Theodore Rex (35 page)

“
No, I guess not,” Roosevelt grunted through bleeding lips. He stood up and peered about him. Governor Crane was unhurt. Cortelyou looked concussed. The coachman lay unconscious, blood oozing from his ears. Craig was nowhere to be seen. Roosevelt staggered over to the wreckage (the barouche overturned and stove in, the horses kicking feebly in harness). Beneath the trolley car was a mass of blood and bone. All eight steel wheels had passed over his bodyguard.

He saw a man in engineer’s uniform staring stupidly, and bunched his fists in his face. “Did you lose control of the car?” The man was too frightened to reply. “If you did,” said Roosevelt, voice shaking, “that was one thing. If you didn’t, it was a
God-damned outrage!”

As his heir apparent mused later, it might also have been a national tragedy. John Hay calculated that Roosevelt had escaped death by just two inches. “Had the trolley car struck the rear hub instead of grazing it and crashing into the front wheel … Crane and the President would have been tossed to the left and under the car just as poor Craig was.”

At the time, all Roosevelt could think of was vengeance. The engineer became truculent. “You don’t suppose I tried to do it, do you?” For a moment he and the President were at the point of blows. Then Roosevelt remembered his dignity and turned back to the wreckage. “Well, I had the right of way anyway,” the engineer shouted, as deputies led him off.

Roosevelt did not seem to hear. He knelt beside the reddened wheels. “Too bad, too bad,” he murmured. “Poor Craig. How my children will feel.”

QUENTIN WAS INDEED
a bereft little boy when Roosevelt got back to Sagamore Hill that evening. But the President, whose face was blue-black and grotesquely swollen, attracted more immediate sympathy. He was also limping slightly from a bruise on his left shin.

In the days that followed, varying explanations of the accident came from Pittsfield. Charges of manslaughter were filed against Euclid Madden, the engineer. One story was that passengers on the trolley car had bribed him to pursue the President; another claimed he had been coming down the slope on schedule, and could not brake fast enough when the barouche got in his way. Madden pleaded guilty.
He was sentenced to a heavy fine, plus six months in jail for failing to control his car.

Memories of “poor Craig” faded slowly, like the leaves around Sagamore Hill. The anniversary of William McKinley’s death came and went without incident. Next day, 15 September, Roosevelt hosted a garden reception to celebrate his first year in office. Several thousand Nassau County neighbors came to shake the President’s hand and sip raspberry shrub from specially engraved glasses. Long Island Sound shimmered through the trees; the air was sweet with the smell of popcorn and banana fritters. Although Roosevelt was still bruised about the face, he seemed healthy and vigorous as he welcomed his guests. “Dee-lighted!” He shook fifty-two hands a minute for three hours.

“
It takes more than a trolley accident to knock me out,” he boasted, “and more than a crowd to tire me.”

Only Edith knew that beneath the neatly pressed flannel trousers, the pain in his shin was beginning to bother him.

THE PRESIDENTIAL EAGLE
fluttered bravely at masthead, its golden wings beating the drizzle. Roosevelt and his aides huddled below in raincoats and wraps, waiting for Manhattan to show across the East River. Fall was still three days off, but for party politicians the summer had already ended. A “grave and delicate” question demanded Roosevelt’s attention out west, where he was headed on another campaign trip.

The question was one of basic Republican policy. Some ambitious insurgents in Iowa, led by Governor Albert B. Cummins, had forced a revolutionary idea into the state platform for 1902:

In other words, monopolistic corporations should be controlled by special, punitive taxation. Price-fixing would give way to an equitable redistribution of Wall Street’s wealth. Railroad rate regulation would control the tendency of agricultural prices to decline in inverse proportion to manufacturing costs. And fair-trade agreements would reopen overseas markets shut by the impossible cost of doing business with the United States.

This “Iowa Idea” made little sense to Roosevelt (what, for instance, about trusts whose products were already on the free list?), but he could see its appeal to ignorant voters. Before leaving Oyster Bay, he had summoned six Republican leaders to advise him on what to say about the tariff while on tour.
The meeting had been so divided as to confirm his suspicions that the Iowa Idea was a party-splitter.
Senators Allison and Spooner and Postmaster General Payne, all Midwesterners, thought he should recommend some discreet modification of rates, to relieve radical pressures beyond the Mississippi. Senators Aldrich, Hanna, and Lodge had objected to any tinkering with a system that worked on behalf of their Eastern industrial constituencies. “As long as I remain in the Senate and can raise a hand to stop you,” said Hanna, flushed of face, “you shall never touch a schedule of the tariff act.”

