Theodore Rex (113 page)

Foraker responded on the floor of the Senate with a speech that limited itself to facts. He said that only eight, not “scores,” of witnesses claimed to have seen Negro soldiers rioting. He demonstrated the invalidity of every precedent and legal argument Roosevelt and Taft had cited for the discharges. He looked for hard evidence of a conspiracy, found none, and noted that General Garlington had had no better luck.

Few listening could doubt that a political war was being declared. It would probably last as long as the President continued to bluster and the Senate continued to probe—strife between executive and legislative, impetuosity and due process. Fortunately, Christmas was coming, and New Year’s Day with its traditional courtesies, so there was time for both sides to weigh the costs of battle.

“
WHEN YOU TURNED
those niggers out of the army at Brownsville,” Owen Wister asked Roosevelt, “why didn’t you order a court of enquiry for the commissioned officers?”

The two old friends were out walking together, along the shore of the Potomac.

“Because I listened to the War Department, and I shouldn’t,” Roosevelt replied. He paused. “Of course, I can’t know all about everything.”

Defensively, he launched into a long disquisition on the fickleness of financial advisers. Wister heard him out.

“And so, the best you can do is to stop, look, and listen—
and then jump.”

“Yes. And then jump. And hope I’ve jumped right.”

THE NEW YEAR
of 1907 found Theodore Roosevelt at the peak of his Presidency. With Cuba peaceful and the Senate irresolute, for the moment, on Brownsville, he could
luxuriate in his Nobel Prize and congratulate himself on the fact that if he so much as winked, a popular majority would form to re-elect him in 1908. He was still only forty-eight years old. America was unprecedentedly prosperous. The national product had become so “gross” that railroads were hard put to supply enough cars, and banks enough cash, to move it. As a result, prices were rising—but so were wages.

All this good economic news redounded to the credit of the man in the White House. Attendees at his annual New Year’s reception observed only one
note of grimness in the smiles and handshakes he exchanged with more than eight thousand visitors. It occurred when he greeted Senator Foraker.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING
, Roosevelt had an hourlong legislative conference with Speaker Cannon and Congressman Longworth. He did not indicate to the press, if indeed he even realized, that exactly one
quarter of a century had passed since he first attended such a conference in Albany, as the freshman assemblyman from the Silk Stocking district.

Then, as ever since, his obsession had been to find and hold the center of power. In 1882, he had watched a small group of Tammany mavericks parlay eight votes out of 128 into an operating advantage that had effectively immobilized the state government for more than three weeks. Roosevelt had never forgotten his early lesson in the application of physics to political process. A mass of opinion on one side was quantifiably irrelevant, if balanced
by an equal and contrary mass on the other. The same went for any number of masses, large or small, as long as they balanced circularly. Only the slightest pressure, applied by whoever stayed
in medias res
, was necessary to tilt the opposites to and fro, or for that matter hold them still. That was power: operating freedom, not force.

He saw that his legislative balancing act now was going to be especially delicate through 4 March, when the Fifty-ninth Congress would end. With a much more Democratic Congress due in December, he was going to be losing many old allies (most seriously, Senator Spooner) and gaining, if not enemies, at best an equal number of newcomers more likely to cultivate his heir apparent than himself. Those Republicans re-elected would by the same token not have to worry, anymore, about contradicting an enormously popular President. Even the representatives among them now knew that they would see out his second term.

To maintain his centricity, therefore, he was going to have to be less confrontational and more accommodating as his power slowly waned. When decisive action was necessary, he could always resort to a privilege he understood better than any President before him: that of the executive order.

On 14 January, Roosevelt moved to quell a fierce Senate debate over whether he had exceeded his authority in dismissing the Brownsville soldiers. He sent Congress another special message on the subject, much less aggressive than his first. Although he still insisted that he had acted correctly, he allowed for the first time that he was prepared to readmit any dischargee who “shows to my satisfaction that he is clear of guilt, or of shielding the guilty.” This was not of much comfort to those who believed that the burden of proof should lie on the other side, but it persuaded a majority of the Senate that the President had not broken any law.

Foraker, undeterred, pressed for, and won,
a full investigation.

NEXT, THE PRESIDENT
tried to counter “
this belief in Wall Street that I am a wild-eyed revolutionist.” He had always jumped at chances to show plutocrats that he had no objection to the formation of trusts of any size, as long as they consented to scrutiny by the Bureau of Corporations.

Such an opportunity presented itself when George W. Perkins arranged for Judge Elbert H. Gary, chairman of U.S. Steel, and Cyrus H. McCormick, president of International Harvester, to meet discreetly with Roosevelt’s incoming and outgoing Corporations Commissioners, Herbert Knox Smith and James Garfield. The encounter took place in a New York hotel on 18 January. Perkins, who was fluent in both federal and boardroom English, acted as interpreter.

Judge Gary praised the work of the Bureau of Corporations under Garfield, and said that President Roosevelt’s overall supervision had helped
make it a bastion of “private rights.” He added that he hoped the agency would be as willing to cooperate with International Harvester in the future as it had been with his own company in the past.

This was a discreet allusion to a deal that Gary had concluded with Roosevelt and Garfield more than a year before. Faced with a bureau investigation of U.S. Steel, he had undertaken to open up the giant trust’s books, on condition that only the President could decide whether there was anything there worth prosecuting. The agreement had worked well enough to avoid any antitrust action by the Justice Department.

Now Congress was calling for a bureau probe into allegations that McCormick’s company was monopolistic. Perkins and Gary asked, as board members, if the President would extend International Harvester the same kind of most-favored-trust status. Garfield was quite sure that Roosevelt would. And so was Roosevelt, when he heard. Gentlemen’s agreements were an accepted part of his code of behavior, as was the discretion they entailed. All Americans needed to know, in this case, was that
he
knew all about
a giant trust that already controlled 85 percent of the national reaper and harvester market.

IF MEMBERS OF THE
Gridiron Club, welcoming Roosevelt to their annual dinner on 26 January, wondered how he could possibly top his previous performances before them, they soon found out. He arrived at the New Willard Hotel looking unusually grim, and the club president, Samuel G. Blythe, saw that entertaining him was not going to be easy.

When Roosevelt took his seat next to Blythe, he noticed that by chance or, more likely, design, Joseph Foraker had been placed in front of them, at
a table perpendicular to the main table. He thus could look forward to several hours of studying the Senator’s haughty profile, while Foraker did not have to look at him.

Oysters were served, then clear green-turtle soup. Between spoonfuls, the President leafed through a souvenir booklet of caricatures of prominent guests. Each sketch was accompanied by jokey captions. One beneath Foraker’s portrait arrested his attention:

Blythe saw the presidential jaw tighten, and got an impression of slowly rising fury. Roosevelt waited for the planked shad to be served, then leaned over and said, “
I would like to speak now, if it can be arranged.”

Service was halted, and Blythe rose to announce the President of the United States. Diners laid down their forks in surprise.

Roosevelt began cordi
ally enough, with compliments to his hosts, then swung on a “Millionaire’s Row” of financiers and lectured them on corporate control. His manner became peremptory. Men of wealth, he said, were going to have to learn to live with the reforms undertaken by his Administration. (J. Pierpont Morgan listened glowering, three places to his left.) The only alternative was a takeover of Wall Street by “
the mob, the mob, the mob.”

Then, picking up his souvenir program, Roosevelt read aloud, “
J. B. Foraker sez, sez he, ‘All coons look alike to me.’
” He threw the booklet down in disgust. “Well, all coons do not look alike to me.”