In view of this privilege, he decided to step finally from Littlefield’s to his own bill. But before doing so, he wanted to get full press attention. Luck and perfect timing gave him a story that made headlines all over the country:
J. D. ROCKEFELLER TRIES TO BLOCK THE TRUST BILL
CHIEF OF STANDARD OIL COMPANY SENDS
PEREMPTORY ORDERS TO SIX U.S. SENATORS
SENSATION IN CONGRESS
NOT THE FIRST TIME BIG COMBINATION
HAS TRIED TO DEFEAT ROOSEVELT PLAN
PRESIDENT THREATENS EXTRA SESSION
Not since his Northern Securities announcement had Roosevelt so effectively provoked a popular outcry. Thanks to McClure’s, John D. Rockefeller was once again a depised symbol of corporate greed, and Standard Oil stereotyped as the ultimate antigovernment trust. Both impressions were unfair: Rockefeller was semiretired and devoted to charitable works, while his great corporation had operated fairly and lawfully for years. But Roosevelt knew from experience that a public image, once registered, is almost impossible to rephotograph: later exposures only darken the underlying silhouette. Just as he was for all time “the Rough Rider,” so was Rockefeller “the Robber Baron,” and Standard Oil “the Anaconda,” constricting democracy in its coils.
By publicizing these three images simultaneously, he simplified the complicated situation in Congress and strengthened support for the “Roosevelt plan.” And by identifying six senators as recipients of Standard Oil’s “orders,” he ensured six votes in favor of the Bureau of Corporations: the honorable gentlemen could hardly reject him now without seeming to be Rockefeller stooges.
Subsequent articles revealed that the name Rockefeller had appeared on only two of Standard Oil’s germane telegrams, and that it was in any case qualified by the abbreviation Jr. This did not save Rockefeller Senior from being accused of “the most brazen attempt in the history of lobbying.”
The old tycoon maintained a hurt silence. When the Department of Commerce and Labor Bill got to the Senate, it was approved in thirty seconds flat.
ON 8 FEBRUARY, Woodrow Wilson, the president of Princeton, got a big laugh explaining to a meeting of alumni why this year’s groundhog had returned to its burrow. It was afraid that Theodore Roosevelt would put a “coon” in.
“JUST AT PRESENT,” Roosevelt wrote his eldest son, “Congress is doing most of the things I wish.”
For the first time since becoming President, he felt real political momentum. In response to his urgent demands, echoed by the General Board of the Navy, the House initiated legislation for four new battleships and two armored cruisers, while the Senate rewarded Elihu Root’s long struggle for an Army General Staff. By agreement with Great Britain, Roosevelt and King Edward VII were each empowered to appoint three “impartial jurists of repute” to negotiate the Alaskan boundary dispute. Favorable action on the Panama Canal Treaty was promised—as soon as Senator Morgan stopped filibustering it.
Roosevelt did not like the sound of that filibuster, and he was wary of corresponding tactics to delay the Cuban Reciprocity Treaty through the end of the session. Knowing that his legislative luck might not last, he worked around the clock without intermission, lobbying even as he ate.
On Saturday, 14 February, the Commerce and Labor Act arrived on his desk. He signed it with two pens, one of which went to the man he had decided to appoint as Secretary of the new Department: George Cortelyou. The other pen went to George Perkins of J. P. Morgan and Company. Evidently, Roosevelt expected the future relations of government and business to be amicable rather than antagonistic.
As a final cadence to these resolving harmonies, news came before night-fall that Herbert Bowen and his fellow negotiants at the Venezuela conference had agreed on a protocol to be submitted to The Hague. The last foreign battleships were steaming out of the Western Hemisphere.
THE NEXT MORNING’S newspapers proclaimed the double achievement: BLOCKADE ORDERED RAISED and THE PRESIDENT’S ANTITRUST PROGRAM COMPLETED.
Roosevelt let the first news story speak for itself. He was reluctant to draw personal attention to Wilhelm II’s large-bottomed retreat: “It always pays for a nation to be a gentleman.” About the second he was oddly defensive, fearing that it might not look like much of a triumph to readers studying the details. How were they to know he had had “a regular stand-up fight” with Senators Hanna and Aldrich before getting any trust legislation at all?