Roosevelt inclined to the Western point of view.
But Governor Cummins’s suggestion that the tariff was “the mother of trusts” was irresponsible. No wonder Hanna, an arch-protectionist, was so disturbed. Already, the Iowa Idea was on the lips of other prairie insurgents: Governors Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin and Samuel Van Sant of Minnesota were barking it with the fervor of patent-medicine salesmen. Protection must give way to Reciprocity—had not William McKinley said as much, the day before he was shot?

McKinley’s successor remembered being a free-trade man himself once, in hot youth. But he had found it wise to recant that heresy upon entering Republican politics.
His failure eighteen years later to win even a minor bill of reciprocity for Cuba proved that protectionism was still the holiest tenet of party faith. Indeed, Speaker David B. Henderson, an Iowan, had announced he would not run for re-election, rather than submit to tariff blasphemies on the stump.

Roosevelt, thinking ahead to 1904, hesitated between risk-taking and caution. He had always been willing to embrace a worthy cause—civil-service reform, for example—if it could be proved legal and representative of
vox populi
.
Tariff reform was beginning to look like just such a mass movement. But the mass, as yet, was still a minority. He did not want to alienate a key constituency—those millions of small businessmen and farmers who traded exclusively within the United States, and relied on tariffs as a bulwark against foreign competition. To them, protection was a right honored by twelve successive Republican administrations, and the Iowa Idea was both an insult and a threat.

During the next eighteen days, Roosevelt intended to drum into Midwestern and Western skulls the basic incompatibility of trust control and tariff reform. He planned major addresses on each issue, at Cincinnati and Indianapolis, before taking his message of strenuous moderation across the heartland of insurgency, from Milwaukee and St. Paul to Sioux Falls and Des Moines. He was setting out, he acknowledged, on an expedition fraught with risk. Every step must be measured carefully, and not just because of the nagging pain in his left shin. “There are a good many worse things than the possibility of trolley-car accidents in these trips!”

DISEMBARKING ON THE
East Side, the presidential party proceeded across Manhattan by cavalcade. Secret Service men rode one hundred feet ahead, making sure, this time, that all local traffic was stationary. A Hudson River ferry took Roosevelt on to Jersey City. At 2:14
P.M.
, his special pulled out of the depot and chugged west through the rain.

When the train crossed the Pennsylvania border, a small, saturnine, droop-eyed man got on. Matthew S. Quay was accustomed to free rides, as senior Senator from the Keystone State, on both public and private transport. Alone with Roosevelt for the next twenty-five miles, he reported on the coal strike. Happily, the miners were about to capitulate. They had abandoned their demand for union recognition. The determination of operators had defeated John Mitchell; management was not mocked.

No sooner had Quay detrained in Philadelphia than another hitch rider got on. This was Frank B. Sargent, Commissioner of Immigration, a former union leader and the Administration’s secret observer in anthracite country. Alone with Roosevelt for the next forty miles, he too reported on the coal strike. Happily, the miners were in good moral and financial shape. Recognition mattered less to them than fair wages. The determination of the rank and file gave John Mitchell strength; labor could not be bullied.

Roosevelt sent a wry message back to Senator Quay that he had received some “almost diametrically opposed” information. The truth, as usual, must lie somewhere in between.

HIS LEFT LEG WAS
hurting badly next day at the Music Hall in Cincinnati. But he showed no sign of discomfort, beyond asking a capacity audience not to interrupt him with applause. “I intend … to make an argument as the Chief Executive of a nation who is the President of all the people.”

It was the first time Roosevelt had invoked the majesty of office, and the crowd listened with appropriate respect. For a while he expounded his familiar formula for trust control: tolerance, mild regulation, and public accountability. All the proposed alternatives, he said, were “ineffective or mischievous.” Chief among these was the Iowa Idea, “a policy … which would defeat its own professed object.” Governor Cummins imagined that tariff penalties would cause trusts to end monopolistic practices. Yet most trusts controlled far less than half of their respective markets. The rare trust with majority control had an advantage of only one or two percentage points. “Surely in rearranging the schedules affecting such a corporation, it would be necessary to consider the interests of its smaller competitors who control the remaining part, and which, being weaker, would suffer most?”