Theodore Rex (22 page)

AT THE END OF
the month, there was an ominous delay in Senate action on the Canal Bill. Senator Morgan announced that his committee was not satisfied as to why the Isthmian Canal Commission had changed its recommendation. Furthermore, he would chair an investigation into the legality of the Compagnie Nouvelle’s proposed transfer of rights.

It was all very well for French stockholders to offer “their” property to the United States—but what if Congress paid the forty million dollars, then found that they lacked authority to sell? Colombia had only temporarily ceded France the rights to cut a canal across Panama, and the rights might not be transferable to another power. Morgan insinuated that the “Panama boom” was a nuisance tactic, organized by railroad men who wanted no canal at all.

With new hearings scheduled through spring, it became clear that the Canal Bill would not resurface in Congress until shortly before the summer recess. Legislators turned their attention to more immediate issues: tariff adjustments for the Philippines, reciprocity with Cuba, a quixotic resolution for the direct election of senators. Few noticed, as the bill slipped off the calendar, that it had acquired an unobtrusive amendment, giving the President of
the United States the final choice of route. Roosevelt was quick to reward the author of the amendment with Washington’s most valuable coinage: free White House access. “
When you come here,” he wrote John Coit Spooner, “always come straight to my room.”

With that, Panama faded from the news, and its lobby from the Capitol. Only Cromwell and Bunau-Varilla remained behind to plot future legislative strategy. They believed that the dry words of the Spooner Amendment would flower like seeds in better political weather. Other Panama promoters, less optimistic, felt that the President had tried to bully Congress and failed.

Jokes began to circulate that “Terrible Teddy” was good for nothing but dining with black men and exercising the diplomatic corps. When the jokes reached Princeton, the beaky professor who had interviewed Roosevelt at Buffalo made a public demand that he be treated with more respect. “
He really determines an important part of the destinies of the world,” Woodrow Wilson said. Americans would discover soon enough that Theodore Roosevelt was “larger” than they knew, “a very interesting and a very strong man.”

THE PRESIDENT CLIMBED
carefully up the beanstalk, an ax in his belt. He clenched his teeth as he tried to separate a tangle of branches above him. High in the sky, on a spreading crest of leaves, sat a giant, gorging and grinning. The giant’s knife was sharp and eager over an array of heaped platters. Roosevelt, peering through thick lenses, sensed rather than saw what the dishes contained: helpless, trussed human beings.

From outer space, a pen flew in, loaded with ink. It scratched across the giant’s belly,
THE TRUSTS
, and wrote over Roosevelt’s head,
WILL JACK REACH THE OGRE?

A FEW DAYS AFTER
Edward Kemble’s cartoon appeared in
Life
, Roosevelt told a friend, “The time has come when my course has to be definitely shaped.”

It was 5 February 1902. He had been in office nearly five months, listening to advice and experimenting with power, not always successfully. His gesture toward Booker T. Washington looked, in retrospect, more courageous than wise; his reform appointments would show only long-term effects; veterans were upset with him over General Miles; and as for the fine phrases of his First Message to Congress, he heard no chinks from masons immortalizing them in marble. Signs of creeping disillusionment were evident in the press, and on Capitol Hill.

Any fool could tell what the public expected of him. Jack must reach, and grapple with, the ogre of Combination. Mail poured daily into the White
House, urging him to prosecute various trusts under the Sherman Act. He had referred possible suits to the Attorney General, but in all cases save one, Knox saw no grounds for legal action. This exceptional case looked strong enough to go all the way to the Supreme Court, yet it was fraught with political risk. Roosevelt and Knox were careful not to identify “it” in their communications. “
Am giving it constant attention,” the latter had telegraphed from Florida, “to the end that your wishes, with which I am in full sympathy, can be creditably executed.”

Now, eight weeks later, Knox was back in town, but still hedging over his opinion. Roosevelt decided to insist upon it. The Attorney General begged one more week. He canceled all his social engagements from 5 February on, citing “a public duty that will admit of no postponement,” and plunged, with renewed energy, into research. As far back as
A.D.
483, he found, the Emperor Zeno had directed the Praetorian Prefect of Constantinople,
No one may presume to exercise a monopoly of any kind … and if anyone shall presume to practice a monopoly, let his property be forfeited and himself condemned to perpetual exile
.

