Roosevelt’s looming visage frightens the U.S. Senate in a Feb. 7, 1906, cartoon from Puck, entitled “The Latest Thing in Nightmares.”
INCREASINGLY FRUSTRATED IN THE WINTER of 1905 by the bickering in Washington and the rancor within his own party, Theodore Roosevelt ranted to a friend that “there are several eminent statesmen at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue whom I would gladly lend to the Russian Government, if they cared to expend them as bodyguards for grand dukes whenever there was a likelihood of dynamite bombs being exploded!” His sardonic suggestion targeted the coterie of conservative Republican senators who opposed his signature plan to regulate the railroads.
The cost to both his party and the country would be immense, he believed, if “the people at large” perceived “that the Republican party had become unduly subservient to the so-called Wall Street men—to the men of mere wealth, the plutocracy.” It would result in “a dreadful calamity,” Roosevelt told a conservative friend, to see the nation “divided into two parties, one containing the bulk of the property owners and conservative people, the other the bulk of the wageworkers and the less prosperous people generally; each party insisting upon demanding much that was wrong, and each party sullen and angered by real and fancied grievances.”
In the struggle to avert this calamitous future, nothing was more essential, Roosevelt believed, than railroad regulation. His first address to Congress following his election victory had indicated his belief in the primacy of the issue. “Above all else,” he declared, “we must strive to keep the highways of commerce open to all on equal terms.” The most critical piece of legislation the country needed was an act to give the Interstate Commerce Commission the power to regulate railroad rates that gave an “unreasonable” advantage to the trusts.
As the battle lines formed that winter, S. S. McClure decided that the magazine’s next series would concentrate on the railroads. His staff had already concluded that many of the country’s gravest problems, from state and municipal corruption to the ascendancy of the trusts, could be traced to the railroads. Whereas earlier modes of transportation (the wagon roads and waterways) had been available to all on an equal basis, a small circle of private owners now controlled the transportation network essential to all commerce. This exclusive circle could effectively determine the fortunes of cities, towns, and companies, the futures of entire industries. Both the Grangers and the Populists had called for governmental regulation of the railroads, but despite the passage of the 1903 Elkins Act, the industry had remained essentially unregulated.
Ida Tarbell’s study of Standard Oil had convinced her that Rockefeller had employed discriminatory freight rates as the primary instrument in his campaign to crush independent competitors. “Until the transportation problem is settled and settled right,” she warned, “the monopolistic trust will be with us, a leech on our pockets, a barrier to our free effort.” Steffens, too, had discovered that in every city and state he had explored, “the story was always the same”: corruption “came from the top”—from the men who owned streetcar lines in the cities and railroads in the states. New Jersey’s dominant railroad had “seized the government,” and the Southern Pacific Railroad had become “the actual sovereign” of California. Like his colleagues, Baker’s own countrywide investigations had persuaded him that “the Railroad problem is pretty nearly the basic problem of our life: and we know little or nothing about it!”
Having completed his labor series, and “eager for more dragons to slay,” Ray Baker was thrilled to be chosen for the assignment. By supplying “the real facts,” the nation’s reporters could shape that essential discussion. The journalist, he passionately believed, is the “true servant of democracy.” This new project on the railroads, he told his father, would be “far more important than anything [he had] ever done.” Baker started by examining everything he could gather on the subject—pamphlets, congressional reports, local investigations, scholarly studies, and court testimonies. He read accounts of La Follette’s titanic fight against the railroads in Wisconsin and sought guidance from experts on the railroad industry.
Upon learning that Baker had begun his investigation, Roosevelt invited him to Washington. Baker promptly replied that he hoped to take up the railroad problem “in some big, important, and impressive way.” On January 28, 1905, Baker joined the president for a “simple and most informal” family lunch, after which the two men engaged in a private conversation. By this time, Baker had gained “a pretty good grip on the railway problem” and shared with the president a detailed outline of his planned series. Central was the argument that railroads were public highways that must be accessible to all on fair and equal terms. They should no longer enjoy peculiar charter rights from the government—including the right of eminent domain and the right to charge tolls.
For his part, Roosevelt was confident he could steer a bill through the House, where the members felt the direct pressure of growing agitation against the railroads. “His chief trouble,” he told Baker, would be the Senate, where members were sent by the state legislatures and many owed their seats to corporate interests. His best chance lay in mobilizing the public so that the Senate could no longer refuse to act. Nevertheless, he urged the reporter to be fair; an analysis couched in demagogic rhetoric would not be trusted. “My job is not to assess blame on anyone,” Baker countered. “I am trying to get at the facts and report them as truthfully as I can.”
“It was altogether the most interesting meeting & talk with him that I ever had,” Baker told his father. “I think he likes to get these things first hand.” The president had asked Baker “to consult” with him often during the course of his research, promising to enable the magazine’s effort to clarify the complex problem for the general public. “Facilities have been given me here as never before,” Baker proudly noted, “the Inter State Commerce people even offering me a desk & stenographer, with full admission to all their published documents & letters. It certainly shows how . . . a greater care for truth & fairness, which I have tried to attain in my articles, gets hold of people.”
Two days after meeting with Baker, Roosevelt began his own campaign for railroad regulation with a major speech before the Union League Club in Philadelphia. “Neither this people nor any other free people,” he declared, “will permanently tolerate the use of the vast power conferred by vast wealth, and especially by wealth in its corporate form, without lodging somewhere in the government the still higher power of seeing that this power, in addition to being used in the interest of the individual or individuals possessing it, is also used for and not against the interests of the people as a whole.” Calling again for a public tribunal with “power over rates,” he argued once more that only the national government could “keep the great highways of commerce open alike to all on reasonable and equitable terms.”
