American Experiment (213 page)

Time was, Mr. Dooley opined to Mr. Hennessey, when magazines were very calming to the mind. “But now whin I pick me fav’rite magazine off th’ flure, what do I find? Ivrything has gone wrong…. All th’ pomes be th’ lady authoressesses that used to begin: ‘Oh, moon, how fair!’ now begin: ‘Oh, Ogden Armour, how awful!’ … Graft ivrywhere. ‘Graft in th’ Insurance Comp’nies,’ ‘Graft in Congress,’ …‘Graft be an Old Grafter,’ … ‘Graft in Its Relations to th’ Higher Life’….”

Others shared Mr. Dooley’s perplexity. How could reform become so popular, so fashionable, in a land that had been enjoying McKinley’s Full Dinner Pail, a nation that had easily bested an ancient European power, a society on the whole quite satisfied with itself? Time would bring some clues. People enjoying material well-being are more likely to move to higher needs and aspirations—such as the pursuit of liberty, equality, and happiness—than those desperately scrabbling for food and shelter. But to move people to higher levels of moral behavior, leadership is required, and not only was Roosevelt all too ready to provide moral leadership, but a “second cadre” consisting of hundreds of zealous young publishers, editors, and writers was now taking the lead.

The striking aspect of these two levels of leadership was the engagement between them. Roosevelt knew many of the reformers personally—he knew Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, Finley Peter Dunne, Norman Hapgood, William Allen White, Ray Stannard Baker. He read them, wrote to them, scolded them, praised them, inspired them. They read
him,
talked with
him, corresponded with him, alternately loved him and hated him, sometimes at the same time. It was this mutually stimulating relationship that, in large part, pushed the President toward increasingly radical positions. The reformers liked his style, his gusto, his personality. “Teddy was reform in a derby,” William Allen White said, “the gayest, cockiest, most fashionable derby you ever saw.”

Perhaps even more important, however, in the rise of reform were other types of leaders—the inventors, printers, investors, and publishers who were developing new types of magazines that became the vehicles for disseminating reform ideas. The 1890s had seen the rise of the “cheap magazine,” selling for only ten cents but offering excellent illustrations with the help of improved engraving, lively and varied editorial fare, graphic descriptions of science and invention, and articles with broad popular appeal. The fine old journals—
Harper’s,
the
Atlantic, Scribner’s,
and the like—continued to flourish editorially and financially on the whole, but the ten-centers were stealing the show.

Their rise—and indeed the explosion of the whole magazine population—was as sensational as some of their feature articles. The number of periodicals in the United States rose from about 3,300 in 1885 to about 6,000 in 1905, thus almost doubling in one generation. Perhaps 7,500 magazines were actually founded in this twenty-year period, but many failed. The variety was also astonishing. “There is scarcely a province in the entire realm of science and scholarship which is now without an official organ in America,” the
Philosophical Review
stated as it added itself to the number. “Magazines, magazines, magazines!” exclaimed one of them. “The news-stands are already groaning under the heavy load, and there are still more coming.”

One of the earliest and most impressive of the ten-centers was
McClure’s.
Founded by young Samuel S. McClure and a college classmate, the journal almost collapsed when its first issue appeared during the slump of 1893 and 12,000 of the 20,000 copies were returned. But with the conviction that “if I like a thing,” then “millions will like it,” McClure found a winning editorial formula in articles about Napoleon, Lincoln, and other heroes. He also pridefully published Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Stephen Crane, and, unknowingly, a convict named O. Henry who sent a Christmas story to McClure through an intermediary. Part genius, part madman, and part inexplicable, in Eric Goldman’s profile, McClure was less a great reformer than a superb editor, but he became more and more engulfed in the reform wave as his investigating reporters helped boost his circulation to 370,000.

And what a remarkable stable of reporters they were—not only Flynt and
Steffens and Tarbell but Ray Stannard Baker, Burton J. Hendrick, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and—later—Jane Addams. And as
McClure’s
circulation swelled, competing journals looked for crusading journalists. The
Ladies’ Home Journal
published Edward Bok on patent medicine evils;
Everybody’s,
Thomas W. Lawson on crooked finance and Charles Edward Russell on the beef trust;
Cosmopolitan,
David Graham Phillips on “The Treason of the Senate.” When McClure seemed to succumb to grandiose visions of out-combining the combines against which his reporters wrote, Baker, Steffens, and Tarbell left him, enlisted White and Dunne, and bought the
American Magazine
for more crusading.