It was a fact, though, that he had negotiated only a modest, discretionary program. The powers invested in him had more to do with publicity than direct discipline. To forestall any radical discontent, he decided to issue a victory statement through the Attorney General’s office, emphasizing the cooperative nature of his plan. J. P. Morgan and George Perkins happened to be in town, so he summoned them to the White House after dark, along with Aldrich and Hanna.
Soon Aldrich was on his way to Knox’s house with scribbled instructions from the President: “Say what has been done: practically substantially everything asked for.… Not only has a long stride in advance been taken; not only have all the promises of last fall been made good, but Congress has now enacted all that is practicable and all that is desirable to do.” It was unclear whether these sentiments were those of sender or bearer, but Knox duly announced that the legislation just passed by Congress was “highly gratifying” to the Administration, and represented the concerted wisdom “of many earnest and thoughtful men.”
The result was another batch of positive headlines. They helped counteract negative editorials, such as one in the Philadelphia Ledger mocking the Roosevelt plan as “a lame and impotent conclusion to so much ferocious talk.” Few Republican papers went as far as the Philadelphia Press in claiming that “no such revolution in the operations of trusts and railroads has been worked since the Interstate Commerce Act was passed.”
Nevertheless, Roosevelt had brought about the first strengthening of federal regulatory authority in more than a decade, and unlike any Chief Executive before him, identified himself with antitrust policy. In the words of the Washington Evening Star, “The President of the United States is the original ‘trust-buster,’ the great and only one for this occasion.”
Whether this would redound to his future glory was uncertain. There were signs that yesterday’s great wave of combination was slowing, even as competition thrived, and the nation’s wealth swelled. Memories of hard times were growing dim. The American people were bored with antitrust, as they were tired of winter. Like their President, they looked forward to a summer of new issues. For now, “trust-busting” could safely be left to Knox, Cortelyou, and the courts.
GEORGE BRUCE CORTELYOU had a habit of carefully straightening his spectacles whenever anything was laid in front of him, whether a memorandum on his desk or sheet music on his piano. Each new challenge had to be focused twenty-twenty, in center lens, as he dealt with it. This self-protective gesture was the legacy of boyhood years when demands and deprivations came from unexpected directions, leaving him a young stenographer of impeccable ancestry but common education. Yet there had been, even then, a slithering efficiency about Cortelyou (associates used such words as oiled, smooth, eel-like to describe him) that sped him to high position, if not wealth, under Presidents Cleveland and McKinley. Now, still poor, he was raised to Cabinet rank under President Roosevelt.
Exulting, he straightened his spectacles and contemplated the future. “I am not going into this new department with the idea of staying indefinitely,” he wrote a friend. “I have refused many advantageous business offers.… If I am successful, and I think I shall be, the returns will be immediate and liberal within a very short time after I retire.” Just at the moment, however, he needed five thousand dollars to repay a debt of honor. A check for six thousand came by return mail. At forty, Cortelyou felt for the first time the luxurious correlation of money and power.
Political gossips doubted that the thirty-seven-year-old Commissioner of Corporations would accept much of Cortelyou’s a
uthority. James Rudolph Garfield was the son of President Garfield, and Roosevelt’s former protégé at the Civil Service Commission. Although he was foppish enough to care passionately about silk hats, his lean good looks were those of a privately educated sportsman. As such he qualified for the elite company of exercise companions whom Roosevelt delighted to abuse with cliff-crawls and frigid swims.
Cortelyou, despite seventeen months of almost daily proximity to the President, had never been so privileged.
ON 18 FEBRUARY, Roosevelt invited Speck von Sternburg to join him for a horseback trot in Rock Creek Park. Snow had fallen and frozen the night before; wedges of white lay in the trees, and the stream growled between ice-roughened banks. The skinny German bobbed along looking correct but cold in afternoon dress, while Roosevelt relaxed warmly in fur coat and cap.
