Theodore Rex (19 page)

THE SENATE WAS
popularly and inaccurately known as “The Millionaires’ Club.” Aldrich protested that he, for one, had begun life as a wholesale grocer. Ordinary Americans saw magazine pictures of his palatial house on Narragansett Bay, noted that his daughter had just married John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and doubted that the Senator would recognize a grocery now if he saw one.

Aldrich was indeed extremely rich, but he told the truth about his origins.
There were a few other self-made millionaires in the Senate; aristocratic millionaires, like Lodge, formed an even smaller minority. Only sixteen members could be described as wealthy or well-born.
Orville Platt was not ashamed to admit that he had never seen more than a hundred spare dollars in his life.
The remaining seventy-four senators were divided evenly between the middle and working classes. Far from representing an “alliance between business and politics”—another popular fallacy—fewer than one in four represented commerce or industry. Most were lawyers of ordinary accomplishment.

What held them together was their collective dedication to politics as a profession. Conscience, not corruption, kept the average senator in office. He worked seven days a week, assisted by one secretary and one typist, for five thousand dollars a year—one tenth of what Roosevelt earned. Venality was a constant temptation, but only the most unscrupulous senators, men such as Matthew Quay and Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania, fattened at the public trough.

Under Aldrich’s management, the Senate was disciplined and hierarchical in structure. Younger members rose by patience and labor. Not even such a brilliant upstart as Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana (ardent, golden-haired, Botticellian) could hope for early privilege. Committee seats were rewards for loyalty and efficiency, and Allison dispensed them with a fine eye for political balance. Positions of power were rotated by the Republican leadership. Aldrich chaired Finance, with Spooner, Allison, and Platt sitting to his left and right. The same quartet, but with Allison in the chair, controlled the Republican steering committee, which in turn controlled all legislative business. Aldrich dominated Interstate Commerce and Cuba Relations; Allison, Appropriations; Spooner and Platt, Judiciary. A few other GOP senators—Hanna, Lodge, George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts, Eugene Hale of Maine—helped swell the ranks of this conservative elite.

ROOSEVELT BROUGHT HIS
trust remarks to an indecisive end, suggesting that if Congress felt debarred from passing a law regulating interstate commerce, it should consider a Constitutional amendment to that effect. He called for a new department to regulate commerce and industry, and new laws to improve conditions for American workers.
He granted labor’s right to combine for self-advancement, as corporations did, on condition neither threatened the larger rights of society.

By now it was past one o’clock. Bottles of bourbon stood tall and cool in the Senate saloon, and white bean soup bubbled in the restaurant. Members began paging through their copies to see how much Message was left. The survey was discouraging—almost twice as much again. But some of the upcoming issues were too important to walk out on. Roosevelt had shrewdly intermixed them with others of less consequence.

He demanded reform of immigration laws, including a threefold ban on persons of low intellect, low morals, and low wage requirements. He analyzed tariff protectionism and trade reciprocity at length, if not in depth.
Clearly, neither subject interested him; he was happy to leave them to Senator
Aldrich, their virtual proprietor. He launched an attack on railroad rebates and rate-fixing.
“
The railway is a public servant. Its rates should be just to, and open to, all shippers alike.”

Then, striking a note altogether new in presidential utterances, Roosevelt began to preach the conservation of natural resources. He showed an impressive mastery of the subject as he explained the need for federal protection of native flora and fauna. Urgently, he asked that the Bureau of Forestry be given total control over forest reserves, currently parceled among several agencies, and demanded more presidential power to hand further reserves over to the Department of Agriculture.

The theme of “water-storing” infused his rhetoric as he appealed for the reclamation of arid public lands. He said that the interstate irrigation program he had in mind was so ambitious that only the national government could undertake it. It must not risk the fate of the countless private schemes that Western water speculators had tried, and failed, to get rich on in recent years. Nor should the reclaimed lands benefit anyone other than the settlers willing to farm them.
“
The doctrine of private ownership of water apart from land cannot prevail without causing enduring wrong.”