To many, Steffens seemed the most gifted of the lot. Reared in an affluent home, in the half-commercial, half-rural hubbub of Sacramento, educated in philosophy and ethics at Berkeley, Heidelberg, Munich, Leipzig, London, and Paris, he found newspaper jobs in New York City in the mid-1890s before joining
McClure’s.
There he began a long career of exposing bossism, traction magnates, municipal corruption, timber frauds, and other perversions of democracy. Published under eye-catching titles—”The Shamelessness of St. Louis,” “Pittsburgh: Hell with the Lid Lifted,” “Philadelphia: A Defeated People”—his exposés won enormous interest in high places and low. Steffens had a knack for gaining the confidence of bosses and magnates, getting them to converse with amazing candor, and printing the exchanges with apparent line-by-line accuracy. But even more, he presented his subjects, their views, and their failings with such humorous tolerance and philosophical understanding as to raise his work far above the level of mere reportage.

In the long run, however, Ida Tarbell may have had more influence on reform, if only because at the start she penetrated to the heart of economic power in the form of the Standard Oil Company and stayed with it. She had reason to dislike Rockefeller and his ilk: her father, a stalwart Republican, had been forced out of business by the oil tycoon, and her mother, reduced to peddling milk while her husband labored in the oil fields, poured out her feelings to Ida about the twin evils of whiskey and monopoly. After winning some fame for her series on Napoleon for
McClure’s,
she won an assignment from McClure to write a detailed study of Standard Oil and of Rockefeller, the “Napoleon among businessmen,” as the press dubbed him. On the basis of five years of intensive research in archives and corporation records, including some of Henry Demarest Lloyd’s collection of documents, Tarbell produced a series of accounts “so heavily laden with questionable business maneuvers, so bound up with bribery, fraud, coercion, double-dealing and outright violence,” in Louis Filler’s summary, “that the fact of efficiency and organization
inevitably gave place to the question of whether such a concern had the right to exist.”

Few could doubt the combustibility of reform, reformer, and Roosevelt after passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. For years, Department of Agriculture reformers headed by Harvey Wiley had been pressing for federal legislation to require accurate labeling of foods and drugs. A bill had twice passed the House, but Senate approval had been held up by an alliance of conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats. Aldrich, deriding the “chemists” in the Agriculture Department, claimed that the people’s “liberty” was at stake. Then exposés of the patent medicine industry in
Collier’s
by Samuel Hopkins Adams and a horrifying portrait of the meat-packing industry by Upton Sinclair in
The Jungle
aroused middle-class public anger to its peak.

Upton Sinclair—a new face on the reform scene. A product of City College of New York and Columbia, Sinclair had been a failed novelist until he produced a novel in which a failed novelist committed suicide. He won more attention with
Manassas,
a Civil War novel, and then took a $500 retainer to visit Chicago’s packing industry and write a novel about it. Sick at heart after seven weeks in Packingtown, Sinclair returned to his New Jersey home and poured into
The Jungle
all that he had seen of workers’ misery and the industry’s nauseating conditions.

Naturally Roosevelt read
The Jungle.
And after a long lecture to the young author in a letter that warned of the perils of socialism and “men of hysterical temperament,” he concluded with a handwritten postscript: “But all this has nothing to do with the fact that the specific evils you point out shall, if their existence be proved, and if I have power, be eradicated.” Roosevelt’s investigations soon proved that existence, and he gained power by threatening to publicize the investigations, pressing key congressmen unmercifully, and after some strenuous give-and-take, settling for essentially the measures he wanted. The food bill made illegal the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or falsely labeled food and drugs in interstate commerce; the Meat Inspection Act, passed the same day (June 30, 1906), provided for federal inspection of companies selling meats in interstate commerce.