Now that Germany’s battleships were at last clear of the Caribbean, a soothing signal to Wilhelm II seemed called for. Roosevelt discounted the seriousness of the naval threat Admiral Dewey had posed, and said that His Majesty’s representatives had made “the best impression imaginable” during the recent negotiations.
The President’s words again showed a respect for diplomatic face. As “a gentleman,” he was in honor bound not to embarrass Wilhelm any more than he had already. So was John Hay. So were loyal archivists. On both sides of the Atlantic, defoliation of the records began. Nine crisis-period telegrams from Sir Michael Herbert disappeared from the British Foreign Office. Three sets of State Department instructions to London and Berlin were suppressed; a fourth was pruned of urgent adverbs. The German “U.S.–Venezuela Relations” series, fifty-one pages thick for 1901, thinned to a mere nine pages for 1902–1903. Hay apparently felt only two insignificant items of his December correspondence were worth preserving. The 1902 dossier of notes sent to the Wilhelmstrasse by the American Embassy in Berlin ended midsentence in a note dated 17 October. Nearly four hundred pages of blank paper followed.
And so, by polite agreement, the Venezuelan crisis faded from history. When Admiral Dewey thoughtlessly boasted that his deployment in the Caribbean had been “an object lesson to the Kaiser,” Roosevelt summoned him to the White House for a reprimand. The sight of the old warrior in medals melted his anger, but he wrote seriously afterward, “Do let me entreat you to say nothing that can be taken hold of by those anxious to foment trouble between ourselves and any foreign power, or who delight in giving the impression that as a nation we are walking about with a chip on our shoulder. We are too big a people to be able to be careless in what we say.”
THE FIFTY-SEVENTH Congress pushed on toward adjournment, shuddering against brakes applied by four determined Senators. John Tyler Morgan fanatically filibustered the Panama Canal Treaty; Quay filibustered a banking bill, to punish Aldrich for filibustering him; and Benjamin Tillman filibustered everything in sight.
Roosevelt’s “tyrannical and unconstitutional” attempts at race reform provided the big Southerner with plenty of material for harangues (one eye fiery beneath black brows, the other horribly missing; fists flailing from worn sleeves, as his voice screeched higher and higher). He had managed to bully the Senate Commerce Committee into a negative report on Dr. Crum, and threatened social violence if the full Senate overrode it: “We still have guns and ropes in the South.”
Of that Roosevelt was aware. But he also understood the tendency of most lawmakers to exaggerate their emotions:
To the Secretary of War:
This [enclosure] is austerely called to your attention by the President, who would like a full and detailed explanation, if possible with interjectional musical accompaniment, about the iniquity of making a promotion for the senior Senator from Maine and refusing to make one for the junior Senator.
Especial attention is directed to the pathos of the concluding sentence of the junior Senator’s letter. An early and inaccurate report is requested.
T.R.
March began, and the big clock in the upper chamber ticked away the last sixty hours of the session. Matters more urgent than patronage backed up against continuing filibusters: the unratified Cuban and Colombian treaties, and several vital spending measures, including the four-battleships bill. Soothsayers predicted a last-minute rush of legislation on the morning of the fourth. Surely not even “Pitchfork Ben” would allow the government to go bankrupt at noon.
Treaties were another matter. Roosevelt saw now that the Senate was cravenly going to let the clock postpone any vote on Cuban reciprocity until the next Congress. So he acted while he still had time. “I, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim that an extraordinary occasion requires the Senate of the United States to convene at the Capitol in the city of Washington, on the fifth day of March at 12 o’clock noon.”
He had hardly finished dictating when complaints about his “precipitous and unnecessary action” resounded in the upper chamber. Evidently he had acted just in time. He responded by threatening to call back the House of Representatives as well, if funds were not voted in support of his naval buildup. If that meant he had to postpone his promised Western tour yet again, postpone it he would, “and keep Congress here all summer.”
