American Experiment (211 page)

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.