CHAPTER TEN

“That Damned Cowboy Is President”

“1902 Finds the Helm in Safe Hands,” an illustration in Puck magazine, Jan. 1, 1902.

THE SHIP OF STATE IS on its way to unknown ports,” the Nation declared portentously, warning that the assassination of President McKinley had “violently altered the natural course of events.” When Roosevelt took the oath of office on September 14, 1901, questions abounded, unsettling conservatives and reformers alike. “What changes will he make?” “What does the future hold in store?” “Will he continue the policy mapped out by his predecessor?”

Conservatives, who had utterly dominated the Republican Party for three decades, feared the impulsive young president would prove a “bucking bronco,” upsetting the alliance between business and government that had delivered unparalleled prosperity at the turn of the century. Reformers hoped Roosevelt’s vigorous leadership would refashion the Republican Party into the progressive force it had been under Abraham Lincoln, endeavoring to spread prosperity beyond the wealthy few to the common man.

Comforting themselves that Roosevelt remained a loyal Republican despite occasional fights with the party bosses, conservatives maintained that his “first great duty” was to carry on the policies of the slain president. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, presidents had been captive to their parties: not only did nominations require the approval of party machines, but party platforms also dictated policy preferences. Furthermore, the partisan press became the central organ for mobilizing voters. Recognizing this longstanding subordination of any personal agenda, the New York Sun predicted that the new president’s actions would “not depend on the possible vagaries of an individual judgment.” The Wall Street tycoon Henry Clews made a similar assumption. “The conservative policy of Mr. McKinley has become so settled in the minds of the people,” he pronounced, “that it matters not who becomes his immediate successor. . . . No one will dare to experiment or to deviate from such a course of administration.”

Throughout his career, Roosevelt had struggled to reconcile party allegiance with the drive to address social problems, a balancing act that became more difficult as the troubling aspects of industrialization intensified. While he considered himself conservative in relation to the Populists, he believed that his party was in thrall to reactionaries who so “dreaded radicalism” that they “distrusted anything that was progressive.” Precisely such men dominated both chambers of Congress, Roosevelt lamented. He would work to “push” them forward but recognized that genuine progress would require a direct appeal to the people, “the masters of both of us.” To reach the general public, he would enlist the new breed of independent journalists, without whose “active support,” he later acknowledged, he “would have been powerless.”

Initially he understood the necessity of caution. Warned that the stock market might crash unless he reassured Wall Street that he and his predecessor were “one in purpose,” Roosevelt issued a solemn pledge: “In this hour of deep and terrible bereavement, I wish to state that I shall continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley for the peace, prosperity, and the honor of the country.”

Even as he publicly vowed to preserve a comfortable conservative agenda, Roosevelt signaled journalists that a new political era was imminent. On his very first day in the White House, he invited managers of the Associated Press, the Scripps-McRae Press Association (now the United Press), and the New York Sun to his office. It was “an unusual request,” one historian noted, “for in those days, presidents rarely convened journalists to discuss public matters.” He proposed an unprecedented accessibility, agreeing to “keep them posted” on each evolving plan and policy if they, in return, promised never to “violate a confidence or publish news that the President thought ought not to be published.” These parameters established, Roosevelt informed them that despite his public endorsement of the status quo, the Constitution had provided for his succession. “I am President,” he bluntly maintained, “and shall act in every word and deed precisely as if I and not McKinley had been the candidate for whom the electors cast the vote for President.”

That evening, presiding over his first dinner party as president, Roosevelt openly avowed his intention to differentiate himself from McKinley. A small party had gathered in the modest N Street residence of his sister Bamie and her husband, Will Cowles, where Roosevelt boarded during his first week to allow the grieving Ida McKinley a measure of time to move out of the executive mansion. Two guests, William Allen White and the young president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, joined the family. White vividly recalled sitting “pop-eyed with wonder” at the edge of his chair while Roosevelt spoke “with a kind of dynamic, burning candor” about his plans. Though accustomed to Roosevelt’s indiscreet talk, White had assumed he would “be different” in his new office, only to find that “he was absolutely unchanged.”

The president worried openly that his pledge to follow in McKinley’s footsteps, compelled by dire economic predictions, would “embarrass him sorely in the future.” He might have forestalled a stock market crash, but if he pursued McKinley’s policies to the letter, would it not “give the lie to all he had stood for?” During a “cataract solo of talk” that left White astonished, Roosevelt’s thoughts turned to his political future. Should he secure a second term, he would be only fifty years old when it came to a close. “Imagine me as an ex-President, dedicating buildings and making commencement speeches,” he mused. The prospect of being “the old cannon loose on the deck in the storm” terrified him. Of more immediate concern, he would likely face Republican Committee chair Mark Hanna in 1904. A powerful adversary much like Boss Platt, Hanna threatened to derail Roosevelt’s aspiration for a second term.

White was delighted when conversation turned to Platt, on whom he was gathering material for a long profile in McClure’s. Roosevelt had promised his assistance, and the two men had planned to meet at Oyster Bay before McKinley’s assassination brought them both to Washington. The profile of the New York boss was part of a series White had projected for the magazine. Roosevelt had read White’s two earlier pieces on William Jennings Bryan and Tammany boss Richard Croker with great enthusiasm. “Here you are living in a small town out in Kansas, not accustomed to the conditions of life in a seething great city, pay a somewhat hurried visit to New York,” he marveled, “and yet you sketch Croker as no one in New York, so far as I know, could sketch him. . . . I immensely admired your Bryan; but then I can entirely understand how you knew Bryan. When it comes to Croker it almost seems as if you must have divined it.”

White had interviewed Boss Platt in his downtown office, “a frowzy little cubbyhole that had not been tidied up for years.” He had talked with his lieutenants, searched out his rivals, and scoured newspaper files. He believed his study of the Platt machine would have national resonance because its “story of intrigue, corruption and the sordid amalgamation of plutocratic self-interest and political power was typical of American politics in the North at that time.” In White’s mind, Roosevelt was to be commended for wanting a tough story “about his own party printed” and for believing that “the more people knew” about the corrupt alliance binding big business and elected officials, “the sooner they would wreck the machines.” By this time, White was convinced the “untrammeled” greed of the great industrial captains must be checked. He left the dinner that night loaded with ammunition for his profile on Platt.

Lincoln Steffens, who joined William Allen White in Washington the following day, recounted his own exhilaration on learning that Roosevelt would assume the presidency. “We reformers went up in the air when President McKinley was shot, took our bearings, and flew straight to our first president, T.R. And he understood, he shared, our joy.” The White House offices, Steffens recalled, “were crowded with people, mostly reformers,” amid whom the president “strode triumphant.” Despite Roosevelt’s attempts to mute his ebullience while Washington and the nation mourned, “his joy showed in every word and movement.” When the day’s work was done, he grabbed White and Steffens: “Let’s get out,” he exclaimed, propelling the two men into the streets. “For better than an hour, he allowed his gladness to explode. With his feet, his fists, his face and with free words he laughed at his luck. He laughed at the rage of Boss Platt and at the tragic disappointment of Mark Hanna; these two had not only lost their President McKinley but had been given as a substitute the man they had thought to bury in the vice-presidency. T.R. yelped at their downfall. And he laughed with glee at the power and place that had come to him.”

By the time White returned to Emporia to write his profile, he had thoroughly imbibed Roosevelt’s resentment toward Platt. “Unconsciously, or perhaps consciously, I used my best and most burning adjectives in that article expressing my scorn of Senator Platt and his machine, and contempt for the things it represented,” White later recalled. “It was a bitter piece.” Although he warned the editors at McClure’s that he was afraid it might be “too scorching,” they were proud to publish it.

The piece vividly delineated the origin of the Platt machine. Twenty years earlier, every business had maintained its own lobby in Albany, an expensive and often inefficient way of influencing the state legislature. Platt made it his business “to bring order out of confusion,” centralizing power in his own hands. He first persuaded corporations to contribute generously to the state central committee rather than field individual lobbyists, and then allocated the money to elect the machine’s slate of candidates. Over time, Platt built up a majority of legislators absolutely beholden to his organization. Corporations thrived under the Platt regime; it cost less to support the state committee than to keep individual lobbies. Furthermore, since Platt took none of the money for himself, “there were no longer stories of individual corruption, of bribes and scandals.” But the people of New York bore the cost of the system that worked so seamlessly for both the corporations and the politicians. “What we call popular government,” White concluded, “is abrogated by purchase of privileges.”

White’s analysis of the workings of the machine was unsparing but deadly accurate; his portrait of Platt, however, was gratuitously savage. He described the New York boss as an earthworm, “boring beneath the roots of local self-government by cities and States, burrowing silently yet with incalculable power, loosening the soil, sagging foundations.” He portrayed a soulless man devoid of any “moral nature,” loyal only to his machine and its corporate sponsors; a man transformed into “a machine himself—hard, impulseless, cunning, cute but witless, immovable, inexorable, grinding.”

Enraged, Platt immediately declared his intention “to haul both author and publisher into court to answer the charge of criminal libel,” threatening that his lawyers had already begun preparing their complaint. “I will get that fellow’s scalp if it is the last thing I ever do,” he seethed, vowing to employ all his resources “to bring about the punishment of this man.” Moreover, White and McClure’s would not be his only targets. Through depositions, he promised to unearth every one of White’s sources, exposing those “who told him the lies,” and proceeding equally against them. Suspecting that Roosevelt himself was one of White’s sources, he stormed into the president’s office, demanding that the journalist be forever barred from the White House. “No friend of mine,” Platt insisted, “can be a friend of that man.” Wisely, Roosevelt denied having read the article but promised to do so.

“I am perfectly heartbroken at the whole business,” White revealed to Roosevelt, “not for myself, but for the embarrassment to you. I thought I was doing a service to good government in the United States by writing the article. I still believe that I was right, but I seem to have been right at a terrible cost to you.” The distraught journalist queried how he might “straighten this business out” but forwarded a second letter to the president’s secretary without waiting for an answer. The second letter was to be shown to Senator Platt or made public, as Roosevelt saw fit. “Not one syllable, hint, or inference escaped President Roosevelt’s lips while I was a guest in the White House, which might have been used in any way to the discredit of Senator Platt,” White asserted. “My opinion of Senator Platt was formed, not by President Roosevelt, but by careful study of conditions in New York politics. Many of my conclusions are probably foreign to those, which everyone knows are held by the president.”

Roosevelt thanked White for the potentially mollifying letter, nevertheless insisting he had no intention of letting Platt’s indignation dictate his friendships. He sought to ease White’s anxiety over their relationship by insisting, “The only damage that could come to me through such articles would be if you refused to continue to champion me!”

No sooner had McClure’s publicly declared that “they would welcome the suit,” claiming to possess a wealth of additional information relating to the boss and his machine, than Platt decided not to go forward. But the incident took a heavy toll on White. He suffered “a kind of nervous collapse,” and though he felt “perfectly well physically,” he could no longer bear to write, or even to read the papers. “My nerves are gone,” he told the editors at McClure’s, explaining his failure to submit another article that was overdue, admitting that “to as much as dictate this letter throws me in a perspiration.” His doctor recommended a protracted rest: “I must leave the state and go to the mountains . . . I am very sorry that I have thrown you all out so.” The staff of McClure’s supported him during the five-month recuperation; equally steadfast during this nadir of White’s career was Theodore Roosevelt. White would not forget either.

“PROBABLY NO ADMINISTRATION HAS EVER taken such a curious hold upon the people as that of Theodore Roosevelt,” remarked the longtime White House usher Irwin (Ike) Hoover. “While he is in the neighborhood,” one critic grudgingly conceded, “the public can no more look the other way than the small boy can turn his head away from a circus parade followed by a steam calliope.”

Indeed, Roosevelt’s initial months as chief executive were less remarkable for significant political accomplishments than for his impact on the public consciousness. “The infectiousness of his exuberant vitality made the country realize there was a new man in the White House,” observed Mark Sullivan, “indeed, a new kind of man. His high spirits, his enormous capacity for work, his tirelessness, his forthrightness, his many striking qualities, gave a lift of the spirits to millions of average men.” Among admirers and opponents alike, the president’s outsized personality compelled attention.

