Theodore Roosevelt (6 page)

TR was a devoted father and never missed some sort of romp with his offspring every evening, even on the busiest day. He adored them and they him, but this was never at the expense of any homework or discipline, and the whole family, with enacted gravity, could lend itself to a deserved punishment, as shown in this charming excerpt from one of TR's letters:

Last night I had to spank Quentin for taking something that didn't belong to him and then not telling the truth about it. Ethel and Mother acted respectively as accuser and court of first resort, and then brought him solemnly into me for sentence and punishment—both retiring much agitated when the final catastrophe became imminent. Today Quentin has become as cunning as possible. He quite understood that he had brought his fate on himself.

TR needed a good deal of physical exercise, particularly to control a waistline responding to his hearty meals. He played tennis with aides, but he preferred riding and long hikes. On one of the latter, accompanied by some more or less willing diplomats, he encountered a stream that could be forded only by the removal of all clothing. J. J. Jusserand, the French ambassador and TR's good friend, emulated his host except for a pair of pink gloves. Asked why he retained these, he replied: “In case we should run into ladies.”

More serious was TR's passion for boxing, and his habit of sparring with younger and stronger men. He finally abandoned it after a young artillery captain smashed enough blood vessels in his left eye to cause permanent dimness. Ultimately, indeed, he lost all sight in that eye. He had the consideration to make sure that the officer's name was never made public.

Such an incident must have warned even an enthusiast like TR of the dangers of too great an emphasis on physical energy, for we find him writing to his German friend, Hermann von Sternberg, that if it was an excellent thing for him to go on a lion hunt or to ride a blooded hunter, “it would be a very bad thing indeed if I treated either exercise as anything but a diversion and as a means of refreshing me for doing double work in serious government business.” And at another time we see him reminding his son Teddie that athletic proficiency is a good servant but a bad master, and that Pliny had advised Trajan to keep the Greeks absorbed in athletics to distract their minds and prevent their ever being dangerous to the Romans.

No president, surely, could have worked harder at the job than TR, yet he was possessed with such a ranging curiosity that he wondered at times if he was giving the myriad political questions that came before him the entire absorption he supposed they deserved. “I do not regard them as being one-tenth or one-hundredth part as important as so many other questions in our life,” he once observed. And at another time: “I have had a most vivid realization of what it must have meant to Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the heartbreaking anxieties of the Civil War, to have to take up his time in trying to satisfy the candidates for postmaster in Chicago.” Yet, even dealing with the problems inherent under a free representative government, particularly in foreign relations, he reminded himself that it was “rather a comfort to feel that Russia, where freedom has been completely sacrificed, where the darkest and most reactionary tyranny reigns, has as yet been unable to do well in the exercise of these functions.”

Always, in his work, he needed the constant distraction and stimulation of reading. He wrote to his friend, the British historian George Trevelyan: “To succeed in getting measures like these through [Congress] one has to be a rough-and-tumble man oneself, and I find it a great comfort to like all kinds of books, and to get half an hour or an hour's complete rest and complete detachment from the fighting of the moment by plunging into the genius and misdeeds of Marlborough … or in short anything that Macaulay wrote … or any one of most of the novels of Scott, or some of the novels of Thackeray and Dickens.”

Which brings us to those “measures” that he had to get through Congress. It is common in our time to regard the president as initiating not only legislation but a whole coordinated program of it. But it is well to remember that TR was considered unusual in his day for undertaking to alter the philosophy of government in its relation to the vast business enterprises that regarded themselves arrogantly as the true guardians of the American dream. What he accomplished in the seven years of his two terms seems small enough in contrast to the sweeping control exercised by Washington ever since the advent of the New Deal in 1933, but his importance is that of a pioneer. In his day he started a healthy discord between the “irresponsible demagogue,” as the tycoons called him, and the “malefactors of great wealth,” as he called
them.

To sum up the major legislative accomplishments of Roosevelt in his two terms of office one might list them as follows: the Elkins Law, against the railroads' practice of giving rebates to favored customers; the creation of the Department of Commerce and Labor with its Bureau of Corporations, which grew to regulate every business that crossed state lines; the Hepburn Bill, which amended and vitalized the Interstate Commerce Act and gave government the power to set railroad rates; the Pure Food and Meat Inspection Laws, which remedied some of the scandals of the meatpacking industry as exposed by Upton Sinclair's novel
The Jungle;
and the Employers' Liability and Safety Appliance Laws, which limited the hours of employees.

The first national crisis, however, that the new president had to handle called not for legislation but for executive action, or at least the threat of such, and at a time, too, when the constitutional authority for any such action was far from clear. In 1902 the United Mine Workers under the leadership of John Mitchell called a strike that shut down the anthracite coal mines. Coal prices quadrupled from five dollars a ton to twenty, and mobs anticipating freezing weather began to stop coal-carrying freight trains to steal their cargo. The operators rigidly refused any concession to the strikers, and the country was threatened with a devastating winter. TR did not know what action was available to him; he finally adopted the neutral course of inviting both sides to come to the capital to discuss the issues with him.

The operators were intransigent and even ill-mannered. Their principal spokesman, George F. Baer, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal & Iron Company, expressed his economic philosophy as follows: “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country.” TR found Mitchell, the union leader, “the only one who kept his temper and his head.” Perhaps the president understood the enthusiasm of the miners who sang the spirited ballad ending: “So shtrike can come, like son of a gun, me Johnny Mitchell man!” Baer would have simply pointed out that the song justified his saying of the workers: “They don't suffer; they can't even speak English!”

