Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  In a rare admission of this fear, Roosevelt confided to Sir Mortimer Durand that he was “dreadfully worried” about the fate of the Dolliver bill. Durand repeated his words to Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary of the new Liberal government in Great Britain:

  He told me that when he woke up at night and the remembrance of it all came to him he had to force himself to think of bear shooting and other things more agreeable than Senators or he could never get to sleep again. He said that he had made a careful study of Cromwell and was convinced that Cromwell never meant to become a dictator, but had been forced to do so against his will by the persistent folly and obstructiveness of his parliaments. “If I had the power to dissolve parliaments, and the will to override the Constitution, I should be tempted to do the same.” However a man here had to live his life “under representative institutions.”

  The trouble with the Senate in 1906 was that it was not a representative institution, except insofar as state legislatures elected its members—often at the command of party machines, or at the behest of corporate contributors. Aldrich and most of his colleagues were so sure of continued incumbency that Roosevelt doubted he would be able to get “coherent—that is, effective—action from them” by invoking voter displeasure.

  As if on cue, The Cosmopolitan magazine proclaimed on 15 January that it would publish a major new “exposure” series by David Graham Phillips, entitled “The Treason of the Senate.” The first article would focus on Chauncey M. Depew and Thomas Collier Platt as “New York’s Misrepresentatives.”

  Roosevelt was not charmed by this announcement, nor by heavy hints, in the current Arena, that Senators Depew and Platt took orders from Standard Oil, along with Aldrich, Bailey, Elkins, Gorman, Lodge, Penrose, and Spooner. He needed the votes of such men. Ray Stannard Baker’s less vindictive railroad series, still running in McClure’s, might yet persuade them to accept his bill. But vulgar abuse could only stiffen their resistance to reform—the instinct of stand-patters under attack, after all, is to stand even more pat.

  IN ALGECIRAS, ON 16 January, Wilhelm II’s longed-for conference on the status of Morocco got under way. This time around, Roosevelt, with no direct interest in the south Mediterranean theater, was happy to leave American peacemaking efforts to others—specifically, to a delegation of professional diplomats headed by Henry White, now United States Ambassador to Italy. “I want to keep out of it if I possibly can.” The stakes at the conference table were much less fraught than they had been six months before, since the Kaiser had been unable to secure an alliance against France with his war-weary cousin, Nicholas II. In a sense, Wilhelm had already won what he had blustered for in 1905: the humiliation of France and the resignation of Théophile Delcassé.

  White was under instructions to press for nothing more controversial than stability and security in Morocco, with occasional vague references to an “open door” there. The bulk of the negotiating could be left to more interested parties. Their wranglings would no doubt be interminable. If the situation ever got ugly, Roosevelt could always be consulted by cable.

  SENATOR ELKINS TOOK no immediate umbrage at the President’s apparent cooperation with the progressive press. He even worked up a regulation bill of his own, to see if it would satisfy him. Inevitably, however, it called for private rather than public rate control. Roosevelt remained committed to Senator Dolliver’s bill.

  On 27 January, Dolliver sent that measure to the House. It was quickly and favorably reported by that body’s Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, and it received the sponsorship of Elkins’s counterpart chairman, Congressman William P. Hepburn (R., Iowa). Although all the world knew who had demanded the legislation and who had drafted its language, it forthwith became “the Hepburn Bill,” and thereby gained prestige. Tall and stately at seventy-two, Hepburn was the House’s best debater, admired for his strength of character and legal acumen. Roosevelt, who affectionately called him “Colonel Pete,” could wish for no more effective sponsor. Nor could Hepburn himself wish for a bigger piece of legislation to crown his long career. Railroad rate regulation was the greatest challenge handed to Congress in forty years. More precisely, to the Senate—the House voted to approve the bill on 8 February by an astounding margin, with only seven negative votes. But the forces of reaction were confident that Old Guard delay tactics down the corridor would eventually make this victory Pyrrhic. “No railway rate bill,” the New York Sun declared, “will be passed by the Fifty-ninth Congress.”