Plunging deep into sociological theory, Knox postulated the “underlying laws” that linked all social and industrial movements, and the common-law “sanctions” that prompted them. Was it rash of the President to seek sanctions of his own? Knox found enlightenment—as Roosevelt himself had done, years earlier—in Benjamin Kidd’s
Social Evolution
. The British philosopher argued that
laissez-faire
economics might suit one stage in a nation’s development, but not necessarily the next. Some governmental tamping-down should follow a period of explosive growth. Nor was discipline incompatible with democracy. As Knox himself put it, “Uncontrolled competition, like unregulated liberty, is not really free.”

What, then, of the Constitution? Knox brooded over Supreme Court rulings on the Sherman Act.
U.S. v. Trans-Missouri Freight Association
(1897) had concluded that combination in restraint of interstate trade was unlawful “whether reasonable or not.” Yet
U.S. v. E. C. Knight
(1895) had condoned some monopolistic practices, and made them difficult to prosecute at the federal level.
Knox felt that
Knight
had been badly argued. He saw reversal possibilities in Justice John Harlan’s lone dissent. (“Combinations, governed entirely by the law of greed … threaten the integrity of our institutions.”) And Harlan still sat on the Court.

For once in his cautious career, Knox felt impelled to advise a policy of risk. Even if Roosevelt’s suit failed, it would point up the “moral dualism” in contemporary American society, whereby big businessmen exhibited one set of values at home, and another set, tending toward barbarism, at the office. If the suit succeeded, it would more or less guarantee the President a second term. And if he, Philander Chase Knox, argued it before the Supreme Court, persuasively and brilliantly …

The Attorney General’s astigmatism gave some people the impression that his one eye focused on immediate business, while the other contemplated dreamy horizons, visible only to himself. “Sleepy Phil” was indeed looking beyond books and briefs in 1902—toward the Governorship of Pennsylvania, or to a seat in the Senate, if only old Matt Quay would die.
Farther off, in 1908 or 1912, Knox saw an even more pleasing prospect: the job of his current client.

Before the week was over, he was ready with
a fourteen-page opinion. He delivered it personally to Roosevelt. “
If you instruct me to bring such a suit, I can promise you we shall win it.”

THE PRESIDENT GAVE
only one vague hint of his impending action in the days following. “
Mr. Hanna,” he said after breakfast on Tuesday, 18 February, “what do you think about the Northern Securities Company?”

Hanna, preoccupied with plans for a business trip to New York, replied that the great trust was “the best thing” that could have happened to the Northwest. As a shareholder and old friend of James J. Hill, he could hardly have said less. That evening, he left town.

ON THURSDAY, 20 FEBRUARY
, the Senator returned to Washington, and found his train full of trust attorneys. He ran into Knox’s predecessor, John W. Griggs, in the parlor car, and asked what was taking him to the capital. Griggs realized that Hanna had not yet seen the morning newspapers.

“
The government has brought a suit against the Northern Securities Company.”

Hanna was thunderstruck. Knox’s overnight statement read:

The statement was typical of Knox in its precise, chilly brevity. It was typical, too, of Roosevelt in its timing. A popular but jurisdictionally weak state suit against Northern Securities, initiated by Governor Samuel R. Van Sant of Minnesota, was about to be thrown out of court. By announcing his own federal suit now, Roosevelt would benefit from the likely publicity. Henceforth
he, and not the Governor, would be seen as David battling the Wall Street Goliath.

Knox’s willingness to invoke the Sherman Act was concussive in its effect on financial markets. Even as Hanna stood listening to Griggs in the parlor car, J. P. Morgan was working to avoid a panic on Wall Street. At first, Morgan had refused to believe the news from Washington. But there had been such a wild rush to sell at 9:00
A.M.
, accompanied by reports of “demoralized” exchanges in London, Paris, and Berlin, that his instinctive reaction was to counterbuy. More stocks fell off the board during the first hour than in a normal day’s trading. Morgan bought steadily through lunchtime, and around three o’clock prices began to rally.

It had been a near thing. The floor was loud with denunciations of Theodore Roosevelt. Not since President Cleveland’s Venezuela Note in 1895 had stockbrokers been so taken by surprise. An investor who knew the Attorney General rang to ask why he had not gotten “a friendly tip in advance.” Back over the line came Knox’s curt reply, “There is no stock ticker in the Department of Justice.”