The Everything Theodore Roosevelt Book (27 page)

Ornithologists were concerned with the devastation hunters were causing among pelicans, herons, egrets, and other birds that featured commercially attractive plumage. They were beginning to reduce the numbers of those birds to the point that extinction was possible.

Many of the birds gathered at tiny Pelican Island, about four acres in size, located in the Indian River Lagoon on the east coast of central Florida. The ornithologists decided that was a good place to make a stand. Paul Kroegel, a local resident concerned with the pelicans on the island; the Florida Audubon Society; and the American Ornithologists’ Union petitioned President Roosevelt directly for relief.

The president was all too glad to accede to the request. In typical fashion he did not want to waste time going through Congress or battling red tape. He asked his advisors if there was any law that would prevent him from declaring Pelican Island a federal bird reservation. None, they said.

Without fanfare, on March 14, 1903, he signed a proclamation stating simply, “It is hereby ordered that Pelican Island in Indian River in section nine, township thirty-one south, range thirty-nine east, State of Florida, be, and it is hereby reserved and set apart for the use of the Department of Agriculture as a preserve and breeding ground for native birds.”

The first of the fifty-one bird refuges he created became a reality—and he did it without ruffling many feathers.

Striking Down a Strike

TR had been in office for about eight months when his first major crisis arose. Anthracite coal miners in eastern Pennsylvania went on strike in early May 1902 for higher wages and better working conditions. Normally, a local strike would not draw the attention of the president of the United States. This one was different.

Almost every American relied on coal for energy purposes at this point in history, and a lot of people panicked over the thought of disrupted supplies with winter approaching. The United Mine Workers, led by John Mitchell, and the owner of the mine, George Baer, who also owned the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad company, drew their lines in the sand. The scene was set for a battle involving TR.

Neither the union nor the mine owner budged as the strike began. Union leader John Mitchell took the initiative and asked the president to establish an independent arbitration committee to resolve the impasse.

TR asked his commissioner of labor, Carroll D. Wright, to look into the causes of the strike. Wright formulated a report that acknowledged each side’s position and proposed reforms, including a recommended nine-hour workday on an experimental basis, instead of the standard ten-hour workday in place at the time, and limited collective bargaining.

TR held back Wright’s report, lest he appear to be pro-union. And, even though Mitchell had proposed the committee, the miners refused to go along with arbitration. So did Baer. Eventually, TR set up a fact-finding group to study the issues and proposed his own solution.

No Settlement in Sight

Negotiations dragged on, and the president chafed to get fully involved. His attorney general, Philander Knox, cautioned him that he did not have the authority to intervene.

Lack of authority did not bother TR. Under pressure from the union, the owner, his own party, and the public, he threatened to replace the workers with army troops, by force if necessary. His goal was to mine coal, regardless of who was doing the work.

TR figured that the negotiators could work toward a settlement while the soldiers dug. The fact that they were not trained in the art of coal mining did not bother TR. His plan raised a few eyebrows among politicians, citizens, and everyone else who had a vested interest in settling the strike.

Secretary of War Elihu Root came to TR’s rescue. He worked with banker J. P. Morgan, who had financial interests in Baer’s railroad, to convince the miners that independent arbitration was in their best interests. Finally, they agreed. In mid-October 1902, President Roosevelt announced that an agreement to end the strike had been reached. The 163-day strike ended on October 23.

Everyone Wins a Little

As a result of the solution to the strike, each side got a little of what they asked for. The miners received a 10 percent pay increase instead of the 20 percent they had demanded. Their workday was cut from ten to nine hours; they had asked for an eight-hour workday. They had also demanded recognition for their union by the mine owners.

The owners refused to recognize the UMW, but they were forced to accept a six-person arbitration board composed of equal numbers of labor and management representatives to settle subsequent labor disputes. As far as Mitchell was concerned, that was a de facto recognition of the UMW. The biggest winner, though, was TR.

The public credited TR with ending the strike, even though Wright, Root, Morgan, and former President Grover Cleveland had done yeoman’s work to resolve the issues involved. His popularity continued to grow, especially as he attacked the trusts that were so prominent in the country.

Trustbuster Extraordinaire

One of the aspects of TR’s presidency that might have caught people off guard a bit was his approach to big business. Anyone who looked at his history should not have been surprised.