  At one o’clock the following afternoon, a triumphant Roosevelt received Ray Stannard Baker at his daily shaving levée. Invitations to this ritual were coveted in Washington, and Baker was particularly flattered to find no other guests in attendance.

  “How are you, Baker? I haven’t seen you since our correspondence in November.”

  The President unclipped his pince-nez and sat down in a light chair that seemed threatened by his bulk. The barber applied a layer of lather while Roosevelt launched straight into an analysis of the Hepburn Bill. Baker, who had heard reports that Roosevelt was wavering on some clauses provocative to the Senate, was surprised how determined he was to give the ICC power over disputed rates.

  Roosevelt recognized that for “the railroad Senators,” the great question was going to be over the role of courts in regulation—whether they should judge only the fairness of the ICC’s rates, or (as Elkins preferred) judge the actual disputes. He said that he and Attorney General Moody stood together in holding that the bill should say nothing specific about jurisdictional limits. Each court should be allowed “to find—as it were—its own level.” Taft and Philander Knox were both in favor of strict language.

  Baker discovered, as Steffens had before him, that the only time to interrupt Roosevelt à toilette was when the razor made further loquacity perilous. He waited until the presidential chin was being scraped before venturing that the railroad bill was “the most important” Roosevelt could ever claim credit for.

  “Yes, but not the most important administrative action. That was Panama.”

  Since being out-maneuvered by Roosevelt in the summer of 1903, Baker had learned how to keep a presidential interview on track. He suggested that the Hepburn Bill was “only a first step.” It could not accomplish all the American people wanted; they would surely ask for more.

  Roosevelt’s head began to swivel in protest. The barber had to match strokes with his gyrations.

  “If this is a first step, where do you think we are going?”

  “You may not agree with me, Mr. President, but I believe that we cannot stop short of governmental ownership of the railroads.”

  Roosevelt became vehement. He said that he knew, better than anyone else, how “inefficient and undependable” federal employees were. It would be “a disaster” to have them in charge of free enterprises.

  Waiting for another razor opportunity, Baker reported that he had just been in Kansas, where there was much social discontent. “The people out there are getting beyond you on these questions.”

  “Here is the thing you must bear in mind,” Roosevelt said, clearly irritated. “I do not represent public opinion: I represent the public. There is a wide difference between the two, between the real interests of the public, and the public’s opinion of these interests. I must represent not the excited opinion of the West, but the real interests of the whole people.”

  Even as he spoke, the Hepburn Bill was being considered by the Elkins Committee. Its basic provisions were the same as those Roosevelt and Dolliver had hammered out the previous December. The ICC would be authorized to set reasonable rates, whenever rates were justifiably challenged; railroads would have thirty days to appeal such decisions in court; private car lines were, for the first time, placed under ICC control; and all of them would have to adopt a uniform and open system of bookkeeping.

  Baker and Lincoln Steffens, not being practical politicians, were disappointed in the Hepburn Bill, and Roosevelt had patiently to tolerate their com
plaints. But the bill was already too strong for Aldrich, who was casting around for some means to defeat it. One of the Senator’s few legislative liabilities was that he had no controllable majority on the Elkins Committee.

  Knowing how ruthlessly Aldrich operated, Roosevelt did not put it past him to allow the bill to be strengthened excessively, and then passed—aware that it would alarm the Supreme Court. “The one thing I do not want is to have a law passed and then declared unconstitutional.”

  THE COSMOPOLITAN’S SERIES “The Treason of the Senate” began to run in earnest in mid-February. It attacked Senator Depew for being rich, and worse still, jovial. David Graham Phillips’s literary style exemplified what was emerging as a common characteristic of the progressives: their fierce, preachy, perpetual grimness. They could no more convey the humor of a situation than they could view a perquisite without frowning. For fifteen minutes or a thousand words, they bracingly commanded attention, even admiration; then they lost it. They simply went on too long and too loudly. LaFollette noticed that when he got up to speak, his colleagues drifted out of the chamber.

