Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  79 What he had just Twelve days before, TR had spoken with pride about “this fundamental fact of American life, this acknowledgement that the law of work is the fundamental law of our being” TR, Works, vol. 15, 330.

  80 This first year London Daily Mail Yearbook, 1902; Collier’s Weekly, 25 Jan. 1902; Mark Sullivan, Our Times (New York, 1926–1935), vol. 1, 31. Contemporary statistics, cited by an English analyst in Collier’s Weekly, 25 Jan. 1902: The United States was the world’s richest nation, worth $88 billion to Britain’s $55 billion, France’s $45 billion, Germany’s $40 billion, and Russia’s $30 billion. See also articles on United States prosperity in Review of Reviews, Sept. and Oct. 1901; Success, Oct. 1901; and New York Evening Post, 31 Dec. 1901. The best surveys of material America at the turn of the century are the opening chapters of Harold U. Faulkner, The Decline of Laissez-Faire, 1897–1917 (New York, 1951), and George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900–1912 (New York, 1958).

  81 Indeed, it could consume Faulkner, Decline of Laissez-Faire, 68–69; Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 1, 33; Success, Oct. 1901; Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 4; James Ford Rhodes, The McKinley and Roosevelt Administrations, 1897–1909 (New York, 1922), 158. August’s export total of $107 million was the largest in United States history (New York Evening Post, 31 Dec. 1901).

  82 Even if the United States William Woodruff, America’s Impact on the World (New York, 1975), 115–16; Forum, 19 May 1902; product sampling derived from a survey of popular British periodicals, Sept.–Dec. 1901 (LC); Success, Oct. 1901; Frederick A. McKenzie, The American Invaders (New York, 1901); “The American Commercial Invasion of Europe,” Scribner’s, Jan. and Feb. 1902. For the exuberant overseas expansion of American corporations in 1901, see Mira Watkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), chaps. 4 and 5.

  83 As a result Andrew Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy (New York, 1893), 5; Faulkner, Decline of Laissez-Faire, 23, 87; Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (New York, 1999), 442–43; Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 4.

  84 It was hard Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle (New York, 1945), 89–90. See Sidney Fine, Laissez-Faire and the General Welfare State, 1865–1901 (Ann Arbor, 1956).

  85 Trees soon barred Williams, “TR Receives.” By 1901 the nation was making more than two billion calls annually.

  86 The foreign papers Clarke in New York Herald, 17 Sept. 1901. Foreign press quoted in New York Sun, 16 Sept. 1901.

  87 Continental comment was World’s Work, Dec. 1901; TR scrapbooks (TRP). For a presentist French view of TR’s prepresidential character, see Serge Ricard, “Théodore Roosevelt avant la présidence: analyse d’une pensée politique,” Canadian Review of American Studies 12.2 (fall 1981).

  88 fifth in the world T. A. Brassey, ed., The Naval Annual, 1902 (Portsmouth, U.K.). Great Britain led the naval ranking, followed by France, Russia, and Germany.

  89 About 9:30 Kohlsaat, From McKinley, 98; Clarke in New York Herald, 17 Sept. 1901.

  90 For ten minutes Ibid.

  91 McKinley had marched With the exception of Grover Cleveland (who had family responsibilities), every President since Lincoln had worn a military uniform during the Civil War. Review of Reviews, Nov. 1901.

  92 Powerful commercial Faulkner, Decline of Laissez-Faire, 68–69; Foster Rhea Dulles, America’s Rise to World Power, 1898–1954 (New York, 1955), 46ff.

  93 They had trumpeted Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. Reports 244 (1901). In this decision, the Supreme Court found that the new territories were appurtenant to, rather than part of, the United States. As long as they remained thus “unincorporated” into the body politic, their inhabitants could not expect the full freedoms enjoyed by United States citizens, “only such fundamental rights as were derived from natural law” (Dulles, America’s Rise, 56). These included rights to life, liberty, and property, but did not include guarantees of, say, uniform tariff and excise rates, nor necessarily any of democratic vote (ibid., 57). TR agreed with William Howard Taft that the Supreme Court’s attitude was just: “What does well here would work ruin there [the Philippines]—trial by jury in all cases, for example” (TR, Letters, vol. 3, 105). Cynical observers suggested that the court’s ruling had been affected by the pro-imperialism vote of 1900.

  94 The old soldiers Frederick H. Harrington, “The Anti-Imperialist Movement in the United States, 1898–1900,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Sept. 1935; see also Howard C. Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean (Chicago, 1927), 13, and Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York, 1968).