Newspapers invariably contrasted the vigorous young president with his staid predecessor, a Civil War veteran from a previous generation. “Where Mr. McKinley was patient, cautious, tactful, a very good listener, mindful of the little things which go to put a visitor at ease,” observed Walter Wellman of the Chicago Record-Herald, “Roosevelt is impetuous, impatient and wholly lacking in tact.” When dealing with public officials, Wellman noted, Roosevelt “is so full of energy that he simply runs over. He has no patience with long speeches or extended explanations. He cuts people off in the middle of sentences, tells them he knows all about it, and very often announces his decision before the caller has more than fairly started with his little say. . . . He wants action, action all the time. But he rarely gives offense, and never means to do so.” Fortunately, the new president had always tolerated, and even relished, humor at his own expense. It was said that he had “a right good laugh” when told of an epigram circulating widely in Washington: “President McKinley listened to a great many people and talked to but few. President Roosevelt talks to a great many men and listens to nobody.”

Roosevelt’s frenetic yet disciplined schedule mesmerized the press corps. In a piece for McClure’s, Lincoln Steffens described a breathless day begun when the president “darts into the breakfast-room with a cheerful hail to those already there,” then rushes to his office before the official workday starts to tackle his voluminous correspondence, dictating “one letter after another” to his secretary, “his voice and face reflecting vividly the various emotions which guided his words.” From 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., except on cabinet days, the second-floor reception room was crowded with senators, congressmen, Army and Navy officials. “The room is a large one, chairs and sofas are set all about it; but they are filled,” Steffens noted, “and many persons are standing.”

At noon, the doors opened to ordinary citizens, “an overflowing stream” of people eager to see the most colorful president in their memory. For an hour, Roosevelt moved speedily around the room, giving each person a dazzling smile and a warm handshake. The press of visitors, a New York Times reporter observed, never seemed “to try the President’s strength or impair his good temper.”

At one o’clock, Roosevelt generally excused himself from the crowd for his midday shave. During the “barber’s hour,” reporters were allowed audience, permitted to question—or more likely listen—as the president expounded upon any number of subjects while the barber desperately tried to ply his trade. “A more skillful barber never existed,” newspaperman Louis Brown-low observed, describing how “the President would wave both arms, jump up, speak excitedly, and then drop again into the chair and grin at the barber, who would begin all over.” Only “when the barber bent over the presidential head and began to shave the lower lip,” Steffens noted, “did he quiet down, giving reporters a few moments to pose their questions.”

Lunchtime was always a lively affair, featuring all manner of guests rarely seen in the White House—“Western bullwackers, city prize fighters, explorers, rich men, poor men, an occasional black man, editors, writers.” If an article or book piqued Roosevelt’s interest, the author received an invitation to lunch. “Whether the subject of the moment was political economy, the Greek drama, tropical fauna or flora, the Irish sagas, protective coloration in nature, metaphysics, the technique of football, or postfuturist painting,” the British statesman Viscount Lee remarked, Roosevelt “was equally at home.”

Late afternoon was devoted to exercise—a horseback ride or boxing match, a raucous game of tennis or a strenuous hike along the cliffs in Rock Creek Park. Dragging visitors and friends through the wooded sections of the park, Roosevelt had one simple rule: You had to move forward“point to point,” never circumventing any obstacle. “If a creek got in the way, you forded it. If there was a river, you swam it. If there was a rock, you scaled it, and if you came to a precipice you let yourself down over it.” Journalists delighted in portraying these late afternoon rambles. Jacob Riis described a route that could be traced by the “finger-marks” on “gripped fences, telegraph-poles and trees,” where Roosevelt’s exhausted companions struggled to follow. Stories multiplied about “this or that general or ambassador or cabinet officer who had dropped out and fallen by the way.”

The French ambassador Jules Jusserand left a celebrated account of his first walk with the president. After presenting himself at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue “in afternoon dress and silk hat, as if we were to stroll in the Tuileries Garden or in the Champs Elysées,” he soon found himself in the countryside, following Roosevelt “at breakneck pace” through fields and over rocks. When they approached a broad stream, he assumed the race had finally ended. “Judge of my horror when I saw the President unbutton his clothes and heard him say, ‘We had better strip, so as not to wet our things in the Creek.’ Then I too, for the honor of France, removed my apparel, except my lavender kid gloves.” To be without gloves, he insisted, “would be embarrassing if we should meet ladies.”

Reporters soon discovered that the hour when the president returned from these excursions and commenced the daily task of sorting his correspondence was “by far the best time to see him.” The New York Times reporter Oscar King Davis marveled at Roosevelt’s “amazing facility for carrying on a conversation while he was going over the mail. He would glance over a letter, make an addition or alteration with his pen, and sign his name at the same time that he was keeping up a steady fire of talk about whatever subject happened to be under discussion.”

Finally quitting his office and the company of his reporter friends, Roosevelt returned to the mansion, where he could relax and dress for dinner. There, in the family quarters, he was “allowed to become again husband, father and playmate.” He talked over the day’s events with his wife, read to the children or, more often, engaged them in physical games. “I play bear with the children almost every night,” he wrote, “and some child is invariably fearfully damaged in the play; but this does not seem to affect the ardor of their enjoyment.”

Under Edith’s guidance, a vital domesticity returned to the presidential residence. “It was the gloomiest house,” she recalled, “with the shadow of death still over it, and a house in which an invalid [McKinley’s wife] had lived, why it didn’t seem as if the air from Heaven had blown through it.” She opened windows, rearranged rooms, brought in fresh flowers, had new carpet laid, and replaced the heavy canopied beds in the children’s rooms with their familiar white bedsteads from Oyster Bay.

Not since Willie and Tad Lincoln scampered through hallways and played hide-and-seek in closets had there been such a din in the old mansion. The children, ranging in age from three to seventeen, unabashedly made the White House their own. They dashed across its wooden floors on roller skates. They hid live reptiles in sofa cushions, walked upstairs on stilts, waded through the fountains on the landscaped grounds, and coaxed their pony to ride the elevator to the second-floor bedroom when seven-year-old Archie was sick. “Places that had not seen a human being for years were now made alive with the howls and laughter of these newcomers,” observed Ike Hoover. The Roosevelt family has “done more to brighten and cheer the White House than a whole army of decorators,” the Atlanta Constitution asserted, “and the merry prattle of children echoing through the corridors and apartments impart a homelike atmosphere which every caller is quick to notice and appreciate.”

WHILE THE REPUBLICAN ESTABLISHMENT HARBORED misgivings about McKinley’s successor, William Howard Taft was certain that Roosevelt possessed every needful quality to be a good president from the outset. In letters home, he rebutted charges of Roosevelt’s “impulsiveness and lack of deliberation,” citing the fortitude, honesty, and intelligence that characterized his friend’s interactions with all manner of men over a wide-ranging career.

Saddened that McKinley had not lived to see “the consummation” of Taft’s own endeavors in the Philippines, he nevertheless trusted that Roosevelt would provide the same steadfast support. “In so far as the work in the Philippines was concerned,” Nellie noted, “my husband knew where the new President’s sympathies were and he had no fears on that score.” A week after McKinley’s death, Outlook magazine published an extraordinary article by Theodore Roosevelt entitled “Governor William H. Taft.” Written a month earlier by then Vice President Roosevelt, the extravagantly laudatory article prompted Horace to tease Will that “only a strenuous man like Teddie would put it so strongly in print, unless the subject of the article happened to be dead.”

“I dislike speaking in hyperbole,” Roosevelt began, “but I think that almost all men who have been brought in close contact, personally and officially, with Judge Taft are agreed that he combines . . . a standard of absolute unflinching rectitude on every point of public duty, and a literally dauntless courage and willingness to bear responsibility, with a knowledge of men, and a far-reaching tact and kindliness.” Indeed, Roosevelt observed of his old friend, “few more difficult tasks have devolved upon any man of our nationality during our century and a quarter of public life than the handling of the Philippine Islands just at this time; and it may be doubted whether among men now living another could be found as well fitted as Judge Taft to do this incredibly difficult work.”

Roosevelt’s support would prove essential for Taft in the weeks that followed as one crisis after another threatened the relative peace and prosperity of the Philippines. Although most of the insurrectionists had surrendered their arms, a brutal uprising in late September 1901 stunned the town of Balangiga on the island of Samar, where a small garrison of American soldiers had set up an outpost at the request of the local mayor. Unbeknownst to the Americans, this request had been a cunning ploy to isolate the troops where they would be vulnerable to a surprise assault.

In the days preceding the ambush, throngs of what appeared to be local mothers and grandmothers in black mourning clothes had assembled at the local church, bearing small caskets said to hold the bodies of their dead children claimed by a recent cholera outbreak. Instead, the coffins held machetelike weapons, and the black-clad figures proved to be guerrilla fighters. Shortly after the church bells rang at 6 a.m. on Sunday morning, September 27, hundreds of insurrectionists suddenly charged into the mess hall and fell upon the unarmed soldiers. One sergeant was decapitated as he sat gripping his breakfast spoon; a private was immersed in the vat of boiling water used to clean utensils. Most of the others were hacked to death. Of seventy-four members of the unit, only twenty escaped with their lives.

“It was a disaster so ghastly in its details,” Nellie recalled, “so undreamed of under the conditions of almost universal peace which had been established, that it created absolute panic.” As a result, she remembered, attitudes toward the islanders shifted: “Men began to go about their everyday occupations in Manila carrying pistols conspicuously displayed, and half the people one met could talk of nothing else but their conviction that the whole archipelago was a smouldering volcano and that we were all liable to be murdered in our beds any night.”

Army officials were quick to place blame for the massacre on Taft’s “silly talk of benevolence and civilian rule [and] the soft mollycoddling of treacherous natives.” General Jacob W. Smith ordered four companies into Samar with the directive to take “no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms.” When requested to provide a minimum age under which residents of Balangiga might be spared, the general stated clearly: “Ten years.” This reprehensible order would eventually lead to Smith’s court-martial.

The Samar massacre made headlines in the States: “Disastrous Fight,” cried the New York Tribune; “Slaughtered by Filipinos,” accused the Houston Daily Post. The news of “the first severe reverse” in many months prompted a delegation of congressmen to visit the Philippines. Taft called for calm, stressing that the Samar tragedy did not characterize and should not reflect upon the entire Filipino people. “One of the Republicans has made an ass of himself by denouncing the Filipinos as savages and utterly unfit for anything good,” Taft told his brother Charles. Contrary to the fearmongering circulated by the military, Taft maintained, “in all other parts of the Islands there is entire peace.” If violence escalated, he argued, the military, having roused the native population “to such a pitch of enmity,” would bear the blame. At each of the five hundred military posts strung throughout the islands, Taft lamented, they imposed themselves with a dangerous disregard for local communities. “Officers take the good houses in the town and the soldiers live in the church, the ‘convento’ (which is the priest’s house), the schoolhouse or the provincial building,” he reported, adding that property owners “are paid an arbitrarily fixed rent and are very fortunate if they get their rent.”

The troubles that beset the Philippines were compounded when a highly contagious viral disease called rinderpest laid waste to three quarters of the island’s draft cattle. Without these sturdy animals to plow the fields, “a dreadful depression in agriculture” resulted. With the spread of hunger, roving outlaw bands—in a phenomenon known as “ladronism”—preyed on their neighbors. And making matters worse, rats carrying the plague continued to multiply despite an extensive eradication campaign by the new Board of Health. “Altogether,” the usually optimistic Taft understated, “we have not passed through the happiest months of our lives out here.”