A House-Senate conference hastily recommended that the President be given enough funds to build not four but five big new battleships. But at 10:00 P.M. on 3 March, Senator Tillman, his face ugly with anger, vowed to filibuster every cent in funds not yet appropriated unless South Carolina was bought off with pork-barrel money. “I’ll stand here and read Byron till I drop dead in my tracks.” At 2:00 A.M., he got his way. He yielded the floor to Senator Quay, who promptly embarked on another set of dilatory tactics.
Outside, the moon was setting, and the Capitol dome was obscured with shadow. In the tobacco-stale House, legislators snored at their desks. Word of Tillman’s victory came to the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. He got to his feet in sudden agitation, a bony, bearded, goatlike figure. “Mr. Speaker, if the House will bear with me …”
Joseph Gurney Cannon was sixty-six, and had been enduring Senate filibusters for nearly half his life. He had seen the House’s power decline steadily, till it functioned as almost a legislative bureau of supply to the Senate, sending money and parchment down the corridor on demand. Only last fall, Roosevelt and the Republican “leaders” had not even bothered to include Speaker Henderson in their tariff conference at Oyster Bay. To Cannon’s proud sensibility, the night just ending marked the nadir of what had once been the greatest deliberative body in the world.
Yet in this dark hour he felt dawn coming for himself. Later today, the retiring Speaker would lay down the gavel, and he—“Uncle Joe” of Danville, Illinois, the tightest wad and toughest talker in Congress—would take it up. Long years of frustration against the Senate surged in Cannon’s breast. His face reddened, and he began to shout, rousing his colleagues from sleep:
I am in earnest, with a message to the House touching this bill.… We have rules, sometimes invoked by our Democratic friends and sometimes by ourselves—each responsible to the people after all’s said and done—by which a majority, right or wrong, mistaken or otherwise, can legislate.
In another body, there are no rules. In another body, legislation is had by unanimous consent … and in the expiring hours of the session we are powerless without that unanimous consent. Help me Cassius, or I sink!
When Cannon lost his temper, he made even Senator Tillman seem tame. His body jerked in spasms, and he grew so hot he would tear off his coat and collar and douse himself with ice water. Now, however, he fought for his dignity, and for that of the House of Representatives:
I am getting to be a somewhat aged man. I pray God that my life may be spared until an intelligent and righteous sentiment, north and south, pervading both the great parties, will lash anybody into obedience to the right of the majority to rule.
Applause roared and rolled out of the chamber into the marble hall. Nobody in the Senate heard it: that body had voted itsel
f a short recess. The House followed suit. Congressmen emerged blearily into the chill air and dispersed in quest of beds, breakfast, and fresh clothes. A pallor tinged the sky beyond East Capitol Street. One by one, the naphtha lamps winked out.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S CARRIAGE rolled up the Hill shortly after 10:00. He found both assemblies back in session. As tradition required, he went to the President’s Room to sign late bills. But the green baize table was bare. He sat waiting in a plump leather chair, his Cabinet officers ringed around him. George Washington and his Cabinet looked down from the walls. A black bust of McKinley stared into space. Finally, bills began to come in. He scrutinized and signed them to the ticking of a grandfather clock. The naval-construction appropriation was satisfying, but he still saw no confirmation of his choice for Collector of Charleston. He was not downcast, having long since decided to put Crum in office, if necessary, by means of interim and recess executive power. Perhaps the next Senate would be less obstructive than this one.
As the hands of the clock narrowed toward noon, his companions tiptoed across the lobby to watch the Fifty-seventh Congress die. Roosevelt sat alone except for his new secretary, William Loeb, Jr. Through the swinging door, in snatches, came the final drones of senatorial oratory—something about snuffboxes? The hands of the clock merged. “May God’s benediction abide with you all,” a voice called.
Far away, at the other end of the building, members of the House began singing “God Be with You Till We Meet Again” to the former Speaker, while the next Speaker smiled, a red carnation bright in his buttonhole. Joseph Cannon always looked amused; it had something to do with the cut of his mouth; but his eyes were hooded and hard. In the months and years ahead, Roosevelt would have a new force to reckon with on Capitol Hill.
Theodore Rex Page 28
