A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  The “Full Dinner Pail” and Assassination

  Not long after the war ended, Vice President Garret A. Hobart died in office. McKinley and the Republicans knew they might have a popular replacement in Teddy Roosevelt, who had recently been elected governor of New York. McKinley had met Roosevelt when he went to Montauk to congratulate General Shafter and his troops; when the president saw Roosevelt, he stopped the carriage and extended his hand. The ebullient Roosevelt struggled to pull his glove off, finally grabbing it in his teeth before pumping McKinley’s hand. Thus, with Hobart out, the Republicans approached Roosevelt—who really wanted no job save the president’s—to replace the deceased vice president.

  Political realities, however, created an inexorable momentum toward the vice presidential nomination. As Boss Platt quipped, “Roosevelt might as well stand under Niagara Falls and try to spit water back as to stop his nomination by this convention.”42 With Teddy on the ballot, a good economy, and the conclusion of a successful war, McKinley was unbeatable. His slogan, a “full dinner pail,” spoke to the economic well-being of millions without committing the government to engage in specific action. McKinley beat the Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, worse than he had in 1896, winning the popular vote 7.2 million to 6.3 million, and taking the electoral vote, 292 to 155. While McKinley looked forward to serving as “President of the whole people,” Roosevelt committed himself to being a “dignified nonentity for four years.”43

  The president had undertaken few new programs (aside from turning the Northern Security Trust issue over to Roosevelt to handle) when he made a trip to the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6, 1901. Just as a premonition of disaster had gripped many around Lincoln in his final days, so too did McKinley’s staff grow increasingly uneasy as he headed to Buffalo. Several crank letters threatening assassination had arrived during the campaign, but McKinley dismissed them. The threats, however, alarmed his private secretary, George Cortelyou, who on his own started a screening process for visitors. In addition, a private investigator dogged the president’s steps, and Buffalo police were on alert. McKinley refused to allow his aides to seal him off from the public, thus agreeing to a long reception line at one of the exposition buildings, the Music Temple. While a line of well-wishers streamed in to a Bach organ sonata, Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist assassin, joined them, concealing a pistol in his bandaged right hand. As McKinley shook the man’s left hand, Czolgosz shot the president twice. The stricken Major slumped backward to a chair, urging Cortelyou to “be careful” how he informed Mrs. McKinley her husband was dead.44

  In fact, he remained alive, unconscious. A bullet had gone through his stomach and into his back; efforts to locate it failed, despite the presence at the exposition of a new X-ray machine, which was not used. Doctors cleansed and closed the wound without extracting the bullet. Over the next few days, McKinley regained consciousness, giving everyone around him hope, but he drifted away a week after the attack. New York City papers, which had earlier published editorials calling for McKinley’s removal—Hearst had even said, “assassination can be a good thing”—engaged in finger-pointing as to whether the press should share blame in the president’s death.45

  McKinley became the third president in thirty-five years to be killed by an assassin, and for the first time, both a president and a vice president from the same administration (1896–1900) died in office. His killer, who wanted to cause all government to collapse, only succeeded in replacing a successful president with a legendary one.

  A Brilliant Madman, Born a Century Too Soon

  By 1907, Theodore Roosevelt—he hated the sobriquet Teddy, and although resigned to it, allowed none to call him that in person—stood five feet eight inches tall and weighed two hundred pounds, mostly muscle. His heavyweight sparring partner described him as a “strong, tough man; hard to hurt and harder to stop.”46 It was a remarkable transformation for the skinny kid who had entered Harvard in the mid-1870s. Yet for such a powerful man, he was small boned, with delicate feet and hands that contrasted with the heavy girth and jowls. His famous teeth, not as prominent as the caricatures, lent a distinctiveness to his speech, which was clipped, raspy, and likened to a man “biting tenpenny nails.”47 Roosevelt’s pronunciation added another distinguishing tone to his speech, wherein he pronounced “I” as “Aieee” and punctuated his sentences with his favorite word, “deeeee-lighted.” Albany legislators had made legend his habit of running up to the podium waving a finger and shouting, “Mister Spee-kar.” Asthmatic and bespectacled with his famous pince-nez, Roosevelt was a swirl of energy. He burst into rooms, descending on friends and foes like a thunderstorm, leading English writer John Morely to call Niagara Falls and Theodore Roosevelt “great works of nature.”48 Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, once meeting Roosevelt, noted in his diary, “Must be President some day. A man you can’t cajole, can’t frighten, can’t buy.”49

  Long before he became president, Roosevelt impressed people with his sharp mind and his ability to discuss intelligently almost any subject—his entrance exams at Harvard testify to his mental capacities. Obsessed with reading (he referred to it as a disease with him), Roosevelt had consumed such mammoth tomes as David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels. Well traveled in Europe, Africa, and America, Roosevelt marveled at the written word as much as at the visual image.

