A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (98 page)

This in part explains his antipathy toward corporations, most of whose founders came from “new” money. Rockefeller and Carnegie were self-made men who had built their fortunes the hard way. Roosevelt could never be accused of being afraid to dirty his hands, but his animosity toward businessmen like Edward H. Harriman suggested that in some ways he envied the corporate captains who had worked their way up from the bottom. To have never had the opportunity to succeed in business troubled Roosevelt. It was all the more paradoxical coming from the man whose classic “Man in the Arena” speech still retains its wisdom and dignity:

 

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
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Roosevelt had succeeded at everything he ever attempted—improving his physical strength and athletic prowess, courting and winning his wife, leading men in combat, and running for office.

By the time he became president then, Theodore Roosevelt had prepared himself for the office in every aspect necessary to the job, save one: understanding capitalism, private enterprise, and the industrial nature of modern America. For someone steeped in the romantic images of the West, Roosevelt should have favored the “rugged individualism” of a Carnegie, but his reform impulse possessed him. As a result, he became the most activist president since Andrew Jackson, doing more to impede business than any president since Old Hickory.

Trust-busting, Business Bashing

An indication of where Roosevelt planned to go with his agenda of corporate regulation could be gleaned from his brief stint as New York governor, where he pushed through a measure taxing corporations. A social Darwinist, Roosevelt liked the notion that there existed an intellectual hierarchy among men, and that only the “best and the brightest” should lead. This same Roosevelt fancied himself the friend of the oppressed and thought farmers, mechanics, and small business owners were his “natural allies.”
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But in Roosevelt’s mind, if the brilliant individual or the visionary man knew best how to reform society, he should do so with whatever tools he had at his disposal, including government. Consequently, it surprised no one who knew him that Roosevelt favored an activist federal presence. William Howard Taft said that he never met a man “more strongly in favor of strong government” than Roosevelt.
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In his first inaugural, Roosevelt spoke favorably of great corporations and endorsed the idea of expanding markets. To this he added that trusts had gone beyond the capacity of existing laws to deal with them, and that old laws and traditions could not sufficiently contain concentrations of wealth and power. Congress sensed the change, passing the Elkins Act in 1903, which prohibited railroads from giving rebates—essentially volume discounts—to large corporations. The notion that businesses were different from individual behavior, or needed to be penalized for success beyond what was “reasonable,” was a Progressive principle that soon emerged in many regulations.

Epitomizing the direction of Roosevelt’s new policies was the Northern Securities suit of 1902. This followed a legal ruling in the E. C. Knight sugar refiner case of 1895, where the Supreme Court declared the regulation of manufacturing a state responsibility; since the manufacturing was within a state’s boundaries, any successful suit had to involve interstate commerce. Since Northern Securities involved railroads crossing state lines, it met the requirements. Roosevelt thought he had an opening, and instructed the attorney general, Philander C. Knox, to file a Sherman antitrust suit against Northern Securities, a holding company for the Northern Pacific, Great Northern, and Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroads. J. P. Morgan, James J. Hill, E. H. Harriman, and representatives of Standard Oil Company had combined the northwestern railroad lines into Northern Securities, a single holding company worth $400 million. What made the Northern Securities suit different was that although the government claimed that Northern Securities sought to create a monopoly, no higher rates had actually emerged, only the “threat” of “restraint of trade.” For the first time, then, the federal government acted against commerce only on a
potential
threat, not genuine behavior, thus debunking the myth that corporations are “like individuals,” whom the law treats as “innocent until proven guilty.”
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Thanks largely to the Northern Securities case, Roosevelt—whose nickname Teddy had been popularized after a toy manufacturer named a stuffed bear for him—now earned the moniker “Trustbuster.” He followed up the victory with an assault on Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, although it was the administration of TR’s successor, William Howard Taft, that eventually witnessed the final disposition of that case—the breakup of the oil giant into several smaller companies. Already, however, the inconsistencies and contradictions of the Sherman Act had become apparent to even some reformers. Research by George Bitlingmayer found that far from helping the little guy, antitrust actions tended to hurt small businesses by driving down profits in the entire sector, presumably those businesses most helped by reducing “monopolistic” competition.
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Roosevelt got away with his assault on corporations by balancing it with rhetoric about the need to control labor radicalism. Only the presidency was exempted from Roosevelt’s concern about the abuse of power. Congress, all too willing to contain the “excesses” of corporations, passed the Expedition Act of 1903, requiring courts to put antitrust cases on a fast track, then created a new department, Commerce and Labor, within which was established a Bureau of Corporations to investigate violations of interstate commerce. All of this legislation came on top of the aforementioned Elkins Act, and represented an attempt by Congress to appear to be doing something. Roosevelt, however, grabbed the headlines, invoking the Sherman Act twenty-five times during his administration.

When it came to action, though, Roosevelt sided substantially with labor. In 1902 he intervened in a strike by Pennsylvania coal miners, who wanted recognition of their union as well as the expected higher wages and lower work hours. Publicly, Roosevelt expressed sympathy for the miners, and then he invited both United Mine Worker (UMW) leaders and mine owners to the White House in order to avert a coal shortage. Mine owners, led by George F. Baer of the Reading Railroad, alienated both the miners and the president, who grew so irritated that he wanted to grab Baer “by the seat of the breeches” and “chuck him out [a window].”
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The owners were “wooden-headed,” whose “arrogant stupidity” made arbitration more difficult.
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He warned that he would send 10,000 federal troops to take over coal production in the mines if the two sides did not reach an arrangement, a move of “dubious legality,” which prompted Roosevelt to snap, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!”
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TR’s bluster finally produced concessions, with both sides agreeing to an arbitration commission named by the president, and led to higher wages (below what the strikers wanted), fewer work hours (though above what the strikers sought), and no UMW recognition. It was enough for Roosevelt to claim that he had brokered a “square deal,” which later provided a popular campaign phrase for the president.