Roosevelt appealed to his lawyers and wondered whether he didn't have the power under common law, if not under the Constitution, to take over the management of the coal companies on the principle that any peasant has the right to take wood that is not his if necessary for the preservation of life in winter weather. Root thought so, anyway. At last TR bit the bullet and announced that if an accord was not reached federal troops would take over the mines and run them as a receivership.

At this, the operators agreed to binding arbitration by an impartial board to consist of a mining engineer, an army engineer, a businessman, a federal judge, and an eminent sociologist. But the union insisted on a union man, which the operators stoutly resisted until Roosevelt broke the impasse by suggesting a union man who was also an eminent sociologist! The strike ended, and the arbitrators gave the workers a nine-hour day and a 10 percent wage raise. No recognition, however, was accorded the union.

Six

TR soon gained a reputation as a radical among the major financiers and business moguls of his day. So fervently held was this notion that a part of it stuck to him. Decades later, in New Deal days, the now veteran Endicott Peabody, headmaster of Groton School to which TR had sent his boys, read aloud to a group of right-wing graduates a letter from another graduate denouncing “Roosevelt” for every crime in the book. His audience, assuming that the reference was to FDR, their bête noire though a fellow alumnus, warmly applauded. “But wait!” the chuckling headmaster cautioned them. “This letter was written in 1905!” In fact, TR, like his distant cousin and nephew-in-law, was neither by birth, upbringing, nor mature inclination in the least bit a radical.

He had no hostility as such to big business, and certainly no feeling of guilt about inherited wealth, including his own. And his early attitude toward labor was very much that of his class; he adhered to the classic credo that every man is master of his fate, and he viewed with suspicion the claims of unions to speak for all employees including dissenters and nonunion men. But his anger against exploitation, when it was revealed to him, was dire, and what was a greater exploiter in his day than a company in the grip of such a man as Jay Gould? It was not the power of business enterprise that bothered him, but what he saw as its criminal misuse.

With TR the crux of almost every great decision was a moral one. He once wrote to a friend pressing him for further reforms:

While I agree with you that energetic, and, in the long run radical, action must be taken to do away with the effects of arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist, yet I am more than ever convinced that the real factor in the elevation of any man or any mass of men must be the development within his or their hearts of the qualities which alone can make even the individual, the class, or the nation permanently useful to themselves and to others.

That is hardly the sentiment of a Marx or a Lenin.

There always had to be an element of wrongdoing in anything TR sought to crush, a touch of crusade in any such proceeding. To him there were good trusts and bad trusts. Bad trusts sought to profit by restricting production by trick or device, by plotting against competitors, by oppressing wage earners, or by extorting high prices for a commodity made artificially scarce. If bad trusts were not disciplined and regulated, then the real radicals would take over. As he put it: “We seek to defy law-defying wealth, in the first place to prevent its doing evil, and in the next place to avoid the vindictive and dreadful radicalism which if left uncontrolled it is certain in the end to arouse.” In similar fashion some of the advocates of the New Deal would later claim that FDR had saved the nation from revolution.

The Northern Securities case was TR's first major move against the trusts. Capitalized at four hundred million dollars and dominated by J. P. Morgan, Northern Securities was the holding company for the controlling stock of James J. Hill's Northern Pacific Railway and of E. H. Harriman's Union Pacific, thus preempting most of the rails of the American Northwest. Hill, Harriman, and Morgan had dreamed of transcontinental lines that would link the industrial centers of the United States with the markets of the East and had been assured by counsel that the Sherman Antitrust Act was aimed against restraint of trade and not restraint of competition. It was also reassuring to them that the act had not previously been much of a threat to big business and had indeed been more frequently invoked against labor unions. And there was indeed a good deal to be said for railroad mergers, though to small farmers and businessmen it seemed that such near monopolies juggled the stock market and overcharged for freight. TR may have echoed their sentiment when he said: “Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth.”

He instructed his attorney general, Philander Knox, to prosecute Northern Securities and its directors as a combination in restraint of trade. He did not consult his cabinet, and the shock of his attack brought the outraged Morgan in protest to the White House. If there was anything wrong, he demanded of the president, why had he not sent “his man” to consult with “my man” to fix it up? But TR did not want to fix it up; he wanted to break it up. Morgan's attitude—that the government of the United States was merely another corporate entity on equal terms (at the most) with the Morgan bank—confirmed TR in his attitude that he had embarked on the right course.

The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the government's position, but only five to four. Still, that was enough to put permanent teeth in the ineptly drawn Sherman Act, which was thereafter wielded with considerable effect against some of the nation's major trusts. But Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., newly appointed to the court by TR on the strong recommendation of his friend Lodge, dissented. He argued that the Sherman Act applied only to combinations that had been illegal in common law, such as agreements between X company and Y company that Y will never engage in X's business, and that the Act said nothing about preserving competition and nothing about a necessary connection between size and monopoly status. Under the majority's opinion, he pointed out, two small stagecoach companies, operating across state lines, could be prosecuted if they merged.

Holmes recognized, however, that more had been expected of the Sherman Act, both by the public and possibly even by its framers:

There is a natural feeling that somehow or other the statute meant to strike at combinations great enough to cause great anxiety on the part of those who love their country more than their money, while it viewed such little ones as I have supposed with just indifference. This notion, it may be said, breathes from the pores of the Act, though it seems to be contradicted in every way by the words in detail.

Holmes did not think it was the function of the judiciary to rewrite even a badly drafted law to the extent that would have been required here, and I agree with him. The president did not; he was outraged. He had expected any judge he appointed to do his best to carry out the spirit of the law as interpreted by the party in power, and if five good judges could see fit to stretch the statute to accord with the probable intent of the clumsy framers, who was Holmes to quibble over a few phrases? “I could carve a better judge out of a banana,” he snorted. This was not TR at his best.