Theodore Rex (104 page)

In requesting such legislation, Roosevelt was merely echoing a regulatory sentiment that had been growing on Capitol Hill during his presidency—growing, indeed, as fast as the American population was outgrowing its dependence on local and seasonal meats, fruits, and vegetables. The railroad age had brought the phenomenon of factory foods refrigerated for distant transport and sale, scientifically preserved for longer shelf life, artificially flavored for better taste. Mechanized techniques transformed large animals into rows of cans, reduced whole orchards to juice, or, even more efficiently, made juice out of nonfructile chemicals—would wine out of water be next? The ancient triple unit of man, horse, and plow became the single “combine harvester,” an inexorably advancing, all-too-obvious symbol of combination in the American economy.

Sinclair was but the most recent and passionate of the radical protesters against all this cutting up and churning out. Poverty-stricken for most of his young life, he saw himself as one of the straws that the combine compressed into bales and tossed aside. His real motive in writing
The Jungle
was political, as the English MP Winston Churchill saw at once: from its dedication “To the Workingmen of America” to its concluding cries of “Organize! Organize! Organize!” it was a declaration of war against capital.

ALICE ROOSEVELT HAD
no such socioeconomic prejudice. Newspaper articles heralding her imminent wedding to Congressman Nicholas Longworth degenerated into endless catalogs of gold and silver gifts, every one of which, gorgeous or garish, she accepted with glee. White House aides complained that Miss Roosevelt would accept “anything but a red-hot stove,” and that the accumulating pile of treasure, requiring a special room and twenty-four-hour security, was “entirely too much to be given to one person.”

“Trinkets,” Alice said, when asked if she was still short of anything. “Preferably
diamond
trinkets.”

King Edward VII’s gift fit that category, being a gold snuffbox with a diamond-encrusted lid. The Kaiser sent a diamond bracelet. Cuba invested part of her reciprocity income on a spectacular pearl necklace. Ambassador Jusserand delivered, on behalf of his government, a magnificent Gobelin tapestry, and the Dowager Empress of China sent enough brocaded silk to
keep Alice in dinner gowns for decades. A cornucopia of crystal, china, and jewelry poured in from congressmen and other aspirants for presidential favor.

The President gave away his daughter in the East Room at noon on 17 February, before a capacity congregation of family members and the Washington establishment—many women wearing brilliant accents of “Alice Blue.” Outside, the White House grounds jostled with the most
frenzied press activity the capital had ever seen.
Roosevelt seemed oddly subdued in his white waistcoat, and answered the Bishop of Washington’s question “Who giveth this woman?” in an inaudible voice. Posing with Alice afterward for a photograph of notable stiffness, he stood leaning away from her slightly, his face devoid of expression. She held herself erect, almost as tall as Nick, in white satin trimmed with old lace, a frozen Niagara of white and silver brocade cascading from her waist and down the carpeted dais.

Did Roosevelt’s masked look, and his apparent scruple not to touch Alice with his shoulder, convey an awareness that the lace covering her shoulder and sweeping in a graceful crescent across her breasts had been worn, long ago, by another Alice? And did Edith Roosevelt, who also remembered that lace with pain, have it in mind when she kissed her stepdaughter good-bye and said, not entirely jokingly, “
I want you to know that I’m glad to see you leave. You have never been anything else but trouble”?

The bride, heading off to Cuba on honeymoon, was missed at least by her Mexican yellow-head parrot. For days after her departure, the White House resounded with despairing calls of “
Alice—Alice—Alice.”

ROOSEVELT READ THE
Depew/Platt profile in
The Cosmopolitan
and began to wonder if the literature of exposure was not becoming a destructive force. He approved of public attacks on corruption and fraud, but not this kind of “hysteria and sensationalism.” The double tendency of subjective journalism, he felt, was toward “suppression of truth” and “assertion or implication of the false.”

What bothered him particularly about the current series was that its publisher, William Randolph Hearst, was a member of Congress. Here was an elected representative of the people using the fourth estate to malign and manipulate his colleagues, probably with intent to destabilize. “
I need hardly tell you what I feel about Hearst,” the President wrote to the Attorney General of New York State, “and about the papers and magazines he controls and their influence for evil upon the social life of this country.”

The pity was that honest exposure writing, even the fact-filled fiction of Sinclair, could still be an influence for the good—witness Senator Aldrich’s sudden withdrawal of opposition to the Pure Food Bill after the publication
of
The Jungle
. A man with extensive interests in the food industry, Aldrich believed that government had no right to prevent consumers from poisoning themselves. But he abstained from voting when the bill passed the Senate on 21 February, by a vote of 63 to 4.

