This managerial compulsion did not surprise old Washington hands. They had long been aware of the “boy’s” maturity of purpose, as of his precocious talent. “Roosevelt,” declared Grover Cleveland, “is the most perfectly equipped and the most effective politician thus far seen in the Presidency.”
ON FRIDAY, 3 JANUARY, Mark Hanna issued a press statement on “the present status of the canal question.” Why Hanna—a member of the Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals, but not an active one—should suddenly espouse this subject was a mystery to newsmen. They supposed that a man so tied to Great Lakes shipping and transcontinental railroads might work to quash the idea of any Isthmian waterway—as the directors of Northern Securities were said to be doing. Yet here he was proclaiming himself a canal man, and hinting at his own preference.
Hanna said that, contrary to general belief, the Isthmian Canal Commission was “impressed with the superior advantages of the Panama route.” It had recommended Nicaragua “to bring the Frenchmen to terms.” And indeed, the Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama now seemed likely to announce a reduced price for its rights and holdings. Accordingly, “a powerful group of Senators” stood ready to transform the pending Canal Bill in Panama’s favor.
At least one reporter—the ubiquitous Walter Wellman—already had a shrewd idea of what the price would be. Wellman did not merely represent the Chicago Record-Herald in Washington; he was something of a political operator and go-between. Acting on behalf of the “powerful group,” he had cabled Philippe Bunau-Varilla, chief negotiant for the Compagnie in Paris: COMMITTEE SENATE PROBABLY ACCEPT OFFER FORTY MILLIONS. IMPERATIVE NOT HIGHER. MOVE QUICKLY.
On the very morning Hanna’s statement was published, a return cable confirmed that the Compagnie would sell all rights and assets for forty million dollars. Admiral John G. Walker, chairman of the Isthmian Canal Commission, delivered the offer to the State Department at noon. Secretary Hay received it without comment. Roosevelt, too, remained silent.
ON 9 JANUARY, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly for Nicaragua, 308 to 2. Senator John Tyler Morgan (D., Alabama) announced that his Committee on Interoceanic Canals would consider the House bill at once, with a view to recommending its passage into law.
The old man could barely control his excitement. After twelve years of invoking visions of a blue, all-American canal, closer to home than France’s muddy “ditch,” he saw his dream trembling on the verge of reality. The South would have its renaissance as ships of a hundred nations, Nicaragua bound, put in at Gulf ports and loaded rich cargoes of Alabama coal, Mississippi cotton, Tennessee lumber, Florida beef, and Georgia peaches.
Mark Hanna jerked him back to reality at a meeting of the Committee on Thursday, 16 January:
HANNA I want the report on Nicaragua delayed until the Panama offer has been considered.
MORGAN It is not worth waiting for.
HANNA Well, the President thinks it is worth waiting for.
MORGAN What do you mean by that?
HANNA I mean that the President has asked Admiral Walker to call the Canal Commission together so it can make a supplemental report for him, which he intends to send to Congress.
MORGAN Don’t believe anything of the kind.
HANNA Suppose you ask the President.
Morgan hurried to the White House. Roosevelt said that in view of France’s new offer, the Canal Commission should be given a chance to “reconsider” its original finding.
Shocked and depressed, Morgan tried to get Admiral Walker to appear before his Committee for an emergency briefing on Friday. But Walker said he was too busy. The President wanted a new, unanimous report, deliverable to the White House “not later than tomorrow evening.”
Experience had taught Roosevelt that a Saturday press release was sure of front-page treatment on Sunday or Monday morning—papers on those days being traditionally short of news. The supplemental report was delivered and released on schedule. Its impact was all that he could have desired. COMMISSION SAYS PANAMA IS BEST, proclaimed the New York Herald.
The commission thinks it has a good bargain.… [It] recites the advantages and the disadvantages of the two routes, showing that the Panama route would be 134.6 miles shorter than the Nicaragua route, with fewer locks and less curvature; that the time of transit through Panama would be twelve hours, against thirty-three hours at Nicaragua … that there is already a railroad at Panama which would be very servicable in building the canal; that two artificial harbors would have to be constructed at Nicaragua and only one would be necessary at Panama.
