Theodore Rex (16 page)

His languid,
laissez-faire
law enforcement so far had earned him the nickname “Sleepy Phil.” Cynics noted that Knox had helped organize U.S. Steel. Henry Adams dismissed him as a Wall Street stooge, “sodden with corporate briefs,” not realizing that Knox needed instructions in order to function. President McKinley had never supplied them.
A friend remarked, “There must be a client—Knox would not know himself without one.”

Roosevelt was quick to remedy this deficiency. He had asked Knox to help him draft the trust-control paragraphs of his Message to Congress, with encouraging results. “I am being advised by the best Attorney General this Government has ever had.” In just eight weeks the two men had become fast friends. They could often be seen riding together in Rock Creek Park.

Knox, Roosevelt discovered, was a distinguished equestrian. Those high-stepping horses were not just for show. Neither were the thousands of leather volumes in his library; the Attorney General was a perpetual, if monotonous, quoter of verse and historical facts. He was polite without being humble, and could be startlingly outspoken. This further endeared him to his “client.” When a visitor asked the Roosevelt children who their father’s favorites were, they drummed their spoons and piped in chorus, “Mr. Root and Mr. Knox.”

NEITHER THE PRESIDENT
nor the Attorney General would reveal what they discussed over lunch on 13 November 1901, but since the Hill-Harriman “settlement” was the day’s big news, they probably devoted little time to the weather.
Such a truce could portend only one thing: further monopolization of the railroad industry. Roosevelt knew both Hill and Harriman slightly, and Morgan rather better. But he was more concerned with the
Sun
’s revelation that George W. Perkins had been an auxiliary party to the settlement.

Perkins was the brightest of J. P. Morgan’s “golden boys”—clever, charming, successful in both insurance and finance, a self-made millionaire at thirty-nine. To Roosevelt, he was a close friend, “one of the men I most respect.”
Perkins had come to the White House recently to advise him on the corporate section of his Message—along with another Morgan partner, Robert Bacon. (Handsome, godlike “Bob,” who so overshadowed pale “Teddy” in the Harvard class of ’80!) It was plain now why they had reacted negatively to his antitrust paragraphs, “arguing like attorneys for a bad case.”

“THE BEST ATTORNEY GENERAL THIS GOVERNMENT HAS EVER HAD.”
Philander Chase Knox, ca. 1901
(photo credit 3.1)

Whatever doubts the President may have had about trust control, he had
none now. “
Perkins may just as well make up his mind that I will not make my Message one hair’s breadth milder.”

MORGAN, HILL, AND HARRIMAN
announced the Northern Securities Company late that afternoon. A few evening newspapers carried the story, but its full impact did not register across the country until Thursday, 14 November. By then, a majority of directors named to the board had approved the conversion and combination of their various stocks, and the giant trust was a
fait accompli
.
The New York
Sun
praised Hill’s charter as “broad and masterly.”

The New York
Journal
saw it as yet another step toward universal monopoly. Ordinary citizens had lost their capacity to feel “rage and terror” at such news; all they wanted to know was “whether the concentration shall be in the public interests or against them.” With heavy irony, the
Journal
complimented “the best business brains in America” for advancing socialism’s concept of a nationalized industrial state:

The irony was lost on George Perkins, who excitedly clipped the column and sent it to Roosevelt. “
To me there is a great deal of significance in an editorial of this kind from a paper like the
Journal.”

In due course, both Perkins and Robert Bacon were reported to have joined the board of Northern Securities, balancing the power of Hill and Harriman. Other board members came from the Rockefeller empire, and the Vanderbilt and Gould systems. The complete directorate read like a miniature
Who’s Who
of finance capitalism.

The more Roosevelt and Knox looked at Northern Securities, the more they saw it as a symbol of the arrogant beauty of Combination. Unlike U.S. Steel—a smoky picture, to most minds, of ovens and boilerplate—the new trust was imaginable in detail, length, and breadth. Here was a shining necklace of rails, bejeweled with real estate, spread across America’s bosom. What it adorned, it monopolized.

Speculators rushed to buy. One of the first was Senator Hanna. “
Can I get some of the new ‘Holding’ Co. stock as an investment,” he begged Perkins. “I asked Mr. Hill to give me some and he said he would but I would like more.… I wish you would look ‘a little out’ for me.”

Lesser citizens to whom one share, at $110, represented ten weeks’ wages wondered how a company purporting to operate in Hoboken, N.J., could do
legitimate business halfway around the globe. The popular journalist Ray Stannard Baker, writing for
Collier’s Weekly
, noted with what “humdrum monotony” five or six plutocratic names appeared on the rosters of giant corporations. “You can ride from England to China on regular lines of steamships and railroads without once passing from the protecting hollow of Mr. Morgan’s hand.”

What would happen when these owners of owners began owning one another? Morgan already owned Perkins. Who would be the ultimate ruler of the American economy? “
Is it possible,” Baker asked, “that the time will come when an imperial ‘M’ will repose within the wreath of power?”

As if in answer to his question, the Roman initials
T.R
. were emblazoned on the sides of White House carriages.

IN MID-NOVEMBER
, the leaders of the Senate began to return to town, many on complimentary railroad passes signed by Hill or Harriman, and paid courtesy calls on the President. Mark Hanna took a look at his Message typescript, and reacted even more negatively than Perkins. “
I see dynamite in it.”

He objected in particular to the heated tone of Roosevelt’s language against overcapitalization. Phrases such as
baleful evils, despotism
, and
storm centers of financial disturbance
would not go down well on Wall Street, while
inevitable depression, reduced wages
, and
mismanagement and manipulation
might imperil the current détente between capital and labor.

Other senators proposed other changes. None seemed to notice that for every word the President had written in criticism of “bad” trusts, there were five in praise of good. Gradually, reluctantly, he erased adjectives, then sentences, then whole paragraphs. He suppressed his condemnation of price-fixing and preferential rebates. He withdrew a proposal to make corporate records subject to government scrutiny. He even crossed out his wish for a Constitutional amendment “to confer on the National Government the power to supervise great industrial combinations.” The Senators were still not satisfied. They were the legislative veterans, he the executive novice, dependent on their support in consolidating his presidency. So he continued to cut, pages at a time.

RESTRAINED AS HE
might have become on matters of trust policy, Roosevelt remained outspoken on the subject of appointments. His daily public reception, held at noon in George Cortelyou’s antechamber, amounted to a patronage mart, and he reveled in the opportunity to show off the decisive speed of his mind. “Tell me what you have to say, quickly, quickly!” No matter how concise the request, he was always ready with a reply—and not always the one hoped for:

He would whirl on round the room, pumping hands and grinning, ejaculating his automatic “Glad to see you!” and “Dee-lighted!” like snorts from a steam engine. Office-seekers learned not to trifle with his memory (“Haven’t you a jail record?”), nor to present him with trumped-up dossiers of support (“Petition? I could get a petition to have you hanged!”).

Those other White House pests, the murmurers of special requests, found Roosevelt impossible to buttonhole. Like an actor, he projected his voice past them, at the crowd. The more furtive his interlocutor, the louder he responded, and he took care to repeat,
fortissimo
, any request that he deemed improper. The effect was of salt poured on slugs. Even as the supplicants melted away, Roosevelt’s voice would follow: “Senator Depew, do you know that man going out? Well, he is a crook.”