Theodore Rex (120 page)

Bryce left vague whom he meant by “strong personality with great authority,” although he did note that J. Pierpont Morgan had “for a time quite outshone Theodore Roosevelt as a saviour of society.”
He was definite, though, in saying that 1907 had marked the end of the “individualistic” era of checking combinations—as exemplified by Roosevelt’s willingness to make discreet arrangements with the likes of Judge Gary and Cyrus H. McCormick. In the new year of 1908, “the guiding principle has been changed to the socialistic ambition to control and convert them.”

ALL THAT WAS NEEDED
to precipitate a final, all-out battle was a direct challenge. It came on 6 January, and from an unexpected quarter: the Supreme Court of the United States. One of Roosevelt’s proudest legislative achievements, the Employers’ Liability Act of 1906, was struck down on the grounds that it applied to intrastate corporations as well as interstate ones—thus unconstitutionally infringing upon states’ rights.

The President’s initial reaction was to send Justice William R. Day a book
on the need for a federal liability law protecting workers, begging him to read what it had to say about two higher-court rulings inimical to bakers and tenement-house cigar makers in New York. “If the spirit which lies behind these two decisions obtained in all the actions of the Federal and State courts, we should not only have a revolution, but it would be absolutely necessary to have a revolution, because the condition of the worker would become intolerable.”

Justice Day, who had concurred with the majority opinion of Justice White, was not able to do much more than note the title of the little volume Roosevelt found so alarming:
Moral Overstrain
.

In the three weeks that followed, the President gave evidence of suffering from that condition himself. He became incensed by Congress’s obvious reluctance to act on his last Message, which included demands for inheritance and income taxes, national incorporation of interstate businesses, greater federal power over railroad rates, compulsory investigation of major labor disputes, wider application of the eight-hour day, and no fewer than four new battleships.

Not unconnectedly, he also viewed with concern two looming threats to the presidential candidacy of William Howard Taft. First, Senator Foraker had made his own candidacy official, and had called upon the Ohio GOP to choose between its two sons well in advance of the national convention, set for Chicago on 16 June. And in New York, the successful and popular Governor Charles Evans Hughes was showing strength as a national candidate as well.

Roosevelt had tried to help Taft by repeating, forcefully and unequivocally, that he himself would not run for a third term. This had at least allayed lingering doubts about his determination to retire. But how to eliminate Hughes, whom he had backed strongly only fourteen months before? He was quite willing to act, if he could do so without seeming treacherous. The Governor was intelligent but humorless, and exuded such an aura of scraggy-bearded self-righteousness that Roosevelt had taken to calling him “
Charles the Baptist.”

An announcement that Hughes was to speak on national issues at the New York Republican Club on 31 January, in a clear bid for party attention, enabled the American people to observe, yet again, that Theodore Roosevelt was the most adroit tactician in American politics. Working at top speed, he wrote
a Special Message to Congress, radical enough to excite the admiration of Upton Sinclair, and released it on the day of Hughes’s speech. Its first words deceptively suggested that it was a response to the Supreme Court’s antilabor ruling, but its later paragraphs, filling twelve and a half columns of dense print in
Congressional Record
, amounted to a rewrite, in
much harsher language, of his neglected Message of two months before.
As a result, he simultaneously wrested from Hughes all the lead headlines (
HOTTEST MESSAGE
EVER SENT TO CONGRESS
), put both Court and Congress on the defensive, dulled Morgan’s “saviour of society” shine, and by the sheer audacity of his proposals made the progressive/conservative split in the Republican Party permanent, with himself—ambiguous no longer—aligned firmly on the left.

He demanded that the employers’ liability law be re-enacted in a form that would satisfy the Supreme Court, yet apply even more strongly to interstate commerce. He declared that congressional unwillingness to write any remedial entitlements for job injuries into the so-called federal worker’s compensation law was an “outrage” and “humiliation” to the United States. “In no other prominent industrial country in the world could such gross injustice occur.… Exactly as the working man is entitled to his wages, so he should be entitled to indemnity for the injuries sustained in the natural course of his labor.” Ultimately, private employers should be compelled to apply federal principles of liability and compensation across the entire industrial landscape.