On October 1, Nellie and two of the commissioners’ wives departed for a trip to China. That very afternoon, Taft fell seriously ill with what doctors mistakenly diagnosed as dengue fever. He remained bedridden for ten days, and when he returned to work, severe rectal pain prevented him from sitting. At the same time, a fungal infection developed in his groin. “While I have none of Job’s comforters,” Taft told Horace with grim humor, “I have many of his troubles.” On October 25, doctors finally discovered a large perineal abscess, most likely caused by the invasion of bacteria into his system. With gangrene spreading, an immediate operation was necessary. As Taft was carried from the palace on a stretcher, his terrified ten-year-old daughter Helen burst into tears. Taft dispatched a telegram to Nellie: “Come dear am sick.” When the ether was administered, he later joked, he deliriously wished that he could “hire a hall and make a speech.” A large incision drained the cavity and removed the infected flesh. His doctors worried that the gangrenous tendency and blood poisoning had not been stopped in time, but they became more optimistic as the wound began to heal. The next day, Taft telegraphed Nellie again: “Much better don’t shorten trip.”

Confined to bed for several weeks, Taft secured an order from Washington appointing commission member Luke Wright as vice governor. This step provided him “peace of mind,” assuring that his duties would not be neglected while he convalesced. No sooner had he resumed work than he immediately fell ill again, requiring a second operation. Roosevelt and Root decided that Taft should return to the United States until he was thoroughly recovered and rested. The Filipinos feared they would never see their friend and trusted advocate again. As Taft made ready to depart, he spoke to the large native crowd that surrounded the governor’s palace to bid him anxious farewell, promising them he would return as soon as he was well.

WHILE TAFT ENDURED THE MOST discouraging period in his experience as viceroy, Roosevelt worked busily to draft his State of the Union address. Scheduled for early December when the legislature convened, his message would provide the first indication of his position on the most critical issue of the day—how best to address the massive trusts that were rapidly swallowing up competitors in one field after another. The period following McKinley’s first election has been labeled “the high summer of corporate influence.” Hundreds of small railroads, steamship companies, tobacco firms, copper industries, and collieries consolidated into single corporations that controlled as much as three quarters of the production in their particular fields.

In the year and a half since Roosevelt had failed to secure legislation to regulate the trusts in New York State, corporate consolidation had produced more than a thousand new mergers, including the creation of the world’s most colossal trust, United States Steel. And every passing week heralded new combinations, stirring fear in small businessmen and consumers alike. Across the country, mergers brought absentee ownership, disregard for working conditions, higher prices, and lower wages.

Roosevelt believed the future of the Republican Party would be determined by its willingness to confront this malignancy. “I intend to work with my party and to make it strong by making it worthy of popular support,” he told Joseph Bucklin Bishop. Despite this resolve, he saw clearly that an open denunciation of the Republican alliance with big business would set the bosses against him. They would deny him the presidential nomination in 1904, just as they had prevented his run for a second term as governor. Moreover, without the support of Republican leadership in Congress, he had no chance of passing even the mildest legislation to regulate the trusts.

The U.S. Senate presented the most powerful obstacle to any progressive reform. Because senators at the time were elected by state legislatures rather than by popular vote, the majority of senators owed their positions to their state machines. These organizations, William Allen White observed, were in thrall to the business interests that filled their coffers through campaign contributions or blatant bribery. In a number of states, the bosses made themselves senators; in others, wealthy individuals purchased their seats outright.

In a scathing editorial, the New York Times suggested that a millionaire could buy a Senate seat “just as he would buy an opera box, or a yacht, or any other luxury in which he can afford to indulge himself.” In some instances, the Times reported, “the sale takes the form of open bribery of the legislators”; more often, the Senate seat was “simply the satisfaction of a ‘claim’ acknowledged by the leaders of the party and created by large contributions to the Party treasury.” A widespread biting anecdote captured the popular view of the Senate: One night, Frances Cleveland, wife of the president, was awakened by a noise in the house. “Wake up,” she nudged her husband. “There are robbers in the house.” President Cleveland set her mind at ease. “There are no robbers in the House,” he reassured her, “but there are lots in the Senate.”

Five men comprised the inner circle in the Republican-controlled Senate. Sixty-four-year-old Mark Hanna had only recently joined the Senate after a long and successful business career dealing in coal, iron ore, shipping, and street railways. Architect of McKinley’s two victorious campaigns, Hanna had earned the title of “national boss” of the Republican Party. Cartoons and editorials depicted a bloated capitalist, a tool of Wall Street, and a representative of the trusts; though more sympathetic to labor than most capitalists, Hanna had become an emblem of “the liaison between big business and government.” Under his influence, not a single anti-trust suit had been prosecuted in two years, even as consolidation escalated beyond anything previously imagined. “In the final analysis,” Lincoln Steffens succinctly charged, Hanna’s methods “amount to the management of the American people in the interest of the American businessman for the profit of American business and politics.”

Much like Platt, Hanna viewed Roosevelt as fundamentally unstable, a political hazard. “I told William McKinley it was a mistake to nominate that wild man at Philadelphia. I asked him if he realized what would happen if he should die,” Hanna fumed. “Now look, that damned cowboy is President of the United States!” Early on, Roosevelt was convinced that he would eventually have to wrest party control from Hanna, but if an open break occurred, he told Steffens, “it would be a great calamity to the party and therefore to the public.” To assail the powerful Hanna machine, the New York World noted, “would be as foolhardy as for a mill hand to fling himself upon a whirling buzz-saw.”

Accordingly, Roosevelt reached out to the older man, expressing hope that they might one day share an intimacy similar to the one Hanna had enjoyed with McKinley. In addition, he requested a conference to solicit Hanna’s counsel on political strategy and the upcoming message. “Go slow,” Hanna cautioned. “It would not be possible to get wiser advice,” Roosevelt graciously responded. Such patience would not cost Roosevelt, Mark Sullivan noted, for “his was the rising star; Hanna’s was falling.”

In addition, Roosevelt sought out the “Big Four,” a group of veteran senators who commanded the power to pass, block, or kill any legislation: Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, John C. Spooner of Wisconsin, William B. Allison of Iowa, and Orville Platt (no relation to the New York boss) of Connecticut. Aldrich, the leader of the group, had become a multimillionaire through investments in street railways, banking, oil, gas, electricity, and rubber. Elected to the Senate in 1881 after two terms in the House, he was considered the most influential Republican legislator on the Hill. As chairman of the Finance Committee, he wielded absolute control over legislation on tariffs and trusts. Furthermore, Aldrich’s only daughter, Abby, had married John D. Rockefeller, Jr., only son of the Standard Oil tycoon.

To each of these influential conservative leaders, Roosevelt made an expansive overture, similar in tone to his September 30 note to Senator Spooner: “I hope to keep in closest touch with you and to profit by your advice in the future as I have profited by it in the past.” At regular intervals, he solicited their suggestions, inviting them to the White House for confidential conversations. As he drafted sections of his message, Roosevelt read them aloud to Hanna and the Big Four, appealing to them as valued mentors. He also included members of his cabinet in these sessions, inviting a frank discussion. The press described “a very pretty scene, this young president sincerely and earnestly placing his thoughts before his older counselors and begging them to criticize wherein they thought he was wrong.”

Journalists noted in early November that Roosevelt had “made more progress in the preparation of his message to Congress than any of his predecessors ever did so far in advance.” This lengthy process allowed him to write the entire message personally rather than simply compile sections submitted by various department heads, as was customary. As page after page accumulated, curiosity about the contents escalated. No subject attracted more interest than the trusts. “Many scribes with many minds, writing for many papers, are guessing and philosophizing as to what the president’s message will and will not contain,” one newspaper commented, concluding that “the only real thing anybody can guess or predict about with an approximation to truth is that it will be Roosevelt’s message and nobody else’s.”

From the start, Roosevelt determined that he would not retreat “one hair’s breadth” from the position on the trusts that he had established in his gubernatorial message, his vice-presidential acceptance speech, and the address he had delivered at the Minnesota State Fair five days before McKinley was shot. “More and more it is evident,” he had declared that day in Minneapolis, “that the State, and if necessary, the Nation, has got to possess the right of supervision and control as regards the great corporations.” He had repeatedly emphasized the need for corporations to deliver public reports to the government on their capitalization, profits, and financial structures. Now, he intended to highlight that recommendation in his annual message by calling for a cabinet-level Department of Commerce and Industries, an agency empowered to examine the workings of the big corporations.

Orville Platt warned Roosevelt that if Congress passed a law “going so far as to force corporations doing an interstate business to make reports to United States officials,” it would likely be ruled unconstitutional. Hanna insisted that the proposition would only “furnish ammunition to the enemy in a political contest” and that “even the labor unions were not greatly interested in corporate control.”

Roosevelt held his ground, even after a contentious session with his friends George Perkins and Harvard classmate Robert Bacon, both of whom were partners in J. P. Morgan’s firm. While he remained “very fond” of both men, Roosevelt confided to a relative that they argued “like attorneys for a bad case, and at the bottom of their hearts each would know this . . . if he were not the representative of a man so strong and dominant a character as Pierpont Morgan.” Not only did they encourage the president “to go back on” his previous demands for disclosure, but Perkins apparently suggested that he “do nothing at all, and say nothing except platitudes; accept the publication of what some particular company chooses to publish, as a favor, instead of demanding what we think ought to be published from all companies as a right.” As the historian Eric Goldman observes, the practice of “not prying into business affairs was accepted as part of a prevailing laissez-faire.”

Just as Abraham Lincoln would exorcise his frustrations in “hot letters” he would put aside unsent, Roosevelt confined his rancor to private diatribe and followed it with a public letter for Douglas Robinson (Corinne’s husband) to share with the two men. “I much enjoyed the visit from Perkins,” he amiably wrote. “I am particularly desirous to see him and Bacon as often as possible.”

To Paul Dana, conservative editor of the New York Sun, Roosevelt spoke more directly. In mid-November, Dana wrote a long, critical letter to Roosevelt admonishing that “the proposition that the Federal Government shall lay its hand on business corporations is revolutionary. . . . It would open the door to an unlimited increase of the powers of the Federal Government.” Adding to his argument, Dana insisted that “there is no authority of public opinion for the demand for trust legislation. . . . I deny the political right of the Republican successor of President McKinley to undertake it.” Roosevelt acknowledged Dana’s warnings but had no intention of altering his course. “Your letter causes me concern,” he replied, “to ask me to alter my convictions as to the proper course to be pursued about these big corporations is much like asking me to alter my convictions about the Monroe Doctrine and the need of building a navy. . . . You have no conception of the revolt that would be caused if I did nothing.”

On the morning of December 3, 1901, Roosevelt’s completed message, totaling more than 20,000 words, was carried to the House and the Senate to be read out by a clerk, as had been the custom since Thomas Jefferson sent the message in writing. “A hush immediately fell over the body as the clerk began in clear, firm, and distinct tones to read the opening paragraphs,” the Washington Times reported, observing that “he did not read in the usual singsong monotone, but with emphasis and expression.” The recitation took about two hours, but “there was interest in every line, and members of both houses listened with unusual attention.” The assembled legislators generally received such messages “with scant courtesy,” the Washington correspondent for the Chicago Record-Herald noted, retiring to the “allurement of the smoking-room or restaurant. To-day they sat still.”

The message opened with an emotional denunciation of McKinley’s assassin, “a professed anarchist, inflamed by the teachings of professed anarchists.” Such men, “who object to all governments, good and bad alike,” only sabotaged progress, Roosevelt declared. This impassioned opening introduced Roosevelt’s agenda of moderate, reasoned reform. His tempered approach toward curbing the abuses of industrialism, he asserted, would prove the surest way to combat the alarming rise in anarchism, socialism, and demagoguery.

In the long sentences of the president’s message, semicolons followed by “yet” or “but” separated clauses that balanced each side of an issue, reflecting Roosevelt’s characteristic “on the one hand, on the other” style of crediting antagonistic views. “The captains of industry who have driven the railway system across the continent, who have built up our commerce, who have developed our manufactures, have on the whole done great good to our people,” he proclaimed, “yet it remains true . . . there have been abuses connected with the accumulation of wealth.” Repeatedly, he employed this rhetorical display of evenhandedness: “To strike with ignorant violence” at the great trusts “endangers the interests of all . . . and yet it is also true that practical efforts must be made to correct those evils.” If he had no patience for those who resorted “to hatred and fear” to denounce the trusts, Roosevelt made it clear that he shared the “wide-spread conviction” that certain invidious practices were “hurtful to the general welfare.” While he stopped short of advocating prohibition of the trusts, he demanded that they be “supervised and within reasonable limits controlled.”