  A frail child, Roosevelt spent summers working out and boxing as a means to build his body. He boxed during his Harvard years, but just as often he fought outside the ring, often decking political rivals who made fun of him. The intellectual Roosevelt, however, could penetrate to the heart of intricate legislative matters, often offending everyone in the process of doing the right thing. He spearheaded several municipal reform bills, nearly pulling off an investigation of New York corruption before witnesses developed “memory loss.” New York assemblyman Newton Curtis called him a “brilliant madman, born a century too soon.”50

  Having overcome asthma, poor eyesight, and his own impetuous moods, Roosevelt was struck by sudden and nearly unbearable grief in February 1884, when his wife died after giving birth only a few hours after Roosevelt’s mother, who had been in the same house, expired of typhoid fever. “There is a curse on this house,” his brother Elliott had told him, and Roosevelt began to believe it. That curse would claim the alcoholic Elliott in 1891, when he had to be committed to an asylum.

  To drown his grief after his wife’s death, the hyper Roosevelt left politics for his cattle ranch in Elkhorn, North Dakota, where he served as a deputy sheriff and helped track down a trio of horse thieves. Then, in 1889, after he was appointed by President Harrison to the Civil Service Commission, he returned to New York, where he developed a feud with the-then New York Governor Grover Cleveland. As in the case of the bitter antagonism between Adams and Jefferson, Jefferson and Hamilton, and Sherman and Lincoln, the Cleveland-Roosevelt feud (lopsided in Cleveland’s favor as it was) was regrettable. Here was another example of two figures of towering character and, in many instances, clear vision, disagreeing over the proper implementation of their ideals. Yet such debates refined American democracy, and were of no small import.

  Even before his appointment to the Civil Service Commission, Roosevelt had started to develop a national name with his authorship of books on the West, including Hunting Trips (1885) and The Winning of the West (1889), as well as ten other works. While far from an inexorable march to the presidency, Roosevelt’s steps seem measured by a certain sense of relentlessness or Providence. He entered New York City politics as police commissioner, a position that called for him to walk the slums and meet with future muckraker Lincoln Steffens and a police reporter named Jacob Riis. Roosevelt fit right in with the two men. (Riis soon gravitated from his job with the New York Tribune to work on housing reform, which was the basis for his popular book How the Other Half Lives [1890]. Steffens, whose wealthy father had instructed him to “stay in New York and hustle,” instead also became a reporter, but with the New York
Evening Post.)51 Roosevelt took Steffens seriously enough to initiate legislation based on his writings, although Roosevelt was dead by the time Steffens visited the Soviet Union, in 1921, and uttered the preposterous comment, “I have seen the future, and it works.”

  Even as a young state assemblyman in the 1880s, Roosevelt was consumed by reform in his public career. His progressivism embraced an activist government to alleviate social ills.

  For many reformers, words like “ethics” and phrases about “uplifting the masses” were only so much window dressing for their real agenda of social architecture. Not Roosevelt. He genuinely believed that “no people were ever benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. It is,” he added, “more important that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful, and intelligent than we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world.”52 Roosevelt came from “old money,” and despite such sentiment, he never entirely lost his patrician biases.

  This in part explains his antipathy toward corporations, most of whose founders came from “new” money. Rockefeller and Carnegie were self-made men who had built their fortunes the hard way. Roosevelt could never be accused of being afraid to dirty his hands, but his animosity toward businessmen like Edward H. Harriman suggested that in some ways he envied the corporate captains who had worked their way up from the bottom. To have never had the opportunity to succeed in business troubled Roosevelt. It was all the more paradoxical coming from the man whose classic “Man in the Arena” speech still retains its wisdom and dignity:

  It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.53

  Roosevelt had succeeded at everything he ever attempted—improving his physical strength and athletic prowess, courting and winning his wife, leading men in combat, and running for office.

  By the time he became president then, Theodore Roosevelt had prepared himself for the office in every aspect necessary to the job, save one: understanding capitalism, private enterprise, and the industrial nature of modern America. For someone steeped in the romantic images of the West, Roosevelt should have favored the “rugged individualism” of a Carnegie, but his reform impulse possessed him. As a result, he became the most activist president since Andrew Jackson, doing more to impede business than any president since Old Hickory.

  Trust-busting, Business Bashing

  An indication of where Roosevelt planned to go with his agenda of corporate regulation could be gleaned from his brief stint as New York governor, where he pushed through a measure taxing corporations. A social Darwinist, Roosevelt liked the notion that there existed an intellectual hierarchy among men, and that only the “best and the brightest” should lead. This same Roosevelt fancied himself the friend of the oppressed and thought farmers, mechanics, and small business owners were his “natural allies.”54 But in Roosevelt’s mind, if the brilliant individual or the visionary man knew best how to reform society, he should do so with whatever tools he had at his disposal, including government. Consequently, it surprised no one who knew him that Roosevelt favored an activist federal presence. William Howard Taft said that he never met a man “more strongly in favor of strong government” than Roosevelt.55

  In his first inaugural, Roosevelt spoke favorably of great corporations and endorsed the idea of expanding markets. To this he added that trusts had gone beyond the capacity of existing laws to deal with them, and that old laws and traditions could not sufficiently contain concentrations of wealth and power. Congress sensed the change, passing the Elkins Act in 1903, which prohibited railroads from giving rebates—essentially volume discounts—to large corporations. The notion that businesses were different from individual behavior, or needed to be penalized for success beyond what was “reasonable,” was a Progressive principle that soon emerged in many regulations.