Roosevelt proudly cited the Anthracite Coal Commission’s 1903 strike report as “a chart” for action against the abuse of court injunctions in strikes and walkouts. “Ultra-conservatives who object to cutting out the abuses will do well to remember that if the popular feeling does become strong, many of those upon whom they rely to defend them will be the first to turn against them.” The Interstate Commerce Commission’s powers should be extended to total financial supervision of railroads, and also physical control of interstate operations and the scheduling of deliveries of perishable products. It was the inadequacy of the Hepburn Act, not its introduction in 1906, that had created an “element of uncertainty” in railroad-stock speculations, and “contributed much to the financial stress of the recent past.” Lastly, the Sherman Act should be refocused to distinguish between beneficial combinations and “huge combinations which are both noxious and illegal.”

Referring to himself not infrequently in the royal plural, Roosevelt admitted that he was engaged in a “campaign against privilege” that was “fundamentally an ethical movement.” His targets were stock gamblers “making large sales of what men do not possess,” writers who “act as the representatives of predatory wealth” (among them, probably, the entire editorial staff of the New York
Sun)
, and “men of wealth, who find in the purchased politician the most efficient instrument of corruption.” He reserved his strongest language for these multimillionaires, not identifying them directly but taking care to repeat, with incantatory frequency, the names of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company and E. H. Harriman’s Santa Fe Railroad. Such men were “the most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminals of great wealth.”

Americans upon whom such men preyed had three choices: to let them flourish without supervision, to control them at the state level, or to regulate them by federal action. He did not doubt that the last option was the only way, as common law no longer had power to deal with uncommon wealth.

SUBSCRIBERS TO THE
theory that Roosevelt was crazy found in his Special Message all the evidence they wanted. Chancellor James Roscoe Day of Syracuse University remarked that “much of it reads like the ravings of a disordered mind.”
The New York Times
and New York
Evening Mail
both spoke of the President’s tendency toward “delusion,” especially with regard to imaginary conspiracies against him, and the New York
Sun
said that his “portentous diatribe” might be referred better to psychologists than to the archivists of Congress. “It is an even more disturbing reflection that the hand which penned this message is the same hand which directs the American Navy, now on its mission toward unknown possibilities. God send our ships and all of us good luck!”

Charles Lanier, of Winslow Lanier & Co., added drugs to the derangement theory. He claimed, in a rumor that tickled Roosevelt enormously, that “
the President is crazy, and furthermore … indulging immoderately in drink and is an opium fiend.”
Current Literature
, in one of its regular roundups of public opinion, noted the curious fact that almost all the questions about Roosevelt’s mental health were being asked, loudly and querulously, in his home state. Calmer voices there were few, and none so salutary as that of a progressive judge, William J. Gaynor of Brooklyn: “Every purseproud individual, as well as reactionary dullard, always considers a great character insane. In their littleness of heart, of soul, he seems so to them; but the people know that Frederick the Great was not insane, although he was called so all over Europe, just as well as they know and understand Theodore Roosevelt.”

Gaynor’s words were borne out by the echolike promptness and fidelity of the response of “Roosevelt Republicans” west of the Hudson. The Philadelphia
North American
placed the Special Message “in the forefront among the really memorable state papers in the history of the nation,” and the Chicago
Evening Post
found it “a profoundly conservative document” in its insistence upon basic moral liberties. In remarkable harmony, a chorus of Southern Democratic newspapers praised the President’s attack on his own Old Guard, and the
Baltimore Sun
seemed quite serious in proposing that he run for re-election as a Democrat, with William Jennings Bryan as his vice-presidential candidate.

Bryan himself—improbably resurgent after the defeat of Alton B.
Parker—had gracious things to say. “It is a brave message and needed at this time. All friends of reform have reas
on to rejoice that the President has used his high position to call attention to the wrongs that need to be remedied.”

All friends of Roosevelt were not, however, friends of reform, as he discovered when he received a letter from Nicholas Murray Butler early in February. More than six years had passed since Butler had sat listening to the “accidental” President ruminate in Commander Cowles’s parlor—years in which Butler’s own self-discovery, as president of Columbia University, had hardened into chronic self-importance.

Roosevelt declined to accept Butler’s censure. “
You regret what I have done. To me your regret is incomprehensible.”