The next day, Roosevelt met with Baker for another luncheon discussion. He admonished the journalist once again to beware of demagogues, emphasizing that the web of corruption linking politicians and corporations was “due quite as much to the blackmailing demands of legislators as to the offered bribes of businessmen.” That evening, Baker wrote a long passage in his notebook enumerating the obstacles to passing desperately needed railroad regulation. While it was certainly possible that some legislators were paid by corporations to oppose unwanted bills, the congressional failure to address the disease was more complex. In recent years, the country had witnessed “an enormous industrial development,” marked by the growth of “railroads, trusts & inventions.” Although these unprecedented changes required new thinking about the relationship of business and government, Baker reasoned, a “legislative lag” clearly existed. Laws generated fifty years earlier, rooted in laissez-faire philosophy, remained on the books. “Once let an idea really penetrate the mind of a people,” as this ethic of non-interference in private enterprise had done, and it would require a massive educational effort to remove it. If he and his fellow journalists could enable the public to re-envision the role of government, Baker noted, there would be “no further difficulty in regulating the trusts & the railroads.”
Yet encouraging a new way of thinking demanded time and hard work, and Baker was still in the early phase of his research when Congress took up the question of railroad regulation during its short session in the winter of 1905. An administration-backed bill granting the ICC power to regulate railroad rates passed the House, but the Senate deliberately scheduled its hearings after Congress had adjourned on March 3, ending any chance for the legislation to pass. Assessing his defeat, Roosevelt concluded that his influence had been stunted: once he relinquished the chance to run for a third term, the opposition concluded he “need not be regarded as a factor hereafter.” Still, he believed that if the necessity for regulation could be “clearly drawn” in the months ahead, the Senate would eventually bow to public feeling.
Sentiment did indeed begin to shift, but not in the direction Roosevelt desired. Troubled by the passage of the regulatory bill in the House, the railroads launched a sweeping propaganda campaign to turn the country against regulation. Lengthy hearings before the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee provided the opening salvo. Organized by senators sympathetic to the railroads, the six-week proceeding featured a witness list stacked to thwart regulatory efforts. Over two thirds of the witnesses, one reporter from Utah noted, “were either friendly toward or in fear of the railroads and testified accordingly.” One after another, railroad executives argued that Roosevelt’s bill was misguided at best and unconstitutional at worst. They pointed out “how delicate and difficult a task it was to adjust a freight-rate, how it required long practical experience,” intimating that disaster would follow if the government “should meddle” in the complex business. “Any tinkering with rates would raise Cain with stocks,” one railway head warned. “It would mean a general unsettling of affairs.”
Forced to travel to Washington at their own expense, the few witnesses who spoke in favor of regulation were mocked and labeled as agitators. Railroad king James J. Hill likened the commotion over regulation to “an attack of ‘pink-eye’ or the grippe,” which would eventually run its course. Members of the Senate committee did nothing to stop such belittling attacks. Congressmen who had voted for Roosevelt’s bill in the House were blacklisted from receiving any further free passes. Not surprisingly, newspapermen attending the hearings were influenced by the strength of the opposition, and the national coverage soon turned sharply negative. A prominent Republican senator claimed that the president was looking for a way out, that he had finally realized his ill-considered foray into this arena might “throw the country into a panic.”
To counter rumors that he had ceded the possibility of reform, Roosevelt dispatched Taft to a conference of three hundred railway executives meeting at the Willard Hotel. Vehemently reinforcing the administration’s commitment to regulation, Taft spoke of the certain advent of railway rate legislation, warning that “if the railway men of the country were wise they would aid and not hinder it.” The industry must recognize, he insisted, “that railroads are a public institution—an institution which must be regulated by law. You cannot run the railroads as you would run a private business. You must respond to the public demand.”
Taft’s words were greeted with “absolute silence,” until Stuyvesant Fish, president of the Railway Congress, jumped to his feet and exhaustively countered Taft’s arguments. The laws already on the books were sufficient to deal with any difficulties, he declared, arguing that the action proposed would cause more harm than good. When he took his seat amid great applause, Taft respectfully asked: “May I have fifteen minutes to reply?” His rebuttal rendered an even more forceful defense of the necessity for a tribunal with powers to revise unfair rates. Taft’s words, “driven directly into the ears of the men who are most determined that there shall be no railroad legislation,” created “a sensation.” Observers understood that the secretary’s address “had been carefully prepared, and prepared with the intention of causing exactly the impression that was caused.”
The following day, Roosevelt endorsed Taft’s speech by flatly stating that his own stance on the subject of the railroads “could not have been better expressed.” Railroad magnates needed to understand that it was “essential, in the interests of the public,” that the government assume a regulatory power over them. Furthermore, he vowed that if this power were awarded, it would be exercised with justice to both the captains of industry and the American people. Roosevelt repeatedly stressed that “the spirit of demagoguery” must not dictate legislative policy. “If we attack unjustly the proper rights of others because they are wealthy,” he was careful to maintain, “we shall do ourselves just as much damage as if we permitted an attack upon those who are poor, because they are poor.” He recognized that “the rock of class hatred” was “the greatest and most dangerous rock in the course of any republic.” But the time for action had come. If Congress refused to advance the administration’s moderate proposal, more radical demands would inevitably gain momentum.
Convinced now of the president’s resolve, editorials predicted “a fight to the finish between the railroads and the administration.” Nonetheless, The Washington Post reported, “an impression prevailed during the summer that the railroad interests were making such a campaign . . . that there was very grave doubt of any legislation of that character passing in the coming Congress.”
BY SUMMER’S END, BAKER HAD completed his research and commenced writing a six-part, 50,000-word series, entitled “The Railroads on Trial.” To herald the upcoming articles, McClure published a lengthy editorial announcement claiming that “the vitality of democracy” depended on “popular knowledge of complex questions.” With regulatory legislation that would impact the entire nation under debate in Congress, the public needed to understand how railroads determined differential rates, whether they conspired to stifle competition, how goods were classified, and how private cars and midnight tariffs operated. The American people, not economists and sociologists, would ultimately have to assess whether a few great men, “like the barons of old,” had become “more powerful than the sovereign himself.”
Mindful of the president’s earlier request to look over his railroad articles before publication, Baker wrote in early September to ask if Roosevelt still wanted to review his first installment, scheduled to appear in the November issue. “Yes, I should greatly like to see the proof,” Roosevelt assured him the very next day. “I have learned to look to your articles for real help. You have impressed me with your earnest desire to be fair, with your freedom from hysteria and with your anxiety to tell the truth.” Baker later recalled his trepidation after sending off the piece, aware that the president’s “approval might be the measure of the usefulness of the entire series [he] had planned.” If Roosevelt found his arguments compelling, Baker could employ “the incomparable sounding board of the White House” in his endeavor to educate the public. Five days later, Baker was elated and much relieved by Roosevelt’s response: “I haven’t a criticism to suggest.” Indeed, the president graciously acknowledged, “you have given me two or three thoughts for my own message.”