  95 “World duties,” TR, Works, vol. 15, 332.

  96 “So they have” Ibid., 333.

  97 Cuba, for example Upon arrival in Washington, the President stated emphatically that he wanted to get out of Cuba (Francis E. Leupp to Oswald Garrison Villard, 20 Sept. 1901 [CS]). “Never in recent times,” TR asserted, “has any great nation acted with such disinterestedness as we have shown in Cuba” (ibid., 476–77). While repeating these sentiments twelve years later in his Autobiography, he admitted that in 1901 “our own direct interests were great, because of the Cuban tobacco and sugar, and especially because of Cuba’s relation to the projected Isthmian Canal” (214).

  98 “Sometimes,” Roosevelt TR, Letters, vol. 3, 105.

  99 Clearly, a vast World’s Work, Sept. 1901; Richard Leopold, Elihu Root and the Conservative Tradition (Boston, 1954), 26–28; Alexander E. Campbell, America Comes of Age (New York, 1971), 94–95; Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (Lawrence, Kans., 1989), 114–15. TR, in Letters, vol. 3, 209, sneers at “those amiable but very far from wise philanthropists who think that we can … benefit the Filipino by getting out of the Philippines and letting him wallow back into savagery.” Review of Reviews remarked, in an article on the problems confronting Governor-General Taft: “Under the most liberal estimates, there are not over a half-million people in the islands who possess anywhere near the capacity for selfgovernment exhibited by the most ignorant negro in the black belt of our own South” (Aug. 1901). For TR’s intense prepresidential interest in the Philippines (he wanted to be the first Governor-General), see Oscar M. Alfonso, Theodore Roosevelt and the Philippines (New York, 1974), chap. 1.

  100 President McKinley’s Leopold, Elihu Root, 34–35; TR, Works, vol. 15, 337–38. Taft disclaimed some of the rumors in a letter to Root (2 Aug. 1901 [ER]), but admitted others were true. According to Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 226, 230, Filipinos were being exterminated, at the height of the insurrection, at a ratio of five dead to every one wounded. For a contemporary view of the relations between the United States and its new dependencies, see Arthur W. Dunn, “The Government of Our Insular Possessions,” Review of Reviews, Dec. 1901.

  101 THE TRAIN BEGAN The New York Times, 17 Sept. 1901; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 3, 20, 23; Alexander E. Campbell, Great Britain and the U.S., 1895–1903 (London, 1960), 179–83; A. Northend Benjamin, “Russia in the East,” Munsey’s, June 1901.

  102 Both powers were Frederick W. Marks III, Velvet on Iron: The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt (Lincoln, Nebr., 1979), 4–5; Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, 8th ed. (New York, 1968), 482; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 3, 20, 26, 112; Raymond A. Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and Japan (Seattle, 1966), 8. See also A. Gregory Moore, “Dilemma of Stereotypes: Theodore Roosevelt and China, 1901–1909” (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 1978).

  103 Worldwide, the balance A modern historian redefines this as “an imbalance” favorable to the United States and Great Britain (William N. Tilchin, Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire: A Study in Presidential Statecraft [New York, 1997], 49). See also Edward H. Zabriskie, American-Russian Rivalry in the Far East: A Study in Diplomacy and Power Politics, 1895–1914 (Philadelphia, 1946), passim. “I think the 20th century will still be the century of the men who speak English.�
� TR, Letters, vol. 3, 15.

  104 The United States acknowledged For TR’s wistfulness regarding Canada, see Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 334.

  105 This was the only TR, Letters, vol. 3, 21, 65–66, 109; see also TR, Works, vol. 15, 335–36.

  106 Roosevelt could claim Marks, Velvet on Iron, 72; TR, Letters, vol. 2, 1209, 1186–87; Kenton J. Clymer, John Hay: The Gentleman as Diplomat (Ann Arbor, 1975), 177–79. See also David H. Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt and His English Correspondents: A Special Relationship of Friends,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, vol. 63, pt. 2 (1973): 39–42.

  107 Now there was this new David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas (New York, 1977), 256–59.

  108 Roosevelt privately favored Allan Nevins, Henry White: Thirty Years of American Diplomacy (New York, 1930), 156.

  109 The stupendous task TR, Works, vol. 15, 273; Senator W. A. Harris to John Tyler Morgan, 29 Oct. 1901 (JTM); TR, Public Papers of Theodore Roosevelt, Governor (Albany, 1899–1900), 298; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 52; Holger Herwig, Politics of Frustration: The United States in German Naval Planning, 1889–1941 (Boston, 1976), 70; Marks, Velvet on Iron, 5–6.

