Theodore Rex (47 page)

ROOSEVELT RESERVED HIS
decision on whether to act as arbitrator through the holidays. John Hay felt sure that he would, in the end, resist this chance for easy glory, and refer the case to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Feeling a surge of tenderness, he put his rusty poetic talents to work and composed a Christmas Eve ode to the President of the United States.

Snow fell as the Secretary wrote. His poem joined the other presents piling around the White House Christmas tree.

“SNOW FELL AS THE SECRETARY WROTE.”
Theodore Roosevelt’s White House in winter
(photo credit 13.1)

“
THE EQUILIBRIUM OF
the world is moving westwards,” a member of the Institut de France told Jean Jules Jusserand early in 1903.

Jusserand, packing his ambassadorial uniform for Washington, did not disagree. An intellectual himself (he was a specialist in medieval culture, and had published several works of literary and social history), he accepted, and mourned, the decline of French power. Yet it coincided excitingly with the rise of his own diplomatic fortunes. At forty-seven, he found himself entrusted with a mission of major importance: to protect France’s
entente cordiale
with her sister republic from increased competition by foreign monarchies. Tunis and Copenhagen had been nothing next to this. Clearly he had been selected less for experience than for brains and youthfulness—qualities now much in demand on Massachusetts Avenue. In Berlin, fifty-year-old Baron Speck von Sternburg was also packing for transfer. Britain’s forty-five-year-old Sir Michael Herbert had been at his post for three months. All three ambassadors had American wives.

Equally clearly, Jusserand saw that his life as half-scholar, half-envoy was over. Washington had little time for historiographical musings. As his friend at the Institut put it, “You will no longer decipher manuscripts, but men.” Jusserand could write in Latin and read fourteenth-century English with perfect fluency. But could he construe Theodore Roosevelt? The task had been too much for his predecessor, Jules Cambon, who seemed to doubt the President’s sanity.

Speculation about Roosevelt was intense at the Quai d’Orsay.
French foreign-policy experts believed him to be the strongest international personality since Bismarck. Yet they could not reconcile the
impérialiste
who talked about “
the proper policing of the world” with the statesman who
had just modestly declined to arbitrate the Venezuela matter. Instead, Roosevelt had suggested that all parties to the dispute meet on neutral ground in Washington, in order to negotiate a protocol for referral to The Hague.

“HE FOUND HIMSELF ENTRUSTED WITH A MISSION
OF MAJOR IMPORTANCE.”
Jules Jusserand, anonymous sketch
(photo credit 14.1)

Might he be, against original expectations, a man of peace?

THE JANUARY ISSUE
of
McClure’s
disagreeably reminded Roosevelt that he had problems to confront at home, regardless of foreign powermongering. Never before had an American magazine publisher put out so shocking a number. Absent were the pallid love stories and escapist travelogues that most
readers looked for. In their place were three long articles on trust abuse, political corruption, and union violence. Each one, Samuel S. McClure noted in his introductory editorial, could be entitled “The American Contempt of Law.”

The frontispiece photograph showed John D. Rockefeller seated, exuding the security of two hundred million dollars. But his trouser leg, hitched too high, revealed a hint of flabby calf, a vulnerable length of sock. This documentary note permeated the subsequent articles, which were remarkable for depth of research, toughness of language, and something fresh to journalism: a sort of tacit moral disdain.

“
The Oil War of 1872,” by Ida Tarbell, described the panic that hit Titusville, Pennsylvania, when the Standard Oil Company announced new freight rates crippling to independent producers. Only one supplier, under a hitherto unknown name, was entitled to enjoy special rates: it turned out to be an alias for Standard Oil. A contemporary blacklist of “conspirators,” reproduced in facsimile, prominently featured Rockefeller’s name. The man with the flabby calf had gone on to other, more subtle schemes, inexorably locking an entire industry in his corporate grip. Tarbell was as meticulous in documenting Rockefeller’s acts of philanthropy as she was in analyzing the fine print of his contracts. But she noted that “religious emotion and sentiments of charity … seem to have taken the place in him of notions of justice and regard for the rights of others.”

Elsewhere in
McClure’s
, Lincoln Steffens contributed “The Shame of Minneapolis: Rescue and Redemption of a City That Was Sold Out.” The article, plentifully illustrated with bribery lists and police-file photographs, recounted the slide to corruption of a once-honest mayor. Thanks to the efforts of a courageous grand juror, Minneapolis was now purged, but Steffens allowed a cynical question to shadow his last paragraph: “Can a city be governed without any alliance with crime?”

The third story, by Ray Stannard Baker, was an equally harsh and factual survey of conditions in Pennsylvania during the coal strike. Entitled “The Right to Work,” it consisted of interviews with nonunion miners who had braved bullets and beatings to continue working. One was quoted as saying, “I believe that a man should have a right, no matter what his reasons are, to work when and where he pleases.” Baker reported that this miner had been set upon by union vigilantes, and blinded with a rock.

All in all, the January
McClure’s
made for ugly reading. But palpably, beneath its flotsam of fact, a new kind of reportage—“
torrential journalism,” Roosevelt called it—was surging from wellsprings of popular discontent.

THE FIFTY-SEVENTH
Congress reconvened for the last time on 5 January, and Roosevelt moved swiftly to push through the legislative program he had
been talking about for so long. “
From now until the 4th of March my hands will be full,” he wrote Kermit.
The American economy had expanded at such a rate in 1902 (oil production alone was up 27 percent) that he knew there was no hope of controlling trust growth by occasional slow prosecutions under the Sherman Act. What was needed was an overall regulatory system calling for the cooperation, rather than the coercion, of businesses engaged in interstate trade.

He wanted three antitrust weapons: a Department of Commerce with an investigatory Bureau of Corporations, a bill banning railroad rebates to large industrial companies, and an “Expedition Act” that would provide special funds to speed up the Justice Department’s prosecution of illegal combinations. (After eleven months, the
Northern Securities
case was still under judicial review.)

These requests, written in English, were passed to Philander Knox, who translated them into language convoluted enough for Congressmen to understand. Even as “Administration bills,” they were less ambitious than some other antitrust measures already pending in the House. One such, sponsored by Representative Charles E. Littlefield of Maine, sought to give the Interstate Commerce Commission draconian powers over all monopolistic corporations. Inasmuch as it contained
some Rooseveltian ideas, the President let Littlefield know that he could count on him for support. “I am prepared to go the whole distance!” He did not add that he doubted the distance would be very long, legislatively speaking.

The “Bureau of Corporations” clause in his own Department of Commerce bill struck Roosevelt as a more realistic proposal.
Corporations would not be forced to open their books if they felt disinclined. All that Knox called for was an information exchange between government and industry, for the common good. Wall Street raised no objections, but corporate representatives congregated in Washington to make sure that the bill did not get stronger in committee. The House of Morgan sent an adroit lobbyist, William C. Beer, to monitor Roosevelt’s dealings with Capitol Hill.

“
He was jovial—away up,” Beer reported to George Perkins, after his first presidential encounter. “I am sure that he feels the Department of Commerce is his baby, and his alone.”