Action on all fronts must begin immediately. Yet—a typical Rooseveltian hedge—it must proceed cautiously:
“We are dealing with a new and momentous question, in the pregnant years while institutions are forming, and what we do will affect not only the present but future generations.”

FOR ANOTHER HOUR
, the Message droned on, while clerk after clerk read himself hoarse, and somnolence gathered in the air like fog. Roosevelt was impassioned on the Navy’s need for more battleships and heavy armored cruisers, firm in his defense of the Monroe Doctrine, galvanic in his call for a canal across Central America. He praised the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress as national treasures—something no previous President had thought to do. He was silent on Negro disfranchisement and lynchings, optimistic for the future of free Cuba, and pessimistic about early independence for the Philippines. He was dogged to the point of dullness on rural free mail delivery, national expositions, merchant-marine subsidies, and the need for a permanent census bureau.

By two o’clock, many senators could stand it no longer, and left the chamber to fortify themselves. Even Henry Cabot Lodge showed impatience as he and sixty-six other holdouts waited for the President’s peroration.

Roosevelt returned at last to the subject of death, with which he had begun two and a half hours before. He noted that William McKinley had been preceded to the grave by Queen Victoria of England and the Dowager Empress Frederick of Germany. He seemed to be reminding his older auditors that nineteenth-century cobwebs were blowing away all over the world. The
twentieth century looked bright for all Americans, yet they would not abandon traditional values.

“
In the midst of our affliction we reverently thank the Almighty that we are at peace with the nations of mankind; and we firmly intend that our policy shall be such as to continue unbroken these international relations of mutual respect and good will.”

ALDRICH, ALLISON, SPOONER
, and Platt emerged from the chamber smiling like Wagnerites after a slow performance of
Siegfried
.
Each had an approving adjective for the President’s Message. It was “able,” “excellent,” “admirable,” and “intrepid.” Their satisfaction was not surprising, since its caveats and circumlocutions had been dictated by themselves.

Democratic leaders, too, were mostly complimentary, although Senator James K. Jones of Arkansas pointed out that the President’s trust control proposals were so nonspecific as to be legislatively worthless. “The Message is in every respect disappointing.”

Members of the House reacted with general approbation, as did the nation’s press. The adjective
conservative
was used often, as if in relief that the young President had matured so quickly. Only 12 percent of editorial comments were critical of him; a mere half of one percent condemnatory.

That night, Roosevelt entertained the Republican leadership to dinner. He had reason to celebrate. Not since the time of Lincoln had a President’s first thoughts received such public attention; congratulatory telegrams were pouring in, and the stock market was surging. Even as he feasted, eighteen of his proposals were being drafted into bills.

Aldrich and Allison saw no immediate threat to the legislative status quo. Yet they sipped Roosevelt’s sauterne with a vague sense of unease. Walter Wellman, White House correspondent of the Chicago
Record-Herald
, caught their mood:

THE WINTER DAYS
shortened toward solstice. Roosevelt returned home from his afternoon rides in ever-thickening darkness. Whether he came from Rock
Creek or the Potomac flats, so
oner or later L’Enfant’s perspectives disclosed the Capitol ahead of him, high and remote on its wooded hill, twinkling with lights as Congress worked late.

On 7 December, he received his first piece of legislation from the Senate. It was a minor customs waiver, and he signed it impatiently. A bill authorizing construction of the Isthmian Canal would have been more to his taste, but the Senate had yet to ratify the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. When it eventually did, on 16 December, congressmen were already turning their thoughts toward Christmas. Roosevelt gave up hope of a canal bill before the new year, and turned his energies to building up political strength.

The quickest way to do this was through patronage, so he began to bombard the Hill with as many as thirty appointments a day.
A surprise choice was fifty-three-year-old Governor Leslie Mortier Shaw of Iowa to replace Lyman Gage as Secretary of the Treasury. Gage resigned with understandable chagrin, having stayed on—at Roosevelt’s request—to give Wall Street a sense of continuity. Now, with stocks rising, he found himself dispensable. Postmaster General
Charles Emory Smith also felt a presidential chill, and stepped aside for Henry C. Payne of Wisconsin.