Roosevelt’s strategic deliberations provoked a stinging parody from Finley Dunne’s Mr. Dooley: “Th’ trusts, says [Roosevelt], are heejoous monsthers built up be th’ inlightened intherprise iv th’ men that have done so much to advance progress in our beloved counthry. On wan hand I wud stamp thim undher fut; on th’ other hand not so fast.”

Although Roosevelt’s carefully balanced propositions invited accusations of equivocation, the rhetoric of his message allowed him to set the stage for reform without immediately alienating corporate interests. Conservative critics, soothed by language touting the benefits of capitalism and condemning the populist call for the total destruction of the trusts, missed the true implications of Roosevelt’s central argument concerning the federal government’s responsibility to regulate corporations in the public interest. “It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract,” he noted, “to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form,” they assume an obligation to the public. Through the creation of a new Department of Commerce, the government would merely exercise its duty “to inspect and examine” corporate finances as a means to determine whether regulation or taxation was necessary. Should Congress determine that “it lacks the constitutional power to pass such an act,” Roosevelt recommended that an amendment to the Constitution “be submitted to confer that power.”

Public attention immediately following his message focused on the trusts. Yet Roosevelt had also outlined his plans for the welfare of wageworkers, reciprocity agreements, railway rebates, forest preserves, irrigation of arid lands, and the isthmian canal—as well as his ideas for reorganizing the Army and expanding the Navy. At the close of his address, he returned to the tragedy of McKinley’s death, acknowledging the expressions of sympathy and grief “from every quarter of the civilized world” that had touched “the hearts” of every American.

Generally, both the public and the press received Roosevelt’s address well. “No other message in ten years past has been read by so many American citizens,” claimed The Independent. The tenor of the State of the Union was viewed as “characteristic of the man; self-assertive, determined, honest, patriotic, permeated with the spirit of progress.” Despite widespread approbation, newspapers remained “skeptical of any important outcome from the president’s recommendations regarding trusts,” convinced that Roosevelt’s primary goal at this juncture was his own nomination and election. “He knows very well that no man can secure the Republican nomination over the trusts,” one Indiana paper editorialized. The trusts understood the proposals as mere theatre to satisfy reformers. While it was “refreshing” to see “a bold man struggling with the devil-fish of party intrigue,” until the middle-class confusion about corporate consolidation galvanized a demand for positive action, the conservative powers in Congress would have no trouble in preventing Roosevelt’s proposals from even reaching the floor.

THE FINANCIAL WORLD WAS STAGGERED on February 19, 1902 when Roosevelt announced the government’s intention to bring an anti-trust suit against the Northern Securities Company. This giant holding company had recently merged the rail and shipping lines of James Hill, J. P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt in the Northwest with those of E. H. Harriman, the Rockefellers, and the Goulds in the Southwest. Consummated during Roosevelt’s watch, this vast new combination, first reported on at length by Ray Baker, touched a nerve in the president.

Baker, who had worked for months on a series of articles profiling the nation’s tycoons, was well positioned to cover the spectacular merger. He had returned to New York from his sojourn in Arizona reenergized and eager to tackle the unsettling issues of labor and capital that had preoccupied him since his college days. He felt that he “had come to see and know the workers’ side” as he covered the Pullman strike for the Chicago Record, conversing at length with Eugene Debs and spending long weeks with a number of other labor leaders. “I knew, or thought I knew, the powerful incentives for organization behind their movements,” he wrote, “and their demands for more wages and more freedom.” Realizing he must also develop an understanding of “the business and financial side,” Baker was thrilled when McClure suggested a series focused on the captains of industry. While he did not consider these articles to be “revolutionary” or “crusading,” his research shaped an evolving conception of capitalism’s dazzling strengths and troubling weaknesses.

Baker’s first article, on J. P. Morgan, published in October 1901, portrayed a Wall Street giant who controlled “a yearly income and expenditure nearly as great as that of Imperial Germany, paid taxes on a debt greater than that of many of the lesser nations of Europe, and by employing 250,000 men, supported a population of over one million souls, almost a nation in itself.” While Baker acknowledged that the powerful private banker was “an expert financial doctor,” who had rescued the American economy from panic on three separate occasions, he withheld judgment on whether Morgan had employed that “unquestioned genius to the highest purpose.”

The alarming dimensions of Morgan’s empire were delineated in a second, follow-up article that analyzed the structure of the United States Steel Corporation. This immense enterprise, the first billion-dollar corporation in the world, had been conceived the previous April when J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and the leaders of nine other steel companies merged to avoid a ruinous, competitive war. Many of these men, Baker concluded, “were unquestionably forced” into consolidation “against their will.” The resulting corporation produced “more than a quarter of the entire [steel] production of the world” and dictated “the destinies of a population nearly as large as that of Maryland or Nebraska.” To enumerate its corporate possessions glazes the mind: more than 18,000 coke ovens, 80 blast furnaces, six giant railroad companies, and 115 steamships. “It is difficult to convey any adequate idea of the magnitude of the Steel Corporation,” Baker concluded. “Nothing like this has ever been seen before.”

Baker’s research for these two articles on J. P. Morgan provided clear perspective on the machinations behind the formation of Northern Securities. The merger, Baker explained, stemmed from a costly quarrel the previous spring: two rival railroads that controlled the overwhelming majority of railroad lines in their respective regions had fought for control of a third railroad. In the aftermath, under the leadership of J. P. Morgan, “the contestants gathered themselves together, counted their losses, smoothed over their difficulties,” and forged a gargantuan new holding company. On November 13, 1901, Northern Securities became “the second largest corporation in the world,” behind only U.S. Steel. With tens of thousands of miles of track spanning the continent and hundreds of ships, Baker declared it “absolute dictator in its own territory, with monarchical powers in all matters relating to transportation.”

“None outside the golden coterie know all the details,” Baker observed, presciently adding, “the future will find one of its great problems in deciding how big a business enterprise must become before the public is entitled to know the full details of its management.” It appeared certain that “the same dozen or more men” would own “nearly all the great railroads of America and the greatest industries besides.” Indeed, with this new combination in place, a person might journey “from England to China on regular lines of steamships and railroads without once passing from the protecting hollow of Mr. Morgan’s hand.” Would the day come, Baker mused, “when an imperial M will repose within the wreath of power?” The implication that these few men were “more powerful than the people, more powerful than Congress, more powerful than the government,” observed Mark Sullivan, “presented to Roosevelt a challenge such as his nature would never ignore.”

Roosevelt asked his attorney general, Philander C. Knox, if an anti-trust suit against Northern Securities could be sustained. A brilliant lawyer who had enjoyed a successful career in Pittsburgh, Knox calculated the odds for several weeks before reporting to Roosevelt that he believed an anti-trust suit based on the Sherman Anti-Trust Law could be won. Roosevelt kept his decision to proceed from everyone else in his cabinet, including Elihu Root, his closest adviser. Root did not share “the view that Taft and I take about corporations,” he later explained to a journalist friend. The unexpected announcement that the government was in the process of preparing a bill “to test the validity of the merger” appeared “like a thunderbolt from a clear sky.” Many commentators feared the outbreak of “a wholesale war on industrial trusts.”

“Not since the assassination of President McKinley has the securities market been compelled to face news for which it was wholly unprepared,” declared the New York Herald, under headlines announcing a precipitous fall in stock prices. Financiers could not fathom how Roosevelt lacked the courtesy to provide advance notice. He was, after all, one of them: a Harvard man, a member of their clubs. “If we have done anything wrong,” J. P. Morgan complained in a hastily arranged meeting with the president three days later, “send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” An agreeable resolution was impossible, Roosevelt countered. “We don’t want to fix it up,” Knox confirmed, “we want to stop it.” Turning to Roosevelt, Morgan inquired if U.S. Steel was in jeopardy. “Certainly not,” Roosevelt replied, “unless we find out that in any case they have done something that we regard as wrong.” Roosevelt remarked to Knox after Morgan’s departure: “That is a most illuminating illustration of the Wall Street point of view. Mr. Morgan could not help regarding me as a big rival operator.”

Morgan’s partners were appalled at the lack of recognition for their substantial contribution to American progress. “It really seems hard,” James Hill complained, “that we should be compelled to fight for our lives against the political adventurers who have never done anything but pose and draw a salary.” Members of New York’s legal community were scathing in their opinion of Knox, calling him “an unknown country lawyer from Pennsylvania.” When these words reached the president, his response was curt: “They will know this country lawyer before this suit is ended.”

For a quarter of a century, Roosevelt later observed, “the power of the mighty industrial overlords of the country had increased with giant strides, while the methods of controlling them, or checking abuses by them on the part of the people, through the Government, remained archaic and therefore practically impotent.” The anti-trust suit “served notice on everybody that it was going to be the Government, and not the Harrimans, who governed these United States.” At the same time, Roosevelt’s actions clearly demonstrated to powerful Republican leaders “that he was President in fact as well as in name.”

Roosevelt next turned his attention to the beef trust. Allegations had surfaced in the press that the big beef packers, led by Armour & Co. and Swift & Co., had agreed to parcel out territories and fix prices, resulting in a sharp cost increase for families purchasing meat. The advent of refrigerated freight cars had diminished the advantage once held by local butchers, facilitating consolidation among the big national firms. Labeling the beef trust “an atrocious conspiracy of greed against need,” one New York newspaper challenged anyone to deny “that such absolute control by a few men over the food supply of a nation is in the highest degree hostile to the public welfare.” After the Justice Department investigated the matter, Roosevelt directed Knox to bring suit against the beef trust. “This is the right course,” the World editorialized, “and the president has proved himself, as he did in directing the similar suit against Northern Securities Co., to be wiser and more resolute than leaders of his party in Congress, who sit supinely in the path of a rising storm of popular indignation and refuse to do anything to ‘disturb the business’ of protecting monopolies by law!”

For all the accolades that attended his confrontations with these massive combinations, Roosevelt considered the Sherman Act a blunt instrument that might prove “more dangerous to the patient than the disease.” In the hands of zealots, unable or unwilling to distinguish good trusts that yielded efficient operations, lower prices, and better service, from bad trusts that used predatory tactics to gain monopoly, artificially depress production, and extort unreasonable prices, the Sherman Act might destroy the very prosperity it was intended to foster. Roosevelt far preferred the approach recommended in his annual address—new legislation enabling the national government to examine corporate records and determine what remedies, if any, were needed. Nevertheless, “with the path to effective regulation blocked by a stubborn, conservative Congress,” the historian George Mowry observes, “the only way for Roosevelt to bring the arrogant capitalists to heel was through the judicious use of the anti-trust laws.”

FOR NELLIE AND WILL TAFT, the winter of Roosevelt’s skirmishes with the trusts marked “a period of bereavement and protracted illnesses.” During the long sea voyage from Manila to San Francisco, doctors discovered that Taft’s incision was not healing properly. It was “opened and drained,” but months of bed rest the previous fall had weakened his knees and ankles, making it painful for him to stand for any protracted time. To compound matters, Nellie was suffering from what was later diagnosed as malaria. In San Francisco, they were informed that their cross-country trip on the Union Pacific would be interrupted by a severe snowstorm in the Midwest. Having received word that her mother was seriously ill, Nellie insisted on moving forward nonetheless. In Utah, a catastrophic blizzard froze water pipes and broke the train’s heating system. Wrapped in blankets, they pressed eastward. Even after enduring these hardships, they were too late: in Omaha, Nellie received a telegram bearing the news that her mother had died the previous day.

Taft remained with Nellie and the children in Cincinnati until he had to leave for Washington to testify before the Senate Committee on the Philippines. From the moment he arrived in the capital, Taft was surrounded by affectionate support. War Secretary Elihu Root and his wife insisted that he board with them during his stay, which eventually stretched to thirty days. No sooner had Taft reached their home on Rhode Island Avenue than the president called with plans to join them that evening. Taft was pleased to find Roosevelt “just the same as ever,” writing to Nellie that it was hard “to realize that he is the President. He greatly enjoys being President and shows not the slightest sign of worry or hard work in his looks or manner.” Scarcely a night passed for Taft without an invitation to dine with the Roosevelts, the Lodges, the Hays, or the Hannas.