The commission … finds now that the reduced offer of the Panama company has made the estimated cost of construction of the Nicaraguan canal $45,630,704 greater than Panama, and the estimated cost of maintenance and operation $1,300,000 greater.
White House messengers transmitted the report to Congress on 20 January. A “Panama boom” began in the Senate, with Aldrich, Allison, and Platt joining Hanna, Spooner, and Lodge on the list of converts. But most of their colleagues awaited the recommendation of Senator Morgan’s committee. Morgan himself declared that Theodore Roosevelt was the true author of the new report. “I will strive to defeat it.”
For the rest of the week, tension prevailed on Capitol Hill. Groups of well-dressed, whispering men gathered in the byways of the Senate, their numbers increasing daily as trains from New York, Chicago, and the South brought fresh infusions of lobbying power. On Wall Street, Edward H. Harriman began to buy up Panama Canal bonds at 6 percent.
Meanwhile, the shock effect of the “boom” reached as far as Panama City. Separatists there panicked, realizing that an American decision to funnel the world’s commerce through their territory would bind them forever to Colombia. If they could only break from Bogotá in time, the golden waterway might be theirs in perpetuity.
OF ALL THE WELL-DRESSED whisperers who thronged the Capitol in the last weeks of January 1902, none wore finer cloth, or whispered more urgently, than William Nelson Cromwell of New York City, and Philippe Bunau-Varilla, of Paris. Although they were but newly acquainted (Bunau-Varilla was just off a transatlantic steamer), they lobbied for Panama like lifelong partners.
Cromwell was the more talkative of the two, at ease in an atmosphere of intrigue. Pop-eyed, cherubic, curly-haired, he had a cute dimple in his pink chin, and his speech fanned a soft, silvery mustache. If the silver was deceptive (he was only forty-seven), the gold elsewhere on his person was genuine, betokening a former Brooklyn boy. Cromwell had earned millions as a trust attorney and American counsel for the Compagnie Nouvelle. But these riches were nothing compared to the commissions and fees he hoped to earn, should Congress accept the Compagnie’s new offer. Even at the reduced price of forty million dollars, it would still be the biggest real-estate deal in history.
If Cromwell’s relations with the Compagnie Nouvelle were mercenary, Bunau-Varilla’s were evangelical and censorious. Passionate in his devotion to French canal technology, he could spit at the incompetents who had mismanaged the great scheme in Panama. “Asines,” he called them, “—donkeys, absurd people.”
It was hard for Americans not to laugh at Bunau-Varilla bristling, so Gallic was he in his gamecock fierceness, all frown and spiked mustaches. Had he stood a foot taller, he might have looked as formidable as he in fact was. He had the bruising willpower and aristocratic intelligence of the best French education d’élite. Yet he had earned that privilege through scholarships. His great wealth, like Cromwell’s, was self-made. Bunau-Varilla was secretly a bastard of humble birth.
Now forty-two years old, he had been inspired in youth by Ferdinand de Lesseps, architect of Suez, and architect manqué of Panama. Bunau-Varilla had gone to the Isthmus as a civil engineer in 1885, and within a year, through sheer drive, had become head of de Lesseps’s vast, floundering project. He had resigned early enough to avoid association with the collapse of the old Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interoceanique, and late enough to become a major stockholder in th
e Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama.
Bunau-Varilla therefore stood to make even more money, presumably, than Cromwell on the sale of the Compagnie Nouvelle’s assets in 1902. But above profit, above even travail pour la patrie, Bunau-Varilla cherished “this great Idea” of a canal linking the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. As an engineer, he was convinced that Panama was the only feasible route. As a lobbyist, he passionately preached its advantages. The New York Sun espoused his cause and proclaimed him “an idealist of the first grade.”
ON 24 JANUARY, Roosevelt attended his first Gridiron Club dinner as President of the United States. Mark Hanna was another guest of honor. Both men laughed heartily as an actor impersonating an obsequious Frenchman bowed, scraped, and presented the Senator with a gold brick labeled PANAMA.
