The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Not unless they’d done something wrong, Roosevelt said.

  The Supreme Court would eventually uphold Roosevelt’s action, finding that Northern Securities had been in illegal restraint of trade. The president would never directly challenge Morgan again, but he would invoke the Sherman Antitrust Act against forty other trusts during his presidency, more than all three of his predecessors combined. “The great corporations,” he wrote, “are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control them wherever need of such control is shown.”

  He did not believe that economic concentration in itself was bad, but he was confident the federal government had the power—and the moral duty—to curb its worst excesses.

  J. P. Morgan (the central figure in the top hat) was the most powerful financier on Wall Street, the master of banks on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as Western Union, General Electric, U.S. Steel, the Pullman car company, Aetna Life Insurance, and twenty-one railroads.

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  J. Keppler Jr. of Puck assessed the odds the new president would face if he dared challenge the giants of Wall Street (clockwise from left): James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railway; George Jay Gould of the Denver & Rio Grande Western and Western Pacific Railroads; Henry T. Oxnard of the Sugar Trust; John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil; and J. P. Morgan himself.

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  Theodore Roosevelt takes his antitrust message to River Point, Rhode Island. In August of 1902, with congressional elections fast approaching, the president undertook a two-week tour through New England, explaining that he felt he had no choice but to bring the great corporations under the “real, not the nominal, control” of the national government because, as he told crowd after crowd, “the government is us … you and me!” “Not since the Great Emancipator,” said the New York Times, “has a Chief Magistrate of the United States delivered to the American people a message of greater present concern.”

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  Theodore Roosevelt takes his antitrust message to Rutland, Vermont.

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  Theodore Roosevelt takes his antitrust message to Randolph, Vermont.

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  A Wonderful Escape

  Wednesday, September 3, 1902, was to be the final day of the president’s New England tour and he was scheduled to speak at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The motorman of a suburban trolley filled with people hoping to hear him suddenly stepped up his speed to get there first. The trolley slammed into the president’s landau, hurling it forty feet across the road and throwing its passengers into the air. The governor of Massachusetts was unhurt, but the president’s bodyguard, William Craig of the Secret Service, was killed, crushed beneath the trolley’s wheels. Roosevelt was thrown out, landed on his face, and injured his left shin. He was back on his feet within seconds, cursing and shaking his fist in the motorman’s face. The next morning’s newspapers hailed his “Wonderful Escape from Death,” but his face was badly swollen and his leg injury turned into a dangerous abscess. Twice, Roosevelt would have to endure surgery to have it drained and the bone beneath it scraped, and he was forced to spend several weeks in a wheelchair, confronted with a crisis that threatened the nation’s economy—and his own political survival.

  Trolley passengers look on helplessly a second or two before their car slams into the president’s carriage in downtown Pittsfield, Massachusetts. “Did you lose control of the car?” Roosevelt asked the engineer afterward. “If you didn’t, it’s a God-damned outrage!” The engineer claimed he’d had the right of way but was sentenced to six months in jail for his recklessness.

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  Onlookers crowd around the mangled carriage after the president and his party had moved on. A local jeweler and sometime cameraman named Wheeler did a brisk business selling souvenir photographs of the accident’s aftermath.

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  The carriage itself. Despite the death of his Secret Service man and his own injuries, Roosevelt finished out his day of speech making and hand-shaking. “It takes more than a trolley accident to knock me out,” he said later, “and more than a crowd to tire me.”

  Made for the People

  America ran on anthracite coal, most of it mined from Pennsylvania hillsides. It was a nightmarish business. Sixteen-hour days. The constant threat of cave-ins. Boys as young as ten breaking big chunks into small ones. Low wages that had not been raised for more than twenty years—and company-owned stores intended to swallow up what little money the miners could scrape together. And dominating all of it, mineowners adamantly opposed to change. Coal mining is a “business not a religious, sentimental, or academic proposition,” said George F. Baer, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company. “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given … control of the property interests of the country.”

  Back in the spring, the United Mine Workers, led by young John Mitchell, called for a strike. More than 140,000 men laid down their tools. Management refused even to hear their grievances. The price of coal rose from five to thirty dollars a ton. Winter was coming. Homes would remain unheated—and the administration was sure to take the blame. Roosevelt’s close friend Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts didn’t think there was anything the president could do—but urged him at least to “appear” to do something.

  Appearances alone didn’t interest Theodore Roosevelt. He summoned both sides to Washington to discuss what he called “a matter of vital concern to the whole nation.” The White House was being renovated, so the talks were held in the temporary White House on Lafayette Square. The face-to-face meeting failed to budge the owners. Roosevelt privately denounced their “wooden-headed obstinacy and stupidity,” and sent word that unless they accepted binding arbitration he would contact the Republican governor of Pennsylvania and ask him formally to request ten thousand federal troops to seize the mines and get them working again.