  Perhaps the fiercest of the young progressives making headlines in February 1906 was a socialist. Upton Sinclair, a bony, driven twenty-seven-year-old, proclaimed himself as dedicated to the equalization of wealth. Yet in the past year, he had managed to sell the same novel to four different publishers—an achievement any capitalist might envy. His book was entitled The Jungle. It detailed unsanitary practices in Chicago’s meatpacking houses with a relish verging on the pathological. First serial rights went to The Appeal to Reason, a socialist sheet with an enormous readership. The quarterly journal One Hoss Philosophy followed up with longer extracts, minus only an episode in which a female meatpacker, forced to give birth on the job, inadvertently allows her baby to be made into sausages.

  Macmillan and Company, meanwhile, had bought book rights to the novel, before allowing Sinclair to move it to Doubleday, Page. Now, at last, The Jungle was between hard covers and selling as fast as clerks could count change. Sinclair had shortened, sanitized, and sentimentalized the plot, but it still presented a nauseating picture of the largest unregulated industry in the United States.

  Doubleday had cannily timed its release to coincide with Senate debate on a pure-food bill. But the book’s success was so great that proponents of the legislation used it to drum up public support. Senator Beveridge sent a copy to the White House. Roosevelt hardly needed to be reminded of the bill, having initiated it himself in his Fifth Message. That document read quaintly now, to eyes scorched by Upton Sinclair’s prose:

  I recommend that a law be enacted to regulate interstate commerce in misbranded and adulterated foods, drinks, and drugs. Such law would protect legitimate manufacture and commerce, and would tend to secure the health and welfare of the consuming public. Traffic in foodstuffs which have been debased or adulterated so as to injure health or to deceive purchasers should be forbidden.

  In requesting such legislation, Roosevelt was merely echoing a regulatory sentiment that had been growing on Capitol Hill during his presidency—growing, indeed, as fast as the American population was outgrowing its dependence on local and seasonal meats, fruits, and vegetables. The railroad age had brought the phenomenon of factory foods refrigerated for distant transport and sale, scientifically preserved for longer shelf life, artificially flavored for better taste. Mechanized techniques transformed large animals into rows of cans, reduced whole orchards to juice, or, even more efficiently, made juice out of nonfructile chemicals—would wine out of water be next? The ancient triple unit of man, horse, and plow became the single “combine harvester,” an inexorably advancing, all-too-obvious symbol of combination in the American economy.

  Sinclair was but the most recent and passionate of the radical protesters against all this cutting up and churning out. Poverty-stricken for most of his young life, he saw himself as one of the straws that the combine compressed into bales and tossed aside. His real motive in writing The Jungle was political, as the English MP Winston Churchill saw at once: from its dedication “To the Workingmen of America” to its concluding cries of “Organize! Organize! Organize!” it was a declaration of war against capital.

  ALICE ROOSEVELT HAD no such socioeconomic prejudice. Newspaper articles heralding her imminent wedding to Congressman Nicholas Longworth degenerated into endless catalogs of gold and silver gifts, every one of which, gorgeous or garish, she accepted with glee. White House aides complained that Miss Roosevelt would accept “anything but a red-hot stove,” and that the accumulating pile of treasure, requiring a special room and twenty-four-hour security, was “entirely too much to be given to one person.”

  “Trinkets,” Alice said, when asked if she was still short of anything. “Preferably diamond trinkets.”

  King Edward VII’s gift fit that category, being a gold snuffbox with a diamond-encrusted lid. The Kaiser sent a diamond bracelet. Cuba invested part of her reciprocity income on a spectacular pearl necklace. Ambassador Jusserand delivered, on behalf of his government, a magnificent Gobelin tapestry, and the Dowager Empress of China sent enough brocaded silk to keep Alice in dinner gowns for decades. A cornucopia of crystal, china, and jewelry poured in from congressmen and other aspirants for presidential favor.