AT THE END OF the month, there was an ominous delay in Senate action on the Canal Bill. Senator Morgan announced that his committee was not satisfied as to why the Isthmian Canal Commission had changed its recommendation. Furthermore, he would chair an investigation into the legality of the Compagnie Nouvelle’s proposed transfer of rights.
It was all very well for French stockholders to offer “their” property to the United States—but what if Congress paid the forty million dollars, then found that they lacked authority to sell? Colombia had only temporarily ceded France the rights to cut a canal across Panama, and the rights might not be transferable to another power. Morgan insinuated that the “Panama boom” was a nuisance tactic, organized by railroad men who wanted no canal at all.
With new hearings scheduled through spring, it became clear that the Canal Bill would not resurface in Congress until shortly before the summer recess. Legislators turned their attention to more immediate issues: tariff adjustments for the Philippines, reciprocity with Cuba, a quixotic resolution for the direct election of senators. Few noticed, as the bill slipped off the calendar, that it had acquired an unobtrusive amendment, giving the President of the United States the final choice of route. Roosevelt was quick to reward the author of the amendment with Washington’s most valuable coinage: free White House access. “When you come here,” he wrote John Coit Spooner, “always come straight to my room.”
With that, Panama faded from the news, and its lobby from the Capitol. Only Cromwell and Bunau-Varilla remained behind to plot future legislative strategy. They believed that the dry words of the Spooner Amendment would flower like seeds in better political weather. Other Panama promoters, less optimistic, felt that the President had tried to bully Congress and failed.
Jokes began to circulate that “Terrible Teddy” was good for nothing but dining with black men and exercising the diplomatic corps. When the jokes reached Princeton, the beaky professor who had interviewed Roosevelt at Buffalo made a public demand that he be treated with more respect. “He really determines an important part of the destinies of the world,” Woodrow Wilson said. Americans would discover soon enough that Theodore Roosevelt was “larger” than they knew, “a very interesting and a very strong man.”
THE PRESIDENT CLIMBED carefully up the beanstalk, an ax in his belt. He clenched his teeth as he tried to separate a tangle of branches above him. High in the sky, on a spreading crest of leaves, sat a giant, gorging and grinning. The giant’s knife was sharp and eager over an array of heaped platters. Roosevelt, peering through thick lenses, sensed rather than saw what the dishes contained: helpless, trussed human beings.
From outer space, a pen flew in, loaded with ink. It scratched across the giant’s belly, THE TRUSTS, and wrote over Roosevelt’s head, WILL JACK REACH THE OGRE?
A FEW DAYS AFTER Edward Kemble’s cartoon appeared in Life, Roosevelt told a friend, “The time has come when my course has to be definitely shaped.”
It was 5 February 1902. He had been in office nearly five months, listening to advice and experimenting with power, not always successfully. His gesture toward Booker T. Washington looked, in retrospect, more courageous than wise; his reform appointments would show only long-term effects; veterans were upset with him over General Miles; and as for the fine phrases of his First Message to Congress, he heard no chinks from masons immortalizing them in marble. Signs of creeping disillusionment were evident in the press, and on Capitol Hill.
Any fool could tell what the public expected of him. Jack must reach, and grapple with, the ogre of Combination. Mail poured daily into the White House, urging him to prosecute various trusts under the Sherman Act. He had referred possible suits to the Attorney General, but in all cases save one, Knox saw no grounds for legal action. This exceptional case looked strong enough to go all the way to the Supreme Court, yet it was fraught with political risk. Roosevelt and Knox were careful not to identify “it” in their communications. “Am giving it constant attention,” the latter had telegraphed from Florida, “to the end that your wishes, with which I am in full sympathy, can be creditably executed.”