  A conservative congressman confronted the president. “What about the Constitution of the United States?” he asked. How could private property be put to public purposes without due process of law? Roosevelt grasped his visitor’s lapels. “The Constitution was made for the people and not the people for the Constitution,” he said.

  The mineowners retreated—but only slightly. They agreed to follow the recommendations of a presidential commission—provided no member of the United Mine Workers sat on it. Roosevelt was determined that labor have a voice and appointed the head of the Order of Railroad Conductors instead. The owners objected until the president told them, with a straight face, that he was naming him as a “sociologist,” not a union man. Roosevelt remembered “the mixture of relief and amusement I felt when I thoroughly grasped the fact that while they would heroically submit to anarchy rather than have Tweedledum, yet if I would call it Tweedledee they would accept it with rapture; it gave me an illuminating glimpse into one corner of the mighty brains of these ‘captains of industry.’ ”

  The mineowners still refused to recognize the union, but they did agree to a 10 percent pay raise and a nine-hour workday. The strike ended. American homes would be heated that autumn—and the Republicans would maintain majorities in both houses of Congress.

  Roosevelt was jubilant. He was the first president to mediate a labor dispute, the first to treat labor as a full partner, the first to threaten to employ troops to seize a strike-bound industry. And it had all worked.

  “I feel like throwing up my hands and going to the circus,” he said.

  Coal smoke blankets the Homestead Steel Works, operated by U.S. Steel on the Monongahela River.

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  Strikers at Olyphant, Pennsylvania, some of the 147,000 members of the United Mine Workers who downed their tools in the spring of 1902. Many were immigrants, and some ten thousand of them would return
to their homelands rather than continue to endure conditions in American coalfields.

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  During the coal strike, city workers dole out shovels of scarce fuel to shivering residents of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A police officer keeps New Yorkers from trying to take more than their share.

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  Members of the president’s Anthracite Coal Commission clamber into a coal car while investigating conditions in the mines at Meadville, Pennsylvania.

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  The president, surrounded by miners after the strike ended: “I am President of the United States,” he said, “and my business is to see fair play among all men, capitalists or wage workers.”

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  The Greatest Disappointment

  It has been very chilly [here] for the past week,” Franklin wrote to his mother from Harvard that October, “and the buildings have been cold through lack of fuel, but now that the strike is settled the coal has begun to come in small quantities. In spite of [the president’s] success in settling the trouble, I think that [he] makes a serious mistake in interfering—politically, at least. His tendency to make the executive power stronger than the Houses of Congress is bound to be a bad thing, especially when a man of weaker personality succeeds him in office.”

  Franklin was a Harvard sophomore now, and echoing the conservative opinions of classmates whose well-to-do parents were appalled at the president’s willingness to deal directly with labor. His mother disagreed. “One cannot help loving and admiring him the more for it,” she told her son, “when one realizes that he tried to right the wrong.”

  After Franklin’s father died in 1900, Sara moved to Boston to be closer to her son. She interested herself in every aspect of his life, exulted in his successes, and overlooked his failures, just as she always had.

  Successes did not come easily. He was not an outstanding student or especially well liked by his classmates. Many of them thought him an overeager lightweight, just as his schoolmates at Groton had. He became editor in chief of the Crimson, and scored a scoop when he learned his famous cousin was coming to Cambridge, but when he ran for class marshal he lost. Still too slight for sports, he led cheers at a football game—though he admitted it made him feel “like a damned fool waving my arms and legs before several thousand amused spectators.”

  He was elected to several clubs, and fully expected an invitation to join Harvard’s most exclusive organization, the Porcellian. He was a “legacy,” after all: his own father had been an honorary member; his cousin Theodore belonged.

  But Franklin was blackballed. As always, he was reluctant to let anyone know how hurt he was, but fifteen years later, he would confide to a young relative that his rejection by Porcellian had been the “greatest disappointment” of his life.

  He was disappointed in love, as well. Alice Sohier was the beautiful seventeen-year-old daughter of a wealthy North Shore yachtsman—the “loveliest” debutante of her year, Franklin remembered—and after courting her for several months he asked her to marry him. One day he hoped to be president like his fifth cousin, he told her—and he hoped to have no fewer than six children, the same number that now tumbled across the White House lawn.

  Alice turned him down. Later, she would tell her granddaughter that she had rejected his proposal in part because “I did not wish to be a cow.”

  Franklin never told his mother about Alice, and to ensure that she did not know too much about his private life had begun using a secret code in his terse diary. Within weeks of his parting with Alice Sohier in the late summer of 1902, cryptic new messages began to appear in the diary’s pages, involving someone identified only as “E.”