Although speculation arose that the Senator was working secretly to defeat the bill later in the House, Roosevelt could congratulate himself on another legislative victory. “
The tone of the Republican Senators is not so defiant as it was a few weeks ago,” Sir Mortimer Durand reported to London, “and one hears on all sides predictions that Mr. Roosevelt will carry all the various measures upon which he was to have been overthrown.” The British Ambassador thought that fear of Depew’s fate might be the reason Old Guard solidarity had begun to erode. Roosevelt, whose contempt for “business in politics” was well known, looked more and more like a tribune of morality as the exposure journalists went about their work.

If so, the tribune had his sword shattered two days later. Aldrich’s negotiatory cunning revealed itself when the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce deadlocked over amendments to the Hepburn Bill. Senator Dolliver had managed to override the nay votes of Elkins and
four other Republicans, and got an agreement to report the bill as written. But after seeming to accept defeat, Aldrich enlisted Democratic support to empower all non-Committee members of the Senate to amend the bill freely later. Violent arguments broke out as to which “friend of the measure” would report it. Aldrich bided his time, then proposed Benjamin R. Tillman—a name so unexpected that the committee voted in favor almost out of shock.

Senator Tillman was neither a Republican nor, notoriously, a “friend” of anything to do with Theodore Roosevelt. His only qualification as sponsor of a federal regulatory measure was his near-paranoid obsession with states’ rights. This, plus the Hepburn Bill’s popularity outside Congress, meant that reform was still a possibility. But Aldrich had at one stroke rendered Dolliver impotent, made the bill look regional rather than national, and severely embarrassed the President of the United States. Debate opened on the Senate floor on 28 February.

Now began a series of blows which Roosevelt could not at first parry. His oldest political ally, Senator Lodge, spoke out against regulation. So did Senator Knox, apparently forgetful of the days when he and the President had prosecuted illegal railroad combinations across state lines. So did Senator Spooner, author of the language that had facilitated the Panama Canal. So did every Republican of any legislative weight in the upper chamber. Joseph B. Foraker, emerging as the most aggressive of the “railroad senators,” made no fewer than eighty-seven speeches in defense of free enterprise.

The issue of court power, again forced by Aldrich, became the main threat to the railroad bill. Roosevelt, Hepburn, and Dolliver had imagined that debate would focus on
administrative
power—the rate-fixing authority of the
ICC. They wanted, at worst, a “narrow review” amendment, which would permit the courts to rule only on procedural questions.

So, amid dry clouds of legalistic dust, the battle dragged on.

As prose,
The Jungle
left something to be desired, and Upton Sinclair’s ear for dialogue
(“Eik! Eik! Uzdaryk-duris!”)
was perhaps best appreciated in Lithuania, but Roosevelt was both fascinated and repulsed by the book Senator Beveridge had sent him. Although disguised as fiction, it had the tang—in this case the reek—of fact. He drew it to the attention of his Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson, along with a letter Sinclair had written him, calling for an investigation of the meatpacking industry. “
I would like a first-class man to be appointed to meet Sinclair, as he suggests; get the names of witnesses, as he suggests; and then go to work in the industry, as he suggests.” The investigation, he stressed, must be kept “absolutely secret.” Attorney General Moody had already learned, from prosecuting the beef trust, that Packingtown was capable of any venality in defending its interests. “We don’t want anything perfunctory done in this matter.”

Roosevelt’s was a mind in which literary images and political priorities floated interchangeably. Whether or not
Sinclair’s description of immigrant workers bending over stinking masses of blood and offal and bits of bone under lights “like far-off twinkling stars” reminded him of Bunyan, he chose to cite a parallel passage in
Pilgrim’s Progress
when he addressed a white-tie dinner of the Gridiron Club on 17 March. It represented his current opinion of investigative journalists, and was fortunately articulated after the
squab stuffed with chestnuts
sur canapé
.

Roosevelt’s subsequent remarks about “a certain magazine” that he had just read “with great indignation” could not be reported, due to the Gridiron’s tradition of confidentiality. He spoke for nearly three quarters of an hour over a white, twelve-foot model of the Capitol, glowing with internal
lights. According to one member of the audience, he “sizzled” with moral disdain. Since his listeners represented all of official Washington, and since
The Cosmopolitan
had just published another installment of “The Treason of the Senate,” it was not long before the Man with the Muckrake was identified as David Graham Phillips.