Now, eight weeks later, Knox was back in town, but still hedging over his opinion. Roosevelt decided to insist upon it. The Attorney General begged one more week. He canceled all his social engagements from 5 February on, citing “a public duty that will admit of no postponement,” and plunged, with renewed energy, into research. As far back as A.D. 483, he found, the Emperor Zeno had directed the Praetorian Prefect of Constantinople, No one may presume to exercise a monopoly of any kind … and if anyone shall presume to practice a monopoly, let his property be forfeited and himself condemned to perpetual exile.
Plunging deep into sociological theory, Knox postulated the “underlying laws” that linked all social and industrial movements, and the common-law “sanctions” that prompted them. Was it rash of the President to seek sanctions of his own? Knox found enlightenment—as Roosevelt himself had done, years earlier—in Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution. The British philosopher argued that laissez-faire economics might suit one stage in a nation’s development, but not necessarily the next. Some governmental tamping-down should follow a period of explosive growth. Nor was discipline incompatible with democracy. As Knox himself put it, “Uncontrolled competition, like unregulated liberty, is not really free.”
What, then, of the Constitution? Knox brooded over Supreme Court rulings on the Sherman Act. U.S. v. Trans-Missouri Freight Association (1897) had concluded that combination in restraint of interstate trade was unlawful “whether reasonable or not.” Yet U.S. v. E. C. Knight (1895) had condoned some monopolistic practices, and made them difficult to prosecute at the federal level. Knox felt that Knight had been badly argued. He saw reversal possibilities in Justice John Harlan’s lone dissent. (“Combinations, governed entirely by the law of greed … threaten the integrity of our institutions.”) And Harlan still sat on the Court.
For once in his cautious career, Knox felt impelled to advise a policy of risk. Even if Roosevelt’s suit failed, it would point up the “moral dualism” in contemporary American society, whereby big businessmen exhibited one set of values at home, and another set, tending toward barbarism, at the office. If the suit succeeded, it would more or less guarantee the President a second term. And if he, Philander Chase Knox, argued it before the Supreme Court, persuasively and brilliantly …
The Attorney General’s astigmatism gave some people the impression that his one eye focused on immediate business, while the other contemplated dreamy horizons, visible only to himself. “Sleepy Phil” was indeed looking beyond books and briefs in 1902—toward the Governorship of Pennsylvania, or to a seat in the Senate, if only old Matt Quay would die. Farther off, in 1908 or 1912, Knox saw an even more pleasing prospect: the job of his current client.
Before the week was over, he was ready with a fourteen-page opinion. He delivered it personally to Roosevelt. “If you instruct me to bring such a suit, I can promise you we shall win it.”
THE PRESIDENT GAVE only one vague hint of his impending action in the days following. “Mr. Hanna,” he said after breakfast on Tuesday, 18 February, “what do you think about the Northern Securities Company?�
��
Hanna, preoccupied with plans for a business trip to New York, replied that the great trust was “the best thing” that could have happened to the Northwest. As a shareholder and old friend of James J. Hill, he could hardly have said less. That evening, he left town.
ON THURSDAY, 20 FEBRUARY, the Senator returned to Washington, and found his train full of trust attorneys. He ran into Knox’s predecessor, John W. Griggs, in the parlor car, and asked what was taking him to the capital. Griggs realized that Hanna had not yet seen the morning newspapers.
“The government has brought a suit against the Northern Securities Company.”
Hanna was thunderstruck. Knox’s overnight statement read:
Within a very short time a bill will be filed by the United States to test the [combination of] the Northern Pacific and Great Northern systems through the instrumentality of the Northern Securities Company. Some time ago the President requested an opinion as to the legality of this merger, and I have recently given him one to the effect that, in my judgment, it violates the provisions of the Sherman Act of 1890, whereupon he directed that suitable action should be taken to have the question judicially determined.
The statement was typical of Knox in its precise, chilly brevity. It was typical, too, of Roosevelt in its timing. A popular but jurisdictionally weak state suit against Northern Securities, initiated by Governor Samuel R. Van Sant of Minnesota, was about to be thrown out of court. By announcing his own federal suit now, Roosevelt would benefit from the likely publicity. Henceforth he, and not the Governor, would be seen as David battling the Wall Street Goliath.
Theodore Rex Page 12