Despite his warm reception in Washington, Taft worried about the hearings. Called by Massachusetts senator George Hoar, an eloquent anti-imperialist who insisted on exposing the truth of events in the Philippines, the proceedings would likely be exhausting and unproductive. “If General Chafee is right,” Hoar proclaimed, referring to the Civil War veteran who served as the military governor of the Philippines, “there is not a man in those islands who is not conspiring against the government and eager for liberty.” The day before the hearings convened, Taft wrote to his brother Horace, playfully requesting “compassion and merciful judgment, when you shall read of the condemnation to which I shall probably be subjected by anti-imperialists and our democratic brethren. Please do not deny the fact that you are still my brother, though a mortified one.”

Yet throughout a long week of testimony Taft acquitted himself exceedingly well, drawing a sharp line between the military’s negative estimates of the Filipino people and his own more hopeful perspective. “I have much more confidence in the Filipino and his loyalty than have a good many of the military officers,” he assured them. Asked by Democratic senator Joseph Rawlins if the country was not “flying in the face” of Asiatic culture and tradition by imposing a republican form of government, he expressed his conviction that such difficulties could be successfully negotiated. In the course of his governorship, Taft said, he had developed “somewhat intimate relations” with the Filipino people and was certain that the overwhelming majority wanted peace and a stable government.

Taft told the committee, as he had told McKinley, that he had not supported the idea of occupying the Philippines, “but we are there.” America’s primary responsibility, he maintained, must be to help the Filipinos achieve self-rule, slowly inducting them into the political process. Eventually a determination would be possible regarding the future of the Philippines—whether they should apply for statehood, declare full independence, or perhaps develop a commonwealth connection to the United States similar to that of Canada or Australia to Great Britain. He called on Congress to reduce the tariff on Philippine imports and to establish a popularly elected assembly to constitute a lower branch of the government while the Philippine Commission continued to comprise the upper branch. Taft understood that some senators considered this policy “too progressive and too radical,” but he believed it would provide “a great educational school” in the art of democracy.

When pressed about instances of military brutality against the Philippine insurgents, he admitted “that cruelties have been inflicted; that people have been shot when they ought not to have been,” and that soldiers had employed water torture to extract information from insurgents. Courts-martial had been ordered to address these abuses. He insisted, however, that the military had largely exercised uncommon “compassion” and “restraint.”

“Following his appearance,” one reporter noted, “not a speaker on either side but paused a moment to pay at least some small tribute to the man.” By speaking freely and openly, Taft “had taken his fellow-citizens into his confidence on the dangers and the doubtful points of our ‘experiment’ as well as on its rosier aspects.” In return, he had earned their confidence “in his sincerity and his ability to meet the task in hand.” Extremely pleased, Elihu Root assured Taft that if he continued his great service to the Philippines for another year or more, “there was not anything in the gift of the President” that would be withheld.

The pleasure of Taft’s stay in Washington was cut short when doctors determined that yet another operation was required to remove a deep abscess that had developed in the aftermath of his previous surgery. The news that he would be confined to his bed for three weeks left him feeling downcast: “I have been hacked and cut and curetted and etherized so much and have lain so long in bed that a continuance of all this for the better part of a month I do not welcome and should deeply regret if it delayed my return.” Nonetheless, he submitted gamely to a third operation in six months, and this time happily recorded that “the cure seems to be complete.”

Contemplating his return to the Philippines, Taft decided to stop first in Rome, where he hoped personally to negotiate some solution to the perplexing problem of the Spanish friars, a situation that had plagued him from his first days in the islands. To the Filipino people, Taft understood, the friars represented “the crown of Spain, and every oppression by the Spanish government was traced by them to the men whose political power had far outgrown that exercised by them as priests.” Over the years, these clerics had come to operate as political bosses, acquiring 400,000 acres of the best agricultural lands and assuming despotic power over the police, the civil government, and the schools. Once the revolution began, he wrote, they “had to flee for their lives. Fifty of them were killed and three hundred of them were imprisoned.” If they should return and attempt to reclaim title to the land, he feared violence would break out. Roosevelt and Root deputized Taft to inform the Holy See that the United States would purchase the lands for a fair price so long as the hated friars never returned to the archipelago. The land would then be redistributed among the poor Filipino farmers.

“What a splendid thing it will be to go to Rome,” Nellie exclaimed when she learned of her husband’s strategic mission. In the weeks before the planned trip, her own health had improved. Blood tests revealed a reduction in her malarial infection and her spleen had returned to normal. But just before they were scheduled to sail, Robert contracted scarlet fever, making departure impossible for Nellie and the children. “What a disarrangement of our plans!” Taft lamented. “And more than this what a trial for Robert and you.”

Louise Taft was in Millbury, Massachusetts, when Will called to explain her grandson’s illness and to bid her goodbye. Realizing that Nellie could not travel, Louise offered to accompany her son. Nellie, despite her own disappointment, was relieved that Will would have the comfort and assistance of his mother during the trip. “Within twenty-four hours,” Nellie recalled, “the intrepid old lady of seventy-four packed her trunks and was in New York ready to sail.” In the years since Alphonso’s death, Louise had astonished her family with her unflagging activity. “She went wherever she liked,” Nellie noted with admiration, “and it never seemed to occur to her that it was unusual for a woman of her age to travel everywhere with so much self-reliance.” Until Nellie arrived in Rome with the children more than a month later, Louise managed affairs with “an energy and an enterprise” that overwhelmed her son with “pleasure and pride.”

Several factors complicated Taft’s mission. He had to take care throughout the process that his dealings with the Pope never implied diplomatic recognition, which would violate America’s separation of church and state and incur the hostility of Protestants. At the same time, he sought to defuse Catholics’ fears that he was antagonistic to the Church. His initial meeting with the Pope, still “lively as a cricket” and “bubbling with humor” at eighty-two, went better than he could have hoped. Most significantly, Taft noted, he secured the pontiff’s promise to meet all questions “in a broad spirit of conciliation,” though the details were left to a group of cardinals who proved far less accommodating. Weeks went by before the cardinals finally issued a statement on June 21, 1902. The Church would consent to sell its property in the Philippines, but would not withdraw the friars currently in residence. With this unsatisfactory conclusion, negotiations were suspended.

When Taft at last prepared to sail for the Philippines, word arrived that a cholera epidemic had struck Manila. He decided Nellie and the children should remain in Europe for an additional month, hoping that by then the outbreak “would have run its course.” Writing to Nellie from the steamer, he confessed feeling apprehensive about his reception in Manila. “I don’t know how the people will take the result of my visit to Rome. Then they are not in very good humor about the strict cholera regulations . . . I may land with a few handshakings and a dull thud.” He regretted her absence but trusted she would soon join him and her indispensable support would help him surmount all difficulties. “I can not tell you what a comfort it is to me to think of you as my wife and helpmeet,” he declared. “I measure every woman I meet with you and they are all found wanting. Your character, your independence, your straight mode of thinking, your quiet planning, your loyalty, your sympathy when I call for it (as I do too readily) your affection and love (for I know I have it) all these Darling make me happy only to think about them.”

To his amazement, Taft’s arrival triggered what was said to be the grandest demonstration of popular support ever recorded in the history of the Philippines. Thirty thousand Filipinos had come from the hills and neighboring provinces to welcome Taft home. Whistles sounded and bells rang as soon as his vessel was spied. From the harbor to the palace, his carriage was met by cheering crowds. Triumphal arches and flags decorated the streets. Children tossed flowers and released doves into the air as Taft went by.

In his speech at the palace, Taft told the people “in a straightforward way of his experiences in Washington and Rome.” Though negotiations with the Vatican had been suspended, “the sale of church lands to the government was assured,” and he was confident that an agreement to remove the friars would eventually be worked out. Taft took comfort that the natives had clearly interpreted his visit to Rome “as a real effort on the part of the United States to do something which could not have been for any other benefit than the benefit of the Filipino people.” Visibly moved, he promised to work unremittingly for the people of the islands. So “universal, earnest, and enthusiastic” was the response, reporters noted, that it left no doubt that Taft had earned “a proud position in the hearts of the Filipino people.”

Back in the United States, Taft’s visit to Rome met with less enthusiasm. “I am in the worst hole politically I have ever been in my life,” Roosevelt confided to his newspaper friend Herman Kohlsaat. “The whole Catholic Church is on my back.” Though every intelligence from the Philippines established “what a lecherous lot of scoundrels the Spanish friars are,” Roosevelt privately railed, Catholics maintained that these reports were “simply propaganda to establish Protestant missions in the Philippines.” If such “calumnies” did not cease, the president was cautioned, Catholics would join en masse to thwart his nomination in two years’ time.

“As things have turned out, it has probably been unfortunate that we got you to stop at Rome,” Roosevelt wrote Taft, lamenting that the Catholic uproar had “rather complicated the political situation” at home. Perhaps, he suggested, they should “let this whole matter go and simply administer the civil government, leaving the friars and other ecclesiastical bodies to get along as best they can.”

Taft responded vehemently. “While the result of the visit to Rome may have been bad in the United States,” he told Roosevelt, “I do not state it too strongly when I say that the visit to Rome has done us a great deal of good in this country.” Taft’s letter persuaded the president to continue talks with the Vatican, which eventually produced an agreement. The United States paid $7.5 million for the lands, which were divided into small parcels and sold to natives, creating a new landowning class. Though the Spanish friars were never formally withdrawn, their power dwindled with the appointment of priests and bishops from other countries. Under Taft’s deliberate leadership, a solution had been found that eased tensions and, in the end, finally satisfied the islanders, the administration, and the Catholic Church alike.

ON JULY 1, 1902, SPEAKER David Henderson delivered a rousing speech to his colleagues, flattering them before they adjourned that “no house of representatives since the adoption of the Constitution had done so much work as this one.” The Speaker’s laudatory words “touched a responsive chord” among the members, who saluted both their Speaker and themselves with unrestrained emotion. “While the cheering and applause were still in progress,” one reporter noted, “the members on the floor began singing ‘My Country, Tis of Thee.’ It was taken up by the correspondents in the press gallery, and soon the vast hall was ringing” as spectators joined in for “The Star-Spangled Banner” and other patriotic tunes. The mood of jubilation culminated when General Charles Hooker of Mississippi, a Confederate veteran who had lost his arm in the war, “took his place by the side of the speaker, and together they sang ‘Dixie.’ ”

Roosevelt’s assessment of the work done by the 57th Congress was far less sanguine. Nonetheless, he was delighted by the passage of the bill providing $170 million to acquire land and begin construction of the Panama Canal. “By far the most important action I took in foreign affairs during the time I was President,” he later reflected, “related to the Panama Canal.” He also took “a keen personal pride” in the Newlands Reclamation Act, which set aside revenue from the sale of western public lands into a national fund for the construction of dams and irrigation projects. The act was structured to enable small farmers to settle previously arid lands. “I regard the irrigation business as one of the great features of my administration,” he remarked at the time.

Congress also appropriated more than half a million dollars for badly needed renovations to the White House. Despite its thirty-one rooms, the mansion did not provide comfortable living quarters for a family, especially a large one like the Roosevelts’. The entire first floor, except for the family dining room, was used for state functions; the second floor was divided between a private wing and executive offices, including the president’s office, the Cabinet Room, and the telegraph room. The family quarters consisted of only five bedrooms and lacked both closet space and sufficient bathroom facilities. The kitchen was outmoded, and the floors throughout “trembled when one walked on them.”