Buoyed by the winds of reform, propelled by Old Guard opposition and his own reaction to it, Theodore Roosevelt during his last two years in office veered tempestuously to the left. This shift was partly rhetorical, but much of it embraced a series of most explicit proposals to Congress and the public. In December 1906, not content with passage of the Hepburn
bill, he declared that all big business should be subject to federal inspection of its books, publicity of its accounts, and—to the satisfaction of La Follette—physical valuation of its railroad properties. He called again for a federal inheritance tax. He urged “compulsory investigation” of major labor disputes. After having long contended that he was an umpire and balance wheel between radicalism and conservatism, by 1907 he was, in George Mowry’s words, “trying to keep the left center together.”

Left center was far too left for the Republican party of McKinley, Aldrich, and Cannon. Roosevelt’s long struggle for conservation sharpened the divisions between “presidential” and “congressional” Republicans. Within a year of taking office he was pressing for passage of the Newlands bill, which would set aside proceeds of public-land sales in states in the South and West to pay for building and maintaining irrigation projects. This measure passed despite the noncooperation of Cannon, whose environmental views were summed up in his remark, “Not one cent for scenery.” While Congress also passed other conservation measures, Roosevelt relied more on his ample executive power, granted in previous legislation, to protect the nation’s resources by withdrawing lands from private exploitation, preventing lands from overgrazing, safeguarding forest lands, and curbing the depredations of cattle ranchers, sheepmen, mining companies, and timber cutters. When, in 1907, Congress amended an agriculture appropriations bill to ban the creation of new forest reserves in several western states, Roosevelt, rather than vainly fight the amendment, and with the help of his Chief Forester, Gifford Pinchot, in a series of “midnight” proclamations added twenty-one more forest reserves just before signing the amended bill—a foiling of Congress that gave the President immense satisfaction.

Roosevelt could not forget, however, that the main challenge to presidential and popular power came not from the congressional Old Guard or the parochial interests it represented but from big business. He knew too that corporate power did not speak with a single voice. Since Roosevelt tended to personalize that power—indeed, all power—he tended to divide his business foes into “good guys” and “bad guys,” or at least into bad guys and not-so-bad guys. What he was dealing with, in reality, was the continuing thrusts of the two capitalisms and their impact on politics.

One man personified Roosevelt’s bad capitalism—John D. Rockefeller. Not only had the oil magnate hired a substitute to serve for him during the Civil War, he was not a “gentleman” of old family wealth, eastern society, or college education. More fundamentally, Standard Oil, with its competitive methods and its power over transportation—railroads, pipelines, ships—was the biggest and most powerful combination of them all. Roosevelt
knew of its reputation for “buying” senators and congressmen; during his 1904 campaign, he piously ordered the return of contributions from officials of Standard Oil. On the basis of investigations by the Bureau of Corporations, which he had persuaded Congress to establish, the President in 1905 reported that Standard Oil had wrung enormous profits from secret rail rates. By 1907, the federal government had seven suits pending against the corporation and its subsidiaries.

Even these challenges to Standard Oil hardly reflected Roosevelt’s bitter hostility to Rockefeller and the men he associated with him, such as Edward H. Harriman. Time and again during Roosevelt’s full term, his letters and conversations turned into diatribes against their “trickery,” “scoundrelism,” and sheer evil. He was convinced, moreover, that powerful corporate heads—often vulgar nouveaux riches, to boot—were plotting with their tools in press and bar and pulpit and classroom to gang up on him, discredit him, block his programs. He welcomed the news that Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis had fined Standard Oil over $29 million for violating the Elkins Act—and doubtless welcomed the ensuing fury in the business world against both the judge and himself.

But he still had to contend with the mighty Morgan, a capitalist of a different color. The banker was, of course, a gentleman with whom one could make arrangements. But he was a gentleman of power—of pervasive national influence and, with his wide international investments, of world stature. And Roosevelt needed such a banker friend in 1907. Worldwide credit expansion and price inflation amid the general prosperity of the time produced strained conditions in money markets in the United States as well as abroad. Rockefeller and other business leaders were already admonishing Roosevelt that the “political adventurer’s” attacks on capital were undermining business and risking a slump. After warning signals mounted in the summer, Roosevelt directed his Secretary of the Treasury, George Cortelyou, to work with the House of Morgan to shore up the securities market. When the Knickerbocker Trust Company closed its doors and a run threatened other banks and brokerages, the Morgan people proposed that the United States Steel Corporation be allowed to purchase controlling assets in the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company to prevent a collapse of the whole banking structure.