  110 Even so, Panama McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 264–65; Campbell, Great Britain and the U.S., 71.

  111 That reluctant appendix Review of Reviews, Sept. 1901; TR, Autobiography, 528–30; The New York Times, 16 Sept. 1901. The first-cited periodical almost wistfully contemplated the day when the United States “should come into full authority” in Panama. “That isthmus is of no practical value to the Republic of Colombia.… It would be to our advantage to purchase [it] at a fair price.” The author of these words was TR’s friend and adviser Albert Shaw.

  112 THE ALLEGHENY FOOTHILLS Olean, City of Natural Advantages (illustrated commercial guidebook, 1889, NYPL); WPA Guide to New York (1940); Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 1, 28, and vol. 2, 271–99.

  113 “The party of” Qu. in Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 2, 250. The following account of the rise of the trusts prior to 16 Sept. 1901 is based on ibid., vol. 2, 307–37; Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 6–10; Fine, Laissez-Faire; Hans B. Thorelli, Federal Antitrust Policy (Baltimore, 1955); and Naomi Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (New York, 1985).

  114 His profits were Faulkner, Decline of Laissez-Faire, 167–77; Lamoreaux, Great Merger Movement, 159; Charles W. McCurdy, “The Knight Sugar Decision of 1895 and the Modernization of American Corporation Law, 1869–1903,” Business History Review Index, autumn 1979. For a detailed study of the Sherman Act, see Thorelli, Federal Antitrust Policy. For statistics showing the pace of business combination prior to 1901, see Ralph L. Nelson, Merger Movements in American Industry, 1895–1956 (Princeton, N.J., 1959).

  115 In 1898, there Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago, 1990), 68.

  116 Ideologically, Roosevelt Nelson, Merger Movements, 33–34, 37; Thorelli, Federal Antitrust Policy, 411–16. For TR’s attitude toward the trusts, see, e.g., TR, Letters, vol. 2, 1400, 1493–94 (comments of John M. Blum); vol. 3, 122, 159–60; and TR, Works, vol. 15, 315.

  117 He saw “grave dangers” This opinion was shared by most turn-of-the-century economists (Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 53). For revisionist views, see Alfred P. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), and Albro Martin, James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest (New York, 1976). Martin helps demolish the “Robber Baron” cliché of earlier writers. Elsewhere, he views equably the tendency of a modern, multi-unit corporation to operate beyond government control (“Uneasy Partners: Government-Business Relations in 20th Century American History,” Prologue 11 [summer 1979]). It was this antidemocratic tendency, not the growth of trusts per se, that alarmed TR in 1901.

  118 America was no longer See H. T. Newcomb, “The Recent Great Railway Combinations,” Review of Reviews, Aug. 1901. By now, nearly all the railroads had been consolidated into the hands of a half-dozen operators (Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 7).

  119 According to a Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence, Kans., 1991), 28; Thorelli, Federal Antitrust Policy, 255n; Ray Stannard Baker, “John Pierpont Morgan,” McClure’s, Oct. 1901; New York Herald, 16 Sept. 1901.

  120 roosevelt liked morgan TR, Letters, vol. 1, 58; vol. 2, 1238, 1450; and vol. 3, 42; Herbert L. Satterlee, J. Pierpont Morgan (New York, 1975), 363; Lewis Corey, The House of Morgan (New York, 1975), 253.

  121 Leyland Steamship Lines Baker, “John Pierpont Morgan.” This purchase, made in the summer of 1901, sent shock waves of apprehension through London’s financial community. Morgan sought to soothe local stockbrokers by protesting, “America is good enough for me.” William Jennings Bryan’s Commoner quipped, “Whenever he doesn’t like it, he can give it back to us” (qu. in Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 2, 355).

  122 Control, indeed, was William H. Harbaugh, The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, rev. ed. (New York, 1975), 157–58; Baker, “John Pierpont Morgan”; The New York Times, 31 Mar. 1913; Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 14; Faulkner, Decline of Laissez-Faire, 38, 374; Review of Reviews, Apr. 1901.

  123 To his mind TR, Autobiography, 439–40; Chandler, Visible Hand, 175.

  124 “The vast individual” TR, Works, vol. 15, 331–32.

