Theodore Rex (101 page)

Here Roosevelt parted company with radicals demanding that the ICC be empowered to fix rates. As his letter to Baker showed, he believed that railroad executives justifiably took advantage of the free-enterprise system, and that a President’s job was to keep the system fair.
The most he was prepared to ask Congress for was a maximum rate, to be imposed by the ICC only in cases of dispute.

Another law he was looking for was in the area of employer’s liability. This was not a new cause for him. As Governor of New York, he had signed a bill mandating it, and as President he had called for the protection of federal employees in the District of Columbia. Immediately after the last election, he had called for a comprehensive Congressional study of the subject, “with a view of extending the provisions of a great and constitutional law to all employments within the scope of Federal power.”
That call had been mainly propaganda, since the lame-duck Fifty-eighth Congress had soon after quacked its last; but this time around, his intent was sincere. So was his desire for an investigation into child-labor abuses, legislation to maintain sanitary standards in the food industry, and governmental supervision of insurance corporations.

ONE OF THE FIRST
things Roosevelt did after returning to Washington was to dedicate his forthcoming book to John Burroughs. He was greatly amused when Scribner’s mistakenly advertised the title as
Outdoor Pastimes of an American Homer
. “
I am hurt and grieved at your evident jealousy of my poetic reputation,” he wrote Professor James Brander Matthews, who had sent him a note of mock inquiry from Columbia University. “If you saw my review of Mr. Robinson’s poems you may have noticed that I refrained from calling him ‘our American Homer.’ This was simply due to the fact that I hoped some discerning friend would see where the epithet ought to go.”

The allusion was to Edwin Arlington Robinson, the reclusive and poverty-stricken northeastern balladeer, whose collection
The Children of the Night
had come his way earlier in the year. Kermit Roosevelt had studied some of the poems at Groton and been transfixed by their chilly beauty. The President had read them too, at his son’s urging, and agreed that Robinson had “
the real spirit of poetry in him.”

Kermit had found out that Robinson was living in New York City, drinking heavily, and so desperate for money he was working ten hours a day as a time-checker in the Manhattan subway system. Clearly, such an existence
was not conducive to the production of more verse. The President, in strict secrecy waiving all civil-service rules, had offered Robinson jobs in the immigration service or the New York Customs House, which latter the poet accepted. A tacit condition of employment was that, in exchange for his desk and two thousand dollars a year, he should work “with a view to helping American letters,” rather than the receipts of the United States Treasury.

In further generosity, Roosevelt had written a review of
The Children of the Night
, comparing Robinson’s prosody to “the coloring of Turner,” and published it in
Outlook
during the Portsmouth peace conference. Léon Bazalgette might have had this enlightened kind of patronage in mind when he approvingly quoted a Roosevelt dictum, “A poet can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.”

THE PRESIDENT STAYED
in Washington just eighteen days, intently plotting railroad-legislation strategy, before embarking on a nine-day tour of the South. His ostensible purpose was to generate favorable publicity for the GOP, in advance of the November elections. But he also wanted to try out some of the centralized-government rhetoric of his upcoming Message in an area of the country that cherished the notion of states’ rights. If his ideas won favor there, it would be much more difficult for Congressional conservatives to challenge them in December.

Tensions were high when he arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, on 19 October to make an announced address on railroad rate legislation. Lieutenant Governor Francis D. Winston did not appreciate being frisked by agents before being allowed to shake the President’s hand, and the “peanuts ’n pickle” lunch laid on at the state fairground came close to a denial of hospitality. Hunger, or anger, made Roosevelt orate with persuasive effect. (“The new highway, the railway, is in the hands of private owners, whereas the old highway … was in the hands of the state.”) He was rewarded with considerable applause.

The following day he made a pilgrimage, poignant to him, to Bulloch Hall, the white-columned mansion in Roswell, Georgia, where his mother had grown up and married his father.
The floors were no longer polished by corn shucks tied to the feet of a mulatto slave boy, as they had been then, and only the Union flag flew in the little park down the avenue. But he knew the place so vividly in his imagination, from listening to his mother and aunt talk about it, that he felt he was revisiting it.