  Epitomizing the direction of Roosevelt’s new policies was the Northern Securities suit of 1902. This followed a legal ruling in the E. C. Knight sugar refiner case of 1895, where the Supreme Court declared the regulation of manufacturing a state responsibility; since the manufacturing was within a state’s boundaries, any successful suit had to involve interstate commerce. Since Northern Securities involved railroads crossing state lines, it met the requirements. Roosevelt thought he had an opening, and instructed the attorney general, Philander C. Knox, to file a Sherman antitrust suit against Northern Securities, a holding company for the Northern Pacific, Great Northern, and Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroads. J. P. Morgan, James J. Hill, E. H. Harriman, and representatives of Standard Oil Company had combined the northwestern railroad lines into Northern Securities, a single holding company worth $400 million. What made the Northern Securities suit different was that although the government claimed that Northern Securities sought to create a monopoly, no higher rates had actually emerged, only the “threat” of “restraint of trade.” For the first time, then, the federal government acted against commerce only on a potential threat, not genuine behavior, thus debunking the myth that corporations are “like individuals,” whom the law treats as “innocent until proven guilty.”56

  Thanks largely to the Northern Securities case, Roosevelt—whose nickname Teddy had been popularized after a toy manufacturer named a stuffed bear for him—now earned the moniker “Trustbuster.” He followed up the victory with an assault on Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, although it was the administration of TR’s successor, William Howard Taft, that eventually witnessed the final disposition of that case—the breakup of the oil giant into several smaller companies. Already, however, the inconsistencies and contradictions of the Sherman Act had become apparent to even some reformers. Research by George Bitlingmayer found that far from helping the little guy, antitrust actions tended to hurt small businesses by driving down profits in the entire sector, presumably those businesses most helped by reducing “monopolistic” competition.57

  Roosevelt got away with his assault on corporations by balancing it with rhetoric about the need to control labor radicalism. Only the presidency was exempted from Roosevelt’s concern about the abuse of power. Congress, all too willing to contain the “excesses” of corporations, passed the Expedition Act of 1903, requiring courts to put antitrust cases on a fast track, then created a new department, Commerce and Labor, within which was established a Bureau of Corporations to investigate violations of interstate commerce. All of this legislation came on top of the aforementioned Elkins Act, and represented an attempt by Congress to appear to be doing something. Roosevelt, however, grabbed the headlines, invoking the Sherman Act twenty-five times during his administration.

  When it came to action, though, Roosevelt sided substantially with labor. In 1902 he intervened in a strike by Pennsylvania coal miners, who wanted recognition of their union as well as the expected higher wages and lower work hours. Publicly, Roosevelt expressed sympathy for the miners, and then he invited both United Mine Worker (UMW) leaders and mine owners to the White House in order to avert a coal shortage. Mine owners, led by George F. Baer of the Reading Railroad, alienated both the miners and the president, who grew so irritated that he wanted to grab Baer “by the seat of the breeches” and “chuck him out [a window].”58 The owners were “wooden-headed,” whose “arrogant stupidity” made arbitration more difficult.59 He warned that he would send 10,000 federal troops to take over coal production in the mines if the two sides did not reach an arrangement, a move of “dubious le
gality,” which prompted Roosevelt to snap, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!”60 TR’s bluster finally produced concessions, with both sides agreeing to an arbitration commission named by the president, and led to higher wages (below what the strikers wanted), fewer work hours (though above what the strikers sought), and no UMW recognition. It was enough for Roosevelt to claim that he had brokered a “square deal,” which later provided a popular campaign phrase for the president.

  Most presidential clout, though, was reserved for corporations, not labor. “We don’t wish to destroy corporations,” he generously noted, “but we do wish to make them subserve the public good.”61 Implied in Roosevelt’s comment was the astonishing view that corporations do not serve the public good on their own—that they must be made to—and that furnishing jobs, paying taxes, and creating new wealth did not constitute a sufficient public benefit. It was a position even more astonishing coming from the so-called “party of big business.” TR despised what he called “the tyranny of mere wealth.”62 Yet like other presidents who inherited wealth—his cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy—Teddy never appreciated what it took to meet a payroll or to balance a firm’s books. Roosevelt knew that in the 1904 election he might lose the support of key Republican constituencies, and therefore he spent the last months mending fences, corresponding with Morgan and other business leaders, and supporting the GOP’s probusiness platform. It served him well. Already a popular leader, Roosevelt knew that the Democrats had allied themselves with radical elements of labor and the farm sectors.