Theodore Rex (51 page)

THE NEXT MORNING’S
newspapers proclaimed the double achievement:
BLOCKADE ORDERED RAISED
and
THE PRESIDENT’S ANTITRUST PROGRAM COMPLETED
.

Roosevelt let the first news story speak for itself. He was reluctant to draw personal attention to Wilhelm II’s large-bottomed retreat: “
It always pays for a nation to be a gentleman.” About the second he was oddly defensive, fearing that it might not look like much of a triumph to readers studying the details. How were they to know he had had “a regular stand-up fight” with Senators Hanna and Aldrich before getting any trust legislation at all?

It was a fact, though, that he had negotiated only a modest, discretionary program. The powers invested in him had more to do with publicity than direct discipline. To forestall any radical discontent, he decided to issue a victory statement through the Attorney General’s office, emphasizing the cooperative nature of his plan. J. P. Morgan and George Perkins happened to be in town, so he summoned them to the White House after dark, along with Aldrich and Hanna.

Soon Aldrich was on his way to Knox’s house with scribbled instructions from the President:
“
Say what has been done: practically substantially everything asked for.… Not only has a long stride in advance been taken; not only have all the promises of last fall been made good, but Congress has now enacted all that is practicable and all that is desirable to do.”
It was unclear whether these sentiments were those of sender or bearer, but Knox duly announced that the legislation just passed by Congress was “highly gratifying” to the Administration, and represented the concerted wisdom “of many earnest and thoughtful men.”

The result was another batch of positive headlines. They helped counteract negative editorials, such as one in the
Philadelphia Ledger
mocking the Roosevelt plan as “a lame and impotent conclusion to so much ferocious talk.” Few Republican papers went as far as the Philadelphia
Press
in claiming that “no such revolution in the operations of trusts and railroads has been worked since the Interstate Commerce Act was passed.”

Nevertheless, Roosevelt had brought about the first strengthening of federal regulatory authority in more than a decade, and unlike any Chief Executive before him, identified himself with antitrust policy. In the words of the Washington
Evening Star
, “The President of the United States is the original ‘trust-buster,’ the great and only one for this occasion.”

Whether this would redound to his future glory was uncertain. There were signs that yesterday’s great wave of combination was slowing, even as
competition thrived, and the nation’s wealth swelled. Memories of hard times were growing dim. The American people were bored with antitrust, as they were tired of winter. Like their President, they looked forward to a summer of new issues. For now, “trust-busting” could safely be left to Knox, Cortelyou, and the courts.

GEORGE BRUCE CORTELYOU
had a habit of carefully straightening his spectacles whenever anything was laid in front of him, whether a memorandum on his desk or sheet music on his piano. Each new challenge had to be focused twenty-twenty, in center lens, as he dealt with it. This self-protective gesture was the legacy of boyhood years when demands and deprivations came from unexpected directions, leaving him a young stenographer of impeccable ancestry but common education. Yet there had been, even then, a slithering efficiency about Cortelyou (associates used such words as
oiled, smooth, eel-like
to describe him) that sped him to high position, if not wealth, under Presidents Cleveland and McKinley. Now, still poor, he was raised to Cabinet rank under President Roosevelt.

Exulting, he straightened his spectacles and contemplated the future. “I am not going into this new department with the idea of staying indefinitely,” he wrote a friend. “I have refused many advantageous business offers.… If I am successful, and I think I shall be, the returns will be immediate and liberal within a very short time after I retire.” Just at the moment, however, he needed five thousand dollars to repay a debt of honor. A check for six thousand came by return mail. At forty, Cortelyou felt for the first time the luxurious correlation of money and power.

Political gossips doubted that the thirty-seven-year-old Commissioner of Corporations would accept much of Cortelyou’s authority. James Rudolph Garfield was the son of President Garfield, and Roosevelt’s former protégé at the Civil Service Commission. Although he was foppish enough to care passionately about silk hats, his lean good looks were those of a privately educated sportsman. As such he qualified for
the elite company of exercise companions whom Roosevelt delighted to abuse with cliff-crawls and frigid swims.

Cortelyou, despite seventeen months of almost daily proximity to the President, had never been so privileged.