  The President gave away his daughter in the East Room at noon on 17 February, before a capacity congregation of family members and the Washington establishment—many women wearing brilliant accents of “Alice Blue.” Outside, the White House grounds jostled with the most frenzied press activity the capital had ever seen. Roosevelt seemed oddly subdued in his white waistcoat, and answered the Bishop of Washington’s question “Who giveth this woman?” in an inaudible voice. Posing with Alice afterward for a photograph of notable stiffness, he stood leaning away from her slightly, his face devoid of expression. She held herself erect, almost as tall as Nick, in white satin trimmed with old lace, a frozen Niagara of white and silver brocade cascading from her waist and down the carpeted dais.

  Did Roosevelt’s masked look, and his apparent scruple not to touch Alice with his shoulder, convey an awareness that the lace covering her shoulder and sweeping in a graceful crescent across her breasts had been worn, long ago, by another Alice? And did Edith Roosevelt, who also remembered that lace with pain, have it in mind when she kissed her stepdaughter good-bye and said, not entirely jokingly, “I want you to know that I’m glad to see you leave. You have never been anything else but trouble”?

  The bride, heading off to Cuba on honeymoon, was missed at least by her Mexican yellow-head parrot. For days after her departure, the White House resounded with despairing calls of “Alice—Alice—Alice.”

  ROOSEVELT READ THE Depew/Platt profile in The Cosmopolitan and began to wonder if the literature of exposure was not becoming a destructive force. He approved of public attacks on corruption and fraud, but not this kind of “hysteria and sensationalism.” The double tendency of subjective journalism, he felt, was toward “suppression of truth” and “assertion or implication of the false.”

  What bothered him particularly about the current series was that its publisher, William Randolph Hearst, was a member of Congress. Here was an elected representative of the people using the fourth estate to malign and manipulate his colleagues, probably with intent to destabilize. “I need hardly tell you what I feel about Hearst,” the President wrote to the Attorney General of New York State, “and about the papers and magazines he controls and their influence for evil upon the social life of this country.”

  The pity was that honest exposure writing, even the fact-filled fiction of Sinclair, could still be an influence for the good—witness Senator Aldrich’s sudden withdrawal of opposition to the Pure Food Bill after the publication of The Jungle. A man with extensive interests in the food industry, Aldrich believed that government had no right to prevent consumers from poisoning themselves. But he abstained from voting when the bill passed the Senate on 21 February, by a vote of 63 to 4.
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br />   Although speculation arose that the Senator was working secretly to defeat the bill later in the House, Roosevelt could congratulate himself on another legislative victory. “The tone of the Republican Senators is not so defiant as it was a few weeks ago,” Sir Mortimer Durand reported to London, “and one hears on all sides predictions that Mr. Roosevelt will carry all the various measures upon which he was to have been overthrown.” The British Ambassador thought that fear of Depew’s fate might be the reason Old Guard solidarity had begun to erode. Roosevelt, whose contempt for “business in politics” was well known, looked more and more like a tribune of morality as the exposure journalists went about their work.

  If so, the tribune had his sword shattered two days later. Aldrich’s negotiatory cunning revealed itself when the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce deadlocked over amendments to the Hepburn Bill. Senator Dolliver had managed to override the nay votes of Elkins and four other Republicans, and got an agreement to report the bill as written. But after seeming to accept defeat, Aldrich enlisted Democratic support to empower all non-Committee members of the Senate to amend the bill freely later. Violent arguments broke out as to which “friend of the measure” would report it. Aldrich bided his time, then proposed Benjamin R. Tillman—a name so unexpected that the committee voted in favor almost out of shock.

  Senator Tillman was neither a Republican nor, notoriously, a “friend” of anything to do with Theodore Roosevelt. His only qualification as sponsor of a federal regulatory measure was his near-paranoid obsession with states’ rights. This, plus the Hepburn Bill’s popularity outside Congress, meant that reform was still a possibility. But Aldrich had at one stroke rendered Dolliver impotent, made the bill look regional rather than national, and severely embarrassed the President of the United States. Debate opened on the Senate floor on 28 February.