Most presidential clout, though, was reserved for corporations, not labor. “We don’t wish to destroy corporations,” he generously noted, “but we do wish to make them subserve the public good.”
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Implied in Roosevelt’s comment was the astonishing view that corporations do not serve the public good on their own—that they must be made to—and that furnishing jobs, paying taxes, and creating new wealth did not constitute a sufficient public benefit. It was a position even more astonishing coming from the so-called “party of big business.” TR despised what he called “the tyranny of mere wealth.”
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Yet like other presidents who inherited wealth—his cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy—Teddy never appreciated what it took to meet a payroll or to balance a firm’s books. Roosevelt knew that in the 1904 election he might lose the support of key Republican constituencies, and therefore he spent the last months mending fences, corresponding with Morgan and other business leaders, and supporting the GOP’s probusiness platform. It served him well. Already a popular leader, Roosevelt knew that the Democrats had allied themselves with radical elements of labor and the farm sectors.

Democrats knew it too, and they beat a hasty retreat from William Jennings Bryan’s more explosive rhetoric, endorsing the gold standard and selecting as their nominee a conservative New York judge, Alton B. Parker. With a socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs, siphoning off 400,000 votes, the Democrats did not stand a chance of unseating the popular Teddy. Roosevelt crushed Parker and, more impressively, carried every single state except the South and Maryland, solidifying the western base brought in by McKinley.

The day before his inauguration, Roosevelt said, “Tomorrow I shall come into the office in my own right. Then watch out for me.”
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Safely reelected, Roosevelt again turned on the business community, especially the railroads. He supported the Hepburn Act, called “a landmark in the evolution of federal control of private industry.”
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It allowed the Interstate Commerce Act to set railroad rates. As part of the compromise to obtain passage of Hepburn, Roosevelt agreed to delay tariff reform, which became the central issue of his successor’s administration. In 1905, at his urging, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, prohibiting companies from selling adulterated foods, or foods or medicines that contained ingredients the FDA deemed harmful. Like most laws, the Food and Drug Act originated out of noble intentions. Americans had already been sufficiently alarmed about the dangers of cocaine, which had forced Coca-Cola to change its secret formula, and, after Sinclair’s horrifying novel, an even greater public outcry over tainted meat led to the Meat Inspection Act.

Summer Camps and Saving the Bison

At the turn of the century, a movement for conserving America’s natural resources sprang up. The first conservation legislation, in 1891, authorized President Harrison to designate public lands as forest reserves, allowing Harrison and Cleveland to reserve 35 million acres. Popular tastes had increasingly embraced a wilderness infatuation, especially among elite eastern groups. Writers had romanticized the wilderness since the Revolution’s Hector St. John and the early national era writings of James Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau. Interest accelerated with the summer camp movement of the 1890s. Roosevelt institutionalized the conservation movement, creating the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and appointing Yale University’s first professional forester, Gifford Pinchot, to head the agency.

Roosevelt’s action marked the culmination of the efforts of naturalists, artists, and anthropologists who had argued for application of Progressive management techniques to natural resources. That movement also had its origins in the efforts of John Muir, an Indianapolis carriage worker who was nearly blinded in a factory accident. When his sight returned, Muir resolved to turn his gaze to America’s natural wonders. In the late 1860s, a trip to Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada mountains led him to produce a series of articles called “Studies in the Sierra,” before exploring Alaska and Glacier Bay. It was in his series of articles appearing in
Century
magazine that Muir drew attention to the devastation of mountain meadows and forests by sheep and cattle. Robert Underwood Johnson, the editor of
Century
, joined with Muir to form the Sierra Club in 1892 to protect natural resources and public parks.
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Important differences separated Roosevelt and Muir, even though the two were friends and even camped together in Yosemite in 1903. Muir was a preservationist who envisioned maintenance of a pristine, sacred natural world in which any development was prohibited. He was also proven wrong in some of his more apocalyptic prophecies, such as his claim that the damming of the river in the Hetch Hetchy Valley would doom Yosemite.

Needless to say, Roosevelt did not share the view that water for people’s cities was the practical equivalent of water for trees. It would be the same mentality that a century later would consign hundreds of Klamath, Oregon, farmers to poverty and financial ruin when an endangered fish was discovered in the basin, causing the federal government to shut off all water use.

The first most practical effect of the new conservation movement came in 1901, when thirty western senators and congressmen from seventeen western states agreed to a plan by Senator Francis Newlands of Wyoming to apply a portion of public lands receipts to reclamation, dam construction, and other water projects. Roosevelt jumped on the Newlands bandwagon and secured passage of the bill, which, without question, taxed some western farmers who lived in areas with heavier rainfall for others who did not. Roosevelt rejected the pristine view, signing the National Reclamation Act of 1902, which made possible the settlement and managed use of a vast, mostly barren, landscape.

As conservationists, Roosevelt and Pinchot saw the use of nature by people as the primary reason for preserving nature. In 1910, Pinchot—in sharp contrast to Muir—wrote that the first principle of conservation was “development, the use of natural resources now existing on this continent for the benefit of
people who live here now
[emphasis added].”
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