“
It is my very good fortune,” Roosevelt told the villagers of Roswell, “to have the right to claim that my blood is half southern and half northern.”

The farther south he went, the more heartening it was for him to see that white Southerners seemed disposed to forgive him for his “Negrophilist” behavior
in 1902 and 1903. Some of his welcomes were almost royal in their triumphalism.
He avoided the question of black disfranchisement in his speeches, and made only one unscripted reference to lynching, when Governor Jeff Davis of Arkansas suggested to his face that the “only good Negro is a dead Negro.” This Roosevelt could not tolerate. “Above all other men, Governor, you and I [as] exponents and representatives of the law, owe it to our people, owe it to the cause of civilization and humanity, to do everything in our power, officially and unofficially, directly and indirectly, to free the United States from the menace and reproach of lynch law.”

ROOSEVELT WAS SO
pleased with his Southern trip that he invited the historian James Ford Rhodes to the White House to hear about it. Rhodes arrived on 16 November and found Root and Taft among his fellow guests. The President recounted his put-down of Governor Davis with the meticulousness of an actor analyzing a
coup de théâtre
. He said he had controlled his displeasure at first, and proceeded with his own speech until he felt the crowd was “in sympathy” with him. Then he had marched up to Davis, looked him in the eye, and issued his reprimand, gesticulating in such a way that both Governor and audience thought he was going to throw a punch. The cheering had been “enthusiastic and genuine.”

It was clear to Rhodes that the President’s brave stand had been made not out of compassion, but out of concern for due process. Roosevelt, encouraged by Root and Taft, proceeded to give robust evidence that he and Davis were not far apart on phylogenetic matters. The Fifteenth Amendment had been “very unjust and bad policy.” Lincoln’s dream of a graduated extension of suffrage, as more and more black men qualified for it, was all very well, but the Yazoo Delta offered proof that a people could regress. Negroes, Roosevelt said, were “
two hundred thousand years behind.”

Rhodes suggested “a million,” and the President agreed. He cheerfully went on to castigate the Irish, who struck him as a good argument for Anglophilia. Not that there were many other justifications. The English were by nature undemocratic, and were not even good at governing themselves anymore: Prime Minister Balfour and his Cabinet were “a set of split carrot-heads” who might “answer perfectly well for a pink tea.” He did not believe in sending American boys to Oxford, and would “dislike exceedingly” to have one of his daughters marry a foreigner. (At least Alice, just back from her marathon junket to the Far East, would spare him that pain: she and Nick were now unofficially engaged.) English girls, on the other hand …

Léon Bazalgette could only dream of listening to Roosevelt talk, as Rhodes was now. But the Frenchman understood that these floods of apparent aggression, half fierce, half humorous, were more indicative of energy
than of serious thought. They were part of
l’outrance qui est dans sa nature
, the excess that was part of Roosevelt’s nature. The weir had constantly to spill, to keep the deep water behind clear and calm.

A SURPRISE RESULT
of the elections that month was that machine candidates of either party were punished in what
Outlook
called “the Rout of the Bosses.” Even Henry Cabot Lodge, who was not machine-made but seemed to personify orthodox Republicanism in Massachusetts, nearly lost his senatorial seat. New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana favored “Reform” or “New Idea” tickets over ones labeled “Stalwart” or “Old Guard.” Evidently, there was a schism developing in the GOP, and the force driving it apart was the same fervor S. S. McClure had tried to describe earlier in the summer. Only now it was less vague, more political, easier to define—as Ray Stannard Baker did, in the first article of his railroad series:

Baker might have used a less distracting word than
party
, with its inevitable overtones of registration and organization. But
progressive
, an adjective hitherto only generally indicative of forward social movement, had been transformed into a label, and might in time (depending on how effectively conservatism resisted it) rate the ultimate dignity of a capital
P
.

Roosevelt could not have wanted a louder fanfare of trumpets to proclaim the importance of his Fifth Message to Congress. But Baker, never one for restraint, gave him an extra trombone blast all to himself: “
Out of hopelessness of justice has arisen the present widespread demand, voiced by President Roosevelt, for some tribunal which is at once impartial and powerful enough to do justice as between the Railroad and the Citizen.”