In clear, powerful language, Baker explained how, despite the Elkins Act that barred cash rebates, the railroads still managed to build in special rates. They had devised a schedule that favored products carried by the trusts through clever classification of goods and commodities. “In the early days of the Railroad,” Baker pointed out, “the Rate was fixed exactly as it was on a turnpike—a regular toll, for so many miles, so much of a charge.” As railroads had begun to consolidate, however, the small circle of controlling owners adopted the principle of “charging what the traffic will bear,” providing preferential treatment to the trusts while forcing exorbitant rates on small shippers. When great clients like the Armours, the Rockefellers, or the Morgans desired special privileges, they were easily arranged—given that such families generally sat on the boards of these very same railroads.
Although “the fundamental purpose of all law,” Baker argued, “is to do justice between strong and weak, between large and small,” the railroads and the trusts had conspired “to build up and enforce the old favoritism to the strong.” For the first time, Baker boldly suggested that railroad rates had become the fulcrum of a new political contest that set “a progressive party seeking to give the government more power in business affairs” against “a conservative party striving to retain all the power possible in private hands.”
In thanking the president for reviewing his proofs, Baker took the occasion to warn him that the mood in the Midwest had become highly volatile; failure to pass regulatory legislation, he predicted, would foment “violent agitation” and calls for radical action. “The country was never at a more critical point in its career,” the reporter observed, nor had it “ever had a better opportunity of handling its problem correctly. I wish, Mr. President—and you will pardon my freedom—that there were a Taft for the Bureau of Commerce and Labor. To my thinking there is no more important place now in the gift of government.”
A few weeks later, Baker was amazed to receive a letter from the president, containing a “strictly confidential” partial draft from his annual message dealing with the corporations. “Will you give me any comments,” Roosevelt asked, “which your experiences teach you ought to be made thereon?” In eight weeks, the president would deliver his State of the Union speech, and Baker reflected solemnly upon “the seriousness of the responsibility” granted to him. “I knew perfectly well how little I really knew about the complicated problems involved in the new legislation,” he later wrote; “but then, who was there at that time who did?”
The reporter carefully weighed Roosevelt’s language. Heartened by the president’s willingness to make railroad regulation his first priority, he found the tone of the draft message disappointing: “It was too general, there was too much of the President’s favorite balancing of good and evil.” Baker applauded Roosevelt’s drive to empower the Interstate Commerce Commission to revise the disputed freight rates but deplored his proposal to limit the Commission’s authority to merely prescribing a maximum rate limit. “I was terribly afraid that he was plumping for a solution that, while it might help a little, and look good politically, would fail to reach the heart of the matter,” Baker recalled.
The research for Baker’s second article, which detailed all manner of new rebate chicanery, had convinced him that the trusts didn’t care what the rate was, so long as they enjoyed a better rate than everyone else. The differential provided their advantage and allowed them to crush their competitors. Beyond their clever freight classification schemes, railroads had implemented a host of “cunning devices”—including private cars, refrigerator charges, elevator allowances, underweighing of freight, and variable tariffs. Such measures were specifically designed to lower rates for the great shippers in beef, oil, and steel while raising them “for the farmer, the small struggling manufacturers and shippers.” Believing he had gained a comprehensive understanding of the railroad conspiracy, Baker felt compelled to tell the president plainly that his approach was misguided.
“I have asked myself over and over,” Baker wrote to Roosevelt on November 11, expressing his doubts “whether the power to fix a maximum rate, which you suggest, will touch this specific case of injustice.” He had determined that it would not. The “evil power” of the trusts, he explained, lay in their ability to compel the railroads to give them a lower rate than everyone else. The problem therefore was “not a maximum rate but a minimum rate.” The only solution was to allow the governmental tribunal to “fix a definite rate.”
Roosevelt replied immediately, agreeing that “it would be better if the Commission had the power to fix a definite instead of a maximum rate.” His attorney general had warned him, however, that fixing a definite rate might be unconstitutional. While the maximum rate might not alleviate all problems, he concluded, “we should have first a law that is surely constitutional.” Baker persisted, reiterating in a second letter that merely limiting the maximum rate would not mitigate the terrible inequity in the entire system. “Is there not, then, some practical way,” he entreated, “for reaching the real abuse?” Quoting the abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s remark on historic reforms, Baker challenged the president’s objection: “If they do not succeed with the Constitution, then they must succeed without it.”
There followed “a long and rather heated correspondence” between the two men, spurred by a four-page letter from the president. “I think you are entirely mistaken in your depreciation of what is accomplished by fixing a maximum rate,” Roosevelt declared, arguing that “the insistence upon having only the perfect cure often results in securing no betterment whatever.” Furthermore, he added, “the railroads have been crazy in their hostility to my maximum rate proposition, and evidently do not share in the least your belief that nothing will result from it.” In additional exchanges, Roosevelt branded Baker’s continued fear that the proposed measure would prove insufficient “simply absurd.” He ended the correspondence with a reminder that “it was Lincoln, not Wendell Phillips and the fanatical abolitionists, who was the effective champion of union and freedom.” Confronted by Roosevelt’s strident tone, Baker was certain that his “suggestion would come to nothing.”
“What was my surprise,” Baker later recalled, “when I read the message in its final form as delivered to Congress, to find that the President had inserted a paragraph, almost in my own words, regarding the regulation of minimum rates.” After calling upon Congress to grant an impartial tribunal authority to set “a maximum reasonable rate” when an existing rate was deemed “unreasonable and unjust,” Roosevelt laid out a far more comprehensive proposal: “It sometimes happens at present not that a rate is too high but that a favored shipper is given too low a rate. In such cases the commission would have the right to fix this already established minimum rate as the maximum; and it would need only one or two such decisions by the commission to cure railroad companies of the practice of giving improper minimum rates.” Finally, he urged Congress to grant the ICC supervision of private-car lines, elevator allowances, refrigerator charges, and industrial roads—all the devices Baker had exposed as subtle mechanisms of discrimination.