TR had come down hard against big businesses when he was an alderman and governor, which was antithetical to traditional Republican Party policy. But, TR was not a typical Republican. He continued his “trustbusting” practices as president by urging Congress to control large corporations by whatever means possible.

TR felt that a first step regarding big business’s influence in the United States was to convince the public that government should curb its power. Americans were leery of large trusts, but they were also skeptical of government regulation. He vowed to change public opinion about government’s role in business and establish controls acceptable to citizens, business operators, and politicians.

TR did not want to eliminate big business’s power completely; he wanted to mitigate it through practical regulation. The challenge required a balancing act. He started with a new Department of Commerce and Labor.

There were antitrust laws in place, most notably the Sherman Act of 1890, but TR did not think they had enough teeth and were not being enforced adequately. So in 1903 he convinced Congress that the country needed a department to oversee interstate commerce and labor relations.

In response, Congress created the Department of Commerce and Labor, the first new entity at that level the government had created since the Civil War. Businesses lobbied heavily against the creation, but they lost their battle. The department included a Bureau of Corporations, whose charge was to uncover violations of current antitrust laws.

Next, he ordered Attorney General Knox to start filing lawsuits against large monopolistic companies, including J. P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Company, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, and James B. Duke’s tobacco trust. Government attorneys launched the first of the forty-five such suits that were introduced during TR’s administration. The fallout was almost immediate.

Not a Popular Person

On February 19, 1902, TR ordered the first antitrust suit under the Sherman Act. His aim was to dissolve Northern Securities Company, a holding company formed in 1901 by business financier J. P. Morgan and railroad entrepreneurs James J. Hill and Edward H. Harriman to dominate railroad traffic in the West. The company controlled the stock of the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroads.

TR alleged that NSC was monopolizing railroad traffic between Chicago and the northwestern part of the country, which did not fit into his concept of fair business practices. When Knox filed the lawsuit on the basis of restraint of trade, Morgan and Republican Senator Mark Hanna from Ohio pleaded personally with TR to stop the lawsuit, but the president refused. Off to court they went.

NSC’s attorneys argued that the company did not engage in interstate commerce; it was merely a stockholder. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. By a margin of 5-4, the justices agreed with the government and ordered the company’s breakup. That was a major victory for the president.

The government’s victory heightened TR’s popularity with the people. More important, it put a halt to railroad operators’ efforts to consolidate the nation’s railroads into a monopoly and lessened business giants’ zeal for creating holding companies.

Finally, it put the Morgans, Hills, and Harrimans of the business world on notice that they were not safe from anti-monopoly lawsuits or legislation. TR had already proved that to unions. Now he showed business owners that he was willing to regulate them as well.

The NSC victory was only the first for TR. Later, other trusts, such as Standard Oil, suffered the same fate. President Roosevelt proved that he was an equal opportunity arbiter when it came to creating as stable a business environment as possible for U.S. companies—and for the people they served.

Building the Panama Canal

By 1870, American trade with the rest of the world was expanding. That meant merchants would need more ships to transport their goods and shorter routes to accommodate them. The U.S. government turned to a project that had intrigued people ever since 1513, when the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama: building a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Many people considered the isthmus ideal for a canal to shorten the trip between the eastern and western hemispheres. The U.S. Navy inherited the task of finding such a route. After examining a number of possibilities, the navy and the government settled on the Isthmus of Panama as the best place, even though it was farther from trade routes and narrower than alternate sites.

An international company formed in 1876 to build a canal received a concession from Colombia, of which Panama was a part. That attempt failed. Next, a French company led by Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, stepped in. The company began construction in 1880. That project also failed, due primarily to the staggering cost in lives and accidents such as landslides. Almost 22,000 workers died, mainly from malaria and yellow fever.

Efforts to build the passage languished until 1889, when the U.S. Congress created an Isthmian Canal Commission to analyze the feasibility of a Central American canal and recommend a route.

Initially, the commission recommended a route through Nicaragua. Then it changed its decision. There the matter rested until the French company offered the United States its assets for $40 million. That revived American interest in the project. All it took was Theodore Roosevelt to get it going. First, though, he had some minor problems to resolve, such as turning Panama into a free country.

TR Takes Charge

Panama joined Colombia in 1821 after a Central American revolt against Spain. Colombia posed a problem for TR during negotiations for rights to build the Panama Canal, since its government believed that he was bullying them into making a deal.