ON 18 FEBRUARY
, Roosevelt invited Speck von Sternburg to join him for a horseback trot in Rock Creek Park.
Snow had fallen and frozen the night before; wedges of white lay in the trees, and the stream growled between ice-roughened banks. The skinny German bobbed along looking correct but cold in afternoon dress, while Roosevelt relaxed warmly in fur coat and cap.

Now that Germany’s battleships were at last clear of the Caribbean, a soothing signal to Wilhelm II seemed called for. Roosevelt discounted the seriousness of the naval threat Admiral Dewey had posed, and said that His Majesty’s representatives had made “the best impression imaginable” during the recent negotiations.

The President’s words again showed a respect for diplomatic face. As “a gentleman,” he was in honor bound not to embarrass Wilhelm any more than he had already. So was John Hay. So were loyal archivists. On both sides of the Atlantic, defoliation of the records began. Nine crisis-period telegrams from Sir Michael Herbert disappeared from the British Foreign Office. Three sets of State Department instructions to London and Berlin were suppressed; a fourth was pruned of urgent adverbs. The German “U.S.–Venezuela Relations” series, fifty-one pages thick for 1901, thinned to a mere nine pages for 1902–1903. Hay apparently felt only two insignificant items of his December correspondence were worth preserving. The 1902 dossier of notes sent to the Wilhelmstrasse by the American Embassy in Berlin ended midsentence in a note dated 17 October. Nearly four hundred pages of blank paper followed.

And so, by polite agreement, the Venezuelan crisis faded from history.
When Admiral Dewey thoughtlessly boasted that his deployment in the Caribbean had been “an object lesson to the Kaiser,” Roosevelt summoned him to the White House for a reprimand. The sight of the old warrior in medals melted his anger, but he wrote seriously afterward, “Do let me entreat you to say nothing that can be taken hold of by those anxious to foment trouble between ourselves and any foreign power, or who delight in giving the impression that as a nation we are walking about with a chip on our shoulder. We are too big a people to be able to be careless in what we say.”

THE FIFTY-SEVENTH
Congress pushed on toward adjournment, shuddering against brakes applied by four determined Senators. John Tyler Morgan fanatically filibustered the Panama Canal Treaty; Quay filibustered a banking bill, to punish Aldrich for filibustering
him;
and Benjamin Tillman filibustered everything in sight.

Roosevelt’s “tyrannical and unconstitutional” attempts at race reform provided the big Southerner with plenty of material for harangues (one eye fiery beneath black brows, the other horribly missing; fists flailing from worn sleeves, as his voice screeched higher and higher). He had managed to bully the Senate Commerce Committee into a negative report on Dr. Crum, and threatened social violence if the full Senate overrode it: “We still have guns and ropes in the South.”

Of that Roosevelt was aware. But he also understood the tendency of most lawmakers to exaggerate their emotions:

March began, and the big clock in the upper chamber ticked away the last sixty hours of the session. Matters more urgent than patronage backed up against continuing filibusters: the unratified Cuban and Colombian treaties, and several vital spending measures, including the four-battleships bill. Soothsayers predicted a last-minute rush of legislation on the morning of the fourth. Surely not even “Pitchfork Ben” would allow the government to go bankrupt at noon.

Treaties were another matter. Roosevelt saw now that the Senate was cravenly going to let the clock postpone any vote on Cuban reciprocity until the next Congress. So he acted while he still had time.
“I, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim that an extraordinary occasion requires the Senate of the United States to convene at the Capitol in the city of Washington, on the fifth day of March at 12 o’clock noon.”

He had hardly finished dictating when complaints about his “precipitous and unnecessary action” resounded in the upper chamber. Evidently he had acted just in time. He responded by threatening to call back the House of Representatives as well, if funds were not voted in support of his naval buildup. If that meant he had to postpone his promised Western tour yet again, postpone it he would, “and keep Congress here all summer.”

A House-Senate conference hastily recommended that the President be given enough funds to build not four but five big new battleships. But at 10:00
P.M.
on 3 March, Senator Tillman, his face ugly with anger, vowed to filibuster every cent in funds not yet appropriated unless South Carolina was bought off with pork-barrel money. “I’ll stand here and read Byron till I drop dead in my tracks.” At 2:00
A.M.
, he got his way. He yielded the floor to Senator Quay, who promptly embarked on another set of dilatory tactics.