Theodore Rex (119 page)

WALL STREET’S
currency drought lasted through November. Cortelyou, whose commitment of Treasury funds into the New York banks had increased to $69 million, got presidential permission to raise $150 million more in government and Panama bonds, just to keep the market buoyant. Not for at least a year, in expert opinion, would stocks rise back to pre-1907 levels. But a short recession after seven fat years seemed preferable to seven lean years, such as had followed the depression of 1893.

Roosevelt wrote Kermit to say that blame for the economic downturn would inevitably center on himself and his regulatory policies. He might have to spend the rest of his presidency answering to the two classes of people always most vociferous in hard times: the bewildered and the guilty. However, “I am absolutely certain that what I have done is right and ultimately will be of benefit to the country.”

His Seventh Annual Message to Congress, delivered on 4 December, rang throughout with the same unapologetic note. “
There may be honest differences of opinion as to many government policies; but surely there can be no such differences as to the need of unflinching perseverance in the war against successful dishonesty.”

BY NO HINT OF
a frown, or a yawn, did he ever suggest that such routine work had become boring for him. But his animation whenever he mentioned Admiral Robley Evans’s battle fleet, now assembling at Hampton Roads, Virginia, for its pre-Christmas departure, was palpable. With 348,000 tons of white-painted armor and gunmetal ready to sail at his command, and most of the civilized world waiting to see if such an armada could possibly hold together for more than a few days at sea, executive paperwork offered few compensatory charms.

Except, perhaps, the pleasure of striking four names off his annual Christmas-card list:
Mr. E. H. Harriman, Mrs. Harriman, and the Misses Harriman
.

THE SIXTIETH CONGRESS
, dominated even more than the Fifty-ninth by Speaker Cannon and Senator Aldrich, made immediately plain that it intended to stand as a conservative battlement against whatever progressive onslaughts—or Constitution-defying executive orders—Roosevelt might throw against it. Congressmen who prided themselves on their personal rectitude disliked the now habitual preachiness (more bully than pulpit) with which the
President told them what laws to pass. They recalled Tom Reed’s famous jibe, “
If there is one thing for which I admire you more than anything else, Theodore, it is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments.”

Cannon and Aldrich, respectively self-appointed as the protectors of
laissez-faire
on Capitol Hill, had had their worst fears of Roosevelt’s financial irresponsibility confirmed by the stock-market slump. Eugene Hale, chairman of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, issued a statement saying that Congress would not appropriate funds to send the Great White Fleet on its way. Roosevelt countered by informing him that the Navy already had enough money in hand, and enough coal in store, to transfer its ships at least from one ocean to another—indeed, possibly as far as the Philippines. Congress was welcome to leave the fleet there—halfway around the world—if it wanted. As for his standing order to sail, “
I am Commander-in-Chief, and my decision is absolute in the matter.”

This early skirmish established what would likely be the style of the two remaining legislative seasons of Roosevelt’s presidency: increasing obstructionism on Capitol Hill, more resort to surprise tactics at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Power attrition on both sides was the key factor. Only Senator Allison remained of Aldrich’s aging leadership. Orville Platt was dead, and John Spooner retired, a casualty of the LaFollette insurgency in Wisconsin. Cannon’s almost complete control of the House could not be denied, but if progressivism continued to change American attitudes toward government, he ran the risk of soon being perceived as a reactionary tyrant, determined to subvert the will of the people.

Roosevelt remained a formidable force, by virtue of his popularity, tactical skill, and unequaled political intelligence. But he had not much more than six months left as the leader of the Republican Party. By next June, a new claimant to that title would be nominated, and in less than a year, a new President elected. Senator Foraker was already a declared candidate, and “Uncle Joe” was not saying no to rumors that he might run, too. Senators LaFollette and Beveridge were separately wondering if they should mount token candidacies, to test the strength of the progressive movement, while William Howard Taft remained an oddly apathetic heir apparent.

Never again—unless Roosevelt withdrew his vow not to seek a third term—would “Theodore Rex” dominate the political scene as completely as he had for the last three years. And on 11 December, he removed all lingering doubts as to the seriousness of his post-election statement that he would not accept another nomination for President. “
I have not changed and shall not change the decision thus announced.”

