Colonel Roosevelt (34 page)

Contrite at not having finished an account of his European grand tour, long promised to Sir George Otto Trevelyan, he took up the manuscript and resumed it with enormous enjoyment.
I found I was expected to walk in with
the queen on my arm and my hat in the other hand—a piece of etiquette which reminded me of nothing with which I was previously acquainted except a Jewish wedding on the East Side of New York
.…

By the last day of September his letter was approaching the length of a small book, at more than thirty thousand words. That afternoon, he went riding with Edith. They were galloping along the bay road when her horse swerved and threw her headfirst onto the pavement.
She was knocked unconscious for thirty-six hours, and remained semicomatose for ten days, waking to terrible pain. Throughout her life, she had been prone to neuralgia, retiring to her room for days at a time. This trauma went beyond any in her experience, permanently wiping out her sense of taste and smell.

The family doctor found no concussion, and she slowly recovered. But the accident, following so soon after her fiftieth birthday and the advent of baby Grace, served as a notice to Roosevelt that they had both reached the years of physical decline. His mustache was going from gray to white, and chronic rheumatism assured him that he would never again stride out as freely as he had in Africa. He comforted her with a copy of Edith Wharton’s new novel
Ethan Frome
—not that she found much to enjoy in the climactic crash scene—and in his only speaking engagement of the season, called passionately for a social policy more considerate toward the frailties of women and children. “I am not talking to you tonight about abstract things,” he told a packed audience at Carnegie Hall, “but about flesh and blood and the ills of flesh and blood.”

Worried as he was about his wife, he was only distractedly aware that the Agadir crisis had eased, with
Germany being “compensated” for French supremacy in Morocco with a large slice of the Middle Congo and several billion tsetse flies. It sounded like the kind of arbitral accord that the President favored.
Meanwhile Taft, still traveling, was trying to publicize himself as a trust-buster. He launched an attack on monopolistic combinations in Boise, Idaho, and warned that his attorney general, George W. Wickersham, would prosecute violations of the Sherman Act, “whether we be damned or not.” Coming from a self-proclaimed conservative, this language sounded like a parody of Roosevelt’s own radical rhetoric, or at best, an attempt to win back Westerners lost to reciprocity. The first national convention of Republican progressives responded on 16 October by endorsing Robert La Follette for the presidency in 1912.

Eleven days later, on Theodore Roosevelt’s fifty-third birthday, Taft handed him an unwelcome present.

THE HEADLINES THAT MORNING
on the front page of the New York
Tribune
could not have been more enraging:

Other newspapers treated the story similarly, with the words
deceived
and
misled
recurring like drumbeats.
Roosevelt was stunned into temporary wordlessness. It was as if everything he had told the Stanley Committee, and subsequently published, word for word, in
The Outlook
, was disbelieved by the Justice Department. With friends like Taft and Wickersham, he did not need enemies in Congress.

For two and a half years, he had tried to keep quiet about Taft. In the process he had disappointed and even lost many of his progressive colleagues, who were now, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, supporting La Follette. He debated what to do about his credibility and the fragmentation of the GOP, cracking like a salt lick under the President’s elephantine missteps. Labor despised Taft; the insurgents always had; free-traders and protectionists alike blamed him for the reciprocity debacle; Democrats could not wait for 1912. Even the Republican Old Guard deplored this prosecution, which could be justified only on the most legalistic grounds.

As James Bryce noted, U.S. Steel was not technically a monopoly: it often lost out on large orders to smaller competitors. Wickersham had therefore focused on the Tennessee Coal & Iron deal as monopolistic
in intent
, enabled by Theodore Roosevelt. His petition granted that the former president had acted honestly in 1907. But to readers of newspaper headlines four years later, Roosevelt’s innocence looked like naïveté—if not complicity in what the financial expert John Moody called “the best bargain [any] concern or individual ever made in the purchase of a piece of property.”

Taft professed not to have known that his attorney general was going to name the Colonel. But the plan’s political intent was plain. Wickersham wanted voters to know that he and the President had launched almost as many
antitrust prosecutions in two years as “Teddy the trust-buster” had in seven and a half. The fact that they were both pro-business did not betray their mutual commitment to the letter of the law.

“
I know you will agree with me that the only wise course for me to pursue is that of absolute silence,” Roosevelt wrote the president of the Reform Club, in reply to a sympathetic letter. By that he meant only oral speech: he would have plenty to say in print. If he spoke out too forcefully to reporters, he would start hearing from Roosevelt Republicans again, and find himself pitted against both Taft and La Follette in 1912.

He told two progressive friends, William Allen White and Governor Hiram Johnson of California, that an emergency could conceivably arise which would require him to make the “sacrifice” of a presidential run. Otherwise, it was best that he remained a private citizen. “I very sincerely believe that if I should be nominated, you would find that it was a grave misfortune not only for me but for the progressive cause.… I ask with all the strength that is in my power … to do everything possible to prevent not merely my nomination, but any movement looking toward my nomination.”

JOHNSON, BEING A POLITICIAN
, took note of the condition and ignored the disclaimer. It was useless for Roosevelt to try to persuade such men that he meant what he said: that his fears were for progressivism rather than for himself. But if he was one day to be nominated against his will, he had to do something about his present low esteem on Wall Street.
At Carnegie Hall he had spoken, he thought, “with guarded moderation” about court rulings that favored property rights over the public interest, “but every single New York newspaper was bitterly against me, and for the most part suppressed my speech, merely playing it up in the headlines as an attack on the judiciary.”

He therefore
worked with extreme care on an article responding to the steel suit.
How
he expressed himself did not really matter.
What
he was saying, in so many words, was that he no longer supported William Howard Taft as President of the United States.

The article, headlined “The Trusts, the People, and the Square Deal,” appeared in
The Outlook
on 16 November. It proved to be not so much a cry of outrage as a sober, detailed statement of his regulatory philosophy, adapted to new conditions, and accepting that combination was a fact of American life. For all its lack of sensationalism, it quickly sold out its press run, and tens of thousands of offprint copies had to be issued to satisfy public demand. Newspapers reprinted it nationwide.

Roosevelt tersely reaffirmed his self-defense in the Tennessee Coal & Iron matter, as testimony confirmed by all the principals involved. He devoted the rest of his space to a repudiation of Taft’s “chaotic” and overly judicial antitrust
program.
Admitting that he had invoked the Sherman Act himself against such trusts as Northern Securities, American Tobacco, and Standard Oil (and succeeded all the way to the Supreme Court), he said he had done so only when convinced of corporate mischief. Throughout his presidency he had exhorted Congress to create an independent agency that would constantly regulate, rather than sporadically punish, the doings of trusts—most of which were law-abiding, and all of which were entitled to be as big as they liked,
as long as they did not monopolize their sector of the economy. “Size in itself does not signify wrong-doing.”

The time had come, he wrote, for an administrative policy of “close and jealous” monitoring of business combinations. Whatever body was created to exercise this authority—perhaps a strengthened version of his own Bureau of Corporations—must have power to override states’ rights and restrain unbridled competition. He acknowledged that the last word was holy to many self-styled progressives.
But those who thought that the Sherman Act was good for competitive rights represented “not progress at all but a kind of sincere rural toryism.” They dreamed of bringing back the primitive freedoms enjoyed by village shopkeepers and smallholding farmers before the Civil War. “The effort to restore competition as it was sixty years ago, and to trust for justice solely to this proposed restoration of competition, is just as foolish as if we should go back to the flintlocks of Washington’s Continentals as a substitute for modern weapons of precision.”