  125 “I owe the public” Corey, House of Morgan, 301.

  126 If they were Ibid.; Lincoln Steffens, “The Overworked President,” McClure’s 18.6 (Apr. 1902). The latter article describes the United States government in terms of a trust much larger than United States Steel, with “the equivalent of a capital, not of a hundred millions, but a hundred billions,” benefiting some seventy-six million stockholders—in effect, the greatest business organization in the world.

  127 elsewhere in the train Kohlsaat, From McKinley, 100–101.

  128 at four minutes past Buffalo Express, 17 Sept. 1901.

  129 the steep climb The New York Times and New York Herald, 17 Sept. 1901.

  130 Boys, youths, and old Photographs and text in Peter Roberts, Anthracite Coal Communities: A Study of the Demography, the Social, Educational, and Moral Life of the Anthracite Regions (New York, 1904); John Mitchell, “The Mine Worker’s Life and Aims,” Cosmopolitan, Oct. 1901.

  131 Roosevelt knew that Mitchell, “Mine Worker’s,” passim; Roberts, Anthracite Communities, 15; David Montgomery, “American Labor, 1865–1902: The Early Industrial Era,” Monthly Labor Review 99.7 (July 1976).

  132 These boys John R. Commons et al., History of Labor in the United States, 1896–1932 (New York, 1935), vol. 3, 402–5; Roberts, Anthracite Communities, passim; Harold W. Aurand, “Social Motivation of the Anthracite Mine Workers: 1900–1920,” Labor History 18 (summer 1977).

  133 Roosevelt understood As early as 1897, in his review of Brooks Adams’s The Law of Civilization and Decay, TR had publicly declared that the poverty-stricken mass “constitutes a standing menace, not merely to our property, but to our existence” (TR, Works, vol. 14, 135). By 1901, fewer than 4 percent of United States workers were unionized, and the cost of living was rising at a steady 7 percent. Faulkner, Decline of Laissez-Faire, 280, 252–54.

  134 Trade-union membership Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 34–35; TR, Works, vol. 16, 509; George F. Baer, “Statement Regarding the Anthracite Strike,” 10 June 1902 (GWP); Robert J. Cornell, The Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 (Washington, D.C., 1957), 54–57.

  135 Roosevelt had been See TR, Letters, vol. 1, 100–101; Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 733; TR, Works, vol. 15, 331. See Howard L. Hurwitz, Theodore Roosevelt and Labor in New York State, 1880–1900 (New York, 1943), for a critical review of TR’s prepresidential labor policies.

  136 PILLARS OF HEMLOCK Now Elk State Forest.

  137 Roosevelt was more prone TR, Letters, vol. 1, 122; Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 382–85; TR, Diaries of Boyhood and Youth (New York, 1928), 247.

  138 Qui plantavit curabit “He wh
o has planted will preserve.”

  139 I am sorry Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 48; WPA Guide to Pennsylvania (1940); World’s Work, June and Nov. 1901; The Forester 7 (1901), passim; Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 1, 128; Michael Frome, The Forest Service (New York, 1971), 16.

  140 Descent via Emporium TR, Autobiography, 325; Frome, Forest Service, chap. 1, passim.

  141 A town sign Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 31; Frome, Forest Service, 9; Ray Stannard Baker, “What the U.S. Steel Corporation Really Is,” McClure’s, Nov. 1901.

  142 To him, conservation Stephen R. Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston, 1981), 108–9; TR, “How I Became a Progressive,” Outlook, Oct. 1912. See also TR, Letters, vol. 2, 1421–22 (to the National Irrigation Congress, 1900), and TR, Autobiography, chap. 11. For the equally ominous state of the nation’s fauna in 1901, see Maximilian Foster, “American Game Preserves,” Munsey’s, June 1901, and John S. Wise, “The Awakening Concerning Game,” Review of Reviews, Nov. 1901. Michael J. Lacey’s “The Mysteries of Earth-Making Dissolve: A Study of Washington’s Intellectual Community and the Origins of American Environmentalism in the Late Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1979) shows that the conservation movement was in fact some twelve years old, and coming into full philosophical flower in September 1901. But the flower blushed unseen by all but very few. It remained for TR, as President, to popularize this philosophy and make it government policy.

  143 IT WAS NEARLY time Washington Evening Star, 16 Sept. 1901. New York World and Chicago Tribune, 17 Sept. 1901.