmed in the chief executive with a host of checks and balances; some of the great moments of American history had seen “liberty-loving” legislators and citizens pitted against governors and Presidents. Not since Lincoln had a President exploited his constitutional and extraconstitutional authority as intensively as had Roosevelt, or made fuller use of his presidential powers of publicity—“the bully pulpit”—and the arts of bargaining, rewarding, punishing, conniving, co-opting, persuading, threatening, manipulating, cooperating, of the strategy of almost indiscriminate use of the carrot and the stick.
Lincoln had civil war as an excuse; Roosevelt had no war. But he had a temperament, and this was the problem. Increasingly, during his years in the White House, he exhibited the kind of volatility, emotionalism, anger, and overreactiveness, and indulged in the type of self-aggrandizement through personal politicking and policy-making, that had always worried prudent republicans about executive excess. At a Gridiron Club dinner in April 1906, he had suddenly and unaccountably turned on his journalistic reform friends and foes by branding them as “muckrakers,” meaning the person who “never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck-rake” and hence became “not an incitement to good” but “one of the most potent forces for evil.” At a later Gridiron Club affair, Roosevelt castigated senators to their faces on their lack of respect for the presidential office, only to be handed a senatorial lecture in return on presidential respect for the Senate; then he stalked out.
Some of his aberrations seemed more quixotic than dangerous. He campaigned for “simplified spelling” and even ordered the government printer to use “nite” and “thoro” until the House of Representatives instructed the printer otherwise. He lashed out at “nature-fakirs” who imputed human qualities to animals; it was not the sort of thing a President should do, he admitted, but “I … proved unable to contain myself.” Neither did one of the “fakirs,” who denied that Roosevelt was a naturalist: “Every time Mr. Roosevelt gets near the heart of a wild thing he invariably puts a bullet through it.”
But the most poignant and significant of Roosevelt’s aberrations was the “Brownsville affair.” A gang of black soldiers quartered near this Texas town conducted a wild midnight raid in which a white bartender was killed. The President ordered the incident investigated, but when no one in the whole black regiment would talk, he directed that the entire complement be “discharged without honor” and “forever barred from enlistment.” This punishment of 160 men—including six Medal of Honor winners— without a trial, military or civil, left a stain on the record of a man who had brooked Southern fury by having Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House, appointed or reappointed worthy blacks to federal positions over much white opposition, and in general tried to accord blacks as much recognition and status as the political situation allowed. All was forgotten during the furor over Brownsville.
To the critics of Roosevelt’s abuse of executive power, he had one compelling answer; a President did not govern for life, he had only three or four years to do his work, and then had to yield. And Roosevelt’s term was to end March 4, 1909. The President had long since selected William Howard Taft as the best candidate to succeed him, and now he stuck to that commitment despite his conviction—which he did not conceal—that he himself could have the nomination by merely lifting his finger. Taft would indeed serve as a check on Rooseveltian power, for he dropped many of Roosevelt’s people, pursued an intensive trust-busting policy in which Roosevelt had little faith, and allied himself with the conservative elements of the Republican party in Congress and country that Roosevelt had battled.
All this lay in the future. For the moment, Roosevelt could leave office knowing that he had been a vigorous and effective leader. If he had not solved the enigma of how a representative republic deals with concentrated economic power, at least he had sharply posed the issue and offered some answers. If he had not solved the questions of the role of strong leadership in a democracy, of the role of party in stabilizing and empowering leadership, of the powerful veto power left in the hands of the Congress and of the judiciary, at least he had made people think about these questions.
And possibly he had helped avert tumult and rebellion. After Mr. Dooley had told his friend Hennessey that he was reading so much about graft that he had to lock “th’ cash dhrawer” at night, Hennessey claimed to have even sniffed a revolution. Mr. Dooley hastened to reassure him:
“Th’ noise ye hear is not th’ first gun iv a rivolution. It’s on’y th’ people iv th’ United States batin’ a carpet.”