Previous presidents had failed to persuade Congress that a thorough renovation was necessary. The Roosevelts alone, Sylvia Morris writes, “had the determination, in spite of criticism, to forge ahead with the long-overdue changes.” The plans, drawn up by the architect Charles McKim, called for the construction of a new West Wing office building connected to the main house by a colonnade, freeing up the old second-floor spaces for conversion into extra bedrooms, bathrooms, and sitting rooms—as well as a boudoir, a library, and a den. The demolition and major renovations were scheduled during the summer months, allowing Edith and the children to escape to Oyster Bay. Roosevelt had originally planned to remain in the White House but was finally persuaded to move into a large town house on Lafayette Square.

Despite his satisfaction with the Canal bill, the Reclamation Act, and the successful appropriations for the White House renovation project, Roosevelt was sorely disappointed by the failure of Congress to take action on the signal economic issue of the day: the trusts. The call to establish a Department of Commerce with the power to demand information and determine necessary regulation of corporate trusts had been at the center of Roosevelt’s first annual message. While the bill was debated at the committee level, Republican opposition prevented any real progress. Meanwhile, the Democratic attack on the trusts gathered momentum, heightening Roosevelt’s anxiety that Republicans would pay at the polls for their failure to address the issue.

Senators obligated to the sugar trust also had managed to kill a reciprocity bill designed to reduce the tariffs on Cuban exports, including raw sugar, by 20 percent. The reduction of duties, Roosevelt argued in a special message, would boost the young republic’s economy and simultaneously open Cuba’s markets to the United States. “I ask that the Cubans be given all possible chance to use to the best advantage the freedom of which Americans have such right to be proud,” he exhorted, “and for which so many American lives have been sacrificed.” Despite his plea, no action was taken. “Their conduct will return to plague them later,” Joseph Bishop predicted.

With the adjournment of Congress, Roosevelt headed to Oyster Bay for a six-week vacation with his family before launching a campaign swing to generate popular enthusiasm for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. The failure of the Republican Congress to take action on corporate regulation and reciprocity issues had furnished Democrats with powerful proof, despite Roosevelt’s anti-trust initiatives, that the Republican Party was “in alliance with the trusts and with all the great monopolies of every description which are preying upon the country.” By appealing directly to the people and lending his personal prestige to the fight for trust regulation, Roosevelt hoped to save his party from defeat in November.

Traveling by train and open carriage, accompanied by dozens of reporters, he opened his campaign in New England. In each of the six states, he delivered speeches focused predominantly on the trust issue, emphasizing the distinction between his own reasonable call for oversight of federal regulation of trusts and the Democratic crusade to eradicate all trusts in a manner that would “destroy all our prosperity.” Roosevelt understood that many looked back with nostalgia on the pre-industrial era, when “the average man lived more to himself,” when “the average community was more self-dependent,” and when the gap between rich and poor was less glaring. He conceded that cities could never provide “the same sense of common underlying brotherhood” as country living, but argued that the modern industrial society had substantially raised “the standard of comfort” for most people. Efforts to turn backward he considered not only futile but also wrongheaded. Lending “a sympathetic ear” to “the unfocused discontent” he encountered, Roosevelt forged a powerful connection with his audience and then hammered home his core message: the national government must assume “full power” over the giant trusts and that power must “be exercised with moderation and self-restraint.”

From Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, the president was met with overwhelming fervor. “The booming of cannon, the clanging of church bells, the tooting of whistles, the braying of brass bands and the cheering of thousands” marked his progress. When he delivered his prepared speeches in the major cities, “factories shut down, stores put up their shutters, flags were hoisted and the people were out in their holiday clothes.” There was not a single moment, observed reporters, “when the streets were not crowded and people were not cheering themselves hoarse.” As the train moved from city to city, thousands gathered at local railroad stations to glimpse their vibrant young president. Indeed, it seemed to one journalist that “small towns turned out their entire population.”

The heady atmosphere of Roosevelt’s tour abruptly ceased on the final day of his New England campaign when a speeding trolley car crashed headlong into the open carriage carrying Roosevelt and his party from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to Stockbridge. The impact overturned the carriage and hurled its occupants to the ground. The president, his private secretary George Cortelyou, and Governor Winthrop Murray Crane of Massachusetts were thrown clear of the wreck, but Roosevelt’s favorite Secret Service agent, William Craig, was caught under the wheels of the rushing trolley car and torn apart. “It was a dreadful thing,” Roosevelt grimly observed; “the car was coming at such a terrific speed that I felt sure all in the carriage would be killed.” The crowd hastened toward the spot where Roosevelt lay, but despite a blackened eye and deep bruises on his jaw and leg, he insisted that he required no help. “I’m all right,” he said. “Some of the others are badly hurt. Look after them.” When he saw the body of his loyal guard he dropped on his knee. “Poor Craig,” he muttered over and over, “too bad, too bad.” Still, he insisted that his tour through Stockbridge, Great Barrington, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, should proceed. Seated in a new carriage, he gave the mounted guard somber instructions: “Gallop ahead, tell the people everywhere along the line that Craig has been killed and I wish no cheering.” Edith rushed to meet her husband at Bridgeport and take him back to Oyster Bay, where he remained for only one day before departing on a weeklong campaign swing through Tennessee, West Virginia, and North Carolina.

Returning to Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt convened a “memorable conference” (with Senators Aldrich, Spooner, Hanna, Allison, and Lodge) to resolve how he should handle the divisive issue of tariffs during his upcoming western tour. The Republican establishment viewed the high Dingley tariff, passed during McKinley’s first administration, as sacrosanct—the key to the country’s economic prosperity. Yet in recent years sharply rising consumer prices had produced growing demand for downward revision of the tariff. Capitalizing on this discontent, Democrats argued that high tariffs not only inflated prices but effectively sustained the hated trusts. The destruction of both trusts and tariffs would be the rallying cry of their fall campaign.

Complicating matters further, the tariff issue threatened to divide the president’s own party between western Republicans, who clamored for relief from the highest tariff in history, and eastern manufacturers, who insisted on continued protection. At a state convention in the Republican stronghold of Iowa, a resolution had passed that linked tariffs to trusts and called for the elimination of tariffs on any product manufactured by a monopolistic trust. “The tariff must be revised, for it is barbarous, extortionate, damnable,” the Chicago Record-Herald journalist Walter Wellman wrote to Roosevelt, insisting, “I want to see you take the lead. It is the biggest work to be done in the country today.” Should Republicans launch the fall campaign without lowering the tariff, he warned, “hell will be to pay.”

Though Roosevelt found this point of view congenial, he also recognized the “dynamite” in tariff reduction. Tinkering with tariff policy might well produce “a panic or something approaching to it, with consequent disaster to the business community and incidentally to the Republican party.” Moreover, Senators Aldrich and Hanna made it clear that if a reciprocity treaty could not pass the protectionist Senate, more general tariff revision had absolutely no chance of success. “As long as I remain in the Senate and can raise a hand to stop you,” Mark Hanna pointedly told him, “you will never touch a schedule of the tariff act.” Bowing to reality, Roosevelt promised the senators gathered at Oyster Bay that he would “make no attempt to revise the tariff at the coming session of Congress,” though he would continue to speak out about the trusts. “I do not wish to split my own party wide open on the tariff question,” he conceded, “unless some good is to come.” The implications of Roosevelt’s retreat on this issue would be far-reaching.

Certain that he carried an unwelcome tariff message to western audiences, Roosevelt anticipated “a three weeks’ nerve-shattering trip.” He soldiered on from Cincinnati to Detroit to Logansport, Indiana, where the sentiment for downward revision of the tariff was particularly strong. The president’s references to the tariff, the New York Times editorialized, sound “like that of a man treading a path selected for him by others, not chosen by himself, and pursued only because the situation seemed to require it.” His words were absorbed by crowds “in comparative silence” after the noisy acclaim that had greeted his earlier speeches. “There are a good many worse things than the possibility of trolley-car accidents in these trips!” Roosevelt darkly quipped.

Unfortunately, the injuries he sustained in the collision proved far more agonizing than tariff complications. He had tried to ignore the continued pain in his leg but was noticeably limping by the time he reached Logansport. A visit to the hospital revealed “a threatening abscess” that required immediate surgery. The abscess was lanced and a miniature pump attached to drain the bloody serum. Refusing anesthesia, Roosevelt climbed onto the operating table and turned to the doctors with a smile. “Gentlemen, you are formal; I see you have your gloves on.” The surgeon jested in answer: “It is always in order to wear gloves at a president’s reception.” If Roosevelt muttered in pain under his breath a few times during the procedure, he reportedly “said nothing that was distinct except to ask for a glass of water before the needle was removed.” Carried out on a stretcher, he received strict orders to stay off his leg for several weeks, forcing cancelation of his remaining campaign itinerary.

As renovations to the executive mansion were still not complete, he was taken to the temporary White House at Lafayette Square. “Tell it not in Gath, but really I have enjoyed this nine days’ seclusion,” he told Senator Orville Platt the following week. “I see Mrs. Roosevelt all the time, as she has come on here to take care of me. I read everything from Pendennis and Our Mutual Friend down to the last study of European interests in Asia. I do not have to see the innumerable people whom there is no object in seeing, but whom I would have to see if I were not confined to my room with my leg up, and I am able to do all the important work.”

Capitalizing on his enforced leisure, Roosevelt appealed to Herbert Putnam, the librarian of Congress, for books that would feed his wildly eclectic intellectual appetites—a history of Poland or something on early Mediterranean races. “Exactly the books I wished,” he told Putnam several days later. “I am now reveling in Maspero and occasionally make a deviation into Sergis’ theories about the Mediterranean races. . . . It has been such a delight to drop everything useful—everything that referred to my duty—everything, for instance, relating to the coal strike and the tariff, or the trusts, or my power to send troops into the mining districts, or my duty as regards summoning Congress—and to spend an afternoon in reading about the relations between Assyria and Egypt; which could not possibly do me any good and in which I reveled accordingly.”

BY EARLY OCTOBER 1902, THE coal strike to which Roosevelt referred had become “the most formidable industrial deadlock in the history of the United States.” The previous spring, more than 140,000 anthracite coal miners had gone on strike in Pennsylvania to protest low wages, harsh working conditions, and long hours. While the five-month-old strike had caused no serious problems during the hot summer months, panic was setting in as cold weather approached. Coal was then the chief fuel source for heating homes, schools, and businesses. By September’s end, schools in the Northeast began closing due to the shortage. Hospitals and government buildings were threatening to shut their doors. Confrontations in the coal fields were becoming increasingly violent, and mobs commandeered coal cars as they trundled through villages and small towns. An all-out social war seemed imminent.

John Mitchell, the charismatic president of the United Mine Workers (UMW), believed that if the American people could truly see “the sorrows and the heartaches of those who spend their lives in the coal mines,” they would sympathize with the strikers’ decision to stop work. To “the average magazine or newspaper reader,” however, the lives of those “who delve in the bowels of the earth; removed from the sight of their fellow-beings,” remained as darkly hidden as the work itself, while the hardships generated by their strike were too immediately apparent.

Some years earlier, Sam McClure had tried to expose the suffering of the industry’s workers, commissioning the realist author Stephen Crane to write a piece entitled “In the Depths of a Coal Mine.” Crane described a sinister system that brought children “yet at the spanking period” into the mines as breaker boys. There, they worked ten hours each day, separating out pieces of slate and other impurities from streams of coal speeding by on conveyor belts. Earning 55 cents a day, a breaker boy rarely set foot in a schoolhouse. His highest ambition was to rise to door-boy, then mule-boy, laborer, miner’s helper, and finally full-fledged miner. If he reached that zenith, having survived “the gas, the floods, the ‘squeezes’ of falling rocks, the cars shooting through little tunnels, the precarious elevators,” and the peculiar miner’s lung disease, he started “on the descent, going back to become a miner’s helper, then a mine laborer, now a door-boy; and when old and decrepit, he finally returns to the breaker where he started as a child.”

In most collieries, mining families were forced to rent their shacks from the company and buy their food, clothing, and supplies in the company store, invariably at higher costs than outside the compound. It was a proverbial saying that “children were brought into the world by the company doctor, lived in the company house or hut, were nurtured by the company store, baptized by the company parson, buried in a company coffin, and laid away in the company graveyard.” Since mine owners generally paid employees in company-printed scrip instead of cash, workers had little recourse but to pay the exorbitant prices the company demanded. Just such conditions led to the founding of the United Mine Workers Union in 1890.