ON JANUARY 4, 1906, COLONEL William Hepburn, chairman of the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, reported the administration-backed railroad bill to the floor of the House. As Roosevelt had outlined in his annual message, the bill gave the ICC the authority to determine a “just and reasonable” maximum for disputed rates. Though it was essentially a moderate bill, it nonetheless challenged “the most hoary tenet of free private enterprise”—the right to independently set prices according to supply and demand.
While Speaker Joseph Cannon could have easily exercised his absolute control over House procedure to prevent the bill from reaching the floor, he had allowed it to move forward. In exchange, the president had agreed to preserve the protective tariff—an issue the Old Guard considered even more vital than railroad regulation. Popular resentment toward the railroads was such that once the bill reached the floor, the outcome was clear. The overwhelming vote to pass the Hepburn bill on February 8 “was in many ways the most spectacular piece of politics ever witnessed at the Capitol,” The Washington Post remarked, noting that a bill vitally affecting over $15 billion of property had passed “without the addition of a single amendment.”
The following day, Roosevelt invited Ray Baker to join him during his afternoon shave. Baker professed his belief that “this railroad legislation was the most important of the President’s administration” but “only a first step” toward broader reform. His investigations throughout the West had convinced the journalist that the public was moving beyond the president’s position, even pushing for “governmental ownership of the railroad.” Roosevelt vehemently disagreed, twisting so abruptly toward Baker that the barber had to flinch quickly to avoid cutting the president’s chin. “I do not represent public opinion: I represent the public,” Roosevelt passionately countered, insisting, “I must represent not the excited opinion of the West but the real interests of the whole people.” Those interests would be ill served, he curtly rejoined, by turning the operation of the railroads over to government employees, for “he knew better than anyone else could how inefficient & undependable” they were. The Hepburn bill, Roosevelt insisted, would address most of the problems. Rather than speculate on future steps, he must focus on the U.S. Senate, where he faced perhaps the climactic struggle of his administration.
A battle royal was predicted between the president and the conservative senators, led by Nelson Aldrich. Public pressure precluded an outright assault on the bill, yet Aldrich and his colleagues remained confident that they could produce a final bill “so whittled down” by amendments “as to be practically worthless.” Roosevelt was clearly prepared for such tactics: “They are making every effort to have some seemingly innocent amendment put in,” he explained to Kermit, “which shall destroy something of what I am endeavoring to accomplish.”
To forestall these inevitable efforts to gut the bill, Roosevelt declared unequivocally that he wished the Senate to pass the Hepburn bill without amendments. His statement produced “great indignation among the conservative senators.” The chief executive, they insisted, had no business meddling in their deliberations. His presumptuous intervention showed a woeful disregard of the Senate’s historic role “as a check upon the half-baked and demagogic bills passed by the lower house.”
Roosevelt’s push to get the bill unamended through the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee rested on the leadership of Iowa’s junior senator, Jonathan Dolliver. A young progressive, Dolliver worked doggedly to produce a majority vote and deliver what would become the Dolliver/Hepburn bill to the floor. Of the eight Republicans, he won the support of three—all from the West where agitation for railroad control was most intense. Combined with five Democrats who had long favored regulatory control, they formed the slim majority Dolliver needed to bring the bill to the floor.
Conceding that he had lost in committee, Aldrich deftly contrived a deal with the Democrats: He would give Benjamin Tillman, the ranking Democrat from South Carolina, the honor of leading the fight on the floor in Dolliver’s place. In turn, Democrats agreed to report the unamended bill “without prejudice,” thereby allowing amendments to be freely offered during debate on the floor. This gambit astonished even the most seasoned journalists. The fact that Roosevelt’s “most outspoken opponent” was “put in charge of the administration’s pet measure,” one Ohio paper remarked, was “considered so audacious a piece of irony that it has made the country gasp.” Fully aware that Republicans controlled nearly two thirds of the Senate, Tillman himself “scarcely had time to pinch himself to see if he were really awake.”
The loyal Dolliver, who had justifiably assumed he would lead the fight, was humiliated. Worse still, the president confronted a truly awkward dilemma. During Roosevelt’s first term, the hot-tempered, foul-mouthed, and slovenly Tillman, known as “Pitchfork Ben,” had engaged in a fistfight with a colleague on the Senate floor. In the aftermath, Roosevelt had publicly withdrawn Tillman’s invitation to a state dinner, incurring the senator’s abiding animosity. The two men had not spoken since. Aldrich calculated that with the irascible Tillman as floor leader, Roosevelt’s influence on the legislative process would be severely diminished. The press agreed. Roosevelt now suffered the indignity, declared the Charleston (South Carolina) News and Courier, of seeing his signal legislation “confided to the care of a man who is not only not of his own party, but one who entertains a personal antagonism toward him.” The president’s “old enemies” in the Republican Party, the Indianapolis News observed, seemed determined not only to defeat his legislation but also to “show at the same time that the President is not after all a formidable figure.”
In the following weeks, pro-railroad Republicans took to the floor, proposing a range of amendments designed to shatter the commission’s authority. They were particularly intent upon a provision granting the courts broad power to relitigate the commission’s revised rates, essentially leaving the pro-railroad judiciary as the true arbiter of rates.
Roosevelt nevertheless remained hopeful that the Hepburn bill would emerge intact, trusting that “public opinion may be relied upon to keep the Senate straight.” By the spring of 1906, public outrage over the railroads had indeed reached a crescendo. Hundreds of magazines and newspapers followed every aspect of the debate, clearly outlining what was at stake. These publications, one editorialist observed, were “never better,” and “never more influential,” than in their joint effort to foster an informed public opinion “compounded of knowledge, discrimination and judgment.”
In March, Baker published the most consequential piece in his railroad series, an exposé of the techniques the railroads employed to malign and falsify the Hepburn bill. Acknowledging the right of the railroads, “in common with all other citizens, to present facts and arguments to the people,” Baker proceeded to reveal the multifarious devices of the railroads’ lavishly funded propaganda campaign. A team of agents determined whether newspaper editors were “good” or “bad” on the issue of the railroads, then distributed free passes to those adjudged favorably inclined, while subjecting those deemed unfriendly to underhanded personal attacks. In one instance, a former city newspaperman was hired to write a pamphlet posing as a representative of farmers against regulation. In another scheme, small newspapers were supplied with free reading supplements seeded with attacks on Roosevelt’s railroad legislation. Subsidized pamphlets spread the rumor that if railroad discriminations were outlawed, separate Jim Crow cars for Negroes would be forbidden. If all such “ordinary devices” to co-opt the press failed, then the railroads purchased newspapers outright.
Baker’s description of this onslaught of covert railroad propaganda acquainted more than half a million men and women with the true methods of the anti-regulatory campaign. “It is a little startling,” one magazine editorialized, “to read how the railroad combines first to rob the country of millions, and then to use a portion of this fund stolen from the people to corrupt the sources of information and thus try to perpetuate their robbery through a blinded public opinion.” New subscriptions and letters commending Baker poured in to McClure’s. A Mississippi farmer wrote that“after plowing all day,” he and his boys had read the entire piece aloud. If he had the funds, he told Baker, he would send a copy to every family in the country. “Every member of Congress,” he added, “should have a chance to read this able presentation of the question between the people and the railroads.” One Wisconsin resident telegraphed McClure’s that he considered Baker’s article “worth all the publication will cost me for the next ten years.” The sensational article heightened public demand for regulation, much as the publication of the Standard Oil telegrams had done during the battle over the Bureau of Corporations.
To the dismay of Senator Aldrich, who had counted on Roosevelt’s pride to prevent any overture to the man he loathed, the president soon made it clear that he “was of course entirely willing to see Mr. Tillman personally,” or meet with any other party empowered to act on Tillman’s behalf. “I did not care a rap about Mr. Tillman’s getting credit for the bill, or having charge of it,” he later recalled. “I was delighted to go with him or with anyone else just so long as he was traveling my way.” Still unwilling to set foot in the White House, Tillman asked former senator William E. Chandler to serve as intermediary.
After a series of White House sessions with Chandler, Roosevelt agreed to support a Tillman-endorsed amendment that limited judicial review to a simple determination of whether the commission’s rate revision procedures were fair. By moving “to the left of his original position,” the president hoped to fashion a majority comprising both Republican progressives and Democratic populists. “The fight on the rate bill is growing hot,” Roosevelt told Kermit, explaining his ongoing efforts to save it: “I am now trying to see if I cannot get it through in the form I want by the aid of some fifteen or twenty Republicans added to most of the Democrats.”
“As for Tillman,” William Allen White wrote in the Emporia Gazette, “no member of the President’s own party could have pressed the bill more vigorously at all times. He demanded that all other state business be stopped until a rate bill was passed, and he kept the senate an hour earlier and an hour later than it was accustomed to sit.” Handed the greatest responsibility of his career, Benjamin Tillman had determined, he said, to “pocket my pride and lay aside my just indignation” in order to aid the president in securing “a good railroad law.” No better illustration of “the mysterious ways of Providence and politics” could be found, The Washington Post commented, than the alliance of “the pitchfork and the big stick.”
Roosevelt would gladly have signed Tillman’s more radical revision of the Hepburn bill if his new coalition of progressive Republicans and Democrats had produced sufficient numbers to override the conservative Republican bloc. But in the end, a number of southern senators balked, deeming the bill a violation of states’ rights, and Tillman could not deliver enough Democratic votes to make it work. Roosevelt was left with no choice but to revert to the original Hepburn bill, which had simply assumed the constitutional guarantee of due process. Despite such setbacks, Roosevelt remained satisfied with this formulation. “The great object,” he insisted, “was to avoid the adoption of any of the broad amendments.”
But in order to forge a majority on the original bill, he would have to mollify moderate Republicans who feared that unless the courts were directly vested with judicial review, the bill might be held unconstitutional. To win over this reluctant bloc, Roosevelt called on two Old Guard senators, William Allison of Iowa and John Spooner of Wisconsin. Both had long been staunch lieutenants to Nelson Aldrich, and both were assumed to be supporters of his bid to emasculate the bill. The political landscape was shifting, however; in Iowa and Wisconsin, the momentum to regulate the railroads had reached a frantic pitch and the two senators understood that ignoring their constituents on this issue would put their Senate seats in grave jeopardy.
Allison and Spooner’s unexpected cooperation with Roosevelt made headlines. Two of the original Big Four, this “little knot of men” had ruled the upper branch in harmony for years. Nelson Aldrich found the break with Allison especially painful, for he relied upon Allison’s masterful knowledge of parliamentary procedure. “Everybody is now watching with eagerness to see which of the two great Senate chieftains will demonstrate superior generalship,” commented the New York Times. From his post at the Emporia Gazette, William Allen White noted that Aldrich appeared befuddled over the fact that he could “neither control the legislation of the upper branch affecting financial interests nor count upon the men he regarded as allies.” This rupture in the Senate oligarchy was widely regarded as “symbolic of the new popular alignment all over the country in preparation for the coming contest between the forces of amalgamated capital and those of popular will and sentiment.”
Straightaway, Allison devoted himself to fashioning his own amendment to the Hepburn bill, which stipulated the right to judicial review of ICC rulings—but cleverly leaving the scope of that review undetermined. The ambiguous language of the Allison amendment allowed the senator toforge a majority. Although Roosevelt had hoped to limit the court’s review to a determination of procedural fairness, he recognized that this compromise provided the only chance of passage. Once the amendment was accepted, Roosevelt later told White, “Aldrich and his people really threw up their hands.” Their chance to obtain a broad review provision had been eliminated. Indeed, when the Hepburn bill finally reached the Senate floor for a vote, Aldrich and a number of his older colleagues were noticeably absent. The bill passed by an overwhelming vote on June 29, 1906.
“No given measure and no given set of measures will work a perfect cure for any serious evil,” Roosevelt reminded critics of the compromised bill. Though flawed, the president maintained that the Hepburn Act represented “the longest step ever yet taken in the direction of solving the railway rate problem.” The legislation not only brought the railroads under federal control; it “lifted the idea of nationality to a point never before reached.” The authority granted the Interstate Commerce Commission became clearer in the months that followed as the first case involving rate revision reached the Supreme Court. By declining to review the specific facts, the High Court defined the scope of judicial review in favor of Roosevelt and the progressives.
The president enjoyed widespread credit for the passage of the bill, exhibiting, one Democratic newspaper remarked, “the politician’s gift of knowing when to fight, and, as well, when to surrender.” Roosevelt had sought a Republican majority for the original Hepburn bill; when his efforts were subverted by the leader of his own party, he had reached out to the Democrats; when that failed to produce a majority, he returned to his original provision, altered only slightly by Allison’s amendment. Even Benjamin Tillman grudgingly acknowledged that “but for the work of Theodore Roosevelt, we would not have had any bill at all.”
However astute Roosevelt proved in dealing with Congress, he would doubtless have failed to secure a meaningful bill without a galvanized public behind him. The combined efforts of Baker and his fellow journalists had generated a widespread demand for reform. “Congress might ignore a president,” the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Weekly Sentinel observed, “but could not ignore a president and the people.”
A letter discovered among Baker’s papers testifies to the impact of investigative journalism on the passage of the Hepburn Bill: “It is through writers like yourself, Mr. Steffens and Miss Tarbell that the country as a whole is beginning to understand. In the future your influence on the life of the Republic will be held to be greater than that of the men who now rule our Senate and our House.” Baker had reflected on their accomplishment and his growing confidence in the nation’s future in a January letter to his father: “This crusade against special privilege in high places is real war, a real revolution,” he wrote. “We may not have to go as far as you did, when you fought out the slavery question with powder & blood. At the present, when any of us is wounded we bleed nothing but ink. But ink may serve the purpose.”
UPTON SINCLAIR, THE YOUNG NOVELIST and friend of Ray Baker and Lincoln Steffens, helped instigate the next battle in the crusade against special privilege. Sinclair thought very highly of the dramatic factual stories in McClure’s that mobilized public opinion but reproached his comrades for failing to endorse the panacea of socialism. At the age of twenty-four, Sinclair had concluded with certainty that socialism was the answer to the country’s ills; his experience of reading a socialist pamphlet in 1902, he later said, “was like the falling down of prison walls about my mind.”
Thus, unlike the members of the McClure team, Sinclair was not struggling to discover remedies for specific ills. “Perhaps it’ll surprise you,” he wrote to Baker during the railroad struggle, “but we socialists don’t agree with your rebate agony. The quicker the concentration of wealth is completed the better it suits us. . . . The point all you reforming folks seem to miss is that you are locking the stable doors after the horse is gone. The trusts are formed. The big shipper has got the money. Also with the money he’s bought the government.”
By twenty-five, Sinclair had already published two obscure novels when the editor of a popular socialist weekly, Appeal to Reason, offered to pay $500 for the right to publish his next fiction project in serial form. He quickly chose the “wage slavery” of industrial-era workers as his subject. The young socialist decided to set his novel in the Chicago stockyards, where an unsuccessful strike by workers in the meatpacking plants had aroused his sympathy. Dazzled by the brilliance of Frank Norris and a small cadre of writers devoted to realism, Sinclair took up residence in Packingtown, the stockyard district. For seven weeks, he recalled, “I sat at night in the homes of the workers, foreign-born and native, and they told me their stories, one after one, and I made notes of everything.” Wandering around the yards during the day, he noted, “I was not much better dressed than the workers, and found that by the simple device of carrying a dinner pail I could go anywhere.” Passing into rancid, hazardous places that outsiders rarely frequented, he watched with amazement as scraps of meat that were later sold to the public were swept from floors infested with rats and covered in human spit. The pressure to produce profits dictated that nothing was allowed to go to waste: condemned hogs were rendered into lard; moldy meats were “dosed with borax” and ground into sausage; spoiled hams were pumped with chemicals to mask a smell “so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them.”
After a month of watchfulness, Sinclair had collected the data but not yet conceived the protagonists for his novel. One Sunday afternoon, he chanced to attend the rollicking traditional wedding celebration of a young Lithuanian couple. Standing transfixed with his back to a wall as the festivities unfolded around him, Sinclair found his characters amid the whirl of music and dance—“the bride, the groom, the old mother and father, the boisterous cousin, the children, the three musicians, everybody.”
The Jungle tells the story of the young couple and their extended family as they immigrate to Chicago in pursuit of plentiful jobs, decent wages, and the fulfillment of the American dream. No one subscribes more completely to the idea that decency and hard work will earn a place in America than the central character, Jurgis Rudkus. Confident in his ferocious strength and determination to provide for his family, Jurgis immediately lands a job. He is “the sort of man the bosses like to get hold of. . . . When he was told to go to a certain place, he would go there on the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would stand round fidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was in him.” Filled with optimism, Jurgis saves every cent to buy a home for his wife and children: “He would work all day,” Sinclair wrote, “and all night too, if need be; he would never rest until the house was paid for and his people had a home.”
Before long, the predatory machine of Packingtown begins to corrode Jurgis’s optimism and assurance. For years, glib salesmen had counted upon the ignorance of the immigrants. If a single payment was missed, the house was lost, along with everything paid into it. Indeed, Sinclair observed, the houses “were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them.” The unscrupulous salesman could always count on a new wave of immigrants, clamoring desperately for jobs and needful of food and housing.
The meatpacking plants grind up workers as surely as they grind up hogs and cattle. Sinclair details the brutal hours of work with no compensation for injury and little hope of evading the diseases legion in unsanitary surroundings. During the holiday “speeding up” on the slaughtering floor, Jurgis is hurt. Finally able to return to work, he discovers that his job has been given to another man. Once “fresh and strong,” Jurgis becomes “a damaged article” his bosses no longer want. At once vividly individual and representative of an entire beleaguered class, Sinclair’s characters are callously denied any real hope of a livelihood or future. The devastation of the entire family has been set in motion, their tragedy engendered not through personal failure but through the savage capitalist system that pits man against man. When his young wife and then his son die, Jurgis is crushed in body and spirit. Finding himself at a socialist rally, he is at last spiritually reborn, awakened to revolution.
After five publishers rejected Sinclair’s manuscript outright, Doubleday finally considered publication. “The revelations in the story were so astounding,” the New York Times reported, “that the publishers commissioned a lawyer to go to Chicago to make a personal investigation of the author’s representations.” When the attorney’s report corroborated Sinclair, Doubleday agreed to move forward. In February 1906, as he nervously awaited official publication, Sinclair sent two advance copies to Ray Baker. One was autographed to the journalist; the second, Sinclair hoped, Baker might deliver to the White House and present to President Roosevelt.
The book created an immediate sensation. Although some reviews criticized the contrived socialist epiphany of the ending, millions of readers found Sinclair’s cast of characters and the grotesque details of the meatpacking industry compelling. “Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous,” observed the New York Evening World, “has there been such an example of world-wide fame won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair.”
James Garfield was the first in the White House to read the book. “Hideous,” he termed the story, “but not more so than the place,” which he had visited during the Bureau of Corporations’ investigation of the beef trust. Sinclair, he wrote in his journal, had produced “a terrible and I fear too true account of the lives of many miserable men & women among the working class in our big cities.” During a long walk with the president, Garfield described at length his response to the book.
Intrigued by Garfield’s reaction, Roosevelt finished reading the novel and invited the author to the White House during the first week in April. Although he proceeded to disparage the socialist diatribe tacked on to the conclusion, Roosevelt assured Sinclair that “all this has nothing to do with the fact that the specific evils you point out shall, if their existence be proved, and if I have power, be eradicated.”
By the time Sinclair arrived for lunch on April 4, a Department of Agriculture investigator was en route to the stockyards with an order from the White House to evaluate the novelist’s charges. Sending a representative of the very agency that had failed properly to inspect the plants, Sinclair objected, “was like asking a burglar to determine his own guilt.” His objections prompted Roosevelt to dispatch two additional investigators with no official ties to the department. He chose two well-respected men: Commissioner of Labor Charles P. Neill and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury James Bronson Reynolds. Sinclair was delighted, though he feared the investigators would focus on the diseased meats rather than the working conditions in the yard. “I have power to deal with one and not with the other,” Roosevelt responded.
As the investigation got under way, the Chicago Tribune ran a series of articles citing “on excellent authority” that the president’s team had already debunked the overwhelming majority of Sinclair’s charges and claiming that Roosevelt intended to castigate the novelist in an upcoming speech. In a state of panic, Sinclair barraged the president with letters, a telegram, and a phone call. Roosevelt patiently explained that the newspaper story was simply fabricated. “It is absurd to become so nervous over such an article,” he admonished. “Hundreds such appear about me all the time, with quite as little foundation.” Chastened, Sinclair maintained that he “should never have dreamed of writing,” except it seemed incomprehensible that a journalist “with a reputation to protect” would dare to disseminate false information in such an “explicit and positive way.” Roosevelt immediately assuaged Sinclair’s anxiety. “I understand entirely how you felt. Of course you have not had the experience I have had with newspapers. . . . Meanwhile, we will go steadily ahead with the investigation.”
In fact, Roosevelt’s inspectors found stockyard conditions comparable to those Sinclair had portrayed. Initial reports told “of rooms reeking with filth, of walls, floors, and pillars caked with offal, dried blood, and flesh, of unspeakable uncleanliness.” These findings were more than sufficient to convince Roosevelt to take action. On May 22, Illinois senator Albert Beveridge introduced a White House–backed bill to institute a rigid federal inspection program covering all phases of the meatpacking industry, from animal slaughter to sausage and canned meat production. If products were “found healthful and fit for human food,” a government label indicating “inspected and passed” would be attached; if not, the meat products would be marked “inspected and condemned.”
Roosevelt warned Senate leaders friendly to the packers “that unless effective meat inspection legislation were enacted without loss of time,” he would make the report public. Although he had no desire to harm the packing industry or the livestock producers, if the meatpackers moved to kill the legislation, he would feel compelled to expose the sickening work conditions. Fearing adverse publicity even more than the regulation, the packers retreated. Without “a dissenting vote” the Beveridge bill passed the Senate three days after it was introduced.
While Roosevelt was satisfied, Upton Sinclair remained disappointed by the bill’s quick passage. To release the report, he told the president, would give the public “a shock it will never get over,” prompting true, enduring reform through “an enlightened public opinion.” Disregarding Roosevelt’s directive to remain patient while the House took up the Senate bill, Sinclair leaked his information from the report to the New York Times. “I sincerely hope that the disturbance I have been making has not been an annoyance to you,” he told the president. “I had to make up my mind quickly.” Exasperated, Roosevelt wrote to Frank Doubleday: “Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for awhile.”
The legislation, meanwhile, foundered in the House Agricultural Committee, chaired by the wealthy stockbreeder James Wadsworth, a strong proponent of the beef trust. One after another, witnesses were paraded before the committee to argue that while isolated problems might exist,“conditions were as clean and wholesome as in the average restaurant, hotel and home kitchen. That there were offensive odors was natural—one ought not to expect to find a rosebud in a slaughtering house.” A series of emasculating amendments was prepared, one negating the “mandatory character” of inspection and granting packers the right of court review.
“I am sorry to have to say,” Roosevelt informed Congressman Wadsworth, “that it seems to me that each change is for the worse and that in the aggregate they are ruinous, taking away every particle of good from the suggested Beveridge amendment.” Because the packers and their representatives had reneged, producing only “sham” legislation, the president felt he was not “warranted” any longer in holding back the unfinished Reynolds-Neill Report.
On June 4, the president transmitted what he called a “preliminary” report to Congress. “The conditions shown by even this short inspection,” he avowed, were “revolting.” His investigators had determined that “the stockyards and packing houses are not kept even reasonably clean, and that the method of handling and preparing food products is uncleanly and dangerous to health.” Federal legislation was imperative to prevent continued abuses. If Congress failed in its responsibility, the full report would be made public.
Released to the newspapers, this preliminary assessment produced a national uproar. The New York Post captured the public mood in a sardonic jingle:
Mary had a little lamb,
And when she saw it sicken,
She shipped it off to Packingtown,
And now it’s labeled chicken.
Faced with public outrage and disgust, the House could no longer keep the bill “chloroformed in the committees.” The most egregious of Wadsworth’s provisions were eliminated and the measure was sent to a conference committee. In the end, a fairly comprehensive meat inspection bill emerged. “We cannot imagine any other President whom the country has ever had, paying any attention at all to what was written in a novel,” the New York Evening Post remarked. “In the history of reforms which have been enacted into law,” Beveridge proudly noted, “there has never been a battle which has been won so quickly and never a proposed reform so successful in the first contest.”
THE MOMENTUM OF THE RAILROAD regulation fight and the meat inspection amendment propelled the passage of a third important bill—the Pure Food and Drug Act—producing a historic session of congressional reform. Crusaders like Dr. Harvey Wiley, chief chemist in the Department of Agriculture, had battled unsuccessfully for over a decade to secure federal legislation requiring proper labels on food and drugs. In the absence of such regulation, adulterated food products and bogus medicines flooded the market. Conservatives lampooned Wiley as “chief janitor and policeman of the people’s insides.” In the Senate, Nelson Aldrich emerged as the most vocal opponent of regulatory measures. “Are we going to take up the question as to what a man shall eat and what a man shall drink,” he scornfully asked, “and put him under severe penalties if he is eating or drinking something different from what the chemists of the Agricultural Department think it is desirable for him to eat or drink?”
Pressure for reform began to build, however, with the publication of two groundbreaking articles in Collier’s magazine. Interested in commissioning an investigative piece on the patent medicine industry, the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, Edward Bok, reached out to S. S. McClure to find a writer capable of painstaking research. McClure introduced Bok to Mark Sullivan, a recent graduate of the Harvard Law School. Sullivan’s article proved too technical and too extensive for the Ladies’ Home Journal, but Bok brought it to Collier’s, where it attracted widespread attention.
Sullivan’s research yielded some stunning discoveries. The Lydia E. Pinkham Company, a celebrated patent medicine firm, advertised its numerous compounds for ailing women beneath the kindly and intelligent visage of Mrs. Pinkham—offering the promise that she would personally answer letters and dispense advice to inquiring customers. When Sullivan traveled to her hometown of Lynn, Massachusetts, and learned that she had been dead for over two decades, he took a picture of the inscription on her headstone: “Lydia E. Pinkham. Died May 17, 1883.”
Less grimly humorous but far more pernicious was the young journalist’s revelation that a secret clause had been written into the advertising contracts of thousands of newspapers across the country. At that time, patent medicines provided the largest source of advertising revenue for newspapers, and this clause stipulated that the contract would be canceled if material detrimental to the industry appeared anywhere in the paper. From William White, who had refused to take patent medicine ads in the Emporia Gazette, Sullivan obtained an original copy of the contract form.
The success of Sullivan’s piece prompted Collier’s to commission a ten-part investigative series on the patent medicine industry modeled after McClure’s exposés. In fact, the writer of the series, Samuel Hopkins Adams, had been on McClure’s staff before moving to Collier’s. Adams procured experts to test more than two hundred patent medicines, a great majority of which were revealed as either “harmless frauds or deleterious drugs”: an ointment containing clay and glycerin was marketed as a cancer cure; a pink starch and sugar pill promised to remedy paralysis; Isham’s Spring Water claimed rheumatism would vanish within days. Even more worrisome, many concoctions were found to contain significant quantities of alcohol and narcotics, potentially leading the unwary toward addiction. Laboratories claiming to test these medicines turned out to be fraudulent or nonexistent.
For the first time, public pressure impelled a bill regulating food and drugs “to run the gauntlet of the upper house in safety.” After reaching the House, however, “it slept. And it slept.” For four months, Speaker Joe Cannon refused to bring the legislation to the floor for a vote. Finally, the national uproar over diseased meat forced his hand. On June 30, 1906, reformers were at last able to celebrate the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. The bill “would not have had the slightest chance” of surviving in the House, Senator Beveridge observed, had it not been for “the agitation” generated by the meat inspection amendment. This landmark bill authorized the federal government to examine the contents of processed food and patent medicines, forbade the sale of adulterated or misbranded food and drugs, and required that every package and bottle be properly labeled.
“DURING NO SESSION OF CONGRESS since the foundation of the Government,” the New York Times proclaimed, “has there been so much done, first, to extend the Federal power of regulation and control over the business of the country, and second, to cure and prevent abuses of corporation privileges.” Had Congress accomplished even one of the three major steps toward railroad regulation, meat inspection, or food and drug oversight, one midwestern paper observed, the first session of the 59th Congress would have been historic. Taken together, these three monumental measures marked “the beginning of a new epoch in federal legislation—governmental regulations on corporations and the invocation of the police power, so to speak, to stay the hand of private greed” and protect the general welfare.
No sooner had journalists illuminated a problem than the fight to secure a remedy had begun. By the spring of 1906, it was virtually certain that Congress would pass measures to regulate the railroads and the food and drug industry; only the timing and nature of those regulations remained to be determined. “For pass them they must,” McClure’s biographer noted. “That verdict had already been reached by the people.”
The momentum of the progressive agenda continued with an employer’s liability law for the District of Columbia; the Antiquities Act that granted the president authority to declare national monuments on federal lands; and statehood bills for Arizona and New Mexico. Conservatives railed against “the most amazing program of centralization” ever enacted, and Wall Street warned that Roosevelt was only “sowing the seeds” of revolution. But the American people overwhelmingly agreed with the president’s declaration that this Congress had accomplished “more substantive work for good than any Congress has done at any session since he became familiar with public affairs.”
Even Democratic newspapers “reluctantly” acknowledged the unprecedented efficacy of the 59th Congress and the remarkable leadership of the president. “The public confidence has been greatly restored in our law-makers,” observed the Detroit Free Press, “inasmuch as strongly reformative measures have been adopted in the face of tremendous private interests, the sole spur necessary being an insistent pubic demand, clearly defined.”
Yet even as he gloried in the moment, Theodore Roosevelt sensed that he would never again achieve this magnitude of success in directing domestic policy. “I do not expect to accomplish very much in the way of legislation after this Congress, and perhaps after this session,” he wistfully confided to Kermit. “By next winter people will begin to think more about the next man who is to be President; and then, too, by that time it is almost inevitable that the revulsion of feeling against me should have come. It is bound to come some time, and it is extraordinary that it has not come yet.”