American Experiment (210 page)

“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.”