The wave of consolidation that created trusts in steel, oil, and beef had produced a massive coal trust during this same period. The process of combination had begun when coal-carrying railroads began purchasing coal fields. Quickly, they utilized their control over freight rates to destroy independent coal operators, “reaping the reward” of monopolistic power over both production and transportation. While mine owners and operators of earlier eras had lived near the coal fields, gathering some understanding of the miners’ situation, the railroad presidents and financiers who now controlled the industry shared no personal connection with their workers. Skilled in high finance, they had little experience with labor unions and scant comprehension of public relations. In the months preceding the strike, the miners had agreed to accept a 5 percent wage increase, a raise which would have amounted to $3 million annually against the operators’ estimated profit of $75 million. The operators, represented by George Baer of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, flatly refused, confident that public opinion would drive the strikers back to work, crushing the union and Mitchell in the process.

The operators badly miscalculated; as the strike entered its fifth month, opinion had turned in favor of the miners, largely due to the contrasting public impressions of Mitchell and Baer. In early August 1902, Lincoln Steffens had drawn a profile of the compelling young UMW president for McClure’s. A telling anecdote in his article illustrated the near-mystical hold Mitchell exercised over the miners, many of them immigrants who barely spoke English: “When President McKinley was shot, and the news spread to the coal region, the workmen gathered into a mob, crying, ‘Who shot our President?’ They dispersed when they learned that it wasn’t President Mitchell who was shot.”

Subsequent coverage confirmed Mitchell’s stature with the workers and the public at large. “No better strike leader than John Mitchell has ever emerged in any time of industrial strife,” Walter Wellman remarked. Throughout the summer, Mitchell conducted himself with impressive dignity, never resorting “to bitterness or retort.” He allowed pump men and firemen to continue at work protecting the mines. He agreed to meet with anyone at any time to discuss potential areas of agreement, publicly declaring readiness to compromise.

Whereas Mitchell welcomed arbitration, George Baer refused even to meet with the labor leader and flatly denied Mitchell’s right to speak for the anthracite miners in the various collieries. To the wealthy, college-educated railroad president, Mitchell “was only a common coal-miner, who had worked with his hands for 15 years, and was now a labor agitator.” Any negotiation, Baer felt, would unduly recognize a mere rabble-rouser.

In response to a citizen’s plea for compromise, Baer wrote: “I beg of you not to be discouraged. The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country, and upon the successful Management of which so much depends.” When Baer’s correspondent submitted this rejoinder to the newspapers, the railroad president’s overweening arrogance was mocked in editorials across the country. “The doctrine of the divine right of kings was bad enough, but not so intolerable as the doctrine of the divine right of plutocrats,” remarked one Boston paper. “It will take a load from the consciences of many earnest people to have this authoritative declaration that God, through the kindness of the coal operators, will be able to manage this strike in accordance with the dictates of infinite wisdom,” jeered the New York Tribune. “But if the medium’s acquaintances really are spirits acquainted with the heavenly mysteries why, oh why, do they on earth talk such egregious nonsense?”

In the Northeast, where people suffered the effects of the strike most keenly, opinion began turning against the Republicans, whom many continued to regard as henchmen of the trusts despite Roosevelt’s bold action against Northern Securities. “The coal business here is getting rapidly worse,” Lodge wrote from Massachusetts. “If no settlement is reached it means political disaster in New England and especially in this state,” he warned. “The demand that the Government take the coal fields is rising louder all the time. It is a perilous cry. When the cold weather comes it will be far worse. You have no power or authority of course, that is the worst of it. Is there anything you can appear to do?” Roosevelt himself was increasingly frustrated. “I am at my wit’s end how to proceed,” he admitted. “Of course, we have nothing whatever to do with this coal strike and no earthly responsibility for it,” he wrote to Hanna. “But the public at large will tend to visit upon our heads responsibility for the shortage in coal precisely as Kansas and Nebraska visited upon our heads their failure to raise good crops in the arid belt, eight, ten or a dozen years ago.”

In discussions with Attorney General Knox, Roosevelt was told that he had “no warrant” to intervene. The Constitution provided no precedent for a president to mediate disputes between labor and management. He was warned “that he would almost certainly fail if he tried; and that he would injure his prestige and perhaps sacrifice his political future if he essayed to step outside the role of his constitutional duties.” Roosevelt would not be confined by precedent or bound by fear of failure. He held to what he called “the Jackson-Lincoln theory of the Presidency; that is, that occasionally great national crises arise which call for immediate and vigorous executive action, and that in such cases it is the duty of the President to act upon the theory that he is the steward of the people, and that the proper attitude for him to take is that he is bound to assume that he has the legal right to do whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.”

On October 1, 1902, he sent identical telegrams to the coal operators’ board of directors and to the union representative, John Mitchell. Both factions were invited to Washington to discuss “the failure of the coal supply, which has become a matter of vital concern to the whole nation.” This singular request from the president captivated newspapermen and magazine writers across the nation.

“For the first time in the history of the country,” Walter Wellman wrote, great corporate leaders and union leaders would join “the President of the United States to talk over their differences face-to-face.” The large crowd gathered in front of the temporary White House on Lafayette Square earlier that morning was increasing with each passing hour. Confidence spread that an end to the menacing coal strike was near at hand. Reporters eagerly followed the arrival of the parties, contrasting the “luxurious private cars” that carried the six coal operators to the nation’s capital with “the smoking car of a night train” that transported Mitchell and his three district presidents to Union Station, whereupon they “trudged down Pennsylvania Avenue, their grips in their hands, stopping at a cheap hotel.” Likewise, the elaborate carriages, staffed by footmen in “plum-colored livery,” that deposited the coal barons at Roosevelt’s door illustrated a sharp disparity with the common streetcars that bore the union representatives from their hotel. Nonetheless, once in the president’s presence, both parties met as equals.

Theodore Roosevelt greeted his guests warmly, explaining that he could not rise from his chair, for his leg was still healing after his recent carriage accident. As the gentlemen took their seats, the president opened the meeting with a graceful statement acknowledging the existence of“three parties affected by the situation in the anthracite trade—the operators, the miners, and the general public.” He spoke, he assured them, “for neither the operators nor the miners, but for the general public.” Rather than adjudicate “respective claims,” he would appeal to their shared “patriotism, to the spirit that sinks personal considerations and makes individual sacrifices for the general good.”

No sooner had the president finished than Mitchell “literally jumped to his feet.” In a voice “clear as a bell,” he reiterated his willingness to negotiate with the operators at any time. If they were unable to reach a resolution by themselves, he would willingly abide by the decision of an impartial tribunal that the president might appoint, even if the ruling denied the miners’ claims. Mitchell’s dramatic statement took both the operators and the president by surprise. “I had not expected such an offer as this,” Roosevelt admitted. Turning to the operators, he asked: “What have you gentlemen to say to this proposition?” After a swift consultation, President George Baer stood up. “We cannot agree to it. We cannot agree to any proposition advanced by Mr. Mitchell,” he emphatically asserted. “Very well,” said the president. “I shall ask you, then, to return at three o’clock and I wish you would present at that time your various positions in writing so we may discuss them.”

When they reconvened, tension in the room quickly escalated. Rather than engage in open discussion, the coal barons read a series of typewritten statements that accused the strikers of criminal behavior, including the murder of hundreds of non-union men willing to work the mines during the strike. “The duty of the hour is not to waste time negotiating with the fomenters of this anarchy,” Baer declared. Roosevelt was stunned by what he considered the “extraordinary stupidity and bad temper” of the operators, who “did everything in their power to goad and irritate Mitchell,” resorting to “insolent” words that were “insulting to the miners and offensive to me.” Roosevelt told Mark Hanna that after the operators belittled the union officials, “they insulted me for not preserving order” by sending federal troops to protect their property “and attacked Knox for not having brought suit against the miners’ union as violating the Sherman Antitrust Law.” Through it all, he marveled, “Mitchell behaved with great dignity and moderation.” Not one of the operators, he remarked, “appeared to such advantage as Mitchell,” who “towered above” them all. Roosevelt later admitted that after one operator referred to the union as “a set of outlaws,” he wanted to take him “by the seat of the breeches and nape of the neck and chuck him out of that window.” With great difficulty he managed to keep his anger in check.

Realizing that the operator’s high-handed belligerence would negate any direct negotiation, Roosevelt finally repeated Mitchell’s proposition that they submit the conflict to a presidential tribunal. Again they refused “to have any dealings of any nature with John Mitchell.” Roosevelt was intensely irritated by their stubborn disdain. “If this is the case,” he concluded, “I can see no necessity for detaining you gentlemen further.”

“Well, I have tried and failed,” Roosevelt told Mark Hanna. “I feel down-hearted over the result both because of the great misery made necessary for the mass of our people, and because the attitude of the operators will beyond a doubt double the burden on us who stand between them and socialistic action.” Worse still, when the coal barons provided an account of the failed conference to the press, they reveled “in the fact that they had ‘turned down’ both the miners and the President.”

The operators’ exultation was short-lived. Roosevelt had made arrangements for a stenographer to record the entire proceedings, and when the statements of both parties were released to the press, public opinion turned sharply against them. While a small number of papers endorsed the operators’ view that the public had no rights in the situation and insisted that Roosevelt’s “uncontrollable penchant for impulsive self-intrusion” had made “a sorry mess” of the negotiations, the majority held the coal barons totally responsible for the failed Washington conference and the continuing strike. Furthermore, their insolent defiance of the president did not compare favorably with Mitchell’s “respectful, placable, and patriotic spirit.”

Public condemnation of the operators’ intractable behavior fortified Roosevelt as he contemplated a more extreme step. With “ugly talk of a general sympathetic strike” beginning to spread, he considered the situation nothing short of “a state of war.” He warned Attorney General Knox and Secretary of War Root that he was considering an action that “would form an evil precedent” but felt “obliged to take it rather than expose our people to the suffering and chaos which would otherwise come.” Knox and Root were free to disavow the action he was contemplating, but he had made up his mind. He believed that the operators and their colleagues on Wall Street were “absolutely out of touch with the big world,” and the president could not remain idle as “misery and death” threatened masses of the American people.

His undisclosed strategy was to ready “a first-rate general” and 10,000 regular Army troops to enter the coal fields with instructions “to dispossess the operators and run the mines as a receiver” for the government until a settlement could be reached. He secured the agreement of his selected general, John M. Schofield, to pay “no heed to any authority, judicial or otherwise,” besides the president in his role as “Commander-in-Chief.” According to this stratagem, if “the operators went to court and had a writ served on him, he would do as was done under Lincoln, simply send the writ on to the President.” This intrepid plan illustrated one of Roosevelt’s favorite maxims: “Don’t hit till you have to; but, when you do hit, hit hard.”

Whether the president would have implemented this unorthodox design is not clear. “Theodore was a bit of a bluffer,” Elihu Root observed. But Mark Sullivan had discussed the measure with Roosevelt on a number of occasions and believed he was prepared to follow through: “The one condition Roosevelt’s spirit could not endure,” he remarked, “was any situation in which individuals or groups seemed able to defy or ignore the people as a whole and their representative in the White House.”

The question proved moot. Secretary Root devised a way to resolve the issue that would not humiliate the mine owners or require massive federal intervention. Certain that public opinion had finally convinced the coal barons to negotiate so long as they did not have to deal directly with union representatives, Root proposed that he travel to New York and meet with J. P. Morgan. If anyone could bring the operators to the table, he believed, it would be the original architect of the coal trust. Morgan’s financial genius had unified the railway owners and coalmen together in the gargantuan combination that now controlled 80 percent of the anthracite coal market. Root would make it clear that in speaking with Morgan, he acted independently, without instructions from the president. Roosevelt enthusiastically approved the plan.

Taking the midnight train to New York, Root met with Morgan for five hours on his yacht, the Corsair. Together, they composed a memorandum that Morgan carried to the Union Club, where the mine owners were holding a meeting. The memo called for the president to establish an Arbitration Commission, virtually identical to the proposition Mitchell and then Roosevelt had suggested at the Washington conference. In this instance, however, J. P. Morgan was advocating the measure—not John Mitchell—allowing the owners to maintain the fiction that they were not negotiating with representatives of organized labor. “It was a damned lie,” Root later said, but it opened the door to a settlement. To his credit, Morgan intervened at this critical juncture, for only eight months earlier he had considered Roosevelt’s suit against Northern Securities as a personal attack. The financier’s willingness to help the president “was one of the crowning moments of his life,” one journalist remarked, observing, “there was to be no littleness in this great hour.”

Despite this breakthrough, immediate difficulties emerged over the composition of the panel. The owners insisted that the Arbitration Commission be comprised of five members chosen from specific categories: an officer of the military or naval Engineer Corps, an expert mining engineer unconnected with coal, a Pennsylvania judge, a businessman familiar with mining and selling coal, and an eminent sociologist. Both Roosevelt and Mitchell immediately recognized the pointed absence of a labor representative in this configuration. After a series of hurried meetings with Morgan’s men, Bacon and Perkins, Roosevelt hit upon a solution. “Suddenly,” he recollected, “it dawned on me that they were not objecting to the thing, but to the name. I found they did not mind my appointing any man, whether he was a labor man or not, so long as he was not appointed asa labor man.” Roosevelt promptly appointed Edgar E. Clark, the head of the Brotherhood of Railway Train Conductors, to the “eminent sociologist” slot. While the owners “would heroically submit to anarchy rather than have Tweedledum,” Roosevelt noted with amusement, “yet if I would call it Tweedledee they would accept with rapture.”

Once the owners further agreed to expand the commission to include Bishop L. Spalding of Baltimore, Mitchell brought his miners back to work, peacefully concluding the nation’s most serious strike. For three months the commission heard complaints from both sides: the operators presented evidence that strikers had not only threatened but used violence to prevent willing miners from working; the miners spoke of the oppressive hardships of the industry. The Arbitration Commission ultimately awarded the miners a retroactive wage increase of 10 percent as well as a reduction in daily work hours, from ten to nine.

“The American people will not soon forget their debt to Mr. Roosevelt,” the Washington Post editorialized, proclaiming, “More glorious than winning a battle is this triumph of peace.” Both Republican and Democratic journals concurred that the strike “was won by popular sentiment, controlled by the people’s chief.” Acting as “the people’s attorney,” William Allen White summarized, Roosevelt had defined the public interest in the previously private struggle between labor and capital. Understanding that the laissez-faire philosophy retained a powerful appeal, he had patiently waited through five months of the strike until the “steady pressure of public opinion” accompanying the onset of cold weather created space for his unprecedented call to bring the two sides together. And after the failed conference, he wisely allowed outrage over its published transcript to build until the public was primed to sustain radical measures it would have roundly rejected but months earlier. Though he “was all ready to act” if final negotiations failed, Roosevelt was thrilled when a less disruptive solution prevailed. “It is never well to take drastic action,” he later commented, “if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion.”

Flush with victory, Roosevelt agreeably shared credit for the successful settlement. “My dear sir,” he addressed J. P. Morgan, “If it had not been for your going into the matter I do not see how the strike could have been settled at this time . . . I thank you and congratulate you with all my heart.” With the coal operators, Roosevelt was less generous. “May Heaven preserve me,” he told Bamie, “from ever again dealing with so wooden-headed a set.”

ROOSEVELT SPENT NOVEMBER 4, 1902, the day of the midterm elections, at Sagamore Hill. “Mother and I took a walk,” he told Kermit, “accompanied by all six dogs, whom we both of us feel are real members of the family.” And the election results that evening brought an invigorating day to a satisfying conclusion. In early October, when his risky intervention appeared “doomed to failure through the obduracy of the capitalists,” there was widespread conviction that “the new Congress would be overwhelmingly Democratic.” But Republicans had defied the midterm curse and retained control of both Houses of Congress. Commentators credited the president’s successful settlement of the coal strike with saving “many thousands of votes.”

Returning to Washington after the midterms, the president was finally able to move back into the renovated White House. All summer long, Edith had worked with the architects, attending to “a steady stream of little problems”—sorting through “fabric swatches by the dozen, samples of wallpaper, and samples of rugs,” selecting sofas, tables, and curtains, poring over detailed plans for every bedroom and bath, designing a garden for the children and a tennis court for her husband. The renovations garnered widespread praise. “If Roosevelt had never done anything else,” a Washington insider remarked, “the metamorphosis of the White House from a gilded barn to a comfortable residence that he has accomplished would entitle him to his country’s gratitude.”

Roosevelt credited Edith’s perseverance and instinct for tasteful comfort. A girlhood marked by relocation from one temporary abode to another as her father’s resources diminished had shaped what one historian shrewdly identifies as a “remarkable coping mechanism,” an ability “to make a home on short notice, then pick up her tent and start again.” She had reappointed the executive mansion with the same aptitude and flair that had once transformed their tiny rented town house in Washington and the cavernous governor’s mansion in Albany.

Edith never sought recognition for her work. “She is an old-fashioned type of woman who feels that no lady should make herself conspicuous,” her secretary Isabella Hagner James explained. “By nature and inclination she should probably have had a life of sheltered seclusion,” Hagner James later observed in her memoir, but when devotion to her husband necessitated a public presence, “never did a woman carry herself with more gentle dignity and charm.” She was “at home” for the cabinet officers’ wives every Tuesday morning in the library, entertained hundreds of governmental officials at afternoon teas, and hosted formal dinner parties with uncommon grace. As Jacob Riis understood, however, “the chief end of her life” lay not in her public duties but in “companionship with husband and children.”

The president deserved credit for at least one aspect of the new West Wing building. “For the first time in history,” reporters gratefully noted, the president had “set apart a room adjoining his own office for the exclusive use of the press.” Formerly crowded together at one end of the general waiting room, journalists now enjoyed immediate access to the president and a room furnished with a large oak table, chairs, and telephones. “The public man who now escapes an interview will have to be a sprinter,” one journalist happily remarked.

Taking stock of his first fifteen months in office, Roosevelt told Maria Longworth Storer in early December that he had achieved as much as he “had any right to hope or expect.” Though occasionally forced to subordinate his own desires to what was possible “under the given conditions,” he found comfort in the knowledge that Abraham Lincoln had often done the same.

With each passing month, the president’s hold on the American people grew stronger. “It is very curious,” Roosevelt told his newspaper friend Joseph Bucklin Bishop, “ever since I have been in the Presidency I have been pictured constantly as a huge creature with enormous clenched teeth, a big spiked club, and a belt full of pistols—a blustering, roaring swashbuckler type of ruffian, and yet all the time I have been growing in popularity. I don’t understand it at all.” To Bishop, the reason was perfectly clear: “All the cartoonists at heart liked him, and there was seldom or never anything bitter or really unfriendly in their portrayals of him; they were uniformly good-natured.”

Caricatures even transformed his failure during a mid-November bear hunt into a triumph, conjuring an image of the president steadfastly refusing to shoot a small bear furnished for the occasion. As renditions of the original Clifford Berryman cartoon proliferated, the bear dwindled in size until he appeared as a tiny cub, prompting toy store owners to market stuffed bears in honor of Teddy Roosevelt. Soon the Teddy bear became one of the most cherished toys of all time.

Roosevelt’s burgeoning public favor augured well for the 1904 presidential race, although no vice president had ever been elected in his own right after succeeding to the presidency as a consequence of his predecessor’s death. “I’d rather be elected to that office than have anything tangible of which I know,” he avowed. Nevertheless, he continued to fear that the Republican establishment would prevent his nomination. “They don’t want it,” he flatly stated, “Hanna and that crowd.” Indeed, each time he riled business interests—as with his anti-trust suit or intervention in the coal strike—Hanna’s name invariably arose. “I do not think Mr. Roosevelt can win,” Alabama senator John Morgan predicted in late November. “I do not believe the wiser heads of the Republican Party want him as the nominee. The trouble is they cannot keep him where they can rely on him. Every now and then he bucks and runs off. They have to lasso him and haul him back.” Newspapers reported that “the monied interests” were determined to prevent his election, even if it meant contributing “liberally” to the opposition party.

Delegations pledged to Mark Hanna were considered especially likely in the South, where Roosevelt’s quiet attempt to include blacks in party councils had stirred fierce opposition. In addition, southern Republicans had never forgiven Roosevelt for the unprecedented dinner invitation extended the previous fall to the black educator Booker T. Washington. At the time, the vehement reaction in the South had stunned and saddened Roosevelt. Newspaper editorials throughout the region decried the president’s attempt to make a black man the social equal of a white man by sharing the same dinner table. “Social equality with the Negro means decadence and damnation,” announced one southern official. “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place,” declared South Carolina’s Ben Tillman. For disaffected Republicans in both North and South, Mark Hanna promised deliverance from Roosevelt’s wrongheadedness.

All these factors weighed on the president’s mind as he prepared his second annual address. Delivered on December 2, 1902, the message reiterated his call for Congress to create a Department of Commerce with broad powers of supervision over the big corporations. The tone of his message, “not nearly so strong as it was expected to be,” proved a great disappointment to reformers. “The plain people,” Roosevelt insisted, “are better off than they have ever been before.” The majority of the great fortunes were “won not by doing evil, but as an incident to action which has benefited the community as a whole.” Although abuse and misconduct were undeniable, he urged, “let us not in fixing our gaze upon the lesser evil forget the greater good.” Those who sought removal of the protective tariff “as a punitive measure directed against the trusts,” he argued, put the entire nation’s productivity in jeopardy.

“It appears that the vested interests of the country have succeeded in scaring the President,” one Washington correspondent asserted, “preventing him from expressing in his usual forcible style his convictions.” The Cincinnati Enquirer deemed it “a very lame message for a president who is chiefly celebrated for his strenuosity,” and further lamented that it read “like a surrender to the party leaders who control the senate and house.” Other commentators were equally unimpressed. “A milk and water communication,” charged the Indiana Democrat, “from a man whose chief aim is the presidential nomination two years hence.”

Even the more moderate reviews were not optimistic that Roosevelt’s message heralded any fundamental progress. “We are bound to believe that Mr. Roosevelt’s heart is in his policy of regulating the trusts, yet even here he is singularly vague and inconclusive,” editorialized the New York Evening Post, predicting that “the result of such an uncertain trumpet can not lead to any serious preparation for battle.”

IN THE CLAMOR FOLLOWING THE president’s message, few perceived that Roosevelt’s ideals were always moderated by his pragmatism. Until the Republican establishment felt threatened by an aroused and targeted public opinion, he knew there was little chance of securing legislation to regulate the trusts. His tepid message revealed a conviction that popular outrage was not yet sufficient to threaten the Big Four, those powerful senators who continued to block his path to significant reform.

More than any president since Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt was able to shrewdly calculate popular sentiment. He read daily excerpts from scores of newspapers, probed the eclectic assemblage of visitors and guests frequenting the White House, and tested his ideas on reporters. Over time, he developed an uncanny ability to gauge the changeable pulse of the American public. His experience in bringing the suit against Northern Securities and mediating the Pennsylvania coal strike had evinced the signal role that the press could play in rallying the public support essential to achieve substantial reform—just as Ray Baker’s series on J. P. Morgan’s “monarchical powers” and Stephen Crane’s description of the inhumane, abusive practices of the coal barons had proven pivotal in alerting the public to the menace of increasingly concentrated monopolies.

In order to aggressively pursue redress for the abuses and inequity of the industrial age, the president would need to ride a seismic shift in national consciousness. He would need an instrument capable of reaching into the homes of workers, teachers, shopkeepers, and small business people across the country—an instrument that would not just explain but vividly illustrate the human and economic costs of unchecked industrial growth and combination. The complex and sometimes contentious partnerships that Roosevelt had forged with investigative journalists would soon illuminate corruption, as if by heat lightning, and clarify at last a progressive vision for the entire nation.