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Franklin as a Harvard freshman, and as a senior seated (center) with the staff of the Harvard Crimson during his term as its president. His successor in that position remembered that Roosevelt seemed to “like people … and made them instinctively like him. Moreover, in his geniality there was a kind of frictionless command.”

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  Franklin’s celebrated surname and his father’s honorary membership were not enough to get him past the door of the exclusive Porcellian Club, the narrow building with the fanlight at 1320–24 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge—a fact that deeply wounded him.

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  FDR’s membership card in the Harvard Republican Club. He joined in 1900 to show his support for the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket and would remain a Republican for at least two years. The “shingle” to which the card entitled him was a placard to hang on his wall as a sign of his enthusiasm for his famous cousin.

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  Franklin (at center, arms folded) and fellow members of the Harvard class of 1904 at their sixth class reunion at Nahant, Massachusetts

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  Eighteen-year-old Alice Sohier dressed for presentation at the Court of St. James’s in London in the spring of 1903, a year after she rebuffed Franklin’s proposal. “She had flocks of beaux,” a family member recalled. “She was having too good a time to be very serious about marriage.”

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  Westmorely Court, the most opulent building on Harvard’s Gold Coast, where, for four years, Franklin shared a suite with a fellow Grotonian, Lathrop Brown

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  Teddy’s Bear

  As soon as the 1902 congressional elections were over, President Roosevelt set off for the Mississippi Delta in hopes of shooting a black bear.

  His guide was Holt Collier, a former slave and scout for the Confederacy who claimed to have accounted for some three thousand bears over a long lifetime. Collier’s hounds found a bear and chased it into a muddy watering hole. Collier blew a bugle, the signal for Roosevelt to come and shoot it. Before he could get there, the cornered bear killed one dog and wounded two more. To save the rest of his pack, Collier smashed his gun over its head, then tied the dazed, wounded animal to a tree until the president could get there.

  When he finally did, he refused to fire. It wasn’t sporting to shoot a bear that could not get away, he said, and he asked that someone else put it out of its misery. Collier killed it with a knife.

  The president was not pleased with the experience. “I have just had a most unsatisfactory experience in a bear hunt in Mississippi,” he wrote. “There were plenty of bears, and if I had gone alone … I would have gotten one or two. But my hosts, with the best of intentions, insisted upon turning the affair into a cross between a hunt and a picnic, which always results in a failure for the hunt and usually in a failure for the picnic.”

  A rumor spread that the lassoed bear had been a cub, and that that was the reason the president had held his fire. A cartoonist captured that version. A Brooklyn stationer’s wife made two stuffed toys modeled after the cartoon cub and called them “Teddy’s Bear.” Soon, manufacturers both in the United States and overseas were turning out toy bears of their own.

  The Teddy bear would become Roosevelt’s most enduring symbol—and helped permanently saddle him with “Teddy,” a name he said he detested. “No man who knows me calls me by [that] nickname,” he complained to a friend that winter, “and if it is used by anyone it is a sure sign he does not know me.”

  TR and companions setting out in search of a black bear

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  A guide bringing in the dead bear Roosevelt had refused to kill

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  Clifford Berryman’s cartoon in the Washington Post transformed the grown bear into a cuddly cub and caught the public’s fancy.

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  The proud owner of an early Teddy bear

  The cover of one of countless books indirectly inspired by the president’s misadventure in Mississippi

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  Breathing the Free Western Air

  In the spring of 1903, Theodore Roosevelt undertook a marathon eight-week tour of the West—14,000 miles, 25 states, 150 cities and towns, 26
0 speeches. He was exhausted but exhilarated as he set out, suffering again from asthmatic wheezing and eager to breathe what he called “the free western air.” With an eye toward ensuring his nomination for president in 1904, he preached about everything from the need for a big navy to the sacred duty he believed every woman had to bear children.

  But as he moved from one spectacular landscape to the next, his central message was the importance of preserving them for the future. “We are not building this country of ours for a day,” he said. “It is to last through the ages.” The United States was fast becoming an urban and industrial country. Americans needed their unspoiled forests and hills, canyons and deserts to refresh and restore themselves. National Parks represented “essential democracy” at work, allowing every American to share in a legacy that belonged to everyone.

  Before Theodore Roosevelt left office—and over the objections of conservatives like House Speaker Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois, who liked to say, “Not one cent for scenery”—he would expand five National Parks, fifty-one bird sanctuaries, four national game refuges, and eighteen National Monuments. All in all, he set aside more than 280,000 square miles of federal land under one kind of protection or another—an area larger than the state of Texas and nearly half the size of the Louisiana Purchase—and created the United States Forest Service to help ensure that the development of natural resources proceeded in a responsible, sustainable way.