MONDAY, 16 DECEMBER
, broke sunny, sharp, and clear over the James River estuary after a weekend of heavy rain. All sixteen ships of the battle
fleet lay waiting for him, blindingly white in the eight o’clock light, as the
Mayflower
creamed into the Roads and proceeded past each gold-curlicued bow. The air drummed with 336 cannon blasts, not quite dividing into twenty-one-gun strophes.

“
By George!” Roosevelt exulted to Secretary Metcalf. “Did you ever see such a fleet and such a day?”

When the presidential yacht came to anchor, gigs and barges brought aboard “Fighting Bob” Evans—a surprisingly small, fierce-faced man, limping with rheumatism—four rear admirals, and sixteen commanding officers. Roosevelt made no speech after shaking all their hands, only drawing Evans aside for a few minutes and muttering to him with earnest, snapping teeth. Bystanders watched the admiral’s cocked hat bobbing like a gull as Roosevelt bit off sentence after sentence. What scraps of dialogue floated on the breeze were mostly banal: “I tell you, our enlisted men … perfectly bully … best of luck, old fellow.”

Less audibly, the President was giving Evans secret orders to stay in the Pacific for several months, then proceed home via the Indian Ocean and Suez Canal. Cameras clicked as the two men bade each other farewell. The commanders returned to their ships, and, as the
Mayflower
got under way for Cape Henry, one by one the battleships weighed anchor and hauled around in stately pursuit. They overtook Roosevelt at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay and ground past him in a perfectly spaced, three-mile-long column. He watched with intent seriousness, periodically doffing his top hat, until the
Kentucky
, the last unit of the Fourth Division, moved by in a vast white wall, all its sailors saluting.

“
THE REACTION AGAINST ROOSEVELT
, socially, is violent,” Henry Adams wrote to a friend as the last tremblings of the great panic subsided. “And, like all Presidents, he will probably find himself, in his last year, a severely dethroned king.”

When Adams used the adverb
socially
, he tended to restrict its compass to the community he belonged to with a sense of tranquil entitlement: old-moneyed, Ivy League, Yankee. The President himself was of this ilk, although his blood was not as blue as Adams’s, and his portfolio nothing like as black. Yet there were—always had been—“foreign” elements in Roosevelt, differences of will rather than mere quirks of character, disturbing to men and women who would otherwise have found him congenial. Ever since he had forsaken his background, at age twenty-three, for what he called the “governing class” of practical politicians, there had been something vaguely traitorous about him. It was not the mere fact that he had chosen a career in which breeding mattered little—Henry Cabot Lodge had done the same, with no loss of dignity. Nor was it his cultivation of cowboys and locomotive engineers and the occasional black dinner companion. It was that from the very start, and most disturbingly since October’s panic, Roosevelt had never shown much respect for wealth. As he said himself, “
I find I can work best with those people in whom the money sense is not too highly developed.”

Essentially an independent, he mistrusted the tendency of the wealthy to form tight, self-protective social cliques or (when they went into business) combinations in restraint of trade. The tighter each formation, the more obsessed it became with its own cohesion, and the more resentful of outside monitoring. He had noticed a definite increase in this resentment since the panic, especially along Wall Street, where the rumors that he was an alcoholic
had strengthened into reports that
he was insane.
At the annual banquet of the New York Chamber of Commerce, a toast to the health of the President of the United States had been met with almost total silence.

To Ambassador James Bryce, a scholarly septuagenarian who had followed Roosevelt’s career from afar for almost twenty years, there was something medieval about the current politico-economic struggle. (“Combinations in restraint of trade,” Bryce reminded his government, “are contrary to common law since Henry II.”) The castles of wealth had been owned by “the great trust barons,” who in theory owed allegiance to the state, but in truth were beholden only to Money. The only nationally empowered defender of the rights of “their villein consumers” had been Roosevelt, intervening “partly from benevolent disinterestedness, partly from statecraft, much as did the medieval Church.” In the process, he had won the devotion of an enormous plebeian following. By March 1907, the struggle had seemed “to be going
à outrance
,” leading to the collapse of the stock market in October, and looking more and more like an episode from a knightly chronicle: